Toward the end of my corporate life, while working for Amazon I was quite down on the direction of my career, and one well meaning friend gave me some advice:
“Look for a role where you can see a good future. Look for a job where you want to do what your boss is doing, and their boss too.”
This seemed like good advice. And the vast scope of Amazon’s business made looking easy. Pulling up the company org chart was to possess a god-like omniscience of the past, present and future of 1,000 different corporate careers all at once. At a company with so many tentacles stretching into so many industries, there were very few doors which were not open to me. But it was only then, while basking in the fluorescent glory of limitless corporate possibility, that I fully appreciated something for the first time.
I didn’t want any of it. There was no corporate future for me, so I opted out.
I believe we struggle to produce young men who achieve a contended, productive and fulfilling manhood for a similar reason: they look at what the men in their lives do, be it their father, or the men in their extended family, the men at church, at work or in the neighborhood, etc. They see the expectations and roles of modern men play in our society, they see modern men as busy, boring, stressed, tired, out of shape, lonely, lethargic and atrophied has-beens. And unsurprisingly, more and more boys are opting out.
They see what “the boss” is doing and they don’t want that job.
They see us and they don’t want to be us.
Through A Glass, Darkly
I don’t believe most men are actually that long list of negative qualities; I believe most men are quite capable of amazing deeds and possess boundless potential, even at an older age, past their so-called prime.
But it’s difficult for boys to see it. Men now live quite opaquely and their children must strain to see “through a glass, darkly” at what dad and the other guys are all about. For the remainder of the article, I’ll discuss 3 key ways men hide their potential from their sons and what we can do about it.
Culturally Distant
I remember graduating from high school and joining the men’s class at my church, called the Elder’s Quorum. It was a difficult transition as I went from meeting every Sunday with my peers and friends, to meeting every Sunday with a bunch of middle-aged guys who had lives and concerns I did not understand. Over the next year, until I went on my church mission, I mostly ignored them and they mostly ignored me. What a wasted opportunity for both sides!
I don’t think my experience was unique. The transitional age of 18 is often a difficult one for boys in any church and unfortunately the terrain can redirect many boys into a swamp of perpetual adolescence.
This is because of our dependence upon mainstream popular culture which exalts boys and their interests as they are in youth, instead of as they will be in manhood. They forego maturity for this exaltation, but it lasts for a short time and before they’re 30 these boys will be cast aside for something newer, cooler.
For example, the older men in my Elder’s Quorum class were running an earlier form of cultural operating system than I was. They had peaked in relevance long ago and were riding out the decline with nostalgic defiance. To me, they seemed cringeworthy, slow and out of date. But I, at the height of my relevance, no doubt seemed aloof, strange and maybe even a little intimidating to them.
And now that I’m middle aged, the cycle repeats, offering our sons a foreign, incomprehensible childhood and consigning us to a way too early wistfulness of our now past glory days. Life is short, too short for old men and young men to be so estranged.
The cycle will end when older men rescue younger men from mainstream culture. One of the most urgent tasks for men and fathers today is to be cultural pioneers and trailblazers. It will feel like a LARP at first, because it is, but if enough men in a given social circle, in a neighborhood or church can join this effort, focus on it, even at the expense of their role as provider, then it will create a culture coherent enough for men and boys of of all ages to plug into.
Before Boy Scouts self-immolated, at its best, it was an example of exactly that: a shared culture strong enough to give boys a way to relate to and learn from men, avoiding the transitional swamp and ascending to the peaks of manhood. Boy Scouts largely used outdoor activities to do this, but there are many possible paths.
But Boy Scouts and nearly every other institution that once existed for this purpose is dead; pummeled and drowned by the ever higher, faster and stronger waves of popular culture.
What hope you have in closing the relational gap is not going to be found in a large, centrally funded organization which has figured it out for you; any such organization is susceptible to the same forces which destroyed the Boy Scouts. The best hope is to be found in tight knit circles of like-minded parents and family, at places like a church.
Professionally Abstract
The building I worked in at Amazon had doggie treats at reception, and dog parks on the 1st and 17th floors. Dogs were welcome to spend all day at the office and many did.
But not children or youth of any age. That would’ve been completely ridiculous!
