Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you

with your most important job being a dad. These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy,

by practical wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

The right thing is not so simple anymore.

When you were younger, you were brash.

You didn't take crap. You didn't keep

quiet. If you disagreed or didn't like something, you said something. We hated hypocrites.

We shook our head at the compromises that we saw older people make. We laughed at them for the way

they settled. We were angry with our parents for their political and social beliefs. We were

idealistic. They were conservative,

and it drove us nuts. Well, now we're older. Now we're the old people. And now we're experiencing

some of the dilemmas we used to so glibly judge. Suddenly, it's not so simple. Now we have a family.

Now we have a mortgage. Now we have a career trajectory we'd like to

continue. Now we've seen how the world works. And of course, that changes our opinion about things.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's underrated short story, The Four Fists, he describes this dilemma perfectly.

People talk of the courage of convictions, he writes,

but in actual life a man's duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence

of his own righteousness. This isn't to excuse craven sellouts or to defend selfish hypocrites.

It's just to state an obvious fact.

Once you have a family, once you've worked hard for something,

once you've been rudely introduced to the facts of life,

...