Things are getting so bad that every time I come back to this site to post, it’s down for one reason or another. And I wonder how long it’s been down, because I don’t actually sit around and read my website day after day.

There’s no one particular reason that it goes down, but rather a bunch of reasons that can all be filed under bad actors have made things dumb and businesses don’t care about you.

In this case, SSL went offline because my host decommissioned some nameservers that they inherited when they acquired my former host. But it’s dumber thank you think because I’d already updated to the new, post-acquisition nameservers. But in their scripting for the change, everyone who came in under the acquisition apparently got their nameservers switched back to the decmomissioned servers, rather than changed to the new servers, because the world doesn’t make any sense. And of course all this SSL stuff is only needed because people suck and that’s human nature.

Yes, it was all solved with 10 minutes on live chat and then a few hours waiting for record changes to propagate, but the thing is, this is basically an “every time I touch my site” occurance. Hosts changing configurations, getting acquired, policies changing, plugins that self-updated but have breaking changes that impose new restrictions due to security best practices that effectively take the site offline… It’s starting to feel as though it’s implausible even to run a fully hosted site these days without a full-time IT staff.

— § —

I don’t like what’s going on in the country at all right now, and I’m frankly alarmed. Everyone thought “I will be your retribution” was basically rhetoric and they also thought “we’ve already done this once before and we survived it” so it’s been more than a bit of a surprise to learn that “oh, he actually meant, like, retribution in the sense of making people suffer” and also to learn that “oh, this is going to be absolutely nothing like the first time and many may not survive it.”

There are a lot of people that are even more in the cross-hairs than I and my ex-wife, but as targeting goes, we’re both far closer to targets than not-targets, each in our own way and in each case for a decent number of reasons.

This American Cultural Revolution is just getting off the ground. It gives me no pleasure and a good amount of fear to wonder what it will bring. I know I’ll suffer, as will many others. But I don’t know how much, or in just what way. That not-knowing is fairly intolerable.

— § —

I’m also lonely. Like, increasingly lonely.

Thing is, I don’t know exactly what the remedy is, since spending time with people, which I actually do an awful lot of, doesn’t fix it.

I am missing that person-that-has-been-my-significant-other-for-decades-now, but I’ve never have that person and will never had or known that person, and it sucks. Someone that I share inside jokes with. Someone that I trust implicitly and can talk to about anything, and more to the point, that already knows all the things I say in preface and can say “I already know everything that you’re about to say for the next hour because you’ve said it before, so let’s cut to the chase—what’s really on your mind?”

I actually don’t know whether to feel lucky that I’ve had many multi-year relationships, or to feel unlucky because I’ve never had a happy relationship that I wanted to stay in rather than harsh relationships full, in the end, of mutual contempt.

It’s sort of like I don’t know whether to feel lucky for being allowed to live the kind of life that the retribution class currently wants to get retribution for having missed out on, or to feel unlucky because I’m about to get retributed.

— § —

In a week, I’ll be in the ring fighting in a tournament. Part of me thinks I’ll get killed. Part of me thinks I’ll just get knocked out. Part of me thinks it’ll just be tiring. Part of me wants to kill. (This part won’t matter, as I’m not actually all that capable of killing, even as someone who’s been practicing martial arts for years now.)

— § —

Like I said, humans suck.

And—2025 already sucks and is going to start to really, really suck before all is said and done. Maybe to a very, very uncomfortable degree.

It was around the time of my post about ghosts, below, that I took the time—entirely on a whim—to play a game that had been hanging around in my gaming systems for a long time: What Remains of Edith Finch.

I had downloaded it, on sale at one time or another, on PS5, and then on Switch, and then on Steam, as though the game was chasing me—but it took me years to finally get to it.

— § —

It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t seen it, or who doesn’t have a rich emotional life, how a video game can move you deeply, in the same way that only the rarest works of literature, or poetry, or art can.

