There are only a few things that get me riled up, like this topic, so let’s get into it right now.
There’s a real crisis happening with men, especially young men.
That’s a fact.
And as a dad of an 18-year-old son, that worries me.
Loneliness, purposelessness…
A quiet sense that the world has moved on without leaving them a clear role in it.
That’s not invented.
That’s not a talking point.
That’s real, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
What doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously is the industry that grew up around it and has established itself as the so-called answer.
Because somewhere between the genuine crisis and the genuine need for answers, a very profitable machine got built.
And that machine doesn’t actually want men to get better.
It wants men to stay just broken enough to keep buying.
It wants to keep telling men that they’re not alpha or sigma or masculine enough, all the while profiting off of them and making billions.
It pisses me off, so I want to say a few things about it.
And yes, before one of those lost teenage boys masquerading as an “Alpha male” finds his way onto this page, let’s get the scorecard out of the way…
I own a gun, and I know how to use it.
I have a purple belt in BJJ and years on the mats.
I’m over 235 lbs because I’ve spent way too much of my life moving heavy weights around.
I have multiple university degrees, and I’m still chasing more.
I have a fair bit sitting in various investments, and yes, I drive a big, new ute… paid for.
But here’s what actually matters.
I have been a loving husband for 20 years.
I am a dad of two.
I have survived a heart attack.
I have uprooted my life and moved countries for the betterment of my family.
I have lost people I loved deeply, and I cried about it, openly and without apology.
I have buried friends.
I tell my wife, my son, and my daughter that I love them, regularly and without hesitation.
And I have absolutely no problem looking someone in the eye and saying I’m sorry.
Ask my family.
And NONE of that makes me less of a man.
In fact, all of it makes me more of one.
Agree, disagree, I don’t really care…
But, let’s also get very real about something that I DO care about…
The Void Is Real. But Your Product Is Fake.
Yes, men are genuinely searching.
For direction.
For meaning.
For a sense that their effort matters and their life has shape.
That hunger is legitimate.
The conditions that created it are real, too.
The collapse of traditional community structures.
The decline of workplaces where men built real friendships.
The erosion of rites of passage that once told a young man when he’d crossed the threshold from boy to adult.
The confusion of a cultural conversation that simultaneously tells men to be more emotionally open and then mocks them when they are.
Men aren’t imagining these pressures.
They’re navigating a genuine identity vacuum.
But somewhere along the way, that hunger got packaged, branded, and sold back to them at $97 a month.
The hustle culture influencer didn’t create the void.
He just learned how to monetise it.
He found men at their lowest, told them the problem was their mindset, and offered himself as the solution.
That’s not mentorship.
That’s a business model wearing a motivational poster.
The first rule of the guru economy: keep the customer just confident enough to buy, but just insecure enough to come back.
But notice that the framework never fully resolves.
There’s always another level.
Always a new enemy to defeat: laziness, comfort, weakness, “the matrix.”
The goalposts move because stationary goalposts don’t generate recurring revenue.
A man who is actually at peace with himself is a man who has stopped buying.
And that, from a business AND alpha perspective, is a problem.
Masculinity Went from a Way of Being to a Content Format
There was a time when masculinity was lived quietly.
A man who kept his word. A father who showed up.
A friend you could call at 2am.
Nobody filmed it.
Nobody optimised it.
It just was.
What’s being sold now is something else entirely.
It’s masculinity as content.
Masculinity as aesthetic.
Filmed morning routines.
Curated cold plunges.
Gym selfies with captions about “the grind.”
Every act of discipline is also, conveniently, a post.
Here’s the thing about genuine strength: it doesn’t need a camera.
When a man is truly grounded, he’s not thinking about how his choices look from the outside.
He’s not building a personal brand out of waking up early.
He just wakes up early because he has things to do and people depending on him.
If your masculinity needs an audience, it’s not strength; it’s a performance.
The shift from real to performed masculinity is subtle but devastating.
It turns inward growth into outward display.
It turns character into content.
And it trains men to measure themselves not by who they actually are, but by how convincingly they can appear to be who they want to be.
Think about what that does to a young man’s inner life.
Every decision starts to carry a secondary question: how does this look?
The morning run isn’t just a morning run anymore; it’s a potential story.
The difficult book he’s reading isn’t just intellectual nourishment; it’s a prop to photograph.
The meal he’s eating isn’t just fuel; it’s evidence of discipline.
