A New Year At Manhood Reimagined

It’s been most of a year, so what’s in store for this space moving forward?

Thing have been quiet here for quite a while, largely because the time and energy I would have spent writing has gone to:

• walking with my parents on my father’s cancer journey which is now in the comfort care phase where we aim to make the most of the time he has left,

• the opening up an exciting new array of opportunities at my 9 to 5 (that now takes up way more hours than those between 9 and 5) after a supervisor who didn’t like me was fired,

• trying to figure out how to best father a ridiculously independent now 18-year-old who will graduate from high school in May,

• dating someone who lives five hours away,

• completely failing to engage as I wanted to in the 2024 election cycle (I’m a third party guy because the two major parties both give us this and this), and

• trying to navigate it all without losing my mind.

That said, it’s also been a year where I’ve had an abundance of opportunities to reflect on my own journey and how to embody my manhood.

Lessons from 2024

So here are a few lessons from my 2024:

Realms of Impact

This one largely flows from caring for my dad. I believe that all of us deserve respect, dignity, and care as we age. It’s just part of my core value of human thriving. Now, how do we bring that to fruition? This is where the realms of impact come in.

The realms start with ourselves, and then move out to the people we are closest to, and then to broader society.

Key to this is realizing that as you move out, your level of impact or influence decreases. So I have the most sway over myself, and then my partner, family, and friends, and then everyone else.

So while believing that we all deserve respect, dignity, and care might shape the way I vote, my vote has far less impact than me making sure my dad gets quality care, and, even more than caring for my dad, by taking care of my own body, I increase my odds of sustaining a higher quality of life for a longer period of time (and then hopefully just dropping dead one day).

Props to Peter Attia for contributing to this idea:

Living From the Inside Out

Using that same base image, there is also an idea that’s been at the core of what I’ve written here, but I don’t think I’ve adequately expressed.

So much of what I’ve talked about focuses on starting with ourselves, whether it’s taking care of our body or healing our psyche, and it’s only from that solid foundation that we can engage in healthy ways with those closest to us or function in broader society in ways that make the world a better place for everyone. In other words, we need to live from the inside out, with our healthy foundation informing everything else we do.

Manhood at Work

As I mentioned above, work has been huge for me this past year.

I spent most of 2023 working under a guy who didn’t like me. Others have suggested he felt threatened by me. Whatever the case, the end result was that he loaded me up with busy work so he could largely avoid dealing with me. Then, in early 2024, he was fired.

While there still wasn’t certainty about what to do with me, I was asked to help out with a few different projects and that ultimately morphed into me taking over a strategic initiative for a new alternative sales channel.

So how do I live from the inside out at work? Doing so demands that I bring my core value of human thriving to the job. It also means that I engage with coworkers, whether they sit above or below me on the corporate hierarchy, in more respectful ways than my former supervisor did me. Then of course I need to make sure I’m not just contributing to the rubber dog shit society.

So Where Does Manhood Reimagined Go in 2025?

My plan is to delve more into the lessons I learned in 2024, unpacking the above in greater detail, but also offering those personal stories of what each post looks like when it moves from the theoretical to the practical.

Here’s to intention manifesting.

What are your big lessons from 2024?