Why So Many Of Us Feel Empty

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:01]I don't think most men are lazy.

[00:00:04]I think most men are starving.

[00:00:07]Starving for a challenge. Starving for purpose, for something real.

[00:00:20]And modern life today is slowly replacing all of it with comfort, distractions, routines, scrolling, stress.

[00:00:37]That's why so many of us feel empty even when life looks the best.

[00:00:47]That's what we're going to talk about today.

[00:00:51]how we feel empty but it appears that we're lazy but we're not because we don't have the challenges. We don't have the drive to do something else.

[00:01:10]I mean we go back and we talk about routine and being on autopilot just like in the last video and the one before that.

[00:01:17]You know, the system created this so that we would make those that developed the system more powerful, more rich.

[00:01:34]But for us as men, we're always craving more. I know I was probably never at my happiness at the highest level of happiness I should say when I was in the Navy and we were doing high-speed stuff, you know, all the time, going here, going there, doing things with special forces and stuff like that.

[00:02:02]And a lot of that stuff's a challenge.

[00:02:06]And today there's not a lot of challenging out there anymore.

[00:02:13]If your challenge is to get up, drink some coffee, eat some breakfast, go to work, come home, pat the dog on the head, eat dinner, watch the news.

[00:02:35]I'm here to tell you that's not a challenge.

[00:02:38]That's a routine that you have fell into. A comfort zone that you have fell into and you need to get out of it. I gotten out of it. Helen, I'm not the brightest freaking bulb on the tree. And I'm not certainly the most sharpest tool in the shed, but I got out of it. And I've never been happier.

[00:03:05]We're just seem to be like we're existing existing without building anything.

[00:03:14]And if you want to build, you're going to have to be able to strive for a challenge or drive for a challenge. And I'm not talking about getting in your car and driving down the road either. You guys know what I'm talking about. You know, find that thing that motivates you to get out of it cuz it it can be deadly. I mean, you think about it. If you're waking up in the morning, going to work, paying your bills, you've got distractions.

[00:03:57]As far as I don't want to say family, but outside family or friends, you know, you've got uh the average, oh, I'm going to take them I'm going to take 10 minutes. I'm going to scroll Facebook, Tik Tok, you know, so you can get that dopamine release so you can hopefully refocus on the plan in front of you again.

[00:04:26]And then you come home and you sit in your chair after you've eat dinner and you're listening to the news and you're scrolling on your phone or your tablet.

[00:04:34]Man, come on.

[00:04:36]There's a lot of us out here that were trapped in it. I see them in the comments. A lot of them are trapped in it. Some of you have got your head so buried in the sand you can't see the light of day. I hope one day you do. I really do.

[00:04:54]But until until you wake up and you actually see that there is more to life than living to work, working to live, wash, rinse, repeat.

[00:05:06]Then possibly you'll see what the rest of us are seeing because what you're doing, you may think it's living, but it's not. It's not living because there are so many more people out there right now that have gone into early retirement in their mid-4s, their early 50s, and even people in their 60s have said, and I quote, "I wish I would have known about this earlier. I would have retired earlier."

[00:05:42]So, what do you got to say about that?

[00:05:46]I'm not putting this content out for to be some type of motivational speaker or anything. I'm just pointing the things out that I felt and that now that I'm on the outside looking in, I see it every day. I talked about it in uh the other video where too many people will walk around looking down at their phones.

[00:06:20]You know, I saw it in the hospital.

[00:06:22]Nurses walking down the hallway, staring at their phone, turning corners, muscle memory.

[00:06:28]You know, these these devices that we hold in our hand have become so important that it's an addiction. I think one of you even said it in the comments that there was a study done or something like that. When you take away the phones from kids under the age of 18, they end up throwing a fit.

[00:06:50]That's not good. That's not good at all.

[00:06:53]Hey guys, how are you all?

[00:06:58]And I mean that right there was a family of family of four, you know, dad, grandma, mom, daughter out here on the trail riding bikes. Not a phone in sight. So I guarantee if I would have stopped them, they would have probably said, "Yeah, we do this all the time. We get away from the distractions so we can come out and do this." And I think I mentioned to you before, this trail is 12 mi long.

[00:07:35]A lot of us have stopped building a life and we're just maintaining the one we're in.

[00:07:42]And that's the God's honest truth because that's exactly what I was doing.

