When you have to deal with something difficult, there’s a school of thought that says it’s better to have it happen unexpectedly. The idea is that thinking about an unpleasant experience for three days before it happens makes it far worse; after all, would you rather experience something negative and three days of anxiety, or just the negative event?

I get the logic, but there are problems. For one, this method requires someone else to both administer the event and lie to you about it. If you have to take your child in to get a shot, it’s definitely easier to not tell them that’s where you’re going until you get there – but you’re also destroying your child’s trust. It’s not worth it.

Three days of anxiety is better than months, years, or a lifetime of damaged trust, fear, and resentment.

All this is to say – bad news sucks. You don’t want to give it. But when you have to, you have to. Don’t spring it on people. The trust is better.

Everything somebody tells you tells you something. It tells you what they thought was important to tell you, if nothing else. Nothing is unimportant, it’s just that the grappling hook might miss. But that’s all it is, looking for a purchase, something to anchor your lifeline to.

There is a particular kind of mistake that is very easy to make, and results in you not only thinking that the world is terrible, but also – crucially – thinking that you cannot make it better. I would like to help you correct that mistake, because chances are good that you’re making some version of it right now.

Imagine that you are in a dark room. It’s very dark, such that it’s almost impossible to see. This is very inconvenient and makes life pretty difficult in that room. There are a few other people in the room, and life is equally difficult for them. They complain loudly, so you’re aware of their discomfort and the fact that it matches your own. Now imagine you take all this in and conclude: “Life is an inescapable hellscape of darkness, and we’re all brutally oppressed by the lack of light!”

See the mistake? It seems obvious from, you know, outside the room.

But some people inside the room don’t find it obvious at all. They truly believe that their particular set of negative circumstances represent something that (A) is universal and (B) cannot be changed, except by something capable of changing universal circumstances. It does not occur to them at all that they are merely witnessing the circumstances of a very small group of people who could change those circumstances quite easily.

If you never talk to anyone outside of that room, it’s pretty understandable! If you talk to some people and 100% of them all claim the same circumstances, it’s quite easy to extrapolate. But birds of a feather and all that. The people around you are also like you. You have to put in a lot of effort to make it otherwise.

People make all sorts of broad statements as if they were universally true. When you hear one, just add the following to the end “…according to the very small group of people just like me that I exclusively exchange information with.”

If you hear someone say “Nobody wants to work anymore,” add the caveat. Same with “We live in a capitalist dystopia,” or “Women always date jerks but never nice guys,” or “The American dream is dead,” or whatever point of view you hear. Remember that this person isn’t describing reality, they’re describing a very small and specific room that they could easily leave.

They don’t, because they haven’t yet realized they can.

Two people with opposing viewpoints have a beef on Twitter, and both are convinced that they’re representatives of the only two viewpoints in the entire human population and that their struggle is a battle in the Great War Between Good and Evil, instead of being an online argument that only 0.0001% of people could even understand, let alone care about. It’s the same tiny group of people in the dark room, except now they’ve chosen to fight over whose fault it is that it’s dark in there.

Most of the problems that you perceive to be “the world’s problems” are actually just your problems. They belong to you and a small group of similar people. They’re quite easy to solve, in most cases – just leave the room.

I notice that there’s a small group of people, for example, who are convinced that economically things are worse now in the United States than they were in the 1950s. (They aren’t. They are, in fact, so much better that it’s almost mind-boggling.) Here’s what I notice about this group of people though: they almost all live in very high-cost-of-living cities and are themselves low-income or low-wealth compared to their contemporary peers. So their personal economic circumstances are rough, and of course birds of a feather – so their peers are in similar straights. Then they look at comparisons to average income earners in average cost-of-living cities from the 1950s and think “See! Things are worse for everyone now!”

They’ve taken their own dark room and assumed everyone is in it. Sure, if you have a low-wage job and you live in Manhattan, things are tough. But the person who makes an average wage and lives in Cleveland is doing much better than their counterpart from the 1950s.

(And the low-wage person from Manhattan is also doing much better than their counterpart from the 1950s, by the way. In fact, they’re doing better than the 1950s average person too, but it’s easy to see what you want to see.)

Of course, this type of person can’t see that they can just open the door and walk out of the dark room. It’s dark, so it might be a little tricky to find the door at first. But they can do it – and they can even shout the directions back into the room to help the others still stuck in there when they do.

Some people do that! They leave the room and try to help others do it too. But our personal failings are often sticky, and complaining about the room – useless as it is – is easier than leaving it. Some part of us thinks that our complaints should carry weight; surely since everyone is in these same circumstances, the revolution is right around the corner! The reason it never comes is because the pain is actually so localized and so minor, but you don’t see that yet.

So the next time you think that there’s some great and terrible flaw with the way of the entire world, pause. Consider that you’re just in a very dark but very small room, and that the door isn’t far away.

