Increasing deep concern on men's issues

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I'm really starting to wonder - for what I've survived through, if I shouldn't be finding or joining some sort of community for men's support, particularly in the way of trying to assist.

So my life has never been easy. I had bullies trying to stomp me out through grade school, a strange sort of isolated popularity in friend circles followed by more high school untouchable treatment in my 20's outside of those circles, similar popularity among the group of people who I went to college with for my accounting degree, and if there's something I've noticed about people it's that most people who don't know me want to treat me like dirt, the more intelligent and balanced people who get to know me like me and the narcissists who get to know me want to kill me. When i was going through deep depression in my late 20's I could hardly be out on a job site without women at the place being like 'We didn't gel with him - please send someone else next time', and it was for nothing more than my emotional state and just not being glib (I kept to myself and there's nothing I could have done to actively creep them out). My 30's were the carousel of dead-end jobs where most places I was at liked my work but either were getting stonewalled by HR on hiring me or had gone from saying '6 months temp to hire' to 'ah, bad news, the company just went through massive downsizing, we can't honor that'.

So living with my parents in my late 30's I started going through something last year, under intense stress from my new job (working something like 70 to 80 hours a week trying to desperately save my own life from getting fired, or a lawsuit - probably rightful - of the client against my employer, all for $20 an hour salary which boiled down to something like $11 an hour or less if it were hourly). This is how I'll best explain it - when you're young you're floating on a certain cushion of grace, ie. your biological clock has plenty of time left in it and your sense of the world is that problems can be fixed in due time. You don't have deep biological panics. Last year at age 38 I started having them.

The best way I can describe that panic, it was a very profound and inescapable sense of 'If you don't have children you'll have failed at the absolute most basic thing life can fail at and you'll have never existed'. It wasn't just a cerebral rumination, it's as if that deeper structure that had given me all kinds of forgiveness and leeway all these years was finally holding my feet to the fire because it knew that there was now a very realistic risk of what it would identify as deep biological failure. The best I can actually describe the feeling, it's equivalent to being tied in a chair and having a plastic bag wrapped over my head, I felt like I was suffocating most of the time when my subconscious mind was doing this to me.


Getting back to the main point of this thread - I'm genuinely scared of what's going to happen to our culture when all kinds of extroverted guys with very few if any internal resources hit this wall. When I think about what kept me from going dark in the sexual sense during this period I really have to attribute it to the combination of a) intelligence, something I was largely born with, and b) my grasp on occult psychology and my ability to leverage symbols. It chills me to think of what this would have been like or what would have happened if I were less intelligent, had less grasp on ways to handle my own levers, because it seems like under situations of true futility and panic people lose themselves to their anger and... well... things happen.

This really makes me wonder, with the hordes of discarded men, if we might be reinaugerating the 70's again in terms of serial killers. I really think we want to do anything in our power to not be making ax murders, 'truck of peace' incels, etc.. I also get that there's only a certain percentage of men going through this who'll become heinous criminals but I also understand that their numbers will always hover around something like one one hundredth of a percent or a bit less (when you think about it - going through such a horrible white-knuckled ride, that the other 99.99% don't do anything bad, with less inward resource than I've been given, is really heroic) and those are the types of people who are great for causing massive scares, destruction of freedoms and liberties under the stress of public passion, etc.

First it's really bad that we have as many men as we do slipping away into the night on fentanyl, while that's at least slipping away without outward destruction it has to be admitted that suicide in most cases is a catastrophic societal failure that obligates the person who was failed to delete themselves.

The only two things I can think of that can really help:

a) Integrate otherwise alienated men into structures where they can be of clear benefit.
b) Let them know that they're immortal, that your biological panics of this type aren't the totality of who and what you are coming to a close.

The last part might be really controversial, especially here, I could talk evidence with people if they want to pry me for it, but that's yet another layer of horror - ie. tell a guy with median IQ whose been ignored and whose going through this panic that he's not only useless and unwanted but give him 100% certainty that he'll cease to exist at death, all he gets to be in that case is his biological panic. Good things can't come from that at all, it's a sign of our society dropping the ball and making its own problems.

Can anyone here think of any men's groups who are trying to do what I'm thinking of? That is - groups that are doing what they have in their power to integrate men, edify them, and overcome society's shortfalls? I'm really thinking this is something I'd want to get involved with because I'm realizing now more than ever just how explosive of a bumble society's creating.

On one hand, I see you posing the age-old question of the meaning of life. But on the other hand, you seem to be talking about something that I do not see; perhaps because I'm 30 years older than you, and clinging to an older worldview. Are you saying that society has a bunch of antiquated expectations regarding men; provider and head of household, father and husband, the guy in charge, but that society no longer offers a means for men to achieve what society expects of them? So guys have ingrained expectations for what they should accomplish, but society has moved on to where men can no longer meet those expectations?

Returning to the meaning of life point, I think that our every action changes the future development of the universe, through knock-on effects which extend down to the end of time. Take for instance having a child. By doing so, you create another individual who acts in the world to promulgate change. Say you don't have a child. That makes things different too, because your life takes different turns if you are raising a child or not. You do different things. What you do changes the course of events in the world. Corporately, all humans alive today will create the world for the next generation to live in. So what has the world taught you? What would you like to see happen? Live in ways that support that change. Plant the seeds of your change and have faith that your seeds will make a difference. We don't need another hero, just a whole lot of people doing normal things to nudge the world a bit in the direction, that they see as most beneficial.

Are you describing a mid-life crisis?

I don't know of any groups. Maybe it's time you started a YouTube channel of your own, if you haven't already.