In Healthy Men’s Work, The Leader is the Least Important Person in the Room

Like so many, I watched the Manosphere documentary on Netflix.

My first feeling wasn’t anger, shock, or disgust.

It was grief.

Because what I kept seeing, underneath all the bravado and the body counts and the Bugattis, was a sea of men who are starving. Men who have been handed a map that promises to lead them to success, to freedom, to power, to manhood, and the map is a lie and a scam. And beyond the map, the issues occur more like an old mindfield.

Let me explain what I mean.

 

The Scorecard

The Manosphere has a very clear definition of what makes a man great.

How many women have you slept with? How much money do you have? What you’ve built. What you’ve conquered.

That’s it. That’s the whole rubric.

No mention of how you show up for your kids. No mention of whether the people around you are better or worse for knowing you. No mention of integrity, or doing the right thing, or the quiet kind of strength it takes to tell the truth when lying would be easier.

And here’s the part that gets me: if you do work that hurts people but makes you a fortune? You’re a king in this world. Have no integrity, who cares? Scam, manipulate, exploit, but grow the bank account, and you’ve won.

That’s not manhood. It looks more like a bully, grown up in a sales suit. It’s the opposite of participation trophies; it’s an exploitation trophy.

 

How We Got Here

This didn’t happen overnight. There’s a through-line, and it’s worth following.

The Greatest Generation, the Boomers’ parents, built an identity around sacrifice. They sacrificed for their country, for other countries, for each other. And they were celebrated for it. Sacrifice was the currency of manhood. Putting others before yourself.

Then they had kids.

And those kids, the Boomers, watched their parents who had lived through the Great Depression and then came home from war and decided: they wanted something different, they wanted security. A House. A job. A pension. The gold watch at the end of a long, stable career. They weren’t chasing meaning; they were outrunning scarcity.

Additionally, the boomer women created the “second wave.” They brought feminist ideals to the mainstream and carved out a new place for women in the world.

And the boomers had kids.

Gen X, the “latchkey kids,” grew up watching their dads disappear into offices, their moms either working double shifts, fighting for equality, or quietly suffocating at home, and both parents performing a version of the American Dream that looked an awful lot like a slow surrender. The dream had somehow been traded for the mortgage. The aliveness had been traded for the pension.

Generation X started to break away; a skeptical generation that learned to go at it alone and pioneered “the work to live” mentality, which Millennials took and greatly expanded on.

Millennials arriving shortly after, not only said, ‘We want to live now.’ But we want it all. We want the good job, the vacations, higher wages, we want to use technology to make more and do less. Sure, we can save, but let’s spend our money while we’re young, travel while our knees still work. Experiences over assets. Don’t work a job you hate and save your whole life to enjoy it at sixty-five; no, enjoy it now. Millennials cracked something open and expanded the definition of a good life. And with that expansion came real cultural evolution, caring about other people’s lives and their feelings, not just your own, a genuine reckoning with who gets to thrive and who gets left behind.

But, and this is important, in trying to make sure everyone was okay, something else happened.

The pendulum swung hard. Traditional and conservative values got painted as the enemy. Women’s rights hadn’t been celebrated by many men as they should, but were viewed as more competition in a world that seems more and more volatile and expensive. Somehow, Men, particularly, started getting the message that the way they’d been raised, the things they’d been told made them men, were not just outdated, they were dangerous. Too many participation trophies were handed out. Everyone’s feelings were hyper-valued; women stepped up big time at home, at work, everywhere, and their lives took off. And many men, instead of being invited into a new conversation, just felt accused. Shamed. Cast out.

That created a wound. And wounds, when they don’t get treated, get infected.

With all this came social media.

And a whole new economy. You don’t need a degree. You don’t need a corner office. You need a following. You need content. You need to sell something, a course, a lifestyle, a version of yourself that people will pay to be adjacent to. The entrepreneurial dream got democratized and then immediately weaponized. Real value and manufactured value became almost indistinguishable. People started selling lifestyles they didn’t actually live, making promises they couldn’t keep, building audiences on the back of false claims and manufactured urgency.

And now the youngest generation, later Millennials and Gen Z, are inheriting all of it.

Pay has been stagnant, and inflation has skyrocketed. They can’t afford houses. They’re entering a job market with no jobs, many being devoured by AI. They’re carrying more anxiety, more debt, more uncertainty than any generation in recent memory. Social Media was also supposed to make us more social, but it’s done the opposite: made us more lonely and isolated than at any point in human history. The old playbook doesn’t work. The new one hasn’t been written yet. And they’re looking around, asking the most human questions there are:

How do I make my life mean something? How do I become someone worth being? How do I fit in, and where do I belong?

These unanswered questions are a door. And the Manosphere walked right through it.

