“We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.” – Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

If there’s nothing else I’ve learned in my short life it’s that we ought to hold a special reverence for pain, because in the turbulent sea of all human experience, pain stands out for the beautifully powerful thing that it is. It is in special moments of pain, fear, and uncertainty that we become who we are. We expose our backs to the lash, letting the scars thicken our skin and steel our nerves; that is how we grow.

A young Masai warrior was expected to leave his village with nothing more than a short spear and rawhide shield, and to return with a lion’s tail.

A boy of the Sepik Tribes must have his body scarified in the likeness of a crocodile and endure weeks of humiliation before being considered a man. His physical change marking his internal transformation.

Our society offers no right of passage; no gauntlet to pass through and no trial to meet. Like Palahniuk’s anonymous narrator, we’ve been born into and meandered our way through an existence sheltered from pain.  Rather than accepting pain and discomfort as a catalyst for growth, we hide ourselves away from it with pills and therapy. Should it be a surprise then that so many of our culture’s youth feel directionless and without purpose? Pain, like salt, is special in that it amplifies everything else. A warm shower will never mean as much to a person whose never felt their body go numb from hypothermia. You can never know how wonderful a meal of cold rice and water can be if you’ve never felt the agony of starving. Pain is the spice of life, without it life itself becomes tasteless and unappealing.

The exception being our service branches, each standing as cultures unto themselves.

Every branch of our armed forces has its own sense of identity, shared beliefs and customs, and above all, its own right of passage; that special, painful time every member can look back to and know that they have been tested and found deserving of a place among their brothers and sisters.

But, we have no great war to win and no great cause to crusade for, and so society does not expect service of us in the way it did some previous generations. So much so that less than 1 in 100 will experience it for themselves.

This means for the other 99 and some fraction of a percent, there is nothing binding us together and, consequently, no sense of belonging. Many people feel they don’t belong to a society, to a people, or to anything larger than themselves, but that they are simply floating through the current of life bumping into other directionless people as they go.

It is well known that this sense of separation is enough to drive people to join gangs, hate groups, churches, anything to find the sense of acceptance that society at large denies them. We are social creatures, and need to feel like we’re part of something.

We are a tribe of 300 million people with no way of looking at the individual and saying to them “you’ve done it, you’re one of us now.” And, yet, we continue to act surprised that so many people feel isolated from the world they’re living in. We hide and numb ourselves with medications in order to not have to deal with the discomfort that drives us to develop and grow as people. And yet, we act surprised that people are going through life without any perspective, empathy, dignity, or care.

I am not surprised.