These Two Things are Killing Men

I've been thinking for a long time how I was going to approach this topic. And I think, just so you know, tuning into this, that the title of the video is not clickbait, it is very literal.

And so I'm going to start off by sharing a quick story with you. And the story starts when I was 16. And I was 16, things weren't going so great in my life. My high school relationship was with someone who was incredibly volatile.

Very angry, and she did not treat me well. And because I was a 16 year old boy, I was a kid, I didn't know any better. And so I let a lot of that happen at home. Things were pretty rough, you know, in my family system. I didn't really feel connected in the way that I wanted to. I bounced back and forth between two families. You know, I experienced some emotional and verbal and physical abuse. And I would hear things like, what the hell is wrong with you? You're such a stupid piece of blank. You know, how the hell could you do that? Why can't you just get your shit together? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I heard those things on a pretty regular basis. And those things were damaging, you know, they were harsh. I felt a lot as a kid and I didn't really know what to do with them. You know, I felt angry, I felt hostile inside. I also felt sad and alone because a lot of the time I was being told, you're not really wanted here and even when you're here you're not really getting anything right. Like I wasn't getting stuff right with my girlfriend, I wasn't doing well with her. You know, I knew that that wasn't going well. When I'd get into conflict at home. It felt like I was responsible for all of that. It felt like I was at the epicenter of all the problems in the household. And so, you know, slowly over time, shame, guilt, self hatred really started to take hold. And I remember one day, after a pretty significant argument with my girlfriend and another pretty significant argument with my family, with my mom and my stepdad, I remember walking out of my house because I had just gotten into it with them and yelling and it was just, it wasn't good. And I walked outside and I walked into the garage and what I would normally do is I'd walk into the garage and I had a heavy bag in there. And on this day I remember walking into the garage and I looked over and on the side of the wall, hanging up on the wall was an orange electrical cord, like Those sort of standard orange electrical cords. And I looked at the back of the garage, and they're hanging from the rafters. Because we had one of those garages where the rafters were open. So the exposed beams in the garage just wasn't finished. There was no insulation, there was no ceiling. It was just open rafters with, you know, all kinds of crap stored on top. And so I saw the orange electrical cable, and then I looked back and I saw my heavy bag hanging from the rafters of the garage. And suddenly I started to have some pretty really dark thoughts. And they were dark thoughts that scared the living crap out of me. And I remember standing there.

Contemplating things, thinking through things. Maybe people would be better without me here.

Maybe things just would be easier.

Maybe this is the one thing that I could do right. But then having the thought of I'd probably screw that up, too.

And really scaring the living crap out of myself to the point where I broke down and didn't take action and didn't really ever talk about that to anybody. Never really told anybody that that had happened. And it wasn't until.

10 years later when, because of my own decisions, my own actions, I found myself again in a similar situation. But in the backseat of my car, living out of a parking lot after having completely imploded, my life blew up, my relationship blew up, my career, lied to a whole bunch of people, pushed people away, and found myself in a predicament where I was questioning whether or not the world wouldn't be better without me.

And these stories I've come to learn after working with men for over a decade, they're not unique. They're not unique. The heartbreaking thing and the real truth of most men's realities is that a lot of men have had experiences and thoughts like what I just described, what I just went through, not just what I went through in the past, because this was 14 and, oh, God, 20 some odd years ago. But a lot of men have had those experiences. And I've come to learn that there are two things. There are two really important things that you as a man need in order to find some level of fulfillment. Satisfaction, satiation, meaning purpose.

Thriving in life. And I found them out of.

These very dark experiences and the stories that I've heard from men. And then recently confirmed by a man named Richard Reeves. And Richard Reeves is doing some phenomenal work with the American Institute of Boys and Men. And he was recently talking about how his institute has done a ton of research. And what they found was one, you know, they were Looking at men who took their lives, because men on average will take their lives four times more than women. And the rates of young men harming themselves, enacting self harm, hurting themselves in a more serious way is on the rise. And men taking their own life is on the rise. And he said that they, they looked at the notes that men left behind after they would take their own life. And these notes had some commonalities. And what he found, what his team found in aggregating a lot of these notes was that there was two things that really stood out that most of these men had in common. Number one was that most of these men did not feel needed. Most of these men did not feel needed. They didn't feel needed by their families, by their friends, by their, by their jobs, by their society, by the culture. They just didn't feel needed. They didn't feel like they had a sense of belonging within the world that they inhabited in their day to day life or in the larger narrative of their day to day life. And the second thing was that they didn't feel useful, they felt useless. Right? A lot of the notes had the same word, useless, I'm useless, it's useless. And I think for many of the men that I've talked to over the years who have described in some way, shape or form, contemplating finding themselves in a dark spot, what they describe is almost always and inevitably some sense of I don't feel like I belong, I don't feel like I'm needed or necessary at all. And anywhere in my life or the places where I am needed and necessary, I feel completely useless. I do not feel like I'm able to contribute anything meaningful in the places that I'm needed. And that's devastating. And I think that there's a couple things that are contributing to the mass migration of men out of society. Not just the, the contemplation of taking their own life, but the real mass migration of men checking out from work, checking out from dating, checking out from relationships, checking out from society. There is a huge narrative that is telling men in our current culture, which is so dangerous, that says men, you are not needed, you're not necessary. You're not necessary for society to be successful. You're not necessary for the world to be okay. You're not necessary for women. You're not needed by women. And I think a lot of women are perpetuating this now. If you're watching this, you're probably not one of those women. If you are tuning into this, you're probably not one of those women that's saying, you're not needed. I don't need you. I don't need a man. But when a lot of men go online and they listen to a lot of women being interviewed about dating and relationships, what they hear are women repeatedly, over and over and over and over and over again answering the question, do women need men? Saying, no, no, I don't need a man. No one needs a man. The world would be better without men. Men are the problem with the world. Men are what's wrong with the world. If only men were more like us, there wouldn't be an issue. And so a lot of men, young, middle aged and old, are hearing this modern narrative within our culture and our society that's saying, you're not needed here. And when men hear that for long enough from enough people, especially people that are around them, especially people that they care about, especially people that they are trying to serve or support or be with, they're slowly going to check out. And the second thing that's happening is that in many ways, the systems that men inhabit are not supporting them to actually become useful for the places that they want to be needed. If you're a man in today's world and you go through an education system and you come out and you go into a therapeutic industry.

