Is Economic Instability Making You Depressed?

I've been trying to crank out a post every week on the subject of depression as laid out in the book Lost Connections. I missed last week, so I'm shooting for two this week.

Anyway, here's another pic for my post to social media:

Johann Hari titles this chapter, "Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future", and it's chapter 12. He discusses the solution in chapter 22.

Hari mentions several examples of people that have lost a sense of a future. He starts by discussing a Native American chief before and after his tribe was forced onto a reservation, and the effects of it today. He talks about a study done that used both anorexic children and depressed children. And he talked about a personal friend working a shit job. The depressed people all had the same thing in common, and that's the lack of an ability to perceive the future.

My last post talked about how a lack of control over your workplace makes you depressed. This chapter discusses how not having a sense of a good future leads to depression. And how economic instability causes that.

While there were non-economic reasons given for this cause of depression, poor economic health is a major one for most of us, so that's where I'm going to focus this post, as many of us can relate to this cause, and the solution is also an economic one.

Towards the end of the chapter, Hari decided to meet up with an old friend from college named Angela. Angela was very happy and carefree in college. He described her as:

"One of those people who seemed to be doing everything at once—starring in a play, reading Tolstoy, being everyone’s best friend, going out with the hottest boys. She was like a firework of adrenaline, cocktails, and old books."

After college, she couldn't get a job because potential employers saw her as overqualified. Desperate for work, she took a job as a telemarketer. The job paid just above minimum wage. It had no set schedule. If she did poorly in sales, her hours were cut the next week. If she could get a full schedule, she'd have enough money to make lunches from chicken and take the bus to work. If not, she'd be forced to eat beans and walk. She would constantly be berated by her boss and powerless to fight back against him. It's the type of job that one only takes if they're extremely desperate for work, and too powerless to fight back against a boss that deserves to be taken out back and beaten with a metal pipe until dead.

Of course Angela was depressed. She, like many of us, lives a life of temporary personal survival that you have without any sense of financial security. She couldn't even take a vacation if she could somehow afford it, because she doesn't even know what her work schedule is going to be like. She couldn't envision any future outside of the current week because her job made it that way.

A lot of us are the same way. If you're financially insecure, you're in constant survival mode. You can't think long term, because you're just trying to survive to the next day, or at best, until the next paycheck. It's easy to understand how that much stress can cause mental health issues.

In chapter 22, Hari makes a case for what he thinks would be the solution. A universal basic income.

Hari talks about an experiment the Canadian government did in the 1970s. The government decided to give the population of a few small towns the equivalent of $19,000 in today's US dollars, no questions asked. The results were phenomenal in both improving the mental health of the population, and also helping people have the means to secure their own future. To quote:

"Depression and anxiety in the community fell significantly. When it came to severe depression and other mental health disorders that were so bad the patient had to be hospitalized, there was a drop of 9 percent in just three years.

...

It had another unanticipated effect, she told me. If you know you have enough money to live on securely, no matter what happens, you can turn down a job that treats you badly, or that you find humiliating. “It makes you less of a hostage to the job you have, and some of the jobs that people work just in order to survive are terrible, demeaning jobs,” she says. It gave you “that little bit of power to say—I don’t need to stay here.” That meant that employers had to make work more appealing. And over time, it was poised to reduce inequality in the town—which we would expect to reduce the depression caused by extreme status differences."

And contrary to popular opinion, it didn't cause the population to become lazy. While there was some reduction in hours, that time not working was spent being better parents to their kids. In other cases, it caused people to get an education so they could work at a job they wanted to be a part of, instead of being forced into working a shit job.

Hari noted that popular opinion keeps a universal basic income from being possible. Everyone knows that if they had more economic freedom, they'd use it to better themselves. You'd spend more time with your kids (if you have any). You'd go to school. You'd spend your free time volunteering. What you wouldn't do is stay home and watch Netflix all day. Unfortunately many people think that's what everyone else would be doing.

