why most men are so very lazy

the dark cave of the phlegmatic hunters

Dear friend!

You write to me that your beloved husband, since he has now retired, just lounges around in front of the television from morning to night, hardly does anything during the day, does not help around the house, but does so in the evenings, even if it is something for you becomes more comfortable, from one club to another, or flees from one event to another. He also meets his friends of the same age in private company almost regularly every other day in the pub around the corner. As soon as you want to accompany him, he counters sullenly: That's nothing for women!
And yet afterwards he tells you in minute detail which of his friends did what again, who bought which great classy carriage, who got the best bargain by selling worthless farmland and which football club would advance to the next higher league with what goal advantage. As if you care! If he then comes home with a swollen chest, because he won twenty euros in a round of skat and spent the whole afternoon and evening in the pub and there alone at least the same thing was noted on his beer mat, you think about it wonder if he couldn't have better repaired the sink in the kitchen during this time and thus saved repairman costs of at least eighty euros.
Dear friend! Your suffering hits me hard, but I fear with all conviction: We men have become profoundly lazy as a result of long evolution and through intensive exploitation of life advantages, although we always strive for superlatives and sometimes achieve remarkable things. You ask me why I am so convinced of this?

Allow me, my love, to take you back to the social forms of prehistory. As hunters and gatherers, humans certainly had equal rights, as can also be seen in the animal kingdom, since the prey could only be prevented from fleeing by being surrounded on all sides by hunting together.
When collecting and digging up roots, fruits and seeds, on the other hand, one lived largely from hand to mouth and everyone looked after themselves.

Hunting, on the other hand, required social discipline and joint planning. Since the meat could hardly be eaten raw with our chewing tools designed for plant food, men and women had to overcome their individual need to immediately devour the food in a further social planning process and first prepare the fire or the earth oven for cooking the meat. When the meat was cooked and soft enough for your teeth, you could eat together.
Since cooked food does not last long either, it was often necessary to continue hunting while preparing the fireplace and preparing the food, since the hunting success was a while in coming. Gender-specific division of labor offered itself. Women with small children to be suckled are certainly slower than men, perhaps not as strong in stature. Role behavior was pre-programmed.

In an early matriarchal society with planned cultivation of fields in addition to hunting, probably several experienced women regulated the life of the village community. The men ran after wild or domesticated animals. When hunting and capturing tamed animals, success and the resulting recognition only resulted from particularly high performance for the short moment of sprinting or fighting.

On the other hand, it seems to me that in the group of women, recognition was gained more through social responsibility and reliability. While the division of tasks ostensibly resulted in equal rights, women in the early days and women in the simpler agricultural cultures were obligated to take care of children, cook and do housekeeping from morning to evening, while men, both when hunting, had breaks to chat and could go to sleep, just as with livestock, when the animals were together in the fence in the evening, largely freed from any active obligation, could sit together, talk and wait.

Despite their children, women have to participate in the cultivation of the fields with slings and child carriers, men "can't" leave the herd, nor take them with them, otherwise the animals would eat the vegetables. Men have to stay with the herd, but they can feign a social or even political benefit from spending time together if they talk about supposedly urgent matters there.

According to the conditions at the time, everyone was actually in good hands and the first large settlements arose from the planned economy, the specialization in crafts and the resulting trade. Thriving societies, such as in the Fertile Crescent, the Black Sea Basin, and up the Danube emerged from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age.

Two catastrophes ended the idyll: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tidal waves destroyed large cultures in the Mediterranean, the broken mountain wall on the Bosporus flooded the densely populated, fertile plain at the bottom of what later became the Black Sea with Mediterranean water.

The cattle-breeding peoples in southern Russia, for whom men's work was now the most important source of food and legitimized patriarchal rule, expanded their raids and flooded the matriarchal communities, ruled by clever women, as an Indo-European migration around 2000 BC.

Both forms of society learn from each other, cultural structures flow primarily from the grain-growing societies, political structures with the expansion and sustenance through robbery and plunder and the dominance of men by the Indo-Europeans.
Whereas the farming cultures were more democratically organized under the leadership of several women, the cattle breeders bring to the world stage a social structure that acts under one leader and can quickly make decisions in the conquest, which then of course also found itself in the reshaping of the heaven of the gods under a single strong and mostly violent God reflects: Shiwa, Mitras, Zeus, Aton, Yahweh, Allah.

