Astronaut Complex
Here’s what I think I figured out about twenty years ago and have been pretending not to know since: most of what guys do, they do trying to get laid, or married, or noticed by someone they want to get laid or married to. Everything else is just the architecture we build around that core fact.
You know the professions we’re supposed to want, the ones that supposedly make you attractive? Doctor, lawyer, firefighter, cop. They’ve got status. They’ve got uniforms. They’ve got the promise of financial security or heroic virtue or both. And I get it—those are good reasons to want to be those things. Except they’re not really the reasons. The reason is always the same. We think being a doctor will make someone want us. We think rescuing people from a fire will make someone want us. We think having a badge and a gun will make someone want us.
But somewhere in the haze of male fantasy, someone realized there’s one profession that beats all of them. Astronaut. These are guys who don’t just help people or look impressive in uniform. They literally leave the planet. They go to space. They’re not bound by anything down here anymore. And apparently, to the female imagination anyway, that’s the hottest thing a man can possibly be.
You see it in every movie that matters. In Armageddon, the astronaut gets the girl—gets Liv Tyler, no less. In Mass Effect, the astronaut seduces literal aliens. In Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear, who’s basically an astronaut, is the guy every toy wants to be around. The astronaut doesn’t have to prove himself. He’s already beyond all the normal hierarchies. He’s already won.
So that’s what we’re actually chasing, I think. Not the job itself, but what the job represents—transcendence, otherness, the confidence that comes from having already been somewhere no one else has. The astronaut is the fantasy because he’s the one who doesn’t care what anyone down here thinks. He’s already been somewhere better.
Which is funny because most of us will never be astronauts. Most of us will stay on the ground—designers, writers, teachers, insurance adjusters, whatever. And we’ll spend our whole lives trying to become the thing we think will make us attractive, knowing the whole time that we’re lying to ourselves. That’s the joke. That’s the trap. That’s being a guy.