What Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Kant Taught Us About Being A Man - Part 2

All right, team, welcome back to the mantalk Show. I'm Connor Beaton, and today I'm going to be giving you five psychological pillars that you can deploy as a man from philosophical thinkers. So we're going to be diving into some great philosophers and the wisdom that they left us through their body of work. Number four. Pillar number four, which is a good one, is, is kind of a mix of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, but it's really about how comfort is not meaning. Meaning will not be found in comfort, and meaning is actually found through choosing suffering. And this is kind of paradoxical in nature to again, what modernity, what materialism will tell you what modernity and materialism are really selling is that in comfort there's meaning. In comfort there's safety. In comfort there's purpose. In pleasure, there's fulfillment. But if you look at the great philosophers and if you just look at your life, that's almost very rarely the case, right? Of course there's meaning and fun and play and going on vacation and enjoying yourself and having a good time. And, you know, it's not all about, you know, suffering, suffering, suffering. But if you look at the great philosophers and let's talk about Dostoevsky for a moment, he really showed that men would rather suffer with meaning than live comfortably without it. They would rather suffer with meaning than live comfortably without it. And I don't know about you, but I think that is fundamentally true for me. I would rather have meaning coupled with suffering, which is necessary, right? If you want to develop meaning in your life, you are going to have to work for it in a way that creates suffering. Right? You're going to have to wake up early, you're going to have to go to the gym, you're going to have to put in the reps, you're going to have to send the emails that are uncomfortable and have the conversations that you vehemently want to avoid and don't want to deal with. And Nietzsche, I think, made this really explicit. He said he who has a why can bear almost any how. And, you know, the modern man is largely, I think, not depressed because life is hard. They are depressed because their suffering has no aim. They're just suffering and there's no meaning involved in it. They're just in pain and there has been no attempt to pursue the meaning in the pain that they are experiencing. And so if you are a man who feels lost, who feels confused, who's kind of wandering through life and you just feel like, man, my life just sucks, it's hard I'm suffering, I'm in pain. I don't know what all of this is for. The alchemy is beginning to kind of go on a quest, an Odyssean like quest, to see how might my pain and my suffering be meaningful. What might be meaningful about the pain and the suffering I'm already experiencing? Or maybe you are just suffering because your life is lacking so much meaning. It's lacking any type of subsistence that you are in pain and suffering because of that, which means that you need to go back to. I think it was pillar number two, which is choose responsibility that you want to carry, even if it causes you suffering, even if it is brutal and hard. There will be a quality of purpose and meaning and fulfillment in that. That really is something that we can use words to talk about all day long, but it's something that unless you have experienced it, the analogy I was about to give then I'm going to give it anyways. It's kind of funny, but the analogy I'd like to give is, imagine describing an orgasm to somebody who had never had an orgasm, right? You can describe it all you want, but until you actually experience it, you don't know how meaningful it can be. So there you go. Hopefully you enjoyed that analogy. I don't think that's something that Dr. Jordan Peterson would throw out, but that's something I'm going to throw at. So what do you do in this area? What's the practical application of what I'm talking about? Well, number one, as I was saying, choose a burden that you are willing to carry for years. Choose a burden that you are willing to carry for years. And an example of that for me is, you know, in the work I do, it's not all light and fluffy. I have men constantly reaching out, whose lives are falling apart, who are in shambles. You know, they've just been served divorce papers, they're fighting to see their children. They, you know, they have suicidal ideation, they're in pain, they're depressed, or they're winning and they're really struggling, even though they've become very, very, very successful. And so that is a weight. It's not an easy thing to continually be hearing the suffering of so many men who are hurting, who are in pain. But that is a burden to that. And it's not even. I don't see it as a burden, but it is a weight that I'm willing to carry for years that I'm willing to carry for the rest of my life because it's so Freaking meaningful to understand the depth of pain that some of you are in. And I appreciate every single one of you that reaches out and shares that with me. I really, really do. So that's number one, choose a burden that you are willing to carry for years. And the second part of this is accept sacrifice and as a cost that you have to pay as an admission fee to meaning. Okay. Accept sacrifice and suffering as a cost and a price that you are going to have to pay to have meaning. There's a trade off, there's a kind of transaction that happens if you are avoiding the sacrifice and the suffering. The meaning will not come. It just will not come. I promise you. And lastly, stop asking how do I feel about this? And start asking yourself, is this worthy of my life force? Is this worthy of me giving my life to it? Is this worthy of me giving my vitality and my energy to it? Purpose really organizes pain. And so if you are in pain and you are not sure what to do with it, as the first line in my book said, a man's work begins in pain. Begin the process of. Of allocating some purpose to the pain that you're carrying and have been given. And that can be a purpose for a period of time. Doing this type of work gives many men gave me a deep and profound sense of purpose because I started to pull myself out of the trenches. I started to pull myself out of hell, as it were, and started to put myself onto a path. So aimlessness, being lost, these things really corrode the psyche and the soul. And if you are more interested in comfort in modernity and materialism, then you are going to have a hard time finding meaning because that is just not found there. Okay, last but not least, truth over approval. Now, this is going to be rough. This is a mix of