Good morning,
My mind and heart have been a mess lately in a way I’ve not really experienced before. I rarely get twisted when it comes to the news. I’ve always been intentional about my relationship with media, committed to curiosity alongside outrage, prone to wanting understanding alongside action.
But something is changing.
Some of it feels like a side effect of parenthood: witnessing human cruelty feels more gut-wrenching when you’re constantly witnessing human innocence. Side-by-side, they wreck you. Seeing power seized and used against people so forcefully and abhorrently feels intolerable now that I have a small human I'm tasked with raising and protecting. And being attuned to the well-being of other people's children has become a daily practice — it's a natural instinct at playgrounds and in the neighborhood and even in community spaces to consider what other children and other parents need.
And some of it feels like it’s because this isn’t about my relationship with media anymore, it’s about my relationship with America. I’ve found myself twisted in knots by the news because it doesn’t feel like news anymore, as if the media was once a fence between me and danger, and in the last few administrations, it’s vanished and I’m standing in the open in front of my country.
My approach to tricky knots has never been brute force. I need to sit back, look at it from a few angles, and then decide my approach. While I rarely share raw first thoughts to this degree, here is a letter I wrote in my journal to my son this weekend. I’m sharing it because perhaps you are also dealing with a growing knot.
Journal Entry, January 25, 2026
Outrage is starting to feel insufficient as a posture for the long haul. I’m so moved by the political action citizens can and are taking and I am also so unsure of what I trust is a solution, outside of this particular moment, to the forces at play across the world. Regime, culture and technological change, all at once.
I wonder if there is a version of first principles that might help me assess what citizenship means to me right now. According to this post on FS about reasoning from first principles, that requires taking everything I know about citizenship apart and looking at what’s true. I liked this:
If I hand you a house made from Lego blocks, you know it’s possible to make a house. Thinking at the first layer, you might move a few blocks around and, in the process, slightly improve the house. Most people stop here. They are presented with something that already exists and they endeavor to make it slightly better. Going a layer deeper and breaking the Lego house into individual pieces opens the door to possibility: not only can you build a better house, you can build something entirely different.
I have no idea what else to build but I do feel close to knowing the values from which to do so. I can’t stop thinking about how to offer at least this—the values that come before politics—to my son, almost 2, now getting verbal.
How will I respond when he starts noticing fear and systems bigger than us, and receives information he never gathered with his own senses? What will I tell him about what it means to be a member of society? What skills will I help him develop that foster leadership?
Here is a first draft.
Dear [child’s name],
I think it’s time to talk about how people organize themselves in America. That’s the name of the landmass on which we live. You’ve seen some of it, but there is so much more you haven’t seen yet. It’s a very big place with big oceans on both sides and countries above it, below it and all the way across the oceans.
There are many ways to organize large groups of people, and if you look at different places, be they little towns or big countries, you’ll notice that they are all organized in different ways. Each place has a story and each has changed over time.
Kind of like you and me. Before you were 1, you couldn’t see much past your fingers! When you are 5, you’ll be able to not only see people and things but also how they all connect, the invisible ways. And there will be a lot of feelings inside your body as it learns to organize itself in new places as you grow up.
Sometimes, the way a group of people is organized stops working well. Often, it’s because not everyone can participate in decisions, so a smaller group takes over. But that small group may care more about what they want than what’s good for everyone. It’s hard to agree on what’s good for everyone in a really big group of people!
It’s not unlike when you pinched B’s nose this week because you wanted a turn at the slide. Can you imagine if 20 people wanted a turn at the slide, and 20 people were already in line for it, and they all started pinching each other’s noses or, worse, they asked the biggest, loudest ones to pinch the smallest ones of the other group?
In these scenarios, it can look like the most important thing to do is to stop the pinching, and yes, for everyone’s safety, please, stand up when you see someone getting hurt.
But after you get home and you have a moment to eat some food and sit down and give or get a hug, it’s important to try to understand how to stop pinching in the future.
In places like America, people tried to make rules so the same people couldn’t stay in charge forever and more ideas about what everyone needs could be tried out.
But those rules were made a long time ago, before there were so many people here, before the internet, and before we were all so connected to the rest of the world. It used to take days to even travel to another city or contact someone far away!
Still, we try to use those old systems and make updates as we go. It’s kind of like living in an old house built at a different time. Remember how we showed you where all the old knob and tube electricity in our walls used to be? It had to be taken out because it’s not safe anymore, with all our computers and lamps and TVs!
But going through change is very hard. We have to be good at keeping our eyes open to the big things and the small ones at the same time. We have to make sure people don’t get hurt when we break old things, and we definitely can’t hurt each other when things don’t go our way.
Here is my best advice about how to do that:
Even if you feel small and like you haven’t seen most of the country and you’re a little bit scared, try to come up with ideas for how you think people should be organized and what they need.
Because trying to come up with ideas is itself a way of living. A very important way.
Even if your plan doesn’t work or no one listens, the next time you see people hurting each other, you won’t feel as scared or angry because you’ll understand why they are doing this and what alternatives could be.
It’s kind of like how mamas always have something in the bag to make their babies feel better, or teachers have doubles of special toys. They don’t always help, but it can be overwhelming not to have anything to offer someone who is having a hard time.
When people live together, big feelings are common. And when feelings get big, people often use the easiest way they can think of to get what they want. Choosing to prioritize everyone’s safety and well-being isn’t easy, but I promise that it’s worth it.
Here is why: It’s the happiest happiness.
