My parents never adapted to how the world works now, and they never really had to want to. The world they built their footing on held still long enough for that to be a reasonable bet.
Mine didn’t.
I’ve spent my whole career adjusting to ground that keeps moving, not because I’m curious or forward-thinking, but because standing still wasn’t an option.
That’s not a virtue; it’s survival.
So there’s a gap. Technology is the visible part. During a phone call, I can sense when they lose track. It’s not that they can’t understand; they just don’t need to the way I do. A belief about careers, money, and planning for the next twenty years was created for an economy that vanished before I could depend on it.
Here’s the thing I don’t do: I don’t correct it.
Someone makes a comment that assumes things haven’t changed. They give advice or suggest I should just do X. I let it slide. I nod. I redirect.
What I don’t say: it hasn’t been true for a while, and it won’t be again. The reason I seem fine is simple. I stopped believing the ground would hold a long time ago.
I’ve had that exact conversation in my head more times than I can count. I have never actually had it out loud.
I wrote about this pattern before, from the inside. Stop Lying to Yourself is about noticing when you rationalize. It highlights the gap between what you want to do and the story you create to justify it. This is a different gap. Nobody’s rationalizing anything to themselves here. I know exactly what’s true and exactly what I’m not saying. The lie, if it is one, isn’t aimed inward. It’s aimed at the people closest to me, and I’m choosing it on purpose, over and over, because it’s cheaper than the alternative.
Cheaper is the honest word for it. Not kind. Cheaper.
There’s a version of Stoic thinking that gets treated as a hall pass for exactly this. Focus on what’s in your control, let go of what isn’t, and if you can’t control how someone else sees the world, why spend the energy trying to change it. That’s a real principle, and I’ve built plenty of arguments on it. It’s not protecting me from a fight I can’t win. It’s protecting me from a conversation I don’t want to have, and calling that acceptance is a much better story than calling it avoidance.
Hierocles, the Stoic who left almost nothing behind except one idea, pictured your circle of concern as rings. You in the center. Then household. Then extended family. Then neighbors, then the city, then everyone, all the way out. His instruction was simple: work from the inside out. Treat the stranger like a neighbor, the neighbor like family, and let the feelings grow with the actions. Every piece I’ve written out of this idea so far has been about that same move: pulling a ring that starts far away a little closer. The user who never gets a name. The developer who opens a file eleven months from now with no idea who left it that way.
Family was never the ring that needed pulling closer. It’s already there. That’s supposed to be the easy part, the one Hierocles didn’t think required instruction. And it’s the one I’ve been quietly avoiding the hardest, because there’s no professional distance to hide behind and nowhere to fade to if it goes wrong.
With a colleague, a client, a stranger on the internet, the relationship survives because there isn’t much relationship to damage. With my parents, the relationship matters most. So, every honest thought I have gets weighed against the cost of sharing it. That cost always feels larger when I’m closer to it.
I don’t think the answer is confrontation. Sitting my parents down to explain just how much the ground has shifted under them isn’t honesty. It’s a different kind of performance. This one focuses on being right instead of being liked. That’s not the gap I’m trying to close. What I’m actually avoiding is smaller and more constant than one big conversation. The small, repeated choice to leave an assumption uncorrected comes from the fear of admitting how different my footing is from theirs. I worry about what that admission might cost us in our relationship.
Virtue as the Stoics describe it doesn’t have an exception clause for the people you can’t afford to lose. If honesty is only meant for relationships that can absorb it without consequence, then it isn’t a true virtue. It’s merely a convenience. I’ve been relying on this convenience with two people who probably deserve my honesty the least.
I’m not going to pretend the next phone call is going to look different because I wrote about it. I can name the pattern accurately instead of dressing it up as patience, respect, or a desire to avoid making things harder for them. It isn’t any of those things. It’s the same rationalization machine from stop-lying-to-yourself, just running on a different target.
I used to think the hardest ring to reach was the one furthest away, the stranger, the future maintainer, the person you’ll never meet. Turns out the hardest ring is the one that’s already sitting across the table from you at Thanksgiving, close enough that lying to them doesn’t even feel like lying. It feels like being nice.
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