4 Hard Truths Men Over 30 Need To Hear

All right, guys, welcome back to the Mantalk Show. I'm Connor Beaton, and today we're going to be talking about the four hard truths that every man over 30 needs to hear. Now, even if you're not 30 yet, these are probably going to be applicable for you. They are probably going to be things that you need to hear. And I'm not going to be talking about the normal crap that most guys would be talking about, right? Most guys talk about like, oh, you need to make more money or you need to save and you need to get in shape and you need to be adventurous or you need to. You need to develop a deep, intentional, daily practice or ritual or whatever it is. Those things, I'm just gonna leave them as a grant that is given, as something that hopefully you're already focused in on and working on. I'm gonna be talking about the deeper four things that every man over the age of 30 needs to know and understand. The first thing is about regret. Maybe you did waste your twenties. Maybe you screwed up and fucked up all the way through your 20s. Good. You either lived a whole bunch and learned a ton of lessons, or you didn't live at all. And that should inform you of the life that you want to live. The unlived expectations, the unlived adventures, the unlived desires that are all percolating up now from your unconscious into your psyche, telling you who you ultimately want to be, the dreams that you want to pursue, the things that you want to build, the places you want to go and see, and who you want to spend time with. If you've not lived, it's oftentimes the most informative thing that you can experience. Regret is a waste of time. Regret is something. And it's not to say don't live without regrets. We're all going to regret something. I love the Christopher Hitchens quote where he says, choose your regrets. I think it's one of the most important things that you can do in your life. And so after your 30s, once you start to pass that threshold of being in your 30s or 40s or 50s, you start to realize that regret is something that you're inevitably going to have to choose. There is a payoff and a consequence and a cost for absolutely every decision and choice that you make, right? If you can only afford to go to Thailand and you can't go to Japan, or you have to choose between the two, and one's going to cost you more money than the other one, you know, costing you your savings, you have a decision to Make. And so let go of the notion that you wasted your 20s because you were chasing women or wasting time, whatever, street racing motorcycles like I was for a period of time, or that you didn't live at all. All of that is just information about how you can begin to sculpt and craft your current day life. The real waste is by not pursuing those things, right? By not implementing some of the things that you either Learned in your 20s or that you feel like you missed out on. So that's the first one. The second one is very simple and it's kind of harsh, but I'm going to say it anyways. The second one is don't make your future self suffer because your present self is acting like a pussy. Now, what do I mean like that? And again, it might sound like harsh language for some folks out there, but. But I really want to drive the message home. If you don't make the hard choices now, wherever you are, whether you're in your 30s, 40s or 50s, or 60s, doesn't matter if you don't make the hard choices now, you will blow up your life later and pay the price now. If you're in your 30s and you don't make the hard choices, the hard decisions to end the relationship that you know you don't want to be in. If you don't make the decision to, to take the risk now to start the business, to shift out of the career path that you can't stand to quit on the boss that you're just like, I can't deal with this, you know, mofo anymore. This is going to lead you to some type of a midlife crisis. This is going to lead you to a place in your life that you will inevitably be miserable with. And here's the kicker that I really want you to remember. And this is for every man watching this. Regardless of your age, you will never have as much energy and as much vitality as you do in your life right now. And if that feels like pressure, good, get after it, right? But you will never have as much energy and vitality as you do right now. Every single man that I've ever talked to and ever worked with says, I wish I had the energy that I did in my 20s or 30s. And so wherever you are on the age spectrum tuning into this, just keep that in mind. Don't make your future self suffer because present you doesn't want to make hard decisions, doesn't want to make hard conversations, doesn't want to take the risk to move his life in a different Direction. You never know what is going to happen. Part of being masculine is by confronting risk. It's by facing the fear of the unknown. The men that I know that, that I have worked with over the last decade, who love their life, who are successful, who embody a deep level of fulfillment, who enjoy their lives, they are the men who have not only taken risks, but the men that have ventured into the unknown, ventured into this unknown territory of what will happen if I leave this job and start this business? What will happen if I build a Runway to having this side business that I've always dreamt about. So don't make your future self suffer because present you is scared. Lean into the fear. Lean into being afraid. Lean into being