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I am about to have a child. By “about to,” I mean in November. And by “I,” I mean I am valiantly making my wife snacks while she grows an energy-guzzling chupacabra inside her. Being a dad was not something I dared to dream of, but now that is upon me, I can’t help but feel giddy. 

I also can’t help but make spreadsheets. My fatherly nesting instincts have manifested not in the selection of strollers or pastel-colored home decor, but in never-ending data analysis. There is a file on my personal hard drive packed with napkin math about raising a daughter in the great state of Massachusetts: stats about graduation rates, career tracks on which women are paid equal wages, high school placement rates to MIT (Harvard is for blowhards), and so on. I promise you the spreadsheet gets stranger tab by tab.

These trackers are all planets, circling around the gravity well of one central question: How can I give my child a happy life? It took me so incredibly long to find personal peace—a decade-plus of stumbling and suffering, of surviving cancer, of learning to let go of the grind. I hope my unhelpful math is an endearing and only slightly deranged attempt to help my daughter have the best possible life. God, please just let her be happy.

The creative state of being

In order to answer the question of how to give my daughter a good life, I sought clarity in essays about the nature of art. Creating great art is just as intrinsically motivated and messy as creating a life is, so perhaps art may have something to teach me.