After I quit my job in biglaw to start an escape room business, I wanted to start posting online but I was nervous to do it. It was still unclear whether my little business was going to make it and the last thing I wanted was to apply to a new law firm position and have to explain why I was bashing on the job that I was applying to get back in to. But all of that changed when a buddy sent me an article about a biglaw partner at a well regarded firm that killed himself in the parking garage of the law firm.
In an interview, his bereft wife said:
I never thought in a million years that he could or would do that. And I keep going back to one thought: “Big Law” killed my husband.
I don’t want anyone else to experience the utter shock and pain I am in. During this terrible spiral, I told him to quit. I told him we could sell our beautiful house, move to Mammoth, our happy place, and snowboard all winter, and then figure it out. He said he couldn’t quit in the middle of a case. The irony is not lost on me that he found it easier to kill himself. I thought after this case was over, we’d find a path back to being happy.
On the morning he killed himself, he said he got an email and had to go into work to put something together. I wanted to ask if I could go with him and just sit there, but instead, I simply offered to make him a sandwich for lunch. And without any hesitation, he said, “No baby, I’ll be fine—I won’t be long.” I’ll be haunted by those words forever. He gave me a few kisses, and tried to get Ivy to come cuddle me.
And then he left, taking his gun with him, and shot himself in the head in the sterile, concrete parking structure of his high-rise office building.”
That night, I posted online for the first time about leaving law and finding my own path. Although I had quit my job a few months earlier, that was the moment that I decided I could never go back to that job. I knew that if I did, I would die. I burned the boats.
Today, men's greatest safety risk is themselves.
In 2022, more men under the age of 45 died from suicide than from cancer, heart disease and homicide COMBINED. Men are twice as likely to become addicted to illegal drugs and three times more likely than women to become addicted to alcohol.
Men are in pain.
When a man is in pain that feels pointless and interminable, suicide seems as good a reason to end it as any. When a man who does not know the purpose of his life he becomes an enemy to himself. If he does not know what he is meant to create, he consumes. If he cannot see the meaning of the pain in his life, he numbs it. If he does not feel safe expressing his heart, he destroys it. The man who thinks he is worth more dead than alive is on the razors edge of self-annihilation.
It's common to think of difficult questions like your personal purpose as questions that will be nice to know one future day when life is easy and the bank account is overflowing. We think its the same as picking up piano or downloading duolingo. A luxury not a necessity.
But when pain finds you on a path that promised to be safe, stable, and secure (a path we'll call the Default Path) you are at the beginning of the end of that life.
The path to your Personal Purpose almost always requires the death of your former life on the Default Path.
I wouldn't have had the courage to become an entrepreneur had panic attacks made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer. When I was miserable on the path that I was only on because I thought it would save me from misery, I thought: "We'll shit, I might as well be miserable doing my own thing."
When my businesses almost failed in COVID and my wife got cancer, I realized how meaningless building escape rooms had become for me. In that emptiness I found the courage to start writing again. I thought:
"If I can loose everything doing stupid escape rooms and trampoline parks, I might as well find something I care deeply about."
The lawyer had to die for the entrepreneur to live and the entrepreneur had to die for the writer to live. Metaphorical deaths to bring about a metaphorical new life. (And to be clear, these often come as dawning realizations, not spectacular revelations.)
That's the path to Personal Purpose and that's why suicide takes us to the heart of the most necessary questions. The irony of the Default Path is that in attempting to avoid all risks, we’ve unknowingly made the riskiest bet of all. We trade our souls for the false certainty of a salary. We give our life in exchange for a living that requires us to kill the parts of ourselves that make life worth living. And at some point, we no longer have an answer to "what the hell is it all for?"
It OK to not always have an answer to that question, because that's when you get to go into the unknown and find an answer that's YOUR answer.
Find the path that's YOUR path. And find a new life that's YOUR life. That's where all the magic is.
