Reflection

Masculinity Across a Life: One Energy, from Boy to Wise Old Man

A great deal of what I see in my consulting room — the addictions, the eating disorders, the aggression, the aimlessness, the midlife unravelling — makes more sense when you stop treating it as a list of separate problems and see it as one thing moving through a life. A man’s development, to my mind, is organised around a single energy he must learn to master, and the shape of a life is the story of what becomes of that energy at each stage. Get the stages in view and the trouble stops looking random. It is nearly always an energy that has found no channel — arrested at a stage it should have moved through.

The boy: raw energy, and the blueprint

It begins as body and impulse. A boy is appetite, will, the refusal to be small — the raw, aggressive, appetitive force I have come to call, after the myth, the Kronos energy. It is not a defect to be suppressed. Unmastered, it is dangerous, to others and above all to himself; mastered, it becomes the engine of an entire life — ambition, courage, the capacity to go after what one wants. The first task of boyhood is simply to channel it, which at its best is what sport is for: a container in which aggression can be spent, disciplined, and felt as strength rather than shame.

And from the very start there is a figure at the centre of it: the father. A boy becomes what he has seen, and what he sees, above all, is his father — the image through which a son learns what it is to be a man, the blueprint of masculinity. A father who lives in his body, who can feel, who takes care of himself and pursues his desire, hands the son a template he can use. A father who cannot feel hands down something narrower: the belief that to feel at all is unmanly.

The young man: the crossing, and where it fails

Then comes the crossing every young man has to make. Early life belongs to the mother’s world — where food is the first language of love, where needs are met, where it is safe to stay small. To grow is to enter the father’s world: challenge, separation, risk, the demand to become someone of one’s own. Some young men cannot make that crossing, and stay where it is warm rather than step into the world that asks something of them.

This, in my experience, is what sits beneath much male suffering. A male eating disorder is often a boy who has remained where food answers every need, the energy that should be pushing him out into life turned back against the body — the endless chase after an imaginary body, a “Body Number 2”, in place of an actual life. Addiction is the same retreat by another route: a substance that meets the need without the world having to be faced. In both, the energy has no channel, and so it consumes the young man from within. What looks like several problems — the drinking, the war with food, the rage, the drift — is frequently one: an energy with nowhere to go. The work here is not to break the fire but to make the father’s world crossable, and to hand the young man the reins of his own drive.

The first half: the hero

Where the crossing is made and the energy is mastered, it turns into direction. This is the heroic half of life — building, conquering, asserting: the vocation, the diploma, the love, the kingdom. It is right and necessary that a young man should live this way; the hero is exactly what the first half of life asks for. The danger lies only in believing it is the whole story — that the lean, victorious, self-made figure is the one image of a man, when it is one kind of man, not all men. There are heroic lives that look nothing like Rambo: the man who writes the book, who pursues a quiet mastery. A boy needs to know they exist, because one of them may be his.

Midlife: the energy meets mortality

And then, usually somewhere near the fortieth year — though it can come earlier, brought on by a death, an illness, a near miss — the same energy meets something it cannot conquer. The moment a man truly grasps that he will age, and one day die, the heroic project quietly loses its power to satisfy. People rarely arrive naming it a “midlife crisis”. They come with a decision that seems to be waiting — leave the marriage, leave the work — or with a duller unease: nothing dramatic, life going on as usual, yet strangely hard to carry. Is this all?

It is, at bottom, a crisis of meaning. We live by a succession of small meanings — pass the exam, get the licence, start the family — each right for its season; midlife is the discovery that these no longer suffice, and that a larger one has to be found. This is why spirituality so often arrives at precisely this moment. Handled well, the crisis is not a breakdown but a passage — and the very energy that built the first half of life is what must now be turned toward meaning rather than conquest.

The second half: the wise old man

On the far side of that passage stands the figure the whole arc has been moving toward. The first half of life belongs to the hero; the second can belong to the wise old man — the one who, having made his way, no longer needs to conquer, and turns instead to serve the generation coming up behind him. This is not the loss of the energy. It is its final form.

And here the circle closes. The elder who has mastered his energy across a whole life becomes, for a boy, the very thing the boy most needs: a father — present, and safe to approach — who makes the father’s world worth entering. The man at the end of the arc is what allows the boy at the beginning to make his crossing at all. One energy, one life: from the raw force of the boy, through the hero, to the old man who hands it on.

And through it all, the body was only ever the envelope; the personality is the letter. What matters, at every stage, is not the shape of the body or the size of the kingdom, but a life that the energy is allowed to serve rather than consume.

This is the arc I have spent my career inside, and each stage has its own essay: the energy a young man must master; what happens when it is turned against the body; and what it becomes when it meets mortality at midlife. None of this romanticises real danger — an eating disorder or an addiction is a serious illness, and is treated as one. But naming the thing underneath, and giving it somewhere to go, is where a life so often begins again.

The hub of the series One Energy, a Whole Life.

See also: Rehab, Honestly — when it helps, and how to choose one.