Dogs. They're everywhere.

Stores, cars, restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, airports, and airplanes. Our world has been taken over by the K9s.

Banning dogs from certain places is now seen as 'exclusionary.' According pets human status — behavior once limited to the eccentric rich — is now everybody's prerogative.

Places previously reserved only for those who walk on two feet and upright are now open to all species. No beast is barred from the dairy aisle, no hound is left out in the cold.

I know it’s hard to believe, but it wasn’t like this until very recently.

Planet of the fur babies

Dog culture as we know it today was virtually unheard of when I was a kid. Traditionally, the only people who exemplified any kind of behavior resembling the “fur baby parent” of today were old, frail ladies who developed inordinately strong attachments to those little rat dogs with curly hair and an annoying yapping bark.

That archetype was goofy. That’s the other thing to remember. The old dog lady archetype was viewed as kind of silly. She wasn’t valorized, she was kind of made fun of, she was seen as odd.

Up until just a few years ago, dogs were never in stores. You didn’t see them inside the market, gas station, department store, or Home Depot. It simply didn’t exist.

Photo by Xavier ROSSI/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Blind item

The only exception was a seeing eye dog accompanying a blind person, but even that was so rare that when it did happen, it was kind of cool.

I remember sort of standing back and watching, stupefied, feeling like I shouldn’t make any noises so as not to distract the dog. It was serious business. The dog was there for a purpose, and its purpose was to serve its master. That was, of course, the traditional purpose of dogs.

Dogs in restaurants were also, obviously, not a thing. Go back to the year 2000 and tell someone that in 25 years they will be sitting down to lunch in a cafe, eating a Caesar salad with a labradoodle to their left and a golden retriever to their right. Tell them that people will increasingly bring their dogs on airplanes, claiming they “need” them for “emotional support.”

This sweet, naive soul from Y2K might develop serious questions about the future and what went wrong.

Dog years

It’s important to remember what things were like. If we can’t remember what things were like, we are unable to accurately understand what it is that we are living in now. If we retcon the past, wiping our memories so we can live in a state or pure present where nothing ever gets better or worse, we are unable to grasp any broader trajectories of life, society, or culture.

But people don't like to be reminded of the fact that things were not always this way. They will resist admitting it. They will lash out if you remind them of it. They will find absurd edge-case exceptions to the truth in an attempt to convince themselves that things have always been this way.

It’s a fascinating phenomenon and a root cause of the inability to understand our culture and society. If you are convinced everything has always been this way, then any critique of the current reality feels like a critique of all reality, and instead of being anything insightful worthy of consideration, any critique can simply be dismissed as being overly negative.

Survival of the dimmest

Part of the reason people don’t want to be reminded of the fact that things were not always this way is because if they do realize things have changed, and are able to accurately judge the development of culture, they are more likely to correctly assess the negative developments and more likely to end up depressed about the current situation.

Image source: Pueblo County (Colorado) Sheriff's Office

Are they somehow anticipating this without realizing they are doing it? Is there some kind of purpose to not being able to remember the past? Is there some preternatural in-born resistance? Maybe most can’t handle the possibility that things are getting worse so there is something in us that basically tells us not to think about it too much. Maybe it is some strange ignorance, a bliss survival instinct.

In dog we trust?

Perhaps, it’s because dog culture is part of the new religion of our time, and the thing about religions is they are supposed to be eternally true, so if we can remember a time when none of this dog stuff was a thing, it casts some kind of doubt on the validity of this new secular religion.

Or even worse, if people can remember a time when they specifically weren’t into the dog stuff, or maybe even made fun of the dog stuff, they will do everything in their power to forget all about it and pretend they and everyone else were always the way they are right now.

People may also just be ashamed of the fact that our society has morphed into a society of frail, old, kooky dog ladies. If they have any sense of shame, they might just be embarrassed about this fact, and they might just try to forget how bad it is. Deflect, ignore, deny.

Whatever the reason may be, many people do not like to be reminded of the fact that things were not always this way.

An unhealthy trajectory

Is dog culture the worst thing in the world? No. But it isn’t a sign of a healthy trajectory. It’s a sign that something is off.

Banning dogs from certain places is now seen as “exclusionary." According pets human status — behavior once limited to the eccentric rich — is now everybody's prerogative.

That’s the new religion.

Our society no longer believes in the old hierarchy of man and animals. The beasts are now elevated to the place of man. That’s actually what’s happening beneath the surface, and it’s disordered. Somewhere, deep inside, people feel that, and they don’t want to be reminded of it because they know it’s wrong. At the very bottom, that’s why people don’t like to remember it wasn't always like this.

When did America's public libraries become homeless encampments?

What happened to libraries?

No, I’m not talking about school libraries being turned into propaganda factories, shelving what amounts to textual pornography for middle school students, all justified under the guise of “inclusivity.” That’s a discussion for another time.

One December, as my wife left the library, a homeless man spit across the stairs onto the back of her dress. She turned around to find him quite satisfied with himself.

I am talking about the fact that across the United States, a tragic number of public libraries have turned into daytime homeless shelters and temporary asylums for the mentally ill, the insane, and generally disturbed.

