Men in Progress, a Few Months In
Progress or more sophisticated analysis
I have been running Men in Progress for a few months now. As I reflect on the group and our conversations, I realize that most men who find their way to this kind of work are not starting from zero.
They’ve read widely, thought carefully, and had the conversations that men seldom get to have. They take the question of how to live seriously. And yet something isn’t moving. There’s a gap between where they are and where they sense they could be, and no amount of thinking seems to close it.
That gap is what I’ve been sitting with.
There’s a version of this work that looks like progress but is actually just a more sophisticated analysis. You get better at naming what’s wrong. You get sharper at seeing the patterns — in yourself, in the culture, in the way certain ways of being get handed down through generations without anyone stopping to ask whether they still fit.
And then you mistake that understanding for change.
The scripts men inherit aren’t hard to identify once you’re looking. What’s hard is the gap between seeing them clearly and actually stepping out of them. Most men who get this far stop at the seeing. The analysis becomes its own destination — a place to live rather than a tool to use.
What I’ve come to understand is that the shift happens when the work stops being reflective and starts being active. When it stops asking “what is this?” and starts asking “what am I going to do?” When there’s no more room to stay comfortable in the analysis, because something in front of you requires an actual choice — one that’s genuinely yours, not a more thoughtful version of what you were supposed to do anyway.