Pod Insights Order of Man The Rise of Vanishing Fatherhood | FRIDAY FIELD NOTES About this episode In this episode of Friday Field Notes, host Ryan Michler tackles a critical societal crisis: the rise of vanishing fatherhood. With nearly half of all men between the ages of 25 and 45 currently childless, Ryan breaks down why this trend isn't just an economic narrative, but a profound crisis of belief.
He exposes the cultural lie that children are a restriction on personal freedom and contrasts it with data showing that 90% of fathers find fatherhood to be their deepest source of joy. True purpose comes from shouldering responsibility, not chasing comfort. Tune in to learn why raising righteous children is the ultimate battlefield for our culture.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
00:00 - Episode Introduction
00:45 - The Fatherhood Statistics Shock
02:24 - Belief Systems vs. Economic Stories
04:27 - The Joy of Fatherhood vs. Societal Expectations
06:37 - The True Cost of Opting Out
08:50 - The Danger of Fragile and Rudderless Men
11:02 - The Birth Rate Collapse and Cultural Decay
13:19 - Reclaiming Culture Through the Next Generation
15:28 - Forfeiting the Cultural Fight
17:28 - Raising Righteous Children as the Mission
19:13 - Shifting from Dopamine to Legacy
19:57 - Step Up and Find the Courage
22:00 - A Call to Action for Modern Fathers
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Every kid you put on this earth and raise with your values and your discipline and your faith. And every man who decides he wants to opt out isn't just losing something for himself. He's forfeiting his seat in that cultural fight. He's letting the other side, he's letting evil, horrible people outbreed him essentially. And so they outnumber him in the one area that actually could decide what this country becomes.
0:31 Speaker 00 I was going through some statistics in the last several weeks, specifically as it relates to fatherhood. And I came across some data that was very interesting. And I think it paints a very important story that we ought to be aware of and be able to combat and actually talk about as men. Some of the statistics that I came up with as I was going through this, or not I came up with, but ran across, is that almost one in every two men between the ages of 25 to 45 years old in this country does not have a child. And I want you to think about that for a second. Not, not doesn't want a child yet, not waiting for the right time, but one in two. So almost half, okay?
1:16 Speaker 00 That number was one in three back in 1980. And so in two generations, it went from most men become fathers to
1:29 Speaker 00 it's basically a coin toss as to whether or not a man is going to have a kid or not. And I want to talk about why that's happening and why the reasons that men are giving for opting out are, are lying to them and why this just isn't a personal choice. It's, it's actually a national problem at this point that I think a lot of us, the country, society at large, not only in this country, but abroad are just sleepwalking ourselves into. So we need to talk about the numbers first and then we'll get into the reasons. And then we'll get into some of, some of the ideas from there. But here's what the data actually shows.
2:12 Speaker 00 The, the share of men, again, from age 25 to 45. So that's a lot of men who listen to this podcast and of course, millions who don't yet. Who are fathers has dropped again from two thirds, and I'm just reiterating this, two thirds from 1980 to just over half today. And the number of childless men in that age bracket has more than doubled since that same time. So that means that over 23 million men now is it's an all time high of men not having children. And here's the detail that I think is really, really important. When you break down and you actually go through the data, the biggest predictor of whether
2:54 Speaker 00 a man becomes a father isn't his income. It's, it's not his education. It's, it's what he believes. And I think we inherently maybe intuitively know that it's, it's men who hold a traditional, often faith rooted, family oriented value system are, are the ones having kids at a rate nearly double of the men who don't. And that gap has been widening for 40 plus years now. So this really isn't an economic story, even though that's what everybody wants to tell you. Well, it's, we just don't have enough money to have kids. It's a belief story. Men who believe that fatherhood is worth building
3:38 Speaker 00 a life around, end up building a life around it. Pretty obvious. But men who've been talked out of that belief, they don't. And, and here's that lie that I was talking about earlier. And, and that's the part that gets me is this belief system because right alongside all of the data about fatherhood and the declining population and birth rates, there's another, another study that, that just came out. It's a huge study. I think there's thousands and thousands of fathers interviewed. And nine out of 10 of those men interviewed said that fatherhood is one of the deepest sources of happiness in their life. Not, oh, it's
4:21 Speaker 00 worth it in the end, not, not hard, but rewarding, not, you know, I guess it's okay. But nine out of 10 said it's the most meaningful thing that they've ever done in their entire life. And I can attest to that. And the researchers ran this study said flat out that they didn't, they didn't expect that number. I wouldn't have expected that number. I would have thought maybe six or seven of those men would, would say that, but not nine, not over 90%. Okay. The researchers, what they said is that they expect, expected exhaustion. They expected regret because that's what society says. Oh, being a father or, or being a mother for our female counterparts
5:04 Speaker 00 is exhausting and, and you'll regret it in the end. I saw a social media post that, that some, some idiot said that most women end up regretting having children at some point along the way. I've never heard that in my entire life. I've never heard a woman say, I really regret having children. What I have heard is I regret not having children and the same is true for us as men. So when the researchers expected this exhaustion and frustration and potential regret, what they actually were met with was joy. So, so let's break, let's break this down. Okay. We've got a generation of men, 23 million men opting out of fatherhood in record numbers. And I predict that that number will only go up.
