Failure
Posted: July 17, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness 1 Comment
Here at the Art Farm Homeschool, summertime living is easy, but not idle. We have created a July Book Club, in which the Magister zooms in, via telecomm, to discuss with my son a short story masterpiece. My son’s recalcitrance to join any club with peers, his aversion to leaving the house, his preoccupation with online gaming left us no choice. The book club is only 4 weeks, while summer break is 12, so the balance of time is definitely skewed to his leisure, but this month, like a fulcrum, he will engage in reading and thoughtful discussion.
This week’s short story is “The Egg,” by Sherwood Anderson. The story is set in the first decade of the 1900s in the fictional town of Bidwell, Ohio. The story’s narrator is a young child, and its protagonist, “the Father,” was “a cheerful and kindly man” whose work was idyllic as a farm hand on a pre-industrial farm. Once married, he “became ambitious. The American passion for getting up in the world took possession.…”
Their path to success was to raise chickens, but the venture fails badly. Having lost that farm, they move into town to start over. They borrow a horse and wagon, load their “cheap chairs” and a crate of live chickens, on top of which, like a crown jewel, the narrator’s baby carriage. “Why we stuck to the baby carriage I don’t know. It was unlikely other children would be born and the wheels were broken. People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.”
The father rode on the wagon, while the Mother and son walked the long eight miles into town, “…a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey through life.” The scene eerily foreshadows Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” when the migrants flee the Dust Belt, traveling Route 66 to the promised land of California. Long is the dark shadow of the American Dream.
Sherwood Anderson revolutionized 20th-century fiction with a probing and unsparing prose. His stories are set during the Second Industrial Revolution, the transition from steam to electricity, from iron to steel, assembly line production, urbanization, corporate consolidation. His core theme was the lonely, isolated individual, whose youthful truth had grown hardened, an unfulfilled longing, struggling for connection.
During the First Industrial Revolution, seventy years before Anderson, Henry David Thoreau railed at the “Iron Horse” of the Fitchburg Railroad, the tracks laid one-third of a mile from his beloved Walden Pond. The deafening roar of industry intruding on his idyll, he wrote, ”We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” He warned the machines were becoming our masters, rendering people into an impotent servitude, “The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation.”
From Thoreau to Anderson the Industrial Revolutions had completely altered the American landscape. And yet the American Dream held firm, the myth of upward mobility, that each generation would succeed its parents; the tireless labor of one’s youth to acquire wealth, spent in later years to regain health. “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
As a child, I remember family discussions, at the Kitchen table, about the American Dream. For my generation the realization has been remarkable. Nearly 90% of Americans born in the 1940s and 50s earned more than their parents. Because of compounding asset growth in real estate and an essentially bull market since the 1980s, the Baby Boomers hold over $85 trillion in household assets.
The Third Industrial Revolution, the advent of semiconductors and the internet, unfolded during the careers of we Boomers. Since 1993, when the browser Mosaic was launched, catalyzing widespread access to the world-wide-web, the stock market has surged 3,100% further widening the gap between the have and have nots.
Now the world of algorithms and artificial intelligence represent the Fourth Industrial Revolution, during which my son’s generation, the Zoomers, come of age. It goes almost without question that the American Dream fades, the thought of upward mobility increasingly out of reach, while the mental health epidemic spikes.
A recent study published by the Dove Medical Press, an open access peer-reviewed journal, found that “17.14-24.19% of adolescents developed AI dependencies over time, while studies consistently show that mental health problems predict subsequent AI dependence, with social anxiety, loneliness, and depression serving as primary risk factors.” The isolation that Sherwood Anderson wrote about, and the desolation of which Thoreau warned, have only increased. Jacob Needleman, the high school teacher my son learned about in May, cautioned, “When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
My son will not read juvenile fiction this summer. The short stories that the Magister has chosen are considered masterpieces, and their hard edge is appropriate for a young man coming of age. Among his age peers, suicide rates have increased 62% since 2007, with boys having significantly higher rates, while Black youths ages 10 to 17 have increased 144% over the same period.
My son comes of age in a conflicted time, an age of skepticism. Sitting on the front porch, we discussed the American Dream, to which he replied, “That may be what it was supposed to be, but that is not how it is.” He is already aware that the American Dream was, at best, a cultural myth, or at least an historical aberration.
It is a sad irony that bankruptcy is used with increasing frequency by older individuals. According to the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, in the last 20 years, the number of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy has increased to become its fastest-growing demographic group. We Boomers have enjoyed an economic abundance of historic proportions, but now aging, increasing numbers are falling behind.
At the age of 44 I declared a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Mine was the good fortune to fail while young, to still have time to start over. I learned that forgiveness lies at the core of civil jurisprudence, and failure can bring a “fresh start.”
The legal doctrine known as the “Fresh Start” came from the 1934 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Local Loan Co v Hunt, 292 U.S. 234, in which the unanimous opinion, written by Justice George Sutherland, reads,
“One of the primary purposes of the Bankruptcy Act is to ‘relieve the honest debtor from the weight of oppressive indebtedness, and permit him to start afresh free from the obligations and responsibilities consequent upon business misfortunes.’ … [It] gives to the honest but unfortunate debtor… a new opportunity in life and a clear field for future effort, unhampered by the pressure and discouragement of pre-existing debt.”
A financial reset is a civil right, but an interior reset is a human necessity. The depth of my experience redirected my life and taught me that the purpose of life is healing, forgiveness a means to that end, which stands in stark contrast to American culture. Jacob Needleman commented, “The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.” Our antidote to the isolation that AI and gaming breed is for my son and the Magister to read short stories during July and exchange ideas.
“The Egg” is told from the perspective of the son, as a grown man, remembering his Father’s failures. My son, a keen observer, forms his own thoughts now, which will include his reflections on my failures. His inheritance from me will be moral more than material. My task is to teach him skill with his tools, depth of character, and an informed view on the isolation plaguing his generation. What he chooses to do with that will become his healing story.
My career advice, should he ever ask, shall come from Thomas Carlyle, who influenced Thoreau and the Transcendentalists, “Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”
an Art Farm 
beautiful.