Dad Trying to Change

How Substack Is Helping Me Change for the Better | 🌱 no. 007

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Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.

— Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

I. What It Feels Like to Be in My Head

If my mind were a street, I imagine it would be knee-deep in trash and poorly lit, overrun with roving packs of wild-eyed Jacobs moving erratically in the darkness, hundreds of them, in turns both yelling and crying, throwing themselves at shadows and rocking on porch steps, cradling their faces with sweaty hands curved upwards in supplication.

But, there, observing it all, would be a lone Jacob, different from all the rest—calm, hopeful, and undeterred—stuck on the highest floor of a perpetually burning building, leaning out the front of an illuminated window, and doing his best to coax the lunatics below into helping him get out of the flames.

II. When Did Time Start Moving So Damn Fast?

I’m running out of time to become the person I want to be.¹

These days, if you ask me to describe my daily experience of time, I’ll tell you it’s stuck on warp speed, vanishing without a trace. I wake up and whole months are gone. I find myself colliding with work deadlines, birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays I assumed were safely tucked away in the distant future but suddenly present themselves as crises waiting to be resolved.

Unless something changes, I’m afraid I’ll blink and discover there’s no time left at all.

As the years melt away, I find myself solidifying into a form I don’t like but feel powerless to stop. Try as I might, I’m still as anxious, distractible, short tempered, and emotionally volatile as I ever was, prone to recurring fits of self-pity, always yielding to the temptation of letting myself sink into cavernous lows. Despite having written an entire dissertation exploring contemporary wellness culture and mindfulness, I’m still unable to prevent myself from being swept away by the caprice of a mind and heart I still don’t quite understand.

The struggle to change my undesirable behaviors is tightly braided with a mean penchant for procrastination.

When I seem to be making progress on this front—like how I’ve finally developed the courage to create and share the art I’ve always dreamed of—my fingers still find the snooze button, both literally and metaphorically, delaying the dream just one more hour, one more day. I have more unfinished projects than you can imagine, each a dusty testament to dreams deferred.

My procrastination, of course, extends to my physical health, too.

My doctor recently looked at my lab test results and read off a series of alarming numbers related to my cholesterol, blood sugar, liver enzymes, and thyroid levels. Walking to my car, I swore to myself this was the wake-up call I needed to change how I treated my body.

Instead, I went home and poured a glass of wine, ate a chocolate chip cookie, and DoorDashed a cheeseburger and onion rings for dinner. Despite having left the doctor’s office scared about what the numbers meant for my long-term health, the abstraction of my imagined future was no match for the concrete reality of my daily exhaustion and bad habits, which quickly did away with my renewed determination to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

Procrastinating about my life feels a bit like a horror movie where you watch the dimwitted protagonist clearly walk toward where the monster lies in waiting and, no matter how much you yell or throw your popcorn at the screen, they keep on walking until they’re all gobbled up.

III. No Time Left to Procrastinate

The stakes of personal change have never been higher for me. As a husband and father of two toddlers, one of whom is non-verbal and on the autism spectrum, my behavior affects everyone around me, and my actions (or inactions, as the case may be) have clear consequences. When it comes to the kids, those consequences have the potential to echo and reverberate through generations. It’s all too important to screw up.

But while I fear dying young and leaving my family behind, or continuing to disappoint them in stupid ways, there’s nothing I fear more than staying the same, hating myself for it, and then spending a lifetime spreading my misery to those around me, forcing my wife and kids to tiptoe around a bitter, resentful, pouting old grouch.

The kids are young now, two and three, but still fully capable of discerning when dad is sad or getting angry. Their awareness and understanding of my behavior will only become more acute as they age. I want to model for them what it means to flourish and live a healthy, happy, fulfilled adult life rather than being a living, breathing, cautionary tale of what not to do.

Although the ideal time for intervention was years ago, there is still time to change and become the father I want to be for my family. As the old maxim goes, “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, but the second best time is now.”

I’m desperate, then, to evolve into my best, enlightened self and leave these older versions of myself behind—not forgotten—just a series of flawed images, arrested in their moments of failure, arranged in neat rows, preserved, and encased in glass with small descriptive plaques, so this way I can visit them, and marvel from a distance at how far I’ve come:

Look, it’s impatient Jacob, the one with the bad temper who swears at the TV remote!

Oh, and there, the anxiety-ridden one, the obsessive one, who suffers imagined troubles!

What’s that? Yes, I already saw the procrastinating Jacob and the one who can’t stop eating peanut butter cookies from the grocery store bakery!

Gaining the type of perspective that allows one to find purpose in past failures is only possible from a vantage point of triumph. I’m still climbing.

IV. So, How Does One Change, Exactly?

Earlier this year, I read Katy Milkman’s How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be (2021). It’s a helpful read for anyone struggling to adopt new behaviors and follow through with their goals. By focusing on the science behind behavior change and encouraging a tactical approach, Milkman helps demystify the process of becoming our best selves.

There’s a quote I love that’s often mistakingly attributed to Aristotle but turns out to be author Will Durant summarizing an excerpt from the Nichomachean Ethics. But, anyway, it goes like this:

We are what we repeatedly do . . . therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.

Yet, as Milkman helpfully reminds her readers, one can indeed “Work to create habits—tiny ones, atomic ones, keystone ones—following the advice laid out in self-help bestsellers,” but a more successful approach is to “customize your strategy: isolate the weakness preventing progress, and then pounce.”

