Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited - 2026 - Part II

Introduction

Last week, in keeping with  my eight-year tradition, I examined Google’s Autocomplete suggestions—i.e., you start a query and have it suggest the rest—to learn about the American Zeitgeist in 2026. Part I focused on crime and punishment (i.e., what Americans fear getting in trouble for) and today I’ll cover everything else.

Who, what, where, when, why, how

Searching on “what is,” here are the top five suggestions Google offered for completing the query:

• What is my ip
• What is the 25th amendment
• What is easter monday
• What is vibe coding
• What is easter about

That first one, “what is my ip,” appeared eight years ago but not four years ago. It’s a pointless inquiry, as your IP address doesn’t actually say much about you or your device configuration ; these addresses are assigned dynamically and temporarily. Gamers and users of VPNs have reasons to want to know this, but they’ve surely bookmarked a website that can actually provide this info. So the popularity of this query is probably based on fear and ignorance: people watched some TikTok video about how “they” are going to “scam you through your IP address,” or they got a scam email saying, “we know your IP address is 192.168.128.230,” and these poor souls are just trying to determine if they’re really in danger. Could Americans really be that fearful and ignorant? Decide for yourself. Perhaps the rest of this post will help.

The second Autocomplete suggestion is surely the result of Americans reading about this or that lawmaker saying it’s time to invoke Section 4 of the 25th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allows removal of the president if he’s deemed “unable to discharge his duties.”  The trigger for this saber-rattling was a post from the Donald on Truth Media on Easter Sunday, alluding to the military offensive against Iran: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Yes, he really said this. The president.

So … does this Autocomplete suggestion support the notion that Americans are fearful and ignorant? Well, I wouldn’t blame anybody for being fearful (either that Trump will be removed or that he’s unhinged, depending on your political bent), and I do not considerate it ignorant to not know what the 25th amendment is. I’d never heard of it either until sometime in the past six months when some other Trump outburst led to the same Quixotic call for removing him.

Moving on to the Easter thing, perhaps Americans are thinking more globally in general, because this didn’t come up four or eight years ago. Obviously Easter Monday is simply the day after Easter (today, in fact) and Americans are probably feeling a bit chapped we don’t get it as a holiday like so much of Europe does. Fair enough.

On to vibe coding: needless to say this query didn’t exist four years ago. Vibe coding is the method of programming where you tell AI what you want, essentially, without caring about how the resulting code works (which makes many in the industry nervous). A coder friend of mine likened it to pulling the handle on a slot machine. I think a lot more Americans are aware of vibe coding than would actually engage in it. I doubt it’d be as popular if it weren’t such an inspired, buzz-y term; if we called it “natural language-directed code generation with deferred comprehension” I doubt anybody would care. But since “vibe coding” sounds so cool, it’s making the rounds, and people don’t want to feel out of touch when it comes up. So it’s not fear or ignorance per se; it’s fear of ignorance.

The popularity of “What is Easter about” suggests to me that a growing number of Americans never went to church, or more specifically to a Christian one. It’s tempting to flag this as ignorance, but then who establishes how knowledgeable an American (especially an immigrant) should be about this (or any) religion?

Okay, let’s move on to “why.” The top five Autocomplete suggestions are:

• Why is the market down today
• Why berkeley
• Why california
• Why is easter called easter
• Why was jesus crucified

Those last two I’ll just lump under the same category as “What is Easter about,” but the other three didn’t show up in either of my last two investigations so let’s have a look. “Why is the market down today” would seem to be a perennial question, other than right now. I mean, why do you think, ya bozos? Could it be related to the world experiencing the largest oil crisis in history? If Americans can’t equate the price of gas to the stock market, I’m sorry—that’s just ignorant. But getting back to fearful, perhaps in this realm they’re not fearful enough.

The “why Berkeley” and “why California” suggestions are a real mystery to me, since the correct answer to both is “duh!” The Google Gemini AI overview responses are, respectively, “UC Berkeley is consistently ranked as the world’s top public research university, offering an elite, rigorous education, top-tier faculty, and massive research opportunities,” and “California is a global hub for innovation, entertainment, and economic power, boasting the largest state economy in the U.S. (4th largest globally).” (As for why these questions seem to have gotten so much search traction, I really have no idea, though my IP address—yes, we’ve come full circle on that—does tell Google my approximate whereabouts, and in fact I live in Albany which is right next door to Berkeley.)