But I played Edith Finch and was transfixed by Milton’s story. And then I learned about The Unfinished Swan. And together, the two of them have gone to that place in me where only the most important things go, with the experiences and moments that you can’t bear to remember and that you also can’t bear to forget. Things that changed you.

— § —

I don’t know how many people there are in the world like this, but for a certain kind of kid, Milton’s story resonates so deeply that you’re moved beyond tears, to that place where time stops and it’s just you, the core of you, and the past that you bring with you—all of the people and the places and the triumphs and the sadnesses that you have lost, that are no longer with you, but that will nonetheless always be yours.

A certain kind of person, who was a certain kind of child, knows exactly why Milton decided to paint himself a door and then walk through it, never to be seen again. It was the dream we had without realizing we were having it.

I was that kid. There are others, I’m sure.

— § —

I don’t know what to say other than that sometimes there is order in the universe—you have a thought, you begin a post, and the universe answers with a work of art that feeds you, takes you back out of the daily grind and back to the world of magic and melody and longing that you left behind—or thought you left behind—with your childhood.

We were down again. Thanks to A— for pointing this out. No thanks to 20i for failing to maintain the registrations of the domains of its acquired hosts. Why should this be my problem?

But I guess it is.

Maybe it’s time to finally move to Lightsail? Thing is, I’m not sure I’m ready for the PITA level involved there.

Whatever, we’ll status quo a little longer.

In our back yard hangs rope swing that my children used to love when they were very small. It’s hung on what used to be a mature cherry tree—that’s now long dead. It’s been—what—maybe five or more years since it died? Actually, it might even be longer than that. It died some time after the divorce, but a long time ago now.

The leafless old tree is still standing there, with the rope swing on it, dangling over the lawn.

In the summer, every time I mow the lawn under the swing, I tell myself that the tree—and the swing—have to come down. With every passing year, the old tree has less structural integrity and is less safe. And even if the tree was still alive, the swing and the branch that holds it are both far too small now for my children anyway—not to mention that teenagers don’t have much use for a rope swing hanging from a tree.

— § —

Over and over again, and often multiple times on weekends, I survey the Steam store and the PlayStation store looking for a “new game to play.”

I comb through page after page of game thumbnails and descriptions. I pass over endless four- and five-star rated titles, titles on sale, games that have reviewed well, games that have been recommended to me. It’s tough to find things that I care enough to play these days.

Sometimes I buy something purely because it’s on sale. I download it, maybe even start it up, and then abandon it after just a few minutes.

I’ve often wondered what it is I’m looking for, but today I’ve just started What Remains of Edith Finch and it makes me realize what’s been common to a lot of the off-the-beaten path games I’ve had enough interest to actually continue to play over the last decade or two.

Like many of the others, it’s a game about remembering, and about the past. Not just any old objective past, not history, but a past. Someone’s past. And the feeling of having had a past and trying to come to terms with it, or even just remember it.

— § —

My main Lightroom catalog has over 300,000 photos in it dating back to 1999, which would seem to indicate that I love photos, and in some sense I do; I love to take them, at least.

I rarely, if ever, look at them though. A strange, unsettled feeling, like a mix of sadness and dread and love all at once, comes over me whenever I try to look at photos from the past, unless it’s the very recent past. I think, at the end of the day, that I struggle to bear it. To look at the past. To confront the fact that it was once the present—a present that is no longer.

I only look when my kids take an interest and want to creep back through images that they’ve never really seen or don’t remember, of what once was—places they once were, parents they once had, clothes they once owned, activities they once engaged in, friends they once played with, and so on.

While they wander through different flavors of fascination as we page through old photos, I repeatedly have the uncanny experience of finding pasts that are still as vivid to me, as I look at the photos, as if they were yesterday—yet that I had completely forgotten had ever been.

That adds a bewildering sense of something like guilt to the sadness and dread and love. Guilt that I’ve completely forgotten about a wonderful moment, or that place, or that person, or that difficult day, until seeing the photo. Guilt that if not for the photo, that important memory would have been lost, and a kind of desperation at the realization that someday, I will no longer be here to look at the photo and have the vivid memory of it once again in response.

