Podcast #993: The Shadows Over Men’s Hearts and How to Fight Them

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. There are a lot of unspoken challenges and hidden battles that face men in modern society. They often manifest themselves in uniquely male malaise where a man feels apathetic, frustrated, cynical and lost. Jon Tyson has thought a lot about the problems men face and has been on the ground trying to help them as a pastor in New York City. In today’s episode, I talked to Jon about the sources of this male angst that he explores as the co-author of a new book, Fighting Shadows, Overcoming 7 Lies That Keep Men From Becoming Fully Alive. Jon and I discuss how men often try to solve their malaise and why those approaches don’t work. We then explore some of the shadows men fight in their lives, including the shadows of despair, loneliness, unhealthy ambition, futility and lust.

Jon offers some advice to overcome these shadows, including sitting around a fire pit with your bros, taking time to develop your telos or aim as a man and injecting a bit more playfulness in your life to counteract grumpy dad syndrome. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/shadows. All right, Jon Tyson, welcome back to the show.

Jon Tyson: Good night, mate. How’s it going? Thank you for having me back on. Always a joy to chat.

Brett McKay: Well, always a pleasure. We had you on last time to talk about the five shifts of manhood. It’s part of a program you do. You got a new book out that you co-authored. It’s called Fighting Shadows, Overcoming 7 Lies That Keep Men From Becoming Fully Alive. You’ve done a lot of work around mentoring and guiding young men into manhood. We’ve had you on the podcast to talk about that, the rites of passage that you’ve developed for your own son, then have also helped other men do with their boys. This book is geared towards grown men. Why did you shift your attention to helping grown men with their lives?

Jon Tyson: Well, to be honest with you, it was just like a giant need that kind of emerged. I had written that book called The Intentional Father, developed the Primal Path curriculum and then a bunch of dads went through it and they said, Hey, as I’m taking my son through this, I realize nobody’s ever taken me through this. And I feel like I’ve got all these holes in my development as a man. There’s all of these areas I’ve never really paid attention to. And there’s all of these things I’m struggling with. And I don’t feel like I have either the perspective or the community to be able to process these. And we just got this overwhelming response, which is do you have anything for men? And I was like, Oh, gosh, not really. And so that started us on a journey several years ago. We started an organization called Forming Men, because you know, men, obviously, they don’t happen by accident, requires an intentional process of formation.

And we worked with that. So we’ve worked with thousands of men over the last few years through that. And we just kept seeing these dominant themes and struggles coming along, that we felt like we wanted to address, which is ultimately what what we did in the book. So yeah, it was a realization that many, many men just didn’t have their own process of development that they had been taken through, and they were looking for something to sort of address the gap. So we took our formation process that we’ve done with young men and try to sort of work for older folks as well. So it’s been really life giving, to be honest with you. I’ve just come from, I’ve been on a bit of a book tour. So I’ve been all over America, from California to the East Coast, and just amazed at the hunger for what it is you do with the Art of Manliness, which is like help men learn to be men in a world that doesn’t either give a spot for that or care about that.

So yeah, it was a gaping need. And it felt like honestly, a bit of a divine invitation to respond to.

Brett McKay: So at the beginning of Fighting Shadows, you all write, a low grade angst seems to have settled over the hearts of men in our world today. How have you seen this angst manifest itself in the men you interact with?

Jon Tyson: Well, it’s based off a Thoreau quote, he said, most men live lives of quiet desperation, unconscious despair, is the phrase he uses. And I think that’s great language. A lot of men can’t quite identify or name what it is they feel. Is it anger? Is it loneliness? Is it frustration? Is it disillusionment, disappointment? And when you can’t name something, it exerts a disproportionate control over you because you don’t know how to fight it. And I don’t think in our culture today, we have many mechanisms for men to process these things. I mean, if a man showed up at work with a blue collar, just you know, like hanging out with the lads, or in a white collar environment, showing up in an office setting, if someone was to say, Hey, how are you doing? And your response was, Well, I’m really struggling in my marriage.

I’m deeply disillusioned with what my life has become after all of these years of commitment. My kids are driving me crazy. And I’m bored and yet sad that I don’t spend enough time with them. I’m really comparing myself to my peers. And I’m slowly drowning in envy and sadness at what my life’s become. No one wants to hear that. You know what I mean? That’s not gonna be welcomed at the bar when you’re chatting with someone, or when you’re going out after work to catch up and it’s not gonna be welcomed in an office. HR is gonna say, Hey, listen, you need to talk to a counselor or someone, this is not appropriate for the workplace. If you’re not a part of a sort of faith community, and sometimes even in a faith community can be very, very lonely because you feel like you’ve got to perform or live up to certain standards, or we’ve lost those organizations in society that men used to belong to, those different organizations. I read some research that in the ’17s and 1800s, 90% of men existed in informal social networks. They were a part of the masons or the honestly, there was hundreds of different options where you could deal with your drama.

Men don’t have that today. They don’t have these places where they can share what’s happening in their hearts. And so I think it manifests itself as frustration, cynicism, unexpected volcanic anger at the people they love, followed by real disappointment that they’re mad at the very people who actually care about them without any kind of outlets to do it. And I think what slowly happens is that men’s hearts get cynical and more and more bitter over time. And then they move to numbing, medicating their pain, their frustration, and then they just slowly sort of fade out. And we see that in America with middle aged men a lot, high rates of depression, deaths of despair amongst men are at an almost epidemic level. 70% of suicides in America are men, because they just kind of feel like what’s the point of another 30 years without hope, a relief mechanism or some cause to give myself to? So I think it’s there. For some folks, it could just be pressure under responsibilities and wondering, will I ever get relief?

