I’m pre-writing your obituary. I hope it does not have to get published immediately, but I did feel it would be interesting to have you speak to people from beyond the grave, if it does get published. So: Do you have anything you would like to say?
In the past few months, I had to make an interesting choice to go on this clinical trial that’s pretty nasty. And you do a little bit of introspection: What’s the point of extending life a couple of months? My girls are now 24 and 22, so they are launched and are doing well. And my wife is mindful of the truth that death is a wicked thief, but she is not despairing at all through this. So I really think that I made the choice to do this clinical trial and extend the few months of life because my boy’s only 14. I want him to have a dad for a little bit longer and slap him upside the head and love on him.
But it’s really a function of the two great commands, trying to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and love our neighbor as ourselves.
And what does it look like to live well in this time? For me, these months have been largely about my son, Breck, but they’re also more broadly about the challenge of what it means to raise kids in this time and place. We spend so much time talking about the jobs apocalypse in light of AI and the digital revolution. And that’s an interesting question. I care about it a lot. But much more fundamental than just the paid-vocation piece, the jobs piece, is what does it mean to be human in this time when we’ve got technological tools that are distorting reality in such fundamental ways?
I think we have a big, big collective action problem of what it means to raise kids in a world that will be this disrupted this frequently. People who are 25, 30, 35, 40, 45 years old are going to have their world upended again and again. What are the fundamental truths and roots that give life meaning and place meaning? I’ve been reflecting about that a lot.
America works and thrives to the degree that people have thick local communities and places and small platoons and congregations to assemble for worship on Sunday morning and throughout the week. Right now, I think we’re living through a period of institutional collapse, and we’re going to need to go through a wave of Tocquevillian institution-building. We’ve been mostly harvesting the consumer benefits of a technology revolution without acknowledging the production, vocational, and communal costs of burning all the districts where local community happens.
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