How do you feel about the dentist? Do you look forward to your appointments? Do you enjoy the cost of cleanings and whatever work needs to be done? Do you enjoy the shaming the hygienist thrusts upon you when you tell her you have been flossing twice a day and she looks at you like you are lying?

I think I know your answers without even knowing you.

In the middle of the procedure this past summer, as my tooth was being hollowed out with vibrating steel, my dentist said he loves doing this kind of work the most.

We all basically feel the same about the dentist. We begrudgingly go because we have to. The consequences of not going are more frightening than lying on your back with your mouth open for 45 minutes while someone picks away at your teeth with little metal tines. A toothache is worse than an hour in the chair numbed up, and a bad smile is worse than a couple hundred bucks a year for regular cleanings.

But still, we all kind of hate the dentist.

Tooth hurty

Though I have to say that lately I have been coming around to the guy behind the mask who comes in for five minutes at the end of the appointment just to tap on a couple of teeth before telling me what I need fixed next. I suppose it’s because over the past few years I have been giving more thought to the benefits and blessings of modern medicine.

When I was younger, I kind of thought they were exaggerating at the dentist’s office about what needed to be done or how crucial it was to fix something. And while I still think there are probably dentists out there who recommend more than is necessary and very much enjoy clients willing to pay for whatever they suggest, I trust dentists more than I have at any other time in my life.

It might sound crazy, but I actually look forward to going to the dentist these days.

I had a crown done this past summer. I ate a lot of candy when I was a kid and never brushed quite as much as I should have. I guess I thought my teeth would last forever. (Narrator: They don’t.) So over the years I had fillings where I had munched on Gobstoppers, Skittles, Shock Tarts, M&Ms, Laffy Taffy, and Now and Laters a little too enthusiastically. Then those fillings cracked and I had them replaced. Finally, this past summer, one of those fillings reached the end of the road, and a crown was necessary.

Crowning achievement

You might not believe me when I tell you I was excited to get that crown done, but I was. I had a crown done by the same dentist for the same reasons a few years earlier, and it went great. He numbed my mouth, went to work, and I left with a beautiful white tooth a few hours later.

The same thing happened this past summer. He numbed me, drilled out the remainder of the filling, had the crown made in their on-site lab, and then fastened it on top before sending me on my way with another beautiful tooth.

Lying there with my mouth open, with vibrating drills rattling my teeth, I thought about how amazing the technology is that makes this kind of operation possible and painless. The assistant used some sort of laser technology to scan my mouth after everything was cleared out, and the crown was finished less than 90 minutes later.

Imagine telling our ancestors that.

I shudder to think about what it was like sitting with a toothache 200 years ago. I don’t need a degree in dental history to imagine it was rather unpleasant, to put it mildly. And so, as much as I naturally want to hate the dentist and his menacing tools, the more I think about the world before the modern DDS, the more I realize I quite like him in 2026.

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Drill, baby, drill

In the middle of the procedure this past summer, as my tooth was being hollowed out with vibrating steel, my dentist said he loves doing this kind of work the most. As a naturally inquisitive person, I asked him why.

He told me he loves the transformation. He loves carving out all the decay and old filling and making it better than it was before. It was the most excited I’ve ever seen him.

Being at the dentist is an intimate experience. We lie there and let a couple of people we don’t know very well hunch over us and get really close to our faces while they dig around in our mouths, and we are helpless the entire time. It can be kind of embarrassing.

“Oh God, they are looking in my mouth with magnifying glasses. Did I brush enough this morning?”

In some way, needing a crown feels like a failure. I didn’t brush well enough, and now I need my tooth fixed. It’s almost like you want to apologize to the dentist.

But hearing my dentist talk about how much he loves doing this kind of work was enlightening. It humanized the man behind the mask.

He’s not a psychopath, despite his love for drilling into teeth all day long. There’s a beating heart inside the DDS. He wants to help. It took me a long time to realize it, but I think I might like the dentist more than any other doctor I see.

Sure, he bears bad news. But he can fix almost all of the problems he diagnoses. That’s more than most doctors can say.

Thirteen-year-old me wouldn’t believe it, but 39-year-old me actually likes the dentist.

The future belongs to people who believe in one

The future will be different from today.

