Men have historically done wild, difficult shit.
Before petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, whale oil was the primary source of lighting fuel in the Western world.
It lit lamps, lubricated machinery of the industrial revolution, and was even used to make soap and candles. In other words, entire cities glowed because men risked their lives halfway across the world to hunt and kill whales.
A whaling ship was usually a stout, broad-beamed vessel — not fast, but built to haul 1,000 barrels of oil. It smelled of tar, oak, and the unmistakable nostril sting of sea salt. The decks would already be slick with grease before they’d ever left the port.
Twenty to thirty men, often strangers, were crammed into a floating factory. Most were dirt poor; some were runaway slaves, indigenous islanders, or drifters who’d signed their mark for a chance at a share.
Ships often left New Bedford or Nantucket with crowds on shore waving. For wives and children, the dockside goodbye was nearly a funeral. Women knew they might not see their men for 3–5 years.
Once at sea, a whaler's life was a pendulum swinging between monotony and madness; floating on the sea for weeks staring at an endless horizon, eating salted pork, hardtack (rock-hard biscuits crawling with weevils), beans, and molasses. Fresh food was sparse unless trading for the (very rare) fruit at ports, and would rot quickly. Water grew slimy in barrels after months on the water. Scurvy would gnaw at the bleeding gums of the vitamin-C deficient crew.
Ordinary sailors slept crammed in the forecastle (the front of the ship). Dark, low-ceilinged, airless, damp. Hammocks swung inches apart. The smell of sweat, bilge water, and oil was suffocating. Vermin scurried over restless, exhausted bodies at night.
During the weeks, months, years of searching for a whale, the crew mended sails, coiled rope, sharpened tools, and endured crushing boredom. Entertainment was minimal — scrimshaw carving, sea shanties, gambling. Tempers flared often.
Then, sudden frenzy:
A man roars, adrenaline coursing, to alert the crew:
"THAR SHE BLOWS" (as in, a blowhole is seen blasting mist as it peaks up from the waves).
The main ship launches smaller open whaleboats — about 28 feet long, slender, and manned by six men with oars. These boats cut through the sea with terrifying fragility, like frail matchsticks on the heaving Pacific. They closed in silently, men holding their breath, while the harpooner stood at the prow, muscles taut with nervous tension.
The harpoon was hurled like a spear, biting deep into blubber. The wounded whale thrashed — its tail could smash a boat to kindling.
Then the “Nantucket sleigh ride”: the harpooned whale lurched away, dragging the tiny boat at breakneck speed, the line screaming and smoking through the thole pins. Men clung on white-knuckled, knives ready to cut the rope if it wrapped a leg.
After hours of being dragged, the whale would tire. Then came the killing blow — a long lance thrust between the ribs into the lungs or heart. Blood would fountain from the leviathan, staining the sea red. The whale sometimes took hours to die, choking and spouting crimson spray.
The carcass was lashed to the side of the mother ship, massive and stinking. It could be 60 feet long, dwarfing the ship itself. Men stood on the slippery, bobbing body with spades and knives, slicing thick slabs of blubber called “blanket pieces” — some as large as a room, weighing tons. Hooks and tackles swung them aboard.
The ship became a slaughterhouse. Oil and blood coated every surface on deck. The men worked half-naked, smeared with gore, the smell clinging to their skin for weeks. Sharks often circled below, snapping at chunks of whale rot.
At the center of the ship stood brick furnaces with iron cauldrons — the “try-pots.” This was unique to whalers: open fire on a wooden ship, surrounded by barrels of flammable oil.
Strips of blubber were cut into small chunks, fed into the pots, and boiled down into golden oil. Dense smoke blackened the sails; the rotting stench gagged the crew. The smell was described as rancid, greasy, and nauseating, saturating clothes and hair until no amount of scrubbing could remove it.
After years at sea, once the ship’s hold was finally filled with barrels of oil and baleen (“whalebone”), the journey home was no victory lap. The return trip might still take months, battling storms, doldrums, or rounding Cape Horn again. A single rogue wave or oil fire could destroy years of labor (not to mention, end the lives of the sailors on board).
