For four weeks, sixty-seven people sat down with a screen and a question that has come to define the age: is this real? Each was shown a procession of news headlines paired with images, a stream of the genuine and the fabricated mixed together in deliberate confusion. Some of the pictures were authentic. Some were the synthetic offspring of generative models, plausible to the point of menace. And for part of the study, the participants did not face this alone. They had an assistant, a conversational AI willing to weigh in, to reason aloud, to nudge them towards a verdict. With the machine at their side, they grew measurably sharper. They caught more of the fakes. They were, on average, twenty-one per cent more accurate than they had been without help.

Then the researchers took the machine away.

What happened next is the reason the study exists, and the reason it should unsettle anyone who has come to lean on a chatbot to tell the true from the false. When the participants were asked to evaluate fresh headlines on their own, their performance did not merely fail to improve. It fell. By the fourth week, their unassisted accuracy had declined by 15.3 per cent compared with where they had started. The tool that had made them better at the task had, over the same weeks, made them worse at it without the tool. And a striking share of them did not notice. Roughly a quarter reported feeling that they had improved, even as the data recorded the opposite.

The work, conducted by researchers at the MIT Media Lab and presented at CHI 2026, the premier international gathering for human-computer interaction research, carries a title that reads almost like a warning label: “Dialogues with AI Reduce Beliefs in Misinformation but Build No Lasting Discernment Skills.” The team behind it, including Anku Rani, Valdemar Danry, Paul Pu Liang, Andrew Lippman and the senior researcher Pattie Maes, had set out to test a hopeful proposition. If conversing with an AI can durably lower a person's belief in false information, perhaps those same conversations might also teach the person to detect falsehood independently, the way a good tutor leaves a student more capable than they found them. The hope did not survive contact with the evidence.

The design of the study is worth dwelling on, because the architecture of the experiment is what gives the result its force. The researchers did not simply hand participants a verdict-dispensing oracle and measure their satisfaction. They structured the month into phases, taking a baseline measurement of unassisted accuracy at the outset, interleaving sessions of AI-assisted evaluation, and then testing participants again on entirely fresh, previously unseen items without any help. That last detail matters enormously. If the unassisted test had recycled familiar headlines, an apparent improvement might have reflected nothing more than memorisation. By presenting new material, the researchers isolated the thing that actually counts: not whether a participant could recall a particular debunked story, but whether the experience of working alongside the AI had left them better equipped to confront the unknown. It had not. The transfer that defines genuine learning, the carrying of a skill from one instance to the next, simply failed to occur. The machine had functioned as a prosthesis rather than a teacher, and a prosthesis, however effective while it is worn, builds no muscle of its own.

The analogue everyone reaches for

There is a metaphor that the researchers, and almost everyone who has since written about the study, reach for instinctively. It is the satellite navigation system. You have probably lived the small version of it yourself: years of obediently following the turn-by-turn voice, until one day the signal drops in an unfamiliar city and you realise, with a cold little jolt, that you have no idea where you are. You have been to this place a dozen times. You have never once learned the way.

The analogy is more than rhetorical convenience, because the underlying neuroscience is real and unusually well documented. The most celebrated demonstration comes not from a study of GPS users but from a study of the people who represent its precise opposite: the licensed black-cab drivers of London. To earn their badge, these drivers must pass an examination known simply as the Knowledge, a feat of memorisation requiring years of preparation and the internalisation of some twenty-five thousand streets and the tangle of routes between them. In a landmark investigation published in 2000, the cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues at University College London scanned the brains of these drivers and found that the posterior hippocampus, a region central to spatial memory and navigation, was enlarged relative to that of non-drivers. A later longitudinal study tracked trainees over the years of their preparation and watched the structure grow, but only in those who ultimately passed.

The Knowledge, in other words, leaves a physical signature on the brain that acquires it. The hippocampus responds to demand. And the corollary, the part that should give every habitual user of navigation software pause, is that the relationship runs in both directions. Tissue that is exercised grows; capacity that is delegated does not. Maguire's drivers also paid a price, performing less well on certain other memory tasks, a reminder that the brain is not an infinitely expandable warehouse but an organ of trade-offs. Subsequent research on habitual GPS use has reported associations between heavier reliance on turn-by-turn navigation and poorer performance on spatial-memory measures, with longitudinal work suggesting steeper self-reported decline in navigational ability among the most dependent users. The compass in your hand, used uncritically, becomes the compass you no longer carry inside.

The MIT team's insight was to recognise that misinformation detection might be a faculty of exactly this kind: a skill that strengthens with practice and atrophies with delegation. When you puzzle over whether a headline is genuine, you are exercising something. You are checking the source against memory, interrogating the image for the tell-tale incoherence of a synthetic render, registering the emotional manipulation in the phrasing, recalling whether the claimed event squares with everything else you know. Hand that labour to a machine and the immediate problem is solved. But the faculty goes unexercised. And faculties that go unexercised, as the hippocampus of the lapsed navigator demonstrates, do not stand still. They quietly recede, and the recession is all the more insidious for being silent, because nothing about the smooth experience of asking and receiving an answer signals that anything is being lost at all.

A long lineage of outsourced minds

If the finding feels novel, the anxiety it provokes is anything but. Plato has Socrates fret, in the Phaedrus, that the invention of writing would implant forgetfulness in the souls of those who learned it, because they would cease to exercise their memory and trust instead to external marks. It is fashionable to cite this episode as proof that fears about cognitive offloading are perennial and therefore overblown. That reading is too glib. Socrates was not simply wrong; he was describing, with reasonable accuracy, a genuine trade-off. Literate cultures did substitute external storage for prodigious feats of oral memory. We gained more than we lost, but we did lose something, and pretending otherwise misses the actual lesson, which is that every cognitive tool reshapes the cognition that uses it. The pertinent question is never whether a tool changes us, because all of them do. It is whether the particular change it produces is one we would choose with our eyes open.

The modern empirical literature on this reshaping is substantial. In 2011, the psychologists Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel Wegner published a paper in Science describing what swiftly became known as the Google effect. Across four experiments, they found that when people expected to be able to look information up again later, they remembered the information itself less well, but remembered better where to find it. The internet, the authors argued, had become a form of transactive memory, an external partner to which we offload the burden of remembering, holding onto the index rather than the entry. We had begun to remember our way to knowledge rather than the knowledge itself. The phenomenon was soon given a popular name, digital amnesia, and it captured something real about the texture of modern thought: the strange confidence of knowing that an answer is retrievable, paired with the quiet erosion of actually holding it.

There is the calculator, too, the example invoked so often it has become a cliché of the genre, and a contested one. The evidence on calculators is genuinely mixed, which is part of why the comparison is instructive rather than damning: a tool that handles arithmetic can free a learner to grapple with higher-order mathematical reasoning, or it can hollow out the numerical intuition on which that reasoning depends, and which outcome prevails turns largely on how the tool is folded into the learning. The instrument is not destiny. The pedagogy around it is. A calculator introduced after a child has internalised the structure of multiplication is an accelerant; the same device introduced before that structure exists can prevent it from ever forming. The lesson generalises with uncomfortable directness to AI, and it is precisely the lesson the MIT study sharpens.

And there is aviation, the field that has stared longest and hardest into the question of what happens when humans cede a complex skill to an automated system. Decades of cockpit automation have delivered enormous safety gains, but they have also produced a documented phenomenon that pilots and regulators call skill fade: the erosion of manual flying ability among aviators who spend the overwhelming majority of their hours monitoring systems rather than hand-flying aircraft. Investigations by bodies including the United States Federal Aviation Administration have repeatedly flagged automation complacency and the degradation of basic stick-and-rudder competence as safety concerns, the danger crystallising in those rare, terrible moments when the automation disengages and a crew must suddenly fly an aeroplane whose feel they have half-forgotten. The aviation world's response is telling, and we will return to it, because it represents one of the few large-scale institutional attempts to deliberately preserve a skill that automation tends to corrode.

The deskilling we forgot to study

What unites the cab driver, the Google user and the airline pilot is a single, under-examined idea: that the most consequential effect of a powerful tool may not be anything it does to the world, but what it does to the person wielding it. This is the argument advanced in a paper published in May 2026 by Ilias Chalkidis and Anders Søgaard, bluntly titled “Brainrot: Deskilling and Addiction are Overlooked AI Risks” and accepted to FAccT 2026, the major conference on fairness, accountability and transparency in computing.

Their contention is structural. The field of AI safety, they observe, has organised itself around a fairly stable taxonomy of harms: discrimination and hate speech, violent or illegal content, information hazards, and the misuse of models by malicious actors for cyberattacks or worse. These are real and serious. But they share a feature, which is that they concern what AI systems output into the world. What the literature has largely neglected, Chalkidis and Søgaard argue, is what sustained reliance on these systems does to their users: the deskilling that follows from chronic cognitive offloading, the slow atrophy of critical thinking, and the dependency and attachment that can shade into something like addiction. These risks are, in their framing, hiding in plain sight, prominent in public conversation yet largely absent from the safety and alignment research that is supposed to anticipate harm. The authors go further, quantifying the discrepancy between how much attention the research community devotes to output harms and how little it devotes to user harms, and arguing that the gap is not an accident but a reflection of where the field's incentives and instruments happen to point.

The distinction they draw is the one that makes the MIT findings so quietly alarming. The danger most people associate with AI and misinformation is that the machines will manufacture convincing fakes faster than we can debunk them, flooding the information environment with synthetic plausibility. That danger is genuine. But it is a supply-side problem, a question of what is poured into the public sphere. Deskilling is a demand-side problem, a question of what happens to the human capacity to process whatever is poured in. The two interact in the worst possible way. The very tool offered as the antidote to the flood of fakes may, through habitual use, be eroding the cognitive immune system that the flood demands. We are, on this account, being handed a crutch precisely as the ground beneath us turns to ice. Worse, the erosion and the flood are likely to accelerate together, because the same advances in generative modelling that make synthetic content more convincing also make the assistant more fluent and more trusted, deepening the reliance at the exact moment the threat intensifies.

