Dear Apple,

I hate your new AI assistant, who answers the phone when I call your 800 number.

Years ago I switched to Apple from Dell because I needed good customer service, as well as reliable products. I was a new small business owner/solo-preneur, had four tiny children… and in one year, had to rebuild my hard drive twice after crashes – six hours, each time. On the phone with poor customer service. The tech circle of hell. People kept saying that compared to PCs, Apple products didn’t crash as much (they don’t), were less likely to get hacked (they are), and came with much better customer service (they do). I switched in 2010 and never looked back, never mind the higher cost. I’ve been a very happy customer.

During those years I’ve called your customer service line probably 50 times, and I always have an above-average experience. I get knowledgeable, polite agents who are easy to understand. Interactions that feel like real conversations – sane, dignified. No buzz in the background, no sounds of a working call center. It stands out.

Of course at the start of each call I talk to a robot, who asks which product I’m calling about, sends me a verification link, asks my hold music hold preference while waiting for a live agent. It’s the way customer service calls work. That’s fine

Last month, everything changed. And so much for the worse.

First, you replaced the first-line-response robot with a full AI “experience” – a robot interacting as if it were a person instead of a robot, not just collecting basic information but itself trying to troubleshoot. I loathe this. And second (and worse), you have the robot-acting-like-a-person using a casual, slang-ridden communication style. A sing-song style voice and ridiculous phrases like “no worries,” “okaaaaaay,” “gotcha” and “hang with me.” What? This is weird and disconcerting - totally startling, the first time.

If I am going to be interacting with a robot, let’s have it be clear to all parties that it’s a robot. Don’t try to pass it off as human, or human-esque. Making your robot sound like a ditzy teenager doesn’t fool anyone, and the effort to fool goes against truth and knowledge. It’s vice-filled, and I lose respect for you.

Worse, rendering your robot in a human-esque fashion forces me into a position of existential questioning that I resent… and that should play no part of accomplishing tech fixes on my Apple products. Your AI sounding like a chatty, try-hard college student evokes my impulse to use courtesy language, modulate my voice, say please and thank you. But your AI is inhuman and therefore not a candidate for this: I don’t say please and thank you to my Scotch tape or hammer or any other tool.

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When a person mishears or misunderstands or has trouble processing a request, we have etiquette for that. We have civility, decorum, civic friendship that anchors our common good. He is, after all, another human being. But a machine is not a human. There is no civic friendship, nor should there ever be an expectation of such. You are exploiting my humanness, my tendencies and training in politeness, to try to get me to engage with a mindless (ie, lacking a human mind) machine as if it were a person. It is not. I object to this.

In reality, your trying-to-sound-human AI makes a charade of human conversation. Of all creatures, only humans 1) are embodied creatures that have bodies and spirits (emotions) and reason (minds), and 2) use logic and language to interact with each other via real conversation.

To have AI machines mimic human modes of conversation is insulting and demeaning. It lessens the dignity of humans – while simultaneously “training” humans to accept this reduction in dignity.

Finally, when I get to the real live human agent at the end of my AI encounter, I approach her with a new irritation that I just accrued while “talking with” the trying-to-sound-human AI. My resentment spills over on her, when she – the actual human – did nothing wrong. She’s just doing his job like she was doing it last month before you started this nonsense. But I feel exploited and degraded by having just been made to interact with a robot like it was a person. Human relationships suffer when we normalize interacting with AI as if it were not AI by human. Cheap substitutes result in floundering, not flourishing.

My request, then, is: go back. I want to keep esteeming your organization’s customer service, not start resenting it. Discontinue the fake-human charade and use the old, true-robot voice. Continue to be (as you have been before) a leader in real customer service, which is respecting what is human and treating your customers with dignity. Be better than the other companies that are taking this anti-human step - a beacon for true human flourishing, an example of prioritizing humans and humanness above “progress,” machines, AI.

We do have a choice of who we will become, and you can be a leader. Thanks for your consideration.

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When our kids were tiny we lived in a sweet neighborhood in southern California, our cookie cutter house (with postage stamp yard) so close to the next that if I and my neighbor stuck our hands out the window simultaneously they would touch. We had a fireman on one side and a policeman on the other side, and it was as wholesome as it sounds. And the best night of the year was Halloween. Every single person came out of their houses, even the ones we never saw otherwise. They dressed up, chatted, took pictures, and marched along in the Halloween kids “parade,” following the lights-on police car of Sargeant Bob, our next door neighbor. It was truly community at its finest; we all adored it.

I thought of this when I came across John Stonestreet’s, “To Boo or Not to Boo,” which starts out with this great line: “Every year around this time, the ritual begins anew. The weather cools off, the leaves change color, and Christians start arguing about Halloween.” Ain’t that the truth.1

I had a little blog in those days called “Souls in the Sandbox” and remember writing on Halloween and why our family engaged. I didn’t know about natural law back then, but if I had my narrative would have included these reflections. Natural law considerations are always helpful. In particular we may ask, what are the goods at stake when it comes to celebrating Halloween as we experience it in 21^st century America?

Of the six basic goods (the pursuit of which leads to our individual and corporate flourishing), the most relevant to the topic are play, beauty, and life. Let’s take a look.

First, play. Play means “to engage in an activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.” As I wrote in my post about it, play is “something you do specifically to bring about fun, to accomplish nothing… (and) our flourishing depends on our pursuing play.” Halloween is arguably the biggest opportunity we have as a culture to pursue play. People dress up, get creative, goof off, act lighthearted – as they do at no other time of the year. They cap off their playfulness with candy, neighborliness, interacting in friendly ways with strangers. Even better.

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Second, beauty – that quality in a “person or object… that gives pleasure, joy, or deep satisfaction to the senses and the mind.” It’s most often visual and acts as (I wrote in my post on it) an “enlarger of the soul, the thing that brings us up and out of ourselves in an almost sacred way.” We flourish when we pursue beauty and flounder when we don’t. In today’s celebration of Halloween, there’s much that’s intentionally un-beautiful, even ghastly or ghoulish. The Boston Globe ran a piece last year called, “Has Halloween Décor Gotten Too Gory?”, and this question seems to be at the heart of current debates I see unfolding online. Parents hating neighborhood outings with their preschooler because lawns are gross or scary – just ugly, at all levels. Huge skeletons. Ax murderers. Zombies with crazy eyes. Bodies suspended from trees. Blood smears. This is all very much the opposite of beauty (that’s the point), and our souls recoil. Pursuing beauty generates virtue, and beauty’s absence contributes to vice.

Third, life – being alive. We moderns may forget, but (as I wrote), “life is a wonderful thing. It’s a good and the foundation on which every other good thing happens– sun on our face, the laughter of a friend, taste of chocolate on our tongue, delight in soccer goal scored or piano sonata played. Without life, there are no goods, no capacity to experience any goods.” Death is the opposite of life and though it’s a natural process, it’s also serious – and sad, tragic, and a thing not to welcome or celebrate. It’s not a friend or a thing to take lightly. A culture that flirts with it or takes it lightly gets into a lot of trouble (just ask ancient Rome in the time of gladiators, or Germany in the 1940’s). Where Halloween revels in death and its symbols – nooses, skeletons, murders, blood, coffins – this is the antithesis of pursuing life. Some suggest that the presence of such signs and imagery can be helpful at some level, a reminder of mortality, a “from dust you have come and to dust you have returned” moment. The fantastic weekly resource Axis’ “The Culture Translator” this week poses the question, “Do you think it’s good to have a time of year to reflect on death?”2 Intriguing. But I never hear these conversations occurring at Halloween, never hear people reflecting earnestly on death as October 31 approaches. Maybe others do.

With these goods in mind, we can ponder how we want to engage in Halloween, if we do at all.3 How do we consider play and beauty and life, and what is the balance of these that is wise and appropriate? We need practical reasonableness for this – there is not one right answer or formula.

If you do boo, my wish is that you boo well, for yourself and your children. These things do matter, and much that our culture considers harmless – and not just at Halloween – is not so. The goal is to flourish, and we certainly can… including at Halloween.

(Now I’m off to find some mini Twix bars, chocoholic that I am! Limitless candy being the best part of this holiday in my estimation.)

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The pats of butter were small and spherical, small coiffed balls of yellow, and he picked one up and tossed it casually across the linen-draped table, over the floral arrangement, at his teenaged son. Who had just asked for butter. At the elegant fundraising dinner we were all attending, bedecked in our finery. We were shocked, of course, my tablemates and me, at so unexpected an action – and then we all started chuckling.

And I thought: lighthearted. Well done.

We are dying of un-playfulness, most of us. Society in general. We are dull and flat and generally not fun – not having true fun, and not being fun people. Look around; you’ll see this is true. And what supreme irony in a world addicted to entertainment and amusement. We laugh alright, yet it’s thin and superficial – like canned laughter from a sitcom. It doesn’t stay with us, doesn’t change our mood or ethos.

But here’s the thing: we need playfulness. Without it we wither and shrivel. Life becomes drudgery. Relationships wilt. Beauty evaporates from the lens of our lives. We become worse people. Playfulness and play are necessary for a life of flourishing.

To be playful is to be lighthearted – cheerful, carefree, humorous. It’s unseriousness, just enjoying life for its own sake. Let’s be honest: we all long for this. Feeling happy is enjoyable and appealing.

We just think it’s unrealistic – we can’t do that, afford the time (or money), we have too many challenges and problems. “Must be nice,” we think cynically, “to be a person who can be lighthearted.”

This is a lie and a dangerous one. Because we can be playful and lighthearted, and we need to. Not every moment of course, but with regularity. If we want to flourish and have good life outcomes, we must learn playfulness! We need to first be convinced that it’s actually important, and second, to confront the enemies of lightheartedness. Here, I submit, are five of the biggest enemies.

1) Productivity is an enemy of lightheartedness. I’m from New England, a productivity junkie, and I have to say: on this one the Protestant work ethic got us good. Many of us believe, consciously or subconsciously, that playfulness is unnecessary or even morally problematic. The important and “right” thing is efficiency, getting things done. What matters is task mastery and achievement, checking things off our list. And these do count, but they aren’t all that counts. Work is necessary and wisdom requires it, but work is not a basic good. Play is. We often over-focus on the to-do list (ask me how I know), and modern tools and technology amp up this game. To our detriment. A person focused on accomplishment, efficiency, and hurry is never lighthearted. Solution: be less productive.

2) Over-functioning is an enemy of lightheartedness. Many of us do more than we should, say yes when we should say no, and do things for other people when we ought not to. Women are notorious for this (Henry Cloud’s Boundaries is a fantastic resource), and the modern tendency to helicopter parent also plays a role. Apps like Find My and Life 360 – the modern tools and technology again – exacerbate the issue. When we over-function, we put things on our own plate that ought not be there but rather be on someone else’s. Our plate gets overfull; we feel unnecessarily burdened… and totally unplayful. We’re too bogged down. Solution: stop over-functioning.

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3) Concern about appearance is an enemy of lightheartedness. We are the most appearance-oriented humans that have ever lived. The household mirror did not even come into existence for the masses until the middle 1800’s! Less than 200 years ago. But now since 2011, we have the self-facing camera on ubiquitous iPhones… and photos to infinity. The more you consider how you look, the less free you are to be, live, do things in the world. For one thing, much of your time and attention goes into your appearance which makes you serious (and insecure), not lighthearted. For another, playfulness often appears undignified and people fear looking foolish – which today means someone capturing antics on camera, potentially causing eternal embarrassment. This is why folks don’t dance in public anymore– a true modern tragedy. Solution: care less about appearance.

4) Screen-based living is an enemy of lightheartedness. Screens suck time, life, joy, and most of all: presence. To be playful, you need presence. You notice something funny around you in real time. You crack a joke or make a funny voice or act out a scene in real time, with real people. You skip down a sidewalk or make eyes at a baby IRL. Being on screens removes you from all this. True: there are memes and TikTok dances, rom coms and Netflix comedy specials, and these are funny and can make you laugh. They do count. But you consume them passively, they rarely penetrate to mood, and unless you watch encounter them live with others, you laugh alone. As everywhere, screen based goods are good but as a shadow not a figure; they are counterfeits of the real thing. By and large, much more lightheartedness is lost than gained due to screen-based life. We need only look at anxiety and depression rates for today’s youth to see this. Solution: get off of screens.

5) The unique fatigue of modern living is an enemy of lightheartedness. Modern living is exhausting in a singular way. We overuse our minds and underuse our bodies. There are too many choices for everything, and trying to sort through them all feels demoralizing. Email and texts overwhelm our inboxes. Doing basic things feels complicated (did the two-factor authentication code come in yet?). Nobody talks to anyone in person, and if they do they overthink it infinitely. All this is wearing, even numbing. Life was simpler 50 or 100 years ago – not better necessarily, just simpler. And complexity invites stress and seriousness – and chases lightheartedness away. Solution: simplify and step away as much as possible.

OK, so I gave you one-line pat answers to complex societal issues, and I get it’s not that easy. It takes initiative and then habit formation. To be more specific and personal… Here are 5 things I have done in the past six months to cultivate light-heartedness.

1. Took up square dancing. Yes, really. Embodiment! And: guaranteed to laugh at yourself at least once a class. Any kind of dancing will do – line, contra, Irish, whatever.

2. Walk with my dogs at least once a day, talk to them more (including goofy pet-owner voice), laugh at them.

3. Play 80’s music when I’m doing chores and sing out loud – a big shift from continual podcasts and audiobooks (which also have their place but don’t increase lightheartedness).

4. Brick my phone – very effective and helps immediately.

5. Intentionally be spontaneous and joke around with my family members each day (it can’t be all deep or all logistics all the time). Skip. Play rock paper scissors. Tell knock knocks. Practice and experiment!

6. Wrote a poem about being lighthearted to recite when I feel myself getting intense (yes, really! I get the irony. You think you can’t plan to turn on playfulness, but I’m living proof that you can, and it works.)1

   

I said 5 but gave you 6, just because I was feeling lighthearted. :)

Make up your own, I dare you. Then try them. We have to take our own flourishing – and here, our own sense of playfulness – seriously. Life is hard, the world is heavy, challenges are everywhere. They always will be. We will not magically start to feel playful because of a change in circumstances. We have to be proactive… and now is the time. Here’s being light of heart today.

