Yes life can be hard for men but don't be a jerk

Hello fellow male humans,

I read on the Internet that you’re having a hard time. I believe it because I have been alive since 1979 and even my “successful” life has had lots of internal woe, scrawled across the pages of diaries intermittently kept since high school.  Life is hard in the ways it has always been hard, such as the struggles of family dynamics, school, work, forming friendships, finding romance, finding a deeper meaning, coping with physical and mental illness, and facing inevitable aging and death. However, life is also hard in uniquely modern ways, such as the constant flood of misery, temptation, judgement, and deception delivered through billionaire-owned social media networks to your very addictive mobile computing devices.

Life is hard for women, too. You may not want to hear this, or may not believe it, but it’s even harder for women than it is for you. This is because women face all the timeless and modern hardships listed above, plus additional, serious dangers and hardships from living in still-male-dominated societies. That monologue about women’s plight in the Barbie movie nailed it.

This post isn’t meant to be a debate of who has it harder, and I’m not trying to make you feel worse than you already feel about your male struggles. It’s just important to remember that women are struggling, too, and its often because of us. 

In your defense, there ARE some specific, extra struggles associated with being male. I’m not talking about the risk of testicle injuries (although that is a thing). I’m talking about social and emotional struggles. I want to identify some of those struggles and address how we deal with them. How we deal with them has implications not only for our personal happiness but for whether we affect society positively or negatively. Some specific hazards and hardships of the male circumstance include:

1.     A ridiculous excess of sexual and romantic desire. The male libido hits like a meteor at puberty and burns for decades. It supplies a lot of anxious motivation and not a lot of satisfaction. The desire for romantic love is another burning meteor, though that one at least has a chance of finding a stable orbit. Developing positive, romantic and sexual relationship(s) in real life IS worth working towards, after attending to the even more important things like a roof over your head and a supportive network of friends and family. However, if you’re trying to sculpt your real life to meet 100% of your testicles’ ridiculous desires you’re in great danger of becoming a selfish, awful, tragic person. Chasing too hard after impossible desires can really hurt you, and others. For example, people who leverage money and power and/or deviously manipulate others to meet their desires can end up as monsters like Epstein and Weinstein. In addition to those infamous abusers of power, there are legions of lower-profile predators and creeps who have hurt women, and legions of sad dudes who have hurt themselves by wasting all their money on porn, how-to-be-a-player courses, strip clubs, prostitutes, etc. Don’t let yourself or your bros become those guys. It’s part of the human condition that there will always be a large portion of your desires that just can’t be met, realistically, ethically, or financially. Some combination of acceptance, imagination, and laughing at yourself will get you through.

2.     The sense of entitlement and deficit of responsibility that come from living in a patriarchal society. Patriarchy is a social system where men hold primary power, dominating roles in political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control of property. There are different degrees of patriarchy, but the USA is still strongly patriarchal according to every economic and social thing we can measure. Males get a lot of perks and privileges that women don’t get. For example, expectations for responsibility are MUCH lower for boys and men than they are for girls and women. Cartoon characters illustrate this well. We think boys like Bart Simpson, teenagers like Beavis and Butthead, and men like Homer Simpson are endearingly hilarious in their bad behavior, while their female counterparts Lisa Simpson, Daria Morgendorfer, and Marge Simpson have to be responsible all the time.

Rarely having to clean up our own messes, consider others’ needs, or pay the full price of our transgressions means males in a patriarchy grow up without developing the full responsibility and moral skillsets that all humans should have. Or we’re slow to develop them. We think we’re special good boys and nice guys when actually we’re morally stunted jerks who can’t deal with real life and who put a huge burden on others. We have this immature fantasy that at some point we'll slay a dragon and be adored and in the meantime we can't stoop to do our own laundry or vacuum the floor. That’s the bad edge of the patriarchy sword. Here’s a personal example: I grew up thinking of myself as a super special nice guy who could do no wrong, and I persisted in that view even when I was being selfish and ridiculous in early relationships. This doomed me to hard lessons and delayed social/emotional maturity, and of course it was hard on whoever I was dating.

