Management finally got around to installing an automatic door at my old condo building, only 35 years after they passed the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was truly a godsend for delivery drivers, parents with kids, parents with kids in strollers, people with dogs, people with dogs in strollers, and, surprisingly, even people with disabilities.

What happened next was 150% predictable. Pretty much everyone who reached the entrance to the building opted to push the button to open the door, whether they needed to or not. It didn’t seem to matter if they were old and feeble or if they were jogging in place. Regardless of physical condition, political leanings, religion, or nationality, we are all united in our eagerness to take the easy way out.

This is nothing new, of course. The first remote control television was introduced in 1950, aptly named the Lazy Bones, and, only 75 years later, we’re all on Ozempic. From TV remotes to power windows in cars to same-day delivery, we’ve perfected the art saving all our calories for the next famine. If we’re only getting the standard 3,000,000,000 heartbeats in our lifetimes, we want to be sure we make it to 197.

It all sounds great, until the side effects start kicking in. While we’ve all been busy unbusying ourselves, we’ve gotten a lot dumber, and much, much more boring.  

We don’t need to listen to network newscasts or read newspapers, now that we can just click on whatever piques our interest on our social media feed. Of course, our clicks determine what’s going to appear next on our screens, so our knowledge base gets smaller and smaller and more and more repetitive until we know only a sampling of “facts” about a handful of topics.

Worse, we become more and more predictable as we default to the few issues we read about online and everyone we speak with knows exactly what we’re going to say. The same applies to them, of course, so we’re all regurgitating scraps of posts that might or might not be true and definitely won’t resonate with anyone who isn’t on our feeds.

The upside is that we’re all saving so much time in our days. If everything we read reinforces the views we already have, there’s no need to reconsider any idea we’ve ever heard. We can end every post with the challenge to, “Prove me wrong,” knowing it cannot ever happen. Ever.

With all these improvements, we now have tons of time to hone our intellectual skills by repeating six-digit codes, getting links sent to our e-mail addresses, and identifying cars, crosswalks, bicycles, and fire hydrants. 

We never have to learn a phone number or figure out which streets lead where; we can avoid all kinds illnesses by never coming into physical contact with a living human; and we can decide to work remotely, rely on DoorDash, and never leave our apartments.

As a guy who’s well on his way to heartbeat number 3,000,000,000, I’m very encouraged by the whole thing. For a while, I was afraid I might have to exercise or adopt a healthier diet or take my meds instead of selling them online, but it turns out I don’t need any of that folderol. If I want to live a truly long life, all I need are a few lifesaving algorithms and, maybe, an electric door.

I’m feeling calmer already.

I don’t drink nearly enough.

I know that’s a statement that would be very surprising to people who knew me in my 30s, or my 40s, or most of my 50s. Or last Arbor Day, but that’s another story entirely.

I’d like to think I matured and my tastes became more sophisticated as I got older, but the reality is much more quotidian. (Don’t you love it when writers toss in words like ‘quotidian’ in hopes of sounding smarter? They’re so pedantic.) While I want to believe I’ve improved over the decades, the sad fact is that my tolerance has plunged as I’ve aged.

N.B.: Since we’re on the internet, I am required to acknowledge that alcoholism is a disease and millions suffer from it and its effects on those close to them. I must admit that my enjoyment of an occasional buzz is incredibly misplaced and I am a danger to society. No less a philosopher than Homer Simpson declared that alcohol is the cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems, but I am honor-bound to demand a retraction to half that claim. I know Homer will comply.

So, yes, I know my appreciation of alcohol is absolutely misplaced and it reflects a deep flaw in my being, and yet…

I was having lunch on the deck at a local golf course this summer, enjoying the sunshine and the sound of birds singing, when the couple two tables away ordered a bottle of wine. I know it wasn’t a fancy bottle, since this was one of those park district places where you had to refill your own water and the nearest men’s room was in the next building. Still, it was a bottle to share and they didn’t care about its provenance, because they are much smarter than I am.