By then, the vessel was weather-beaten, sails patched a hundred times, the decks warped and black with soot from the try-pots. Men were malnourished, sick, and covered in scars. Some had died and been sewn into canvas, weighted with stones, and slid into the sea.
Whalers were notorious in port. You would smell a whaling ship before you saw it — the rancid reek of boiled blubber and smoke clung to the timbers. Merchants might celebrate the barrels of oil, but townsfolk were appalled by the repugnant stench of the men's homecoming.
Unlike merchant sailors, whalers were paid in “lays” (fractions of profit).
- Greenhands (rookies): 1/200th to 1/250th lay.
- Ordinary seamen: 1/100th to 1/150th lay.
- Boatsteerers/harpooners: maybe 1/80th.
- First mate: 1/20th.
- Captain: often 1/16th or more.
After 3–4 years at sea, a greenhand’s total take-home might be $50–$150 (in mid-1800s money). For perspective, a common laborer on shore might make that in a single year — without risking his life to harpoon sea monsters.
A whaleman might spend three to five years at sea, risk death a dozen times, endure hunger, filth, mutiny, and madness — and come home with enough money to buy a new coat and boots. Meanwhile, the lamps of New York, Boston, and London burned bright with the oil he’d boiled in hell.
This meager compensation assumed they harpooned and processed a whale at all.
Whales were overhunted by the mid-19th century. Ships often returned from what would be called a "gameless voyage" after 3–4 years with half their barrels empty. Since sailors were paid only by their “lay” (share of profits), a fruitless voyage meant four years of life-threatening labor for zero pay. A man could spend his youth at sea and step ashore penniless, while his family starved in his absence.
Most men simply can't fathom that level of suffering and sacrifice to do anything of significance, let alone work and provide for themselves and their families.
I count myself amongst those men. There is no way my soft ass could ever endure four freaking years on the ocean trying to hunt a sea monster so that my family MAYBE could eat. Yes, it's true that few whalemen signed on willingly. It was poverty, debt, discrimination, or desperation that drove them. But that's a flavor of survival sacrifice most modern men in the West rarely taste, if ever.
Even today’s hardest jobs — logging in Alaska, deep-sea crab fishing, working oil rigs — are brutal, but they’re measured in weeks or months, not years. Whalemen endured 3–5 years without break, without safety nets, without medical care.
But forget the hardest jobs; many men today would have panic attacks if the Wi-Fi goes out, the bougie restaurant they're in doesn't have a keto option, or they forget their cell phone at home when they go for their afternoon stroll.
We just don't fucking work anymore.
I feel sheepish talking about this as an online entrepreneur working from the comfort of behind a blue-light flickering laptop, but I can't help feeling the tension of our modern aversion to skilled manual labor. In North America, skilled trades are bleeding out:
Since 2007, the construction workforce has fallen by about 11%—from 6.9 million to 6.2 million workers. Interest in carpentry apprenticeships dropped nearly 50% between 2020 and 2022, signaling a generational collapse in new talent.
At the same time, more than 20% of current workers are already over 55, and nearly 41% are expected to retire by 2031. Fewer than 10% of tradespeople are under 25, leaving a thin pipeline to replace them.
Industry groups estimate a shortage of roughly half a million workers per year just to meet demand. Together, these trends reveal a shrinking labor force shaped by cultural devaluation of manual trades, the lure of white-collar (or online entrepreneurship) paths, and the erosion of apprenticeship systems.
My business partner Matthew and I teach people how to build online coaching practices that make $12-25k per month. We often give our clients shit when we time audit them to see how many hours they're putting into their business. Many people end up putting in less than 10-15 hours, claiming lack of time, excess stress, lack of energy, motivation, or inspiration, or needing to dedicate the time to "self care and nervous system regulation".
100% of the time, the reality is that people (including me) are pissing their time away on bullshit like doomscrolling Instagram brainrot, randomly drifting from distraction to distraction, or "productive procrastination", binging on unimportant tasks that create the illusion of progress.
Open up your screentime app right now. I dare you. Stare how much of your life you're giving to Zuck's black hole straight in the face.
It's a rare select few that actually own their own time, cultivate the metaskill of sustained attention towards a directed aim, and don't go for the quick hit of sacrifice-free instant dopamine that our modern world offers us.
