Is It Wrong to Bring a Child Into This World? - Part II

Introduction

As I described in my last post, I am at the time of life when some of my friends have kids of child-rearing age, and once in a while I’ll hear one say, whether quoting their kids or expressing their own sentiment or both, “It just seems wrong to bring a child into this world.” Notwithstanding my complete respect for those who choose not to procreate, this notion riles me up.

I did some research to make sure the “just seems wrong” argument isn’t merely a fringe thing. And as I mentioned last week, it turns out that a large Pew survey found that a lot of people hold this view. In fact, 38% of respondents aged 18-49 cited “concerns about the state of the world, other than the environment” as a main reason they don’t want kids, and 26% cited “concerns about the environment.” My research also turned up, again and again, the “antinatalist” movement that holds that it’s always wrong, from an ethical perspective, to bring a child into the world, regardless of circumstance.

Last week, after providing some background on how overpopulation isn’t the bugaboo we all thought it was, I analyzed the environmental and ethical perspectives of the “is it wrong” question. In this post I will take on the “concerns about the state of the world” position, which is the one that vexes me the most.

Before we begin…

Yes, this post is a polemic, like last week’s. My ideal audience is anybody who googles “Is it wrong to bring a child into this world?” and believes, or at least suspects, that it is. But I’m not here to put down anyone who believes this, or is beginning to; after all, there’s no shortage of current events to be worried about. Meanwhile, I’m also at the age where some friends and family are starting to fantasize about grandchildren, and aren’t always subtle about pressuring their adult children to get going.

I am totally fine with those who, for personal reasons, just don’t want kids. And that’s a lot of them: it’s the number one reason given by respondents to the Pew poll, in the 18-49 age group, for opting out. Here are the top five:

1. Just don’t want to – 57%
2. Want to focus on other things – 44%
3. Concerns about the state of the world – 38%
4. Can’t afford to raise a child – 36%
5. Concerns about the environment – 26%

If a person is being challenged about not procreating and cites the first, second, or fourth reason, he or she is opening the door to a debate about his or her priorities, which could be unpleasant—I’ve witnessed and even fielded accusations of selfishness (before I had kids, obviously). This is truly offensive, and I can appreciate the temptation to advance a more principled position—and take the fight to the other person’s turf—by citing the state of the world. And I can imagine a parent of my generation hearing this concern from his or her grown-up offspring, and accepting the negative perspective without kicking the tires very hard. But what if that offspring is advancing the idea tentatively—and maybe even hoping, on some level, to hear it refuted?

What a shame it would be succumb to anxiety, and actually conclude it’s wrong in principle to procreate right now … especially when this position is pure nonsense. In this post I will argue that a) now is not a historically bad time to bring a child into the world, and b) barring a zombie apocalypse, Terminator-style AI takeover, or nuclear winter, it’s never a bad time to bring a child into the world.

Our world is not that bad

To begin with, rumors of the demise of freedom, democracy, human rights, safety, and economic opportunity are greatly exaggerated. How can I so smugly state this? Because they’ve always been exaggerated. As I’ve described before in these pages, humans have a built-in, evolutionarily encoded impulse to focus on the negative. Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician and statistician, examined this in his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. This book explains why a vast range of people—including scientists, executives of multinational companies, journalists, medical researchers, attendees of the Davos World Economic Forum, and others—have historically done really poorly on a multiple-choice test about the state of the world. In fact, people do worse than if they guessed at random; as Rosling explains, they’re “systematically wrong.” Out of nearly 12,000 people tested in 14 countries in 2017, “every group of people … thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.” I myself took this quiz, years ago, and got like a 3 out of 13. I hadn’t thought I was that ignorant or that negative, but that’s kind of how cognitive bias works. But wait—don’t leave! This doesn’t mean I’m an idiot who doesn’t deserve your attention: the average score across those 12,000 people was a mere 2.

This bias toward negativity is exacerbated, Rosling explains, by “selective reporting by journalists and activists”—which accentuates the negative to create a sense of urgency. (Read this, quick! Donate now!) Meanwhile, Rosling points out, people may feel that it’s heartless to acknowledge that the world is improving when there is still so much wrong with it. Fair enough, but it’s also heartless to be complicit with the rabble-rousing algorithms designed to make people as anxious as possible.

Not only is the world not that bad, but it’s almost certainly in better shape now than when you were born. “What?!” you may ask. “How can you assert that when you don’t even know me, so you don’t even know when I was born?” The answer is: because the world has been improving all along, so my assertion is true no matter how old you are.

To support this audacious claim, I’m going to compare 2026 to three historical snapshots: the birth years of my mother-in-law, of myself, of and my first child. Three sequential generations. You’re going to laugh at how much better things are for the kid lucky enough to be born today.

1932 — The year of my mother-in-law’s birth

I chose the birth year of my mother-in-law, rather than that of my own mom, because my mother-in-law is older—in fact, she’s among the oldest 1% of living humans globally, maybe even the oldest 0.5%, so she’s among albertnet’s most elderly potential readers. And here’s the America she was born into, broken down by some of the biggest concerns people have today about our world’s fitness for bringing up children:

• Economy: 1932 was arguably the single worst year of the Great Depression. There was 25% unemployment, and without any social safety net, unemployment generally led to immediate destitution. Over 9,000 American banks had failed.
• Geopolitics: In Germany, unemployment had hit 30% and economic desperation was fueling the rise of the Nazi party, by now the largest in Germany. Adolph Hitler would become chancellor within a year.
• Disease: There was no polio vaccine, no antibiotics, and no vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella, or chickenpox. Tuberculosis was still a leading killer. In the US, infant mortality was roughly 60 per 1,000 live births in 1932—compared to about 5.4 today.

Just imagine if my mother-in-law’s parents had contemplated the state of the world and were in a position to decide whether or not to have a baby. I mean, her dad had a job crushing rocks (to make gravel). Fate did me a huge favor there, as my mother-in-law went on to have a happy childhood and is still enjoying a long, satisfying adulthood after having four beautiful children, one of whom became my wife. If you were to ask my mother-in-law today if the circumstances of her birth put her in a deep existential hole she never managed to climb out of, she’d laugh in your face.

1969 — The year of my birth

I was the last of four boys born to my parents, and—birth control having been readily available—was not an accident. My mom and dad conceived me with full knowledge that their world was seriously messed up:

• Geopolitics: 1969 was the peak year of American troops in Vietnam, with over half a million deployed. The draft was in effect, meaning virtually every young man in the country faced the possibility of being sent to fight in a war with no clear end.
• Political dysfunction: The year before, 1968, had seen the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; police attacking anti-war protesters at the Democratic National Convention; and widespread urban riots. Nixon had just taken office under a cloud of suspicion that would culminate in Watergate. The previous year’s Tet Offensive had shattered public trust in the government’s honesty about the war.
• National safety: The Cold War was at a sustained peak. Both the US and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear warheads to destroy civilization multiple times over, and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction was widely bandied about.
• Economy: Inflation was famously bad in 1969, at 6.1%—a shocking and disheartening rate after two decades of price stability. The Federal Reserve responded by increasing interest rates sharply, which pushed America toward a long and stubborn recession. Americans had no idea they were on the cusp of one of the great bull markets in American history; they saw only inflation, a growing recession, an expensive war with no end in sight, and a deeply divided country.
• Crime: the murder rate was heading toward what would become the worst era of American violent crime in modern history, peaking at 10.4 per 100,000 in 1980—more than double today’s rate.
• Culture: Within a month of my birth, the TV show “Hee Haw” premiered. And my father actually watched it. These were dark times indeed.

2001 — The year of my first child’s birth

The year 2001, and those following it, were not halcyon days for America. And yet it never occurred to my wife and me not to have kids, based on then-current events. In fact, if you were to have asked us to explain our pro-procreation rationale as concisely as possible, we’d have gotten it down to a single word: “Duh.” And yet, here’s what was going on in our world:

• Terrorism: September 11, 2001—the deadliest terrorist attack in America’s history—killed nearly 3,000 people and triggered a governmental response that fundamentally changed America’s approach to security and surveillance. The anthrax letters that followed killed 5 and infected 17 others, raising fears of biological warfare on American soil. The sense that the homeland was no longer safe was entirely new and profoundly destabilizing psychologically.
• Economy: The dot-com bubble had burst in March of 2000, wiping out trillions in wealth, and by 2001 the US economy was in deep recession. This was worsened by 9/11, which caused the stock market to fall 7.1% on its first day of trading after the attacks.
• Political dysfunction: The country was bitterly divided over a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, which halted a recount in Florida. The Court’s ruling was so unusual that it explicitly stated it should not be cited as precedent—an extraordinary statement to make. Suffice to say this decision struck a great many Americans as scandalous.
• Geopolitics: The US was on the verge of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but with no clear target or objective identified. The world suddenly felt dangerous in ways it hadn’t since the Cold War.