Now, I don't agree with Hari's ideas about a universal basic income, but that's because the numbers were crunched, and it would cause the U.S. national budget to double. It's simply not affordable. However, we can and should find ways to make sure that the basic needs of people are met regardless of whether or not they are gainfully employed.

We have four basic needs. We need food, shelter, education, and medical care. We should be finding ways to make sure that everyone has those basic needs met without forcing them to work. Everyone should have access to all of those things regardless of whether or not they are working. And before anyone says, "That just rewards laziness", look two paragraphs up. When the basic income experiment was done, people still worked. They'll still work because they want to, and also for one other reason:

Luxuries wouldn't be promised. We love luxuries, and all of us are willing to work for them. For some of us, having a kick ass, HDTV with a giant screen is a luxury we want. For others, it's an awesome vacation. For me, it's to have a membership at a good gym, another one at a good dojo, and plenty of time to put some hot lead downrange. All of that takes money, and none of that would be promised to me just because I didn't have to work to avoid starvation and homelessness.

I read this book about a year ago when I was still working as a security officer at an oil refinery. It explained very well why I was depressed. Not only did I hate the lack of control at my job (I was ordered to go to different places hourly, and all of my suggestions to improve the place went into the "deleted" section of my boss' email), but I had to constantly pick up extra shifts to make ends meet. For me, working 60 hours a week wasn't weird. It was just something I had to do. And I was depressed because of it. Now, I have a job that pays much more. I don't have to work overtime now. I'm staying home and doing dad shit.

When I talk to people about supporting programs that would eliminate the need to work for survival, I mention both the mental illness benefits of such programs, but I also talk about it in terms of freedom. Every day, millions of Americans go to work at jobs they hate and do it just so they can barely get paid enough to survive. This country talks a big game about freedom, but if you are forced to work to survive, you are not free. This is known as wage slavery, not to be confused with chattel slavery, which is in and of itself a horrific practice, but it's a form of slavery nonetheless. If our country is going to talk a big game about freedom, we need to find ways to make us truly free. The system of wage slavery needs to be abolished. Our country and our mental health will be better off as a result.

Is Your Job Making You Depressed?

This is part two of ten in my posts about the causes of depression. It's also the first one where I'm going to address the nine causes of depression laid out in Johann Hari's book Lost Connections.

I can't stress enough to get the book. If you can't afford to buy it, hit up your local library. I'm just providing the cliff's notes of what's an incredibly good book.

Here as always, is my meme to draw in the social media crowd:

The first chapter of the section discussing the nine major causes of depression is titled Disconnection from Meaningful Work. It starts out by telling the story of a recovering drug addict named Joe. He had a decent paying job at a paint store. Every day, he would clock in, mix paint, and clock out. He'd come in the next day and do the same thing. And again. And again. The monotony of the job wore on him. Not only that, but he felt that his job was pointless. His boss would only see him to chew him out when he was late, and he received no praise for doing his mundane job well. He also hated that his job had no room to grow. His job was just to follow instructions given to him by management and go home. If he had any ideas on how to better run the store, nobody listened or cared. So Joe turned to drugs to deal with his mundane job.

Now some people could try to tell Joe that his job is important. After all, people need paint, so he is providing a valuable service by making sure that people that need paint, have paint. And Joe said that he tried to psych himself up by telling himself that. Yet he couldn't help but feel a sense of dread over the idea that he might be doing that same job for thirty years.

Lost Connections cites a study Gallup did on millions of workers in 142 different countries. They found that only 13% of workers actually like their jobs. Another 63% just sleepwalk through their jobs (like Joe). Another 24% of people hate their jobs so much, that they actively try to sabotage their employer.

Just try to imagine how serious that is. If you work at a corporation that has just 5,000 employees, there are 1,200 coworkers that hate that job so much, they're actively trying to burn it to the ground! Another 3,150 coworkers are just sleepwalking through their job. There's only 650 coworkers that get up and punch in with a smile on their face. Only 650 of your fellow coworkers out of 5,000 enjoy their job, while 1,200 are trying to sabotage your workplace, and a little more than double that are just going through the motions until they clock out.

