Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle!

This week, Gregory Stock puts something in front of us that sounds, on its surface, like the easiest question in the world. Of course you’d say yes. Of course you would. What kind of person would even hesitate? And yet — the more I sat with it, the more I realized it’s exactly the kind of question that exposes the gap between who we want to be and who we actually are when the cost becomes real and specific and personal.

Here’s what Stock is asking: Would you be willing to forgo all use of the Internet for 5 years if your sacrifice meant that someone would permanently provide for 1,000 children, saving them from starvation?

Simple, right? One thousand children. Five years. You do the math, you make the obvious choice, and you move on feeling good about yourself.

Except I’m not sure I would do it. And sitting with that fact has been genuinely uncomfortable.

My Answer: No. And I Need to Explain That.

Let me get the uncomfortable part out of the way first, because I think there’s a version of this post where I spend a lot of words building toward a righteous conclusion and never actually say the quiet part out loud. So here it is: if someone offered me this deal today — give up the internet for five years and one thousand children will be permanently fed — I don’t think I would take it.

I want to be clear that I’m not proud of that answer. I’m not offering it as a position I feel good about defending. But I think the more honest and interesting version of this post is the one where I actually reckon with what that answer reveals, rather than the one where I tell you what a generous and self-sacrificing person I am and we all feel inspired together.

So let’s actually look at this thing.

The Utilitarian Math Is Not As Simple As It Looks

The immediate instinct — the one that makes this question feel easy — is to run the utilitarian math. One thousand children versus five years of my internet access. A thousand lives against my convenience. Surely that’s not even a contest.

But I want to push back a little on the framing, because I think it smuggles in a few assumptions worth examining.

First: what does “forgo all use of the Internet” actually mean for someone whose entire professional life runs through it? I work in early childhood education, managing an online system, communicating with providers and stakeholders, producing newsletters, keeping data moving across a network of programs and people. None of that functions without the internet. So we’re not just talking about giving up Netflix and Twitter. We’re talking about my ability to do the work I do — work that, incidentally, also serves children and families. Does my professional replacement continue that work while I’m offline? Does it just stop? Does the thing I spend my days doing simply cease to exist because I made a noble sacrifice?

And that’s before we even get to the blog — which has been part of my life for over twenty years, and which runs entirely online — or to the practical reality that almost every meaningful connection I maintain with people outside my immediate physical world runs through some kind of internet infrastructure. The phone calls are fine. Everything else is not.

I’m not raising these complications to build myself an escape hatch. I’m raising them because I think the question is more interesting when we take it seriously rather than treating it as a softball.

The Gap Between What We’d Say and What We’d Do

Here’s the thing that actually bothers me most about my own answer: I know how I’d present myself if someone asked me this question at a dinner party.

I’d say yes. Almost certainly. I’d say of course — a thousand children, five years, that’s not even close. And I’d mean it in the moment, in the abstract, in the version of myself that exists in conversation rather than in consequence.

But Stock isn’t asking the dinner party version. He’s asking the real version. The one where you actually hand over the device, actually lose the access, actually feel the weight of five years stretching out in front of you without the thing that connects you to your work, your people, your creative outlets, and most of the information infrastructure of modern life.

And in that version, I think a lot of people who said yes at the dinner party would hesitate in the driveway.

I’m not exempting myself from that critique. I’m applying it to myself first. The fact that I’m being honest here about my likely answer doesn’t make me virtuous — it just means I’m trying not to lie to you or to myself about who I actually am versus who I’d like to be.

Is Personal Sacrifice Even the Right Framework?

There’s another piece of this that nags at me, and it’s harder to articulate without sounding like I’m reaching for a philosophical escape route.

One thousand children are starving right now. Not hypothetically. Not in a thought experiment. Actually starving, in the actual world. And the mechanism that would save them — in Stock’s hypothetical — is not a policy change, not a systemic intervention, not a restructuring of global food distribution. It’s one person giving up their internet access.

I find myself genuinely troubled by a frame in which the solution to a massive, structural, collective problem is an individual’s personal sacrifice. Not because personal sacrifice isn’t real or meaningful, but because it lets everything else off the hook. If I give up the internet and a thousand kids get fed, does that mean we’re done? Does that mean the system that produced their starvation gets to keep running? Does my sacrifice substitute for the harder, slower, more important work of building something better?

I don’t think Stock intends the question that way. I think he’s probing something specific about what we’re actually willing to give up, personally, when the stakes are this high. But I can’t engage with it honestly without noting that the premise makes individual virtue the load-bearing mechanism for a problem that individual virtue was never designed to solve.

And Yet

Here’s where I land, and I want to be honest about the discomfort in it.

I think the reason I wouldn’t take the deal is not because my reasoning about systemic frameworks is correct, or because my professional obligations are so weighty, or because five years is genuinely too long. I think the reason is simpler and less flattering than any of that: the internet is woven into every part of my daily life in a way that makes losing it feel almost unimaginable, and that feeling of unimaginability is doing a lot of the work in my “no.”

I don’t think that’s admirable. I think it’s honest.

The question Stock is really asking — underneath all the specifics about children and internet access — is something like: What are you actually willing to give up for someone else? Not in theory. For real. And the answer that question tends to produce, when we’re being truthful with ourselves, is usually smaller than we’d like it to be.

Five years is a long time. A thousand children is an enormous number. And somewhere in the space between those two facts is the version of me that would say yes without flinching — and the version that actually exists, sitting here, being honest about the gap.

Your Turn

I want to hear where you come down on this one, because I genuinely suspect the answers are going to be more complicated than they might first appear.

Would you take the deal? And if you say yes — which is the easy, obvious, socially acceptable answer — I want to ask you to sit with it for a minute first. Really sit with it. Five years. No email, no social media, no streaming, no navigation apps, no online banking, no way to read the news or look anything up or stay connected to people who don’t live in your zip code. And at the end of those five years, a thousand children who would have starved are alive and fed.

Is that yes still as easy as it was thirty seconds ago?

And if your answer is no — or if it’s a complicated, uncomfortable maybe — what does that tell you about yourself? What does it tell you about the difference between the values we claim and the costs we’re actually willing to absorb?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I’d genuinely love to know where you land on this one — and more importantly, whether you land there easily or whether you had to fight with yourself a little to get there.

Until next week, this is Aaron, still here at The Confusing Middle, still letting Gregory Stock make me uncomfortable one question at a time.