Granted, my first child was conceived before the attack on the World Trade Center. But did my wife and I regret for one moment bringing her into that world? Not at all. After all, we decided, with eyes wide open, to have another child two years later, even though by then unemployment had hit its peak and my own employer had gone bankrupt.

I hope I’ve compellingly suggested that every generation has been born into conditions that could, by the “concerns about the state of the world” logic, have argued for not procreating—and yet my mother-in-law, her daughter, your humble blogger, and my children are all glad we’re here. And since the dates of our respective births, so much about the world has improved. Here are some highlights:

• Today, infant mortality is eleven times lower than it was in the year of my mother-in-law’s birth. If that doesn’t make this a better time to have children, what does?
• Violent crime has fallen more than 50% since its early 1990s peak, and property crime has fallen almost the same amount, according to FBI statistics.
• Since the year of my first daughter’s birth, the economy has boomed; despite 9/11, two wars, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and a pandemic, the stock market in 2026 is worth roughly six times what it was in 2001. If we go back to 1969, parents afraid of market conditions would deprive a child of the opportunity to partake in 30-fold S&P 500 growth over the next 57 years (adjusted for inflation, with dividends reinvested).
• The world demonstrated an unprecedented capability to respond to a crisis, that being the COVID-19 pandemic. As aptly recounted here, an amazing collaboration took place between the biotech industry and various governments. Based on groundbreaking innovation and a largely unprecedented willingness to accelerate regulatory approval, a vaccine was developed in less than 12 months. This shattered the previous record, which was the mumps vaccine in the 1960s, which took about four years. A 2025 study published in JAMA Health Forum, a publication of the American Medical Association, estimates that the COVID-19 vaccines saved 2.5 million lives. I cannot imagine what would have happened had COVID hit back in 2001.

Still worried about politics?

If you’re still rejecting my assertions about the state of the world, perhaps your position is largely political. After all, politics is probably the most divisive force informing the national mood right now. So I’m going to tackle that, but don’t worry—I won’t take a side. (As described here, I think partisan bickering is pointless and not the purpose of albertnet.) Instead, let’s imagine a political change that I think we can all agree would be disastrous: what if we lost the right to free speech? And how about another: what if we fell under tyrannical Communist rule? Would I then concede that it’s wrong to bring a child into this world?

My answer is an emphatic “No.” Because if we decided, on the basis of Communist tyranny and the lack of free speech, that it was wrong to have children, we’d also be saying it’s been wrong for anyone in China to have had a baby in the last 77 years, or anyone in Russia for most of the last 109. We’d be saying it was wrong for my college roommate to have been given a chance at life: he was born into an authoritarian monarchy in Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries on earth; lived through a Communist revolution and one of the most brutal regimes in African history; was labeled an “enemy of the state” as a teenager who dared to speak out; escaped to America; and is now thriving and raising a family. Do you want to tell couples in less privileged countries than ours that it’s immoral for them to have kids?

Which brings me to my final point: the intrinsic absurdity of basing the decision of a lifetime on a snapshot in time.

A failure of perspective

Let’s do a quick thought exercise. Let’s suppose my wife and I had been thinking about starting a family a couple years earlier, in 1999, so we did an assessment then of the state of the world. The Dow had just closed above 10,000, and then 11,000, for the first time in history. The NASDAQ produced a mind-boggling 85.6% annual return. Unemployment hit its lowest level in 30 years. The federal government posted a $125 billion budget surplus — its second consecutive surplus after 30 years of deficits. Geopolitically, the Cold War had been over for a decade, the Soviet Union was gone, and democracy was spreading globally. It might have seemed like the perfect time to bring a child into the world—and yet within just a couple of years all this had collapsed. A child born in 1999 would be less than a year old when the NASDAQ began its catastrophic slide, losing three quarters of its value over the next couple of years. My kid would have been two years old on 9/11; three years old when WorldCom became the largest bankruptcy in American history after massive accounting fraud; and four years old when the US invaded Iraq and unemployment peaked at it post-recession high. So basing the decision to procreate on favorable conditions no more guarantees a happy life for your child than rough times portend a fraught one.

This is the folly of taking a snapshot in time and assuming it will set the tone of a person’s life for the next 70, 80, maybe 90 years. A child born today will live until roughly 2100 … who could possibly say what will happen between now and then? Think back to my mother-in-law’s life … she has lived through a crazy mixed bag of good and bad, from the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, the 1970s stagflation, the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and COVID-19—but also the defeat of Axis imperialism, the creation of the polio vaccine, the Civil Rights act and Voting Rights act, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the eradication of smallpox (which had killed millions), the previously unimaginable access to information made possible by the Internet, the development of mRNA vaccines and unprecedented speed of the COVID vaccine, and the dramatic global decline in extreme poverty—more people lifted out of poverty in her lifetime than in all the rest of human history combined.

My takeaway? Looking at current events and deciding not to have kids is simply a failure of perspective. Basing an irreversible decision on what you read on your phone or hear on your podcast is not clear-headed risk assessment—it’s an anxiety response dressed up as moral reasoning. Again, I don’t blame you for feeling anxious. I just find it unsupportable to convert that anxiety into a judgment like “it’s wrong to bring a child into this world.”

A final note

I want to reiterate that I’m not trying to promote procreation—I am completely fine with “I choose not to,” and object merely to “no one should.” I am willing to work very hard to understand another’s perspective, so long as it’s not some froot-loopy moral judgment. Let me give you an example. I’ll confess I was somewhat flippant when my daughter announced she would never be a mother. I said something like, “It’s natural that at age 22 you’re not ready for parenting,” and intimated that her biological clock may one day cause her to change her mind. She seemed inordinately irritated by this response, I felt at first, but I finally understood her perspective when I read this passage in one of her college papers (for a philosophy class, on a non-procreation topic):

If I heard my parents talking about the messiness and inhuman effort of raising a child and I said I certainly wouldn’t go the same way they would laugh, and respond, “Just you wait till those hormones kick in.” It was as if they wished destruction upon me in the form of chemicals that would override reason and change my conception of self, that iron necessity to do what I did not want, justified because I’d become someone who desired it.

I call that “owning it.” She’s not afraid to answer the question for herself, not for the world. I think we can all respect that … right?

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

High School Dress Code - The Redline

Introduction

I have tried to be a good parent, but it’s not always easy keeping up with the job. A recent example: my younger daughter’s college tuition bills always went to her, and she never forwarded them because who cares? So I’d suddenly have to scramble after she received her third reminder and decided to bring it to my attention. Could I have put this recurring task on my calendar? Sure. Did I? Nope.

Thus, I suppose it shouldn’t have been a surprise when I recently stumbled across a document that my kids’ high school sent home, years ago, for me to sign. I swear I’d never seen it before, though it was certainly my signature at the bottom. Probably my kid thrust it in my face when I was trying to hustle her out the door, and when I didn’t see any financial impacts I just blindly signed it. Well, now that it’s come across my desk again, and I finally have the time to look at it, I’ve decided to redline it like I should have done in the first place. Since the school is most certainly not going to review my edits, I’m posting it here as a service to those who still have kids in high school and should be campaigning to refine their schools’ regulations. Note that due to HTML complexities, I’m not going to actually use a red font or strike anything out. You get to figure out what the original text was and which verbiage comprises my amendments and embellishments.

Albany High Dress Code – suggested revisions for immediate review

1. Clothing should be neat, clean and appropriate with shoes worn at all times. Common sense and reasonable judgment should eliminate the need to correct students in the area of dress and personal appearance. In the event that common sense and reasonable judgment do not prevent the need for correction, the source of the faulty judgment or lack of common sense will need to be established. This is a two-way street, and surely students will find administrators’ judgment lacking. Since these kids are the darlings of marketers, with their clothing choices becoming the habits that will cement lifetime value for the clothing industry, consideration will be made to grant the kids some clout, versus the educators who are, let’s face it, kind of bitter and probably not contributing much to the economy, based on their famously poor wages.

