Month: September 2025

I had a conversation with my son this week. He’s a freshman in high school. We live about two miles from his school. Close enough that he can’t take a bus. Far enough that walking home after school in the Florida heat is annoying. He asks me every day, “Can you come pick me up after school, Dad?” 

And I say, “No, dude. I have to work. I’m at the office.”  

He gets mad. He hates walking home. I’m not heartless. It IS hot out there. But … I can’t just leave work to come get him. That’s how you get promoted to customer, and I certainly don’t want that. Today, as with every other day, I offered to pick him up from school when I’m done with work, but he doesn’t want to wait. Normally, this is where the conversation ends. But, today, it seemed like there was more, so I pressed. 

“What’s up?” 

He told me about how all his friends from 8th grade are in other schools, how the people he knows from scouts ignore him because he’s the “weird” kid (he’s Autistic, so relationships are tough), and he just hates it. He just hates it. 

I told him I was sorry it was so tough. I gave him a hug. I told him things will get better, even though there is a very real possibility they won’t. It’s hard watching your kids hit this particular wall. 

“So, will you pick me up?”

“Sorry, bud. I have to work.” 

“YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT MY FEELINGS!” he screamed, and then slammed the door shut as he walked off to his classes. 

I get this kind of thing a lot when I’m talking to people about politics, which is not something I do very often anymore because it almost always ends poorly. We each express an opinion and, sometimes, people get very angry if I disagree with them. Then, they accuse me of not having empathy, or not caring about their feelings. 

I get hit from both directions. Progressives often accuse me of lacking empathy; conservatives, of being “unpatriotic.” Different labels, same result: the conversation ends before it begins.

Anyway, with liberals, I’ll be talking with them about SOME issue: second amendment, abortion, economics, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. SOME issue. They’ll state their opinions, I’ll state mine. They’ll talk about their feelings and I’ll say “That’s great …but that doesn’t convince me to change my mind.” And then I’m accused of having no empathy. 

At the risk of sounding exactly like the kind of asshole they often accuse me of being, it seems like they think whoever has the biggest sob story wins. They seem to think empathy is the highest virtue. 

And I think that’s dangerous. Not that empathy is dangerous, but making it the highest virtue. Here’s why … 

Any virtue, not balanced against the other virtues, can be dangerous. I have empathy for my son’s feelings about walking home from school, but if THAT were the main driver in my decision-making, I’d lose my job and then he’d have to walk to and from our new encampment under the highway overpass to get to school. There is a limit to what my empathy can do in this situation. Beyond that, the struggles and challenges he faces now trigger the kind of change he needs to grow into the man he will soon become. We all have to deal with hard times in life similar to what he’s facing. We become better people because of it. If I allow my empathy for his current challenges to reign supreme, he will never have to face this challenge and will never become a functional adult. 

I very much WANT to solve this problem for him. No parent worth their salt wants to see their kid suffer. But in this case, action on my part is the wrong answer. He needs to suck it up and walk himself home, and I need to force myself not to fix this the way I have stepped in and fixed so many things for him over the years. 

And I have. Believe me, I’ve walked into school offices and community groups that were unwilling or unable to accommodate special needs kids like my son, and I’ve held them accountable until they did better.

But if I want him to grow up, there has to be balance. Without it, even the best intentions collapse into harm. The same is true of every virtue: compassion, justice, courage, civility, temperance. Left unchecked, each one curdles into its opposite. Too much justice, and the world forgets grace. Too much compassion, and selfishness runs wild. The hard work of life is not in choosing one virtue above the rest, but in holding them together. And that balance doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be anchored in a moral framework sturdy enough to keep heart and mind, mercy and truth, in tension.

Lately, we have trouble as a society deciding on what that framework is, or whether it even exists to begin with. 

Quite often, when I discuss things with people who accuse me of lacking empathy, the real reason things fall apart is because they tend to believe Empathy is the supreme virtue. People do it all the time.

Earlier this week, one of my friends asked about some quotes Charlie Kirk had about empathy. In the quote she shared, Charlie says he hated empathy, and thought it was a made-up word that causes harm. 

“Jesus commanded us to have empathy for our neighbors,” she said. I was confused. 

“That’s usually  ‘Love’ your neighbor,” I said “Not ‘empathize’ with them.

She did not respond.  

When Jesus told his followers to “love your neighbor as yourself,” he was quoting Leviticus 19:18. The Hebrew word there, ahava, means affection, loyalty, even friendship. Hebrew offers other options: rachamim (a tender, motherly mercy), chesed (covenant kindness that implies action), nechamah (comforting someone in their grief). Each of these leans toward what we might today call empathy. 

