Esquire has long had a mantra: “man at his best.” And over the decades, as American culture has twisted its way through one radical shift after another, the magazine has enthusiastically embraced its mission of doling out advice on how to achieve that Platonic ideal of manhood—whatever it happened to be at the moment.
But delivering such sage instruction to our readers is arguably more challenging than ever. To begin with, consider what it means to be a man in contemporary American culture. Oh boy. If you’ve been looking for a can of worms to crack open, may I recommend that one? In the past, Team Esquire selected at least a couple routes when it came to the dispensing of life guidance. Depending on the currents of the culture, you might have encountered the Bond (James Bond) approach or the Bly (as in Robert Bly, the poet who helped spur the men’s movement) approach. The Bond approach tended to involve the making of martinis, the wearing of tuxedos, the driving of sports cars, the beguiling of women with one’s savoir faire, etc. The Bly-ish approach was marked by a profundity of the soul and leaned toward Serious Proclamations along the lines of “A man must make no new friends after the age of forty but should remain close with the few men who remind him that he is a man” and “A man must drink brown liquor in the cold months and clear liquor in the warm months because a man’s soul must remain attuned to the seasons.”
Or something. Far be it from us to be flippant about preceding decades, which in certain respects seemed more fun than the one we’re stuck in, but the whole idea of man at his best hits different in 2024. Men are just people trying to figure things out as they go along, and it feels misguided to get overly prescriptive. A guy should drink and wear and read and watch and drive whatever he’s comfortable with. He should work hard (but not too hard) and play hard (but not too hard) and all that.
BELA BORSODI
But that brings us to a serious question: Are there real, actionable methods for optimizing one’s path in today’s world?
Just a cursory skim through the latest data would suggest that men have lost the script. Epidemics of loneliness, outbreaks of toxic masculinity, college-graduation rates spiraling downward for young men—something is decidedly off. In recent years, suicide rates have surged among both men in their fifties and men in their twenties. Last year, a study revealed that men die from overdoses—of meth, coke, fentanyl, heroin—two to three times as often as women do. Most of the horrific, near-daily mass shootings in the U. S. are committed by men. Guys are struggling.
Into this void pours everything from the contradictory self-care decrees of social media (learn to say no, learn to say yes, eat nothing but vegetables, eat nothing but meat, put family first, cut yourself off from family, here are thirty-four books you need to read this month) to the sociopathic sermons of proto-fascist kickboxers and bodybuilders. It’s a mess out there.
Even for those who’ve been basically getting by, the coronavirus wave that swept across the planet in 2020 left more than a trail of suffering and loss. It also fostered a sort of long dishevelment—an internal and external disorientation that bedevils many of us four years later. Clothes still don’t seem to fit right, and one might occasionally realize, much to one’s own shame, that one has been wearing the same outfit for several days in a row. Maybe your exercise routine has gone out the window and you stare too frequently into the dopamine-hijacking kaleidoscope of an iPhone. Like you, maybe, we’ve moved beyond skepticism when it comes to manifestos, fad diets, Silicon Valley techies who want to stay eighteen years old forever, and grand pronouncements regarding How a Man Should Be. But we have developed a deep respect for patient, pragmatic systems that lead in the general direction of health and happiness.
That’s what we want you to find here. The concept of “man at his best” in 2024 has less to do with gasping to the end of a triathlon or dressing for a fox hunt than it does with (as Texas songwriter Guy Clark once put it) stuff that works. To find that stuff, we turned to our fellow man. That is, we surveyed men who are experts in different areas of life. A lot of their advice is fundamental. Go for a walk and ideas percolate. Sleep well and life might look better the next morning. We can’t offer guarantees, but we feel confident that if you do this stuff, you won’t come away with regrets.
LEARN HOW TO LISTEN.
We’re all guilty of it: nodding vaguely and gazing at a screen when someone is talking to us. Babble surrounds us, as a feature of contemporary life, but paying attention eludes us. There are personal and professional advantages, though, to teaching yourself how to listen. “The key to listening is, counterintuitively, to prove you are listening, and that’s based on what you do after someone stops talking,” says Charles Duhigg, author of a new book called Supercommunicators. “As a listener, you might be nodding your head, or smiling, or watching closely, but the speaker probably won’t really notice. They are focused on what they are saying.” To optimize the act of listening, Duhigg recommends something known as “looping for understanding.” (Hey, don’t wander away—this is interesting.) How Duhigg explains it: “Step one: Ask someone a question. Step two: Once they finish answering, repeat what you just heard in your own words. Step three (and this is the one people usually forget): Ask if you got it right.” The conscious practice of doing this sharpens a conversation in both directions. “When we prove to someone we are listening—and genuinely want to understand them—we trigger an almost automatic instinct within the other person to listen to us in return. So to listen well, loop for understanding. It will nudge you to listen more closely. And it eventually becomes almost automatic, a habit that makes you a supercommunicator.”
WATCH BIRDS.
