A Therapist on The Long Walk’s Stebbins Scene
There is a scene in The Long Walk 2025 (Francis Lawrence’s adaptation) in which a dying boy tells the two friends walking beside him what he would have wished for if he had won. Not money. Not escape. He wanted to be invited into his father’s home. For tea.
I turned the film off there. I don’t know how it ends, and I haven’t gone back to find out. I work with loss for a living, and that scene still closed the distance between fiction and life faster than I was prepared for. I want to try to explain why, because I think the reason matters well beyond one film.
Stephen King’s The Long Walk: a young man’s book about young men
Stephen King wrote The Long Walk before almost anything else he published. He drafted it as a teenager in the late 1960s, a first-year university student watching the Vietnam draft swallow his generation, though the book didn’t appear until 1979 under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. Francis Lawrence’s 2025 adaptation keeps the premise brutally simple. Fifty boys volunteer for an annual televised contest. They walk. Anyone who drops below pace three times is shot. The last boy walking receives a fortune and one wish, anything he wants.
It’s worth highlighting the fact that this story came from a young man in a moment when the state had made the futures of young men conditional. The Walk is voluntary in name only. In the film’s broken America, boys sign up because it is the one route left to a life that counts for something. They are not competing for luxury. They are competing for the right to matter.
The wish gives the game away, What Stebbins’ wish really means
For most of the film you could read the boys’ motives as ordinary ambition. Then comes the wish.
The boy is one of the contest overseer’s many illegitimate sons, unacknowledged his whole life. His father runs the very machine he is dying inside. And when he finally names what winning was for, it is this: to be welcomed into that man’s house. A cup of tea. An invitation that would have cost his father nothing, that was always available, and that was simply never sent.
That is the moment the allegory stops being about dystopia and starts being about us. Because the wish reveals what the prize was actually denominated in. Not currency. Recognition. He had converted an unmet need to be wanted into a contest of endurance, as though worth could be accumulated through suffering and then exchanged for love.
Psychology has language for pieces of this. Carl Rogers argued decades ago that when regard is conditional, we learn to chase the conditions rather than live from ourselves, and later research by Assor, Roth and Deci (2004) confirmed how corrosive conditional regard is even when it “works”. Crocker and Wolfe (2001) showed that when self-worth is staked on a single contingency, every setback in that domain becomes an existential event rather than an ordinary disappointment. The boy on the road is a textbook case walked to its logical end. His worth had one door, his father held the key, and the Walk was the only corridor he could find that seemed to lead there.
Self-Determination Theory sharpens this further. Deci and Ryan count relatedness among our basic psychological needs, as fundamental as competence or autonomy, which means the boy isn’t being sentimental. He is starving, and the Walk is the only pipeline he can find to the nutrient. And notice that his goal looks self-chosen. Nobody assigned it to him. But SDT draws a line between goals we pursue from our own values and goals we adopt to earn regard that has been withheld, and the second kind remains borrowed no matter how freely we picked it. Sheldon and Elliot (1999) found the bleakest implication: achieving those borrowed goals barely improves our wellbeing. Which means the tragedy holds even in the version of the story where he wins. Tea granted as a prize could never be the tea he needed, because an invitation extracted through victory is not an invitation. The need was to be wanted, and you cannot win being wanted.
Not everyone is carrying the same weight
Here is the detail that stayed with me as a clinician. The boys are all on the same road, facing the same rifles, but they are not carrying the same stakes. Some drifted in on bravado, half-serious, and when reality arrives they feel something close to the ordinary fear of death. Others have routed everything through the outcome. Same event. Radically different loss.
The variable isn’t how much each boy wants to win. It’s how much he has already invested. Time, hope, identity, the alternatives he closed off to be there. Behavioural research on escalation of commitment, going back to Staw’s work in the 1970s, shows how sunk investment distorts judgement: the more we have put in, the harder it becomes to see clearly whether the goal was ever reachable, because seeing clearly would mean auditing everything we have spent. So we walk faster. We invest more. The size of the investment becomes its own argument for continuing.
We applaud this, incidentally. We call it grit. We line the road and cheer, and our cheering is conditional on the walkers continuing to walk. The film makes the crowd complicit and it is right to.
Disenfranchised grief: when our roads don’t have rifles
Here is where the film and our lives part ways, and the difference is not in our favour.
The boys at least know the terms. The rifle announces the ending. There is a shot, a date, a body, something the others can mourn as they keep walking. One of them, sensing his end, can even hand his rosary to a friend and ask that it reach his grandmother. An announced ending permits that. It allows farewells, instructions, a token sent home. Grief researchers have long observed how much mourning travels through objects; Volkan called them linking objects, the things that keep a thread between the living and the dead. A rosary arriving at a grandmother’s door is grief given a route. Their families will know they are gone.
Our versions of the Walk end silently. The training that never becomes an Olympic medal. The decades of striving that were supposed to end in a parent finally turning towards us. The migration, the mortgage, the degree, the “one day when I’ve made it”. When these futures fail, there is no shot. There is no moment. Often, the person themselves cannot say when it happened. The future simply stops arriving, and life is expected to continue as though nothing has ended, because officially nothing has. And there is no rosary. A bequest needs a moment to be made in, and a silent ending never offers one. Nothing is handed over, nothing arrives at anyone’s door, no object carries the loss out into the world where it could be seen and shared.
Kenneth Doka gave us the term disenfranchised grief for losses the world does not recognise and therefore does not permit us to mourn. Pauline Boss described ambiguous loss, grief without a body, without closure, without proof. Both concepts get close to this territory. Neither, I think, fully covers it. Because what the boy on the road was going to lose had never existed in the first place. Only in him. Invested in, built around, sacrificed for, entirely real as a structure inside a life, and yet nowhere to be found outside it.
The question I keep returning to
I stopped watching because the wish was too ordinary. If he had wished for a mansion I could have kept my distance. Tea with your father is small enough that everyone recognises some version of it: the future that hinged not on becoming extraordinary but on someone finally turning towards you.
Since that evening I keep asking myself a version of his question. What is my cup of tea? And how much have I already paid for it? I’d invite you to sit with your own answer before reading on. It tends to arrive faster than we’d like.
Grieving a future that never happened
The boys who fall on that road are mourned. Their deaths have witnesses.
But what do we call it when the future a person spent years walking towards simply never arrives? When there is no funeral because nothing, officially, has died, and no memento to pass on because the thing that ended never had a body? I see this in the therapy room more often than almost anything else, and I have come to believe our vocabulary for it is missing a word.
I’m working on that. More soon.
Rebeca Paiva is a BACP-accredited therapist and doctoral researcher writing about identity, self-transformation, and the psychology of the futures we build. She practises online at Serenity Sessions. If you would like to be notified of her articles, please subscribe to https://substack.com/@rebecapaiva1
References and further reading
Assor, A., Roth, G., & Deci, E. L. (2004). The emotional costs of parents’ conditional regard: A self-determination theory analysis. Journal of Personality, 72(1), 47–88.
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
Doka, K. J. (Ed.). (1989). Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington Books.
King, S. [writing as Richard Bachman]. (1979). The Long Walk. Signet.
Lawrence, F. (Director). (2025). The Long Walk [Film]. Lionsgate.
Rogers, C. R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality, and interpersonal relationships, as developed in the client-centered framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of a science (Vol. 3, pp. 184–256). McGraw-Hill.
Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497.
Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(1), 27–44.
Volkan, V. D. (1972). The linking objects of pathological mourners. Archives of General Psychiatry, 27(2), 215–221.