Does Anyone Care About Men's Mental Health_ - Matt Rudd

The transcription covers a discussion about midlife crisis, societal pressures, fear of failure, and reluctance to seek help for mental health issues, especially among men. It highlights how individuals may feel stuck in their careers or life situations, leading to feelings of emptiness and struggles with self-worth. The conversation emphasizes the importance of pausing to reflect on one's goals and happiness, challenging societal norms, and seeking support when needed. Men are portrayed as conditioned to be strong and successful, which can hinder their willingness to address mental health concerns. The dialogue also touches on the evolving conversation around mental health awareness, particularly regarding men's mental health. What are you going to do when you leave school? Are you going to do a degree? And if you do a degree, how useful is that going to be? And what job are you going to... you know, there's this pressure to keep going. And that's all wrapped up with a focus on you have to be a success, particularly as a bloke, not what is it you actually want to do with your life. Matt Rudd, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Chris. It's good to be here. Does life get any easier as you get older, in your experience? No. Thanks for having me. It's been great to be here. Speak to you next time. Life doesn't get easier when you get older. I think, well, people get happier when they're a lot older. That's the thing. You know about the happiness curve. So the low point is in your 40s and then when you hit rock bottom and then start to pick up again when you don't care so much about stuff. So I'm looking forward to my 60th birthday because that's peak happiness. Why do you think that is? Why is it a U-shaped curve? Well, that's the whole book, isn't it? It's why is it, you know, the points where you've achieved everything and you're lucky that society expects you to do. Why is it that just at that point you're extremely unhappy or not extremely unhappy, quite unhappy? I mean, there's a lot of reasons. I think the main one in my own experience was, you know, I'd done all these five-year plans, I'd been, you know, done the exams, gone to university, got up the, you know, job ladder, climbed the career ladder and got married, had kids, all the traditional stuff and then I kind of popped my head up at the age of 43 and just didn't know what to do next. And I was waking up in the middle of the night, I was catastrophizing, couldn't sleep and it just got worse and worse. And what was interesting, I think, you have your own experience, it sounds like, you know, you had quite a few extreme things going on but for me it wasn't a crisis, it was more like doldrums, midlife doldrums, which I think is much more common. If you have a full-blown crisis, you're forced to kind of confront what's going on and try to change things. But for most of us, it's a kind of struggling on scenario. That's something that I think about an awful lot, that if you hit rock bottom, there's only one place to go from there. Some of the reasons why when you watch a movie and the hero falls from grace and then he's drinking and in the gutter and stuff, there's a certain amount of romanticism around that because you know that there's only one direction for him to go from there. And the same as anybody that's gone to the gym, if you try and three-quarter squat and then go up from there, it's pretty difficult. But if you bounce out of the bottom, it's actually relatively easy. And I think that you have this in life too, that people can become sedated by comfort, that life's not that good but it's not that bad either. You don't have the activation energy to actually kick you out of the bottom of whatever you're dealing with. And yeah, that sort of sedation by comfort, complacency, like not giving up the average for the good or the good for the great, I think that's where a lot of people find themselves. And also fear, I think. For men in particular, it's fear. When I first started feeling like I was struggling, I couldn't really access well-being books. I just found it all too much. So I started talking to other men. And a lot of them, you know, I talked to them because to me they looked like they had it all together. So I find out how they were managing. And after, you know, two pints into the conversation, it was clear that they were also struggling with what was going around their heads. But an alarming amount of them said, I just don't want to talk about this because I can't start thinking about me and life because I've got all these plates spinning. This is a real midlife thing as well. You've got dependence, you're hanging on to a lot of different things. And if you start what they saw as being indulgent and thinking about life, the whole plate spinning thing, you know, the house of cards could fall down. So the fear, I think, is a fear. It's easier to keep your head down, plow on German soldier syndrome is how one psychologist described it to me. Yeah, you've got this quote where you say, if I start worrying about the meaning of life, I'll go mad. I just have to keep going. And that's another part of sedation, right, that people find. They sedate themselves with busyness too. Yes, and it is better to keep struggling on and keep what you've got than what I saw and what they see as risking losing it all. Yeah, the indulgent thing is something that I find so interesting. I had throughout my 20s, I had bouts of not super acute depression. I wouldn't get out of bed for a few days at a time. I was running these nightclubs. I was going to bed. And my sleeping pattern was disgusting and all over the place. And I wasn't eating well, and I was parking a good bit, and so on and so forth. And I would just have these periods after I worked for a very long time where I couldn't get out of bed. And I was like, well, what's happening? Is this because I'm weak? Is this because I'm deficient in some way? And that was, you know, the fact that you're in bed and stuff, that you don't feel very good with whatever the emotions are that are going around. But the worst thing is the second-order self-referential shame and guilt around the fact that you know, okay, so ostensibly what is actually wrong? And you go, well, nothing. It's just a waste of fucking existence. And you think to yourself, how bourgeois and indulgent and wanky is this to say that in a life where I don't technically have anything going wrong, if someone was to come up to me and say, dude, I remember I went to my GP. And this is a while ago. This is probably 10 or 12 years ago. And I think and hope that mental health discussions have probably improved in the NHS since then. I went to go and speak to my GP. And I said, I don't feel very good. I'm having these sort of bouts of feeling a bit low and stuff. He said, well, what's wrong? And I kind of said, well, I don't have any financial problems. I haven't recently split up. I'm not in grief. I'm not, there's no, like, nothing is hanging over me other than the sheer weight of existence itself. And she gave me like a single-page printout and sort of ushered me on my way. I thought that didn't really help. It also put a bit of a, not a bad taste in my mouth, but it made me hesitant about seeking help again in