So why do we often feel busier, more stressed, and more, well, inconvenienced than ever?

My guest today argues that many supposed advancements don’t actually save us time, money, or energy — and that even when they do, they can eliminate forms of friction that made life richer, more enjoyable, and more human.

His name is Gabe Bullard, and he’s the author of Against Convenience. Today on the show, Gabe and I discuss how self-checkout, mobile ordering, digital communication, streaming services, food delivery, and even smartphone cameras can paradoxically make life more annoying and less satisfying. Gabe also shares questions to ask yourself to decide which conveniences are worth keeping, and why deliberately adding a little friction back into your life can sometimes make it better.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you’ve got a philosophical bent and you like to lift weights, you’ve probably heard of Yukio Mishima.

Mishima was one of history’s most interesting cats. He was a Japanese novelist and playwright, a martial artist and bodybuilder…and an insurrectionist who attempted to overthrow his country’s government.

His life started out one-sided. Then he found a way to artfully combine dual energies. Then he came apart.

Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka in Tokyo in 1925. When he was a baby, his grandmother Natsuko, a sickly aristocrat from a samurai family, took him away from his parents and raised him in her sickroom. She wouldn’t let him go out in the sun or play with other boys. He grew up surrounded by female cousins and classical literature. There was no outdoor, rough-and-tumble play. To compensate for the lack of physical stimulus, a scrawny and sickly Mishima crafted a rich imaginary world.

When World War II came, Mishima fully expected to be drafted and die for the emperor. That’s what he wanted to happen. He came from a samurai family, and it was his destiny to sacrifice all for the glory of Japan. But an army doctor misdiagnosed him with tuberculosis and sent him home to work in an aircraft factory while his classmates went off to die in the Pacific. He never forgave himself for that. “I lacked…the muscles suitable for a dramatic death,” he wrote years later.

After the war, he published his first novel, Confessions of a Mask, at 24 and became instantly famous. He wrote novels and plays at an astonishing clip and became one of the best modern fiction writers in Japan. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.

But despite the literary success, Mishima was discontent. He built his entire identity out of words and abstractions. He didn’t feel fully alive. He described his younger self as a creature of the night, holed up in a “dusky room,” burning the midnight oil, with a body he not only ignored, but despised.

But a trip to Greece in his late 20s, where he stood in front of the classical statues and saw what the human body could look like, kickstarted Mishima’s journey in the visceral world of physical culture. Seeing those white statues gave him what he called a “will to health in the Nietzschean sense.” In 1955, Mishima walked into a gym and started lifting weights. He kept at it three times a week, without a break, for the next (and last) 15 years of his life, and added boxing and kendo along the way. He took great satisfaction in his bodybuilding, treating it like a spiritual or religious practice.

For a while, it seemed like Mishima would be like a Japanese Ernest Hemingway or Jack London, relishing a life of both physicality and letters.

But Mishima became more and more politically radicalized. He felt that the soul of Japanese society, and particularly its samurai culture, had been eviscerated after WWII and wanted to resurrect it and restore the Emperor to the center of political and spiritual life. So he embraced an extreme form of nationalism and started his own private army, which he suited up in sharp military uniforms. Then, on November 25, 1970, he attempted to lead a coup to overturn Japan’s postwar political order. The coup had no chance of succeeding, and Mishima had already planned what he would do when it failed. After the soldiers who had assembled below the balcony at the Self-Defense Forces’ Ichigaya headquarters jeered him, he walked back into the commandant’s office and committed ritual seppuku.

He committed suicide by disemboweling himself with a dagger and then having one of his followers (in the end it took two of them) decapitate him with a samurai sword.

Dang.

Mishima was a complicated guy who left a mixed legacy, and you don’t need to look to his politics or radicalism for inspiration. But there is something you can glean from his philosophy.

Particularly the philosophy he forwarded in his book Sun and Steel.

The Sun, The Steel

Two years before he killed himself, Mishima published Sun and Steel to explain what he learned from his religious (in both senses of the word) pursuit of weightlifting. The title is his shorthand for the two things that pulled him out of the sheltered mindset he had developed in his childhood.

The sun is objective reality. It’s “the world beyond your head,” as Matthew Crawford put it. When you’re out in the sun, you’re like the guys that escape Plato’s cave of shadows, and you finally see things the way they really are. The sun doesn’t care about your theories of how you think the world is supposed to work. It’s fitting that Mishima made the sun his symbol for hard reality. This was a guy who spent his childhood hidden from the sun in his grandmother’s sickroom and, consequently, from real life.

The steel is the barbell and plates. The steel was the tool he used to train his body and mind so that he could meet the reality of the sun on its own terms.

The sun, the steel: together these elements provide a counterbalance to a life lived too much in the abstract.

I first read Sun and Steel a long time ago, and much of it really resonated with me. What I appreciate about Mishima is that he was a brainy, cerebral guy who understood there’s a danger in living inside your head too much. It can make you morbidly self-conscious. And the remedy to that is to train your body. Hard.

I know I’ve learned that lesson. I make my living sitting in a chair typing words or talking to people via the internet in my closet for the podcast. I spend most of my time in the world of ideas, and I’ve seen how that can lead to a downward spiral of rumination. But I’ve also seriously trained with the iron for over a decade, and have found it’s taught me things I couldn’t have learned any other way.

Mishima does an illuminating job articulating what those lessons have been, and below I offer seven of the insights from Sun and Steel that have stuck with me:

1. Living Entirely Inside Your Head Is Existentially Stunting

Most people make friends with their body before they enter the abstract world of ideas. A child runs and climbs and scrapes his knee and gets back up without thinking much of it. Mishima experienced it backward: “My memory of words reaches back far farther than my memory of the flesh.” A person who only lives in the world of words, he says, becomes a man who can write a tragedy but “cannot participate in it.” In other words, when you exist in the world of the abstract, you live only half a life.

Living entirely inside your head can also breed anxiety and despair as thought loops back endlessly on itself. Mishima found an antidote in shifting his attention outward and pushing against something that wasn’t him: the barbell. Science has since confirmed the broader point that physical activity is one of the best ways to get out of your head and improve your mood.

2. Your Body Speaks a Language

My favorite idea from Sun and Steel is that there is a “language of the flesh.” Mishima said he learned it “much as one might learn a foreign language.”

What does it mean that your body has a language? Nietzsche, whom Mishima read closely, gets at it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “You say ‘I,’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this, although you would not believe it, is your body and its intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I.'” There’s an embodied kind of intelligence you can’t acquire simply by thinking about something. You have to actually move your body. You have to “perform.”

