Why Masculinity Isn’t Broken, Just Untrained...

Something is breaking inside the modern man, and he knows it. It’s not dramatic. It’s quiet. It happens in the pause between conversations at the pub, in the moments before sleep, in the stillness of the night at 3am, when the noise dies and the truth has nowhere left to hide... It is not weakness. It’s the slow collapse of the self that comes from years of performing instead of becoming...

Men like to believe they are shaped by circumstance, but the truth is harsher: they built the very systems that now suffocate them. They traded depth for distraction, truth for performance, friendship for function, and now they are choking on the distance those trades created. The world didn’t take their meaning; they outsourced it.

Carl Jung, the famed Swiss Psychologist said that until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our lives and we will call it fate.

That’s what most men are living, the quiet tyranny of unexamined patterns. The father now 50, looking back and realising he worked to avoid intimacy with his kids, the husband in his early-30s who mistakes control for care, the 81 year old man who has spent decades sprinting from a conversation with himself.

These aren’t accidents. They are choices repeated until they feel inevitable. The masculine crisis is not that men feel too little; it’s that they have spent so long suppressing the signal that now the whole system is short-circuiting.

Anxiety, burnout, rage, numbness, all of it is feedback from a nervous system tired of pretending.

Every scroll on the iphone, every meeting, every forced smile, is another rehearsal of competence for an audience that isn’t even watching. The truth is, they never were. He performs for the ghosts of expectation, the father who measured worth by output, the employer who rewarded control, the culture that confuses composure with value. The crowd he has been trying to impress left years ago. But the spotlight stays on, because he is the one who has let these habits be his master, he is holding the switch.

The friendship recession cuts deeper than statistics admit. In 2025, men have half the close friends they did twenty years ago. It’s not just loneliness; it’s erosion.

Male friendship once formed around shared purpose, building, fixing, sweating, creating, real proximity that forged trust. In country towns, sport still holds some of that energy, but even there, the ritual has shifted. Fewer men play; more watch. The weekend match has become entertainment, not initiation. The body no longer participates; it spectates.

The nervous system reads that as starvation. Biology will tell you, without real proximity, without the grounding of shared effort, testosterone turns restless, cortisol climbs, empathy declines. Men regulate through doing together, through projects, work, competition, shared labour. When the ritual of doing together thins out, the energy has nowhere to go. It turns inward. What looks like independence often becomes a slow erosion….think isolation that numbs the pain but deepens the wound. The body reads it as harm, even when the mind calls it control.

Attachment theory explains the pattern. Boys who grow-up without 'reliable male warmth' internalise avoidance as protection. They learn that dependency is danger, that vulnerability invites rejection. As adults they replicate it, retreating when intimacy feels too close, working longer hours, finding safety in abstraction. John Bowlby, a British psychologist on child-development, would call it an avoidant attachment style; Jung would call it a shadow in disguise. Either way, it’s the same result: a man who appears strong but is relationally malnourished.

And for the partner beside him, the experience is maddening, to sleep next to someone whose body is present but whose mind is locked behind concrete.

Some women have shared with me, that they respond with over-functioning: trying to fix him, to encourage emotion out of him, over-explaining, compensating for the absence. Others have said they have hardened…convincing themselves “he’ll never change”.

Both responses make sense, and both sustain the inertia. The truth is, he won’t change until he decides to. And the reality is she cannot carry the relationship alone. Love stops being alive when one person becomes the other’s conscience. The only path forward is mutual ownership, two people choosing to grow up rather than play out each other’s projections.

And even the mentorship collapse compounds it. For centuries, masculine identity passed through being together in proximity: apprenticeships, elders, rites of passage. A man learned who he was by standing next to older men who embodied direction and restraint.

Today those figures are absent or distracted. Middle-aged men are too busy ‘surviving their own disorientation’ to guide anyone else. Young men turn to algorithms for initiation. The digital mentor replaces the embodied one, and boys learn swagger without substance. The result is a generation fluent in motivation but illiterate in maturity.

Erik Erikson called the middle decades of life the stage of generativity: the impulse to mentor, to build legacy. When that energy has nowhere to go, it curdles into stagnation. That’s why we are seeing, forty-year-old men with resources and intelligence but no generative outlet, trapped between relevance and regret. They are not broken; they are uninitiated. They have never been taught how to become elders.

The economic ground has shifted beneath men’s feet. The old contract, provide and you will be respected, no longer holds. The modern world rewards leverage over labour, visibility over virtue. For men who built their worth on reliability and endurance, it feels like the rules changed mid-game, devotion replaced by disruption, constancy mistaken for obsolescence.

That creeping sense of being outdated, isn’t just financial; it’s existential. Viktor Frankl described it as the existential vacuum, the emptiness that comes when we have the means to live but no meaning to live for. The problem isn’t that the world betrayed men; it’s that men outsourced their meaning to a world that was always going to change.

The locus of control is still internal. The question is no longer “What happened to the world?” but “What will I build now that it has changed?” Purpose must become portable, something you carry, not something that depends on an employer, a market, or applause.

Providing was never really about money. It was about orientation, showing up steady, decisive, trustworthy. The currency now is presence: attention, consistency, direction. That’s what anchors families, teams, and communities when everything else moves.

But presence demands vulnerability, and that terrifies men who were trained to equate emotion with weakness. In truth, emotion is refinement, not rupture. The prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational governor, performs best when integrated with the limbic system, where feeling and empathy reside. Neuroscience now confirms what philosophy always hinted at: strength and vulnerability are not opposites but complementary circuits.

When a man suppresses emotion, his amygdala stays on high alert, flooding his body with cortisol and fatigue. When he can name and release what he feels, oxytocin and serotonin re-balance the system. Strength without softness burns out. Softness without strength collapses. Integration, the capacity to hold both, is coherence.

