I glanced over my shoulder at the warm light spilling from the living room windows through the bushes. No one watching. With practiced movements, I tapped out a cigarette, cupped my hands against the Cape Town breeze, and lit up. The first drag filled my lungs with poison that somehow felt like relief.

It was the habit I was most ashamed of. I had started smoking back in Egypt, and despite stopping numerous times, I kept on going back. What a joke. Here I am, thirty-four years old, hiding my smoking behind my parents’ house like a teenager. I exhaled slowly, watching smoke disappear into the darkness. Would they smell it on me when I went back inside? Probably. My mother’s nose missed nothing.

I took another drag, hating myself for it. Ten years of promising myself I’d quit. Ten years of returning to these death sticks. So much for living without boundaries—I’d just exchanged my father’s rules for the chains of addiction. I had never thought that freedom could lead to self-loathing in that way.

The nicotine coursed in my brain. My mind drifted back to the three-day hike through Cape Point Reserve I had just completed with my dad. The trail wound along cliffs down to where the Atlantic crashes into the Indian Ocean. We’d walked mostly in silence, comfortable and uncomfortable at once.

“Look,” he’d said on the second morning, pointing to a small antelope frozen in awareness of us. The kudu’s spiral horns caught the morning light before it bounded away. My father smiled, childlike wonder on his weathered face.

I remembered the weight of my pack digging into my shoulders as we climbed, sweat trickling down my spine. The simple satisfaction of boiling water for instant coffee on our small camp stove. The evening sitting on the veranda outside the simple hut as the sun slid below the horizon and stars growing in brightness until they seemed close enough to touch. As my father and I enjoyed the moments, the memories had come filtering through my consciousness.

“Your room’s a mess, Paul. How do you find anything in there?”

“By not having someone constantly telling me how to live my life,” my fourteen-year-old self had replied, muttering under my breath.

“Dad, you don’t understand women at all.” I had been eighteen, dismissing his gentle warning about getting sucked into drama in relation to my girlfriend.

“That’s an oversimplification of the Bible,” I’d said during my university years, armed with the ideas of philosophy of science, watching sadness creep into his face as I dismantled his lifelong faith with academic precision.

“I don’t believe in fairy tales anymore,” I’d announced after my conversion to atheism, rejecting not just his religion but everything it represented.

Still standing in the garden, I took another drag, watching the ember glow in the darkness. These memories tasted bitter then. What I had called freedom had become its own prison—of addictions, shallow relationships, and endless striving.

That morning, on our final day hiking, I had noticed my father failing to hide a worsening limp. Upon interrogating him, he had admitted that he had a knee injury from a recent squash game. By this point it had swollen to the size of a small melon.

We were halfway across a 5 km stretch of rocky beach, the sun beating down mercilessly on rocks strewn across the path from waves pounding the beach on our left to steep cliffs on the right.

“Let me help you,” I’d said, offering my arm.

It had taken a few more offers before he eventually had to accept, placing his arm around my shoulder. We had found a crack leading up the cliff side and climbed that way, his weight against me, his breath labored.

“Remember when you had to lift me down that cliff side at the Drakensburg escarpment when I was little?” I’d asked.

“Life comes full circle,” he’d answered simply.

We’d flagged down a passing ranger’s vehicle when we eventually reached the road. As we waited, sitting side by side on a boulder, he’d squeezed my shoulder. “Thank you, son.” Three simple words that somehow carried more weight than all my accomplishments abroad.

Back in my parents’ garden, I crushed the cigarette against a rock and buried the evidence under the bushes, bringing back the feelings of guilt again.

Inside, I went and washed my hands and face, sniffing for the smell of smoke. Upon entering the living room, and despite his swollen knee, my father was setting out coffee cups for church members arriving for their weekly prayer meeting.

Laughter erupted from someone’s joke. These people had known each other for decades—had weathered marriages, births, deaths, failures and successes together. My parents had been having the people of their church over like this for decades. They worked like a perfect unit, my dad the authority, holding the space, my mom, his helper, working the room, noticing everything.

My father introduced me to everyone, his pride undimmed by our differences. I shake hands, make small talk, feeling the hollowness of my own connections back in Copenhagen. This community was multi-generational, families following each other, from great grandparents to grandchildren growing up together. In Denmark, I had shifted my group of friends every few years, from political science, to rock climbers, acro-yogis to burners and then TNT. Marriage here was a lifelong sacrament. My relationships with women cycled through the same patterns of infatuation, testing, competition, drama and separation.

As the evening progressed, I found myself wanting to understand what was happening here better. I noticed that they had something which I had been missing in my life. At some point one of the church members mentioned their struggles with doubt. “Sometimes I wonder if my prayers are even heard anymore,” he confessed. “The silence can be deafening.” I found myself nodding. “I’ve been wrestling with that too,” I admitted. “It’s hard to find something you can trust in a world that seems so random.”

The conversation flowed around us, and then, without planning it, I turned to my parents. My mom was serving my dad a cup of tea. They exchanged a glance of two people who understood each other in a way deeper than words.

Read more

This video is my story of what happened when I took a shortcut in my writing, from the euphoric high of the first weeks to the months of withdrawal symptoms and concentration issues which followed.

Read more

I am walking with Rasmus in the King’s Garden, just across from Mama Mystica. I had just recently completed the full membership courses of The New Tantra (TNT), the black tantra sex cult that Rasmus introduced me to. Now I had applied to join the men’s group that Rasmus was running. The meeting had gone great, I had played all my cards right. And now, for some reason, they had rejected me.

Since Burning Man, the path that I had stepped onto was an ever more desperate search for more and more extreme experiences to keep the same feeling of aliveness and keep the sense of nihilism at bay. Lacking any real sense of a proper purpose for living, and having embraced new age post-modernism, the most interesting thing left to do in life was to explore the limits of consciousness, using every tool, technique or shortcut that could be found.

TNT regularly ran a series of workshops, from level 1 to level 10, promising a combination of spiritual enlightenment and mind bogglingly wild sex. I resisted the urge to join for as long as I could. The courses were horribly expensive and the leader, Alex Vartman gave off a bit of a creepy cult-leader vibe. Besides, I didn’t want to just be a carbon copy of Rasmus.

But the draw was too much and eventually, my curiosity got the better of me. I signed up for the double combo of level 1, “Sexual Deconditioning” and level 2 “Advanced Sex”.

According to Vartman, traditional tantra was either too static and religious, or it went totally wacky in esotericism. He had therefore invented a new tantra for the modern age which avoided the traps of both extremes.

Participants are taken through a series of exercises designed to push them outside of their comfort zones, let go of inhibitions and slowly open them up to transgressing each other’s boundaries. Sexual deconditioning meant basically that everything society taught about sex and normal moral boundaries was a lie put in place to control you and limit your self expression. In order to be truly free, you have to break down this conditioning and return to your natural state, free of limitations and sexual morals.

The problem however is that we have become so identified with these stiff and forced sexual morals, that extreme force is needed. We mistake our sexual boundaries for our own preferences, but this is really just societal conditioning solidified into ego. Our natural state is to all be joined together completely freely, enjoying each other just like bonobo monkeys. In an enlightened society, ideas of controlling ourselves or each other would fall away and we would relax into pure the freedom and ecstasy which we are destined for.

The first step on the path is the initial work to “open the kundalini”.

Kuṇḍalinī literally means “coiled snake” and is seen to be a type of mystical energy, located in the base of the spine. It is dormant by default, but can be awakened through techniques such as meditation, breathing techniques and yoga. Awakening kundalini causes mystical experiences associated with transformation and expansion of consciousness, even up to enlightenment and attaining a godlike state of being.

TNT was proudly a “Crazy Wisdom” school. Crazy wisdom was a term used by abusive non-dual teachers such as Adi Da and Trungpa to describe doing seemingly irrational and transgressive acts in order to bring about the awakening of the kundalini and the person. Attaining enlightenment was really the only worthy goal in all of existence, and thus normal moral boundaries could be transgressed if they could bring one closer. In fact, the guru shocking the student out of their sensibilities, was often the best way to awaken. The goal was such a worthy one, that any means could be justified. Drugs, forced nudity and even rape or having sex with dead corpses dug up from a graveyard are all game for “crazy wisdom”.

“De-armouring” was the approach taken at TNT Level one to awaken kundalini. Our kundalini energy was stuck due to blockages in our energy system. By exerting extremely hard and painful physical pressure on specific trigger points, the blockages could be forced open. We were shown the trigger points, which happened to be the most painful. And we were told that we should not in any way hold back from applying all the pressure that we could, irrespective of the pain the person might feel, unless they used the safeword “appletree”.

Before we started, the staff demonstrated what a person with an open kundalini looked and acted like. Basically the person goes into what looks like uncontrollable spasms, at times even looking like an epileptic fit when you touch their spine. Particularly open people could be stimulated this way without even physical touch but “energetically” from a distance.

Read more

Rasmus had just got back from his semester abroad at Berkeley University and he and I are busy putting up a drywall. He had written out on a Facebook group that he needed some help with renovating a room. I had jumped at the opportunity.

I wanted to get to know him more, to understand how he worked. There was something I had seen about him, his confidence and way of charming people that I felt magnetically attracted to. Having been brought up in a moralistic Christian family, the freedom and authenticity of his new student commune, Mama Mystica felt like water in a dry land.

I first got to know Rasmus on a student-organised study trip to China with the Institute of Political Science. One year my senior, he was the crazy joker guy who was the heart of the party all the time. But right from the start, I felt a certain affinity with him. Everyone else at Political Science was interested in working for the government, but him and me had early on decided that we were interested in the private sector. Public sector bureaucracy was for boring men in grey suits. The private sector was more risky and there was space for more innovation and ambition.

I had met Rasmus for coffee a few times and talked about entrepreneurship and business. I was still married at the time so didn’t enquire too much about his private life, which I sensed was a lot more colourful than mine.

In my second year studying Political Science, I had taken a road trip in the USA with Freya. One stop on the journey was San Francisco, where Rasmus was studying for a semester at Berkeley University. I asked Freya if she could give me a night off where she stayed with our son, and I headed out to the Castro to meet Rasmus.

He was dressed in a tight metal studded leather jacket, had green spikes in his hair, and looked like he was headed to a Pride parade. He told me about life there, and was clearly inspired by a new found sense of freedom and exploration. I was a little taken aback, but didn’t want to appear judgemental.

On that trip, I was busy reading On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. It’s an iconic book about the heroes of the Beat Generation who see the meaninglessness of society around them and decide that they just don’t give a damn. Fitting into other people’s expectations led to suffocation. Real living was being an authentic expression of yourself, irrespective of the consequences.

At this time, my relationship with Freya was starting to show serious signs of trouble. Seeing the way Rasmus was living, not caring about social standards, I decided that I didn’t want to live my life in this fake way, while I was dying on the inside.

So, heading out of San Francisco, on the way up into the northern mountains, I decided to take a risk and bring up a difficult subject with Freya.

“Freya, I need to talk to you about something. It is really difficult for me that we never have sex any more. So I have been using pornography,” I blurt out.

Beneath the frustration and anger of a sexless marriage, I was wracked with shame and guilt of my hidden porn habit. No surprise, the conversation didn’t go well.

It was not many months later that I found myself cycling away from Freya and our son on that cargo bike.

So having now freed myself of the chains of that relationship, I turned to a new kind of hope. Instead of the problem being me, perhaps it was the model of relationship with marriage and monogamy that I had been conditioned to believe from my earliest years.

As a married man, bound in that repressive institution, I had no real options. Now I was free to make my own decisions and take full responsibility for my life. All my options were wide open, and the world was waiting.

When Rasmus had come back from Berkeley, he started a bunch of crazy initiatives and events. It started with simple fancy dress parties, then it was burlesque, then sex positivity, kink and polyamory. A whole slippery slide of earthly delights and enjoyments.

His apartment in central Copenhagen turned into an underground hippie commune, taking on the name “Mama Mystica”. It was like he had brought some kind of spirit home with him, a goddess that was as enticing and seductive as it seemed edgy and dangerous.

Before my divorce, I had been around the edges of the community. Every Sunday they watched a movie together, and I had joined in that as often as I could. Now I no longer needed to be the slightly stiff, guilty feeling, married guy observing all the fun.

Helping Rasmus put up the drywall was my way of offering friendship and support to get more in. But Rasmus is vague, even evasive to my questions. So I leave that day with the impression that I am only seeing the tip of an iceberg, my curiosity growing even more.

Mama Mystica had already started growing a collection of crazy psychedelic art works on the walls and in the passages. I remember one day noticing a container full of used nitrous gas capsules and wondering what they were for. Somehow the idea floated into my brain that this might be something to do with drugs.

That was concerning to me. My upbringing had taught me that drugs were bad. They led to addiction and severe dysfunction, and were taken by people who were dropouts and deadbeats. Surely Rasmus and the Mama Mystica crew weren’t into that?

One evening at Sunday movie night, after the movie, the conversation drifted into drugs. I learned there, that psychedelics were a specific class of drugs, not at all like the hard stuff such as heroin or cocaine. Psychedelics were rather about opening your mind and exploring consciousness.

I go home and do my own research. And sure enough, it turns out that professor David Nutt, the world’s leading expert in the exploding field of “psychopharmacology”, had proven that drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms were perfectly harmless, and might even be good for you.