5:49 Speaker 00 And at the same time, the men who are fathers tell us, and you can attest to this as well, if you are, that it's the best thing to ever happen to them. Okay. That's, it's not a coincidence that those two sets of data exist. That's, that's what we would call a con, a lie, deceit. Somewhere along the way, men got sold this story that, that a kid, having a kid, having a child is constricting. It's, it's a cage. That, that fatherhood is, is the thing standing between you and the life that you actually want. And there are hurdles
6:31 Speaker 00 that needs to be overcome. That, that the freedom in your life looks like fewer obligations, fewer people depending on you, fewer reasons to have to show up on a bad day. And guess what? Millions and millions of men bought into it. Not because it's true, but because it's easy to believe that the alternative, which, which is that building something in your life that outlasts you, a legacy. It takes everything you've got and a lot of men aren't sure if they've got it.
7:06 Speaker 00 And I want to tell you why I think, first of all, it's horrible, terrific. And it's also bad for individual men, men choosing to opt out of this incredible opportunity to have children. So let's start in the home first, and then we'll zoom out, we'll talk about the country. But what does opting out of being a father actually cost a man? Well, purpose for one, right? That's what the study suggested, suggested, excuse me. Fathers report, even anecdotally, you know this, but let's just go with the data. Fathers report a sense of purpose at roughly double the rate of men without kids.
7:49 Speaker 00 Not because, again, parenting is easy, it's not. It's very challenging. It's one of the most challenging things you'll do. But I'm sure you know this, I hope you know this, because one of the questions we often get here, asked here, is how does a man find his purpose? And what I think is happening is that young men, even boys, are growing up to be men, believing that purpose comes knocking on your door, and you don't have to go out and struggle, or suffer, or sacrifice for it. But you know, right? It comes from carrying and shouldering the weight of something bigger than that comfort. And if you strip all of that away, you don't get a man who has more freedom.
8:33 Speaker 00 You get a man with more time on his hands and less of a reason to get out of bed. And as my mom, when she was raising me, and her grandmother, or excuse me, her mom and my grandmother used to say, idle hands are the devil's workshop. And I'm sure you've heard something very similar. This is a very satanic plan. Okay, I've said this before, and I'll keep saying it. Comfort is not the goal in life. Comfort is the trap. It's the trap that too many men, myself included, in aspects and times in my life, that we fall into. A guy who builds his entire life around avoiding weight, avoiding discomfort, avoiding struggle, avoiding hardship, meaningful hardship, purpose-driven hardship.
9:19 Speaker 00 Ends up, ends up light and, and weak and fragile. And, and light, weak, fragile men don't make a mark on anything. They drift around. They get tossed to and fro by what I call the doctrine of popular culture. They, they're aimless, they're rudderless. I mean, you've probably felt that in your own life. I guarantee you have. And I know you have, because I talk with you guys daily. The stretches where you have the least responsibility were the stretches that you felt, excuse me, were, I should say, were not the stretches where you felt most like a man.
9:59 Speaker 00 They were the stretches where you felt untethered, maybe even childlike.
10:07 Speaker 00 Now, there's a second cost to this that a lot of people don't talk about. Is what happens 20? Or 30?
10:16 Speaker 00 Years down the road. When you get older.
10:20 Speaker 00 Whether you have kids or not, you're gonna get older. And the question is whether anybody's in the room. You know, a guy who spent his 30s and 40s optimizing for independence
10:33 Speaker 00 often finds himself at 60, 70, 80 years old with maybe a great resume, a paid off truck. And, and nobody who has to love him, nobody who does love him, nobody's gonna show up at his funeral. Nobody's gonna carry his, his torch. Nobody's gonna pass down the information that he had, that he shared. Nobody's gonna take that and make it something greater and build a legacy beyond what he could have imagined. That's not freedom.
