My Father Wasn’t Absent, Just Apathetic

I’m not a parent, but even I know that kids are extremely vulnerable to influence. They’re experience sponges soaking up any and all kinds of traits, habits, mannerisms, phrases, and information they come across. It should go without saying that in the case of nature vs nurture, nurture plays just as big a role as their biology.

This is why it’s so important for children to have role models to look up to as they come of age. They need to experience and physically see an example of a healthy and well-rounded adult as a part of their daily life. Most parents understand this responsibility and do their best to showcase themselves as the arbiters of morality and virtue in their children’s lives. Sadly, many, many parents don’t do this, and it’s fairly obvious when you interact with kids who have shitty parents. Guess what? They’re shitty too. Who would have thought…

As a kid myself, my mom was always much more involved in my life than was my dad. My dad, for as long as I can remember, has worked two jobs from seven in the morning to about nine at night. He would come home for an hour to eat dinner in between, but if I wasn’t around during that time, I normally wouldn’t see him until he came home later on. For years, I watched him wake up early, go to work, come home to quickly eat, go to work again, and by the time he got home, he was tired, irritable, and wanted nothing else but to shower and watch tv until he fell asleep on the couch. This was the pattern I witnessed for the majority of my life. It became so ingrained in my behavior that I can see this exact same pattern manifesting in myself now and can feel how difficult it is to break those habits.

As an adult now, I can’t really say I blame him that much. When you work two jobs and have literally no time at home or flexibility to live how you’d like, the only things you end up caring about are whether you’ve got a meal and to not be bothered while you relax and watch your shows. That kind of life is exhausting, and I can’t in good conscious point the finger of blame at him personally for doing the only thing he knew how to do, which was provide for his family.

However, as a growing boy watching your father only ever doing one of two thing — work and watch tv — you can’t help but have these actions get planted deeply into your subconscious. Children copy their parents, so it’s no surprise I see my father in my own actions.

I say this because like him, until recently I was working too much and I still struggle with breaking away from watching too many shows and movies. I’m 33, and you’d think I would have developed by own set of habits by now. I do have my own interests and hobbies, sure, but I still see myself working until exhaustion, coming home around the same time he used to, and watching tv until I’m too tired to stay awake. Over the years, I’ve caught this unsettling pattern in myself so many times that I have to actively act in opposition to what feels to be my natural instincts.

As a child, I never watched my dad rummaging around the house fixing appliances, or working on the car, or out with friends being active, or really have hobbies or interests at all outside of reading and watching television. I saw work. I saw tv. I saw annoyance at inconvenience and frustration at anything that interrupted his routine. Over, and over, and over.

Now, as a grown man making his way in life, I see myself falling into the same habits I witnessed as a kid. And not because I’m consciously choosing these habits, but because I’ll notice myself acting in the exact ways he used to without even thinking about it. I’ll see the fixation on work, the ease of which I can turn off my brain and just watch things, and the annoyance at anything that pulls me away from the cycle.

Absence vs Apathy

I have a lot of friends that grew up without fathers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.5 million children, more than 1 in 4, live without a father in the home.

Now, I’m not here to tout the importance of a “traditional” household, or to call homes with two mothers or two fathers into question, or to dismiss the insanely difficult position of being a single parent. There are plenty of legitimate ways of raising children and I’m not one to criticize any of them while not even having children myself.

This isn’t about the statistics that coincide with fatherless homes and the potential detriment is presents to growing children. Yes, there are studies done about the importance of growing up with a present father figure, but I’m not a sociologist, I’m just telling you what I’ve seen through personal experience.

And what I’ve personally seen, despite the statistics, is that most of the people I know who grew up with absent fathers… are actually doing better than the people who had fathers around that were more apathetic about life.

Call it my personal theory, sure, but what I witnessed in the people I knew who grew up without their fathers was a kind of resourcefulness that I didn’t see those of us with an apathetic influence. These guys I’ve known who never knew their dads were also never presented with any kind of influence as kids. They didn’t have any kind of male template off of which to base their own actions. They may have picked up a few things from their mothers, of course, but I don’t think that as straight males those kinds of things stick as strongly as would the actions of a father figure would have had they been around.

I’m speculating, don’t shoot me out of the cancel cannon.

Because these guys grew up with a blank space where their dad should be, they used that lack of influence to carve out a path for themselves in a whatever way they saw fit. They didn’t have years of habit-forming in one direction or another. They didn’t watch a father go to work and teach them things and present of way of living to them at a young age. All of these guys I knew grew up without much structure or strict rules. They didn’t have curfews and bedtimes and didn’t have the fear of an angry dad waiting at home hanging over them. They used this absence of masculine energy to formulate their own ideas about how to live and as adults now have flourished due to this necessity of having to figure it out on their own.

Then there’s people in my position. People who did have a father figure growing up, but that father’s actions influenced us in ways that were ultimately detrimental to how we’d like to function as adults. There wasn’t just an empty space for us to fill with our own ideas of how to live our lives like those with absent fathers. Instead, that space was filled with apathy. It was filled with a defeated lethargy that keeps asses glued to couches and eyes cemented on screens. This was our teacher, our mentor for how to live. This is what was normal, commonplace, and simply what you did when you weren’t working at a job you didn’t actually enjoy.