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A few years back I went to my 25^th year college reunion and mixed and mingled with a gaggle of classmates I hadn’t seen for decades. It was fun to catch up with folks and hear what was going on in their lives. Quite a lot of people were going through divorces or had recently divorced. These stories were sad to hear but the dynamic also seemed normal, since nearly 50% of marriages end in divorce; I wasn’t surprised. The one thing that did surprise me was the person considering a shift into an open marriage. Open marriage as in – when spouses stop being exclusive, when they allow other sexual partners into the mix.

Open marriage isn’t new (after all nothing is new under the sun), but the willingness we see today to explore and potentially tout it is new-ish. It’s worth examining because this stuff matters, a lot.

I’ll start by saying: this isn’t what any girl grows up dreaming will happen. Virtually no woman on her wedding day walks down the aisle toward her fiancé, eager for a day when he’ll say, “I want to also be romantically and sexually involved with another woman.” No. She wants and expects to be his one and only. The point of the vows is belonging – he to her and she to him, exclusively, for life. That’s what the wedding’s about: uniting in matrimony, two becoming one.

And marriage isn’t something we can tinker with at will because it’s not a societal preference or a product of culture. It’s what humans have done and how societies have functioned throughout history, across time and culture. It’s also a component of natural law.

John Finnis, the leading voice in new natural law theory, describes it like this:

“Marriage is a distinct fundamental human good because it enables the parties to it, the wife and husband, to flourish as individuals and as a couple, both by the most far-reaching form of togetherness possible for human beings and by the most radical and creative enabling of another person to flourish, namely, the bringing of that person into existence.”1

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Let’s unpack.

By far-reaching form of togetherness, Finnis means friendship (each seeking the other’s good for its own sake), camaraderie, and sexuality. He means a dynamic of shared life that seeks mutual flourishing for both. In the west we typically pair marriage with romance, but it isn’t always so. In many cultures and ages, shared lives of mutuality with exclusive sexuality as a feature don’t include – or at least start with – romance.2

By flourish as individuals and as a couple, he means that when they choose to connect in marriage, it adds to both. There’s expansion in the all three parts of the self – body, spirit (emotions), and mind (thoughts) – when the partners marry. It’s a comprehensive partnership. This is why sexual uniting that connects body only – the effort to unite physically while withholding emotionally or rationally – doesn’t contribute to long-term flourishing and ultimately harm us.3

By bringing that person into existence, he means bearing children together. It’s through the unique act that centers marriage (a man and woman coming together in regular sexual union) that children come into the world – children that bear half the DNA of one and half the DNA of the other. New life results. And the two parties responsible for the new life have a vested interest in the baby’s care and well-being; they are the child’s origins. Parenting the child adds dimensionality to what the partners already have – it becomes even more “far reaching togetherness” than before. And the child has continual access to, and protection and input from, both parents whose genetic materials he or she bears – statistically the safest setting for a child.

No other institution works like this. There are many friendships that don’t include this most far-reaching form of togetherness (that is, sex). There are sexual unions that don’t involve friendship – are about desire, pleasure, recreation. There are sexual unions that simulate friendship-based partnership but differ in intention – lack commitment and permanence. There are sexual unions that produce children outside of lifelong commitments of married parents. But only marriage provides a true partnership: friendship-based, stable, sexually safe and positive for both parties, procreative, producing children in a secure setting. Spouses, children, and society all benefit from this institution as they do in no other situationship.

This doesn’t mean that everyone will marry, or that flourishing for every human requires marriage.4 It doesn’t mean that every marriage will produce children, or that a marriage is only good if it does produce children. And it doesn’t mean that all individual marriages are good and positive, just because marriage as an institution is good. Clearly there are flourishing people who never marry, couples in marriages without children, and marriages in which partners abdicate (or never had) a spirit of friendship, marriages in which abuses and betrayals occur, marriages that break apart well before “till death do us part.”5

Nevertheless, natural law holds that the institution of marriage is a basic tenet of human life and itself good. John Finnis again: “marriage is utterly misunderstood when conceived as no more than an official status, imposed by law and accompanied by government entitlements and mandates. Its intelligible and inherent connection with human flourishing (and thus with human nature) makes it far more than a function of legal arrangements and definitions.”6

He’s saying that marriage isn’t put in place and ordered by a religion7 or formed by a government. Its essence is stamped onto the human way of being in the world (in a collective sense) and is good in evident ways; its practice is intrinsically enacted as humans seeks flourishing.

To modern ears, the idea that marriage is earth-old, unique, and positive sounds outdated and even unappealing. For decades now, we’ve viewed relationships, commitments, and sexual pleasure as aspects of our own individuality, and subjective. These are matters for our own preferences to direct, our own autonomy to decide. All options are viable – one chooses what one likes and others validate. We are masters of our own destiny. In such a climate, to just assert a statement like “marriage is a good” (even if it’s true) is a thing Not To Be Done. For, we moderns think, who are we to say?

But here’s the reality. Marriage is a good. It’s beautiful and noble and life-giving, human in the best sense of the word. There’s a reason we long for it, that our heart smiles when we attend a wedding or a 50-year anniversary. That what is truest and most tender in us rises up when we consider belonging to someone, building a life with a spouse, working for his/her good as we work for our own, sharing life together, including the new lives that spring forth from whole-person togetherness.

In a world where many marriages end in divorce, where fewer young people than ever are getting married, where marriage is often scorned or feared, we must say it loud: marriage is a good. It’s worthwhile: hard, beautiful, meaning-ridden, noble work. Bring real marriage back. Elevate its importance, and fight for it.

Every data point shows that marriage – a friendship-based, monogamous, procreation-oriented, lifelong partnership of flourishing – creates the most positive outcomes in virtually all spheres of life compared to other pairing/situationship settings (see here, here, here, here, here, and here, among others). Other options and opportunities don’t yield long-term flourishing for individuals, children, and societies in the same way. They just don’t.

Open marriage, then – back to where we started. Though it uses the term “marriage,” it isn’t really one. It stopped being a marriage when the spouses admitted a third party. They did so for novelty, pleasure, individualism. But open marriage isn’t reasonable. It doesn’t lead to the other goods, build virtue, or promote thriving.

Here’s, then, to authentic marriages – to committing to, supporting, celebrating them. Here’s to be willing to view and promote marriage as the good that it is. Our culture and our children desperately need it.

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Fall is grateful season, November in particular (coming right up) and I’m grateful and also… ungrateful? To tell the full truth. For me the online fall gratitude lists are mixed up with autumn commodification - broadcasted pumpkin spice lattes, Michaels’ fake fall leaves, ‘sweater weather’ reels. The “more meaningful November” vibe feels forced to me – somehow packaged and commercialized.

Hear me: I like fall think the gratitude list-makers are earnest. Heck, I may have once done a list with my littles myself. Being thankful is always appropriate, offline or online. And given Thanksgiving, November’s a logical month for this focus. Also: we humans are profoundly UN-grateful creatures in general, forever inclined to note each woe and ignore all that’s well. So we do need to learn gratitude, desperately. Being thankful’s objectively good for us, improving our attitude, emotional state, physical health, relationships.

The idea of the gratitude list is to be granular and specific – coffee in your favored mug, best woolly socks, gas chugging into your car. Again, this makes sense. Every single thing you have is a gift, not a right. The wise person notices, is glad to be a recipient of, each.

But I’ve been thinking about gratitude in settings that lack this stuff. How does gratitude work in the refugee camp? The hospital amputee ward? The slum?

I realized this: the basic goods we know from natural law are things that virtually always do or can exist in our lives, and are therefore always are things humans can be grateful for. They’re ubiquitous and transcend time, place, and material items.

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Think of the story of the prisoner who’s lost all he has, even his freedom… but looks out the window and sees the bright blue sky. Seeing it there allows him inhale deeply; it grounds him, keeps him sane. He still, blessedly, can access beauty.

Think of the unhoused person living in a shelter, no possessions left in the world, but grinning mischievously as he comes through the food line. Cracking a joke, even. He has retained his sense of play, despite all he’s gone through. It buoys his heart and uplifts all those around him.

Think of the movies you’ve seen of desperate ones struggling in war-torn or violent settings, fleeing terrible situations with their kids. On the other side, they cling amidst tears, unable to let go – so just grateful to have made it out alive. They all made it; they still have life.

Think of the isolated newcomer in the center of a crowd, awkward and maybe rejected or bullied. Lonely and sad, she recalls that bedside stack of letters from her best friend, full of love and intimacies. This friend is there for her despite all, is enough to carry her through. One true friend provides a solidity and anchor to weather dreadful storms.

Think of the forlorn and impoverished child, having little to wear, eat, hold - but learning at school how to read a book. The light in her eyes as she begins to make out sentences, then stories that warm and bolster. She’s gaining knowledge and the path to truth, to transcendent things far beyond her immediate setting.

The basic goods are not things, not objects for possession. Nor are they technology or anything that could ever be technologically administered, no. They are more, better – and uniquely for humans. Every person has them or opportunity to, across time, space, geography, circumstance. They are part of our birthright as creatures on this earth. One may lose all else, but these goods endure.1

Well too may this apply in our own lives. We may get injured or ill, lose our job or house, go bankrupt, be cut off by a family member – terrible hardships may befall us. Though any of this may happen, we still have the basic goods, and access to them (in increasing measure as we pursue them – as we are wise to do). The more we pursue goods, the more we move toward flourishing.

We also of course have the God who created us and gave us life – we are creatures after all – and wonderfully bequeathed the basic goods to us. God himself is the greatest gift, and it is to him we owe our gratitude for all good things – from specific gifts (coffee) to basic goods (beauty and friendship) to himself best of all, and all that comes with life in him. The Christian knows this and consequently can partake most in the good.2

But it’s worth noting that everyone has access to the goods he made, including those who are apart from God.3 Those suffering a dark night of the soul, distanced through doubt, not yet introduced, tied up other belief systems. The goods are available to all; they rain alike on every man, woman, and child. One may hope that engaging with the basic goods, drinking deep and experiencing the flourishing that comes with them, beckons people toward the God who made and gives them - ever and generously. As it did for me.

The basic goods are a great inviter into contemplation of Who gives these gifts, these literally good gifts.

This fall as I don’t make my gratitude list, and try to sidestep scorn (a vice!) and think generously about all who do… I want to think about the basic goods. I want to thank God for the starry night, for belting songs across laughter with my girls, for the anchor of trusted friendships, for the joy of delving into new things and gaining understanding, for the gift of being alive. These goods are gifts God never stops giving to any human looking for them – just as he never stops giving the ultimate gift, himself.

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Before the campers arrive in June, camp holds a mandatory “staff week” – counselors gather for training and to ready themselves for the summer – and ready the place itself! (It’s only the best residential summer camp in the country, rife with song, swimming, s’mores… Plus star-strewn nights, whispered prayers around campfires, hikes through the Whites. Epic and unforgettable.) When I was on staff in the 1990’s, staff week was about 10 days long. Now, I was surprised to learn when my children became counselors, it’s a full two weeks. Why the extra 5 days?

One reason I’ve heard is this: young people need more training in basic life skills than they used to. And this makes sense. Today’s teens do fewer chores than their forebears, have more adult supervision, reside in a more leisure-filled world, and rely – as we all do – on technology to do much for them. These norms add up, and a gap in skills can result. So when it comes to making beds, cleaning toilets, leading activities, driving vans, planning for discipline of unruly tweens… things may take more time for counselors to learn. Fair enough.

But this isn’t a post about activities for teens; it’s a post about activities for all of us. Because in the end we all make beds, clean toilets, lead other people, all the things. And we all have 24 hours in our day, every day of our lives. The question is: what do we do with those hours – and how do we decide? Which things are worthy of learning, doing, making a habit of? Each of us has to figure out the answers… and live with the consequences.

Enter a term philosophers called “practical reasoning.” It means:

shaping one’s participation in the other basic goods, by guiding one’s commitments, one’s selection of projects, and what one does in carrying them out1

Sounds boring but it’s actually m a g i c.

Through practical reasoning, we use our thoughts and will to figure out what we should do… and then do it. OK, but how? By participating (you see it nested in that phrase above) in the other basic goods.

Next you must obviously ask: what are the goods? The five basic goods are: life including health/safety, beauty, friendship, knowledge (of truth), and play. If you pursue knowledge, not ignorance- you flourish. If you pursue friendship, not isolation- you flourish. If you pursue beauty, not ugliness- you flourish. You get it. Go for the goods and thrive; avoid them and flail.

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So to summarize… You say

Aha! There are things out there in the world, outside myself, that are objectively good!

When I pursue them, I flourish!

And when I don’t, I falter and flail.

That’s practical reasoning; that’s it. You consider the basic goods, make a choice that line ups with them, enact the choice. The end. (This is the heart of natural law.)

To bring this into today’s parlance and The Memes of Our Lives, think of Dwight Schrute of The Office, that modern sage. Call to mind his timeless insight:

“Whenever I’m about to do something, I think, ‘Would an idiot do that?’ And if they would, I do not do that thing.”

Exactly – Dwight’s a natural law philosopher. Non-idiots pursue the goods. Idiots reject them. Case closed.

There’s actually a sixth basic good and it’s practical reasonableness itself. So practical reasonableness is both <a thing you use to pursue the goods> and <a good in its own right>.

This means, it’s always and ever good to marshal your energy to consider how to live well, and then act on the conclusion you arrive at. It’s always good to enact non-idiot-ness.

Practical reasonableness is akin to wisdom, which is “using your knowledge and experience to make good decisions and judgments.” A wise person stops at the gas station when the low-fuel light comes on; he values life and safety. He doesn’t rush past it hoping he can make it to the next one 20 miles down. A wise person, fried from work at 5 pm, goes out to walk the neighborhood loop and gaze at the setting sun; she values beauty and friendship. She doesn’t power through another 20 emails, get a migraine, and yell at her kids.

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This is pretty simple, not rocket science. Although of course there are times when it isn’t straightforward, when discernment is needed. Go for a run or read a book? Visit Grandma or have lunch with a friend? Become a doctor or a teacher? Not clear cut – your call. You still have to choose among goods, to make decisions. But now you have a starting point.

Note that technology usually doesn’t help you pursue the basic goods. The goods are for humans and relate to the flourishing that’s attainable by humans through reasonable choices. So they don’t interact with technology. Technology doesn’t have life, beauty, friendship, play, wisdom, or knowledge. Can’t shortcut to or replace them (only counterfeit them).

