Why are things the way they are?

Why does it feel like things were better before?

Having a society of people walking through life in a drab stupor will, believe it or not, have strange impacts on the way the world goes.

No, that’s not exactly right. Everything — emphasis on thing — wasn’t better before. Well, maybe it’s the people then. Yes, that’s it — the people. Why does it seem like people were better before? No, that’s not it either. Not quite. People weren’t better before. There have always been the wicked and the evil and the lazy and the annoying. The world has always had problems.

Well, what is it then? What is it that I am feeling, you are feeling, and we all are feeling? Why does everything feel “off” for lack of a better word?

There’s a lot of answers, and a lot of them are pretty good. Answering questions this big is like looking at an object at a table from different directions. There are multiple correct descriptions of what is sitting in front of everyone, and all the answers help paint a clearer picture.

Ostinato of apathy

But is there an answer, a detail, a fact, or an X factor that sits under all the other things and runs like an ostinato through seemingly unrelated domains connecting the dots in a strangely unifying way?

Perhaps.

And if I were to try to list a single X factor that weaves like a thread through all the various forms and domains of decline, descent, malaise, and dysfunction, I might conclude that the fact that connects all these problems is something insurance covers, doctors prescribe, and we are all supposed to nod along with.

SSRIs and other forms of antidepressant medication.

I saw a video recently of an extended family. In a self-satisfied, joke-y sort of way, they all listed the medications they were on. It wasn’t a real joke, it was clear they were all actually on these things, but the video was joking about how funny it is, or something. Like many things TikTok, the tone was a plain, mundane, nihilistic, uncapitalized “lol.”

Of course, TikTok isn’t real life. But it isn’t exactly fake life either. This family of drug-dependents might be a bit of an exaggeration, though not necessarily a fabrication. Spiritually, the video is correct. More people are on these drugs than ever before, and that’s an undeniable fact of reality.

Drugs not hugs

This kind of thing didn’t exist when I was young. Drugs existed, both legal and illegal ones. Prescription drugs to help you be less depressed existed too. There were jokes and themes about Prozac in the 1990s, and before my time, in the midcentury, they were juicing disturbed people up on all sorts of stuff too. But the prevalence of them, overuse of them, and unabashedly flippant taking of them was nowhere near what we see today.

When I was young, the only people who were on this stuff were people who were decidedly “messed up.” Those who had genuinely tried to commit suicide or were really on the brink. And it wasn’t a good thing, and it wasn’t used flippantly. It was serious stuff. Somewhere in the last few decades, this attitude changed.

SSRIs and other antidepressants are the X factor under so much of the general malaise and dysfunction in our perplexing and seemingly decaying culture. At first, it doesn’t really make sense, or it just seems like a bit of a stretch because people think these drugs just “make people happier,” but that’s not exactly what happens. Even if they do seemingly “make people happier,” or at least less depressed, that isn’t the only thing they do.

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Dead inside

Listen to people who have been on these drugs describe how they make you feel. The picture isn’t exactly a rosy one. It’s better than suicide, but it isn’t normal. A very common observation you hear from people is that they make you feel dead or like you don’t care about anything. They also lower libido and what might be described as general drive.

These drugs don’t only impact one’s happiness. They bleed out and into all these other things, and when you have people taking them at the scale we do in the U.S., the culture shifts in ways that are unintelligible and confusing to those of us not on anything. Having a society of people walking through life in a drab stupor will, believe it or not, have strange impacts on the way the world goes.

Because of all this, our society is more full of de facto zombies than ever before. No wonder young people feel listless. No wonder achievement and striving for greatness seem naive or corny.

No wonder people aren’t partying.

No wonder the birthrate is in the tank.

No wonder the Democratic Party has become what it is when so many of its voters exhibit depression and anxiety.

No wonder everyone dresses like slobs.

No wonder there is a general apathy that bleeds through everything we see and hear.

No wonder the interior design is bland and factory-like.

No wonder everyone feels like tomorrow is going to be worse than today.

No wonder — to answer our first question — things are the way they are.

Want less spoiled kids? Have more of them

Kids are different these days. Kids are spoiled these days.

It sounds like something an old curmudgeon might say, but sometimes the old curmudgeons are right, aren’t they?

Loving children doesn't require arranging the world around them. In fact, doing so can hamstring the very people we're trying to help.

There have always been rich people who could spoil their children. But for most of human history, ordinary people simply didn’t have enough money to do much spoiling with things. They lived modestly, and their children did too.

Kids didn’t have bedrooms and closets overflowing with toys. They might have a doll, a wooden train, a ball, a bat, a top, and a few other things. Read old memoirs and accounts of childhood, and you encounter children delighted by things that would barely register as presents today — an orange in a Christmas stocking, for instance.

Imagine giving the average American kid in 2026 an orange for Christmas and expecting excitement.