The cars will be different. The clothes will probably look worse. Our phones might still be little black bricks with touch screens, but there will be new applications and new platforms for the dissemination of information. Some cities will grow, some will shrink, new suburbs will be built, and already dying small towns will finally collapse.

There aren’t many logical reasons to have children in 2026. We don’t need them to work the farm or provide free labor at the shop.

We have a tendency to imagine the future as essentially the present but a little farther away, with some higher numbers at the end of the date.

But nothing stays the same forever.

People grow old and die. New people are born. And the people who inhabit the future won't simply have different names from the people alive today. In some important ways, they will be different kinds of people, because they will disproportionately be the descendants of the people who chose to have children now.

The end of the something

We are, in some way, at the end of something, even though we can't clearly see it yet.

The fertility collapse is too big, includes too much of the developed world, and is happening over too long a period of time for us to perceive the whole thing at once. The world's population is still growing, but fertility has fallen below replacement level across much of the world, and dozens of countries have already reached their peak populations.

People aren't having kids like they used to. Or, more precisely, certain people aren't having kids like they used to.

In America, liberals are having fewer children than conservatives. A 2026 study using decades of General Social Survey data found a widening fertility divide by political orientation, with the difference becoming especially pronounced among more recent generations.

Another recent survey found conservatives reporting 1.40 children on average compared with 1.09 for liberals. That sounds like a small gap until you realize it amounts to nearly 30% more children — and demographic differences compound with every generation.

Running on empty

The average secular, centrist Democrat Boomer might have had two kids in 1982 because that's just what you did. Today, his kids might have dogs.

We don’t yet see the impacts of the asymmetrical population collapse because we are still at the very tail end of secular liberals reproducing. But eventually the tail will disappear, the gas will run out, the engine will slow, and we will see a future of different people.

Sometimes I meet with older people who never had children or older secular centrist Democrats who had two kids but whose children haven’t decided to do the same. I wonder if they are able to see the self-eliminating tendencies of their general worldview or if they give any thought to why exactly their children haven’t chosen to become parents as they did and if, perhaps, in hindsight they might reflect that there were flaws in raising them the way they did.

Sometimes I find myself someplace where the average age is 64, and I wonder if the people realize what that means. It’s not that they should be lying awake at night sweating bullets because they aren’t replacing themselves. We can only do so much in this world, and some problems are bigger than us. But I do wonder if they realize that the future will be different in part due to their choices regarding procreation and child-rearing.

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Why bother?

There aren’t many logical reasons to have children in 2026. We don’t need them to work the farm or provide free labor at the shop. So we who have children today have them for deeper reasons. Sometimes they are outwardly religious ones, like the imperative to be fruitful and multiply. Sometimes they are less religious ones based loosely on culture or love of family. And sometimes it’s just hundreds of little signals that add up gradually to form a general attitude toward family life.

“We’d love to have more.”

If you are in the conservative world in any way, this is a phrase you are well acquainted with. You have heard it said too many times to count, and you have probably said it quite a few times yourself. It’s just what you say after a conversation about a baby, a new car to accommodate another kid, or any other funny story about family life.

It’s a short little sentence, but it being a sort of default thing to respond with very acutely illuminates the difference between the liberal world and the conservative one in 2026.

In the liberal world, this is not a phrase that is uttered naturally. There is no presumption that (of course!) you want more children. At best, children are viewed neutrally, and at worst, they are considered kind of a buzzkill for what could be a life of “freedom” and higher earning potential. On that side of the political world, it is simply not a cultural assumption that children are a blessing and the more the better.

Betting on the future

But that attitude is dying, literally. It doesn’t seem like it yet, I know. It’s slow. We are still over-saturated with young people born to the types that wouldn’t have kids today. We are still in the middle of that very long population bottleneck, and the ship is still coasting though the gas has just about run out.

But over time — a very long period of time — the attitudes of those who don’t care for a world of children will slowly dissipate and become less potent. They are self-eliminating, after all. That’s not opinion; it’s a cold fact of reality that we all see clearly now. The only people who will exist in the future will be people born to those who believed children are good, that the more life there is, the better, and the future should be one that is full of humans.

I’m optimistic.

Better to be new than true? Welcome to the era of 'take-ism'

I’ve recently come up with the term “take-ism” to describe what I consider to be one of the most pernicious and destructive social phenomena of our era.

We all know the term “hot take.” Basically, it’s an idea that’s provocative, strident, and also — and this is key — a bit new. It’s the opposite of a cold take, which is essentially common knowledge.

