The meaning of A Man’s Work

How men can reclaim the lost art of emotional connection among themselves

Read it on newsletter.amanswork.com

I recently chatted with Isabella Chiu who authors the newsletter What Would A White Man Do? We challenged each other to explain what the titles of our newsletters really mean. So here’s my attempt at explaining the meaning of “A Man’s Work.”

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Men have work to do. Always have, always will. 

To provide and protect, we needed to get good at hunting. And a bit of violence. We worked on that.

Then the need shifted to making money. Our focus shifted to performing at jobs. 

Today, the unmet need men are increasingly asked to tackle is emotional connection. It is required for raising healthy families and performing well in most jobs. And while the need grows stronger, our ability to provide it grows weaker. The rise of desk work and virtual interactions make emotional connection something we need to learn. It no longer comes naturally. 

Emotional connection is the biggest challenge boys and men face today. And just about everyone is aware we’re not acing this work. 

• Men are getting the message from wives, girlfriends, and their own children. 

• Men are getting the message from media covering the rise of male suicide and depression.

• Men are getting the message from each other. Loneliness among youth and senior men is at an all time high. Our inability to connect with other men is perhaps the strongest driver of depression of them all. 

What’s frustrating is that there’s no guide for emotional connection. And we need training not just to look inside ourselves, but to interpret the whole world of emotions playing around us, all day long, every day of the week.

How do we interpret the emotional spikes we get from family, friends, and people on the Internet? Everyone has baggage. Recognizing it instead of internalizing it is part of the work. 

So what does this work look like? And is this work actually different for men? 

Here’s where things get a little controversial. There’s a belief that work around emotional connection is similar for men and women alike  - it’s just that men don’t do it. Either they’re too lazy or too dumb to rise to the occasion. Another belief is that it’s not men’s fault, but society’s at large. Men and women alike don’t raise boys to be emotionally sensitive to themselves or the world around them. 

All these notions can be true in millions of circumstances around the world, but the thesis of A Man’s Work is different. The thesis is that men’s work is a technology that we lost, and it is up to men to find again. 

Here’s what I mean by this.

• Emotional connection for men looks different than for women because we process emotions differently. The way fear, anger, shame, sadness, and joy show up in men looks different than in women. This makes men intuitive at reading other men emotionally. And like any form of intuition, it requires recognition and practice to build. How can we do that?

• Men can learn emotional expression much more directly from other men than from women. A man can see a woman cry and not feel the pain she’s feeling. When the same man sees another man cry - especially another man he respects like a father figure - his nervous system learns to cry. I know this has been true at least for myself. How can we train our nervous systems to express ourselves more fully?

• The settings where men emotionally connect are often different than for women. A prime example is the existence of men’s groups. There are thousands of men’s groups across the US that, in my opinion, provide a high degree of emotional exploration and development for men. There are very few groups tailored to women, and the interest to create new ones among women is far lower. This begs the question, what environments and settings are more conducive to men diving in and doing emotional work?

These differences explain to me why the status quo fails men’s emotional development. We don’t have our own spaces, our own language, or our own tools to improve our own emotional development. I think men have consciously and unconsciously yielded the development of those things to women.

And so rediscovering these lost technologies becomes the mission. And because there’s no guidebook, it’s messy. It looks like thousands of different groups and millions of men figuring out what works for them. It looks like a lot of trial and error of new tools and new environments. Most are bound to not work. Some will move things along. A few will change the game. A Man’s Work is dedicated to that process.

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Isabella has written her own piece about the meaning of What Would A White Man Do? It’s a deliberately provocative title that makes a lot of white dudes defensive. I find that a little funny because people wear “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets and I imagine Jesus is pretty cool with that. 

And I also get it. White men embody an archetype that means a lot of things to a lot of people - both good and bad. Traits like entitlement, confidence, and being vocal can serve us and not serve us. 

Part of “the work” for anyone, in my opinion, is understanding how other people perceive us. For white dudes, we get whiffs of this from social media, which trends towards political and shallow language. Getting a deeper understanding requires deeper portrayals.

Another part of “the work” in my opinion is to view personal development not as fixing broken parts of ourselves, but setting up our lives to give to others. A lot of white dudes have to get over a lot of shame, and filter a lot of negative public narrative, to get there. Empathetic dialogue like the one Isabella’s newsletter encourages is a useful path I’ve found to do that.

You can subscribe to Isabella’s blog What Would A White Man do here: