Author: letterstoleland

September 21, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

I’m just going to come out and say it: I think consciousness begets matter, and not the other way around.

Who knows: perhaps by the time you read this, this letter might seem blasé. As I write, we view things quite differently. I’ve mentioned this before, but so far as I can tell, the dominant worldview, in both the scientific community and public perception, is that material reality somehow begat consciousness. I say “somehow”, because we still – after several decades – don’t have a plausible understanding for how consciousness came into being.

There are some academics arguing on behalf of the primacy of consciousness. Donald Hoffman and Annaka Harris come to mind: both conclude consciousness is fundamental, with Hoffman going further in suggesting what we take for the physical world is more like a user interface than a direct view of what’s underneath. But, so far as I can tell, these voices are influencing neither the broader scientific community nor public awareness in a meaningful way.

I should probably pause here and admit I don’t have a full working theory for how consciousness is fundamental to the universe, nor what the full implications are. I hope to explore some of that while writing. First, it might help if I outlined my personal journey in terms of how I came to this understanding. Because, until very recently, I assumed consciousness stemmed from material reality, though I’ll admit I never really gave the topic much thought.

The first concept that rocked my sense of grip on reality had to do with atoms. We’ve long understood that atoms are mostly empty space, with protons, neutrons, and electrons occupying a relatively tiny amount of the space in an atom. Here is the thought exercise that really confused me: if my human body is made of atoms that are mostly empty space, and my table is made of atoms that are mostly empty space, why doesn’t my hand pass through the table unimpeded and unaltered? Why do I experience the table as solid? When I press my hand against the table, why do I perceive that the matter in my hand is pressing against the matter in the table?

As far as I can tell, the atoms in my hand never really make contact with the atoms on the table. Turns out the atoms in my body form something of an electromagnetic field, and the atoms in the table do the same. So when I press my hand against the table, the electromagnetic field around the table resists against the electromagnetic field around my hand. What I perceive as mass pressing against mass is really energy resisting energy. What I just described might seem obvious or trivial to you; for whatever reason, I found this mind-bending: reality and my perception were different in important and non-trivial ways.

Extending this idea further, we’ve long known humans have a limited capacity to perceive reality, but I’m not sure how much we’ve really internalized that idea. We know, for example, that humans can only see a certain spectrum of light, and can only hear a certain range of sound. Light other animals can see is invisible to humans, and sounds other animals can hear are silent to us; we know because we’ve developed tools that can identify both. We also generally understand that the color brown isn’t necessarily defined by the way humans perceive it, but rather humans have adapted to interpret light reflected at a certain wavelength in the way we perceive brown. Point being: we know our perception of reality is limited at best. Yet I submit we often get stuck assuming our perception of reality is, in fact, reality.

The second experience that really messed with my understanding of fundamental reality relates to the double-slit experiment. Shine light through two slits onto a screen that records where the light lands and you get stripes, reflecting a wave pattern. Fire the particles one at a time and each lands as a single spot, but the spots, once enough particles are fired, build the same stripes. Record which slit each particle used, and the stripes vanish: two piles result instead. I cannot comprehend why recording the path should change the pattern. Typically, we assume measurement records a snapshot of something already decided. Here, how we measure seems entangled with which facts show up. To be clear, that is not proof that consciousness begets matter; it is proof that the old picture — finished objects sitting out there, mind as a spectator — does not survive contact with the data. I can’t quite explain why the double-slit experiment rocked me the way it did when I learned about it. But, like the hand on the table, it really messed with my understanding of fundamental reality.

Undoubtedly I was influenced by the fact that these thought exercises were befuddling me during the time I was having mystical experiences. Prior to those experiences, I assumed we could only know things we derived rationally. Things we could measure, things we could prove demonstrably, and things that we could logically deduce – those were things we could know. Suddenly, however, I was having experiences I couldn’t explain, but seemed to be teaching me things I would come to understand on a much deeper level than anything I could explain with logic. I would never be able to prove those experiences carried any meaning to a skeptic or materialist, but there were things I learned from those experiences that I just know, like “know it in my bones” kind of know. These letters often capture the things I’ve learned from these experiences.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I eventually began looking for others having mystical experiences. From my church and through Spiritual Stew, I’ve learned that there are more people than we realize having mystical experiences, but they tend to be reluctant to share lest their sanity be questioned. I’ve gravitated toward learning about others having mystical experiences via reading or podcasts as well. I’ve come to suspect telepathy, mediumship, and near-death experiences are all in some way related to the types of experiences I’ve had. To be clear, there are lots of charlatans who profess to have certain skills, but the existence of charlatans does not negate the possibility these skills can be real. For me, I’ve noticed I get a sense of expansiveness around certain people. This sense of expansiveness reminds me of my own mystical experiences, and tends to guide me in whether I trust others sharing their skills or telling about their own experiences. Not everyone will have that capacity for discernment, and I don’t assume mine to be foolproof, but it seems to be working for now.

Anyway, the idea that consciousness begets matter raises all sorts of questions. Like how did the earth and the stars and the solar system and the elements on the periodic table all come into being? I won’t pretend to have many answers, mostly more questions of my own. Humans experience time as linear, but I think we are realizing time isn’t fundamentally linear. Is the human condition more like the quantum aspects of a photon, with a superposition of possible outcomes all present until we experience them? Is history fundamentally in the past, and known or knowable, or do we impact history as our lives progress? In some ways we clearly impact history: the way we remember and tell stories evolves to fit the problems we face as society at any given time. But I even wonder whether we somehow impact the archaeological discoveries we make by virtue of our consciousness; as in, do we will certain historical facts into being? That might be too big a leap even for me, but I’ll admit these are the things I ponder these days. By extension, I think it goes too far to suggest we willed the universe into being; but I do think our consciousness shaped the universe we’ve experienced. Our scientific discoveries are us allowing new experiences and knowledge to come into being as much as they are genuine discoveries.

The reverse is true too: experiences that were once common have mostly now vanished. A world open to the idea of miracles experiences miracles. Not that long ago in human history, people generally credited the divine for unexplained phenomena. Having a deeper understanding for why things occur is, of course, wonderful progress. But by rejecting the possibility of the miraculous, we restrict the miraculous and, when miracles do occur, we tend not to notice.

To give an example of how remaining open might affect the outcomes in our lives: the law of attraction is an old idea that suggests what we think about is what we attract. Hypnotists, mystics, and self-help gurus have long taught that we should imagine the things we want. Jesus even seems to have promoted the idea: in Mark 11:24 he counsels “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours”. I’ve personally had some success with the practice, such that when I ask for what my soul truly wants, I find the universe starts bending in ways to help. There are some elements of the law of attraction that seem pretty straightforward: e.g. when we condition ourselves to seek a certain outcome, we are more likely to notice the opportunities that might help us achieve that outcome. Personally I think the law of attraction can extend further, where we really can begin to bend reality over time. These outcomes are often explainable in retrospect, with myriad little nudges resulting in the desired outcome. But as we experience them they can seem profound, like the universe reaching out to help and support us. Skeptics will tell me I have too active an imagination, to which I merely respond that I’d rather believe in miracles, and our ability to manifest in connection with the Divine, than not.

If that sounds like wishful thinking, at least it is old wishful thinking: the historical record is thick with reports from people who purported to see the world bend. Perhaps the most thoroughly reported stories about Jesus and the early apostles present them as healers. The apostles’ capacity for healing is often cited as a major reason why people joined the early church. In the period since antiquity, Catholic saints are recognized as saints in part because they performed miracles like healing, levitation, bilocation, or prophecy. We tend to assume the people reporting these miracles were tricked or misguided, but these miracles were often thoroughly and meticulously researched. The Catholic Church continues to canonize saints today, reporting rather diligently on miracles (two demonstrable miracles are required for canonization) before declaring someone a saint.

During the Reformation, Protestants posited the Cessation of Miracles, which argued that divinely inspired miracles ceased in the early centuries of the church. Interestingly, some Protestants argued magical mystical experiences continued, but that these experiences were the work of the devil. During this period lived some of Catholicism’s most notable levitators, like St. Joseph of Cupertino and St. Teresa of Avila. The Catholic Church, wary of accusations that such miracles should be the work of the devil (and no doubt filled with skeptical monks and priests besides) diligently researched these purported miracles, and deemed them true, accurate, and evidence of a special connection with the divine.

Documented stories of miracles are not confined to Catholic tradition. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam all tell stories of levitation, to take just one example. Of course, levitation is but one type of potential miracle, and I use it just for the sake of illustration, to suggest the idea of miracles spans cultures across most of history. Only in the last century or two have we broadly stopped believing in miracles, or in the presence of the supernatural in everyday lives. One reason why we stopped believing in miracles is that miracles don’t answer to the scientific method. In science we demand experiments be replicable. Miracles don’t work this way, so they aren’t supported using scientific experimentation; as a result, as our society became more scientifically driven, we increasingly came to reject not only miracles but even the idea of the divine. What I have come to realize is that miracles don’t obey the scientific process because 1) miracles occur when we open ourselves up to the divine, and 2) the divine brings forth what it wants, not what our egos might want. The results are unpredictable and non-replicable, and thus non-scientific, but I’m coming to believe in them anyway.

My thesis is that by denying the presence of the divine, we restrict the presence of the divine, and limit the potential for the divine to enter and work in our everyday lives. The result is a world more limited, more dull, more lifeless, and less loving than it could be. My ultimate argument is not only that consciousness is fundamental (and thus begets matter), but that adjusting our understanding accordingly might allow us to lead fuller, richer lives filled with more love and more impact than we currently imagine.

I am not trying to convince you of the primacy of consciousness. We each retain the right to determine what we fundamentally believe, and I have no desire to deny that right even if I could. But I do want to share some of what I believe, particularly because what I believe runs so counter to the times in which I live. From there, I merely encourage you to think about what it is you believe; my hypothesis is that we each form our belief systems, and it is up to us to decide whether those belief systems are tacit and unexamined. From what I can tell the unexamined belief system causes us to sleepwalk through life, subtly ceding the tools to manipulate us without recognizing we’re doing it.

For what it’s worth, watching the two of you navigate childhood only reinforces my belief in the primacy of consciousness. I genuinely believe Everett has some mystical abilities that are likely to get buried under a layer of insecurity that so many of us (and perhaps especially the mystically inclined) experience. And while Leland likely thinks he is governed by his rational mind, I know that to be only partly true. I only know how to explain using an anecdote. When Leland genuinely wants something, he is able to summon a force of will that bends almost everyone in his orbit accordingly. Your mom and I, your Uncle, all your grandparents…all of us typically play the role of authority figures with you. By authority figures I mean to say that we typically tell the two of you what to do, and not the other way around. To be very clear, all the authority figures in your lives try to grant you as much leeway as possible to enjoy your lives and explore and discover who you truly are. But we also set boundaries, and use certain unspoken algorithms for when we say yes or no to requests. Leland hacks those algorithms in a way I can’t describe, but I suspect almost any of those closest to him would intuitively recognize: when Leland truly wants something, he articulates that want with an almost undeniable power and force. My coach calls this “acting in alignment”, and Leland exemplifies this better than most people I know. My point is just to say that Leland, in my telling, is letting his consciousness shine through, whether he recognizes it or not.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

September 8, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about China.

It’s hard to overstate how much China has changed over the course of my lifetime. When I was born, China was astonishingly poor and mostly isolated from the world. Chinese and American citizens had very little to do with each other. Now, America and China have become both economically intertwined but also geopolitical rivals to the degree some wonder whether the two nations entered a Thucydides trap, such that China’s ascendency sufficiently threatens American hegemony to provoke war between the two nations. My understanding is that China openly promotes a theory that America (and the West more broadly) are in decline while China is on the rise. This idea seems to be taking hold, explicitly and implicitly, in the American psyche: Americans are at something of a nadir in terms of self belief and confidence, and seem to find Chinese confidence inspiring. It doesn’t hurt that the Chinese government’s communist roots lend credibility to the idea that Marxism is not only ascendant, but the attractive and inevitable future. The idea that China is proof Marxism works is bunk, but it’s an idea that appears to be gaining steam in the zeitgeist.

Americans used to credit Nixon with “opening up China”, which almost certainly overstates American influence and understates Chinese agency. China was almost certainly ready to move past famine and poverty and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, looking for a way to grow the economy in order to support their people. Eventually, China landed on a hybrid model, creating economic zones governed by different laws than the rest of the country. These economic zones were, by Chinese standards anyway, surprisingly laissez-faire, allowing the companies operating within these zones relative freedom to make the decisions necessary to compete in the global economy.

Prior to the establishment of these economic zones, behemoth “state owned enterprises” (SOEs) dominated the Chinese economy. These SOEs were owned by the government and run by party operatives. They were wildly inefficient and ineffective. The SOEs remain in operation and still dominate some sectors, but their impact on the economy shrunk. The companies operating in free trade zones, conversely, became proof of concept for other types of economic liberalization, which became the primary economic driver and a transformational economic engine in the country.

The economic zones started modestly enough. But as the world globalized and international trade volumes exploded, China’s vast population of poor potential workers attracted investment. American companies, to take just one example, could close local manufacturing plants and move sourcing to China, where labor was multiple times cheaper and environmental and labor laws more relaxed. Eventually American companies learned they could purchase products from outsourced manufacturers without employing the factory workers needed to build those products. American companies were able to shrink the size of their workforces (and the associated risks and complexities) as well as the size of their balance sheets, shifting huge amounts of capital to Chinese companies; shifting these assets to Chinese manufacturers made American companies seem more impressive, particularly when analysts measured profits relative to assets in attempts to quantify capital efficiency.

These Chinese factories, borrowing learnings from Taiwanese forebears, learned how to pool production capabilities. At one point in time I worked with a Chinese factory who built computers on behalf of my company. So far as I can tell the factory cross trained workers such that they could build computers for one brand one day and another brand the next. As a result, the entire supply chain became more efficient, with the Chinese factories able to minimize the amount of time labor and capital sat idle precisely because they were able to use one factory and labor force to build products for multiple brands.

American companies leaned into these trends, but so did the American government. America even supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, a group that attempts to ensure all participants played by a shared, agreed-upon set of rules when it comes to global trade. Our thesis (or at least the thesis sold to the American public) was that helping China become wealthy would encourage the country to democratize; I genuinely thought China would become freer as it became wealthier.

For a long time, things seemed to be working. The more China participated in the global economy, the richer the country became. The richer the country became, the more the citizens appeared to demand freedoms at home. And the government appeared, albeit slowly and reluctantly, to be letting go of control of more and more aspects of Chinese life. As far as I could tell, China really did seem on the way to becoming a rich, successful, democratic nation. What I missed: while China liberated economically, the CCP retained an iron grip on political control. Personally, I genuinely thought growing wealth and income would force China to liberate politically; so far I have been gravely mistaken.

I travelled to China a lot between 2008-2015. Particularly in the later years, it’s hard to overstate the buzz I felt when visiting. People clearly felt a sense of pride, energy, enthusiasm, and optimism for the future. My sense was that people were proud of how far the country had come, and felt a real sense of optimism and bullishness about where the country was headed. Just a generation or two removed from abject poverty, young Chinese people were beginning to consume conspicuously, flaunting wealth and status wherever possible. Those were heady times in China, and probably even a little manic.

I won’t pretend to know China well enough to know precisely where things went wrong. In fact, for the most part, I suspect the problem lay with my own expectations more than Chinese actions. So perhaps a more relevant question would be how I came to awareness the thesis of liberalization was playing out differently than I anticipated. Donald Trump’s antagonism toward China in his first term accelerated my awareness that not all was well in America’s relations with China. Trump blamed America’s trade with China on the demise of the American working class. Trump’s accusations held some merit: competition with Chinese manufacturing absolutely hurt working class wages in America. But China wasn’t alone at fault: America and American companies cheered these developments all along, and I along with them. To be clear, China engaged in unfair practices. Chinese companies, or other operatives, were notorious for stealing American trade secrets. While welcoming export-driven manufacturing, China restricted access to local markets: through tariffs, licenses, ownership limits, and informal barriers. The Chinese government continued to subsidize or protect Chinese companies from international competition in ways that pretty blatantly violated WTO rules, but suffered few penalties for doing so; at the very least, the WTO proved too slow adjudicating unfair trade practices. But all of these things had long been understood, so in many ways Trump’s behavior seemed odd, given the degree to which America had either been tacitly complicit or explicitly supportive to date.

China’s response to Trump’s antagonism surprised me, and seemed to awaken Americans to a geopolitical rivalry I – and I think much of the American public – didn’t previously realize existed, or at least whose existence we hadn’t yet internalized. Looking back, I realized China demonstrated they had no intention of continued political liberalization. Later China even started rolling back some of the economic freedoms I assumed would eventually lead to political freedom. Xi began to bring Chinese companies increasingly under state control (or at least state guardrails and influence). The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems insistent on remaining in firm control over not just the political future, but also the economic future of the nation.

Increasing geopolitical tension between American and China over the last decade brings us to a point where America and China appear to be offering the world two competing visions for the future. China’s vision is more clearly articulated: a world led by China instead of – per their telling – dominated by America. American confidence is so low that the competing vision isn’t particularly well articulated these days. In fact, I think there are competing American visions, one perhaps better articulated than the other. The older American vision relates to an earlier letter on secular nirvana, and basically argues that the world should continue integrating until all nations are democratic and find frameworks to work together peacefully in perpetuity (with America playing the lead role). As more of us realize the fundamental flaws in the old vision, we’re in the process of articulating a new vision. Personally, I’m not prepared to lay it out with any precision. As a guiding principle, I believe we are headed toward a world of more freedom, not less, and so any proposals that limit human freedoms should be viewed with skepticism. Relatedly, I suspect we’re headed toward a world where more decisions will be made locally, in contrast to most of the last century, where decisions increasingly got made nationally or internationally. Nations are likely to survive, at least for awhile, but with less power than they’ve known recently. I anticipate we’ll unlock more human creativity and, in the process, unshackle ourselves from some of the chains that have limited or even controlled our actions over the last few decades.