First, it came for your fitness or your struggling dating life. Maybe it taught you it’s version of confidence, maybe it got you angry and gave you someone to blame, but always and eventually, you’re angry with a crafted identity, surrounded by others who are angry, a crew (who you likely don’t know except for the comment section), and a leader who seems to have it all figured out. And the deeper in you go, the harder it is to see what you’ve actually joined.

 

The Biggest Scam on the Internet

Writer and journalist Liz Plank recently made a brilliant observation. She pointed out that when you strip the manosphere all back, what are these men actually doing? They’re just performing for each other and seeking each other’s approval. Building followings of men who will validate them, celebrate them, and tell them they’re kings.

The Father Wound on Steroids. The women are almost beside the point.

I think it points to what’s really going on. So many of these men didn’t have healthy, loving fathers. As adults, they are lost. They are profoundly hurt, wounded, and desperately lonely. They have no healthy male role model to guide them, and the women they attract are trophies, helping them get the attention and validation from other men. These women are also easily discardable because they can’t fill the wounded hole in their hearts. Ironically, they are participation trophies, cause they really have no value or meaning. It’s not these women’s fault either; they were never going to fill the hole. They are likely wounded and lost women themselves. The wounds they are both facing aren’t about each other; they’re unhealed childhood wounds: abuse, feeling left out or behind, not knowing your value or your place in the world.

So the cycle continues. More women. More money. More content. More followers. More, more, more, chasing a feeling that the strategy can’t produce.

 

Cults With Better Branding

My friend Jason called it: the Manosphere is essentially the new gangs. A new mafia of sorts. A place where men who feel powerless, invisible, economically stressed, and emotionally isolated can find a crew. An identity. A sense of belonging. Swap the criminal enterprise for courses. Swap the rival gangs’ enemy for the systematic enemy. Swap the actual violence for trolling and online raging.

Which, honestly? I get it. That need is real. The need to belong to something, to have brothers, to feel like you’re not alone in the world, that’s not weakness. That’s one of the most human needs there is.

The problem is what these crews are actually selling.

Liz Plank also said, “The manosphere here is just homosociality if it were an MLM.” When you combine Jason and Liz Plank’s ideas, men seeking the approval of men, organized around a shared identity and a charismatic leader, you know what you’ve got?

Liz called it an MLM, but MLMs can be legit. I think it’s a pyramid scheme. Thank you, Liz and Jason, for laying the planks for me to expand on this aspect.

Tate and others like him are selling a dream. The men buy in, recruit more men, who recruit more men. The leaders get rich and famous. The followers get the feeling that they’re part of something. And the hope that if they grind harder, get colder, eliminate more weakness, they’ll eventually ascend.

They won’t. That’s not how pyramid schemes work.

 

Real Men’s Work vs The Manosphere

Here’s what I believe in my bones after years of doing men’s work:

The men who are genuinely changing lives, the coaches, the mentors, the circle-holders, the guys in the trenches helping other guys find their way, they’re not building cults. They’re building men who don’t need them anymore.

Read that again.

The leader is a tool. A container. A guide. Their job is to hold space for other men to find themselves, not to get those men to worship them. The moment a man’s leader becomes the point, something has gone wrong.

Real men’s work doesn’t ask you to be more like the guy at the front. It asks you to be more like yourself. More honest. More accountable. More capable of love, for your partner, your kids, your friends, and yes, yourself.

It doesn’t sell you a persona. It helps you shed the ones you’ve been wearing since you were eight, when you decided it wasn’t safe to feel things.

 

The Grief

There are millions of men, millions, who are turning to the manosphere right now because they are hurting. Because they feel lost. Because nobody ever taught them how to be a man in a way that actually feels like freedom.

They’re not stupid. They’re not irredeemable. They’re hungry.

And they’re being handed fast food and told it’s a feast.

That’s the grief. Not that these men are bad. They’re being failed. By leaders who are building empires instead of building men. By a culture that still confuses status with substance. By a movement that mistakes dominance for strength and isolation for power.

Real strength looks like this: being the kind of man your kids speak reverently about when they’re forty, being the kind of partner who actually shows up. Doing work in the world that you’d be proud of, even if nobody ever paid you for it.

Real freedom looks like this: knowing who you are so clearly that you don’t need a leaderboard to tell you.

That’s the work. It’s harder than buying a course. It’s slower than building a following. And it doesn’t come with a Bugatti.

But it’s the only thing that’s ever going to fill that emptiness inside of you.

 

Alex Terranova, is a 3x Author, Coach for Men, The Co-Founder of Alchemy of Men, which host Men’s Retreats and Men’s Groups with a mission to help men heal, rise, and live unreasonably. You can learn more about Alchemy of Men here