On Fatherhood (Reply to Matt Walsh, TMZ, etc.)

Okay. All right. What's up, everybody? We're back. We're live. I'm Justin Murphy. This is the Other Life Podcast. And in this week's episode, we're going to be talking about fatherhood. I've been thinking about fatherhood a lot lately, and especially this week, because you're on twitter you probably already know this but if you're only listening on the podcast feed or if you only watch my stuff on youtube you might not know that earlier this week i wrote this short reflection on twitter x i should say and it went just through the roof viral i've never seen anything like it i mean i've it's not my first rodeo but never quite seen anything quite like this I'll catch you up if you're not paying attention. If you haven't seen it, I will catch you up. But it invited a wild amount of commentary and input. And I think I actually learned a lot. I got incredibly critical feedback, let's say, from many quarters. Pretty much every type of person seemed to not appreciate it, although a lot of people privately in my DMs did, and especially fathers, and some people publicly respect them. But it's a very delicate topic. And yeah, so I'm just going to I prepared some thoughts. I should probably start by, for those of you who aren't following along, if you're not on X, I should probably start by reading it. I'm sick of looking at it, but if you're listening on the podcast and you're not addicted to X like many of us, I will do you the favor. So what I wrote was this. Am I just a monster? Oh, wait, hang on. Let me check something real quick. Yeah. Okay. It's been four years since I became a father and I'm beginning to fear for my soul. The truth is I just don't like being around kids for very long. Historically, this is not uncommon among fathers, but today it feels almost illegal. It's causing me a lot of confusion and anguish. The ideal amount of time I would like to spend playing with my kids is probably. Seventy to one hundred and forty minutes a week, roughly ten minutes each day, maybe twice a day, taking breaks from work. My feelings of love toward them are perfectly strong. But if I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about ten minutes, my blood starts to boil. I just want to be working or accomplishing something. I try to be grateful, but it doesn't work. It's nine a.m. this morning. Saturday, January third. It's a sunny, warm day here in Austin, and my four-year-old son is begging me to play catch in the street. I was drinking coffee, still waking up, so I didn't really feel like it. But at this age, his desire to play is insatiable. He begged and begged, so I conceded, and with a smile. I have no problem being a kind and loving father The problem is only that I do not enjoy it. It's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure. It just seems wrong that I experienced so little delight when my dad friends all claim to experience so much. It was beautiful. We live on a picturesque tree-lined block. I'm even relatively relaxed from the holiday rest. Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic peak experience. Yet for every single minute on the inside, I just don't want to be there. I want to be drinking my coffee in peace. Then I feel guilty and absurdly ungrateful and ashamed when we're done. I know that when he is a teenager, I'll long to have these days back. I have all of this perspective rationally, and I've been very patient and steadfast trying to digest it, but nothing fixes me emotionally. Am I a terrible person? Where's my feeling? Sorry. It's not funny. It's just such a fiasco. Or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal and it's modern parenting norms that are off. Whether it's my fault or not, I don't even care. I just want to figure this out. Something is wrong and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this. That's all I said. Seems like a simple, honest, humble reflection. But People didn't like it. Did not go over very well. This was, I think the most viral tweet I've ever had. And I've had a few, it went, TMZ did a segment on it. Like I met Walsh from the daily wire, did a segment on it. I'll play a clip in a minute. Be fair. I mean, he's got good critiques. Everyone's got good critiques. It's messed up. That's why I was struggling with it. I don't want to feel like that. So it really got me thinking though, because a bunch of people did say that it's totally normal. And in fact, pretty much all the people I know and trust told me it's normal and it's not a big deal. And every father feels like that sometimes or a lot of the time. And But pretty much every single type of person hated it. And I want to reflect on why I really, I really listened and read all of the replies. And I believe that The discourse around fatherhood is unique. There's something uniquely off. I'm actually kind of obsessed with it now. I've been doing a lot of research in the past few days and really thinking about this. I feel like I might have to write a book on fatherhood or something or on this discourse because I have a theory and I want to present that theory to you. But I also want to kind of start by kind of working through some of some of the high level general kind of problems that people had with this and kind of the the the critique of this. And then I want to give you my theory of father father discourse. The first thing that I want to say is that fathers should generally stay silent about everything. That is actually the right way to be. One of the biggest critiques that I got from this was that a father should not talk about this, let alone share it on the internet. And I think that's basically right. Those instincts are completely right. It is the job of the father to bear the burdens that he has to and to take care of his wife and kids. quietly and with a smile and all of the pains and struggles you, you bottle them up and you keep them hidden. You don't let your wife or kids see that. And I can, I generally completely agree with that. That is in fact, the time tested, uh, longstanding tradition, which is completely healthy and correct. And I would even go so far as to say that the very best fathers are the ones who are the best at this. men who can bear tremendous weight and suffering and the most terrible burdens, but they can do it with a smile on their face in complete silence and secrecy. This is the height of paternal nobility, I would say. And that has been the case for as long as we know, and it probably will be the case for as long as we know. And I don't want to make any major amends to that. I'm sorry, I don't want to majorly amend that in any kind of way. However, I do think that there is something very, very off with the fatherhood discourse. And something is going to have to change, however slightly, which is rooted in the fact that we do not live in the world that our fathers lived in. And in fact, the world that contemporary fathers live in is unlike any world that fathers have ever lived in. And I want to develop this line of thinking. I have a fairly well-developed theory of what's going on here. And I want to build that out for you in this episode. But let's start a little bit by looking at myself frankly and harshly. That was the first critique that a real man would ignore his feelings and should not talk about this in public. But the second is that, you know, it's narcissistic or just, you know, that I'm obsessed with my own feelings or I'm obsessed with myself or whatnot. And, you know, Again, there's a lot of truth to this. I'm sure I am. I'm sure I'm all kinds of terrible things. But the thing is that there's information in feelings. You know, if you're really interested in kind of getting to the bottom of something or understanding something, then you do want to pay attention to your own feelings. And especially if you're interested in thinking about