I’ll start with this: everyone ultimately has to make their own choices. Nobody can be forced to live a certain way, nor should they be. There is no universal blueprint that works equally well for every person. At the same time, it does not follow that all choices are equally good.
There are reliably better and worse ways of living, both for individuals and for societies. Because force is not the answer, all we really have is conversation, persuasion, criticism, and the sharing of wisdom accumulated through experience.
This is one of the places where I’ve drifted away from the libertarianism I held for most of my adult life. The central weakness I now see is the assumption that people can be understood primarily as independent individuals pursuing their own preferences. In reality, humans are deeply interconnected. The quality of my life is influenced not only by my decisions, but by the decisions of my family, my community, and the civilization around me. Individual choices do not remain individual for long; they propagate through networks of relationships and eventually become culture.
Take the common libertarian response to destructive behavior: “It’s their life, their choice.” At one level, that’s true. We cannot stop every bad decision, nor should we attempt to control everyone. But if a society loses the ability to distinguish between flourishing and decay, it loses the ability to improve itself. If someone is addicted to heroin and living on the street, the appropriate response is not indifference disguised as tolerance. We should be willing to say that this is a tragedy, that it is bad for the individual, bad for those around them, and bad for society. That judgment is not coercion. It is simply recognizing that outcomes are not morally or practically equivalent.
The deeper issue is that humans are not isolated actors. We influence one another constantly. Children learn from parents. Friends influence friends. Communities establish norms. Entire generations shape the assumptions of those who come after them. In tribal societies this was obvious because everyone lived in close proximity and depended on one another for survival. When someone became destructive, the tribe responded because the consequences affected everyone. Modern societies are larger and more complex, but the principle remains unchanged. We are still shaping one another whether we acknowledge it or not.
Once you recognize this, the question becomes: what kind of society should we be trying to create?
To answer that, we first need to define flourishing. A flourishing society is not merely one that maximizes freedom in the narrow sense. It is one in which people experience meaning, purpose, responsibility, connection, competence, and belonging. It is one in which individuals contribute to something larger than themselves. It is one in which future generations are raised well enough to inherit and improve what came before them.
This is where tradition becomes important.
Modern people often treat tradition as the opposite of thinking, but tradition is better understood as a form of cultural memory. It is the accumulated result of countless generations confronting recurring human problems and preserving what appeared to work. Tradition is not automatically correct, and every tradition should be open to examination. But dismissing it outright is intellectually arrogant. Ideas that survived centuries did not survive by accident. They survived because enough people found them useful, meaningful, or necessary to keep passing them forward.
That does not mean every inherited belief is true. It means inherited beliefs deserve investigation before rejection.
The same applies to religious traditions. Whether one ultimately accepts Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, or none of them, refusing to engage deeply with them guarantees ignorance. These traditions have shaped civilizations and guided billions of people through questions of meaning, morality, suffering, family, sacrifice, and purpose. To dismiss them without serious study is not skepticism; it is incuriosity. The wiser approach is to engage them fully, extract what is valuable, challenge what appears flawed, and think carefully about why they endured.
My views on family emerged through a similar process.
For most of my life, I shared many of the modern assumptions about freedom. No kids. Maximum flexibility. Build life around personal preferences. I pursued that path for decades and experienced it as fully as one reasonably can. Then I had a family.
What changed was not merely my schedule or priorities. My understanding of life changed.
Children are often described as a sacrifice, a burden, or one lifestyle option among many. That framing misses something fundamental. Children are not simply beneficiaries of adult care; adults are transformed by caring for children. Parenthood forces responsibility, patience, selflessness, long-term thinking, and participation in something larger than individual desire. It connects us to both the past and the future simultaneously. We inherit life from previous generations and become responsible for transmitting it to the next.
I now believe adults need children almost as much as children need adults.
This realization is difficult to appreciate before experiencing it because the transformation occurs gradually. You do not simply add children to an already complete life. The structure of life itself changes. Questions of meaning and purpose that once seemed abstract become concrete. Much of what modern people search for through achievement, consumption, entertainment, or endless self-optimization emerges naturally through family, responsibility, and service to others.
That is one reason I find the modern dismissal of family so strange. Every human civilization, every culture, and every one of our ancestors organized life around family because family was not considered one value among many. It was considered one of the primary foundations of human existence. To assume that billions of people across thousands of years all happened to be mistaken requires extraordinary confidence.
The same logic applies to civilization itself.
A functioning society requires substantial agreement about right and wrong, responsibility and obligation, virtue and vice. Complete moral fragmentation is not freedom; it is chaos. If every individual adopts a completely different conception of what matters, collective action becomes impossible. Trust erodes. Institutions weaken. Shared purpose disappears.
This does not require absolute uniformity. Disagreement is healthy. Debate is necessary. But societies need enough common ground to cooperate, raise children, maintain institutions, and pursue long-term goals together. Historically, shared moral frameworks provided that foundation. Today many people reject those frameworks without replacing them with anything equally coherent.
The result is confusion rather than liberation.
I also think many modern forms of nihilism are profoundly mistaken. The attitude that humanity ending would not matter, that civilization is ultimately meaningless, or that life should be reduced to maximizing pleasure and minimizing inconvenience strikes me as both philosophically shallow and psychologically corrosive. People who adopt these views often mistake detachment for wisdom. And these people pay a heavy price for it through confusion, lack of meaning, purpose, and direction.
Life is astonishingly improbable. We are the product of an unbroken chain of life stretching back billions of years. Every ancestor survived long enough to reproduce in procession, and that experience fundamentally changes who we are, how we think, how we balance, how we behave. The reproduction process and leadership of the next generation is a forcing function to make humans better, more responsible leaders, in overwhelming positive ways. Every generation carried something forward. To regard that inheritance with indifference seems less like enlightenment and more like a failure of gratitude and recognition of its profundity.
If everyone believed humanity should simply stop existing, none of us would be here to hold that belief in the first place.
This is why I care about family, civilization, and continuity. Not because preserving humanity is the only purpose of life, but because these things enrich life itself. They provide meaning, responsibility, connection, and belonging. They transform existence from a private experience into participation in an ongoing human story.
Finally, I remain open to being wrong. I am interested in new ideas and willing to revise my views when confronted with better arguments. Having a family is not one you can undo, but once you do it, it opens a curtain of life that you otherwise don’t know is there. You can’t look at someone with a kid and imagine what it is like as that view misses it entirely. It has to be experienced, and most flourishing parents all agree with this. It’s hard to imagine life without doing it once you’ve done it.
But I am increasingly convinced that flourishing societies require strong families, shared moral foundations, respect for accumulated wisdom, and a recognition that humans are fundamentally social rather than purely individual creatures.
The modern tendency to reduce people to isolated consumers pursuing personal satisfaction misunderstands human nature. We are shaped by one another. We depend on one another. We inherit from those who came before us and influence those who come after us.
A healthy civilization begins when we take that responsibility seriously.
