Confronting the Emptiness in the Hearts of Men

Note: This is not a tract about religion or religious belief, although the phrase “emptiness in the hearts of men” is often applied this way. However, spirituality may be a significant factor.

A few additional clarifications are in order. Let us agree that both men and women suffer from emptiness at times. Both are related to a patriarchal society that routinely denies their fundamental humanity. You the reader are very likely on the short end of a domination stick that is used to keep you in line. But the gendered origins are quite different, just as the experiences of men and women are different.

Men’s lives follow a certain trajectory. As children, we learn about ourselves, we assume a certain gender, and we face considerable peer trauma that leaves indelible marks. As young men we are busy finding our way, building a profession and experimenting with romantic interests. Moving into middle age, many of us are supporting families, learning to be fathers and watching our elders grow frail. Later in life, we move beyond work and find fresh creativity in the form of art, gardening or being a grandparent.

Of course there are many variations on this trajectory. The one that is most obvious? Some men do not live long enough to realize the joys of later life. Death is a constant presence once we make it past the young adult years. This is as it should be. Life is precious and precarious. It should not be squandered or taken for granted.

The Early Years

We humans have the longest childhood of any of our nearest evolutionary relatives. As infants we are completely dependent on parental care. As young children, we attend most carefully to our peer groups, working hard to fit in, assuming certain traits and suppressing others as the price of admission. Once past puberty and into the teen years, we begin to think of ourselves as sexual beings. Sexual hormones pervade our still-developing brains and we learn about attraction, rejection and what is considered acceptable gendered behavior.

Boyhood is the cauldron in which men are formed. Some parents begin the gender-influencing project by teaching male toddlers and preschoolers how to play and interact as boys should. Then as prepubescent children, peer groups form and quickly take over the role of gender enforcers, teaching boys how to behave, how to relate, and about all the traits that must be suppressed. Prominent among these are any diversions from the heterosexual norm.

The early teen years are a time when most boys become curious about their own gender identity. According to a CDC survey of 17,508 students in 2021, approximately 25 percent of teen boys and girls identified as something other than heterosexual. This included 12.2 percent who identified as bisexual, 5.2 percent as questioning. 3.2 percent as gay or lesbian and 3.9 percent as other. But while things may be changing, the challenge for boys as they begin to identify as gay or questioning is how to cope with severe bullying from their peers. The bullying is most serious during middle school (elementary years seven and eight), and the beginning of secondary school, for most children ages thirteen to fifteen.

What are the traits that boy-bullies demand suppressed? Emotions (only anger is acceptable), touching (other than during a sports game), acting or looking gay, showing weakness or fear, asking for help, treating girls and women as equal human beings (rather than as property or sex objects). To be clear, bullies will seek out any weaker boy to pick on, and for whatever reason they choose. This includes any quirk, habit or neurological issue that stands out.

The result is that many boys are harassed for years, from elementary school all the way through secondary school, often by the same bullies. While we have seen some small efforts to address this situation, generally the resulting trauma is not accurately perceived by school administrators nor taken seriously by parents. Instead, it is left unresolved and potentially dangerous as the bullied boy becomes a man.

Counterpoint. There is some indication that Gen X and Millennial parents may be intentionally avoiding gender stereotypes and are helping their young children grow toward whatever gender they choose. It is also true that some male children appear to avoid the bullying trap either through overtly nerd-like behavior or because they offer some other “extreme” public facade, for example, they display highly feminine gay behavior. Finally, right-wing conservatives will likely deny that there is anything wrong with boys learning to be men within these traditionally gendered stereotypes.

Young Men

Young men, whom we may identify as ages 18 to 34, must negotiate a minefield of options, decisions and self-awareness as they leave home, begin careers, and search for meaningful relationships. These young people face rates of loneliness much higher than any other gender or age group, according to a Gallup survey covering 2023–2024:

“Based on aggregated data from 2023 and 2024, 25% of U.S. men aged 15 to 34 said they felt lonely a lot of the previous day, significantly higher than the national average of 18% and the total for young women, also 18%.”

Loneliness combined with unresolved childhood trauma is a formula that often leads to depression, anger, regret and hatred, depending on one’s experiences and influences. These are heavy hearts for these young men to endure. The typical young man is also on his own for the first time since leaving his family of origin and is ready to make his way in the world.

