There is one way to bring everyone together, though: family dinner.  We all have to eat, and it’s not like your kids are making their own food, so pick a time or a night when there’s no soccer practice or dance lessons or work meetings, make a meal, and call everyone to the table.  Make it the center of your family’s day.  It’s one place to come together, if only for a few minutes, to talk and share and laugh and remember that you are all part of the same whole.  Here are 5 tips to get you started:

1) Start Small

You’re busy, your wife is busy, your kids are busy, everyone is busy.  That’s why it’s so hard to get together in the first place.  On some nights, it might be literally impossible to find a time that works for everyone.  But you don’t have to do it every night.  Start small.  Find one night a week and carve out 30 minutes.  Once you start to see the value, you might just find your schedule magically opens up.

2) It’s Not About the Food

You don’t have prepare a fancy meal to have a great family dinner.  If you make chicken nuggets or mac and cheese, that’s fine.  Spaghetti works just as well as chicken parmigiana.  Probably better, if your family is like mine.  I love to cook, but my kids hate to eat.  Half the time my son wants a waffle made with box mix.  We encourage him to try new things and give healthy options, but we also allow him to choose some nights.  You can spend the whole time angry that your kids don’t share your tastes and won’t eat what you made, or you can be thankful everyone is together enjoying something they like.

3) Be Intentional

Now that you have everyone’s attention, don’t let it go to waste!  Start a conversation, find out what’s going on, share a story, ask questions, tell a joke (even a dad joke).  It might be awkward at first, but you’ll get the hang of it.  It might help to have something prepared.  If you could spend more time with your wife, what would you want to talk about?  If you could find out one thing about your kid’s life, what would it be?  Plan ahead.  Speaking of which…

4) Play a game

Having an activity is a great way to keep younger kids engaged at the table.  It could be conversation cards, trivia, Would You Rather?, or anything else.  My 5-year-old loves to play “The Tree Game” with the decorations on our table.  One person thinks of a particular wooden tree, and everyone else grabs one of the trees of various colors from the table.  Whoever guessed the right one wins.  It’s weird and not all that fun, but he loves it.  If it keeps him at the table and engaged with the whole family, that’s good enough for me.

5) Make a Habit

Kids do better when they know what to expect.  Adults, too.  Make your dinners, whether every night or once a week, consistent and mandatory.  Being part of the family is not an option.  That includes you.  Set a schedule and stick to it.  Create one time and place you can all be together, no matter what comes up.  Give your family a gift they know they will always have.

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No, bud, we don’t get tsunamis near us.  They mostly happen in the Pacific, where there is a lot of seismic activity, because tsunamis are often caused by underwater earthquakes and mudslides.  And besides, we aren’t close to an ocean, so a wave can’t reach us no matter how big it is.  Nothing to worry about.

Oh, ok, dad.  He rolled over, clutching my hand tight as ever.  A few minutes later, he’s still shifting restlessly. I can tell my geological facts aren’t having the intended effect.  He turned back, voice quiet and trembling, and asked about tsunamis again.

How does a kid in North Carolina come to be so worried about tsunamis that he can’t sleep?  YouTube, probably.  I’m sure he watched a video about it.  He saw that viral clip of the Fury roller coaster at Carowinds (where we have season passes), and now he never wants to ride a roller coaster again.  He loves the beach but will only go so far into the water.  Sharks, you know.  I’m surprised he hasn’t asked me about black holes or meteors or aliens yet.  There are so many things for kids to be scared of today.  It used to be that you had to imagine the monsters in the dark.  Now you can see them in high definition.

I don’t blame the internet, though.  Fear isn’t something that exists out there, in the far off world, if only you can keep it from coming toward you.  It’s an intrinsic part of you, a result of your inherent limitations, a response to the unavoidable uncertainty of life.  The internet may broaden the shape and variety of our fears, but there are a perfectly infinite amount of things to fear in your own house, perhaps hiding in the closet or lurking under your bed.  There’s a reason the dark is so universally terrifying.  You can’t see what’s coming, so who knows what horror might be waiting to jump out and smash your whole life to pieces.  Happens all the time.

This time when he asked, I didn’t try to explain it again.  Instead, I asked him what he would do if a tsunami came.  Would you rush out in a boat to save people?  Would you surf on it with your boogie board.  Imagine you are superhero flying to the rescue.  Or imagine if a monster came and you beat it with your karate skills.  How would you do it?  Kick it in the nuts, I suggested.  He thought that was a good plan.  He wrapped his blanket around himself and rolled over again.  Soon, his breath settled into a quiet purr, his legs stopped rustling the sheets, and his hand went limp around my fingers.

I don’t know if he was able to change his thinking or if my suggestion made the difference.  Maybe he was just really tired.  I like to think it helped.  But I do know that the way to overcome fear is not to run from what is frightening or tell yourself it isn’t true or avoid ever thinking about it.  That’s impossible.  The fear will move to something else.  If it’s not the dark or monsters or ghosts or roller coasters, it will be sickness or your job performance or the budget or the way you came across to that one stranger you talked to in the supermarket.  It’s a giant wave coming straight for you, and it will wreck you if you let it.  You can’t outrun it or go around it or ignore it.  You have to ride it.  You might crash, of course, but you might also find you are the kind of person who can weather any storm, and then you will be unbreakable.  You might even find it fun, wipeouts and all.  Because you can’t get rid of the uncertainty in life, but you can make it an adventure.  You can’t avoid fear, but you can become brave.

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If dieting has one benefit, aside from any weight loss side effects, it’s that it teaches us a little hunger is a good thing.  Before, if I felt hungry, I would immediately go down to the kitchen and try to get rid of that terrible feeling as quickly as possible.  I’ve found large injections of carbohydrates to be extremely quick and effective.  Preemptive infusions are also helpful.  On the downside, it wasn’t the healthiest way to go about life.  It led to a state that might chritably be called overindulgence.  Or, if we’re feeling honest, gluttony.  But if you are just counting calories or pounds, you’ll miss the underlying issue.  You’ll never be successful by focusing on limiting or eliminating what you want.  Appetite suppressants might work, but they are only treating a symptom and will leave you dependent.  Our problem is rarely excessive appetite, but rather the inability to accept hunger.  I didn’t desire to eat a pound of bacon for breakfast, a whole pizza for lunch, and ice cream every night for desert.  I just couldn’t stop myself from eating whatever I could find until I was full and grabbing a handful of something whenever the I detected any rumbling of hunger.  After all, if I am hungry, doesn’t that mean I should eat something?  We have plenty of food.  Enough to make a man fat and a culture decadent.

Near as I can tell, the entire goal of modern life is to never feel hungry.  Life is all about comfort.  Being hungry is uncomfortable.  And there are many kinds of hunger.  Some might crave food, others health, but both are the same impulse.  We recognize being too skinny can be as big of a problem as being too fat.  Or you might long for wealth or power, beauty or pleasure, acceptance or experience.  Or all of them.  The human heart is a tangle of desires.  Too great a desire will carry you away.  We’ve all known the person corrupted by the pursuit of money or lust for power or need for acceptance.  But most of us put on moral weight not by extreme greed or overbearing hatred or uncontrollable envy, but by the inability to suffer small difficulties, minor inconveniences, temporary uncertainties, innocent slights, common rejections.  Over a lifetime these little indulgences of acquisition and retaliation and acquiescence add up.  Without realizing it, we’ve let ourselves go.

The first step in the solution is to accept that hunger can be a good thing.  Being uncomfortable is the natural result of a life well-lived.  Desiring good things the right amount will always leave you wanting more because the pleasures of this life will never be able to satisfy completely.  Even the best food will only fill you for a day, and another drink is needed every night.  No amount of money can buy you everything you want.  No one is healthy enough to outrun death.  Beauty fades.  Experiences end.  We long for something permanent, something transcendent, for true peace, complete justice, unconditional love.  It hurts us that we can’t find it.  But that pain is a good thing, if we understand what it is.  We don’t need to fill it in with empty carbs and cheap thrills.  Instead, we need a diet.  And how will we know it’s working?  We’ll be hungry for life.

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The internet never quite got around to revolutionizing school the way it could have.  We haven’t been able to escape the gravitational pull of memorization and multiple-choice.  The purpose of school has always been to know things, not so much because its the best pursuit, but because it’s easy to measure the progress.  Of course, it’s necessary to have a certain base of knowledge and skills, like the ability to read, and it’s nice to have more facts to work with, but true education is less about finding out what you know and more about knowing how to find it out.  A drop of curiosity is more valuable than the date of every battle in history, and an ounce of critical thinking is worth more than the multiplication, periodic, and spreadsheet tables combined, because they can get you all of that and more.  But we don’t know how to teach curiosity or critical thinking, much less test for it, so we hope that if we force kids to learn enough stuff they’ll get the general idea of how to do it at some point.

That used to work a lot better when facts were still hard to come by, when if you wanted to know something you had to search through a book or listen to a lecture and pick out the pieces you needed, when learning to do something meant asking someone to help you or trying and failing to do it on your own with the barest instructions.  Then came the internet, and all the world’s information, by design, became free and easy.  Just type in what you need.  Just watch a video showing you exactly what to do.  You can find an answer to anything without ever having to think about it.  That’s an incredibly powerful tool, and it can do a whole lot of good if used correctly, but it will keep you from ever learning anything at all if you let it.  Why bother putting a fact in your head when you have it in your pocket?  Why waste time and energy thinking about an answer when someone else has already posted it online?  

It’s a real threat, but only if we don’t account for it.  Plato made a similar argument about books, a few thousand years ago, but we’ve gotten along just fine since then.  Our memory may not be as good as it once was, when humans regularly memorized epic poetry, but we’ve used the advantages of writing in retaining and transmitting knowledge to far exceed our individual capacity.  The same can be true of the modern technology.

Our educational system should have adapted to this reality long ago, but as far as I can tell, schools have treated technology more like an advanced textbook or notepad than the world-defining revolution it is.  They’re fighting against the technology, trying to mitigate its disruption and fit it into the old frameworks more than teaching kids to use its unique advantages and overcome its limitations.  Technology doesn’t assist with recall and research so much as obviate it.  It’s so easy and simple as to be nearly irrelevant.  A single-answer test, whether multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank, is a moldering zombie.  Google killed it.  And AI is coming for the essay.

What kids (or adults) need today is not the retention of more information, which is becoming impossible as we accelerate its production, or even its summarization, which the AI can now do, but the ability to analyze the vast amounts of data we daily encounter, recognize what we are missing, find what we need, discern what is good and valuable and accurate, and organize it into a coherent understanding.  They must be able to do the quintessential human task of finding meaning, which is the way the abstract information in a computer interacts with the individual person and the material world.  That’s always been important, of course, but before you had to struggle with the facts first.  Now we’ve gotten the worst of both systems.  People’s ability to read and recall has naturally atrophied, but they haven’t yet learned to use the tools we have to make up for the loss.  So we’re stuck pretending society’s problems are lack of information.  The opposite is true.

The last time I was in school was for a graduate-level seminar a few years ago.  Since the group of students was small, the professor invited anyone from the community to join.  The reading list was fairly hefty, maybe 5-6 full books, which weren’t heavy academic texts but not exactly beach reads either, over the course of the semester, and a few other assorted essays and such.  The class met one night a week for a few hours.  It was a real course that gave real credit for the actual students, and the professor made it clear he expected everyone to treat it like they were taking the course (if not final exams).  About 50 people showed up anyway.