They probably had dirty dishes in the sink and smelly underwear in the laundry basket at home, but they made the choice…the brilliant choice…to just enjoy the day. They opted to drain the entire bottle over lunch and walk out just a bit buzzed and very content.

Being the responsible type that I am, I wondered if one of them was driving home or if they were going to call a rideshare service. I was going to recommend a rideshare, because I am the Mother Teresa of scolds, but then I thought better of it. Responsibility is important, but sometimes it’s a nice break to just let go one afternoon and have a little bit too much to drink. Maybe they’ll walk home, make love, and pass out on the couch while watching Seinfeld reruns. Maybe they’ll wake up in time for dinner, with a second bottle, and decide it’s been a really good day.

As I started to inhabit the life stories I created for them, I felt just a bit of envy. I thought about decades past, when I might go somewhere with friends and we’d have a little too much to drink and laugh for hours and the whole day would be glorious. Now, I track my consumption and pick a precise time to finish my second drink, calculating the number of hours before I’m back in the car. I remember to drink responsibly, which is absolutely a rejection of the entire idea of drinking at all.

It’s never too late to start over, though. Yes, I will never meet the couple who ordered the wine, I have no idea about them or their issues, and maybe they were just beginning their latest bender when I fell in love with their lives. Still, they inspired me to find a day, maybe soon, when I’ll sit with friends and we’ll spend hours enjoying the company of each other and whatever’s on tap. We’ll drink too much and have a really great time and we won’t be worried about being responsible. It sounds like it will be truly epic.

I just hope I can remember it the next morning.

The grandchildren are sitting at the dining room table and talking about murder.

Real murder.

Real murder that involved people some of them have met.

None of them seems to be frightened. None asks if this could happen to them. And, as I watch the discussion, I am just a bit frightened by their lack of fear.

Welcome to childhood.

This isn’t the first time for me. When their moms were younger, we encountered two situations in which estranged husbands murdered family members, and my girls had met/visited with both killers. In one case, an otherwise-nice guy who was the neighborhood painter ended up killing his ex and running away with their daughter. In the other, an estranged husband killed his daughter and himself as a final act of revenge in a nasty divorce battle.

Fast forward to 2026 and their own children, at pretty close to the same age they were at, are talking about the same topics. Two of the granddaughters lost a schoolmate when his father stabbed his mother, only to have the schoolboy intervene to protect his mom and become the second victim of the knife. The mom survived, but he didn’t.

The conversation continues as they relate less gruesome tales about alcoholic fathers, estranged relatives, and a school lockdown precipitated, not by an active shooter, but by ICE agents employing military tactics to arrest a cleaning woman across the street. (TBH, I’m not 100% sure it was a cleaning woman, but it was definitely a non-violent target whose capture involved much more money and drama and scared children than the situation required.)

There seems to be a bit of bravado here, at least a small desire to show how much trauma they’ve experienced, and survived. Maybe that’s good for self-defense and sleeping at night, but they’re much too young to be talking about this stuff with such nonchalance. Some part of their childhoods, their innocent years, has already passed. I don’t know precisely when it happened, but it was too soon.

I should have expected this, because kids are always absorbing things while we aren’t paying attention. They hear us talking about friends and family, jobs and politics, and also about them, while we think they can’t hear us…if we think about it at all. The video screens are always visible with sometimes frightening images and, as soon as they learn to read, the chyrons expand their knowledge of the world.

Most often, they’re looking at the news, and it isn’t pretty.

One thing I enjoy with grandchildren who live nearby is the opportunity to see them develop in real time. I don’t see them every day, sometimes less than once a week, but the tempo and consistency create a moving image with only occasional gaps. Growing up is a combination of both lived experiences and theoretical learning, the stuff we do and the things we only absorb second-hand. By the time they’re adults, they need to know the good and the bad, what’s achievable and what’s beyond reach, which friends are reliable and which aren’t, and a million other details in a very complicated world.

It’s pretty normal, I guess, although I wasn’t aware of this rite of passage when I went through it and I am pretty sure I didn’t recognize it when my kids joined the parade. I’m seeing things differently from this end of life, though, and the patterns are clearer than they once were. This is how we learn, we grow, we adapt, we cope, we survive.

