A Hitchhiker's Guide to Excellent Masculinity
A corrective guide for men, because no one taught you how
One of my readers mentioned while reading my last article that there is a shortage of good men on the dating market. While this was largely true throughout the 2010s and into the lockdown years, men have been on an upward rather than downward trajectory since Covid. This shift did not happen because culture became kinder or more understanding, it happened because reality started hitting.
“We all must suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.” - Jim Rohn
The rise of online voices pushing men toward strength, competence, and self-improvement coincided with growing pushback against feminism and a broader rejection of narratives that rewarded fragility, passivity, and endless self-explanation. This piece is here to serve two purposes. First, to accelerate that correction. Second, to give men a clear operating manual for how to win instead of merely existing. Firstly, to all men: Be a man. Take responsibility. Take action.
Making yourself excellent will get you the best life
In a recent video titled Get Better, Dr. Orion Taraban pointed out that there are three universal things that everyone basically wants. Everyone inherently wants to be stronger, richer and more attractive. Yet if we look around, it is obvious that many men are none of those things. The question, then, is simple. If these desires are so universal, why are so many men failing to get what they claim to want?
Because incentives matter, and most men are only disciplined when consequences are immediate.
"We'll replace rugged individualism with collectivism" - NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani
Most of us understand some basic realities about life. Many people would happily lie on the couch all day ordering Uber Eats and watching Netflix if life allowed it. If not for consequences, plenty of us would do exactly that. The reason we don’t is obvious: we would lose our jobs, run out of money, and eventually end up homeless. This is precisely the fatal flaw with socialism and its UBI-adjacent fantasies: remove consequences and productivity collapses. Historically, the only way that problem has ever been “fixed” is with gulags, but that is not the focus here.
The point is this: men are very good at avoiding pain that arrives quickly, and terrible at committing to effort where results are more gradual. Becoming stronger, richer, and more attractive happens incrementally. So does becoming weak, broke, and undesirable. The penalties for neglect arrive slowly, quietly, and are easy to rationalize, which is why so many men spend years stuck in the gray zone, telling themselves they are fine while steadily decaying.
The challenge for men is not insight, it is discipline. It is learning to trade short-term comfort for long-term power. Excellence is not a personality trait, it is a behavior pattern. It is the repeated choice to do what compounds instead of what soothes. Men who make that choice consistently do not just become better dating prospects, they build lives that actually work, for themselves and their families.
Average is the most dangerous place to live
Human beings, and men in particular, crave optionality. This is not ideological, it is biological. No one wants to be trapped with only one option. This is why people value living in a capitalist society. When you walk into a store, you can choose between dozens of brands and types of deodorant. In Mother Russia, everyone used the same one, if they used any at all. When you travel, you would rather have choices of where to stay than be forced into a run-down hostel with a shared bathroom at the end of the hall. You may even choose to stay in a skeevy hostel, but it is better to do so as a preference rather than as a necessity imposed by lack of optionality.
Choosing where to stay on vacation is simply a parable for the rest of life. Average men end up in average jobs, average relationships, and average lives not because they carefully chose them, but because those were the only options available. Average is not a preference; it is a default. It is where you wake up one day and realize your life was selected for you by inertia, not intention.
“Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.”
This is what makes average dangerous. It does not feel like failure, it feels tolerable. Comfortable enough to endure, yet painful enough to drain you slowly. Average is where men tell themselves they are “doing fine” while quietly surrendering leverage in every domain that matters.
Excellent men do not “get lucky,” they build leverage. They become the man with options. In work, the excellent man gets hired, promoted, and paid. In life, he gains freedom. In dating, he chooses instead of waiting to be chosen. The average man does not choose, he accepts. He takes what is left, if anything is left at all. You may think you want an average life. What you do not want is to arrive there because you lacked the strength, discipline, or courage to earn anything better.
Excellent is being stronger, richer, and more attractive
So what does an average man actually have to do to become an excellent one? First, a disclaimer: it is not easy. If it were, you would already be doing it instead of reading this piece.
Let’s start with the basics: a hard, sweating workout a minimum of four times per week that does not take place in your house or apartment. Now I’m sure that a number of my readers have just balked at that suggestion. Or more likely, you have begun to perform mental gymnastics inside your head. “Well, I have a pull-up bar at home,” or “I do go to Crunch and walk on the stair machine a couple times a week,” or “It’s too cold to leave the house that often.” These are not obstacles, they are negotiations with discomfort. This is why you are weak.
