Man Up!

One of my good friends told me the other day that we are both drowning in "it should be better." That hit me harder than I thought. I looked back at 2025 and thought, "good god, that was the shittiest year of my life." My dog died, I progressed nowhere in my life substantially, or at least that's what it felt like internally, and worst of all, I lost the one person in my life who it felt like loved me just for existing, my grandma. Like most good things, I didn't realize it until it was too late and by the time I did, she was gone.It's not that I don't have a great family and great friends that love and care about me or that I had some awful childhood. This isn't some hard-knock story about how I overcame a million and one things to be great, but it is a reality-check. This life shit is hard and I don't think it gets talked about nearly enough, especially from a mental health perspective. Now personally, I am a man, so I am gonna choose to talk about it from a man's perspective. My life experiences, which I'll get into along the way, made me grow up a lot faster than most of my peers. They also put what felt like a million pounds of pressure on my shoulders for as long as I can remember. Whose fault is that? I don't know. If I hear from one more family member (yes, I am middle-eastern so it is cultural and I hope my listeners that share that background with me understand) that I need to be gainfully employed by someone who isn't my dad or I need to get a girlfriend or I need to leave the nest, I will likely jump into the tub with a brand new Breville toaster....hypothetically, of course.The goal of this isn't to just be the stupid endeavor of a soon to be jobless man, or a rant on useless BS, but to talk about and share the mental health struggles of my generation, from the lens of someone who has dealt with a lot of internal turmoil for a very long time. My goal is to eventually have guests on the show and reach the next man who thinks the only way out is the final