HealthyGamerGG - Why Modern Men Feel Empty

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

Dr. K breaks down why so many men feel lonely, rejected, and angry today. He explains how society ties a man's worth to his relationship status and how internet advice warps real human connection. Using clinical insight and lived stories, he shows why effort alone is not the fix, why reciprocity and natural interaction matter, and how unprocessed sadness can harden into anger. The episode offers practical tools to clear social media projections, regulate emotions, and build healthy, organic relationships. Topics include: Social gatekeeping and status tied to relationships Why doing everything “right” still feels empty Reciprocity as the core signal of safety and interest How to be natural by reducing projection and reading context Anger as disguised sadness and how to work with both Concrete steps to date without resentment or creepiness Countering red pill narratives with self-inquiry and repair HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Want to get started? Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax. Hey, y'all. Just a reminder that in addition to these awesome videos, we have a ton of tools and resources to help you grow and overcome the challenges that you face. We've got things like Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health, personalized coaching programs, and things like free community events and other sorts of tools to help you no matter where you are on your mental health journey. So check out the link in the description below and back to the video. Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Knoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.

On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. Man, it's hard to be a dude on the internet nowadays. So many of us are lonely, sexually frustrated, and disrespected because we can't find a girlfriend or can't get laid. And so we try so hard to find a girlfriend. because we look at our lives and we're sad, we're lonely, we're sexually frustrated, and we see these other people who are surrounded by beautiful women in beautiful places, having lots of fun

or sexy, amazing, and we want that too. We see all the smiles, we see all the sexiness, and we think to ourselves, that life is way better than mine. And the way for me to go from here, sad, lonely, sexually frustrated to there is to get a girlfriend. But it's not only dudes that tell us this. It's also women, usually on places like Instagram, who are relatively attractive trying to make it as an influencer, and they're more than happy to shit on us when we do not fit that mold. And this is when you may say, but that's just on the internet. The real world is a different place. Unfortunately, we live in a society that values a man based on their ability to engage in romantic relationships, right? A dude who, like myself, I'm not trying to flex here,

I'm 42 years old. I'm hopefully happily married and I've got two kids. And when people look at me, they think I'm normal. Little do they know. Oh my God, that needs to be added out. Unfortunately, the real world treats men who are single. Like, if you're a virgin, you don't have a girlfriend, you're not married and you're 25, 30, 35, 40, people are going to start treating you like a creep. Even if you just walk across the street and you watch some kids playing because it reminds you of the joy of your childhood, someone's going to call the cops because they think you're a pedophile, right? Single dude who's 42 labeled a pedophile, whether you are or not. Unfortunately, we live in a world that places your status, your worth as a man based on the kinds of women that you

can surround yourself with. And this is something that I was shocked to discover in my own life. So when I got married, I got married in my first year of medical school. And then, like, this really hit when I was in residency. And, like, you know, I was in the hospital. I had. a ring on my finger and I had kids even and like people like the women the nurses especially but also some of the doctors in the hospital started treating me really differently I got all kinds of female attention and at first I was like okay maybe they're just being friendly which I think is absolutely the case right so I think that when I would bring my one year old daughter to work and all of the nurses who are predominantly women were gushing over my daughter you know it's so awkward like if you're a dude

if you're a male nurse and there's a male doctor and the male doctor brings in their one year old kid, are you allowed to be overjoyed, start cooing and awing, oh, can I hold him? Aren't you precious? Aren't you adorable? Which is what's really scary is like, I feel that way when I see a one year old. I just love all kids now. Like, ever since I've had my own kids, I appreciate kids. Kids are just so damn cute and it reminds me of when my kids were one year old, but you can't

do that as a dude. As I started demonstrating to other women that maybe I was safe, I noticed that their attention towards me changed. They started touching me more. And I do think that some of that was not necessarily romantic or sexual in nature. I think they just genuinely thought like, okay, here is a good guy, right? Here is a safe guy. Because a lot of women have terrible experiences with sexual predation, assault, et cetera, unsolicited

picks from men. So one of the ways that I think a lot of women feel like a guy is safe is if he is happily married and has kids or has a stable girlfriend and has kids or has a boyfriend and has kids, that shows that this person is safe. So a lot of the ways that we get judged as men, are we safe or creeps, depends on our status with women. And we live in this weird paradoxical society where women basically get shamed for the number of sexual partners they have,

