15% Of Men Can't Identify A Close Friend

I think for a lot of people, if you could, if you could interview them post pandemic and pre pandemic, what you would find is that a lot of people, probably a shockingly high amount of people, acclimatized to a much higher kind of loneliness and isolation than they were experiencing before. I know I went through it. Or it was just like, oh, yeah, there's just. It was like, oh, I haven't seen a lot of people in like the last five days. Huh. Okay. I should probably go and, and chat with people and spend time with people. So I think, you know, we, we know unequivocally, statistically, the research is in that, you know, your close friends, the, the amount and the quality of close friends that you have in your life at 50 will predict your health and your happiness at 80. Right. Like, this is, it's the biggest study that's ever been done. We know it. We know how important having close friends is.

Yeah.

And yet, you know, 15% of men can't identify a close friend.

Yeah.

In, in, in America. Right. And it's higher in other countries.

Right.

And I think that's only getting worse, you know, and so I think that is a huge priority because that pushes us to get out of our head, you know, get out of like the ruminating about all the bullshit that's happening online and go and just hang out with some people for a little while, you know, and let like, release the stress valve for a little bit.

Like, it sounds like we're talking basics again. And I agree with you relationship wise.

Like, just the necessity of feels like what the pandemic may have done is taken things that were not just luxuries, but philosophical ideas. Oh, you need to have a morning practice. Oh, you want to have a morning routine. Oh, it's good to get together with friends sometimes. And now in this post pandemic dip, we're looking at these things and saying, this is how you survive.

This is how you be okay in the world. It's not just great to have a buddy that you go have coffee with because it feels good. You go have coffee with a buddy because it's going to keep you alive. And when men perhaps take that level of gravity of it or seriousness of it, then they'll take the action. Right. I had a bunch of people reach out after I talked about that dinner. Like, wow, I can't believe you invited four or five people over for dinner. And I was like, yeah, it was really easy. It was four or five texts. Would you like to come to dinner? On Friday night at 6pm, don't bring anything. By the way, we're going to answer one question. Yes. This is the beauty of dudes, right? You know, I have heard from some female, from women, like, it's really hard to get women together. We're so jealous of the fact that you guys did. We did a snowboarding trip for the nation and it was like one email went out and then a month later ten dudes showed up at a house and that was it. And my partner's like, that is mind boggling to me. We would have 700 emails and no one would ever get together. So guys, like embrace this. That if you're the one sitting there saying like, well, I don't get invited to. I don't know what to do. I'm not sure who to hang out with. Start asking, like, be the guy that reaches out and is like, hey man, having a couple guys over for dinner Tuesday. You want to join? Hey, a bunch of us are going to go hiking on Wednesday. Want to join? Hey, a couple of us are going to go surfing on Friday. Want to join? Like, be that guy. If you're listening to this, like, be that guy. Because you're going to start the ball rolling and you're going to give other guys permission to do the same. Which taps back in again to what we really love, which is to be leaders or to be in a leadership position. To feel like we have impact, to feel like we're making a difference in the world.

I was gonna say. And to not be ashamed of that. Like, I think what I've been somewhat surprised by is the amount of like pushback that I, that I get online sometimes from individuals from both men and women about, like us as men stepping into a more self leadership oriented position. It is shocking to me how like.

