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.

You're a hostage to fortune now.

After having kids, every parent quickly realizes just how much less freedom they have.

Your schedule is different. Your sleep is different. What you can watch on TV is different.

Where you can live is different. Kids are, as we've said, a dose of unavoidable reality, a reality

where you are indisputably, almost laughably, not in charge.

They decide, life decides. You are tied up in the whims and the needs of a baby, the moods and

commitments of a teenager, the desire to be close to, to support, and to see your adult children,

the dream of the crowded table, as we've called it. And of course,

there is a more deeper and more profound loss of freedom that has come over our lives, too. Suddenly,

we are so much, so much more vulnerable. Before, we didn't care so much about what happened to the

world, maybe even to us. Didn't care, we didn't even think much about what happened to the world, maybe even to us.

Didn't care, we didn't even think about it.

And now it's all we can think about.

We worry, we fret, we fear, how will this or that affect these people we brought into existence?

These precious loved ones were responsible for what if something happens?

Joan Didion, who so hauntingly wrote about the loss of her husband

and then her adult daughter and her books, A Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights,

both must-reads for any parent or person,

...