The Death of the Grown Man

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:29:28 -0800

I am no Darwinist, but as I see it, the Age of the Grown Man is nearly complete. After several thousand years of hunting, gathering, procreating, and rescuing, it’s quite possible that The Grown Man has only a few decades left before he morphs into another species. (Disclaimer: With only one semester of college biology under my belt and no Y chromosome in my DNA, I might be the wrong candidate for recording such a primitive history, but indulge me; writers get paid to exaggerate stuff in order to make a point--or in this case, give it away for free).

Eons ago, the Grown Man relied on physical strength. He had to; otherwise, he and his family might die. Without the luxury of believing he had eighty years in front of him, he got right to the business of surviving. That’s about it.

Then a bit of complexity pushed the GM into some micro-evolutionary survival skills. He needed to do more than just stay alive; he needed to fight, to be good, to invent stuff that made the other GMs look like losers. In this way, he was able to attract his fair share of women from which to choose his favorite. When he found one, the two of them figured out how to stay alive even longer and protect their young carefully, given their unique biological skills.

Then we read the Old Testament narratives of a great many GMs—men who feared God and prayed for wisdom. Some foreshadowed our moral decline (think David in his Bathsheba era or all those wicked kings with names starting with “J”), but others were Grownups in the best sense: brave, protective, self-sacrificing seekers of justice. There was no time to be silly, for there were too many causes to fight for, and in the case of the Israelites, there were covenants to keep. God himself was a model of straight-up holiness. He was unchanging, cosmic, even frightening when he needed to be.

As societies began to change, the GM changed with it, losing his blunt edges, some growing spoiled, indulgent, and hedonistic—and they suffered for it. The strongest men survived and the weaker ones? Well, you know how it goes when men grow weak. Mid-millennium, the hedonists died out doing temporary things while the GMs kept fighting for things with a longer shelf-life.

But here’s the weird part. Somewhere in the last century—and picking up frightening speed in the past two decades—the adolescents are gaining traction while the GMs are dying out. Why? Well, I have no scientific idea, but the layman’s theory wonders if 1) we’ve given young men too many virtual causes on which to waste their vast intellectual and physical resources, or 2) if young men believe they have a third of their lives to squander, why get busy doing important things right away? (There are YouTube videos to watch and comedies to write and beers to drink, for God’s sake!)

The death of the Grown Man is not merely hypothetical. I met a man last month—a pleasant charter bus driver about the age of thirty—who was a premiere specimen in my fake paleontology. As a chaperone, I sat in the front of the bus, and he and I chatted on and off over 800 miles. He carried a picture of his World of Warcraft avatar on his Blackberry, knew every science fiction film we discussed, still lived at his mother’s house, spent a few semesters in community college, saved his money to go to Vegas every few months, and met his girlfriend while online gaming (they had yet to meet in person, he told me). When I asked him what inspired him—what was most meaningful to him or what goals he dreamed of—he mentioned that he just liked to wander, kind of like his bus rides, waiting to “see what happens next.”

What universe do I now live in where great swaths of strong young men are trading in their vitality for a zero return? This isn’t a phase, mind you, where a sixteen year-old stumbles his way around for a year or two. It is, rather, becoming the long, dry era of arrested development, where men halfway through their lives are still sleeping till noon in their mothers’ guest rooms. The Grown Men are dying every day, and someone has forgotten to tell the next generation what to live for.

As one who believes that Jesus Christ was the ultimate GM, I say study his words, his behavior, his leadership, and his divinity. If you know a Grown Man—if you are lucky to have one in your house—put his picture everywhere and get the word out that he is a treasure. Gather up the boys in your neighborhood and bring them to him. If you are a Grown Man, you won’t need to beat your chest and sneer at the losers; just keep leading, keep pressing forward, rally together with others who are likeminded so that we all might say as Paul did, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”

adolescence

The Death of the Grown Man