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After 250 years, we’ve become accustomed to our freedom and independence. Have you ever contemplated what the country would be like if the American Revolution never happened?

Without the revolution, the United States wouldn’t exist today. The world would be a very, very different place. See, no revolution means we never had that Tea Party in Boston harbor. The thirteen colonies remain British territories. That means no Honest Abe, FDR or JFK. No Congress, no Constitution, and no Supreme Court as we know them. We also drive on the wrong side of the street, obsess over cricket and we all have really bad teeth. Starbucks sells pumpkin spiced tea in the fall.

If things go differently at Valley Forge and Saratoga,, George Washington’s face isn’t on the quarter coin or the dollar bill. Without the war, Washington subdivides Mount Vernon into the nation’s first swim/tennis neighborhood. Later he is elected the first President of the Homeowners Association.

The US dollar bill with Margaret Thatcher’s face.

Instead the dollar bill had the face of King George III, until Margaret Thatcher died. The quarter was changed from Queen Victoria to Princess Diana after her untimely death.

Princess Diana on the US quarter coin.

Americans vote for mayors, governors, and local representatives, but national representation is nonexistent. CNN has nightly talk shows about the absurdity of Parliament.

Without a horrific US Civil War, slavery remains economically entrenched for decades. Slavery ends through economic and moral MK pressure—but it survives into the mid 1900’s. 

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Fearing diseases that were killing off their tribes, Tecumseh negotiates for the native Americans to have their own territory. They consolidate and retreat west of the Mississippi to form the Indian Colonies of America. They master agriculture and grow wealthy exporting grain and livestock across North America and Europe.

Around 750,000 men died in the American Revolution and Civil War, many simply due to disease or exposure. Without those deaths, roughly 25 million more babies are born. Among them are some exceptional founders, engineers, scientists, and leaders with unusual combinations of intelligence, ambition, courage and an insane amount of energy.

The 25 million babies include hundreds more people like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Walt Disney, etc. 

Most of humanity’s greatest technological leaps were born here, in America. In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew 120 feet at 6.8 mph. Just forty-one years later, the Lockheed P-80 fighter jet reached 600 mph.

Just 65 years after the Wright brothers took flight, Neil Armstrong took one “small step for man” and planted the American flag on the moon.

In the 1980s the US defense department wanted to create a way to communicate after a potential catastrophic nuclear attack. They created a communications network called the internet.

Later the defense department arranged to launch satellites to better monitor troop movements and to improve missile targeting. That created the Global Positioning System or GPS.

The telephone, telegraph, air conditioning, transistor, light bulb, zipper, microwave oven and smoke detector were all invented here. More importantly, we also invented fried chicken and bourbon.

Without the American Revolution there is no United States of America. Without the internet and GPS there is no Google, iPhone, Waze, Uber, etc. There is no Google, Apple, Waze, Uber, Tesla, etc. We’d still be struggling to re-fold Rand-McNally maps and talking on pay phones in those red phone booths. Why? Because unlike most other countries, striving is admired and success celebrated here.

The question isn’t whether war is horrible. It is. But it’s worth remembering that what emerged from the ashes is the most prosperous, innovative and powerful nation in human history. 

It’s become fashionable for aspiring socialist politicians to take shots at our form of government and our approach to capitalism. Ignore them. There’s no whining on the yacht.

We should be grateful to live in a country built by extraordinary risk-takers, builders, inventors and dreamers. We inherited freedom, opportunity and abundance that much of the world still dreams about.

Thank God for the brave men who stepped forward and risked everything for our freedom. May God bless them and these United States of America for another 250 years.

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You’ve heard it before: most of the things we worry about never actually happen. It’s not a new thought. The world’s greatest Philosophers and thinkers have repeated this since Socrates was a boy.

Nearly two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius observed that when we are distressed, it is rarely the event itself that troubles us, but our judgment about it. The blow will only land once. But we practice for it 1,000 times. Envisioning all the worst case scenarios—the parade of horribles—in our head.

See, we are not genetically wired to see things as they are. We are wired to scan for danger. The brain always defaults to threat detection before the rational mind has time to object. Mouth gets dry. Heart rate ticks up. Muscles tighten. The body prepares for a predator that may exist only in our mind.

We borrow trouble from the future. We replay trouble from the past. Then we wonder why the present feels impossible to inhabit.

The Tyranny of Anticipation

Most anticipation has very little to do with the present. It lives in the future. As Brene Brown once said, “we dress rehearse for tragedy”.

• The phone call that hasn’t come.

• The diagnosis that hasn’t been delivered.

• The conversation you keep rehearsing in the shower.

• The failure that has not occurred — and statistically, probably never will.

Some of you will get this analogy, some of you won’t.

Michel de Montaigne understood this intuitively. Fear, he suggested, does not politely wait for evidence. It arrives early. It sets up camp. It begins charging rent. The remarkable part is not that thinkers like Montaigne noticed this tendency. It’s that centuries later, we still refuse to believe them.

Marcus Aurelius pushed the idea further. The event itself, he argued, is neutral. It is our interpretation that generates suffering. Trouble is inevitable. Suffering, to a large extent, is imaginary.

When something difficult actually happens, it hurts once. But when we anticipate it obsessively, we endure it dozens — sometimes hundreds — of times before reality ever has a chance to speak for itself.

Seneca’s Warning

Seneca the Younger warned that this habit weakens us. A person who is constantly bracing for catastrophe is already exhausted before the trial arrives. Fear, he argued, makes us less capable—not more prepared. Worrying in advance feels like vigilance.

If this guy was “Seneca the Younger”, what did “Seneca the Older” look like?

No matter the outcome, we just don’t want to be surprised. And we often convince ourselves that if we can predict it we can preempt it. That if we think hard enough about worst-case scenarios, we can somehow outmaneuver fate. But the ancients knew better. You cannot outthink the future. You can only destroy the present.

Pascal’s Dark Turn

Blaise Pascal took a darker view. He believed we instinctively understand how unsettling our own thoughts can be. That is why we fill silence so aggressively. Doomscrolling. Podcasts. Social media. Background noise in every quiet moment.

The result is a culture constantly on edge, constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not a crisis — just constant vigilance. A permanent readiness for something that may never arrive.

Modern systems amplify this tendency. News cycles trade in hypothetical catastrophes. Social platforms reward outrage about events that will never directly touch our lives. Algorithms drip-feed just enough alarm to keep us engaged, rarely enough resolution to let us exhale.

To say that much of our suffering is imagined does not mean bad things don’t happen. They do. Preparation is not foolish. Grief is not fictional. But imagined suffering deserves examination. Not every thought deserves belief. Not every scenario deserves rehearsal.

A More Humane Way to Live

The shared insight of Montaigne, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Pascal is that we make life harder than it needs to be. We bleed internally over futures that never arrive. We rehearse grief prematurely. We exhaust ourselves carrying burdens that have no weight outside the mind.

A more humane way to live does not require eliminating fear. It requires interrogating it. Asking, calmly: Is this happening now? Is this certain? Or is this my mind running simulations again?

• The phone may never ring.

• The diagnosis may be benign.

• The conversation you worried about for months is resolved in a ten minute conversation.

• The failure never happens.

The mind will always generate monsters. That is its nature. Wisdom is learning which monsters deserve your attention — and which ones are only shadows cast by imagination across a perfectly ordinary day.

The irony is painful: in trying to protect ourselves from suffering, we create it. A better life doesn’t require eliminating fear. It requires learning when fear is lying. And that, perhaps, is the quiet freedom these thinkers were pointing toward all along—not control over events, but restraint over imagination. 

Because the mind will always generate monsters. Wisdom is knowing which ones are real.

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Let me guess. You are worried about the future. From your vantage point, civilization is hanging by a thread. Everyone seems to agree: the end is near.

The list of looming catastrophes is endless. Political polarization is tearing society apart. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will eliminate millions of jobs. Climate change is destroying the planet. Birth rates are collapsing across the developed world. Government debt is spiraling out of control. Young people are lonely. Older people are isolated. Institutional trust is dying. I’ve written about most of these things. You are not totally wrong, my friend.

It's enough to make you wonder if you were born in the final chapter of the human race. And yet I've noticed something interesting about history. Most of the disasters we're told will end the world never seem to, you know, end the world. It reminds me of Adams' Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. That is, most disasters move slowly enough that society has time to react.

The law is hardly scientific. There are no scientists involved. But it does seem to explain a recurring pattern in modern life. For decades, we've been distracted by predictions of imminent catastrophe.

When I was younger, predictions of mass starvation were common. Then agricultural productivity improved, technology advanced, and the world's population became wealthier and healthier than many experts had expected.

For a while, it seemed plausible that nuclear war would destroy the planet. During the Cold War, millions of people genuinely believed they might not live to old age. Then there were killer bees.

These might just be yellow jackets, but you get the point.

If you're under forty, you may not appreciate how much attention the killer bees received. They were advancing from South America. We were dead meat. The bees arrived. Civilization survived.

For years we've watched obesity and diabetes rates climb, with no end in sight. Then along came GLP-1 drugs, a development few people saw coming. It is dramatically altering the trajectory of both conditions. The future has a habit of introducing variables that are outside of our comprehension.

Whatever one's views on the severity of the problem, climate change is not a light bulb that just turned on. Focusing on innovation, sustainability, and conservation over the last twenty-five years is moving the needle.

The same is true of artificial intelligence. Predictions range from workplace efficiency to robots taking over the earth and killing all of us. The truth is somewhere in between. Falling fertility creates genuine economic and social challenges. But demographic change unfolds slowly enough that governments, businesses, and families have years to adjust their behavior.

The same pattern has repeated itself for generations. Acid rain. The ozone layer. Y2K. The Mayan calendar. Mad cow disease. Bird flu. Too big to fail. You get the point.

These problems didn’t happen overnight. They developed slowly enough to be observed, debated, studied, and eventually addressed. The ozone hole seemed terrifying. Then governments, scientists, and industries adapted.

Doomsday predictions generally assume that human beings will continue behaving exactly as they are behaving today. History suggests otherwise. Adams’ Law of Slow-Moving Disasters suggests that when circumstances change, people adapt. Human beings are many things, but we are not a passive species.

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What fascinates me is that every generation seems convinced the world is on the edge of disaster. The details change, but the script remains remarkably consistent: “something is changing. People are uncomfortable. Therefore the world must be ending”. Blink twice if this sounds familiar.

Not every disaster moves slowly. World War One and Two arrived suddenly and inflicted enormous damage. But even after the introduction of nuclear weaponry, the world didn’t end, 

Problems can be real, serious, and worth addressing without implying the collapse of civilization. If the assumption is that human beings will remain frozen in place while problems accumulate around them, the prediction is flawed. (See if the messenger is wearing a tin foil hat.)

