The Response-Able Man: Turning Life’s Shit Into the Seeds of Meaning
The Response-Able Man: Turning Life’s Shit Into the Seeds of Meaning Between shit and response there is a space. What you do there determines the man you will be. When most of us hear the word responsibility, we think of the traditional roles men have carried for generations. Get a good job. Provide for your family. Be a good husband. Be a good father. Be a good son. Show up as a decent community member. Be a good Christian. Be a good Jew. These things matter. They’re noble, essential even. They keep families alive and communities from falling apart. I honor them. But here’s the truth: just because you are responsible does not mean you are response-able. That’s the deeper cut. And it’s where Viktor Frankl takes us when he says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” That’s the polished version. But let’s be real. Between shit and response there is a space. And it isn’t neat or tidy. It isn’t some quiet Zen garden where you hum a mantra and float out enlightened. It’s a fucking messy, scary, shameful, shadowy space. WELCOME TO THE UNDERBELLY That space is where your unresolved junk lives—the wounds you never healed, the shame you never faced, the fear you never admitted, the grief you never let out. It’s where your father’s voice still echoes, where your mother’s wounds still bleed, where your failures and betrayals and secret addictions still lurk. It’s the man who works himself into the ground but still feels like a fraud. The man who hides behind porn or booze because intimacy feels impossible. The man who explodes at his kids because he never dealt with his own father’s rage. The man who buries his depression under work, money, or “being the good guy.” Most men don’t want to go there. So they don’t. They leap right past it. They skip the space entirely. And the result is reaction. REACTION = ENSLAVEMENT Life hits you—traffic, bills, your wife saying she doesn’t feel seen, your kid melting down, your boss cutting you off at the knees, another blindside you didn’t see coming—and boom, you react. Your kid mouths off and you snap. Your wife pushes and you shut down. Your boss humiliates you and you rage in your car the whole way home. You get knocked down by life and you ghost everyone who loves you. Or you grab the nearest escape. You pour another drink. You open porn. You pop the pills. You light up. You raid the fridge. You scroll yourself numb. You chase sex without intimacy. You bury yourself in work so no one notices how lost you are. You get busy, distracted, or high enough to not feel. That’s not responding. That’s surviving. That’s fight, flight, or freeze—your reptilian brain calling the shots. It feels automatic because it is. And the longer you live like that, the less alive you actually are. Reaction isn’t freedom. Reaction is slavery. CROSSROADS OF A MAN I’ve seen it all. The man with the house, the car, the family—who confessed he was a ghost in his own life, jerked around by everyone else’s expectations. The man who lost his business and drowned his rage and shame in whiskey until he nearly lost everything else. And the father who buried his son and wanted to bury himself too—until he stepped into the space instead of skipping it. He told me, “I can’t bring him back, but I can carry him forward.” That’s response. That’s freedom in the middle of hell. And that’s what I want for myself, and for every man I walk with. Not to just survive. Not to check the boxes of being “responsible” while secretly suffocating. But to thrive. To live awake. To expand the space so wide that I can finally breathe. SHIT MAKES THE BEST SOIL Frankl’s discovery wasn’t that the shit stops coming. It never stops. His discovery was that in between the shit and your response there is a space. And in that space lies your only real freedom. Most men can’t see that. The space is too small. But the real reason? That shitty space is scary. And, well, it smells like shit. It’s the last place you want to stand. It feels raw, humiliating, overwhelming. It’s easier to skip it and go straight to reaction—grab the bottle, the porn, the pills, the phone—anything but face the stink of your own shadows. But here’s the paradox: that same shitty space is also fertile. Shit is fertilizer. If you face it, work it, and own it, it becomes the very soil where the seeds of meaning grow. The work I do with men is helping them face their shit, expand that space, and learn to be response-able—turning life’s shit into seeds of purpose and power. And in that expanded space you breathe. You pause. You remember you don’t control what just happened, but you control how you meet it. You look at the shame instead of burying it. You wrestle with the anger instead of leaking it everywhere. You sit with the grief instead of drowning it in booze or porn. You face the demons instead of running from them. You let the wounds finally heal instead of infecting them with more reaction. That’s what it means to respond. That’s how shit becomes soil. THE ONLY REAL POWER Everything else will be stripped from you—your job, your possessions, your reputation, even the people you love most. But your response—your choice—never disappears. Every time you expand the space and choose, you engrave it into reality. You plant the seed. You leave a mark that outlives you. That’s real power. Not power over others, but power over your circumstances, over your reaction, over yourself. That’s what Frankl discovered in the camps. That’s what I’ve seen with the men I walk with. And that’s what will