The reason you are an average man, and the reason you are not stronger, richer, or more attractive, is simple. It is easier to be average than it is to be excellent. Most of you were never trained to push through resistance. You were trained to negotiate with it, often with the help of that therapy that taught you how to explain discomfort instead of overcoming it.
There is a reason the old gym teacher trope still applies: “The only person you’re cheating is yourself.” When the push-ups got hard, most people found ways to make them easier instead of better. They shortened the reps, rushed the movement, and sacrificed form. It hurt less in the moment but cost them strength long-term. That instinct clearly did not end in gym class, you carried it straight into your work, your discipline, your finances, and your relationships.
This beta pattern extends far beyond physical training. Most people choose the path of least resistance by default. If even the suggestion of structured, consistent effort made you flinch, that reaction explains exactly why you are still average. Becoming an excellent man requires that instinct to be beaten out of you. You must learn to move toward resistance instead of away from it. So first, I suggest a good MMA class for that purpose. It teaches you, very quickly, that discomfort does not kill you and avoidance does not save you, and excuses do not work. What is hard for you is hard for everyone else. The difference is not talent, it is choice.
Excellent men take the harder path by default while weak men look for the bell. One confronts resistance head-on while the other schedules their weekly therapy session to explain why it feels unfair. And women can tell which one you are long before you ever open your mouth.
Hustle is not exploitation, it is apprenticeship
Men are lazy, and that’s fine. Left to our own devices, most of us would happily live like sheikhs, served the finest foods with a harem down the hall for when we are in the mood. That instinct is pretty universal. The problem is that for roughly 99.99999% of us, that life is not coming. There is no lottery ticket, no genie, no pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. So if you want more than the bare minimum, you are going to have to hustle.
This is where hustle enters the picture, and where it is most often misunderstood. Hustle is not exploitation; it is apprenticeship. It is how men acquire leverage by learning how the world actually works.
“You either build your dream or someone will hire you to build theirs.”
In the previous section, we talked about avoiding the path of least resistance. This is where that principle becomes non-negotiable. Doing what everyone else does will only get you what everyone else has. If you want more, you have to produce more value. That means working smarter, and often harder, longer, and more deliberately than the people around you, especially early on.
The job of a man is to build something. For himself, for his future family, and for the community he lives in. The beauty of a capitalist system is that it forces competence. You are only rewarded to the extent that you solve real problems for real people. There is no bypass, no shortcut, and no moral exemption.
Hustle is simply the process of learning how to become useful at a high level. It is how you acquire skills, judgment, and credibility before you have options. It is the tuition you pay before leverage kicks in.
So stop treating hustle like an insult. It is not exploitation, it is education. Find a path that aligns with your abilities and temperament, then commit to it fully. Work until you are useful. Then work until you are difficult to replace. Then go out and build your empire. That is how excellence is built and how freedom is earned.
Your personality sucks
Speaking of dating, you might be wondering why you’ve had such a hard time with women. The truth is your personality sucks. Yes, you. You are uninteresting, flat, and dull. Your guy friends know this too, which is why your friendships are shallow and you spend most nights watching Netflix and other things alone. The men around you do not seek you out, do not rely on you, and do not miss you when you are gone. If other men do not enjoy your presence, why on G-d’s green earth would a woman?
Yes, this section applies to you. You do not need more dating advice, you need a personality that generates energy instead of consuming it. You need to become a more interesting person. That does not mean reading idiotic books like How to Win Friends and Influence People. Personality is not learned in theory, it is forged in action.
Get hobbies. Join a sports league. Engage in healthy male competition. Build skill in something that demands effort and produces visible progress. It does not matter what it is. What matters is that it gives you momentum, structure, and something real to talk about that you are passionate about and did not come from a screen.
Women are not looking to complete you, they are evaluating whether you are already complete. They are watching to see if you have gravity, direction, friendships, and a spine that exists independently of them. A man without gravity repels everyone. Fix that, and your dating failures will correct themselves without you saying a word.