Everybody has one friend convinced the world is about to end. Maybe they need to read this article.

The future has always been uncertain. The difference today is that uncertainty arrives in real time, delivered to our phones every few minutes by people whose livelihoods depend on capturing our attention. Unfortunately technology expanded our awareness of problems far faster than our capacity to solve them.

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The world will face serious challenges in the coming decades. But if history is any guide, those challenges will arrive slowly enough for people to notice them, argue about them, and eventually begin adapting to them.

And that, more often than not, is how civilization managed to survive predictions of its imminent demise.

Like I said, I bet you worry about some of this stuff more than you should. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me. AI hasn’t taken over Wit & Wisdom (yet). I’m still a real guy.

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One of the more entertaining phenomena this year is taking place right now. Freddy is an anonymous German tourist visiting the southeastern US for the World Cup games. He’s documenting his travel with two friends on X/Twitter.

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to remind us of how good we have it here. To be clear, Freddy isn’t in awe of the famous landmarks. He’s in awe of the mundane. The little things we all take for granted in the U.S.

Freddy’s journey through the American south.

Things like eating scattered, smothered and covered hash browns at Waffle House at 2 a.m. Visiting a Buc-ee's 75,000 square foot “gas station” with an astounding 80 toilets and urinals. Seeing enormous Ford pickup trucks that appear capable of towing an aircraft carrier. (Ford is giving Freddy a Ford F-150). Driving buttery smooth interstate highways that stretch for hundreds of miles in one state. Enjoying frigid Air Conditioning, something rare in Europe these days.

American gas station

What's striking isn't simply that these visitors enjoy America. It's the sense of wonder they bring to experiences and things that most Americans stopped noticing years ago.

• Freddy walks into Buc-ee's “gas station” and reacts as though he's entered another dimension. Americans walk into Buc-ee's and wonder why the brisket isn’t ready yet.

• Freddy marvels at the choices in an Wal-Mart. An American grumbles because they stopped carrying four-flavor Life Savers candy.

• Freddy drives for six hours and is astonished to learn he's still in the same state. Americans complain about the traffic.

Most Americans have spent their entire lives surrounded by things that Europeans cannot fathom. Things like the Coca-Cola freestyle soda machine with more than 165 beverage combinations and flavors available. Or the soda fountain at QT that offers either cubed or crushed ice. But for us, they are just table stakes. We've grown accustomed to comfort and abundance.

Back in the 1300s, Chaucer wrote that familiarity breeds contempt. I think the modern version is familiarity breeds indifference. Because familiarity doesn't just make things comfortable. It makes them invisible.

A homemade sign welcoming Freddy to Louisiana.

Many Europeans arrive carrying a mental picture of America formed largely through corporate media coverage. If that were your primary source of information, you'd expect to encounter a nation perpetually on the verge of collapse. Instead, they often find ordinary people living ordinary lives, talking to strangers, enjoying sporting events, buying strangers drinks, and enthusiastically recommending restaurants that serve portions large enough to feed a family of four.

The America they encounter is often more cheerful, friendlier, and warmer than they imagined. Not perfect. Not free from problems. Just more normal. And that normality can be surprisingly attractive.

One of the recurring themes is how incredibly nice Americans are - even to Germans whose ancestors killed our ancestors in WWI and WWII. What Americans regard as casual friendliness can feel remarkable to people from cultures where interactions with strangers are less friendly.

Yesterday American football legend J.J. Watt arranged for the three guests to stay in a five-star hotel in Houston. They found an enormous number of gifts in the room, including signed jerseys from Watt and friends.

Gifts waiting in Freddy’s hotel room in Houston.

Visitors notice things that regular Americans overlook because they haven't spent decades ignoring them. Their perspective reminds us that many aspects of American life are neither universal nor inevitable. They're cultural habits we've come to regard as background scenery.

It’s like a stranger staying in your home. They are overwhelmed with the space and beauty of your home. You, meantime, are frustrated with the finicky plumbing, the nosy neighbors and the dysfunctional Homeowner’s Association.

Americans complain constantly, but beneath the complaints there remains a stubborn belief that anything is possible here. We are the people that created Wal-Mart, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Starbucks. Like it or not, we are the only country with a trillionaire and reusable rockets that go up into space and return back to earth.

People move across the country for opportunities. They start over. They reinvent themselves. They pursue ideas that seem unlikely to succeed. Some fool had to open the first 75,000 square foot gas station. Some fail spectacularly. Others succeed beyond our wildest expectation. As the Sinatra song says, if you can make it here you can make it anywhere.

Foreign visitors often pick up on this before Americans do because they're observing it from a distance. They aren't distracted by the daily frustrations that dominate domestic conversations. Instead, they see a society that still assumes the future can be brighter than the present.

LSU Tiger Stadium

What we often forget is how unusual much of modern American life would seem to almost anyone but us. Football stadiums that hold 102,000 fans. Bean burritos for $4 at Taco Bell, which Freddy calls outstanding. Guns available for sale at Bass Pro Shops. Unlimited chips and salsa at any Mexican restaurant. The Germans remind us that many of the things we take for granted are, in fact, remarkable.

Perhaps that's why so many of these travel stories resonate. They aren't merely accounts of Germans discovering America. They're accounts of Americans rediscovering America through German eyes.

Every nation possesses qualities that outsiders admire and residents overlook. But there is value in occasionally borrowing someone else's perspective. It helps us distinguish between genuine flaws and mere familiarity. It reminds us that gratitude often begins with noticing.

Watching Germans marvel at America may say less about Germany than it does about us. Their sense of wonder highlights how thoroughly we've adapted to a place that remains, by any objective measure, unusual. The scale, the ambition, the abundance, the contradictions, and the optimism all blend into the background when you've spent a lifetime surrounded by them.

Visitors don't have that problem.

They arrive seeing America clearly.

For a brief moment, so do we.

What do you take for granted in this great country of ours? Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

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There’s a part of growing older nobody can teach you. Most people discover it around the same time their knees simultaneously crack when they sit down. Or when they develop unusually strong opinions about lawn mowers.

That coveted Snapper mower comes with an absurd number of warning labels. Don’t stick your hand underneath it while it’s running. Don’t drink alcohol while operating, etc. Things you’d assume a grown-ass man already knows. And yet, somewhere right now, there’s a man sitting in an Emergency Room. He’s three Natty Lights deep. He’s carrying two fingers and a thumb in a zip-lock bag. Because sometimes human beings insist on learning things the hard way.

It’s the same with life. The people who love you are constantly trying to save you from yourself. That’s why parents lecture and grandparents often repeat themselves. Because, as Andy Stanley once said, “the common denominator in all your bad decisions is…you. And we were there for all of them.”

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Of course, parents and grandparents aren’t always right. Mine came from the generation that believed that lung darts and Tang were both health products. These are also the people who served us fried SPAM. What exactly is SPAM, anyway?

But underneath the nicotine, Tang, and that mysterious canned meat was an enormous amount of lived wisdom. The older I get, the more I realize old people weren’t trying to get in my way. They were just trying to keep me from doing stupid things. Things like financing a jet ski at 19% interest or getting my high school girlfriend’s name tattooed on my chest.

The problem is that most of us are incapable of applying wisdom until we are carrying our fingers in a zip lock bag. Because there are certain lessons human beings prefer to learn firsthand. Things like:

• Money can’t buy happiness.

• Experiences matter more than things.

• Relationships determine results.

• English muffins are neither English nor a muffin.

• You can be right or happy, pick one.

• Never eat anything bigger than your head.

• Some people aren’t meant for you…..long-term.

• Animal and graham crackers are not really crackers at all.

• There’s good, fast, and cheap—pick two.

• ‘Tis better to occasionally apologize than to constantly ask permission.

• Never ignore your gut feelings.

Everybody nods politely when they hear these mantras because deep down most of us agree with them. We just don’t think they apply to us. See, when you’re younger, life feels like one giant loophole. Consequences happen to other people. We are the exception. We are different, somehow. It’s amazing how confident we become standing at the edge of mistakes we haven’t made yet.

Then life humbles you with a roundhouse kick you never saw coming. Like working too much for too long and suddenly realizing that your children aren’t children anymore. Or marrying the wrong person for fifteen or twenty years. Or hearing that someone died unexpectedly and instantly realizing how many phone calls you postponed.

One morning you catch your reflection in the mirror and wonder where the time went. And somewhere in the middle of ordinary, mundane life, you think: I should’ve known better. Then comes the staggering realization: doggone it, I did know better.

That’s the great irony of life. The older you get, the more you realize that timeless wisdom sounded cliché precisely because it survived generation after generation of human stupidity. Because those that shared the timeless wisdom likely made the same mistakes. Sure, there’s wisdom in making mistakes. Sometimes that’s the only way people learn.

• Things will be different this time.

• Just this once.

• He says he’s changed.

• I can handle it now.

• I’ll pay it off over time.

But trust me, there is no wisdom in the second kick of a mule.

There’s a reason nearly every religion, philosopher, song writer, and old man sitting on a Cracker Barrel porch eventually arrives at the same conclusions. Because human beings are highly predictable. People have been doing the same stupid stuff since Jesus was a boy. We keep relearning the same lessons (the hard way) generation after generation because we all want a shortcut to the same things.

• Pleasure.

• Love.

• Validation.

• Money.

• Admiration.

When your grandfather warned you that life moves fast, he wasn’t being philosophical. He was trying to explain that he was your age about fourteen minutes ago and he didn’t think the rules applied to him either. Unfortunately he knows that there is only one path to hindsight for you.

The great irony is that once we get punched in the pie hole, we instantly see the world differently. The fog clears and we become “wiser”. We begin to act as if we are suddenly smarter than everyone else. Like the addict who makes it through rehab and then starts telling all their friends not to do cocaine. Never mind that those same friends and family spent years trying to get him off cocaine.

And one day, if you’re lucky enough to grow old, you’ll probably catch yourself doing the exact same thing. Not cocaine, but repeating timeless warnings to younger people. Watching them sprint toward the proverbial Emergency Room like a dog chasing a squirrel into traffic. They’ll smile politely as they pass by, the same way you once did.

And they won’t listen either, at least until they’re carrying two fingers and a thumb in a Ziplock bag.

I’m curious. What lessons did you have to learn the hard way? Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

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Grief arrives like a summer storm. Sometimes dramatic, with thunder and lightning. Sometimes so subtle you don’t notice it until you feel the rain hit your skin.

