There is an invisible measuring stick that follows men through life. Most of us never talk about it, but we know exactly what it measures.
Are you successful enough? Strong enough? Wealthy enough? Fit enough? Are you a good husband, a good father, a capable provider? Did you build the business, buy the house, fulfil your potential and make something substantial of your life? Can you withstand pressure without showing that it hurts? Beneath all of those questions sits another one that men rarely say out loud: are you keeping up with the other men?
I am 45 years old, and I still measure myself against it.
Writing that feels exposing. There are parts of my life I would much rather package neatly, intellectualise or keep private. Publishing them creates the possibility that someone will think I am insecure, overly emotional, unsuccessful, or simply sharing too much. Maybe some people will. I am increasingly willing to take that risk because if another man reads this and recognises something he has carried silently for years, the discomfort of being seen is worth it.
The ancient Greeks understood that a good life could not be reduced to status, possessions or external success. Aristotle wrote about eudaimonia, often translated as human flourishing or living well, and about philia, friendship rooted in genuinely willing the good of another person.
Those ideas feel remarkably relevant now. Men are surrounded by measurements, but we rarely stop to ask whether the things being measured are actually the things that make a life meaningful.
The Blindfold of Comparison
Recently, I moved home to Aotearoa New Zealand after 22 years in the United States. I returned with my wife and daughter to Eastbourne, Lower Hutt, and began another chapter of life at 45.
I want to be careful not to dramatise this. I have strong male friendships. I have built a career I am proud of. My work, consulting and business interests are growing from strength to strength, and I have been fortunate to work with extraordinary people in places that have shaped me deeply.
I am also aware of the privilege in my life. I have had access to an Ivy League education, meaningful professional opportunities, a beautiful home, a loving family and experiences many people never receive. I do not take any of that for granted.
That is partly why this feels important to name. Privilege does not erase grief, loneliness, insecurity or the desire for deeper belonging. Nor does having much to be grateful for make us immune to the invisible measuring stick. In some ways, it can make the self-judgment more confusing: if so much is going well, why do I still sometimes feel that something is missing?
This is not a story of deprivation. It is a story about how comparison can blind us to what is already abundant, and how even a fortunate life can still contain loneliness, grief, ambition and unanswered questions about what success really means.
Instead of seeing the friendships I already have, I can focus on the larger local circle of men I do not yet have. Instead of seeing what is growing professionally, I can focus on what has not happened quickly enough. Instead of recognising the courage required to reorganise an entire life around something I deeply value, I can interpret change as evidence that I have somehow stepped off the expected trajectory.
The decision to return to New Zealand was not primarily about career. I wanted to be closer to family. I wanted my daughter to know her grandfather not just through phone calls, photographs and occasional visits, but through ordinary life, familiarity and time together.
There was a cost to that choice, as there usually is when we choose one meaningful thing over another. But perhaps one of the braver questions a man can ask himself in middle age is not simply, “Am I succeeding?” but, “Who taught me what success was supposed to look like?”
If success means continually maximising income, scale, visibility, status and professional momentum, many of the most meaningful decisions of our lives can look irrational. If success also includes being a present father, living near people we love, tending friendships, doing meaningful work, knowing where we belong and recognising that time with ageing parents is finite, the calculation changes.
That does not mean I have transcended ambition. I have not. I want my work to grow. I want my businesses to succeed. I want to create something substantial and continue becoming more capable in the second half of my life.
I also sometimes feel lonely.
What I miss is not friendship itself. I have good men in my life. What I long for is something broader and more immediate: a local tribe of men with whom life is shared regularly and with depth. Men I can move alongside, laugh with, challenge and be challenged by; men with whom conversation can travel beyond work, sport, children and logistics into the territory of what we are becoming, what we fear, what we have lost and what we still hope to create.
A man can have strong friendships and still experience loneliness. He can be successful and still question whether he has succeeded enough. He can make a courageous decision based on his values and still occasionally wonder whether he has fallen behind.
That is the power of the invisible measuring stick. It moves even when we do.
Grief Does Not Care How Strong You Are
There is another part of my life I rarely speak about publicly.
My wife and I went through multiple pregnancy losses.
Even writing those words, I feel the instinct to move on quickly, as though staying there for too long risks revealing something I am supposed to have learned to carry privately.
