DROPPING OUT: FLIGHT OR FULFILLMENT?
Like John Koffend, many men in their middle years feel cheated when they discover that the ideals drilled into them—obedience, self-denial, and diligent work—have failed to deliver substantial rewards. Those who are unable to transcend their feeling of having been exploited tend to view themselves as victims, undercutting their own ability to make new choices. Anxious to flee, they grab at anything that promises release from their despair. Some drown their sorrows with traditional pain-killers like alcohol or drugs. Some deny their sorrows by plunging into promiscuous sex or compulsive overwork. Others are seduced by the siren song of youth.
Although our culture’s neurotic obsession with youth is not new, keeping people young has now become big business: Men are being wooed, along with women, to tint or transplant their hair, consume cosmetics, and banish sags with surgical uplifts. But the American male is no longer satisfied simply to look young. Today he yearns to copy the young as well—their values, attitudes, and lifestyle.
This topsy-turvy trend reached its peak in the late 1960s, a time of collusion between youthful trend-setters and a generation of older men who had never played. Thus the counterculture at its height—with the flower children and the Monterey Pop Festival—charmed many middle-aged Americans with its messianic idealism, sensual freedom, and gentle cry of love. Enchanted by the chance to enjoy an adolescence they had been denied, adults across the country fell in line behind these pubescent pipers. Grown-up men grew sideburns, switched to bell-bottoms and mod ties, tuned in to the rock beat—and turned on with marijuana.
By 1970 much of the mystique of the youth movement had been destroyed. Heads had been busted in Chicago and bullets fired at Kent State. Woodstock had disintegrated into Altamont, heroin had taken its toll, and the Manson murders had brought the show to a bloody climax. The rock culture had turned into the dope culture, and the nation knew that the young were not the saviors they once seemed to be.
Despite this collapse, however, the beguiling ways of the young continue to entice aging males who feel overburdened and underappreciated. Some, having watched their own adolescent children sidestep responsibilities, become irresistibly attracted by the promises of carefree sexuality and hedonistic revolt that a youthful lifestyle seems to offer. This attraction is particularly strong among men who feel that their own life has been too work-oriented and constricted. Their disillusionment often leads to the relentless pursuit of pleasure and a desperate attempt to identify with the youth cult.
Some men straddle the fence by becoming weekend dropouts—dressing in jeans, smoking pot, and frolicking with young swingers. Others attempt a modern-day version of Gauguin’s flight, rejecting establishment standards in favor of a radically different way of life. Rather than sail to the South Seas, however, these men can join the younger generation by taking off for less-distant retreats like New Mexico, Oregon, Colorado, and Southern California—a choice that usually ineludes experimenting with communal living, drugs, and new forms of sexual freedom.
Men who drop out do so for many different reasons, some of which have nothing to do with recapturing their youth. In some cases their flight is motivated by fear and despair. In other cases it is inspired by a genuine search for a better, more human way of life.
Recently, for example, numerous magazine and newspaper articles have documented the fact that a growing number of affluent Americans are quitting the corporate world not for the sake of a new job, but for an entirely different lifestyle. Successful business executives and skilled professionals, they have all changed their minds about what they want and how to get it. At mid-life they have decided that their careers were actually of little consequence. “I discovered I had been chasing a phantasmagorical carrot all those years,” said one executive.
In most cases these men have given up city living or suburban commuting for a simpler, more independent existence closer to nature. Typically the discontent accumulated slowly before the final decision was made. And very often their new choice—a farm, a ski lodge, or a boat—was the realization of an old dream. Some felt a strong desire to work with their hands, like the man who grows cranberries in Wisconsin; or the one who works as a toolmaker on a hundred-acre farm in Colorado, where he also raises animals, and hunts and fishes in his spare time.
Occasionally a profoundly moving experience that triggers a total re-examination of values inspires a man to turn his back on society. John Koehne, for example, is a former CIA official whose life was transformed at the age of forty-six by an experience in an encounter group. Until then he had led a conventional life: private schools, Yale, the Army, steady promotions at the CIA, and a fifty-thousand-dollar suburban home with his wife and three children. But when his agency sent him to a four-day encounter group, he returned “so damned different” that his wife wondered if they could continue living together. Suddenly he began opening up to himself and others, a complete reversal of his old ways. “This was just the opposite of the way I had been living for forty years,” he says. “There was no possibility of ever going back.”
The following summer, Koehne persuaded his wife to participate in some encounter groups with him, and she too began to change. His transformation was further accelerated by rebelling teen-agers, who each, in turn, dropped out of boarding school. “I had to stop and look and begin to understand what was happening,” says Koehne. “I wasn’t the sort of parent who said, ‘You’re going to have my values or get out.’ And as soon as I tried to understand the kids, questions began to come up about myself.”18 As a result of these new forces brewing, Koehne finally quit his job at the CIA a year and a half later.
“It wasn’t right for me,” he decided. “I just couldn’t put my needs first there, not in the selfish sense but in the human one. I was putting the institution and the job first. It was a conflict of values—between the new set emerging for me and the existing set that society wants to impose.”
After leaving his job, Koehne and his wife spent ten months traveling in a camper truck, their new way of life as. yet undefined. With no demands on his time, he found at first that he missed a “sense of obligation and compulsion.” Gradually, however, he evolved a plan to establish a “growth center” based on the principles of yoga. After starting such a center in northern California, and living there for five years, John and his wife, Ana, have recently founded the Dharma Center in Virginia.
How well such middle-aged dropouts fare when they reverse gears and try to acclimate themselves to a totally new way of life varies greatly. In some cases the experiment fails, and a man eventually returns to his old patterns, dejected and disappointed. In other cases the man who makes radical alterations achieves genuine satisfaction and happiness.
Why the difference? Why do some men sink when they make multiple life changes, while others triumph? Most social scientists agree that a man’s capacity for coping with dramatic change depends in part on factors related to his past history, ego strength, and flexibility. It also depends on how realistically he has chosen, in terms of expectations as well as self-awareness.
“When a man in his middle years starts asking, ‘Can I really be that other person I always thought I could?’” says Dr. Lawrence J. Hatterer, a Manhattan psychiatrist, “some men just grab life by the balls and say, ‘Of course! Why not?’ They are the ones who have the vigor and confidence and aggressivety to start entirely new lives for themselves. But as a rule, if a man tries to change his love life and his work life and his home life and his money life—if he zonks himself with all those at once—let’s face it, he’s got to go under. Often it’s the less mature or less aware person who thinks he’s capable of altering all these things suddenly.”
Dr. Harry Levinson warns that it is naive for a man to think he can change himself into anything he wants, or literally start over from scratch at mid-life. “We cannot disregard our life history as if it didn’t exist,” he cautions. “Mid-life changes are outgrowths of what a man has always been. They are new directions.” An excessively optimistic view of how much a man can change his life reflects an element of irrationality, which in turn usually veils excessive discontent with himself, says Levinson. A man will then seek to change his circumstances compulsively as part of a frantic effort to like himself better.
Thus when a man in his middle years decides to burst constraining bonds for the sake of a dream, the decisive issue is self-awareness: Whether or not he dares confront himself honestly and discard illusions about who he is. The man who runs away to avoid this self-confrontation will discover that his geographical move is but a mirage.
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