Manliness

Fred On Everything:

"Women want security, comfort, nice houses and nice cars. Men eventually feel cramped by them. Of course there are exceptions. The old social order, in which women were shy and retiring and stayed in the house, was to a considerable extent artificial. You now see women on the long mountain trails, sometimes solo, and diving the deep walls in the Caribbean. But they are exceptions.

And so you get a young engineer who knows that something is wrong but may not know what. He’s bright. Engineers are. He is working on some detail of the hot section of a big new high-efficiency turbo-fan. It is interesting work and well paid. After work every day he goes to the local hangout to check out the babes, though somehow they aren’t quite what he’s looking for, and his buddies come by with their new Lexuses, and they drink beer and talk about the market. Every night. Another birthday rolls around. He asks the overarching question for a lot of young males today in a world that isn’t theirs: “Is this all?”

Maybe he gets a motorcycle, or skydives, but it’s still the controlled world, artificial adventure. Or, just maybe, he goes to some silly survival school, an answer arguably ridiculous to a question that isn’t."