Kant and Nietzsche. Nietzsche. But I think one of the main struggles that so many men face in our culture today is the. The approval seeking that culture and society have really incentivized every human being to fixate on. Right. You, every single day as a man, are incentivized to focus in on approval seeking. And there's actually a price, a hu. Price that we have seen over the last several years that you will pay if maybe people disagree with you, you might lose friendships, you might lose opportunities, people might, you know, call you some type of ist or ism, you know, that you're, you're a racist, you're a misogynist, you're a sexist, you're a whatever is. If they disagree with you and it can be a trap. It is a trap as a man to pursue approval over truth. So in many ways the modern man, you and I and every other man is constantly in this incubator being pressured to be agreeable, to be inoffensive, to never be offensive, to be morally aligned with a certain part of the crowd. And the truth is that that doesn't bring any type of satiation or fulfillment. Again, this is about sovereignty. The masculine and men seek equality of sovereignty. Yes. Yes. Brotherhood, yes. Relationships, yes. Connection, yes. Community. I'm not saying be a lone wolf and never talk to anybody and you know, live in a hut out in the forest in the woods. But when we over index and over prioritize agreeableness and not being non offensive and being constantly apologetic for stepping on anybody's toes, then our sense of self is dependent on, on whether somebody else approves of us. And another way of saying this, and this is just my frame, you can never build self worth, internalized self worth and self value if you have outsourced and externalized the you have outsourced and externalized where the validation and the approval of your value and your worth comes from. So we need to internalize, we need to develop a culture internally of being able to recognize our own value, being able to build that value, creating the markers and the goals and the aims that help you to build that sense of worth. Now Kant would demand that truthfulness was a kind of moral duty. When you really read his work, he was, he was rigorous and meticulous and kind of ruthless with this notion that you as an individual have a moral duty. You have a fundamental core responsibility to truth in your life, in your relationship and to society, which I think that we have largely lost. And then Nietzsche would say that truth is actually an act of courage and bravery. So he doesn't necessarily go into whether or not it's a moral duty. But what he really says is we all know, and I think they go hand in hand, which is really nice. Nietzsche would say that we all know that there's a cost, there's a price to pay for speaking truth. And you are putting yourself objectively in maybe, maybe sometimes danger socially or culturally or online from, from, you know, the keyboard warriors, by speaking truth. But the result is that a man who cannot speak truth loses trust in himself. A man who cannot speak truth loses trust in himself. And so what do we do? You start to say the thing that costs you social points. You start to say the thing that costs you social points. Now here's the catch. With this is that you're not always gonna be right, you're not always going to be right and people are not always going to agree with you. But that's the point, right? If you preserve, if you preserve being right all the time, if you prioritize being right all the time, never offending anybody else, you are going to erode your sense of self respect and self worth. So if you say the thing that might cost you some social points again, within reason, right? We don't want to go out into the fringes and be wild and crazy and go online and you know, deuces a blazing and just saying whatever the hell we want to actively try and be offensive. Some people deploy that tactic. But say the truth even if it costs you some social points because it will preserve your sense of self respect. Stop outsourcing your sense of validation and acknowledgement to other people. So start to insource, start to recognize yourself and validate yourself for the things that you genuinely have achieved and accomplished. The little hard things, having that conversation, speaking that truth, sending that email, they might be objectively small to other people and those other people in your life, friends, family members, you know, girlfriend, wife, et cetera, they might never see those things or applaud for them. And that's why you need to do it. So start to insource your validation, start to recognize yourself and be absolutely ruthless about this. I mean that the one thing that has fundamentally changed my life is I pulled the nets in of where I would get validation from, where I needed to have acceptance, from, who I needed to like me. And I started to insource that whole infrastructure and last learn how to tolerate being misunderstood and not being liked without becoming bitter or resentful. This is a hard one. I think in many ways part of the masculine culture that has arrived in our world today that says f everybody who disagrees with me, I don't freaking care. I don't care what you say, I don't care what you do. And is completely devoid of any type of empathy because there's a kind of suicidal empathy on the other. That void of empathy isn't also morally just, it isn't also psychologically rewarding or fulfilling. So you can build a tolerance for being misunderstood, for not being liked without becoming resentful and bitter towards the people who do not like you or do not understand you. There are many people who don't like and understand me. That's totally fine, it's all right with me and I don't need to think less of them. I don't need to pretend like, oh, I just don't care what other people think. What I care about is that there are some people in my life who genuinely their opinion does matter because they do know me and they have a different perspective. So to summarize all this and thank you for hanging in with me on this philosophical deep dive into pillars of manhood and masculinity. Modern men, we must learn to choose responsibility over resentment, to master yourself before correcting the world around you, to integrate your darkness instead of denying it or being controlled by it. Choose meaningful suffering over empty comfort. And lastly, speak the truth even when it might cost you approval. Thank you so much for tuning in. Don't forget to share this with somebody in your life that you know will enjoy it. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you if you enjoy this type of content. Until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.