Missing male rites of passage

One of the things that we lost in the transition to modern progressive, urban culture was the male rite of passage.  My progressive mind initially dismissed these kinds of ceremonies.  I thought they were relics of a more primitive time that no longer had a place in modern life.  I don't know what a modern form of this would look like, but I think we're missing something by not having it.

The male rite of passage was a process by which tribe elders/men symbolically transitioned boys to men.  The specifics of the ceremony aren't important as they varied across cultures, but the common issue is that boys went through an excruciating trial and came out as men on the other side of the trial.  Very often, this process destroys the male's ego.

Interestingly, we replicated this behavior in some ways in modern society.  The military does this in boot camp.  Fraternities and their hazing processes do this..  Sports teams have an element of this (particularly football). In the modern examples, the process is similar in some ways to the old rites - break the boy down and rebuild him as a man.

In the modern world, we don't have that obvious demarcation point where a boy becomes a man.  The primary characteristic of a man is taking ownership over his life.  He acknowledges the control he has to make his life what he wants it to be.  He doesn't blame shift.  He doesn't defer.  He isn't lazy.  Men are not ego driven.  It's not a coincidence that we have more adult boys than we have ever had in the history of this planet.  What defines an adult boy?  He lives with his parents when he's 30.  He plays video games all day instead of engaging with life.  He meanders in his work life because no one has given him a life path. 

I believe the larger problem is comfort.  We got it in our minds that suffering is no longer a necessary part of life.  Wouldn't life be great if we could remove pain?  The answer is a resounding no.  We use discomfort as a sign for change.  If everything is good or great, where is the impetus for transformation into something better? 

A lion raised in a zoo cannot go back into the wild because it never learned to hunt on its own.  A lion in the wild went through hell trying and failing to catch prey, but it got better each time and built a skill set through adaptation where the lion became something different, something better.  It went from a cub dependent on its mother to a self sufficient animal that a lion raised in a zoo can never be. 

Men need discomfort and forced adaptation just like lions.  Becoming a man isn't a matter of chronology.  It's a series of learned and adapted behaviors that he either learns on his own or his tribe puts him through.  Maybe it's enough to absorb these traits from one's father. Maybe it's enough to learn these things on one's own.  But for a lot of boys and men, they are missing this transition.  Like lions, men need to learn how to hunt.  Men need to learn how to be the place where the buck stops.  When the chips are down, men don't look to others to solve their problems, men bear the load and go to work.  For millennia, men learned this in rites of passage.