Being a Serious Man
The serious man has a morning routine. He schedules his personal development and turns his life into a series of quarterly objectives. His Instagram feed looks intentional. His networking feels strategic. He reads the right books and actually takes notes. He treats his body like an asset requiring investment and maintenance. He follows the right thought leaders and has opinions about cryptocurrency and AGI that sound well-informed.
He will tell you that his seriousness isn’t about the money — it’s about momentum. Yes, he may not be wealthy yet, but he’s wealth-adjacent. Not powerful, but positioned. Not happy, but close enough most days.
He’s the one who knows what ROI stands for, who will tell you smart things — like that an elevator pitch is not about what you say while riding an elevator, but what you say when people follow you out of it.
You know him because you might be him.
The serious man has confused motion with taste. He's built an identity from a resume, mistaking the social programming for his own drive. There's a dark comedy here — a grown person believing that if he just runs fast enough, reality will finally notice him and hand over the keys to everything.
But the machine is patient. It feeds on the beautiful delusion that faster equals fuller, that more equals what wakes you up. It computes: optimise yourself, brand yourself, become yourself — as if the self were a product waiting to be perfected rather than a life waiting to be lived.
The serious man doesn’t live his life so much as get lived by it. His desires aren’t desires — they’re scripts. His dreams aren’t dreams — they’re downloaded templates of what the thrust behind every late night is supposed to look like.
Every institution conspires to keep this game running. The economy promises that wealth translates to worth. Social media sells the lie that visibility equals validity. The culture says climb, and we ask how high instead of asking why we’re climbing at all.
The achiever who mistakes pace for purpose signs an invisible contract: if I hustle harder, achieve greater, arrive first, then meaning will be my reward.
Years pass. The serious man delivers on his end — the degrees, the promotions, the recognition. He becomes someone people point to as successful. But the promised weight never arrives — or if it does, it feels like chewing gum that’s lost its flavor.
The machine extracts everything and rewards with comforts and pleasures. But external rewards lose their appeal fast. Prestige becomes a sugar high that crashes harder each time. The system reveals itself as rigged, but by then the serious man is too invested to walk away. He’s the responsible adult in the room, the one who figured out how to play the game — never mind that it sometimes makes his calendar look like a Tetris board.
The wanting that never rests isn’t evil. It’s fuel — though some insist on gulping it straight, then wonder why their stomach burns. The question remains: whose engine is that fuel running? The serious man rarely asks why he wants what he wants. He mistakes the machine’s directions for his own authentic longing.
There's ambition tied to external validation — the endless hunger for status, income, approval. This kind of appetite has no bottom.
Then there's ambition aligned with principles, with mastery, with meaning-making. This kind can become a path, but only when chosen freely rather than dictated by invisible contracts and borrowed dreams.
Ambition without self-inquiry doesn't serve the man who carries it — it consumes him.
After years of faithful service to the contract, something cracks. The serious man has chased everything he was told to chase and caught most of it. The taste of success dissolves quickly now, sometimes before he can even swallow.
This is the breaking point. The most dangerous moment and the most fertile.
Some pour another coffee, reopen the laptop at midnight, and chase the next rung as if restlessness were a ladder. They pursue bigger, more extreme versions of the same victories. Others grow bitter, resentful that the deal they honored wasn’t honored in return.
But a few dare to pivot. They glimpse something the machine doesn’t want them to see: the possibility of a joyful life not organised by the contract.
Ask yourself:
- What have I sacrificed at the altar of being taken seriously, and was it ever mine to give?
- When did I last want something that wasn’t already tried and approved by everyone else?
- If nothing I achieved could be displayed or measured, what would still feel worth doing?
The life that can’t be measured isn’t reckless or chaotic. It’s not the opposite of ambition — it’s ambition liberated from the contract.
It’s living by your own meaning rather than accepting prepackaged definitions of success. It’s finding joy in belonging rather than beating, purpose in connection rather than conquest, mastery in what can’t be measured by status or income.
This unreasonable life doesn’t abolish wanting — it interrogates it. It asks whose voice is speaking when you feel the hunger for more, better, faster. It notices when ambition feels like authenticity and when it feels like borrowed programming.
Being a serious man was about proving your worth to a system that profits from your doubt. Being unreasonable is about creating worth that exists independent of external validation. It’s the difference between performing a life and living one.
And the contract? The contract was never real.