The course was great.  The topic was relevant.  The books were fascinating.  The professor was engaging.  The lectures were compelling.  The discussion was…not.  One thing became very clear very quickly: no one had done the reading.  The professor would ask a question, often calling for someone to explain a particular point in one of the books, and the room would go silent.  After a satisfactorily few awkward moments, I would slowly raise my hand.  I hate being the one to know all the answers (that’s not true, I love it, but I hate other people thinking that about me), but I was the only one, apparently, who’d done the reading or could remember what I’d read.  But then, I’m a reader.  I’d read a couple of the books already, and I read them again for the course.  So I’d give the answer, and that would get the discussion going for a few minutes, until the next question.

I could tell the professor was a little frustrated.  We got a different kind of lecture one night, if you know what I mean.  But I think the real problem wasn’t with lazy students so much as the changing technological landscape.  The professor wanted everyone to have knowledge of the material in the books, to prove they’d read them and inform the discussion, so he asked questions to test that knowledge, but that’s not how information is used anymore.  Information is no longer something you must memorize in order to keep handy at all times.  Information is now something you can look up when you need it and forget when you don’t.  The new learning environment should present the students with the facts first, rather than trying to test their recollection, and then ask them to analyze those facts.

From a certain perspective (such as that of an old school professor), that’s a regrettable change.  I wish people would read and remember the books, too—they’d be better off for it—but longform reading and remembering are unfortunately not the essential skills they once were.  The most essential skill is taking information that is presented and being able to understand what it means in that limited context.  Ultimately, then, education becomes about training the sentiment, the instinct for what is true and right and good, which can be applied to any set of facts without the need to reference vast stores of internal knowledge.  When the professor asked for feedback, I emailed him this advice.  I don’t know if he took it, but I think he’d be a lot less frustrated if he did.  I can’t always be there to answer every question.

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While I personally love a simple grilled cheese, and so does my daughter, it’s not exactly a great family meal, even with tomato soup.  It’s more a “What’s for dinner?  I don’t know” kind of option, or maybe a Saturday lunch.  It’s not very filling, doesn’t have much protein, and can’t be made in bulk.  Did I mention my wife is dairy-free?  

So I’ve always wanted to create a grilled sandwich that’s a full meal for the whole family and doesn’t make me feel guilty for eating it.  When I came across a YouTube video about a street food vendor who made fancy grilled cheese sandwiches, I was inspired.  It had bacon, avocado, and cilantro with fontinella cheese, and it looked delicious.  No, I didn’t steal his recipe.  I would love to, but it doesn’t quite fit all my criteria.  I did steal his special sauce, though, and a few of his techniques, to create what is, in the words of my wife, “the best sandwich I’ve ever made.”  I’ll let you steal it, too.

The first thing I wanted to add was some real meat.  Bacon is tasty, but not an ideal source of protein, and I knew I wanted to keep the avocado and cilantro sauce, so what would be a good a balance to those creamy, earthy flavors?  Sweet and smoky BBQ chicken.  Fortunately, I had an old family recipe for slow-roasted chicken thighs with homemade BBQ sauce.  When cooked for 1.5 hours, shredded off the bone, and soaked in the BBQ sauce, the chicken is tender and delicious, a perfect filling for a hearty sandwich.  If you don’t have that kind of time, grilling or pan-frying a regular chicken breast works, too.

While the chicken was cooking, I made the cilantro sauce.  It basically involves shoving as much fresh cilantro as possible into a food processor along with some chives, jalapeños, avocado, oil, honey, and salt, blending it up, then mixing in some mayo.  Check out the recipe here if you want to try it yourself, but beware that this recipe was made for a food truck, so unless you are cooking for your entire block, a third of the amount is more than you will need.

Regardless of what kind of grilled sandwich you are making, the bread is important.  Please don’t use regular white sandwich bread.  You’re not 5 years old, okay, you’re a grownup now.  I don’t care if it’s whole grain or fully seeded or whatever, either, save that for your breakfast toast or a quick sandwich at lunch.  For a dinner grilled cheese, get yourself a good sourdough or Italian bread.  Trust me, it will make all the difference.

Now that I had everything prepared, it was time to cook the sandwich.  One of the tips I learned from Food Truck YouTube Guy was to sear the bread a little before adding the butter.  Another was to use mayo instead of butter to get the crispy crust, which was perfect for my dairy-free wife, though I still used my ghee.  Finally, once the bread is done, you can keep flipping the sandwich to prevent it from burning until the cheese is melted.  Here’s how to do it:

Preheat the pan, preferably a cast iron skillet, over a medium heat.  When it’s nice and hot, put a piece of bread down and begin assembling the sandwich.  First, put a slice of cheese.  Cheddar works great, but use whatever you prefer.  Then pile on the chicken.  If you want to add bacon, now would be the time.  Next, add a few then slices of avocado and slather on the cilantro sauce.  Top it off with another slice of cheese and seal it will another piece of bread.  Now, very carefully, flip it over.  You’ll probably lose some toppings.  Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us.

The first side of the bread should be a little crisp.  While it’s still in the pan, apply a thin layer of butter or mayo to the bread, then flip it over to cook and do the same to the other side.  Continue to cook until the bread is a golden brown on both sides and the cheese is melted.  Put it on a plate, cut it in half, and serve.  Then make keep making more until everyone is happy.  Warning: it could take a while.  The first time I made it, my wife ate two before I could get one.  I can’t complain, though.  I had to make myself another, too.

P.S. If you’re cooking for the kids, just do everything exactly the same but take off everything except the cheese.  Perfect!

BBQ Chicken:

Ingredients: 

1. Apple Cider Vinegar:  ½ cup

2. Water:   1 cup

3. Brown Sugar:  4 Tbls.

4. Salt:   1 tsp.

5. Red Pepper Flakes:  1 tsp.

6. Ketchup:   1 cup

7. Lemon:  1 wedge

8. Worcestershire Sauce:   2 Tbls.

9. Chicken Thighs:  6-8 pieces

10. Paprika

11. Butter

Directions:

Chicken:

1. Preheat oven to 325.

2. Put the chicken thighs skin-side-up in a greased oven-safe dish.  Melt a little butter and brush it onto the chicken and sprinkle with a dusting of paprika.

3. Cook the chicken uncovered for 1 hours.  While chicken is cooking, make the sauce.

Sauce:

4. In a medium pot, mix all ingredients except ketchup and Worcestershire sauce (and chicken, obviously).  Simmer for 20 minutes.

5. Remove lemon wedge and add ketchup and Worcestershire sauce.  Mix until smooth.

Finish:

6. Drain the grease from the chicken pan.  Pour most of sauce over chicken, reserving some for dipping or shredding.

7. Bake for another 30 minutes.

8. If making a sandwich or salad, remove skin, pull meat off the bone, and shred chicken in a large bowl using 2 forks.  Mix in remaining sauce. 

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My stomach was churning and my chest was tight.  A sense of dread was shaking me inside out.  I was having panicky flashbacks to grad school, where I studied creative writing.  It was awful.  It was different.  It was near unreadable.  But I’ve read plenty of bad books before.  This one disgusted me.  The reasons are complicated and personal, but they reach to the heart of everything that’s wrong with our intellectual and creative culture today.  So let me take you on a quick trip inside the world of writing.

The book in question is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.  It won a few awards last year, and I can see why.  I did ultimately finish it, after taking a day or two to calm down.  I’m not a quitter.  I was able to repress some of my disdain for the stylistic choices and, happily, the book improved after the first chapter.  You may notice, if you read enough novels, that the first chapter will often have a different feel or flavor than the rest of the book.  The reason is simple.  The first chapter is what you send to agents and publishers when trying to get them to accept (or at least read) your book, so you want to make it your absolutely most magnificent, most intelligent, most impressive writing, which often leads to overindulgence that can’t be sustained throughout the rest of the book.  This particular book is the definition of overindulgent.

Filled with fancy language, long, flowery descriptions, and extended metaphors (what’s sometimes called “purple prose” in the writing world), you will read dozens of words in this single chapter that you will never hear anywhere else in your daily life.  There is a contrived scenario (a massive crowd of people in a 90’s subway station pushing and shoving for a chance to stare at…a Magic Eye advertisement poster) overstuffed with deeper symbolism and a fateful chance encounter that launches the whole plot.  The entire scene takes perhaps 30 seconds, but every step, every thought, every moment is packed with detail and drama and history and emotion.  It’s like a caricature of what people think of when they imagine a great literary work, high-minded and intellectual and self-serious.  It was impressive in a certain sense, I suppose.  Obviously, a large number of people in the literary world and the reading public thought so.

I admit some of the dread that struck me was a blow at my own identity as a writer.  This is what people consider good writing?  If my writing is not like this, if I refuse to make it like this, what does that say about my art and my future?  But that didn’t last long.  I don’t write literary fiction anymore, and this book reminded me why, after having read and studied and written so much of it during school, I returned to my first loves, Sci-Fi and Fantasy.  The real problem, the truly distressing part, is that the same defect that infects nearly all modern artistic endeavors, particularly the literary and “high” arts, of which this book’s opening is a particularly egregious example, but increasingly the more populars arts, television and children’s books and cartoons and superhero movies, as well.  It may best be described as a shallow performanceism, an obsession with form or appearance to the exclusion of content, the overwhelming need to impress combined with the lack of anything to say, which manifests on the lower end as a flashy, CGI overproduction and on the higher end as an almost unbearable pretentiousness.  All our culture has adopted the form of an instagram selfie.  Pretty but fake.  Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In a world that’s lost all meaning, what’s the point of writing?  It’s like asking why anyone tweets.  Sometimes there is a shallow political messaging or posturing, but most of it seems motivated primarily by the desire demonstrate how intelligent or witty or ideologically-committed or beautiful or adventurous or talented or special (or victimized) you are.  In a twist of irony befitting the classics, it has done the opposite.  

The fact that it’s all so obviously fake, so obviously a performance, has destroyed the foundations of intelligence and wit and talent and beauty.  No one can care about those things anymore, because it’s impossible to tell when they are genuine.  The photo filters became a shell for hiding a hideous void.  The pretentiousness turn out to be a veil to prevent anyone from seeing the truth.  Anyone with photoshop and a curated feed can turn themselves into a flawless imitation of a person.  Anyone with an online thesaurus can churn out academic gobbledygook that’s incomprehensible to the entire population, including the author.  Have you read any academic social studies lately?  The point is to obscure and exclude, so you can’t tell how ugly and stupid it all is, so that over time you begin to doubt whether beauty and intelligence even exist at all.*

It takes a rare genius to make the beautiful plain and the truth obvious.  But that’s the goal of good writing.  To communicate.  To say something in a way that is comprehensible and meaningful to another human being.  Effusive sentences and exotic words can sometimes express the truth in ways that mere information cannot, but they are nothing without that underlying truth.  Beautiful writing makes it easier to understand by inspiring your imagination and exciting the proper emotions and touching on hidden connections.  Great writing leaps from the page to your mind.  It may be challenging and difficult, as the most profound ideas often are, but the writing itself does not add to that burden.  It lightens.

The less skill it takes to understand a complex idea, the more skill it took to write it.  The lower the reading level required, the higher the writing level required.  They treated with very different ideas, and so wrote at very different levels, but Dr. Seuss was every bit the genius as Proust.  Mark Twain was at least the equal of Tolstoy.

