when your truck is louder than your life | musing no. 23
a lesson in cosplay masculinity, wide tires, and the noise men make when they’ve got nothing to say.
they think it looks tough.
dominant.
alpha.
a lifted truck, with tires sticking half a foot past the fenders, and an exhaust that could wake a cemetery.
in their heads, it’s the same posture a linebacker takes before impact or the way a pitbull stands in a doorway — wide, planted, unmovable.
in reality?
it’s cosplay masculinity on wheels.
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some of them got there through a friend group where the dumbest idea spreads the fastest. one guy throws spacers on his wheels and gets attention. the next guy follows. soon, everyone’s buying offset rims and telling themselves it’s “a lifestyle” while quietly googling how to fix death wobble at 60 mph.
others arrived here without a father who ever looked them in the eye and said,
“explain to me how making your truck less safe, less functional, and more expensive to drive makes you more of a man.”
that conversation never happened.
so they were left to figure masculinity out on their own.
and they did what men without mentorship often do — they built the loudest version of themselves they could afford.
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here’s the thing: they *know* people are laughing.
they’ve heard the jokes.
they’ve seen the memes.
they’ve felt the smirk from the guy in the next lane.
but the louder the mockery gets, the louder they get.
because the entire persona is built on pretending not to care.
if you strip away the noise, they’re left with a fear most men will never admit:
and to them, mockery still means you’re being noticed.
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this isn’t rebellion.
it’s camouflage.
it’s not about power.
it’s about hiding in a performance of it.
when the world has failed to teach you quiet confidence, you imitate whatever power you’ve seen. you chase *visible dominance* because it’s easier than building the kind you can feel when no one’s looking.
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and i get it — that’s why i can’t decide whether to pity them or sympathize with them.
pity, because they’ve been failed at almost every level:
- **by their fathers** (who weren’t there or weren’t paying attention)
- **by their friends** (who didn’t have the backbone to say “bro, this is ridiculous”)
- **by social media** (which rewards the most cartoonish versions of masculinity with the most attention)
sympathy, because deep down, they want what every man wants — to be respected, to be noticed, to feel like they belong.
they just bought into the lie that you get there by being loud enough to drown out the doubt.
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if you’ve got a man in your life heading down this road — or already on it — you can’t shame him out of it. you can’t mock him into maturity.
you lead him out the same way men have been led out of bad ideas for centuries:
by giving him something better to belong to.
something that makes the cheap version feel exactly as small as it is.
because once a man feels the quiet power of knowing who he is, he doesn’t need to widen his stance to be seen.
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he’s not just a man. he’s the one she trusts enough to surrender to.
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