Safetyism vs. The Soul

Teddy Roosevelt encouraged us men to seek challenge in our lives. He told men to embrace failure and risk because it is far better to pursue glorious victories than live a life of ignoble ease. He called it the strenuous life. He described a life that rejects the modernist , comfort seeking doctrine.

I see lots of young men who are not just seeking comfort but are afraid to seek challenge, even of the smallest kind. I see young men who are afraid of failure, afraid of looking foolish, and afraid of looking like a beginner. To be a beginner is often to look foolish, making it doubly frightening.

A man's mind, body, and spirit atrophies when he isn't challenged. Men become increasingly incapable of facing even the simplest of challenges. Arriving on time, maintaining a home, building their fitness and even personal cleanliness become impossible tasks. The enervation of young men is a sinister tyranny that consumes them and society by inches not by leaps.

This timidity is not the hard tyranny of Stalin, Pol Pot, or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with death camps and public executions. It is a tyranny of soft despotism that is central to the doctrines of modernity. The modern doctrines make men only concerned with base pleasures, and immediate gratification. Those who would otherwise be strong young men are infantilized into submission. At worst they are transformed into bleating sheep who hope and trust that the government will act with benevolence and protect their flock. These men, in the name of safety and comfort, trade away their liberties. No society in history has regained their liberty without a great deal of bloodshed.

This is the result of decades of safetyism; an ideology that spares feelings at the expense of learning to overcome setbacks. Further, safetyism interrupts young men's natural desire to explore their world and test their limits. Risk taking is the native tongue of youth. To silence it is to mute a young man's soul. It is increasingly clear that young men can feel safetyism smothering them like a wet blanket, even if they can't articulate it.

That is not to say their risk taking should be without boundaries but young men who don't push themselves are stunted well into adulthood. It was not so long ago that young men in their 20's were starting families, businesses, or struck out for adventure across the country or world. Today they spend hours lost in video games or pornography. They are not starting families, not even dating, and have been taught that masculinity is intrinsically evil. Safetyism, and all the adjacent modern 'isms, erase failure by erasing greatness. The ideologies demand the strong feign weakness to prevent the weak feeling small.

This doctrine has failed young men and likewise failed us all.

In my youth it was cool, even admirable, for a young man to strike out on his own. Maybe he would move across the country, sleep out of his car or couch surf, all in the pursuit of a dream. They would start a small business and grow into a empire. They would be celebrated for thier tenacity and grit. James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison were between the ages of 18 and 25 when they signed the Declaration of Independence. Functionally writing and signing their own death warrants. They then started a revolution against the British superpower and won, securing an eternal legendary status.

We can't all fight a revolution or command regiments into battle like our founding fathers. Today, our battle is largely internal. We have to find what William James called "The Moral Equivalent of War". This can be found in courage, discipline, and a communal pride, as he explained in 1906. These tenets hold today and they can be found in the gym.

I practice what I am preaching. I am consistently looking for challenges in my own life. I refine some of the things I'm good at, or I cast it aside because I feel that I'm good enough. This makes me very useful, even bordering on expert, in dozens of domains. It also means I have room in my life to seek those things that don't come naturally to me. Case in point, in January of 2026 I put down my Muay Thai gear, after nearly 20 years, and picked up Olympic weightlifting. Which I am terrible at. It's like a battle between me and the weight bar itself. Strength is not the issue here, I am plenty strong. No, the challenge is balance and technique. It takes courage to set aside the things in which I am proficient and embrace being a novice in a completely new domain.

The olympic lifts require speed, precision and violence of action. It is an argument between the lifter and gravity, a fight for supremacy over the bar. I lose the argument more often than not. I regularly Steinborn squat and standing military press my body weight. But I can't clean and jerk nearly that much. My brute strength is useless without the development of the skill. My near empty bar often comes crashing to the floor when I perform the snatch. Only a few feet away a young woman half my size lifts her body weight overhead with relative ease.

I seek this challenge explicitly because I can't do it easily. I'd rather fail in pursuit of a triumph than do things I conquered long ago. Seeking challenge for yourself is a quiet personal rebellion against a world that would have you quieted by entertainment and pacified by technology.

The man who seeks challenge, does difficult things regularly, is less afraid to do difficult things in many other aspects of life. He faces challenges at work and in relationships with a steadier hand than he would have otherwise. He can build things, like businesses or skills, even the practical work required to maintain a home. He is the very thing a despotic ruler fears, useful, self sufficient, and ambitious. He builds where they destroy. He demands his natural liberty where they demand compliance.

Young men, all men, but young men especially, have a duty to themselves and their families, community, and country to be as fit as possible face life's inevitable challenges. Productivity, prosperity and security are byproducts of this seemingly simple and somewhat self-interested activity.

In other articles, I have discussed the physical pillar of fitness as serving the "vessel". The greatest enemy of the vessel is the ego that prevents a young man embracing being a novice. The ego must be cast aside so the young man can acknowledge the cracks in his hull, then fix them. Once he is the novice, he must continue to keep his ego at arms length in order to accept help or instruction. He does this to serve himself so that he may serve others. A leaking, sinking, ship cannot carry anyone safely ashore.