This is not the only recent study to point in the direction. In early 2025, researchers at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University surveyed hundreds of knowledge workers about their use of generative AI and reported that higher confidence in the AI was associated with less critical thinking, while higher confidence in one's own abilities was associated with more. The same survey found that AI-assisted workers tended to produce a less diverse range of outputs for a given task, a possible signature of homogenised, under-interrogated thinking. Around the same period, the researcher Michael Gerlich published a study in the journal Societies, drawing on data from hundreds of participants, that found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical-thinking scores, mediated by cognitive offloading and most pronounced among the youngest respondents. None of these studies is the last word. Each has the familiar limitations of survey-based and correlational work, and self-reported measures of one's own thinking are notoriously unreliable. But they are beginning to rhyme, and when independent groups using different methods and different populations converge on the same uncomfortable melody, the prudent response is to listen rather than to wait for a single decisive experiment that may never come.

The young, the trusting and the exposed

The demographic dimension is where the abstract risk acquires a sharp social edge. According to data gathered by the Pew Research Centre and cited in the MIT study, roughly one in five American teenagers now turns to AI chatbots for news, and around one in five adults under fifty does so at least some of the time. Pew's broader survey work supports the surrounding picture: about two-thirds of US teenagers aged thirteen to seventeen report using AI chatbots at all, with close to three in ten using them daily, and adults under fifty are roughly twice as likely as their elders to report using a tool such as ChatGPT.

Read those figures alongside Gerlich's finding that the young rely most heavily on AI and score lowest on critical thinking, and a troubling alignment comes into focus. The population most inclined to outsource the work of telling true from false to a machine is, on the available evidence, also the population whose independent capacity to do that work is most at risk of going undeveloped or eroding. This is not a story about people losing a mature skill they once possessed. For many of the youngest users, it may be a story about a skill that never gets built at all, because the scaffolding is removed before anything load-bearing has formed behind it. The lapsed navigator at least once knew the route. The teenager who has only ever asked the chatbot whether a story is true may never lay down the cognitive map in the first place. There is a developmental window in which the habits of scepticism, source evaluation and patient verification are most readily acquired, and a tool that pre-empts those habits during that window may foreclose them in a way that is far harder to reverse than the deskilling of an adult who learned them long ago.

It would be easy, and lazy, to slide from here into a familiar lament about distracted youth. That is not the argument, and the data do not license it. The teenagers turning to chatbots for news are, in many respects, behaving rationally. The information environment they have inherited is genuinely treacherous, thick with manipulated images and algorithmically amplified falsehood, and a tool that promises to cut through it is a reasonable thing to reach for. The problem is not their judgement in reaching for it. The problem is the design of the thing they reach for, and what that design does to them over time. Which raises the question the MIT researchers were ultimately driving at, and the one on which the entire matter turns. Is the deskilling inevitable, a fixed cost of any AI assistance? Or is it an artefact of how these tools happen to be built, and therefore something a different design might avoid?

Tools that tell, tools that ask

The MIT team did not stop at diagnosis. Embedded in their analysis is a distinction that may prove to be the most useful thing to come out of the entire study. There are, broadly, two ways an AI can help a person evaluate a claim. It can tell, or it can ask.

A telling system delivers verdicts. You show it a headline, it informs you that the headline is false and perhaps explains why, and you move on. It is efficient, satisfying, and, on the evidence, corrosive, because it positions the human as a passive recipient of conclusions rather than an active producer of them. As Valdemar Danry, one of the study's authors, put it, AI systems that tell by providing direct answers are more likely to foster reliance, whereas those that ask, through something like Socratic questioning, are better at engaging a person to actually learn. An asking system withholds the verdict. It prompts you to consider where the image might have come from, whether the source is one you recognise, what about the framing is designed to provoke. It hands the cognitive labour back to you, while structuring that labour so you are more likely to perform it well. The asking system is, in a precise sense, less helpful in the moment and more helpful over a lifetime, and the tension between those two timescales is the whole game.

It is worth pausing on a particular detail the researchers reported, because it sharpens the stakes. They identified a subset of participants, around a fifth of the sample, who behaved as what might be called dependency developers, passively accepting the AI's guidance with little independent scrutiny. And it was precisely the gap between felt and actual competence, the quarter of participants who believed they had improved while measurably declining, that should worry us most. A person who knows they have grown dependent can choose to wean themselves. A person who has grown dependent while believing they have grown skilled has no reason to, and every incentive to deepen the reliance. Misplaced confidence is the mechanism by which a temporary aid hardens into a permanent dependency, and it is exactly the mechanism a telling interface cultivates, because nothing about receiving correct answers teaches you to doubt your own unaided judgement.

This is the difference between substituting for a skill and scaffolding it, and the word scaffolding is doing precise work here. In developmental psychology, scaffolding refers to the temporary support a more capable partner provides to a learner, support that is calibrated to the learner's current level and, crucially, gradually withdrawn as competence grows. The point of a scaffold is that it comes down. A scaffold that becomes permanent is no longer a scaffold; it is a crutch, or a cage. The conventional misinformation chatbot, the one that simply renders verdicts, is a crutch by design. It offers no path towards its own obsolescence. The asking system, by contrast, is built to make itself unnecessary, to leave the user more capable than it found them, exactly as Maguire's Knowledge left its drivers with enlarged hippocampi rather than enlarged dependence on a map.

The design vocabulary for this already exists, and it has an appealingly counter-intuitive name: productive friction. The dominant instinct in technology design is to remove friction, to make every interaction as smooth and effortless as possible, and for most purposes that instinct is sound. But learning is not frictionless, and the very smoothness that makes a tool pleasant to use can be what prevents it from teaching. Productive friction is the deliberate reintroduction of effort at the points where effort produces growth: a prompt that asks you to commit to a judgement before the AI reveals its own, a system that requires you to articulate your reasoning, an interface that surfaces the verification heuristics a journalist or fact-checker would apply and invites you to apply them yourself. A growing strand of human-computer interaction research, including recent work on AI provocations designed to restore critical thinking to AI-assisted knowledge work, has begun to demonstrate that such friction can measurably raise the quality of engagement without destroying the tool's usefulness. The trick is that the friction must be productive, targeted at the moments where struggle builds capacity rather than merely irritating the user, and calibrating it is a genuine design problem rather than a slogan.

What aviation already knows

The aviation industry, having confronted skill fade decades before the rest of us, offers a working model of what taking deskilling seriously looks like in practice. The response there was not to abandon automation, which would be absurd given its safety record, nor to pretend the erosion of manual skill was not happening. It was to mandate the deliberate, scheduled exercise of the very skills the automation tends to atrophy. Pilots are required to hand-fly, to practise in simulators the failure modes in which the automation drops out and human competence must take over, to maintain the faculty against the day it is needed. The principle is that a skill worth preserving in a partly automated system must be actively maintained, because the system itself will not maintain it. Left to its own logic, the automation will quietly let the skill decay.

Translate that principle to the epistemic domain and the outlines of a response begin to appear. It implies that media-literacy education cannot treat AI assistance as a neutral convenience to be bolted onto existing curricula, but must reckon with the possibility that the tools students use to check facts are simultaneously shaping, and possibly degrading, the faculties the curriculum is meant to build. Pattie Maes, the senior MIT researcher, drew exactly this conclusion, stressing the importance of raising awareness in schools and academic communities about the shortcomings of AI as a learning tool. It implies that the design of consumer AI products is not an ethically neutral matter of feature optimisation, because the choice between a telling interface and an asking one is, in aggregate and over years, a choice about the cognitive capacities of a population. And it implies, perhaps most provocatively, that we may need the epistemic equivalent of mandatory hand-flying: structured, regular practice at unassisted discernment, built into education and perhaps into the tools themselves, on the understanding that the capacity will wither if it is never exercised.

The analogy is imperfect, of course, and the imperfection is instructive. Aviation could mandate hand-flying because it is a regulated profession with licensing bodies, recurrent training requirements and a safety culture forged by catastrophe. There is no equivalent authority over the billions of casual interactions between ordinary people and consumer chatbots, no licensing regime for citizens evaluating the news. The maintenance of epistemic skill cannot simply be legislated into the daily habits of a population the way it can be written into a pilot's logbook. That makes the design layer more important, not less. If we cannot mandate the practice from outside, the practice must be engineered into the tools themselves, so that the path of least resistance is also a path that keeps the underlying faculty alive. Chalkidis and Søgaard gesture at a complementary lever, suggesting that public information campaigns and regulation might mitigate deskilling much as they have been mobilised against other public-health risks, treating cognitive atrophy as a hazard to be managed rather than an inevitability to be absorbed.

The limits of one study, and the shape of the stakes

Intellectual honesty requires holding all of this at the right distance. The MIT study tracked sixty-seven people over four weeks. That is a serious, well-constructed piece of work, but it is not the foundation for sweeping civilisational pronouncement. Sixty-seven is a modest sample. Four weeks is a short window against which to project lifelong cognitive change. Laboratory and online study conditions are not the messy reality of how people actually consume news, and the artificiality of repeatedly classifying headline-image pairs may exaggerate or distort effects that would look different in the wild. The measured decline, real and statistically significant within the study, is a finding to be replicated and probed, not a law of nature to be enshrined. The authors themselves frame it as evidence that demands further investigation, not as a verdict already delivered.