And for other men, it feels like despair with which they have no place to turn. I remember hearing David Foster Wallace talk about suicide. Obviously, he was a remarkable author who ultimately took his life. But I’ve been haunted by how he described suicide, which was a death of despair. He said, no person who takes their own life, for the most part wants their life to end. They just want the pain to stop. And like a person who jumps out of a building that is on fire, they don’t wanna jump, they just would rather jump than slowly burn to death. And I think that is a good sort of indicator of how many men feel, there’s like this burning pressure and frustration, edging them out of the light towards the darkness. And they feel like our world is giving them very few mechanisms to be able to respond to it. So I see a lot of that, just talking with men. I’m in New York City, I see a lot just talking with men that I meet in public, I lead a faith community, I see that with people in my congregation. And getting out on the road, like I have been, I see that many men coming up after saying, thank you for naming the thing in my heart, I haven’t known how to describe it. And we use the metaphor of shadows to describe that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, why do you use the metaphor of shadows to describe that angst?

Jon Tyson: Well, I think many people initially do talk about Jung and Jung’s idea of the shadow is, it’s actually, it’s kind of a mind boggling concept. And I think it was one of his keenest insights about human nature. We didn’t channel it primarily off that, we channeled it out of the scriptures. But it’s a really interesting metaphor. It’s taken from the idea of an eclipse. We recently had an eclipse. And an eclipse is where from your vantage point, it feels like the sun disappears. So from your vantage point, it’s like, oh, my gosh, the sun is gone. But we know, due to science, that something has just blocked the sun, the sun is doing fine. Now, if you can imagine 1000 years ago, in a pre-scientific understanding of what was happening with an eclipse, you would have thought the world was ending, like you would literally would have thought, oh, my gosh, this is the apocalypse or something.

And the idea of shadows is basically taken from a passage of scripture, where Christ comes to Peter and says to him, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat, but I’ve prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And that word fail is the word Ekleipo, where we get the word eclipse. And I think it’s an interesting metaphor, even if you’re not a person of faith. Jesus says that Satan’s strategy was to put something between you and the light, so you can’t see the light, and all you’re left with is struggling in darkness. And Jesus says, I’ve prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And I think that’s what happens to a lot of men, their vision of life gets blocked out by a particular struggle. And it seems like there’s nothing in their life, but that struggle. And so we call that living in the shadows, because it feels like the light, the vision, the clarity, your sense of well being is blocked out by a particular issue. So your vision becomes your struggle, and you can’t see beyond it.

So in the book, we talk about seven of these core shadows we see in the hearts of men, there’s many more, it could have been a 20 chapter book. But we try to pick out some of the core themes. And if you talk, how many men do you know, that their life is dominated by struggling in secrecy and shame with a particular issue that feels like it’s taken over their reality. And so we try and talk about what those are, and then how to fight those shadows, which is what the book is about, how do you reposition your perspective, your heart, your life, where you can see the light again and realize life is more than just struggling with a particular issue.

Brett McKay: Oh, so this, you’ve seen this angst that a lot of men have, I’m sure people who are listening to this right now, they might think I’ve definitely felt that. How do men typically try to resolve this angst?

Jon Tyson: I mean, I think there’s a few responses people have, one of them is to try and work harder sort of that, that’s just the sort of like, the busier, push the treadmill faster. And I think when you’re younger, that may work, you can distract yourself with hard work and accomplishments and excitement, getting on a dating app and going out with a bunch of people. And you can sort of manage it or medicate it. I think a lot of folks, I mean, these days are trying to figure out how do I honestly address it? That’s why there’s so much talk about therapy, mental health, being honest about our interior lives. At different moments of history, there’s been these what they call men’s movements. There’s several in the 1800s, 1900s. Robert Bly is probably our most recent men’s movement guy. There was another big faith movement called Promise Keepers. There’s the mankind movement, there’s all these movements. I actually think we’re in the early stages of another one of those, which is men getting together, being honest, opening their hearts, and trying to figure out how do I get something out of life that is more than this?

And so yeah, the hedonism doesn’t seem to work. I mean, the social research, they talk about hedonic hotspots in our brain, and why after the dopamine hits, you actually feel worse than when you were before. So yeah, I think hedonism, escapism, workaholism, when they all end, you’re left with yourself. And you’re left with the same problems. So people, I think, are looking for more than momentary relief, and looking for larger solutions.

One of the shadows you talk about is this idea of despair you’ve mentioned. What do you think are the sources of despair in a man’s life?

I think it’s multifaceted. I think part of it is men feel like they don’t know how to fit as men in the modern world. So somewhere between total apathy and becoming Andrew Tate, men feel like they don’t know how to be a man in the world anymore. They’ve got these instincts, which are backed by social psychology about the differences between men and women. And they feel like the gifts they carry as a man are often perceived as a threat, because men have used those gifts badly. And so I think there’s an inner desire to use what they’ve been given for the sake of others, but they’re not sure how to show up. So I think there’s like a lack of confidence. I think many, many men feel shame. The classic guilt means I’ve done something wrong. Shame says there’s something wrong with me. And so a lot of men refuse to step up or take responsibility because they feel like they don’t have what it takes, or there’s something wrong with them.

And I think a lot of men have sort of like lost their purpose. They feel overshadowed in the modern world. I understand why, but there’s many communities in the world today, not primarily in Western culture, that honor men as they age. They honor their wisdom. They honor their contribution. They honor the lessons they’ve learned. And we live in a world where we prioritize youth over age. We have reduced our perspective on what really matters. And so like a typical middle aged dude feels like he doesn’t have much in front of him or much behind him. And they just sort of don’t know how to be anymore. So there’s a phrase, a biblical phrase, which is the phrase that Jesus uses. It’s the phrase lost. Men feel lost, which means there’s a place they’re supposed to be, but they don’t know how to get there.