Young men may try to hold onto friendships from secondary school or college, and possibly make new friends, all the while wading through the detritus of stoic past promises and manly restrictions that interfere with their ability to make and sustain friendships.

Many young men turn to social media to provide a kind of idealized family. From the user’s perspective, here is a domain in which all bets are off, and they may speak their minds and align themselves as friends and brothers with content creators who offer substantive positions on many of the challenges young men face. Many by this time have developed disdainful, distorted and antagonistic relations with young women, and it is on social media that they may find other young men who agree with them.

Such experiences may be further complicated by career dissatisfaction, the sense that a young man encounters when his work does not measure up to his expectations. He may experience a loss of purpose and a lack of fulfillment in employment, in part because he has been raised to believe that careers make the man.

Compensatory activities at this age are likely to include excessive drug use, sexual exploration and fantasy, and sexual conquests with varying degrees of consent, and the notion (probably suppressed) that women exist for a man’s sexual satisfaction.

The other major compensation at this age is becoming a full-on member of one of the many manosphere programs. For the most part these openly express and support the extremist wing of the patriarchal domain, playing on young men’s loneliness and sense of alienation from work, family and romance. But the proposed solutions likely involve denigrating women, blaming women for the youthful challenges almost all young men confront, and encouraging the nice young man next door to adopt misogyny, hatred and sometimes violence as his solutions to life’s challenges.

Why are the manosphere programs described here as “compensatory?” Contrary to popular belief, most young men delve into these programs in their teen years, but experimentally, and for the most part, they are not ready to sign-up as full-on members until they become young adults. By this time, they have been battered by transitioning out of the parental home, finding employment, coping with housing and roommates, and engaging in sexual activities which generally fall short of a young man’s expectations. Anger is the predominant form of emotional response.

Counterpoint. This scenario is generally much worse for young men of color. All too often they have experienced dysfunctional families with missing fathers, strung-out older siblings and the lure of violent gangs which serve as alternative families. Similarly, upper middle class chads or confident white boys may perceive their worlds as arenas seemingly designed to help them learn the art of bossing others around.

The Middle Age Man

Most young men transitioning to middle age life are unprepared. This happens because stoic, independent attitudes prevent them from learning from prior generations. Instead they struggle along with peers working very hard to keep their feet on the ground. They were offered only a vague notion of what happens next: marriage or committed partnership, children, a home in the suburbs, and suddenly enormous bills to pay.

Some men are seduced by women who only want a child of their own, and they find it particularly easy to manipulate a man who very much wants the whole family, children, and home scenario. For our purposes, we can identify middle aged men as roughly 35–60 years of age. Admittedly, this is a broad span of years, but it is useful because for most men, these are the years when things begin to get comfortable and then go disastrously wrong: divorces, custody battles, loss of career positions, business failures, the loss of loved ones, psychological instability, and so on.

Many men who manage to sustain healthy marriages or domestic partnerships are often squeezed between taking care of children and aging parents simultaneously. And yet they muddle through, struggling mightily, many misled by the domineering power brokers who suggest to them that “you are only as old as you feel.”

Those who own the means of production or secured offshore production and the importing of goods and services maintain a variety of tools by which to stimulate this middle men group to continue purchases of specialty goods as a means of distraction. Entertainment products such as sports cars, boats and tickets to high-end sport franchises. Even social media exists for both commercial purposes and to enlist the average man into cycles of triviality that feel like connection, but in fact only serve to distract from political engagement.

For the most down and out middle aged men, there is always pornography as an inexpensive means of keeping their spirits up, recovering from divorce and managing the catastrophic experience of feeling victimized by family court. With porn, a middle aged man is only a few minutes away from an engrossing fantasy and a few moments of bliss.

Even pensioner support is provided as a lure to keep middle aged men working hard and fitting in so as to achieve ever higher levels of responsibility, leadership and productivity. These men manage the many companies owned by the one percent who have secured the means of production. The vague unhappiness that pervades these men’ s lives can then be monetized into politically-focused religion, morality-based hatred and blame toward the opposite gender, the purchasing of firearms, and the warmongering spirit needed to reset the national attention from time to time.

