Most Young Men Are Painfully Lonely

The picture of an ideal man in Western culture looks weird and kind of contradictory.

The ideal man is strong, stoic, financially successful, yet simultaneously emotionally intelligent, sensitive (but not too sensitive), and loving. The ideal man in Western culture looks a lot like Superman.

Actually, no… The ideal man in Western culture is better than Superman. Superman would probably be too much of a workaholic, and he definitely hasn’t processed enough of his trauma to be a good partner or an ideal man.

The ideal man isn’t like Superman, either. The ideal man is, well, ideal.

He’s a fictional character created by the culture that he stems from. He doesn’t exist anywhere except for a comic book, a movie, and the imaginations of every person who desires an ideal man or desires to be an ideal man.

The problem is, most men who are trying to be “ideal men” are falling way short, and it’s ruining their lives. Or is something else at play? Masculinity is complex, confusing, and evolving. Many of us have not kept up.

Are you a real man?

I used to think that “real men” were tall, strong, stoic, and full of drive and ambition. I thought real men worked hard, took what they wanted, and made everything they did look easy and robotic. I thought real men had girls lined up out the door waiting to sleep with them, I thought they had huge muscles, and I thought they never got sad, too happy, or upset.

Do you want to know the truth?

The truth is, 36% of real men are mentally ill. 50% of real men are under 5 feet 9 inches. About half of all real men are single.

I don’t have a statistic for this, but I’m going to make a wild claim that most “real men” don’t have startups, boats, or nice cars either. Most humans don’t have flourishing businesses and roughly 40% of the population will never have enough money to retire. Men aren’t the exception to this, they’re part of it. The actual “real men” (you know, the ones in the real world) don’t look nearly as impressive as they’re portrayed in the media or as they’re told they can be at Jordan Peterson lectures.

I don’t want to be the guy to sit here and whine about the struggles of men (although, the fact that white men make up 7 out of 10 suicides does erk me a bit), but the crisis of masculinity hits close to home for me. It’s personal.

Many men are beginning to realize that they’ve been grasping for significance in a world that doesn’t really care about how important they think they are. We’ve been caught chasing status, women, and power, and we’re realizing that maybe that wasn’t such an ethical or wise thing to do. The typical masculine identity is achievement-oriented. This is not good.

Now, we have to figure something else out to occupy our conquest-driven minds. We have to find peace, not success.

The solution is deliberate connection

I can already hear the groans through my screen.

“Connection” seems like a cop-out answer, but it’s the only one that I can come up with that’s any good. Men need connection the same way that anyone needs connection, but the modern take on masculine interpersonal connection is lacking. Take it from someone who’s spent his entire adult life in martial arts gyms grappling and lifting weights with “alpha males”.

A lot of men are living full lives that are emotionally empty, and they’d prefer it that way.

When I was struggling with severe depression and depersonalization, all I wanted was support from women to make me feel validated. I wanted to be told I was desirable by attractive women in order to boost my self-esteem and make me seem like I was high up on the social hierarchy. This was all I wanted.

So, I lifted weights, became a more confident speaker, improved my status in social settings through achievements, and I started getting noticed more by women.

Sure, getting noticed by girls is exciting, but the funny thing is, no girlfriend has ever “cured me” of my depression and insecurities. The expectation that a girl could cure my mental struggles just by her hotness alone is the unconscious, toxic masculinity-induced belief that plagued me through my early 20s.

Do you want to know what really made me happier? Fighting in the gym with my bros, every single day — and then actually talking to them a little bit.

Strength in numbers

Strength isn’t always how much you can deadlift, how hard you can finish a takedown, or how much pain you can stomach in your personal life without snapping and turning into the reincarnation of your dad that scares you so much.

Sometimes, strength is just listening.

I’m speaking from experience here. Many men get so lost in their “personal legend” and their quest for external success that they forget that there are literally millions of other people on the exact same quest. A lot of people are struggling with the same problems.

However, instead of working together, building bonds, and improving male relationships, men instead say “no homo”, and carry on with their own stoic (and oftentimes selfish) pursuits of greatness. Maybe I’m just overly sensitive and blindly idealistic, but I’ve found that life’s challenges become far easier when I step outside of my own quest for a bit and help others with theirs.

I first found this through teaching martial arts. For me, the stoic pursuit of greatness has been through battling for competitive glory on the Jiu-Jitsu mats. When your entire life (as mine was in my early 20s) is riding on the results of your butt-scooting pajama wrestling matches, life seems really not fun and way too important.

By removing myself from my own quest, I’m not only able to help other people, but I’m also able to approach my own problems more objectively and more calmly.

Recently, I was going through a breakup, and one of the things that helped me was listening to a friend tell me about his own relationship struggles. Listening made me realize that I wasn’t broken or “a failure” just because of my failed relationship, and it also helped my friend feel better because I was able to hold a space for him.

Most men won’t go into conversations like that with their friends. I know that because I used to be one of those guys, and was suffocating. The first step is the hardest, but the ones after aren’t exactly easy. Genuine connection in a world that preaches emotional disconnect is tough.

Closing thoughts

I probably can’t fix masculinity. I’m just a guy.

I definitely can’t fix all of the unhappiness in the world, but I do think that regardless of who you are, what your race, gender, or sexual orientation is, we’re more alike than we allow ourselves to think.

What I mean by this is that a lot of our problems create similar sensations, and they have similar solutions. Although we don’t have identical experiences, we have similar experiences. Instead of seeking someone who’s exactly like you, you might find (as I did) that it’s enough for someone to just listen to you.

“Maturity” is what happens when you’re able to shine the spotlight away from yourself and make yourself listen to someone else. What goes around comes around.

It’s a grand thing to strive for, and it will also make all of us happier.