And if you’ve ever been lost and been late, you know how stressful it is. You know how disappointing it is. If you’ve got people in the car with you, you feel like a jerk. I’m old enough to remember navigating the roads with a Rand McNally map, no GPS, no help. And if you got lost, you relied on asking other people. It’s very disempowering. It was very, it wasn’t humbling. The difference between being humble and being humiliated. Humble requires agency. It’s a voluntary stepping down. Humiliation says somebody is putting me down against my own consent. You feel humiliated because you cannot navigate where you wanna go. I feel like a lot of men feel like that. I don’t know what a man is. I don’t know what it means to be a man in the modern world. I don’t know the path to get to being a functional man. And again, talking back to those mechanisms don’t work. I’m gonna medicate or I’m gonna map my frustrations onto social causes to try and recover a sense of meaning. There was a fascinating article that the Atlantic did on researching, ’cause I think many, many religious traditions are in decline amongst Generation Z.

And they asked the question, where does all that energy go? And the answer was politics. And so I think we’re trying to deal with our despair by mapping it on trying to get meaning out of social causes, which often makes us more polarized, more angry and only feeds our despair if our particular party or your side doesn’t get in power, we feel like it’s the end. So yeah, it’s there’s a lot happening in the hearts of men, every now that I’ve sort of facilitate these, I wouldn’t call them workshops, we call them events, but we do four day immersions, really getting into men’s hearts. And the things that men sort of confess or open up to or vulnerable about, I don’t look at any man the same anymore. I think what is that man carrying around in his heart, that heaviness, that lack of purpose, that uncertainty, that shame.

And again, I say this, it makes, it produces tremendous compassion, because behind the smiles, and behind the success is often this sense that I haven’t done enough. I’m not enough, and I don’t know how to become enough. And so yeah, that is, I think, a very, very real thing many people are facing.

Brett McKay: And another thing you talk about another source of despair, and you kind of alluded to it, but you really flesh it out in the book is this idea that a lot of men, they don’t have a telos, this is a Greek word means an aim in life. Maybe they had a telos in their 20s and 30s, their telos was go to college, get a job, get married, establish myself. And then once they get to midlife, they’re like, well, now what? Or maybe what happens is the source of despair is they had these aims, young in life, they get to midlife, and they haven’t realized their aim, like those sort of very concrete, call them aims of achievement. And they have despair. And you know, Kierkegaard talks about this, he said, one of the sources of despair is that you have this idea of the self you wanna become, right? I wanna be successful, I wanna have a great family life. And when you don’t achieve that, there’s that gap, and you just you just feel terrible. Like, what am I doing? Like, I’ve wasted my life. But he also said that if you wanna overcome that despair, you have to, I mean…

Kierkegaard, he was a religious philosopher, so he’d say, you have to become, instead of thinking about the self that you wanna become, you have to think about the self that God wants you to become. But I mean, you can apply this to, you know, anybody. It’s like you have to find a telos that’s bigger than yourself.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, Viktor, yeah, Viktor Frankl, I mean, I think his stuff on logotherapy, I mean, that stuff has deeply impacted me. And I feel like that should have a resurgence. I’m really heartbroken about the amount of people I meet who have like, I’ve never read Man’s Search for Meaning. And because that’s the way he survived Auschwitz and the death camps. You know, he basically said, you have to have a vision beyond your current circumstances that pulls hope into your current circumstances. And if you don’t have that, it’s over. If all you are is your current struggle, and there’s nothing beyond this, how do you not give in to despair? And so in his mind, he had started writing the book that I think would ultimately become Man’s Search for Meaning. And he saw himself beyond the death camps, being able to use what he went through to prove his vision of logotherapy.

And one of the things he asked, and he, you know, quotes Nietzsche, which is, you know, you can endure any what, if you have a strong enough why. And that’s getting in touch, you know, logotherapy is meaning therapy. He believed like the point of life is a quest for meaning. But his approach was totally different. Getting back to sort of Kierkegaard’s idea. He says, when you are young, you ask, what do I want from life? But the older you get, the more you realize meaning comes from responding well to what life asks of you. And he connects meaning and responsibility. Men are at their best when they’re accepting responsibility and they find meaning within it. And I think that’s a huge part of it. You’ve gotta have a vision beyond your current season about the kind of man you wanna be in order to find meaning in your current season. So yeah, I think we’ve gotta get beyond the pain and pleasure of our moment.

Ask those bigger questions, spend time doing the real work about what we think life is asking of us. And then beginning to sort of plot beyond that.

Brett McKay: And I think the challenge there for men, particularly if you’re in midlife, is making time for that, that introspection and that questioning, ’cause you just get so busy just trying to balance all the things you got going in your life, but you have to be intentional about this. Like I’m gonna carve out, maybe it’s a weekend where I just go by myself and I’m gonna sort through this stuff.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, and you know, so I have two responses to that. I 100% agree. One of them is like one of my mentors said to me, he said, Jon, if you don’t rest, he said this, rest is in your future. You will either live a life of Sabbath and renewal, or you will burn out and be forced to take a rest. But I promise you, you cannot live like you’re living. Rest is in your future. And I would say the same thing. You either take time for this or this will be forced on you by crisis. And the truth is, because we do so little of it, simply turning one game off and saying, you know what, I’m just gonna get the scores on ESPN or get the highlights. I’m gonna take three hours and just draw out sort of the seven categories of my life. Like, you know, how am I doing as a dad? How am I doing at work? How’s my health? How’s my finances? How’s my marriage?

