Three Great Dads

It isn't Father's Day yet, but lately I've been thinking a lot about three dads who mean a lot to me.  So here's three reflections on three amazing dads.

Consistency

Recently, my Grandpa Don passed away.  It's taken me a long time for me to process his passing, because Don was an anchor of stability and certainty.  He was one of the special people who framed my life and gave it context.  Even though he was very old and had a broken hip, it was unthinkable to me that Don could actually die.  I believed until the very last day that he would pull through.  Then, he would sit in his recliner and listen to his western tunes, just the same as he did every day as long as I've known him.

I've always had a difficult time dealing with change, and Don's most remarkable character trait was that he was consistent.  And not only consistent, but consistently good.

We often admire people for doing great deeds of heroism, and the people who are constantly doing good in every little decision that they make are left overlooked.  Doing good in a one-time, high-stakes situation is much easier than doing good in every dull moment, when we are tired, or cranky, or old.  My job was to bring Don his mail each day, and I always noticed that much of that mail consisted of charities thanking Don for his generous donations.

That is not to say that Don didn't perform any great deeds of heroism.  He definitely did.  He swooped in to the rescue of a family that was hurting, and he became the husband and father that they needed.  He financed missions and college tuitions and gave generous loans.  I'm certain that he's done great things that nobody on earth knows about other than him and his creator, because he was the type of man to not let his right hand know what the left was doing.

Recently, his old computers came into my possession.  I got them up and running again and perused some of the files.  They were full of family history records, baseball statistics, and photos of him and his kids.  It was a privilege to be able to back up those files.

I had sometimes wondered if there was a mystery to Don because he was so quiet.  But the truth is that there was no mystery, and certainly no skeletons in the closet.  Don was just an excellent, dependable man.  He was exactly who he seemed to be, and exactly who he was supposed to be.  And that was what our family needed.

Sacrifice

I've finally graduated from college, and now Bree and I are thinking about having children.  This had led me to spend a lot of time thinking about what fatherhood means, what I need to do to prepare for it, and looking back upon my own childhood and how my dad raised me.

My dad has often lamented that when I have kids, I'll look back on his parenting with disgust, and I'll be horrified at how he treated me.  But I'm not so sure.  In fact, as I contemplate the realities of fatherhood, I look at my Dad's example with more and more grace.

As a kid, my life was about me.  When I reached adulthood, the suspicion began to faintly dawn on me that my life might not be about me.  When I got married, I realized that my life was never about me, nor would it ever be, and that I had been fooling myself for ever thinking that it was.  Once our child is born, that knowledge will cease being theory and will have to rapidly become practice.

One of my favorite anime is called Clannad.  The latter part of the story is about the protagonist, Tomoya, learning to become a father.  One of the biggest themes in Clannad is that parents give up their dreams for the sake of their children.  In fact, children become their parents dreams. 

When I think of my childhood, I think of my Dad picking me up from preschool and taking me to A&W's for fried chicken and root beer floats.  I think of the nights when he would sneak in with his laptop for a late-night Spongebob watch party.  I think of my Dad's shop, where he tolerated my chaos in his place of business.  I think of the countless hours of grease and grime and hard labor that he's done to provide for our family.  I think of how even in the depths of the Great Recession, we always had a fully-stocked fridge and a warm house.  I think of all of the tears and prayers and wishes for our safety and success.  In short, I think of me and my siblings becoming my Dad's dreams.

And so as I prepare for fatherhood, I am grateful for having a great father who serves as a good example to me.

Bravery 

Recently, I saw The Fiddler on the Roof at the Hale Theater with my in-laws.  It's an excellent play about fatherhood.  As I watched the play, I began to see my father in law, Matt, in it.  In the play, a Jewish man named Tevye copes with a rapidly changing world and with his daughters, who each become married to successively more undesirable men.  The first daughter marries a poverty-stricken tailor, the second a hopeless radical, and the third an uncircumcised gentile.

Four years ago, Bree and I had begun to make plans to get married.  She was very traditional, and she told me that if I wanted to marry her, I had to get Matt's blessing first.  So I shot a text to Matt and we made plans to meet at a Thai restaurant.  I showed up early and paced the restaurant nervously.  

Eventually Matt showed up and we had our conversation.  I'm sure that it was a conversation that Matt had been expecting (and perhaps dreading) for a while.  I told him that Bree and I wanted to get married and asked for his blessing.  He told me that if that is what Bree wants, that is what he wants.

Back then, I didn't really grasp how difficult that conversation must have been for him.  But now as I think about what it means to be a father, I have reflected back on that pivotal moment.  

If being a father means that your children become your dreams, then marrying off your daughter must be the most gut-wrenching thing in the world.  On one hand, if you approve, you are placing your fragile dreams in the care of some young miscreant, who has far less life experience and couldn't possibly appreciate the responsibility.  On the other hand, if you disapprove, you are crushing the dreams of your daughter, (which, as previously established, are now your dreams.) 

In that moment over a plate of pad thai, Matt demonstrated a special kind of bravery and trust.  And so I am grateful to him for trusting me, and for showing me what it means to be a father.

Tales from the Park

Taking a break from preachy opinion pieces, today I'm going to tell some funny stories from the many seasons that I've spent working for the Parks n' Rec department.  These stories aren't told in any particular order.

Crashing the Lawnmower

One of my duties was to mow and trim the grass around the Parks Division building.  This was mostly an easy job with the exception of one little parking median.  This particular median was a pain to mow because of its hilly terrain, tiny trees that had to be crouched under, and cars parking with their bumpers hanging over the grass.