There is a generation of older men out there who grew up thinking that the only purpose in life was to work and provide for your family. When that’s been accomplished, however, what then? You worked a long day, that means you did what you were supposed to do, and now it’s time to sit and stare at a tv until it’s time to sleep just to wake up and do it again. Then, you do that until you can finally retire and just live solely on the couch. Something like that, anyways.

This sort of apathy towards life and ambivalence towards doing anything new falls onto the shoulders of your children in the same way any actions do while kids are young. Guys, if your Dad was a Mr. Fix-it, always tinkering with appliances and taking things apart and putting them back together, I’m willing to bet you have an inclination towards DIY. Even if you’re not great at it, it probably still crosses your mind that you could fix something yourself rather than buying a new one.

Maybe your dad was a real people person and was always talking the ears off of guests and neighbors and had a natural proclivity for networking. Do you see any of that extroversion in yourself? I’m guessing it’s in their somewhere, even if it just shows up as being friendly to strangers while in public or something small like that.

Some of us, though, watched for years as our father’s eyes were glued to the television. Night after night, year after year. And now, being around the age my dad was when he had me, I see myself falling into that trap so much more easily than other people. I’m an expert at turning my brain off for hours while episode after episode plays. And the scariest part of it all is that it doesn’t bother me as much as I know it should for the simple fact that subconsciously my brain thinks that’s it’s all normal. It thinks that this is how you live — you live apathetically and with a particular lack of ambition that keeps you habitually returning to the screen as your natural comfort zone. You return to your childhood, and therefore to safety, every time you find yourself mindless staring into the pixels.

I suppose it’s something to be aware of this, and something more to be writing about it instead of letting it drip out of my ears while I watch a movie, but it’s still something I actively struggle with. It’s still something I’m so aware of that I can barely watch tv at all without being acutely conscious of how much time I’m “wasting” regardless of how much I actually accomplished that day.

I’m not saying all tv is bad, and I’m not saying you should never watch any. It’s not about the tv specifically anyway, it’s about the developed habit of an apathetic attitude towards life. And in my mind, growing up with apathy being the only attitude you’re exposed to has been much more detrimental than growing up with the absence of any said influence. Sometimes that’s how it feels, at least.

Children who grow up missing one half of a parental dynamic are going to fill that gap in other ways. Whether they find an outside mentor, or an older role model, or use their own sense of adaptation to figure something out on their own, that empty space will be used one way or another.

I happen to know a bunch of guys who grew up without fathers and ending up using that lack of influence as a permission to pursue their own interests without being held back by the influence of a father acting one way or another while raising them. On the other hand, those of us influenced by apathy have been left dealing with fending off the subconscious habit of simply not trying; of not caring, and not caring about not caring. We want to care. We want ambition and the desire to better our lives, we’ve just grown up not knowing what that looked like. So now we look for that influence in popular culture. We find role models on the internet, through podcasts and self-help books. Men get swept away by people like Jokko Willink or Jordan Peterson explaining simple concepts like taking responsibility for your life and see that basic advice as something mind-blowing all because we’ve never had a male figure in our life with any sort of ambition or interest in growing as a person.

We find ourselves desperate to find something to drive us forward so we don’t fall backwards into the bad habits of our fathers. We shamefully admit that sometimes we wish they hadn’t been around at all, that way we wouldn’t have been given such a deflated example of what it means to live a life. We love our dads, of course, but we can’t help seeing their actions, their shortcomings, in our own lives and resenting them for it.

Don’t assume that what I’m saying is that having an absent father is a good thing, just that it’s not all healthy influence on the other side, either. I feel for those out there without fathers, I really do, but I relate more to those who did have one and watched for years as they simply…did…nothing.

It’s not an excuse not to act now. It’s not a good enough reason to justify laziness as a man in his 30’s who’s had plenty of time to figure life out, but it is a good thing to be aware of when considering why it can be so hard to get up and moving, or why your mind continually falls into apathetic spirals that leave you drained and unconcerned with the world as a whole. It’s a good thing to understand about yourself as you pick up the remote yet again and watch the actions of our fathers animating us as our life’s puppeteer.

Fathers need to understand the importance of their actions and how much their children are actually soaking up. They see and hear it all. Every angry outburst, every fist slammed on the table, every biting remark to your spouse, every condescending comment and lack of interest in their children’s activities, every time to work hard as well as every time you give up. It’s all there to be swallowed, absorbed, and regurgitated in odd forms later in life.

So please, be mindful of how you act around your kids and be aware of what behaviors of yours they might be subconsciously holding onto. You don’t have to be perfect, but know that whatever they see you doing now is what they’ll unconsciously start repeating themselves as they get older. Wouldn’t you want to instill in them better habits than just sitting around staring at the screen for hours at at time? In this day and age, I’m sure they’ll already be doing plenty of that, they don’t need the further validation that there’s nothing wrong with it coming from you.

Teach them things, share your wisdom. Open up and share more stories. Laugh with them and give them a good sense of humor. Show them how to live their lives in the world, not just how to watch other people live theirs.

Having an absent father isn’t something to wish upon anyone, but when considering the differences between being absent and being apathetic, you have to ask yourself, is influencing your child toward a life of apathy truly better than not being there at all?

You tell me.

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Previously Published on medium

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