Furious George

Go to any public library in any big city, and you will see a security guard slowly patrolling the quiet floor. Every once in a while he wakes up a bum up who’s sleeping on a bench behind the periodicals.

“No sleeping,” he mumbles as he nudges the drowsy man. Unkempt and disturbed homeless men in their 50s hunch over the computers while mothers pull their 3-year-olds close, hurrying past on their way to the children’s section.

Hanging around, right inside the lobby in the winter, the insane argue as a fight is about to break out. You walk by, head lowered, hoping to get inside without attracting any attention.

Great expectorations

Years ago my wife and I lived in Milwaukee. The library there was like any city’s library. A big, beautiful building right downtown full of books — and vagrants. So many of these old city libraries are so structurally stunning, and there is something darkly poetic in this. These grand buildings, built at a different time, a higher time, now lower than ever.

The bricks are the same, but their purpose has been degraded. One December, as my wife was leaving, a homeless man spit across the stairs onto the back of her dress. She turned around to find him quite satisfied with himself. This is the current state of these once-great testaments to literacy.

There may be no greater metaphor for our collapsing society than the demise of the library. Before everyone had money to buy the books they want, the library was a lifeline. Before the internet and before everyone had a telephone in their homes, the library was an oasis of knowledge. In the desert of the new world, the library was a miraculous thing. It was a symbol of civilization itself.

Goodnight, literacy

Today, however, people don’t read. They can, I think. But they don’t, that’s for sure.

They watch TikTok and rot their brains consuming gutter slop content. The majority of the population no longer desire the library like they once did. They, of course, still need the library, but they don’t want the library. This is another part of the story that is the demise of the library. The people are degenerating.

Of course, some people still read. I read, you read, we all read here. What are you doing right now, after all? But many of us buy our books. Personally, I end up buying books so I can support the author and own the book myself.

Often the books that I end up buying are a little off the beaten path, so they won’t be found in the library. Though I do use the library for a host of more general research purposes. Nevertheless, I know I am not the norm and neither are you. People don’t read.

Do people refrain from reading because of the homeless in the library? Probably not. People don’t read because people are getting dumber and their attention spans are fried.

Crime and... crime

But there is a certain percentage of people who visit the library less because of the general anarcho-tyranny of the situation inside. My wife stopped visiting the library after she got spit on. I stopped after being worn down by the generally depressing scene of disheveled men sleeping next to the nonfiction.

The homeless invasion of the library is a tragic example of a society that no longer has the will to keep order as it ought to be kept. The reason vagrants populate the library is the same reason cities tolerate shoplifting and general disorder. The institutions responsible for keeping order and maintaining a decent public space are too cowardly to do so. They sacrifice the rights of the upstanding citizen for the sake of the dysfunctional and disturbed.

You might think that this all sounds too harsh. One might protest, “Homeless people have a right to be at the library too!” Well, to a degree, they do. But vagrancy is a thing, and we all know what it is.

A farewell to harms

There was a time when our public spaces were kept more orderly. When those disturbing the peace were told to move along and if they didn’t go on their own, they were made to go. The homeless have rights, but so does everyone else. Public spaces deserve to be orderly, and if our government and institutions can’t ensure that, then they are failing.

There is a bigger question running like a thread through all this. Is it humane to turn the insane loose on the streets? For a while people were institutionalized; that was our solution. But then we stopped, and for the past few decades or so we’ve thought the best option was letting people go free, even if they end up harming themselves or others.

Which way is the right way? That’s a big question. I don’t know what the exact answer is. I’m not sure there’s a solution that makes us all feel good. But what I do know is that the scene of mentally ill homeless people disturbing everyone else and turning the public library into a homeless shelter is an acute example of societal dysfunction and degeneration.

There is something dark, depressing, and poignant about the scene of the city library today. This place where people used to learn before they fried their brains is now a homeless shelter.

We're all 'too busy' to eat dinner as a family — but we should do it anyway

What does it mean to eat dinner together as a family?

Why do we do it? Or rather, why did we do it? It seems the number of families who eat dinner together every night is shrinking.

I remember that if the phone rang during that time, my parents would look at one another shocked. 'Who would be calling during dinner?'

It feels like every year it becomes more rare. The image of a mother, father, and a couple kids sitting around a table, full plates in front of them and a few serving dishes in the middle, is becoming an old-fashioned image in our day and age.

Today, families are too busy to have dinner together. Too much work, too many obligations, too many schedules.

Dad has meetings, mom has to go to the gym, the kids have practice, dinner will have to wait.

Grab and go

A house today is more a place for atomized individuals to rest their heads at night before heading out and on their way every morning. It’s more a hostel and less a home. Breakfast out the door, lunch on the go, dinner on your own.

What kind of family life is this?

In the preindustrial world, families saw a lot of one another. Life wasn’t a fairy tale back then, times were tough, I am not sure people were always so chipper or joyful, but families did spend a lot of time together. That’s just how it was.

Life in the modern world, on the other hand, is hectic. Today, families are pulled apart by the chaos of modern life: the activities that never stop, the nagging sense that we might be able to “have it all.”

An antidote to atomization

For a while in the 20th century, families coped with the fracturing chaos of modern life by eating dinner together every night. It was a standard thing. All across American society, families ate dinner together.

