The Liberating Power of Fatherhood
How many of you have talked about the prospect of parenthood with young couples or members of your family? I’ve lost count of the times the subject has come up. People tend to be scared stiff about the prospect of regret or letdowns in family formation. They look around them at a culture where the average age for marriage is now around 30 for men and women (it was under 24 in 1970) and say to themselves, “I’ll just stick to the norm.”
Listen to me. The new norm is wrong.
Have kids! Get married and have kids. Yes, in that order. But do it. Do it now, or, at least, sooner than you probably think you should, especially if you’re ambitious and on the move. Yes, you read me right. Especially if you’re ambitious.
This Is True Rebellion
Embrace the chaos.
Embrace your nature.
Embrace the future.
Make it the rock-solid rebar reinforced concrete foundation of your identity. And when you do, you might just discover the biggest secret of our age…
Having kids is the ultimate act of liberation.
Look around you. Look at the popular culture consumed by corruption, vice, and contrived catastrophe. Who would look to the arbiters of this culture for advice on ordering their life?
Rebel.
There are plenty of reasons to rebel against our culture. It’s a culture that’s produced the highest levels of anxiety and depression we’ve ever seen. We’re wealthier than any people to ever walk this planet, yet we’re increasingly stuck in place, unsure of what direction to walk.
And who can blame us?. We’re being misled. For decades, self-appointed gurus from the left and now even the right have discovered they can make themselves rich and famous by convincing you to reject family, fatherhood, and the future itself.
Some proclaim that humanity is a scourge on the planet, a population bomb waiting to explode… or one that already has. Don’t listen to them. Life is too short to get this wrong. I’m going to focus on one simple element of the decision to have kids: the question of freedom. Will you have more or less of it with kids in your life?
Be sure to catch my even more in-depth video essay on how to save the planet by having kids.
What Kids Do And Don’t Need
Think of all the personal reasons people give for delaying starting a family. Money is one I hear often. There are all these costs kids impose, not to mention the sleepless nights and scary trips to the ER. The struggles are many and they are real.
But let's zero in on that money part.
We’ve convinced ourselves that we need to have everything figured out financially before we start a family, but this is a fallacy. Having a family is precisely what helps us figure everything out. Parenthood lays out what your priorities will be. The advantage this gives you in the workplace right out of college will shock you.
Having kids in your twenties, early in your marriage when you’re not making much money and you still feel like a kid yourself, is good for your kids and for you. Frankly, kids today have too much. Too much stuff, too much scheduling, too much adult interference of all kinds.
Kids need less. Being young and broke as parents prevents you from spoiling your kids. It forces you to get creative. It forces your kids to deal with discomfort and boredom, to learn how to live with delayed gratification. Don’t let pride lead you astray here. They’ll be better off for it, even if it hurts a bit when you can’t afford to send them to the best summer camp or trip abroad.
Hopefully, I’ve made some sense when it comes to lingering concerns of what kids need to be happy. But what about you?
Be Free (From Yourself)
One of the most powerful forces I’ve experienced in becoming a father is one nobody prepared me for: it set me free. Free of my ego. Free of my attachments. Free to go for broke.
You see, my son was a surprise, so I lucked into this discovery early.
I was 28 when he was born and my wife Lisa and I were both working in TV in New York City. His birth changed everything. It changed me.
We were both workaholics, staying late most nights at the Nickelodeon offices where we met. Entertainment is an ego-driven business and I was no different. Like every other snooty film school graduate, I wanted to be the next Steven Spielberg.
I was, and remain to this day, a striver.
My career progress was a cornerstone of my young identity, which meant that I was constantly comparing myself to other people. This is the fatal mistake too many of us make. Comparison is the thief of joy for a reason. Envy is a profoundly deadly sin.
Wrapping up your identity in your goals creates a fatal cost for failure. Losing means you’re a loser. And you are guaranteed to lose along the way. There are no overnight successes.
And then there’s the success trap.
We are remarkably adaptable to both adversity and delight. It turns out that pursuing pleasure and success is not a path to lasting happiness. Win an Oscar? Get a book deal? You’ll be on cloud nine for a few weeks or months.
Get a big promotion and leapfrog to the top of the corporate ladder? Same thing. New wears off. The water finds its level again. Winning the lottery won’t make you happy for long. Welcome to the hedonic treadmill.
As Victor Frankl notes in his classic book Man’s Search For Meaning:
“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue… Doing so would be the same as urging people posed in front of a camera to say “cheese,” only to find that in the finished photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles.”
For Frankl, happiness is a bank shot best achieved through the search for meaning. That search involves three primary paths, each of which I found in becoming a father.
We find meaning through:
Loving relationships;
Triumphing over hardships;
Creating value for others in our work.
Having kids checks all of these boxes. It’s not always fun, but it's filled with meaning and is certainly fun a good deal of the time. But it’s Frankl’s other insight that changed everything for me when my son was born. Frankl notes that even in the worst circumstances, we all retain one final freedom:
The freedom to choose how we respond to those circumstances.
This isn’t the last human freedom. It’s the first. And becoming a dad activated it like nothing else.
My son gave me that freedom before I hit 30 and it changed everything. I quit my job a few years later. I started a company with Lisa and moved to Texas. We’ve survived near-death experiences, pandemics, and personal attacks without losing any sleep. All of that is possible because we’re free.
We know what matters. We know who we are. Everything else is gravy.
This is the selfish reason to have kids. It will liberate you from your own worst enemy: your ego. It will set you free to pursue a life of meaning on which true happiness is built. It will force you to experience essential adversities that our modern world has made tragically optional.
In a world desperate for meaning, do what people have always done. Have kids.
getting out of your own way by having kids = spot on