PATH OF THE DRAGON

Freedom Without Initiation

September 08, 2026Reading time: 8 min

Western societies spent much of the twentieth century challenging the authority of institutions that taught people to belong to something larger than themselves.

Family. Marriage. Religion. Community. Duty. Nation. Inherited obligation.

These institutions were not innocent. They could be oppressive, coercive and cruel. Much of that liberation was necessary. Women gained autonomy. Sexual minorities won freedoms long denied them. People became less trapped by family, class, church and convention. A person born into one life was increasingly permitted to choose another.

That was an extraordinary achievement.

But liberation has a shadow.

The same institutions that constrained people also formed them. They gave people roles, shared rhythms and enduring claims upon one another. Winning the right to leave did not tell us how to build forms of belonging worth staying for.

Radical critiques of family, marriage and inherited roles exposed real oppression. Where domination became the whole account of those institutions, their formative work became harder to defend. Consumer capitalism, secularization, changing sexual norms, technology and liberal individualism were also reshaping how people belonged.

These converging changes strengthened an older ideal: the sovereign individual. The self-development market inherited it; it did not invent it.

The person who belongs first and foremost to himself.

The person whose relationships must feel fulfilling, whose work must give meaning, whose identity must feel authentic—and whose obligations remain binding only while they still feel chosen.

Sociologist Andrew Cherlin describes a related turn in American marriage: personal choice and self-development increasingly shape what people expect the bond to provide.1

Why make sovereignty the image of maturity at all? A sovereign can be generous while remaining the final authority over what is owed. What happens when another person’s legitimate claim conflicts with the life I want for myself?

Marriage and parenthood have moved later across OECD countries, while fertility has fallen sharply.2 Across 21 European OECD countries, daily face-to-face meetings with friends declined between 2006 and 2022 as remote contact increased.3

Housing costs, insecure work and the costs of care also delay lives people dearly want. These trends are no verdict on the maturity of the unmarried or childless. The question is what teaches any of us to make a commitment and live within its claims.

Who Initiates the Adult?

Traditionally, adulthood did not depend upon finding the sufficiently “embodied” romantic partner capable of therapeutically activating you.

Institutions assigned adult roles. At their best, people learned responsibility by inhabiting them.

You married. You raised children. You worked. You served. You cared for aging parents. You belonged to a congregation, neighborhood, extended family, trade, community or nation.

Other people had claims upon you.

That last sentence matters.

Adulthood was not merely the acquisition of independence. It was the acquisition of obligation. A role could be imposed without producing maturity; still, answering to others gave people something that self-definition alone could not supply.

“What do I want?” remained a human question. Adulthood added another:

“What is required of me?”

Modern culture understandably associates obligation with coercion. We spent generations learning to escape unwanted duties. Chosen obligation never requires staying where you are abused or unsafe; a legitimate claim is not unlimited entitlement to another person.

There are obligations we consciously accept because something has become more important than our immediate freedom.

A child. A marriage. A sibling. A friendship. A craft practised for twenty years. A union. A sustained scientific project. A chosen household that holds when someone gets sick.

Something we cannot simply abandon the moment it becomes costly.

You become different because changing your mind no longer erases the claims your choice has created. Someone arranged their day around your promise. Someone is waiting for the help you offered. Their need exists beyond your enthusiasm for meeting it.

The Privatization of Initiation

When shared institutions lose their formative role, the hunger they answered remains. A market opens around it.

Adults are sold ways to become “embodied men,” “divine feminines,” “sovereign beings,” “healed inner children,” “integrated lovers,” and “awakened leaders.” Formation becomes something to seek, purchase and manage privately.

The substitutions become familiar:

The tribe becomes the retreat.

The elder becomes the coach.

Confession becomes therapy.

Ritual becomes breathwork.

Initiation becomes a workshop.

Religion becomes spirituality.

Community becomes a WhatsApp group.

And adulthood becomes another project of self-optimization.

Therapy can relieve suffering. A retreat can open a life. Neither benefit resolves the cultural problem created when people must purchase, organize and evaluate their own initiation.

The customer is invited to keep asking whether the experience serves them. Belonging asks what they will help sustain. Can a culture built around the first question teach us to live by the second?

