Nothing to say / But that's OK

(Good morning, good morning)

As my spend more time being a parent, it's apparent it is how ridiculous a job it is. For starters, I don't really know how honest to be. I'd be quite happy to have the kids believe in Santa Claus until Karen and I died and presents stopped mysteriously showing up one year, but on the other hand I've dropped "Daddy's job is of no real value to society" on them a couple of times, and that's maybe going too far in the other direction.

I mean I guess you don't want to drop the harsh realities of existence on your 3 year old. But after living in the Proper Adult world for a few years it sort of becomes clear that all those traditional parental maxims on life success that seemed (at the time) like they were ancient wisdom coming down from a mountain top on stone tablets are sort of, well, bollocks. (Or maybe they used to be applicable, but now they aren't? Hard to tell.)

"You need a good education to succeed" – well, as it turns out, no you don't. "You should get a degree" should have "in a high demand, high-paid industry" on the end if it wants to be useful. "If you work hard, you'll do well." Well, maybe sometimes, often no. "Follow your dreams" doesn't work most of the time either. In fact, "Look, just inherit my large existing fortune" is probably about the most reliable advice in this department.

So when it comes time for wisdom-dispension, I don't really know what advice I'll deploy. I don't really believe those things any more. Much like an indicator light for "Feeling ready to be a parent!" will never come on (wait as long as you like: it never will), it seems like you'll also wait forever to feel like a sufficiently credible advisor in the area of "When you're an adult, if you want X, you need to Y. This is the secret." I don't know any of those secrets. And yeah, probably I'm a bit of a Negative Nancy, but all the versions of them that people repetitively told me when I was growing up seem to me to have turned out to be pretty inaccurate. And yet (strange as it may seem),  I feel like conveying a message that goes along the line of "Look – don't try. Best to tune out - in the end you'll probably become some kind of miniscule cog in the great grind of society, like most of us. In fact, become a drug addict if you want, it doesn't really matter" would somehow be something of a parenting fail.

So I guess I'll just... basically say nothing? "Whatever happens happens kids, so just try to positively influence what happens to you as much is as actually possible." I think I can stand behind that one. Then I only have to work out how to avoid advising them not to produce any grandchildren, because their lives will probably be horrible, because humanity is going to start running into all the issues caused by it utterly screwing itself over as fast as it can go.

Hmm. Probably earliest just to die early before that comes up.