Ryan Holiday

I think that's a really important part about being a parent

and something that's fundamentally missing in both a lot of children's literature these days and in adult literature.

Where are the heroic figures?

If anything, the literature is about parents making the selfish choice.

I just reread Revolutionary Road.

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.