Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
Parents can help children get the most out of play and use it to strengthen the parent-child bond. But you don’t want to help too much. “Guiding play can be fine, but one needs to be careful to give enough room for the unknown to take shape,” Alcée says. Here’s what that means on a practical level.
what matters is who you are, not when you do it. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. And if you're not, a good economy won't save you. Someone who thinks "I better not start a startup now, because the economy is so bad" is making the same mistake as the people who thought during the Bubble "all I have to do is start a startup, and I'll be rich."
Screenwork has been hit by a Weimar scale inflation
Smart Questions are, typically, kind of dumb. And, just as typical, questions that might initially seem dumb or underinformed, or downright unintelligent, are the smartest way to learn stuff if you’re a journalist, an academic, or anybody else.
The biggest obstacle to our capacity to love each other is that we fear the asymmetry of giving and not receiving. But the heart is a muscle: you can make it bigger by training it, and the bigger it gets the less it cares for symmetry or saving face. Instead of repetitions of lifting weights, you train your heart with repetitions of *directing compassion at things*, like that friend who's less available to see you than they used to be, or the crush who ghosted you after several nice dates.
As an important aside, if you try to learn on your own, it can be really hard. You’ll hit some weird ruby error and give up. It’s important to have someone—a friend, a teacher at a coding bootcamp, etc.—that get you through these frustrating blocks.
David Whyte nailed this in *Constellations*, writing, “Ambition left to itself, like a Rupert Murdoch, always becomes tedious, its only object, the creation of later and larger empires of control.”
Over the course of the potty training weekend, my husband and I repeated the goal to my son what felt like hundreds of times — and it wasn’t just “poop and pee in the potty” — he’d known he was supposed to do that for months now and that hadn’t motivated him. The goal now was to keep his underwear clean and dry. We reminded him constantly that to do that, he’d have to tell us when we had to go. Trust your child to do that even if you think they won’t — kids this age don’t like to be forced to do *anything*.
For years, science and conventional wisdom have stated unequivocally that looking at a device — like a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or television — before bed is akin to lighting years of your natural life on fire, then letting the flames consume your children, your community, and the very concept of human progress. Simply Google “screens before bed” and you’ll find thousands of articles, many from higher-education institutions and furious British people (they seem the most worked up about this issue as a nation). The message is clear: The blue light emitting from your devices is destroying your natural melatonin reserves, altering your circadian rhythms, and making you ugly. Watching TV or TikTok before bed is giving you headaches and making you confused, leading to depression, diabetes, cancer, and early death. If your offspring opt for the same crutch, they will never achieve greatness.