Dismantling the Old Commandments

On ambition, identity, and inherited narratives

On February 11th, I’ll be running a free one-hour taster for REBOOT, a group coaching program for dads looking to radically rethink ambition, identity, and the scripts we inherited. You can RSVP here.

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Newsflash: A 35-year-old millennial father living in the United States spends more time caring for his children than his baby-boomer mother did at the same age. It sounds unbelievable, and I’d question it too if I hadn’t read it in The Economist earlier this month. But it’s right there in the data: the shift is real. It’s happening.

Yes, mothers spend more time than ever, too. A conversation for next time.

I’ve been writing this newsletter for five years. And the thread running through it all is the overwhelming work that dads face as they wrestle with existential questions at the heart of modern fatherhood. To question our beliefs. Doubt the stories we inherited. Imagine new futures. Create spaces where we can be vulnerable, freed from the pressure to perform to societal norms around ambition and success.

And, most importantly, to do all of this together.

Last year, I did something I’ve never done before. Every Wednesday, rain or shine, I joined a call with six other dads to go deep on what fatherhood means today: as we stand at a historical inflection point, when more is expected of us than the fathers that came before, more than we were ever taught to handle; when the pressure to provide is now shared often, but the pressure to parent is present always, in a way that it once wasn’t—for my dad, at the very least.

This was the first time I had coached a group of dads together. I called it REBOOT, a name that staked its intention to rethink the biggest relationships in our lives: with our partners, our children, our friends, our jobs, and ourselves. Dads joined from across the United States and Europe. You didn’t have to work in marketing to take part, but hilariously, most of them did. But no matter where they came from, or where they worked, they were all wrestling with versions of the same question:

Now I’m a dad, who am I supposed to be?

We are stepping into a new definition of fatherhood whilst entrenched in its past—chains that run thousands of metres deep, barnacle-encrusted links resting on the seabed. Those norms drive our internal narratives: they tell us that fathers need to keep quiet and carry on, that it’s our duty to do as our fathers did before us, as generations did before them, no matter how misjudged those decisions and actions might have been.

The traditional fatherhood tropes have begun to shift: whilst Homer was still strangling Bart until a few years ago, the father who hits his son today is held in the same light as the one who once hit his wife. Dad is no longer the sole provider, the disciplinarian, the boss of the house. There was once a time when, if dad said jump, your response better be “How high?” But those old commandments no longer hold: they are stone relics carved for a different era, for a world we no longer live in.

Charlton Heston, dad of two, in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments

Today, we search for new models, beliefs and behaviours we hope will transport us towards the hallowed promised lands, where life will be different, where parenting might suddenly be easier. Maybe change is the answer: a new job in a fresh country, a leap into the unknown, choosing to bet on yourself after cashing a monthly paycheck for most of your career. These transformations feel terrifying, as they should: internal voices ward us off making a change, the mind’s desire for mental homeostasis setting off alarm bells. As a father, those voices scream louder: the archetype of provider pulls us back towards its dark, murky depths. Move forward, or sink into the deep, dark blue—which do you choose? Because if you want to get there, you can’t take everything with you.

@_aholliday#holliday

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These conversations came up regularly in weekly group sessions. We’d talk about seismic shifts in our sense of self, how to find work aligned with our values, and how to untangle our identities from job titles and salary bands. Those discussions were to be expected. But a surprise for me was the regularity with which we came together around smaller shifts. The ones that take nothing more than a few words to stop us in our tracks—an instant moment of clarity that allows you to see the world from an entirely new perspective. If you’ve been reading the newsletter for a while, you’ll know where I’m going here. Back in 2021, I wrote about William B. Irvine’s “Last Time Meditation,” which I’d picked up from a Waking Up session:

“When you’re doing something, you should reflect on the possibility that this might be the last time you do it. Again, you don’t dwell on this possibility, it’s just a flickering thought. Doing this can dramatically change your perspective on the events of your daily life. Mowing my lawn can be a burden, particularly on a hot day, but I can lighten that burden by remembering that there will be a last time that I am physically able to mow a lawn, and that after that time has passed, I will likely look back on these as the good old days.”

One of the dads in the first cohort told me he thought about the Last Time Meditation “almost every day” since he first read about it in this newsletter all those years ago. These little hacks provide a circuit breaker, allowing us to find necessary milliseconds between action and reaction; to take a breath, for just a moment, before we lose our shit and drop into a negative spiral that can last anywhere from a few minutes to the best part of a week. My friend Justin and I work for ourselves; we lean on each other through the good times and the bad. One mantra we have found essential is “This is the struggle I choose.” When the shit is hitting the fan. When work begins to dry up. When, like during the pandemic, I’d have chewed someone’s arm off for a monthly paycheck. With any choice, there will always be a battle. This is the struggle I choose.

Here’s another I’ve found myself coming back to. Last April, I went to Manchester to be with my family on the one-year anniversary of Mum’s death. It was a lot, in the middle of a month that was a huge challenge for myriad reasons: a perfect storm of life, career and family. I could have done without going back there; at the airport, as I was leaving Barcelona, I caught myself thinking it. But I remembered another great reframe: rather than thinking “I have to do this,” I entertained a more abundant thread: “I get to do this.” I get to see my dad, who has been through the toughest year of his life. I get to see my sisters, who I’ve grown ever closer to over the last 12 months. I get to be with my nephew on the weekend of his birthday. I get to have breakfast with my niece, halfway through her GCSE exams in the final year of high school. What a privilege it was to be with them all.

I offered the same reflection to my dad when he shared how much work it took to keep the garden looking good. I told him he gets to spend this time outside, in a garden he and his wife both adored, that continues to provide joy to him and so many, offering moments of solace and staggering beauty every day—even on the days where the sun doesn’t come out, which in Manchester are many.

These reframes came up regularly with the REBOOT dads—a group who were all regular readers of the newsletter, which created an instant shorthand and shared set of values and beliefs. During our six months together, we witnessed regular, powerful, and plentiful shifts. Several dads arrived measuring success by salary and title. By the end, they’d shifted to different metrics entirely—control over their calendar, presence at the school gates, emotional well-being. One dad put it simply: his goal was no longer to be wealthier, but happier. Forty years of inherited scripts, actively being dismantled.

Shared realisations became inspiration for others: one dad committed to being “the friend who doesn’t talk about work” at social gatherings. Another realised that when friends wrote letters for his 40th birthday, not one mentioned his job: they wrote about his humour, his loyalty, and how he shows up when things get hard. We traced how the conflict styles we grew up with were still running as background processes in our own marriages. So many dads—myself amongst them—were raised witnessing a very typical relationship of the time: explosive fathers, avoidant mothers, no attempt at repair; destructive cycles that, without action, we are doomed to repeat, patterns echoed through generations. This time around, we get to end it.

I’m not offering a silver bullet. Those same questions you’re asking, I’m asking them too. I’m asking them here, through a few thousand words every week, thinking out loud in your inbox in the hope that it might illuminate a path for others. I’d be lying if I said I had all the answers. But I’ve finally stopped searching for them on my own.

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Join the REBOOT Taster Session

The second REBOOT cohort starts on March 4th. Before then, I’m running a free taster workshop on Wednesday, February 11th at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 7 pm CET. I’ll walk through the program's core themes, share some tools you can use, and you can hear firsthand from dads who went through it last time.

I’ll leave the last words to one of them:

I am really benefiting from the meaningful thinking you encouraged me to do as part of the process. I’m able to connect what I’m doing to a sense of purpose and my core values. Most importantly, my work situation is allowing me to be fully active as a parent and husband. I think a big thing I’ve learned is that being engaged in making a meaningful life means nothing is ever solved, but I am enjoying that process a great deal now. Taking action, reflecting, refining. I look back on our work together as one of the more important and impactful things I’ve done.

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Good Dadvice

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