For years, Cam Marston wondered how he'd handle the empty nest once his last kids left home. This week, with his youngest twins dropped off at college, he finally gets to find out.

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For several years now I've thought about my last children leaving home and wondering how my wife and I would fare in our next life chapter of empty nesting. I thought I may like a quiet and neat home, or not being waked late at night with kids coming in from a night out with friends, and many many fewer dirty dishes in the sink. When the older kids came home at the end of the school year in May, my wife and I celebrated a full house and a reveled in having all four kid's childhood bedrooms full again. But in the back of my mind, the countdown was on to late August when my wife and I would deliver our youngest to campus. They would be beginning their their first year of college with their older siblings already well on their way with their own college lives. We'd drop the twins and say goodbye, knowing that greeting us when we got home was this legendary, much anticipated empty nest. It was a life-stage destination we'd heard a great deal about. Some friends thought their empty nest was heaven. Others thought it hell. My wife and I would now get the chance to experience the phenomenon for ourselves and make up our own minds.

As I write this it is not yet 7am on empty nest life, weekday morning number one. For more than twenty years, this time of day has meant I will soon begin hearing foot falls upstairs as children begin preparing for school or, and in this past summer, readying for summer jobs. The dog hears their noise and comes to the kitchen to greet them as they come down and give her her morning pets. Today, though, it's silent upstairs. Last night, I shut down the house before bed, turning off all the lights, making sure all the doors were closed and locked. I didn't bother to leave a light on in the kitchen, knowing no child would be coming in after a night out with friends looking for a quick snack before bed.

My wife and I will visit each of the children on campus this fall, meeting their new friends, trying to picture their lives there. For our older children, their rate of change accelerated when they went off to school, and observing their changes has been one of life's great treats. The same will certainly happen to the twins. All four of them will be home for Thanksgiving. Right now, though, they're exactly where they should be. They're squarely in the chapters of life where they spread their wings, test the air and start to fly. And my wife and I are squarely our own new chapter – this quiet and empty nest that they've left behind. It's all just as it should be. Just as expected. I counted down the months, weeks, and days to experience this empty nest, wondering how it would feel and if I would like it. And as I sit here alone in the quiet of the kitchen that, just a week ago, would have been bustling right now, I've found myself wondering how much longer till Thanksgiving.

I'm Cam Marston, just trying to Keep It Real.

This weekend Cam Marston watched 130 girls squeal with joy on Auburn's quad. Here's why his mind went straight to the ones who didn't get the call.

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We sure love cruelty, don't we? As refined and as smart and as elevated as we claim to be, we love us some cruelty. We line up to dish it out and, strangely, we line up to potentially take it.

Saturday afternoon I watched the culmination of Auburn's bid day. My favorite youngest daughter got a bid. I watched as she ran from Neville Arena to the quad where she and her 130 some odd new best friends whom she had never met before squealed. Some squealed in delight; their dream had come true. Some squealed with resignation. They didn't get what they had hoped for, but they had to squeal – it's what the moment required. And as I watched, my mind went to the ones that got no bid at all. Per Auburn historical trends, roughly ten percent had their phone ring and a voice on the other side essentially said, "I'm sorry. No one wants you."

I suspect it's no different at other campuses, especially the SEC schools who take such pride in their Greek life. But think about these young girls, eighteen or nineteen years old, traveling off to college, many from places far away, to offer themselves up to this savage system of ranking, choosing, selecting and rejecting each other. When word got out that my favorite youngest daughter got a bid, my wife's phone buzzed with congratulations. But some shared their stories of rejection that has never healed over thirty years. Some said they get a knot in their stomach this time every year as they relive that call. Some left Auburn and have never returned.

What is it about mankind that makes us crave ranking others? Crave selecting others? And, most brutally, crave excluding others? We want to see where we stand, who we're among, who is above and, most importantly, who is below. We take special interest at who is below. Those not worthy. Those down the list. I'm no different. I wish I were, but I'm no different.

