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It’s Man Week and I thought I’d share some of my experiences and thoughts on masculinity. I’m mostly going to speak from personal experience because I’m not sure if my understanding of masculinity is universal. I suspect that it might be but I’m not going to be that presumptuous. Maybe Man Week can help me sort that out!

Growing up without a dad

My Dad left when I was pretty young. My mum, my sister and I were living in Darwin and he called up one day and said that he was in Sydney. Won’t be coming back. At the time I didn’t think this meant he was gone from my life completely, he just wouldn’t be living with us but “he can still come over can’t he, Mum?”. From then on it was pretty much just me, Mum and my sister.

It’s true that growing up without a father figure denies you direct, everyday contact with a role model, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not surrounded by the proposition of masculinity in just about every part of your life. If you can’t look within your own family you can turn to chaps like Jason Bourne or Tom Hanks from Sleepless in Seattle. Dr. Karl. Culturally we’re almost drowned in artefacts that define masculinity for us and it’s not hard to get some cookie-cutter idea of what a man is, or should be.

In some ways growing up without a Dad can make life even less confusing. Instead of learning from someone else, trying to follow your Dad’s massive footprints on the beach, you become more independent and you have to take everything that is being thrown at you and make some kind of sense of it by yourself. You’re forced to decide what to take stock of, what to discard and in the process you get some kind of idea of what a man is meant to be and what kind of man you would like to become.

When you grow up with women your idea of masculinity comes from the female perspective, which I think is a good thing given that the female is the counterpoint to the male and as a young man I can say that just about everything I’ve done in my life, stupid or otherwise, has been the result of female influence. And I don’t mean this in some macho “I lead with my dick” way, but in more of a holistic Yin and Yang kind of way.

Wrestling with your ego

A big part of my journey in to manhood was defined by the struggle I had with my ego. Ego is central to masculinity and in my opinion  is one of the big barriers men have to overcome when trying to live up to this ideal of a decent man. It’s a personal journey and you have to learn what ego is, how to control it and when to let to run a muck. My journey began in my teenage years and lasted all the way through until I was about 24 and in my third year of University. I’m not willing to say I’ve overcome all the negativism of ego, but I’m much further along than I used to be and I don’t think it rules me in the way it used to.The story is partly chronicled in an online journal I kept, one that I hope never sees the light of day. When I look back on some of the things I wrote about about uni, life away from home, girls, love, mateship etc. I cringe, but in a weird way, writing down and sharing my experience with strangers really helped me. I’m in the place I am because of that journal.

Having one bad role model is important

This sounds a bit nuts, but my Dad was shit and he wasn’t around and he didn’t live up to this idea of what a man should be and having that kind of bad role model in your life really helps to you to understand what it is to actually be a man. I don’t want this to sound like a Dad bashing paragraph and I’m not after sympathy, but I knew that he didn’t feel any sense of responsibility to his family, he wasn’t brave and his values were all out of shape. If you have a problem to solve, sometimes the best place to start is with the solution. Conversely I knew that if I wanted to be a decent man all I had to do was start with a bad man and work backwards.

Having such a strong desire to be a good man was always kind of a ‘fuck you’ to my Dad. I can be a good person, a man and successful and I can do it without you. Some of this anger is still there but I’ve mostly let it go.

Gen. Y Man

Sounds like some sleek clothing label (which, oddly, is appropriate) but I’m talking about my male contemporaries and their place in the world. Boomers, Xers and everyone else seem so eager to define Generation Y and to be honest, it can get a little annoying. According to their definition of an entire generation we actually posses some qualities that are out of sync with the standard idea of masculinity. Gen Y can’t commit to anything, are flakey, move around a lot and stereotypically the men are more effeminate than previous generations. Instead of saving for a home we buy iPods, eat out heaps and get drink a shit load of cocktails. Gen Y also have a different set of values compared to previous generations and I think this is resulting in a rejection of some of the ideas traditionally associated with masculinity. I can’t wait to see what future-man looks like. Maybe Matt Corby will be our next PM.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it means to be a man and I hope it’s something I have to strive for the rest of my life. It’s true that men need to lose some of the shit they carry about with them and learn to talk to each other. About life, football, ladies, whatever. I think Man Week rules and I’ve loved reading what my fellow men have to say about being men. Man!

Oh and just to prove I do have a sense of humor, I’ve included a video that might teach you all a little more about Gen Y.

Last Friday I went to a burger restaurant in Crows Nest called The Counter. Aside from being all about serving natural produce, the menu system is specific and invites you to ‘build your own’ meal. The concept isn’t entirely original but the menu is broken down in to 6 sections;  type of meat, the weight of your meat, basic sides (lettuce, chilli capsicums etc), special sides (beacon, egg), type of bun and sauces. Then of course you have the sides menu, the drinks menu and the desert menu. Each of these little sections contains between 5 and 18 options. All in all you can choose one of 312, 120 burger combinations. This isn’t accidental, in fact it’s one of their main selling points. The pitch being that you will have a unique and different meal every time you visit the restaurant, unlike some of the other burger joints in the world.

So with 312, 120 different possibilities it should be damn near impossible for me to walk away feeling unsatisfied. How could I be? With such an abundance of choice I should have been able to find the perfect burger combination for me. But the truth is I walked out feeling a little less than happy. Not unhappy, but not happy either.

I am meant to feel liberated by this excess of choice and by my ability to choose freely. The scale is relative: the more choices I have, the freer I should feel and freedom is something we value very highly. So why did I walk away feeling discontent? Barry Schwartz gave a TED talk on the ‘Paradox of Choice’ way back in July 2005. He also wrote a book of the same title which argues that  choice has made us not freer but “more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied”. His idea being that the excessive amount of choices we are faced with on a daily basis actually works to “erode our psychological well being”.  At The Counter I was presented with so many different options that it took me 10 times longer to choose what I wanted and once I had finally settled it was that much easier for me to believe that I could have chosen a better option, that my burger choice (1 of 312, 120 possible combinations) could have been the wrong one. “Would this have been better with tomato? Maybe I should have gone for the Garlic Aoilie instead of the Chilli Sauce?”

When faced with such an intimidating number of desirable choices we begin to consider “hypothetical trade-offs”. We begin to evaluate our options in terms of missed opportunities instead of the opportunities potential. Schwartz is basically saying that a choice overload, such as the one I experienced at The Counter, can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them. Logically we assume that amongst such a large number of choices exists the perfect option but by virtue of the fact that there are so many options, the chances of us choosing the right one is significantly decreased. With so many choices our expectations are unrealistically high and Schwartz tells us that this can make you “blame yourself for any and all of your failures”. In the long run this can lead to “decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress”.

While I didn’t walk out of The Counter with clinical depression, it’s easy imagine what kind of effect this gigantic amount of choice could have over time. Every day I am faced with decisions involving countless amount of choices and potential outcomes. I don’t think solitude is the answer but I definitely think living in the City is both corrosive and invigorating at the same time.

I just came across this at The Long Now via Noah Brier’s blog and it got me thinking. I’ve often wondered what I would do should I ever find myself traveling back through time. I’m ashamed to say I think I would be ill equiped both to steer humanity in the right direction and to profit personally. I guess this is one less thing I’ll loose sleep over.

And yes, energy does equal mass times the speed of light squared and no, I’ve never heard of this Einstein fellow.