Not just on Sunday or Saturday. Every night. Practices, classes, and rehearsals were scheduled around dinner. People weren’t forced to choose between dinner and some prescheduled activity or obligation.

Even deep into the '90s, there was a sense that you shouldn’t call anyone between 6:30 and 8:30 in the evening. That was when people ate dinner. There was an assumption everyone was eating with their families. I remember that if the phone rang during that time, my parents would look at one another shocked.

“Who would be calling during dinner?”

Dinner was the final sacred realm. The last untouched territory. Everyone might be out on their own all day, but at 6:00, everyone came back together as a family again.

Kids would tell one another, “I’ve got to go, I have to be back for dinner.” The street was quieter at those times. The world slowed for a couple hours. For the sanctity of dinner, the sanctity of family.

This is gone today. That societal detente has been eroded. Dinner is no longer respected.

Making dinner matter again

Now, parents eat separately because it’s easier. Kids eat on the bus on the way back from the volleyball tournament. Families go out to eat, and they all sit around the table scrolling their iPhones not saying a single word to one another. Today, for most, dinner doesn’t matter.

But it can. Even though society tries to fracture the family in 100 ways, we don’t have to go along with it. We still have free will. We can choose a different way. We can still come together as a family for dinner every single night.

That’s what we do in our family. We don’t watch TV during dinner, we don’t look at our phones during dinner, we don’t have separate dinners for mom and dad. We all sit down together every night.

The freedom of obligation

It’s not always easy. It’s hard with little kids. Every parent knows that. The messes, the cajoling, trying to teach manners while eating at the same time. Often, it’s not exactly a relaxing vibe.

It would be so much easier to throw something together for the kids, sit them at the table, then go in the other room and scroll the timeline on my phone. It would be so much easier to not block off that time every night. I would have more freedom if we didn’t eat dinner together. But I would be missing something important. I would be missing dinner together.

Our culture is what we do. Eating dinner together is a part of our culture. Eating dinner every night with no other distractions is good. Even when it’s bad, it’s good.

It’s not about grand meals or perfectly prepared dishes. It’s about something deeper. Eating dinner together is about coming back together at the end of the day, sitting around the table, and looking at each other in the eye — remembering that we are a family, thanking God for the food in front of us and also for those around us.

That’s what eating dinner as a family is about.

I never talk to liberals. Every so often I need to remind myself why.

I never talk to liberals.

That may be a bit of an exaggeration. I do talk to liberals. I know extended family members who are liberals. I go to the store, and I am sure some of the people I talk with are liberals.

I genuinely forget that there are people who still believe in 'the wage gap.' It’s insane.

But I don’t talk politics with liberals. I don’t work with liberals. I don’t suffer under a deranged HR regime whose raison d’être is making sure no employee even considers thinking some politically subversive thought that may, God forbid, go against prevailing liberal orthodoxy.

A quiet place

I live in a nice little town on Lake Michigan and it’s about 50% liberal, but they aren’t really so crazy or kooky. They are fine. People in this area of the state are pretty polite, so these liberals are just other people on the street. They aren’t in my face. I don’t live my life under a liberal framework, muzzling my every thought so I don’t offend the people around me.

I’ve been on the right almost my entire adult life. I don’t have a secret political identity that I need to guard so that I am not socially ostracized or left without a job. My kids are homeschooled, so we aren’t forced to interface with the general population or current brainwashing program of a public school. I’m just not really around liberals that much. I spend my days basking enjoyably in the conservative discourse. It’s very nice.

I live and work in the conservative world. All the debates I am involved with are intra-conservative ones. All the intellectual work I do in my mind is under the presumption of a conservative worldview. All the critique I feel or find myself discussing with others is critique of our own side. They are questions we are working out together so that we can be stronger. Intellectual teamwork. The liberals are just “the other side” or “those people over there,” and I don’t really devote any of my time considering what they are doing.

Picking my battles

I have to say my isolation from liberals has a positive impact on my mental health. It’s not only because I don’t have to deal with navigating the ever-changing labyrinth that is the progressive code of right and wrong. It’s because all my professional and personal efforts go toward helping strengthen our side. I don’t waste any intellectual firepower engaging with lost causes. It’s enriching to know your work builds.

While it’s very nice and I would never trade my position with anyone, I am certainly not champing at the bit to swim in the waters of modern liberalism. I am aware that I have some emotional blind spots due to my professional isolation from liberals.

Reality checks

Sometimes I forget just how insane things are over there. I genuinely forget that there are people who still believe in “the wage gap.” It’s insane. Every once in a while I will wade into the waters or hear a story, and it smacks me in the face.

“Wait, are you kidding me? These people really believe this? They really do?”

“Oh yeah, they do.”

I forget just how widespread the insane delusions are over there. I lose sight of just how deep the far-left creep has penetrated.

Of course I know it intellectually, but I don’t feel it. I can tell that sometimes in the back of my mind, I am referring to my conservative Democrat parents of 2003 and thinking they are somehow representative of anyone over there in the current era. But I know it’s delusional. In reality, my conservative parents of 2003 are more like staunch social conservatives of 2025.

This is what happens when you are far away from something. When you are isolated, you forget how things really are. It’s related to the same impulse we have to forget the bad memories but remember the good ones. I know that I suffer from this forgetfulness due to my glorious distance from the hysterical liberal framework.