On one of the occasions that I mowed this median, the mower slipped on the wet grass, sending it sliding into the bumper of one of the cars.  This scraped off a small section of paint from the rear of the car.  I shut off the mower and looked at the scuff, trying to think of what to do, briefly considering buying a bucket of white paint.  It was very early in the season and I was mortified about making a bad impression.  I called my boss, who is normally very chill and kind.  It was the first time I ever saw him angry.  You see, not only had I damaged one of his colleagues cars, I had also committed the grave sin of forcing him to have to fill out paperwork.  An hour later I was peeing into a plastic cup taking a drug test on a technicality, because the city requires employees to take one in the event of any vehicle collision.

The Worst Claw Game

In the morning when I met with my boss, he explained there was some garbage in the little landscapes by the side of the highway that needed to be cleaned up.  Arriving at the first one, I found some scattered garbage and a very strange cardboard sign hung from a tree with weird patterns and designs on it.  I warily trashed the pieces of schizophrenic art and headed to the next site.

At the next site I met with my section lead, a guy named Derek.  He led me over to a tent.  He asked if anyone was home, which received no response.  He apprehensively unzipped the tent and found nothing inside other than a pile of dirty clothes.  Derek and I packed the tent into my truck and then Derek sped off.  However, my job was not yet done, next to where the tent had been was another small issue:  A huge layer cake of toilet paper and fossilized feces.  Wincing, I took out my trash claw and got to work.

The first 'layer' wasn't so bad.  But the problem was that as I peeled back the sun-baked fossilized layers I uncovered the more rancid and fresh layers underneath.  Soon the stench was so overpowering I had to take breaks to walk away and gag.  Sometimes it was hard for my claw to find purchase and as I choked and nearly cried from the stench I was reminded of those frustrating claw machines they have in arcades and supermarkets.

Sa'be

One morning my boss announced that I would be working with a different guy for a change.  His name is Steve, and to me he's the definition of a stopped clock being right twice a day.  On one hand he rides his bike everywhere, he has an active lifestyle, and he doesn't own a cell phone.  On the other hand, he believes in every conspiracy theory.

It all started when we were driving out of the Parks building.  I saw a bigfoot crossing sign which someone had put up as a joke.  Just trying to make conversation, I said "You know, people in the pacific northwest take Bigfoot really seriously."  Steve leaned over and looked at me.  "What do you know about Bigfoot?" he said in a grave tone.  He went on to describe his own personal encounter with bigfoot, in which he smelled the creature but did not see it.  He was too afraid to open his eyes because he knew that once he saw bigfoot it would "change his life."  He also chided me for using the word bigfoot, saying that the creature prefers to be called "Sa'be."  I noticed later that he had the word Sa'be written on the knuckles of his gloves.

Because of my agreeable personality I didn't push back or try to argue with Steve.  This led him to become more comfortable talking to me and over the next two weeks that I worked with him, he told me the truth about fairies, colloidal silver, 9/11, aliens, orbs, and chemtrails.  Once he even told me that his cat spoke to him.

I never saw Steve eat solid food.  His diet consisted entirely of some kind of liquid concoction he drank out of a thermos, which was a mixture of chia seeds and mushrooms.  He was really active for his age (he was around 60) so perhaps his diet is actually effective.  Steve was also really, really good at his job.  I've never seen anyone mow or trim better than Steve could.

I talked with Derek and he asked me how working with Steve was going.  He also told me not to ask Steve about Sa'be.  I laughed and said "too late."

The Tarantula Incident

One day when I was working at one of the parks I was getting ready to clean the bathrooms when I was interrupted by a homeless man, who was carrying a bottle of vinegar in one hand.  He asked if he could go in and I said yes.  Unprompted, he then explained what the bottle of vinegar was about.  He said that one of his friends has a pet tarantula.  The problem is that when he's sleeping, the tarantula likes to crawl around and eventually finds its way into his pants, where it bites his penis due to its resemblance to a worm.  He claimed that vinegar makes excellent tarantula repellent, so he was going to go to the bathroom to pour it on his penis.  During the course of the conversation he was wincing and whinging as if in pain from a tarantula bite.  I wished him well and he walked into the bathroom.

Earlier in the summer, this same homeless guy opened up to me about how he became homeless.  He explained that he used to be a pastor in central Utah.  One of his congregants was addicted to painkillers and he was trying to help her quit her addiction.  This lead to him taking away her opioids, and she called the police on him.  He was arrested for theft.  In prison, he then became addicted to drugs.  Of course, I didn't believe a word of the story.

Mike

Working at the park you become well acquainted with the homeless.  Every once in a while you meet a member of their ranks who stands out.  One of the most notable homeless I encountered was Mike (no relation to my boss)  Mike was probably in his 60s, but he dressed like he was 13.  He wore a baseball cap, colorful shorts and a t-shirt.  His pride and joy was an electric scooter that he rode everywhere.  At the time, the power at the pavilion was shut off, which upset Mike because he wanted to charge his scooter.  

My first encounter with Mike was when he walked up to me and said "I'll give you 50 dollars if you'll turn on the power for the people, and not just for the mormons!"  I explained that I didn't know how to turn the power on and I didn't have permission.  He scoffed and zoomed away on his scooter.  I later learned that he went on to offer my coworker 100 dollars to turn the power on.

Another day while I was pulling weeds, I ran into a couple of homeless guys who asked me the whereabouts of a missing knife.  I told them I didn't have a clue.  One of them asked me "How much do they pay you for that s***?"  I told him $18.50.  He asked if he could make as much.  I almost told him that he had a fat chance of getting hired because of the drug tests and background checks, but his friend beat me to it.  "They don't hire jailbirds like you!" he said.

Anyway, later I ran into Mike, who was laughing as he gleefully scraped paint off of his scooter with a shiny knife.  I asked him where he got the knife and he said "finders keepers!"  After he was done, he repainted the scooter with a new coat of paint.  I saw over the course of the season that he changed the color of his scooter monthly and took great pride in it.  He loaded so many bags of stuff on his scooter that it looked like Santa's sleigh from a christmas movie.