the world or if you're trying to figure out the truth of something. if that is part of what you feel called to do is to just understand the world around you as thoroughly, perhaps even as radically as possible and as freely as possible, then you can't just ignore your feelings. There's data there. There's insight there. And so I get it. I get it. I probably should not be so in my own head, blah, blah, blah. That's true. And I probably should not care so much about my own feelings. But the reason that we write is because we want to make sense out of something. And I think we have maybe gone a little too far in saying that fathers are especially as fathers navigate this incredibly new, complicated world that they have to navigate. I think we've gone a little too far in saying that this sort of norm of absolute secrecy and privacy that fathers are expected to uphold, that it's sort of absolutely unlimited, that it must necessarily on all cases be a kind of absolute repression and secrecy. I don't think that I believe that. And I want to make to you, I guess, a couple arguments as I think this through. Now, before I do that, I'll give you even more ground. I mean, yeah, I'm messed up in lots of ways. One thing that I learned from this for sure was that something a lot of people said was that this is a dopamine addiction. I probably look at my phone too much, stuff like that. and that's absolutely true i'm sure that's that's true um you know when you do work that is connected to the phone and online and stuff like that it's this is a constant uh constantly creeping problem for for many of us obviously so guilty is charged absolutely and know there were a few other lessons that i learned but uh these are very specific tactical and concrete you know critiques and bits of feedback that came out um no doubt about it if you want to you know be a father in the modern world you better be really really good about time management You do have to wake up early. Some people, a lot of people poke fun at me because I was, it was nine AM and I was still waking up. And, and there's truth to that. You know, a good father should, should, you really should wake up as early as possible. I've always found that days where I do that and often I do it, I, you know, life is much smoother and better. But I'm not always able to. And sometimes I work at night, whatever. But that's a huge, huge point. So anyway, this is all basic for the fathers out there. Most of you already know this. But these are absolutely fair critiques. And these are all things I could do better and should do better. But none of this is that interesting. None of this is that original or whatever. But I do think there is something here that's original, not in my tweet, but there are interesting elements here in this fiasco that I think are really worth reflecting on. I mean, one point to start is that If you look in the past few years, there have been quite a lot of popular essays written by female professionals about the struggles of family and marriage, especially in the context of living some kind of professional knowledge worker existence. I think back to not that long ago, I think it was last year or two years ago, that essay by Emily Gould, where she writes about her rather crazy fiasco becoming a mother and trying to juggle her own professional work and her feelings towards her husband and all of this. And her, her, I think, struggle with bipolar, if I remember that correctly. And that was a, in many ways, brilliant and very impressively honest article. I, the first to respect that kind of thing. She, she, she lays it all bare. But in that article, I mean, it's pretty, it's insane. It's like really, really crazy stuff. And she does not come out looking very good, which again, I applaud it. I, the first to respect and appreciate that by all means. But I noted that that essay was very viral and very popular. And the tone and the mood around that was very, very different than the tone and the mood around my tweet. Obviously, a tweet is not a long-form essay. It's all very different. But there's something there. I kind of got to thinking about that. And then I got to realizing that actually there have been a lot of these essays in recent years. There was a crazy one. I think it was in the Atlantic. I forget the person's name. Oh, I think it was Honor Jones. I forget if it was in the Atlantic, but I remember that name. She writes about her decision to blow up her marriage, basically, because she wanted to think about sex and art and explore having sex with women or something like that. Like it was this very, very rather simple and straightforward kind of narrative of selfishness, if I recall correctly. And look, I'm not here to shame any of these people. I don't care to judge, but again, that was really viral in a more, in a much more kind of fashionable way, right? Like, you know, the very, very different mood and tone around it. And I got to thinking, you know, has there been anything written about fatherhood, um, with this kind of angle in any way at all? And I did some searching and I really wasn't able to find anything. In other words, where, where a father speaks honestly and self-critically about doing something wrong or bad. And, um, isn't really trying to justify it or isn't really trying to, you know, spin it as something really good, but just basically talking about the blood and the guts of it and how hard it is and how he's kind of doing a bad job in a way that, you know, was able to kind of capture any kind of, you know, zeitgeist or cultural traction. And I really wasn't able to find anything. And then I got to thinking, well, You know, that's probably why this tweet just blew up so crazy, because I didn't think it was going to. I mean, you all know, I kind of know what I'm doing, but I wasn't expecting it to go that big. I figured it would be, it would ruffle some feathers or whatever. And, you know, yes, sure, I do enjoy that. And yes, I have a knack for it. And yes, it's somewhat purposeful. But I had no idea that it was going to be like that much of a sensation. It was actually the first time that I had a viral tweet where Usually what happens is like your notifications are just going crazy. And so like you refresh the notifications like nonstop or whatever. That's like virality. This is the first time where you could go to the home timeline on X and everyone like for, for, for hours, like everyone was talking about it, even not mentioning me, not replying, not replying, not quoting it, whatever it was like, it, it was like a different kind of viral and maybe that has something to do with like the algorithm changes who knows whatever it doesn't matter that much but the point is it matters in that you know this thing hit a nerve and so i started i started thinking you know why why is there not more writing about this kind of thing why why and why did this relatively innocent kind of self-deprecating personal story uh go that big and what i began to realize is that fathers generally abide by a kind of universal shared commitment to keeping everything secret. And they should, as I said earlier, that's appropriate. It's a noble thing. However, I think this becomes a little bit more complicated in the feminist and post-feminist era. I mean, we now live in a world where women are are equal to men in the public sphere they have the same rights and the same proclivities to speak in public and we all now have this new norm where um women and men are supposed to treat each other equally and speak to each other equally and uh women participate in the public sphere and look i'm not i don't hate women i'm not not a misogynist i'm not even really anti-feminist i mean i think it's much more complicated than than people want to admit and our civilization is is doing a fairly radical experiment with women's liberation and we're still in the