If you’re unaware it’s happening, how can you prevent it from happening?

If you’re unaware that male testosterone levels are declining by 1.3% every year regardless of age, or how testosterone works in the male body, you’re unlikely to care about your testosterone levels, missing a very important aspect of your health as a man. (If you’re wondering how to naturally increase your testosterone levels, learn more in my new book, the Man Diet, that you can get here for FREE.)

If you’re not aware of an opportunity in business, you’re not going to take it and get the possible benefits from it.

Being unaware, however, can’t be an excuse if you want to get better, to build a better life, and become a better man, because it’s your duty to be aware.

1. By praising weakness.

In some corners of our society you’re actually praised for being a victim. The more arbitrary victim classes you belong to, the higher status you hold. You’re seen as strong, for being weak.

If you don’t watch out for it, you can find yourself being proud of being a victim, and your victimhood may not actually be real, nor should you want it to be. You’re a man. A man cannot be a victim unless he gives his permission. If he does, he also relinquishes power over his current and future life as a victim depends on others to succeed, to be ‘allowed and enabled’ to succeed.

This victimhood goes deeper, especially now with men, as we’re seeing other groups praise men’s vulnerability and condemn the stoicism that actually leads to a life well lived.

We’re being pushed to dive into our feelings, to explore them, to express them, and in doing so, we’re giving our emotions and feelings power over our mood, our actions, and what we ‘feel’ like we can accomplish in this life.

If feelings and emotions are truth, then we’ll be a victim to them forever.

The reality is that, no, your feelings are not who you are. They aren’t even the most important aspect of your existence. What you do, the man you are, and how you react to said feelings, is.

What you want to accomplish in this life doesn’t care about your feelings. Actually, by giving your emotions weight, you’re moving further away from the life you want to create rather than closer to it. In short, you’re becoming soft. You’re willingly becoming a victim.

2. Life’s never been easier.

Society makes us soft simply by being easier than it’s ever been.

Where we used to walk or ride an animal, we now sit in a vehicle on our way to sitting all day at work. To avoid becoming too soft to live a flourishing life, we now have to adopt hardship.

We have to train our bodies in the gym, to seek our pain. We have to head to the mountains, hunt our own food, do things we don’t feel like doing because the reality is that for our survival, we no longer have to do them.

If you don’t feel like doing something that’s a sign that you have to do it.

3. By turning our back on the Barbarian Virtues.

The barbarian virtues are the virtues that helped us build great nations like America and Canada. Nations founded on freedom that created more prosperity for more people than any nations before them.

This prosperity was won. It was won in war, in hard work, in ingenuity, a sense of honor and patriotism.

When you love your nation you do your best to see it succeed, and you do your best to defend it.

There’s also the matter of land ownership. Citizens actually had – and many still have – a steak in the success of the nation by literally owning a part of it. We don’t think about how significant that is, but for the first time even the middle and lower classes if defined by annual income can own a part of the nation by owning land.

When you own land you have pride in where you reside, both on the plot of land and the nation in which is exists.

Everything about the prosperity of nations like America is founded on the barbarian virtues, the wons developed in battle, things like honor, courage, and grit.

Now, however, we’re turning our backs on the very virtues that made us great. We’re seeing strength as oppressive when it’s actually used to liberate. We’re seeing myths like the existence of a patriarchy influence laws and regulations.

Rather than allowing people to succeed on their own and feel the pride and purpose that comes with accomplishment, we’re trying to create equity, where everyone ends up the same – and we’ve seen the results of such pursuits in the past, yet we think somehow the result will be different now.

We’re weak because we’re not praising strength.

4. The rise of the participation trophy.

You know if you’ve won or lost. Not only do you know by the score of the game (and everyone keeps score even if it’s not kept by an official), but you feel it in your gut.

You know what it feels like to win, and what it feels like to lose. They do not feel the same.

So don’t tell your kid that he’s a winner when he’s a loser. He knows. Tell him how to become a winner, and let him actually feel what it’s like. Let him get addicted to that feeling, and develop the grit, toughness, and the habits that victory demands.

5. Equity vs Equality.

We touched on this briefly, but when a society wants equality of outcome, the need for hard work is lost, and the innovation, the jobs, the prosperity that was created by rewarding hard work is also lost.

Equity is the equality of outcome, not of opportunity, and it’s what many in today’s society are pushing for.

This desire for equality of outcome will make you soft because you’ll want what someone else has earned, you’ll think that you somehow deserve it.

As a society, we should not want an equality of outcome because equality is a myth, the developing things like discipline and intelligence is a way for ensuring inequality, which is what we’re actually after.

I do not want my competition to be equal to me. I will work harder than them to ensure this.

You’re the same. You want to win so you want inequality, and society ends up winning on the coattails of those who are better than everyone else at something, and create prosperity for others as a result.

Forget about equity, focus on making the playing field in your own life unequal. You want victory do you not? — and not just for yourself, but your family as well.

6. The rise of entitlement.

You are where you deserve to be.

To believe anything else is to rob yourself of the truth, and we need truth!

Yet, you’ll hear it from some, that you deserve better, that you’re better than that fella who’s built a bigger business than you have.

Never think you deserve something more than what you have. It’s a lie. Go get more, earn it, and then you’ll deserve it.

Entitlement is soft.

7. The fall of violence.

Finally, men, and especially young men, need some violence in their lives. Sure, it’s best if it’s controlled, but scuffles are best settled with violence when you’re a kid. You fight the guy you have a disagreement with, and then usually build a stronger friendship in the process.

We cannot rob our society of violence. It’s a viable way to solve problems, and violence is a part of everyday life all over the world, expect for here in the west.

This will be taken the wrong way. I know it will be. This does NOT mean violence against people who don’t deserve it, and it does mean violence in the form of competition.

Learning how to fight and actually sparring is a great way to avoid becoming soft. Yet, even in our schools, we’re seeing a complete dismissal of the fact that ‘boys will be boys’ when a couple guys decide to throw down.

Violence is seen as the worst possible form of action. It isn’t. Being deceitful is. Being cunning and stabbing people in the back, is. Violence keeps people in check.

The more strong, good men we have who are also dangerous, the fewer evils will take place because violence will keep it in check.

As a man, it’s your duty to know how to be good at being violent. If you’re a father, a husband, this is even more true and you have lives to protect. Their safety is yours to defend. Get good at defending it.