“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”- Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
This essay began in a conversation with my wife about my brother and my nephews. The young men we were discussing range from about 10 to 32 an age span that takes in childhood, adolescence, and some uncertain years of adult life.
I was thinking about their futures, and about how differently the question of direction presents itself at each age. At ten, a path can be an interest, a good teacher, something to practice. By thirty-two, the questions carry more weight. What kind of work will you do? Where will you belong? What will you commit to? At what point does preparing for life become living it?
My young son was less on my mind in this particular conversation. At his young age, I feel he has direction. That does not mean his future is settled, or should be. It means that, for now, he seems to have something to move toward. Watching that has made me think more carefully about what direction provides, and what happens when it becomes harder to find.
I do not want to turn the younger men in my family into illustrations of a social theory. They are individuals, with different temperaments, circumstances, and possibilities. But caring about particular people has a way of making an abstract question harder to dismiss. We tell young men that they can become almost anything. We are less clear about how they are supposed to become someone.
Compared with many of their ancestors, they possess an extraordinary range of possibilities. They can reject inherited occupations, leave their hometowns, change their beliefs, postpone marriage, and begin again. These are real freedoms. Yet possibility does not explain what to do on Monday morning. It does not tell them which sacrifices are worthwhile, whose judgment deserves respect, or when the long rehearsal for adulthood is supposed to end.
The question that stayed with me after talking with my wife was uncomfortable: Were some of the encumbrances earlier generations lived under doing useful work? And can we recover that work without recovering the injustices attached to it?
What the old paths provided
My first thought was that four institutions had supplied recognizable routes into adult life: college, military service, religious service, and the trades or agriculture.
That is a sketch, not a complete historical map. Young men also entered factories, mines, shops, offices, family businesses, and precarious labor. Many had little meaningful choice. Opportunities varied enormously by class, race, place, and period. Farming was often an inherited necessity. College was unavailable to many. Religious service encompassed both formal vocations and the ordinary obligations of congregational life.
Still, those four pathways help identify something we may have trouble supplying today. Each could place a young man inside an institution that existed before him, establish expectations he did not invent, and offer a progression from novice to competent participant.
The student encountered disciplines and standards. The recruit entered a chain of command. The apprentice worked under someone whose competence was visible in the finished product. The young farmer learned that animals, weather, and machinery were indifferent to his preferences. Religious service could make him accountable to a congregation and to people whose needs interrupted his plans.
These arrangements did not reliably produce good men. Universities rewarded conformity. Armies brutalized. Churches concealed abuse. Workshops exploited labor. Families mistook obedience for virtue. But at their best, such institutions answered a practical question: How does an inexperienced person become someone others can rely on?
Their answer involved repetition, correction, and duties whose value did not depend entirely on whether he enjoyed them. He learned to arrive on time, complete difficult work, accept criticism, and consider someone else’s needs. Responsibility grew as competence grew.
Eventually, other people recognized the change. Someone trusted him with the tools, the account, the younger apprentice. Adulthood acquired a public meaning.
I find that worth dwelling on. A young person can be encouraged endlessly and still have no evidence that anyone needs him. Being told that you have potential is different from being trusted with something that matters.
Yet the older arrangements exacted a price. A man whose occupation was settled at birth might have possessed direction and lacked justice. His sister might have been denied even his narrow alternatives. The coherence of a community could depend on punishing anyone who did not fit.
A society can make life legible by making departure impossible. That is too high a price. The challenge is to preserve the possibility of departure while rebuilding institutions worth staying in.
Freedom needs a form
Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty has stayed with me since I first encountered it years ago. It gives language to the tension I was trying to describe.
Negative liberty concerns freedom from interference: the space within which we can act without others obstructing us. Its achievements are immense. Freedom of conscience, movement, and association protect people against having their lives commandeered by someone else.
Positive liberty concerns self-direction: the aspiration to govern one’s life rather than be governed by forces one cannot control or understand. Berlin’s warning was that this aspiration becomes dangerous when authorities claim to know our true interests better than we do. Coercion can then be presented as liberation.
That warning matters here. Concern about young men does not entitle us to assign them destinies. The family, church, state, and nation have all confused their own authority with the welfare of those under it.
But freedom from interference does not answer every question about a human life. Permission to choose is different from possessing the habits, confidence, relationships, and resources through which a choice becomes sustainable.
A young man may be free to enter a trade while lacking an apprenticeship, free to study while lacking the habits required to learn, or free to join a community while knowing none that would notice his absence. His freedom remains valuable. His difficulty remains real.
