Society is a good boyfriend, but a terrible father

 Young women infatuated with fun always think they'll be teenagers forever. At the bottom of this lies a sense of overwhelming terror.

                                                   creds: @kalavithi.artgallery (IG)

Will they ever find a man who does what the moment requires? In short, a father? 

On these grounds, they always choose men who are full of life and can call up adventure in even the smallest things, like going out to the mall or getting drunk somewhere for the night in an expert way. There is something in that which is worthy. Fun is a virtue. We all need it as a distraction.

But this is of course, not the full picture. The full picture includes taking responsibility as an adult and a father. 

I am not talking here about Jordan B Peterson's sense of fatherhood. I'm not talking about that dead-fish type responsibility, where you're supposed to imbibe death and boredom in the present and wait for something good to happen. That's for the birds. This life has excitement built into it at every moment, quaking and waiting to come to the surface. We need only to see it.

What I'm talking about is containing the entire picture of life in one sitting.  You need to have in you the child and the father and the grandfather in order to be a father. The father is the entire cycle of life rolled into one.

Especially nowadays with families being so split up and society being fractured, you need to carry this all within you. We can't afford to get second-hand wisdom from modern books or even older wiser men in these times. Everything is particular to the individual. The idea that you can lock old food away in cold storage for another day in the form of books, and then eat it in microwaved form at your leisure; that idea is all but gone.

Self-help guides are only a crutch. Sometimes they're a mat to lie on and make the authors rich. This metaphor of the mat brings to mind a story in the Bible, where Jesus says to the paralyzed man at Capernaum "Now pick up your mat and walk!" It takes someone who is full of the Father to say such things. Everyone needs to hear a father in the room. But as I've mentioned, fathers are few and far between.

Now we all know what a teenager is and why they're all the rage in today's culture. We know this already quite well. The teenager represents novelty. They're continually finding new things and are continually excited. This is very much the energy of the internet. This is why we spend long hours on the internet at the price of sleep.

But teenagers only share and recombine what already is. They aren't creating anything. The father creates. The father is in the present moment fathering new possibilities. He is the generator of reality for his family. He does not simply piggy-back off the inventions of society. He deals with reality as it stands and responds accordingly. The lack of fathers in this metaphorical sense is why our problems pile up and no one can deal with them. We are addicted teenagers, not responsible fathers. 

Which brings us to the grandfather. The reason people are so attracted to Peterson in the first place is they're looking for that grandfatherly role. They can't find it in themselves. The grandfather has walked the path of the father. He is the overseer of the father. Without the father in the mix though, you're saggy in the middle. You may have the teenager and the grandfather built into you, but you still need the father to survive and generate a solid sense of reality in the present. Books are wonderful grandfathers but poor fathers.

This is why most women are at wits end. They have very little fatherly energy going around. Even their own fathers don't particularly exude much strength. Their own fathers are probably the best thing they have, but they are nonetheless a poor example. And the reason, I am willing to suggest, is that they're products of the hippy or post hippy generation. These were times filled to the brim with teenage mentality. Steve Jobs was one of these "teenagers." 

He simply could not be a father in real life. He was too engaged with experiencing the new. The father is able to make things, not simply reinvent the vehicles for seeing them, like the computer and the I-Pod. The media is just a means of seeing the old. The father also creates what is necessary, not what the people want.

But the ideas that underlie these new media have not changed. The father is able to generate new realities that underlie media. New philosophical realities are the preserve of the father. The fact that we're so philosophically poor as a world and as a generation is because none of us want to be a father. None of us can face existence and what it requires of us. It requires total humility and total vulnerability.

We're good lovers and good pontificators, but there is very little that we're able to do right now to support and charge the present with what it requires or fulfill the present moment as food fulfills a malnourished child, much less our women. The women are stuck on the teenage dream simply as a distraction from the father that's lacking in today's society.