When I was a senior in high school back in the late 80's, one of my friends and I were filling up my car at the local gas station and we observed a man with a hunter green Ford Ranger filling up his truck. He was a solid representative of a type that's common in my county. I don't have any real memory of that incident from almost 40 years ago. Instead, the image I can conjure of that scene is of an archetypal character. Skinny, average build and height, work boots, jeans, flannel shirt, work jacket, trucker cap, mustache probably in his mid to late 40's.
We joked about him for a while after we drove off because a guy who drove a Ford Ranger back then was a specific type--no nonsense working man. The guy at the gas station was essentially an embodiment of a Ranger. Those 1980's through early 2000's Rangers are shockingly basic compared to any new car or truck today. They often had crank windows, a manual transmission, maybe no A/C. You bought one if you needed a truck for specific chores, but didn't have sufficient money, or the desire to go into debt on an F-150.
Mulling over that memory brings to mind the concept of "classes" from Dungeons and Dragons, or Biology. The D&D concept is a player character is a profession. There's even a ranger class modeled on the Aragorn character from The Lord of The Rings. So the character wakes up in the morning as a Ranger and is one all day long. In fact, there's penalties for deviating from type in the form of loss of experience points.
Is real life like that? I'd say not today. In fact, our system is setup so most people are artificially maintained in an undifferentiated state for decades and are dogged by the question of "what am I?" Often that leads to the "mid-life crisis" scenario.
I don't think the man-type maps well to a profession in most cases. There are some D&D class-like professions today, like a farmer, cop, fireman, where the man is his profession 24/7. However, I think most "professional jobs" like engineer, or lawyer or even a doctor really don't map directly to the man-type. The "professional" is just a "worker"--a cog in the pyramid machine.
I think that's one of the problems of life, since the professional types are indistinct and separate from a person's true calling, they are basically a distraction and a thing to be endured, as is school. It's like being in a prison for 40 years. It's a byproduct of the pyramid system. Anyway, I'll get back to that in a future post.
The true "man-type" is obscured by that problem. I think the vast majority of people only arrive at their "man-type" when they're fully established. For many men, that doesn't really happen until the age of 40 years. It's effectively arrived at via a sorting process, so while a 14 year old might "want to be" a thing as an adult, they don't really know all that entails, and probably only get there through trial and error. A 14 year old boy, in most cases, is just in a broad category, then over decades might end up in a more D&D class-like scenario.
Most of the males in my school days fell into two broad categories; basically urban people (or professional class parent families) and country people (working class, or farming families).
There were only a handful of boys in my school that were conscious of the type they wanted to be and emulated it. One kid I knew named Eugene was a farmer's son and clearly wanted to be a farmer so he acted like a farmer as a kid. There were a handful of "rich kids" who were also a specific type at a young age.
Most, though, like me and social circle, were only a type in potentia. Then we went through a process of differentiation by trial and error over subsequent decades. This dividing-in-categories process would winnow down the whole population of men into several classes. By the time a man is in his 40's or 50's, his type is reflected in his neighborhood and home and stuff he owns. I think many, probably most, remain an indistinct type, though.
My neighborhood is a freakish example of sorting into types, and in our case, types-by-location. The people who live here are like animals with specific habitat requirements that ended up in an ideal ecological niche. For example, one of my neighbors was a pro mountain biker in the 1990s. Back then I was road racing bicycles and mulling over the concept of pursuing it "full time" or being a road-cycling bum. His job title is basically the same as mine. The list goes on.
What are "the classes" to begin with, that is, the real world equivalents of the D&D classes? I think the starting point would be the subset of primitive jobs, which derive from the needs of life back in the earliest human settlements, or tribal life thousands of years ago. I'll try to break that down in the next post.
