Railroad to Nowhere

What happens when providing for your kids means missing out on their lives?

Next Wednesday, I’ll be running a free one-hour taster session for REBOOT: a group coaching program for dads looking to radically rethink the interconnected web of identity, career, and family. Sign up here.

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At this time, every year, I find myself drinking from the cinema firehose—my personal annual challenge to catch all Best Picture movies before Oscar night. How many have you seen? If your number is low, don’t worry—I get it. If you are hoping to go see a movie with your beloved, it can be an especially tough sell. There’s the sitter, which will cost you anywhere between €6.60 in the Netherlands (Europe’s cheapest) or $27.79 in San Francisco (before tip). Add in a taxi there and back, some kind of sugary or sweet snack (diner’s choice), and maybe a quick drink afterwards and it feels extravagant to go and watch a screen in a dark room—pretty much how most nights end, without the perks of being able to pause for the bathroom, or to roll off to bed halfway through and leave the rest for tomorrow.

But for any dad with even a passing interest in cinema, it’s clear that there’s something in the water right now, and fatherhood is front and centre across the majority of nominees. Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value, Hamnet, Frankenstein: all of these movies grapple with the tension between the father our children need us to be, and the external validation our egos chase away from home. It’s a wild turn of affairs when only One Battle After Another offers an aspirational version of fatherhood, with a pot-smoking, gun-toting Leonardo DiCaprio doing everything in his power to protect his daughter.

As parents, we’re all operating in the slipstream of popular culture, so you’re forgiven if you haven’t caught up. You have a few more weeks before I come back to talk about the rest of these movies in depth and what cinema is telling us about fatherhood in 2026. Instead, today, please enjoy this amuse-bouche: a relatively spoiler-free reflection on a movie you can watch at home this weekend—and, with a sub-two-hour runtime, you’ve actually got a chance to watch it in one sitting.

Train Dreams is an adaptation of a Denis Johnson novella, and is a slow, stunning, meditative exploration of fatherhood and our search for meaning. It stars Joel Edgerton, an Australian actor who is most famous—in this house, at least—for playing a young Uncle Owen in Star Wars Episodes II and III. Edgerton plays the part of Robert Grainier, an unassuming lumberjack living in Idaho around the time of World War I. Vast swathes of the movie are set far from home, as Grainier boards a train to follow where the work is, with the distant redwoods of the Pacific Northwest providing the most fertile territory for a logging crew.

Grainier goes hell for leather working to build the dreams of the railroad barons, chopping trees to become railway ties, building the infrastructure that will usher in a new era of economic growth across the United States. He is a father who provides: he returns home after months away with a wad of notes in his pocket and hands them to his wife as he walks through the door. She has been learning to provide in his absence: weaving wicker baskets to catch fish in the river near their home and becoming adept with a rifle to hunt local deer.

Logging is dangerous work—whilst the spectre of death is ever present, the greatest threats come not from falling trunks and branches, but from the people he encounters. The stakes are raised when Grainier becomes a father: every time he leaves, he worries he won’t return, and comes back to a daughter who is “like a different person every time I see her. I feel like I’m missing her life.” For a brief period, he finds local work; the pay isn’t great, but the movie’s narrator informs us, in dialogue lifted directly from the pages of the book, “Though he didn’t know it then, he would always look back on this time of his life as his happiest.”

And this is where I have to stop talking about the plot. Because anything more will ruin it for you. And I implore you to carve out one hundred and three minutes this weekend to immerse yourself in this world that director Clint Bentley has crafted. Not because of its staggering beauty, and his uncanny ability to channel Terrence Malick on the regular. Or the immaculate sad dad vibes that run throughout, intentionally dialled up by inviting Bryce Dessner, guitarist from The National, to compose the score. This is a movie that begs to be watched by fathers in 2026 because it connects us to a core pressure point in this narrative for generations: how we provide for our families and how that work pulls us away from our homes. How should dads show up for their families? And what happens when our ability to protect is in direct conflict with the need to provide?

Although set over a hundred years ago, the vision of fatherhood in Train Dreams isn’t a relic of a bygone era. How do I know this? Because it’s the same version of fatherhood I grew up with. My dad worked as a roadman—no, not that kind, UK-slang aficionados—but a man who literally built roads. He’d leave home early on a Monday morning, before I woke up, and would return on a Friday night, the smell of tarmac (or what you’d call asphalt over the other side of the Atlantic) permeating the house. Huge chunks of my childhood were spent driving around the motorways of England and Scotland, and my dad would regularly point out the junctions and bridges he had helped build. Like the movie’s protagonist, my father spent his working years pouring blood, sweat and tears into the infrastructure of a growing country. Later, he’d dig more holes as he worked to install fibre optic cable underneath the streets of the UK, the very same piping that many dads will be using to read this today.

Today’s world is different. We no longer carry the burden of bringing home the bacon alone: a third of US heterosexual marriages see wives paid as much as the husbands, and 1 in 7 marriages see the wife as the primary earner. Our physical strength is no longer the driving force behind how we protect our children, who are increasingly looking for our emotional intelligence. A father who does not earn still carries a stigma, but what does it mean to provide in 2026, when more men choose to be stay-at-home dads, or are trying their hardest to find (or intentionally create) careers that will allow them to be in the lives of their children as much as they want to be?

For fathers of a bygone era, this wasn’t a choice. You were the breadwinner, and you went wherever bread could be made. But for many fathers today—not all, but I’d wager a fair few reading this—we have agency in the matter. You can decide to take a job that allows you to work from home two days a week, even though it may mean your boss will pass you over for that promotion. Or you can remain in a role that will allow you to cruise at 50 mph for 80% of the time, but have enough left in the tank for a good evening with your family, and not a short, snappy one whilst you’re keeping an eye on late-night Slack pings.

Those choices weren’t available to Robert Grainier. They weren’t available to my dad either. But they are for me. And maybe for you, too.

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Choosing a Different Narrative

This year’s Best Picture slate offers different flavours of failing fathers: dads running away from expected arrivals, others consumed by chasing ego-fuelled ambitions, or abandoning children they once promised to love dearly. Honestly, there was another entire essay here, chock-full of spoilers, that I ripped out and will share next month. Dads on the big screen are going through it right now. But so often—as is true in art and life—the drama is of their own making. This essay felt apt to share today because a) you can—nay, you MUST—watch it at home this weekend and b) because it’s going to form part of the curriculum for the second REBOOT cohort.

I’ve droned on for years that the content you consume—the books you read, the movies you watch, the podcasts you listen to—will colour your worldview like very little else. When I first started putting together a group coaching program, it felt right to include a suggested media diet: one movie to watch and three books to choose from. Last time round, those movies included two I’ve written about in the newsletter: Perfect Days, Wim Wenders’ magnificent meditation on work, purpose and contentment and Another Round, a radical rethinking of how we build and maintain adult male friendships. This year, I’ll be putting Train Dreams into the mix, as it rocked me and has left me contemplating the role of a father ever since.

The core thread running throughout REBOOT is the cold, hard fact that identity, career, and attention are part of a single interconnected system and cannot be examined in isolation. It provides a space to question the role that work plays in our sense of self, and the danger of it becoming all-consuming, leaving fatherhood feeling like an obstacle rather than an opportunity.

This program is everything I wanted when I was transitioning away from Google. Weekly group sessions where we hold each other accountable, one-on-one coaching to work through personal challenges, and a tight-knit community of fathers who get it. This isn’t traditional executive coaching—though, of course, we talk about goals, values, and purpose. It’s not therapy either—though healing always happens when dads can open up to each other. It’s something different—a radical reimagining of the relationships in our lives: with work, technology, family, friends, and ourselves.

I’ve come to think of it as business school in reverse. Traditional business schools teach us how to scale, optimise, and maximise: more money, increased growth, improved efficiency. They don’t teach us to question the machine—only how to keep it running, to sacrifice everything at the altar of shareholder value. REBOOT is for unlearning the toxic patterns, beliefs, and behaviours that got us here, and for building new monuments in their place. This isn’t about stepping back—it’s about stepping up and designing a life that feels intentional, sustainable, and deeply fulfilling.

Because what unites the dads I’m talking to aren’t job titles or LinkedIn histories—it’s that nagging feeling that something’s gotta give. That the way we’re working isn’t working. That somewhere between that terrifying Teams notification sound and the school run, between quarterly reviews and the hundredth reading of The Gruffalo, we’ve lost something essential about who we are and what matters most.

REBOOT is for you if you’re …

• … done being told the hamster wheel is a career ladder

• … questioning whether the tension between home and work is unsolvable

• … tired of working to others’ definitions of success

• … ready to stop delaying that leap towards what’s next

• … finished with performative success and primed for real change

Over six months, a carefully selected group of dads will work together to write a different story. To move beyond surface-level change into genuine transformation. The group will be intimate—just 6 dads per cohort—because this work requires trust, vulnerability and the kind of conversations you can only have in small circles. The chasm between the man you are and the one you want to be can be vast—and it isn’t something you should have to cross alone.

Next Wednesday, I’ll be running a one-hour taster workshop, where I’ll talk through the REBOOT framework, the media diet, give you some tools you can use, and speak with a few of the dads who ran the gauntlet last time. We’ve got 15 dads signed up already.

I’ve saved you a seat.

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Good Dadvice

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