Or, you know, how’s my sense of self? What’s my contribution? And then just spending time on those. You can get so much done in a few hours because we rarely take that much time. And I always remember, Stephen Covey talking about the most important hour of the week is every Sunday night having the discipline of just living an intentional life by pulling out those roles, goals, and responsibilities and aligning it. So I would say, yeah, I’m amazed at how many people think they don’t have time, but with a very small investment could radically improve their sense of self and the vision that they think they have. And so again, yeah, I would urge men to just, if you can’t do an hour, do 30 minutes. Do what you can, not what you can’t. And then slowly build capacity over time. But meaning is coming for you. Either through crisis or through cultivation. And I would urge you to take whatever time you can, even five minutes a day, and begin to work on that now.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So another shadow you talked about is the shadow of loneliness. And we’ve had lots of podcast guests on before talking about how lonely men are. Men hardly have any friends, especially if you get into midlife. If you’re married, it’s typically your wife who might be scheduling your social calendar out. And there’s a hunger. I think in my experience, a lot of men are looking for friends. And there’s all these health consequences and mental health consequences of not having a strong social support system. One of the things you encourage men to do in the book is to recreate or revive the lost art of the hang.

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: So tell us about this. How can reviving the lost art of the hangout be an antidote to male loneliness?

Jon Tyson: Well, I know lots has been said on it, but I do just think this is an epidemic that we’ve gotta lean into. We’re more connected than ever while at the same time being more lonely. So Jon Eldridge has an illustration that we really lean into. He talks about the three layers of the heart. He talks about the shallows, which is just cultural banter. You know, how about them Yankees? It’s, you know, who’s gonna be elected president. It’s stuff about our culture. Then the Midlands, which is what he talks about, which is, you know, sort of the stresses of our lives. Hey, my daughter’s not doing too well. She’s really wrestling with anxiety. Hey, things are tight.

My wife wants to go on a vacation and I wanna do some repairs on the roof and there’s a tension. You’re talking about the strains of your life. But he said there’s a third layer called the depths and the depths is like, here’s my primal fears, man. This is the stuff that’s driving my life, but I’m afraid to admit it. Or here’s a dream I’ve had in my heart and I really wanna go after it, but I’m controlled by fear. I just lack courage to make the risk. And I’m only saying that to clarify the art of the hang is not just cultural banter. Like let’s get together and shoot the breeze about sports. That’s where men are most comfortable.

And you may start there, but it’s a commitment to really ask the question, what’s in the depths of your heart that you’ve buried out of fear, busyness, depression, obligation, and how do we dig that up and help you get back to really pursuing the thing that’s in your heart. And so we’re a big believer that anything that matters in your life is scheduled. And by the way, you’ve gotta schedule it in such a way that it doesn’t strain your system so that your wife’s mad that you’re meeting with men. You’ve gotta give her time, give your girlfriend time so she can do the same thing with people she needs. But it’s like creating conscious spaces for men to open up their hearts and be present and vulnerable with one another. And we talk about the power of a fire pit.

We love a good fire pit, you know, for a couple of hundred bucks, a few benches and a fire pit. It’s just something there that I think men seem to respond to that feels different than sitting in a coffee shop where there’s people around you listening to you. I’m a big, big believer that men need same gender spaces for processing information. If men are in places where women are present, they often tend to either perform or to manage their image or to be anxious or to hold back. So I think having spaces where men can be open and honest and vulnerable. And so we’ve got a, I think, this was one of my recent emails, it’s called building a brotherhood and it gives you a 10 step process to how to build a brotherhood.

Be intentional, get a vision for it. Curate the space yourself, you know, just resolve, hey man, I need to do something about this. Buy a fire pit for a couple of hundred bucks on Amazon, put it in the backyard and just say, hey fellas, do you wanna come over? Now, I don’t know what, you know, it’s either come over and we can hang out, smoke cigars, whatever it is people do, cook barbecue, whatever. But let’s get together and have places where we consciously do this. It will not happen by accident and it may require you taking some initiative. And then I’d say like, you know, move towards this. You may start in the shallows, but you gotta have a vision at the end of it that you will, you will let people in on the deepest dishes of your heart and there’s gonna be a brotherhood that’s gonna work towards it. So you’ve gotta take these small light connections and then move them towards like a deeper sense of connection.

And man, I’m telling you, there is a movement of men gathering around fire pits and backyards that we hear from and the stories are amazing. Anytime someone says to you, I’ve never told anyone this, you’re dealing with shame. And the amount of men dealing with their shame by processing things they’ve been through, they’re feeling, they’re going through, it’s radically empowering. So I say, yeah, you need this. It’s non-optional. So get a vision for it and then reach out. And I think you’d be amazed if you do it well, how often men long for that and respond to that. And then you bless everybody with you because of it. Your family should be stronger. You should be more present to serve and sacrifice because you’re drinking from a well that’s sort of filling your heart. So again, these are not just hobbies. A good hobby is good, but I’m talking about more than just community. I’m talking about intentionally getting to the depths of a man’s heart.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think another piece of advice I would add to that is be patient. Once you get this thing going…

Jon Tyson: Definitely.

Brett McKay: There’s a lot of men who they’ve never experienced that sort of thing. They don’t know how to socialize. And it’s just not even on their radar. So you might make a lot of invitations and a lot of people say no, or one guy will say yes, might come for two nights and then not come. So be patient. Don’t get frustrated and give up on it because it starts off really slow. Or it might not even, you might just have one guy show up, maybe no guy show up. But if you just keep doing it, it’ll eventually pay off.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, there was some psychological research done on how to be vulnerable with people. They basically talk about the five layers of vulnerability. And I found these over the years to be very, very helpful. The first layer is what they call cliche, which is where you’re just making stereotypes. This is like someone saying to me, hey, did you grow up riding kangaroos to school? And I was like, no, I did not. Aren’t you from Australia? You know, they have cliches. And then you have facts, which is where you find out the reality of what people have actually been through. Then you get to this dangerous point, which is opinions. And opinions are great. But if you have a different opinion than someone, emotions will be sparked.