Mike was industrious.  He would show up at the park at peak hours, bringing food and flowers, which he would sell to the park patrons at the pavilion.  He also had a big boom box which he used to play pop music full blast.

Humanity is not Negotiable

 

In the time that I've been writing this blog, I have promised myself to never use artificial intelligence to write it in any capacity.  Not to write, not to research, not to sketch outlines, not to workshop, and not to generate mediocre images.  (The reason I use so much classical art on this blog isn't to be pretentious, it's because that way I can at least trust that it's human.)  This rule has expanded to every other aspect of my life.  I don't use AI for school, for work, for my personal programming projects, or for any other purpose.

All of the thoughts on this website are free-range, organic human thoughts.

A year ago in my Environmental Ethics class, the professor once asked us to imagine nature as virtual reality.  In a class full of nature lovers, he asked if we would be satisfied to be submerged in some kind of matrix-like simulation of nature.  Students raised objections, such as that a simulation could never capture the sunlight shimmering through the summer trees or the scent of a pine tree.  The professor urged us to imagine, for the sake of argument, that the simulation could do such a thing.  A perfect imitation with no way to know the difference.

My response was that for as long as I could not tell that the simulation was a simulation, I would appreciate it as if it were nature.  But if the illusion was ever broken even for a moment, if I was ever told the truth, I would never be satisfied with a false nature.  All of my memories living within it would be forever poisoned, and I would seek to leave as soon as possible.  The professor asked me why, and I replied that consciousness (or spirit) was the distinction.

Consciousness is a difficult topic that will be dealt with on this blog in greater depth in the future.  But for now it is sufficient to note that I do not subscribe to materialist theories of consciousness.  Not only on religious grounds, but on philosophical grounds.  My position on the subject is closest to a kind of metaphysical idealism or panpsychism.  That background deeply colors my position on AI.  I do not believe that machine consciousness is possible because I suspect that mind, spirit, life, and biology are deeply intertwined.

Back to the topic of a false nature.  For me, the beauty of nature is not solely derived from a pretty picture or a breath of fresh air.  It is from a feeling of interconnection that is unmatched in artificial environments.  On my nature walks, the simple squirrel or deer is imbued with a kind of magic that endures.  The fact that the animal has its own inner world, an eye that sees me, a mind that thinks.  It's a miracle.  The herbs and the trees are no exception.  They have their own kind of vegetable life, reaching toward the sun, bringing forth growth and seeds and brambles and leaves, feeding the animals, building the soil, shading and holding me.  And if you pay attention to plants, you'll know that there's something going on in there, that they're not just dead matter.  Even the stones might sing on the right day.  Mind is spread out all over nature far broader than we conceive, and nature has a majesty and divinity far greater than the sum of its parts.

Compared to an authentic nature, a simulated one is worthless, no matter how convincing.  When the animals and plants and stones and rivers are just switches flipping in chips with neither mind nor will, where the sunlight is a graphical program that nourishes nothing, there is no miracle.  Every tree would become a smokestack and the sky would become the ceiling of a prison cell no matter how beautiful it would otherwise have been.

I tell this story of a false nature because it illustrates the difference between real art and AI-spewed trash.

I once heard a funny quip on an odd corner of the internet.  Someone remarked that AI forced them to believe in the human soul by showing them what art looks like without it.  I chuckled and groaned.  In the face of that sacrilege, the mind can intuit the dignity of man, that he is matter and yet also sacred fire.

Art is not just valuable because it appeals to some aesthetic sense.  Art is valuable because of the artist.  The fact that a real human had a human experience like mine, grappled with it, struggled, and managed to transmute it into something beautiful is what gives art meaning.  No matter how tightly AI simulates human art, it will never actually be able to produce an authentic artwork, because AI will never have experience of any kind, let alone a human one.  Even the simple text prompt that a human puts into an AI is more of a work of art than the image vomited out by the algorithm could ever be.

People who don't care whether an artwork is made by a human or not are giving something away about themselves.  They are showing that they never valued humanity or the human experience.  They only value the surface-level aesthetics of what they're looking at.  It's a self-own of epic proportions, and it's scary how many people never cared about humanity in the first place.  They were only unmasked when the inhuman began to walk among us.

If creating an idol is a crime against God, then creating AI is a crime against humanity.  AI was created through the outright theft of the products of human creativity with the goal of providing the rich with a way to mass-produce the products of the human mind without having to pay humanity its due for its service.  It's a crime against human dignity.

That is my stance on AI, and I'll die on this hill.

For the people reading, I implore you to not use AI, and to use your discernment to the best of your ability to not consume AI-generated media and products.  (This might mean quitting your favorite slop media sites.)  Using AI may be convenient for cheesing schoolwork but you are only robbing yourself of the skills and knowledge that you could have had if you didn't outsource your mind to the carbon-belching, water-guzzling plagiarism machine.  Being human is inconvenient.  But it's worth it.  And to me, humanity is not negotiable. 

Poppy

I often argue with myself about exactly what a miracle is.  I find that most definitions of the word are deficient.  Is it something that breaks the laws of nature?  No, we find phenomena that break those laws all the time- we just rewrite the laws to accommodate them.  Is it when something amazing happens, something meaningful and improbable?  Naysayers would scoff that those aren't true miracles, just coincidences.

I want to set the argument aside and proceed with a squishy, indeterminate definition of miracle.  I suppose I'll know one when I see one.  In this post I would like to tell you about one of the little miracles I've had the privilege to know.

Her name was Poppy.