There's plenty of reasons why people hate their job. The pay sucks. The benefits suck. But this chapter doesn't address that (that's for another chapter, and another post). This is about control.

Joe felt controlled in his workplace, as many of us do. We have a boss that micromanages us, and when we present suggestions to make the company better, they're largely ignored. We're told what to do constantly, and we don't get to have a voice in how the company is run. That was why Joe found his job to be meaningless. That's why many of us find our jobs to be meaningless.

Now if you saw a story like Joe's, some would be tempted to give him some empty platitude like, "Find a job you like, that way, you'll never have to work a day in your life!" But we all know that's bullshit. Even if Joe found a different job, someone else would have to make the paint. Joe might find happiness at another line of work (he said he wanted to become a fishing tour guide in Florida, but didn't want to take the risk of moving and taking a job with less pay). But either way, someone has to make the goddamn paint!

I debate politics often online. One day, I saw in a leftist page a meme that talked about a world without money. I commented, "Then who would do the work?" I told them that if you're a leftist, you're probably in the proletariat (the working class), and if you're in the proletariat, you probably work a shit job. Yet that shit job you work is needed. Someone has to take out the trash, cook the burgers, run that retail gig, etc. And if it weren't for the money, none of us would do it. I didn't get any real answer on who would to those jobs if it weren't for the paycheck.

In chapter 18 of Lost Connections, Johann Hari addresses this. He was curious about the answer as well. He says:

The obstacle is that meaningless work has to be done. It’s not like some of the other causes of depression and anxiety I’ve been talking about, like childhood trauma, or extreme materialism, which are unnecessary malfunctions in the wider system.

Work is essential. I thought about the jobs all my relatives have done. My maternal grandmother cleaned toilets; my maternal grandfather worked on the docks; my paternal grandparents were farmers; my dad was a bus driver; my mother worked in a shelter for victims of domestic violence; my sister is a nurse; my brother orders stock for a supermarket. All of these jobs are necessary. If they stopped being done, then key parts of our society would cease to function.

 After pondering all this, he found the solution in a bike shop in Baltimore, Maryland.

Josh worked in a bike shop most of his life. He loved bikes. But working in a bike shop doesn't pay very well, so he and his fellow coworkers decided to start a union. A bunch of reasonable conditions under a union contract were sent to his boss, who they believed to be a decent man. The conditions were in fact, reasonable. Yearly negotiations over pay as well as permanent contracts for the workers. The boss did as you'd expect if you ever tried to organize a workplace (*cough* no experience there *cough*). He hired a legal firm that specialized in union busting and hired part time workers as scabs.

Josh and his coworkers didn't have the financial ability to take his boss to court over the illegal union busting tactics that his boss was participating in, and his boss knew that. So Josh started reading up on the concept of co-ops.

Democratic Cooperatives are businesses that are owned and controlled by the workers collectively. There's variations in the way they work, but basically, the workers make decisions on how to run the business collectively, there's no bosses (or if there are, they're elected by the workers), and everyone shares in the profits equally.

Josh and his co-workers decided to form a co-op bike shop. With that, Baltimore Bicycle Works was born. The business meets once a week to discuss work issues where everyone has a say in how things are run, and decisions are made democratically. The workers enjoy what they do because they know that they matter. Their ideas on how to run the bike shop are taken into consideration. They share in the profits collectively, instead of being employed on a low wage system. They take in new hires as apprentices, and if they do good work, they get brought on as full partners. Everyone has a voice. Everyone gets the full value of the profit they produce.

It's not a total fairy tale because as Josh's wife, Merideth says, they had to work ten hours a day, every day, for the first year. But even though they had to put in 70 hours a week, they felt that their work was meaningful. They had incentive to make sure their business succeeded.

As I stated above, more than 80% of us are unhappy at our job. Even if we're not working to actively sabotage it, we just see it as a job and nothing else. We know that something is seriously wrong with our system.