Grief is almost uniquely human. Few animals display the kind of grief we humans endure. For us, it’s universal and if you lived long enough, you’ve likely felt the unmistakable heaviness of grief. Overwhelming to the core.

We each deal with grief in our own way. Unlike any other emotion, it tends to bring about the very best—and also the very worst in people. Revisit The Big Chill or Four Weddings and a Funeral if you need a remedial course.

David Kessler gets it right when he speaks about grief leaving a fingerprint. Not a wound or a scar, but a fingerprint. A fingerprint and grief are as unique and individual as the person who passed. That fingerprint is evidence. Evidence that something mattered to us. Evidence that we loved and lost something deeply treasured.

There was a time when people understood grief more intimately than we do now. Grief was communal, shared. Families often displayed the dead in the parlor of the house for several days. Family and friends “sat up” with the dead and mourned together, sharing their favorite stories. Death wasn’t hidden behind institutional walls or outsourced to pale-faced professionals in cheap suits. It was public and shared.

Today the process of grieving is much more efficient. Much more sterile. People often die and are buried in the same week. But I often wonder if that efficiency cheapens the process.

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Pastor John Claypool once wrote that “If we are willing, the experience of grief can deepen and widen our ability to participate in life.

See, Claypool lost his twelve year old daughter to leukemia. He later wrote that “when I remember that she was a gift, pure and simple, something I neither earned nor deserved nor had a right to. And when I remember that the appropriate response to a gift is gratitude…then it puts some light around the darkness and creates the strength to begin to move on. The greatest thing you can do is to remind me that life is a gift… every particle of it, and that the way to handle a gift is to be grateful.”

I often think about Claypool when someone close to me dies. I like to remember that what I lost was never owed to me in the first place. And when I feel grief, the best response is gratitude.

There’s no rush, but the best way to move forward in loss is to develop a sense of gratitude that is greater than the grief. It’s the grief that provides the evidence that something mattered to us. It’s the gratitude that gets us through.

Grief was never intended to be managed alone. Human connection and hope are essential for navigating deep grief. In the Netflix series After Life, two unlikely strangers share a common bond of grief on a cemetery bench. Below is a wonderful four-minute compilation of their conversations about loss and recovery. (Maybe come back and watch this scene after you finish reading. Get some Kleenex, first.)

We’ve become experts at avoiding reminders that our time on earth is fleeting. People “pass” instead of dying. Nobody sits up with the dead in the parlor. Instead ashes arrive in fancy containers like the ones the veterinarian gives you when a pet dies.

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But grief refuses efficiency. It’s not linear or logical. It shows up at the most inopportune times. It’s often triggered by simple things: the smell of coffee or perfume or the heavy smell of fresh cut grass. Or the familiarity of an old, favorite song. Like an undertow, it pulls you under when you least expect it.

But eventually you realize the fingerprint of grief is not a malfunction. It’s the new normal. That realization changes things. Because eventually grief stops being only about the person you lost. It becomes about the person you become afterward.

Maybe healing isn’t moving on at all. Maybe it’s learning to move forward while allowing the fingerprint to remain. Because grief, for all its pain, is still evidence. Evidence that someone reached deeply enough into your heart to leave part of themselves in your soul. And over time, gratitude slowly begins to soften the sharpest edges of that loss. Not because the grief disappears, but because you begin to understand that the pain is connected to something amazing and rare.

And perhaps that is the quiet hope hidden inside grief—that even after someone is gone, the mark they left on our soul never fully disappears.

Have you ever struggled with the fingerprint of grief? Tell me about it. Click the link below to send me a message. I promise that you’ll hear back from me.

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A young man is standing in the wings, preparing to enter the sanctuary to marry his wife. His best man, and father, places his hand gently on his shoulder. “Son, before we open that door, I want to share some advice.”

“Never forget your friends,” he said. “They will become more important as you get older.”

There’s a reason to believe the father was right. According to a recent survey, only 50% of American males are satisfied with their friendships. The father continued his advice….

“Regardless of how much you love your family and the children you happen to have, you will always need friends.”

Vivek Murthy knows this fact. As the 19th Surgeon General of the United States, he repeatedly stated in recent years that the most prevalent health issue in the country is not cancer, heart disease, or obesity, but rather isolation. This isolation is most prominent among men.

While women are nearly twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with depression, men have a higher suicide rate. In fact, the suicide rate is highest in middle-aged white men. In 2024, men died by suicide 3.9 times more often than women.

The father added,

”Remember to go out with them occasionally (if possible), but keep in contact with them somehow.”

As men reach middle age, there’s a sense of guilt associated with maintaining friendships. Friendships take time away from families and, to a lesser degree, work. In the post-modern era, men are in a competition to see who can be the Dadliest Dad on the block, even at their own peril.

A new study suggests that the health risk of loneliness in men is equivalent to smoking or being overweight. The study followed 2,500 middle-aged men (ages 42 to 61) for 20 years and confirmed that loneliness increases cancer risk by 10%.

The father continued his advice:

“Inasmuch as time and nature carry out their designs and mysteries on a person, friends are the bulwarks of our life.”

In 1990, thirty-three percent of Americans reported having ten or more close friendships, excluding relatives. Today, only thirteen percent report having that number. So, ironically, the TV show Friends would never get the green light in today’s world. It’s just too unrealistic to think someone could have that many friendships.

For most men in their twenties and thirties, having twelve close friends seems like a fairy tale. If Jesus had come along a little later, he might have ended up with only 4 or disciples.

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Medical professionals believe that meaningful “bro-mances” promote overall wellness. Our friends’ influence can help lower the risk of many health problems, including high blood pressure, obesity, and depression.

Modern dads, who take parenting more seriously than men did two generations ago, are spending approximately three times as much time with their children. 

“After 70 years of life, here is what I’ve learned:- Time passes- Jobs come and go- Life goes on- Children grow up”

American author John Eldredge vividly highlights the value of cultivating meaningful friendships in his legendary book Wild at Heart. He writes, “The issue was, and is, that men simply are not bonding much these days… and we are either purposefully choosing or unwittingly failing to make bonding….. a priority.”

But, true friends are always there, no matter how many miles away they are.”

The Gilligans

The dad continued….

”Your children cease to be children and become independent. And it will break your heart.”

But once the kids are gone it’s harder to make friends. Just look at these Google search results. It graphically presents the number of people searching the internet between 2004-2026 for “How to Make New Friends as an Adult”. Anything jump out at you?

Despite our best efforts at creating the perfect life on our own, happiness is really about close and meaningful connections with other people.

“When we started this adventure called life, we did not know of the incredible joys or sorrows that were ahead.”

It’s about lasting and intentional friendships. It’s about the intertwining of our lives in a deep and significant way. We must have people of substance to “do life” with, and we cannot “do life” with people on Facebook and Instagram.

The father continued: “Love your parents, take care of your children, but keep a group of good friends.”

The father finished his advice before the sanctuary doors opened.

“Your friends will save you in ways you cannot understand yet.”

Because at the end of life, nobody wishes they had spent more time pretending they had everything under control. They wish they had more conversations, more dinners, more weekends away, and more people to laugh with about how absurd life actually is?

So call the friend. Make the trip. Schedule the dinner. Keep your circle alive while there’s still time to enjoy it.

Do you have a good group of friends that you can count on? Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

Last year 1.2M people read Wit & Wisdom. The newsletter comes out every Monday via email. It’s always free, and I’m always looking for new friends. Please join us.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky stood blindfolded in the snow waiting to be executed. He was 28 years old. He had already watched a priest deliver last rites to the prisoner beside him. He believed, fully and completely, that he had minutes left to live.

Then, at the very last moment, a messenger arrived. The Tsar had commuted the sentence to hard labor in Siberia instead. The execution had been staged. A cruel piece of psychological theater. See the best way to break someone is to make them think that their life is over—before you send them to Siberia.

And somehow, that wasn’t even the hardest part of Dostoevsky’s life. He endured prison camps, poverty, epilepsy, gambling addiction, crushing debt, and the deaths of people he loved.

At one point, he signed a publishing contract so brutal that if he missed the deadline, he would lose the rights to nearly everything he had ever written. With weeks left, desperate and cornered, he dictated a novel at breakneck speed to a young stenographer named Anna. Later, he married her.

See, sometimes the worst moment of your life is the turning point of your life. Only after years of chaos, suffering, failure, and humiliation did he write the books the world would remember forever. Books like Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a person is believing their current circumstances are permanent. They rarely are unless you’re Ben Sasse, The World’s Most Interesting Man. See what I did there?

Twenty-eight-year-old Dostoevsky standing knee-deep in the snow could not possibly have imagined the life still waiting for him. I’m not Dostoevsky, but I remember getting dressed one morning at age 40’ish. Work had grown monotonous. I had just crossed 1,500,000 miles on Delta Air Lines. I asked my wife, “how the hell am I gonna do this over and over for another 25 years?” Spoiler alert #1: I didn’t.

Most of us can easily recognize this pattern in other people’s lives while struggling to see it in our own. We understand instinctively that a great protagonist suffers in the middle of the story. We just panic when it’s happening to us.

Most of us can’t imagine our future selves. Which is probably why so many people just give up. Often times we look at a situation and think, “I just can’t see any possible way out of this.” As if you’re knee-deep in snow, waiting for the bullet. Spoiler alert #2: you aren’t.

Human beings are uniquely bad at understanding time, particularly when they are struggling. One bad month feels like the beginning of the rest of your life. A lonely season feels permanent. Failure feels inevitable. Guilt feels overwhelming. Grief feels suffocating. When you are knee-deep in the snow, it becomes very difficult to imagine any way out. To imagine that you still have more chapters to write. More masterpieces to create.

But almost everyone who has lived long enough has experienced this strange reversal: you look back on a season that once felt overwhelming and realize that if you had given up there, you never would have reached the best parts of your life. I’ve had moments like that more than once. Maybe you have too.

The older I get, the more I think hope is less about optimism and more about humility. It’s the quiet acknowledgment that maybe you are not the best judge of what your life will become. Maybe the future is wider than your current field of vision. Maybe this chapter is not the ending you think it is. (I bet you have a friend that needs to hear this.)

Simple truths are often like that. At the lowest point in your life, if someone had shown you how the story ends, you wouldn’t have believed them. Things almost always turn out better than we expect, no matter the circumstances.

Dostoevsky went on to write: “Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been an age of happiness.” Not exactly the words of a fatalist. The words of someone who stared directly into the abyss and still concluded that life was worth living and loving.

See, the greatest novels ever written were inside of him all along. Even at the lowest point of his life. They were always in there, just waiting to come out.

A man once stood blindfolded in the snow believing his life was over. The world remembers him because it wasn’t. Keep going, my friend. It’s not over yet. You have many more chapters to write.

