It seems to me that for self formation to happen, for self organization of any sort to happen, you have to have a perceptual space for it. It has to have a place relatively free of conflicting winds: a cove, a valley, a shelter.
Most children thrust into our modern world are ill-equipped for it. Under the thrall of delusional doctrines like the Self Esteem movement, parents more or less let their children parent themselves. Predictably, they do poorly at it. Their sense of self and self control is more like a goo than any sort of perceivable structure.
When they try to negotiate our culture, if they are unable to keep their religious moorings, they get lost. Nobody anywhere is saying anything that makes much sense, if you drill down far enough. The environmentalists, when you get to the core of the movement, seemingly want the extinction of humanity; at a minimum they find it hard to justify our existence. The socialists want generalized comfort, but have nothing to say about any deeper purpose of life. Meaning is pain transformation, and has no place if the goal was to eliminate pain in the first place. It is out of place, awkward. People who still believe things without reference to the prevailing winds look insane to the fully indoctrinated/acculturated.
These things I say often, but because every time I see a little further. As I have recently been arguing the question is not how meaning forms, but what the factors are that prevent the natural tendency among living, sentient creatures towards order from more fully expressing itself.
Why Kurt Cobain? Why Nine Inch Nails? Where is that failure? Is it simply overindulgence expressing itself by raging against boundaries that were never presented? Somewhat, but I think it goes deeper than that.
What is Dungeons and Dragons, or World of Warcraft, but a parallel world in which some sort of order exists, and whose future can be somewhat predicted.
Allan Ginsberg was not lazy. He was not apathetic. He simply was not able to form meaning WITHIN the boundaries of the place, the space, he inhabited.
Logically, the task is then building new spaces, congenial to new growths.
This is highly abstract, but that is where I normally begin. Hopefully this basic point is useful to someone.