Male Loneliness

The Call to Get Lost

The image of the Hermit from the Rider Waite-Smith Tarot deck has long symbolized the often unexpected or undesired need to journey alone in order to gain clarity and insight.

Despite building so many roads, drawing powerful maps and driving much of the transportation, men are lost.

Endless guidance on the importance of “strategy”(Seth Godin), the brilliance to “start with WHY” (Simon Sinek) and the promise of fulfillment if men just “build things that matter” (Simon Squibb) isn’t helping:

Fires are burning in Wales, the Arctic winter has risen to 20C (68F), 150 Pacific Gray Whales have washed up dead on the American Pacific shore this year and Banda, India saw temperatures of 48C (118F) last month. As we turn up the heat from our consumption of fossil fuels to enable a world where private jets can be labeled green investment, endless compute for AI ambitions voided all climate agreements and endless consumption rips up and poisons the earth, we are returning to an era of the dinosaurs where the middle of the planet was uninhabitable, sea levels were 170 meters higher than today and temperate rainforests could grow in Antarctica—but now it’s a lot more toxic.

Where’s the TED Talk calling out all this absolute bullshit?

We have been scammed by lust dressed up as virtue. The familiar faces of journalists and truthsayers risking their lives for a better world have been replaced by obscenely wealthy people draped in calm professionalism, podcasting headphones and frameworks that promise prosperity. As the world burns, influencers on Substack, social media and the press still promise “abundance” (Ezra Klein). Abundance of what?

The call of a trillionaire(!) to colonize Mars isn’t the nobility of some male urge to adventure forth and find sustenance—something that in so many species such as lions is actually done almost entirely by the women. It is the grift and make-believe invocation of an old archetype of the male wandering alone into the wilderness without any of the demands to actually risk their own lives without the support of the 99% who are keeping them alive. It is impossible to live on Mars, and furthermore:

If you or I got on a time machine, hit the buttons at random and went back to some point in Earth history, 90% of the time we would die as soon as we opened the airlock door.

— Edwin Kite

We are being called forth by the most powerful people on earth to venture forth and explore our annihilation.

Even the most earnest of pleas to reset masculinity are mired in the same ambitions of desire. Scott Galloway gave us the reassuring “Protect, Provide, Procreate” from his Notes on Being a Man (2025), which reads as “what role play to expect of others in your relationships.” And critiques of this still say “why we need something more.”

No. Enough of “more”.

Dear Traveler, I return to this tired writing trope not only because I’m a Gypsy and I’m reclaiming it from people who do not know actually how to travel and only know how to be tourists and colonizers. I return to it because the condition of traveling is to, obviously, not be at home. To not have the entitlement that you can do whatever you want when you’re in someone else’s home. It is to admit that you are guest. It is to give yourself the permission to be lost. It is to free yourself from selfish demands that always end in pain, and instead give yourself the gift of allowing yourself to be found. Found by freedom. Found by people who might need you. Discovered by the world.

But that’s jumping ahead. That’s getting back too quickly to a framework that’s going to allow us get busy again and avoid hopelessness along with confusion, uncertainty and fear of nothingness that comes with being alive.

Throw out the podcasters, the think-tanks and the PhDs with all the answers. The “manosphere” is the womb we all wish we could return to where we’re magically just taken care of while we don’t even have the courage to admit that we occupy women’s spaces, bodies and thoughts already. I have been given the best education of feminism my entire life (and I’m gay), and I still cannot resist this pattern sometimes. But knowing this isn’t just my stepping back from my expectations to be seen, heard and loved. It’s my own permission to go into the wild.

While lots of institutions are going to lie to you right now about the history of Tarot and claim that cartomancy is just something people have always done, that is an exaggeration. Meanwhile, the divination of cards has always been part of a Roma, Sinti and Gypsy woman’s work and practices. The women in my family have known this for centuries and carried it quietly for our own safety—a lesson many gadji (non-Roma women) are learning right now as fascism threatens their influential intuitive voices online. But like astrology—another profession known well to Roma and Sinti although not exclusively—Tarot has gained mass popularity through extraction especially by turn of the 19th-20th century occultists, and gives us shared language right now for the archetypal. It is how I want to invite you to consider the Hermit—the wizard-y looking old man with a lantern and staff going into the night alone.