Here’s an example of that. Right now, I’m teaching my son Gus how to drive stick shift. He read the article we wrote about it several years ago and watched a YouTube tutorial, approaching the new skill as an abstract theory you can download into your brain. But when he gets in the car and starts actually trying to apply that theory into practice, it only sort of works. It doesn’t translate completely. So he asks for advice on when to shift or how to take his foot off the clutch, and I give him some, and it works…a little. But in the end, I simply tell him, “You just got to feel it. I can’t tell you exactly what to do. There’s no three-step process. Your body just sort of learns what to do and when to do it.” The physicality of driving stick requires him to learn the language of the flesh.

The same goes for any physical activity, be it throwing a football, climbing a rock face, or deadlifting a heavy barbell from the floor. The language of the flesh is a language of physical action, not abstraction. If you want to fully express yourself and communicate with the world, you have to learn it.

3. The Iron Doesn’t Lie

As a novelist, Mishima made his living manipulating words. He could do whatever he wanted with them. The barbell was different. He couldn’t manipulate it. He had to conform himself to the steel:

The steel gave me an utterly new kind of knowledge, a knowledge that neither books nor worldly experience can impart…For me, muscles had one of the most desirable qualities of all. Their function was precisely opposite of that of words.

In short, unlike words that can be arranged to tell yourself the story you want to hear, the steel won’t let you do that.

Henry Rollins made the same point in his famous Details essay “Iron and the Soul”:

The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver…two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.

I make my living with words, so I’m as good as anyone at telling myself a story. I can’t do that with the barbell. I either lift the weight or I don’t. I can’t spin the results. The iron teaches you not to lie because it doesn’t lie.

4. Pain Is Information

“Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh.” As Mishima observed, pain is often the medium for the language of the body. Physical pain can tell you things about yourself that you didn’t know, even your values.

Kate wrote a great Sunday Fireside called “You Are Your Relation to Pain” about this idea. The pain of a hard workout can feel like an unwelcome stressor…or evidence that you’re becoming more fully alive. How you interpret pain reveals something about what you value. As Ernst Jünger put it: “Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are.”

5. The Body Brings You Up to the Surface

The whole modern approach to self-knowledge, from therapy to journaling, is about digging. If you want to learn about yourself, you go deep inside your psyche. Self-reflection can be useful, but like any good thing, taken too far, it becomes a hindrance. Think about those nights when you lie in bed caught up in a whirlwind of thought about how your life isn’t going the way you wanted, rewinding every mistake you’ve made and conjuring up increasingly dire futures. That’s what happens when you live entirely in your head.

Mishima poses a contrarian question. What if, instead of only going down into your psyche, you went up into the world?

Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface?

By surface, Mishima means your skin: the boundary where you meet the world, the part of you that’s visible in the sun. His claim is that there’s as much truth up there as in your psychological basement. Once he started training, the anxieties and neurotic fantasies he’d lived with since childhood receded. He learned that things weren’t as bad as he thought. The sun puts things in perspective.

I’ve experienced this. Whenever I’m in a rut or a foul mood, my natural bent is to ruminate. I think that thinking about the problem over and over will solve it, but it rarely does. It usually just makes me feel worse. So I go down to the garage and train, and I usually feel better afterward. The iron gets me out of my head, because my only focus is getting the next rep. When I’m doing a heavy set of squats, the only thought in my head is “Don’t die.” That’s it. There’s no room under a 420-pound barbell for thoughts about why my recent article didn’t get as much traffic as I wanted. The weight doesn’t care. Most of life doesn’t care about most of your problems either.

6. Shared Suffering Brings People Together

At one point in the book, Mishima describes carrying a portable shrine through the streets during a festival with a crowd of other young men, all of them staggering under the weight of it. They were all miserable. But he noticed that misery made him feel closer to those other guys: “The pounding of the heart communicated itself to the group; we shared the same swift pulse…only bodies, placed under the same circumstances, can experience a common suffering.”

I’ve never carried a shrine, but I know what Mishima’s talking about. Back when I played high school football, I absolutely hated pre-season two-a-days. So did my teammates. Just awful. The morning practice started when it was a “cool” (and very humid) 85 degrees. Then you’d get a few hours off and head back to the field when it was pushing 100 and even more humid. But that shared suffering brought the team together. During practice, we’d encourage each other when one of us was flagging; between practices we’d trade gallows humor. Shared pain made us one. I loved those guys.

If you want to bond a group of people, have them do something physically demanding together.

7. Be a Man of the Pen and the Sword

The samurai had an ideal called bunbu ryodo, the dual way of the pen and the sword. A samurai was supposed to be a gentleman and a fighter, and a man who was only one or the other was either a brute or a coward. Mishima lived the ideal of the refined warrior. He’d train hard in the gym and then come home to write or listen to flute music. He combined both brains and brawn, and saw parallels between the gym and the classroom. Adding weight to the bar little by little, he wrote, “was remarkably similar to the process of education, which remodels the brain intellectually by feeding it with progressively more difficult matter.” Progressive overload, baby. It works for your muscles and your mind.

Books and barbells. That’s mostly my life, and the combination has lent it richness. I think it’s important for guys to think, to be philosophically inclined, but to always stay grounded in the objective reality of the sun by way of the steel. Read Kierkegaard. Then go deadlift.

If you like to spend time in the gym, and you like to think about why you like to spend time in the gym, go read Sun and Steel. It’s about 100 pages. You can knock it out in an afternoon. It will give you a new appreciation of how the steel can help you listen to the language of the flesh and, as Mishima put it, experience “the eloquence of life.”

For more on the philosophy of physicality, including a discussion of Yukio Mishima, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Smells can conjure up powerful memories. The smell of pine needles can take you back to childhood Christmases or the smell of a laundry detergent can remind you of home.

For me, there are certain smells that I’ve come to associate with manliness. Whenever I smell them I think of my dad or grandpa or some aspect of my boyhood and my initiation into the rites of manhood. 

It was back in 2009 when we first came up with the idea for creating a list of manly smells. We asked you, our readers, for your input, and we gathered together 15 especially virile scents. The list was a hit, and we of course received hundreds of comments relaying further manly smells to feature. So four years later in 2013, we did another crowdsourced list, that time of 18 aromas. We’re at it again, but this time we’ve combined those two original lists with a handful more to boot. Thus, below we present the ultimate collection of manly smells! Interspersed in this list you’ll find not only our descriptions of manly smells, but also memories from our readers themselves. 