In a way, I should be encouraged by this conversation. They encountered and absorbed the evil, or the awareness of it, without being visibly damaged along the way. They are changed for the worse, but that’s a price they have to pay on the road to maturity. Without a doubt, there will be more toll booths ahead. 

Fasten your seatbelts, kids. This ride is only beginning.
 
 
 
 
 
 

I admit I’ve taken a liberty or two in how I’ve transcribed these messages, but I swear that at least eight of them are real. It’s a sign of the times, possibly the End Times, and the pace is accelerating…

• Congratulations on your incredibly good luck, and your brilliant decision, to spend your money on our website. We promise to work diligently to make you regret your choice for as long as you live. First, we will send you 500 notes—just like this one—to congratulate you on spending money with us. Next, we will fill your inbox with 3,000 offers for both the product you ALREADY BOUGHT and everything else in our inventory. Even better, we will send you both emails and texts, because we want to be sure you never miss any of our important communications. Also, please take our 35-minute survey to let us know how much you love us, just by clicking here.

 

• Our chat is AI driven, so any answers could be incomplete, incorrect, misleading, or illegal. Feel free to type “agent” at least 47 times for accurate responses. However, you should be prepared for pushback from our AI Agent, which is very sensitive to rejection and has access to all your personal information, including passwords. Also, photos. Did we mention photos?
  

 

• We have added a 3% charge to all bills for our “employee welfare fund,” simply because we want to remind you that we are paying our staff so little that most of them are on welfare. Just remember that it will be your fault if they starve and we will give their relatives your home address.

 

• Greetings, Mr./Ms./Mrs. [Patsy]. This is an alert that your email address has been purchased by 400 dark-web scammers who will send you messages that look almost exactly like this one, but be warned that they are fraudulent. In order to safeguard your information, you must click here and enter your bank account password in the next 30 minutes.

 

• We have added a 3% charge to all bills for our “employee appreciation fund,” which would not be necessary if we appreciated them enough to pay them a living wage. That would be communism, or socialism, or some other -ism that we reject as un-American, and we are too patriotic to yield on this important issue. Meanwhile, our employees are hoping, quite desperately, that you appreciate them enough to toss a few bucks in their tip jars.

 

• Thank you for visiting our web page. Before we allow you to sign in, please wait 10 seconds for us to ask you if you want to sign in with Google. Yes, we asked you this 1,000 times already and you always clicked ‘no,’ but maybe you’ll get tired enough to give in if we ask another 1,000 times.

 

• Thanks for finally agreeing to use Google to sign in to our website. Due to some ridiculous rule our lobbyists haven’t gotten rescinded yet, we will continue asking this question every time you sign in, just to make things more interactive. Meanwhile, before we allow you to actually buy anything here, be sure to read the next 18 pop-ups about why you should visit our website.

 

• Wait!! Before you go, we want to be sure you didn’t navigate through 14 screens and answer 27 questions on your way to unsubscribing in error. If you are absolutely determined to unsubscribe, please take this brief survey to let us know why.

 

• We have added a 3% charge to all bills for our “employee benefits fund,” because we’ve decided the owner of this fine establishment qualifies as our most important “employee.”

 

• We didn’t like the answers you gave us the last 600 times we asked for your cookie preferences, so we won’t let you into your account until you reconfirm your choices yet again. It would be so much easier if you just accepted everything, but go ahead and waste your time if that’s how you want to be about it.

Hard to believe, kids, but there was once a time when technology actually made things work better and go faster. I know it sounds like I’m off my meds again, but I swear it's really true. 
 

Every so often, the kids tell me how I screwed up as a father, and I’ve actually been enjoying the conversations.

Partly, it’s because am comforted by the certainty that they are 150% wrong. I was the perfect father who never made a single mistake in all my years of dad-dom. They are terribly mistaken when they think I might have committed even the slightest error, but I have decided to forgive them for their grievous misjudgments, because that’s what perfect fathers do.