scared. And do it anyway. The third thing is that death is right around the corner. Death is right there. Stop avoiding death and let it into the house of your mind. Let death be your roommate. Let it inform your decisions. Keep it in mind. Keep it close to you. And stop denying that you're not closer to death than you'd care to admit. One of the things that I've seen with so many men is they bring this false belief that they're not afraid of death. I'm not afraid of death. I'm not afraid of dying. That is a very adolescent sentiment. If you really knew death, you'd be afraid. And it's not that you should cower in fear or anything like that. It's not that it should cripple you and freeze you in place so that you can never make decisions. It's actually the opposite. It's that by befriending death, by understanding that it's present, by letting it sit six inches from your face while you have to make decisions and choices about your life, it can actually help you to form a very meaningful existence because it gives you a sense of finality. It helps you remember that there's little deaths every day. There's a conversation that ends and will never happen again. There's a connection that ends and will never happen again. You enter into a coffee shop that you'll never walk in again. There's these little moments of finiteness, of endings and limitations that the immature, masculine, the immature and adolescent version of us wants to pretend doesn't exist. This immature and adolescent version of you believes that it's infinite, believes that you, like this. This form that you have, will never die, and it's indestructible and etc. So we shouldn't be crippled by death, but we shouldn't pretend that it doesn't exist. So you have to start to welcome it in and to let it affect your choices, to let it influence the way that you make decisions, the way that you look at problems, the way that you appreciate, you know, enjoying the summer. I did this for a period of time. I wrote about this in my book where I actually calculated out how many days I had left in my life if I were to die. I think it was at 85 and it was a very small number. You know, I had. I think I remember writing in my book and at the time when I did the exercise, I had more debt on my credit card, I had more dollars of debt on my credit card than I had days left to live. It was mind boggling to me. You know what that did? It lit a kind of fire under me and made me realize like, oh, there is this limitation. It's my fundamental belief that men and women experience time in a very different way. We as men have this one long arc to the grave. And for a lot of men, if they don't have certain experiences in their life, if they don't have an initiation process, if they don't go through some type of experience where either they have a near death experience, if they experience some type of devastation in their life, where there's a real sudden ending, where there's a real direct limitation, they can feel like they're just going to go on forever. Whereas women's lives are interrupted every every month, right? Where their menstrual cycle is this sort of death and rebirth internally, right? This shedding of a layer internally, they also give birth, which we don't. And so those things can interrupt their lives and give them a much more finite sense of the cycle and the cyclical nature of existence and put them in touch. Much closer to a sort of myopic view and myopic in a positive sense of time and of life. And for men, because we have this arch, right? There's not like a cutoff date, right? Where women, you know, after 40 or 41 or 42, it becomes much harder and sometimes almost impossible to become pregnant, right? And then they'll go through menopause. And you know, that is sort of a death in its own way. We don't really have that, right. I know 75, 80 year old men that get women pregnant. I mean, it's just a very different form of existence. And so you have to be willing to start to recognize endings and limitations and death's presence in your life and allow it to shape and mold you in a positive way to help you to experience gratitude and grace and thankfulness and forgiveness on a daily basis. And the last thing that I'll say, the last thing that every man over 30 needs to hear, is that your unwillingness to find or create your own definition of freedom is the only real death that you can experience in this life form without actually dying.

And you're sort of living in that space. It's a type of mediocrity that so many men get caged into. You get trapped by not really exploring, pursuing, defining, searching for, beginning to understand what your version of freedom is. And you have to find that type of freedom. Maybe you find it in spirituality, maybe you find it in adventuring, maybe you find it in how you structure your life, whatever that is to you. Part of your mission as a man, especially after 30, is to begin to refine and define what your definition of freedom is, and then live it, to live that freedom daily. Because the masculine in you craves freedom and its ultimate level of satisfaction, its ultimate level of satiation with life, its ultimate connection to its truest form, if we could call it, is when we are in alignment with the type of freedom that we wish to embody as men. So as always, don't forget to man it forward. Share your thoughts in the comments below. And I'm curious, what do you think all men after 30 need to hear till next week? Connor Beaton signing off.