The figure of the wizard is an old one, and much of his magic and insight was inspired not just by imaginations of Celticism and its Druids, but by the wandering minstrels, sages and travelers that are part of my people—the Gypsies. There is a lot of stereotype and misunderstanding around this, including the belief that we are free, careless people. This is not true. Our history in the world is thousands of years old; we did not just stumble out of India a thousand years ago by some tragic accident as you might have been told. Things have happened to us, but we have always carried within and between ourselves our truth of humanity, non-violence and independence from systems that harm others.

It is the vulnerable position of being alive that is missing in these man-stories, and is summoned in Victor Frankl’s timeless Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). But even his choice to choose attitude gives us back that hope that we’ll get it right. We can get the band back together, fix the machine or get back to the arms of those we have outgrown or lost. Our minds are terribly clever.

But returning to the Hermit, what I notice in the face of the old bearded man is his youthfulness. His hooded head cast down shows us a softness, a gentleness we tend to only associate with the young, naive and hopeful. It is his submission to death of his ego, ambitions and, one day, his life that softens his face into agelessness.

In old age, perhaps, it is not hope that we need from our elders. It’s surrender. It is knowledge that things did not, in fact, work out. It is the willingness to return to what has been unknown and the liberation that all things one day go away. The Hermit is not just losing himself in the world, he does what so many men of forgotten mystery schools have done. He vanishes into the real frontier—time itself. He reveals to us not nihilism or black-pill defeat-ism, but the truth we are all hungry for.

I’m almost 43, so I cannot speak for young men, although soon I hope to share a prayer I wrote to myself as a young man. I can speak as a person looking ahead at what I was told would be my era to lead and shape the world for the better. The only leadership, right now, I seem to be able to offer, is a responsible form of retreat. To do less. To touch the world lightly. To be grateful to be fed and safe. To let yourself be received by that which is being rejected by almost everyone who wants to offer you certainty, especially when monsters are lurking everywhere. Unfortunately, I have no powers of organized or violent resistance to give you, but I pass no judgement upon it.

There is sobriety in his journey. There is wisdom. De-occupy masculinity from modern demands. Maybe try letting go of what you’re expecting out of manhood and maybe, just try enjoying it for once. Notice when others actually truly enjoy it, and what that reveals about you. All of these men telling us what it is to be a man all seem to have one thing in common; despite having it all, they’re profoundly unhappy. So stop and rest.

I’m not saying men, especially the powerful who are living in the wealth of other people’s labor, should shirk their responsibilities. If that’s you, you have a responsibility to recognize the world has always been able to exist without you and will continue to. It is you who need it. Also, that the foundation of human civilization has always been women and children, and if we study history, it seems as though it’s almost always been men terrorizing that civilization. But I know none of these men are reading this or have read this far into this piece.

I am speaking, I suppose, to those men who have had their hopes and futures taken from them by a system that tells them they are not enough and ensures they have even less than that. Men who have been told that baller lifestyles are what they need to provide. That being lustful and lusted after is accomplishment. That being defensive or attacking innocents when you’re hurt and scared is bravery. I know more and more of you are alone. You don’t have people to care for or children of your own, and what to do now is a big, scary question easily buried by distractions.

I don’t know if there is an answer or framework for what men are and what masculinity should be, whether divine, ordinary or dangerous. I do know looking at the Hermit that perhaps we are also looking at a young person who must bear a burden and a wisdom far beyond their years. But to quote one brave wizard who went into the wild of his own imagination amidst the slaughter of the trenches of the First World War while colonial genocides spread around the world:

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

— “Gandalf” in The Lord of the Rings

I think in Gandalf, JRR Tolkien gave us the wise man and leader who had braved his own solitude for ages not because Tolkien himself knew such a man himself, but because he knew the world desperately needed him. And perhaps men and women like this already do and always have existed, and it is time to listen to them.

For whatever it’s worth, you have my permission to take a step back and get lost, if only for a moment. Stop waiting to be provided for and learn how to care for yourself how you need to be cared for. Thank the communities that help sustain you, and learn what it is serve. Let the world be filled the voices of those who don’t want to or are not called to lead, but must for those whom they love and the vulnerable things in the world that need protecting and survival. Find your own road in this life that you have. Refuse the call to be the center of everything. Let peace fill your soul. And when you’re needed, you will be found.