Hardware Store

The hardware store is a smorgasbord of manly smells: paint, wood, fertilizer, metal. It’s all there. As a boy, there was a local hardware store that my dad would go to. He’d lug my brother and I along. We’d open up all the drawers for the hinges and nails and play hide-in-seek in the door displays. Like many local hardware stores, it went out of business years ago when the big box stores moved in. The building was torn down and replaced with an upscale shopping center. But whenever I drive by the corner where it once stood, I can still smell the manliness that once emanated from that place.

Black Coffee

“My favorite scent, not just manly scent, but scent period: the smell of coffee percolating in one of those enamel coffee pots on a campfire on a cool autumn morning, right next to the river. Inhale the good, exhale the bad. Heal.” —PiperJon

“Cowboy coffee! Not that BS latte smell of hot milk, but the deep, powerful smell of cowboy coffee made by dumping grounds right into the pot, in deer camp, at 5 am, over a campfire.” —Wilson

Shoe Polish

The smell of shoe polish is a distinctively manly smell. For many men it conjures up images of soldiers shining their boots to a mirror polish. For me, whenever I crack open a can of Kiwi black shoe polish to shine my shoes, I’m instantly transported to my childhood den. About once a month, my dad would pull out his wooden shoe polish kit and take all his boots to the den to polish them. He usually watched a classic detective show like In the Heat of the Night or Magnum P.I. while he did it. The warm smell of shoe polish and leather filled the entire room, and it would usually linger there after he finished.

Gasoline, Motor Oil, Grease, and Garage

“Every time I’m at a gas station, I can smell my father with his hands covered in engine oil and gasoline from splashing the red canister contents onto the funnel. Those red rags smell more like a man than most men do.” —James

“I drive an old Triumph Bonneville motorbike and I have to ‘tickle’ the carbs before starting it until a little gas comes out. The smell of it on my finger or leather gloves always makes me nostalgic for my dad’s bike on the carport.” —Matt

“My dad would smell like that after working on the family cars, my older brothers would smell like that after working on their cars, and my husband smells like that every day, as he is a mechanic. Too much is too much, but just the right amount of grease on his tan forearms, smelling manly…WOW. That is one hell of a manly smell.” —Alison

Cut Grass

For many men, mowing the lawn is the bane of their existence. But even if you hate the actual chore of mowing the yard, you can’t deny that the smell of fresh cut grass is pretty darn manly. Combine that grass-y smell with a little body odor from the exertion, and a bit of gasoline (if you’re not using a reel mower), and you’ve got a scent you may find yourself in no rush to wash off after giving your lawn a haircut.

Old Tackle Box

“The smell of the metal on old, worn-out pocket knives mixed with the remains of earthworms on fish hooks just brings me right back to fishing with my grandpa as a young buck.” —Mark

Sawdust

I haven’t worked with wood as much as I would like to. But whenever I do, I always try to savor the smell of sawdust. I can remember when I first gained an appreciation for this scent. It was at that old hardware store I mentioned earlier. Out back, they had a lumber yard, and I remember getting big whiffs of sawdust as I watched the workers saw wood down to size for my dad. The smell of sawdust also brings back the memory of my dad showing me how to sand my first pinewood derby car. Good times.

Airplane Cockpit

“I worked B-52s, and the smell of 40 years of sweat, burnt food, tension, and hard work just can’t be beat. I’m sure it’s one of those acquired smells, but once you get it, you got it.” —Josh

Scotch

There’s nothing like the warm, rich, smoky smell of an aged Scotch whisky. To the first timer, the smell of Scotch can be off putting. But once you get past its initial pungency, you’ll discover a symphony of smell. Each Scotch has its own distinct smell, but they all share some general characteristics. You’ll definitely smell the smoky peat used during the malting process. But if you get in closer, you might catch the subtle fruity smell of apples or cherries. There’s also a hint of licorice, reminiscent of kind old men. Taken together, you’re left with a scent that will put hair on your chest.

Baseball Glove

“I remember when I played in Little League there was no smell like putting your glove on your face: leather, dirt, grass, sweat. Baseball is full of great manly smells.” —Sam

Barbershop

I love walking into a barbershop. You know why? Because they all smell so damn manly. A barbershop smell is a mixture of Barbicide, shaving cream, musky smelling hair, and cheap (and free) coffee. If you’re going to an old barber shop, it may also smell ever so faintly of tobacco from the days when men would smoke a cigarette and put out their butts in the ashtray on the barber chair armrests.

Gunpowder

I think every man’s affinity for the smell of gunpowder began at some fireworks stand out in the country. That’s where mine did at least. Every Fourth of July, without fail, the parents would take my brother and I to a fireworks stand on an old country road. I can remember being overwhelmed by the smell of gunpowder as we ran up to the stand. After we filled up our paper bags, I would often stick my nose in it and take a nice big whiff. It smelled of danger.

The smell of spent gunpowder is just as appealing, like shotgun shells or the way it smells all around after you fire off a round from a pistol.

The Interior of an Old Car

“Nothing beats getting into an old car (that hasn’t been completely restored from the ground up) and taking a big ol’ whiff and just smelling the years.” —Josh

Original Old Spice Cologne

Go to any men’s section in a department store, and you’ll see a stand selling $60 bottles of cologne with foo-fooey scents. Walk into any local drugstore and you can find manliness in a bottle for less than $12. Before they made deodorant, Old Spice was known for its cologne. They still make the cologne, but it doesn’t get much play these days, which is a shame. Based purely on anecdotal evidence, women seem to love a man who wears Old Spice. It reminds them of their grandfathers. They’re not hot for their grandpas, obviously, they’re just keen on the smell of old fashioned manliness. When they get a whiff of you sporting Old Spice they’ll instantly associate you with a time when men were men. Quit dousing yourself in Calvin Klein or gassing yourself in a cloud of Axe body spray and get some Old Spice.

Horses

“Anything to do with horses . . . dried manure, saddle leather, wet saddle blankets, even the smell of hay and sweet feed.” —Kerry

Campfire

It’s sunset. The last rays of light are slowly fading into the horizon. You go over to the fire pit and begin to strategically place dry leaves and small twigs into a tepee shape. You light a match, and watch the leaves smolder. And then it reaches you: the first bit of smoke from a campfire you created with your own two hands. You suddenly feel more manly. But the smells don’t stop there. Throw in some maple, pine, or pinion logs and you up the manly smell quotient a few marks.

And the campfire smell stays with you when you go home. It gets in your clothes and in your hair, though you don’t really notice it until you walk into a clean house. The contrast between your smoky smelling self and your antiseptic home gives you one last chance to revel in the manly scent of a campfire, before it gets washed down the shower drain.