And because a lot of men don’t know how to handle strong emotions of difference, we often resort back. So we go back up the hierarchy, which is, well, that’s because, and then you weaponize the facts about someone’s life. And then you reduce them to a cliche. Well, what would you know? You’re an immigrant here. You’re from Australia. You rode a kangaroo. We sort of reverse those dynamics. And the real tension moment is when you have different emotions, you know, and it’s learning to say, hey, tell me why you voted for that person instead of you’re an idiot. How could you have voted for that person? And again, that is slow, patient work of trust. But if you get through that and you can get through those emotional tensions underneath, you’ll find out you can be really vulnerable with people.

And that’s where the deep stuff is. So yeah, it takes time and patience. And you gotta, you can’t, when it gets hard, you’ve gotta lean in with kindness and patience and not revert back to weaponizing the details of someone’s story against them.

Brett McKay: Another shadow you talked about that resonated with me was the shadow of ambition. And I think a lot of men are conflicted about ambition ’cause we get conflicting messages about it. On the one hand, we’re told as a man, you need to have this drive and you need to have ambition so you can achieve and succeed. But we’re also told, well, no, ambition’s bad. You gotta be humble, play it small. You don’t wanna be a showboat or a narcissist. What can men do to resolve this conflict they might have about ambition?

Jon Tyson: Well, my conviction is, my come from is that ambition is a good thing. It’s not even a neutral thing. I think ambition is a good thing. We need men with ambition in their hearts. The opposite is apathy, laziness. And I don’t think we need more lazy, apathetic men. I think there’s something beautiful with ambition, but there’s a very, very real challenge in it. And that challenge is unhealthy ambition damages people because it uses people as a commodity for personal success. And James K. Smith, who I know you’ve had on your podcast, he talks about the two determining factors of ambition. One is domination, which is like a competition gets into our ambition where we’re just competing against others. Instead of doing our best or having like an internal motivation of ambition to be the best we can be, we only wanna be the best compared to somebody else.

This is our reference group. Am I doing better than my college buddies who I’m tracking on social media? So it’s a comparative ambition. And then, so it’s domination is the first part. And the second one, he talks about attention or recognition, which means people have to know you’re beating other people or it doesn’t feel meaningful. And domination and recognition, I think do a tremendous amount of damage in the world because your ambition that fuels you to success makes you treat people in such a way that often robs you of success. Whether it’s you use women as a commodity, whether we see it with workplace bullying, which is narcissistic jerks, just using other people or just sort of a ruthless lack of trust in the workplace. I think that can be very, very hurtful. So the overreaction a lot of guys have is to just say, well, man, I’m just gonna sit back.

I’m gonna relax. But you can’t do that either because that’s actually rooted in fear and cowardice. James Hollis, he says, every day a man wakes up, there’s two forces, two shadows that stand over his bed. One is fear and one is lethargy. And we’ve gotta fight those things. We’ve gotta say, I’m gonna confront my fear and I’m not gonna be lazy. So that’s, again, it’s such a challenging message to sort of deal with. So I talk about in the book, three keys to healthy ambition. The first one is having a vision beyond the horizons of your own concerns. Most men are just using accomplishment for selfish gain. So that’s it. I will sacrifice people for myself.

The best leaders sacrifice themselves for people. And this is not just sort of like the Christ archetype of the cross. This is leaders literally using their power out of love and humility for others. Whether that’s a good dad who is taking his kids to the game when he is exhausted, when he’d rather stay home. Whether it’s a man who refuses to look at porn to alleviate his frustrations and spends time investing in his wife and winning her heart and affection. It’s sacrificing the self for the sake of others. So you’ve gotta get a horizon of concern beyond your own life. Number two, you’ve gotta get this crystallization of discontent, which I think is a beautiful phrase. That is when something happens in your heart where you say, I must change.

So an example, like you may see a photo of yourself at a Christmas party and you just go, holy crap, I got fat. Like what happened to me? Is that me? And you’re like, man, I cannot end 2025 like this. And then you really get focused on. But that photo acts as something that pushes you on. It can be your wife threatening to leave you. Hey, listen, I’m unhappy with our marriage. And you go, oh, my gosh, I thought I could just manage her. I can’t domesticate and manage my wife. I’ve gotta work on my marriage. It’s that moment where everything begins to change. And a lot of men don’t sit in it long enough for that to happen. They numb their frustration. I say, I think I say in the book, you’d be amazed what a good pizza and a good movie will do to stop your real frustration crystallizing.

So it really brings about change. And then at the end, I talk about taking radical action in alignment with that renewed vision and that new sense of resolve. And I think if you look at it, every movement in history and every change in a man’s life comes when they get a vision of healthy ambition. They really get a clear vision. They really get a clarity of heart and they really commit to taking radical action. So to be honest with you, in New York, most of the men who’ve read that book said that that chapter on ambition was the most helpful chapter for them because there are so many mixed messages about it today.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This idea of ambition and apathy, I think a lot of men struggle with this. They wanna do something good. They wanna have that drive, but they don’t know how to do it. So they just fall into apathy. And from getting letters or emails from not only men, but also women, women who are married to guys, one of the complaints that these women have or something they’ve noticed in the lives of their husbands is that women find an ambitious man attractive and they find an apathetic man completely unattractive. A lot of source of marital discontent is often the wife looks at her husband’s like, you don’t, what’s going on? You don’t do anything. What happened to the man that I married? Who had this drive and had this vision. What are you doing now? And you have this great quote by Jon Steinbeck from Travels with Charlie. So Jon Steinbeck, he’s an old guy at this point when he goes on this road trip with his dog, Charlie.

