When you look at old photos, you notice a lot of different things. Different cars, different clothes, different kinds of houses. More suits on men, more dresses on women.

One affirms dignity. The other induces a sense of childlike silliness.

No iPads, no tattoos, blocky TVs that looked like furniture, and big long station wagons.

You also notice that the workers wore clothes that were a lot nicer. All across the board, the average work uniforms of the past were nicer than they are today. A grocery clerk from the old days dressed with greater dignity than half the people you might find at a wedding in 2024. And the average worker in 2024 wears a uniform that can’t possibly do anything other than depress him. It’s sad but true.

The store uniforms we see these days tend to be graphic T-shirts with stupid little designs on the back. Of course, I would love to see nicer uniforms because I want everyone to dress better, and I would much rather look at decent clothes than ugly clothes; the beautification of our society starts with ourselves, and we can all make a difference. But the argument for nicer store uniforms isn’t only about what’s pleasant for others to see. It’s about the dignity of the worker and the quality of his life.

If I worked at a store and my uniform was a bright blue graphic T-shirt with a cartoonish design on the back, I really wouldn’t feel very good about what I was wearing. If I had to wear this uniform every day, I would feel silly and stupid. Infantilized.

It would be hard to take myself and my job seriously. If I was stuck working some stupid job I hated, wearing some dumb silly shirt every day would only make the whole situation worse.

I’m sure an argument for these graphic T-shirt uniforms is comfort. I’m sure the workers say they are comfortable, and the owners want their workers to be comfortable. Our society worships comfort, after all. It’s one of our great idols in 2024. The road to slob-world is paved with comfort. And while, of course, comfort matters, it’s not the only thing that matters.

You can sacrifice dignity for the sake of comfort. We do it every day in our culture. Furthermore, it must be said that a graphic T-shirt isn’t necessarily more comfortable than a properly fitting 100% cotton button-up.

Look at old photos of the past to see what properly fitting uniforms should look like. Full-cut pants with room to move easily. Loosely fitting button-ups with ample fabric around the midsection, chest, and biceps. The sleeves were easily rolled up with no constriction or an overly tight fit. Simple, dark shoes. The modern world of the 20th century was built in this simple uniform.

These clothes are no less comfortable than a pair of jeans and a graphic T-shirt. In fact, they are, believe it or not, more comfortable. People just don’t realize it. And the difference between this simple, basic uniform and the infantilizing graphic T-shirt is night and day. One affirms dignity. The other induces a sense of childlike silliness.

Workers deserve dignity. I know when you read that, you might expect to read next about insurance, time off, and workplace safety and not clothing and style.

But clothes matter, and they matter to everyone. A more dignified workforce means a more dignified society, and we all deserve a more dignified society. Nicer uniforms — uniforms that affirm the dignity of man — don’t need to be expensive. They don’t need to be finely made or particularly fancy. They can be simple and utilitarian. They just need to be dignified and serious. They need to command some kind of authority and purpose.

This was essentially how all uniforms looked in the past. The goofball uniform wasn’t a thing. There was an unspoken assumption that a uniform should convey seriousness. That assumption followed another assumption that adults should convey seriousness as well. This was the basic order of society.

Times have changed. The uniforms aren’t serious today because the society isn’t serious today. Men today are more likely to wear clothes that make a joke than clothes that make a statement of seriousness. Strength and beauty are not considerations for most people today when putting together an outfit. They should be; they were for most of history, but not today.

All of this has a terribly negative impact on the general psychological state of people in the America of 2024, but it compounds for the worker whose uniform feels more like an insult to injury than anything else.

Why require workers to wear something that is stupid and undignified? If workers are required to wear a uniform, let it be a uniform of dignity. It’s better for the worker, better for the customer, and better for the general aesthetic health of our society.

Want to make your clothes look worse? Strap on an Apple Watch

The source of all our problems is right in front of our eyes and on far too many wrists: the Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch is bad. It’s really bad. It’s an abomination. It’s a crime against nature.

The pressing desire to know all these detailed metrics about our body throughout the day isn’t spiritually healthy.

If we wanted to pinpoint the moment everything started going down the tubes, we would find ourselves staring at the release date of the first Apple Watch. Once we crossed that threshold, everything started slipping.

OK, I might be exaggerating a little.

The Apple Watch is not a crime against humanity. It’s not the worst thing in the world. But it’s not good. I know this will anger many who have given into the Apple Watch craze, but someone must tell the truth about this pointless device.

Techno-communist

The Apple Watch is ugly. No one in his right mind would try to convince you that this nondescript, black cube that hangs off your wrist is elegant or attractive. It’s not pleasing to look at or wear. It’s not strong or powerful in any understandable way, either. It’s nothing at all. Aesthetically, it barely exists.

Who looks worse with an Apple Watch — men or women? It’s hard to tell. It looks equally ridiculous on both. It looks pointlessly geeky. The smooth black front and the tapping at the touch screen looks less retro-futurism 1986 and more senior special at Del Boca Vista. It looks less Harrison Ford in "Blade Runner" than it does Rick Moranis in "Spaceballs."

For guys, the fragile aesthetic doesn’t exude any kind of strength. It feels overly fastidious and annoyingly particular. It almost feels blandly androgynous, or techno-communist, for lack of a better word.

