This Old House

 

Twenty-five years ago today, Amy and I closed on our first house. We went to get fajitas after to celebrate, but even within the span of the lunch hour the dread of being responsible for a physical structure began to build in us.

I've become more handy since then, but the place (and our stewardship of it) remains a work in progress. But of more personal importance than maintaining the building is making it into a home, which it has been for the two of us and now three kids.

A quarter of a century is a long time but also a blink of an eye. In this space we have experienced sleepless nights, family celebrations, and countless hardships. I am thankful to have a safe haven for myself and my crew.

The Children of Immigrants Have Become the Parents

 

As a child of immigrants who is now a parent himself, I find solidarity with friends and colleagues in the same situation. Taiwan, India, Mexico, Haiti, Nigeria, and other countries of origin could not be more different in some ways, and in other ways there are shared experiences that bring me great comfort, joy, and laughter as I connect with others. 

On a more serious note, there are the deep things, like feeling a sense of connection and obligation to do right by the ancestors, which I think is largely a positive and profound sentiment. Less beneficial are challenges my peers and I face to allow ourselves to spend money, take care of ourselves, and otherwise prioritize self-care, since our own childhood was shaped by parents who scrimped and sacrificed (and who themselves had parents who scrimped and sacrificed even more deeply). 

It is also instructive to compare notes about what it is like to raise kids, especially teenagers, in this era. On the one hand, we cannot possibly fathom the tremendous pressures faced by modern youth. On the other hand, we are also struck by how often we observe behaviors by our children that were completely off-limits to us when we were kids – talking back to the elders, leaving our rooms uncleaned and our homework undone. 

On a lighter note, it appears that things like reusing cookie tins to store sewing supplies or making sure you leave a party with a doggie bag of food are universal norms that have been seared into all of us, regardless of what country of origin our parents came from. As are norms around dating, which is to say being super strict about who you’re comfortable with your kids seeing or probing into who the parents of their significant others are to see if they measure up.

 If you are a child of immigrants, what are some of the commonalities, either serious stuff or silly stuff?

Dream State

 

I think what we dream, and how we feel when we wake up from our dreams, is a vivid window into our lives. Like our sub-conscious is trying to reach into our world and tell us something – about what we fear or crave or like or don’t like.

 The other day I had a telling dream. In it, my whole family was at the airport, and so were all my cousins’ families. Our flight was significantly delayed, people were crabby, and the kids were starting to get hangry. 

My immediate impulse was to see this mini-crisis as a small opportunity. Could we give the teens some money to get food for themselves and Asher, while Amy and I went for a power walk through the terminal? But before I could actualize this plan, I noticed as all my cousins sprung into action in a more collective way, rallying around cousins who had smaller kids or special needs or otherwise needed extra support to survive this hiccup. 

I woke up feeling guilty. It was undeniable that my immediate impulse was to do something for myself (quality time with my wife), while everyone else’s was to look out for the greater good of the group. And it was undeniable that, as I woke from my dream and before I could logically think through the dream sequence, the emotion I was feeling was guilt. A window into my deeper inner musings. 

And an opportunity to probe this notion of whether it is ever ok to be selfish. Which of course the answer is yes. The very nature of self-care, in a world in which the opportunity to care for others is unlimited, is that we have to set boundaries in order to prioritize ourselves, both so that we are available to care for others and because our own wellness is a worthy thing to safeguard in and of itself. 

Perhaps my brain was, subconsciously, making a connection to an incident that had happened just a day prior to my airport dream, in which I was grappling with whether to be selfish or to serve one of our kids. It was a weekend day, yet I had been literally or figuratively running since the wee hours – exercise, cooking, cleaning, running Asher to his activities – and finally had a moment to plop down on the couch and watch some TV with Amy. Only for Asher to come in and ask for something of me, which I knew he would think was urgent but was not actually urgent. I told him I would help him but in an hour, and could I have some quality time with his mother first, which he found highly unacceptable but I held my ground. 

