Coming-of-age rituals
Why Pain, Darkness, and Isolation Are the World's Most Common Gifts to a Teenager
Almost every human society that has ever existed decided the best way to turn a child into an adult was to first make them suffer.
The Idea
Coming-of-age rituals — anthropologists call them initiation rites — are so widespread across human cultures and so structurally similar to one another that their existence tells us something profound about how societies actually work. The French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, writing in 1909, noticed that these rituals almost always follow a three-part pattern: separation from ordinary life, a threshold period of suspension and ordeal, and finally reincorporation into the community with a new identity. He called this structure the rites of passage. What's striking is not just that the pattern repeats — from the Amazon to the Himalayas — but that the threshold phase, the liminal period, almost always involves hardship by design. Isolation in the forest, scarification, fasting, sleep deprivation, or enduring physical tests aren't sadistic accidents; they are the mechanism. The ordeal does real psychological work. It severs the initiate's attachment to their former self, creates an experience so intense it becomes a fixed identity marker, and binds them — through shared suffering — to every person who has endured the same. This is why the rituals aren't simply ceremonies; they are social technology. They manufacture belonging, moral seriousness, and a felt sense of transformation that a simple birthday or a handed-over car key cannot replicate. The question they force us to ask about modern life is whether transformation without ordeal is really transformation at all.
In the World
Among the Satere-Mawe people of the Brazilian Amazon, the path to manhood runs through a glove. Specifically, a woven mitt packed with bullet ants — insects whose sting is ranked, on the Schmidt pain index, as the most painful inflicted by any insect on earth. A boy approaching adulthood must wear the gloves, with hundreds of ants woven in, for ten minutes. He must do this twenty times in his life before the initiation is complete. What makes this more than spectacle is the context surrounding it. The boys spend hours in the community preparing the gloves. They dance throughout the ordeal. Elders watch. The community witnesses. When a boy removes the gloves — his hands temporarily paralysed and shaking — no one treats him as a victim. He is received as someone who has proven something real, not to others, but to himself and to the social fabric that holds the group together. The anthropologist Lionel Tiger, writing on male bonding, argued that extreme shared experiences of exactly this kind produce the deepest social cohesion human groups are capable of. The Satere-Mawe are not outliers. They are a vivid, legible version of something that hunter-gatherer societies, pastoral cultures, and early agrarian civilisations have almost universally reached for: the idea that identity must be earned through a moment that cannot be faked.
Why It Matters
It's easy to observe these rituals from the outside and feel a mixture of admiration and relief that you did not grow up in the Amazon. But the more interesting move is to ask what we have replaced them with — and whether the replacement works. Western modernity has largely dissolved formal initiation. What exists instead is a long, ambiguous adolescence, with no clear moment where society looks at a young person and says: you are now one of us, fully, with responsibilities and standing. Research on identity development consistently shows that young people benefit from experiences that are challenging, consequential, and witnessed — exactly the ingredients traditional rituals supply. The military, elite athletic training, and some religious traditions still understand this intuitively. The rest of us tend to drift through the threshold years accumulating experiences but lacking the narrative frame that converts experience into identity. This doesn't mean anyone should start weaving ant-filled gloves. It means it is worth thinking seriously about what you regard as your own formation — the moments that made you, rather than merely happened to you — and whether the people around you, especially younger ones, have access to anything like that.
A Question to Ponder
Is there a moment in your own life that functions like an initiation — something that divided your sense of self into before and after — and if so, was it designed, or did it find you by accident?
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