The Listening Room HQ

There are times when the most useful thing a man can do is pause. A pause can be as ordinary as sitting down after a long day, going for a walk without turning it into exercise, making something to eat, working in the garden, listening to music, or simply allowing a few hours to pass without trying to make them productive. Men are often very good at doing. Less good at stopping. Sometimes a man's body knows before the mind does that it has had enough. The signs can be small: irritability, tiredness, difficulty concentrating, feeling that everything needs to be dealt with immediately. Sometimes the sensible response is not another solution, more chores, more busyness. It is a pause. As we are doing here at The Listening Room HQ for a couple of weeks. Posts at The Listening Room HQ's sister vessel, The Polymath , will also pause for a couple of weeks. [painting: Eli Gross - Pause, 2024] Contact Us | Sessions | Maps & Readings | Entries | ...

Stress is part of being human. I know this not only from reading about it, but from living through periods of intense stress myself. Over the years, there have been moments when my own system needed more than willpower or problem-solving. It needed to settle. Stress can come from work, relationships, responsibilities, uncertainty, financial pressure, grief, or other sources. If stress persists it's important to check its source, including medically. Here I'm writing some brief notes for on-the-spot stress relief. Not a dense post on the neurobiology of stress and illness. When stress arrives, many men immediately try to solve the problem. They think harder, work harder, push harder. Sometimes that is useful. Other times the body needs a chance to come down from the stress response. Here are three simple practical steps that can help create that space. 1. Notice what state you are actually in Stress does not always look the same. Sometimes it is agitation: a r...

"It pays my way and it corrodes my soul." — The Smiths, Frankly, Mr. Shankly A few days ago, someone posted a photograph from Corgo with the caption: "Vim só de visita ao Corgo porque o tempo cronológico não dá para mais." I just came by Corgo, because chronological time allows for no more. On the surface, there is nothing unusual about such a sentence. It is the kind of thing many of us say: life is busy, there are obligations, conferences, projects, juries, cultural events, meetings. The calendar fills itself. The days disappear. And yet, reading those words, I found myself thinking of Seneca. The person who wrote them does not need to keep running. She and her husband are retired. They own a beautiful cultural and artistic retreat by the Atlantic, north of Porto, in what was once a quiet fishing village. They have, by all appearances, arrived at the stage of life toward which so many people spend decades working. And still, there is no time...

One year ago today, on 13 July 2025, The Listening Room HQ came into being. It shares its birthday with my mother. It was created not as a business plan or an exercise in branding, or as another corner of the internet competing for attention. It emerged from a much simpler conviction: that, in an increasingly noisy and fragmented world, human beings still need places in which they can be heard. And from personal experience. From seeing men splitting, becoming aggressive, violent in front of me, or towards me. Over the past twelve months, The Listening Room HQ has become many things. A place for conversations about men's lives and inner worlds. A space in which emotional literacy is treated not as weakness, but as craft. A vessel for questions about friendship, fatherhood, grief, creativity, anger, love, loneliness and the countless ways in which we attempt to navigate being human. From the beginning, this vessel refused the false choice between lived experience and knowledg...

This post is a follow up of the previous one The Difference Between Action and Contact . There is a trap that many of us fall into when life becomes overwhelming. We start moving. We make calls. We send messages. We search. We ask. We read. We go from one place to another. We spend hours trying to change a situation. From the outside, it looks productive. Inside, it often feels like we are doing everything we possibly can. Sometimes we are. But movement and progress are not the same thing. Over the last few days I was reminded of something I had quietly forgotten. Activity can soothe the feeling of helplessness. Effective action changes things. The difference matters enormously. Activity often comes from urgency. It is driven by the understandable desire to regain control when life feels uncertain. It keeps us busy. It can even feel reassuring because we are no longer standing still. Effective action asks a different question. Not: "What else can I do?...

It is not unusual for some men to always be doing something. Those things can include work, messages, calls, solving problems, planning the next steps. It often looks like competence. A busy man living his life. However, at a point, action turns into something else. Often is something else. For instance, a substitute for contact. Contact with self, contact with others, contact with what is actually happening in the body, in the moment, in life. I have been noticing this for a long time. It is present in many men I know. Some conversations with a friend of mine are a good example. He is constantly in motion. Not just physically, necessarily. Mentally and socially. Always responding. Always engaging. Always moving something forward. If there is nothing to do, he finds something. It is not unusual for him to be on two or three different calls. Do you know those Wall Street films? Or TV shows like Billions or Succession ? Not that my friend is a billionaire or a stockbroker...