Category: Commentary

The idea of freedom or choice is often mistaken for lack of structure or constraint.

Structure and constraint are necessary to function. They are the foundation from which deviation and surprise are possible, like jazz musicians improvising on the simple structure of a known theme.

Good structures and constraints tend to be simple and live at the bottom of the stack, so to speak. They provide a foundation and lots of experimentation is possible on top of them.

So what does it mean when I advocate for freedom and choice, if I’m acknowledging the need for structure and constraint?

The freedom to choose your structure. The ability to opt-in to existing constraints or create your own that you and others can opt-in to.

The deadly form of constraint or structure is one imposed from on high by a single source of power. They will become corrupt and draw corruption around them. They will kill vital feedback loops, innovation, experimentation, discovery, and knowledge. They will get more and more detailed and far reaching in the structure they impose, turning it from a stable base to a chaotic bureaucracy.

This is always and everywhere inevitable when people have the power to impose constraints on others against their will (with the partial exception of parenthood, which ought to be a process of slowly transferring the imposition of constraints from the parent to the child until the child is able to assume it fully). See Public Choice Theory and all of history for proof.

So in rejecting the imposition of constraint and structure from the outside, do not forget to establish it from the inside. Any area in which you are free from external constraint, you should be choosing and crafting and doing your best to stick to your own constraints, or opting in to those created by others.

If you attempt to operate without constraints, you do not end up unconstrained. You end up in bondage to unspoken, dark, shadowy constraints like depression, lack of ambition, lack of confidence, sloth, gluttony, lust, and all the other chains of hell.

Constraints are your weapons and armor against these forces. Pick up the well-established ones that fit you, and craft new ones as needed.

The power of choice is to choose your own constraints and create your own structure.

When Gehazi miraculously saw the army of angels, he was seeing what Elisha always saw. Angels are always there, those of us who are not prophets only rarely have the capacity to see them.

The same is true of hearing.

The voice of God spoke the world into existence. His voice maintains it. The Psalmist says God is his song. Zephaniah prophesies that God rejoices over us with singing.

Creation reverberates with the song of God.

This casts a new light on the idea of distraction. Turn on any news channel. You will immediately be hit with noise. Literal and figurative dissonance, disharmony, drowning out the beautiful background harmonies emanating from heaven.

If we are exposed to enough noise long enough, even silence won’t be enough to open our ears to the music. We have to relearn, and redevelop the faculty for true hearing.

Remind yourself. Stop and listen to the song of God which is being sung over you even in this very moment.

Return to the land you’re from

To see what it’s become

If it’s changed

And now feels strange

Have you lost, or won?

It’s hard to live without regret and also learn from mistakes.

Regret is backward looking and slows life down. The what ifs are endless and unproductive.

Yet we all make sub-optimal choices, and to learn from them, we’ve gotta think about why and how.

I’ve not yet found a great way to do both.

I’ve only ever had three times in my life where I wonder if I exited a situation too soon.

I’m a big believer in living free, and changing your situation if it doesn’t serve you. This has been an amazing orientation for my life, and benefited me in more ways than I can count.

But as I’ve gotten older, and especially with raising kids, I have had to expand my time horizon when it comes to how long to put up with sub-optimal situations. Sometimes sticking it out and making the most really are best.

I’m still trying to learn that.

I’m not fickle or disloyal, but a little too up for a big new adventure. A few times, that’s blinded me to ways I needed to stay the course.

Family road trip

Oh how the emotions flip

Hope they get a grip

One of the most popular types of social media post is the type that chastises people for being too outraged for one thing and not outraged enough for another.

This is a losing battle.

Outrage is exhausting. Fighting about outrage is equally exhausting. Trying to figure out whether and to what extent to be outraged about what is even more exhausting.

The reality is, everyone is correct.

We are always inappropriately outraged. I get too upset by my own small inconveniences, and not upset enough about the suffering of others. I never have enough information or empathy to properly order my outrage quotient. This is all true. And it always will be true.

Don’t worry about whether others are outraged at the right things. They aren’t. Neither are you.

Put down the opinions and pick up your cross.