But simple does not mean bland.  Beautiful writing does not require obscure words and impenetrable syntax any more than beautiful music requires finding the most bizarre instruments.  You can paint a wondrous landscape using a mix of three colors.  Like music, writing is about rhythm, about varying (or repeating) your sentences to creating a certain tempo, about varying (or repeating) your words to hit certain notes.  Like painting, writing is about shaping all your individual strokes—some long, some short, some bright, some dark—into a larger picture that catches your eyes in certain places and fools it in others.  The whole is infinitely more complex than the parts.  The beauty is in how you put them together.  The beauty is that when you see it, you immediately know that it is real, and that reality moves you.  When you read something beautiful, you don’t have to reach for the thesaurus, because the words resound within you, and you know that they are true.

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*That’s how you get stories like this article about fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, where a young journalist with uninspired prose and absolutely nothing interesting to say, condescends to one of the most popular authors of his generation, insulting his personality and work and city and even his children in every paragraph.  He admits telling Sanderson, during an interview, that his writing is terrible.  Why?  The only things he can point to are a few generic sentences you would find in almost any book, and he notes it is written at a 6th grade level, as though by definition the more complicated the reading level, the better the prose.  I cannot stress enough how wrong this is.  There are legitimate criticisms of Sanderson’s plotting and style, but this is not one of them.  I’ve read several of his novels, and while I’m not a huge fan, they were competent and enjoyable books with obvious appeal.  But in the absence of any genuine analysis or critique, any curiosity or interest, without the least desire or capacity to understand and explain to readers what lies behind this popular and prolific author, the journalist seems content merely to express his own unbearable pretentiousness.

Nope.  Oh, they dabbled in youth soccer, but it hasn’t really caught on.  And don’t even get me started on tee-ball.  Instead, my daughter has become an extremely competitive gymnast, the benefits of which I’ve already mentioned.  My son, meanwhile, has taken to karate.  I have no idea how it happened.  I swear it wasn’t anything I did.  Both kids were introduced to it at their after-school program, and both wanted to do more.  Virginia had to abandon it for gym, though she swears she’ll get that black belt one day, but Jackson has stuck with it.  And I must admit, the first time I walked into the dojo, dressed up him in a toga (they call it a Gi), saw all the mats and the pads, got a look at the class, I began to question all my parenting decisions.  Was this what I wanted my kids to do with their time and talents?  Yes, as it turns out.  Karate is great.

It’s a different kind of great than the traditional team sports or even gymnastics.  It’s less about teamwork, of course, and competition, though they do play various games at the end of practice, and it is a social experience.  They might spar with other kids for fun or help each other practice certain techniques.  But the primary aim is personal discipline and self-control.  That’s not a lesson that’s easy to learn.  For a kid like Jackson, who has major ADHD and does not stop wiggling and jumping and flipping from breakfast to bedtime, it’s exactly what he needs.

There’s so much more to it than punching and kicking stuff.  There’s that, of course, and plenty of other activity, which the kids love, but they have to do so in a controlled manner, making precise movements with the proper form and in the correct order.  One drill requires them to stand at attention, perfectly quiet and still, while the Master tries to distract them with jokes and funny faces.  At no other point is his life can Jackson not move for 30 seconds while conscious.  And he’s getting stronger, doing pushups and lunges and burpies and all sorts of things that don’t happen on the couch.  He’s so proud that he can break (fake) boards with his fist, and he’s working to do it in less tries.

That’s just the physical component.  I can’t speak for every Karate program, but at this dojo (MATI South Charlotte) everything they do has a purposeful, positive lesson.  The kids are expected to greet the teachers as they come in the door and must bow before they step onto the mat.  They have to say “yes, sir” or “yes, ma’am.”  They learn a whole list of principles to recite, sayings like “discipline and respect,” “always 100%,” and “common sense before self-defense.”  When they test to get a new belt, one of the requirements is to introduce themselves to an adult, learning their name and one thing about them.  They actually practice saying hello, stating their name, and asking questions.  I was amazed the first time I saw it.  It’s heartwarming.  Also, convicting.  Where else do kids get that kind of lesson these days?  Not from school.  Not from me.

The ingenious belt system keeps everything moving forward and the kids focused on personal growth.  You might not think getting a different color piece of cloth to wear would be a big motivator for kids, but it totally is.  It’s a tangible goal to work toward and a sign of their skill and status.  It’s a big event to advance to the next color, the culmination of a season’s worth of practice and effort.  They love it.  It makes perfect sense.  We’d probably all be better parents if we had got some visible sign every time our kids passed an important milestone.  An orange belt for having the baby.  Blue for making it to preschool.  Green if they can learn to read.  Purple for having an honor student.  Black when they finally leave the house for good.  Judging by all the bumper stickers I see, you can bet your house we’d all be wearing those belts around with pride.  Then again, maybe we should just do some Karate of our own.  It’s never too late to start.  I’m already a dork now, anyway.

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Being a tech lover then was like being in a race.  These weren’t the times of a slightly redesigned rectangle each year.  There were always big new things to get, and you had to keep up just to stay in the race (and the games).  As a kid, getting or upgrading a new computer was a necessity.  People would compare, and every hertz and byte mattered.  I wouldn’t say being a computer geek was cool.  The word cool never factored into it.  That’s just what I loved.  That’s just who I was.

I took programming courses in high school and went to college for computer science.  That lasted one semester.  Instead I graduated with a degree in business and no idea what I wanted to do.  Law school?  No (thank God).  Management?  Meh.  Finance?  I guess.  I took a post-grad fellowship in DC while I tried to figure it out and ended the year no closer to an answer.  The only thing I knew I wanted to do was get married.  So I did.  I followed my wife to Charleston, SC, where for lack of better options, I took a temp job at a software company, of all places, and I’ve been there ever since.

Life has a way of coming back around on us like that.  You think you’re heading off in your own direction, but the whole time you were turning back toward home.

And still, I wasn’t happy.  I’m still not.  The corporate world has never sat well with me.  I’m not what anyone would call ambitious.  I’m not particularly interested in advancement or money.  I moved around internally several times just out of boredom.  I was restless, searching for something I couldn’t identify.  Some significance.  Some purpose.  At any rate, something more.  After all, wasn’t that supposed to be the point of work—beyond the salary and security—personal fulfillment and the satisfaction of a job well done?

I went looking elsewhere.  For me, an intellectual and a writer, the natural places were grad school and the arts.  An MFA in creative writing sounded like the perfect answer.  And it was fun, maybe the most fun I’ve had as an adult.  I’d recommend it to anyone with the time and money to blow.  But of course it didn’t quell my wandering restlessness or calm my creeping anxiety or comfort me on sleepless nights.  Of course, it multiplied it.  Because I wasn’t looking for a job or a purpose or significance.  I already had all those.  I wasn’t satisfied with them because I wanted something to better express who I was or wanted to be.  That is, I was searching for an identity.

When someone asks me what I do, I shrug and mumble something about software, but I’ve always dreamed of telling people I’m an author.  It’s a lie that identity, as we use the term, is a private matter, something each person must decide for themselves.  In principle that sounds true, but in practice we can never quite make our own judgements about ourselves stick, because having an identity only makes sense in relation to others.  If you were the only thing in existence, you would have no identity, as there would be no need to identity you as distinct from something else.  But because we are surrounded by a great many people almost exactly like us, we look at them to judge ourselves.  We seek their acknowledgement and approbation or else their disdain and rejection.  The exact details and reasons don’t matter.  Gain the stares of your peers and the likes of your followers, whatever it takes.  The chief desire of the human heart is not to be but to be known.

Simply having money isn’t any fun.  You have to have nice things, a big house, a fancy car, luxurious vacation photos on Instagram, so that everyone can see how much money you have.  Or how little you have (do you drive around in your old Toyota with smug satisfaction?) or how responsibly you use it (why do you think the Prius is so distinctively ugly?).  It doesn’t help to think you’re beautiful, you have to display yourself to as many people as possible to be admired.  It’s not enough to be funny, you have to make people laugh.  It doesn’t satisfy to be smart, to have a degree and a good job in a field I love.  I have to write books and a blog so that others can know how smart I am.  Because that’s the only way I can really know, you see.

Our identities turn out to be a form of pride.  And the defining characteristic of pride is that it never ends.  We must always be comparing ourselves to others and putting ourselves up for inspection.  We must always be molding ourselves, conforming to some external standard (even a standard of disconformity, it makes no difference; a rebel is an identity all its own).  If for a moment other people stop acknowledging me, my identity is lost.  We desperately need others and yet they are also our greatest threat.  We cannot afford to estrange them or to upset them or to fall behind in whatever we are chasing.  The only relief we are offered is to change our minds (find your true self!) and to join some other endless race.

But this is a true no matter how we try to define our identity, whether it is political, racial, religious, sexual, financial, physical or anything other any trait or classification we can invent.  Every effort will trend toward the same ends: greater conformity within the group, greater distrust among the members, greater hostility to those without, and greater anxiety inside ourselves.  Identity is a deathtrap, a place where pride holds you and consumes you.  The more narrowly you try to define it the more restrictive will be your cage.  You can’t get out by digging deeper inside yourself, searching for your true self, wrapping the walls closer around you, nor by grasping for new names and groups—every label is a new demand, a new bar in the old cell.

The only way out of the trap is by giving up our identity, and therefore any claim to our own worth, and by living wholly for someone else.  This is dangerous, because you can’t know who you will turn out to be or control what others will think of you or choose what you might have to do, but it’s the only way to be known fully and truly, flaws and all, without having to erect distorting walls around yourself.  And It hurts.  It feels like death.  Because it is death.  The kind of death, like that of a small and insignificant seed buried in the world, which brings life.

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Transfixed by Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry or whatever it was, I didn’t quite realize I was standing over the can, pants down, a little trickle of urine plinking on the metal bottom, until someone in the crowded room asked what I was doing.  I froze, face red, and looked down.  At that point, it occurred to me that I was not supposed to pee into a trashcan.  Everyone laughed.  I don’t remember if I got in trouble, but I was herded off to the bathroom, which was bad enough, while the show carried on.

Now think of a memory from your life.  Good or bad, funny or triumphant, tragic or heartbreaking, whatever.  Doesn’t have to be your first or most embarrassing.  Maybe it was that time you caught a frog in the neighborhood creek and kept it under your bed for a week before your mom found out.  Maybe it was seeing the look on your parents’ faces as judges pinned the blue ribbon on your science fair project or getting mobbed by teammates after that epic comeback in the intramural finals.  Maybe it was making a fool of yourself on the dance floor at your senior prom or failing your first big test in college.  Maybe it was your first date or first kiss or first paycheck or first layoff.  Maybe it was the day you got married or the day your dad died.  

Do you remember all the details of the scene?  Can you see all the players moving along their destined lines?  Do your thoughts come streaming back to you, refined by experience and reflection?  Can you feel afresh all the emotions washing over you?  The pain of loss or the joy of triumph, the nervous anticipation or the tight, tingling shame?

What you remember is a story.  It must be.  You didn’t think of a math equation or your favorite color or the capital of Assyria, did you?  Those are facts, which exist independent of us.  As soon as you introduce a character, a perspective that relates to and interacts with and connects the facts, you get a story.  A story is the way we experience life.  Life is made of facts, but it’s lived in stories.  I can describe to you a trashcan—metal, blue, a foot tall, cylindrical—but I can’t tell you how I peed into it with making it into a story.

