The woman at the next table is gushing loudly and continuously to her friend about how brilliant her new niece is.

It turns out—and this is a big shock—babies are smart and they seem to be learning new things all the time. And, who would’ve guessed, her niece turns out to be really curious about the world around her. Who could have predicted that? Well, everyone.

You see it all the time, that sudden sense of discovery, when some random person enters a phase of life that has only been experienced by 7 billion people before. Whether it’s sex for teenagers or taxes for new jobholders, all of us are big-time explorers throughout our lives.

Perversely, even the greatest adventurers among us never actually discover anything. We just find something WE haven’t encountered before and, when we tell someone older about it, they work hard to stifle a yawn.

Been there. Done that. Welcome to the party.

Maybe it would spoil the fun, but part of me thinks we should have a giant set of spoiler alerts for people who need to know what’s around the next corner. They’d be flags more than spoilers, offering an early indicator of changes ahead. 

I think about this a lot as my grandkids get ready to experience new flume rides on their journeys from babyhood to child to teen and, if I live that long, adulthood. Should I tell them about the irritating kids they’ll meet as their social circles grow? Should I tell them about the increasingly powerful level of competition they’ll face as they get older and get thrown into bigger pools of talent? Should I try to explain puberty and hormones and their upcoming rebellion against their parents? Or, is it best to just leave it alone and let them know that it’s normal…after it happens?

Life is full of surprises, although I’m not sure we can call them surprises when most are 100% predictable. How much better might it be if we had a guidebook to let us know what’s coming up? Would it make life more manageable, make it easier to adapt, or would it take the joy out of discovery?

Without a doubt, we’d flag the negative things: the cliques they’ll encounter in high school, the friends who will walk away, the people who will be picked ahead of them. Mostly, we’d be alerting them to a million disappointments that will make them more capable as adults, but only after they’ve paid a very high price. Would they become more confident, or more fearful, as they learn which shoe will drop next?

Looking back, I wonder if I would have been able to handle some disappointments more productively if I had had some idea they were coming. Perhaps I would have thought of better responses and dealt more effectively with them, or maybe I would’ve been so overwhelmed by a looming disappointment that I would have overreacted before anything happened.

So, which is it? Do we tell our younger family members what to expect and how to deal with it or do we let them discover it on their own and, while dabbing their tears, say it was to be expected?

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Our waiter retired three years ago when he couldn’t work due to Covid, but he’s back in the workforce now because inflation has been so high and the government safety net he was promised isn’t covering his lavish lifestyle.

He’d probably be blaming Joe Biden, but he lives in Istanbul and his challenge is the declining value of the Lira. The latest inflation rate in Turkey has improved to just under 50%...yes, 50%...and the Lira has declined 79%...yes, 79%...against the dollar since Joe Biden took office. It turns out that inflation isn’t just an American thing, even though we sometimes act as if we’re all alone in our suffering.

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to many parts of the world and to meet a large number of people along the way. Whenever I get the chance, I chat one up and find out that yes, we’re all the same on many levels. Geography and culture add to the complexity of our experiences, so it’s not surprising that the Ukraine war looks much different in Poland than it does in Pennsylvania and inflation is different in Istanbul than in Iowa. Where we stand on issues depends on where we sit, sometimes literally, and we sit on a catbird seat pretty much everywhere in America.

That’s why we’re at a huge disadvantage when it comes to understanding the rest of the world. We are the 500-pound gorilla, which is a slight improvement from 800 pounds before Ozempic, but we are the one beast that cannot be ignored. Specific nations need to pay special attention to China or Russia or India or Brazil, but pretty much everyone needs to consider what the United States is doing to affect their economy and trade and military security.

We, on the other hand, don’t really need to think that much about anyone. We should, of course, because we have many serious adversaries and competitors and risks. Having a sense of what’s happening around the world would give us much-needed perspective about our local issues. But who has time to even think about any other countries when we hardly have a spare moment for our daily cat videos? And Wordle?

I'd say we're Number One and every other country is Number Two, but that would require recognizing that other countries exist. And maybe they do, at least in theory, but not in the world we Americans inhabit.

So, when the inflation goes up in the United States or products are in short supply, we tend to think it’s all about us, it is only happening here, and only our local politicians are to blame. And it’s not just inflation. Remember that Covid thing? Hundreds of countries trying to figure out how to contain it, how to protect people, how to maintain an economy in the midst of a pandemic, but we broke it down into just two perspectives: blue states versus red. It was the same thing with avian flu, just as it was with AIDS and just as it will be with whatever comes next.

Seriously, folks, we need to get out more.

We also need to get more subscribers to this incredible blog. You cannot change the world all by yourself, but you can solve at least one problem by clicking here to join our subscriber list.
 

