Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from parents just like you all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Deal with it now.

We all have our issues.

We have trauma from childhood. We have bad,

we have bad habits we picked up in college. We have scripts that we learned, patterns we've repeated,

coping mechanisms we've developed. We'd prefer not to die with them to carry them always,

but when exactly are we planning on dealing with them? In a perfect world, we would have gotten serious about it before we had kids. Well, in the next best world, we'd deal with them now.

All I know is that as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier,

Bruce Springsteen explains in his spectacular biography, Born to Run.

It becomes much heavier, he says.

We've talked before about his strange and disorienting childhood, which was warped by the grief of

his grandparents and their inclination to spoil him, along with the distance and the demons of his

father. He related that, like a lot of

us, the defenses that he built to withstand the stresses of his childhood, he said, to save what I

had of myself, it outlived its usefulness. But when the bill comes due, Springsteen says, the payment is in tears.

But the tragedy of not dealing with your shit is that you're not the

only one who has to pay that bill. Springsteen had to bear the burden of his grandparents and parents.

Just as many of us are stuck dealing with the issues that could have stopped a generation or two

earlier.

Well, we can't help that, but we can do our best to make sure it stops with us.

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