Yes sometimes the worst moments of your life were the turning points of your life. I want to hear about your turning points. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

Last year 1.2M people read Wit & Wisdom. The newsletter comes out every Monday via email. It’s always free, and I’m always looking for new friends. Please join us.

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Over the last twenty-five years, something concerning has happened: men and women have drifted apart. What was once a modest ideological difference has widened into a pronounced gap — one that now shapes how we vote, how we date, whether we marry, and whether we have children.

This isn’t just an American story. The same gender divide shows up in South Korea, Germany, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. That makes it harder to blame a single cable news network or a single polarizing politician. The pattern is broader — and likely structural.

Young women have shifted left at a faster pace than previous generations, with 64% leaning liberal. Young men have moved modestly right, with 47% leaning conservative. The result is the widest gender-based ideological divide in modern history. It’s part of the reason why young women appear to be more politically active today.

I’m not judging anyone here for their preferences. I’m just sharing the trends with you.

Social media algorithms didn’t invent our differences. But they learned how to amplify them. Political messaging increasingly diverged along gender lines. Content aimed at men emphasized national security, crime, gun rights, and national identity. Content aimed at women emphasized reproductive rights, education, healthcare, and immigration. The more users engaged on the social platforms, the more the platforms fed their biases.

Of course, technology is not the only factor. The complete nutters amplifying this divide are growing more effective and more alarming. On the left, Hassan Piker a Turkish born political commentator promotes a brand of left-wing thought that edges into the language of revolution. On the right, Candace Owens is a political commentator and activist with 6.4M followers on Instagram. The stuff she says is too dumb to repeat in good company.

1.2 million readers came for meaningful conversations like this last year. Why don’t you join us?

The consequences extend beyond elections. Because what used to be a political preference is now a personal identity. The deeper crisis is not political but spiritual. People are looking for political answers to spiritual problems.

Today, dating apps let you filter mates by politics the same way you filter by religion, height, and/or location. If you’re filtering on political affiliation, you’ve just removed 50% of your eligible dating pool. The result is fewer dates. That polarization is feeding our isolation and loneliness epidemic. I wrote about this in Twenty-Five Years of Bowling Alone. That segmentation is also a contributor to the sex drought.

This matters because intimate relationships have historically softened political divides. Marriage once forced negotiation, compromise, and daily exposure to different viewpoints. You know, love can build a bridge, etc.

When fewer couples cross ideological lines, fewer people practice disagreement within trust. Without dating and sex you don’t have anyone to marry. Our marriage rate has dropped almost in half since 1949. Even after the Supremes legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, the numbers continued to slide.

The declining marriage rate is fueling a drop in the number of babies that are born in the U.S. The birth rate has dropped in half since 1960 and continues to drop. It’s a good thing the robots are about to take over since we aren’t going to have enough humans to run our factories or staff our Amazon warehouses.

Loneliness has risen alongside these shifts. Surveys show growing numbers of young adults reporting fewer close friends and less in-person social interaction. Alcohol consumption among young adults has declined, as has participation in civic groups and religious institutions. The bowling leagues and neighborhood associations that once mixed people of different backgrounds have thinned.

The patterns overlap in telling ways. As community institutions weakened, digital communities expanded. Unlike physical communities, digital spaces are frictionless echo chambers. They allow people to curate not only their news, but their virtual friends. These groups reward certainty and punish ambivalence. They bind people together not through shared obligation or connection, but through shared opposition, shared anger.

The widening ideological gap between the sexes isn’t the disease. It’s just a symptom. A symptom of a society that quietly dismantled the institutions that once formed the foundation of our communities. Not just marriage and family, but churches, neighborhoods and civic groups, too. Places where we learned to live in community and to disagree without being disagreeable.

When traditional institutions—marriage, faith communities, civic organizations, neighborhood groups—decline, people still hunger for belonging—for what they’re missing. They still want meaning, identity, and solidarity. Politics offers all three. It provides moral language, heroes and villains, rituals, and a sense of purpose. It can even provide community. But it rarely demands compromise.

The widening gender gap, then, may not be the disease. It may be a symptom of something deeper: the erosion of shared spaces where men and women once built common lives despite their differences.

Real community is the enemy of polarization because it forces us to see one another as whole people rather than avatars of an ideology. If we want to slow this drift, the answer is to set aside our temporal differences. To create more spaces that pull us offline. Real community is the enemy of polarization. And until we rebuild “community”, we shouldn’t be surprised when people keep mistaking ideology for intimacy, and outrage for purpose.

I’d love to hear what you think of this article. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

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We all wonder when our days on earth will come to an end, and whether we’ll “go gently into that good night” or “rage against the dying of the light”.

Ben Sasse always believed he was living on borrowed time. And, now, time is the central focus of his life. A Nebraska farm boy educated at Harvard and Yale, former United States senator, husband and father. But with all that going for him, in less than six months Ben Sasse will be dead.

Ben Sasse showing the effects of chemotherapy in an interview with Opinion. Image courtesy of The New York Times.

It started in October with some back pain that got progressively worse. Turns out it was stage IV metastasized pancreatic cancer—a death sentence. Doctors gave him 3-4 months, initially. He's in a clinical trial at MD Anderson that is buying him a few more months.

There will be no last minute reprieve from the Governor. No sudden, inexplicable, miraculous remission. He is nearing the end of his life and teaching us how to die with the utmost grace and dignity. Make no mistake, Ben Sasse is “not going gentle into that good night”. He refuses to accept death quietly and is instead raging “against the dying of the light.” Fighting fiercely for every morsel of life to the very end.

Ben Sasse on 60 Minutes. Image courtesy of CBS News, 60 Minutes

In recent interviews with 60 Minutes and the New York Times, he shares his prognosis in a rare moment of public humility with no filter. The result of a ticking clock and 40mg of morphine. I commend both of these interviews to you.

The effects of chemotherapy have left his voice weak and gravelly. He shifts quickly across a wide emotional spectrum, moving from joy to sorrow and back again within seconds. He seems to laugh and cry at the same time. But the cancer has also clarified his life. It put an end to hubristic nonsense" and "delusional self-idolatry.”

His wife, Melissa, has been his closest companion for more than three decades. Their daughters are young adults. Their son, Breck, is fourteen. That is the wound Sasse returns to most often: not his own fear of dying, but the grief of leaving his young son behind. How do you pack a lifetime of wisdom into a few, short, conversations? Not knowing when the clock will run out.

In the Senate, Sasse often warned that American politics had become too loud, too tribal, too addicted to outrage. Too much politics; not enough civics. He argued that the deeper crisis was not merely political but spiritual. Sadly, he suggests people are looking for political answers to spiritual problems. A role he says politics is fundamentally incapable of fulfilling. 

He laments years striving to be and do more. Clarifying how we spend years chasing significance and then discover too late that the important things were embarrassingly close at hand all along: our family, our friends, a Sunday afternoon, a neighbor, a meal, a prayer, a quiet hour not surrendered to a glowing rectangle.

Sasse hasn’t become weepy or sentimental. He’s not seeking sympathy. That is part of what makes his witness striking. He is still funny, still argumentative, still interested in politics, higher education, artificial intelligence, liberal arts, and the future of the country. Like a man who has all the time in the world. But the hierarchy has changed. The permanent things have moved to the front.

In the New York Times interview, Sasse is a picture of grace and humility, dressed in a Nebraska cornhuskers ball cap and a run-of-the-mill flannel shirt. He sports a broad smile, even as he bleeds from nearly every pore on his face.

He admits that, despite his deep and unwavering faith, he is at peace but not ready to die. He would rather live. He would rather walk his daughters down the aisle. He would rather raise his son to be a man. He would rather have more years with Melissa.

And yet he is not raging at God. His faith has given him a vocabulary for suffering. Words like repentance, finitude, resurrection, hope. He believes death is the final enemy on earth, but not the final chapter. When asked if he will miss his wife, he answers with the wisdom of a man sure of where he is going: “we are going to be apart for a time.”

So Ben Sasse is dying in public, though he didn’t plan it that way. He is using the time left to speak about the things that matter. Honor the Sabbath. Eat dinner together. Take fewer business trips. Build stronger families. Tell the truth. Love what is near.

I don’t know anything about Ben Sasse politically and, more importantly, I don’t care. What I see in him is exactly what we are missing today. A man full of wisdom, a man who isn’t playing games. A man who has nothing to lose as his life has already been taken from him.

A lot of people are asking why more politicians are not like Ben Sasse. Because voters will not elect them, that’s why. People say they care about character, but most don’t vote that way. Instead, we vote party line, ideology, self-interest, or against a perceived enemy. How can we expect our leaders to embody higher levels of virtue if a we don’t make personal character a red line? It seems that we get the leaders we deserve.

The death sentence has not made him smaller. It has made him bolder, sharper. A farm kid from Nebraska. A scholar, a senator, a college president, and finally a dying man seeking to teach us about living. And we are all better for it.

Imagine if each of us were given a few weeks to experience the wisdom of the dying. A few weeks to focus only on what really matters when time runs short.

The final chapter is not the end of the Ben Sasse story, but the beginning of the next book. A book focused on the legacy he leaves behind—in the people he has reached and in the things in life that really matter when time runs short.

I’d love to hear what you think of this article. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

Last year 1.2M people read Wit & Wisdom. The newsletter comes out every Monday via email. It’s always free, and I’m are always looking for new friends. Please join us.

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There’s a great golf course near me that carries an amazing yet simple tag line: “Nobody Cares”. It’s the kind of place where nobody keeps track of their score.

It’s an admonition that you should be enjoying the course, your friends, the Whiskey and the weather and not worrying about the score. Why? Because nobody cares….but you. My kinda place.

Much of golf, and life, is spent as if someone is watching, evaluating, keeping track of your score. They aren’t. The simple truth is that nobody is paying attention to you because, you guessed it, they’re too busy worrying about themselves.

If that’s true, then why does it seem to take a lifetime to understand. In your 20s you care what everyone thinks…in your 30s you start to question it…in your 40s you notice most people are focused on their own wins and losses. By the time you reach your 50’s, you should start to realize nobody was ever thinking about you to begin with. Like coming to the realization that professional wrestling is fake.

For a long time, you assume there’s a scoreboard somewhere. You imagine that it tallys things. That your wins, losses, bad decisions, status, relationships, etc. are being tracked. That every so often “people” look at the scoreboard. You and I have been thinking this way since we were eating paste in Pre-K.