That is largely not designed to help you be more useful, you can sit in there and talk about your problems all day long and talk about your emotions and talk about your feelings and never get any direction on how to be more useful, on how to stop not only feeling useless, but being useless. Because the stark reality of some men's lives, and I've been there, the stark reality of some men's lives is that when they look around, they very logically and clearly see I'm pretty useless. I'm actually not contributing anything. I'm a burden to the person that I'm with. I'm a burden to the people that are around me. And there's no one fucking helping me to become not a burden. There's no one helping me to become useful to the places and the people that I genuinely care about. So if you are an individual that supports men, that serves men, maybe you're a teacher, maybe you are an educator, maybe you're a college professor, maybe you're a mentor, maybe you're a therapist or a psychologist or a coach. I don't know what you do. Maybe you just work with men. Maybe you're an electrician or a construction site worker or whatever the hell it is your job is to reaffirm and remind a man, whoever he is. Maybe it's just a man that you work with, you know, digging gravel in the gravel pits in northern Alberta like I did, reminding him you're needed. I like having you around. It's great having you here. You really contribute to my life. You make a difference to me in the way that you show up, with your humor, with your whatever it is, with your anecdotes, with your wisdom, with what you teach me. But really reaffirming for a man once a day in your life that he's needed and that he's useful, because you never know how that might actually save that man's life that day. And secondly, if you are a man that's feeling this way, I get it. I get it. You know, I almost don't have a lot to say to you because I know what it's like to be in a place where I feel and felt completely useless, completely hopeless and not needed in any way, shape, or form. And I think the reality for some men, and reality for some of you maybe watching or listening to this, is that when you look around at your life, you're like, yeah, I do feel pretty useless, and I don't feel very needed. The only thing that I can say is, that's the path. You know, when I found myself at rock bottom, living out of the back of my car because I had cratered my life, what I realized after living there for about 12 days, after having some pretty dark thoughts, was that I had found a path, a path to creating a life where I was needed. And I didn't know what that looked like. I had no idea. I had no clue. I didn't know what it was gonna look like. I didn't know I was gonna be doing this today. If you told me I was gonna be doing this today, I would have laughed in your face. I've been like, that's impossible. If you would have told me what my life would have looked like today, I would have told you that that was impossible. Because nobody, as useless as I thought I was could produce something like my life is today. And so you have a path. That is the mission. You know, I said in my book, you have to make pain at some point in your life. You have to make your pain your purpose. And I think what I really would have loved to have said as a caveat to all that is that what that means is finding the places that you want to be needed and developing the skillset and the competency and the capabilities and to be useful in those places and spaces. And maybe that's just having better conversations with your partner. Maybe that's not being an ass to your kids and learning how to be useful in regulating your emotions instead of flying off the handle all the damn time, Right? Maybe it's being able to learn a new skill set so that you can go out and get a second job and support your parents in the way that you want. I don't know what that looks like for you, but that is a mission. And for me, when I crawled out of the hole. It's a very strange way of saying it, but maybe I should say it. I clawed my way out of that dark place. I had to kick and scratch and climb my way out of this place where it was like, I don't know where I belong. I don't know where I'm needed. I don't know if I'll ever be able to feel useful again in my life because I have felt so useless for so long. But it was very clear to me in that moment that that was the path forward. And so if you are one of these men that's out there, that's struggling, that feels that way. Take that, try it on, chew on it, start to see, like, where could I be needed? Where could I be useful? Where could I start to serve and support and contribute and add value and let the noise of culture and society do its thing? Let it blow, right? Because one day the narrative will shift. It always does. It always will. And one day the necessity of men will return, whether people like it or not, whether people think it's too late or not. My hope is that it's not too late, that people wake up to the remembrance that men masculinity is incredibly necessary in our world and that without that, things not only become dangerous, but they start to fall apart. So thank you for tuning in. Please man it forward. Share this episode with somebody in your life that you think needs to hear it, that you think would have something value to contribute to this conversation or would benefit from. Just thinking about some of the things that I've put forward. Till next week. Connor Beaton signing off.