Men, comfort is castrating you. Here’s what to do.

If you’re a man and you feel like you’re fighting a losing battle to stay connected with life, filled with purpose and conviction and a fighting spirit, then you’re not alone.

We are experiencing a crisis of comfort.

We have air conditioning and heating that removes our need to thermo adapt to the seasons.

We have easily accessible internet porn that offers strong dopamine hits on demand without requiring any effort beyond picking up your phone and entering a web address.

We have food that gives us perfectly calibrated “hits” of salt, fat, and sugar while being mostly devoid of the fiber, nutrients and micronutrients we need to stay in peak physical condition.

We have social media feeds that interrupt our independent thinking and give us a constant stream of useless updates and notifications.

Things are too easy. Too convenient. Too quick to satisfy our immediate desires.

We live in a state of ever-present FOMO. We’re oversaturated with convenience and comfort. And on some level, we can feel that this is not our natural state. We’re still not satisfied. No matter how much processed food, porn, or scrolling we do, it doesn’t fix that vague feeling of emptiness.

Advertisers know this. And they continue to milk our attention and squeeze our wallets, because we’re easy marks. The less conscious we are about the source of our discontent, the easier it is for marketers to persuade us that their product is just what we need to feel better.

Finding a sense of connectedness with life, of meaning and purpose, does not require one to acquire more stuff. You don’t need a one-wheeled skateboard, a perfectly curated Instagram feed, or a double mocha latté to fill the void inside you.

If you’re a man, you don’t need to seek the attention of others to validate your purpose in life.

You don’t need to seek the attention of women to validate your masculinity.

You don’t need to virtue signal your outrage over the latest injustice on social media to validate your existence as a moral being.

If you’re a man, what’s missing is substance, meaning, and mission.

The substance of a good life

What do you need to transform your life from one that feels purposeless to one that feels engaged and purposeful?

I’ll propose that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There’s gold to be found when you start by taking responsibility for your own life. Thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Mark Manson, and Jocko Willink have strong followings of people who are catching on to that idea and finding it transformative.

What I propose — in a most unoriginal way — is that you start by fixing your own life before you try and change the whole world around you. And for many of us, that means starting with how you take care of yourself.

To flourish, a human being needs a few simple things:

• Sunlight
• Meaningful social connections and human contact with real people
• Shelter
• Adequate sleep
• Nutritious food and clean water
• Exercise
• A sense of empowerment and purpose

Start taking inventory of your own life.

Are you sabotaging yourself in these ways?

Are you staying up late watching Netflix, and thereby damaging your reward and motivation centers while also hurting your body’s ability to metabolize sugars?

Are you regularly using porn to relax and fall asleep, under the justification that everyone else does it and it’s supposed to be good for your prostate? And is that preventing you from achieving real and meaningful relationships with women?

Are you constantly scrolling and swiping on social media and dating apps, fragmenting your attention into thousands of little pieces every day?

Are you spending the majority of your days indoors, outside of natural light, hurting your body’s endogenous production of vitamin D?

Are you eating processed food that’s been stripped of its nutrients?

Are you drinking “energy” drinks in an effort to offset feelings of fatigue and depression?

Do you feel like your work is meaningless and serves no greater purpose?

Do you live in a concrete jungle, away from the healing power of nature?

Do you feel resentful toward the women who reject you — or worse, don’t even see you?

Do you resent successful men who seem to have it all, while you struggle in obscurity?

Do you resent the condition of your body, because it feels like it’s failed you?

Answer these questions truthfully. The answers are for you and no one else. If you find that many of these uncomfortable truths apply to you, it’s normal to feel a sense of shame or discomfort. I invite you to stay with the discomfort rather than trying to push it away.

The first step to overcoming what’s wrong in your life is to realize that there are things that are wrong. And here’s another truth that’s not original: The natural condition of life is to suffer. The sooner you accept that as a man, the sooner you can escape from the haze you live in and start shaping the honorable and purposeful life you want to live.

You are going to do this incrementally, piece by piece. In doing so, you will transform yourself into the man who accepts the challenge and tragedy of life and rises up to meet it. You will become the hero who rises up to slay the dragon.