Maybe my children were too young when it was taken to have any real memory of it. Maybe there are a thousand other photos, spread out through my hundreds of thousands, that are equally as important as this one—that I will never look at again.

Those pasts, those once-presents, have already been lost. That sense of loss is debilitating to me. It’s like losing family members that you love dearly, but not even knowing who they are. It’s like knowing that you’re failing to save the world, somehow, over and over again, but not even being able to observe it directly.

— § —

I have yet to chop down the old tree, even though I know I should. It’s not just in the summer when I’m mowing that I think about this. Now that I have a dog and I’m outside at all hours for dog breaks, I have the same thought in the winter, too.

“That old tree’s got to come down. Swing, too.”

Today I came inside and once again went to Amazon and eBay looking for prices on cordless chainsaws and pole saws and so on. But once again I didn’t buy anything. I put it off, kicked the can down the road again.

The thing is, I feel guilty. Despite the fact that nobody has been on that swing in years, and that I have two teenage kids who have forgotten that it exists, I also have two little children who swing on it all the time. Who stand on it, holding onto the ropes tightly, and fling themselves back and forth, giggling, all smiles and hair and sunlight through the green branches above them.

They will be devastated if I cut down their tree and their swing. So I can’t bear to—to let them down—or to imagine the looks on their faces if they were to find out that I have vague plans to do such a thing out of some misplaced adult need for adult abstractions like safety or pragmatism.

— § —

The past is everything. It is the repository of all meaning and all happiness.

The growing and increasingly sentimental museum of one’s life in adulthood also—as it turns out—hurts.

Like hell.

There was this calculation that they kept asking us to make in our heads back in the high school days, which was that the farther along we got toward—or in—higher education, the richer we would eventually be.

Of course it’s now clear that that was entirely incorrect. In fact, it goes something more like: every day of higher education is a day’s worth of income you will never have; every year of higher education is a year’s worth of income you will never have. And if you go “as far as you can go” in higher education, you also go “as far as you can go” toward economic disempowerment.

I don’t think this was intentional deception. I think this was a bunch of people who grew up with the G.I. Bill thinking that digital watches were still pretty cool.

— § —

First work week of the year is now done.

Work continues to have this weird quality for me, this sort of ontological bewilderment that I still haven’t overcome as I realize that what you do at work is both:

(a) the substance of your life, and

(b) generally of no substance whatsoever in the modern “white collar” world

— § —

I am watching this Los Angeles fire coverage and it strikes me again just how badly I misjudged everything over the course of my life. So many people with so much to lose. I don’t have much to lose at all, despite having worked long hours my entire life at “highly skilled jobs other people can’t do.”

It also dawns on me that if I am ever to have anything to leave to my children, or to experience for myself (say, my first ever vacation—I have lived an entire life without ever having one), I am going to have to start over and/or start anew and do something entirely different from what I have done thus far.

You can’t get to there from here. You can’t become financially secure doing white-collar work. Not as such.

The question is: am I (literally) exhausted? Do I still have it in me? I keep thinking and acting like I do, but then days pass and then weeks pass and then years pass and I don’t:

(a) leave my job

(b) exit my career

(c) start a new business

(d) change anything at all

I have told myself I’ll do this when the kids are grown, but by the time the kids are grown and gone I will be that much older, and it now strikes me that I might feel differently once the kids are grown, as they will still be in need—it would still be a disaster if my current career were to crash and burn.

Not a moral disaster or a philosophical disaster, just a financial disaster. And as distasteful as it is to say, in the real world of today money is more important than morals or philosophy.

We all know that to be true, or we wouldn’t still be employed at all. But oh well.

Year 48 almost done. Year 2024 almost done. I can’t remember whether I did an end-of-year post last year. Maybe I forgot. I forget.

