Somewhere in Osu tonight, a young man is sitting across from a woman he has been chasing on WhatsApp for three weeks, and he has nothing to say. Somewhere in East Legon, a young woman is scrolling past yet another Bumble profile, sighing the particular sigh of someone who has stopped expecting anything interesting to happen. And somewhere in every barbering shop, every trotro queue, every Twitter Space debating “who is at fault,” the same argument is playing out: are Ghanaian men getting worse at courtship, are Ghanaian women asking for too much, or is something bigger — something neither side controls — quietly rewiring how an entire generation relates to one another?

I put that question to one of the darker, more uncomfortable, and more useful minds writing on human behaviour today: Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and Mastery — a man whose books have sold millions of copies worldwide, been quoted by Jay-Z, 50 Cent, and Drake, and been credited, and blamed, for teaching an entire generation how power really works, whether we admit it publicly or not. I have spent time with his recent interviews, and what he says about seduction, confidence, and why so many young people today cannot connect deserves a serious airing in Ghana — because I suspect we are further along this road than we think, and further from admitting it than we should be.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE CLAIM: MOST PEOPLE HAVE STOPPED LEARNING A LANGUAGE THEY NEED TO SURVIVE

Greene’s central argument is deceptively simple and worth repeating slowly, because it cuts against everything the manosphere and the self-help industry currently sell us. Seduction, he says, is not a trick, a set of lines, or a system you download and apply. It is a mating ritual, older than language itself, built on reading and responding to another person’s body — their posture, their eyes, the way they cross their legs, the tone underneath their words rather than the words themselves. “One thing about words is people can lie,” he says, “but body language, it doesn’t lie.”

His argument, in three parts, is this: we are losing that language because we have replaced human contact with screens; we are mistaking instant gratification for genuine desirability; and we are, as a culture, telling young people that confidence and charm should arrive without cost, without rejection, without the long, humbling apprenticeship that every generation before them had to serve.

That last point deserves to be printed in bold across every university hostel wall from Legon to KNUST. Confidence, Greene insists, cannot be faked, and it cannot be downloaded from a YouTube “alpha male” video. It is built the same way a carpenter builds skill with wood — through repetition, through actual accomplishment, through the humiliating, unglamorous work of trying, failing, and trying again in front of real human beings who can reject you to your face. He admits he was rejected by nearly every woman he pursued between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, precisely because he was “faking confidence” rather than earning it.

THE STEEL MAN: IS THIS JUST AN OLD MAN BLAMING THE INTERNET?

Before I go further, let me offer the honest counter-argument, because Greene’s thesis has real critics, and a columnist who only tells you one side is not doing her job.

Skeptics will rightly point out that “kids these days can’t talk to each other” is possibly the oldest complaint in human history, recycled by every older generation about the one beneath it. There is also a fair critique that framing seduction primarily around effort, patience, and “reading body language” risks ignoring the very real structural pressures young Ghanaians face — economic precarity that delays marriage, the cost of dating itself in a country battling inflation, and the genuine safety calculations many women must make that have nothing to do with romantic chemistry and everything to do with basic protection. It would be unfair, even reckless, to tell a young Ghanaian man struggling to date that his real problem is “insufficient patience,” when many of his peers are also struggling to find jobs, pay rent, and support extended family — realities that Greene, writing from Los Angeles, does not have to reckon with in the same way we do.

That critique lands, and it should temper how we apply his ideas. But it does not erase the deeper claim, which is not really about Wi-Fi or apps at all — it is about attention itself, and what happens to a generation raised to expect that attention should be effortless and instant. That claim, I believe, survives the criticism.

THE GHANAIAN ANGLE: WHAT DATING APPS HAVE DONE TO A CULTURE THAT ONCE COURTED SLOWLY

We should be honest about what has changed in Ghana specifically. A generation ago, courtship in Accra or Kumasi involved family, church, neighbourhood, and time — a young man had to show up at a woman’s house, greet her mother, prove over weeks and months that he was serious. It was slow, occasionally suffocating, but it forced a kind of patience and social skill that simply cannot be replicated in a Tinder swipe.

