The Purpose Crisis That Modern Young Men Face
And why young men today need to grow in courage.
The following essay was submitted for the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal. Since they ultimately decided not to publish it, I'm re-posting here. Enjoy.
America’s Young Men Are Lost
Young men in America today seem adrift, struggling to find purpose and direction. I believe the root of this crisis lies in a departure from the moral virtue of courage—and the solution is its restoration.
By Aristotle's definition, courage is to face your fears for the right reasons, at the right time, in the right way. Many young men today–myself included–often fail to grasp in theory and in practice that virtue lies in the middle between two extremes: deficiency and excess.
Timidness
Take the deficiency of courage: timidness. Today many young men avoid the challenges of dating, opting instead for online communities that promote the idea of living fulfilling lives without women. Perhaps with a bit more courage, these young men would be more willing to face rejection head on, and continue dating to find their match.
Other young men in their 20s and 30s feel aimless and isolated, and are more likely than their female peers to live with their parents. Perhaps these young men are choosing comfort by staying at home, even if taking the courageous choice to move out is a better path.
I’ve even found it easier to focus on trivial distractions, like managing my fantasy football roster, rather than to take a courageous career move, when necessary.
Fearlessness
On the opposite side of the same coin, I see courage’s excess of fearlessness in Luigi Mangione’ killing of Brian Thomson, an act that was wrongly celebrated on some corners of social media. Mangione's digital footprint reveals a troubling distortion of moral values, suggesting he may have viewed his actions as justified—a tragic misunderstanding of what the 'good' truly is. And perhaps indicative of the distorted moral values that can emerge in certain corners of the internet.
Though I didn’t know Mangione personally, his graduation from Penn just one year after my own from Brown University brings his actions closer to home and serves as a source of reflection.
Where Did Moral Virtues Go?
Some are quick to describe Mangione’s murder as a symptom of the indoctrination of higher education, or as a symptom of negative sentiment toward private insurers. While both theories might have truth to it, I see it as a symptom of a departure from moral virtues.
While Mangione's actions reflect a tragic misuse of courage, my own experiences as a student-athlete on the football team taught me the value of courage applied for the right reasons. Perhaps I was lucky to be a student athlete at Brown, where my professors encouraged independent thought and taking intellectual risks, like defending an unpopular economic theory in an essay during my junior year.
Having The Courage To Do The Right Thing
My football coaches also taught the value of doing the right thing, even in the face of challenges. This gave me the courage to finish a football game at Yale my senior year, even after breaking a finger during the first half, and having it taped at halftime, all because my teammates needed me. Experiences like this taught me to reflect on what the ‘good’ worth being courageous for truly is, and to pursue it when necessary.
Just months after Elon Musk’s SpaceX caught a rocket with 'chopsticks', the words of General Omar Bradley during his 1948 Armistice Day Address ring truer than ever today: “We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”
To navigate the complexities of modern life, young men like myself need to reclaim the middle way of the moral virtue of courage to serve as a compass for our decisions. By embracing courage, we can begin to have a positive impact on the world around us, and restore purpose and direction to our lives.
— Grant Varner