And he says, why did he do it? Why did he go on this road trip when he didn’t have to? And he said, my wife married a man. I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. I’m very fortunate having a wife who likes being a woman, which means that she likes men, not elderly babies. And I think, yeah, a lot of women, they wanna see their husbands and the men in their life be a man, like have a drive for something bigger than themselves.

Jon Tyson: I think part of that. So if I could address women for a minute, I would say, yeah, I’m sure that that’s disillusioning. I’ve certainly had seasons of like real passivity and apathy where I think my wife was like very graciously saying, yo, homeboy, it’s time to level up. But I would say, you’re not gonna nag or guilt or shame your husband…

Brett McKay: Yeah, that won’t work.

Jon Tyson: Into being the man you married. It’s just like, that is not the way a man’s heart is motivated. Men respond to encouragement. Men often respond to affirmation, so if all you do is point out what he’s not doing, you’ll get more of it, and it may honestly feel like trivial. You may in your mind be thinking, what is this, like a three-year-old kid that needs affirmation? The answer may be you’re actually dealing with him, wrestling with his inner child that was deeply wounded. That’s like being exposed under pressure. So I think you gotta be patient. Men respond to vision and encouragement, or they do criticism. But I would say this to men. Steinbeck’s got another quote, which I love. He says this, A boy becomes a man when a man is needed. I’ve seen boys be 40 years old because there was no need for a man. And I think one of the things that you can appeal to a man’s heart is to simply say, we need you. Young men, we need your zeal. We need your strength. We need that heroic energy. We need that drive and ambition that often accompanies youth to shake us out of our midlife apathy. Like we need you in the room being you.

And we need to say to middle-aged men, Hey, we need you as fathers and mentors. Like, we need your wisdom. You’ve bled and suffered through all of this duty and obligation. Do something with it. Like, turn around and add wisdom to the zeal of the young people. And elderly men, your best days are not behind you. You are the sages that can get us into history to understand how we faced these problems before. And you can temper either our midlife despair or the zeal we have without knowledge. And I think just saying to men, literally, we need you. This is one of the themes I preach. When I’m in a room full of men, I’m like, I wanna say this to you. Listen to me now, you are needed. Your wife needs you to show up with a full heart. Your kids need you to show up. Your coworkers need you to show up. Your community. And I’ll often have men come up to me weeping, saying, you have no idea how long it has been since I felt needed.

And here’s the truth. We need better leaders in the world. We’re in a crisis of leadership. We need better fathers in the world. Our kids are suffering because men are struggling. We need better husbands, we need better teachers, better mechanics. We need better baristas. We need better politicians. We need better business people. So when a lot of men feel like there’s no place for them, I’m like, this has never been a better or easier time for you to rise and becoming the man that you are called to be, that you wanna be, because you will shine in a time of such darkness and such apathy. So yeah, I wanna do what I can to help let men know we need them at their best in our world today.

Brett McKay: I love that. So I love that idea. If you’re a man listening to this, maybe in your 30s, maybe in your 40s, maybe in your 20s, you’re kind of having that quarter life crisis when you’re trying to figure out, how can I get my drive, that healthy ambition again? I like that idea of paying attention to the things that frustrate you, that cause discontent and crystallize it, lean into it, and then go and try to solve it. You also, one chapter that resonated with me was the shadow of futility. And there’s a particular section in there, where you talk about the importance of play in a man’s life, a grown man’s life. And this reminded me of one of your newsletters. I love your newsletter. People are listening, they need to subscribe to it. It’s really, really well done. But one of the newsletters you sent out was about the dangers of having a heavy, weary, cynical heart.

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: And basically it’s just like, it’s being a grump. And I think being a grump… Being a grump is something that I’ve struggled with. I’ve noticed like starting in like my 30s and now, just kind of grumpy and I don’t like it. And I know a lot of men I’ve talked to my age have expressed similar concern. Like, man, I’m just a big giant grump. And it’s just, you’re irritable and you just, your temper is short. And I think oftentimes when you’re getting in your 40s, men think, well, the reason why that’s a problem is your testosterone’s low. So they go get testosterone replacement therapy. But like for me, like my testosterone’s fine. It’s good. So it’s not that. It’s not a biological problem, it’s something else going on. What do you think is the source of this sort of male irritability and grumpiness?

Jon Tyson: Well, let’s just be honest. I think that’s most people, the snappy dad who’s screaming at these kids that they’re late for school and then injecting a high level of stress before the kids go off to school. And I have to say, I’ve got a lot of thoughts on this because this is my personality, man. I am a serious, sober-minded, intense man.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I hate it.

Jon Tyson: And I’m grateful I married a woman. My my wife just pokes at me, and I’m always so thankful for it. One of the things we need is we need to recover being childlike, but not childish. And childlike is just that sense of wonder. One, wonder is, it… Wonder sounds like my life motto. Okay, so I’ve got two. My cup overflows is one, because that’s my stance on gratitude. And the other one is fighting cynicism, pursuing wonder. And people are like, pursuing wonder? Man, that feels kind of soft. Like, what is that? I’m like, yeah. But wonder is from the German word, wunda, where we get the word wound. And it means your membrane of normalcy is pierced open. You’re stabbed awake by the beautiful and the transcendent and the glorious and the great in your normal sense of life. And we have to learn to cultivate wonder, which is basically about having margin. So you’ve gotta slow down a little bit, and you’ve gotta stop projecting adult frustrations into your kids’ life. That’s terribly damaging. And so, yeah, part of it is you’ve gotta create space to get in touch with the things that not just relax you. Men are good at relaxing, but they’re rarely good at renewing.

