The Undemanded Man · Verissimus

You have almost certainly watched it happen to someone — maybe more than one someone. A capable man, once full of plans, begins to fade. The days blur into one another. He reaches for his phone before his feet touch the floor. He fills his evenings with small pleasures that ask nothing of him and leave nothing behind. He isn't unhappy, exactly. He is numb. And numbness is quieter than sadness — which is precisely why it can go unnoticed for years, in a friend, in a brother, in the person across the breakfast table.

We write here under a single name because we keep meeting the same man. Not one man — a pattern, wearing a hundred different faces, turning up in the lives of people we know and admire. We have taken to calling him the undemanded man. And the first true thing worth saying about him is that he is not broken. Something in the modern West has quietly stopped asking anything of men, while handing them an endless supply of things that feel like living without ever quite being it. The drive has not died. It has been starved of a worthy target and drowned in cheap substitutes. Both of those can be reversed. This is a note about how.

Start with what fills the gap. Nearly everything worth having sits on the far side of anticipation — that long, uncertain stretch between the effort put in now and the reward that may come much later. That gap is where a person comes alive. Modern life has become extraordinarily good at collapsing it to nothing. Video games hand over mastery and status in an afternoon. Pornography delivers the sensation of conquest with none of the nerve it once took to earn a partner's attention. A little weed turns restlessness — the body's own signal to get up and do something — into a warm, agreeable nothing. A Harvard psychologist named Deirdre Barrett has a phrase for all of it: supernormal stimuli — artificial versions of the things we are built to want, engineered to pull on us harder than the real thing ever could. A counterfeit so good it defeats the original.

Here is the part worth sitting with: losing to these things is not a sign of weakness. They are designed by very intelligent people to beat a very old part of the brain, and in a fair fight that old part loses. The people who climb back out rarely describe a burst of willpower. Almost always they describe the same quiet first step — they stopped treating those pleasures as harmless and started seeing them plainly, as thieves slowly making off with the appetite for anything difficult. No one wins a fight they refuse to name.

Why does this fall so hard on men in particular? Because of the engine under the hood. The hunger to build something, to win something, to matter to someone, to have earned a place rather than been handed it — that is not vanity, and it is far older than any of us. Researchers who study testosterone have found that it pushes men specifically toward status they can earn: it rises when there is a real contest in front of them and a genuine chance to climb (Losecaat Vermeer et al.), and it lends itself to exactly the sort of striving that carries a person up a hierarchy (Archer). A man is, in part, built to want to earn his standing. That appetite is a gift.

But a gift with nowhere to go turns on the one who holds it. It isn't laziness. It's horsepower with the handbrake on.

The same engine that would carry a man up a mountain, given no mountain, simply idles and overheats in the driveway. And the overheating gets renamed — anxiety, depression, laziness, drift. It is usually none of those. It is power with no permission to move.

A word to anyone who loves a man like this — a partner, a mother, a friend. When he goes flat, it is rarely that he has stopped caring. Far more often he is a strong current with a dam across it. What he needs is not permission to relax. He needs something real to push against, and someone who plainly believes he can move it. Few people hold more power to switch a good man back on than the ones already standing beside him.

There is one last piece, and it is the hardest to see, because no one profits from pointing it out. For nearly all of history, a man's ambition was not a private hobby he opted into. It was demanded of him — by work, by family, by the plain arithmetic of survival and courtship. Richard Reeves, who has studied the state of modern men as carefully as anyone, calls what replaced that demand cultural redundancy: the low, constant hum that no one is really counting on you. That old order had real faults, and no one here wants the whole of it back. But when the demand disappeared, nothing was set in its place. No one is going to knock on the door and require a man to become who he might be.

That sounds lonely, and it is. Turn it over, though. If no one is going to demand it, then the demand belongs to the person who feels it. That is not a sentence handed down. It is a set of keys handed over.

Ask the ones who have found their way back and the answer is rarely heroic. It tends to come down to three things. First, awareness: they learned to see the cheap pleasures as the thieves they are, and each time the harder thing was chosen over the easy one, the easy one lost a little of its grip. Second, distance: they made the cheap things harder to reach and the worthy things easier — because friction is destiny, and people drift toward whatever is closest to hand. And third, a demand: they chose something difficult that would take years, that they might genuinely fail at, that would cost them something real — and they named it out loud to the people they loved, so that quitting quietly was no longer available.

That is the whole of it. Awareness, distance, a demand. The drive that seems to have gone missing was never gone. Ambition is not a temperament some are born with and others aren't; it is what ordinary human biology looks like the moment it is finally handed something worthy to want. Point it at something a little frightening. Clear away what has been feeding on it in the dark. And ask more than the world is asking — because the world has stopped asking, and no one was built to stay undemanded.

The undemanded man is not a diagnosis. He is a person caught between two states, waiting for a reason. More cross back than anyone would guess from the outside. There is no reason the next one shouldn't be reading this now.

— Verissimus

Works Cited

Barrett, Deirdre. Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Losecaat Vermeer, Annabel B., et al. “Exogenous Testosterone Increases Status-Seeking Motivation in Men with Unstable Low Social Status.” Psychoneuroendocrinology, vol. 113, 2020, article 104552.
Archer, John. “Testosterone and Human Aggression: An Evaluation of the Challenge Hypothesis.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 30, no. 3, 2006, pp. 319–345.
Reeves, Richard V. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Brookings Institution Press, 2022.