Last week when we spoke about his school situation he said, in his own words, that he was bored with the repetition of waking up every day to do the same things. His comments were familiar — when I was his age, and for twenty years after, I suffered from the same confusion about the nature of life.

I won’t suggest that I know anything now, but at least I’m comfortable with the thought that we aren’t here to be entertained. It seems like we often forget it because in modernity we live among such affluence, but all life is work.

When I was his age, I didn’t know that — I was too busy romanticizing my future adulthood to think about anything deeper. Maybe we can be the first parents in a pair of long cycles to successfully ask our kid to consider a more realistic nature of being alive, instead of taking our playfulness for its face-value.