And so you’ve gotta ask yourself like maybe part of it is like, what are the drains and gains of my life? But then how do I consciously create a space where I’m renewing my heart, I’m doing the things that feed me, you know? And then I prioritize those in my life. So there’s a sense of joy that I’m drawing from. St. Thomas Aquinas said, A man deprived of spiritual joy will go over to carnal pleasures. And at that principle remains, a man without meaning in joy will just try and medicate with pleasure. So you’ve gotta ask yourself, what really brings me joy? What gives me that sense of wonder and renewal? I can tell you, for me, it’s listening to jazz music and riding motorbikes. Like, if I do that, that fuels me and it fuels me. And then you’ve gotta learn to sort of, from that well, feed those who are around you. So here’s how this changed my… Practical example.

My kids were raised in Manhattan, went to school on 57th Street in Midtown, and it’s right near a playground called the Heckscher Playground in Central Park. And I used to, I was a classic, we’re gonna be late. We’re living in the Upper West side trying to get the train down. We’re gonna be late. And every day I was just screaming at my kids and stressing them out. And it was just all this anxiety. And I thought, what if I changed my family schedule, where instead of injecting stress into the day, I started my day by getting my kids up earlier and then playing in Central Park with them every morning before they went to school. So that’s what I did. I just changed my family schedule, put the kids to bed a little bit early. It was a war at first. It took time. But then my kids wanted to get up because we would play for half an hour every morning before school in Central Park. And their day started with me chasing them around, having fun with them, laughing with them, and then I would walk them to school full of joy to start their day. And that transformed their and my lives.

And so I started to try and ask small questions like, how do I adjust my schedule to have more margin personally? How do I redeem some of my dead time and use it for time that’s not just relaxing, but renewing? And then how do I monitor my emotional field where when people come into my presence, what they get is the good part of my heart, not the stress part of my heart. And again, that was a long journey for me. That probably took me a year of what I would call repentance, other people would call transformation or penance, probably. But then it really has produced that deep sense of joy in my life. So now, again, I have to prioritize that, not as a luxury, but as a necessity. Stuart Brown says this, when a man stops playing, he starts dying. And so, play is a necessity. There’s all this research on what happens to our brain. Massive levels of creativity are released. What it does for our mental health is kind of remarkable. So, yeah, I’d like, again, like many of these things, if you can prioritize it, or it’ll come to your life in a crisis. You can cultivate it or there’s gonna be a crisis. And just take small, little tiny steps. And by doing that, I think they make larger changes over the course of time.

Brett McKay: One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is just not taking things so seriously. I think it’s men, we’re like, oh, everything matters. If we get to school on time, it’s super important. Or the house needs to be fixed at this time because I want it on this schedule ’cause it needs to be, and if it doesn’t, then it like, or if I don’t get this raise and like, oh, everything’s ruined. And it’s just like, one thing I always think about, I’ve been thinking a lot about, is Zorba the Greek. Have you seen that movie?

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s that famous scene. So like they’re creating this mine shaft or something and just complete disaster. And the character Zorba, it’s like, well, we’re just gonna dance. He just laughs about it. It’s so funny. And I really love that approach. And I think Nietzsche, I know he had a lot to say about joy. I think oftentimes people think about Nietzsche as just like, well, God’s dead and everything. But his goal in life was to like live, have a joyous experience. You had to encounter life with a certain amount of lightness. Don’t take things so seriously. And you even see this in like religious works. Dante, we had Bishop Baron on the podcast talking about Dante’s Inferno. And he makes the point that Satan, in Dante’s Inferno, he’s like this heavy cold figures at the very bottom of the earth. And he says, as you get higher into heaven, things get lighter and lighter and angels are light. I think Chesterton talks about that. We need to be like angels. Angels are light. And I’ve been trying to have more of that in my life.

Jon Tyson: Oh, I totally agree. The Bible talks about the fruit of the spirit. So people ask all the time, like, what does it really mean for a Christian in particular White tradition to live a spiritual life? And it’s nothing like popular society portrays it. Here’s what the answer is, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. And really, isn’t that what all of our therapy, isn’t that what all of our mindfulness is trying to get towards? And then when you look at who Jesus critiqued, he saved all of his anger for the Pharisees who were self-righteous, uptight, aggressive.

Brett McKay: Yeah, serious.

Jon Tyson: Like, so again, it’s Dallas Willard has a statement. He said spirituality wrongly understood and practiced is a major source of misery for humankind. And the thing that the saints of my world, which means the people who I think are like most consistent living their faith, one thing will shock you was they’re the most joyful and relaxed. That’s a wild word. Relaxed. But yeah, may we get more joy and play in our lives.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I’m sure everyone’s encountered people like that, and they’re just, they feel so good to be around. And it rubs off on you, and I wanna be like that kind of person for my family. Another shadow you talk about is the shadow of lust. I’m gonna end on this one. In one of your newsletters, you noted something that I’ve observed too. It seems like a decade ago, 15 years ago, there’s a lot of talk about quitting porn and the like. Now, you don’t see that conversation very much. What do you think is going on? Do you think people have just resigned themselves to the idea that porn is just part of our lives and culture?

Jon Tyson: Yeah. It’s been so normalized and so celebrated. Look, rather than just even the personal experience, the social research on pornography is that it is not healthy for our society. It radically distorts our sexual tastes and preferences. The New York Times had an article recently that just said, like, the dangerous trend around teenage sexuality.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I saw that one. It was really disturbing. A statistic that stood out to me was two thirds of female college students have been choked by their partner during sex.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. Rene Girard, who talked about mimetic desire, if I could summarize mimetic desire, it’s this. We love what the people we love, love, which means we think our desires are neutral, but they’re radically shaped by the people we respect. And the same thing happens in our sexuality. You watch pornography and you think it’s natural and normal and healthy, and then you begin to imitate that in real life. But because pornography is not real life, you realize that all you do is damage your actual partner, by pretending to do what it is. Violence has gotten so mapped into it as well. And so it’s very, very confusing to live in a Me Too world of violent pornography. You know what I mean? These are such contrasting messages. So I feel like in despair, men have given up fighting it, and it’s been so normalized. People have lost their sort of heartache for it.