2. Shorts may be worn, but shorts and skirts that are too short, frayed, torn, or too tight are not acceptable. Clothing must not have holes that would attract attention and/or cause a distraction to the educational process. The judgment of this is up to school personnel, who are actually quite reasonable. For example, after last year’s dust-up around skirt length and the impressive solidarity of boys who began wearing miniskirts to support the cause, the school is now officially allowing skirts (of appropriate length) for both boys and girls. Also, staff members generously do allow holes in garments that are essential to their function, such as arm holes, neck holes, and leg holes. The staff acknowledges that a lack of a necessary hole, such as a missing aperture at the base of a sleeve, would be distracting if it were to inhibit the student’s actual arm from being usable. Also, if a garment has fringes, which are effectively quite similar to fraying fabric other than being tidier and more obviously engineered, as opposed to suggestive of excessive wear, the garment will be tolerated. Moreover, tassels are acceptable and even encouraged. The main distraction to the educational process is any feature of a garment that would be noticed by teenage boys with their raging hormones. Since most teenage girls find boys gross, it is reasonable that boys’ attire can be shorter, more frayed, or even torn, though too tight would be distracting to anybody. A final note: it is unreasonable to expect an educator to have to explain what, specifically, is unacceptable about a garment, in the event that it is distracting on a hormonal level. This could cause blushing and the suggestion of untoward attention. Educators will simply use the term “frayed” in a very generic way and students should accept this as a catch-all term for inappropriate clothing.

3. Markings or insignia on clothing or the body must not be obscene, suggestive, show gang affiliation, feature inappropriate language, or advocate disruptive behavior. Staff acknowledges that gang activity in Albany is exceedingly rare, so the colors red and blue may be freely worn, though red is preferred as it is the school color. It is also acceptable to wear clothing bearing a Berkeley High insignia, but only ironically. Inappropriate language is to be determined by the educators. For example, “FIGHT THE POWER,” though it advocates disruptive behavior, is acceptable as a tribute to Public Enemy (a rap group many staff members enjoyed as teenagers), whereas “DIE YUPPIE SCUM” is offensive to educators who are acutely aware of their lack of yuppie status. In situations where staff members disagree, a recent example being the phrase “I POOPED TODAY” on a t-shirt, determination will be made based on any staff member being uncomfortable. In such cases it is strictly forbidden to single out the offended staff member, such as by calling her “constipated” or “bitter.”

4. Clothing must not advertise or promote alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. If, for example, a student’s parent works for Pfizer and receives a branded t-shirt as swag, and the student wears this to school, he or she may be asked to go home and change. Furthermore, if a garment advertises a product that could be mistaken for a drug, such as Pfister (a plumbing fixture company commonly confused with Pfizer), that garment cannot be worn. The rule applies even if an alcohol-related brand is not featured primarily to promote the product. For example, if a student wears a retro Coors Classic t-shirt that he nicked from his father, he or she will be sent home, even though Coors beer is practically water.

5. Underwear may not show. However, it must be worn. The school administration acknowledges that this is difficult to enforce. For the most part the “honor system” will be used, but if a student is suspected of “going commando,” he or she may be sent home to change, with zero dialogue around why the staff member is suspicious.

6. Tops worn by boys or girls must not be revealing as judged by school personnel. Exceptions may be made based on what is being revealed. For example, a tight shirt revealing belly paunch will be tolerated, to avoid fat-shaming.

7. Clothing should cover the midriff. It’s bad enough when a nice flat midriff distracts hormonal boys; when a “muffin-top” is exposed, that’s distracting to everybody.[ In fact, consider changing “should” to “must.”]

8. Clothing that is disruptive or causes distraction while at school or a school function is not permitted. This includes disruption or distraction that accrues to the wearer, not just staff and fellow students. For example, if a student must hitch his or her pants up every thirty seconds to avoid violating rule #5, the pants are considered distracting. Certain exceptions may be made; for example, a student unable to concentrate due the discomfort of a hair shirt may continue wearing it if he or she is doing penance in accordance with his or her religious beliefs, which are protected under school policy.

9. Cargo pants/shorts with more than five pockets are prohibited. The “watch pocket” does count as a pocket, whether or not the student actually carries a pocket watch. An exception to this rule may be granted in the event that the student must carry more prescription medication (including inhalers, insulin pens, Narcan spray applicators, and EpiPens) than would fit in five pockets. In this event, given the weight of all these full pockets, a belt must be worn to avoid violation of rules 5 and 8 as described above.

10. Albany High School reserves the right to allow or disallow certain apparel and accessories. If a student is asked to remove a hat or other headgear by any school personnel or guest teacher, the request must be honored promptly with no discussion. In the event of conflict, such as a student wearing a Stanford cap because a parent attended school there, which annoys a teacher who went to Berkeley, the teacher will automatically prevail. Or, if a teacher thinks visors simply make no sense, the student must remove his or her visor or add a yarmulke to complete the cap.

Postscript

In case you were wondering, almost all of the above rules are from the actual Albany High dress code. The only exception is number nine, which is from Southern Nash Middle School. I find this five-pocket prohibition a bit rich, especially from a school whose logo is highly anatomically suggestive.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXV - Holiday Edition

Introduction

This is the twenty-fifth installment in the “From the Archives — Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, and Volume XXIV is here. There is no common thread running through all these volumes, and they jump around in time and place, so you can read them in any order, disorder, preorder, reorder, or backorder. You can skip around, rip around, take little sips, mouth the words with your lips, and dip in and out.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re passages recycled from old letters or emails to friends or family. For this special 25th edition, today being the 25th and of December no less, I’m doing something different: all of these are taken from my past holiday newsletters, which—being satires of the newsletter genre—tend to be a little dark. So brace yourself … in fact, you may wish to fortify yourself in advance with some spiked eggnog.

1999

This year has been really fun and exciting. We’d have liked to travel overseas like most of our friends do, perhaps to see some ruins, maybe in Greece, but we didn’t. We did go to Moab, Utah, for camping and mountain biking in Canyonlands National Park. The Slickrock trail made E— cry, and we came home early, but we had a great time!

Another big thing we’ve been doing this year is trying to buy a home. We’ve learned a lot about classics, charmers, indoor/outdoor living, and understated elegance. Unfortunately we can’t seem to afford anything. But those of you who have been to our apartment know we’re just fine where we are!

If you aren’t mentioned in this newsletter, please don’t feel bad—we’ve been so busy it makes us forgetful. One thing keeping us busy has been business travel. On my last trip I found out the hard way that the cough syrup bottle has to be stored in an upright position. During my layover in Denver, in the airport bathroom, I discovered that the syrup had completely emptied itself into my travel bag! It was the cherry flavor, bright red and really sticky. As I was washing the things in my toiletry bag, it fell into the sink, and because of the little electric eye, the water turned on automatically and filled the bag before I could stop it. The syrup got all over everything in my entire bag—my socks, my underwear, my shoes, clothes, everything. The airport janitor says it happens all the time.

2002

We did a newsletter three or four years ago and just never really got around to writing another one. So, let me fill you in on what has happened in the last few years. I sure hope you remember us.

We bought a house a few years ago, in Albany, after a whole bunch of unsuccessful offers. It was a very frustrating process. E— even cried, but I didn’t. I guess you could call me the “man of the house.” We got a cat too, M—, and we were really excited about her for a while but now we have a baby, A—. She is so cute. She’s really, really smart. Like today I gave her her lunch, and then handed her a wet paper towel to see if she would wipe her own face. Well, what did she do? She tried to wash her foot! I’m actually a bit worried because I’m told that exceptionally intelligent babies are a lot more work. I guess that’s the price you pay.

A— is so fun to watch when she’s playing with other babies. She’s very assertive. She takes away the other kids’ toys, which isn’t very nice but you have to admit, those skills will be very useful when she’s an executive of some kind some day. That’s what I tell people, at least people whose babies haven’t lost out to her. Actually, it’s mostly the non-parent friends I tell this to. I’ve definitely learned that some people don’t want babies of their own, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love babies. They even “get” the kind of parent-style joking that we parents do. It’s very subtle. For example: this friend of mine (no kids) takes me aside one day, and gives me this little speech about how not everybody is going to be as interested in the details of A—’s development as somebody who has a baby. And at first I’m thinking, What is this guy talking about? And then I realize he’s joking! Total deadpan. That was so funny.