Traditionally, there are two kinds of men’s watches. Watches that are formal and elegant and watches that are rough and rugged. The Apple Watch is neither. It’s a secret, ugly third thing.

It’s confused, and it makes every outfit look confused. Jeans, a flannel shirt, and boots look strong. Add an Apple Watch, and it looks confused. A sport coat, poplin button-down, and khaki chinos look classic. Add an Apple Watch, and it looks bizarre.

Femininity killer

For women, the size and shape of the Apple Watch looks dreadfully clunky and unfeminine. No woman’s wrist looks delicate or beautiful with an Apple Watch. The same bland androgynous effect that we see with men is felt with the women.

A woman’s watch should be small and delicate. It should be dainty. It should suit the size of her wrist and exude a kind of feminine elegance. It should feel like jewelry.

The Apple Watch on a woman looks like a post-prison ankle monitor or some kind of experimental monitoring device they put on you in the hospital when you are knocking on death’s door.

I have seen women in dresses, heels, and Apple Watches. It’s absurd. The ensemble is one of elegance, and then out of nowhere, the Apple Watch is slapped on the wrist, and it feels like it had to have found its way there by accident. No woman would intentionally wear this thing with a dress, would they?

Slave to sleep

It’s enough to oppose the Apple Watch on aesthetics alone, but that's not the only strike against it. The very idea of the Apple Watch is offensive and neurotic. Unless you have a serious medical condition, you really don’t need to be monitoring your daily bodily functions and variations this closely.

I know that endlessly obsessing over sleep is a trendy thing today among those who have too much time on their hands, but if you are a young and healthy person, you should be able to live your life without turning every day and night into an Excel spreadsheet.

The pressing desire to know all these detailed metrics about our body throughout the day isn’t spiritually healthy. It isn’t normal. It isn’t vital. It’s pointlessly obsessive. The Apple Watch exacerbates this decadent obsession of our age more than any other device.

This obsession is driving people nuts even if they don’t know it yet. Deep down, you know you don’t really need to know all this stuff. You know it isn’t making your life better in any meaningful way. It’s all just pointless data collection.

If you really want to wear an Apple Watch when you exercise, fine. This makes sense. But this silly device really shouldn’t be on your wrist outside the gym. Ugly pieces shouldn’t be staples in a wardrobe, and the Apple Watch is an ugly piece.

Pointless overkill

Apart from the obsessive heath monitoring, the other features of the Apple Watch are completely redundant. You don’t need a watch to receive reminders from your calendar, messages, or emails. You have a phone for this, and nine times out of ten, your phone is sitting right next to you on the table. You end up with two devices within three feet of each other both sending you the same notifications. It’s pointless overkill.

As if all that weren’t enough, the price is the final kick in the shins. You are looking at spending hundreds of dollars on a redundant device that exacerbates your neuroticism while looking ugly and polluting every outfit you wear. Sounds great, huh?

Don’t take the bait. Don’t waste your money on an Apple Watch. Buy a Timex for 50 bucks and call it a day. Grab a $25 Casio for a real retro-futuristic look. Whatever you do, for God’s sake, never buy an Apple Watch.

OK, Doomer: How to stop the scroll and take control

You are drowning in doom.

Everything only seems to go one way. The news always validates what you already suspect. It’s the same thing every day. It all just gets worse and worse.

If life were truly terrible, you would have no desire to spend every waking hour brooding over depressing predictions about how everything is only going to get worse.

You open your phone and you scroll just so you can get mad. The truth is that you don’t want to see any glimmer of hope.

You mad?

You want to be mad, you want to be sad, you want to know how bad everything is. You want the hard stuff. The dark stuff. The worse it gets, the better it is. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

Good. You are addicted. It’s making you miserable, but you are hooked. You can’t stop. You are like the strung-out crackhead at the safe injection site, but instead of a dilapidated room and glazed-over eyes, it’s you hunched over your iPhone on your couch next to the air conditioner.

Doomerism is addicting.

Mainlining apocalypse

It’s a modern drug of the internet. It’s like falling down a hole over and over again. You fall down and then you fall some more. And then you kind of want to see how far it goes, so you start running as fast as you can down into the black abyss.

You seek out more and more obscure accounts and sources. You want to feel like apocalypse is right around the corner. You want to know all the bad stuff first so you can say “told you so” when your nightmare (secretly a fantasy) becomes reality.

You want to get as depressed as you can about the state of the world. There is no future. That’s what you say. You are happiest when you are sad. That’s your dirty little secret, but you will never say it. You can’t. You have to pretend like you are dooming for the sake of the greater good.

You don’t ever want to fix it. You don’t want any solutions. In fact, seeing solutions ticks you off, so you scroll right past those. Deep down, you want to hear over and over again that everything is hopeless.

It’s dark. It’s twisted. And it could only exist in a time like ours. Relative material abundance, decent medical care, and a fairly predictable life when compared to most other times in history. These are the conditions for doomerism.

If life were truly terrible, you would have no desire to spend every waking hour brooding over depressing predictions about how everything is only going to get worse. No. You would be hoping for any kind of lifeboat. Any kind of hope.

Doomerism is a kind of LARP product of the internet and abundance-induced boredom.