With this in mind, I think those who are bullish on China and bearish on America are being shortsighted and cynical. Of course, our egos love the idea that a totalitarian nation might be right after all, and that we will all eventually live under totalitarian rule. Of course, they might be right. But our egos fail, time and again, to understand one of the core things that makes America great: America’s ability to unleash our citizenry on a problem without much in the way of overarching control or direction might seem chaotic, but is a source of far more strength than weakness. America’s capacity for reinvention and renewal is unrivaled, and I submit we’re going through our latest period of reinvention and renewal. To the extent America is willing to resist our own totalitarian instincts and lean into the freedoms that made us great, I find it inevitable we will find our way around whatever problems China poses toward our future capacity to live free, thriving, meaningful lives. My sincere hope is that China comes along for the ride. As of now I’m not optimistic, but if we are wise we will offer plenty of chances to change course.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

September 1, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about higher education.

College education has become something of a flashpoint in American politics. In the previous administration (when Democrats were in power) the federal government undertook to forgive college debt. In Democratic presidential primaries candidates often talk about how we need to make college education free for everyone. Now that Republicans are in power, they have managed to shift the tone of the discussion, slinging accusations at universities ranging from discrimination to incompetence to ideological capture. I’m less interested in taking sides in the debate, and more unpacking how I think we got to where we are today.

My original assumption (and I think the default American assumption) was that attending university taught us skills directly applicable to our future careers. However, I was frequently advised not to worry too much about picking my future career too early – and, by extension, worrying about picking the right major to prepare me for said career. Examples abounded of people who found meaningful careers in fields completely unrelated to their degrees; the common thread seemed to be that their degrees taught them valuable skills regarding how to think or write, which proved to be enough to figure the rest out on the job. So I went into college assuming that the primary objective was to get a degree directly related to my future career, but understanding that folks often navigated meaningful careers thanks to the indirect skills developed while getting their degree.

My current understanding of higher education is broader. I still believe people get degrees in order to learn information or skills relevant to future careers; the difference is that I now understand skill acquisition to be merely one of three reasons for going to college. And I kinda suspect skill acquisition is the least important of the three.

When I was in business school, a professor introduced a hiring theory of higher education. This theory suggested that universities provide something of a filtering function for prospective employers, making it easier for employers to identify a pool of qualified applicants. The extensive work universities do to screen highly qualified applicants becomes something employers leverage.

As a hiring manager, I came to experience the value of university filtering firsthand. Most paths toward identifying qualified applicants proved time intensive. When my team posted jobs, lots of people applied, but the overwhelming majority of these applicants proved unqualified, or at least a poor fit. Internal recommendations proved the most reliable way to hire: when someone working for the company understands the job requirements and recommends someone from their professional network, these recommendations succeed at a remarkably high rate. But the second most efficient method for hiring qualified candidates came from identifying select university programs where we experienced track records of hiring success. In our specific case, we discovered MBAs (and particularly MBAs with backgrounds in finance, consulting, or engineering) generated the highest yield. With some schools I venture we had hiring rates approaching 10% of applicants, which was orders of magnitude better than online applications. So, hiring at these programs saved us enormous amounts of time and energy in identifying and hiring quality candidates.

The third reason people go to college is for what I call the “country club benefits”. Nominally, people join country clubs for access to the amenities; really, people join country clubs for access to a society of high status individuals. Similarly, people nominally go to college to learn relevant jobs skills, but really go to college for access to high society. There are multiple layers to the country club benefits. The first layer represents the relationships one develops at college: these tend to be lifetime friendships with people who help us navigate the world the rest of our lives. Forming particularly close relationships with high caliber people is enormously valuable. The second layer represents access to polite society more broadly. Lots of jobs require a college degree – even when, again, the degree isn’t directly applicable to the scope of work. College degrees play such a filtering function in our society that lots of college graduates hardly interact with non-graduates in any meaningful way, and vice versa. This social segmentation between graduates and non-graduates represents a huge change within the scope of my lifetime: relatively few people in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations went to college, so when I was growing up graduates interacted with non-graduates regularly. Nowadays this segmentation means college graduates have access to better information, more impactful social networks, and more high-paying job opportunities by the mere fact of having earned a college degree.

On some level, I think colleges figured out how critical they were in terms of bestowing access to high society, and undertook to extract as much value in the exchange as possible.

When I was an undergrad at a small liberal arts school in Texas, I was struck by the caliber of student the university recruited from all over the country. I later came to realize that most of these high caliber students were on scholarship. I also observed a substantial population of private school kids from big cities, particularly nearby Houston and Dallas. I later came to understand these students were often less impressive, and their parents were usually paying the full cost of tuition. At our most elite universities, what I have come to understand is that the same dynamic plays out in a more concentrated form. Elite universities compete fiercely to attract the nation’s best and brightest across a litany of fields. Elite universities also allow our nation’s most connected to compete even more fiercely for the opportunity to attend the university at full cost (or sometimes even well above full cost – with extra donations required to secure a space for less qualified legacies). While this arrangement is not commonly understood, and would likely be unpopular if it were understood, I do find some merit in the arrangement: the nation’s best and brightest benefit by gaining access to the nation’s most connected, and the nation’s most connected benefit by gaining access to the nation’s most capable and talented. Together, the talented cohort and the connected cohort help the university graduates achieve more success than either cohort could achieve independently.

We’ve seen the nominal cost of tuition skyrocket over the last 40 years. The real cost of tuition has increased faster than inflation, but more slowly than the nominal cost. That’s because most students don’t pay full tuition. Most students qualify for scholarships or financial aid; universities keep raising prices in part to maximize how much they are able to charge the richest prospective students.

Even still, real tuition costs rose faster than GDP continuously for decades. Interestingly, those increased costs didn’t go to teaching: teaching costs remained roughly fixed in real terms. Instead, administrative costs exploded. Universities now employ many, many more administrators than they did when I attended. What value these administrators bring is unclear to me. My hunch is that they are meant to justify the increased tuition costs charged by providing extra services.

By definition, no industry can grow faster than the economy forever; if it did, the industry would eventually become the whole economy. Thus, higher education costs eventually have to stop growing, and some signs suggest they may have already peaked. Indeed, universities now face some interesting headwinds. For one thing, the population of college age students is shrinking, thus shrinking the pool of American candidates for college. Interestingly, the percentage of American kids attending college appears to be shrinking as well, and a shrinking number of young people combined with a shrinking percentage of young people attending college implies a shrinking overall demand for college education. One way colleges appear to be responding is by recruiting more international students: whereas there were roughly half a million international university students (undergraduate + graduate) when I graduated around the turn of the century, that number has roughly doubled since. International populations provide universities an opportunity to attract more of the world’s best and brightest, and also more of the world’s willing to pay full tuition costs.

Even still, university attendance is down from an all time peak in the early 2010s, and the implied dynamics will be interesting to watch. Will universities be able to convince more American’s to go to college? Will they continue to increase international enrollment? Will they be able to offset declining enrollment by increasing tuition costs? I don’t know the answers, but the implications could be profound.

Of course, like with so many industries, AI will have a huge impact on higher education. I anticipate AI will impact not only what we learn, but how we learn. Sometimes techies anticipate the impending doom of higher education because they anticipate learning becoming much more efficient. Personally, I find these mental models oversimplified, for the reasons outlined in this letter: tech optimist / higher-ed doomers are focusing on the skill acquisition element of higher education, but ignoring the hiring benefits and country club aspects. Before anyone can truly disrupt higher education, they must first figure out how to either help employers surface high quality candidates efficiently or disrupt the country club benefits of higher education.

The most likely path forward, were I an entrepreneur looking to disrupt the field, would be to focus on the highest caliber students. These should be the easiest to empower, the easiest to teach new skills, the easiest to help demonstrate their potential worth to prospective employers, and the easiest to help find other ways to gain access to connected society (high society is always on the lookout for fresh talent). Once the highest potential candidates begin eschewing higher education, the whole edifice begins to break down. The second tier of talent will begin to follow the path laid out by the most talented; eventually, the wealthy and connected students will begin to understand they are no longer paying for access to the best and brightest, and will presumably reduce their willingness to pay accordingly. I won’t make any precise predictions, only that I do expect some disruption to higher education in the coming years.

Which is probably a good thing. I don’t like the degree to which a college degree has become a dividing ground between the haves and the have nots in America. I don’t like how the division has been, at least in part, self-reinforcing: lack of a degree starves an individual of access to other talented people and potential jobs, thus permanently reducing job prospects. Once upon a time I saw college as a great equalizer, granting folks from different socio-economic backgrounds equal opportunity to earn their way in the world. I’m not sure whether that mental model was ever true, but these days I see college as a tool that appears to be solidifying a caste system of sorts, with graduates and non-graduates occupying separate and distinct places on the social hierarchy.

One thing that will be interesting to watch is whether AI increases or decreases the value of intelligence. Intelligence appears to be a huge differentiator in career outcome: it strongly influence which students get into elite institutions, but also appears to influence how much those who graduate from elite institutions earn (a business school professor once told the class he ran regressions to understand what factors influenced future income, and the strongest predictor by far was the score on the entrance exam). On the one hand, AI will be smarter than all of us, so perhaps will dramatically reduce the value of raw intelligence by leveling the playing field. On the other hand, perhaps AI will turbocharge the capacity of the intelligent while the less intelligent struggle to take full advantage of AI’s potential. I honestly don’t know. Either way I expect AI will shake up higher education, and to the extent that means disrupting the formation of castes, I think that’s a good thing.

Of course, the two of you are only a few years away from making your own decisions regarding higher education, and by that time the disruptions will become apparent. A hiring manager at Google recently told me he’s increasingly using AI to write the code he used to assign to entry-level engineers. What I realized from talking to him: our educational system is designed to teach students how to *do* things: write code, draft a document, summarize research, or build a model to simulate an outcome, among others. As AI overtakes our capacity to do these activities, I think we need to start leveling up our students such that they think less in terms of producing something, and more in terms of how to edit the thing. Typically in a workforce the entry level staff produces the first version of the thing, and then their manager or supervisor helps modify or edit the thing into its final shape. Executives then help the team shepherd the output through to adoption. My suspicion is that all levels of the stack will need to “level up”. Entry level workers will need to develop a capacity to assign work to an AI engine and then refine the outputs until it is ready for public consumption, and then managers will become responsible for shepherding the output through to adoption. That shift will require a dramatic rethink in terms of how we teach. We need to teach you how to work with AI to create things that are ready for public consumption. Interestingly, the best way to do this will be with real world experiences: classroom simulations are likely to decline in value while we increasingly test out real world applications in monitored settings. As we demonstrate competence for producing work of real value, students will find their own paths away from the learning environment and out into the professional world. The lines between classroom and real world are thus likely to blur. All of this seems interesting and promising, at least to me.

What this means for higher education, I don’t know. I anticipate there will always be institutions dedicated to cutting edge research, and I anticipate there will always be students interested in learning from those doing cutting edge research. But I think the future of education is far less lecture-based, and far less everyone-does-the-same-homework driven. I think people will learn at their own pace, directed by their own interests and abilities, and classes will increasingly become geared toward solving real problems (or, in primary and secondary education, at least simulations of real problems).

The two of you are likely to be caught somewhere in between: as of today you are mostly learning using legacy methods. By the time you finish high school and (presumably) enter college I anticipate AI job disruption will be rather fierce. So you are unlikely to have grown up in AI-native classrooms, but are likely to encounter a job market significantly disrupted by AI. We have some time to gauge which way the winds are blowing and try to react proactively. We’ll see how we do.

In the meantime, I anticipate higher education will remain something of a political and cultural flashpoint for the foreseeable future, for the very reason that the tool we’ve long relied upon to train us for the future may longer be able to do so.

I love you.

Love,

Dad

August 25, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about billionaires, and particularly billionaires in America. My last letter covered, at some length, my thoughts around inequality. Billionaires are part of that discussion, but felt like they deserved their own separate treatment.

Billionaires dominate headlines and political discussion these days. In my dream world, these discussions would be behind us by the time you reach adolescence and college (and begin wrestling with your own understanding of the world around you); unfortunately, we seem sufficiently far from achieving any sort of consensus regarding billionaires that I suspect they will continue to be a hot topic as you begin to explore current events. By the time you read this, you will be able to evaluate not just my comments on the topic, but likely your own personal journey regarding the evolution of your own beliefs.

Just to establish my current understanding of things, let me provide the types of arguments I see folks making. The most common, by far, is some version of “if billionaires just paid more taxes, we could fund x”, with x presumably representing the claimant’s preferred form of redistribution. I often see claims like “billionaires shouldn’t exist” or, more recently, “every billionaire is a policy failure”. Less commonly but still often I see folks attempt to make the argument that billionaires only exist due to some combination of greed, corruption, and outright theft. Generally I find these arguments bewildering; they strike me as seductive, to be sure, but blatantly populist, oversimplified, and directionally unhelpful. What has disappointed me is the degree to which these arguments have taken hold amongst Americans with college degrees – precisely the type of folks I once assumed were inoculated against conspiracy theories. To be clear, I don’t assume one need be a conspiracy theorist to object to extreme (and increasing) levels of wealth inequality; in practice, however, these arguments seem pretty clearly meant to appeal to our emotions rather than our intelligence.

I’m not particularly interested in directly refuting the claims outlined above, I include them just to provide a backdrop against which to compare my understanding. After I outline how I think of billionaires, I can add a few thoughts regarding what might be driving the current backlash.

First of all, let me introduce the fundamental building block of the economy as well as wealth creation: the individual transaction. When someone buys a good or service from another, I submit that 1) the purchaser values the good or service more than the money they pay for it, and 2) the seller values the money more than the good or service they are selling. Thus, I submit value is created in the individual transaction: the buyer experiences value by owning, consuming, or experiencing something worth more to them than the cost of the purchase, while the seller experiences value by receiving more money than the good or service was worth to them. When buyers and sellers transact willingly (e.g. not at gunpoint), these transactions add value to both the buyer and seller.

The American economy is effectively an accumulation of these individual transactions. In most of these transactions, because both the buyers and sellers benefit, so does society as a whole. There are exceptions; for example, we’ve all experienced buyer’s remorse. Moreover, while we might not be familiar with the term externalities, we are familiar with the concept: if a company pollutes while making a product, the buyer and seller might benefit while society as a whole suffers. There are other examples, but broadly I submit that individuals and societies adapt to curtail the frequency of transactions with negative social consequences.

If we can agree that, on balance, individual transactions create value for both buyers and sellers, doesn’t that suggest billionaires become rich because they provide lots of goods and services to lots of people that create lots of value? Yes, but with some caveats. Imagine a scenario: you see a flower in a park, and want to pick the flower to take home with you; someone standing between you and the flower learns you want the flower and decides to pick it and sell it to you. Assuming you decide to pay the person, you have still receive value from obtaining the flower (otherwise you would not pay for it), but did the person who picked it really provide value? You were there, you were willing to pick the flower yourself, and indeed intended to pick the flower. In this scenario, society benefitted (because you got the flower you wanted), but the seller doesn’t appear to have contributed much value that might justify their compensation. “Positional advantages” refer to situations where sellers earn excess profits by virtue of their location or some form of unearned preferential treatment. Personally, I tend to think of wealth accumulated this way, whereby someone becomes rich more because they leveraged positional advantages and less because they created value in the world, as “extractive wealth”.

Inheritors of billions are not necessarily extractive, but they represent another subset of billionaires that hardly seem to have earned their riches. My point is not to demonize inheritors of wealth; I’m simply interested in exploring the differences between what I will call “earned” and “unearned” wealth. Earned wealth, under this definition, is generated by creating products worth more to buyers than the cost of producing them; unearned wealth would be of the extractive or inherited variety.

I mean not to suggest unearned forms of wealth are evil, but merely to suggest a healthy society would look to tilt incentives toward earned wealth and away from unearned wealth. To this end I have, at times, attempted to form common cause with the anti-billionaires I encounter, because I see lots of room for policy improvements that might discourage unearned wealth. Closing the carried interest loophole would at least stop the practice of letting financiers pay taxes at capital gains rates rather than marginal income rates. Strengthening (rather than our multi-decade practice of weakening) inheritance taxes would limit the amount of unearned wealth we pass from generation to generation, hopefully preventing a type of aristocracy from forming. Finally, when someone borrows money against shares in a company, they should get charged taxes on the money raised to offset the capital gains taxes avoided.

I get little traction with those who hate billionaires when I recommend solutions like those outlined above as a way to find some common ground (and, thus, generate meaningful policy wins that might reduce inequality and make our tax policy more fair). My sense from those conversations is that my proposed solutions are insufficiently punitive, and have begun to wonder whether those who rail against billionaires are as motivated by a desire to punish as they are a desire to create a more fair and just society.

For one thing, conversations around taxing billionaires started with implications that we needed to increase the tax rates on their incomes, whereas lately those conversations are increasingly shifting to an argument that we need to be taxing billionaires’ wealth itself. The idea of taxing wealth chills me, because it seems to me to intimate that the state asserts the right to take people’s stuff, which strikes me as a terrifying precedent to set. For another, I sense that billionaire vilification represents a type of “othering”, where we define a certain group as inherently different and inferior from the in-group. Most people don’t know any billionaires, and for most of us it’s hard to imagine becoming a billionaire, so it’s perhaps easy to convince ourselves that billionaires are somehow uniquely evil and damaging to society.

Most concerning, at least to me, are the reactions I get when I try to draw distinctions between earned and unearned wealth. When I try to point out that some of our billionaires have pretty clearly made our lives better by building companies that meaningfully contribute to our wellbeing, I often get shut down. People can usually accept the idea that certain transactions create value for both buyers and sellers, but surprisingly often cannot make the leap to accepting the idea that some billionaires became wealthy by aggregating a huge volume of transactions that improved the lives of their customers. As far as I can tell it seems to be a mental block, because I haven’t encountered a particularly cogent counterargument. Perhaps most instructive of all, in my conversations people seem to reserve their greatest vitriol precisely for the types of billionaires who created value for their consumers and not the ones who amassed unearned wealth.

