Who Forms Us Now

Information Is Everywhere. Formation Is Not

We are living in the most informed society in human history. Nearly every fact, book, lecture, and scientific paper sits within reach, and artificial intelligence is making knowledge more abundant still.

Yet wisdom does not seem to be keeping pace. If anything, the distance between what we know and how we behave is widening.

Our problem is no longer a lack of information. It is a lack of formation. Information teaches us what is true. Formation shapes who we become. We have become extraordinarily good at the first while paying less and less attention to the second.

How does a person become someone who can be trusted with real responsibility? Not through a longer rulebook, but through the slow cultivation of judgment. The difficulty is that formation rarely feels like formation while it is happening. It looks like work, hardship, or an ordinary season of life. Only later do we realize something in us changed there.

Learning to Be Counted On

Character is formed by carrying real responsibilities. Through routines and by standing shoulder to shoulder with people who quietly model what good looks like.

When people hear McDonald’s, they think hamburgers. I think responsibility.

When a teenager starts working there, they discover a training system, a team, and a set of standards. Very quickly they learn that the whole operation depends on people showing up for one another. If they don’t come to work, their colleagues cannot do their jobs.

That is where judgment begins. You cannot hand a nineteen-year-old a country to run. You can hand them a fry station. If they fall behind, customers wait longer, teammates get frustrated, and the restaurant feels it. The consequences are real but survivable. That is how discernment develops.

Over the years I have watched hundreds of young people walk through those doors uncertain of themselves. Some were lost. Some were angry. Many had no real sense of where their lives were heading. Then something began to change. They learned to show up. They earned trust, then greater responsibility. Some went on to own restaurants. Others built careers somewhere else entirely. Many built strong families and meaningful lives. None of it came from a lecture or a test. It happened because someone expected something real of them.

Confidence grows not because someone tells you that you are capable, but because someone trusts you with something that proves you are.

My time in the Marines taught me the same lesson at greater depth. Working alongside people you do not choose. Living simply. Sharing responsibility. Contributing rather than consuming. Those experiences reveal that we are capable of more than we imagined, and that we can keep going when circumstances become genuinely difficult. It is why I believe so deeply in the idea of a national service year.

When the Rules Collide

Most of life’s hardest decisions are not battles between good and evil. The real difficulty lies in choosing between two goods. Honesty against loyalty. Compassion against fairness. The welfare of one person against the long-term health of an entire organization. No handbook resolves those moments, because each side has a legitimate claim, and whatever you choose costs you something you also value.

Our response has been to write more rules. Rules are a form of stored wisdom, and they protect us from obvious mistakes. But eventually life presents situations where two good rules point in different directions. At that moment, no manual can decide for you. You are left with the person you have become.

Judgment cannot grow out of certainty. It develops by wrestling with uncertainty, admitting you do not know the perfect answer, and making the best decision you can anyway.

I have spent much of my career in that territory, because the problems I cared about did not come with clean answers, whether reducing antibiotics in the food supply or turning used fryer oil into fuel for delivery trucks. None of it came from a procedure manual. It came from refusing the binary I was handed and looking for a third way.

Following rules well and having good judgment are not the same thing. I have worked with people who honored every rule perfectly and faltered the instant reality shifted, and with people of remarkable intuition who could not hold themselves to a consistent standard. What you want is the person who knows the rules well enough to recognize when they have reached their limits.

Rules and judgment are not opponents. When you are young, you need rules, apprenticeship, and people worth imitating. But eventually the map runs out. As former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca observed, “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” There is no shortcut.

The Four Conditions That Shape Us

Character and judgment are not accidents. They grow under particular conditions. Four matter more than almost any others.

The first is responsibility.

Being trusted with something real. Real consequences, real people, real accountability, not a simulation of any of it. We often think we help people by protecting them from responsibility. We have it backwards. Trusting people is how confidence grows. Give a child something real to be responsible for and watch them rise to meet it.

The second is proximity. Compassion weakens with distance. The closer we are to the human consequences of our decisions, the more naturally our conscience comes alive. The cruelty that has become commonplace online is rarely what you witness between two people standing face to face, even when they profoundly disagree.

The third is belonging. We become like the people we respect. Every human being longs to belong somewhere. That influence can be deeply constructive or profoundly destructive, which is precisely why choosing your people matters so much.

The fourth, and perhaps the deepest, is purpose.

The settled commitment that something matters enough to give yourself to it. As David Brooks has written, the goal is to lose yourself in something larger than yourself. Few things shape people more deeply.

Preserve the Function, Improve the Form

For much of history, the institutions that organized everyday life also formed character. Families, congregations, workplaces, and neighborhoods did not simply hold society together. They shaped the people within them. Part of how they did this was by handing people obligations they did not choose. You did not choose your family, or the difficult customer, or most of what life set in front of you. Learning to serve people you did not choose may be one of the deepest forms of moral development there is. It is what a sense of duty once demanded.

Faith did much of this work as well. Not because everyone agreed on doctrine, but because it created rhythms of reflection, communities of accountability, and regular reminders that life was about more than the self. Those rhythms cannot be replaced by an algorithm.

None of this is nostalgia. The past was not better; it was harder, and those same institutions excluded many people. Women, minorities, anyone who believed differently or loved differently or simply did not fit. No one should want the old forms back as they were. But something real was lost along the way. They asked something of people and held them to a standard.

So let’s preserve the function and improve the form. Keep what those institutions asked of us. Leave behind who they shut out.

Who Forms Us Now?

If we are not going to rebuild the old institutions, we have to ask a harder question. Who or what forms us now?

For much of history, formation happened almost by default. You lived in the same town for most of your life. You worked somewhere for decades. People knew you, which meant they knew who you were becoming. When someone began to drift, there was usually a neighbor, an aunt, a teacher, or a coach who would quietly say, this is not the person I know.

Almost every condition that made that possible has thinned out. We change jobs, cities, and relationships far more often, and much of life now happens under handles not even attached to our names. Those changes brought real freedoms, but they came at a cost. An algorithm knows your preferences. A community knows your story. It remembers who you were and holds some sense of who you might become. That is one of the quiet things those places were always doing, and one of the hardest to replace.

They also gave us proximity to people further along than we were. As former university president and U.S. Senator Ben Sasse has observed, modern life sorts us into age bubbles. Children spend their days almost exclusively with children, adults with adults. We have gained efficiency and lost one of the oldest ways human beings ever learned judgment: simply watching older people live.

No Single Institution Is Enough

A company can teach a great deal. Responsibility, excellence, accountability, teamwork, service. These are real, and they form people. But an employer cannot offer unconditional love, and it should not pretend to. A workplace is not a family. It is closer to a team, and a team, unlike a family, replaces the person who cannot do the job. That difference matters. You do not do that to a brother or a sister, however much you might occasionally want to.

The answer, then, is not to ask one institution to do everything. It is to ask every institution to do its part.

Families. Schools. Faith communities. Sports teams. Military service. Businesses. Neighborhoods.

No single institution can form a person. Together, they can.

Every generation inherits more power than the one before it. The question is whether it also inherits better judgment. If judgment must be formed, then the work ahead is to build places, real communities organized around shared purpose, where people learn, work, serve, fail, and recover together. You do not teach any of this. You do it by doing.

The defining question of our time may not be, What do people believe? It may be the older and more important question:

How are people formed?

Your Turn

What’s one experience that formed the person you are today?

This essay is paired with a song I wrote called “Who Shapes Us Now?” Both explore the same question: how do we become the people we are? The song reflects on the people, experiences, and small moments that shape us, often without us realizing it. And it asks us to consider not only who shaped us, but who we may be shaping in return.