Matthew flies into a rage when he finds out someone doesn't use Google calendar, and exiles them into the "banished from working with us" bucket.
Time management and fragmented attention spans aside, our modern world is optimized for convenience and comfort. We're offered a life free from ever having to experience the edge of our capacity, strength, fortitude, or endurance in any way, shape, or form.
I believe this to be poison to a human soul, particularly for men.
Initiation.
This weekend, I spent 4 days in the backcountry with 9 other hardy men, traversing over the mountains of British Columbia to camp in by an obscure lake, hacking dead trees at full force with a dull axe to build 10 foot fires to warm us while we drank whisky and sang sea shanties that we didn't know the words to.
The lads call it the "Savvy Send" (named after a ski touring company they used to run where they'd take adventurers deep into the back country to shred wildly dangerous routes) and have done it for over 15 years.
The walk-in to our campsite was treacherous in ways I'd never experienced. Fighting our way through dense, wet alder, tripping over roots and dead logs, slogging through rivers with no viable way to cross other than "get knee deep and deal with your soaked boots", with shaking legs trying to balance an 80 lb bag stuffed with camping gear, steaks, freeze-dried meals, and not nearly enough water as we traversed up uneven and unstable boulder fields.
I'm no stranger to summiting, having lived on and off for 8 years in Banff, Alberta in the Canadian Rockies. But all the hikes I'd done previously were on maintained trails, switchbacks that gently coiled up to the peak, with the occasional scramble up loose scree. They were tough, but nothing even remotely close to as demanding as this.
I'd never been so confronted by a physical challenge as I was bushwhacking and trailblazing our way to our remote camp spot, with sloshing boots and both quads on the verge of hitting a double charley horse with still a half mile to straight-shoot up a mountain. I was utterly under-prepared, and under-geared.
The mental gates I had to pass through were as intense and grueling as the hike was on my body, terrified of being the one weak, dumb liability whose legs would give out, tumble down the slope, and either die, or have to be helicoptered out by mountain rescue.
I didn't die, but my body felt broken by the time we arrived and I set up my tent. Every joint in my body creaked, my left knee was so cooked I could barely bend or put weight on it, and I was so exhausted that I completely dissociated.
Every man felt demolished. And not a single one of them let it stop our drive forward to do what we had to do. There wasn't a moment's break before we started tying up tarps, hunting around the area with our axe and saws to gather wood to build the fire, and started cooking the pounds and pounds of steak we'd brought on a dirty, ashen, searing hot rock.
The following days, we drove our broken bodies and went full lumberjack cutting down and "processing" several gargantuan dead trees, taking turns hacking away at the trunks at full force with a dull axe while the other men screamed obscenities to egg us on.
We'd then either shoulder or "tired flip" the huge logs back to our fire pit to burn through the night. My aching body got covered in moss, dirt, and several gashing cuts on my shoulders, legs, and hands, making grasping the axe handle an agonizing endeavor.
It was the most miserably uncomfortable experience I've ever suffered through. There were at least 4 times I thought I was going to die as I tripped and fell down the mountains, suffered through the unrelenting elements, and felt the lactic acid burning and cramping and nearly immobilizing every muscle in my body.
And it was one of the happiest and fulfilled I'd ever been in my life.
For most of human history, boys became men through ordeal. You were taken from the mother, stripped of your comforts, plunged into trial, and forced to face death—whether symbolic or literal. Out of that descent, you returned with scars, with knowledge, with responsibility. You weren’t a “man” because of age, hormones, or career. You were a man because you had died to boyhood and been reborn into responsibility.
Spartan boys would be taken from their families at age 7 to spend 5 years in an agōgē. They would be given single cloak for the year—no shoes, no beds. They ate sparingly, often encouraged to steal, but punished brutally if caught—not for the theft, but for being incompetent enough to fail.
Training in running, fighting, singing war songs, and enduring pain was their primary way of life until the age of 12. Literacy was minimal; obedience, toughness, and cunning were top priority.
Then, from 12-18, they would endure even more brutal trials through adolescence: Whippings at public altars (sometimes to death) to train endurance of pain. Extreme hunger—deliberately half-fed to force creativity and theft. Constantly mocked and tormented for psychological hardening.
