Is Your Operating System Glitchier Than A PC?
Men, it's time we find a different way of being in the world.
Series Introduction
I propose manhood isn’t about something defined that we become, but the journey from boyhood (being born male) to a healthy self-determined adulthood. With that comes six action statements that describe the journey of manhood (as opposed to the journey to manhood):
growing beyond cultural expectations,
overcoming societal obstacles, and
healing your psyche, to
discover your most authentic self, and
use your gifts to serve the world.
Over several weeks, I will unpack these. This is the fifth post on growing beyond cultural expectations. Here are parts one, two, three, and four.
Hi, I’m A Mac.
It’s been a few years since the iconic ad campaign starting Justin Long and, um, the guy who played PC came out, but it remains, in the opinion of many, one of the best ad series of all time (having been a Mac guy since I first opened my first iPod Mini in late 2003, I’ll admit my personal bias).
For those of you who aren’t familiar (or if you were like me last night and want to relive the glory of one ad right after the other), here are all sixty-six ads produced between 2006 and 2009.
While there is plenty of focus on things you do with your computer throughout the series (making spreadsheets vs. movies), Mac also goes after the Windows operating system, especially with the bungled release of Vista, the propensity for viruses, and the constant need for upgrades. The goal is to highlight the software behind the scenes, the framework on which everything else happens.
Just like your computer has an operating system, so does your life, although we are far less likely to think about the framework we are operating in. It’s just something we’ve grown up with and we’re so familiar with it, it’s like the air we breathe. We take it completely for granted, like a fish does water, that said, once we become aware of it, we see how it impacts everything we do.
In the language I use here at Manhood Reimagined, growing beyond cultural expectations is all about upgrading your operating system.
Two Ways of Being
Typically, I’m not a fan of black-and-white thinking.
Democrat or Republican? I’ll go with neither.
Weights or cardio? Can I get a good dose of both?
Black or White? I’ll take a rainbow.
But there are times when things are as simple as whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie or not (it is, and if you think otherwise, it’s okay to be wrong). Another example is that there are only two ways of being in the world; two operating systems that can guide you: Power and Love.
That might seem a bit simplistic, but let me break down what I mean by each of those.
The Challenge To Love
I should open by admitting that the power and love dichotomy is not original to me. I picked it up from the late Catholic public theologian Henri Nouwen who left what was, by all external metrics, an incredibly successful career as a professor at schools like Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard, to serve developmentally disabled adults at a L’Arche community outside Toronto, Canada. While the move made no sense to the outside world, it brought him a sense of peace, something he’d been seeking for years.
While this longing shows up throughout his writings, it was already there in his late 30’s when he released a short collection of essays titled, “Intimacy” (affiliate). The second essay in that book, “The Challenge to Love,” outlines the way of power vs. the way of love.
Power
How does Nouwen understand power? He writes:
We are judged, evaluated, tested, and graded, diagnosed and classified from the time our parents compared our first walk with a little neighbor’s. Gradually, as time goes on, we realize that our permanent record is building its own life, independent of ours. It is really not so amazing that we often feel caught, taken, and used for purposes not our own. The main concern then becomes not who I am but who I am considered to be, not what I think, but what others think of me. In this taking existence we find ourselves operating in terms of power, motivated by fear.
Intimacy, p26
Those italics are mine and they highlight the essence of the power operating system. While power is typically thought of in more outwardly aggressive terms, the power operating system is far more insidious and doesn’t require any physical strength, social authority, or cultural privilege. Instead, this power is about our attempt to control others’ perceptions of us.
Rather than being true to ourselves because people might reject that, we structure our lives around presenting who we believe we are supposed to be to the world.
Power is the operating behind:
the unspoken hollowness Nouwen felt in the midst of his prestigious career.
comedians who devote their lives to making us laugh even in the midst of deep depression.
the sober stoicism of a man who is desperately lonely.
the gay or bisexual man who presents a straight face to the world.
me as I put on my pastor face and pitched a happy family life even as I secretly sought to soothe the chaos within.
But even when our mask is well-received or even celebrated, we know that people are only accepting and celebrating an image we present. We remain certain if they saw the real us, rejection would come.
Love
In this framework, love is terrifying because it is the opposite of power.
Love means allowing people to see your true self.