Locker Room

“The smell of a change room after a game . . . Sweat, grass, blood, and deep heat, and after the showers, various types of stinkpretty. Just the smell of a change room almost has the power to impregnate any females passing by.” —Ben

Freshly Churned Dirt

“For me, it’s the smell of freshly turned dirt — that earthy, loamy smell reminds me of the large garden we had in the backyard when I was a youngster. We emigrated from Hong Kong when I was a kid, and my father dreamed of having a farm or acreage in Canada. We never did get that farm, but the privilege of working on his own land meant spring and fall, my kid brother and I were outside mucking around in the garden with him as he toiled away. To this day, when I turn the dirt in my own garden, the smell of turned soil reminds me of ‘real’ work and what life is all about, not the antiseptic feel of my office, pushing electrons and paper around in an endless circle.” —Ozone

Pipe Smoke

Not many men smoke pipes these days, so that the sweet smell of pipe tobacco has largely evaporated from our world. Cigarette and cigar smoke can be acrid and obnoxious, but pipe smoke is, well, just pleasant. A whiff of a nice clove or cherry wood blend summons images of kindly older men in tweed jackets sitting in a chair next to a warm cozy fire with an old dog nearby.

Construction Site

“The smell of a rough framed house, before the exterior doors, windows, and roofing are installed.” —Kerry

“Cutting steel with a torch. Creosote timber. That deep-down earth smell when excavating. Wet concrete.” —Jim

Navy Ships

“Having spent a lot of time at sea when I was in the US Navy, when I visit a warship museum, such as the USS Midway, the first thing I notice is the smell. Kind of a paint, hydraulic fluid, boiler exhaust, salt air mix.” —Perry

“I’m an old Navy guy and after 35 years I can still remember that smell. Red lead paint, bunker oil, steam, food from the galley, and gunpowder. Add several hundred — or several thousand — tired and often scared people. Put it all in a steel box and seal it up from the sunlight and fresh air. I visited the USS Texas about 15 years ago. She’d been cold iron since the late 1940s but when I went below decks I could still smell the ghost of that smell in the air.” —Dave

Your Grandpa’s Chair

Me as a boy with my Grandpa Hurst.

It seems like every old man has a chair that’s just for him. After years of sitting in it, the seat conformed specifically to the contours of his body and his scent has been permanently stamped into the upholstery. At least that’s how my grandpa’s chair was. That’s him sitting in his chair with me on the left and my little brother, Larry, on the right. One of my fondest memories was going to my grandpa’s house in Bosque Farms, New Mexico for Thanksgiving. We’d sit on his lap and he’d hold us in his big strong hands. His chair smelled like the pinion wood he’d burn in his cast iron stove, the barn that he kept his horses in, and the sweat of a man who worked hard even in retirement. In a word, it smelled like pure manliness.

I miss my grandpa. And I miss that chair.

Gun Cleaning Solvent

Another ritual my father had when I was growing up was cleaning his government-issued gun for his job as a Federal Game Warden. It was usually done on weeknights after dinner. He’d bring his gun cleaning kit to the kitchen table and place a white cloth in front of him on which he’d place his revolver. I was always fascinated by all the different size brushes in his kit. He’d then slowly open up the bottle of Hoppe’s No. 9 gun cleaning solvent. It filled the entire room with a rich, warm smell.

The first time you smell gun solvent it’s pretty jarring, but then you get used to it, and then you start to like it. That smell alone may even inspire you to make cleaning your gun a regular weekly chore.

Splitting Firewood

“Hand splitting of firewood. You can’t use an electric or gas-powered log splitter and get the same effect. From the metallic smell you get stuck in your nose as you use the double action file to restore the edge on your decades-old axe, to the one-of-a-kind aroma released by a length of red oak as it is cleaved in two, right on down to the combined smell of dank bark chips stuck to your sweaty flannel shirt. Much like the lawn mowing smell, I like to pause to enjoy it.” —Dave

Charcoal

I love tearing open a bag of Kingsford and letting that waft of charcoal goodness hit me right in the nose. It’s a smell that tells my mind and body that summer is officially here. But the smell only gets better when you throw a match on it and watch it turn from black lumps of coal to glowing red stones, ready to cook any meat you throw on it.

Bowling Alley

In their heyday in the 1950s, bowling alleys replaced the fraternal lodge as a place for men to gather and bond. Perhaps that’s why I associate the smell of a bowling alley with manliness. The combination of lane wax, piles of bowling shoes that have been worn by thousands of people, and cigarette smoke mix together to form that distinct bowling alley smell that permeates alleys across the country.

Zippo Lighter

Not just any lighter carries the scent of a Zippo, which is one that will bring you back to your youthful days of Grandpa letting you play with fire while Mom and Dad weren’t looking. Zippo lighter fluid isn’t anything special on its own, but when it’s soaked up into the cotton padding, travels up the wick, and is ignited by the flint wheel to create an enduring, windproof flame, a unique and manly smell is created.

Leather

Nothing beats the smell of well-worn leather. Some of the manliest pieces of clothing and accessories are made from leather — jackets, boots, briefcases, saddlebags. The smell of leather reminds me of riding horses with my grandpa. I loved walking into the barn where he stored all his tack and taking a deep breath. I remember thinking, “This is manly.” 

Newsprint

“My dad would sit on the couch after work (whence by the way, he would come home smelling of machine grease) and read the paper, back in the days when the paper would really leave some color on your hands. I would sit next to him and that newsprint aroma would waft out when he spread the pages wide open. In the winter, he’d light an old kerosene heater just before he settled down to the paper. Talk about being engulfed in manliness.” —Hawkins

Aqua Velva

Pete Rose and the Lone Ranger are some of the manly icons who’ve worn Aqua Velva — one of the best forgotten drugstore colognes and aftershaves. Aqua Velva’s biggest selling point has always been the cooling menthol that soothes away razor burn, while bracing your face with a potent, minty smell. After the wintery menthol punches you in the mug, the scent fades to a pleasant aroma of oak and moss. You’ll find yourself walking around with a little swagger in your step and calling people “tiger” and “ace” after you start wearing it.

Bacon

One of the best parts of spending Thanksgiving at my grandpa’s ranch were the breakfasts. Every morning I’d wake up to the smell of pan-fried bacon, pancakes, and black coffee. That’s what heaven smells like.

Bay Rum

The history of bay rum is as manly as it smells. Several centuries ago, sailors in the Caribbean had the idea to mix bay leaves and rum together to create a cologne that helped cover their stench on long voyages. Islanders took this basic recipe and began adding their own olfactory flourishes by mixing in cloves, citrus rind, and cinnamon. Thus was born an incredibly unique and wonderful fragrance that spread to the rest of the world and became popular among men as an aftershave scent and as a staple at classic barbershops. You can even make your own.

