It Was Simpler Than This, Right?

There are very few things these days that feel universally, uncomplicatedly good. Everything seems to come with a caveat, a think piece, or a reason to be slightly suspicious of why it exists in the first place. And then Pizza Hut quietly brought back “Book It”, and for a moment, it felt like none of that applied.

If you’re of a certain age, you know exactly what that means. You read a few books, filled out a little chart, and suddenly you were the proud owner of a personal pan pizza that felt, at the time, like a Michelin-starred reward for your intellectual contributions to society. It was simple in a way that feels almost foreign now. Read, get pizza, feel accomplished. No optimization, no tracking, no trying to turn it into something that could scale. Just something small that worked.

Part of why I love it is the nostalgia, which seems to be hitting harder than usual lately. But a bigger part of it is that I finally understand it in a way I didn’t when I was a kid. As a parent, the brilliance of a well-placed incentive system is impossible to ignore.

Every night, we have a routine where our daughter picks a book, we climb into bed, and we read together for a few minutes before she goes to sleep. “Read” is doing a bit of heavy lifting here, because she has recently decided she would like to take the lead, which mostly means she narrates what she thinks is happening in the pictures with absolute conviction.

And honestly, it’s incredible to watch. There’s something about the confidence of a toddler that makes you realize how much of adulthood is just slowly learning to second guess yourself. But alongside that, there’s a more practical realization happening in real time. Parenting, at least at this stage, is less about holding firm philosophical lines and more about negotiating a series of very small, very specific deals.

You want to brush your teeth, great, maybe Gabby's Dollhouse is on the table. You don’t want to put on pajamas, interesting, that might also affect Gabby’s availability. It’s not a perfect system, and I try not to rely on it for everything, but it works more often than I’d like to admit.

Which is what made the return of “Book It” land differently this time around. Sometimes motivation doesn’t come from within. Sometimes it comes in the form of a very tangible, very immediate reward, and that doesn’t make it less meaningful.

One of her favorite books right now is I Wish You More, and it’s one of those rare children’s books that feels like it was written just as much for the adult reading it out loud. We were flipping through it the other night, moving through page after page of simple, generous wishes, and I found myself slowing down more than usual.

Because somewhere in the middle of reading it, I started asking a quieter question underneath it all. What do I actually wish for her? Not in the abstract, not in the way you answer that question at a dinner party, but in a real, grounded sense of what kind of life I hope she experiences.

There are parts of the world I grew up in that I feel protective over, things I would gladly hand down if I could. The slower pace, the analog nature of childhood, the feeling that not everything was competing for your attention at all times. But there are also things I wouldn’t wish on her, limitations we accepted without question, a lack of awareness that we didn’t even realize we were operating inside of.

And then there’s everything that hasn’t happened yet, the parts of her life that will be shaped by forces I can’t predict or control. Which makes the question less about recreating something familiar and more about deciding what actually matters going forward. It’s not just about wishing her more. It’s about being intentional about which “more” is worth wanting.

The New York Times recently put out a series interviewing songwriters, and I found myself pulled into it more than I expected. There’s something about hearing how people think about their craft that makes you look at your own a little differently. Case in point: Taylor Swift.

She talked about her songwriting process, and something she said stuck with me longer than I expected. She described how intense and specific emotions feel when you’re younger, how everything feels heightened and immediate, and how writing comes from believing those moments are worth capturing exactly as they are.

Not polished. Not revised into something more acceptable. Just preserved.

And it made me think about how quickly we lose access to that version of ourselves. Not because it disappears entirely, but because we learn how to smooth it out, how to make it more reasonable, more efficient, easier to explain. The sharp edges of those early feelings get rounded over time, and eventually, we forget what they felt like in the first place.

Which is what made me look at my daughter a little differently this week. The way she tells a story that doesn’t quite follow logic but somehow still makes perfect sense to her. The way she reacts to things with a level of intensity that feels disproportionate but is actually completely honest. The way everything, good or bad, feels big.