Terminally online

A key to doomerism is the abstract nature of the engine. Doomerism is almost always primarily based on, and derived from, news or social media. The real thrust is almost never found in real, tangible life.

The primary drivers tend to be far away, abstract, or found primarily in the digital realm. The farther one moves from the actual world and into the digital, the deeper into the realm of doomerism one wanders.

Every doomer is terminally online. Of course, it’s very possible to be depressed offline. There are, tragically, far too many souls lost in the dark labyrinth of depression.

But this is not doomerism. Every doomer, without question, is addicted to the discourse, social media, or the news cycle. These abstract digital forces take up the majority of the doomer’s daily concern. Life and living have all but evaporated for the doomer. All that remains is discourse addiction and dooming.

The cure for doomerism

While doomerism is a serious affliction, it can be cured. The first step to treating doomerism is reclaiming your agency and reasserting control over your personal domain.

The news cycle, discourse, or latest and greatest rage-bait are worthless in your personal world. They don’t help you cultivate your culture; they don’t positively impact your personal growth or your quality of life in any meaningful way.

All they do is distract you from taking control in your personal domain. They draw more and more of your attention into the domain where you are helpless while you give up any hope of impacting the domain where you are most able.

Vital realism

Of course this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take an interest in world affairs or politics. Of course not. But you must put these things in the right place. You must realize that overly obsessive doom and gloom are like a cancer of the spirit. Even if the doomed analysis was correct, it doesn’t help in any positive way. It is worthless.

To overcome doomerism, you must return to the actual and the personal. You must learn to accept the things you cannot change and realize that all the pointlessly depressing discourse is like a drug wanting to drag you down into the toilet bowl.

It might feel like it is gravely important and you need to know it, but it really isn’t and you really don’t. Think for a moment about all the extremely depressing bits of info you have learned, worried over, and then forgotten. How much of your life did you lose?

We only have so much energy to expend. We can only spin so many plates at one time. If we focus every last drop of our hearts and souls on that which we are not a part of, we become spectators in our own lives. Watching carefully. Depressed about the outcome. Analyzing what could have been done differently after the fact. Dooming.

The solution to doomerism is not naive Polyannaism but vital realism. It’s allocating your effort and emotion to the domains where your action is most profoundly felt.

The world will not change because of doomerism. The world is indifferent to the doomer. It will change if we make positive change where we we stand. Cultivate our culture, live the values we believe, and make a positive impact on the world around us.

Corduroys: The perfect winter trousers

What happened to cords?

I swear, they used to be everywhere. Remember? I know I’m not crazy. I have these distinct memories of my parents buying me wide-wale cords at Kohl’s, or maybe it was JCPenney, or maybe it was Target.

A worn-in pair of corduroys are comfortable like a pair of sweatpants, yet dignified and strong.

Wherever it was, it wasn’t anywhere particularly fancy. Corduroys were standard and easy to find. They were what we wore when the weather got cold. I remember getting them before school every year. Boys wore them, older kids wore them, dads wore them, grandpas wore them. Everyone wore them.

But gradually, something strange happened. Our culture started shifting away from classically influenced clothing and moving toward sport-influenced clothing.

Sweatpants nation

Think back into the foggy recesses of your mind. Tug on those dusty memories. If you think hard, you can probably remember a time when guys wore chinos instead of sweatpants. Or leather shoes instead of sneakers. When more guys wore ties to work and fewer wore T-shirts. When every man had a sport coat in his closet. When cords were common and unremarkable.

If you have never thought about any of this, you might be wondering for the first time, “Oh yeah, what ever happened to cords?” It’s one of those things that happened very slowly, so it’s hard to pin down an exact year they faded. They just vanished from the mainstream.

A true tragedy, because cords are the perfect winter trousers.

Seasonal classic

Even though cords have shrunk in terms of their popularity, you can still find them if you know where to look. It may not be easy to hunt down 100% cotton cords with no stretch added, but you can do it. I recommend J. Press, Cordings, or J. Crew. These aren’t cheap pants, but they are great pants. Unfortunately, because cords are not as common as they once were, we end up paying a premium for what was standard just a few decades ago.

Cords are warm and cozy. The fabric is luxurious. A worn-in pair of corduroys are comfortable like a pair of sweatpants, yet dignified and strong. Classic clothing — like cords — understands the seasons. The summer pieces feel inexplicably like summer, and the winter pieces feel undeniably like winter. Classic clothing helps us feel both season and time in our clothes. This adds a natural variance to life.

When you bring your summer shirts out of storage, it’s exciting. When you wear your overcoat for the first time after the temperature drops, you have an extra skip in your step. Classic seasonal clothing allows us to reflect the changing world around us. It’s deeply organic. It feels whole. You would never wear a pair of cords in the spring or the summer, but you would in the autumn or the winter. Cords solidify an outfit as being autumnal or wintery.

A shot of color

While a simple pair of neutral cords is a must-have, cords don’t only come in navy or brown. Cords are fascinating in that there is a tradition of them being bold and bright. Red cords, yellow cords, purple cords, green cords. These are all classic iterations. This is something very unique. We don’t see this kind of adventure in other classic pairs of pants. Cords are very special for this reason. Bright and colorful, yet traditional and classic.