I first met Poppy one evening eight years ago.  It was the first time I went to visit Breanna's house, the woman who would become my wife.  Back then we were awkward teenagers who had no inkling of the significance of our meeting or of the long journey ahead.  Poppy was Bree's little fluffy cat, friendly and cuddly.  Poppy took a liking to me, and I to her, and soon I was petting her and squeezing her and she climbed on my back.  I didn't consider myself much of a cat person until I met Poppy and she lazily strode into my heart. 

Poppy back in 2018

Over the years as my relationship with Bree grew closer and deeper, Poppy became as much a staple of life for me as Bree did.  Wherever Bree was, Poppy was our little chaperone in the background.  She was a little poofy cloud, snuggling on the couch, laying in the sun, and doing anything for treats.  She was an expert at nonverbal communication, and she wouldn't allow us to ignore or misunderstand her little requests.  Looking back, it's hard to believe she never spoke a lick of English, because she always made her thoughts known one way or another.

I grew especially close to Poppy after Bree and I finally married and moved into my grandma's basement together.  Grandma was generous enough to allow us to keep Poppy with us, and thus our little family was born.  Poppy was simultaneously like a doting mother and happy-go-lucky child.  Bree and I worked inverse schedules, and Poppy kept me company on the lonely evenings that Bree worked her late shifts at the hospital.

 

She was a small thing on the outside, but huge on the inside.  She was the best cat in the world.  She was special.  I know that all cat owners feel that way, but to me, it's true.  In the same way that the love Breanna and I share is a miracle despite there being billions of similar relationships all over the world, I know that Poppy was a miracle cat.  Sometimes the most everyday, mundane things in life are the most miraculous.  We just have a hard time seeing it.

As summer drew to a close this year, Poppy began to show signs that she was nearing the end.  She was 17 years old, which is very old for a cat.  She hardly showed any pain and she bore her age with grace, but she walked a little bit slower, lost her ravenous appetite, spent more and more time sleeping, and began losing weight.  She was as cuddly and sweet as ever, and she was still herself, but Bree and I knew that she didn't have much time left, and we were at the precipice of a very hard decision.  To be certain, we took her to the vet and she confirmed that Poppy didn't have much longer.

Poppy in her golden years

It was an impossible choice.  How could we make that decision for her?  And yet we had to.  Bree was brave, and she chose to give Poppy a peaceful passing, without pain.  She didn't want Poppy to die in some cold pet hospital, so we planned for the vet to come to us.  In the days leading up to it, we spent lots of time with Poppy, setting aside other things to give her lots of time and attention.  It still felt like it wasn't enough.

On the final day, Poppy laid outside in the sun on our little picnic blanket.  I opened the door for the vet and led her to where Poppy and Bree were laying, and my heart sank.  In that short walk to the blanket, time slowed to a crawl and I felt each heavy footstep.  The vet was kind and professional and she did everything right, but there can only be so much good in a 'good death.' 

 

Because of Bree's tough decision, Poppy passed away comfortable in the company of those who loved her, instead of cold, sick, and alone as she may have otherwise.  She couldn't have understood what had happened, but I pray that if she did, she would have forgiven us.  I hope she has moved on to new journeys and adventures, wherever they may be.

 

As I've grown older, the truth of impermanence has grown more and more real.  Everything comes into being and passes away like the constant turn of a wheel, and the longer I live, the faster the wheel spins.  The recognition of this truth has prompted me to spend more time appreciating life and those who I love, rather than anticipating whatever is coming next.  When I look back on the time I had with Poppy, my greatest regret was that I did not give her enough love or attention, and did not appreciate her for the miracle she was while I had the chance.

Thank you Poppy.  For being our best friend and for teaching us by example how to age with grace, how to love unconditionally, and how to appreciate the little things.  We'll never forget you.  Thank you for teaching me what a miracle is.

 

When the Stork Fails

In recent years, the subject of population decline has started bubbling up from the depths of our social consciousness.  The first stirrings of depopulation began quietly in the east with falling birthrates and shrinking populations in Japan, China, and Korea.  As of 2025, China's population has fallen for 3 years straight.  Japan, on the other hand, has been shrinking for 15 years, and it's been called a 'silent emergency.'  At first, this might just seem like an Asian problem, and some could write it off as a quirk of foreign cultures.

The reality is that fertility is falling all over the world, everywhere.  Western countries aren't as far along on the curve as the countries mentioned above, but it seems that we're all going to the same place.  Africa and a few other scattered places still have relatively high fertility rates, but they will soon begin to fall as well.  The global total fertility rate peaked in 1963 at 5.3 births per woman, and since then it has steadily fallen each year, down to 2.2 births per woman today.  The United States is below the global average with a rate of 1.6, which is below replacement rate: 2.1 births per woman.  Without immigration, the population of the United States would already be shrinking.

This trend has also begun to take hold in my home state of Utah, which used to be the second-most fertile state in the United States.  Despite its religious commitment to natalism, the fertility rate declined the fastest out of any state in 2023, falling to the eighth most fertile state.

Globally, it is apparent that the total human population on Earth will peak and begin to decline relatively soon, before the century's end.

Population decline generally leads to economic instability.  A shrinking population means less people are working, spending, and paying taxes.  The population begins to age as birthrates decline, and the growing elderly population becomes a greater and greater economic burden on working age people.  It may in fact cause a fertility 'tailspin,' where young people respond to hard times with less children, which leads to less workers, which leads to more economic instability, thus the cycle continues.  

Political ideologues have thought of many bad ideas to counter the fertility decline, which range from the ineffectual strategy of paying people to have kids, to stalling by importing immigrants en-masse, to authoritarian forced-procreation schemes.  I doubt any of these 'solutions' will have much success in the coming years. 

Total fertility for the globe over time.