Porn, OnlyFans, and synthetic intimacy
Hashem designed man with an innate desire for intimacy. As He says, “It is not good that man be alone; I will make him a helpmate opposite him.” Personally, I think another dude would be more practically helpful, but that’s probably why I was not consulted during creation. The world was designed intentionally, and the drives placed within us are not accidents or bugs in the system. They exist to propel men toward building, creating, and advancing the world.
Masculine drive, fueled by testosterone, is not gentle or abstract. It seeks to compete, to build, to acquire, and yes, to conquer. Men are wired to pursue resources, status, and the ability to attract a wife not because we are crude, but because nothing of value is handed to us freely. One of the core features of that drive is optionality: the possibility of winning, choosing, and earning access rather than being assigned it. In Chassidic terms, desire creates ratzon, and ratzon pulls divine energy into action. When there is no striving, there is no growth. When everything is given, nothing is built. Optionality is not indulgence, it is the engine that keeps a man moving forward.
Technology, like everything else, is morally neutral. It amplifies whatever it touches. In the hands of a builder, it builds. In the hands of a degenerate, it corrodes. Pornography is one of the most destructive examples of this amplification. It takes the strongest motivating force a man has and feeds it a counterfeit victory. The brain receives the chemical reward of success without the effort, risk, or competence that success is supposed to require. The engine revs, but the wheels never touch the road.
“Get your dopamine from what you create not what you consume.”
OnlyFans escalates this by adding the illusion of connection to the illusion of intimacy. You are no longer just watching, you are “interacting.” You are given the simulation of being chosen. In reality, more often than not, you are chatting with old Indian men in call centers following scripts designed to keep you paying. You feel selected while becoming weaker. You feel validated while becoming poorer. You feel desired while doing nothing that would actually make you desirable.
This is synthetic intimacy. It hijacks the reward system while bypassing the purpose of desire entirely. The drive that should push you into the gym, into work, into risk, and into pursuit of a real woman gets discharged in private, with nothing to show for it. Over time, this trains a man to watch instead of act, to consume instead of pursue, to expect pleasure without effort. Real intimacy requires courage, rejection, patience, and competence. Synthetic intimacy requires only a screen and a credit card. Eventually, the man who chooses the simulation loses his appetite for the real thing, not because it is unavailable, but because he trained himself to avoid the discomfort that gives life its meaning.
These systems do not accidentally harm men, in fact they are designed specifically to harm men. A sedated man is compliant. A man chasing simulations does not build, does not compete, and does not threaten anyone in power. Porn and OnlyFans do not merely waste your time, they neuter the very force that would have made you formidable. They turn masculine drive into a closed loop of consumption and self-soothing. These are nothing more than instruments of the Globohomo, designed to pacify masculinity and keep men docile, distracted, and easily managed. If you want to be stronger, richer, and more attractive, this has to go. Not because you should be a monk, but because they are siphoning off the fuel meant to build a real life.
Stop inner work nonsense and chase something real
The latest fad pushed by our Globohomo masters to sedate men is the claim that everyone is “damaged” and therefore must engage in endless “inner work” before taking any meaningful action in life. If you do not believe you have trauma, that is conveniently reinterpreted as proof that your trauma is simply too deep to recognize. It is a perfect, unfalsifiable paralysis doctrine. The outcome is always the same: delay action, defer responsibility, and retreat into feelings that never improve your life.
This ideology trains men to obsess over internal states that produce nothing. You are taught to endlessly analyze feelings that do not pay your bills, strengthen your body, sharpen your judgment, or make you more capable in the real world. You feel productive while producing nothing, busy while building nothing, and self-aware while your life remains unchanged.
These ideas have infected both religious and secular spaces alike, and they function much like pornography. Both redirect masculine drive away from action and into the intangible. One numbs desire, the other numbs responsibility. Both promise relief and deliver stagnation. The result is not growth, it is inversion: men are trained to see themselves as fragile projects instead of capable actors, and to derive identity from their supposed brokenness. In reality, the Victimhood Olympics has never made anyone fulfilled and will only cause stagnation for its competitors.
“Inner work” has become the most socially acceptable excuse for avoiding outer work. It provides a respectable reason to delay responsibility indefinitely. You are always almost ready, always processing, always recalibrating. Meanwhile, nothing improves, no strength, no achievement, and certainly no tangible results.