Belly of the beast

I realize that my distance from liberals has softened my emotional response to them somewhere in my mind. I often find myself thinking about them — the opposition — in purely intellectual terms. I think of them earning a C- in class rather than a big, fat F. Or maybe they are like some distant tribe in the Amazon rainforest with strange and disturbing ways that aren’t compatible with our civilization. I enjoy the comfort of intellectual distance.

But then I inevitably have a wretched face-to-face encounter with 2025 liberalism, and my calm, zen-like attitude evaporates. I feel a surge of emotions; suddenly I'm disgusted, irritated, and angry. This is what people deal with every single day at work and every single day on the street. No wonder people are so angry all the time. I would be too.

I don’t even know how perpetually angry I would be if I had to deal with degenerating 2025 liberalism all the time.

It’s really interesting how distance obfuscates truth. How my isolation from liberals is great for my general outlook yet also threatens to delude me into a softer emotional response. I’m not eager to surround myself with liberals, trying to convince people who have no desire to be convinced. I’m going to stay right here in the heart of the right, working to make our side stronger. But maybe every once in a while I need to venture out into the belly of the beast just to remind myself how bad things really are and how miserable it must be to be a liberal in 2025.

“There but for the grace of God go I.”

Lessons from the ice storm

I live way up in Northern Michigan. Not quite the Upper Peninsula but almost. Closer to Canada than Detroit, in what many would call the “middle of nowhere.”

We get a ton of snow storms — 125 inches of snow per year is the average. Weekends of 18 inches falling from the sky aren’t really that uncommon. “It snows every single day up there,” in the words of my father.

It was smart to trust our guts and leave when we did. In our modern world, we tend not to listen to our instincts. We think we are too smart for them.

But we don’t get too many ice storms. The temperature doesn’t tend to hang out around 32, accommodating the wicked mix of rain and sleet required to create any meaningful ice problems.

Frozen, creaking, snapping

Last weekend was different. The whole northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula was decimated by the worst ice storm we had seen in over a century. Everything shut down. Everywhere lost power. The streetlights were black. Gas stations unable to pump. Towns completely dark. Electrical substations were out of commission, hundreds of electrical poles had collapsed.

We lost power Saturday night at around 8 p.m. We assumed the lights would be back on in a few hours.

We were wrong. In the middle of the night, lying in bed, we listened to the frozen trees outside our window. The wind blew, and thousands of little cracks echoed in the air. The ice-covered branches sounded like mini machine guns rippling over our roof. Every once in a while, we heard a creak, a violent snap, followed by a low thud rattling the house.

It was eerie, lying there in the quiet, waiting for the next snap, wondering if one of the great trees in the back would end up coming down right through our roof.

The wind wasn’t terribly loud. There was no howling, only cracking. Being aware of the fact that the entire region was dark when viewed from outer space made those moments in bed that night all the more ominous. The whole wooded land dark, frozen, creaking, cracking, snapping.

Time to go

By noon the next day, things seemed to be getting worse. More branches came down, taking electrical wires with them. The electricity wasn’t coming back soon. We decided there was no reason to sit around and wait. We decided to pack up the kids and the $500 worth of meat in our chest freezer and head four hours south to stay with family in West Michigan.

With just under half a tank of gas, we needed to find a station as soon as possible. We found a Mobil with power in Boyne Falls. A line of cars stretched out of the parking lot. After 10 minutes, a worker came and told us they were out of gas.

We bought some ice inside, packed the coolers of meat full, and got back on the road. Fifteen miles farther south, in Alba, we found another station with power. This time they had gas. With a full tank and coolers full of ice, we were on our way.

Our neighbors stayed. They kept us updated with texts over the next few days. We told them to go over and raid our pantry, use our towels, and take anything they needed.

The great birch

Our power finally came back on Wednesday night, four days after it went out. Many suffered incredible damage. There are some in the country who still don’t have power. Thankfully, our house is relatively fine, though the great birch in the back is destroyed, and the maple lost some big branches, too.

With everything in life, there is always something to learn. Some lesson, some insight, some reflection. The smartest thing we did was leave when we thought we should leave. Four days without power isn’t a Herculean test, but it isn’t enjoyable when you are in the middle of an ice storm in the middle of nowhere. No one would really choose to do it.

I’m a workaholic. I’ve got too many deadlines and too many projects. If we would have stayed, I wouldn’t have gotten any work done. In addition to being out $500 dollars worth of meat, I would also be catching up for the next two weeks. Staying would have only made things worse for everyone.

It was smart to trust our guts and leave when we did. In our modern world, we tend not to listen to our instincts. We think we are too smart for them. They seem like hocus pocus when compared against the spreadsheet. We explain them away as being irrational or illogical. And of course, sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren’t.

This time, they weren’t.

Fragile systems

It’s incredible how fragile our modern systems are. We need electricity to do our work. We need electricity to keep our food fresh. We need electricity to call on the phone. We need electricity to get our gas. We need electricity to go anywhere. Just a few days without this thing, and the world comes crashing down.