“Trusting the science” was something I took seriously at that time. So I concluded that this was yet another area where my parents had been too stuck in old-fashioned ideas. Perhaps this was the key to all the fun and craziness at Mama Mystica.

My first psychedelic experience was at The Borderlands, a Nordic version of the American Burning Man festival. I had the experience of lying on some kind of bed, while tall alien entities with big heads stand around, looking at me and discussing what to do with my body, but not touching me. Given it was just a figment of my imagination, I don’t bother too much about it - not knowing yet what these kinds of entities might do to me in the future.

At the festival there, far more pertinent to me is the fact that one of Rasmus’ previous girlfriends, who I just met, is suddenly really into me. I don’t find her particularly attractive, but when I notice that Rasmus starts talking to me in a far more open and respectful way, then I decide to run with it.

So my life goes into a psychedelic gear.

Subscribe now

Read more

Jordan Peterson ignited something within me - a search for a father. I knew that I couldn’t just follow an internet avatar, but I needed real world men in my life. I needed a mentor as a father I could look up to. Finding a Father would be like finding home.

In the warm and soft years of my childhood, I remember thinking that my biological father was a perfect man. He could really do nothing wrong. Puberty and the storms of my teenage years put an end to that. What had been a deep accept of all my father offered me, turned into withdrawal and instinctive rejection of his ideas and thinking.

From leaving my parents home and up until my early 30’s I thus lived a life with no head, no father, no mentors. I didn’t need it. I had cast off the silly superstitions of my Christian roots. Having received my inheritance, a strong sense of discipline and industriousness from my upbringing, I was intelligent, capable and ambitious. Anything I didn’t know already, I could easily learn. Sure, there were times when I could learn from other people. But I took a particular pleasure in outdoing my teachers.

Then, as I reached my 30s, I think that I stared to sense that there was a maturity that I was lacking. I had heard the word mentor, and realised that there was something very maturing about becoming a student of a teacher of life.

Shaking Hands with a Foreign Father

That was the time that I met Richard Piper (not his real name).

I remember that first meeting with Richard in 2014 at The Borderland, the hedonistic Scandinavian Burning Man festival I was helping to organise. Richard appeared on a gravel road, like he’d materialized from the dust itself. His handshake wasn’t just firm—it seemed to transmit something magnetic. When he looked at you, really looked, the rest of the world dimmed. The air around him felt charged, dense with possibility.

I only found out later that he was a celebrity and television personality in Sweden. Six months later, in a Burner meetup at a Swedish castle, Richard turned to me in front of thirty people: “Paul, I want to invite you to come to visit me in Stockholm. We are going to take MDMA together. I think we could unlock something powerful.”

The room watched, waiting. I felt the pressure of collective expectation, but also genuine curiosity. Everyone I consulted afterward encouraged me—”Richard’s invitations are rare,” “He sees something in you,” “This could be a key for you.”

Being Joined

Two months later, at Richard’s apartment in Stockholm, as the MDMA dissolved the walls I’d built through a lifetime of conditioning, his theories about tribal masculinity hit me like dark revelation. Men needed a tribe of brothers, not just friends. We needed rituals, priests, warriors, secret monk orders, oaths of loyalty. We’d been domesticated, turned into productivity machines and pleasant partners, but underneath lived something wild and necessary. We needed to stop playing nice and unleash our power.

“You get it,” Richard said, leaning forward, his eyes bright with chemical enhancement and genuine excitement. “Most men are too afraid to even look at what we’re discussing.”

Everything he said felt like permission—to form deep bonds with other men, to acknowledge the competitive drives I’d been taught to hide, to be assertive without apology. After years of suffocating in nice-guy personas, here was a framework that explained my discontent.

The New Family

We started organizing immediately. Research weekends where we’d gather the sharpest men we knew, dissect the crisis of modern masculinity, build something new. I wrote the manifesto that emerged from those sessions, my fingers flying across the keyboard, powered by a sense of purpose I’d never felt in my Microsoft office.

The timing was perfect, across the Atlantic, Jordan Peterson was just hitting headlines with his opposition to Bill C-16. So the response overwhelmed us. Hundreds of men, hungry for exactly what we offered. What began as Richard’s idea, filtered through my writing and organizational skills, became a movement. The Nordic Men’s Gathering in 2017 was our crown jewel—a hundred and forty men ready to do the work.

Now, at the Gathering, one of our team leaders, Marcus, stands at the edge of our circle, arms crossed, jaw clenched. Just yesterday at the opening ceremony of the Gathering, he’d grabbed the microphone with tears in his eyes: “I would take a bullet for each and every one of you brothers.” He felt too emotionally unstable to me, so I had reduced his speaking time. Now were hearing word that he’s gossiping, whispering criticisms, creating an undercurrent that threatens to poison the entire event.

Manly Boundaries

Richard catches my eye across the lunch tent. That single glance communicates everything—we both know this needs handling. He moves through the crowd with the same fluid confidence I first witnessed at Borderland festival two years earlier.

“Marcus, walk with us,” Richard says. Not a request. Marcus follows us outside, his defiance already softening under Richard’s steady gaze.

“What’s really going on?” Richard asks once we’re alone by the forest edge. Direct, no judgment, just presence. This was what initially drew me to him—this ability to cut through bullshit while making you feel seen.

“I’m just trying to share my truth and be authentic,” Marcus finally says, his voice a mixture of defiance and hurt. “Everyone else gets to share their wisdom, but I’m pushed aside. It’s the same story everywhere I go.”

Richard places a hand on his shoulder. That touch I remember, the one that makes you feel chosen. “I see you, brother. We all do. But this event isn’t about you. Right now, we need to think of the other 139 men here.”

Richard is reasonable and compassionate. But first of all, he is firm. Manly. “We are going to have to ask you to leave. I will call you as soon as I get back home next week and we can talk it all through. But right now, you have to leave.”

Marcus’s looks up at Richard. I am amazed—there is gratitude on his face. Somehow Richard has thrown him out, and created a new personal fan in the outcast at the same time.

One hour later, Marcus’ bag is packed, his car gone from the parking area.

After this, I feel a surge of admiration for Richard’s decisive leadership. He’d done what needed to be done without hesitation, preserving the integrity of our gathering, and ensuring that Marcus would not bad mouth us when he got home. This was exactly why men followed him, this was why me and him were the perfect partners—he could teach me to make the hard calls that other men avoided.

Family Habits

But patterns emerge if you’re watching. The morning after our MDMA journey, Richard had barely looked up from his laptop. “Brother, urgent emails,” fingers tapping out a message. Later, I wondered if it was because I hadn’t given him what he was really seeking. I started noticing how his intense focus would shift—always onto someone newer, younger, more eager to please. The way certain men would glow under his attention for months, then suddenly find themselves on the outside, wondering what they’d done wrong.

“It’s just because there are so many people he wants to help,” I’d tell myself. “He gives what each man needs. I shouldn’t be selfish.”

Watching Richard Piper now work the lunch area, I notice how he spots and goes directly at a young man from Norway who asked a particularly vulnerable question the day before. Soon they are separated from all the other men and the young man is clearly getting emotional under Piper’s attention.

Ok, so it seems Piper has a thing for young guys. I know that he had been a spokesperson for the LGBT movement in Sweden. He calls himself “queer” and tells everyone that he “lives with men and sleeps with women”. Everything I have seen so far seems to indicate that really keeps women at arms length and is on a constant hunt to seduce young men.

But who was I to police his desire? I had, at that stage, firmly adopted the ethical system of the mainstream elites of the day. Human sexuality came in all kinds of flavours and colours. As long as sex was kept between consenting adults, then all was good.

But as I watched that young guy looking up at him, something deeper than my present ethics moved in me.

I had built this. I had written the manifesto. I had organised the logistics, answered the emails, stood on that stage in front of a hundred and forty hungry men and told them they had found a home.

And then this man I had built it with, the man I had cast as father, as elder, as the visionary of the movement. I needed him. He had the reach and the celebrity that was necessary to get this thing moving. But what was it exactly that he was looking for in all this?

I didn’t let the question finish forming. Not yet. I wasn’t ready for where it led.

To follow that question, please hit subscribe - this is going to be a three-part series of “Confessions From the Manosphere”.

I had been listening to Jordan Peterson for months now. Order, chaos and the idea of God. Now 34-years old, I was back home visiting my parents and trying to come to terms with the fragmentation of my own life and the lack of a clear aim for the future.

I had come to realize there was value in the beliefs of my parents’ Christianity. And I was struggling to integrate that with my university-trained mind.

I wanted to understand faith in God. This faith seemed to imply a belief in a fundamentally ordered and good universe, something I could sense would be beautiful and meaningful if it were true. But I could not bring myself to believe it when all my friends rejected it.

We drop into the story as I speak to Alex at my parents’ church. Alex had told me that faith in God always comes through revelation, directly from God himself.

My next question to this:

“How do I get this revelation then?”

“Oh, that’s easy—you just ask for it.”

Something about Alex’s response jolted me. “What do you mean, ask? Who do I ask? How?”

“Prayer. You just pray to God for faith, ask for it. If you mean it, then He will give it to you.”

The Ask for Faith

The conversation replayed in my mind as I drove with Laura to the Kirstenbosch Gardens at the foot of Table Mountain.

The yearning in my chest—was that the seed of faith? This ache for something more, something real—was there a last ember not yet died out?

An image of that orchid Laura had given me in Copenhagen came into my mind. I’d forgotten to water it for three months, certain I’d killed it. But when I finally remembered, a tiny green shoot still clung to life in the dried husk. I thought of the possibility of some kind of shrivelled muscle of faith inside of me, neglected, which Alex had made me aware of. Starved and atrophied, but maybe—just maybe—not completely dead.

A fair test, I tell myself now, settling onto a smooth boulder by the trail. I would treat it like an experiment: if God exists and I really ask, something should change. If nothing happened, I’d have my answer.

A Prayer

“I’m going to try to pray,” I announce to Laura. I close my eyes. The words feel thick and clumsy in my throat.

“God...” The name feels foreign on my tongue. “Jesus Christ...” Even stranger. “If you’re there...”

Sheepishness floods me. I’m a grown man talking to the air. But something shifts as I continue. The words begin flowing, not from my head but somewhere deeper.

“I need help. I trying to live a right life, but it’s not working. I’m tired. I’m starting to feel empty. If You’re real, give me faith. Make me completely certain that You exist. I want to know. Not just want. Show me you’re real and I’ll... I’ll serve you for the rest of my life.”

I sit in silence, eyes still closed. No lightning. No voice from heaven.

Then I open my eyes. I see Laura in front of me. I see the trees swaying in the breeze.

The world looks the same...

…but clearly different.

Sharper somehow. More real.

Looking at Laura, her face a mixture of puzzlement, expectation, and playful scepticism, it’s like I am seeing not just a different person, but a completely different being. Still a physical body, but now also something...

…spiritual?

It’s subtle but unmistakable—I can see more clearly, perhaps more deeply, like I had just woken from a confused daze.

I don’t know if this counts as a revelation of God’s existence. But I know immediately that the prayer had an effect.

Walking back to my car, I realize with startling clarity that I’ve been binding my life to this woman by my side, without truly seeing her.

Could I trust my judgment up to this point? My aims had been so confused, so scattered between pleasure-seeking and stability-craving. I realize that everything—absolutely everything—in my life up to this moment would need to be reconsidered.

Higher up the Mountain

The next morning over breakfast, I tell her I want to take a hike further up the mountain. This time I go alone, up where the air thins and the ocean lies beneath me like a sheet of hammered silver. I need to think, to pray again, to understand what’s happening to me.

Sitting on a sun-warmed rock, I pray again. This time the words come easier, faster. I pour it all out: my anger, my fears, my frustrations, the desires of my heart. And as I pray, the answers come. Things fall into place. The reasons for my failures suddenly seem clear. The error of my ways becomes obvious. The path forward is lit up.

I have bought into a lie about what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman. I have been deluded about how to create a lasting bond. I have allowed my lust to corrupt my integrity. And pride has buried shame deep into my heart, beyond even my own sensing of it.

As I head down the mountain path, if feels as if a massive weight has been lifted from my shoulders. It’s almost like a young boy who had been lost in the wilderness, searching desperately for his father’s home, had now spotted the lights of the house from a hilltop. I don’t know every step on the way there. But I am certain of the direction. I can see the way to truth, to safety, to clarity. I can see the way home.

Bringing it Home

When I return to our rental, Laura can tell this isn’t just a new idea. Something significant has shifted in me. I take her hands in mine and tell her what I need to say.

“We need to be celibate for a while,” I say.

Her eyebrows rise. “Celibate? Are you serious?” There’s scepticism in her voice, also fear or hurt.

Read more

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

- T.S. Eliot

On the Path of Manliness, no factor has greater impact than the way a man goes about his search for God.

This is the quest to come to know truth, to witness beauty and to discern true goodness. The wisdom, patience and clarity of intention by which a man navigates on this search will determine the kind of man that he will become.

Having spent nearly half my life building what I thought meant “success”, I had put these questions aside. But now, by my mid thirties, my spiritual search had begun in earnest. It had become clear to me that I was searching for communion - not least a loving, life-long commitment to a woman. And I found myself being in a far off country, having left the mother of my son, and indulged in life, not sure if I could find my way back.

