Theory of Change: My Kids as Motivation

On November 7th, 2014, the greatest theatrical space odyssey ever created (in my opinion) was released to the world: Interstellar. Five days earlier, on November 2nd, I embarked on one of the greatest earthly odysseys possible: I became a father to a baby girl.

Though these two events seem unrelated, to me they are as intertwined as space and time. 

Interstellar tells the story of an astronaut father who goes on a mission to another galaxy to find a habitable planet for humans to occupy, all the while desperately longing to get home to his daughter whom he promised he would return to. 

It’s not a coincidence that this movie had such a profound impact on me. As a self-proclaimed deep thinker, it sparked a level of curiosity in me that I had never reached before. Terms like “black hole” and “relativity” filled my imagination, and took up the majority of my Google searches.

And as a new father, it pulled strongly on my heartstrings. I had always felt a sense of awe and wonder looking up at the stars. Now I felt the same way looking at her. It’s like she was a reflection of the cosmos, and the cosmos were a reflection of her. (Could a father-daughter dynamic set in space be more spot on?)

Essentially, Interstellar was the right movie for me at the right time because it blended the feelings of love and interconnectedness to create a newfound sense of stewardship.

Fast forward to the early summer of 2020, and my wife is about seven months pregnant with our second child. Although we didn’t know the sex of the baby at the time - we wanted a labor day surprise - the possibility of this baby being a boy started to become real when questions about manhood and masculinity began flooding my brain:

What does it mean to be a man? How am I going to teach my son about being a man when I never had a positive example? What is my role as a man (father, husband, earthling, etc.)?

Without a real starting point I went looking for answers, and lucked out when I happened upon the greatest book on Men’s Gender Studies ever written (in my opinion), Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man.

Written in 1992 by Sam Keen, a philosophy professor turned “skilled explorer”, Fire in the Belly completely dismantles the outdated models of masculinity we’ve come to accept as normal in our modern society, and offers a healthy vision for what men can be. Needless to say, it blew my mind.

It was the right book at the right time because it awoke a sense of activism in me that coupled perfectly with the sense of stewardship that Interstellar had provided nearly six years earlier. 

June and July went by quickly, and on August 2nd we welcomed our baby boy into the world. Keen’s words were still rattling my core. Specifically, a single declarative sentence perfectly matched how I was feeling:

“The historical challenge for modern men is clear - to discover a peaceful form of virility and to create an ecological commonwealth, to become fierce gentlemen” (Keen).

Challenge accepted… but I was still missing a key ingredient.

Fatherhood, above all else, fuels my theory of change. Having kids is like signing your initials into the universe’s proverbial wet cement. It immortalizes you, telling everyone else “I was here.” However, with this immortalization comes responsibility: it’s one thing to want to become a fierce gentleman; it’s a whole other thing to truly exemplify one.

Earth, our home, will be around for another five billion (5,000,000,000) years. Yet each of us, if we’re lucky enough, will only get to experience about 80 of those years. Simple math tells us that, relative to cosmological time, we only have an atomically small amount of time here, so what we choose to do matters. 

Luckily, design, the once missing ingredient, is now providing me with the skillset to do what matters: instilling a sense of stewardship and activism in my kids. There isn’t a playbook to do this. And, as we’ve seen, sometimes inspiration can come from unlikely sources at unlikely times. But what I’m gathering through design is a new way of thinking, a mental model, a lens to see the world that I can pass on.

Design = Stewardship + Activism

Ironically, one way to see the world is through the lens of science fiction. (Have I mentioned Interstellar?) In her essay Rewriting The Future: Using Science Fiction To Re-Envision Justice, educator, writer, public scholar, and spoken word artist, Walida Imarisha, states that science fiction “allows us to imagine possibilities outside of what exists today” (Imarisha). 

On top of giving me a new perspective, design provides me with a sense of positivity and optimism because, at its core, it’s also a creative problem solving methodology.

Sometimes I ruminate about questions such as What kind of world did I bring my kids into? and Will my kids be part of the last generation of humans? Naturally, bleak questions tend to have bleak answers. Looking at these questions through Imarisha’s eyes or through the eyes of a designer, however, there is less bleakness and more possibility. No problem seems wicked enough.

Another element related to science fiction, specifically in relation to space and time, is serendipity. Both instances, watching Interstellar and reading Fire in the Belly, felt like a scene in a movie when a series of seemingly inconsequential events culminates into a grand climax. 

In their piece, The Relational Work of Systems Change, Kania, Milligan, and Zerta define serendipity as “being present to the work and to each other… grounding the work, individually and collectively, in love” (Kania, Milligan, and Zerta). Again, it’s not a coincidence that, in the realm of Interstellar, “the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space” is love (Nolan, Interstellar, 2014). It seems that by welcoming serendipity, design gives you permission to allow magical moments to happen.   

Design = Imagined Possibilities + Serendipity

Ultimately, I don’t yet know the impact I want to make in the world. I do know, however, that I want to zoom in and out between the micro (at the level of a newborn baby) and the macro (at a “cosmic” level), to tackle everything from individual issues to systemic problems. 

Design may take me anywhere. I just hope the journey involves my two North Stars, my kids, giving me the chance to exemplify what it means to be a father, including being a fierce gentleman, a steward, and an activist.