The Importance of Being Earnestly Right

“I know where we’re going, I just don’t know where we are right now,” I said. I had driven into an unexpected detour on a road trip to New Mexico during my twenties.

I did not admit I was lost because that would mean I was wrong. I’d been raised to believe that, as a man, being wrong was a sign of weakness, and men could never be weak. My insistence on being right about our directions did not prevent me from adding an hour to our trip.

Although this kind of thinking fell from cultural currency in the decades since I was a youth, many young men today are picking it up again. In a 2026 poll by market research firm Ipsos, 32 percent of Gen Z males said men should figure out problems on their own rather than asking for help; 33 percent believe men should have the final say on decisions made in the home. The percentages of men holding these beliefs decreased in descending order for Millennial, Gen X, and Baby Boomers.

Nearly a third (31 percent) of Gen Z men in the study also said they believe “a wife should always obey her husband.” The recent trend of this belief was again reinforced by its being held by 29% of Millennial males, 21% of Gen X men, and 13% of Baby Boomer males.

A 2016 study from the American Psychological Association found that, among the 11 masculine norms it reviewed, self-reliance was the one most connected to men’s poorer mental-health outcomes and reluctance to seek psychological help. Men’s expectations to be self-reliant and dominant authorities affected not only their internal well-being, but their ability to function socially and in relationships.

Self-reliance can be positive and empowering. I’ve always felt better about myself when I was independent, rather than dependent on someone else. But believing self-reliance is without limits has always seemed to me a dangerous way to interpret it.

When I was a child, maybe 5 or 6, I remember my father, mother and I driving in our tiny black Morris 1300. I sensed my father was upset about something but didn’t know what it was. I leaned forward to better hear my parents’ conversation, my hands pressed on the back of the front seats. For the first time, I heard my father say, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” Along with “The only thing I have to do is die,” it would become one of his most repeated sentiments, a statement he would make to bring conversations to an abrupt halt. They both summed up his approach to the world, which was that it had to adapt to him, not he to it.

To this day, I don’t know what the conversation was about or why we had such an exotic compact car when my father worked as a barber and my mother as a homemaker. I just know that it was the day I noticed my father begin to repeat these statements more frequently. Another was, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” a maxim he borrowed from his idol, Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi.

The Women’s Liberation Movement had begun in these years and, though the women in my family were more well-read, the men did not appear to be phased by any of it. From what I could see, no one in our family challenged their certainty and decision-making. My father had learned this kind of self-reliance from his father.

A subsistence farmer from Calabria, Italy, my grandfather immigrated alone to the U.S. in the 1920s, returning to bring his family with him shortly thereafter. He worked as a laborer on dam projects in the Allegheny National Forest and eventually opened a small store in nearby Sheffield, Pennsylvania, where the family of seven lived in one room above the store. He hated authority, whether it was the mafia that forced him to leave Italy or the clergy and police who entered his store and whom he refused to serve.

When I was a young, he told me about the hard work he did at the dams when we drove by them in his car, recalling how he made a living however he could. He was a silent man but spoke when he felt it necessary. His silence and convictions governed the family, as well.

After he sold the store and purchased a house in Warren, Pennsylvania, he sometimes brought his mistresses into the home. It was not a subject of great debate in the family. It was how life worked. In some ways, he became the authority he rejected.

My father, on the other hand, played his quick gold-toothed smile and sense of humor to more charming effects socially. He ran a small barbershop in Erie, Pennsylvania, and we rented an apartment across the street. I grew up in the barbershop and believed the friendly atmosphere my father maintained there verified the normalcy of our life. Like his father, however, he rejected any challenges to his authority.

“I don’t know and I don’t care.” I came to understand the meaning of these words more clearly as an adult.

My father was not admitting indifference to his ignorance. He was saying that none of it mattered if the final word rested with him. What need was there for facts and alternative opinions if one was already right? More than that, real answers and solutions could also be unnecessary. Being right ensured that the fiat of certainty, no matter which direction it aimed, always struck the bullseye of its target.

His mistresses were given no more say in decision-making than my mother. If violence became necessary to implement his certainty, he used it. Mistresses and husbands of mistresses sometimes phoned my mother panicked with fear, asking her to stop her husband. But there was no way to stop him, because certainty, by its nature, must always prioritize itself. My father’s belief in his authority became a threat to others.

Eventually, this need to be the axis of control brought hazard. My father began seeing a woman whose family was in the mafia. At 11, her son was two years older than me and we played together on their property that backed to short cliffs overlooking Lake Erie. My father would proudly refer to the woman as my second mother.

My father governed my mother and I by his need for order. However, this need could not save him the night he discovered his mistress at a bar with her neighbor and assaulted them, with the neighbor escaping long enough to grab a shotgun and shoot him in the head.

Though my father was unarmed, a judge ruled the incident as justifiable homicide and the Erie District Attorney threw out the case, to the great disappointment of my father’s family. Though she would not talk about the fear she lived through with my father until many years later, my mother did not protest the judge’s decision.

In the decades that followed, my mother and I found our own healing paths. Mine included years of cognitive behavioral therapy. Though they were separate processes, they brought us closer. We accepted the past so that we could learn from it.

Today, I no longer question the love for me that my father professed daily, nor my grandfather’s love for his family. Only its prudence, its methods.

However, I sometimes imagine how my father’s life might have turned out if he had been able to ask for help. I consider myself self-reliant but am not afraid to accept help. I am getting better at asking for it when necessary.

I no longer want to be right, to pretend I’m in control. I found no peace in that. There is nothing for me to prove.

Authority feels helplessly finite. I want to embrace uncertainty, even if I am only able to catch a flashing glimpse of its endless expanse.

—

This post was previously published on Unfinished Men.

***