Now we’ll look at “who.” Four years ago people were googling Julia Fox (whoever that is or was); Will Smith’s wife; Moon Knight;  the Super Bowl teams; and Joe Rogan. Here are the top five today:

• Who won march madness
• Who is nancy guthrie
• Who is this
• Who is steve hilton
• Who is this meme

March Madness is obviously some sports tournament that ended less than a week ago so who cares—it probably says nothing about the zeitgeist. Nancy Guthrie is a missing person, the mother of some news personality, who is in the current news because there’s a ransom note now, and a sheriff with an undeclared loaded gun, and surely other bits of lurid intrigue, none of which I care about, because this person is a complete stranger. As she surely is to all these people googling her just because it’s exciting. Seriously, people, go read a crime novel. On to Steve Hilton: he is running for public office and that’s timely, blah blah blah.

Now, “who is this” is a fascinating suggestion. At first I took it to be a sign that somebody forgot he was only using a search engine, and assumed he was in conversation with an AI chatbot, and forgot which one it was. (I myself jump from bot to bot whenever they freeze my session due to lack of paid subscription.) But I went ahead and searched on it, and Google says it’s either the name of a song (it names four candidates) or “a phrase used to ask for the identity of a person, often used over the phone.” On this basis, I’m either going to finally become a rapper and write a song called “What Is My IP,” or I’m going to start asking people, especially over the phone, “Who is this?” Since random telemarketers are bound to volunteer this information anyway, I’ll stick to using it with people I know, whose voice I recognize, and who are in my contacts. Should shake things up a bit.

But “who is this meme” is a real mystery. Perhaps it’s just that “meme” is such a common noun, and the phrase “who is this” is just yearning for a predicate, so Google took a wild guess. Who knows? Who is this knows?

Let’s move on to “where.” The first carryover from previous years is, predictably enough, “where’s my refund”  which suggests I shouldn’t do this report so close to Tax Day. That query came in at #2. The most popular is “where is artemis 2 now,” pertaining to the spacecraft that is heading for the moon (and once again, the popularity of this query says basically nothing about the zeitgeist). Next was “where is the super bowl 2026” which came up last time as well, and I just absolutely cannot fathom the popularity of this query because the Super Bowl happened already, all the way back in February, and if even I know that, despite being totally uninterested, how can so many people not? Next was “where to watch heated rivalry,” another broadcast sporting event; that this suggestion came under “where” is a random artifact of video websites being thought of as places. Ditto “where to watch uconn vs Michigan.” So much for where.

The next query ought to be more interesting: how. What are Americans trying to learn? The only carryover from previous surveys was “how to screenshot on mac,” which at first blush begs the question: haven’t people figured this out by now? But actually this makes sense: it’s because Gen-Z, having been weaned on smartphones, not laptops, is exploring this for the first time, and/or the Mac users have forgotten since they’re mostly phone-addicted as well, and/or entering their demented years. “How to screenshot on windows” was right behind this, in #2. Next was “how to file a tax extension,” making its first appearance though procrastination is obviously as old as time. Fourth place went to “how many ounces in a gallon,” which shows that Americans are apparently no better at math than they were four years ago, but at least they’re thinking bigger, because last time we saw “how many ounces in a cup.” Fifth place went to “how far is the moon from earth,” which again is merely timely, not illuminating.

