You won’t feel the change from newbie outsider to invested insider, because it probably doesn’t happen in a single moment. But you will feel the recognition of it having occurred. You will find yourself facing some change to the status quo, a status quo that once felt both alien and inevitable, and the status quo will suddenly seem fungible. You will feel things about the change, including, possibly, resistance. And in that moment you will know that you have become the status quo.

That’s not bad, necessarily. As with almost everything, representing the status quo comes with both responsibilities and benefits, risks and rewards.

A hazard of online grocery ordering is that sometimes you don’t check the size of an item carefully before you click “buy,” leaving you with a 6 oz package of tortellini or individual bag of Doritos where you’d clearly intended to buy a bigger bag. The website doesn’t ask: “You sure about that?”

So when she understands that she needs the five egg whites I unceremoniously tipped into the sink, she is immediately calmed by the realization that there is, for some reason, a carton of 15 eggs in the fridge. By the time I return to the kitchen to rescue the project she’s already got fresh egg whites in a bowl and is beating them with the electric mixer, seated on the kitchen floor.

The thing gets into a cake pan and then the oven with remarkable efficiency. I wash her dishes and wipe down the counters, feeling less like a put-upon parent are more like a baker’s assistant, happy for the privilege. She sets the timer for an hour and exits the kitchen to victoriously get ready for bed. Even for a strike-cancelled school night, it’s late.

She will see it through, though, and so when the cake is still gooey in the middle after the timer sounds, and when it still isn’t done after an additional 10 minutes, nobody is going to bed. It’s 11:00 before she can declare it completed and taste a token of her work. I should be annoyed that the evening–my evening–got pushed so late by a spontaneous project, but I’m not. I wonder if the number of late-night pound cakes baked isn’t a measure of the fullness of a life. I think she understands this better than I do.

I’ve never made pound cake, but that hardly matters to her mission. She has set about making it, shuttling back and forth between the red hardback tome splayed open on the counter top and the pantry and between the pantry and the refrigerator. I said I’m not doing any more kitchen cleaning tonight.

I’m not doing any more kitchen cleaning tonight.

I’m not doing any more kitchen cleaning tonight.

She comes to me with a rumpled sugar bag. “Is this one cup?”

“I don’t know. You should measure it.”

She comes to me with a rumpled flour bag. “Is this enough flour?”

“I don’t know. You should measure it.”

Minutes worth of undeterred, focused work elapse in the kitchen. I’m several paragraphs into my magazine article before the first serious obstacle presents itself. “Dad, how do you separate eggs? The recipe says to use eggs that are ‘separated.'”

I’m not doing any more kitchen cleaning tonight, but only if I get involved here. I explain the simple egg-separating technique, but her face is registering more confusion than confidence, so I offer to show her with one. That’s it. She sees one and she’s got it. In a couple minutes there is a bowl of yolks and a bowl of whites. She asks if I’ll mix the yolks into her batter while she adds them one at a time.

I’m not doing any more–

Once we’ve beaten in the yolks, she asks what to do with the whites. “I don’t know,” I answer. “Probably get rid of them.” And just like that the egg whites slide down the drain.

She’s got it from here, and it’s time for my shower, so I leave her to it. No sooner have I closed the bathroom door, though, do I hear the project’s first panicked exclamation. “Oh no!” she yells. I wait for more. Nothing.

“What is it?”

“We were supposed to keep the egg whites!”

She wants me to approve more time on YouTube, so she can find a cupcake recipe. Denied.

“Use a cookbook,” I suggest, suspecting this may put an end to the idea to bake something altogether, suspecting the idea was to secure another hour of phone time.

“OK.”

She disappears into the kitchen, and I can hear her pull a book down and open its pages. I suggest she locate “cupcakes” in the index, but she insists that she needs the table of contents. I don’t dispute this decision, and I decide, in that moment, to let her do what she will and to stop making suggestions.

Several minutes later I can see that she has arrayed all her ingredients on the countertop, and I decide it’s okay to ask one more question. “What are you making?”

“Poundcake.”

“I’m bored.”

I’ve just settled into my reading chair with a cup of that pumpkin tea from Trader Joe’s that I love after cleaning up the dinner dishes when the sixth grader, mindlessly circling the dining room table, makes this announcement. The New Yorker is open on my lap

“Do you want to play a game?” I ask. I would gladly set down my magazine and leave my reading chair to revisit an activity she used to love but has seemed to grow out of.

“No. I want to bake something.”

I suck in my breath, and before the words can get themselves in decent form they come reflexively out. “It’s late and I just finished cleaning the kitchen.”

She pauses and cocks her head to the side a bit. “What time is it?” I look at my watch.

“It’s 8:30.”

“Oh, that’s fine. I don’t go to bed until 10:00.”

