Transformative Experiences
A powerful experience will often do more to change a young man's values than any workbook. So what experiences should we intentionally prompt?
Character formation is usually conceived as an intellectual pursuit. You read the right things, listen to the right messages, reflect, mentally rehearse, and expect change to follow. Thoughts are supposed to change your feelings and behaviors. But, we should look to work the process in reverse, as well. The right actions are even more effective at changing our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
“These waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues.” –Edmund Burke
“Reed’s car keeps stalling out,” my wife informs me as I come in from work. “It will start after a jump, but then dies mid-drive. We left it parked in the Starbucks off 157. It’s less than a mile from a Pep Boys, but I was afraid if he tried to drive there, it would die on 157 and he’d be stuck. Will you take him out there to get it?”
Reed is my brother-in-law. Fast forward thirty-minutes. My wife’s fears prove warranted. Reed and I are in the middle of 157 pushing a 2008 Honda Accord, while three lanes of northbound travel converge into two, furiously passing us on the right.
Standing in the middle of rush-hour traffic, you can’t help but feel exposed. Driving is usually more like a video game. Rain bounces away. Dust and bugs are evaporated imperceptibly. There is no real sense of the speed you’re travelling; no bite from the external temperature; no connection to the terrain, or the violence of the cars passing by—you are completely insulated often to the point of becoming mindless. But that veneer of security is ripped away as soon as your feet hit the pavement. Suddenly, there is a keen awareness that contact with any one of these two-ton beasts would be your end. Senses are heightened. The mind completely present and adaptable—unconcerned with the past and future. It is go time.
Here in the eye of the storm, it suddenly dawns on me that I am smiling euphorically. To passersby I must appear unhinged, but I feel downright giddy. Our mission is clear. Pep boys stands about 600 meters up a mild incline. In 500 meters we can veer into the safety of a left turn lane before crossing three lanes of traffic to arrive at our destination.
A man in his mid-30’s runs across the street to join. He is instantly my brother. All the normal pleasantries are somehow hilarious transposed against our current challenge. “Oh you’re in consumer finance. I bet that’s interesting.” We quickly find ourselves joking and laughing despite the lactic burn that fills our legs.
The three of us now push as one, never considering fatigue or self-pity. As we draw nearer our excitement mixes with anxiety. How the hell are we going to make this left turn against the flow of three lanes? No one says anything about it, however. Not until a slight opening emerges. “That’s as good as its gonna look! Push!” We all dig in and sprint against the vehicle with surprising effectiveness. The car clears all traffic as we pull into Pep Boys with time to spare.
Peak Experiences
“These (peak experiences) are moments in which you are lifted out of the daily grind and you sense that there is something larger and more sublime in life that you have been missing…. These moments can come from exerting yourself past what you thought were your limits. They can come from overcoming great obstacles…. You want to deliberately go in search of such moments. Stimulate them if you can. They have the effect… of altering your attitude for good. They expand what you think about your possibilities and about life itself, and the memory is something you will always return to for extreme inspiration.” –Robert Greene
Experiences like these are far too rare in our convenient, safe world. Our large, highly-developed infrastructures preclude the need for rising to any occasion or banding together to get a job done. We’re conditioned to expect the government or AAA to step in and solve each problem. Occupations compartmentalize. Communities isolate. We drive on stressed, busy, and engulfed in noise that we hardly care about.
Then on rare occasions there is a great storm. Trees fall. We come out of our houses, talk to our neighbors and connect through shared experience and a common mission. As Sebastian Junger shows in his amazing book Tribe, people often look back on disasters—from the nightly bombings of the Battle of Britain to the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina—with a strange fondness. They remember those moments as times of connection and meaning. “Before,” they realize, “I wasn’t fully alive.”
I don’t wish for war or disaster. But I do wish for more occasions that force us to rise. Adversity calls something out of us that comfort never will. Just as I want my children to face trials—to skin knees, to struggle, to earn confidence—I wish the same for every adult who’s forgotten the thrill of doing something hard and real.
Our good is very good—low infant mortality, abundant food, infinite information. But it’s also lulling. Depression, anxiety, obesity, and addiction are now the natural byproducts of a life too safe and too insulated. We’ve traded friction for emptiness.
While there is great joy to be found in simple daily rhythms and inner calm, we require intermittent strife and time outside our comfort zone in order to grow and be fulfilled. Even more, there is a large difference between a sense of calm which only follows true confidence and the far more common apathetic, mindless malaise that is usually accompanied by a hidden anxiety.