Finally, the most infamous trial: selected youths were sent into the countryside armed only with knives, tasked to survive by stealth and—chillingly—to murder helots (Sparta’s enslaved underclass) as a way of instilling terror and proving their ruthlessness. This was initiation as bloodletting: to bond the young warrior not only to his comrades, but to the violent maintenance of Spartan order.
After they had proven themselves, at 20, a Spartan male could fight but was not yet a full citizen. He lived in communal barracks, ate in syssitia (common messes), and remained under iron-fisted discipline. He was part of the phalanx, but still under the city’s guardianship. Marriage was permitted, but until age 30, he could not live with his wife—Sparta demanded his loyalty first.
Are you fucking kidding me?
When I was out in the woods, I realized how absurdly weak (physically, psychically, mentally) I actually was, naked to the harshness of the elements and exertion demanded of me.
On the last call of his Mentally Fit Course this past week (which was an initiatory ceremony in its own right), my friend and mentor Erick Godsey said that there are one of two ways that our soul will try to get it to move in the direction of our dharma (life purpose):
1- We can ignore its whisper and continue to hide in comfort and distraction until life is forced to deliver us disruptive, ego-crushing tragedy (like our job, relationship(s), health, physical well being blowing up), becoming too loud to ignore.
2- We can voluntarily put ourselves through initiations, and start doing the shit that scares us, challenges us, and invites ego death so that our characters can live up to our life purpose.
Researching the historic masculine initiation rites for this article further exacerbated the brutally confronting reality that we simply don't have to deal with the hardships that once forged us into men in the modern world. And the weakness of men doesn't just hurt men... it hurts everyone. When men suffer, women suffer, as we outlined in our last article about testosterone decline in the modern world.
Different indigenous cultures had rites of passage as part of their cultural heritage to usher boys into manhood. They typically involved inordinate amounts of physical and mental suffering to harden and forge them into the strong, capable men suited for their role in their community.
The Lakota, Ojibwe, and other Plains tribes in North America all did variations of vision quests, where boys fast alone for days in a remote, exposed place — mountain top, cliff, or open prairie. No food, no water, no shelter. He waits for dreams or visions, confronting the Creator through creation itself.
Australian aboriginals used survival-as-initiation "walkabouts", where adolescent boys are sent into the outback for weeks or months, navigating by stars and landmarks, surviving on gathered food, often with minimal tools.
The Mandan Okipa Ceremony was a brutal ceremony where, after a significant period of fasting and isolation, young men entered a lodge where their chests and shoulders were pierced with wooden skewers. These skewers were attached to ropes hung from the roof beams, sometimes with buffalo skulls attached to their ankles for more weight to tug on their flesh, and the initiates were suspended until they fainted from pain and blood loss (a symbolic "death"). The ordeal ended when the skewers ripped out of the skin. This initiation was to create a shared suffering with women of the tribe; men cannot create life through birth, so they “balanced” the cosmic scales by enduring bloodletting, mutilation, and agony, entering into the mystery of life through pain.
The Maasai of Africa have to hunt a fucking lion with a spear. To slay the fiercest predator on the Serengeti was to take on its courage and power, becoming a defender of the community. The act bound the warrior archetype directly to the ecological predator-prey drama.
Because our culture doesn't have baked-in initiation rites, it's our responsibility to create our own rites of passage where we are confronted with the edge of our capacity. All of these aforementioned indigenous rites had the commonality of confronting and honoring the reality of death.
Our own self-imposed limitations seldom have this direct encounter with our own "corporeal impermanence" baked in, but we can expose ourselves to sufficient suffering to collapse our ego, and microdose mortality. We can put ourselves through significant suffering and behavior change to die to who our personalities defined ourselves to be.
Confront the Gates: Designing Your Own Rites
Matthew and I designed our QX Business Coaching Method to be a type of initiation. It's not purely tactical; it's transformational, which by nature, is disruptive and destructive.
At each step, it requires a person to challenge the existing paradigm they've been living in, adopt new habits and behaviors, and navigate a type of 'ego death' as they confront learning curves, fears of being seen, reputation destruction from doing reachout, blocks around asking for money, and actually standing for something in their content.