I often say that I want my kids to know they are the most important things in my life but they are not the only things in my life. It is healthy for them to know I would run through a brick wall for them. And it is healthy for them to know that sometimes I need or want to do something else first before I tend to their needs. There are times to be unselfish, to be sure. But it’s ok to be selfish too.

Ancillary Intelligence

 

Much has been said about the effect of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT on the future of work and learning. I am by no means going to be able to summarize or add to that. I do want to make what I consider a simple and obvious point, which has profound implications for how we prepare ourselves and our kids for the future, which is that these tools are meant to enhance and not replace our intelligence. 

Again, I scarcely consider this to be earth-shattering insight. On the one hand, it makes as much sense to ban AI from classrooms and workplaces as it would be to ban calculators, computers, and the Internet, all of which are tools we humans use to do tasks better and faster. I think most people understand this. 

I think the opposite issue is understood to be more troubling, which is that rather than using these tools to enhance our intelligence, too many people are using them to replace our intelligence. In a classroom setting, this is akin to plagiarism, which is rightly vilified, and it is seen as not accomplishing the goal of education, which is not to regurgitate existing content but to properly understand it. It would be like, well, plagiarism: responding to an essay assignment by submitting someone else’s paper, which in addition to cheating also cheats you of the learning experience you go through when you actually produce your own paper. 

Similarly, in the workplace, people that pass off AI tool output as theirs feels like a form of cheating. But, in an office setting, I would argue the bad feeling comes from a slightly different place. Sure, it lacks in integrity to pass off someone else’s work as yours, whether you are copying from ChatGPT or parroting research without proper citation. But, it is also bad that you haven’t added any of your own value to the task; all you’ve done is move one piece of information from one place to another, and I scarcely need to tell you that there is very little value (from an employee to their workplace, or from a consulting firm to its client, say) in that. As opposed to, say, using ChatGPT to get you started, and then thinking through how to improve that output based on your own smarts. Thoughtfully enhancing your intelligence through AI tools, in other words, rather than blindly replacing your intelligence with their outputs. 

It's weird to realize but no less true that I have two adult children living under my roof, plus a third child who turns double digits in a month. So I process the topic of artificial intelligence as a professional service provider and business leader, but also as a dad. And this dad wants his kids to be intelligent. Which means using tools that help them become more intelligent. And it also means not substituting those tools for intelligence.

Social Collapse

 

There are very few talks that I remember as vividly as one given by Bart Campolo at my church’s retreat in the mid-1990s. He is a gifted speaker, and his main point that day was that television was distorting our connection to reality and our ability to process our thoughts. Honed by his work in youth ministry and his own consumption of TV programming, he astutely pointed out that, while we tend to focus our judgment of TV on bad content (e.g. violence, sex, profanity), his criticism was the medium itself. TV, in his telling, subverts our need to connect to our feelings and to the world around us. It is literally make-believe, everyone on the screen is beautiful, and there are no boring scenes; none of this is how our actual lives are. And, the immersive nature of the medium is such that we become passive consumers; through visual and auditory cues, we are told when things will be heart-pounding or sweet or enraging or foreboding. The end result of all of this is that we become increasingly dissatisfied with the real world, and increasingly unable to articulate what we are actually thinking and feeling. 

This is consistent with the main point of the 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” by Neil Postman, which caught the front end of a TV-dominated era that has influenced not only entertainment but culture, community, and politics. To come back to my above point, it’s not that we consume trashy content; it’s that we’ve relegated ourselves to a platform for content that has rendered us passive, thrill-seeking, and escapist. 

You’re probably already where I’m going, which is that 30 years after I heard this talk and 40 years after that book came out, we are experiencing an extreme version of this phenomenon due to the prevalence of social media, which is a far more pervasive form of the TV medium that both Campolo and Postman lamented. On social, everyone is beautiful and everything is effortless. The irony of this arc is that social media is basically the natural extension of the boom in “reality TV” in the early 2000s, in which scripted shows with paid actors gave way to contrived competitions among regular people. And yet there is very little “real” about the reality TV we now consume through social media. 

