The seven tell-tale signs you're turning into your dad

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21 hours ago

Illustrations by Javi Aznarez
Many of us spend our adult lives trying not to turn into our parents. Even if just subconsciously, it's common to feel that, unlike every other person who has ever lived, you will somehow be the one to break the cycle and maintain your own distinct identity, far removed from the man or woman who brought you into the world.
But you can't cheat nature, or nurture. Genetics and childhood memories will always get the better of you. If you are a son, one day you will see your father staring back at you.
The mirror becomes your enemy. There is a tipping point – usually in your early-50s – when looking at your reflection becomes like confronting a portrait in a ghoulish family album. You used to recognise yourself, but now it seems as if the features of another person are colonising your face. Hearing your voice in a recording triggers the opening of a time portal (the bad kind, not the fun superhero kind). Then you answer the phone to a relative and they say, 'Wow, you sound just like your father', and your heart sinks.
Just as dispiriting is that you have probably let yourself go to the exact point at which your silhouette bears an uncanny resemblance to your father's at the same age as you are now. Mind you, your father never had Ozempic, so for those hoping to break the father-son doom loop, maybe weekly weight loss injections are the way to go. Even if you are one of those whippet-like men with a fast metabolism, you will still look like your father in other ways – the same hair, and the same hair sprouting from your nose.
There is no actual enjoyment in watching these formulaic programmes, with the same old car bores and boorish historians. It's just that you are drawn to them inexorably, like a hungry dad to a chicken jalfrezi.
The biggest father-son viewing vortex is anything about vintage cars (this applies to men who have never been interested in cars before). You find you're unable to change the channel when your hopping stops on Wheeler Dealers, as a banged up Land Rover arrives at the garage. Despite cringing at every contrived utterance during Bangers And Cash ('We're selling dreams' says Derek – yeah, if your idea of a dream is to spend eternity with the kind of people who get excited by pork pies and Hayes manuals), you still find yourself hanging on to see how much the E-Type goes for at auction.
And then there is anything with Nazis in it. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the period isn't going to learn anything new from Nazi Megastructures or How The Nazis Lost The War (they invaded Russia – next question). Once you start down this road it's very hard to turn back. Resist it at all costs, like a Belarusian partisan after Operation Barbarossa.
The 1980s has assumed the same mythical significance for you that the 1960s held for your father. Just as he was always prattling on about trips to Carnaby Street, full employment and how bands could really play their instruments in those days, now you get all dewy-eyed every time someone mentions a Ford XR3i or The Breakfast Club, and you insist that was when dance music 'really was dance music'. The same rule can be applied to the 1990s for the younger Gen X-ers, with its supposedly great football and music (and supposedly great football music).
You will begin to profess the same rose-tinted reminiscences about your own golden decade – that time when the sun shone brighter for longer – as your father did to you about his glory years. And you have exactly the same inability to see your nose growing inch by inch with each new lie you tell yourself.
You're in good company. Just like Donald Trump, you get your news from the mysterious 'they' – as in, 'They say robots are going to replace footballers', or 'I've heard they are putting sedatives in the drinking water'.
Most men in the process of turning into their fathers won't be crazy enough to give credence to theories about the moon landings, but they still develop an enhanced vulnerability to nonsense. Perhaps Beyoncé really is one of the leaders of the New World Order or Simpsons episodes are full of 'predictive programming' that allows the Illuminati to brainwash us in readiness for future events.
Other favourites include any whispers involving the less reliable members of the Royal family, or worrying about radio frequency identification chips 'they' have implanted in all our brains. One curious synergy between young conspiracists (often those living alternative lifestyles who refer to the rest of the world as 'Babylon') and the older gentleman, is an obsession with the dangers of technology. If you find yourself mumbling things such as: 'They are selling my data to Chinese mind farms', then you are well on your way to father-son osmosis.
Talking to the television is less a sign of senility than irrelevance. You respond to newsreaders when they say hello or goodbye as if they are addressing you directly. This is a lot more revealing than you realise. It doesn't mean you are losing your mind when you talk to Fiona Bruce, it means no one listens to anything you say. You just want to have a conversation with someone, anyone. A lot of men reach a stage in their lives when the most flagrant disinterest they experience is in their own homes.
You should recall those moments when you yourself were younger, watching and listening to your father sitting in 'his' chair. Well, you have become that man. Try to avoid answering rhetorical questions in adverts.
'Who says electric vehicles can't be fun?', says the voiceover.
'Nobody,' you reply dismissively.
This can cause funny looks, not that you don't do this alone as well. That in itself is enough to make you bleakly philosophical. If a dad talks to his TV and no one is around to hear it, does he make a sound?
Having spent the first half of your life listening to, cataloguing and obsessing over pop, rock, soul and dance music like any self-respecting Gen X footsoldier, you now find most new music sounds bland, generic and, quite frankly, disgusting. Sabrina Carpenter singing about – actually I'm just not even going there – or Chappell Roan describing something decidedly filthy in the song Casual, makes you feel a bit queasy, not least when you are driving your children to drama class. All this conveniently ignores the very sweary hip-hop you listened to in your own youth. Congratulations: your father was a hypocrite and now you are one too.
There is a hint of tragedy to this decline. It's a sad surrender. When you stop to think about the importance of music in your life up to the past few years, the fact that you are now too tired and set in your ways to embrace the music of your children is heartbreaking. Do you hear yourself saying things like: 'That's just a rip-off of Talking Heads', or 'Bananarama already did a song called Cruel Summer'? 'What does XCX even stand for?'. Sound like anyone you know? You are to your children as distant from the buzzing of modernity as your father was in your youth, when he would change the radio station because he couldn't stand 'that bloody racket'.
As with all the other red flags listed here, this is as poignant as it is comic. It speaks to the sense that, as you slowly transform into an uncanny avatar of a parent, you are repeating his mistakes as well as his hairstyle. It all gets a bit Lion King and the Circle of Life, but hearing yourself shouting at your children to tidy their bedroom or losing your temper over some minor indiscretion causes a peculiar type of heartbreak.
Salman Rushdie wrote: 'At 16, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.'
It doesn't matter how many times you have told yourself, 'I won't be like my dad', sometimes in the heat of the moment DNA takes control. For those mindful enough to check themselves, please take your medicine with a bit of humility. Learn from these alarm bells and remember what it was like when you were the son. Use the good, discard the bad. After all, the child really is the father of the man.
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