[00:07:47]But I'm not anymore. Now I'm building for my retirement in a year, getting all this monotonous crap out of the way so that if I do decide to pack up and go live in a cabin in the woods somewhere off the grid, I'm going to. Or if I decide to hop a plane and go to Panama, I'm going to do that because there's nothing that's going to stop me.

[00:08:12]Not money, nothing.

[00:08:17]Now, one of the big things is that a couple of y'all said, "Well, y'all, you must have a lot of money stacked behind you." I don't.

[00:08:28]And I put it in one of the comments before I come out here to start to shoot this video.

[00:08:33]I have a pension, military pension, 22 years, 52% of my base pay. You can do the math.

[00:08:41]I'm 42% service connected. So with disability.

[00:08:47]So if you can figure that out, you can do the math, you'll see that it's below the poverty line of what I draw every year.

[00:08:56]I work for $19 an hour in today's economy.

[00:09:02]So with both of those, I'm right on the edge.

[00:09:08]And I guarantee you within a year I'll be below it.

[00:09:14]And then what's going to happen? You've got a lot of our senior citizens out there now. You know, people that are 65 or 70 that didn't have the chance to build wealth or build a nest egg for their retirement. You know, I'm talking about our parents and if you're lucky, maybe even your grandparents.

[00:09:35]I guarantee you, you know, if my dad didn't have his disability and my stepmom didn't have their social security, they wouldn't be able to live.

[00:09:48]You know, they've they've stopped buying Christmas gifts. They save up the money to hand out um what do you call it? Uh gift cards at Christmas, you know, and it's and it's sad. It's a sad state that we live in now with with with this system and it just ah it just pisses me off sometimes.

[00:10:17]But we have to as men, we have to get back to building a life so it matters for oursel. And if you have a family, a family that you that that you're with, you know, your your wife or your husband, your kids, you have to be able to build for that. And if you don't, then you've lost your edge.

[00:10:40]You know, you've lost your ability to crave more. You've got no mission in life.

[00:10:48]You with no direction, not you know, you don't know whether you're coming or going, you know, and there's and there's no growth there. If you're not growing as a man every day with lessons learned or as or having having to be challenged, you're stuck. You're comfortable. So ask yourself, when was the last time I was challenged?

[00:11:23]When was the last time I had drive for something?

[00:11:29]And if you can't answer that question, and if it hasn't been within the last month, maybe some things you need to start taking a hard look at.

[00:11:43]You know, I get so aggravated. You know, I talked about, you know, the nurses walking around with their heads down, looking at their phones all the time and scrolling and all that And that crap is really starting to just irritate the hell out of me, you know, and I and I don't know why. I think it's because I've been able to, you know, limit do a personal rule for myself and maintain that rule by saying I'm only going to look at my phone so many times a day for this many minutes.

[00:12:18]And even even the generation behind us, okay, that Y generation, you know, that Gen Z, you know that, you know, and then what is it? The Gen Alpha, Alpha or whatever they call now.

[00:12:36]And then of course the other generations coming up behind them.

[00:12:41]They they knew what they were doing when they handed these phones out and they started making this stuff. I I talked about this in my last video, but I mean it is ridiculous, you know, the phones and the scrolling and the keeping up on social media and you know, oh, you know, Karen and Tommy got a new Tesla. Oh, honey, we got to go out and get an Escalade. Why the why?

[00:13:09]You got you got a perfectly good car in the driveway, you know?

[00:13:15]But then you get into the the taboo stuff.

[00:13:21]You know, you get into especially men and some women.

[00:13:26]So women don't think that I'm leaving you out in this. You know, you're just as bad with the phones and scrolling and stuff because a lot of the nurses I saw were women, you know. But what I'm getting ready to talk about porn and alcohol and I'll speak from one end of it, the alcohol end of it. There's no hope at the end of that bottle. Yeah. It's a numbing effect. It numbs it for what?

[00:13:53]8 hours, 12 hours.

[00:13:57]Then if you're lucky enough, you get up the next morning, you don't have a hangover.

[00:14:03]But what do you do after that? Then you're right back in the same place.

[00:14:11]I mean, you just you just grab another six-pack, you grab another bottle and get to the end of it. And I'm speaking from experience here on that end.

[00:14:21]Then when you want to talk about porn, well, we all know where that goes.

[00:14:28]You know, they put it out there for everybody to look at. It's readily accessible on your phone any given day of the week, any time of the day, day or night.

