A Guide to Male "Stupidity"

What women don't understand about male bonding

Write & Lift is an ethos of personal and spiritual development through conscious physical exertion and practice of the writing craft. Through this effort to strengthen our bodies and minds, we become anti-fragile and self-respecting sovereign individuals. Through this effort, we may stand against untruth and evil and create a new culture of vitality, strength, and virtue

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A Guide to Male "Stupidity"

Ten years ago, my friends and I were drinking around a bonfire when my buddy had a brilliant idea. He picked up a large wood axe and walked over to a granite boulder with a seem down the middle and said:

“Watch this, I’m going to chop through this boulder.”

As he brought the axe over his head, we started a guttural chant. And when the axe head struck the rock, I saw the flashing millisecond of a spark before I fell to the forest floor holding a watering right eye.

I opened my left eye and saw the nickel-sized rock on the ground. I ran my hand over my face and blinked slowly. My friends watched in silence.

“I must’ve closed my eye right before it hit me. What are the fucking chances.”

We all burst out laughing and gave a toast to my near misfortune before I lunged at my drunk friend, and wrestled him to the ground. We’ve never stopped laughing about it.

When I tell this story to women, they’re transfixed. A placid look of shock and surprise. They just don’t get it. They’re not supposed to. That’s why I’m writing this.

There's something about moments of reckless absurdity that women can't comprehend: the midnight rope swing over shallow water, the drunken street race with grocery carts, countless “hold my beer” moments that could have gone terribly wrong but instead became the stories we still tell decades later. Women see danger (as they rightly should). Men see the electricity of being alive. Of proving onself to the world.

The Necessity of Stupid Shit

Men need to push boundaries like we need food. It's spiritual sustenance. A necessity. In its absence we wither, become soft, and our passion for life erodes slowly.

Before civilization corralled us into climate-controlled offices, men hunted mammoths with stone-tipped spears and crossed oceans in wooden ships. Aristocratic families sent elder sons into the officer corp to be right across the world. Spartan teenagers were abandoned on mountainsides to fend off wolves. The Comanche made their sons hunt buffalo on horseback with nothing but a spear.

The modern world took this away, so we invented our own dangers and tests. Our bodies still crave the rush of evolutionary necessity. Our biology doesn't know we've conquered nature, so we create artificial risks. We jump from higher cliffs, drive faster cars, and fight each other with rules just civilized enough to avoid permanent damage.

What impossible task have you faced? What elemental force has threatened to swallow you whole?

When men do dangerous shit with our friends, we answer an ancient call. It's entertainment and calibration. Harnessing and controlling the same spiritual energy that made our ancestors brave enough to sail into uncharted waters or climb mountains nobody had yet to name.

When men toss each other into snowbanks from balconies or set things on fire that they shouldn’t, they’re testing the limit of what their bodies and mental limits can endure. It’s not because we're stupid (although sometimes we are), but because we're desperate for the feeling of being on the edge. Necessary stupidity is the closest thing to a vision quest that modern civilization allows.

What women often miss is that these moments aren't just for entertainment, they're a covenant. When you've seen your friend do something legitimately insane, possibly lethal, and emerge unscathed, you're bound together. There's a blood pact in shared stupidity.

Greek warriors of antiquity knew this. The Sacred Band of Thebes was formed of 150 soldiers, each sworn to die before they would see their partner killed. They remained undefeated until Philip of Macedon finally destroyed them at the Battle of Chaeronea. When archaeologists uncovered their mass grave in the 19th century, they found the remains exactly as ancient writers described: pairs of men buried side by side, having died rather than abandoning each other.

Modern brotherhood doesn't require death, but it does require risk.

Trust is implicit. You watch my back; I'll watch yours. If something goes wrong, we're all in it together. If the cops show up, nobody snitches. If someone gets hurt, we get them to safety first and ask questions later.

When my eye nearly got taken out, my immediate response wasn't anger. It was relief that I still had my vision, followed by laughter at how close I’d come to disaster. We were still alive and in one piece, still brothers, still goofballs.

Hard Conversations Happen on Mountainsides

Male bonding is caricatured as superficial. Men watch sports together, talking about nothing but the game, grunting monosyllables over beer—a surface-level friendship sharing the same “occupied space.”

From a birds eye view, this isn’t inaccurate. But what is missed is that real “vulnerability” between men happens sideways. It happens in motion, during action, in the pause between one stupid adventure and the next.

I've had more honest conversations with male friends shoulder-to-shoulder than I've ever had sitting face-to-face. The most important spiritual revelations I've experienced came on adventures with my guys: filthy and sore, staring into a campfire, watching the sun rise through the window in an unknown corner of the world. The deepest conversations emerge during the drive home from somewhere we shouldn't have been.

