What to Do When You Feel Lost in Life as a Man
Feeling lost in life as a man? Waiting for clarity keeps you stuck. Direction comes from motion, and a week of small daily wins is how you get it back.
By Your Bro · · Self Improvement
Remember City Slickers? Billy Crystal turns 39, hates his job, can't figure out why he's miserable, and his buddies drag him out west on a cattle drive to snap him out of it. Somewhere on the trail, Jack Palance's grizzled old cowboy Curly holds up 1 finger and tells him the secret of life is one thing. Billy asks him what the one thing is, and Curly just says that's what you've got to figure out. That scene came out in 1991, and men have been nodding along to it ever since, because almost every guy hits a stretch where he wakes up and has no clue where his life is headed.
So you're feeling lost. Maybe you've got a decent job you don't care about, or no job you care about at all. Maybe you're 25 and everybody you graduated with seems to have it figured out, or you're 45 and the plan you had at 25 ran out a while ago. Either way, you go through the motions all week, you numb out on the weekend, and on Sunday night you get that sinking feeling that another week went by and you're still standing in the same spot.
Most men wait for clarity that never shows up
The biggest mistake a lost man makes is sitting still until he figures it out. He reads another book, watches another podcast clip, scrolls through guys on Instagram who seem to have found their calling, and tells himself he'll make a move once he knows what he wants. Know this: clarity almost never shows up while you're sitting on the couch thinking about it. Billy Crystal didn't figure out his one thing in his office in New York. He figured it out on a horse in the middle of nowhere, after a lot of hard days doing stuff he'd never done before.
Direction comes from motion. When you start doing things, even small things, you get information back. You find out what you're good at, what bores you to tears and what makes you lose track of time. A guy sitting still gets none of that information, so he stays lost and blames it on not knowing his purpose.
Stop rehearsing the worst case in your head
A lot of lost men aren't lazy. They're stuck in their own heads, running through every way a change could blow up on them. What if I quit and can't find anything better? What if I start the business and it fails and everybody laughs? I wrote a whole Bro Chat on this called Your Brain Is Practicing What You Fear, and the short version is that every time you replay the disaster, you're training your brain to expect it. Seneca said we suffer more often in imagination than in reality, and the guy was right 2,000 years before anybody invented the group chat.
Clean up the stuff that keeps you numb
Be honest with yourself about how you spend your nights. If the answer is 3 hours of your phone in bed, a few beers and whatever Netflix autoplays next, you're never going to feel the discomfort long enough to do anything about it. Being lost is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is useful, because it's the thing that pushes a man to change. Numbing it out every night just keeps you comfortable enough to stay stuck. If the phone is the big one for you, start with how to stop scrolling in bed at night, because getting your evenings back is the easiest win on the board.
Pick small wins and stack them
You don't need to know what you're doing with the next 20 years. You need to know what you're doing tomorrow morning. Get up at the same time, get a workout in, make your bed and do 1 hard thing you've been putting off, like updating the resume or calling the guy who offered to show you his trade. Then do it again the next day. After a week of that, you'll feel different, and that feeling is what most lost men are missing. You stop seeing yourself as the guy who drifts and start seeing yourself as a guy who does what he says he's going to do.
It's the same reason I wrote about keeping your resolutions like Rocky. Rocky didn't win in Russia because he had a vision board. He won because he chopped wood and ran up a mountain every day in the snow until he was ready.
Write down your own code
Once you've got some momentum, sit down and write out what you actually stand for. Who do you want to be for your wife or your future wife, your kids, your buddies and yourself? What won't you tolerate anymore? A lot of the lost feeling comes from living by everybody else's rules, and I laid out how to fix that in stop floating and define your life code. A man with a code still gets confused now and then, but he always has something to steer by.
Where to start this week
If you want a simple plan so you don't have to figure it all out alone, grab the free 7-Day Strong Man Reset. It gives you 7 days of small, daily wins so you're moving again by next weekend, and it's a lot easier to find your one thing once you're back in motion.