Video summary
Modern fathers are undeniably more involved than previous generations, engaging deeply with their children through reading, emotional conversations, and shared domestic labor. Despite this increased participation, many men experience a profound and specific kind of exhaustion that goes beyond physical fatigue or simple sleep deprivation. This feeling arises even on days where everything went right, leaving parents with the persistent sense that they missed a better version of themselves. The core issue driving this misery is not a lack of effort, but rather a shifting standard of what it means to be a good father; while past generations were often judged by basic metrics like financial provision and physical presence, today's fathers hold themselves accountable to an endless, self-created checklist of emotional attunement, attachment theory, and perfect discipline that has no passing score.
This relentless self-audit is compounded by the structural collapse of the extended family network that once supported parenting. In previous eras, raising a child was a communal effort distributed among grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors, which prevented any single unit from bearing the entire weight alone. Today, the nuclear family often operates in isolation, with migrant families facing an additional layer of distance where their support networks are physically unreachable. While digital tools like parenting forums and podcasts offer some scaffolding, they cannot replace the immediate, tangible presence of a village that can step in at 3:00 AM during a crisis. Consequently, the burden of emotional, practical, and financial labor is concentrated entirely on two people trying to sustain themselves, leading to a depletion that society often fails to acknowledge or support adequately.
Furthermore, the rise of social media has transformed fatherhood from a private act into a public performance, creating an economy where visibility matters more than reality. When a father's identity becomes tied to being the present, intentional, and emotionally aware parent, every bad day feels like a catastrophic failure of that persona rather than a normal human experience. Unlike their fathers who raised children by instinct without an audience watching or judging them, modern men feel compelled to maintain a consistent image regardless of their actual energy levels or mental state. This performance creates a gap between who they are on a hard day and who they must appear to be, generating a unique form of anxiety where resting feels like failing the role they have constructed for themselves.
Ultimately, the goal is not to regress to the past or romanticize the imperfections and absences of previous generations, but to recognize that the current struggle stems from navigating harder conditions with fewer resources and higher expectations. The exhaustion felt by modern fathers is not proof that they are doing something wrong or falling behind; rather, it is evidence of their deep care and consistent effort in a demanding environment. True groundedness for children requires seeing a father who accepts bad days without turning them into catastrophes and who understands that showing up to do the ordinary things—feeding, bathing, and sitting with them—is enough. By honoring this tiredness as a sign of dedication rather than pathology, fathers can learn to be intentional without being consumed by the need for perfection, allowing themselves the permission to simply be human.
Read the full video transcript
There's a specific kind of tiredness
that has nothing to do with not sleeping
enough. It's not physical exhaustion and
it's not emotional in any way that you'd
usually recognize or be able to name
clearly. It's something else.
It's the kind that finds you at the end
of the day where you genuinely did
everything right, where you were patient
when it was hard to be patient, where
you were present, you made dinner, you
did the bath time, you read the story,
you put the phone down and you had a
conversation. Conversations that your
own father with you. You showed up in
ways, all the ways that mattered.
And you still feel like you came up
short somewhere, like there was a
version of the day that was better than
the one that you actually had. And that
version is the one that you should have
managed.
That feeling, that specific, quiet, hard
to locate feeling
is what I want to talk about today.
Millennial fathers are more involved
than any generation of fathers before
them.
>> [music]
>> And that is not an opinion. It's just
what the data shows. We read to our kids
more, we attend more medical
appointments, we have more conversations
about feelings and fears and what's
happening at school and what it all
means. We cook, we clean, we show up at
assemblies, we take calls from teachers.
We do that invisible labor that our
mothers largely absorbed alone, that our
fathers largely didn't register was
happening.
We are, by almost any measure, more
involved. And yet, we are also more
depleted, more likely to say that
fatherhood has negatively affected our
mental health,
more likely to feel like we're failing
or at least falling short of something.
Even in the weeks where everything
functionally went fine and nobody could
point to a specific thing that went
wrong. And I think that paradox deserves
an honest conversation and I don't mean
that motivational, yeah, you're doing
great. Keep going." kind of
conversation. That doesn't really land.
Just an honest one. Because I think
there are a few things quietly producing
this exhaustion, and none of them get
talked about with enough clarity. So,
today I'm going to try to do that.
The first thing that I want to talk
about is that we added more.
Significantly, honestly, more than a
generation before us.
But, here's what happened that nobody
really warned us about. The standard
moved. It moved with us when we did.
Think about how your father's success as
a parent was actually measured.
At least, I can say this for mine.
He provided financially. He kept the
lights on. He showed up for the big
visible moments. Sometimes.
He kept his hands to himself, more or
less.