All of this leads to me the sobering possibility that people are angry precisely because billionaires have amassed earned wealth. I am starting to suspect that unearned wealth can be forgiven, because at least I can dismiss that wealth being unavailable to me. Perhaps earned wealth is more difficult to accept precisely because it brings my own shortcomings into stark relief. If I am a college graduate suffering under a load of debt while working a job that doesn’t require a college degree…perhaps the idea of taking accountability for my life situation and the consequences of my own actions is more than I can bear.

I am uncomfortably reminded of the story of Cain and Abel. In the story, Adam and Eve had two sons. Abel, the oldest, offered the choicest outputs of his ranch as a sacrifice to God. Cain also made an offering, but apparently withheld the best outputs from his farm. We are told God approved of Abel’s offering, but not Cain’s. Cain became angry and sulked. God confronted Cain, intimating that he should choose to do well, otherwise sin was lying in wait wanting to master him. Rather than master the sin God encouraged him to confront, Cain instead killed his brother Abel.

Think about the potential parallels in this story: a group of billionaires brought the best of their inherent gifts to offer. As such, God rewarded them with riches. Another group of folks did not offer the best of their inherent gifts and were thus not rewarded. Seeing the rich rewarded while they were not, the other group became bitter and sulked. And rather than confront their own inadequacies and adjust accordingly, they seem more interested in punishing the rich in an apparent attempt to eliminate the rich from existence.

To be fair, I do not mean to suggest that billionaires are more morally righteous than the rest of us. Indeed, I suspect it is very difficult to become so wealthy without becoming sufficiently attached to our wealth as to create false gods around money and riches. But I tend to think of that as being between the billionaire and God, and not really my business so long as the billionaire isn’t actively impeding on my ability to lead my life.

I’ve mentioned before that Marxism seems to fill a religious need for its adherents. I suspect this gets at another possible reason why folks object to billionaires. I find the anti-billionaire rhetoric tends to be laced with Marxist ideology. This might also explain why attempts to find common cause have failed: because the real goal is to eliminate earned wealth and the economy built on the individual transactions that create earned wealth. The presence of earned wealth, and the overwhelming evidence that individual transactions create prosperity not only for the rich, but also the majority of participants, might start to confront the (in effect) religious belief that capitalism leads to poverty and suffering. Perhaps the vicious rhetoric toward billionaires responds to a perceived threat to tightly held (de facto) religious beliefs. I hope I’m wrong, because history suggests people can go to great lengths (including horrific levels of violence) to protect their most tightly held beliefs in the face of contrary evidence.

I really, really don’t like to be in the business of attempting to peer into the hearts of others and divine their intentions, particularly in these letters. But I would be disingenuous if I pretended these observations and thoughts hadn’t occurred to me. What I do think is true: when people get this angry, the anger is typically the result of some genuine, unrecognized, unmet need combined with an ugly, confused, convoluted attempt to blame others for a surface frustration only tangentially related to the real problem.

What occurs to me as I write is that I don’t have a clear sense of the real unmet need behind the anti-billionaire sentiment (and, to the degree they are connected, the Marxist sentiment more broadly). This is an area where I want to spend some time going forward. Because my experience tells me that once we understand the real unmet need, we can begin to appeal to the better angels within the anti-billionaires, and hopefully redirect energy currently pointed in darker directions. Wish me luck.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

August 21, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about inequality.

My mental model is that global income inequality shrunk over the course of my lifetime, while American income inequality rose. I think these phenomena are interconnected. But I seem to be the only one who sees things this way.

In terms of why I think global income inequality has shrunk…well, it just seems obviously true from my perspective. Just this century more Chinese have moved into the middle class than there are people in the United States: depending on how you define middle class, China has seen somewhere between 300-700 million people join the ranks. Globally, the middle class grew by something on the order of 1.5-3 billion people since the year 2000. Think about that: somewhere between a quarter and a third of the world population joined the middle class in about a quarter century. More than half the world population is now middle class or wealthier (vs roughly a quarter of the global population in 2000); in fact, some estimates suggest more than half the global population is middle class today, without accounting for wealthier classes.

In even better news: the global share of people living in extreme poverty shrunk from nearly half in 1980 to a little over a quarter at the turn of the century to somewhere below 10% today.

Given those astronomical improvements in poverty and middle class status, how could global income inequality not have shrunk? A quick Google search tells me that global Gini coefficients (a measure of income inequality) have indeed shrunk (albeit modestly), thus corroborating my mental model. Taken together, these are not ironclad arguments, but the data seem sufficiently compelling to convince me global inequality shrunk over the course of my lifetime.

And yet, income inequality in America increased over these same time horizons. Some measures show that the bottom earning half of Americans saw their wages stagnate over a 30-40 year time horizon. Those bottom 50% of earners have seen their wages grow faster than the top half over the last decade or so, but not enough to put a meaningful dent in American inequality. In fact, American income inequality matches all time highs. Previous eras – namely the Roaring 20s and the 1870s (the early part of the Gilded Era) – matched current Gini coefficients, but these are hardly eras most Americans want to emulate.

This increase in inequality upended American politics, almost certainly leading to the election of Donald Trump and the populist-leaning MAGA movement taking over the Republican party. On the Democratic side, we’ve seen the party lurch left overall, and seen a surge in openly socialist and Marxist candidates, activists, and voters. It’s important to understand not just the policy solutions both sides are proposing, but the motivation behind those proposed policy solutions.

At this point, I need to provide some personal background in order to explain how my understanding of the political landscape, at least when it comes to inequality, evolved.

I majored in Economics and during college came to identify as libertarian. Libertarians believe in minimizing government intervention, whether said intervention be directed toward free markets or the private lives of citizens. As a guiding principle, libertarians seek the least government intervention possible. In practical terms, being libertarian meant often aligning with Republicans on fiscal policy and Democrats on social policy, as well as trying to influence whichever party was in power.

Over the course of my life, the libertarian viewpoint influenced American politics a great deal. In 1980 the top marginal tax rate approached 70%; since 1990 top tax rates fluctuated between 30-40%. Globalization soared: in 1980 international trade accounted for a little over a third of global GDP; that number peaked above 60% in 2008 and mostly hovered between 55-60% since. Deregulation allowed a number of industries to innovate and flourish. Migration increased, both within the US and internationally. As a libertarian, I cheered all these developments.

Then Donald Trump upended American politics. Suddenly a Republican administration wasn’t particularly interested in the virtues of migration and free trade, and preferred to erect border walls and antagonize America’s largest trading partner (China) instead. Libertarians began to realize we didn’t have safe quarter in the Democratic party either: the Obama administration started out deferring to perceived economic experts, but the 2008 financial crisis – and particularly how those steering the economy handled things – appear to have led to instinctive distrust. Libertarians have been thus been politically homeless for the past decade.

For me, the experience led to some soul searching. For one thing, I was completely blindsided by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. I was far from alone in my shock: most Democrats, libertarians, and even a lot of traditional conservatives felt the same way. My personal response to that shock was to attempt understanding what happened and why. I don’t think attempting to understand what happened made me unique, as it was a natural response to the shock so many of us felt. In fact, I don’t know what part of my journey since election night 2016, if any, is unique. What I do know is that I seem to have arrived at a pretty different place than almost anyone I know.

For one thing, it was hard to escape the overarching conclusion that Trump’s election was an explicit repudiation of the libertarian message. Here was a candidate elected on a platform explicitly opposing trade agreements and immigration, two things I firmly supported. More sobering, Trump was elected as a Republican, representing the party that traditionally aligned with libertarians on fiscal policies. To me, Trump’s supporters seemed to be issuing a clear rebuke of the financial stewardship for which I had cheered for nearly two decades.

Personally, I found Democratic responses, and proposed solutions, uninspiring. Democrats argued that Republicans were racists and insisted what people really wanted were things like free healthcare and free college tuition, all while raging against corporations and billionaires. I didn’t sense that Democrats were really listening to what Trump voters were trying to tell us, which made coming to a clear understanding difficult.

My earliest interpretation (and I forget what I read that influenced my thinking) was the election of Donald Trump amounted to throwing a metaphorical brick through the window, an attempt to be heard by America’s decision makers, and an expressed preference to burn it all down – if that’s what it took – rather than continue the course. Eventually I became exposed to the work of David Shor. Shor (a data scientist, self-identified socialist, and former wunderkind forecaster for the Obama campaign) argues that left-leaning and right-leaning coalitions are shifting all over the world, with education serving as the primary differentiator in party split. In his telling, Republicans (and their right-leaning counterparts in other countries) are becoming the party representing folks without college degrees, while Democrats (and their counterparts) are becoming the party of college graduates. Personally, I found this reframing helpful, in part because it seemed both intuitively plausible and consistent with polling data I had seen. If Shor was right, I began to wonder, why would Americans without college degrees be coalescing into a party? What frustrations would cause them to, in many cases, switch party allegiance and vote for so polarizing and unconventional a candidate?

My conclusions were not comforting to my self image.

Over the course of my lifetime, globalization led America to shift millions of jobs from American workers to counterparts in other countries, particularly China. The lower wages paid to foreign workers allowed companies to lower prices while increasing profits, which allowed American consumers to save money, which allowed companies to expand the number of products built in China, which allowed those companies to further increase profits while consumers expanded the number of products they could afford to purchase. The American economy grew at steady, healthy clip and unemployment mostly stayed low, implying that the jobs lost to foreign competition were mostly offset by new, better jobs being created. I cheered all of these developments as they happened.

At the same time, America’s relaxed immigration enforcement allowed millions of people to enter the United States without documentation. I considered it an open secret that these immigrants worked in construction, on farms, in restaurants as cooks and busboys, as janitors and landscapers and housekeepers and warehouse staff across any number of industries. In each of these industries, I understood that the undocumented immigrants lowered the cost of producing these goods and services, thus benefitting consumers. With some reservation, I cheered these developments as they happened: I wished America would amend it’s immigration policy to allow more people to enter legally but, barring that, I was perfectly content continuing to allow people to enter the country illegally, believing they contributed more to American society than the costs they imposed.

What we now know is that Americans without college degrees are disproportionately those who have seen their wages stagnate over the course of my lifetime. My understanding its that whether or not someone has a college degree serves as the primary differentiator between those who have seen their wages stagnate and those who enjoyed substantial wage growth. To me, this makes intuitive sense: Americans without college degrees (I’ll use the term “uneducated” going forward; it’s impolite, but easier to type and read than “without college degrees”) have been competing with the Chinese (among others) on wages in industries like manufacturing that could be outsourced abroad, while competing with illegal immigrants on wages in industries like food preparation and construction that must be performed locally. Increasing labor supply, in the absence of offsetting increases in demand, inherently lowers prices. Uneducated American workers have thus been competing for jobs against workers from all over the world in a manner that just wasn’t true fifty years ago. Educated workers faced some of the same competitive pressure, but not nearly as much: educated folks generally don’t immigrate illegally, some number of white collar jobs need be done close to headquarters, American innovation continues to increase the number and size of those companies to be supported by educated American workers, and American universities attract talent from all over the world – which seems to both support American innovation (creating jobs) as well as prepare most graduates to compete on the job market commanding high salaries and wages. Yet while educated Americans seem to avoid the downsides of increased competition for jobs, we benefit from the lower costs of housekeeping and food and construction costs provided by wages suppressed due to a glut of illegal immigration, in addition to the lower cost of goods produced abroad.

Most sobering of all is the degree to which I directly participated in all of what I just outlined. I spent the bulk of my career working for an American company that once assembled products in the United States. By the time I joined, that manufacturing had all moved to China. I worked in the supply chain, and so saw the evolution relatively close up. The short version is that my company spent a huge amount of energy teaching folks in China how to build our products, imparting a tremendous amount of skill along the way. Thus, not only did I cheer globalization in principle and benefit from cheaper goods in practice, I earned outsized compensation in part by directly participating in making it all happen.

When I put it all together, I come to the conclusion that America’s uneducated workers decided they were tired of feeling left behind. They got frustrated watching wages rise seemingly all over the world except for within their own families and communities. They were mad a people like me for enabling it to happen. They were frustrated by the belief they have something to contribute, and they felt ignored, gaslit, or patronized by the dominant American narrative. So they decided to change the narrative.

American media, and the educated folks with which I interact, tend toward disgust when facing arguments put forth by the MAGA movement. I respond to MAGA differently, and in fact use the two of you as a proxy for how to think about things. For me, Democrats (and the educated folks with whom I interact more broadly) are more like Leland (and older siblings more broadly): more mature, more capable of clearly articulating wants and needs, and more capable of compiling a more logical and rational argument for why they are on the right side of an argument. MAGA Republicans (and the uneducated folks they represent) are more like Everett and younger siblings: less mature and skilled with prose, but with an intuitive understanding of fairness, and thus prone to arguments that don’t make intuitive sense but backed by clear emotional power. I treat MAGA arguments much like I treat Everett’s outbursts: requiring clear boundaries, but worthy of unpacking to understand what sits underneath. And with both MAGA and Everett, I find what sits underneath is worth understanding and addressing for a more complete, thorough, fair solution to a problem.

[I’m unintentionally being condescending toward MAGA, at least in its current form. Indeed, like Everett, MAGA matures rapidly. Today, MAGA is generally able to articulate itself pretty effectively, albeit often after an immature, attention-grabbing behavior. A decade ago, MAGA was less mature, less fully formed, and thus less articulate.]

And so now, how do we proceed? I certainly don’t have complete answers, but I’ll offer some proposals, along with some suggestions on where to look (and where not to look).

For one thing, I think America’s workers have a point that we should not allow immigration to go unchecked. In retrospect, our border policy prior to Trump reminds me of what happens when siblings play competitive games with each other: the older sibling manages to subtly shift the rules of the game to ensure they win; the younger sibling doesn’t necessarily know how, but they come to recognize they’ve been cheated somehow. Eventually (and especially if the younger sibling continues to lose due to shifting rules), the younger sibling responds with an emotional outburst. I just don’t think what we were doing pre-Trump is sustainable, for the same reason it’s not sustainable to let the older sibling continue to manipulate the rules of a game to ensure they always win; eventually the younger sibling will flip the table over. People seem to assume reforming our immigration laws is politically impossible, whereas I think it’s our only viable solution. To get there, I suspect we’ll have to 1) increase the number of people we allow in legally (because there really is strong demand for international labor above and beyond what Americans can supply, and also because America benefits from the renewal of perspectives and ideas immigrants bring); 2) develop and maintain tight controls over how many people are allowed in; 3) allow for some level of dynamism in terms of how many people are allowed to enter the country legally (as opposed to waiting for Congress to change the laws every time it makes sense to adjust immigration levels); and 4) have some hard conversations regarding what types of people we want, and in what numbers. There are those who believe we should sharply curtail all immigration, while there are others who believe all immigration is good. I tend to believe there are certain types of talent we clearly want to attract in maximal quantities: something like a fifth of the current Fortune 500 includes an immigrant cofounder, and we should want to allow the types of people who can create new jobs or new academic breakthroughs into the country at a mostly unfettered pace. At the other end of the spectrum, I think we want to continue to allow immigration amongst uneducated and unskilled immigrants, but I think this will need to be tightly managed and weighed against the potential impacts said immigration levels might have on existing workers.

Writing has helped me uncover something I previously couldn’t see: the people in that bottom 50% of earners who do in fact have college degrees. Interestingly, they have been something of a blind spot for me. Well, that is not entirely true: I am aware there are college graduates who do not earn a great deal. But I perhaps underestimate the degree to which they drive Democratic political discourse despite their relatively small numbers. From there, it occurs to me that I should likely treat this group much like I treated MAGA: like a tantrum-throwing child, worthy of hearing out while setting clear boundaries on acceptable behavior.

Looking this up, I see that something on the order of half (I see numbers ranging from ~40-50%) of recent college graduates work in jobs that do not require a college degree. The data show huge variation across majors, with some majors showing underemployment well above half, while other are substantially less than 25%. Given how much college tuition costs have soared, and that we no longer allow graduates to discharge education debt in bankruptcy (a policy I loathe), I can see how this would lead to a deeply frustrated cohort of Americans.

On one hand, I am deeply sympathetic: growing up I internalized a message that everyone should go to college, and I assume many recent graduates internalized a similar message. On some level, these kids did everything we told them to do: go to college, get a degree, and figure the rest out later. Unfortunately, while that message worked for prior generations, it no longer holds universally true today.

On the other hand, there is some evidence of recent graduates having made poor choices. The degrees with the highest rates of underemployment are in fields I did not pursue at least in part because I did not think they had viable job prospects. And while I went to a private (and modestly expensive) university, my family and I were pretty conscious of the costs involved, so I took a bunch of actions (applying for and securing scholarships, serving as an RA to pay for housing, etc) to ensure my college education was reasonably affordable. I think everyone should be allowed to discharge debt (including education debt) in bankruptcy, but I also think high school graduates need to be prepared to start taking ownership of their actions. I’m not putting this all on the young graduates: as a society, we need to do a better job of teaching our kids of the consequences of their actions; that includes guiding kids toward the right schools and the right degrees and the right financial decisions (i.e. how much aid to take on, how to secure other forms of financing, etc.) and, in some cases, means directing kids away from college entirely.

Regardless of my frustrations, the subset of low-earning college graduates is now too large to ignore. Even if I wanted to ignore them, that option is no longer politically viable. Even as I write, I am coming to realize how much this group is currently driving Democratic political discourse. Free healthcare really helps if you are underemployed and don’t have company-provided healthcare. Free college tuition sounds awfully attractive to those who struggling to pay off college debt. Punishing billionaires (perhaps a topic for another day) might sound more attractive than taking ownership of my perceived underachievement.

Part of the problem I have hearing from educated youth is that their messages are too often filtered through older generations still trying to fight old battles. Another part of the problem is that underemployed college graduates are a lot more like me than struggling blue collar folks. One of the ironies of the human condition is how our greatest enemies are often the folks who look most like us.

