The Cost of Uninitiated Adulthood
How the absence of initiation shapes our world — and what remembering it can restore.
Something essential has gone missing in our world: the passage into true adulthood.
In most traditional societies, initiation was a communal act that marked the end of childhood — not a celebration of success, but a ritual death of innocence, entitlement, and self-centeredness. It was meant to humble, to teach limits, to reveal that life does not belong to us alone.
Without such thresholds, people grow old but never truly mature. They may learn skills, build careers, or raise families, yet remain ruled by the untempered drives of adolescence — the hunger for recognition, accumulation, control. The world we live in now is the direct result of this: nations and corporations behaving like reckless teenagers, obsessed with dominance and pleasure, unable to reckon with consequence or mortality.
An uninitiated society cannot sustain life.
When adults have never faced their own symbolic death, they project it outward. They wage real wars to avoid facing inner ones. They consume endlessly because they’ve never been taught that enough is sacred. They extract from the earth as if it were lifeless because they’ve never stood before it as students or kin.
Initiation was the old way of preventing this.
It placed young people in direct relationship with mystery, with danger, with the vastness of the natural world. It taught humility through encounter — the kind of learning no lecture or book can offer. The initiate returned knowing, not in theory but in their bones, that life is larger than them and that their gifts exist for the benefit of the whole.
In the absence of this, we see adults seeking meaning through consumption, distraction, and power, because they have never been invited to surrender to something deeper.
They mistake freedom for indulgence, and strength for domination.
Initiation work today — whether through wilderness rites of passage, ceremony, or deep community witnessing — is a way of repairing this tear in the human story. It does not belong to any single culture. It is a universal movement of remembering.
To be initiated is to be tempered. It is to face your smallness and your belonging at once. It is to discover that adulthood is not about personal achievement but service — to people, to land, to life itself.
In times like these, initiation is not a luxury or a quaint tradition. It is essential. Without it, we will continue to fill the world with the wounded hunger of uninitiated power. With it, we begin to grow the kind of human beings capable of care, restraint, and reverence — qualities our world desperately needs to survive.
At Vanaprastha, this is the heart of our work — to remember what it means to come of age in relation to the living world, and to help rebuild the pathways that lead us there.
