Becca Rashid | The Atlantic

Can We Keep Time?

2024-01-15T05:00:00-05:00

It can be tough to face our own mortality. Keeping diaries, posting to social media, and taking photos are all tools that can help to minimize the discomfort that comes with realizing we have limited time on Earth. But how exactly does documenting our lives impact how we live and remember them?

In this episode, diarist and author Sarah Manguso reflects on the benefits and limitations of keeping track of time, and Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and researcher at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, discusses what research reveals about how memories work and how we can better keep time.

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Becca Rashid: You know, Ian, whenever someone asks me to get in their BeReal, I’m always like, What? What is that? What’s happening? What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Do we need to do this?

I am not very social media–savvy. So they have to give me a break.

Ian Bogost: Becca, you’re talking about the app, right? This app that asks people to post a photo from both the front and rear cameras on their phone, and like you get a coordinated message in your friend group to take your BeReal photos?

Rashid: Yes, and I’ve heard that everyone on the app takes a photo at the same moment in time?

Bogost: At the same time. Yeah, that’s how I understand it.

Rashid: I’m curious if that’s, like, across time zones. I don’t know; very interesting.

Bogost: Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s like synchronized photos of everything, and then they vanish again.

Rashid: Normally, we’re like sitting on my couch or eating lunch. Like something super mundane.

Bogost: Mmm hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s part of the idea—to show that most of the time your life is ordinary.

Rashid: Right.

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Rashid: Welcome to How to Keep Time. I’m Becca Rashid, co-host and producer of the show.

Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

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Bogost: Becca, do you remember time capsules?

Rashid: Yes. I didn’t really live in that era, but yes, I’ve heard of them.

Bogost: That’s what I was wondering. It used to be kind of a thing. You would, uh, collect a bunch of photos and scraps of paper and letters and whatever you could find and bury it in the yard for folks a hundred years later to dig up and investigate.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: We used to assemble these archives, these time capsules for the distant future. And some of them are cosmic—you know, in 1977, America sent human memories, almost time capsule–like memories, into deep space on Voyager. And now they’re out there in the galaxy somewhere.

Rashid: Mmm. Right.

Bogost: But as a kid in the ’80s, it felt like time capsules were everywhere.

Like you’d trip over people burying capsules in their schoolyards or churchyards.

Rashid: Really?

Bogost: Yeah. I remember I went to visit the site of the Oppenheimer atomic bomb test as a kid. And they were putting a time capsule in the ground. And, like, you know, the stuff that goes into it—it’s a different time horizon than your camera roll.

Rashid: You yourself don’t have access to the records of your own life; you’re trying to save for someone else.

Bogost: Yeah; it’s not for you. It’s for some future generation to see the ordinariness of your present life. That’s quite a bit different than taking smartphone photos that you’ll probably never look at again, or posting ones on BeReal that will then disappear a day later. So it does kind of seem like apps these days, they really orient us toward the present, and less so toward the past and the future.

Rashid: Interesting you say that. I feel like—I wonder if it really orients us toward the present, or if just a lot more of our present time is now used to document things we want to look back on in the future. And how are we even distinguishing between present, past, and future time anymore?

Like don’t all those BeReal photos that you take begin to blur together and become this, you know, unmanageable sort of trove of content? I get the kind of longer-term projects that people do—like parents taking photos of children every day as they grow up to document their change over time.

But all the stuff in between just feels like a culture around needing to capture our time in some way, to measure it, and just kind of make sense of the movement of time in our lives.

Bogost: Yeah. I mean, there are so many apps these days to record and measure, like, just about everything. You know: the number of steps you took, or stairs you climbed, your weekly screen-time report, the UPS packages you received, period-tracker apps that measure women’s bodily rhythms, how much exercise you did yesterday or didn’t do. All of that stuff.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: It used to be weird to record stuff like that. Justin Hall, who was sort of heralded as one of the first bloggers when he started publishing his personal diary on a website in 1994—it was strange. Like, he was posting personal things. And people thought that was unusual, and they were maybe even uncomfortable with it. Or an early internet entrepreneur named Josh Harris famously streamed his whole life—him and his girlfriend—in 2000, right after the turn of the century. And that was weird too. You know, it was strange, and it felt dirty in a way; you were seeing into someone else’s life. And it was also weird when the so-called quantified-self movement arose a few years after

Rashid: What exactly was that?

Bogost: Right; so that was a name at the time for this new movement driven by technologists largely. You know, to record and track anything that you could record and track. The step-counting and all that kind of stuff started then too.

Rashid: Wow.

Bogost: And so all of that had to be invented, and it has only come to feel natural because it’s been adopted. Which is notable that so many people were like, Okay, yeah, we’ll do that.

Rashid: Interesting. And that’s clearly just a huge cultural shift, right, about what feels too personal to share.

Bogost: Or even too personal to keep.

Rashid: Right. Like, I’m thinking about my first blog as like a middle-schooler on Tumblr. I had essentially just embarrassing garbage on there that I didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing; it was really just a documentation of my favorite, you know, music, fashion trends. But now a lot of online content I see, or documentation in general, feels a lot more curated in a way.

Bogost: You know, Becca, in my generation, people did record stuff. People used to keep, you know, diaries. But that was, you know, less filtered—partly because it was so private.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: I mean, this was a private thing that people kept for nobody, kind of—just for themselves. But then slowly, over decades, we moved that activity online. And that not only made it normal to share it, but also normal to try to hold on to all that stuff, to document and keep it in a different way. Like, not everyone would have a diary back in the day. And now kind of everyone does, even if they don’t call it that.

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Rashid: I’ve always wondered if this sort of compulsive documentation—these habits we have around writing down what happens at any moment in time—is actually about the fear of losing time, and our impulse to, you know, want to control it.

Sarah Manguso: I felt this kind of maybe pathological anxiety that if I lost those memories, if I lost the memory of the emotional weather of the day, I would be losing some essential part of myself, this essential part of my life.

Rashid: So Ian, Sarah Manguso’s kept a diary since she was about 14, documenting her daily life detail by detail.

Manguso: Oh, I write in my bed, on my laptop. I write on my sofa. I was unable to stop ruminating on the smallest things that happened to me until I wrote them down. At which point I could then be free of this kind of obsessive, you know, thinking and rethinking.

Rashid: Ian, Sarah’s also the author of many nonfiction books, and she’s a professor of creative writing at Antioch University. Her practice of writing everything down in this diary made me wonder. How are all the ways that we play with time, and the ways that we try to preserve it by documenting—how much is that really helping us hold on? And I know we want to keep time, but … can we?

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Rashid: Can you describe the style of a typical entry in your diary?

Manguso: In the beginning, in the very beginning, when I was in my teens, the entries were very emotionally overwrought. It really was just sort of your, you know, toxic waste dump of teenage feelings. Which I think, you know, is a fairly universal experience for teenage diarists.

Rashid: Yes.

Manguso: Over the years, I began writing in present tense; I stopped using the pronoun I. I log the date: the year, month, and day. So there are some formal habits that have become somewhat fixed over the years.

Rashid: You know, a lot of diarists, or people who journal to the extent that you do, are sought out later in life and later in history for their reflections on a specific moment in history or a moment in time.

Manguso: Oh, no; nobody would care. Like, really. [Laughter.] There’s no historical moment captured in my diary. My heart sinks when I think of the prospect of having to, like, represent the past to the people of the future because, you know, it’s just gonna be like: “Here’s what I was thinking about, and this person I was obsessed with.” And yeah; it’s all gonna be really embarrassing if we’re looking for historical import.

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Rashid: Can you explain a bit about how this process of recording every day changed when you became a mom, or perhaps when you were pregnant with your son?

Manguso: Yes. Soon after my son was born, I underwent a period of sleep loss. And because your working memory is so impaired by sleep loss, I sort of lost the sense of linear time in the way that it had felt before.

Once I had the ability to sort of think about abstractions again—to think about anything except, you know, Keep the kid alive, keep the self alive—I realized I don’t need the diary. You know, it’s neither necessary nor sufficient.

Rashid: So, Ian, in our pursuit of keeping time and trying to figure that out, I wonder how gaps impact our memories? Like with Sarah—she wasn’t able to document every single thing she had planned to. When her son was young, she had to step away from her diary. And I think there are often gaps between the way we record things and how we want to remember them.

You know, we might just take a photo at lunch with friends, but we really want to remember how deep the conversation was across the group. I wonder if there is some shorthand way to practice making those kinds of memories stick?

Bogost: Yeah—totally, Becca. I mean, the memories we keep are related to the way that we hold on to them. If we want to learn how to keep time, we need to know something about how memory works, so that we can use it effectively.

Charan Ranganath: We are not designed to remember everything. Our memory is supposed to be selective, right? So we often kick ourselves for not being able to remember everything that we ever experienced, but I think that expectation is wrong.

Bogost: Becca, I talked to Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. And Charan taught me that memories are not just records—like stored pages of a diary, pictures, phone, or whatever. But the way that we interact with our memories also changes them, and us.

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Ranganath: I think we don’t appreciate both the opportunities that memory gives us for the future and the way it already does affect us without even necessarily knowing it.

Bogost: How do we hold on to memories in our brains?

Ranganath: So, memories themselves come about through connections between neurons that change when we experience something. Literally, there’s a physical change that takes place in our brains after we have all of these experiences. And our brains are constantly reshaping themselves over time.

Now, some things that we experience are more significant than others, and they release these chemicals called neuromodulators. So it could be when we’re under stress, or it could be when we’re surprised, or it could be when we’re experiencing desire or some other kind of motivation. Those are all things that release these chemicals, and those allow certain memories to persist at those moments.

And so by default, we will have predominantly better memory for these things that are more memorable, essentially. The things that we should remember; the things that our brain biologically responds to in a way because it should be significant. Does that make sense?

Bogost: Well, it does. But it makes me want to ask—what does it mean for something to be more memorable?

Ranganath: Yeah, so in terms of what the brain is trying to do, it’s trying to find something that is not consistent with what we would have already known before. That’s a big part of it, right? So, in other words, if you have constraints on how much that you can remember, why remember the things that are already consistent with what you knew? You just need to remember the things that are different in some way. So, that distinctiveness is a big part of what makes something memorable.

And then, of course, there’s the other things—like the ways in which an experience grabs on to some of our motivational systems in the brain, which also are associated with emotions. So things that make us scared, or things that make us feel, like I said, desire or hunger. But even curiosity, too; it’s another one that we found drives these changes in the brain.

Bogost: Hmm. You know, we often—as individuals in the world—want to hold on to time. We don’t want to let it go. We want to keep a kind of closeness with events that happened to us: whether they’re important, or whether they’re kind of unimportant, but delightful. Like, we want to hold on to time, almost.

Is there a strategy for that? For, you know, going, Oh, okay; this thing is happening to me or just happened. I want to keep that close to me. How should I go about doing it?

Ranganath: That’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. How to not only remember but to curate my memories—taking advantage of the selectivity. And so what I try to do is focus on the things that I want to remember and creating experiences that are going to be more memorable.

So sometimes that involves a change in our context, just to put us in a new state of mind and give us something that’s a little different than our routine. So just to give you an example of the opposite of that: During the pandemic, when we were all locked down, everyone had lost that ability to change their context very much.

And we were stuck in front of screens all day. And so I asked students in my class, “Do you feel like the days are passing by faster, slower, or the same while you’re locked down?” And about 95 percent of the people in the class said that they felt like the days were passing by more slowly. So then I said, “Do you feel like the weeks are passing by faster or more slowly?” And about 80 percent of them said the weeks were actually passing by faster.

So what I think it was is: Without that change in context, people felt like their days were just going on forever. But then when you reflect on longer timescales, you say to yourself, Hey, what happened in the past week that was memorable? And the fewer things that you can pull up, the more it feels like time was just passing by and it’s slipping through your fingers, right?

Bogost: Given that most of us, when we think about memory, think of it as being about the past—what does it mean to construe memory as an activity of the present or the future instead?

Ranganath: So I’ve spent much of my career studying what’s called episodic memory, which is our ability to remember events from the past.

Bogost: Okay.

Ranganath: But a lot of my recent work has been, really, about how we use information in episodic memory. And so what I mean by that is: Let’s say you’re watching a movie or you’re listening to a story. How do you use what we’ve learned in memory to be able to understand what’s going on in those stories or movies? How do we predict it?

Or if we’re navigating—let’s say, you’re trying to figure out your way from the hotel to this place where you have a conference. How do you use memory to actively figure out where you are and navigate to where you want to go? So, in other words, moving from this perspective of memories being about the past to memory being about the present and the future.

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Rashid: So Ian, if Charan is saying that to do a better job at holding on to memories when we’re experiencing something new or novel, for me, with my iPhone camera roll, it’s like a low stakes—kind of “Here’s a beautiful flower I saw on my walk” or whatever—and I’m not at least consciously trying to preserve a memory or hold on to it.

Bogost: Oh no, for sure. I mean, but also think about how much easier it’s become, Becca, to do that with your phone?

Rashid: Yeah; of course.

Bogost: I mean, it’s definitely a habit, and I don’t mean that in a negative way; it’s just a thing that we do. And it’s a thing that people didn’t used to do—like, we recorded things, but we didn’t do so obsessively. Because in part you couldn’t; it was not possible.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: Photographs were expensive and time-consuming to develop on film. And, like, writing out memories longhand in diaries is, you know, irritating, and you get a hand cramp or whatever. I’m also not sure if people are really reviewing how they change with time.

Rashid: Really?

Bogost: Or are they? Like, I don’t know. Are they—are we—hoarding all of these materials?

Rashid: Hmm … I mean, that’s a good point. I’ve seen interesting data from the University of Illinois on how people who looked at themselves more often during video calls then reported worse moods—people on Zoom calls. And so maybe we simultaneously want a heightened sense of awareness and reject it.

Bogost: Yeah; being in your life and recording your life—they feel like they’re at odds, and you have to move back and forth between them in a way.

Rashid: Totally.

Bogost: Yeah; I’m really upset, though, that you brought the “yourself on video” thing. [Laughter.] Because I’ve really been noticing this lately.

I use Zoom and Microsoft Teams—both of those software-package video calls?

Rashid: Okay.

Bogost: And Zoom has this filter that, like, smooths out your skin. And it makes me look great.

Rashid: Are you sure that’s true? Is that true? [Laughing.]

Bogost: I didn’t realize it until I started using Teams—which doesn’t have it. Or at least I don’t know how to turn it on, if it does. So like, I’ll go into Microsoft Teams, and I’m like, Oh my—who is this old guy looking at me?

Rashid: I didn’t know that.

Bogost: Yeah; there’s a button. I think it says “Enhance your appearance” or something.

Rashid: Oh, wow. I thought that’s just what I looked like. Great. Now I’ll get on Teams and humble myself.

Bogost: I’m sure that you look okay. I don’t. I have to have my appearance enhanced.

Rashid: Yeah; I mean, that’s just a filter on work calls. And then I think about all the other things on social media that make you into a supermodel, and all these apps that show you what you’ll look like 40 years into the future.

Bogost: Yes; same kind of thing, yeah.

Rashid: And I’ve always stayed away from those apps, because I feel like if I saw myself, you know, 50 years into the future, I would feel like a stranger to myself, right?

And—

Bogost: Right!

Rashid: There’s such interesting psychological research about the barriers to connecting with that future version of ourselves. Because for many of us, our identities change with time; we can’t really emotionally connect to the needs of our future self. You know, which makes us probably worse long-term planners. And saving for your future self is like saving money for a stranger. You don’t know that person. You don’t know their needs.

Bogost: Sure; I mean, you can’t. Right, Becca?

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: Behavioral scientists—like, economists, whatever—they sometimes present this problem you’re describing as, like, just a simple one. Just a problem of forward planning. Just save for the future. Just, you know, care for your health, and go to the doctor.

Um, but it’s really hard. And it is actually a longstanding puzzle in human culture and our conception of self. Philosophers have a different name for this problem. They call it “identity over time.” And it’s just not obvious that you or me or anything is the same thing that it once was when it moves into the future.

I guess what I’m saying is: It’s not just a problem of planning or being foolish, and kind of overcoming our foolhardiness through habits. Although it might be that, too. But a real, legitimate philosophical question—quandary—is at work here.

Rashid: Right. And given your larger philosophical point here, it does bring up a question for me. Like, what should I be holding on to and recording? And is it even helpful in understanding how I’m changing over time? Or is all this record-keeping via social media and diary writing just affirming some evidence that we exist?

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Manguso: I think it is possible that social media might feel exactly the way that my diary feels to me. Which is that—until you post it, it doesn’t feel like it’s done yet. Or until you post something, you don’t exist. Or maybe until like X-number of people see the post, it hasn’t really finished happening yet. And, you know, for me, obviously the audience thing is not the thing that scratches my itch. But simply the expression of it in language is what makes me feel better.

Rashid: Interesting. When you read back over your diary, does it feel like you’re reading your own words, or like you’re looking into someone else’s life?

Manguso: Oh, wow. That’s interesting. Well, if I go far back enough, occasionally I want to see if something happened the way that I remember. And so I’ll go back enough years that I don’t remember what it was like to write that year.

And it doesn’t feel like somebody else’s life. You know, it just feels—I don’t know how old you are—but it just feels like, Oh yeah, this was one of my previous iterations. This is, you know, me, like, 2.0. And now I’m, you know, 9.4.

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Rashid: Ian, if I’m ever in a place where I don’t have Wi-Fi or something, I’m just kind of scrolling back in my camera roll for hours. [Chuckle.] And it doesn’t provoke any kind of intense emotion or kind of nostalgia of like, Oh wow, this amazing trip I took three years ago. It’s just kind of a photo in my phone, almost the same way I would access a memory in my mind and just pull it up.

Bogost: Yeah; it definitely feels like the tools for that kind of revisitation of memory are, like, really underdeveloped. Like, sometimes I’ll get a push notification from Facebook. I really don’t use Facebook, but it’s still on my phone, I guess. And it says, “You have memories to look back on today.”

Um, you know, like, what? I mean, my adult kids were in town for the holidays. And at one point, Facebook sent a push that said, “You have memories to look back on,” and showed me a picture of my son. And I was like, “Facebook, he’s in the literal house.”

Rashid: Like, back off.

Bogost: Like back off, you know? Like, “Come on; I’m doing it. I’m doing the thing.” But then, you know, if it knew where he was, then that would be creepy.

So, who knows what to do? I mean, technology has definitely helped us keep more time through memories, but it’s also done it in a haphazard way that maybe doesn’t have the highest-quality result.

Rashid: And I think Charan’s advice about being selective about which memories we keep is so tough in this era.

Bogost: It’s really hard.

Rashid: When all the memories in our mind also have some kind of physical record online to actually pull us, you know, back into that moment. That photo of you and your son is, like, from who knows when.

Bogost: Right; it’s all munged together, for sure. You know, maybe somewhere in your house you have like a shoebox of print photos, and you just threw them all in. But now, it’s like everything that you’ve ever thought or seen or done is in one giant shoebox in your phone, and it’s hard to know how to make sense of any of it.

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Bogost: How do you know when you’re doing the right thing—when you’re keeping the right amount, when you’ve overdone it, or when you’ve underdone it—from the perspective of a healthy memory life?

Ranganath: Yeah. I guess what I’d say: So there are people, for instance, who have highly superior autobiographical memory. They’re not necessarily happier than people who don’t.

They have these detailed recollections of, you know, what they ate for lunch, let’s say nine months ago. But they don’t benefit from that, right? So I think this is a very good question, where you have to ask yourself what’s useful.

First of all, I think you’re documenting too much if there’s things that you document that you don’t go back to.

Bogost: Interesting!

Ranganath: Right there, you realize that you’re hoarding memories, right? And you don’t want to be a hoarder. And so, like, that’s your first indicator—if I took a hundred photos of my trip and I never went back to them, maybe I took too many photos. Now sometimes, you don’t know what’s interesting until you look back. But I think the problem is that if you take too many photos, I can guarantee you, you’ll never look back.

Bogost: Huh. So where does the impulse come from, to hoard memories like that? To hold on to everything—to create a bunch of records, or to keep a bunch of scraps, or take a bunch of photographs? Is it about feeling? Is it a desire to be in control of time and its passage?

Ranganath: Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re all afraid of the idea that we will lose our memories, ’cause it’s so embedded in our narratives of who we are. And so there’s an existential fear there. But also I’m mindful of the fact that I’m in the fourth quarter of life, and so I’m asking myself, “What am I doing with my time right now?”

And if I look back and I say, “Boy, I’ve spent the last week just sitting in front of a screen, and I have nothing memorable from those experiences”—that’s very frightening to me. Because I’d like to have lived a life that’s more memorable than that.

So sometimes, it’s not about hoarding every moment as much as being able to value the experiences you’ve had. Because if you have one experience that is valuable that you could draw upon later on from the past week, that’s a whole lot better than mindlessly documenting everything you’ve ever done for the last week, right? And that’s going to be more personally meaningful to you, I think, in terms of anchoring you in where you’re going in your journey in life.

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Bogost: You know, Becca, my mother always kept everything. Like, scrapbooks of stuff. You know, like participation ribbons I got from the third-grade busking competition, whatever it was. I don’t even know, you know.

Rashid: Do you feel like you’re as connected to those items as she is? Like, does seeing you know, the third-grade soccer trophy or whatever make you nostalgic for that time?

Bogost: Absolutely not.

Rashid: Oh. [Chuckle.]

Bogost: And I’ve always had this kind of weird feeling about all that scrapbook stuff. Like, are those things important to me? Am I making a mistake? It actually makes me think of—there was this article I commissioned for The Atlantic a number of years ago that made the case for why you should go ahead and throw your children’s art away. Like, all the drawings or whatever the kids make.

Rashid: Oh, interesting.

Bogost: Yeah. Cause you know if you have kids, I mean, he’s produced all this art all the time, and it all feels very tender and important in the moment. But then it piles up, and it’s not very good anyway; you know, it’s children’s art. [Laughter.] And so, like, you know, what should you do with it?

Rashid: My mom would be so upset to hear that. She just found some old art of mine that I made in middle school and, like, relaminated it at Staples. This is, like, material from 20 years ago. And that’s, like, one poster from my childhood. [Laughter.] That helps her, you know, remember who I was as a 12-year-old. But if she had an iPhone, God knows what she would do.

Bogost: Yeah. I totally get it. I mean, Mary Townsend—who’s the philosopher who wrote this “throw your kids’ art” piece I mentioned—what she recommended is to keep a few. You know, be selective.

Rashid: Mmm.

Bogost: Keep a few. Because saving something that you’ll never look at again—kind of in the way that Charan is explaining—if you keep all of it, that actually will erode those memories more than it will amplify them.

Rashid: And I wonder if part of the ease and kind of joy of digital memories is that they are kind of immaterial, and they don’t have to take up physical space in your house?

Bogost: No, for sure.

Rashid: But I wonder if they play less of a role in our memory, for those same reasons? I don’t know. With that poster my mom kept—looking at it, holding it—I not only have the memory of that thing I made, but who I was at the time. I can kind of remember, like, painting on that poster.

Bogost: Mmmhmm.

Rashid: Why I chose the colors I did. And just my general context of me in that period of time is stored better, in a way, in that physical copy.

Bogost: I mean, it makes sense. But then, at the same time, now that your smartphone is such a major part of your life—an extension of yourself, really—when you create those memories, you may be creating them in concert with that device.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: And so that could make the digital things seem just as real, if not more real and striking, than the physical ones in the way you’re just describing.

Rashid: Do you think it preserves the context of when you captured that memory in the same way?

Bogost: Yeah. That’s it. I think that it does.

Rashid: Hmm.

Bogost: We should be careful not to think of these digitally created contexts as somehow lesser than taking what, like a film photo? Or, you know, jotting something down on paper? Those were technologies, too, and we had a different and maybe similar relationship to the apparatuses. Something that was taking part in the construction of the memory then, too.

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Bogost: So, Charan, I wonder if you can tell me: How does the contextual nature of memory impact our general experience of the world? And I’m especially interested in our experience of the passage of time.

