What I Want My Son to Know About Meaning (That My Father Never Told Me)

My son is three and a half. He’s just starting to figure out how life works. And there’s something I desperately want him to know – something my father never told me, something I didn’t discover until I was 50.

This isn’t abstract philosophy. It’s about what carries you through decades of feeling like you’re failing at life.

For most of my adult years, I believed meaning came from achievement. From building something important. From making my imagined future happen. And when life didn’t go according to plan – when I tried different things and failed at most of them – the regret was crushing. The worst part? I thought it was all in my control. That if my life didn’t turn out right, it was my personal failure.

Then I read something in Bernardo Kastrup’s “The Daimon and the Soul of the West” that made me rethink all of this. He says the “great discovery of the second half of life” is that our lives aren’t, have never been, and can’t ever be about us. That we’re instruments of nature’s self-expression, not the protagonists of our own stories.

I had to reflect on this. Deeply. Because if that was true, everything I believed about meaning was backwards.

Bernardo uses this analogy: imagine an apple blossom that thinks life is about staying a beautiful blossom forever. It would cling to that form, resist falling, resist becoming an apple. And if all blossoms did that? No apples. No seeds. No trees. The blossom’s “purpose” isn’t about the blossom – it’s about what the tree is doing through it.

When my son was born, I couldn’t accept him for months. He felt like an interruption to the flow my life was supposed to take. I resented the situation. I resented him. I wasn’t the father I wanted to be. Eventually, I made peace with it. But when Bernardo Kastrup’s teaching landed – more than a year later – suddenly all the pieces began to fit. My process of maturing had a much grander explanation than I’d realized.

Here’s what’s actually different now: I have a regular job, a three-year-old son, other projects, plenty going on. Then I felt this urge to restart my YouTube channel. There’s no logical reason for it. I don’t know where it’s going. But I knew I had to respond. The old me would have asked, “Does this fit my plan? What’s the ROI?” Now I just ask, “Is this what wants to move through me?”

And the decades I thought I wasted? I know now I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. All of it mattered. I wouldn’t trade any of it.

Honestly, I still catch myself planning outcomes and attaching to how things “should” go. And that’s okay. But I do notice when the ego is justifying versus when something’s moving from deeper within. That’s the difference.

Walk through this with me in the video above.