3.     The toxic competitiveness dynamic. Guys experience weird pressures and expectations from living in societies that over-inflate the importance of male “greatness” and hierarchical position. You’re supposed to be a big hero, or a big stud; the brightest peacock in the flock. Someone is always trying to make you feel bad and insecure for not being man enough, and they’re selling you muscle growth powder, penis enlargers, get-rich-quick schemes, etc. They say it’s not enough just to be a good person and good team player. The message is that 99% of men are worthless, ugly, too-poor, and too-short and wimpy, and you’re going to be miserable and loveless unless you can dominate all the competition and become some kind of warlord pimp Adonis. Now it’s true that there is some disparity in the amount of attention paid to flashy versus average guys, and some women have terrible, superficial tastes in men, just as most men have terrible, superficial tastes in women. It’s also true that there is some real unfairness in terms of the genetic cards we’re dealt, which I addressed in the 2010 post “Ugliness, Fairness, and Happiness.” But the world is not nearly the all-or-nothing, winners-dominate-losers kind of world that the manosphere influencers say it is. The “nice guys finish last” thing is not true. There are many ways that a not-so-flashy guy can find his niche in the world through cooperation, kindness, consistency, etc. You can flavor your niceness with a little pizazz without going to the extremes of being a macho jerk. The natural way to do it is to lean into the things you're good at and see where they lead. I got a lot of mileage out of windsurfing and science as a bachelor, and those are things I liked doing anyways. Compared with the warlord pimp Adonis, who will be hated by most people and likely deposed quickly by the next aspiring warlord pimp Adonis, a humble good guy will develop a stable network of people around him who actually appreciate him and will help and support him as he has helped and supported them. Another reward of developing your goodness rather than striving for greatness (a.k.a. clout), is that it makes a better world for EVERYONE, not just you.

Conclusion: The unfairness of the world is real, but the manosphere’s advice for how you should deal with that unfairness is terrible. Their advice is like, “You have to seize power for yourself by becoming a dominant, aggressive, alpha male. Showing any empathy or kindness towards others will just make you a loser.” Every man competing to be an alpha male, and ignoring essential-to-the-fabric-of-society things like cooperation and niceness, is a recipe for both personal and civilizational disaster. In fact I think idolizing and enabling alpha male types has contributed a lot to the dysfunctional, right-wing, authoritarian oligarchy we have today. For all but a very few well-positioned billionaires and political elites, the optimal strategy for the self is actually to be LESS selfish; to create a fair, egalitarian society through cooperation, niceness, and holding abusers and exploiters to account. Working TOGETHER we can ALL get ahead.

Being anti-war not the same as being pro-dictator

It's interesting, though not surprising, to see Venezuelan and Iranian expatriates cheering the US' capture/killing of their autocratic leaders Maduro and Khamenei, respectively. Should we be cheering, too? Should we be like, "Even though we hate Trump for many other reasons, we can't complain about him beating up other bad guys"? Here's what I think:

It's clear now that the US military has the physical capability to kill or depose the heads of state of these poorer countries, but it's not clear that we have the ability (or even the intention) to set them up with new governance that isn't just as bad, or even worse. Like, are Venezuela and Iran about to become wonderful, free, safe democratic places that their expatriates will be delighted to return to? I'm not holding my breath. In Venezuela the annointed leader post-Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez, seems to come from within the same oppressive regime as Maduro, with the only difference being that she's friendlier to US-aligned oil oligarchs than Maduro was. In Iran the defeat of the regime may eventually allow the installation of leaders more pliant to US, Israeli, and Saudi oil oligarch interests... but that seems a far cry from actual democracy that would empower and improve conditions for Iranian people. Plus, that's like the best case scenario for Iran, and worst case scenarios involve chaos of warlords, terrorism, mass civilian deaths by bombings and starvation (like Gaza x 100), etc.

So my current, over-simplified take is that this new batch of wars is bullshit that will benefit a few sociopathic oligarchs while not improving, or even further degrading, the living conditions of millions of people. We need to get our own democracy functioning again in the US so we can have reasoned debate and careful consideration of these things instead of just having a free for all for our dumb dictator oligarchs to "experiment" with trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives.

One thing that might help us with better decision making about wars involving foreign dictators and such would be to consider these general principles:

1. Don't BE a dictator. Obviously very few people are ever in the position to consider the "should I become a dictator or not?" moral question, but if any nascent dictators are reading this blog, yeah, don't do it, bro.
2. Don't support dictators or aspiring dictators in your own country. This means being ACTIVE in nurturing democracy and protecting it from the forces that can undo it, such as runaway corruption and wealth inquality.
3. Don't support dictators in other countries financially, militarily, or otherwise.
4. Don't depose a dictator if you're just going to replace him with another dictator or leave an anarchic mess that's as bad or worse than the dictatorship was.