2003

So, about this Christmas season. I’m just going to say it: above all other feelings, I just find its obligations oppressive. On top of that I can’t stand the music. Those songs get stuck in my head and just sit there, agitating me like a chunk of peanut stuck in my teeth. I try to get rid of them, try to do a song-graft with something equally catchy but non-holiday-themed, but it’s futile and I get the mental equivalent of a tired, sore tongue that can’t stop pushing against the nut fragment. Why do I hate the music so much? Beyond how insipid it is to begin with, it’s the way the songs are enhanced, groomed, and molested. Usually you hear this music in malls and stores (I haven’t heard a caroler in decades). These places have two objectives in mind when meddling with the music. First, they believe that it’s old and tired and needs to be freshened up (when actually the whole holiday is supposed to be about honoring tradition). Second, many of these venues don’t want to be exclusionary, so they have to stick to the non-specific winter holiday songs. Shrinking the list of candidates means that the remaining songs become terribly overplayed, like “Winter Wonderland” and “Jingle Bells” (which was originally a Thanksgiving song, by the way).

I want to comment on one song in particular that I cannot stand: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It’s just plain stupid. You mean to tell me this was the first year Santa encountered fog, and that he couldn’t have the elves make him a powerful headlight? Couldn’t the songwriter have thought of something more plausible, like Santa took pity on the poor deformed reindeer and created a position for him, at the head of the group no less, just to show those other snooty reindeer a thing or two? That would be a lot better lesson than the one we really get: that you should be loved and included based on your usefulness. My indulgent sense of moral outrage is not satisfied. I want to see those other reindeer pay for their earlier bigotry. The other thing I hate about this song is that it’s inextricable from the made-for-TV movie, so you can’t hear it without having all the cloying visions return, like how you picture dancing hippos when you hear that song from “Fantasia.” So I have to picture those cutesy reindeer with their absurdly oversized eyes, and that stupid elf Hermey with his swoopy blond hair, and the abominable snowman with the messed-up teeth. And now, as a parent, I even have the Rudolph board-book that, of course, A— loves. So I read it sweetly, suppressing the snideness that threatens to creep into my voice (although I can never help embellishing the story; for example, Rudolph’s nose is red because he’s a drunk and all the blood vessels in his nose have burst; Clarice is attracted to him only because he’s an outcast and she wants to gall her father; Hermey the Misfit Elf is actually kind of a narcissist; and the Abominable Snowman only wishes he were abominable, when in reality he’s just as uptight and judgmental as everybody else).

2004

I have to admit, it’s been really tough trying to think up what to say in my newsletter this year. So much has happened, and yet I’m still in the same place I left off at after last year’s edition. And beyond that, I just don’t feel like I’m in the right spirit, I guess you could say. It’s time for jolly things, and happy things, and I guess I feel happy enough and jolly enough until I start thinking about writing the letter itself. I talked to a friend about it, and he said he totally understood—that given the shaky state of world affairs, he couldn’t get into a cheery holiday mood either. But he totally misunderstood me. I’m talking about the little, private humiliation of not having anything impressive to report.

Well, not humiliation, really, but what I mean is that a Christmas letter is supposed to be high-spirited and optimistic because of how well the year has gone. And though it hasn’t been a bad year, I just somehow feel like my family came up a bit short. For example, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed when people ride in my station wagon, because it’s so old and doesn’t even have drink holders. Well, this year we went out walking with another young family and I felt the pain all over again, because their stroller had drink holders! So I looked at my second-hand stroller closely for the first time, and not only does it not have a drink holder, but it’s just old and beaten and kind of corroded. So whenever I’ve tried to think of happy things to say about my family all I can think about is that stroller. So tawdry.

And that’s not the only thing that’s giving me writer’s block. I look back on the year and my kids were just, well, I don’t know, they just screamed and melted down and made all kinds of messes. Not very impressive, which they seem to know themselves, and E— and I don’t kid ourselves that we’re much better.  Home life is just one fiasco after another it seems (well, I don’t make messes, though sometimes I get irritated and maybe break a few things and E— calls it a tantrum). It’s like somewhere along the line this family just lost its pride. Maybe I’m not the only member of this household who notices the shabby station wagon and stroller.

2005

A magazine called “Real Simple” appeared in my bathroom. It’s an easy read. It really is simple. There’s a recipe in there called “Cupcakes with Ice Cream Frosting” that has only two ingredients. One is “cupcakes.” I’m not kidding! Anyway, there’s a column in “Real Simple” where readers write in with their time-saving tips. I’m going to send them this one: stop worrying about cleaning out the car. The next time you forget the diaper bag, you’ll be glad you can get by with what’s strewn on the floor. We keep a bag of clothes in the back that we intend to donate to the Salvation Army. When we’re really behind on laundry, it’s nice to be able to dip back into that bag to dress the kids.

I wish life could actually be “real simple.” Ever since I became a parent, it seems like things have gotten completely out of control. Kids just seed chaos constantly, in practically every interaction. For example, A— broke down crying during an argument she started about whether “Mulamimoto” (the name of her imaginary cat) begins with an “M” or an “R.” She’d asked me how it was spelled, and I correctly answered “M,” and then she totally refused to accept this answer. How can I teach her to read when she refuses to obey the most basic rules about what sounds a letter makes? I finally capitulated, just to shut her up, and as if to cement the new spelling she made me program the imaginary cat’s phone number into our phone, with the label “RULAMIMOTOR.” Fine, kid, whatever. L—, meanwhile, will fixate on some food item, cry because it’s not presented quickly enough, stop crying when she gets it, but then start bawling all over again. Why? Too hot? Too cold? Too much? Not enough? Not living up to its promise?

But despite being frazzled a lot of the time, I think my attitude was generally pretty good this past year, and that my enduring emotional health must surely rub off on the kids. Still, I sometimes worry. Tonight A— asked me to play a game with her. I expected it to be our standard game, in which I surgically remove her appendix. But tonight she announced she wanted to play a new game: Deathbed. I told her I didn’t know that game, and she told me we could make it up together. It went fine. At the end I told her she had to speak her last word. Her choice: “Done.”

Other albertnet holiday posts

• 2025 Last-Minute Online Holiday Gift Guide!
• 2024 Online Holiday Gift Guide!
• 2023 Last-Minute Online Holiday Gift Guide!
• 2022 albertnet Last-Minute Online Holiday Gift Guide
• 2021 albertnet Online Holiday Gift Guide
• 2020 albertnet Last-Minute Online Holiday Gift Guide
• The 2019 albertnet Online Holiday Gift Guide
• Interview With Santa Claus
• The 2018 albertnet Christmas Guide
• The Christmas Eve Doldrums
• A Cure for Holiday Consumerist Bloat
• The Black Friday That Wasn’t
• Santa Denial, and How Lance Armstrong Taught Me to Lie
• Fiction — The Happiest Christmas Story I Know
• My 2012 Holiday Newsletter: the Cat’s POV
• My 2011 Holiday Newsletter — Head Lice!
• My 2010 Holiday Newsletter — Importance of Santa Mythology
• Holiday Mall Report: the Lotion Sniper
• My 2009 Holiday Newsletter — Retail in the UK
• The Suppressed 2008 Holiday Newsletter
• Descent Into Chaos: My 2005 Holiday Newsletter

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

When Your Loved One Buys a Juicer

Introduction

Today I tackle the unpleasant topic of what to do when a family member or close friend has purchased a juicer. This is a trying ordeal for all involved, and if not handled properly can lead to a host of negative outcomes up to and including complete estrangement. If someone close to you has already purchased a juicer, perhaps it’s not too late for this post to help. And if such a purchase hasn’t happened yet, don’t be naïve: it can happen to anyone, even you.

Why do people buy juicers?

When a person buys a juicer, it’s tempting to think a normal consumerist impulse is in play: a friend has one, it was on sale, etc. Don’t be fooled: the juicer purchase occupies an entirely different realm than, say, the harmless acquisition of a food processor or “bullet” style blender. To understand why an otherwise reasonable person would buy something that does not have, and cannot have, any utility whatsoever, you need to delve into how the brain works and how a this kind of destructive behavior can be essentially “programmed.”

On the face of it, such “programming” doesn’t look so different from regular advertising, with its slick photo or video showcasing a product to good effect, usually including an attractive person (whether a celebrity endorser, a model, or social media influencer) who creates mimetic desire in the consumer. But in reality, promotion of a juicer is far more sophisticated, and the campaign is deployed extremely precisely to capture the consumer at his or her very most vulnerable.

