Young Men's Wellbeing

The Pressure to Have It All Figured Out

There’s an unspoken expectation that hits young men sometime around their late teens: you should know what you’re doing by now. You should have a career plan, a direction, a purpose. You should be confident, capable, and moving forward. And if you’re not? Well, something must be wrong with you.

This pressure comes from everywhere — family, school, social media, the culture at large. And it’s amplified by the fact that everyone else seems to be nailing it. Your mate just landed a graduate role. Someone from school is posting gym selfies and motivational quotes. Your cousin’s travelling the world. Meanwhile, you’re lying in bed at 2pm on a Wednesday wondering what the point of any of it is.

Here’s what nobody tells you: almost every young man feels this way at some point. The ones who look like they’ve got it together? A lot of them are faking it too. The highlight reel you see online bears almost no resemblance to what’s actually going on behind the screen.

At CFMF, we work with young men who are navigating exactly this. Some are dealing with specific challenges — anxiety, depression, family breakdown, substance use. But many are just… stuck. They’re not in crisis, but they’re not thriving either. They’re drifting, and they don’t know how to stop.

The first thing we want you to know is: there’s nothing wrong with you. What you’re experiencing isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a sign that you’re a young man living in a culture that’s forgotten how to initiate its boys into manhood. You’re being asked to figure out something that previous generations had help with — and that help was called initiation.

What’s Missing: Initiation and Mentorship

For most of human history, young men didn’t have to figure out their identity alone. They had elders — men who’d been through it before — who walked alongside them, challenged them, and at a certain point, initiated them into manhood through a deliberate, ritualised process.

That process is largely gone from modern Western culture. We’ve replaced it with… not much. Maybe a twenty-first birthday party. Maybe the end of high school. Maybe nothing at all. And so young men are left to cobble together their sense of manhood from whatever’s available: social media influencers, pornography, video games, alcohol, or the hyper-competitive hustle culture that tells them their worth is measured by their output.

None of these are adequate substitutes for what initiation provides: a genuine experience of being seen, tested, and welcomed into the community of men by men who’ve earned the right to guide.

That’s exactly what Forged was created to offer. Since 2019, Forged has taken young men into the Australian bush for five days — away from screens, away from the noise, away from the expectations — and guided them through a process that helps them answer the questions every young man carries: Who am I? What do I stand for? Where am I going? And who’s walking with me?

Forged isn’t about toughening you up. It’s about helping you become more fully yourself — the version of you that exists underneath the performance, the comparison, and the numbness. The men who facilitate Forged have been through their own rite of passage. They’re not lecturers or drill sergeants — they’re mentors who remember what it’s like to be where you are.

Beyond the Screen: Building Real Connection

Let’s talk about loneliness, because it’s the elephant in the room for a generation of young men.

Studies consistently show that young men today have fewer close friendships than any previous generation. They’re more connected digitally and more isolated relationally. They might have hundreds of followers and not a single person they’d call at 3am. They might game online with a crew every night but never talk about anything real.

This isn’t because young men don’t want connection. It’s because they’ve never been shown how to create it. The skills of honest communication — being vulnerable, listening without fixing, sitting with discomfort, asking for help — these aren’t taught in schools, and they’re certainly not modelled on social media.

Our circle groups are designed to fill that gap. A circle is a small group of men who meet regularly — usually fortnightly — and practise being honest with each other. The structure is simple: one person speaks, the rest listen. No advice. No cross-talk. No fixing. Just presence.

It sounds almost laughably simple, and a lot of young men are sceptical before their first circle. But the feedback is overwhelmingly the same: “I’ve never had anything like this.” “I didn’t know other blokes felt this way.” “This is the first time I’ve been heard.”

That experience of genuine connection — real, face-to-face, no-filter connection — is transformative. It doesn’t just feel good in the moment. It rewires something. It gives you a template for what honest relationships can look like, and once you’ve experienced it, you start wanting more of it in every area of your life.

If you’re a young man reading this and something’s stirring — even if you can’t name it — that’s enough. You don’t need a diagnosis, a crisis, or a perfect explanation of what’s going on. You just need to show up. We’ll take it from there.