What Keeps Me Up At Night

Some nights I lie awake doing math I don't want to do.

It was never my strong suit, especially when it comes to big numbers. And we’re talking big numbers here. The kind where the  number is so large that it loses its meaning.  

Thirty-nine trillion dollars. That’s a big number. It’s also the number the United States crossed for the first time three days ago, on March 17, 2026. The gross national debt. A topic that we have developed a kind of collective numbness to, like the way we lose the sensation of our clothes against our skin.

I am trying not to be numb about it tonight. Because the people that will have to pay for that number are not abstractions. They are my children. My grandchildren. People I love who will be the victims of our convenient thinking. In other words, inherit a world of hurt they did not create.

That is what keeps me up at night.

How We Got Here

The honest answer is: one unconscious decision at a time.

The national debt did not arrive like a flood. It arrived like rust. Quietly. Incrementally. Through decades of politicians in both parties choosing to tell us what we want to hear and give us what we wanted today at the cost of our children’s tomorrow. Tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts. Wars charged to the national credit card. Social programs expanded without revenue to support them. Stimulus packages. Bailouts. Each one individually defensible. Each one adding another layer to a structure that has been building since the 1970s when the United States last ran a meaningful surplus.

Lao Tzu wrote: "All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small." The debt is a great and difficult thing. But it originated in something very small and very easy — the repeated human choice to avoid short term discomfort by creating long term consequence. Multiplied across fifty years and political posturing of every stripe.

This is not a partisan problem. It is a human one.

The Numbers That Should Stop You Cold

As it may leave our offspring out in it. In 2025 the United States paid $970 billion in interest on its national debt. Nearly a trillion dollars. To wrap your mind around $1 trillion, imagine spending $1 million every single day; it would take you nearly 2,740 years to spend it all. Let that sink in for a moment.

Imagine what could be done with that kind of money. Infrastructure,  schools, affordable health insurance, veteran care, college tuition, clean energy investment. The list is long. All lost to unconscious ideals. To service the cost of excessive borrowing.

Paying the interest on that debt represented the third largest expenditure in the entire federal budget, behind only Social Security and Medicare. Broken down per household, more than the average family spends annually on healthcare, on clothing, on gasoline, or on education.

Imagine what would happen if you kept borrowing against your home to pay for renovations, vacations, college tuition, expensive toys, etc., etc., regardless of your income. The eventual reality of that situation is not hard to picture. Here’s the thing, reality applies to countries the same way it applies to households.

Things could and would accelerate out of control.

Interest payments are projected to reach $1 trillion in 2026 and $2.1 trillion by 2036. Becoming the fastest growing category in the entire federal budget.

We are all aware of the generational inequality that already exists. How much more difficult it is for first time homebuyers to get their foot in the door, if you will. The current debt trajectory will force future taxpayers (today's toddlers) to face higher tax burdens and significantly lower public services compared to previous generations.

Social Security's trust fund is projected to become insolvent by 2032. Not 2052. 2032. Six years from now. At which point benefits would face an automatic 23 percent cut — affecting the retirement security of people who spent their entire working lives paying into a system they were promised would be there.

The math does not lie. And the math says we are borrowing from people who do not yet have a voice in the decision.

The Consciousness Problem Underneath the Math

Here is what I believe is being overlooked at the human level, the thing that no fiscal policy addresses directly or remotely.

The debt is not primarily a math problem. It is a consciousness problem.

It is what happens when a civilization collectively operates from the same unconscious calculus that my book The Whisper Before the Wave explores in individuals. Comfort now. Consequences later. Let someone else interrupt the whisper.

The political system runs on two to four year cycles. The consequences of today's decisions arrive in thirty year generational cycles. That mismatch is not accidental, it is structural. And it is sustained by a collective sleepwalking that serves everyone in the present at the expense of everyone in the future.

The seventh generation principle discussed in The Whisper Before the Wave, speaks to how for many Indigenous nations hold the belief that every significant decision should consider its impact seven generations forward. Roughly 175 years. It is the opposite of how modern democracies actually operate. And it is, I would argue, the whisper that the current moment most urgently needs to hear.

We have built a civilization of extraordinary capability and almost no long term thinking. And we wonder why things go amiss. We can send a signal to the edge of the solar system, but we cannot sustain a political conversation about a problem whose consequences arrive after the next election cycle. That is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of presence.

The Fuller Principle

Buckminster Fuller, the prolific American inventor, architect, and futurist, wrote: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old one obsolete."

I think about that often in relation to this problem. The existing model — partisan warfare over debt ceilings, kicking the can — has demonstrated its inadequacy across decades. Partisan polarization, the old way, has produced nothing but more debt, more division, and more paralysis.

Perhaps a more effective model would not be primarily legislative. It would be cultural. A shift in what citizens demand of their representatives and of themselves. A collective decision to take our children’s future seriously. Not just say would do anything for them. Do something for them. Do this for them. Adopt the seventh generation principle that served the Indigenous for epochs.

It begins small. Lao Tzu knew this. It begins with the conversations we are willing to have and the ones we refuse to avoid. With the questions a teenager asks at a kitchen table that an adult has the courage to answer honestly. With the voter who demands fiscal responsibility over a partisan pandering. We’ve all heard tales of The  "Greatest Generation" the demographic cohort born 1901 and 1927 +-. What made them great was their willingness to fight for what was right, and in the process, sacrifice.

It begins with presence. With the willingness to feel what is true rather than look away because the truth is uncomfortable.

A Letter I Haven't Written Yet

I am writing a letter to my grandchildren. One that explains what we knew and when we knew it, and what we chose to do or not do about it. Not just the trillions in debt we will be “gifting” them, a sickened planet as well. Truth be told, It’s hard to think about without feeling melancholy. Taking a beat and looking up can have that effect on a person. Perhaps that’s why we don’t do it nearly as often as we should. I keep starting to write it and stop. I am not quite there yet, not sure where to begin…or how it will end.

But I know this. The people who will matter most in the story of what happens next are not the economists or the politicians. They are the citizens of today who decide that the future belongs to them as much as the present does. Who interrupt the whisper of comfortable inaction before it becomes a wave their children cannot swim against.

The debt is thirty-nine trillion dollars today. It will have gone up a 10 million dollars by the time you’re done reading this article. The question is not whether that is a problem. The question is whether we are willing to be the generation that stopped sleepwalking long enough to do something about it.

For my children. For my grandchildren. For the seven generations after them.

Having seen the smoke and not yelled fire, is worth losing some sleep over.

Let's Do Human Better.