By the time you read this, I will be somewhere in the northern Idaho wilderness with my younger son Bradley.
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We will have no phone and no cell signal.
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Instead, we’ll be building a primitive shelter with our hands, sleeping under the stars, surviving in the wilderness warmed only by fire.
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He turns twelve this month.
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And this isn’t your typical father-son camping trip.
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It’s a coming of age, rites-of-passage experience.
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Let me explain…
1 | The Primitive Power of Fire
In Return to Real, I write about a study published in Evolutionary Psychology that found the sight and sound of a crackling fire significantly reduce blood pressure and promote relaxation.
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The longer people watched, the calmer they became.
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A dose-dependent response the researchers suggest may be evolutionarily hardwired, because for early humans, fire meant safety, warmth, and community.
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There’s a reason our nervous systems respond to looking downward into a campfire differently than looking forward at a screen. It’s a rewilding trigger buried deep in our biology.
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Yet how many of us regularly spend time around firelight anymore?
2 | Across Cultures, Historic Rites of Passage Have Been Comprised of Three Essential Ingredients
Top left: a bar mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age at thirteen. Top right: Maasai warriors during a coming-of-age ceremony, the ceremony that ends warriorhood and begins elderhood. Below: a father-son wilderness camp in the US, about the closest thing most American boys get. Different continents, different centuries. Same three ingredients.
For most of human history, a boy didn’t become a man by turning a certain age. He became one by going through something.
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The Lakota sent young men alone to a hilltop for days without food, in a rite called hanbleceya, “crying for a vision.” Aboriginal Australians sent adolescents alone into the bush for months, on walkabout.
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These rites of passage originate on different continents, but they share the same three ingredients:
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- Separation. You leave the tribe.
- Ordeal. You face something hard, often alone, usually in nature.
- Return. You come back as someone different.
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When my older son Henry turned thirteen, he and I hiked the Grand Canyon together as part of a father-son rite-of-passage experience.
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It’s a trip that will forever change my life.
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I wrote about it in [Issue #053] Between Death & Danger is the Path.
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In that piece, there was one critical detail I wasn’t ready to share.
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I share that detail in the final chapter of Return to Real.
I’ve since come to believe that rites of passage experiences like these may be one of the most critical things we’ve lost in the raising of our next generation of men.
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Which brings us to…
3 | Why the Phone As A Rite of Passage Is The Worst of All Worlds.
Here’s what a twelve-year-old gets today instead.
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A smartphone.
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And when you run that against the three ingredients we just examined, here’s what quickly becomes apparent:
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- Separation? The opposite. The phone goes everywhere.
- Ordeal? Nonexistent. It’s engineered to remove every ounce of friction from every minute of the day.
- Return? There is none. You never come back.
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It’s not only that we’ve lost traditional rites of passage. It’s that we’ve replaced them with something that erodes what they were designed to do.
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And with each passing year, more and more traditional rites of passage disappear…
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Remember counting down the days until you turned sixteen?
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Did you know that fewer than half as many sixteen-year-olds hold a driver’s license today as in the early 1980s?
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It’s true.
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The ordeal that used to mark the edge of childhood, is gone. As Scott Galloway and others have written, an entire generation of boys is adrift, and nobody is showing them the way.
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In last week’s [Issue #116] What Cigarettes Can Teach Us About Where AI Goes Next we explored how correction always seems to start with children.
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But for this one here, you can’t just take the phone away. You have to put something in its place.
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As I write in Return to Real:
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“If you want to realign your life and redesign your work around what’s real, it requires doing something radical.
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You have to break the digital trance before you can do anything else. You need a pattern interrupt.
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You need to rewild in order to reconnect.
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That’s where we begin.”
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The Return to Real isn’t just for twelve-year-olds.
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It’s for all of us.
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Including you and me.
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Which brings me to the announcement this week…
4 | The Kindle Edition of Return to Real Is Officially LIVE on Amazon.
This week, the Kindle edition of Return to Real is now officially available for pre-order on Amazon.
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AND when you pre-order it through the link in this email, you get $286 worth of bonuses, free, including:
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- The RTR Roundtable Series. Three live sessions with me, one for each of the Three Shifts. October 15th, 22nd, and 29th. Live plus recordings.
- The Missing Chapter. A brand-new chapter, not in the book, on how Return to Real applies to where AI is right now.
- The Practices Guide and the Reflections Guide. The two companion resources from the back of the book.
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If you haven’t yet ordered your copy of the book, I’ve tried to make this a total no-brainer: The Kindle is under $10 bucks. It’s available for download anywhere in the world. And with it, you get $286 worth of bonuses.
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To get these bonuses, all you need to do is this:
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- Pre-order the Kindle edition on Amazon using this link here.
- Come back to that same page, enter your name, email, and order number, and we’ll get you set up.
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If you’ve already ordered a version of the book from our website, you’re covered. I always take care of my early adopters :-)
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Okay, I’m going to leave you with that for today.
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Bradley and I will back from the woods on Tuesday.
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There will be separation.
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There will be ordeal.
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And then…
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There will be a return.
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Wish us luck.
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Until then, remember to hug the ones you love.
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Ryan :-)