Still, coherence can’t be taught through slogans. It must be earned through ordeal. That’s what rites of passage once provided: structured struggle, witnessed transformation. But we have removed those initiations and called it progress. Now men invent artificial ordeals, extreme sports, overwork, conflict....to feel tested. Pain isn’t the enemy; meaningless pain is.

What men need are meaningful thresholds: challenges that purify rather than destroy. Building something hard, mentoring someone younger, repairing what they broke, these are modern rites if done consciously.

PTSD, trauma, depression, these are not identity; they are weather patterns. Seven years of darkness can end the moment a man stops negotiating with it. The body holds memory, but it also holds potential. Neuroplasticity means the brain can rewire through consistent new action. Agency is not theory; it’s biology. You either fire new neural pathways through new behaviour or you fossilise in repetition. Healing is not mystical. It’s movement with meaning.

And for the partner watching him crawl back from that abyss, patience must evolve from pity into presence. You cannot rescue him. But you can refuse to collude with his avoidance. Hold him accountable to the life he says he wants. Demand participation. If he truly wants to come home to himself, he’ll meet you there. If he doesn’t, you will know soon enough. Compassion is not the absence of boundaries; it’s the enforcement of truth.

The digital life has stolen the pauses that once shaped men’s inner worlds. Long drives. Quiet work. The slow rhythm of labour that forced reflection. Those spaces are gone, replaced by constant input, every silence filled with dopamine, every idle moment overtaken by noise of a podcast or music streaming. The mind never rests long enough to hear itself.

Reflection now has to be rebuilt, not found. That’s why physical practice matters, running, lifting, working with your hands, whatever it is for you. The body is the last honest place left. When you push it truthfully, it tells you what’s real. Jung called this the embodiment of the psyche, thinking through the body until the mind finally listens. This is the threshold every man faces: will I keep performing, or will I practice? Performing keeps the image alive; practicing keeps the soul alive. One feeds applause. The other builds alignment.

But practice doesn’t just transform the man, it transforms the space around him. When a man reclaims presence, everything he touches begins to recalibrate, including his relationships. The “wife who settled” isn’t weak; she’s weary. She adapted to his absence because resistance felt futile. But resignation breeds resentment, and resentment corrodes respect. She doesn’t need him to be perfect; she needs him to be here. If she’s reading this, she already knows: the cost of enabling his inertia is her own erosion. Patience is a virtue, but paralysis is not. Calling him to his edge isn’t cruelty; it’s love. The right man will thank her later.

See, masculinity itself is not toxic, it is just untrained. The same energy that once conquered continents can rebuild communities, and inner worlds if directed with consciousness.

The task, though, is not to reject power but to refine it; not to shrink, but to steward. Maturity, Jung believed, is measured not by control but by containment, the ability to hold tension without collapsing into aggression or retreat.

So, for men, that means learning to sit in discomfort without shutting down or being bowled out. For women, it means holding their ground without having to carry everyone else’s weight. Containment isn’t repression; it’s responsibility. It’s the discipline to hold ambition and humility, strength and empathy, reason and intuition in the same breath. That balance, that coherence, is what emotional adulthood looks like.

Culturally, we are all being forced into the same reckoning. We have lived too long in separation with men stripped of emotional range, women stripped of rest. Each compensating for the other’s absence instead of developing their own wholeness. What appears to be emerging now is a new kind of partnership, not one of dependence or independence, but of mutual evolution: two people choosing to grow alongside each other without losing themselves in the process.

Men don’t need to become softer; they need to become truer. Women don’t need to hold everything together; they need to stop rescuing what was never theirs to save. The point isn’t to blur the differences, but to bring both back into balance, side by side, not stacked on top of each other.

At the centre of it all is agency. We happen to the world, or we decay inside it. Every man who blames circumstance has already surrendered. Every woman who confuses endurance for love has already started disappearing. The locus of control is always internal, we were given brains and a capable body for a reason….Frankl called it the final freedom, “to choose one’s attitude in any circumstance.” That choice is the hinge on which transformation turns.

So what does that look like in practice? It looks like men building real friendships again, not networking, not escapism, but shared discipline and honesty.

It looks like mentors reappearing, not as gurus but as guides who admit imperfection. It looks like couples daring to talk before resentment becomes tradition.

It looks like leadership that prizes integrity over image. It looks like small, consistent acts of self-ownership: cleaning the mess you made, finishing what you start, telling the truth even when it costs you comfort.

Masculinity isn’t dying; it’s moulting. The outer shell, stoicism without empathy, strength without service, is cracking. What’s emerging is rough, uncertain, alive. Men who are no longer content to outsource their meaning. Women who refuse to mother grown men. Partnerships built not on dependency but on development.

We are learning, painfully, that growth demands rupture. The friendship recession, the mentorship void, the economic betrayal, all of it is compost for a new archetype. The man who integrates his shadow. The woman who integrates her power. The couple who stop performing survival and start practicing creation.

There’s no shortcut. No algorithm. No hack. Just the steady work of integration: feeling what you avoided, saying what you mean, acting on what you know. The world doesn’t owe (us) men recognition; it offers reflection. Every disappointment, every crisis, every exhausted glance from the person who loves you is an invitation.

Masculinity isn’t a war to win or an identity to defend. It’s a discipline, the daily alignment of strength and tenderness, order and openness. The man who understands this becomes dangerous in the best sense: not because he dominates, but because he’s unshakeable.

If avoidance built this world, awareness will rebuild it. If isolation defined this generation, connection can redeem it. But only if we choose it, again and again, from the inside out.

The world doesn’t happen to us.We happen to the world.

And the moment a man believes that, really believes it, everything begins again.

TK