By those metrics, by that particular set
of criteria, a significant number of our
fathers were perfectly adequate. They
passed. They could look at themselves
and feel like they had done the job.
Now, think about how we measure
ourselves. Are we present enough?
Emotionally attuned enough? Is there too
much screen time? Not enough time
outside?
Are we using the right kind of
discipline? The non-punitive, boundary,
consistent, but not rigid.
Have we had a conversation about
anxiety? About what it means to be a man
today in this specific moment with
everything that it comes with?
Are we teaching by example? Or quietly
undermining it by working too much? Or
being distracted? Or letting them see us
on the phone? Or use the phone during
dinner? Do our kids know in their bodies
[music]
that they are loved unconditionally?
Or they associate our approval with
their performance?
We are holding a checklist our fathers
never had. And we built that checklist
ourselves. Well, mostly from the
internet and from parenting books and
from the comment section of things that
we read at midnight when we can't sleep.
And I want to be fair here because I
think most of those questions actually
matter. The consciousness behind them is
not the problem. Their awareness is not
the problem. The problem is that there
is no passing score.
The bar is not fixed at a place where
you can reach and rest. You clear one
standard, and immediately you find
yourself standing in front of two or
three new ones that you hadn't seen
before.
And for me, that's not a recipe for
confidence. That is not a recipe for the
kind of groundedness that you are trying
to model. That is a recipe for a
particular kind of exhaustion that comes
with the permanent sensation of not
quite arriving, no matter how far you've
walked. My father didn't know about
attachment styles. He didn't lie awake
wondering whether the way he said, "Not
now." would calcify into something that
his child will spend years unpacking
with a therapist. He didn't interrogate
his own patterns or think about the
cycle that he was breaking or
continuing. He just fathered.
Mostly imperfect, often absent, but
without the constant weight of
self-interrogation sitting on top of
everything else that he was already
carrying. And there are days that, if
I'm being completely honest, I
understand the appeal of it. Well, not
the absence or the emotional
unavailability or the silence that so
many of us carried into adulthood like
old furniture. No, I don't mean that
one, and I don't want any of that back.
And I wouldn't trade it for any of what
I'm trying to build.
But
the rest of it, the freedom from
constant self-audit, the permission to
just show up without having to analyze
every moment of showing up afterwards,
I understand wanting that, more than I'd
like to admit sometimes.
And the second thing I want to talk
about is that my father didn't do it
alone. And I don't mean that
sentimentally in the way that people say
it when you're talking about community
in an abstract sense.
I mean it structurally. There were
aunties who took the kids when the house
got too loud or
too chaotic and nobody had to ask them.
There were grandparents in the same
building if you lived in a family house
or at least in the same street. There
were uncles who could correct a child
without it becoming a whole incident.
There were neighbors who watched without
being asked who were just as present in
a way that distributed the weights of
the entire thing across a whole network
of people rather than concentrating it
in just two people. The weight of
raising a child was spread. Wasn't even
or perfect or without its own
complications, but it was spread. That
network for most of us raising children
today no longer exists in any meaningful
way to be honest. It doesn't.
The nuclear family unit, that's two
people in an apartment doing everything,
is a relatively recent design.
And what it demands is that those two
people
absorb [music] everything, sometimes
just one, absorb every single function
that used to be distributed across a
community.
The emotional labor,
the practical labor, the financial
labor, the
the educational decisions, the
discipline, the comfort,
all of it is concentrated in the small
unit that is also trying to sustain
itself. And now for me adding the
migrant layer on top of that because if
you're raising children in a country
that isn't yours,
which a significant portion of people
watching this are, then your village
isn't just scaled down,
it's a few hours flight away.
Those aunties exist. The grandparents
exist and they want to be there and you
can feel that they want to be there.
They are just not here. And you feel
that absence in a particular way at 3:00
a.m. when something is wrong and there's
nobody to call who would actually come.
So, what can you do with that weight?
Well, you Google things in the middle of
the night, you join parenting forums, or
you listen to podcasts
or like this one, maybe. You try to
build from digital material and
scheduled video calls, and that is the
scaffolding that your grandparents had
just woven into the fabric of where they
lived. The Netherlands has something
genuinely worth acknowledging here.
Paternity leave that actually means
something. A cultural understanding that
fathers should be present from the
beginning. An infrastructure that at
least tries to acknowledge that raising
children is a shared social project.
That is real, and it matters. But, even
here, the nuclear unit is sealed off in
its own way.
That's Dutch model of the small,
self-sufficient, private family that's
efficient and independent produces its
own kind of
isolation, if I should put it [music]
that way.
