Three characters. Three completely different lives. The same war running underneath all of them — the one between where you are and where you're supposed to be. What the book understands, and what most modern fiction gets completely wrong, is that masculine struggle isn't a flaw to be processed. It's a forge.
The difference between Marcus Aurelius and the productivity influencers who quote him is that Aurelius never expected it to be comfortable.
// StoicismHackworth doesn't write the way generals write when they're trying to protect their legacy. He writes like a man who's made every possible mistake and refuses to hide from any of them.
// MilitaryNobody is coming to give you permission to be great. That's not pessimism. That's the cleanest thing I can tell you.
// DisciplineEverything written for the library, in order. The full article catalog — new posts are open to all. Older entries are locked behind the newsletter. One email. Lifetime access.
I'm in my early thirties. I lift seriously. I read more than people expect. That combination confuses some people, which is fine — they're not the audience.
This site exists because I got tired of book content written by people who've clearly never been tested by anything. Reviews wrapped in caveats. Essays that spend three paragraphs apologizing before making a point. Recommendations that assume the reader needs to be protected from strong ideas.
I don't write like that. When something is good, I tell you why it's good and what it asks of you. When something is soft, I say so. If you're here looking for consensus opinion, there are a thousand other corners of the internet for that.
The books I care about are the ones that take struggle seriously. Military history. Stoic philosophy. The rare novel that actually respects the men inside it. That's the library. Everything else is noise.
I train, I read, I write when something's worth writing about. If you want to know when that happens, the newsletter is the place to be.