Fertility rate by country in 2024

To understand what's going on, we need to take a brief look at history.  For most of human history, the human population grew almost imperceptibly slowly.  It was only at the beginning of the industrial revolution that population began to increase rapidly.  Medical innovations ensured that less mothers, children, and babies succumbed to disease, reducing deaths.  Industrial agriculture and the mass production of goods made the necessities of life cheaper, allowing families to support more children and increasing births.  What's changed since then?

The most commonly cited reason I hear online for the fertility decline places the blame squarely on women.  Access to birth control, abortion, education, and women's rights more generally are diagnosed as the underlying problem.  This idea is obviously useful for culture warriors but I doubt that it is the root cause.  Culture generally lies downhill from economic and material factors.  People are indeed choosing to have less children, but we should ask why they are making that choice, instead of laying the blame on the brute fact that they can make that choice.

Besides all of the celebrated technical, medical, and productive advancements of the industrial revolution, there was another, quieter shift in human society that often goes unnoticed.  For most of human history prior to the industrial revolution, the majority of the population lived in isolated farmsteads and small villages.  For the people who lived in these rural areas, the center of economic activity was not the business or corporation.  It was the household.  Each household was a small family enterprise, and there was no difference between 'work life' and 'family life.'  As a result, having a large number of children was not just emotionally fulfilling or a religious obligation.  It was also an economic advantage and a matter of survival.  In a household economy, your children are your workforce, your lovable employees.  Furthermore, before the age of steel, engines, and coal, there was a much greater need for manual labor in the home and in the economy at large.

With the industrial revolution, that relationship began to change.  As a result of factory production, economic activity began to centralize in industrial centers in cities, and the household morphed into a place for consumption, not production.  The family lost its central role in the economy, replaced with impersonal transactional relationships between employers and a faceless, replaceable mob of employees.    This change was gradual, not instant, and it was faster in some parts of society than in others.  The mechanization of agriculture took longer than other industries, so rural life managed to hold out a more family-centered mode of production for a little while longer.  But the machine was relentless, and today a vast majority of agricultural land is owned by huge agribusiness, not by family farmers.

In this new state of affairs at the height of industrialism, it is no longer economically advantageous to have lots of children.  Life is divided into the 'work life' or career, and 'family life' or home life, and often these two aspects of life operate in opposition to each other.  Another child isn't another pair of hands to work the land, it's another mouth to feed, another insurance bill to pay, another college tuition, a bigger house, a bigger car, etc.  Other factors at play include the unique circumstances of industrial life.  The peak of fertility for young couples happens to coincide with important education and career decisions, leading couples to delay childbearing until later.  

Economic pressure has driven the single-income family to the brink of extinction, making it harder for potential mothers to have time for child-rearing and for families to juggle career and familial responsibilities.  When children are a luxury rather than a necessity, people will generally choose to have fewer of them.  It's simple math, really. 

Some might object to my argument, pointing out that I am essentially arguing that industrialization is responsible for the population boom and bust simultaneously.  This is where culture comes in.  It takes a while for cultural momentum to be beat down by a new economic reality.  The children of the pre-industrial age who have just moved into a city and gained industrial employment are going to see the large families they were from as the norm, and will act accordingly.  However, over time, the culture loses force and each generation will have less and less children as they gradually adjust to industrial realities.

In short, the population boom is caused by a holdout pre-industrial culture within an industrial society.  But this must give way to an industrial culture, which then leads to the population bust.  I believe this is clearly borne out when looking at the map of fertility decline.  The countries with the highest fertility are the least industrialized, and the countries with the lowest fertility are the farthest along the curve of industrial development.  The Amish, who spurn industrial life within their insular culture, have a birthrate nearly four times the average in the United States.  Industrial civilization is not just ecologically unsustainable, it is also sociologically unsustainable.

I do not believe that there is a viable remedy to this problem on a societal scale, because the problem goes much deeper than government, politics, or culture.  Even if a natalist government were to put a blanket ban on contraceptives and abortion, people would find other ways (both legal and illegal) to prevent pregnancy as long as the incentives remained, and the birthrate would still inevitably decline.  A 'War on Contraception' would end up exactly as effective as the War on Drugs has been.  Governments are not omnipotent.  In the end, you can't force people to do anything, especially something as personal as bearing children.  In a society that had already divorced family life from economic life, the sexual revolution was an inescapable conclusion.

People often hearken back to the rosy sitcom image of the 50s family as a solution.  In my opinion, the stereotypical family of the postwar period is not the legitimate traditional family.  It is a modern invention, a re-enactment of something that is long dead.  It is preferable to the current state of affairs only in the way that a cold corpse is preferable to a rotting one.  Authentic family-centered life does not resemble the fairytale of 50s consumerism.  It is something quieter, closer, and deeper.  We should look toward the Amish, the Pioneers, the Native Americans, and the multi-generational homes of rural Latin America for inspiration.

Most importantly, the fertility collapse is the inescapable conclusion of the industrial age, and also the least terrible way that the population boom of the industrial age could end.  The population simply cannot grow forever on a finite planet, so the boom had to end sooner or later.  Not long ago during the rapid population increases of the 80s and 90s, Malthusians warned of a coming 'population bomb' which would exhaust natural resources and end in mass starvation.  Instead of this horror coming to pass, people are just quietly choosing to have less children.  I am sure that after many years of decline, the population will become stable, the industrial age will burn out, and the world will settle into a new normal where the family recovers its venerable role.

Now that I've gotten through all the doom and gloom, what's left for us to do?  

Even though I believe that there is no way to restore society at large to family-centeredness, I still think that it is possible to shift our priorities as individuals and families toward living family-centered lives.  Doing this necessarily goes against the grain of culture and mass society, and is very difficult.  Most people will simply follow the route of least resistance.  But if small, insular groups (whether religious, racial, or cultural) can find a foothold, they will have the long-term advantage.

