‘It’s Not Fair!’—The Battle Cry of Stuck, Bitter Men

Brother, let’s have a real conversation about fairness.

I used to get hung up on it too. I spent years wrestling with the idea that things should be fair—relationships, careers, money, success, respect.

But eventually, I realized something.

That mindset wasn’t making me stronger. It wasn’t helping me build anything. It was keeping me stuck in childishness and immaturity. Because the hard truth is:

Life isn’t fair.

It never has been.

And that’s not an excuse to roll over—it’s an invitation to step up.

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The Fairness Trap

The world is full of unfairness. Good men suffer. Liars win. People who put in less effort sometimes get more reward.

And if you let that break you—if you stew in the injustice, replay the offenses, and demand fairness before you’ll move forward—you’re handing over your power.

You’re not waiting for justice. You’re delaying your own leadership.

Fairness isn’t given. It’s created.

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The Dead-End of Double Standards

And while we’re on that subject—let’s talk about double standards.

If fairness is a trap, double standards are its close cousin—just another illusion that keeps men stuck in powerlessness.

I get it. It’s easy to notice them.

• “If a man did that, he’d be crucified.”
• “Women get away with this, but men get shamed for it.”
• “The rules are different for us.”

Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t.

But tell me—what’s the actual payoff of sitting around talking about it?

Does it move you forward?
Does it make you stronger?
Does it get you what you actually want?

Or does it just pause, paralyze, and poison your ability to build the life you could be living?

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The Mad = Masculinity Myth

There’s a dangerous misconception that anger is what makes a man strong. That rage is what makes him masculine.

A lot of men who have spent years feeling weak, small, fearful, and stifled eventually reach a breaking point. They’ve swallowed their pain, played the nice guy role, and hidden their real feelings behind forced smiles and quiet suffering.

And then—one day—it erupts.

The anger comes out. The resentment spills over. The rage, the venom, the contempt—it finally has a voice.

And for the first time in a long time, they feel something that resembles power.

They’ve gone from swallowing everything to letting it all explode—and because it feels strong, they make a critical mistake:

They start to believe that this—this burning, resentful, righteous fury—is what it means to be a man.

But it’s not. It’s just the other side of the emotional immaturity coin.

One side swallows everything—gritting its teeth, pretending, enduring.
The other explodes—yelling, blaming, demanding.

Neither one is strength.

Neither one is leadership.

Neither one is masculine maturity.

Because mature masculinity isn’t about swallowing your feelings OR spraying them all over the world, it’s about owning them, directing them, and channeling them into something powerful.

Warning Signs You’re Stuck in the Trap

There are a few dead giveaways for telling when you’re caught in this feeble definition of “masculinity”. If these are present, you haven’t found strength—you’ve just found another form of weakness that helped you stop feeling weak, but is making you even weaker:

1. There’s a villain in your story.
   • A person or a group of people you believe must be stopped for things to be right.
   • A person or group you believe deserves your hatred and animosity.
   • Your energy is directed toward defeating rather than building, you’re still playing a losing game.
2. Someone has to be seen as weak for you to feel strong.
   • Your “strength” is found by comparison with others.
     • You hold contempt for other men who “don’t get it.”
     • You feel a need to classify yourself in terms like “alpha” and other men as things like “beta,” “simp,” “cucked,” etc.
     • You need an “us vs. them” to maintain your sense of power.
   • If your strength depends on proving others inferior, it’s not strength—it’s just another dependency.
3. You spend more time calling out injustice than creating what you want.
   • Anger might be justified, but is it producing anything?
   • If your focus is complaining about problems instead of building solutions, you’re stuck.
4. Your ‘truth-telling’ is fueled by resentment, not wisdom.
   • You say you’re just being “honest.” But is it clarity—or just venting?
   • Truth that isn’t anchored in purpose just becomes another form of chaos.
5. You secretly like feeling misunderstood.
   • If your identity is tied to “being the one who sees the hard truths,” it might be time to ask:
   • Are you here to lead, or just to be right?
6. You’re carrying around emotions that aren’t life-giving—to you or anyone else.
   • Bitterness. Resentment. Contempt.
   • Cynicism. Hopelessness. Self-righteous anger.
   • Do these emotions actually fuel you toward anything good? Or do they just keep you trapped in the same cycle of frustration?
7. You’re emotionally reactive—easily triggered, defensive, and argumentative.
   • You find yourself constantly needing to explain yourself.
   • You feel attacked when people challenge your ideas.
   • You jump into debates and arguments, convinced that “winning” the exchange is what proves your strength.
   • But a man in control of himself doesn’t need to react—because his power doesn’t come from proving anything to anyone.