Is it the overexposure to infinite faces and places that our phones enable that creates this desperate need for novelty, even at the expense of our sanity?

A hot take is often offensive to someone out there, but that's just a byproduct. What it really needs to offer is novelty.

Race to novelty

Take-ism is essentially a race to novelty above all and at all costs. While there are hot takes that are true and novel takes that do illuminate an unexplored and previously unobserved fact of reality, the pursuit of truth plays little role in the real thrust of take-ism.

The logic of take-ism is essentially the logic of the internet: novelty = interest = attention = likes = follows = good. Truth doesn’t matter, earnest belief doesn’t matter, all that matters is novelty and attention.

Take-ism takes many forms, ranging from the very benign to the extremely corrosive and actually evil. A couple of benign examples of take-ism would be things like:

“Actually, summer is the worst season of the year.”

“Actually, Italian food is terrible.”

Maybe someone really believes those things. Who knows? The point is that everyone knows summer is supposed to be great and Italian food is supposed to be delicious, so saying the opposite gets attention. The take wins.

Take it till you fake it

More corrosive and evil examples of take-ism would be things like:

“Actually, the good guys lost World War II.”

“Actually, the United States of America is a force for evil in the world, and China is force for good.”

You’ll notice the word “actually” appears at the beginning of all four of those examples. Even when it doesn't, it's always implied. Take-ism loves to correct.

“Actually, everything you know is wrong.”

Take-ism also plays a role in conspiracy-theory culture. A big part of what propels the conspiracy-theory influencer world is a logic of take-ism and insatiable need for new secrets and new "truths."

You can see this logic in transgenderism. “Actually, I am not who I am, I am someone else. I am not a girl despite having XX chromosomes, I am a man. Actually, biology doesn’t matter. Actually, your eyes cannot tell you reality. Actually, everything you know is wrong.”

The fact that transgenderism has spread primarily by way of the internet is a further confirmation of the fact that it is ultimately just a form of take-ism. Obviously, social contagion plays a huge role in this case, but the subterranean logic underneath it is take-ism.

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Belief optional

Of course, we can never know for certain why people believe what they believe — or if they really believe it. But we can make some inferences based on our own observations of the world and what we know about human nature.

We can also see the financial incentives at play in the era of posts, memes, and short-form video. And lastly, we can easily see how simple it is to manipulate people who posses shallow morals and a mind permanently addled by nihilistic brain rot.

How much do influencers, writers, posters, and speakers believe when they claim to believe an idea based on take-ism? How much do the doom-scrollers believe when they hear it? What difference does it make if one believes based on earnest thought or one believes based on a secret desire for something novel?

Slop culture

The question underneath all of this is why do people seek out the novel above the true?

Why exactly is take-ism the latent logic of the internet? Is it inherent to the medium? Does the internet — and its democratic communication — lend itself to unifying with take-ism?

Is it the overexposure to infinite faces and places that our phones enable that creates this desperate need for novelty, even at the expense of our sanity? Are we being entertained to death by endless scrolling and thusly all we want is more entertainment and nothing else? Does the internet click-economy clandestinely aim to make us all into cynical nihilists who no longer care about earnest belief, goodness, or truth?

Whatever it is — and it’s a lot of things — take-ism is responsible for the boiling of people’s brains in vats of conspiracy sludge, transgenderism, and countless other forms of intellectual damage and dysfunction, which are currently coursing through the culture.

Are antidepressants zombifying American culture?

Why are things the way they are?

Why does it feel like things were better before?

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

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

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

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

Ostinato of apathy

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

Perhaps.

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

SSRIs and other forms of antidepressant medication.

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

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

Drugs not hugs

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

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

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

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Dead inside

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

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

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

No wonder people aren’t partying.

No wonder the birthrate is in the tank.

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

No wonder everyone dresses like slobs.

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

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

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

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

Want less spoiled kids? Have more of them

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spoils of abundance

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

We spoil them with importance.

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

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

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

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

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

Lonely islanders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for sharing

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

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

That's life.

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

RELATED: We need a Labor Day for moms

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Love and limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last days of summer: The fleeting high point of the year

The end of the year is nigh.

