There is a lot of material out there on how to be a good 21st century Dad.
Books and blogs are full of advice on how to be more present with your children, supportive to your spouse, and more involved as fathers than we used to be.
This is a good thing and a sign of progress.
What seems to be missing, though, is advice for the long game. How does one become a great granddad?
Although he can be easy to miss nowadays, a great granddad embodies a variety of important roles: family sage, handy-man, role model, sounding board and story-teller, and just the quiet, content, and friendly old man sitting on the porch rocker, among many others.
None of these qualities can be developed overnight, and each could be the subject of a thesis in and of itself, let alone a short article.
But when you really peel back the onion, some key ingredients of a great granddad –and ones that are manageable enough to begin improving on today – are his utility, self-reliance, and resourcefulness.
These qualities, in turn, are a direct result of his experience, and his experience is the byproduct of a life lived with a thirst for knowledge and a dedication to self-improvement. Only through lifelong learning and self-improvement can one become truly self-sufficient and dependable, the way our greatest granddads seem to be.
So the question is this: as Dads, what can we do now – especially during quarantine – to prepare for our duties as granddads?
“There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and this is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – a devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, to social, political, and to intellectual or to creative work.”
Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age
Think of your most adored grandfather, whether he is a part of your family or not, and whether he is living or resting in peace.
What do you know about his formative years as a teenager and young adult?
When he was growing up, living life “in the present” wasn’t yet a common and necessary piece of advice. It was just a default mode of living before the Information Age changed how we spend our time.
His primary goal wasn’t to incessantly broadcast a filtered private life to the masses to receive indirect, shallow approvals – he was out and about actually experiencing life and learning practical skills along the way, such as hunting and fishing, construction and carpentry, vegetable gardening and canning, or whatever else your favorite granddad happened to specialize in.
The substance of his particular skills was less important than the presence of them – all great grandfathers, it seems, have put in the time to master some sort of unique craft.
When free time presented itself, he naturally sought direct experiences, hobbies, and interests in which he could “concentrate his entire being” – well before the science behind “cognitive flow” became a necessary part of our vocabulary – rather than the mindless streaming and scrolling more common today.
And when the car made funny noises, the freezer turned warm, or the azaleas became overgrown, his default reaction was to learn a new skill and address the issue himself, not search online for an opportunity to outsource the solution.
A “man cave” to a future great granddad was not a windowless basement equipped with furniture and electronics encouraging inactive passivity. More likely, it was an open-air garage in which he could stand, think, tinker, do, build, and embody his ideas in form.
The combination of these crafts, skills, and hobbies produces a settled disposition and simple satisfaction that is common in our greatest granddads. Sadly, this contentment with the here and now, what is right in front of us, is something sorely missed by many young men nowadays.
Much of this is due to the never-ending social media scroll in which we are fed filtered versions of the lives of our “friends” while involuntarily comparing those lives to our own. Yet a lot of this is also due to the improper and derogatory use of the term “domesticated”.
If domesticated means being self-sufficient, creative, useful, and fully aware of and responsible for our home, property, family, lifestyle, and time, then yes, by all means, we are domesticated.
And we like it – it feels good to have walls out front you built yourself, plump tomatoes in the garden you raised from seeds, a slow-cooked meal ready for your family, and homemade (and homegrown) grape wine fermenting in the basement.
More importantly, these worthwhile pursuits can all be achieved in the company of your family, especially your children. Why would you play golf for six hours on a Sunday when you could spend a morning pickling cucumbers with your son?
This form of self-sufficiency, utility, and knowledge on a variety of unique subjects also produces the quiet, subdued confidence we often find in our favorite granddads.
This particular flavor of confidence – less common today than it was before – creates the sort of humility defined by David Brooks as “the freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the time.”
Our greatest granddads felt no urge to broadcast to the world their ability to make sourdough bread, nor did they feel the need to publish photos of the bathtub they installed in the bathroom. They simply took pleasure in serving something or someone greater than themselves, such as their neighbor or their wife. They gained immense satisfaction from completing what we now might call “mundane” tasks, and living ordinary lives, with dignity.
And even their extraordinary accomplishments went unannounced – how many “WWII – I Served” bumper stickers did you see growing up?
This simple satisfaction, to our greatest granddads, often involved “seeing a plan unfold, in tangible form, as a result of [their] own efforts, with as little intervention as possible between [their] purposes and plans and their execution.”
Though in their era, there wasn’t as much of a need to define these things, nor outline how to go about achieving them – it was just how you found yourself spending a Saturday afternoon.
“The man who works is never bored, is never old. A person is not old until regrets take the place of hopes and plans. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for aging…and [this work] may or may not be the source of his livelihood.”
-The Good Life
We, as fathers, have a duty to our children. But we also have a duty to our potential grandchildren to be worthy of the title “grandfather” through the gradual accumulation of knowledge, skills, and experiences that can one day make us the unique, dependable, confident, and resourceful role models to them that our greatest grandfathers were to us.
Otherwise, we may find ourselves becoming passive, distracted, and grumpy old men full of regrets – something no grandchild wants to be around.
So the next time you have some free time – such as during this quarantine – consider how your greatest granddad would have spent it.
Would he have “binged” on Netflix day after day, or lost entire evenings to Twitter or Instagram? Would he have obsessively checked and organized an email inbox?
Or would he have picked up a new skill, learned a simple instrument, or simply spent more time with the birds on the porch?
For the vast majority of us, especially those of us with kids, quarantine innovation and creativity at the level of Sir Isaac Newton and Shakespeare is out of reach. In fact, most of us with kids will struggle to find time to repair the closet door. But that’s not the point.
As stated in The Good Life, “the man who works is never bored, is never old. A person is not old until regrets take the place of hopes and plans. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for aging.”
Or, as Andy Dufresne deftly stated, we just all need to get busy living, or get busy dying.
I think our greatest granddads would agree.