Privileged, furious and hoodwinked—an ode to the middle-aged white man
“Why are so many dystopian, offended, dejected, inconsolable, apocalyptic, belittling, accusatory, hopeless, helpless, critical, hating, suppressing and above all grouchy comments and posts made by (middle-aged or older) men?”
This is a paraphrase of a question a friend posted on Facebook. One could argue that this is an overgeneralisation, or at least that it says more about my friend’s filter bubble than about men in general. I do, however, see the same pattern; very rarely have I met the same furor, anger, despondency, hate and judgment from women, as I have from men.
Partly, this is selection bias: as a gay man who hangs out in a lot of gay forums, I will interact with more men. However, the fact that women might act as described in the question, does not negate the fact that a lot of men do.
I have a theory.
Sometime around your 40s you start contemplating life, the meaning of it, your choices in it and other existential questions. You may have contemplated these questions before, but at a younger age it’s more about potential and exploration. The potential trajectory of your life can take so many shapes that the possibilities seem all but endless. Possibilities breed hope, and hope is a strong antidote to negative feelings. The more privileged you are, the more options you have had. Privilege is in many ways synonymous with “being able to choose” and “fewer closed potential paths”.
When you reach mid-life, your life trajectory is much clearer. You have made a lot of choices we see as important: career, relationship, kids. Now you can evaluate those choices.
But what if you didn’t make the choices? Research shows that too many options make us anxious and if there is a default option, we tend to fall back on it. We avoid the anxiety of choice by not choosing, thus ending up on the default path designed for us by our community’s expectations. As I wrote in another post:
The expectations from people around us become internalized to such a degree that it can be hard to know if it’s something that I want or if it’s something that other people want me to.
So you evaluate the choices you’ve made. You have assumed that “living a good life” means living up to other people’s expectations, to do “the right thing” as it were. You find yourself comparing the options you picked (whether by action, or by default) with the endless options your younger self used to have.
When you look at younger generations in the west, they seem to have access to more options than you. Society has changed and become more open, increasing the numer of options for most individuals. Science and technology have advanced, not only opening doors but making new ones. Western societies have long had a trend towards individualism, where each generation has had more individual freedom than the previous. You look at the potential life trajectories of young people and compare them to your own actual life trajectory so far. Comparing how your life turned out with the potential of younger generations will evoke either envy of them, or happiness for them. I believe that your own satisfaction with your life is an important factor in whether you’ll be happy or envious.
So imagine someone who made all the right choices (where “right” means “what everybody else expected me to do”) and realises that it did not lead to happiness or satisfaction. People around you don’t really acknowledge the sacrifices you have made, let alone are grateful for them. Perhaps they hardly are aware of them, because they too are stuck in defaults and not choosing. The bigger the discrepancy between the dreams of your younger self, and the actual life you are living, the stronger the reaction. Some will handle this with a crisis, going back and making choices again, whether it’s divorcing and marrying someone else, switching careers or heading out on another journey to “find yourself”. In a way, this is taking responsibility for the choices you made (or avoided to make).
Others will double down on their current path in an attempt to convince themselves that this bleak realisation of such great potential is the only choice they had. This path means refusing responsibility. The unsatisfying realisation of all your potential becomes the fault of your partner, your parents, your kids, your career, your boss, your lack of luck, not enough time… If this is the way you feel, chances are that you will feel anger, resentment and envy against everyone who made other choices, especially when you see those choices as selfish compared to the selfless sacrifices you’ve made. These selfish choices seem to question the choices you made, sometimes to the point of invalidating them. But you never made most of your choices, you just accepted the default option. Your anger at your own perceived lack of choice is projected at all the young people and all the options they seem to have, an anger often tinted with envy.
In this scenario, you end up praising those who make choices similar to yours. “If other people, especially the younger generation, make the same choices that I made, that means my choices were right. Right?” This feeling of affirmation and representation matters to you nowadays, because even TV and movies where every character was like you when you were younger, now has weird minorities in every other role. If they’re not gay or black they have Aspbergers or something.
