We don’t talk about the grey parts. The stretches where nothing’s wrong, but nothing’s right either. Where you’re functional, productive even, but operating at a removed state from your own life. The clinical term is anhedonia. The poetic one is ennui. Both describe the same flatness, the same muted existence where emotions arrive dampened, experiences feel secondhand.
Men experience this differently than we admit. We’re trained to identify problems we can fix. Broken car, yes. Conflict at work, manageable. But this pervasive sense of disconnection, this low-grade dissatisfaction that colours everything without announcing itself as depression or anxiety? We lack the vocabulary. We lack permission.
Sadness has texture, urgency. Ennui is the absence of texture. You’re at dinner with people you love, and you’re performing affection rather than feeling it. You achieve something significant and intellectually register the fact, yet experience none of the satisfaction. Sex happens to you. Music washes past.
The mechanisms function, but the meaning has leaked out somewhere you can’t identify. This matters specifically for men because our social acceptance relies on doing rather than being. We’re evaluated on our output, competence, and ability to maintain composure under pressure.
You can be deeply competent while feeling nothing about your competence. You can maintain relationships while experiencing them through glass. The performance continues. The interior atrophies. November’s focus on men’s mental health typically centres on suicide, addiction, and obvious crisis. These warrant attention. But ennui is the substrate beneath them, the years of progressive disconnection that precede the breaking point. It’s the man who seems fine until he isn’t. The one who kept all the plates spinning while slowly vacating himself.
Everyone and their therapist are surprised when the transition is complete. The risk factors are structural. Men are discouraged from expressing emotions in detail from childhood. We learn crude categories: angry, fine, tired. We’re rewarded for suppressing vulnerability, for powering through, for not making our internal states anyone else’s problem. This works until it doesn’t. The suppression becomes automatic. You lose access to the full range of feelings.
What remains is duty, obligation, the motions. Isolation compounds this. Male friendship often centres on shared activity rather than emotional disclosure. You have people with whom you do things. People you’ve known for years who couldn’t name what troubles you because you’ve never said, and they’ve never asked. This isn’t their failure or yours. It’s the operating system.
Work culture accelerates the process. You’re optimising, performing, producing. Your value is your utility. Your feelings are inefficiencies to be managed. You learn to operate in a state of mild dissociation, as full presence would make the grind intolerable. The coping mechanism becomes the condition. Testosterone’s role deserves scrutiny without biological determinism. Declining levels are correlated with reduced motivation, flattened affect, and a diminished pleasure response. But the relationship isn’t simple causation.
Chronic stress, poor sleep, sedentary existence, and social isolation all suppress testosterone while independently contributing to ennui. The hormonal and psychological reinforce each other in a downward spiral that’s difficult to arrest once established. The pharmaceutical response is predictable: diagnose depression, prescribe SSRIs. Sometimes this helps.
It’s existential more than neurochemical. You can correct serotonin reuptake while leaving untouched the fundamental question of why you’re going through these motions, what meaning you’ve constructed, whether the life you’re competently executing is one you’d choose if choosing were genuinely available. Recovery, if that’s the term, requires relearning presence. This sounds therapeutic and vague because the specifics resist generalisation.
For some, it’s physical: returning to the body through deliberate discomfort, through training that demands full attention, through sensation intense enough to penetrate the numbness. For others, it’s creative: making something for no purpose beyond the act of creating, reclaiming an activity divorced from productivity. Connection matters, but connection is hard when you’ve forgotten how to want it.
You must practice vulnerability in small doses with people who’ve earned your trust. You have to say true things about your internal state and tolerate the discomfort of being seen. You have to ask for what you need before you collapse from not having it. Purpose helps. Not the corporate mission statement version, but a genuine orientation toward something beyond self-maintenance.
This doesn’t require grand ambition. It requires identifying what actually matters to you beneath the accumulated shoulds, then aligning behaviour accordingly. Most men are executing someone else’s blueprint, wondering why completion feels hollow. The Movember conversation needs to expand beyond crisis intervention. Suicide prevention is crucial. So is addressing the decades of progressive disconnection that precede the crisis.
By the time we notice we can’t breathe, the air’s been thinning for years. You can’t fix this with listicles and self-care rhetoric. It requires structural changes to how men relate to emotion, to each other, and to measures of worth. It requires questioning whether the Stoic ideal serves us or diminishes us. It requires building friendship models that include emotional honesty. It requires workplaces that value people over profits.
Individually, it requires noticing the numbness before it becomes total. Asking whether you’re living or performing. Whether you feel things or remember feeling things. Whether the person operating your life is someone you’d want to be.
It doesn’t demand immediate attention. It’s patient. It waits while you optimise, produce, and maintain appearances. It will still be there when you finally stop moving long enough to notice you’ve been empty the entire time. The question is whether you’ll listen before you have to.