The future

This brings us to the most exciting part of the post, where we stop living in the past and ask Google about what’s on the horizon. I started with “am I going…” Compared to last time, I see a whole lot of repeated queries:  am I going crazy, am I going to be okay, am I going to hell, am I going blind? There’s kind of a sadness, I think, about people googling these important and existential questions when they have to know Google won’t have the answers, at least not anything they can trust. I wonder if these people are like the speaker in Poe’s “The Raven,” who keeps asking this bird questions—“Is there balm in Gilead?” and (in essence) “will I get over my lost Lenore?”—because he knows the raven won’t answer, other than “Nevermore,” and he wants to torment himself, like some ritual act of self-flagellation. These first perennial Autocomplete queries were so sad, I was almost cheered up by the fifth one, the relatively harmless “am I going to owe taxes in 2025.” (Uh, ask your tax software, dude! Problem solved…)

And now we are on to our final Autocomplete query, “will I ever.” These are very similar to four and eight years ago, with repeat appearances of “will I ever find love,” “will I ever be able to afford a house,” “will I ever be happy,” and “will I ever find love again.” What’s instructive are the suggestions we no longer see: “will I ever get a ps5” and “will I ever get a job.” I guess four years ago it was hard to get a PS5 (don’t worry, Gemini says supply has largely caught up with demand!), but at least people had jobs. I feel bad that people are putting this lugubrious “will I ever get a job?” query to Google, knowing it’s probably as hopeless as asking “am I going to hell?” or “is there balm in Gilead?” All I can advise is a) try touching up your LinkedIn profile, and b) it’s not you … it’s them.

And now, following the tradition I established four and eight years ago, I’ll abandon Google and its Autocomplete and turn to the Magic 8-Ball at www.ask8ball.net. I asked it, “Will I ever be good enough?” It promptly replied, “Without a doubt.” Maybe too promptly … I mean, not even AI seems that fast! So just to make sure that this utterance wasn’t its only stock and store, I asked it, “Is there balm in Gilead?” It answered, “Reply hazy, try again.” I guess I’ll have to google it.

Previous Autocomplete Zeitgeist posts

• Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited - 2026 - Part I
• Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited
• The Autocomplete Zeitgeist

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Is It Harder to Get Into a Top College Now?

Introduction

In my last post, I presented a list of college application “frequently asked questions.” Because research is a hassle, I didn’t do any. My answers were all based on what I’ve heard from parents in my community and from my older daughter. I regurgitated these people’s collected wisdom in slightly distorted form to inject humor. My main point was to satirize the doom-and-gloom attitude of pretty much everybody around me (except my wife, who also finds the prevailing attitude pointless and annoying).

                                                                     

That being said, I assumed that my answer to the first FAQ—”Is it harder to get into college now?”—was basically correct. (My answer was, “Yes, it absolutely is. Your child is way, way smarter, more industrious, and more resourceful than you, and yet won’t be able to sail through the process and attend a top college like you did.”) I took everybody’s word for it that top colleges really are more selective nowadays, simply because this opinion was always given with such an air of authority. I took it on faith that my community was actually basing this position on facts and research. It turns out that these people are all just a bunch of ninnies, mistaking fear for reality … Chicken Littles all, spouting falsehoods irresponsibly. This post debunks all that and presents a theory on the origin of this mass hysteria.

The conventional wisdom

All the parents and high school kids around me say the same thing: “It’s way harder getting into a top college than it used to be.” This is stated as irrefutable fact and when I’ve expressed skepticism, I’ve been shot down. The evidence given (if any) is the lower rate of acceptance—i.e., the number of rejected applications. So many more students are being rejected, the logic goes, our crop of kids may well be among them.

I have instinctively doubted this, and in trying to buck up my daughter I said, “It’s probably just more pack fodder. The field is larger, but not the front of the group that actually has a chance.” I chose this bike race analogy to try to make the dialogue briefer and a bit less dull. My point was, if you have 20 good racers who are all competitive, and then a bunch of poseurs buy fancy bikes and jump in to the race, without a prayer of placing high, your race hasn’t really gotten harder. It’s just gotten bigger.

My daughter refuted this counterpoint on the grounds that a) students with really good grades and SAT/ACT scores are being turned away, and b) everybody knows it’s gotten harder—this is just established fact. Out of sheer laziness and a sense that pessimists are usually right, I never pursued the truth. Until now.