Technology usually offers efficiency, comfort, and information – by spades. But information is simply data. Today this data often looks like friendship or sounds like truth - “You’re absolutely right to feel that way” or “You make an excellent point.” But as we all know, baseless validation and unfounded claims of correctness aren’t actual knowledge, wisdom, or friendship.

Practical reasonableness requires us, then, to beware. Avoid the trap technology can set for you. Don’t become faster, more comfortable, better informed… and less of a human. Flourishing less over the long term. With less virtue and worse character. Technology won’t help us get where we ultimately want to go: the good place, the place of the basic goods.

So I’m glad my children are counselors at camp (seriously, I can’t recommend this enough for joy, grounding, and formation for young adults), and I’m glad camp has the full two staff training weeks – gaining functional skills and leadership ones too. More than that, I hope they become practically reasonable people. I hope they cherish life, make dear and lifelong friends, play hard, hike mountains and see sunsets, love truth and pursue it, fulfill their commitments as part of that. Become wise and live a life of non-idiots. Flourish. After all, isn’t this what we want for all of our kids?

The first article I ever published was called “In Praise of Solo-Tasking: the spiritual ramifications of multi-tasking and three ways to get your life back.” It was 2013. I was 37 and had four kids 8 and under, and my household was busy and at times chaotic. I’d only had my first smartphone for a couple years, but even then, technology was turning up the volume every day on the drive for productivity.

One of my “three ways to get your life back” was to strictly limit technology. Specifically, I suggested going back to checking email and inputs three times a day. I wrote:

The expression “morning, noon, and night” used to mean “all the time.” Now morning, noon, and night—three times a day—is considered infrequent. Today all the time is literal: 24/7, every minute. And that’s how often technology is open for business. I’m going back. Engaging in media three times a day is a healthy, moderate rhythm, so I’ve been rebooting my default mode to that setting. I’m training myself to save up web-based activities—emails, bills, social networking, news—for those three time blocks.

Ha!

You won’t be shocked to learn that this habit didn’t last, long-term. My efforts were no match against the psychological exploitation of the app developers. “I’ll see your naïve, quaint efforts to limit your screen use, and raise you the like button, the ‘for you’ tab, endless scroll, the ‘up next’ feature, reels, the three dots when someone is typing back to you, and <name your example here>...”

We never stood a chance.

But this topic has always, always been important to me. From the beginning I knew that digital tools were bleeding my humanity. That it was a fight for the soul. I got into the digital wellness industry for while, spoke on the topic, became a screen coach, wrote a little book called Your Faith and Your Phone. If the data is right, I’m not as screen-addicted as the average American. And yet I’m still screen-addicted. The majority of the time, I’m aware of that low grade “urge to check.” Am I missing something important? Does someone need me?

A big part of modern life, it turns out, is suppressing the urge to digitally check things on a continuous basis.

Last week, when I noted this sentiment on Substack, a commenter replied that the real cost of constant checking is “the loss of that interior place where nothing is asking anything of us… Attention is how we become present to reality, to other people, and even to ourselves. I once read; ‘A life constantly checked can become a life rarely inhabited.’”

Exactly. We aren’t inhabiting our lives, engaging with beauty, settling into presence, looking into someone’s eyes really listening, pondering the deeper things. Instead we get pulled by the checking checking checking to the superficial and utilitarian. It’s the low-grade hum we all live with, and it creates a unique type of modern fatigue about which our forebears knew nothing.

So. I got a Brick. I’m 50 years old – no millennial or Gen Z here – and still, I got a Brick.1

If you don’t know about it, it’s a physical tool that connects to your phone and lets you block certain apps so you literally can’t open them (except at times you set). I have all social media bricked 23 hours a day; I can only access them 8 – 9 PM. This means when I’m out and about, I can’t check Facebook or Instagram…

…or Substack. And Substack has become the hardest platform for me, since I started writing there. On the one hand, I love ideas and to read long-form. Reading essays by writers I respect while waiting in the carpool line is wonderful – and, uncharacteristically for our age - not superficial. On the other hand, it’s still a form of social media and as such it exploits my psychology with its algorithms, likes, comments, etc. And with that infernal sense of relevance (or lack thereof) we all have come to know, need, and loathe. Whenever I open it, I look to see if someone engaged or commented on my work. I compare and envy and long. I wrestle insecurity and potential discouragement, every time I open it. Again: cue the exhaustion.

Bricking, then, is a form of freedom. Your phone will no longer slave-drive you. You will be the boss, and it will be the tool. You can have your soul back. It stills the thumbs and removes the temptation. I love it.2

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I’ve been bricking for ten days, and guess what else has happened? I now check my email on my phone much more. Isn’t that choice? My physical and psychological defaults are so wired to checking something that now when I have a free moment, that I check my emails – my work one, and my personal one. Ridiculous! So I just set up a second Brick modality when I can lock myself out of my emails when I want to too (when I want only, because I am a 2026 working woman and sometimes I actually do need access to my email). When I do THAT, then I quit with the absurd checking checking checking.3

This is what it’s come to? A grown woman having to jury-rig a system on her very own digital device that she has paid for with her own money so she can prevent it from messing with her psyche?

Yes my friends. This is what it’s come to. The data on myself and my habits are in, and I can tell you, positively, that I will default to being an over-productive, shun-the-idea-of-boredom, relevance-driven, utilitarian-minded junky every time.

But I would like to flourish. This is what I write about. This is what I love about natural law, and why I write about it. I believe, to the depths of my soul, that I can use reason to make choices that lead to my thriving. That I can be proactive, shun appetites (even ones that have been exploited by psychology and The Machine), do hard things, and live better. And doggone it, I’m going to. For the sake of the good.

So, PSA: sign up for Brick. No affiliate link, just in the spirit of friendship. Your brain and soul will thank you. You will be able to exhale. You will bring a book with you for when you’re in carpool line. The world will become quieter in a way you need. It’s good over here.

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When she was around 9, my oldest daughter scrawled me a note on green construction paper that ends with this: “I hope to be like you some day.” Heart, melt. I kept it, obviously. A decade later and I see it almost daily, all dog-eared and worn – it’s a bookmark in my Bible. Because honestly: could a mom receive a better message from her child?

Getting that note made me feel loved and valued. Bolstered. Approved.

The note, you might say, felt validating.

Validation is a much-used word today, and it turns out to be a little complicated. Of the word’s various definitions, the one we moderns most often use is this one: “affirming a person, or their ideas, feelings, actions as acceptable and worthy.”

Used in this sense, validation is an action that happens inside a relationships between people – like my daughter and me. We need to consider three things here. First, humans have an innate need for connection and closeness with other humans; it’s how we’re wired. We want to feel safe with and approved by another. This is the center of healthy relationship: being noticed and appreciated.

Second, we think of affirmation and validation as the same thing, but they’re not. Why? Because at the heart of validation is the word “valid,” which means true. Conforming to reality. The primary definition of validation is: “the act of confirming something as true or correct.” 1 + 1 = 2; this is correct and I can validate it. 1 + 1 = 3 is incorrect, so I can’tvalidate that. If I affirmed this second math equation, I’d be mistaken – and it wouldn’t be validation (because the equation isn’t valid).

Third, we often say approving things to people that aren’t true. It happens all the time. I might say, “You did so well on your piano recital,” when you didn’t. “Nice work on that essay,” when it was mediocre. Why do we say affirming things to people when they aren’t true? Often because it’s pleasant and comfortable. I want you to feel good about yourself. Also, I want you to like me. And, I like relational harmony between you and me.

In these cases, our uplifting but untrue words result from a wish to ease, please, or advance an invisible agenda. This type of speech is rooted in our appetites, those things that lead to pleasantness and comfort in the right now. It’s short-term gratification, usually without regard to long-term flourishing. We often don’t think about our appetites or realize that we’re acting on them; it usually happens subconsciously. But misusing logic and language in this way is bad for us.

But something else could be going on. We might say affirming things because we’re recognizing the interior world of the person we’re speaking to. In today’s therapeutic world, this proliferates so happens often. I could say: “I know that you’re angry” or “I see that this is hard for you.” Here, I’m recognizing the internal emotional landscape of the person I’m talking to as a means of support. And there is truth in this scenario – you feel anger, I identify and voice the reality of that anger. So this is a genuine validation, of a type. My words acknowledge the real thing of your emotion.

The problem here is whether the validation is appropriately placed or helpful. Sometimes saying, “I see you’re angry” is helpful. Relationship is, again, about knowing and being known – connection and worth and love. So my observing aloud your internal state may help you feel loved, and grow. It may soften you. But it may do the opposite. My verbalizing your visible emotion at a particular moment may give you the sense that you’re justified in your position or actions, even if they aren’t justifiable (aren’t reasonable, aren’t oriented toward the basic goods). Sometimes a loved one’s observation of emotion can translate into a license to deepen a misguided position. The person receiving validation may think: “I feel this, even you see it, so it’s legitimate for me to feel and act this way.” It becomes rationale, an excuse for poor behavior. The validation may harden you. Conveying empathy or validating one’s internal experience are tools, sometimes valuable ones… but they aren’t innately good (as discussed in my recent gentle parenting post). They are not virtues.

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The difficulty is that emotions – wonderful and necessary as they are – are complicated and don’t emerge in a rational manner. But good, the basic goods, are things that require reason to know and pursue. A person whose emotions and internal state direct her course of action, without reference to reason, will not flourish. So when we validate emotion and subjective experience, we run the risk of accidentally endorsing unreasonable character traits and unreasonable behavior. Of thwarting virtue and abetting vice. Of “helping” a person along the road to being a worse person.

Humans aren’t machines, thankfully!, and there is no delineated line between reason (thoughts) and spirit (emotions) as they operate within us. It’s a dance: art, not science. We may wish for a formula to know when it’s helpful to validate someone’s internal experience and when it’s unhelpful, but there is none. To respond well to others, we need life experience, maturity, and a spirit of friendship. We need deep conversation. Most of all, we need the conviction that truth and goods do exist – out there, objectively – and are knowable, and that living according to them creates the best life for all of us humans.

My sweet daughter and her scrawled note on green construction paper. What if she said, “You’re the best mother ever…” but I was screen-addicted, ignored her always, gave her no bath and no clean clothes, fed her Cheetos night and day? The note would encourage me and maybe make me feel “validated” (wrongly used on purpose) in my role, but that would be irrelevant. Her words wouldn’t correspond to truth and my feelings about them would be irrelevant. I would be an objectively bad mother, and only that would matter in the big picture.

In a different way, I could wrongly validate her. I could say “I see you’re angry,” or “everybody is angry sometimes,” or “this is the kind of situation that makes you angry,” and never teach her that anger is usually mixed with pride and a tendency toward cruelty, both vices. Not teach that it’s often helpful to acknowledge anger, but it’s always necessary to train behavior when one feels angry. Not require her to learn to control her actions so her anger doesn’t hurt others. I would have validated the existence of her emotions but failed to train her in virtue; she would not flourish. And again, only that would matter in the big picture of her character.

What I long for, daughter, for you and me, is that we be people of truth and friendship. That we love what is good and turn from what is bad, including within us. Learn to say true things always, to people and about people, with kindness. And sweet girl, learn not to say words that are false, even when doing would be pleasant and be appealing. Learn the value of silence. Show a person’s value, always, and make them know that they are always valued – by God and by you – whatever they do. One can never lose the dignity that comes simply with being human and having life. But do not validate that which is untrue, or which ought not be validated.

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I’m bad at lots of things, but here is one thing I’m good at: getting things done. I am quick. I am efficient. I am, you might say, a machine.

Productivity is my thing, and especially when it comes to things word-related. I talk fast, write fast (and illegibly), type fast. Fast typing comes with attacking the keyboard – ask me how I know – and thus I developed terrible carpal tunnel syndrome when I started my professional career in the early 2000’s. My first boss told me, in those days, that he guessed I was more efficient than 90% of people. I thought this was the nicest compliment anyone ever paid me.

Now I know it wasn’t. Because being fast, you see, is not a virtue. It’s not a character trait at all. It’s just a speed. You don’t congratulate your hand mixer when you set it to 10 and it whips the egg whites.

But I didn’t know that then, and our whole culture seems not to know it now. We all keep our sights set on going and going, breakneck. This kind of fast is about keeping your brain cylinders spinning on high. It’s about adrenaline, driving yourself, using every tool, hardcore multi-tasking. It’s scrolling between applications, Googling, copying and pasting.1

Here’s the thing: when I sit at my laptop and tackle my tasks, the whole thing is an exercise of brain-supercharging. I become a proverbial “brain in a jar.” I first heard the term from Jennifer Fulwiler, the atheist turned Christian writer turned comedian (though the term’s not original to her).2 She was describing how comfortable she felt encapsulated in the world of thoughts, tasks, rationality. Cordoned off from the other aspects of life: relationships, emotions, whatever’s happening outside your brain… or your window. I get this.

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See, there’s an insularity that happens to us when we get into our zone of intense thought, efficiency, and productivity. Our brain becomes untethered from the rest of us. Our hyperfocus detaches us from being a full-orbed person. It can feel like a superpower… and we don’t even notice how it diminishes us.

My friend Matt Norman, coach and author, unpacks how this works well. He says:

I was in a flurry of activity, moving rapidly between conversations, decisions, and responsibilities. I was trapped in one of my familiar, circular mental states: If I just move faster, I’ll get more done, which will finally allow me to slow down.

It was in this agitated state that I ran outside to (give Peter what he’d asked), planning to exchange some quick pleasantries before immediately getting back to my to-do list.

But Peter doesn’t talk fast.

He dictates the pace of the interaction with his deep, measured voice and deeply thoughtful questions.

“Matt…” he asked, leaving a long, comfortable pause. “…what are you reading right now, and what do you think about it?”

Like a speed bump slowing a speeding vehicle, his manner forced me to decelerate. We sat in longer pauses. I felt my anxiety to get on with my day begin to melt. I started breathing more deeply, my cortisol abating. I returned to my responsibilities feeling more human. I felt dignified rather than depleted.