There is a lot of worry over the role of technology in our lives, where it comes from, and where it might lead.

I do not disagree that technology may be originally inspired by dark forces, or that we are unprepared to deal wisely with a high-tech world and it might lead to our spiritual or physical destruction.

I do not disagree that technology has a pull that can turn us into slaves of the great disembodied machine, and our behavior can begin to look like the worship of some dark deity.

I do not disagree that there are some who willfully seek to serve this deity, attempting to usher in “entities” that can think for us and run our lives in some panopticon dystopian mass-factory control grid.

But those who start on a narrative like the above usually forget the danger on the other side.

They go all-in for more touching grass, more sunshine, more time in the woods, more rural ideals. These are good practical antidotes to too much technocratic city life, but as spiritual ends, they have the same danger as technology.

The “return to nature” is no less a threat to humans fulfilling our unique human nature as the techno utopia. Technology is not a good god, but neither is nature. Both wish to have us in their grasp. Neither want us in our rightful place, free beings who wield them and master them, redeeming them and bending them to the will of He in whose image we were created.

One way to tell when you are in danger is whether your motivation is primarily reactionary. If the draw to nature is rooted more in anger at technology than love of creation, you are playing on the enemy’s terms. The warring demons of technology and nature each want you to take their side. The one whom they serve just wants you to take a side – any side.

Entering into an antagonistic relationship with nature or technology, and by extension with those who are fans of either, means you are in the devil’s territory.

Picking one as the ultimate goal means the same. Both are false idols.

The pursuit of technology above all else ends at brains in jars.

The rejection of tech and pursuit of nature above all else ends at howling naked in the woods.

One wholly rejects the animal part of human nature. The other embraces it at the expense of our divine nature.

Christians should have a different orientation to both. We needn’t get caught in the battle between two false gods. We needn’t feel the persistent tension between screen time and time in nature. We needn’t be driven by fear.

We are the ones given dominion over nature, and over the tools we can derive from it and use to help us master it.

Even if false gods inspired technology before we were ready to handle it, through Christ it is redeemed. (He redeemed even that vile technology of torture and death, the cross.)

We must reject the god of technology and its promise to make us gods. It is a false hope.

We must also reject the god of nature and its promise to free us from the machine and return us to the innocence of the animal.

We are something else. We are image bearers of God Himself. We are appointed to rule justly over this domain, bringing all things into His service.

I just watched a movie called “Missing” with the kids last night. It was the greatest ad for Apple products I’ve ever seen.

It was a unique, generally interesting and well-paced crime mystery story, where everything happens on the screen of a device. Security cameras, laptops, phones, watches; the entire thing unfolds through the (literal) lens of devices.

The crime gets solved using internet sleuthing and digital tools. A Facetime to a friend to have them find an Instagram photo leads to a Siri voice command to save the protagonist.

I have no idea if Apple had any hand in making this movie, but if they didn’t, they should have! It’s a fun story and doesn’t feel like forced product placement, because the entire plot is about using digital tools in unique ways in a high stakes environment to save the day.

A story built as an ad from the ground up actually works better than cramming a product into an existing story.

I’d love to see more of this. I can’t wait for the movie about saving the world with nothing but spreadsheets.

As a truth seeker, I bristle at the idea that there is any knowledge that’s dangerous to have. But there is.

Not in an absolute sense. I don’t believe there’s any knowledge that is always and forever dangerous. But I think almost all knowledge can be dangerous at the wrong time.

It’s easiest to see with children. There are plenty of facts and types of know-how that can damage a child if conveyed too early. No one would deny this.

It’s also hard to deny that all grown humans are still at various stages of maturity, always with room for more. Humanity as a whole is also very young in many ways.

Putting these things together, it logically follows that there is always knowledge that is dangerous to individuals and humanity as a whole.

Does this mean shadowy agencies and secret societies should censor and hide it, cloak and dagger style? No.

Really the only implications worth considering are personal. Recognizing that, on the individual level, there may be knowledge that does not help you but harms you if you are not yet ready for it can help you slow down a little. And remembering the same about others can take the edge off the urge to proselytize.