The truth

The truth is, the increased difficulty of a top student getting into a top school has been greatly exaggerated. Here is a summary of my findings:

• The number of high school seniors is shrinking
• The number of qualified applicants to top colleges has not significantly grown
• Students apply to far more colleges than ever before, out of fear of being rejected and because electronic application methodologies like Common App have made this so easy to do
• This application inflation is greatly decreasing the acceptance rate
• This acceptance rate number is illusory because so many applicants are not qualified
• Colleges are deliberately encouraging behaviors that shrink this acceptance rate number, to appear more elite
• Looking at the metric that matters—the percentage of top students accepted by at least one top college—paints a picture that is astonishingly rosier

I will cite evidence from six articles (all from mainstream news magazines) to support all this. My conclusion? Virtually every member of my community owes my kid and me an apology for all the unwarranted anxiety they have caused by perpetuating this myth of increased selectivity.

And now, here is my point-by-point evidence of the above, to thoroughly document and explain what is really going on.

The number of high school seniors is declining

This article in The Atlantic states, “The number of American high school seniors is shrinking, having peaked in 2011.” This is also stated by Time magazine here. (Actually, the Atlantic cites Time on this point, but presumably The Atlantic does fact-check.)

The number of qualified applicants to top colleges has not significantly grown

The Atlantic reports that “according to [education company] Noodle[.org]’s data, the number of seats at competitive colleges has grown faster than the total pool of qualified applicants—raising a student’s chances of getting into a ‘selective college.’” Meanwhile, US News & World Report declares, “As selective as they’d like prospective students to believe they are, colleges and universities have been watching enrollment decline for five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Last year alone, it dropped 1.4 percent, or by about 270,000 students, at institutions nationwide…. Part of that is due to the shrinking supply of 18-year-olds and to families’ concerns about the high cost, and relative value, of college.”

Students are applying to far more colleges than before

The Atlantic reports, “Many high achieving students will apply to 10 or 15 schools, so you’re looking at doubling or even tripling the number of applications from the same pool of applicants. Application inflation is linked, [the Noodle.org VP] believes, to the Common App.” The Washington Post reports, “More than 800,000 students used the Common Application last year to submit some 3.5 million applications to more than 700 colleges. Plenty of students today apply to colleges they have hardly any intention of attending.” The New York Times explains it thus: “Enabled by technology that makes it easier to copy and send electronic documents and driven by the competitive anxiety that plummeting admission rates produce, top students have been sending out more applications…. In essence, the growth in applications per student creates a vicious cycle, causing admission rates at the best schools to artificially decline, students to become more anxious, and the number of applications per student to grow even more.”

Application inflation is greatly decreasing the acceptance rate

The Washington Post article describes the acceptance rate number in somewhat useful terms: “The top 20 national universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, for instance, enroll only about 100,000 students out of 17 million undergraduates nationwide. So the denominator is rising as the numerator stays the same in an equation that is more like the odds of playing the lottery for most students and parents.” This explanation is only somewhat useful, though, because of course colleges aren’t accepting students at random. This is the whole problem: the acceptance rate is being treated like odds in a lottery when in fact colleges have an objective basis to discard most applications.

This acceptance rate number is illusory

As reported in Time magazine, “What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions.” The New York Times makes a similar analysis: “[Admission rates] don’t represent the true odds of a well-qualified student’s being admitted to a top school. That’s because anyone can apply to college, well qualified or otherwise. Selective colleges immediately toss the long shots and dreamers from the admissions pile in order to concentrate on students with a legitimate shot at getting in. But they don’t parse their admissions statistics that way, in part because it’s in their best interests to seem as selective as possible.”

Colleges are deliberately shrinking the acceptance rate

US News & World Report declares, “Some [colleges] have encouraged the applications boom, with its resulting effect on their ability to predict yields, by urging marginally qualified students to apply. Known as ‘recruit to deny,’ this practice makes them appear more selective and boosts their standings in some college rankings.” The Washington Post reports, “Colleges buy more than 80 million names of test takers from the College Board annually. In some cases, schools simply encouraged more students to apply as a way to improve their standings in the rankings.”

As far as I can tell, my daughter has received solicitations from every college in the country, even the ones she’s sure would never accept her. She now holds the distinction of getting more junk mail than the rest of the family combined (to say nothing of her e-mail spam, which currently stands at over 2,500 messages with 50 in the last week alone). Hell, Carleton College even sent her a Frisbee!