Matt’s description of this episode stayed with me. The to-do list and the pace it keeps threaten to make us into a machine. Yet we are human and not machines, so humanness is where we thrive. It’s where our dignity resides. It’s where we dwell in our actual bodies and engage with others in human (not machine) ways. Machine fast; human slow. Machine self-consumed; human other-aware. Machine: tackle to-do list; human: breathe real air, be outside, talk to fellow man.

But let’s admit that being machine-like is alluring. Being a machine, an efficient brain in a jar, feels very appealing at times. We like being productive at lightning speed and uber-connected (yet anonymized). We like being detached from the messy parts of life we didn’t choose. We like feeling so much agency. I know I do.

In Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth describes today’s world, which has grown ever more mechanized in ways we don’t even realize. We’ve inherited a vast, interconnected system of functioning that he calls the Machine. The Machine, he says, “is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up – cars, laptops, robot mowers, and the rest…. (It is) rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which calls in a huge agglomeration of power, control, and ambition.”3

Yes.

My laptop (or cell phone) makes me faster, but it also inflames that thing in me which believes that I can, and should, rule the world. That fast is more is powerful is necessary is better. The cogs churn and it feels right. I’m a brain in a jar – thinking, planning, pulling a thousand virtual levers.

But at that very moment, I’m lost.

Because in truth (and truth is the one thing here that really matters), I am NOT a brain in a jar. I am a creature, a being not of my own making. I am limited and human, comprised of three parts: body and spirit and mind. All three matter, and without balance between the three, I will flounder. And so will you.

We need to pull back from the Machine of today’s world, and resist the pull to act in machine-like ways ourselves. It’s far from easy, and every new invention and emerging technology makes it harder.4 Can we learn to stop and slow, to go outside, to inhale the fresh air? Can we seek beauty, play, engage in friendship? Can we stop commodifying everything (including ourselves), and set up habits and system that keep ourselves human?

I’m with Kingsnorth. Against the Machine. More than a brain in a jar. Out on the curb, I hope, chatting with Matt and Peter about the last book I read. Being deep, and breathing deeply. I hope you’ll join us.

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Things were raw and confusing for me – I was in a tough place – when I first encountered Mary Oliver. The poem was “Wild Geese,” and there’s a good chance you’ve heard it. It starts like this:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes…

This was twelve years ago. The poem stopped me in my tracks.

You see I was trying, very very hard, to “be good.” To consider aright, pray aright, do all the right things. I was surrendered too, let me tell you; I was letting go and letting God. Had been for ages. But I felt stuck and exhausted.

What Mary tells us in this poem is: stop trying so hard. Instead, go pursue that which is objectively beautiful. Go seek beauty. Get outside yourself and engage with transcendence. Navel gaze less. Look out – and up, where the geese are.

This is the crux of natural law. The basic goods (one being beauty) exist out there; they’re real and objective and preeminent. They don’t change. They don’t depend on you or me or the mess we carry within us. As we seek them for their own sake, we begin to flourish. We begin to find ourselves, our place. That’s not all of it, but it’s the biggest part.

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When Mary says “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” is she advocating for worship of appetites, for radical autonomy, for acceptance of vice? She is not. How do I know? Because Mary was also a pursuer of truth. We see this in her poetry, in the way her pursuit of beauty eventually led her to know God, and in the redemption she experienced as a result, healing (in her 70’s, no less) from her wounds and the traumas of her childhood. She was a private figure and told the story very seldom; I heard it from her own mouth here. It moved me. I think she was among the bravest women I know.

Because Mary pursued all the goods, she dwelt with truth and reason.

I recently watched a documentary called “Grizzly Man” that follows the life of activist Timothy Treadwell who spent 13 summers living with wild Alaskan bears until he was killed by one. And I thought of Mary. Like her, Tim loved beauty, animals, and the natural world, and he also built his life around observing them. But unlike Mary, he did not balance chasing beauty with pursuing the other goods. For starters, he didn’t embrace truth. He spun a narrative about bears, their capacity for friendship with humans, and his own role as a necessary protector the bears against predation by the US government – and his claims were patently false. He also spurned the goods of friendship and human life; he was unreasonable. So Tim’s story, and his untimely end, reflected tragedy more than wholeness or flourishing. It stands opposed to Mary Oliver’s in this way. She flourished in the end; he floundered – and was killed by the ill-conceived object of his worship, the bear.

The basic goods are beauty, knowledge (of truth), life, friendship, play, and practical reasonableness (basically wisdom). We need them all. We keep our pursuit of them in balance. We do not navel-gaze.

The end of the poem:

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I have a place “in the family of things,” and it’s a good (not perfect) place. I do not need to be good, enacting a schoolmarm’s check list or becoming a guilt-ridden dullard.

Rather, I get to be a human, to be alive. I get to see sunsets and clouds and birds, to hear my dog’s whine and my child’s voice. I get to splash in creeks and jog through fields and play. I get to learn, to hear stories and read books and know things – to grow in truth. I get to love my friends and be loved by them. I ponder this incredible world (good and bad alike) and cultivate virtue and avoid vice – that is, respond with reason. There I find God, and what is most real.

This is flourishing. Thank you natural law.

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The older man paused and then stopped in the aisle, and I realized my seatmate had arrived. He was a distinguished looking African gentleman, navy blue suit with a starched white Oxford, gallant from the start. He offered to take my aisle seat and let me take his window; it was just us two. We were about to fly 7 hours overnight from Guinea to Belgium, and (savoring the notion of a wall to lean my pillow) I gratefully accepted.

It’s just, I can’t be 100% sure of exactly his words when he made his kind offer. You see, we were speaking in French.

My once-solid French is now rusty at best, to my chagrin. But we persevered through conversation about his family and mine, where and why we were going, our occupations. I slept (in his seat.) Hours later as we waited in an interminable passport control line at the Brussels airport, we interacted – his concern for my wellbeing and connecting flight remaining.

It got me thinking about language.

It’s a topic we don’t consider much today. There are more than 7,000 languages spoken globally – we can’t speak with the vast majority of humans on the planet! But we Americans give this little thought. Our country is enormous and everyone speaks English, not the case for most peoples of the world. Even when we go abroad we usually find people who can communicate with us.

Let’s think about it though. What IS the deal with language?

Language matters because it’s a defining part of being human. ONLY humans use language – no other creatures on earth do. Rocks don’t, and animals don’t. Sure, some animals can communicate, through bodily movements, actions, and non-conventional sounds. But they don’t use words and have conversations. Only humans develop a full vocabulary and use it to communicate thoroughly, work through details, plan activities, share stories, and truly connect with each other.

Natural law helps us see the enormous importance of language – to being human, and to human flourishing. In fact, of the four orders of natural law, language sits with logic in the second order, close to the top. (The orders, which originated with Aquinas, are 1) things given in nature, like a banana, 2) things pertaining to language and logic, 3) things humans can choose for flourishing, like education and 4) things humans make, like a hammer.1) Logic is just looking at known facts and drawing reasonable conclusions from them. Logic and language work together: you use reason to figure out a thing, and then you use language to communicate the thing you figured out.

The centerpiece of logic and language are truth: with logic you identify truth, and with language you communicate truth. (This is the basic good of knowledge – knowledge of the truth.)

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Here, I suggest, are the key things to consider about why language is so important, more important than we give thought to.

—Poor logic and language skills make us vulnerable and thwart our flourishing. If we can’t reason well and we can’t communicate well, we struggle to pursue and attain the basic goods. Without the basic goods, we can’t thrive.

—Logic and language can be intentionally obstructed to lead away from the truth. This happens all the time – the child who justifies his cookie jar raid due to his parents’ miserliness subverts his own logic to get what he wants. The advertisement that highlights benefits and skips over risks subverts language to mask aspects of what’s real.

—Vice occurs when logic and language are suppressed or left uncultivated. We acquire virtue and good character when we pursue and enact truth (and the basic goods) and vice when we oppose it. Vice leads to bad outcomes and misery. Virtue protectives us from what’s bad - and even relating to how we use language.

—The point of reading and writing is to foster logic and language so our critical thinking skills work properly and we can use them to live reasonably. Again: reasonable living leads to virtue and flourishing. If your reading or writing skills are poor – if you’ve been unmotivated or coddled or haven’t had to overcome friction to master these skills – you suffer.

—You can’t outsource logic or language – there are no shortcuts. If someone else, or something else, does your reasoning and communication “for you,” you don’t yourself have logic and language. They aren’t in you. So you (again) fall into vice and flounder.

—AI doesn’t itself have real logic or language, it only mimics and extends the logic and language of the engineers who trained it. Large-language models (LLMs) generate “human-like” language.2 AI isn’t human so by definition it can’t have logic and language of its own. It has no brain to think thoughts and no experiences, viewpoints, or perspectives to share in its language. It is a machine using borrowed language and logic for particular purposes.

—Interacting with AI as if it had its own logic and language is bad for us, because it enacts a lie (which itself is illogical). We can’t flourish when we live in untruth. To treat something as if it were human when it isn’t human diminishes us individually and corporately. This doesn’t mean that we can’t use and benefit from AI as a tool, but it does mean that we’re required to do so carefully, within limits, and using our reason well to guide the “how.”

We need to think harder about language and what it does for us, before we slide further into the morass we’re creating by its loss in our lives. If we understand why language is a) a gift specific to us humans and b) critical for our flourishing, it can help protect us against the instinct to under-appreciate and under-use it. And protect us against the temptation to outsource it. Even when we engage with AI-generated writing that’s effective or well-crafted, it still is inherently different from human-produced writing – and we must recognize this. As says, “what we do when we speak—whether gracefully or gracelessly—is different fundamentally from what computers do when they respond to prompts…. *Even if* AI learns to ‘write better’ than us, we will still be the only creatures with language in the deep sense.” Exactly so.

A start would be understanding how much our rampant use of social media diminishes our language capacity (and the logic that undergirds effective language). The more we use social media – and the average person uses it 2.5 hours a day – the worse we get at using language. We consume instead of contemplate. We receive (generally in a numbed mindset, not a logic-led mindset) ad nauseum and don’t stop to articulate a reasoned response. We lose out on the practice of real interaction with ideas, around the practice of deep conversation; deep conversation can never happen while consuming social media. Thus we are left, as Jonathan Haidt has aptly said, a

“people wandering amidst the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.”3

We have language still, but only a vestige of it. It’s no longer doing the work that language is created to do – to draw on logic and identify and grasp truth between us.

As we rely more on AI to do our thinking and communicating for us, and as we engage in social media and its downward logic-and-language trajectory, we ultimately lose touch with reality and become unstable. This occurs literally in some cases – insane or hallucinating people who no longer know what’s virtual and what’s actual and embodied. But more often, it happens slowly, subtly, pervasively. We just no longer know what the world, our lives, or meaning are really about. Paul Kingsnorth describes well the modern person’s daily experience with “hyperreality… a world in which fake things would come to seem more real than reality itself.” He goes on to tie the state of hyperreality to language: “the sign would no longer point to the signified – it would point to nothing at all.”4 At this point what we experience comes to have no bearing on what is real, true, or said. Language is meaningless – 2 + 2 has come to equal 5 (in the famous 1984 episode). This is tragic.

And it’s preventable.

The Guinean man in the navy suit on the plane next to me was a real man, speaking a real language, conveying real points of fact to me, human to human. Through my faltering French, I learned about his English-speaking wife living in Maryland, trying to get their family’s immigration process in order. About his children in Europe. About his upcoming consult with a German physician in Frankfurt, because he needed that level of care for a medical situation he was experiencing. I won’t forget him.

True, the man’s and my ability to communicate well was hampered because of the natural limitations of human language, an earth-old challenge. But the two real minds and hearts, engaged in this simplified exchange of ideas, were rightly and authentically communicating. Between us were truth, dignity, and earnest connection. This is what human language has the capacity to bring, at every level.

Let’s do everything in our power not to lose it.

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My primary job from the age of 14 to 19 was that of babysitter, and summertime nanny. Across hundreds of hours I cared for children of all ages, including live-in jobs where I stayed with families for a week, a month, or a summer. These were times of playing and coloring, strollers and scooters, pasta and popsicles, books and bedtime. It was practice in persuasion, and in tenderness: “Let’s get you tucked into bed now.” It was soul formation, theirs and mine. Growing up is after all chiefly about who we are becoming.

Babysitting teaches responsibility, sure, but it’s also its own masterclass in people, behaviors, relationships, leadership – in how families work. It’s show-and-tell, trial by fire, and you see different styles and methods parents use with their kids. We encourage our teens to babysit partly for this reason; there’s so much they can learn.

What’s obvious is that all moms and dads love their kids and want to raise them well. Everyone’s ideal is to raise a human who’s well-adjusted, capable, kind. Everyone wants a harmonious home and fruitful relationships between family members. The question is, how?

Not, I submit (and I’ve thought about this a lot), through gentle parenting. It’s gotten a lot of press in recent years, and I see many young mothers today feeling confusion and the weight of pressure - overt or subtle - because of it.

Gentle parenting seeks to communicate with children using empathy and validation, treat them with respect, emphasize connection, and avoid rewards or punishments. It asks children to process their emotions and consider how their actions impact others. It aims for a softer approach than traditional parenting styles and works to improve “a child’s self-awareness and understanding of their own behavior.” In some aspects it mirrors, and is sometimes used synonymously with, child-led parenting.

I like the ideas of connection, softness, nurture, and each family member being attuned to the others. Who doesn’t? Lovely. I just don’t think gentle parenting is the way to get there. I don’t think gentle parenting ends up with what it aims for, or that it delivers on its promises.

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Let’s start with some foundational things that we know through our trusty guide, natural law, worth considering when we think about kids and raising them.

—What is. A child is a small, unformed human, with inherent worth, subject to appetites and passions and whose reasoning faculties aren’t yet operative; they develops as he ages. A parent is the source of the child’s life, responsible for his nurture and his de facto leader. An upbringing is a child’s growth of all three parts of being human – body, emotions, and thinking – over years. (But gentle parenting underemphasizes a child’s lack of reason, a parent’s role as leader, and the three-part nature of the child.)

—What is good. Children, like all humans, flourish when they enact the basic goods: life/health, beauty, knowledge, play, friendship, and practical reasonableness - basically wisdom. They flounder when they act against the goods. (But gentle parenting focuses on engaging primarily with a child around what he’s feeling, not about the goods in the situation.)