We choose careers for how they look to others (see most lawyers). Then we stay in them long after they serve us. You choose friends based on what it says about you. Then you keep them long after the lipstick is off the pig. You choose romantic partners based on how they look and not how they make you feel. Then stay in the relationship too long to avoid being single. The simple truth is that most of your stress comes from people you should’ve let go of earlier.

Imagine coming to the realization that nobody cares when you’re in hospice. That you’ve lived your entire life for the applause of the fans. Only to find that nobody is even in the cheap seats.

David Duval, a former top PGA Tour golfer, worked his entire life to reach the pinnacle of his sport. In 1999, he finally reached the coveted world number one golfer ranking. In 2001 he won the US Open Golf tournament. Then an amazing thing happened. He realized that nobody cared, including him. He famously asked a friend, “Is this all there is?” Within a short period of time he withdrew from the world stage, seeking a quieter life away from the spotlight.

The “nobody cares” mantra is even tougher for younger folks to accept. Particularly when so much of their lives are lived on display, constantly seeing affirmation. Seeking moments and images to share with their fans on social media platforms.

The worst is the LinkedIn job posting from someone with 18 months of experience: “I’m excited to announce that I have been asked to join the esteemed firm of Do-wee, Cheatem & How as a Junior Associate. In this role I will be leveraging my Merger & Acquisition experience with multi-National corporations and syndicates seeking to find diversified private mezzanine and senior credit facility options, etc.”

Someone should call him and nicely suggest that nobody cares. Not to be mean, but to save him thirty or forty years of thinking somebody does.

It’s just how it works. People are occupied with their own lives, their own concerns, their own version of the same invisible scoreboard. The attention you imagined was never really there in the way you thought.

If no one is keeping score, it doesn’t mean nothing matters. It just means the metrics change. Would you have chosen the same schools, careers, friends and jobs? Would you have moved somewhere else? Would you have dated or married the same people? Probably not. Isn’t it interesting how clear the answers are when you realize that nobody cares?

Of course you can’t go back and re-trade those decisions. They are already baked into the cake. So what’s the point? The point is you aren’t finished yet.

And when you finally accept that nobody cares, something shifts. It means you start caring about the right things. You finally get to focus on what Arthur Brooks calls the four pillars of happiness: faith, family, friends and work that serves others.

It’s about being present. About doing work that serves others. About friendships that don’t feel one-sided. About a life that, if no one ever saw it, would still be pleasing to you.

The only person who ever really kept score…was you. So you might as well keep a different one.
Or better yet—put the golf pencil down entirely because nobody cares.

I’d love to hear what you think of this article. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

If you’re new to Wit & Wisdom, we’d love for you to join our community of 25K readers. The newsletter comes out every Monday via email. It’s always free, and we are always looking for new friends. Please join us.

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Stoicism is having a moment. Again. Like a philosophical cockroach, it refuses to die—probably because it’s built for resilience.

Stoicism is a philosophy that emphasizes self-control, fortitude and living in accordance with nature. It originated in Athens around 300 B.C. and was popular in Greek and Roman times. 

Why does this ancient philosophy still pack a punch? Because, quite possibly, it holds the secret sauce to a happy and meaningful life. See, stoicism is built on fundamental truths that don’t change. Ever.

Here are my five favorite Stoic quotes and why they still matter today:

You can’t control the weather. Or whether your fav team made the playoffs. Or whether it rains on your vacation. But you can control how you respond to these things. And that’s where your superpower lies.

I often wonder why people freak out over things that they can’t control—things like traffic, the economy or the line at the Post Office. Isn’t there always a line at the Post Office?

The Stoics would find all this angst exhausting. Their approach? Train yourself such that every idea that pops in your head isn’t necessarily a good idea. It’s okay to ignore some thoughts and to simply laugh away others. Doing so will allow you to better control how you react to life’s uncontrollable circumstances.

Blink twice if you’ve ever laid awake at night with your head spinning over something that might happen. Congrats—that makes you human. The human brain is a world-class fear factory, always cooking up doom & gloom scenarios that will probably never happen.

Yes, bad things do occasionally happen. But most of our suffering is our brain running amok, catastrophizing every minor inconvenience into an existential crisis that is very unlikely to happen.

You bombed a presentation at work? Called someone important by the wrong first name? Forgot someone’s birthday? Okay, it happens. It’s not the end of the world. Yet, in your mind, you’re already living in a van down by the River. Just stop it, already.

Seneca’s point? Stop torturing yourself with imaginary disasters. The reality is usually far less dramatic than the silly version in your head.

Last year 1.2M people read Wit & Wisdom. The best compliment you can offer me is to send this article to a few people you care about and ask them to subscribe. I’d be grateful.

People claim they don’t have enough time, but then spend hours doom-scrolling, binge-watching, or arguing with total strangers online. Even though you and I both know that every classroom had a kid who ate paste. That’s probably who you’re arguing with on-line. They usually have a Star Trek character for their profile picture and live in their Mom’s basement.

See, time is the one resource you never get back. Money? You can earn more. Energy? Take a nap. But time? Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. The Stoics weren’t about squeezing more into life, but making sure what they did counted.

Seneca would like that I just installed an app on my phone that restricts my usage of Social Media to twenty minutes a day. Sure, it’s like being 14 years old and having my Dad tell me to get off the telephone (again). But, so far, I’m averaging a daily savings of 21 minutes.

So, track where your time actually goes. Then ask yourself if you like the results. If not, change what you’re doing.

Here’s a hard truth: happiness isn’t about what happens to you. It’s about how you interpret it. Two people can go through the exact same thing—let’s say getting diagnosed with a nasty illness. One sees it as a disaster and spirals into despair. The other sees it as an opportunity and embraces the challenge with gusto and vigor. Same event, different mindset; likely a different outcome.

Marcus Aurelius, who was running the entire Roman Empire while dealing with plagues, wars, and betrayal, still had the mental clarity to understand that external events don’t define you—your response to them does.

If your life feels miserable, are you focusing on what you’ve lost? Or what you still have? Are you looking for opportunities? Or just excuses? Happiness starts in your own head, my friend.

Simple. Direct. Brutally effective. Of course, that assumes that you know whether something is right or true to begin with. Not always easy.

The Stoics didn’t overcomplicate things. They weren’t interested in justifications or loopholes. Their philosophy was clear: if something isn’t right, don’t do it. If something isn’t true, don’t say it. Period. The modern world could really use a dose of this kind of wisdom right now.

Honesty and integrity aren’t about what you can get away with—they’re about what you should do. And deep down, you always know. Always.(Hint: if you have to justify a decision to yourself, it’s probably the wrong decision.)

Final Thought

Stoicism isn’t about pretending life is easy. It’s about playing the hand you’re dealt with clarity, discipline, and resilience. The world is chaotic. People are irrational. Bad things happen. Stoicism doesn’t fix those things—it just helps you navigate them without losing your mind.

So, why does Stoicism remain relevant after 2,325 years? Because human nature hasn’t changed. The same problems Marcus Aurelius and Seneca faced—stress, fear, time management, moral dilemmas—are the same problems we face today.

If you’re tired of feeling like life is happening to you, Stoicism offers a different approach: take ownership of your mind, stop wasting energy on things you can’t control, and focus on what actually matters.

Because at the end of the day, the people who master their minds? They win the game—no matter what century they live in.

What bad things have happened to you? I’d love to hear from you. I write purely for the joy of making new friends, so please reach out and tell me how you handled it. Click these button below to start a conversation with me. I read and respond to ALL comments. 

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Despite all the noise and bad news, this is an insane and remarkable time to be alive.

Imagine you just woke up from a coma. The first memory you have is from 1981. The Iran hostage crisis is just ending after 444 days. You also vaguely remember that NASA is about to launch the first Space Shuttle.

American hostages in Iran

In the first hour, you try to catch up on the news. There’s a lot to take in, but you learn that astronauts have just returned from the moon. They traveled a total of 694,481 miles. The Commander of the Artemis II mission is a widower whose wife recently died after a long battle with cancer. His kids encouraged him to go anyway.

The astronauts rode on the most powerful rocket ever built by man. And they flew further into space than any human has ever flown. According to the New York Times, it was 252,756 miles to reach the moon. That distance is equivalent to 728 million wiener dogs lined up nose to tail. The barking would be insane.

My wieners: Lulu & Maggie

We didn’t just go to the moon, we went full Pink Floyd—to the dark side of the moon. The Mt. Everest of space travel. No other nation has done this. They’d like to, but they have no idea how to pull it off.

Last week I got over 100 emails about Why Your Dog Might Be Smarter Than You. Click here to read it.

Incredibly, the rocket wasn’t aimed at the moon. It was aimed to where the moon would be in six days. Like a quarterback throwing a long bomb on a slant to a wide receiver.

The Slingshot Maneuver

They went around the moon and slingshotted back to earth through a 10,000 degree wall of plasma at 25,000 mph without a hitch. At that speed the capsule would cross the entire United States in six minutes. The news anchor mentions that there are only five flags flying on the moon, they’re all American flags. You get chills.

The Orion capsule hit the atmosphere at 36 times the speed of sound. The air couldn’t move out of the way fast enough, so it compressed into a shockwave twice as hot as the surface of the Sun. The plasma ionized the surrounding air and blocks all radio signals. For several minutes, the crew fell faster than any humans have ever traveled inside a spacecraft, and nobody on the ground could talk to them.

The capsule slowed from 25,000 mph to 17 mph in thirteen minutes. Parachutes didn’t even deploy until the last four. Everything before that is managed by a curved piece of titanium and glue entering air twice as hot as the Sun.

In other news, we are apparently in some kind of skirmish in Iran. You are stunned that after all this time, we’re still dealing with those ass-clowns. We are finally confronting the same regime that took American citizens hostage in the early 1980’s.

While you hate war, you are impressed with our military’s professionalism. They’ve apparently destroyed Iran’s military in six weeks. Meanwhile, what’s left of the Iranian regime is hanging on by a thread. Good riddance.

F-15E Strike Eagle

An F-15E Strike Eagle jet was shot down over southwestern Iran on Good Friday. The weapons systems Officer, a Colonel, went missing. To escape, he climbed 7,000 feet into the Zagros mountains and hid in a crevice.

We sent in a Special Ops team that included SEAL Team 6 and the CIA. It was the most complicated rescue mission in the history of modern warfare. They pulled the Colonel out in a big, nighttime raid on Easter Sunday. Like something right out of a Tom Clancy novel. Nobody on our recovery team got hurt or killed. How reassuring it must be to the families of those in harm’s way that we leave no one behind. No other country does this. You wonder if Burt Reynolds or John Travolta will play the role of the Pilot in the movie.