There are genuine counterarguments, too, and they deserve more than a perfunctory nod. The optimistic case is that AI assistance frees human cognition from drudgery to operate at a higher level, much as literacy freed us from the tyranny of oral memorisation and arithmetic tools can free a mathematician for genuine reasoning. Perhaps a generation that offloads first-order fact-checking to machines will redirect its cognitive energy towards more sophisticated forms of judgement, towards synthesis and meaning-making and the evaluation of the machines themselves. Perhaps. But that hopeful trajectory is precisely the one the MIT data fail to support. The participants did not ascend to some higher plane of discernment; they got worse at the task and, in many cases, did not realise it. The mismatch between their declining accuracy and their rising confidence is the detail that should linger, because a population that is simultaneously less able to detect falsehood and more sure of its abilities is not a population that has traded up. It is a population that has been quietly hollowed while believing itself enriched.

What ties the strands together is the recognition that we are conducting an unplanned experiment on the epistemic capacity of the species, and we are running it backwards, deploying the tools at planetary scale first and asking what they do to us afterwards. The MIT study is one of the early, careful attempts to ask the question with rigour, and its provisional answer is that the relationship between AI assistance and human discernment is not neutral. The default design of these systems, the telling design that simply hands down verdicts, appears to trade long-term capacity for short-term accuracy, and to do so invisibly, beneath the user's own awareness. That is the worst kind of trade, because it offers no signal that a trade is being made at all.

But the same study, read carefully, contains the seed of a more hopeful possibility. The deskilling is not a fixed cost of intelligence in a box. It is, on the evidence, a consequence of a particular and dominant design choice, the choice to substitute rather than to scaffold, to tell rather than to ask, to remove friction rather than to place it where it does some good. A different choice is available. We know what scaffolded discernment looks like, in the Socratic tutor who refuses to give the answer, in the aviation regime that mandates hand-flying, in the developmental scaffold engineered to come down. We have the design vocabulary, the productive friction and the asking interface and the heuristic made visible and practised. What we have lacked, so far, is the will to prefer the tool that strengthens us over the tool that merely serves us, and an industry whose incentives reward engagement and ease rather than the slow, unglamorous cultivation of an independent mind.

The compass in your hand will always be more convenient than the one you must build inside yourself. That has been true of every tool that ever offered to think on our behalf, from the written word to the calculator to the satellite overhead. The question the fading compass poses is not whether to use the tool. It is whether we will insist on tools that, like the best teachers and the hardest examinations, leave us more capable than they found us, or settle for tools that leave us merely more dependent, lost in a familiar city, certain we know the way.

References

1. Rani, Anku, Valdemar Danry, Paul Pu Liang, Andrew B. Lippman, and Pattie Maes. “Dialogues with AI Reduce Beliefs in Misinformation but Build No Lasting Discernment Skills.” arXiv:2510.01537, 2026 (presented at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01537
2. “The consequences of relying on AI for accurate news.” MIT News, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 9 June 2026. https://news.mit.edu/2026/consequences-of-relying-on-ai-for-accurate-news-0609
3. Chalkidis, Ilias, and Anders Søgaard. “Brainrot: Deskilling and Addiction are Overlooked AI Risks.” arXiv:2605.03512, 2026 (accepted to the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT '26). https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03512
4. Maguire, Eleanor A., et al. “Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 8, 2000. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.070039597
5. Woollett, Katherine, and Eleanor A. Maguire. “Acquiring 'the Knowledge' of London's Layout Drives Structural Brain Changes.” Current Biology, 2011. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3268356/
6. “Changes in London taxi drivers' brains driven by acquiring 'the Knowledge'.” ScienceDaily, 8 December 2011. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111208125720.htm
7. Sparrow, Betsy, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner. “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Science, vol. 333, no. 6043, 2011, pp. 776–778. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1207745
8. Lee, Hao-Ping (Hank), et al. “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers.” Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, 2025. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-impact-of-generative-ai-on-critical-thinking-self-reported-reductions-in-cognitive-effort-and-confidence-effects-from-a-survey-of-knowledge-workers/
9. Gerlich, Michael. “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking.” Societies, vol. 15, no. 1, Article 6, 2025. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
10. “Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025.” Pew Research Centre, 9 December 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/12/09/teens-social-media-and-ai-chatbots-2025/
11. “Americans' Views on AI Chatbots, Smart Devices and AI's Impact.” Pew Research Centre, 17 June 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/
12. “The Dangers of Overreliance on Automation.” FAA Safety Briefing Magazine, Federal Aviation Administration. https://medium.com/faa/the-dangers-of-overreliance-on-automation-5b7afb56ebdc
13. “Methods for Preventing the Degradation of Manual Flying Skills in an Automated Cockpit Environment.” The Collegiate Aviation Review International. https://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/CARI/article/view/10345

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Chapter 1: The Question That Finds You When the House Is Quiet

You know how it feels when the house finally goes quiet and your mind decides that is the perfect time to open every locked drawer. The dishes are done, the lights are low, the phone is face down, and yet you are wide awake, staring at the ceiling like the room has become a courtroom. That is the kind of hour when strange Bible passages do not feel like distant theology. They feel personal. That is why the New Testament restrainer mystery video matters to me, not because it gives us another prophecy puzzle to argue about, but because it touches the place where many of us quietly wonder whether God is still holding anything together.

The passage is in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. Paul is writing about the rise of the man of lawlessness, a figure many Christians connect with the Antichrist, a final rebellion, and a time of deep deception before the return of Jesus. But before Paul talks about that evil being revealed, he says something almost unsettling. He says there is something restraining him. Something is holding him back. Something is keeping this lawless figure from stepping fully into history before the appointed time. Then Paul says the Thessalonian believers already know what that restraining power is, which makes the quiet truth about what God holds back such an important doorway into this whole subject.

That is the mystery. Paul clearly knew what he meant. The Thessalonians apparently knew what he meant because he had taught them in person. But we were not sitting in that room. We did not hear that conversation. We only have the letter, and in the letter Paul does not name the restrainer. He does not say it is Rome. He does not say it is the Holy Spirit. He does not say it is the church. He does not say it is an angel. He leaves us with enough to know that evil is being held back, but not enough to identify the restrainer with complete certainty.

I understand why that bothers people. It bothers me too. We want the name. We want the missing line. We want Paul to slow down, turn toward us, and say, “Here is exactly who I am talking about.” But Scripture does not always answer our questions the way we want it to. Sometimes it gives us enough truth to trust God without giving us enough detail to control the mystery.

That is hard for people like us because we live in a world where everything is supposed to be searchable. If the car makes a strange noise, we look it up. If a bill shows a charge we do not recognize, we check the account. If someone sends a cold message, we read it three different ways and wonder what they really meant. We are used to chasing explanations until we feel back in control. Then we come to a verse like this, and the Bible refuses to hand us the whole file.

But maybe that refusal is part of the mercy.

Before we try to solve the mystery, we need to feel the pressure Paul was answering. The Thessalonian Christians were not reading this letter with a cup of coffee and a notebook full of end-times charts. They were under strain. They had heard troubling claims that the Day of the Lord had already come. They were afraid they had missed something. They were afraid the world had entered its final darkness. They were afraid God’s plan had moved past them while they were still trying to stay faithful in ordinary pain.

That fear is not as ancient as it sounds. A mother feels a version of it when she checks the news after the children go to bed and wonders what kind of world they are going to inherit. A man feels it when he sits in his truck before work, already tired, wondering why every system seems harder, colder, and more dishonest than it used to be. A caregiver feels it beside a hospital bed when the machines keep beeping and the prayers feel quiet. You may not use the phrase “man of lawlessness,” but you know what it feels like to ask whether darkness is getting the upper hand.

Paul’s first answer to that fear is not a timetable. It is steadiness. He tells them not to be quickly shaken. He tells them not to be alarmed by every claim, every rumor, every voice pretending to know more than it knows. The final rebellion has not come. The man of lawlessness has not been revealed. The end has not arrived unnoticed. In plain terms, Paul is saying that panic is not discernment, and fear is not proof that the worst thing has already happened.

That alone is a word many of us need. We often mistake emotional intensity for spiritual accuracy. If something scares us badly enough, we assume it must be true. If the headline is dark enough, the diagnosis serious enough, the bank account low enough, the relationship strained enough, we start believing our fear has become a prophet. But fear is not always telling the truth. Sometimes fear is only telling us that we are tired, overloaded, underfed, lonely, or carrying too many burdens without enough prayer and honest support.

Paul does not shame the Thessalonians for being frightened. That matters. He does not call them weak for needing reassurance. He does not say, “You should know better by now.” He gives them truth strong enough to stand on. He reminds them that the darkest movements in history do not get to write their own schedule. Lawlessness may already be at work, but it is not fully released. Evil may push, but it is still restrained. Deception may spread, but it is still limited. The figure Paul describes cannot appear one day before God allows the appointed time.

This is where the mystery starts to open. We naturally ask, “Who is the restrainer?” That is a fair question, and we will walk through it carefully. But beneath that question is a deeper one. If something is holding back the full arrival of evil, then history is not loose. It is not falling down a staircase with no handrail. It is not being dragged wherever human pride, demonic power, political ambition, or cultural madness wants to take it. There is still a boundary. There is still a line. There is still an unseen command that says, “Not yet.”

I think that is where this passage begins to speak to the person lying awake in the quiet house. You may not be thinking about prophecy tonight. You may be thinking about a child you cannot fix, a debt you cannot erase, a body that will not cooperate, a marriage that feels tense, a grief that keeps returning, or a future that feels too uncertain to name out loud. But the same God who restrains the great movements of evil in history is not absent from the smaller rooms where His children are afraid.