future too. Yeah, and as we know, men are very reluctant to ask and seek help either from friends or from medical professionals. So the fact that you actually overcome that first hurdle puts you already in a big minority. And there's things going on here. It is, men do see it as indulgent to try and seek help for themselves because we're conditioned from a very young age to be strong and to be successful and not to fail. And, you know, there are better, much more expert people who've been very profound about all this, but the toxic effect of having to be strong and therefore bracket silent is a real problem. But yes, so fear and worrying about showing weakness are the twin pillars that mean you end up, you rock up in your 40s in the pit of sizes or you just plow on until you get the gold watch, which is what the vast majority of people I've interviewed for this book were doing. That was their attitude. Keep going, not much longer to go, which is a really depressing concept actually. Yeah, that you have the innocent, playful beauty of childhood then just this huge swath of hiding from your existential enemy until you hit 60, at which time everything can be okay again. Yeah, and the thing is, I don't think you have to make any radical changes. That's the interesting thing. What you've got to do is, I've missed the opportunity, I'll do it from now on, but it's just pausing, stopping and thinking, what am I doing here? Is this the thing? Am I too focused on that? Where's the happiness in this? And it's trying to just stop the external pressure that you must succeed, as well as your own inner monologue telling you, keep going, don't break. You've got to try and put the pauses in. And I don't think I really stopped and thought until I was in my mid-40s. I had such a clear set of hurdles to get over at each stage of life, which we all have. And you just don't feel that you can stop and think, what am I doing here? Even if you carry on doing the same thing. There was one guy I spoke to who, he just graduated and he wanted to be an author. And then I met him and I was just talking, trying to give him some career advice. And he was in a real panic and he was considering doing, he just graduated, he was going to do a master's, so another year in university. And he described it as a panic master's. He wasn't doing it because he wanted to grow his brain or because he enjoyed education. He was doing it because he was so concerned that on his CV there would be this sort of gap. So he was going to do it, sit through another year of lectures, just so there wasn't a gap. And so I just said, this is ridiculous. How long have you been trying to be an author? How long have you been sending off your CVs? Five weeks. So, I mean, it is so much worse now for the next generation. Although, you know, the language is better and men are more open, hopefully, than they were 20 years ago, and certainly more than they were when my father was a kid, or 100 years ago. We have the Victorians to thank for our very slow recovery from all of that. The pressure is just greater now. What's your thoughts on the conversation around mental health, generally at the moment, and then specifically for men? I've really, really struggled to resonate with a lot of the campaigns around it's okay to talk and ask twice and stuff like that. I don't know whether the problem is bigger than that, whether a little social change campaign and a cool hashtag is insufficient to fix it. I understand that it's coming from a good place of people trying to open up a conversation about mental health. It's never really resonated with me that much, and I'm someone that's, you know, suffered with mental health problems before in the past, incredibly compassionate and passionate about trying to help it in the future. What do you think about the current conversation? It has become, this is tricky, but it has become quite trendy. For instance, at my workplace, I get an email every week asking me to fill out a well-being survey, which is quite annoying, actually. Is it damaging your well-being to fill out the well-being survey? I hate filling out surveys anyway. Every time I buy something, I have to fill out a survey. So that's not great. All I can say, and I think the more you hear something, it's good to talk and then should open up more. You kind of become blind to that. You kind of shut down. As I said before, five years ago, I just wouldn't have listened to a podcast like this and I wouldn't have bought a self-help book because I just found it too much. I was not ready to be at step one. And that's typical for a lot of men in particular. The talking, actually, and now I'm going to say, it is good to talk. That was the thing that, for me, made a change. And it wasn't just going to the pub with your mates and having a chat. You have to actually kind of force them to be serious, so that this is how I'm feeling, which is really tricky to get through. But then once you start talking, the idea that men can't talk, are silent, it's nonsense. I spoke to so many men over the last three or four years, first friends and then wider. And once they start, it's really profound. And that was, for me, the thing that made the biggest change, that enabled me to then start accessing other things. The idea that it's not just me, I'm not the weird guy waking up at three o'clock in the morning and worrying about, if I get mortgage insurance, will I not be able to afford the mortgage? Like, stupid things like that. So, yeah, talking is good, but it's also, you've got to overcome this embarrassment, shame, all of that that goes with it. So, it's a three-point problem. All right, is that the optimal inebriation level? Maximum, yeah. Maximum inebriation level. I've tried both those things. I've tried not drinking and I've tried drinking far too much and that doesn't particularly work either. Is it really true? Just to say something completely that you haven't seen with Melanie. Yes, it's true. And I feel like I'm being gaslit into an alternate universe. I've never heard of it. I don't know what it is. Mary Harrington looked like I'd killed her brand new puppy when I said that I hadn't done it. And then I tried to reach out to my own audience on Twitter in a desperate attempt to get some sort of backup and was further lambasted by them. So, yeah, I don't know what it is. This is the other contributing factor to the midlife doldrums as you start referencing incredibly famous cultural moments and people haven't heard of it because they were too when it came out. Did you see, there was this meme that went hyper-viral after the Super Bowl and it was a tweet and someone said, I realized whilst watching the Super Bowl and thought, oh, really good that they're bringing out all of these current artists and not those old throwbacks to people that are way older. When they then realized that Dr. Dre and 50 Cent and Eminem and Mary J. Blige came out 20 years ago and realized at that moment that you are now the boomers that previously you would have been insulting. So, here's a question. When do you become old or how do you know when you're starting to get old? I wrote about this in my column this week actually and I've got a fairly graphic answer. Do you want the graphic answer? Absolutely. A very wise friend of mine once told me that in