You envision an image of the rescued pilot on a helicopter, holding an American flag. He’s as American as apple pie. Surely he’ll be on the cover of Time magazine next week. It’s hard not to feel a surge of patriotism—he flew into danger to protect us; we brought him home from the very heart of it.

His rescue is proof that no matter how far the threat reaches, America will fight through it to bring our people home. (see also Saving Private Ryan) Surely Mike Wallace or Harry Reasoner will have him on 60 Minutes this week.

With all this going on, it strikes you that this must be an insane and remarkable time to be alive. In just 15 minutes you’ve seen amazing things that only America could pull off. But you begin to wonder if this kind of stuff happens all the time now. Nobody, including the nurses, seems to be impressed by any of this. How odd.

Why isn’t there a ticker tape parade for the astronauts? Why aren’t we celebrating our brave men and women in the military? And how come the F-15E pilot isn’t on the news and on Johnny Carson?

You wonder when impossible missions became “routinely possible”. Maybe that’s the quiet trade we made: once remarkable; twice mundane. When amazing achievements pile up, appreciation atrophies. We apparently built a country where incredible things happen all the time…and then we forgot to stop and appreciate how incredible they really are.

I’d love to hear what you think. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

If you’re new to Wit & Wisdom, we’d love for you to join our community of 25K readers. The newsletter comes out every Monday via email. It’s always free, and we are always looking for new friends. Please join us.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE LONG FORM OF THIS COLUMN ON SPOTIFY

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who love dogs and people I don’t understand. See, dogs are truly one of life’s greatest gifts and I’ve often wondered if they have more to teach us than we have to teach them.

My dog treats every meal like it’s the finest meal in the history of food. Same bowl. Same food. Same place. Every single day. And every single day he acts like Chef Wolfgang Puck personally prepared it just for him. Sometimes he’ll look up at me in between bites, as if to say, “can you believe how good this stuff is?”

Then he goes outside and lies in the sun like he’s on vacation. Because, you know, life is pretty good for a dog. Not a care in the world. Later he’ll chase a ball as if the future of the free world depends on it. Then he’ll take a nap like he just finished a double shift at the steel mill.

And when I come home — even if I’ve only been gone for fifteen minutes — he completely loses his mind like I just returned from six years fighting the Russians in Ukraine.

Max

Dogs don’t save excitement for special occasions. They don’t feel guilty about naps. They don’t worry that they got too much sun or that they weren’t productive enough today. They don’t eat something great and then promise themselves they’ll be more disciplined on Monday.

Humans, on the other hand, seem to live by a very different set of rules. We have somehow convinced ourselves that enjoyment must be earned, scheduled, limited, and justified. Somewhere along the way, we learned to feel slightly guilty about enjoying anything, even down time.

A recent study confirms that doing "absolutely nothing" is challenging for many, with 56% finding it hard to enjoy down time. Nearly half of travelers (48%) feel guilty if they are not busier on vacation.

Chick

We say things like “I deserve this” before we eat something good or take time off from work or buy something special, as if everything must be justified to some invisible committee, instead of just enjoyed as a part of being alive.

Meanwhile, a dog will eat until he’s full, lie in the sun until he’s warm, chase a ball until he’s exhausted, and fall asleep without a single ounce of guilt about how productive his day was.

Dogs give 100% to whatever they’re doing.
When they’re happy, they show it.
When they’re tired, they sleep.
When they’re excited, they don’t hide it.
When they love you, they show it. Dogs don’t ever complain and don’t ask for much. And that same dog will be with you on your worst day. And he will carry your secrets to his grave.

In comparison, we hold everything back. We try not to get too excited. We try not to enjoy things too much. We cut conversations short or text instead of calling. We rush through meals without even tasting the food. We see major life events through the lens of our iPhone. We live like enjoyment is something we’ll get to later. We’re always saving our happiness for some future version of life.

When things calm down.
When we make more money.
When we get through this busy period. When the kids are gone.
When everything is finally in order.

But life rarely calms down. There is always something to worry about, something to fix, something to improve, something to plan. So we end up living most of our lives distracted, stressed, and guilty for not being productive enough.

Dogs don’t live like that. They probably think we’re nuts.

Oak

Because humans are always trying to add things to their lives so they can enjoy life later. A bigger house. A better job. More money. A nicer vacation. A newer car. We are constantly upgrading our lives while quietly postponing our enjoyment of them.

A dog will walk around the same block for his entire life. But he’s just as excited today as he was the very first time. Just pull out the leash. You’ll see.

He doesn’t need a better yard, a better house, a better bowl, or a better humans before he allows himself to be happy. He is fully committed to enjoying the life he already has.

Which makes me wonder. Is it possible that our dogs are smarter than us?

Max

You only get about 80 years, if you’re lucky. Your dog will only get twelve of them. It’s why he doesn’t want to waste time. He knows it’s limited. If you only got twelve years don’t you think you’d live differently, too?

Lulu (R.I.P.)

Maybe nothing new needs to be added to your life for it to be more enjoyable. Maybe you don’t need to add anything. Maybe you just need to stop holding back.

Rosie

One day your dog won’t be there waiting at the door. His life will be over. But you’ll have amazing memories of your time together. Those memories are him still trying to teach you how to live differently.

So stop wasting the time you have. Because one day…you’ll realize you weren’t waiting for the right time. You were just running out of it.

And honestly, the more I watch my dog, the more I think he’s figured this out, which means he is a whole lot smarter than me.

I’d love to hear what you think of this article. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

If you’re new to Wit & Wisdom, we’d love for you to join our community of 25K readers. The newsletter comes out every Monday via email. It’s always free, and we are always looking for new friends. Please join us.

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We pushed this generation hard. Relentlessly hard. The script was clear: work hard, get good grades, stay out of trouble, go to a good college, and “all your wildest dreams will come true.”

Nearly half of all younger men between the ages of 18–23 say that the statement “I am inclined to think I am a failure” describes them at least somewhat well. Even among those in their later twenties, that number is still 38%.

Men are making up a shrinking share of college students, and even fewer are completing their degrees—only about 41% of graduates are male today. At the same time, young men show higher incidence of conditions like ADHD and autism. Young men do lead in a few categories: substance use, pornography use, gambling, and interactions with the legal system.

Part of the confusion lies in the shifting definitions of what it means to be an adult. Only 31% of young men say completing formal education is extremely important to becoming an adult. This is not surprising, given the evolution of Artificial Intelligence and the anticipated changes to the job market. Traditional white-collar career paths, it is suggested, are soon to be relegated to the dustbin of history, with more blue-collar jobs such as electrician, welder, and plumber taking their place.

Regardless, 53% say financial independence is extremely important, and 55% emphasize taking responsibility for yourself—hardly warning signs that young men don’t understand adulthood. Yet, even in their late twenties, 59% of men say they do not feel like adults. Perhaps that’s why over half of young men say “the time isn’t right” to start a relationship.

Ironically, according to surveys, most young men still want what young men have always wanted. 68% say they want to get married someday—about the same as young women.

But young men (57%) are more likely than women (45%) to say they want to be parents someday. This is not a generation that has opted out of adulthood. It’s a generation that has lost the roadmap for how to get there.

Young men are desperately in need of guidance and direction. But, 77% of all teachers are women, and roughly 70%–80% of therapists are female. It was the opposite in the 1960s. With fewer families attending worship services today, young men have no spiritual foundation. And that means few have Pastors or Rabbis to lean on for guidance.

A man can create a less intimidating space for dialog. Especially for discussions about porn, gaming, or gambling—issues that are more common among young men. When that option isn’t available, some young men simply opt out or refuse to participate. Perhaps that’s why young men are returning to church. They’re in search of meaning, community and a sense of purpose.

In the absence of a spiritual foundation, many young men choose distraction. They opt-out of life, while seemingly wanting the same things as prior generations. They seem to embrace the vision of adulthood, but they just don’t feel “man-enough” to step into it. 

And the longer that gap persists, the more it turns inward. What begins as hesitation becomes self-doubt. What begins as delay starts to feel like failure. Perhaps video gaming, isolation, and delayed milestones are just the symptoms of a deeper issue. But, the deeper issue may be simpler than we think.

Ask any 50-year-old man today what he feared most as a young adult. You’ll likely hear that he feared failure more than anything else. It’s universal for men. Perhaps for today’s young men, it’s not a crisis of desire or motivation—it’s a feeling that they’ve already failed.

For young men comparison and evaluation are constant. If you fail today you fail publicly. it’s the ultimate vulnerability—to look like a failure—to be embarrassed in front of your friends. The easiest way not to fail is not to try—especially given the permanence of social media today. Young men fear judgment and humiliation more than death.

Maybe the real failure isn’t theirs. Maybe it is ours. We handed them a script for a world that no longer exists, then watched them struggle to perform it anyway. We told them the path was linear, predictable, fair—and then dropped them into something fragmented, uncertain, and constantly shifting beneath their feet.

So, they hesitate. They delay. They look for safer ground before taking a step. That doesn’t look like ambition from the outside. It looks like disengagement. But underneath it, there’s something else entirely—calculation, self-protection, and a sense that they’ve already failed.

If that’s true, then the solution isn’t to shame them back into motion. It’s to offer something we haven’t given them yet: a new definition of adulthood. One that values responsibility without pretending certainty still exists. One that replaces the illusion of a guaranteed outcome with the discipline of showing up anyway. Because adulthood was never about getting it right, it was about stepping forward despite the possibility of getting it wrong (again).

And maybe what young men need most right now isn’t more pressure, but permission to try, to fail, and to try again. Permission to find their footing without feeling like every misstep confirms their worst fear—that they were never enough to begin with.  

I’d love to hear what you think. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

Last year 1.2M people read Wit & Wisdom. We release a new article every Monday via email. It’s always free, and we are always looking for new friends. You can always unsubscribe if you don’t like it.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

We pushed this generation hard. Relentlessly hard. The script was clear: work hard, get good grades, stay out of trouble, go to a good college, and “all your wildest dreams will come true.”

Nearly half of all younger men between the ages of 18–23 say that the statement “I am inclined to think I am a failure” describes them at least somewhat well. Even among those in their later twenties, that number is still 38%.

Men are making up a shrinking share of college students, and even fewer are completing their degrees—only about 41% of graduates are male today. At the same time, young men show higher incidence of conditions like ADHD and autism. Young men do lead in a few categories: substance use, pornography use, gambling, and interactions with the legal system.

Part of the confusion lies in the shifting definitions of what it means to be an adult. Only 31% of young men say completing formal education is extremely important to becoming an adult. This is not surprising, given the evolution of Artificial Intelligence and the anticipated changes to the job market. Traditional white-collar career paths, it is suggested, are soon to be relegated to the dustbin of history, with more blue-collar jobs such as electrician, welder, and plumber taking their place.

