Orbiting the Manosphere
Lessons in self improvement
Chris Williamson is a beautiful man with high cheekbones, almond eyes, and a scruffy, chiseled jaw. Originally from Essex, England, he worked for a while in London as a night club promoter and model before breaking through in 2015 as a cast member of the inaugural season of the now-titanic British reality TV show Love Island. Williamson didn’t last long on the show, and has described the experience as a transformative one, spurring him to deeper reflection and seeking to “make a difference in peoples lives.”1 In 2018, he launched a podcast in the model of lifestyle gurus Tim Ferriss and Mark Manson, mostly focused on “life hacks” like fitness and productivity tips. Since then, Williamson’s Modern Wisdom has steadily grown, gathering strength over time. As of this writing, its YouTube channel has over 3 million subscribers, with videos consistently registering hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views.
I discovered all of this after the fact, of course. I had never heard of Williamson when, one evening in the summer of last year while bored on my couch at home, I was delivered a video courtesy of the ever-obliging YouTube algorithm. It featured Williamson speaking directly to camera strongly urging that I, to improve outcomes, refrain from drinking on first dates and instead consider going for a nice walk. Intrigued by the contours of this man’s face, I clicked through to his channel and before long I was immersed in videos with seductive titles like “How to Fix Your Self-Esteem” and “The Truth About the Patriarchy: Men Don’t Benefit Anymore.” In addition to this more provocative stuff was standard issue self-help and life advice content: videos in which Williamson discusses quitting caffeine (something he describes as “incredibly illuminating”); interviews with fitness experts; direct-to-camera sermons on lessons learned and personal reflections. Most of the content featured long conversations with people I had never heard of talking excitedly about how to alter the material conditions of one’s life.
I came upon this at a unique time. I was committed to self-development in 2024 for a host of predictable reasons. I was moving into my 30s with an inarticulable disaffection. Happiness remained elusive. I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and a lot of energy to put toward what seemed like the most urgent task: leveling up, lest life leave me in the dust.
The primary motivator for me initially was fitness. I had started going to the gym a lot and was looking for practical, science-based tips. This is one of Modern Wisdom’s core topic areas, featuring lengthy in-depth interviews with a category of person I had not previously known existed: bodybuilders with doctoral degrees. Mike Israetel, Layne Norton, and Andrew Huberman brought scientific rigor to my quest for physical transformation. I don’t fancy myself this type of “gym bro” guy, but in these videos I felt the irresitable allure of self-perfection. Mike Israetel, an extremely popular fitness influencer, has a second channel titled “Making Progress” on which he publishes in-depth lectures on topics ranging from objective morality to how to solve the homelessness crisis. In the channel’s opening video, Israetel, perched at a desk enveloped in soft cinematic lighting, looks into the camera and professes, “I have a secret obsession…the creation, nurturing, and continuity of progress.”
After a few weeks, I had become an avid Modern Wisdom listener. The internet age has engendered an interesting phenomenon: someone can be utterly unknown to most of society but amass a huge number of followers, and a huge amount of clout in certain circles. Many of these people showed up on the Modern Wisdom podcast; people like George Mack, Alex Hormozi, Cory Allen, and Jonny Miller. Gurwinder Bhogal, Robert Glover, Jimmy Rex, Dr K HealthyGamer, and George TheTinMen. Nomad Capitalist, Mike Thurston, James Smith, and Jim Kwik. The list of seemingly randomly-generated names goes on and on. While out for a morning walk, cleaning my apartment, and on trips to the grocery store, I listened to long interviews with these people about dating, personal fitness, and career success. There were days when this was the last thing I heard before going to bed at night and the first thing I listened to in the morning. I learned a lot about nutrition and weight training. I listened to conspiracy-inclined celebrities like Eric Weinstein and Tulsi Gabbard discuss the obvious perniciousness of the powers that be. I consumed many, many dried beef sticks and enormous quantities of the electrolyte energy drink LMNT. Above all, I spent a lot of time alone in my apartment thinking about how to be better.
In both his interviews and his more intimate personal reflections, Williamson himself comes across as genuine, humble, and curious. He does not contain Rogan’s aggressive rebelliousness, nor Jordan Peterson’s brooding misanthropy. He tends toward positivity and humor in his work, the sheer volume of which speaks to an insatiable thirst for information, advice and, of course, wisdom. If anything, Williamson’s most objectionable trait is a mildly annoying boyish nerdiness. In workout vlogs he’s posted of chatting and training with fitness influencers, you can see this excitability manifest as a certain giggling energy. He tells bad jokes and waxes philosophically between sets. He also reveals a fierce perfectionism, grunting through an extra rep with exacting form.