Reduced to Numbers
Reduced to Numbers Tattooed on his arm, Auschwitz prisoner number 119104. That was Viktor Frankl’s number. That’s what the Nazis did—they reduced human beings to numbers, nails, and screws. They calculated that the average body had enough iron to make a handful of nails, enough fat to produce a few bars of soap, enough skin to make a lampshade. Men and women stripped of names, faces, stories, and souls—reduced to raw materials, to data points, to “nothing but.” Fine. That was reductionism at its most evil extreme. But here’s the question: how did we get there? Not overnight. Not all at once. It came slow. Methodical. The steady erosion of humanity, piece by piece, until it no longer felt like a crime to turn a man into a number. Reduction of the world around us, reduction of the people within it, until nothing sacred remained. And if you think our world isn’t marching down the same path of numbers, think again. Frankl warned us: “Today’s nihilism no longer unmasks man as nothingness but masks him as nothing-but.” That’s the danger. To see a man as “nothing but” biology, “nothing but” chemistry, “nothing but” a paycheck, “nothing but” a problem to fix. How Reductionism Shows Up in a Man’s Life Look around. We already live by the scoreboard: A man is reduced to his salary, his net worth, his LinkedIn title. A woman is reduced to her weight, her likes, her filtered photos. Children are reduced to test scores, GPAs, athletic stats. Relationships are reduced to swipes, streaks, followers, and views. Health is reduced to steps tracked, calories burned, and heart rate zones. Worth is reduced to numbers on a scale, a spreadsheet, or a social feed. We may not be building lampshades from skin, but we are building a world where souls are flattened into spreadsheets. A world where meaning is traded for metrics. A culture where men and women become products, where life itself is judged by algorithms, clicks, and quarterly reports. That’s reductionism. That’s “nothing-but-ness.” And it’s killing us slowly, one number at a time. The I–It Trap: Transactional Living Martin Buber gave us language for this sickness. He called it I–It. In I–It, you don’t meet life—you use it. Everything becomes a tool. Everyone becomes an object. Money: not energy or responsibility, just a scoreboard. Another number to flex or a distraction from the void. Women: not mystery or partner, just conquest, swipes, porn, trophies. What can I take from her? Experience: not communion, just consumption. Did it serve me? Did I win? That’s I–It. You may look powerful on the outside, but inside you’re brittle. Armored like a dragon. Untouchable, but also unreachable. The I–Thou Alternative: Encounter Over Transaction The way out is I–Thou. In I–Thou, you stop reducing and start encountering. You see people, money, and the world itself as sacred. Money: not just cash flow, but lifeblood. A way to create, to serve, to bless. Women: not an object, but a mirror. Sex isn’t scratching an itch, it’s communion, fire, transcendence. Experience: every moment a doorway. The sun on your skin. Your child’s laugh. The grind of the gym. The silence of prayer. In I–Thou, life stops being a hustle and starts being holy. Why Brotherhood Breaks the I–It Cycle Most men spend their lives stuck in I–It and only stumble into I–Thou when life cracks them open. A birth. A death. A breakdown. Something forces them to see differently for a moment before they collapse back into reduction. The call of real manhood is to flip that script. To live in I–Thou as your baseline. To encounter people, not use them. To honor life instead of consuming it. Yes, you’ll still need I–It. You’ll still fix the faucet, file the taxes, close the deal. But that is not where meaning is found. That is not where men come alive. This is why Men’s Peer Groups matter. They are training grounds for I–Thou living. They teach men—often for the first time in their lives—how to sit across from another man and not see competition, not see a rival, not see a paycheck, a title, or a threat. To look at him and not reduce him to “nothing but.” To see him as Thou. To honor his story. To witness his pain. To celebrate his fire. Because until you learn to see the man beside you as more than a number, you will never be able to see your wife, your children, or yourself as anything more either. The Challenge for You That’s the invitation, brother. To stop living reduced. To stop being “nothing but” a number on a paycheck, a notch on a bedpost, a follower in a feed. To stop reducing your own soul to what it produces, and to stop reducing the people around you to what they can do for you. And you don’t get there alone. No man does. That’s why Men’s Peer Groups exist. They are where men unlearn the I–It trap and practice I–Thou in real time. Where you stop posturing and start encountering. Where the man across from you is no longer competition, transaction, or threat—but mirror, ally, and brother. If you’re ready to stop living reduced and start living real, this is your call. Step into a Men’s Peer Group. Practice I–Thou. Stop being a number. Start being a man.