[00:14:40]And that just starts sick addictions, you know, because if you're addicted to, let's just say, let's just say you're addicted to both, alcohol and porn.

[00:14:57]Well, there's going to come a time, and I'm going to say this, there's going to come a time when your significant other, whether that be husband or wife, wants to reconnect by making love.

[00:15:17]And your member isn't going to react the same way that it should.

[00:15:24]And that's just going to cause a deeper divide.

[00:15:27]And if you think I'm lying, ask people who have been addicted to it because the studies are out there. You can go you can go study them. You can go read them. I'm just g I'm just spitting the facts out about it.

[00:15:44]The distractions with with entertainment, you know, when I talk about entertainment, a lot of younger generation goes out to the bars all the time. You know, you know, you may make $129,000 a year, but you can't afford a house.

[00:16:01]H sounds like one, you either live in a high cost of living area, i.e. one of the major cities, which you couldn't pay me $3 million a day to live in one of the cities.

[00:16:18]Or you can't manage your money.

[00:16:21]Nice.

[00:16:24]>> And if you can't manage manage $129,000 a year, you got bigger problems to think about because if you're doing that with going out to the bars and chasing women or chasing men, telling you it's not going to pay off.

[00:16:42]It's not going to pay off for you.

[00:16:44]You've got to get back to getting you've got to get back to getting that drive that want you you you got to want more.

[00:16:54]But if you don't, you just living like everybody else with their head in the sand and just say, "Well, this is the way it is.

[00:17:07]I'll work till I'm 65 and then I'll try to draw my social security and then I draw my social security. I guess well I'm going to have to work more because now my social security isn't going to take care of me for the rest of my life because you know my house may be paid off but I I'm going to need I'm going to need a better car here soon you know so and I need to pay my bills.

[00:17:32]I still have electric still have gas. to sell water, still got to pay the trash bill.

[00:17:42]It's It's ridiculous.

[00:17:48]Modern life today keeps us and I and I would say modern life today keeps men, but it's not only men, it's a lot of women, too. Keeps us distracted enough just to survive. And think about that.

[00:18:07]Modern life today keeps us distracted enough just to survive.

[00:18:18]What do you think about that?

[00:18:22]I think it's true.

[00:18:26]I mean, what else would it be?

[00:18:31]We're working five days a week, 8 to 10 8 to nine hours a day. You get two days off Saturday and Sunday for the most for most people.

[00:18:41]You know, if well a lot of people, I'll say this, a lot of people depends on the job they're working. They may have they may have to work Saturday, Sunday, but they may have Monday off and then their next day off may be Wednesday. So, they're not lucky enough to have two days off in a row. You know, I I am lucky enough to have set my own hours for my own schedule.

[00:19:11]And and that's and that's what I work four days a week, nine and a half hours a day. I have a three-day weekend every weekend. Whether that's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Saturday, Sunday, Monday.

[00:19:21]I'm not giving in on it anymore and I'm not compromising on it anymore.

[00:19:30]But if modern life keeps us distracted enough just to survive, then I think most of us aren't exhausted and tired.

[00:19:48]We're just numb.

[00:19:50]absolutely numb.

[00:19:55]Again, we've got to have that we've got to have that that drive. We've got to have that mission that okay, this is what we're going to do today or this is what I'm going to do today. And that goes for men and women both.

[00:20:09]There's no challenge there. There's no brotherhood or sisterhood. You know, a a couple of people had mentioned to me that they had some friends and when they started to change, those friends started looking at them kind of weird.

[00:20:30]Well, I told you guys, I think it was in one of the first couple of videos.

[00:20:35]You'll have to go back and find it. I'm not sure which one it's in, but it's in one of those other videos where I said, "Your friends will be the first ones to jump ship because you're going to start being more different than they are and they don't like it because they don't want to stand up too. And it's not because they're afraid of it. It's because they are afraid to fail and be seen failing because they're going to be afraid to be laughed at.

[00:21:09]I shake I shook my head at a lot of my friends that well people that I thought were my friends. You know, I had a pretty good circle. My circle's gotten a lot smaller now, but my my circle has gotten smaller with people who see the same thing that I see now.

[00:21:33]And if we don't have purpose, we just start disappearing. We start disappearing into the crowds.

[00:21:41]We don't we don't mean enough to oursel not to let that happen.

[00:21:54]And when and when we don't have a mission or you know that drive to be better or to do something about it to to get outside the system so that we can have that peace and that solitude and that happiness. Distractions become our lifestyle.