Counterpoint. Once again, this scenario is generally much worse for middle-aged men of color. For men who have negotiated the many barriers designed to keep them down, including poverty, prison and gang warfare, many remain curious about their own identities. Have they become successful white folks? Doubtful. Similarly, we should acknowledge that many middle-aged men do not believe that they have endured the kinds of suffering depicted here. They will argue that their lives have gone smoothly. Is this accurate or just another trick of patriarchy? Hard to say.

Late Adulthood

For men who survive the middle age years, they emerge into late adulthood, ages 60–85, like war veterans recovering from a variety of injuries, and with a host of bad memories they try very hard to forget. Like everything else in a patriarchal society, these bad memories serve to maintain a proper and legitimate social order. They warn men to temper their expectations, especially as they approach retirement, and to normalize the persistent sense of failure in life.

Next to young men, late adulthood men experience the most serious loneliness of their lives. But by this time it has morphed into a kind of existential loneliness fueled by sorrow, regret and grief, all of which the late adulthood man has experienced directly.

Even if a man is prepared financially to transition to retirement, and most are not, the specter of being separated from one’s work peers is frightening. Rarely do work friends make the transition over to retirement and manage to remain friends. At this stage, men begin to question the meaning of their lives, experience a spiritual void, and confront the emptiness that has burdened their hearts for some time.

But all is not lost. This is an opportunity for men to re-order their lives, take on new challenges and build new friendships. If they are motivated, and willing to get past the bad memories. If the latter is not achieved, then these elder men will become bitter and hopeless. On the contrary, if a man in his 60s allows himself to “still feel young,” then perhaps he may avoid the profound sense of hollowness or lack of purpose that is often felt despite material success or personal achievements in the past.

The truth is that late-stage patriarchy has little use for elderly men except perhaps as grandparents. In this role, they tend to help raise children and introduce them to the same patriarchal expectations to which the child’s parents are committed.

In counterpoint, there are also those elder men who assume creative roles in the arts, in writing, and in community leadership. These men are the troublemakers of modern life. They nip at the edges of the massive grand ballroom of patriarchy, leaving their names scratched into the outer edges of the foundation. If they are lucky, their efforts will catch the attention of the young men who are better positioned to make significant changes in society.

Connection versus Emptiness

“Is this it?” Whether just starting out or following years of contributing, men of all ages routinely ask themselves this question. It is the sense that there is more to life than one has experienced.

It is important to state that a sense of emptiness is not necessarily depression, although the two are sometimes related. Nor does emptiness imply suicidal thoughts. Quite the opposite. Asking this simple question indicates that a person is alive and thinking beyond the edges of lived experience.

Inner emptiness is the sense that one is missing something crucial and life-sustaining. It stems from the loss of purpose and contribution, a profound feeling or purposelessness, or a spiritual void. Such inner reflections tend to arise at each life transition, and are especially intense for men.

Men are so accustomed to being the providers and contributors that anything that disrupts this self-image can trigger what is often called the “shadow dance.” Here we have a disconnect between ego and shame. Men have taken success as the defining feature of themselves; this is ego. Whereas emotional struggles or shame lurk just beneath the surface. But instead of acknowledging the dance, many men are so disturbed by the disconnect that they seek distractions like social media, porn or mind-altering substances.

To counteract the disturbing effects of the “shadow dance” we must acknowledge that this is a normal and even strategic approach to life’s uncertainties. Emptiness builds when we ignore the journey’s hardships and pretend that “we’ve got this” as if it is a point of pride. Other counter actions we may take include building genuine connections with other men, finding ways to engage in purposeful actions, and reconnecting with a spiritual life.

Ultimately we may counteract emptiness by engaging in life, a full life that includes joy, sadness and deep connections with others. If your individualism is getting in the way, it may be time to stow it and move on.

*********If you are in crisis or have thoughts of suicide, call now:*********

Previously published on Substack. Want to see more writing like this? Or if you would like to support the Shine a Light Men’s Project, please consider buying the author a cup of coffee.

Vic Caldarola is the founder and lead facilitator of the Shine a Light Men’s Project, a men’s mindfulness program, and a member of the Still Water Mindfulness Practice Center. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.