It’s not your fault, but it is your problem

A lot of the articles I’ve written have been in the general genre of what young men need to do differently. When I publish one of these articles, inevitably someone responds by criticizing me for blaming men and wondering why I don’t criticize women.

For the record, it happens in reverse too. When I criticize a trend that is largely among women, I get called a misogynist. I’ve come to grips with the fact that this is a hazard of the profession. But there’s a gender war I refuse to get involved in.

There’s a large subset of men online who are tired of being criticized, and I understand why. If I wrote a series of articles about how women are responsible for all the ills of the West, I would be rightly pilloried. However, entire Substack platforms are dedicated to discussing the problems with maleness and the problems with whiteness.

So in an atmosphere where young men can be criticized with impunity and blamed for all the world’s ills, it can be tough to hear another piece of criticism. Just another brick in the wall, right? Anyone who’s had a problem child knows that constant criticism not only doesn’t work; it starts to motivate them toward more extreme behaviors.

But there’s a difference between something being your fault and something being your problem.

Finding Fault Is for Children

There are many things in this world that are not your fault. Certain hiring practices make it harder for you to get a job. Not your fault. Certain aspects of the dating world are stacked against you. Not your fault. The fact that you were inundated from a young age by a porn industry designed to get you hooked as early as possible. Again, not your fault.

In your youth, something is your problem only if it is your fault. If a toy breaks and it’s your fault, you’re gonna get in trouble. If it breaks and it wasn’t your fault, you’re not gonna get in trouble. And if someone else broke something of yours, someone will probably fix it for you.

But in the real world, when you become an adult, you become the person who fixes someone else’s problems for them. Something might not be your fault, but it is your problem. Part of growing up is realizing the distinction.

A lot of men out there are being told by various influencers that it’s feminism’s fault, or Protestantism’s fault, or whatever. They’re often rightly diagnosing the problem, but they’re focused too much on fault. That’s what a child does. A child tries to find fault, because when a child correctly identifies who is at fault, that person gets in trouble, and an adult fixes it for you.

A man simply sees the problem and finds solutions.

I’m not content to just find who’s at fault for the problems of the world. It may be easy to identify, and it may be true. But that’s an exercise that doesn’t make the problem any better. My temperament is to see something that’s broken and ask how we can fix it.

Why Responsibility Sounds Like Blame

Often, when I write that men have the responsibility to do something, it sounds like I’m saying they are at fault for the problem being there in the first place. That’s not my intention. I don’t really care who’s at fault. I just want the problem fixed.

When I come home and my wife is super sick and there are toys all over the floor, and she says, “You have to clean up, I’m dead sick,” she’s saying I have a responsibility. She’s certainly not saying it’s my fault the toys are on the floor. It might even be her fault. But it doesn’t matter whose fault it is, because I have the responsibility.

If you lack confidence, though, when someone says you’re responsible for this, it sounds like blame. And the way responsibility stops feeling like blame is when you develop confidence.

Find Little PRs

I think what young men lack today, more than anything else, is a sense of agency. They lack the sense that they can just do things.

A sense of agency comes from confidence, and confidence comes from proof. It’s a virtuous cycle. The alternative is a vicious cycle. Guys haven’t done anything because they lack confidence, and they lack confidence because they haven’t done anything.

So the trick is taking that first step.

Just accomplish one hard thing you thought you wouldn’t be able to do. You can get addicted to that feeling, and you just keep moving toward it. Every great person who ever did anything worth doing started by doing little things.

Anybody who ever broke a world record broke their PR first.

There’s a story, probably apocryphal, that The Times once asked writers, “What’s wrong with the world?” and G.K. Chesterton wrote back: “Dear Sir, I am.” That’s the posture we should adopt. He said so not because everything is truly his fault, but because he realized that anything wrong with the world he could recognize only remained broken because he had not yet fixed it.

Many things in this world are broken, and they’re not broken because you did anything wrong. But you have agency. You can’t sit around and wait for things to happen.

It’s not your fault, but it is your problem.

Go fix it.