The decision as to which world people will live in when they are born was made for them long before they were born. The modern world IS the reality of everyone's life, the non-civilised world is NOT. The first is lived practically and sensorially, the second is imagined.

If you had been born in a world where pure survival is what counts, you would have been born far away from any civilisation and your relatives would have taught you to live/survive in exactly that world. At no time would the people who live un-civilised (without modern means) be able to prepare their children for a modern world, as they would have no experience with it. They would be completely incapable of doing so. In the same way, modern people are completely incapable of doing the reverse. Exceptions prove the rule.

You can't have it both ways in perfection: Learning to exist in a modern technologised world and at the same time being taught the manual skills that enable you to hunt, fish and plant in a pre-civilised world. One or the other.

It is not you who decides what you are equipped and prepared with from the moment you are born, but your environment. By the time you are old enough to consider that there could be a non-civilised, technological way of existence, you will already be adept at coping in this modern, machine-dominated environment.

How to move around in it, how to calculate, write, read, operate these machines. This reality takes up your entire attention and lifetime.

The moment your knowledge of history, the countless films, or an encounter with real man tell you about a pre-civilised world, you see what you are incapable of. The strong, raw, violent man you wish you were but are not, he can inspire you and motivate you to want to learn some of his skills. Then you might learn to hunt, fish and take a maturity test on your own. But you will always want to return to the bosom of what you have known since childhood. If not, no one will ever hear from you again.

But the strong, raw, powerful man can also frustrate and annoy you because you would like to be like him but you are not and have done nothing to be like him. You disagree that you have spent your life learning how to cope in the modern world with its modern tools and your lack of consent sticks to you like an ugly stain.

The only chance to look forward to a reasonably satisfying existence would be to pass the very maturity test you want. If it is the desire to experience the only thing you accept in order to emerge purified and tested, that is exactly what you have to do: look for a test in which you could die.

If you don't do that, if you wish for the modern world to become a pre-civilised one, you become a nuisance to your fellow human beings. You tell them all the time how wrong they are living because you think YOU are living wrong. You spit at their feet about how stupid they all are, but actually you think you're stupid yourself.

For me, there are only two ways out of this misery (which actually is only one way):

• I consciously put myself in a life-threatening situation for which I am either prepared or unprepared and see whether I come out alive in the end
• I remember a situation that already involved this mortal danger and which I had previously wrongly judged should not have happened to me.

In my case, it was the birth of my child. It included all aspects of a maturity test:

• the realisation that I was facing a very important event
• the uncertainty about the actual course of the labour
• the intense agony without any ability to describe it
• the violence of those involved (four people forcibly pushed me onto the bed and onto my belly)
• the unadulterated fear of death (for myself and my baby)
• no possibility whatsoever of escaping from the situation

If a man does not also create a reality situation for himself that provides him with all aspects of a maturity test, which he accepts in order to have experienced himself as ‘tested and passed’, he is not a man. Then he is a boy. Women have it easier because they can choose pregnancy and childbirth and then they simply have no way of escaping this test (unless they are foolish enough to have a planned caesarean section). What a man can do, well, that's up to him.