 

I need to get more excited about life, but definitely lose my enthusiasm for almonds and eyewear, because life offers up more curves than a calligrapher…
 

• Man, overbored. Sometimes I think people are really too emotional and too excited about minor things, but it’s always possible that I’m way wrong about that one. I was watching a cooking demonstration recently, and the woman next to me was gasping as the chef put salt on the food and taking notes when he said she should “season to taste.” When I thought something was particularly boring, she was sitting there with a smile on her face and saying, “WOW.” Clearly, she’s getting a lot more joy out of life than I am.
• Fakir fakers. So, when exactly do you give up on the con? I forget which museum it was, but there’s one in Istanbul that displays a large number of seriously questionable relics, including the staff Moses held up to part the Red Sea. I couldn’t help but wonder if the sultan who accepted these gifts Sultan who accepted these gifts knew they were fake, but given in good intentions, or if he believed the certificate of authenticity, but the fact they are still on display is concerning. At this point, when it’s clear to everyone in the world that this thing we believed 500 years ago cannot be true, shouldn’t we fess up and move on?
• Water we doing? Seriously, I should never buy almonds. It takes at least a gallon of water to make one almond and, if I have an almond croissant, more fresh water than an average person drinks in a day. The same thing with walnuts and pistachios, and don’t get me started on lettuce. There’s no way to justify using all that water, plus the cost of processing, shipping, and handling at my local store. And yet, I know people who will eat this stuff and not think twice about it, even if they also think of themselves environmentally responsible.
• Megiddo moves downtown. Millions of people think Armageddon will be the final battle of good versus evil, but it turns out they’re wrong. The ultimate battle will be pigeons versus cockroaches, pitting the world’s true survivors in mortal combat. Whoever wins, it won’t be pretty for those of us who think we’re at the top of the food chain today.
• Distaff rules. There’s a museum in Athens with an exhibition that asks, “What if women ruled the world” and the program description suggest lots of rainbows and unicorns. That cannot be correct, though, since it turns out that, gasp, women are people and people are fallible. Power corrupts, and anyone who thinks that rule exempts women is denying their humanity and is a terrible sexist.
• Delayed reparations. I spent some time in Poland recently, walking past buildings still pockmarked with bullet holes 85 years after World War II. Somehow, they’ve never gotten around to repairing the concrete, which made me feel much better about my to-do list.
• Problem solved! Throughout history, the problem with the Greater Fool Theory was that, eventually, we ran out of fools. Today, though, we seem to have solved that issue.
• Not up to specs. I finally gave in and bought prescription glasses to help me read, but it’s very disappointing. I used to think I looked okay for my age, but suddenly I look so much older and have really bad skin. There should be a law against selling such defective lenses.

If I ever come to terms with my new looks, subscribers will be the first to know. Click here to join the team.

Finally, a batch of 100% true and absolutely guaranteed insights into Tuesday’s election, brought to you by the impeccable and flawless researchers who make Dad Writes the world’s even finer finest news source. Ignore everyone and everything you hear about the campaigns and the voters. Here are the true facts:

• At least a dozen self-appointed heroes in full body armor will show up at the polls to protect the integrity of the election where it’s most in danger: in blue cities in swing states and, most likely, in a black precinct. (Fits the description, ya know.)
  
• Exit polls will be cited all day as flawless indicators, but most of them will turn out to be wrong because voters have learned to lie to reporters. Surprisingly, Donald Duck will have a much lower vote tally than the exit polls will suggest.
  
• Nobody will care about the vote in Idaho or Illinois or Alabama or any other state that’s essentially guaranteed to be Red or Blue, but all 12,962,000 residents of Pennsylvania will be interviewed at least once by at least three networks.
  
• Voter turnout will be embarrassingly low. Yeah, it’s the most important election ever, but I’ve got an Amazon delivery I’m waiting for and the polling place is a whole mile away.
  
• Turnout among younger people will more than double, soaring to 3% of registered voters and influencing zero races. Gen Z representatives will express surprise that their votes on TikTok were not included in the tallies.
  
• At least one cable network will announce the winner before half the polls are closed. They will be wrong.
  
• Early tallies will favor Republicans more than the final counts, because more Democrats tend to vote absentee or by mail than Republicans and those votes usually get counted last.
  
• We won’t know the winner on November 5. It takes a few days to count all the votes, including the ballots mailed in from our troops overseas and the folks in the nursing homes. Propagandists will claim these “delays” prove that massive fraud is afoot, leading at least a dozen self-appointed heroes in full body armor to show up at the counting centers to protect the integrity of the election in black precincts in blue cities in swing states.
  
• Donald Trump will declare himself the winner before the votes are counted.
• Social media will include 4 billion videos of polling places from 2020, or 2016, or from Azerbaijan, proving that fraud is massive and rampant and that hundreds of millions of votes have been switched. Zero will have basis in fact, but violence will ensue.
• Republicans will declare the vote rigged in any swing state where they lose.
  
• Throughout the night, news anchors will talk about the results as if something is going to happen, even though the election is already over and we simply haven’t finished counting the votes.
  
• CNN will offer up new maps and new granularity about individual precincts, because they have to kill a helluva lot of time while waiting for the votes to actually be counted.
  
• By 11 p.m., news networks will be marveling at how much the pollsters missed and how different some of the results are from the latest surveys.
• By 11:30 p.m., pundits who made the wrong prediction will explain all the mistakes the candidates made in screwing up their perfectly assembled models for victory.
  