We pick up the story in 2016…

Subscribe now

Landing at Cape Town International with Laura, seeing the familiar sight of Table Mountain rising above the city, something stirred in me. She squeezed my hand as we stood in the line for passport control. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, surprised to find it was true. For months now, other women had become background noise. The constant hunt, the endless cycling through relationships—it had lost its appeal. Laura’s presence beside me felt like enough. More than enough.

That Sunday, we went to my parents’ church.

I sat in the plastic chair, genuinely curious rather than armed with my usual arsenal of intellectual ammunition. The music washed over me—not the contemporary pop concert style I’d grown to despise, but traditional hymns that somehow felt both ancient and alive.

During coffee afterward, an elderly man cornered me to explain Noah’s flood in strictly literal terms, geological evidence included. Years earlier, I would have enjoyed dismantling his certainty piece by piece. This time I simply nodded, excused myself, and moved on.

What struck me was not the quality of the argument—but the quality of the fellowship. These people had genuinely formed a loving and caring community. That unsettled me more than bad theology ever had.

Falsehood cannot sustain communion for long. And yet—here was something holding.

That is when I noticed Alex.

He was not impressive by any modern metric. Overweight, glasses slightly crooked, shirt untucked. Quiet. Attentive. The kind of man invisible in fashionable circles and irrelevant in status games. I remembered him from my teenage years—often present, never pushing himself forward.

When our eyes met, he smiled with such unguarded warmth that I found myself walking toward him.

“Paul,” he said, extending his hand. “Your parents talk about you often.”

We spoke for twenty minutes about nothing of importance: local politics, water shortages, his work as a property administrator. And yet something in his manner disarmed me. He was not trying to persuade me. He was not posturing. He listened in a way that made me lower my guard without noticing.

Eventually, I heard myself say something unexpected.

“I’ve been watching these people,” I said. “They have something I don’t.”

Alex nodded. “What do you think it is?”

“Faith,” I said. “They believe in something bigger than themselves. It gives them a foundation for communion. Like they’re standing on the same ground, aiming at the same thing.”

“That’s a good way to put it,” he said. “Faith is the foundation of Christian life. No one lives without faith, really.”

I crossed my arms. “I’ve been trained to deal in facts, not faith.”

He smiled—not dismissively, not defensively.

“When you get on an airplane,” he said, “do you inspect the engine yourself? When you eat at a restaurant, do you test the food for poison?”

I bristled. “That’s different. That’s based on risk evaluation, likelihoods.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Faith isn’t stupid. It’s a decision to rest on something, to trust its spirit—even when you can’t measure and weigh everything.”

He continued calmly. “You trust the sun will rise tomorrow. You trust that love is real, even though you can’t measure it. Faith connects us to something enduring. If it is misplaced, it doesn’t work. It has to bear fruit—peace, patience, stability. Otherwise it collapses.”

“I wish I could have that,” I said.

The words surprised me as soon as they left my mouth.

“But I can’t,” I added quickly. “Once you’ve seen through the illusions, you can’t go back. I have a master’s degree in political science. I’ve studied evolutionary psychology. I know how humans construct meaning where there is none.”

Alex tilted his head slightly, genuinely curious.

“What if all your academic studies are themselves a limited way of seeing?” he asked. “What if you’ve been trained to see only atoms and void, when reality might be saturated with God?”

I smiled despite myself. It was a fair question, right from my own relativist worldview.

“Of course. You can only see what your assumptions about reality say exist,” I conceded.

“But I grew up in a Christian home, so there was plenty of opportunity for God to speak. I’ve tried. Even now, I am still trying to get faith.” I hammered the nail in the coffin. “It isn’t working. So tell me, how does one get this faith?

“Faith comes by revelation.”

Alex answered without hesitation.

“So how do you get revelation?” I asked.

“You ask for it.”

I stared at him.

“You ask God for faith,” he said. “If you truly want it—and if God exists—He will give it.”

Returning as a Son

I left the church that day unsettled.

Not with faith. But with a realisation, that I had been going about this the wrong way.

If God existed, I realised, He would not be argued, philosophized or rationalised into my life.

If he was there, the only way he could come, was if I decided to return to Him, as a son.

To be continued in Part 2, two weeks from now…

Thanks for reading. If you are interested in a community of men who are returning to tradition i order to build a stronger, more stable life, then check out our community on www.pathofmanliness.com

Path of Manliness

Subscribe now

This is a guest post, written by Justi Andreasen, author of Reclaiming the Biblical Worldview.

Every January, the same pattern unfolds. Resolutions are declared. Plans are drawn. And within weeks, most have quietly dissolved.

We assume the problem is discipline. Or clarity. Or desire. But what if the problem is older than that? What if we have forgotten what a beginning actually is?

What the Ancients Knew

Older traditions understood a beginning as a meeting. A seed must find its soil. A pattern from above must be received by something below. The heavens, they said, cover the earth. And the earth supports the heavens.

In his commentary on Genesis, Matthieu Pageau describes this as the most fundamental notion in biblical cosmology:

The union of heaven and earth involves a dual interaction, in which the heavens “cover the earth” and the earth “supports the heavens.” On one end, spiritual reality informs corporeal reality with meaning and purpose. On the other end, matter expresses spirit by making it visible and tangible in the universe.

A beginning happens when the two meet. When something descends and something receives. When direction finds a place to take root.

Heaven names the invisible: the principle, the calling, the direction that seeks a place to land. Earth names what is already given: the body, the place, the limits, the life that is here and now.

This is the frame. And once you see it, our failures start to make sense.

The Seed Without Soil

The first failure treats the future as raw material. Something to be engineered, optimized, willed into shape.

From the ancient perspective, this is a seed that believes it can grow anywhere. It seeks no soil. It asks no questions about what is actually here, what can actually be sustained. It simply demands that reality complies.

When this fails, the explanation is often personal. A lack of discipline. A failure of resolve. The seed blames itself for not pushing harder. It never occurs to the seed that it landed on rocky ground.

The Soil Without Seed

The second failure moves in the opposite direction. If forcing life into shape does not work, perhaps meaning should be felt rather than consciously formed. Instead of plans, there are intuitions. Instead of goals, moods. Guidance is sought in everyday signs, energies, and impulses that promise alignment without commitment.

From the ancient perspective, this is soil that never holds a seed long enough for it to grow.

A seed needs investment. It must be buried, watered, tended. But soil that is always open to the next possibility is soil that is always ready to uproot what was just planted. A new idea arrives, and yesterday’s seed is forgotten. Another vision appears, more exciting than the last, and the tiny shoot that had just begun to break the surface is pulled out to make room.

This feels like freedom. But it is the freedom of the barren field. Everything is received. Nothing is grown.

To reclaim a Biblical worldview, subscribe to Justi Andreasen for full-length articles every Wednesday and Sunday.

Subscribe to Justi Andreasen

So What Does This Look Like In Practice?

The soil is everything already given. Your finances. Your job. Your body. The people already in your life. The society you life in. The hours in your week. Reality. These are not obstacles to your future. They are the ground in which it must grow.

The seed is the principle you are trying to live by. The new habit. The project. The vision of who are called to become.

The work of beginning well is learning to fit these two together.

Consider: A man wants to get strong. He reads about elite training programs, five days a week, two hours a day. But he works long shifts and has a small flat with no equipment. He tries to force it. Within a month, he has quit.

The seed was fine. The soil could not receive it.

A better question: What kind of training can actually take root here? Maybe it is thirty minutes, three days a week, with a pull-up bar in the doorframe. The seed is smaller. But it can grow.

Or consider: A man wants to build something of his own. He dreams of quitting his job and launching a business. But he has rent to pay, no savings, and a relationship that depends on his stability. He waits for the day when conditions are perfect. That day never comes.

The soil is ignored. The seed stays in his pocket.

A better question: What kind of beginning belongs to this life? In incarnational logic, what descends does not bypass limits but assumes them. A dream that refuses this never truly begins. It remains held in the mind, hovering above the body, resting on the surface of life like a seed on stone rather than entering the soil.

A real beginning accepts the narrowness of the present. It is smaller than imagined. But it is real.

The ancients understood that heaven does not replace earth. It enters it. The pattern must meet the material. The vision must find the life that is already here.

This is the exercise: Look at your soil. Be honest about what is actually there. Then ask what seed can grow in it. Or ask what soil you would need to prepare for the seed you want to plant.

Both questions are valid. But you must ask them. A beginning that ignores the ground it stands on is not a beginning. It is a fantasy.

The Meeting

To begin well is a matter of discernment before it is a matter of strength or sensitivity. One must attend to the soil as it actually is. And one must attend to the seed that can actually be carried here.

A real beginning happens when direction is given in proportion to what can receive it. And when receptivity commits long enough for form to emerge.

A seed falls. The soil receives. Neither alone produces the green shoot. But when heaven meets earth, something begins to grow. This is how life renews itself. This is how it always has.

This post is public so feel free to share it

Share

Subscribe to Justi Andreasen

Subscribe to Paul Lloyd Robson

Some men have tried to apply some of the ideas with their own family, and have run into drama.

Some men have simply been so triggered by the ideas that just reading it has caused a lot of emotional turmoil in themself.

Yes. Family relationships are messy and good intentions alone are not enough to ensure good results.

So with this essay, I will try and communicate some of the further insights I have had into this kind of father wound through speaking to these guys.

Let me start with me sharing some of my story.

My Long Detour Around Fatherhood

For most of my life, I ran from my father—and from every father figure. I distrusted masculine authority and imagined myself self-sufficient.

It was only in my 30s that I realised that I had hit a loft in my own growth, and that older men as mentors had a lot to give me.

The first father figure I took into my life gave me confidence, direction and a deep sense of purpose that I had been lacking. But he also showed up my lack of discernment. Behind the mask of wisdom and slick confidence, he wanted to give me drugs and try to seduce me.

A painful lesson: not every “mentor” is a father.

My next “father figure” was Jordan Peterson—better, but still distant and imperfect, especially as an online avatar, as I wrote about in my essay, The Fall of the Prophet.

From there I began to speak more deeply with my own father, as I wrote about in Sonship: From Rebellion to Respect.

Later came Jonathan Pageau, whom I had the privilege of getting to know very well through his visits to Denmark. His example was more grounded, more real, but still too abstract.

Today my wife and I have a spiritual father—our parish priest—who takes responsibility for our souls and lives with such love that I regularly see it shining in his eyes. This has become the very foundation of not just my life, but my whole family’s existence.

What Healing Actually Requires

So what does the actual practical work look like with sons and fathers?

In my last essay, we spoke about the fact that a father is there to bring a son into contact with the harsh realities of existence. In that light, the fact that our fathers are flawed is actually useful.

A coddled man collapses at the first injustice. A man who expects life to be unfair—and still holds focus on his mission, acting responsibly—can face anything.

This is why learning obedience to one’s father matters. Not blind obedience, but sober acceptance that authority above me is part of reality.

Yet many men come from profoundly dysfunctional families. These patterns often stretch across generations. They do not get fixed because we read one essay or have one conversation.

Why Sons Need Boundaries, Not Crusades

For many sons, the first task is establishing boundaries—not rebelliously, but prudently.

Obedience should not be extended to doing anything sinful or harmful. You remain fully responsible for your own actions before God.

Be careful about trying to “fix” your family. The most dysfunctional sons are those actively trying to heal their parents. The only person you can fix is yourself.

If you notice yourself seeking recognition, acknowledgement, or an apology from a parent—stop. You’re likely making things worse.

When trying to connect with fathers or authority figures, we often get triggered. We lose peace, take offense, and fall into old patterns. What began as connection becomes drama.

So, this is where boundaries matter. You need to protect the fragile peace in your heart that allows for genuine growth.

If reaching out isn’t bringing peace and harmony, step back. Shorten visits. Limit certain conversations. If you want to leave a family event early, you probably should.

You may not yet have the strength to sort everything out—and that’s okay. Seeing dysfunctional patterns doesn’t make it your mission to fix them.

Your task is not to fix your father, but to learn from him what you can—and entrust the rest to God.

The Battle Inside the Heart

We imagine healing will come when others finally understand us or apologise. That is a lie whispered by our pride: “If everyone else just sees the world in the exact same way as me, then everything will be ok.”

The truth is that real change happens internally.

St Maximus the Confessor teaches: “The one who harbors resentment is like a man who drinks poison and expects another to die.

”

When you stop rehearsing judgement, your agency returns. Boundaries give you breathing room. Within that space, your heart can begin to soften.

Vulnerability in Order, Not Exhibitionism

Modern culture preaches vulnerability everywhere, usually as emotional exhibitionism. Men are encouraged to splash their unprocessed emotions onto whoever will listen. This creates instability and drama, not strength.

True vulnerability is different. It is not self-display. It is admitting weakness to someone with authority, experience, and responsibility for your soul.

The son who can say, “I am afraid and unsure—guide me,” in the right trusted setting with a man who can handle it in the right way has begun to grow in humility. But vulnerability outside the context of order quickly becomes a mess.

Receiving a Lineage—and Carrying It Forward

A son must also accept responsibility. Obedience does not excuse failure. You must seek the right advice, invest yourself in the outcome of your decisions and refuse to blame your father when life doesn’t give you what you want.

To be a son is to receive a lineage. You inherit what is good and carry it forward. No man gets everything he needs from his own father right from the start. So he will need to go out in to the world and find the missing parts his own dad lacked.

