Maybe Boomers Missed Their Rite of Passage

That’s why they’re approaching their deaths as amateurs.

Photo by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash

So many people came to their own deaths as amateurs, as if for the first time. Because their first time was when it was upon them. — Steven Jenkinson

Why are we so afraid of death?

• We are living a culture that has become disconnected from the integration of life and death.
• We have lost our proper sense of how to relate to both Eros and Thanatos.
• We run in fear from death until the moment we can no longer avoid it.
• We don’t understand that we are merely a part of a living system — a.k.a. Gaia, and we think that we are separate units of life with the manifest destiny to rule over the “resources” of this planet.
• We live inside of a war mentality and are constantly fighting to survive when we could just accept the fact that this life is simply, as Bill Hicks put it, just a ride.

I believe much of this comes from us having lost access to traditional rites of passage. These rites of initiation into adulthood often involved staring death in the face and then using that experience to help guide us to a purposeful use of our adult lives. Our elders held space to take us to the edge and then…