You Can’t Out-Parent a Broken World
Fatherhood, Eternity, and the Duty to Rebuild Our Civilization
I’ve been circling around two ideas that won’t leave me alone.
They haunt the way I look at my kids, my work, my home, my country. They’re changing what I believe my life is actually for. And I think a lot of men—especially fathers, the men who hope to be fathers, and maybe the men who opted out of fatherhood, but deep down, feel that void in them—are feeling the tremors of the same realization, even if we haven’t named it yet.
So let me try to name it.
1. If eternity is real, nothing in my life is small
Here’s the first idea:
If this life were it—if death were a hard stop and I simply vanished—then much of what we obsess over would be pointless. Morality would be negotiable. Legacy would be sentiment. Sacrifice would be optional. Comfort would be king.
But I don’t believe that.
If there is eternity—if the soul endures, if what I worship and how I live echoes beyond the grave—then everything matters.
My habits matter.
My loyalties matter.
How I treat my wife matters.
How I form my children matters.
What I build with my time, money, and energy matters.
What I bend the knee to—God or the machine—matters.
If there is forever, almost nothing is trivial. That realization alone is enough to blow up the “do what feels right” culture I was handed. But that’s only half of it.
2. My kids can’t out-perform a collapsing civilization
Here’s the second idea:
If I want my children—and their children—to endure, they can’t do it in a vacuum. They need a world that does not hate them.
I can pour everything into “optimizing” my kids: education, discipline, health, faith, skills, resilience. And I should. That’s my job.
But if the environment around them is hostile—morally, spiritually, culturally, economically—then at some point my efforts hit a ceiling.
If my children are thrown into a civilization that mocks faith, dissolves family, worships consumption, mutilates truth, and treats children like accessories or obstacles, then their “fitness” alone is not enough. They need a habitat fit for human souls.
That means I can’t just think about my kids in isolation. I have to care about:
The health of my marriage.
The culture of my home.
The church we attend.
The neighbors we choose.
The schools or lack thereof.
The laws that govern us.
The land we live on.
The economy that demands our time.
The technology discipling their attention.
I’m not responsible for controlling the whole world. But I am responsible for refusing to shrug and hand my kids over to a world order that’s actively corrosive.
Their future depends, in part, on the environment I help build or choose. The fitness of the habitat is as important as the fitness of the child.
3. The through-line: Eternalist generationalism
When I put these together, a sharp idea emerges:
If eternity is real, and if I care about my descendants, then my responsibility runs in two directions at once:
Upward: to God, to truth, to eternity.
Outward: to architect an environment—moral, cultural, economic, spiritual—where my people can walk in that truth for generations.
This isn’t just “legacy” in the Instagram sense.
It’s not vague “save the West” doomer posting.
It’s this:
Because eternity is real, I am obligated to build a rightly ordered micro-civilization beginning in my home and extending into my community—rather than merely trying to succeed privately inside a hostile system.
Idea 1 stretches my horizon vertically: toward God and forever.
Idea 2 stretches it horizontally and forward: toward my grandchildren and the world they’ll inherit.
Together they demand that I live, build, and fight as if both heaven and my great-grandchildren are real.
That redefines the job description of “dad,” “husband,” “man.”
It’s no longer:
“Raise good kids and retire comfortably.”
It becomes:
“Participate in constructing a faithful, durable way of life that can carry souls and families toward their eternal end long after I’m gone.”
4. What this touches in real life
This isn’t abstract.
It cuts into almost every decision I make:
How I work
Am I just renting my life to a system that owns me, or am I moving toward some form of ownership, stewardship, and productive use of my gifts that serves my family and community?Where I live
Is this a place where families can root for decades? Where faith, children, and commitment are normal—or ridiculed?How my children are formed
Who has their imagination and conscience—parents and church, or state and screens?How we use technology
Is it a tool in our hands, or a discipling force in theirs?Who we link arms with
Do we have real local allies—men, families, pastors, tradesmen, farmers—who will stand together when the wind shifts?How we relate to law, economy, and power
Am I paying attention to the systems my kids will have to live under, or just hoping it’ll work out?How we steward our bodies, food, and land
Are we building strength, health, and stability, or outsourcing all of it to the same machine that’s making us sick and soft?
I’ve started to treat every major decision as a test:
Does this help build an eternally-oriented, multi-generationally habitable world for my people?
If the answer is no—or “it might make my life easier now, but it corrodes everything later”—I have to call it what it is: untrustworthy.
5. Why this feels like war with the modern world
If you feel like you’re going insane trying to live this way in 2025, you’re not crazy.
Modern life is built on the opposite premises:
No eternity: life as comfortable consumption before you die.
No obligation to descendants: mobility over roots; pleasure over kin; retirement over legacy.
Radical individualism: family, church, community, nation as optional accessories.
Short-term incentives: corporations, institutions, and politics optimized for quarters, not centuries.
Delegated formation: kids raised by school bureaucracies, algorithms, and marketing departments instead of fathers, mothers, pastors, neighbors.
If those premises are false—and I believe they are—then the “normal” way of living is not neutral. It’s dangerous.
That tension so many of us feel—the sense that we can’t just tweak a few habits and call it good—is the honest signal.
I’m realizing I can’t simply “be a good dad” inside a civilization that is structurally discipling my children away from truth, away from loyalty, away from God, away from family.
I am morally compelled to rebuild the environment itself:
starting with my own soul,
then my marriage,
then my household,
then the local networks that knit into something like a parallel order.
Call it a homestead, a church community, a brotherhood of families, a small town revival—I don’t care about the branding. I care that it’s real, rooted, and ordered toward God and our children’s children.
This is the work in front of me now.
Not escapism. Not nostalgia. Not vibes.
Eternalist generationalism: living like forever is real, and like my great-grandchildren will either bless my name or curse it based on what I chose to build—or chose to ignore—right now.
If this resonates, you’re not alone.
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God Bless,
The Dissident Dad