Ranganath: Context is central. And something that we’ve studied a lot in my lab is the idea that context comes in as part of the memory itself. And so, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience of hearing a song on the radio, and just all of a sudden a memory that you didn’t think was there popped into your head. Or times where, for me, it’s like if I traveled to India. Which I don’t do very frequently—but when I have, I immediately get all of these memories of seeing my relatives in India that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to access when I’m here. Just the sights, the smells, the sounds are really enough to drive those experiences of remembering.

And so context is super powerful: both in terms of determining what we remember and also determining the things that we can’t access.

Bogost: That’s interesting. So are you suggesting that, you know, if there’s a memory that I want to hold on to, or I want to amplify, that kind of changing the context in which I remember it is one tool to do so?

Ranganath: Absolutely. And that doesn’t just have to be a change in place. It can also be a state of mind. You know, I think our brains naturally want to generate predictions about how things are supposed to be, and what that means is it reduces the load of what we have to learn and remember.

And if you want to have something, though, that’s memorable and distinctive, you have to do the opposite. You have to ask yourself: What’s different about this experience that I can hold on to later?

Bogost: Hmm.

Ranganath: And you can take advantage of that, too, by documenting what’s different. So when I go on holidays, I like to take pictures of things that are very unusual, that will bring me back to the moment.

And sometimes those aren’t actual landmarks. They could be even things like moments when we’re out eating at a restaurant or something, and I catch my daughter laughing while she’s got a drink in her hand or something. And those kinds of moments are anchors that allow me to go back and not just see the picture, but re-experience the event.

Bogost: Humans have had technologies of documentation for a long time. Whether those are photographs or paintings or paper records, books. How have those changes in the way that we do recordkeeping, as a human culture—what impact have they had on our sort of cognitive relationship with time?

Ranganath: I can’t give a precise scientific answer to that question, but what I can say is, based on what we know, that our memories are intertwined with our social world, right? And so, a lot of the documentation that you’re talking about is not just for the purpose of recording, but communicating.

Bogost: Hmm.

Ranganath: And that act of communicating our experiences actually changes how we remember. There’s great research showing that parents, for instance, that engage with children about memory and meaningfully talk to them about their interpretation of their past—actually, [those] children are much less likely to have mental illness later on.

Bogost: Wow.

Ranganath: And so, this ability to engage with our past actually informs our narratives of our life. And they inform our sense of who we are. If we take that into the realm of time, the more of a rich life narrative we can construct, the more we feel that time was well spent.

Bogost: Wow.

Ranganath: And I think even the painful experiences in our life, if we engage in ways of documenting—with art, for instance, or with journaling—the more we can engage with even those painful memories, and approach it from a different perspective. Not one of staying stuck in the past, but rather, How can I take that past and use it as a learning experience, or as a way of understanding the world differently and, essentially, growing from it? I think that will give you, not just the sense that you had that time, but you used that time well.

___

Rashid: You know, Ian, I think in making this podcast with you, I’ve realized that my time has never really been separate from me. And I viewed it as separate from me for so much of my life.

Bogost: Sure. It can feel like you’re swimming in time—or maybe against it. But it’s more like, without the current you don’t even exist.

Rashid: Right. And now, I’m at least trying to move with that current in a different way, I guess, without constantly thinking about another way that I could have used my time and that has brought me some sense of relief.

Bogost: I also came into this podcast feeling just ill at ease about time. Where did it go? And how can I tame it moving forward?

And you know, I understood that memory and personal records and stuff like that, that seemed to be related to time—like, of course they are! But both Sarah and Charan have helped me understand how our drive to document things—whether with diaries or photos or just memories in your head—those are kind of symptoms of that desire to “hold on to” our experience of time. You know, to keep time.

Rashid: And, like I was saying, I feel like I have a complicated relationship with what exactly to hold on to. I want to collect as much of the emotional experience as possible. And I don’t know if that’s a reasonable expectation—to be able to hold on to the joy of every moment exactly as it happened the first time. But I think the drive to keep everything—whether on social media, or in shoeboxes, or camera rolls, or whatever—convinces us that we can really hold on to that moment, exactly as it happened.

Bogost: Yeah; I keep coming back to Charan’s use of the word “hoarding” to describe this kind of behavior. It really cuts to the chase, doesn’t it?

Rashid: Yeah.

Bogost: We live in this “pics or it didn’t happen” world.

Rashid: [Laughing.] Right.

Bogost: And it makes me feel like the time I spend on whatever I’m doing has been turned almost into an evidentiary process. Like, unless I can prove to you that I ate this meal or visited this place, like, I didn’t even do it. It’s really pretty perverse, when you think about it.

Rashid: But those choices are still up to you—what we do with all those images in the cloud. It’s an emotional choice, I think. I assume we want to hold on to the best memories, and get rid of all the bad times in our minds and probably in our camera rolls as well. [Laughter.] Just trying to keep everything, hold on to all of it, and just sort of document incessantly, won’t stop the current of time.

Bogost: Right, Becca. We have all these tools that are almost making memories for us before we’re ready. We’re forgetting that the selectivity of memory is what we still have agency over. You can choose what to hold on to.

Rashid: You can choose.

Bogost: —what to keep.

Click here to listen to additional episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Time-Management Tips From the Universe

2024-01-08T05:00:00-05:00

Time can feel like a subjective experience—different at different points in our lives. It’s also a real, measurable thing. The universe may be too big to fully comprehend, but what we do know could help inform the ways we approach our understanding of ourselves, our purpose, and our time.

Theoretical physicist and black-hole expert Janna Levin explains how the science of time can inspire new thinking and fresh perspectives on a much larger scale.

Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Janna Levin: “The one sense in which time is frustratingly different is that I cannot extend equally in each direction. I cannot just turn around and go into the past. And I seem to be always driven forward into the future. I can stand still in space, but I can’t seem to stand still in time.”

Becca Rashid: Welcome to How to Keep Time. I’m Becca Rashid, co-host and producer of the show.

Ian Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

___

Rashid: One time I took a nap, and I remember I woke up at sunset but it looked like dawn, and I was like, I’m late for work. Like, What have I done? And, uh, that’s why I avoid naps in general. It’s just, I’m so disoriented every time. In one way or the other.

Bogost: Yeah, or like when you travel; you know, I travel overseas, and I’m jetlagged. And the time is all messed up, and I wake up in the middle of the night. And then I can’t go to sleep—or you start falling asleep in the middle of the day because you’re so far away. Like, what time is it even?

Rashid: And you can’t control it. I love how I’m just napping and you’re traveling the world.

Bogost: I have napped like you’ve described too.

Rashid: There are all these ways that I experience these weird lags in my space and time, not just with napping. But sometimes, if I’m really tired, a song sounds slower to me; like the beat feels like it’s delayed in some way. Or if I’m really caffeinated it feels faster. And same thing with time. And maybe I’m just getting older, or it feels like time is moving faster, but—

Bogost: I hate to tell you this, Becca, but I think you may just be getting older. Because, you know, time feels like it moves faster for me year to year. And then sometimes I’ll look at myself in the mirror—you know, after looking at a photo—and I’m like, Okay, that hair didn’t used to be that color quite so much, right?

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: I feel like much time has passed, you know.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: Like, there’s a kind of funhouse-mirror effect with time’s passage where you think you look a certain way in time, but it turns out you’re all wonky.

Rashid: Right; it reminds me when I used to go home as a college student and my little brother, who’s six years younger than me, looked like a different person every year I visited. And now, the way I see my parents aging.

Bogost: You’re aging at the same time. Uh, it’s not just them. It’s also you. But you don’t have that sense of it inside your own head. You need some reference from outside of your body to remind you. Oh yeah: time.

___

Bogost: Janna, are you a timely person? Do you think of yourself as a timely person?

Janna Levin: I’m very often on time. I really am. But I can also get lost in time. I mean, I think if you’re going to do theoretical physics, and you’re going to hunch over a blank, unlined sheet of paper—which is what I like—with a pencil for 12 hours, that you’ve got to be able to kind of turn off some of the chatter, some of the internal biorhythms, that make you so aware of time passing.

Bogost: So Becca, I spoke with the theoretical physicist Janna Levin to understand what it means to place ourselves in the universe, in particular as it relates to time.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Levin: I’m Janna Levin, and I’m a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University.

Bogost: Levin specializes in black holes, actually.

Rashid: Oh, interesting.

Bogost: Yeah, and black holes are weird because time seems to behave totally differently around them.

___

Bogost: So what is it about black holes? What is their role in helping us understand the nature of time?

Levin: The nature of time seems to go more and more out of sync as you get closer and closer to the black hole. So let’s say you’re an astronaut orbiting far from a black hole. And you have this beautiful clock, and it’s telling you what time it is, and your body is exactly in sync with the clock. And movies run at a normal rate and music plays at a normal rate. And your companion—another astronaut—has a perfectly synchronized clock built by the same manufacturer, but they jump into the black hole.

Levin: What you find is as they get closer and closer to the black hole, the astronaut from far away will literally see the ticks on the clock appear to take longer to be spaced, uh, in a more elongated way—so that it’s as though time is running more slowly for the astronaut who’s falling toward the black hole.

Levin: Now, it’s not just this clock; it’s also the music they’re playing, the movies they’re filming—they all are running slowly compared to the astronaut far away. Now, the one who jumps in thinks their clock is normal; absolutely normal experience.

Levin: They just think the astronaut left on this orbit far from the black hole is running very, very fast, racing through years of their lives. All the movies are fast, the music is fast, and the clocks are all speeding ahead. And they realize that they’ve come out of sync as they get closer and closer to the black hole.

Bogost: So it’s almost like the black hole is a lens for physicists to ask difficult questions about time. You can see it more clearly through the subject of the black hole.

Levin: Yeah, the way the black hole distorts—slows time down as you approach its horizon relative to somebody very far away—it makes the black hole like a magnifying glass, in some sense. So that you can look on higher and higher energies and smaller and smaller time scales, because it’s like this magnifying-glass kind of quality.

Bogost: Okay; the magnifying-glass metaphor is really helpful to me, but Janna, I’m still not sure I understand what time is. Like, I kind of have no idea what time is when I stop and think about it, even though I understand what you’re describing, and I live in time all the time.

So once you use this magnifying glass of the black hole to shed light on the nature of time in the universe, what is the answer? Like, what is time anyway?

Levin: Hmm. I’m not sure anyone can give you a fair answer to that question.

Bogost: Oh, no!

Levin: But we would all love to. I could say, let’s go back and say, “What is space? Let’s start there and see how time is different.” So I can say, “Well, I know I can move, extend my hand to the left, and I can extend my hand to the right in space. I have a kind of intuitive notion of that, and I can also measure space with rulers, and how far away things are.” Now, time can be very similar to space, is what Einstein realized—that there is sort of a four-dimensional space time.

And in some sense, as the person nears the black hole, it’s as though they’re rotating what the astronaut far away called “space” into what they’re calling “time.” It’s as though they’re rotating away in this four-dimensional space time.

But the one sense in which time is frustratingly different is that I cannot extend equally in each direction. I cannot just turn around and go into the past. And I seem to be always driven forward into the future.

Levin: Even if I’m standing still in space, I can’t stop the next moment from passing. I can’t stop my body from aging, and we always go forward in this direction.

___

Rashid: You know, some of the happiest memories I have from childhood with my brother was operating under the same schedules, in a way. You know: waking up, going to school together, putting our backpacks on, getting yelled at to put our jackets on, and then sort of rushing out the door. And then, you know, coming home after three; like, eat something, have a snack.

Bogost: Eat something … drink some water!

Rashid: Yeah. [Laughter.] Yes. The thing I forget to do. And, you know, now my brother recently moved to Sweden for grad school. Fancy, fancy!

Bogost: Oh, wow.

Rashid: That feeling that we’re kind of on the same rhythm of each day; we’re kind of operating under the same clock and sort of moving through our days together is completely not there. And you know, I don’t know what time of day he does his work, or I don’t always know where he is in space at any given time.

Bogost: Yeah; I think I see what you mean, Becca. I have two adult kids, and they live in a different city from me, and I’d much rather be closer to them more of the time. And you know, in part that’s just about wanting to be close—like, physically close.

Rashid: Of course.

Bogost: But when I do see them in person, then it also feels different. It feels better, but in a different way because we’re occupying the same time, not just the same space. Even if nothing important is happening, it’s happening to us together.

Rashid: I think that’s exactly what I miss—like, that empty time we would share with each other.

Bogost: So, Becca, there’s space, and there’s time, and time is fundamental to existence, just like space is. But our relationships with space and time as human beings are, like, very different from one another, right?

Rashid: Right, right.

Bogost: Like, you could go visit your brother in Sweden. You could get on a plane and bridge that distance if you wanted to or needed to. Move around in space. If you’re, you know, stuck in your car driving home and like, Oh, if only I can get home, but you will.

You’ll get home eventually, and then you’ll be there. But you can’t really do that in time. You can’t move around in time. You can only go in one direction, and that’s forward.

___

Bogost: Okay; I want to ask you more about this. And I was thinking about it as I tried to prepare for our conversation. So, I have three kids. And two of them are grown up, and one of them is a lot younger. And before my youngest was born, I didn’t think about her at all, because she didn’t exist. But now, the idea that she once didn’t exist is kind of impossible for me to imagine. And there’s a name for this, right? It’s called the Arrow of Time. So what does that idea mean: the Arrow of Time?

Levin: Just in response to what you just described so beautifully—we all feel this asymmetry. Intuitively, we have a great deal of anxiety about the idea that we might not exist in the future. But we’re completely okay with the idea that we did not exist prior to some point in the past. That asymmetry is just built into us. We’re not distressed to believe that there was a point before which your daughter didn’t exist.

Bogost: Yeah.

Levin: This is just because we all fundamentally feel the asymmetry. We intuit it was just part of our everyday experience. Now, we don’t actually know that it’s that firm. It is conceivable; many people have played with this within the context of Einstein’s theory of relativity, that you could find a path where you did go backward in time.

And, there are all kinds of solutions that we know exist mathematically, but we think that reality will forbid these mathematical solutions from ever becoming actualized in the universe. But we don’t know for sure that the asymmetry absolutely cannot be violated.

Bogost: So does that contribute to our, like, cultural obsession with time and the way that it flows forward? I’m thinking here of time loops and their popularity in science fiction. You know, Tenet or Doctor Strange or the time-dilation effects in a film like Interstellar or even alternate timelines; these examples in novels and film of playing with time. What do you make of those as a physicist? Is this, like, our cultural attempt to wrestle with the Arrow of Time?

Levin: Yeah; I think it’s a really good way to challenge your belief system. One of the things we have to do in theoretical physics is get over our intuitions that are based on a very limited experience of being a certain size, evolving under the sun and having certain eyes as a result of that, and living a certain duration and moving relatively slowly. So we don’t really notice relativity as an experience.

So it’s beautiful, actually, to do these thought experiments and really challenge your biases and try to break them. And see—maybe we could go backward in time. Maybe I shouldn’t presume that just because it’s never happened to me that it couldn’t happen.

And that there wouldn’t be a physical, mathematically realizable way to do that. And so we play those games all the time.

Bogost: I wonder in your job—which is to think about cosmic things—how does that impact your daily life? Like, when you’re, you know, commuting or going to the grocery store, what is your knowledge or understanding of the nature of the universe? How does it contribute to your day-to-day life?

Levin: Well, there’s a lot of scientists who will say that whether or not they’re comfortable using the word spiritual, that thinking about these things gives them a profound sense of meaning and a connectedness to something much vaster than their ordinary lives.

And I often, especially—you know, we’re at a time of great pain and strife and trouble in the world. And I often will meditate on this bird’s eye, even beyond the bird’s eye, to really imagine the Earth under this star, and the star that’s been burning for billions of years. And then panning away from the star and imagining this entire solar system, all of us, silly little people warring together, orbiting together around a supermassive black hole 26,000 light-years away. And that is where we are. That is how we got here. And so, do I think about that if I get cut off on my bike on my way over to the studio to talk to you?

I don’t; you know, I’m shaking my fist in the air, and I’m frustrated. But I do believe that in a deep sense, it really has altered my sense of who we are.

___

Rashid: Ian, you know how people make, like, a five-year plan or like a 10-year plan? I’ve never ever been that kind of planner, because that’s just not how my experience of life or time has ever been.

But I realize that people can have this impulse to control their time. Because you’re one person in the universe with very little control, and all you can do is sort of map out, you know, maybe your weeks, maybe your years, in a way that feels like it’s under your control. And hopefully at the end of the day feels like you’ve made the most of whatever chunk you’re given.

Bogost: Yeah. And you know, as Janna’s explaining, that feeling comes from the fact that we can go forward and backward and sideways in space, but we can’t do the same thing in time.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: And when it comes down to it, that’s sort of just the fundamental puzzle and problem with time. That is, as you know, like normal-sized objects, beings in the universe, we cannot go backward. And so that feeling is also weird, you know. But with black holes—those are interesting to physicists because they’re exceptions, or at least potentially exceptions, to the normal rules of physics.

And so, therefore, they offer these kinds of lenses through which scientists can look at time and understand it better. You know, that’s great for theoretical physicists, but not so great for the rest of us. Like: I don’t have a black hole nearby, Becca, that I can sort of ask questions about time.

Rashid: Thankfully, yes.

Bogost: But I wonder, like, are there other lenses that ordinary people can use to make sense of time?

Rashid: Right. I feel like we humans need a few ways to understand ourselves better. And even though it’s not directly related to physics, Ian, this theory called the social clock—which Bernice Neugarten, a social psychologist, came up with in the 1960s—can help explain that feeling of pressure that we can feel: that we should be hitting certain social markers at different stages of our life, at different ages specifically.

Bogost: Okay.

Rashid: Obviously the big things—marriage, having children—but I was thinking about how those are norms dictated by society, right? But let’s say you’re someone who was raised with two cultures. Then the social clock can have sort of different terms, depending on which society or cultural norms you’re trying to fit into. So.

Bogost: It’s like keeping track of different time zones; you have to keep track of different social clocks.

Rashid: Exactly; exactly.

Bogost: If you think about the social clock not as a set of hard-and-fast rules or even cultural rules, but as something more like that lens—like the way that Janna thinks about black holes, like she’s going to look at time through the lens of the black hole—you can look at your own personal time through the lens of a particular social clock.

Bogost: And that could be an American one, or it could be a different one. And there’s less pressure, perhaps.

Rashid: But it can start to make the social clock feel as chaotic as time itself. From like one line moving chronologically through all these different life changes and events into this sort of wave of unpredictability. But maybe that leaves more room for the unexpected, and for serendipity too.

___

Bogost: So Janna, how much time do we have? Like, is time infinite?

Levin: It’s a really difficult question. I don’t know if space is infinite, either. We know it has a finite past. We can’t think of time as outside of the universe anymore. We can only think of time as a quality of the universe. Or it could be that the universe just expands and, uh, expands and expands, until essentially each particle is so far away from every other that there’s really no meaning to the passage of time anymore. How would you even know time has passed? To know time has passed, I have to experience some change.

Levin: It could be a change just in my thoughts. It could be an accumulation of heartbeats. Or it could be a tick on a clock. But all of those things require more than a single particle floating alone in the universe. And, in fact, if I were to show you this as a movie—if I were to show you a movie of a single particle—you would have no idea if the movie was running fast or slow, if it was true to time, whatever that could possibly mean. You would not have any scientific way of measuring the passage of time.

Bogost: Janna, you mentioned change. Is that all time really is? Just change?

Levin: We do, yes, measure time through change. If I were to—classic example—take this glass of water I have here and smash it to the floor and film this for you, you would absolutely believe the movie had run forward in time. Because you know that individual pieces of glass everywhere and water splashed everywhere: That’s the logical way things unfold. They don’t—if I were to show you the movie running backward—reassemble into a seamless glass with water inside it, naturally. That’s not something we see.

Levin: What we do see is: We see change in the direction of greater disorder. We do not see change in the direction of increased order. And so that’s also part of the Arrow of Time conversation.

If I were to show you movies, you’re always going to be able to guess that one’s running forward in time if you see things going toward greater disorder, like smashing apart. More disordered. And you’re always going to know they’re running backward if you see things perfectly reassembling.

Bogost: Huh.

Levin: So we do seem to measure the passage of time as tightly correlated with the increase in disorder.

Bogost: Janna, this is making me feel a little more at peace with the chaos in my own life, I think. But it reminds me of the fact that, you know, time feels different at different times. Like, a long flight can feel really slow—but then the vacation that you’re flying to goes by really quickly. Is there a physical reason why time feels different, or is that a psychological thing?

Levin: I think one of the explanations could be this one of disorder—and a lot of people will cite this—that when there is a lot of change relative to your overall experience psychologically, you will consider that to be time moving more quickly.

Levin: If you’re a child and you’re having an experience, your overall body of experience is so small that actually, psychologically, your perception of time is kind of slower. And as you get older, that same experience you might share with a child, seems to you that time is passing faster—because your overall body of experience is larger relative to the amount of change you’re perceiving.

Bogost: Do you find yourself using your knowledge of the physics of change in your day-to-day life? Like, does it make you feel better during a busy week that, oh, there’s just a lot of change happening right now?

Levin: It can, but it can also remind me not to have such fractured attention.

Bogost: Huh.

Levin: Because I think it can feel like life just flies by. And more considered attention, I do think, elongates—at least for me—that experience of a stillness, or being in the moment, or a slower passage of life.

Levin: But I have to say I’m an incredibly busy person. I have a real problem with that. [Laughter.] I don’t wanna pretend like I’m the Buddha here. And I do find I’m always thinking about the future, which is, you know, the proverbial saying not to do. Be in the moment.

___

Bogost: Becca, sorry to get morbid here for a second.

Rashid: Oh!

Bogost: But like, the idea of living in the moment—it makes me think about the moment when all your moments end, you know.

Rashid: Oh no.

Bogost: And if you read about the things that people say on their deathbeds at the end of their lives, a lot of those sentiments have to do with regret. With things that those people are happy that they did, or things they wish they’d done.

A few years ago in a story for The Atlantic, the writer Michael Erard explained how the dying often use these metaphors of travel to talk about their impending deaths: like, just trying to make sense of what’s happening to them.

Rashid: Wow.

Bogost: Yeah. Oh, the sentiment, like, “If I could just find the map, I’d know where to go next.” And the way I understand that sentiment, is that, like, even at the end of life—when you know there’s no more moments left, and there’s no choice but to face the forward flow of time into oblivion—people still haven’t fully come to terms with it. They’re still yearning to go back, to make changes. Or take comfort in the fact that they can’t go back and make changes, but they recognize that pull or that tension, you know?

Rashid: I mean, my own sort of fascination with the social-clock stuff, I think, came from a similar yearning to go back and turn back the clock and make the changes to my life that would, you know, put me in line with what I should have done.

And that is the scary time thing; right, Ian? We’re all coping with it in different ways. Realizing that no action—no sort of doing anything can turn back the clock. No mental tricks can bring that time back.

Rashid: How is it that we have to approach time with this forward-looking sort of optimistic approach, when almost everything else we do involves going back, to some capacity? Editing an email before we send it; revising, like, a text. You know, we can kind of do everything forward and backward to elicit a different result.

Bogost: People think they’ve gotten used to the undo key, right? There’s a sense that you should be able to undo anything. Like, we can redo it. I can Control-Z my life.

Rashid: Totally. You know, I think about the time I must have lost with my parents when I was a teenager, just, you know, dreaming about the day I’d move out. [Laughter.] Time is just this sort of train I feel like I’m on, that’s moving along, you know, without my consent. And I just have to be okay with that.

Bogost: That’s what Janna is saying. You’re on the train, Becca. It’s like the constant tragedy of time—that you from 10 years ago will never return. Neither will you from yesterday.

Bogost: But it’s also, like, the great comfort of time. Time allows change to happen. It allows you to change.

___

Levin: I very much feel part of a vast ecosystem going back to the Big Bang. I really remember learning that. And I remember being floored at the idea that there are atoms in my body that are primordial. And of course, many people say we’re made of stardust. And some of that primordial material went through stars and had to be cast back out in the universe. And are in my body, right now—from a star.

Bogost: Uh huh.

Levin: And I know that that’s something lots of people know now and talk about. But there are times where, yes, I can suspend the feeling of that being just an intellectual fact and actually, uh, feel a real sense of comfort that there will be a future where we will all be part of that larger ecosystem again.

