Op have you ever read any zen poems or quotes? Like Buddha, Dogen, Kobayashi Issa (on the Goodreads website). Those helped me a lot in my time of suffering and self-actualization.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

(Buddha)

Men are killing themselves in record numbers, especially young men. You think the answer can be simplified to, "push that chit way down and man up"?

Yeah. I mean back when we did that, we weren't killing ourselves as much. Maybe it'll work better. Maybe not. I just know it works for me to not dwell.

Modern times require modern solutions. How many of our grandads ever touched a weight, were rich, and had large social followings? That's what it takes these days.

What are you talking about bro lol

After WWII, any able bodied male could walk into the nearest factory, give the manager a firm handshake, and he had a good job that could provide for a family for life. Then he went down to the local sock hop or soda jerk and picked himself out a looks matched wife. Houses were $12 and there was plenty of time for hobbies and hanging out at the VA with your war buddies. My gramps has been retired for THIRTY GODDAMN YEARS from his job at the electric power plant with full pension and 100% free healthcare.

Look at life now for young men - it's a completely overwhelming clusterfukk in comparison. Telling men to bottle up like it's 1950 ignores the reality of modern life expectations.

After WWII, any able bodied male could walk into the nearest factory, give the manager a firm handshake, and he had a good job that could provide for a family for life. Then he went down to the local sock hop or soda jerk and picked himself out a looks matched wife. Houses were $12 and there was plenty of time for hobbies and hanging out at the VA with your war buddies. My gramps has been retired for THIRTY GODDAMN YEARS from his job at the electric power plant with full pension and 100% free healthcare.

Look at life now for young men - it's a completely overwhelming clusterfukk in comparison. Telling men to bottle up like it's 1950 ignores the reality of modern life expectations.

This is pretty much the heart of what I am getting at. The science on this is pretty murky, but I know of at least a few studies which showed that venting your anger actually just reinforces it. Wouldn't surprise me if the same held for other emotions.

Logically, it is plausible since everytime you recall a memory, you are also reencoding it along with some new data, strengthening its association. If you do this enough, that memory becomes connected to many other memories of your life and becomes centrally important to your consciousness. Then, when that happens, it can become very hard to downplay its emotional significance to you. The trauma will keep being reopened everytime the traumatic memory or anything related to it is recalled.

You’re not the person that should be directing anyone on how to handle their personal issues; you’re broken and filled with excuses.

I read the title and not the OP and not going to read the OP...get help.

Yeah fellas, smash down all your feelings until you completely snap one day in a grocery store over some dumb sh!t like writing a check because you decided to not address why your aren’t ok...don’t shed a tear thou.

i haven't cried in 20+ years. broken arm bone sticking out, compressed spine, funerals anything. man up

Correct. Those of you on ********, try this: find two "friends", one who has under 100 "friends", and one who has at least 1,000 "friends." Now try to have a conversation online with them. You'll notice one will engage with you, the other won't. Now think about what you know about those two people. You'll find that one is emotionally quite stable, and the other one's all over the place, having constant dramas. The ones most connected online are the least connected in person.

But again, it need not be so. For example, my little garage gym is a tribe. When a woman's son died, gym members went to the funeral. One went off to have a baby, and another has gone and done family photographs for them. Two of the women who came here, not content with seeing each-other three times a week, had Saturday morning brunch, too. And so on. It's a voluntary community, and as my wife observed a few months in, you can tell who's going to be around for years in the place by how much they engage with the others.

I have had gym members who suffered from anxiety and depression. They spend a lot of time at the gym on their mobile phones. They do not have brunch. They do not go to anyone's funeral. They don't take pictures of someone's baby, in fact they don't even know someone had a baby.

Some might say that they are unable to connect with others because of their anxiety and depression. But it may also be that they are anxious and depressed because theychoosenot to connect with others. On this forum and elsewhere, I see a lot of people who choose not to connect with others.

Gyms, sports teams, bridge clubs, Masons, churches, book clubs, soup kitchens to volunteer at - there are many places out there to join and contribute to a community and become part of it. Whether you engage with, contribute to and join that community is up to you. It's your choice. You don't sign up and then just hang around awkwardly along the edges and bored, get out your mobile phone. You step on up and contribute. That's manly.

Some have talked about solving problems. The truth is that some problems have no solution but time. If you get the flu, all we can do is make you as comfortable as possible while your body goes through the process. There's no solution to the flu problem, you just have to go through it. But we don't say, "Well I gave you some paracetemol, now I'll leave you to it." We sit with the sick. Likewise those grieving or whatever. If someone's mother just died, there is no solution to his problem. He is going to go through a rough process. You don't have to say or do anything. You just sit with him.

Offering a solution to the problem is what we do because we're uncomfortable with the person's feelings, and the feelings they produce in us. It's alright to be uncomfortable. This applies whether the discomfort is "manly", like camping in the cold or grinding up a heavy weight, or the discomfort is not "manly", like sitting with a guy whose mother just died. Deal with the discomfort, because sometimes problems have no solutions, you just have to ride them through.

You can join or build a tribe. It's up to you. Men take action, they don't sit around saying "society today..."

Men cry when something is honesty emotional like you parents die or something like that. Its sad.

Women cry when they are out of lies and have to face reality that they ****ed up.

So for the privilege of being a part of your "tribe" you charge people $200 a month?