order in order to deal with the post-pee dribble you have to, you've got to trick it, Chris. So, you finish, you shake three times, no more, definitely no more and then you put it away and as you're putting it away your brain mustn't connect to know what's coming next but then you whip it out again and it comes out and when you know you're old is when you have to do that twice. And I wrote that in the paper at the weekend and a friend got in touch and said wait till you're 60 then it's four times. That was not a serious answer to your question and I apologize but what is a happy thought is that when I talk about getting old in the newspaper I get lots of readers getting in touch saying I'm 78 and I've never felt younger. So, I do think, what I think actually is the trick is to navigate through midlife and get out the other side intact without feeling like you've just been working. Yeah, this is something that I want to have a conversation about more. So, I'm 34, I was 34 last week and it feels very strange because at 34 you're definitely out of young adulthood, I think. You're definitely out of the stage where all of the rules that you used to have in your 20s could work. People are expecting you to kind of have your shit together at least a little bit more and you are, for the first time ever each year that comes by, you're not necessarily fitter in terms of what you can do athletically or in terms of the way that you look than you were the year before. Whereas throughout your 20s each year you're getting whatever, you're in the gym, more muscle mass, you're getting stronger, you're more confident, you're whatever it might be. And then there is a point where you reach like attractiveness, apogee even as a man and then you start to say, oh, hold on a second, where's this progress coming from? It's actually taking me longer to recover from workouts. It's taking me forever to recover from a hangover for quite a while now. But everything starts to get a little bit and there is a sense of, like at the top of a roller coaster ride, that weightlessness and you're going, whoa, hang on a second. And that's something that for the people that are below the age of 30 you start to realize, you're chronically aware of your own mortality when you start to understand that you're not as unbreakable as you thought that you were before. I snapped an Achilles a couple of years ago playing cricket, like the most British way to rupture an Achilles ever. I think that the conversation around aging for men as well is a different one because everybody is so hyper aware of the implications of aging for women and the fact that women are very often judged by their beauty and the way that they look and aging kind of runs against that. Whereas for men to say, you know, about aging, you're supposed to become the hairy-ass bloke, right, with a pint in his hand. That's kind of one of the tropes. Yeah, but, I mean, it is easier for men. It is easier because it's okay to go gray or bald or whatever happens. I think the change is, to go back to what I was saying earlier, it's when you don't have an immediately obvious roadmap anymore. So, for me, with having three kids, when they're very young, you've got a load of mechanical processes to get through just to get out the door in the morning. And then it's the same with your job. You've got, you're at the bottom of the ladder. The only way is up. And then you reach this point where, you know, the kids are becoming more self-sufficient and they're leaving home and you get to the point in the career where you kind of don't want to go up anymore because to go up is more pressure and more time and all the rest of it. But in our culture, people who don't want to move up are viewed with suspicion and it can be seen as a negative that you want to do the same thing or you don't want to take on more responsibilities. And so there's this kind of just, the certainty of youth falls away into this kind of less certain, less obvious way of moving forward. And that's, that isn't old, that's not old, but it's the sort of, you can see, you can see backwards to where you come from and then there's this kind of blur that feels scary, you know, you're 40s and you're 50s and then you are old. You said that the system largely set up by men for men isn't working for the vast majority of men. And I think that this is where attention lies, that you have this, you know, for a very long time patriarchal society that was created to and largely facilitated in an attempt to try and encourage men and assist them. You know, we've recently only just about reached gender equality with stuff. So for men to start complaining about the fact that there's a problem with the society does feel indulgent, not only on the individual level but on a system-wide level too. And it's quite easy, I think, to wave away the concerns of men. Because you say, well, look, look at all of the things that you've had for all of this time. You know, is this just you complaining about the fact that finally you haven't got the situation the way that you want? And you go, well, no, it's the fact that neither men nor women are fantastically happy all the time at the moment. Exactly. And that is, that's the point of the book because if it's not working for us, then it's not working for anyone is the point, you know. And if you look at the figures, there is a real spike in depression and suicide with men particularly in the 45 to 49 bracket. So it's trying to work out how on earth we got there. And I had written a lot of this and done a lot of the research for this before the pandemic and I was kind of doing the revises as we were moving into lockdown. And suddenly a lot of the things that I was saying might be better, that men do want to have a work-life balance, they do want to be involved with their families, all of those things, suddenly that was thrust upon us. You know, the pandemic would be magic answer to everything I was whinging about in the book in a fairly extreme and dark way. But, you know, now we're at a point where we're coming out of it, hopefully, and very quickly. And everyone's saying, oh, I can't wait for it to get back to how it was. But we need to be careful not to, you know, it was such a dramatic shift. And everyone I've been speaking to was suddenly saying, oh, it's great, I can do the, well, not the school run, but I can get the kids ready in the morning, I can be there. In meetings on Zoom, you could see, you know, kids running in and out of the background. It was like, yeah, we do actually have a family. You know, we are men, but this is our family. And it's all the things that women have been juggling with for a lot longer. And it's been really interesting to see all of that. I just think it's very important that, particularly for the next generation, who are obviously more eager than us old farts to get back to how life was, that they hang on to this kind of weird hybrid part working from home, part working from office thing as we return to whatever normal is. If it goes back to how it was, that's going to be a disaster. What's your post-mortem of the working from home with a family situation? Like you say, do you feel like you should be careful what you wish for? I don't know what it was like for you. Before we started this, I had to go and shout at everyone