Before She Arrives

Thoughts after setting up a crib.

Yesterday, we set up our future daughter’s crib. It was one of those sweet, strange moments where time seems to fold in on itself. The days are counting down to her arrival, and yet it feels like only yesterday that we found out about her. Now there is a crib sitting in the corner, quietly insisting that the future is not theoretical anymore.

When I think of her, I already see the next eighteen years playing out in front of me. I know life will not go exactly as I picture it. Hell, maybe none of what I picture will happen. But that does not make me any less excited for those future moments. I cannot wait to show her my favorite shows, teach her how to drive, take her to sporting events, and read to her while she is still small enough to think my voice is the most interesting sound in the room.

Still, setting up the crib made me wonder what kind of world she is about to enter. Extremist politics, climate change, artificial intelligence, a tidy little welcome basket from the twenty-first century. How do we parent and teach a child in a world that seems determined to be both advanced and deeply ridiculous?

It is funny to think that millennials may be the best generation at using computers. The generation before us did not have computers until adulthood. Younger generations have grown up with technology their whole lives, but software has become so user-friendly that many people cannot handle it when something goes wrong. Millennials, meanwhile, had to learn to use computers when they were still useful but still openly hostile. We had to troubleshoot. We had to install things. We had to watch the family computer make noises that suggested it was either connecting to the internet or contacting the dead.

Maybe our daughter will benefit from that experience. I do love going into long explanations about the history of everything, which may delight her or make her flee the room. Time will tell. Maybe that is why I love digitizing memories. Maybe that is why I should have been a history professor. I have always believed that you cannot explain the present without explaining how we got here.

That applies not only to the world, but also to the operating procedures I write at work. People forget why we do things. They see a rule or a process and think it appeared out of nowhere, conjured by some joyless committee with a fondness for forms. But usually, a rule exists because something went wrong. There was an error here, a problem there, and now we have a procedure to prevent it from happening again.

The same is true of regulations, which people love to complain about until the alternative arrives and ruins everyone’s afternoon. Some people act as if regulations were invented purely to annoy business owners. But many of them were created because, at some point, someone made a mess large enough that society had to say, “Right, perhaps we should not do that again.” People forget struggles quickly. The years around the 2008 financial crisis were dark, but for those who spend their days drifting between sports, television, and selective memory, it is as if that period never happened. That forgetfulness worries me.

In politics, I keep hoping people will grow tired of extremism. So far, this has not been a winning prediction. Trump was an extremist from 2017 to 2021. Biden was a moderate from 2021 to 2025. Yet people forgot how turbulent those Trump years were and voted the clown back into office. Trump helped create extremists on both sides. The more extreme one side becomes, the more the other side sharpens its knives. So, in 2028, I would not be surprised if the Democrats respond with their own extremist. That is how pendulums work when no one bothers to install brakes.

Is there hope for a return to moderation? I want to believe there is, but I doubt it will happen easily. The way people interact now makes moderation harder. I can keep my daughter off social media until she is older, but I cannot keep her away from everyone else who is already using it. Social media has some good uses, but I think something broke when endless scrolling became normal. The algorithms are not designed to make people wiser, kinder, or more thoughtful. They are designed to keep people staring. In fairness, they are very good at their jobs, which is more than can be said for many humans.

In the past, people met in bars, churches, potlucks, and other shared spaces. Extreme ideas could still exist, of course, but they were more likely to be challenged by ordinary people standing nearby with potato salad and common sense. Now, people can disappear into online corners where their worst thoughts are not corrected but applauded. Extremism no longer has to survive in public. It can grow comfortably in private, fed by strangers who mistake outrage for insight.

I have seen this in my own family. I cannot count how many times I have watched someone post a picture of a person of color and claim they committed some horrible crime, only for the story to be false. And the person sharing it would not take fifteen seconds to check. I saw parents, aunts, cousins, and other relatives post racist, sexist, and completely false things. I lost respect for many of them. I do not say that lightly.

For me, I always wanted to know more before I shared something. I wanted to verify it. I wanted the details. I wanted the nitty-gritty. But many people wanted something else, to be accepted by people they were never going to meet. Somehow, the “cool crowd” from high school became an online mob of strangers, only now some of them are white nationalists in Idaho building bunkers for race wars that exist mostly in their own fever dreams. A normal and healthy development, obviously.

