i'm going to email you 100 times
Frame Studies · Romance, Parenting & Family · 2026 · 1.1k words
Fatherhood has remade Visa's priorities, disrupted his old ambitions, and turned him into a man with narrower daily concerns. With a second baby due in July, Visa is going to publish daily until then: then disappear into newborn chaos.
how fatherhood has changed me
the relief of being decentered, and the shearing of past interests
I’ve been a dad for almost 2.5 years now, which is about 7% of my life. I’ve had a lot to say about it in that time. It’s magical, mundane, delightful, frustrating, beatific, tedious. A maximally human experience. My toddler is beginning to have actual proto-conversations with me, which opens up a whole new dimension of interestingness. We have another baby on the way, due in July, so we’re going to be swept into newborn chaos all over again. It should probably be less scary because it’ll be familiar, but it’ll also be more challenging because now there’ll be an older toddler running interference. It’s going to be a lot of deliriously sleepless nights, twice as many diapers, a maelstrom of bottles and laundry.
When people ask something like “how has fatherhood changed you”, I feel like they’re usually looking to hear something romantic. It’s a big life change, going from caring primarily about yourself to caring primarily about someone else. It reorients you in your own personal cosmology. I actually found this to be a relief in many ways. I like being in social environments where I’m known and introduced as A’s dad. It takes some of the pressure off, somehow. I’m not that important. I’m just the support staff, the backstage crew. I feel less pressure to be interesting or entertaining. I get to just be the dad. It’s a refreshing change from a lifetime of feeling like I had a spotlight trained on my back, as someone unusually tall and dark with a unique name and a laundry list of other oddball qualities. In a group of dads, I’m just another dad. And we can socialize as representatives of our kids. It’s sort of obvious once you’re in it, but I don’t think it’s spelled out very clearly for people who aren’t yet: parenthood is a kind of great international club. The number of random interactions you have with strangers increases tremendously. (I imagine, again, that this experience is different depending on how approachable you seem, whether you’re a man or woman, etc.) I’ve come to greatly enjoy this. It makes me feel much more like a welcomed part of the wider social reality I inhabit.
That said, I do feel like fatherhood has also been like an earthquake, particularly in the sense that there are different parts of my life that have slid against each other in ways that have caused discontinuities.
The most intuitive way to describe this is to talk about my long-running todo lists. I have always tried to take lots of notes, typically as snapshots of my mental state. What I’m thinking about, what my priorities are, where my attention is going. I’ve persisted with the habit I think because my notes tend to reveal to me a more complex, evocative, varied version of myself than my memory does. My notes show me that I flit around a lot more than I realize, pursue interests that I subsequently forget about, and have patterns to my thoughts, feelings and observations that I’d struggle to discern otherwise.
Usually, though, when I look at old notes, I can see a pretty clear throughline from where I was to where I am. But since becoming a dad, many of these throughlines feel like they have been disrupted. Here’s what got me started on writing this entire post at all. I was glancing at my Roam notes, where I have an old todo list that I haven’t updated in a while. And I see all these todos that I had come up with from before I was a father. A selection of some that catch my eye:
Read and write about the history of pamphleteers – this was something I wanted to do as part of a wider project about media history
Read Ascent of Money – a book about the financial history of the world
write post about ‘nation-states’ and ‘capitalism’ being interim not-good-enough states
write about ‘organizational DNA’
write about ‘being spiritually ambitious’
write about society running on polite fictions
All off these remain relevant to my long-term interests, but after becoming a dad, I have lost much of the original context from which I intended to those posts. They don’t currently interest me. I’m currently much more interested in much ‘narrower’ matters, like trying to figure out how to manage my time and energy within a daily cycle. What to make for breakfast. How to get a good workout in with as little effort and time as possible.
I still care about big things, I think, but I don’t really have the energy for it at the moment.
Another way of thinking about it all– I feel like all of my work and interests tend to revolve around the question of human flourishing. How do humans flourish? What are the conditions in which we flourish? How do we achieve those conditions for ourselves, and for more and more people? My first two books were each attempts to answer bits of that question, and I had planned my third major work to be a series of essays that also answered another part of that question, particularly re: how do we flourish in relation to our media. But lately I’ve come to feel that maybe that question isn’t for me to answer right now, at this stage in my life. Well- it’s more complicated than that. There were elements that I subconsciously included in the formulation of that question, which I’m not sure I articulated explicitly anywhere. And those subconscious elements have shifted. I could maybe still attempt to answer the question of “how do we flourish in relation to our media”. But I’m not the same person I was when I started asking that question. I kinda wonder if I should be asking different questions entirely. I’m not sure.
One thing I know is that I have much less time than I previously thought. In about 100 days, I will probably be so overwhelmed that I won’t have time to write anything. So I’m going to try something a little crazy. I’m going to try and publish something on here almost every day. I’m going to try and empty out my todo lists and notes apps and drafts as aggressively as I can. That means, if you’re subscribed to me via substack, you’re going to get a lot of emails from me. Like, possibly 1 every day. But only until the end of June. And then I’m going to go dark again, for I don’t know how long.
If there’s anything in particular you’ve been wanting to see me write about, now is the time to ask!
Thanks,
Visa
✱
2026jun15 update: The original title of this post was “I’m going to email you 100 times”, which turned out to be a bit of wishful thinking – I’ve published 12 posts in the time I hoped to publish 80. So it goes.
Originally published at https://visakanv.substack.com/p/im-going-to-email-you-100-times.