Norway fighting "enshittification" - I love them for this

One of the best things about a good, working democracy is that it protects normal citizens from being exploited by the rich and powerful. I'm delighted to see Norway's "Consumer Council" trying to protect folks from the insidious exploitation of consumers known as "enshittification." The Norwegian Consumer Council hilariously explains the enshittification phenomenon in this video:



They also have a more serious document proposing solutions to the problem here: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree/

Here in the US we're less protected from enshittificators because the ruling regime of oligarchs is largely made up of enshittificators and has done its best to dismantle opposing elements of the government like our Consumer Financial Protections Bureau. Therefore, fighting enshittification in the US is more of a grass roots resistance thing, where we have to eek out whatever small victories we can. I'm proud to have finally squirmed free of quintessential enshittificator Photobucket but there are a lot of other enshittificators at large that continue to have an undue influence on my life. For example, whenever I play a YouTube video for my marine ecology class its surrounded and interrupted by a vignette of dumb ads. I pledge to redouble my efforts to fight enshittification however I can.

Florida Keys marine ecology fieldtrip photos

Every semester I take my Florida Gulf Coast University Marine Ecology class to the Florida Keys Marine Laboratory for a few days to snorkel and learn about South Florida marine species and habitats. This year we went earlier than usual, but we lucked out with a stretch of warm weather between cold fronts. For the second part of the trip, shark and ray expert Dr. Pilar Blanco joined us, scoping out the venue for future research and teaching trips. That seemed to improve our luck at seeing sharks and rays, including this pair of Nurse Sharks (Ginglymostoma cirratum) snuggling under a ledge at Alligator Reef.

A link to the full album is here- https://photos.app.goo.gl/NbfLxnJPHEyzsMTR6

Carbon Dioxide *IS* pollution and *DOES* endanger people

Pollution has a clear definition. It's anything that humans put into the environment that causes harm. Harms that can get something classified as pollution include:

1) Harm to plants or animals.
2) Harm to human health.
3) Hindrance of human activities - for example, making water unsafe to swim or fish in.
4) Reducing "ecosystem functionality" - making nature less able to do the important things it does, like processing waste and providing fresh water, food, oxygen.

A complication that confuses people is that many pollutants are also naturally-occurring substances, which only become harmful when humans put them into the environment at unnaturally high levels or in contexts where they are inappropriate. These are called "Quantitative Pollutants" and include things like nutrients, ozone, and carbon dioxide. My favorite example of a quantitative pollutant is pure fresh water - if you dump too much fresh water into an estuary all at once it can cause harm by killing the saltwater-dependent organisms.

The less-confusing type of pollutants are "Qualitative Pollutants" - substances that NEVER occur naturally, like plastics and synthetic chemicals. Their identity as pollutants is independent of context. For example, there's no normal, healthy level of plastic in the environment.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a quantitative pollutant. It's occurs naturally as a minor but important component of Earth's atmosphere. Minor because it makes up less than 0.05% of atmospheric gas composition, but important because it's essential in photosynthesis and other cycles of life, it strongly affects ocean chemistry and acidity, and it strongly affects the insulative properties of the atmosphere (and therefore weather and climate). Over the long history of earth there have been natural ups and downs in CO2, which have had huge consequences for climate and life. Even the relatively minor oscillations in CO2 from 0.018% - 0.030% over the last 800,000 years have affected our repeated cycling into and out of glacial periods. (You can see the CO2 record of both the recent and distant past at https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/).

Given how sensitive vital climate and ecosystem processes are to atmospheric CO2 levels, it's alarming that recent human activities (deforestation and fossil fuel burning) have increased the CO2 concentration from 0.028% (the stable average of the last 12,000 years) to 0.043%; way higher than any level seen in over a million years. And the increase has been sudden, mainly happening since the industrial revolution around 1850. Does the man-made increase in CO2 constitute pollution? I.e., does it cause any of the harms described at the beginning of this post? Yes. Here are some of the harms it causes:

1. Harm to plants and animals- Increasing CO2 alters photosynthetic processes in ways that favor some plants, disfavor others, and alter plant nutrition, messing up natural systems as well as crop production. Some of these effects were reviewed in a recent, high-profile review in the scientific journal Stress Biology - https://doi.org/10.1007/s44154-025-00217-w Plants and animals are also harmed by CO2 effects on ocean chemistry. CO2 reacts with water to form carbonic acid (H2O + CO2 = H2CO3), which increases the acidity of the ocean and impairs the ability of organisms like coral, plankton, and oysters to make shells and skeletons and carry out their normal life processes. Finally, the global warming caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 has a multitude of harms to species, from simply making it too hot for them to survive, to changing rainfall or other aspects of climate that organisms depend on. Clearly CO2 meets the "harm to plants and animals" criterion for being pollution.

2. Harm to human health- CO2 at high concentrations has direct negative effects on humans. At 0.1% concentration it starts to impair cognitive function, and at 4% concentration it can knock you unconscious. Right now those direct harms to human health are more of an indoor concern, like if you're in a poorly ventilated space with a lot of people exhaling or machinery running. But if we keep putting CO2 into the atmosphere at the rate we have been, the outdoor concentrations could also get to 0.1% cognitive impairment level in just 100 years or so. The more immediate human health impacts of CO2 pollution are the indirect health impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on humans. Like, we're more likely to experience starvation, malnutrition etc. as climate change and ocean acidification distrupt crop production, fisheries, etc. Just because an effect is indirect doesn't mean it's not strong and real.