The bright and colorful cords of the winter are like the brightly painted houses you see near a gloomy fjord in Norway. They are a shot of color in the darkness of winter. A bright reminder when the sun hasn’t shined in weeks. They are indefatigable optimism when everything feels grim. They are a supremely unique instance when you can wear red pants as part of a traditional outfit.

When working with a pair of brown or navy cords, you have many options with your shirt. Take your pick of an OCBD, and it will most likely work great. When working with a pair of bright and colorful cords, you want to keep your shirt simple. Stick with white or light blue to make sure you don’t look clownish. Too many colorful pieces is never a good idea.

Flexible formality

Cords are incredibly flexible in terms of formality. You can dress cords up and you can dress cords down. Cords work great when paired with an OCBD, loafers, navy blazer, and knit tie. They also work great with bean boots, an OCBD, and a Shetland wool sweater thrown on top.

The rich texture of corduroy is unparalleled. Whether you are wearing fine wale or wide wale, there is no other pant in our wardrobe that offers this level of textural interest. The only other classical fabric that comes close is seersucker. The grooves of corduroy feel nice to the touch, and the unique texture adds a subtle point of interest to every outfit. Often, we think of color when we are considering interesting points in an outfit. But texture plays its own role. Cords are a wonderful reminder of that.

Winter can be depressing. The weather is often oppressive. Our mood can turn dour. The mundanity of it all can get to you. But cords give us something in our closet to look forward to. They are fun. They are comfortable. They are interesting. They are cozy. They can be bright and colorful. They are classic and traditional. They are the perfect winter pant.

The navy knit tie: Dependable, versatile, and anti-fragile

So you want to start wearing a tie.

You’ve tossed your hoodies, and you are wearing button-ups these days. You even throw on a sport coat every once in a while. It feels good.

The navy knit tie is the anti-fragile tie for the father of young kids. It’s the fabric and the color.

You are dressing better than 95% of the guys in America in 2024, but you want to go further. You see those old photos, and you want to look like those guys.

You want to wear that mythical garment that was, once upon a time, a staple in every man’s wardrobe. Even the men who worked dirty jobs during the week had ties for church on Sunday and special occasions.

As women wore heels, men wore ties. It wasn’t in the ancient past. It was just yesterday, in the 20th century. But since then, our society has become increasingly informal, and ties have faded from the scene.

You want to wear a tie, but you don’t know where to start. It’s a small piece of fabric, but it’s a big step if you didn’t grow up wearing one. People will notice. It will stick out to some degree. You want to wear a tie for yourself. You aren’t trying to be a show-off or grab attention. You are hesitant.

A beautiful patterned silk is lovely. Ancient madder is luxurious. A bright and bold regimental tie is quintessentially preppy. A kelly-green motif tie is joyous. One can’t help but smile at a light and fluttery bird motif.

But they are all too much for you at this point in your style development. When you imagine wearing all those brilliant ties, an image of you wearing a neon sign around your neck that reads “LOOK AT MY TIE” appears in your mind. You don’t want that. You want to ease in.

So what do you do? Buy a navy knit tie.

A navy knit tie solves the problem perfectly. It’s quiet and simple. There are no stripes or figures that dance around your chest.

The hand is unostentatious. A navy knit doesn’t have any kind of glittery sheen. It doesn’t feel delicate or overly formal. If an elegant micro-pattern feels fine, a knit tie feels coarse. A knit reminds us of a thick rope, something almost utilitarian.

There is a deep texture to it. You can practically see through the fabric of a crunchy knit if you get close enough. When you hold a fine ancient madder, you use your fingers. When you grab onto a knit, you use your whole palm.

A knit tie bridges the gap of formality and informality. Any kind of tie is formal in 2024, but the knit tie dresses itself down. It’s a tie, but it can read as an informal one. A knit gives you plausible deniability in the way a bold motif simply cannot. It doesn’t scream out. It is quiet.

All of this is perfect for the guy who is new to menswear and doesn’t want to stand out. It’s also perfect for the guy who has been wearing ties for years. He doesn’t necessarily want to stand out, either. Clothes aren’t about shock and attention. The beautiful, quiet subtlety of the knit is useful for all men.

And the navy knit is one of my sartorial MVPs. I rely on it all the time. It’s supremely flexible. It works great with a wide variety of shirts and jackets. In many ways, with a navy knit you don’t even need to think. It’s there for you when you need it. When in doubt, I reach for my navy knit.

Maybe you are a father with young kids. They are always jumping on you, pulling on your clothes, and asking to ride on your back. This is no place for a tie, right?

Wrong. The knit tie is kid-friendly. With the more delicate ties you often end up concerned about creases and folds. If your tie falls behind the cushion of the couch and stays there for three weeks, it’s going to end up with some terrible wrinkles and creases.

But not the knit tie. You can crumple up a knit, slip it under your mattress, and wear it the next day. No one will know. Your toddler can pull on it with his little hands, and no damage will be done.

The navy knit tie is the anti-fragile tie for the father of young kids. It’s the fabric and the color. The crunchy, dynamic texture combined with dark, forgiving navy makes the navy knit tie the tie that every new father should buy. J. Press makes a great one.