“But I have generational trauma.” No, you have TikTok vocabulary and no discipline. Your trauma credits will not pay your rent or buy groceries. They will not fund the Pesach vacation you want or the life you imagine for yourself. Get off your ass and start doing real work. No amount of therapeutic language will substitute for effort, competence, and follow-through.
If you want a better life, stop staring inward and start building outward. Harness your masculine drive to make something of yourself, rather than transforming into a whiny little bitch. Lift heavy things. Learn hard skills. Take risks that scare you. Produce something real. Masculine drive is meant to be discharged into creation, not endlessly analyzed into impotence. Do not complain that women do not want you. Become someone worth wanting. Inner work will not save you, outer work will.
Attraction is a consequence of competence
Women are deeply, biologically attracted to competent men. This is not a theory, a social construct, or something invented by the manosphere. It is easily observable reality. Competence signals safety, direction, and reliability. When a woman senses that a man can handle problems as they arise, she relaxes. She stops managing, anticipating, and compensating. Attraction grows in the absence of worry.
The feeling that drives this is simple: “I don’t have to worry because he’s got it handled.” That is one of the strongest attraction triggers there is. Not because women are weak, but because attraction is not built on sameness, it is built on polarity. Women are drawn to men who can take responsibility where it matters, just as men are drawn to women who bring what they lack.
This is why all the “inner work” you’ve been doing is not making you more attractive, no matter how convincingly it is packaged on Instagram by dumb influencers. Emotional vocabulary does not fix a flat tire. Processing your feelings does not solve problems under pressure. A man who can calmly and confidently handle real situations beats a man who can perfectly narrate his childhood wounds on cue.
Knowing how to change a tire, plunge a toilet, or figure things out when something breaks is far more attractive than how articulate you are about your inner world. Women do not select men based on how reflective they are. They select men based on whether life feels easier, calmer, and safer with them around. No one cares about your trauma or how much of a victim you are. Strength, resilience, and composure under pressure are what actually register as attractive.
And this shows up constantly. She notices whether you planned the date properly. Whether you stayed composed when something went wrong. Whether you froze, deflected responsibility, or took charge. She is not consciously scoring you, but she is registering everything. Competence leaks, but incompetence leaks faster.
You do not need to be able to renovate a house by yourself, but she does want to see that you can handle the basics. She wants a man who can figure things out, a man who does not unravel the moment something breaks. A man like that does not need to explain himself, his presence alone does the talking.
So stop trying to be attractive by looking inward. Some women will tell you that is what they want, but their actual selection behavior tells the truth. Build skills, build decisiveness, build reliability. Attraction is not created by self-analysis. It is created when a woman looks at you and knows, without thinking about it, that you are capable.
Men and women do not experience attraction the same way, and pretending otherwise is one of the great lies of modern dating advice. Men ignite through stimulus and direction. Women warm through safety, consistency, and emotional attunement. This is not a value judgment, it is a wiring difference. Ignore it and you will sabotage attraction while blaming everything except the actual cause.
This is why competence matters more than communication. Men lose attraction when they stagnate. Women lose attraction when emotional continuity breaks. One side requires momentum, the other requires stability. A man who understands this stops trying to “connect” his way into attraction and starts building a life that naturally creates it.
Pursuit
A man who does not pursue does not get chosen, period. This is not bitterness or insecurity, it is biology. Attraction does not materialize on its own, and women are not going to move the process forward for you. If you are waiting to be noticed, you are already losing.
Pursuit is a masculine responsibility. It is not desperation and it is not simping, it is leadership. Someone has to initiate and create momentum and it will never be her. Men turn potential into reality by stepping forward, that is how anything ever happens.
Modern men have been brainwashed into believing that pursuit is creepy, immoral, or beneath them. That lie exists to keep you passive, docile, and alone. Yes, bad pursuit is awkward. So what? The answer to bad pursuit is not withdrawal, it is competence. And competence is only built one way: practice.
Rejection is part of the deal. It stings, absorb it and keep moving. Masculinity has always required the ability to take a hit and stay standing. If a simple no rattles you, you are nowhere near ready for a yes, because a yes requires steadiness, not fragility.
“Fear is an evolutionary response designed to keep you safe from predators, not girls.”