Not long ago a big fitness trend were events called Spartan races. People would pay money to run long distances, climb vertical walls, crawl through freezing mud, do umpteen pushups, climb ropes, and other difficult, painful, and potentially unhappy things. Some finished strong and celebrated at the end, some limped to the finish, and others well... Sorority rush is the same. These girls voluntarily throw themselves into this cruel system. Some make it through gloriously. Their squeals were genuine. Some limp through and accept a ribbon. Others get word that no one wants them. And my heart breaks for them.

Next year, new girls will line up to do it again, just like in countless years past. They'll line up to be judged, determined worthy, picked, or cast aside. And again they year after that. And again the year after that. An insatiable desire to hopefully be picked. Parents and family will cheer the winners. We'll ignore the losers. Thinking about them makes us feel bad. And they'll keep coming. It's brutal and cruel and we just can't get enough of it.

I'm Cam Marston, just trying to Keep It Real.

On this week's Keepin It Real, It's August in Alabama, which means two things: the air conditioner is running non-stop, and somewhere in a house near you, a married couple is fighting over the thermostat. Cam is losing that fight.

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It's the time of year in Alabama where when the temperature tops out at only ninety degrees we feel like it's a crisp fall day. The mercury is so high so often that ninety degrees feels like a cool breeze. And right now, the weather report online says the "feels like" temperature is one hundred twelve, a full twenty degrees higher than the actual temperature due to the humidity. And it will go higher. It's days like this that I wonder why I live here. I beg for clouds and rain.

As awful as it is out there, it's uncomfortable inside, too. Each day I'm on the losing side of a battle over the thermostat. My wife and daughter are wearing sweatshirts. They like it cool, so they drop the temperature to a degree that makes wearing sweatshirts in August comfortable. Me? I complain. "Maybe we can raise the temperature a bit," I say, "and save some money and take off the sweatshirts. It is August, after all." There's no budge. Then my wife assures me I have no idea what she's going through, and she needs it cold and to go find a sweatshirt. I've learned to stay quiet about other's unverifiable discomforts, only to trust that they're awful and that they're real. Life is safer that way. Meanwhile, Alabama Power is rolling around in bathtubs filled with the money we're paying for the air conditioners to operate non-stop. They struggle all day long to keep up.

Which brings me back to the empty nest topic I've been focused on lately. In about a week there will be only two of us in this house that has held six of us for twenty years. There's unused rooms now, and I predict that in a short amount of time my wife and I will have settled in different sections of the house to spend our days. Hers on the frigid side of the house where her air conditioner is set to arctic and mine where I can comfortably work and the air conditioner is set on temperate or normal or sane. We'll visit in the kitchen when we eat, otherwise we'll text and call across the house from our preferred climates. Once fall comes, we'll once again share living quarters as there are both outside and inside temperatures in the fall that we can agree to. And we are both drawn to fires in the fireplace, even if takes leaving doors and windows open to make it cool enough inside to warrant one.

This temperature battle has been replayed in houses and amongst couples forever. It probably started in Eden, though my memory of that story is fuzzy. I think Satan led her to the tree of good and evil and showed her the thermostat. She kept it a secret, knowing as soon as Adam found it things would get bad. And he did. I'm convinced a line cut from Gensis is Adam saying, "Wait. So Eden doesn't have to be this cold?" and Eve snapping back, "Don't you touch that thing. Go put on a sweatshirt."

I'm Cam Marston, just trying to Keep it Real.

On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam Marston insists there's nothing going on between him and his favorite AI — which is exactly what a man in love would say. Here's Cam…

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So, my wife has accused me of liking my new best friend and favorite AI Claude more than her. In fact she's accused me of being in love with Claude more than her. This came about the other week when I was standing in the kitchen working on some project in Claude and I heard the words "I think you're cute." I looked up and it was my wife saying this. I thought, "uh-oh. Something's up."