You’ve probably heard about the Japanese notion of “forest bathing.” Essentially it’s about reconnecting with nature but doing so with more intention, more purpose—sort of like active listening but with trees. In his book Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, Christian Cooper makes a persuasive case for bringing winged creatures into the picture as well. “When you’re birding, you are alert to sounds, to particular kinds of motion and particular shapes—you have to be, or you’re unlikely to see many birds!” says Cooper. Birding forces you outside of your own head, and because it makes you laser- focus on the world around you, your internal monologue—the one we all have—takes a backseat for a time. “Instead of your mind talking, it’s listening,” he continues. “And after a while, it doesn’t turn off. A part of your brain is always listening, and I have found that to have a profound healing effect.”
BELA BORSODI
DUMP THE CLUTTER.
There’s good reason why Marie Kondo, Swedish death cleaning, and countless episodes of Hoarders have gained traction in the American psyche. Junk encircles us, envelops us, overwhelms us. “Our material possessions are a physical manifestation of our internal lives,” says anti-clutter advocate Joshua Fields Millburn, one third of a trio (with Ryan Nicodemus and T. K. Coleman) billed as the Minimalists. “The average American household contains more than 300,000 items. With all that stuff, you’d think we’d be beside ourselves with joy. Yet study after study shows the opposite: We’re anxious, overwhelmed, and miserable.” The Minimalists preach a gospel of tossing out and letting go. Millburn recalls his first experience as an epiphany of austerity. “The more I did it, the freer and happier and lighter I felt—and the more I wanted to throw overboard,” he says. “A few shirts led to half a closet. A few DVDs led to deep-sixing an entire library of discs. It was a beautiful cycle.” The point is not to inhabit a bare room. The point is to make room, as Millburn puts it, “for the intangibles that make life rewarding.”
GO FOR A WALK.
I have a friend named Peter. Because of the proximity of our birthdays, which stand one day apart, Peter is almost exactly three decades older than I am. He just turned eighty-seven.
Whenever I see my friend in Manhattan, I am struck by something: He walks everywhere. He can walk for block after block in New York City. He walks the stairs in his high-rise apartment building for exercise. Simply by making a habit of this, Peter is probably staving off cognitive and physical decline. “Movement is probably the most powerful antiaging thing you can do,” says physician Frank Lipman, a coauthor of several books of common-sense wellness wisdom. Lipman likes to refer to “exercise snacks.” Skip the escalator and trudge up airport stairs. Rake leaves. Scrub pans. Yank weeds. Anything to avert that swiveling, life-sapping desk chair. Your college roommate ran a marathon. How nice for him. You don’t have to, though, and in fact the excesses of competitive endurance aren’t necessarily ideal for your body in the long run. “The type of exercise that puts you on the cover of Muscle & Fitness is not good for you,” says Dan Buettner, author of numerous Blue Zones books about the science of longevity and creator of the Netflix docuseries Live to 100. Yet you can, according to Buettner’s research, add three hypothetical years to your life by shifting from sedentary mode to a twenty-minute walk each day. Plus, there is something about the purity of a long walk—no equipment required, just venture outside and pick a direction—that lends itself to the unraveling of mental knots. “I have walked myself into my best thoughts,” the Danish philosopher Søren Kierke gaard once said, “and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
PLANT A GARDEN.
Speaking of moving all the time, consider Ken Sparks, also known as the Farmer Ken, who teaches people about the pleasures of growing your own eats and who reaps a year-round harvest of fruits, vegetables, and herbs from a single acre in southern California’s Riverside County. “I don’t go to the gym,” Sparks says. “My workout is on the land—all day long I’m going up and down hills.” The ancient act of planting a garden can lead to a bounty of upsides. Growing your own peppers and mint and tomatoes and collard greens (as Sparks does) means not only getting to eat them but also getting to share them with friends, neighbors, and the broader community. In his case, taking up gardening also helped the Ohio native through a period of mourning and disorientation. “It kept me grounded and sane,” he says. “It gave me a chance to connect back with nature and connect back with home.”
SLEEP DEEPLY
Nothing else on this list will make much sense unless you focus on the doze. Otherwise you’ll be too foggy and tetchy to concentrate. “Sleep is the single most effective thing that we can do each and every day to reset our brain and body health,” says Matthew Walker, a Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience who is known as the Sleep Diplomat. Walker’s got plenty of practical (and oft-shared) guidance for how to do it: Go to bed at the same time every night, stay away from screens, keep the bedroom cool, be wary of your intake of caffeine and booze. But more than anything, give your brain a rest. “The biggest roadblock for most people is stress and anxiety,” Walker says. “When you are in bed, you need to get your mind off itself. Because in the darkness of night, things always seem worse, and the last thing you want to be doing is ruminating when you are trying to get to sleep.”
SCHVITZ.