But then he should integrate what he has learnt again back into himself, not rejecting his father and thinking he can “reinvent” himself from scratch.

A man who is faithful to his father’s tradition will eventually become a trustworthy father himself.

When Fathers Fail: The Path That Still Leads Upward

Many men can carry deep pain from childhood. Your father may have mild failings or be a complete failure—an addict, mentally broken, even suicidal. Violence and abuse are unfortunate realities. But seeing yourself as victim and making yourself judge of your father leads nowhere good. Accepting where you started and taking responsibility to grow is the path to manliness.

Judging our fathers has a spiritual cost. It casts us as righteous victims, which is a lie.

Christ does not command us to admire our fathers—He commands us to honour them. There is a difference.

Irrespective of pain experienced, you received the greatest gift from your father—your life.

If you accept your lot as a son to your father, you pick up your cross—much of which you inherit from him—and continue struggling upward as he attempted to do.

I want to reassure you that the pain of a bad or missing father can be healed. The path involves immersing yourself in community built around shared principles, a church. What was broken in relationship must be healed in relationship. St Silouan the Athonite tells us: “Grace proceeds from brotherly love, and by brotherly love grace is preserved.”

You may reconcile with your biological father; you may not. But you can still heal through the presence of other men who bear Christ’s love.

Becoming Like Children Again

This path runs directly against modern culture, which sees rebellion as virtue and tradition as oppression. But growing as a son requires childlike trust—not childish naivety, but foundational faith.

Faith grows in small amounts—like a mustard seed. It’s not blind trust against evidence. It’s “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen“ (St. Paul). Christian faith provides solid foundation in deeper truth, tried and tested through ages, not passing trends. It is as Christ told us to be, “as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves”.

We are not asked to obey tyrants. But we are told to reorient ourselves toward tradition, authority, and reverence—virtues that modern men lack precisely because they rejected their fathers.

This positions us as “little children” before God. Small children trust because they must rely on their parents’ wisdom. May God give us the grace to become like those children.

Six Principles for Christian Sonship

So, to complete this, I want to suggest some practical and down to earth rules for sons:

Firstly, it is important to underline that honouring your parents is a fundamental spiritual law. Alongside theft and murder, this is a boundary which has consequences if it is not held.

But what does this mean? Here are six rules that I want to propose:

1. Do not put yourself above your parents

   —This means no teaching, correcting, or guiding your parents unless they themselves ask for it.

2. Stop judgement of your parents in words or thoughts

   —Instead try to understand and make excuses for them. Replace repetitive judgemental thoughts with prayer.

3. Seek peace, not acknowledgement

   —Harmony is the most important in the family, so avoid escalation; withdraw when needed.

4. Bear their weaknesses with patience

   —Remember their age and how you were completely dependent on then as a helpless child.

5. Offer small, concrete acts of love

   —Kindness softens your own heart.

6. Understand and preserve the good in your lineage

   —Nurture your inheritance so it may become fruitful rather than rejecting it.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. And if you would like to hear more about the work that I do, then check out the web site, www.pathofmanliness.com

“Absent fathers.”

“No role models.”

“Fatherhood is lost.”

But in truth, every man is given experience of fatherhood in many forms: he was born to a biological father, certainly — but also spiritual fathers, mentors, elders, bosses, teachers. God has placed fathers in every layer of life and society.

The crisis is not the absence of fathers. It is the inability of sons to accept the fathers they have.

Like the sailor in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner who cried, “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” we swim in the presence of fathers—but recoil from the ones we actually have. We want a different father. A better one. One who fits our expectations, emotional needs, and imagined criteria. And if the father available to us fails to align with our ideal, we dismiss him.

“Fathers, fathers everywhere, but none good enough for me.”

The Traditional View: You Don’t Choose Your Father

Within Christian tradition, and especially Orthodox tradition, hierarchy is not a social construct; it is a spiritual reality woven into creation. A man does not begin by assessing whether his father “did a good job.” He begins by honouring him. This is not sentiment. It is the first commandment with a promise: “that your days may be long in the land.”

You cannot decide your father.

You cannot negotiate your way into a different lineage.

You often cannot select a more agreeable authority.

Your father—wise or flawed, present or absent, living or departed—is given. And the same is true of many of the wider father figures who appear throughout life. Your task is not to evaluate, judge or correct them, but to learn what it means to be a son under them.

You may offer insights. You may suggest improvements. But when your counsel is dismissed, the traditional path is to focus on what is always within a man’s control: his own humility, obedience, and endurance. Spiritual growth rarely blooms in the soil of self-determination; it blossoms under the shelter of obedience.

A Father Chastises The Son He Loves

Some will say, “But my father was a tyrant.” Yet this objection itself often reveals the modern assumption that we are entitled to ideal conditions before we are required to honour anyone.

A mother’s love nurtures. A father’s love places expectations and even demands. His role is to have standards for his son and to bring out what is hidden within him. Just as a sculptor chips away stone to reveal the form within, the hard knocks of fatherhood shape a boy into a man—if he bears them with humility.

Scripture tells us, “A father chastises the son whom he loves.” No boy understands this while he is still a boy. The toddler cannot grasp why he may not run into the road; the teenager resents the curfew he does not yet understand.

But obedience precedes understanding, not the other way around.

It is obedience that brings maturity, wisdom and insight. The boy rebel boy is depriving himself of the very pathway of even seeing, let alone escaping his childish ways.

The Example of St Paisios

Orthodox history is full of stories where obedience—sometimes to unreasonable or irritable leaders—became the very means of sanctification. The point is not blind submission for its own sake, but the purification of pride.

When I first converted to Orthodoxy, the saint that inspired me with his simple humility and obedience, more than any other, was St. Paisios of Mount Athos.

As a young novice, he worked under a difficult and temperamental monk. Once, he was ordered to complete a carpentry task in a way he could plainly see was misguided. He gently suggested a better approach and was sharply rebuked. So he obeyed and did the task exactly as instructed, knowing it would later have to be undone.

When another monk discovered the “mistake,” he scolded Paisios harshly—insulting him and shouting at him. Paisios did not defend himself or shift the blame. He accepted the correction without protest, and, with his superior’s permission, redid the work properly. He later said experiences like this chipped away his pride and taught him how to relate rightly to authority.

This humility did not make him a doormat. It formed him into a spiritual giant.

Decades later, tens of thousands sought his counsel. Today pilgrims from around the world still line up at his grave. When I visited on an ordinary weekday in 2024, the line of men and women waiting to venerate his grave stretched far beyond the monastery gate.

St Paisios reminds us that if a child obeys with humility—even when the father is mistaken—God rewards the obedience and protects the child.

The Path out of Counterfeit Sonship

Modern culture teaches young men to see themselves primarily as victims of flawed fathers, to build identities on grievance and self-protection, and ultimately to model sonship on rebellion.

This is why the saints insist that a son learns maturity not by evaluating his father’s correctness, but by receiving the discipline that he is placed under. All authority is given by God and is for our salvation, even (or especially) when we find it unfair.

Our culture has lost the ability to distinguish fatherly discipline from tyranny; anything that constrains desire is treated as oppression.

But the traditional path begins with honour, not evaluation.

Obedience, not self-assertion.

Acceptance of one’s place, not constant negotiation of it.

The Path of Manliness does not begin by judging our fathers.

It begins by learning to be sons.

If this idea speaks to you, and you want to join the path alongside other men learning obedience, responsibility, and sonship, I recommend checking out Path of Manliness Core.

Read about our Core Groups

For nearly a decade, my full time work with men has been under the brand Maniphesto—a manifesto for men. But the work has clearly shifted. Certainly I am no longer writing any declaration of who men should be. Instead I am walking a path myself, together with a band of brothers, struggling towards a vision of manhood by taking up our cross to follow Him who showed the Way.

Just yesterday, I published a video conversation with my own father that has been a long time coming. My conversion to Christianity was perhaps one of the happiest days of my dad’s life. To then see me become Orthodox was, in his eyes, me returning to the dead traditions of the Roman Catholic Church he grew up in.

So in this conversation, we spoke openly about the differences between Orthodoxy and Protestantism—a conversation that was, for both of us, as personal as it was theological. It wasn’t easy. I think for both of us, beneath the theology ran a fear of misunderstanding and a longing for connection.

Therefore, I think it is timely to share the story below - a passage from the book that happened while I was still an atheist, around 2016. I hope it captures the role my father played at beginning of that turning point — the moment when I began to see my father not as an obstacle to freedom, but as a man grounded in faith whom I could finally begin to respect.

The Story - Smoke and Shame

I stepped outside my parents’ house, casually announcing “Just getting some fresh air.” The evening breeze carried the scent of my mother’s gardenia bushes mixed with the salt of the Atlantic Ocean. My hand slid into my pocket, fingers closing around the crumpled pack of Marlboros I’d hidden earlier.

I glanced over my shoulder at the warm light spilling from the living room windows through the bushes. No one watching. With practiced movements, I tapped out a cigarette, cupped my hands against the Cape Town breeze, and lit up. The first drag filled my lungs with a familiar poison that somehow felt like relief.

What a joke. Thirty-four years old, hiding behind my parents’ house like a teenager. I exhaled slowly, watching the smoke disappear into the darkness. Would they smell it on me when I went back inside? Probably. My mother’s nose missed nothing.

I took another drag, hating myself for it. Ten years of promising I’d quit. Ten years of returning to these death sticks. So much for living without boundaries—I’d just exchanged my father’s rules for the chains of addiction. I had once thought freedom meant doing whatever I wanted; I hadn’t realized it could lead to this kind of self-loathing.

The nicotine sharpened my senses. My mind drifted back to the three-day hike through the Cape Point Nature Reserve I had just completed with my dad. The trail had wound along cliffs where the Atlantic crashes into the Indian Ocean, creating that distinctive line in the water where currents meet. We’d walked mostly in silence—a silence that was both comfortable and uncomfortable at once.

The Long Walk

“Look,” he’d said on the second morning, pointing to a small antelope frozen in awareness of us. The kudu’s spiral horns caught the morning light before it bounded away. My father smiled, a trace of childlike wonder softening his weathered face.

Subscribe now

I remembered the weight of my pack digging into my shoulders as we climbed, sweat trickling down my spine. The simple satisfaction of boiling water for instant coffee on our small camp stove. The quiet of the evening as we sat on the veranda outside the hut, watching the sun sink below the horizon, stars growing brighter until they seemed close enough to touch. As my father and I shared those moments, old memories began surfacing one by one.

The Weight of the Past

“Your room’s a disaster, Paul. How do you find anything in there?” My fourteen-year-old self had replied, muttering under my breath, “By not having someone constantly telling me how to live my life.”

“Dad, you don’t understand women at all.” I had been eighteen, dismissing his gentle warning about getting sucked into drama with my girlfriend.

“That’s an oversimplification of the Bible,” I’d said during my university years, armed with the arrogance of intellect and the tools of modern philosophy, watching sadness creep into his face as I dismantled his lifelong faith with academic precision.

“I don’t believe in fairy tales anymore,” I’d announced after moving to Denmark, rejecting not just his religion but everything it represented.

Still standing in the garden, I took another drag, watching the ember glow in the darkness. The memories stung. What I had called freedom had become its own prison—of addictions, shallow relationships, and endless striving.

Carrying My Father

That morning, on our final day hiking, I had noticed my father failing to hide a worsening limp. Upon pressing him, he admitted to a knee injury from a recent squash game. By this point it had swollen to double size. We had been halfway across a five-kilometre stretch of rocky beach, the sun beating down mercilessly, waves pounding the shore to our left and steep cliffs rising to our right. He’d tried to hide his pain, but I had seen him wince with each step.

“Let me help you,” I’d said, offering my arm.

It had taken a few more offers before he finally accepted, placing his arm around my shoulder. We found a crack leading up the cliffside and climbed that way—his weight leaning on me, his breath laboured.

“Remember when you had to lift me down that cliffside in the Drakensberg when I was little?” I’d asked.

“Life comes full circle,” he’d answered simply.

We flagged down a passing ranger’s vehicle when we eventually reached the road. As we waited, sitting side by side on a boulder, he squeezed my shoulder. “Thank you, son.” Three simple words that somehow carried more weight than all my accomplishments abroad.

Back in my parents’ garden, I crushed the cigarette against a rock and buried the evidence under the bushes, a child’s guilt-ridden strategy I hadn’t outgrown.

Among the Faithful

Inside, I washed my hands and face, sniffing for smoke. Upon entering the living room, and despite his swollen knee, my father was setting out coffee cups for the church members arriving for their weekly prayer meeting.

Laughter erupted from someone’s joke. These people had known each other for decades—had weathered marriages, births, deaths, and failures together. My father introduced me, his pride undimmed by our differences.

I shook hands, made small talk, but the conversations felt thin in comparison to the bond these people shared. My friends back in Copenhagen would show up—as long as it wasn’t too inconvenient, or if they could expect something in return. My relationships with women cycled through the same patterns of drama and confusion—two lost souls searching for direction in each other’s confusion.

As the evening progressed, I found myself wanting to understand these people better. There was something in their presence—a quiet certainty, a shared gravity—that I realized I’d been missing.

The Step I’d Never Taken

At some point, one of the church members mentioned his struggles with doubt. “Sometimes I wonder if my prayers are even heard anymore,” he confessed. “The silence can be deafening.”