Spoils of abundance

Mass abundance changed all that. We can now spoil our children with things on a scale our ancestors could hardly have imagined. But I think we spoil them in another, more consequential way too.

We spoil them with importance.

Spoiling children with things is a problem everybody understands, even if plenty of us do it anyway. We know that buying children whatever they want whenever they want it can produce ungrateful, entitled adults.

But we talk much less about what happens when we organize family life around children — their preferences, their feelings, their schedules, their entertainment, their happiness. We don't merely give children too much. We make too much of them.

There are many ways to describe this kind of spoiling, but the simplest is that we teach children to believe the world revolves around them. A child who learns that lesson fails to learn humility, flexibility, self-awareness, and the ability to accommodate other people. He grows up with a distorted view of how the world works and what his place in it is.

This has been happening for at least a generation or two, and I think we've all seen the results in our degrading culture, even if we don't always recognize the cause.

The explosion in material spoiling is easy enough to explain: mass abundance. But what explains this other kind?

Lonely islanders

As usual, there isn't one answer. The rise of “gentle parenting” is part of it. So is the cultural change that followed the social revolutions of the 1960s, when adults increasingly began looking to “the youth” rather than expecting the young to learn from their elders. Another part is parents abdicating their roles as leaders, teachers, and disciplinarians because they would rather be their children's friends.

But there is another explanation that interests me more: Families got smaller.

The connection between smaller families and spoiled children is pretty straightforward. The fewer children you have, the more time and attention you can devote to each one. That sounds wonderful, of course. All good parents want more time with their kids.

But smaller families don't just give parents more time. They give parents more bandwidth to accommodate every preference, negotiate every disagreement, indulge every mood, and bend over backward in ways that aren't necessarily good for a child.

If you have one child, that child naturally becomes the center of your world. And why wouldn't he? We love our children. Of course they're central to our lives.

But there is a difference between three, four, five, or six children being the center of a family's world and one child being the center of it.

When all of a family's attention, energy, money, patience, anxiety, and ambition can be concentrated on one child, it's much easier for that child to conclude that his importance within the family reflects his importance everywhere else.

A large family naturally limits how much the household can revolve around any one child. And that may be one of its greatest virtues.

Thank you for sharing

When parents have more children, they are forced to divide their time and attention. They cannot endlessly negotiate every dispute or accommodate every preference. They can't always have infinite patience, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Sometimes Dad has to be the judge and make a ruling. Sometimes your brother gets his way. Sometimes your sister gets the front seat. Sometimes somebody else gets the last piece. Sometimes you have to wait. Sometimes you have to share. Sometimes the family is doing something you don't particularly want to do, and you're doing it anyway because you're part of the family.

That's life.

A house full of siblings teaches lessons that parents can otherwise spend enormous amounts of effort trying to manufacture. You learn that other people have needs and desires too. You learn to negotiate, compete, compromise, forgive, wait, lose, and get over things. Most importantly, you learn that you are loved enormously without being the most important person in the room.

RELATED: We need a Labor Day for moms

David McNew/Getty Images

Love and limits

Having more children places natural limits on our ability to spoil them as much as we might instinctively want to. In doing so, it can make us better parents and our children better prepared for the world.

Because the desire to spoil our children is perfectly natural. We want to give them everything. We want them to be happy. We want to enjoy our time with them. We want them to know how deeply they are loved.

Those are good impulses. But good impulses can manifest themselves in unhealthy ways. Loving children doesn't require arranging the world around them. In fact, doing so can hamstring the very people we're trying to help.

At the end of the day, our job is the same job parents have had throughout history: to raise children who become moral, functioning, upright, hardworking, well-adjusted adults capable of forming families and raising good children of their own.

Our children should know that they are loved beyond measure. They should also know that the world does not revolve around them.

Teaching them both may be one of the most loving things a parent can do.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the cruel lie of egg-freezing

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a busy woman. When she’s not posting thirst traps on social media, she’s apparently planning a 2028 presidential run.

And she has no intention of letting anything derail her ambitions, least of all a dirty diaper.

A woman giving birth to her first child at age 42 faces the reality of attending high school graduation at age 60.

The 36-year-old’s recent decision to freeze her eggs, coming shortly after her split from ex-fiancé Riley Roberts, has only heightened speculation. Left-leaning commentators quickly hailed the move as a triumphant act of personal autonomy, a source of inspiration for career-minded women trying to balance climbing the ladder with the inconvenient realities of human biology.

But while Ocasio-Cortez has been canny about harnessing the attention her decision has generated, dismissing her Instagram announcement as an isolated stunt would be a mistake.

Across America, thousands of young women are making the exact same play, putting motherhood on ice to prioritize graduate credentials and promotions.

On ice

Now, a man — and a "privileged" white man in particular — critiquing women's reproductive choices inevitably invites comparisons to a hyper-liberal female columnist lecturing men on the finer points of masculinity. But there is a crucial difference. While woke gender commentary relies entirely on ideological grievance, hard biological and demographic data back up every single one of the following points.