He starts to live his life slightly outside himself, always watching the performance from a director’s chair.
And real life, the messy, unfilmed, un-optimised version, starts to feel inadequate by comparison.
That is not a man being built.
That is a man being hollowed out.
Shame Is the Sales Funnel
Pay close attention to how the pitch works.
It starts with an audit of your failures.
You’re broke because you’re weak.
You’re alone because you’re too soft.
Your body is evidence of your lack of discipline.
Your hesitation is pathetic.
You are, essentially, not enough, and everyone can see it.
This isn’t motivation.
This is targeted humiliation dressed up as tough love.
And it works, because shame is one of the most powerful psychological levers there is.
It bypasses rational thought.
It goes straight for identity.
Once a man believes that his current self is inadequate and embarrassing, he’ll pay almost anything to become someone different.
Shame is not a catalyst for growth. It’s a mechanism for control.
But the irony is thick.
These influencers claim to be building men up while systematically tearing them down.
Every new course, every new program, every new “level” exists to remind you that you’re still not there yet.
That’s not a mentorship structure.
That’s a subscription model for inadequacy.
And look at the specific shame that gets weaponised.
Money.
Body.
Status.
Women.
These aren’t random targets.
They’re the exact pressure points where young men feel most exposed, most uncertain, most desperate to prove something.
The algorithm that serves you this content didn’t find those pressure points by accident.
It found them because data confirmed they convert.
Your most private insecurities have been mapped, catalogued, and turned into a targeting strategy.
And that should make you angry. Very angry.
Not at yourself.
At the machine.
At these so-called gurus.
They are NOT on your side.
The Lifestyle Is Fiction
The jet.
The penthouse.
The watch collection.
The women.
The compound in Dubai.
Some of it is real.
Most of it is rented, borrowed, or staged.
And all of it is carefully curated to make you feel like success is visible, external, and available, if only you buy into the right system.
Here’s the thing you need to know…
Real successful people, by and large, are not filming their success.
They’re busy with it.
The men who have genuinely built something, a business, a family, a community, a life of meaning, tend to be remarkably uninterested in showing you their watch.
They have nothing to prove, which is exactly why they don’t spend six hours a day on social media telling you how to live.
The loudest voices in any room are rarely the wisest ones.
When you hold the curated lifestyle up to reality, the cracks show fast.
The “business empire” is often a course-selling operation whose primary product is itself.
The “freedom” is being chained to content output every single day, because the algorithm punishes absence.
The “discipline” is a personal brand strategy that happens to involve a cold plunge.
None of that is wrong on its face, but it’s profoundly dishonest to call it something it isn’t.
There’s also a geographic dimension worth naming.
A lot of this content is produced in countries with low costs of living and few regulations, where renting a Lamborghini for a day costs less than a decent dinner.
The “empire” looks a lot more impressive when shot through a specific lens in a specific city with a specific prop budget.
None of that is disclosed when you’re 19 years old, watching it from your bedroom at midnight, wondering why your life looks so small by comparison.
Your life looks small because you’re comparing it to a film set.
But that’s not a reflection on your life.
Remember, as people we tend to compare “up” and never “down”, and these f#ckers know that, so they play on your insecurities.
Chances are you already have a fairly good life with much to be grateful for and more opportunities than you think.
They don’t want you to believe that since someone has to be gullible enough, i.e, you, to pay for their expensive lifestyles.
And on that note, let’s also talk about the “next level” guru who turns this into some sort of spiritual quest…
God and Nietzsche in the Same Breath
Some of the more sophisticated influencers have discovered religion, or stoicism, or both.
They quote Marcus Aurelius in the morning and Machiavelli in the afternoon.
They invoke God’s name when talking about success and mysteriously go quiet when the topic turns to humility.
But selective faith is a very old trick.
Take what validates you.
Ignore what convicts you.
Christianity, Islam, Stoicism, every serious moral tradition in human history has placed humility, generosity, and service at its centre.
Not as optional add-ons for the already successful.
As the foundation.
As the point.
The hustle gospel cherry-picks.
It loves the parts about strength, dominance, and being chosen.
It finds the parts about washing feet, forgiving enemies, and giving without recognition considerably less photogenic.
Here’s the thing…
You don’t get to use God, if you believe in agod, as a brand endorsement while ignoring everything He actually asked of you.
Also, Aurelius spent his entire written work interrogating his own pride, his own anger, his own hunger for recognition.
He wrote about the smallness of human ambition against the vastness of time.