That does not mean we get easy answers. It does not mean every painful thing is prevented. The Thessalonian believers were still suffering. Paul himself suffered. Jesus never promised a life untouched by trouble. What this passage gives us is not a soft denial of pain. It gives us something stronger. It tells us pain is not proof that God has lost control. Evil activity is not proof of evil authority. The presence of darkness is not the same as the victory of darkness.

There is a difference between something being allowed and something being sovereign. That difference may be the first real key to this mystery. God may allow a season He has not surrendered. He may permit a trial He still governs. He may let His people walk through pressure while still keeping boundaries around what pressure can do. We do not always see those boundaries. We often only see what reached us. We rarely see what was stopped before it arrived.

That thought humbles me because I have spent too much of my life judging God by the visible parts. I remember the doors that closed. I remember the prayers that seemed delayed. I remember the moments when life felt heavier than I thought I could carry. But I do not know how many disasters never touched me because God restrained them. I do not know how many conversations never happened, how many traps never closed, how many wrong turns were blocked, or how many unseen dangers were told by God, “No farther.”

Maybe that is why Paul can leave the restrainer unnamed and still give us comfort. The name matters, but the restraint matters more. The missing detail invites study, but the revealed truth invites trust. Something is holding back the man of lawlessness, and behind that something is not chaos, chance, or human luck. Behind it is the God who still rules the hour, the door, the line, the limit, and the final word.

Chapter 2: Reading the Line Paul Did Not Finish

There is a certain kind of confusion that comes from finding an old note in a drawer. Maybe it is tucked inside a box with photographs, birthday cards, a receipt from a place that no longer exists, and a letter written by someone who has been gone for years. The handwriting is familiar, but the context is missing. One sentence says, “You remember what happened that night by the river,” and suddenly you feel the distance between you and the people who first held that paper. They knew the story. They knew the place. They knew the tone behind the words. You are left holding the sentence, trying to rebuild the moment around it.

That is close to what happens when we read Paul in 2 Thessalonians. We are not reading a cold religious manual. We are reading a letter. Paul had sat with these people. He had taught them face to face. He had prayed with them, warned them, encouraged them, and answered questions we do not have recorded. When he says, “You know what is restraining him,” he is reaching back to a conversation they remembered. The problem is that we are reading the letter centuries later, and the conversation he is reaching back to was never written down for us.

That does not make Scripture weak. It makes it real. The letters of the New Testament came out of living relationships, not conference rooms. Paul did not write to strangers in the abstract. He wrote to churches he loved, people he worried over, believers who were trying to stay faithful while the world around them pressed hard against their faith. Sometimes the letter assumes shared knowledge because letters do that. If I write to a friend and say, “Do not forget what we talked about after your father’s funeral,” that sentence may be deeply clear to him and completely hidden from anyone else who finds it later.

So when we ask who the restrainer is, we need some humility before we start acting certain. Paul knew. The Thessalonians knew. We do not know in the same way. We are not helpless, because the passage gives us real clues. But we should be careful not to turn a debated passage into a weapon. There is a difference between studying a mystery and pretending we own it.

The first strong possibility is that Paul was speaking about Rome. In the world of the Thessalonians, Rome was everywhere. It was in the taxes, the soldiers, the roads, the courts, the empire’s pride, and the shadow of Caesar. Rome could be cruel. Rome could crush the innocent. Rome could demand loyalty that belonged only to God. But Rome also restrained chaos. It held back rival powers, kept certain kinds of order, and slowed the collapse of civic life into constant violence. For people living inside that empire, it would not have been strange to think of Rome as a restraining force, even if it was an imperfect and often unjust one.

That idea becomes more interesting when you consider the danger of naming Rome directly. If Paul had written, “Rome is holding back the final lawless one until Rome is removed,” that could have been read as a political threat. Christian letters traveled through real places. Real enemies could read them. Real accusations could follow. So some believe Paul used careful language because the Thessalonians already understood what he meant, and writing the name out loud would have created unnecessary danger.

There is something believable about that. We all understand careful language when danger is near. A father may lower his voice in a restaurant because he does not want the children to hear the whole story yet. A worker may write a cautious message because the wrong person could forward it. A family may use a phrase that means something to them but not to outsiders. Not every unnamed thing is mysterious because the writer wanted drama. Sometimes something is unnamed because the people involved already know, and saying it plainly would bring trouble.

Still, Rome does not answer everything. The Roman Empire fell in the West long ago, and the full final scene Paul describes did not unfold in a simple, completed way immediately after that fall. Some Christians answer this by saying Rome continued in other forms, or that Paul was speaking of government order more broadly. That may be possible. But if we are honest, Rome alone feels too small to carry the whole weight of the passage.

Another possibility is the church itself. This one lands differently because it brings the mystery closer to our own lives. The church is supposed to be a living witness against lawlessness. Not merely a building, not merely a Sunday routine, not merely a place where people gather because they share traditions, but a people filled with the life of Christ. When the church is faithful, it becomes salt in the earth and light in the world. It preserves. It exposes. It slows decay. It tells the truth when lies become comfortable. It prays when the world has stopped listening.

You can feel this in ordinary life. A workplace changes when even one person refuses to join the cruelty. A family changes when someone chooses confession instead of blame. A neighborhood changes when one house becomes a place where people can ask for help without being humiliated. A church changes a town when it stops performing religion and starts carrying burdens. None of that looks like a dramatic prophecy scene. It looks like casseroles after funerals, rides to appointments, quiet prayers, honest apologies, and people refusing to let darkness have the last word in the room they occupy.

So yes, the church may restrain evil in a real way. But the church cannot do that by personality, branding, volume, or human effort. The church is not magic. It is not powerful because people put a cross on a sign. It restrains darkness only when it is surrendered to God. A church without the Spirit can become another institution protecting itself. A believer without humility can speak the right words and still carry the wrong spirit. If the church restrains, it is because Someone greater is working through the church.

That leads many Christians to the Holy Spirit. This answer has deep spiritual weight. The Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin. He awakens conscience. He keeps the truth of Jesus alive in human hearts. He strengthens weak believers, exposes deception, and keeps drawing people toward repentance even when the culture around them is drifting away from God. The Holy Spirit often works without making noise. He presses on the heart. He brings a Scripture back to mind. He stops a person mid-sentence before they say the cruel thing. He gives someone the strength to walk away from what would have ruined them.

There are moments when you can almost recognize that restraint inside yourself. You are about to send the angry message, and something tells you to put the phone down. You are about to go back to the habit you know is destroying you, and a small warning rises in your chest. You are about to give up on prayer, and somehow a thin line of faith remains. Maybe you called it conscience. Maybe you called it common sense. Maybe later you realized it was mercy.

The Holy Spirit fits Paul’s language because the restrainer seems both personal and powerful. Paul speaks of what restrains, and then of one who restrains. The Spirit can be spoken of in a way that carries both the work and the Person. The Spirit works through the church, but He is not limited to the church’s visible strength. He is God present and active in the world. If lawlessness is the movement of rebellion, then the Spirit is the holy resistance of God against that rebellion.

Yet even here, we should be humble. Paul does not say the name plainly. He could have. He often speaks of the Spirit directly. Since he does not here, we should hold the answer with conviction where we can, and modesty where Scripture leaves room.

There is also the possibility of an angelic restrainer. That may sound strange if we only think of angels as decorations on cards or soft figures in paintings. But the Bible presents angels as powerful servants of God involved in real conflict. In Daniel, spiritual beings are connected to earthly kingdoms. In Revelation, angels hold back winds, announce judgments, pour out bowls, bind powers, and stand at turning points in history. Scripture gives us enough to know that what happens on earth is not disconnected from unseen spiritual reality.

That does not mean we should become obsessed with the unseen world. Some people lose their balance there. They start naming things God has not named and claiming certainty where Scripture asks for reverence. But it does mean the world is deeper than it looks. Behind elections, wars, family systems, temptations, courage, hatred, repentance, and mercy, there is more happening than human eyes can measure.

By the time we walk through these possibilities, something important becomes clear. Rome can restrain only if God uses Rome. The church can restrain only if God fills His people. The Holy Spirit restrains because He is God at work. Angels restrain only when God commands them. Every path keeps leading back to the same place.

The instrument may be debated, but the hand behind the restraint is not.

That is where the mystery begins to steady the soul instead of merely filling the mind. We may not be able to write the restrainer’s name with perfect certainty in the margin of the page. But we can write this: God is not absent from the delay. God is not absent from the boundary. God is not absent from the “not yet.” Something is holding back the full rise of lawlessness because God has not allowed it to step forward before its time.

And if that is true in the largest movements of history, then it can also be true in the smaller places where we are afraid. The God who governs the hour of final evil is not confused by the hour you are living in right now. He sees the bill on the counter, the message that was not answered, the test result you are waiting for, the child you worry about, the regret that still visits in the morning, and the private fear you do not know how to explain to anyone. He may not tell you everything He is doing. He may not name every force He is restraining. But He has not stepped away from the line.

Sometimes faith is not knowing the missing name.

Sometimes faith is trusting the God who did not give you the whole explanation but still gave you enough truth to keep walking.

Chapter 3: The Mercy You Never Saw Coming

There are mornings when protection does not feel like protection. It feels like being stuck at a red light when you are already late. It feels like the job not calling back after you prayed hard and tried to sound confident in the interview. It feels like a friendship growing quiet after you thought you had finally found someone who understood you. It feels like the bank app loading while your stomach tightens because you already know the number is going to be smaller than the pressure waiting for it.

