(Originally published in a slightly different form on this day in 2006)

My favorite “season” comes to an end today with the breaking down and storage of our Christmas decorations until this time next year. For us the season begins back in October, with Halloween — not my favorite holiday but a fav of my wife and daughter who, at 12, is developing new takes on, well, just about everything (more on this later).

Our spirits begin lifting in earnest as October begins, as we anticipate the next three lighthearted months. After Halloween passes, and everyone is officially sick of whatever remains of “our” candy, we stay on an upwardly spiraling emotional trajectory through Thanksgiving, no matter how we choose to celebrate it, which is followed a week later by my daughter Audrey’s birthday, and then Christmas.

By New Year’s I am not so much weary from all the work that has been associated with holidays as I am irrationally apprehensive about what is to come, or just let down that it will be three quarters of a year before the fun begins again.

And now the next few seasons will be transitional, I think, since my daughter is far from the wide-eyed believer of all manner of things that she was, for far too short a time, only yesterday. She tried to find a middle ground for Halloween, at first declaring that she would not wear a costume — but would go out and collect candy, studiously not describing this activity as “trick or treating.” She then blinked, I think after gaining consensus with her two best friends, and the three set out in disguise (Audrey as Gogo Yubari from “Kill Bill Volume I”) with dads in tow, but at a respectful distance.

For these next few years, the better to establish her credentials as a adult, Audrey will cease to believe in Santa, returning to the fold after only a few soulless years, I hope, as I did after my skeptical, uncomfortable and often angry teens.

My wife Nancy and I have already outed ourselves as the handmaidens of the Easter Bunny, a fiction Audrey discovered was not entirely as we had described when I forgot to lock a door and she saw several dozen plastic eggs and bags of candy on our bed a few years ago. She herself scientifically proved the non-existence of the Tooth Fairy a couple of years ago by intentionally not telling us that she had lost a tooth before putting it, in secret, under her pillow and discovering the next morning — Eureka! — that nothing had been exchanged for it as she slept.

Quod est demonstratum: The Tooth Fairy depends on parental notification.

But Santa, like god, is another matter, beyond the reach of science. While I count myself as a defender of this faith I will not be evangelical: Not just because that isn’t my style but because I don’t have to be.

Audrey will see the truth of the matter for herself when the time comes, or she will not. That is the way of the world.

(Post script: Not a one of us has lost our enthusiasm and childish joy for Christmas. But like politics and religion, the subject of Santa is best left unaddressed …)

Daddy Issues: Santa, Science and the Holidays was originally published in LadyBits on Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most of you won’t end up doing what you set out to do. That’ll be good for you, and the world.

I didn’t go to my college commencement. I was too embarrassed.

I was embarrassed because I wasn’t graduating “on time.” I had been so lackadaisical for 3-1/2 years that it took me two extra semesters to get the credits I needed to graduate from New York University.

I turned in my best performance during those final semesters, but it wasn’t nearly strong enough to significantly improve a GPA battered by all the indifference which had preceded them. I ended strong, but had nothing really to show for it, I thought. Insult, meet injury.

I was a slacker before that’s what you called people like me. I didn’t go to most classes. I mean, at all. I majored in philosophy because there was no math. I dropped classes incessantly — hence the final sprint. My study ethic was to read 800 pages of advanced psychology the day before the final. And then I’d spend that day procrastinating and really only start at 8 PM.

I’m not proud of having been lazy. I was ashamed. For years I even concealed my college graduation date on social networks because I didn’t want anyone to do the math. “Wait, What – he graduated college five years after high school! Slacker!”

The point is, it mattered to me. It mattered a lot. It mattered way too much.

Timing is everything of course, but it isn’t the only thing. Parents obsess when their newborn is still in diapers way after his peer group isn’t. The wise ones in the mommy group know that there are no kids in diapers in kindergarten. Late bloomers actually do start in bloomers they wear late in life.

Look around you: There are kids who have already done way better than you and kids who have not done nearly as well. But remember: You’re all kids. Most of you won’t end up doing what you set out to do. That’ll be a good thing for you, and the world.

My first job out of college was as a bookstore clerk. I was a “temp” at Reuters for 2-1/2 years until they finally hired me full-time, at the same entry level position, news dictationist — and put me on company-mandated three months’ probation. It would be years before I made the far-from-certain leap to the re-write desk.

It felt like an eternity to me, but it was just a blip. You’ll spend a lot time over the next few years agonizing over your pace. Don’t. And if you must agonize, see a therapist — it’s even worse to pretend you aren’t stressing out over your success rate.