He obsessed over his own moral failures.
He did not use stoicism to justify wealth accumulation.
He used it as a daily challenge to become more virtuous and less self-interested.
And don’t get me started on other stoics like Epictetus.
The influencer version of stoicism takes the aesthetic, the discipline, the endurance, the cold logic, and quietly drops everything inconvenient.
The point is that a man of genuine faith, or genuine philosophy, doesn’t use it to justify his ambition.
He uses it to interrogate it.
But that’s a much harder and far less marketable thing to do.
And the same goes for discipline…
Discipline Without Wisdom Is Just Control
Now, the influencer version of discipline is a specific thing.
It’s the cold shower.
The “4 am club.”
The strict diet.
The rejection of anything “soft.”
It’s discipline as performance of toughness; a daily ritual of proving something, mostly to yourself.
But here’s a question worth sitting with: what are you actually controlling, and why?
Because genuine discipline is directed outward.
It’s in service of something, a family, a craft, your country, a purpose larger than your own image.
It asks: what needs to be done, and am I doing it?
It doesn’t care how you look while doing it.
What gets sold as discipline is often just anxiety on a schedule.
The rigid routine that can’t be deviated from.
The obsessive optimisation.
The inability to rest without guilt.
The classification of any softness, like a slow morning, an afternoon with no output, a day spent just being with someone you love, as moral failure.
These aren’t signs of a strong man.
They’re signs of a man who is deeply afraid of what he’d find if he stopped moving.
Real discipline knows when to rest.
It knows when to play.
It knows when to sit with someone who needs you and abandon the schedule entirely without resentment.
The man who cannot do those things isn’t disciplined.
He’s rigid.
And rigidity is just fear wearing a gym vest.
The most disciplined men I’ve ever known were also the most at peace. That’s not a coincidence.
Now, to be clear, I don’t care if you wanna get up at 4 am or never sleep at all.
I don’t care if you’re fasting for a week or doing ice baths daily….
I really don’t.
But let’s just call it for what it is most of the time.
Control and fear wrapped in public performance pretending to be discipline.
But, that aside, let’s also talk about another elephant in the room that’s often worse than the latter…
I call it,
The Humility Contradiction
Here is a contradiction so obvious it should be embarrassing, and yet somehow it isn’t:
These men preach humility. Then they spend twelve hours a day talking about themselves.
They tell you not to seek validation.
From accounts with millions of followers.
They quote Aurelius on ego.
While monetising their personal brand.
They tell you that real men don’t need approval.
While checking their engagement metrics.
The contradiction isn’t incidental.
It’s structural.
Because the moment they actually became humble, they’d stop posting.
The business depends on continued self-promotion.
Which means the humility, however sincerely felt in private moments, will always yield to the content calendar.
This is not a personal failing unique to any one person.
It’s a systemic problem with building a public persona around virtues that are, by their nature, quiet.
You cannot be both genuinely humble and constantly visible.
At some point, you have to choose.
And every one of these men, every single day, chooses visibility.
Which tells you everything you need to know about the actual hierarchy of their values.
And it ain’t what they’re selling or teaching.
But there’s another mechanism also worth examining: the so-called community.
Or tribe, clan, team, or whatever they want to call it…
The Brotherhood That Isn’t
These ecosystems are very good at offering men something that feels like brotherhood.
The forum.
The group chat.
The comment section.
The shared identity of being part of the “awakened” few who see clearly while everyone else sleeps.
It’s “us” against the world.
Women.
The infidels.
The lost.
The beta.
And that is enormously appealing to lonely men.
And it’s not entirely fake.
Real connections do form.
Real conversations do happen.
But pay attention to what the community is organised around.
It’s almost always organised around a leader, a product, and a shared contempt for something: women, “simps,” weak men, mainstream society, whoever is currently positioned as the enemy.
Brotherhood built on shared contempt is not brotherhood. It’s a coalition of wounds pretending to be strength.
Real community is built on mutual care, shared responsibility, and the willingness to challenge each other toward better, not toward more purchases, more content consumption, more ideological purity.
When a community’s primary function is to validate the guru and keep members in a permanent state of us-versus-them, it’s not building men.
It’s harvesting them.
It’s using them.
The loneliness that drove a man to find this community in the first place doesn’t actually get resolved inside it.
It gets masked.
It gets directed to some innocent target.
There’s a difference between feeling like you belong somewhere and actually belonging somewhere.