The calendars you buy at Walgreens are all wrong, and so is your iPhone. The end of the year is not a month or so after we have swollen ourselves with food from Thanksgiving or when the Christmas decorations are up. The spiritual change of the year doesn’t occur when there is frost on the ground and winter boots by the door.

Perhaps the school schedule isn’t arbitrary or based on temporary factors but reflects a deeper truth.

The end of the year is nigh. Nay, it’s here (!); it’s right now. You and I are living through it today, at the end of the summer.

Back to school

I came across a post the other day from Benjamin Braddock. It read, “It feels like the fading of summer is the real ending of the year.” I tapped my iPhone, turning the little heart icon from white to red, indicating I agreed with his sentiment, sent it to a few friends for further discussion, and decided I needed to write something.

It would be easy to explain the feeling as a product of schooling. We spend more than a decade of our youth on that schedule, and it gets ingrained in us. A few weeks after Memorial Day, we would be let out and free for what felt like forever.

But it wasn’t forever. The summer always went quicker than we wished it did, and by the time the middle of August rolled around, we would start feeling a bit ill and rather depressed at the thought of beginning school again.

The last weeks before September aren’t the middle of the year; they are the end, and as children we knew it.

We live that schedule for years in our youth, but I don’t believe it’s that which is responsible for our feeling that the end of the summer is the real end of the year. Perhaps the school schedule isn’t arbitrary or based on temporary factors but reflects a deeper truth that indeed the year begins when the summer ends.

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Cold snap

It’s something about the knowledge of the impending cold and the freezing of the living world. I know that soon, all too soon, the leaves will begin to change. First the young trees and the very old ones. They go from yellow to orange, to red, and then they fall and they crackle and we rake them, and some burn them, and fall is here.

It’s a clear transition, even though it happens slowly, and a dramatic change in the world we see. And for some reason the change from winter to spring doesn’t feel like the beginning of the year even though we might think it would. Like the sun rises and the dark becomes bright, we might logically conclude that as the temperatures rise and the world blooms, we are beginning the year. But it doesn’t feel like that, does it?

Seemingly, counterintuitively, it is when the air turns cold that the year begins. And truth to be told, I believe it’s less about the arrival of the cold and more about the passing of the warmth.

Fleeting treasure

The end of the summer is the high point of the year. It’s when the air is at its warmest, when the water is most comfortable and swimming is best, and when every single tree is full of leaves. The way the light fills the sky and glitters on the water is very different at the end of the summer than it is at the beginning. It’s more golden, more full, and more treasured.

It’s finite, and we know it, just like we knew those last weeks of summer vacation were finite as kids waiting to begin sixth grade.

Then end of summer is the end of the year, and it has always felt right to me that Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year — comes in September. God gave the dates of the calendar in the Bible, and he made the new year at the end of the summer. Our feelings about the nature of the seasonal cycles and the feelings that accompany them reflect deeper ancient truths about the way the world has been ordered since the beginning of time. The school schedule came later.

Summer sigh

The last days of summer, the days we are living through right now, are like a sigh. A smiling and not yet mournful sigh, a sigh that means we are content and happy. The kind of sigh that you let out when you are so full that you wish the moment could last forever.

On the beach, the kids playing in the sand, splashing in the water, running and laughing, the sparkling water, sun-kissed skin more caramel than ever before, the happiness the sun brings, the sound of the waves.

Endless summer might be heaven, but heaven isn’t here on earth; for that we must wait. Those last days, the days at the end of the year, they tease us. And the knowledge that they are finite is what makes them precious. But what if these could last forever? If only they could last forever!

But they can’t. Time marches on, we are at the end now, a new year must begin, and it will begin soon, after the last day on the beach.

Do you wear your shoes in the house?

Do you wear shoes in the house?

Or do you remove them every time you open the front door, place them tidily next to the closet, and proceed into your humble abode with only a thin layer of sock between your foot and the floor?

What does it mean that most households in America today are shoes-off households? Why is there a change?

This question of indoor footwear, or lack thereof, is a surprisingly interesting one. You might think it doesn’t really matter that much whether or not your shoes stay on while inside, but it is a somewhat fascinating little debate for the acute observers of our perpetually evolving American culture.

Sole survivors

There are a few different ways to view the shoes-in-the-house debate. The first layer is that of personal preference. For lots of families in America, it comes down to a mundane choice. Mom and dads on a random weekday just sort of come to the conclusion that they are going to either be a shoes-on or shoes-off household, and that’s what they do for the rest of their lives together. For others the decision is an inherited one. They grew up keeping shoes on, so that’s what their kids grow up doing. We do what we are used to; it’s tradition.