What I appreciate most about Milkman’s framing of behavior change is the emphasis on how people chronically overestimate their own willpower and, consequently, set themselves up to fail by creating conditions that actively work against the changes they’re trying to implement. Thinking back to her training as an engineer, she explains,

An engineer can’t design a successful structure without first carefully accounting for the forces of opposition (say, wind resistance or gravity). So engineers always attempt to solve problems by first identifying the obstacles to success.

Unlike Milkman, my academic background is not in engineering but first in delinquency and eventually literature. I often neglect taking time to identify obstacles to success and instead approach my plans for behavior change with the tact of the Kool-Aid Man—Oh Yeah!—buoyed only by unbridled enthusiasm and unwarranted confidence in my discipline and willpower. Unsurprisingly, as Milkman points out again and again, most of these efforts fail spectacularly.

How I approach my plans for behavior change

Take my desire to cultivate a healthier lifestyle as just one illustrative example:

Rather than set myself up for success, I continue to keep all the cookies, gummy bears, beer, wine, chips, and blocks of cheese in the house; I also keep all the food delivery apps installed on my phone. Meanwhile, I do nothing to plan delicious, healthy meals with easy preps or find ways to replace my daily snacking rituals with healthier alternatives. Until recently, one of my running shoes was lost in a cupboard for months (see toddlers).

In other words, the message I send to myself is

I’m going to leave this house filled with alcohol and unhealthy snacks, give you no healthy alternatives to them, offer no tasty dinners to look forward to—only laborious meal prepping of things that are green—and, if you’re a real man, you’ll overcome these conditions, laugh in the face of temptation, and embrace your new lifestyle of after-work water and oxygen shots for dessert. Oh, and I will not buy you new running shoes, either.

It’s such a bummer—so unfair to expect change that way.

Unfortunately, instead of recognizing how I set myself up to fail in these aspirational situations, I attribute my failures to a weakness in character. Put simply—and with less vulgarity than how it’s usually expressed in my head—I’d be able to change if I were a better, stronger person. In this way, failing to change not only hurts on a micro level, but on a macro one as well; every small, daily failure is symptomatic of the much larger problem of, well, being me.

Thankfully, Milkman’s book not only helps throw the absurdity of these willpower tests into relief, but she also offers several detailed strategies for effective behavior change, meticulously outlined and explained over eight chapters.

(For an in-depth look at all eight chapters of Milkman’s book along with my favorite quotes and strategies, check out my upcoming entry on dad’s bookshelf.)

V. How Substack Is Helping Me Change for the Better

One of the strategies for behavior change Milkman explores is leveraging the use of commitment devices, “something that reduces your own freedoms in the service of a greater goal.” They are self-imposed and come in the form of “hard” and “soft” commitments.

An example of a hard commitment device is anything with concrete, material costs like making a cash pledge. Companies like Beeminder and Stickk² allow users to create a trackable goal and pledge money to ensure they meet it.

Milkman tells the story of Nick Winter, a software engineer who pledged to pay $14,000 dollars to Beeminder if he didn’t achieve his twin goals of writing a book and going skydiving within three months—and he accomplished both.

An example of “soft” commitment devices, meanwhile, are purely psychological and social in their costs. The clearest example of a soft commitment device is a public pledge. If you make a public pledge, you’re risking your reputation and the pain of letting yourself down and others if you break it.

Milkman likens the psychological pain we feel after breaking a pledge to the “soft penalty” of cognitive dissonance where we end up frustrated and perplexed by our internal contradictions—basically how I feel most of the time. Sticking to the pledge, meanwhile, allows you to stay in alignment with your values and in good repute with the folks you made the pledge to.

Although I had never thought about my Substack in these terms, I suppose dad trying is my soft commitment device: A public pledge to change for the better.

I started this project in hopes of achieving my writing dreams and making new friends. The way I saw it, the latter would hold me accountable to accomplish the former, especially if they were paying for my writing or if I eventually wanted them to.

But, after reading How to Change, it’s clear Substack is an integral part in the larger process of my aspirational self-fashioning to become the best version of myself, fulfilling my potential as a husband, father, teacher, and member of my local community. By choosing to do battle with all the ugly versions of myself in a public arena, I can hold myself accountable, and hopefully have friends around to cheer when the best parts of me defeat the lesser, meaner parts.

This is all so obvious in retrospect. I mean, it’s all there in the name: dad trying. The animating spirit of the whole project is simply trying to change, knowing I’ll still fail plenty in the process, but what matters is showing up every day and leaving behind some kind of record that I’m trying to be better today than I was the day before.

If the worst happens, and I’m not around to see my babies grow up, these essays and videos will exist as a record of their dad attempting to be better for them; even the essays that don’t seem to have anything to do with parenting are still efforts made by their dad to understand himself and the world around him, to rearrange himself and heal, to evolve, to burn off the impurities, to be able to proudly declare—quoting George Saunders quoting the poet Hayden Carruth—that I am “mostly Love, now.”

So, dear reader—and I hope new friend—just know that I’ll show up every week with something to share, another artifact from my ongoing quest to be a little better every day. I promise I’m trying my best to change and not be so much of a knucklehead all the time.

There’s so much about me I don’t like that just feels so darn hardwired, so intractable, so inexplicable. But, with the right strategies and a supportive community, I do believe change is possible—for all of us.

1. For those tempted to respond with “But you’re so young! You have plenty of time!” it’s worth noting that the urgency I feel stems in part from the fact my paternal grandfather died at 28 and my father was diagnosed with cancer at 36 and again when he was 62. That’s just the start (we haven’t even talked about my uncles or cousins yet). The men in my family don’t seem to stick around very long, so I’ve never assumed I have a surplus of years to waste.

2. Stickk’s website claims it currently has 622k commitments totaling $65 million dollars in cash pledges.