The Good Men Project

By MATTHEW P.

If, as William Blake wrote, contrariness breads wisdom, there is much to learn from the contradictions of our times. The headlines hint at our collective schizophrenia.  Our country slowly goes broke while 2 percent of the population accumulates more wealth than the remaining 98 percent combined. Market apologists still applaud the invisible hand of capitalism without admitting that a government bailout the size and scent of socialism just kept them in business. Kids coming out of the best schools can’t spell Shakespeare but know the mathematical formula for standard deviation and Sharpe ratios. Our best and brightest increasingly prefer the allure of the seductive buck without bothering to look under the ethical hood of our so-called success stories: MBAs packaging (and masquerading) mortgage-backed vapor as investment-grade securities that bankrupted an entire system while covering their asses with default swap insurance and federal bailouts. Our leaders speak of family values while looking for sex in airport bathrooms or Argentinean hotel rooms. Many of our political role models appear to have all the sophistication of game show hosts. As for showbiz, despite some wonderful exceptions, the majority of our popular heroes are celebrities famous for little more than being famous. Statistically, Americans spend more time as a nation watching TV or drinking than we do connecting with our lovers, children or families. Our TV ads are filled with smiling faces and jogging models, yet almost 40 percent of us are swallowing two anti-depressants a day. Meanwhile, the media, caught in a sanctimony straight out of a Hawthorne novella, considers the sex lives of fallen golfers and starlets as newsworthy. Love and sex so confuse and interest us; yet, so little intelligence is given to the topics. One of today’s most popular shows involves a cadre of women crammed into a mansion while competing for a husband as if true love was as regimented as winning a talent contest. It’s entertaining, yes, and we need entertainment. We need a break form the pace of the American workweek. We need to unwind, pop a few SSRIs, mock our failed capitalism, and then watch The Bachelor. We are all a bit confused. Me too. Me in particular.

Still, I am more and more convinced that the poet Octavio Paz was correct: We live in an age of mud, in what another poet, Robert Bly, described as a celebrity-mad population of idiots. But I’m not interested in bullying our pop culture. I do fear, however, that de Tocqueville was on to something when some 200 years ago he warned against the dangers of American individualism drowning under the peer pressure of thinking, speaking and striving like everyone else. Under such immense pressures to fit in, we are losing the art of living candidly, individually, humbly.  That’s a modern problem.

Here, and if only briefly, I want to address living and speaking honestly. I want to reveal how I fucked up and why that matters. Men in particular don’t like to openly discuss failure, yet it can be the best thing that ever happens to us.

But there’s a danger in honesty. Candor, even when discussing mistakes, often swings between the extremes of self-serving confession and grandstanding arrogance. Somewhere in the middle, however, the pendulum pauses at the truth, and the truth, when it is spoken for its own sake, teaches. We’ve all felt this. When something authentic is witnessed, when a man speaks not for attention but for connection, we feel a strange peace, a sincere, almost instinctive desire to lean into the teller’s words as a babe roots for a mother’s breast. Who has not surrendered to the tender value of an honest “I love you,” “I am afraid,” “I am sorry,” “Help me,” “I do not know,” or best of all: “Forgive me”? Such phrases, when uttered honestly, precede and conclude entire tomes of raw emotion and thus offer a chance at actual catharsis. In this, our era of twittered intimacies, 24-hour news cycles, Wall Street spin, bipartisan sound bites and Facebook self-advertising, we are in particular need of humility, of unedited honesty. Few men can simply admit when we are lost, tired or afraid, or when we have failed or when we are hurting. We need to speak more bravely. And yet moralists of every continent have unanimously warned that if for even a moment all men were to truly speak their minds, society would immediately collapse under the weight of our revelations, of our pure selves. How then are we to exchange truthfully, and hence learn directly, if our most raw, terrified and proud selves fear crossing the lines of propriety?

