Overtherapizing Men's Mental Health

“Men need to talk about their feelings.” But when they do, they’re “attention-seeking”.
“Men should be expressing their emotions.” But when they do, “men are toxic.”
“Men can cry in public too.” But when they do, women get the ick.

You are supposed to be composed and suppress your emotions in front of people. The culture is not unhealthy - we’re just in the wrong environment for it.

When men express their emotions directly, the result is crime and violence. When we talk about our emotions that’s fine but doesn’t solve the underlying problem, which is usually downstream of feeling useless, powerless, or replaceable. Instead, we need to channel our emotions into productive efforts.

Why are we in the wrong environment? We have effectively defeated most natural problems we evolved for over a million years, and are left with societal problems that are infinite at any level of affluence (as classic Russian literature amply demonstrates). Men are not as good at those as they are with natural problems.

The other reason men’s culture has become “unhealthy” in modernity is that we’re increasingly giving up on following the main pathways to meaning:

• Function - work, charity, general usefulness to society. Email jobs, scrolling on social media, and playing video games does not help with feeling useful.
• Family - most men will say providing for their family is the greatest purpose of their life, yet we are getting married and having children later and later in life, if at all.
• Faith - accessible to all, this path goes the deepest, and you can choose to follow it at any time - even at your very last breath. I have hope more of us will decide to.

In Small Bets we talk about working like a lion on the hunt. But humans were hunters too - some still find meaning in defeating natural adversities. If you haven’t, I recommend seeing Happy People by Werner Herzog, or how some other indigenous people live to this day. Your instinct to go work on a farm is correct - if for nothing else, then to remember what it feels like when a problem is finite, physical, and responds directly to your effort.