Complicating matters, I strongly suspect part of the reason underemployment (which I am using as shorthand for financial underperformance more broadly) flies under my radar is precisely to hide from some of the root causes. We don’t want to face the degree to which academia, and society more broadly, have failed swaths of our younger generations. For that matter, we don’t want to face how we ourselves – their parents, siblings, advisors, etc. – failed pockets of young adults. We really don’t want to do the hard work of cleaning up the mess we’ve created, and really want others to let us off the hook for allowing such a mess to take hold. The problem, of course, is that we will not be able to properly address the mess unless we deal with it at its source. But that is a topic for another day. For now, figuring out how to listen to, empathize with, and help underemployed young graduates is a task for me to take on going forward.

Thus far in the letter, the only concrete solutions I’ve offered are to reform American immigration policy and some vague handwaving about fixing higher education. Truth be told, I don’t have too many solutions to offer. In fact, I strongly suspect inequality will shrink regardless of any purposeful actions we might take. For one thing, some of the headwinds American workers have faced are likely to turn into tail winds. The Baby Boomer generation created a glut of workers that only now is retiring and leaving the workforce. Chinese wages have skyrocketed since manufacturing first moved there; companies are shifting production to countries with cheaper labor, but will never again find such a homogeneous source of cheap unskilled labor. Moreover, populations are shrinking around the world, such that young folks entering the job market are likely to face decreasing competition on the global job market.

The huge caveat to all of this is AI. AI is coming for jobs, of that there can be little doubt. Worse, AI appears to be coming for precisely the type of jobs – those currently performed by newly minted college graduates – we probably need most (from a political perspective anyway) right now. New technologies consistently come along and eliminate the need for certain jobs; these new technologies invariably cause consternation and small-scale panic. So far, new technologies seem to create more jobs than they eliminate, such that we’ve never faced an unemployment crisis created by technology.

The optimistic case for AI is that humanity will solve existing problems more efficiently, freeing up resources to tackle new problems. The pessimistic case is that AI will eat jobs faster than it creates them. Even for me – an eternal optimist – it is not at all hard to imagine AI creating even more extreme wealth inequality than we see today. AI is too big a topic to adequately cover in a discussion around inequality; I flag here only to acknowledge that, however we decide to address inequality, AI will almost certainly become either a material constraint or a material aid.

One final thought before I depart. For one, you will notice that I have not set any sort of target level of equality. That is on purpose, because I think the target sits unhelpfully somewhere between American levels today and perfect egalitarianism. Some might argue in favor of perfect egalitarianism; personally, I find that target foolish and naive. For one thing, I don’t think any society ever has maintained perfect egalitarianism. Communist countries might have seen suppressed Gini coefficients, but I submit the hidden perks enjoyed by party elites resulted in vast under-appreciated inequality (and that’s without considering the crushing burdens of poverty and authoritarianism communism placed on the common worker and society as a whole). Even chimpanzees live in hierarchical societies, where status confers benefits like more mating partners and priority access to nutrient-dense food; measuring chimpanzee inequality might be difficult, but the phenomenon is real enough.

Like with chimpanzees, I anticipate human inequality (whether measured or obscured) will persist for as long as humans themselves persist. Also like chimps, humans retain the capacity to depose ineffective leaders and install new social hierarchies. How chimps reorganize is complex, and so it is with humans.

One thing I can say with some confidence: we are undergoing a reorganization of social hierarchies within the US. There will be winners and losers. If we are lucky, America can navigate the changing landscape without total war, and ideally even with minimal violence. But the losers are unlikely to go down without a metaphorical fight, and so I anticipate political rancor and unrest may well continue for at least a few more years.

That’s not a happy note on which to end, but hopefully by the time you read this whatever acrimony you experienced in adolescence is well behind us, allowing you the opportunity to feel the joy and inspiration of building for a new era. May the current generations of adults start cleaning up the mess we’ve made before we hand the reigns over to your generation. Wish us luck.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

August 18, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

This morning overwhelmed me a bit. I mostly stuck to my typical routine: drop you off at school before heading to the gym where I exercise, stretch, and sauna and then stop by the grocery store to pick up a few staples on the way home to eat lunch, meditate, and write. The primary change to my morning routine today was that I didn’t listen to a podcast. I typically listen to podcasts on any number of topics while I work out. Today I decided to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but not had the guts: to exercise without additional stimulus. Partly I did this because I was excited to write today, and wanted to think about what I might write. What I found was that ideas came flooding through faster than I could process or hold them. I seem to be genuinely excited about this project, to a degree where I am worried I might not be up to the task of honoring it. Alas, so it is with the things we care about. Onward.

Today I want to talk about Adam and Eve. This is a topic I’ve touched on several times before, so part of me is loathe to retread old ground. I’m tempted to say this will be the last time I will cover the topic; truth be told, I don’t think I can make that commitment: I’ve been fascinated by the tale of Adam and Eve for a few years now, and find myself revisiting its themes often. What I do hope is for this letter to serve my deepest dive into the topic, covering all the themes I notice (including several I’ve not mentioned to date), such that in future letters I can point you back to this one, and merely underscore (or add to) previous observations.

The story of Adam and Eve has been told for thousands of years; that alone seems worthy of interest. For one thing, people seem to have a deep seated need to understand “how it all began”. Even today, while we no longer look to Adam and Eve (and the book of Genesis more broadly) to define how humanity came to exist, we do have a modern genesis story: The Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang, so we believe, explains how the universe came into being, how the earth formed, and how humans evolved in that timeline. Without taking a side in the veracity of either of these genesis stories, it’s important to understand how badly humans seem to need a story that explains how the world, and humanity, came into being.

I wanted to be a little more precise in terms of defining how many years humans have been telling the story of Adam and Eve, but that is tricky to nail down with precision. There is a Creationist view that believes one can literally follow the timeline of events outlined in the the bible and calculate that Adam and Eve date back 6,000-7,000 years old. Personally I never felt the need to assume the events of the Old Testament are meant to be understood literally, so don’t think it safe to assume the story dates back that far. The first evidence of the story of Adam and Eve being written down dates back nearly three thousand years. But we broadly understand that humans are a storytelling species, and that there likely existed an oral tradition that predates any written records, though by how much we really don’t have any way to know. The story of Adam and Eve has significant overlaps and echoes in The Epic of Gligamesh, a Babylonian story first written close to four thousand years ago with an oral history that would likely extend centuries earlier. Whether the story of Adam and Eve was adapted from The Epic of Gilgamesh, influence by it, or somehow derived independently, it’s not crazy to suggest the story of Adam and Eve has roots extending back more than four thousand years.

Consider the evolutionary pressure the story must have faced. Oral storytellers need to captivate their audience, so would have refined the story over time. Extraneous detail would have been discarded, leaving only the truly captivating elements to survive over time. And while the story almost certainly isn’t meant to be taken literally, it’s worth considering what deep truths must have been encapsulated in order for the story to have survived over the millennia, such that it not only survived the oral storytelling era, but also that we still tell the story to this day.

Genesis 2 mostly talks about how Adam and Eve came to be. Perhaps because we now assume humans evolved into being, this is not the portion of the story I find interesting. I’ll gloss over this portion of the story for today, and merely reserve the right to find inspiration and dimensionality in this part of the story later. I often find deeper meaning in biblical stories after a discovery in my personal spiritual journey. So it may be with Genesis 2, or maybe not.

The one element of Genesis 2 that sets up Genesis 3 (the focus of today’s letter) is that God supposedly put Adam in the Garden of Eden to work and take care of it, telling Adam he was welcome to eat fruit from any tree in the Garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. First off, it’s worth observing how deeply our belief that humans hold an obligation to look after the natural world runs: we’ve been telling ourselves we were given that mission by God for thousands of years. For me, it’s crazy to think that modern environmentalists, conservationists, and climate activists – though typically quite secular in professed beliefs – share a sense of mission with humans who have professed it was ordained by God for millennia.

Picking up in Genesis 3, a snake appears, and takes up the “bad guy” role in the story. The snake informs Eve that the cost of eating the forbidden fruit is not death (as God supposedly warned), but merely knowing good and evil “like God”. They eat the fruit, realize they are naked, and sew fig leaves together to cover themselves. God proceeds to find out that they have eaten the forbidden fruit, and assigns punishments. The snake is condemned to crawl on its belly and be cursed to live in a state of deadly enmity with humans. Eve is condemned to experience pain in childbirth and be ruled by her husband. And Adam is condemned to never-ending toil in order to secure food. Lest Adam and Eve live forever, God expelled them from the Garden and placed a cherubim and flaming sword to guard the tree of life.

The punishments attempt to explain why humans still struggle in ways that still ring true to this day (I don’t know why, but I find this fascinating):

• Humans feel shame being seen in our natural (naked) state.
• Humans evolved a deep seated and visceral fear of snakes.
• Women, seemingly uniquely in the animal world, suffer during childbirth.
• Agriculture is hard work, and a seemingly constant battle to survive (more on this thought in a moment).
• Men have (or until very recently had) power over women.
• Man continues to suffer in separation from God and an inability to live in harmony with the natural world.

Of these supposed punishments, only a fear of snakes seems to make much sense once you really stop to think about them. Why would humans feel shame being seen naked? Why would women suffer during childbirth? Why should humanity seem to suffer more anguish than other species in the struggle for survival? (To be clear, plenty of other species appear to have more difficult battles for survival than humankind, but humans seem to suffer mental and emotional anguish in ways that are uniquely human, despite our relatively secure lot in life). And why should men have historically held so much power over women?

My next point will retread some prior observations, so I want to take a little detour.

A year or so ago I learned about a recent academic study. The author was exploring the reasoning behind a phenomenon with which I was unfamiliar: that humans invented agriculture in at least seven different parts of the world independently. Five of these locations (the Fertile Crescent, northern and southern China, modern day Mexico, and in the northern Andes region of South America) invented agriculture within a couple thousand years of each other, which hardly seems like it could be entirely coincidental given human history extends back 300,000 years or so. The paper hypothesized that agriculture might have developed in response to relatively sudden changes in weather patterns, creating an incentive for humans to get more proactive about cultivating (and storing) food. The author identified changes in the earth’s orbital patterns (like axis tilt) that apparently led to increased temperature extremes across seasons (e.g. summer vs winter in the northern hemisphere) and precipitation extremes in areas with wet and dry seasons. The theory goes that humans, no longer able to rely on predictable food availability in the cold winter season (or dry season), learned to cultivate and store an excess of food in the hot/wet season.

As I read about the study the thought hit me: “this is the story of Adam and Eve”. For 300,000 years humans lived in relative harmony with their environment. They developed tools to obtain and secure food, but they relied on their environment to provide the nutrients they needed. As seasonal weather patterns became more extreme and unpredictable, peaking around 12,000 years ago, people decided to take a more proactive approach to food security.

To me, the crux of the story of Adam and Eve is man’s elevation of his own image to that of god. We decided we no longer needed to live subservient to God, nor in harmony with our natural surroundings. We felt (and continue to feel) a responsibility toward the natural world, but we came to believe the world was ours to manipulate and control as needed to ensure our survival. We stopped trusting that God or nature would ensure our survival, and decided we needed to take proactive control of ensuring our needs were met. In the process of deciding we would grant our evolved brains primacy, we elevated ourselves – and our egos – to god status, no longer living in harmony with nature. Within our beings, we put our brains in charge, pushing our emotions and spiritual selves into subservience. These actions inherently put some separation between us, nature, and God. Ever since, we’ve felt a dull ache, a desire to return “home” to some unknown and undefined location or state.

This desire to return home is so eternal that it’s captured in the monomyth, also known as the hero’s journey. We tell stories where the hero starts at home, gets called to adventure, is guided by a (sometimes magical) mentor before venturing into the unknown on a series of adventures. In at least one of these adventures, the hero must go alone to face some manifestation of his deepest fear. In another of the adventures, the hero must face the deepest of temptations. Eventually, these adventures transform the hero into a fully realized version of himself, and (partly thanks to the transformation) the hero is able to secure victory in whatever the objective of the original quest. Finally, the hero returns home, bringing his newly transformed self into integration with the life he previously left behind.

The hero’s journey provides the framework for the original Star Wars trilogy. One can find the outline of represented in The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Odyssey, and many (most?) of our favorite epic tales.  We keep telling the same story over and over again.  Why?  

I submit the monomyth holds so much power over us precisely because it outlines what we most want: transformation and reintegration. We want to be transformed, and we want to integrate the transformed self into the life we temporarily left behind in order to secure the transformation. The monomyth is ultimately describing a spiritual journey. Fascinatingly, it provides something of a roadmap. Following an invitation away from the confines of the familiar in order to grow and develop new tools, before facing a series of adventures and crossing into the unknown to face fears and temptations, in order to achieve a transformation…describes my spiritual journey to date. I would place myself at some point in the return home and integration portion of the journey as of today. Via spiritual stew, I’ve had the good fortunate to hear about many spiritual journeys, and find while the specific adventures vary wildly from story to story (much like the adventures vary wildly between Star Wars and Harry Potter), the underlying themes and patterns show remarkable overlap.

The hero’s journey, I submit, offers individuals something of a solution to the problems presented in Adam and Eve. We separated from God and we yearn for a return. Our original path is closed off (as symbolized by the cherubim and flaming sword), so we must find a new way home. The hero’s journey provides clues for how to find our way home (as do the world’s religions; potentially more on this topic another time), suggesting our paths are unique to each of us (which is consistent with my personal observations). Unfortunately, while the hero’s journey serves as an inherently resonant guide for each of us individually, humanity continues to struggle with our collective separation from God, in a manner that takes on a pattern. The Old Testament documents the pattern I’m describing: people sin and so are allowed by God to be conquered and oppressed by their enemies, at which point they cry out for God’s help and are rescued. Personally, I think this pattern continues to play out in modern times, though I would frame the pattern slightly differently.

Every 80 years or so America enters a new epoch. We enter the new epoch with a clear understanding of mission: we know the purpose of the new epoch, and are motivated to set about building this new world (and preventing the calamity marked by the end of the old epoch). Eventually, we overextend the building mission of the epoch, and shift focus toward utilizing (vs building) the tools we’ve developed. Eventually, we start to abuse the tools we’ve built. Finally, we start to realize the tools no longer seem to solve our problems, and because no one alive remembers a time without these tools we face an identity crisis. Eventually, we set about deconstructing the old epoch and then, eventually, begin building anew.

In spiritual terms, I believe the transitions between epochs are divinely inspired. We move into the new epoch joyful for the seemingly endless opportunities we see in front of us (God’s gifts). Eventually, we begin to take God’s gifts for granted, and begin to assume the we ourselves built this new epoch (increased separation from God). Separation from God inevitably leads to a world of decay (a world where our tools dominate us instead of us utilizing them), at which point we undertake to deconstruct. In the chaos of deconstruction, we begin to search for a connection with God again. Enough of us establish connection with God to navigate a (previously unseen) path out of the chaos and destruction and into the hope and promise of a new era. And then the cycle repeats.

Distilled all the way down, man oscillates back and forth between connection with God and separation from God, eternally tempted to elevate man back into the role of God but always willing to cry out for God’s help in our darkest hours.

The story of religion, too, is the story of oscillation between connection to God and separation from God. Our religions convince themselves they understand the will of God, attempting to force God to shrink to fit our capacity to comprehend. Our leaders convince themselves they need to assert increasing authority over their flock…and perhaps their spiritual enemies as well. These small-minded behaviors, born of an attempt to stuff God in a box whose dimensions we understand (and can thus manipulate), in effect elevates man back to the status of god and leads to tremendous suffering. Eventually some devoted and inspired folks attempt to reestablish a more genuine relationship with God. By opening themselves up, these individuals receive inspiration that leads the religious body into a new era.

I also wonder if the story of Adam and Eve plays some misdirection on humanity. The story clearly tells us that Adam and Eve, by eating the forbidden fruit, came to know good and evil. I increasingly wonder whether humans genuinely do possess the ability to discern good from evil. Recent evidence suggests to me that evil (or what we have traditionally considered evil) increasingly hides in plain sight while folks struggle to notice. Actually, that’s not entirely true: folks are quite adept at observing the evil emerging over there (in our spouses or parents or kids or siblings or, especially these days, in the other political party), but shockingly blinded to the evil overtaking us in here (in my own being, tribe, or political party).

Whether humanity possesses the ability to discern good vs evil or not, I increasingly wonder whether that’s even the right paradigm. I’m deeply torn on this one. On the one hand, warning against evil (and the evil one, or Satan) is a theme that runs through both the Old Testament and the New (including in Jesus’ teachings), and permeates our modern stories and belief systems. On the other hand, I find little evidence of either good or evil in my own spiritual pursuit. I find evidence of light and shadows, love and fear, truth and lies…but not good and evil. I’m open to the possibility I’ve just been blocked to evidence of good and evil. In the meantime, I find myself drawn toward what I perceive to be the polarities of love and fear. What we traditionally label good and evil I am coming to think of as “actions born of love” and “actions born of fear”. The polarity of love and fear I do in fact think we have the capacity to discern. I submit two people could take the apparently exact same actions, yet we could instinctively, viscerally understand which person was acting from a place of love and which was acting from a place of fear.

I submit that the two of you already have shown this capacity for discernment. Being children, you make mistakes often. As your parents, part of our job is to guide and correct your wayward behavior. You can tell the difference between when your mom and I set loving boundaries versus when we attempt to correct your behavior from a place of fear. Our words might differ only slightly, but you can feel and sense the shift in tone and energy. In my experience, you both respond positively to boundaries set with love (even when those boundaries sting), but respond negatively to corrections relayed from fear. You are even developing the capacity to articulate your observations, in order to give your mom and me feedback when you believe we’ve crossed into fear (and thus no longer providing constructive boundaries or direction).

