A Tax On Life

Thoughts on Father's Day

Today is Father’s Day in the U.S. and many other countries around the world.

A while back I re-listened to a conversation between comedians Patrice O’Neal and Marc Maron. 

Bill Burr and Louis C.K., among others, have stated that Patrice O'Neal was their favorite comedian before he died in 2011. 

In the middle of the conversation, O’Neal observes that it wasn’t until he was 40 years old that he fully recognized and understood that he had grown up without a father. He didn’t know what it meant to have a dad, and the role such a figure plays in the life of a young man. O'Neal had never had a father. A lot of the people he knew growing up were also fatherless. As a result, it hadn’t occurred to him until relatively late in his life what a sharp deficiency this was.  

The first time I heard this many years ago, it hit me pretty hard. I knew exactly what he was talking about.

After never knowing my biological father, living in a series of foster homes where the primary caretaker was always a woman, and then losing contact with my adoptive father, I’d gone my whole life implicitly understanding that I never really had a dad, but the meaning of that absence had never before surfaced in my mind as a conscious thought.

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There’s a phrase that a lot of people from intact families take for granted:

“My dad always says...” Other variations include “My dad taught me..” and “My dad likes to say…”

I went the first seventeen years of my life seldom hearing anything like this. Then I joined the Air Force and heard it on occasion from my fellow military members. When I reached college, I heard it a lot.

A few off the top of my head:

“My old man likes to say that if you want to win you gotta hang with winners.”

“My dad taught me that cooking is an art but baking is a science.”

“My dad always says if you’re going to do something stupid, at least be smart about it.”

One phrase that a good friend of mine once told me still lingers in my mind. It captures the idea that once you reach a certain level of income, it’s not worth sweating all the nickel and diming that accompanies regular and everday events and routines. Paying for parking, tipping the restaurant server, ATM surcharges, etc. “My dad always calls it a ‘tax on life.’”

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I watched a lot of episodes of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire during the lockdown.

You’ll notice that in the version that Jimmy Kimmel hosts, the “phone a friend” lifeline has been replaced with “bring your smartest friend.” This change is presumably because in the era of fast internet, if you call someone at home, they can cheat and search for the answer online. Now, as a contestant, your friend sits behind you. If you use the “smart friend” lifeline for a question, he or she can help you decide on an answer.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, celebrity contestants typically had smart friends. They’d bring in an accomplished physician like Dr. Drew or a highly successful attorney or a talented author.

For ordinary, non-celebrity contestants, there was an interesting social class difference.

White-collar contestants typically brought one of two types of smart friend:

• A smart person with whom they worked or with whom they attended college or grad school

• Their father (seldom did these Millionaire contestants bring their mothers)

A few days ago, I ran a poll on Twitter asking, “If you were a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and had to choose either your mother or your father as your ‘bring a friend’ lifeline, who would you choose?” In an ideal world, you would get to choose who would help you based on the question you are asked. But in the game, you have to choose in advance who will help you, without knowing what the question will be. More than 70 percent of respondents said they’d choose their father.

Blue-collar contestants on Millionaire seldom brought their dads. Fatherlessness is concentrated largely (though not entirely) among the working class and the poor.

This highlights a stark class divide in social capital. Upper-middle-class professionals tend to have more friends and a more active social life, relative to working-class people.

This wasn’t always the case. Working-class neighborhoods used to be vibrant and socially active. In 1990, Americans without a college degree were actually slightly more likely to report having a group of close friends, compared to those with degrees.

In 1990, 64 percent of Americans without a degree and 59 percent of college graduates said they had 5 or more close friends.

By 2021, only 34 percent of non-graduates have at least 5 close friends, compared with 47 percent of Americans with degrees.

Social capital has declined overall, but it has been particularly dramatic for working-class people.

Upper-middle-class professionals have more friends, offering a larger source of knowledge, meaning, and fulfillment. And they often have twice as many parents from which to learn and receive support.

Not having a father is its own tax on life.

I grew up without much fatherly advice. Maybe that’s one reason why I’m so motivated to seek important and useful information and wisdom. For reasons I explain in Troubled, I spent a good portion of my youth unconsciously longing for paternal guidance.

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I seldom hear people, men or women, express variations of “that’s what my mom likes to say.”

Perhaps this is because men simply enjoy hearing themselves talk more and pontificate and foist unsolicited thoughts and advice on others around them.

It’s possible women and men have equal amounts of useful knowledge, but men, on average, are more assertive and willing to speak their minds when it comes to offering their views on resolving everyday tasks or commenting on the trials of life.

My late adoptive grandmother, I felt, was far wiser than her husband, my grandfather. But this perception may have arisen simply because my grandmother was sociable and could recite biblical stories from memory, whereas my grandfather was a reserved man who seldom spoke.

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People who read some behavioral genetics point out that children from single-parent homes also have the genes of families that produced those homes. For example, your dad is in jail. Did you become a delinquent because there was no father in the home, or because you inherited a bunch of behavioral traits associated with delinquency?

The behavior genetics line that “deadbeat fathers transmit their genes to their kids, which makes these kids more likely to have behavioral difficulties” is correct. But it overlooks the fact that who becomes a deadbeat dad is responsive to culture, policy, and milieu.

The celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote that “Motherhood is a biological necessity, but fatherhood is a social invention.”

In her new book Father Time, the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy points out that across contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, some degree of direct male care exists but seldom amounts to much.

Among hunter-gatherer societies, babies are held by men between 3-22% of the time. Even in the most father-involved foraging societies, mothers do the bulk of the childcare.  

In modern developed countries, perhaps 1-5% of young men would happily, regardless of situational factors, leave their kid and baby mama to seek freedom and sexual variety. But around 30-60% of young men would be open to being a deadbeat, provided there were no stigma or judgment or penalty. Which we are now learning.

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I’ve picked up a few important lessons from other people’s dads.

Some years ago I was at a birthday dinner with my former First Sergeant who had recently been reassigned to another unit. We were seated next to each other. His family chattered among themselves while he and I spoke. After some small talk, he explained to me that this was their tradition—for his wife and his kids to throw a birthday dinner for him at this particular Marie Callender's. I said something like, “You must really enjoy this if they do it every year for you.” He shrugged, leaned over, and quietly mused, “To be honest, Henderson, not really. I’d rather have a quiet evening at home. But it's a once a year thing. It’s more for them,” he nodded toward his family, “than for me.” And that imparted the lesson that spending time with others and celebrating special occasions (even ones meant for you) isn’t about you, it’s about everyone else.

I’ve been taxed pretty heavily in the early part of my life, and have been trying to recoup the losses ever since. To all the dads out there dispensing important knowledge, wisdom, and guidance, even to guys like me who grew up without one, happy father’s day.