early innings of that experiment and i think there are beginning to appear tremendous and complicated implications of this radical experiment and I think we're going to have to talk about many things. It's not at all obvious that it's stable or, or necessarily beneficial even for women, but I'm not, I don't, I don't, I don't hate it. I'm, I'm down for the ride. Let's figure it out as a civilization. You know, I'm friends with a lot of women who are brilliant and I have no interest in, you know, I'm not like person, I'm not trying to turn back the clock. I'm not LARPing as some kind of medieval, you know, Catholic or something like that. I'm, realistic. I get it. And I want smart women to have the right to develop themselves however they want to, generally. I just think it's really, really complicated. And this is one of those complications, okay? Because it makes sense for men to bear all of their burdens in absolute secrecy as fathers, because we want to protect our wives and we want to protect the children. In an ideal world, like a husband's wife would not have to worry about anything like that. I want nothing more. I want my wife to not have to worry about anything. I want her to just be happy and free to be a good mother and yes, to be a good wife. So I'm self-interested in that way. But I would love nothing more than to shield her from absolutely every anxiety or stress that I struggle with. That is the ideal. Once women start participating in the public sphere, as they currently are, as absolute equals to men, and in many cases, they're doing better than men, right? You all know these data points. Women are kind of doing better in school now, when you look at certain professions. like journalism or whatnot, some of these, you know, so-called liberal professions, uh, they are actually increasingly, uh, it is the case that women are actually doing better. Okay. And so again, I have no, I have no, I'm not upset about, I don't, I'm not like activated about that or upset about that. However, what, however, the issue is that it suddenly is not clear in that context that it makes sense. that men are also supposed to maintain their kind of historical universal commitment to a kind of dignified secrecy about everything that it feels like to be a man. Okay. So in other words, what I'm getting at here is that I'm not sure that women fully understand how much pain and suffering has been That they've been shielded from. I'm not sure that the average wife actually has any clue how much pain and suffering the father or her husband bears quietly and silently inside of himself. not because kids are that bad or because and certainly not because wives are that bad not because having a family itself is so bad it's not that it has more to do with the struggles of the modern world um we live in an incredibly and increasingly complicated world uh the challenges are and the threats are increasingly multivariate and and and obscure and illegible And so as a father, your obligation is to take care of your wife and kids, to provide for them. But that's not all. It's also to... to discharge your duty to your family, to bring honor on your family's name. You have to do justice to the gifts that God gives you. And this means finding a career or a vocation that does justice to those gifts. It means being honorable in the public sphere, speaking the truth about things that matter, having courage, these types of things. So it's easy to just say with shorthand, Your job is to provide for your wife and kids. Well, even that actually is not obvious anymore. What is enough to provide for kids? How much do you have to make to provide for your family honorably and adequately? Nobody has any clue. And the reason nobody has any clue is because there are no longer any shared standards for any of these things. There was this article a few weeks ago that went viral for a week that was called, it was arguing that the new poverty line is a hundred thousand dollars a year. That if you don't make that much a year, you're poor. Now, this was refuted and analyzed by a lot of smart people. And so there were some serious problems with that analysis. So I'm not sure that I don't believe that that is a true statement. However, it went super viral. And that means a lot of people felt that there was truth to that. Like that spoke to a lot of people's soul when this guy published this argument. The fact that it could go so viral and so many people could say, look, this is proof of how hard it is now. Even if the guy was wrong, the fact that it could go so viral is in itself revealing of how none of us even know what is the difference between rich and poor. So if a father's job is to provide for his wife and children, how much does he have to provide? How much money do you have to make? I will tell you, some days I feel like, oh, I'm doing great. We're doing great. We've really made it. We're upper middle class. This is great. I've made enough. I'm providing adequately. I can stop worrying so much about money and I can focus on being present to my wife and kids and loving them and being happy and calm. Some days I feel like that. And then other days I feel like I'm actually poor. Like we're actually maybe going to be homeless one day because the economy, this, the economy, that AGI, you know, what if, what if what I'm doing totally fails, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you know, The contemporary father struggles, I think, with extraordinary uncertainty around all of the key requirements of being a father. Like you never know what is enough. You never know where you even are because as a society, we don't have any shared standards on what is adequate or what are the right markers for things. I mean, another example is occupation, right? I mean, typically, historically, an occupation was... know a relatively fixed and and a very significant element of a man's kind of status and social positioning you know to to do justice to your family's name and to do justice to the gifts that god gives you you have to work hard and and get into a certain occupation that is worthy of your of your gifts and of your background now it doesn't mean that you it doesn't mean that you have to be striving for fame or something It doesn't mean you have to be striving for, you know, to be a billionaire or something like that. But look, a man has to, a man is required to do the best that he can to fight and work hard to arrive at a certain position that is, that, you know, does justice to his gifts and to his family. And if you fall short of that, you should, you feel ashamed and you feel, you, you feel like a failure and you should, and I'm not, I'm not harping on anyone or being mean or nasty, but I'm saying a man has these deep callings to, to, to, to live his life adequately and to hit all of these key requirements of what is required to live a good life and to be a, to be a good man, uh, providing for your family as one, having a job or an occupation or a vocation that is adequate and does honor to your, to yourself and your family. Um, that is one requirement. And there are, there are, you know, some others as well, like speaking forthrightly and honorably in the public sphere, like participating in the policy in a way that is honorable and forthright. And again, uses your gifts to the maximum of their ability in a way that is courageous and thoughtful and committed to the truth and to virtue. And these are basic requirements of a good man's life. And on each and every one of those dimensions that I just mentioned, nobody has any clue anymore what it even means to successfully discharge one's duty. Like as a contemporary father, you never know when you've arrived. Do I make enough money? Is my job good enough? Is it stable enough? Have I contributed to the public sphere with enough courage and enthusiasm? Have I risked myself enough