But I can tell you this, and it is not because of religious morality. So this is not a, oh, you’re a religious… You’re a member of the clergy and therefore you’ve got this morality you wanna beat people down with. Women involved in porn, radically unhappy, higher levels of medication and drug use, tremendous amounts of childhood sexual abuse have accompanied that. And so this is like an… The problem with porn in essence, if I could summarize this, is that sex is designed not just as a pleasure mechanism, but as a connection mechanism. And so it doesn’t surprise me when people use sex to deal with their loneliness. That’s what it’s designed to do, help you deal with your loneliness. But the problem with porn is that it dehumanizes and commodifies women, which means we extract the sexual component of them, and we dismiss their personality, their needs, their emotions, their dreams, their goals.

And as a result, in real life, when we want a connection with a woman, but we use her for lust, our connection mechanism is broken because we’ve been trained to dehumanize and separate the pleasure aspect from the real life aspect. So it creates tremendous issues in relationships. And so, yeah, I wanna advocate for a recovery of kind of a sexual dignity and nobility that’s been lost in hedonism. Louise Perry wrote a fascinating book, and she’s an atheist feminist, so she’s not a theological conservative or… She’s like fully LGBTQ affirming, she is not… Doesn’t have like a purity mentality or anything like that. And she wrote a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. And here’s what she said. If you take a huge continuum of sexual desire, like how much, and what kind of sex do people wanna have, you will find there’s a continuum where there’s like 5% to 10% on the bottom that tend towards asexual, low sexual desire.

And then on the right hand side, you’ll have a tiny percentage that are hypersexualized people who want all kinds of sex all the time. The typical person, including the majority of women, are somewhere in the middle, which means they have a normal sex drive where they wanna have sex for the most part, with a committed partner that they feel safe around. And what porn does is it takes the desires of this tiny fraction of hypersexualized men, and violently forces it on women to have a kind of sex they don’t wanna have. And it damages women by making them live up to hypersexualized men’s desires. And it damages men by cultivating the desires to be hypersexualized, instead of building what is actually a satisfying sex life, research shares, which is in a committed, monogamous relationship with a person that you’d love. So yeah, it’s I think even now, the regular social research is telling us that like dehumanizing people, chopping them into little components, extracting the lust, commodifying it, and using it for ourselves is not a good way to form your desires to be a loving man of commitment, and to approach women with nobility and dignity, which is what a lot of women want.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And Ross Douthat, how do you pronounce his last name? You remember that?

Jon Tyson: Douthat, yes.

Brett McKay: Douthat, yeah. Ross Douthat in his book The Decadent Society, he points out that sort of the pornification of our culture. It’s actually, it’s made sex like less sexy. And it’s become sort of this hygienic… We kind of treat it like sort of this therapeutic hygienic thing. It’s like, well I have this just like you have a desire for food and drink, we have desire for sex, and you just gotta scratch that itch. And he is like, well, no, sex is more than that. It’s about… Like you said, there’s a connection part. When you sever that connection part, you actually make sex. Like he says yeah, not sexy. I think he has a point.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, that’s definitely true. I am known for addressing hard and complex issues. I actually just gave a sermon called, Why does God care what I do with my sexuality? What is the point of the human body? And then how do I honor God with my sexuality? And here’s my simple point. The point of the body is to make love visible. Like an athlete, an athlete uses their… They train their body so at the right moment, they can perform at their peak power. And like a ballerina who uses her body to reveal beauty through dance, that’s what our bodies are designed to do, is to reveal love and commitment to a physical act. They’re not built as an extraction mechanism of pleasure alone. And I think that when we treat people with dignity as whole persons, and when we train, discipline ourselves, everybody’s putting boundaries around sexual behavior somewhere. Everybody in the world knows that sex is potent, formative and has profound consequences. There’s no such thing as casual sex.

And that’s why we put boundaries around children because we know that how damaging inappropriate sexual relationships could be to children, sexual abuses are plague in our nation, damaging so many. We’re all trying to figure out where the boundaries go. And many people are realizing that disciplining our desires to honor people holistically is leading to deeper and more fulfilling relationships than just giving into our desires and doing whatever we want. So I don’t have a shame-based approach. I don’t have a stop it approach. I have a directing your desires towards learning to love well. It makes a man feel better about himself, because he has a sense of control even over himself, and it makes him learn to respect women and treat them as whole people with dignity and not just as a sexual object to be utilized for personal pleasure.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Augustine would say you gotta order your desires.

Jon Tyson: Order. Yeah. Ordering the loves.

Brett McKay: Ordering your loves.

Jon Tyson: Ordering the loves. Yeah.

Brett McKay: And that idea that sex makes visible the invisible, that’s the theology of the body. That’s Pope Jon Paul II, right? He did a whole…

Jon Tyson: That is correct. Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So if you wanna dig deeper into that, we can check that out. Well, Jon, this has been a fantastic conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, you can go to jontyson.org, that’s my personal website. Or you can go to fightingshadows.co, that’s where the book is. And if you wanna see our stuff at Dads, it’s primalpath.co and then formingmen.com is where all our stuff is located.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jon Tyson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jon Tyson: Mate, really appreciate the chat. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Jon Tyson. He’s the author of the book Fighting Shadows. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about the book at the website, fightingshadows.co. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/shadows, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. The Art of Manliness website has been around for over 16 years now, and the podcast for almost 10. And they both have always had one aim, to help men take action to improve every area of their lives, to become better friends, citizens, husbands, and fathers, better men. If you’ve gotten something outta the AOM podcast, please consider giving back by leaving a review or sharing an episode with a friend. As always, thank you for the continued support, and until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.