A Companion Reflection on Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man
Note from the author: The language of this essay is necessarily gendered because the thinkers and cultural currents under discussion are themselves preoccupied with “man,” “male identity,” and masculinity, often within or adjacent to what is now called the manosphere. I use these terms critically and provisionally, aware that they can obscure as much as they reveal. The aim here is not to defend rigid categories, but to examine the forms of mentorship, aspiration, and cultural anxiety being articulated through them.
Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man has found an audience because it offers what many young men now lack: direction, plainly stated. Its central injunction is simple enough. A man should strive to become a protector, a provider, and a procreator. He should cultivate discipline, competence, financial stability, and the capacity to take responsibility for others. In an age of drift, precarity, and diffuse confusion, such advice carries obvious force. Galloway is right to resist passivity, grievance, and the narcotic consolations of self-pity. He is right to insist that adulthood requires effort, obligation, and a willingness to be claimed by something beyond the self.
Yet the force of his counsel also reveals its limits. It assumes, for the most part, that the principal task facing young men is how to establish themselves within the existing order: how to gain footing, secure income, build families, and move with some degree of agency through the institutions of modern life. The horizon remains largely intact. The question is how to succeed within it.
But the world young men are entering is not merely competitive. It is increasingly unravelling.
Climate change is no longer a deferred concern, a matter for future generations or the abstract language of policy. It has entered history as an active destabilising force: fire, flood, drought, crop failure, heat, migration, and the steady weakening of the ecological systems on which all prosperity depends. War in the Middle East, and the wider coarsening of geopolitical life, has exposed something equally grave: not only the brutality of armed conflict, but the routinisation of mass civilian suffering, the collapse of moral restraint, and the growing inability of international institutions to restrain organised violence. Add to this the widening chasm of inequality within and between societies, and it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain the old liberal fiction that the future will be some manageable extension of the recent past.
These realities do not invalidate Galloway’s emphasis on discipline and responsibility. But they do cast it in a harsher light. For the question can no longer be only how a young man might make it. It must also be what sort of human being is being formed by such counsel, and whether that formation is adequate to a century marked not by confidence, but by contraction, fracture, and loss.
It is here that Francis Weller becomes a counterpoint, not as a lifestyle alternative, nor as a therapeutic corrective, but as a thinker of deeper cultural and psychic necessities.
Where Galloway speaks in the language of agency, discipline, and worldly traction, Weller turns toward what he calls the landscape of the soul. His concern is not primarily with performance in the world, but with the interior conditions of a life that can bear reality without becoming either numbed or brutalised by it. He is interested in those regions of experience modern culture habitually neglects or suppresses: grief, longing, vulnerability, beauty, imagination, reverence, and the felt bonds that bind us to community, place, ancestry, and the more-than-human world.
Central to Weller’s thought is a distinction between spirit and soul. Spirit tends upward. It seeks vision, clarity, transcendence, mastery, ascent. It is animated by direction and aspiration. In itself, this is not a defect. Human beings need purpose, discipline, and orientation. But modern Western culture is already saturated with this upward motion. We live amid the imperatives of expansion, achievement, optimisation, and self-fashioning. Many admire those who rise. We are trained to seek leverage, velocity, and advantage.
Seen in this light, Galloway’s vision of masculinity is recognisably spirit-weighted. It is outward-facing, strategic, aspirational. It concerns how to become effective, stable, and competent within the visible structures of the world. This is not false wisdom. But it is partial wisdom, and partial in a very modern way.
What is neglected in a culture of ascent is the counter-movement of soul.
Soul, in Weller’s telling, does not rise. It descends. It takes us down into the denser and less manageable strata of experience: sorrow, eros, fear, tenderness, memory, mortality, shame, beauty, and the obscure knowledge carried in dreams, symptoms, and unbidden longings. Soul is not interested in our market value. It is not concerned with self-optimisation. It wants depth before clarity, truth before performance, relation before status. It asks not how to get ahead, but what in us has gone unattended, displaced, or exiled under the pressures of modern life.
To learn how to descend, then, is not to indulge obscurity or collapse into passivity. It is to acquire the difficult capacity to remain in contact with what the culture teaches us to outrun. It means allowing grief to speak before it hardens into numbness. It means listening to disturbance rather than immediately converting it into pathology or weakness. It means developing patience with ambiguity, and with the shadowed parts of the self that do not fit the clean rhetoric of mastery, productivity, and control.
This has implications well beyond the private or therapeutic. A descent into soul is also a different way of meeting history.
The crises now gathering around us are not merely technical failures awaiting managerial correction. They are revelations of a civilisation organised around extraction, acceleration, and denial. Capitalism is not only an economic system; it is a regime of perception. It trains attention toward what can be measured, monetised, scaled, and displayed. It colonises even the inner life. We are invited to treat ourselves as projects of accumulation, to optimise, brand, invest, and compete. Under such conditions, it becomes difficult to hear anything that does not speak in the idiom of performance.
To descend is to interrupt that idiom. It is to allow oneself to register what the culture prefers to neutralise: damaged landscapes, extinguished species, abandoned communities, children buried beneath rubble, rivers running dry, forests turned to fuel, and the moral injury of witnessing repeated atrocity from behind screens. It is to let such realities become more than information. They must become sorrow, outrage, intimacy, obligation.
And here the language of the revolutionary. The revolutionary is one who refuses consolation in appearances. He studies the material conditions of life with rigour: the political economy of extraction, the earth-science realities of climate destabilisation, the energetic basis of industrial civilisation, the social consequences of inequality and imperial war. He understands that the crisis is structural, not incidental; civilisational, not episodic. He knows that no amount of private success can answer for a world organised toward ruin.
But if this revolutionary seriousness remains only external, only analytical, only political, it risks becoming sterile, even cruel. It can become one more form of hardness, one more flight from vulnerability. Weller’s contribution is to suggest that any transformation adequate to this historical moment must also pass through the depths of the soul. Without grief, analysis becomes abstraction. Without tenderness, lucidity becomes contempt. Without an inner descent, even the revolutionary impulse may reproduce the very severance from life it hopes to overcome.
A mentorship formed solely by the logic of ascent may produce disciplined and capable men, but also men too well adapted to a disordered world, efficient within it, successful by its standards, yet inwardly estranged from the deeper claims of life. A mentorship that descends asks harder questions. What is protection in an age of ecological destabilisation and permanent war? What is provision in an economy built on extraction, inequality, and the erosion of the commons? What is fatherhood under the long shadow of climate instability and civilisational strain? These are not rhetorical embellishments to the masculine ideal. They are now the terms of its seriousness.
Weller does not simply supplement Galloway. He quietly reverses him. Instead of beginning with how young men might rise, he begins with whether they have learned how to descend, how to enter the depths from which moral imagination, real courage, and a less counterfeit form of adulthood might emerge.
That may be the more urgent mentorship now.
The question is no longer just how to succeed in the world. It is how to remain human in a time of unraveling, and how to become, in the deepest sense, both soulful and revolutionary: ruthless in understanding the material conditions of the age, yet still capable of love, grief, reverence, and fidelity to life. That task may require discipline and strength, yes, but also the harder, slower, less glamorous work of entering the landscape of the soul.