—Authority baked into the parent-child relationship. It’s a parent’s duty and responsibility to provide for and lead her child, and it is a child’s natural right to be cared for and led by his parents. Parent and child are equal in worth and dignity, but their relationship is leader-follower, not peer-peer. (But gentle parenting downplays the authoritative role and responsibility of the parent, instead asking the child to take the lead – for which he isn’t qualified or trained.)

—Appetites and passions. An appetite is a strong desire for something, a passion is a powerful feeling of enthusiasm about a thing, and both are strong drives within humans. They often lead us human to do what we want, even when it isn’t reasonable – because we enjoy short-term pleasure in the moment more than long-term good. Since young children lack reason, they are often driven by appetites and passions. (But gentle parenting ignores the reality and power of appetites and passions; it discounts the reality that indulging them when they oppose the goods leads to vice.)

—Moral formation. Parents are responsible to help children grow as whole people, and this includes moral development. Their job is to help kids learn that that our actions are moldable regardless of our desires. We have power and responsibility to consider our actions and direct them toward the goods, even when we don’t want to. This is virtue: habitually doing what’s good and right. Parents help children learn virtue through effort, repetition, and accountability. (But gentle parenting prizes processing emotion, validation, and the dynamics of the parent-child relationship in the moment over forming virtue.)

—Empathy is not a good. To have empathy is to actively identify with someone else and his experience, to “walk a mile in his shoes.” Seeking to understand another has value and may be appropriate, but is not a basic good. It’s not even a virtue. Empathy is based on feelings; these are one of the three facets of the human, and not more important than body or reason. And it must always be remembered that feelings are subjective, changeable, and sometimes pointed at bad. If I spend time empathizing with Jack the Ripper, I don’t flourish. Naming an emotion doesn’t justify it. So while at times empathy may be helpful, it’s far from a magic bullet. (But gentle parenting makes empathy a leader and other aspects of character development and of correction become subordinate to it.)

We want well-adjusted children, and this includes healthy emotions, self-regulation, and secure connections to parents. But we don’t want children who prioritize emotions over reason, whose first instinct in every situation is to look inward to see what’s happening inside, who feel entitled to have every internal state validated (by themselves and someone else) before they proceed. The priority must be on the goods: knowing them, pursuing them, becoming aligned with them, even when we at first don’t feel like it. When we adapt ourselves to the goods – objective, consistent, always wholesome and life-giving – we flourish. But too often, we ask the world to adapt to us (adult and child) and to our own subjective, changeable, and often comfort/pleasure-driven state. This isn’t healthy. It produces vice, not virtue. It damages rather than strengthens relationships.

Gentle parenting leaves children untrained in the most important things. It asks them to self-draw on a level of reflection and reason that they don’t yet have developmentally. And it puts the cart of emotion ahead of the horse of reason, at the child’s expense.

Instead, parents can use their authority to lead a child into a life of using reason to direct emotions, pursue good actions, and become well-regulated as a result. They can model it, teach it, and require adherence to it. When they do this winsomely and with kindness, it produces the best outcomes on all sides (see this). This is the “gentle parent” a child needs and can respect, and with whom she can feel safe and well-led.

So I say: be gentle as a parent, but don’t gentle parent. Your child doesn’t need you to validate her or help her figure out what she’s feeling every hour of the day. She does need you to correct her appropriately, demonstrate what kind of behavior is acceptable and fruitful (regardless of how she feels), and teach that resisting appetites not aligned with the good is necessary and required. To help her become a child of virtue instead of vice – because a virtuous life is full of flourishing, but a vice-filled life is full of misery.

Reasonable actions are those that lead to the good. Gentle parenting doesn’t cause children to act in real time in favor of life, beauty, play, knowledge, friendship, and wisdom (the basic goods). So it isn’t reasonable.

Growing up is about who we are becoming as humans. Here’s to raising virtuous children who are saturated, in every way, with the goods.

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I went to a small grammar school in London when I was a girl, clad daily in a blue and white-striped pinafore, grey blazer, and straw bowler-style hat (in the summer, a beret in the winter). Two by two and holding hands, we traipsed through the London streets on our daily “Walk,” like girls in the Madeline storybook. It was as idyllic as it sounds, and my memories of those years – grades 2 through 4 – are beyond fond. My father was an international banker, and he and my mom began attending and taking us to a church called Holy Trinity Brompton (where the Alpha course originated). They encountered Jesus there… and it changed the course of our family’s history. England became, and still is, the birthplace of our family’s faith.

I spent a year in Oxford in the mid 1990’s, a phenomenal year that was as rich spiritually as it was academically. In a 2016 essay called “Spiritual Study Abroad” I wrote, “It wasn’t just that I got to study at glorious Oxford University, where transcendence and antiquity drip off every pillar and across every cobblestone. And it wasn’t the academics, though the Bodelian certainly inspired and the dons lived up to their reputation. It was more in more than that. It was what happened at the soul level.”

Ever since my year at Oxford, something powerful and beautiful happens in my heart when I visit England. There’s a bubbling up of faith, an infusion of goodness, truth, and beauty that washes over me. It happened again last week when I went with a younger daughter to watch my oldest daughter row in the Women’s Henley Regatta- an epic experience all its own. As humans we experience the reality that place holds powerful sway within us. When we return to locations that have been important in our development, we feel something intangible… but as real as the nose on our faces. It can’t be ignored.

I left my New Hampshire home at the age of 32 and returned when I was 47 – to the very same house, which we’d been renting out for our 15 years of absence. I left with two small babies and returned with four teenagers. In this case it felt strange to come home to the same place, because I felt so different. So much life had happened in the intervening years (and five intervening homes scattered around the globe; my husband works for the Navy). The experience was beautiful and also disorienting, if I’m honest. I thought about Odysseus going home after the Trojan War, Naomi coming home to Judah after decades in Moab, the prodigal son returning to his father’s house. This is a picture of being human: start somewhere, leave and grow, return to the starting point – at once the same, and changed.

We are all on our own hero’s journey.

It’s a journey of embodiment. We know the sights and smells, the feel of the bed, the taste of this food. Comfort comes to us wordlessly and subconsciously in the places where we’re formed. Our thoughts mix with our emotions mix with what’s felt, seen, heard, touched, tasted in the places of our dwelling (we are humans of three parts, after all). As C. S. Lewis says:

“First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells… With this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life; for beer and tea and open fires…”

Place is tied to our sense of wellbeing, to our flourishing. It just is. It’s not empirical; it’s more soulish than that. It’s art, not science and mystery, not data. One can’t map the depths of the human person, even if the person is ourself. One can’t map how geographic sites affect “sites” within our spirits. And yet that they do can’t be denied.

In a materialistic world addicted to information, to answers, to rationality, well must we remember this. Claude has no birthplace, attended no brick and mortar school, rode in no car, wrote with no ink pen, smelled no bacon. Nor will pretending or wishing that Claude is human (or any other AI) make it so. Claude is identical in England or Chile or Boston or Kenya, wherever you log on: no home, no trajectory, no hero’s journey.

No spark in the eye or ache in the soul - no remembering, no being reminded, no becoming.

My gratitude abounded to be with two of my daughters, worshiping in the church of my youth after riding the London tube and pounding the London pavement to get there. To bask in that goodness, that truth, that beauty. If it came to it, I’d trade a lifetime of interacting with Claude – or using a computer at all – to for those moments. What matters, matters… and can’t be changed.

Here’s to being human.

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“Why is the virtual world worse than the regular world? We all know it is, but exactly why?”

This question launched what became a sweeping project in natural law - the age-old set of universal truths, derived from nature and common to all humans, that’s discovered through reason. (It’s 100% less boring than it sounds.) I asked it to my brother-in-law, a natural law expert, knowing he’d answer simply yet fully. He did. He gave two basic reasons:

1. The human person has three intertwined parts: body (embodiment), spirit (emotions/appetites), and mind(reason). To flourish, a person needs all three engaged, but the virtual world excludes the body.

2. Humans thrive as they make decisions that lead toward the good. The virtual world has few viable opportunities to pursue the basic goods: life, beauty, friendship, play, knowledge, and practical reasonableness (basically wisdom). It mostly offers cheap substitutes. And when we ignore or act against the basic goods, we tank.

That’s it. Satisfying, and brilliant in its simplicity.

The virtual world is worse than the real world in many ways, but one place that gets a lot of press is social media. And it should. Today we know very well just how damaging social media can be, especially at high volume and especially for young people. We know it’s addictive. We know it generates insecurity, comparison, envy, anxiety, depression, loneliness, vice, even suicide occasionally. There are so many studies. Frankly, we’re all tired of hearing it.

But social media’s still here and the damage isn’t abating. So we still need to talk about it.

Most attention is put on what consuming social media is doing to us, and rightly so. The average person spends 2.25 hours per day (which is 34 days in a year) on social media: a disaster. I think, though, that we pay too little attention to what creating social media is doing to us.

Everyone wants to be an influencer

The number one career choice for Gen Z is being an influencer. In the U.S., 57% of Gen Z say they’d be an influencer if given the opportunity. It beat out all the other jobs by a wide margin. Why? First: fame. Second: money. The things everyone wants.

What is an influencer, exactly? It’s someone who can “shape the attitudes, behavior, or decisions of others through authority, knowledge, position, or the nature of the relationship with the audience.” Most often, it’s a person who films herself doing or talking about things and then broadcasts it to the world, hoping viewers will like it, want more, follow.

There are millions of types of social media influencers, because social media covers virtually everything. Influencers who talk about a specific topic – politics or nail care or fishing or exercise or homesteading or Marvel – have a better chance of not being ruined by the endeavor. They have a focus that’s outside themselves. They’re shedding light on an area of expertise, and this limits their scope in positive ways and can be protective. I’ve seen this play out with many, even my own family members. Their content’s not primarily about their life; it’s about <this topic>. A writer writes about her thoughts or perspective (as I am here); this type of influencer is similar - just communicating through video instead of writing.

The trouble is influencers who feature primarily themselves – their lives, activities, fashion, looks, makeup, “what they ate in a day,” family. These are the “lifestyle” influencers who live their lives on camera and on stage; the focus and point of the footage is themselves. (This used to be called ‘vlogging.’)

This is bad for people for three reasons. First, you can’t be present or live authentically when you’re thinking about an audience, and being present is requisite for a flourishing life. The lines between your life and performance become blurred, causing you to live badly. Second, you become highly self-absorbed, thinking constantly about how you look, angle, background, whether you’re funny enough, etc. Third, you objectify yourself, making yourself a product for sale. A human is never a means to an end; a life is always to be valued for its own sake.

Influencing is different when the subject is you

So when people make themselves the subject and object of their own social media channels, things go badly. Character degrades. Relationships suffer. Superficiality increases. Mental health erodes. We saw early instances of this before social media existed via reality TV shows – “19 Kids and Counting” with the Duggers (I wrote about them here) and “Jon and Kate Plus 8”. They thought, “We’ll just do what we normally do but on camera; nothing will change!” – and were totally wrong. At great cost to themselves and their families. (Ruby Franke is a good recent example.) Now that social media’s here in force, we see it happening pervasively.

The bottom line is that creating and posting social media content destabilizes you, when your focus is yourself and your own life.

Case in point: last weekend two teen daughters and I watched the new Netflix documentary “The Crash.” A 17-year-old girl drives a car into a brick wall at 100 mph, surviving herself but killing her two passengers. One was her boyfriend. (Spoiler alert:) what looks like an accident is eventually tried as a murder, and Mackenzie Shirilla is convicted.

Mackenzie was a girl’s girl, into fashion, appearance, shopping, her phone. She got in a little trouble at school, smoked pot daily, had been with her boyfriend since 9th grade and lived with him (her parents approved). She was a high-drama girl, and had – the court process uncovered – a toxic relationship with her boyfriend.

And there was this: Mackenzie was very active on TikTok and aspired to be a social media influencer. Her life was content she farmed for her videos; she did it as a pastime. When I saw this I thought, “Ah, there it is.”

Even as Mackenzie is recovering in the hospital, her life-as-performance mindset continues on. As one report said:

“Shirilla didn’t let her hospitalization from a car crash that killed her boyfriend and friend stop the camera rolling. She posted images from her bed and a video of her mother wheeling her out. Around that time, a clothing company reached out to Shirilla to collaborate, her mother enthusiastically responded, writing: ‘Thank you for this opportunity. She’s been trying to contact you guys.’”

That she could still be focused on her social media activities at so tragic a moment is almost hard to believe. And when the documentary ended, I could not stop thinking about it.

Am I saying that living as an influencer (or trying to become one) caused Mackenzie to murder her boyfriend? No. Correlation isn’t causation. But I am saying that publicly exporting her life on the socials added to her destabilization, and would for anyone. You stand on loose gravel instead of foundation when you do that. Whatever instability you have in your life get amplified. Adolescents already struggle with identity, are insecure and vulnerable, even before a fixation with becoming Instagram-famous. To me it seems clear that the mindset and behaviors of being an influencer was one contributing factor in Mackenzie’s emotional instability.

The lifestyle influencing path, in their own words

Here is the path a lifestyle influencer takes, steps on the road toward destabilization (quotes are from influencers who started in the biz even before teenage years).1

1. Start with a concept of exhibitionism about daily life, erasing the separation between interior world and exterior world: “I’ve always loved the idea of being able to kind of put yourself out there for everybody to see. I’ve just naturally loved being able to have something that’s like, ‘Oh yeah, here’s me. Look at what I’m doing.’ I’ve always posted things about myself, just kind of open diary.” (-Raegan Best)

2. Add in the pressure to continue “creating” and posting, to augment likes and views: “It starts to really take a toll on your mental health… Because as soon as that camera’s off, I’m depressed and sad.” (-Sophie Fergi)

3. End up with a distorted view of self missing that your life and worth are intrinsic and innate, simply because you’re an unrepeatable human being. “When a camera is on, I have worth. That’s my worth right there – I am performing for you and that is what I’m here to do.” (-Piper Rockelle)

Honestly, it’s heartbreaking.

Folks, we need to think about this when we hear young people say they want to be influencers, to reevaluate the notion that it’s just “kids making silly videos to put them on the internet.” They’re cute, they may start as innocent, but this is not a harmless pastime. Francis Bacon said it well: “Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.” Just so. We want and the world needs kids who are substantial, deep, thoughtful, developed humans – humans who have what they need to flourish – not superficial and destabilized and mal-formed.

