The question is older than written language. Probably older than language itself, if we’re being pedantic about it.
In Homer’s Iliad, a man was measured by his cunning in battle and his willingness to die for honor. The Icelandic sagas defined manhood through the respect of your community — your reputation was your identity. Biblical tradition tied it to obedience, sacrifice, and moral duty. Each era, each culture, each grandfather sitting at the head of a dinner table has had a slightly different answer.
And yet. Here we are in the 2020s, and the question feels more loaded than ever. Partly because the old answers don’t quite fit anymore. Partly because we haven’t agreed on new ones. And partly because the conversation itself has become a minefield, where saying the wrong thing gets you labeled either a toxic masculine throwback or a spineless pushover, depending on which room you’re standing in.
So let’s try something different. Instead of defining what a man should be — which always ends up as someone’s wish list projected onto everyone else — let’s look at what undermines a person, regardless of gender. Because the traits that make someone weak, passive, or unreliable? Those aren’t gender-specific. They’re human problems.
The Trap of the Permanent Victim
I need to be careful here, because this one gets misread constantly. I am not talking about people who’ve been through genuine trauma. I’m not talking about abuse survivors, or people battling mental illness, or anyone dealing with circumstances legitimately beyond their control. Those people aren’t playing victim. They’re surviving.
What I’m talking about is the habit — and it is a habit, one that sneaks up on you — of building your identity around your suffering. Of leading with your wounds. Of making “things are hard for me” the central narrative of your life, not because you’re working through it, but because it’s become comfortable.
Comfortable is the key word. Victimhood, paradoxically, can feel safe. When you’re the victim, nothing is your fault. When nothing is your fault, you don’t have to change. When you don’t have to change, you don’t have to risk failure. It’s a closed loop, and it’s seductive as hell.
I watched this play out at a party a few years back. Guy in his late twenties, recently off antidepressants, had a few drinks and started broadcasting his misery to the whole room. How empty everything felt. How pointless. I don’t doubt he was hurting — genuinely, deeply hurting. But the way he performed it, loudly, publicly, to a room full of near-strangers, wasn’t processing. It was a bid for a specific kind of attention: the kind where people gather around you and confirm that yes, the world is unfair, and no, it’s not your fault.
A few women at the party felt sorry for him. Fair enough. Most of the guys quietly wrote him off. Not because they were cold. Because they recognized something instinctively: that posture doesn’t lead anywhere. It just loops.
Why Your Grandparents Didn’t Have This Problem
My grandparents grew up during a war. They were hungry more often than full. The whole family shared a single pair of shoes. That’s not a metaphor — one pair of shoes, rotated based on who needed them most that day.
Did they sit around telling that story to get sympathy? No. They learned how to ration, how to fix things that broke, how to squeeze something useful out of every bad situation. Not because they were tougher than us in some mythical way. Because the alternative was starving.
We don’t live in that world anymore, and that’s mostly a good thing. But something got lost in the comfort. When survival isn’t on the line, it’s easy to mistake minor discomfort for genuine crisis. It’s easy to confuse “this is hard” with “this is impossible.” And it’s easy to settle into a passive relationship with your own life, drifting along and blaming the current when things don’t go your way.
Passivity Is the Real Enemy
Forget masculinity for a second. Forget the entire gender conversation. The single most destructive posture any human being can adopt is passivity — the belief that life happens to you, rather than because of you.
Passivity looks like waiting for someone to hand you a better job instead of building the skills that make you undeniable. It looks like expecting your relationship to fix itself without having the uncomfortable conversation. It looks like scrolling through other people’s highlight reels and feeling bitter instead of asking, “What am I actually doing with my time?”
Active people aren’t always successful. They fail constantly. But they fail forward — they learn something, adjust, and try again. Passive people don’t fail, because they never try. And over a lifetime, that’s far more costly than any individual failure.
If you catch yourself defaulting to passivity, start small. Don’t try to overhaul your entire life in a weekend. Just pick one area where you’ve been drifting and take one deliberate action. Send that email. Have that conversation. Sign up for that class. The momentum of a single action is more powerful than a month of planning.
What “Strong” Actually Looks Like
Here’s what I’ve noticed about the strongest people I know — men and women both. They share a handful of traits that have nothing to do with bench press numbers or how loud they can yell in an argument:
- They take responsibility, even when it’s not entirely their fault. Because fixing a problem is more useful than assigning blame.
- They’re honest about their weaknesses. Not in a self-pitying way. In a “this is what I’m working on” way.
- They’re uncomfortable being uncomfortable, but they do it anyway. Courage isn’t fearlessness. It’s action in the presence of fear.
- They protect the people around them. Not by being aggressive, but by being reliable. Showing up. Following through.
- They don’t need everyone to agree with them. They can hold an unpopular opinion without needing to convert the room.
None of those traits require a Y chromosome. None of them require a gym membership or a deep voice or a particular haircut. They’re available to anyone willing to put in the daily, unglamorous work of building character.
The Ancient Answer, Modernized
If you strip away the cultural packaging, every historical definition of manhood — from Homer to the Bible to the Norse sagas — boils down to roughly the same thing: be useful. Don’t be a burden on the people around you. Contribute more than you consume. Stand for something, even when standing costs you.
That’s not a gendered idea. It’s a human one. And it’s as relevant in a modern office as it was on an ancient battlefield.
The question “what does it mean to be a man?” might be the wrong question. A better one: “What kind of person do I want to be, and am I acting like that person right now?”
If the answer is yes — keep going. If the answer is no, you don’t need another article or another motivational quote. You need to do one thing differently today. Just one. And then tomorrow, do it again.
That’s it. That’s the whole formula. It’s not complicated. It’s just hard. And hard, as it turns out, is exactly the point.