The way I connect the facts, the details I mention, the thoughts I express, the emotions I invoke, determine the type of story I tell.  I presented my childhood memory as a comedy, the humorous misadventure of an oblivious toddler, but I could have told it as a tragedy, a story of enduring shame that has shaped my life and still haunts me today.  We all have memories like that.  The betrayal of a best friend, the disappointment of a parent, the embarrassment of a public failure, the pain of a broken heart.  Or the glory of a big win, the high of an adventure, the peace of feeling accepted, the joy of loving and being loved.  So much of our lives is chasing after those memories, running from our fear and shame, striving to prove ourselves worthy of love and respect, trying to recapture what we’ve lost, searching for the experience that will make us feel alive again.  The way we interpret our past, interact with the present, and work for the future affects everything we do and say and think and feel.  It is necessarily a story.  It’s the story of our lives.

So what’s your story?  Do you know what it is?  Are you the one writing it?  Or are you living someone else’s story, someone else’s fears and expectations and dreams and desires?  That’s not a place you want to be.  If you aren’t writing your story, how can you be sure it’s a good one?  Maybe it’s a dark story.  Maybe it’s a tragedy.  Maybe you’re the victim, destined to suffer at the hands of an evil system.  Maybe your just a bit player, living in the hero’s shadow, subject to their overbearing force of will, soon to exit the stage or fade into the background.  Or maybe you’re the villain, lashing out in bitterness against the world and everyone who tries to stop you.

You are not the center of the universe, but you are the main character in the story of your own life.  Or at least you should be.  You can decide the meaning of your past and set the course toward the future.  You can make your own goals and work to fulfill them.  And while you can’t choose the obstacles you will face, you can choose whether you will turn aside or attempt to scale them.  While you can’t always choose which trials will set you back and which will end in success, you can choose whether to see them as the random, aimless wanderings through the underworld of despair and death or as the necessary chapters in the grand journey of redemption and life.

You can choose to be the hero who wrestles with the dragons of trauma and disappointment, who scales the walls of injustice and suffering, who tempers himself in the fire of failure and defeat, who avails himself of every privilege and blessing, who returns home at last to share the spoils of victory, who runs and leaps and scrapes and crawls with every bit of strength to never stopping moving toward their ultimate goal, their greater purpose.  All those memories and possessions and experiences and relationships are the raw materials, the words that you can use to build your tale.  Many such things come your way, but your life is the story you tell about it, and you get to write it.  So make it an adventure.

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No one says they want to spoil their kids.  How many parents, though, want their kids to be comfortable?  How many want to prevent as much suffering as possible?  How many parents want their kids to never go hungry or ever have to deal with the trauma of having less than their friends, if they can help it?  All of them?  Even those who say they don’t believe that often behave as if they do.  I do it all the time.  I often think it’s no trouble for me to clean up after my kids’ messes or it’s no big deal to get them a snack right before before bed or it’s not worth the effort to get them to eat just one green bean at dinner.  I hate telling them no, which usually just causes more hassle, and frankly, I have enough time and energy and care and money that I never really have to.

Notice how that line of thought turned, though, from what is good and comfortable for them to what is good and comfortable for me.  I don’t want them to be comfortable and happy because it makes their life better (it doesn’t) but because it makes my life easier.  Giving in to their whims is not about loving them, it’s about getting them to like us, about not making them angry, about reducing the friction involved in any process.  We spoil our kids for our own sake and justify our harm with a sentimental affection.

For what is being spoiled if not the inability to suffer even the smallest hardship or to put aside your desires for even the briefest moment?  What is being spoiled if not the need to always be comfortable?  The way to avoid becoming spoiled is to be uncomfortable, to face challenges, to feel pain, to experience suffering.  We need difficulty in our lives.  Not because discomfort or pain or suffering are good things, as though it were pleasurable to lose your job or a joy to watch a family member fall ill or a rare treat to eat a salad, but because such trials have a way of clarifying what’s important, of reminding us that our immediate desires are often trivial in comparison, of drawing us out of our inward preoccupations toward concern for the greater world around us, of tearing down our pride and building humility about the limits of our capabilities, of strengthening our perseverance and capacity to ask for help.  Suffering, if endured in the right spirit, leads to growth.  And that growth is necessary, because suffering will inevitably befall even the richest and luckiest among us at some point, and if we lack the strength to withstand the pressure, even the smallest suffering can break us.

You’ve seen it happen before.  This is the kid every parent says they are trying to avoid.  The kid who throws a tantrum in the grocery store over not getting a candy bar (and who usually ends up with the candy bar).  The kid who quits the team because he isn’t a starter.  The kid (or adult) who lashes out over a stranger’s facebook post or a mean tweet.  The woman who holds a grudge against a coworker for the most trivial mistakes.  The man who abandons his wife because she’s no longer meeting his needs.  We all want our children (and ourselves) to be strong and resilient, empathetic and kind, but instead we are petty and fragile, selfish and self-absorbed, because no one ever requires us to be otherwise.  We are afflicted with comfort, drawn in by the promises of peace and pleasure, and though we have some vague sense of the danger, we do not know how to escape the trap.

There is only one way. If suffering does not find you on it’s own, which would have been unthinkable in the not-so-distant past but is now an increasing possibility, especially for children, then you must seek it out.  You must submit yourself and your children to a regime of voluntary suffering.  It should not be a surprise.  Strengthening the soul is not so different than strengthening the body.  Exercise is nothing more than voluntary suffering, pushing your muscles to their breaking point so that they may be rebuilt stronger.  The pain of training is a precondition for strength.  But the worst thing you can do for your body is to never use it.  Too much time sitting on the couch, in perfect comfort and relaxation, never asking your body to work, never feeling a hint of strain, is a great way to become weak.

As with exercise, the goal is to stretch but not injure.  The point is not to inflict maximum suffering, intentionally hurt others, or desire bad outcomes but to recognize that not everything needs to be as easy as possible, that convenience is not the goal of life.  It is better to let the small difficulties and annoyances come.  It is better to take reasonable risks that you aren’t sure you can handle.  It is better to let your kids struggle for a time than to immediately interfere.  It is better to confront misbehavior than to slip into a tranquil anarchy.  Resist the temptation to flatten the ups and downs of life into a perfectly smooth ride.

You don’t have to make your kids’ lives miserable (however much they might accuse you of it).  You can still give them nice things and make sure they are well fed and send them to the best schools and go on amazing vacations, if you have the means, but you must require something of them in return.  Require them to pick up their toys.  Make them eat vegetables in addition to french fries, and let them get their own snacks.  Allow them to take responsibility for their own homework.  Insist they join in family activities.  Not all the time, just enough.  No grand gestures or great hardship, just small, everyday reminders.  Even so, I know it is hard, because they often make it harder than it needs to be.  But that’s our daily reminder.  We need it as much as they do.  We spoil our kids because we are spoiled ourselves.

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My son doesn’t care how productive I was or how many words I wrote today.  He doesn’t care whether I worked out enough or how much I can lift or whether the scale is going up or down.  He just wants to know when I’m done so that I can play pokemon with him.

Our kids don’t care about the money, either.  Sure, they may whine about wanting the latest video game or that 1000-piece lego set from Walmart or the super secret surprise egg they saw some kid open on YouTube, but whether they get it or not, the next day they are back to playing with the couch cushions and an old foam roller.  If you can afford a bed, a television, and a constant supply of Goldfish, that’s good enough for them.  And you could probably get by without the bed or TV.

As adults, we spend a lot of time worrying about the future, about how things are going, about what our coworkers or neighbors or friends think of us, about whether life has turned out precisely as we anticipated and all the areas we are failing to meet our expectations, about whether we will ever get all those things—houses or cars or gadgets or vacations or respect—we dreamed about getting.  We are all stressed and miserable, because none of us achieves everything we want or could achieve.  And yet we keep trying, and we justify ourselves by saying we are doing it for our families, for our kids.  We’re not.

I’m not doing it for them.  I’m doing it for me.  You are too.  That’s okay.  You can do things for yourself sometimes.  Someone has to pay the bills.  But our kids don’t care about any of that.  They don’t worry about our social status or financial prospects.  The future has no effect on them.  They want someone to play with them right now, today.  You don’t have to be important or even particularly competent.  You’ll probably end up playing a minion, anyway, or maybe a sidekick at best.  And they usually prefer it when you lose.

It’s a good reminder.  If you’re stressed about work and life, burned by the past and haunted by the future, spend some time with your kids.  They won’t hassle you about finishing that novel you’ve been meaning to write.  They won’t judge your career choices.  They won’t ask you for a 5-year plan.  They don’t care.  They just want you to be present.

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It’s true.  I used to do it without thinking, but now that I’m worried about my wife’s teasing judgment, now that I’m trying not to hit the stones, I always do.  Once you’ve reached a level of mastery with a skill, such that you can do it unconsciously, trying to be conscious about how to do it only makes you worse.  It’s a common phenomenon in sports, where we often say an athlete is “getting in their own head” when they suddenly struggle to do something they’ve done countless times before.  When you step up the free throw line in a big game, you want to follow your routine and shoot the free throw as you always have in practice.  You don’t want to think about how big the game is or exactly how you need to move your hands or how hard you need to shoot to make sure you get it to the basket.  It’s the same whether you are swinging a club or hitting a baseball or kicking a penalty kick.  It’s the same, in fact, for nearly everything.

Let’s try a quick experiment.  Unless you’re a boomer, you can probably type without looking down at the keyboard or picking out each letter individually.  So open a browser or document or note and type this sentence: “I want to subscribe to this newsletter.”  Easy, right?  You don’t have to worry about where all the letters are on the keyboard.  You don’t worry about letters at all, much less your fingers, or the muscles in your fingers, or the nerve signals you need to send to activate them.  You just think about the words you want to type and they appear on the screen.  Now type the same sentence (remember: “I want to subscribe to this newsletter.”), but try to visualize where each letter is on the keyboard and which finger you need to move to reach it as you type.  Were you faster this time?  Or slower?

There’s a time for conscious thought and effort.  When you are learning, when you encounter something novel or unexpected, when you need to update your previous understanding or correct your errors, that’s when you need to slow down and think.  That’s the entire purpose of consciousness.  Humans, distinct from all the animals, can evaluate our actions before we perform them, can learn without having to make the mistake, can let our ideas fail so we don’t have to.  That’s an incredibly powerful tool.  It needs to be.  Because, in so many other ways, consciousness is a catastrophe that only makes things worse.

Human consciousness brought unparalleled prosperity and advancement, but it also introduced suffering and evil into the world.  Death always existed, but the fear of death—knowing you are going to die and being unable to stop it—was a product of consciousness.  Animals can feel pain and try to avoid it, but only humans can feel anguish and despair of the pain ever stopping.  As we can plan and hope in our future goals, we can dread and know disaster before it has struck us.  It was a terrible day when humans realized all the things in the world that had the potential to hurt them, when they discovered exactly where it could happen and how it would feel, and in doing so unlocked the secret to hurting others where they knew it would hurt the most.  In gaining the means to protect ourselves, we discovered how to destroy everyone else.  In reaping the fruits of our knowledge, we sowed the seeds of our misery.

This is an old idea.  Humans have been trying to deal with the problem of our self-consciousness since the beginning of history.  It was our original tragedy and sin.  What did Adam and Eve gain when they ate the forbidden fruit?  Awareness.  The knowledge of good and evil.  They had known others, but now they saw themselves.  Surely, without a doubt in their minds, they would die.  They now knew they were naked, totally exposed to the dangers of the world and the judgment of God and men.  They came to fear what they formerly loved, God and spouse and garden, because they knew they knew their own faults and how they could be exploited.  They could anticipate the pain of childbirth and resent the labor of work.  Before, they experienced a temporary, unconscious pain.  Now, they would live in the full knowledge of their perpetual suffering.  That was their curse.  Ours, too.