Mackenzie Shirilla’s crash and its circumstances were tragic. And her habits before initiating the crash that killed two were also tragic in their own way – and preventable. Let’s be part of the prevention of this destructive path for others, however we can.

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I’m a podcast girl; I listen to many. Sometimes I listen to a dozen in a week. Often not the whole thing, and sometimes (I admit it) on 1.5 speed. I’ve learned so many things from podcasts: they’re interesting and there are an almost infinite number of topics to choose from. Sometimes I consider ditching my smart phone in favor of a flip phone, and I think what I’d miss most is being able to easily listen to podcasts and audiobooks.

For me and for many, podcasts are a net positive.

When I think about the downside of podcasts, I think about a) how they can make me overuse my phone in general and b) how they can lead me to an “information overload”-style of consuming. Overdosing on left-brain, factual content, and treating my mind like a machine… without bringing in soulful and beauty-inviting options to balance. I could listen to a cultural commentary podcast or to Bach; each does something different for my being. (I could also choose silence, a fantastic option.) I usually pick the podcast.

What I haven’t thought about is Podcast as Social Pornography. So this quote from Arthur Brooks’ recent article “Why Your ‘Perfect’ Life Feels So Empty” grabbed me. His premise is that many young people can curate their lives to be just what they like and yet are unhappy and feel untethered from meaning. About one of his researchees, Brooks says this:

“To pass his overabundant free time, Marc, like almost everyone these days, is online a lot: scrolling social media, watching videos. To simulate a social life, he spends hours listening to podcasts of other people having interesting conversations. He calls it ‘social pornography.’

…Life felt unreal: full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences, all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible.”

This person is listening to podcasts so he can hear two people have an interesting conversation, and by listening to it feel as if he were actually involved in it. He’s lonely and wants instant company. He wants the stimulation, engagement, and mutuality that comes with a two-person conversation… without being in the conversation. Marc seeks a form of friendship that involves being with no friend, a form of friendship that in fact lacks the friend and maintains his aloneness.

He’s wise enough to recognize what he’s doing and that it’s un-real, and he diagnoses his own situation: social porn. When people watch actual porn, they view erotic behavior between other people for their sexual stimulation. It’s a one-man “pastime” that occurs when a person consumes, and fantasizes about, other people’s sexual experiences. Marc is saying that when a person listens to a podcast conversation, it’s the same idea: a one-man experience of consuming other people’s social experience.

Pornography is a cheap substitute for sex. Podcasts can be a cheap substitute for friendship, and for the balm we experience when we engage in deep conversation.

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The parallel is of course imperfect because pornography by definition objectifies another person, which goes against the basic goods and is always vice. Pornography is always wrong while listening to podcasts isn’t. But the point is this: cheap substitutes exist and are (in Brooks’ words) “simulations” or “fake experiences.” They appeal to us because what we really want is the real thing… but in the absence of it, we’ll take this knock off.

I’ve written about how TikTok is a counterfeit experience of a cocktail party (hear jokes, share stories, learn something new, listen to music or dance. I said:

Whenever there are cheap substitutes for actual goods (in this case friendship and sociability), our appetites tempt us to take the easy way out… and we let ourselves believe that we’ll flourish as much using the substitute as we would pursuing the reality. But it’s a lie. There are no shortcuts to flourishing. You wind up first less happy, and second, an objectively worse person (because pursuing the goods is what creates virtue and builds your character). Lose-lose.

True here, too.

Marc points out that podcast can pose a similar temptation to Tik Tok. Instead of making a friend, import a pair or group of friends virtually and listen to them talk. Virtually take in their closesness, engagement, intimacy digitally. No matter that you don’t know them. No matter that no parasocial relationship, even just Marc eavesdropping on made-to-be-listened-to conversations, can fulfill.

This is what I love about natural law: it tells us straight what we all already know.

No cheap substitute can ever, ever replace a good. There are no shortcuts. Trying to get at basic goods by using substitutes causes harm and thwarts flourishing.

Consider these cases of simulations, all worse than what they imitate.

• Listening to podcasts can’t replace real conversations with real friends

• Pornography can’t replace sex

• TikTok can’t replace an actual party

• ChatGPT can’t replace gathering, remembering, and mulling information for ourselves

• Chatbots can’t replace girlfriends (or boyfriends)

• Pets can’t replace children

• “Reborn” dolls can’t replace babies

• Videogames can’t replace real games, aren’t true, full-orbed play

• Watching the movie can’t replace reading the book

• Scrolling can’t replace solitude

• FaceTime can’t replace being together with someone IRL

• GPS can’t replace a map

<The list is incomplete; add your own here.>

It isn’t unreasonable to use tools to assist or enhance your life, but it must be done well. The basic goods must remain front and center. Your pursuit of them must be helped, not hindered, by your use of tools. Where tools hinder, they must be laid aside.

So Marc, if you want a thriving life, ditch the podcasts; lay down your social porn. Instead, do the effort-filled, sometimes intimidating work of finding a potential friend. Then, cultivate a friendship. Be proactive, not passive. You can do it! You must do it; we all must. A thriving life is waiting.

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You know what feels like a rock in your chest? When you have a terrible problem weighing you down, and you can’t talk to anybody about it. The burden is so heavy. The issue bores into your heart and lodges. You feel consumed, maybe spiraling, and yet there’s no one you can talk seriously to about this thing. Maybe you try to talk to someone but they can’t enter in; it gets brushed off. Suddenly you’re faking lightheartedness as the topic goes to someone’s T-shirt or a funny reel. Your heart sinks further. You now feel distressed and alone: that singular pain.

Words, the words the pass between us humans, are the sole way we share with another the inner workings of mind and heart – a chief part of what makes us human. Conversation is something we can’t live without. Without words, we’re stuck within ourselves, isolated. Without words, there can be no camaraderie, no unburdening, no true friendship Without words, we’re set apart and detached.

And yet, we live in a world with less conversation than ever before.

There’s connection, to be sure, but it’s not the same. Connection is less, and worse. Connection online can be anything – a thumbs up, an emoji, clicking “like” on a post. And connection IRL can likewise be wordless: a head nod, grunt, or frown. It’s contact, but it may be nothing more.

The tennis ball

Conversation, though, means words, and it means two-way. Growing up, my parents taught that conversation is like a tennis game. Someone hits you a ball by saying something, and then you hit the ball back to him by replying. Back and forth, back and forth the ball goes. Each does his part. When one fails to respond, the ball drops: the rally’s over, the conversation’s done. And a one- or two-hit rally isn’t a real rally.

I don’t think many parents today tell their kids that a conversation’s like a tennis game, and you need to hit the ball back, at least a few times. It’s not part of the modern parent’s repertoire. This is partly because the modern parent herself isn’t much considering the importance of conversation. Like everyone, she’s overscheduled and in a rush. She’s distracted, often looking at her phone. Her thoughts are more focused on herself and what she’s doing than on the other person. Conversation happens, of course, but it’s often short, utilitarian.

When adults don’t prioritize real conversation, and when kids aren’t taught about real conversation, we get a society of people not talking to each other. In the short term, many don’t mind this or actually prefer it. The grunting teenager who stalks silently off when asked a question does not want to have conversation – would rather not hit the ball over the net. It takes work, she doesn’t feel like it, and there are more engaging things to tend to like what’s happening on her phone. Adults are like this too. Between a phone call with a friend vs Netflix episode, we choose Netflix. We’re tired and don’t have the energy to talk. We yield to comfort and ease and skip the conversation.

Dying of loneliness

In the long term, however, people don’t thrive when they don’t talk and a society with little conversation doesn’t do well. Why? Humans are made for connection and relationship. We’re wired to know and be known. We want to be seen and cherished, and to belong. When we are, we flourish. When we aren’t, we flounder. We become lonely and isolated.

We’ve in fact become so lonely that it’s devastating our health and killing us. The U.S. surgeon general declared a loneliness epidemic in 2023, with nearly half of adults reporting measurable loneliness. Worse, lonely people die earlier than the un-lonely. Research shows this: “People who experienced social isolation had a 32% higher risk of dying early from any cause compared with those who weren’t socially isolated. Participants who reported feeling lonely were 14% more likely to die early than those who did not.” This is serious. To undo loneliness and save the day, we must actually talk with one another. Watching other people talk on screens or listening to other people talk on podcasts (or even audio books) don’t cut it. We need real humans, and real conversations, in our real spaces.

But I ask this. Are all conversations created equal? Will any conversation do – bolster our health, prolong our life, help us thrive? I argue: no. At one level any conversation is better than no conversation, in the sense that it demonstrates we’re still alive and capable of talking. But not all conversations mitigate loneliness, because not all make us feel seen, known, cared for. Many don’t, and some do the opposite. A conversation full of yelling, misunderstanding, or false accusations creates greater loneliness than no conversation. We come away feeling less human and valued than before.

Three kinds of conversation

When I talk to my teens about conversations with others (and they bring up this topic surprisingly often), we identify three main kinds.

—Superficial. These conversations are topical – about the weather, clothes, plans, a TV show, a joke, food preferences. They tend to be characterized by basic interest, good will, and humor, and this makes them connective in a loose way. Pleasant, superficial conversations are a key part of the fabric of society; they’re conveyers of the common good. Superficial conversation when out and about is valid – and better than no conversation! You can have them with anyone (the bank teller, the fellow plane passenger), and you should.

—Gossipy or malicious. These conversations are a type of superficial conversation, except they’re malignant instead of benign or positive. They’re about someone’s bad haircut, disastrous relationship, poor choice – minus context, true understanding, or empathy. They take what is available at a superficial level and cast negative aspersions on it. This kind of conversation, discrediting and often sarcastic, has vice baked in. Avoid.

—Deep. These conversations are where the meat is: a person coming to better know another and be better known himself. They convey meaningful information – thoughts, feelings, beliefs, fears – and within them, care is given and received. A certain amount of vulnerability is baked in. If superficial conversation is “small talk,” deep conversation is “big talk” – where issues of life are hashed out. The things discussed really matter. It takes time and trust for deep conversations to occur; they aren’t had with just anyone. Deep conversations occurs within the spirit of friendship, and this is the real loneliness-abating kind of conversation. We all need them. Pray, choose recipient wisely, and pursue.

Deep is the hardest to find

Here is the challenge: people don’t always want to have deep conversations. They might fear the exposure or vulnerability (read: risk) that come with them. They might not know how, because they have little experience or practice in this type of conversation. They might be so habituated to superficial or gossipy conversation from their social circles and social media content that it doesn’t occur to them. They might lack the attention and energy that deep conversation requires, so they sidestep that seriousness and keep things light, topical, humorous. “Girls just want to have fun,” after all (and boys too).

For moderns, the temptation to avoid deep conversation is especially high for two reasons. First, we are so habituated to consuming and being entertained that stepping outside that space to tend to deeper matters feels extra awkward and burdensome. The neural pathways to connect more deeply with others are malformed, because many have long glutted themselves on individual, temporal preferences for many hours a day. Second, deeper conversations require attention, and we are handicapped in attention – again, because of digital practices – and disinterested in changing. It’s work. We’d rather not.

But let’s be clear that sticking to superficial conversations and avoiding deep conversation is a mistake, one that the majority are making today. Superficial conversations are not enough to fuel the heart. Deep conversations are where goodness, truth, and beauty – the best parts of life – are corporately reached for, grasped, unpacked. If we skate on the surface of self (our own and other people’s) we will not flourish, or be part of other people’s flourishing.

Sociologist Sherry Turkle’s insights here are helpful. In Reclaiming Conversation, she says, “reclaiming conversation begins with reclaiming our attention.” Paying attention is how we invest in others, and how we show we care. Eye contact is part of this; Turkle calls it “the most powerful path to human connection.” When we ask people about their lives and truly listen, or when we respond to someone’s request to open up to us about an issue they’re having, we act as a real friend. We love well. We grow in virtue – for our good and the other person’s.

I long for fewer superficial conversations and more deep conversations for our world, especially the next generation. We see their struggle with this everywhere. Kids are hurting for the lack of people in their lives who see them, know them, are interested in them past their clothes, hair, music preferences. And kids need this from their peers, not just from us adults. Where we have failed to teach children to have (and how to have) deep conversation, we can reverse this trend. It takes practice, but the skills are learnable. We can model it for them, encourage it in them, normalize it – in every way. And we must.

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The woman’s name is Osa. She’s toothless and spry and probably 70, and when I meet her, standing barefoot in the dirt by her corrugated tin hut, she’s wearing the brightest purple sateen dress. She’s perhaps the happiest woman I’ve ever met. She thanks us soundly for the food gift we brought, and when we ask what needs she has that we could pray for, she can think of none. “I have everything that I need, and God has been so good and faithful to me,” she beams. This is in marked contrast to what her milieu suggests, and to the circumstances of many of her peers in the neighborhood – the poorest of the poor of San Pedro de Macoris. Her smile overtakes leave me, and I leave the interaction inspired, humbled. What a woman. What an outlook.

When I ponder my experience with Osa (and other poignant moments), serving in the Dominican Republic this week, I feel gladness that my daughters are with me on this trip. At sixteen and fifteen, they can well enter into the depth of these moments, with all their complexity. Dirt-road villages laden with trash alongside every road and filling every “back yard.” Zealous dancing and fervent song. Windowless houses made of thin tin and planks, with holes in the roof and emaciated dogs slinking from shack to shack. Exuberant yet barefoot children wearing threadbare clothing, offering sometimes shy smiles and sometimes bold hands. Gorgeous brown eyes and carefully braided hair, with beads. Belly-shaking laughter. What is one to make of these things?

We are here to serve. To unmake ourselves as the center of our own lives, at least for a time. To understand the lives of those who face different challenges than our own – greater ones. To take from our plenty and offer some to those with less. Without grandeur or condescension. With sincerity, on both sides. We learn as much as we convey, and we gain as much as we give. Probably more.

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How does it work, though? What do I hope my daughters understand about service, that they may not already know? Natural law helps us, revealing:

• There are those to whom we have a duty or obligation to give – respect to an authority, care and nurture to a child, obedience to a parent, work to an employer, fulfillment of commitment to one to whom it’s been pledged. We must meet these obligations; justice and integrity demand it. Beyond this, though, is charity: the virtue of giving to others who have unmet needs… in cases when we have the right not to give. It’s an unrequired act of goodness.

