Young Men Need to Join a Choir

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Like most young people at 25, I wasn’t doing anything particularly impressive. I’d had a lot of odd jobs: working for my fraternity, doing contract shifts at the LCBO, and even delivering fish. I was rudderless, jumping around, trying to figure out what I wanted, and mostly failing.

I had gone to school to be a doctor. But somewhere between anatomy labs and cadaver dissections, I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a hospital.

Like many young people - by the time I finished undergrad, I had been the master of my domain. I was in a routine, and had figured out how to navigate college life. I was the fraternity president, played on rec sports teams, and did musical theatre. University was a place where I mattered, where I felt I truly belonged. It was a relatively small place, and there was structure.

But returning to Toronto, without having a clear goal like medical school, I went from being a big fish in a tiny pond, to a tiny fish in an enormous pond. Swimming around with a vague notion of being something someday. There was no structure. Instead there was chaos.

Now I was extremely lucky. I had fantastic friends, great mentors, good fortune, and enough focus to help get me through that life period - but looking around, my experience was uncommon.

For most young men, that shift from mattering to anonymity is one of the hardest transitions they can go through. We want to be useful. We want to matter. But the real world doesn’t offer many clear paths or mechanisms to achieve these things.

There is an order of operations at play: most young men have trouble building a romantic relationship or getting married until they’ve settled into a career. They want to be (at the very least) on the path to stability often in the form of salary and eventually home ownership. In cities like Toronto, that doesn’t happen until your late 20s and only then if you’re exceptional and/or lucky. If you’re not, it is difficult, if not impossible to hit these milestones.

Without milestones or responsibility, you don’t feel useful. If you don’t feel useful, you lose confidence and you can easily start to drift.

That drift won’t be corrected unless young people (men in particular) actively seek out remedies. The more you drift, the harder it is to get back on track. The best way to stay focused when your career isn’t popping off is to achieve growth through connection and shared purpose. There’s no better place to find these things than in community spaces. Getting involved in third places offers opportunities to connect, to contribute, learn, and lead. Finding these places is not easy. They are rarely marketed to young men. That’s a huge problem. If men aren’t in these spaces, there are no opportunities for role modelling, for learning how to be a good person, or how to succeed.

For me, it was joining a choir at the age of 25, quickly identifying that it was a community to grow and play in, and then volunteering for leadership right away. That group kept me focused on something greater than myself as I was jobless, going through a breakup, or down in the dumps.

When you join an organization, you can meet people 10 years ahead of you in life. They can give you the advice that a parent or a peer cannot. They can show you what makes a young professional successful and the mistakes to avoid. They can share their lived experience, give you a person to lean on for advice when trying to date or start a family.

The lack of participation in these spaces is a major gap in our societal blueprint. It is a vestige of a more traditional era. An era where people would automatically find friends and community through their workplace or religious space. With a tough job market, remote work, and the fading of religion, young people are left to figure it out for themselves. They band together, and give each other permission to stall out. When your five best friends are all idling, you don’t feel as motivated to level yourself up. It’s a tough cycle to get out of. I don’t blame them at all. You have to work really hard to get ahead nowadays, and it's a tall order to hit the expectations of what it means to be a successful person. People naturally shy away from a steep climb.

With all of the social progress that has been made in the last twenty years, we like to think we’ve moved into a new way of thinking. The truth however, is that most men still measure themselves through a traditional lens. Moreover, most women do too. Men are being asked to do double duty on gender roles. They are expected to be both strong and caring. They are expected to be both providers and partners, assertive and deferential. Women on the other hand are typically still able to choose to lean into both roles, one, or the other. Men are expected to do both.

Now, I am not saying the old way was better, but I am saying it was more stable. We’re still reckoning with the cascading effects of feminism, and the dust hasn’t settled. Obviously, feminism is a great thing, but we are still trying to reorder ourselves and men receive mixed signals. Should they get after it and try to succeed? Or should they step back and support? Most women I know only want to date men in the same echelon as them. So forging ahead in the classic patriarchal style still seems like the safest bet for long term prosperity and happiness.

But the economy isn’t cooperating. The milestones: career, home, family, aren’t being hit with the same regularity. And that leads to the other huge issue that needs to be addressed here: the career and skills gap. School is working better for women. The statistics are clear, way more women than men are graduating from university. Without that competitive education, men are finding it harder and harder to get jobs.

So how do we solve the skills gap?

Well, we need to equip young people, (both men and women) with the skills they actually need to succeed. This starts back in 10th grade careers class. I remember in my class, I took a test and was told I’d make a great midwife. There was never anything about getting a job, or building a career. LinkedIn and Indeed didn’t exist yet. The internet wasn’t the same thing 15 years ago. Applying for jobs nowadays is a numbers game and really difficult if you don’t have connections or understand the mechanics.

On the topic of careers specifically, it’s noteworthy that professional track unionized workers (Ontario high school teachers) have the task of teaching kids how to duke it out in the job market. Teachers typically have a very specific and irregular mechanism for getting jobs placed in this province. I’m not convinced that they know what’s best for a non professional. Besides, if you’re not on a professional track, ie. doctor, lawyer, accountant, do they really understand the systems and mechanics?

Young people should be taught how to navigate the modern job market, how to identify and market their skills, how to network, and how to ask for help.

That last one is especially key. There’s an affirmation that my spin instructor ends all her classes with:

If you need help, ask for it. If you have help, offer it.

What a world it would be if more young people thought this way. If young people knew who to turn to when they felt they weren’t getting a fair shake. When they identified they wanted more instead of just accepting unsatisfactory conditions.

Our people are more educated than ever. They have more tools, more literacy, more resources. And yet, they still can’t make it work. Why?

To me the answer is that we don’t have a clear path outlined and we are unenthusiastic as Canadians about entrepreneurialism. There’s hope though, we aren’t far off. We have the raw materials - education, values, work ethic. As Dr. Keita Deming points out in his book Strategy to Action. We just need a solid strategy, and the correct tactics to implement it.

My opinion is that that strategy should focus on equipping our youth to acquire skills and build confidence. They should be shown the value in building things, and the rewards that can come with an increased risk tolerance. The tactics include things as simple as getting involved, actively looking to take on leadership roles, however small they are, and finding ways to serve others.

Doing these things in low stakes environments trains people to do them in high stakes environments. When you’ve learned how to negotiate, sell something, be autonomous, or ask for things as a teenager, or recent graduate, you have that blueprint on how to do it as an adult.

In the age of AI, decision making is becoming more and more important - we can train our young people on that.

Scott Galloway often mentions on his various podcasts and speaking engagements that he believes in a National Service Program in the US - wouldn’t that be something wonderful to implement for young Canadians.

Until we change the national conversation however, young men will be left to fend for themselves. In the meantime, maybe they can join a choir.

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