• By 11:31 p.m., all of us will get emails asking for money to fund the recounts and lawsuits that are about to be filed.
  
• By 11:32 p.m., half the nation will believe they don’t have a country anymore.
  
• On November 6, the sun will rise in Chicago at precisely 6:30 a.m.
  
• At 8:30 a.m. Chicago time, the stock market will open higher, unless it goes down.
  
• By 9:00 a.m., the 2028 election campaigns will begin…but only if you send them $3.00.
  

 

Politics is just like a basketball game and crime is an epicurean passion of mine, or so it seems this week…

• Not an average Joe. I met a guy who cried when Stalin died. He was in a Soviet grade school and his first years were filled with adoration for the man who created all that was good in his life. He knows better now, but his tale is a reminder that you’re not really an adult until you’ve unlearned a whole buncha stuff that you soaked up as a child.
  
• Truly Speck-tacular. I know cities appear as dots on a map, but I’m still surprised at how many people think Chicago actually is the size of a dot. I keep getting questions about pretty much every news item out of this town, with people wondering if it happened in my apartment.
  
• Death takes a holiday.  One of the sad facts of life in Chicago is that we have shootings every day, but wouldn’t that mean that shootings aren’t news? Maybe we should only report on crime when nobody gets shot or killed, which would have the added benefit of making us less nervous about our daily existence.
  
• Connoisseurs of Crime. Speaking of which, all the news coverage has made me a bit of an expert on the different types of crime in our town, and around the country. Just as the Inuit are supposed to have 4,000 words for snow and British comedians have 5,000 words for butts, local experts here have different classifications for crimes, and they do make a difference. There is often some overlap, but gang crimes are different from domestic disturbances, which are not the same as bar fights, hate crimes, drug crimes, generic street crime or one-offs. Some crime here is more common than in the rest of the country and some is very rare in comparison with other cities and states. Cable news treats it all the same, but that’s just laziness at work. 
  
• Double dribblers. Now that basketball season is starting again, I’m reminded how much an election race is like a basketball game. There’s all kinds of ups and downs and back and forth—and fouls—and the lead changes every two minutes. Nothing really matters until the final seconds, after all the fouls.
  
• Yes, we can. Every so often, a friend will point out something really crazy and claim, “You can’t make this stuff up.” I always wonder if they’ve ever logged onto Twitter.
  
• Decision time. A friend of mine said he cannot understand how anyone is still undecided about their vote at this point, but I run into those folks all the time. Mostly, they’re in front of me at McDonald’s, agonizing over whether to supersize their meal.
  
• Not yet. One of the most important and underused words in the English language is ‘yet.’ There’s a first time for everything and we seem to have an accelerating pattern of firsts in our unstable world. So, when people tell me social media hasn’t caused the collapse of civilization or that AI hasn’t caused nuclear power plants to explode or poor people haven’t rebelled and killed all the elites hobnobbing in in Davos, I feel compelled to remind them. Yet.
  

Maybe we all benefited from having no televisions in our rooms, and very few in the hotels, but I spent a week in Yellowstone National Park this fall without hearing a single word about the election. On the tour bus, at the restaurant counter, waiting for Old Faithful to erupt, the conversations were as notable for what they didn’t cover as the topics du jour.

Somewhere around day four, I realized I had not heard anyone say Trump or Harris or Vance or Walz or rigged or debate or vote or polls. There was a guy with a Team Trump bumper sticker on his truck, but I think that was from 2020 or 2016 and he didn’t read the phrase out loud for us, so it doesn’t count.

Instead, all the people I met were talking about wildlife and geysers, weather and climate, terrain and flora. None seemed interested in bringing politics into their journey. Maybe they don’t care as much as I’d think EVERYBODY CARES when I drop into the Twitter-verse or open the emails asking me for $3 to save the nation. Maybe they care deeply, but needed a bit of detox as they escaped the hellish battles of partisans for the gift of God’s creation. Maybe they just have better things to think about.

Dunno and don’t care. It was exquisite. Even better, it was a slap in the face, a reminder that I don’t have to travel 1,500 miles to enter a different world. All I need to do is move from one room to another, either figuratively or literally or both.

We all make the choice, every day of our lives, and some choices are more damaging than others. On Twitter, it’s all politics all the time and I can read 100 different explanations about why the same slice of video is the end of Trump or the proof of his apotheosis. Some of the politics has infected LinkedIn, but mostly it’s a million notes about trying harder, working harder, never giving up, and not being a worthless failure. During the Jewish High Holidays, I spent days in a room where all I focused on was my spiritual and moral worthiness.

The thing we forget, or that I certainly ignore, is that we have a million rooms and a million choices. Nobody forces us to focus on just one thing in just one space. Nothing requires that we answer every question with a reference to politicians or a whatabout. None of us is trapped in the misery zone, although we stay much too long by choice.  

What room should I enter today? Which room will any of us choose to inhabit over the next 24 hours…of 24 years? I can choose the room that offers comfort and solace, or fear and pain. Stupidly, I choose the latter much too frequently, forgetting I have the power to move physically or spiritually to more pleasant surroundings.

I hope everyone else is much smarter than I am about the whole thing.