Most of us do not call those moments mercy. We call them frustration. We call them delay. We call them rejection. We call them one more thing going wrong in a life that already feels too heavy. And to be fair, sometimes a closed door is simply painful. Sometimes a delay costs us. Sometimes a loss is really a loss, and pretending otherwise can make faith sound fake.

But 2 Thessalonians 2 opens a window we do not naturally look through. It tells us that God can be working in the form of restraint. Not only rescue after something breaks, but restraint before something breaks us. Not only healing after a wound, but protection from wounds we never received because God held something back before we ever saw it coming.

That is a difficult kind of mercy to recognize because it does not always leave evidence. If God saves you from a wreck after the car flips, there may be a hospital bracelet, a bent frame, a story, and a moment where everyone knows something miraculous happened. But if God prevents the wreck by letting you misplace your keys for seven minutes, there may be no testimony. You may only feel annoyed while looking under the couch cushions. You may never know what was waiting at the intersection you did not reach on time.

This is not an invitation to become strange about every small inconvenience. We do not need to turn every flat tire, every missed call, and every delayed appointment into a dramatic hidden sign. Faith does not require us to invent meanings God has not shown us. But humility does ask us to admit that we do not see the whole field. We do not know everything God has blocked. We do not know every danger that was turned aside. We do not know every relationship, opportunity, habit, road, conversation, and decision that looked harmless to us but was not harmless in the eyes of God.

I think about the person who begged God for a job and did not get it. At first, it felt humiliating. They had told people it looked promising. They had already imagined the new routine, the new desk, the relief of having a better paycheck. Then the company called someone else. For weeks it felt like God had ignored them. Months later, they found out the department had collapsed into chaos. The manager who seemed charming in the interview had driven people into burnout. The position they wanted so badly would have taken their evenings, their peace, and maybe even their family’s stability. What felt like rejection may have been God standing at a door they were too tired to evaluate clearly.

Not every disappointment gets explained that neatly. We have to be honest about that. Some losses remain painful and confusing for years. Some prayers still make us swallow hard because we do not understand why the answer came the way it did. But the fact that we cannot explain every closed door does not mean every closed door was empty of mercy. Sometimes we only know enough to say, “God, I did not want this, and I do not understand this, but I believe You see more than I see.”

That is where the mystery of the restrainer becomes more than a debate about the end times. It becomes a way of seeing life under the rule of God. Paul is saying lawlessness is already at work, but it is not free to do everything it wants. There is pressure, but there is also a limit. There is danger, but there is also a boundary. There is evil, but there is also restraint. If that is true for the final rebellion of history, then it teaches us something about the character of God in the quiet places too.

God’s restraint is not always comfortable because restraint often feels like being denied. A parent knows this. A child may reach for something sharp on the counter and cry when the parent moves it away. The child experiences the moment as loss. The parent understands it as love. The child sees only the object being taken. The parent sees the blood that did not have to spill.

Adults are not as different as we think. We reach for things too. We reach for approval that would enslave us. We reach for control that would harden us. We reach for relationships that would drain the life out of us. We reach for shortcuts that would cost more than patience ever would. Then God, in ways we do not always recognize, closes the distance between us and what we thought we needed. We feel the loss first. The love may take longer to see.

This does not mean every painful thing in your life was secretly good. That would be careless and cruel. Some things are evil. Some people really did wrong you. Some wounds should never have happened. The Bible never asks us to call darkness light. What it does teach is that even in a world where evil is active, evil is not sovereign. God can restrain what He does not yet remove. God can limit what He has not yet ended. God can work around pain, through pain, and beyond pain without ever becoming the author of evil.

That distinction matters deeply. When someone is grieving, they do not need a cheap explanation. They need the nearness of God. They need someone to sit beside them without rushing the wound. They need permission to say, “This hurts,” without being corrected by people who are uncomfortable with sadness. But later, when the first waves of pain settle and the soul can breathe a little, they may also need the quiet strength of knowing that the pain they saw was not the whole story. God was present in more ways than they could measure.

Maybe you are in a season right now where all you can see is what God has not done. He has not fixed the relationship. He has not opened the door. He has not changed the person. He has not removed the pressure. He has not answered as quickly as you hoped. That can feel lonely, especially when you are trying to keep faith while still being honest about how tired you are.

But what if there is another side to the story you cannot see yet? What if God is restraining something behind the scenes? What if He is slowing a disaster, weakening a temptation, blocking a trap, limiting an enemy, softening a heart, preparing a provision, or holding back a darkness you are not equipped to fight directly? What if the silence does not mean nothing is happening? What if the silence is the sound of God working where your eyes cannot go?

I do not say that lightly. I know faith can sound easy when someone else is the one hurting. It is different when it is your kitchen table, your child, your marriage, your body, your bills, your future, your name, your reputation, your loneliness. It is different when you are the one whispering prayers with no energy left to make them sound strong. But this is exactly where we need a faith that is deeper than visible evidence. We need a faith that can say, “Lord, I will thank You for what I can see, and I will trust You with what I cannot.”

The Thessalonians needed that kind of faith. They were afraid because the world around them looked unstable. Paul did not tell them everything they might have wanted to know, but he gave them enough. Evil was already working, but it was restrained. The final darkness had not arrived. God’s people had not been forgotten. The Lord still held the line.

That same truth can steady us in smaller rooms. You may not know why the door closed. You may not know why the timing changed. You may not know why something you wanted slipped out of reach. You may not know why God allowed one pain while preventing another. But you can bring all of that confusion to Him without pretending. You can ask honest questions and still trust His character. You can grieve what hurt and still believe He is restraining more than you realize.

One day, I wonder if we will see it. Not every answer, maybe, but enough to make us fall silent in gratitude. Enough to realize that our story contained more mercy than we noticed. Enough to see that the God we accused of doing nothing was often holding back things that would have crushed us. Enough to understand that some of the empty spaces in our lives were not signs of abandonment, but places where danger never got permission to arrive.

Until then, we live in the tension. We study the mystery. We admit what we do not know. We trust what has been revealed. Evil is real, but it is limited. God’s restraint is real, even when it is hidden. And the mercy you never saw coming may be the mercy that was already there, standing between you and something you were never meant to face.

Chapter 4: When Fear Pretends to Be Wisdom

A person can sit at the kitchen table with a half-finished cup of coffee, open a video on their phone, and feel their whole nervous system change in less than three minutes. The voice on the screen sounds certain. The music underneath it is tense. The words are urgent. This leader, this war, this technology, this treaty, this headline, this number, this symbol, this timing. Before long, the coffee has gone cold, the room feels smaller, and a believer who was just trying to understand Scripture now feels like the world is about to collapse before dinner.

That is one of the dangers of a passage like 2 Thessalonians 2. A real mystery can invite real study, but it can also become a doorway into fear. Some people do not handle mystery with humility. They handle it like a weapon. They take the restrainer, the man of lawlessness, the rebellion, and the language of the end, then they turn every uncertain event into proof that they have figured out what Paul left unnamed. They may sound confident, but confidence is not the same as truth.

I understand the pull. When life feels unstable, certainty feels like medicine. Even frightening certainty can feel better than honest uncertainty because at least it gives the mind something to hold. A person would rather say, “I know exactly what is happening,” than admit, “I am scared, and I do not know what God is doing.” That is why end-times speculation can become strangely addictive. It gives fear a structure. It gives anxiety a map. It makes the heart feel informed, even if it is not becoming more faithful.

But Paul was not writing to make anxious people more anxious. That matters more than we may realize. He was not pouring gasoline on panic. He was taking shaking believers by the shoulders and helping them breathe again. His message was not, “Be terrified because the mystery is dark.” His message was, “Do not be quickly shaken. Do not be alarmed. God has not lost control.”

That means any reading of this passage that leaves us more frantic, more suspicious, more harsh, more obsessed, or more detached from ordinary obedience has probably missed the spirit of the passage. A teaching can use biblical words and still move the heart in an unhealthy direction. If a person studies prophecy and becomes less loving, less patient, less truthful, less steady, and less present with the people God has placed in front of them, then something has gone wrong.

The restrainer mystery should make us humble, not arrogant. It should make us watchful, not paranoid. It should make us serious, not strange. It should deepen our trust in Jesus, not make us addicted to decoding every public event as if faith depends on our ability to solve what Paul did not fully explain.

There is a difference between discernment and suspicion. Discernment listens for truth while staying submitted to God. Suspicion assumes danger everywhere and calls that wisdom. Discernment makes a person prayerful and steady. Suspicion makes a person restless and sharp. Discernment can say, “I do not know yet.” Suspicion hates that sentence because it needs a target, a theory, a villain, or a deadline.

You can see the difference in daily life. A parent practicing discernment notices that a child has grown quiet, puts the phone down, and asks a gentle question at the right time. A suspicious parent storms in with accusations and pushes the child further away. A spouse practicing discernment senses distance in the marriage and chooses an honest conversation. A suspicious spouse starts building a case, reading tone into every text message, and treating fear like evidence. A believer practicing discernment tests ideas by Scripture, prayer, wisdom, and fruit. A suspicious believer chases voices that feed the very fear Jesus came to free them from.

The Thessalonians needed discernment, not panic. They had received claims that the Day of the Lord had already come. Those claims shook them. Paul did not tell them to ignore spiritual matters. He did not tell them prophecy was unimportant. He corrected them with truth and brought them back to steadiness. That is the pattern we need. We should take Scripture seriously without letting fear become our teacher.

This matters because fear can make people careless with holiness. That may sound strange, but it happens. When someone becomes convinced the world is ending at any moment, they may stop doing the ordinary faithful things that actually matter. They may neglect their family emotionally while claiming to be spiritually alert. They may spend hours watching alarming content but struggle to sit quietly with God for ten minutes. They may argue about the Antichrist while refusing to apologize to someone they wounded. They may study the man of lawlessness while allowing bitterness, pride, or dishonesty to grow in their own heart.

