Are Boys and Men No Longer Tested?

And If Not, Does This Mean the End of Men?

I recently listened to a fascinating conversation on Sam Harris’s Waking Up app between Sam and former war-correspondent Sebastian Junger. The topic of the conversation was meaning in life, how that is located, and how things have changed in the past 20-30 years for many boys and men.

In the past—hundreds and thousands of years ago—there were tests for boys and men, faceoffs with life through which boys and men had to struggle in order to be considered “men.” In Native American tribes this often included brutal experiences such as being left alone in the woods for many days or weeks as a boy, alone to fend for yourself, or else being beaten, clubbed, pierced, whipped. It was an endurance of physical pain; suffering. Often it involved a dangerous hunting expedition. It was the classic rite of passage.

In European culture, too, of course. Oftentimes this meant leaving home young, becoming financially independent, taking on tough responsibilities at a tender young age. Also, 150 years ago and before, say, before vaccines and many other basic preventatives which we now take for granted, most families had five, seven, ten kids or more because they knew that several or more would die, many in infanthood. And of course for a long time there were constant wars: The Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War, two world wars, Vietnam, etc. Work was generally of a physical nature and pushed you every single day. Life was often rough and challenging and people were consistently exhausted.

In the modern age this has all gone away.

Now the vast majority of people in the modern West work in air-conditioned settings staring at computer screens all day. Children rarely die. Preventable diseases don’t kill. Worse, you no longer even need to leave your home, really. Everything can be done online now: Ordering food to be delivered, communicating through social media, even work can now be done at home. Online dating can even make a human being arrive at your door (potentially) for casual sex.

Add to the above the fact that we live in the most industrialized, mechanized, wealthy nation on planet Earth in the year 2025—a result of that horrible thing called capitalism which the young ones constantly decry now while wallowing in their own navel-gazing narcissistic privilege—and you get to a place where, for sure, for the most part, boys and men have lost The Art of Being Tested.

Now, look. A note should be made here. This isn’t, of course, everyone. And it does, for sure, depend on class in many degrees. For example: If you’re a Black kid growing up in poverty in the inner city…that’s different. You’re definitely being tested, though admittedly in a more urban, futuristic, pampered way compared to 150 years ago. So I guess when I say “most people” I generally mean the middle and upper classes of all races.

Sebastian Junger grew up in a place like me: Mundane, dumb suburbia. The Class Womb. Safety. Privilege. Etc. (In suburban Massachusetts, for Junger, evidently.) For some reason, though, as a young boy he felt deeply that he needed to test himself in some way, to prove to himself that he was a “man,” whatever that precise word/definition meant to him back then. (Manhood, like the word racism, seems to have fragmented off into a billion directions at this point; no one really knows “for sure” what it means anymore, if anything.) And so he took off and found his own road, working as an arborist for a long time, cutting tree limbs down from high above hanging suspended with a chainsaw. (He was injured at one point.)

In the 1990s when war was happening in Bosnia he decided to fly there and “make himself” a war reporter. He did just that and this became his career. He thrived on danger, close calls, and chaos. Like most soldiers report during war, he felt an incredible unity and comradeship with the soldiers and his fellow reporters. Being shot at was terrifying yet also thrilling. Strangely enough. Junger said, it also seemed to give him a great, deep sense of life meaning. It was the fact of going beyond the ordinary into the extraordinary; shifting from the mundane to the compelling and thrilling, that gave him this new sense of meaning. (Soldiers in war often want to return to war after dealing with the boring day-to-day existence back home.)

Four years ago, while at home with his wife relaxing, Junger experienced a serious internal bleeding aneurism episode. He lost about a pint of blood every ten minutes. The hospital was an hours’ drive away. His wife took him. He was told he would probably not make it. They tried everything. He saw a vision of his dead father. He saw a black void. Somehow, he survived. And in that survival he once more found a sense of profound meaning. Life or death experiences can do that.

Junger discussed how after World War I and World War II people all came together. The explosive madness and violence brought people together. Ditto New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Ditto New York City after 9/11. The point is: Despite the horrible events which transpired in each of the cases mentioned, afterwards it brought people together; it transcended the normal, the mundane, the basic, the average and brought people to a deeper sense of themselves and each other as a collective human species. Aka: It offered meaning.

