The Great Resignation

Young men and belonging.

The cult-classic Fight Club epitomizes how far young men will go to find something — in the nihilistic modern world — to belong to.

Young men are killing themselves. Young men are addicted to drugs. Young men are overrepresented in video game players and porn users. The rates of all these problematic behaviors have increased immensely in the last ten years. Jonathan Haidt, Zach Rausch, and Richard Reeves – all prolific figures in the field of social science – have compiled research and data highlighting these alarming trends. There are many outcome measures presented, data reported based on behavior or self-reports of behavior on a wide scale. To add to the data, I would like to offer some observations I gathered from working with young men on a smaller scale and in a distinctive environment: a juvenile correctional facility. I believe these observations can elucidate drivers of certain behaviors and what information these behaviors are conveying.

I’ll set the stage first: the campus of the facility appeared summer-camp-esque, to the untrained eye. The large, overhung fences topped with barbed wire might be a bit suspect, but otherwise the facility had all the fixings of “fun”: basketball courts outside each unit, a grass volleyball court, a sizeable field for soccer. Inside the units, the youth’s behavior was reminiscent of camp living, too: they spent most of their time oscillating between the stimulating activities of rough-housing and watching cable reruns of near-naked women performing their latest song. To be honest, through a good majority of my experience there I felt as though I was doing time with the youth. Limit setting and a focus on treatment were difficult, in part because of a staffing crisis and the fact that most youth lacked motivation to engage in rehabilitation.

My main job was supervision, and while doing so three patterns of behavior amongst the guys began to rise to prominence: horseplay, telling “war stories,” and engagement with screens.

 Obvious within the unit milieu was a distinctive polarity between activity and non-activity. The “play fighting” the guys would engage in, suggestive of a boxing or sparring match, was reminiscent of that which might appear in a contact sport these guys were barred from participating in. Playing video games or watching TV were as ubiquitous in the facility as they are in general; the appeal for the youth, though, appeared to be distraction or living briefly in a world where the guys had freedom to do what compelled them (several guys played the video game Grand Theft Auto who had – allegedly –  committed the crime of the same name).

It was the “war stories” that really interested me, though. Often the youth telling the story would have a group of peers surrounding him, the number dependent on how effective a story-teller he was, and listening intently. The content – hyperbolic in nature – would range from gang-related behavior, such as fights against rival gang members, to sexual encounters. These moments often involved the youth acting out some element of his story. 

Let’s dig deeper because these moments, presented as a pattern, represent something interesting about these young men and – I’d argue – young men in general. By observation one could easily tell that both the story-teller and listeners were captivated by the narrative; often the more harrowing, violent, or explicit the events within it, the more captivated the audience. As an observer being acquainted with the history of story-telling, these moments evoked images of our ancestors imparting myths to their tribes about dangerous encounters that tested the human spirit and resolve. The Odyssey and the Iliad, two of the longest surviving myths that we are able to read today, began as oral traditions that were sung for audiences before committed to written verse. 

The connection between the stories these guys were telling and the old stories is deep. The Odyssey and the Iliad were driving forces of Greek civilization; we read them today in classrooms and analyze them. There are important lessons within them and that knowledge informs our relationship to them. 

These “war stories,” the exchanging of embellished versions of these young mens’ lives and experiences, were their Odyssey. They certainly treated the stories with reverence; they would voluntarily sit and listen to their peer tell them. An observer could tell they sought these experiences out, they pursued opportunities to share these stories. These stories were symbols; experiences they offered each other that conveyed information about their strength and courage.

The stories also described initiations. They were rites that the youth passed through to access some essential quality of what it means to be a man. Within the context of a gang, in which many youth were affiliated, initiations would vary from enduring a beating to stabbing a rival gang member. Cruel and wanton violence was the norm in these experiences, yet they were prized nonetheless.

Initiations, similar to myths that were performed first before being recorded, are ancient behaviors. The great historian of religion Mercea Eliade, through his book Rites and Symbols of Initiation, outlines these rituals in Australian indigenous tribes. These practices had all the brutality of modern gang initiation, where boys were “ripped from their mother’s arms” and inducted into the masculine role. Yet, the ancient equivalent had a spiritual anchor – a tether to the tribes’ cosmology, to the way they conceptualized their place in the workings of the world – that is nonexistent today. The ritual was considered to be on a level of importance that is difficult for us moderns to conceptualize; it was imbued, in as deep a way as possible, with meaning.

This meaning is mostly absent in modern initiations; what little has been salvaged exists in their function. Initiations today serve the purpose of meeting the young man’s desperate need to belong. He needs to belong to something; he will endure whatever is asked of him to meet that need. Groups ranging from gangs to fraternities to the military all initiate their inductees, but some serve higher purposes. Desperate young men will settle for belonging to a gang because it is better than not belonging to anything, but it is far from ideal. 

We can afford to zoom out now, given all this information. Extrapolating from the observations I acquired in eight months with the most aggressive subset of the young male population – in a prison environment that probably encourages violence rather than restricts it – is certainly anecdotal. But something rings true in their behavior, something I, as a young man, can empathize with. Finding a group in which to belong, that will validate one’s inherent skills and abilities, is not an easy task for young men; the modern world often only presents superficial options neglectful of a deeper meaning.

A possible direction for future research into young men’s current difficulties is investigating this need to belong. How do young men talk about belonging? What responses might they give if presented with a question like “where do you feel you belong?” How do we, as a society, facilitate young men’s recognition of this need – which needs to happen first and foremost – and their meeting this need? Young men are resigning; young men are saying goodbye. This research is necessary to alter this trend.