This article is part of the Men’s Therapy series on masculinity and mental health.
To Be a Man: a Song on Courage, Connection, and Men’s Mental Health
Martin Luke Brown’s To Be a Man asks: Is this what it’s like? A moving look at courage, silence, friendship, and the realities of masculine conditioning.
Introduction — The Song as a Mirror
Some songs are less entertainment than revelation. They hold up a mirror to the fault lines we carry inside — the places where private anguish collides with cultural expectation. Martin Luke Brown’s recent single, haunting in its simplicity, circles around one unanswerable refrain: “Is this what it’s like to be a man?”
As Brown himself explains, “I think it is so important to show male vulnerability and compassion.” The lyrics shine a light on bravado while also pointing to the courage it takes to make our very human needs for connection apparent. Lines like “I had a friend, now I don’t, he was 29... it’s not like he died in a crash or had a heart attack” puncture the silence around men’s mental health and challenge our collective reluctance to speak of suicide
His music video adds an added visual layer - and a potent one at that. Brown sits alone in a group therapy room, surrounded by empty chairs — a visual echo of isolation. Later, each man in the group lip-syncs the lyrics, embodying the unspoken but shared pain of the “man code.” To see the words mouthed by many is to glimpse how universal the hunger for tenderness really is.
Heaviness in the Chest: The Somatic Voice of Suppressed Emotion
The song opens:
“I walk around looking down with my head down low / something rests on my chest so uncomfortable.”
This heaviness is not only jus metaphor. For many men (for many people in general), anxiety and depression can appear not as words or thoughts but as somatic weight: migraines, gut pain, chest tightness, muscle tension or spasms. Somatic trauma theory reminds us: the body keeps score (van der Kolk, 2014; Maté, 2003). When emotional life is silenced, it can get amplified in the body.
Research echoes this. One study found that among men in outpatient care, somatic symptoms were often tied to narcissistic grandiosity, suggesting that physical complaints can serve as a safer language than emotional confession. Pain in the body becomes a way of preserving a self-image that conforms with societal demands, while still signaling distress.
This can look like an unexpected panic that can feel as if it came “out of nowhere,” or dissociation so sudden and intense it startles the person experiencing it. The body has been whispering for months, but masculine conditioning can teach us not to listen. While these experiences are not only just related to masculinity, gender can play a role. Pediatrician and well-regaurded psycholanalyst Donald Winnicott’s false self captures this terrain: the constructed identity of composure and independence. Yet the body resists. It pulls us back toward the tenderness and grief we’ve been taught to exile. The somatic is less betrayal than reminder: even disavowed parts of us do not stop calling out.
A Friend at 29: Mortality, Transition, and the Crisis of Masculinity
Midway through, the song turns elegiac:
“I had a friend, now I don’t, he was 29 / he didn’t know how to be, how to live this life.”
The late twenties often carry particular risk. Psychologists describe this stage as one of upheaval: careers falter, relationships fracture, identities feel too small. Astrologers call it the Saturn return — the symbolic transition into adulthood — but psychology sees the same dynamic: the collapse of illusions, the pressure of responsibility, the demand for authenticity.
For men, the dissonance can be brutal. When success is equated with career, provision, or independence, any faltering feels like failure of the self. Suicide statistics confirm the stakes: In a 2023 study, the suicide rate among males was nearly 4 times higher than among females.
The lyric “we’ve all read the stats, and we can do the math” cuts to the gap between intellectual awareness and lived reality. As Einstein had once said, “Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.” Men may register at in some way, the weight of depression and anxiety but lossing people one loves becomes an entirely different and visceral experience.
The verse does not just ask “Is life hard?” It asks: “Is being a man, as we have defined it, unbearable?”
“Won’t Someone Hold My Hand”: The Starved Need for Connection
Later verses soften into plea:
“Won’t someone hold my hand?”
This line is radical not because it is sentimental, but because it risks what rigid modes of masculinity punishes most: tenderness.
Peer socialization makes this need perilous to express. Boys learn early that affection risks ridicule. By adulthood, many have retreated into safe performances — beer, sports, jokes — while their hunger for closeness goes unnamed. Yet the ache remains.
Research shows how deep the loss runs. In 1990, 55% of men reported six or more close friends. By 2024, only 26% did. Seventeen percent of men now report having no close friends at all — a fivefold increase. The song’s plea is thus no anomaly. It is a voice for a generation of men estranged from intimacy.
Historically, male friendship was once openly affectionate. Today, the same gestures are policed. The very closeness once emblematic of masculinity is now deemed suspect.
Often, this estrangement appears as grief without name — the ache for friendships that once existed but slipped away, the longing for someone to call when life collapses. To risk the words “hold my hand” is therefore not weakness. It is courage, a reclaiming of tenderness as strength.
Performative Masculinity: “Kick a Ball, Wage a War”
The song shifts into parody:
“Kick a ball, drink a beer, crack a joke or two / buy a house, wage a war, anything to prove / that you are worthy of unconditional love.”