It’s been a few months since I posted here as well. I guess it’s been a few months since I posted anywhere. For many years, starting sometime in the 1980s, I was always “posting” public stuff somewhere. Because I wanted people to see it. Because I made friends that way. Because the network loved me, whether or not any particular person did.

But it’s been a few years since things felt that way. In the age of social media, the network no longer loves anyone, and I’m not special enough to change that. So I don’t post as much as I used to. And I don’t meet as many people as I used to. Old instincts die hard, but I guess twenty years on they have finally died.

— § —

I’m in a big house that’s not mine, alone. That’s been most of my life, and it’s still the day-to-day. Probably it will be until the day I die? Not sure.

The kids aren’t here, they’re with their mom. Somehow the timing always seems to work out that way for the end of the year—kids with mom for New Year’s Eve, then I pick them up on New Year’s Day.

The tree is still up. The house isn’t too messy. I spent half the day working. I’m not sure I’m in the right frame of mind for the last day of the year, but I’m not sure what the right frame of mind for the last day of a year is, anyway.

— § —

So what happened in 2024?

• Obvious headline item, got a dog again.

• Had a lot of puppy blues for a long time, though those are mostly gone now.

• Felt most of my friends continue to get farther and farther away.

• Continue to not really know what to do about that.

• Continue to not really know how to live once you’re not in the higher education system any longer.

• Did a lot of my own automotive work.

• Played a lot of Elden Ring.

• Worked an awful lot.

• Not sure what else. That’s pretty much it.

At some point in the past, I remember hearing research coming from the psychology community that adults are least happy with their lives in middle age. So I think that’s me and I think that all of this is normal.

There are these people that you really care about and that you spent many years really loving, but now it’s been decades since you really spent any time together and your lives have gone in their separate directions and they’re far away (or you’re far away) and when you get together it’s not quite comfortable any longer or you don’t know what to say, and that’s if you even get together any longer, which in most cases you don’t.

But new friends are also difficult because frankly you just don’t have a lot going on. Your life takes on this strange automatic quality. Some guru somewhere I’m sure says that you shouldn’t let it do that and you should live consciously but honestly that just makes it more painful since in fact materially you must repeat, day after day, the same things, for many decades in a row, even though they frankly don’t have that much to do with you in any practical way, because that’s modern life. It’s also Marx and it was a good insight, but he didn’t really know what to do with it after that and neither do any of us.

— § —

The kids learned this year that I have a couple of half-finished novels sitting around and they really want me to finish them which is ironic because I don’t think I’ve ever cared less about writing than I do right now.

There are actually very few things that I care about right now apart from my kids and my dog and the fact that I worry about my kids and their schooling and teenage life and I worry about my dog and dog health and the fact that she’s waiting on first heat and will soon need a spay.

— § —

It’s harder and harder to access what I really think or what I really do. Autopilot makes things that way; you start to lose track of the things right in front of your face.

— § —

We did go to a football game this year, even though it’s the worst year that the team has had in decades.

We didn’t manage to camp this year, as we had a small puppy that wasn’t fully vaccinated yet throughout the prime camping period.

We did fish but we didn’t catch anything. Utah isn’t like it was when I was a kid; there are very few wild areas left.

Daughter is trying to switch schools. Son decided he didn’t like guitar. Daughter got her black belt. Son’s voice dropped.

— § —

L—, I miss you even if I don’t know what to say to you. The same goes for you, A—. C— I’m sorry for not calling you more. Thing is, I haven’t kept myself up mentally. I don’t have any thoughts any longer. I think those should come back as retirement gets closer? I don’t know. I know that right now I mostly don’t think anything.

— § —

What am I looking forward to in 2025? I’m hoping that I finally start to make a dent in some financial stuff. There are a lot of things in my life that were very costly that happened years ago, and they have been the dominant truths in my life for a long time now. In theory, some of those debts will finally start to be paid off in 2025.