A single egg-retrieval cycle costs anywhere between $12,000 and $20,000, with annual cryogenic storage fees adding another $1,000 or more just to keep the deep freeze running. Add in injectable hormone regimens that rack up thousands more per round, and the invoice quickly resembles a down payment on a house.

The financial gamble becomes outright predatory when weighed against the clinical evidence.

Eggs retrieved after age 35 have live-birth rates below 20% per batch. Recent studies show that 94% of women who freeze their eggs never even end up using them. In other words, many women put having a child on a mental to-do list right below traveling the world, making partner, or running for office, assuming medical technology will hold the door open indefinitely. They treat cryogenic storage as a biological safety net, paying thousands in annual storage fees for an insurance policy they will likely abandon. By the time they realize the safety net is largely psychological, the biological window has closed, leaving them with an empty nursery, a mountain of storage receipts, and a harsh lesson in the limits of corporate empowerment.

Time's up

Human biology runs on a clock, and no amount of liquid nitrogen can stop it. The medical risks associated with late-in-life pregnancies expand rapidly with every passing year. The probability of chromosomal abnormalities, including Down syndrome, rises from 1 in 1,250 for a mother at age 25 to 1 in 100 by age 40, spiking to 1 in 30 by age 45. Modern obstetrics performs modern-day miracles, but older pregnancies still carry significantly elevated rates of preeclampsia and premature deliveries.

The physiological tax continues long after leaving the delivery room. For parents entering their 50s, keeping up with energetic ankle-biters can be a torturous affair. A woman giving birth to her first child at age 42 faces the reality of attending high school graduation at age 60, rapidly approaching retirement age while simultaneously taking on university tuition bills. The prospect of ever seeing a grandchild reach adulthood becomes a statistical long shot.

National demographic stability relies on baseline replacement fertility. Specifically, it requires an average of 2.1 births per woman to maintain a functional society. In 2025, the total fertility rate in the U.S. dropped to an all-time low of 1.62 births per woman. By 2034, it is expected to fall to 1.6.

Normalizing the deferral of motherhood into a woman’s late 30s drives birth rates off a demographic cliff. Converting childbearing from a foundational milestone of young adulthood into an afterthought for middle-aged professionals is a slow-motion recipe for economic and cultural suicide.

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Double burden

For those wondering how we got here, one needn’t have an advanced degree in sociology to connect the dots. Modern feminism dismisses family life as little more than a foolish career setback. It sells women the lie that a cubicle, a stronger CV, and a performance review are inherently more fulfilling than creating a family. This same careless disregard extends to the political ideology that drove it.

During a recent interview on ABC’s "This Week," Ocasio-Cortez said, “Woke 1 was crazy,” punctuating the remark with a dismissive chuckle. She may find that era of radical activism amusing in retrospect, but the consequences were anything but funny. Innocent people lost their lives due to defunded police forces. Livelihoods vanished. Reputations were ruined. Social trust was completely incinerated. Yet now that the political winds have shifted, she stands atop the wreckage and simply laughs it off.

Just as that ideological crusade upended social norms, the cultural elevation of cryopreservation now seeks to upend basic human biology. When childbearing is delayed by 15 years, the generational bridge that historically sustained extended families begins to crumble. Grandparents who would otherwise provide vital child care and daily support in their 50s and 60s are instead in their 80s, requiring intensive care themselves just as their adult children are attempting to navigate the demands of newborn parenting.

This dynamic transforms what was once a natural, thriving family support network into a brutal double burden. Exhausted middle-aged parents in the “sandwich generation” are left caught between aging elders who need care and young children who also need care.

So for those who applaud Ocasio-Cortez, it’s worth asking what happens to America if more young women follow her lead. The uncomfortable reality is that many already are. She may yet become a mother in her 40s, but there is no guarantee she will — and many of the women now freezing their eggs may never become mothers either.

Why I'm not worried about AI 'replacing' me

I've been thinking about how often we encounter the word "premium.”

It used to mean something materially better: better leather, better denim, better craftsmanship, richer ingredients, more care. Now it usually means smoother software, cleaner interfaces, fewer inconveniences, more optimization.

I’m not particularly worried about AI replacing meaningful creative work because I suspect it may end up clarifying what creativity actually is.

But in the AI era, the meaning of the word may flip again. When flawless synthetic output becomes infinite and nearly free, reality itself starts becoming premium.

Man vs. machine

I was having lunch with a group of conservative thinkers the other day when the topic of AI came up. After a brief discussion about the impact on the workforce and the broad and possibly revolutionary effects it may bring, someone turned to me and asked how I thought it might impact my work as a writer and photographer.

I said something to the effect of the following.

I am not particularly worried about AI — at least not for myself. For others, definitely. For the world as a whole, yep. But for myself and my work? No.