And I started wondering if part of my job isn’t just to guide her or protect her or prepare her, but to help her hold onto that. To create enough space for those moments to exist without immediately translating them into something more practical or more manageable. To let them stay a little messy, a little oversized, a little unresolved.

Because maybe one day, those are the things she comes back to. The raw material for whatever version of storytelling she chooses. A song, an essay, a memory she can actually feel instead of just describe.

And maybe the real work, at least right now, is making sure those moments don’t get lost before she even has the chance to remember them.

I don’t think nostalgia always announces itself the way we expect it to. It’s not always some sweeping, cinematic moment where you sit back and reflect on how much things have changed. Sometimes it shows up in smaller, more inconvenient ways.

Lately, work has been intense. The kind of intense where Monday morning doesn’t feel like the start of a week, it feels like stepping onto a battlefield where you’re not entirely sure how it’s going to go. And somewhere in the middle of that, I’ve been having these weird, vivid flashes of what it used to feel like before any of that existed.

Before work had stakes. Before everything felt measured. Before there was that underlying hum of “keep up or get left behind” sitting just beneath the surface of most days. Before the quiet thought that maybe one day the thing you’re good at gets replaced by something faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

It’s not that I want to go back. Not really. But I do find myself missing the version of life where things didn’t feel quite so loaded.

And for a second, you catch yourself wondering… is this it?

Is this what it’s supposed to feel like when everything is working the way it should?

That same feeling has been showing up in other places too. We’re planning our daughter’s birthday party, and somehow it’s turned into this whole production. Logistics, locations, coordinating schedules, making sure everything is just right.

We’ve been talking about summer plans too, and I caught myself looking at flights the way you look at real estate listings you have no intention of buying. Just casually browsing things that feel increasingly out of reach. It made me think about how a summer used to be defined by something much smaller. A road trip. A local water park. Something simple enough that it didn’t require planning months in advance or justifying the cost.

It’s not that those things don’t exist anymore. It’s just that somewhere along the way, they stopped feeling like enough.

There are two events that happen around the same time every year that I’ve always loved: the Kentucky Derby and the Met Gala.

On the surface, they couldn’t be more different. One is rooted in tradition, history, and a kind of timeless pageantry. The other is modern, performative, and constantly evolving. But for me, they’ve always felt connected.

Maybe it’s the ritual of it. The fact that they show up every year, unchanged in their timing even as everything else shifts. Maybe it’s the sense that they belong to a different pace of life, one that feels slightly removed from the day-to-day.

Or maybe it’s just that they’ve always been there, and that counts for more than we give it credit for.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to make things like that part of my daughter’s world. Not in some forced, overly curated way, but in the quiet way traditions actually stick. You watch something together. You mark the moment. You come back to it again the next year.

Because those are the things that turn into anchors over time.

And at the same time, I can’t help but notice how even those spaces are changing. The way everything becomes bigger, more sponsored, more polished. The sense that even tradition isn’t immune to being optimized, scaled, or, in some cases, bought.

It doesn’t ruin it entirely. But it does make you aware of how hard it is to keep anything feeling simple for long.

I don’t think you get to choose what becomes nostalgic later.

It’s rarely the big stuff. Not the perfectly planned birthday or the trip you debated for weeks. It’s the smaller things you barely notice while they’re happening. The routines, the traditions you didn’t mean to start, the moments that just feel like normal life.

And then one day, they’re not.

I think that’s the part I’m trying to pay more attention to right now. Not recreating what used to be, but noticing what’s here before it quietly turns into something I wish I could get back. Especially for her.

If this made you think about something you might miss one day, send it to three people who would get it. Sometimes it helps to catch these things while you’re still in them.

Same time, same place next week,
Chris

Part of what I’ve been missing lately is how simple things used to feel. Even just understanding what was going on in the world didn’t require sorting through so much noise.

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