5:5:24
A post/video on the difference between being immature and being mature. A subject most men never talk about despite the crisis in maturity that plagues our digital society.
What does it take for a man to grow up? What is growing up?
As I’ve written, in1970s movies, adults were the norm. They were our primary identification and influence. And for that reason anyone at any age could identify with their lives and struggles—their beauty—onscreen. Adults were not considered “old” because adults were all we had to aspire to! This had its pluses and minuses. Childhood and its duration is a Victorian invention, which means we keep extending the window of childhood, postponing adulthood and maturity altogether. As a child, I routinely watched movies with 30 something and 40 something year old characters and found them riveting and relatable. Magical and mysterious. I wanted to grow up and be like them. I wanted to grow up and be an adult with an adult life.
The Teen movies of the 1980s changed that. But it did so by making teenagers the adults. We had to maturate kids first before we could infantilize adults, which came later, starting in the 1990s.
I always find it interesting how people discuss the teen movies of yesteryear with such seriousness. Until I remember we are analyzing the behavior and actions of 17 year olds! For instance, I was listening to a YT video on the 1986 John Hughes movie Pretty in Pink last week, and wading through the comments, which was full of Gen Xs fiercely debating whether Andie made the right choice by picking Blaine over Duckie. It later hit me that these people were obsessing over the fictional decisions of teenagers from the 1980s. It seemed relevant to me. Of course this is also because they are returning to their own adolescence; their own life decisions, their own heartbreaks.
Andie and Blaine as Twin Flames
Let me come back to my point:
What does it take for a man to stop being a wounded masculine and become a divine masculine?
Given that Adrian Grenier—the actor that Jordan Peterson interviews in the video above—is almost 48 years old, we know it happens late, if it ever happens. Our society does nothing to generate or require true manhood anymore. We are surrounded by arrested development and emotional stuntedness everywhere we look. We are surrounded by autogynophilia. No one can handle anything, least of all their bodies and sex. Everyone is an overgrown child with tempermental demands. That’s why grown men can play video games all day and watch porn and it’s thought to be completely normal and not in any way at odds with being a mature man or moral or healthy. There is no morality. There is no responsibility. There is no normal. There is no tradition. There is no sacrifice for another. In fact, you can now skip out entirely on being a man altogether, and just become a caricaturized woman instead—a fetish—at any age. You can jump ship and abandon masculinity altogether.
As the interview makes clear, fame is a process of corruption, as I have been arguing for years in all of my books.
It is there to split you into two, if your childhood didn’t do it first.
Acting for a living is professional dissociation.
As writer and healer Solarah writes: “The purposeful trauma cycles of the false matrix were designed to cause further internal splitting that would constantly have us deferring to external voices and programs for ‘recovery.”
The false-light vocation of Hollywood acting has led to an acting society, as I argue in Time Tells, vol 2. In which everyone has been trained to perform and to become the center of their own world (movie) via the mass self-documentation, narcissism, and performativity of the social media age. You are the Star of your own life. You are God.