Canvas Tents

Whether associated with camping or life in the Army, the distinct smell of canvas tents — a mixture of the scent of the fabric and a mildewy musk — is indelible for many men. Personally, this smell reminds me of Boy Scout camp in Colorado.

Wood Finish

While cutting, assembling, and sanding/planing wood provides a variety of manly scents, finishing your work provides another unique aroma. On its own, wood finish is often slightly noxious. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but it’s not terribly pleasant. When applied to wood, though, and the smells are allowed to intermingle, you have a whole new scent. Mix the natural, fresh smell of lumber with the artificial, man-made stain or polyurethane, and you get the bonafide smell of man creating something new and beautiful with the gifts nature has given him.

Lava Soap

Since 1893, Lava Soap has been the go-to soap of painters, grease monkeys, and other men who get their hands dirty for a living. Why is it called “Lava”? The soap contains ground-up pumice (a volcanic rock) that helps scour tough-to-remove gunk from your hands. Despite its volcanic inspiration and composition, rather than smelling sulfuric, it actually has a pleasantly fresh scent — one that’s associated with rolling up your sleeves and putting in a hard day’s work.

Burning Leaves

Perhaps it’s strange to be nostalgic for something I never experienced myself, but I’ve always found the idea of burning leaves in the fall quite evocative. Most cities in the US had banned the practice by the time I was born, but my parents have told me about these autumnal leaf burnings; for about a month, all you could smell in most North American neighborhoods was the scent of smoldering piles of detritus. I imagine it would have smelled like a campfire, magnified by ten. If you want to experience this smell today, just throw some leaves on your campfire the next time you build one.

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in September 2017.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Salesman. My latest Criterion watch was this 1969 documentary, which follows four door-to-door salesmen from the Mid-American Bible Company as they work Catholic parishes around Boston and then down in Florida, trying to move a $49.95 (that’s $500 in 2026 dollars — expensive!) illustrated Bible to working-class families. It’s a peek into a world that no longer exists, and an interesting look at the intersection of religion and business in America. My favorite scenes are the sales meetings, where the men get pumped up by their manager and the company’s “theological consultant” (that was his real job title) about how they’re on “the Father’s business” before heading back out to knock on doors. The desperation of Paul Brennan, the old-timer who can’t get sales anymore, reminded me of Jack Lemmon’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross. I actually enjoyed this flick more than that one. Definitely less f-bombs.

Ode to a master mechanic by Matthew Crawford. I really enjoy the writing of former AoM podcast guest Matthew Crawford on craftsmanship and the importance of encountering the material world to get outside our heads. His latest essay on Substack is about Ken Jansen, a machinist in Belmont, CA, who builds engines for Volkswagen drag racers. This ode to Jansen is really about the idea that for stuff to work, you need people around who know things. And by knowing, Crawford means people who’ve got a lifetime of embodied knowledge. They know things in their bones. It’s the kind of tacit knowledge you can’t fully explain nor learn from a Google search or from AI.  This kind of practical knowledge only gets passed down in person, from one guy to the next, in shops with no storefront. Ken learned from a German mechanic who trained at the VW factory after the war, and Crawford has been learning from Ken. Crawford’s worry is that as these guys retire and die off, nobody’s stepping in to replace them, which means a future world where fewer things work. 

The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck. I picked up this 1932 Steinbeck book after reading that Brandon Flowers said the concept for The Killers’ album Pressure Machine (a set of songs about Nephi, his small hometown in Utah) was partly inspired by it. The Pastures of Heaven contains a series of self-contained yet interconnected stories all set in the same California valley. My favorite is about a farmer named Shark Wicks who’s poor but convinces the whole town he’s wealthy by talking up an imaginary stock portfolio, which he tracks in a ledger like it’s real. The illusion eventually comes crashing down in humiliating fashion. Steinbeck’s writing here is simple and plain, yet very evocative. Really enjoyed this one. 

New Balance 574. I needed a new pair of everyday sneakers and went back to the NB 574. Can’t beat it. It’s the classic ’90s dad shoe (New Balance designed it as a trail runner in 1988), and the gray colorway goes with about everything I own. What’s funny is that the 574 has also become my 15-year-old son’s standard shoe, so there are now two identical pairs strewn around the house. The way I tell which pair is his and which is mine is that his are bigger. The kid has gotten taller than me.

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: A Place for Everything, and EVERYTHING In Its Place and Why Nothing Succeeds Like Success.

Quote of the Week

Monotony is the awful reward of the careful.

—A.G. Buckham

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You’re surely familiar with the idea that humans spend a lot more time sitting than they used to. If you haven’t heard the statistics — the average American sits for 9-10 hours a day — you’ve experienced it in your life, finding yourself spending long stretches of your work and leisure time sedentary in office chairs and on couches.

You’re probably also familiar with the ill effects all this sitting can have on both our bodies and minds: higher blood pressure, higher blood sugar, impaired metabolic health, anxiety, and depression.

As Manoush Zomorodi, author of Body Electric, shared on the AoM podcast, one of the big effects of spending a lot of time sitting is, ironically enough, feeling unaccountably tired. This, despite the fact that you haven’t done anything physical. Sitting saps your energy and makes you feel strangely fatigued.   

You might hope that the 3-mile run you do in the morning or the lifting session you get in after work will counteract the effects of excessive sitting. But while it does help, working out for one hour doesn’t erase the consequences of spending ten hours sedentary. Even among people who exercise, long bouts of uninterrupted sitting are still associated with worse metabolic and cardiovascular outcomes. And being too sedentary — even if punctuated by sessions at the gym — is still a drag on our mood.

Fortunately, the solution doesn’t require upping your exercise time 10X. Instead, you can combat the ill effects of sitting by peppering your day with surprisingly small movement “snacks.”

The Outsized Power of 5-Minute Movement Breaks

In seeking to improve her health and reenergize her routine, Zomorodi came across research from Keith Diaz, a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, that investigated how much movement the human body needs to mitigate the effects of prolonged sitting. 

In one study, five minutes of walking every half hour helped offset increases in blood glucose and blood pressure, while reducing fatigue and improving mood. The walking wasn’t even strenuous; the treadmill was set to about two miles per hour.

Zomorodi then tried the protocol herself. On one day, she spent eight hours sitting and working with only normal breaks every few hours. On another, she walked for five minutes every half hour. The results of this routine change were striking: her blood sugar was nearly cut in half, her blood pressure dropped by five points, and she reported substantially better concentration, energy, and mood. 