The welfare state fills some of those
gaps, I will be honest. But, the state
cannot hold your child while you cry,
and it cannot sit with you in the
kitchen at the end of a hard week and
just be there. No, that's not going to
happen.
And the third thing, and this one I find
most uncomfortable to say out loud, so
I'm just going to say it carefully.
We're not just being fathers, we are a
lot of the time performing fatherhood.
Stay with me.
Social media created an economy of the
visible.
What you actually do in private is less
legible, less real in some way than what
you actually post
about doing. And fatherhood, which used
to happen almost entirely in the private
interior of a family home, invisible to
everyone outside it, has gradually
migrated outward to the caption or to
the reel, to the post about what your
4-year-old said that made you think
about leadership differently. And look,
I want to be careful here because I
don't think it's
purely cynical or bad. Some of that
visibility really matters. We do learn a
lot from it.
It normalizes involved fatherhood in a
way that has ripple effect. It tells
other men that this is something worth
doing, that's something they are allowed
to do without it being a threat to
anything.
And that for me is very real. But
there's a cost to the performance that I
don't think we're calculating honestly
enough.
When your identity becomes the uh
present, intentional,
and emotionally aware father, when
that's part of how you're seen by other
people, and part of how you see
yourself, the gap between who you are on
a good day and who you actually are on a
hard one becomes its own kind of
exhaustion to manage.
You cannot be present father on a day
where you are distracted and running on
empty, for example. You cannot be
emotionally attuned on a day where you
have nothing left to give anyone. And if
your self-image depends on that
consistency, if the performance has to
continue regardless of what's actually
happening underneath, then the bad days
don't just feel bad. They feel like
something is collapsing,
like you've lost access to who you are.
Your father never had to prove it
publicly. His fatherhood was not a brand
or identity he was maintaining.
It was just a thing that he was, whether
it was good or bad, whether he was
present or absent, without an audience
watching, and without he himself
watching for an audience.
And I think about that sometimes, what
it would actually feel like to father
like nobody was watching, including
yourself. So, here is where I want to
settle this rant. I'm not arguing that
we should go back to anything. I don't
think that direction exists, and I
wouldn't want it if it did. The presence
matters. The attunement matters.
The breaking of the cycles that needed
breaking, that is real work and is worth
doing, and I don't think we should
flatten any of it. But, I think that
there's a version of conscious
fatherhood that has somewhere along the
way
quietly tipped into something else, into
a kind of perfectionism, or into
self-surveillance that's so constant and
so demanding that it produces the exact
opposite of the groundedness that we are
trying to model for the people that we
are modeling it for. Our fathers
parented largely by instinct, and
sometimes that instinct was wrong,
badly damaging wrong. That is the
silence, the distance, the discipline
that was really just unprocessed fear
wearing a harder face.
I am not romanticizing any of it. I want
to be clear about that. But, underneath
the instinct, underneath all of it,
there was a kind of permission, and I
think that's worth trying to salvage. A
permission to not interrogate every
single moment, to trust that showing up,
that is being there, or feeding the
child, and sitting with them, and doing
the ordinary, un remarkable things that
you did today, also counts. That today,
[music]
as it actually happened rather than it
should have,
is enough. And I think that's the
question that this whole thing has been
circling around without actually
directly saying it. Can we be
intentional fathers without being
consumed by the intention? Can we hold
the consciousness, the attunements, the
genuine desire to do this better [music]
than was done for us without turning it
into a performance we can never actually
really live up to?
Because, if the point of all this work
is to raise a child who feels secure,
that is honestly, [music] quietly in
their body secure,
then that child also needs to see a
father who rests, who accepts a bad day
without making a catastrophe of it, who
is clearly and visibly human.
>> [music]
>> They need to see that, too. They need to
see a father who loves them without
turning that love into a project that
needs to be managed or optimized and
reported on. I don't think we are
fathering better or worse than our
fathers did in any simple sense that you
could put a number on.
I just think that we are fathering
differently in conditions that are
honestly harder to navigate with more
expectations and more information and
significantly less support than the
generations before us had without fully
realizing that they had it.
That for me is not a failure. That's
just a reality that we are operating in.
But the tiredness, and this is the one
thing that I want you to actually carry
out of here if nothing else stays,
the tiredness is not evidence that
you're not enough. It's not a signal
that you're doing it wrong or that
you're behind some version of yourself
that has some more together. No, that
tiredness might just be evidence that
you care deeply and consistently and in
a way that costs something.
And that is worth honoring instead of
pathologizing. You're not behind, you're
just in it. So, let me know in the
comments what's been the heaviest part
of this for you.
I'll read them, so drop them down there,
and I'll see you in the next one.
Peace.