I found myself nodding. “I’ve been wrestling with that too,” I admitted. “It’s hard to find something you can trust in a world that feels so random.”

The conversation flowed around us, and then, without planning it, I turned to my father. “Dad, how do you maintain faith in such a changing world? I’ve never seen you waver in your trust in God to show the way in every circumstance.”

The words hung in the air between us. My father’s eyebrows lifted slightly—surprise flashing across his face before he composed himself. For a moment, the room seemed to hold its breath—or perhaps it was just me, suddenly aware of what I’d done. When had I last genuinely asked for his perspective? Certainly not during my university years. High school? Maybe earlier.

My father set his coffee mug down slowly, gathering his thoughts. The lines around his eyes deepened—not from age, but from a lifetime of considering questions like mine with genuine care.

“You know, Paul,” he said finally, “I used to think faith was about having all the answers. That if I just studied enough or prayed hard enough, then everything would be easy.” He smiled slightly. “It took me years to realize that’s not how it works.”

He leaned forward. “Faith isn’t scientific proof. It’s more like... trust, tested through experience. Trusting in God, as in trust in the fundamental goodness of life, even when you’re struggling and walking through darkness.”

The room had grown quiet, everyone listening.

“I don’t know how God works,” my father concluded. “But I’ve found that when I put my trust in God—rather than demanding that things turn out the way I want them—I find my way through the difficulties without knowing what is coming next.”

The Geography of Grace

Our eyes met, and something passed between us—a mutual recognition of this small but seismic shift. For the first time in decades, I wasn’t dismissing his wisdom before he’d even finished speaking. For the first time since I’d been a teenager, I actually wanted to know what he thought.

Something shifted inside me, like tectonic plates realigning after years of pressure. The geography of our relationship transformed, creating new terrain I couldn’t yet navigate but somehow recognized.

I didn’t yet understand what was changing—but I sensed that something in me had finally begun to turn homeward.

Afterword: The Long Way Home

The Path of Manliness starts with Sonship. If you were touched by this story to read all the way to the end, then perhaps you could be interested in joining a group of men who are struggling on that path together.

Consider joining the Path of Manliness by signing up for a 90 min Genesis Workshop here

→ Join the next Genesis Workshop

You can also see the conversation with my dad here:

→ Watch the Father & Son Talk on YouTube

This Substack explores the living wisdom of tradition—particularly as it relates to manhood—in an age hungry for stability and meaning.

But what is tradition, really? How do we distinguish life-giving wisdom from dead habit—or worse, from oppression masquerading as virtue?

In what follows, I’ll offer a definition rooted in language, history, and Christian theology. We’ll see how tradition forms identity, why even “anti-traditionalism” becomes its own tradition, and how the Orthodox Church understands tradition not as nostalgia for the past, but as participation in the living Logos—Christ Himself. Finally, we’ll face the sobering truth that every generation hands something down—but not everything handed down is faithful.

A Definition

From the Latin tradere—“to hand over, deliver, or entrust”—tradition means something given to us because it was found worth preserving.

Yet tradition is not the same as inheritance. My father’s hand-carved cupboard, or my wife’s great-grandmother’s shawl, are heirlooms. They are beautiful reminders of the past, but they do not shape who we are in the present.

Tradition, by contrast, is not a thing we possess—it is a life we participate in. It must be lived to exist at all. Through repeated acts—ritual, language, song, labor, and love—it forms the invisible bonds that make a people what they are.

Take away the shared tradition, and the group dissolves. Whether it is the Robson family, a nation like Denmark, or the category of men, it is the shared way of life—the pattern of doing and believing together—that constitutes the group’s very being. Without it, only abstract individuals without identity remain.

The Tradition of Anti-Traditionalism

Every living community depends on its traditions for coherence. A social grouping that starts to treat traditions as optional will also start the process of ceasing to exist.

There can be no group that does not have traditions. Even a group built on a shared foundational belief of opposition to tradition has simply adopted “anti-traditionalism” as a core tradition. movements built on rejecting the past inevitably form new traditions—rituals of rebellion, sacred phrases of denial, and moral codes of “liberation.”

Anti-traditionalism is simply a tradition of self-negation. Like all false traditions, it cannot endure. This explains the transience and exhaustion of so many modern movements—they burn bright for a moment, then collapse, leaving behind disoriented individuals searching for belonging.

Tradition and Logos

So there is something deep about tradition, something collective happening beyond the scope of our usual individualist focused perspective on life.

We can see that tradition takes on a life of its own. Tradition is contained and transmitted within the life of a collective body of the people who practice the tradition together through time. Through this, it gains an intelligence somehow greater than the sum of the individuals that practice it.

We can neither fully comprehend nor predict its workings. Some traditions endure for millennia, as if engraved into reality by a divine hand; others arise and vanish like passing shadows.

We all live within bodies of traditions at multiple levels and layers. In an Orthodox Christian perspective, this “intelligence” of tradition is not some impersonal Jungian “collective consciousness”, but rather a participation in and interaction with Christ, the Logos who is the embodiment of divine wisdom. Man is created in the image of God, and is intended to enter into union with God - not as a homogonous grey mass of impersonality, but rather each man as a unique co-creative divine being, a god with a small “g”.

Christian Tradition

The word tradition appears often in the New Testament. In Greek, it is παράδοσις (paradosis)—“that which is handed down.”

St. Paul commands the Thessalonians to “stand firm and hold to the traditions (paradosis) you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thess. 2:15). Here, tradition is clearly something that is vital, and also not at all limited to Holy Scripture.

I remember the first time I heard about the Orthodox Church, back in 2017. I had recently come to faith in Christ, but I was disheartened by the superficiality of the churches I visited. A friend said to me: “You should look into the Eastern Orthodox Church—they have preserved the original transmission from Christ.”

That word transmission struck me like a missing piece falling into place. It was not about finding the exact right doctrines according to my own judgement. It was about finding the place where the revelation I had received could be grafted into the Body of Christ.

From the very beginning, the Christian faith was transmitted person to person, body to body, soul to soul, within the life of an established and defined community. Before the New Testament was written and eventually compiled, the Church already existed, baptizing, praying, partaking of the sacraments. The faith was never a set of abstract doctrines, but a living inheritance of life, worship, and understanding—a way of being handed down from those who had known Christ to those who would come after.

The Dual Meaning of Transmission: Legend and Betrayal

The Church Slavonic word for tradition, предание (predanie) carries the same meaning—“that which is given over”. Interestingly, predanie also means legend in Russian, linking tradition to ancient oral storytelling that carried wisdom across centuries. Before Christianity, these were the primary vessels of cultural memory and moral formation that told truths about courage, sacrifice, and love. Still today we still find many of these stories valuable enough to tell them to our children.

Yet predanie has a darker side too. The related verb предать (predat’) means “to betray”. It is the very word used of Judas when he “handed over” Christ to His enemies.

This dual meaning reminds us: every generation hands something down—but not everything handed down is faithful. We either transmit what gives life, or we betray it.

Thus, Christian tradition is not good simply because it is old. It lives only insofar as it remains united to its source: the life of Christ, the Word (Logos) made flesh.

The apostles handed down not merely abstract teachings and interpretations, but participation Divine Tradition. This means participation in the Church, the Body of Christ itself—“the faith once delivered to the saints.”

To be part of this living transmission is is to join a body that spans time and place—and to become responsible for what we will hand to those after us.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also be interested to read my article on Jordan Peterson, The Fall of the Prophet, where I explore more about why wisdom and tradition cannot be merely an intellectual pursuit (such as I claim Dr Peterson tends too much towards), but needs to be embodied in community and action.

I also run a network of online men’s groups, focused on reconnecting our lives to traditional Christianity. If that sounds interesting, please consider signing up for a Genesis Workshop here: https://pathofmanliness.notion.site/genesis-workshop

Read about the Genesis Workshop

Subscribe now

This is a guest post, written by , based on a talk by Jonathan Pageau at the 2017 European Men’s Gathering in Denmark. Any confusion or wrong turns are the author’s alone.

The First Father-Slayers

Hesiod’s Theogony tells how the Sky (Uranus) and the Earth (Gaia) produced monstrous children. Uranus, ashamed of them, stuffed them back into Gaia.

Here we already glimpse the father as civilization: he refuses chaos, pushes back the freakish, sets boundaries.

But Gaia resents it. She conspires with her son Cronus, who ambushes Uranus and castrates him.

Space opens. The children can breathe. But not for long.

The Revolution Eats Its Children

Cronus quickly becomes as tyrannical as his father. A prophecy warns that one of his children will overthrow him. His solution? He swallows them whole.

The cycle repeats: a father overthrown, replaced by another tyrant who consumes his own children.

The French royalist Jacques Mallet du Pan saw the same logic at work in politics. In 1793 he wrote: “Like Saturn (the Roman equivalent of the Greek Cronus), revolutions devour their children.” History has only confirmed his warning.

• French Revolution: Kill the king, and the Reign of Terror follows, consuming even its earliest supporters.

• Russian Revolution: Kill the Tsar, and purge after purge sweeps through the new order, devouring those who built it.

When you cut off the head, you don’t achieve freedom. You unleash chaos and blood, a cycle of destruction that consumes its own promises before they can bear fruit.

Who the Father Really Is

Why? Because fathers are not just men. They embody the principle that holds a people together.

Destroy that principle and you dissolve the very reason you exist as a group. Any group, be it a nation or a family, without “fathers,” is not free. It is a mob.

And yet no earthly or mythic father is perfect like God the Father.

They are all flawed. They falter, make mistakes, fail to live up to their own ideals. The righteous Noah became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent, and even the great and noble king Priam made choices that contributed to Troy’s fall. Your father, your leaders, your founders - none are without imperfection.

So what do you do with a broken father?

Two Options

One option is to expose their wrongdoing.

When Noah lay naked, his youngest son, Ham, told his brothers what he had seen. But when Noah awoke, he pronounced a curse on Ham’s son Canaan, and his descendants were condemned to servitude. Attempting freedom through exposure, then, brought only subjugation.

The same pattern would echo millenia later, as revolutionaries toppled the statues of their “fathers”, seeking liberation, only to find chaos and betrayal in its place.

The other option is covering.

When Ham revealed their father’s nakedness, Shem and Japheth responded carefully: they walked backward into Noah’s tent so as not to see him, and draped a garment over him.

Centuries later, the Trojan hero and ancestor of Rome, Aeneas, carried his father Anchises out of burning Troy, lifting him on his shoulders through the chaos of the city.

In both cases, the fathers’ weakness was acknowledged. But only by covering and carrying the flawed father was the link to the past maintained - and the promise of a future secured.

To reclaim a Biblical worldview, subscribe to Justi Andreasen for full-length articles every Wednesday and Sunday.

Subscribe to Justi Andreasen

The Vision of the Future

Later, when Aeneas descends into the underworld he encounters the shadow of his father, Anchises, who reveals a prophetic vision of Rome’s destiny. The moment underscores a profound truth: by honoring his father, Aeneas gains insight into the future.

A vision he would have been unworthy of had he abandoned Anchises to perish in Troy.

Every life replays this drama.

Inside you is a head - a principle of order. But hidden desires rise up. Addiction, resentment, lust: they want the crown. But kill the father within, and chaos devours you. The Greeks expressed this with myth. We know it from bitter experience.

Christ and the Dead Father

That is why Christ doesn’t come to usher in a new era by erasing tradition and killing the old, imperfect father.

Instead, He descends into the underworld to raise Adam, the fallen father of us all. Fully God and fully man, He rescues His imperfect earthly father through obedience to His Heavenly Father, the perfect ideal: “not my will but yours be done”.

The key is to carry the past not through blind conformity, but while acknowledging its flaws: living in accordance with a higher ideal, as seen in Christ’s faithful obedience to God the Father.

By saving the dead father, Christ opens the way to resurrection. This is the true alternative to the cycle of castration and devouring.

Rebellion consumes.

Sacrifice redeems.

Revolution vs. Redemption

This pattern repeats in every sphere:

• Politically: Kill the king, and you get terror.

• Personally: Expose your father, and bitterness consumes you.

• Spiritually: Reject your tradition entirely, and you cut yourself off from meaning.

When you place yourself above all authority, rejecting any guiding principle outside yourself, there is no stable standard for right and wrong - so every action becomes subject to personal desire, and chaos inevitably follows.

But Christ shows another way. The true Son does not expose or castrate. He covers, carries, and transforms. And the Father in heaven raises him up.

As Pageau puts it: “Go into the underworld and save your father - not because he deserves it, but because without him, there is no future.”

The Choice Before Us

Every man faces the same choice.

Expose and undermine your fathers - and be devoured in turn. Or carry their weakness, cover their shame, and receive a vision of the future.

The cycle of revolution promises freedom but delivers servitude. The way of Christ, by contrast, brings resurrection. Not just at the grand scale, but in every life and every family

The fathers of the past remain imperfect, but Christ shows the way forward. True renewal does not come from overthrowing the past, but from acknowledging its flaws, carrying its weight, and aligning it with a higher ideal.

In this way, the past is honored, the guiding principle is preserved, and a future worth inheriting is made possible.

This post is public so feel free to share it

Share

Subscribe to Justi Andreasen

Subscribe to Paul Lloyd Robson

If you’re disillusioned with the culture and ready to trade isolation and algorithm-fed confusion for order, accountability, and tribe, this video lays out the path. I talk about traditional masculinity, why online avatars can’t guide your major life decisions, and how local community and the Eucharistic life forge durable men.