[00:22:22]we've become just like everybody else.

[00:22:25]And I challenge you guys out there when you're out tonight, when you're if you're going to work tonight or some of you guys are over in Europe and you'll be watching this later late tonight. When you're out today, look around.

[00:22:41]Count how many people are around you.

[00:22:44]Then go back and count how many people are staring at their phones.

[00:22:52]or on their phones as far as like talking or whatever.

[00:22:58]Distractions, a lot of distractions.

[00:23:04]We we we drift away from our responsibilities and we start drifting away from those we love.

[00:23:18]Not maybe emotionally, but a lot of times internally and maybe not even so much physically, but internally.

[00:23:32]If if you've been married and you're married with kids and the wife or the husband comes home, is it the same is it the same that it was 10 or 15 years ago when you guys first got married?

[00:23:49]Probably not because you got kids, you've got major responsibilities, right?

[00:24:00]When was the last time you asked your kids how their school day was and actually got an actual answer out of them?

[00:24:10]Or even your grandkids, an actual answer out of them without them staring at their phone?

[00:24:18]You guys remember when our grandparents or our parents would ask us how school was and we'd say, "Good." And they would say, "Well, what did you learn today?

[00:24:28]Yeah, I bet a lot of us out there don't even know when some of our kids' papers are due or or when their final exams are.

[00:24:39]You know, we just hope and pray that our kids are smart enough to get to the next grade because we're just living for the next day. We're living for the the end of the the end of the school year so that we can say, "Okay, you're you're going to be a junior. You're a senior.

[00:24:55]So, you're going to gra we got one graduating this year and one going to be graduating. That's no way to look at that. No way at all.

[00:25:05]And I know a lot of you out there do that.

[00:25:09]And I'm not calling you out. I'm just saying I'm just stating a fact.

[00:25:17]The scariest part about all of this, a lot of us can't even remember who we used to be.

[00:25:28]And I'll say this again.

[00:25:32]If 7-year-old you when you sat there and you said, "Well, I'm going to be this and I'm going to be that and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that."

[00:25:44]Is that the case now?

[00:25:47]Are you what you said you were going to be? Now, I know things change. You know, sometimes, you know, sometimes those things don't have a way of working themselves out. But are you doing what you want to do? Have you done what you wanted to do?

[00:26:07]Probably not. I don't know. I know when I asked myself that, I was like, well, sort of.

[00:26:15]You know, I was always one that said, you know, I want to travel and see the world. And I got to do that with the Navy.

[00:26:23]But now that I'm home and I've been in the system for 13 years, I realized something else was missing. And maybe that's what was missing. I need to travel more.

[00:26:35]I don't know, but I'm going to figure it out.

[00:26:42]What were your dreams like when when you were, you know, in grade school? What were those dreams about?

[00:26:53]Why can't you reach back and grab them now and take and do it now? Because now you're older, you're smarter, you have more things at your fingertips that could possibly make that happen.

[00:27:05]You've got but but this is the thing.

[00:27:07]You've got to have the energy and the hunger to do it. You got to have the drive to want to do it. And if you don't, then you've slowly traded the strongest part of yourself just to be comfortable.

[00:27:34]Stability and emotional feelings will eventually make you disappear.

[00:27:49]Now, you got to have stability, but you can reshape that stability to what you really want it to be.

[00:28:02]You know, when when I decided this, I realized I wasn't tired of life. I wasn't tired of taking care of my responsibilities as far as paying my bills and taking care of my dogs and stuff.

[00:28:19]I was tired of being disconnected from my purpose.

[00:28:27]what was I doing? And when I realized I was working to live, living the work, it made a whole lot more sense to me that I needed to be changing everything that I was doing.

[00:28:52]At some point, we're all going to have to decide.

[00:28:56]We're all going to have to decide.

[00:28:59]And to be honest with you, I want I want everybody that's in the comments, all 1,600 of you that have subscribed, you're going to have to decide one day, hopefully here soon, that and ask yourself the question, are you actually living or are you just maintaining yourself until you die?

[00:29:40]I mean, that's the question.

[00:29:46]Thank you guys for uh subscribing and coming on board for the journey. Again, the comments in the community section is open. be cordial and um be honest with one another, but be adults.

[00:30:04]And I want to thank you again, but you need to ask yourself that question.

[00:30:12]Are you really living or are you just maintaining yourself until you die?

[00:30:18]That's totally up to you.