Why? Because I think AI will have a strangely asymmetrical impact. The more something already resembled machine output — efficient, predictable, frictionless, synthetic — the more vulnerable it is now that actual machines can produce it at scale. But anything trying as hard as possible not to seem machine-made will become more valuable than ever.

For all the photos and videos that were overly surreal or trying to be as smooth and perfect as possible, the jig is up. AI will do it better and easier. There will be no need for glossed-up photos or videos that look unreal and appear like cheap visual candy. Eventually — and we are already seeing it — this style and whole aesthetic will be completely unwanted and thought of as one of the most egregious examples of what is now known as AI slop.

For the cheap writing with no meaning and no purpose, the words that exist only to fill the page, it’s over. It’s the same story for anyone who has spent recent years trying to perfect the art of being a human Wikipedia page without any heart or humanity. All of this stuff will be replaced by AI.

Essentially the skills that are basically humans just attempting to act like, or perform the functions of, computers will be less valuable than ever.

PASCAL PAVANI/AFP/Getty Images

Great divide

Certainly, there will be a great divide, and surely many people will continue to enjoy the AI slop. They will watch the videos on Facebook not knowing or even caring if they're computer-generated. They will listen to AI music and be content, like the driver of the cab I recently took in Italy. There will be people who actually prefer the machine-made over anything human.

But for those of us who value personality, judgment, taste, eccentricity, and genuine presence, all things human will become more valuable than ever.

In a world of infinite fake perfection, the real will become more valuable. The unedited image will become premium. A film photograph is not just an image file floating around a server farm somewhere; it is the physical residue of a real moment. Light literally struck a strip of chemical-coated film and permanently altered it. Someone had to choose the frame, press the shutter, and live with the result.

Proof of life

The faceless information-spewer is finished. Once machines can produce infinite competent text, competence itself becomes cheap. What those who care will seek out instead is the evidence of a particular consciousness. In the age of AI, the most valuable thing a creator can offer is proof that a real human being was here.

I’m not particularly worried about AI replacing meaningful creative work because I suspect it may end up clarifying what creativity actually is. It's not just the domain of painters or novelists but of anyone with the courage to put something of themselves into their work, something that resists the eerie, frictionless perfection of the AI age.

The more we are immersed in that perfection — the more inescapable it becomes — the more people will hunger for signs of actual life — that "handmade" quality of something one human creates for another.

That will be premium.

Foreign aid should offer resources, not liberal ideology

When news breaks that foreign aid programs are being paused or restructured, many Christians understandably fear the world’s most vulnerable will be left behind.

It is a fair concern. But it also raises a harder question: What if some of what we have called “help” was not helping in the way we thought?

The recent restructuring of foreign aid creates an opportunity. It allows the United States to reconsider not only how much it gives, but how it gives.

Imposed values

For decades, American foreign assistance has done real good in many places. But too often it has also come with expectations that placed struggling nations in an impossible position. Funding was tied to adopting policies on family life, sexuality, and bioethics that did not reflect the values of the communities receiving that aid. Governments that resisted those conditions risked losing support their people depended on.

From a Christian perspective, that should give us pause. Care for the poor is a moral calling. But care that requires communities to compromise their deepest convictions is not compassion. It is pressure, even if it is delivered in the language of progress.

Scripture calls us to love our neighbor, not to remake our neighbor in our own image.

Pursuing the good

That is why the Geneva Consensus Declaration matters. Today, 41 nations representing more than 2.5 billion people have joined this coalition, affirming that international law does not establish a universal right to abortion and that each country has the authority to determine its own laws on life and family.

These nations were not forced into agreement. Many joined because they were weary of outside institutions attempting to impose agenda-driven frameworks through funding conditions and international pressure. What they were seeking was not isolation, but partnership. They wanted to be treated not as projects to be managed, but as nations capable of shaping their own future.

This reflects a principle Christians should recognize. Human dignity includes moral agency. It includes the freedom of communities to pursue the good, before God, without coercion from more powerful actors.

ericmetaxas.com

The Protego framework

There is also a practical reality the United States cannot ignore. Countries like China are expanding their influence across Africa and Latin America by offering infrastructure and investment with fewer visible conditions. America's advantage lies in offering something China cannot: genuine partnership that respects the nations it serves.

In practice, that means moving from a model of control to a model of partnership.

At the Institute for Women’s Health, we have sought to do this through what we call the Protego framework. Instead of arriving with predesigned solutions, we work alongside national leaders, faith communities, and local institutions to build programs that reflect the values and needs of each country.

In one African nation, this has meant developing a national framework for health and life-skills education with input from across society, including interfaith leaders. It is designed to reach tens of thousands of educators and health workers. The program belongs to that nation. The values behind it are its own. And when the partnership ends, the capacity to sustain it will remain.

This kind of work is slower. It requires listening, humility, and trust. But it reflects something essential to a Christian understanding of service.

Human flourishing

We are not called simply to deliver outcomes. We are called to serve people as people, not as instruments of our own priorities.