Men are often remarkably uncomfortable speaking about reproductive loss. We know how to talk about injuries, career setbacks, difficult bosses, business failures and sometimes even divorce. Pregnancy loss occupies a different territory. It carries grief, helplessness, biology, guilt, love and imagined futures that disappear before they have the opportunity to become real.
For men, there is another complication. The physical experience belongs overwhelmingly to our partner. Her body carries the pregnancy and endures the loss. Quite rightly, much of the care is directed toward her. So the man often becomes the supporter, the organiser, the steady one, the person who makes sure everything keeps functioning.
That role can be an expression of love. It can also become somewhere to hide.
My grief did not disappear because I was not the one carrying the pregnancies. I imagined those children, the shape of our family, siblings for our daughter and a future that, for a time, felt completely real.
After those losses, trying again eventually felt like more than we could bear. We are profoundly grateful for our daughter, but gratitude does not cancel grief. Those two realities can occupy the same human heart.
Some time later, someone very close to our family said something to me that I have never forgotten. They spoke about how sad it was that we had not been able to “complete our little family.”
I cannot say with certainty what was behind the remark. Perhaps it was careless, unconscious or simply an awkward attempt at sympathy. Perhaps there was something sharper underneath it. I will probably never know.
What I do know is how it landed. It suggested that what we had was somehow incomplete, that my wife, my daughter and I represented an unfinished version of a proper family, and that the children we had lost were not only a source of grief but evidence of something we had failed to accomplish.
That hurt far more than the person who said it probably understood.
It also revealed something important about the measuring stick: sometimes it is not only inside us. Sometimes other people hand it to us without even realising they are doing it.
The Cost of Honest Answers
People sometimes ask why we did not have more children. Usually there is no malice in the question. It is conversation. But when I answer honestly and say that we experienced pregnancy loss, the atmosphere often changes.
People apologise. They become uncomfortable. Sometimes they look as if they wish they had never asked.
I understand that response, but perhaps there is something for all of us to learn here. If we are willing to ask another man a personal question about his life, we need to be prepared to receive the truthful answer.
His marriage may have ended. His partner may have been unable to conceive. He may be infertile. He may have experienced pregnancy loss or the death of a child. He may never have met the person with whom he hoped to create a family. He may have desperately wanted children, or he may simply have chosen another path.
We cannot tell men endlessly that we want them to open up and then become frightened when they actually do. The responsibility for male vulnerability cannot sit entirely with the man who is speaking. It also belongs to the people who are listening.
That is where Aristotle’s idea of philia becomes more than philosophy. Real friendship is not simply proximity, usefulness, shared interests or entertainment. It involves willing the good of another person and developing enough strength in ourselves to stay present when his reality is uncomfortable.
When Circumstances Become Verdicts
The measuring stick has a particular cruelty: it converts circumstances into judgments.
One child becomes not enough. A business that is still growing becomes not successful enough. A friendship circle that is still forming becomes evidence that you are not connected enough. A changing middle-aged body becomes proof that you are no longer fit enough. A period of financial uncertainty becomes evidence that you are not providing enough.
Events slowly become evidence for the prosecution, and the defendant is ourselves.
That is one reason I believe men’s health requires more than simply encouraging men to “open up.” Opening up matters, but men also need other men capable of receiving what is said without fixing it, competing with it, minimising it or immediately responding with a bigger story of their own.
Most importantly, a man needs to know that what he reveals will not later be used against him.
I suspect men are hungry for that kind of trust.
The Men Standing at the Edge
There is a particular group of men I think about often: the men standing at the edge.
The man without children. The divorced man. The widower. The man whose business failed. The man who is unemployed. The man who does not drink. The socially awkward man. The man whose body does not look the way contemporary male fitness culture tells him it should. The man who moved somewhere new and knows nobody. The quiet man with an extraordinary mind. The man who stopped receiving invitations because everyone assumed he was not interested.
And perhaps most painfully, the man who desperately wants friendship but has no idea how to ask for it.
Sometimes we mistake social confidence for strength. They are not the same thing. Some of the strongest men I have met were never the loudest or most socially dominant men in the room. They were simply waiting for someone to make space.
This is where I believe men who already possess confidence, influence or social power have a responsibility. If you are the confident man, notice who is standing alone. If you are successful, make room for the man whose career has collapsed. If you are a father surrounded by fathers, remember the man who wanted children and never had them. If you are an athlete, welcome the beginner. If you are a leader, look beyond the men who already know how to look like leaders.