[You two are not wholly unique in your ability to discern love and fear, and your positive reactions to love and negative reactions to fear. But I will say that a person’s ability to sense the difference, and respond appropriately, is impacted by the degree to which that person is trapped in fear. Whether temporarily or more deeply possessed, the degree to which we are trapped appears to dictate our capacity to discern fear and love, and to respond appropriately. Metaphorically, I think of fear as represented by shadows. As such, fear is deeply resistant to light, and will do whatever possible to avoid the light; that includes hijacking our actions in order to frighten the source of light or, failing that, running away. So, we have the capacity to respond positively to actions born of love, but only to the degree we have not been hijacked by fear.]

I said I would return to God’s punishment of man, specifically consigning man to the toil of agriculture in order to secure food. I mean only to point out here how humanity often seems to be trapped in a mindset that no longer seems relevant. Thankfully, humanity seems to have mostly solved the problem of how to feed the planet. While a large number of us work toward that food security, and while those farmers presumably continue to toil painfully, the percentage of us who continue to cultivate food is small and shrinking. And yet, from what I can tell we generally continue to worry about our security in ways that no longer seem relevant. To some degree, humanity seems to be adapting slower than the world is changing. On another level, I wonder how much painful toil was ever required: Jesus chided his followers on more than one occasion, suggesting God would provide for their needs. I’ll admit: I myself struggle to internalize what these passages mean, because I cannot comprehend a world where we do not concern ourselves with from where our next meal will come; I suspect internalizing these messages will correspond with my next spiritual breakthrough.

To that point, there are those who wish humanity would return to our hunter gatherer state, presumably assuming we might return to a state of harmony with nature. I am deeply skeptical. For one thing, the story of Adam and Eve itself implies that a return to the garden is impossible. The deep resonance of the hero’s journey implies that we must find our own, individualized paths. On a more practical level, while the world proves quite capable of supporting eight billion people, I sincerely doubt it could support so many without the cultivation of food. And I think, evolutionarily, the battle between agriculture and the hunter gatherer lifestyle occurred long ago, and agriculture won comfortably.

In sum, the story of Adam and Eve seems to resonate across the millennia precisely because we 1) intuitively recognize something deeply true about the story (that humans elevated ourselves to god status, creating a separation between ourselves and God), and 2) instinctively comprehend how elevating ourselves to god status leads to our suffering.

In terms of solutions, I have many to offer the individual. I’ve offered a few within this letter, and offer them throughout these letters. I have fewer solutions to offer humanity as a whole. Perhaps we are relegated to each finding our way back individually; in fact, my experience strongly suggests this is so. On the other hand, I do sense a shift occurring that will likely enable more people to find their paths, even if those paths remain individualized.

Okay, it’s getting late. I enjoy writing these TOE letters, but find them more difficult to write than the others. And so, I need my rest.

I love you,

Dad

August 17, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I kick off a project of sorts. I anticipate it will span several letters. The letters may be consecutive, but they may not: I reserve the right to interrupt this project to write about other topics; I also reserve the right to come back to this project when appropriate. My intention is to title letters in the project “Your dad’s Theory of Everything, part x”.

Part of me wants to spend more time explaining the project. But I am realizing that is my fear trying to get in the way, and I just need to dive in. So here goes: today I want to talk about stories.

Indulge me on a quick diversion to explain how I came to think of story as foundational human technology.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, based on a correlation between neocortex volume and group size in primate species, extrapolated and predicted humans can maintain roughly 150 stable social relationships at any given time. The thesis that humans are limited to 150 relationships at a time is referred to as Dunbar’s number. Whether Dunbar is correct in proposing that humans are limited to ~150 relationships is not what I want to explore today. Neither is whether the relationship is causal – brain size determines group size – or not. Whatever the real number and the ultimate cause, what stuck with me regarding Dunbar’s number is that there appears to be a link between brain size and group sizes in primates.

What strikes me about Dunbar’s number is that humans appear to be unique in our ability to organize in groups that vastly exceed the limits one might predict based on our brains. While our core stable relationships might be governed by the size and makeup of our brains, we are wholly unique in the primate world in our ability to organize in groups (cities, nations, religions, etc.) that are orders of magnitude larger than our brains would be expected to handle.

Why? To the extent people have examined humanity’s ability to organize groups larger than our brain makeup might predict, we typically point to the mechanisms – language, laws, culture, religion – but for me this all distills to story. Humans are a storytelling species, and I submit that these shared stories are what allow humans to organize in larger groups. Shared stories allow humans to establish a shared understanding of the world, our place in the world, and how we are meant to behave. Stories lead us to establish social norms and mores, which enable us to approach and interact with strangers without fear for our safety. Stories are foundational to religions, nations, corporations, and any other organization with a shared mission and purpose. Without shared stories, for better and worse I suspect humans would still be wandering the earth in bands of 150 or so people.

As I write, our shared stories are breaking down. Developed nations have become less religious, reducing our reliance on one traditional dimension of cohesion from story. As people migrate at an accelerating rate, we find ourselves increasingly interacting with others whose behavior is guided by different stories than our own. And we are currently reexamining the American story, as our faith in the existing story collapses.

The current American experience is, at least in part, typical. When a society begins to fall upon hard times, that society inherently looks to their shared story for clues regarding where they went wrong and how they might course correct. When a society fails to find solutions in their shared stories, the people begin to examine the stories themselves for holes, gaps, and potential modifications. Since its founding, America has seen itself as born of freedoms and inherent human rights, along with a specific brand of rugged individualism and exceptionalism. Since WWII, America also defined itself based on our institutions, seeing ourselves as global guardians of democracy, peace, and truth.

And so, Americans are reexamining our stories to see where we went wrong. Some blame immigration, others xenophobia. Some blame racism (particularly institutional racism), others blame “woke” and DEI. Some accuse America of being hopelessly inherently flawed due to a perception that it was built upon a foundation of slavery; others accuse America (and the West more broadly) of creating undemocratic institutions that increasingly dictate our daily behavior. Personally, I don’t find any of these accusations and proposed redefinitions of our shared story particularly compelling. For one thing, they all rely hopelessly on the theory of “good guys and bad guys”: that there are good guys and bad guys in the world, and that one need must first classify humanity and then proceed accordingly (e.g. reward the good guys and punish the bad guys). Personally, I no longer adhere to the belief that humans can be split into good guys and bad guys. To the degree good and evil are real, I agree with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Beyond that, I’m coming to believe fear vs love is a more relevant continuum to explore than good vs evil. But more on that topic another time.

In my dream world, these letters would contribute to the formulation of new shared stories. More realistically and pragmatically, I am hopeful that writing these letters helps me engage with the world, in hopes we might find ways to curtail our most toxic impulses during this time of chaos.

Stories are not just what hold us together as societies. Individual human psyches organize around stories, often subconsciously. I’ve seen folks refer to “limiting beliefs” and “invisible scripts” as descriptors meant to capture this phenomenon. But it’s genuinely shocking how often we get stuck due to some invalid underlying assumption or story. Samples include “I am not good enough”, “I am unloveable”, “money is the root of all evil”, “good guys do x, bad guys do y”, “that person always does that thing I hate”, “I am bad at math” or “I am good at music”, or my current bugaboo “I can’t do x until I do a, b, and c first”.

A genuinely stunning amount of my energy over the last few years has been directed toward identifying the stories I used to define me or my circumstances before working to unlearn and discard the harmful or debilitating among them. I was unpleasantly surprised by how many stories were unconsciously buried in my thought processes and belief systems, and I was shocked to discover how much of my behavior those stories drove. In particular, I was shocked to discover just how many of the dissatisfactory elements of my life had been created by these stories.

Over time I’ve come to develop a toolkit for identifying and releasing unhelpful stories. But I haven’t abandoned the use of stories altogether. Indeed, I’ve come to appreciate not only the pernicious potential for self-limiting stories to dictate our circumstances, but also why humans find stories valuable in the first place.

For whatever reason, humans retain compelling stories. Our brains possess a limited capacity to remember information. Stories seem to provide scaffolding that allows us to organize information in dimensional ways that enable us to exponentially expand the amount of information available for us to access when needed. Need to remember a fact? Just revisit that portion of a compelling story and find the necessary data retained therein. Storytellers (authors, movie makers, etc) are deeply familiar with the power of story, and purposefully embed things they want us to remember or believe in otherwise compelling stories, in the hopes that their stories subconsciously nudge us to accept or retain whatever nuggets of wisdom they wish to impart.

Nowadays, I try to be conscious of my stories (and these letters are part of that attempt to create awareness). I also try to be purposeful about holding stories loosely, so that I might release untrue or unhelpful stories once I realize they are no longer true or helpful. Finally, I’ve developed some tools to help me identify when I am unconscious of the stories driving my behavior; these tools do not prevent me from allowing some stories to become unconscious, but they enable me to accelerate the process of becoming aware and, thus, taking action to release them.

Part of the purpose of these TOE letters will be to document, and thus examine, some of the stories I currently hold. Part of the purpose is to contrast my stories with what I perceive to be stories held by others. What might be unique to this project, relative to my letters thus far, is that I don’t know what I expect you to glean from the TOE letters. I just feel a need to write them, and sense that the need comes from a place I can trust.

Hopefully this project, and its value to you, becomes clearer over time. Forgive me that I cannot articulate my vision or purpose today, and please indulge me on an exploration with an unknown destination.

I love you,

Dad

August 13, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

The end of our summer was something of a blur. We came home from Taiwan and struggled mightily (at least Leland and I did)adjusting to jet lag. We recently returned from a long weekend with your Uncle in SoCal. He took us to Disneyland and your favorite gaming spot across the street from where he lives. You went to a trampoline park, and visited all your favorite food spots (including daily trips to your precious Italian ice spot). The weather was hot, which affected our ability to sleep (that and you guys just always stay up too late when we travel down there). We came home late Tuesday morning and the two of you went straight from the airport to a playdate with a bunch of your friends; given how much we’ve travelled this summer, I was really glad you got a day to reconnect with some friends.

Tuesday night I announced to the two of you that my summer with you was over, and that I was going to take Wednesday to recover. What this meant in practice was still that I spent the day with the two of you, it just meant that I refused to do anything I didn’t genuinely want to do. In the morning before Leland woke up, Everett and I watched TV, and I insisted on watching things I wanted to watch (not just what Everett wanted to watch). When Leland asked to go outside and throw a football around, I flat said no. Normally I enjoy doing things with the two of you such that, combined with my natural agreeable nature (I score highly in agreeableness on personality tests), I’m normally pretty flexible in letting the two of you decide the things we do together. Sometimes I might steer our activities in a certain direction, negotiate for a backup option, or make tradeoffs (e.g. we’ll do what you want to do after we do what I want to do, or vice versa), but normally I’m pretty flexible about what we do together. Not yesterday. Yesterday I was willing to hang out with you guys, but found myself noticeably rigid in terms of defining which activities were acceptable.

I am glad I warned you two the day before; even still, my change in demeanor I think came as something of a surprise. You both handled it well, part of which I attribute to the authenticity with which I expressed my plans and needs. The truth is that I was wiped yesterday. I have sincerely loved our summer together, but I was completely exhausted. My body was essentially demanding that I start taking care of myself, a sentiment I expressed genuinely and earnestly to the two of you.

I was a little worried about how this morning would go: you guys looked pretty sleep deprived when we got home from your Uncle’s house. And while you slept in (Leland) and/or napped Wednesday (Everett) and went to bed early Wednesday night, I worried you still might not be rested for school today.

Whether you were rested or not, the two of you woke up and got ready for school without much fuss. Everett had woken up and mostly completed his morning jobs before Leland I emerged into the living room; I was struck by Everett’s display of maturity. And while Leland is no morning person, he woke up and got ready rather seamlessly.

Per tradition, we measured both of your heights, and learned that both of you grew close to an inch over the summer. This was more than I expected, but not totally shocking: you both are undergoing body transformations that are interesting to watch.

Let’s start with Leland. Leland, your face has widened, partly due to a dental expander you wore from the beginning of the year until last week. Your cheeks are skinnier, and your face more angular. You are in the process of losing the last of your baby teeth. Your torso is thin and elongating. For reasons I can’t quite describe, my intuition tells me that your body is ready to add some muscle, particularly to your torso and arms.

Interesting story, only partially related. Leland, you’ve been exceedingly modest your whole life. You’ve never been willing to take your shirt off in public, nor to swim without a rash guard (a sort of swim shirt to protect from sunburn). Well, this summer you stopped wearing your rash guard. I first noticed at a pool party we attended in Taiwan, and it’s possible you were just mimicking your friends who were also not wearing shirts. Regardless, this was notable, and it continued when we checked into our hotel and went to the pool on consecutive days at the end of the trip. Both days you went shirtless. An entertaining story came out of this, where you brushed off your mom’s demand that you put sunscreen on your body. I think you did sunscreen, but did so lazily and sloppily. In related news, you experienced the first sunburn of your life, which tormented you for about two solid days afterward. In fairness to you, you probably deserved your parents helping you put sunscreen on your torso for the first time. On the other hand, you were sufficiently dismissive of your mom’s direction that maybe you needed to learn a valuable lesson.

Everett’s body has changed too, and in ways that have surprised me. Leland will soon enter puberty if he hasn’t already, so significant changes are to be expected for him. Approaching 9 years old, Everett’s age does not imply body transformation. And yet. Everett, your body filled out this summer, such that your brother outweighs you by less than ten pounds despite being four and a half inches taller. Until now I would have always described you as wiry, now your build is almost husky. Your wrists and ankles are about as big around as your brother’s. You put on enough weight this summer that, for the first time, the word “chunky” comes to mind when I look at you. Your mom worries that you are getting fat, but I do not: now that we are back home for the summer, I am confident your activity levels will increase and your food intake will be healthy enough that you will lose the very few pounds of excess you put on this summer.

The extra weight is mostly not excess. You added a lot of muscle this summer, to the point where I strongly suspect you have more muscle mass than your brother. I do not mean to suggest you are stronger, just that your muscles likely weigh more than his do. Your hips, butt, and abdomen area have filled out dramatically, and (from roughhousing with you) it’s clear to me these areas are remarkably powerful and strong.

Everett, your legs have gotten hairier this summer, to the point where your leg hair is now (for the first time for either of you) visible to the naked eye from a reasonable distance. This isn’t the type of leg hair I would associate with the onset of puberty, but it’s a notable development nonetheless.

Your body types have long been sufficiently similar that I’ve always assumed they would remain so. Both of you seemed to be following your mom’s trajectory of a thin, wiry frame. Now, Everett seems to be filling out in a way that seems more akin to the way in which my own body developed. Even then, there are differences: I was always a sturdy kid, but I don’t think I was as strong as Everett is through his core. Then again, some of the sports at which I excelled probably required a strong core, so maybe I’m wrong. Either way, now that your two body types are diverging, I’m fascinated to see how they develop from here.

Back to today. Leland resisted breakfast this morning. My dad never ate breakfast, in part because he was too anxious facing the school day. Part of me wonders how much of Leland’s claimed lack of appetite was due to anxiety. Then again, even on the weekends Leland rarely expresses hunger or a desire to eat before about 10 am. But Leland has always eaten breakfast before school willingly, so I’ll be curious to see how this develops in the coming days and weeks.

We have been warned that middle school drop-off is a traffic nightmare. So this morning Leland, in a bit of a role reversal, started pestering me to leave about 20 minutes before school starts (under normal traffic conditions, we live about 5 minutes away). Fortunately for us, the traffic challenges seem to primarily affect people coming from a different direction than our house; drop-off was really pretty seamless.

And so, Leland is now, officially, a middle schooler. Middle school seems like a big change. Like most big changes, I suspect we’ve overestimated the immediate impact, and underestimated the rolling nature of the changes ahead of us. We (and most of the parents, so far as I can tell) are braced as if we expect cataclysm. Typically, in my experience, the changing of eras are felt less as a sudden impact and more as a slow reverberation. We shall see how this one goes.

Everett now gets dropped off later than Leland, and I offered to come back and pick him up if he preferred, and he did. When I got home, Everett was playing with your mom, but hopped up to head to school. On the way out the door Everett said something about being the most popular kid in school. When we pressed, Everett clarified that he thought he was amongst the most well known kids at school, because last year he played with all the 5th graders. I found myself wondering if Everett’s expression of apparent bravado perhaps masked some fear, and maybe Everett was anxious about going to school without his big brother. Everett has dreaded this day (or at least this development of going to school without Leland) for a little over a year now, so at the very least I have to applaud the bravery he displayed heading to school today. Truth be told, I’m quite confident Everett will have a good year, and that going to school without Leland will be good for him. My hope is that Everett will learn to form more of his identity separate from Leland, and will begin to understand who he is and what makes him special. Because like your brother, Everett, you are a remarkable kid.

As I pulled away from the elementary school I noticed there were far more cars parked than normal. Only at that point did I realize that your mom and I have walked you both to class on the first day of school every year at elementary school thus far. I feel a little bad that we didn’t walk Everett to class today, but such is the life of the younger kid. One of our recurring conversations these days is about how life is unfair for both the younger and the older kids, but in different ways. Older kids have fewer privileges at the same age than younger kids, while younger kids’ milestones get treated with less fanfare. Your mom and I try to be fair, but we also try to be upfront about the reality that we will treat you differently.

After I dropped you off, I was very much looking forward to going back to the gym today for the first time in more than two months. Ironically, the power went out in the area, and my gym closed. Fortunately, I can still exercise without the gym, and so I did my normal exercise routine at home. Even though I missed the gym, it felt good to exercise purposefully again.

Last week I managed to catch up with a friend while Leland was getting something of an introduction to the middle school. We swapped updates on our summers. I found myself giving us both some advice. It had a lot to do with staying the course. Doing the work. Embracing the sense of monotony and drudgery that sometimes comes with facing (or seeming to face) the same problems over and over again. I reminded both of us that we’ve felt a recurring theme around the idea of steering into the storm, rather than away from or around it. Somehow these all felt like useful reminders, to both him and me.