to get off the Wi-Fi. So I'm saying how wonderful it all is, but there's pressures. I think we all got quite tired of it. And it's nice to be going back. But I certainly feel that I know my kids better at the end of all this than I did before. And I keep mentioning kids and work, but that's the real heart of all of this, all of the reasons why this system that supposedly was set up for men and supposedly for men hasn't been working. It's that kind of patriarchal, you're the provider and the woman's looking after the kids. And what's happened is women have, and it's a great thing obviously, been moved into the workplace, but men haven't made any real efforts to move the other direction. So women have been facilitated at moving into the workplace, but men haven't been facilitated at moving back into the household. Yeah, and you see it in particular with parental leave. So I got a week off for each kid. I don't have to watch my wife nearly dying, 72-hour labor. It was worse for her, I know that, but watching it is also bad. And then finally get home, try and clear the detritus of the remnants of the failed home birth up to get it ready. And then I'm back at home, back at work a day later and my colleagues go, everything all right? And I say, yes, and that's how you did it. But now just 15 years on, that's already beginning to change. I spent some time with an insurance company and decided to get shared parental leave, regardless of gender, you get six months off. And I had to go and talk to these really annoying people who were all just so happy and balanced. They'd returned to work, all excited about being back at work. They'd established a bond with their sons and daughters. It was great. And I would be very, very surprised if in 10, 15 years, that's just not a universal policy, because it also helps the employer. Productivity had gone up. I don't know if it was because the dads were just so relieved to be getting back to the office, or whether it's because they'd had a little break from the rat race. They'd got off the hamster wheel, to name another rodent. And it's all just trying to disrupt that idea that you're just slogging away from age 18 to age 65, or in your case, 68. It's going to be interesting to see what happens with people who are increasingly in the gig economy. We've had this recent opening of working from home, of people being able to determine their own working hours, freelance, Fiverr, all of these sorts of organizations, or people that are just starting businesses. This show is a business on its own. It doesn't have a premises. Who am I going to get leave off? Who's going to pay me to leave? No one. So very much with an increase in people perhaps starting small and medium-sized companies, or just commercializing themselves and their own talents, that's going to be another challenge that more and more men and women are going to have to face when it comes to... No one's paying you maternity or paternity leave in that way. Yeah, and there's an illusion there that you have more freedom. You're working for yourself, almost, and you can pick and choose your hours and et cetera, et cetera, but workers' rights go out with that. It's difficult. I mean, starting your own business is a different thing, isn't it, which you know much more about than I do, but that has all the same associated pressures, and it's the broader theme of, you know, pursuing stuff and pursuing success, and how important is that? And I would argue that it is such an obvious thing to say that it's far, far less important than happiness and balance, and this is where you're in danger of ending up sounding like a full-on monkish self-help guru who that's really, really hard when you've got responsibilities and overheads and all the rest of it. Yeah, talking about letting go of chasing commercial, monetary, statusful, possessional success is... I keep on having this a lot at the moment, and I think that it's because there really isn't much of an aspirational, especially for men, an aspirational role model or archetype that they can follow that isn't the monk that just recounts all worldly possessions and decides to go live up on a hill. It's not very cool to say, do you know what it is? I'm good materially. I'm fine with this position, with earning this many thousand pounds per year, without just ruthlessly chasing whatever the next... You said it earlier on, more promotion, more stress, more responsibility. I'm not seeing many conversations between people, especially men, saying, I'm good where I am. I've reached the position I need to be at. I've reached the monetary wealth I need to be at, and now I can actually use the time that I've invested so far to pivot me to a lifestyle that I want to have a much more holistic view of progression and self-improvement and growth and earning. It is difficult, and I'm saying all of this, but I still envy other people, and I still look at, oh, someone's got that. It's really built into things from the very beginning. There's so much keeping up with the Joneses, and I don't know what the answer is. I know the answer isn't people like me saying, don't have so much stuff, but we are in a materialistic culture, and I am old enough to now realize that having the latest gadgets and the latest telly and a flash car is definitely not the answer. How you convey that, because I think everyone knows it, but there's a beneath-the-surface envy and a need to keep up with other people. It's really difficult, and it must all be built into early life and being encouraged to succeed again. It all goes back, how do you show that you are successful if you don't have all the stuff, and that's a difficulty. When you were describing not accumulating stuff, that would be classed as quite beta male. Oh, right, he doesn't need things, so great, but I want to get external validation, and in order to do that, I need stuff, and by stuff, it can also include success at work, job titles. Women, achievements, followers online. I can't remember women, because I've been married for 16 years, but that's definitely Instagram followers, and when I was getting ready for this, I did have a little peek at how many Instagram followers you've got, and you've got loads, like loads, and I thought, oh, I've got not that many at all. You see, it's all the time. It's not as simple as, my neighbor's got a nicer car than me. Here's a couple of insights around, especially the alpha, beta, and sigma. There's sigma now. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but there's a sigma male too. That's basically anyone who tries to be Keanu Reeves, and one of the insights around this is, most of the guys that I know that are unreservedly chasing accomplishments, and women, really should be looked on with pity. I think, dude, this is you filling a hole inside of yourself, the sense of insufficiency that you have. The only way that you can satisfy that is by continually chasing women, and achievements, and money, and external validation, and success, and all of this stuff, and it's that quote, what is it? This person's so poor that all they have are money to keep them going. Another side of this is that, if you have, if you're the sort of person, especially a guy, who is not materialistically driven, I think that that should be seen as a competitive advantage. You can be happy at a hundred grand a year. You can have the same level of happiness at a hundred grand a year, versus your friend who grew up, maybe in a more materialistic household, maybe people showed their love and affection by buying each other gifts, maybe there was a keeping up with the Joneses environment, or whatever, and that person's got to get to a million. Now maybe it's not ten times harder to get from a hundred thousand to a million as it was to get from naught to a hundred thousand, but still, you can say, look, I'm good. This is where I want to be at, and really genuinely leaning into that, and understanding, having a low materialism set point, or a lower, comparatively, materialism set point, how many people pity the guy that's in a marriage, and yet still feels the need to message girls on Instagram, or when he's away on a stag do on a weekend with the boys, because he knows his missus isn't going to find out, decides to sleep around. You pity that guy, because you think you haven't been able to find a sense of security and solace in your relationship to the point where you're having to go and do things that your integrity and your virtue aren't aligned with, and if they are aligned with it, then your integrity and your virtue are fucked. So I think that there are some solid places for men to stand with this. Again, I'm saying this to myself as much as I'm saying it to anybody else. I'm not the role model. I simply have an idea of the path, but I think increasingly, as you see these archetypes of guys relinquishing that materialistic push, relinquishing those external measures of success as being internal measures of self-worth, the more that we can try and do that, and I do think it's happening more, I think the better it's going to be for everybody, including the wives of the men that this is happening to. Yeah, and there have been loads of studies over the years where they've tried to put a price on happiness, and so in the States, you need to earn X thousand dollars in order to be happy, and then it diminishes very, very quickly after that. But I don't think, it's not really, there isn't a price. Obviously, there isn't a price because there's so many different circumstances. I mean, for me, I was quite pleased with myself when I was in my 20s because I deliberately picked journalism as opposed to friends who were going on to become lawyers and management consultants. I still don't know what a management consultant does, but they were all earning a lot of money when they were young, and I felt superior to them. I mean, it's just ridiculous. It's more kind of weird comparing yourself to other people because I was choosing what was then a noble art, so journalism, and I, you know, how great is that? I felt good about it, but then the reality is I was doing it so I could see my name in a paper or a tiny little tractor magazine or whatever it was back then, and you just, so it's still doing things for the wrong reasons, and I think, and now when you talk to younger people, they're going through all of those different emotions and thoughts, but with this huge pressure to get moving and get going, and that's much higher than it used to be. You know, you didn't used to have careers advice fairs starting from the age of 14, and you didn't used to have such vocational, you know, it's all about what are you going to do when you leave school? What are you going to do? Are you going to do a degree? And if you do a degree, how useful is that going to be? And what job are you going to, you know, there's this pressure to keep going, moving forward, and that's all wrapped up with a focus on you have to be a success, particularly as a bloke, not what is it you actually want to do, what is it you want to do with your life. Sorry, go on. Just how do you think school plays a role here at defining the framework that men step into, the boys that will later become men? So, so much. In the way that the classroom is, and also in the way that peer groups work. So you've got on the one hand, it's all about grades. Whenever you hear the government talking about education, it's all about getting good grades. There's nothing, there's no kind of holistic approach to how to be a man. I mean, sex education when I was at school was one biology lesson where the embarrassed teacher showed you a cross section on the overhead projector of a sliced penis. You don't know what an overhead projector is, now I'm going to feel old. This is my world as well. Right, fine. And now it's kind of a bit more involved. But in Swindon they have sex week, a whole week where everyone's discussing not just sex, but relationships and what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. And the whole of kind of relationships, well-being and how to live a life is built, not just into that week, but throughout the curriculum in all the different classes. So it's just completely natural for people to be, for Swedish kids to be analysing what they expect out of their life when they get older, not just out of their job. And so, you know, it's really fundamental. And then you've got the, you know, the peer group where it's, you know, pack mentality, they're recovering from having to sit still and be polite and etc. in the classroom. So outside of that, it's kind of Lord of the Flies. An interesting undercurrent to the fact that grades are so important, I don't know whether this is the same in America, but certainly in the UK, it is a zero-sum game when it comes to the way the distributions for grades are done because they can't have, it's always the same proportion of A stars, A's, B's, C's, D's, etc. Right? And that means that if the entire school improves, nobody actually moves. If everyone improves at the same rate, so it embedded that competitive nature is literally embedded into the structure of how school works, at least in the UK. Which is crazy when you think about it because we're all talking about how do you improve your education? And if they're fixated on grades, having that, you know, finite number of A stars, how can you possibly improve? It's not mathematically possible. And the other thing that happens in the States, I think, and particularly in the UK, is start them earlier. We need to get them going, you know, let's have a sure start. So get them into school at four, but get them thinking about school before that. In Germany, they don't really start formal education, you know, sitting at a desk, which is not an ideal place for any kid, but in particular a boy, until they're eight. And they have better results coming out the other end. So they have a chance to be a kid and to climb trees, is what I'm romantically thinking, but it's probably just sitting on an iPad in Hamburg. Whereas our kids from the age of four are sat at a desk being told to behave, and if they behave, they get a gold star. So that's external validation, and off we go. And you could, everything you've ever discussed on all your episodes of your podcast, if we got the first four years right, that a huge amount of the problems that come up in later life would be dealt with. Do you think that's right? Yeah, absolutely. Everything is, I mean, that's the sort of, the most developmental stage of the brain. It's when things are being hardwired of, you know, what to expect. And I, is this