Worth-Less: Why Men Must Stop Selling Their Souls for a Paycheck
Descending Up: The Midlife Descent That Leads to Your Soul’s Ascent Your net worth is not your self-worth. And if it is, you’re going to end up worth less. Worthless. That isn’t clever wordplay. That’s truth. Every man I’ve ever worked with—good men who want to become great men—has been caught in this trap. Not the freeloaders, not the guys checked out on the couch, but the ones out there hustling, grinding, building. Even they confuse net worth with self-worth. It starts with the second question every man gets asked. The first is your name. The second is, “What do you do?” And we all know the answer. “I’m a paycheck.” Sure, we dress it up with job titles: I’m a doctor, I’m a lawyer, I’m a teacher, I’m a contractor. Doesn’t matter. The translation is the same: I’m a paycheck. I wrote about this in my blog, What Do You Do. When society hears what you “do,” what it really hears is a number. That guy’s worth $80,000 a year. That one’s worth $200,000. Another’s worth $500,000. We’ve reduced men to digits. And then we teach men the sickest game of all: Chase the Decimal. Move it one place to the right. Then another. Then another. Six figures. Seven. Eight. Just one more decimal. Just one more. That’s how you matter. That’s how you win. Except you don’t win. Because it never ends. And even if you somehow catch it, the clock has already run out. Game over. All you’re left with are numbers in a bank account. Not even dollars anymore. Just digits. Code. Currency so abstract you can’t touch it or even explain it. I once raised money for a start-up and got a seat at the table with a billionaire. Everyone around him whispered. I was told how to present myself to “the king.” But this was no king. We started with money. We ended with meaning—or really, the absence of it. No queen. Princes and princesses who wanted nothing to do with him. He had the Midas touch, but no meaning touch. A man buried in gold and starving for love. That’s the decimal chase. Even when you catch it, you lose. And some men don’t even make it that far. Some take their lives over money. My father did. A mountain of debt crushed him. But if he had turned his head, if he had looked at the mountain range of meaning right in front of him—kids who loved him, grandchildren who adored him, friends, community, respect—he would have seen he wasn’t broke at all. He was wealthy in every way that mattered. But the decimal blinded him. And it kills men every single day. This is what Viktor Frankl understood. Men reduced to numbers are no longer men. They’re objects. And objects can be used, exploited, discarded. He knew it firsthand in Auschwitz, stripped of his name, reduced to the number 119104. But Frankl also knew the antidote. He wrote: “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is unique, as is his specific opportunity to implement it.” That’s it. That’s the point. You are unique. There never was and never will be another you. There is no meaning of life. There is only the meaning of your life. And only you can fulfill it. If you don’t, it is lost forever. That’s the tragedy. And also the invitation. So stop chasing decimals. Stop reducing yourself to digits. Stop letting your worth be confused with what you’re paid. Because your worth can’t be counted. It can’t be deposited. It can’t be traded. It’s priceless. And here’s the truth: you won’t remember that alone. This is why we created Men’s Peer Groups. A brotherhood where men stop reducing themselves to numbers and start reclaiming their worth as men of spirit, mission, and meaning. If you’re ready to stop the decimal chase and reclaim your unique, unrepeatable, priceless life—join us. Men’s Peer Groups
Descending Up: The Midlife Descent That Leads to Your Soul’s Ascent
Descending Up: The Midlife Descent That Leads to Your Soul’s Ascent Men come to me restless and unsettled, unable to name what’s happening. “Am I burned out? Depressed? Just getting old? Is it my marriage, my job, my body?” Underneath it all, what they’re really saying is: Something must be wrong with me. “I’m supposed to be upbeat, grateful, testosterone-filled, happy, always hustling, always climbing, always winning.” Because descent feels like defeat. We’ve been trained to think life is an endless ascent — prove yourself, climb higher, show strength, build identities. So when the descent comes — and it always comes — we panic. We label it burnout, depression, stagnation, failure. And in a culture that worships youth and polish, descent looks like death. Instagram feeds us endless smiles, sculpted bodies, curated vacations. Facebook reminds us of younger faces and thinner waistlines. LinkedIn shoves constant promotions in our faces. Up, up, up — never down. So we hide our struggles, cover the gray, filter out the vulnerability, pretending decline and descent are the same thing. We scramble to reclaim the ethos of our twenties, chasing thrills, buying toys, running from the darkness. And that’s when we need to call BULLSHIT. They’re not the same. Decline is decay. Descent is initiation. And what this culture mocks as weakness, ancient wisdom has always known as the only way forward. And descent has a name… Katabasis: The Descent Before the Ascent Katabasis is a Greek word that literally means a going down. Every culture that ever understood men, rites of passage, or transformation has known this: descent comes before ascent. You cannot climb higher until you’ve first gone lower. The great myths and scriptures are unanimous on this point: Odysseus had to descend into the underworld before he could make it home. Joseph had to descend into a pit and then prison before he could ascend to power in Pharaoh’s court. Jonah had to descend into the belly of the whale before he could rise to his mission. Moses had to descend into exile in Midian before he could return as a liberator. Even Christ, in the Christian telling, descended into death and hell before resurrection. Every man who ever rose had to first go down. That is not accident. That is not weakness. That is necessary — just like it was for Mark. Mark’s Descent I’ll never forget a man I’ll call Mark who came to see me. On paper, he had it all: successful career, wife, kids, the house, the cars, the vacations. From the outside, he looked like a man who’d only ever gone up. But inside? He was crumbling. He told me he felt hollow, like he was sleepwalking through a life he’d worked so hard to build. He’d lie awake at night asking himself, “Is this all?” He wasn’t clinically depressed, he wasn’t falling apart in any way the world would notice — but he was restless, unsettled, and ashamed of it. Because the script he’d been handed said he should be grateful, happy, powered by drive, climbing higher, smiling wider. And he wasn’t. So he thought something must be wrong with him. It reminded me of that line from American Beauty, when Lester Burnham confesses: “Both my wife and daughter think I’m this gigantic loser and they’re right, I have lost something. I’m not exactly sure what it is but I know I didn’t always feel this… sedated. But you know what? It’s never too late to get it back.” That’s the feeling. Sedated. Numb. Not broken, but disconnected. Not ruined, but restless. And like so many men, Mark first tried to fight it the way our culture tells us to: by “upping” his game. He hit the gym harder, added more reps, tried testosterone injections to feel young again. He booked more adventurous vacations—heli-skiing in Canada, thrill-seeking escapes to remind himself he was still alive. On the surface, it worked for a moment. He looked sharper, pushed harder, climbed higher. But the numbness returned. Because no matter how much you pile on the adrenaline, the trophies, or the toys, you can’t medicate the soul. You can’t hack your way out of the descent. And the truth is, nothing is “wrong” with you when you feel that way. What’s happening is the descent. And here’s the key: It’s never too late to get it back. The way to get it back isn’t by clawing your way higher. It’s by learning to descend up. Aliyah: Going Down to Go Up The Jewish tradition has a word for ascent: aliyah. Literally, “going up.” To move to Israel is called making aliyah. To be called up to the Torah is called an aliyah. But here’s the paradox: Israel sits at the lowest geographic point on earth. Moving there is literally a descent in altitude. Yet for thousands of years it’s been called an ascent — because physically, yes, you go down, but spiritually, you rise. That’s the paradox of katabasis. Down is not the opposite of up. Down is the doorway to up. What looks like loss becomes the path to gain. What feels like failure becomes the threshold of transformation. Aliyah is the practice of descending up — choosing to see that every physical descent can become a spiritual ascent, every emotional setback can become a deeper step forward, every season of loss can be the soil for a greater rising. To descend up is to stop fighting gravity and start using it, to stop denying age and start apprenticing to its wisdom, to stop running from pain and start mining it for meaning. The Second Half of Life Here’s the truth: in the second half of life, descent is unavoidable. Sex-drive drops — but maybe that’s the gift, forcing us to stop thinking with one head and start using another. Gravity pulls our bodies down — but that’s the chance to lean on something deeper than looks. Tragedy shows up at our door — but in the