I offered an anecdote: when I practice yoga it still hurts the same way it did when I started practicing three years ago; if it weren’t for demonstrable changes in my body, I might be tempted to believe I hadn’t progressed – and thus get demoralized and quit. Even still, I often feel the temptation to quit. I view that as a metaphor for my spiritual practice: I often feel stuck, like I am facing the same challenges again and again. And yet, with any perspective at all it’s clear I’ve progressed substantially in terms of my mental and emotinal wellbeing. At times these reminders help me embrace the temporary challenges of perceived monotony, and dig deeper into problems I’ve been avoiding.

What have I been avoiding? That requires a little detour.

With Leland especially, I’ve always had an intuitive sense of when he was getting stuck with negative energy trapped and needing release. Leland would start becoming unusually whiny, sensitive, and expressive. It’s hard to explain, but I could sorta just tell he needed to let something go. Even as a baby, I would take him into another room (partly so that his mom wouldn’t have to watch). Leland has always, always, always hated being trapped. Nothing infuriates him as quickly and predictably as trapping him; even today, Leland goes crazy the minute he starts to feel physically trapped. And so, I would hold Leland close to my chest. I held him loosely enough that he was of course physically safe, but I also held him tightly enough that he would feel a little trapped. Sure enough, within a few moments Leland would start to get angry and melt down. Having catalyzed the melt down, I would loosen my grip and just hold on to protect both him and me. I would let him cry and scream and punch and kick. It usually only lasted a few minutes; once he let go of the bad energy, he invariably reset and was fine again.

Everett was sufficiently emotionally volatile that he didn’t need prompting: his melt downs happened naturally. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Partly I just matured as a parent, and learned to let him process his own negative emotions naturally (more on how in a moment). Over time, with Everett we merely taught him to direct his energy into safe places, typically by going into his room; from there, he was welcome to scream and hit and kick a pillow or something that wouldn’t hurt him.

One thing I realized along the way was that I had deprived Leland the ability to process his own emotions naturally. By always triggering his melt downs, I worried I might have impeded his ability to let go of crummy emotions on his own. And so, the next time I sensed Leland getting stuck, I took him into the bedroom (like I had done, at a much younger age, with Everett). I made clear that he was not allowed to leave the room, and I stayed with him. But I didn’t make physical contact. Unlike Everett, with whom I tried this at a much younger age and so had a more intuitive sense of how to proceed, Leland got genuinely confused and didn’t know what do to. The confusion deeply frustrated him, adding to the frustration which caused us to go into the bedroom in the first place. As I watched I came to appreciate how his lack of experience processing his own emotions naturally had impeded his ability to handle them now without my help triggering a melt down. Fortunately, his increased frustration eventually led to the meltdown he needed, and I watched him let go of the energy that was stuck as he cried it out. Afterward, he came over, sat in my lap, and gave me a hug. I wish I had let him experience that at a younger age, but I am glad he experienced it while still a child. In that moment, I was proud of Leland for overcoming his programing, figuring out how to melt down and let go of the negative emotions that were trapped inside.

I bring that story up because I sense a similar negative energy stuck in those around me these days. I sense that it’s affecting friends of mine going through divorce, people at my church, our political discourse, and several other friends and loved ones. I don’t exactly know how to describe it other than just a general sense that a yucky energy is stuck and wants to be released, but the people holding the energy have no idea how to let it go (or, in most cases) that it’s even there. As I watch, I can’t help but be reminded how Leland used feel and behave right before I triggered a meltdown.

This observation of stuck energy needing to be released (and reminding me of Leland needing to melt down) has been a recurring theme of the summer. I’ve spent the summer wondering what that observation means, and what it invites me to do. I’m still not at all clear what precisely I can do nor how I can help, but I have had a couple of minor breakthroughs. The first I already mentioned, and that is merely a willingness to steer into the storm. Just being willing to face those who are showing stuck energy is a place to start, though it’s by no means easy. Facing into those harboring bad energy takes a lot of energy. Nevertheless, I am finding an invitation to explore this space.

The other minor breakthrough came while we were at Disneyland. Leland has long hated rollercoasters; your Uncle convinced Everett to go on a roller coaster (which, it turns out, he loved). Leland asked if I wanted to go on the ferris wheel. I’m afraid of heights, so didn’t exactly like the idea, but I wanted Leland to feel like he was getting to do something fun and special while Everett was on the roller coaster with your Uncle, so I said yes. As we stood in line I learned that some of the cars on the ferris wheel swung back and forth while they went around. It was even worse than that; it’s hard to explain, but the cars were on tracks that allowed them to slide back and forth, and then swing back and forth once they hit the end of the track. So going up we slid one direction before swinging, and then going down we slid the other direction before swinging some more. I didn’t mind the ferris wheel itself, but I hated the swinging. I sat clutching the chair, generally hating the experience. And then the thought occurred to me: this is what the discomfort of steering into the storm feels like.

I very much don’t know where these thoughts will take me. There are some things I can say with confidence. First is that things are changing, and my perception is that they are changing at an accelerating pace. The second is that the pace of change is going to lead to some destruction. The third is that the destruction will lead to some opportunities to let go of the negative energies trapped in association with whatever was being destroyed. The fourth is that there are healthier and less healthy ways of releasing the negative energies we feel. The fifth is that I have some room to contribute, though how specifically I don’t know. But (and this is sixth) if I can sense the invitation (or invitations) to steer into the storm, that will likely guide me. And (seventh) the experience is likely to be deeply uncomfortable, somehow akin to swinging on the ferris wheel.

And so, now that the two of you are back in school, I am finding myself still invited to set some boundaries (you will not be shocked to know that I’ve experienced plenty of temptations to put off my creative outputs in favor of all manner of other activities – ranging from mindless distractions to a lingering to do list to texts and phone calls from folks I dearly love…but might need to call back after I finish my creative output for the day). Even as I write this, I find myself tempted to create different reasons to avoid the work. I am observing a familiar point in the spiritual process. Let me see if I can explain.

First, a thought or sensation arises. That thought or sensation crystalizes into some type of understanding of invitation: something I am invited to explore or release or face. What comes next is inevitably temptation and distraction, as I do seemingly whatever I can to avoid doing the work I know I must. Eventually, I start to see the distractions for what they are. Even after I see the distractions clearly, they still manage to keep me distracted for some time. Eventually, I start to calmly accept the work that need be done, and prepare myself. Finally, I lean in, and let the thing run its course.

Very roughly, what I am realizing is that I am in the process of transitioning from being distracted to preparing to do the work. What amuses me every time I reach this stage in the cycle is just how repetitive the cycle proves to be, and yet how difficult (in fact, seemingly increasingly difficult, and only bearable for the confidence built over all the previous cycles) the work continues to be.

Okay, it is time to go pick up Leland and find out how the first day of middle school went. I love you both, and look forward to navigating a pretty different paradigm this year together. Wish us luck.

Love,

Dad

July 28, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

As expected, our weekend was exciting and eventful. Also as expected, by Monday everyone was ready to decompress. For reasons still unclear to me, I slept horribly Sunday night and felt awful yesterday (Monday). At first I thought I had heartburn. Looking back, my symptoms were consistent with a stomach virus. The problem with the stomach bug hypothesis is that I don’t think I ate anything others didn’t also eat, and I seem to be the only one with symptoms. Fortunately I got a great night sleep last night and, while I don’t feel 100%, at least feel much closer to normal.

I was pretty appreciative of how everyone responded to my not feeling well. None of the reactions were new or unique, but I certainly don’t take them for granted. When I tried waking Leland up yesterday I told him that I needed his help because I didn’t feel well, and that I wouldn’t be able to “rough him up” (our term for roughhousing) as part of his waking up routine. Leland responded from what seemed like a dead sleep, half turning his body to put one arm around me and give a half hug. Given how little Leland enjoys hugs and how absolutely dead asleep he otherwise appeared, this seemed like a truly generous outpouring of support. Later, I attempted to take the two of you to school. Fortunately, your mom (unusually) joined us (she’s normally working), because she and I were due to go watch a movie together afterward (it was still Sunday in the US, after all). Well, I had to duck out while your mom and Everett scouted a bakery because I suddenly but desperately needed to vomit. When I came back Leland was carefully watching me, and when I asked for a tissue, quickly rifled through his backpack to find a pack. Once your mom and Everett returned from the bakery, we decided that I would go home while your mom would take you to school. As you walked off, Leland turned around to give me a hand signal as if to say “don’t worry Dad, I got this”.

According to your mom, Leland then turned and said “don’t worry Mom, I’ll show you how to get there”. Your mom hasn’t ridden the MRT nearly as many times as we have, and so isn’t particularly familiar with navigating her way around the MRT. It doesn’t help that ours is the busiest MRT station in all of Taipei, making navigation all the more difficult.

And…truth be told, your mom doesn’t have the best sense of direction to begin with. I often tease your mom with different versions of “I love you; I didn’t marry you for your sense of direction”. To be fair, I don’t have the best sense of direction either. And one thing I think I’ve noticed about those lacking a good sense of direction is a lack of practice. Generally people travel in groups, and those groups quietly separate into those who know (and thus lead) the way, and those who follow while focusing energy on the group dynamics along the way. Growing up, I rarely knew where I was going because I was merely paying attention to my group. I think Everett mostly travels the same way. And, so far as I can tell, this is broadly true of your mom as well, at least outside particularly well worn and familiar routes.

Leland, I’m starting to appreciate, appears to have an excellent sense of direction. It runs in the family: apparently Ah Gong had an outstanding sense of direction, as did your Uncle (your mom’s brother). When she was young, your mom told Ah Ma that your Uncle should be a taxi driver when he grew up (the implication being he had such a good sense of direction); I’ve always thought this reflected a telling compliment: your mom is quietly quite competitive, especially with her twin brother, and I think this was her tacit acknowledgement that he was better than her at something. I could be wrong, but I don’t think your mom acknowledged (either then or now) that there are too many things her brother does better than her.

During our time in Taiwan, Leland has quietly led us through the MRT stations each time we’ve traveled. We’ve mostly eaten dinner around our area; around Taipei Main Station is a massive underground network of shops and restaurants. This network is segmented in ways I find deeply confusing, and from talking to others I trust I’m far from alone in my confusion. Leland does not seem to struggle. For one thing, I’ve noticed Leland appears capable of retracing his steps after traveling to a location a single time. For another, Leland appears to be able to backtrack comfortably from locations he’s visiting for the first time. Finally, so far as I can tell, Leland seems to be able to understand where locations should be, connecting the dots between multiple prior trips to understand how to find the target endpoint even from a previously unused route. And he’s doing almost all of this without hesitation, quietly just walking out front of the group and guiding us to our destination. I’ve explored our area quite a bit more than Leland (I walked the area pretty extensively; I like to orient myself via exploration when traveling to new destinations); even still, I feel like I am just now catching up to where Leland was a week ago in terms of my ability to navigate my way around the area where we are staying.

At the end of the school day I still wasn’t feeling well enough to go out, so your mom came to pick you guys up. She unfortunately went the wrong way on the MRT (that sense of direction rearing its head again), and was late coming to get you guys. She and I assumed you would wait for her at our agreed upon meeting point. But we also have AirTags in your backpacks that allow us to know where you are, and I started checking once I knew your mom was running late. I texted your mom, “I hope Find My is wrong, because it looks like the kids are near [the MRT station near school]”. Your mom responded “they were”. You guys had apparently decided to come home by yourselves; thankfully you ran smack into your mom as she was coming out of the station and you were going in. You likely suspected I didn’t feel well enough to come, and apparently hadn’t made explicit arrangements with your mom on where to meet, so decided to just go home together. Frankly, I don’t think you would have had any trouble getting home: especially yesterday, Leland was focused and I’m quite sure would have made sure both he and Everett got home safely.

There’s an interesting minor point here. Leland is more than capable of navigating himself. Everett, partly because he is younger, and partly because he is likely less gifted at navigation than Leland, is not. When focused, like he was yesterday, Leland is more than capable of leading his brother home safely. Like most boys his age, Leland can also get lazy and sloppy in the grind of day-to-day life. It’s in the unfocused sloppiness that we worry Leland might lose track of his brother…at which point who knows what Everett might do? [Everett’s reactions to getting lost or abandoned are fascinating in their own right; I am reminded to do a post on this topic, hopefully soon.]

Your mom took you to a foodcourt downstairs from our apartment. I believe at Leland’s request, your mom gave Leland money, at which point Leland helped each of your order food at different spots; between Leland’s introversion, historical aversion to speaking Chinese, and typical reluctance to help his brother, this was notable behavior that I interpret as a new level of leadership and maturity.

After dinner (and desert), Leland apparently asked Mom if she knew her way home. When Mom confirmed, Leland hopped up and put on his backpack, announcing he was going to check on Dad. This felt like the final thoughtful act in a day full of them from a rapidly maturing boy. Some days maturation means testing boundaries; those days are inherently less fun (at least for me), but no less necessary for your development. Days like yesterday are pretty rewarding, when we get to see you develop into more mature, capable, thoughtful versions of yourself.

Leland wasn’t the only member of the family who stepped up. Your mom, to her credit, always fills in the gaps when I am not feeling well. Thanks to your mom’s efforts, I always feel like I have the space to focus on recovery; I don’t take that for granted, and am always grateful and somewhat amazed at her ability to take over my duties in addition to her own whenever I am under the weather (which, thankfully, is not too terribly often).

Everett made fewer obvious contributions in my relative absence, but that’s fine. Leadership from the front is not his role – certainly not yet anyway. Everett is only 8 after all. Perhaps more importantly, he’ll always be the baby of the family, and as such it will be awhile before we lean on him to lead the charge in various activities. I used to tell people at work that leadership takes various forms, and that one can lead from the back just as effectively as from the front. I watched high functioning leadership teams, and noticed that when new challenges arose they tended to rotate who would lead from the front; everyone else would fall in and support the leader and ensure they had maximum odds of success. Some might argue that what I am describing is following; I disagree. My distinction might be pedantic, and if you want to adjust the labels for your own use, feel free. But following can take infinite forms: one can follow willingly or unwillingly, reluctantly or eagerly, in a supportive or unsupportive manner. To me, when one takes as much ownership and accountability for reaching the objective as the person leading from the front, that’s leadership.

When humans travel on foot, we quietly and (usually) unconsciously fall into formation. Someone instinctively takes the lead, and someone else instinctively takes a position at the back. One might imagine, particularly in more dangerous times, that the person in front took the role of navigation while also protecting the group from attacks originating in front of the group; the person in the back, meanwhile, ensured that the group remained together and protected the group from attacks from the back. Over time, this formation became effectively hardwired into us; watch virtually any group travel together, and you will quickly see people fall into their roles. The leader from the front and the leader from the back aren’t necessarily the highest status individuals (though they often are, or at least among the highest status), but they are both playing leadership roles for that particular expedition.

Personally, I am far more comfortable leading from the rear than I am from the front. Instinctively, I almost always take up the rear position in any walking group. The front-facing leader needs to navigate (not what I do best) and make decisive decision on behalf of the group (not my favorite thing to do). For me, keeping the group together, relaying feedback to the front (if we need the group to stop on behalf of someone, for example), and making sure everyone is safe comes more naturally. The same was true of my career: I was more comfortable leading from the back – keeping the group cohesive, ensuring everyone was set up for individual success, and giving folks rotating opportunities to lead from he front. One of the things I noticed over the course of my career, and especially later in my career at Apple, was that American culture tends to recognize, appreciate, and reward leadership from the front more than leadership from the back. I’m not sure which I find more valuable, but I strongly suspect leadership-from-the-back is undervalued in American business culture. Then again, of course I would think the skill at which I excel is undervalued.

My point is not necessarily to intimate that Everett will, like his dad, always prefer leading from the back. What I am saying is that Everett did contribute yesterday by being a willing, supportive, agreeable follower. Someday his leadership style will emerge; for what we needed yesterday, Everett played his role.

Everett woke up this morning far happier and energetic than he’s been on the entire trip. Your mom and I went to lunch together, and I noticed she is more upbeat today as well. What I am starting to suspect is that you all benefitted from some extra time together. You both have gotten a lot of dad time on this trip and over the course of the summer. And while your mom has been around a perfectly reasonable amount, she’s faced more work stress than usual of late, and she was gone for a week just recently. You have seen your mom a pretty normal amount since her return from her business trip, but our weekends have been filled with socializing, so you’ve interacted more with your peers and less with your parents. My point being, I think you guys were facing something of a deficit of quality time with your mom, and I think you guys really enjoyed, appreciated, and benefited from having some dedicated mom time last night. Everett and Mom especially showed noticeable mood improvements, which brought me joy to observe.

Now we approach the end of our trip. While we don’t leave for another five days, your mom and I are starting to recognize the need to plan for the end. Similarly, I am realizing this is likely my last opportunity to write on this trip. Tomorrow I return to help the friend who broke her back earlier on the trip. Thursday your mom is taking the day off, and we will need to pack up and get ready to check out of our place, because on Friday you guys have final performances to which we are invited before we check out of our rental apartment and head to our hotel for a final weekend of fun together before we fly home.

But those are details for later. For now, it is time for me to come get you and take you guys out for dinner (your mom and I had a late lunch, so probably won’t eat much tonight). Pretty soon we’ll start to discuss whether we’ve enjoyed the trip, and whether we want to do it again next year. Your mom and I already discussed, and already vote yes. Leland seems to be having so much fun that I cannot imagine he would say no. And Everett seems to have grown into the program this year, and seems to be enjoying learning Chinese more than before. For Everett the highlight of the trip is hanging out with his friends that live here. So long as they live here, I suspect he’ll want to return. But we shall see, and that is a conversation for another day. For now, if I don’t leave soon to pick you up at school, who knows where I will find you?

[The answer, as it turns out, was the train station.]