a loving world, or is it a tough world? And, you know, flinging them off into school at such a young age, it hardwires that life is hard and we, you need to succeed, which is really not a great thing to be teaching kids, you know, toddlers. What's your thoughts about the relationship between men and technology? Well, you know my thoughts, because we started this conversation with you telling me I need to restart my computer, and that led to a 20-minute running around the house trying to find another computer that hadn't automatically updated itself. So, thank you for that, Chris. My blood pressure has almost gone down. I mean, it's really obvious that technology is in some ways great. We're talking to each other now remotely. I'm able to, you know, have fed the kids before we started this. That wouldn't be possible without the joy of whatever thing we're on. But, as everyone has been saying for a long time, it's all pervasive. You can't get away from it. Again, it's done all sorts of damage to childhood, and it has a huge impact on relationships in teens and young adults. I mean, it's just depressing. It's depressing talking to 20-somethings about dating, because it's all blind dates. I'm going to sound like a really cantankerous old man. And I'm also talking to the wrong guy here as well. Blind dates. Anyway, we didn't have blind dates 20 years ago, but now it's all, you know, it's all done on the apps. So, I would love, and as soon as I do get to the Gold Watch, I will have as little technology as possible. And I reached that conclusion when we got a smart thermometer. No, a smart thermostat. Do you have one of these? No, but I've been in houses. It's like a Nest type thing. That thing. I don't know if we're going to name it, because I'm going to be rude about it. By the way. Before, we had a dial and a switch. So, if you wanted it on at a certain time, you did the thing. And now, because technology makes life so much more efficient, we have the Nest with an app that you have to set. And it has a light of its own, because it has decided, and I agree with the thoughts, but it has decided it needs to be eco. It's impossible to turn it off eco. So, it comes on for 20 minutes in the middle of the night. And I should say that, you know, three years after my sort of midlife doldrums, I was starting to sleep through the night. But now the thermostat puts the heating on, so I'm up. And we can't... Anyway, it met the hammer, and that will be my... That will be what I do. As soon as I don't have to be on technology, I won't. So, you're... I'm not being a cantankerous old man, but also being a Luddite at the same time. We've managed to blend these two worlds together, have we? Yeah, well, what do you... I mean, what do you do? Because your whole life, your whole work is, you know, technology is critical to it. But how do you... Everyone always says, don't take your phone to your bedroom, don't check your phone after a certain... Are you able to have limits? Do you have balance? Or do you just have your iPhone shouting at you because you've been on the phone for 36 hours this week? Permanently attached to my right hand. Well, it feels like fighting a losing battle, right? I'm very... I have been, ever since I started this podcast four years ago, very skeptical around technology and our relationship with it. Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology was a huge influence on me and has been for half a decade now. So, yes, sleeping with the phone outside of the bedroom, doing intermittent fasting for your phone so you don't use it before a certain time and you don't use it after a certain time. But it does feel an awful lot like we are putting band-aids over bullet wounds here that the fundamental technology, the limbic hijack, the addictive nature of it, the fact that it gives us social approval, the fact that it is necessary and there's a kernel of truth in the fact that you need to use it because you've got to get the Uber or you need to navigate where you're going on Google Maps or what about if somebody needs to message you or whatever. I wonder whether we're going to be looked back on by future generations in the same way as... I know people that held slaves or something just like this primitive, ridiculous situation that we managed to put humanity into that you couldn't bear thinking was ever going to happen again in future. I wonder whether... I think in future we're probably going to look back on factory farming with a fair bit of disgust and say, look, this is... how on earth were we so uncivilized and so sort of terrible. But I wonder whether we're going to look back on this period and say... or alternatively we are going to fuse and become ones with the machines in which case it's just going to be the genesis of our leveling up. Yeah, the singularity where we're all living in the mess of us. That's a very bleak, bleak note, Chris. But I liked what you were saying about the... I've lost my train of thought completely. I apologize. That's fine. Fighting back against it. Well, what about... You mentioned relationships there. Apart from the technology element of this, what did you learn about men's relationship with relationships? Well, when I... This all started, as I've said, with conversations in parts that morphed into wider conversations that became an article in my newspaper entitled, Why Are Successful Midlife Men Unhappy? That's quite a baiting title in the current environment. And I was thinking this is going to end in disaster. But what actually happened is a huge amount of men said, that's describing me. But interestingly, a huge amount of their partners said, this is describing my partner. And I think that you can get into a trap that it is a battle of the sexes. But the reality is most of us live in a relationship with someone from the opposite sex. And it's important that we work together rather than in opposition. So, for me, I found that doing a bit of work rather than being this repressed guy who's just, I can't talk about anything because if I do, everything will fall down. By doing a bit of work myself, I'm married to someone who has been doing the work for much longer than me because she's much more open, she's more emotionally intelligent, all of those cliches. But our relationship is stronger now I've made the effort. And it is an effort. As you know from the book, I haven't got any master plan, there's no easy solutions to any of this. And those books where they promise that there is are definitely lying. But there are little things that I've picked up along the way and little snippets of conversation. Like the happiest guy I met in the whole research. Little things he says just have made things better. And that's obviously if I'm happy and my relationship is better. What were some of the takeaways from that guy? I'll tell you about the guy. So the guy was in his mid-twenties and he was on his way, doing all the things that are expected of him. You know, done school, left school, bottom of the career ladder and set up a burglar alarm installation business. And it was going well. He had a house with a mortgage. He was just starting to pay off. He had a serious long-term girlfriend. But the people who have burglar alarms installed tend to be older. So he was having coffee every day with an oxygenarian