The Renaissance man was a product of a very specific world.
Knowledge was scarce. Disciplines were still close enough to touch. Mastery across domains was not only possible but admired. Leonardo could paint, engineer, dissect, and theorize because the intellectual surface area of the world was small enough for a single mind to span. Society rewarded breadth because it needed it. The ideal was coherence: one individual, many faculties, one integrated identity.
That world is gone.
The modern era is structurally unforgiving. Success is harder to reach, failure is more visible, and rewards are distributed unevenly. A small minority will do extremely well. Most will not. The distance between those outcomes is widening, and the psychological cost of falling behind is rising with it.
This is not because people have fundamentally changed, but because the environment has. As Richard Reeves and others have argued, the roles that once organized male identity have thinned or disappeared, and nothing equally durable has replaced them.
For much of the late twentieth century, the prescription for success was clear: specialize.
Pick a lane early. Go deep. Compound. Institutions were stable, careers were linear, and narrow expertise paid. Specialists were rewarded; generalists were tolerated at best.
I tried to follow that path. I tried to overspecialize. I failed not because I couldn’t do the work, but because I was bored by it. I gravitated toward generalism because it was the only way I could stay engaged, curious, and mentally alive.
For a long time, that choice looked like a mistake.
“Jack of all trades” was not a compliment. It was shorthand for unfocused, unserious, second-best. Specialists won the jobs, the titles, the respect.
That judgment no longer holds.
In volatile systems, specialization ages poorly. Narrow expertise is efficient in stable environments and fragile in shifting ones. When change outpaces credentials, range matters more than depth alone. The ability to learn quickly, translate between domains, and recombine skills becomes a competitive advantage.
What once looked like drift now looks like adaptability. What once signaled a lack of commitment increasingly signals resilience.
The Renaissance man did not disappear. He evolved.
He belonged to a world where a single individual could plausibly hold the whole map. Today, knowledge is abundant, fragmented, and accelerating. Depth is siloed.
The Renaissance archetype survives as the misfit generalist, the bored specialist, the person who moves laterally when the system demands verticality. For years, he looked inefficient. Then the ground shifted. Suddenly, he was the only one who could connect the pieces.
At the same time, a parallel crisis unfolded.
For decades, masculinity was organized around provision. You worked, you earned, you mattered. Globalization and free trade destabilized that equation. Manufacturing left developed economies, blue-collar labor lost value, and the breadwinner role fractured across large parts of the United States and Europe.
This was not only a loss of income. It was a loss of identity.
Technology did not cause this rupture, but it accelerated it. Social media and algorithmic feeds offered distraction and simulated status at scale.
Generative AI is now extending the pressure upward, compressing white-collar work and eroding the promise that education and credentials guarantee safety.
When a role collapses and nothing replaces it, anger follows. Humiliation looks for a target. Elites, immigrants, globalists become abstractions onto which frustration is projected. Figures like Andrew Tate function less as causes than as symptoms. His rejection of reading and reflection flatters insecurity by reframing thought as weakness and noise as strength.
This is not incidental. It is cultural.
I grew up reading fiction. Then I stopped and focused almost exclusively on non-fiction: biographies, history, strategy. I recently returned to fiction, and the value was immediate. Not as escape, but as training.
Fiction develops empathy and judgment in ways no productivity system or online debate can. It forces you to inhabit other minds, other incentives, other failures. It teaches comfort with ambiguity rather than reflexive certainty.
Jemima Kelly of the Financial Times recently wrote about the quiet collapse of male reading culture. The data are stark. According to the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, only 27.7 percent of men now read novels or short fiction, down from roughly 35 percent a decade ago.
This is not a harmless lifestyle shift. It is a cognitive one.
Men who stop reading do not become more “real,” as Tate claims; they become easier to manipulate.
These dynamics compound. Education systems increasingly reward traits that mature earlier in women. Dating markets concentrate outcomes among a small number of winners. A growing share of young men experience social and romantic invisibility. Loneliness becomes the baseline. From there, radical ideologies—left and right—find fertile ground. Identity is offered where purpose is missing.
The result is a brittle masculinity: performative, angry, externally sourced. Strength is confused with dominance. Confidence with noise.
This is where a new archetype becomes necessary.
Not a return to the Renaissance man as he was, but an evolution of him.
The centaur man is half-analog, half-digital. He combines real-world social intelligence with technical fluency. He can speak to a stranger at a bar and collaborate with AI without fear. He understands that reading a room matters as much as reading data.
Generalism, here, is not vagueness. It is integration.
The centaur does not know everything, but he knows how things relate. He moves across domains without losing his center. He reads not to signal sophistication, but to sharpen judgment. He builds skills, and he builds character.
In an age of artificial intelligence, strength is not raw performance.
It is continuity. Reliability. Resilience. Empathy.
The ability to show up, communicate clearly, and keep one’s word. The old masculine markers—muscle, spectacle, dominance—do not compound. Human qualities do.
The future does not belong to the loudest men, nor to the most narrowly optimized ones. It belongs to those who can adapt without dissolving.
The Renaissance man has not returned.
But his successor is taking shape.
The centaur man.