Remarkably, instead of seeking out a person who is emotionally isolated and has low self-esteem, juicer marketers use every modern technology available (e.g., tracking cookies or pixels, sentiment analysis within social media posts, etc.) to watch for an uplift in optimism. This is the key vulnerability the juicer industry exploits: the erroneous sense that anything is possible, even making nutritious juices in your own home. The peculiar nature of this scenario makes it very hard for loved ones to spot early warning signs. It’s not uncommon, for example, for a member of the juicer-buyer’s household to later report, “I can’t understand it … she seemed fine, she seemed happy!”

Consequences of buying a juicer

The most commonly feared consequence of a juicer purchase happens to be a myth: that it will lead to constant messes that can be extremely difficult to clean up, particularly when substances like beets, berries, pomegranate juice, and/or turmeric are involved. While this certainly can happen, it isn’t really the central problem, because the reality is, most juicer-buyers only use their juicer once. This might seem outlandish, given how expensive juicers are, but if you’ve ever actually drunk the vegetable liquid produced by this appliance, you’ll immediately understand the rationale for never using it a second time. The reality is, nothing produced by the juicer is actually palatable … it only ever seemed like a good idea. The juicer-buyer will likely intend to use the device periodically, even habitually, but is almost certain to never build up enough gumption to do so.

In fact, the most severe consequence of the juicer purchase is the deep shame that the buyer feels every time he or she sees it in the back of a cabinet. Juicers are not small—in fact, they are the very epitome of the giant, single-function kitchen appliance that home owners should avoid, other examples being the bread machine or electric can opener. (Only a toaster is arguably worth the space.) With most such encumbrances, family members may hope to see it offloaded to Goodwill or some other thrift store—but the juicer, in most cases, will not be. The reason? Cognitive dissonance. The juicer-buyer spent so much on it, he is loathe to admit it’s worthless, and the sunk cost fallacy usually crops up, meaning the family is stuck with this thing for life. And every time the buyer sees it, he is likely to feel subconscious stirrings of regret around not only of the folly of having acquired it, but of the ongoing self-delusion driving him to keep it. Whether or not these feelings bubble up to the surface, the juicer-buyer usually lacks the resolve to squarely confront the problem. Hence the festering shame … the juicer might as well be a scarlet letter.

How to help your loved one 

Of course the juicer-buyer is not only hurting herself. The myriad case histories of these purchases are simply heartbreaking, as entire families are impacted. The buyer’s spouse is bewildered as to not only the extravagant uselessness of the object, but of the purchasing decision having been made unilaterally, with no warning or consultation. Meanwhile, children lose faith in the parent who bought the juicer, in light of this inexplicably reckless behavior, and this can lead to a crisis of trust and consequent feelings of insecurity. Then there’s the clutter of the juicer itself, taking up valuable cabinet or countertop space. But while it’s understandable for family members to feel hurt, we must never forget that the buyer is the central victim. Here are some guidelines for properly handling the situation, so as to avoid further harm.

Lead with empathy

It is understandably tempting to express your incredulity at the act of purchase, without pausing to frame your inquiry carefully. It might seem perfectly reasonable to blurt out, “What part of don’t drink your calories do you not understand?!” Or you might demand, “Why would we throw away the best part of fruit—all that dietary fiber—and consume only the part that’s bad for us!?” But this kind of reaction is a big mistake, on two levels. First, since the buyer already knows deep down inside that he has made a mistake, this will only increase his latent remorse. Second, this antagonistic confrontation may drive the buyer into deeper denial, while fanning the flames of what is bound to be a difficult dialogue that could drag on for years.

Thus, it’s crucial to react with kindness and concern rather than confronting the buyer aggressively. Let her tell her story, and try to validate her position. “So … this juicer,” you might begin. “Are you envisioning making delicious and nutritive smoothies for the family?” You might be surprised to learn that your innocent assumption—that she was planning tasty shakes with fruit juice, yogurt, and nuts—was dead wrong, and that she’s planning to go straight to making vegetable drinks, even something with kale. Don’t kid yourself: juicers are not just blenders on steroids. They are specifically designed and marketed to exploit the rare but powerful delusion that vegetable-based beverages are drinkable. 

As disturbing as this is, try to be patient and supportive as your loved one explains her dedication to the family’s health, and the benefits of leafy greens high in vitamins K and A, antioxidants like quercetin and kaempferol, and omega-3 fatty acids. When she describes how much easier juicing is than making a salad, try not to immediately contradict her by pointing out how hard a juicer is to clean, especially given its oleophilic plastic bowl and dome. Remember, this buyer is already in a highly vulnerable state … if she weren’t, she wouldn’t have bought the juicer in the first place! So instead, as strange and inappropriate as this may feel, thank her for thinking of the family’s health. Remember, if you’re going to eventually pick up the pieces and move on, you need her to feel like you’re on her side.

Let the juicer-buyer fail

It can be so hard to just stand by and watch a loved one fail, but in the case of a juicer, it’s actually the best thing you can do. If the purchaser perceives a battle of wills between the two of you, his judgment is bound to be further clouded. Just watch and wait, and when that first batch of kale, cucumber, carrot, and beet concoction comes out, accept the proffered glass willingly. (Honestly, you have no choice anyway.) Promote the drink to the children enthusiastically, as though they don’t sense your skepticism. And then: pretend to enjoy it. Don’t worry, you won’t be working against yourself, for the simple reason that you will inevitably come up short in your play-acting. Not even Edward Norton or Frances McDormand could pull off a realistic impression of someone enjoying a vegetable beverage. Your vain attempt to avoid wincing, grimacing, puckering, or even gagging, and the pleasant smile you try to arrange, will be duly noted. In fact, you will be invoking the juicer-buyer’s empathy.

Extend this strategy to the clean-up. Don’t offer to wash the juicer, no matter how badly you may want to get it out of your sight so you can begin trying to put the entire wretched affair behind you. Let the sprawling apparatus just sit there on the counter, its clear dome spattered with green flecks, looking like somebody actually projectile-vomited inside it. Work around the juicer using the limited remaining counter space, and in fact let the buyer see you being a good sport about it: that is, let her sit with the consequences. If you give in and wash the juicer for her, you’re being an enabler. And if cleaning the kitchen is normally your job anyway, do a poor job with the juicer. Let the residue of beet juice, coconut milk, and/or flax seeds adhere to the sides … the juicer-buyer needs to see all this. (And if the juicer gets put away without being up to your normal standards of cleanliness, don’t fret. Bear in mind it will never be used again anyway.)

Be alert to collateral damage

If you have children, watch for any warning signs that they are coping poorly. Seeing a juicer in action, and knowing it was purchased intentionally, may cause them to doubt the foundation of reliable, competent parenting they rely so heavily upon. If necessary, have a private conversation with your kid(s), emphasizing that anyone can make a mistake like this under certain circumstances. Make this a teachable moment about the evils of targeted advertising campaigns and the ruthlessness of corporations in exploiting our vulnerabilities. Draw attention to your spouse’s overall track record, emphasizing how this behavior truly was an anomaly. And remind your kid(s) that, as hard as it may be to believe, your spouse had the best of intentions and a sincere belief this was in the family’s best interest.

How to move on

While it’s understandable to seek closure in a situation like this, consider that it should not come at the cost of the juicer-buyer’s humiliation. Put this purchase in the proper perspective: your family is only out a few hundred bucks. Don’t get me wrong, “only” does seem preposterous in the context of a totally worthless appliance, but in the big scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. After all, your loved one didn’t take in a violent rescue dog with expensive health problems, or get scammed into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency. Just bide your time, let the juicer molder away in a back cabinet, and reflect on all your loved one’s fine qualities. And remind yourself that all kinds of people buy juicers … you just never hear about it. Humans are not perfect. We all make mistakes.

Now, depending on various factors—the level of rapport you have with your loved one; her overall mental health; her sense of humor—it may be possible to ease the ongoing emotional burden of this purchase with a little levity. Coming across the cursed appliance, you might say, brightly, “Oh, the juicer! We should do another veggie beverage!” This is risky, of course, if you don’t get the tone exactly right. Imagine how distressing it would be if your loved one thought you were serious. It is probably safer, if you try humor at all, to be a bit more vague. For example, the next time the family suffers a major setback, you could say, “Well, at least we still have our juicer.” Again, this is a risky move, as it could be construed as sarcastic, and adding insult to injury. Remember, the purchase of this juicer will haunt your loved one for years … I would always err on the side of caution.

