But as I closed the book, I couldn’t help but question Galloway’s solution: lean into a vision of masculinity that he summarizes in three words: “Protect, Provide, Procreate”. Grind relentlessly, build yourself into a provider, be emotionally available, and everything else will follow, he tells young men. It felt like he was giving modern teenagers a 1950s-era Guide to Husbands.

Galloway is pretty explicit about his ideal. He describes the WWII GI as “peak man” following the war, claiming these men were irresistible to women thanks to clean uniforms and GI Bill-fueled finances, hence the baby boom.

What Galloway neglects to mention is that in 1945, women couldn’t open bank accounts, marry other women, or escape social exclusion if unmarried. Sure, it must have been the uniforms they found hard to resist.

This sort of half-baked, unevidenced claim is characteristic of Golloway’s book, which is aimed as a memoir-slash-manifesto, a look at his own life to provide a roadmap for men out of loneliness and economic instability.

He mined his experiences for nuggets of wisdom, but found mainly platitudes and not an ounce of structural analysis. The result is a lackluster guide to an outdated manhood, offering a lot of questionable advice and a few fleeting moments of sanity.

So let’s start with the positive, since, despite everything, there is some. Galloway gets one big thing right: masculinity has to evolve beyond emotional detachment and lone-wolf mythology.

He puts mental health at the center of his advice, pushing back (at least rhetorically) against the idea that emotional intelligence is a “woman thing.” He urges men to name their feelings and actually express them. “You’re male, also human. Lean into your emotions. Otherwise, you’re just sleepwalking through life,” he writes.

In the final chapter, which is a letter to Galloway’s two sons, he urges them to embrace vulnerability: “Try to be more emotive—reckless even—with your emotions”. It’s one of the few lines in the book I genuinely love. It paints emotions as bravery and feels expansive rather than prescriptive. Emotions can be wide, unruly, and fully human.

His emphasis on friendship is also genuinely valuable; with so many men facing isolation and loneliness, his insistence that men must actively cultivate community at each stage of their lives is on point.

Galloway is also sharp when taking on tech companies. He correctly identifies the exploitative design of platforms engineered to hijack young men’s attention and self-worth. As he writes, “A tendency for risk-taking, mixed with poor impulse control, renders many young men helpless against a torrent of on-demand dopamine provided by the world’s richest tech companies and makes maturity a hard sell for teen- and college-age boys.”

He doesn’t extend that critique to the influencers who profit from the same vulnerabilities, but his indictment of Big Tech’s predatory mechanics is nonetheless one of the strongest arguments in the book. As someone genuinely furious about how these systems prey on the way our brains work, I found myself nodding along.

What I had far less patience for was Galloway’s insistence on masculinity as a biological destiny, ignoring decades of research showing how much social conditioning shapes what we call ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. “Nature matters more than nurture,” he writes, seeming to believe that he had answered a centuries-old academic debate with a couple of anecdotes and his life story.

He goes on to extol the wonders of testosterone. “T is an incredible substance. It’s the engine of masculinity, what wins wars and World Series,” he claims, conveniently overlooking women’s achievements in sports, the military, and leadership.

His essentialist vision of manhood — centered on protecting and providing for one’s family — is presented as an alternative to the usual advice of the manosphere. In reality, it’s the same prescriptive and narrow vision of what men can be. Even the idea of a single template of “peak man,” rather than recognizing the multitude of ways to exist as a nuanced human being, cages men in a framework that benefits neither them nor women.

And for all his talk of promoting men’s mental health, this limited view of identity is hardly conducive to self-love for anyone who doesn’t fit that mold. Much of his advice reveals that his defence of men’s feelings is mostly surface-level rhetoric. For example, he tells men that their twenties should be devoted to the grind. Home should be reserved for “seven hours of sleeping and recharging your tech​​, that’s it.” Not exactly a blueprint for emotional well-being.

Then there is Galloway’s portrayal of women as largely ornamental and instrumental, valued for what they provide for men.

He repeatedly evokes his mother and wife as important figures who helped support him emotionally. They have no more depth than that. His mother is defined by her love of him, whereas his father is given an identity, flaws, and aims of his own. As for his wife, he couldn’t write much about her, he says, because she asked him not to after an early podcast where he roasted her.

He urges men to have relationships with women because they can serve as “guardrails”, never acknowledging the emotional labor this demands of them. In fact, the book opens with a list of thanks to an all-male roster of several dozen names. Sure, it’s a book about men. He’s making a point. But what the list actually does is reinforce the patriarchal tradition of overlooking women’s contributions.

Then there is Galloway’s advice on dating. “I told them I was getting a drink and wanted to buy them one, too. (Note: I didn’t ask; I just did it),” he writes, seemingly oblivious to the notion of consent. Later, he states, “Men should always strive to make women feel safe,” without digging into what that means, beyond empty words, nor reflecting on how his own behavior might have made women feel unsafe.

Earnest, but out of touch, is how I would describe Notes on Being a Man. It offers practical advice to men on mental health and the importance of connections, but it also defends a narrow, prescriptive vision of masculinity. It sidelines women, relegating them to the role of emotional caregivers, and it fails to address the structural causes of young men’s malaise.

And yet, it has value. It gives men a path to feeling proud of a masculinity centered around strong relationships and emotional development. The dream of manhood he presents is too narrow, too prescriptive, and too essentialist, but for some, it may offer a starting point to sketch their own, more expansive version.

Most importantly, he opens a conversation that is drastically needed. If nothing else, read it for the urgency. As Galloway notes, “While the forces of technology and social change are chipping away at on-ramps to intimacy and relationships for young men, it’s unlikely they will lose their political power … Politicians will emerge from this class, and many more will pander to them.”

If angry young men are going to shape our political future, anything that can help guide them towards greater empathy is worth paying attention to.