to advance the world in a way that is pro-social and that honors God and that is faithful to God? You know, each one of these questions now breaks down into, like, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty sub-questions, each one of which is like a PhD-tier research project, okay? Think about, like, food to take a simple example, right? You have to provide for your family. That's your obligation. That includes a certain amount of money. Putting food on the table is the classic canonical phrase. What food should you put on the table? Should you be carnivore? Should you be paleo? Are seed oils a problem or are they actually not a problem? To do this basic thing, to do it fully and correctly and adequately, to really care about your family and to do it right, you have to have strong... answers to all of these questions. And it's not easy. These are only a few examples. And when you multiply them all out, and if you were to actually write down on paper all of the kinds of puzzles and questions that you have to answer using your own honest judgment and grappling with the information and the knowledge of the world, you could spend all day, every day, just trying to figure out what is the truth about any of these questions. And so this is the world that the contemporary father is living in. There's many more, right? There's the phone, right? Like I said, it's like people were right to criticize my posts for saying I'm probably dopamine addicted. I'm probably on my phone too much. Okay, but we work on our phones, right? And to actually, most good jobs nowadays require you to be plugged into the internet, right? So it's all just incredibly complicated. And yes, it is my job and it is the job of every father to figure it out. Don't complain. That is all true. However, at a certain point, when these complexities pile up and the modern world becomes increasingly, there are threats from every possible angle on the most basic things, which traditionally for all of human history, the father could just basically trust certain defaults before modernity, before capitalism. They weren't the best necessarily, but you didn't have to kind of burn a lot of cognitive cycles or emotional cycles thinking about or worrying about these different threats. Okay. You just kind of did the best you can. Everyone kind of did the same thing because there weren't that many options and there wasn't that much information. So as these, as the number of threats increases, okay. And the complexity of all of those threats increases. And again, At the same time, the kind of fixed social infrastructure has been liquidated. That's basically what capitalism does. All that is solid melts into air. As Mark said, I might have botched that. I forget the exact words. But that is all true. Whether you love capitalism or hate it, that is a hundred percent true. So there are no fixed references for what counts as enough or what is safe or adequate. And everything is a complex research problem. And the number of possible threats has exploded. That's the situation that the contemporary father is navigating. And if you really love your kids, if you really love your wife, and all you're trying to do is to be a good father to the best of your ability, to do honor to your family, and to just carve out a life that is sufficiently secure, and where you are using the gifts that God gave you in the best way that you can, you never know when you're done. You never know when you have finally arrived. And if you never know when you have arrived, that means you never arrive. That is the experience of the contemporary father. It's a million threats that you have to worry about all the time. You never have strong, particularly clear certainty or closure on any of them. because things are always changing, new ones are always emerging, new research is appearing, the narratives are always shifting, and there's no fixed references to rely on that can give you any peace of mind or comfort or confidence that you or anyone around you kind of respects or can be satisfied with. So you're basically deprived of all kind of social belonging in a way. Even if you have good friends or whatever, as dads, you and your dad friends, you never really know if you're doing enough there, you know, and, and you can't really even suss it out. So the pain and suffering, I think that comes from inhabiting this. I mean, I think, I think honestly, I think women just have no clue. I think, and I think they can't know because we have men and fathers have this very reasonable and good and healthy mindset. Norm and commitment to, to, to shielding them, shielding them from everything we possibly can. Uh, and so my current mental model based on everything I've learned in the past week is that basically. I think what's going on inside of the contemporary father's mind is so much more insane and so much more difficult and so much more kind of emotionally and intellectually and cognitively just impossible and tumultuous and painful that Women, frankly, just can't even imagine it because we've never told them and because we still don't tell them. And because if you even accidentally or briefly in a simple, honest, self deprecating way, let a little bit out of the bag on public, everyone will pounce. Okay. I mean, that really is pretty interesting to me. And the reason I think it's complicated and this norm of secrecy among men It's just it doesn't add up anymore. It doesn't make sense anymore is is precisely this this key other variable that, well, women are now fully empowered to do what they want to do. And that's what they're doing. And so we as men and as husbands are trying to kind of maintain fidelity to this traditional historical norm. At the same time, the world around us and the other sex is. off completely doing their own thing and in many ways are participating fully in the public sphere. And so how are we supposed to govern a society together, men and women, in an equitable way? How are we supposed to keep this civilization on the rails when women have now equal empowerment and we are kind of bearing a certain load that historically and to this day, we never, ever talk about. I mean, when you think about it that way, it's like obvious that something is going to have to give here. And I don't even think, I'm not convinced that all men should start talking about their feelings. I am not saying that at all. And I don't plan on doing that either. I think men need to be tough. Men do need to hide almost all of it and bear all of it responsibly and dutifully and strongly. That will always stay. However, something has to give here. I think it's pretty obvious. And so now, I mean, this week has just made me so interested in the question now. I mean, I've already started digging through some of the data and really trying to wrap my head around this. I mean, I might have to write a book about this topic. I mean, it's obviously so explosive and obviously no one else wants to really... do this work or talk or really think it through so that's what i've started to do and i'm just sharing here with you some of the earliest intuitions that i'm having uh it has something to do with this this explosion of complexity that causes i think um far more kind of emotional uh and kind of inner turmoil and difficulty than any man in history frankly has ever had to go through or consider or work through or solve And it really comes down to this issue of never knowing what is enough. Because if you really are committed to taking care of your family and kids as well as you possibly can, and to doing right by your larger family name in the public sphere, and you don't ever know what's enough because there are no fixed references that everyone shares, and because of this complexity explosion, what that manifests as it means you have to be always working on all of them basically. Like you