Bogost: Okay, well, speaking of being part of that larger ecosystem: I mean, it’s almost like a euphemism for a difficult topic that we nevertheless have to talk about. Which is that, you know, if time is change, that part of the change that we experience as human beings is death. Like, we’re gonna die someday.

Bogost: Or even before that, you know: My kids will grow up and leave the house, and they won’t be around anymore. Do physicists have something to say about that? About how humankind can grapple with our minor role in the universe? And you’re kind of touching on that with your own personal experience.

Bogost: But is there something in physics that gives us clues about how to live—without, you know, checking out or without falling into existential despair?

Levin: That’s a very difficult question, but I have already left behind a part of myself that will never exist again. There will never be 7-year-old me again.

Bogost: Uh huh.

Levin: There might be some deep sense in which that does exist: 7-year-old me. It’s just not one of the movie frames I can make my way back to.

There are all these deaths along the way. I have children, and they’ll never be babies again. I will never hold my little babies. And I think that when we kind of see it that way, and we begin to ask, “What does it mean to be me?”

I left so much of that behind. Am I still the same person? I mean, these are philosophical questions. I think you’re wondering: What does a physicist have to say about that?

I think it’s really going to sound quite difficult, but the physicist is likely to go as far as to say, there really is no self. You are a collection of quantum particles and interactions, and they change. And we see this all the time. I certainly could take a chemical that would completely change my chemistry and completely change my personality. In what sense am I still me?

Levin: I could have an injury to my brain, and the tissue is reoriented and reconfigured. In what sense is that still me? And in what sense was it ever me? We are just a collection of particles. And one day we will go back into the galaxy.

Bogost: So what, then, is the purpose or value of your and my time on Earth, in that context?

Levin: Well, this is back to taking that astronomical view of the Earth and why people are so stirred by things like, uh, the International Space Station taking a photograph of the Earth rising, “Earthrise.” I believe it helps us to understand that so much that we take so seriously is completely devoid of any meaning.

Levin: And most of all: This kind of notion of our differences, I think, has been kind of historically catastrophic. To think of all of us in this way can be transcendent, and it can be quite unifying. And I think it’s okay to still say, I really love the color green, even if I believe it’s only in my mind. I can live with that. I can sit with that.

Bogost: Janna, I have one last question for you. In a sentence, how do you define time?

Levin: [Laughter.] One last question that people have been wringing their hands over for centuries to come and will for centuries to come. [Laughter.] I, if forced, would say, “To the best of my present understanding, time is a measure of change.” And I’m very unsatisfied with that answer. I almost should be more rebellious and say, “I can’t do that, and I don’t want to do that.” Because if I were to do that, I’d be saying something so tricky.

Levin: So, for instance, it would be very easy for me to argue with that statement and say, “Well now, what do you mean, change?” Change happens over time. We’re caught in a little loop. I could say something like, “Time is a dimension.” But it’s a dimension that has an arrow, where you’re forced to always move in a particular direction.

Levin: So it’s a dimension just like north, south, east, west. Up and down. Spatial dimension. But it has this weird restriction that I can only move in one direction in that dimension. Why does it have the Arrow of Time? Well, that is a hotly debated topic that will continue to go on.

Levin: But some scientists, some cosmologists, feel a lot more comfortable now saying things like, “Oh, that’s just because in the early universe things were in a very ordered state. And so the only place it can go is to become more and more disordered.” And so time passes. [Laughter.]

If the universe began in a maximally disordered state, just a blender of everything was maximally randomized, that there would be no passage of time. There also wouldn’t be galaxies or people, or radio shows, or thoughts. So some people feel very confident that it’s a cosmological question. The question is, “Why did the universe begin in such an ordered state?” And that’s the big mystery.

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Rashid: That’s all for this episode of How to Keep Time. This episode was hosted by Ian Bogost and me, Becca Rashid. I also produce the show. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of our music. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

___

Bogost: Becca, I was going to tell you a joke about time travel, but you didn’t like it.

Rashid: What? I didn’t… I don’t?

Bogost: [Laughter.]

Rashid: [Laughter.] I don’t get the joke... Oh, I get it, I get it, I get it!

What Is Rest, Anyway?

2024-01-01T05:00:00-05:00

Between making time for work, family, friends, exercise, chores, shopping—the list goes on and on—it can feel like a huge accomplishment to just take a few minutes to read a book or watch TV before bed. All that busyness can lead to poor sleep quality when we finally do get to put our head down.

How does our relationship with rest affect our ability to gain real benefits from it? And how can we use our free time to rest in a culture that often moralizes rest as laziness? Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of several books on rest and director of global programs at 4 Day Week Global, explains what rest is and how anyone can start doing it more effectively.

Listen to the conversation here:

Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Ian Bogost: You know, Becca, even though I rest in the sense of going sideways and unconscious at night, I don’t feel like I rest enough. Or maybe that I don’t rest properly. I mean, maybe I don’t even know what rest is, even.

Becca Rashid: Same for me. I feel like between sleep and work, those breaks that I need have never really been incorporated in my life.

Bogost: You know, I was thinking about it, Becca: Rest is really a cornerstone concept in Western civilization. Like, it’s in the Bible. Right at the start of Genesis, there’s supposed to be a Sabbath—a day of rest, a break from making and using to doing something else. And what is that something else? You know, in the religious sense, it’s a time for worship, for God. And in that sense, it’s not like “rest” is a break, exactly. It’s more like a structure, like an organizing principle. Like: Here’s a thing you need in order to make the rest of your life operate.

Rashid: I mean, the mainstream sort of American Protestant work ethic implies that rest needs to be more than just rest. You know, it’s working toward other must-dos. The day of Sabbath is for rest and worship, going to church, serving the community, serving your family. Right?

And if we’re literally talking about sleep as rest, that’s one thing. And many of us probably wish we could find more hours. And studies show only a third of Americans report feeling they got quality sleep.

Bogost: Not surprising.

Rashid: Not surprising at all, with younger adults and women more likely than others to report trouble sleeping. Those groups are actually more affected by their quality of sleep, you know, giving ourselves opportunities to rest. I’m curious about whether we have to justify it to ourselves when we rest as something we deserve instead of something we need.

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Rashid: Welcome to How to Keep Time. I’m Becca Rashid, co-host and producer of the show.

Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

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Pang: At least a space is opening up for thinking differently about the relationship between work and time and productivity, and the place that rest and leisure can have in it.

Bogost: So Becca, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is sort of rest-obsessed. He’s written a few books about the topic, and one is literally called Rest.

Pang: I’m Alex Pang. I run programs and consulting at 4 Day Week Global.

Bogost: But of course, he himself is very productive—writing all these books and talking about them and consulting. And he’s not only got experience, studying this stuff, but living it or trying to.

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Bogost: What got you interested in rest?

Pang: I had been interested in the psychology of creativity, and what it is that helps people have insights and sort of interesting ideas.

You know, when you do that work, you really spend a lot of time talking about actually how people are working. Right? You get into the mechanics of their labor and read their notebooks, and that sort of thing. And there are parts of their lives that influence creativity. And one of them is what people do with their leisure time—or with that time that gives your kind of creative subconscious an opportunity to work on problems, even while your conscious mind is elsewhere. And for a long time, you know, we thought of that as unpredictable, because very often it feels that way.

But you know, in the last 20 or so years, there’s been work in neuroscience and psychology that’s helped us better understand what goes on in our minds and our brains when we have those ideas and how certain kinds of rest sort of create a fertile ground for sort of insight and inspiration.

Bogost: So you came to “rest through creativity” in your research on creativity. Were there particular figures? Did you have, like, a role model for creativity and rest that inspired you?

Pang: If I had to choose one, it would probably be Charles Darwin. Partly because, you know, he is a monumentally important figure in the art of history and the history of science.

Bogost: I have heard that.

Pang: Also because he’s someone whose life is exquisitely well documented, right?

Pang: The Cambridge archive has 14,000 letters to and from him, and we can reconstruct with a pretty amazing degree of precision where he was, what he was doing, his daily schedule—and connect that to his creative work. Charles Darwin would work for a couple hours and then putter around in the garden, work some more, and then go on a long walk.

What’s important there is that it means that you are, in a sense, using two sets of creative muscles. There’s your conscious mind—where you’re sort of working to solve problems—but then your unconscious is able to take over and continue thinking about things, you know, often in new ways and exploring sort of new connections or avenues.

Bogost: What are some of the ways that you’ve seen people culturally understanding rest and how it works? You know, especially how it’s different from their initial conception that “rest” means sleeping, or something along those lines.

Pang: One important thing is recognizing rest as exercise and serious hobbies.

Bogost: It’s somewhat an un-intuitive idea of rest that it’s not necessarily related to idleness or laziness. Like, what is rest actually? Maybe that’s the question I want to ask you.

Pang: Yeah. So I think rest is just the time you spend recharging the mental and physical batteries that you spend down working. And, you know, we often think of rest as being an entirely kind of passive thing, right? It happens on a couch, with a bag of snacks in one hand and a remote in the other. But one of the things that working on this taught me was that actually, the most restorative kinds of rest often are more active and more physical. That exercise, hobbies: These are things that can be a source of greater restoration. You know, both in the immediate run—in terms of recharging our batteries for the afternoon—and sort of maintaining creative wellsprings over the course of our entire lives.

Bogost: So Alex, tell me more about what you mean here. What happens when we rest? Like, what are the mechanics of rest?

Pang: Rest is where an awful lot of, sort of, the body’s maintenance work [is done]. The consolidation of memories. You know, the sort of literal cleaning out of bad stuff that builds up on our brain. Brain plaque, and that sort of thing

Bogost: Brain plaque?

Pang: Yeah. So when you sleep, there’s the brain. Of course it has, you know, the neurons and all the cool stuff that fires up in an MRI machine and makes those pretty colors. But there’s also a second system that sort of does the hard maintenance work of feeding the brain, but also taking away toxins and things that build up in it. And that system is kind of dormant during the day when you’re really active.

Pang: But when you sleep, it lights up, activates, and sort of does its thing. And so the theory is that, you know, one of the reasons that bad sleep is associated with things like dementia or later-life cognitive issues is that the system hasn’t had an opportunity over time to do the kind of repair and maintenance work that it would if you were better rested.

Bogost: Brain plaque. I can’t wait to tell my daughter that sleep is like going to the brain dentist.

Pang: There you go.

Bogost: Thank you for that gift.

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Bogost: You know, Becca, we tend to treat rest as an indulgence. And that doesn’t seem right. Like, when I think about my friends or my colleagues, everyone seems to be talking all the time about wanting a break: “Ah, you know, if I can only get a break.” But then when they get one, they use it mostly just to recuperate: to, like, recover from all that work. And that kind of rest—that sort of recuperative rest, recovering from, your day or your week or whatever—okay, fine. You know, that seems necessary.

But also that seems kind of bad: culturally, socially, morally even. I hope “rest” is more than that. Like, you know: Good rest would let you partake of your life, and to spend time in that life. It would be restorative rather than just recuperative. Right?

Rashid: Right. And the recuperative rest—I mean, I still have the tendency to make rest into something I must do rather than something I need or my body needs. It’s never been rest for rest’s sake; it’s always been something I have to do.

Rashid: Yes, and especially during the workday. I mean—you know this, Ian—I don’t drink water.

Bogost: This is an ongoing, known problem. Becca. Yes, we’re trying to get you to hydrate.

Rashid: We’re getting better at it. Like, the little things: to just get up from my desk, take a break, go get some water. Like the most basic thing, rest at work feels so inappropriate in a way. Even knowing when I need the rest—or knowing how to do it in a way that feels genuinely restorative and not just to keep working.

___

So studies tell us that the average knowledge worker loses about two hours a day to overly long meetings. To, you know, inefficiencies or distractions caused by technologies or poor processes.

Bogost: I am shocked to hear this. [Laughter.] It totally sounds normal.

Pang: And so you can get a handle on those three things: meetings, technology, and distractions. You can actually go a long way. And so that means doing things like having better meeting discipline around the length of meetings, agendas—all that stuff that we all know we ought to do, but all too rarely don’t. It also means, very often, redesigning the workday to be more conscious about how you spend your time and having better boundaries between, say, deep focused work versus podcast recordings versus time with clients.

Pang: And then finally, also thinking about how you can use your technology in two ways. First of all, to eliminate distractions, number one. And so that involves things like setting up particular times of day when you’re checking email, but staying off of it for the rest of the time. And then, second: looking for ways in which you can kind of augment your intelligence or your capacity to do your most interesting work. And so that’s doing things like, you know, using AI research assistants or other kinds of tools to help you be more effective at the stuff you love best.

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Bogost: What I take away from that, Becca, is the idea that, in America, the purpose of work is to be at work, not to do work. You know, that’s a reasonable criticism, right?

That we’re kind of cosplaying work, rather than actually being effective. Maybe we would be more effective—both in our work lives and our rest lives—if we took those breaks that appear naturally, like that time that appears when a meeting ends early. Like, you don’t need to fill that up with “We’ll just sit here in the meeting because it was scheduled,” or “You know, I’ll just do more email now.” You could just use it for nothing, or for those other activities that would rejuvenate you—like, you could take a walk or procure your favorite diet cola. Just something to give yourself a sort of sense of being in the world. Yeah. Not just to take care of yourself and your body—although that’s part of it—but also to punctuate the work experience so that you can then move on to the next task.

Rashid: Interesting. I think some of that performative pressure makes it easier to feel overworked, because the labor goes beyond just doing your job, completing tasks—but also upkeep some image of a constantly occupied, working person.

Some recent data shows that about 59 percent of American workers are at least moderately burnt out, which is even more than at the peak of the pandemic.

And, employee engagement continues to decline, even though we have things like sabbaticals and things that would ideally prevent burnout; that’s not available across most professions. And most people, again, only take them after they’ve felt overworked or without rest for decades.

Bogost: When it’s too late.

Rashid: You know, decades.

Bogost: Yeah; I mean, there’s got to be some sort of white space between getting up from your desk to get some water and taking a sabbatical for a year, right?

___

Bogost: Is the only—or the main—purpose of rest to prepare for more work?

Pang: No. And I think it can help us have more productive lives and better ideas, gives us permission to rest in ways that, you know, we might not otherwise. But, you know, there is a very long history across pretty much all cultures and religious traditions about things like the spiritual value of rest, right?

Sort of the idea that there are connections that we can make—or things we can understand about ourselves, our place in the world, the nature of our lives—that only come when we’re resting. Or, you know, when we’re still.

Bogost: Alex, I want to ask you now about sabbaticals. And I wonder if you can start by just explaining to our listeners what a sabbatical is.

Pang: A sabbatical is a period of time with academics—you know, a semester or a year where you take off and often go somewhere else physically. And you are either learning some new set of skills or working on some other kind of, you know, professional development project, right? Another book. I think that the only bad sabbatical is the one that you don’t take.

Bogost: So, what’s the difference between a sabbatical and a vacation? Some of what you’re describing sounds like you take time off; you know, you go somewhere else, or you don’t. And I don’t imagine that many of our listeners want to spend that time recharging for work.

Pang: Functionally, the first difference is that with sabbaticals, you have at least the kind of outline of a plan of something new that you want to learn, or something else that you want to do. Vacations—you don’t go into it with the assumption that you will master some new sort of lab procedure, or, you know, finish that big book that’s been on your desk.

Pang: But I think that in both cases that there can be a recharge. But also, you know: great unexpected insights or new ideas that you can have because you give yourself the time to get away and to have a break.

Bogost: What’s an example of one of those discoveries or new ideas that you’ve seen from sabbaticals?

Pang: My favorite one is Lin-Manuel Miranda. You know, he talks about how he had worked on In the Heights for seven or eight years or so, pretty much nonstop. And he was finally convinced to take a vacation, and that’s when he took along a copy of the Alexander Hamilton biography.

Pang: And he said, “As soon as I gave my mind a break from In the Heights, Hamilton jumped into it.” And something like 20 percent of startups have their origins not when the [founders are] in the lab, or in front of the whiteboard, but when they’re on the beach or on the hiking trail.

Scaling out just a little bit more: People who are both more satisfied in their jobs and do better jobs are our folks who have better boundaries around not working nights and weekends, and also have other things in their lives—whether it’s hobbies or families—that can occupy them.

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Rashid: You know Ian, I wonder if what’s made it hard to make rest a habit in my life is the fact that the self-care rituals feel so separate from anything I would naturally do to rest. Like: The sort of cultural depictions of what rest should look like, at least for women, are like makeup tutorials, putting on a face mask and reading a book, or taking a bubble bath. Or whatever social media–induced ritual. But it never really becomes a habit.

Or the thing I naturally go to for rest, versus when I’m not even thinking about it—versus I’ll go sit down at my piano keyboard or pick up my guitar and maybe an hour or two goes by. But it just requires less effort, you know?

Bogost: Interesting; yeah, I mean the habit-changing is a big part of this. Becca, what I hear Alex saying is that to rest effectively, you need to fill that time with meaningful activities. Changing habits is really hard.

Bogost: Do you know this guy James Clear?

Rashid: The guy who wrote Atomic Habits, yes.

Bogost: Atomic Habits: sort of the king of habit-building. You know, millions and millions of copies of this book sold. So certainly there’s something that people find useful in it. And he’s got a lot of tips—but one of them that I find really interesting is that for habits to take, they have to reflect your identity more than your goals.

Rashid: Huh.

Bogost: When you think about habit change, it’s not just like, “Here’s what I want to do; these are the outcomes that I want.” But: “This is the person I want to be”—you know, like a better friend, a more voracious reader. Uh, a more hydrated individual.

Rashid: [Chuckle.] Right.

I’m normally sort of averse to being told how to rest in the “right way,” and I’m not alone. I’ve noticed certain trends online, especially among teenagers—there’s a certain type of rebellion against all of these self-care rules of how to rest, right? You know, there’s this thing called “bed rotting,” which has fascinated me, where teens are, yes, bed rotting.

Bogost: That doesn’t sound good, Becca.

Rashid: It’s fine. The teenagers are fine, but they’re just—

Bogost: —Okay—

Rashid: —maybe they’re doing nothing in bed. You know, scrolling on their phones.

Bogost: I see; okay.

Rashid: All weekend. And that’s sort of the activity.

Bogost: Right, right. But it’s a revolt against the productive rest time, where they’re supposed to be, you know, doing something, doing something else. Having a hobby or a side hustle or a skincare routine.

Rashid: Right. It fascinates me. I mean, I see it as a sort of reclaiming of rest for truly purposeless, like, indulgent leisure.

Bogost: Well, it gets back to these ideas of like: What are the conditions under which rest is even possible? Good rest, restorative rest—like the kind that we’re after. So like, for teenagers: The American Academy of Pediatrics has been calling for later start times for school, especially for high school, for years now. At least since 2014, and long before that, I think. Because teenagers are chronically sleep deprived if they have to wake up at 6 to get to school by 7:30—partly because they go to bed late. Hormonal change, and other sorts of things. But that’s just a minimum requirement to operate; just getting enough sleep. It’s not the end of the line when it comes to rest.

Rashid: So it sounds to me, Ian, to find the time for restorative rest—let alone know what that looks like for you—requires a lot of deprogramming of things that we’ve learned from, you know, our high school age. Of not having enough sleep as a teenager. And, you know, moving toward a place where rest is something that we know how to do, we don’t feel guilty about, and we can actually enjoy, is kind of the goal, right?

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Bogost: One of the cases for focus work that you make is early rising—um, getting up early. And I’m going to tell you, Alex, I do not like getting up in the morning. So you’re going to have to sell me on this one.

Pang: First of all, at a practical basis, nobody else is up early. If you don’t like getting up, you’re not going to waste that time. I am less likely to, you know, self-distract at 5 a.m.

Pang: There’s a lovely study that found night owls doing things in the early morning—or early birds working on problems late at night—tend to come up with slightly more creative solutions in those periods.

Bogost: So, Alex, are you saying that this is almost like muscle confusion or something? That mixing it up with your default chronotype—the way that you would typically spend your time—can lead you to use that time more restfully?

Pang: That’s a great way to put it. I think that the one other thing I would add is that this is something that really only works if you practice it and if you prepare. So, prepare in the sense that one of the things that successful early risers will often do is set up everything they’re going to do the night before. Like, you know, write down the couple of things that they’re going to work on; the questions that they’re going to answer.

Pang: So when you are up at what, 5 a.m., you don’t have to make choices about what you’re going to work on, right? That’s already decided. In advance.

Bogost: That makes sense, but do people sometimes take changes in their habits with time too far? Like, I saw this video of a young woman who wakes up at 3:50 in the morning to go to the gym, and it feels kind of like a competition for, you know, effectiveness. “Look how much of the day I’m squeezing.”

Pang: Right. You know, I think that we all have to experiment and figure out what works best for us. I’m someone who can write well in the early morning, but those times when I have gone to the gym or, you know, worked out with my kids who were both athletes in the early morning, I’ve slept the whole rest of the day.

Pang: So it just completely wipes me out. And I think that some people see it merely as a way of stretching out the number of hours that you’re going to work, rather than appreciating that, you know, there really is something about the very early hours of the day that feels different.

Pang: I think there’s a real reason why in monasteries—whether Catholic or Buddhist or what have you—that some of the services are held at 4 or 5 a.m. There is a quality to that time that if you sort of respect and work with, can deliver great benefits to you.

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Rashid: So, Ian, I’m sure you’ve heard of flow state.

Bogost: Oh.

Rashid: You know, that feeling of deep concentration that momentarily allows you to feel almost without a sense of time.

Bogost: And it’s characterized by this sense of, like, an alignment of your abilities and the challenges that are presented to you. And that produces this sense of self confidence, and you operate in this almost-virtuosic, automated way, like an athlete in competition.

Rashid: I’m no athlete, but I am interested in how just being in that mindset makes us feel confident. I mean, are you an athlete? Do you have any favorite flow state–type activities?

Bogost: I’m a couch athlete.

Rashid: Okay.

Bogost: Um, napping athlete. No, I mean—to be honest, Becca, I have always been a little suspicious of “flow.” I’m not sure that people should expect to have the ability and the opportunity to, like, operate their lives among clear goals and direct feedback where their capacities perfectly match the circumstances of their tasks and all of that.

Bogost: Like, I’m not sure that they should expect that to happen very often.

Rashid: Interesting.

Bogost: It’s like: Complete absorption is amazing and delightful when it happens. And I don’t feel it very often, you know? Like, I feel it when I’m doing woodworking or Atari programming, but I don’t feel that way when I’m doing the things at which I’m supposedly expert—you know, like when I’m writing or mowing the lawn or something. Those are not flow experiences to me. The time that I spend mowing lawns or hanging out with friends—I don’t want to see them as opportunities to maximize performance.

Rashid: Your mindset in your free time. Yes.

Bogost: Yeah; like, it seems like a surefire way to set myself up for disappointment and to experience less restful time than I would have otherwise. Like, am I getting better at happy hour? You know, that’s just kind of weird.

Rashid: It reminded me of something that felt very akin to flow state—but I would never think about it in those terms—is growing up, I drank a lot of tea with my family.

Tea-drinking rituals are sort of a big thing in Bangladeshi culture. And tea time was the one focused time in the day, now that I look back on it—but it wasn’t with the intention to focus.

Rashid: So, the only task in those few hours was to make the tea, or what we call in Bangla, cha. And the break was really just for conversation, or in Bengali what we call adda, and nothing else. And, you know, the whole afternoon would go by; there wasn’t even this framing. There wasn’t even the mindset to get anything out of it.

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Pang: You know, I think the good news about flow is that it’s not something that you’ve got to travel to a mountaintop in order to find. It is something that we can achieve through activities closer to home, or require less investment and less time.

So this is why gardening is one terrific, highly localized example of something that is often deeply engaging. It’s physical, and unless you’re a gardener, it’s probably pretty different from your day job. And offers, you know, opportunities for that sort of immersion in another kind of way of being that can be deeply satisfying—whether it is rock climbing or gardening or playing chess or being musicians, or any number of other things.

Bogost: That makes a lot of sense, Alex, definitely. The idea that doing something different from your day job or your normal practice.