Ready to begin? Join the Genesis Workshop—a clear, practical process to gain strength, stability, and community through traditional wisdom:

Genesis Workshop

The article I refer to in the video:

The Fall of the Prophet

At the time, I thought I had liberated myself from all the “chains” of tradition and religion. I believed freedom meant doing what I wanted, when I wanted, without limits—whether through sex, psychedelics, or endless experiments with spirituality. Religion was a tool to influence people and get them to do what you want (or rather what I wanted). What I didn’t realize was that this so-called freedom was a prison of self-indulgence, a trap keeping me cut off from God, fellowship with others, and becoming a man.

This is the story of one moment where the cracks in that worldview began to show. It’s an episode from my book The Path of Manliness, and it marks the first time I was confronted with the possibility that Christ—whom I had rejected all my adult life—might be the truth I had been searching for.

I never expected to find Christ in a tantric yoga school in Thailand.

Koh Phagnan. The morning after the Shiva and Shakti party, I sat cross-legged on a thin cushion in Agama Yoga's main hall, a dull ache in my temples from the confusion of the night before. Around me, senior students floated by in flowing white clothes—a stark contrast to the black leather my "home" tantric school, The New Tantra, defaulted to. The hall was simple but beautiful, whitewashed walls catching the morning light that streamed through open windows, carrying with it the scent of jungle and sea salt from the nearby beach.

I'd spent the previous night dressed as Shakti—the divine feminine—complete with a sequine studded mini-skirt and makeup. I'd enjoyed watching the discomfort ripple through the new age men as I deliberately blurred gender lines. My transgression had been calculated to grab attention through shock, my sense of freedom absolute.

I had taken my pick of the yoga girls there - this time a slender brown Californian with curly hair and an intensity that was irresistible. It was her last night on the island and I determined that I would make it a good one for her.

Back at her place, she'd pulled out a book of poetry and asked if we could pray about grace.

"Grace?" I'd repeated, something tightening in my chest.

"Yes," she'd said. "Divine grace. The unearned gift that makes everything possible."

I'd nodded and played along. Normally I would have done some kind of meditation, but poetry and prayer fitted just as well into my spiritually enlightened persona.

It would need some adjustments of course—grace was a Christian concept I'd long abandoned. Everything good came from our own power, our own awakening and complete acceptance of everything about ourself—not some external divinity bestowing gifts we didn't earn.

Still, I'd bowed my head and looked like I was enjoying it. I even asked her if she had some poems she could share with me to take home.

I left the same night. A storm was brewing and she had to pack her bags for the early ferry. As I was heading out, she handed me a sheave of papers with various spiritual images and texts. I shoved them into my bag, scuttled out the door and onto my scooter, buzzing through the dark over Thai roads snaking over hills as the lightning and thunder started crackling through the jungle.

The next morning, I'd spent an hour watching water droplets from the now passed storm forming on a twig on my balcony, swell, and fall. Complete presence. Complete Attentiveness. Complete equilibrium.

This is the video I recorded that morning in 2015 of the drop forming on a twig. Despite my feelings of "presense in the moment", I still took out my phone, recorded it and sent it to my then 8 year old son...

"This is living life," my pride told me. "Radical acceptance. Presence. Freedom. No boundaries."

Yet as I got on my scooter to head into the morning lecture, something felt out of sync, like a note played slightly sharp in an otherwise perfect melody.

Now I sat waiting for Swami Vivekananda Saraswati to begin his lecture. I was halfway through an intense 40-day program, designed to introduce novices to ancient tantric practice. I didn’t know yet that this Swami was manipulating and sexually abusing many of his female students.

The swami entered, his presence commanding immediate silence. Tall and imposing with his beard and penetrating gaze, he moved with the confidence of someone who believed he held ancient secrets. We all revered him here—this man who promised the keys to the path of spiritual enlightenment through free love and yoga.

"Today," he began, his Romanian accent thick but clear, "is Easter Sunday."

My attention sharpened. Easter? Why would he mention that?

"And so we will speak about Christ."

The words hit me like a dull slap to a drunk in a daze. Christ? Here? I glanced around, noting the confusion on some faces, acceptance on others. Sunlight streamed across the room, illuminating dust particles dancing in the air between us and the swami.

I don't remember much else of what he said. What struck me was the simple fact that this man, a leader of the tradition I had embedded myself in, which I had chosen to base my life on, this respected tantric master, was speaking of the very same Christ which I had rejected. Now he suggesting we should hold him in reverence, even worship him.

The cognitive dissonance was a sharp needle, piercing of the inflated balloon of my worldview. My entire adult life had been spent systematically rejecting everything associated with Christ. I was happy participating in traditional worship of Hindu monkey and elephant gods. Even the dreaded Kali, garlanded with the skulls of men and dripping with the blood of those she devours—a destroyer of worlds whose dance ends civilizations—had been accepted by me as an object of devotion preferable to the Christian Son of God. I'd ridiculed faith, and angrily berated Christians for their responsibility for war and conflict. I'd abandoned prayer for meditation, church for yoga studios, hymns for mantras, community for individualism. I'd replaced moral frameworks with the pursuit of expanded consciousness. I'd traded the bread and wine for psychedelics and tantric rituals.

And yet here was this spiritual teacher telling us that Christ was worthy of our devotion.

What if the very tradition I had been running from contained the truth I had been searching for?

After the lecture, I got back to my hut and my eyes fell on the sheave of papers from the girl last night, lying on the entrance table. Peeking out from amongst them was a portrait drawing of Jesus Christ. I instinctively took it up. There was something about the way he was looking at me. I placed it on the wall of my meditation corner, alongside the yantras and other geometric patterns already there.

I didn't know it then, but that Easter morning in a tantric yoga school on a Thai island was the beginning of my long journey home.

Looking back, I can see why this moment was so decisive. I had run to the ends of the earth in search of transcendence and anything that promised freedom. And yet it was Christ, the very name I thought I had outgrown, who found me.

That Easter morning on Koh Phagnan didn’t instantly make me a Christian. It didn’t even stop me from running even further for a while. But it planted a seed: the realization that maybe the man at the center of the ancient faith I had rejected was not a relic of the past, but the source of life itself.

This is what my book, and my work with men, is really about. We can chase freedom through experiences, indulgence, or self-expression—but none of it satisfies. True manliness comes not from escape, but from responsibility. Not from new techniques, but from ancient tradition. And not from self-worship, but from communion with God.

That’s why I started The Path of Manliness. To help men rediscover this truth together—not as isolated seekers, but as sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers.

👉 If this story resonates with you, consider joining our next Genesis Workshop, where we set down the foundation for living out these four masculine roles in a practical way. It’s the first step on the Path of Manliness. You can read more and sign up here.

Genesis Workshop

Subscribe now

This summer, 42 men joined the Path of Manliness Summer Gathering on my homestead in the countryside to do just that. Every participant was invited to bring a particular skill they could offer the other participants, and we ended up with a program including skills from “How to Survive a Fist Fight”, and “Survival Basics” to “Carpentry” and “Tending the Land”.

Unique for this event was that we wanted to explicitly ground it in Orthodox Christian values. It is no secret that many male communities suffer from an excess of vulgarity, drunkenness, blasphemy, and contempt for women. We asked every man who signed up to commit to at least respecting Christian values if he wished to attend.

As reported in my first article on the gathering, it was a transformative experience. Having worked with men’s gatherings for eight years, however, I was expecting criticism from people who were not there, and didn't understand what had happened. No surprise then, when shortly after the event, I read in a Christian Danish newspaper, that my men’s camp on South Fyn was “embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing” Manliness

The argument given in the newspaper was that manly activities such boxing, military exercises, and similar activities have nothing to do with Orthodox Christianity – and therefore the whole thing must be a fraud.

A strange criticism to be sure. It sets up a strawman, as if we were claiming boxing to be Orthodox Practice. Of course, boxing is not Orthodox. Nothing human can add to the Orthodox faith, which is centered on our life of Christ, His Church, and the sacraments.

But the Orthodox faith is not confined to Sunday mornings in church. It is meant to penetrate all of life – our work, our families, our communities, and yes, even our bodies.

Building Brotherhood, Not Bravado

The camp was never about replacing the liturgy with boxing. It was about building manly skills together with like-minded men.

The point was not to prove ourselves or pass some “manhood test.” The point was to challenge body and will in ways that strengthen character and brotherhood. A night exercise in the woods is not about worshiping God, but is a great way for men who live in big cities and work behind desks to gain a new, more grounded perspective on life and learn discipline, endurance, and trust with other men. You discover your own limits while also building bonds of friendship. Such experiences, engaged with in a spirit of love, cannot replace the faith, but they point toward it – reminding us that man is both soul and body, created to live in community.

Why the Outrage?

The more relevant questions to ask here are: why does a men’s gathering provoke such strong reactions? Why is it considered “embarrassing” when Christian men gather to build manly skills and competence?

Or one could simply ask: Would the same critique have come if a group of Orthodox women had gathered to knit and sing hymns?

Hardly.

It seems the outrage is not really about boxing. It is part of a broader cultural pattern, conscious or unconscious, where masculine identity is constantly undermined. In our time it is considered politically incorrect to speak positively about masculinity – about strength, discipline, and responsibility. And yet, this is exactly the Christian message that men today need to hear.

St Paul exhorts us:

“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Cor. 16:13).

If you want to join other men learning to live their faith as men—in daily life, not just on Sundays—sign up for the Path of Manliness Genesis Workshop.

Read abuot the Genesis Workshop

This is an initial report from the Path of Manliness Man Skills Summer Gathering, held this weekend on my homestead. The gathering was designed to teach traditional man skills. These skills embody physical strength, self-sufficiency, and practical ability. This report focuses on another aspect of the event—the part that impacted me most. It was the personal stories that emerged, particularly from two unique participants, that made the event unforgettable.

While the gathering was focused on building practical skills and brotherhood, I knew that our shared Orthodox prayers, the Saturday vespers, and the Sunday liturgy would also be part of the rhythm. I didn’t expect every man to connect with these moments—some had never set foot in a church—but I hoped they might at least sense the stillness, order, and reverence that have shaped men for centuries.

Among the early arrival volunteers were two men, Sasha and Jeremy, with pasts that I never expected. They had been deeply involved in LGBT communities. One had been taking hormones; both adopted a female identity they thought would bring them peace. They followed that path with conviction, but the reality was very different. By the time they arrived here, they had walked away from that life—determined to rebuild themselves as men and ready to test whether a place like this could help them do it.

Their decision to leave the transgender identity behind and reclaim their true selves was an act of immense courage. They joined the gathering, not knowing exactly what to expect, but seeking an alternative path—a way to rebuild their lives, reconnect with themselves as men, and move away from the pain and confusion they had experienced in the LGBT identity.

What happened next was nothing short of extraordinary.

The Struggle and The Shift

One of the men, Sasha, a highly intellectual man with ties to neoliberal thought and figures like Jordan Peterson, arrived withdrawn and reluctant. He avoided eye contact, struggled to interact, complained often, and repeatedly said he wanted to leave. He isolated himself with his earphones on, spending most of his time alone in a corner. It was clear that he had a long road ahead in processing the upheaval in his identity.

Sasha had not found the event on his own. He came because Jasper, a long-time member of one of our online groups, invited him. Jasper believed our work could support Sasha in rebuilding his life, and he made the effort to bring him along.

Before the event officially started, I saw Sasha engaged in a deep conversation with Jeremy, who had also been a part of our community for about a year. I don’t know the content of their conversation. But their body language and tone clearly spoke of an engaging and personal exchange. It was the first time I saw Sasha engage openly with someone.

In our setting, these weren’t “former trans men” or “ex-queer activists.” They were simply men—men with work to do, skills to learn, and a place to stand shoulder to shoulder with others. The gathering didn’t treat their past as their defining feature. In fact most of the participants didn’t have a clue about their background. Instead, the event gave them the same thing it gave every participant: a chance to prove themselves through what they could contribute.

As the days went by, something began to shift more and more. I noticed Sasha’s interactions slowly becoming more open. He started attending the workshops, though quietly, and began making small connections with the other men in the group. Then came the turning point—a writing workshop where he experienced what could only be described as a breakthrough. In this workshop, Sasha wrote a text which moved the other men, and clearly demonstrated an ability to write evocatively. Being valued by men who were there not to “say nice things” but to build each other up in truth and honesty gave Sasha a powerful sense of being recognised as a man among men.

What followed was a complete transformation in his demeanour. His energy lightened and opened, and he started engaging and clearly contributing to a positive, supportive culture. His whole being seemed to radiate a newfound joy and peace. By the end of the weekend, he had not only reconnected with his own masculinity but was clearly deeply moved by his experience in the Orthodox Church service we attended. He stood at attention throughout the service, crossing himself and bowing at the correct times. After the liturgy, he went directly up to the priest and started asking about spiritual practices such as prayer and fasting. He had decided to turn to the Orthodox faith, to embrace a new path grounded in traditional values.

What’s striking about his journey is that he grew up in an Orthodox country but moved to Holland as a “queer refugee,” using that country’s offer to LGBT people from nations that don’t support such identities. Now he is clearly on a path back home–in a spiritual if not geographical sense.