who said, always, how old are you? He'd say 27. And then they would spend the next five minutes talking about all their regrets and how much they wish they were 27 again. So this obviously got to him. Finished with his girlfriend, got rid of the house, been to the business and moved to a caravan next to Loch Ness in Scotland. And he has lived there for the last 30 years. And so, journalists have talked to him before and he's always this sort of the crackpot Nessie hunter. But we were talking to him and I was kind of in the middle of all this fog of midlife. And he was describing, I was saying, come on, you know, how can he possibly, how can this be a fun way to live? And he just spoke for about 10 minutes about a weather front coming across the loch and light coming down and it just shifted in a way that he'd never seen before. And he felt the lightness inside him. And I've tried a lot of meditation over the years and I've never quite got that kind of moment of enlightenment that the real black belt monks talk about. But I could feel I've got what he was saying. And I just thought that's, we can't all go and live next to Loch Ness, right? That'd be billions of caravans wrecking Loch Ness. But ever since that conversation, I've found that there are always moments in the day, regardless of how shit the day is, where you can stop and just appreciate it. And this is something the self-help gurus say all the time, live in the moment, live in the present. It doesn't work when you're talking to a stressed out midlife man. It took that conversation with that guy to realize there was some truth in it. It doesn't have to be onerous or hard work. And that's what's been one of the changes that's helped me. What were some of the other characteristics or traits that you found that were common amongst the men that seemed to have it together or some part of it together? Of the reasons that they were struggling? No, of the reasons that they were doing well. What were the characteristics or traits that were common amongst the men that were doing well? Well, the first one, the older men, the ones who were through it all, they were all, I've met a whole group of old guys. And it was really interesting talking to them because the traits they all had in midlife were the same that me and my midlife mates all have, all depressing. And now they were older and retired, they weren't thinking about the future. Not because they were about to drop dead, but because they didn't have to worry about things in the future other than dying. Illness and death is quite depressing, I suppose. But they were just living in the present. And I think the younger people I spoke to, the ones who were successful in life, not in stuff or careers, were the ones who somehow had managed to stop giving so much of a shit. They just didn't care. And that's not to say they were just slobbing around, not trying. They just weren't what-if-ing about everything. They weren't thinking three steps ahead and being negative. They're just really not quite case after after. We've all got pressures. But just if something bad happens, well, that happens. And I would love to be better at not caring so much, not always imagining the worst-case scenario. And I'd say I'm 10% better than I was five years ago. How much of that do you think you can leapfrog? I read this in Johan Hari's most recent book where he said that so many of the things that we ascribe to our own personal development are simply byproduct of us getting older. And as someone that spends a good bit of time trying to expedite that process, it fills me with a sense of kind of futility that all of the shit that I might be doing and all of the progress that I'm celebrating my wins for might just be coming along for the ride as the days go past. But I wonder how much you think we can expedite getting from where you were to them, or how much of it's like a conveyor belt that you're just waiting for that moment to arise? Yeah, that is nonsense. I think loads, loads of... You can do a lot. I mean, the mere fact that you're talking about this, I wasn't even thinking about all of this stuff when I was your age. And I've had brilliant conversations with people in their 20s who have read the book, and as I keep saying, it's not a self-help book, but they've read what awaits them and thought, no, I'm definitely not going to... I'm definitely not going to... I'm going to start dealing with all this stuff now. And it's to do with talking, it's to do with opening up, it's to do with pausing. And I wish I'd started... I really wish I'd started earlier, but then, of course, that's me being regretful and negative. But I think there's amazing opportunities, even in this more kind of stressed and even more high-pressured environment that young men are faced with now. Just by merely discussing it, thinking about it, that's just... I'm very positive about that. For you, not for me. I think that the conversation is progressing. When I think about the guys that I'm around and the sort of conversations that we have, I've got a buddy out here who, randomly out of nowhere, got some travel anxiety, been on planes millions of times before, right? He travels all over the place. And he really struggled to get on a plane twice in a row. And he told me the story, and he said, dude, I felt like such a loser. I was going back down the escalator at Austin Airport, having had my girlfriend come to collect me. For now the fourth time, she dropped him off and collected him once, then dropped him off and then had to collect him again the second time when he couldn't get himself onto this plane. And he was like, dude, I was going down the conveyor belt and I felt like such a loser and I had tears streaming down my face and I just felt like I was a complete waste of space. And even in that moment, for me, I'm a pretty open guy. I was like, wow, that's such a showing of... You'd say that that's brave and courageous to open up in that sort of a way. And that was a really stark moment where I thought, fucking hell. I wouldn't have spoken like that to my friends 10 years ago. He's having to admit to you that he's not a manly man in that specific instance. But once you start having that level of relationship, it's really great. I mean, so many friends, our relationships have evolved because we're not just taking the piss out of each other and making light of everything. I mean, the opposite end of that is kind of those very serious men's circles, which I'm not saying are a bad thing, but they're not for everyone, where you're sitting in a circle and you get 10 minutes to talk about how awful everything is. There's a balance where it's more organic and I think men aren't as shamed by mentioning things they're worried about as they used to be. I mean, definitely, if you look at how it was in the 19th century, just crazy. You kind of referenced that a couple of times now, that sort of Victorian era, whatever, stoicism or idiocy. What are some of the examples that you're referring to there? Total stoicism. I mean, Rudyard Kipling, he was early 20th century. He's the guy that did the cakes, right? He's the man that does the apple Bakewell tarts. Before he was doing the Bakewell tarts, he forced, I think I'm right in saying, his son, who wasn't past fit to join the First World War, he got