I want to ask you, Alex, about social perception as it relates to the topics that we’ve been discussing around rest and time use. Because it just strikes me that there is this aversion that we have—as Americans in particular—of, you know, laziness. And, like, the person who isn’t working hard.

Pang: It certainly has made it harder to take rest seriously and to sort of carve out a space for it. Both as individuals or within organizations.

We are at a point, I think, where after the pandemic—with people both having to reinvent how they work and having time to rethink the place of work in their lives—a space is opening up for thinking differently about the relationship between work and time and productivity, and the place that rest and leisure can have in it.

The question is how effective or successful we’re going to be at sort of bringing more rest in there.

Pang: But these days, it is common knowledge that some of the most important muscle-building—you know, the consolidation of memories, muscle memory—that doesn’t happen while you’re practicing. It happens while you’re resting. And sports teams now hire sleep psychologists and experts to figure out when you should have downtime.

Pang: And I think that if people for whom being able to be just a little bit more accurate in their three-pointers—or to be a hundredth of a second faster—have recognized the value of rest, then that serves as a really good model, an inspiration, for all the rest of us.

Bogost: Alex, how do you rest?

Pang: So, I’ve become a big fan of naps in the afternoon rather than, you know, one more cup of coffee. When I’m working on a book, I’ll get up super early and write for a couple hours before I take the dogs out for a walk. And the other thing is that in terms of other serious hobbies, I inherited a camera from my dad. And for me, going out and taking pictures—doing photography—is an opportunity to observe the world in a more thoughtful, mindful way. To really, very consciously, slow down to pay attention to what I’m doing. And to try to literally see the world a little bit more clearly.

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Rashid: So Ian, I am realizing—from everything that Alex taught us—that time for rest doesn’t mean that we’re immediately going to know how to do it. It’s going to require a new kind of habit formation, right? Like, we have to learn how to relax. How to restore ourselves in a way that does feel active and isn’t just in this habitual cycle of, you know, “I’m going to spend my whole day at work.” Maybe I go to the gym before, and after that, I need to eat to survive.

Bogost: Yeah. He tells us he likes to nap. But that’s not the end; that’s just the start of the restful life. It would be a huge mistake to wait until retirement, if indeed it ever comes, in order to start.

Rashid: And there’s a way that we have to be conscious about when relaxation starts to feel truly like you’re not engaged with your life in the way that you want to be. Just because it’s off time doesn’t mean that you’re not in your life anymore. You’re not spending your time the way you actually want. It doesn’t mean you have to lay—what did you say?—sideways and be unconscious.

Rashid: There’s a different kind of restorative rest when I go over to a friend’s house and play with her kids, and I see her journey as a parent. I’m, like, building Legos with a three-year-old and, you know, chasing them around the house as a dragon. Things I normally don’t get to do.

Bogost: Yeah, if your rest time is time that you invest in actively doing something—

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: —your usual affair, then that’s a sign that you’re on the right track.

___

Bogost: That’s all for this episode of How to Keep Time. This episode was hosted by me, Ian Bogost, and Becca Rashid. Becca also produces the show. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smirciak. Rob also composed some of our music. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

___

Rashid: The only time I really reach flow state, though, is, like, when I’m eating.

Bogost: That’s perfect. Yeah. Noodles. It’s all about the noodles.

Rashid: I’m a big noodle person as well.

Bogost: I like flow when it applies to ramen.

Click here to listen to additional episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Time to Break Up With Your 9-to-5

2023-12-18T05:00:00-05:00

Before laptops allowed us to take the office home and smartphones could light up with notifications at any hour, work time and “life” time had clearer boundaries. Today, work is not done exclusively in the workplace, and that makes it harder to leave work at work.

Co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost examine the habits that shrink our available time, and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, a professor of Latin American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, offers his reflections on American culture and shares suggestions for how to use the time we do have, for life.

Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Ian Bogost: So Becca, many years ago I was driving home from work, and I had a terrible day. I don’t remember why, but I was just cheesed off. And I was, like, white-knuckling my steering wheel, you know, still angry from whatever had happened. As I was driving, I saw a colleague of mine from work walking to the train to go home.

Becca Rashid: Uh huh.

Bogost: And he was just kind of sauntering down the street. And I noticed that he was carrying a book, like, as if it were a lunchbox almost. He was very casually holding this book at his side.

And he had nothing else, not a bag or a backpack or anything. And I remember looking at him and thinking, Oh man, he has it figured out—like, “What is wrong with me that that’s not how I’m behaving, now that my workday is over?”

Rashid: He has it figured out because he’s holding a book?

___

Bogost: Well, the interpretation I had of what was going to happen to him next is that: He had left work, his workday was over, and he was going to get on the train and read his book and go home. And, you know, make dinner, do whatever he did in his evening routine. It just somehow came naturally to him to leave the office and begin the process of not being at work.

In a technical sense, I could do whatever I wanted with my leisure time once I’d left work, but there was something preventing me from really having control over that time.

___

Rashid: Welcome to How to Keep Time. I’m Becca Rashid, co-host and producer of the show.

Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

___

Rashid: So Ian, your book story makes me think of how many of us who can’t leave our work at the door, even if you are someone who successfully left work behind with the book on the train. And there’s just this specific dread when you feel like your entire day, and weeks, and potentially your life will be expended at work.

Rashid: I wanted to quickly play this clip for you, of a young woman I saw on TikTok talking about how all her hours in a day go to work. And she’s sitting on the couch, she’s in her sweats, and talking about her very first 9-to-5 job, and she starts shedding a few tears.

TikToker: I know it could be worse. I know I could be working longer, but like: I literally get off, it’s pitch black. Like, I don’t have energy. How do you have friends? Like, how do you have time for, like, dating? Like: I don’t have time for anything, and I’m like so stressed out and—but, like, am I so dramatic? It’s fine.

Bogost: Oh wow; I mean, yeah, she’s got it, doesn’t she? I really empathize with this girl. [Laughter.] I mean, I’m in a very different life stage, but even the situation this young woman is describing—it’s not really new.

Nor is it confined to her generation or anything. It’s just, she’s got fresh eyes on it. Like, what the heck, my whole entire day—my whole life—seems to be taken up by work (or work-related activities, like commuting), and there’s no life for me left. That’s what she’s saying.

Rashid: And the obvious solution would be working less, and winning more time back for yourself. But that seems pretty unlikely as the only solution.

___

Bogost: Yeah, but what if you could live more for yourself even when you’re at work? Rather than seeing that time as totally lost to your boss or your company, as time that’s not yours—even though you’re there, you’re there at work, in your body while it all happens to you.

Rashid: And I do think in her stating it so plainly, it forces us to sort of revisit our mainstream approach to this binary we create between work and life, which is obviously bothering her.

Bogost: Thinking of your work time as something that isn’t yours—like it’s some ghost, other personality—that’s the problem that has to be solved in some way.

Rashid: And it forces us to question whether there are maybe new ways to structure our time.

___

Ignacio Sánchez Prado: But, I also think—I mean, is a job worth not having a minute to think about yourself, you know? I don’t think so.

Rashid: So Ian, you know, maybe our conditioning to prioritize work isn’t just a thing in our heads or because we’re at the whim of our calendars.

Sánchez Prado: My name is Ignacio Sanchez Prado. I go by Nacho, which is short for Ignacio in Spanish. I’m a professor of Latin American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis who researches Mexican culture broadly.

Rashid: Depending on where you work, or the nature of your job, a lot of people’s work require you to leave your life at the door. Ian, Nacho is someone who spends time observing and studying cultural practices. And I wanted to ask him if, and how, time can be understood as a reflection of culture.

I’m wondering if our culture and social practices around our time at work can feel like more of a barrier to using our time in a more cohesive way, where that binary between work and life feels less disconnected.

___

Sánchez Prado: I think that what was surprising actually is that in the United States, people work for working, and I think that one thing that I want to make clear because I don’t want to create this narrative where Americans are hard working and Mexicans are leisure centered. Mexicans work very hard.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: And are very productive in Mexico, in the office culture, and the university culture. But I don’t think the notion that you are defined by your employment is as strong.

Rashid: Nacho, could you tell me about how that work and leisure-time balance is in Mexico?

Sánchez Prado: So people see their job as a means to an end, and the end is their family life, their social life, their leisure, their hobbies. I think the difference is not the hard working, but also the understanding that putting limits to your work is a right. And if you don’t, you’re just giving up your rights.

I think that leads for people to—I mean, I have friends who drop work at the time that the work is done, and they don’t care if it’s done or not. Or people don’t really think that they should be spending their weekends answering emails. I think that if you have the privilege to access employment, there’s no job that is worth destroying your mind or your life.

___

Sánchez Prado: My mom didn’t know how to cook, because she was a secretary; she worked six days a week, all day.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: When she comes home, she’s not going to cook—but we would go together to an eatery and eat together. Because it is possible to walk out of your apartment and have 15 places where you can go eat in the vicinity of your neighborhood. And it’s very inexpensive. And it can be a sit-down place; it can be a taco stand.

Traditional Mexican places are not necessarily designed for this kind of expeditious eating. When I came to the U.S., it’s the first time I saw a restaurant telling you that you have the table for a maximum amount of time.

Rashid: Right. You have the timed reservation.

Sánchez Prado: It’s something I had never seen before. I mean, we have reservations, but nobody tells you you have to leave at 11:30, right?

Rashid: Yeah, right.

Sánchez Prado: You leave when you want, or when they close. But nobody’s gonna come and time whether you’re using the table too much.

Rashid: Right.

Sánchez Prado: There’s a word in Spanish called sobremesa; it’s sort of the after-dinner conversation. And that is so much of a social practice that there’s a word for it, and it’s called “over table,” right? So it means that it’s right after eating on the table. It is expected that you will linger and continue conversation, rather than just get up and leave.

Rashid: Right. What’s the rush? What’s the hurry?

Sánchez Prado: Exactly.

Rashid: Yes, where in the U.S., it feels like even our productive approach to work is also when we’re eating.

Sánchez Prado: You know, it is also the fact that dinner or supper also has other social components to it. So it is common that people would go from work, maybe to meet their family, their children, maybe to meet their friends—but I also think that the culture is a little bit more gregarious,

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: That motivates people, even in work spaces, to socialize. One practice that we have, it’s going away because of fast food and stuff like that. But our lunch times are very long—they’re about two hours. Because it’s the main meal, there are various restaurants that offer multi-course meals, and people usually go from their offices to those places to eat as a group.

And the two hours of the break allow you to have more full engagement with your coworkers than a half-an-hour lunch at your desk.

Rashid: This is during the weekdays?

Sánchez Prado: This is the weekdays.

Rashid: Oh! Can you describe this meal to me? I’m so jealous.

Sánchez Prado: Yes. If it’s a working-class place, it’s called a comida corrida. So it’s like a ... I don’t know if it has a direct translation, but like a meal in sequence. You get a soup, and then you get either rice or pasta or something. And then you get a main course with a side and dessert.

Rashid: Oh, sounds so good.

Sánchez Prado: It’s not only the gastronomical practice, which is interesting on its own. But also: If you have office workers that go to a place like this in groups of four or five, sit together, and are sharing a table for an hour or two, the social engagement in that office is different than when everybody’s sitting in their cubicle and their office. But I think that the embedding of social practice in the day makes a big difference in this case, for the nine-to-five or nine-to-seven worker.

In Mexico, we have become more of a victim of the corporate culture the minute we have lost the ability to have that kind of social, gregarious lunch.

___

Bogost: Oh my gosh, Becca. I just had, yesterday, a supposedly social gregarious lunch with a friend in from out of town. And the whole time we were still, like, looking at our watches. He was like, “Oh, I want to make sure you get back for your meeting.” And I was checking to make sure I wasn’t going to be late. So it’s really difficult. We’re still at work, even when we take the time to eat that way.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: I mean, I think one of the things Nacho is pointing out is that it’s too big a burden to ask people to create that time for themselves.

Rashid: Mm hmm. Right.

Bogost: You need to make space for it, socially and culturally. Um, there has to be a kind of common understanding that, you know, hanging out with your friends or even your co-workers in a different setting is important.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: And that’s just how your day plays out, rather than, oh, How can I figure out how to finagle a way to be social with the people who are important to me?

Rashid: Right. And as Nacho was saying, this multiple-course lunch and these additional hours that people give themselves during the workday—there’s this sort of freedom they have, to go have that meal together and really enjoy it.

And you know, some of the happiest countries in the world, some of their primary metrics of their happiness include that freedom to make decisions and social support, both of which could be understood as time-related. They have the flexibility to make decisions about time, and time to invest in strengthening their relationships.

Bogost: I mean, do people in those countries just work less? Do they just have more time on their own to play with?

Rashid: Well, the three happiest countries in the world—Finland, Denmark, and Iceland—aren’t far off from the average American workweek, in terms of average hours worked. And the average American workweek, which is around 38.8 hours, according to data from 2022, is not that far off from Denmark’s average workweek, which is 33.4. Iceland’s is around 35.5, and Finland’s is 35. So it’s not so much a matter of not having enough hours in the day, which was so surprising to me.

Bogost: Which suggests that we don’t require a whole lot of additional time, necessarily, but figuring out a different way of conceptualizing that time in order to experience the kind of enjoyment and freedom that Nacho is talking about.

Rashid: Right, and even though there is a seemingly small difference in average work hours between each of those countries, that may translate into a more serious time discrepancy day to day—that does make finding that one extra hour a little harder.

___

Sánchez Prado: What I find worrisome—and I say it to my students sometimes—is that sometimes you ask people “What enriches you?,” and they don’t have an answer to that question. If you don’t have an answer to that question, I will be worried. I think that that’s a question that you have to find an answer for.

Rashid: What kind of answers do they give you, if any?

Sánchez Prado: Well, sometimes nothing, because sometimes the teachers go on TikTok, right?

Rashid: Hmm.

Sánchez Prado: I’m very addicted to social media, so I’m not gonna bring any kind of moralism to that. It’s okay if you look at Facebook, but you need to have something that is, for you, a little bit more enriching in your leisure time.

Rashid: Mmm.

Sánchez Prado: In order for you to develop a sense of value to it. I had a student that was doing crochet, even in class, and she really loved that. Sometimes they tell me, “I like to paint.”

I think that one of the culprits is universities. And private ones very particularly, because they have this structure of after-curricular social activity that is built and regulated by the university, and it takes over time of the students. So the students never develop the ability to develop that kind of meaningful leisure time on their own. They’re here all day; they live here.

Rashid: Right.

Sánchez Prado: And I think that if you graduate from that, to the world…

Rashid: Right.

Sánchez Prado: I’ve seen some of my students; just they don’t know what to do with themselves after their job is done.

It might be that some people just don’t even develop the skill to begin with. If I were to give practical advice, which I like to do sometimes, is begin by asking yourself—what kinds of things enrich you?

Rashid: Hmm.

Sánchez Prado: And then make a proactive effort to make sure that they’re a part of your day. You have to be proactive about it, in this culture.

___

Bogost: So Rashid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans have more than five hours of free leisure time per day.

Rashid: Wow.

Bogost: Do you feel like you have five?

Rashid: It does not feel like five, for sure, but I believe it.

Bogost: It does not feel like five to me either. Right. And, you know, I think the reason it doesn’t is because we don’t know what to do with those five hours of time, or however much of it we have. And so it just kind of, you know, evaporates into little pieces. Instead of using it well, it just vanishes, between our fingers.

It makes me wonder. I mean, this is kind of an impossible question to answer, but, you know, it only makes sense to talk about leisure time once you have work time to compare it to.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: And so, back before people had leisure. Leisure is essentially an invention of the Industrial Revolution. So, you know, when you would have been a peasant working the land—and your whole day’s worth of time was just taken up with subsistence from dawn to dusk, and then you couldn’t do anything anyway because it was dark—at least you kind of knew, maybe, why you were doing the things that you were doing hour to hour. Less of your time would vanish, because you had so little of it to start with. And also because you were making use of all of it.

Rashid: So you almost would prefer to know what you are going to be doing at every hour? Is there, like, a decision-making component there that makes it harder to know? Like, okay, “If this is my free time, and I just finished my work time, how do I make the decision about what to do now that it’s all mine? I can use it however I want.”

Bogost: That’s exactly it, Becca: “Okay, I’m at work. Oh, and now I’m not at work anymore. And so now I have to figure out what that means. Um, now I’m using my time for myself. And I’m not at work, so I really have to make good on the leisure time that I have. And then by the time I’ve figured out what I want to do, I’ve burned through half of it and don’t have it anymore.”

But you know when you’re a kid and even your leisure time is more structured? “Now is when you can watch TV,” because that’s when your parents allowed you to.

Or “It’s time to go brush your teeth,” or what have you. Something about, you know, that phase of life feels a little better, doesn’t it?

Rashid: Hmm, interesting.

Bogost: Because you know what’s happening next, and why.

Rashid: Yeah. It sounds to me, Ian, like having that authority figure telling you how you should be using your time is helpful in a way. And as Nacho said, his university students have many of their leisure activities baked into their day to day—the place they work is also the place they live, and sleep, and make friends, so that makes it easier to decide what to do.

If everyone is going to the football game or taking breaks between a study session, it guards against the kind of decision paralysis you may have if you have a full Saturday afternoon free. There are so many more variables: Maybe gathering everyone in one place to do it with, schedule it, and making sure you have a good time.

Bogost: And having that external force that is making a decision for you is really helpful, because now you no longer have to make a choice. And when you make a bad choice, and it’s your choice, then you feel guilty for it. You feel, I could have made any choice, and I did the wrong thing with the time I had available.

___

Sánchez Prado: I don’t care about what people think. Not everybody has that privilege, right?

Rashid: Yes.

Sánchez Prado: Some people get pressures because their promotions, their salaries are tied to that, so we don’t have to be frivolous about that.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: But I also think—I mean, is a job worth not having a minute to think about yourself, you know?

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: I don’t think so.

Rashid: How do you think someone who doesn’t have that flexibility in their schedule could incorporate some of these practices in their life?

Sánchez Prado: I don’t think you need to be working all the time that you’re at work.

Sánchez Prado: Unless you have a boss on top of you or a computer timing you, which happens.

Rashid: Uh huh.

Sánchez Prado: I mean, if you are in that, you just don’t have a way out, right? You’re just in, like, a work regime of constant surveillance, right?

Rashid: Right.

Sánchez Prado: Since most people are not in that situation, bring a book to your desk and read. Give yourself 10 minutes every hour to read it.

Rashid: Hmm.

Sánchez Prado: Right? I mean, if you’re going to eat and work, you might as well eat while you’re working, and then take your lunch break and do something else.

Rashid: Yeah!

Sánchez Prado: People care that they’re not being perceived as good-enough workers. Because you are aware of a judgment that other people are going to have of you. But maybe you shouldn’t care, right?

___

Rashid: So Ian, as we’re analyzing these work-life boundaries, it made me think about our American cultural values around work and home, and which one people think should have more value, or which one we should allocate more time to. And I found this really interesting data on Americans evolving views about the meaning of life.

Bogost: Oh my gosh. And what did it say?

Rashid: And there was the survey conducted from September 2017 to February of 2021, and it sort of tracked these changes and preferences over that four-year period. And the Pew Research Center asked a sample of adults to answer the question “What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling, or satisfying? What keeps you going, and why?”

Bogost: So what did people say?

Rashid: Of course I assumed it was work.

Bogost: Uh huh.

Rashid: But surprisingly, over the course of those four years, the share of adults who mentioned their job or career as a source of meaning declined from 24% to 17%, which was already significantly lower than I thought.

Bogost: —was already pretty low.

Rashid: And people were more likely than the initial year in 2017 to mention society a source of meaning in life.

Bogost: Yeah, Becca, it almost sounds like we’ve been faking ourselves out.

Rashid: A little.

Bogost: Like, yeah: We believe that everyone else believes that work is where we should derive satisfaction. But, in fact, very few of us in America seem to think that that’s really the case. And instead we want to find it in one another, rather than in our workplaces.

___

Rashid: That’s all for this episode of How to Keep Time. This episode was hosted by Ian Bogost and me, Becca Rashid. I also produce the show. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of our music. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Bogost: We’re taking a quick break next week, and after all this talk about busyness and schedules, I’m really looking forward to some rest. That’s also the topic of our next episode. Talk to you then.

___

Bogost: Becca, I’ve been oversleeping lately, and I finally went to the doctor, and he recommended that I sleep on a bed of herbs.

Rashid: [Laughter.] This is ridiculous. What? What? What?

Bogost: [Laughter.] You gotta give me a “Why?” [Laughter.]

I’ve got another one. You want another one?

Rashid: Let’s do another one, because I started laughing too early.

Bogost: Yeah, you started laughing prematurely. It was a ridiculous setup. [Laughter.]

Bogost: How can you tell when your clock is hungry?

Rashid: [Laughter.] Why aren’t you feeding your clock, Ian?

Bogost: Wow, well, you know… [Laughter.]

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How to Keep Time: Look Busy

2023-12-11T05:00:00-05:00

Many of us complain about being too busy—and about not having enough time to do the things we really want to do. But has busyness become an excuse for our inability to focus on what matters?

According to Neeru Paharia, a marketing professor at Arizona State University, time is a sort of luxury good—the more of it you have, the more valuable you are. But her research also revealed that, for many Americans, having less time and being busy can be a status symbol for others to notice. And when it comes to the signals we create for ourselves, sociologist Melissa Mazmanian reveals a few myths that may be keeping us from living the lives we want with the meaningful connections we crave.

Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Becca Rashid: Ian, I was having lunch with a friend last weekend who was trying to organize a birthday party for her colleague.

Ian Bogost: Okay; great.

Rashid: And, typical story, she said she was having trouble gathering everyone because everyone was too busy and it was impossible to get them to commit.

Bogost: Of course.

Rashid: But my favorite part was that she said one person in the group said she couldn’t make it because she had to go to Crate & Barrel that night.

Bogost: She was going to Crate & Barrel?

Rashid: She had to go to Crate & Barrel at 7 p.m. on a Friday. That was already in her schedule.

Bogost: She had a flatware appointment?

Rashid: Yeah, I assume.

Bogost: Wow.

Rashid: I mean usually I don’t mind when people tell me they’re busy for work—but these kinds of reasons feel so much more common. Even though collectively, the highest-earning Americans, especially men, on average have been working less. So how can it be that everyone is constantly busy, with what? Like, I just don’t know.

Bogost: Yeah; we’re not just busy because of work, though. It’s something else too.

Rashid: I’m Becca Rashid, producer and co-host of the How To series.

Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: This is How to Keep Time.

Bogost: I’ve been reading a little about this idea called “action addiction.” And I should say here that this isn’t necessarily, you know, fully accepted in the behavioral psychology community. There’s a lot of dispute about what kind of behavioral addictions really exist, but the idea behind action addiction is that beginning a new task—any kind of task, whatever it is—releases a little dopamine in your brain the same way that pulling the slot-machine lever does.

And in the same way that all behavioral compulsions do, that feeling decays. And then you long for more. And that’s filling our time: that desire for novel feelings, novel sensations, which we pursue instead of going out to dinner with our friends.

Rashid: Right. And I feel like many of us say we don’t have time for other people or wish we had more time for a social life, but it feels like there’s some compulsion to stay busy with random tasks and chores to the point of making ourselves unavailable.

Bogost: I wonder if that unavailability—being unavailable—is almost a point of pride?

Rashid: Oh yeah. Or a way to just signal to each other, “Sorry, I have better things to do. You should have gotten on my calendar earlier if you wanted to see me.”

Bogost: Yeah; I wonder how this happened. If it has become normalized to appear busy, culturally, when did it become accepted?

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: Why is busyness supposedly a show of importance, when it just feels terrible actually?

Rashid: Right.

___

Bogost: So, Becca, I talked to Neeru Paharia a few weeks ago. She’s a consumer-marketing professor at Arizona State University, and she studies busyness.

Neeru Paharia: Time has this property of being scarce. So, if you think about luxury products, most of their value is not functional and instead is purely symbolic.

Bogost: She had some revealing things to say about the ways that time can be a type of social asset.

