Lessons/Reflections from my 20’s [Day 17]

Modern rite of passage for young people.

We hear about this increasingly nowadays; how young men are struggling to come to terms with the new reality. This fast-changing world is hard for a lot of people to figure out and there’s certainly been a few casualties on the way.

I’ve been aware of this and charting its development as I charted my own development and I’ll talk about the rite of passage for young men. I will be talking about this specifically for millennial men, but broadly speaking I think this holds some water across the ages.

A theme I have been talking about for many of the posts of my reflections are the themes of how high transparency of what others are doing shapes us, living in hyper competitive environment and lack of awareness.

This trifecta appears to me to be having a moving effect on our young men. If we can split down the three ages of man crudely:

Child — You are financially and emotionally dependent on your parents
Young adult — You are somewhat financially and emotionally dependent on your parents
Mature adult — You are mostly self-sufficient and contribute to society

Now using the three stages of development I’ve noted, what we’ve seen over the years is the bleeding of one development stage into where its subsequent development stage used lie.

Eg: Historically, you left home at 18 to fend for yourself. You took out a student loan and got on with it. You were married at 21 and had a property and children by 25.

This was how it worked, life was a lot less volatile and you got on with it.

Nowadays it’s not quite working like that. Now, as we enter the era of globalism there are quite a few stark realities coming to light, just turning up isn’t going to be enough. With the ease of which capital can move around the world, we see a global need for flexibility and an uncompromisingly high standard of delivery of service/product that is less supportive of ‘taking what its gets’ from the local talent pool.

You have to train in university much longer, for example nearly all of my literature class went onto further education straight after their primary degree.

While the education period has expanded, so has the length of time that people are wholly dependent on their parents for support, therefore we see the childhood period extending even to the mid-twenties!

What we are then observing is that when the children are ready to make the transition they are in a very tenuous position.

The Boomers (our parents) speak about how brittle we are, and hearken back to a time where it was all quite straightforward. Not easy by any means, but straightforward.

On some levels, they have a point, there is an extended period of time that we are dependent on our parents now, but an element of them fail to appreciate the pressures of the intervention of social media and the newly hyper competitive landscape, where the absolute level of reward have increased in a winner takes all death match, the chance to be thrown on the scrap heap has increased exponentially ( look at the lost generation in Spain and Italy right now).

All of this uncertainty, makes it more challenging to complete our rite of passage. All this uncertainty makes it hard to have a uniform time when everyone gets their shit together and moves on together in lockstep. It is very fluid and protracted and lacking in answers as to when it will happen.

The rite of passage from child to adult is all about becoming more useful until you reach a time when you can start helping others yourself.

Now for the actual experience of the rite of passage, it can harrow, and endlessly painful. If you’ve been paying attention, men are taking it particularly badly, with the level of suicide among men 18–24 being the most elevated of any age group. This has been true in Ireland for at least the last 20 years too, Ireland had Europe’s 2nd highest levels of suicide in young men for many years.

I posit that the uncertainty in our rite of passage is certainly a contributing factor.

Many young people do not understand privacy. They look at their parents as dinosaurs who are out of touch. When you talk about privacy you hear authoritarian surveillance tropes such as “If you don’t have anything to hide what are you worried about?”

What is misunderstood however about privacy is that it is important for two HUGE reasons.

Privacy enables us to ask questions that may be controversial without the fear of having our heads shot off. It enables us to have enough light to get rid of bad ideas. This is crucial in our development, for immature, ill-conceived ideas to die off.

Most importantly, privacy gives us the space to develop ourselves as a human being.

It is well stated in the Free-man’s Perspective, a journal on liberty

“To develop ourselves healthfully, we must develop ourselves by ourselves, without outside pressures.

The less we are able to choose freely, the less we are really ourselves, and the more we become what other people want us to be.

The positive value of privacy is that it stands between us and manipulative outside forces.

Privacy allows us to grow according to our own natures, not according to the demands of a collective.

Privacy is a tool for becoming what we authentically are.”

The child today has given up all of their privacy and then struggles so much to find their identity and it can lead to anger, depression, anxiety and suicide.

During this time, we must maintain some perspective. This is the hardest time of a young person up to age thirty and sadly, a lot of people don’t make it out to maturity, to adulthood by thirty.

Your parents may not fully appreciate your case specific struggles, but they get the idea on a high level, they’ve gone through their own rite of passage.

My message to you is to hold on.

Hold on, hold on and hold on some more.

You WILL get through it.

You WILL burn in the fire of not knowing what you’re doing here

You WILL squirm at the fact that you are not in fact very useful…. YET

And….

You WILL make it.

As someone who has crossed the chasm from child to full-fledged adulthood, it is time to extend a helping hand to you and that’s why I write this.

And I promise you, when you too get to the other side, you will be so grateful for the journey and your immense growing pains will subside into the past.