And you’ll do this by making small changes, no matter how insignificant they seem at the time.

What kinds of changes? Glad you asked. You’ll determine the changes you need by asking yourself questions.

Your body:

• What are you eating or drinking that makes you feel weak?
• What foods could you add that would add nourishment to your body?
• How do you show appreciation for your food?
• What can you do to eat more mindfully?

Your mind:

• How often do you interrupt your thoughts in order to check social media and applications?
• What was the last book you read? What could you read now?
• What would it take for you to start journaling for 5 minutes per day?
• What negative self-beliefs do you have about yourself and how true are they?

Your spirit:

• What is your purpose in life?
• What pursuits feel meaningful to you?
• How empowered do you feel to pursue your purpose?
• What are you most afraid of?
• How often do you lie?

Your environment:

• How well does your environment reflect your internal state?
• What can you do to make your bedroom 1% more peaceful?
• What can you do to make your life 1% more organized?
• What can you do to connect with nature 1% more?

If you only read one book this year, it should be this one

12 Rules for Life, by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

That book will teach you how to get your life in order. You can use it like a how-to manual. Get it now if you don’t have it.

Okay, now what?

I’ll bring up something uncomfortable, because it needs to be said.

If you’re watching porn and masturbating, stop.

It’s making you less of a man. I say that unequivocally, and I can speak both from personal experience and my experience helping guide other men.

Whatever justifications you use for watching porn, they are in place because part of your brain is addicted to the high of that behavior.

The male brain was not designed to have access to an unlimited variety of sexual partners every single day on demand. Porn and masturbation together sap your strength, vitality, and mental clarity.

When you give up porn and masturbation, or PMO as the No-Fap community calls it, you may experience some or all of the following positive changes:

• Greater sense of self-control
• Greater mental clarity
• Greater drive to accomplish your goals
• More energy throughout the day
• A decrease in neuroticism and anxiety
• Increased confidence
• Increased sense of wellbeing
• Greater social curiosity
• An easier time asserting your boundaries
• Greater ease and confidence in speaking with women

I can tell when I’m speaking to a man who watches porn and masturbates and feels disconnected from his life. There’s a degree of hopelessness and shame in that person’s affect. It also makes you more childlike by separating work from reward. When it comes to relating to women, it can lead to resentment when real women don’t throw themselves at you. You can get a toxic sense of sexual entitlement.

I don’t know of a single man who has proclaimed that adding porn and masturbation to his life made him a better man. It’s such a powerfully addictive stimulus that it might as well be like adding alcohol or junk food.

If you try to give it up and find that it’s more difficult than you imagined it to be, then get help. The NoFap community on Reddit can be a support group. A behavioral psychologist could be another resource.

If you’re going to make one high-impact change in your life, then this is a great place to start.

Here are some of the negative side-effects that you may notice when giving up porn:

• Irritability and sexual frustration
• Difficulty sleeping
• Frequent and uncomfortable erections
• “Flat-line”, or a sudden and temporary decrease in libido

Despite these side effects, the journey to becoming porn-free is worth it. The benefits far outweigh the discomfort of letting go of this addiction. If you want to be stronger, then make this change as soon as possible.

Are you a mess of a man? There’s hope if you do this.

This is your Hero’s Journey.

You are the benchmark for you. No one else. No matter what your starting point, and even if you’re out of shape, broke, addicted, and weak, this journey is worthwhile.

You have exactly one life to live, and you’re entirely responsible for how you choose to make yours unfold. Life will throw its slings and arrows at you, and you can choose whether you become the man who can handle that or the man who wears victimhood as his identity and slides into nihilism and resentment.

Nihilism is not a good place to go. It’s dark, and it leads to chaos and death. Modern life is pushing us in that direction. It wants us to “buy in” to the illusion that comfort and happiness matter above all else. So it sells us things we don’t need. It keeps us out of the sun. It glues us to screens with titillating images and video games. It feeds us emptiness and tells us it’s substance. And we know, deep down, that it’s a lie.

If you’re a mess of a man, you’ve got a hell of a mission in front of you. And if you choose to engage with that, if you choose to start by fixing yourself, you have a chance to leave the world better off than before you showed up.

And that’s a worthwhile aim.