I ran into a father and son in the elevator while walking my dogs. I had my headphones on, but with transparency mode I could hear their whole conversation without looking like I was listening.
The boy was maybe eight or nine. He seemed afraid of dogs and immediately hid behind his father. So I pulled both of my dogs into the corner of the elevator and blocked them with my body.
That was when the father, already sounding irritated, asked his son what there was to be afraid of. My dog, hearing herself become the subject, poked her head out curiously. The boy let out a startled shriek—one of those shrill, slightly feminine cries that would get a child publicly humiliated by a pack of boys who think performing masculinity makes them men.
The father, trying to hold back his anger, snapped at him: "What are you scared of? You're a boy. Aren't you ashamed of being this timid?"
The boy didn’t talk back. The father shook off the hand clutching his sleeve. I got out on the first floor, so I don’t know what the rest of their conversation sounded like on the way down to the garage.
Experts can come up with a hundred ways to train boys to be brave. They can also produce a hundred warnings about how fathers should never crush a son’s dignity. Entire essays can be built out of theory, analysis, and psychological vocabulary—carefully reasoned, impressively detached, full of the confidence that comes from believing you see the world more clearly than everyone else.
And still, none of that can match the force of that father’s one sentence.
No matter how massive a theory is, it still gets flushed away. And the one pressing the handle is often the very person those theories dissect so thoroughly—the so-called sample under analysis.
In that brief encounter, I felt like there were two shadows standing behind that father:
- once, he too was a little boy who hid behind his own father when he saw a dog;
- and now, he is a man shaped by misogyny, projecting his fear of diminished masculinity onto his son.
People who love standing above the crowd can write a hundred explanations for why men need courage, and a hundred more for why men lose it. But can any of that save a boy who is already being pulled into the same cycle? No. Because when they write their hundred methods for educating others, what they are really doing is trying to save themselves.
Yes, this is an attack on people who produce theoretical analysis, philosophical reflection, and logical systems. That includes me.
You produce some grand output, admire it for a while, and then someone else hits flush. That is the arrogance of making things: the belief that life can be distilled into an answer.
Like that father and son I saw this morning. Their lives could branch into countless different meanings, but all of those possibilities are overpowered by the standard contained in one sentence: "You're a boy." That line has already shaped the first eight years between them. It may continue shaping the next eighteen, twenty-eight, thirty-eight.
A man terrified of losing his masculine force. A boy who cannot accept who he really is and is therefore forced into bravery.
Those are interpretations, of course. They belong to the part the observer gets to understand. But understanding is not the same thing as reducing someone’s future to a neat, ugly conclusion and calling that insight.
Someone once asked me whether writing so often about my own experiences and then drawing a conclusion from them was too much of a generalization.
Honestly, that question contains its own trap. If even an individual experience cannot be used as a sample from which to think, does that mean the bigger, bolder conclusion is automatically more valid—more universal, more certain, more deserving of an audience that gathers around to admire it and hesitates to flush it away?
Creators are arrogant in exactly this way. We think life can yield an answer. Worse, we think that answer can be laid over other people’s lives like a template.
And the result is predictable: one group gets drunk on its own performance, another watches the spectacle like people staring at someone spinning in circles, and a third group puts on the costume of reason and laughs at the ones spinning—just to prove they are not the crazy ones.
So I can only start by analyzing myself, because I am also part of the machinery that produces answers. I am one of the people capable of pressing the flush.
There is no theory that can really save people. When someone writes a hundred methods for educating others, they are usually just trying to rescue themselves.