Everyone has so much going on, which makes it hard to sit down and “smell the flowers” as they say. It’s hard to keep up with the trends in greater society when it feels like your life is increasingly chaotic and you’re looking over your shoulder.
The month of May just ended, which is Mental Health Awareness Month. Safe to say, it gets less publicity than say October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month for example. Cancer hits so many with physical pain – not to mention the anguish that comes with it for families, literally of all shapes and sizes. Mental health, however, has always been stigmatized, cloaked and hidden. We are taught to put on a smile and deal with it, but to quietly suffer and not air out that kind of laundry. Back when, someone who goes to therapy was long considered “crazy” dismissively.
I’ll shine some light on the numbers. Spoiler alert: if you look at the trends across sources, mental health has been consistently getting worse and more costly no matter how you slice it (these charts were from studies done in December of 2023).
Also, not too surprising news is that the younger your generation, the more mental health issues you are facing as a general trend. Two-and-a-half years ago, 73% of people cited having a mental health issue in the past year.
A lot has changed since that time.
And for the record, it’s okay to not be okay.
Fair disclosures: I am married to a front-line social worker and crisis worker. Every single day, she and her peers navigate the compounding numbers of our unhoused communities, veterans, and individuals left short on answers and hope and have turned to suicidal plays. Witnessing their selflessness is a daily masterclass in empathy. They are the quiet, essential infrastructure holding our communities together, operating in a system that often feels like it has running out of human solutions.
Many of the youth today were taught that the path to success is paved through education (of which job-placement rates don’t support largely thanks to unbridled advanced in technology). Most probably haven’t heard of the artist Tupac, who was gone too soon. Tupac was an activist with SO many famous quotes, interviews and statements that remain relevant 30 years later, like the one below, “They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.”
To use a baseball analogy, I feel like I’ve had to face not only every curveball life could throw over the past few years, but every Paul Skenes “splinker,” slider, curve and heater (shout out to my Pirates, first sign of competitive life in ages). I absolutely know the feeling of being in that clear, growing majority.
As an executive operator who builds high-velocity GTM engines and complex AI data workflows, it has been a humbling paradox to sit on the other side of the screen. I know firsthand what it’s like to spend hours-upon-hours job hunting, matching keywords and navigating automated applicant tracking systems only to hit immediate auto-denials. It forces an honest calibration of what matters. It also makes me realize that while I am actively hunting for my next senior GTM, marketing, or strategic operations leadership mandate, the goal isn’t just to find a title—it’s to align with a team that values human clarity as much as velocity.
I am a believer in the power of compound interest.
I know that if I can lock in my alter ego mindset, escape in the mountains, get some ski laps and laughs in with friends, or spend some time with animals or in nature, that gives me some temporary reprieve. Meditation, deep breathing, down-time and escaping screens all helps – just ask the experts…to a point…
Even when I’m down, I try to count my blessings and remember that someone else has it worse. I’ve always tried to make someone’s day putting a smile on their face – be it asking my grocery baggers about the latest in their life and thanking them or being nice to the customer service people on the phone that deal with a lot of upset people.
The photo above at the top is from my time gig-working at a local music festival, trying to make people’s day with a quirky greeting at the gate with my man Julius. Julius spends time handwriting cards and gives them to random people for encouragement: mine was “You deserve all the wonderful things life has to offer. Share the love.”
This exact friction is why I am officially launching an all-terrain lifestyle project today called Apres Leisure. The brand was born out of a profound need for those special ‘Third Places’—the quiet mountain ridges, the ski laps with lifelong friends, the local brewpubs, or a festival gate with Julius—where we step away from the digital noise, find temporary reprieve, and transform to our legendary forms. We believe our apparel and gear can serve as physical artifacts to trigger the mindset needed to persevere. To anchor this mission with action, a portion of all proceeds throughout the month of June will be directly donated to frontline mental health initiatives.
Money isn’t everything. It won’t solve the world’s issues, but I believe that if we can make the effort to take the time to connect with people, following up and showing someone that you are thinking of them, creates traction and goodwill is infectious.
May is over, but that doesn’t mean the movement and momentum has to end here.
Be kind, divert some energy to someone else in the community and if they take the notion and do the same, that can start a movement, and could well become a trend in itself.
TRUE NORTH TEAM CONSULTING 