I’ve been gone a while.
If you’re a paid subscriber, you noticed. If you’re a free subscriber, you may have wondered if Allied We Can had quietly folded the way most projects do; without an announcement, without a goodbye, just an inbox that stops filling up.
It didn’t fold. I went quiet on purpose.
Some of that silence was forced on me. My daughter Ericka died, and grief doesn’t care about your publishing schedule. I shared what happened on social media and in my last piece, and I’ll write about her again in two weeks. Not today. Today I want to tell you what I learned by being quiet, because the silence stopped being only about loss after a while, and started being about something I think most of you need too.
Noise Is the Default Setting Now
You don’t notice it until you stop.
Open your phone in the morning and count the things competing for your attention before you’ve even sat up in bed; the notifications, the group chats, the alerts, the reels you didn’t choose, the comments on something you posted last week and have already half-forgotten. This is the air we breathe now. And like any air, you don’t notice it until it’s gone.
When I stepped back from the show, the writing, the coaching, the inbox, what surprised me wasn’t how hard it was to be away from the work. It was how loud the rest of my life still was. The noise didn’t come from Allied We Can. The noise was everything I’d wrapped around being a man who always thought he had an answer, always shows up, always knows what to say.
Strip the work away and the noise was still there, just waiting for something else to fill the channel.
That’s when I started to better understand what young men have been telling me in conversations with my stepsons, men I meet out in the world, in spiritual direction and coaching sessions:
I don’t know how to change this. I don’t know what I actually believe. I don’t know what I want.
Of course you don’t. Nobody can hear themselves think in a room this loud.
What The Manosphere Sells You Instead of Silence
The manosphere is loud on purpose. So is the outrage machine on every side of the political spectrum, and so is the algorithm that picked the last fifteen videos you scrolled through whether you wanted to watch them or not.
Loud sells. Loud keeps you watching. Loud convinces you the answer is one more video, one more take, one more guy with a ring light and a podcast mic explaining what’s wrong with you and what to do about it.
What loud cannot do is help you become anyone.
Becoming someone, actually someone, not the version of yourself you perform online. It requires a kind of attention that the algorithm is structurally incapable of giving you. You can model good men. You can learn from them, study them, walk in their wake until you find your own footing. That’s how this has always worked. But absorbing someone’s content isn’t the same as modeling someone’s life, and a follower count is not a mentor. You can’t build conviction out of a stranger’s certainty.
You have to get quiet. And the people selling you masculinity know that if you ever do, you’ll stop buying what they’re selling.
That’s not a conspiracy. That’s a business model.
The Silence I Trained For
I didn’t disappear into nothing. While I was gone, I finished my certification as a spiritual director.
If you don’t know what that is, and most Gen Z men don’t, it’s the practice of sitting with someone in their life, not to fix them, not to advise them, not to give them content, but to help them notice how the Spirit is moving in them and around them, and what they’re already hearing underneath the noise. It’s the opposite of the influencer model. There’s no script. There’s no take. There’s a person, and there’s silence, and there’s the slow work of finding out what’s actually true.
I trained for it because I needed it, and because I walked alone for a few years on my own journey, and I don’t want other men to walk alone the way I did. I’d spent years writing and speaking and showing up for other men, and I’d started to suspect that the thing they were actually missing wasn’t another framework or another book or another podcast.
It was someone willing to be quiet with them long enough that they could hear themselves.
That’s harder than it sounds. Most of us, when we get quiet, hear something we don’t want to. We hear old grief, old anger, old fear, the questions we’ve been outrunning for years and the parts of ourselves we said we’d deal with later.
The noise is comfortable because the noise drowns all of that out.
The work is learning to listen to it without flinching.
What I Heard
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