3. Hindrance of human activities- Too hot to go outside, no snow to ski on, no fish to catch, etc. You get the picture.

4. Reducing ecosystem functionality- Excess CO2 definitely impairs ecosystem functions, as evidenced by a mountain of all sorts of different scientific studies of climate change, ocean acidification, and plant physiology disruption. Here is just one of many papers reviewing these studies- https://doi.org/10.3390/environments10040066

This is a figure from an introductory oceanography textbook that illustrates some of the harmful impacts of CO2 pollution the marine environment, specifically. It really is a huge cascade of harms.

For the reasons I've reviewed here, the identity of CO2 as a pollutant has long been recognized by the science and environmental management community. Of course, powerful polluters spend billions of dollars buying politicians and trying to downplay the CO2 pollution problem and resist CO2 pollution regulations. The US Environmental Protection Agency moved in the right direction in 2009 when it officially recognized that CO2 and other greenhouse gases were harmful to human health and welfare. Unfortunately the current US regime is highly corrupt and beholden to the fossil fuel industry and other CO2 polluters, and catering to those special interests they have repealed the 2009 decision. This is very foolish and irresponsible and will harm both nature and human life if it goes through, so various groups are launching legal challenges to the decision. It's not a done deal yet, and strong activism could stop it. I encourage you blog readers to learn about and support efforts to fight back. This might be a good place to start- https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/environmental-groups-vow-stop-trump-s-epa-revoking-endangerment-finding

Went to the new MOTE Aquarium in Sarasota

I'm on an advisory council for something called the "Seagrass Restoration Technology Development Initiative." The initiative is funded by the state of Florida and administered through a private organization called Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium. Periodically the group gets together and all the scientists funded by the initiative update the organizers and advisory council on their research activities and findings. Yesterday there was one of those get-togethers at Mote SEA - the organization's fancy new public aquarium at Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota. It was neat for lots of reasons:

1. Nathan Benderson Park is a unique and impressive venue for competitive rowing and paddling. I'd been there to compete in "Sup 'n Run" races in 2016 and 2017 and to cheer Robert Norman's 24 hour SUP distance record attempt. I was nostalgic to see the place again.

2. The Mote SEA aquarium wasn't built yet when I did those sup things, but I'd seen the crazy building under construction from the freeway, so I was curious what it was like inside. Here are some pictures-

3. The seagrass science aspect of the meeting was even more interesting (to me) than the public aquarium. I brought my grad student along so she could absorb the latest info on how to characterize genetic diversity and stress-adaptations within seagrass plants. The hope is to use that knowledge to improve seagrass conservation and restoration success. Of course the other, even-more-important part of successful seagrass conservation and restoration is reducing the man-made environmental stressors that have been killing seagrass: nutrient pollution, climate change, coastal hardening and dredge/fill operations, etc. So let's not forget about that.

Finally free of Photobucket? + Old blog memories

My recent "fast" from FaceBook has given me the free time and head space to finally do something I should have done a long time ago- Download and rehost all my old blog photos that were formerly hosted on Photobucket. Photobucket is an awful, exploitative, F-rated by the Better Business Bureau company that has horribly mistreated its customers for decades and deserves to go out of business + probably have its executives fined and imprisoned. Even now that I've cancelled the autopayment on my account, I've been so wronged by them for years that I half expect them to still charge me next month somehow. I'll watch my bank account carefully to make sure I don't get robbed again.

On a better note, going through my old blog posts from 2007 - 2017 has been a personally poignant experience, forcing me to reflect on the ups and downs of my adult life so far. Sometimes I cringe at the things I did or said in the past, or my general tone: judgemental, sophomoric, bragging and humble-bragging, etc. I have alternately tried on wise-old-man and cool-young-dude voices with neither being quite genuine. But overall I feel good about my process and progress as a human being. I'm proud of hacking it fairly well as a marine biologist, husband, and amateur watersports athelete, and I'm proud of maintaining a pretty good moral posture in a politically fraught and environmentally threatened world starved for love and goodness. In addition to the stuff suitable for blogging there have been some behind-the-scenes challenges and sad chapters that I think have weathered me helpfully. There is a long and rough road ahead but I'll keep walking it (and blogging it) as well as I can.

PS- If you want to get a little "catch up" on the parts of the journey that are most interesting to you, the links on the sidebar to search the blog by different keywords and time periods could be useful.