Lost in the Finite and Lost in the Infinite.
“The disease of our times is that we live on the surface. We’re like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep.” – Steven Pressfield
The challenges of modernity find their origins in the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Western society began to question all its traditional institutions and the structure of society changed radically. Populations exploded, transportation quickened, people moved to cities, and life took on a frenetic pace. All of a sudden our world offered boundless possible beliefs and a seemingly infinite number of career options. The world, today, has only moved further in this direction. Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher found that most people responded to this immense freedom by becoming both lost in the infinite and lost in the finite.
To be lost in the infinite is to be paralyzed by the abundance of options. For most of human history, there weren’t options. You hunted, gathered and helped the tribe survive. More recently, you took on the family farm after your father died, or married a farmer and raised children. Today you could be anything—a doctor, lawyer, real-estate agent, salesman, teacher, engineer, entrepreneur, or any of a billion other options, all of which come with their own pros and cons. You can move anywhere, adopt any religion, love anyone, say anything, and, generally, live any way you want.
The cruel twist to all this freedom is that the more choices we have, the more irrational those decisions become and the more unsatisfied we are with each decision. Each choice is subject to far greater buyer’s remorse as we remember the upside of all those other options we could have selected. Most importantly, as psychologist, Barry Schwartz, details in his book, The Paradox of Choice, we are far less likely to make any decision. Overwhelmed by the number of choices we spin our wheels in infinite analysis. This is what it means to be lost in the infinite. Picture the 22-year-old college grad who moves back home and spends his days scrolling through social media, playing video games, defining every disadvantage, critiquing everyone, and waxing prolific about things he might someday do.
It’s far easier to lose ourselves in voyeurism and point out where everyone else is wrong than to take any action. Action invites failure, pain, critique, and all those antecedents of growth and purpose. Most today, employed or otherwise, find themselves frequently lost in the infinite—pointing out the flaws in other people’s efforts and everywhere society falls short of utopia, all the while avoiding life in favor of mindless distractions. The masses are hypnotized by social media’s infinite scroll of self-promotion and outrage. Which brings me to the finite.
To be lost in the finite is to be lost in the “standard model”—in society’s norms as we know them. It is the promise of happiness and fulfillment if you just follow the expected and “normal” path through Western life.
You know… get good grades, go to college, study a practical subject, get a job, buy nice things, get married, buy bigger, nicer things, have kids, overprovide for and overprotect those kids while indoctrinating them in this standard model, retire, spoil your kids’ kids, die. That’s the macro picture. The micro looks more like this:
Wake, work, TV, bed.
Wake, work, TV, bed.
Wake, work, TV, bed.
Sprinkle in some scrolling, snacking, and commuter stress, and you have the modern routine.
None of these things are bad in themselves. In fact, marriage, family, and meaningful work are some of life’s greatest gifts. But when pursued unthinkingly—under the guiding values of comfort, convenience, and consumption—they produce what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.”
The Zen proverb puts it well:
“Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.”
It’s not the actions that change, but the spirit behind them.
To escape both the paralysis of the infinite and the complacency of the finite, we must act—deliberately and differently. We must reject the standard model’s shallow values and cultivate a deeper hierarchy of purpose, guided by meaning rather than ease.
How Real Change Happens
Values are the operating system that determines most of our decisions. They are a preference hierarchy that grows more sophisticated as we mature. As a two-year-old, my son got into everything. He sought to experience the world so he could determine preferences—ice cream tastes better than broccoli.
As kids mature they become capable of valuing more than just immediate gratification. Teenagers tend to value peer feedback over parental advice. Adulthood is about developing complex values—everyone wants me to go to the bar, but I’d prefer to feel decent for my morning workout and I want to be productive tomorrow at work.
The most common path to rewiring our values—the operating system that determines most of our decisions—is to:
identify the characteristics of good and bad values,
reflect on your past actions and the values they indicate,
and then define new values and the actions they necessitate. It’s a useful process that I recommend for everyone.
Still, all that work tends to be very wordy and abstract. Values have trouble taking root without a lot of reflection. There tends to be a large gap between our logical mind’s detached musings and the reality of daily living where we are governed far more by emotion. Values are not tangible, yet their outcomes are. Thus, a more effective avenue for re-coding values is to start at the endpoint—action.
Put another way, self-development is usually conceived as an intellectual pursuit. You read the right things, listen to the right messages, reflect, mentally rehearse, and expect change to follow. Thoughts are supposed to change feelings and actions. But, we should look to work the process in reverse, as well. The right actions are even more effective at changing our feelings and thoughts. A powerful experience will often do more to change values than any workbook.