• Dignity is at the center. Since all humans share the same nature and partake in the same moral order, we give to and receive care from others. We do to others as we would have them do to us. With dignity at the center, charity rightly proceeds as an act of the good of friendship.

• Motive matters. If we serve others to look good, pad our resume, or impress our boyfriend, it’s not actually friendship or charity but self-interest. Selfishness can look like philanthropy. This is no virtue at all.

• Motive can change, can be corrupted. Pride that was absent at first can easily creep in when performing a non-obligatory act. Any good can be corrupted; this is vice.

• Our primary commitments are and must be to those closest to us. If we fail to help our sick neighbor next door, we ignore the common good within our community. This isn’t reasonable. If we ignore our literal neighbor, we have no business helping the sick in a farflung location. Subsidiarity requires this; we must order our loves.

What gratitude I feel for the organization we serve with this week, led by people who serve their neighbors well at home in our town – and also engage in continuous relationship with on-the-ground partners in a developing country. We can invest in our US-based community and also invest deeply in a part of the world that has far fewer resources and opportunities. Good at home, and good abroad – focused, not scattershot or haphazard. This, to me, seems optimal. Our hyper-connected world allows for a depth of partnership of this type that can be authentic. Ultimately communities in both the US and the DR benefit.

As with me. And my daughters. New relationships have formed for us in our DR days, and many will endure.

We are so much the better, wiser, richer for our time here, coming to intimately know the people with whom we spend this week. Our hearts are enlarged. Our perspective is expanded: meeting Osa and scores of others like her, and being changed by them. Giving them a bit of food and taking interest in their lives and needs – and being received, gaining friendship. Lending us perspective. Helping us understand a different culture. Letting us see humanity through an enlarged lens. This is the gift that the virtue of charity continues to give (since all virtues reliably cause flourishing).

John Wesley said, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.” We have limits and must live by them (so this can be over-done). But Wesley’s words are good advice, because a life oriented toward service is a blessed and rich life indeed.

I remind myself of this, and I impress it on my daughters, on our last night in the DR. Bring this home with you, dear ones, and forget it not. We are all enlarged when the virtue of charity grows in us, so may we do that which we are not obligated to do. May we remember that the God who made us all humans makes it possible, more than we think and with greater positive impact to our hearts than we can know. What a gift.

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One of my daughters was, from the youngest age, distinctive in what she preferred to wear. She loved flashy jewelry, leopard print, scarves. She got this enormous white straw hat with a flashy gold ribbon on a thrift store outing and wore it daily, everywhere, the whole year she was 6. It was like living with the queen. And it worked for her – so well. The girl had style and fashion sense and wasn’t afraid to show it. To this day, she can pull off dynamic outfits that few others could.

She is, you might say, “authentic” in her wardrobe. She wears what she likes, how she likes it, and it suits her. When she does this, she benefits from it because she provides a window into her inner being – what she enjoys and makes her tick. And also we benefit from it because we know and understand her better, appreciate her intricacies more fully.

Authentic. It’s a word we hear all the time in the 2020’s, one everyone likes and gravitates toward. It’s one of the chief “values” of our day. But should it be?

Authenticity is about genuineness – something real, valid, not fake. Authentic is a candid photo instead of a posed one, clothes you choose instead of a uniform, a new haircut you like even if it bucks expectations (or your mom’s preference). When I’m authentic I’m “the real me:” candid, comfortable, showcasing strengths, able to be vulnerable. What I hope, when I reveal my authentic self, is that it’ll be well received by others – that I’ll be seen, known, and ultimately accepted. Authenticity is a precondition to real belonging and to intimacy with others.

Thus far authenticity sounds positive and healthy. So, is there a problem? Answer: yes. The desire to be authentic can become a trap. In our day, it often does. There are three reasons why.

First, we humans are complex, full-orbed beings who vary from context to context, mood to mood, situation to situation, viewpoint to viewpoint. What’s happening to and within us is subjective and constantly shifting. All three aspects of our selves – bodies, emotions, and thoughts – change in small and large ways, in one day and in one decade. Many things we’re focused on today won’t be important to us a year from now. This means that while we always value ourselves and our own dignity, we are unwise when we hold our preferences, emotions, positions too tightly. They are not fixed (and not more important than other claims on our being).

Second, over-focus on our state of being makes us self-absorbed and miserable. In trying to be authentic, we poll ourselves constantly, asking, “Does this feel like me? Suit me? Am I sufficiently comfortable?” (If not, then of course we must readjust to be more authentic.) But philosophy, religion, science, and data all reveal the same truth: the more we fixate on ourselves and our mood, the less content we are.

Third, when we focus on – and seek overmuch to express or jigger– our situation, mood, appearance, preferences to be authentic, we worsen our relationships with others. High allegiance to authenticity builds the mindset: “This is who and how I am, the real me, and you have to accept me like this.” We valorize loyalty to our own personality or perspective, regardless of others. What we feel then trumps what we do. We see authenticity of this type in Noah Kakan’s song “You’re Gonna Go Far:”1

So pack up your car / put a hand to your heart

Say whatever you feel / be wherever you are

This person is being authentic to self – going wherever, being whatever, saying whatever – the heart directs. What happens in relationship with others is secondary (as the song unpacks), and comparatively unimportant.

So, a drive to be authentic has its downsides. What we actually need to thrive is something else: integrity.

Authenticity: the pretender of integrity

Authenticity has us looking inward at self, preferences, strengths, comfort level, but integrity’s gaze is more outward-looking. It requires us to think about ourselves in the broader context of humanity. Integrity is about the commitments that are inherent in the lives we are living.

What commitments, you ask? Well, none of us is an island. We’re intrinsically connected to the people and institutions in our lives – some given, some chosen. Take me: I’m a human, girl, daughter, sister, American, person of the 2000’s (all given). I’m also a wife, friend, mother, worker, neighbor, reader, baker (all chosen). In each of these contexts, I benefit from goods that come with the package. As a daughter I received food, clothes, love. As an American I get rights, leadership, paved roads. As a worker I receive purpose and money to live; as a reader I gain yummy foods. You get the point: I get a piece of the goods related to each. (Many are common goods – more about those here). Simultaneously, I reciprocate and do my part in those dimensions the best I can; I seek to do what’s good – making an effort and following through. This is what integrity means. It’s being constant across circumstances, and acting consistently in all my life commitments. It’s pursuing the goods within all my spheres and connections.

Integrity also includes commitments I choose, activities and recreation that add to my flourishing. I may join a church, play on a sports team, spring clean my house, take up the guitar. Following through on my undertakings, too, is about integrity. Can I count on myself to do the things I tell myself I’ll do (like I follow through on what I owe others or tell them I’ll do)? With others and myself, I cultivate trustworthiness and reliability. I’m dependable and will, by and large, finish what I start. That’s not to say that I must continue with every hobby I try or every effort I undertake; that isn’t realistic or feasible. But it does mean that if I make myself a promise about something important (tied to the goods), I can trust myself to not just drop it. I don’t let myself flake out on myself, like I won’t flake out on others.

Integrity is in all cases about truth; it’s connected to what’s objectively real. Maybe to a truth that has a claim on my existence – me as daughter, wife, employee, citizen, neighbor (and the duties that correspond to each). Or maybe to the truth of my word that I gave when I made a commitment, to someone else or myself. My thought, word, deed will align with what’s true.

I say authenticity can be the pretender of integrity because both can say, “Be true to yourself!” But authenticity means by it: “Look inward, assess how you feel, express yourself in ways that feel consistent with your preferences, ensure your maximal comfort.” It’s primarily subjective. Integrity, on the other hand, means by it: “Dependably fulfill your real commitments toward others in your life, and yourself, as you advance the goods.” It’s objective – or seeks to be.

The real challenge with authenticity is that it’s incomplete. It generally only identifies the “you” in “be true to yourself” with feelings, the spirit realm of self. It ignores your embodied aspects (where you live, who you came from, the duties of family, community, etc) and your rational aspects (what is objectively true and right and wrong to do). Authenticity today is often code for: “reject claims on you that don’t align with what your emotions say or your experiences direct.” That path leads away from flourishing.

Being “authentic”… online?

What today supercharges the conversation about authenticity is digital life, especially social media. Gen Z particularly values authenticity, or so the researchers say; this generation “constantly seeks out authentic, connected experiences.” Because they like the idea of being authentic, the ring of authenticity is what social media serves up. Forbes reports, for example, that “TikTok embraced unfiltered, raw content from its inception” to maximize the drive for authenticity. And it’s true; part of the draw to scrolling TikTok, Reels, or Shorts is seeing the different personalities, topics, styles, and types of humor that come through. It feels real, fresh, fun. It’s the opposite of what’s disliked – a boring still photo, like this, of formally dressed people standing stiffly in front of their house:

But is social media really a fount of authenticity, as Gen Z hopes and evidently craves? Because the idea of a bunch of unique, quirky, individualized people on social media letting us enjoy their authenticity is, paradoxically, not real. What’s broadcast as genuine, isn’t. First, as soon as you begin to capture yourself for an audience you exit what’s natural (truly authentic) and enter a performative space that’s by definition un-candid. What you were doing before someone a camera comes out is never what you do once it’s out. Second, when we all watch each other and take notes from each others’ behavior, we become more like one another and actually lose authenticity – the great flattening. Everyone becomes more the same. Third, the space in which we seek to be or become authentic becomes commercialized. Instead of securely enjoying or revealing the way we are, we’re coaxed into an idealized and hoped-for authenticity, just over the horizon. The “authentic you that hasn’t quite arrived yet.” It’s elusive – and expensive. , as often, says it best.

Everywhere I look it seems like someone is selling me my authentic self. Through cosmetic surgeries, through therapy, after downloading this app, I can discover who I really am. It’s reached the point where I feel like that’s what being young is now. Coming of age isn’t about fulfilling duties or responsibilities or milestones, it’s a search for one thing: finding your true self. Or, more accurately, buying it.

Not only does life online fail to deliver in our hopes and search for authenticity, it worsens the whole endeavor by convincing us others can coax or sell or convince us into it (and we should let them). They can’t and we shouldn’t. Freya concludes by saying that ultimately, there’s no fulfillment in celebrating a self in a vacuum; a self only has meaning or purpose in reference to others. Her point is similar to the “inward / authentic / insufficient” vs “outward / integrity / sufficient” paradigm we’ve looked at. She says,

I’m not convinced there’s even such thing as a self without other people—let alone an authentic one. There’s a vanity to even thinking there is a self to be found. We are our relationships with others. If you were left alone with all your products and clothes and aesthetic enhancements and never spoke to another person, you would not be your true self. You’d be nothing.

Exactly. We are not autonomous beings, we can’t be, and when we try to be, it goes poorly for us. What we need is an outward-focused life, being our piece of a glorious tapestry in which we are only one part – but playing that part as well as we can. Without excessive self-polling for comfort or met preferences, without undue navel-gazing, without continual consideration for how we look, seem, measure up to others’ ways of being. All of these sink us.

Instead, then, pursue, the basic goods. Grow in knowledge, build true friendships, play hard, love life, seek beauty (other than your own), invest in the common good. This is the way – for all of us. As recently wrote in The Authenticity Trap: “When we eat, work, rest, age, and even gain weight, we are not failing to become our true selves. We are living as creatures, which is precisely what we were made to be.” Just so – in enacting our real lives well we grow as full-orbed humans, not wooed by a never-ending drive to be authentic but instead acting well and with integrity in all our realms.

May it be so.

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Last month, Joseph Duggar was arrested for molesting a 12-year-old girl. It allegedly happened on a family vacation in 2020, when the victim was nine. Joseph reportedly confessed to her father but pled not guilty. He was released on $600,000 bond.

The story is big because Joseph’s one of the 19 children of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, widely known from TLC’s longstanding “19 Kids and Counting” reality TV show. So the family is famous and known for being: Christian, large, strict, and very modest (probably in that order). Joseph is the second Duggar boy to be arrested on sexual charges. His oldest brother Josh is serving a 12-year jail sentence for receiving and possessing child sexual abuse material in 2021.

An in-depth article about this called “Ten Loads of Laundry” has been circulating widely. Its author, , was raised in a purity-focused Christian subculture similar to the Duggars. It’s worth the read. Holly describes the system the Duggars were raised in that treats sexual attraction as sin, doesn’t teach boys to handle potential lust, and requires girls to help brothers avoid sexual temptation. For example, when the family encountered an attractive woman, the girls called out the code word “Nike” as, in their words, “a signal to the boys, and even to Dad, that they should nonchalantly drop their eyes and look down at their shoes as we walk past her.” For a boy to behold a pretty girl and find her attractive was problematic and seemingly a moral failure.

Holly’s points are important and matter, in the end, to all of us. She says,

“The boys were not taught that looking was a minor thing to be managed with ordinary self-discipline. They were taught that looking was a catastrophic failure… (They had) a mind with no graduated moral framework…, a mind that was never taught to measure degrees of harm…”

She sums this up by making this statement, true of all humans: “(What is needed is) genuine moral scaffolding, built to their actual developmental scale, that will eventually make them capable of governing themselves.” Italics are mine.

Key terms, these ones: “moral framework” and “moral scaffolding.” Holly’s right: the Duggar boys didn’t have one. They needed one. And we all need one.

Virtue requires practice, and there are levels

What emerges in the Duggars’ story and Holly’s analysis is this: virtue requires practice. Virtue means habitually doing what’s good and right.1 To live virtuously is to be trained slowly over time, through effort and trial and accountability.

Maybe this sounds obvious, but it really isn’t. Especially not today. It used to be obvious and front-and-center in how people lived, learned, and functioned in society. It used to be baked into the cultural cake.

