A man calls a therapist. He’s been married for decades. He has a young daughter, a home, a family that looks fine from the street. And he describes himself as “touch-starved and lonely.”
That call is the heart of “Can I Still Be a Good Man if I Leave?”, the October 19 episode of Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? It landed in a week when several voices in the Trailhead Library were circling the same problem from different sides. Scott Galloway called loneliness the root of a national crisis. A psychologist at the University of Bath argued that some loneliness can’t be cured at all. And the poet Mark Nepo wrote about walking toward something beautiful and finding barbed wire when you get there.
Read side by side, they’re having an argument. It’s worth listening in, because the answer matters for every man with a full calendar and nobody to call.
The Case for Each Other
Galloway’s essay “Each Other,” published in his No Mercy / No Malice newsletter on October 16 with an audio version the next day, starts with homelessness in Los Angeles and ends somewhere much closer to home. His claim is that America’s most visible breakdowns share a root. We’ve stopped feeling responsible for one another.
He leans on numbers. He cites a 2023 UCSF study finding that 90 percent of homeless people are single adults, many with no family or friends to ask for help. He cites YouGov data showing 38 percent of Americans are estranged from a family member. He cites research linking social isolation to a 29 percent higher risk of early death.
Then he turns to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whose 2023 advisory compared the health effects of social disconnection to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Murthy’s prescription, as Galloway lays it out, is to treat connection as infrastructure. Put someone in charge of it. Run housing, transit, and paid leave through a simple test: does this bring people together? Have doctors screen for loneliness. Galloway’s own closing line puts the whole argument in six words: “There’s only one answer: each other.”
This is the problem-and-solution frame, and it’s useful. It takes something men are trained to treat as a private failing and names it as a public condition. If isolation carries a smoking-level health risk, then building friendships isn’t soft. It’s maintenance. For plenty of men in midlife, that reframe is the permission they’ve been waiting for.
But it leaves something out. Perel’s caller shows us what.
The Loneliness Inside a Full Life
Perel’s caller doesn’t lack infrastructure. He has a wife, a child, a home. He isn’t estranged or unhoused. He’d pass any screening question about whether he has people in his life. And he’s still alone.
Perel doesn’t treat this as a scheduling problem. As the episode describes it, she moves him past the binary of staying or leaving toward a different question: what does he need to feel alive and true to himself? No policy can answer that for him.
Sam Carr, a University of Bath psychologist who studies loneliness in later life, offers language for what’s going on. In “What Is Existential Loneliness?”, posted to his Psychology Today blog on October 23, Carr separates three kinds. Social loneliness is missing a network. Emotional loneliness is missing close bonds. Existential loneliness is something else. It’s the recognition, which Carr draws from the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, that no one can fully share your inner experience. Not your spouse. Not your oldest friend.
Carr pushes directly against the cure framing. He notes that public-health conversations increasingly treat loneliness as something to eliminate, and he points to a 2026 review of 121 papers showing how unsettled even the definition of existential loneliness remains. His conclusion is that this layer of loneliness doesn’t go away. It gets met, and lived with, in the company of another person. Others can’t cross fully into our inner world, he writes, but “they can help us feel witnessed rather than abandoned.”
Here’s where the two frames collide. Galloway and Murthy are right that most men need more people. Carr is right that more people won’t touch the deepest layer. A man can join a league, a board, a men’s group, and still lie awake feeling that nobody actually knows him. If he was promised that connection would fix that feeling, he may decide the fix failed. Worse, he may decide he did.
Nepo’s poem “Hill of the Real,” posted to his Substack on October 19, adds a piece neither frame quite reaches. From a distance, a hill looks like the place you’ve been searching for. Up close there’s rocky ground, a rotting stump, loose barbed wire, a dead deer. Nepo says people are like that. We’re drawn to someone’s beauty, then we meet their damage, and we feel let down or even deceived. His answer is that the work of intimacy is to “love the land for all it’s been through.”
Put the three together and they say something none of them says alone. Connection is necessary infrastructure. It won’t erase the separateness at the core of being a person. And the closeness that does help only shows up after the distant, idealized version of someone gives way to the real one. That includes the idealized version of yourself.
What a Circle Is Actually For
This matters for how we describe Trailhead’s own work. It would be easy to pitch a men’s group as a loneliness cure. Show up, make friends, problem solved. Carr’s argument suggests that pitch sets men up to feel like failures when the ache doesn’t leave.
A more honest description is that a circle is a place to be witnessed. Nobody in a circle will fully enter another man’s inner world. That isn’t the job. The job is to stand at the edge of it and listen, so the man inside feels seen instead of abandoned. That’s a smaller promise than a cure. It’s also one we can keep.
Tara Brach, in her talk “Cultivating a Courageous Heart, Part 2,” posted October 23, describes a posture that fits this work. It’s often taught as strong back, soft front: grounded enough to stay present, open enough to feel the hurt underneath fear and anger instead of defending against it. That’s close to what a good circle asks of everyone in it, the man talking and the men listening.
Nepo’s hill points to a practice, too. His reflection prompt asks readers to tell a trusted friend about a person or a dream that looked ideal from far away and became more real up close, and how they responded. That’s a campfire question if there ever was one. It assumes the realness is coming. It asks what you’ll do when it arrives.
Perel’s caller may stay. He may leave. Either way, his is a second-half-of-life question. The first half asks whether you’ve built the right life. The second half asks whether you’re actually living in it, and whether anyone knows you’re there.
Galloway ends his essay with Rhenda Strub, a 71-year-old Seattle Mariners fan who lost her son and then posted online inviting strangers to share her season tickets. Her inbox filled with messages from people with stories like hers. She found friends and a community. Read with Carr in mind, the story isn’t about her grief ending. It’s about who showed up to sit beside it.
That may be the clearest picture of the whole week. Not a cure. A seat next to someone, the game going on in front of you, and the hard part acknowledged instead of solved.
That’s what we’re trying to build. Infrastructure, yes: time in the woods, a community that gathers when it can, men who keep showing up for each other. But the goal isn’t to make loneliness disappear. In the second half of life, some of it is simply the cost of being a person who has lived. The goal is to make sure no man has to carry it unwitnessed.
How this was made: Trailhead keeps a running library of the thinkers who shape our work, and each week an AI reads across what they’ve published and drafts a synthesis like this one. The ideas belong to their authors and are credited and linked above; the pattern-finding is the machine’s, and the library is curated by Scott Levine.
Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash.
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