Three hundred years ago, the same storm wouldn’t really impact life so much. The horses would keep marching, the letters would keep moving, the fire would stay burning, work would get done. No food would go bad, no systems would melt down. The only thing that might happen would be property damage due to a falling tree.

Today, if the electricity stops, life stops. It’s fascinating and worrying how fragile we, and our modern world, are. We are skating on egg shells.

The great, beautiful birch in our backyard is destroyed. The branches cracked at the top and buckled down. The old tree is drooped over our deck. We are all sad about it. We loved that tree. The long branches, the beautiful leaves, the white paper-like bark. Lying in the hammock on long summer days, watching the sky under the shady protection of the old beauty.

It’s the same story for all the big birches on our street. All those tall, lanky giants were taken down by the ice. Their strong trunks made no difference. Their long branches — the ones that only come with age — were too vulnerable.

The young ones around town are fine. Without any fatal cracks, they will bounce back soon as the weather warms. Their branches were too small and light to be broken under the weight of the ice. They’re OK. That's how it's supposed to be.

On growing out of 'edgy' entertainment

I don’t really care about “really dark” TV shows or “screwed up” movies anymore.

They're supposed to rattle me or provoke me, but they don’t. They just bore me. I’m completely uninterested.

It’s almost as if these stories are created by people who have never really reflected on the deeper nature of life and tragedy.

In my 20s, I went through the typical phase of thinking shows and movies that “pushed the limit” were interesting, or at least might be worth watching. I don’t remember when exactly I grew out of that phase, but I can say confidently I am completely out of it at this point. I really just do not care about dark, screwed up, edgy, boundary-pushing television or movies anymore.

Method to the madness?

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t one of these people who are decidedly into shows or movies that push it as far as one can take it. But I wasn’t against it, either.

I thought there may be a reason why shows need to push you, shock you, or disgust you. That something more interesting was going on. That by brutalizing your eyes and sensibilities, they were preparing you for some kind of deeper truth or revelation that can only be understood in that kind of presentation.

Even if it seems confusing at first, there is a logic to the thing. Just wait. The story can only be told in this form, and you cannot extract the meaning without the brutalization. I was open to that theory of it all.

I’ve been trying to figure out why exactly I stopped being interested in this kind of thing. I can’t really pinpoint a year it happened. I can’t really figure out an exact reason, either.

Aging out

For a while, I thought it was because I became a parent. It would make sense. You are thinking about your kids all the time, so you end up transposing stories and all of that onto your thoughts about them, and it forces your tastes to change. You don’t really want to watch this garbage anymore.

I thought that could be it, but upon further reflection, I don’t think it is.

I think it happened as I aged.

Aging doesn’t happen in a linear fashion. Yes, our official age according to the United States government and every other legal entity on earth changes according to a universally recognized system of days, weeks, months, and years. And yes, it is all linear. But that’s not the kind of aging I am talking about.

I am talking about growing older, becoming more mature. It’s more than just a number. We go years without aging very much, and then, suddenly, we age a bunch over a few months. Something happens — sometimes something good, but more often than not it’s something bad — we are pulled through the ringer, and when we come out on the other side, it feels like we are different people in a bunch of ways we can’t really put our finger on. We aged.

After aging just a little, experiencing some things that weren’t exactly great, getting beat up a little bit here and there, and coming to realize that life is more fragile than I previously thought, I kind of stopped being so enthralled with the pointlessly vulgar and masochistically depressing television shows that seem to be everywhere.

Taste trumps trickery

My disinterest in this style of media isn’t just due to sentimentalism — though it would be just fine if it were — it’s about taste.

As I mentioned earlier, I originally thought there was a method to the madness and that the brutalization was necessary for the message, or question, of the art to be communicated. But the truth is, most of it’s not really art. It’s not really that thoughtful, either.

But it appears to be thoughtful mostly because it’s really easy to mass produce an endless stream of brooding and unsettling video imagery today. It’s a trick, basically.

Low brightness, strong contrast, minimal dialogue, strings scraping long chords every few minutes. Everything in Aeolian mode. Nihilistic characters who are disturbed, selfish, psychopathic, and generally unlikable. Pointlessly shocking details that convey a “really dark” sensibility with no resolution. You can crank that out over and over again and people eat it up.

It’s all so obvious and heavy-handed. It’s so predictable and boring. The drive toward crudity isn’t a necessary part of uncovering richer insights into the human experience. It’s just a pointless, desensitized form of slop that rots one’s brain and taste.

Blunt and obvious

It’s almost as if these stories are created by people who have never really reflected on the deeper nature of life and tragedy. Or maybe they haven’t ever developed any kind of nuanced emotional sensibility, so the only way they have to portray “feeling” is in the most blunt and obvious way imaginable.

I think that gets to the bottom of it. Having aged just a little bit has shown me some things about myself and life that are more sensitive and too delicate to portray, or exist in concert with, such grotesque storytelling.

Encountering such blunt, needlessly provocative eye-poking just grates on me at this point. It doesn’t shock me. It doesn’t provoke me. It doesn’t do anything they want it to do.

It just irritates me. Bores me. It feels like listening to a crappy garage band after hearing a string quartet play Mozart.

Morning sickness, Italian-style

My wife and I were in Italy when we found out she was pregnant with our first. We were so happy.

