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As I walked Lucy through the neighborhood a couple of nights ago, I waved at a neighbor who was sitting on his front porch and smoking a cigarette. I like this guy a lot, but my immediate reaction was judgment.

“He knows that’s deadly,” I thought. “Why in the world would he keep doing something that’s going to kill him?”

And then my inner observer laughed at me mockingly.

“And why do you keep eating things that you know will kill you?” the voice teased. “Do you think you’re better than he is?”

I’m a hypocrite. You probably are, too. We all love to judge others harshly while we create excuses for behaviors in ourselves which are just as bad — and sometimes worse. My deadly diet is among my worst habits — and it makes me a hypocrite to criticize anyone else who’s making unhealthful choices.

I fear that the modern American diet is going to kill me. Nobody is forcing it on me, but I feel trapped in a deadly pattern — and there are many millions on the same path of slow suicide with me.

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For a few weeks now, I’ve been thinking a lot about some simple questions.

What does it mean to waste your life?

And if you discover you really are wasting your life, what do you do about it?

I’ve known that I wanted to talk about this for awhile — ever since I saw an odd exhortation on a church sign near my house. It said, “Please don’t waste your life.” I didn’t disagree with the sentiments of the sign — although I’m unclear what their context was — but I started thinking about how few people even realize their lives are wasted until it’s too late.

That led me to thinking about my own life — and how my thoughts about a life worth living have changed over the years. But I wasn’t really ready to talk about it until I passed a house near my office Monday afternoon and saw a front yard with two two adult-size chairs and one child-size chair.

Then I knew how I wanted to conclude this. Maybe it won’t apply to you, but it feels true for me.

Tap or click below to listen. And please forgive the train in the distance at the end. I’m not really worrying about avoiding such sounds anymore. Keep Reading

I’m on the losing side of a bitter culture war. The hip postmodern folks won. The people they called prudes and squares — people like me — were the ones who lost.

The cool people don’t believe life has meaning or purpose. They don’t believe we came from anywhere or that we’re going anyplace. They say a person’s only real goals are pleasure and self-gratification.

If it feels good, do it. That’s their motto.

Of all the damaging effects of their sloppy thinking and slipshod ideas, it seems as though the worst have come from the mad rush to disconnect sex from love — and from the eagerness to unleash porn on immature and lustful people.

It’s not popular to talk about voluntary limits. Most people don’t want to see what these ideas are doing to those around them. They just want to laugh at the prudes who are dumb enough to disapprove. They don’t want to see the collateral damage of what they’re doing.

But if you look at the filth and degradation that are inside the minds of many millions of people today — and if you can see the damage they’re doing to themselves — you’ll see that this massive culture change has done serious damage that can never be undone.

The culture as a whole is doomed, but you can still decide whether this will affect you — or your children.

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