breathe easy

The most successful healthy people are often not the people who love exercise, but who have accepted that the minor unpleasantness of putting in an hour down at the gym will make their lives infinitely better.

Friendship, at least for me and my wife, is a weird balance, because as introverts we have a natural reluctance to going out with people. Left to our own devices, we’d rather nest in at home every evening – we’ve spent time working, we want to relax, going out with people and putting out more energy seems exhausting.

Yet we do it. Because we realize that if we followed our natural instincts all the time, we’d be unhappy in the long run. We need friends. But we can’t just call up our friends when we need them – that’s treating them like tools. So we gotta get our duffs off the couch and say those precious, precious words:

“Wanna hang out?”

We need to reach out and cultivate those relationships in advance, to schedule nights out, to go to events we’re not really thrilled about when we start out – because, like exercise, a lot of the time it actually turns out to be pretty awesome once we’ve started. You feel pumped, you feel jazzed, you feel glad that you went and did it.

A lot of maintaining good friendships is getting past that inertia of “Don’t wanna.” (The other half is knowing which nights you’re absolutely right to spend at home alone.)

Friendships are wonderful, and empowering, but they’re not a free natural resource for most of us. And I think a lot of people wind up lonelier than they should because they’ve got this weird, sitcom-fed idea that friendships just happen – Joey and Monica and Chandler just wind up on the couch at the coffee shop by magic every night.

Whereas the truth about friendships is that those “you wind up in the same place every night” usually only happen when you’re living in the same place, which only really happens in college. Once you’re a grownup, your friends scatter, and you have to chase them down – Joey’s at the cafe every Tuesday for open mic night, and Monica lives on the other side of town but really wants to see that show at the Capitol Theater, and Chandler’s working lots of overtime but hey do you wanna catch a drink when he gets off work at 8?

You have to schedule. You have to go to places with people you’re not 100% comfortable with yet. You have to decide to leave your apartment.

That all takes a certain amount of labor. And you get rewarded big in the end – there’s nothing better about walking into a room and seeing that smile when your buddy shows up and getting that hug and knowing that yeah, this evening was totally worth going out for because you stuck with these people until you had a history together.

The Scran Line on Instagram

A lot of guys think “toxic masculinity” is a demonisation of all things masculine, but there’s a reason why it’s called “toxic masculinity” and not just “masculinity”. In Denmark we have two shows that illustrate the difference clearly.

The first pictures are from a show called “Real Men”. It’s basically about men who are so controlled by toxic masculinity it’s killing them. They refuse to eat greens because ew, real men only eat meat. They drink too much alcohol and drive everywhere because god forbid they do any kind of exercise because that’s gay/womanly. They’re so afraid of looking feminine it’s slowly destroying their lives. The show then tries to teach them a healthier way of life so they can be there for their families, especially their children.

The second set of pictures are from a show called “Shoot and Eat”. It’s a hunting and cooking show in one. The older hunter has to shoot an animal with the help of the younger cook who will then prepare the animal with the help of the hunter. In between they do things like build stuff, try new types of beer, have fun with gadgets, goof around and chill in nature. It’s a celebration of the masculine without the toxic part. They don’t ridicule women and the feminine while they have fun with their man stuff. It’s one of the longest running programs here because it’s popular with women too. You see, women don’t mind men being masculine, they just don’t like toxic macho boys who constantly put women down to feel more important.

Occasionally the young cook will worry a bit about looking feminine but the hunter is having non of that. At one point they had to braid rope to build a bigger thing and the cook asked “Isn’t this a bit girly?” and the hunter just responded “I love braiding. It’s so relaxing” There, drink your beer and shut up, boy.

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