The Lost Boys

The article was neatly tucked away in the September 8, 2008 edition of Newsweek. One would hardly notice because this particular edition was devoted to the covering the Republican Convention. Yet there it was.

Titled Why I Am Leaving Guyland Peter Pans aren't as happy as they seem. by a Tony Dokoupil. http://www.newsweek.com/id/156372 Dokoupil, a 27 year old who was married the week his article was published in Newsweek, gives us a disturbing look at the twenty-something male and his attitudes.

It is hard to pick out one sentence that is the most significant or powerful. Start with this one......Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile—and endlessly adolescent—generation of men in U.S. history.

The author tells us of a generation of guys who are lost in world of drinking, sex and meaningless relationships.

Once the preserve of whacked-out teens and college slackers, this testosterone-filled landscape is the new normal for American males until what used to be considered creeping middle age, according to the
sociologist Michael Kimmel. In his new book, "Guyland," the State University of New York at Stony Brook professor notes that the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from "a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life."

What is the real issue in all of this? First of all there is far more to this problem than can be answered in a simple "one-liner."

If you have spent any time around me, you know that one of my "things" is this issue of "adolescence." Here we see it again. It is as if the author along with the rest of us including the church and most ministries are saying that a little adolescence is normal but a little can go a long way and it does not take very long before a little becomes way too much.

We have accepted this ludicrous man-invented idea of adolescence as a normal part of our lives and we are destroying our young men in the process.

Secondly, where are the older men....you know old guys like me.... to invest in the lives of these young guys long before they see life as one party after another and still let mom do your laundry. We need older men to start investing in young guys much younger than we are thinking that mentoring should start.

Now for those who wonder why is it all about the guys??? It is not. But we need to wake up and realize that when we raise up weak guys who have not grown into men, we are also putting the same generation of young ladies at risk.

We must raise up strong men and women who know who and whose they are in Christ. One sex does not grow stronger at the expense of the other.

The last point that really grabbed me was the statement that for guys in their 20's this is "the new normal."

I wrote about this very same issue of accepting the abnormal as normal and the issue of adolescence in my book, Men of Honor Women of Virtue. http://www.achosengeneration.org/

Men, it is past time for us to invest in younger men. While the situation is critical, it is not hopeless.

Who are you investing your life in today???