INSPIRATIONAL HUMANS

Men in the Modern Day

What it means to be the Man in the Arena

Photo by Russ Ward on Unsplash

The seventh day of the coming month of November will mark my twenty-fourth birthday. While this may seem a random way to start off an article, (it is by the way) this is a fact which has led me to undertake some degree of introspection. Having spoken to my parents, aunts, uncles, and other such older friends and family, the general consensus I received was that I should be have been considered an adult for all intents and purposes from the age of twenty-three onwards.

So while the seventh will mark my birthday, it will also to a certain extent mark a full year of adulthood, a full year as my father puts it of having been a man in the real world. A startling thought to come upon while drinking a can of beer by a canal, to say the least.

This is a strange time to be a man (or a woman for that matter, I am merely speaking from my own perspective) as so many of the milestones which normally mark out a man’s life are still well beyond the grasp of your everyday twenty-three-year-old.

Can I afford a mortgage? — not a chance in any form of hell. Do I have a stable well paying job? — not even close. Am I in a committed long-term relationship and looking at getting engaged or even married in the near future? Again, I will have to reiterate that I am nowhere close to this.

At twenty-three years of age, I am currently a relatively broke masters student living in a foreign country and hoping to pick up a bar job to fund myself, the same profession I have been in for many years — still sweeping floors, dealing with drunk clientele, and the other more unsavory parts of the profession which has led a number of friends and family, who are of a more traditional mindset, to question what I am doing with my life and give not-so-subtle hints that I should be farther along the stereotypical route of being a man.

Photo by Adam Jaime on Unsplash

Yet, it seems that this disconnect is one that many others face. So many people I have come in contact with describe similar sensations of arrested development, questioning…