wake up in the morning and you're like, okay, I have to make more money and I have to, you know, read more books to improve my understanding of the world and gain mastery over the world that I'm in. But I also need to do some writing and, and, and, and kind of reflection to actually do the work of mastery and build a mental model that is adequate to the world. If I don't, read and write, then I'm going to be falling behind and I'm not going to be able to maintain an understanding of the situation that I find myself in the world. But you also need to be pursuing some kind of public-facing, honorable career or job or path of some sort where you are contributing to the polis in a way that is courageous and forthright. And when there's no way to determine what is satisfactory on any of these dimensions and there's more there's there's new threats to worry about all the time i mean think about like covid like tomorrow there could be some new global pandemic and all of a sudden you might die if you don't figure this out um or maybe what you have to figure out is that in fact actually there's no there's no risk to you dying but if someone says you could die then you have to figure that out right and so it's like If you actually take these things seriously and you're really trying to keep your family safe no matter what and make sure they have enough money no matter what and do work in the world that is according to your calling and your gifts... and you're really committed to doing this, you're just going to be killing yourself all the time, like all day, every day. And look, I'm not trying to toot my own horn. I'm not saying I'm like such a, you know, I'm so messed up and kind of emotionally messed up because I'm such a great, perfect father. And I just care so much about them. I work so hard and I never feel like anything's enough. I'm not, maybe that's how it sounds. I'm not trying to give you some sort of sappy narrative like that. Like, no, I have lots of problems. I'm sure I'm egotistical. I'm sure I'm narcissistic. I'm sure I'm soft and pathetically emotional and I'm too romantic and all kinds of stuff you could say about me, which is true. I'm sure it's true. But I actually think I'm pretty normal. And therefore, if I'm feeling this, I'm pretty sure that this week I actually chanced upon a pretty big finding. I think I accidentally... stumbled into something huge. That's actually what it feels like to me, because I think there's a huge mountain of, of questions here that I just don't see anyone answering or even trying to answer, honestly. And I see how, how punished it, I mean, no one wants, no one wants you to talk about any, like you try to go deep on some of this stuff in public and, uh, you'll find pretty quickly, uh, there is a, you know, um, an alliance of multiple types of people, men, women, rich, poor, who all have very different but converging reasons for really not wanting the average normal dad to start talking about just what it's like, just what it's like. There's a lot of strong reasons that nobody wants to hear that. And some are good. As I said before, it is appropriate and noble and necessary that men should keep most of their pain and suffering quiet. And I have no problem with that. And I'll continue. And I generally do do that. And I will continue to. but there are also i think a lot of twisted reasons there are a lot of petty reasons and there are a lot of motivated there's a lot of motivated reasoning going going on here some of it has to do with the fact that all of a sudden half of the public sphere is women which has never been true in history but also among the men i mean i noticed that from a lot of the pushback from me uh to me from other men there's some sick and twisted stuff going on right now i think in in the public face of a fatherhood and I was actually going to play the clip from Matt Walsh. He did a segment on my tweet and said a bunch of things, some of which were reasonable, some of which were rather cruel and whatever. That's his MO. I don't care at all. But I was going to play it. I did pull it up. I have it in a tab. I was going to play it and kind of walk through it. But honestly, as I've given this short monologue, I've decided I don't really feel like it. Not for any strong reason, but just because I don't particularly want to participate in this kind of YouTube discourse. I think what's going on here is very subtle. It's very complicated. It's very interesting. And the Matt Walshes of the world, they're going to have their, you know, it's a media machine, right? They wake up every morning with a staff looking for, you know, the viral thing to make fun of or comment on or whatever. And that's fine. It's totally fine. uh, but I don't, I, I, I was going to actually engage. I was going to play the clip, talk about it, play the clip, talk about it and kind of, uh, have a fun little segment where I, you know, engage and then his followers will follow me, blah, blah, blah. I just not here for it. I was going to do it actually, but I'm just deciding on the spot. No, I don't need to, I'm playing a different, I'm playing a totally different game. And, uh, you're allowed to do that nowadays by the way and i think that's what i want to close on is kind of the meta conversation because man people hated this so much and it really reminded me like wow you know the world really does not want you to the world, the world does not, the world does not want like a normal average person to simply think hard about things and share honest truths like that. If you, if you do that, you will actually pretty quickly, probably you will chance upon some hot button thing and it will, and it could go viral and people will, and the world will immediately kind of agree with itself that no, no, no, no, don't, don't go there. We don't want you going there. And you know, I've been thinking a lot about that as well, because you should go there. We should go there. You know, not every, we don't want every man in the world or every father in the world. Sorry. We're out here writing about their feelings and, uh, the civilization would collapse. Okay. If that happened and look, I take, I take, I take full responsibility. Like my tweet, it was weak. Like it is weak. Uh, it was a moment of weakness for sure. Uh, If I was stronger, I would not have tweeted that. If I was a better dad, I would not have tweeted that. But I'm not just a dad, right? I'm a writer and I'm embarked on my own personal mission to try to understand the world and try to write what I'm figuring out. I try to speak on here about what I'm figuring out. I publish it to the podcast and my different channels. It's my own humble little mission, but it is my mission. And it is what I've been trying to do for a long time and what I will continue to try to do. And so... think since i know a lot of you who watch my stuff or listen to my stuff are similar and you're working on a similar kind of project you know i want to speak to that a little bit real quick because i think the i mean the amount of hate that i got was so crazy i mean like i'm lucky that i that i do have very thick skin i'm not like you know patting myself on the back i'm just saying temperamentally i'm built in a way that it just i i don't care in ways that like other people just are really, really affected. So most people, if you get a ton of hate, if you go super viral, especially for something personal online and it's just like forty eight hours of people saying, oh, my God, you're a psychopath. They should take your kids away from you. You're probably going to kill people one day. You're like like just saying hateful stuff like over and over and over again for forty eight hours. most people like most people break like that. Well, that will break a lot of people. It's, uh, you can say, just ignore it. It's nonsense or whatever, but no matter how much