Men talk when we're tired. When we're broken down. When we've pushed ourselves to some limit together and there's nothing left to prove. Men will open up about a failing marriage at 2 AM while tending the dying coals of a campfire. We’ll admit addiction halfway up a mountain, gasping for breath, too exhausted to maintain a facade.

The vulnerability doesn't come from a structured conversation about feelings. It comes from exhaustion. From the brief moment when we've worn ourselves down enough that the truth slips out. Women create safety first, then speak truth. Men create danger first, survive it together, and then find safety in that shared survival.

After an adventure or surviving something stupid, all social barriers fall. I've watched the most stoic men I know break down with brutal honesty after they'd been pushed to the edge first. Only after they’d earned the right to that vulnerability through risk.

We’re Happiest When Building

There's a childlike joy in men share when creating something together. We will spend ridiculous amounts of time building things that have no practical purpose. A treehouse too elaborate for any child to appreciate. A potato cannon powerful enough to puncture drywall. A homebuilt computer that serves no function beyond the satisfaction of having assembled it.

This is the shadow of our ancestors who built cathedrals, bridges, and ships. The same impulse that carved stone monuments and raised cities from wilderness. The need to shape the world, to impose our will on raw material, persists even when we have no mammoth to hunt.

When men get together in garages, basements, and workshops, we're recreating the tribal technology hub where innovations emerged. The first man to knap flint into an arrowhead did it surrounded by his brothers, all suggesting improvements, competing to make a better point.

My father has spent decades woodworking, building computers, and researching obscure genealogy. He needs this like he needs air.

We need tangible projects with visible progress. The weekends I've spent helping friends and family build decks, pour concrete, or landscape a yard weren't about the finished product. They were about the sacred act of creation, transformation, and bringing order to chaos.

And yes, we find constant excuses to turn work into play, into competition. Who can hammer a nail with one strike? Who can carry the heaviest load? Who can solve the wiring problem that no one else could figure out? These aren't just games. This is how we establish competence hierarchies without bloodshed. How we determine which man leads which aspect of the project.

A Fraternity of Choice

Men operate best with a shared mission. Something to accomplish, overcome, or complete together. We are purpose-driven in our friendships in a way that often mystifies women.

Ancient war parties had clear objectives. Hunt the mammoth. Defeat the rival tribe. Modern men still organize around missions, even when they're self-imposed. Build the deck. Win the game. Summit the peak.

This mission-oriented fraternity is why men can spend an entire day together and exchange fewer than a couple hundred words and describe it as deeply meaningful. Communication happens through shared action toward a common goal. Words become secondary when aligned in purpose.

My closest male friendships were forged in pursuit of something. Starting a band together. Working grueling jobs. Building in the summer heat. Real loyalty comes from living and working together at a breaking point.

Shared moments of idiocy transcend time.

Fifteen years later, my friends and I still reference the close calls we shared over long weekend nights. The stories are told countless times, embellished beyond recognition, and turned into a personal mythology.

These stories become a shared scripture. The oral tradition that binds us across decades. They're how we remember who we were before mortgages and middle management and mewling infants. Before our backs hurt and our hairlines receded.

These are rituals of remembrance. Keeping alive not just the memories but the feeling of being alive together in moments of intensity.

Women create scrapbooks and visual collections. Men create their own mythologies.

And in these stories, we achieve a kind of shared immortality. The story of my near-miss with the rock fragment will outlive me. My friends might tell it at my funeral, and their sons might hear it, and something of my spirit will live on in that moment of beautiful idiocy.

We’re Simple Creatures

Female friendship has its own profound beauty and strength. They’ll never bond in ways men do, but I do know they’d benefit from understanding the fabric of our retardation.

The freedom of unnecessary risk. The honesty that comes only after exhaustion. The spiritual brotherhood of shared stupidity and survival.

Both men and women suffer in a sanitized, disconnected, safety-obsessed culture.

When I watch my wife and her friends together, their connection seems formed through words, through emotional intimacy, and through the careful exchange of vulnerability. It's beautiful but so different from how I connect with my brothers.

I wonder sometimes if they envy us. Not the stupidity itself, but the freedom in it. The permission to be reckless, push boundaries, laugh in the face of danger rather than prepare for it.

Perhaps that's enough: this mutual acceptance of mystery, the acknowledgment that men and women can witness each other's bonds without fully comprehending them, the respect for different but equally sacred forms of connection.

In the end, we are all acting in ways we know to be true, though we may lack the language to describe it. The methods differ, but the goal remains the same: to feel fully alive, to be truly known, to leave stories worth telling when we're gone.

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As always, thanks for reading.

-Joe