I could go on about pay and benefits and all that, but like I said, that's another chapter of the book, and another post, for another time. This is about control, and the lack of it, that we have as workers.

Imagine if we workers collectively owned and controlled the businesses we worked in, instead of having a boss that tells us what to do. How much more free would we feel? What a relief it would feel to know that we belonged to a workplace that was ours! How much more would we enjoy going into work if we knew that our voice had value and was recognized!

We wouldn't be a mass of workers going through the motions in our job, just counting the minutes until we could clock out. We wouldn't be actively trying to sabotage our company, because we own the fucking company!

The Nation published a study that showed that worker co-ops are even more productive than typical top-down businesses because it turns out that when everyone owns the company, everyone wants to make sure that company succeeds. We have the opportunity to become happier, more productive workers if we are able to own, control, and make democratic decisions in how the company is run.

In my personal life, I do like my job. I work security at a hospital. I don't feel micromanaged, because I work the night shift and part of the benefits of working that shift is that upper management is asleep while I'm working. And yet I also know that my voice really doesn't matter in how things are run.

A few weeks ago, many of us had a meeting with senior management and the topic of parking enforcement came up. Even though it doesn't seem like a big deal for those not working in my field, for those of us working security on the night shift, workers parking in places they shouldn't be (like places reserved for patients), this has become a thorn in our side.

I did have a suggestion to improve things, and I told the senior manager that I would email him my suggestion on how to fix things (I didn't want to bring it up in the meeting, because I didn't want to be "that guy" that drags on a meeting when we'd all rather be elsewhere).

I emailed my boss my proposal to fix the parking situation, and I got the response I was expecting. Nothing. No emails back saying anything. And that was exactly what I knew I'd get.

When I was in my twenties, if I proposed something about security issues, I'd be enthusiastic about it. "This is a really great idea, he's got to implement it!", I'd tell myself. And I'd get no response back.

At my age, I have more than a decade of private security experience under my belt. And yet, when I give a suggestion based on that experience, it's the same as always. Not a goddamn thing. And that was what I was expecting. I gave my proposal expecting no response, and that's exactly what I got.

I really don't think my job is making me depressed (I'm sure the real reason lies in what you'll see in a few more posts), but I know that my voice doesn't matter at my job. I'm not controlled much, but I sure as fuck don't have a voice in how to do things, either. Maybe I'm in that 63%.

My wife is a school teacher. She teaches middle school. I can tell that the lack of control in her job gets to her. Middle school students are the worst because they're at that 12-14 year old age where, well, they're just the worst. I don't need to tell you why. We were all there once.

And then there's the combination of both state and private management of her school that micromanages her job. If you work in a really poor district (as she has) there's a standardized test her students have to take every two weeks. Imagine trying to teach a class when every other Friday has to be dedicated to testing. You can't do it! Along with that, she gets an attitude from the kids and their parents, management keeps telling her how to do her job, and the state keeps giving standardized test after standardized test that both keeps her from being able to teach, and measures her abilities as a teacher. The amount of micromanagement she experiences is insane! As a husband, it's enough to make me want to find the few motherfuckers in charge of this shit and start slitting throats. No wonder she's depressed at her job! She has no freedom under it! Just imagine if you had to train dozen of people how to do your job, and you had testing on it every two weeks based on their ability to do that job. The mental strain would make it impossible.

My wife and her fellow teachers (some of which experience severe psychological distress) would be better off just running the school themselves. They're good teachers. They just need to be able to do their jobs without assholes micromanaging every part of their job.

A few posts ago, when I said I would be discussing Lost Connections, I said that the thing that separates this book from other books that talk about depression, is that self-help books that talk about depression are largely bullshit because they offer easy answers that don't really address the actual causes of depression. Lost Connections does us no such favors. This is one solution that none of us can do individually. We as the working class need to do this collectively. We need to rise up, organize, and demand a better system than the top-down management driven workplace that we work in. And that's going to be hard.

Does Poor Diet Cause Depression?