Regardless, 53% say financial independence is extremely important, and 55% emphasize taking responsibility for yourself—hardly warning signs that young men don’t understand adulthood. Yet, even in their late twenties, 59% of men say they do not feel like adults. Perhaps that’s why over half of young men say “the time isn’t right” to start a relationship.

Ironically, according to surveys, most young men still want what young men have always wanted. 68% say they want to get married someday—about the same as young women.

But young men (57%) are more likely than women (45%) to say they want to be parents someday. This is not a generation that has opted out of adulthood. It’s a generation that has lost the roadmap for how to get there.

Young men are desperately in need of guidance and direction. But, 77% of all teachers are women, and roughly 70%–80% of therapists are female. It was the opposite in the 1960s. With fewer families attending worship services today, young men have no spiritual foundation. And that means few have Pastors or Rabbis to lean on for guidance.

A man can create a less intimidating space for dialog. Especially for discussions about porn, gaming, or gambling—issues that are more common among young men. When that option isn’t available, some young men simply opt out or refuse to participate. Perhaps that’s why young men are returning to church. They’re in search of meaning, community and a sense of purpose.

In the absence of a spiritual foundation, many young men choose distraction. They opt-out of life, while seemingly wanting the same things as prior generations. They seem to embrace the vision of adulthood, but they just don’t feel “man-enough” to step into it. 

And the longer that gap persists, the more it turns inward. What begins as hesitation becomes self-doubt. What begins as delay starts to feel like failure. Perhaps video gaming, isolation, and delayed milestones are just the symptoms of a deeper issue. But, the deeper issue may be simpler than we think.

Ask any 50-year-old man today what he feared most as a young adult. You’ll likely hear that he feared failure more than anything else. It’s universal for men. Perhaps for today’s young men, it’s not a crisis of desire or motivation—it’s a feeling that they’ve already failed.

For young men comparison and evaluation are constant. If you fail today you fail publicly. it’s the ultimate vulnerability—to look like a failure—to be embarrassed in front of your friends. The easiest way not to fail is not to try—especially given the permanence of social media today. Young men fear judgment and humiliation more than death.

Maybe the real failure isn’t theirs. Maybe it is ours. We handed them a script for a world that no longer exists, then watched them struggle to perform it anyway. We told them the path was linear, predictable, fair—and then dropped them into something fragmented, uncertain, and constantly shifting beneath their feet.

So, they hesitate. They delay. They look for safer ground before taking a step. That doesn’t look like ambition from the outside. It looks like disengagement. But underneath it, there’s something else entirely—calculation, self-protection, and a sense that they’ve already failed.

If that’s true, then the solution isn’t to shame them back into motion. It’s to offer something we haven’t given them yet: a new definition of adulthood. One that values responsibility without pretending certainty still exists. One that replaces the illusion of a guaranteed outcome with the discipline of showing up anyway. Because adulthood was never about getting it right, it was about stepping forward despite the possibility of getting it wrong (again).

And maybe what young men need most right now isn’t more pressure, but permission to try, to fail, and to try again. Permission to find their footing without feeling like every misstep confirms their worst fear—that they were never enough to begin with.  

I’d love to hear what you think. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.

Last year 1.2M people read Wit & Wisdom. We release a new article every Monday via email. It’s always free, and we are always looking for new friends. You can always unsubscribe if you don’t like it.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THIS ON SPOTIFY

Anxiety in America is at an all-time high right now. It’s the time of year that US high school seniors are learning where they will (or won’t) spend their next four’ish years. Parents and kids know that their future hinges on a single decision by a group of total strangers.

Click the image for a sample acceptance video. (Spoiler alert: he gets in)

But, getting in the right college has little to do with your kid’s future success. Why? Because most of the advice on success is logical, well-meaning and, well, totally wrong.

So, what does predict success? According to Eric Barker, author of Barking Up the Wrong Tree, it has very little to do with grades or getting into your dream school. These six observations from his book will blow your mind—especially if you’re waiting on a decision.

1. Valedictorians Rarely Become Millionaires

First, making money isn’t the only measure of success. But, I bet you thought the Valedictorian of your high school class would be crazy rich by now, right? Not so fast. Karen Arnold a researcher at Boston College wanted to see what becomes of high school Valedictorians and Salutatorians. Of the 95% who graduated college, the majority of them went on to lead productive lives. But, did they change the world? Did they go on to become titans of industry? Nope. But, why?

Because most Valedictorians are rule followers and not rule breakers. And, playing by the rules never leads to outsized results. According to Dr. Arnold, “they settle into the system rather than transform it.”

2. Grades Don’t Matter

Our parents always taught us that getting good grades are the key to success. But, the average GPA of millionaires is a paltry 2.9.

I wanna be friends with this guy.

So, how come the impulsive kids who barely paid attention in school ended up more successful than the whiz kids?

Because, focusing obsessively on grades and performance at the expense of free-spirit creativity is limiting. Those C-students in the back of the classroom weren’t even paying attention. But, they also weren’t encumbered by the expectation of becoming a Doctor or a Lawyer.

All that freedom gave them extra time to try other things. You know, creative stuff like music, acting, writing, programming, and the like. Things the whiz kids had no time for.

That free-spirit approach allowed them to explore different disciplines, perhaps some outside the confines of traditional education. They were able to find something they were truly passionate about and exploit that passion.

3. College Doesn’t Matter

So if playing by the rules isn’t the secret to success, what is? Apple founder Steve Jobs never graduated college, but he turned out okay.

You can add Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Degeneres to the list. They’re all college drop-outs and they’re all visionaries. If I had their money I’d burn mine.

Elon Musk earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out of a Stanford University Ph.D. program. Today he is worth close to a trillion dollars. I think Elon had a 2.9 Grade Point Average. Okay, maybe not.

According to author Eric Barker, “58 members of the Fortune 400 richest Americans either avoided college or never graduated. Their average net worth is $4.8 billion. That’s twice the average net worth of those Fortune 400 members who attended Ivy League Schools.”

In addition, some of America’s biggest brands are rethinking the need for a college education. Companies like Dell Computer, IBM and Google are reducing educational requirements for certain positions. It’s a dramatic change, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

4. Your Performance is (Almost) Irrelevant

As Ricky Bobby’s father Reece Bobby once suggested, “if you ain’t first, you’re last.”

Courtesy of Talladega Nights

But, Reese Bobby was incorrect. Your performance is not always the best indicator of success.

According to Jennifer Chapman, a researcher at University of California at Berkeley, the single best predictor of success is good, old ass-kissing-not performance. Yup, ass kissing can’t completely save you from poor performance but it is clearly correlated with higher degrees of success.

Jennifer Chapman

5. Jerks Do Better

Studies also show that jerks finish first a lot more than high performers. And, they’re often more successful.

If you’re too nice people see you as less competent or weak. If you’re a jerk, people see you as powerful. Jerky people are more assertive and aren’t afraid to tell people (or their boss) what they want or need. That assertiveness doesn’t win you any friends at the water cooler but it keeps your wallet fatter.

6. The School of Hard Knocks Beats the Ivy League

Would you be surprised to learn that fifteen British Prime Ministers were orphans? It’s true. See, many times it’s life’s tragedies that serve as the rocket fuel for success.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, suffered from severe and debilitating bouts of depression. So did, Sir Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud and Princess Diana.

Oprah Winfrey, Ralph Lauren and Elvis Presley share the humblest of beginnings. They weren’t just poor, they were hungry, abused and afraid.

But, that kind of upbringing can be a stronger motivating force than any Ivy League education. Once you’ve been hungry or cold you never forget it and you never want to go back there.

The Big Finish

Okay, so let’s recap what we’ve learned here.

First, Valedictorians almost never become millionaires. They simply don’t break enough rules to get there. Second, grades just don’t matter that much to your future success. Most millionaires had a 2.9 Grade Point Average. Third, College doesn’t matter. As Steve Jobs suggested in 1982, go and get different experiences than the normal course of events.”

Fourth, your performance is irrelevant. Try kissing ass instead of working harder. Fifth, jerks do better than high performers. Sixth, the school of hard knocks beats the Ivy League any time. Just ask Oprah, Ellen, Elvis or Elon. Chances are if you go by one name you are rich and famous.

So what does matter? It’s simple. Things like grit, determination, focus and a relentless pursuit of things that other people deem impossible. Think: electric cars, privatized space travel or putting 1,000 songs in your pocket.

That’s it, just a few words of inspiration for those of you waiting by the mailbox. Just remember: none of it really matters.

I’d love to hear your thoughts - and 99% of thoughtful messages will hear back from me. (1% margin for error cause, you know, I’m human.)

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In 1982, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson famously said, “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom”.

If Wilson was alive today he would laugh at himself, given that 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years. In 1982 he was drowning in a mud puddle. Today we are flailing around in a tsunami of information, yet still thirsty for wisdom.

Just imagine life before the internet, iPhones, Facebook, Instagram (Reels), Tik-Tok, Netflix, CNN, FoxNews, etc. While the amount of information is growing exponentially every year, our ability to process that information has not changed.

We are processing 1,000 times more information with the same brain we had in 1982. That’s like trying to stream an NFL game on Peacock with a Commodore-64 computer.

With that much information coming at us, it’s easy to get distracted; easy to lose our sense of awe. Awe is that feeling that we get when we sense something that challenges our understanding of the world. Think: looking up at the night sky to see millions of twinkling stars. Does that ever get old?

Drinking Life Through a Fire Hose

As a result of this information overload, we live in a constant state of distraction. Awash in information; starving for wisdom.

Perhaps what we need is to slow down. To turn off the information flow. Like when the power goes out during a storm and you suddenly find yourself in the dark. The quiet a stark contrast to the ordinary hum of life.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to turn it all off? To slow everything down. To remove all but the passage of time?

Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s memoir The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (public library) illustrates what happens when we slow life down to a crawl.

Bailey’s memoir recalls a mysterious neurological illness. An illness that left her bedridden, her life’s aperture limited to four white, institutional walls for fifteen months.

Unable to simply turn over in bed or watch television without total exhaustion.

Bailey retreated into a vortex of time. A vortex that made some painful minutes seem like days and some entire days disappear into weeks and months. A vortex totally devoid of information.

She writes, “Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties.” A vortex devoid of all other living things.

Life for Bailey became a story of patience and resilience. Like a marathon runner putting one foot in front of the other. Trying with all his energy to simply keep moving; not quit. 

Her aperture of attention reduced to everything contained within four white walls. Reduced to simply enduring each day, minute by minute.