Then the nausea came. And it was bad. Real bad. It turns out my wife experiences something called hyperemesis gravidarum during her first trimester.

I remember standing in the bedroom telling her in quite forceful language, 'You have to eat. There is no other option. You need to eat to survive.'

Basically it’s extraordinarily terrible morning sickness. We didn’t know it was a thing at the time. It was only years later and another kid later that we realized there was a name for it and that what she experiences isn’t just normal morning sickness.

The technical jargon doesn’t really matter, though. That there is some designated medical term to describe her grueling morning sickness isn’t really relevant to any of this. The point is that she gets it bad, real bad. And we had no idea what we were in for when we found out we were going to be parents.

Italian for 'bagel'?

It was February. We were staying at an Airbnb in a small town named Loiano about 40 kilometers from Bologna. We were there for three weeks. Every day I would walk to the little grocery store in search of anything my wife could stomach. She felt like she was going to vomit constantly. All day, all night. That’s how it is for her during the first trimester. All she wanted was a bagel, but there are no bagels in Loiano. The closest bagel was probably somewhere in Paris.

I walked to the pharmacy a couple of times to try to get her some medicine to alleviate the sickness. Pitifully fighting through the Italian language, I tried to communicate to the pharmacist what we needed. He gave me some stuff a couple of times, but it never seemed to work for my wife.

She didn’t want to eat at all. I remember standing in the bedroom telling her in quite forceful language, “You have to eat. There is no other option. You need to eat to survive.”

Bed rest

She didn’t leave the Airbnb for 10 days. My job was basically running around town trying to find food she could eat, medicine that might make her feel better, returning the rental car to Bologna, working, cleaning, and trying to figure out some way to make her anything other than miserable.

Everything was melting down. I remember one night her telling me that she didn’t know if she could handle a plane ride because she felt so terrible. We sat there trying to brainstorm any kind of solution. “How are we going to get back home?”

I think about that trip a lot. It was a turning point in our relationship. It was the last trip we took as people without kids and the first trip we took as people with kids. It was the first time we had to really work together in a different, more adult kind of way.

We had to solve these problems together in a way that we never had to before. It was the first time I really saw her in a bad state. Really worried. Really just not herself.

Welcome to the team

It was our first introduction into what your life is like as a parent. You are part of a team in a way you never were before. You’ve got to get the job done, and your feelings matter less than they used to.

We have different feelings about that time. My wife hates thinking about Loiano. When I dare utter the name, she winces in pain. All she remembers is being sick. I have different memories. It was hard, of course. I was busy doing everything I could on my end to try to help her while also getting my work done. Someone needs to pay the bills. But I wasn’t suffering like she was.

I have fond memories of walking in town to get more groceries in hopes of finding something she could stomach. The low winter sun. Long shadows. The brown grass and bare branches. The quiet streets in this small Italian town.

Standing on the balcony at 2:30 a.m. after I had finally finished my work, drinking bourbon, watching the lights of a car heading down the small country road far in the distance. The big, bright moon overhead.

Growth mindset

That was six years ago. I’ve grown a lot since then. I feel like a different person in a lot of ways, because I kind of am. I said that time was hard, but it wasn’t really. It only felt hard because I was pretty weak. I wasn’t used to solving real problems. Now, after having a couple of kids and managing a lot worse stuff, Loiano would be child’s play for us.

But we can’t go back and live life again with the knowledge we have today. To look back and see our past worries as simple or our old stress as quaint is a good thing. It’s a blessing to remember and realize that we were different then from what we are today. We’ve grown, learned, lived, and aged. What wonderful gifts those are.

To thine own self be true — especially in our fake digital world

Every once in a while you hear about these people who build up totally fake identities on the internet.

They devote hundreds of hours to crafting a persona and a story that are completely fabricated. They claim they have eight kids. They claim they have a ton of money. They claim they are something they are absolutely not.

We shouldn’t seek out approval pretending to be someone else. We shouldn’t drift off into the digital abyss, play-acting like little children.

What is that? What can we learn from it? What does it mean for us?

A new kind of delusion

It’s a very modern phenomenon, that’s for sure. It didn’t exist 50 years ago. It couldn’t have existed 50 years ago. There was just no way to do it. There was no internet. No possibility of retreating into the safety of a false digital reality.

And that’s what it is at bottom: a retreat into a more alluring world. A world where you don’t have to ever do anything or be anything. You can just say you are anything, and that’s enough.

It’s a kind of fantasy escapism. Yes, of course, we have had fantasy and escapism for a long time. Books can be just that. But this is very different from books. It’s more interactive, more immersive, more alluring.

We live in an era of parallel worlds. There is the digital world and the actual world. It’s no stretch to suggest that retreating into a false digital identity, living in a false digital world, is a retreat from life itself.

How do you end up claiming that you have 11 kids when you have none? How do you end up claiming you are some wealthy mogul when you are living with your parents? How do you end up claiming you are 27 when you are 49?

The same old escapism

I imagine it happens slowly. It starts with a desire to escape. To leave life behind. To become someone else, someone you see as greater, without doing any of the work to get there.