She has chosen to focus on the objection that mattered least. And she’s not wrong; school has been cancelled for tomorrow already. I got the automated phone message three hours earlier. It’s the ninth day of the teacher strike, and by now I don’t even answer when the call comes. I recognize the number and I know.

“Okay, but I’m not doing any more cleaning in the kitchen,” I yield in my “I’m-very-serious” voice. She intones the requisite promises to not make a mess.

I sigh into my tea.

If you don’t feel good about the content, nail the packaging.

The clock ran out on my sermon preparation time this week, so it was a jittery Sunday morning filled with interior visions of pulpit calamity. But I was robed up in plenty of time and my stole was perfectly even.

Another way to say it: act the part.

Seth doesn’t want to hear your anecdote. I do.

For a couple of reasons: first, that something is true in your experience means that you’re basing decisions on it and reacting from your gut, not your analytical brain, in moments that are fraught with possibility.

Your anecdote could be like the one I witnessed on a crowded train yesterday, when a man supported a stranger who nearly tumbled over after the train lurched left, and then, after catching the stranger, gave him three kindly pats on the back. People are good and kind. See? My anecdote proves it.

Never mind that an impartial study would show that incident to be a statistical rarity and not how the world actually works. The anecdote works on you at a different level, a gut level, than the study will. It moves you.

The other reason I want to hear your anecdote is that our era is increasingly ceding valuable philosophical real estate to data, which is wonderful, but that will never fully explain how the world actually works. Our ability to collect, analyze, and put to use mountains of data is a game-changer for everything from public health to player development (in sports), so the question, “Do the data support it?” should always be answered with utmost honesty. And yet not all data are the same.

Qualitative research is no less valuable than quantitative, and yet its findings aren’t considered “data” in the same way. Case in point: I hear a lot of the same kinds of anecdotes from parents of my youth when I speak with them one-on-one. Taken together, those anecdotes tell me something true about how the world is actually working where I live in a way that a survey probably would not.

Finally, we’re becoming too timid with our personal anecdotes, I think. The data may not bear this out, but I suspect that many of us who respect the power of data experience a corresponding reluctance to make assertions based on our personal experience. We’re not telling our story. That’s a problem and something of a category mistake, because you can tell your story as illustrative of something true while not generalizing it as universally true for everyone. That’s a skill we need to learn in a data-driven age.

Particularly for those of us whose lives are wrapped up in faith, personal narrative is indispensable to the search for truth and meaning. The gospels are collections of anecdotes, for the Apostle Peter’s sake.

Respect the data. Tell your story. You can do both at once.

For most of my adult reading life I have avoided fiction. “Avoided” is perhaps a bit strong, but I have certainly preferred nonfiction for its grounding in “the real.” That is a silly preference, because good fiction is as real as Bowling Alone or Fast Food Nation, maybe even realer.

The past month I have ridden my bike to work while listening to audiobooks that I purchased as companions to Kindle editions of novels. Middle England, The Rotters Club, The Closed Circle, The Dearly Beloved: I have read more novels in the past month than in the past decade. I recommend them all. Their authors know what “real” is, and their skill for describing it makes an important contribution.

Seth Godin’s plea to shun cheap chocolate reminds me I never told you about Tony’s Chocolonely.

About a year ago I noticed these brightly wrapped chocolate bars in the checkout of my neighborhood grocery store. They were huge, and they cost about $5 each, so I never bought one.

Then about six weeks ago in Amsterdam, Laura, Meredith and I strolled past a doorway marked with “Tony’s” signage and that led down a flight of stairs and into a basement shop filled with these bright wrappers. There was an entire wall of levers that, when pulled, produced small chocolate samples. Another wall was a window into a chocolate production facility. And there were computer terminals to help you design your own chocolate bar with your own personalized wrapper.

So this is where those $5 chocolate bars are coming from. Amsterdam?

Tony’s Chocolonely is a Dutch company started by a Dutch television producer named Teun van de Keuken who launched a crusade to rid the chocolate industry of slave labor after reporting on chocolate producers’ inability to guarantee that they did not employ slave labor. So he got himself arrested under a Dutch statute criminalizing the purchase of stolen goods and then launched his own company to prove that you can manufacture great chocolate and pay farmers a living wage. It’s a compelling story about a singular mission: to rid the global chocolate trade of slave labor.

In 2015 Tony’s expanded production to the United States, so the bars in my local checkout are actually coming from Portland.

Anyway, I’m a fan, and now you know. I almost forgot to tell you.

Neither.

Read about it in the paper.

Tomorrow.

There will be more information, and that information will be assembled and presented by a professional with reliable sources. You can read it at your own pace to make sure you understand the parts you care about most.

It will make more sense.