Digging In

Reflections on a lifetime of back-breaking work (not mine)

Feb 27, 2025

I’m on a solo writing retreat this week, deep into the book. Every day I wake up, walk to my desk and look over the Rio Segre toward an old monastery that has stood here for nearly 1,000 years. Today the horses came out to graze in the field below. The book is going great, thanks for asking. But I now deeply understand why many authors, like so many parents, are “one and done.”

I’ve been working behind the scenes to lock down some “guest professors” as part of the REBOOT group coaching program. During our sessions, we’ll discuss books that help us shift perspectives on long-held beliefs that stubbornly persist. Excited to have Paul Millerd join us to talk about The Pathless Path, and later Simone Stolzoff will come aboard to discuss The Good Enough Job. I’m locking it down on Sunday, and we’ve got room for one more dad—if you’re curious where you might end up after spending six months working on yourself—and not just for someone else—now is your chance.

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I’ve polished up an older essay this week, one of my all-time favourites. After it was initially published, my uncle sounded off in the comments informing me that Seamus Heaney was his old English Literature lecturer when he was at Queen’s University in Belfast. This essay also became the pilot podcast episode for The New Fatherhood: if you’d prefer listening to it, my harsh Mancunian voice interspersed with the warm Irish lilt of Seamus Heaney, you can do so on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Pocket Casts.

The curse of a career spent in advertising is seeing everything as a problem that can easily be solved with the right strategy. Understanding what makes an audience tick; helping them find the necessary McGuffin to provide revelation and transformation needed in their own hero’s journey; figuring out where they spend their time, and the magic words needed to convince them they need your product.

I’ve made a living advising other people on how to do it. And then I chose to do it for myself. After two decades spent using my skills to convince people to choose one brand of toothpaste over another, or to tempt them to upgrade their phone to the newer model when the one in their pocket is working just fine, I realised I could use it for something else. Something that meant something. To use those powers for good—to seek out dads who find themselves on a path parallel to mine. To share what I’ve learned from time spent looking for answers inside, rather than chasing shiny things everywhere else. Those dads might be earlier in their quest. Perhaps they’re closing in on the finish line, if such a thing exists—a vanishing point creeping towards infinity. They’re all looking for something thought-provoking—and feel-provoking—along the way, and the feeling that they’re not doing this alone.

In the world of the “adland strategist”, the tribe of which I plied my trade, you can’t make your way through a week of this-could’ve-been-an-email meetings without someone referencing Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This iconic, rainbow coloured pyramid helped humankind understand our motivations like never before, a career dedicated to pushing the study of the mind beyond mental illness to a place he termed humanist psychology. His work helped us understand the incentives that drive us to what we do. Maslow’s fascination with human behaviour continued into later life, and in 1966, 4 years before his death, he coined the “law of the instrument:”

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
— The Psychology of Science, Abraham Maslow

When I started The New Fatherhood, the urge to take a marketing hammer and use it on a literary nail was overwhelming. My brain kept cascading into AIDA funnels, bounce rates and conversion goals. The only way to make it stop was to close the valve completely:

“I spent 2021 focused on learning to write. To treat it as a craft. To give it the respect it demands. To commit to learning the way, like thousands of writers had done before me. To read more great books about writing. To read more great books, period. To get down to the nuts and bolts of language, taking the modern classics, interrogating the aspects of each sentence, unpacking their secrets, private lessons from the world’s greatest authors, often delivered from beyond the grave. I'd spend my time—as Ira Glass so eloquently put it—"closing the gap ... to make work as good as your ambitions."

It was well over a year until I felt comfortable wearing the word “writer.” Before, it was an ill-fitting jacket: tight across the back and the cuffs, baggy everywhere else, pockets exactly where you don’t want them. On the odd occasion I’d use it, privately, I’d feel achingly uncomfortable. I've written all my life, but it's always been on behalf of someone else: the company I worked for, the agency I was pitching with, the CMO’s presentation I was ghost-writing. But what you’re reading now? This is different. It’s my raw words, my view on the world. There’s nothing to hide behind out here.

When that first notification popped up on my phone, gloriously declaring someone had decided to pay $6 towards this sapling of an idea, it was unlike anything I’d ever felt. I’d been paid before, for all kinds of things. But to be paid to write? One person choosing, of their own volition, to pay me—with their own money—for words I pushed out onto the internet—and, if I didn't fuck things up, they’d do it again next month?