Beyond the simple choice of personal taste, there are geographical ways of looking at the question of rubber soles on wood floors. There are regional factors at play. The U.S. is a big place with lots of different climates, and taking shoes off or keeping them on wavers a bit from region to region. For those in the sloshiest and snowiest ares of the U.S., keeping your boots on inside in the middle of February is a nonstarter. For others, in the drier regions, keeping shoes on isn’t particularly concerning whether it’s July or February.

There are also global differences in the answer to the question of shoes inside the house. I should say it’s a bit hard to get reliable data on global attitudes regarding this question. All the maps you find are slightly different, and the sources aren’t exactly clear. I mean, what’s this polling really like? But taking account of all the available maps, the very west end of Western Europe, North America, Central America, and South America tend to be shoes-on, and the rest of the world is generally shoes-off with a few exceptions.

Don't tread on me

Last but not least, a final aspect to this discussion is one of American history. Have you ever seen a photo of a family gathering or party in America during the 1950s in which the majority of adults are sitting or standing around inside without their shoes on?

Probably not, and if you have, it’s an exceedingly rare photo of an equally rare occurrence. Back in old America — think 1800-1950 — people kept their shoes on inside. The thought of a group of adult men and women sitting around showing their dirty socks to one another would be very preposterous, extremely undignified, and generally rude. No one was asking people to take their shoes off at the door in 1958 America.

Though America is still considered a shoes-on country by many foreigners, things have changed. There is a trending line running toward socks on the floors and shoes by the doors.

What does it mean that most households in America today are shoes-off households? Why is there a change? And what has brought it about?

It’s hard to say. Some might argue that increased immigration from countries where shoes-off is the norm has changed attitudes in America without people realizing their attitudes are being changed. I think there could be truth to this. Immigration obviously brings unforeseen impacts, though I’m not sure many Midwesterners are really that influenced by Asiatic household footwear norms. Any influence due to immigration is probably minimal when it comes to this very narrow matter.

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Footloose and fancy-free

I think any change toward an increase in more shoes-off households comes more broadly from an increasing informality that has spread through our culture over the past four decades. People are now comfortable showing their bare socks and requesting others do the same when visiting their home.

Is that a good thing? Is it a sign of a closer community or a more generally friendly and approachable disposition?

I don’t know. Maybe, but probably not. People are not closer today than they were in the past. They know their neighbors less, community bonds are weaker, and social satisfaction is down. Robert Putnam's 2000 book "Bowling Alone" documents all this well. The fact that more people host parties and request that guests take off their shoes says more about increased informality and less about closeness.

Toeing the line

Changing opinions about cleanliness play a role in this evolution. For some reason today, people really do not want any dust or dirt tracked into the entryway to their house. It’s not unreasonable to want a clean house. We all do. I have three kids in a small home and know how messy it can get. But brooms and vacuums exist, and they work. People certainly seem more concerned about any possible dirt being tracked in than they did a few generations ago.

I don’t think there’s an objectively right or wrong way. Shoes-on houses are good, and so are shoes-off ones. Though I do think it’s worthwhile to wonder what cultural changes signify, because they often mean more than what meets the eye. And no matter how logical it might be to remove shoes so as to keep a house cleaner, the change from 1956 to 2026 says something about changing attitudes regarding formality and presentation in the American home, and it’s fair to wonder if those changing attitudes are related to broader developments in the society, many of which are not terribly good.

Is there some strange connection between requesting that guests remove their shoes and pajama pants in the airport? In the American context, probably yes.

As for me, I’ll keep wearing my sport coat at the airport and my loafers in the kitchen.

Yes, groceries are more expensive. Now what?

Inflation. Everyone's discussing it these days, at least on X.

Is it bad? Is it fine? Are our perceptions skewed by virtue of living in 2026 which makes accurate evaluation of prices in 1996 impossible?

Going to McDonald’s was an occasion back then. There weren’t 35 different kinds of IPAs in the grocery store. Arugula didn’t exist until sometime around 2009.

It’s hard to know. Different people have different ideas on all of this and it’s hard to say one is more right than another. Sometimes there are multiple right answers.

