“Masculinity”

Recently I've been really struggling with the concept of “masculinity”, and the feeling of not being “masculine” enough—not being “man” enough. The tragedy of this feeling is, that, it’s probably one of the most depressing feelings a young guy can have, a teenager can have.

You start to question every fiber of your being—your past, present, and what your dreams for the future are. Maybe I won’t amount to anything. Nothing at all. My life is meaningless, isn’t it? To be fair though, it is meaningless. Life is utterly meaningless, and that’s fine.

We’re dropped off on this god-forsaken planet, just for the purpose of continuing the human race. Through evolution, our true purpose in life is just to reproduce, take care of the offspring, and like, you know, just die. That’s it.

Coming back to the topic at hand, when I think of the word “masculine”, certain people come to my mind—Brad Pitt, Leonardo Dicaprio, Ryan Reynolds—tall, chiseled bodies, and what not. Especially Leonardo dude, he’s like, just wow. He’s lived the “perfect life”—dating supermodels, money, fame, everything.

To put things into perspective though, and to provide a bit of context, I don't think I'll be considered the most “masculine” person by most folks speaking to me—I have a higher-pitched voice, average height, and just overall average looks; not very masculine, so to say.

The strange thing is that I'd never really thought about all this before; I never cared really, but as I'm about to turn 18, I've started caring a tad bit more than I'd care to admit (pun intended). Coupling this along with the several other problems in my life at the moment including loneliness; it just adds fuel to the fire.

Between watching everything under the sun on YouTube for hours—Markiplier to Linus Tech Tips to Colin and Samir to Nikhil Kamath to Nico Leonards to Wendover to Modern MBA, and much much more, to sleeping for hours and hours on end because I have no energy or willingness to do anything, the leftover time is filled with overthinking.

This now brings us, once again, after the long tangent, to the topic at hand. “Masculinity”. Yes, “masculinity” or lack thereof is my muse at the moment, rather, it has me imprisoned.

On a sidenote, how do we define “masculinity” though? Is it just based on the narrative peddled around by mainstream media and the public at large? Perhaps it’s the image portrayed by content and cinema of how a guy should be, if he is to be considered masculine? But how do we attribute certain traits to a gender, and then build archetypes around it? Perhaps that's where certain physical and emotional indicators come into play—larger height for men, curviness for women. Traits like being dominant, strong, and brave, for men. While traits like being caring, emotional, and whatnot for women.

But it does give way to a question—are humans, as a species, so simple to place into boxes; boxes guided by notions and expectations dictating them to behave in a certain way; as a guideline for their existence. That's just bonkers, no?

Anyway, as a reader of this article, you must be wondering as to what the point of this particular blog article is—there is no point. At this point, I’m just sort of documenting my journey from a nobody to hopefully being a nobody with a bit of money—money which I probably will never spend because I’m extremely frugal and it’s just a KPI for me—to measure how much better I’m doing than someone else using this one metric.