I want the younger people in my family to have choices their predecessors lacked. I also want them to have enough footing to make those choices. An open field can be exhilarating when you know how to navigate. It can be frightening when every direction looks equally uncertain.
Aristotle offers part of an answer. In the Nicomachean Ethics, character develops through habituation. We acquire dispositions through repeated action. Understanding courage or justice matters, but understanding alone does not make us courageous or just when something is at stake.
This challenges the familiar instruction to discover yourself before making commitments. We often speak as though an authentic identity waits somewhere inside us, fully formed, needing only to be uncovered. Find your passion, then choose your work. Know who you are, then decide what you owe.
Much of who we are develops through activities we could not fully understand beforehand. An apprentice cannot know mastery before enduring incompetence. A volunteer may discover an aptitude for service only after accepting an inconvenient task. A parent encounters demands that no amount of advance reflection can reproduce.
Commitment produces knowledge. Some possibilities become intelligible only through participation. That does not make every demanding experience formative. People become habituated to dishonesty, cruelty, and submission too. Aristotle’s insight makes the quality of institutions more important. If repeated action shapes us, we should examine what we are repeatedly asked to do.
A worthy obligation develops capacities that eventually allow the novice to exercise judgment of his own. Tocqueville adds a social dimension. His account of American associations describes people learning to act together in institutions between the individual and the centralized state. Through voluntary groups, citizens practice cooperation, negotiate disagreements, and assume responsibility for common purposes.
An association gives freedom something to do. Someone must organize the meeting, maintain the building, raise the money, and finish the work. The person accepting the task becomes accountable to particular people.
For a young adult, that can be a substantial education. An opinion expresses identity with relatively little demand on its holder. An obligation tests whether he can cooperate with frustrating people and complete the work after enthusiasm fades.
These settings also distribute formation. A free society need not agree on one model of the good life. It can sustain many communities that make different demands, allowing meaningful commitment alongside genuine pluralism.
Durkheim helps explain the opposite condition. Anomie involves the weakening of norms that regulate expectations and give desires boundaries. It is more than loneliness. It is difficulty knowing what constitutes a sufficient, intelligible life.
Without some shared standards, aspiration can expand indefinitely. There is always another possible life against which the actual one appears inadequate. A young man may struggle to recognize progress because he has no stable measure of it.
The comparison machinery around him compounds the problem. He sees wealth, achievement, adventure, and beauty stripped of their context. His beginning competes with everyone else’s displayed success.
Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice fits here, with a qualification. More choice is not invariably harmful; its effects depend on the person and the decision. But abundant alternatives can increase comparison, regret, and pressure to identify the best possible outcome.
Applied to adulthood, the burden becomes existential. Choosing an occupation also means declining other possible selves. Settling into a place means passing up other places. Commitment becomes difficult when every decision appears to require proof that no better alternative exists.
Burke supplies a further challenge to the assumption that each generation should design life from first principles. Inherited institutions can contain experience their members did not create and may not fully understand. Customs coordinate expectations and transmit knowledge without requiring everyone to reconstruct their justification.
Inheritance deserves examination, however, rather than automatic deference. Institutions also transmit prejudice and preserve privileges. The useful question is what an institution does, and what will perform that function if it disappears.
If apprenticeships, congregations, local associations, and family obligations weaken, individual discretion may expand. The places where people learned to use discretion may shrink at the same time.
These thinkers disagree about important things. I would not flatten them into a common doctrine. But together they help explain the problem: freedom needs protection from domination, while the capacity to exercise freedom develops through habits, relationships, and institutions. We have to hold both thoughts at once.
Obligations worth choosing
This is not exclusively a male problem. Women experience uncertainty and institutional decline too, and many carry obligations heavy enough to make an essay praising commitment sound detached from their lives.
My concern here comes from thinking about the boys and men closest to me. What helps a young man move from having possibilities to accepting useful, recognized responsibility?
Some still feel the expectation to become providers while finding the route obscure. They may feel judged by a standard nobody has helped them meet. Meanwhile, the language of manhood can arrive burdened with domination, emotional repression, and contempt for dependence. We rightly ask them to reject those failures. We also owe them a compelling account of maturity.
That account need not be elaborate. A mature man can keep promises, perform useful work, regulate his conduct, care for others, accept correction, and show courage when it costs him something. These virtues are not exclusively male. They can still give substance to a boy’s desire to become a good man.
But virtues require settings in which they can be practiced. “Be responsible” is incomplete advice. Responsible for whom? Entrusted with what? Supported by whom when the work exceeds his experience?