The jobs we do today are unrecognisable from the ones our parents did, fuzzier with every generation that passes—photocopies of photocopies of photocopies, a meme screenshotted so many times it’s littered with compression artefacts, a datamoshed replica of the work your great-grandad once did. Those older jobs still exist, of course. But you probably don't have one of them. My dad worked in construction. He spent the 1980s driving up and down the UK in a Transit van, through sleet, snow and shit, laying pipes in the ground—water, gas electric, and later fibre optic—getting paid by the mile. His hard labour directly correlated to the salary delivered—in cash, in a small, square, brown manilla envelope—on Friday evening, various deductions scrawled across the front. He’d head home on Friday evening after a week of work—probably via the pub, so say we all—with that lifeline in hand. Sometimes it would be enough to get through to next week. Other times it wouldn’t. Living week-to-week, only able to focus on the bottom layers of Maslow’s pyramid, utterly oblivious to the future he was literally paving the way for: fibre optic cables he was installing that his son would eventually use to build a career, raise a family, start a newsletter, and ultimately lead to a guy in Tokyo paying him $6 a month to keep doing it.

Last week, for reasons unknown, Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” paid my brain a visit. I haven’t read it since I studied it for my English Literature GCSE 26 years ago. Almost three decades later I was dumbfounded by its predictions. A man of Irish descent, a writer of words, sits pen in hand, considering the generations of men that came before him and dug: turf for Heaney’s father, tarmacadam for mine.

“By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.”

Heaney remembers his father as a man who dug, wherever it took him, further and faster, as he “bends low, comes up twenty years away.” He contemplates his place amongst a lineage of strong men, who toiled for a living, exchanging their blood, sweat and fears for food and shelter for their families. He, like me, wonders if he’ll ever understand that struggle, a life spent with no a spade in hand.

“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.”

The spade becomes a pen; the pen becomes a keyboard. Maslow’s hammer becomes a gift, a tool to climb the pyramid towards a dream of self-actualisation. The father, unwittingly, indirectly, laid the way for the son. A poem, uncovered again, 56 years after Heaney first dug it free, its roots deeper now than ever they were.

In 2010, 3 years before his death, Seamus Heaney shared thoughts from a lifetime spent under poetry’s spell.

“The difference in a poem, or a work of literary art, is that it is not utilitarian communication. It is some kind of housing of a moment—a snapshot of consciousness—that can be looked upon, by other people.”

My son will soon turn six. The only digging he’s seen his old man do is with a hand trowel in a window box, or with fingernails down the side of his temple on the days when it all gets too much. Will he meet this poem as a teenager, feel it woosh by at first, before boomeranging around when he’s ready for it? Will he wonder on its “housing of a moment” and his place in the lineage of fathers who came before him? Will he, one day, see himself reflected in Heaney’s words, pondering the inadequacy of his spade, just as I do with mine?

3 things to read this week

“Goodnight Moon” by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen in Looking At Picture Books. A conversation between two of my favourite children’s picture book authors, as they look back on the gentle absurdity of the 1947 classic Goodnight Moon, digging into every little detail like a pair of conspiracy theorists dissecting the Zapruder film. “Why has this become the ultimate goodnight book? Why are three copies given at every baby shower? And I think it’s because it uses the tools of the picture book—language and pictures—to encompass so much of the experience of falling asleep. How hallucinatory and bizarre falling asleep is. How so much of falling asleep is feeling very awake. And most importantly, how scary falling asleep can be.”
“Love You Forever, Death, and Cocaine” by A.J. Daulerio in The Small Bow. Love Goodnight Moon? This is your lucky week. A.J. Daulerio uses children’s books as a lens to explore how we talk to our kids about death, and his son’s obsession with it after the passing of his grandfather. “His interest and acceptance of death are not exactly Zen but more like a 12-year-old’s, one who has recently discovered Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” album. When I told him we had a new mailman, he wondered why. “DID THE OTHER ONE DIEEEEEE????” I told him I was sure he had just been assigned a new route, and he was visibly disappointed.”
“How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me” by Daniel Oppenheimer in The New York Times. The most discussed link in the Dadscord this week, Oppenheimer chronicles a series of eight sessions with Terry Real, “by far the most famous of the therapists we’ve seen during our marriage.” Let’s have more men opening up and talking about couples therapy, please, especially when they’re as powerful and vulnerable as this. “Anger was a defense against being sucked into someone else’s chaos and also a means of seeking recognition. Push them away, and if that doesn’t work then have a big raging fight. At least if we’re yelling, my needs are being reckoned with.”

Real Recognise Real

I started to dig into more of Real’s work off the back of that NYT article, particularly his 1997 book I Don't Want to Talk About It which dissects the "secret legacy of male depression." One great paragraph, amongst many, to leave you with:

Boys don’t hunger for fathers who will model traditional mores of masculinity. They hunger for fathers who will rescue them from it. They need fathers who have themselves emerged from the gauntlet of their own socialisation with some degree of emotional intactness. Sons don’t want their father’s “balls”; they want their hearts.

1997!?! OG New Fatherhood vibes, prescient as hell.