Researchers later tested a similar approach by enrolling nearly 20,000 people in a global study. On average, participants reported a 25% decrease in fatigue. 

This is heartening news: You can improve your mental and physical health with very short bouts of activity that don’t have to be intense to be effective. As Zomorodi said, “The point is to get the blood flowing and raise your heart rate just a little bit, but you don’t have to go crazy.”

Every 30 minutes, just get up and walk. Go outside or simply walk around your house. Jump on a treadmill if you have one. The movement needs to be continuous; just standing at a desk doesn’t carry the same benefits. 

Don’t want to walk? Move in place. Jumping jacks, push-ups, bodyweight squats, or any other simple movement can also work. And don’t obsess over hitting that exact 30-minute interval every time — while the greatest benefits accrue to those who move every half hour, there are significant benefits even for moving every 1-2 hours. The broader goal is to break up long stretches of sitting with a short bout of physical activity.

You Also Need to Move Around After Work 

It’s easy to think of sitting as a workday problem; you sit at your desk all day, so you need to get up occasionally. But what happens when work ends? For many people, you go home and sit on the couch for three or four hours.

You don’t have to give up your favorite show or turn leisure time into exercise. Between episodes or during commercial breaks, get up to walk around the house, take the dog outside, or do a few jumping jacks. The goal is to avoid turning an extended period of relaxation into a long chunk of uninterrupted sitting. 

Make It Automatic

Now, the hardest part isn’t necessarily the five-minute break — it’s remembering to take it. When you’re absorbed in work, it’s surprisingly easy to go from “I’ll get up in a minute” to realizing that two hours have passed. That’s why one of the most common strategies participants used in the study was setting a timer.

Set one for 30 or 60 minutes. When it goes off, drop what you’re doing, get up, and move for five minutes. You don’t have to interrupt a genuine flow state, but you do want to create a regular pattern of breaking up long periods of sitting.

You don’t have to be moving all day long to live with greater vim and vigor. Just five minutes here and there will have you feeling more vital. 

For even more info and actionable advice from Manoush Zomorodi, be sure to listen to the podcast: 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

My guest calls this collection of abandoned or deferred desires your “invisible list” and is the author of a book of the same name.

Today on the show, Ravi Gupta presents a plan for tackling the things on your invisible list by picking one hobby-like activity each year and working your way to an intermediate level in it. He explains the different categories these pursuits can fall into, from the liftoff project to the mental marathon to the skillbatical, and how to pick the right one for your season of life. We also discuss how camps for grownups can make skill acquisition more enjoyable, why you should consider taking up an adult-appropriate sport like tennis, why Ravi decided to take the MCAT even though he doesn’t plan to become a doctor, and how working on your invisible list can give your life chapters and, over the course of a decade, turn you into a Renaissance-man badass.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The raglan tee (or as most guys know it, the baseball tee) is a shirt with sleeves that contrast in color from the body. Those sleeves are its defining feature: instead of attaching at a vertical seam on top of the shoulder, they’re cut in one continuous piece of fabric that runs from the underarm up to the collar. You know the shirt — it’s the one Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez wore in The Sandlot.

Like the rugby shirt and the trench coat, the raglan started as purely functional gear (in this case, for a one-armed general) and worked its way into everyday menswear. If you’ve written it off as something for little leaguers and concert merch tables, take another look. Few T-shirts do more to flatter a man’s build and have such an effortless appeal.

Here’s the history of the raglan tee, why men look good in one, and how to wear one well.

A Brief History of the Raglan Tee

Like most menswear, the raglan-sleeved tee was born in war. In 1815, during the Battle of Waterloo, a 26-year-old British officer named FitzRoy Somerset was struck in the right arm by a French musket ball, and the arm had to be amputated on the spot. (As the surgeon carried the limb off, Somerset called after him to bring it back; his wife’s ring was still on one of the fingers.) Somerset learned to write and fight left-handed, kept climbing the ranks, and eventually rose to command British forces in the Crimean War as Lord Raglan.

A one-armed man could hardly get in and out of the era’s military uniforms, which were tailored stiff and snug through the shoulders. So as Raglan prepared for conflict in the Crimea, he brought the problem to John Emary, his tailor and the founder of the Aquascutum menswear company. Emary’s solution was to eliminate the shoulder seam altogether. He cut the sleeve and shoulder as one continuous piece of fabric, which left a diagonal seam running from the armpit up to the collar. The design gave Raglan a coat he could put on and take off by himself, and enough room in the shoulder to swing a sword. After the war, the raglan overcoat caught on beyond the battlefield. King Edward VII wore one, giving the style a royal stamp of approval.

The raglan cut eventually found a natural home in baseball. Its roomy shoulder construction suited a sport built around throwing, and raglan-sleeved undershirts became a familiar part of the ballplayer’s uniform. The three-quarter sleeves and contrasting colors eventually produced the classic baseball-tee look we know today.

Rock stars in the 20th century adopted the raglan tee as part of their signature look. They even used it for merch. In the 1970s, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and the Rolling Stones all sold raglan tees at their concerts. Punks wore raglans too, mostly because they were cheap and unfussy.

Why a Man Should Own a Raglan Tee

It flatters a man’s build. A raglan’s diagonal seams run from the collar down toward the underarm, visually widening the shoulders and drawing the eye inward toward the waist. Because there’s no seam sitting on top of the shoulder, the fabric also drapes smoothly over the delts and traps instead of breaking up their shape. Contrasting sleeves amplify the effect, making the upper body look broader and the waist look trimmer.

Women notice it. Research on male attractiveness has found that women tend to prefer builds with a pronounced shoulder-to-waist taper (make sure you’re regularly working out those man antlers!). The raglan tee not only accentuates that shape, but it also carries appealing associations — to athletes and rock stars. It’s part of the reason Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez looks, according to my 13-year-old daughter, “so fine.” Chicks dig a guy in a raglan.

It’s made for fall and spring weather. Fall and spring often have cool mornings and warm afternoons. A raglan can keep you warm in the morning, but is light enough that you won’t be burning up later in the day. It also pairs naturally with everything else you’ll be wearing during these seasons, like jeans, chinos, boots, flannels, and light jackets.

What to Look for in a Raglan Tee

A Close (But Not Tight) Fit. Because the raglan has such a forgiving shoulder, it’s tempting to size up. Don’t. When the shirt’s too big, the armhole droops toward your ribs and the silhouette gets sloppy. Aim for a fit that sits close to your body without clinging to it. The diagonal seams should lie flat across your chest, the sleeves should lightly hug your arms (showing off your biceps), and the hem should end just below your belt line.