An Unlikely Friendship

With life slowed to a snail’s pace, Elizabeth Bailey retreated into a life of solitude. But, then, in the depths of existential despair, she receives an unusual gift. A friend delivers a potted plant to her bedside, comprised of violets from the nearby woods.

Nestled deep inside the violets, a common woodland snail emerges, altogether unaware of his new home.

Confined to her own shell, with her life’s aperture nearly closed, Bailey becomes enthralled in the life of the snail.

Watching her new companion’s daily adventures and exploration of its new and strange world.

Embracing each day with a renewed sense of wonder and awe. Embracing the slowness of life. An intimate journey of simplicity and shared resilience. Yes, companionship can arrive in the strangest of packages.

The unlikely companion changes her outlook on life. She spent hours simply watching him eat. She writes, “As the snail's world grew more familiar, my own human world became less so; my species was so large, so rushed, and so confusing.”

The Smallness of Life

In her newfound isolation, Bailey becomes enthralled with the gastropod. Watching his gentle movements and marveling in the simplicity and smallness of life that often goes unnoticed. His excruciatingly slow movements providing the only visible evidence of the passage of time.

The snail goes about his daily business in isolation, consumed with moving about the violets unencumbered by the change in circumstances.

Unaware of the enormous impact of those slow and methodical movements. Unaware of the peering eyes of an unlikely companion, just a few inches away.

But, of course, snails are nearly blind. They also have 2,640 teeth and one foot. (Those two factoids have nothing to do with the story. Not sure why I included them…..) But, in contrast to her own pace of life the snail seemed almost hurried.

A Refined Purpose

Following her recovery, Bailey wrote a letter to her Doctor:

“I could never have guessed what would get me through this past year - a woodland snail and its offspring; I honestly don't think I would have made it otherwise.

Watching another creature go about its life...somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in my life mattered, so I kept on....”

Krztstof Niewoly

This symbiotic relationship continues for an entire year until Bailey begins to recover. As her energy levels increase she begins to lose interest in the snail.

She can no longer live at a snail’s pace. Her old world calling her back. Her final challenge to never forget the snail’s role in her physical and spiritual recovery.

All of this raises the obvious question, “how often do we drown in information, while starving for wisdom”?

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE LONG FORM OF THIS COLUMN ON SPOTIFY

Wisdom used to be something we expected to grow into, something that was earned through years of trial and error—years of confusion and uncertainty.

Wisdom belonged to gray-bearded philosophers, theologians and grandparents. People who spent decades trying and failing and learning and trying again. Wisdom implied time. It implied mistakes. It implied a life of careful reflection.

The “Short Cut” to Wisdom

Ironically we all respect wisdom. But we want the summary, the shortcut, the important life lesson distilled into a tweet, an Instagram Reel or a quick TikTok video that can be digested before the traffic light turns green. As if modern wisdom has a shortcut, a CliffsNotes version for life. But wisdom has never worked that way. It’s earned, not digested. And that takes work, hard work. Patient, repetitive effort applied over a long horizon. The kind of effort our culture is being trained to avoid.

Things that once took years to learn can now be digested in seconds. Take, for example, the three-hour and 14 minute movie Titanic. Modern AI tools allow you to watch the movie on YouTube in nine minutes.

A long movie is one thing. But real wisdom cannot be reduced to nine minutes, no matter how good the technology gets.

Confusion and Repetition

The problem is that most meaningful parts of life don’t work that way. Real learning requires confusion and repetition. In surgical training doctors are trained to see one, do one, teach one. Meaning that the best way to learn a surgical procedure is to see, do, and teach, with each providing its own learning opportunity. Not sure about you, but I don’t want my surgeon watching a YouTube video instead of seeing, doing and teaching a procedure a few thousand times.

Ironically, our new Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, etc.) offer immediate answers to any question in the world in about five seconds. Answers are (mostly) correct. (For example, how does nuclear fusion differ from nuclear fission? Answer: here).

The Speed of Expectation

This new technology is destroying our patience and raising our expectations. I often get frustrated with ChatGPT when it gives the wrong answer to a research question. I end up typing in ALL CAPS when it doesn’t do what I ask. You know, because yelling at a computer always makes things work better. I often fail to appreciate the years and years that programmers spent teaching those AI platforms to think. It didn’t happen overnight.

The process of writing and re-writing this column six times involved long stretches of quiet contemplation. Sometimes words come easily and other times, well, they just don’t. But when our daily diet consists of endless quick dopamine hits of information and stimulation, anything that requires sustained attention can feel frustratingly slow (it did).

Traveling between New York and San Francisco in 1926 was arduous. Using the Lincoln Highway, the journey typically lasted around 19 days. But once the transcontinental railroad was completed that trip was reduced to three days. Our expectations were totally rewired to expect or demand a three-day trip.

Today we demand that an airplane traveling at 36,000 feet and 600 mph, stream a basketball game in real time, for free, with no buffering. Something that just a few years ago would have been preposterous to demand. Preposterous— like demanding 100% accuracy from a brand new AI research tool.

Faster communication. Faster feedback. Faster entertainment. Faster, faster, faster. But wisdom isn’t fast. Wisdom is slow. It develops through long, patient experiential living. Through wandering in the wasteland. Through watching outcomes unfold. Through the steady accumulation of experiences that force us to reconsider what we thought we understood.

Wisdom is a Practice, Not a Destination

The ancient Stoics treated wisdom not as an achievement but as a practice. Something you work at daily. Something that grows slowly through reflection, discipline, and the quiet resolve to act with justice, courage, and temperance.

This is why real wisdom almost always looks ordinary from the outside. It develops through routines that seem unimpressive in the moment: reading, reflecting, meditating, and discerning. All things that require time and investment.

The tension isn’t that we’ve stopped admiring wisdom—it’s that we’ve stopped admiring the road that leads to it. Wisdom still grows the same way it always has—through confusion, repetition, patience, and reflection, one slow season at a time.

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The Wit & Wisdom Newsletter: starting conversations on the things that really matter

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One hundred years from now, you and I will both be dead. But don’t fret, my friend. You aren’t missing anything. Everyone you know will also be dead. All your children, your grandchildren, your friends, your pets, and your entire family will also be, you guessed it, dead.

After your funeral, the physical things you cherish and hold dear will mostly be given away or sold. That’s why they call it an “estate sale.” Things not sold will be given to a charity. The home you live in today will eventually be inhabited by total strangers or torn down to make way for something new.

That “priceless” vinyl record collection you’ve spent a lifetime procuring, dusting, insuring, and protecting? It’s called “priceless” because nobody else wants it.

See, everything on earth will rust or rot, and that’s what will happen to most of the stuff you covet today. Lots of it will be rusting or rotting at the bottom of a landfill—or owned by a total stranger.

That sweet automobile you worked so hard to afford? The one that tells all your friends and neighbors that you’ve arrived? It’s been crushed into an 18-inch hunk of rusting steel. The only remaining evidence of your ownership is the Wendy’s french fry you dropped between the seats years ago. It went down with the ship.

What about my grandchildren and great-grandchildren? Surely they’ll remember me, right?

Okay, let’s assume you die at age 80 and you have a ten-year-old grandson. It will only be 75 years before he will be the last person on earth who knew you. If you’re lucky, he will have saved a few iPhone videos and photos of the two of you together in happy times.

Our grandchildren’s grandchildren will have never even heard of us. They likely won’t know our names or anything about us unless they’re really interested in genealogy.

My great-great grandfather courtesy of Ancestry.com.

My father died in 2000. He lived in the same city for 35 years and worked at the same employer for 40 years. Not a single person at his company even knows he worked there. My daughter never met him or any of his four brothers and sisters. Only a small handful of people on earth remember meeting him. And, that number grows smaller every year. He’s only been gone for 26 years.

Here is the only thing on the internet that proves he existed: his World War II draft card signed in 1942. He was 21 years old.

courtesy of Ancestry.com

See, after we die, we’ll only be remembered for a few short years. Depressing, huh? Few people, if anyone, will ever visit your grave. Maybe it’s the reason why a recent study found that 23% of Gen-Z kids want to be famous. But is being famous the key to eternal relevance?  

I seriously doubt that today’s social media influencers will be remembered after their deaths. Some new, younger, hipper influencers will take their place before the funeral flowers wilt.

Cresting the Waves

The English philosopher and writer Alan Watts (1915-1973) described life as being like the course of a ship on the ocean. The ship plows forward, breaking through the surf. It crests waves, some small and some so enormous they appear to almost sink the ship. But the ship travels on.

Behind it lies the wake, the evidence of its journey. In time, that wake just disappears into the ocean. It’s the same way with the memory of our life on earth. Time and distance are not our friends.

Given that our time on earth is fleeting, it’s important to ask yourself the question: “What will I leave behind?” It’s typically our less desirable traits that are passed down to our children and grandchildren. In many cases, those less desirable traits become our entire legacy.

Just imagine if your ancestors had been more mindful about what they were passing on to future generations. Imagine if your great-grandfather resisted that insatiable desire to drink alcohol and abuse his wife after the war.

Imagine if your grandfather broke the cycle of alcohol abuse before he passed it on to his only son. Imagine if your father had been able to conquer his demons before alcohol destroyed your parents’ marriage. Imagine how different your childhood would have been?

Three generations and hundreds of lives later, the destruction and despair your great-grandfather fostered are incalculable. How different all those lives would have been if someone had just stopped the madness. See, we all leave a legacy in the traits we pass on to future generations, even if nobody remembers us—traits that aren’t chronicled on Ancestry.com.

We all have those moments that don’t just pass—they lodge themselves in us. The inflection points. The scenes that quietly divide life into before this and after that happened, altering how we see the world forever. That’s why the actions of our ancestors, while fleeting, can impact generations to come. Generations that will never even know their names. 

So many of us today are worried about legacy. What we will leave behind. What will matter when we are gone. The simple answer is—not much. The most important thing you can leave behind are the memories you helped create and the cycles you helped destroy.

It’s up to us to recognize the negative patterns. It’s up to us, moreover, to break the patterns. The patterns of darkness, brokenness, hate, and immorality. The patterns of infidelity, addiction and abuse. Ironically, these patterns of behavior are likely your deepest connection to your people and your past. (Blink twice if this is starting to sound familiar.)

Yes, your time on this earth is short. And, your children and grandchildren don’t want your stuff. However, you can leave a positive and lasting legacy if you seek to break these patterns.

Rather than focus on leaving that priceless vinyl record collection to your children and grandchildren, seek to leave behind something much more valuable—something that will live on long after you’re gone.

Seek to promote the truly priceless patterns of health, prosperity, faith, goodness, righteousness, and love to future generations. After all, these are the kinds of traits you want to be remembered for.

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