Well, let's throw up another content warning that's all the rage for we leftists nowadays:

CW: Diet, eating disorders

And as always, here's a picture for the social media crowd:

Alright, I finally got enough free time to write out my first post on the causes of depression! Woo hoo!

I'm starting off with number ten on my list, just because this is still a blog discussing health and fitness. I might not go in the order that I presented in my last post after that. A lot of this writing is for me as well as those that read my blog, and part of me wants to write about things that feel more important for discussing what may be causing my depression. Either way, eventually all of the topics will be discussed.

So first things first, could a poor diet be causing people to be depressed?

Well, maybe.

There's been a few studies done on the subject, and every one that I've seen has agreed that obese people are more likely to be depressed. But are people obese because they're depressed, or depressed because they're obese?

The science isn't clear on which part is the cart or the horse, but they are definitely intertwined. To cite an article from Obesity Action Network:

While we still have much to learn about the association between obesity and depression, this much is clear: the link between the two conditions is clear. Considering the devastation either of them alone can cause, research to gain an even better understanding of how and why the two are connected and then identify any additional treatments could benefit many millions of people.

And while I don't talk too much about anorexia or bulimia, there's evidence that depression can cause those eating disorders as well:

Depression may lead to eating disorders, but there’s also evidence that eating disorders can result in depression. “Being severely underweight and malnourished, which is common in anorexia, can cause physiological changes that are known to negatively affect mood states,” says Lisa Lilenfeld, PhD, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Argosy University in Arlington, Va., who specializes in eating disorders.

Depression in people with eating disorders typically has its own unique features, according to Ira M. Sacker, MD, an eating disorders specialist at Langone Medical Center at New York University and author of Regaining Your Self: Understanding and Conquering the Eating Disorder Identity.

“People who develop eating disorders feel as people that they’re not good enough,” Sacker says. “They become obsessed with perfectionism. That perfectionism begins to focus on what they eat. But underlying it is depression and anxiety. Often, these patients have suffered a lot of emotional trauma.”

I'm sure I don't have to tell you that having  poor body image issues can lead to being depressed.

I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes in 2008.  For those that know about the symptoms of diabetes, people with a blood glucose level that's off balance (not between 80-120 mg/dl) often experience extreme mood swings and anger. Having a poor diet caused physiological changes that kept me from being able to feel happy.

Going back to the article from the Obesity Action Network, crash dieting isn't encouraged to help with depression (they can even make things worse). To quote:

In a 2008 review of study outcomes in the Journal of Clinical Psychology (Markowitz et al.), the authors urged clinicians to integrate the treatment of these two diseases and cautioned that dieting, which can worsen mood, and anti-depressants, which can cause weight gain, should be minimized. The authors also recommended that exercise and stress reduction, which have been shown to be effective treatments for both diseases, should be considered a first-line defense.

In my personal experience, there's no cart and no horse. Poor diet and depression are more of a vicious circle. I feel sad, so I stop meal prepping. I eat fast food and drink alcohol excessively. Then I get more depressed, so I eat and drink more. And so on. Until I finally get enough strength in me to start over and work to undo the damage I caused.

I'm not saying that this is the only cause of depression (I still have nine more topics to discuss), nor does eating healthy and exercising will cure you of depression. Just that it will help things. And that's something I'll have to remind myself of for the rest of my life.

Depression Sucks

Gonna toss out a content warning (as we leftists love to do on Facebook nowadays):
Depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide will be discussed here.

First things first, here's my obligatory meme so I can really show off my link on social media:

As we've entered into a near year and we're all another year older, I can say that I've had depression for nearly twenty years now. That's a long fucking time!

Most people think of depression as this permanent fixture, as though you are always sad. This isn't true. Despite my long history of depression, there's been moments where I've experienced happiness. Hell, this blog started with showing me as a very happy, new, thin athlete. My year after I had bariatric surgery was pretty nice. There's been other times when I've felt pretty happy as well. My wedding day. The birth of my kids. The first days when I got home from war. But eventually, depression (and its best bud, anxiety) have always come back.

