Daniel Burgess on Comfort, Honour, and the Emotions Men Carry

Ask a woman what she wants in a man and you will get ten answers. Ask society and you will get ten more. Daniel Burgess thinks that is the problem. Men have lost the baseline, and a man without purpose will settle for comfort instead.

He and Rashid open with the men who cruise through life at 60 percent, numbing anything that asks something of them, and the years that pass while they do. Then they get to the cost. Daniel calls it the backpack full of rocks, the unexpressed emotion a man hauls around believing he is protecting everyone from it, when it is quietly leaking out as numbness, passive aggression and distance from his wife and his kids. Which is why, he says, women reach for help early and men wait until the house is burning down.

From there the conversation turns to honour, and Daniel’s own definition of it: respect for the man beside you, and respect from the man above you. Horizontal and vertical. Relational accountability, which he argues kept men in check more effectively than laws ever did, and which we have largely lost. He and Rashid work through what it looks like when that honour runs both ways between men and women, and disagree productively about whether men are best held by men.

They also go into the emotions men inherit from their fathers and grandfathers, why almost every man insists he does not have anger, and what Daniel does about it. And he tells the story he built his identity on, that his father left and did not love him, and what he found out years later about the six years his father spent looking for him.