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

P.S. Tonight after dinner, right before heading off to bed, Everett said apropos of nothing “I really want to go back to Singapore” and then started to leave for bed. I immediately called you back playfully, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Come back here!”. After you rejoined your mother and me (Leland was in another room), I asked what you liked about Singapore. “It’s so beautiful.” I asked you to name a specific thing that was beautiful…and then I asked you to name however many you could think of. You listed the Merlion, the Marina Bay Sands, the Zoo, and the Botanic Gardens. That’s…most of what we did in Singapore.

Mom, sounding slightly wounded, asked if you also liked Taiwan (I think she was worried you were trying to suggest you liked Singapore but not Taiwan). You turned around and gave her your “don’t ask silly questions” look, which put that concern to bed quickly. I asked, if you had to make the decision right now (and understanding that you could change your mind later), would you want to come back and do the trip again next year. You didn’t hesitate: yes.

July 23-24, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Hoo boy. This summer is flying by. We still have a few weeks to go, but we are more than two-thirds of the way through. I knew this summer was going to be busy, and your mom warned me that we were doing too much. I don’t know that I would do anything differently, though I will admit things have been sufficiently busy that it’s felt difficult at times to catch my breath.

Let’s unpack and see what there is to learn. I’ll hit the high points, and then dig into whatever areas want extra attention.

The first thing to note is that Leland completed fifth grade and, thus, his time in elementary school. We finished the school year with some festivities and a ceremony allowing the school and the kids to say goodbye to one another. I’m generally not a huge fan of “graduation” parties at the end of preschool and elementary school. On the other hand, there is value in ceremony, and having some intentional ceremony allowing Leland and his classmates to say goodbye to the school, and the teachers and remaining kids to say goodbye to them, seemed entirely appropriate. Another dad and I compared these events to those of our childhood; our recollection is that our milestones were marked by fewer ceremonial events (e.g. we don’t recall celebrating the end of elementary school). We agreed that, while celebrating every milestone in a child’s life can go too far (thus, my resistance to graduation parties prior to actual graduation), some ceremony is appropriate. And I’ll give the school and community credit: I think we largely struck the right balance. We didn’t call it graduation, we called it promotion. There were no caps and gowns, though you did walk across a stage and receive a certificate. One thing I found interesting: after the ceremony ended, the kids were (uncharacteristically) almost as enthusiastic as the parents in gathering to take pictures together; it seemed to me Leland and his friends shared an intuitive understanding that they were marking a transition, and that transition was worthy of recording in some purposeful ways.

When planing the summer, Leland specifically requested we not travel immediately after the school year ended. So we spent the first week of summer in a camp with one of Leland’s closest friends. The following week we flew north to spend time with your Gran and Grampa, your cousins, and your cousins’ parents (your aunt and uncle, although I’m pretty sure you think of them as your cousins’ parents). The week after that Leland, per what’s become something of an annual tradition, attended an outdoor camp with another friend. To my surprise, Everett did not want to go to this camp (I was surprised only because Everett these days typically wants to do what Leland does, mostly because Everett enjoys being around his brother; I take it as something of a good sign that Everett was willing to assert his desire to do something different from Leland). Everett has been expressing his love for volleyball, so I used this week as an opportunity to sign Everett up for a volleyball camp. That was, comfortably, the most time Everett has spent playing volleyball (it was 6 hours a day, not counting an hour lunch break); fortunately I think Everett enjoyed it as much as he expected to.

I picked you guys up early from your camps on Friday and we drove up to Guerneville to spend a weekend at a house with another family on a “dads and kids” trip. This was sorta entertaining, as it was the first time I’d taken you both on a trip with another family with no moms involved. My friend and I decided in advance to cook rather than eat out, a decision that made me very curious on how things would go: again, we have gone on several trips where we cook most of the meals, but the moms and dads typically fall into pretty standard roles on those trips, with the moms handling a lot of the meal prep and anticipating household needs while the dads manage the grill and entertain the kids. I was genuinely curious to see how the trip would go without any moms around and, fortunately, everything went very smoothly. The other family’s kids are older, but everyone got along great. We spent our days tubing and kayaking and swimming on the Russian River, and our nights cooking, eating, watching the World Cup, and playing games. It was fun, and a nice opportunity to get out in the wilderness and see some friends we don’t see as often as we’d like.

The following week included July 4 weekend, which meant very few camps were offered. I decided to let you guys have a week of downtime ahead of our big trip. You guys had a playdate or two with friends, but we mostly watched the World Cup (which was a really pretty incredible experience this summer; both watching the games but also seeing visitors from all over the world experience the different cities hosting the games…and some places on the road in between) we played a lot of mahjong (your Ah Ma picked up a custom made mahjong table, which inspired us to play).

July 4 was on a Saturday. We really didn’t have an plans; partly because most of our friends were out of town, but mostly because we were leaving the following Monday and (your mom especially) needed to pack and get some down time ahead of our trip. We don’t typically celebrate Independence Day in any meaningful way: fireworks shows are typically past bedtimes, and most of our crew is too noise-sensitive to enjoy a fireworks show anyway. But America’s 250th seemed worth celebrating, so I wanted to do something. We of course watched some World Cup games, but I looked in advance and found as many Independence Day celebrations on TV as I could and recorded them all. On the day, I scanned through looking for events that you might enjoy that might expose us to a little Americana. Most of what I found did not interest you much. We watched little of the Sail 250, which I thought was pretty cool but everyone else found pretty boring. And we sampled different networks’ telecasts during the evening. The Washington celebrations were impacted by potential storms, which ruined at least one telecast. If memory serves, I believe we settled on CNN, which was showing highlights from celebrations in various cities across the nation. So we could watch as CNN cut from Boston to Nashville to San Diego to New York, among other cities. This telecast still wasn’t enough to hold all of our attention, so I merely put it on while the family played mahjong. The telecast highlight came once the storm in DC cleared. After the President gave what seemed like an interminable speech, the fireworks display began. And oh, what a display. The fireworks played over a cover band singing American classics; not the fireside singalong songs of yesteryear, but pop and rock classics from the last few decades. Most had nothing to do with America specifically, they just happened to be some of the catchiest, most popular songs the nation has produced. They announced that the band were military personnel; I was shocked when I realized the singers were also military personnel in uniform. I was shocked because the singing was so good, and I somehow assumed they had hired professional musicians to cover classic songs. The fact that these were uniformed personnel filled me with a strange delight. I don’t exactly know why, but watching military personnel perform struck me as much more inspirational than our typical habit of hiring stars to perform. The only explanation I have for why I enjoyed the touch so much is that it reminded me of just how multitalented our military, like the nation it represents, truly is when given the opportunity to showcase their talents.

The Monday night after July 4 weekend we left for the airport. Our flight took off around 1am, which meant we left our house around 10pm. You guys are both typically asleep before 10pm, so this was pretty disruptive to your sleep patterns. But you both handled the airport really well. Your mom and I wanted to sleep, and so both skipped the in-flight meal after takeoff. To our surprise, you both decided to eat. Your mom had already fallen asleep, and I decided to let you guys make that decision for yourselves. In retrospect, it might not have been the best decision: while Leland slept really well on the plane, Everett really struggled to fall asleep. Everett is normally the better sleeper, so this surprised me. Everett just couldn’t get comfortable, a situation he eventually found really, really frustrating. My best guess is that the late meal kept Everett awake, and I suspect it’s something we’ll learn from going forward.

We landed in Taiwan around 5am with about 2 hours to kill before our next flight. We wandered the airport and found some food before heading back to our gate. Fortunately Everett slept most of the next flight, because he really needed it.

We landed in Singapore around noon. Like last year, I wanted to get to Asia a few days before your program began so that you guys could adjust to jet lag; unlike last year, we decided we didn’t need to spend those days in Taiwan. You guys have both, independently, been clamoring for us to bring you to Singapore; as best I can tell, you both wanted to see the place where you were born, which has really prompted me to think about how humans form attachment to places. Since Singapore is on the same time zone as Taiwan, we decided to spend our days adjusting to jet lag in Singapore.

We thought four days in Singapore would be more than enough; for the average visitor, it probably is. But we have five and a half years worth of memories and relationships built up, and really, really didn’t have enough time to see and do everything we wanted. Personally I’m horrified at how many people I didn’t see on this trip; your mom and I left feeling like we almost have to come back soon. Maybe if we do the language program again next year, we’ll spend the days leading up in Singapore again.

But we saw and did a lot. We saw the new part of the airport (the Changi Jewel), which is an attraction all its own. We went to the zoo. We briefly visited Orchard Road. We walked around the Marina Bay, visiting the Marina Bay Sands hotel, the attached Shoppes, and wandering across to see the Merlion. During the evenings and on Saturday we saw old friends from when we lived in Singapore. One of Leland’s favorite things to do in Asia is partake in a good hotel breakfast buffet; truth be told, I’m the same way: the combination of western (like omelettes and bacon and pancakes) and eastern (like dumplings and noodles and buns) options make for a strangely delightful combination. So we booked a package for the hotel buffet, which is how we started each day in Singapore. Overall, we managed to consume most of our favorite Singaporean dishes: laksa, char kway teow, carrot cake, prawn me, and bak kut teh. To my delight, you enjoyed pretty much everything. Everett insisted we try durian. The place we visited offered something of a sampler platter. Everett genuinely enjoyed the first type he tried, to my delight. Unfortunately, the subsequent two types had a far sharper flavor, which turned Everett off of the whole experience. It may be awhile before he is willing to try durian again; right now he is dead set against it, despite the one he enjoyed. My only hope is that Everett does, someday, try it again.

I had three favorite activities on the trip. The first was walking the Botanic Gardens, which was something of our default family weekend activity when we lived there. The gardens were walking distance from our apartment, so we would go there and wander through the gardens when we didn’t have other things to do but wanted to get out of the house, burn some energy, and get some stimulus. The gardens did not disappoint. We saw a black swan and a number of monitor lizards and, as always, the basic scenery was delightful.

My real favorite activity was visiting our old apartment complex. We obviously can’t visit our old apartment, but we could walk the grounds. Seeing the grounds brought back a lot of memories from the early days of both your lives, which was something I genuinely enjoyed. The best part was hearing Leland’s scattered memories. Ahead of the trip he correctly recalled the outline of our old house. When he saw the old pool where we used to swim almost every weekend, he started explaining to Everett how I used to bait him into swimming the width of the pool at two years old: I would lift him out of the pool and put him on the edge. Leland would jump toward me into the water, at which point I would begin to swim away on my back. Leland would race to catch me; when it worked just right, he would remain about a stroke away from catching my neck until I reached the opposite side of the pool. Leland remembered that experience in remarkable detail, even pointing out the exact spots where we would start and finish.

My third favorite activity was seeing our old helper on Sunday morning before we left. She looked after each of you while your mom and I were at work the first year (for Everett) or three (for Leland) years of your life. She remembers you both fondly, and your mom and I hold a lot of gratitude for the care she showed the two of you. So we invited her to visit us on her day off, and she met us at our hotel, where we treated her to breakfast, gave her a few gifts, and caught up a bit. It was really nice to see her: as much as I enjoyed seeing old friends, seeing our old helper stood out as one of my favorite parts of the trip.

We left a little sad and feeling like the trip had been a little too short, but excited to get to Taiwan. We’re now a little over a week and a half into your three week program, where you spend your days learning Chinese and your nights and weekends exploring Taiwan, seeing friends, and eating some of your favorite foods.

The language program seems to be going well: you both acknowledge learning a lot of Chinese thus far, you both like your teachers, and Leland especially seems to have made some new friends. Your mom travelled to India with work the first week, which made for a slightly more complicated adventure. But we’ve navigated quite well overall. We’re a little short on sleep right this moment, but that’s partly because there just feels like so much to do and experience while we’re here.

We spent last weekend visiting cousins in Taichung. The cousins have some kids your age, which made for an interesting experience: their English seems to be about as good as your Chinese, which makes communication difficult but not impossible. But I’ve become convinced that play is a universal language: you’ve been able to play with these cousins since long before you were able to speak any Chinese (or they any English). Over the course of the weekend, I do get the impression you found the ability to communicate, at least somewhat. I suspect that weekend did as much to improve your Chinese as the program thus far: there’s nothing quite like being motivated (and forced) to practice in a real environment.

We took in a baseball game this past Tuesday, for the second year in a row. Watching professional baseball in Asia is a far more exciting, intense experience than in the US. There are chants and songs and dances that the crowd and cheerleaders perform throughout the game, which creates a really fun and dynamic environment.

Everett’s favorite food is sushi, and his favorite way to consume sushi is via conveyor belts…so we’ve done that three times in less than two weeks. Partly we go so often because everyone enjoys the experience, but mostly we go because sushi is so much cheaper here than in the US. On other nights we’ve had beef noodle soup, dumplings, and all our favorite Taiwanese breakfast foods. It’s been a pretty great experience, and I’m looking forward to our last two weekends (and our last school week in between) before we fly home.

Last night your mom came out with us, and she let you guys play some Pokemon as well as the Taiwanese pinball game you both like. I joked that your mom has suddenly become the “fun parent” while I’ve become the “strict” parent; while your mom was gone last week I was pretty insistent that we come straight home (eating dinner on the way) and be showered and ready for bed by 7:30 or so. Entertainingly, you guys nodded in agreement. I wondered aloud to your mom if there is something inherent about the primary homemaker (I think the word I used was “everyday parent”) becoming more strict and boring, vs the parent who gets to spend less time with the kids naturally wants to maximize the fun in those interactions.

After pinball we grabbed some dinner we could eat on the way home. This was one of those experiences, again, where we benefited from having your mother around. The menu was entirely in Chinese, and while your mom wasn’t able to read everything, she was able to communicate with the stall operators to understand what all the items were. The stall operators were wonderfully friendly, leaving us feeling great about our interactions with them. And the food was wonderful. These were a combination of grilled and fried meats on skewers, and everyone loved them. We observed that the seasoning was perfect: not too strong, but not too mild, and just a delicious flavor.

You guys are currently on your field trips, with Leland visiting a museum on the coast and Everett visiting a bakery factory (where I assume they make all the baked goods distributed around Taipei for this particular brand). This weekend we plan to spend some time with some of Leland’s classmates out near the coast on Saturday, and then hang out with our local friends on Sunday. Next weekend we’ve booked a hotel in town (one where we stayed last year, and everyone loved) before we head home next Sunday.

We still have another nine days before we leave, but the time is starting to feel short. Everyone has been articulating the things they still want to do on this trip, and we’re starting to realize that we might not get to all of them. So last night we made a list, and will start chipping away at that list this weekend.

The approaching end of the trip makes me appreciate that summer is almost over. You’ll be back in school three weeks from yesterday. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the trip, as well as the summer, and yet two things are simultaneously true: I’ll cherish memories from this trip to Taiwan and this summer as a whole, and I’ll be ready when they both end. I’ll be ready to get back home to our beds and our friends back home, and I’ll be ready when you guys go back to school and we can get back into a bit of a routine again.

Perhaps I should be careful what I wish for, because I’m not entirely sure how long it will take us to adjust to a new normal, whatever that may be. One thing this summer has only reinforced is that Leland is changing, and will continue to do so. In your Chinese programs here in Taiwan, Leland has moved up to classes with middle school-aged kids. Leland is loving it, and to his credit has made friends as seamlessly with the older kids as he does with peers and younger kids. Those older kids have more independence than Leland gets from his parents currently, and it’s prompted Leland to seek out more independence himself. I sorta anticipate this trend will only continue as he get into middle school and starts interacting with older kids back home. Last night we had a pretty entertaining conversation, where Leland was asking for the opportunity to go to Taipei 101 with your friends unsupervised…but had forgotten to do most of his daily responsibilities. We were able to have a healthy conversation about the linkage between independence and responsibility, and that you have to demonstrate responsibility in order to gain more independence. Fortunately Leland was able to learn that lesson without missing out on fun with his friends: apparently the plans changed to get families together this weekend (which makes me wonder if some of the other parents also balked at the idea of letting you kids go out unsupervised). So this summer has only reinforced the theme of change, and the idea that Leland is embarking on a period of change that will likely feel rapid to mom and dad.

For Everett, the themes of this summer are obviously different; they are also harder to summarize. Even predating this summer, Everett’s temper started to flash in new ways. Long ago Everett learned to retreat to his room when emotions overtook him, and I’ve long been grateful for his ability to handle his extreme negative emotions in such a healthy manner. Over the last few months, however, Everett’s temper has begun to flare up – particularly when interacting with Leland – and without the mature toolkit kicking in. Partly this is because Leland doesn’t help things: unlike Mom and Dad, Leland doesn’t have the maturity to prompt or invite a mature response from Everett. What I think I’ve noticed: when Everett’s anger starts to escalate, Leland goes into a type of defensive mode that presents (at least to Everett’s eyes) as belittling or mean-spirited behavior. And while Everett is not wrong that Leland’s behavior is often unattractive in those situations, what Everett is too young to understand and appreciate (at least yet) is that Leland isn’t acting out of malice, but out of a desire to protect himself from Everett’s wrath. Leland’s immature attempts to protect himself reflect his youth and inexperience, as do Everett’s reactions when his brother dismisses Everett’s frustrations and concerns.

Those arguments between the two of you are something I’m watching and hoping to steer in the coming years. For better and worse, I suspect it’s a dynamic the two of you will carry into adulthood. Quite often we discover where pain gets stuck through recurring confrontation with loved ones, and those recurring confrontations serve as guides for how to heal – if only we find the tools to discern and follow the clues using a new map. As your dad, I’d love to help you heal now, and I certainly will try. But my sense is that forming scars as kids and then learning to heal as adults is something of a developmental milestone for adulthood.

On this trip, Everett’s temper has extended beyond just Leland and been directed at Dad and (particularly) Mom as well. I have a few hypothesis for why that might be. For one thing, Everett did a really good job holding things together while Mom was traveling with work. I’m increasingly convinced that kids have an intuitive sense when one parent is gone that they need to behave better for the remaining parent, recognizing that the single parent is more likely to get overloaded and overwhelmed if presented with too many problems. Consistent with that hypothesis, when Mom came back from her trip, Everett almost immediately devolved into something of an emotional wreck. Your poor mom was exhausted after taking a red-eye back to join us for the weekend…only for Everett to seemingly punish her by having a remarkably short fuse with her (and everyone else) the night she came home. I asked, even as it was happening, if Everett had found it difficult having mom be gone while we were adjusting to life in Taiwan: he responded angrily and sarcastically, “believe it or not, Dad, yes!”. I always think find it helpful when we identify the real root of our frustrations. In this instance, identifying the issue helped, but didn’t solve everything.