Professionally, most fathers are very obscure to their children. They do not have any conception for what dad does at the office. All that many children see is a father who is distracted and distant, who doesn’t have much attention to give them except perhaps some small portion of the last and least dregs of their mental and physical strength at the end of the work day.
Men since time immemorial have been providers, hard workers and often away from home. But the corporate, anti-family model of modern employment is something different: severing the connections between a man’s work and his family life until his role as provider is a separate thing; wholly disembodied from what his sons are and do.
Regardless of the work a man does, it’s time for our society to recognize that it’s not in the best interest of boys to be separated from the context of their father’s life and work until they’re 18 or in most cases even later as a college graduate. It’s time for educational institutions to remove the scales from the eyes of boys by incorporating apprenticeships and earlier vocational opportunities to make their dads and other men more professionally clear.
Of course, neither mega-employers nor public school systems are anywhere close to understanding this; they’re likely to continue on their deadly trot toward the cliffside and will take anyone within arm’s reach with them.
And so, it falls to men themselves to create contexts of work and education that allow their sons to see and work with them. (Have I mentioned something about being a pioneer before???)
This often (but doesn’t always) mean working in small businesses or owning your own business. Many a man is afraid he's not cut out to run his own business but it has long been my stance that owning a business is in your blood.
Ambitiously Lacking
What inspired this post was an experience from a church meeting I attended some years ago. I was in a large room with many men and many teenage boys. I looked around the room at the men: good men, loving men, kind men, men who were sacrificing their time to be here with these boys. But also out of shape men, tired men, men distracted by devices, men who have a hard time understanding boys today, men who feel life has passed them by, men whose primary skill is only useful deep within the bowels of a corporate org chart and whose primary hobby is either a 40 year old movie franchise or a sports team. Boys themselves once, but men now with some long forgotten ambition.
Then I looked at the boys, many of whom were our sons. I thought: “We are their dads and church leaders. They love us, but do they want to BE us?” I would understand why if they didn’t.”
Boys deserve men who actively pursue their own goals and improvement. This is not to suggest that all men must be marathon running spartan warriors with 3% body fat, possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of all interesting things and capable of building a rocket ship in his spare time. (But I’m not ruling it out either!) Regardless, boys should see men who have not experienced adulthood as a sentence of life imprisonment.
Boys also deserve men who heavily invest in the boy’s development and talents. In a community where men and boys are culturally close and professionally transparent, boys will look to the men in their lives to set and keep the markers of masculinity. He will accept the challenge to complete rites, rituals and work which bestow the title of man upon him, because he knows the ones encouraging him, pushing him and honoring him are men themselves. He wants to be them.
God gave us sons. It’s my hope that men no longer hide from them and become more intentional about what our sons see of us, so that they will want to be us and in true manly fashion, be better than us.
To a boy, his father is:
…the maker of his memories
…the steward of his future
…the challenge he must meet
…the pioneer he must surpass
…the pillar he must build on
…the inheritance he must grow
God gave me a son. What will he see of me?
Really liked this post.
On point 3. I also feel like i often have the opposite problem with the high school boys in the small group I lead. Sometimes I feel like I’m *really cool* and they should want to be like me. But they really don’t seem to have interest (or experience) in learning from adults in that way. There’s a heavy imbalance of me asking them questions, vs the opposite.
Maybe that means I’m not doing a good enough job, or that they’re still young, or that they’re not used to asking questions to any adult, or that they’re more interested in talking with their friends (and I’m grateful they’re more excited about this than their phones), or some combination.
Our youth group sessions tend to be very didactic too - kids sitting silently in pews late on a Sunday, listening to a grown up talk, while they’re surrounded by all their friends (but not engaging with them). I think making church feel like the worst parts of high school runs the same risk that you call out in the article.
Great thoughts.
Around the time I first became a dad, I had a conversation with my pastor's oldest son. He told me that his dad was his hero. He's planning to follow in his footsteps.
And that word, hero, really struck me. I wouldn't have ever said that about my dad. He definitely fit this distracted, corporate mold you describe. I'm trying to do much better. But is there any chance I can do as well as my pastor? His son, of course, saw what dad did every Sunday. And they were missionaries earlier in his childhood, so he saw and experienced that too.