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Old Yarn - The Day I Learned Bicycle Gear Shifting

Introduction

Here is the fifth “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” “The Enemy Coach,” and most recently “The Brash Newb”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Trigger warning: this post is long. It is a rambling tale that doesn’t skimp on any details. And no, it won’t teach you this weird little secret your doctor doesn’t want you to know. It won’t give you the social currency you’d get from talking with colleagues about the last episode of America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Season 2.* So if you’re cool with bike lore of no particular interest to your social network, then read on. But if you’re impatient and/or won’t read anything you can’t summarize in a tweet (I refuse to say “X”), go somewhere else.

(*As much as it sounds like I made up this TV show, I didn’t. It’s the fifth most popular show on Netflix right now. The center cannot hold.)

Learning to shift – late summer 1978

As I mentioned last week, one of the cooler things my dad ever did was to buy my brothers and me 10-speed bikes long before any other kids had them. In fact, these were the first bikes we ever owned. This yarn is about the day—in fact, the very moment—I learned how to shift gears. If that sounds really boring, don’t worry: I’m here to entertain, not to edify. This post describes, among other things, three bike crashes and one near-death experience. (Why isn’t this post mainly about the near-death experience? Because that didn’t change my life. It just put it briefly in jeopardy.) (Full disclosure—if I can be permitted to directly follow a parenthetical with another parenthetical—this post doesn’t feature any really gory crashes. For that, click here or here.)

The peculiar thing about getting this ten-speed for my ninth birthday was that my dad forbade me to touch the gear-shift levers. I asked why my bike even had them if I wasn’t supposed to touch them. “Don’t worry about that,” was all he said in reply. This was pretty typical of my dad. He didn’t really like dialogue. He absolutely loved a good monologue, so long as he was delivering it and on a topic of his choosing (for example, the design of an interferometer he was building), but had little patience for pushback or even pointed questions, which could seem like insubordination. So I just kept my mouth shut and, in the ensuing days and weeks, even months, rode the bike around in first gear all the time. Yes, I was that well-behaved and craven.

I don’t know exactly why my dad prohibited gear shifting, but it’s not hard to guess. His opinion of his four sons wasn’t exactly rosy. It’s probably Geoff and Bryan’s fault. They’re twins and the oldest. Family lore (passed down from our mom) has it that our dad originally had high hopes for his kids, figuring we’d all be the genius offspring he richly deserved, but these hopes were dashed early. When the twins were still babies, he caught them trying—and failing—to throw all their blocks out of their crib. They weren’t clever enough to align the blocks properly to fit through the slats. These dumb babies were just banging the blocks against the slats, perpendicular to them. Disgusted, Dad brought our mom over to witness this atrocious stupidity. Did she wonder if jettisoning the blocks was even the goal of these babies, vs. enjoying the chock-chock-chock sound they were making? Or was she tempted to explain to her husband about realistic infant development milestones? Apparently not. It seems nobody ever corrected my dad, and from that day forward he had to live with the sad “truth” that his kids just weren’t up to snuff. (Other family lore has it that he said to me once, “You’re not very bright, are you.” It’s tempting to dismiss this anecdote except there were five witnesses. Could we all be wrong? Well, actually, yeah, but not necessarily.)

Where bicycles were concerned, our dad was particularly pessimistic about our capabilities. As described here, all three of my brothers and I distinctly recall our dad’s reaction when Max (who’d drawn the short straw) asked if we could register for the Red Zinger Mini Classic bike race. “You boys are too stupid to race bicycles,” he declared. “You’d get yourselves killed.”

So why did he even buy us cool ten-speeds, if he had such a low opinion of our cycling prospects? I put this question to my brother Max. His reply was along the lines of, “Typical one-speed kid’s bikes disgusted Dad. No son of his would ride anything so vulgar. We had to be on proper ten-speeds whether we deserved them or not.”

Now, I realize I should be careful not to drag my brothers too far into my own story as regards the gear-shifting prohibition. I don’t specifically recall them being included in this, so I asked Bryan about it. “I think we were allowed to shift,” he said. “We probably ruined that for you with our own screw-ups.” He proceeded to recall how he tried to fix one of the brakes on his bike. He loosened the cable-fixing bolt, perhaps for diagnostic purposes, and pulled the cable out. Back then the cable would feed through a very narrow cylindrical aperture before being bolted down. Since this is the same dumb kid who as a baby couldn’t even throw a block out of his crib, you won’t be surprised to learn what happened next: he couldn’t get the cable back in. In fact, when he tried, the individual steel strands broke free from one another, fraying hopelessly. Bryan broke down in despair, convinced that he’d entirely wrecked his bike. Not only would he not have it to ride anymore, but he’d be in big trouble with Dad.

If getting in trouble for bike problems strikes you as preposterous, you obviously never met our dad. He was so devoted to his career, any extra parenting demands that pulled him away from his work during an evening or weekend was like a crisis. Nothing, it seemed, peeved him more than extra child-rearing tasks. We would actually be in trouble for getting a flat tire on our bikes. This was construed as an act of moral turpitude, like we were trying to throw our dad’s world into a tailspin by running over something sharp. It’s like nothing was an accident … every mishap was an act of treachery. All this being said, there was a positive side to our dad’s oppressive reign, which is that we learned how to fix our bikes ourselves, so that our “crimes” could be kept secret.

But of course, this frayed cable incident occurred long before Bryan developed any proficiency as a mechanic. At the time he bemoaned his plight to our babysitter, H—, who took pity on the boy and intervened, calling our dad at work to soften the blow. The upshot was that Dad didn’t get angry with Bryan (or at least kept it to himself), but he also didn’t get around to fixing the bike for what felt to Bryan like a year. Needless to say, until the bike was fixed, Bryan was forbidden to ride it. Our bikes always had to have two working brakes.

I told this story to my younger daughter, who incredulously asked, “Why wasn’t Uncle Bryan allowed to ride with just one brake? One is plenty!” Now, before you decide that her attitude marks me as an incompetent parent, let me just say I keep a pretty close eye on the family fleet and proactively make any repairs necessary. The only time my daughter has ridden with only one brake is when she was off at college and burned through a set of brake pads on her Breezer while I wasn’t looking. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true because she sometimes borrows my mid-‘60s Triumph 3-speed, whose coaster brake occasionally fails for reasons I cannot fathom (much less fix). But that’s pretty rare. In general I am a stickler for bicycles having two working brakes.

(Here is a drawing, by my daughter, of her Breezer. It’s not pertinent to the story, but when your kid pays such a loving tribute to her bicycle, you kind of want to share it.)

Now, being committed to truth in these pages, I must disclose something: my dad’s strict rules notwithstanding, I myself became quite reckless about the two-brake rule, a mere three or four years after having so obediently followed the no-shifting protocol. Perhaps something about an over-strict parent encourages a wholesale abandonment of that parent’s policies. I was around twelve when I bought a 3-speed bike, a basic Sears model, used. Yes, Sears made bicycles. Don’t believe the Google AI Summary on this. In fact, here is a photo of a Sears bike that is the spitting image of the one I had.

Just as in the photo above, my Sears had two handbrakes (and I don’t know what this says about its age as compared to my Triumph). The rear brake stopped working (probably a broken cable) and I don’t think I even considered fixing it. By this point I knew how, but it just didn’t seem important when I still had a perfectly good front brake. (I also didn’t bother replacing the broken gear cable connecting the Speed Switch shifter to the Sturmey-Archer internal 3-speed hub, so this bike was always in third gear, which was the highest. For this reason its nickname was the Third Speed. Why do I mention the brand of hub? Well, so I could include some eye candy here.)

Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, so, I didn’t bother to fix that rear brake. Nor did I consider riding more carefully. Quite the opposite, in fact. Exhibit A: my bike ride to Mr. Tomato’s Pizza to meet some friends. Mr. Tomato’s was at the bottom of the gently down-sloping parking lot of the Basemar shopping center. It had a huge picture window, and from a distance I recognized my friends sitting right in front of it. I decided to give them a good scare, and started sprinting toward them as fast as I could. My plan was to slam on the brakes (er, brake) just in time to keep from crashing through the window. Two things failed to occur to me. One was the possibility of a pedestrian walking along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. There was an overhang above this sidewalk, supported at intervals by big pillars that could easily obscure a shopper from view. The other thing I didn’t consider was the possibility of my one brake suddenly failing. This is what actually happened. Just as I hammered the brake, the cable snapped. There was absolutely no way to stop and I was less than ten feet from that giant window, carrying great speed.

