Prediction · Rituals and Traditions ·
Nobody hands you the keys
Our rites of passage into adulthood were built out of things we came to own: the first car, the first apartment, the first door that was ours. In a world where you own nothing, those doors are gone. The crossing still has to happen, so we will have to build new doors on purpose.
The examiner signs the sheet without looking up. Your father hands you the keys he has carried for years and steps back from the car. You drive out of the lot alone with the windows down, and for the first time in your life no adult knows exactly where you are.
The shape of a crossing
In 1909 the French folklorist Arnold van Gennep compared rites of passage across a great many societies and found the same three steps nearly everywhere. First, separation: you are taken out of your old place. Then a threshold, a time in between, when you are no longer what you were and not yet what you will be. Then incorporation: you come back with a new standing, and everyone treats you differently from that day on. He called the middle step liminal, from the Latin limen, threshold, because so many of the rites he studied involved stepping across an actual doorway.
So here is the principle. A rite of passage needs a door: a real change of standing, made visible by something you can hold or cross. For most of the modern world those doors were made of property. The first car took you out of the back seat, put you through the threshold of the permit and the road test, and brought you back with keys. Moving out took you out of your parents’ house, put you through a bare apartment and a first lease, and brought you back with a door of your own.
The sentence that pushed a generation out that door was “my house, my rules.” It was an argument about ownership. Whoever held the deed made the rules, and the only way to make your own was to hold your own.
The first-car rite is younger than it feels. The driving test did not become universal in the United States until 1959. Rites are invented, and they fade. That is the hopeful part of this piece.
A child who has always been driven
Now take the objects away. A child born into the bundle has ridden in robotaxis since his car seat. At eight the car takes him to school alone. At twelve it takes him across town to a friend’s. At sixteen nothing happens, because nothing needs to; the car comes the way it always came. His freedom of movement did not arrive through a door. It arrived through a dial, turned up one notch at a time on a settings screen.
Home works the same way. If his family is on the Living tier, the place he grows up is not his parents’ property. It is a home the operator provides on a membership his parents hold. When he wants a place of his own, he does not need a deposit, a cosigner, secondhand furniture and a friend with a truck. He needs his own line on a plan and a job. In this model no one in the workforce earns less than $36,000 a year, by law, which is exactly the price of Whole Life, so the first paycheck pays for a whole life of his own. The studio is furnished, and the move is a ride. “My house, my rules” has nothing to stand on, because it was never anyone’s house. The rules were always the terms.
Freedom used to arrive through a door. In the bundle it arrives through a dial, and a dial has no ceremony.
What the dial costs
The loss is not the car. It is the moment. Van Gennep’s deeper point was that a crossing does social work: it tells the person, and everyone around them, that something has changed and that how they are treated must change with it. A dial gives you all of the freedom and none of the announcement. A young person can become fully independent without anyone, including themselves, ever marking the day.
A society that loses its thresholds does not stop growing up. It stops noticing when it has. And people who are never given a crossing tend to manufacture one, often through risk.
So the old doors close, and the work is to build new ones. This time we get to build them around what matters. The old rites marked possession: you have a car, you have a lease. The new ones can mark responsibility: you hold something that matters, and other people can count on you to hold it.
Nothing changes about the car. It arrives at seven-forty, the way it always has. But that night his AI asks him something it has never asked before: “Your parents’ access to me ends at midnight. Is there anything you want to keep sharing with them?” He sits on the edge of his bed for a long time before he answers.
Seven predictions
The AI handover becomes the new first car.
The day a young person’s AI stops answering to their parents and answers only to them will be the defining threshold of adolescence, because that AI holds their life. Families will mark it with a date, a conversation and a dinner.
The first bill in your name becomes the new first apartment.
Moving out becomes a line on a plan rather than a truck and a lease. The rite will form around the day a young person takes over their own tier and pays for it from their own work.
“My house, my rules” becomes “our agreement.”
With no deed to stand on, authority at home moves from property to consent. Families will write their terms down, and parents will keep their authority the way good managers keep theirs: by earning it.
Families will put ceremony back on the dial.
The first solo ride, the first city crossed alone, the first night away will be marked on purpose, because no single object marks them anymore.
Adding someone to your plan becomes the new moving in together.
Joining tiers will carry the weight that signing a joint lease or buying a first house together used to carry, and it will gather a ceremony of its own. A plan built for two costs no less than two plans; it simply holds more.
The family plan replaces the baby shower.
Family plans will not discount; they will add. Prenatal care, diapers, a nanny, all bundled in, so the bundle itself rewards coupling and children. The old ritual of gearing up for a baby, the registry, the shower, the crib assembled at midnight, gives way to a single upgrade. Families will still gather, but the gift becomes time and help, not gear.
Driving becomes what horseback riding became.
When cars arrived, riding moved from necessity to craft, sport and tradition. Driving will follow: learned on purpose, at a track or on a back road, as a skill and a coming-of-age weekend rather than a requirement. Some families will still give a first car, as an heirloom choice rather than a default.
Where I stand
I tell my students to rent rather than buy and to ride rather than own a car. When I say it, I am asking them to skip two of the oldest rites of American adulthood on purpose. So I give them a different door: let your first employer be your first customer. The first invoice you send for a finished piece of work is a crossing. Before it, you were someone who needed a job. After it, you are someone a business pays. It has all three of van Gennep’s steps, and it has nothing to do with owning anything. That is the argument of First Customer, and I think it is the shape of the rites to come.
The claim ledger
- Already true
- Rites of passage are invented and they fade; the driving test only became universal in the United States in 1959, and teenagers are already less eager to get a license than their parents were. Driverless rides are open to the public. Parents already manage a child’s phone and apps through settings that loosen with age.
- What has to happen
- Robotaxis allowed to carry children on their own. Personal AI with a real handover from parent to child. A wage floor high enough to cover a whole tier. Bundles that let a young person hold an account in their own name. And families willing to mark the new crossings on purpose.
- Where I am probably wrong
- On whether we will design new rites at all. Rites usually grow out of scarcity and struggle, not intention. If nothing replaces the old doors, a generation will slide into adulthood without anyone telling them they arrived, and some will go looking for a door the dangerous way. The bundle can give a young person everything except the moment, and the moment is the one thing a family has to supply.
Back to the lot behind the DMV. The keys were never really the point. The point was your father stepping back from the car. That still has to happen. It just will not come with keys.
Someone still has to step back.
Background
- Rite of passage, on Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage, 1909.
- Liminality, from the Latin limen, threshold.
- Driver’s licenses in the United States, on the history of licensing and testing.
- When was the first U.S. driver’s license issued?, History.
- John Rector, You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy.
- John Rector, What Ownership Was Holding.
- John Rector, First Customer.
- John Rector, Letting Go.
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