Now for the interesting part: Like Adrian, I grew up in New York City. I am also an only child. In middle school, 6th to 8th grade, my classmate and good friend, Sarah, a bookworm like me, took acting classes after school with Adrian, a boy she was madly in love with. She would talk to me about Adrian all the time. I had never met him. When I was 14, I went to LaGuardia (the Fame school), and Sarah moved out of the State. Adrian also went to LaGuardia, so when we met and ran in the same crowd freshman year, I knew he was the boy Sarah had loved. Adrian was shy, sweet, preppy. As he says in the interview, he was always in brightly colored gap clothes that his mother picked out. I was the opposite—a post-punk new wave Downtown girl, who listened to the Cure and The Smiths and bee-bop Jazz. My parents were intellectuals and Downtown bohemians. We lived in a loft in New York City. Adrian was not at all a cool kid or a ladies man. We became friends. And once made out under the stairwell in the basement, where the Acting and Music majors studied. He was an Acting major and I was a Music major. Nothing much more happened between us and we didn’t ever become close. I remember him being very innocent freshman year. I was in love with another boy, I’d known since I was a child, who was also a Music major at LaGuardia, and a Jazz prodigy. He was two years older. So I fell into his crowd after a few months. Adrian went off in his world. We remained friendly. By the end of sophomore year, he started to change. I left LaGuardia my junior year. Years later, he started getting movie roles and I remembered who he was. I ran into him on the street a few times, or through friends at parties, or at Angelika theater in NYC, for a couple of decades. By his Entourage years, he had turned into a player, womanizer, as he says in the interview. He was very full of himself and smarmy. And I remember seeing him on the subway in NYC with various women a few times. When that happened, I thought about the sweet boy in high school, freshman year. Somewhere, in a box, I have a photograph of all of us sitting at the Pizza joint/coffee shop we all used to go to after school together, by Lincoln Center. In the picture, Adrian has a red turtleneck on and is wearing a baseball cap. On warm spring days, we would all hang out at the Meadow in Central Park. Everyone hung out with everyone. There was zero hierarchy and in-fighting. Almost no cliques. Every kind of scene and style. No one ever talked about identity, race, class, or sexuality. Everyone was cool with each other. Weirdly, I learned through his interview with Peterson, that Adrian also went to Rudolph Steiner for a year, like me, when he was a child. Were we there at the same time? Steiner was the only school experience I ever loved as a kid. It had a huge impact on me, and I still think about the year I was there fondly. After college, Adrian went to Bard, like a lot of my friends. He also knew a lot of the kids in the movie Kids, as I did. So our worlds were very different but adjacent. I rejected that whole world/scene every chance I could, despite having friends who were in it and courting it. I was always very serious and uncompromising about my anti-fame, anti-drugs stance. All those people got corrupted, went to Hollywood, were hipsters, or died from drug overdoses.
Adrian had turned into a kind of predictable Lothario sell out. As one person commented on YT, he “acts like he is shy in this interview, but he is a total flirt.”
Actors are people who want to monetize and market their charisma. I always resisted that. People would always tell me how charismatic I was, and beautiful, and they couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to capitalize on being beautiful, tall, and thin by becoming a fashion model or an actress. I was approached for both a lot when I was younger. I chose to write and think and travel and study instead. I wrote about this in Beauty Talk & Monsters. I am not trying to brag or boast here—it was not an easy path to go against these female stereotypes and expectations and I never pursued my life based on appearance, which I paid for it dearly in many ways.
I don’t know how genuine Adrian’s actual reformation (which he starts talking about around 36-37 min) really is. Actors lie. Men lie. People lie. We are a fraud society. So take his version of “growth” and awakening with a grain of salt, of course. People tell stories to rebrand themselves.
Things must always be experienced to be believed.
I always want everything (and everyone) to be true. But most things in our world are not true. They are the opposite of true. It is a hard pill for me to swallow to this day.
In our cabal world, up is down, down is up.
Who knows what kind of man Adrian really is now. But if his story is true, it is encouraging to know that a man in his 40s can actually begin to mature and completely change after losing the love of his life. I wish this kind of transformation and ego death could happen to all men. The narcissism and pride of the egoic Self, and the deeply ingrained identity that it produces, as Adrian mentions about his “charity work” ego-fronts, keeps us from actually changing, even when we lose the things and people our souls need and crave the most. Adrian says he believed he was good when he was in fact the opposite of good.
As someone who has dated a number of men that were adored by their overbearing yet emotionally withholding mothers, I think people don’t talk enough about how mothers (post-60s single mothers especially) who worship their sons, never taught them how to be good to other women, how to grow up and be strong and reliable in romantic relationships, how to be honest and emotionally available with women, how to be true partners and protectors. This has created a collective and cultural wound because these same men are flabbergasted when they meet genuinely strong women (not Toxic feminines, but divine feminines) and cannot do what is required to be with them. Don’t know how. Are too fragile, or too toxic, or both. So they either end up with weak women who do not challenge, stimulate, or nourish them—who inspire no change or growth—and are not in touch with their divine feminine strengths, or with Toxic feminines with whom they play games and vice versa all their life. I have found that strong (wounded) mothers do not like it when their sons have strong girlfriends and wives. They are threatened by it, at least my generation was.