It seemed as though all was lost, but just before impact I spied one of the pillars, which fortunately had a round cross-section and a smooth finish. I wrapped that pillar in a bear hug to at least keep myself from crashing through the window. Amazingly, as my momentum spun me and my bike around the pillar, the bike ended up pointed along the sidewalk at the moment it escaped my legs. It went shooting off forward, straight down that sidewalk, still at great speed.

So wonderful is the design of a bicycle, it can travel a great distance with no rider, as my brothers and I had learned to our delight earlier that summer. Not wanting to damage our ten-speeds, we’d conjured up a beach cruiser whose sole purpose was rider-less travel. (Its Ashtabula one-piece crankset assembly had fallen out so we couldn’t pedal it around anyway.) That bike was called Ghost Rider, or Ghostie for short, and we spent many an afternoon getting it up to speed, one guy riding it and several others pushing, and when we couldn’t get it going any faster, the rider would jump off the back and send the bike flying down the street. It could go for several hundred feet before either tipping over or drifting into a parked car. Well, in front of Mr. Tomato’s my 3-speed surely set a new record, since its speed was at least double that of a kid running. It was amazing to behold it flying down the sidewalk along the storefronts. Fortunately it was a slow business day for that mall, with no foot traffic. Equally astonishing was that I was completely unscathed other than perhaps slight damage to my hands and arms, similar to rope burn. My friends regarded me through the window with complete bewilderment, slack-jawed and disbelieving. I guess the point of this story is that my dad’s lack of faith in my intelligence wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

Of course my dad never know about my near-death experience at Mr. Tomato’s, or indeed of most of the crashes my brothers and I had. But the very first days of owning our bicycles were not promising. The problem was, we suddenly had this new hardware but lacked the know-how to use it. As weird as this may seem, our dad made zero effort to teach us how to ride, and in fact I am deeply puzzled as to how he even expected us to learn before being presented with these sophisticated ten-speeds. Did he just think people are born knowing how to ride a bike?

Which brings me to how my brother Max and I did learn, or at least were given one lesson apiece, on how to ride. No parents were involved, of course. Max went first. It had come to pass that Geoff and Bryan realized Max lacked this important skill, and talked their friend R— into loaning out his bike for the lesson. It was a typical kid’s bike in that it was a one-speed with high-rise handlebars and a banana seat. (We had a whole saying around this, that we would chant in mockery of these inferior bikes: “High-rise handlebar with a roll bar, banana seat, small wheel in front, big wheel in back, cool-dual frame, rusty old chain, with a slick, streamers from the grips and flower pedals.” I fact-checked this with Bryan and he remembered like half of it, and I added a couple details, and Max knew the rest. “Cool-dual frame” probably pertained to the two extra top-tubes of the Schwinn Sting-Ray, a popular model in those days. A “slick,” as Max eloquently put it, is “a rear tire with no tread for monster skids.” “Flower pedals” refers to “dust caps on the pedals that looked like daisies.”)

Actually, R—’s bike was somewhat unique in that it was an official licensed Boy Scout bike. But that’s neither here nor there. The more important detail is the single instruction that Geoff and Bryan gave to Max as they put him on the bike at the top of Howard Place, a long downhill: “Whatever you do, don’t turn!” Max and I remember it like it was yesterday. So ridiculous. I mean, what was the guy supposed to do? They didn’t tell him how to brake. They just figured that his future would work itself out somehow, after he’d built up all that speed! They set him off, gave him a good push. Now, I just did some research with Google Maps, and this street ran about 450 feet at an average grade of 5.5%. With help from ChatGPT (because I’m lazy, not because I needed it) I just calculated that by the time Max crossed Ithaca Drive (which Howard Place T’s into), he had to have been going at least 20 mph. He dutifully followed the instruction not to turn, so it’s a good thing there was no traffic on Ithaca to run him over. Instead he crashed over a curb, with so much velocity the bike kept going, and then hit a low fence that stopped him so he tipped over into the grass, remarkably unhurt. He leapt to his feet, delighted, and cried, “I can ride a bike, I can ride a bike!”

Alas, that was Max’s only lesson before receiving his ten-speed, months later, on his birthday. I guess he just assumed his skill was still there. He jumped on the bike and managed to pedal it not only to the end of our street, Hillsdale Way, but to negotiate the right-hand turn onto Howard Place (the same street I mentioned earlier), which is a cul-de-sac. He rode to the top, managed to turn the bike around, and then came barreling back down. In trying to make the left-hand turn back on to Hillsdale, with my dad and my brothers and me watching, he clipped a pedal and crashed. He got up, winced at his road rash, and checked over the bike. A big divot of foam rubber had been ripped out of the brand-new saddle. Regarding this, he thought to himself (as he related to me yesterday), “Well, I guess now this bike is really mine.”

Did I do any better? Alas, no. My lesson was a year or so later. Perhaps having been spooked a bit by Max’s disastrous first effort, Geoff and Bryan didn’t start me down Howard Place. Instead, they put me on my friend P—’s bike, another lowly one-speed, at the top of a steep driveway facing Hillsdale. They gave me a big push and I flew down the driveway, absolutely frozen in terror, went straight across the street, and crashed into the curb on the other side. I hadn’t built up nearly as much speed as Max had, so the curb stopped the front wheel cold and I flipped over the bars. I didn’t quite clear the sidewalk and landed roughly on it, but was no more hurt than on any other day, what with all the various skirmishes kids faced during that era of free-reign bullying. But I can’t say I’d learned any biking technique at all.

So when, about six months and zero follow-up lessons later, I got the Fuji Junior, I really didn’t know how to ride. But there was no way I could just stand there and look at the bike, with my dad seeming so expectant (apparently notwithstanding Max’s fiery wreck on his bike’s maiden voyage). So I just winged it, riding down the sidewalk, pedaling furiously because the one thing my brothers had managed to get across was that speed was the key to balance. I made it about two houses down before veering off course, heading straight for a mailbox. I managed not to run into it, but raked my back across it rather painfully. Somehow I kept the bike upright, and I guess by that point I had the hang of it. But this first ride on the Fuji Junior couldn’t have impressed my dad, and may have reminded him of Max’s similar misadventure, and this is perhaps why my dad decided to declare my bike’s shifters off-limits. Maybe he felt I had my hands full just learning how to steer the bike. Fortunately, I did figure out the brakes.

Well, once my fear abated, I fell madly in love with the bike. As I’ve mentioned before in these pages (in the notes to my “Corn Cob” poem), my Fuji had Suntour shifters and derailleurs, which I noticed when with great delectation I examined every last feature of the bike. Suntour seemed like a really cool word. I didn’t grasp at the time that it was brand of component; I thought Suntour was a sub-brand of the bike, as though Fuji was the make and Junior was the model and Suntour was the sub-model, like they do with cars now (e.g., Subaru Outback Expert Sport-Trac, L.L. Bean Edition). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

One day when the bike was still new, I rode all morning, from my house up to the end of Howard Place and back down, then all the way down Hillsdale and back up, then back up Howard and back, over and over again, whistling the whole while because I was so happy. I happened to notice Mr. S—, who lived on the corner of Hillsdale and Howard, looking at me funny. He was out working in his yard and every time I went by he glared at me. What was his problem? I just shrugged it off. Well, later that day, another neighbor, Mr. D—, confronted me, asking if I’d vandalized Mr. S—’s house and yard. I was like “WHAT?!” It happens that Mr. S— had described at length to Mr. D— how I’d vandalized his place, and then rubbed it in by riding by again and again, whistling merrily to showcase my Schadenfreude as I watched him clean it up. I was mortified at this totally false accusation, and declared my innocence to Mr. D—. He advised that I’d simply have to go over there and knock on Mr. S—’s door and explain that I wasn’t the vandal. This I did, despite being a very shy kid, and I was so upset I was crying throughout my denial speech. My river of tears, it seemed, was mistaken for remorse and contrition by Mr. S—, who clearly didn’t believe my story of riding by again and again just because I liked to ride. At least my blubbery speech mollified him sufficiently that he didn’t see fit to involve my parents. This was a big break, because my parents never seemed to believe in my innocence, either. My mom once made me go apologize to yet another neighbor for being part of a cruel pack of kids that relentlessly teased her dog, even though I told my mom over and over that I wasn’t involved. Can you imagine how soul-crushing it is to apologize for an act of animal cruelty you are entirely innocent of?

