We do not live in the world of our fathers. For thousands of years, men did a thing. We had a job. We were responsible for physical and financial security. To put down the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. In return, the women in our lives provided caring and nurturing.

Then, over the last 50 years, it all changed.

Women no longer need men for their financial security. They are better educated than men and have closed the pay gap. Women do not need men for their physical security. They have the police. We are no longer necessary for the role we served for thousands of years.

Damn.

Like we’ve been laid off from our jobs as a gender.

What society needs from men changed without announcement. No new instructions were delivered to each of us outlining our new responsibilities. The old paradigm died… and then… nothing. Whatever the hell the new expectations look like seems rather ambiguous to a lot of us. That leaves us feeling lost.

The old deal is dead and this is what the new deal looks like

At this moment, we are living through a revolution. A century from now, humans will look back on our lives as a period when everything changed.

Like the Industrial Revolution, when machinery changed the demands on men. We moved from field to factory, changing the nature of our contribution. A revolution in our physical labors. Then came the digital revolution. Men’s contribution was no longer derived from our brawn but from our brains. A revolution in our intellectual labors.

The new revolution looks different

Men are unnecessary for women’s physical or financial security. Artificial intelligence is in the process of automating the brainy bits of our labor. If not brains or brawn, where is the next frontier?

Emotions.

The next chapter demands that we, as men, learn a new thing. The new strength of man is not physical. It is emotional. Society does not need us to be stoic, distant, and aloof. It needs us to be connected, available, and vulnerable. Many of the behaviors that got us mocked as children or were smacked out of us by our fathers are the very things society is demanding of us today.

The problem is we suck at this stuff.

We avoided emotion because it was seen as a weakness. After decades of suppressing our emotions, they are unfamiliar creatures. We’re awkward when wrangling them, and we’re more awkward still when wrangling the emotions of others. Yet wrangle them we must. Because understanding and connecting with another person starts with understanding and connecting with yourself.

What society needs from men now isn’t security. It is psychological availability, support, and connectedness.

This is where you start

You start with yourself. Who are you? When faced with the question, often we’ve forgotten.

When we are small, we know ourselves. As we grow, we want to fit in. Picture the true you as a badass golden statue. At least you think it is badass.

When you are little, everyone can see it. Then you do something that gets a negative response from those around you. Expose an emotion that looks weak or express an opinion that isn’t popular. An outward demonstration of a behavior that doesn’t fit in the box.

You get negative feedback.

Someone tells you that it isn’t ok to be you. The part of you connected to that behavior doesn’t seem acceptable.

Embarrassed you want to cover it. You slap a bit of wet concrete crudely on that part of the statue to hide it away from the world. Another passerby mocks a different bit. An emotion you shouldn’t express. You want to measure up. Impress. You feel a compulsion to conform.

Smack.

On goes a new chunk of cement. The cycle repeats. Over and over. Until the statue is buried under a massive, crude-looking pile of rock.

Finding the real you starts with picking up a hammer and chisel. Chipping away the stuff you’ve piled on top of who you really are. The bitch of it is that each swing hurts a bit. Each chunk that falls off makes you feel awkward about the stuff that is exposed. Unfortunately, this is the awkward, painful journey to finding ourselves.

Yet we try so many other things. Things focused on outward-facing outcomes, not inner-facing truths. We think that if we accomplish something, go to a place, or get a girl, there will be this lightning-strike moment where it all makes sense. But it won’t. Emerson nailed it when he said:

“At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack up my truck, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

This is what happens when you are trying to run away from yourself

As that old cliché goes, wherever you go, there you are. And we are lost. Wandering about looking outwardly for directions to find clear purpose as men.

You won’t find it by looking out, but you will by looking in. Like all things that make you stronger, the exercise is uncomfortable.

We don’t like the hard questions. We like certainty. The hard questions don’t give us that. When we do make a pass at the hard questions, we do it as a brushoff exercise. Concerning ourselves with the bits of the iceberg above the surface and ignoring the mass beneath.

It is difficult because another man’s story is a poor reference. Men that had the courage to take an unconventional path or the discipline to take a conventional one and do it with excellence are not models for you in their choices. Only in their character. Bravery in being true to yourself is something to emulate. Discipline is something to emulate.

Their choices and how they got them back to the badass golden statue of who they truly are is unique to each of them.

This is where you go to find yourself

The novelist Fredrick Buechner discussed finding yourself and the things you love, where “your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”

You can find love, service, and purpose at the intersection of these things. Doing so might be difficult because to go in this direction, you might need to go against the expectations of people close to you. To defy those expectations makes you feel alone, which sucks.

We like the comfort of approval from a group of people around us. It is how we wander so far away from ourselves in the first place. Seeking validation that we’re doing it right. So much so that we’re willing to abandon ourselves for fear that we will not be accepted by others and live a life that isn’t deeply rooted in our true selves.

I don’t have a step-by-step pathway for you to find your way back to yourself. Anyone who says that they do is bullshitting you. You are not them. Each of our paths is different.

As Brene Brown said, “I’m an adventurer. Not a mapmaker. I’m on the same path as you.” She also described well what it looks like when you get there. That you’ll “understand your past, love yourself, and own your shit.” You’ll “put more value on getting it right than being right.”

What I can share is what I discover along the way. The parts of the jungle that I come to know that you, too, will have to navigate in your journey. The truth is that your present circumstances dictate only the place from which you depart. Not the place where you come to rest.

We cannot use a disadvantaged starting position or a late start to excuse ourselves from running our best race. So start now.

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This article was originally published on Medium in the publication Pragmatic Wisdom.