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You've written a lot, and tied much of it to your personal experience, I'm not sure I can match you in length but I will try in depth. I'm not really motivated to litigate point for point with you though.
Cutting a path through life, towards death, dissolution, non-existence, remembrance, the next life, pick your metaphysical ending. Not every journey is about the destination. I exist therefore I am. There is no purpose other than the one you give your own life. You need to forge your own meaning. That meaning is going to be deeply personal and deeply individual. No one can give it to you, or tell you what it is. The biggest crime our society has inflicted on men, is that by trying to control them, force them to fit in the square hole of society, we have created a class of men who need to be told what to do, how to think, how to feel, how to be. Lo for it to be me to fall to the common trap of now prescribing what manhood means, all I can say is that manhood is forge by the individual. You cannot forge something without resistance, without struggle.
It sounds like to you, meaning was found through family, you see your existence as the perpetuation of your familial line. That's an old meaning, common through history. But it has its risks. As stated elsewhere in this thread, it depends on others to engage with you. You have tied your own happiness to others, and are thus at the mercy of the fates, or the health of our society. You can rage against the darkness but accept it is the darkness of your own choosing.
I have never been one to find meaning in my genetic line. Oh I've had the thoughts about my biological purpose, but I'm not a animal. I am not chained to my biology. I find meaning, manhood, masculinity in the depth and breath of my knowledge and skills, my ability to overcome challenges. To me nothing gives me greater satisfaction than thinking about where I came from: an outcast, autistic child, to a pillar of my local community. I'm not going to humble brag about all the skills I've developed or knowledge I have acquired. But I look back on my struggle, and I find meaning in it.
I'm sure there are broad strokes around what meaning a man can find. What it means to "be a man" but its varied, and subscribing to a one-size fits all; these are the boxes you need to check to be "a man" is exactly the opposite of what manhood means.
Our major viewpoint differences is that you have tied yourself to others, to society, to reward you for "being a man". You have an external locus of reward. All your efforts, gaining skills, knowledge, capability, are all in service of peacocking your way into to having other's recognize you and reward you for those skills/knowledge/capabilities. Incentives do exist, they do drive behavior, but the mistake is that thinking life is some sort of video game where the rewards are deterministic: insert resources, tech, behavior, -> get predefined rewards for doing so. It's not and has never been. Yeah the previous generations paired up more, but those weren't all marriages of love, but economic necessity, social necessity, cultural necessity. Times change and people don't want to be shackled to someone who "was there and available and I could stand", they want a fantasy of love and marriage.
Your entire mentality seems to be as though you can engineer society like its some video game, provide the incentives -> get behavior. And then you get mad because society is not encouraging the incentives you think it should, failing to conceive that maybe society is not a video game. It's this weird technocratic thinking that is divorced from reality.
Different time period, Rome existed in a brutal world where most people died often, and to survive it required you to band together, build a community, struggle together, and win at all costs. Modern life is not that world. If you want to go back to subsistence farming and raiding your neighbors for sheep, then move to Afghanistan or Somalia and Iron-Age Max with the bros. You can forge this men-helping-men tribe the same way everyone has already figured out to: Shared Struggle. Modern life is currently too wealthy, safe, secure, comfortable to really give you that struggle. You find that sort of camaraderie in places where those comforts are stripped, or the struggle is emphasized. It probably doesn't scale well.
And lets be clear, your fantasy of Rome being this Men-For-Men paradise was far from the truth. The society was not propelled by the unified purpose, but by individual agents each seeking what was best for themselves with a society that had converged to channeling that towards its own continued existence. It was not engineered. Nobody sat in the game design room and was like "here add a pinch of republicanism, a dash of social approval from public works, and a splash of citizen armies" For every society that has converged to pro-social norms there are hundreds of societies that have converged on anti-social ones and failed. History doesn't remember them.
I have a fairly Nietzschean disposition, the ancient world was cruel and brutal. I do not judge the men of yesteryear by what was required to exist in such a time.
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