Recently, a friend in New York was telling me about three bond traders in her social circle. All were aged about 40. All were masters of the financial universe. Million-dollar bonus, big house, big cars – in short, the sort of alpha male that makes a bumbler like me feel woefully inadequate. And here’s the thing: having worked like slave dogs for the best years of their lives, all had spectacularly dropped dead in the past three months.

It made me wonder, is being an alpha male really all it’s cracked up to be? Is the big-balled model of successful masculinity – Philip Green, David Beckham, Gordon Ramsay – something every man should aspire to? Personally, I’ve only ever wanted to be a beta. Not for me the megabucks and status symbols that mark out the big beasts of this world, and certainly not if it means working myself to death to have them. I’m content to be simply an excellent drinker of beer, smoker of fags and starer through windows.

Of course, that could make me merely a slacker, a lazy fool without drive or ambition, but I prefer to see myself as being at the vanguard of a brave new movement. There are signs that a backlash against alphadom is creeping into the public consciousness – a new value system that recognises overwork and materialism as the blind alleys they really are.

The beta male represents a new, more rounded idea of what it means to be a man. It is shaping up to be the next important trend in sociological development, because the beta male rejects the narrow, all-conquering competitive model of the alpha. He unites the punk ideal of not caring what other people think with a sense of social responsibility and the perception of life as full of variety. He is the philosophical man; he sings, dances, thinks and grows vegetables.

And right now, the beta way has never looked more attractive. Witness the Blur bassist turned cheesemaker Alex James, with his new-found gentle, farming ways. (The Monty Python team were more prescient than they realised when they came up with the line: “Blessed are the cheesemakers.”) Witness also the new-folk movement, represented by festivals such as the Green Man, where musicians and bands such as Gruff Rhys, Voice of the Seven Woods and Circulus promote a return to nature. Witness Pete Doherty, not so much stumbling as staggering through life; Hugh Grant, who never quite cracked the alpha-male market and has turned bumbling into an art form; Louis Walsh, the perennial underdog; and Russell Brand, whose wildness and poetic nature are the reasons for his appeal. If you doubt that beta is the hot ticket at the moment, just answer the following: who would you rather spend a sunny afternoon with – alpha Alan Sugar or beta Boris Johnson? Even undoubted alphas such as David Cameron and Al Gore are realising that a mantle of beta-ness, however flimsy, is a good look.

At lunch the other day, the conversation turned to a man who earns $20m a year. He had just taken 100 of his closest friends on holiday at a cost of half a million quid. The tone turned from admiring to pitying when one of the party, an Exmoor wine merchant, said: “I suppose that he has to work very hard.” Of course he does. And, with furrowed brows, we all agreed that the long hours, the angst and the adrenal overload could not possibly be a price worth paying for any amount of money. We concurred that a real man (and I do not count myself as one, quite yet) should be able to mend the roof and write a poem, throw a ball and bang a nail; that to be manly may not actually mean staring at screens all day, endangering your health, both mental and physical, all in search of a few measly pounds; that it may be rather stupid and boring to devote your life to work, which, after all, kills 2m people every year, according to the UN; that it may be wiser, more enjoyable and, dare I say it, sexier to be a laid-back, multitasking individual who has been sensible enough to create an enjoyable life for himself.

He is less likely to die young, and he can play with the children, with ample time to wander the woods and valleys, notebook in hand, sketching and pondering. The differing strands of his person united into one integrated self, the beta male is probably a less anxious individual who is also a lot nicer to his wife. We agreed that Plato, in his most famous text, The Republic, was right to say that the philosophical man was not an irrelevant dreamer, but the most important person in a sane society. Indeed, he believed that the philosophers should be the rulers of the state.

So there we have it. Get out of the money pits and into the fields. It is the noble path. Mark my words: the bumblers shall inherit the earth.