Your father didn't know shit

Nobody is keeping secrets from you because there aren't any magical secrets

Your father didn’t know shit.

I know this because as a father, I don’t know shit. And I live in neighborhoods hanging out with other fathers who also don’t know shit. And I’m old and wise enough to look around me and realize that nobody knows shit, and even to look back over my life and realize that nobody in the past really knew shit either.

We’re all just regular humans bumbling around this Earth, figuring things out. None of us are in possession of the secret wisdom to achieve good outcomes in most things and live a happy life. Not your dad. Not your grandpa. Not your creepy uncle. Not your cool uncle. Not your high school football team shooting the shit in the locker room. Not even legendary evil internet misogynist Archwinger or any of the more-famous personas among the internet manosphere.

It’s 2025. This means that the internet has been a presence in nearly every first-world household for 28 years now. Which means that there are adult humans — millions of them — who have never lived a single second in a world without the internet. We could probably add a few years to that 28-year span to lump in the kids who were already born when the internet came around but have still spent the majority of their formative years exposed to a world with the internet.

Note my word choice, by the way. Not just exposure to the internet itself, but exposure to a world that has the internet.

I could type a long-winded essay about this for another five or six paragraphs, but I think I’ll just skip to the conclusion of this point: the end result is young adults and early-middle-agers alive today who have some gaps in their understanding of how the real world works.

One key deficiency we’ve begun to see in a world with the internet connecting us all is how disconnected all of these perpetually-connected people are from each other.

As a species, we have significantly less connection with our ancestors, our children, and our communities than we have ever had in the past. We consider our parents out-of-touch old farts who don’t know shit (yet we forget that sometimes - more on that later). We decide who to date based on a mental list of pros and cons. We decide whether we want children based on a list of pros and cons that include a financial balance sheet, then after we have them we watch our phones instead of their little league game, while getting upset at our parents when they visit because they spend the entire time on their phone or in front of the TV instead of playing with their grandkids. Our friendships are surface-level and consist primarily of co-workers and neighbors forced into our lives through proximity and random chance, while we work entirely too many hours then come home to spend most of our free time screwing around on the internet.

This complete lack of connection with humanity leads us to dehumanize humans. As a species, we’ve started to stop seeing other humans as humans, and begun to see them as sources of utility or entertainment. We’ve begun to consider who adds value to our lives and in what way and what it costs us in time and energy (and sometimes actual cost) to keep them around. Even (especially) who we date. Even our children.

This fits right in line with modern western first world countries, who have ideologically reduced the precious humans that make up their populations into piles of economic units and labor units who exist to solve their country’s problems by laboring and spending money. This leads large swaths of people to see most humans as replaceable - even interchangeable - and to arrogantly decide that most large problems can be solved if we just allocate enough economic units and labor units to the task. So if any large-scale problems that irritate us exist, it’s someone else’s fault for not allocating the nameless faceless units needed to solve them.

Another key deficiency we’ve begun to see in a world with the internet is that despite the unlimited amount of information available at every human’s fingertips, we have lost all sense of history.

I’m not talking loony toons stuff like people deciding World War 2 was a gigantic conspiracy of fakery concocted to let the Jews secretly take over the universe. Just a more general absence of knowledge.

For example, young adults today, born in 2002, who have never lived a day in their life without the internet on a handheld device in their pockets, have weirdly strong opinions about historical time periods. One such opinion we see often in the internet manosphere and some of the more traditionalist/right-wing sectors of the internet is this idea that the 1950s were the golden age of humanity - fueled most notably the traditional gender roles assigned to the sexes, and the amazing nuclear-family marriages we had that were filled with love, sex, respect, and happy children thanks to these traditional gender roles that clearly made everyone so happy that I can’t believe we ever changed anything.

This, of course, is not actually what the 1950s were like. Leave it to Beaver was a fictional TV show. But nonetheless, the internet has no shortage of kids born in 2002 who think they want to return to the 1950s, or at least have a 1950s style marriage.

Another weird assumption from today’s young adults is a belief that the 1950s adults, despite the additional 75 years of technology and knowledge and societal experience we have over them, were incredibly wiser than any of us today. Many of us fondly reminisce that if grandpa or great grandpa were alive today, he’d give so many of the silly people around here a dose of much-needed wisdom.

In fact, one issue frequently raised by the internet manosphere is the modern absence of male spaces and the modern absence of men like Dad and Grandpa (or at least what we assume the dads and grandpas of the 1950s were like).

Much the same way we view the 1950s with these rose-colored glasses and think that this was a magical time when everything was all right, we imagine that dads (those same dads above we consider to be out-of-touch old farts) to be this magical fountain of wisdom.

We tell ourselves, if only men were allowed to grow into men, like in the 1950s - if only men were allowed to speak freely as men, and to have male spaces where they gather and speak like men and trade man-wisdom - then everything would be okay. We’d never have had those rough childhoods. We’d never have struggled to get laid. We’d never have stumbled into the internet manosphere.

We imagine that our dads were in possession of this magical silver bullet of father-son wisdom, and if only they’d been free to grow into the kind of men who could deliver that wisdom and if only they’d been free to take us on father-son camping trips without the girls where we could all talk freely and exchange that man-wisdom, then everything would have turned out great for us! Look what women and society and governments and the Jews and the illuminati all did to us by taking away male spaces and making divorce more common so fewer dads are in the homes and censoring us so we can’t speak male wisdom to each other!

I don’t know what wisdom, exactly, I was never told or am not allowed to tell others - but people seem very enamored with the idea that if only men were more free to do so and not shackled by society, their dads would have taken them on a boys-only outing for a few days and imparted a magical pill of father-son wisdom that would have changed the course of their lives for the better.

Instead, here we are, doomed to wander the internet, searching for the advice from replacement father figures. Gurus who have the answers our fathers were never able to tell us.

But much like the 1950s humans, our dads didn’t know shit. Neither did our grandpas. Neither do us internet gurus. We’re all just normal humans bumbling around figuring things out. That’s what 1950s humans did. That’s what our dads and grandpas did. That’s what all of us - gurus included - are doing now. There is no magic silver-bullet wisdom that can be imparted to you that will make everything click and change your life.

If there is, it’s wisdom so basic it can scarcely be called “wisdom”. Eat right and exercise so you’re more physically capable and look less shitty? And women prefer men who look good over men who look shitty? Learn and practice social skills so you’re able to get ahead socially and professionally and be less weird and awkward? And women prefer men who are socially skilled and not weirdos? Women are human beings who act in self-interested ways often to the detriment of men they are dating?

We really need manly fountains of wisdom to tell us things like this?

Maybe we could all use a few good friends to check us when we’re being stupid, but that’s not something Dad would have fixed with a magic dose of wisdom over a father-son camping trip during our youth.

No, we’re all just humans bumbling about. And maybe that’s the answer. More bumbling until you figure some stuff out. Then talk to your current humans - not the 1950s, not your Dad, not your gurus - just regular bumblers like you who are also figuring things out. This path you’re on where it feels like you don’t quite have a handle on things and are bumbling around a bit? That’s normal. That’s everyone’s path. That’s the real reason your Dad never told you the secret to life - he didn’t have it either.

And while life is full of smart, useful, entertaining people, maybe it’s better to connect with our fellow-bumblers than to make them mere knowledge-units as part of our disconnected internet search for wisdom.