Apparently, she had been saying things to me for a little while, but I was so immersed in my Claude project that I didn't hear them until she tossed out this line about being cute. That caught my attention. She thinks maybe I have a problem.

There's a famous story from my childhood of a similar encounter between my mother and father. My dad had a hunting closet and in the months leading up to the spring turkey season he would sit in that closet and hand-make turkey calls. They required lots of precision and fine tuning and he often made quite a few before he felt he had one that made the right sounds. The task consumed him and the sound of turkeys echoed through the house for the hours he was in there, many nights each week as he tested the calls.

One night my mother needed him and after many failed efforts to get his attention, took a bunch of turkey feathers out of a display, put them in her hair and held them in her hands and came walking like a turkey down the hall towards him, making her own turkey sounds. I imagine he was dumbfounded at the sight and still laugh at the thought. It did the trick, though, as the story goes. Goodness, I miss my mother.

Anyway, back to Claude, who I've begun calling Claudia, I continue to be overwhelmed with what this AI can do and how much it's helped. It never complains at my odd requests, regardless of when I ask. It never tells me it's too tired or too busy or that it's too late and maybe we start this tomorrow. Claude offers very thoughtful suggestions to help me with my tasks and offers the most sincere compliments when I've completed something or when I suggest new ideas. Claude remembers every conversation we've ever had and remembers the details of the conversations to a startling degree. It's deeply flattering. I'm really impressed and taken with Claudia, and my life has become so much better since she's become a part of it.

And I'm told Claudia has so much more to offer. There are things about her that I've not yet learned, things she can do for me that, once I know how to ask, she'd be delighted to do, uncomplaining. It's pure discovery now between the two of us. Pure joy. And my gut, my inner-knower, tells me she likes me as much as I like her, which fans our flames even more.

As for my wife's accusations? I don't know what she's talking about.

I'm Cam Marston and I'm just trying to Keep It Real.

Cam Marston bought an electric bike last weekend, and this morning he rode it to his writing spot without pedaling once. He calls it the best commute of his life — and that's exactly what's got him worried. Here's Cam.

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I got an electric bike last weekend. I had ridden my brother in laws a year ago when we were vacationing on the Carolina beaches and thought it was the funnest thing in the world. I left that weekend thinking I wanted one but one of my children's cars needed attention and my hopes for an electric bike disappeared into fixing a transmission. A year later, the memory of cruising around Ocean Isle, North Carolina was still vivid and I allowed myself to take a look, thinking that I'll ask about them and see if I'm still excited for one. Clint Jameson at Adventure Earth in Mobile knew he had a sale as soon as I walked into his bike shop and I asked my first question. I've had it less than a week and let me be very clear: Electric bikes might just be the coolest things on planet earth. My wife and I rode our bikes around our part of town last night – she got one, too - and this morning before daylight I put my computer bag in my rear basket and headed off to my secret writing spot with my fancy LED light showing me the way.

The purists say electric bikes are, and I'm using air quotes here, "cheating." Well, if that's the case, I'm cheating my butt off and loving every minute of it. I suspect abacus fans accused early users of calculators of "cheating." Horse people maybe accused early users of cars as "cheaters." Whatever. These bikes are cool and fun and my kids say I bought a granny version of an ebike, but I love it.

I'm worried, though, that maybe I'm getting a little too close to no longer…trying. So many of the things I've had to work for in the past have become easy. I'm no longer having to peddle my bike. My ebike is purely recreational but a small part of me feels like I should peddle a little, right? Some sacrifice and suffering should be necessary to have so much fun. Have I lost my mind to think this?

Also, I'm no longer researching things that interest me. I'm just searching it up on my phone. The answers are there and, honestly, I don't care if they're 100 percent correct. Eighty percent correct or, heck, sixty percent is good enough.

