Men need a third thing

I don’t listen to many podcasts—just a couple. Podcasts are often an escape, catering to our interests or boredom. But let’s be honest, there are too many podcasts nowadays. Back when it was just Joe Rogan and a handful of others, podcasts felt meaningful—filled with lessons and purpose. Today, anyone with a mic and clickbait dreams thinks they can start one. It’s become a diluted space. That said, keep an eye out for my podcast soon.

One time, while washing dishes—a chore I despise [who doesn’t]—I listened to The Diary of a CEO (DOAC) podcast. Dishwashing is unbearable without some distraction. Sometimes the distraction is a podcast, other times it’s the timeless banjo tunes of Stevo Karabby or the soulful rhumba of Franco Luambo and Madilu System. Great music finds its way to your soul, especially when you’re not even trying to hear it.

In the one DOAC episode, Trevor Noah said something profound that has stuck with me since: men need a third thing! He explained that in the past, women—primarily stay-at-home wives—bonded naturally through shared activities: chatting while knitting, crashing groundnuts, or weaving sisal baskets. This camaraderie built strong connections and resilience in women. It developed a sense in women enabling them to just sit and be around their fellow women, while the men went out to hunt or fight wars. Brought about a bond of unity and togetherness that helped the women in times of menstrual periods, birth, marriage problems and in disciplining the young girls.

Men, however, never cultivated that ability to just BE with each other. We’ve always needed something else to fill the silence—a third thing. I don't know about you, but I don't know many guys who know how to just sit with their male friends and just be. Not do a thing. BE.

Different places have a word for it. In my high school we called it ‘kugas’ (gassing). After a tense LaLiga [inter-class] match, we’d lounge on dorm beds or concrete benches in the sun and just talk about everything and nothing. Football, annoying prefects, conspiracy theories, girls from Pangani—it didn’t matter. We’d talk, laugh, fall silent, talk again, and then laugh again. Gassing was a way to cool down from all the pressure of being in a top school, or from the repetitive annoying routine of the weekdays. It was unplanned, unstructured, and very much necessary. It meant doing nothing but actually talk with your fellow men in blue shorts and red shirts. It wasn’t studying together or discussing how many moles are needed to balance an equation. Kiswahili would call it soga. Kiswahili ruins the fun in everything.

Recently, I visited my friend Omwanda. He had been posting depressing Tommy Shelby memes on his socials—clearly not in a good space. It is one thing to want to be a gangster and successful man like Tommy, but when you get to the stage he was in Seasons 5 and 6—depressed, suicidal and lonely—then that’s different. You’re contemplating ‘not continuing with any of it’, as Tommy would say. And so I went to see him—invited, of course. Never go to anyone’s house uninvited, even to your mum’s.

I went to his house and Omwanda welcomed me like all male friends do, handshakes you with a banter joke then walks away and you follow. We settled on his balcony, past his father basking in the front porch with a worn-out vest, while I answered his joke with my own of how his head looks unshapely from the back.

His balcony is surrounded by so many plants—a small pointy aloe vera, snake plants, spider plants tickling our leg hairs, and even English ivy curling along the walls all the way to inside his room. One of his sisters has her own petunias potted by her balcony’s corner—she gets her own flowers coz there are no signs whatsoever of a man in her life. Omwanda’s balcony felt like a greenhouse but with enough space to sit and breathe, and with enough unrestricted sunlight to make the flowers even more beautiful.

In my few years of knowing Omwanda, this was actually my first time going to their two-floor house. Each of his siblings has a bedroom with its own balcony where they go to cool off steam in case of a dispute or quarrelling. The balconies overlook a lush garden of their father’s home-grown carrots, cabbages and more flowers (it must be a family thing), providing a serene and picturesque view.

Omwanda is not the talkative type, and neither am I at times. And so we sat and took in the fragrant air of the flowers, and stared at the carefully-tilled garden below for like 12 minutes (it felt more than that though) until I broke the silence and asked, regretfully, about his flowers.

“So which one is this?” I asked randomly, not even pointing to a specific plant, but Omwanda went off immediately, like he was waiting for me to ask.

“This is called a Spider Plant. Chlorophytum comosum [I had to Google that coz no way I’m remembering that]. They are excellent natural air purifiers because they absorb toxins like carbon monoxide, improving indoor air quality..”

“Mmmhh”

“Spider plants hazihitaji ata care mingi, kuwater kiasi and indirect sunlight na zitakuwa sawa. Haziattract pests pia so ziko very fine ata around kids.” he says enthusiastically.