“Empathy,” by contrast, is modern. The Greek empatheia originally meant “excess passion” leaning toward the negative, and only took on its current sense in the late 19th century through German philosophy. In other words, love is ancient and active; empathy, at least as we define it now, is new and more fragile. 

Jesus could have elevated any of these virtues. Instead, he chose ahava; he chose love. And in the New Testament, that word expands into agape, a love that is not just feeling but commitment, not just sympathy but action. It includes empathy but transcends it, balancing heart with mind, compassion with truth.

Knowing other people’s struggles and imagining yourself in their pain is a good thing. But “he who has the most pain wins” is not an effective approach. Neither is “You disagree with me, therefore you don’t care about my pain” 

Unbalanced “empatheia.” or a modern approach to emotion that isn’t balanced with other virtues. THAT is where empathy can cause damage, and THAT is what I think Charlie Kirk was talking about when he says he hates it. 

I can’t say for sure, though, because he doesn’t go into it beyond the short clips making the rounds on social media. And we can never ask him, because someone – likely overcome with empatheia – took his life rather than balance the virtues they thought they had in their head. 

The Greeks weren’t wrong to worry about “empatheia.” Left unbalanced, any virtue twists into a vice. The challenge of life, whether as a parent, a citizen, or just a human trying to make sense of it all, is not to choose which virtue wins, but to hold them together in tension. Heart and mind. Strength and mercy. That balance is where love actually lives.

At the end of the day, my son will still walk home. He’ll sweat, and he’ll complain, and he’ll slam a few more doors before he learns that walking home isn’t the end of the world. And I’ll still sit here wrestling with when to lean into empathy and when to hold back. 

Love isn’t always soft. Sometimes it’s sweat on the sidewalk, tough conversations, and holding a line you wish you could bend. Not because you don’t care, but because you do.

I finished the day at Starbucks, which is exactly the sort of thing I swore I’d never do. The lobby seating was all taken, so I wedged myself into a corner with my laptop, pretending this was an office and not a place where people shout their orders for caramel drizzle like they’re summoning the dead.

I had twenty minutes to kill between meetings, which was just enough time to delete the emails I’d carefully ignored all day, when an older gentleman shuffled over. I’d noticed him earlier making the slow pilgrimage to the counter for a refill. He moved like he’d been carrying invisible weights for a while and had only just set them down.

He introduced himself by way of medical history: two strokes, recently recovered, glad to be back at Starbucks where the baristas greeted him like a favorite uncle.

“You miss the little things like this,” he said, smiling.

It seemed rude not to respond in kind, so I told him about my own brush with mortality, or at least with liquified chicken. I’d just graduated from the post-weight-loss-surgery diet of protein shakes and pureed meat, which is as bad as it sounds. He nodded gravely. Here was a man who had survived worse, I thiught. Or maybe he had just tasted the same brand of shake.

We compared notes on recovery, on parenting, on Midwestern winters (he’d escaped them ten years ago), and on Florida summers (which are like being trapped in a sauna with God’s disapproval). His son is expecting his first child, which means he and his wife might trade palm trees for grandchildren and move back.

“We rented an Airbnb up there for a few months,” he said. “We’ll see after that.”

We drifted into small talk about sports, health, weather; the sort of conversation you’d find scrawled in the margins of life. Ordinary, unremarkable. Which is to say it was exactly what I’d been missing.

I don’t know when ordinary conversation became extraordinary. Somewhere between the hashtags, the boycotts, and the shouting heads on cable news, we forgot how to chat about anything that didn’t come pre-loaded with outrage. I’ve started and stopped a dozen essays on The State of the Nation, particularly in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but I always stall out. Every word feels redundant, like adding one more paper cup to a landfill.

What I miss are strangers. Not the ones on Twitter, avatars hurling grenades in any direction, but the kind you meet in line at a coffee shop who tell you about their grandchild or their gallbladder. Once upon a time, this was called “society.” Now it feels like a black-market exchange: one sliver of humanity for another. No refunds.

When my next meeting began to buzz angrily on my laptop, I excused myself. He smiled and introduced himself properly.

“My name’s Tom.”

“Joe,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Good to meet you, too, Joe. God bless you and your family.”

“Same to you, Grandpa Tom.”

His grin at that was enormous, like he’d just been promoted to the title he’d wanted all along.

It wasn’t a solution to anything. Not to politics, or polarization, or the abyss that yawns open every time I turn on the news. But it was something, a brief truce with a stranger in the kingdom of burnt espresso. And for twenty minutes on a Wednesday, that felt like enough.

I was sitting at the bar with my wife the other night, the kind of bar where the bartender knows you well enough to ask, “Same thing?” but not well enough to ask how your kids are doing. His name was Jim, and he slid a fresh glass of Bourbon across the counter when Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade” erupted from the speakers.