Strength that only reinforces an existing hierarchy is not particularly impressive. Strength that makes the circle larger is something else entirely.
The man standing quietly at the edge of the room may carry exactly the intelligence, courage, loyalty or leadership our communities need. He may simply never have been invited in.
Fatherhood and the Men We Forget
Father’s Day has taken on a different meaning for me.
During a meeting of the Global Wellness Institute’s Men’s Health Initiative, the conversation turned to men’s suicide and the particular vulnerability some men experience around Father’s Day. A statistic was shared about male suicide on or around that day, and I remember being completely floored by it.
What stayed with me was not simply the number, but the question underneath it: what must a day that publicly celebrates fatherhood feel like to the man who wanted children and never had them? To the father who has lost a child? To the man estranged from his children? To the man whose relationship has broken down and who no longer wakes up in the same house as them? To the man whose partner experienced pregnancy loss and who never found language for his own grief?
For many men, Father’s Day is joyful. I am deeply grateful to be a father and I love what that role asks of me. But celebration can cast a shadow.
Some men desperately wanted to become fathers. Some experienced infertility or reproductive loss. Some relationships ended before children became possible. Some never met the person with whom they hoped to create a family. Some are fathers carrying grief that nobody sees, while others consciously chose a life without children.
Yet male identity is still frequently organised around a narrow cluster of expectations: husband, father, provider, breadwinner, protector. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these identities. The danger begins when they become the only recognised markers of a meaningful male life.
Perhaps that is why the conversation at the Men’s Health Initiative affected me so deeply. It forced me to see that even a day intended to celebrate men can unintentionally sharpen the invisible measuring stick for those who feel they have fallen outside its categories.
There are extraordinary men without children who mentor, teach, coach, create, care, protect, lead and invest themselves deeply in the next generation. Their contribution is not diminished because it does not arrive through biological fatherhood.
And there are fathers whose lives do not resemble the polished version presented in advertisements and greeting cards. They may be grieving, separated, frightened, lonely, financially stretched or simply trying to hold things together.
If brotherhood means anything, it must be spacious enough for them too.
Moving Men: Another Doorway
Talking matters, but words are not always the first or most revealing place to begin.
Sometimes a better question is: Who told you how to be a man?
Before a man answers, his body often does. The jaw tightens, the chest lifts, the shoulders pull back, the eyes drop or the breath changes. A memory can arrive before language does.
That enquiry sits at the heart of Moving Men, the work I facilitate around masculinity, movement, connection and belonging. It is not about teaching men how they should behave or asking them to adopt a new model of masculinity. It is about examining what we inherited, what we chose, what we rejected, and what still lives in us beneath the story we tell about ourselves.
Movement offers another way to ask those questions.
And yes, sometimes there is a drum.
I can almost hear the eye-roll. A group of men moving to the sound of a drum can quickly be caricatured as some kind of new-age ritual: soft, fringe or vaguely ridiculous. The joke often arrives before the experience does.
Yet across cultures and centuries, drums and rhythm have called people into battle, ceremony, celebration, mourning, procession and collective action. Rhythm has coordinated bodies, strengthened resolve, marked transitions and gathered individuals into something larger than themselves.
There is nothing particularly new about it. What is relatively new is how detached many modern men have become from communal movement, ritual and embodied expression. We sit more, work behind screens, communicate through devices and increasingly inhabit highly individualised lives, then wonder why so many men feel disconnected.
Somehow, the drum became a punchline.
That interests me because ridicule is an effective defence. If we can laugh at something before we try it, we never have to discover what it might ask of us.
A drum begins. There is pulse, repetition and rhythm. A man can move alone and still remain unmistakably part of the group. He can find his own response without having to imitate anyone else. He can witness the force, restraint, awkwardness, confidence, grief, humour and dignity expressed through another man’s body and meet it with respect rather than judgment.
There is power in that kind of witnessing.
In this context, I use 5Rhythms, the movement practice created by Gabrielle Roth, not as choreography but as a framework for enquiry. The five rhythms—Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness—ask different questions of us: what happens when we follow rather than force, take a clear direction, loosen control, allow possibility, or simply stand in what remains?