The metric that matters

My favorite among these articles is the one from the New York Times, which makes a valiant effort to talk us off the ledge: “For well-qualified students, getting into a good college isn’t difficult. It probably isn’t that much harder than it was generations ago. The fact that everyone believes otherwise shows how reliance on a single set of data—in this case, institutional admission rates—can create a false sense of what’s really going on.” The article goes on to say: 

Some students are applying to 20 or more schools: to increase their odds of making a single match. The most important elite college admissions statistic, then, is not the percentage of applications top schools accept. It’s the percentage of top students who are admitted to at least one top school. And that number isn’t 5 percent or 20 percent or even 50 percent. It’s 80 percent. It turns out that four out of five well-qualified students who apply to elite schools are accepted by at least one…. Since there has never been a time when 100 percent of well-qualified students were successful in the college admissions market, the truism that elite colleges are far more difficult to crack than in years gone by can’t be correct: 80 percent is too close, mathematically, to nearly everyone.

Needless to say, this Times article should be required reading for all parents of college-bound teenagers, and for those teenagers.

My daughter’s reaction

When I presented all this to my daughter—the one person I’m willing to bother arguing with about this, because I hope to reduce her anxiety—she was understandably skeptical. She immediately began Googling all this for herself. “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’ve already compiled the relevant articles for you.” She gave me one of those looks. Acknowledging that of course she’d fact-check me later anyway, I asked for a few minutes of her attention to read her some of the passages I’ve quoted above.

My daughter didn’t actually seem relieved. Perhaps all this seems too good to be true given the atmosphere of doom she has been trapped in for the last year or so. Or maybe being optimistic just feels weird and wrong at this point. She immediately came up with some hard questions. “What do they mean ‘top school’?” she asked. I cited the article: it defines top school as “one of the 113 schools identified by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges as the most selective.” My daughter, naturally, looked this up on the spot and read off the list. I’d heard of at last 90% of the colleges listed, and they really are elite. (My alma mater, UC Berkeley, didn’t even make the list.)

Next she questioned how the Times defined a “well-qualified” student. The answer is, it’s “combined SAT scores (or an ACT equivalent) of at least 1300.” My daughter stared in blank disbelief. “That’s not high at all. That’s like 60th percentile,” she said. Then she fact-checked herself: it’s actually 90th percentile. Competitive, sure, but not insanely high. Could the Times really be right about this? Well, they based their findings on the applications of 800,000 students. And they’re the New York Times, for crying out loud.

Why the hysteria?

So the natural question is, how could every adult I’ve talked to about this be so wrong? Why this widespread panic? I have two theories.

First, it’s far more exciting and engaging to paint everything in the darkest shades possible. FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) gives a nice urgent edge to your sidebar chatter at book club. FUD also makes better headlines, which might be all most people bother to read. Consider this one , in Business Insider: “It was the hardest year on record to get into elite colleges—admissions experts explain why.” What’s remarkable about the article is that it doesn’t really support this “hardest” assertion, but rather says much the same thing as the other articles I’ve cited. For example: “The steady uptick of college applicants, especially at elite schools, is stark, driven in part by the emergence of Common App, which allows students to apply to many schools at once.” It goes on to say, “There may be reason to view this lowering acceptance rate with some skepticism.” It trails off talking about how the strong cohort of high-scoring international applicants, “while it may drive down the overall acceptance rate, likely has less impact on US applicants than is sometimes believed.”

Meanwhile, beyond being typical drama queens, I think a lot of these parents are responding to their deep-seated fear that their kid(s) will wash out. (If so, they’re likely sharing their kids’ experience.) Perhaps by portraying the college admission game as nearly unwinnable they’re assuaging, in advance, the shame of their kid’s defeat.

It’s tempting to have sympathy for these beleaguered people, but in fact I’m kind of pissed off. Their willingness to be readily duped by deliberately misleading statistics, and to heap that unfounded fear on their poor children—and mine!—has caused untold unnecessary anxiety. And that’s not the only collateral damage. By creating so much fear and angst, our communities are teaching children to be self-absorbed and monomaniacal. My teen years involved a lot of messing around, having fun, killing time, and basically being a kid. Our current crop of teens are like 16 going on 40. Practically every action they take has their college admission in mind. As a group they’re just a huge buzz-kill. You know who they remind me of? Stressed out middle-aged parents. It’s pathetic.

