The Lost Path to Manhood
Why boys don't just become men. Why every society must define manhood.
We talk a lot about masculinity and manhood. But what exactly do these mean? How are they defined? Should they be defined?
These questions persist for good reason. Manhood isn’t automatic. It’s not like eye color, or height, or the process of growing taller. Left to themselves, boys don’t become men—they become man-children, wandering without purpose and ruled by their appetites.
That’s why every successful society in history has had to define what it means to be a man and create a path for boys to walk. Manhood is a construct in the best sense—it only exists when a culture names it, defines it, and calls boys up into it. That’s how you get men who are admirable, capable, and worthy of respect.
As Rob K. Henderson puts it:
“Mature masculinity is artificially induced through culture. Mature men do not naturally emerge like butterflies from boyish cocoons. Rather, they must be carefully encouraged, nurtured, counseled, and prodded into taking the actions necessary to achieve mature manhood…
…manhood exists to push against the default setting: self-indulgence and avoidance of responsibility.”
For women, the path is less fragile because biology itself demands certain hardships that create undeniable thresholds, cultivate character, and demand responsibility for themselves and others. Across cultures, these natural trials have usually been accompanied by mentoring, rituals, and communal support that guide girls into womanhood. That doesn’t mean womanhood is effortless, but it does mean the process of proving oneself a woman is less at risk of being bypassed. A girl cannot escape the realities of womanhood.
A boy, however, can. He can grow taller, stronger, even father children without ever being recognized as—or acting like—a man. As Henderson writes:
“Boys have to be encouraged—sometimes actually forced—by social sanctions to undertake efforts toward a culturally defined manhood, which by themselves they might not do.”
Without initiation or standards, boys default to indulgence and aimlessness. And when societies allow that, both men and their communities suffer.
For a number of reasons, our own society has largely abandoned the task of providing boys this essential path. And we are now seeing the consequences.
Where We Are Now
Today’s boys have inherited a world seemingly intent on keeping them boys forever. Their natural drives are hacked by supernormal temptations.
Rather than the call to be capable of protecting themselves and others, they are given video games.
Rather than the call to hunt and provide, they are handed consumer goods and an endless invitation to live in their parents basements.
And rather than the challenge of proving themselves a worthy suitor, they are given porn.
Every natural impulse that once pushed boys toward maturity is now hijacked by industries selling substitutes. And while the marketplace keeps them distracted, the home and school too often keep them soft. Doting mothers baby them well into adolescence. Schools—steeped in a culture that prizes comfort, compliance, and therapeutic self-expression—often infantilize boys while stripping away the challenge, discipline, and sense of possibility that once called them into manhood.
The result is a lost generation: fearful of their incapability, ashamed of their smallness, and fooled into worshiping comfort.
When “You Do You” Goes too Far
Layered on top of all this is the modern belief that everyone should “define their own path” and “make their own meaning,” and that all value systems are equally valid. That might sound liberating, but it’s a dead end for boys and society.
As Jonathan Haidt warned in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, this culture of radical individualism, which became popular after World War II, strips away the common paths and shared values that once anchored young people and gave them the capacity to care about more than themselves:
“... it cut children off from the soil of tradition, history, and religion that nourished older conceptions of virtue…. Asking children to grow virtues… looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking them each to invent their own language. Even if they could do it, the resulting isolation would be crippling.”
The triumph of egalitarian “value-neutrality” has been disastrous for boys. Adolescent boys don’t need to invent their own morality from scratch. They don’t need endless freedom to “define themselves.” They need to see a clear, demanding, and honorable path—a path to becoming men worth admiring.
They need and want to be called into something greater. The philosopher Matthew Crawford makes this case well in a recent article:
A lot of young men seem to be stuck on their couches in a stupor of screens, unable to launch a life. One could point to any number of contributing factors… Surely one of them is that the basic engine of male aspiration—competition—has fallen under suspicion in our egalitarian moral landscape.
What your better self might be capable of is something you have to discover. The ascent is set in motion by watching other people and feeling the sting of rank. I want to be like that person, not those lame and self-satisfied people, whom I suspect I more closely resemble. Such emulation is what gets you off the couch. Our taste for effort, directed to those excellences that are arduous to achieve, requires a keen sense of the vertical dimension. It just seems to be the case that this dimension comes alive for us through other people. We compare ourselves to them, and want to be counted among those who shine.
Every boy wants to become a man worth admiring. Even before adolescence, they imagine themselves as heroes. By around age 10, status and respect dominate their minds.
That’s not conditioning. That’s nature.
The problem is, we’ve stopped giving them a route to achieve it. Instead, we tell them to dream up their own value system, their own identity, their own path. That’s not freedom—it’s abandonment.
We can’t outsource this. If our society won’t define and develop men, then it falls on us: fathers, coaches, mentors, pastors, teachers, cool uncles, and leaders of all stripes.
Because without a path, boys don’t become men. And without men worth admiring, families and communities crumble.
It’s time to stop pretending manhood will just “happen.” It never has.
Raising Men
In my years in education, I’ve seen this up close. Boys aren’t lacking potential—they are lacking a path. What they need isn’t more comfort and understanding, but higher expectations. They need challenge, discipline, and mentors who would call them into something greater.
That conviction led me to create a small men’s group. We pushed ourselves physically, wrestled with big ideas, and marked thresholds of growth with real rites of passage. It was invitation-only, and it had teeth. To this day, I believe it was the most important work of my career.
Raising Men is the next step. It exists to answer the question our culture has stopped asking: What does it take to become a man worth admiring?
It’s about restoring the path—through fitness, discipline, and character. It’s about fathers, coaches, and mentors reclaiming their role. And it’s about giving boys what every society has always given them: a clear, demanding, honorable standard to rise to.
What Most “Mentorship” Gets Wrong
Too often, even good men get this wrong. They think mentorship is just hanging out, being nice, and taking young people to do entertaining things. That’s nice, but it isn’t what is most important—it does not fill the void. Without clear standards, without the courage to draw hard lines and to say this is what it takes, we aren’t mentoring—just hanging.
The path to manhood can’t be vague. It comes with expectations, discipline, and defined milestones. Boys don’t need more consumption; they need standards that call them upward and men who can show them the way.
That’s what Raising Men is about. It’s about helping fathers, coaches, and mentors reclaim the seriousness of their role—and refusing to shrug off the responsibility of shaping boys into men worth admiring.
This isn’t about fake macho posturing, nor about being harsh or rigid for its own sake. There should be plenty of fun and laughter along the way. But beneath it all is a serious core—a purpose that drives everything: to build strong, disciplined, virtuous young men. And the way we do that is through challenge, character, and community—at home, in schools, in sports, and anywhere men are being made.
If you would like the 10 Rules for Every Young Man and the full Mentor Guide—with gateway actions, discussion questions, and the Raising Men Code—you can grab it here:
👉 Download the 10 Rules for Every Young Man (PDF)
In my last post I also shared the 10 Rules for Every Young Man Poster. If you’re a paid subscriber and would like these rules in a different color scheme, for your sports team, school, etc., please just respond to this email.
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Thank you for reading and sharing with any kindred spirits!
Carry the fire!
Shane
Thanks for this Shane!!!