Omwanda loves his plants. Not casually—obsessively. He speaks passionately about them. Their biological qualities and minimal care needs. “These are my babies,” he said, “nurtured with love, not just soil.”

Okay, let’s calm down. They are just plants. But I mistakenly blurted out, “You’re a psycho, you know that?” But he smiles it off, “So I’m told..”

Who knew people love plants this much. The care he provided them is unmatched, not even his cracked-screen phone receives that much care. Don’t even get me started on a girlfriend, he definitely doesn’t have one despite his denial. But if he did, she’d be the luckiest coz she’d have constant flowers sent to her—fresh, and grown with ‘love more than soil’. Sometimes I think he exists in his world with these plants, and we are just extras. He looks at them with admiration, and hope that they’ll be trees one day. Or that’s not why they keep the plants in the first place?

“Ziii. Hizi si za kugrow kama miti! Maybe one day, but right now I want to take care of them forever.”

Omwanda went on and on for hours about his plants, to the extent of telling me his dreams of moving out to grow his own garden. Not for space or freedom—but for the plants. It was both admirable and perplexing. A garden in his own home, of not only balcony potted plants, but an orchard, trees and gardens. I mean, people have different ambitions to want to move out but his is so that he can grow a garden. That’s right, grow a garden.

I do believe people who take care of plants that much have underlying issues that I’m not yet qualified enough to talk about. And Omwanda knows it, he also doesn’t know what trauma caused him to be a plant enthusiast. But it’s a getaway that even I would invest in, because you’re taking care of nature and having something worth doing. A weird purpose—building something that if the plants stay healthy for long, gives you a sense of satisfaction and achievement that makes you push your suicidal attempts to another date.

As I washed dishes later, Trevor’s words resurfaced. Men don’t just sit and connect anymore. We always have the third thing. There's you, there's me and there's the third thing. There’s the PlayStation, there are the football matches, there are the gym sessions, the plants, the scrolling through our phones. It is never a why do we need the football match, the eFootball, the phones. Why can't we just sit and BE. Be in the sense of “Hey what's happening in your heart, Omwanda? What's going on with your engineering course? What’s up with that your long distance girlfriend? What happened to that business you were to start?”

“What's happening in my heart? Oh, let me tell you what’s going on..” Women have their little udaku spaces to share, but men? We have to mask it with distractions. You have to be the alpha (or is it beta?) male that is tough and shows no emotions. Some may argue that maybe women have been genetically coded to that, but it is also because they had been forced to practice that. As I’d said, men were like ‘you can't come to the factory..the office..etc’ for so long that the women learnt to just BE.

Right now most people don’t know how to just sit with their thoughts, or just sit with themselves and say to themselves, ‘How are you doing?’. The degree of comfort in being by yourself is no longer there, because you sit and you remember there’s a tweet to check, or a series to watch, or a match to cheer. There’s always the third thing.

Even friendships are transactional now. How many places can one go to connect with people without money? When we were kids we used to go to each other’s homes and just sit around the other kids and play with the soil, or fight with sticks, or lie in soft grass and try to guess cloud shapes. You hang out with other kids and that was just what you did. It didn't involve money, or plants, or video games. It was being around your friends.

And I admire that about my weed-smoking friends. In my freshman year I had a roommate who would stare deathly at the wall for hours when he was high. And his smoking mate would be seated behind him on the bed also just staring into nothingness. And they’d sit like that with blaring Siddy Ranks reggae in the speakers, not a word spoken, not a glance at their phones. Just being.

But nowadays we need a third thing:

“Do you have money for a video game console? No? Oh, then you can't meet up with your friends on EA Sports game nights.”

“Do you have money to go to a movie? No? Then you can't hang out with your friends at the movies.”

“Can you afford an Uber ride? No? Then hakuna mahali tunaenda na wewe.”

“Do you have a cool series we can watch? No? Then what am I coming to do?”

I quote Noah:

I’ll leave it at that. Trevor nailed it: we’ve forgotten how to connect for the sake of connection. Men (and anyone else) are increasingly isolated, unable to sit with themselves or others. And yet, the ability to just be—with no agenda—is the foundation of genuine relationships. Putting down the PS controllers, away from the social media distractions—just sitting with each other. Asking the real questions. Being present.

Trevor Noah’s brilliance extends beyond comedy. His comedy is extremely hilarious too because of his genius. I’d recommend you watch the podcast for yourself—you’ll see what I mean.

✍🏽Reagan.

*Omwanda - alias.

*Udaku - gossip