In the feminist world, we are told that receptivity and passivity, as well as the need for protection and divine partnership, is a weakness. In feminism, the point is for women to be their own husbands. Their own providers. To act like men. This creates an imbalance, a distorted, toxic, or predatory feminine. As Adrian points out at the end of the interview, women (his wife when they first got together) have their guard up because of a lack of strong paternal presence either when they were growing up and/or in their adult romantic life. He describes this as an absence of valiance from men. Something he failed to provide for when they were first together. In the Tarot and spiritual world, there is the idea that masculine women can be what is called chasers in the divine counterpart connection. In order to be strong, modern women are taught to go after what they want—like men—and that to stand your ground for what you deserve is a weakness because it is passive. In the spiritual world, and of course in the ancient world, the opposite was true. To quietly command what you deserve is a sign of ultimate truth and feminine strength. Standing in your power and worth. Feminine energy has been completely distorted, co-opted, and infiltrated in the modern-digital era, and turned into high-achieving masculine energy—put on like a dress. And divine masculine energy has been distorted and perverted by too much feminine energy, which they have a distorted rand vampiric relationship to after centuries of patriarchy and misogyny and hatred of the feminine. I like how Adrian points out that his reformation was a multi-year process, as was earning back the trust of the woman he loved and lost. He says he was committed to however long it would take to get her back. She did not budge until this trust was earned. Adrian: “We had to fall in love all over again.”
Wounded masculines are users, seducers, and manipulators. Divine masculines are protectors and supporters. The Divine feminine heals and receives.
I like that Adrian calls out his own selfishness and immaturity. So many men in their 40s and 50s are still emotionally self-absorbed and self-centered. I also like that he says that he changed his friend group and surrounded himself with people who had the spiritual life and wisdom that he wanted for himself.
It takes guts (though he had the financial security to do whatever he wanted) to drop the hyper-false matrix life you’ve built for yourself, and go into complete abstainment (again, I don’t know how true Adrian’s story is). It is significant, of course, that his wife is so much younger than him, 18 years, and on paper, she is hardly interesting (she is a social influencer—yawn), but Adrian is not exactly a genius himself, nor is he a good actor. The point here is that for this story to work for someone like him, a woman has to be very young in order for the middle-aged man to be able to have his second chance, second life: Become a father. Would this have happened with a woman his age? His wife was in her 20s when he had his dark night of the soul, he was in his 40s. So there was time because again, men are always given time to grow up, even if it’s 20 years late. Also, some people (mostly men) live a charmed existence and everything works out for them, even after decades of living an unconscious, hedonistic life, with no moral code. They fuck up and can start again at any point. Adrian still got what he wanted. Men are not chained to a clock, so there is a lot of time to waste and/or recoup.
The take away: a healed man can change the world. Wounded men can ruin it.
I think every man should listen to this interview. There is nothing I admire more than people who give up everything that had, everything they thought and believed, in order to change and prove themselves to the people they love. It gives me hope. It’s my favorite kind of story. A story of valor and redemption. My own seeking life has required me to walk away and start again many times. Too many times.
20th century films were always about the wounded masculine learning to become the divine masculine. That is what the training montage is. Preparation, growth, awakening, becoming strong. Training doesn’t have to always be physical, like in Rocky or the Karate Kid. It can also be spiritual and emotional. In fact, that is what even the physical training montage is really all about. The emotional as physical. The dark night of the soul. Trial by fire. About Last Night (1986), for example, has a good montage scene, which consists of the commitment-phobic playboy Danny (Robe Lowe) wanting his “freedom” over a committed relationship with the love of his life. After dumping Debbie (Demi Moore), and breaking her heart, Danny sleeps with a ridiculous amount of women, in denial and avoidance of his true feelings and true path. He is trying to avoid the spiritual and emotional growth that his love for Debbie requires. This avoidant conquest takes the form of a montage, which is really a time-jump. In The Notebook, the “training” consists of Noah building his dream house for Allie while he waits 7 years for her to return.