and men get shamed for the lack of sexual partners they have. And so what's really scary about this is, as we sort of are living in this world, where if you're a dude, you are going to be judged, based on your capacity to find a partner because a partner indicates a certain degree of safety in normality. And so as we strive for this, right, as we are judged for being virgins, being losers, being creeps, we look for answers. And this is where social media offers a ton. Be a high value man. Be over six feet tall. Make $100,000 a year. Be in the top 10%, be in the top 15%,

and then women will flock to you. This is not just about dealing with loneliness and sexual frustration. This is about being seen as a human, not a cretan, not a creep, not a pedophile. This is what you need to do. This is what I want y'all to understand. If you cannot become six feet, if you cannot make $100,000 a year, if you can't have a big, if you are not able to have these things, you will not be able to find a girlfriend. And if you cannot find a girlfriend, people in the world will not try.

treat you as a human. They will treat you as a predator. So it's not just that I'm seeing this in my personal life. This is something, unfortunately, we've been seeing way more in our coaching program, where people are coming to us with this situation of like, I'm single, I'm alone, I have a lot of negative emotions, I don't know how to get started, I'm dealing with a lot of rejection, there's a lot of technology addiction. And we've had a ton of experience of helping people like this. So finding a girlfriend for men is not an issue of relieving sexual frustration. It is an issue of being accepted by society. But the problem is that this formula doesn't work.

There are plenty of men out there that have done what they're supposed to do, including being born with good genetics and being over six feet tall in adulthood. They've done what they're supposed to do, and yet they wake up one day and they find that this is not enough. And then some people have sort of figured this out, right? So we have a clip like this where someone says, okay, what's missing is effort, right? You need to put in more effort.

But that too kind of rubs me the wrong way. Because most of the men that I work with who are single virgins and or had a single traumatic relationship a few years ago, but have been single since then, they're not a virgin anymore. Most of these people are putting in a ton of effort. Like, this is what blows my mind is I think most of the people who are single in the world today are putting in way more effort than people who are partnered. And we see this all the time with like people talking about their dependent partners, right? these women who are dating men children who won't even like clean the dishes or expect their girlfriend to cook for them, clean for them, pay the bills, and be sexually available to them whenever they feel like it.

I think actually the single people are working way harder than the partner people. So the question is, okay, like what do we do about this, right? So if you're someone who is struggling to find a girlfriend, if you were seen as less than human because you can't find an appropriate partner, if you don't have that badge of I'm a normal human, I'm a safe person to be around. How do you handle this? And this is where we can look at some of the success stories. So granted, this is Twitter, and someone is just simply asking, you know, how did you meet your other app?

For people who are actually in relationships, how did y'all actually meet? And we see that my wife dialed the wrong number, and I can't remember why we agreed to meet the next day, but 27 years and three kids later, still going strong. I literally manifested this relationship. I walked into a random mall in Baltimore City and said to myself, I might just meet the love. of my life, ran into this guy and we've been tight ever since. Met on a dating app, right? So we do sometimes meet people on dating apps. We had one video chat and I was smitten, right? So there's this sort of love at first sight kind of thing. Performing in Atlanta with my bestie, he was a producer and an engineer.

So we see that sometimes people meet in professional relationships. Shot me a DM on here for tacos, but timing wasn't right and she was over me. Months passed. And I asked her to go get tacos. She pulled up in sweats and no makeup. The date ended up lasting five hours and a lot of us talking and laughing and I never looked back. We met on Tinder with no intention to date, just having fun. We ended up falling in love after a month of dating. She was a lift passenger.

Oh my goodness. This sounds super creepy, right? But we connected. Can you imagine your lift passenger hitting on you, dude? This is my favorite. Congrats. Happy for you. As a psychiatrist, when I look at these, I start to.

to send something in the ether. I'm detecting a lot of green flags. And this is what actually the research on formation of relationships actually backs up, is that relationships involve a lot of things that we can't see on the internet. The internet is really good at showing us particular things. An internet can show us attractiveness, but can not show us genuineness. The internet can show us sexiness, but cannot show love, right? The internet can show symbols of romance, like fancy flowers or an extravagant gift, but can't show like respect. And this is what becomes so hard if you're a dude who's trying to figure out,

how do I find a girlfriend? Because people will say you have to put in effort. What does that mean? People will say, don't be creepy. People will say be natural. But the internet never shows us natural, right? And then we also have examples of people who were like, we met for the first time. We hung out for five hours and it was like the best day of my life.

