Without male mentors, many men of this generation have felt adrift, unsure of how to deal with an indescribable but acute lack in their lives.
How did we get to the point where it is possible, as Edward Abbey put it, “to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood?”
~ Brett McKay from, A Generation of Men Raised by Women | The Art of Manliness
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Many people have had success using these life optimization tools and tricks, and they’re not necessarily a bad thing. Their effect all depends on which of two relationships someone has with hacking:
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Hacking approach #1 can be beneficial; every man should have a little MacGyver in him and keep some duct-tape solutions in his back pocket. And if there’s a better way to cut an onion, by all means, go for it.
But hacking approach #2 invariably leads to a life that’s less optimal, not more. The damage results not so much from the actual hacking practices themselves, but from the mindset their pursuit and adoption begets.
~ Brett McKay from, The Pitfalls of Life Hacking Culture | The Art of Manliness
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The truth is, that wherever we are in life, we all have pockets of time that we own, and that we could be doing more to actively shape and make the most of. It’s just that so often we default to the path of least resistance. Unbelievably, Americans only use 51% of their paid vacation and paid days off. When we’re not working, and do have free time, rather than pursuing a constructive hobby or side business, we’ll often plop in front of the TV or mindlessly surf the internet. Instead of seeking out good books to read to feed our minds, we default to consuming whatever information happens to pop up in our Facebook feeds. The ironclad rules that governed our childhood are long gone, and yet we still don’t feel fully in control of our lives. We feel swept along by the currents of our responsibilities, so that our lives seem to go by in a unthinking haze – a fog that is ever so often perforated by the question: “Why haven’t things turned out the way I had hoped?”
~ Brett McKay from, Become the Author of Your Own Life | The Art of Manliness
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Say yes whenever you can and overcome the inertia of rigmarole. One of the greatest impediments to adventure as an adult is the number of your responsibilities, and how said responsibilities sap your willpower. Psychologists have shown that we have a limited supply of willpower each day, that if we use it for one thing, we have less it for another, and that when our willpower runs low, our default answer to everything becomes “no.”
~ Brett McKay from, How to Be More Adventurous | The Art of Manliness
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Creating an awesome adulthood involves using your imagination to create a story for yourself, and then taking ceaseless action to bring that narrative to life. It’s like riding a stationary bike that powers a film projector: to create a new world — to project your chosen narrative on the screen of your life — you must pedal continuously.
~ Brett McKay from, Churchill’s Advice on How to Be an Adult | The Art of Manliness
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This is a rather large, long (and I think, well written) series of posts from Brett over at Art of Manliness. Well worth a read in my opinion.
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WWII Workout Week concludes with some exercises you can do to improve your posture. While posture is an oft neglected part of physical training programs, it provides a myriad of benefits and can boost both your physiological functions and your confidence.
~ Brett McKay from, WWII Workout Week: Posture Training
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Circa 1946, from the Army field manual FM 21-20. ‘ten-HUT!
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Following “via negativa” may seem like a defensive and risk-averse way to live. But by focusing on what you don’t do, you actually put yourself in a position to be more aggressive with life. The man who has never been arrested, doesn’t have debt, and doesn’t have the drama that comes with bad relationships has more opportunities presented to him and more money, energy, and willpower to capitalize on those opportunities when they appear; the man who has gone though life making stupid mistakes, doesn’t. In other words, you’ll never get a chance to work on the “shalls” if your life’s been wrecked by ignoring the “shall nots.”
~ Brett McKay from, Via Negativa: Adding to Your Life By Subtracting
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Postman argues that our modern concepts of childhood and adulthood (and the gulf between them) were birthed by the printing press. Literacy became the dividing line between these stages of life; adults were competent readers, children were not, and they thus had to become adults by mastering written language.
~ Brett Mckay from, The Printing Press, Literacy, and the Rise and Fall of the Secret Society of Adults
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Yet from the first encounter, the theories unraveled in the face of situations that could never have been predicted. The most respected generals in the world were made to look like amateurs. Their faith in abstract planning blinded them to the reality of the situation. It took years of conflict before they began to really adapt to the reality of their situation.
~ Kyle Eschenroeder from, 5 Tools for Thriving in Uncertainty
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How redundancies increase our antifragility is obvious: if you only have one of something, and it fails, you can be up the creek without a paddle. Members of the military have a maxim that neatly sums up Taleb’s philosophy: “Two is one and one is none.”
~ Brett McKay from, Two Is One and One Is None
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Unfortunately, true community in our modern world is hard to find for soldiers and civilians alike. Instead, we increasingly live out our lives as members of networks. This transition from community to network life is truly at the heart of the increasing feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and anomie that many people experience in the modern age. We’ve never been so “connected” — and yet so isolated at the same time.
~ Brett McKay from, Communities Vs. Networks
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An educated man can…
~ Brett McKay
entertain himself;
entertain a friend;
entertain a new idea.
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