Happy Father’s Day!
This is my first Father's Day, and I am still adjusting to my new favorite title.
Becoming a father is a hard thing to put into words, and I am not going to pretend I can. Not that much changes. In some ways, life gets smaller and simpler. And somehow everything changes at once, and feels completely different.
Things I used to treat as trivial are suddenly front and center. Things I never thought about keep me up at night. And a few of the things I was sure mattered turn out, this year, to barely register. It is just a shift, and I am still inside it.
A year ago this day belonged to my own dad. This year, it is also a little about me, which takes some getting used to. Nowhere near as important as Mother's Day, to be clear.
I keep thinking about two World Series, thirty-three years apart.
A friend I deeply respect, a generation ahead of me and with more life behind him, told me about a night in 1992. He was in a small room off his first son's bedroom, watching the first Blue Jays World Series, wondering how his boy's life would turn out different from his own. He mentioned it almost as an aside, then added that the world felt steadier back then.
I knew the feeling from the other end of those same thirty-three years. Last fall the Jays finally made it back to the Series. They lost, though it is still too soon to talk about that. My wife was pregnant, in the second trimester, and I was into the game. But in the gaps, between pitches, my mind kept drifting to the same place my friend’s had: trying to picture the life coming toward us, and what the world would even look like for my son.
Two fathers, two World Series, a third of a century apart, both in a quiet room, not knowing what their kids’ world would become.
Someone had recently pointed out that my son belongs to Generation Beta, the first cohort that will never know a world without AI. It broke my brain a little, trying to hold how far that is from my own childhood, when we went years with no internet, then dial-up that tied up the phone line, then somehow all of this.
It goes back further than the two of us. Both my grandfathers served in the Second World War, one near Ridgetown and one around London, and came home to raise their families without much talk about any of it. What it means to be a father has changed a great deal since then. I get to be more present, more in it, than they were ever really allowed to be. But the core has not moved. They met a genuinely frightening unknown and built anyway. My dad, when he became a father in the 1980s, could not have pictured my life. I cannot picture my son's. None of this is new.
Every unimaginable future so far has mostly meant expansion, more of the world opening up, not less. I carry real fears about where some of this is heading, the climate, the inequality, the plain greed of it. I also catch myself thinking the world is more open and more possible than it has ever been. The truth is probably that some of it gets better, some of it gets worse, and a lot of it lands somewhere none of us can picture from here. There was never one answer. There is just the not-knowing, and what you do inside it.
So what do you actually pass down, if not a map?
The map expires. Mine will be useless to my son the way my parents' was to me.
I asked my friend a version of that. What do you tell the people you mentor, or your own kids, about navigating a time like this? His answer stayed with me because it was so unglamorous:
Be honest with the ambitious ones reaching for the stars before the substance is there, because most of them come to see it on their own anyway.
Always help the person trying to change direction.
And with your own children, take one thing at a time, and try not to sweat the small, irksome things that feel enormous tonight and are gone by next month.
No framework, no five steps. Just a way of carrying yourself that a kid absorbs long before they can name it.
The trap is letting the size of all that steal the small moments, where life actually happens. So what gets handed down is not the advice, the introductions, or the plan. It is smaller and more durable: which problems you choose, what you refuse to panic about, whether you meet the unknown with clenched hands or open ones. You do not need a child for this to be true. Someone is always coming up behind you, watching how you carry it.
Last Saturday I held my son asleep on my chest for a few hours at a backyard barbecue. The smell of his head, the weight of him, kids running around the yard, a dozen parents half-watching and half-talking. None of us has any real idea what the world will look like for these kids. But every one of us wants it to be better for them than it was for us, and we are all quietly building toward that. That is not nothing. It might be the best reason for hope I have found.
I am four and a half months in, so I will not pretend to have figured this out. Most days, I am the one being rearranged. The peace I can find is not really for me. It is the thing he inherits.
So I keep coming back to all of them, those fathers in their quiet rooms across seventy years, not knowing, choosing to build anyway. The world is unrecognizable in every generation. The job has not changed once.
Happy Father's Day! Especially to the new ones, still figuring out what to do with it.
See you next Sunday,
Eric
P.S. Whether or not you have kids, someone somewhere is coming up behind you. I would love to know what you are hoping to pass down. Replies land.
Eric Tribe
Strategist, operator, and occasional writer
Writes Infinite Momentum each Sunday.
Canadian based in Los Angeles.
More about me here