Avoid hardening your woman Facing suffering, hardship, tests, trials, violence, and struggles makes us men more masculine and tough. We grow up and get better by doing hard things. Women are not like us. They are not meant to face the harshness of the world. Both men and women grow up to maturity through taking on responsibilities. However, the optimal set of responsibilities that causes a man to grow up and the set that causes a woman to grow up are different. Women mature by carefully guarding their value from damage or erosion. Protecting the fragile nature of femininity and learning to transmute the raw value men provide into even more valuable things (a house into home, food into a mean, sperm into a baby, etc.). Women have three times the touch sensors in their thinner, softer skin. Their bones are more fragile, they have less muscle mass, and their more sensitive CNS can't take the same stimulation as ours. They need more sleep than we do. Estrogen causes emotional rollercoasters. Women are the "weaker vessel." Almost every young woman is feminine. It's in their nature. But a harsh life, a lack of fatherly protection, fending off attention from low-value men, battling with men in the workplace, or facing the same challenges that make a man better will beat that lovely softness out of her. We are not the same. Masculine men want a sweet, soft, feminine woman. But you can't have that if you assign her a role in the family that overburdens her and causes her to be in a masculine frame for hours a day, leaving her exhausted. Women are capable of being very tough, but the cost or doing that is giving up their femininity. Yes, it's not fair. Your woman needs better treatment than you do. Just as your children need even better treatment than she does. If that bothers you, marriage, women, and children are not for you. None of this is about providing her with luxury. Women don't need luxury to be feminine and its likely to be harmful to them and your children in the long term. You also don't need to spend large amounts of money to care for her. Money can help, and outsourcing support for your wife is a viable solution when you lack a supportive extended family. For example I have hired a full-time maid for my wife for several years now. Giving your wife good treatment is about how you interact with her and the world you create for her. Are you a source of leadership, authority, protection, comfort, strength, and support for your wife? Do you help her when she is overwhelmed? That's the way to care for a woman. Both men and women thrive when we have a cognitive load to carry, but the optimal load tends to differ. While there is overlap, women do best when they are busy, loaded up, and responsible for things that appeal to women and are suited to their strengths, feminine things. Let her be busy with the useful things she is best suited for. If you are a woman reading this, please pay attention to the men you date and their attitudes about taking care of their women and eventual children. If you need help evaluating a man, DM me with the details, and I will give you expert advice.

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A husband must always defend his wife (and children) from insults, including those from his family, because she is under his protection and part of his household. However, his defense must be calm, firm, and dignified, not emotional or reactive. The objective is to restore reciprocity and cooperation with his kin, not to punish them. As her guardian he stands between her and the disrespect, setting clear boundaries with his kin while preserving family harmony when possible. If his wife is wrong, he corrects her privately; if his relatives are wrong, he corrects them publicly. In doing so, he shows leadership, earns his wife’s trust, and maintains order in his home.

Please explain why you feel that? I am curious. Is anything I said untrue?

That time I was dying. As I sat there, listening to soft music and piano melodies, trying to ignore the pain, I wondered, "Is this how I die?". Everything hurt all the time and had been hurting for years. At that point, I was 31 years old and 5 years into a long, steady decline in my health. In 5 years, I had gone from a powerful young man with nearly unlimited energy and vitality to a broken shell of my former self. My gut was swollen and distended. Anything I ate rotted inside me rather than getting digested. It felt like I had swallowed a handful of razorblades, and they were now perforating my insides. I was slowly starving because I couldn't digest food. Every joint was swollen and arthritic; I couldn't wear my wedding ring or fully close or open my hands. Standing, sitting, and lying down were painful, no matter the position. Even when I was asleep, I could feel the joint and gut pain intruding on my dreams, gnawing at me like some hungry dog devouring a corpse. My skin was thin, red, and irritated. I had some acne, but mostly I was suffering from dryness, flakiness, and cracking, especially at the joints. My teeth had become so loose that they moved back and forth in my mouth. It's a miracle that they didn't fall out. My eyes were itchy all the time, and my vision was dim. Colors were dull, and I couldn't focus my eyes. I was nearly color blind. My ears were constantly ringing, and I had greatly reduced hearing due to swelling in the ear canals. Most of my hair had fallen out, especially on one side, and my face was puffy and swollen. All my hormones had collapsed: testosterone, estrogen, thyroid, and adrenals. Except cortisol, which was through the roof. My liver and kidneys were failing (and hurting). My heart hurt, and I was often gasping for air as a result of the repeated sinus and respiratory infections that plagued me. I have a deep mastery of meditation that has helped me manage the terrible pain and mental stress, but even that has limits. Because I couldn't eat or sleep, I was tired all the time. Too tired to do much of anything. Even giving instructions to my wife about how to handle what little remained of our business would exhaust me. But the worst part of all was the brain fog. I went from a top 0.003% IQ to a high double-digit IQ. For the first time in my life, thinking was hard. I felt like a prisoner in my own body with an indeterminate sentence. On the day I asked the question in the opening, I had just come out of a 30-day intense fever with delirium (hearing voices, speaking with my ancestors, battling demons, etc.), during which I had been bedridden. With the fever, on the edge of dying, I had come to fully embrace both my life and my death. All my fear, anxiety, and expectations left me. I had reached what some call a state of enlightenment. I was at peace with whatever would happen. Enlightenment is not like what they tell you. It's more like a little death. Something inside you dies to make room for something better to be born. When the fever broke, I hadn't eaten for about 10 days, which made me feel a bit better. I got up for the first time in weeks. Now back to my question from earlier. "Is this how I die?" I have always had a unique relationship with death. The way I was raised was to be ready, if necessary, to die at a moment's notice for what I believed in. Death doesn't scare me or even bother me, but dying sick in bed didn't strike me as an honorable death. What did bother me was that I have great gifts and a grand mission to accomplish, yet I had not completed my work; in fact, I wasn't even sure what that work was, but I knew that it involved helping my people rekindle their Thumos, or inner fire. It was a debt unpaid. Also, I had no children to carry on my legacy, another debt unpaid. During my illness, many of my family members died, including my youngest brother. My family had shrunk away to nearly nothing. I needed to make new life to conquer death. How could I let myself die in peace when I owed this great debt to my ancestors and my people? It was in this moment that I became a man. I took full responsibility for myself, my life, and my future. I determined that I would pay my debts and die honourably. Then I laughed. I laughed at death and suffering. I shouted into the void, "Is that the best you've got?" For the first time in months, I was alive again. In the kitchen, my loyal wife, who had never given up on me or complained about my condition or its effects on our lives, was about to cook some spring lamb. I went in and felt this massive urge to eat some of the raw lamb. For the next 6 months, all I ate was raw lamb, and I slowly recovered. In the following two years, I got back to a functional level of health. I was still not at 100%, but at least I could work and be "normal.". Slowly, as I healed, I cut ties with all that was holding me back, reprogrammed my brain, removed blockages, took charge of all my relationships, and put limits on everyone who wanted a piece of me. Today, at 47, I am stronger than ever. I have three small sons, and I am fully engaged in my mission with the help of the very best men I know doing the most important work on the planet. My wife and I have now been together for more than half our lives, including the decade or so that I was sick. I suffered the ultimate memento mori experience, looked death in the face, and laughed. I know how to build and rebuild a life, how to live without anxiety or fear, and I can show you how.

