Reading Time: 6 minutes
Key Takeaways:
• Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men highlights the enduring need for men’s social connection and support systems.
• Subtle conversation starters, such as Movember mustaches or personal jewelry, allow men to open up about deeper topics naturally.
• Retail stores can foster meaningful human connection by creating events that bring people together around shared interests.
The names have changed. The need for somebody who gives a damn hasn’t.
I hadn’t thought about Of Mice and Men in years. Like most people, I read it in high school, wrote the absolute minimum word count needed for the essay, learned that the rabbits probably represented something important, and filed that information in the same part of my brain where I keep the quadratic formula and the significance of the mitochondria. It’s the powerhouse of the cell!
Then, while working on INOX’s partnership with Movember, I started reading more about men’s mental health and kept running into the same subjects. Loneliness, isolation, lack of meaningful friendships, lack of belonging. If you only know Movember as the thing where guys grow questionable mustaches every November, there’s a lot more behind the facial hair. Somewhere in all that reading, Steinbeck came crawling back out of the filing cabinet.
Of Mice and Men was published in 1937, and the book is crawling with lonely dudes. The funny part is they’re surrounded by other lonely dudes. They work together, eat together, sleep in the same bunkhouses and play cards together, yet they’re all sort of islands. Steinbeck even sets the story near the town of Soledad, or “solitude” in Spanish, for those of you who uninstalled Duolingo. Not really subtle there, John.
George and Lennie are the weird ones because they have each other. The other ranch hands actually find that unusual. Everybody else works, gets paid, moves on and repeats. George and Lennie have something the others don’t. They have somebody who gives a damn what happens to them.
That’s where a book I hadn’t thought about since high school started sounding strangely current.
Today we have better names for all of this, better research, and thankfully, better resources. But underneath all the terminology is something Steinbeck understood pretty well in 1937. Guys need other guys. We hear that men need to talk more, and sure, but I think we sometimes forget how guys actually talk.
Most of us aren’t calling a buddy and saying, “Robert, I’ve noticed a concerning decline in my emotional well-being. Would you like to unpack that with me?” It’s more likely, “Wanna grab a beer?” Or golf. Fishing. Watching the game. We can stand around a grill discussing charcoal placement like national security depends on it, and somewhere in there, the real stuff sneaks in through the side door.
That’s what I find clever about Movember. The mustache is ridiculous, and I mean that as a compliment. For a month, respectable men willingly make themselves look like 1980s state troopers. Someone notices it, makes a joke, asks about it, and now you have a conversation. The serious stuff gets an opening without having to walk through the front door.
So how does any of this connect to jewelry?
We’ve always talked about jewelry as self-expression, a way to show a little bit of your personality without saying anything. But now I’m starting to see it differently. What if, sometimes, it’s less about self-expression and more about an invitation?
A little “Hey, here’s a fun fact about me.”
Dad’s old watch. A wedding band. A cross. Something tied to fishing, music, your heritage, your team, whatever you’re into. They’re little clues we wear about ourselves, waiting for somebody who recognizes one.
“You fish?”
“What’s that symbol?”
“My dad had one of those.”
And there it is. Now there’s a thread to pull on. It could last thirty seconds. Twenty minutes later, you could be talking about your fathers. You never know which conversations matter when they start.
That puts jewelry in a pretty interesting place. The piece doesn’t create the connection. It doesn’t need to. It just tells the guy across the room, “Hey, here’s something about me.” Sometimes that’s enough to give him a reason to come over and ask.
Our stores can do the same. Host the Movember event. Have the men’s night. Get people together around something they already give a damn about. Don’t sit everybody in a circle and announce that it’s time to bond. Please don’t. Give them a reason to show up. Humans can handle the rest.
Which takes me back to Steinbeck.
Almost ninety years later, we’ve gotten much better at naming loneliness and doing something about it. But Steinbeck’s version was considerably less complicated.
George and Lennie had somebody.
A beer, a game, a ridiculous mustache, a weird bracelet somebody asks about. Sometimes the smallest things give us an opening to find our people.
And every once in a while, they give us somebody who notices when we’ve gone quiet, asks, “You good?” and actually gives a damn about the answer.
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