Paharia: So if you think about, for example—a diamond ring has actually no intrinsic value. So then the question is: Why do people spend so much money on something that has no value? And it turns out there’s a lot of psychological value in something like a diamond.

____

Paharia: When we think about products that are scarce, there are very few of them out there, so people really want them. When we think about a person as being scarce, then we think of scarcity in terms of time.

So how much time do you have? Well, if you have very little time, then you, in and of yourself, are somewhat of a scarce resource. And then people might come to feel that you’re more valuable, or have more social status.

So if you, for example, try to schedule a meeting with somebody and they tell you, “Well, I have about 15 minutes at 4:15, two months from now”—that is a very clear indication to the receiver of that proposition that they must be important. Or if you go to a doctor and you can get an appointment, you know, today, your inference again might be, “Well, they must not be very good, because they’re not in demand.”

Bogost: Is this a uniquely American phenomenon? Are there other cultures where busyness has the same social status as it does in America?

Paharia: We ran studies in the U.S., and we ran studies in Italy. So in Italy, there’s more of the sense of status that the wealthy can both waste time and waste money. And that you gain your social status from your family and your family name, as opposed to the U.S., where you gain your social status by working hard, earning a lot of money, and kind of climbing the ladder in that way.

And what we found was that in the U.S., a very busy person was seen to have more social status than a less busy person. But in Italy, it was the exact opposite. So there, the person who had time for leisure was seen as having more social status than the person who had to work. And so that sort of reflects the more traditional idea that if you’re really wealthy, you don’t have to work. You have social status in terms of having money, and you have social status because you have so much time. People who have less resources have to work to buy food, to have housing. They have to work. And therefore, the busy people have a lower social status.

Bogost: You’ve looked into this in your work around the kind of humblebragging that people do around their busyness. Can you tell us a little about that?

Paharia: So humblebragging is a brag disguised as a complaint. So, I sometimes will just see what people are posting on Facebook. And one person said something like, “I had a meeting in D.C. this morning, and then I had lunch in New York in the afternoon. In Boston for dinner, for another meeting. I’m so exhausted.” I thought, Wow, like, what is the point of that post?

Bogost: What is the point of that post? Why would we want to brag about not having free time? Isn’t that what we want, in theory?

Paharia: I can speak a little bit to the historical context of it. So, there was a theory many years ago by this gentleman named Thorstein Veblen, and he talked about how the wealthy have both money to waste and time to waste. So you can waste your money on luxury products, gemstones, etc.—that kind of stuff—and you can waste your time on, you know, learning how to ride horses and learning these very intricate mannerisms of, you know, where the fork and the knives and all that stuff goes. So his theory was that the very wealthy and the very high-status people have so many resources that they could waste both their money and their time.

Bogost: Mm hmm.

Paharia: That has evolved, at least in American culture, where having less time is seen as valuable. And I think a lot of that has come from our sense of social mobility: this belief that you can work hard and climb the ladder.

Bogost: I’m thinking back to the diamonds; you need resources to buy them. But I could just pretend like I’m more busy than I really am, which might make myself appear more important. Do people run that kind of calculus? Are people thinking about their time in that way?

Paharia: Yeah; so you’re asking to what extent are people strategically doing this? I think people are doing it not necessarily with a full consciousness that, Hey, you know what, I’m going to say I’m busy, because I want people to think I’m important. But sometimes these things kind of linger in our consciousness right below the surface.

People are motivated to be busy because they’re not only signaling to other people that they’re important, but they’re signaling to themselves that they’re important.

___

Rashid: So Ian, I guess it makes sense to me that we have some innate desire to feel important and valued by society standards. But I also wonder if people have adjusted their levels of busyness since the pandemic.

I mean—I would think that some of that compulsion to use every minute of our time productively, or for some future goal, is a reaction to when we couldn’t use our time in all the ways we otherwise would have.

Bogost: Oh, that’s so interesting, Becca.

Rashid: So maybe some part of this busyness thing is to make up for that time we feel like we lost.

Bogost: It’s really tragic to think about it that way, isn’t it? That yeah, you know, the pandemic was highly traumatic and confusing, but it happened. And to continue to obsess over the lost time, and then to lose more time at trying to recuperate it, is almost worse.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: Maybe it’s also because we are conditioned to feel like a busy person. You know, that kind of busy-bee persona where you’re always buzzing around, getting things done. And I mean, I certainly feel that way—that that’s a virtue I’m supposed to pursue.

Rashid: Hmm.

Bogost: I have like, I don’t know, half a dozen different roles: at the university, at The Atlantic, in my home life. It certainly makes me appear busy. It makes me feel busy. And sometimes I wonder: Am I busy in a good way? Or do I just appear busy?

You know, it’s easy to look busy by just doing a ton of things that maybe don’t matter.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: And that doesn’t seem to match the spirit of what we mean, or what we think we mean, when we talk about a busy person who’s productive, and that’s why they’re busy.

Rashid: Right; and it seems like doing it well is not the point.

Bogost: I was curious to ask Neeru about that. About what it feels like, what can happen, when busyness starts to just completely take over.

___

Paharia: There’s this tendency to want to overschedule yourself, and it could be coming from, “I want to feel important; I want other people to feel that I’m important.” There’s some existential dread of too much idleness—you know, if [you] have too much time, your mind might go to dark places.

I think a lot of people do try and keep themselves busy because it’s a distraction, you know, from some of the bigger existential questions that would arise about our life here on Earth and the time that we spend here. So creating a sense of busyness for yourself can lead to a feeling that you yourself have sort of a reason to be, in a way.

Bogost: Is there a way to stop normalizing busyness as an excuse?

Paharia: I feel like one of the things would be to reflect back and think about: Is it making you happy? Is it making you happy to overschedule yourself, if that is, in fact, what you’re doing? Or are you feeling overwhelmed by that?

The second question is: What is the fear behind not having a schedule? Is it that you’ll have nothing to do, or that you’ll be bored, or that you’ll then become agitated? But there is sometimes a compulsion to keep going.

Bogost: Yeah; it’s so interesting. I mean, I wish there were easier answers. But you’re right. It’s so hard to stop.

Paharia: One of the things we do in our family is we try to not overschedule ourselves. So many weekends we have no plans at all, and have a few other families and friends who also have no other plans. And so then it becomes more of a spontaneous kind of way to get together with people. It gives us some space, you know: “Hey, what do we feel like doing right now? Let’s go get a coffee, or do something like that.”

___

Rashid: Hearing Neeru talk about busyness as a status symbol, Ian, is kind of funny to me. It’s like this personal suffering that we inflict upon ourselves to make people think we have a life, or we’re wanted by a lot of other people—we’re popular. And at the same time, it’s its own sort of avoidance mechanism. It seems like I have so many friends who say, “I actually like to stay busy, because, you know, I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts.”

Bogost: Oh my god…

Rashid: What if we would genuinely be happier taking that time to do nothing and not feel bad about it?

Bogost: Right. Feeling bad about it…

Rashid: Instead of multitasking into oblivion—you know, like holding our phone while we’re watching a movie, or FaceTiming someone while we’re cooking dinner—always having to do a million things at once.

Bogost: Yeah. And trying to do everything all at once, it’s not even the most useful way to get things done well.

Rashid: Right, of course.

Bogost: There’s research on “switching costs,” which is just a name for the time you lose when you switch tasks. And the evidence shows that the cost of switching from reading a book to checking my phone because it buzzed could actually cause me to do both of those activities less efficiently…depending on the tasks we’re switching from and to. One study shows switching costs can lead to a loss of up to 40 percent of someone’s productive time.

Rashid: Oh, wow. I mean, I’m not totally surprised by that—but I also fall into this trap of thinking that those people who are really effective at multitasking are also the most ambitious or accomplished among my friends. But the sort of busyness for busyness’s sake, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with accomplishing a big goal or anything like that...

Bogost: You’re just ticking off boxes. You’re doing your to-dos, even if you don’t need to.

Rashid: Right. I think it’s tough when busyness isn’t a choice. Like working parents—the people taking care of their children and their own parents simultaneously—and, you know, just keeping up with that. The dropoffs, the doctors’ appointments, the shift schedules, on top of just being healthy, having a social life. You know, I could go on and on. But that small hit of “I’ve done everything I need to do today; I’m being responsible; I’m a good productive member of society”—that little high—doesn’t feel the same as “I had the presence of mind today to ask my kid how their day went and actually hear their response.”

Bogost: Yeah. And you know, the really scary part is: It kind of does make you a good parent or whatever. You know, like you could probably go your whole career, maybe your whole life, just doing a bunch of things. Just ticking off boxes,

Rashid: Yeah.

Bogost: And people would probably judge you to have been successful.

Rashid: Yep.

Bogost: You were a noble person. What’s the alternative to doing a bunch of things? It’s like: You were slothful. You were lazy.

Rashid: Right. At least that’s the stigma, that you got nothing done.

Bogost: Even if the things you got done were meaningless, you still got them done.

Rashid: I found this interesting research about parents, whose primary concern with their teens’ social-media use—aside from just seeing inappropriate content online—the second two top concerns are kids wasting their time and not getting their homework done. Both of which feel like a value judgment about, you know: “I don’t want a lazy kid.”

Bogost: Yeah: “You’re wasting your time. What are you doing, staring at your phone?”

Rashid: Right, and maybe it doesn’t have to be “I’m lazy when I’m not occupied,” but maybe just not having busyness be the main thing that makes us feel like worthy, valuable members of society

Bogost: Yeah. It’s like: Busyness on its own isn’t necessarily the problem. You just want the right amount of it. And we definitely don’t have the right amount of it.

Rashid: I’m curious to learn from an expert who can explain where this pressure comes from to be constantly busy, be task-oriented, ahead of everything else. And I wonder if there’s a way to balance the social pressure of looking busy with the actual obligations of our day-to-day life.

___

Melissa Mazmanian: Everybody repeatedly told us that right now was a particularly busy time.

Rashid: Hmm.

Mazmanian: And next week, or next quarter, or next month, it was going to get better. And so, I think we oftentimes make sense of our busyness and our feelings of overwhelm by feeling like—if we “just get over this hump” or this deadline.

Rashid: So Ian, I talked to Melissa Mazmanian, who’s a sociologist from UC Irvine. And she co-wrote a book in 2020 called Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age, and her research analyzes why American adults struggle with overwork and this unmanageable busyness that she says goes beyond just schedules.

Mazmanian: My colleague Christine Beckman and a graduate student, Ellie Harmon, and myself spent around 80 to 100 hours with each family. And we just hung out with these families. And through those kinds of micro-moments of everyday life, you see how people are trying to be the ideal worker while still prioritizing other aspects of their life.

Rashid: She lays out three myths that motivate American adults to stay constantly occupied: the desire to be the ideal worker, have the perfect body, and be the perfect parent.

Bogost: Yeah, those are definitely dreams.

Mazmanian: In terms of the people that I’m studying, I will find that the people who buy in more tend to be more stressed and feel like more of a failure, right? So, the more that you feel like, “No, no, no, I actually should be able to be a perfect parent, and I should be able to run five to 10 miles a day, and I should be able to be seen as an ideal worker”—the more you’re committed to that and unwilling to question what it looks like to be a good parent and a good worker in a healthy body—the harder it is. Because they are fundamentally impossible.

Rashid: So Ian, if Neeru’s saying busyness indicates to others that we’re valuable in some way, I asked Melissa to explain the other side of that—how busyness can make us feel valuable to ourselves.

___

Mazmanian: I don’t think I’m alone in someone who’s always carrying—almost like you think about a wave going out, and there’s like the trickle of water after the wave that we’re carrying along. This trickle of water of all the things we didn’t get to: all the emails I didn’t answer, all the times I didn’t do my workout. All the times I wasn’t there for my children. And managing that is, I think, one of the interesting kinds of truths of living in Western society.

So first of all, I have no idea what it means to be genuinely overworked.

Rashid: Heh heh heh.

Mazmanian: I don’t know if many people do. There’s some studies that show that people will literally hit a breaking point, which means that your body breaks down, or you develop addictions of various kinds, etcetera. That’s extreme.

So what does it mean to live a sustainable life like that? You’re every day feeling like you’ll be able to wake up the next day, and maybe there’s some ups and downs. But that it feels genuinely sustainable.

One thing that was fascinating was that everybody repeatedly told us that right now was a particularly busy time.

Rashid: Hmm.

Mazmanian: And next week, or next quarter, or next month, it was going to get better. And so I think we oftentimes make sense of our busyness and our feelings of overwhelm by feeling like—if we “just get over this hump,” or this deadline.

But there’s a lot in our lives such that those humps and deadlines continually happen. We’re balancing the cycle of a school year; we’re balancing the cycle of financial quarters; we’re balancing the cycle of artificial deadlines that we make for ourselves at work and in our personal life.

We also have these kinds of life-cycle deadlines that we put on ourselves. Everything from “What age should I get married?”—I think some of these are crumbling, but—“If I want children, what age should I have children?” We are living in terms of a million kind of created deadlines, which make it feel like there is always the next thing. That “If I just get over this, I will feel better.”

Rashid: Did you find anything in your research that explains that optimism that people have? That right now is the busiest moment—but next week it’ll certainly get better, and I’ll have more free time to do the thing I actually want?

Mazmanian: So I will say one of the explicit things to mention here is that people in our study were not unhappy. These were not people who actually said, like, “I want to do less.” What they’re saying is, “I want to do what I’m doing better.”

This is everyday life that, at least for these human beings, doesn’t feel like overwork, burnout, about to lose it. This is just: “I wish I could do it with a little more sanity, a little more sleep. You know, a little less intense.”

We’ve become so committed to the idea that “doing it all” is what the goal is. That this is productivity—that this is what I need to do to feel good about who I am in the world. And so that optimism comes with the idea that I’m actually getting a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from feeling like I can be the superhero.

___

Rashid: So, Melissa, moms with intense time pressure can face a higher risk of mental-health issues. So, I’m surprised to learn that in your research busy or overworked people are not necessarily more stressed or unhappy. Were there any gender differences in the optimism around busyness? Or did you discover anything about who is most likely to achieve that sort of superhero status with their busy schedules?

Mazmanian: There is research by Erin Reid that shows both men and women chafe against these ideal-worker norms in the workplace. But men have an easier time, quote, passing as an ideal worker—meaning that if they leave early, someone watches them leave early and they assume, “Oh, that guy is leaving because he’s got another meeting somewhere else,” or “He’s going to visit the client.” A woman leaves early? People tend to assume, “Oh, that woman’s leaving early because her kid has a doctor’s appointment.”

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Mazmanian: You know, we have gendered associations with how people use their time and display it at work.

Rashid: How did we go from that sort of eight-hour workday standard to becoming obsessed with controlling every little block of our days? Like the: “8 a.m. to 8:15, I’ll eat breakfast. 8:30 to 9, I’ll do my workout.” Like, how did we get to that point of scheduling every minute?

Mazmanian: Going way back in time to the Benedictine monks. This was the first place in Western society where—and this is work from Eviatar Zerubavel, scholar of time and scheduling and kind of histories of time. He looks back at the Benedictine monks as the first time where what was seen as a valued social order and a desirable social order—which is spiritually pure, I guess—is one in which time is regular at the level of the hour.

Before that, you kind of have religious rites during this time of year, or schedules based on festivals or holidays. But the Benedictine monks: They brought it down to the level of the hour. And every hour was supposed to have a spiritual purpose.

And this idea that you wake up at this time, and have the glory of God, and then you go to, you know, Mass. And in the monastery, you could look around and know what time it was based on what everybody was doing, right? So what you do first, second, third of the day was really sedimented in these monasteries. And I think you can see the roots of that into what you’re talking about in terms of our everyday life today.

Rashid: I wanted to get back to something you said earlier about these cycles of time or these cycles in our lives—all of those sort of time markers that indicate when we should do what at what time. And as that relates to the nine-to-five, like: How did we develop this cadence?

Mazmanian: So prior to the Industrial Revolution, people were working incredibly long hours. Your work and life were totally kind of merged together. And then with the Industrial Revolution and people leaving and going to factories, they were completely overworked. Exploited to the point where their bodies were breaking down and so forth.

[Henry] Ford established an eight-hour work shift on his manufacturing plants, and that was right before the Great Depression. Then the Depression happened. A lot of people got laid off. And [W.K.] Kellogg, who was the Kellogg cereal guy, he actually instituted a six-hour work shift so he’d pay people a little bit less, but get more people back at work by doing six hours. Now interestingly, Kellogg actually had another belief in the value of free time and leisure time.

And there was this whole language around the Industrial Revolution that we were going to become so efficient that everybody was going to have a ton of leisure time. And that this was actually going to be a crisis of humanity, because we wouldn’t know what to do with all of our free time. So there’s a whole academic scholarship at the time that was leisure studies, which was like: “Oh, no. What are we going to do when we all have too much time?” Well, fast-forward 100 years; that is not the case. And it turns out that in the end, the capitalist enterprise is so strong that if you have free time, people tend to commit it back to work in order to try and make more money.

So Kellogg kept his six-hour shifts, but by the 1950s, basically everyone had chosen to go back to an eight-hour shift because they wanted the two extra hours and more money. So we tend to prioritize money over time, and I don’t know why. But I think that is a bit of a moral and social value that we’ve become accustomed to.

___

Bogost: So Becca, about 10 years ago now I invented this phrase: “hyper-employment.”

Rashid: Is it different from just choosing to work more in order to make more money?

Bogost: It’s the idea that you have all these little jobs that you didn’t previously have and may not be real jobs—like ones you’re not getting paid for—but you’re responsible for the work. Like, maybe you have to do your own accounting and expense reports at your job, where previously someone else would handle that work. It’d be a whole job taking care of accounting. For example, think of all the things that you do because smartphones and computers let you do them. You’re your own travel agent.

Rashid: Right, right.

Bogost: And you have to manage your personal brand on Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever. And you kind of need to do that to be a professional in the world. It’s optional but also kind of compulsory now.

Rashid: Interesting. And that hyper-employment also adds that extra scheduled component. Like, now you have to buy a movie ticket in advance, or you have to put in the work in advance to schedule it.

Bogost: Yeah; now that’s your responsibility. And if you mess it up, it’s your fault too.

Rashid: Right.

___

Mazmanian: A lot of what motivates us to act, what motivates us to spend our time in certain ways, what motivates us to use technology in certain ways—well, oftentimes your core motives are truly a sense that, “You know, I’m a worthy human who’s doing the right thing, and I can feel good about myself.”

And those core senses of self? Sure, they come from personality; they come from background; they come from some innate character traits. But as a sociologist, I’m a firm believer that a lot of what gives us value is based on our society.

Rashid: But why would people aspire to “do it all” when they quite literally know that they can’t? You are giving these units of time—like, what’s appropriate to do at 8 a.m.? A workout, let’s say. It’s much harder to do at 2 a.m., at least for me. So, like, is it even possible?

Mazmanian: Well, you’re making us sound like very rational humans. And I just don’t think we are. I think that we have these kinds of values that translate into desires or thrusts or hopes or dreams, or how we feel like we should live our lives.

___

Bogost: So Becca, learning to catch yourself in this act of talking about being busy or feeling busy—maybe that’s the first step to taming it. Like for me, that “How are you? I’m busy” refrain—I think it means “I know what I’m doing, but I’m disconnected from why I’m doing it or where it’s leading.”

Rashid: Interesting. So for you, the busyness feels like some distraction or cop-out from actually thinking about how you’re doing?

Bogost: Right.

Rashid: I think that Crate & Barrel story—to go back to that—bothered me because someone is trying to celebrate their birthday, and they have to also accept the fact that they’re less important than, you know, a flexible home-decor chore that obviously can be shifted around.

Bogost: Right. That could have been done anytime. But, you know, the person doing the home-decor chore—they may not even really be prioritizing it over their friend. They’re just like, “I’m busy. On to the next thing. I gotta go to the store. I’ve gotta do that.”

Rashid: True.

Bogost: I know when I’m in that mode, I just have this strong sense that I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I need to figure it out.

Rashid: And that sort of gives you some feeling of security, right? Like, I know what’s next. And you’re right: I guess maybe I’m making it more personal than it has to be, because mainstream American culture doesn’t make it particularly socially acceptable to actually tell someone how you’re feeling.

So many conversations in adulthood are what I call “life update” talks. It’s just sort of an exchange of plans and schedules and vacations coming up, and things that I have left to get done this week, and…

Bogost: “I’m going to free up right after I…”

Rashid: Yeah. I mean, shocker—it does make it harder to actually get a sense of how someone’s doing. I think it would be helpful to tap into why we do what we do, and if we could explain or communicate a bit more of that, it’s better than just, “I’m busy, and I don’t want to let you into my world.”

Bogost: Yeah. And you know when you are busy, it might mean that you’re just on autopilot.

Rashid: So true.

Bogost: “Busy”: That’s a good red flag. It’s like an opportunity to reflect, and to ask yourself, “What am I feeling in this situation? What am I doing?” And the answer might be “Nothing.”

Rashid: At least “less.”

Bogost: Or at least “less.”

___

Rashid: Ian, have you ever tried eating a clock?

Bogost: Eating a clock? I haven’t tried that.

Rashid: It’s very time consuming.

Bogost: Oh my gosh.

____

Bogost: Hey, listeners, we want to hear from you.

When was the last time you remember being alone—without using your phone, even—for more than an hour?

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How to Keep Time: Try Wasting It

2023-12-04T05:00:00-05:00

Co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost explore our relationship with time and how to reclaim it. Why is it so important to be productive? Why can it feel like there’s never enough time in a day? Why are so many of us conditioned to believe that being more productive makes us better people?

Listen here and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Becca Rashid: So, Ian, when I sent you that voice note yesterday, I just wanted to let you in my head a little bit.

Rashid field tape: Hello, Ian. Alas, I’m waiting at the bus stop, and it seems it will never come.

Rashid: A small glimpse into how anxious I am just waiting for anything.

Rashid field tape: I don’t know what to do. Do I just start walking? Do I give up? Do I walk to the Metro?

At this point, who really knows? It’s been probably four minutes. Oh!

Ian Bogost: It was only four minutes, Becca. It’s not very much time.

Rashid: It’s embarrassing, and I’m standing there, and while I’m waiting I’m switching between two modes, of like, I should be making the most of this time. Let me read that article my friend sent me. Or check my emails.

Or, like: This is insane. It’s only been four minutes. I should be a bit more mindful. But I know that I don’t want to be wasting my time just standing there.

Rashid: I’m Becca Rashid, producer of How to Keep Time, and I’m here with my co-host, Ian Bogost.

Bogost: Hey, Becca.

Rashid: Hey, Ian. A lot of your writing and reporting here at The Atlantic is about technology and all the ways it’s changed how we understand ourselves and the people around us.

But I also think about how much tech has changed our relationship with time.

Bogost: Technology tends to make things faster.

Trains and airplanes get you places faster; factories and machines build things faster.

But communications technologies—like telephones and the internet and such—allow us to send and receive information faster. And a lot more frequently, too.

Rashid: And all those emails and texts and posts and notifications give us more stuff we can do. And it makes it easier to do something all the time, right? That makes it harder to tolerate wasting time—just doing nothing, or being alone with your thoughts.

Bogost: Oh gosh, it’s so true, Becca. You know, your laptop, smartphone—all of those devices make it easier to get more done. Work, socialize, or do banking, or kind of anything at all.

So on one part, we’re more efficient but continue to feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. And you know, Becca, in your last season, you talked about the difficulty of building meaningful relationships. And when it comes down to it, most people just need more time to do that kind of thing.

Rashid: But even when we do have enough time, we don’t know how to lean into the moment the way we used to—we’re either anxiously planning for the next task, or we’re being compulsively productive because we’re sort of nervous about free time in this new way, when we’re just sort alone with our thoughts.

Like, why does it feel like time is moving too fast at certain points and other days not at all? Or how do we reconcile regrets over losing time or wasting that that we do have?

Bogost: Yeah, I mean all this time stuff can feel really slippery —one moment, you know what you want to do and you just can’t find time to do it.

But then the next moment, you’re absolutely swimming in time that you don’t know what to do with. So hopefully we can make sense of some of those problems this season.

Rashid: This is How to Keep Time.