No that doesn’t really mean I’ll be able to save or start a business or anything like that, as all of that cash is earmarked for other debts. I am a typical American in that. They told us to go to college so that we could become slaves, and we did. It is what it is.

— § —

What will I do tonight? Will I stay up? Probably not. I’m tired and I’m a bit worried. Likely dog is just about to have her first heat, but I’m not sure. Watching out for UTIs and so on.

Have been on PTO for weeks, but have been working anyway, because these are the Americas, and we lie. We say we are taking time off but then we work, because we know that both are expected: it’s expected that you take time off for mental health, and it’s expected that you work through it if you want to justify your salary. That’s just how we roll.

We are a peculiar culture and I’m not all that special any longer. I don’t know how I feel about that, either, but I know that it’s true. Once I was pretty special, but I gave that up for Lent because special largely = painful and because I tend to like Catholic stuff.

Enough said.

Goodbye 2024, I won’t know whether I loved you or hated you until I get farther away and can look back from a distance. But in either case it’s sentimental in some way or other to watch you go.

I have recently set my personal laptop back to Kubuntu, after running Mac OS on my own machines since switching from Linux in 2009. Why the switch back?

Because Apple is killing Mac OS, bit by bit, and stopping its participating in computing. Or at least computing for my generation. Apple is a phone company, not a computer company, and all of the things that they sell that claim to be computers are increasingly really just phones.

I can’t blame them much, it’s smart business; today only the high priests of technology can compute. For the young crowd, there are only phones.

That’s not to say that I’m happy about switching back to Linux either. For example, I sat down to write a post, found that part of my setup (espanso) was broken by some recent software update, and then ended up on Github and trying to build rust code from a git repo, which of course involved many recursive dependencies.

Two hours later, the rust build fails with a panic, which I take to be something rather like a segfault, and because I don’t rust, and rust is way after my time, I throw up my hands and will just work without espanso.

This is all why I left Linux in the first place. But now Mac OS is dying and Windows remains what windows always was, which is: a way of getting abused.

And I am not a fan of abuse.

So here we are. The worst best option is back to Linux, and eventually no doubt I will be cursing trying to get computing done at all as computing dies entirely and Generation X with it, because that is the way of generations—they develop their habits and keep them until they die, at which time their culture and artifacts are forgotten to history.

But none of this is what this post is about.

— § —

Long day. Long few days. We dog-sat two additional dogs (for a total of three) and had a very busy weekend (multiple events, hours long) which was going to make things complicated.

But what really made things complicated was when I felt ill enough on Friday to take the day off, and then when I woke up on Saturday with a fever of over 102 degrees.

By the end of the weekend, two sick kids plus myself, fevers all around, we had done the events (in a daze) and managed to watch the dogs but someone had been kicked in the head (one of the things we had to do was sparring in Taekwondo) and there was vomiting and nausea and disorder all around.

But that’s not what I’m really writing about either.

What I’m really writing about is what happens after all of that is over, which is a return to normal, and normal is the problem.

— § —

Right now, normal for me looks like:

• I am in a house alone

• With a dog

• It’s quiet

• And that’s it

I admit it. I am lost. And lonely. And frustrated.

Basically, I’m a stereotype.

None of this was nearly as obvious as it is now until I got this dog. Somehow, having a dog around revealed all of the above in a way that hadn’t been obvious to me before. But now it’s clear as day.

It’s just me here. The cashiers and the service providers that I see as I got about my life are not my friends or my family; they are not real social interaction. Bloggers and YouTubers the same. And co-workers. None of these people will give a shit if you drop dead, and none of them will help you if you lose your job and end up homeless.

With startling regularity over the last year, people from my past have reached out to me to reconnect, but these people are not my friends or family either, by and large. There is a reason we stopped interacting in the first place, usually, and those reasons haven’t gone away, even if people are starting to take stock of their lives and find themselves where I am.

This feels like such a first-world, bloody-mindedness problem.