It forces them to have more skin in the game in their own work, embody the practices they preach more, and uses tools that you won't often find in your typical business coaching container, like neuroscience, building external nervous systems with tech, Internal Family Systems style parts work, and even dream interpretation (yes, really).
When people courageously face their own triggered resistance to their behavior and identity change, they become the type of person who can reliably make $12-25k per month while helping people with their coaching offers.
Matthew and I are about to start our own initiation for our Physical Pillar called 100 Days of Discipline. For 100 straight days, we are going to commit to hard, high volume calisthenics workouts. If we miss a day, we start again at day 1.
During those 100 days, we've committed to only eat the following foods:
🥩 Beef (mostly ground with biweekly steaks)
🥣 Bone broth + gelatin
🥚 12 Raw egg yolks
🧈 Butter
🍉 Fruit (mostly watermelon and pineapple)
🍯 Honey
🌴 Dates (Matthew only)
☕ Coffee
💧 Water
⚡ Electrolytes
... with a few supplements like creatine, and some vitamins/minerals to fill in a few nutritional gaps.
This isn't optimal in terms of training or nutrition. It's just hard, limited, and specific. The constraints and challenge are meant to improve physical health and capacity, but above that, sharpen the mental muscles of discipline and consistency, while obliterating the parts of ourselves that would be all too eager to make mental excuses (including the excuses that "it's not optimal enough").
Matthew is aiming to gain 10-15 lbs, while I'm aiming to lose the same amount (effectively "swapping" our current starting weights).
When you're designing your own initiation rites, it's tempting to overhaul your entire life, go full-tilt trying to implement 50 new behaviors, and end up crashing and burning in a tar pit of dissonance and self sabotage. Don't do that. Instead, I recommend a gradual build-up of changes that iterate and compound in difficulty as you slowly build up a foundation of capacity.
Here are some starting points that you can jump into. I suggest committing for 30-40 days, and tracking your progress every day in either a journal, or a Notion dashboard habit tracker.
Level 1: Commit to 90 minutes of deep work per day ("Dharma Sprinting").
After I read the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, I was awakened to the radical importance of developing the metaskill of sustained, undistracted attention directed towards a desired aim.
I started doing a practice that I called "Monotasking", where I'd set a timer for 1-3 hours, and do undistracted focused work. No phone checking. No side questing. No task switching.
Later, when I was exposed to the work of Erick Godsey, I'd found out that he'd read the same book and created a practice with a way cooler mythopoetic framing that he calls 'Dharma Sprints'.
It's almost identical to my own framework that I'd used in the past, with a few adjustments (which I've bolded):
- Decide on the next "right action" that you are going to take
- Choose the duration of the sprint
- Define the constraints
- When the timer is set, you either do the task or you meditate
- When finished, write an honest review of how it went
The swap out of "doing nothing" for meditation is a good choice; my original idea behind doing nothing was to allow yourself to get so bored again that you're motivated to get back to your work. However, the spacing out and doing nothing allowed for a lot of passive fantasy, rumination, and an unconscious runaway mind that's thinking about the past and future... and frankly, a runaway monkey mind is quite likely if you're just starting to mend your attentional injuries. Meditation solves this by directing your mind to the present moment, and puts up guardrails to prevent it from wandering to a million different irrelevant places.
The review is the coolest part, though. It adds the element of progressive iteration, helping you develop a "practice within the practice"; maybe you interrupted yourself because you had to go up and get a glass of water. Next time, before your sprint, you'll have a glass of water next to you before you start. Maybe you couldn't resist checking your phone within the parameters; next time, you can delete all the tempting apps, and go put your phone, turned off, in a drawer, in another room (I have literally had to lock my phone in a timed safe at various phases of my journey).
The point is to discover your areas of opportunity to improve it... then use the next Sprint as the experiment to see if your hypothesis worked. Over time, you'll develop your own systems, environmental setups, triggers and rituals that will help you drop into deep work more reliably.
Maybe you finished sooner than you expected, then floundered around for another 20 minutes trying to figure out the next thing to do; next time, you'll have a primary, and a secondary task ready to shift into with your leftover time (or you'll end your sprint early, do a reflection, and prepare for the next one).