I've seen therapists and they didn't have a lot of help for me. I saw three therapists between 2015 and 2018, and I ended my sessions with them after each one asked me up front, "What are you hoping to get out of this?" Along with other things they told me, I understood that it was psychologist speak for, "I don't know how to help you." Some would put me on pills, and they would help for a while, but eventually, I'd be back at square one. I began to think I was broken. Three fucking therapists (as well as the VA nurse that I saw back in 2011) couldn't get me to be less depressed and anxious. I am just stuck living with extreme sadness and fear until the day I fucking die.

And that's when you start going to dark places. "What's the point of going on if I have to spend the next 40-60 years of my life feeling like absolute shit?" is a question I've asked myself more than once.

Mental health advocates have long been telling people that depression is something that's in your head. "You have a chemical imbalance in your brain", is what they like to tell you. A lack of serotonin or dopamine is why you feel this way. So when the pills eventually stop working, it makes you feel like shit to know that your brain is fucked up. You go back to feeling broken. Nobody can fix you.

And it's all bullshit.

Almost a year ago I came across a video in my Facebook feed that was interviewing a man named Johann Hari (shown below). The first thing he says is, "You're not crazy. Your pain is not a pathology. Your pain makes sense. We are depressed and anxious in this culture for perfectly good reasons." That is some very comforting words to hear when you've been told for years that you're in pain because you're broken.

After seeing that, I immediately downloaded Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections to my Kindle. I read the entire book in two days. The basic premise of the book is, You're not depressed because you have a broken brain. You're depressed because your life sucks, and it's (probably) not your fault.

After being told for years that I'm depressed because my brain is fucked up, being told the obvious-that my life sucks and I have perfectly good reasons for being depressed and anxious-felt like a breath of fresh air.

Johann Hari's book lists nine reasons why people in our society face depression and anxiety, and I plan on doing a separate post on each one of them, as well as a tenth that I'm adding in. Here's the list of those:

1. Disconnection from Meaningful Work
2. Disconnection from Other People
3. Disconnecting from Meaningful Values
4. Disconnection from Childhood Trauma
5. Disconnection from Status and Respect
6. Disconnection from the Natural World
7. Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future
8. Genetic issues
9. Long Term Effects of Depression on the Brain
10. Poor Nutrition

The last one is the one I added, and I'll probably be discussing that first.

The biggest takeaway from the book is that there aren't any easy solutions for depression. For decades, self help gurus have made a fortune selling books with easy answers, because those answers were always solutions done individually. But they typically don't work, because the real solutions to depression are collective ones. Meaning, we as society need to make major changes. Major changes, that are going to have to be sold to the populace at large before they can be made.

The past three months have been really hard for me. Depression does come in waves, and for the last three months, it's been a rough one.

In my past, depression was easy to manage because I only had to take care of me. I'd wake up whenever I felt like it (I worked nights, so I didn't have to worry about sleeping past my work time), would get drunk and/or high, and spend my whole day playing video games. All the drugs and distraction kept me in a pleasant state of denial about my mental health.

The past few months, I fell back into those habits. I drank to excess almost nightly. I started smoking weed again. And I would spend my night hours playing old Xbox 360 video games. Problem with that now, is I'm a husband and a parent. I can't just wake up whenever and do nothing. I have adult shit. I have to cook food, clean, and spend time with my kids. I got tired from the depression and hangovers, and still had to do all that adult stuff (as well as my job). I would feel good when I was seven sheets to the wind and capturing my thousandth Man of War on Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, but being completely drained the next day only made my depression worse.

Depression literally sucks. It sucks the life out of you, and it makes being a responsible adult insanely hard.

Fortunately, I feel like my spell of depression finally broke a few days ago. It's too early to tell if I'm out of the woods (for now, anyway), but at the moment, it feels like coming up for air after nearly drowning.

Lost Connections is available at Amazon or your local library.

On Masculinity...