You don’t leave your life if you are happy. You don’t leave reality if you are fulfilled. Think about drug addicts who zone out every day. Do they do it because they are fulfilled in their lives? No, they want to zone out as far as they possibly can without going over the edge into death.

A similar thing is going on with retreating into the digital. “Life is miserable, but the digital world can be whatever I want.” That’s the logic.

That’s how it all starts. Then it accelerates. The "likes" start coming in. The followers start increasing. Fabricators see what works, and soon enough they are throwing red meat to their mob. The people eat it up.

They see that everyone loves who they are. Well, not who they actually are, but who they pretend to be. “I’m not enough, but my pretend self is.” That must be painful, but it can be overcome for the sake of likes and follows.

Bridging the gap

The examples above are extreme. Most people, thankfully, don’t concoct false parallel lives for internet dopamine hits. But the question of how we bridge the gap between the digital and the actual in a healthy way is a question we all must wrestle with. How do we remain ourselves in the digital world?

Honesty. That’s how we remain ourselves. We just have to be honest, or at least not dishonest. We don’t have to tell the whole world everything about who we are. Strangers don’t have a right to anything that’s ours. We don’t owe anyone any details about how we live our lives.

But we shouldn’t lie to ourselves or others. We shouldn’t seek out approval by pretending to be someone else. We shouldn’t drift off into the digital abyss, play-acting like little children.

Living a parallel life isn’t natural. We haven’t evolved with the internet. We are new to it. Throughout human civilization, we have only lived IRL. Now, we live IRL and online. The dissonance of managing two conflicting identities at the same time is not something we were ever made to do.

Bad for the soul

It’s not good for the soul, either. There has to be some kind of corrosion that happens when you live a parallel life in the digital world. Some kind of deeper self-hatred burns there. The self-deception must eat away at you.

The most fundamental problem of losing oneself in the digital world is the fact that we will never escape the actual one, no matter how hard we try. We can’t upload our brains to the cloud. We can’t get away from the fact that we are stuck here on earth. We can’t escape our bodies, the rooms where we sleep, or the fingers with which we type. The actual world will always remain, as long as we do.

Offloading one’s energy and emotions to a parallel identity in the digital world only prevents us from bettering our actual lives in the actual world. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get or how many followers you have if you hate yourself. It doesn’t matter how exciting your digital life looks if your actual life is miserable.

The internet has given us incredible opportunities, but it also presents us with incredible dangers. We must never lose our way in a false digital world. We must always remain ourselves, both online and offline. This might be one of the great challenges of our time.

You are a child until you have a child

You are a child until you have a child.

Right up until the moment you hold that baby in your arms, you are a child yourself. You see the world from that perspective. You are on that side of things, and it colors everything you feel.

My dad always used to joke about how he would never go see us in our room when we were sleeping because we always looked too sweet. That’s parental humor. The good stuff.

You might be an old child, one who graduated college a decade ago, but you are still a child.

And then it all changes. Or at least the seeds of the change are planted, and you are thrown onto the other side, forever.

The great divide

The world is divided between those with children and those without. It's parents vs. the childless in our society, and the battle is just getting started. It will only intensify as we move into the future, and greater numbers of childless people grow older without becoming parents.

But I'm not here to stoke this conflict. I'm not here to attack those who, for whatever reason, don't have kids. I merely want to state a fact of life. We are not the same.

It’s hard to nail down what it is that really separates the children from those with children. It’s not politics. It’s not money. It’s not education. It’s not culture. There are those with children and those without on all sides.

Nor is it being a good person. There are bad people who are bad parents. Great people who are not parents.

It’s not necessarily responsibility either, even though kids do demand that. It’s deeper than all these things. It’s some kind of essence or knowledge. Or maybe it’s some kind of acceptance of a constellation of truths that you only perceive once you have kids.

Falling short

There’s something about imperfection. That’s one of those truths in the constellation. It’s not just the surface imperfection of the scratched up tables, the walls that always end up covered in scribbles, or the realization that you are not going to have “nice things” for a long time.

(And that’s OK, by the way. Nice things are overrated.)

But it’s more than all that. Something stranger. It’s about the imperfection of life itself. Having kids forces us to give up trying to think of ourselves as perfect. When we are parents, we try to be better than we were, because we want to be good role models. So we aspire to be greater (or more perfect) in this sense.

But at the same time, our children can't help but reveal how far we fall short. Their innocence reveals our corrupt nature in more poignant terms. Life isn’t perfect; neither are we.

You’re beat, sick of work, sick of corralling the kids in the car, sick of ushering them along the sidewalk, sick of cleaning up rice from the floor after dinner, tired as hell, and counting down the minutes until you can finally get a break once the kids are in bed. And then, once they are finally asleep, about 15 minutes later, you feel bad for wanting to get them in bed as soon as possible.

“Damn it.”

The good stuff

There’s a certain way you say that word as a dad. Under your breath, by yourself, in the morning, late at night, in the car, out back behind the house, just sitting there by the window, looking at a photo of your kids from a few years back.

The way you say it, that’s the tragic part. The resigned part.

It’s the feeling that no childless person understands. My dad always used to joke about how he would never go see us in our room when we were sleeping because we always looked too sweet. That’s parental humor. The good stuff. Sardonic and deeply sensitive at the same time, if you get it. It’s the stuff that you can’t relate to if you are childless.