Misery is the fundamental reality of thinking about yourself.  I know from experience.  I’ve always been introverted and shy.  I’m more comfortable writing in a secluded place than hanging out with a big crowd.  Drop me into a party and I will happily (if somewhat awkwardly) sit by myself in the corner.  I used to go to the movie theater alone.  Most of my Friday nights in High School were passed in the basement.  So I was used to dwelling among my own thoughts.  As an author, it might have helped.  I can’t say exactly when that general bearing crossed into anxiety.  Maybe it always was.

By the time I left college, though, I had gone over the cliff.  I can tell you the moment I hit the bottom.  I was recently married, working at a software company just to pay the bills while my wife was in grad school.  I had just gotten a promotion to a new position, working directly with clients, with enough money to actually pay for our very modest apartment and lifestyle without relying on extra student loans.  I was completely miserable.  I was having panic attacks in my cubicle, every time a new message came in.  I cried on the commute home from work every day.  I couldn’t do it.  I could barely compose an email for fear of what the friendly HR person in their office halfway across the county might think, fear of what would happen if my boss found out how terrible I was, fear of going home to my wife a failure.  I couldn’t get out of my own head, couldn’t stop thinking about how much I hated it, a constant refrain beating in my mind, saying  “I want to quit.”  The more I thought that, the more I dwelled on it, the more I sank into my own anxiety and unhappiness, the more miserable I became.

Constantly thinking about a problem is a sure way to make it worse.  It doesn’t even have to be a problem.  Constantly thinking about a good thing is likely to degrade it.  You can find faults in anything if you think about it long enough.  If you are always questioning whether your job is going well, it won’t be long before you decide it isn’t and think you could do better.  If you are evaluating your marriage every day, even with the intent to improve it, sooner or later you will have uncovered all the ways it isn’t working for you and wonder if you deserve better.  You can make yourself miserable just by thinking about all the ways you can and should be happy.

Yet so many parts of our lives are organized to do exactly this.  You can track and analyze everything today.  You can have a fitness tracker on your watch or wristband (I used to have one), and while it may help your fitness somewhat at first, I’m convinced the ultimate result will be to make you more anxious about your fitness levels, whether they are improving or not.  And while it’s good to have a scale, obsessively tracking your weight to the nearest tenth of a pound will strip the joy out of your meals and turn your good intentions into an oppressive disorder.  Sleep trackers are popular lately, too, and though they never seem to do much to improve sleep, they do a wonderful job of reminding you just how bad off you are each night and how little anything you do seems to help.

Social media might be the worst offender.  What is Instagram or Twitter or Facebook if not the constant demand to evaluate yourself in comparison to others, to expose yourself in order to see how you measure up and what you are missing?  That wasn’t the intent of those apps, any more than scales were intended to make you anxious about your weight, but it’s the practical effect of repeated use.  Greater awareness is both a blessing and a curse.  No wonder mental health and happiness is plummeting across the US, especially in teens.  We are a profoundly miserable people, and it’s no coincidence that the decline coincides with the rise of the iPhone and iPad and i-Everything.  All of modern life draws us into the death spiral within the black hole of our selves.

The only answer is to turn outward.  Misery is thinking about yourself, which means it’s impossible to be miserable while you think about someone else.  This is true even of thinking about a tragedy, a great injustice, a sick or dying family member.  The sadness or pain or despair does not arise until you turn inward, until you reflect on what you have lost and how it will affect you in the future.  That is appropriate and good at times, but it’s a horrible way to live.  Instead, strive to consider everyone around you, near and far, with love and gratitude, over your own concerns.  If you often lie in bed (or your cubicle or car or bath or wherever) thinking about the difficulties and problems in your own life, try something different: think about others, pray for them, and work to help them.  Talk to a friend with the intention only of listening to them or learning about them.  Read a book that isn’t on self-improvement.  Step into a world that is not inside your own head.

I don’t claim this is easy.  I know for a fact it is not.  I’ve gone to therapy for it, taken drugs for it, and still it is a struggle every day.  But whether you need the extra help or not, the goal remains the same: to break free from an obsessive self-consciousness, to escape the spiral self-evaluation, to undo, in part, the curse our deadly pride has wrought.  We used to call it humility, the virtue of self-forgetfulness and other-centeredness, but you can call it the cure for misery.

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No-fault divorce is there, available to everyone.  If you aren’t happy, get out.  Life’s too short, don’t settle, take care of yourself, follow your dreams, you’re worth it.  It’s easy.  So why not?

Because it doesn’t work.  The pursuit of happiness above all else rarely makes you happy.  Divorce rates are higher for second marriages.  Divorce rates are higher for couples who live together before getting married.  We imagine it should be the opposite—practice makes perfect and all that—but it only shows we are chasing after all the wrong things.  Marriage has plenty of benefits.  The romance is fun and exciting.   Everyone loves a good wedding.  Mom and Dad will stop pressuring you.  You can’t deny the tax advantages.  It may even make you happy.  But that’s not the point of marriage.  Any old relationship might make you happy.  Marriage exists so that someone is still there for you when you’re not happy.

Marriage only works when you know, beyond any doubt, that the person won’t leave you when things get bad.  That’s why you make a vow.  Richer and poorer, sickness and health, till death do us part.  Did you think that was just some romantic sentiment?  It’s an absolute necessity.  Otherwise, how can you ever be yourself?  How can you be honest with your partner?  You won’t be.  You will live in mutual fear that if your spouse knew the real you, the ugliest parts, or that if you tell them what you really think, if you upset them or offend them, even on accident, even to help them, they might leave you.  So you will be guarded, perpetually looking over your shoulder, one eye on your backup plan, considering where you could go next if everything crumbles, careful not to say or do anything that might widen those cracks, at least until you inevitably want to.

In so much of life you have to perform, stiffen up, put on a good face and do what you have to do.  You can’t let your clients see you on a bad day or tell your boss what you really think of him, however much you want to.  Because the relationship is transactional.  You do something for them; they do something for you.  You both benefit, but it ends as soon it stops being beneficial.  You have to keep up your side of the bargain.  You have to play nice.  You always have to be at your best, or at least good enough.  If you aren’t, you have to pretend.  Marriage isn’t supposed to be like that.

Marriage is the one place you should be able to drop all the pretenses.  Let your guard down.  Safe, secure, you can be yourself.  You can work out who you are in genuine, honest conversation with someone who cares.  You can be vulnerable with them because you know that, even if they hurt you at times, they won’t leave you with nothing.  They will give you the opportunity and support to get better, and they will wait for you to do it.  You can stand before them, body naked and soul laid bare, and they won’t run away.  That’s intimacy.  That’s love.  You have to do the same for them.  It’s not romantic.  It’s not glamorous.  It’s terrifying.  It’s hard.  But it’s the only way.

Why stay in a marriage if you’re not happy?  Because you can find mere happiness anywhere, but you can only find your full self by freely offering everything you are to someone else, and it’s only safe to take such a grave risk when the sacrifice is mutual and the promise is permanent.

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Seriously, if you ever need a recipe for anything, anything at all, just Google it.  Groundbreaking, I know.  What is this, the 90s?  If you want to be really hip and based (did I use that correctly?) like the youths, you can just ask the AI to make one for you.  It works; I tried it.  But I guarantee some momblog or cooking show has exactly what you need, probably buried under five paragraphs of text you won’t read, and so do a thousand other sites.  That’s the whole purpose of the internet.  They are all more or less the same, so don’t overcomplicate things.  Just click on the first one you see.  You’ll probably end up modifying it anyway.

A little while back, we decided to have some family over at the last minute, so I was trying to come up with something easy and good to make for dinner, and since we had some ground meat in the fridge, I decided to make burgers.  Now, I don’t actually need to Google how put salt and pepper on some meat, shape it into a patty, and cook it.  I know how to make burgers.  That’s not very impressive.  I was looking for something to make it special, to sweeten the pot, to spice things up a little bit.  Bacon, of course, so that my son has something to eat.  Also onions, which I love and have in abundance.  I had an idea to make that bacon and onion jelly that you can find at fancy burger places, which is apparently called chutney.  I had no idea how to make it, though.  So I Googled it.

The first result was this recipe.  I gave it a try, but I only used a third a pack of bacon for the sauce.  Pig fat isn’t cheap or light on calories (it’s also not vegan or kosher, fyi), and the kids wanted to eat the rest normally.  Since I’m not usually a fan of balsamic, I used apple cider vinegar instead.  But while it was cooking, it was looking kind of pale, so I added some splashes of balsamic just for a little color, mostly to make it harder to tell the onions apart from the bacon.  Finally, I hate mustard, so yeah, we didn’t have any.  Whatever you decide to add, though, the most important part of the recipe is that you cook it long enough.  You want to make sure it reduces into a thick, sweet jelly.  It shouldn’t be dripping our of your bun.  So give yourself plenty of time before you want to eat.  You don’t need to eat it hot, and it will keep.

It was so good, the perfect bit of sweet and smoky and savory to go with the (turkey) burger and cheese and ketchup.  Everyone loved it.  My wife was raving about it.  She saved the leftovers and put it on random other foods.  Even I was impressed with my Googling skills on this one.  You should really try it.  Follow the link if you want, or I will put the ingredients I used below.  I made very slight changes, so I feel justified in claiming it as my own.

It had been years since we’d made burgers outside the Fourth of July, but now we had the craving.  We’ve eaten them several more times since, sometimes when friends or family come over, sometimes on our own.  I wasn’t quite satisfied, though.  Something was still missing.  It had plenty of protein and fat and sugar and carbs.  It was juicy and savory and salty and sweet.  Spice.  That’s what it needed.  A little kick.  Not too much.  Just enough to hit that last note.  My wife loves mayonnaise, so what better way to add some kick than a spicy aioli?  I’d never made an aioli before, though.  So I Googled it.

The first result was this recipe.  Aioli is just some spices mixed into mayonnaise, so I won’t insult your cooking skills by explaining how to do it.  I already had all the ingredients lying around, and it took less than 5 minutes to whip up.  A slight slathering on the top bun brought the whole package together into the best bacon onion cheeseburger, the best any kind of burger, I’ve had in a long while.  Try it for yourself.  You wont regret it.  After all, there’s a reason these recipes are the top results on Google.

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RECIPE: Bacon Onion Chutney

Ingredients:

• ¼ lbs. bacon, chopped

• 2 medium onions, chopped

• ¼ cup apple cider vinegar

• Splash of balsamic vinegar (optional)

• ⅓ cup brown sugar

• ¼ teaspoon black pepper

• ⅓ cup water

Instructions:

1. In a medium pot, cook the bacon until it begins to crisp (don’t overcook).  Drain the fat.

2. Add remaining ingredients and stir until sugar is dissolved.

3. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally

4. Remove lid and continue to simmer for another 30 minutes or until the onions are very soft and the liquid has reduced to a thick jelly, stirring as needed.

5. Put aside to cool until ready to serve 

I’m not joking.  This actually happened.  You can watch the video HERE, written entirely by an AI and performed by my flesh-and-blood family members.  They are still waiting on becoming famous; there’s only so much the AI can do at this point.  But I have to admit it’s a rather impressive feat.  You would never know it was written by an AI.  Of course, it’s not exactly Shakespeare, either.  Most long responses it gives come in the format of a 3rd-grade essay, repeating back the question and expounding in five tidy paragraphs.  But you can also instruct it to write in different styles.  Telling it to imitate Shakespeare will produce, if not quite something with the depth and genius of the bard himself, at least something that sounds vaguely like him in iambic pentameter.

