I think Sam Keen has hit the nail on the head. I need to read this book. Not because I did this, but to feel better about the fact that I went the other way. “patience, honesty, kindness, contentment, wisdom”. At least I try on a regular basis to lean that way. I may not always make it, but I am so not the typical man. Sometimes, that is a really hard road to follow, with the male world judging me as less than a “real man” for it.
“When men who have spent their formative years in extroverted action first turn toward the unknown country of the soul, they soon reach a desert — the vast nothingness. Before rebirth comes the painful awareness that we have long been dead. Before feeling comes the dreadful knowledge that we have been anesthetized and are numb.”
“Little did we understand that by doing the manly thing, girding up our loins, pulling in our guts, pushing out our chests, and constricting our breathing, we forced most feelings into exile in our unconscious.”
“Perhaps the greatest price men have paid for their obsession with fearlessness is to have become tough on the outside, but empty within. We are hollow men.”
“We reduced our world to an arena in which courage is constantly demanded and the other virtues — patience, honesty, kindness, contentment, wisdom — are not cultivated.”
Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
by Sam Keen
An Aging Trans Woman 