Every Man Needs One Thing That Makes Him Grin Like an Idiot

Stop punishing yourself by living like the man you used to be.

I bought a grey Volvo SUV.

I need you to understand how wrong that was for me. I’d spent 20 years building two digital media companies from nothing. When I sold the first one, I bought a C7 Corvette. When I sold the second, I bought a C8. I was the first person in Utah to have one. I felt like Tony Stark every time I got in that car.

Then I moved to Puerto Rico, didn’t bring the Corvette because it was going to cost a fortune in import taxes, and made a decision that tells you everything about where my head was at the time:

I bought a grey Volvo SUV.

Not because I needed an SUV. Because somewhere between the move and the financial hit and the rebuilding, I’d decided I should be “practical.” Sensible. The last time I’d felt good about my life, I’d been wrong about everything. So feeling too good became the thing I was afraid of. The Volvo was the car you buy when you’ve decided to punish yourself quietly, in a way nobody else even notices.

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Men who manage to rebuild after a major setback often get the hard parts right: they hit the gym, fix their finances, get their diet dialed in. Maybe they start reading again, and find their way back to church. They do the work.

But some never update the way they live to match the man they’ve become.

They’re still buying grey Volvos.

They’re wearing clothes that belong to the guy who gave up on himself. Driving the car they bought during the worst year of their life. Saying no to anything that looks like it might bring them actual pleasure, because somewhere along the way they decided they didn’t deserve it, or were afraid of the consequences.

Here’s the thing: after the wreckage, after the divorce or the career collapse or whatever blew your life apart, you made a deal with yourself. Probably not consciously. The deal was:

The last time I felt good about my life, I was wrong about everything. I was confident, I thought I had it figured out, and it all blew up. So I won’t trust that feeling again. I’ll be disciplined. I’ll be responsible. And if I start feeling too good, I’ll treat it as a warning, not a reward.

That deal made sense at the time. It was survival, and kept you focused when you needed focus more than anything else.

But at some point, you were supposed to renegotiate it.

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A few months into my time in Puerto Rico, I flew out to Colorado for a belief-work retreat that cracked something open in me. Something I’d been carrying for a long time. The details aren’t important here. What’s important is what I did when I got back to San Juan:

I swapped the Volvo for a Dodge Challenger.

The Challenger wasn’t my dream car, but it wasn’t a grey Volvo. It was the first external admission that the man driving the sensible SUV didn’t exist anymore. The internal shift had happened. The hardware just needed to catch up.

That pattern kept repeating. Every time I leveled up internally, my external life lagged behind until I forced the update. A move to Nashville brought a blacked-out Audi S5 that I pushed to 600 horsepower. Then came a motorcycle: a Honda Rebel that looked cool but was completely gutless. I outgrew it in an hour.

I went to a multi-day motorcycling school, came back, and realized the truth: I was still buying machines for the rider I had already stopped being.

That’s when I bought the Ducati Diavel V4.

It was the kind of bike I never would’ve dreamed of handling a year earlier. I added a racing exhaust, blacked out the silver, and replaced the plastic with carbon fiber.

I’ve had it a year now, and it still puts that idiot grin on my face every single time I look at it.

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Maybe you’re reading this and thinking it doesn’t apply to you. You’ve done the work. Your body, your finances, your habits, your faith, all of it rebuilt. Better shape than you’ve been in years.

And you still won’t let yourself enjoy any of it.

You eat clean but it’s the same four things on rotation. Your apartment looks like you moved in last month even though it’s been three years. Your closet is full of clothes that belong to a man who stopped caring what he looked like. You can afford better. You just don’t believe you’re allowed to have it.

You call it discipline. Discipline has a purpose. This is penance. And it’s penance for a crime you’ve already been forgiven for.

“…that each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.”
Ecclesiastes 3:13

Joy isn’t the reward you get after the rebuild is complete, it’s the evidence that the rebuild is actually working. If you’ve rebuilt everything that matters and you still can’t grin at something in your life, you haven’t finished. You’ve just built a more organized cage.

Every man should have at least one thing in his life that makes him grin like an idiot when he sees it.

Maybe it’s a motorcycle. Maybe it’s a 34-inch die cast model of the starship Enterprise sitting on your shelf (that’s mine in the top photo, BTW). It could be a leather jacket you’d never have bought two years ago, or a guitar you finally picked back up, or a trip you booked just because you wanted to. The thing itself doesn’t matter. What matters is that it belongs to the man you are now, not the man who was just trying to survive.

The reason has nothing to do with price tags or proving something to anyone else. It’s about proving something to yourself. It says: I’m not that man anymore. I did the work. I’m allowed to be here.

If nothing in your life puts that grin on your face yet, you’re not done. Find the thing. Allow yourself to have it. A rebuild that works isn’t enough. The life you’re living must feel like it actually belongs to you again.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

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