you say that it, it, it will break most people. And it, and every time it happens to me, it I'll be honest. Like, I mean, usually it, it brings me to the limits of like, you know, being able to, uh, not be hurt or to feel really scared or sad or whatever. And, um, you know, it really kind of got me thinking that I mean, that's always where the good stuff is, you know? And now I'm really, really interested in this topic. That was all the proof that I needed to know that, okay, well, this is why people are not writing. This is why fathers don't write about this stuff. This is why no one's really talking about this stuff. And I invite you to do the same. You know, that's kind of what I've always been about, I guess, in my own little way. And I know a lot of you are doing the same. So my final reflection on all of this is just that, I'm not here to reply to the Matt Walsh types, actually. I'm not trying to build some big brand around being a commentator or being some sort of viral sensation. I'm not in the culture war. I'm out of the culture war. I've dropped out of the culture war a long time ago. But But there is a different space. There is a different layer that I want to point to, which I am in my own humble way trying to inhabit. And it's worth reflecting on that because what the world will make you feel, if you are like me and you're just embarked on some kind of research project or you're just trying to be an independent scholar in your own humble way like I am, You're just trying to seek the truth and you're trying to make sense out of the world, you know, and you're trying to be as educated as possible. And you are trying to build original knowledge and you are trying to build a body of work. And you're serious about that, but you're not trying to be Matt Walsh or some, you know, big time YouTube analyst or news anchor or something. there is this other layer that exists that you are allowed to inhabit, that I inhabit, that many people inhabit, which is just looking for those things that most people don't want to talk about, that if you say it even a little bit, everyone on the internet will hate it. But that is actually important and it's true in some non-trivial way. I mean, when you find that, you don't have to go to war with Matt Walsh, actually. You don't have to you know make yourself like a big commentator or you don't have to build a brand around your signature talking point or whatever you actually don't have to do any of those things uh the world the world will make you feel that like you're either matt walsh and you're a professional speaker banging the drum about hot button topics as you know as you're living you do it every day you're shaping the discourse or if you're not that then you should just be quiet and be a nobody, a quiet, simple dad who never writes in public about anything interesting or provocative or interesting or original. And other modes of life exist, actually. It's not just those two. You're allowed to be a good dad who's mostly focused on being a dad. And you don't have to care about being famous or having huge clout or whatever, being like an influencer or something like that. But you know what? You're all, you're allowed to write a blog and you're allowed to build a body of essays and you're allowed to write books and try to understand something, something non-trivial about the world that other people don't understand. And that maybe other people don't feel confident talking about, or they're too scared to talk about. And yeah, that's, that's kind of my final reflection is how much I'm realizing in this experience, like there's not really a playbook for that yet. People don't want, and everything seems to kind of make you feel like that's like, you're not allowed to just be that. But you can, and I've been doing, I mean, I've been doing it for a long time now and yeah. The other thing that I think is very interesting about all of this is if you if you kind of chance upon some sort of sore point in the discourse and you kind of find some little wrinkle that nobody else wants to talk about, but it's true and you know it's true and you actually do for better or for worse through your strength or in my case, through my weakness, and you do actually kind of put it out there and you realize, oh, you know, I've kind of seized on this like nugget of insight that people hate and no one else is talking about. But this is something people don't fully understand. This is not well known. This is part of a larger story that no one really seems concerned to investigate or to talk about. That if you try to seize that and you try to say, okay, I'm going to actually work on this. I'm going to think about this for the next few weeks or months. I'm going to write about this. I'm going to try to understand what's really going on here in a truthful, honest way, whether people like it or not. If you decide to do that and you decide and you take it seriously, people will hate you for that as well. It's really interesting. And that's, I mean, that's why, that's like why I'm doing that. That's why I'm doing all the stuff I'm doing with the Indie Scholars Project and the Indie Scholars Community and the book. It's really all about this. Like there's this, you are allowed to be a humble individual. individual person who is just in your own humble way, trying to figure something out. And you're also allowed to take yourself seriously. And you're also allowed to fight for that. And, uh, you know, you're, you have to fight through the haters and they'll tell you that you're being narcissistic or that you, you know, oh, oh, here's another, here's another, my favorite. You'll hear this all the time. Oh, that you have, you have delusions of grandeur. Yeah. If you take your own experiences seriously and you try to understand them seriously and honestly, and you believe strongly in building that model of the world and putting it out there consistently over time. Yeah. And you actually dare to take yourself seriously and to do that and to believe that it matters. You have delusions of grandeur because you think that you're some genius or whatnot. No, thank you very much. I'm no genius. I don't have any delusions of grandeur. In fact, I don't expect anything at all from anyone. But I take my ideas seriously. I take my thoughts seriously. And I don't think I'm some kind of genius. I just think I'm interested in understanding the truth for its own sake. And many, many people in history have been called by a similar vocation. And many of them are much smarter than me. And I don't ever hope to, I don't even hope or pretend to be necessarily as gifted or as significant as those who I most admire. I think it's essentially at the end of the day, a humble pursuit, but it is but it is a calling and some people have it, some people don't. And I think if I represent anything, what I represent is just those people. Anyone out there, if you feel called to build a body of ideas, build a body of work, you're trying to understand stuff that other people don't want to hear about or they haven't thought about in the same way, you are allowed to just think about it and work on it quietly in your own way. It doesn't matter how you make money. It doesn't matter what your position in society is. this is interesting and this is fun. And I believe, I believe in doing it. I've been doing one thing pretty much, uh, my entire adult life, which is just essentially this, but I've done a lot of experimenting and searching and testing different vehicles, you know? Um, and so that's kind of what I want to end on is that, you know, for anyone else out there who has these kinds of experiences, whether you're a father or even more broadly, um, I'm left thinking a lot about this sort of layer of intelligent, thoughtful, personal exploration and truth-seeking that is, at the end of the day, it's very humble and