Self-Worth Isn't Really About Me
Because meaningfulness is only completed with other people
☝️Thanks for being here. You can read, listen along, or simply listen if you’d prefer.
This essay is part of an unplanned trilogy. My hope is that each stands on its own, but if you’d like to start at the beginning, check out these two first:
Meaning and others
When Taylor Ashton Ellwood invited me to speak with him on a Substack LIVE event about success, it was in reference to an essay he’d written in response to an essay I’d written.
A realization hit me mid-conversation.
None of what we do matters in a vacuum, especially our investments in self-worth.
Ever since then, I keep wondering to myself and asking others if this is true.
It’s other people who make any investment worth pursuing. It’s the ways our invested resources are reflected back to us through the experience of others that make our efforts truly gratifying.
This is where success alone can fail to deliver. It needs an exchange, like creating jobs, connecting people, mentoring others to do the same, charity, or some such pathway to connection and reflection with others.
Referring to my last essay on self-worth as a diversified investment strategy, when we see how our investments positively impact the lives of others, that’s an undeniable source of self-worth. It’s what can give any investment of money, attention, or energy… meaning.
Determining self-worth is about defining meaningfulness for ourselves as individuals, and I believe it always includes others, even when it doesn’t seem to.
This further illustrates the difficulty of isolation, and in the interests of this Substack, the isolation felt by men. It’s a problem not only of one’s community or lack thereof, but also the meaningfulness of how our communities reflect the investments we make.
The lonely man problem
This comes into focus when we consider men’s isolation. Folks call it the loneliness epidemic. This freighted term attempts to capture a concern that we can all share. It’s about isolation, but it’s more complicated than that. Isolation is often just one log on this pyre.
This incendiary circumstance is not just a problem for men, because men live in the world we all share. These men might live in solitude, but they often act out in the presence of others. Similar to how femicide and sexual abuse of women is a us problem, men’s isolation is a problem for all of us, like it or not.
In both cases, the victims suffer in an intolerable solitude, and when there is rupture, the emotional shrapnel can affect everyone around them. What’s even crazier is the Venn crossover between the two.
When the match is inevitably lit, because life can be trigger-y, isolated men are more likely to act out violently, not just toward themselves, but toward partners and others.
Research conducted by Boston College and Georgetown University illustrates this by what COVID taught us about isolation and its effect on intimate partner violence (IPV):
Loneliness is not only acutely painful in its own right; it also inflicts a range of long lasting health-related harms, and can heighten survivors’ vulnerability to coercive control and intimate partner violence (IPV), creating a vicious cycle that may continue long after the cessation of COVID-related policies.
Peek under the hood of this research only if you feel brave. Suffice it to say, we can’t simply sit back and let anyone suffer in isolation like it’s their problem, certainly not men. And wagging our fingers is pointless.
The even harder detail to parse is that not all time alone is bad for men.
The Hero’s Journey
A friend recently took a very solo, life-affirming, and meaningful journey on a motorcycle through the northernmost parts of Scotland. There was nobody there to share this with him, and in many ways, that’s what made it so meaningful for him.
Lest I betray his trust by telling too much of his story, let me share my own. In 2018, only months into our time in Mexico, I told my wife that I would be going on a ten-day silent retreat. She declined to raise her hand and join me. That was fine. I was determined to go.
She would later share with me that leading up to it, she felt a mixture of feelings. She was concerned for my safety, and for her own loneliness, but also impressed with my bravery. Her word, not mine. I didn’t see my actions as brave. I saw them as necessary.
Before I’d left on this journey, I’d already caused a ripple in the life of someone else. This would come back to me after the retreat, which was strangely isolating. It’s ten days of silence. There are other people, but one is asked not to make eye contact, even. It’s a shared act of solitude, at least until day ten, when one finally meets the person that they’ve been bunking with.
All the while I was away, Cristina kept a journal of her days to hold me close. And when I finally returned home, I’d like to think I unfolded something about this person I seem to be. I may have left as a personal mission in development, but the value of that was the ways in which I would relate to my wife, my friends, and my family… anyone, really.
There is an arc of meaning that is completed when it’s shared with others, even when the labor of the journey is shouldered by one. It’s in that resonance that the arc feels most punctuated.
