Next week I’m turning sixty. And people are lining up, out the door and around the block, to find out what sort of lessons I’ve been learning in all that time.

Oops, check that. No they’re not doing that. But if they did…

It’s such a good question, I don’t need someone to ask it to start churning away, coming up with an answer. What’s the biggest lesson for me out of the past, let us say, forty-two years give or take. What’s really upturned my apple cart.

“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care” has emerged from the forty-five year fog with some unexpected weight to it. But that’s not exactly a surprise. I’d heard it, and I could see some truth in it at the very beginning. I may not have responded to it as well as I should have. So I learned. But as a true surprise? It doesn’t take the top slot.

I would say, to this imaginary line-up of people wanting to know what I’ve learned, my number one world-upside-down, pancake-flip epiphany would be something like…

The most important first step, before attending to an effort that is serious, is to purge the work area from those in attendance who are not serious. Offer them a hint, usher them out, deport them, defenestrate them. Maybe that comes off as cynical. But with team and group-think crammed down our throats these last several decades, it’s become a truth that hardens and emerges with prominence, becoming even more true, because we’re not allowed to openly acknowledge how true it is.

Some people are needed. Some people are not.

There are various messages people use to communicate “I am one of the unserious people who should be escorted out of the room before you start.” Griping about millionaires and billionaires hoarding all the wealth, is a good way to show you’re an unserious person. Serious people don’t need to worry about how much someone else has, or doesn’t have. They’re more worried about what people can do. And they don’t loot. Looting is what you do when you have a want or a need you can’t take care of yourself.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to their need.”

If you’re a manager, existing in the command chain somewhere — or, thinking you should be in it somewhere — a good way to show you’re an unserious person is to say things like “perception is reality.” There is some truth in this. “Command chain,” these days, is a string of salesmen selling things to each other, and yes perception is important when you sell things. But if the work is important, salesmanship should retreat as a priority. Sound space, I have found, is a limited resource. When people are consuming huge pieces of it to restate the obvious, it’s as good a sign as any that the wrong people are in charge. That there’s too much influence being wielded by unserious people.

I’m grateful for the time I have spent around salesmen. I learned a lot. I wish I didn’t see them as antagonists, like I did back in the early days. “Nothing happens until the sale is made,” their little wooden plaques displayed to all who were interested, along with all who were not. Well, that’s true. But to be effective as a salesman, you have to hold the mark’s attention. If you don’t do that, you’re not selling, you’re just making a lot of noise, wasting time and energy, probably being an irritant. And salesmen fall into this trap when they show they’re unserious people.

One way to show you’re unserious when you’re making your pitch, is to make a lot of noise that doesn’t mean anything. Every paragraph should have a purpose. Every sentence within the paragraph should have a purpose. Ideally, any one part of it would cause a huge structural catastrophe if it were not there. And the target of the pitch should be aware of this, that being on the receiving end of each sentence, of each word, is a productive use of his time.

I’m grateful for having lived through Obama. Obama taught me the human genome is flawed, and probably limited, because we have this tendency to follow whoever is the most entertaining to watch. But these tend to be the unserious people. Throughout the millennia, humans have had a lot of things to say to other humans, but there are very few things more full of fluff and useless sound making than an Obama speech. Obama broke that “Every paragraph should have a purpose” rule, broke it again, broke it a few more times, then crushed it into fine dust beneath His heel. He was archetypal among unserious people.

But fun to watch.

That’s generally how it works. Charismatic types, who have the talent to compel large numbers of shallow-thinking listeners to focus on every word when every word is disposable, have developed that particular skill for a reason. There was, in their case, a need. They did a lot of babbling and babble was all there was to it. They nurtured and grew this talent, out of a need to make the chaff look like wheat.

It’s a funny thing — we argue about politics on social media or we see others doing it, and we think “When you’re on your death bed, are you going to value the time you spent doing this?” Good question. But people ask that, and they’ll go right back to following unserious people.

If I had regrets about spending my limited amount of time on the planet arguing about politics, such regrets dissipated six years ago with the China Virus debacle when we all became sheltered-in-place political playthings. You know that saying attributed to Pericles: Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you. Point for Pericles; that’s more or less exactly what happened. And so I don’t regret arguing about politics. This sixty-year-old is filled with regrets about following unserious people. If I’m looking at all those candles on the cake nursing some burning desire for a do-over that I can’t have, the truth is that said desire would be driven by that, rather than by the other.

Women need men.

Those are the three words, right now, most assured to draw a rebuke. An emphatic one, an instant one, and from everywhere. It is the one truth in life that people are most pressured, by way of a force both deep and broad, to reject. No no no, says the Loud Crowd. Women don’t need men, men need women. Or: Here’s a woman who doesn’t need men, and it only takes a single example to dismantle your blah blah blah yakkity yakkity yak yak yak…

Or: Some women might need men, but not nearly as much as men need women. That’s the important thing.

