Podbit · Modern Wisdom
Male beautification has increased decade-on-decade since the 1990s, with weightlifting being the biggest behavioural driver. Today virtually every young man weightlifts recreationally, and a typical man's daily grooming routine would be unrecognisable to his grandfather. Looksmaxing is just the newest — and most visible — wave.
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At 1:21:21 · chapter starts 1:20:46
Macken Murphy zooms out from the looksmaxing moment to place it within a documented century-long trend. Historian Lynn Luciano's work shows male beautification rising decade-by-decade since the 1990s. Marta Cowell's cross-cultural beautification study found women beautify more in all but seven countries, with the male exception being weightlifting. Murphy's data analysis shows weightlifting has gone from a non-behaviour to something essentially every young man does recreationally across generations. The deeper argument: as women's financial emancipation reduced the signal value of resource provisioning, men shifted competitive effort toward physical presentation and — crucially — parenting. A man today spends more time with children than mothers did in the 1950s. Rob Henderson adds that among college-educated men, paternal involvement has skyrocketed; among non-college men, it has barely changed. Steve Stewart-Williams offers the evolutionary note: women do find muscularity and good grooming attractive, but is less convinced women's luxury handbag spending signals resources to attract men — more likely it's intra-female intimidation.
In Rob Henderson's Twitter poll, ~75% of men said they'd rather sleep with someone they find attractive who doesn't find them attractive than the reverse.
In Rob Henderson's Twitter poll, ~75% of women said they'd rather sleep with someone unattractive who finds them attractive than someone attractive who is uninterested in them.
Men have tripled their parenting effort since the 1970s, and a modern father spends more time with children than mothers did in the 1950s.
Most people confuse things they value instrumentally (because they get them other things) with things they value intrinsically (for their own sake). Greenberg's friend stayed in a miserable relationship for years because she was living by her parents' values, not her own — the values map made the mismatch instantly visible.
Jungian analyst James Hollis distills a good life to four things: shut up (have gratitude, stop whining), suit up (prepare yourself to fulfill a role), show up (do the actual work in service of others), and daily get out of stimulus-response to ask what your deeper wish actually is. The whole landscape of self-help slots into just these four bins.
Toward the end of their 20s, many men discover that all the strategies that earned them recognition and success have stopped working. It's a second adolescence — more important than the first — where the question shifts from 'how do I play the game?' to 'who do I actually want to become?' Most people going through it look fragile from the outside. They're actually building a foundation.
Boys are told from childhood not to cry, not to feel, not to be weak — but anger gets a pass. The result: a generation of men who reroute every emotion, including sadness and fear, through the only acceptable channel. Emotional avoidance isn't toughness, it's misdirected sensitivity.
Men need a 'bank account' of masculine status — muscle, money, success — before society grants them permission to express vulnerability. Chris Bumstead can cry at the Olympia and get celebrated. A struggling nobody doing the same thing gets contempt. This creates a tragic paradox where the men who most need emotional support get the least of it.
Emotional sensitivity isn't a defect — it's a high-resolution scanner for human experience. Highly sensitive people pick up body language, tone, and unspoken tension that others miss entirely. In the right environment, that's not a liability. It's a superpower.
Her supervisor told her she was too emotional for the pediatric ICU. So she asked herself: 'What area of medicine can I cry in?' That question led her to psychiatry. Finding the environment that holds your emotional sensitivity isn't retreat — it's strategy.
For someone with RSD, ghosting isn't ambiguity — it's a self-verdict. Their brain doesn't read 'this relationship ended,' it reads 'I am the reason this failed.' No closure means the brain fills the gap with evidence of personal insufficiency, and it keeps filling indefinitely.
More freedom doesn't produce more happiness — it produces more anxiety. Kierkegaard identified this 180 years ago: the more options you have, the more you feel the 'dizziness of freedom,' a paralytic unease at having to choose any single one. The freest generation in history is, by his prediction, exactly the most anxious.
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