If you've picked up any of our gear, you'll know about our Neo-Barbarian series.

So what is a neo-barbarian?

Outsiders by choice

The word barbarian comes from the ancient Greek barbaros, which simply meant foreigner. The Greeks used it for anyone who wasn't Greek, and they meant it as an insult: the uncivilised outsider.

We wear it with pride.

As inner warriors, we stand outside the current order, the Dork Age, in our ethos and our spirit. Compared with the world around us, we are barbarians.

The Dork Age is built on weakness

The guiding principle of the Dork Age is weakness.

It tells you to just be yourself. Don't strive for anything. Be comfortable in your own skin. In fact, just be comfortable.

Your only job is to consume. Subscribe to the streaming service. Eat the slop, both the kind on your plate and the kind on your screen.

The Dork Age wants you docile. Domesticated. Like cattle.

We are not cattle

Neo-barbarians aren't content to live like cattle.

We strive for strength. We pursue a noble struggle, and our struggle is self-mastery: becoming the best version of ourselves we can be.

That means rejecting the values of the Dork Age: mindless consumption, the endless feed of slop. It means directing ourselves towards a higher purpose beyond shallow materialism.

In a world that wants you weak, strength is a revolt.

For us, strength is almost a form of prayer. It's a process of transformation. Day in, day out, we go to the gym, we lift heavy, and we forge ourselves in the fire of suffering.

Comfort has removed the struggle

For most of human history, just staying alive was a struggle. If you wanted to eat, you raised the animals and slaughtered them yourself. You worked the land under the mercy of nature. It wasn't easy.

Now you can order dinner to your door.

Nobody wants to go back to toiling in the fields six hours a day. But in removing the struggle from survival, we've removed the struggle from life itself. With endless entertainment and pleasure a tap away, what's left to strive for?

A life that's nothing but an endless stream of pleasure isn't a life worth living. Not to me.

Strength is our noble struggle

You need something to struggle for. And there's nothing better to strive for than strength, because strength is the foundation of your physical existence.

Strength training doesn't just build muscle. It trains your mind and hones your spirit. It makes you:

  • More disciplined
  • Tougher and more resilient
  • More goal-oriented and organized
  • More mindful of your health, recovery, sleep and nutrition

Comfort is weakness

Some comfort is unavoidable in the modern world. Almost everyone has a smartphone, high-speed internet and next-day delivery. Our grandparents couldn't have imagined it.

But this much comfort isn't natural for human beings. I believe it plays a big part in why anxiety, depression and other mental health problems are rising. And technology keeps pushing in the same direction: self-driving cars, AI doing everything for us.

If machines can do everything for you, what's the point of you?

That's why we're neo-barbarians. We're the outsiders. We don't strive for comfort. We strive for struggle. We thrive on it.

We're not here for comfort. We're here for war: the war against atrophy, the war to make ourselves better.

Got questions about the neo-barbarian ethos? Get in touch, and share this with anyone who's ready to stop living like cattle.