Will it ever end?

Alas, I’m not sure getting into a good college will actually help. By that point, worrying and hand-wringing will have become a habit that is hard to shake. I’m basing this on a couple of things.

The first is an anecdote shared with me by an acquaintance whose sister works at Duke University, and whose job includes interviewing prospective students—i.e., those who have been accepted—to determine scholarship eligibility. She was struck, my acquaintance told me, by how unexcited and often downright sullen many of these kids were. I mean, here they’d been accepted by Duke, but they seemed so downcast! So finally she asked one of them why he wasn’t more excited. “I’m still waiting to hear from Harvard,” the ungrateful, over-privileged little shit replied.

Here is my second anecdote, from spending an afternoon at UC Berkeley at an internship fair. My role there, as I was quick to explain to every Cal student I talked to, was simply to answer their questions and describe the culture at the company I work for. I made it clear that I wasn’t the one evaluating them. But almost every student treated our chat like a job interview. They all had pretty extensive résumés, even the freshmen (which made up a surprisingly high proportion of the group, given that they were only like six weeks into their college careers). They all had this air of desperation about them.

One interaction in particular illustrates what I’m talking about. This student asked me, “What classes should I take?” I replied, “Well, I didn’t major in Computer Science, so I wouldn’t know anything about that.” She pressed on, “No … I mean, what classes should I take?” She was practically winking at me. I finally grasped her meaning: she meant what classes would look good on her résumé and help her get an internship at my company. I had no idea. I told her, “What I’ve witnessed in tech is that a lot of engineering types don’t write well. I think you should take a couple of writing classes.” She seemed perplexed and asked, “Can I?” I replied, “Of course you can! You can take whatever class you want! And you should … I mean, you’re at a world class university. You should take advantage of your opportunities here!” Her expression was priceless, like a light bulb on a dimmer switch gradually coming on. She had clearly never thought about college in any other terms than advancement and career prospects. “Wow … I guess I can!” she replied, astonished.

Call to action

If you’ve been sowing doom and gloom by parroting all this received wisdom about colleges being more selective, please stop. If you have a freaked out kid, please tell him or her to relax and try not to worry. And if you don’t believe me about any of this, go click on some of the links I’ve included here and read these articles for yourself.

As for me, next time some fellow parent trots out all this malarkey about college admissions being way more competitive, I’m going to tell him flat-out that he’s wrong. No, I won’t subject him to a withering argument … I’ll go one worse. I’ll ask him to read this post. This of course will end the dialogue forever, since as you well know, nobody reads this blog … except, apparently, you (and I hereby offer my congratulations at your intellectual stamina).

Postscript

This post only scratches the surface of my disgust at prevailing attitudes toward higher education. For a more comprehensive (but lighter-weight) survey, check out my previous post.

For further reading

• The Truth About Elite College Admissions
• College Application Frequently Asked Questions
• How to Choose a Major
• The Best Advice I’ve Received
• Going Broke at College
• The Importance of Goals - Debunked!
• Parables from the Rooster Father

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Fear & Bloating On Hallowe’en

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Introduction

The bloating part goes without saying, and this photo captures exactly what I’m talking about:

(Update: for a brilliant narrative of Hallowe'en bloating, check out my brother's comment at the end of this blog.)

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The fear part is a bit more complicated: I’m going to describe what is scary—not just fun-scary, but actually scary—about Hallowe’en. There are several categories: mythical fears, historical fears, real-time fears, and the dread of nascent fascism.

Mythical fears

The main mythical fear, of course, is the razor blade embedded in the apple. I was astonished to hear this one again this year (though the person who mentioned it may have been speaking ironically). Back in elementary school we got a stern warning about this from the teachers—practically a scolding. I don’t know what motivated the teachers: did they think this was a real threat, or were they just as titillated as we were, or were they just increasing our excitement about the holiday? Never mind that in the history of man there has never been a razor blade embedded in an apple.