90 minutes is the standard duration for a Dharma Sprint initiate until you develop your focus muscle.
I am doing a Dharma Sprint to finish this article explaining to you what Dharma Sprints are.
If you have no major projects that you're currently working on that are the clear and obvious answer to what you should funnel your focus into, I suggest committing to a radically honest journaling exercise that helps you develop a deeper relationship to your soul, and helps clarify a future vision for a life that is authentic to you.
I've developed a journaling and habit tracking template you can use, which you can find here.
Your level 1 might then look like:
- 40 minutes of radically honest pillar prompt journaling
- 20 minutes of reading
- 30 minutes of writing/reflecting on what you learned (in the same journal page)
Level 2: Bookends
"Bookend Habits" are how you start and end your days - typically the first and last 90 minutes.
While some people advocate for long, elaborate morning routines, my personal flow has evolved over time to look like:
I used to journal in the mornings, but I found that beginning my day with emotional introspection put me too deeply in my feelings to be effective and dialed in for work.
Instead, I moved my journaling to the evenings, which (when dialed in) looks like this:
- Phone on DnD and plugged in the other room at 8 pm
- Blue light blocking glasses on, 30 minutes of journaling
- 30 minutes of reading/taking notes on what stands out
- 10 minutes of breathwork/hapé/prayer
- Pass tf out
A few core elements I've found to be fundamental to building a life that doesn't feel like a dumpster fire are that:
1- Your ideal day actually starts the night before
2- Learning to get 7-8 hours of sleep per night is one of the most indispensable skills that you can possibly cultivate (which is why I have a whole section on it in our business coaching curriculum)
Level 3: Commit to a Vision/Project
This one is spicy.
Maybe there's something that you've always said you wanted to do, but have never had the courage, strength, or gumption to commit to. For me, those things have been/currently are:
- Creating a sustainable online business that shares the frameworks I've used to save my own life
- Recording an album of my own music
- Having a consistent writing practice (in the form of regular published articles or a newsletter)
- Run a retreat abroad
For you, it'll probably be different. You might not know exactly what it is until you've done 30-40 days of honest journaling, and it bursts out from the pages you've written like a roaring dragon that you now know you have to slay. When the "big scary thing" is apparent to you, and you have a clear picture of what that authentic, genuine ache to create something is, then you answer these questions:
1- What is the vision of the future I want to create?
2- What are the habits of the person I need to be to create it?
3- What can I commit to daily that I can track which makes me more like that future version of myself?
Then you make a checklist. And you commit.
Memento Mori: Prepare for Death
Doing this will trigger the shit out of you. You'll come up against resistance, stories, excuses, and your fried out, desensitized dopamine pathways that have been bludgeoned to death by our distracting, instant-gratification digitally dumbed-down world.
Joe Dispenza has a book called "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself", which talks about the unconscious loop of thought–emotion–behavior cycles where you keep thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same emotions, and acting the same way—so your body becomes addicted to your past identity and keeps recreating the same reality, even when you consciously want change.
Like the initiates fasting in the wilderness, you'll experience the pain of withdrawal from your familiar reality, and your psyche will go into full rebellion as you attempt to step into a version of yourself that isn't grooved into the synaptic superhighways of practiced self-identity.
Committing to a new morning routine won't make you confront your mortality the way that almost falling down a mountain or starving yourself in the woods in bear, wolf, and cougar territory will,
But it will make you feel like your old personality is dying.
Be mindful of death.
Set up an initiation. Track your progress. Notice your resistance. Don't beat yourself up if you fall off - remind yourself that it "makes sense", collect the data, and make iterations. Recommit. Repeat.
If at first you don't succeed,
Die, die again.
Suggested Reading:
Jams in Heavy Rotation
This song was the song stuck in my head and was used as the rhythmic anchor to my axe swings when I was aching in the woods
Wanna get Brunked?
Matthew and I have a free WhatsApp group with all the workouts, exercises, and details of the 100 Days of Discipline training plan, as well as a community of people dropping in when they're completing their daily workout for accountability. You can hop in for free HERE.
If you commit to making your own initiation, make an IG story about it for public accountability and tag me (@anthony.manuele)
Luv u,
A
