HEALTHY MASCULINITY

Aaron Renn is a writer and consultant who is Senior Fellow at American Reformer and writes a newsletter to help people to successfully adapt to the 21^st century world. Today he wrote about the 10 Pillars of Healthy Masculinity which is a summary of a talk he gave at the University of Dallas. It can be seen on YouTube. They are worth sharing.

• Identity. If you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what to do. “Who are you?” is the most fundamental question of life.
• Mission. Every man needs to have a mission. And it’s important for men to know that their hopes, dreams, plans, and aspirations matter too. I also posted this segment as a clip.
• Agency. You have to believe that it is possible to take action to change your circumstances to the better, to take positive steps towards progress in your mission.
• Virtue. This is not just being morally upright, though that’s part of it. It’s cultivating excellences across multiple dimensions of virtue: the theological virtues, the cardinal virtues, the tactical virtues, etc.
• Knowledge. You need to know how the world works. Not just how people tell you it works, or how you would like it to work, but how it actually does work.
• Wisdom. You have to constantly grow in how to apply your virtue and knowledge in the right way in each situation. Because nothing will undermine your mission like folly.
• Fraternity. Every man needs a band of brothers. Nothing is easier to overlook than the need for fraternity. Too many men either have no friends, or only the illusion of friends (who are really just the husbands of their wife’s friends).
• Family. Getting married and having kids is the normative path for men in life. A lot of young men say they want to get married someday. Well, someday gets here a lot faster than you ever thought possible, and it’s all too easy to miss your window.
• Suffering. One of these days, life is going to punch you in the face. Think you aren’t going to suffer in life? Think again.
• Legacy. What are you going to leave behind when you are gone? How will you have an impact in the world that extends beyond the span of your own life?