11:01 Speaker 00 We often hear, and I wish I knew the book right offhand, or maybe it was a speech, but a gentleman was talking about interviewing people on their deathbed. And their biggest regret was not that they didn't spend enough time at work. It was that they didn't spend enough time doing things with people they love. Well, what if you don't have anybody to love? Okay, not having children is just isolation. Yeah, maybe you've got better furniture. Maybe you went on better trips. And? You didn't have anybody to share it with. Now, so that's why it's bad for the man. But let's talk also about why it's bad for culture. Because this isn't just happening at the individual family level. It's happening to us as a country. And I don't think a lot of people have connected these dots yet.
11:46 Speaker 00 We are in a birth rate collapse, not a slowdown, not a relatively few amount of people aren't having kids anymore. No, it's a collapse. The US fertility rate has been below replacement level for, at this point, I believe it's over a decade, maybe even 15 years. And it just keeps sliding, keeps sliding. Okay, so replacement level is technically, I think I saw that it's 2.1 kids per woman, just to keep the population steady. And we are well under that. And most frankly, most of the developed world is in that same hole. It's Japan, it's South Korea, most of Europe.
12:32 Speaker 00 And some of those countries are decades further down this road than we are. I mean, they're watching towns empty out, schools are closing. The economic model is just buckling under the weight because there aren't enough young people to replace the old people.
12:51 Speaker 00 And here's why that's not just some abstract policy problem.
12:57 Speaker 00 Every retiree in this country is currently supported by the labor and taxes of working age people. It's one of the greatest scams in the world. Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, every hospital, every school, every road. It's all funded the same way. And when the ratio of young to old flips, the whole structure starts to strain, starts to buckle, starts to collapse. Fewer workers, less and less taxpayers, fewer soldiers to protect what we have.
13:31 Speaker 00 It's fewer people to build the next version or the better version of this country at all. And obviously, men are half the equation. You can't have a birth rate problem without having a fatherhood problem that strings right along underneath it.
13:48 Speaker 00 Every father who opts out of it isn't just making his own private decision about his life, he's, he's one more brick pulled out of this wall that we call a nation. And then if you multiply that by 23 million people, and you start to see a little bit, maybe catch a glimpse of the problem that we're actually dealing with. And this is, this is way bigger than just one man's comfort. This is generational. You and I and other men making choices today are deciding collectively, right? All of us together, whether there's a next generation of Americans at all. Whether there's enough hands to carry what we've built, or whether we hand our kids
14:30 Speaker 00 and our grandkids a country that's shrinking and graying and rotting and dying and just running on fumes. But here's a point that I want to make that I think if you're not convinced by the last two points I made, that might just be the most compelling. Okay? If, if you're serious about the fight for this culture, and I think you are because you wouldn't listen to this podcast for very long if you weren't. You'd be annoyed and frustrated by me, and frankly, plenty of people are. But I know most of you are serious about the fight for our culture. I hear it every week in our community. I hear it every week in our Brotherhood, the Iron Council.
15:13 Speaker 00 I hear it every week on social media and the circles I run, and it's men who are just fed up watching all the values that they believe get, get mocked and sidelined and legislated against. And guys, we, we need to understand something. The, the most powerful thing that we can do in this fight to reclaim our heritage and our culture isn't a podcast like this. Now, it's, it's a help. It's part of the reason I do this. But it isn't social media, isn't, it isn't a comment section. It isn't an argument that you win or lose or draw with online. It's, it's a child.
15:57 Speaker 00 Culture isn't won in a single generation by out arguing the other side. It's won over decades and generations by those who actually show up to raise the next generation. Every kid you put on this earth and raise with your values and your discipline and your faith and your definition of what a man is supposed to be, that's a vote that gets cast for the next 40 years or longer.
16:30 Speaker 00 And every man who decides he wants to opt out isn't just losing something for himself. He's forfeiting his, his seat in that cultural fight. He's letting the other side, he's letting evil, horrible people outbreed him essentially. And so they outnumber him in the one area that actually could decide what this country becomes.
16:59 Speaker 00 Like, think, think about that for a second. If the, if the men like you and me, who believe in strength and responsibility and faith and family and Christianity and all the righteous virtues that we do, stop having kids at the rate they used to. And the data says they're, they're the only group that's still holding the line, by the way. Those family oriented, faith based type people, while everyone else around keeps having conversations about identity and false ideology and dangerous economic systems like socialism and communism. We just lose by forfeit. We lose. We give up all of our seats.
17:41 Speaker 00 It's not because we're out argued. It's not because our systems are inferior to what those people say. It's because we're just outnumbered and we're outvoted by people who understand that raising kids is the actual battlefield.
17:58 Speaker 00 And while we were busy fighting it somewhere else,
18:02 Speaker 00 if you want to win this nation's culture back, don't just post about it. Build a household that produces the kind of man that culture desperately needs, and you know it needs.