personal. But, you know... People will hate you for it. And not because you're special. I'm not, again, I'm not saying, oh, people hate me because I'm such a genius and I have the secrets of the world. No, nothing like that. Nothing like that. But on the other hand, you have to keep going. You have to care enough about yourself and believe enough in yourself to think that this stuff is worth doing, that it's worth thinking hard about things. It's worth telling the truth about confusing, complicated things. It's worth sometimes being a little pathetic or weak or something. If you feel in that moment that there is a truth there, that um, hasn't been written about yet fully or adequately. Um, and that there's some sort of public value to, um, saying that or sharing that, you know, this is a, I, I, this is how I live. This is, this is the life that I've, that I have, I've chosen. And again, I'm not being grandiose about, I know that people think that sounds grandiose, but I'm only saying it. I'm only being explicit about it because I know how many of you out there have a similar interest in doing independent research, independent thinking, independent writing, and doing this progressively over time in order to build some independent perspective on something. Since I've kind of come to represent that for a lot of you and we have a community of people who are doing this kind of thing, this is the kind of meta reflection that is actually most interesting and important to me in all of this. Because a lot of people just come by and whatever, they see one of my viral tweets that I have like once a year or once every other year or something like that, like those people They don't know what I'm doing. They don't know what we've built as a community and all of that. And I don't need them to. I don't expect them to. It's fine. I love the idea of periodically hitting them with a grenade and And they don't know what's going on, and they don't need to care. But they engage with my discourse. And I just go back to my little personal humble little cave, my little studio here and our little community that we have. And so I'm now just talking to my people and anyone else who's sort of interested in reading and thinking and writing in public. Because it's a crazy, crazy world out there right now. And you don't have to be a Matt Walsh type. You don't have to be a culture warrior. But you also don't have to live your life in confusion and silence as you try to navigate the modern world. If you're interested in trying to figure things out. You can be honest on Twitter, let them hate you, whatever. It's worth doing. And I support you. And many of you are kind of doing that kind of stuff with me. So that's cool. So I think that's pretty much all I got. I mean, there's much more I could say. I actually did write a long form piece. It's probably gonna be published somewhere soon. I'll let you know. But yeah, I think that this is gonna be a bigger, this is something I wanna think much more about. Uh, and I'm happy to, you know, maybe I'll take a question here. Let's see. Uh, someone asked if I'll take questions. Sure. Let's look at this one for a thinking person. It's hard to constantly remind ourselves how zero thinking the world is. We always obsess about how to communicate some novel thought they don't want to hear. Um, Oh, sorry. That that's a good comment, but that's not a question. Someone, someone had a question. Someone said, um, are you taking questions? Yes. I'm happy to take questions if you have any. So that's a yes, but actually I don't see any questions yet. So this person says, Justin, you look like the leader of a Balkan communist party in that shirt. I mean, that sounds pretty cool. Not a communist, but This person says, Matt Walsh twisted Justin's words and lied in his show. Yeah, I watched it. It was funny. I mean, dude, it's hilarious. I mean, it's fine. It's all fine. Like I said, I was going to reply to it piece by piece, but I'm just not – No, no, I just don't want to. I just don't want to. I got my own lane. I'm going to stay in it. And, you know, I know a few thousand of you will enjoy this and appreciate it and will be useful to you on the podcast feed and the YouTube feed. That's why I'm doing it. And, you know, the issue is that, you know, the big issue is, well, one of the big issues is just that If you really want to kind of go to battle and kind of like the... the high attention spaces of the attention economy, you inevitably, you basically have to participate at a kind of very binary level, basically. Because that's how it works. The more binary it is, the higher up the pyramid you go. Because the more it can be compressed into simple binaries, the more people can kind of resonate with it and understand it and identify with it in a way. So if you're talking like I just did in this session, I'm at a very kind of low level, like talking about many nuanced things one after another. I don't have a big pointed thing that I can slap on the headline and the thumbnail. And so this is only going to be interesting to a relatively small number of people. But if you can, through increasingly sort of rigid and explosive binaries, kind of make it really, really pointed, then obviously, yeah, way more people can get interested and get excited by it. So you do have to kind of decide what level of discourse you want to participate in. I have no problem kind of going to bat if someone invited me on some big show or something like that. I would go on to debate or whatever. I can play ball. But if I'm going to come to the public sphere and share my perspective on something, I'm going to do it on my level, you know, in the kind of zone and the. with the kind of zone that I find to be most worthwhile and in the style that I find to be most worthwhile. And these things are kind of mutually exclusive. If I now turned to replying to Matt Walsh or whatever, I would, by definition, sort of click into a different mood at a different level of the discourse. And you have to make your own decisions about what level of the discourse is worth participating in. Yeah, TMZ actually invited me to go on their show on the segment that they did. And I declined. I declined. In part because it was like... This stuff is like, it's hard on a family. This is the first time that one of my viral tweets was actually about a personal reflection. All the other times it was a take, like the Greta Thunberg, Jeffrey Epstein one. That's like a provocative statement, a provocative idea or whatever. this was the first time that something i wrote about myself like a personal story went viral and that and especially with the family being related that's a totally different it's totally different thing and so when this was like going nuts um you know tmz asked me to do an interview i i was basically like no because they're so sensational and it's like it's it's stressful enough for like my family when this stuff happens you know what i mean so um Very interesting world we live in, but I'm going to stay right here. I'm going to keep doing my thing in my own way. And I appreciate you all and your interest in my work. And yeah, if you're working on anything interesting, join the community. I now actually made the community free to join if you want to just come check it out and say hi and possibly get involved. It's only for people who are working on their own kind of long-term projects. creative projects um and i think we're really going to be focusing more on kind of the humanities and the social sciences which is you know my own background what i know best um we used to have you know all kinds of people come through like novelists and artists and stuff like that and if that's you i i still would love to hear from you i'm happy to help if i can but um the community the indie scholarship community is going to i think increasingly be specifically, you