Faithful foreign engagement takes seriously the dignity of every nation and every community. It refuses to make care for the vulnerable conditional on ideological agreement. It invests in what supports human flourishing, strong families, healthy communities, and the well-being of women and children, while ensuring that these efforts are shaped locally rather than imposed from outside.

The recent restructuring of foreign aid creates an opportunity. It allows the United States to reconsider not only how much it gives, but how it gives.

For Christians, the goal should not be to defend every existing program. It should be to ensure that our engagement reflects the character of the One we serve. We are called to help the vulnerable. But faithful service cannot be separated from humility, respect, and truth about the human person.

I want to like our Kindle, but I'm hopelessly addicted to real books

The Amazon Kindle was released on November 19, 2007. A little tablet full of countless books you can take with you anywhere — it was a cool idea then, and I suppose it’s still a cool idea now. Over the years there have been a bunch of new versions. Amazon updated theirs, and other companies have released their own versions of what is now known as an e-reader.

My wife’s got one. She just bought it a few months ago. She wanted it because she was sick of looking at her phone when nursing our daughter in the middle of the night. It’s worked well. She hasn’t been scrolling; she’s been reading instead.

Sometimes I like thinking about my kids coming across my books when I’m old or dead and gone and finding these little things I’ve written.

I’ve held hers and played with it a little. It’s very cool, and I want to like it. I want to load one up with lots of books, read it on the airplane or right before I drift off after midnight with all the lights off in the bedroom, and join the future with all other fellow e-readers (the people, not the object).

But I just can’t; I like books too much.

Judging covers

I like the way the real pages feel on the pads of my fingers. I like how it sounds when I flip the page. I like to fold back the edge and mark my spot. There’s something about the smell too, especially the old books. You know that smell, don’t you? If you put your nose near the inside of the binding and sniff, you will get it. It’s the faint scent of a college library and an old house.

I love the covers of paperbacks and how they change over the years as new editions are released. I most particularly love the old(ish) ones most. I can always pinpoint the decade based on the fonts and colors. It’s funny how deeply infused a book is with the aesthetic sensibilities of the decade in which it was printed and just how easy it is to discern when one was released.

The 60s were simple and modern. The 70s had loopy fonts with lots of brown, greens, and yellows. The 80s were colorful with floral patterns, some neon, and sharp lines. The 90s were classy and simple with understated serifs and an air of sophistication.

Paperback delighter

One of my favorite things to do is lie in the hammock on a Saturday afternoon reading. A small, flimsy paperback in my right hand, two fingers on the inside holding the pages open, and three others on the outside for support. The summer breeze, the leaves on the birch above, the ropes of the hammock on my back, and a little paperback.

I love to write in my books too, mostly the more intellectual ones. I underline sentences, bracket paragraphs of importance, and write things in the margins. They are things I want to remember. Even if I don’t know when I will come back to the book again, I want to make a note in the event I do. Sometimes I like thinking about my kids coming across my books when I’m old or dead and gone and finding these little things I’ve written. Maybe they will want to read what I wrote; maybe they won’t.

I’ve heard that we don’t remember words we read on the screen as much as words we read on a page. I don’t know the science behind it, but I feel like it’s true — or at least it is for me and my wife. I asked her what she thought as a newly minted e-reader enjoyer, and she said she agrees. She said it feels like she remembers ever so slightly less. Like it doesn’t stick quite as much or like it just doesn’t go deep enough into her brain.

Slightly foxed

The books on the e-reader remain perfect forever. They look the exact same on every single device. In the event the device falls in the lake, you might be out $200, but soon enough you’ll have a new one, and all 500 books will appear on that little screen just as they were before.

Real books don’t stay perfect for very long. The pages get bent, the binding gets broken, the margins are full of ink, and the edges of the pages yellow as the years pass. The more we read a book, the more we know a book, and the more beaten a book becomes. Old floppy paperbacks that look like they’ve been through a war are coveted in the same way leather bags with beautiful patina are.

I want to like the e-reader. I want to join the future. I would feel so futuristic and so efficient with one in my hand. But I can’t, and I won’t. I like the physicality of books too much. I like the wear they have; I like the time they show; I like the fact they tell a story of who and where we were when we read them.

When your 'rich' neighbor can't afford furniture

Would you ever spend so much on a house that you had no money left to furnish it?

It sounds absurd to me, as I imagine it does to you. But apparently, it's fairly common these days. I don't personally know anyone like this, but I do know enough people who are house poor that the extreme version seems at least plausible.

Financial overextension is, in one sense, a numbers problem. But it’s also something deeper.

Especially since we don’t see inside most homes. We drive by a place with six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and a five-car garage and assume wealth. We assume comfort. We assume it’s all filled in.

Chairs optional

That assumption is increasingly outdated. A big house doesn’t necessarily mean someone can afford it. It just means they’re willing — or able — to make the monthly payment. Everything else is optional.