___

Bogost: Becca, when you’re thinking about wasting time, what do you mean? Wasting time compared to what? To do more work? Or like, waiting to get back to your desk to do more work? So that you can, what … send more emails? Isn’t that just a waste of time, too?

Rashid: No, I know. I know. But I always have the thought in the back of my head that my time is limited. There’s actually something called chronophobia.

Bogost: Chronophobia.

Rashid: Where some people really worry about that experience of time passing. I can understand that impulse to feel like time is withering away if you’re not doing something productive with it.

Bogost: Sure.

Rashid: I don’t know; it makes me wonder how we got to this point of measuring our own time and other people’s time. How do we actually spend less of our time measuring how much of it is being wasted?

Bogost: When you think about it, it isn’t all your time always being put to use. You’re there in your body and your mind. You’re living through your day and your life no matter what you’re getting done. And your time is finite.

Your years on Earth are numbered. And, uh, you’re never going to be able to do everything. You want to do everything possible because of that. So maybe we, rather than chasing it, need to figure out how to be in time. Being in time rather than chasing time.

___

Oliver Burkeman: I was completely freaked out when I first did this calculation and figured out that, uh, the average lifespan in the developed world is around 4,000 weeks.

Obviously, you don’t know how many weeks you’re gonna get in any individual case. It’s more this fact of it being finite is something that I think we obviously intellectually understand, but we don’t behave on a day-to-day basis as if time were finite.

Rashid: So Ian, I talked to Oliver Burkeman—a journalist and an author. He used to write a column for The Guardian where he wrote a lot about productivity hacks and personal development.

Burkeman: This fact of it being finite is something that I think we obviously intellectually understand, but we don’t behave on a day-to-day basis as if time were finite.

Rashid: And during our interview, he mentioned what he called a disillusionment with all the self-help solutions.

Bogost: Yeah, yeah; I feel that.

Burkeman: So I think an awful lot of that kind of conventional productivity advice is really based on keeping this fantasy alive that very soon—next few weeks, next few months, at some point—you’re gonna get to this place where you are on top of things, where you have got your arms around everything, you’re the sort of air traffic controller of your life, you know?

Rashid: But then one day, after years of being in the weeds of lifestyle advice, he had a kind of epiphany on a park bench during a really stressful week when he realized that none of the time-management hacks were working.

Burkeman: I was trying sort of increasingly frenetically and frantically and desperately to come up with the set of techniques and scheduling tricks that would enable me to get through this ridiculous quantity of stuff and just being hit by the thought like, Oh, oh, it’s impossible. Oh, I see. Right. It’s impossible.

Bogost: Becca, I mean I’ve definitely spent years CHASING time myself and not knowing exactly how to be in it, but maybe the trick is to just accept what Burkeman is saying … that it’s impossible.

Rashid: Burkeman wrote a book in 2021 called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, where he walks readers through his personal journey with trying to get on top of it all, on top of time, and failing miserably.

___

Burkeman: We’re constantly trying to reach a kind of godlike position over our time.

Rashid: Okay; when you say “a godlike position,” I’m thinking, like, all forgiving, most merciful. But when you say “godlike position over time,” what do you mean by that?

Burkeman: I think—and again, to some extent this may just be the hang-ups and screwups of me and some other people—but I think that a lot of what we’re doing when we claim that we’re engaging in becoming more productive, more efficient, getting on top of things, getting organized, is really an attempt to kind of feel unlimited with respect to time, with respect to the tasks, responsibilities, goals, ambitions we might have for using our time.

It’s a way of sort of not having to feel what it really feels like to be finite, to have to make tough choices, to have to acknowledge that there are always going to be more things that it would be meaningful to do with time than we’re ever going to have the opportunity to do.

Rashid: It’s interesting; I went through this phase, you know, in my early 20s where I realized if I wanted to be amazingly accomplished at anything I would have had to have started when I was three years old. You know, whether that’s like gymnastics or ice skating or what have you; I was already decades behind. It can be really hard to cope with the realization that that time is gone, and you may not have ample time to get there in the future.

Burkeman: I think obviously it is possible, in a very sort of down-to-earth way, to use one’s time well for some future goal, right? But I think that on a sort of deeper level, what a lot of us are doing when we’re trying to use time well, in that sense—when we’re sort of deeply committed, as American culture is especially deeply committed, you know, to the idea that every moment must be used maximally well—it’s not only that that becomes a very sort of capitalistic idea where the only real benefit is is the profit motive.

It’s also just the fact that it’s focused on the future, right? It’s all-defining: Everything about now in terms of some more important moment coming later, when it’s going to actually have its value. It’s going to cash out, you know; it’s going to have been worth doing.

And so because what happens when you do this is that you end up, like, missing your life. You end up missing the present. Or to speak to what you were saying, you know, focused on regret that you didn’t start using your time in this rigorously instrumental way earlier in the past, you get to this very strange conclusion.

The only real way to use time really well—to actually find meaning in the present—is by some definition of the term to waste it.

I think that in many ways, because of the world in which we live, that is so completely committed to the idea that time must be used for future benefits, everything we think of as “wasting time,” as pure idleness, is really defined as that because it doesn’t lead to something in the future.

Rashid: Right, and I’m even referencing my childhood as wasted time, when I should have been training to be a gymnast, instead of just, like, a childhood. But in adulthood it’s harder to see it that way, because efficiency, time management, and productivity are all essential elements in how we make a living.

So, how can we approach this idea of wasting time and how we’re conditioned to think about it—not as something pulling us away from productivity, but just as a part of life?

Burkeman: It’s something that takes a positive effort. It feels like you shouldn’t just be using your leisure time to go on a run. You have to be training for a 10K or something.

Rashid: Yeah, right.

Burkeman: You have to have fitness goals. It’s kind of a bit embarrassing, in some way, maybe, to have a hobby these days, but it’s really not embarrassing to have a side hustle. And the only real difference is that one of those is something you’re trying to turn into a business.

Whereas, you know, if what you like doing is collecting stamps from around the world, right? That doesn’t really work anymore. I’m not sure what happened to stamp collecting these days, but you know.

Rashid: Like, a nonproductive hobby for sheer enjoyment, but there’s nothing materially valuable about that. Maybe, with the stamps.

Burkeman: Right. Yeah, the philosopher Kieran Setiya, he uses the phrase “atelic activities.” So, activities that are not given their meaning by their telos or where they are headed.

Burkeman: And that’s absolutely true in kind of listening, really listening, to other people. Incredibly hard. It’s really hard not to just spend a conversation thinking about what you plan to say next when the noise coming from the other person ceases for a bit, which is of course not really listening. And so for me, a big part of this is just understanding that this does not feel second nature to too many of us.

Rashid: I hear you. I mean, even in this moment I find myself thinking about what you’re saying and also ahead to all the questions that I have left to get through. It’s sort of like when someone asks me what my name is, and then I tell them, and they tell me theirs—but all I can remember is my name that I said out loud.

___

Bogost: So, Becca, maybe it’s a problem in our culture, rather than in us. We’re just all, like, so wound up over making the most of every moment. So much that we don’t even really know anymore what “making the most of a moment” would even mean.

Rashid: And you know, Ian, I’ve even had friends tell me they’re on dating apps almost as a way to productively use their time. Instead of scrolling on Instagram, at least they’re, you know, building toward a relationship.

Bogost: Okay, it’s been a long time since I’ve dated, and I never use dating apps. Are you saying your friends are like, “Well, got some downtime; I better get my dating in”?

Rashid: Yes, definitely. Dating is its own version of a productive hobby, in my opinion.

Bogost: I guess it makes sense in a certain way, like dating as productivity or as an investment in your future partnership, or whatever it is that you’re after. Like, maybe that’s where that idea comes from. You know, “I don’t want to waste my time if this isn’t going anywhere,”—that sort of sentiment is about progress. Like, that a relationship is about moving forward and building into whatever comes next. God forbid your relationship isn’t going anywhere, right?

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: But, like, where is “anywhere,” anyway?

Rashid: I don’t know. I feel like I’m happiest when I’m just wasting time with people. So, when I’m trying to make the most of my time with someone, anyone—romantic or otherwise—I’m not at least trying to think about how much of my time they’re taking up, or the most efficient way to be with them, or whether it’s going somewhere, or whether it’s productive.

___

Burkeman: If I am just sort of around the house with my son and my wife, it’s very easy to fall into “what needs doing next”—you know, this chore, that chore, preparing for the next day. I think if you can do anything to sort of put yourself in a position where you have, you know, all gone on a walk, or all gone to visit something, or all watching the movie, or whatever it is—if there’s a sort of a framework around that—it’s a little bit easier to step away from that instrumentalist mindset.

When I remember, I think also bringing attention to the senses, as opposed to thought, is really important. You know: just literally paying attention to sights, sounds, touch, smell, whatever, is a way of reducing the power that otherwise naturally—for people like me anyway—goes to kind of compulsive thought.

Rashid: So how can I be both mindful and engaged with my time more generally, without having to go full Zen mental-shutdown mode?

Burkeman: Just to be clear, I find being in this mindset—rather than the instrumental future-focused one—really difficult. And I think, you can certainly get lost in thought. And I’m not sure I want to condemn that, because I think sometimes that can be a perfectly meaningful thing to do, but understand and expect that it’s going to feel uncomfortable at the beginning. A lot of people these days say they don’t have time to read anymore.

Rashid: Right, right.

Burkeman: And I think what they often really mean is that they don’t like the experience of sitting down with a book, because their minds are so conditioned to moving fast that it feels unpleasant. I’ve certainly had that experience.

All I can do—and I find it extraordinarily effective, but it doesn’t feel like an incredibly great insight or anything—but all I do is I remind myself that this is how the first couple of pages feel when you’re wired for speed and you’re just sitting down and you’re just beginning to read a novel. And you know, that’s fine, but the discomfort does not kill you, and it lifts.

___

Rashid: So, Oliver, most of our conversation has been about the necessary mindset shift that’s required to be more in tune with each moment. And, you know, it makes me think about my friends with kids, because they have to be super-present with their child in the moment, be present with themselves (enough to be patient with their kid). And they also need to keep up with all the productive tasks and demands to make the most of their time in their own lives.

I mean, how do we balance these competing priorities when there is a sort of instrumental goal to, you know, raise your child and make them into a compassionate human being in the future who can exist and thrive in the world on their own, and also be present with them in the moment?

Burkeman: I find parenting to be an extraordinary crucible for all of this, just because there is so much pressure, both internally and externally, to treat all questions of what it means to be a good parent as questions about what you need to do in order to create the most successful future adult. Um, you know, my son’s learning to play the piano a bit.

I’m trying very hard not to turn into a sort of tyrant form of parent insisting on so much practice that it takes all the joy out of the experience. And when instead he’s banging around on the piano and I’m banging around on the xylophone that we have in the house.

Rashid: A band!

Burkeman: Exactly. You know, I don’t think that there is any part of me, in that moment, that is thinking, How can we make this band really good so that we can …

Rashid: … start a world tour?

Burkeman: From touring and downloads, right? I mean there is something about the letting go into those moments that is absolutely fantastic. But where I would most naturally go would be like, “Okay, piano practice for this many minutes. Have you gone through these exercises?”

With parenting and life in general, it always feels like you’re learning just too late. But I am learning that there’s value in the sort of ridiculousness of making those noises in the present, rather than where they might be leading.

___

Bogost: So Becca, the other day I met a colleague of mine for a drink after work, and we went to this sort of weird pub in this hotel. And there was no cell signal, no Wi-Fi network, and I was just sitting there waiting for him.

So I just looked around at, you know, the people coming in, and I looked at the menu a few times, and I realized, This is so rare.

I finally couldn’t do anything else, and so I didn’t feel like I should be doing something else. Because there was nothing else I could really do.

Rashid: Oh, interesting. I feel like if I was in your shoes, I would still feel like I should be doing something else.

Bogost: I probably did feel that way, in truth. But that sensation that, like, it’s worse to do nothing than to delete emails on your phone? Right? But you know, it wasn’t always like this. I wrote a piece earlier this year about this. What did people do before smartphones? I don’t mean for work or for entertainment—what did they do during those off times? When they were waiting for the dentist, or whatever, and it was actually terrible? We were super bored, you know.

I remember being a kid, and you’d look through the Highlights magazine a hundred times before the doctor finally called you. Or like, reading anything you could find: signs on the wall, staring at clocks. You know, in the past, when you had a magazine or whatever, you would burn through it. It would be expended. There were only so many pages, and once you’d read them or skimmed them, you were done.

And your phone, your Instagram, whatever it is: There’s always something new. Maybe it’s not interesting to you, but it’s new. And that feels like a difference.

So that discomfort associated with having nothing new to see in the moment, that’s kind of gone away. Now there’s always something new. And I think that makes it easier for us to think, Well, I should be doing something new at every moment.

Rashid: Right. And that pressure to do something new at every moment—I’ve been at so many dinners and we just sit down, it’s a group of people. And if there’s even a brief lull in conversation, someone says, like, “Where are we going after this?” But we just got there. We’re at the place, we’re at the dinner.

Bogost: You know Becca, I wonder if it’s hard to tolerate wasting time because we’re always looking forward to something—what comes next. Or we have things like smartphones now that make waiting more tolerable, because we can do something new all the time.

But you know, I mean, we didn’t used to know the bus was coming in four minutes, because you could look at your phone and see it. I mean it would come eventually, perhaps, and you would be forced to kind of deal with the fact that the bus, you know, it’s not just there for you, that you’re just one person in the world, and you might have to just wait.

___

Rashid: Patience, patience. We’re always being tested … like right now. We’ll be back right after a quick break.

___

Burkeman: The art historian Jennifer Roberts points out that patience these days is actually a kind of really important form of control. It used to be that patience was something that people, rather condescendingly, had recommended to people who didn’t have power, right?

So in the days when women were much more likely to be sort of obliged to remain at home doing domestic things, while men were out working in the world, patience was a virtue—because it’s the kind of thing that keeps people from complaining about their situation.

But as society has sped up, patience changes its role. Like now, the default is that we’re all moving incredibly fast. and it becomes a form of agency to be able to sit with a problem, sit with an experience, and not need to bring things to the next stage or figure out where they’re headed.

Rashid: As a little kid, and even now sometimes, just feeling like everything I wanted to do in life needed to be done today. Like—the concept of “more time tomorrow” was never my default. And I remember my parents would always say, “Why are you rushing everything? You’re so young; you have so much time.” Is it helpful to teach kids that time is limited or unlimited? And which one leads to kids having a better relationship with time as they get older?

Burkeman: Yeah; there is a way of interpreting all this talk about time being limited and life being short, which is incredibly stress inducing, right? It basically says, like, “There’s no time. You’ve got to get moving now. You’ve got to fill your life with a million extraordinary activities every day, because otherwise, will you really have lived?”

Burkeman: I think, firstly: Kids, in my experience, have a very natural affinity for being more present and less sort of fixated on maximizing efficiency. But then, obviously in an age-appropriate way, the message here is, “Yeah, time is finite.” But that’s not a reason to start hurrying and fit the absolute maximum into a single day or a single lifetime.

It’s a reason to cherish the time that you get, and to really show up for it and to enjoy it. I definitely went through a significant period of early adulthood where I was deep in the kind of time-maximization efficiency mindset, and maybe one has to go through that to, you know, come out the other end with some kind of insight.

Rashid: So Oliver, for families or people who do have serious time constraints, they don’t always have the luxury to choose when to spend time with their children, or when they need to be at work. Is there anything that can help make the inability to choose feel less painful?

Burkeman: I think a lot of this is easier for me to say than it will be for some, and it’s much worse if for somebody, the decision they have to make is between keeping food on the table and spending quality time with their kids, for example. They’re just in a worse position than me.

They’re in the identical position to me only in the sense that in every hour, they can do one thing with any moment, realistically, and all the other ones they have to let go. It doesn’t mean that the choices, the options that you have open to you, are good ones. That depends on your situation in life and society, absolutely.

But it does mean that you can let go, to a significant extent, of being haunted by indecision or by guilt or by the sense that you ought to have been doing something else with it, right? Or that you somehow ought to be doing more than you can do. Nobody should ever feel that they ought to do more than they can do.

Rashid: I feel that way more often than not. But how do I begin to step outside this productivity mindset with my time?

Burkeman: You can decide to adopt a certain hobby or change how you apportion your time, so as to spend more time nurturing a particular relationship or something.

You’re not committing to it for the whole of the rest of your days; you just have to take a bit of your time now, or very soon, to do something that matters to you. Even if it’s only 10 minutes; even if you are not confident that you’re going to be able to do it every day for the next month or anything like that. But to just do some of it.

And I think actually, this is a place where the focus on habit-building can be quite counterproductive. Because if you tell yourself you’re going to start meditating every day, forever, that’s quite a burden. And it’s quite tempting to sort of put it off for a few more weeks until your schedule clears up. If you tell yourself you’re going to do it for 10 minutes today, and that’s it, then that is the point at which things start changing interestingly in one’s life, I think.

I think we all experience, sometimes, that sense of simply being in the flow of time, rather than having this kind of clock or calendar, or however you visualize it, hounding you. Or that you’re constantly sort of fighting.

It’s just for itself. Well, that’s obviously very close to a pretty deep sort of spiritual, Buddhist-sounding, Daoist-sounding idea: about how actually only the present is real, and that you have to sort of find value in it if you’re going to find value anywhere. There’s a real argument that “wasting time” in the way we define that these days is something that is extremely important for us to learn to do.

Rashid: Oliver, thank you so much again for your time. I’ve learned so much.

Burkeman: Oh, it’s been a pleasure.

___

Bogost: So, Becca, I think what Oliver is saying isn’t that we should try to capture the literal present moment; that’s impossible now. Always vanishes. It’s gone. It’s gone. But it’s like a slightly bigger “now”—like a little trunk of the moment that you can be in and you can feel happening.

Rashid: I hear what Oliver is telling us being something more like, “When I’m off the clock and I’m at home, I don’t need to be rearranging my pantry immediately as my grandma would love to have me do.”

Bogost: I need to do that too.

Rashid: I’m just so conditioned to be productive and feel like when I have a minute of downtime, if I’m not working toward one of those goals, that it is being wasted.

Bogost: Mmm. So Becca, our show is called How to Keep Time. So “keeping time”: I was thinking about that phrase. You know how you use it in music, like you keep time in music?

Rashid: Like with a metronome? Yeah.

Bogost: Yeah, like the rhythmic sense of keeping time. Like tapping your foot.

Rashid: Yep.

Bogost: If you could feel the beat or hear the metronome, that is as close as we get to sort of being in the moment. Yeah; you can’t capture the present, but you can kind of feel it moving from present to present to present.

Rashid: And I guess that’s the goal, right? I mean, it’s something I’m definitely bad at, because I’m always thinking about maximizing my 4,000 weeks, if I’ve even got that much time.

And I think for me, I just need to start thinking of my time as my own—not something that needs to be maximized or proven to other people as something that I’m using properly.

What does that even mean?

Bogost: Right. Because you’re just using it, “properly” or not.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: You know, you might not be productive all the time. You might feel like you’re wasting time. But the time that you spend … it’s still yours, even if you’re not making something of it. I mean, maybe we need to make that absence of productive satisfaction okay.

___

Bogost: Hey, hey Becca, they’re finally making a movie called Clock?

Rashid: What?

Bogost: It’s about time.

Rashid: Oh God.

Bogost: Yeah.

Rashid: Stay with us for next week’s episode, where we explore why we pressure ourselves to look busy … even when we’re not.

Bogost: That’s on our next episode of How to Keep Time.

Introducing: How to Keep Time

2023-11-06T06:00:00-05:00

Why can it feel like there’s never enough time in a day, and why are so many of us conditioned to believe that being more productive makes us better people? On How to Keep Time, co-hosts Becca Rashid and the Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost talk with social scientists, authors, philosophers, and theoretical physicists to learn more about time and how to reclaim it. How to Keep Time launches in December 2023.

Listen to the preview here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript:

Becca Rashid: Ian, I’ve been reading about this concept called the social clock, and it’s sort of this invisible timetable that tells us what we should be doing at different stages of our lives.

Ian Bogost: So, Becca: Are you on time? Are you on track on the social clock?

Rashid: I am off the social clock, and it’s not easy.

Bogost: I’m not sure if I was on or off the social clock when I was your age, but I think there’s a point at which, maybe, the social clock breaks down. The question I face isn’t whether I’m on time, but what should I do with my time?

Sarah Manguso: The diary really helped me suppress some of that: some of that worry, some of that anxiety.

Rashid: You know, given time is finite, it can feel almost impossible to not compulsively try to make every waking minute productive.

Oliver Burkman: The only real way to use time to actually find meaning in the present is, by some definition of the term, to waste it.

Bogost: Is this a uniquely American phenomenon? Are there other cultures where busyness has the same social status as it does in America?

Rashid: Ian, what’s the one thing you wish you had more time for?

Bogost: I wish I had more time to figure out how to use the limited time I have.

Rashid: Existential dread about our limited time is at the core of my curiosity. And I really want to know why so many of us are conditioned to believe that being efficient makes us better people.

This season, we’re going to get into our complex relationship with time and what makes us feel like we’re running against the clock.

—

Rashid: I’m Becca Rashid, producer and co-host of the How To series.

Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: This is How to Keep Time. The season begins this December.

How to Talk to People

2023-09-14T06:00:00-04:00

Making small talk can be hard—especially when you’re not sure whether you’re doing it well. But conversations are a central part of relationship-building. Radio Atlantic is pleased to share this episode of How to Talk to People.

The social scientist Ty Tashiro and the hairstylists Erin Derosa and Mimi Craft help describe what it means to integrate awkwardness into our pursuit of relationships.

This episode is hosted by Julie Beck, produced by Rebecca Rashid, and edited by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak.

Music by Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Ryan James Carr (“Botanist Boogie Breakdown”), and Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “She Is Whimsical”). Click here to listen to additional seasons of The Atlantic’s How To series.

How to Talk to People: How to Not Go It Alone

2023-06-26T05:00:00-04:00

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

The values of individualism that encourage us to go it alone are in constant tension with the desire for community that many people crave. But when attempting to do things on our own, we may miss out on the joys of coming together.

This season’s finale conversation features writer Mia Birdsong, who highlights the cultural and philosophical roots of Americans’ struggle to build community. In a culture pushing us to put our own oxygen mask on first, Mia argues for the quiet radicalness of asking for help and showing up for others.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

Be part of How to Talk to People. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip,” “Just Manners”), Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), and Yonder Dale (“Simple Gestures”).

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, do you remember the first time I approached you in the office?

Julie Beck: [Laughter.] Yes.

Rashid: I sent you a message from behind your desk, saying, “Hi, can I come to your desk?” while … staring at you sitting at your desk.

Beck: From—let’s be clear—less than 10 feet away.

Rashid: Yes.

Beck: I was like, “Yes, you can?” I remember you being really tentative when you kind of crept up, and I was like, “You don’t have to ask permission to come say hi to me.” And then I was wondering if I looked really unapproachable or something. But I was really excited to meet you, because we’d been working together on Zoom for a while, but it was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: I promise that is not my usual approach. I think I just forgot how to human a little bit, and what it felt like to work with people in an office. So I think I thought I was being polite, but I maybe just made it a bit weird.

—

Beck: Hi, I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

—

Rashid: When Julie and I first got together to develop the series—after my awkward desk approach [Chuckle]—we talked a lot about how we wanted the show to explore how small, everyday conversations can become the deeper connections that we want more of in our lives.

Knowing how to talk to people isn’t simply for the sake of starting conversation or fighting through the awkwardness of small talk. The point is to ultimately reach a deeper understanding of the people around us.

Beck: What I’ve always wanted, and what I think so many people long for, is this sense that you are part of a rich, interconnected community. That you have an extended network of support and love, full of many different kinds of relationships that serve many different purposes. And the types of conversations we’ve explored in the podcast so far are the stepping stones that lead up to that.

And now, we’ve arrived at our finale episode. And this is a big one. We’re going to talk about how you build a community, and that can be a really complex concept. The barriers that can make that rich sense of community feel hard to find are not just psychological, within our own minds. There are cultural barriers, too.

Mia Birdsong: The American narrative about freedom—which is deeply individualistic—is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself.

