Much of my thinking about the world is influenced by evolutionary psychology. I’ve previously referred to many of the issues modern people face as existing downstream of the disconnect between the primitive ‘hardware’ our minds function on clashing with the latest ‘software’ the modern world requires our minds to execute(various sources).
I’ve also written about the importance of having a close group of friends who you can turn to when times get tough, or that simply spending time with helps you relax and unload all the stresses of your daily life. But that was more of an esoteric ramble, whereas here I want to talk about something more specific and actionable. But I do believe the context that led someone to a course of action is important in understanding the outcome, so let’s step back a few years first and talk about…
A Happy Accident
While traveling back in 2016/17 I met two guys who would go on to become my closest friends in the world. We three all had strong ambitions towards entrepreneurship, and started what we initially called a ‘business mastermind’ group: a place where we could talk about our projects and ask for help/insight into different ways we could tackle the challenges we were facing.
We also had shared interest in philosophy/psychology/self improvement, and as time went on our conversations became more about supporting each other in life at a broader level. After hearing our conversations in the background for years the partner of one of my friends chimed in and said ‘this business mastermind group of yours is sounding more and more like men’s group therapy!’.
And so began my first foray into the world of men supporting men.
I still talk to those guys every week and hope I will continue to for many years to come. But they live across the pond in Europe, and per my above writing on camaraderie I wanted to intentionally build a local support network in my new home city of Denver.
A Swing and a Miss
In late 2021 I tried to start a group along these lines in Denver, but I was always afraid to call it what it was. I got some of my closer guy friends together under the guise of a ‘philosophy group’, where we would pick the work of some thinker and read it leading up to a session, then discuss it.
This worked for a bit, but as it does in any socially busy city like Denver life got in the way and people became less and less responsive to my calls for another meetup.
This was crushing to me, as my attempts to get the guys together was a weak cover for what I really wanted to say: “I’m suffering. I need help. I need someone, ANYONE to lean on right now!”
Eventually my internal chaos went untended too long and I figured the most reasonable course of action was to make a radical life change. So in the summer of 2022 I decided that civilian life in Denver wasn’t for me, moved all my possessions into storage, and bought a one way ticket to my old stomping grounds of Medellin, Colombia.
Fresh Start, Familiar Battles
It shouldn’t be surprising that this didn’t resolve any of my internal struggles, and in fact exacerbated a number of them. I still had a few friends in Medellin from my previous travels, but they’d built up entire lives in the intervening years and I was only able to see them sporadically.
Even though I didn’t have the intentional support network in Denver that I was striving towards, that doesn’t mean I was entirely lacking it. I had (and still have) friends here I could talk to if I reached out and made it clear that I needed help.
But in Medellin I was removed from that support context, as well as from the ability to access professional mental health counseling due to my location abroad (thanks American healthcare system!).
All this led to me getting worse over time, until I reached out to the friends from my Denver philosophy group and set up a call with them. My original plan was to level with these guys and be honest: “I’m suffering, please help”. I was exhausted, emotionally raw, and just needed someone to vent to.
However, that friend group hadn’t seen each other in a while due to winter weather and a resurgence in covid, so more people joined the call for a general catch up chat. As often happens the conversation was dominated by the more social members of the group, and throughout most of the call I sat there in silence thinking “My call for help has gone unanswered. Again. Fuck.”
As it got late and it was clear that the call needed to end soon so that people could get to bed, one of them asked me how I was doing. I remember internally feeling incredibly angry, as if I was being thrown a bone in the 9th inning after being run over roughshod for 95% of the game.
I responded “not great”, and that was basically that. The call ended.
Why couldn’t I just be honest about my struggles? Why couldn’t I ask for help? Why, despite all the progress I’d made in recent years, was I struggling so hard with this simple task of…
Being Vulnerable (as a man)
While I have my own thoughts about why this is so difficult for men, someone far more well informed than I has already said it better/more succinctly:
Revealing any weakness is shaming. Basically shame is weakness… Our worst fear is being criticized or ridiculed—either one of these is extremely shaming. Basically men live under the pressure of one unrelenting message: Do not be perceived as weak. -Brene Browne, Daring Greatly
Weakness in the eyes of others lowers your status. Lowered status leads to a bunch of awful things that terrifies every man to their core, but two big ones stand out:
- You’re less desirable to romantic partners(potential or current).
- Your peers lose respect for you(primarily your male peers).
To tie this back into where this post started: I believe that these two feelings are deeply rooted in our evolutionary psychology. It can be easy to write these off as low level ways of thinking that any rational person would never fall for, but if you look at the list of slang terms many of us grew up with or are being used now it’s harder to argue this isn’t still present in our cultural narrative: wimp, pussy, beta, sissy, incel, nice guy, soy boy, cuck, simp, and many others.
I find it particularly interesting that the term ‘nice guy’ can have negative connotations: perhaps alluding to the idea that a guy would only be nice as an ulterior motive, or to cover up for some other weakness.
Regardless, after my time in Colombia I decided to move back to Denver since traveling clearly wasn’t the answer to my problems. I then proceeded to struggle along for another 8 months or so, looking for various outlets to my internal issues that ranged from good to horrible:
- Therapy
- Studying philosophy
- Journaling
- Exercise
- Coffee with friends
- Fiction reading
- Video games
- TV
- Weed
- Alcohol
- Nicotine(in all it’s forms)
I can’t recall exactly what happened that led me to take the plunge and ask my guy friends here to start a men’s support group, but it was a feeling that I believe is best captured in the movie Deadpool:
When you reach such a low point in your mental state, when everything else you’ve tried isn’t working (even things that worked in the past), when you can’t see any path forward to a good place in life, when your internal dialogue sounds something like “…fuck it. What do I have to lose?”
I’d hit fuck it, which meant it was time to…
Start a Men’s Support Group(Finally)
Starting a men’s support group has been a very interesting thing. I was initially hesitant to even talk about it, because again: saying that you need support as a man means you must be weak.
But the way people have responded to it has shown me nothing could be further from the truth.
Every single woman I mentioned it to has been incredibly supportive of the idea, and most of the men I’ve mentioned it to have wanted to join. It’s been hard to say no to friends who need support, but I know from experience and from studying social dynamics that at a certain point a group is too large to have the types of deep conversations that are necessary.
This is also part of my motivation behind writing this post: to help empower men to start their own support groups. I’m going to outline the key pillars we landed on in our group and the reasoning behind them.
Here’s the step-by-step guide on how to do just that:
If you want to start your own group but are a bit nervous or overwhelmed, feel free to reach out! I’m happy to help others build the same kind of support system I’ve built. Shoot me an email here: https://brandonolin.com/contact/
And no, I’m not trying to turn into a self help guru who’s going to charge for men’s group consultation. If I ever ask for money for assistance in this area, I give you my explicit permission to slap me upside the fuckin head.
I just want to help people help people. The changes in my own life as well as the lives of other members of my group has been pretty damn profound, and I want more people to have access to this.
As a wise man once said: “instead of trying to save the world, start by helping the people in your own backyard”. Let’s lift each other up one person at a time, and maybe those small ripples will one day become big waves.
All the best,
Brandon