The Power of Brotherhood and Shared Experience

I think that what made this transformation interesting was the context in which it occurred. Our gathering, rooted in traditional masculinity and values, was explicitly aimed at providing men with skills. But underlying this was an implicit shared desire to create an environment where brotherhood flourished. In working together, learning together, and supporting one another, men were able to see that they weren’t alone in their struggles.

In particular, the bond that formed between these two men was illustrative. When they first connected—one a staunch neoliberal capitalist, the other a permaculture community organiser devoted to idealistic, ecosystem-based living—there was plenty to separate them. Yet, they didn’t get sucked into arguing politics. We had explicitly agreed to avoid political discussions during the entire event. It was perhaps in that conversation, that they gave themselves the permission to open up.

For men, being able to be vulnerable is important. But the right place for vulnerability is with a trusted friend, not a public forum. Many men instinctively recoil from the artificiality of sitting in a circle with strangers to discuss feelings. At this event, men were encouraged to focus on skills and learning, to become the kind of men who could create value and be a rock of support for others. As they did this, then they naturally created a space where they could figure out who they could trust and learn from.

Identity: Built on Heritage, Contribution, and Brotherhood

We never spoke about identity politics at the event. But the shift away from an identity based on sexual orientation to one based on heritage, contribution, and brotherhood was clearly implicit in the design of the event. When they arrived, each participant was asked to write their name as well as identity on their name tag—not defined by sexuality, but by what they could offer as men. "Nikola the Financial Advisor," "Noah the Coder," "Matthew the Teacher." This simple exercise reminded everyone that true identity is rooted in who we are in relation to others, in the skills we possess, and in the contributions we make.

Both men stayed at the homestead for a few days after the event and I had the opportunity to take a good walk with both of them in the countryside around our homestead. On my walk with Sasha, he wondered why well-resourced, successful men embraced an LGBTQ lifestyle he had found dysfunctional. We didn’t find final answers, but we discussed how attraction to men can be channelled either into physical intimacy for immediate gratification or into brotherly love—building him up, supporting him, and helping him grow.

A Growing Need for Support

Something that has got me thinking is that, Jeremy shared with me an observation: the number of men exiting the transgender and queer communities, seeking a way back to a more grounded, authentic existence, was growing, but that they are ignored or actively censured. He noted that he constantly felt pressure to censure himself and had not found any other forums where he could even talk about his personal experience without being met by defensive pushback.

Given my own past involvement in the LGBTQ movement, the thought has been on my mind of whether I should be speaking more about this subject. Given the hostile response and censorship many people experience when expressing a critical perspective on transgenderism, I realise this is not a decision to be taken lightly.

Conclusion: The Power of Manliness

Whether I engage on these topics or not, I can certainly say this summer gathering reaffirmed my belief in the focus on manly skills. By focusing on the growth of practical, down-to-earth abilities that help us protect, provide, and lead, men gain a concrete experience of male identity—far more valuable than abstract theories.

By working with skills, men naturally create the kinds of bonds that can enable them to trust each other and grow as a man amongst men.

A war rages inside of each man, between two equally destructive forces. The first: the insatiable hunger that drives men to chase material achievement, women, and novel experiences, only to feel emptier with each conquest. The second: the numbing apathy that threatens to swallow men if they abandon desire altogether.

This is the impossible dilemma that haunts modern men. When we follow our desires, we find ourselves trapped in an endless cycle of wanting more—yet never feeling fulfilled. The promotion, the new car, the sexual conquest—each promised satisfaction that evaporates shortly after it is attained. But when we try to suppress desire entirely, we become hollow men—passive, directionless, devoid of the vital energy that makes life worth living.

Modern Lies: The Illusion of Being Above It All

Some “modern” spiritual systems, particularly those related to Buddhism, tell men to extinguish desire altogether—to remain calm, unaffected, above it all. But here’s the irony: even the desire to be free from desire... is a desire. You haven't escaped the trap. You’ve just added a new layer of abstraction to the same old onion—distancing you even further from the heart of your desire.

What I've discovered through years of working with men is that most of us fundamentally misunderstand the nature of desire. We don't need to choose between unbridled wanting and lifeless resignation. There's another path—one that transforms desire rather than either indulging or suppressing it. This is about redirecting desire.

Let's start here: When I use the word "desire," what comes to your mind? For many men, it triggers thoughts of sexual urges, material wants, or guilty pleasures. There's often shame attached—as if desire itself is something base or animalistic that needs to be suppressed.

This distorted view goes to the heart of the confusion men are experiencing in their life.

What Desire Really Is

Desire is really the tuning of your compass that directs every action you take. We men are teleological beings—a fancy way of saying we're always moving toward some end or purpose. You don't just act randomly; you act based on what you want. Your desires shape your behavior in ways you might not even recognize.

"Watch your desires, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny." This wisdom, often attributed to Lao Tzu, reveals a profound truth: the trajectory of your entire life flows from what you desire.

Men throughout history have recognized this. Tolkien identified five primordial human desires: to explore depths beyond our limitations, to experience freedom and transcendence, to understand mysteries hidden in darkness, to communicate across boundaries, and to escape mortality. Jordan Peterson speaks of desires for order, meaningful confrontation with chaos, and achievement. Joseph Campbell recognized our yearning for transformation, purpose, and finding meaning through story. Even neo-pagan writers like Jack Donovan see that fulfillment comes through struggle—through building strength, courage, and mastery.

The first step in transforming your life is learning to direct what you desire.

You’re Being Programmed

Yes, you read that right—desire can and should be be directed. And it requires conscious control to direct it. Desire can flow upward toward things that elevate us—wisdom, virtue, meaningful connection, transcendent purpose—or downward toward instant gratification that leads nowhere.

We often think of our desires as purely internal - something that bubbles up from inside us, reflecting our authentic selves. But is this really accurate? Consider the advertising industry. Companies wouldn't spend billions of dollars annually if advertising didn't work. The empirical evidence is overwhelming: external influences can and do shape what we want.

The Flow-Boy and the Collapse of Principle

I have spoken on this substack about man-children and “flow-boys”. The “flow-boy” is the man who’s desires are directed from the outside. One day it’s climate activism, the next it’s dopamine detox. His compass is broken, not because he doesn’t want to direct his desire correctly—but rather, in his eagerness to desire the “right things”, he desires whatever he’s told to.

You can recognize the flow-boy by his social media profile proudly proclaiming "Black Lives Matter!", quickly replaced by "I stand with Ukraine!" followed by "I support [whatever cause is trending this month]." The flow-boy believes he's making independent choices, but he's actually just following the cultural current. I'm not proud to admit it, but I am a recovering flow-boy.

The Anchor of Tradition

The reason why so many otherwise good men fall into this trap is because of the rejection of tradition. By dismissing the accumulated wisdom of generations, men are defenceless against manipulation. Without a stable foundation, men are unable to see outside the framework of current cultural trends, and have no real deep-rooted principles for living their life.

The roles I often speak about here—son, brother, husband, father—are the ones that foster the kind of maturity that teaches us to delay gratification and pursue desires that initially demand more from us but ultimately deliver deeper satisfaction. This is what separates boys from men: the ability to distinguish between desires that lift them up versus those that drag them down.

Individuals who see themselves as separate and defining their own desires will tend to have no defence against these winds of culture. A man who recognizes the massive exploitation and manipulation through media and culture will actively root himself in something stable. The traditional view helps us instead to see how we are not an isolated individual who popped into existence all by himself. Instead, a man is a small shoot on the great tree of life—rooted in the accumulated wisdom of generations.

The Path of Manliness Begins Here

Tradition offers this man strength, stability, and proper direction for his desires. These practices and institutions have survived for generations precisely because they work. They weren't designed by any single person but emerged organically and were refined through centuries of trial and error.

Have you ever seriously examined where your desires come from? French philosopher René Girard coined the term "mimetic desire" to describe how we want things primarily because others want them. We absorb desires from our culture, advertising, and the people around us without questioning them. The new car, the promotion, the new girlfriend—ask yourself honestly: do you want these things because you know they will bring you fulfilment, or because they're what society has programmed you to want?

What's particularly telling is how tradition and modern culture differ in their promises. Popular culture constantly sells us on shortcuts and easy wins: "You can have it all at no cost and with no compromises." This is obviously false, yet many are tempted to believe it. Tradition, on the other hand, acknowledges that many valuable experiences require significant effort, struggle, and even suffering.

By aligning my desires with tradition, I've found something the cultural flow-boy rarely experiences: stability amid chaos, trust in time-tested wisdom rather than trending hashtags, and a sense of belonging to something larger than myself. This doesn't mean blindly accepting everything from the past, but rather approaching tradition with generational humility—recognizing that our ancestors possessed wisdom we have lost in our materialist individualism, and their insights are not merely outdated superstitions.

Desire Was Always for God

In the Christian anthropology, desire is inherent in the human, a gift from God. We read in the book of Psalms “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

So Christian tradition tells us that we can learn to take inventory of desires and consciously redirect them toward what is truly life-giving. Desire itself isn't the problem—misdirected desire is.

Saint Augustine observed centuries ago, "You have made us for Yourself, O Lord. Our hearts are restless until they rest in you"—acknowledging that our deepest desires point toward ultimate meaning and goodness.

What I am trying to communicate here, is that, in the Christian worldview, all desire, ultimately, is for God. Everything else is a substitution for and a way of numbing the pain of that fundamental disconnection from God.

So the problem is not desire, the problem is that we allow our desire to be directed towards other things than God. Money, status, women, cars. All of these things become replacements for God—idols in religious terminology.

If you don’t yet have a working understanding of God, this might sound strange. But no one fully understands God. A single experience of something greater than yourself—a moment of awe, love, or peace and stillness—is enough to begin. From there, desiring God can bring you toward the source of goodness.

What I've discovered, is that when men begin directing their attention toward higher desires, somewhere "Godwards", particularly through the roles of son, brother, husband and father, then something awakens within them. This is the kind of awakening that doesn't happen when your attention is constantly hijacked by the endless dopamine hits of pornography, mindless consumption, or validation-seeking on social media.

When a man becomes attuned to rightly ordered desire, he discovers that true freedom isn't found in self-indulgence. Rather, freedom is found in aligning himself with what he was designed for. This redirection doesn't happen overnight—it's a gradual process of recognizing the emptiness of material desires and experiencing the fulfillment that comes from pursuing God.

🔨 The Next Step

If this spoke to you—if you're wrestling with where your desires are leading you—consider joining the next Genesis Workshop.

It’s a 90-minute session where we reflect together on the foundations: what it means to live as a son, brother, husband, and father. You’ll be invited to take one small, concrete step toward rightly ordered desire.

No hype. Just the beginning of something deeper.

👉 Sign up here if you feel called: https://pathofmanliness.notion.site/genesis-workshop

The next Genesis session is already on the 23rd July 2025 at 1pm EST, 7pm CET.

Last week I got into conversation with an old university friend, and we quickly got stuck into the big questions in life. "I think religion is good," he said, "we need it. But every religion has this dark side—they use violence, fear, and force to control people. To divide them."

This line of thinking is perhaps the most common objection I encounter in my work with the Path of Manliness. My mission with this platform is to help men reconnect to strength, stability and community through aligning their lives with traditional approaches to manhood.

Particularly when it comes to "organized religion" and Christianity, I encounter this persistent idea that tradition is somehow synonymous with tyranny and oppression.

Reasonable Reform to Radical Doubt

This connection has its roots in the Enlightenment, which encouraged people to think for themselves rather than rely on traditional beliefs. The Enlightenment slogan "Sapere aude!" or "Dare to reason!" was used in a specific context and in a specific way—it posited reason and logic against tradition. The individual person should be sceptical toward the wisdom of tradition, which was seen as oppressive and superstitious, and instead "think for himself."

Most enlightenment thinkers still believed in the existence of God, such as Newton and Locke. This even includes the most directly derisive and mocking of all traditional forms of wisdom, such as Voltaire. Others such as Burke tried to reform more than do away with it. The pattern throughout however was more belief in the individual human mind, as the arbiter of truth, and scepticism towards inherited revelation of truth.

This scepticism toward tradition gained much more serious traction with Karl Marx, who taught that all social structures exist to maintain power for the ruling class. The Frankfurt School refined this into critical theory—the notion that traditional institutions inherently oppress. By the 1960s, this thinking had infected universities, media, and popular culture. Today, it's the water we swim in.

Christ as God, Christians as Sinners

I challenged my friend to consider that the idea of Christianity as inherently oppressive is a case of mixing correlation with causation. The existence of Christians, historically as well as today, who have been greedy, selfish and manipulative is of course a reality. But saying that it is because they are Christians would require demonstrating the mechanism whereby the Christian faith itself engenders oppression.

At the heart of Christianity, we have Jesus Christ, the God-man. Throughout his life, people tried to crown Him as a king many times, to which he responded by fleeing. Clearly domination and oppression were not on His agenda—rather, he was absolutely explicit that his purpose was to willingly give himself up to be slaughtered by those same people whom he loved. The Christian story goes on to tell us that by doing this, he defeated death, triumphing over the Roman Empire itself, and demonstrating the power of love over all.

Tyrants can of course call themselves Christians. Atheists can talk about the Crusades and the inquisition all they want. But the Christian story is very simple and easy to understand—clearly this is a faith which has nothing to do with oppression, greed or tyranny, despite men's attempts to misuse and distort it.