The role of the male patriarch becomes particularly authoritarian from the definition of the male sole God, so to speak, to the absolute ruler. While in broad Islamic and Islamist forms the man still locks the women away at home with the housework, he can not only book the visit to the tea house with the other men as a social, even political act, but explains it from this with this leading social responsibility retrospectively as the mandatory head of the family, because everyone else is politically too stupid and has to remain so without outside contact and schooling.

On the other hand, there were of course repeated attempts to integrate the original cult of the great mother into the monotheistic tendency, which in the original version in many mother religions provided for an annual cultic celebration of procreation. A priestess from the ruling elite slips into the role of the great mother (Astarte, Ischtar, Lilith, Isis, Demeter) and chooses a teenage lover who is killed after the festival is over. He takes on the role of messenger to the underworld and is reborn.

Strong and courageous animals (bull, lion, deer, bear and wolf) can also symbolically assume the role of the begetting Godman or lend their form to him.
Many examples from ancient art history and mythology can be interpreted in this way: Europa and the bull into which Zeus has transformed, the bull cult in Crete and other parts of the Mediterranean region, Mitras and the bull sacrifice, Heracles under the skin of the Phrygian lion, Cerumnos , the Celtic deer god, Wishnu incarnated as a boar, the bear cult among the Ainu, etc.

On the other hand, the role of the lover's killing after the cultic act of procreation and the errand to the underworld can be found in the stories of Osiris, Orpheus, Dionysus and his satyrs, and finally also in the mythical form of Jesus. We don't have to look far for the mother goddess in the case of the latter either. In the lost Gospel of Magdalen, the important role of the woman at Jesus' side is broken down. In the Three Women at the Tomb, the errand to the underworld is enacted for the matriarchal leadership group. Finally, Mary as the loving Mother of Heaven expresses the desire for worship in the style of the Magna Mater in a special way.

Now you may understandably ask me, my dear, what your husband, who prefers to leave his savings in the pub than in the church, has to do with the wolves and bears we are talking about here. Ultimately, he lacks any wildness when he just fell asleep in front of the television again. Also, thank God, he is not yet drawn into the underworld while he is asleep, nor does he spend weeks as if dead and without needing food, in the cold winter in the bear's cave. Quite the opposite.

Not that he would particularly bother with the preparation of the meal, but when the delicious smell of the fried potatoes you have prepared or the Wiener schnitzel rushes through the apartment, he is always alarmed and suddenly asks: what is there to eat today. After he has eaten it with smacking pleasure and emptied the usual pint, both culinary obligations release him after hard work of chewing and swallowing, which he thinks is well-deserved for an afternoon nap on the sofa, while he takes good care of you from work in the kitchen white.

In the evening he leaves you well-rested for his indispensable commitments with sentences like: "There's a local council election soon, I have to convince the other regulars that our long-serving CSU member So-and-so is suitable (hard political work)" or "Today is the second leg at the football club against the neighboring community, I definitely have to back them up with my clapping (protection of the district)" or even "The skat club is about the whole thing today, I can't leave them alone (important acquisition of money to provide for the family)" .

My goodness!
Should I now say: With so many obligations, your husband still shows himself to be the protector and breadwinner of the family, even at retirement age!!?
Or has over time, our male role outside of the family in the game of tending goats and playing "Fangerles" with wild animals, perhaps without any further task, become obsolete?
Does he feel that the request to empty the garbage can might even be beneath his dignity as a top athlete on the television or as an honorary unnamed political expert at the regulars' table?
Does he see himself as a victim of the mother goddess boredom, maltreated, slipping into the shallows of the sofa?
I can only tell you: something is going wrong!
Give him the opportunity to push himself to the limit at home as a 5-star chef, suggest a cleaning race, or challenge his ability to get the drain back as an incentive.
Invite all his pub buddies over and give them the chance to have a highly scientific conversation about perfecting grilled food. Give him confirmation of the messed up steaks, which he actually clumsily charred on the outside while they are still bloody raw on the inside. The English and Americans have shown you here for a long time how, in addition to junk food from the Italian restaurant next door, you also give your personal cowboy a verbal reward for such ignorance. "Oh, that's very British".
We men need confirmation for hoped-for top performances, otherwise we look for other trivial activities where we can improve ourselves.