him in anyway, and then, of course, he was killed. Because it was far more important that Rudyard Kipling's son was a man than he not get killed. I mean, the repression around sex was ridiculous. The way kids were educated was, I mean, obviously, it's a long time ago, but what is interesting is a lot of that stuff was still around until the 60s, really, and then it was a whole generation to move forward from that for it to start filtering down to the kids. So we're alive at an interesting time. Things are more progressive, more positive, but the pressures are also always ramping up as well. And we're supposed to remember, we're supposed to have robots doing all the work by now, and that obviously hasn't happened. So it's a very complicated picture. There's a concept called conceptual inertia. I spoke to an ideas historian, and his book was about existential risk. But he identified that a lot of the time, even once something, let's say that you go from the earth being the center of the universe to the earth orbiting the sun, right, that that movement from one type of view of the night sky to another one. Let's say that, first off, it's not accepted. Then it is accepted by society at large and downstream from the scientists, but people still don't act like it's accepted for a while, and this is this conceptual inertia that it takes time for things to sort of filter and bleed through, because culture moves very, very quickly on the surface, but I think that the subtexts and the assumptions that people have, they are these big sort of lumbering behemoths that get dragged along behind, and it takes a long, long time. I think back, man. I think back to university, and there wasn't even the ability to satirically talk about someone being a lad. So in the UK, that was like the in-betweeners was one of those moments where the super hyper lad, the J from the in-betweeners person, was mockable. You would take the piss out of that person because that was someone that had taken masculinity and just tuned it up to a million but wasn't ever actually delivering on any of this stuff, and that was before that was even a trope. There wasn't an archetype for me to take the piss out of the guys from being that way or for us to do it to each other. So when you think about how quickly stuff on the surface has changed, yes, but you go, okay, but there's still all of these assumptions around the way that men are supposed to be about them taking their lay count as like one of the fundamental sources of value that they have, how many girls have slept with in the last year and stuff like that. So yeah, I think that the conceptual inertia plays a big role in this, dispensed with what was Victorian but what did Victorian cause and then what was downstream from that and then how long is it going to take to get rid of it. That's such a great way of putting it and it's depressing in a way because things do move slowly but I think we've got to, it will be another couple of generations but so we need all these big societal changes and they're happening, they really are but then it's the small things that you do for yourself that are equally important and that's things like having the conversations, for me taking a 20 minute break and doing nothing every single day, all the really little practical things but in order to get to that point I had to go through quite a lot of stop struggling, stop trying to be a manly man and just carrying on as if everything's fine and all of that nonsense and write the whole book. And that as well, yeah. I think that going through the trenches and the discomfort of arriving at those realizations, I think that that is quite a big part of it and it's one of the reasons why I would agree with you, you can expedite your progress towards certain things but it's not simply a fact of knowing whatever the strategy is and then implementing it. A lot of it is the journey of discomfort along the route to finding the strategy, to falling off, to dropping the habit, to rediscovering the habit, to realizing what life's like without it and so on and so forth because that is what gives you, it's what connects you to the reason that you're doing a particular practice because you realize what life is like without doing that thing. You realize that having a 15 minute walk first thing in the day makes my day better. Oh wow, I've just discovered this thing and then over time you go through a really bad day and you think well I'm going to go for this walk and you get back and you go well I feel better but without the bad day you wouldn't have the polarity that actually explains to you why this is an important strategy. It's not just about arriving at some perfectly optimized life routine where all of the problems have gone away. The problems that you work through on route to achieving that particular routine and having those practices and having that world view I think is the thing that makes the difference and also people like yourself that are breaking the fourth wall around what it's like to be in a weird period of life. What is your 40s really? What are they? It's just this point at which you're probably supposed to be a dad for a bit and then you're maybe supposed to let your kids go off to uni for a bit or something or maybe not. What is it? You're supposed to be a grown up and you're supposed to be successful and you're supposed to have it all together. I can assure you I don't feel different to when I was your age. That's the odd thing. I don't feel... I mean I feel old one day and I feel like I was 35 minutes ago the next day. So it's tricky but you're right. All of this stuff it does take time and effort. When I first started to use the well-being term forest bathing which means just walking to the end of the road and standing under a tree which we're always told you've got to do that it's good to clear the head. For years I just thought I don't need to do that I'm alright and then I started doing it out of just desperation to find some way of pausing thought and I'd say it was about 3 months I was sitting under the tree still worrying about the mortgage what it did because I didn't have my phone or an audio book to plug in I was just like having a special time to worry about stuff a bit more and it took months to get to the point where yes, finally I don't care anymore I've got the whole I really think that's I've really done a lot of waffling today but the not caring is the thing that I think works most not worst case scenarioing everything and I can now do that under a tree every day like some kind of proper monk the rest of the day is all the same as it always was still worrying about everything but that special moment is really good and that's taken 3-4 years to get to in total Matt Rudd, ladies and gentlemen if people want to keep up to date with what you're doing or harass you online where should they go? I think we've discussed how I feel about technology and if people want to shout at me they can do that on Twitter but otherwise just leave me alone deal with your own problems that's the wrong thing to say you see, not to tell Pelt Guru I know we're signing off when people have got in touch I've had some amazing conversations and so I'd love to chat Thanks Matt What's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe Peace www.mooji.org