My second hypothesis is just one of fatigue: I think Everett is tired, and fatigue is contributing to his short fuse. I’m noticing Everett often presents as tired well before bedtime on this trip, and (unusually) is sleeping until the alarms go off in the morning. And fair enough: we’ve had an incredibly busy and active summer, and I can hardly blame Everett for struggling to keep up with sleep.

To your mom’s credit, she came out with us last night partly because she wanted to invest a little time and energy into repairing relations with Everett a bit. She originally envisioned taking Everett out alone, while I enabled Leland to hang out with one of his friends. But Leland’s friend wasn’t available after all, so we all went out together. But your mom still focused some energy on spending time with Everett. At the end of the night I asked if things were better between the two of you, and Everett said yes. I asked if they were merely improved (but still needing work) or all the way better, and Everett said “all the way better”. I’m really glad you guys (Everett and Mom) were able to get the time and interactions you needed to repair, and I’m particularly glad your mom knows how to invest in your relationship to repair things when needed.

My third hypothesis is that Everett is not looking forward to Leland going to middle school next year. This will be Everett’s first year at Elementary school without Leland, and Everett has been dreading that eventuality for a year. It was on our trip to Taiwan this time last year when I first broached the subject, remarking that it would be Everett’s last year with Leland on campus. Everett, I’ll never forget your response: your face instantly contorted into what was intended to be a smile, but was pretty clearly a desperate attempt to hold back tears. At the spring talent show I noticed a pretty heavy dose of “senior year spring semester energy” – that sense of invincibility from being Big Man on Campus, that sense of inevitability that the year would finish soon (and nothing anyone could do would stop it), and that excitement that a milestone was on the horizon – from the fifth graders. After the show, Everett raced to find me, burried your head in my shoulder, and said “next year is going to by horrible!” I asked if it was because Leland would be gone, and he affirmed “Leland and all his friends!” It struck me that Everett noticed the same energy I had, but that he – understandably – had personalized his reaction to it.

For the last two years, Everett has spent much (most?) of his time at recess and afterschool playing with Leland and his friends. I once asked Leland if that bugged him; he responded “kinda?” Everett is sufficiently physically developed that he can mostly tag along, and he particularly seems to thrive when the group plays sports. Sometimes Leland’s friends pick on Everett, which leads me to try to find a delicate balance: on the one hand, I expect Leland to protect Everett when his friends cross the line into truly inappropriate behavior; on the other hand, taking some abuse from the older kids is price of group entry for the younger brother. I had a younger sister myself, so haven’t lived these dynamics, but I’ve asked every man I know with an older or younger brother if they’ve experienced the same dynamics, and to a man they’ve all affirmed. I genuinely think there is something universal to that element of brotherly interaction: younger brother tags along, and suffers some abuse along the way. The benefit, so far as I can tell, is that as you guys age Everett will have a small army of protectors looking out for him in adolescence.

But the downside of spending so much time with Leland’s friends is that Everett has underinvested in relationships with kids closer to his own age. To be fair, I sympathize: I too tended to hang out with older kids growing up, and I suspect being tall and physically developed lends itself to seeing older kids as peers. I am curious how much of Everett’s recent behavior is prompted by a presumably unconscious sense of dread that Leland is going to a different school next year. Personally, I suspect having Leland move on to middle school will be very healthy for Everett, as I suspect it will prod Everett to form more of an independent identity and rely less on his seeming identity as Leland’s younger brother.

My final hypothesis is that Everett is our bellwether kid. I believe every family has a bellwether kid, and you can almost always identify the kid if you know the family well enough and know what to look for. The idea is that the bellwether kid is the relatively sensitive kid who feels the positive and negative energy radiating out of those around him. And when the bellwether kid feels negative energy flowing out of family members, it really bothers them. What happens is that no matter the source of the negative energy, the bellwether kid reacts, and most often reacts via misbehavior. So if Dad is feeling stressed out because of work, the bellwether kid intuitively feels the stress and acts out in an effort to get the negative energy away. Families tend to treat their bellwether kids as problematic, at least partly because it’s much more convenient to try to “fix” the bellwether kid than it is to address the negative energies flowing through the rest of the family.

This trip in particular, and this summer more broadly, has left us all a little stressed out. Your mom, on top of everything else, has been going through a lot of organizational changes at work, which is causing her more work stress than usual. I’ve noticed that I’m feeling and carrying more stress than I have since I worked; my sense is that this summer has included a little too much stimulus and not quite enough self care. In my last note I set a goal to do a good job of setting boundaries in order to continue my creative pursuits. Well, until now I’ve broadly failed at the attempt, and I think the lack of creative outlets and self care has come at the cost of feeling and carrying stress.

Ha, I’m just now realizing I left out a pretty major event that occurred this summer. Last Wednesday, a little over a week ago, a friend called me. It’s actually the family we met in Guerneville. The wife is here this summer with the kids, while the husband is home and working. Well, it turns out the wife was in a bike accident while visiting Sun Moon Lake; she was calling me from the emergency room in the small town nearest the lake. It was 1am back home, so the husband wasn’t reachable. Her kids had helped her get an ambulance and get to the hospital, where the doctors were telling her that 1) she broke her back, 2) that she needed invasive surgery, and 3) that she might be paralyzed. She was, quite understandably, panicked, and looking for some advice on what to do. When she called I was actually walking through the MRT station on my way to pick you up; I had tons of background noise and chaos surrounding me. For the first few minutes while she talked, I really had no idea what to say. For awhile I realized I could just listen and hear her talk: she was emotional after all, and understandably needed to express her fears and concerns to give her some space to function. So for awhile I adjusted to the new reality by just listening. Eventually I asked her what happened, but honestly that was a ploy to buy myself more time to figure out what to say. I’ll admit I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t know what to do or say. But one thing she mentioned repeatedly was that she wasn’t sure that this was the doctor she wanted operating on her. One should always get a second opinion in situations like this, and it’s fair to wonder whether the one available doctor in a small town is the most capable doctor to handle such an important procedure. Truth be told, I think her intuition also told her that this doctor wasn’t the right one for her. So I asked the first question that finally popped into my head: “are you safe to move?” She realized she hadn’t asked that question, so hung up to talk to the doctor (and call other people). Well, it turned out she was safe to move, so later that night she and the kids rode an ambulance, sirens blaring, for three hours to a hospital in Taipei.

As this was happening, my thoughts turned to my friend (the husband/dad of the family) and the kids. The husband is probably my closest friend in the world, so I couldn’t help but empathize with him. And for the kids, I couldn’t imagine how traumatic and stressful it might be to 1) watch mom break her back basically right in front of them and 2) suddenly be thrust into a position where so many decisions and actions rested on their shoulders. So I reached out to my friend, and I reached out to the kids. The kids had made contact with the dad, so he was now awake and aware of the situation. The kids seemed to be handling the situation decently well, and my goal there was mostly just to make sure they felt like they could reach out if they needed anything. I offered to the dad that it might make sense to set up a group WhatsApp where the kids could reach out for help, and then whichever dad (my friend or me) happened to be awake or available could respond and provide whatever help was needed.

This was all happening while your mom was in India. Unfortunately, this meant that, though I prioritized picking you guys up, looking after you, and minimizing your disruptions, I was pretty constantly on the phone calling or texting folks. You guys handled the situation wonderfully, but I felt pretty bad about how much time I spent on the phone that week, and how little parental attention you guys were getting Wednesday and Thursday night of that week.

By Wednesday night, the mom had reached a hospital in Taipei that specializes in spinal surgery. She contacted everyone she could think of back in the States, and managed to find a spinal surgery specialist in Taipei who her network knew and could contact. Fortunately, this doctor happened to be the attending doctor in the ER Thursday morning. By the time he reached her, he was already aware of her situation (their mutual friend had somehow made contact) and was looking for her. He asked for new scans, reviewed her situation, and decided he could address her situation with a minimally invasive surgery. According to my friend, this doctor exuded competence; he clearly put her mind at ease about finding the right doctor. Even better, he was able to fit her in for surgery that afternoon.

After dropping you guys off at school and coming home for a bit, I went to the hospital to find the family and see if there was anything I could do to help. If nothing else, I just wanted to see the situation in person, just to give my friend back home an update based on my in-person observations. When I arrived, I found the daughter near an entrance to the hospital with her grandmother (her mom’s mom) who lives in Taipei. Turns out the daughter had an ear infection, so the grandmother was helping her schedule an appointment with a doctor in the hospital so that she might get some antibiotics. When I arrived they briefly paused their scheduling attempt to bring me to the ER to see the mom. The mom seemed pretty glad to see me. She was pretty emotional at the sight of me, and I’d be fascinated to (at some later date) hear what she was feeling in that moment. My sense is she felt some relief at having an adult present (to be fair, her mom was also there, though I got the sense she didn’t feel at all comfortable leaning on her mom for support, for reasons I don’t fully understand). I kinda suspect she also felt some shame over the accident; she had already expressed that she felt like the accident was the result of carelessness on her part. I also strongly suspect she just felt unusually vulnerable, which probably felt pretty uncomfortable and unfamiliar: this is a person who strikes me as someone who doesn’t let her guard down easily, for better and worse.

After I arrived, the mom turned her attention to me, and I kept her company by letting her talk and asking her questions about the situation. This freed the daughter up to focus on getting her ear appointment scheduled. The son seemed deeply uncomfortable by the situation, and generally seemed to be avoiding the ER entirely. I can’t say I blame him: even at 15, I can’t image that it’s easy for the baby of the family to see mom in that kind of state.

When I arrived it was unclear whether the mom would have surgery that day. We were uncertain right up to the point where they prepped her for surgery in the early afternoon. I was lucky to be able to stay with her up until it was time for her to go into surgery, at which point I helped the daughter and grandmother move their belongings up to her room (which only became available once we confirmed she would go into surgery; until that happened the mom would remain in the ER). For whatever reason, I think my presence helped the mom in the hours before surgery.

I left the hospital to come pick the two of you up from school. Each of you, independently, came running up to ask “Dad, is Auntie paralyzed?” Clearly this situation had something of an impact on the two of you too. I had to tell you, honestly, that I didn’t know for sure, but that she had gone into surgery and that we would need to wait until the surgery was over and we heard what the doctor had to say.

At this point I texted my friend back home, just to give him an update on everything I had seen and experienced. He could get most of the same information from his kids, so I focused on 1) making sure I shared all the relevant details briefly – just in case the kids left something out due to the complexity of the situation, and 2) giving him my personal observations on how everyone was doing. Basically, I was sending my friend the updates I would have wanted had the situation been reversed. Fortunately I thought the kids were holding up remarkably well, and I frankly thought the day had gone about as well as could be imagined: the mom had gone from being relegated to a crowded and brightly lit ER where she was unlikely to get any sleep (due to pain, brightness, noise, and a lack of privacy) to having surgery with a doctor that inspired confidence in one of the most discerning people I know and moving into a private room. The kids let us know when the mom came out of surgery several hours later, but they didn’t hear from the doctor that evening.

I went back to the hospital the next day (Friday) to find out the surgery had been successful, that the mom would be receiving a brace for her back later in the day, and that upon receiving the brace the doctor wanted her up and walking around. That shocking outcome simplified my role for Friday. I participated in the celebratory mood before noticing both kids pulling out snacks early in the afternoon. I asked them what they had for lunch. They responded with blank stares. I asked when they had last eaten a meal. The blank stares remained. Finally I asked “what have you guys eaten today”. Without either kid changing expression, both just held up the snacks as if to say “this”. I said “how about we go get something to eat”. The mom agreed, and though the situation immediately became more complicated thanks to a nurse arriving to clean her wounds and take a new x-ray, followed by the brace being delivered, I managed to help get the kids each a cooked meal that day. I left the hospital thinking the prior 48 hours (starting from the time she had broken her back) could not have gone much better for the mom, and feeling a sense of gratitude for the rapid improvement in her prognosis, and perhaps a little proud of my tiny contributions.

After spending the weekend in Taichung with the cousins, I returned to the hospital on Monday to help the mom as she got discharged from the hospital. My contributions at the hospital were small: helping to carry stuff home, but also (again) just providing the mom a sense of security from having an adult she trusted around. We got the mom into a taxi and back to the apartment where she and the kids are staying in Taipei. I helped her unpack and get settled in. We took inventory and realized she needed a few things to feel ready to unwind and sleep through the night, so we split up to run some errands: the daughter went to a supermarket to pick up an assigned list of items, while I went with the mom to a medial supply store to pick up a few tools she apparently needed to help sleep at night. I was fairly stunned by how well she was able to get around: she walked slowly and gingerly, but far more capably than I ever would have anticipated. Once the mom felt adequately set up, I left to let her focus on rest and recovery. I told her I would come back to check on her later in the week, but she texted me a few days later to say coming by would be unnecessary because things were going well and she and the kids were fully capable of taking care of her needs. This was good news and a welcome break from what had been a fair amount of time and energy allocated on my part. I am reminded as I type that I would like to check on the kids, just to make sure they too are doing well and don’t need some support.

So, on the one hand, I give myself some grace for not writing thus far this summer: between a busy June schedule, followed by trips to Singapore and then Taiwan, where your mom left for India while we got you settled into a school routine just in time to learn that our family friend broke her back and needed some support…of course I haven’t had as much time to write. On the other hand, I subscribe to the theory that your external world comes to reflect your internal state, and take the chaos of the last few weeks especially as cause for reflection. I have yet to reflect sufficiently to identify what, if anything, the chaos of the last few weeks are meant to teach me. What does feel increasingly clear is that, despite my aspiration to set boundaries, I have not done a great job of actually doing so. It’s tempting to make excuses for the lack of boundary setting: one week you guys were home from school, and I’m not sure I’d ever be comfortable denying a friend support in a scenario like what happened last week. But I recall wasting some opportunities to write early in the summer when you guys were in camps. And over the course of this week I’ve said yes (sometimes explicitly, other times implicitly) to encroachments on my time that I knew would frustrate my desire to write. So I wonder how much of the chaos of the last few weeks is meant to remind me to set more and better boundaries, vs how much is due to some other internal resistance to creation. Honestly, at this point, I don’t know the answer.

Either way, I’ve enjoyed the summer thus far, and I look forward to the rest of it. My intention is to write again next week, so we’ll see if I do a better job of setting boundaries and prioritizing some of my own wants and needs. In the meantime, I very much look forward to our weekend together as a family. We’re becoming increasingly capable and confident navigating Taiwan by ourselves (versus our first few trips, where we pretty constantly had folks hosting us and showing us around), which really opens up our ability to enjoy and appreciate our time here. Leland even hit something of a milestone tonight: twice he motioned for me to let him order food on behalf of the family in Chinese. Until now we’ve prodded Leland to use his Chinese in Taiwan frequently; he almost always declines. The lone exceptions: when Leland wants a treat, and I tell him that he’s going to have to order it for himself if he wants it. But tonight was different: Leland quietly but proactively asked for the opportunity to practice his Chinese. In each case the interactions turned more complex than anticipated; in one interaction they were out of one of our requested items; in another they had several clarifying questions. In each case Leland handled the communication, and translated to me when he needed my inputs deciding the correct answer. I was quite proud of that progress, which seems to affirm the overarching thesis that these trips to Taiwan seem to help your Chinese; in part from the sheer frequency of practice at school, in part from the intrinsic motivation that you seem to get from being in Taiwan and recognizing how speaking Chinese opens up opportunities and experiences that are otherwise unavailable, and in part from the opportunities to practice out in the real world surrounded by people who often speak English reluctantly if at all.

Everett himself seems to have hit something of a stride with his own Chinese. He’s not as far along as Leland, but he’s in the same class Leland was in last year (at a younger age). Earlier this week when I asked if Everett was learning any Chinese, you response emphatically “Yes. A lot.” Leland expressed a similar confidence in his learning at about this point in the program last year, so I am optimistic about Everett’s future motivation and progress as well.

In terms of the future, I’ll be curious to see. At some point I anticipate sports (especially for Everett) are likely to encroach on our ability to spend summers in Taiwan. And it’s entirely possible you guys will decide you don’t want to do this trip anymore. Earlier in the trip I genuinely wondered whether we would all decide we wanted to come back next year; at this point I’ll be a little surprised if we aren’t unanimous in our desire to return. If anyone disagrees, it would likely be Everett. But Everett enjoys our local friends, and has really started enjoying the program in a way I don’t think he did last year or even last week, so I’m optimistic even he will want to come back next year.

Because as disruptive as this trip is to my schedule, I genuinely enjoy coming here. I enjoy seeing our friends, eating the food, and experiencing a culture so vastly different from America’s. I also enjoy how much both of you enjoy your time here. I particularly enjoy how much your mom loves being back in Taiwan, and how happy she seems when she’s here. I also enjoy how we get to grant you both a little more independence while we’re here, trusting that things are a little safer and more accessible in Taipei than they are in American cities. On a deeper level, I enjoy how we get to measure progress via our time here: it’s relatively easy to remember where we were this time last year as a family and compare to our current situation; this comparison allows me to gauge not only your progress in terms of learning Chinese, but even just your basic maturation and ability to handle increased responsibility and independence. These trips serve as little test beds, which allow us to learn and recalibrate, often making minor but important adjustments to how we operate for the following year. We have big changes on the horizon, but I find myself optimistic that this trip is helping us prepare for those changes, in part by helping us appreciate how much has already changed, but also by helping us take a fuller and more honest look at where we are as a family, and where we need to focus our attention and energy accordingly.

With that, here’s to a great weekend ahead, visiting friends and experiencing some new things.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad