Ryan Holiday

You have the struggle with the obligations and the

And the dysfunctions of parenting in modern society, but not a lot that sort of gives you a sense of like being part of this kind of sacred, like that, yeah, your kid is this warrant and that that warrant has a kind of holiness or sacredness to it.

Yeah, I think there's a lowercase stoicism to the road and then at different times, some uppercase stoicism as far as the virtues and the values.

There's the sort of toughness and the resiliency and the bravest thing I did was get up this morning.

But there's also the idea of like,

Hey, we don't eat people.

I know that seems like a pretty low bar, but the rest of the world has descended into barbarism, but we have chosen not to.

The rest of the world might steal.

The rest of the world might hurt, might use people for its own survival, but we're not going to do that.

And we're not going to do that because we're the good guys, as the child so earnestly says.

And you can see this kind of interplay between the father and the son where it's like every time the father has to make a vexing moral choice or has to protect them or they have to do something that in a civilized society would be wrong, like raiding someone else's house, the child goes, but we're still the good guys, right?

How are we the good guys?

And again, I feel like that our primary job as parents is obviously to keep our kids literally safe and alive.

And then the next most urgent thing is raising them to be one of the good guys.

Yeah, that we are mortal.

We don't get to decide when we go, how we go.

There's a passage in Meditations where Mark Surilis is quoting Epictetus, and I think pertains here to the road, where he talks about, as you tuck your child in at night, he says, you should say to yourself, they might not make it till the morning.

And when he does this philosophical practice, I do not think he is

Detaching in advance.

I think he's he's reminding himself that tomorrow is not for certain, that every day is a lie.