We’ve all known someone who was hopelessly immature and destined to go nowhere. Life was a party and he seemed to only care about seeking more pleasure and debauchery. And then you bump into him five years later and, as if by magic, he is an inspiration. He has cleaned up, quit smoking, and now heads a unit that fights wild fires. “What happened?” you ask. “On a whim, I joined the fire department.” I was living at home and I figured it was a way to hang out with cool guys and get my parents off my back.” The rest is history.
His experience triggered a chain reaction of unconscious value transformations that changed every pattern in his life. Similarly, the video-game junkie, gone Marine may have heard the words discipline, duty, and resiliency before, but they didn’t take tangible form until boot camp. He now lives according to a clearly defined code, but only because of the physical exhaustion, the meticulous inspections, the arduous punishments, and the brotherhood these fostered.
Talk is cheap. It’s easy to intellectually conclude that X is a better value than Y—health over immediate gratification; commitment over promiscuity; learning over mindless consumption.
But emotions usually drive our actions and they don’t speak in words. Emotion is literally a physical manifestation. Each has its own sensations. Emotion speaks in feelings. It listens to action and changes through experience. So, the question is, what actions drive the development of more fulfilling values? Now we’re getting somewhere.
Truth Through Trial
“Tao (the way) that can be spoken of is not the constant Tao.” –Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Reading, studying, and self-education are essential for growth, but they’re not enough. It’s good to play with ideas and cultivate the mind—but there’s far more to truth than theory.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the 20th-century British philosopher, argued that objective truth exists, yet language is utterly inadequate for revealing it. Asking someone to describe love, flow, or beauty, he said, is like asking them to build a house with a bottle of Windex. Or as Philosophize This! host Stephen West put it, “To Wittgenstein, asking ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is like asking, ‘How much red paint would it take to be funnier than sound waves?’” The question itself betrays confusion about the limits of language.
Truth feels paradoxical because life is endlessly complex. We don’t arrive at truth by theorizing about it, but by acting—by confronting reality directly. To be lost in the infinite is to get trapped in the maze of linguistic possibility, forever chasing the illusion of a perfectly articulated ideal. Without a clear path, it’s safer to critique than to create. And so we live in a world of commentators, too afraid to step into the arena.
Modern life makes it easy to avoid discomfort. Every friction has been engineered away, every hardship outsourced. But these conditions leave us ill-equipped to live meaningfully. You can’t know who you are—or become someone worth knowing—until you’ve faced real challenge.
Amid our unprecedented convenience and constant stimulation, we need to get out of the car and reengage with the rawness of life. Only by entering that vulnerable, chaotic space do we recover a sense of depth and color. This isn’t just philosophy—it’s anthropology. Across history, every enduring culture has created rituals and traditions to evoke these universal human experiences: the ordeals that lodge values, reveal truth, and awaken the self in ways no words ever could.
Onwards toward the Rite of Passage
Self-discovery is an iterative process. Action tends to reveal and spur greater inspiration. Thus, societies have always featured universal experiences central to growth and maturation at all ages.
The universal experiences that, until recently, have been shared across all peoples, religions, and tribes include:
Fasting
Fighting/Bootcamp/Team Sports Training
Finding Food
Long Foot-driven Treks/Pilgrimages
Frequent and extended time in nature
Building/creating
Mastering a craft/art
Mission work/charity
Meditation
Gratitude or prayer
Play
Fellowship
These exercises have been ritualized and practiced in most human societies. After years of training, elements were combined into a Rite of Passage. This deeply challenging experience would demonstrate an individual’s maturation into a capable, honorable, and self-actualized member. As such, successful completion warranted both the perks and expectations of full manhood. This ensured both the survival of the tribe and the fulfillment of the individual.
As industrialized societies grew more stable and affluent, it became possible for civilizations to operate without every member becoming brave, virtuous, and useful. Consequently, cultures have slowly moved away from these expectations. Yet, in doing so they are neglecting the essentiality of these developmental experiences for the individual’s fulfillment.
This is what religions and moral philosophies have always known:
We are all in need of self-discovery and self-mastery, and this only comes through practice.
The modern world works hard to eliminate hardship. But without real trials, we drift—comfortable, safe, and numb. Every boy, every man, needs moments that pull him into the arena. With Raising Men, my mission will be to help clarify that route and empower mentors to create more transformative experiences—the rites that make men worth admiring.
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Thank you for reading and sharing!
Carry the fire!
Shane