It’s undeniable that this content improved my life in meaningful ways. As I developed a more consistent workout routine, better eating habits, and commitment to wellness generally I noticed all of the benefits the experts extol: better sleep, better overall mood, and more energy throughout the day. I started cooking more for myself and going on walks every morning. I was reading more.
When I told my doctor about my new habits his face lit up and he said, “I like what I’m hearing!” He did not say, “Careful that you don’t slip into a vortex of incessant self-negation, puritanical thinking, and anti-social behavior!”
Much has been written about the dangers of this so-called “Manosphere.” And although I had only alighted on the edges of it, I could feel its strong gravitational force. I work as a product designer in the tech industry, and am intimately familiar with the nefarious tactics that are often deployed to boost viewership on platforms like YouTube and Instagram and draw people down rabbit holes that can turn someone’s worldview incrementally more radical. And as my Modern Wisdom consumption increased, I could feel my thinking become discernibly more “heterodox.”2 I sensed my desire for individual change morphing into a more generalized hardened mentality, a decreased patience for ambiguity, a fixation on positivist explanations of the world. The desire to improve oneself blends naturally into this mindset because self-improvement necessitates, much like a computer program, a discernible logic with reliable inputs and outputs. (It’s no coincidence, in my view, that this world is both practically enabled and generally occupied by tech bros.) An attitude of disciplined commitment to results — cause and effect — suggests a capacity to break through the disabling forces that frustrate one’s ambitions. Through cold calculation and force of will, it is implied, one can in fact reassemble material reality into something like ideal. Hard work becomes the skeleton key to a better life. To the dissatisfied soul, puritanism has a unique appeal.
The Manosphere phenomenon sits at the intersection of a few forceful cultural shifts. One of the most important and unnerving was recently detailed in Derek Thompson’s excellent deep-dive in The Atlantic on antisocial 21st century behavior, an accelerating trend that reached hyperspeed during the pandemic. If we are to understand the allure of YouTube videos and parasocial podcast relationships, we must understand the infrastructural foundation of a society that is atomizing people at greater and greater rates. For me, Chris Williamson and his podcast became a social experience, and something to grab onto when life felt flat. The gateway to what Maya Vinokour calls Lifestyle Fascism is not, in my view, an a priori radical politics but a more banal listlessness. What can explain the ever-more-severe ambitions of the world’s richest man and CEO of three companies, other than a certain existential boredom? Like for a YouTube viewer on hour three of flipping through videos, the amount of stimulation required for gratification increases over time.
Historically, the term Manosphere has been used to reference much darker, more virulent content than the relatively benign fare I was dabbling in. None of the nine podcasters profiled in the Bloomberg piece entered my feed. But I now think of the Manosphere as a long spectrum, stretching from unobjectionable bro-targeted life advice, to the more conspiracy-friendly so-called Intellectual Dark Web, all the way to 4chan and the depths of depravity known formerly as the “alt right.” And though I never ventured into this territory, I could see how the stepping stones materialize. Transgression feels good, and once you’ve reoriented yourself into a contrasting position to whatever is deemed “conventional wisdom,” it’s a slippery slope to destruction. Questioning everything is incredibly seductive because of the unimaginable “other reality” it alludes to. Before you know it, you’ve flung off the shackles of decency and run headfirst into a fiery pit of misogyny, conspiracy, and fatal levels of contrarianism.
It has been said that “satisfaction equals perception minus expectations.” The plague of disillusionment among young men in America at this point has been well documented. I consider myself lucky, with a good job and a life I enjoy in New York City. And yet, like most people, I harbor some grievances against my current station. Manosphere content is more than anything entertaining because, like self-help, it appeals so directly to hope. With the right information, and the right perspective, the individual “agentic beast” (as Williamson once put it) can wrestle life from the maws of fate and assert his will.
I took my tour of the Manosphere with an eye toward the exit and a critical suspicion that allowed me to avert some of its excesses. But not everyone will come to it with that same approach. It’s difficult to critically engage with what you’re being fed when it’s pinging various pleasure sensors in your brain. A true commitment to wisdom requires manually seeking out alternative perspectives, historical texts, and a deeper understanding.
The Manosphere is fundamentally a product of the internet because it allows unalloyed access to information without context. The “smooth brain” meme articulates the psychological state this can produce – frictionless access to information that feels good but doesn’t engage with countervailing perspectives enough to be sufficiently intellectual. But at its core, the Manosphere does not care for the tedium and inefficiencies of wisdom-building. Theirs is a shiny future. The best is yet to come.
https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2022-03-04/love-island-was-a-mini-existential-crisis-reality-star-turned-podcast-guru
“Heterodox” is a term commonly used to describe the “podcast bro” culture of Joe Rogan, et al.