As I am successful as I could’ve been? Almost certainly not (though you, too, will have days when you just know you’re a complete fraud). Would I have made my father proud? No idea. Am I at peace with my place in the world? Yes.

The toughest job you’ll ever have is finding one that you enjoy. You can’t put a price on that position even if the world puts prices on things that require you to work at jobs you don’t like.

Of course, this is all very easy for me to say. And you have much better things to do. Like coping with the fact your best friend just got first-round funding for a project he started in his dorm room on a drunken dare. And studiously not figuring out how long it’s going to take to pay off your student loan.

Look at the bright side: Most startups fail, so casually bring up “Burn Rate” as you heartily congratulate your first-mover buddy (you also get to cross “schadenfreude” off your bucket list early). Rejoice in the knowledge that President Obama didn’t pay off his student loans until he was running for the US Senate. Take a moment to let sink in that no guidance counselor will ask you, ever again, where you’ll be in five years. Savor the knowledge that you’ll get paid to go someplace every day for the rest of your life instead of paying somebody for the privilege.

Now, don’t look around you. Be smug. You’re one up on all of them all now. You’re positive you have no idea where you’re going, and just as positive that anybody who says he does is an idiot.

And that ignorance will set you free.

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Hey, Class of 2013: Don’t Plan. Live was originally published in I. M. H. O. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Twenty years on, turns out Web didn’t change everything

When my daughter was born, AOL was on the ascent for the first time, relishing such achievements as its first million dial-up members — who were themselves relishing 14.4k (2400 baud) dial-up connection speeds. The first web browser available to the general public, Mosaic 0.6b (for beta), beat Audrey into this world by a scant three months. I’ve written of that milestone, of being among the first few thousand people in the world to surf what passed for the web, as my Roy Neary moment: a sudden, irreconcilable, non-negotiable need to jump on that ride. I am a little ashamed to say downloading and launching Mosaic rivalled the moment I witnessed my daughter being born. But most of you, I’m sure, are nodding.

For Audrey, what preceded the Internet might as well be ancient history in some boring textbook. She is among the first humans to be born into a world where the advanced Internet has always been, and what was before is quite possibly inconceivable. That is why the Internet age is in a different league than my analog: being in the first generation for whom there was always TV. Television may have changed the world but for the Internet generation it’s even rather insignificant: they prefer the laid-back supply of Netflix, HBO GO and torrents to the demand of appointment TV. Streamed, of course, over the Internet.

Because of the Internet, Audrey has better things to do than the bidding of a box which insists we passively absorb the content it delivers to us at scheduled times. Tech has been a great equalizer because it empowers us to create every bit as easily as we consume, on our own schedule. But tech hasn’t been much of an equalizer at all where it really counts. Audrey was also born into a world where there should be no need for post-modern feminism. Instead, as she prepares for the real world, the male-female divide in technology has widened — something which, twenty years ago, I would not have thought possible.

Audrey is a gamer, and her main Guild Wars guild is run by a woman. But even in the gaming world she remains an anomaly. She wants to design games. If she is as successful as I expect she will be, she will stand out not only for her skills but for her gender.

The gender divide is everywhere. At Micro-Tech, where Audrey and I bought parts for the gaming clone we built, not one woman was working the components section. Women are half the nation’s workforce but hold only ¼ of computing and technical jobs, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology based at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “At the executive and founder levels, women are even scarcer,” the New York Times reports.

Five years ago, my first article for Wired was about Startup School at Stanford. There were no women on stage, and hardly any in the audience:

It was a bright and sunny day outside but the real heat was inside Stanford University’s Kresge Auditorium where an SRO crowd of 700 attended Startup School ‘08, a day-long conference for entrepreneurial wannabes hoping to be the next Sergey and Larry.

The guy-heavy hacker crowd — disproportionately light on nerd girls and disproportionately high on iPhones –- wore t-shirts stating the obvious, like “Science Is the New Black.” There was one startup baby in attendance (dad in tow) and two startup dogs. When lunch was served it was the jet fuel of innovation: pizza and Rice Krispie treats.

This is 2008. In a room of 700 students at the Google Recruitment Center you could count the number of women on one hand.

I don’t know who to blame for this, or if blame is even the right impulse. But nearly 20 years after AOL was something for the first time, and the Web came to life, and my girl was born, tech hasn’t put much of dent in the digital gender divide at all.

And if that isn’t a daddy issue, I don’t know what is.

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Daddy Issues: The More Things Stay the Same (Tech Edition) was originally published in LadyBits on Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.