Last fall, I met a group of friends for my first venture into the Russian and Turkish baths in Manhattan’s East Village. I didn’t really know the protocol, so I improvised, and my initiation into the schvitz went something like this: Sit in hot room. Tiptoe into cold pool. Sit in hotter room. Slide into cold pool. Sit in hottest room—while pouring cold water on head and eventually fleeing so as not to turn into rack of lamb. Drop into cold pool. Afterward, stepping out onto East Tenth Street, I felt high, ecstatic, delirious, which (according to experts) may’ve been my nerves and my brain and my heart and my immune system saying thank you for the reset. The Korean jjimjilbang, the Turkish hammam, the Scandinavian sauna, the Russian banya—it’s no coincidence that so many cultures have ancient traditions of self-care involving water and extreme temperatures. “It’s a very powerful therapeutic modality,” Lipman says of saunas. “Studies confirm a lot of these effects—tons and tons of studies.”
This article appeared in the March 2024 issue of Esquire
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HANGOUT WITH YOUR FRIENDS IN THE REAL WORLD.
We dreaded it at first. We doubted our judgment. We were three old friends who’d agreed to road-trip to Virginia to celebrate a fourth’s birthday in December, and somehow none of us had sensibly backed out at the last minute, which is how we found ourselves in a car stuck behind a dump truck in Brooklyn—frozen in traffic for forty minutes. But eventually the path cleared, we started rolling south, and the rightness of road-tripping with old friends clicked into place. To avoid people—to isolate—is all too easy, especially when you’re texting with those people regularly and can savor the illusion of connectedness. But surrounding yourself with friends is “way more important than we think,” Buettner says. In the Okinawa Prefecture of Japan, one of the five Blue Zones he has studied, the community holds space for the concept of a moai, which is a group of loyal friends. They meet on a regular basis to drink green tea or mugwort sake and shoot the breeze. It’s no accident that they want to live past 100. “One of the best investments you can make is curating your friend group,” Buettner says. “We reap the ROI for decades.”
GET ENCYCLOPEDIC.
Judging from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and the average sports-bar argument, men require little encouragement when it comes to this. Whether they’re fixating on Reggie Jackson’s batting averages in the 1970s or Pixies B-sides from the 1980s, dudes like data—the more arcane and tedious, the better. No, you don’t want your friends to dread sitting next to you at dinner, but there are rewards that arise from the practice of identifying what you’re obsessed with and drilling down. “Know thy taste,” says André Hueston Mack, a sommelier and entrepreneur who has built a career on his passion for and knowledge of wine. “That might be beer, matcha, or Tibetan butter tea. Learn what you like. It’s not about knowing it all, or knowing what’s trendy, but about getting to know your own taste and, ultimately, yourself.” To know one thing extremely well is to know many other things that are connected to it. “I’ve come to realize that wine is far more than just a delightful beverage,” Mack says. “It encompasses history, politics, culinary art, and regional and cultural nuances, as well as aspects of biology and chemistry.”
EAT BEANS.
Diets have evolved into rigid belief systems; their proponents bombard us not necessarily with nutritional common sense but with a cultish certitude that eating _______ (keto, paleo, vegan, fruitarian, insert whichever you prefer) will solve all your problems. Actually nothing will solve all your problems. Sorry, but Michael Pollan’s famous seven-word dictum does a nice job of encapsulating what you ought to know: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. The trick is to fret less about what you eliminate and to focus more on finding ways to incorporate a daily array of those plants. Beans briefly became chic as a pantry staple during the pandemic, when a bag of Rancho Gordo heirloom flageolets suddenly seemed fancier than a Rolex, but they deserve a permanent place in the spotlight as a source of both fiber and protein. “Fewer than 20 percent of Americans get enough fiber,” says Buettner. “Beans are cheap, they’re versatile, you can make them taste good—they’re just a miracle food that doesn’t get enough attention.”
MAKE SOUP.
While we’re on the subject of beans, let us praise the pleasures and consolations of soup. A man should know how to make soup—this we believe. The ritual of doing so carries with it, more than almost any other task in the kitchen, traces of the sacred. A tureen of broth (be it chicken or mushroom), with steam rising from its surface, brings calm to a solo diner and camaraderie to the communal table. And take it from Brooks Headley of New York’s Superiority Burger—Esquire’s Chef of the Year 2023—when he tells you that making very good soup can be accomplished with very little time or effort. “If you’ve got some canned beans and half an onion, a couple cloves of garlic, you can make a pureed bean soup—creamy and nourishing, luxurious and comforting, yet just whizzed together with pantry items,” he says. “You’ll need some olive oil and the acidic powers of a single lemon, but you probably have that around, right?”
SEND LETTERS.
You can trick yourself into believing that all those texts and direct messages constitute an enduring form of communication, but the rapid rate of digital change suggests that they’ll probably all evaporate into a fog of forgotten code. The culinary world has its Slow Food movement. I like to think of letters and postcards as Slow Texts, sauntering through the postal system at their own pace, not arriving with a grating Pavlovian bleep but instead just kicking back in the mailbox, ready when you are. Mindful of her time but wanting to check in with a quick “we’re thinking of you” now and then, I began sending random postcards to my eldest child when she went away to college. She never said anything about them. Then one day I went to visit her, and I noticed that she had saved the postcards and used them to decorate her dorm room. Fortunately, I stayed cool. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t notice that I started wiping away tears with my sleeve.
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