Socialism starter

Matt Walsh wrote:

Grocery prices are insane. They’re still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader. End the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue. It’s one of the main reasons socialists are gaining power.

He’s not wrong. Grocery prices are higher than I ever remember. Most families I know are acutely aware of the situation. When you're feeding growing kids, you can’t skimp the way you skimped when you were 21. You can’t feed them junk because it’s cheaper; you have to feed them nutritiously, and so you end up feeling those higher prices pretty sharply.

Burrito-nomics

Jeremy Kauffman wrote:

“So far as I can tell, it's simply not true that food has gotten more expensive in real dollars in the United States. Why are people so convinced this is true? What's the evidence?”

Below his post he shared a graph detailing the fact that grocery prices have only risen in nominal terms, not real terms, essentially saying prices are higher but so are wages.

In response to claims of $20 burritos being prohibitively expensive for young people, Kauffman detailed the hard numbers for feeding burritos to a family of eight with ingredients from Wal-Mart. The total price was $18.38

Kauffman isn’t wrong either. Although my wife handles the food in our house, I do know we buy our groceries from Meijer, Aldi, and Walmart. I know there are absolutely affordable prices to be found if you don’t buy your ingredients at Whole Foods and you make your food at home rather than going out. A gallon of milk from our local Walmart is $3.17; a gallon of milk from the nearby Whole Foods is $6.69.

To his point about prices rising nominally but not in real terms, I’m not an economist or a statistician, so I don’t know all the ins and outs of how these numbers are calculated, but I do know we tend to really notice in passionate and negative terms when the prices swell at the store but we don’t really notice or account for our paycheck swelling in our bank account. It’s a sad fact that we tend to focus on the bad more than the good.

Passion for premium

Lomez wrote:

Short answer is that post-boomers became accustomed to premium/boutique brands. These things do, in fact, cost a lot more than generics. No seed oils. All organic. Cage free. Etc. Etc. My family spends a lot more on groceries in *real* dollars than my parents did because, like just about everyone posting online about this, we over-extend and buy the$20 dollar bottle of nice Vermont maple syrup and $8 fancy French butter and do this across the board for almost every category [choose your own indulgence/health fixation]. I know we're not alone in this. I've seen your pantries.

The longer answer is that other categories of spending have gone significantly up — housing, childcare, insurance — and so there's less slack in the average person's budget. Grocery prices might be flat as a general matter, but the belt can still feel — and actually be — a lot tighter.

He is certainly correct, and like most other very correct answers to complex questions, the people don’t want to hear it.

In the 1990s, before the foodie revolution, our parents fed us very plain food. We rarely went out to eat, and it was a big event when we did. There were no cans of sparkling water. We never had pop in the fridge. We didn’t even really stop at fast food when traveling; we packed sandwiches in a cooler full of half-melted ice bags at the bottom.

Going to McDonald’s was an occasion back then. There weren’t 35 different kinds of IPAs in the grocery store. Arugula didn’t exist until sometime around 2009. The children of 2026 have no experience with the iceberg lettuce salad of 1996 — you know the one, with bland white crispy lettuce, large tomatoes that aren’t even close to ripe, and three fat cucumber slices.

Our kids eat guacamole, sushi, organic eggs, copious amounts of raspberries with Greek yogurt in the morning, and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t even encounter until I was in my 20s.

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Fancy feasts

It’s a fascinating story about class and taste. How even though our society is, in many ways, more classless and lowbrow than ever, many people are eating food that really only very wealthy and very health-conscious individuals ate back in 1996, and that fact plays some role in how we perceive prices.

The thing about shifting expectations after the foodie revolution is that it doesn’t feel like any of those things that were fancy and expensive in 1996 are elite in 2026. Fresh guacamole is now the Kraft American cheese single, and now no one would eat the Kraft American cheese single, and this skews our perception.

Of course, it goes without saying that someone does eat the Kraft American cheese single. Millions of people do, just like we did. Actually, in fact, we didn’t eat the Kraft American single at the Root house in 1996 because they were considered kind of fancy and more expensive than buying a block of cheese and cutting it yourself.

Reality bites

The truth about inflation is that whether it’s real bad, pretty normal, or the end of the world as we know it, we can’t do anything about it. You, dear reader, have no way to meaningfully change the global financial system or the American economic situation at this time. These things are too big for an individual citizen to have any control over. You can’t make the prices lower, you can’t stop the bleeding, you can’t do anything other than buy what you need to buy while doing your best to stay within your budget.