As individuals and communities, can we reverse the general trend toward fertility decline?  No, and that's okay.  Because we can create pockets of family-centeredness, oases of meaning and tenderness in the desert of nihilism and selfishness.  And that is worth the effort.  In a future post, I will discuss some of the particulars of how this can be done.

 

Getting Over Video Games

Hello, my name is Rainer Hurtado, and I'm a recovering video game addict.  The first video game I ever played was one of those old flash games on my Dad's laptop.  My Dad was good with computers and he was forward-thinking.  I'm sure he thought that my interest in video games was a good thing, that it would lead to other useful pursuits in computers and technology. (This has been true, to some degree.)  I’m not blaming Dad for my video game obsession, other kids in the family had the same opportunity to play them but it never became a problem for them.
 
When I was a kid, I was only permitted 45 minutes of video games a day, which seemed painfully brief.  Over time I bent the rules more and more, and whenever my parents left the house, the rules went out the window entirely.  Video games quickly went from being a harmless once-in-a-while indulgence to the 'default activity' that I filled all my time with whenever I didn't have school or work, and it had begun to spin out of control.  Playing a bit of video games every once in a while with friends on a weekend is harmless, but when hours and hours of gaming becomes a daily habit, it's a serious problem.

The only thing I looked forward to at the end of the school day was hopping on the computer and playing games.  My parents tried to get me to become more well-rounded and stop playing so much, but it was to no avail.  I was completely absorbed in gaming and I had no will to change.  As I entered college and started living on my own, gaming took up so much of my time that I'm ashamed to even think about it.

When I look back on all the time I wasted, the most obvious question is 'why?'  What was so alluring about video games that drew me to them day after day for hours on end?  What made me prioritize them over all other activities?  After mulling it over, I think I found an answer.  To understand why, we first have to take a look at what distinguishes video games from other forms of media.  

All video games, from the earliest, simplest ones to the complex behemoths on the market today have one thing in common.  They are deeply interactive.  Movies and TV shows typically don't take input from the user and alter the experience accordingly.  In fact, this was one of the reasons that in the early days, video games were considered a more positive form of media than the alternatives, as they encouraged activity rather than passivity.  The interactivity of video games allows the gamer to become the protagonist of the game and share in the joys and failures of the protagonist in a very intimate way.  People watching Harry Potter might get deeply immersed in the story and sympathize with Harry, but they do not become Harry.

Accordingly, the gamer feels a sense of achievement and a thrilling rush of dopamine as they accomplish tasks and outwit obstacles in the game world.  This becomes more insidious the more you think about it.  Besides just being entertaining or stimulating like other forms of media, video games have something else up their sleeve: they are machines that manufacture fake achievement.  And worse than this, accomplishing achievements in video games is carefully designed to be just challenging enough to give the gamer a hit of dopamine, but not so challenging that they become frustrated, lest the gamer 'ragequits' and finds something better to do with their time.

Everything worth doing in the real world is hard.  Going to the gym is hard.  Relationships are hard.  Hiking is hard.  Writing is hard.  Art is hard.  Meditation is hard.  Gardening is hard.  Eating healthy is hard.  Learning an instrument is hard.  Sometimes, even getting out of bed is hard!  Real life is just deeply, deeply hard.  The mismatch between the ease of accomplishing a simulated achievement and the stark challenge of accomplishing something real leads the gamer to spend more and more time gaming and less time living.  After all, when everything seems so hard, what else is there to do? The gamer is left impoverished of real achievements, while a vaporous cloud of fake ones evaporate in the sunlight like dew.

(Some gamers might quibble with the distinction between a ‘real’ and ‘fake achievement, but to such people I would pose the question: Would you rather finish a ‘dating simulator’ game or actually get a real girlfriend?)

I can recall very real opportunities that I passed up on because they would interfere with gaming.  As a kid, I quit taekwondo because it was hard and games were easy.  In my teens, I rejected an opportunity for voice lessons because it would interfere with my gaming time.  In my early college years I spent most of my free time gaming in my apartment that I could have instead spent on making lasting friendships and learning new skills.  And as I look at my Steam page with its countless pointless hours sunk into games, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that I could have done something, anything better with the time.  This is the tragedy of video game addiction, it takes away your time, saps your willpower, and gives you nothing real in return.

I finally had this realization a year or so into my marriage. I felt disgusted and realized I needed to take a step back and think deeply about who I wanted to be and what I actually wanted to achieve in life.  I decided to quit gaming and fill my time with other things.  I drew up a list of things I wanted to learn and practice.  I wanted to start going to the gym and improve my physical fitness.  I wanted to learn to garden to become more self-sufficient.  I wanted to hike regularly to become closer with nature.  I wanted to take up a practice of meditation and prayer to deepen my relationship with God and improve my mental faculties.  I wanted to write a journal to leave something behind for my descendants.

Now that I had my goals, I began taking steps to achieve them.  I got a gym membership, dug out plots for gardening and bought seeds, began writing a daily journal, and started a simple practice of daily meditation and prayer.  In this early stage of development there were a lot of setbacks and ‘relapses’, and it was difficult to juggle all of my responsibilities.  The urge to play video games would rear up frequently and it would be very hard to resist.
 
In a strange turn of events, I was reminded of a particular game called Getting Over It. In a way, it's an anti-video game.  In the game, you play as a guy stuck in a cauldron holding a hammer.  The task is to climb a huge mountain of garbage with nothing but the hammer.  The game is meant to be completely boring, unforgiving, and difficult.  There are no save points, there are no exciting enemies to battle, there’s no satisfying powerups or thrilling music, and there is no way to make the game easier.  It’s just a mountain of garbage.  One slipup can lose you all the progress you’ve made in a single second.  When you fall, a narrator dryly mocks your failure, rubbing salt in the wound.  Most people give up the game after a few minutes of boredom and frustration.