Life is all about trade-offs and choices. Most of life is about bit by bit finding better replacements for one tiny piece of your life at a time – straight upgrades, with no drawbacks. They exist, they just have costs. Often the cost is the time of discovery; sometimes it’s the effort to earn the upgrade. But one way or another, we pay juice to improve our existence.

But then there are the other kinds of choices. Not easy choices between a good and a bad option where the only cost is figuring out which is which. But the genuinely challenging choices between two bad or – often more difficult – two great choices.

My middle child faced a serious dilemma tonight. Having cleaned her plate during dinner, she (by family law and custom) was entitled to one desert. But alas, there were two delicious options! Two treats were available and she had to pick one. She was nearly paralyzed. I even suggested that she could take a half portion of each, but even the sub-decision of “do I trade half of this for half of that” was agonizing.

Both because I don’t want her to over-indulge in sweets and because this was a good lesson, I held her feet to the fire on the choice and didn’t let her cheat. We may be able, with sufficient moxie, to have anything – but never everything. Learning to choose between equivalent options is surprisingly difficult. But eternally necessary.

In the end, she found the greatest solution – time. She can take half of each tonight, and save the other half of each for tomorrow. If the horizons stretch long enough, we can make all the choices we like.

Medicine for really little kids usually comes in liquid form. You can do the classic spoonful, but these days the meds come with little plastic syringes so you can just squirt it into their mouths. Despite whatever they try to flavor it with, medicine still tastes like medicine and many kids don’t love it.

When a kid is feverish, that’s not really the time to impose discipline if you don’t need to – it’s the time to get the medicine into the kid however you can. I learned that if I took the dose of medicine and just shook it up in a few ounces of juice, my son would gulp it down and all would be well.

We’ve all done something like that. Parents mash pills into applesauce. Pet owners wrap bits of bacon around the pills so their dog will swallow them. Caretakers of the elderly mix medicine into tea.

But it isn’t just medicine, and the wisdom is helpful all around. Any time you have to do something you’d find unpleasant on its own, there’s almost always a way to mash it into a larger volume of something you find enjoyable to the point where you barely notice. Have to write a term paper? Crank up music, grab a cocktail, and write it a paragraph at a time during the loading screens between levels of your favorite video game.

Mash it up in the applesauce if that’s what it takes to get it done.

If you eat too much chocolate and not enough protein, get chocolate-covered almonds. It’s not as good as just almonds, but it’s way better than just chocolate!

The point is this – we don’t have to grit our teeth and endure unpleasant things just because they’re good for us or necessary. We’re allowed to make them pleasant. We’re allowed to coat them with sugar or drown them in music or cover them with glitter to make them fit into our lives – especially if they alternative is avoiding them entirely.

When you can’t say no to something, don’t expect it to be good.

It never hurts to remember that most basic lesson, and today is as good a day as any.

There are few ways to conjure wonder and joy like pushing the envelope of what books you will read to a child.

Is this book too “mature” for them? Too scary? Are the words too big? Is the subject matter too complex?

Oh, then what a ride you’re in for!

This is how they mature. They grab your hand and then they tell you how brave they are. They ask you what the words mean, and they learn. Their minds grow more complex to match the subject matter.

One thing that is true of most people and all children – they will rise to whatever is presented to them. Protecting them from things you think are beyond them is like building a wall separating them from their potential.

I finished reading Roald Dahl’s The Witches to my children tonight (my two youngest, just as I did with my oldest some years ago). It was all they could talk about. Well, except for when we would start the next book.

Throw everything you can at them, and never stop. They’ll outgrow you anyway, but send them off with wonder in their hearts and curiosity in their brains, and you’ll have done a wonderful job.

If you try to do something quickly, you will do it poorly. If you try to do something well, you will do it quickly.

This is the Paradox of the Wire. When you’re in a desperate time crunch, you can’t focus on that. You can’t even think about that. You have to go full Zen and focus entirely on quality of execution, because haste makes mistakes. Cut one corner and you’ll collapse the whole thing.

If you’re late, focus on driving well – because one accident or getting pulled over one time will lose you more time than you could possibly gain from speeding. That principle applies to everything – quality is the only road to speed.

I just received a small but incredibly kind and meaningful gesture from someone who knows me very well.

When you really need this sort of thing, you don’t always know what to do with it when you get it. That’s one of the signs of needing it, I suppose.

I am not always great at showing it. But I am very, very grateful for the smallest kindness.

We tend to look down on people taking “the easy way” through some dilemma, but why? Spending more resources than you must on a task is foolish. Perhaps we’re judging overall character – the kind of person who would take the easy way out must surely be a pitiable sloth!

But it depends on what you’re trading for.

Am I lazy because I have someone else mow my lawn when I could easily do it myself? Or am I being a faithful steward of scarce resources – namely, my time and energy – so I can spend those resources on going to the park with my children? I made that exact trade yesterday, and I can’t think of one person who isn’t better off because I did.

Your life isn’t measured by how hard it is. If there’s an easier way to joy, it’s worth looking.