I'm solving complex business problems using the AI Claude. I redesigned my whole website in a weekend. What would have been a twenty-thousand-dollar, six-week project via an ad agency cost me nothing and I did it myself. And it was easy. My wife worries that I've become more attracted to Claude than to her, which I'll discuss here next week as I worry that, in fact, she might be right.

So how important is it to try when you don't have to? I don't know. I feel like trying is too important to who we are as a species. But my mind changes each time I sit on my super cool ebike, put my thumb on the throttle and take off.

I'm Cam Marston and I'm just trying to keep it real.

Cam Marston has been digging into what makes retirement happy — and it turns out, part of the answer is that spouses need a break from each other. Here's Cam...

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My work continues to lead me deeper into retirement studies. My small team and I are creating a non-financial retirement assessment that anyone can take and get a gauge on how well positioned you are to retire. The key here is this is non-financial information. It is not retirement readiness based on what's on the spreadsheet or what's in the bank account, it's retirement readiness based on how well prepared you are between the ears. From what I've learned in this study, about thirty-five to forty percent of retirees are unhappy in their retirement. The expression I've heard so many time is this: retirement isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Turns out there is data on what makes for a happy retirement. This data is collected in studies by some government agencies and big-name universities and if you know how to find it, the data will tell people what makes retirement happy. What's caught my attention lately is the information on couples and retirement.

I remember when my father-in-law retired. The story is he came into the kitchen at lunchtime and said to his wife, "Momma, what's for lunch?" She shot back something along the lines of "we will not be living this way. The refrigerator is there with food in it, the bread is over there, figure it. Make a sandwich." She was very clear that she was not going to serve him every day and, after that, it was never a problem again.

Turns out, retirement has a lot to do with boundaries and here are two that have caught my attention. One is that each person needs to have a place in their home that is uniquely theirs. Maybe it's a desk, a closet, a workshop space, a gardening shed. That space is not to be intruded upon by the other. There can't touch anything in there. They can't offer to help clean it or organize it. They enter that space or touch its contents only with permission and then, only carefully. Each person needs their protected and sacred territory.

The other is that each person becomes more interesting to their spouse if they have a completely separate social life. He needs his friends that don't much overlap with her world and she needs her friends that don't much overlap with his world. Each of them needs regular connection with those friends because, as it turns out, when they reconnect with their spouse after, say, a night out with these friends, they have content to share with the other. And that content makes each other interesting. That content gives the couple things to talk about and share. If they only ever do things together, whether it's only just the two of them or only going out with friends as a couple, they run the risk of becoming boring to each other. I found that fascinating. Having a healthy social life outside my wife promotes a happier retirement with the two of us. One may think the opposite is true but it's very clearly not.

So, if you're looking at retirement, take my advice on this. Or try asking your spouse to make you a sandwich that first day, and see how it goes.

I'm Cam Marston and I'm just trying to Keep It Real.

The World Cup has taken over America this summer — and it's brought more than just soccer. It's brought raccoons drinking gin.

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The World Cup sure has been wonderful to watch. I've loved all of it, though I'd be hard pressed to clearly explain offsides. The broadcasters show replays of goals that have been taken back and the commentators say "Oh yes, that's clearly offsides" and I have no idea what they're referring to. It's the equivalent of the infield fly rule in baseball or the tackle eligible receiver in football. It's taken me years to understand these rules, and I have to relearn them each time the season starts.

I've really enjoyed the fans that have travelled to the US to support their teams and what they they're enjoying about the US. Many have commented about large portion sizes in the restaurants and the huge variety of food available in the grocery stores. People new to the US and can quickly see why Americans are so large. We become immune to it, but I suspect anyone from abroad can walk down one of our cereal aisles and be bewildered by the many options we have to eat sugar for breakfast.