That’s not entirely new. Mortgages have been around forever. But the willingness to stretch to the absolute limit — and beyond — does feel more common now than it used to.

You could point to low interest rates or lending practices. That’s part of the story. But I’m less interested in the financial mechanics than the cultural impulse behind it. Why do people feel the need to live this way?

Here comes the neighborhood

The obvious answer is keeping up with the Joneses. But even that has changed. It used to mean keeping pace with your neighbors, the people down the street. And even then, there was only so much of their lives you could see. There were natural limits.

Social media has erased those limits; now we all share one big neighborhood, in which everyone is empowered and encouraged to exaggerate their affluence. And that makes it much harder to remember what normal actually looks like.

Realism isn’t what’s rewarded on Instagram, TikTok, or X. Performative realism, maybe. But not the real thing. Spend enough time scrolling and you start to believe that everyone has the renovated kitchen, the extra cars, the perfect bathrooms. You start to feel like you’re behind.

So people stretch. They buy the house. They take on the payment. They tell themselves they’ll figure out the rest later. And in doing so, they become the next set of Joneses for someone else to chase.

Ed Jones/Getty Images

Empty rooms, empty souls

Once you’re on that treadmill, it’s hard to get off. You work more to afford more. You feel stressed because you’re always one setback away from trouble. You justify new purchases because you’ve “earned” them. And any attempt to scale back feels like failure — like slipping backward.

Keep that up long enough and you can end up in a strange place: the proud owner of a house you can’t really afford, with rooms you can’t afford to fill.

But from the outside, it looks great.

At bottom, this is materialism run wild — an inversion of priorities. Things elevated beyond their proper place. Consumption standing in for meaning. And it’s widespread enough that it’s hard to single anyone out for it.

There’s no simple fix at a societal level. But on a personal level, the starting point is obvious: Take an honest look at what you’re spending, why you’re spending it, and whether it’s actually making your life better — or just making it look better.

That’s not new wisdom. Most of our grandparents understood it.

Financial overextension is, in one sense, a numbers problem. But it’s also something deeper. A sign that our values are out of order. That we’ve lost track of what actually matters.

The empty, oversized house is a fitting image for the culture that produces it.

Big and impressive on the surface. Empty inside.

Ode to a 1984 Buick Skylark — and to all the other cars of my life

America is a nation of cars.

Those hunks of metal on four rubber tires are our lifelines. They are how we go to work, go home, go out to eat, go on vacation, and go just about everywhere and anywhere. When we are just a few days old, we come home from the hospital in one, and on our way out, we head to the grave in a hearse.

I bought it for $450 from a friend who was moving to New York City. It was cream with a plush, brown interior.

From birth to death; we live in cars.

We love our cars when they work for us, and we hate them when they don’t. We curse them when they break down, when they don’t start, and when they demand $2,750 for a new computer chip just to get running again.

We even mourn them when they break down once and for all — no matter how much grief they've caused us. We become attached to our cars because of course we do. For Americans, they are an inextricable part of life.

1978 Oldsmobile Starfire

And of our history. Cars transport us through space, but also through time — to certain chapters in our lives. A car is a physical reminder of who we were behind that particular wheel.

I remember my first car like we all remember our first car. It’s the first time you are free like an adult even though you are not an adult. You are still very much a stupid kid, but you don’t feel like one in the driver's seat.

Mine was a 1978 Oldsmobile Starfire. It was light blue, and it was my grandpa’s before it was mine. He “sold” it to me for $1. I loved that car. I felt like I was in an old movie when I was driving down the road. I loved looking at it parked. I loved thinking about the fact it was mine. It was so cool, so retro, so rear-wheel drive, so bad in the rain. One morning on the way to school, I drove it off the road and into a ditch, and that was the end of the Starfire.

1993 Plymouth Voyager

My next car was really my parents’ car, and it wasn’t a car; it was a van. They let me use it pretty much whenever I wanted to. It was a white 1993 Plymouth Voyager. The sliding door was full of sand and barely moved. The crank windows weren’t working so great. There was an MP3 player plugged into a tape adapter shoved into the tape deck on the dashboard.

That van is my senior year of high school. I remember driving with my girlfriend to a crappy Chinese restaurant about 40 miles south just for something to do with a pretty girl I liked. We did that a lot. I got two tickets speeding back from her house late at night in that van.

1984 Buick Skylark

After the Voyager, I drove a 1984 Buick Skylark. I bought it for $450 from a friend who was moving to New York City. It was cream with a plush, brown interior. I don’t even know how many miles it had on it, I just knew that it ran, and it ran good.

I drove that thing all over. Up north, over to Detroit, down to Chicago, out to Wisconsin. It had a cigarette lighter and ashtrays. I remember smoking American Spirits in a yellow pack in that car. Driving with the windows down in the summer and slipping around the road in the winter.

The Skylark was my college car. It was an "old" car then, but now it's ancient: 1984 was 42 years ago. I suppose that makes me ancient too.

