Testosterone has become the explanation of choice for an impressive range of male problems — aggression, risk-taking, mid-life misery, and the invention of the leaf blower. The reality is considerably more interesting and considerably less tidy.
Loneliness among men has reached levels that would, if it were a physical disease, prompt a public health emergency. Instead it gets a shrug, a suggestion to join a club, and a change of subject.
Grief is one of the few experiences that arrives without asking permission, ignores all previous arrangements, and refuses to behave in the way you've been told it should. Men, in particular, tend to find this inconvenient.
Depression in men is under-diagnosed, under-treated and over-fatal. A significant part of the reason is that most men — and many of the people around them — don't recognise it when it's happening.
At some point, someone you care about is going to be struggling. You'll know something is wrong. You'll want to help. And then you'll have absolutely no idea what to do. This article is for that moment.
At some point in the first year of retirement, usually around Tuesday afternoon, it dawns on most men that endless freedom and purposeless emptiness are much harder to tell apart than the brochure suggested.
Most men will cheerfully admit to surviving on five hours' sleep as though it's a point of pride. It isn't. It's a slow-motion act of self-sabotage with a remarkably comprehensive list of consequences.
Men are losing their friends at a rate that would alarm them if they noticed it was happening. Most don't notice until they're trying to think of someone to call and the list is shorter than expected.
Your brain is lying to you. Not occasionally, not in unusual circumstances — regularly, systematically, and with considerable conviction. Here's what it's doing and why it matters.
It's not a crisis. It's not a cliché. It's a perfectly normal psychological process that most men are completely unprepared for — which is why it tends to arrive like a lorry through the living room wall.
Work is not just what men do. For most men, it is a substantial part of what they are. Which makes whatever happens to it — stress, redundancy, retirement — considerably more than a practical problem.
The self-help industry is worth approximately $15 billion and contains roughly $14.5 billion worth of noise. This article is an attempt to identify what's left. There is a version of self-help that involves getting up at 5, journaling for forty-five minutes, meditating, cold-showering, and visualising your best
Body and Mind
For centuries, medicine treated the body and mind as entirely distinct concerns. This turned out to be wrong in almost every direction you care to look.
Relationships
Most men put more research into buying a car than into understanding what makes a relationship last. This is probably not unrelated to the divorce statistics.
Life Stages And Transitions
Ageing is inevitable. A lot of what men believe about what it does to their minds, however, turns out to be either wrong or considerably more complicated than they've been led to expect.
Understanding Your Mind Let's start with something that shouldn't be controversial but somehow still is: men have emotions. Not watered-down, occasional, minor-inconvenience emotions — the full range. Grief, fear, loneliness, shame, tenderness, love. All of it. The idea that men are less emotional than women isn'