God Exists (But Doesn't Really Exist)

So what is actually happening here? I want to put forward that 400 years of Enlightenment thinking have played their course and been found wanting. Now it seems, religion is coming back.

The Enlightenment was an attempt to reason from first principles, to start with a tabula rasa, without dependence on religion. One can understand why they wanted to do this, as certainly the medieval Roman Catholic Church of the day had its problems. However, this "independence from tradition" has steadily grown to a point where today, in our secular materialist mindset, we simply start from the assumption that God does not exist, without giving it due consideration.

My friend admitted to me that traditional religion was good and necessary, but he also somehow managed to simultaneously believe that God did not really exist. This was fascinating for me to hear, as I think this position is probably very common today.

In his own words, he believed that from a functional perspective, God did exist—that the rituals and moral imperatives we receive from religion worked and made sense. Thus he could accept that as a kind of functionalist "proof" of the existence of God. And yet at the same time, he held the belief that God doesn't exist as a concrete, creating, sustaining force in reality—that there is no metaphysical deity who actually intervenes in the world.

I will not try to make the case in this article for why it makes sense to believe in the existence of God. But I do want to consider this perspective and what it does to our view of reality.

How the Enlightenment Defeated Itself

I this it is particularly relevant to consider this, because I believe that this perspective is typical in our society today—particularly for the “reasonable” man who has a wife and kids whom he loves, a stable job, and a university education.

In Denmark where I live, this is called a “cultural Christian”. It is a man who, just like 75% of the population is a member of the state Lutheran church, which he visits once a year at Christmas, but at the same time believes that the idea of God is more of a fairy tale than really existing.

How is it that one can paradoxically, believe that 'God exists even though he doesn't exist'? Does it make sense that, through religious rituals and moral imperatives, God becomes real in human experience and behaviour, even without objective existence?

At least we have to note how this view entails compartmentalizing reality, taking on a perspective which is disconnected from the reality of everyday life experience. We have to separate the "functional" from "the true." Thus people thus end up relying more on abstract theories about reality, rather than their own common sense experience.

But let us pause here and remind ourselves of the main goal of the Enlightenment again - wasn't it exactly to help people to get a firm grasp of reality by using simple, grounded every day experience? In fact that was the entire idea behind the scientific method - to rely on experience rather than inherited ideas from tradition.

I believe that most people could see at least some truth in the idea that we today are a society of people increasingly disconnected from reality. Could it be that the enlightenment has really ended up perpetuating the exact same problems that they set out to address?

At least if you read my essay on https://pathofmanliness.substack.com/p/how-to-be-countercultural-without, then you can see my take on why rebellion tends to continue the same negative patterns it sets out to change.

How Anti-Tradition Bias Enables Immaturity

To continue to bring this down to the everyday level of experience, and also to tie in more the practical aspects of being a man I address on this platform, I want to add some considerations about how the “anti-tradition” bias might be influencing us.

I think this narrative about tradition as oppressive has a specific pattern that appeals to certain weaknesses and immaturity in our psyche. Think about it—who's most susceptible to the message "The system is keeping you down"? It's the guy who doesn't want to do the hard work that the system demands of him. The man who envies those above him. The person looking for someone else to blame for his problems.

What started as a basic reasonable desire to investigate things from first principles has now morphed into a deeply embedded bias against tradition, providing an easy escape route from responsibility.

When men's relationships fail, when they feel stuck in life, it is easier to blame "oppressive traditional structures" than to look in the mirror. The patriarchy is keeping you down! Religion is controlling you! Traditional masculinity is toxic!

This victim mindset is psychological crack for the emotionally immature. It activates our basest instincts—envy, resentment, self-pity. More dangerously, it inverts reality itself. Suddenly, every authority figure becomes an oppressor. Parents who set boundaries are "controlling." Bosses who demand excellence are "exploitative." Churches that teach moral standards are “intolerant” and "judgmental."

The end result? We crown ourselves as the sole authority in life. Our desires become divine. Our feelings become facts. Any tradition that challenges our impulses must be torn down. We become revolutionaries against reality itself.

Why Traditions Persist

But rebellion isn't strength. Real strength comes from taking our place within hierarchies and learning how to contribute to them before we decide to write them off. Traditions often persist because they serve vital functions. Authorities generally deserve respect because they've earned it through competence and wisdom.

I don't think that the arguments here are some kind of “final proof” about the truth of traditional religion. Of course all traditions in society are going to have positive and negative elements. I do think however that there is an invitation here to consider some of the more misguided, anti-traditional aspects of our current narrative.

If traditional structures work and hold our society together, then surely that is not the worst measure of whether they are true.

If all of our postmodern theories tell us that God cannot exist, but at the same time are clearly leading to disintegration and nihilism, then surely those are the theories we should be questioning?

The traditions I'm advocating—being a good son, brother, husband, father—have survived thousands of years across every culture because they address fundamental human realities. They create stable families. They raise healthy children. They build functioning communities. They channel male energy toward construction rather than destruction.

Choosing the Right Constraints

Yes, power can be abused. Institutions need constant attention and reform. Sometimes they even need to be replaced. But the solution isn't to burn everything down and crown our individual desires as king. That path leads to the fragmentation of the hyper-individualist society we are seeing today.

Real freedom doesn't come from rejecting all constraints. It comes from choosing the right ones.

On opportunity for a New Beginning?

If this resonates with you—if you're tired of the intellectual compartmentalization, the victim narratives, and the disconnection from reality that our culture promotes—I want to invite you to something new.

Two weeks from now, I will be holding a "Genesis Workshop," designed for men who are ready to examine the foundational assumptions that have shaped their lives and to begin again from first principles. Not the Enlightenment's "first principles" of individualist materialism and autonomy, but the far more ancient—and at the same time, more present in everyday life—first principles of meaning through brotherhood and meaning, focused on these roles of son, brother, husband and father.

I don't believe in radical transformations through a simple online seminar, nor will I promise one. I do believe in small trajectory changes which can lead to transformation over time.

The outcome of the workshop will be identifying your "one thing"—the answer to the question: What is the one thing that you could do, which if you did it would make everything else unnecessary or easier?

This will be formulated as a concrete daily habit that provides a clear path forward for you.

Genesis Workshop Details:

• Wednesday, July 23rd at 7 - 8.30pm CET (1 - 2.30pm EST)

• 90 minutes

• €20 / $20 USD / 150 DKK

This isn't about grand gestures or dramatic life overhauls. If you have enjoyed my writing, it's a chance for you and I to meet each other. And it will be an opportunity for you to focus on identifying the single most leveraged action that can begin to align your daily reality with the traditions we've been discussing. If you're ready to move beyond the contradictions of online or cultural Christianity and postmodern confusion toward something more solid and integrated, drop me a message and join us.

I had put my faith in a culture of progressivism that promised me everything—a global career, riches, status, endless mobility, sophisticated pleasures, the ability to reinvent myself completely.

The following scene, from The Path of Manliness book I'm writing, is from 2015 when I was a Sustainability Lead for Microsoft, celebrating what should have been the pinnacle of my career.

Yet increasingly I couldn't avoid a gnawing sense that something essential was missing.

The Celebration

The crystal clinked as my boss raised his glass in the private dining room of Copenhagen's Admiral Hotel. "To Paul," he said, his American accent cutting through the murmur of conversation. "Who not only organized our most successful COP delegation but somehow got us face time with the Danish Minister of Science himself."

Approving nods circled the table—executives from three continents, two sustainability directors from partner companies, and my teams from Paris and Seattle.

"It was nothing," I say, the practiced modesty of someone who knows it was definitely something. "Denmark is small enough that if you know the right people, doors open."

Outside the tall windows, Copenhagen harbor reflected city lights that blurred in the December darkness. I smiled and accepted their praise with practiced humility, but inside I was soaring. This moment—the culmination of the UN Climate Conference, with me at the center of Microsoft's sustainability efforts—felt like vindication.

I had evolved beyond my traditional South African upbringing into something more sophisticated, more global, more progressive. What would my father think if he could see me now, advising ministers and corporations on saving the planet? The thought of him, steadfast in his faith and traditional values, flickered briefly before I pushed it away, focusing instead on the admiring faces around me.

"The Minister was particularly impressed with your input on smart grids," my boss continued, swirling his third glass of Barolo. "He mentioned it twice during the closing session."

I leaned forward, elbows on the white tablecloth. "It's about finding the market-based solutions that incentivize the right behaviors. State regulation is far too constrictive."

The table nodded in agreement. This was our shared language—markets, incentives, global frameworks. So different from my father's world of commitment, community, faith.

The waiter appeared with another round of plates—Nordic fusion cuisine arranged in artful minimalism. Reindeer Tataki with Yuzu-Miso glaze. Not quite the Michelin-starred meal we'd had at Noma with the Danish team, but impressive nonetheless. I caught the irony—discussing carbon footprints over imported wine and exotic ingredients flown in from across the globe. The thought floated up and I let it drift away just as quickly.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I discreetly check it under the table.

A text from Sofie, the woman I'd taken to bed last night. Last night was amazing. Coffee tomorrow?

I slipped the phone back without replying. The connection had been purely physical—two ships passing in the night. I'd be flying to India next week anyway.

"Paul's our man in the North," laughed Carlos from our Brazil office. "How many languages do you speak now?"

"Just three fluently so far, but I'm taking Spanish classes every week now." I shrugged, as if it were nothing.

The CFO from our partner company leaned in. "So what's next after Copenhagen? Surely not back to the Danish winter."

I grinned, feeling expansive. "India. I'm buying a Royal Enfield motorcycle in Mumbai next week and riding it across Karnataka. One month, no itinerary."

"Alone?" asks a female executive from our German office.

"Of course," I reply with practiced nonchalance. "Best way to really experience a place."

"God, you're living the dream," sighed my colleague from London. "While we're all rushing home for Christmas with the in-laws."

Christmas. The word triggered a memory—carols service in a small church by my gran's farm in the Drakensburg, my father's hand warm on my shoulder, stars blazing in the Southern Hemisphere summer sky, matching the candles in our hands. The pure, unquestioning joy I'd felt singing those songs. When had that simplicity slipped

away? I wonder if my son Noah will have that kind of experience?

"Paul doesn't do conventional," my boss laughed, pulling me back to the present. "That's why he's so valuable. Always thinking outside the box."

Outside the box. Outside tradition. Outside the boundaries that had shaped my childhood. I'd broken free, hadn't I? Become global, progressive, unlimited. So why did that memory of Christmas feel so vivid, so real compared to the glossy surface of this moment?

The harbor lights wavered through my wine glass as I raised it. My suit felt suddenly restrictive across my shoulders. Getting into rock climbing had transformed my body into something worth showing off to women like Sofie. Women whose names I'd forget by next month.

"We've made real progress this week," I said, adopting the authoritative tone that had become my professional signature. "The Copenhagen Accord may not be legally binding, but it keeps people looking to us for more. Microsoft is positioned perfectly to be a thought lead on this."

Everyone nods enthusiastically while putting aside the knowledge that not a single concrete commitment had actually been made during the entire conference. Tomorrow, we'd all fly home on jets, having solved nothing but feeling virtuous for our concern.

"The key is influence," I add, swirling my wine. "We change the system from within."

As heads nodded, I caught sight of our reflection in the window—expensive suits, animated gestures, empty plates with barely-touched food pushed aside. Beyond us, a family walked along the harbor, bundled against the cold, a father lifting his small son to see something in the water. The boy's laughter was silent through the glass.

My phone buzzed again. Sofie again, just sent a "?"

Something hollow expanded in my chest. Tomorrow I would meet with the Minister's advisors again. Next week India. Then Seattle in February. Always moving, connecting, advancing. The trajectory was clear—more connections, more recognition, more women in more countries. I had it all figured out.

"Another round?" My boss was already signaling the waiter.

"Absolutely," I said, pushing away that strange emptiness. This was success. This was evolution. This was freedom.

The family outside disappeared into the darkness, the father's hand still holding his son's. For a moment, I couldn't remember what we were celebrating.

The Emptiness Inside

Looking back on this story today, I can see that there was a growing awareness inside of me of a need for something foundational that needed to change.

The trip to India would open my eyes to seeing the world in new ways I had never considered before. It would still take a long time, encounters with people like Jordan Peterson (see my article on his influence here), and a step of faith, before I would find stable ground.

I’m looking forward to sharing more of the journey with you here on Substack.

Subscribe now

Perhaps you found that the story resonated with you - maybe you are in a job that feels increasingly meaningless and empty. Maybe you are noticing the contradictions of a society which promises endless happiness through material gains, but delivers a downward spiral of nihilistic distraction.

Most of the men who I work with today have shared this experience— the more you realise your goals, and achieve the things that you thought you want, the more it becomes clear that material goals are really empty and meaningless in the long run.

Our individualist, materialist society is very effective in getting men to fully engage their energies and life to becoming an efficient wheel in the system in order to climb its hierarchies. But at some point, most men wake up and realise that this system can never bring any lasting happiness in itself.

The Path of Manliness is about finding meaning and lasting satisfaction and peace in the place where generations of men have always found it - in the four core roles of a man in his life—as a Son, a Brother, a Husband and a Father.

If that makes just a little bit of sense to you, and if you are interested in hearing more about the alternative, then please drop me a message below, even if it is to just say “Hi”.