By David Herz
The working title:
There is this one thing that makes me particularly sad.
It is the young professional, late twenties, early thirties, whose longest emotional attachment is to his dog. He might have a carefully curated apartment, or an expensive coffee habit. He could be constantly optimizing and self-optimizing, traveling, engaging in extreme sports. Whatever the experience, I see an independence that somehow still leaves him profoundly alone.
Maybe he's become very good at managing his life, but quietly, imperceptibly sometimes, he is losing contact with why life was meant to be lived in the first place.
This is not an attack on pets. I like dogs. I understand companionship. In many ways, I understand loneliness too.
We have forgotten a matter once taken for granted. It's apparent in this line from Bob Dylan's Masters of War (1963):
We have gone from taking continuity for granted to treating it as optional.. There is no other animal that, when given the right conditions to reproduce, chooses not to.
Something has shifted in our civilization when so many intelligent, capable, educated young adults increasingly organize their emotional lives around weak substitutes for family rather than family itself. We have built a culture extraordinarily skilled at helping people avoid risk, avoid dependence, avoid permanence, avoid obligation, and yet increasingly incapable of helping them build meaningful attachment, the foundation of a meaningful life.
For years, I have watched the drift happen around us.
For those in this drift, the people for whom this was written, I would ask you to consider a possibility.
Think back to childhood. A day spent completely. You ran, explored, imagined, built, laughed, and finally collapsed into bed exhausted and content. Tomorrow was coming. Of course it was. And tomorrow would bring another adventure.
I maintain that that you is still there.
But we'll need to take a small leap of faith to access it: that it is possible, that it is worth it, and that it is still yours for the taking.
I am a lawyer, a husband, a father. Over the last ten years, I have answered thousands of questions for those trying to make relationship work, for those untethered despite doing everything modern life told them would make them fulfilled.
And I have come to believe that many of our deepest modern miseries are not random.
They are downstream from drift.
We have slowly severed freedom from responsibility, sex from continuity, adulthood from obligation, achievement from belonging, and human beings from the structures that once taught them how to carry life forward together.
This book is my attempt to think honestly about that.
I would like to say that this is not political, but I am a highly political creature. This is not a nostalgic walk: the past was not perfect. Pretending otherwise is childish. This is not intended as some simplistic moral commandment that every human life must unfold identically.
Rather, this is my philosophy of relationship. This is how human beings flourish. This is how we carry the world forward.
And I suppose before I ask anyone else to think honestly about these questions, I should begin with myself.
I have thought about whether I am the person to write this book.
I am not always happy. I don't know how I get out of bed some mornings. I am not always as honest as I ask you to be. As I write this, I am struggling deeply with one of my children. There are days I feel like I have failed more than I have succeeded. There are days loneliness still visits me. There are times I just start sobbing. I wonder whether I carried certain burdens properly. I replay conversations in my mind and wish I had been wiser, calmer, kinder, stronger, fearless.
I know enough about human beings to distrust anyone presenting himself as having mastered life.
And yet.
There are moments I think about what my life would have looked like had I never taken the leap into family, had I stayed perpetually free, had I protected myself from responsibility, from vulnerability, from the possibility of heartbreak and disappointment and sacrifice.
And I cannot imagine choosing that life instead.
Not because family is easy. It is not.
Family wounds you. Marriage exposes you. Children humble you. Love requires you to become larger than your selfishness. Responsibility can exhaust you. Continuity demands sacrifice.
But even with the tears and scars and failures and uncertainty, I cannot imagine my life without the laughter that filled my home, without the absurd moments, without the feeling that my life belonged not merely to my own appetites but to something continuing beyond me.
I cannot imagine my life without the buy-in to a future world that family represents.
That phrase matters to me: buy-in to a future world.
Because civilization itself depends on people willing to love the future enough to build it.
Not because every marriage succeeds. Not because every family is healthy. Not because people become perfected through love. Human beings remain gloriously and painfully imperfect.
The point is not perfection.
The point is participation.
Participation in life. Participation in continuity. Participation in creation itself.
From my Orthodox Jewish perspective, this is not merely sociology. Human beings are meant to become partners with G-d in carrying creation forward. Men and women are not interchangeable economic units floating through a marketplace of self-interest. We are builders of continuity. Builders of belonging. Builders of small civilizations called families.
Inside family we first learn sacrifice, forgiveness, restraint, trust, loyalty, responsibility, duty, humor, patience, and love. Long before governments matter to us, family matters to us. Long before politics, there is belonging.
This is why I increasingly believe many modern people are not suffering from too much family obligation, but from too little meaningful attachment altogether.
We are living through a strange experiment in radical individualism, much of this embedded in deeply disturbing post-modern and critical ideologies. We have spent decades teaching people to remain unbound, endlessly flexible, permanently self-creating, careful never to need anyone too deeply. We have taught women to fear dependence and men to fear responsibility. We have slowly transformed commitment itself into something many people experience less as meaning and more as threat.
We have taken on finding ourselves before we find a mate, not realizing that we can not truly find ourselves without one.
And we wonder why so many people are lonely.
We wonder why anxiety and depression rise even amid abundance. We wonder why so many adults drift through years of relationships that never become anything durable. We see fertility collapse, and civilizations following. Trust erodes. People increasingly seem exhausted by freedom itself.
The modern world aggressively dismisses the sacrifices of marriage and children while ignoring the effects of drift.
Time. Continuity. Belonging. Stability. Shared memory. Intergenerational meaning. The chance to become woven into the life of another human being deeply enough that your identities become inseparable from the story you are building together.
This book is not an argument against ambition, achievement, freedom, or excellence. In fact, I believe deeply in human excellence. I believe in building. I believe in accomplishment. I believe in purpose. I believe human beings are capable of extraordinary things.
But I also believe many people discover too late that achievement without belonging becomes strangely hollow.
Some of the most extraordinary women in modern life built families and then went on to become doctors, lawyers, executives, politicians, creators, and leaders. They did this not despite family, but often strengthened by the emotional and structural foundation family provided. The right marriage does not shrink people. It steadies them. It expands them. It gives them somewhere meaningful from which to launch.
The same is true for men. Many men do not rise to their potential until they need to be strong for someone else. I am pretty clear that we don't grow up until we have children, but it is only when we see the world again through the eyes of a two year old that we can finally become the (mature) child we were always intended to be
Healthy interdependence is not weakness.
It is civilization.
The atomized model of adulthood imagines human beings strongest when they stand entirely alone. This is a lie. We are strongest when we willingly bind ourselves to meaningful responsibilities and trustworthy people.
Not perfectly.
But courageously.
The goal is not to build a perfect family.
The goal is to build a real one: a life shared with imperfect people imperfectly over long periods of time; a life rooted deeply enough that joy and grief alike actually matter; a life that carries the world forward a little farther than it found it.
That is what this book is about.