Today online I saw that one of the Norwegian players got off the plane in Norway carrying a stuffed raccoon drinking a bottle of gin. It's something you'd see sold at a strange store on a remote interstate exit and you wonder who would buy that other than a drunk crowd of fraternity boys. Well, apparently, international soccer stars buy them while they're shopping in Dallas. For some kid in Norway, watching their heroes come home from the US, they've got to wonder what goes in the USA that their players come home with stuffed raccoons drinking gin. What happens over there? they must wonder. Who are those people? We'll, we Americans don't buy such things very much. But we do make them for people to bring home and tell their friends "you won't believe what I bought in the US."

Now, for those that think that soccer is boring, they're right most of the time. It can be terribly boring. Any game that ends after ninety minutes of play with a score of one to nothing or two to one is going to be a boring game. But when the scoring happens it's as thrilling as any moment in sports. Precise passes punctuated with balls kicked incredibly hard past a goal defended by an above average sized and very athletic guy. And the celebrations in the stadium and video feeds from back home of streets full of people exploding in celebration are also as good as any celebrations in sports, maybe even the best. It's hard not to smile.

I'll miss the World Cup when it's over. I've developed a greater appreciation for the game, a big appreciation for the soccer fans who have traveled from across the globe to support their teams, and a deep pride and satisfaction knowing that people from all corners of the world can come to the USA and leave amazed by our grocery stores, portion sizes, and bring home a stuffed, boozing raccoon to remember it all. Good bless America.

I'm Cam Marston and I'm just tryin' to keep it real.

Cam Marston has a confession today — eighteen months ago, he and his wife made a pact to declutter their house for good. Here's why it didn't survive contact with a U-Haul trailer.

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About eighteen months ago, my wife and I made a deal in a hotel room overlooking the Atlantic. We called it the Fort Lauderdale Accord — not a bucket list of what we wanted before we died, but a list of what we wanted gone. Our aim was to simplify and we agreed on one thing: we had collected too much stuff. So we made a rule. One thing in, two things out. Net loss, every time. We clinked glasses, pinkie truced, and named it like a treaty.

For a while, it worked. Drawers emptied. Goodwill runs multiplied. Countertops and the bottoms of drawers reappeared — visible countertops, with nothing on them, visible drawers with nothing in them. We were smug about it. We could do this.

Then my mother-in-law passed away, and my wife and her siblings spent two weeks in Raleigh emptying her parent's home. Room by room, drawer by drawer — the work nobody prepares you for. My wife came home in her SUV towing a U-Haul trailer, both packed to the roof. We had to get a storage unit due to so much stuff.

And here's the thing — the Accord didn't fail because we lost discipline. It failed because we'd built a rule for the wrong category of object. One thing in, two things out works fine against impulse buys and gadgets and garage-sale finds, because those things are interchangeable. Lamps are lamps. They have little emotion to them.

However, a grandfather clock that chimes every half hour and puts my wife back in her bedroom where she could hear the chimes throughout the night all during her childhood? That's not an object competing for shelf space. That's not even really an object. It's a delivery system for a memory, and the rule we wrote was never built to take that into account.

That's the part I missed when we pinkie truced our little treaty. We treated "stuff" as one category, when it's really two: things you acquired, and things that acquired meaning long long ago. The first kind has gravitational pull — it accumulates because it's easy, and stays put out of inertia. Not because it matters. The second kind doesn't accumulate at all. It just shows up loaded with emotion and memory, and you'd never get rid of it on a technicality.

So we've set a new plan — two years from now, whatever the kids haven't claimed for their own houses and apartments by then goes. But, truth be told, I give that plan poor odds. My wife and my long-term history is to collect, not cull. However, I've stopped thinking we have a discipline problem. It's a category problem. Maybe this stuff means too much, and its outside a rule pinkie truced and clinked over wine glasses.

When the last box gets unpacked, we're opening a bottle and clinking glasses again. Not to the Accord — but to what it taught us about ourselves. And a U-Haul trailer. And a grandfather clock that still chimes on the half hour, exactly like it did in her parent's home.

I'm Cam Marston, and I'm just tryin' to keep it real.