Here, masculinity is reduced to proof — actions performed not for their own sake, but to validate one’s worth. Anthropologists have long noted that masculinity is constructed as conditional, not inherent. It must be continually demonstrated, continually defended.
The cost is depletion. Worth becomes commodified: dependent on production, performance, and provision. When failure or error inevitably comes, shame follows. On the collective stage, this same mechanism manifests in hyper-masculine posturing — governments valorizing aggression, leaders clinging to force over dialogue. The show of strength is often less a sign of power than of a type of desperation and sometimes even fragility.
What men hunger for, the song reminds us, is not proof at all. It is unconditional love. The tragedy is that conditioning convinces them love must be earned, even though love that must be proved is no longer love.
“Maybe a Million Dollars Would Make You Feel Enough”: The Tower of False Selves
Another verse offers irony:
“Maybe a million dollars would make you feel enough / but even if you have it all, you’ve got it all to lose.”
Material success is offered as balm, but it is brittle. Role strain theory shows how men tie identity to productivity and wealth, equating worth with labor. Yet even at the apex of achievement, fear of collapse remains.
Rachel Pollack, award winning writer and internationally recognized expert on the Tarot, offers her interpretation of the Blasted Tower card which provides additional illumination of this idea. The Tower is the sudden collapse of false structures — an external shock that shatters illusions so something sturdier may be built. Painful though it is, collapse clears space for authenticity.
The song stays in the rubble, repeating its refrain. But that is where transformation begins: in the moment we realize that what we thought made us enough never could. Pollack reminds us that the card after the Tower is the Star — symbol of renewal, tenderness, and connection.
Refrain as Lament, Refrain as Invitation
By its end, the song circles again and again:
“Is this what it’s like, to be a man? … Won’t someone hold my hand.”
The repetition is lament, but also invitation. It is the collapse of illusion, but also the courage to imagine new forms.
Seen through the video, the refrain becomes even sharper: the empty chairs, the silence, the lip-synced voices — all proof that this isolation is not private but shared. It is the unspoken pact men live under, breaking only in rare moments of music, grief, or collapse.
The challenge is to let the Tower fall and to build anew:
Friendships where presence replaces proof.
Cultures where the empty chairs of therapy rooms are filled with men who risk voice.
The song does not answer its own question. It does something braver: it dares to keep asking.
References
Brown, Martin Luke. To Be a Man [Official Video]. YouTube. (2024). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExZRCHLxCmM
Melodic Mag. (2024). Martin Luke Brown asks what it is to be a man in new single. Retrieved from https://www.melodicmag.com/news/martin-luke-brown-asks-what-it-is-to-be-a-man-in-new-single
New York Times. (2021). Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone? Retrieved from PDF copy you provided.
Kealy, D., & Ogrodniczuk, J. S. (2011). Pathological narcissism and somatic symptoms among men and women attending an outpatient mental health clinic. Journal of Psychiatric Practice, 17(5), 306–313.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking.
Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection. Toronto: Vintage Canada.
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Karnac.
Pollack, Rachel. (1980). Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness. San Francisco: HarperOne.
Pollack, Rachel. (2001). The Shining Tribe Tarot. York Beach: Weiser.
Pollack, Rachel & Place, Robert. (2011). The Raziel Tarot: The Secret Teachings of Adam and Eve.
Ostaseski, Frank. (2017). The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living. New York: Flatiron Books.
Karff, Erik. (2024). The 3 Types of Courage: Lessons from Zen Hospice Founder Frank Ostaseski. erikkarffpsychotherapy.com.
National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Suicide Statistics. Retrieved from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide — Note: the total age-adjusted suicide rate in the U.S. in 2022 was 14.4 per 100,000 (Range: 0 to 25) and suicide is among the leading causes of death in young adults.
Full Lyrics:
i walk around looking down with my head down low
something rests on my chest so uncomfortable
i don't know what this is
i didn't ask for this
call my mum, call my dad, call a therapist
or walk around looking down with my head down low
i had a friend now I don't, he was 29
he didn't know how to be, how to live this life
yeah we've all read the stats
and we can do the math
it's not like he died in a crash or had a heart attack
i had a friend, now i don't, only 29
is this what it's like
i don't understand
is this what it's like, to be a man, to be a man
i don't understand
won't someone hold my hand
won't someone hold my hand
kick a ball, drink a beer, crack a joke or two
buy a house, wage a war, anything to prove
that you are worthy of
unconditional love
maybe a million dollars would make you feel enough
but even if you have it all you've got it all to lose
is this what it's like
to be a man, to be a man
i don't understand
is this what it's like
to be a man, to be a man
i don't understand
won't someone hold my hand
to be a man, to be a man
i don't understand
won't someone hold my hand
to be a man, to be a man
i don't understandwon't someone hold my hand