How quickly we have discarded the masculine and male orientation within our culture. Like, it really is surprising to me in some ways that, you know, men have done some incredible things. We've done some terrible things. You know, we've done some stupid things, you know, like individually and collectively. But men have done some absolutely tremendous things. Yeah. And what I find fascinating is the amount of people that are like, oh, that's yeah, that's misogynistic for wanting a man to like be a leader. And it's like, no, it's not the majority of when men want to be leaders. And so I think one of the other things is, one of the things I've been talking with guys about is like, just don't engage in the Bullshit gender wars. Just don't engage with it. Like, you remember, like you texted me last night, I put a post up about how 42% of women are now the breadwinners, and that there's unexpected consequences of that on many different levels in the sense that our relational roles within our societies have fundamentally changed. You know, in 1960, it was 11% of households had women earning more than men, and now it's 42%. Right. And maybe it's even higher now, who knows, because the poll was in, like 2019. But so we have these massive shifts happening in our culture. We have, you know, 66% of men between, you know, 19 and 29 or 18 and 29 that are single and. And 30% of them are sexless. And so we have this big tension that's starting to emerge between men and women in our culture for sure. And I think part of that tension is that it is very easy to turn on the news, to go through social media, and to get conscripted into this stupid fucking gender war that is happening that is just destroying dating, that's destroying the, you know, the, the fun of flirting with people out in real life, that's destroying marriages and relationships because people are entering into these relationships with this really deep mistrust dislike of men or women or the masculine or the patriarchy or whatever it is. Right. Fill in the blank. Right. And so I think one of the things that we have to start to move away from is one, that we just all opt out from the gender war and we say, I'm not going to participate in that anymore. I'm just not going to partake in it because it's just nonsense and it's not helping anybody. And two, I think that we have to be able to hold two ideas simultaneously, meaning we have to be able to talk about the very real. The very real challenges that young men are facing right now in our society and our culture. Without that meaning that you are somehow misogynistic, patriarchal, or anti women. Right. We have to be able to say, listen, young men are struggling and they're starting to struggle really bad. And we need to talk about this because this is a problem. Rather than saying, oh, they're all lost and they're all narcissists and they're all incels and dit, dit, dit, dit. It's like, well, you're going to create more of them.

Yeah.

And so I think. I think that those. I'm curious to get your two cents on that. No, it's a Little bit of like a soapbox. Like, thank you for coming. My TED Talk moment.

Yeah. I've said for years, we threw the masculine baby out with the toxic bathwater. Like, that's. It's like all men bad. And now what do you know, we have a tail on that. Or there's an after effect to that. And that is that men are struggling. That is that boys are struggling. And there's two sides to this. Right. We talk directly to men and two boys and say, hey, do better. Here are some options. We feel for you, we get you, we understand you. And there's backlash on one end of like, fuck them. It's a patriarchy. You guys created the system, you should suffer in it. And then on behind the scenes, though, I get mothers, I get sisters, I get wives. I get all of these women saying, well, this is my husband, this is my son, this is my brother. I don't know what to do with him. I genuinely care. I'm so tired of the, the cultural war on boys or the cultural war between the sexes. I just threw something up. Yes. Last night saying, here's what I see when I open my social media feed. Female influencers making fun of men, women celebrating them in the comments, Male influencers bashing women, men celebrating them in the comments. No one really recognizing that this has an effect. This. Everybody who reads this, sees this, comments on it, likes it, Put a heart, put a fight, whatever, walks away, like with a little bit of contamination on them. And they take that contamination into their relationships. They take that contamination into the next conversation they have with their wife, into the next conversation they have with their boyfriend or the guy that they're dating. And it creates real discord. It creates real disconnection. And the easiest way to not be contaminated is just to, to let it go. Don't. Don't comment on it, don't watch it, don't feed it, don't give them the attention. Right. If no one watched that.

People would stop producing it. People would then stop the, the argument, which is not going anywhere, that, that it's your fault that we're not having sex. It's our fault that this is happening. It's your fault, it's men's fault, it's women's fault, blah, blah, blah. It's so stupid.

Yeah.

And it's so tiresome. If had any solution, I'd be like, do it. You know what? Keep it up. This is actually making change. It's not. It is actually. We, we. Now is the time more than ever for connection, for us to say, hey, I see you, you're a human. There's a lot of things on your life that I don't understand. There's a lot of things about my life you may not understand yet. This is a basic building block of good mental health, of emotional health, of society, of peace, of the planet continuing, of the species continuing, of people having joy, of people having fun, of people celebrating their lives. The best things come from connection. So let's stop feeding this machine that we, I'm going to even say, are self perpetuating or a lot of people are self perpetuating because they are wounded, because they have been hurt by the opposite sex. And so it's easy to jump on that bandwagon.

But you know what?

It's lazy. Right? I remember dating. I'm going to talk about this in the next day or two. I was dating a female influencer years ago and she said, like, I don't feel comfortable putting a lot of the stuff out that I used to because. Because of you. I was like, well, why is it because of me? She said, because I now see like the other side of the coin. I see that men are actually dealing with real. And so it doesn't make me feel as comfortable to make fun of them. I was like, good, you know, don't do that. And by the way, it's lazy. It would be so easy for us with our platforms to be like, we're just now going to make fun of women.

And we. And we would probably get a ton of traction, a ton of traction.