Four years after I bought the Skylark, I sold her to my brother for $300 and moved to Chicago. I didn’t have a car for almost a decade. I didn’t need one there, and I didn’t need one when I was overseas.

2007 Volvo XC90

The next car I bought was with that old high school girlfriend, now my wife. Right after we got married, we left the city, and so we bought a 2007 Volvo XC90 with about 120,000 miles on it. It cost us $3,600, which we borrowed from my wife’s grandparents. We paid them back over the next year.

We didn’t have the Volvo for too long; it broke down a couple years later. But it was a beast of a car and the first thing we owned together. Thinking about it now, the XC90 was kind of a symbolic introduction to married life. It wasn’t my car; it was our car.

RELATED: My grandpa’s old desk

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2009 Volvo S70

After the XC90 was a 2009 Volvo S70. It was a fine car, and it was the car in which our son came home from the hospital. That car was us three. First-time parents, firstborn son. That first year with your first kid is special, and that car was where it happened.

The S70 was a little weird. It wouldn’t start if it was colder than 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside. You would think a car from Sweden would be able to handle the cold, but it couldn't. I had to hook it up to a starter that plugged into the wall and juice the battery for 30 minutes if we needed to start it when it was cold.

Our last trip in that car was our trip to the hospital when my wife was in labor and about to give birth to our daughter. In the middle of the night, I drove my wife and our son through a snowstorm to the hospital. We hit a massive piece of ice flying off a plow, the car eventually overheated, and the S70 died on the side of the road somewhere in Northern Michigan at about 4:30 a.m.

My wife took an ambulance to the hospital, my son and I took a cop car behind her, and the Volvo took a tow truck to the scrapyard.

2017 Honda HR-V

A few days later, we got a Honda HR-V from my wife’s then-92-year-old grandmother. She never drove it, and she didn’t need it, so she gave it to us, and it’s been our car ever since. I don’t know how much longer we will have the HR-V. Maybe 10 years, maybe one year. We’ve got three kids in there now, and it can’t take any more. One day, maybe we will be lucky enough to upgrade to an SUV with another row. We’ll see.

I can already tell how we will remember the HR-V. I already know the chapter it will define for us. We will say it was our first real family car, our car when we added two kids and grew a lot in quite a few ways. Our lives have become much better in that car. We’ve experienced some bad stuff in it but much more good on the whole. We grew, that’s for sure. It’s a good car now, and someday we hope to remember it as a great car.

It sounds funny to mark our time by our cars. But the more I think about it, the more I think it’s as good a way as any to divide up our time here.

Cars: the things that take us wherever we go.

Why 3 kids are easier than 1

Two of our kids went to visit my parents a couple days ago, so my wife and I are home with just our youngest for a few nights. It’s strange. It kind of feels like it felt when we only had our first. It’s so quiet, so insanely quiet.

In fact, I’m laughing as I write this thinking about just how quiet it is compared to normal (read as: insane) daily life. Babies cry and all, but the truth is once you have older ones, you realize that those little cries and protests are really just cute and kind of pitiful, even if they seem furious.

There is something vital in us that seeks out friction and new horizons, physical and mental.

But of course, they don’t feel like that at the time when you are new to everything with your first kid.

Cry babies

I remember one time, probably two or three days after we left the hospital with our son, we called the 24-hour nurse line because we were concerned he might hurt himself from crying so much. She very kindly assured us that everything was fine and that we shouldn’t worry about him hurting himself due to crying.

My wife and I think about that story probably every six months or so. We laugh so hard about how little we knew, how nervous we were, and how loud those weak, little screams from a 5-day-old mouth must have felt to our uninitiated ears. We weren’t used to crying, we weren’t used to holding a little human screaming his hardest. We genuinely thought he might blow a blood vessel or something.

Now it’s different. When our 5-month-old cries, we aren’t particularly disturbed or shocked. It’s just what they do. We know the kinds of cries (my wife better than I), and it’s just not a big deal. They aren’t even loud, or at least not compared to the cries from a 2-year-old in the throes of an illogical tantrum.

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0 to 1

It felt so hard when we only had our son six years ago. That leap from zero to one is a big one. Up until that point, you have basically spent your life being selfish. In your quiet, organized, little apartment where nothing is moved unless you move it, where no one screams for no reason, and where you actually have time to relax, life is very easy. So that leap with your first is big, and the chaos feels like a lot.

But now? This brief return to life as a family of three feels like a vacation. There are no messes unless my wife or I make them. I don’t have to admonish someone every 10 minutes for not doing what they should be doing. I can get so much done, we have so much extra time, and everything is so quiet.

It’s funny how easy that thing that seemed so hard feels now. As we have more kids, we adapt to more chaotic circumstances. We are able to take on more stuff. We are able to manage more people. Our love expands, and so does our bandwidth.

