The virtues of minimalism

I came across a video on YouTube by fellow Tulsan Brett McKay some weeks back about what he calls the "Menaissance," namely, a trend towards reasserting the positive aspects of male psychology and behavior which our society has let fall into desuetude, and even disrespect, thanks in part to feminism. You could also view the renewed interest in virtue ethics and the revival of Stoicism as part of the same trend in philosophy.

Think about how our grandfathers lived, for example. American men in the first half of the 20th Century, most of them manual laborers of some kind or other, read Ernest Hemingway's novels (if they read novels), watched John Wayne's movies and admired sports figures like Ted Williams because they found their implicit male value system reflected in those parts of the culture.

I realized from the video that I like how McKay thinks, so I added his blog feed, The Art of Manliness, to my Google home page.

McKay lets other bloggers post on his site, and I found this one, "Minimalism Begets Manliness," by Gianpaolo Pietri, of interest. I especially like this point:

2. Action. A man is defined by the actions he takes, not the money he makes. Men love taking action. One of the things that makes communication difficult between men and women is how we react to problems that arise. A man’s first instinct is to come up with a solution and immediately take the required steps to implement it. A women is more concerned with understanding the nature of the problem and talking through it. Guided by minimalism, a man trains himself to focus on only that which matters, which in turn determines the actions he should take.

Money certainly helps in defining a man, of course. But the hunter-gatherer and warrior lifestyles predate the bourgeois lifestyle by many generations, and they probably still reside within us as our default state of flourishing, just as we still seem to do better with paleolithic nutrition than with agricultural nutrition, at least past our peak reproductive years.

But even businessmen prefer to take action to solve problems, and I suspect most men feel annoyed to some extent by women's inclination to talk about problems incessantly instead. (I know that behavior annoys me.)

In fact, I wonder how much of our ability to survive as a species had depended on men's ability to ignore women's prattle when we need to take action. I tend to respect women more who have a practical orientation and who keep the grooming talk down to a minimum, than I do stereotypically feminine women who have to tell everyone about the petty aspects of their lives all the time. (I know a woman about my age who keeps talking even after I leave the room.)