You are spinning plates when you have kids. Your arms reach wider, and you are pulled 100 ways at once.

Benevolent dictator

You take on more roles than ever before. You are like a dictator who controls the education system, religious system, medical system, housing, and everything else you could possibly imagine all at the same time, 24/7, for decades.

Your stress tolerance increases, and you just naturally start to think about yourself less than you did before. You fade in a sense, and you are no longer the center of your own world.

You are a leader and need to manage your people like a ruler manages his, and it demands a stronger stomach. You have to lie all the time because you don’t ever tell your kids the whole truth. Answers for a 5-year-old aren’t fully honest answers. There are things they shouldn’t know yet.

You also teach your kids never to lie in the next breath. Yes, it’s complicated.

In truth, for parents the concerns of the childless are hard to take so seriously. They seem more and more petty the deeper into parenthood you get. They feel like the concerns of children.

But you know they don’t feel like it to them because you remember how you felt before you had kids, when you were a child, too. It’s not their fault for feeling like that, and it’s not ours for feeling like we do. None of it is anyone’s fault. It’s OK, we all have our own role in this life. But we aren’t the same.

You’re a child until you have a child, and you can never go back.

You will never be 'ready'

Life doesn’t wait.

Time doesn’t stop. We can’t press pause. The longer we put something off, the harder it gets.

Lots of people talk, but many never do. I remember so many conversations where so many people would tell me about so many things they were planning.

These things all sound like cliches — and maybe they are — but they are true. But it’s hard to see it at the time. And it’s particularly hard to see it when you are young, because it feels like life is just always coming. There is always more road. There is always another chance. No need to rush.

Pick a city, any city

In modern America, there’s a familiar path lots of young people tend to follow. College, grad school, move to the city. It doesn’t really matter which city. You just move to the biggest, closest one. Or that’s what I did, at least.

It’s a liminal time. You’re done with school, but not really living your real life yet. What’s real life? Marriage, kids, and a house outside the city. You don’t have that. You have some crap job that’s just enough to pay the bills. Or, if you are serious, you might have a decent first-year job where you can “get your foot in the door.”

That brief period in your mid-20s feels full of possibility. But that possibility is a fleeting and deceiving thing. Lots of people talk, but many never do. I remember so many conversations where so many people would tell me about so many things they were planning.

“I’m just going to work a few years, save a bunch of money, and then I’m going to go travel.”

I heard so many iterations of this sentiment. They seemed so sincere when they talked about their plans to quit and travel, or start a business, or do what they really wanted to do. But they never did. It was all talk. It was all dreaming.

Too comfortable to fail

I am sure they meant it when they said it. I have no doubt they really wanted to quit that job and go on some adventure. But the pay was too good. Their job was too easy. Their apartment was too nice. They got in a routine — and it was a nice routine — and getting out got harder and harder the longer it went on.

It’s understandable. I don’t blame them. Getting a good job and sticking with it is a good idea if that’s what you want to do. We all live different lives, and that’s good. The world would be boring if we were all the same. But it happened so often in such similar circumstances that I couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t just different people living different lives. There was something else.

It’s hard to quit a good job. It’s hard to take a pay cut. It’s hard to choose more work (running your own business) rather than less work (being a corporate cog). It’s hard to scale back your lifestyle once you let it creep up to intoxicating heights.

First it’s the nice apartment that you don’t really need. Then it’s the really nice car. Then it’s the constantly going out to eat. Then the expensive gym membership. Then the vacations and the superfluous junk you just like to buy whenever you feel like it. Soon enough, it really feels like you “need" all these things that you didn’t have just a few years earlier, and you can’t imagine sacrificing them. Quitting the job and traveling is off the table. Starting the business is too risky.

That’s how it happens. That’s how people let life slip away. They drag their feet just a little too long. Get a little too used to the things they don’t really need and then can’t imagine giving them up. All that talk of taking control of their life was just talk. They are now stuck. I remember it so well back in my mid-20s, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s a theme through all of life.

'Not a good time'

You see this same thing when it comes to having kids. So many people — often, believe it or not, the same people — put it off until they are “ready.” Or that’s what they call it. They say they need to have more money, need to own a house, have to buy a bigger house, need work to quiet down. “It’s not a good time right now.”

Truthfully, they will never be ready. There will never be a good time. There is always an excuse. The longer and longer they put it off, the harder and harder it gets to pull the trigger. And then, eventually, it becomes impossible to pull the trigger. That door closes eventually. If you wait to have kids until you are ready, you are never going to have kids. That last sentence could be expanded beyond kids.

Take the leap

If you wait until you are ready to do it, you are never going to do it. That’s it. That’s the thread through all of this. The 25-year-old in the city. The professional couple who is waiting to have kids. The guy who has an idea for a business but is too afraid to take the leap.

All of us, any time we wait because we are too scared or hesitant to make it happen. Every day that we delay, the harder it gets to go do what we really want to do. We get trapped in permanent delay. Waiting for life to happen.

But life doesn’t wait. It’s always happening. Right here. Right now. It is the one thing we can only lose and never gain. If we want to do it, we’ve got to do it now. Time is always slipping away like sand in an hourglass

“If not now, when?”