Rashid: Reaching out may be exactly what we need to do to find the community support we need.

Birdsong: I’m just like, Ugh, I can’t figure this out, and I’m like, Duh! Like, ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it.

Beck: Mia Birdsong is the author of a book called How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. In our conversation, she explores how the injustices baked into our country’s history have limited people’s ability to connect with one another, and how we understand the definition of community.

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave, right, was considered unfree, was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Rashid: Mia argues that today, too many people equate freedom with independence, and that can lead us to go it alone when we don’t need to.

Birdsong: And I think we’ve been told, right? The people who are strong—the people who are achieving and are successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own. And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering.

Beck: I think we definitely tell ourselves a lot of stories about how other people must have it more together than we do.

Birdsong: And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person.

Rashid: Mia gets into all of it. She shares real advice about how to ask people for support … without feeling bad about it. And how that can actually bring us together.

—

Beck: Mia, there’s been a lot of research on how lonely Americans are, how disconnected people are from their neighbors. And a lot of people feeling like they don’t have anybody to confide in, even. What do you think is behind all that?

Birdsong: There’s a Harvard study; there’s been a couple of Cigna studies. The BBC did a loneliness experiment, which was a global study. And, you know, Americans are lonely. Loneliness has been increasing, and unsurprisingly, the pandemic made it worse. The BBC study was interesting because it found that loneliness is highest among young people, men, and those who are in an individualistic society—a.k.a., America.

Beck: What is the role that you think individualism plays in all this?

Birdsong: When I think about individualism in America, I connect that very strongly to capitalism—how America defines what success looks like and what it means to be a good person.

And part of what capitalism has done is: It has inserted the exchange of money. I didn’t, you know, get together with a bunch of my friends and build my house. I paid for it.

What’s interesting is that among people who don’t have money, don’t have as much access to money, you see a lot more relational child care. Like, where your neighbor—or your best friend or your sister or your dad—takes care of your kids. And then that social fabric gets built in, because it’s not a transaction. It is what family does.

And then I think the other piece is that the definition of success is so much about the idea that one can be a self-made man, right? Or pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

So there’s this idea that as an individual, you’re going to work hard, and you’re going to make it on your own—which “invisibilizes” all of the help that people do get. Either from the systems that exist and the privileges and advantages you have, depending on your relationship with that system.

So I think about, you know: People who are born wealthy tend to stay wealthy. If you’re white, if you’re male, if you’re able-bodied, if you’re straight, there are all of these advantages that you end up having.

Beck: And there’s a sense, too, like acknowledging any help that you did get makes your success seem less impressive somehow.

Birdsong: And we think that asking for help is a form of weakness. The more attached you are to this version of what it means to be successful and happy and good, the less you are connected to other humans. Because you’re out there trying to make it on your own.

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave was considered unfree was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Beck: Wow.

Birdsong: And it added a whole other layer to how I think about the Black experience in America, from being kidnapped and trafficked from home. And if we think about our people as being not just the human beings around us, but also the land we’re from—our ancestors, right?

Through to: An intrinsic part of the way that America practiced slavery was about the threat or experience of being sold away from your family. To the prison-industrial complex, right?

And through all of that, there’s also been Black people’s resistance to it—from people jumping overboard slave ships because they’re like, I’m going home one way or another. Obviously, people running away from plantations.

After Emancipation there’s this archive where you can look at these online. There were all of these advertisements that we placed in newspapers, trying to find loved ones that we hadn’t seen for decades. Sometimes it was one of our children. Sometimes it was a parent. Sometimes it was, you know, a best friend. Sometimes it was a spouse.

They’re beautiful and heartbreaking, ’cause they’re all very short. But they’re people talking about how they’re looking for somebody and they were sold to this person. So their name might have changed. The limit on the kind of information they had about this loved one—but the determination that they had to find them—was just like…rejection of the ways in which slavery was making Black people unfree. It was this insistence, right?

Beck: And the freedom to reconnect.

Birdsong: Totally. And I think about how many Black folks I know who find out, you know, when they’re an adult that Uncle Bobby is not actually their dad’s brother, but is their dad’s best friend from elementary school.

I have a friend who told me about her and her siblings looking at these family photos and realizing they didn’t know who was chosen family and who was blood or legal family. And then also, ultimately, that it didn’t matter.

And all of that stands in such stark contrast to the American narrative about freedom, which is deeply individualistic. Which is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself. Which means that you need to hoard resources, so that you have everything that you need. You get everything through transaction, so that you don’t owe anybody.

It means you don’t ask for help. It means you’re not responsible for or accountable to anybody. The idea of freedom being you can do whatever the hell you want, and nobody can tell you otherwise, right?

And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person. Because we are fundamentally social animals. Like, we need care, right? And this American idea of freedom is so separated from that.

Beck: So when you say the American-dream narrative is antithetical to freedom, what do you specifically mean by the American-dream narrative?

Birdsong: So when I think about the fundamental ideals that were written into the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and who was articulating that … we had white, straight as far as we know, landowning men. Who represented a minority of the American population.

Women were not considered at all—that’s like half right there. No Black people. No poor people. So when I think about that, and I think about what the American dream is—that’s the ideal, right? And that you do that through working hard, not asking for help. And, you know, you’re amassing your kingdom.

Beck: Mm.

Birdsong: That is not being a person. That is not about being in community. It’s not about caring for others. There’s nothing in there about love. It’s such an existentially central part of the human experience—our pursuit of and desire for and need for love.

—

Beck: Can you tell me about a time your community really showed up for you?

Birdsong: Ooh, yes. In July of 2021, I got diagnosed with colon cancer. And Stage 3 colon cancer. And I was going to have to have surgery and ultimately went through three months of really intensive chemotherapy, very aggressive chemo.

Beck: Ugh.

Birdsong: Yeah, it was no fun. But 20 minutes after I got the news, I had a phone call with my friend Aisha. We were working on a project together, and I was all anxious. Not because I had been told I had cancer, but because I didn’t know when I was going to be able to, like, continue the project.

So I totally got on the phone with her, and I was like, “Girl, I’m so sorry. But I just found out I have cancer, and I have to have surgery. So I’m going to have to postpone my work on this project.” She was like, “Mia.” She was like, “Let’s take a breath.”

And in that breath, I moved from kind of hiding from what was scary about this—behind “I have to get this work done”—to being in this place of being able to feel how afraid I was. But also, like, not alone.

Before we got off the phone, she had the meal train set up that would ultimately make sure that my family got fed while I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, and then for the three months that I was going through chemo.

She then circled up with three other friends of ours. And this group of Black women who called themselves “Mia’s Care Squad” then basically coordinated all of the things with the rest of my community—like, my larger community—that I would need.

They made spreadsheets. They had email chains: a squad of people who would run errands for me. They collected everybody’s advice. So I wasn’t getting bombarded with like, you know, all kinds of advice. But I totally wanted advice, because I was like, “I’ve never had cancer before. I want the advice.”

I feel like there was this way in which they tended to my physical well-being—but they also were tending to my spirit and my heart. They created a “joy fund” for me.

Beck: Oh my gosh; what does that mean?

Birdsong: Which was like a pile of money for me to spend only on things that would bring me joy. I bought a lot of art supplies.

When I was having surgery, there was a group of people outside on the hospital lawn singing for me.

The way that this group came together. And I remember having this moment in the beginning of being like, I am absolutely going to tell my community what’s going on with me. I’m not going to be one of those people who secretly goes through chemo. I’m like, Everybody’s going to know. And I am absolutely asking for their help. I do not want to do this thing by myself.

Beck: What did it feel like to hear your friends singing outside your hospital room?

Birdsong: Well, I couldn’t hear them, because I was in the basement of the hospital having my part of my colon taken out. But I knew that they were there. And I remember as I was getting the anesthesia, holding—because I saw them when I was coming into the hospital.

I remember just holding them in my head. And oh, my God. Because, you know, I was terrified. It was so comforting to know that they were out there singing for me.

So I’ve now been cancer-free for more than a year. And when I look back on that experience, I mean: It sucked. It was terrible. Like, cancer sucks, chemo sucks. But there’s a way in which it wove the fabric of community together tighter for them. I mean—we have shared the spreadsheets with so many other people.

And I know that what my community did has been a model for other people who have also gone through cancer or just, you know, something terrible. I feel so grateful that I got to have that level of love and care, and that I didn’t have any shame about receiving it.

—

Beck: I want to talk more about asking for help and offering help, because I feel like that’s very loaded. Why are so many of us hesitant to ask for help?

Birdsong: I think that, one: We often don’t see people asking for help, so we think everybody else is doing it on their own. Which is a lie. Not only is everybody else doing it on their own, but that it’s easy, right? When in fact, all of us are just a hot mess if we’re doing it on our own. We’re suffering.

Beck: It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Birdsong: Totally. So there’s that piece: that we don’t have a lot of good modeling for it. And I think we’ve been told that the people who have their shit together—the people who are strong, who are achieving and successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own.

And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering. When I was in my 20s and 30s, especially: the way that people would say how they got no sleep and were really tired.

Beck: Yes.

Birdsong: As like, something they were proud of.

Beck: “I worked so much. I’m so busy. My calendar is so full. I’m so tired.” Exactly. Like—congratulations?

Birdsong: Yes. Exactly—that thing, right? That is like, I have suffered in order to be productive. I have suffered in order to achieve. So that there is some way in which we have tied together “suffering and pain” with “being a good person and achievement.” I feel I’m at this place where I’m like, No, I want ease. Just because I can do something by myself doesn’t mean that I should.

I absolutely have to remind myself of this. I often find myself struggling—usually it’s something that I’m thinking about, not so much a task I need to do—but I’m just like, Oh, I can’t figure this out. And I’m like, Duh! Ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it. And inevitably—even if it’s just sharing the anxiety or stress or hardness of the thing—I automatically feel better, just because I’m being witnessed.

Beck: Is there a right way to ask for help?

Birdsong: Well, I’ll tell you what works for me. I often find, generally, that casting a wide net is better, right? Especially if it’s hard to ask for help. Asking one person and them saying “no” means you have to go do it again. When I text my neighbors for a lemon, right, I text all of them. I’m not texting them one at a time. I think the other thing is to tell on yourself and to say.

Beck: To tattle on yourself? [Laughter.]

Birdsong: Yes! To be like: I need help with something. I’m finding it really challenging to ask for help. I don’t want to be a burden. I’m going to do it anyway. And then, ideally, you’re able to have conversations with people, and they can reassure you that you’re not a burden.

I don’t know anybody who is constantly asking for help, that other people are like, Oh my God, Like, stop. That’s not my experience. I feel mostly we don’t ask enough. Maybe practice with things that feel like less of a lift—that don’t feel so critical to you, but that feel like they would bring you some ease.

If you know a friend is going to the store, ask them to pick you up some coffee because they’re going to be there anyway. And then you can go by and get the coffee.

Beck: And if they say no to picking up the coffee, that doesn’t destroy my confidence in the same way.

Birdsong: Totally. Maybe I already have coffee, and I’m just going to pretend I need coffee and see what happens.

Beck: What are your thoughts on the right way to offer help? Because a piece of advice that I hear a lot is that you shouldn’t ask “How can I help?” or “What can I do for you?” Because that’s more stress on the person: to then find something for you to do when maybe they’re in crisis or something.

Birdsong: Right, ’cause it’s not specific.

Beck: And then the advice is: “You should just do something without being asked.” But then, what if that’s unwelcome?

Birdsong: Totally. So this is where I’m also like, we need to stop trying to get an A in asking and offering for help.

Beck: I feel very called out by that.

Birdsong: We’re going to mess it up. I know, all of the high achievers are like, I want to get an A in asking and offering help. I think if we really have no idea what we can offer, we can say to people, “I want to offer some help, and I don’t know what would be useful to you.”

Beck: Mm hmm.

Birdsong: “Do you have an idea about something that would be useful, or is there someone who is close to you who does know what might be useful? And can I talk to them?” We don’t want to offer help that is not useful, because it feels risky.

And I think this is where we have to like, tap into what we know about our loved ones and come up with—here are three things that you could offer, right? And offer those and see if they want any of them. Or do a thing and see what happens. And bring them food. The death of a loved one is not going to be made worse by the fact that you gave them bread and they’re gluten free.

Beck: Small potatoes at that point.

Birdsong: Exactly. When I think about something like a joy fund, right? There’s a kind of imagination that was required to come up with that, that I think is harder in times where we’re all grinding with work and shepherding children and commuting and all of that. There was something about the slowing down of the pandemic. And in my mind, that was the slowing down of the wheel of capitalism that gave people room to show up for me in a particular way.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And I’m saying all of that because—especially right now, like we’re not post-pandemic, but we’re capitalism—the wheel of capitalism has started winding along the way that it was before.

And our mental capacity gets sucked up by, you know, both our paid and unpaid labor. And keeping our lives going. So I want us to give ourselves some grace when we find it challenging to make the space that we need for community.

Beck: Right. Because it’s not entirely our doing.

Birdsong: Exactly.

Rashid: Julie, there was an interesting survey on time use showing that by 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends—which doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time to me. And there was an almost 40 percent decline from five years before that. So, it seems like there’s so much we’re pressured to squeeze into a week or a day that four hours per week is all many people can even manage.

Beck: That was even before the pandemic, too. So I can’t imagine it’s gotten better since. But you’re right, Becca, that time is finite, and life is full of demands. Which is breaking news, I know. I mean: It would be nice to see those stats go up. But also, no matter what, it’s never going to be possible to always be a perfect friend or a perfect neighbor.

Mia said, “You need to stop trying to get an A-plus in helping people.” And I felt very personally roasted by that, because sometimes I do think about community-building as…homework? [Laughter.]

Even though I want to focus on relationships more than personal achievement in my life, those values of hard work and perfectionism follow me into my personal life as well—where if I’m not living up to that ideal of creating a perfect utopian community for me and the people I love, then I’m subconsciously giving myself a bad grade. What a nerd!

Rashid: You’re not a nerd…you’re trying to stay on top of it! I now make it a point on Sunday evenings to kind of write out a list of things I want to do in the next few weeks. And then I try to actually set up social time with my group of friends—I actually started a little neighborhood supper club with my friends, where we do themed dinners every month.

I like that it’s created this routine for us—where I know we have this thing we like doing together, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Beck: I like that you attend to your correspondences on Sunday night. It’s very Pride and Prejudice of you. [Laughter.]

Beck: So Mia, we’ve been talking a lot about how communities show up for each other in a crisis. And I think most people are really ready to show up in a crisis. But how can we have that kind of interdependence when it’s not a crisis?

Birdsong: Right, because all of us are going to experience crisis. That’s just a given. I have met so many older white men who—their wives die, and they’re in this moment of crisis, and they have nobody. They have their therapist, is who they have. They will just start talking to anybody about what’s going on with them, because they are so lonely.

So I think about that as the opposite of what we want.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And part of it, for them, is that they’ve kind of put all of their social connection in the one basket of their wife. And when that person doesn’t exist anymore, they’re just set adrift.

Beck: So community is, by its nature, something that has to be built by multiple people, of course. But if you are feeling a lack of community in your life, what can you as an individual do to kickstart that process?

Birdsong: So, the advice people get is often to join a thing. And I’m like, that sounds lame in some way. But it’s also totally true. Especially as adults, right? We don’t have that built-in, kind of like a school situation—where we’re meeting people who we know we’re building friendships with.

Beck: Right. We have work.

Birdsong: Exactly. Which I feel is not actually where you should be centering your social life. Because despite what your boss might say, your work is not your family. I mean, people obviously build genuine relationships there, but that should not be your most important social interaction.

So I’m like: book clubs. Activism. If you have some kind of faith, a faith community. Because you’re not going to meet people sitting at home, like I’ve tried.

I think the other piece is that sometimes we know people, but we don’t allow ourselves to be known by them. We’re not having the kinds of conversations that allow people to see into the interior of our lives. We’re not really telling them what’s going on with us. We stick to small talk. Right?

It is a recounting of what happened that was interesting in your life. And, you know, you say that you’re “good” as opposed to what you’re struggling with, or how you’re actually feeling. Or something that you’re wrestling with that could even be, you know, an intellectual thing. It doesn’t have to be painful. But we keep things at this surface level, and we don’t allow things to go deep.

Beck: How do you figure out what you want a community to look like in your life and then bring that into the real world? It seems like a very basic question, but it also seems really hard to actually do it.

Birdsong: Yes. And part of it is to get quiet with yourself. Notice the part of you that is longing for something. And I think, to make some room for it, and to notice how you’re thinking about that part. Like, if it makes you anxious, or if you wish it didn’t exist, or if it’s beautiful in some way to you—sit and find that piece of you. And I think you have to ask it, right? What is it that it wants?

You don’t make a strategic plan for building community. So then it’s really about seeing what that leads you to, and seeing who it leads you to.

I think for many of us, it is like—we have people in our lives, but we want to bring them closer in some way. I think that we actually have more knowledge and wisdom about how to build relationships than we give ourselves credit for. And I think primarily what gets in our way is not “Do we know what to do?” but “Are we willing to do it?”

There is no way to be in close relationships without being seen in some way. And I think many of us—I am “many of us”—are terrified of being known. We want people to see the best version of ourself, because we think that’s the version that people will love. That’s the version that people will praise.

That’s the version that people will want to, you know, be around. But nobody is that version of themselves. We are all many things. Sure, we do good and we do well, but we also mess up and are unsure and insecure and have a hard time.

Beck: I feel like what I’m hearing you say is that if there’s a basic action to community-building, it is “not hiding.”

Birdsong: Totally. Yes.

Rashid: You know, one thing I have noticed ever since the pandemic, Julie, is that most of my socializing is now a lot more homebound, which is not a good or bad thing. Yeah, but: I established a lot of new traditions with my community, like cooking dinner at different people’s houses or movie nights, or things in my life that used to be oriented around going out and meeting at bars.

And that still happens, too. But I have established a sort of newness in the rituals I have with my circle of people. What about you? I mean, have you learned anything in the making of this podcast that has changed your approach to your existing relationships, or helped you build new ones?

Beck: I wish I had a big update for you that would illustrate my personal growth. But I don’t think a lot has really changed with my friends or in my community. I’m not best friends with my neighbors yet. I think what I’ve noticed more is just patterns in how I think about my relationship to my community.

Rashid: I feel like that’s what we’ve set out to do, right? Sort of break down these steps of just bringing people closer to us. The initial awkward small talk, the hanging out, the scheduling the hangouts, the tough communication with friendships, and ultimately the sort of selfless disposition that you need to have if you want your relationships to feel more mutual and not feel transactional.

Beck: I think another hallmark of life in our capitalistic society is the pressure to optimize and self-improve all the time. I fall into that trap of thinking things will be better if I change this or if I change that.

So it kind of strikes me that a lot of my angst comes from feeling like I need to optimize my community toward some ideal through my own hard work—which is actually a very self-centered way to think about it.

The point of a community is that it’s not just in one individual’s control. And as much as it’s good to put effort into your relationships, you also have to just let go and be curious and see what’s actually there, and enjoy what’s there.

Rashid: And I think when you do try to control the situation, you can end up with our messaging-behind-the-desk situation, where before saying “Hi” I thought it was maybe a better idea to message you first, and make sure that you were comfortable with the interaction and all of that.

Beck: But you know, an imperfect awkward beginning like that can actually lead to something great. Because we’ve really become friends while making this podcast! You’ve been to my house; we’ve had many long, rambly, chatty drinks together. You’ve met my partner, you’ve met my sister, you’ve met a bunch of my friends.

Some of that was the result of intentional effort and reaching out and scheduling. But it was also the result of easing up on overthinking, and just being together. So I think it’s a balance of effort and ease—or effort, but not to a neurotic degree.

How to Talk to People: How to Know Your Neighbors

2023-06-19T05:00:00-04:00

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

Are commitment issues impacting our ability to connect with the people who live around us? Relationship-building may involve a commitment to the belief that neighbors are worthy of getting to know.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, author Pete Davis makes the case for building relationships with your neighbors and offers some practical advice for how to take the first steps toward creating a wider community.

We don’t need you to bring along flowers or baked goods to be a part of the How to Talk to People neighborhood. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), and Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, tell me about your relationship with your neighbors.

Julie Beck: In our apartment building, it’s a huge apartment building. It’s basically the size of a whole city block. And there are tons of people there. The only people whose names I even know are my immediate neighbors, because we share a roof patio. Like, I can see them over the fence.

And when they first moved in, I remember my partner and I were gardening on the roof, And I was like, “Joe, we need to introduce ourselves to them.” And he was like, “Nope, we’re not going to.” He was like, “I don’t want to. You can do that.”

We did exchange names and say hi, and that felt like a big victory. However, we immediately thereafter went back to ignoring each other. Every time we see each other on the roof, maybe there’s a small wave—but like, that’s it.

Beck: Hi, I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: It’s really strange to think that neighbors are the people who are literally closest to you, and yet so many of us don’t know them at all.

Pete Davis: You know, I’d walk around town, and I’d walk around the neighborhood and I’d be grumpy that everyone was so cold. And what are people like these days? They weren’t like this when I lived here 10 years ago. [Julie: Laughter.] But then I started practicing, you know? Well: I’m kind of like them, too, because I’m not reaching out to them. You know?

Beck: Pete Davis is a civic advocate and the author of the book Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing. He thinks one reason that neighbors don’t always bother to get to know one another is that our society has commitment issues.

Davis: What I noticed was that all the people that were giving me hope and giving my peers hope had in common was that they were all people who decided to forego a life of keeping their options open and instead make a commitment to a particular thing over the long haul.

Beck: So what does keeping our options open have to do with our sense of feeling like we’re connected to our community? What exactly about committing helps us feel connected?

Davis: You know, I moved back to my hometown after school. And I was gliding on the surface of everything when I moved back—just trying to get a sense of the place again—and I was feeling down on the place. I’m like, Why did we move back? Maybe we shouldn’t have moved back. Am I just moving back because I have this nostalgia? You know, all these things.

You know, when you think about becoming friends with a neighbor, those fears that I mentioned of commitment are fears that are present with you. If I have to commit every Thursday at 7 p.m. to go to this meeting, who knows what I’ll miss out on.

Beck: I do feel like there is a common refrain these days that people just don’t know their neighbors like they used to. Is that true? Was there ever a time when Americans were really good at getting to know their neighbors?

Davis: Yeah; I think it is true. I think, you know, there’s always been a spirit of nostalgia, but we actually have data to show that this type of nostalgia might be correct. The great cite here is Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam: the book that was kind of famous in the early 2000s about the decline of community in America. And he has data set after data set, graph after graph, that show that this is the case.

So “neighbors” in the broad sense of the term—you know, people in your town. You look at any angle on it, and we’re seeing a decline. So between the 1970s and the 1990s, the amount of club meetings that we went to per year was cut in half. The amount of people serving as an officer in a club, the amount of people attending public meetings: all major declines. Membership in religious congregations—it was 75 percent of Americans at the mid-century mark, and now, in the last few years, it crossed under 50 percent, you know?

You look at informal socializing: Putnam was able to find the national picnic data set. Where in the mid-’70s, we went on an average of five picnics a year with our neighbors.

Beck: Oh, my. [Laughter.]

Davis: And that was down to two by the ’90s.

Beck: Bring back picnics! Oh, my God.

Davis: Bring back picnics, and people doing dinner parties. The amount of people that say they have no friends—you know, in 1990, that was only 3 percent of Americans. In 2021, it was 12 percent. And so we do have numbers that show we’re in a neighboring crisis.

Beck: And well, I know we’ve already been talking about this with the spicy picnic data, but can you give us kind of an overview of how Americans’ relationship with their neighbors has evolved in the last 50 years?

Davis: Yeah. There was a famous essay even written back in the ’70s about the early rise of back patios. It was by Richard Thomas. And, you know, the front porch used to be the iconic appendage to a house. And starting in the ’70s and ’80s, interest in back patios started growing and then exploded in the ’90s and 2000s.

And now when you’re watching HGTV, or being toured in a new house or a new build by a realtor, they’re going to talk more about the back patio than the front porch. And both of those are socializing. The difference is the back patio is friends you already know, whereas the front porch is an opportunity to meet the people that start as strangers who live around you and turn them into friends that you know. Which is much less likely if the main socializing area is in the back of your house than in the front of your house.