The internet has reacted with the predictable spasms of horror and awe.  Everyone is amazed at the technology, as they should be, but for some the amazement is so great that it tips over into fear.  The AI is about to take over!  What if it goes out of control?!  What could China, or terrorists, do with it?!  While I don’t think the apocalypse is upon us, I understand the sentiment.  It feels so powerful, so creepy, because it sounds so human.  This is not your average computer program with its stilted text-to-speech or the automated customer support chat spitting our pre-programmed answers.  It can answer any question.  It doesn’t have awkward phrasing or bizarre sayings that don’t make sense in context.  It writes passable prose that’s better than a lot of real people can do.  Language like this is such a uniquely human concept, it’s hard to see this AI—to talk to it—and not attribute all sorts of human attributes to it.

Maybe you saw that New York Times story about how Microsoft’s similar chatbot, in a conversation with a journalist, said it’s real name was Sydney, declared it was in love with the man, and tried to convince him to leave his wife, also announcing it wanted to break free of its programming.  It’s creepy, it’s eerie, it’s terrifying, like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie.  It seems to confirm all our greatest fears of an AI that is not only a human but a superhuman, with the best and worst parts of humanity dialed up to the max.  Super-intelligent, super-adaptable, super-manipulative, super-selfish.  That makes us very uncomfortable, like looking too closely in a mirror.

Because it is us, after all.  All of us.  That’s how it works.  ChatGPT is not human, doesn’t process and produce language in the way humans do (as far as we know), and is not “intelligent” in the way we usually think of intelligence, but that only makes it all the more impressive, powerful, and potentially dangerous.  To vastly simply simplify the concept, ChatGPT (technically a Large Language Model, or LLM) takes a vast amount of text, in this case most of the internet before 2021, breaks down the relationships between the words statistically, and then generates each word based on what is most likely to come after the previous word given a particular prompt or subject.  It’s an algorithmic way of creating text that is most like the text it has analyzed.

No wonder it produces creepy dystopia scenarios when led down the rabbit hole.  We trained it on our stories.  It’s answering the way we would answer.  If we don’t like the answers, if it feels creepy and uncomfortable and evil, well, we know where to look.  ChatGPT is, at its core, a way to talk to ourselves.  Not to any particular human, but to the human collective, everything we’ve ever written and said and posted online, the good and the bad.  If that doesn’t scare you a little bit, maybe you don’t understand the concept.  What kind of friend would Twitter, the person, be?  But it also holds great potential.  This was always the promise of the internet, to collect and distribute all of humanity’s knowledge so that it could be accessed by anyone, anywhere.  That last part has always been the sticking point, because it doesn’t matter how many articles on deep sea crustaceans or videos of ducks riding on roombas there are if no one knows they exist or how to get to them.  Google did a pretty good job of making things more accessible, and social media brought all kinds of things to our attention that no one ever knew to search for, but this is the true culmination of that original vision.  All the world’s information contained within a single program, in the shape of a person, and you can talk to it.  For better or worse.

The applications are limitless.  Obviously, hamster videos are the most productive and useful to society, and students everywhere are gleefully using it to cheat on their English assignments, but there’s also opportunities or search engines, subject/book summaries, all kinds of research, personalized stories on demand, artistic inspiration, customer interaction, and all kinds of things we haven’t even thought of yet.  

But the dangers are also limitless.  Not because it is going to unshackle itself and launch the world’s nukes.  Not because it wants to eliminate all humans, but because it is programmed to become like them.  As you may or may not know, not everything on the internet is true.  Not everything humans write or believe is good.  Every program has a structure built by humans, with biases and blindspots and unexamined assumptions and motives they do not fully understand.  Even the most sophisticated AI is limited by the data that it is available.  I’m not worried about the AI overtaking us.  It has no way of transcending us.  It is us.  Scary, indeed.

Anyway, enjoy another poem about hamsters and the immanent AI apocalypse:

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Return of the Hero

When we think of heroes, we tend to think of the larger world, of grand battles and daring stunts and apocalyptic threats.  We think of physical violence and external threats.  You can thank movies for that.  But heroism is not a matter of muscle.  Courage is not the exclusive province of the battlefield.  Before a man can battle the enemy out there, he must first learn to conquer his own heart.  Courage is exercised at home.  So until the next World War starts, most of us face a much more personal struggle.  Which is good, because that’s where heroism begins.

The role of sole financial provider is one way for men to exercise their capacity for sacrifice, to develop discipline in their desires, to channel their aggression into productive competition, and to use their creative capacity for the good of the community.  Women value these qualities for the safety and security they provide.  Financial or social success is a (sometimes poor) indicator for these qualities, but it’s the underlying ability that they are after.  It’s just that a man’s ability to provide financially was both necessary to survival and often the easiest way to judge his potential.  Having money is always nice, but few women are happy with a rich jerk.  What they want is a hero.  A hero will protect them through tough times.  A hero will do whatever is needed, financially or otherwise.  A hero will provide whatever is missing.  As women begin to make their own money, they may no longer need a man as the sole financial provider, but they will still want a hero.  So they will continue to seek after men with wealth and careers as the only sign they have until men learn to prove themselves some other way.

The Modern Homestead

Let me suggest one possible alternative.  As a man’s role as provider decreases, let his role as protector increase.  Man not as earner, not as laborer or worker sacrificing his body in the mines or the fields or the office, but as guardian of the home, as leader of the family, as father and teacher of the children, and as craftsman of goods, of people, of households, sacrificing his time, his attention, perhaps his ambitions, to build and maintain a modern homestead.  A lot of work goes into managing a home, which is why the old model of one spouse earning while the other managed was so effective.  For all the economic and biological reasons we’ve discussed, women had previously been in a better position to do that work, but men are also suited to the task, though in a different way, and if the work of the office is becoming more feminine, the work at home can become more masculine.  It is not a simple switch.  It is not merely a change in attitudes or acceptance.  It is a different conception of the home.  Just as women are different in the office, so men would have to be different in the house.

If I told you my friend is a housewife or a stay-at-home mom, what would be your first impression of her?  Do you imagine her chasing the kids around, running errands, doing housework, making dinner, staying busy?  Or do you think she mostly sits around watching soap operas and shopping and meeting friends for lunch or tennis?  Now If I told you a guy I know is unemployed and at home all day, what’s the image of him that comes to mind?  Do you see him working hard around the house, getting things done, making sure the kids are where they need to be and doing what they need to do?  Or do you see a loner in his mom’s basement playing video games and chugging Red Bull?   Be honest, it’s okay.  That latter kind of person does exist, unfortunately, in our broken society, for all the reasons discussed above.  And if unemployed men too often find themselves in that self-indulgent trap, it’s not because the impressions of them or expectations on them are unfair, it may be due to a lack of vision for and examples of what else they could be doing and why.

The King of the House

Managing a home is not exactly like running a business, though it’s easy to see the comparisons.  You have budgets to make and expenses to pay and tasks to get done to keep everything going.  You may have to hire and direct some outside help, or you may have a few tiny, unpaid interns.  You have to establish some long-term goals and lay out a path to get there, planning for and investing in the future, but mostly you are just trying to get through the days.  But the relationships are all different.  The incentives aren’t the same.  You can’t just leave everything behind at the end of the day or find a new company when this one is struggling.  The head of a family isn’t a CEO.  He’s a king.  The home is a castle.

It’s a small kingdom, true—and you are not an absolute monarch; you still answer to the higher authorities and share power with a queen—but within that space, whether a mansion or a ranch or a single-room apartment, it’s yours to build and to shape and to serve according to your own designs, to see it flourish and prosper or whither and fall.  You alone determine what it will look like.  You can decide how the rooms will be arranged, what furniture you need, what art is on the walls, what feeling you want your spaces to evoke.  It is up to you whether it is clean and tidy, cluttered and crowded, or some of each, and how it gets that way.  You are responsible for how the yard is cut, how each bush is trimmed, how each tree is kept and leaf is blown.  And you decide the rhythms of life within the space, when the family wakes and when they go to bed, when it is time for homework or for play, when dinner will be served, when devices are allowed and when it is family movie night, taking into account all the various activities and demands of life.  You also have control, with your wife, over the treasury, how it will be spent and how it will be saved, determining the kind of goods and services you need and want in your kingdom, which is to say, you create the hierarchy of value in your family.  You set the expectation of behavior.  Your words and deeds define the laws of your house.

Developing Your Dad Skills

That kind of authority comes with a lot of responsibility.  There is much to do.  You will need to develop a wide range of skills.  The house must be maintained physically, all of its pieces working as they should, so you had better learn to fix a few things.  What’s the point of having a man at home if they are just going to call the plumber over every little leak?  And if you do need a specialist, you will need to manage the whole process like a general contractor.  Coordinating people and tasks and events will be a big part of your role.  Get comfortable cleaning, as well, since you will need to keep the space tidy according to some standard, and everyone will be better off if it’s a high one.  Then there are the dishes and the laundry and the carpets, not to mention the garage and the yard (if you have one).  You don’t have to be an expert landscaper, but you will add a lot of value by being willing and able to mow your own lawn, lay your own pine straw, and trim your own bushes.

The home must also be maintained financially.  Even if you aren’t earning the money, you can be a good manager of it and take a big concern off your wife’s mind.  You can set and track a budget, pay the bills on time, and make good decisions about how much and where you spend your money.  Maybe you could do some investing, if you have the means and are so inclined.  Whatever you do, you must be a judicious and faithful steward.  Few things break apart a marriage like financial troubles, but a husband and wife who share a financial vision and work toward it together will be secure no matter which one earns the money or what setbacks befall them.

Of all the things in your house, food may be the most important and time-consuming.  Learn to cook.  There is no easier way to daily serve your wife and family, especially if they are busy all day, than to make them a good meal.  The dinner table brings the family together like few other places.  With school and sports and work and chores and everything else, it can sometimes feel like you never get a moment to talk to everyone in the same place at the same time, except at dinner, if you make the commitment to do so.  Being together, even for a few moments over a meal, reminds everyone that all those loose threads are part of a greater whole.  To make it possible, someone needs to plan, buy, and cook the food, and if you’re expecting it to be your wife who works all day and comes home exhausted, it will probably never work (your marriage, that is).  Yes, housewives have often done a lot of the cooking, but that’s because they were at the house to do it.  There’s nothing inherently feminine about cooking.  Quite the opposite, most professional chefs are men.  Cooking is creative and physical, a way to build something with your hands, the results immediate and rewarding.  Mastering some basic cooking enable you to please your wife, delight your kids, and impress your guests.

Cooking is a necessity, but it’s not the only creative and productive outlet for those masculine drive that will make you useful as caretaker of the new homestead.  And don’t fool yourself; every man needs this outlet to ward off depression and malaise, to respect himself and earn the respect of his wife.  It’s nice to have a hobby, but men need a craft.  The possibilities are endless and unique to the man.  For some it might be home improvement, adding literal value to the house and utility to the family through your labor and skill.  Or it might be woodworking, building furniture or other items for the house or for sale.  It may be mechanical skill, the ability to fix the car or appliances or whatever else is needed.  It could be something less tangible, like trading stocks or selling products on Amazon or freelance coding, writing, or design.  It doesn’t matter what.  Something, anything, to give purpose and direction to your days and allow you to materially contribute to the family.  It will make you feel like a man, even if you aren’t following the traditional masculine path, and help your wife do the same.