Our forebears had a grid they used when they thought about good and bad behaviors, and good and bad character. It included four types of actions that exist along a spectrum: virtue, continent action, incontinent action, and vice. They work like this:

1. Virtue, a virtuous action: a good thing done, aligned with a disposition that wanted to do it

2. Continent action: a good thing done, despite a disposition not to do it (i.e., overcame a contrary desire, or a temptation)

3. Incontinent action: a bad thing done, with a disposition that knew it was wrong, struggled against it, but did it anyway (i.e., yielded to a contrary desire or temptation)

4. Vice, a vice-filled action: a bad thing, aligned with a disposition that wanted to do it (i.e., without hesitation or scruples)

You see, every action comes with a corresponding desire. To live well, we need to undergo training that first teaches us to consider the link between our desires and our actions. We learn that we want things and do things, and sometimes the wanting and doing match up, and sometimes they don’t. This is part of being human. Once we understand that, we learn that that our actions are moldable regardless of our desires. We can consider and direct our actions – and we can do good things, even when we don’t want to do them. This is the benefit of having reason, a characteristic that only humans have (cats and oak trees don’t). Building character, then, is learning to mold our actions toward what is good, even when we’d rather not. And finally, the training teaches us that when we keep doing good things even when we don’t want to, we begin to want to. The actions we do contribute to our desires and our wiring. Eventually, we come largely to want the good for its own sake. With the scaffolding of habit and oversight, virtue begins to take root.

C. S. Lewis describes this concept well here:

“The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.”2

In saying this, Lewis echoes Aristotle, who says,

“Moral virtue comes about as a result of habit… we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” (Book II, Chapter 1 (Bekker 1103a33–1103b1)

This is how desires and actions work – how humans are and have always been. And it’s the reality of moral development, which is about long-term practice with oversight and correction. We form neural pathways, habituate ourselves to enact right desires, and experience gradual lessening of wrong desires. Self-governance is the result.

The Duggar boys, Holly says, were never taught these realities or given a chance to practice. Their family’s framework avoided practice on purpose, seeing the practice arena as itself negative and vice-filled. Consequently, they got stuck in incontinence – having wrong desires against which they struggled and lost.

Holly uses this key term: moral imagination. Imagination is what allows us to conceptualize: “With this desire or possible intention, I could do x (good) or y (bad).” She writes: “Understand what the theology does to the moral imagination. In a normally functioning moral development, a person learns to navigate a spectrum. A glance is different from a stare. A stare is different from a fantasy. A fantasy is different from a conversation. A conversation is different from a touch. The gradations matter — not because every step on that spectrum is equally acceptable, but because the spaces between them are where conscience gets built.”

Just so. The imagination allows a person to see a situation in his mind’s eye and consider context and possibilities. In this, the gradations between potential behaviors do matter: they’re differing steps on a conceptual ladder. The virtue-vice framework is also one of gradations, and it also functions like a ladder. The steps are between vice and continence, continence and incontinence, continence, and virtue: the ladder of moral formation.

Non-practice in religious settings

In Christian communities today, language about practicing virtue and vice are basically gone from our vocabulary, and so is the topic of moral formation in general. What once was central and commonplace is now virtually unheard of. “Incontinent actions”? Please. That’s just a joke about getting the runs in today’s world.

Why? The Protestant Reformation ushered in a way of thinking that shifted how we conceptualize ourselves as humans and our actions. Protestants emphasize justification by faith alone; they highlight the reality that all humans are flawed and sin, and our behaviors don’t affect our standing before God. Belief is what connects us to God and leads to salvation. As a result, focus on actions and behaviors diminished and were seen as a distraction from the more important conversation about faith. Moral formation was seen as less important than a person’s beliefs, and also potentially suspicious: it might tempt a person to believe that their actions (rather than faith) could garner salvation. Attention to man’s overall sinfulness and the need for believing faith eclipsed the landscape, and transformed the language, of moral formation. The ladder of moral formation fell into the background because it might distract from or derail key concepts of faith.

But virtue and vice exist whether we talk about them or not, and moral formation is required to flourish and grow in the good whether or not we train people in it. We still need to understand how human desire, intention, and actions work together, and we still need to understand the power of practice and scaffolding. It’s true that man is unable to perfect himself through his own efforts; a person cannot become wholly virtuous by effort. We are not God. Our reason and effort can never perfect us; only God can. However, it’s also true that God asks and expects us to behave virtuously. We are responsible to do our part, and we rely on him to do the parts we can’t do on our own.

Holly points out the real and tragic implications of not training in virtue in practical, real-world ways. The Duggars are not alone in this (though their situation was unique and exaggerated.) Lack of scaffolding served the Duggars poorly – and their victims worse.

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Non-practice in secular settings

The practice and language of moral formation, formerly central to how Christians thought and taught about the world, used to trickle down to the rest of society. People unconnected to church and Christian faith still were acquainted with the principles of moral formation because these principles were part of society’s basic architecture. And they are found in natural law, which western cultures embraced and articulated in their operations. (Think “all men are created equal,” “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” “innocent until proven guilty” – all natural law concepts and language.) The concepts of virtue, vice, and moral formation are outgrowths of a life that pursues the basic goods, as natural law reveals.

But today, both Christian principles and natural law tenets are distrusted or rejected outright. The ideas of pre-existing order, limits in which all humans live, objective truth, and the unchangeablity of what’s good are (among other natural law tenets) suspected or rejected. For decades postmodernism, radical individualism, and the cult of materialism have proliferated and brought new core “values” to the fore: pleasure, personal preference, autonomy, relativism, and authenticity. These are seen as the paths to fulfillment, even though they don’t deliver.

When a child goes out the door, a modern mother says, “Have fun!” not, “Be good!” (as former generations of parents used to say). Be good? A modern secular mother can no longer explain to a child what this means. And it doesn’t seem that important… or enjoyable.

The modern secular mother, then, is unlikely to hold the basic goods in esteem, or “get” virtue – or its value. She’s more likely to want her child to experience pleasures, have high self-esteem, be true to himself, and stand on his own two feet without needing anyone else. These concepts are the water the modern secular person and family swim in, the water of modern society.

I’ve written elsewhere about the primary reasons I limit my children’s smart phone use: it prohibits their growth in virtue. This is unlikely to be why a mother of today’s society – one unacquainted with Christian faith or natural law tenets – would limit her child’s phone use (if she did). The categories she thinks in are different, in this arena and others. For her, the ladder of moral formation is unused because she doesn’t know it exists – and if she did, she’d likely wouldn’t be enthusiastic about it.

“We are here”

One way and another, then, we live in a time where ordered moral formation is generally Not A Thing. No conceptualizing the ladder of moral formation in daily life, assessing desires alongside, thinking about practicing virtue and building habits toward the good through slow trial and error… all against our corporate best interest. Our families (all of them, not just the Duggars), societies, schools, even churches would be flourishing more if they were. We would do well, then, to reverse the trend. So:

Here’s to forming morals in ourselves and our young people, proactively and well. Here’s to returning to natural law tenets and a full understanding of how the human person works. Here’s to championing moral imagination and the power it wields. Here’s to a return of the virtue ladder, for all of us. The world will be better, truer, and more beautiful when we again widely do these things.

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Her name was Katie. When I saw the post with her obituary, I caught my breath. My stomach dropped, and I honestly just… couldn’t believe it. She had five young kids, twelve and under, and cherished them; she was a tender and present mom. Her seven-year-old also had cancer, like she did, and she spent most of the last year of her life helping him navigate and fight it. I didn’t even know her that well – we had been part of the same community in the last state we lived in – but she had this way about her that was warm and steady.

She was 43.

Death is such a sucker punch: Katie’s death was. You know this; you have your Katies (and also your closest people, whose deaths are for you a far heavier grief).

It’s so personal and individual, death. And yet, bizarrely, death is also corporate. It will happen to every single one of us, without question and without fail.

Death is a sucker punch because – and this sounds obvious but bear with me – it marks the end of life. Life is a wonderful thing. It’s a basic good and, in fact, the foundation on which every other good thing happens to us – sun on our face, the laughter of a friend, taste of chocolate on our tongue, delight in soccer goal scored or piano sonata played. Without life, there are no goods, no capacity to experience any goods. This is what begs our consideration, in a clear and unclouded and non-political way: the goodness of life. It requires our careful thought.

Let’s start with this: life is its own end, not for anything else. It’s not about productivity or gain or reward. Life itself is its own reward. One of the earliest articulators of this was Aristotle, who wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics: “Life is good in itself, and is to be pursued not merely as a means to some other end.”1 We know deep down that Aristotle’s right – life is inherently good. It’s valuable and worth protecting. And each of us only gets one.

The reality of the goodness of life comes to us every time we recoil from situations where life is treated as not precious and worth protecting. Consider this, from Mencius a Chinese devotee of Confucius, from the fourth century BC:

“Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly feel a sense of alarm and compassion—not because he wanted to get in good with the child’s parents, nor because he wished to win praise from his neighbors and friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child. From this it can be seen that whoever is without the heart of compassion is not human…; and whoever is without the heart of right and wrong is not human.”2

The man would know, as we all know, that a child falling and dying in a well is a terrible loss. He would also innately know that failing to prevent the child’s fall and death, if he could, would be wrong. Why? Because life is a good.

Falling ceilings and administering posions: safety and health

The value of human life is recorded in other ancient texts too. Among the Israelites, the ten commandments (circa 1500 BC) include this one: “You shall not kill.” Again, why? Because human life is precious and to be respected, upheld. Or consider an even older text, a tenet of Hammurabi’s code of Babylon (circa 1750 BC): “If a builder builds a house and it collapses and causes the death of the owner, that builder shall be put to death.” Why should the builder be put to death? Because he’s not been sufficiently careful with human life; he’s treated it carelessly and caused death. The only just punishment for such flagrant disregard of life was, his culture believed, the builder’s death.3

Physical safety falls under the umbrella of life, then, and so does health. Lack of safety can end a life, as the house builder’s ceiling crushing the resident to death, and likewise lack of health can lead to death. Throughout history, doctors and healers have been sought for assistance with health for the prolonging of life. This is why the famous Greek doctor Hippocrates, hailed as the “father of medicine,” spearheaded the Hippocratic oath. It was written around 400 BC and says, in part:

“I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.”

(He will not offer poison, note, because doing so would harm and likely end life – it would do the opposite of treat life as a good.)

The oath has been used by medical practitioners, to varying degrees, for more than 2500 years. We see that has been broad agreement, around the globe and for millennia that a) life is good and it’s logical to preserve and prolong it and b) we have a duty to interact with others, as with ourselves, correctly when it comes to the good of life.

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The unique dignity that comes with being human

Natural law articulates what we humans already know by conscience, and what our lived experience reveals. It’s good. When we pursue life, health, and safety, we flourish; when we turn from life, health, and safety, we flounder. Note that the innate goodness of life relates to human life. Why? Because we are the only kind of creature that possess all three aspects of the self: embodiment, spirit (animal nature), and reason (intellectual nature). No other creature has the last one, reason, so only humans can think, plan, observe, wonder, manage emotions, decide, delay. The presence of reason – and the co-existence of the three elements– are what make us human, and what put us in a different category than trees or dogs. Our forebears called this the “Imago Deii,” the image of God.

There’s a special dignity attached to humans that no other creature carries, and our uniqueness and this dignity are what make human life innately valuable. It’s for this reason that in the U.S. Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote, “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with (the inalienable right to life).” Jefferson said humans – unlike deer or cats – have a right to life because the Creator, who made humans like him as reasoning beings, put it in them; therefore it ought not be taken away.4

The dignity and life value extend to every human. They aren’t altered by their age, location, race, ethnicity, or consciousness level. They have the same amount of humanness and dignity in every case. If a person is asleep, unconscious, too young or too old to know what’s happening, in pain… that human is still human. The person’s life is still innately valuable. Life is still a basic good. We pursue the good of life and uphold, respect, care for the life – no matter what. We advance safety and health in relation to that life.

Not everyone agrees

Throughout history there have been untold times when people have intentionally damaged or ended the lives of other people, when they have not treated life as a good. They have murdered fellow humans and claimed justifications for it. They have set infants out to die on a rock by exposure because they were not wanted by their parents. They have enacted economic plans purposefully that they knew would kill millions of their countrymen. They have committed genocides in efforts to eradicate people groups. And these are only a tiny fraction of the examples. It is safe to say, then, that many, many people don’t treat life as a good. Some publicly state that they don’t believe human life is a good.5

Does the disagreement that life is good negate the reality that life is good? It does not. When people kill other people or commit genocides or set babies out on rocks, they don’t say, “killing others and leaving babies to die and wiping out people groups is good.” They just say, “It had to be done for xx reason.” Or “there was no other option.” Or “the ends justify the means.” They don’t explain the actions as actually being good because they can’t. Along these same lines, consider the thought patterns we all have when we consider those whose lives have been ended in these ways. We feel sorrow or anger for them (unless our consciences have been eroded by intentionally thwarting reason, or by repeated vice). We don’t feel: “I’m glad that happened. It was good.”

“Life is good:” right but kind of wrong

That life is a basic good of course doesn’t mean that life is easy or painless. Because moderns value autonomy above all things, even though autonomy is not a virtue, many now believe that life’s only a good if we see it as a good. Wanted life is good, and unwanted (or compromised) life is perhaps not good. But this is inconsistent with natural law and illogical. If life is only valuable when it’s wanted by a person, then anyone’s wanting or not wanting life could justifiably be the determining factor between life and death. “You shall not kill” becomes, “Kill sometimes, when the conditions are right.”6 If this were true it would mean that, as one scholar has written “any particular human life is more or less valuable… (which) raises the questions of how the value will be measured and whom the state will authorize to make the valuation.” It would make questions of life subjective. And it would mean that some other human would somehow get to make those rules7 - illogical, and not his place.

The “life is good” slogan has it right… and also kind of wrong. Life isn’t good because we’re having fun, experiencing pleasure, things are going our way – which is what’s implied. Our life may or may not feel good or positive. Sometimes it can feel or be downright bad. It can be incredibly unpleasant and terribly painful; there can even be despair. None of this can or ever should be minimized (and much can and should be done to alleviate suffering of every kind). But even when life isn’t good, life is still A good. And it always will be, for all of us. No matter what.

Because of this, when life is pursued and maintained, it leads (on balance) to flourishing. When life is derided, treated lightly, or taken away/ended, it leads away from flourishing. Difficult situations are not improved by turning away from life, for anyone. They are worsened. This is true for individuals, families, communities, and societies.

Katie’s life was a good, and it was also demonstrably good because she was a person of virtue, of faith in God, of fierce love for others. She was a person of true flourishing. Thus the loss of her, and people like her, is in a sense a double whammy. Her life was a good and her life was good.

Also: every person who lives has been given the gift of life and life is a good in itself. Here’s to living that out in our culture.

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