The Aimless Generations

I see generations of children growing up who never had to do anything as kids. I know because I’m one of them.

I grew up in a city. My parents did everything for me. Besides a handful of minor chores like taking out the trash and cleaning up my room, I was essentially not a helpful member of the household. It’s not because I was lazy - my parents didn’t want my help. And I’m not the only one. This is now the default.

Whole generations are growing up in cities where our lives are of no consequence until we suddenly become adults, and then we encounter the real world - big, scary, and anxiety-provoking. It took me years to overcome that, find my footing, and become a self-actualizing adult.

The real world doesn’t care for incompetent and incapable people. If you can’t look someone else in the eye and maintain a conversation, you will struggle to make friends, find a job, or even just function in society.

That’s why we see so many young adults who grew up not making their own food often default to eating out in college. After 18 years of life on this planet - they never learned the basic skill of cooking for themselves. Never mind critical thinking, map reading, budgeting, carpentry, bushcraft, or any number of other useful skills they should have been learning.

But that’s what childhood is for. It’s for experimenting, learning, doing, playing, and having purpose. That’s not something you’re meant to learn at 18 when you’re thrust into your first job, college, or a special “how to be an adult” program (yes, they’re real).

Our Job as Parents

As parents it’s easy for us to say, “I’ll just do it myself”, and exclude our kids from various tasks. It’s often faster to just get things done myself, right? But then I have to ask myself, why did I bother having kids if I’m just going to be impatient and rush off to do chores myself?

Every day I go to the garden my 3 year-old wants to come with me. He’s cute and I love his enthusiasm - but I also have to be patient as he takes several minutes to put on his shoes, gets distracted several times on the way there, and then whines about how it’s hot.

But when he comes back with a basket of vegetables for our family to eat, he has purpose. He’s learning. He’s helping. His life has meaning. And he gets to hang out with his dad.

The interesting thing is, sometimes he really does help. And if I didn’t give him a chance, he’d never be able to prove his value in the garden. And he’s just 3. Imagine what he could do when he’s 10!

We need to stop babying our children. Stop finishing hard tasks for them, or doing something for them because they’re taking “too long”. I’m not saying don’t help when they genuinely need help (they need to know they’ll get help when they need it and that we love them), but have discernment. Don’t rush in too quickly, let them try to finish a difficult thing first. Overcoming difficulty is how confidence is built.

Every cucumber picked, every screw tightened, every step stool moved - every little thing they do adds up. My kids, as little as they are, can independently go and feed our animals, let out the chickens, collect eggs, pick tomatoes, put on their own bandaids for each other, and so on.

Of course, if you live in a city, you might need to get creative. People aren’t meant to live in concrete boxes on top of each other, produce none of their own food, and be plugged into an endless entertainment machine all day long. They’re meant to wander, explore, build, sow, harvest. All of that requires a homestead. That’s one of the reasons we moved out of the city - I genuinely don’t think children can thrive growing up in that kind of environment.

When they grow up, my kids will have had an almost two-decade long track record of working hard, failing, trying again, and succeeding. Building self-confidence isn’t done overnight. It’s not done with a self-help book or a therapy session. It’s done one step at a time, proving to yourself that you can get things done, that you’re competent, and that what you do matters.

Don’t take that away from your children.

Is anyone else tired of the, “you’re not educated enough if you can’t read Greek and Latin,” posts that seem to be floating around Substack? I see them all the time now.

Underpinning every single one of them is a not-so-subtle undercurrent of “you suck”.

Here’s what I think is happening: a handful of people spent years of their childhood learning Greek and Latin. They were told this made them well-educated and smart. They then went out into the real world and realized that… nobody cares. Not even other well-educated and smart people.

What used to be a badge of intelligence in the 19th century is just not relevant anymore. Just like a college degree is no longer a meaningful badge.

These kids, who are now adults writing on Substack, were prepared for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Which is sad. Sad for them, and sad for the world, because these are smart people who put in the hours, they were just rowing in the wrong direction.

So now they’re mad. They’re mad that their schools or parents subjected them to years of learning largely pointless knowledge at the expense of learning something more valuable, or - you know - just being a kid and getting to play, which by the way is also valuable.

Everything has an opportunity cost, folks. There’s only 24 hours in a given day. If you’re learning Latin and Greek, you’re not learning French, Spanish, Algebra, budgeting, gardening, sewing, carpentry, music, how to run a business, or any number of other things. Your time and energy are finite.

So what do they do? Instead of placing the blame where it ought to go, they go on social media and try to virtue signal with their pretentious attitude, trying to make themselves feel better. It’s not that they wasted years of their childhood learning useless skills - no - it’s that you, all of you peasants out there - are simply not educated enough.

Self-knowledge is important, and some of these folks seem to be missing it.

Now - if you actually use Greek and Latin for some reason in your real life, perhaps you’re a translator, then great - that’s not a useless skill for you. But for the vast majority of people who learned it - it was a waste of time. Just because “classical” education made this part of the curriculum two hundred years ago, doesn’t mean it’s still valuable today.

I can read a perfectly reasonable translation of Plato’s “Republic”, and figure out that he was a big government statist who wanted to lord of everyone else, without having to learn Greek first. There’s two points I’m trying to make here:

1. Reading translations is perfectly fine. Yes, you might miss some nuance, but it’s probably not worth years of effort learning a dead language to get it. Besides, most people who learned Latin and Greek as kids don’t actually read original texts as adults, and

2. Most of the ancient philosophers were… well, let’s just say, not very good. Philosophical thought has improved over the centuries and millennia. That’s not to say that modern philosophers are all good either. Every age has a small minority of clear thinkers and a large majority of charlatans. But I’d much rather read Rothbard than Plato. There seems to be a certain worship of Ancient Greeks that seems to entirely miss the fact that their society had slaves and enshrined homosexuality and pedophilia. Sure, they also built awesome things and were very advanced for their time, but most classical education seems to skip right over the unsavory parts.

You could say that learning Latin and Greek builds discipline, but so does any difficult task. Learning French builds discipline. Building a house builds discipline. Gardening builds discipline.

Moreover, there’s vastly more to learn now than there was two centuries ago. Physics, biology, and chemistry are deeper rabbit holes than ever before. Engineering, mathematics, computer science. What about history? You could spend your entire life learning about history (and there’s a lot of lessons here that are useful to us today) and still only learn a tiny fraction. The amount we’ve learned about horticulture in just the last few decades could fill an entire library.

A serious educator in 2026 would look at the vastly expanded sum of human knowledge and have to make serious prioritization decisions on what could benefit the next generation today, and I truly struggle to see how Latin and Greek would make that cut.

And we should stop worshipping the past just for the sake of it. Yes, people 200 years ago were doing a lot of things right. They were homesteading, homeschooling, and living in intact families and communities. So we look at their education and we think, “Oh, they studied Greek and Latin, that must be why their society was good at these things,” and then we try to emulate it. But they were also doing a lot of things wrong, and correlation is not equal to causation.

This kind of past-worship is just as toxic of a mindset as the modern progressive attitude that everything in the past was bad.

They’re both wrong.

It turns out, you need to actually develop criteria and apply your own filter. And developing that ability to reason and judge for yourself is a far more important skill for your kids to learn than learning Greek or Latin.

P.S. The modern government education system sucks, and it sucks for a reason - they want you stupid and compliant - and that’s why parents should be homeschooling, but the “classical” education is not necessarily the answer.

As parents with kids, this is something we’re in the process of figuring out ourselves. I intend to share what we learn here. Hopefully this series on homeschooling & education will be valuable to others.