Oh, we talked, we followed each other for years on Twitter, but then when we finally met up, we hung out every day for two weeks. So this is the key thing that I want you all to notice. All of these relationships demonstrate reciprocity, where one person is matching the other person's energy. But what do we hear on the internet? We actually hear lots of examples of always. do things one way. Wait 24 hours before you text her back. Wait 24 hours. Make him wait for you.

Don't respond to him right away. Don't put out on the first date or else this will happen, right? This is where like everyone is giving us this stock advice. But really, I think what the science really shows is that we want to be reciprocal. Like the first date that I had with my wife, we hung out for 10 hours. Like it was wild. And if I had followed some stupid internet advice back then, who knows if I would be in the relationship that I'm in right now. So this is where we've got to be careful about some of this advice because the basic problem with internet advice is that is generic. It does not fit to a particular, you know, person and we'll get more to that. But what I see here, and I think this is now going to offer generic advice, is be reciprocal, right? So give and take. And this is what,

what I see so much is that a lot of times when we see these horror stories on the internet, these terrible text exchanges, what do we see in these terrible text exchanges? A lack of reciprocity. You send one text. They explode in your face with walls and walls and walls of text. You think you're a nice guy, but really what you're doing is trauma dumping, right? You're not matching the energy at all. And this is what's really fascinating. Matching people's energy is how you get them to feel safe, comfortable, and like you. And I'll give you all a beautiful example of this. One time when I was a second year resident working overnight in the emergency at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Harvard Medical School. I sat with a patient and I wasn't sure if they were a patient with depression with psychotic features. So sometimes depression can get so bad where the negative self-talk can literally turn into auditory hallucinations.

It is a voice telling you, you hear it in an auditory way, all of these negative self-thought, all of these negative self-thoughts, which actually turn into like literally auditory hallucinations, or whether this person has something called schizoaffective disorder with depressed mood. So in schizoaffective disorder, this is basically someone who has a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia. So this is a diagnosis that's characterized by delusions, paranoia, auditory hallucinations, right? This is what we call psychosis. But then they get depressed on top of that. So the problem is that both patients are both depressed and hallucinating. So how can you tell which one comes first? Is this hallucination a result of the depression, or is this depression layered on top of the

hallucination? So I went to my attending, and my attending asked me a brilliant question. They asked me, imagine you're on a subway, and the subway is full, this person is sitting down on the subway, and there's one seat open, only one seat open next to this person. You feel like sitting down. Your legs are tired. Would you sit down next to them? If the answer is yes, they have depression with psychotic features.

if the answer is no, they have schizoaffective disorder with depressed mood. Okay, so this is what they explained to me, and I was like, I would not sit down next to this person. They just feel creepy. And here's what happens in schizophrenia. In schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, it doesn't just create paranoia or delusions. It also severely interferes with our affective or emotional circuitry. These people have something called blunted affect, so they won't smile super big, they won't cry very loud, they just have a very neutral expression.

And I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but if I like, right now when I'm talking to you all, hopefully y'all are engaged, but if I start going like this, like, how would you feel about me? Did you want to date me? I love you so much. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.

I really can't wait to kiss you and touch you in all of the places that you like. Fibin creepy. Like even when I do it, I'm laughing a little bit on the inside, so that's a little bit less creepy. But do you all see how, when someone has a blunted affect, they can't be reciprocal.

And what I see so much on the internet is a lack of being reciprocal. So either we over-invest and chase people too much, or they will ask a question that is relatively genuine, and we respond to it with a profound amount of anger. The second thing is that relationships need to be organic. Now, this is also really hard, because if I tell you, oh, my God, like, yeah, like, successful relationships are organic. Your first question is going to be, how the hell do I be organic?

Because people will tell you on the internet, be natural, be organic, be loose. What does that mean? So this is something where we can dive into it. This is so cool, okay? So what does not being natural look like? And this is where from like a psychiatric perspective, the more that you bring into the relationship or interaction, because these aren't even relationships yet, the less organic it will be.

