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I’ve started participating with a TV programme called ‘Nederland in Beweging’, it’s a short 15 minute daily show on Dutch television in which you do exercises in front of your tv, following along with the presenters. It’s a full-body set of exercises, intended to focus on condition and flexibility and coordination.

It starts with a warming up, continues with sections ‘good for your heart’, ‘good for your legs’ and ‘good for your torso’, and then a cooling down. It isn't really a replacement for cardio training or strength training, but as a short programme for the whole body it is very good.

It is very accessible, I do it together with my mother, who is 77 and suffers from deafness and poor balance, so she does a lot of the exercises only halfway. It is aimed more at my age, which is 54, where people are still flexible and capable but might have a few beginning problems.

As soon as this is available will watch...

@RobinH Your comment actually reminded me of something that happened to me very recently.

My wife and I took her daughter to Disney World for a week. The entire trip was built around her, which was completely appropriate and something I was genuinely fine with going into it. But over the course of the week I found myself getting upset far more often than made any sense given what was actually happening.

I started feeling ignored, unimportant, and at times even unloved.

The strange part was that I knew those feelings weren't true. I wasn't sitting there thinking, "My wife doesn't love me." I could actually see what was happening in my own mind while it was happening. I could recognize that old attachment wounds were being triggered, that I was interpreting things through those old wounds, and that the story my mind was constructing wasn't supported by what was actually happening.

And yet knowing that didn't make the feelings go away.

I could see the pattern and still got caught in it.

That experience really brought something home to me about the difference between insight and actually being free of a pattern. Sometimes we can intellectually understand exactly what we're doing and still be completely caught in the emotional machinery of it.

And I wonder if something similar is happening in what you're describing about feeling useless or fearing that your wife might eventually leave you.

You actually said something really important yourself: you know those fears are baseless, and you know your wife supports you. That's the insight. But the fact that you know it doesn't necessarily mean the fear won't still arise.

I've spent roughly 80% of my adult life as the primary breadwinner. Now my wife makes about three times what I make. So I absolutely understand the ego hit of no longer occupying that role.

But I've had to learn that the feeling of being less important isn't evidence that I am less important.

That's a really important distinction.

And I think this is where Buddhism has become useful to me. The practice isn't necessarily about arguing with the feeling until it disappears. Sometimes the mind already knows the argument and the feeling keeps coming anyway. The practice becomes learning to sit with what is actually happening without feeding the story attached to it.

At Disney, I eventually started using the Great Compassion Mantra while walking. I only knew the first ten lines at the time, so I would repeat those ten lines as I walked. It didn't "prove" to me that my feelings were irrational. I already knew that. What it gave me was something to hold onto while the mind was spinning, until the rumination eventually wore itself out.

That experience actually changed how I understand compassion too. I usually think of compassion as something directed toward another person's suffering. But that week it became compassion toward the part of myself that was hurting, even when the story that part of me was telling wasn't true.

So when you say that you keep coming back to Buddhism because of these feelings, I don't necessarily see that as evidence that something is wrong with you.

Maybe that's exactly what practice is for.

Not to convince yourself that you shouldn't feel what you feel, but to learn how to experience those feelings without automatically believing them.

And maybe your wife making more money than you doesn't need to be solved at all.

Maybe the deeper work is learning that being loved, being useful, and being valuable aren't things that can be measured by your income.

You don't have to become the person who earns the most money in order to become the person you want to be.

And honestly, from what you've written, it sounds like you already care deeply about being useful to her and to other people. That matters. Your art matters. Your writing matters. The way you show up for people matters.

A paycheck is only one measurement of contribution, and probably not even the most interesting one.

I think that's one of the things I'm slowly learning myself: sometimes the thing that needs to change isn't the situation. It's the story the "I" has attached to the situation.

@marcitko
Ah, happiness resides in life's small victories.
After all, great victories are the sum of many small victories even as a lake is the summation of so many drops of water.

Peace to you
Peace to all

@Lionduck said:
At least in the USA, women were part of the workforce. They were, however, restricted in the types of jobs and their levels in the hierarchy were, generally, highly restricted. Property rights, economic rights, political and such were limited or non-existent. Foe economics and work, it was the myth of the "Weaker Sex".
That the opening up of women entering the brauder work force is not what drove prices up. It was, perhaps, a contributory factor, but not the driving force.
In the 1970s, nationally, when women finally achieved the right to control their own finances, the reactive (conservative), ccorporate forces looked at the masses and said, "They are too powerful, we must regain our dominance." Beginning with President Nixon, the corporatists began a long campaign to regain dominance in the economic field through their the political influence. The true collapse began when President Regan, with his pro-corporate and anti-union and "Trickle Down" economics and his termination, in 1987, of the FAIRNESS DOCTRINE which required equal air time for opposing political views.
The power of unions declines as laws were changed to better fulfill the corporate (moneyed) interests, and weaken the political power and influence of the working and middle class. All while corporations consolidated power, politically and economically. Wages stagnated or rose slowly in response to increasing prices while the power elite
saw their slalries and bonuses skyrocket.
Of course, the power influencers and the "movers and shakers" pushed the "Blame" on women and minorities. Minorities have never been the source of economic hardship in this nation. Women have been in the greater workforce in numbers in the USA for over 60 years. They are not the cause of the current situation where two or three jobs can not adequately feed, cloth and house a family.
The lack of the human element in the business equation, the "Profit over People" Corporate (and Billionaire) and the false business mindset and the need to always "Grow or Die"
The current Corporate mindset of Gain without the inclusion of Goodness is the core. There is no problem with personal gain when it includes Gain (Goodness) for the community, the society (the people). Gain, without the human element is GREED.
Corporations, of themselves are not Bad. Profit of itself is not Evil. It is the abuse of the power arising from ever centralizing Corporate power and the emphasis of profit with disregard to the benefit or harm to the people (workers, communities, customers/consumers) where the evil arises.
The Buddhist approach of awareness and concern for the People and the environment, the ecosystems of which we are all a part, is a counter-valence to the greed and arrogance, the MARA we see so much in the business and political elite and others which seems so prominent today.
as individuals, in embracing and opening up the power within are we thus able to affect, to change the power without. A thirteenth century monk said it well:
WHEN THE BODY BENDS, THE SHADOW MUST FOLLOW

Peace to all

I think the big shift started when the idea that the sole mandate for business was to return profits to shareholders. It was in Milton Friedman's 1962 book, but it really started to take hold in the 70s. I think it also has to do with the size of the businesses today too. Many small business still care about their employees, vendors, communities, customers. But if you want to compete with big companies its all about maximizing returns for the shareholders.

But this is a bit of a tangent away from the thread topic. Most of the reasonable concerns I've heard raised about the struggles of men and boys today has little to do explicitly with not having the provider role. I think to the more traditional men I know and some of them make less than their wives and don't seem to care one bit.