I’ve Got Everything. So Why Am I Still Not Happy?
- Men Behaving Honestly
- May 16
- 4 min read
You know the bloke. Decent job, roof over his head, a partner who loves him, kids who are alright, mates he’d take a bullet for, a car that starts in the morning.
On paper, he’s winning. And yet there’s this low hum underneath it all that goes: is this it? If that bloke is you, here’s the first thing, you’re not broken, and you’re not making it up. There’s a name for where you are, even if no one’s ever bothered to give it to you. That’s exactly the bit we dug into in the very first episode of Men Behaving Honestly.
You’re not at rock bottom, but you’re not really living either
Picture men’s mental health as a spectrum. At one end, a man who’s suicidal, who’s had enough. At the other, the guy who’s fully optimised, up at 4am, cold water, breathwork, killing it. Most blokes aren’t at either end. They’re bobbing about in the middle, and nobody talks about the middle because it doesn’t look like a problem.
James put it better than we could: imagine you’re swimming in the sea, and the sea is life. The waves knock you under, you fight to keep your head above water, and eventually you get a bit of a doggy paddle going. You’re okay. You’re breathing. But you’re not swimming anywhere.
A lot of men spend years right there. treading water and calling it fine.
The brave face is doing more harm than you think
The stoic look, the “yeah, I’m alright,” the cracking-on. There’s nothing wrong with that in a moment, sometimes it’s exactly what gets you through the day. But when the brave face stops being a moment and becomes your only setting, it chips away at you, bit by bit by bit. And here’s the part that catches men out: a lot of the time, you can’t even name what’s wrong.
You’ve got everything anyone could point at and want, and you still feel flat, and you don’t know why. That not-knowing isn’t a failure. It’s the starting point.
“Men just need to talk more”... cheers, very helpful
It’s one of the most frustrating things you’ll hear, and it’s frustrating precisely because it’s true but useless. A lot of men don’t know how to talk about the stuff they need to talk about. A lot of men haven’t got anyone who’ll actually listen.
So you’re left with a problem... you know you should, you don’t know how, you don’t know who and so you don’t. Telling a bloke to “just talk” without showing him how is like handing someone a map with no roads on it.
If change feels too big, make it stupidly small
There’s a reason you feel overwhelmed when you think about sorting yourself out. Picture a ladder where the rungs are spaced too far apart, you reach for the next one, you can’t get to it, so you freeze, and then you quit. And then you file it away in the suitcase of stories:
“See, I tried, no good.”
So what if you made the task smaller? And then smaller again? At some point it gets so small and so seemingly meaningless that there’s genuinely no reason you can’t do it. One phone call on Tuesday.
That’s it. Make the call. Then the next thing reveals itself. You don’t change your whole life in one weekend with Tony Robbins. You change it one daft little rung at a time.
The most powerful thing you can do is just decide
Johnny tells a story in this episode about climbing in Morocco. Altitude sickness, the worst day of his life on the side of a mountain, falling behind the group, just hoping it would magically sort itself out. And an ex-Special Forces fella turns to him and basically forces him to choose: up or down, mate.
Decide.
Making the decision didn’t make the climb any easier, it was still torture, three steps and stop, three steps and stop. But hoping things get better on their own was never a plan. And here’s the twist: on a different mountain, Kilimanjaro, he didn’t make the summit. Got carried down like a baby. And that was the brave call, because it wasn’t the right mountain for him to die on. Sometimes the courage isn’t pushing to the top. Sometimes it’s turning round and climbing the right mountain for you.
By not deciding, you’re still deciding, you’re just handing it over to chance, and you don’t know what chance is going to give you.
So, what now?
That’s the whole point of this show, we go and sit in that grey area, honestly, with no one pretending they’ve got it all figured out. We’re two blokes exploring it, having a laugh, getting some of it wrong.
The invitation from episode one is dead simple: make one honest decision about who you want to be as a man. Then take the smallest possible step toward it. That’s it. That’s the start of the adventure.
Listen to Episode 1 of Men Behaving Honestly: “The One About Honesty” on Spotify, or find it wherever you get your podcasts via menbehavinghonestly.com.
It’s honest, it’s funny, and it might be the most useful 45 minutes you give yourself this week.
If you’re closer to the edge of that spectrum than you’d ever tell anyone, please talk to someone today. In the UK you can call Samaritans free, any time, on 116 123. You don’t have to be in crisis to reach out, that’s rather the point.
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