If you have no friends, make some. If you’re lonely, talk to people. If people are actually coming to you wanting to be your friends and you turn them away, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

If you also have the rare insurance that covers therapy 100 percent without co-pay, yet you don’t want to actually get a paid-for friend that way either, then who the fuck can help you?

— § —

The thing is, our society and our culture are broken in this way. Late middle age and/or the entryway to old age are not times to be “starting” things. This is not natural.

At this stage, you should have your friends and family and have large histories and long memories with them. If you don’t, nobody new is going to fill that role. It’s too late. It’s not the right time.

I don’t have an answer for this, but to say that I think freedom is the problem. The older I get, the more I begin to think that what freedom is really good for is giving people the illusion of positive choice while they’re young, only to fucking destroy them when they’re older.

There was a time when you were born into a social circle and that was it, that’s your lot, those are your people, even if this one beats you and that one steals from you and the other one is a dirty liar. And likewise if they hated you—maybe you are the biggest asshole on earth, but they were stuck with you.

What freedom forgets is that people die, and that before people die, they spend the last third of their lives as a drooling pre-corpse burden. Freedom is like buy-now-pay-later.

You may have a good time in the moment, but when the bill comes due, you left with “suffer” and “seppuku” as options while reality—and the young (and foolish who are busy embracing their own “freedom”)—laugh at you.

— § —

Basically, life is a jerk, time is a bastard, and this Generation Xer is increasingly bitter (but still doesn’t really want to talk to all the people he broke up with, broke with, or left behind in the past).

When the kids are out of here (which is soon—having teenage kids is like preparing for or carrying out a slow divorce; you see less and less of someone and more and more of their life and possessions disappear from yours until—you know in the end—you won’t “have” them any longer as real intimate relationships), I think that’s the practical end.

Sure I’ll sit around for another couple of decades metabolizing, but that’s basically where life ends for a divorced dad in the west in this epoch.

— § —

As a side note (and irritatingly I think I’ve said this before here, possibly more than twenty years ago), the reason I write stuff like this here is because—essentially—this blog is my best (and, at times, it feels like only) real friend.

Yes, yes, you can go and make friends, but we’ve just been over that and there’s this whole other post that I’m not making right now about how some people feel comfortable with and nourished by everyone (extroverts are this way, I think, my son being one of them) and other people really struggle with that, and are kept afloat by a few strong relationships with similar people who fade over the years.

I think there’s a gendered component to this too, in bell curve terms, but who knows. Yeah, yeah, woah is me and first world problems.

Every now and then I think for a moment I’ll do the therapy thing, but that just seems so hollow—because the only reason I’m doing it is because I don’t like any of the other people I could make friends with, but therapy gives a nice introvert-friendly relationship for a fee. It’s cerebral, and tremendously intimate, and also naturally contained. So I’m not really looking for help, just buying the kind of friend you can’t actually have or make in the real world.

My ex-wife used to get angry and tell me that I needed to learn to like people. She may have been right on the theory (I mean, who can argue?) but in practice you are what you are.

— § —

I don’t know, maybe I should buy a friend or two.

Paid friends vs. parasocial relationships vs. silence vs. get a dog.

I guess I went and got a dog.

And here we fucking sit.

— § —

Final side note, the thing that really gives me a headache is trying to understand how it is that I sit here and post stuff like this (and have my entire life) even though I suspect it does me damage, both intrinsically and with respect to career, relationships, and so on—while others post all day on LinkedIn and it increases their stature and earning power.

And yet I can’t bring myself to do it an never have been able to, even when I was in academics and they were telling us to “nurture a social media identity” as an important career task. And when people message me on LinkedIn, which happens a fucking lot, I generally ignore them even though:

• That is cutting off social interaction

• That is harming my career

• If my bosses find out, I’ll probably be fired

I just can’t do it. Yet everyone else does. My whole world is full of people messaging happily on LinkedIn and building their “network” and doing lunch and doing golf and seeming to have a grand old time. But I can’t do it, and I’ve never been able to do it.