The actor is a seducer. A seducer of the viewer, a seducer of the culture. Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary follows the turn from the aesthetic, hedonistic scheme of male seduction, the kind of cruel experiments we see in films like Bob Swaim’s Masquerade (1988) and Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men (1997), and teen comedies like She’s All That (1999), to the ethical life, which requires commitment, reform, and miraculous thinking—the virtue of absurd faith, where true love is a true life. Much like the old screwball comedy, we also see this shift in countless Hollywood movies, like Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and Becoming Jane (2007), when the male cad meets his female love match, which instigates and requires great inner change.
In their interview (I like the way Peterson grills Adrian throughout. I think interrogation is what makes someone a good therapist, but few therapists use this approach anymore. They coddle their patients) it is implied that liberalism leads to spiritual bankruptcy: immorality, selfishness, promiscuity, immaturity, and hedonism. What Adrian calls a “Godless and ungrounded life.” In his case, this lack of grounding literally takes the form of City life. Life in NYC and life in LA, which cut him off from his heart, he says. He was “all head and cock.” To get grounded, he had to renounce his decadent modern “poly” lifestyle by living in his camper in the woods for a couple of years, where he says he learned to truly rely on himself for the very first time. These tenets of Hollywood and Blue City liberalism, donating to Leftie causes, having open romantic/sexual relationships, drinking and doing drugs, being vain and self-involved, made him feel he was “good,” even though the opposite was true. What he refers to as “distractions” throughout the interview is secular code for temptations. In our world, being open to temptations constitutes goodness because it means you are willing to do anything and think anything in order to appear tolerant and permissive and “open.” But also, willing to be possessed and infiltrated, talked into things, led astray, cut in half, influenced by the social and cultural world. We are rewarded when we do this instead of the other way around. In theory, everyone has different distractions and temptations, but most people are plagued by the same handful of vices—addictions. This is no accident. Peterson, who has had a history of prescription drug abuse himself, confesses that he would have probably not been able to resist these same temptations had he found fame as a young man, like Adrian. What happens when you remove these distractions, wipe the slate clean, lose your dependencies, and go to your Zero point? What do you find? Who are you then? What do you value? Who and what do you stand for? If you can do that, that is how you discover your strength and resilience. What happens if you lose everything and everyone? What happens when you squander true love? You’ll never know what is truly important to you and what you are willing to do get it, unless you train yourself to live a simple and sovereign life, where you can overcome anything.
While I am not sure I believe it is true (remember, as a rule, I do not believe actors), it is interesting, for example, that Adrian repeatedly states that he was not interested in acting, in making movies, in being famous. And yet, this path kept presenting itself to him until he finally succumbed to it. Was this his great mistake? He does appear to exhibit some form of aspirational regret. According to Adrian, acting was never his aspiration. Actress Sheryl Lee Ralph has stated that: “Fame gives people the opportunity to be exactly who they are.” No one regrets making money in America, no matter how they made it. Adrian wouldn’t have been able to afford the land he lives on now, for example, had he not made his millions from Entourage. So there’s that. Once he succumbed to becoming a full-time actor, his agent/manager, he says, literally presented scoring the role of Vince as the doorway to the attainment of temptation and vice—what Adrian calls “access.” Why would landing a part in a series be presented in this way: as the entrance to a life of moral vice and spiritual degradation? Think about it. It’s just a role, right? It’s just a job. Yet that’s not the way these success stories are advertised to young actors or the stage parents who pimp their kids to Hollywood and the music industry. It’s Diddy promising a 14 year Justin Bieber a Lamborghini (or whatever the car model was) when he turned 16. Why is an expensive car worth selling one’s body and soul? It tells us that corruption and demoralization is the point. It’s Adrian’s manager telling him he could get all the woman and drugs he wanted when he got the part of Vince in Entourage. So the role is just a means to an end. The end is demonic. The end is betrayal—betrayal of self and betrayal of others. Women especially, who in turn betray and sell themselves to famous men. We could say these parts, these “roles,” these “success stories” are indeed gateways to ruin. A carrot dangled to initiate corruption and emotional desertion. Only the strong break free.