David Reimer was born in 1965 in Canada. Because his doctor was a fucking idiot, he lost his penis when the doctor botched the circumcision. The parents didn't know how to deal with it, so they went to see Dr. John Money in Baltimore, who was known as the top psychologist on gender roles in the world at the time. Because it was 1965 and medical ethics were completely fucked, he decided to use Reimer for a social experiment. He was to be given a surgical sex change and be raised as a girl.

To say that it didn't go well is an understatement. David (called "Brenda", at the time), told his parents he felt like a boy, refused to wear dresses, and fought his brother to play with his "boy toys" of guns and cars while refusing to play with dolls.

I'll mention why I'm bringing this up in a bit.

A few years ago I first heard of the concept of "toxic masculinity", and what I read about it was originally in the context of teaching men why we need feminism, which made it easy to digest and didn't cause me to have a knee-jerk reaction of "How dare you say being manly is bad!"

The article explained that as men we're expected to do things that are awful. Not just awful to women, but awful to other men, and awful to ourselves. We're told to repress emotions. We're not allowed to feel sadness, fear, or well, pretty much anything other than joy or rage. This causes us to be unnecessarily aggressive towards people, and causes depression. Showing emotion is "girly". You're also not allowed to do "girly" things, like baking or cleaning the house.

That really struck a chord with me. For years I was suffering from depression and I didn't know it, because it manifested itself as anger. I was in the Army for most of my 20s, and you're not allowed to be sad in the Army. The Army doesn't issue you any tears, soldier! You're allowed to be angry, though. So I was a ball of rage for most of my adult life. This led to me being kind of a shitty person. Or as my wife once told me, "Yeah, you were kind of an asshole back then."

The article concluded by saying that we should be willing to embrace what is seen as "girly" to become better men. Be free to be sad sometimes. Do the fucking dishes. Bake some cookies.

I took that advice to heart. I work on trying to be more honest about my emotions, even when it puts me in a position of vulnerability. I've turned into quite the chef. I'm still a slob, but I'm working on it.

I also took the main idea of that article to heart. Men need feminism. When society truly sees women as equals, doing all that "girly shit" won't be seen as bad.

So the years have passed, and I'm working on being a better man. But there's something that has been on my mind for a while:

What is masculinity without the toxicity?

The left has really failed to answer this question, and I think that's a big reason why there's been a massive backlash to the new feminist movement.

I imagine that some folks are reading this and thinking, "Are you shitting me, Grasshopper? People are against feminism because they're sexist assholes! Are you trying to tone police us?"

Of course not. There's always going to be a sexist backlash to any feminist movement, and yet I think that a lot of that backlash could be dealt with if we had an answer to the question I've been asking myself: What is masculinity without the toxicity?

The left has done a great job at showing why being more, well, "girly", for lack of a better word, isn't something that men should be ashamed of, but they've failed at creating an idea of masculinity that doesn't have the toxic elements traditionally associated with being a man.

If you go on social media to search for "positive masculinity", you'll find groups, pages, and Twitter feeds showing men being good, decent people, but I'm often at a loss when I ask myself how their actions are masculine in nature. Yes, these men are doing good things, but I don't see how anything they're doing is masculine. The positivity part is there, but the masculine part feels lacking. What are they doing that could be different from a woman expressing femininity?

Oh, so you're saying we should have well defined gender roles? Geez, why not just start quoting Jordan Peterson while you're at it?!

No, that's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that there's going to be traits and actions that men have and do to express their masculinity, just as women have and do the same to express their femininity. We need to start talking about how we men can express our gender identity without being toxic.

Which brings me back to David Reimer.

The man who was born a boy but raised as a girl hated being forced into his role as a female. He felt he was male. He wanted to do things that boys typically do. He didn't want to play with Barbie dolls. He wanted to play with toy guns and cars. No matter how much he was forced into a role as a girl, he knew he was a boy. He identified as a boy, and wanted to do the same stuff that boys do.

This is common with transgender people as well. A friend of mine recently posted a story on Facebook that revealed a study that showed that transgender people tend to have brain activity that resembles the cis-gendered people of the gender they identify with. We have scientific proof that gender identity is more than about physical attributes. We cis-gender men and transgender men have masculinity as part of our identity, and we need to know how to express it without the toxic elements.

