1 September

Father’s Day this weekend. There is no harder or more important job than parenting. We idolise celebrities and explorers and rock and sports stars and rich business people. None of that comes close to being as important as raising the next generation. Parents and teachers are what make civilisation and keep it from falling over. Most of our societies no longer have many kids, and the ones we do have we fail to educate well. We disrespect teachers, we underfund schools, we force kids to get infected with lethal viruses. Our young are in underpaid jobs, and can’t afford homes, while carrying vast debts for education that is actually provided to help society. But the cost is borne mostly by them. Everything we do as a culture points to it being fundamentally broken and focused on the wrong things. If your culture isn’t focused on raising the next generation, it’s a dead and toxic culture. Ours is more interested in recreational travel, gigs, sport, eating out, gambling and drinking than it is in kids. It’s an adolescent ‘good time’ culture. Compulsory fun, you have to demonstrate your fun life on social media to be a true member. My passion is leaving the world a better place than I found it. Tough questions, hard questions. That’s what’s fun for me, the challenge of chewing on big problems, thinking them through, helping to solve them. If adults don’t do this, nobody will, we can’t just keep kicking those cans down the road to the next generations, ignoring them in our recreational fun lives. Our jobs won’t fix them either, they’ll mostly just make other people rich.