Nouwen writes:
When a man cries, when the walls of his self-composure break down and he is able to express his deepest despair, weakness, hate and jealousy, his meanness and inner division, he somewhere believes that we will not take and destroy him. As if a voice told him: “Don’t be afraid to tell.”
Intimacy, p28
Notice how power crushes love by telling us that our honesty is unloving. Don’t tell people about the “hate and jealousy” within, that isn’t nice. If your wife knew that you were afraid things weren’t going well at work think of how insecure and unsafe she would feel, it’s better not to say anything.
So power wins, the mask goes up, and we all keep pretending everything is okay.
How Is This Love Loving?
But how is just being honest and vulnerable an act of love?
In his latest book, “The Myth of Normal” (affiliate), Gabor Mate argues that we live in a toxic culture. His argument goes something like this:
If you were in a lab and put organisms in a culture plate, and all of them got sick and most of them died, would you think that each of those individual organisms was sick, or would you think there was something wrong with the culture you put them in?
Just in case you’re wondering, the answer is the second.
Well, what should we assume when we live in a society where we have a mental health crisis, an addiction crisis, an obesity epidemic, and about $17,000,000,000,000 in consumer debt? Who in their right mind would argue that each of us individually is a wreck but the operating system we live in is just fine?
Gabor Mate is also known for saying that addiction, be it substances, food, or consumption, is just a bad solution to a much deeper problem. So what is the deeper problem we are trying to solve, one that also undergirds our mental health crisis? Living by power and covering up our truest selves because we are afraid to love ourselves or each other enough to be honest and vulnerable.
Radical Self-Acceptance
But when we reveal all of us, we are engaging in a radical act of self-acceptance. We are choosing to love ourselves, warts (both real and perceived) and all. This same act simultaneously creates an opportunity for someone else to love the true us and becomes an invitation for them to engage in the same honesty and vulnerability we have shown. This means we are inviting them into an act of radical self-acceptance, and what could be more loving than that?
Recognizing the Dragon
Honesty and vulnerability are also key to addressing those actual warts. Whether it is an addiction, the pain you still carry from childhood, stereotyping a group of people, or any other issue, until we’re honest that a problem exists we’ll never be able to do anything about it. We will never be able to heal what is behind it.
This is one point that Jordan Peterson nails in his tale of the dragon:
Living Love In A Power World
Let’s imagine for a moment that you believe I’m right on three fronts:
There are only two ways to live: power and love.
The way of power is the source of every issue we face, both as a society and as a species.
The way of love is the path to resolving all of our issues.
Now what?
I can hear you now, “I can’t just start living love in a power-obsessed world, I’ll get eaten alive.”
There’s some truth to that sentiment. After all, if you ask Henri Nouwen who has ever truly and fully lived love, he would point to Jesus … and they crucified him for living and teaching it. Heck, even the people who most vocally claim to follow Jesus today have adapted his message so it too is about power.
In addition to love being rare, it’s also really messy at first. You’ve spent a lifetime wiring your brain for power. There are going to be moments when you’re honest about something but then the facade will spring back into place and you won’t give the whole truth. There will be other times when you’ve done such a good job projecting a false image to the world that even you believe it (this is the essence of shadow work).
For both of these reasons, I’d start exploring these ideas with a therapist or a holistic life coach. I say this for two reasons. One, you don’t know them so there’s a certain level of distance from the rest of your life which makes it easier to be vulnerable. Two, you are paying them to listen without judgment and maintain confidentiality.
The reason I point to a holistic coach is that they are trained to focus on the heart, mind, body, and soul rather than your external world.
If you are more curious about shadow work, psychedelic breathwork i a powerful tool to bypass the cerebral cortex and let the psyche speak.
That said, you might have a friend that you can be real with, so perhaps the best place to start is by sharing this newsletter with them and asking if they are interested in some raw conversation. A great book to discuss together would be James Hollis’, “The Wounding and Healing of Men” (affiliate).
The point is to start somewhere small and begin to retrain your brain. In time, ways to expand the scope of living by love will appear, and it will begin to impact your closest relationships and your work. It takes time, but in my experience, there’s no better path to pursue and it is the only way to create a healthy and functional society that values human thriving.
There will be more on how our society undermines human thriving next as I take up overcoming societal obstacles.