Shanty Men and The Loss of Cultural Education

“Shanty man, oh shanty man!
Who’s got a berth for a shanty man?”
Shanty Man by The Fisherman’s Friends

I was in a Dollar General browsing hard candies, when I overheard two male workers in their mid-20s watching a YouTube clip of a videogame cutscene. The scene was of a thunderous sea shanty sung by a masculine choir, with a thumping war drum as the beat.   With the phone propped on some boxes, the two men loaded products from a rolling cart onto the shelves. "Dude imagine how it must have felt to work on a ship," said one clerk. The other, without stopping said "I wish I could do something like that. It’s like being part of something bigger I guess."

The shantyman was once a fixture on sailing ships, his voice rising above the creak of timbers and the crash of waves. Sailing songs were not mere entertainment but a necessity. These chants kept time for hauling ropes, raising sails, and moving heavy cargo. A ship was a machine of men, powered by muscle and rhythm. Without synchronization, the work became inefficient, even dangerous.

Modern reenactment of a shantyman - notice the age of participants.

Yet the shantyman served as more than a mortal metronome. He was a mentor. The young sailor, green and untested, learned not only the motions of seamanship but the culture of the sea. Here, on deck, surrounded by men who had weathered storms and doldrums alike, he absorbed the tacit knowledge of the trade. Most importantly he learned how to hold himself amongst his shipmates. The ship was a closed world, but it was a world with structure, hierarchy, and initiation. A boy became a man through work, through camaraderie, through shared hardship. And the shantyman stood at the center of it, a voice tying generations together. 

Now, in a variety of professions, that voice has gone silent.

“Send the ships from dock to dock
While sat upon our arses in an office block.”

Modern work has stripped labor of all ancillary skill education. Productivity optimization strategies have determined there is no time for workplace singing. Any moment not spent scanning, lifting, typing, or in meetings is a moment wasted. Where once work imparted skills beyond itself such as provisioning, craftsmanship, or mediation it is now an exercise in maximization. There is no auxiliary skill gain beyond mandatory compliance training or approved professional education, no tacit lessons learned by watching older workers. A retail store cashier isn't expected to improve at their job; in fact, the employer would prefer they didn't. A customer service rep in an office is not expected to grow beyond their script. Work is not about becoming competent or self-sufficient; it is about performing a motion until it can be automated or outsourced. 

And so, office and retail work have taken on a sterilized, domesticated quality. There is no hierarchy of experience, no physical initiation, no trials to prove oneself. Bonds between men are actively discouraged, replaced with HR directives and quarterly team-building exercises that attempt to manufacture camaraderie without any of the friction or hardship that makes it real. A hundred employees sit at desks, each one replaceable, each one silent, each one isolated. There is no shantyman, no cook, no captain to pass down traditions or skills.

This kind of cultural knowledge has no immediate economic value, but the long-term consequences of its loss are not easily understood. It may even be preferable to companies that the working population remains fragmented. An atomized worker does not waste time talking to coworkers. At home, his free time is predictable. He watches Netflix, scrolls through his phone, and orders DoorDash. His habits, both at work and in leisure, are easily monitored, easily monetized.

“Floating computers dressed up as a ship.
Skippered and crewed by a microchip.”

If the Industrial Revolution made work impersonal, automation has made it isolating. Ships still sail, factories still produce, and the lights remain on, but the hands that built them have been reduced to a dwindling few. Older workers, trained in the last era of skilled labor, remain out of necessity; there are not enough young men with experience to replace them. This has created an unprecedented generational gap: young men are locked out, with few entry points into trades and no paths into the world of gritty skilled workers, where much cultural knowledge is gained.

This effect has been magnified by the loss of third spaces and youth training programs. In my youth, I was an active member of the Boy Scouts of America. Many lessons were learned, often in ways that would now lead to workplace termination. I recall a time when I came to blows with an older boy, later sent to military school, after I declined to give up my chair for him. Today, my memory of him is positive despite this incident. Another time, after the boys from each troop had gone to the commissary, a depot where each troop picked up a milk crate of ingredients to be cooked at camp, there was an equally physical event. One troop had not been issued any cheese powder for their mac and cheese. Rather than hike a mile or two back to the commissary, these young boys decided to steal it from another troop of older scouts. I can assure you many beatings were laid down over that cheese powder, and a valuable life lesson was learned.

Boyscout membership peaked in 1972 at around 4.75M active members, after the pandemic the number is less than 1M, despite now allowing girls to join.

In the past, a factory floor, a workshop, or a ship was a place of cultural inheritance. The young learned from the old, and the old passed down more than technique. They passed down the very structure of a working life. Today, that cycle has been severed. Automation has allowed the legacy industries to survive without replenishing their ranks. The young men who might have once become machinists, deckhands, or toolmakers are left without direction. They drift into gig work, into retail, into jobs that require nothing and teach nothing. They sit in Dollar General watching videos of men singing work songs, yearning for something they have never experienced, something they cannot name.

“Was it a ghost from a distant past?
Or just a breeze in the radar mast?”

It is easy to dismiss this as nostalgia, but it is deeper than that. The question, “How often do you think about Rome?” became a meme for a reason. It reveals something unspoken: the young, feel an absence of bonding in their work. They sense that they were meant to be part of something older, something with cultural weight. The two men in the Dollar General weren’t just watching a video; they were mourning a lack of work culture, that for the circumstances of their birth, they never could have had. 

Civilization has spent thousands of years refining the process of turning boys into men through work, through mentorship, through shared struggle. The Roman legion, the medieval guild, the ship’s crew, the factory floor; all functioned as both productive labor and male social structure. When these institutions collapsed, they left a void. That void has not been filled. 

And so, many grasp at ghosts. They imagine themselves on Roman battlefields. They picture themselves hauling ropes on a ship. They listen to sea shanties on YouTube and wish, for just a moment, that they were somewhere or sometime else.