Ben Tate on why being of service isn't selfless it's survival.
"By having that support and knowing that I'm a phone call away or a text away, it's like a spiritual armor. Knowing that I can just pick up the phone anytime, send a text when I'm struggling, or just call someone and see how they're going. It helps me navigate the dark."
Spiritual armor. That's not a phrase you expect from the guy behind one of TikTok's most joyful accounts a man whose entire feed is sunshine, costumes, and a little girl's laugh. But that's exactly the point. The joy you see in @benandzara is not the absence of darkness. It's what happens when a man builds a fortress of human connection around himself and his family, brick by brick, phone call by phone call, over more than a decade of intentional work.
And it turns out, that armor protects everyone inside it.
What "being of service" actually means.
Ben has a couple of older mentors he calls family. Men who've been in his corner through 12 years of sobriety, through career highs and personal lows, through the chaos of raising kids and navigating the strange world of viral fame. What he's watched these men do consistently, quietly, without fanfare is be available.
"They've shown me that being available to be of service to others has helped them function with grace and integrity in all areas of their life," Ben said.
This wasn't lost on him. It became a governing philosophy. If things are going well with the @benandzara brand, with social media, with career that's great. But if it's just me, me, me, something stagnates. "I feel like it will stunt me," Ben said. "The more I give out to the universe and I'm available to my fellow man or woman in a loving way, the more everything else is easier. I'm freer."
This is what COYT has understood from the beginning: checking in on your teammates is not charity. It's not martyrdom. It's not even purely altruistic. It's one of the most effective tools for your own mental health and wellbeing, because the moment you reach outside yourself, you step out of the spiral.
When your problems feel like the biggest problems in the world.
Ben is honest about the days when it isn't easy. There are moments when his own problems feel enormous, and the last thing he wants to do is pick up the phone to check on someone else. But a good friend gave him a piece of advice he's carried ever since: when you're really struggling, call someone you know is struggling — and ask how they are.
"Most of the time when I do that," Ben said, "I get off myself."
That's the mechanism. Not toxic positivity. Not bypassing your own pain. Just redirecting attention outward long enough to break the loop and discovering that connection itself is the relief you were looking for.
Eric Robert put it another way during their conversation: "Sometimes I don't feel like working out, but I need it. We start to feel better, and then we stop taking the medicine that actually got us to feel better."
Consistency is the medicine. The daily check-ins. The habit of reaching. Even on the days it feels unnecessary, especially on those days.
What this does for everyone around you.
Ben's wife knows that calls and check-ins are part of the deal. His kids have grown up watching their dad invest in people. His brother, sister, and mother now get weekly calls because he's seen firsthand what that kind of consistent showing-up does for relationships, and carried it home.
"I check in on my sister, my brother, my mom which I didn't always do. And now I can make sure that's a weekly thing, because I've seen how important it is for friendships that aren't on my bloodline. What it's done for my relationships within my family is pretty amazing."
The ripple effect is real. When you build a culture of checking in whether it's in your friend group, your workplace, your locker room, or your family, you don't just protect one person. You create an environment where it's normal to ask how someone is actually doing. Where the answer isn't always "fine." Where the crack in the voice is allowed to show.
Eric Robert described it this way: "When people that aren't obligated to check on you, check on you, you don't have to love me, but you choose to that's when it's impactful. That's when it's really real."
You are the armor for someone else.
Here's what COYT wants you to sit with today: somewhere in your network is a person who doesn't have a support system. Who feels like a burden. Who is sitting with something they haven't said out loud yet because no one has made it feel safe to say.
Your phone call is their armor.
You don't need the right words. You don't need to fix anything. You just need to say: "I was thinking about you. How are you actually doing?"
And if you're the one who needs someone to call right now — reach out. To a friend, a mentor, a teammate. Or to us at COYT. Because a problem shared is a problem halved, and you were never supposed to carry this alone.
"They freely gave it to me and loved me back to life," Ben said of the men who showed up for him. "And if I can do that to people on a daily basis what a gift."
What a gift, indeed.
Check on your teammates. Visit checkonyourteammates.org.