The Masculine Urge to Walk Away

Recently, a tweet went viral asking a simple question:

Most of the answers involved conquering something, dominating someone, having many children, stopping crimes, committing high-profile heists, you know the usual.

But no one mentioned the king of all masculine urges: To Walk Away

Every man feels it. In school, at your job, in relationships, in your hometown. You might feel it right now, reading this instead of working. It’s the impulse to step out of your life, to leave the cubicle, the calendar, the commitments and simply disappear. Funny enough, the feeling doesn't vanish with business success or personal, it sometimes intensifies. It can all start to feel less like freedom and more like a comfortable, gilded cage.

But you can never admit this. Most men don’t. For good reason. It will blow up your life. Try explaining to your spouse that you fantasize about abandoning your shared life, or tell your boss you dream of never coming back from lunch. The conversation won't go well. So it's smart to stay quiet. Every man learns to suppress it. And society helps him do that too.

Religion was one of the first things to tame this urge. It made marriage indissoluble. Communities enforced belonging through excommunication, which cut a man off from neighbors and from God. Apostasy, the purest act of walking away, was treated as unforgivable, often punishable by death in later religions.

Modern Taming

Today, secular society carries on this tradition through two powerful narratives.

First, the cowardice frame, slogans like "Winners never quit, and quitters never win." We're conditioned to see leaving as failure. Every sports movie and war film reinforces this, real strength means staying for the final confrontation.

Second, the delusion frame, "The grass is always greener on the other side." This dismissive phrase reduces genuine discontent to faulty perception, teaching us to distrust our own wisdom about our situation.

Both frames serve the same function, they keep men in place. And there are good reasons why society needs this stability. Organizations depend on continuity. Mortgages require steady income. If everyone acted on their escape fantasies simultaneously, the social fabric would unravel.

The urge to leave is primal, volcanic and dangerous. It shouldn't be tamed completely. It needs to be channeled, weaponized, deployed strategically. Done right, walking away makes you powerful.

The Power of Walking Away

You see this in negotiations. The party willing to walk away holds all the leverage. That’s rule number 1. The moment the other party recognizes you need something, you're at a disadvantage.

It happens in with dating apps, the person who seems too eager or always available gets less interest than someone who appears to have options. Same with job interviews, candidates who seem desperate for any job have less negotiating power than those who appear to be considering multiple offers. The best candidates are those who seem genuinely satisfied where they are and don't have to leave.

In romantic relationships there is often a power dynamic where one person could potentially leave and the other will absolutely never leave. That one person accepts poor treatment because exit feels impossible. But the person who could walk away, who has built a life that doesn’t require their partner’s constant approval, commands the relationship. Not through threats, but through the quiet, mutual understanding that they are choosing to stay.

This isn't new. The Stoics built their philosophy around this idea. Seneca wrote about walking away from wealth, status, even life itself with a calm mind. Not because he advocated poverty, but because knowing you could thrive without these things made you free.

Walking away matters in creative work too. You need to know when to stop each day. When to leave the canvas, close the laptop, put down the pen. Keep pushing and your work becomes bloated, overworked. The best artists know when they've done enough. They let it sit, let their minds process, then return fresh the next morning.

The Ancient Models

The Iliad and Odyssey have survived millennia because they're manuals on how a man should conduct himself. Read together, they're paired meditations on masculinity, one about staying, one about leaving.

The Iliad is about warriors who stay in a doomed war rather than return home. They know many will die, yet honor demands they remain. Achilles is told by his mother that he can either go home to a long life or stay at Troy and die young but win immortal glory, and he chooses to stay. Hector, too, knows Troy will fall and that he himself will likely be killed, yet he fights on because to leave would betray his duty.

Meanwhile, in the Odyssey, Odysseus survives by walking away. The entire poem is about how he survives by withdrawal, evasion, and delay. Unlike Achilles or Hector, his heroism isn’t in dying gloriously but in outlasting and outwitting.

• He escapes the Cyclops' cave through cunning, not strength.

• He leaves Circe's luxury after a year.

• He abandons Calypso's offer of immortality for mortal life in Ithaca.

• At every trap, the Lotus-Eaters' forgetfulness, the Sirens' song, his power comes from the ability to leave.

Masculinity here equals strategic disengagement. Glory comes from having the strength to walk away. Even at Troy, Odysseus is the one urging retreat when the Greeks are overextended. He understands that survival trumps a doomed heroic stand.

That old dilemma hasn’t vanished; it reappears in modern literature too.

No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is another parable of staying versus leaving.

Llewelyn Moss finds the briefcase of drug money and can't walk away. He has options, leave it in the desert, return it, disappear entirely. But he chooses to stay entangled, bound by pride and the belief that he can manage it. It kills him in the end.

Anton Chigurh, by contrast, terrifies because he embodies absolute optionality. He can kill or spare, take or leave, vanish without hesitation. The coin toss scenes dramatize this stance: nothing binds him, and every encounter becomes a negotiation in which he holds all the leverage precisely because he doesn’t care about the outcome. If Moss is destroyed by staying entangled, Chigurh’s inhuman power comes from his radical capacity to walk away. He is optionality taken to its psychopathic extreme.

In This Newsletter

1) The Modern Addiction to Avoidance

2) What Does it Look like When Men get Trapped?

Modern Addiction to Avoidance

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