The navy knit is everything you can ask for. It is versatile, subtle, understated, durable, and classic. It’s the perfect tie to help ease you into the wonderful world of neckwear. Whether you're a young guy, an old head, a father, or a bachelor, it won't let you down. Start with a navy knit, and go from there.

Our sons deserve to dress like men

Our sons are born into a world of moral and aesthetic chaos. There are no rules, no expectations, no limits.

The barriers that frame our traditionally fixed forms are broken down in front of our very eyes. Any sense of hierarchy is eviscerated. The definitions of man and woman are mutilated. Sacred and profane are turned in a blender together. Culture is flattened, and American aesthetics are forgotten.

Your grandfather learned how to dress from his father, and your father from his father. What are you teaching your son?

And in this perilous state, there are men who claim that clothes do not matter.

Cultural slop

These men do not understand the harsh reality that if they do not teach their sons how to dress, their sons will be swallowed up by the cultural slop of our era. They claim that clothes aren’t important and that men don’t need to care about how they dress. They couldn’t be more wrong.

It’s not only that this idea is wrong. It’s dangerous. It’s giving up and surrendering your son to the tides of mass-culture 2024. It’s this attitude that allows the creeping hands of culture-less androgyny to grasp the throat and squeeze.

This androgyny is a primary thrust of our time. A confusing of man and woman. Telling children that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. It’s in the language; it’s in the messaging; it’s in the clothes. If you do not resist aesthetically, you will be eaten alive. If you do not swim, you will float down the river like a dead log. To oppose the culture of 2024, it’s not enough to talk about it. You must embody it aesthetically. If you do, the impact is powerful.

Man or beast?

Why do we wear clothes? Because we are not beasts. We were exiled from the Garden many years ago, and since then, we have covered ourselves. Today, we have civilization. Since we do not walk around nude, our clothes reflect the divine and eternal forms of man and woman.

Deuteronomy 22:5 should come to mind. There is a reason why God tells us that men should not wear women’s clothes and women should not wear men’s clothes. Concerns about men and women wearing appropriate clothing are as deep in our civilizational psyche as practically any other concept.

Of course, clothes are not only about making a distinction between man and woman. Clothes are also about culture and values. When we look at someone, we see his clothes immediately. You cannot meet people and ignore their clothes. They scream out at you. You will always remember something about what someone wears. It’s not only the colors or the fabric. You communicate with your clothing. Clothes tell the world who you are, where you are from, and even what you believe — whether you like it or not. Clothes are an acute aesthetic manifestation and representation of both culture and sex.

How much “gender confusion” was there when women wore dresses and skirts regularly and men wore ties and jackets every week? Very little. It’s not that those things were the only things preventing the tragic chaos and confusion we see today, but those things were part of the broader aesthetic structure that kept order. We live in the world, not only in our minds. When men dressed like men, it kept them strong men. When women dressed like women, it kept them beautiful women.

Derelict

We read endlessly about the dire state of young men these days. After reading, do you think there is no connection between the nihilistic misery of young men and the fact that a great majority of them look like street urchins?

Do you think there is no connection between the depression and social isolation of the boys who wear foolish clothes and those clothes that only remind themselves of how foolish they are? Of course there is a connection. It is clear as day. Young men are being beaten down by their clothes, and no one will help.

Claiming that clothes don’t matter and thoughtlessly turning your son over to the mode du jour is surrendering to madness, giving up the fight, abdicating responsibility. It’s a sign of ignorance and unawareness.

A traditional value

It’s our job as fathers to teach our sons how to dress like men and with a sense of dignity. No one else is going to do it for us. It’s our responsibility. Our boys look up to us. We are their first teachers. This is not a new value. This is a traditional value. Your grandfather learned how to dress from his father and your father from his father. What are you teaching your son? That you don’t care? Or how to dress like a man of the West?

If you do not teach your son how to dress, the culture will do it for you. And this culture will not teach him to dress like a man. It will teach him to dress like a slob. It will teach him to dress in a way that depresses him. Our current culture will not try to elevate him. It does not want him to be strong and confident. Counting on the current culture to teach our sons how to dress is equivalent to turning your son loose on the internet all day, every day. You would never do that, would you?

Teaching our sons aesthetic values in personal dress is an important part of teaching them how to be men. This value has been terribly neglected in recent decades, and we are tragically living with the consequences. It is chaos, confusion, misery, and an ugly world. Our sons deserve better. Our sons deserve to dress like men.

Kids can't draw scary faces

My kids love to draw. They are always setting up shop at the kitchen table. Commandeering the place we eat for their own artistic creations.

Some days it feels like the floor is permanently littered with colored pencils and markers. Every night when the whole family cleans the house after dinner, we always discover some stragglers.

The other day, our son accidentally whacked his sister in the face when they were playing outside. She cried pretty bad. He’s such a good kid, he didn’t mean to.

An orange pencil under the piano. A green crayon at the bottom of the laundry. A blue marker in the bathroom. How the hell did a marker get in the bathroom? Oh, someone drew on the wall.

Ferocious beasts

The kids draw all sorts of things. Cars, trucks, animals, people, our family. They also try to draw scary pictures. They draw monsters. They draw ferocious beasts with big claws. But they can’t draw scary faces. They don’t shake me. They don’t send a shiver up my spine or make me want to look away. They make me smile in a terribly sad way.