The Right Sleeve Length. Short sleeves should hit mid-bicep. Three-quarter sleeves are the classic baseball look and will show off your forearms (women love a dude’s forearms!). Long-sleeve raglans are great for cooler falls.

Medium-Weight Fabric. Very thin fabric can look flimsy and cling to the torso; very thick fabric can make the shirt feel bulky and sweatshirt-like. A medium-weight cotton or cotton blend is your sweet spot. It’ll give you enough structure to emphasize the shoulders, chest, and contrasting sleeves while still draping naturally.

The Right Colorway. A white or heather gray body with navy, black, or red sleeves is the classic look, and it’s hard to beat. Raglans with a dark body and lighter sleeves are generally less ideal, but will flatter a man with a bigger midsection. You’ll also find raglans in single solid colors, though going solid gives up the contrast that sets the shirt apart.

How to Wear It

Wearing a raglan is stupidly simple. Pair it with jeans or chinos and some canvas sneakers or boots, and you’re good to go. When the weather cools down, layer it under a flannel or a denim jacket.

Go ahead and add a raglan tee to your rotation. It’s got two centuries of history behind it, wears as easily as any other tee, and will do more for your build than anything else in your t-shirt drawer.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In one of the emails Oliver Burkeman, author of Time Management for Mortals, sent out to his subscribers, he talked about how we typically treat our to-do lists like buckets that we need to empty every day. 

The problem, Burkeman observes, is that the to-do list is a bucket that never entirely empties. As we clear some tasks out, others are added in. It’s like the Magic Beer Floating Faucet Fountain that they used to sell at Spencer’s back in 1990, along with black lights and bags of reindeer poop. 

Because you treat your to-do list like a bucket that needs emptying before it overflows, you get stressed out by the fact that it nonetheless remains perennially filled. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, you continue to carry the expectation that one day, if you work hard enough or find the right organizational system, you’ll finally get all caught up.

There’s a better alternative to existing in this tense, unsatisfying state of productivity limbo where you constantly feel like you’re failing.  

Burkeman argues that if you want to reduce the stress you feel about your to-do list, you need to change the analogy with which you frame it, from a bucket, to a river. 

When you go backpacking and stop at a river to fill up your hydration pack, you never think, “I need to capture ALL of this water that’s flowing by me.” That would be 1) impossible, and 2) silly. 

Instead, you take what you need and then move on with your hike, not thinking twice about all the water you left behind. 

You should treat life’s tasks and chores the very same way. 

The Autofocus Method & Its Benefits

Reading Burkeman’s analogy of thinking of your to-do list as a river reminded me of a productivity method I used years ago with great success that treated tackling life’s tasks from a similar perspective. 

Developed by writer and productivity expert Mark Forster, it’s called the Autofocus method.

Unlike most to-do list systems, Autofocus does away with categories, due dates, and priorities. You simply create one giant list of tasks (your river) and then work on whatever your focus is naturally drawn to when you review your list. This approach to productivity has several benefits:

It treats your to-do list like the river it is. The Autofocus method accurately approaches your to-do list as a rushing stream that constantly carries in new things in need of doing. You can’t do all of them. The river will never be “done.” So instead of getting overwhelmed by this endless stream of to-dos, you simply dip your hand into the current and tackle the task you think is the right thing to do right now. Rather than worrying (too much) about the other stuff, you go with the flow. 

It combines reason and emotion in your decision-making. Forster argues that the Autofocus method combines both the rational and intuitive parts of your mind. You do the right thing that you think and feel needs to be done at that time. The feeling part is important. If you don’t feel like doing something or have the ganas to do it, you likely won’t do it. 

If I look at lists I’ve entered into my Todoist, I’ve got several items that I’ve scheduled and prioritized because I rationally told myself that it makes logical sense to do these things on this schedule and at this priority. 

But they’ve been on my Todoist for months showing “overdue.” No amount of reason can get me to do those things because there isn’t enough emotion or feeling to move me to do them. 

You might be thinking, “But what about something like taxes? No one wants to do taxes, so if you just went by feeling alone in deciding to do your taxes, they’d never get done.” 

But in my experience, I haven’t found this to be true. My feelings get plenty stirred as I get closer and closer to the tax deadline. It’s not a positive emotion. It’s basically the fear of getting a penalty from the IRS, but I eventually feel plenty when it comes to my taxes. 

It’s the same thing with other jobs, though the motivation can arrive without any rhyme or reason. So it’s true that most days you probably don’t feel like organizing your garage. But there likely are times when the urge to do so randomly strikes, and when that urge arises, the Autofocus method will prompt you to ride it. 

It encourages little and often work. Autofocus promotes a “little and often” approach to large tasks. With this method, you work on something as long as you want, and if you’re not done with it, you cross it off where it was on the list and add it anew to the bottom of the list. You can work on that thing again when you feel it’s the right time.

Oftentimes, an all-or-nothing approach to doing chores results in doing nothing. With Autofocus, you do a bit at a time until the job is done.

It re-acquaints you with self-trust. It may seem like a “system” as simple as this couldn’t possibly work. That’s because most productivity systems are based on the idea that you can’t trust yourself; their underlying premise is that you’re basically a lazy SOB who won’t get anything done without firm schedules and deadlines. But could it be that you think of yourself that way, and have largely acted in line with that assessment in the past, because you’ve only ever tried to tackle tasks based on external schedules and deadlines? Maybe you’re not a lazy SOB; maybe that’s just not an effective way to work, and you’d actually be more productive if you simply set out to get done whatever it is you feel like getting done each day. Maybe you’d discover you actually do have plenty of impulses to complete tasks once you start regularly prompting yourself to consider what you’re up for doing and let yourself choose what you’d like to work on.

Try trusting yourself that if a task is important, you’ll eventually want to do it. And that if you never want to do it, it may not actually be important. 

The paradox around productivity is that the less pressure you feel about how and what you “ought” to be getting done, the more you can actually get done.

How to Use the Autofocus Method

Forster has modified his system over time, but I like the brilliantly simple version that I used back in the day. There isn’t much to it beyond what we’ve already mentioned: create one giant to-do list, look over the list, and do the task that jumps out to you.

But there are a few more bits of structure and strategy that help keep the system moving along; here are Forster’s instructions and more details about how to do it:

Page 1 of a mega master to-do list.

1. Create one long list of everything you have to do or want to do in a notebook. One item per line. 

Don’t build a dam in your river of tasks by analyzing each item you put down to determine its priority and then filtering it into an appropriate task channel. That often takes too much work and usually replaces the work of actually getting the things you need to get done, done. 