The more modern fear is that kids will be abducted while trick-or-treating. I don’t remember there being any fear of this when I was a kid. As far back as I can remember, I trick-or-treated without parents. There was one kid on our block whose dad would accompany him, and we mocked him for it. But these days, every kid has at least one parent along. We parents travel alongside our kids in a big mob. Alexa gets a house or two away from Lindsay and it’s hard to keep them both in sight.

Historical fears

As a kid, I really did find Hallowe’en scary. Here are some highlights.

First, there was the costume accident. My dad was helping my brother Geoff with his robot costume, which had a mechanical arm with a bicycle brake caliper on the end, so Geoff could grab candy. My dad was using a Swiss army knife and the blade closed up on his finger, slicing it really badly. It bled like crazy. Of course my brothers exaggerated, telling me how if it weren’t for the fingernail (that went “all the way to the knuckle!”) , Dad’s finger would have been cut clean off. (It didn’t occur to me to ask about the bone in there.)

Then there was the drunken girl episode. I think I was still in elementary school. My brothers and I, out trick-or-treating, came upon a couple of teenage girls, one of whom was bawling. Geoff explained to me, in hushed tones, that she was drunk, and that was what happened when you got drunk. So for years I thought drunkenness always led to crying your eyes out, and since I wasn’t sure by what mechanism drinking alcohol led to drunkenness, I thought it might happen to me—maybe all the time—when I got older.

It wasn’t until fifth grade that I got really scared, though. This was the beginning of self-consciousness, when I didn’t want any undue attention drawn to me—and a good costume did just that. I was fine for years when I always went as a vampire (not Count Dracula, mind you, just some rank-and-file vampire). But in fifth grade I had to wear the costume my brother Geoff had made. It was an insect head, made from papier-mâché, with big bulging eyes. To make the eyes really cool, like the compound eyes of a real insect, Geoff had painstakingly glued split peas, round side out, over the entire surface of each eye. It took him forever. When it was done, he was too shy to wear it, so he gave it to me. I got to school, put it on, and was immediately fussed over by the teachers, which embarrassed me almost to death so I had to take off the costume. (Teacher approval equaled the enmity of your classmates.) My best friend asked if he could wear it and I gladly let him. He entered the school-wide costume contest and won first prize.

In seventh grade things got really bad. I went to the junior high school Hallowe’en dance, equipped with Geoff’s latest costume creation, an even cooler insect head with miniature marshmallows covering the compound eyes. Teachers and administrators were delighted, thus I was mortified, and stashed the costume in the school office. Once I hit the gym—that is, the dance floor—I realized I was a complete social outcast, and would have gladly shrunken myself to insect size to escape everybody. A girl I had a crush on had this sparkly stuff in her hair for some reason, and this scared me. Because of the crush, she’d scared me to begin with. Then my friend—my only friend at the school, whom I know from bike racing—danced with her, which just seemed unfair. As it dawned on him that I was an outcast, and it dawned on me that he was realizing this, I had to flee the gym and headed to the auditorium.

In the auditorium, all the other social outcasts were watching a really disturbing movie in which a guy was lighting himself on fire. That was scary enough, but then the nerds were all laughing, which was even scarier. I fled the auditorium; in the hallway outside I ran into a school administrator who asked why I wasn’t wearing my really great insect costume. I fled to the gym where, as far as I could tell, my peers actually knew how to dance, and enjoyed it. I fled back to the auditorium in time to see another on-screen suicide. Back and forth I went, like Mary, the girl in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie who spends her last living minutes running to and fro inside a burning hotel.

Though I was miserable at the dance, I was terribly afraid of the stigma of coming home early from it. So I toughed it out as long as I could and then headed home. (I didn’t learn until years later than it was common to be uncomfortable at a junior high school dance; that lots of kids hid their discomfort; that the movie was “Harold & Maude,” a comedy in which the hero only pretends to kill himself.) I didn’t even have time to mope around the house before my mom arrived and asked, brightly, “Well, how was it?” Something about her hopeful, enthusiastic attitude just put me over the edge. It crushed me that she had no idea I was such a pariah, that for all she knew I’d had a great time. I burst out crying, to her great astonishment.

