The Worst Advice My Dad Ever Gave Me And Why I'd Give Anything to Hear It Again

The moment a man dies, the editing begins.

Not in a cynical way. Nobody sits down with a red pen and starts crossing things out. It happens automatically, in the hours between the phone call and the first cup of bad funeral home coffee. The complicated man starts becoming something cleaner. The embarrassing opinions get quietly retired. The confidently wrong advice — the stuff you rolled your eyes at for decades — gets left on the cutting room floor.

By the eulogy, he's a saint.

That's understandable. That's grief doing what grief does. But it costs you something real, and it's worth talking about.

The Man You Bronze Is Not the Man You Lost

There's a particular kind of mythology that grows up around fathers after they die. It's not dishonest exactly — it draws from real material. He really was patient that one time. He really did show up when it mattered. The love was real.

But the man who existed before the mythology included someone who gave you legitimately questionable advice with complete confidence. Who was wrong about car engines, or money, or how long you could leave leftovers in the fridge. Who had opinions about relationships that reflected a world that no longer exists. Who told you to walk it off when you needed to sit down. Who was, in other words, a person.

When we canonize our dads — and the pull to do it is enormous — we trade the actual man for an easier, cleaner version. The saint at the memorial is more manageable than the real one. He doesn't contradict himself. He doesn't embarrass you. He's finished, fixed, and framed.

But you didn't love a saint. You loved a specific, flawed, sometimes maddening human being. And the bad advice is part of what makes him that.

As Why did we start Dead Dads? puts it, Roger and Scott started the show because the conversation they needed — the real one, not the polished memorial version — didn't seem to exist anywhere. Life kept going after the loss. And the edited version of their dads didn't quite fit the size of the hole that was left.

That's the thing about hagiography: it's lonelier than honesty.

What the Bad Advice Actually Was

Every man who's lost a father has a version of this. The advice that was confidently wrong. Delivered with the kind of certainty that only someone who has never Googled a single thing in their life can muster.

Maybe it was financial logic from a different era — the kind that made sense when you could buy a house on a single middle-class salary and still have money left for a boat. Maybe it was relationship advice that would get you in serious trouble if you repeated it out loud today. Maybe it was home repair guidance so incorrect that you spent an entire weekend doing something wrong, very thoroughly, before a YouTube video fixed in four minutes what he'd sent you down the wrong path on for two days.

The details vary. The structure is almost universal.

He said it with confidence. You believed him, or argued with him, or privately dismissed him. And now, years or months or decades later, you would give a lot to hear him say it again — the wrong thing, in his voice, with that particular certainty that was entirely his.

A piece from Outside Online captures this perfectly: dads deliver dubious advice "with such utter confidence that their children go on to parrot the same facts for years after." The earthworm that doesn't survive being split with a shovel. The egg-crate foam that isn't peak sleeping pad technology. The confidently held belief, passed down with love, that turns out to be completely made up.

And yet. There's something in you that still reaches for it.

The Absurdity Is the Point — Let It Be Funny

One of the things that makes bad dad advice worth recovering — rather than just cataloguing and moving on — is that it's often genuinely funny. Not in a mean way. In the way that real people are funny when they're completely, serenely wrong about something.

Grief does this thing where it strips humor out of the picture. The jokes your dad made that drove you insane. The bits he ran into the ground. The deeply embarrassing opinions he shared unprompted at dinner tables. All of it gets solemnized after the loss, as if laughing at it is somehow a betrayal.

It isn't. The Dead Dads tagline is Death. Jokes. Closure. Not always in that order — and that sequence matters. The humor isn't avoidance. It's access. It gets you back to the real person faster than the reverent version does.

If your dad gave you advice about how to handle a job interview that was wrong in a very specific, period-accurate way, laughing about it now isn't disrespecting him. It's remembering him. The laugh comes from recognition — from the fact that you can still hear his voice, still picture his face doing the thing he did when he was explaining something he was absolutely sure about.

That's not nothing. That's actually a lot.

For more on why humor and grief aren't opposites, Yes, You Can Laugh at Your Dead Dad's Mistakes — Here's Why is worth your time.

The Reframe: It Was Never About the Advice

Here's the thing that takes a while to land: the bad advice was never really about the information it contained.

It was about him showing up. Him being the person you turned to, or the person you argued with, or the person who had opinions — strong, incorrect, confidently stated opinions — about how the world worked and how you should move through it. The advice was the delivery mechanism for the relationship.

This is why it stings when you realize you can't ask him something anymore. Not because you desperately needed his take on refinancing your mortgage or the correct way to season a cast-iron skillet. But because asking him was the thing. The back-and-forth. The predictable way he would frame the answer. The moment of connection that lived inside an exchange about nothing in particular.

Lachlan Brown, writing about two decades of dismissing his father's advice, described the moment of recognition at 37 when he realized his father had been right about everything — the savings warnings, the friendship predictions, the observations about lifestyle creep. The advice had been correct all along. He just hadn't been ready to hear it.

But that's the optimistic version. The one where the advice turns out to have been secretly wise.

What about when it really was just wrong? When the advice was a product of a different time, or a different set of circumstances, or just a blind spot the man happened to carry? What then?

Then you hold onto it anyway. Because the wrongness is his too.

Keeping Him Three-Dimensional

There's a line from one of the Dead Dads episodes that lands hard: "If you don't get to talk about the people, then they disappear, right?"

Not just the best version. The whole person.

The challenge with grief is that it creates enormous pressure toward the memorial version of someone. People around you are uncomfortable with complexity when it comes to the dead. They want to say he was a good man and leave it there. The eulogy is not the place for nuance. The condolence card definitely isn't.

So the full person — the man who made you roll your eyes, who had a pet theory about oil changes that was entirely wrong, who gave relationship advice that reflected his generation more than your actual situation — tends to get quietly retired from the conversation.

And that's a loss on top of a loss.

Recovering the bad advice isn't about debunking him. It's not about score-settling or finally being right after all these years. It's about preserving the whole picture. The man who was wrong with confidence is more real, more present, more him than the figure who exists only in the sanitized highlight reel.

When John Abreu came on Dead Dads to talk about the moment he received the call about his father's death — and then had to sit down with his family and tell them — what came through wasn't a memorial. It was a real relationship, with real texture. The complicated thing. Which is always where the actual person lives.

What You're Actually Trying to Hold Onto

At some point after the loss, you start to realize that the things you're grieving hardest aren't the big stuff. Not always. Sometimes the sharpest ache is for something small and specific and slightly absurd.

You want to be able to call him with a dumb question and have him give you a confidently wrong answer. You want to be able to disagree with him. You want the friction of a real relationship — the eye-roll, the argument, the conversation that ends with both of you holding your position, and that somehow being fine.

You want, in other words, the bad advice. Because the bad advice means he's still there.

The Sympathy Card Did Nothing. Dark Humor Saved Me. — that's a real experience that a lot of men share, and it points at the same thing. The formal expressions of grief, the polished tributes, the careful memorial language — they can feel less like connection and more like distance. What cuts through is the specific, the honest, the real. Even when the real is a little ridiculous.

So: what was the worst advice your dad ever gave you? Not the almost-bad, not the good advice you just didn't appreciate yet. The genuinely, specifically, him-shaped bad advice.

Write it down somewhere. Say it out loud. Tell someone who would have known him.

That's not disrespect. That's how you keep the real one around.

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Dead Dads is a podcast for men figuring out life without their father — one uncomfortable, occasionally hilarious conversation at a time. New episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else you listen.