The distinction between formative obligation and coercive encumbrance must therefore be concrete. A formative obligation connects a demand to a worthwhile purpose. It develops competence, judgment, or care. Its authorities can be questioned and held accountable. Standards apply to those in charge. Responsibility increases with capacity.
A coercive encumbrance primarily preserves someone else’s power. It treats questions as disloyalty, makes departure ruinous, or demands submission without a defensible connection to the work. It borrows the language of duty while refusing reciprocal duties.
Pleasantness is an unreliable guide. A demanding teacher can be fair; an agreeable supervisor can exploit. Formal consent is insufficient too. Someone may accept degrading conditions because the alternatives are desperate.
We have to judge the arrangement as a whole. Does it build independent judgment? Are its demands proportionate? Can mistreatment be challenged? Does authority serve the learner’s development? Those questions prevent nostalgia from doing our thinking. They also prevent us from dismissing every difficult expectation as oppression. The four pathways can be reconsidered in this light.
College can discipline attention, enlarge judgment, and expose students to standards beyond immediate preference. It can also provide an expensive interval of uncertainty. Institutions should be candid about costs, expectations, support, and plausible outcomes. Families should respect several routes into competence instead of treating a degree as the universal badge of success.
Military service makes hierarchy, interdependence, and responsibility unusually explicit. It also involves distinctive risks: death, injury, trauma, and participation in the use of force. Those realities prevent it from becoming a convenient remedy for uncertainty. We should support those who serve and build civilian institutions capable of demanding seriousness too.
Religious communities can connect individual lives to purposes beyond achievement and consumption. Visiting the sick, teaching children, and caring for families create recurring obligations. Religious institutions must also earn trust; spiritual claims cannot excuse abuse. People outside faith need substantial communities of service as well.
The trades and agriculture offer education through consequences. A system functions, a structure holds, a crop survives or something must be understood and repaired. Such work deserves respect without romance. Safety, compensation, physical strain, and economic prospects matter. Calling poorly paid labor noble does little for the person performing it.
Across these pathways, the task is to make institutions worthy of the commitments they seek. That places demands on adults who are already established. Employers must train people who are not yet fully productive. Skilled workers must teach patiently. Civic organizations must give newcomers consequential work. Families must allow young people to contribute, make mistakes, and try again.
We cannot lament a lack of responsibility while withholding every meaningful opportunity to practice it. I need to include myself in that sentence. It is easy to discuss what young men ought to do. It is more demanding to consider what I might teach, where I might make an introduction, or which responsibility I could help someone take on.
The conversation with Perla brought the issue close enough that a purely cultural diagnosis feels insufficient. Whatever the wider forces, these are people we know and care about. They will need adults willing to spend time, exercise judgment, and stay interested after the initial conversation.
The approach must fit the age. A ten-year-old needs manageable duties, chances to explore, and adults who take his efforts seriously. A twenty-four-year-old deserves an adult conversation about work, money, competence, and commitments. Neither benefits from having his entire future prescribed.
Direction can begin modestly. A skill to practice. A job to investigate. Someone to help. A responsibility that recurs. Exploration remains valuable, as does changing course when a path proves unsuitable. A mistake should not become a life sentence. But indefinite deferral has costs. Skills deepen through practice. Trust accumulates through repeated conduct. Belonging grows when people develop a history of showing up.
No one can preserve every possible life. Eventually, trying to do so takes time away from living the one available. That is the burden of freedom. We must choose without complete knowledge, accept the loss of alternatives, and discover what our choices require of us. The answer cannot be a return to compulsory destinies. It can be a renewed willingness to make commitments whose purposes we understand, in institutions where dignity survives dependence and authority carries duties of its own.
So here is my invitation to anyone who recognizes something familiar in this essay: choose one young person in your life and help make one next step concrete. Have a conversation about what interests him, what he finds difficult, and where he would like to become more capable. Resist demanding a complete life plan. Look for something he can actually do in the coming month.
Introduce him to someone whose work he might respect. Arrange a chance to observe a trade. Help him find a recurring service commitment. Teach him something useful. If you have authority over work, give him a real task with clear expectations and enough guidance to succeed.
Then follow up. Formation takes more than an inspiring afternoon. For the young men themselves, the invitation is equally practical: choose something worthwhile that will ask you to return after the excitement wears off. Find competent people who can correct you. Accept a responsibility that makes a difference to someone else. Give it enough time to teach you something.
And for me, the next step is to carry the conversation with Perla back into the relationships that prompted it, to listen more closely and look for places where I can be useful. We should want young people to inherit more freedom than previous generations possessed. We should also help them build lives substantial enough to bear it.
Freedom opens the door. We still have to learn what is worth walking toward.