Mature Masculinity Leads Upward—It Doesn’t Soak in Anger & Contempt

There’s nothing innately masculine or attractive about endlessly chanting, “It’s not fair!” or pointing out every double standard in the world.

It doesn’t command respect.
It doesn’t build anything worth having.
It doesn’t make you the kind of man people admire and follow.

All it does is keep you stuck in the illusion that until “out there” changes, you can’t have the life you want.

That’s a lie.

A lie that keeps you weak, bitter, and waiting.

And the longer you wait, the more life you waste.

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The Mature Masculine Understands This Truth

There is no enemy, force, or system “out there” that is keeping you from becoming your best or creating the life you want.

There is no problem out there bigger than the one within you.

The limit is—and has always been—your relationship with yourself:

• Your ability to trust yourself.
• Your ability to regulate your emotions.
• Your ability to take ownership instead of blaming the world.
• Your ability to act from grounded strength instead of emotional reactivity.
• Your ability to stop negotiating with reality and start building your own.

The mature man realizes this—and when he does, he becomes unstoppable.

Because he is no longer waiting on the world to change.

He is changing himself—and through that, he shapes his world.

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The Better Path

There are two kinds of men here:

1. The ones who stay frustrated, stuck, and waiting for fairness.
2. The ones who stop waiting and start building.

But this isn’t about us vs. them.

It’s not about who’s superior and who’s inferior—because the truth is, we all start in the first category.

This is how every human being begins life.

Infancy and childhood are, by design, a season of dependency—a time when we are entirely reliant on others to create safety, meet our needs, and shape our world.

And for the most part, we’re taught to outgrow this:

• We learn to feed ourselves.
• We learn to walk instead of being carried.
• We learn to create instead of just consuming.

But when it comes to our emotions, our sense of power, and our self-worth, we were never taught how to transition out of dependency.

No one ever told us:

• That our inner world isn’t supposed to be dictated by the outer world.
• That waiting for life to change before we feel peace, power, or stability is a losing game.
• That maturity is about self-sourcing, not waiting for the world to cooperate.

In fact, you could argue that modern culture actively stifles this transition.

We are constantly fed the message that we’re not okay unless:

• The economy is right.
• The political system is fixed.
• The relationship is fair.
• The world recognizes our worth.

This perspective is highly effective at keeping people small, pliable, cooperative, and endlessly consuming—because if we believe that inner peace only comes from external changes, we’ll spend our entire lives:

• Trying to control what’s outside of us.
• Searching for the right products, services, or solutions to fix us.
• Consuming more and more, hoping for a breakthrough.

But this cycle doesn’t create peace, groundedness, or maturity.

It stifles them.

I know because I used to be the first one—stuck, waiting, frustrated, needing fairness before I would act.

The only thing that changed? I stopped waiting.

I stopped needing life to adjust before I adjusted myself.

And when I did, everything shifted.

So the question isn’t about which group you belong to—because we all start in the first.

The question is: When will you decide to move into the second?

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The Consequences of Stewing in Hurt

If you don’t make the move, but continue to make fairness a precondition for action, here’s what happens:

• You waste your energy on things outside your control.
• You delay your growth, your impact, and your life.
• You give resentment and bitterness free rent in your head.
• You play defense instead of building the life you want.

