> The fact that so many people hit adulthood without this basic self-determining ability is apocalyptic. We lost a lot of our traditional rites of passages. So

> The fact that so many people hit adulthood without this basic self-determining ability is apocalyptic. We lost a lot of our traditional rites of passages. Some of the traditional ones goes against contemporary notions of childhood and would be considered child abuse. In some cultures, for example, failing the rite of passage is fatal. Those cultures may consider that the spirit inhabiting the child was not serious or ready about being an adult. Try against next time. I'm not suggesting we lost our way and we should go back to traditional practices. Rather, there are wisdom we learned with our modernity and there is wisdom we lost when we left behind traditional wisdom. There is some sort of way where we can have those teachings of self-reliance that's expressed natively, and emergently from our modern sensibilities. I don't know what that is, though it's something in the back of my mind for a while.