Kids just can’t draw scary faces. And why is that? They try and try, but they can’t. A vampire with a little fang hanging out of his mouth. The other side of his lips curl up in a little smile. His eyes are a little misshapen and asymmetrical. His face is soft and funny. Kind and cute. It was the scariest thing my son could draw, and it wasn’t scary at all.

He excitedly shows us his drawing, and we pretend to be scared. “Ooohhh that is scary! A vampire!” But we aren’t scared. I feel that lump in my throat. It’s a rush of confusing feelings that all come at the same time, and I can’t explain any of them. And truthfully, I don’t want to either. This boiling hot ball of feeling makes me feel so good and so bad. I am so happy and so sad.

A very long time

Kids can’t draw scary faces because they haven’t seen scary things. They haven’t seen a scary world. They are innocent. They are pure. They live in the world that we create for them. We protect them. We don’t tell them scary things, and we don’t show them scary movies. When they ask when we are going to die, we tell them that we aren’t going to die for a very long time and that they don’t have to worry about that.

Their world is sweet and kind. Simple. Even when they are mad, they don’t know how mad you can really be. The knob goes all the way up to 10, but they think it only goes to 3.

'Even when I'm old'

The other day, our son accidentally whacked his sister in the face when they were playing outside. She cried pretty bad. He’s such a good kid, he didn’t mean to. He said that he’s never going to forget it. “Even when I’m old, I’m going to remember it,” he said.

They read old books and old fairy tales. There are scary drawings of witches and giants. My son is currently obsessed with dragons. He has this red toy dragon that he loves. It looks pretty fierce. It has a split tongue that sticks out through razor sharp teeth.

But still, he can’t translate that onto paper. He can’t draw a scary face. They are always cute. They are always happy. The world as he feels it betrays what he aims to draw.

We can’t be someone we are not. We can’t feel something we don’t know. They can’t draw scary faces because they don’t know them. They don’t feel them. They aren’t them. They are innocent. They are small. They are sweet.

We, on the other hand, are sullied. We are corrupted. We are conniving. We are ugly and hateful. We are liars and cheats. Children remind us that we are not, in fact, good. It’s easy for me to draw a scary face. Just give me a pencil.

Layer after layer

We hang all their pictures around the kitchen. We have a line of string lights that run from one wall to another. We hang them up there. My God, there are so many dangling, barely holding on under the weak pressure of these little micro-clothespins. We keep adding to our collection every day. They keep bringing them to us. Layer after layer on top of one another.

The world is tragic. Things go so wrong. Why do they have to go so wrong? I don’t know. But when I see those little drawings, I smile somewhere inside. Their little hands drew those little faces. They try so hard to make them scary. But they can’t, and it’s adorable, and I love them for it.

I stare at them, and I think of how different I am than they are. How much worse I am. And, of course, they make me so sad because they aren’t going to be innocent forever. They will eventually grow up and see a scary world, and they will know how to draw scary faces.

Polo shirts should not be made of polyester

No shirt is more ubiquitous in men's closets today than the polo shirt.

And with good reason. It's the shirt you throw on when you want to wear more than a T-shirt but less than a button-up: a middle-ground that's a safe bet for most occasions in this post-business-casual world. Which is why it's a daily go-to for millions of men.

The 100% pique knit cotton polo, by contrast, only looks better with age. When the placket shows wear and tear, it feels welcoming.

But not all polo shirts are created equal. Some are hardier than others. Some wear better than others. Some last longer than others. Some look more classic than others. Simply put, some are better than others.

Tragically, the most commonly found polo shirts are some of the worst polo shirts. They are the polo shirts that should be cast into a great volcano on some distant tropical island. They are the polo shirts that don’t even deserve to be a rag in your garage. They are the polo shirts that look like the uniform for a low-level data analyst at a nuclear waste treatment facility in the distant future.

They are the sleek, shiny, polyester monstrosities known as "performance" or "Dri-FIT" polos.

Polo shirts can be unflattering. They can be unforgiving. Even the nicest ones can be tough to wear. The way they are constructed and the general thinness of the fabric tend to reveal any imperfections in one’s physique. If you are carrying any extra weight around, a polo shirt is going to throw it in your face.

If you ever wonder why you never look that good in a polo, this is the answer.

You aren’t alone. And if all this is true with the nicest polos — 100% thick pique cotton knit polos — it is all the more true with their garishly colored petroleum-based counterparts. The main way these garments "perform" is by reliably making you look much worse than you need to.

They do this by being utterly redundant. A "sporty" version of the polo shirt? The polo shirt has always been sporty — it was "athleisure" a century before the category existed.

The polo shirt was originally meant for tennis. French champion René Lacoste created it in 1926 as a more comfortable alternative to the long-sleeved white button-ups men usually wore on the court.

Short sleeves. Pique knit cotton. An unstructured, flat collar. Hard to improve on that. And for years, nobody tried. Until our scientific hubris got the best of us. What if we made these out of plastic? And in colors undreamed of in nature? We were so preoccupied with whether or not we could, we didn't stop to think if we should.

But these polos are "moisture wicking," they'll tell you. Nonsense. The claim that moisture-wicking is desperately needed for comfort during normal daily life is a delusion. If it’s so hot that a pique cotton knit polo isn’t cool enough for your daily life, then a short-sleeve linen button-up is in order. Nothing is cooler. Nothing is more classic.