One requires a login.
The other requires showing up for real people in real life over a long period of time.
Only one of those builds a man.
Now,
What It Does to You Over Time
The men who spend years inside this type of ecosystem don’t tend to come out of it stronger.
They come out of it harder and indoctrinated, which is different.
Harder towards vulnerability.
Harder towards relationships that require real emotional give-and-take.
Harder towards anything that can’t be optimised or turned into output.
The qualities that make a person genuinely good to be around, warmth, humour, and the ability to just be present, are classified as weaknesses and slowly trained out.
And most relationships suffer.
The partner who wanted a man who could also be tender gets someone who’s read too many books about frame control.
The friends who wanted genuine connection get someone who’s learned to see every interaction as a transaction, every favour as a ledger entry.
The children who needed a father who could sit with them in their pain get someone who is always optimising something, always performing for an imaginary audience, always somewhere slightly other than here.
The hardest men are rarely the happiest ones, and the happiest men rarely need to become hard to get there.
Identity, in the long run, becomes performance.
The man stops asking who he is and starts asking how he appears.
That’s a very lonely way to live.
And it’s the direct product of a culture that taught him self-image was the whole game.
When the performance becomes the identity, there’s nothing underneath it anymore.
It is hollow.
It rings fake, as many so-called alpha males online do when you dig deeper and listen long enough.
And that emptiness, when it arrives, tends to arrive loudly.
But in my mind here’s,
What Grounded Masculinity Actually Looks Like
It’s usually much quieter than they’d have you believe.
Here’s a classic example of what it does NOT look like, that went viral…
It looks like a man who keeps his commitments without announcing them.
Who has opinions but doesn’t need to win every argument.
Who isn’t loud and tends to either swear or shout louder when challenged on this B.S.
Who can sit in discomfort without immediately reaching for a system to fix it?
Who can be tender with his children and firm with his boundaries, and see no contradiction between the two.
A grounded man is reliable.
Not because he’s performing reliability, but because his word means something to him.
His integrity is internal.
It doesn’t shift based on who’s watching.
He behaves the same way in an empty room as he does on a stage, and he actually prefers the empty room.
He’s not trying to dominate every room (watch the earlier video).
He’s trying to be useful in it.
He’s allowed to be uncertain.
He’s allowed to not know.
He’s allowed to fail, to grieve, to change his mind, to need help from someone who loves him.
He’s allowed to not have a six pack given to him by either copious amounts of steroids, HGH or TRT.
None of those things diminishes him.
They are, in fact, evidence of a man secure enough not to need armour.
He knows his weaknesses, not because an influencer told him to “acknowledge his shadow” in a 12-week program, but because he’s lived long enough and been honest enough with himself to see them clearly.
And he works on them without drama, without a camera rolling, without needing a community of strangers to validate the effort.
He doesn’t need permission from a stranger on the internet to feel like a man.
He already knows what he is, and what he still needs to become, and those two things together are enough.
That version of masculinity has no product attached to it. Which is exactly why no one’s selling it.
A Closing Thought
Let me close with this…
This article isn’t for the influencers. They know what they’re doing.
It’s for the man at 22 who found this content at a genuinely low moment and felt, for the first time, like someone was speaking directly to him.
That feeling was real, even if what followed it was exploitation.
It’s for the man at 35 who has been grinding for a decade, still feels vaguely hollow, and can’t quite figure out why.
It’s for the man at 45 who looks back and realises he spent his best years optimising himself and neglecting the people who actually needed him.
You’re not broken.
You’ve been convinced you are.
There’s a difference, and it matters more than almost anything.
The hunger you feel, for purpose, for direction, for a sense that your life is building toward something real, that’s not a weakness to be fixed by a stranger who found your pressure points through a targeting algorithm.
That’s the most human thing about you.
It deserves to be answered by your own honest reflection, your relationships, your work, your faith, if you have it, and your community, if you’ve built one.
The real work of being a man has always been the same.
Show up for the people you love.
Do what you say you’ll do.
Know yourself honestly and keep growing.
Sit with uncertainty without letting it break you.
Give more than you take.
Be someone that people can rest in, rather than someone they have to perform for.
No course required.
No program necessary.
No audience needed.
So here’s the question to sit with:
When you imagine the man you’re trying to become, is he someone you genuinely admire, or is he someone you’ve been told to want to be?
And if every account you followed disappeared tomorrow, would you still know who you are and where you’re going?