Because that’s not just buying a friend, that’s adopting an entire worldview in which people and friendships are commodities for trading. Which of course is 100 percent the truth, but fuck if I can cope with that, so I act like I’m still 19 and pretend like it’s not the case.

Like when I got my bachelor’s degree and said I wanted to do anything but work in marketing or sales, knowing full well underneath it all somewhere that there are only two jobs on earth in the free-market parts of the globe: marketing and sales; there is literally nothing else.

This post has gotten out of control, but maybe I should end on:

I’m old. I’m Generation X. And fuck all this shit. I’m still bitter about it, decades later. Oh, and I’m a stereotype and I might buy some friends because my insurance will cover it.

THE END.

Every year my kids and I have gone to Smith’s Ballpark during the summer to see baseball games. We didn’t make it this year. This is the last year of Smith’s Ballpark; after this, the team is moving elsewhere. Another bit of lost time. Every year we have thrown birthday parties. This year, kids doing other things. The Japanese maple my daughter bought me for Father’s Day is dying and I don’t know how to bring it back. All little losses that other’s won’t even notice but are central to my structural integrity.

It feels these days as if the entirety of my life is made up of fragments of time that are drifting away and soon to be lost, never to be seen again. I don’t feel wistfulness. I feel something along the same lines, but multiple orders of magnitude stronger, to the point that it’s nearly debilitating. I sit here and I look around at the artifacts and environment of my life, saturated with meaning and memory, but now only meaning and memory. It’s me and the stuff, in silence. Why am I here? What am I for now?

I guess I am alone and having difficulty fighting off sadness. There’s not a lot for divorced men over 35. Rather than wanting to know us, society generally wants to punish us for the perceived sins of our fathers. Ours is to wait—and fade—until the end.

Through it all, the unmitigated brutality of time, devoid of any sentiment, continues to amaze. Or maybe to haunt.

So I thought getting another dog would be one of the last things I did as the single parent of two children. I was actually completely wrong.

In fact, getting a dog is one of the first things I did as the parent of two young adults, and, in a way that’s just an echo of the future right now but will emerge over time, one of the first things I did as a single empty-nester.

And on those counts, it has been unexpectedly soul-crushing—but I have to deal nonetheless, because these things are things that were always going to happen.

— § —

Life is changing. And I’ve known this phase was coming for twenty years, but I’m still unprepared for it and I am still not having a good time.

I’ve always been bad at life changes; I’ve always been the person that wants to settle in to a life and then just live it. I don’t live for change like my ex-wife did; I don’t launch into big transitions and revolutions just to keep myself from getting complacent.

I think it’s the lower-middle-class thing; money is always short, you’re always a disaster away from penury, there’s always the question of whether the car will start or whether the central heating will hold out whether you’ll get really sick and be unable to work.

On the lower half of the class ladder, you spend your whole life trying—and failing—to reach stability. On the upper half of the class ladder, ironically, you spend your whole life trying—and failing—to avoid complacency.

You’d think these things have something to do with the resources that you have at hand, but really it’s about culture. As I’ve grown older, it’s become clear to me that a lot of much-hated voices are right; to a large extent, the problems that you have result not from circumstances in your life, but from the way you are and act, the choices that you make, and the way that you carry yourself.

I grew up lower-middle class on the west side of Salt Lake City in the gang-ridden Glendale and Rose Park neighborhoods. My parents had one car and sometimes it worked. We ate a lot of boiled food that started off in cans. I rarely got what I wanted for Christmas. Money was always tight.

When I became an adult, I set off to learn about the world. I lived in Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and New York. I got two bachelor’s degrees, then a master’s degree, and then a doctorate. I wrote a bunch of books. I went on TV. I spoke to a lot of audiences in auditoriums. I worked at think tanks. I got offered a job at the United Nations.

But at the end of it all, I have ended up with a life very much like my parents’ life. Often, I look back on what I thought were correct decisions and realize they were incorrect, or foolhardy. Meanwhile, people I knew as a young adult that are far less educated, and far less successful in career terms, live far more comfortable lives with far more money and far more security, somehow.

