About a week ago, I was doing some strength work in my gym at home. I recently discovered resistance bands and I have been incorporating them into my weight training. There is a bunch of new exercises I can do, and I’m really impressed with how it changed my workouts. My four-year-old son is equally impressed with the bright-colored bands, and he claimed several for himself. 

During my workout he messed around with the bands, doing all kinds of exercises, when he completed one of his “exercises”, he ran to me with great excitement and told me that this exercise made him super strong! While doing another set, he called out: “look daddy I’m getting so strong” He then came and showed off his muscles and told me that the exercises are getting easier because he is getting stronger. Over and over, he used the word strong!

He was consumed with the idea of becoming stronger. His mission was to make the hard thing look easy and the heavy things, light, and showed off his muscles in the process.  While this might sound like normal toddler behavior something about him wanting to be strong and lift heavy things reminded me of Jack Donovan’s explanation of strength in his book the way of men, I’ll get to that in a minute.

Childhood Dreams

After the excitement with my boy and finishing my workout, I could not get the part out of my head that this four-year-old had a dream, a mission to become stronger. Thinking about it I realized that most little boys I know wanted to be strong and have muscles. It’s the ultimate dream and one of the biggest compliments you can give a little boy is telling him he is a big, strong man. 

Boys dreaming of being big and strong is manliness in its rawest form, it’s honest without politics or wokeness.

Unfortunately, most men lose their childhood dream of strength along the way. We forget the excitement we once had about being a little boy dreaming of being strong. Most men today are physically weak, and their strength limit is around lifting their own ass from a couch, anything more than that will end in huffing and puffing and flabby legs. Men became fat, lazy, and weak.

In the book, The Way of Men Jack Donovan explains that if you take something apart, there are certain aspects that must remain intact for it to retain its identity. Without these aspects, it becomes something else. Without strength, masculinity becomes something else. If you want to make an honest attempt to understand masculinity or manliness, physical strength will be at the centre of the argument. The way of men is the way of the strong.

Let me put it simply. If you disassemble a pocketknife it will consist of a blade, handle, screws, and locking mechanism. If you put it back together without the blade you will have a very nice handle, a handle is good but not very useful when you need a knife. By removing the key aspect of the knife, in this case, the blade, you made something else. 

Strength is a key aspect of being a man. It always has been. Think of Samson in the bible, the Spartans, and Strongmen flipping cars at a world’s strongest man event. There is certain awe to it. 

If you then remove strength from a man, you have created something else, something different. It is no longer a man but an object without intention, and a man without intent, is not very useful.

An argument against strength

You might argue that most of us don’t need strength anymore. We are living relatively safe lives, with our alarms and barbed wire fences. Most have office jobs; we drive cars to get from and to work. We have trucks hauling the heavy loads. We made life easy for ourselves.

Back in the day Men had to be strong or their chances of survival would decline drastically. It was not safe, and you had to be ready to fight bandits wanting to kill you for fun or for your food. Work was hard and mostly everything was done by hand. No cars or trucks so you had to walk and carry the load yourself. Life was hard, and strength was necessary to survive.

So, you might argue that strength became somewhat redundant in today’s way of life, having machines doing all the heavy lifting for us.

But what about that dream you once had as a child? What if Jack’s argument holds true that the way of men is the way of the strong? 

Do you know yourself?

The Romans had the maxim, know yourself. And I concluded over the past couple of years that most of us do not know a thing about ourselves. And most do not bother to find out. We neglect the key components that make us men, and we are paying the price. Depression, suicide, and loneliness are at an all-time high specifically for men!

We are being led by weak men like sheep to the slaughterhouse and we do not understand why. We are hated and called toxic. We became handles, where knives are needed. We became beings without purpose or intent. We became something else, and it is not good.

Conclusion

I believe children’s simpler way of thinking holds many truths. There are no grey areas. No woke culture or social media influence. They do not care if they offend, they speak their minds. “A boy should be strong, if you’re not strong you are a girl.” Words from a four-year-old.

You can make up all the excuses in the world why you don’t need to be strong, why you don’t need to be fit. At the end of the day, it is as simple as a child’s perspective. Men are supposed to be physically strong; it is the way of men. Without it you will suffer and feel empty.

Maybe you are depressed, lonely, or contemplating suicide. Maybe you feel a little lost or without hope. Are you looking for a better life? A better world? And not sure where to start?

START HERE! Know that strength is one of the key components that makes you a man. You need it like the handle needs the blade. Get stronger. Get to know yourself and see how things change around you! 

“A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be, if he were strong.” Mark Rippetoe.

THE STRONG