We humans have a terrible tendency to focus very heavily on things we can’t really change. I don’t know why it is, but it is. Is it because we are naturally malcontent? Or is it because we are whiners with no strength? Or maybe we are masochists? Obsessing endlessly about something you view as terrible and painful when you have no way to change it seems like a form of masochism, doesn’t it?

Whatever it is, it isn’t good. We can’t focus all our energy or emotional firepower on being angry about inflation. Maybe we should be angry; maybe we shouldn’t be angry. I don’t know. But I do know that all we can do is acknowledge the reality of the world as it is, whether it be good or bad, and do our best to adapt to the current situation, live the best life we can in the meantime, and hope for the best.

That’s how it was in 1996 and how it is in 2026.

Technology peaked with radio — especially when it comes to catching the game

Remember the radio? Of course you do. It’s not hard to remember. It’s still around. You can buy a little one on Amazon and tune into AM or FM. Cars still have them, for now. You can enjoy classical music on public radio, political commentary on talk radio, the game on a Friday night, or whatever else there is floating around on the airwaves at any given moment on any given day.

Before TikTok there was Facebook, and before Facebook there was MySpace, and before MySpace there was television, and before television there was radio, and before radio there was silence.

'Who else is listening to this right now?' That’s what I wonder a little when I’m driving and scanning the radio. There’s no way for me to know.

Imagine what that transition was like — from silence to radio.

Big world

I’ve been reading “Hello, Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio” by Anthony J. Rudel recently, and in it, Rudel writes at length about that time and transition from silence to radio sound.

The world was so big in those days. Rhode Island was so far from Spain, and Ohio was so far from Rhode Island. In that big world of people without Social Security numbers or anything like our panopticon of 2026, there were millions and millions of little worlds. Towns, blocks, clans, families, and people all in their own little worlds, living and breathing in silence.

Radio was, in some way, a beginning of the modern world as we know it. Of course, there have been many symbols of many beginnings in different and disparate domains, and radio was one of them. The ability to transmit a message across the land to anyone else who might want to listen was the beginning of mass communication and mass modern society. In hindsight, it was the first step in a long march toward Instagram, Facebook, and X.

When media was social

But radio was nothing like today's social media. The people who listened to it still lived primarily in embodied communities — families, churches, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Radio expanded that world; it did not replace it.

Social media has done the opposite. Millions of us now inhabit synthetic networks populated by algorithms, bots, AI-generated content, and strangers selected by recommendation engines rather than real proximity. We are connected to more people than ever while becoming increasingly detached from the human beings physically around us.

Radio felt like a kind of modern magic. Voices traveled across the plains, through the night, and into your living room, making a vast country seem smaller. Yet those voices still pointed back toward a shared human world, answering one of humanity's oldest questions: Is anybody out there?

Beautiful uncertainty

There’s something beautiful about how terrestrial radio isn't completely predictable or reliable. Fishing, not knowing what you might catch when throwing your line in the water is like that. Driving and just letting the road go is like that. Tuning into the radio, passing over static as you turn the dial right, hearing faint music or voices covered by the gray sound, and landing on a station you haven’t heard before is like that.

Driving late at night with one hand on the wheel and the other on the dial, scanning from station to station, seeing if there is anything worth listening to is different from looking through Spotify playlists or flipping through CDs like we once did 20 years ago. Spotify playlists somehow feel like shopping at the store, and CDs felt like something private, while radio stations feel like something almost — almost! — communal.

“Who else is listening to this right now?” That’s what I wonder a little when I’m driving and scanning the radio. There’s no way for me to know. There’s no way for the radio station to know. There’s no way for anyone to know who’s listening in their car or in their bedroom or in their kitchen.

The sound is sent out into the world on a certain frequency, and those who are tuned in hear. There is no history of it marked, there is no documentation logged, there is no surveillance state knowing you listened that night. Ah, the sound of freedom.

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Batter up

Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe it’s aesthetics, but whatever it is, there is something so damn American about listening to a baseball game on the radio. The game sounds better over a little tinny speaker with crackle and static than it looks on a 96-inch flatscreen. The way the announcers sound, the way they describe every detail, the distant cry of the crowd in the background. You imagine sight in your mind behind your eyes as you play out what they tell you.

