Ditch Diggers Dilemma
The Ditch Digger’s Dilemma
When Love Builds the Wrong Road
Building Intuition Before Equations Series
By Joseph P. McFadden Sr. and Claude Artificial Intelligence
February 2026
The Ditch
I dig ditches so my children do not have to.
I work hard so that my children do not have to.
I do what I do because I want a better life for my children.
If you are a parent, you have said some version of these words. If you are not a parent, someone said them about you. These sentences carry the weight of generations. They are among the most noble things a human being can feel. The immigrant working double shifts so his daughter can go to college. The single mother skipping meals so her son can have new shoes for school. The father destroying his knees on a factory floor so his kids never have to.
This instinct is universal. It crosses every culture, every economic class, every political persuasion. It is, in many ways, the engine of civilization itself.
But I need to ask you a question, and I need you to sit with it before you answer.
What if the ditch was the gift?
What if, in our desperation to spare our children the struggle, we are removing the very thing that made us strong enough to spare them in the first place?
* * *
Part I: Darwin Is Smiling
For months, I have been exploring the intersection of neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and education. I have written about how our brains evolved for a world that no longer exists, how passive learning is accelerating cognitive decline, and how we have essentially domesticated ourselves into mental softness. Throughout this journey, I carried a mental image of Charles Darwin sitting with his head in his hands, horrified at what we have become.
Then, standing in the shower one morning, it hit me. The image was wrong.
Darwin would not be face-palming. He would be sitting there with a grin, giving us a thumbs up. Or, more fitting for our era, sending us a lazy emoji.
Because we are not broken. We are performing exactly as designed.
Evolution does not have goals. It does not care about intelligence, wisdom, or human flourishing. It cares about energy efficiency. It rewards organisms that accomplish survival with the least metabolic expenditure. Your brain, that magnificent three-pound organ consuming twenty percent of your energy on just two percent of your body mass, is under constant evolutionary pressure to do less. Not more. Less.
This is not a flaw in the system. This is the system.
I wrote about this early in this journey when I explored the concept of self-penning, what I called the domesticated mind. Just as animals in captivity lose the sharpness their wild counterparts depend on for survival, we have been slowly, lovingly, generationally penning ourselves. Each comfort we create, each struggle we eliminate, each tool we build to think for us removes a selective pressure that once kept our cognitive edges sharp.
There is a thermodynamic elegance to this that is both beautiful and terrifying. As individuals, we naturally seek to minimize our internal entropy, to find order, comfort, ease, the path of least resistance. But in doing so, we serve the larger dissipative system. We are not fighting entropy. We are serving it. And we are building tools, increasingly powerful tools, to help us serve it faster.
Darwin is not horrified. He is watching a system perform precisely as physics and biology predict it should.
The question is whether we are content to let it.
* * *
Part II: The Gift That Takes
Here is the cruel paradox at the heart of the ditch digger’s instinct: the drive to spare your children from hardship is the same drive that, unchecked across generations, produces children who cannot endure hardship at all.
This is not a moral failing. It is not bad parenting. It is love operating without a feedback loop.
The ditch digger works with his hands. His children go to school and work with their minds. Their children inherit the wealth of that work and are told to follow their passions. And the grandchildren of the ditch digger, three generations removed from the calluses and the sweat and the aching back, cannot understand why they feel so anxious, so fragile, so unable to push through difficulty. They have everything. Why does everything feel so hard?
Because struggle was never just an obstacle to be overcome. It was the curriculum.
In my classroom, I see this in real time. When I ask students whether they prefer multiple choice exams or essay questions, the hands go up overwhelmingly for multiple choice. Every time. This is not laziness. This is the amygdala, what I call Amy in my teaching framework, doing exactly what she evolved to do: selecting the option that requires the least metabolic expenditure. Multiple choice lets the brain pattern-match and move on. An essay forces the prefrontal cortex, PFC, to construct an argument from scratch, and that is biologically expensive work. The brain resists it the way your body resists running uphill.
Amy is not wrong to prefer the easier path. She was designed for it. But when we build educational systems, parenting strategies, and entire cultures around making everything easier, we are essentially telling PFC to take the day off. And when PFC takes enough days off, he forgets how to show up at all.
Look at what we have systematically removed. Physical education, once a core part of schooling, has been gutted in districts across the country. The ancient understanding that a healthy body supports a healthy mind, an insight the Greeks had thousands of years ago, has been sacrificed on the altar of budget cuts and standardized testing. We took away the physical struggle and the cognitive struggle simultaneously, then wonder why both bodies and minds are declining.
And now we have built the ultimate labor-saving device for the mind itself. Tools that will write your essays, solve your problems, summarize your reading, and generate your ideas. We hand these to our children and call it progress. And from the perspective of evolution, it is. It is the next logical step in the long march toward minimal effort. Darwin nods. The entropy grows.
* * *
Part III: Defining Better
So here is the question that should sit at the center of every conversation about education, parenting, and the future we are building.
What does a better life actually mean?
