Transcript 0:00 This is Against the Fade, a podcast for men who refuse to fade in midlife. And I'm Jonathan. Think back to when you were a kid. There was probably a man you watched, your dad maybe, an older brother, an uncle, a coach. 0:11 And you didn't just listen to what he told you. 0:13 You watched what he did, how he carried himself, how he handled it when something went wrong, the way he stood, the way he worked, the way he treated other people around him. 0:21 And you copied it, probably without even knowing you were doing it. You picked up how he laughed, how he shook a hand, what he did when he was angry or tired or scared. 0:30 Some of us are still running his patterns today, the good ones and the bad ones, forty years later. That's how it works for boys. We don't become men from a lecture. 0:38 We become men by watching one and quietly deciding that's how it's done. So here's the thing I've been thinking about lately. Somewhere along the line, the camera turned around. We're not that boy in the memory anymore. 0:50 We're the man somebody else is watching. Most of us think the work we're doing in midlife is private. 0:55 We're trying to get our health back, strengthen our marriages, and figure out what we're even doing with the back half of our lives. That feels like our own business. 1:03 And a lot of us are fighting that battle on three fronts at once. There's the physical valley, where the strength and the energy and the health quietly slip away from us. 1:11 There's the social valley, where the friendships thin out, and we end up more alone than we'd ever admit. And then there's the valley of meaning, where the sense of purpose that used to pull us out of bed goes soft. 1:20 Climbing out of those valleys feels like a private fight, but it isn't. Because when a man does that work, he becomes something. He becomes a man of character. 1:28 And a man of character, just by living in front of younger men, is setting a bar. He's showing them what's possible, whether he meant to or not. Now, I want to be careful here because there's a trap in what I just said. 1:39 If you start getting strong and getting right just so younger men will look up to you, you've already lost it. That's performance. And men can smell performance from a mile away, especially the young ones. 1:50 So let me be clear about the order. We do this valley work for ourselves, for our own life, for our own health, the people right in front of us, our wives, our kids, our closest friends. That's reason enough. 2:03 That's the whole reason. We don't need another one. But here's what I've come to believe. When we do that work for the right reasons, something spills over the edges. 2:12 It doesn't stay contained in our own body, in our own house. The psychologists have a word for this stage in life. It's called generativity, the pull a man feels in midlife to pour himself into what comes after him. 2:23 Turns out, that's not a weakness or a distraction. That might be the most important work we do, and the simplest version of it is right under our own roofs. The habits we build don't stay ours. 2:33 Our kids are watching what we eat, how we move, whether we drink to cope, whether we quit. We're modeling it every single day, the good and the bad, without saying one word about it. 2:43 And it's not just the physical stuff anymore. 2:45 They're watching how we are on our phones, whether we can put it down, how we talk to people we disagree with online, whether we go looking for a fight or what we let into our own heads through that screen. 2:55 And we don't have to father anyone. We don't have to be a mentor to anyone. We just have to become men of character. The rest takes care of itself. 3:03 But we have to be honest about something because this is where it goes wrong for a lot of us. The example isn't the body. We've all been sold that lie. 3:11 Some guy with the perfect physique, shirt off, selling us a program and a worldview. And then you find out what he's actually like, how he treats people, what's going on underneath. 3:20 Turns out, the body was hiding a hollow man or worse. So if a younger man is reading us and all he can read is that we look good, we haven't set a high bar for him. We've handed him the same lie that got sold to us. 3:31 The example is the character underneath. The body's part of it, but it's also how we treat people who can't do anything for us. 3:37 Whether we kept our word, whether we have real friends or just went quiet and alone, whether we're chasing something that matters or just killing time. That's why this takes all three valleys, not one. 3:47 A man who only fixed the physical and left the other two empty isn't setting a high bar. He's just one more guy who looked the part, and we've all got enough of those to follow already. 3:55 And here's why this matters more right now than it may have when we were boys. A lot of younger men today don't have what we had. Richard Reeves, a researcher who studies this stuff seriously, lays out the numbers. 4:05 One in three boys and young men don't have an adult male he can turn to for help with school or relationships. One in four doesn't have a single male mentor he can go to about his future. So sit with that for a second. 4:16 A quarter of them facing everything that's coming with no positive male role model in their life. So picture a young man with that hole in his life. He's still going to figure out what a man is. 4:26 He has to, but he's figuring it out from whatever he can find. And what's the loudest, easiest thing to find? It's what the algorithm pushes at him all day long. 4:34 It's some guy on a screen selling him anger and a shortcut. That's the competition. That's who's setting the standard for him right now. And it's not really a fair fight. 4:42 A stranger on a phone versus a real man he can actually see. The screen only wins by default. It only wins because too often the real man, the one that's right there in his life, has gone quiet or gone soft or faded. 4:53 So let's go back to where we started. To you, as a boy, watching a man and quietly deciding that's how it's done, that wasn't a special case. That's just how boys become men. We don't hand them a manual. They watch us. 5:05 They copy what they see. And most of the time, none of us, them or us, even knows it's happening. It's not a lecture they remember. 5:12 It's the thousands of small things they absorb without anyone saying a word, which means we don't actually get to decide whether we're an example or not. So sit with that for a second because it's the whole thing. 5:22 We don't get to opt out. The young men around us, our sons, our nephews, the kid at work, the ones we'll never even meet, they're reading us right now. And they're not reading the man we mean to be. 5:32 They're reading the man we actually are, the one who showed up today. So we're already setting the standard, every one of us. The only question is, how high are we setting that standard? That's the heavy part. 5:43 There's no version of this where we sit it out. We're setting the standard high or we're setting it low, but we're setting it today at whatever height we're actually living at. 5:51 And here's the other side of that, the part worth holding on to. It means the work is never wasted. 5:56 Every hard morning, every workout we didn't want to do, every time we kept our word when it would have been easier not to, we thought that was just for us. It was never just for us. 6:06 It was always flowing downhill to someone, whether we saw them or not. And it doesn't stop with them. The young man who learns from us, he becomes the standard for the one coming up behind him. 6:14 So set it high now, and we're not just shaping one kid. We're starting something that trickles down a line that we'll never see the end of. For me, some of that is faith. 6:22 The idea that we're stewards of something bigger than us, that we're meant to leave it better than we found it. Maybe that's where you are too, and maybe it isn't. 6:29 And that's all right because every man, faith or no faith, knows the feeling of wanting to leave the people behind him better than he found them. That pull is in all of us. 6:38 So here's what I'm wrestling with this week, and I'd ask you to wrestle with it too. 6:42 Take an honest look at the standard we're setting right now, not the one we think we're setting, the one a younger man would actually read off of how we're living. 6:50 Then take the worst of it, the thing that the audit turns up that we already know is the problem, and go fix that one thing this week. The audit is the awareness. The fix is the climb. And I'm doing this audit with you. 7:00 Every one of us has a valley we've been avoiding. So that's all for today. If you found this information useful today, please subscribe to the channel. 7:08 And if you want more information or go deeper on some of these topics, subscribe at againstthefade.com. This is Against the Fade. Don't fade.
