Why Love, Why Fear, Why Men, Why Me?

Check out this graph. It’s something I put together in March while I was in Costa Rica unthawing from the Maine winter.

It shows something striking. Men in the United States are 33% more likely than women to operate from a fear-based mindset. Only 48% of men fall into what I call the love-based zone, compared to 61% of women.

I didn’t set out looking for this data. I wasn’t trying to prove a point about gender. I started somewhere else entirely.

The Paradox That Started It All

I started by noticing that a lot of men, especially young men, are suffering.

Men are four times more likely than women to die by suicide. For young men, it’s five times. Men report deeper loneliness. They carry the weight of being providers. They face pressure to perform, to produce, to never show weakness.

And here’s the paradox that kept playing in my mind. Men hold most of the power in the world. Most of the privilege. Most of the money. So why all this pain? Why the disconnection? Why the desperation?

Something wasn’t adding up.

Multiple Threads Converging

Around the same time, I was reading a lot about love and fear. Not in a touchy-feely way. More like...what if these are the two primary operating systems we use to move through life?

Shirzad Chamine writes about this in Positive Intelligence. He calls them Saboteurs (fear-driven) and Sage (love-driven). Different neural pathways. Different ways of seeing the world.

I was also reading Chris Lombard’s book, The Horses in Our Stars. It kept circling back to love and fear as fundamental forces.

And I kept thinking about the men I know. The men I’ve worked with. The conversations I’ve had with other men. The patterns I’ve seen in myself.

This left me asking, what if men aren’t broken? What if we don’t need healing any more than anyone else? What if we’re just operating more from fear than love?

Testing the Hypothesis

I couldn’t let those questions go. So, I did what I often do when I can’t shake something. I went looking for data.

I built a model inside MRI-Simmons, a massive database of information about American consumers. I used attitudinal statements to map fear and love-based mindsets. Things like scarcity versus abundance. Control versus connection. Zero-sum versus collaboration.

Then I ran the numbers for men and women. The opening graph is what I found. When I saw those results, something shifted. This wasn’t just interesting data. This was a map showing where so much of our world’s pain comes from.

Men hold disproportionate power and privilege. That’s just true. We hold most political offices. We run most corporations. We control most of the wealth.

The numbers make this impossible to ignore:

• Over the last century there have been more Senators named John (including Jon and Jonathan) than the total number of women Senators over that time period. 65 Johns vs 64 women. And today, despite women being more than 50% of the population, they hold just 26% of Senate seats.

• It was not until 2023 that women CEOs outnumbered CEOs named John in the S&P 500.

• An analysis by Oxfam in 2024 showed that men control 60-66% of global wealth.

By these standards men seem to be a story of success.

So why the significantly higher rates of suicide and loneliness? That does not feel like success to me.

The only answer I can come up with is fear.

And if men are disproportionately operating from fear, from scarcity, control, dominance, and zero-sum thinking, then that fear-based operating system is running the world.

It shows up everywhere. In how we treat the environment. In how we build our economies. In how we approach conflict. In the violence we perpetuate. In the disconnection we normalize.

I couldn’t unknow this.

What I Believe

My core belief in life is simple. The world works better when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. As Ziggy Marley sings, “Love is my religion.”

Regardless of where people sit on the political spectrum, it’s likely that most of us agree that things are fucked up in the world right now. The world needs healing.

I believe that healing starts by shifting more of us toward love-based ways of being.

• Curiosity instead of Judgment

• Connection instead of Isolation

• Contribution instead of Extraction

• Purpose instead of Status

And if we want to shift the world toward love, one of the most under-leveraged places to start is with men. Not because men are bad. Not because men are the problem. But because my research shows that men tend to be driven more by fear.

Why is that the case? That is certainly complicated and I am still unpacking that in my journey.

Why Me?

So why me?

That’s a fair question. I’m a white guy who used to run a B Corp certified performance apparel company. I’m not a therapist. I’m not an academic. But I am pretty damn curious, and I just can’t say no to a good adventure and a hard challenge.

So, the question became, why not me?

This all started with a simple question about men and intentional adventures. What would it look like to push ourselves out of our comfort zones by day and gather around fires at night? To share stories, open hearts, hold each other accountable?

That was all I was after. A yearly practice for myself and maybe others who wanted it.

But the more I followed that trail, the clearer it became. There are cracks in the lives of men. Loneliness. Pressure. Disconnection. Fear. It wasn’t just personal. It was cultural.

And the more I followed that trail, the clearer it became to me that fear-based masculinities are at the root of so many things we’re trying to fix in the world.

That realization left me restless. I couldn’t shake it. So, I did what I often do. I started exploring. Not with the intent of producing something polished, but to wrestle the ideas into the light. To see what they added up to.

The result was a 100+ page paper I called “If We Want to Heal the World, We Need to Heal Men.” People started telling me it was good. That I had created something much bigger than I set out to.

So here we are. This is the story I didn’t mean to write. But it’s also the story I couldn’t NOT write.

What I’m Learning

I’m three months into this adventure now. A quarter of the year exploring where love and fear show up in the world, especially in the lives of men.

And I’m learning things I didn’t expect.

Love isn’t soft. It’s not the opposite of strength. It is strength. It’s our operating system for thriving. For connection. For creation. For showing up fully alive.

Fear isn’t the enemy. It’s our operating system for survival. For staying alert. For protecting what matters.

They’re not opposites. They’re dancing partners. And most of us never learned how to let love lead.

This adventure is about following that trail. The interplay of love and fear. About having conversations around campfires. About asking hard questions and sitting with uncomfortable answers. About exploring what it means to free men from fear so we can all move toward something better.

I’m not trying to produce something polished. I’m just trying to pay attention to what’s true.

And what’s true is this: the world works better when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear.

So that’s why love. That’s why fear. That’s why men. And that’s why me.

The Trail Forward

If you’re reading this, you’re part of the unfolding. A trail that begins with men but reaches far beyond them. A trail that, if we follow it with courage and love, might just help us heal the world.