You don’t even need to evaluate whether you should be writing down a task or not. Simply jot down whatever comes to mind, as it comes to mind. With the Autofocus process, items will naturally be culled later on.   

The first time you create your list, it might be multiple pages long. That’s okay! Remember, this is a river, not a bucket! You won’t be doing all of these things at once.

2. Read quickly through all the items on the first page without taking action on any of them. You’re just getting a feel of the stream of tasks in front of you.

3. Go through the first page again, more slowly this time, looking at the items in order until one stands out for you. Forster says that this is the heart of the system. When you look at an item, you know it stands out when you feel like now is the time to do it. Forster says the feeling is hard to describe but easy to recognize.

4. Work on that item for as long as you feel like doing so.

If you begin work on a task, but don’t finish it, cross it off and move it to the bottom of the list (on the second page in this example).

5. Cross the item off the list; re-enter it at the end of the list if you haven’t finished it yet. This is the part of Autofocus that encourages “little and often.” For example, if you have a task to clean the garage, you put it on your list, do it when you feel like it’s the right time, clean for as long as you feel like doing so, and put it back at the bottom of the list if you haven’t finished. You can work on it again when the time is right.

6. Review the list on the first page again in the same way. Don’t move to the second page until you complete a pass of the first page without any item standing out.

Review page 2 and see if a task jumps out to you.

7. Move on to the next page and repeat the process. Whenever you have time, look at your list to see if there are items you feel prompted to complete. I think regularly looking at the list is a key to success with Autofocus: you don’t generally think about tasks that need doing by default; you have to keep prompting yourself to consider what things you can knock out.

8. Once you’ve finished with the final page, re-start at the first page that is still active. Repeat the process.

9. If you get to a page and no item stands out for you on your slow pass through it, then all the outstanding items on that page are dismissed without re-entering them. (Unless it’s the last page where you’re still adding new items.)

Use a highlighter to mark dismissed items. This is how you cull items from your river of tasks. Just because you dismissed an item, doesn’t mean it has to be dismissed permanently. Maybe right now it’s not the thing you need to focus on, but in a few months or next year, it might be. 

Feel free to revisit dismissed items every now and then to see if you feel like they need to be put back on your active list.

All items on page 1 have either been worked on or dismissed; page 1 has become an inactive page.

10. When all the items on a page in your notebook are crossed out or highlighted, put an X in the top corner to signify that there are no incomplete tasks on this page anymore. The X demarcates an inactive page which no longer needs your attention.

As new to-do’s arise, add them to the end of the list.

That’s it. 

As I said, what I like about this method is that it treats your to-do list like the river it is, and it encourages you to combine your reason with intuition so that you do the right thing for right now. Consequently, your to-do list seems less stressful and actually kind of enjoyable to tackle. 

Because Autofocus doesn’t rely on dates, it’s essential to combine it with a calendar system so you can account for time-sensitive tasks like appointments and turning in forms at certain deadlines.

For more details about Autofocus, check out Mark’s website. I also highly recommend checking out his several books on productivity. Lots of great big picture insights about combining reason and intuition so you get the essential things done in a way that runs with, instead of against, life’s endless flow. 

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in September 2022.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The virtual Criterion Closet. If you’ve been following along with me for a while, you know I’ve been on a quest to become a cinephile, which I’ve been pursuing by watching films from the Criterion Collection during my zone 2 cardio sessions on the treadmill. To find my next pick, I usually just ask ChatGPT to recommend a random movie from the collection. Longtime AoM reader Robert H. recently shared a more fun way to find my next picks: a virtual version of the famous Criterion closet. The actual Criterion closet is visited by filmmakers and actors, and they get filmed pulling their favorite discs off the shelves. This site allows you to have that experience virtually. You can browse all 1,327 spines, pull down a case to inspect it, or hit “Random” to have it hand you a surprise selection. You can even make your own four closet picks and share them as a Polaroid, just like the celebrity visitors do. I love when the internet is fun, and this is definitely fun.

Dan and Dave Playing Cards. Classic card games still have a satisfying place in the modern world (here are the 6 every man should know), and you can always use standard Bicycle cards to play them. But if you’d like some playing cards that look different while still feeling good in your hand, check out Dan and Dave. The company was started by twin brothers Dan and Dave Buck, sleight-of-hand artists who helped pioneer cardistry (the art of card flourishing) before getting into producing designer decks. They’ve got all sorts of great-looking designs. One of my favorites is their Vintage Plaid deck. Antlers is another handsome one. They’ve also done a bunch of collaborations with designer Brad Fulton, whose decks have a vintage 1950s casino vibe — like the Ace Fulton’s “Canceled Edition,” which comes with a hole drilled through the center, mimicking the way old casinos canceled their decks to keep the cards from being snuck back onto the tables.

Compelling People by John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut. I read this book a long time ago, but I still think about it a lot. Neffinger and Kohut argue that all our social judgments of other people hinge on two qualities: strength (the ability to get things done) and warmth (making people feel cared for). Someone who projects both is compelling; someone who projects neither comes across as contemptible. Once you have that axis in your head, you start seeing it in everyone: politicians, co-workers, and yourself. The book got me thinking so much that it inspired an article on AoM about how to gut-check whether you’re contemptible. If you want an overview of the strength/warmth idea, check out my podcast interview with Kohut.

How to Raise a Son Who Is Boring and Unattractive to Women. Anthony B. Bradley, who I’ve had on the AoM podcast before, wrote a piece on why so many young men today struggle in the dating market. His argument: a lot of these guys are just boring. Raised to build résumés rather than inner lives, they specialized early in one activity, never picked up an instrument or read a book for pleasure, and spent their teenage years around screens and same-age peers instead of multi-generation cohorts. The result is a young man with strong grades and good stats who can’t hold a conversation about anything. Bradley writes the piece as a satirical ten-step guide for parents who want to produce such a son. Worth reading if you’ve got boys at home. Don’t raise potato heads!

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: Someone Has to Enjoy the Party and Exit, Voice, Loyalty, Neglect: Why People Leave, Stay, or Try to Burn It All Down.

Quote of the Week

The power of a man increases steadily by continuance in one direction.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When it comes to camping, there are rules you should follow to respect nature: don’t use even biodegradable soap in streams to avoid disrupting the ecosystem; pitch your tent on established or durable surfaces instead of trampling vegetation; use local firewood so you don’t introduce invasive insects and diseases.

There are rules for respecting your fellow humans, too. By practicing good outdoor etiquette, you keep the experience safe and peaceful for other campers. Follow the above dos and don’ts, and you’ll help preserve the tranquility people were likely seeking when they decided to get out in nature.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.