The Advice That Finally Shut My Mind Up
The traditional talk therapy doesn’t work for men.
Not entirely. Not on its own.
Men and women are different. Our wiring is different. Our failure modes are different. Modern therapy—well-intentioned as it is—leans heavily into feelings, validation, naming emotions, and sitting with them. These things work. But for many men, they are insufficient.
Maybe they’re insufficient for all of us. I can only speak from the inside of being a man.
For some men, therapy isn’t just incomplete—it makes things worse.
I think action is the best therapy.
Men heal by moving. By being in their bodies. By doing things. Often hard things. Often boring things. Often the same thing for a long time—painting for hours, running until the noise clears, lifting weight until the mind shuts up, climbing a mountain that doesn’t care about your childhood.
Action is therapy.
Talk therapy isn’t working for men. More men have tried therapy than ever before, and yet more men are lonely, addicted, checked out—doom-scrolling, numbing with drugs, drowning in porn or OF. They don’t know how to show up for themselves, let alone for the people they love.
My guess—unscientific but hard-earned—is that fifty percent or more of men are broken by the time they’re thirty-five. Not shattered. Just quietly broken. Under-desired. Under-fulfilled. Under-challenged. Over-cynical.
These men aren’t broken because they feel too little.
They’re broken because they do too little that matters.
Ambitious, driven men with high testosterone are wired for status-related motivation. This isn’t ideology. It’s biology. Establishing dominance—not over people, but over domains—is a primal need. That need has to be satisfied.
Think of testosterone as fuel for status pursuit. It wakes up when there’s a ladder worth climbing, a craft worth mastering, a tribe worth protecting. When there isn’t, it leaks. Sideways. Into porn. Into substances. Into cynicism. Into quiet despair.
Every religion figured this out early. Every rite of passage did too. You don’t sit young men down and ask them how they feel. You give them something to carry. Somewhere to go. Something to build. Someone to protect. You let meaning emerge through exertion.
I’ve had excellent therapists. They’ve helped me deeply. I’ve had real unlocks—learning to regulate my mind, understand patterns, name things clearly.
Therapy isn’t useless. It’s incomplete.
Therapy can tell you why you’re stuck.
Action tells you whether—and why—you’re still alive.
Therapists are part of the puzzle. But for a top-1% male mind—one built to solve, build, win, protect—therapy can feel like sitting in fog and describing the fog.
Men need quests.
We need to quest max.
This isn’t alpha posturing. There’s a well-validated behavioral treatment for depression called Behavioral Activation. It says the same thing in medical language: do meaningful things even when you don’t feel like it. Mood follows motion. Action comes first.
We already know this. Every man knows this in his bones.
We are as much physical creatures as we are cognitive ones.
Psychologists might call what I call quests our need for competence and autonomy—the feeling that I can do hard things and I chose this. Quests also create relatedness. Men bond shoulder-to-shoulder, not face-to-face.
So we need three kinds of quests.
Competence quests—climbing mountains, building companies, running fast marathons, flying planes.
Tribal quests—doing hard things with other men, teams, crews, groups bound by effort. Shoulder to Shoulder.
Meaning quests—things that give nothing back to us directly, but give something to the world. We need to care beyond ourselves to be happy, and we need meaning quests.
We need to care beyond ourselves to be happy.
And we need to earn that happiness through motion.