Later that night, out trick-or-treating and barely able to see out of my cool insect mask, I was mugged by a bigger kid who stole all my candy. I went home and told my brothers, who enlisted their friend—who had a Jeep!—to go out looking for the perps, to beat them up and get my candy back. Of course I know there was no way we could find, much less identify, the evil muggers, but I played along, feeling like on this night I was leaving my silly childhood behind me.

Real-time fears

Now that I’m a grown-up, I don’t have to dress up or anything, and can take simple delight in my kids and their costumes. They’re too young to be self-conscious, so when they get scared it’s by one of the really great haunted houses a neighbor will assemble here and there. When they’re scared, it’s like scared-lite: even they know it’s all in fun:

But occasionally I see something that kind of creeps me out. For example, along the elementary school parade route was a very young girl who was dressed most disconcertingly: super-short shorts, fishnet stockings … kind of like a groupie. What kind of wacky parents does she have? Did they have fun pimping her out like that? Is she like a doll to them, something to dress up scandalously for their amusement? And above all, how square does it make me that I take issue with this?

Another fear: the jack-o-lantern. Not that it's possible to carve a pumpkin well enough to be literally scary; rather, Alexa asked me if I could put the candle in it for me. “It's all gross in there and I can't bring myself to do it,” she explained. I lifted the top: the horror! The inside walls of the pumpkin were richly carpeted with thick, gnarly mold. I swore I could feel it breathing spores on my as I dropped in and lit the candle.

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Then, during the trick-or-treating, I had the willies, time and time again, seeing little Lindsay, her floor-length princess dress skimming the ground, running recklessly down dark staircases with a big bag of candy. It seemed only a matter of time before she would trip on the dress and fall flat on her face. With twenty adult witnesses, I’d be roundly disparaged for allowing this to happen.

Of course I have to worry, as a parent, about what this holiday teaches the kids. Like most American holidays, it seems to celebrate gluttony. Families are really generous in our area, sometimes giving kids three pieces of candy, or a full-size candy bar or an entire sleeve of Starbursts. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a neighbor said, “Here is an amuse-bouche, compliments of the chef, while you wait for your candy.” Eventually the bags became almost too heavy for my kids to carry. Here, Lindsay attempts a hands-free setup, perhaps to have immediate access to her candy, like a horse’s neck-mounted feed bag:

The specter of fascism

As a modern parent, I am constantly beating back the growth of children’s rights. There’s a strong strain of permissive parenting here in the Prius belt, and though I’m not a retrograde child spanker or anything, I bristle at the tendency of so many parents to soften every directive by adding “okay?” at the end. “Tommy, remember that we use words, not fists, and certainly not baseball bats, so I’d like you to please stop beating your friend now, okay?” Though I’m not actually all that strict—perhaps not as strict as I’d like to be—I do take great pleasure in the fact that I get to create reality for my kids. Perhaps partly because we don’t have cable TV, they really have no idea how a typical family runs. So my wife and I get to make up whatever rules we want.

For example, every time one of the girls gets a treat—candy, dessert, a slice of pizza, anything—they automatically offer it up for the “parental tariff.” The sanctity of their very own treat is a totally foreign concept to them. And on Hallowe’en the tariff is worthy of a progressive European nation: they get two hours to enjoy their candy, and whatever is left goes to Dad. So for two hours today they chattered away merrily amidst their piles, occasionally bringing me candy, usually something relatively unappetizing like a black-licorice flavored Dot. At one point Alexa said, “Here, Daddy—this one isn’t a loss leader, it’s actually good: a chocolate-covered caramel thing!” (It was good, if a bit smashed and sweaty.) And then, when their time was up, I went and just took all their candy, and they didn’t protest one bit.

At first I was pleased that my autocratic policies were so easily accepted, but then I’ll confess I had a somewhat chilling realization: these kids may be just a bit too docile. It’s hard to imagine them sticking up for the little guy against a giant corporation someday. Is it possible my parenting is crushing out their spirits, shrinking their horizons, setting them up to be trodden on as adults? But when I consider Alexa’s well-reasoned and persuasive argument for being allowed to read her fourth Harry Potter book, or Lindsay’s impassioned entreaties for five more minutes of play time before bed, I think everything is going to be just fine.