“I used to LOVE them,” Jim said, shaking his head like he was remembering an old flame.

“Me too,” I offered, though in my case “love” meant one burned CD and the occasional head nod in traffic.

“Too bad they sold out,” he said.

I asked what he meant, and he launched into a story about major labels, reunion tours with high ticket prices, and band members living like hedge fund managers. Apparently, if you once wrote songs about dismantling the system, you aren’t allowed to charge $150 for floor seats.

It struck me as funny, this idea of “selling out,” mostly because I’ve been doing it quietly for years.

When I was young, my career ambitions alternated between two noble callings: professional baseball player and beloved author. Not once did I think, “You know what would be thrilling? Fluorescent lighting and quarterly performance reviews in a swampy state shaped like a pistol.” And yet, here I am.

Idealists burn out fast. That uncompromising spirit doesn’t survive long against utility bills and dental insurance. And if it somehow does, just add children. The revolution doesn’t seem quite so urgent when it’s 3 a.m., your baby is screaming, and you’re trying to calculate whether you can afford formula without cutting into your beer budget.

The loudest anti-establishment voices I knew in college either overdosed, disappeared, or got real jobs. One guy I knew used to carry around The Anarchist’s Cookbook like it was scripture. Today he sells insurance in North Dakota. I saw a picture of him recently. He wore a pink suit, grinning with his little girl at a daddy-daughter dance. His tattoos, which once shouted “F(*orget*) The Man,” now peek meekly from under his sleeves, like children forced to sit still in church.

We all become that guy eventually. My friends who played in punk bands now mow their lawns on Saturday mornings while their Spotify playlists shuffle from “Revolutionary Rock” to Yacht Rock without irony. I once swore I would never be one of those people, but I now hum along to “Rebel Yell” while trimming hedges in cargo shorts.

Maybe selling out isn’t so much betrayal as it is triage. You pick your battles. Do you want to keep your middle finger raised forever, or do you want to raise your daughter in a gym decorated with crepe paper and helium balloons?

I’ve got my own daddy-daughter dance coming up soon. I already promised to wear something pink. Maybe that makes me a sellout. Or maybe the real sellout is refusing to bend, clinging to some brittle purity until everyone else moves on and leaves you behind.

If ending up like my friend in North Dakota, twirling his daughter under fluorescent lights while a censored version of “Killing in the Name” plays in the background, is the price of selling out, then I’ll take it.

Maybe that isn’t selling out at all. Maybe that’s the encore.

I was scrolling through LinkedIn the other day, which is the professional equivalent of loitering at the mall food court (lots of noise, smells, and people insisting you try their samples). That’s when I saw a post from a woman who announced, with complete sincerity, that she was developing a new system that would “rewrite quantum mechanics.”

A bold ambition. Unlikely, sure. But if she pulls it off? Fantastic. That’s how innovation happens: someone staring at the universe and saying, “I bet I can fix that.”

The problem wasn’t the idea. The problem was her job posting, which essentially read: I need someone to do all the grunt work while I float above the clouds like Zeus tossing down lightning bolts of inspiration. She wanted people to run the numbers, crunch the data, and compile the results. Basically everything but think the thought.

“I’m an IDEA person,” she wrote in the comments, as though it were a credential.

I laughed. Everyone is an idea person. Sit next to a drunk guy at a bar and he’ll have fifty, half of them about how to get rich selling deer jerky door-to-door. An idea, on its own, is like a gym membership. It feels productive the moment you sign up, but it doesn’t get you any muscles until you actually show up and sweat.

What I see more and more are these self-anointed “thought leaders.” Their only discernible skill is forwarding tasks to someone else. They dress up their avoidance with shiny words like “strategic mindset” or “product visionary,” but really, they’re allergic to effort. They treat labor like a contagious disease. You half expect them to sanitize their hands after shaking yours, in case a little actual work rubbed off.

This is where the “nobody wants to work anymore” chant always gets it wrong. It’s not the grocery clerk, the plumber, or the fresh-out-of-college kid with student debt the size of a starter home. The people who don’t want to work are the ones holding conference calls about their “disruptive ideas” while someone else updates the slides.

On this Labor Day, I want to say: ideas are nice, but labor is what matters. It’s the work you do, not the inspirational LinkedIn post you make about how much you’re doing. Without labor, there is no holiday. There’s just a long weekend where you tell people, “I could totally rewrite quantum mechanics,” while waiting for someone else to bring you a hamburger from the grill.

As for me, I’ve got plenty of ideas too. They’re all written down in a notebook somewhere. Maybe one day, when I find someone to do the grunt work, I’ll get around to them.