The synthetic Dri-FIT polo, like all synthetic things, ages terribly. With every bit of wear, the shirt looks worse. There is no expectation that the shirt will be broken in one day. There is no repairing or mending that will ever be done. The synthetic polo is meant to be tossed the day that it starts showing any kind of wear and tear.

The 100% pique knit cotton polo, by contrast, only looks better with age. When the placket shows wear and tear, it feels welcoming. The more broken in, the more comfortable it becomes. The nick on the collar feels like a worn handrail. The fabric is subdued and quiet. The thickness of the knit is forgiving.

A synthetic polo leads you down a path of disposability. It looks best with disposable pants and disposable shoes. A 100% cotton polo looks best with 100% cotton khaki chinos and a pair of leather boat shoes. Natural begets natural. Natural complements natural.

You deserve a better polo shirt. You deserve a 100% cotton pique knit polo. Row the boat out to the island, climb the ancient steps, look down into the crevasse, and throw your moisture-wicking polo into the volcano and never look back.

Work from home? Give yourself a dress code

I have never worked in an office. I have always worked for myself. I have always set my own schedule and determined the rhythm of my day.

Back in early 2020, when COVID hit, everyone’s work changed. All of a sudden, people were working from home. Almost everyone I knew was asking me for advice. How to adjust. How to deal with it. How not to lose your mind. How to stay productive. There was one thing I told everyone: Dress decently for work from home.

When no one is there to make you dress decently, will you still dress decently? When no one is there to stop you from being a slob, will you turn into a slob?

Working from home can be great. You don’t have to battle endless traffic every morning. You can work from the comfort of the nook in your kitchen. You don’t have to be on guard constantly, always trying to stealthily dodge cultural land mine after cultural land mine.

You are free to get your work done when you want to get it done. You are also free to look like a slob. You don’t need to wear a jacket or a tie. You don’t need to wear a shirt with a collar.

Honestly, you don’t even need to wear a shirt at all. You can, theoretically, just lie in your bed naked and get all your work done. You can skip the grocery store and start ordering all your food in. You can end up living your life in pajamas. Hour after hour, day after day. It’s all the same.

Slowly, ever so slowly, you become a shut-in. You leave your house less and less because everything is so easy at your house. Your work is there. Your food can be delivered there. Your bed is there. And life is so much more comfortable in pajamas. Oh, isn’t it so easy when you don’t have to put anything on?

“I’m just not in the mood to get dressed today.”

And while these details of this trajectory are extreme, this is generally how it happens. One thing leads to another, and then another, and then another. It can happen to anyone, but it happens most often to those who are thrown headfirst into WFH. For the person who is used to a certain life working at an office with expectations thrust upon him from the outside, the freedom of work from home can have disastrous consequences.

Dressing decently for WFH is a simple act that helps stop many potential problems dead in their tracks. A great deal of the degeneration that occurs when working from home hinges on being homebound. If you look like trash, you don’t want to leave your house, so you won’t leave your house. It’s a vicious cycle. While if you look nice, you want to leave your house, so you will leave your house. It’s a positive cycle.

Dressing decently for WFH helps tremendously with productivity. In theory, you might be able to get all your work done from your bed. Practically, it’s not going to happen. You are not going to be that productive in pajamas. You are not going to be that sharp in your bed, in a hoodie, unshowered and unkempt. It’s just not going to happen. All of that makes your mind dull — and if not your observable mind, then certainly your spirit. You might be doing fine on paper, but really you are operating, at best, at 75%. That just happens to be enough to make it.

You are simply less capable when you are working from your bed while looking like a street urchin. Your mind is sharper when you are dressed with intention. You might not be dressing up for anyone else; you are working from home, after all, but you are dressing up for work. You are also dressing up for yourself, and that’s important. It’s good for you.

When you work from home for an extended period of time, you run the risk of having your life blend together into one indistinguishable mass. Your personal life blends with your professional life. Your work day turns into your personal day. You lose all distinction and end up feeling like you are always working and never resting.

Or it could be that it feels like you are never working. Or maybe you are just perpetually stuck in this strange no-man’s-land. Whatever it is, you don’t feel right. You lose distinction and slink down into a worse version of what you want to be.

Dressing decently for WFH helps correct this problem. Since you are not able to segregate your personal life from your professional life in space, you need to segregate them aesthetically. With your clothing, you can make a distinction between work hours and personal hours. Dressing up for work, even when you don’t have to leave, makes work into something distinct that also, in turn, makes your life outside work into something distinct.

Wear loafers when you are working and camp mocs when you aren’t. Wear a sport coat when you are working and a sweater when you aren’t. Wear an OCBD when you are working and a polo shirt when you aren’t. Wear a tie when you are working and take it off when you aren’t. Make some distinction.

It doesn’t mean that you have to wear a suit or anything overboard. Just some addition of something that makes work feel like work. It doesn’t have to be grand, but it has to be something. That little something, when repeated over and over again, helps separate your day. It helps to prevent everything from blending together into an amorphous mass. It helps you stay sane and the best version of yourself.