Because the life you end up with has almost nothing to do with your intelligence, or your work ethic. It has everything to do with your class and the class culture in which you were raised. Tacit knowledge is everything. “Education,” “learning,” and “training” don’t count for much, if they count at all.

— § —

So here’s how the rest of my life will go. I know it already because I’ve seen it in the environs in which I was raised.

I’ll continue to struggle along through the next fifteen years of work. It will get progressively harder and I will fall a few rungs on the ladder, possibly back into a manual labor or grunt work role.

It will continue to be tough to make ends meet. My financial life will get more and more disorganized and there may be some bankruptcy or some throwing my hands up in the air and just not having things or just not paying for things. Life will gradually become more precarious.

I will eventually be retired, probably due to health reasons, and be on social security. I will not have enough money to live. Lower-middle class people will look at me and just think I’m old and that’s how life looks when you’re old. Upper-middle and upper class people will look at me and see someone that didn’t make good life choices and wasn’t “smart” about preparing for retirement.

I won’t travel because I won’t be able to afford it. I will watch an increasingly large amount of television. I will walk with more and more of a hobble. I will develop one or a few chronic conditions that “will eventually kill” me. Maybe diabetes, maybe COPD, who knows. Things that create visible discomfort and shorten life and make people not want to spend too much time with you, but that give you a decade to suffer with them. I won’t speak to audiences in auditoriums ever again (in fact, I already haven’t done now for 15 years or more). I won’t be in the set that ages into the holders of wisdom and speaks at events. I will be in the set that ages into a kind of pitiable state and is mostly forgotten and ignored, and that speaks mostly to myself.

Between now and then, I will keep worrying a great deal about money and about my future. I will continue to try to save, and to try to invest, and to try to make progress in my career, but it won’t work out. When I look back on the decisions I make, a lot of them will be obviously wrong in retrospect, though they seemed right at the time and I agonized over them and studied them carefully.

Eventually, I will die. I will have been mostly for fifteen or twenty years. Not too many people will attend the funeral. Many of those who do will be do-gooders and busybody well-wishers from the neighborhood. Family members will say I lived a good life and helped other people in quiet ways even though superficially I don’t look like I came to all that much in the end, and they will say that now I’m no longer in pain.

— § —

The one path I’ve observed out of the lower-middle and lower classes over all these years—and ironically, the path I and many of my friends rejected most stridently when we were young—was the military. That was for real losers as far as we were concerned. But I look at the people in industry that I know now, and nearly everyone of stature or success served in the military—and many of them were born into disadvantaged circumstances.

So for any young people thinking that you’d like to be the first in your extended family to “go to college,” don’t bother. You’ll still end up in a broken down house with broken down plumbing and broken down finances, you’ll just be able to recognize your failure better, in ways that actually reduce your happiness.

Instead, consider giving in to the suggestion that you’ve no doubt received but fought against—and join the military. Then, work as hard as you can there. I increasingly wish I had, as I survey what’s ahead for me and feel entirely helpless, despite everything, to prevent it.

— § —

In the meantime, I’ll have a dog for the next twelve years or so. My dog won’t live quite as long as expected because I won’t be the dog owner who can afford $10k of annual healthcare for a dog through the last five to seven years of its life. Pet care professionals will look askance at me and imply that I’m not, and haven’t been, a responsible pet owner—in effect, that I shouldn’t have adopted a pet because I’m lower-middle class.

Unlike the people whose houses become more picturesque with the right dog, and who have dog walkers and dog groomers coming and going, my house, yard, and clothes will look far more disheveled and run down for the next twelve years or so, and there will be no dog walkers or dog groomers coming and going. Just me.

Some people will look at an aging and increasingly elderly man with a dog, the two of them walking alone in the park, and find it to be sad. Others will look and find it to be cute. Others will look and find it to be offensive.

I won’t notice any of them.