Now, an entire courtship can begin and die inside a phone screen, without either party ever learning to read the other’s face. Greene calls this the danger of internet pornography and instant gratification — the false belief that connection, like content, “should be very easy and quick.” I would extend his warning to our own context: the danger is not only pornography, it is the entire architecture of modern Ghanaian social media life, where a man can build an entire persona, an entire “confidence,” out of filtered photos and borrowed captions, without ever once standing in a room and being read, in real time, by another human being who can see straight through him.

And here Greene makes a claim that should provoke real debate in our barbershops and beauty salons alike: vulnerability, not bravado, is what actually seduces. “What seduces you about a puppy, about a child,” he says, “is their vulnerability.” A man who performs total invulnerability — who never admits fear, doubt, or need — does not read as strong. He reads as suspicious. “Maybe he’s a serial killer,” Greene jokes, “maybe he’s got skeletons in his closet.” Compare that to the loud, performative “alpha” content flooding Ghanaian social media, all peacocking and zero softness, and you begin to see why so many young men following that script are, by his account, doing the exact opposite of what actually works.

POWER IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS
Greene’s wider argument about power itself is just as provocative, and just as relevant to a country obsessed, quite reasonably, with who controls what. Power, he insists, is not the presidency, not wealth, not political office — it is, at its root, “a feeling,” a sense of control over one’s own circumstances. And the feeling of powerlessness, he argues, quoting Malcolm X, corrupts more thoroughly than the feeling of having power ever does.

Sit with that for a moment in a Ghanaian context. How much of our public anger — the insults traded between NPP and NDC supporters, the fury directed at ECG when the lights go, the bitterness of graduates unable to find work despite their certificates — is genuinely political conviction, and how much is simply the corrosive, compounding feeling of powerlessness looking for somewhere to land? Greene’s uncomfortable answer is that a person denied real agency will often manufacture the illusion of power through cruelty, gossip, or online combat, because doing something, even something ugly, feels better than doing nothing at all.

THE STROKE THAT TOOK HIS POWER AWAY
The most striking part of Greene’s recent reflections has nothing to do with seduction or strategy at all. In 2018, he suffered a stroke that left the left side of his body paralysed. The man who wrote the definitive modern text on power discovered, in an instant, what it means to have none — unable to walk unaided, unable to type, unable to button his own shirt. “Please understand,” he says, “the ability that you have now to run, to walk, to type — it can be taken away from you. It’s miserable. Please don’t take it for granted.”

There is something almost scriptural in that warning, and it belongs in this conversation for a reason: everything Greene teaches about confidence, seduction, and power depends on a body that can act on the world. When that body fails, all the strategy in the world cannot restore it — only patience, therapy, gratitude, and the people willing to stay by your side can. He credits his wife, plainly and without embarrassment, for carrying him through the darkest stretch. It is a humbling coda to a career built on the language of control: in the end, what saved him was not mastery, but love, and the willingness to receive help without shame.

A FINAL WORD
I do not believe Ghanaian men are failing at love because they are lazy, and I do not believe Ghanaian women are asking for too much because they are difficult. I believe we are, quietly and without quite realising it, living through the same global transformation Greene describes — a generation raised on instant everything, now discovering that the oldest human skill, reading another person’s face and earning their trust slowly, cannot be rushed, downloaded, or swiped into existence. Perhaps the debate we actually need is not “who is failing whom,” but whether we are willing, as a culture, to put down the phone long enough to relearn a language our grandparents never had to study, because they never stopped speaking it.

Author’s Note: I wrote this piece after reviewing Robert Greene’s recent interviews and cross-referencing his central claims against his published books. I am not a psychologist, and readers navigating genuine relationship difficulty, loneliness, or safety concerns should seek guidance from a qualified counsellor rather than any single book, podcast, or column — this one included. My aim here is not to romanticise Greene’s more calculating philosophy of power wholesale, nor to suggest that patience alone solves what are, for many young Ghanaians, real economic and social barriers to dating and marriage. It is simply to open an honest, occasionally uncomfortable debate about what our screens may be quietly costing us.

About the Author: Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian columnist, filmmaker, and founder of Brownsy Silva Company, writing on culture, psychology, and the Ghanaian condition for readers at home and across the diaspora.