Well, no. Women need men, and while men might need women just as badly, that’s irrelevant. It isn’t a contest. If men need women, there’s no crisis brewing there because society overall is quite into acknowledging the need men have for women. But there is a problem, large and growing, with women needing men because we pressure ourselves into believing they don’t, when they do. It’s a house-on-fire, and we’re in the house, coming up with reasons to doubt that the house is on fire when we should be attending to the fire.

Women need men. There are some exceptions, but that’s what they are, exceptions.

Lately the Loud Crowd has come around to the idea that the men are suffering and injured from the cultural reforms of recent years. That looks like a step in the right direction, at least. But it isn’t. They’re not willing to go so far as to say “These reforms were in error.” No no no. The reforms, shoving the idea that women don’t need men down everybody’s throats, could not have been in error. They just leave the men wounded and agitated and lonely and sad; the solution is a “Covid Cares emoji” or something. Maybe a prescription of psychotropic drugs to help bridge those synapses.

Actually that’s a huge step in the wrong direction, not a tiny one in the right one. Women need men, and when they need men, what they need is the skills men have been developing as they transition from boy to man. Or — skills they *should* be developing. Well brace for a shock, because developing those skills is not all fun. Spreading the message that women don’t need men has been enormously damaging, because it’s incentivized these boys-becoming-men to skip the ritual.

We’ve kept the reprimands that “you did it wrong.” That’s always been key. But we’ve discarded everything else, including the “Now go back and do it again.” That’s been replaced with “Nevermind, I’ll do it.” So all that’s left is the reprimanding, and it takes more than that to grow a boy into a man.

Now it’s fashionable to worry a bit about the boy/man being hurt?

Don’t worry about that, I say. Worry about the women and girls being deprived of what men are supposed to be bringing.

Girls on Facebook speak with one voice now. They’re the wounded and incomplete ones. Women who are complete and whole, and capable of building lives with men, offering decent respect to men, are quiet. They’ve got too much to do. The ones making noise are making the noise about “choosing the bear.” Sounding off with a whole litany of complaints about how unsafe they feel around men, “Not all men but always a man” committing these various crimes and misdeeds. If it weren’t for men there might not be protection for women, but who would these women need protection from?

All sorts of giddy trash talking, looking on the surface like it points out a problem we need to solve, until you ask: How do we solve such problems? What are we to do about this? And if you take it seriously, the only answer that emerges is something like “Lock up all the men” although very few actually come out and say that. That’s the subtext. Women are living among men when they don’t want to live among men, but are forced to do so, and the women don’t need the men.

All false.

The truth is that if a woman had her life together and had everything working the way she wanted, and her one unfulfilled aspiration would be to self-isolate from men, she’d simply do that. We have an advanced society in which women can do that if they choose. Quite easily. We men have given women that. But to make this life complete, women still require manly skills. Just not manly presence.

You brute-force people into rejecting a truth, it becomes more true. And that’s where we are with “women need men.”

It’s more true than it was before, now that we have more men coming of age without the skills or the wherewithal or the rough-and-tumble that a real man is supposed to have. It’s created a scarcity. And you know what economics has to say about scarcity.

Women can step in and provide whatever and wherever the men are lacking, for whatever reason? Yes. There is some truth in this. And that’s where we are. The women have been stepping up and doing this. They’re very unhappy about it. Because women need men. The stronger women can get along without the men…the way your neck can get along without proper support from the pillow. But in the morning you’re really going to feel it, and that’s where the strong women are right now.

This neck ache was entirely preventable. Oh, it’s there. Just like a real ache, you may think you’re hiding it. But you can tell a woman who’s been rolling out those manly skills that should have been found in someone else. You can spot ’em a mile away. They’re not happy. Strong. Doing manly things. But, hurting, and worse than the men.

Still, we ask: What more can we do, to convince the hold-outs wherever they are, that women can do everything men can do?

Instead we should be asking: How did we get off on this kick? Now that we’ve raised multiple generations of boys to reach manhood without knowing how to change a tire or tie a square knot, and put our women in pain. What were we supposed to get out of this? What was the up-side supposed to be?

Women who can change tires and tie square knots? Sensitive men who are ready to retreat behind the line, and bloviate away about how redundant they are and how women can do everything they can do? Were those the prizes?

Okay. Got ’em, mission accomplished. It’s not that impressive.

Everyone wants to show how insightful they are. To be the first to intone that women can do everything men can do, or that the men are hurting and lonely and need a Covid-cares emoji or some drugs.

The truly insightful people who are first at noticing what’s true, are now noticing that we’ve gone as far as we can go with this. We’re at the end of a cul de sac and it’s time to execute the one-eighty and beat a hasty retreat.

Time to teach boys to become men again.

Because the women need it. So does everyone else.