The thing is, we don’t feel it happening when it’s happening. The stress keeps right up, following a straight line so we don’t realize we are becoming more competent, and it isn’t until we are able to visit ourselves in our prior situation for a few days that we are able to really see how far we have come.

Sink or swim

This phenomenon doesn’t only apply to raising a family. It applies to our work, our adventures, and all of everything we do. We adapt to our environment, rise to the occasion, and our capacities expand when needed. If we stop, look back at our lives, and really think about how we have grown, we see that often we’ve grown the most when we have been forced to.

We grow when we take on things we don’t think we can handle. We don’t know how we are going to do it — whatever it is — but we jump in, do it, and two years later, it’s just what we consider to be normal, and we are ready again for a new challenge. There is something vital in us that seeks out friction and new horizons, physical and mental. And so we keep doing that over and over again throughout our lives, and we keep getting stronger and more capable as the years pass, even if we still feel kind of like we don’t know anything at all.

It’s possible to try to avoid struggle and the growth that comes with it. It’s possible to try to take the easy way out. But life finds a way of demanding more of us. Whether we like it or not, we are thrown overboard and told to swim, and more often than not, we find that we can swim quite well.

Why we're saying no to the cult of travel sports

On any given Tuesday afternoon, there are thousands of parents rushing out the door in a panic, corralling their kids into the car, frantically battling their way through traffic, picking up something cheap to eat because there’s no time for anything else, nearly crashing as they try to shave a few minutes off because you can’t be late, for God’s sake, and then finally dropping their kid off at the sports center for travel soccer practice.

On the weekends, they are driving four hours for tournaments, staying in hotels every Saturday night, and spending thousands of dollars every year devoting their lives to the wide and ever-expanding world of travel sports.

What does it do to your family if you aren’t ever eating dinner together?

Have you noticed any of this? Have you heard of any of this? Well, I hope you haven’t, but you probably have. Travel sports are a big thing these days, and they seem to get bigger every year. Soccer, baseball, hockey, volleyball: Whatever the game, the phenomenon is the same.

Soccer monster

When I was young, travel sports weren’t such a big thing. I know they existed somewhere, but I don’t think I knew anyone personally who did them. My wife knew someone who did travel hockey, but that was it. Back in those days, travel sports were rare, and it seemed that the only people who did them were people who were extraordinarily “into” sports. Now travel sports are everywhere, more kids are in them, and they are more consuming than ever before.

I know a woman who admits that the only reason she works is to fund her son’s travel soccer habit. She’s joking a little, but only a little. Every week she is buying new gear, shopping for more accoutrements, booking hotels for the whole weekend, exploring other travel leagues that might be better, and generally devoting a large portion of her life to travel sports.

The travel soccer her son is in runs all year and costs around $10,000. That doesn’t include any of the travel expenses or hotels. At the end of any given year, their travel soccer bill could easily be a tidy $25,000. She says they almost never eat at home, which makes sense. On the weekdays she is carting her son to travel soccer; on the weekends they are staying in hotels.

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Fare play

Sure, it’s not for everybody, but what’s the big deal about spending a couple of hours on the freeway every weekend? That’s what I used to think. Then I learned that it’s not uncommon for parents to fly with their kids to various tournaments around the country. That’s how deep the travel sports addiction can get. I was shocked.

It would be one thing, I suppose, if only the truly exceptional young athletes were caught up in this — the 0.000000001% destined to become pros or compete in the Olympics. But these are average kids we’re talking about, kids who will most likely never play their chosen sport beyond high school.

I’m not a sports hater. Sports are good for kids. I grew up doing sports in the summer and after school in the spring and fall. My kids do baseball, soccer, and tennis. But they aren’t traveling anywhere to play these sports, nor will they be. And we have more important things to spend money on than a $25,000 travel soccer bill.

The problem with travel sports isn’t the sports. It’s the travel. And it’s the travel that’s such a problem because it’s that which results in life being completely subsumed by practices, tournaments, and all things travel sports. And the problem with all things being subsumed by travel sports is that you don’t have time for anything else, and you lose track of what actually matters.

Time out

What does it do to your family if you aren’t ever eating dinner together? What does it do to your kid — their sense of purpose and their perception of their role as a child — if all you do is cart them around like a dutiful chauffeur? And what about their spiritual development? If you are traveling every weekend for travel sports, you certainly won’t be attending synagogue on Saturday or church on Sunday. How do you teach your kids about values or faith if you never make time for them? Well, you can’t.

Lastly, what about culture? What do travel sports say about the state of our society and what we value? Sure, without question, travel sports are a lot better than smoking weed, being a general menace, or sitting on your butt all day doing nothing. But are those really the only options?

They can’t be.

How do families remain families — close families — in an era of over-scheduled kids, over-worked parents, and in a world that seems intent on drawing us apart and off into things that don’t really matter? It’s a big question, and each family has their own answer. But whatever the answer is for whoever you are, travel sports are probably not it.