The Odysseus Instinct and "Male Freedom"

How this master instinct in males maximizes their inventiveness and discovery

One could say that a man’s privacy is the most desperate of attempts at freedom—the freedom to think, to fantasize, to create and plan and strategize in a place where no one else is allowed, or could ever travel—his mind his secret thoughts and the unconscious itself.

Perhaps the sense of and use of one’s freedom, like everything else about our behavior, lives on a spectrum, too.

Odysseus was the adventurer and world traveler who waged war, conquered lands, found treasure, slept with fair nymphs, sailed the seas, led men through harrowing times, and succeeded in his pursuits after many labors and toils.

He was the Superhero of his time, and his literature wrapped together in one character, many of masculinity's varied traits and instincts. Above all, what he unified them under was what may be the master driving instinct of them all - the pursuit of and use of freedom in what I call the Odysseus Instinct.

His is perhaps the behavior that, out of all those in men, is both most perplexing to women while at the same time among the most alluring—his struggle to achieve and keep freedom, most often and erroneously attributed to the pursuit of women and dating, in base language, to “chasing tail.”

When, just as it was for Poseidon, far more psychological than physical, such that any physical freedom a man achieves is only in service of the psychological.

This instinct is in all men and colors all they do, from the drive to achieve more income (which buys more freedom to do what one wants on one’s terms) to quitting a job (or a relationship) that is too stifling to going on road trips and other adventures just for the sake of doing so—the Odysseus Instinct is the passionate drive in men to create by way of discovery.