If you want a turn at the slide, sure, you can find your way to get one. But what if you could find a way for everyone to have fun at the same time? It’s harder than just taking your own turn, but when you find that way, you will be happier than you ever could have been alone, or if only your group of friends got what they want.
You won’t believe me until you practice it once or twice, so try it out.
Easy ways are to start in lower-conflict situations, like, if you are bored or lonely, can you come up with a way to get the neighbors out to play together? I promise it will feel more fulfilling than finding your own toys to play with at home.
To develop the ability to do this, you can’t be afraid of people. You have to practice being someone who wants to spread friendship, especially with people who are either more quiet than you and don’t say hi first, or with people who are louder than you and hurt your ears.
Try to find a quiet moment with each type of person and ask about their life. Then, make plans to do something fun. Over time, when things happen, like the time we all lost power for a few days or the big storm came or something scary happened and the police and fire trucks came, you’ll call on these friends and want to make sure they are safe and you’ll feel connected to them. This is what I mean by happier happiness.
Sometimes, it might feel like happiness is a funny goal to have in life, but it actually should always stay your biggest goal. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s silly.
Because actively pursuing it for yourself and other people at the same time unlocks your best thoughts and best feelings and best plans. When you’re older, I can explain to you how I learned this from my Buddhist teacher and you can study it more carefully.
If you practice living this way, you'll find it easier to understand why things happen the way they do, in school, at work, in elections, in faraway places. And you’ll also feel really clear about what to do. Especially when you see people being hurt. First, help protect them.
Second, ask yourself: who is trying to get what and why? Is there another way to work on this? In my experience, not enough people spend a lot of time on the second question, but it’s very important that we do, even if it’s not our job and we don’t get paid for it. If you want to live amongst people anywhere, you have to see and nurture the invisible strings between them. This is called interconnection, the invisible strings between people that hold communities together, no matter if they are organized this way or that. It’s a life-level thing, like how you feel about your stuffies or the earth.
Doing so will make sure you never fail to protect someone weaker than you, and also that you never close your heart or mind to bullies. In the end, we are all people trying to get what we want and feel connected to each other. This is absolute truth. Even the person getting everyone to pinch each other is trying to get something done — but that doesn’t mean we let them pinch.
Here is where it gets important.
Every time you see the nose-pincher, you have two choices: you can either think, Oh No! It’s them again and hide, or worse, get angry and band together with your friends and call them names.
Or, you can take a deep breath, keep your body safe, and ask people you trust about how to help. The cool thing about living in a world with so many people is that there are always people who know more than we do about how to solve certain problems. We just have to find them.
Then, come home, give or get a hug, eat something and work on the future.
I know that sounds like an indirect way to deal with the nose-pincher, but sometimes, we can’t stop someone from doing something in the moment. But imagine if all your friends (and even new people you haven’t met yet) had the guts to walk right up to the pinchers and take their spot in line?
In the world of grown-ups, people with lots of money and people who like to be mean often get to be loudest about how things should be organized.
There are many ways to address this imbalance, which we won’t get into today. But one thing we can do is make sure people who care about everyone's happiness also have resources and loud voices. That's part of why we build strong friendships.
But today, what I want you to know, is that if you want to work on the future, it’s important to always look at the world the way a bird at the top of a very tall tree would see it.
That way you’ll be able to see things like: how was this organized in the past? How do the loud people want it to be organized in the future? Where am I now? And all the while, building deep bonds with the people around you.
When you see things from the top of a tree, you’ll be less afraid when scary things happen and you’ll be quicker to take the right action without hesitation, while making sure your friends who care about the happiest happiness, find their way to loudness. And when happy people get loud, well, I hope to see that way of organizing people spread more and more.
Many places in the world have had to go through these processes over and over until they began to feel safe and happy. None of them are perfect.
But remember, we live in a place that is still very young compared to many other places and quite a bit larger. Imagine being younger than everyone and also having the most feelings to organize. It’s a tough job!
Our way of organizing America is only 250 years old. There are other places that are already thousands of years old.
In those places, lots of mean people tried to organize things in their own way and hurt a lot of people along the way. But lots of kind, happy people grew into leadership that helped many others as well.
In short, let’s be patient, brave and work hard to build strong groups of friends who don’t believe in nose-pinching. That starts with taking care of our bodies, talking about hard feelings and having the courage to dream up a way of organizing people that you believe in.
Love, Mom
The knot loosened tremendously after working through this with myself. Sometimes thinking about what you would say to a child holds the most honest answers.
In the adult version of this, I am making two promises to myself as a citizen this year:
Promise 1: Take action based on convictions and a plan, not reaction.
This requires keeping the long game in mind no matter what. If outrage is my main catalyst for action again and again, I get tired and sad and only act when anger is loudest. Holding complexity means making a plan for the year on what change I want to invest in through sustained actions (be they targeted donations or political action or education or working through my own blocks). All of that requires energy and effort—especially to willfully hold complexity and understand power. Why hasn’t this been scheduled in my calendar like my child’s care and my personal goals? I’m disappointed in myself for not approaching citizenship with this level of rigor. It’s time to step it up.
Promise 2: Build strong friendships in every spare moment possible.
And trust that these networks will turn into power. Healthy people make courageous choices. They also tend to build stability that lets them take risks for others. I think this isn’t named enough. Practiced compassion and network-weaving lead to increased trust, information gathering and safety. Together, people with strong bonds and humanistic values and access to wealth can become a political fabric we haven’t seen enough of yet. I thought I was building community for my own fulfillment, but I’m realizing it’s the longest long game.
Happy Monday,
Jihii