The Rules Were Never The Rules
A Father’s Day Letter to My Son
Dear son,
As we close in on what I hope is just the first third of our journey together, there's something I've come to believe that I want to share with you, along with the reasons why. A belief you can’t explain isn’t really yours. You’re renting it from whoever told it to you, and rent always comes due at the worst possible time.
When I was your age the path was so obvious that almost nobody questioned it. Study. Get a job. Work hard. Buy a house. Save for retirement. You’ll be fine.
It worked for my parents, and for most of my life it worked for me. And when something works for fifty years, people stop calling it advice and start saying that it’s the way the world is.
But it was never the way the world is. It was the way the world was, for a little while, because a handful of conditions happened to line up. None of them were laws of nature, and one by one they are going away.
I’m not saying the world is ending. I’ve lived too long to trust anyone who says it is. The person predicting disaster always sounds smarter than the person saying things will probably be okay. He’s usually wrong, and he usually has something to sell.
What I’m telling you is that the rules are changing, the way they always eventually do.
You can see it in what is happening to the dollar. It buys a little less every year, and it always will. Some of that is bad luck but most of it is a decision. When a country owes more than it can ever grow its way out of, it has one quiet exit, and sooner or later it walks through it. It lets the money shrink.
Nobody sends a letter when this happens.
You just notice, slowly, that the same dollar covers less of what actually counts. A house. A year of school. An hour of a doctor’s time. Your paycheck has more zeros on it than your grandfather’s ever did, and somehow it stretches less far.
So you chase a bigger salary, the way everyone does. But a bigger salary is not the same thing as more money. And more money is not the same thing as more purchasing power.
Now, this is the part where you expect me to tell you to buy the usual inflation hedges — stocks, real estate, a little gold — and those are all fine things to own. But there is one thing that beats every one of them.
It’s developing real skills. Keep getting better at producing something people actually need. Not something that sounds impressive when you say it out loud. Something someone will pay for. It’s the one kind of wealth nobody can inflate away or tax away or take from you in a courtroom. It has no choice but to go where you go.
What I really want to hand you isn’t a plan, it’s an approach.
Before you build your life on a rule someone gives you, ask what made it true — then ask whether that’s still the case.
Those two questions will outlast any plan I can give you.
Beyond that, don’t trust any single, confident answer, including this one. I’m telling you the world is changing. I am not telling you I know how it will turn out. Nobody can. The people who sound the most certain about the future are usually just the most comfortable being wrong in front of a crowd.
The deal I grew up with isn’t waiting for you, at least not in the shape it reached me in. But the thing underneath it is — a life built on what work you can promise and deliver, instead of what someone promised would work. That part is still here. It just doesn’t come in a box. You must build it yourself.
So keep building real skills like you have been, and you’ll be ready for whatever the rules of your time turn out to be.
I’m proud of the way you think. Of everything I could ever leave you, that’s the one thing I’m certain will hold its value.
Love you,
Dad
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