A screenshot of Getting Over It

I thought about it for a while, and wondered if I could use the game the same way a heroin addict uses Methadone Maintenance Therapy, using brief hits of a less potent drug to take the edge off of withdrawals.  Whenever I felt the urge to play video games, I was only allowed to play Getting Over It and nothing else.  These sessions rarely lasted more than five minutes because of how much I hated the game, and then I would get up and do the stuff from my list of tasks.

Surprisingly, this actually worked, and soon enough my daily routine stopped revolving around video games.  Hours I would have otherwise spent gaming were replaced with hiking, reading, writing, meditating, drawing, and doing chores.  On the day I finally finished Getting Over It, I deleted it from my computer and that was that, no more video games.  I no longer felt the compulsion to play them, and finding better things to do with my time had become second-nature.  It was a hard process, but very worth it.  Progress in personal goals is slow and sometimes it can be discouraging, but when I look back on it I know I am forging a way forward and all I need to do is persist.

It’s been almost 2 years since I cut video games out of my daily routine, and in that time I have become stronger and more fit, able to endure harder labor and strenuous activities.  I have spent more time reading, writing, learning, and engaging with complex ideas.  Spiritually, I have maintained a regime of meditation, contemplation, and prayer each day which has helped me to feel the presence of God and think with clarity.  As I write my journal each night, I note how much more interesting my days are now that they aren't parasitized by a single activity, and before I go to sleep I smile knowing that I am no longer allowing life to pass me by.

Our little piece of Nowhere

 

When my wife and I got married three years ago, we had a dream.  In short, we fantasized about going "back to the land" and becoming homesteaders.  Back-to-the-land movements have sprung up repeatedly in the history of the United States and elsewhere as a response to an increasingly inhuman world.  They eventually die out as the ex-urbanites learn the enormous toil and struggle that comes with living off the land and being isolated from society.  Some people can make it, but most people can't.

As we contemplated the realities of trying to live off the land, we realized that there were serious problems with our plan.  First of all, purchasing enough land to live on would be a tall order.  Land isn't cheap, and we're not going to be wealthy any time soon.  Second of all, farming has a steep learning curve, and if we were depending on our land for our sole source of food, our first season would end with desertion at best and a couple of frozen corpses at worst.  Third, we can't make it far without access to municipal water and electricity.

The probable fate of a city slicker trying to 'live off the land'

As a result of these considerations, we rethought our dream and downsized it to something that we could actually achieve.  Instead of living off the land in an off-grid cabin, we decided that we wanted to aim for a smaller parcel of land near a small town.  That way, we could have jobs, access to grocery stores, municipal water, electricity, and sewer, and our kids could go to school.  We would create a garden and expand it over time to supplement bulk foods that we would purchase rather than trying to get all of our calories from the land.  Over time, we would become more self-sufficient while still having a support structure.

Our specific metrics were:

• The property ideally needs to be 1-5 acres.
• The property needs to be near a town which has a hospital, school, grocery store, and other amenities.  
• The property needs to be able to be hooked up to municipal water, electricity, etc. 
• The road needs to be open all year round.
• Absolutely no HOAs!!!

Unfortunately, it became obvious quickly that this dream wasn't going to be possible in our home state of Utah.  Homes here cost over twice as much as they did when I was in High School, and any decent-sized plot of arable land near a town costs half a million at the very least.  We resigned ourselves to the truth that if our dream was to become a reality, it was going to have to be far away.

Over the years we've been monitoring our options near and far.  One day we saw a property which caught our eye, and it seemed more and more promising the closer we looked at it.  This particular parcel was on the edge of the town of Ainsworth, Nebraska.  Ainsworth is small, but it has all the necessities.  Among other things, there are grocery stores, hardware stores, a school, some restaurants, and a hospital.

 
The town of Ainsworth

The property itself is three acres, with one cleared acre and 2 wooded acres with a little creek running through.  On the north side there's 2nd street, which is open all year round and is plowed by the city.  On the south side, there's the cowboy trail, a 300-mile bike trail which goes through much of Nebraska.  To the east, there's a neighbor and the city's storage yard.

 
A view of the property with rough boundaries

Ainsworth is the county seat of Brown County, which is known for being in the 'Middle of Nowhere.' The population is small and close-knit.  Nebraska has a reputation for being flatter than a pancake, but this is not the case for Ainsworth and the surrounding region.  Much of the western half of Nebraska is covered by the sandhills, where ancient sand dunes are held in place by prairie grasses.  The sandhills are unsuitable for plowing or planting, so they have been left relatively unchanged, and there's plenty of wildlife management areas and recreational areas in the region.

A satellite view of some sandhills.  The green areas are low-lying wetlands, the blue areas are lakes and ponds formed by the aquifer that underlie them.

The property looked so good to us that we reached out to the realtor and did research on Ainsworth and the surrounding areas.  We commissioned a survey of the property and looked through the zoning laws in the town.  The only objectionable thing we found in the zoning code was that there was a limit on chickens... no roosters were allowed within our zone and only 6 chickens maximum!  Seemed unreasonable to me, but it wasn't a dealbreaker by any means.  (There weren't any rules about ducks or quail!)  We talked to the realtor over the months and had the realtor give us a tour of the land via video call.  She was very helpful and friendly.

In the end, we made a big gamble.  We purchased the property without having been there in person.  It was a risky decision, and not one that I would recommend others do.  But our intuition was that this was a good choice.  Now all that was left was to plan a journey to the property to see if our gamble paid off.