So if I show up on a first date, but I have a ton of emotional baggage, if I've been going down the social media rabbit hole and I think all women are bitches and I'm just itching. I have all these thoughts in my head and I am projecting all of what I've seen on the internet on the internet onto an actual human being. That relationship will not be natural. That will not be organic. What does natural mean? Natural means that I offer something and you give something in return. there is a natural reciprocal, organic exchange. What makes these exchanges hard? When you have a lot of stuff in your head that you are layering on to this person's actions. When this person doesn't respond to your texts in time, they don't respond to you for 24 hours, that means they're playing hard to get. That means they're texting other people. Do you see how you can inject a lot of meaning into benign interaction?

Whereas if you wipe all of that stuff out of your mind and then you sort of receive what this person offers without a filter, that is what becomes a natural interaction. So basically a natural interaction is like, I send one tennis ball over to your side of the court. You send one tennis ball back. But what we tend to find is I send one tennis ball. You read into it way too much. And then you send 15 tennis balls back. And we've seen this time and time and time again. Now, this is really hard because in our current society, as we spend a lot of time on

on dating sites and things like that, dating apps, we will build up so much resentment that the only place it has to go out is to be projected on the poor unlucky person who happened to match with you. The opposite is also true. And if y'all are using dating apps, you've probably seen this where you're the poor unlucky recipient of this person's overwhelming projection and emotional baggage. The other really scary piece of evidence, I mean, this isn't really evidence, this is anecdotal based on my clinical practice that I've seen, is I've seen healthy relationships get injected

with social media-based ideas. I've worked with women whose husbands have started, you know, following particular alpha male red pill kind of influencers. It's drastically changed the way that they behave in their interactions with their wife. This is, in some cases, tragic cases led to divorce. And I'm scared to say that this is happening at an increasing frequency. And it's not just this happening to men. I've also had a fair number of dudes. These are actually more personal relationships whose wives, these are actually married men, have started going down social media rabbit holes around particular ideas of what women are entitled to and things like that. And they actually had a healthy relationship with two kids, and then their wife starts to get all of these ideas

about, like, oh, I shouldn't be working and I should do this, and like, you should be taking care of me, and like, you should be doing the diapers, and you should be working, and you should be helping me clean the house. And, like, they go down this rabbit hole. And then suddenly, their natural organic interactions, which have been present for 15 years, get injected with this other layer of stuff. And that will actually lead them to divorce, too. And that will actually lead them to divorce too, I've seen it way too often. So now the question is, okay, so if we want to be reciprocal and we want to be organic, we want to be natural, how do we actually do that, right? How do we come across as not creepy, especially because we're going to be judged for being single in the first

place? Two major things that I'm going to share with y'all. The first is we have to work with anger. So this is what's really interesting. A lot of people will wonder, why are men so angry all the time, right? We look at men. We're like, oh, men are so angry. Men are so angry. They need to do something with their anger. Like, that's bad. Men are angry. Anger is predators. Like, men are predators. Men are angry? And it's okay to feel your emotions, right? Men should express their emotions, except for anger. That one's off the table. No, if you express anger, you become a predator. So why are men so angry? So we have to understand what the evolutionary purpose of our emotions is. When human beings, in general, when things aren't going well for us, and we need help, the primary emotion that we

experience is sadness. No, it sounds kind of weird. But let's think about sadness. Sadness is the most visible emotion, right? It is something that you can see when someone's crying, you can see it from far away, you can hear it, it's loud, their nose is blubbering, their tears are going, like, you can tell when someone is crying. So if we look at sadness, sadness is an emotion that is designed evolutionary to recruit aid from outside of you. Oh yeah, I'm sad, I'm crying, my my boyfriend or girlfriend just dumped me. And what happens? Hopefully your friends show up and they're like, okay, like, bro, okay, girl, like, let's go out.

Like, let's take care of you. It's going to be okay. They, it's a signal for help. Unfortunately, we live in a world where if you're a dude and you cry, unless you are a superhero who is shedding a calculated, calculated amount of tears and then takes action into your own hands, sadness is not really acceptable. A lot of men, a tragic number of men that I've worked. worked with when they expressed sadness, and it's okay to cry once. Like, oh my God, he's crying. He's so

sensitive. But try crying every day for six months. Like, see how people treat you then. And so if the signal that we send out to get help, hey, I'm crying because I'm lonely, I'm a loser, I'm a virgin. Oh, I feel so lonely and I don't know. What is the world's response? Bra, you're not entitled to shit, bruh. Come on, bra. What? You expect women to solve this problem? for you too. We're expected to do your dishes, wipe your ass, take care of your kids, and you want our help in getting laid. You're not entitled to shit, bro. I'm not saying that that's right or wrong. I'm simply pointing out this is the common experience that people go through today. And so if sadness doesn't work, then what is the human brain left with? So we turn to another emotion,