Let me try. Let me toe dip into the first-person, let me use personal pronouns and risk in these paragraphs an honesty that does not drift into mere confession or solipsism. Goethe warned that most men write to show off what they know rather than to teach what they’ve learned. In telling certain truths, I want to impart lessons learned rather than hint at trophies won in the male rat race. The aim is to touch upon my unusual basket of broken male illusions and share them in order to connect with those who might benefit from their candor. Some will confuse my sincerity for boasting (though I have nothing to boast of). Besides, I’ve sometimes found that “coming clean” before the wrong audience can be disappointing. Perhaps that is what Hemingway meant when warning that nothing hurts more than opening your soul to a son-of-a-bitch. In telling the truth, there is always the risk you won’t be understood or that your motives will be challenged. That hurts. Yet those who speak bravely, which is to say honestly, deserve an equally brave and honest audience; it’s worth the risk.

What then, is my truth? Like most of us, I was a contradiction—that part of Americana that our national poet, Walt Whitman, described as the “pell mell of a thousand selves, the sinner and the saint, the fool and the wise man.” I have known unusual excess, perversion, great wealth and poverty, wisdom and ignorance, appalling dishonesty and heart-wrenching accountability. In the process, I’ve realized that something unusual happened to me. For whatever reason, events, ambitions, mistakes, coincidences and blind luck converged in my odd biography to grant me an extremely atypical life—a life that both exaggerates and satirizes all four corners of the American Dream and the alpha male fight for all the trappings of “success.”  Think of the dirt poor, financial-aid kid from Michigan who won the dot.com lottery and ended up with a yacht in Palm Beach and a château in southern Europe by age 30. A man with polo ponies and shiny friends. A trilingual man with a black American Express card and degrees from the best schools—Choate through Harvard. Think of a man who worked Wall Street, Hollywood and the spooky halls of international espionage yet drank as many of his beers with French farmers and Midwestern factory workers as he did with famous writers, actors, hedge fund managers or tenured professors. Think of a man who has known delirious acts with women in hotels around the world yet, like our politicians, seemed the perfect husband and father on the black-tie circuit or alumni dinners. Think of a man with a gorgeous wife and perfect children. Think of a man who stopped working at age 29. That was me. The life one dreams of, strives after. The life that guarantees happiness. The American dream teetering toward nightmare. The great contradiction.

And what did contradiction, as Blake promised, teach me? What can it teach you? And why, amidst all of my excess and “success” was I so unhappy?

It would be too easy to say money corrupted me or that it didn’t buy happiness. As for me, I tend to agree with the words of Frank Sinatra, who admitted, “I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich. Trust me: Rich is better.” I enjoyed the money, the freedom from fiscal worry. Nor did I mind the attention money gave me or the opportunities that came in its wake. Men like money (and women do too). I am writing about honesty, and I say without a blush that wealth creates a fog wherein those who possess it hear “yes” far more often than “no” in a wide variety of contexts. When I think back on the credit card Bacchanalia of my 30s, I liked it—it was a pleasure. That was part of the problem; and as I’ll suggest below, it was also part of the solution.

But why the unhappiness? I was young. I was rich.  I was getting laid. I was traveling. I was playing polo in South America, the UK and Mexico. I was living in France, dabbling in West Coast film production and popping into NYC for various nights of excess in a Union Square apartment. I had it all—all that we are told to believe from the first day we sit before a TV or read a Vanity Fair article. I had all the fiscal/carnal perks of the rock star without the headaches of the paparazzi. So what was the problem? How had the black card and the BMW lost their shine? How did the pleasures grow stale? Why didn’t the expensive diplomas or the house on the hill sustain me?

I feel the answer lies in the distinction between pleasure and joy, a distinction that characterizes not only my own contradictions, but those of the “superman” culture so many men have sheepishly bought into. The pleasures (and they are pleasures) that men are told and trained to achieve—the kind we see in our peer groups, schools, magazines, realty shows, billboards, etc. (you know, all the sexy, “be a real man” stuff that rains down on us from the ad agencies and their commerce-driven selling points that account for 70 percent of our GDP)—are in fact, well, dishonest. Dishonest not because they don’t package and sell pleasure, but because they fail to disclose the absence of any lasting joy. Joy. It’s missing. And the sadness we see on the front pages—the sadness of our fallen heroes (from Tiger Woods to John Edwards, Wall Street to Malibu) —is identical to the sadness of the men who read such headlines. It is the sadness of chasing and confusing the pleasures of the American dream with the far more elusive and humble joys of being respected rather than envied, loved rather than networked or “pitched to.” The lasting joys, the kind not touched upon by reality TV, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, NPR or HBO are the simplest of all. They are never purchased; they are found in the contentment that comes from a personal commitment, a personal sacrifice, a personal accountability and thus a personal evolution toward something larger than the self. They are found in the warmth of a slow and sincere kiss, the squeal of a happy son or daughter, or at the laughter at a table of friends who love you without judgment, a talent only learned from recognizing one’s self and others purely, which is to say, honestly—flaws and all. At some point in climbing the American ladder, many of us, as the song writer said, got “caught up in all there was to offer,” and fell for the hype—the advertised pleasures—while tumbling straight past the more meaningful and humble joys.