We are in a bad place, and much of this can be traced to this root cause, first from TV and now from social. Low self-esteem comes from being bombarded with impossible body standards. We are facing a mental health epidemic because the ubiquity of content cannot help but leave us anxious. Even our eyesight and body posture are suffering from all the screen time. Most importantly, addiction to our screens has robbed us not only of social connection but in many cases of human touch, which is disastrous for our wellbeing. 

Most people who see this feel that we must take drastic action. Ban TikTok! Delay giving our kids phones as long as possible! Enforce rigid screen time limits! There is a place for these interventions, and I certainly respect the desperation behind them. But I fear these remedies only address the surface, and are hard to sustainably enact anyway. Just as we needed to take care once television became so ubiquitous, we need to take care now that social media is everywhere. We need to talk to our kids about the dangers, not just of the content but of the platform itself. We need to literally touch grass. We need to take long self-imposed breaks from our screens. Postman called it ”amusing ourselves to death,” and I don’t disagree that it is that serious.

Happy 20th Birthday to Jada

 

We love you Jerds!

Life Lessons from Sports

 

 

Organized sports is a common childhood activity that we parents often prioritize when thinking of what will be good for our kids. We value the values it imparted on us from our own lived experiences, and so we desire for our own children to reap that benefit too. 

I will leave for another day what “youth sports” has metastasized into today, what with the traveling teams and the year-round schedules and the expensive gear. Rather, I just want to reflect on what I see in professional sports that warms my heart, which I draw a direct line to life lessons that we can learn from sports from our earliest ages. In no particular order: 

1. Owning failure. Like life, sports has success and failure. Which may seem obvious, but in our social media saturated society, our kids often only see success, or when they see failure it is something to be mocked and shunned. But we will fail often in life, so we must learn not to avoid it and we must learn how to own it. What a terribly small life that never tries for fear of failing, or that has to meet failure with excuses or anger or seclusion. For all the amazing exploits professional athletes are capable of, the one that amazes me the most is their ability to fail spectacularly and publicly, and yet move on to the next play. Or even worse, when their spectacular and public failure costs their team the game, they meet with the press after and own that they messed up. What a powerful, painful, and yet necessary life lesson. 

2. Having a goal and putting in the work to achieve it. Sport is, by definition, competition, which means a ubiquitous goal is to win. Which means having a plan in place to achieve that goal. Which means putting in the work to come up with, prepare for, and work towards that success. Which, again, sounds obvious. But how many of today’s kids don’t have plans at all, let alone ones that are both inspiring to pursue while realistic enough to achieve? And how unglamorous it is, in a social media age where success is not only everywhere but effortless, to train and get the reps in and do it again and be ready. Yet any professional athlete will tell you that the few seconds of success on the court is built upon thousands of hours of practice. So it is in life. 

3. Be gracious in victory and defeat. We seem to have an aversion for competition today, as if we are afraid of kids experiencing either victory or defeat. Perhaps we are afraid that victory will get to their heads or defeat will crush them, so we game our games so that there is no victory or defeat. But in life we have victories and defeats. Is it not better to prepare our kids for life by helping them to know how to be gracious in victory and defeat? Probably the most heart-warming and tear-inducing videos of professional athletes for me is when they spend the whole game competing their butts off against the other team, and that after the final bell they embrace their competitors and show respect for how hard good competition made them play. In life, there seems to be no middle ground between “there can be no competition” and “the other side is evil, not to be consorted with.” But in life, I would argue it is critically important to understand that we compete all the time, and yet how wonderful it is to respect, compliment, and have great affection for those we compete against. I love seeing professional athletes do this. 

What life lessons did you learn from sports when you were a kid? If you’re a parent, what life lessons do you hope your kids learn from their sports experiences.