The men who sit around complaining about fairness don’t change anything.

Complainers don’t create.
Complainers don’t lead.
Complainers don’t get respect.

They just get stuck.

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What Leadership Looks Like

Leadership doesn’t come from getting a fair deal. It comes from refusing to let an unfair deal in an unfair world keep you small.

You want fairness? Go build it.

You want better standards? Stop getting sucked into the drama of what others aren’t doing. Live in a way that elevates yourself to better standards. Watch how it inspires others.

Stop negotiating with circumstances and start creating your own reality.

I know this is hard.

I did it—I still do it. But before I started, I spent twenty years stuck—complaining, stewing in unfairness, needing to be right, and carrying around a whole lot of unpleasant emotions in the process.

And I’m not the only one.

I’ve met countless men—men I’ve had the privilege to walk with, and men who have discovered this elsewhere—who have found that freedom isn’t something you wait for. It’s something you build.

Men who made the shift, stopped waiting for fairness, and started creating what they wanted instead of waiting for someone to hand it to them.

For me? That shift changed everything.

Now? I have an incredible relationship—a fair and just one. One where I’m respected, appreciated, and treated as I want to be treated.

And none of that happened because I whined, bitched, or demanded fairness or became an expert at identifying double standards.

I have it because I stopped focusing on what was unfair and started directing my energy into building something unshakable within myself instead of outside of myself.

And I’ve seen this work again and again–and rapidly.

I talk to about 200 men per year about their life and relationships. I’ve yet to meet a single man who whined, complained, and protested his way into a better life.

And yet, I’ve watched countless men try. I often observe many online groups where the same men who arrived there complaining four, five, and six years ago are still there, still complaining about the same things, still wondering when the world is going to reward them with change.

But the men who step into real leadership—of themselves first—don’t stay stuck.

They stop waiting and start creating.

They stop demanding change in others and start becoming the change in themselves.

And that option? It’s available to any man willing to choose it.

So give up the waiting. Create what you want.

Don’t make change in anything or anyone else a prerequisite.

Stop complaining and protesting. Start creating.

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But Won’t That Make Me a Doormat?

I hear this a lot. It’s the knee-jerk reaction of most men stuck here.

No. It does not make you a doormat.

The truth is, I spent years feeling like I wasn’t a doormat—when in reality, I’d given away all my power to things I couldn’t control.

Which begs the question—who’s truly the doormat in that scenario?

Letting go of others needing to change doesn’t make you weak. It makes you powerful.

Because letting go of fairness doesn’t mean tolerating bullshit.

It means choosing power over pettiness.

It means not just turning away from what drains you—but not letting it drain you in the first place.

It means refusing to make what happens in the lives of others about you.

• If someone disrespects you, that’s about them—not you.
• If someone acts unfairly, that’s about them—not you.
• If someone succeeds without putting in the work, that’s about them—not you.

Most men exhaust themselves fighting the wrong battles—trying to change, control, or punish what was never theirs to begin with.

A masterful man is imperturbable.

He is untouched by pettiness, injustice, or unfairness—not because he ignores them, but because he knows they have no bearing on his ability to create what he wants.

This is what makes you unshakable.

This is what makes you free.

The moment you realize you don’t need fairness to move forward, you win.

The moment you decide to build instead of complain, you become untouchable.

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Some of This Was Hard to Hear—But If You’re Ready, I’m Here to Help

I know some of what I’ve said is going to hit hard for some men.

I’ve been where you are.

I know how difficult it is to realize that the biggest thing in your way… is you.

But I also know what’s on the other side of that realization—and I know what it takes to get there.

If you see yourself in this, and you’re ready to do the work—I’m ready to help.

This isn’t for men who want to debate.
It’s not for men who want to stay stuck, waiting for the world to change.
It’s for men who are done with the waiting and ready to lead themselves forward.

If that’s you, apply for my two-month intensive here:

👉 Apply Now

Your move.

—Sven