18:21 Speaker 00 That's not a side project to this, to this mission. This is the mission, raising righteous children.
18:31 Speaker 00 So here's what I want to leave you with. If, if you're a man who's been telling yourself, maybe you're a young man, and I get it. Look, I get it.
18:39 Speaker 00 It is hard and there are economic concerns and there are ideologies that have permeated, dangerous ideology that have permeated our culture. And I understand that. But if you're a man who's telling yourself that fatherhood is, is a problem or a threat to your freedom,
18:58 Speaker 00 I, I'd actually ask that you look hard at where that belief came from.
19:03 Speaker 00 I think it was Ronald Reagan who made the case that everyone is something like, isn't it convenient that everyone who argues for abortion has already been born?
19:15 Speaker 00 Okay, it's easy to argue and say, I don't want to bring kids in the world. Well, guess what? You were brought into the world.
19:21 Speaker 00 Did you arrive at the thought that having kids limits your freedom? By default or, or by real thought? Or did you absorb it from politics and culture and ideology? That profits off you staying uncommitted, untethered, unattached, easy to sell things to in this consumeristic type world?
19:47 Speaker 00 A man in my mind with a family is harder to manipulate because he's looking at decisions over a longer time of, of timeframe. He's not chasing the next dopamine hit. I'm not simply making a decision today about this podcast or about paying the mortgage or about stepping up in my community or, or coaching one of my kids' sports teams for myself. I'm doing it because I have children, so I'm making better decisions. Someone at home, someone who needs me steady. That kind of man is bad for a lot of business models, at least temporarily.
20:26 Speaker 00 It's worth asking whose interest it serves for you to believe that kids are a problem, that they're a cage.
20:35 Speaker 00 And if you're already a father, and a lot of you listening are, this is your reminder that you're not behind, that you're not missing out. And you aren't the guy who's settled, you're the guy who's actually in the arena, as Theodore Roosevelt might say, while other men are on the sidelines telling themselves they've made the smart move and then they'll end up regretting it. Nine out of 10 of you say it's the best thing you've ever done. Believe that data. And if you don't understand the data, know it before you start making decisions whether or not to bring children to the world. And look, if you're on the fence, not against it, just not sure that you've got what it takes, I tell you what I've told thousands of men at this point in this community. No,
21:19 Speaker 00 no one feels ready. I've got four incredible children, and every time we've brought a child into the world, into this world, I didn't feel ready.
21:31 Speaker 00 You don't get the courage first and then step up. You step up and then that courage shows up because it has to. You have to become a man when you start having kids. There's no other alternative. That's how it's always worked. For every man, every single one of us who ever built anything that actually mattered. Again, I'm going to say this about this optimization thing you hear all the time, biohacking, optimization, efficiency, effectiveness. It's good, it has its place, but we don't need a bunch of men optimizing for comfort. What we need is men who are going to carry the weight, to build something that outlasts them, that builds a legacy, and to put kids on the earth who are better
22:16 Speaker 00 equipped than we were. So that's the job.
22:22 Speaker 00 Have kids, raise them righteously, work together in communities and tribes to help raise those kids in righteousness, fend off and thwart the enemy, who are, by the way, having kids at a significantly greater rate than us. And if that doesn't scare the daylights out of you, I don't know what will. So, those are my thoughts on the rise of vanishing fatherhood. And if you're a father again, I commend you, you're doing great work. May not always feel like it, but I promise you that you are. You are in the fight. I am in the fight. There are a legion of young men who are trying to decide whether or not they're going to get into the fight. And I would suggest for the sake of all of us that they do. All right, guys, if you have any commentary or thought on this, check
23:04 Speaker 00 it out on YouTube, youtube.com/OrderOfMan. Drop a comment below. Tell me you agree, tell me you disagree, tell me I'm full of crap, give me some other data that might support this position, or maybe yours, an alternative position, but I'd love to see it. And if you have questions about fatherhood, let me know as well. I know it can be a scary thing, and an intimidating thing, but like nine out of 10 men say in that survey, the most rewarding thing you'll ever do. All right, guys, we'll be back next week for an interview. Until then, go out there, take action, and become the man you are meant to be.
23:36 Speaker 01 Thank you for listening to the Order of Man Podcast. You ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be? We invite you to join the Order at OrderOfMan.com.
Previous Hope is What Makes America Great, Living 'The Man in the Arena', and Calling Out Your Wife's Secrets | ASK ME ANYTHING Next KYLE CARNOHAN | How Fatherhood Will Save Humanity Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