If a better life means easier, then we are succeeding beyond any generation’s wildest imagination. We have more comfort, more convenience, more access to information, more tools for avoiding discomfort than any humans who have ever lived. By the metric of ease, we are the pinnacle.
But is that the metric?
Is a better life one where the child cannot think their way through a complicated problem? Where they reach for a tool before they reach for their own mind? Where the first instinct when faced with difficulty is to find a shortcut rather than to push through?
Is a better life one where the child cannot pass basic physical tests that were once a standard part of education? Where the body, the vehicle that carries the mind through the world, has been neglected because we decided physical rigor was no longer necessary?
A healthy body, a healthy mind. The Greeks said it. The science confirms it. Exercise promotes neurogenesis, strengthens the hippocampus, reduces the amygdala’s baseline reactivity, and improves prefrontal cortex function. Physical struggle literally builds better brains. And we are engineering it out of childhood because it is hard and because hard is what we are trying to eliminate.
This is not a political argument. This is not nostalgia for some imagined golden age. This is thermodynamics. This is neuroscience. This is the observable, measurable consequence of a species optimizing for comfort in a universe that rewards complexity built through challenge.
If better means more resilient, more capable, more able to think independently, more physically and mentally prepared for the unpredictable demands of existence, then better requires something that feels counterintuitive to every loving parent.
Better requires struggle.
* * *
Part IV: Picking Up the Shovel
Now, before you close this essay thinking I am arguing that we should make life harder for our children out of some perverse principle, let me be clear about what I am saying and what I am not.
I am not saying we should return to some brutal past. I am not saying the ditch digger was wrong to want more for his family. I am not saying progress is the enemy.
I am saying we need to be conscious about what we are doing. Aware of the trade-offs. Intentional about reintroducing productive struggle into lives that have been optimized to avoid it.
Because here is the good news, and this is important: the same neuroscience that explains the decline also gives us the roadmap for reversing it. The brain is plastic. It responds to demand. If you challenge it, it grows. If you challenge the body, the brain benefits. This is not wishful thinking. This is measurable, repeatable, documented science.
So what do we do? We start with awareness.
First, understand the wiring. When you find yourself, or your child, reaching for the easy option, that is not a character flaw. That is Amy doing her job. Recognize it. Name it. In my classroom, my students now understand why they instinctively prefer the path of least resistance. That understanding alone changes the dynamic. You cannot override a system you do not know is running.
Second, reintroduce physical challenge. This does not mean becoming a marathon runner. It means moving. Regularly. With enough intensity that the body has to adapt. Walk. Lift. Play a sport. Do something that makes you breathe hard and want to quit, and then do not quit. The cognitive benefits of physical exercise are not a side effect. They are the main event. Every parent who fights to keep physical education in their child’s school is fighting for their child’s brain, not just their body.
Third, embrace cognitive discomfort. When your child struggles with a math problem, resist the urge to immediately provide the answer or hand them a tool that will solve it for them. The struggle is where the learning lives. That frustrated feeling, that moment when the brain wants to give up, that is the moment when PFC is being built. When Amy says this is too hard, that is the precise moment when growth is available. Not easy growth. Real growth.
Fourth, use tools wisely. I am not anti-technology. I am writing this essay with the help of artificial intelligence. But there is a difference between using a tool to extend your capability and using a tool to replace it. A calculator in the hands of someone who understands mathematics is powerful. A calculator in the hands of someone who never learned to think mathematically is a crutch that looks like a wing. Know the difference. Teach the difference.
Fifth, redefine the goal. Have the conversation with yourself and with your children about what a good life actually requires. Not just what it looks like from the outside, but what it feels like from the inside. The deepest satisfaction, the kind that no amount of comfort can provide, comes from doing something hard and knowing you earned it. That feeling is not available through the path of least resistance. It never was.
* * *
The Right Ditch
I started this essay with the ditch digger’s creed. I do what I do so my children do not have to.
I still believe that. But I have come to understand that the gift is not the absence of ditches. The gift is the knowledge of which ditches are worth digging and the strength to dig them.
The ditch digger’s hands were calloused not because he was unlucky, but because he was engaged with the world in a way that demanded everything from him. And in that demand, he found his capability. His resilience. His identity.
If we hand our children a life with no ditches, no struggle, no demand, we have not given them freedom. We have given them atrophy dressed in comfort.
But if we hand them a shovel and teach them why the digging matters, if we help them understand their own wiring well enough to override the instinct toward ease, if we show them that the joy is in the work and not in its absence, then we have given them something far more valuable than a smooth road.
We have given them the ability to build their own.
I am still on this journey. The puzzle is far from complete, and I suspect it may never be. But I will tell you something I have learned along the way: the deeper I dig, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more joy I find. Not in spite of the effort. Because of it.
That, I think, is what we owe our children. Not a life without ditches. A life where they understand that digging is the point.
* * *
Be a driver, not a passenger.
Now go do the work.
Combating Engineering Mind Blindness, One Student at a Time.
Every failure tells a story.
McFaddenCAE.com
McFadden@snet.net
Link to audiobook and essay below