Paul would not have wanted that. The same chapter that speaks about lawlessness also points us toward truth, endurance, and salvation. The point is not to make us experts at naming darkness while neglecting the light. The point is to keep us faithful while darkness is present. If evil is restrained, then this present hour still matters. There is still time to repent. There is still time to forgive. There is still time to tell the truth. There is still time to return to prayer. There is still time to love the people in your house with patience instead of treating them like interruptions to your fear.

That may be one of the most practical lessons in the whole passage. God has not revealed every detail, but He has revealed enough for obedience. He has not told us the restrainer’s name with certainty, but He has told us to stand firm. He has not given us permission to panic, but He has given us reason to hope. He has not called us to build our lives around speculation, but He has called us to live in the light while the world is still being given time.

Think about someone caring for an aging parent. The days are repetitive. Medications. Appointments. Insurance calls. Laundry. A chair by the bed. The same story told again because memory is slipping. That person may not have the energy to study every theory about the end times. But if they bring tenderness into that room, if they speak gently when they are exhausted, if they pray while folding another load of sheets, they are living in holy resistance to lawlessness. They are refusing the coldness of the age. They are showing that Christ is still at work in ordinary love.

That kind of faith will not go viral most of the time. It will not look dramatic. It will not make a person feel like they have cracked a hidden code. But it may be closer to what Paul wanted than many of the louder conversations we hear. A steady Christian changing a diaper, paying a bill honestly, forgiving an enemy, feeding someone hungry, resisting temptation, visiting the lonely, or speaking truth without cruelty is not wasting time while waiting for prophecy to unfold. They are living as a witness that evil has not taken everything.

The mystery of the restrainer is not a call to escape ordinary life. It is a call to see ordinary faithfulness as part of the larger battle. If lawlessness is already at work, then every act of obedience matters. If deception is already moving, then every truthful word matters. If darkness is pressing, then every lamp matters, even the small one on the kitchen table.

Maybe that is why God does not satisfy all our curiosity. Curiosity can keep us looking outward forever. Obedience brings the question home. It is easier to ask who the restrainer is than to ask where lawlessness is trying to grow in me. It is easier to debate the end of the age than to confess the sin I keep excusing. It is easier to analyze darkness in the world than to let Jesus expose the shadow in my own motives.

That is not meant to shame us. It is meant to bring us back to the ground where real faith grows. The mystery is big, but the next faithful step is often small. Turn off the fear-feeding voice. Open Scripture without trying to win an argument. Pray honestly. Make the apology. Check on the person who has been quiet. Refuse the habit that keeps making you hollow. Tell the truth even if your voice shakes. Ask God for wisdom without demanding that He give you control.

When fear pretends to be wisdom, it will always ask for more information before it obeys. Faith does not need every missing detail to take the next right step. It trusts that the God who restrains what we cannot see is also guiding what we can do.

So yes, study the mystery. Respect the passage. Think deeply about Rome, the church, the Holy Spirit, angels, and the sovereign hand of God. But do not let the mystery pull you away from Jesus. Do not let the unnamed restrainer become more fascinating to you than the named Savior. Paul’s comfort was never hidden in our ability to solve every prophetic detail. His comfort was in the Lord who governs the moment, restrains the darkness, and calls His people to stand firm without losing their hearts to fear.

Chapter 5: The Mercy Hidden Inside Not Yet

A man can sit in a waiting room and feel time turn against him. The clock on the wall makes a small sound every second, but it does not feel small when he is waiting for the doctor to come back with results. The magazines on the table are old. The television in the corner is talking to no one. His phone is in his hand, but he is not really reading anything. He keeps looking at the door because the door is where the answer will enter. Until then, every minute feels like both hope and punishment.

Waiting does strange things to the soul. It can make a faithful person feel forgotten. It can make a reasonable person imagine the worst. It can make a praying person wonder whether God is listening or whether heaven has gone quiet. We usually think delay means something is wrong. If the answer has not come, we assume the answer is being withheld. If the door has not opened, we assume God is refusing us. If the change has not happened, we assume nothing is happening.

But 2 Thessalonians 2 gives us another way to understand delay. Paul says the man of lawlessness is not yet revealed because he is restrained until the proper time. That phrase matters. The delay is not random. The waiting is not empty. The absence of the final event is not proof that God is inactive. It is proof that God is governing the moment.

That is hard to receive because we usually want God’s timing to explain itself. We want the reason written clearly on the wall. We want to know why the answer is taking so long, why the person has not changed, why the pressure has not lifted, why the promise seems far away, why the burden still sits on the chest when morning comes. We can say we trust God’s timing, but that sentence becomes real only when His timing makes us wait longer than we wanted to.

The Thessalonians had their own version of that pressure. They were afraid the great day had already come, but Paul tells them the opposite. Not yet. The rebellion has not fully arrived. The man of lawlessness has not been revealed. Something is holding it back. They may have wanted the whole story to resolve quickly, but Paul reminds them that God does not move history according to human panic. He moves it according to His purpose.

That is not only true for prophecy. It is true in the daily places where we struggle to trust Him. Not yet can be one of the hardest mercies God gives. Not yet can sound like silence when it is really protection. Not yet can feel like rejection when it is really preparation. Not yet can feel like God is late when He is actually refusing to rush what love is still forming.

A young parent understands this in a small way when a child asks for something they cannot carry yet. The child wants the pocketknife, the keys, the phone with no limits, the freedom to go wherever they want with whoever they choose. The parent says not yet, and the child hears, “I do not trust you” or “I do not love you enough.” The parent means, “I love you too much to hand you something before you are ready to hold it wisely.”

I wonder how many of our prayers meet that kind of answer. We ask God for influence before humility is strong enough to survive it. We ask for a relationship before our identity is rooted deeply enough in Christ. We ask for more money before our character has learned how to steward small things without being ruled by them. We ask for open doors before we have learned how to walk faithfully in the room we are already in.

That does not mean every delay is about our immaturity. Sometimes God is working on circumstances around us. Sometimes He is preparing other people. Sometimes He is protecting us from what we cannot see. Sometimes He is simply doing something larger than our immediate relief. But either way, delay is not wasted when God is the One holding the clock.

The restrainer mystery teaches us that God’s “not yet” can be an act of mercy for the whole world. If the man of lawlessness is held back, then the delay means more time. More time for repentance. More time for mercy. More time for the gospel to be spoken. More time for prodigals to come home. More time for stubborn hearts to soften. More time for someone who has spent years running from God to finally turn around and say, “Lord, I need You.”

That changes the emotional weight of the passage. The delay before final judgment is not weakness. It is patience. God is not slow because He is confused or powerless. He is patient because He is merciful. Every day that the final darkness is restrained is also a day when someone can be reached by grace.

This should make us more tender, not more smug. If God has allowed more time, then we are not supposed to spend that time congratulating ourselves for being on the right side of the mystery. We are supposed to become people who carry the message of Jesus with urgency and compassion. The world is not merely a stage for prophecy. It is full of people God loves, people with names, wounds, children, addictions, regrets, pride, fear, and secret prayers they barely know how to pray.

Sometimes we talk about the end of the age as if the only thing that matters is being right about the timeline. But Jesus did not tell us to be timeline collectors. He told us to be faithful witnesses. He told us to love our neighbors, forgive our enemies, care for the least of these, make disciples, watch, pray, endure, and keep our lamps burning. If God is restraining final evil, then the time we have is not empty space. It is assignment.

That assignment may begin closer than we think. It may begin with the person in the next room, the one we have been impatient with because we are tired. It may begin with the coworker who talks too much because loneliness has made them needy. It may begin with the relative who frustrates us, the neighbor whose name we still do not know, the teenager who acts like they do not care while quietly hoping someone will not give up on them. God’s patience toward the world should make us more patient with people.

There is a quiet warning here too. If God’s restraint gives more time, then time is not something to waste forever. The fact that final judgment has not come does not mean judgment is imaginary. The fact that God is patient does not mean we should keep postponing obedience. A delayed consequence is not the same as no consequence. A restrained darkness is not a defeated darkness until Jesus ends it.

That truth touches private life. There may be something God has been asking you to deal with while there is still time. A bitterness you keep feeding. A habit you keep hiding. A call you keep avoiding. A truth you keep delaying. A prayer you keep postponing because you are afraid of what surrender might require. The mercy of not yet is not only comfort. It is invitation.

We can see this in the simplest human moments. A person gets one more evening to make peace before resentment becomes a family pattern. One more honest conversation before distance hardens. One more chance to stop lying to themselves about what that habit is costing. One more morning to open the Bible before the noise of the day takes over. One more drive home to decide not to become the angry version of themselves everyone has learned to avoid.

Grace often arrives as another chance.

That is why the mystery of the restrainer should not leave us staring at the sky while neglecting the ground under our feet. God has given time, and time is holy when it is received as mercy. If Jesus has not returned, if the final lawless one has not been fully revealed, if the darkest hour has not yet arrived, then today still has purpose. There is still something to mend, something to confess, something to forgive, something to build, something to give, someone to love, someone to warn gently, someone to encourage, someone to invite back toward hope.

The waiting room does not feel easy while you are in it. The clock still ticks. The door still stays closed until the appointed moment. But faith begins to breathe differently when it stops assuming that delay means abandonment. Sometimes the door has not opened because God is not finished working on what is behind it. Sometimes the answer has not arrived because mercy is still moving in places we cannot see. Sometimes not yet is not the absence of God’s love. Sometimes not yet is the form His love is taking right now.

