Syntax Errors in the Book of Parenting
Teenage children: the ultimate debugger of your parental code. They expose your loops, glitches, legacy scripts—without mercy and often without context. The fix? Forgive the past. Refactor the mess. Speak your truth. And yes, feed the poor. Just recursive love and a better idea.
The ideal time to discover you’ve been thoroughly scrambled by your parents is when your own kids hit puberty. By then, you’ve softened—like overcooked peas—and you finally grasp how easy it is to pass the dysfunction baton without even breaking stride.
No rebellion needed. Just a quiet recognition of the pattern you’ve inherited.
You begin to see what they did.
You forgive them for doing it.
You see them seeing it in you.
You see your kids seeing them in you.
And you forgive your kids for becoming you—before they even know it’s happening.
Congratulations. You’ve become your parents—digitally enhanced, emotionally buffering, and slightly more fluent in memes. The quirks you once mocked now squat rent-free in your own behavior, upgraded with better Wi-Fi and a subscription to existential dread. You’ve inherited the sighs, the unsolicited advice, and the uncanny ability to misplace your glasses while wearing them. The rebellion was brief; the recursion, eternal. And somewhere between the smart thermostat and the third failed attempt to explain TikTok, you realize: the cycle didn’t break—it just got a software update.
So here’s a thought: Un-mess yourself. Find your self. Be your-self. Proclaim your-self. And while you’re at it—feed the poor. Because someone should.
And on that note, when Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you,” it wasn’t a shrug—it was a challenge. A reminder that permanence doesn’t excuse neglect. Poverty isn’t a footnote to devotion—it’s the margin where compassion should be scribbled, loudly and often. The quote, often misused to justify inaction, actually echoes a deeper call: if the poor are always with us, then so should be our generosity.
So feed the poor, because someone should. And if not you, then who’s debugging the soul?
Harry is a recovering satirist, part-time philosopher, and metadata tinkerer. His archive spans two decades of metaphysical mischief, theological punchlines, and poetic nonsense. He believes in satire’s transformative power, the elegance of expressive metadata, and recursion—once writing a poem that never ended and a script that crashed browsers.
This one’s compact but layered — a philosophical spiral on generational patterns, forgiveness, and selfhood, with a final twist of moral clarity.