So this isn't about gender roles. It's about gender identity, and how best to express that identity.

Expressing gender identity is different than gender roles. Gender roles dictate we must do things because we are a man or woman. Men are required to be stoic, angry, and be the bread winner in the family. Women are required to be passive, submissive, know how to cook, and raise children. Gender roles are limiting and lead to harm.

Expression of our gender identity, on the other hand, is when we choose to do things because we are a man or woman. We want to express our masculinity or femininity. This brings freedom and self-care. We need to have a conversation over what that means. We need to start talking about what it means to be masculine without being toxic.

However, I think we on the left are scared to have this conversation, because we're worried that we're going to be dragged.

The left loves to eat their own, and if you make even the slightest misstep in talking about gender, Leftbook and Twitter will fuck your world up. Nobody wants to be set up for being bullied and dragged through social media because they accidentally said something problematic. So having this conversation is scary. I'd be worried about it if my blog reach expanded anywhere past my friends on social media. Even so, I've spent several hours reading and re-reading my blog draft to make it clear that I'm not talking about gender stereotypes or gender roles. I'm saying that we need to start talking about how men can express themselves as men without being toxic. And I'm certain that despite my best intentions, I still fucked it all up somehow.

It doesn't matter. This needs to be said, because the right is having this conversation, and if I, a 37 year old feminist man is wondering what it means to be a man without toxic masculinity, I can guarantee that there's 17 year old boys that are asking themselves that. And if Roosh V, Jordan Peterson, and the Proud Boys are the only ones willing to have this conversation, we're going to have another generation of misogynistic, angry, and mentally unhealthy men to contend with.

There is, however, one place in all of the internet that I have found as a good source of information for wholesome masculinity. The Art of Manliness has been around for some time, and it provides a great resource for advice for men in a very non-toxic manner. It has advice for everything from basic things like how to make small talk or tying ties, to more complex things like parenting and relationship advice. And it does it without all the aggressiveness and false bravado that you get from toxic masculinity.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Let the dragging begin!

How to Have a Healthy and Nutritious Thanksgiving

Worried about how to have a Thanksgiving without adding on a bunch of calories? I'm here to help!

Here's my tried and true way to make a Thanksgiving dinner that's nice and healthy!

Step 1: Don't.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk!

Seriously though, no matter how dedicated to health and fitness you are, there's three days where it's completely acceptable to stuff your face.

1. Christmas
2. Your birthday
3. Thanksgiving

Don't be so dedicated to fitness that you don't get to enjoy life. Go ahead, eat the pie.

If it helps, just tell yourself you're bulking. :)

Starting Over Is Hard

There's a reason why I haven't written in over six months.

Back in May, I lost my job. I lost it despite the fact that I thought I was irreplaceable. I was an EMT at a security firm that couldn't afford to lose EMTs. I lost it by doing the one thing that I could do that would cause me to lose my job. I crashed a patrol vehicle.

Over the past months since, I lost that job, got placed at a less paying job that didn't care about my EMT skills, and ended up taking a much better paying job at a place I love working at.

There's a lot of thing I wanted to write in those six months, and even have a long draft written on the whole deal. I decided to not publish it because it's only half done, and at one point, I realized I was writing a novel.

But I can't write about anything else until I mention that. So to sum up the last six months:

1. Losing your job sucks. I don't care who you are. Even if you're a socialist (as I am), losing your job feels like a judgment on your self worth.

2. I was depressed during that time, which was why I wasn't working out much.

3. I tried a new workout during that time, but I kept getting injured, so I gave up on that, so now I'm starting over with the 5x5 method until I do something new.

That about sums it up. I've been wanting to write more on all of this, but since I've not written anything in the last six months, here it is.

There's a lot more I want to write about. Everything from fitness, to politics, to everything else. But I couldn't get started until I finally finished this. So good, we're done. Moving on.