So we do not despise the delay. We bring our impatience honestly to God, and we ask Him to teach us how to live faithfully inside the mercy of time. We do not know every hidden detail of the restrainer. We do not know exactly how God is holding history in place. But we know enough to say that the present hour has not been abandoned. The line still holds. The door opens only when God permits it. And until that day, every breath is not merely waiting. Every breath is a chance to come closer to Jesus.

Chapter 6: The Hand Behind the Gate

There is a moment in the grocery store when a person realizes how thin their patience has become. The line is moving slowly. The cart has one bad wheel. Someone is arguing about a coupon. The cashier looks tired enough to cry, and the person behind you sighs loudly as if everyone else exists to ruin their afternoon. You came in for bread, milk, and one quiet errand. Now you can feel irritation rising in your chest, looking for a place to land.

That may seem far away from 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, but it is not as far as we think. Lawlessness is not only a future figure. Paul says the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. That means rebellion against God does not only arrive in world-shaking events. It also presses into ordinary human rooms. It shows up in the way people use one another, speak to one another, shame one another, ignore one another, and excuse themselves while demanding grace from everyone else.

If God restrains evil in history, then part of our calling is to stop cooperating with lawlessness in our own lives. We cannot control every nation, every system, every public lie, every spiritual battle, or every hidden force moving through the age. But we can ask Jesus to rule the next sentence that comes out of our mouth. We can ask Him to restrain the pride that wants to win every argument. We can ask Him to stop the bitterness that keeps rewriting the story so we always look innocent. We can ask Him to interrupt the anger before it becomes cruelty.

This is where the mystery becomes a mirror. It is easier to wonder who the restrainer is than to ask where I need to be restrained. It is easier to study the man of lawlessness than to admit the small lawless places I still protect in myself. That does not mean we are the man of lawlessness. It means the same spirit of rebellion that will one day have a terrifying public expression already looks for quiet agreements in ordinary hearts.

A person may never bow before a beast, but they can bow before resentment. They may never join a final rebellion, but they can rebel against God’s command to forgive. They may never deceive nations, but they can lie to a spouse, shade the truth at work, exaggerate someone’s failure, or tell themselves a private sin is harmless because nobody sees it. The end-times mystery is not meant to make us point at everyone else. It should bring us low enough to pray, “Lord, do not only restrain darkness out there. Restrain what is trying to grow in me.”

That prayer is not weakness. It is wisdom. A person who asks God to restrain them is not asking to become small. They are asking to become free. The anger that feels powerful often makes us servants. The desire to control everything often becomes a prison. The habit we defend eventually demands payment. The bitterness we keep feeding does not stay in the corner where we left it. It spreads into our tone, our face, our decisions, and our ability to love people who do not make love easy.

This is one reason I believe God’s restraint is mercy. Sometimes He restrains circumstances around us. Sometimes He restrains evil that is moving toward us. But sometimes He restrains us because He loves the people who would be hurt by our unhealed places. He may slow us down before we say the thing that cannot be taken back. He may press conviction into our chest before we choose the old habit again. He may let a plan fall apart because success in the wrong spirit would have made us harder to reach.

That kind of mercy can feel uncomfortable. Conviction rarely feels pleasant at first. It can feel like the room got too bright. It can feel like God has put His finger on something we hoped He would overlook. But a God who never restrains us would not be loving us. He would be leaving us to become whatever our worst impulses wanted to make us.

Think about a man who is known by everyone as dependable. He pays the bills, keeps showing up, fixes what breaks, answers the phone, and carries more than he says. But inside he is tired. He has started snapping at people. He has started using silence as punishment. He tells himself he has earned the right to be cold because nobody understands the weight he carries. Then one evening, before he walks into the house, he sits in the driveway with both hands on the steering wheel and feels God whisper into his conscience, “Do not take your exhaustion out on them.”

That is restraint. It is not dramatic. It will not be the kind of story people make into a movie. But if he listens, a home changes. A child does not have to absorb anger that was never theirs. A wife does not have to be punished for pressure she did not create. A weary man does not become a cruel man simply because he refused to let God stop him.

That is holy ground.

We often want the spectacular version of faith. We want mysteries, signs, great moments, and deep answers. But much of Christian maturity happens when God restrains us in quiet places and we stop fighting Him. The hand that holds back the man of lawlessness is the same sovereign hand that can hold back my tongue, my pride, my envy, my lust, my fear, my despair, and my need to be right.

This does not make the mystery smaller. It makes it closer. The restrainer in 2 Thessalonians remains debated. Rome may be involved. The church may be involved. The Holy Spirit may be the clearest answer. Angels may play a role in ways we do not fully understand. But every serious answer leads back to the same God. The hand behind the gate belongs to the Lord. He is the One who determines the appointed time. He is the One who allows, limits, delays, commands, and finally ends what evil wanted to make permanent.

And Paul does not leave us staring at the gate. He turns our eyes to Jesus.

That is important because the restrainer is not the hero of the story. The restrainer delays the man of lawlessness, but Jesus destroys him. The restrainer holds back darkness for a season, but Jesus ends darkness forever. Paul says the Lord Jesus will overthrow the lawless one with the breath of His mouth and destroy him by the appearance of His coming. That is not a close fight. That is not heaven barely surviving. That is the King returning, and lawlessness discovering that all its arrogance was temporary.

This is where the soul can finally rest. We do not need to know everything to trust Him. We do not need to solve every debated detail to live faithfully. We do not need to become experts in fear. We need to become people who know where history is going and who belongs on the throne.

The world may feel unstable, but Jesus is not unstable. The headlines may be dark, but Jesus is not confused. Evil may be active, but evil is not eternal. Lawlessness may have a mystery, but Jesus has a name above every name. The restrainer may be unnamed in Paul’s sentence, but the Savior is not unnamed. His name is Jesus Christ, and He still has the final word.

So what do we do with this mystery now?

We live awake, but not afraid. We take Scripture seriously, but we do not let speculation steal our peace. We watch the times, but we do not neglect the people at our table. We admit what we do not know, but we hold tightly to what God has made clear. We thank Him for the rescues we saw and for the restraints we may never see. We ask Him to restrain evil in the world, and we ask Him to restrain anything in us that does not look like Christ.

Maybe tonight, when the house gets quiet again and the mind opens those locked drawers, this passage can meet you differently. Not as a riddle meant to torment you, but as a reminder that God is holding more than you can see. There is a line darkness cannot cross without His permission. There is mercy in the delay. There is purpose in the not yet. There is patience in the time we have been given. There is protection in some of the doors that never opened.

And there is Jesus at the end of the story.

Not panic.

Not chaos.

Not the man of lawlessness.

Jesus.

The mystery begins with an unnamed restrainer, but it ends with a named Savior. That is enough for today. It is enough for the kitchen table, the waiting room, the hospital chair, the drive home, the unpaid bill, the tired parent, the lonely believer, and the person trying to hold faith together when the world feels loud. God is still ruling. God is still restraining. God is still patient. God is still near. And when the appointed time comes, Jesus will not need our fear to help Him win.

He will come in glory.

And darkness will find out it was never in control.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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3 July 2026

Flight (working title): an opening, a gust of fresh air and momentum, light clipping edges, delimitation with less information. In the body of work that is coming together—there are probably five or six paintings contending right now—this one is the most pared back (and maybe the most sure of itself as a result). But it's hard to know if I trust it or not yet. Which is usually a sign that it's doing something. Anyway, this one comes on the heels of seeing Picabia at Hauser & Wirth today, which was actually a bit underwhelming (sort of a one-note curation) but nevertheless left me with swirling impressions of bold line and careful overlay. Have also been on a Richard Hamilton kick, and his Five Tyres Remoulded (1971) portfolio seems to be taking up a lot of real estate; a manual on spatial exploration and contradiction. And so I came to a funneling of action, a hollowing out of a vessel, a tidal force in a tiny collision. Looking ahead on the calendar, I now see a small day that looms large.

Saturday

In Summary: * After a quiet day at home I'm planning to follow live coverage of the Independence Day Celebration at Washington, D.C. on NTD News. I'll follow this with the night prayers, then head straight to bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 227.41 lbs. * bp= 140/83 (68)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 08:30 – 3 boiled eggs * 09:40 – 1 pb&j sandwich * 12:00 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 15:12 – air-popped popcorn * 16:20 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 06:30 – Pray the Rosary * 07:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 07:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 13:30 – listening to general sports talk on 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, ahead of this afternoon's Rangers / Tigers game. * 17:30 – and the Tigers win, 3 to 0. * 17:50 – tuned to NTD News – for their special live coverage of the Independence Day Celebration at Washington, D.C.

Chess: * 14:40 – moved in all pending CC games

Hey, and welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to your daily does of rambling. i’m your host. Today im very bored, which is why im writing a stupid introduction like this, because i have absolutely nothing to talk about, well. almost nothing. i do have something to complain about, im getting awfully bored and im miserable and when those two get mixed together, you get this version of me, where every joke makes absolutely no sense, but I laugh at it anyway because my standards for entertainment have dropped below sea level. but anyway, one of my friends graduated yesterday. congratulations to him, and whatever words people say these days, unfortunately, i was also there, i dont know how this keeps happening, but people i have never seen before somehow know who i am. i dont even introduce myself, i stand in corners and i actively avoid eye contact, yet somehow somewhere they still manage to walk directly towards me like im the main attraction, i tried escaping. several times. walked away, pretended i was looking for someone, pretended i had somewhere to be. at one point i considered simply evaporating. spoiler. didnt work. i had to wait for my friend anyway, then in the act of betrayal… that i will absolutely remember forever, the graduate decided to announce to everyone that “Ahmed” is here today. wonderful. Absolutely wonderful, suddenly complete strangers wanted conversations, and about what? i dont know, life. or weather, work. how ive been, who they were, who i was. questions followed by more questions. frustrating. i spent nearly two hours nodding, smiling politely and pretending i understood why we were all speaking to each other. Social interaction is such an interesting invention, someone should cut that network off. at some point i even pretended to be on a phone call just so people would leave me alone, there wasn’t anyone on the other end, there wasnt even dignity on my end. eventually everyone became distracted by someone else, which, for once, worked in my favor. i got home. thankfully, all well and out of questions to answer, and silence. the greatest sound ever created.