Maybe the beauty of radio is the fact that we don’t have control once we finally land on a station that’s clear. Someone else chooses the music to play or the words to say, and it’s there in the background, and everyone out there who’s listening listens. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad, maybe it’s all right, but it’s just what there is, and it’s fine. I think we might get sick of making so many choices these days. There’s too many choices. Going on a ride with someone else is nicer than driving ourselves.

If all this is just nostalgia, then it’s a nostalgia for a world that hadn’t quite yet evolved, or rather devolved, into the global cyber panopticon we have today. It was a world teetering on the edge of technological modernity; one still with the magic of the old little worlds; one that was peering over the fence toward the future and everyone else far away. It was a big world out there, and we could only hear just a little of it.

It was tinny, scratchy, and it was magical.

How to raise a family on only $380,000 a year

I recently came across a short article in which the female half of an early-30s DINK (dual-income, no kids) couple in Charlotte, North Carolina, outlined their finances.

They make a combined income of about $380,000 per year. They have no debts other than a $450,000 mortgage, which they expect to pay off in the next seven years. They've accumulated $1.1 million in savings, to which they add about $8,000 each month. Other than gym memberships and an occasional dinner out, they rarely splurge.

'People can’t have kids if they can’t afford a house,' they say. Really? Are renters rendered sterile? I was unaware.

Baby bust

"I love our life together," she says. The only thing missing? Children. They definitely want them, but have chosen to wait until they "feel more financially secure."

You read that right. An otherwise financially literate couple thinks $380,000 per year is not enough to have kids.

Prudence is one thing; this is more like paralysis. And it's fairly widespread in 2026, as evidenced by a decline in both birth rates and general happiness.

How did the standards for a good life balloon so far beyond our ancestors’ wildest imaginings? How did people come to believe they cannot start a family without things their grandparents never possessed? And how did this historically anomalous idea come to seem perfectly reasonable?

Feature creep

There is no single explanation, but our inflated expectations seem to track alongside what is sometimes called “feature creep.” This happens when manufacturers continually add conveniences that, in theory, improve a product but eventually raise the baseline — and the price — to a once-unheard-of level.

My sister recently bought a new car. It is amazing. It can do all sorts of things, and despite not being a luxury model, it was quite expensive. She told the salesman, an old-car enthusiast, that she wished she could simply buy a basic car without all the bells and whistles. He agreed.

That is feature creep. The floor has risen so high that heated steering wheels, assisted driving, and iPads embedded in the dashboard are becoming standard equipment. The same thing has happened to houses and apartments, which are now expected to have renovated kitchens, new bathrooms, smart lights, smart thermostats, and every other costly convenience.

Lease on life

As our products have become more elaborate, so have our expectations for what constitutes a good life — and for what having children requires.

People have grown accustomed to so much comfort that they have lost the ability to adapt as their parents and grandparents routinely did in the not-so-distant past.

This is usually the point when someone brings up the housing market.

“People can’t have kids if they can’t afford a house,” they say.

Really? Are renters rendered sterile? I was unaware.

The Root family must have slipped through the cracks, because we have had children while renting and somehow survived. I am obviously sympathetic to the problem of exorbitant housing costs, but I am not going to pretend that home ownership is a prerequisite for having children.

My parents had me while living in an apartment. My father’s parents had their first child in an old Army tent pitched behind the farmhouse where they were staying for the summer. And that is only the 20th century. The farther back you go, the tougher it gets.

RELATED: You will never be 'ready'

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Doom patrol

The belief that renters cannot even contemplate starting a family is closely related to a couple earning $380,000 a year feeling too financially insecure to have children. Both are also distantly related to the depressive claims of online doom-mongers that life is harder than ever, when it so obviously is not.

No one starves in the United States today. It has been a very long time since that was a normal possibility. We have become so thoroughly removed from true want that we have forgotten what the word means.

After the extraordinary material abundance of the 20th century, it is perhaps unsurprising that millions of people developed unreasonable—and ultimately unsatisfiable—expectations for what they need before they can live well or bring children into the world.

The remarkable thing is that they sincerely believe it. Deep down, they really do feel that what they have is not enough, despite having more than their grandparents could have imagined.

Those DINKs in Charlotte really do believe that an income of $380,000 a year is not enough to start a family.

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”