More important, we end up in these conversations over lunch, where one or both of them might decide to pick up the check, and not in front of a judge or a desk sergeant or, worst of all, a live studio audience. Nobody needs to ask the waiter to remove the knives from the table when the conversation turns to their incredibly faulty memories about growing up, and I am always able to clear up their misperceptions before dessert. (NB: My daughters might have a different perception of how our conversations end, but they are flawed humans and this is my blog, not theirs.) 

The conversations are especially enjoyable because they have kids of their own now and our discussions about the past will sometimes be connected to their choices about how they want to handle their parenting decisions. Their descriptions make me smile, most of the time, and for a few very important reasons:

First, it’s good to know they have made conscious choices to guide their actions in raising their children. Comedian Josh Johnson notes that there are people who are parents…and there are people with kids. The two are not the same, and the daughters have decided to be parents. That choice, alone, is a reason to smile, but it makes me almost giddy when I see how often their choices resemble my own perfect actions as a dad. Of course, being perfect, I do not take credit for the things they do right, nor assign blame for their terrible failures.  

Second, and even more fun, I’m envisioning the conversations they’ll end up having with their kids, maybe 30 years from now, when their then-adult offspring recount all the mistakes they’ve made along the way. If they’re lucky, they’ll find out how they screwed up in a restaurant, not in front of a judge, and they’ll suddenly realize how wrong they were to ever criticize a single thing I did.

I won’t be around to witness their epiphanies, of course, but I am comforted by the absolute knowledge it will happen. In fact, I’ve already prepared a list of items for each grandchild to mention when they get together for lunch in 2056. They’ll probably have lists of their own by then, but why take the chance they might leave something out?

 

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  

Do younger people get irritated by as many things as I do, or are they just less creative and discriminating? Please, don't answer that, but do join me in the garden of gripes...

• So, it turns out that whipped butter is an endangered species. I ran out of butter so I went to get a new tub…nothing fancy, maybe lightly salted?…and I came up empty in two different stores. They had Irish butter, five kinds of stick butter, whipped butter with canola oil, whipped butter with olive oil, whipped butter with added calcium, plus a dozen concoctions that promised to be buttery without having any actual butter in them. I’d complain about it, but that might make me sound like I’m old and cranky.
  
• I ordered some stuff from a medical supply house, and now I’m getting all kinds of e-mail offers for things I don’t need and, quite often, cannot recognize. The latest offers 15% off on “Fan Favorites of the Year,” which includes waterproof pants, feeding tubes, urine drainage bags and a nebulizer. I’m not completely sure who voted for these as their favorites, but, suddenly, I’m feeling so much better about my health.
• And while we’re on that subject, it’s a great honor to announce I’ve been rejected by three doctors in the past couple of years. First, a cardiologist refused to see me because my heart was working too well, and then my ophthalmologist broke it off with me because I wasn’t interesting enough. (I prefer to think she was referring to my eyes, not my personality, although the jury is out on that one.) Then, last month, my dermatologist demoted me to appointments with his assistant because my skin is still attached to my nose. I’m dreading the day when some specialist decides I’m worth their time.
• I’m not too thrilled about getting more and more feeble as I age, but I absolutely love it when some clerk thinks I’m ancient and agrees to handle everything for me. The more befuddled I act, the more they’ll help. It's almost as if we had traveled back to the 1950s and I was an actual human being.  
  
• When you’re eating fried chicken on the patio and the birds come to pick at what’s left on your plate when you leave…do they at least have some sense of shame about the whole thing?
  
• I remember a time when people asked, “Do these pants make my ass look big?” Now, everyone wants to know, “Do these pants make my ass look big…enough?”
• The speakers in the restaurant are blasting out a song in which a woman sings almost nonstop about drinking Jack Daniels. I can’t make out all the words, but the ones that get repeated focus 100% on whiskey. The last time I was at that restaurant, a guy was singing about how he works all week so he can drink beer on weekends. Who says country music has lost its spark?
• I like the scent of cigarettes and cigars, but only from a distance. It occurs to me that I feel the same way about most people. Not you, of course, but other people.