Women do not want to manufacture momentum, they want to respond to it. Even the women who say they prefer men who do not pursue, reliably choose men who do. Ignore what is said and observe what is rewarded. Behavior tells the truth long before language does.
Pursuit does not mean begging or chasing endlessly. It means stating interest clearly, extending an invitation, and remaining grounded regardless of the outcome. You ask, she answers. You move forward or you move on. No spiraling, no sulking, no huffing the copium pretending it was mutual when it was not.
If you ask a woman out in a normal, direct, respectful way and she reacts poorly, that is not a failure, it is information. Men who understand pursuit collect information and continue. Weak men internalize it and stall.
Waiting to be chosen is a feminine strategy. Men who adopt it do not become evolved, they become irrelevant. If you want a woman in your life, you must step forward and create the opportunity for yourself. No one is coming to tap you on the shoulder and hand you a relationship.
So stop hiding behind fear, excuses, or fake morality. Build yourself into a man worth responding to, then act like it. Pursuit is not optional. It is the price of entry.
What acceptable dating criteria looks like
Ask most people what the sexual organ of a man is and they’ll give you the obvious answer, but they’re wrong. The primary sexual organ of a man is his eyes. That is not primitive; it is biological reality. Men experience attraction visually first, always. So let’s start with the baseline requirement that everyone pretends is controversial but everyone privately understands: you must be genuinely attracted to her.
If you cannot imagine intimacy with her, you should not be going out with her. This is not cruelty, it is honesty. Dating someone you are not physically attracted to is not noble, it is dishonest and it wastes both of your time. Attraction is not optional, it is the entry requirement. Clear the threshold or walk away.
That does not mean you are entitled to a fantasy. If your standards are distorted because your primary exposure to women comes from a Hub tab in an incognito window, that is your problem to correct. You are not entitled to a 10 simply because the only women you look at are performers optimized for a camera. Attraction is a threshold, not a trophy. Clear the threshold, then move on, because once attraction is present, it rapidly drops in importance.
A wife is not just a personality match, she is a teammate for life. The correct question is not just “Do we get along?” It is “Does my life function better with her in it?” If her presence adds chaos, instability, emotional drag, or constant friction, then attraction becomes irrelevant very quickly. Chemistry does not build a life, function does. This is where most men fail, because they screen for excitement instead of outcomes.
Which brings us to the criterion most men are embarrassingly bad at screening for: motherhood. This will look different for each man, but most do not consider it at all. They fixate on chemistry between the two of them while completely ignoring her suitability as the mother of their future children. You are not just selecting a woman for yourself, you are selecting the environment your children will grow up in. Her emotional regulation, temperament, values, and capacity to nurture matter far more than how entertaining she is on a date. Men who ignore this trade short-term excitement for long-term regret.
Some women will treat you poorly. Some will test boundaries, drain energy, or manufacture drama, sometimes without malicious intent. It does not matter why they do it. Those are not good women and you should not tolerate that behavior. They will not unlearn such patterns for you. You remove yourself and keep moving. Attractive women often get away with bad behavior precisely because they are attractive. Do not let beauty blind you to dysfunction.
Acceptable criteria is not complicated. Attraction gets you in the door. Function determines whether you stay. Motherhood determines whether you build. Respect determines whether you walk away. Men who get this wrong end up trapped. Men who get it right end up choosing instead of settling. That is the difference between dating intentionally and letting your life be decided for you.
What your feminine energy is actually for
Every bad actor today will tell you to “get in touch with your feminine energy.” You are bombarded with this message constantly, from pop psychology, from social media, from therapy culture, from people whose lives you should not want. You can safely assume that anyone instructing a man be more in touch with his feminine side is attempting to weaken him. That is not because feminine energy does not exist, rather there is an agenda to deliberately misapply it. You do possess feminine energy, and you must apply it in the correct time and place.
In Chassidus, masculine and feminine are functions. Masculine is mashpia, the initiator, the vector, the force that moves reality forward. Feminine is mekabel, the receiver, the stabilizer, the vessel that allows direction to land. When these roles invert, or when both sides pursue leadership, chaos ensues. When the polarity is correct, everything aligns.
Feminine energy in a man has exactly two purposes.