Another important factor here is how we perceive gender and agency. Men are in general better trained in being a subject. Women in general are better trained in being an object. Or, to put it in other words: men are people, women are objects. A subject has agency. An object doesn’t. Realising you might have made the wrong choices, also questions your status as subject. A real man doesn’t dwell on things, he is decisive and acts. But you are dwelling on the choices you made or defaulted to. Are you not a real man?At this point, if you chose ‘crisis’, this insight makes that crisis deeper. If you chose ‘double down’, your conviction and resolve become that much stronger.
In many cultures, women cry more than men. The explanations for this are partly biological, partly cultural. Crying has long been a proxy for feelings, or at least indicative of the intensity of feelings, in the west. The truth “men cry less than women” often leads to the (wrongful) conclusion: “men don’t feel as much as women”. It also becomes a self-referencing logic loop, where boys and men are taught to cry less, to show fewer emotions, which then is used as evidence to the next generation that it is manly to not be “overly emotional”. Of all the factors in my theory, this is the one that I believe causes the most harm. For many men, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You see, we are capable of very complex feelings, yet to be able to recognize them, we need to be able to identify and name them. A toddler doesn’t know the difference between amused, entertained, happy, delighted or pleased: they’re just happy. They don’t know the difference between hungry, ravenous, famished or peckish: they just want food.
In this regard, feelings are like colors, you need to learn how to discern between them and what to call them. It doesn’t matter that you know that “sienna” is a color if you haven’t associated that word with the particular shade of color it describes. If you’re a man, and “sadness” is something you have felt (or been allowed to feel) only in situations when it was impossible to keep it in, like the sudden loss of a close friend or relative, that becomes your frame of reference. You never feel “sadness” until you feel what people with more nuances would describe as “sorrow and despair”.
If you want to learn more about feelings and how we need to learn to recognize them, I recommend listening to this episode of Invisibilia, where an anthropologist discovers a new feeling.
When we say that someone “he doesn’t have feelings”, what we really mean is “he can’t discern between nuances in feelings”. Speaking of expectations: this is problematic, because the former states an absolute while the latter opens the door for learning. But learning, especially as an adult, requires friends that are close enough for you to be comfortable talking about feelings, and here is where the last factor comes in.
Middle-aged men are lonelier than their female counterparts. This isn’t something that happens overnight, it’s a gradual process that starts rather early, accelerated by default choices and a skewed view of manliness and parenting. Women in general are trained from childhood to be caring and considerate of others. Men in general aren’t, at least not to the same degree. This gives birth to the notion that marriage is a cage used to domesticate the Free Man. Marriage implies family, and family implies sacrifices and putting other individuals’ needs ahead of your own. For women in general, this is business as usual. For men, it’s the death of the free, unshackled man with agency and endless options, and birth of a caged caretaker. Even our language encapsulates this: a woman can “catch herself a husband”, but it’s very rare (if ever) that we say “he caught himself a wife”.
Seeing the Free Man and the Caged Caretaker as two separate phases of your life is exacerbated by hearing Caged Caretakers reminisce about “the best days of their lives” which often occur in college: they’re old enough to be adults, but still free and nothing will ever be as good again.
Being thrown from one role into another overnight is hard for anyone. It’s even harder if you don’t really know or understand the role. You might look to your own dad, but in all likelihood he worked most of the time to provide for the family. But you do your best to do the right thing: you become a “we” instead of an “I”, “a father” instead of “a man”.
You hang out less and less with your old friends. Those that still are Free Men are impossible to keep up with, those that are Caged Caretakers have schedules impossible to coordinate with yours. It’s easy to see how loneliness creeps up and becomes normalized, but at least you’re married and at the very least it saves you from being alone. (Should you have chosen ‘double down’, while your wife chose ‘crisis’ you will most likely end up divorced, which understandably makes you angrier and more bitter)
I know that this is a caricature, a stereotype that most men don’t fit into very well. That’s not the point with this post. The point is to paint a picture for everyone who looks down on these middle-aged men, a picture that will perhaps make it easier to meet that dystopian, offended, dejected, inconsolable, apocalyptic, belittling, accusatory, hopeless, helpless, critical, hating, suppressing and above all grouchy middle-aged man with understanding, love and support rather than hostility, anger and contempt, even if they start the fight. Anger and hate begets more anger and hate, while non-complementary behavior has a chance to break the vicious cycle.
If you liked this, I would also recommend you to read another of my posts: “Life is not a journey towards death”.