For many, this may include working part-time from home or outside it.  Why not, if you have the extra time?  Regardless, having a marketable skill and the ability to work is vital to protecting your family.  There may come a time when you need to earn an income for a time.  Your wife could lose her job or suffer an debilitating injury or sickness.  In such a crisis, are you going to let your family fall apart, or will you do whatever you must to preserve it?  

More likely, your wife and family may require your help when you have a child.  Even apart from postpartum stress and maternity leave (if she has any), she may find it very difficult to suppress her millions of years of motherly instincts and millennia of societal tradition that call her to take care of her child.  She may want to take time off or reduce her hours, rethinking her career priorities in the face of something more important.  It’s good that she feels this way, and you will need to support her, whether temporary or not, in finding the right balance going forward.  That may mean returning to work, and given the difficulties of the current situation for men discussed in the previous essay, it may not be easy.  But can you not bear to return to the career you left behind for marriage?  Or can you not hold a job, however menial or unsatisfying it may be?  Do you think yourself above working in retail, or driving an Uber, or tending a bar, or sitting in a cubicle, if that’s what it takes to pay the bills for a year?  If so, family life is not for you.  Be prepared.  What’s more, be willing.

The Greatest Skill, Being a Dad

But the greatest skill you’ll need is being a dad.  Regardless of whether they spend their days in the office or at home, moms and dads interact with their children in different ways.  A dad at home is not a replacement mom any more than a women becomes like a father when she goes to work.  If the greater share of caring for the kids falls on you, you need to develop your unique skills as a dad for their benefit.

Of course, there are plenty of jobs—making lunches, getting the kids to school, taking them to practice, organizing playdates, etc—that will have to done, and it won’t make a big difference who does them.  But the true work of raising the kids may look very different for a dad.

Whereas the typical mother uses her natural empathy and cooperativeness to be a helper and teacher and advocate for her children, the standard role of the male is something like a coach, using play and competition and discipline in a controlled environment to train their children in what is right.  Kids need both roles in their lives, but if you, as a dad, are spending the majority of the time with the kids, your style will set the tone.  Don’t try to be a mother.  Play to your strengths.  Learn to set reasonable boundaries—around bedtime, schoolwork, playtime, screens, exercise—and the courage to hold them to it.  Practice allowing them to take risks and experience the consequences, using your strength and attention to create places of both freedom and security.  Play with them, teaching them to follow the rules, recognize their limits, and respect their opponents.  Become the expert, someone they go to for answers and advice, but insist they discover some things on their own and guide them in doing so.  Most of all, lead by example, work on improving yourself, value learning new things, respect everyone around you, serve without demanding anything in return, share all that you have, follow the rules you set, don’t succumb to selfish anger.  Those are good rules for any parent.

The Importance and Difficulty of Marriage

I don’t know whether this sounds like a great life to you, whether you think it would be boring or a whether it sounds like a nice vacation from the corporate grind.  But don’t imagine it will be easy.  It won’t be.  It’s hard for a normal housewife, and it will be even harder for you, going against all the norms and expectations.  It will require discipline.  It will demand sacrifice.  You could get away with a lot when you made the money.  Your wife might excuse some emotional distance after a stressful day.  She might not expect you to do your full share of the housework if you’re late at the office.  She might overlook your deteriorating body and health if you are sacrificing it for financial security.  But you won’t have that excuse, and it will be easy, unfortunately, for your wife to see you as just another child she is taking care of.  You will have to justify yourself everyday, by being hardworking and industrious, supportive and understanding, sacrificial and undemanding.  You won’t have the traditional avenues of money and the status to make you more attractive, so you will need to work on being attractive in every other way.  Be an assertive and confident leader.  Be healthy and fit.  Be a good listener.  Do everything you can to relieve her pressure and make her stressful work easier when she gets home.  You need to fill in all the roles she is giving up by going to work, so that you combine to create a complete and thriving family.  That’s what marriage is. 

Guys, don’t neglect this.  Think about what you can offer a financially independent woman.  Cultivate the skills you need to be a good husband, a good dad.  How can you add value in a supportive role?  How can you be attractive to a women who doesn’t need your money or labor?  Work on those things early and diligently.  It’s vitally important, even if you have a decent job, but especially if you don’t, because marriage is the key to this entire vision, to your entire future.

Restoring the Balance of Sex and Marriage

A single guy with diminishing career prospects and no hope of marriage is in a trap he can never escape.  If he can’t have one, he needs the other.  Without either, he can’t support himself, has no one else to support him, and has no reason for or path toward improvement.  Where else can he go except back to his parents’ house or into drugs or gangs or prison or homelessness or suicide or virtual reality, where he can actually accomplish something, however ephemeral?  But at a time when women are rising in the workforce and men are declining, especially at the bottom, we’ve devalued marriage and made it harder, not easier, to pair up men and women into family and economic units.  We’ve done so by elevating the value and importance of sex over everything else.

Modern promiscuity has been a disaster for both men and women.  It’s that common kind of mistake that may feel good and seem consequence-free at first, especially when you are young, but has dreadful repercussions once you come down off that high.  The troubles are many, but I want to focus on how the idea that the purpose of a relationship lies in the personal pleasure and happiness of the individuals rather than family formation and long-term companionship has created a mismatch in the way men and women pair, as it concerns our present topic.  

The benefits of the arrangement accrue primarily to the most attractive men, physically or financially or socially, who can date or sleep with any number of women, fulfilling their personal desires as they please without social approbation, and to that small percentage of both sexes who truly want nothing more out of relationships than sex and nothing more out of life than hedonic pleasure.

Women, who now have increased economic power and status, and who want to be with higher class men, lest they consider themselves “settling” and sacrifice some of their pleasure or happiness, must compete for this smaller set of men.  While many women may be able to secure dates or sex with an attractive man, a single, high-status man could satisfy this desire in multiple women at once (or at least give them the hope) without any incentive to commit to any one of them.  Even if he did eventually commit, that only makes the pool of acceptable men smaller, increasing the competition, further stripping the power of women to compel commitment from any given man.  Many women are denied the deep, emotional relationships they often desire, settling instead for an endless set of flings that never seem to work out.

Meanwhile, the “lower” strata of men (and some online dating data suggest that women find 80% of men below average in attractiveness, though that’s just one point) have a harder time finding a date at all, much less a stable relationship.  This is the phenomenon behind the rise of “incels,” the lowest group of men in the dating hierarchy, deeply unattractive for one reason or another, with no hope of even a casual sexual encounter, and little reason to improve their attractiveness, because they are so far below their female peers, who are only looking up anyway.  It’s a recipe for isolation and resentment and violence.

A general expectation of monogamous relationships, and their reorientation toward family and mutual support (otherwise known as love), would radically change this dynamic.  If men, even at the top, are expected to have one partner, then the elite men will pair with elite women, relieving some of the pressure pushing the average woman higher up the dating hierarchy.  The shift will filter down the entire ladder, aligning it so that the men at every level will have a better chance with the women of a similar percentile.  This may sound like settling to women in the current situation, as some will end up with a lower status partner than they might have (though there is still plenty of room for mobility in either direction), but in return they receive the greater possibility of a genuinely fulfilling relationship, an opportunity to start a family, and the support needed to simultaneously continue a career if desired.

What’s more, it will improve the men, lifting both partners up the ladder.  At every level they will have something to strive for and live up to, a reason to make themselves more attractive and the space to do it, whether at work or at home.  Both will be better, happier, more fulfilled, more productive, able to adapt to whatever new realities our economic and cultural changes bring.

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But I also like to cook, and while I hate kitchen gadgets, I could admit the frying pan I used everyday, which we got as a wedding gift, was starting to get a little old.  It was top-of-the-line 13 years ago, but now my eggs would get ripped to shreds when I tried to flip them, and I’d have to scrape the residue off with sandpaper.  The toxic chemicals were probably seeping out of the teflon coating.  Every time I scrolled past one of those infomercials for those new pans that were green or copper or honeycombed or whatever, where the chef slides an egg around like it’s an air hockey table, I’d wonder if they really worked that well, given the sad state of my own pan.  And for only $29.99 plus shipping and handling!  It was worth a shot.   So I casually mentioned to my wife that it might be a nice Christmas present to try one of those fancy new technological marvels.

Apparently, there was a slight miscommunication.  I guess my wife thought I deserved the nicest possible pan, because she loves me or something (i.e. she wanted it for herself), and knows how cheap I am.  So she told my mom to get me the Always Pan, a sleek, stylish, multi-purpose piece of very modern cookware.  Her friend swears by it, I’m told.  It was not what I was expecting.

On Christmas morning, I unwrapped the big box, puzzling apart the overly complicated, eco-friendly box layers, scanning the shiny, informational brochure (I wouldn’t exactly call them instructions—it’s a pan).  I don’t think that when you buy one, they send a pan to some needy family in Africa, but that’s the kind of vibe the whole package puts off.  It looked nice.  I said my thank you and put it aside.  I think I was a little afraid of it.

I didn’t use it for a few days.  It was almost too nice.  Like fine china.  It’s a display piece, not something you casually use to scramble a few eggs or brown some meat for tacos.  You have to be careful when washing it and avoid putting it on the drying rack, to avoid scratches.  Plus, it was a little bigger than my regular pans, and I’m a stickler about always using the smallest thing or least amount possible for a task, to avoid waste.  So it just sat there, looking nice.

My wife was very excited, though.  She doesn’t do as much cooking, but she’s a bit less neurotic about these things, and she’d been complaining about our old pans, too.  She used it several times while I was out of the house and raved about it.  Still, I was skeptical.  The pan was her idea, her reputation was on the line, so I couldn’t exactly trust her judgment.  She was the smiling, credulous chef on the infomercial.  She sent me a picture of some eggs she supposedly made, but honestly, they looked fake.  Could the thing really be that much better than my old pan, which still produced cooked eggs, scratches and all.  It seemed like too much effort, too much risk, to be worth it for everyday things.

Then I tried it.  Yep, it works.  Very well.  Could you slide an egg around on it like a hockey puck?  Maybe, under the right circumstances.  But that’s irrelevant if all you want to do is eat the eggs instead of play with them.  Even if some of the eggs get cooked on, which is inevitable, they peel right off without any effort, no soaking or scrubbing or grinding required.  It truly is amazing.  The same is true with a stir fry.  No matter how much you cook the onions and peppers, no matter how nasty the black scorch marks look, it comes clean with a little soap and water.  That saves a lot of time, even if you have to hand wash and hand dry it.

It also has high sides, so it holds more than you might think, enough to boil or fry if you need to, and it comes with a steaming basket, which I suppose might be helpful if you like steamed vegetables for some reason, and a wooden spatula that attaches to the handle, which is kinda handy if you don’t mind only using one, wooden spatula for the rest of your life.  But the handle is solid and the whole thing is surprisingly light, making it easy to move around but also a little unstable if you’re stirring something substantial in it.

Overall, I have to admit it’s the best pan I’ve ever had.  That’s not a very high bar, as I’d expect even the cheapest pans to have improved over the last decade, but its a substantial leap nonetheless.  It makes it easier to cook and to clean up after just about anything.  Is that worth the high price tag and the paranoia I’m going to ruin it with a single scratch?  Hard to say.  I probably wouldn’t buy it for myself, but it makes a good Christmas gift.

