On the Essentiality of Rites of Passage
How to find or create modern day rites of passage. And a look at creating the conditions for people to feel they "matter."
Hello Bar-Setters!
Last week I shared the age by age Ladder to Adulthood that Dr. Jonathan Haidt proposed in his recent book, The Anxious Generation.
This ladder is a brilliant start, but I would highly recommend filling out the ladder to adulthood more fully. You can create more impact by adding some big moments, like earned gifts or a trip you take when your kid hits a certain milestone, and a more intentional adult development program.
An intentional adult development program…
Thats a bit vague and overwhelming. But it used to be something that the adults of each society handed down to their children. Throughout time, each village has been very intentional about passing on a cultural heritage and creating a certain kind of person. This was the obvious point of any upbringing. And this adulthood training program always culminated in a rite of passage.
Rites of Passage
I’m a big proponent of rites of passage. (See my recent podcast interview: Rediscovering Rites of Passage)
Some of the core tenets of my youth development philosophy are that:
Communities should be intentionally trying to lead our young people to become a certain kind of person.
We must make adulthood desirable.
We must clarify the expectations we have of young people and clarify that we expect them to become self-dependent, impressive adults.
Experience often teaches lessons that can’t be learned any other way. Our kids need a succession of increasingly hard challenges.
The barbarian virtues matter!
Over the last few decades we’ve prioritized safety and feeling good over toughness, camaraderie, physical vitality, personal agency, and many other important values.
Our obsessive attempts to remove any chance of physical pain or injury has facilitated the proliferation of far worse pains. This point is captured well in this interview with Jon Tyson, author of The Intentional Father:
When you look at some of the other rites of passage that other cultures have… some of them are harrowing… we would probably take kids away from parents who did some of these ancient rites of passage. It can sound kind of barbaric.
But when you look at the levels of anxiety with our young people today… our lack of initiation, at scale, is more damaging than the initiation cultures, no matter how intense they were in other societies.
We do far worse damage by removing painful initiation rites than through the physical damage these rites incur.
But we don’t have to make rites of passage barbaric. The choice isn’t either we subject young adults to torturous pains, or miss out on all the benefits of a rite of passage. We can create a rite of passage with all the benefits, but without crossing the line into savagery.
Still, some physical pain, risk, and hardship is necessary and helpful. These are indispensable tools for creating deeper bonds and better people. This is why sports can be so meaningful for many people. There are stakes. There is painful training. There is discipline. And there is some exposure to injury and physical self-sacrifice.
I’ve spoken before about the need for a “moral equivalent of war.” Many men have come to me to say that football served that role for them. That was my experience as well, but it can come from other places. The important thing is not to water these experiences down and remove the hardship, standards, and team-mindedness that make such experiences so profound.
We adults must insist upon certain virtues for the sake of our kids. Our kids may complain in the moment, but these standards are what creates the space for them to really connect and matter to each other.
Mattering
Our communities are struggling to adapt to a world that no longer depends upon each of us for its survival. As I wrote in my book:
Throughout human history the pursuit of competency has been essential to human survival and the survival of our communities. Civilizations had to develop a social apparatus that pulled people to a baseline level of competency or they would not last. Usefulness was a requirement of life and, consequently, humans evolved a deep yearning to be useful. But modernity, with its attention-hacking algorithms, automated processes, and rampant safetyism seems to be specifically designed to stamp out our basic inclinations for self-expansion. Advanced technology makes it possible for society to “progress” even while a majority of individuals never reach a baseline competency. People can now go their whole lives without being useful except as scrollers, eaters, and buyers. But this need not be the case.
When we talk about progress, we tend to think in terms of increasing technological capability. Progress is the development of technology like map apps and driverless cars that eliminate the need for human competency. This honors one or both of the chief values of modernity—safety and convenience—but runs contrary to the goal of human flourishing. We need a new definition of progress.
Comfort and abundance are our curse, making it difficult for each of us to meet our most vital human needs: authenticity, competency, and connection.
For a while, now, “belonging” has been a buzz word in schools and youth development circles. Everyone has been trying to create a space where everyone belongs. But they usually attempt to accomplish this in phony ways, which diminish the ties that really bond. They focus on moral relativism and accepting everyone, all the while forgetting it is standards and mutually held values that bond us to people.
More recently, another word has come to replace belonging: mattering.
This is what we actually need—to matter to the people around us. And to matter, we have to bring value. We have to become a certain kind of person. Real authentic connection and competency are cultivated through trials and hardship. My best advice is to seek and create these environments for your children.
For years, I talked about these ideas with my high school men’s group. They insisted upon having their own rite of passage. You can read about that here:
Thank you for reading and sharing!
If you are digging this vein, I’d encourage you to check out this recent post:
Carry the fire!
Shane