~

I grew up in a similar safe, boring environment as Junger, but decades after him. My childhood was just before helicopter parenting became A Thing. I was allowed to roam free with my friends. When we fell down and scraped our knees, we cried it off and kept playing. When we fought with each other, we figured it out on our own. At five a neighbor up the street put his father’s loaded 9mm handgun into my mouth and said he’d blow my brains out. He counted down from 10. At seven my friend’s older brother forced me to smoke my first cigarette.

Alcoholism struck which became a wave I rode for ten years, from 17-27.

And these were my Testing Years.

I barely escaped high school. I was arrested half a dozen times. I spent 16 hours once in the drunk tank. There were serious, multiple-roll car crashes I miraculously survived. Sex with any woman willing and literally never with a condom. Hopping moving freight trains; hitchhiking across America; being kidnapped in Mexico; fist fights in places like Philly and Santa Cruz in grayouts and blackouts; once actually jumping off a moving freight train backwards, landing an inch from the rails, the loud severe metal wheels crushing in their intensity; shooting up heroin with random street kids; spitting in a cop’s face and calling him a pig; driving 100 MPH on Highway 101 and passing people on the shoulder, still drunk; a million blackout driving sessions, sometimes coming into consciousness from a blackout realizing I was in fact driving, with a packed car and some 80s punk band blaring, all the windows down, back to Ojai from an LA show; etc.

In other words: I was tested. I found out who I was. I understood that I was a “man” in a very concrete sense. Yes, always I have been sensitive, even timid in some ways. But during The Drinking Years I wore a professional social-psychological mask which I needed for survival. The alcohol was Robin to my Batman. It widened an aperture in the space-time continuum and allowed me to Be Tough and Angry and Intense. I did things during that decade of drinking which I never could have done sober.

So for me, alcohol became my inner shaman; it was the poison which I gave myself in order to Do What Had to Be Done. To be tested. To show myself. To find meaning. And I found as much meaning after getting sober by seeing who and what I actually wasn’t. Often in life discovering who you aren’t is a potent way to find out who you actually are. The drunk me was not Me, really, but rather a powerful shadow side of my darker self. But it’s this self, this side that needed to be tested.

~

Kids today seem—generally speaking—so far away from that as to have clipped it permanently off from their lives. There seems to be no more ability or even need to be tested anymore. And I think as a result we’re losing something. With both Junger and myself: Since we grew up in privileged middle-class backgrounds we had to therefore set off on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. We had to set sail on the high seas and actually go looking for the test, the trouble, the truncated version of terror. Some are “lucky” enough—maybe; from one perspective—to be born into harder straights. Lucky because they are tested young and without their permission, which gives them a sort of psychological edge over the rest of us.

It seems Gen Z and people under 30 today are living in digitized bubbles of luxury so intense at this point that we’ve arrived at a sort of post-literate, post-testing, post-communication, almost post-human time. Testing is much rarer, less accessible. Young peoples’ lives are more isolated, more controlled, safer, less risky, more apt to be subdued, at least in terms of physical struggle. Sure, they have many more things to worry about: Social media, being pushed to think about college in fourth grade (how will you stand out?), the culture wars (mostly fantasy online), isolation, alienation, school shootings, politics gone mad, etc.

But most of these things can be “dealt with” digitally, facing a screen at home.

I think the thing we’ve lost, for boys and men, is the ability to test your physical limits, your psychological limitations, to push yourself deeply out of your comfort zone, to face death in some sort of meaningful way, to push to the outermost walls your resolve to fight and beat back The Inevitable. I think of men like Hemingway, Norman Mailer, authors like Mary Karr and Joan Didion, eras of collective struggle like the 1930s and the 1950s and the 1960s. We’ve moved away from those kinds of struggles. Too much wealth, too much privilege, too much ease and safety and enclosure. Everything is too online.

Maybe we need to bring back some of that angst, fear and terror. Face yourself in the mirror. Move into the center of your fear. Slap death around a little, see if it responds, see if it catches you in its jaws.

Or maybe stay safe and forget it.

Your call.