It's always fair to question whether people know what they're talking about

More nightmare fuel from the AI Blog Post Image Generator. The eyes are just a little too wide, the pupils a little too small.

One problem with the Internet (among many) is that everyone has a voice, but relatively few have credibility.

That is to say, you can't go far wrong ignoring the vast majority of what you read online. And I'm not just talking about the wacky social theories or the laughably partisan political stuff, either. I mean just about everything.

Including this blog.

A few months ago I worked with a brilliant guy named Brian Skillen and his team on ways to increase sales and visibility of my book. They knew exactly what they were doing, and to the extent I followed their advice, I undoubtedly ended up selling more paperback and electronic copies of "5 Kids, 1 Wife."

The biggest thing the experience gave me, though, was clarity around who I am (and am not) as a writer, what I have to offer, and why I write in the first place.

I learned from Brian and Co. that non-fiction books that sell well tend to do so because they help a reader along his/her individual journey. They solve a problem or provide a way forward with a relevant issue or challenge.

In short, they answer the reader's eternal question of "what's in it for me?"

Brian suggested the best route for me would be to position "5 Kids, 1 Wife" as a practical – if somewhat humorous and even tongue-in-cheek – guide to parenting. Lots of people want advice on how to raise their kids, and who better to get advice from than a guy who raised five of them?

In theory, this makes sense.

But here's the thing: My kids turned out pretty well despite me. I really don't know what to tell people when they ask for parenting advice.

Honestly, I just kind of stumbled my way through it, and thankfully it ended up working out. I'm simply not an expert when it comes to being a dad.

Over time, I've come to realize that what I offer up here on the blog and in the book is not practical instruction, but really entertainment. It's just me writing goofy stuff for the fun of it and hoping you'll come along for the ride.

So if it ever seems like I'm offering serious (and clearly unsolicited) advice about being a parent, a spouse, a friend or anything else, remember I don't really know what I'm talking about. Like most people who create content on the Internet, I can be safely disregarded.

My only hope is that, when I write about something stupid I've done or I make another painful dad joke, you will chuckle for a second and then go on with your day feeling a wee bit happier.

That is, in the end, all I can really give you.

I realize everyone is winging it to one degree or another, but...

One thing I wasn't told as I was growing up is the fact that no one is going to teach you most of the stuff you do in life.

What I mean is, when you break down your day hour by hour, most activities are things you kind of picked up on your own, or that you're just plain faking your way through.

At least that has been my experience.

I think I had some vague notion as a child that, much as my teachers were already doing for me in school, some unnamed group of people was going to take me aside at some point and explain in detail how to do my job, how to own a house, how to raise kids, etc.

Oh, I got small pointers here and there. And I had great examples to learn from in my parents.

But when it comes to the minutiae of life – personal and professional – by my mid-20s I had reached the horrifying conclusion that I was pretty much on my own when it came to figuring stuff out.

In retrospect, school wasn't teaching us how to do things. It was teaching us how to figure out how to do things.

I wish I would have known that at the time.

Even though I now have a clearer picture of how things work (or don't work), I still get uneasy when I think about all the stuff I do for which I was never really given any instruction.

Job-wise, I went right into the newspaper business without having been taught how to write like a journalist, how to think like a journalist, how to gather facts like a journalist, etc. I just kind of...did it, admittedly better some times than others.

Later on when I moved into corporate communications, I jumped in without a real understanding of what I was supposed to be doing.

Being married? Having kids? Still learning.

Writing? Being a public address announcer? I am doing these things without the benefit of even a single person sitting me down and saying, "OK, here's what you want to do. Step 1..."

And I am in no way unique in this. Many, many of us have this uneasy feeling that we missed some important meeting or class along the way where a lot of vital life information was taught.

But there wasn't any such meeting, nor does anyone offer such a class.

We have collectively been thrown into the deep end of the pool and told to swim.

Remarkably, most of the time we manage to do it. Or at least we manage to keep our heads above water.

Which is really the same thing.

No offense, but you most likely have no idea what you're talking about

I'm not a confrontational person, so I don't especially enjoy arguments or online debates. You will understand, then, how much it pains me to have to tell you that you are clueless when it comes to the major issues facing the world today.

You will also understand that I'm right there with you. I fully count myself among the clueless. I'm not saying I have the right answers and you don't. I'm saying that together, we barely understand the questions let alone the answers.

When it comes to almost any issue on which people are likely to take a stand these days – things like Charlottesville, global warming, North Korea, immigration, any random thing tweeted out by President Trump, etc. – I frankly do not trust your judgment, nor should you trust mine.

The reason is that all of these are stunningly complex problems, and unless you are:

(a) a trained expert with access to and understanding of the relevant information needed to form an intelligent opinion, and

(b) someone who does not take a knee-jerk position to the political right or left

...then I have no choice but to discount your take. And since I know virtually no one who fits both point (a) and point (b), I'm forced to conclude that you're full of poop. I actually hate the word "poop," but this is ostensibly a family blog and I'm not about to drop even a relatively mild S-bomb here.

Take global warming, for instance. You can certainly correct me if I'm wrong (I don't think I am, but again, what do I know?), but climatology is an immensely complex science, is it not? Concomitantly, global warming theory is also very complex and nuanced. Yet every time it's cold in August, some uninformed jack-wad is on Twitter with his "Hey, so much for global warming, huh snowflakes??" take.

There is no need to point out to this person that nothing in the concept of global warming precludes a cold day – or a long stretch of cold days – in what is normally a relatively warm time of the year. They have "won" because something happened that seems to support their supremely uninformed and simplistic opinion on a given topic, and any "facts" that get in their way have been made up by the biased liberal media or are being propagated by right-wing corporate fascists.

This is not intelligent debate. This is a bunch of monkeys with keyboards typing about random things of which they have little to no understanding.

And these same monkeys are called upon to evaluate the opinions of political candidates and vote for the ones they believe are right.

Yet they have virtually no idea what "right" is or how to get there. They (we) are unfairly expected to have a big-picture view of questions and problems that go far beyond anything they (we) are trained to analyze and understand.

Now, having said all of that, I do realize the seemingly inevitable conclusion of this line of thinking: That there's no need to have an opinion on anything, that we should trust our fate to a small handful of experts on each issue, that we should just stick to playing online poker on our phones and watching "Game of Thrones" and let the really, really smart people decide everything for us.

And I have no counterargument to that. That's terrifying to me and it's not at all what I want, yet I still feel strongly that very, very few of us are equipped to rationally and thoroughly pass judgment on the big issues of the day. We just aren't. We can gain some small understanding, but we don't have enough context, knowledge or training to be able to say definitively what course society should take on any given important question.

This, by the way, is why I'm supremely comforted by my belief in the God of the Bible. I am convinced there will be a "happy ending" to all of this, but I'm also aware that I live in a country in which people are free to believe that or not. You are permitted to make fun of me for putting my faith in "sky fairies" or whatever, and I'm free to ignore you because, as I've said, you don't have any more idea than I do what you're talking about.

I need to stop talking now, especially since you've come this far and have realized I have no firm advice for you. This is, I think, an unsolvable question. You either shut down and let yourself be guided by politicians and power brokers, or you take a strong stand on everything, knowing you ultimately lack the capacity to fully understand the question thoroughly or to appreciate opposing viewpoints in an objective way.

Life's crazy, isn't it?