And to the extent I have acquired any authority to speak of joy, I gained it—as in most contradictions—through moments of sorrow and loss. I’m skipping over massive amounts of detail, of disturbing images, shouts, tears, curses, humiliations, embraces and atonements. But to sum it up: I lost almost everything before I learned anything. Losing the money was easy. The millions that came from the dot.com era vanished in a hedge fund with the same speed and irrational nonsense they were earned. Money so whimsically won doesn’t feel as bad when so whimsically lost. The real sorrow, and hence the real lesson, came from accepting the pain I caused those who trusted my superman image—the perfect husband, perfect father, brilliant investor—you know, the “successful man.” Looking back at the litany of lies, indulgences, excuses and rationalizations that fed the appetite of my pleasures, I am appalled. Chastened. I have learned that pleasure is about the image—the self—while joy is about something much more. Joy arrives when the self bows out, when the pleasures of the self—the carnal, the material, the globetrotting and the facades—are revealed as fleeting. The joys, however, of committing to something larger than the self are lasting; they sustain us. Committing to a promise, a vow, a responsibility, a friend, a family, a love—these inexpensive watersheds offer so much greater wealth than any pleasure I ever knew at the top of the so-called hill.

Such notions of modest joy once seemed generic and trite to me. They were noble yes, but ultimately I felt I was entitled to more, that my decisions were fine so long as those closest to me were left happily in the dark and ensconced in the comforts that money can buy. What a lie. It’s a lie so many men of means, entitlement, ego and vanity buy into as we buy excuses and alibis in order to mask a contradictory sense of insecurity.  Yet it’s also a lie we impose on the innocent, and that is where the results are both inevitable and devastating. The price of pleasure’s great lie—its staggering toll—eventually sinks in when those who loved us most regard us with the gaze of a stranger. I’ve seen that expression in my children and between the endless tears of a shattered spouse who had placed her faith in a boy of pleasure rather than a man of joy.

Today I rent. The boat is gone. The big house on the French hill is no longer mine. I certainly don’t have enough money for silly polo matches. I’m 40 years old, and I have a regular job and a W2 form for the first time in over a decade. It’s a struggle, though hardly one for which I expect any sympathy. My time now is dedicated to the value of my incomparable children. I am enjoying taking responsibility, telling the truth—finding a different notion of the “self”. I am rebuilding from the parts of me I had forgotten in the fog of pleasure. My ex-wife and I speak daily. Often for hours. Recently, after some long and loving pauses on the phone, she forgave me. The power of this gesture has made all the difference—for both of us. I find her extraordinary, and the kind of love we’ve found as humans in many ways surpasses the love we knew as spouses. I’m discovering myself again, the basics again. I’ve found hints of joy, and long after the money has drifted away, I am, at last, becoming a rich man.

As for me and the pleasure-seeking, prestige-winning notions that all men are sold into from Little League to the Ivy League, let’s try to conclude in a moment of compassion, of empathy. Not all of us will make the front pages or the highest tax brackets; not all of us will know the Sturm und Drang of the latest celebrity pleasure seekers (i.e. Tiger Woods). Each of us, however, will have our own type of fall, big or small. Perhaps what therefore makes our obsession with pleasure and our fear of failure so valuable in this confused and misguided land of the advertised American dream is that we all, at some point or another, must wake up from the dream. We all fall down. And falling down creates an opportunity for newer versions of the man who gets back up again. That’s the man who interests me: the one who rises, the one who learned something while humbly shaking off the dust.

[Photo by Katerha]