001 Culture Problem: the "Failure to Launch" guys

FTL (Failure to Launch)

Does culture sometimes fail us?

Is American culture somehow broken?

In one particular case, I think the answer’s “yes.”

The case in question: Failure to Launch.

FTL is a condition suffered by millions of young men. Guys get to the end of their adolescence and they freeze. They can see adulthood. They know people who live there. But it just feels like a world away, too far away for them.

FTL has been visible to the therapeutic community for some time and to those of us who happen to know of someone who is FTL. (And I reckon that’s probably all of us.)

But the issue remained obscure. Then quite suddenly it was front and center. Essays by Belkin, Edsall and Galloway (citations below) called attention to the issue. This mattered especially because it was the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Scott Galloway now weighing in.

This might mean we can hope for a national remedy. Though, frankly, I would have thought this issue was so troubling, so damaging of the national interest, we would have responded before this. (I have asked a couple of parties to fund a study and was gently told to “f!ck off out of here. We don’t care.” Seven million people is not a big enough problem for you?)

But let’s sketch out the cultural aspect of this problem.

Traditionally, cultures posited developmental categories. In the American case, these are, roughly, “babies,” “infants,” “children,” “teens,” “young adults,” “mature adults,” “really old people.” Roughly. (Just kidding about the last one.)

Culture then supplies an LTR (light transit rail). This transports people from one category to the next. Typically, this is accomplished by a rite of passage which is designed to detach someone from the old identity, shepherd them through the liminal moment in which they are no longer X and not yet Y, and deliver them to the new identity. Hey presto, a young male becomes a man. No FTL. Done and done.

So what happened?

For starters, we are a culture that is sometimes made uncomfortable by formality and ceremony. Yes, there are national rituals and some personal ones (weddings and school graduations) but we tend to do things unofficially. For young men, there are no vivid rituals. We tend to use available markers, getting your driver’s license, going off to college, and graduating from college. (Or in the case of Belushi as Bluto in Animal House, getting thrown out of college. “Five years of college down the drain.”)

So the ritual for young men has never been well formed or especially formative. Americans delight in showing how little they care about school graduations. Wearing no shoes or shirt is regarded as high wit in many schools. Not showing up is perfectly ok. Turning a “graduation” into an industrial conveyor belt, with kids shuffling obediently across the stage, to accept a degree from a university administrator who could not care less, this does not summon the majestic powers of ritual. This is “going through the motions.” Ritual is not motions. It’s meanings.

But that’s only the start of the our problems here.

The more serious problem is that we are a fiendishly inventive culture. That means we are changing the identity categories often. We are especially keen to change maleness as a category. We are really keen to change toxic masculinity, a central issue in a me-too era.

Most everything about our culture is open to revision. And we are changing so fast we need to initiate acts of invention…if only to respond to our acts of invention. This is exactly I think what Healy is talking when he says that culture is once ballast is now a source of our instability. Our culture is feverishly tearing at itself, and some people are paying a heavy price.

In the FTL case, this means kids as teens can feel a chorus of voices doubting many of their identity options. And it means as they stand on the verge of adolescence and look out at adulthood, things don’t get any clearer. This isn’t terra firm either. No wonder they feel lost. The ritual is broken. The categories are missing. They are stranded.

The right reaction in my opinion, is not, as so many observer seem inclined now to do, to decry the “decay of Western civilization” and the “forces of darkness” that threaten the “very fabric of American life!”

That we reinvent our categories is one of the good things about American life, one of the measures of our agility and adaptability. We can see what needs changing. We can summon the will to change. We can get on with changing necessary to solve problems like toxic masculinity.

What we are not so good at is attending to the casualties. It’s all very well for us to demolish categories, to cancel identities, but there are people who pay the price and this means that as we refashion our culture, we want to attend to the people who are especially dislocated by the changes we seek.

At the very least, this means we need to level with these guys. We need to say, “look this is what just happened to our culture and why. Here’s what it means to you as you aim for adulthood. Here are some of the strategies you can use. Here are some of your options now.”

We have effectively stripped these kids of their identities. We need to clarify the what and why. We have to equip them with the intellectual and practical tools they need to perform their own acts of self invention.

The real objective: restore their agency and powers of initiative. Let them respond to our feverish invention with inventions of their own. Rescue. Think of this as an act of generational rescue. Cause it is.

Articles cited:

WSJ: Douglas Belkin. 2021. A generation of American Men Give Up on College: I just feel lost. https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-education-men-women-enrollment-admissions-back-to-school-11630948233

NTY: Thomas B. Edsall. 2021. ‘It’s Become Increasingly Hard for Them to Feel Good About Themselves’, September 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/opinion/economy-education-women-men.html

Medium: Scott Galloway. 2021. Young American Men Are Facing a Crisis https://gen.medium.com/young-american-men-are-facing-a-crisis-69e7233bc93e