WFH is about freedom. And freedom is a revealing thing. It’s a doubled-edged sword. When we are free, we are allowed to rise and we are allowed to fall. It’s up to us. No one is making us do anything. We are in control. No one is going to make you dress decently for WFH. No one is going to make you care. In a deeper way, WFH reveals who aspires to something higher and who sinks to something lower.

When no one is there to make you dress decently, will you still dress decently? When no one is there to stop you from being a slob, will you turn into a slob?

At first it might be uncomfortable to wrestle with these questions, but ultimately, it is emboldening and energizing. WFH gives us an opportunity to dress decently not because someone made us, but because we want to. In an era of ultimate freedom, choosing to dress intentionally is about choosing sanity, doing something better for ourselves because we care about ourselves. That is what dressing decently for WFH does. It keeps us sane and keeps us better.

Ditch the helicopter — children need submarine parents

The birth rate is falling. Population collapse is imminent. The world is graying. We are living through a massive population bottleneck.

It’s so large and so gradual that it’s hard for us to see. We can’t even really feel it … yet.

The submarine parent doesn’t do anything for his kids that his kids can do for themselves. The submarine parent steps back and gives his kids room to breathe.

Large swaths of the population are being culled. Entire socio-cultural blocs are simply being eliminated from the game. The future will not look like the present. There is heavy selection going on. But it doesn’t feel like it because it is all based on choice. Everyone is free to have children or not.

Bare care

And who chooses to have children in an era of population collapse? Who are the ones deciding to inherit the future? While it’s a varied assortment of people from a variety of backgrounds, there is one pitfall that haunts us all.

It’s very simple. If you are consciously deciding to have children during an anti-natalist era, you most likely really want to have children. You probably didn’t end up with a couple of kids by accident. It was a very intentional choice.

For many, it means going against the grain. You care a lot. You probably “care” more than your parents did, most certainly more than your grandparents did before them. Your grandparents probably didn’t critically examine their parenting style daily. That verb, parenting, didn’t even exist in popular consciousness when they were raising kids.

If you are choosing to have kids today, you might be obsessed with your kids. And this obsession is exacerbated by the fact that there are fewer and fewer kids around. That you are in the minority accelerates all of this. It’s more fuel for your fire.

You are laser-focused on raising your kids right, so determined to give them the best opportunity possible. It almost becomes your identity. The temptation is to become so neurotically focused on your kids that you become a helicopter parent on steroids. We all feel it. We all love our kids so much that we can’t help ourselves.

This is the struggle.

Brat factory

By virtue of the fact that you have kids during an era of population collapse, you are predisposed to over-caring and over-parenting. As with so many things in life, a positive contains the seed of a nascent negative, even if it isn’t always obvious on the surface.

Everyone knows that only children have certain issues that children raised with siblings do not. While having lots of one-on-one time has certain benefits, there are also negative impacts.

Crudely put, if you are a kid and you are always the center of attention with the perception that the world revolves around you, you often turn into a brat. This tends to be how snots are made. It’s the truth. Every parent knows it.

How do we very involved parents having children during this strange era avoid this fate for our children? How do we avoid creating a brat factory?

We need to restrain ourselves. We need to step back. We need to realize that our natural inclination is to care too much. We need to realize that that strong desire to have a family becomes a curious weakness at a point.

That sounds provocative, but it’s true. We need to realize that we live in extreme times and that all of us who have kids have some kind of extreme feeling inside us that resulted in us having kids, and we need to temper that.

Submarine parenting

We need to, somehow, raise our two kids as if we have five kids. Or raise our four kids as if we have eight kids. We need to realize that we do not risk doing too little. We risk doing too much. We cannot be helicopter parents. We need to be submarine parents.

Helicopter parents are always hovering over the children making sure everything is right. They are always there making sure they have the best of the best. They want to make sure they have every opportunity. They are always at their children’s beck and call, obsessing over the latest and greatest fears Instagram serves up.

The helicopter parent takes on all the stress of her child in hopes of making her child’s life as easy as possible. Helicopter parents love their children. They just don’t realize how that love hurts their children and themselves. We are already stressed about everything; we are already embarking on the task of maintaining civilization amid population collapse. We can only take so much.

The submarine parent isn’t always visibly there waiting to correct anything that might be troubling the youngster. The submarine parent doesn’t do anything for his kids that his kids can do for themselves. The submarine parent steps back and gives his kids room to breathe.

Dive!

Submarine parents realize that there is effectively no chance that they run the risk of being absentee parents. They realize that they have spent hours researching the best techniques for sleeping, introducing foods, conscious choices about discipline and technology, and every other possible consideration known to mankind.

There is zero chance they aren’t involved. There is zero chance they are checked out. They are the most involved generation of conscious parents ever to have walked God’s green earth. In light of this, they must relax and embrace the submarine.

Submarine parents are always there, of course. But they aren’t hovering. They aren’t making everything easy. They aren’t the entertainment committee. They aren’t always correcting every inconvenience or every minor trouble.

We love our kids so much that we have to realize that our love can be a hindrance. It can manifest in ways that aren’t helpful.

Our natural drive and desire that led us to have children in the first place run the risk of driving us, and our kids, crazy. We have to to temper it and realize who we are. It’s okay. We have to relax a bit. If we don’t want to run a brat factory, we must reject the helicopter and embrace the submarine.