anger. Anger is the emotion that prompts action, right? When we feel sad, we literally feel like doing nothing. It is an emotion that induces a lack of motivation and signals for help. I can't do this on my own. I need your help, right? Help me do this thing. Anger is the emotion that does the exact opposite. It motivates us towards action even when we shouldn't act. So when someone gets really pissed, what do your friends usually, oh, calm down, bro. Don't go into that office. Don't start yelling at your professor. Don't start yelling at your boss. Don't break up with her yet, bro. like take a deep breath, don't act. Like calm down, calm down and then act.

Anger induces action. And so what we see, I see this in so many of my male patients, where sadness doesn't work and the only option they have to bring themselves out of it is anger. Because when we get angry, then we don't care how many people we're up against. Anger is the one emotion that allows us to face all kinds of odds and act anyway. So until we allow men to feel sad or be sad, we're going to end up with men who are incredibly angry. Now, why does this matter for you? Because if you are engaging with a woman or a man, whatever, and you're trying to engage in a relationship,

if you have a certain amount of sadness that has been transmuted to anger and you are coming to this relationship with a lot of anger, reciprocity is going to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, right? because they send you something you have so much suppressed anger that kind of comes out. So you must deal with this anger by first of all asking yourself what you're really sad about and sitting with that sum. We've got a lot of resources around emotional regulation and stuff like that. You all should check out. We have a whole series of lectures about it.

Definitely check that out. Second thing is about being natural. So the more that we project into the relationship, the less that we treat this person like a person. and the more that we treat them like a representative, an embodiment of the ideas that social media teaches us, the harder of a time we're going to have. Because we're not responding to a human being. We are responding to a projection of a human being. Now, we're going to talk for a second, if you guys want to understand how do I deal with that, Dr. Kay?

We have to understand projection. So if you look at a lot of the alpha male red pill kind of people, what they'll say is that, you know, women are transactional, they're just looking for this. they're looking for the most high value male, right? Women are like basically incapable of like real love. The kind of love that women used to be, used to represent before feminism, right? Before feminism like ruined all the women. Man, it's so sad.

They were like they were really there and they were really good and stable partners. Those women were capable of love in the 1950s. But the women today, man, they're just not capable of being partners the way that they used to be. This is projection. So let's understand how projection works. Projection is when I have a feeling that I do not like and is too much for me to hold. I'm going to take that feeling and I'm going to project it out and I'm going to put it on you. And then I can blame you for it.

So what is that feeling, Dr. Kay, what does that mean? If I feel unlovable, if I feel like a reject, if I feel like a loser. So if I'm unlovable, then no one will love me, right? Makes sense. If I'm unlovable, then no one will love me. But that's really hard to sit with, this core idea that I am unlovable. Oh my God, it's so psychologically painful. So instead of what I do, I take my unloavability and then I say, you are not capable of love.

You see what I did there? Little bait and switch. Oh, yeah, I am unlovable. You do not love me. There is no love here, but it's my fault. But instead of what I can do, I can do something super cool, I can take that I'm not unlovable and I can say, oh, you're not capable of love. That's why there's no love in the relationship.

It's not my problem. It is your problem. This is projection. And what I found in literally 100% of the red pillars that I have worked with is a traumatic experience around love where they feel fundamentally unlovable at the end of that experience. They get left for somebody else. Oh, yeah, I'm not capable of being. I'm unlovable because she left me for someone else.

So, so common. I'm talking about 100%. Clinical practice, right? So anecdotal. So just my practice, maybe there's a selection bias. But I see this in 100% of red pillars that I've worked with. So if you want to start to be natural, if you want to start to not inject this kind of stuff, you need to look at all of the things that you see that are problematic in women and try to think about,

okay, this person is a bitch, this person just wants money, and then start to ask yourself, am I a little bit of an asshole? do, am I afraid? Holy crap, the number of men who say yes to this question when they end up in my office. Am I afraid that I won't be able to make enough money? Oh my God, the answer to that question is yes. And if they're afraid that they won't be able to live up to expectations, they're going to project that out. So if you're a dude who's struggling to find a girlfriend, things are way more complicated.

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