Note: There will be no voice recording for this week’s post or next week’s post. I’m living out of a hotel room in Connecticut for the next two weeks and don’t have my recording equipment.
Feel free to message me and tell me how broken your heart is.
Something I’ve noticed lately is that most families I know don’t have a defined sense of vision — a shared idea of what the family is and what the family stands for. Most families I know are just groups of individuals who happen to share blood and matrimony.
That’s not to say that they aren’t close at all. But in our way of doing things, the family unit itself comes second to the individual.
From the age of 6 or 7, kids are so busy being externally stimulated that they no longer want to sit around and go through the tedious process of playing board games with their parents. And we as parents are so busy with overtime and phones and trying to start a side hustle and trying to date in a hellishly awful dating landscape that we don’t make that time either. I mean, I literally do not know one family that plays board games together anymore. But then again, maybe I don’t get out enough.
There’s external stimulation, and there’s also the optionality that comes with an advanced society.
200 years ago, maybe your options for what to do with your life would have been: farmer, or about 3 other things. Whatever jobs happened to be available near where you were born. And, in some ways, this would have been great. When people have limited options, they tend to be happier with individual outcomes. They feel less paralyzed by the overwhelm of choice and by the emotional dead weight of opportunity cost.
100 years ago, as cities grew and suburbs became a regular part of American life, people had much more access to choice. To the freedom of pursuit. A person of nearly any background could be a tailor, or a postal worker, or a farmer, or a factory worker, or a small business owner, or any number of other things, with relatively low barriers to entry.
Today, we tell our kids “you can be anything you want to be.” And we mean it.
And, although that’s one of the worst things you can say to a child (because it paralyzes them with an overabundance of optionality), we embrace such choice and run with it. Because we think we’re supposed to. Because we take choice as a self-evidently good thing.
Today’s teenager has such vast options for who and what to become, that by default they end up moving away from the family unit. Not physically, in most cases, but at the very least emotionally and in their individual values.
When your eldest daughter wants to be a lawyer, your son a screenplay writer, and your youngest daughter a dog trainer and part-time DJ, you can bet they all have different social, moral, and emotional values. Furthermore, it’s hard to create any sort of structure in the family. It’s hard to develop and maintain a household, or a set of values, that works for everyone. In traditional homes, you told your kids what the family values were. In today’s home, the kids tell you. And they don’t even agree with each other.
Of course part of growing up is making one’s own values, to some extent. That’s necessary in order to truly grow up and become a citizen of the world. To become someone who could lead his or her own family. We’re not samurai — you can’t just be blindly loyal to family tradition forever.
This individualism isn’t inherently a bad thing. In a lot of ways it’s a wonderful thing. The entire Western tradition, from the Bible upwards, is based on the redemption and ultimacy of the individual. Having moral, creative, and physical dominion over one’s own life is what gives Western culture its “pursuit of happiness” foundation in the first place. And it allows people to spend their time on whatever ambitions they feel are worthy.
And it’s why America became the cradle of innovation and prosperity in the modern world. It’s the same thing that happened in Ancient Greece.
But it also means that, even from a very young age, the individual has less and less accountability “to the family.” It also means that families are at the mercy of hyper-individualism. On one hand you have the Confucian traditions of the East, with filial piety and family honor at the center of life, and on the other the household that revolves around the children in the West. Two extremes. Fortunately, most of us are maybe somewhere in the middle.
I was lucky enough to be part of a family for a while (it’s complicated) that seemed to get the balance right: they worked together, studied together, and played together. They all had chores that they were good at. They ran the homestead together as a team. They raised animals together. They knew what their family was about; they had a vision.
And yet they all had their own individual interests both inside and outside the home. It was gorgeous. Imperfect, as anything, but gorgeous.
Some parents choose to raise their kids in a traditional and/or religious household — not necessarily to indoctrinate their kids (although that does happen), but to create a family that, in their eyes, is worth having. And, although I’m not religious and likely never will be, I can see why they do it. Because at least a foundation can be better than no foundation. A vision better than no vision.
I don’t have any answers — this is a tough issue. Balancing the extreme individualism and pace of our time against the need for tradition, structure, and family cohesiveness.
What I do know is, if I never play board games with my kids, I hope someone smacks me in the head and asks what the hell I’m doing. Because if I’m too busy for that, I’m living a life that isn’t worth living.
There’s another thing I’ve noticed recently. It’s hard for me to say if this is changing with our generation or if this is old news. As always, perhaps both.
My grandparents (who thankfully won’t be reading this) are coming up on the end. And they’ve consciously been in the process of getting rid of stuff. Begging the children and the grandchildren to take their family heirlooms and their handcrafted old trinkets. Their boxes and crates of cherished memories. And of course we have been — both because some of them are neat, and because we know how important it is to them. Even though our houses can’t really hold any more shit than we already have. We’re doing it for them. To make them feel like their memories and lives are valued.
My grandparents are clinging to the concept of legacy. For the Silent Generation, legacy is still a thing. They have spent the last few years passing their things and their stories to us, so that we may hold their legacy for them and pass it down to our own kids.
Unfortunately, the reality is that their legacy isn’t all that important to us. Legacy, in the high-speed individualism of the developed (Western) world, just doesn’t really mean anything anymore. We’ve all got too many other things to focus on. Our lives are too full of stuff, and our houses are too.
But there’s another interesting thing about legacy: it’s a concept that relies on mystery. On the magic of imagination.
It’s a concept that relies on wondering what life was like for our grandparents. It’s a concept that relies on wondering about larger-than-life personalities and their eccentricities. Wondering how these larger-than-life personalities got through mysterious periods like the Great Depression and World War II.
When our parents used to talk about their parents and their grandparents, we had to use our imagination to have a relationship to those people. Their personalities were mysterious: if someone said their grandfather was “stoic,” we’d imagine what a stoic man looks like. We’d picture someone who seldom speaks. Whose eyes are so stern and so full of resolve that they can command an entire family wordlessly. He would almost invariably look more stoic in our imaginations than he actually was. Because people that stoic really don’t even exist. We romanticize personalities for the concept of legacy, because it’s inspiring.
In fact, having a grandfather or grandmother who had as much character or resolve as a god of Greek mythology is a point of pride for us. For anyone of any culture. It’s something we wear as a badge of honor.
But now that everything is recorded on phones and we can simply watch videos of our grandparents, that mystery is gone.
The legacy personalities of our families are shrinking back down to size and will no longer serve as some abstract sense of inspiration for what we ourselves could be. It’s one less ideal to look up to and strive toward. It’s one less bit of magic in our lives. And we’re already running low on those.
But I still find myself wondering, all the time. Wondering what it takes for a personality to truly have an impact on a family. What it means to be that stoic. Wondering what it means to leave a legacy.
There’s still plenty of magic in life. You just have to go looking for it.
Drink some water and raise chickens with your kids.
JDR
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” - Confucius
One of your best Justin.
I especially liked the connection to past generations and mystery. My Grandfather was a stoic Midwest farmer and very kind. At least that's how I remember him. He may not have been, but that's the myth my memories have built.
As far as religion, I think you are on to something. I grew up Catholic, but was exposed to a lot of faiths growing up. I'm fairly agnostic myself but have alot of respect for religion and especially the community it brings. I just don't have the faith. Today's politics seems to want us to choose a side between religious vs non-religious, conservative vs progressive. It all seems so unproductive and harmful for society.
Really nice piece. Thinking about starting a family, religion almost gives one a basis of ideals. In a more and more secular world, I wonder what's the best way to go about this. Board games you suppose? : )
Thanks for writing this.