Conversation between Josh Trent and Stefanos Sifandos (Wellness Force podcast) exploring what it means for modern men to exercise agency and the practical virtues that support that agency. The speakers emphasize personal responsibility/sovereignty, inner work, and five "tactical virtues" (strength, courage, mastery, honor, plus connectivity). They tie these virtues to evolutionary roots, physical and emotional resilience, confronting complacency, and developing intimacy skills.
Chapters
I think the demands of the modern man right now have never been so great. You know, being fully present with our woman, being fully present with our community, our job, our health, like it just continues to stack up. But there is this center point and you know, Lao Tzu talks about the middle way. And even if you look at like the ancient masters or the contemporary masters, everyone essentially, they explore the extremes, you know, like you had said, like the men that shut down and push people away or the men that become hyper aggressive. But, but I feel like there is this genuine middle. And one of the quotes that I was looking at from the School of Life and if you haven't seen the School of Life on YouTube, you gotta check it out, man. There was a video on there and it defined the definition of an adult. A person who can alter their own circumstances through their own agency. I mean like, it just gives me a chill.
Sovereign empowerment.
In order for a man to truly be his own agency and to truly have like the power to balance all those things I talked about and, and to have the self awareness to navigate the extremes you talked about, where does that man begin? I mean, maybe it starts with a deep breath, but, but where does that man actually begin? Obviously it's like feeling enough pain, but what's that trajectory look like from that point?
Yeah, I like to reference in anytime I receive that question, the vast majority of the time I like to reference a gentleman by the name of Jack Donovan. And he has four tactical virtues. And I've added a tactical virtue to that for a specific reason. So the tactical virtues are streng, courage, mastery, honor. And I've added connectivity there because I think we need connectivity more than ever now. And yes, I mean I was looking at this a number of years ago, it was a couple of years ago now, but I'm going to go there. But before we go there, we, I want to say something else. We need to do our work. Like we need to do our inner work. And I preface these five tactical virtues or I preface this before going into the five tactical virtues. For me it leads back to that and it leads back to that quote that you just said about agency, responsibility, sovereignty, autonomy, whatever words you want to put around, whatever words you know, you know, the audience may resonate with or you. Yeah, I think that's just so, so important for us as human beings to, and men to be, to take ownership of. It's not your responsibility, it's mine. Because the moment we say it's someone else's responsibility or we blame someone else for not feeling a particular way or experiencing life in the way that we want to experience life. What happens is we disempower ourselves and we give our power away. That does one of two things. We either retract from the world or we lash out in the world. So you're looking at two sides of the shadow. That light side that retracts, that goes more introverted, internal, or that dark side that is more external, lashes out. Extroverted. Right, but in a shadow way. And the shadow way, at some level, it's just about intimacy in relationships. It's about how you give and receive love, and it's about whether you're allowing people in. Are you surrendering to that? Or are you too scared? Are you too scared to be loved? Are you too scared to love because you're scared of loss, whatever it may be. So look at these tactical virtues, and I like them because really, what these tactical virtues represent is what does it mean to be good at being a man? Not what does it mean to be a good man? What does it mean to be good at being a man? There's a lot of definitions out there. There's a lot of opinions out there.
There's a lot of movies made, a lot of movies.
That's exactly right. But most of the movies follow the suit of what does it mean to be a good man? And that's a subjective cultural inference. It's an individuated thing. It's a familial thing. It's a peer group thing. It's a culture thing. It's, it's, it's. There's too many. The interpretations are too vast and too broad. Nothing wrong with it. But I think it's. I really do think it's a question that can be asked after the what does it mean to be a good man? And for that, I like to go back to our evolutionary roots. Not only social psych, evolutionary social psychology, but evolutionary biology. How we've grown up, how we've evolved over the, you know, I don't know, a few million years as humanoids, somewhere there, right beyond the few hundred thousand years as Homo sapiens, like, really going back into, how did we develop? What were the things that we did that shaped us? What's deep in our nervous system, what's deep in our brain stem, in our cerebellum, really, who are we? Right, because that's still. That unconscious part of us still drives a lot of who we are. Now, as the prefrontal Cortex has developed, we've had tremendous opportunities to see Ourselves differently to make more deliberate, conscious choices that have elevated consciousness or elevated this capac capacity to think about marvels of the universe. Right. Like the cosmos, in a completely different way. We haven't been stuck in survival facing off beasts and animals that are 10 times bigger than us. Right. So that's a blessing that we have. But that unconscious, primal aspect of self still drives us. So let's start with strength. For so many reasons, being strong is really important. Stronger people are harder to kill. Now, I'm just talking about physical strength. I'm talking about emotional strength, resilience, spiritual strength. I'm talking about emotional resilience as well. I'm talking about having a capacity to move through difficult times and physically being strong in our bodies. Because to the feminine, that represents discipline, that represents confidence, that represents assertiveness, that represents trust in oneself. These are important qualities that the feminine looks for in the masculine, irrespective of what your biological gender is. Right? Yeah. So that's important. I think every man needs. And I'm not saying you have to deadly lift 300 kilos or a thousand pounds.
I don't get from you that this is aesthetically how you hear. No, we're talking about internal strength.
Yeah, yeah. And definitely physical strength. Like just having trust in your body.
Exactly.
Like, we have to come. You know what, what does breath do, brother? It brings us back into the body.
That's right.
Like it's health and vitality in the body. So you've just got to be competent in your body, move your body, trust it. You've got to take it to the edges. This is the thing. People don't know what their edge is because we're too complacent. Men are too lazy. I did a post on this. Yes. I haven't posted it, but I' I've been in this hyper creative space, man, and I've been. I've literally got four weeks worth of posts already lined up. Like, I just. I just keep talking, not really writing, but I'll do some writing, but just typing. And it's all coming out of me. And so one of the things that I wrote yesterday was about men being so fucking lazy. Like, we are addicted to complacency. We are addicted to. To comfort, excessive comfort. That's not what makes a man a man. Man was bred in difficulty and challenge. It is the domain of the masculine. We were responsible for extending the perimeter. We were responsible for fighting off really big things. We were responsible for hunting. We were responsible for ensuring the safety of our communities and Tribes, for whatever reason, that was what was bestowed upon us. We, the large majority of that responsibilities was bestowed upon men. That's in us, right? That's why, you know, partly the. The expression or the extension of the cultural role of man has been to provide. Right. And that takes form in different ways, depending on the culture in the era and the values of that culture. But strength, so important, courage. We avoid difficult things and come back to this. This age of laziness and complacency. Technology is a marvel, and to our detriment. It's made us soft. It's made us. Oh, I don't need to do that. I need to make. I don't need to make the effort now. What happens is the more we don't make an effort, the more. The more we don't believe in ourselves, the more we don't test ourselves, the more we don't know who we are. That's a parallel drawn and a carryover into every other area of our lives. Or you're having an argument with your partner. I'll just leave. Because the masculine wants to be empty anyway. The masculine just wants to leave. That's what's in our nervous system. The female will shut down and numbs out internally. The masculine literally leaves physically the environment when he's in fight or flight.
Which is the opposite of courage. Correct.
We're not facing our stuff.
And within this. You talked about strength. You talked about courage. Within the courage, though, there's so many layers and nuance. I mean, gosh, man, like, emotional development. Like, just because we're aware of these concepts does not mean they're embodied.