Some people instinctively know their limits. As pressure rises, they see the signs: stress tolerance reached, capacity maxed, strength spent. They slow down and pace themselves. Others do not. Their focus locks onto the task so hard that they do not feel exhaustion. Think pit bull. They latch and hold. Nothing convinces them to release. Some are more like a Malinois, always seeking stimulation and output. Rest is foreign. Others resemble the bulldog, low pain sensitivity, little complaint even when hurting. Many are simply dull to their own needs, partly for physical reasons, partly psychological. For these people, exhaustion arrives by ambush. It feels like total failure. They are so capable and productive that when the crash comes it is not just mild fatigue that can be overcome with a good night's rest. Instead it feels humiliating, as if something is broken. In truth, the body is enforcing rest they refused to grant it. Yes, the ideal pattern is to see fatigue coming and pace accordingly. If you are not built that way, you must build systems that will do it for you. Install safeguards that give you objective feedback. Use calendars, energy logs, training caps, peers who can call a timeout. Have someone in your life who “takes care of you”. Also, accept that even with safeguards you will sometimes push too far. Give yourself grace, then adjust the system so that it is better the next cycle. Remember the Norse berserker. A rare asset in war. He could enter a high state of battle fervor, an almost religious experience, ignore pain, and unleash massive destructive power for a time. Afterward he collapsed and needed days to recover. Some of us are built like that. We can do remarkable things for a season, then we must stop to rest. Honor your design rather than lament it. Manage it. Do not attach a moral value to the cycle. Learn your rhythms, use the peaks for hard work, and protect the troughs for recovery. That is how you turn volatility into advantage.

Thank you for that detailed feedback.

The loss of independent patronage in science has done more harm to both the progress of discovery and public trust in knowledge than any other single institutional change. When research was funded by private individuals motivated by curiosity, prestige, or civic duty, distortion was low and epistemic independence high. Scientists pursued truth for its own sake, and while bias and error were never absent, they were not structurally incentivized. The 20th century industrial and state model replaced this with bureaucratic and political incentives, research was guided by national goals and institutional survival. In our own time, that model has evolved into a pharmaceutical-financial complex where studies are often undertaken only if their results can be commodified. The outcome is predictable: when the incentive is profit rather than understanding, we generate marketable products more reliably than we generate truth. This shift has created a crisis of legitimacy. The public senses, often correctly, that what now passes for “science” is frequently designed to manufacture outcomes, not explanations. And yet this was inevitable: people follow incentives. When curiosity and truth were the reward, discovery followed. When the reward became revenue, it came at the cost of truth.

Many of the practices our ancestors used for living well, raising children, and building durable marriages worked for centuries without clinical study. The absence of trials is not evidence against them. It is evidence that we stopped paying attention. Families should test inherited methods with prudence. Avoid harm. Identify the probable causal mechanisms. Translate those mechanisms into modern forms. Observe results and keep what works. Do not discard the proven traditions of our ancestors because they lack papers. Run honest experiments at home and measure the outcomes.