Protecting my daughter from that world will be one of my goals. Maybe people will grow tired of the internet and crave real human connection again. We are social animals, and the fake connections we get online cannot sustain us forever. They mimic community without providing much of what community actually gives: accountability, patience, humor, forgiveness, and the ability to tell someone, gently or not, that they are being an idiot.

Maybe people will also begin to see that blind loyalty to political parties keeps us divided. Loyalty is often a trait the rich want to instill in everyone else. Keep buying the cheap product, keep working under bad conditions, keep defending the system that benefits someone above you. It is strange how people can be more loyal to a car company, a political party, or a brand than to the people who actually matter, their spouse, their children, and their immediate family.

And if extremism is not enough to worry about, there is climate change. Any reasonable person can see that climate change is happening. The data is there. Even our grandparents and parents talk about how winters used to be colder and snowier. And they are right. I may add data to this later, but I have done my own research and run the numbers. One of the biggest changes is that low temperatures are rising faster than high temperatures. Anyone can pull weather data for their own area and see it, especially in America, where we have nearly a century of local data available in many places. If you are skeptical, then I invite you to do your own research. It would probably be good to take a break from scrolling to put together a pivot table.

I fear that the time to save the planet may already be passing. But maybe I am wrong. Humans have always found new solutions, often after exhausting every worst option first. Perhaps we will find ways to make the planet better. I hope so. But Americans may have to rely on other countries, because our current administration seems intent on making climate research disappear with a snap of its pudgy fingers. I hope universities in India, France, and elsewhere help lead the way. America is no longer acting like the world's leader. At the moment, it is auditioning for the role of cautionary tale. England, if it is not careful, may join us in the sequel.

Then there is AI. How do I protect my daughter from AI? Or will she need protection from it at all? If AI became smart enough, could it hack into the world’s nuclear missiles and end civilization, as portrayed in the Mission Impossible movies? Possibly. Though given my experience with technology, it would probably first ask us to verify we are not robots.

I have been using AI for the past four years, and my view is that AI is only as useful as the person using it. In my profession, AI is widening the gap between those who know what they are doing and those who do not. You still need to understand the concepts. If you do not know what you need, AI will not magically get you there. It can suggest things, yes, but there is no substitute for knowing what you are looking for.

For people with experience and knowledge, AI can speed up work. I had already been working with VBA and queries before AI became widely available. Now that my colleagues are also using AI, they can automate more than before, but the gap remains. AI can help, but it is not always right. Just the other day, Google’s Gemini told me that six was greater than seven, which was bold. Incorrect, but bold.

That is why I want to teach my daughter how to think and create without depending on AI. If she learns the underlying skills first, then when she does use AI, it can make her faster. But if she relies on it before she has built those skills, it may make her weaker.

My deeper concern is not that AI will destroy humanity in one dramatic nuclear event. My concern is quieter, that people will outsource their creativity to it. Those who use AI to create all their images, stories, ideas, and art risk losing something essential. There is a dullness in merely breathing without anything original going on in your head. People need to create, write, draw, take pictures, build things, garden, and learn. These are not hobbies in some trivial sense. They are part of what makes us human.

I have nothing against AI. I use it. I think it can be valuable. But I believe people often use it incorrectly. AI should be something you delegate work to. You are the boss, AI is the worker bee. It can help organize, edit, summarize, or speed things along. But when you ask it to become the source of your ideas, you begin draining your own skills. You outsource not just the task, but the muscle.

So protecting my daughter’s creativity will matter. I want her to play with Lincoln Logs and building blocks. I want her to paint, garden, read, imagine, and make things badly before she makes them well. I want her to know the pleasure of creating something that did not exist before, even if that something is just a lopsided drawing, a muddy garden bed, or a story about a dragon who inexplicably works in accounting.

As I sit here writing this, the crib is now in the corner. I already have the next eighteen years mapped out in my head, which is both beautiful and completely unreasonable. I will show her Doctor Who when she is young, read Agatha Christie novels to her when she is older, and try to help her think outside the box, or at least notice when someone is trying to sell her the box at a markup.

I do not want her raised by social media or parked endlessly in front of a television. I want her outside, in nature, with books, with art, with dirt under her fingernails and questions in her head. I know it will not go exactly according to plan. Children, I am told, have their own opinions about these things. But I am patient, and I can be flexible.

I cannot wait for her to come into this world. I cannot wait for the years ahead when I get to guide her, teach her, learn from her, and watch her become whoever she is meant to be.

The crib is ready.

Now we wait.