Part of the benefit of living in the Bay Area – other than tech – is early stage exposure to large scale social and cultural experiments. Hippies, New Age, East

Part of the benefit of living in the Bay Area – other than tech – is early stage exposure to large scale social and cultural experiments. Hippies, New Age, Eastern mysticism (translated into Western culture), libertarianism, futurism, biohacking, micro-dosing, etc. etc. All of them seeking to find a new but familiar frame of reference for being human in a rapidly changing modern world. In the whole of human history, every thriving culture had a dedicated male right of passage where a boy becomes a man... every culture except one... ours. While not mainstream, a few newer practices in the vein of cultural biohacking exist as nascent replacements for right-of-passage ceremonies. The ones I've come across are somewhat underground or at least offline. They're not a secret, they're just currently weird in the same way Steve Jobs using meditation for productivity was unorthodox a few decades ago. While it's easy to downplay the role of right-of-passage ceremonies as archaic, their existence served a necessary function. It's where a boy gained his confidence and understanding in his role in the community. A time where he stood up as a man to face his peers and elders. An expression at the core of human experience: claiming individual identity within a group. The need for these ceremonies has not gone away. We just now see the aftermath of what happens when our culture no longer serves the needs of the individual, opting instead to serve the crowd. With men causing most of the newsworthy problems these days, perhaps the culture is not optimal for adapting biologically and socially male tendencies into our present reality. I've had a chance to attend a few different right-of-passage ceremonies. It's hard to explain how powerful an intentionally crafted ceremony can be in transforming someone until you've seen it first hand. It's nearly impossible to describe.