1. Emunah & Bitachon
The first is emunah and bitachon, the ability to receive (be mekabel) from Hashem. Faith, humility before G-d, and trust that provision does not come from our inputs alone. This is where softness belongs: upward, toward Hashem. Not outward toward women, coworkers, or strangers in some performative emotional exchange.
A man who spills his internal state everywhere is not evolved, he is undisciplined. Your feminine side is there to enable you to receive from Hashem, not for unloading uncertainty onto women and calling it vulnerability. Strength does not come from emotional exhibitionism, strength comes from alignment with something higher than yourself.
Let’s be clear about what this means in practice. Women are not where you process fear, doubt, or uncertainty. The moment you look to a woman to stabilize you emotionally, you invert the dynamic. She does not feel closer, she feels responsible, and responsibility kills attraction. If you need grounding, you take it to Hashem, to disciplined action, or to other men who can handle the weight without collapsing. You do not bring it into your romantic life and pretend it is vulnerability.
2. Calibration
The second purpose of feminine energy is calibration. It exists to sharpen masculine direction, not replace it. It helps you read the room, sense timing, adjust pressure, and know when to push and when to pause. This is not passivity, it is precision. Masculinity sets direction while feminine energy fine-tunes execution.
This is why men who are overly masculine become blunt, socially clumsy, and unnecessarily abrasive. And why men who are overly feminine become passive, approval-seeking, and invisible. Both fail, though not equally. Masculinity must lead. Feminine energy exists to support direction, not substitute for it. Polarity requires both, but never in equal measure.
Your job is not to emotionally merge with everyone around you. Your job is to set the frame. Women do not want you to feel what they feel. They want you to understand what they feel while remaining grounded in yourself. One is leadership, the other is submission disguised as empathy.
Modern culture tells men to lead with feelings. That advice reliably produces men who hesitate, over-explain, and wait for permission. A man who leads with feelings does not feel safe, he feels unstable. Here is the rule: feelings inform action, they do not initiate it. Feelings are data, not directives. Not every feeling needs to be spoken and not every emotion needs to be shared. Action comes first, reflection happens later, privately.
“Your mind must be stronger than your feelings.”
So stop trying to “get in touch” with your feminine side as if it is a replacement for masculinity. It is not, it is simply a tool for you to use to sharpen your masculinity, not to justify your inaction. Masculinity leads while feminine energy supports. When you invert that order, attraction dies. When you get it right, everything locks into place.
In conclusion…
If you strip everything in this piece down to its non-negotiables, the formula is simple. Lift your body until it is strong. Build a skill until it pays for the lifestyle you desire. Eliminate the habits that sedate your drive. Pursue women directly and absorb rejection without collapsing. Choose deliberately instead of randomly. Lead spiritually upward, not emotionally outward. Act first, reflect second. Feelings inform action, they do not dictate it. Men who live this way do not need motivation, permission, or validation. Their lives work because they are constructed to work.
Modern culture does not produce men worth following or women who feel safe with them. It produces polite paralysis, endless self-analysis, and a permanent state of almost-ready. The script tells men to talk more, feel more, process more, and take fewer risks. It treats strength as toxic, ambition as dangerous, and competence as uselessness. Meaning is not found by naming your suffering correctly. Meaning is built by becoming competent enough that your life actually works. Discipline is replaced with discussion. Action is replaced with rumination. Responsibility is replaced with diagnosis. The outcome is predictable: softer men, weaker marriages, stalled lives, and a dating market full of adults who can describe their feelings flawlessly while being unable to build, lead, or carry weight when it actually matters. The alternative is not cruelty or chaos, it is excellence rooted in responsibility, achievement, and competence.
A man who lifts, works, builds, pursues, and chooses deliberately does not outsource his spine to a therapist, his confidence to his feelings, or his direction to a HR department. He understands that feelings are information, not instructions. That competence creates attraction. That polarity creates harmony. That responsibility creates freedom. This is not revolutionary. It is (apparently now, un)common sense. Torah never instructed men to narrate their way into excellence. It demanded that they act, lead, sacrifice comfort for the future, and become formidable enough to protect it. Do that and everything else follows. Ignore it, and no amount of talking about your feelings will save you.
P.S. I know some of you who read through this are girls and are smirking about all the work guys need to do. Fret not, the piece eviscerating y’all is hot on the tail of this one. You lot aren’t so great either.