Happy Motherfucker is a book in progress — a survival guide for men navigating the wreckage of the life they thought they were building. More excerpts here regularly. If this landed, share it with the guy who needs it.
I deserve to be happy.
I am capable of being happy.
Can I truly define what happiness even looks like?
Those three sentences sound simple. They're not. Most men I know — including the version of me who first wrote them down on a bad night several years ago — can say the first two out loud and mean them on a surface level while having absolutely no honest answer to the third.
We know we want happiness. We know we're supposed to be capable of it. We just have no real idea what it looks like for us specifically, as opposed to the version we were told to want.
Here's what I know for certain: no deathbed confession has ever been "I think I may have laughed a little too much." Nobody at the end of a life looks back and wishes they'd been more defended, more careful, more efficient at managing their own unhappiness. The regrets run the other direction. They always do.
Which means whatever we're protecting ourselves from by staying unhappy — whatever the armor is guarding against — it's not protecting us from anything worth protecting. It's just protecting us from the life we could be living.
— — —
You're Not Having a Midlife Crisis
You're having a midlife awakening — and you're pissed off about it, which is honestly a pretty good sign.
A crisis is something that happens to you. A car wreck. A diagnosis. A call at 2 a.m. you weren't ready for.
What you're going through is different. This is you, finally, after years of running full speed in the wrong direction, stopping long enough to look around and say: What in the actual fuck happened to my life?
That question — ugly, inconvenient, long overdue — is the beginning of something. Not the end.
This book is for the guy who did everything he was supposed to do and ended up somewhere he doesn't recognize. The guy who followed the rules, checked the boxes, held it together for everyone else, and woke up one morning staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m. wondering whose life he's been living.
It's for the guy who has never read a self-help book in his life and would rather eat glass than sit through a seminar about his inner child.
Welcome. You're in the right place.
— — —
What This Isn't
Not a program. Not a twelve-step anything. Not going to tell you to meditate for twenty minutes or keep a gratitude journal or eat cleaner and watch how your energy shifts. I'm sure that works for somebody. That somebody is not who I'm writing for.
This is a book about happiness the way a mechanic talks about an engine — no bullshit, no poetry, just an honest look at what's working, what's shot, and what you can do about it with what you've got.
I'm not a therapist. Not a doctor. Not a life coach with a podcast and a course you can buy for three easy payments. I'm a farm kid who went to art school, survived some genuinely spectacular personal disasters, and came out the other side with a few things worth saying.
This book started as a humorous philosophical rant I was writing to help myself find my own way. Which is probably the most honest description of any self-help book ever written, if authors were actually willing to admit it. What I know, I know because I lived it. What I got wrong, I got wrong expensively.
— — —
The Thing Nobody Taught You
We spent our formative years memorizing the quadratic equation, the preamble to the Constitution, the difference between a gas and a solid. Mountains of carefully organized information, tested for retention.
And somewhere in twelve or sixteen years of structured education designed to prepare us for adult life, almost nobody sat us down and said: here is how to understand what you're actually feeling and why. Here is how to figure out what you actually value as opposed to what you've been told to value. Here is how to do your own honest soul-searching and arrive at your own definition of what a good life looks like for you specifically.
We got food pyramids. We did not get that.
The people who find genuine happiness mostly stumble ass-backward into it. They land on it through some combination of lived experience and hard-won self-knowledge that the system never helped them develop intentionally. They hang onto it for dear life, often without fully understanding how they got there.
The rest of us watched what looked like happiness in other people and made a reasonable but deeply flawed assumption: that if we did the same things, we'd get the same result. So we followed the template. Education, job, relationship, house, the accumulating evidence of a life being properly lived.
And then we stood in the middle of it and felt — nothing much. Or worse, felt the specific hollowness of someone who did everything right and got the wrong thing.
We mistook comfort for happiness. Security for fulfillment. The absence of obvious crisis for the presence of something worth having.
— — —
So Say It
You're not broken because you're unhappy. You're unhappy because something real isn't working, and the first honest step is admitting that — out loud, to yourself, without softening it.
So say it. Right now, to yourself or whoever's in the room:
I'm not as okay as I've been pretending.
That's the whole door. Everything else is just walking through it.