Over the years, I’ve become obsessed with references, so I decided to sit down and write out some of what I’ve figured out.

4 hours since Muse Gadgets was announced - the response has been amazing. Welcome to everybody joining our Discord and hanging out. Thank you for your pull requests (we merged some already), and for sharing the gadgets you built! Some of my favs 👇

My army of Claude Code agents make me feel like a proud father today.

We invented the washing machine, the dryer, the dishwasher, the microwave, frozen dinners, online grocery, the robot vacuum, and DoorDash. The married household with young kids spends more total hours on chores and childcare today than it did in 1965. Dads went from under 10 hours a week to 28.7, the 300% everyone is quoting. Moms went from the high 40s to 42.5, a slide of five or six. Stack the two and the household total rises. A full century of labor-saving invention, and the modern family with toddlers logs more unpaid hours at home than the family that did the laundry by hand. Here is the part that should stop you. Every one of those machines did its job. Core housework genuinely collapsed. Mothers do roughly half the cooking and cleaning they did in the 1960s. The dishwasher worked. The dryer worked. The hours got freed. Then the culture spent them. The time the appliances saved flowed straight back into the children. This is the same law that governs every efficiency gain modern life has produced. Faster email bought us more email. Automation at home bought us a higher bar for what a parent owes a kid. Watch what childcare even means now versus then. In 1965 a kid got sent outside until dinner. Supervision was loose, the neighborhood raised half of them, and a parent hovering every waking hour would have looked unwell. Today the job is continuous. Driving to practice, sitting through homework, managing screens, booking the enrichment, never leaving a small child unwatched. The one activity that exploded is the one no machine will ever touch. You cannot DoorDash attention. So pull back and the chart stops being about fathers. It is a portrait of a species that refuses to bank its own productivity. Every tool we built to do less at home, we spent on doing more for the kids. The washing machine freed the afternoon. We handed the afternoon to the children and quietly renamed the old, looser way neglect. We automated the housework and poured every saved minute into the one job we decided can never be done well enough.