Speaking of my housemate. i dont think ive ever met someone capable of saying so many words without actually communicating anything. he’ll walk into the room, begin a story, somehow forget what the story was halfway through, remember another story instead and combine both into one disaster and here is where it gets messy, he’ll either blame it on me or ask me if i was listening, No. respectfully, no. i left mentally about seven minutes ago. sometimes i answer with random words just to see if he notices, he doesnt. im convinved i could respnd with “microwave” to every sentence, and we’d still have a perfectly functioning conversation, if he didnt randomly make the conversation about me mid-talking. well, whatever thats all ive got today,

see? i told you i had nothing to write about, i somehow turned “im bored” into three pages of complaining. thats probably my only consistent talent.

Sincerely, The man who keeps insisting he has nothing to say, then refuses to shut up.

P.S i sent her one of her favorite flowers today, not because i wanted her back. i keep telling myself that. i just wanted her to text me, a simple “i miss you too” maybe even “happy fourth.” instead, i got absolutely nothing, maybe its three in the morning and im letting noises in my head easily. but still how cold does your heart have to be to receive flowers from someone who once meant everything to you, and not say a single word? maybe im wrong, and you almost texted. either way, good night, maybe you’ll open your heart to me in my dreams.

The employer got us coffee and donuts for showing up on Canada Day. I do like unexpected free snacks at work. There is something nice about it that isn't like just bringing a coffee and donut for yourself. I suppose it is similar to how having a meal prepared for you tends to seem a little better than cooking for yourself.

After having my free donut at break, and then going back to work, I found myself thinking about some experiences I've had with food and past workplaces.

Some years ago I used to work overtime at my current place of employment. One Saturday shift the boss had brought us donuts. At break time I saw the box sitting on a table near the punch clock. There were three left in the box. I thought, I will punch for break, and then get one. In the time it took me to turn around and punch my card, a coworker had showed up, and he had the last three donuts stacked up on a napkin in his hand.

I briefly gave him the benefit of the doubt, and wondered if maybe he was bringing a donut for other people he was sitting with or something. But no, I watched him sit down at a table by himself, and eat all three of them. I didn't say anything even though I really should have. Whenever I saw him after that I would think about those damn donuts. Sometimes he would need my assistance on the job, and would ask for my help. I would help him, but I certainly didn't put in my best effort. Forever destined to be the guy who stole my donut. So inconsiderate.

Another place I worked, suddenly news would start circulating. Samosa party at lunch time! The first time I heard it after starting my employment there, I was like, wtf is a samosa? I quickly learned. Those tasty little triangles of amazingness. I really like them. I would also get excited about the samosa parties when they happened.

After working there for awhile though I started to see a darker side of the samosa parties. Bringing them was a weird unspoken requirement, like some kind of social status symbol. A way to fit in. If you want to have some, then expect at some point to be the provider of them. And, oh man, the gossip and fighting about the leftovers. The whole thing just became tainted and weird to me. I eventually ended up avoiding them altogether. I would focus on reading a book while eating my own lunch. Let them have their weird fights about samosas. Not having any? No, thank you.

Funny now when I think about that place. The crew there was like that with pretty much everything. They would turn the simplest of things into a stressful ordeal. It was the most toxic workplace I ever worked in. I believe there is a line between authority and just simply being a power tripping asshole. The bosses there were the latter more often than not. The workers were divided into gangs constantly using psychological conflict and gossip as weapons against the others. I was never accepted into any of the gangs. And it wasn’t for their lack of trying to recruit me. I lasted there for two years. I had a mental breakdown and quit. I looked the place up a few years after I quit, and it was gone. Good riddance, I thought. And THAT is a very brief summary of an awful time in my life.

I had another job right before that awful one, as a temp. It was a pretty small place. The agency didn't tell me very much about it before I went there. I went in on my first day thinking that it was a factory, but it turned out to be a very small distribution warehouse. I remember the silence there. How strange it was after working only in factories before that. The crew there was five guys, and then me, plus bosses and owners. I thought, this is so weird, and also, there shouldn't be too much conflict here with such a small crew. I wasn't even through day one before I realized how wrong I was about there being no conflict. Before the end of the day all of them had taken their turn talking shit about the rest of the crew to me.

There came a day when one of them asked me if I would like a coffee and donut. One of the guys was going out in the company van to get Timmies. Right away I was like, no thank you. I made up the excuse that I had coffee before work. That was actually true, but it was not the reason I turned down the offer. Honestly I wouldn't have minded another coffee and a donut. In hindsight I realized that my no thank you, and the excuse I generated, were really more knee jerk reaction than conscious decision.

At that point in my life I had already been working for over twenty years. I instantly and instinctively knew that the coffee outings would inevitably turn into a thing. And I was right. Within a few weeks they started taking turns going out. Then there was the day when it was someone's turn and they didn't want to go. Then another day someone went with someone else's money, and bought extra food for themselves with it instead of bringing back the right amount of change. It became another thing for them to gossip and fight about. I was quite glad to not be part of it other than hearing the different versions of the outrage.

For the past 2 months I have been battling with back pain. it hasn't been good time.

it got better over the weeks but then last week again, somehow it got triggered again and since then I was bed ridden.

I got to understand a few things about why this keeps on coming back. The conclusion that I have come to now is that it is my erector spinae which gets stiff after long continuous walks.

Last time when it happened, it was due to I walked about 13k steps every day in which about 7-8k was done together. This time as well, I did 6k steps when the back wasn't completely healed, next day I sneezed and it got locked again.

The endurance strength of the back needs to be increased. This time: baby steps.

Anyway today after 5 days I was able to stand continuously for 10 mins to make two cups of tea. Until now I could prepare but midway I would have to lie down, take load off the back so that it doesn't become worse again.

Here's to tea...

Texas Rangers vs Detroit Tigers.

My MLB game today has the Rangers playing the Tigers. This game is scheduled to start this afternoon at 3:05 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find a link to the radio-call of the game.

And the adventure continues.

On this day in 1976 America celebrated its Bicentennial birthday. And my family had moved to a house that was less than a year old. We had moved into the house in the late fall of 1975. Today I am living in that house after having left it for over twenty years.

You might notice that I refer to this place as “a house” or “that house”. I don't refer to it as a home. I am not certain that this building is, or ever really was, a home. There is a big differentiation between a house and a home. That likely isn't a revelation for most people. In fact, many understand that home isn't tied to a specific building. Instead, home is where you have a sense to being complete instead of just existing or enduring.

On this day, the 250th birthday of this country, I now know that the Bicentennial was the beginning of the end of my family. And, in an odd way, that end is similar to the state of this country.

My father had a vision for his family. A vision that he felt very strongly about. He wanted to right what he felt were the wrongs of his upbringing. He had a vision for his family. The problem was: the rest of us weren't on the same page. We didn't share his romanticized image of living in the country, of cutting ties with a larger portion of society for the simple life.

And that made everything complex.

My father had this vision of living the simple life. Of raising crops and becoming, at least in part, self-reliant. His vision included my mother, sister, and myself embracing his vision of this lifestyle. The reality is: we didn't, and we never would have embraced it had we known what was in his mind. But, he was from a time when the father was the leader of the house, and the family was subservient to the head of the household.

My mother wasn't the type of person to be isolated. She thrived on human interaction. It was a quality I often found downright irritating. She could meet someone in the grocery store, and instead of having a brief, polite and courteous interaction with them, she would have them telling her their life story. People just seemed to innately trust that she had the knowledge and wisdom to help them solver their lives problems.

My sister was the intellectual. She devoured books at a rate I never could have fathomed. A trip to the bookstore or library tended to result in her carry out stacks of books. A stack of a dozen books would last two weeks, at most. She was not the person that was going to be a “salt of the earth” type of person. She wasn't destined to become a housewife, or given to the back-breaking physical labor of planting and harvesting a large garden. Her ambitions were never going to fit with my fathers vision.

I was the dreamer, the person given to looking at something and saying “what if?”. The sounds emanating from my stereo gave me more solace than any book or garden. I didn't find any value in the social aspects of sports, and didn't appreciate the bounties of the land. And, I didn't have a green thumb to save my life. I was the person that wanted to go off and explore a library or museum on my own. I wanted to see how others had expressed themselves, and find my own form of self-expression.

My father predicted that Donald Trump was going to win the 2017 Presidential Election. When he told me this, I thought he was making a joke, trying to get back at me for predicting the election of Jimmy Carter. (To be fair, I hadn't made that prediction based on any understanding of politics. I just made a prediction based on how I saw other people reacting to Carter. It was as if I was channeling my mother.) What did my father know at that point? After all, in his advancing dementia he had suddenly become fascinated with Dr. Phil.

But now, I wonder if there wasn't something to that prediction? Could my father have understood that the rise of Donald Trump was exposing the deep divisions in this country? Did my father see the parallel between the rise of Donald Trump and the divisions that had been exposed in our family when we moved to this house?

There is no answer to these questions for me. Just as there is no answer to the future of this country. The only thing I know is: just as this building will still be a house tomorrow, there will still be a country called America when there is a different President.

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Categories: #Reflections Tags: #home, #house, #family, #division, #vision, #demise, #history, #future License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.