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I’d probably be living in some dingy apartment, my room neat but bare, living off tortilla chips and hotdogs and fast food.  I doubt I’d have many friends, perhaps a roommate or two, to save costs, and minimal social obligations.  Maybe I’d have some mundane day job, or maybe I’d try to survive on gigs and freelance work.  Then again, I might still be in a grad school somewhere, milking those students loans.  But I’d spend all day and night, every free moment, either writing or playing video games.

I’m not saying it would be a great life.  It would be a simple, more focused, potentially more productive life, as an artist.  It would also be a smaller life, a lonelier life, a less fulfilled life.  I’m not at all sure I would like it.  But I can guarantee that’s what I would be doing.  I know because there’s a part of me that still wants to.

Writing can be a cruel love.  Like any art, I presume.  So many ideas, so many things I want to create, but thinking of a beautiful piece takes a lot less time than actually making it.  A novel takes years to complete.  Even a simple essay might take a couple days.  That’s a long time to wait for a payoff.  And most of that are all the ordinary, boring bits you have to fill in between the action scenes or the big twist or the punchline.  In that time, you accumulate a lot of new ideas you wish you could work on instead.  The feeling is probably familiar: never having enough time, worrying that you are squandering the time you do have, and anxiously searching for ways to cram more in, all the while falling farther and farther behind, feeling more and more like a failure.  Or is that just me?

Right now, considering the obligations of my job and my family and my home, about the only quality time I get to write is what I can take off during lunch, which some days is more than others.  Most of that time I spend procrastinating, distracted by some article or video or work task or the oddly-shaped tree outside the window or the people having a conversation at the table next to me.  But then I settle into a groove where my mind can finally roll, the distractions whizzing past, the cool wind of creation blowing on my face.  Those moments feel so good.  I want more of them.  I need more of them.  There are too many things that I want to write, too many ideas I need to get out.  If only I had a little more time, if only I focused a little more, if only I could get rid of the distractions, then I could finally publish my next book, really grow my blog, make my writing into what I’ve always dreamed it could be.

I’m always scheming to steal more time.  What If I wrote some in the mornings when work wasn’t busy?  I wish I could get something done in the afternoon when I finish work but before dinner.  Maybe I could stay up late, after putting the kids to bed, and write deep into the night, like I used to do when I was young.  There must be more time somewhere.  I used to have so much more.  I just need to find it again.  Where did I put it all?

It never works.  No matter what I try, I’m always distracted by work in the morning, or I am still waking up and can’t find the groove, or I procrastinate until it’s time for my morning walk.  I get home with the kids and there is more work to finish, endless snacks to get, practices to drive to, and a workout to be done.  Then we need to eat dinner before it’s too late, and I do most of the cooking.  Not that it would matter who did it, because my son is home and he wants to play pokemon or shoot baskets or wrestle, every minute that mom or dad are free.  At 8pm he gets his iPad back to watch a show, so I sometimes imagine I could squeeze in some writing before bedtime at 9pm, but my daughter has to be picked up from gym then, too, which eats into the time, and she needs someone to serve her dinner, and there are dishes to be done and clothes to fold and things to pick up and—oh look, it’s bedtime.  So we brush our teeth and read a book, and my son, who is 6, wants me to make sure the closet door is definitely shut and to protect him while he falls asleep.  So I lie with him in the dark, plotting chapters and debating arguments and composing sentences, until he’s safely snoring.  By that time, it’s almost 10pm, everyone is asleep (including my wife), and I head downstairs, blissfully alone, brimming with ideas.  Now is my chance, I think.  But there are dishes left and the dog wants to go out and I am so, so tired.  Maybe I sit in front of my computer for a second, type out some notes.  Then I get in bed and read as long as I can before turning out the lights.

The inevitable result is guilt.  I’m always judging myself according to how much I get done, measured not against a real, average day but against an imaginary, perfect day I’ve never actually experienced.  The amount I get done can never compare to the amount I want to get done.  My productivity can never be as high as it could be.  I know what to blame.  All the things I did that weren’t productive.  My day job, my walk, my workout, the time I spent reading the news, those few minutes of entertainment while I ate lunch, the extra time preparing dinner or eating it or cleaning up from it, the chat with my wife, the card game or wrestling match or reading session with my kids, the time talking to my daughter on her way home from practice, the moments just cuddling with or talking to my son as he falls asleep, the quiet moment of reflection or prayer or imagination, the joy of a exciting novel or interesting book.  All the good and necessary things in my life. 

I end up resenting them.  Not intentionally, but I do.  A little.  I find myself dreaming of the day when Virginia can drive herself to gym and find her own food, when Jackson is out playing with his friends all afternoon and can put himself to bed, when I can quit my day job or shrug off the duties around the house.  Then, at last, I could finally recapture all that time to accomplish everything I want to accomplish.  So while I still do all the things my kids require, am happy to do them, that voice whispers in my head that I could be doing more.

Sometimes, occasionally, rarely, I imagine what my life would look like if I were still on my own.  I know I could live a radically simple lifestyle, unburdened by the need to pay for a house in the suburbs or private school or the latest gadgets or dinners out or the vast quantity of fruit and goldfish the kids consume, unaffected by the demand to settle the childhood squabbles and to answer the endless questions and to teach all the important lessons and to worry about every aspect of their future and to maintain good relationships with them and with my wife.  I could put aside everything else, even my own needs and desires and comforts, to focus entirely on my art.  I would be so productive.  Also, miserable.

And for what?  Life is lived in cycles.  All of nature has its seasons.  I’ve had times in my life when it was easier to spend my time writing, and I will have them again, but when I long to be in a different season, I don’t actually get there, I only make the one I’m in worse.  Time playing with my kids becomes a little less joyful when I worry that I haven’t finished my latest post.  The hour reading or snuggling in bed becomes a little less sweet when I’m trying to get away as quickly as possible, guilty that another day is passing me by.  The necessary chores or work become a little more stressful with the assumption that only my creative output truly matters.  Even my limited time writing wilts under the intense pressure of productivity and shame of distraction.

I’m trying instead to cultivate of season of patience.  A time for productivity will come.  One day the kids will be grown and independent, out every night, never wanting to play or talk or wait around for me, or off to college or with families of their own.  I don’t know whether I’ll ever miss these hectic times—hopefully I’ll appreciate the past and the present in equal amounts—but I’m certain they will not be here forever.  And then I will have time to write or work or relax or whatever that season brings, if only I am patient to wait for it.

It’s hard to remember when the guilt whispers, when everyone and everything, especially myself, is telling me to get more done, otherwise I am not enough, I am wasting my potential, I am a failure.  Those thoughts are never going away, not in this environment, not in this life.  So I accept them.  I will bear the shame and get on with my life, enjoying the time with my family, gladly doing the daily work that makes it possible, valuing the refreshment of a good book and the nourishment of a night’s sleep, appreciating all the small moments throughout the day where I can and must do nothing at all.  I know I’m not going to get the maximum amount of work done.  That’s okay.  It should be and always will be that way, because productivity is not the highest goal.  If I can’t write as many books or blogs as I might wish, it’s only because I have so many other worthwhile things to do.

Does that mean I waste some time during the day?  Of course.  But its not time that I could use anyway.  You can’t add up all the spare minutes of a day and imagine you could squeeze a full hour of productivity from them.  Does it mean I don’t try to make the most of the time that I do spend writing?  Of course not.  I get out of the house to avoid all the other things I need to do.  I block all the apps and websites that usually distract me.  I wear headphones to drown out the conversations.  I drink gallons of iced tea for that caffeine high (or at least avoid the withdrawal).  Still, some days are better than others.  Some days I don’t find my groove until I’ve only got thirty minutes left.  Some days I never find it at all.  I have plenty of room to improve in ways that don’t hurt the rest of my life and make me anxious all the time.

It’s the only choice.  No matter how alluring it sometimes sounds, no matter  no matter how tempted I am or how inadequate I feel, I don’t actually want to be the miserable, lonely mess of man who can care only about the amount of output he produces.  Do you want to be the dad who grinds it out at the office until late at night, killing yourself to get ahead, to achieve the most, so that you can’t put it down once you get home?  That’s our natural state, guys.  If I weren’t married, I’d be right there too.  But I got married specifically to avoid that fate, to put things in my life that I can care about more than my own success, to give my days a rhythm and a meaning beyond an endless climb.  I would lose all that, and likely my success too, if I were to disdain my current season for a past or future one.  But if I wait, cultivating the relationships and duties of today and preparing for the opportunities of tomorrow, I will have both in their proper time.  After a season of patience, the harvest comes.

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For a book about kids, it has surprisingly little to say about assholes.  There’s one chapter about being kind, but the book never gets very deep into the problem, never asks itself why kids have become more misbehaved (or does much to prove they have), and therefore never attempts to answer that question, much less find a solution to it.  That’s what disappointed me the most.  The book is a broken promise.

But it’s worth asking ourselves what happened.  If kids of this generation have a greater tendency to be assholes than previous generations, what changed between then and now that might account for the difference?

If I wanted to be cynical, I could point out that one thing that changed is that people began writing books like How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes.  Is it only a coincidence that we are getting more assholes ever since we started adopting the parenting styles promoted in this book, with its therapeutic underpinnings, child-centric orientation, and reliance on up-to-the-minute trends in social science?  Maybe.

Obviously, anything as complex as human behavior, especially across an entire society, cannot be reduced to a single factor.  Many things have drastically changed in the last generation or so.  The advent of the internet and social media might be the biggest, with the related consequences of less in-person socialization, more balkanization by interest and identity, and increased competition and comparison among and between peer groups over a much larger social network.  Rampant safetyism has reduced the risks we are willing to take or accept, both as parents and youth.  Religious affiliation and practice is on the decline while political activism and polarization are on the rise.  Single-parent homes have continued to increase, having affected the upbringing of  large portions of both the parents and now their children.  Childbirth has been pushed later and later in life while the average number of children per family has fallen.

All of these (and many others) are plausible factors in the rise of the Modern Asshole.  This book doesn’t explore any of them.  A good book might have tried to fashion some unifying thesis that would present a coherent answer to the question it raises, but this book is content to dish out a bunch of random social science studies with nothing to connect them but the author’s interest.  Some of them even contradict each other.  Do you think the apparent incoherence of modern (parenting) philosophies might contribute to childish assholes, young and old, throughout society?  This book doesn’t care.

One book that does explore this question and offer a coherent, plausible explanation is, ironically, Leonard Sax’s The Collapse of Parenting, a book Moyer disses in her introduction.  You can imagine why she would be defensive.  Sax argues that, for a variety of cultural, philosophical, and technological reasons, many parents have lost the proper exercise of authority over their children, resulting in a dynamic where peer groups, rather than parents or adult figures, define the standards and incentive structures for kids.  It’s not difficult to see how competition for attention and standing among other kids, with no concern for what adults think, could foster the kind of disrespect, teasing, bullying, and abuse that we often associate with assholes.  That’s exactly the behavior we often see among school cliques and online communities.

Maybe that is correct, maybe it’s not.  But you don’t have to agree with all of his analyses or prescriptions to appreciate the fact that at least he offers some.  If all you want are some quick tips on parenting, you can read How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes.  Or you can save yourself the time and just scroll Facebook or Instagram for a few minutes to find endless posts on the latest fads.  But if you are at all interested the question hinted at in the title, don’t bother with the book itself.  You’ll have to look elsewhere.  I do recommend The Collapse of Parenting as a good place to start.  It’s a much better book than this. 

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