There is an eternal tension between the heroic and domestic life. They used to be one and the same, now they have grown far apart.
In the premodern age of hardship, building a home, securing a family, farming land, had a level of heroism to it. They were acts of survival against a brutal, uncertain world.
Domesticity itself was heroism. A man wasn’t a “suburban dad” or a “wandering ronin”, he was both. He was Farmer and Fighter. He was Father and Adventurer. He was Builder and Destroyer.
Domesticity itself was an act of heroism, and adventure was necessary to secure domesticity.
Building a home, raising children, tilling land, defending a village, were not "safe" choices. The home was a frontier that required courage, strength, cunning, resilience. It was a life at odds with man and nature. Starvation, disease, war, wild animals. Disaster was always near. Building a home was walking through hell, it was standing against death
But in the padded comfort and abundance of the modern world, where survival is easy, heroism shifts elsewhere. It’s not found in the cookie cutter home buried in the suburban sprawl. It’s found in adventure, self-mastery, danger, art, and risk.
Deprived of true hardship the heroic spirit mutates. When life demands nothing, men turn to women, war, wealth, and wounds to remember who they are. You see it in the playboy, the business builder, the trader, the traveler, the gambler, the political dissident, the guy who finds ways to bleed for fun.
Heroism in today’s world is rebellion, creation, seduction, risk, and the pursuit of pain for its own sake. It’s something that has to be searched for or maybe even stolen.
Dont get me wrong, raising children can still be heroic, if done consciously and courageously. But most people aren’t raising kids like warriors or sages. They’re raising them like bugmen. Feeding them slop, wrapping them in plastic, housing them in beige and gray decorated boxes, filling their mind with cowardly opinions, leading them towards mediocrity and obedience.
The “wife guy” is not a symbol of love, hes a symbol of spiritual decline. It’s not that love and fatherhood are weak. It’s that they’ve become automatic, trivialized, and have been drained of risk and sacredness. And without struggle, beauty, danger, and honor, life becomes a kind of living death.
Thats why the image of the wandering warrior, the rogue artist, the adventurer, feels like the last real frontier of the masculine spirit today.
In a world where everything is safe, danger is sacred. The men of the past built cages around us. The men of our time will break free and venture back into the wild. Its the only way to remain human