Okay, time to move on. It was the toward the end of the summer when, on a day I now see as momentous, Max taught me how to shift my bike’s gears. We’d pedaled up Table Mesa Drive and were about to descend Vassar Drive, which is a 5.5% grade. Max, surely tired of waiting for me as I coasted down such hills (first gear being way too low to be of use), pointed at my stem-mounted shifters and told me, “Grab those two levers and push them all the way forward.”

Now, you probably think we’ve finally reached the crux of this story, after so very many diversions, and will now get to the really important, life-changing bit, and that’s almost true, but first I need to pause yet again to explain about these shifters. If you’re old enough to have used old-school stem- or down-tube-mounted shift levers, and remember how they worked, you may have raised an eyebrow just now when reading about Max’s instruction to push both levers forward. On almost any ten-speed-type bike, pushing the right lever forward would put the chain on the smallest cog in back (making for a higher gear, exactly as intended), but pushing the left lever forward would put the chain on the smaller chainring up front (making for a lower gear, at odds with the rest of the shift). You’d also wonder why, since I always rode in my bike’s lowest gear, both levers would have been down at the moment Max issued his instruction. On almost any bike, this would have meant my chain was on the big chainring, corresponding to the higher gear range. The only way you might have thought, “Oh yeah, of course, this makes sense” is if you’re the kind of bizarrely knowledgeable bike maven who would recall that the Suntour derailleur line-up of 1978 included the Spirt model, which worked backwards from most other derailleurs. As it happened, Max’s instructions were perfectly accurate for putting my bike in its highest gear.

And this begs the question: if my front derailleur (and thus left shifter) were essentially backwards from most others, how is it that Max’s instructions were correct? Wouldn’t he have assumed my bike worked the same as his? When I started this post, that question wouldn’t stop nagging at me. Now, if you’re wondering if I’m just remembering it wrong, think again … after all, this was a life-changing moment, forever seared into my memory. The highly specific action gave me, even before the gear shift actually took effect, a very powerful feeling. I knew that these gears were the key to somehow going faster, though I didn’t have any idea how (because when you think about it, the behavior of a bike’s gearing only makes sense after the fact, when you know empirically how gearing works; before that, the notion of differently sized cogs and chainrings affecting a bike’s speed is highly, highly abstract). The idea that I was somehow about to unleash great speed was tantalizing, and to achieve this by taking one hand, applying it to two levers, and pushing them both all the way forward in one go … it’s like pushing the throttle control forward on a fighter plane, or, better yet, remember the opening scene in “Risky Business,” when Tom Cruise’s character pushes all the levers on his dad’s stereo’s graphic equalizer all the way up, so he can totally rock out? It was just like that.

Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, I had to find out if it was possible the front derailleurs on my brothers’ bikes, meaning Simplex derailleurs (these being Motobécane Nomades), might have also been backwards. This could have been a convention, after all, because this arrangement just makes sense. You have one consistent rule—pushing lever forward = higher gear—instead of the conflicting rule of pulling the left lever down = higher gear while pushing the right lever forward = higher gear. This conflicting behavior stymies cycling newcomers. On my wife’s road bike, I actually put “H” and “L” stickers on the down tube near the shifters to show which way to move them. It’s one of the more confusing things about pre-pushbutton shifting.

I couldn’t reach my brothers right away so I consulted ChatGPT. It assured me that, in fact, Simplex derailleurs were also backwards (vs. more modern shifters), just like the Suntour Spirt. GPT confidently declared, “The circa 1975 Simplex shift lever was pushed forward (toward the front wheel) to move the chain to the big ring. As a result, the lever would end up in a vertical or forward-leaning position when in the big ring.” Had it stopped there, I might have been fooled by a classic AI hallucination. But GPT went on to say, “This action corresponded to pushing the shift lever forward (since the shift lever pulls cable as it rotates forward).” Of course this is wrong. The shift lever pulls cable when you pull it down. So I asked it to furnish photos and diagrams. It provided a photo of a mid-‘80s Shimano Dura-Ace front derailleur (useless); a drawing of a Simplex rear derailleur (also useless); a photo looking from the left at a ‘90s-era triple crankset (ditto); and a photo of a bottom bracket with chainwheels in the background (noticing any trend here, i.e., useless?). Then it described these visual aids in exhaustive, needless, and useless detail.

I pointed out its error, challenging the notion that pushing a shift lever forward would ever tension the cable, whereupon GPT completely backpedaled (pun intended, couldn’t resist) and recanted everything it had said earlier, saying, “You nailed it!” and providing a totally new answer to my original question: “No, Simplex front derailleurs (like the Prestige models used on Motobécanes in the mid-1970s) were not reverse-spring designs like the SunTour Spirt.”

But wait, I’m not done. Disgusted by ChatGPT’s blithe ineptitude, I asked it to furnish a diagram and a photo to illustrate its revised explanation of Simplex’s shifting. Look what it came up with:

Can you believe that? For all its detailed description (running over 1,600 words in all), ChatGPT apparently had no concept of the cable actuation. Look at the arrow pointing from the “Cable” label … it has no head, goes nowhere! No cable is shown! And look at the arrow showing the motion of the lever: it’s 90 degrees off of the actual motion. And since when is the lever mounted directly to the derailleur? Where would the cable even be?

Actually, in fairness, I know of at least one front derailleur that was actuated by a handle instead of a cable. It was on an ancient Schwinn Collegiate that I bought from a police auction. The rear derailleur had a normal shifter and cable setup, but that front derailleur had a handle. At least it did, for a while, until my pant leg caught it one day during hard pedaling and ripped it clean off the bike. But this wasn’t a Simplex derailleur; I’m pretty sure it was a Huret (though it was labeled “Schwinn Approved” in keeping with the fiction that this was an all-American bike). That derailleur looked something like this:

Getting back to ChatGPT, its drawing wasn’t even the worst of its crimes. Look at this fake photo it generated of what it imagined that Simplex front shifting system looked like:

I thought for a second this was an actual photo of some bizarre ill-fated real-life setup, but look at the ersatz brand stamped into the shift lever, in a nonexistent alphabet. The entire rendering is just grotesque. In fact, for me, and I suppose anyone else who has great familiarity with bicycle components, this mock photo is deep into uncanny valley territory, to the extent it’s almost nauseating. Also note how the derailleur cage doesn’t clear the chainring teeth. Artificial intelligence my ass!

Suffice to say, Simplex derailleurs of that era weren’t backwards and nothing can explain Max’s spot-on instructions. When I asked him he simply admitted, “I don’t have an answer for you. Geoff and Bryan probably made the observation so it must have been common knowledge. I know I didn’t discover that on my own.” Bryan theorized that Max had taken my bike out for a few joy rides and discovered it that way; Max could neither confirm nor deny this. The perfect accuracy of his instruction shall have to remain a mystery.

But oh, when I pushed those levers forward, and that bike went from first to tenth gear … it was breathtaking. I mashed the pedals with everything I had, working hard to get on top of that 52x14 top gear, until I was just flying down Vassar. I’d had no idea just how effective pedaling in “the big meat” (as a bike’s highest gear is known by racers) could be. It’s like if you had what you thought was a Fred Flintstone car, propelled by your feet paddling the ground, and then one day you discovered that this car had an engine. What a game-changer. It was like I went from patsy to made man in the span of a minute.

Not only did this sudden knowledge change my cycling, but it forever changed how I regarded my dad’s authority. Not only would I use all my gears from that day forward, but I’d have this secret I’d be keeping from him. It was impossible for me to revert to the lowly, gutless, quaking obeyer of rules; I was like, fuck that guy! He kept this gearing magic from me! He kept me down! I felt like Toecutter in Mad Max: “The bronze, they keep you from being proud.”

As it turned out, I never did get in trouble for defying my dad. An absentminded fellow, he evidently forgot he’d ever issued that prohibition. Or who knows, maybe on some level he wanted me to take some initiative. But most likely he’d intended to one day teach me all about shifting, but just forgot. Maybe he’d have thought a little harder about this if he’d had any inkling that his silly rule, coupled with Max’s intervention, would turn me into a lifelong rebel…

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