The point is not to make every man expressive in the same way. It is to notice what happens when familiar protections of status, irony, professional identity and performance are no longer doing all the work.
On sacred ground, with rhythm holding the space, this can become something strong, grounded and unifying. A man does not have to confess anything or perform vulnerability. He can simply move, pay attention, witness other men with dignity, and be witnessed in return.
Over time, the enquiry becomes less about performing masculinity correctly and more about recognising what is actually true.
Who taught me how to be a man? Which parts of that inheritance still serve me? Which parts no longer fit? What happens when I stand beside another man who embodies strength differently from me? Can I respect his expression without needing to diminish it? Can he respect mine?
For me, that is where brotherhood begins to move beyond identity and into practice.
The Warrior We Actually Need
I do not believe the answer to men’s suffering is to strip masculinity of words like strength, courage, protection or warrior. I want to reclaim those words.
The classical world had its own language for courage. The Greek concept of andreia was associated with courage, manliness and the ability to stand firm in the presence of fear.
But courage is easily misunderstood. It is not the absence of fear, grief or insecurity. It is not the ability to dominate, endure pain silently or pretend that nothing reaches you.
The courage I am interested in is more demanding: the courage to remain present when something hurts, to tell the truth when the truth does not make you look impressive, to protect another man’s dignity when he is struggling, to resist the pack when the pack is cruel, and to reach toward the man everyone else has overlooked.
A warrior protects.
Protection is not only about defending people from obvious physical threats. Sometimes it looks like noticing. Sometimes it is an invitation. Sometimes it is sitting beside a man whose marriage has collapsed and resisting the urge to give him advice. Sometimes it is hearing that someone has experienced pregnancy loss and refusing to tidy up the sadness with a reassuring phrase.
Sometimes it is simply communicating: you do not need to be different from who you are in order to remain in this circle.
That is a masculinity I believe is worth defending.
What Defines a Life Well Lived?
I still feel uncomfortable publishing parts of this article.
There is a voice in me wondering whether I have said too much, whether speaking about our pregnancy losses is too intimate, whether acknowledging loneliness somehow diminishes the strong friendships I already have, and whether admitting insecurity undermines the very real success and momentum in my life.
Perhaps that is precisely the point.
A man can be grateful and grieving, successful and uncertain, strong and lonely, ambitious and satisfied, deeply connected and still longing for more tribe.
Maturity may have less to do with eliminating those contradictions and more to do with learning how to hold them without converting them into evidence that something is wrong.
This is where I return to eudaimonia. What does it actually mean to live well?
For me, perhaps it means continuing to build meaningful work while also having the courage to choose family. It means being ambitious without allowing ambition to erase what has already been achieved. It means recognising the men who are already in my life while still admitting that I long for a deeper and more immediate sense of brotherhood.
It means allowing myself to be proud without becoming complacent, vulnerable without becoming powerless, and strong without becoming defended.
Somewhere there is a man convinced that he is failing the invisible test of masculinity. He thinks everyone else received instructions he somehow missed. He believes he should be wealthier, stronger, more successful, more certain, more connected or more capable than he currently is.
Perhaps he is newly divorced. Perhaps he never became a father. Perhaps his career collapsed. Perhaps he is grieving something nobody knows about. Perhaps his career is thriving and he still feels lonely. Perhaps he walks into rooms full of men and nevertheless feels entirely alone.
We need that man, not as an act of charity, but because we do not know what he carries or what he might become if somebody finally stopped measuring him.
He may be the teacher, leader, mentor, friend, father figure, advocate, artist, builder or protector our communities desperately need.
Aristotle’s highest form of friendship asked human beings to desire the good of another person because of who that person was, not because of what he could provide.
Perhaps modern brotherhood begins somewhere similar.
We stop asking men to prove their worth before we make room for them. We stop assuming the man who appears strongest needs nothing, or that the man who appears uncertain has nothing to offer. We become brave enough to question the measures we inherited and intelligent enough to recognise when they are blinding us to the life already in front of us.
Then perhaps we begin to measure success differently: not only by what we have built, earned or achieved, but by the people we have stood beside, the courage with which we have lived, and whether the men around us became stronger because we made room for them.
Sincerely,
Douglas Drummond
If this resonates with you, please join me this Fall as we explore modern brotherhood and movement at Esalen (link here).