We purchased the property in Feburary of 2025.  We planned our trip to be in the following spring, because we wanted to see the property in full bloom and we didn't want to take a chance on icy roads.

We began our journey to the property on May 12th.  Northern Utah and western Wyoming are quite beautiful, and the ride was very scenic.  We were driving white-knuckled a few times along the way due to high winds and swerving semi-trucks.  We stopped in Cheyenne for the night after driving 6 hours.  The following day we left Cheyenne and soon crossed into Nebraska.  Eastern Wyoming was a flat wasteland, but upon crossing into Nebraska it gave way to grassland with some interesting sandy landforms and pine trees.  

Before long, we had crossed into the sandhills proper.  They were beautiful.  They reminded me of the foothills I like to explore back home.  There were tiny unincorporated towns nestled in the sandhills, and we stopped at one to get lunch and stretch our legs.  I thought about what it would be like to have been born in one of those little towns.

The sandhills and their bovine inhabitants 

Eventually, we came to the southern part of Ainsworth.  I recognized buildings that I had seen from satellite images, and we turned left on 2nd Street.  Soon enough we arrived at the property.  This was the moment of truth!

Upon setting foot outside the car, the first thing we noticed was how good the air smelled.  I had heard from the internet that Ainsworth often smells like cow because of the feedlots to the north, but our piece of forest smelled very crisp and fresh.  We were both ecstatic.  We ran through the clearing and plunged into our two-acre wood.  In there it was like our own world of green.  The trees were enormous, and some of them had abandoned treehouses in them.  The little creek had a population of little fish and there was a family of ducks in the pond.  I had my first encounter with ticks, which we don't have at home.  I like to wear shorts, so this led to a frantic run back to the car to get some pants on.

 

Bree sitting on the fallen tree 

A view of the forest

The little creek 

 

The cleared acre viewed from 2nd street

Overall, the property was even better than we had expected.  After we settled down, we grabbed some cookies I brought to bring to our neighbors.  We met our neighbor who was also the seller of the property.  He appreciated the cookies and he gave us a friendly tour and talked about the town.  He had a hard time hearing us, but he loved to talk and over the course of the conversation he answered all the questions that we would have asked.  After exploring our property a bit more, the sun began to set so we stayed the night in a bunkhouse in the nearby small town of Long Pine.  The bunkhouse was very nice, especially for how affordable it was.  I would highly recommend visitors to the area to stay there.  As the sun was setting, we took a leisurely walk to the nearby bridge, where we got a nice view Long Pine Creek.  On the way we saw some rabbits and other woodland creatures.

 
The Long Pine Bunkhouse

The railroad bridge

 

Long Pine Creek as viewed from the bridge.

The next day, Wednesday the 14th, we relished exploring our land again, but then moved on to exploring the town.  There's a grocery store a mere block away from our property, which is very convenient.  There's also a Kung Fu studio, but it wasn't open while we were there and I never found out if it's still in business.  We bought some groceries and I got a haircut at the local hair salon.  Bree visited the hospital and talked to the lab workers there.  She is sure that she could get a job there.  We visited a bunch of the stores, including the thrift store and the bookstore.  There was a museum we were excited to see, but it wasn't open at the time.  Everyone that we met in town was friendly.

 
The museum

We reached out to the realtor to let her know that we had made it to Ainsworth.  She was delighted to hear that we were there, and she invited us to have dinner with her at the Tipsy Pine, a pizza place in Long Pine, about a 30-second walk from the bunkhouse where we were staying.  I brought some cookies for her and she surprised us by paying for the meal, which was very kind of her. Our realtor was very helpful and kind. We talked with her about the property, the town, and our plans for the future.  The pizza was good and the owner of the restaurant was friendly.  As we left the Tipsy Pine we noticed that the feedlot smell mentioned earlier had rolled in.  It wasn't so bad. I've lived in a small town before, and there was a similar situation with their turkey farms.  The locals call it the 'smell of money.' 

On Thursday the 15th we went to the nearby town of Valentine and rented bikes to bike along the Cowboy Trail.  We biked from the town to the nearby Niobrara bridge.  The river was broad and beautiful.  Along the way back, the wind started picking up. We had plans to tube along the river, but unfortunately the storm rolled in and frustrated those plans.

 

Biking along the cowboy trail

A view of the Niobrara river from the bridge.

 

Once we were finished biking, we drove to the Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge.  There was a lookout point which overlooked the canyons and hills.  It was a beautiful place and our photos didn't do it justice.  It is home to bison, elk, and all kinds of wildlife.  The whole region was beautiful, and over the course of our trip I really fell in love with it.

Overlooking the refuge

 

The next place to visit was Smith Falls State Park, the home of the highest waterfall in Nebraska. Compared to some of the waterfalls we have at home it was relatively small, but it was still beautiful and worth visiting.  After we visited the falls, we hiked around the park and I learned something interesting about the ecology of the area.  During the Ice Age, the cooler climate made it home to boreal trees, like spruce, birch, and aspens.  However, the warming climate at the end of the ice age caused these trees to disappear except in the canyons that are sheltered from higher weather.  It made me think about what people can do today to help make these areas more resilient in the age ahead.

 

Smith Falls

 

Us in front of Smith Falls

 

Bree in front of the falls

 

In the evening we took soil samples from the property for later testing.  Since we plan on growing a big garden, it's important to know the characteristics of the soil.  After that, we went to the bunkhouse for our last sleep in Nebraska.

 

The next day, the 16th, was the final day of our trip.  There's little to write about.  The trip home was fine and we did all 12 hours in one go.  When we got home we were relieved to be back, but we were left with a distinct longing for our little piece of nowhere.  I don't know what the future holds or where we'll end up, but I'm sure we'll be back soon.  I believe that our gamble paid off in the end.