If You Can’t Read A Book, Read The Room.

Male loneliness is not the absence of people in our lives. It’s the presence of people that we cannot talk to about our struggles.

Sometimes we overthink these things. That there is some future out there that rewards men for being men. Look, the reality is you will have to familiarize yourself with your favourite chair in the house because that will probably be your best friend in the sunset of your life.

See the older men in your life. 

Most of their friends are dead or ailing. They’ve been discarded for younger men with complex ideas for modern days. Their clothes are worn-in, belt fraying, and their shoes are nondescript. They don’t even remember the last time they saw an unfamiliar face or spoke to someone new. 

This isn’t only for the grandfathers and uncles in your neighbourhood. The men who were board chairmen, CEOs, and captains of industry are all folded away in their homes or in ceremonial non-executive director roles. Time is unforgiving. 

More so to men because they spend their entire life sacrificing themselves at the altar of being a strong, silent provider. 

Let’s check in again in 2055, some thirty odd years from now. Nobody cares if you have talk-time on your phone or need your diaper changed. They haven’t called you in weeks and you’re wearing the same belt you wore decades ago to Sean Tembo’s inauguration. 

This is a reality most men are unwilling to admit. That their long hours in the loneliness of provision today are rewarded with more hours of loneliness after provision tomorrow. 

 ight now, you’re hopefully in the prime of your life. Earning, physically capable and able to feed yourself. And you’re rightfully expending all these capabilities to make life better for the people in your life. 

But when you can’t stand up to take your medicine, your children will be living their lives, your partner probably dead or entrenched in social or church activities, friends buried, family being family, and former workmates likely dead or in the hospital. You’ve seen this movie before, and you’ve already got a starring role, brother. 

Even when they’re having drinks with friends at the bar, men are lonely. There’s just something about male loneliness that cannot be filled by weekend chills or five-a-side football. It’s there, feasting on your fate, dining with your destiny. 

You might want to start putting away some money for your fuel, talk-time, clothes and food in your later life. Not your pension – you know who gets to enjoy that, no? Right after you’re buried in the new clothes nobody could buy for you when you were still ticking. 

Today is a tough read. I know. It’s June. But men these days think their fate will be different from that of their grandfathers and fathers. We have to get smarter than society, gents. 

Get going today on the finances, habits, hobbies, and friendships with other men that will tide you over when everybody leaves you alone to say thank you for being there for them.