Or does it teach us to remain in preparation?

I heal myself so that I may become ready to live.

Then I discover another wound. Another attachment pattern. Another energetic blockage. Another childhood imprint. Another relationship that “no longer serves my highest self.”

Another year passes.

The preparation for life becomes life itself.

Neverland

The “divine feminine” and “embodied masculine” give this postponement an erotic vocabulary.

The woman waits for a sufficiently initiated man. The man waits for a sufficiently feminine woman. Each is told that the properly embodied opposite will awaken something dormant within them.

A person arrives with a history, a temperament and demands of their own. The teaching supplies a role for them to fill. We can become exquisitely attentive to polarity while barely meeting the person.

What if the ideal itself keeps another person from ever being enough?

The spiritual-development world has its self-declared goddesses and eternal playboys, each enormously articulate about intimacy while every actual partner somehow falls short of the conditions under which commitment could begin.

Peter Pan acquires a therapist.

Wendy gets a podcast.

Neverland becomes very sophisticated.

The failure need not be hypocrisy. Two people can sincerely pursue these ideals. They simply become experts in why the other is not ready.

I have used these ideals in my own writing. That investment gives them no immunity.

Happiness Above All Else

What is all this work ultimately for?

If happiness becomes the highest good, every bond eventually has to justify itself by the quality of my experience. The partner, the work, the community, even the self remain on probation.

Does seeking happiness above all else lead to fulfilment, or to a life of seeking and never having enough?

Consumer culture promises completion through the next purchase. Spiritual self-development can preserve that promise while changing the merchandise: the next insight, the next release, the next version of me.

Even fulfilment can become a more respectable name for the same bargain. I will commit because commitment will finally make my life feel meaningful. Another person is still being asked to deliver a result.

Something worth loving can matter on a day it brings no happiness, no growth and no sense of becoming better. Joy belongs in a life without having to govern every decision. Another person’s need does not have to become an opportunity for my development before it deserves an answer.

Freedom Needs Form

None of this requires returning to violent marriages, surrendered autonomy, policed sexuality or religious control of private life. The choice is not oppression or atomization.

The deeper question is whether we can recover the initiatory function of commitment without restoring the coercion that historically accompanied it.

Can we choose obligation?

Can we construct families without making prisons of them?

Can communities demand something of us without consuming us?

Can adulthood involve sacrifice without glorifying suffering?

Can freedom mature beyond the mere preservation of options?

The point of freedom is not to remain unbound. It is to become capable of choosing what is worthy of binding us. Your preferred story about yourself no longer settles the question of what you owe.

Bounded Infinity imagines a finite form opening onto inexhaustible depth. The idea becomes demanding when that finite form is a promise that now limits us.

A grand vow can also keep us in fantasy. Declaring a commitment does not establish the capacity to carry it. Capacity can grow through participation, but other people should not have to organize their lives around abilities we only hope to acquire.

A promise takes form on the morning you would rather sleep, when the person you said you would help is waiting. You go because you said you would. The visit needs no breakthrough to justify it.

A society cannot outsource the whole work of belonging to people working on themselves. We need forms of life in which people are shaped partly by participation itself—not only by preparing themselves privately until they are finally ready to participate.

Twenty years of working on yourself can pass without letting another life matter enough to interrupt the project.

Does a spiritual path help us inhabit a life, or give us increasingly sophisticated reasons to keep preparing for another?

The Dragon cannot remain forever in the cave contemplating itself.

Eventually, it must enter the world.

  1. Andrew J. Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage”, Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (2004), 848–861. Cherlin traces changing marital expectations while noting that marriage retains considerable symbolic importance.↩︎

  2. OECD, Society at a Glance 2024 and its “Marriage and Divorce” chapter. These trends reflect economic conditions, changing preferences and family arrangements, among other factors. Cohabitation increasingly substitutes for marriage, especially in Nordic countries.↩︎

  3. OECD, “Trends in Social Connections: Are People Becoming More or Less Connected?”, Social Connections and Loneliness in OECD Countries (2025). Changing contact patterns do not establish that emancipation caused loneliness.↩︎