American culture is hurting men
Letter #37
The lights dimmed. The IMAX screen glowed. It was time.
Our theater was packed to the brim. ‘How many people in here have never seen Interstellar?’ I thought. They were in for a treat.
We start on a blight-infested earth. Crops are dying. Okra’s extinct. Corn is about to follow suit. Cooper, a former astronaut, is trying to make ends meet as a farmer with his family. He dreams of going back to space.
His daughter starts noticing weird anomalies in their house. Books fall from the bookshelf all day, and dirt falls in uniform lines on their floor. Murph, his daughter, calls it a ghost.
Cooper studies it and realizes… “It’s not a ghost, Murph, it’s gravity.” He flips a quarter and it gets sucked into the dirt. He realizes the dust patterns are coordinates in binary. Where to? Who knows.
They travel to these coordinates, and discover it’s NASA headquarters. Gravitational anomalies have been happening around earth for years now. NASA believe “they” are trying to send us a message. Who’s they? We don’t know.
A wormhole popped up around Saturn 50 years ago. “They” put it there. We sent people into it to find new inhabitable planets, and NASA needs experienced astronauts to head the next mission.
Cooper is a perfect fit. They ask. He accepts. What else can he do? The earth is ending. To save his children, he needs to leave them. It culminates in an emotional goodbye that sets the tone for the rest of the movie:
Interstellar means a lot to me. I watched it months before my wedding on the year I turned 30, and it impacted me significantly.
Last week you wrote this Dad, “Can we admit that there is in all of us a yearning to feel safe as a child?”
In Interstellar, Cooper says something similar:
“When you become a parent, one thing becomes really clear. And that's that you want to make sure your children feel safe. And that rules out telling a 10-year old that the world's ending.”
There’s nothing I can say to that. That’s true.
It seems we have two options:
Don’t show any weakness to make our kids feel safer.
Show what we’re feeling, which makes our kids feel unstable.
Is it really this binary, though? I asked this question online, and found research suggesting that yes, falling apart in front of your kids is problematic. But it also said that showing emotions, in general, is not a bad thing AS LONG AS it models healthy emotional regulation.
Something like “I’m feeling a little down today, but that’s okay. Sometimes we all feel this way.”
This teaches your kids to handle emotions in a healthy way. It also allows the parent to express some of their emotions. It’s a win-win.
Furthermore, kids can pick up on unspoken emotions. If they see their parent suppressing things, it can create anxiety and confusion. They may grow up feeling like difficult emotions should be ignored rather than processed in a healthy way.
It seems the correct answer, like so many things in life, lies in the middle between these two extremes.
I wonder how much American culture plays into this as well. It’s come to my attention recently just how many downsides our capitalist, individualist system has.
For one, it creates this proclivity for people to attach their value to achievement.
You quoted General Patton last letter. He said,“Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser.” You also wrote “I don’t think most men and especially American men deal well with defeat.”
Why not? What is it about American men specifically that causes this phenomenon? It has to be our culture. Every Sunday Americans sit down and watch grown men beat each other to a pulp on a football field from noon til night. Our culture is competition. It is our idol.
Yes, competition has many upsides as well. It creates battle-hardened winners. It creates prosperity, and innovation, and progress. But I’ve wondered recently whether the juice is worth the squeeze as much as I once thought.
Dalia asks me a lot about bullying in American schools. She watches American shows or movies showing bullying and says “Wow, this is horrible! Bullying is really that bad in the United States?”
As a victim of bullying myself, I tell her yes.
Is vicious bullying linked to our individualist culture as well?
Studies show yes! Rates of bullying in the USA are higher than countries with more collectivist cultures, like Japan. So, damn. It’s kind of a mind f*ck to realize that.
In America, a common phrase we ask strangers is “What do you do?” Work is that important in our culture. That’s why you have so many people who leave the US to go live in Europe, where they prioritize leisure, relationships, and cultural heritage instead.
It’s like that movie Arrival, where the aliens come down and Amy Adams tries to learn their language. The movie talks a lot about communication, and how the language we speak determines how we think. I think that goes for culture, too. In the movie the colonel say “If all you ever gave me was a hammer, everything's a nail.”
Maybe our culture is the hammer here. Maybe that’s why our politics are so heavily charged, and people are burning out left and right. We see everything as an intense battle that we must win. It’s who we are.
And this problematic mindset filters down into the populace and wreaks all sorts of havoc. It gets men to attach their value to success, and gets us to see everybody else as competition.
Thus the male loneliness we talked about the last two weeks.
Research suggests that while male loneliness is a global issue, it’s more pronounced in highly individualistic cultures like the United States. I mean, damn, again!
It’s a mess! What do we do? Leave the USA?
No. Of course not. I guess the first step is to just understand what’s happening. Have some awareness. Like I said, there’s so many benefits to our system, and it’s helped us be dominant as a country for decades now, but its also got its downsides that we need to be aware of.
I guess in this culture that loves winners and “strong” men, we need to remember quotes like these:
"A great man is always willing to be little." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
We don’t need to place all of our value on how much money we make, or how good we are at our jobs. Dad, you’ve worked so hard for decades now and you’re great at what you do. That’s something to be proud of, but I hope you know it’s not what I’m going to remember about you. I’m going to remember you as an empathetic, gentle man who was always striving to be better.
That’s all I needed, too.
This is one of my favorite publications out there. You’re so right, there’s a big difference in being emotional in front of our kids in a way that is unhealthy and leaves them feeling responsible for our emotions, and intentionally modeling how to regulate emotions.
We just interviewed Dr. Dan Allender for our podcast and he said something that blew my mind when talking about how men can be incredibly courageous in a lot of settings, until they run into a conflict with their wife. “You can put your body in the realms of great danger without having to put your heart into it.”
Lots to unpack in this letter Tom.
I loved that movie Interstellar. And it’s kinda the type that messes with one’s brain!
Helping kids feel safe is so important. Safe with you, the adult. Safe in that you chase off the monsters under the bed, and have their dreams in mind as you encourage them. Safe means you don’t lie about your feelings, instead you take the time to help them to understand complex emotions like “disappointment” and “grief”. Safe means helping them understand their emotions too.
Bullys are taught. They have learned this abuse from someone being a bully towards them. They have been taught that power OVER someone means strength, when instead it’s only intimidation.
Men’s violence against men and women must be stopped. And Men must lead the charge in this change. It has to become socially unacceptable to be a bully and to harm others
That marvelous phrase that “if all you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail” comes from psychologist Abraham Maslow, and became known as Maslow’s instrument theory. It’s a theory I have used frequently when counseling to help clients learn solve a situation…. They must first be curious if they have the right tools, and if they are asking the right questions.. otherwise they cannot truly solve the puzzle of how to make change.