I sat there listening to someone confidently explain something completely wrong.

I don’t know a lot about a lot, but I just happened to know enough about this subject to know that this surface level pop take was not just off, but absolutely backwards; the opposite of the actual meaning.

It didn’t make me mad, it just made me tired.

I didn’t know this person well, and didn’t have much to lose or gain by them being correct or not. Should I say something? Should I argue in front of others? Or maybe later, privately share the info they are unaware of?

The thought of doing that made me more tired.

So I just let it pass.

This happens more often as I get older. Usually, it’s something trivial said by a younger person, about a date or pop-culture reference or the meaning of a word. The kind of thing you are prone to get wrong unless you lived through it. I rarely say anything, because the energy required to be “um, ackshually” guy exceeds the value of the correction.

But it also slowly alienates me from the world. My wife and I laugh about these little things privately. Not in a condescending way ( or at least we try not to condescend), but a sign of the absurdity of life and aging.

As I silently observe people confidently proclaiming incorrect information, a terrifying realization dawns. How often was I on the other end while some older person sat silently, letting me prattle on like a fool about things I didn’t know?

Then it hits harder. That can’t be something I did once upon a time. It must be something I’m still doing. No matter how much older and wiser I feel, there is someone else compared to whom I am a fool on just about every matter.

Whenever I open my mouth or hit my keyboard, I am spouting nonsense in someone else’s mind and they’re just too tired to let me know.

That’s a good reminder.

We assume the best stuff makes its way to us. Great books, great ideas, great songs, great inventions. They’ll rise to the top and be included in Best Of lists, popular collections, and history books, right?

Yet we all know from experience this is not true.

If you’re a consistent creator of any kind, you know that your best stuff is not your most well-known stuff.

There are things hidden in the thousands of posts I’ve written that I think are the best, deepest, and most important. I’d most like them remembered. Yet they are essentially unknown, even to the small number of people that read a lot of my stuff. And that’s in the internet age for a loud and public person.

Now compound that over every single mind in history, remove the ability to do any record keeping or distribution for most of it, and you start to realize that the majority of worthy things created have never been seen or have been forgotten.

This is exciting to me, not depressing.

The act of creation is about more than other eyeballs or ears enjoying it. It transforms the fabric of reality itself, even if never seen by another soul. We are living in a world partly shaped by acts of creation we’ll never know about.

Father’s Day today

Not really sure what to say

Good to be a dad

I tend towards a jam band type of life.

I don’t like to do a lot of practice or memorization or perfecting or repeating. I like to do it live, making it up as I go.

This is not always good, but I chaff against other approaches. So instead of fighting it, I try to roll with it.

What’s required to make this successful isn’t memorizing exactly what I’m supposed to do, but instead knowing the foundation in an out without even thinking. When I really know the core of something, I can jump in and plot a path across its crust on the fly.

I don’t want to live the same day twice, sing the same song twice, or write the same thing twice.

Innovation is a series of bundlings and unbundlings.

Entrepreneurial individuals see a bunch of disparate resources and pull them together into a whole more valuable than the sum of the parts.

Then things change. The next set of entrepreneurial individuals see value left on the table, and break the whole into parts, tweak them, and serve people a la carte in a way that creates more value than the whole.

These things are happening in both directions all the time, across all industries.

Education is in the early stages of a massive unbundling, which will inevitably be followed by rebundling in new ways.

First, everything got put into ever bigger bundles. School became the giant blob that absorbed all facets of the life of anyone under 18.

Then, more and more people began breaking away from that bundle and trying different bundles – private schools, alternative schools, homeschool programs.

Now, not just one bundle, but all the bundles are getting unbundled. The walls are breaking down. The lines blurred.

Education is beginning to open.

Kids can pick and choose items from any of the bundles. Music at the public school, two days a week at a private school, a homeschool co-op, a teacher, a little unschooling or worldschooling sprinkled in.

Each kid can have their own personal bundle, different each semester and season of life, comprised of the pieces they pick from these other big bundles.

No longer do you have to choose Mainstream Ed bundle or Alt Ed bundle – both made by others and intended to serve masses.

You can create your own bundle.