know, people working in, you know, different kinds of serious nonfiction related to the humanities and social sciences, whether that's philosophy or political theory or, you know, sociology or political science or whatnot. That's my own, it's just my, my own bread and butter. So it just makes sense to stay focused on that. And yeah, Yeah, so feel free to come through, say hello. If you're working on anything interesting, always happy to hear emails. And yeah, subscribe to the podcast if you're not already. Other Life Podcast, get it anywhere you want. I've talked about this before, but things have been a little iffy in recent months. I've been super busy. And as you can see with my tweet, I've been a bit of a mess. But the book, by the way, that I've been working on for all year and has also been killing me, is just about done. I'm proofreading it. I can actually show you a little proof copy that I'm proofreading. It's awesome. I mean, I'm really proud of it. I mean, it's not like, you know, Nobel Prize winner, I don't think. But it's, again, it's my own humble little contribution, but I'm quite proud of it. And I've been working on it for quite some time. That will be shipping imminently. I know I've been saying that for a long time, but it is coming, I assure you. And yeah, it's basically six case studies looking at what I think are six of some of the greatest independent scholars throughout history. And in fact, frankly, a lot of the greatest thinkers in all of history were Independent scholars and people don't really know that. And that's why I I wrote this book, because a lot of people basically assume that, you know, you have to be a professor or you have to have some sort of, you know, institutional support or background in order to build a tremendous body of work. And it's just not true. And in fact, it's a pretty common. pattern, actually, that some of the most interesting and successful writers and thinkers in history basically just go their own way and try to figure it out on their own and build their own unique economic model for paying the bills and doing that in a way that is good for their strengths. And And I wanted to learn more about how they did that. I wanted to learn from the best. And so I did case studies on Plato, Montaigne, Spinoza, Samuel Johnson, Emerson, and Nietzsche. And there's a little bit of reflection on contemporary issues. in the introduction and the conclusion, but it's mostly just a set of historical case studies really trying to understand how these people built their lives and careers so successfully on the outside of all institutions. In each case, they were basically just very creative in carving out a very personalized model and lifestyle that was hugely successful for them in terms of their ability to produce, you know, world historical work. So I wanted to kind of understand the economics of that and the, the, the actual models that they built for themselves so that I could, you know, learn, learn from the best, you know? So I'm really excited about that. You can pre-order if you want to just go to scholar.otherlife.co. It will be shipping very, very soon. Uh, someone says I still want based the tie. Uh, maybe, maybe, maybe the based, the based book series will continue. Maybe not. I do think I'm going to do a second edition of base still is, um, which is going to irritate people because, uh, I mean, look, that book based still is, I think it's a fun, cool book. I'm in every way proud of it. I have no problem with it, but it was just a short, fun thing. It's like a pamphlet. It's not, I never, you know, it's not, it's not that serious. And I had a lot of fun with it and took a lot of liberties with it. Um, and because of that, a lot, you know, it's got a lot of haters. Uh, it doesn't have the best reviews online. There's a lot of people like say, you know, terrible things about it. Uh, cause it's a provocation and it, and that's fine. Uh, so I want to really put the haters on suicide watch by doing a second edition where I actually go and clean it up and, uh, and, and, and make it better. So that's, I've been on my, on my kind of mental agenda, but I have, you know, way too many things on my mental agenda. Uh, so we'll see maybe, but I appreciate, I appreciate the request. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll do the tie as well. Um, you thank you i appreciate the input so all right i think that's all for today i appreciate everyone hanging out you subscribe to the youtube channel if you're watching on there um or if you're listening on the podcast feed i appreciate you listening i appreciate everyone who's been with me for so long you know i've had a i've had a wild ride of wildlife uh i've had some periods where i go kind of radio silent then some periods where i come back on full blast Uh, but at the end of the day, I built this little platform for myself. Never going to stop it. You know, you're always going to hear from me for the rest of my life. I will be published publishing my ideas and my research and my perspective and the weird escapades that I somehow get involved in by just being a normal, normal dad writing about things in public. I'm going to continue to be publishing on all these channels. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully everything will be kind of soon resuming to a kind of professional full-time blast. But I know I've struggled to do that with kids and with some of this consulting stuff that I've taken on. KnockChain has, you know, been amazing. KnockChain is out into the world. KnockChain, the project, if you don't know, is that I've been working with the company and the platform that I've been helping to I built their brand and do their messaging and stuff for the past two years. Only over Christmas break, like right before Christmas break, it kind of, we had our first cross-chain bridge went live. So that was kind of when it really became, you know, available to the rest of the world. So, you know, KnockChain is really in a whole new place now. And so that's been incredibly gratifying. But because of that, you know, I should hopefully be able to spend more time on my own content and my own business. And this, this, this crazy newfangled indie scholar model that I built for myself. So I'm hopeful to spend more time on this stuff. And I know for sure I will, you know, continue to write my essays and publish these books and do this podcast and make these videos. Uh, but I'm not exactly sure yet with these small kids and everything else I got going on. I'm not exactly sure when we're going to be back to a hundred percent full steam. Uh, but I know, I know I'm not stopping baby. So I appreciate everyone who's been, uh, yeah, along for the ride all these years and interested in my thoughts and my work. So thank you for being here. Uh, Yeah. Especially after not, I mean, after not publishing a podcast for like, you know, several months and then I published one and then several months went by, like the past year, the past couple of years have been so rough that honestly, the fact that anyone is still here is amazing. You know, for those of you, like, I see a lot, I see a bunch of names in the, in the YouTube that I recognize. And, uh, I know there's still quite a lot of you who still listen to the podcast, even though the production has been so unpredictable and spotty, like that just means so much. So thank you so much. I really appreciate you. Just, yeah, it means a lot and I'm not stopping. And the fact that you're still here, just, it's awesome. The internet is amazing. And. That's all I got for today. Thank you, everybody. I appreciate you. Shoot me an email if you want to share your work. Join the community if you want for free. Subscribe to the email newsletter if you want to hear from my updates that way. And thank you. Have a great weekend. More soon. Love you. Bye-bye.