It’s hard to imagine it meaning so much in an empty world, and if that’s not compelling enough, consider that isolation is the most time-honored form of torture for the imprisoned. People die in solitary confinement. Outside the Buddhas of the world—those who’ve trained and tested the limits of solitude—the rest of us tend to find isolation maddening.
It’s not just the presence of others
The historic Buddha, born a prince, left his very privileged and comfy home to sit alone in a cave for an indefinite amount of time. He stayed there for something like seven years, nearly dying in the process, but eventually achieving enlightenment for his efforts.
Talk about a solo journey, giving life a little meaning. When I left my career of ten years in the fitness industry, I wish I could report that it was in search of enlightenment or even meaning.
I just wanted to spend more time partying. So I did. For seven months in Costa Rica, I partied until I realized that any meaning my life had was back in my former career.
Unwilling to go backward, I sobered up, found a support group, and started writing. That led to writing SEO content and eventually marketing emails.
But the work felt empty, and writing as an income had stripped the meaning from what writing provided. After a slog through purpose discovery work, a career in coaching called me to step up.
What gives my life meaning is connecting deeply with individuals so that we can solve problems together, or at least that was how I originally wrote my purpose statement.
Connecting. With individuals. Together.
It’s no wonder I see this puzzle this way.
Unfolding meaning through this
What I now think I stumbled onto in that conversation with Taylor, what my friend’s story of a motorcycle journey and my retreat further illuminated, is that meaning is both the unfoldment of our unseen parts and the ways we share them with the people in our lives.
There is no one without the other, but the cycle of meaning is completed when the part that seems like a “me” connects with the parts that seem to be a “them,” when we all break bread and share tales of what’s transpired.
It’s not the accomplishments of a successful friend in and of themselves, but the sharing of those accomplishments with others. It’s the battles won, the allegiances forged, and what has come of it all. It’s the communion felt in a community we’ve come back to after a hard solo journey in solitude.
This is how the feeling of meaningfulness unfolds alongside our own process of unfoldment, and that of other people as they witness it.
The invitation is for us to partake in both. Go out and do scary shit, then come back to share it with others, inspire, and celebrate. Tell stories of what you find. Share what you notice. Ask others what they think.
To the extent that meaningfulness can find a durability, this is the way.
Thanks for being here,
~Damon
Tolomen
Men need a space where they can feel normal and seen with other men.
The therapy-free men’s group I facilitate is still looking for other men who are skeptical about men’s groups. We have room for at least two more men.
It’s $30 a month. Please DM me if you or someone you know could benefit.
This may be true of all humans, but I think it is particularly true for men: we feel more worth-while and valuable when we're useful to others. We're made to be useful to others. We can't be useful to others if we aren't engaged with others. We can't be useful to others if we don't cultivate useful skills that we can offer others. There's a "toxic" stereotype surrounding the egotistical man who thinks highly of himself and his skills, but genuinely useful men also tend to be humble, because they've been humbled by what happens when you do something you want to be good at for the first time and get your ass kicked by a lack of skillfulness.
I've been staying with a friend who has a teenage son. She's been single parenting for years, and he stays in his room playing computer games for literally entire days. I'm treading a thin and precarious line in my conversations with her because I know how much that behavior is crippling his future sense of self-worth by tying up his free time in such a frankly worthless activity. It worries me, and I know everyone is doing the best they can, but so much in our culture right now makes it way too easy to stay isolated. Comfort and convenience is killing men in so many ways. I draw a red line straight to tech.
I say all of this because there's a simple equation that I've developed over the years that's a fast track to meaning for men especially: be useful + be connected = experience meaning. Especially in the first half of life, this is critical. The second half of life is good for cracking that shell of identity that's tied to usefulness to make room for deeper spirituality oriented toward an exploration of who you really are in the scale of the cosmos.
That's it for my rant. Thanks for the thoughtful and beautifully written pieces. You're a great example of a good, useful, and connected man, Damon. I'm glad to know you.
Great article and a thoughtful reflection. One of the realizations I've had in light of my latest substack experiment is how important it is to engage with the community aspect of this platform.
Meaning doesn't exist in a solo container. It's really easy to get non-engaged in today's world and its really important to make the effort to engage!
I appreciate your engagement and what has come out of our mutual reflections of each other's writing.