Re-Wilding Our Boys into Men
Cannabis, screens, school, and the suffocation of the masculine soul
Oceans are such wise teachers. They immediately communicate reality - that you are small, that life is dangerous, wild, adventurous, exhilarating, peaceful and soothing, all at once. A few days in front of one has provided the opportunity to observe some truths about humanity - our soul, our purpose, our nature.
Specifically, boys and young men.
I’m not sure I believe in school for boys. Boys can be taught to read and do basic math without going to school. Everything else can be learned through curiosity and imitation and necessity and internal drive. Otherwise, their souls die.
Boys are meant for adventure. For doing crazy, dangerous $@%#. For potty jokes and testing the power of their arms and legs and endurance. For competing until they pass out. For running wild, as fast as they can, after a wave or a seagull or a bug. For playing games over and over and over again.
They are made to imitate men.
This is their education, for better or worse (choose wisely, women). Boys are built to watch and beg to try and do it themselves and participate. How to hook the bait, how to spool the fishing rod, how to shuffle the cards, how to stay standing on a moving boat.
They want to do it. They want to try. When they fail, they want to be shown how not to fail by a man (not a woman).
When they’re out of control, as they tend to be, they respond primarily to a man telling them so, honestly, sternly, sometimes a little too frankly for a woman’s taste.
This is the animal kingdom.
Young men are being killed by our culture and its norms.
My state, like many states, makes cannabis available everywhere in all ways and places. Not your granddaddy’s weed, at 15% THC. These are synthetically manufactured 85% THC oils and products, infused with endocrine-disrupting fragrances and flavors, burned directly into the lungs and, from there, changing the brains, spirits, and organs of our young men at a scale never seen in human history.
Their drive, their ambition, their adventurous souls are being snuffed out by these toxic levels of “sedative,” in the name of something “natural,” “plant-based” and “just like a beer” to help relax and deal with the pressures of modern life.
As young men, the boundless energy and curiosity, adventure and out-of-control-ness - so innocent and adorable at five or seven years old - are still in there, often manifesting as intense emotions, anxieties, hyperactivity, destructive tendencies.
These are now problems needing cures, control, suppression - they don’t serve them well in prison school or their mindless, entry-level jobs where they’re supposed to behave, sit still, conform and obey.
Minimum wage in hyperinflationary metropolitan areas makes it nearly impossible for a young man to get ahead, or even to pay today’s bills. Saving, investing, owning - those are so out of reach and imagination that he doesn’t even dream or plan for them.
And yet.
Young men can still emerge from the vaping, gaming, minimum-wage grinding basement of their lives into the sunshine of a coastline that offers an enticing challenge, wave after crashing wave.
Their desire to conquer and master nature, whether by paddleboard, fishing line, or fire pit, dribbles out hope that the man they’re meant to be has not been altogether suffocated.
Monosyllabic communications turn into complete sentences. Zombie visages can melt into smiles like a sunrise. Disinterest in others can turn into coaching, correcting, ribbing, connecting.
With no one else to engage with, he can turn to the little ones as playmates.
Will he go too far? Will he be too harsh? As he cajoles the scared little girl into the ocean, as he picks her up to bring her to his playground, he doesn’t force or coerce. She cries. He puts her down and lets her make her own choice.
The masculine dignity that is both powerful and kind is in there. It’s been in there, waiting for the rhythms and majesty of nature to blow away the cobwebs of the modern poisons on the soul of man.
I say to the parents out there: it is worth being totally different. It is worth being annoying and weird. It is worth protecting the influence of nature (outside of them and within them) on your sons.
Keep them away from fluorescent lit prisons run by adults who don’t love them, and populated by children you don’t want them imitating. This is not the way they should spend the majority of time that the sun is up.
Keep their bare feet on the ground, and their eyes squinted at the sun, their hair stringy from the rain, their fingernails dirty. Tell them stories around a fire, read them books born of adventure, teach them to use dangerous tools and do dangerous things. After a certain age, let their fathers and brothers and uncles and grandpas be their heroes and helpers and primary teachers of most stuff.
Humans are not built for gaggles of little boys to be caged behind a desk or sitting still in a circle, raising hands and repeating canned answers asked by a kind-faced woman who shares no history with them. Who wasn’t there at their birth or who doesn’t see through the dirt-smeared face to admire the heart of a lion that only comes out in private moments.
Manhood is scary as hell. It requires risk and failure and humiliation. Anyone sensible, if left to his own devices, will seek to avoid that hard stuff, or medicate the anxiety of it with escapist screens or psychoactive chemicals - drugs, booze, ultra-processed food. That is obviously much, much easier than becoming a man.
(Nota bene: A nagging woman criticizing all this as it happens in front of her doesn’t change the trajectory, it only intensifies his impulse to hide from his birthright.)
Put a bunch of “peers” facing the same terrors and pressures together and see new heights of slavery and destruction caused by the worst habits metastasizing, ritualizing into elaborate self-justification schemes, unchallenged by reality or wisdom.
Humans are not built for armies of teenaged boys and young men to be isolated with each other, building their subcultures of misunderstandings, misplaced values, and mind-numbing habits. They’re meant to run with the men, and the little boys, in the sun and the rain, and to build things, to learn things that are useful, to teach those things to the younger ones, with their muscles and minds engaged.
As they read and watch and learn, those who are destined to pursue more formal education will emerge. Most already reject “higher education” as neither high nor educational in the things that matter or that give them a reason to get out of bed.
Over time, imitation and experimentation become skills, initiation becomes apprenticeship, and play transforms into something that some might call work, but that he calls a purpose. That something - it makes him useful and interesting to a woman, and eventually indispensable to her and the little ones who start the cycle of wonder all over again.
That feeling of being useful and needed and admired - that is the jet fuel for the masculine soul.
Many of us women know this, but we don’t know how to draw it out from what seems like an already-crushed soul of a son, a brother, a husband, a father. All we have on offer seems to come out as judgment.
And so I offer this to my sisters: you control the family schedule.
Take them away from school and “jobs.” These prisons will wait, even if they say they won’t. Even if these places threaten bad things if you do it. They are the bad things.
Bring them to the sun. To the mountains. To the water. To the woods. It may take a few days or longer for them to emerge. Which will annoy you. Be patient.
Do things that require their help, their muscles, their hands. Ask them to take the little ones into nature for a few hours, as a favor to you. Let them make all the decisions about what that looks like. Do your nails while you bask in the sun or rock on a porch or gossip with your mom. Be happy.
You are the writer of their destiny. You are the maker of worlds. You are the mother of men.
great article - agreed. The experiences I had working with older men, including my a 15 year business partnership with my Dad, were the most critical professional experiences in my life.
Katy, this is sooooooo good. Your words are so well crafted and so meaningfully impactful. I’ll be honest, I cried a little. Too often they’ve been lost and forgotten. Thank you for remembering our boys.