And because it’s a front porch—maybe you don’t know this person yet. You don’t feel comfortable having them in your house. But we used to design our houses in a way that had this liminal space between kind of stranger and intimate privacy where community is built.

Beck: Maybe also a part of the barrier to talking to our neighbors is that we don’t have a lot of context for them beyond their geographical proximity. Maybe we know that they walk their dog at 8:00 every morning, but we don’t know what kind of person they are a lot of the time.

One thing that’s not given me a great ton of faith in my neighbors is I joined Nextdoor, perhaps misguidedly. And it’s a really tough space—just of people’s fears and worst sides really being on display. It’s just post after post about crime: “I’m afraid of this.” “Watch out for these two young boys that were looking at my house the other day.”

And I think people are often very reasonably wary of interacting with their neighbors in the sense that those people might be coming to those interactions with a lot of biases, unwarranted fears, and assumptions. And racism or sexism, or any of the things that can make our interactions with strangers in public ranging from extremely uncomfortable to dangerous.

Rashid: Right.

Beck: And so I do want to acknowledge that if people have that wariness of their neighbors not treating them as fully human, that is very fair. Simply getting better at talking to people is not going to dissolve racism or sexism or street harassment, or any of those deep-rooted societal problems that infect our relationships with our neighbors. That’s a much bigger problem than just “Do I know my neighbor’s name?”

Davis: I don’t want to be naive with all this messaging that every neighbor is going to be nice. And even among nice neighbors, there’s going to be this layer—just because of the culture that we’re living in—of seeing more, you know, I call it the Ring-camera culture of 2020s America. Where everyone outside your door is someone who’s out to get you, whether it’s a politician trying to get your vote or a door-to-door salesperson.

If that’s your experience of the outside world, because we live in such a low community time, it’s harder to form a community now than it is in a higher-trust society or a higher-trust era. I don’t think it’s something we all have to do alone.

If you’re the type of person that knows three other people in the apartment complex and you’re all friends, you’ve been there a long time and you’re more confident and outgoing and you have less to lose, and you’re less scared of this thing—which doesn’t make you any better, but it’s just like a quality you have—you need to give a little bit of that to everyone else. By being the person who has a little bit more wiggle room to have the vulnerability to lead in breaking the ice.

Beck: Yeah. As it becomes less common for anyone even to knock on your door, then it’s more alarming when someone does. Or you’re just expecting that when you’re at home, you’re going to be left alone.

So how can you build relationships with your neighbors that are as respectfully distant as they need to be, but also can be intimate enough to provide some support?

Davis: There’s a lot of ways to invite people to come be part of your life. So, you know, one of them isn’t knocking—it could be leaving an invitation. That will make them feel comfortable to receive this message and then make an affirmative choice to join or not. No one wants that person who immediately is way too vulnerable and intimate with you.

Beck: You know, Becca, sometimes I feel like there’s this sort of invisible barrier that feels almost physically effortful to push through before you can just say something to a neighbor.

There was a sociologist named Erving Goffman who called that barrier “civil inattention.” And it’s essentially, you know, the default polite posture that we have toward strangers in public. It’s essentially saying I see that you exist, and then you completely withdraw your attention from them and look away and look at your phone and leave them alone.

Rashid: So this is what always happens in the bathroom when you’re both washing your hands.

Beck: Yes, that’s right. The brief eye contact in the mirror, the tight smile. And then you look down and you’re washing your hands very, very solitarily. And that is exactly what happens in my building. Right.

You know, we’re walking down the hall toward each other. We’re looking down. And then there’s a little smile. And then we pass each other, and we don’t speak. That makes me feel like it would be invasive to try to strike up a conversation with them, like we’re both signaling that we want to be left alone.

Rashid: I’m going to tell you a little story about my neighbor who did invade my space.

Beck: Okay. [Laughter.]

Rashid: I’m fine, I’m safe. I was getting into one of two elevators in my building. We have our big moving-your-couch-from-floor-to-floor elevator. And then the small elevator that not more than one person should be getting into at a time.

Beck: And it was the small one, I’m sure.

Rashid: It was, of course, the small one. And he just slightly turned his body and said, “So, you’re a singer.”

[Laughter.]

Beck: Which you are, for the record.

Rashid: I think I am. And I just started profusely apologizing. I was like, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea that my YouTube karaoke was playing that loud, and I was singing over it.”

But it made me extremely self-aware. As you said, someone popped that invisible bubble between us of never acknowledging that we have this relationship, whatever it may be.

Beck: So, do you wish he had just never said anything and continued the sort of fiction that you are just two strangers who know nothing about each other?

Rashid: I mean as much as it was a bit jarring, in the end it was actually kind of nice.

Beck: There is a weird intimacy that we do have with our neighbors, like he can hear what you’re playing through the walls. You share a wall. But if we pass each other, we sort of don’t acknowledge that weird intimacy, or we just pretend that we’re complete strangers with no context of each other.

Davis: Totally. And in some ways, sometimes people are relieved when the intimacy is admitted to, because it pops the tension of it all. You know, I can hear you. I can see you. I saw that you didn’t bring your trash out. Or something, you know, without being nosy. There’s always the—we don’t want uber conformity, and we don’t want invasions of privacy. But there’s something in the middle.

Beck: Yeah. My building, God bless them, they’re always trying to host these community events. So, you know, it’ll be like It’s Valentine’s Day, come down and get some free drinks and cookies. And people will go. And then they’ll just take the food and leave, or they’ll just talk to whoever they live with that they already came down there with. There’s no mixing. They’re not getting people to mix. What are they doing wrong?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we need to have some of these events run by the people themselves. You also have to have an aggressive host, where even though it seems like it’s really annoying to be the host that says, “Hey, I got to know you and I got to know you, so you should talk because you’re both nurses and you both have third-graders. You guys should talk.” You know, that is the type of thing that brings people together. It’s not just automatic of “You lay out Valentine’s Day cookies and everyone’s going to talk,” because you have to have someone that breaks the ice and brings people together.

Beck: Well, this is where I struggle, right? Because I can see how when you first move somewhere, that seems like a natural opportunity to introduce yourself to the people who live next to you or something.

But I’ve lived in my building for two and a half years now. I’ve lived in my neighborhood for almost 10 years, and I feel like it’s too late. I don’t have that excuse of being new anymore. Now so much time has passed that it just feels really weird to randomly try to get something going now.

Davis: You know, it is nice when you just move somewhere that you have this excuse like, “Hi, I just moved here.” And people are going to give you the honeymoon period of that’s not a weird thing to say. That “get out of awkwardness free” card is gone when you’re not.

Beck: Oh yeah, it’s long gone.

Davis: But you know, I’ve always believed that this isn’t something that we need to overthink. You have to just walk up to a neighbor in some way and invite them to be closer to you, which is obviously really awkward. It’s so awkward. That’s the reason we’re all not neighborly with each other.

Beck: Right.

Davis: But everyone is waiting for someone to do that to them. You know, that’s the funny thing. And in some ways, we’re all playing a prisoner’s dilemma with each other where it’s like, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me. And they’re thinking in their head, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me, or Maybe they don’t trust me or whatever.

And the way to break that prisoner’s dilemma with each other is for someone to go a little bit above and beyond, to have an act of vulnerability. And so a gift is one example of that, which is—“I went out of my way to show you an act of goodwill, to show you not only that I’m trustworthy a little bit more, but also that I think you’re trustworthy a little bit more.”

Mention the concert you went to last weekend when you’re passing in the hallway. Mention something about your family. It doesn’t need to be totally too much information. It can just be the next level of personality.

Beck: You know Becca, even at the most sort of super-benign and cliched neighbor interaction of going over to borrow something, I’ve actually had a negative experience with that myself.

Rashid: Can you tell me what happened?

Beck: Yeah; it was a really simple interaction. I had moved into my current apartment building, and we had all of our taped-up boxes, but I realized that I had packed the scissors inside one of the taped-up boxes, and that I needed scissors to open the taped-up box to get the scissors.

I thought, You know; that’s fine. I’ll just go ask a neighbor. Everybody has scissors. That’s an opportunity to introduce myself and also get something that I need.

So I went down the hall and I knocked on the door that had a light on under it or something, where it seemed like somebody was home. And this very harried woman came to the door, and she had her phone at her ear. And she was like, “What?! What do you need?”

And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I just moved in. I just needed to borrow some scissors. Like, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but do you have scissors?” And she kind of huffed, and then went off and got the scissors.

She did give them to me, but in a very annoyed way. She probably wasn’t expecting a rando to knock on her door in the middle of the day, but I just went and used her scissors and then silently returned them. And then we never spoke again.

Rashid: Did she apologize when you returned the scissors?

Beck: No. She just took them back and just was like, thanks. I think she probably felt sort of interrupted and having her privacy impeded upon. But also I had a very benign request and was met with open hostility. So it did not make me want to knock on more doors, that’s for sure. It was just a reminder: Just because somebody lives near you doesn’t mean they’re going to be neighborly.

Beck: How can you ask a next-door neighbor for help without feeling like you’re an inconvenience?

Davis: You know, the amazing thing is that, with relationships, it all works the opposite of what our fears are telling us, the way that they work. So, you know, you think giving something away means you lose something. But actually, giving something is a gain.

You think that when you reveal something about yourself, it’ll make you hated because people will disagree with the particularities of you., But it actually makes you loved more, and being generic is what alienates you from people.

Beck: One of the things that’s been relieving, but also tough, is that on the one hand, the idea that having that kind of community you want feels so hard is not just your fault for not trying hard enough. Because there’s a lot of institutional things at work.

But then it also feels discouraging, because there’s only so much I as one person can do to change any of that.

Davis: It is none of our faults, and we shouldn’t be accountable. This is not a finger-wagging at individuals to solve this alone. Like, the answer’s just going to be all of us deciding to be nicer and reach out more.

It needs to be a mix of us individually doing that, and rebuilding the civic infrastructure that helps us do it. You know, it’s not just reaching out to your neighbors. It’s reaching out to your neighbors to talk about how we can reach out to our neighbors.

Beck: And what are some things that you’ve done in your life to be committed and stay committed to your neighbors? Do you bring them cookies? What do you do?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we are increasing our gift game.

Beck: Okay, [Laughter.] What’s your best gift?

Davis: We’re mostly doing baked goods and flowers now. And actually, the flowers is a double commitment—which is our local farmer’s market. We’ve become friends with the florist there, and we’re going to go visit the florist at their flower farm soon because we’ve decided to not just treat them as, you know, the person we buy flowers from. And then we bring those flowers to our neighbors and try to have a connection there.

The book that changed my life more than any other is called I and Thou by Martin Buber, who is a Jewish theologian from the early 20th century. He lays out these two ways of relating to the world. He calls them “I and it” and “I and thou,” or “I and you.”

And what “I and it” is: You see everything around you. You see other people, but also the whole world. You see them as objects—its—that have served purposes in your life. Only reflecting what they are to you, how they bother you, or how they help you, how they’re different from you, out there, similar to you.

“I and you” relates to all the rest of the world as “you.” They are fellow subjects. They are also players in the video game of life. They are full of life. They have a depth that you can’t understand. When you really are engaging with them, and you let all of the ways that they measure up or help you or facilitate you or bother you or compare with everything else.

When you let that fall away, you’re bathed in the light of their shared reality with you. They’re also there. And even just a small victory in that fight by building a tiny relationship with one other person isn’t a small thing. It’s everything.

Beck: That’s amazing. [Laughter.] Pete, thank you so much. It was really, really great talking to you and having you on the show.

Davis: Thank you so much. So appreciate what you’re doing with this.

Beck: Yeah, Becca: I appreciated Pete talking about tiny steps and the importance of small relationships.

I think I can get stuck in black-and-white thinking sometimes, where I’m like, Oh, the stakes are really high. Because either my neighbor is going to hate me like the Scissor Lady, or if I just do all the right things, then we’re going to be best buds and we’ll share beers on the roof in the evening. And, as with most things, I think the truth is often somewhere more in the middle.

Rashid: And there’s this concept called Dunbar’s number. The psychologist Robin Dunbar has theorized that people are only able to actually cognitively handle maintaining so many relationships at once—about five deep, intimate friendships at a time. But you can actually handle about 150 or so friendships total in your sort of larger web of the friends of friends, and college friends.

So I feel like neighbors maybe fall into one of those outer rings, where it’s okay that you just sort of know their name and the name of their dog. And, you know, that type of relationship is enough.

Beck: So my very small update on my own neighbor relationship is: The other day I saw those same roof neighbors who we introduced ourselves to like a year ago and then never spoke to again. And I sort of made myself go over there and say, “Hey, you’re so and so and so and so, right?” Like, I remember your names.

I just said, “I wanted to offer, since we share a roof, and it would be really easy if you’re ever out of town and you need us to water your plants, we would be happy to.” And they were like, “Oh great! Like, same! We would be happy to do that, too.” So, we did make that tiny step toward a very small plant-watering relationship.

Beck: It’s actually a lot more than nothing to have someone right next door who’s a little something more than a stranger.

Rashid: I mean, now every time I sing, I know someone is listening. [Laughter.]

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

How to Talk to People: What Makes a House a Home

2023-06-12T05:00:00-04:00

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

What motivated two families to engage in the organized chaos of shared living, and how did they learn to talk through, and shape, new expectations for their family life at home?

In this episode of How to Talk to People, we hear from Deborah Tepley and Luke Jackson, who remember when they first asked their best friends to buy a house with them. The Flemings—soon to be expecting their first child—didn’t hesitate to say yes. Their real-estate agent and extended families warned against the decision, but the families shared a vision of a home where the values of community could flourish in practice.

Be part of the How to Talk to People family. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Bomull (“Latte”), and Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Julie Beck: What are some common misconceptions about your home life that you find yourself having to explain to people?

Deborah Tepley: We’re not swingers. [Laughter.]

Bethany Fleming: I think a lot of people when we say like, “Oh yeah, we live with another couple,” they’re like, Oh, like they live in the basement.

Beck: No one’s banished to the basement.

Bethany: And then there’s like a whole slew of questions about “How does that work?”

—

Beck: Hi. I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: Deborah Tepley, Luke Jackson, and Bethany and TJ Fleming kindly invited us into their home on a Monday afternoon.

I first reported on their shared living setup back in 2019 in an article called “The Case for Buying a House With Friends.” But this was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: When Julie and I walked into their house, I felt a sort of ease and playfulness in their shared living setup. Their decor was simple and airy, with cream walls and dark accents. And two light-gray couches, where we recorded for the next few hours.

Beck: It was really cozy and honestly amazingly clean, considering two young kids lived there: one named Mary Hayley and the other named Pax. But as down to earth as they are, their home life is actually kind of quietly radical.

Rashid: It’s all well and good to live with friends when you’re young, but the concept of “settling down” can be a strong motivator in adulthood. And “single-family homes” are called that name for a reason because the expectation is a single family will live in them. As limiting as that may be.

Beck: So this all started a few years ago at a New Year’s brunch. The four friends who had met at church were enjoying some champagne, having some laughs. And then kind of out of nowhere: Luke proposed that they should all buy a house together. And all four of them were down. They were excited to try a more communal way of living.

Deborah: We are currently in our shared home, which is in Petworth in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C.

Luke Jackson: And this is Luke. We are in our living room, which is great.

TJ Fleming: And this is TJ, and I would just add that it’s a bright, sunny day outside, and we can see many of the plants we’ve planted.

Bethany: I don’t have anything to add.

Beck: Okay, great. [Laughter.]

Beck: So after many logistical conversations and plenty of financial spreadsheets, they now have a group mortgage and split the costs of their home 50/50 between the two couples.

Rashid: While visiting with these families, I found myself wondering whether how we define what makes a house a home may be what limits us. I feel like our culture can pressure adults to orient family life exclusively around a romantic partner and children. But it’s not always immediately clear to me how to build community in a different way and what that looks like.

Luke: Yeah; it’s always like, “Oh, so you’re renting together?” and I’m like, “No, no, no. We bought a house with other people.” People assume that we regret it.

Deborah: I think people are very curious about the logistics of the arrangement. They’re curious about the kids and how that works. Before offering that information to someone, I do think about it: Do I want to have this conversation? And so that is something I actually do consider before sharing about our shared living situation.

Beck: How much energy do you have to explain yourself today?

Deborah: That’s right. Yeah.

Beck: Do you think it’s just that our sort of American ideal of “one family, one home,” “my home is my castle” vibes is so strong that they’re like, They must be in the basement. They couldn’t possibly be upstairs.

Luke: That’s what I think. Yeah—that people think about what their life at home looks like, and they assume that ours must be some recognizable version of that.

TJ: The message of the American dream of “Buy your own house” ... the National Association of Realtors has been really successful in making sure everyone believes that’s for them. [Laughter.] You know, we still get most of those benefits. It’s just, we share it._.

Deborah: And I think that is a difference, from either renting together or one household renting to another. There is not the same sense of shared ownership. There’s also, I think, maybe a power differential if one household owns a house and one is renting.

But we’re all in it. So if something breaks or if something needs to be repaired, we’re all invested. We all really care about the outcome. And I think that actually helps us to avoid conflict, because we’re all so invested in this property and we love this house.

Beck: And whose idea was it first to buy a house together?

Deborah: I had been pitching Luke on living in community for a couple of years. I grew up in a big family, and I really love living with other people. I loved living with roommates. And so I kept sending him different articles or podcasts about different people who are in group-house situations. And Luke had never had a roommate other than a family member before he married me. And so he said, “Absolutely not.”

And then one day he came home after listening to a podcast or a sermon that I had sent to him and said, “I think I might be open to this.” That being said, no one was more surprised than me when Luke popped the question at New Year’s brunch to TJ and Bethany.

Beck: So you were both married at the time of the New Year’s brunch.

TJ: Yeah.

Beck: And did you feel any pressure, as married couples, for your home life to look a certain way?

Luke: I think culturally, you just assume: You get married, you buy a home. You know, have a family and live like an independent, nuclear kind of family unit.

And so I think that had always been my assumption of what our married life would look like. But as Deborah and I were sort of talking about buying a home and what might that look like, and this was definitely not one of the default options. [Chuckles.]

Beck: What would people say when you told them that you were thinking of doing this? What kind of pushback would you get?

Deborah: When we talked about it with other people, everyone thought it was a bad idea, including our real-estate agent. I think most people were worried about the worst-case scenarios. What if it doesn’t work? You’re all on the mortgage. What happens when someone has kids? If it doesn’t work, how are you guys going to be able to split amicably?

Bethany: I got a lot of questions about what discipline looks like. And, do they even like kids? What if they don’t like your kids? But I felt like, you know, it’s Luke and Deborah: They’re going to love our kids. And if I am going to parent for the first time in front of anyone, I would want it to be Luke and Deborah, you know?

Beck: What was it that you wanted from your home life that wouldn’t be met by the traditional single-family-home arrangement? And what did you hope that this would provide instead?

Bethany: You know, all four of us have full-time jobs. And so when you’re living in community, we split groceries; we divide up who’s cooking and when. And, you know, there’s a lot of talk out there about how the domestic labor falls on one partner in a relationship. And so we divide that among four people.

TJ: Neither of us on our own would have purchased this house, financially speaking. We got to buy a larger property in a neighborhood that we were more excited about living in.

Luke: Yeah; I maybe approached it least practically of any of us. [Laughter.] So living even with just a spouse, right, is challenging. But it also encouraged me to grow, to be gentler, to be kinder. To be less self-centered.

And so I was sort of thinking, Wow, if living with just Deborah has done that, imagine adding more people to the mix. I don’t know if that’s panned out quite the way that I thought it would.

Bethany: Doubled in size!

Luke: Tripled in size!

TJ: Luke, you’ve become gentler and softer.

Luke: Thank you.That’s reassuring to hear. I actually think it makes us better people, and encourages us to grow less self-centered to live in community like this.

Deborah: I think that people often assume that we made this decision for financial reasons. I think it was more of a missional kind of—the desire to live in community, and to live with TJ and Bethany.

And I thought I would be a bigger person, like you imagine I’ll be really altruistic. And I think a lot of times I’m not, and I really have appreciated their grace and forgiveness toward me when I’m not a big person, or when my behavior is very poor. And so there’s a lot of opportunities for grace and forgiveness. And I’ve been the recipient of that time and time again.

Bethany: Yeah; I also just think it’s a lot of fun. I really feel like we’re not communicating how much fun we have together. Someone’s always around to talk to or hang out with.

Rashid: You know, Julie, I’m at an age where many of my friends have serious romantic partners and many even have kids. So the time for casual hangouts is understandably limited. But there has been a noticeable shift in the ease of just meeting up and hanging out spontaneously.

Beck: Yeah; that is something that I worry about a little bit—being in a long-term relationship. We’ve also been through a pandemic and just only hanging out with each other for a few years.

I don’t want us to be super-insular in our relationship. And that does happen—married people are a lot less likely than single people to hang out with their friends and neighbors. And research shows that holds true across race, age, and socioeconomic status.

So even though I don’t think we’re going to necessarily invite another couple to move in with us right now, I am trying to be more deliberate about spending more time with my friends regularly. As much as we love each other, I don’t want our love for each other to pull us away from our friendships.

Rashid: Culturally, sometimes it feels like it’s not very adult to want to live with your friends forever. So although that is my ideal scenario—to have a huge, L-shaped IKEA sectional couch where my partner along with 10 friends can all sit together—it doesn’t always feel the most realistic when it comes to a long-term living situation, where I can actually live with those sort of chosen family members of mine and make a home with them.

Beck: I mean, especially once you reach certain milestones—like if you do choose to get married or if you do choose to have kids—the expectation kind of gets even stronger that you’re going to live with just your nuclear family: just your partner and your kids.

Rashid: And the cultural and social pressures are just one part of the equation. In the case of these two families, they had to lay out and untangle their individual expectations—and fears—too.

Beck: So going into this, that’s what you were hoping for from it. What were you afraid of?

Bethany: Oh, that’s a good question. We wrote all those things down. This was a suggestion from our realtor. He was like, “Before you guys start on this process, write down all your fears, fold them up on pieces of paper, put them in a bowl, and just pull them out one by one and talk about it.” And so that’s what we did.

Beck: What else do you all remember about the bowl conversation?

Deborah: Well, we all cried. One of my responses was that they would regret having bought a house with us in a year or two years. And I just thought about how bad that would feel.

Luke: I mean, I think fundamentally, it was about rejection, right? Like, wow: They’re going to live with me, and they’re going to figure out what I’m really like. And they’re going to be like “Wish we had done a hard pass, like six months ago” kind of thing.

TJ: Similar to any relationship where, you know, something is going to change, you worry about, like, Will I lose this friend? Or Will things not be as fine? Or Will they be way different? And you know, that was, I guess, one of my fears.

Luke: One other thing we talked about—I think we talked a lot about—what happens if somebody really goes off the rails? I think several of us have had mental illness in the family, and had family members suddenly go through a mental-health crisis and change.

What if God forbid, one of us gets divorced or whatever? I remember the mental-health one being one that we all cried about.

Beck: What do you remember about move-in day and the sort of weeks and months following that?

Bethany: Oh, my gosh. I was seven months pregnant. But I do remember during that time we would all take family walks late at night. And you know, nothing fit so I looked ridiculous. And Luke and Deborah walk really fast, so they were just really walking very, very slowly. We all walked at my pace so that we could talk. We did it every night.

Luke: We all had something that we were anticipating kind of together. Getting the nursery ready. And talking through: “When is Bethany’s mom coming?” “When is TJ’s mom coming?” “When they go to the hospital, what are we going to do?” Just being a really fun period when we all were kind of looking forward to Mary Hayley’s arrival and waiting with bated breath.

Beck: How did you both decide the role that you wanted Luke and Deborah to play in your children’s lives?

Bethany: Aw, what a really sweet question. I mean, well, Luke and Deborah are the godparents to our children. That felt like a really obvious one. We want our children to experience Luke and Deborah, and just the kindness and the love that they bring to our family. I mean, we’re a family.

Deborah: I mean, we’re just part of their normal life. And they’ve never asked, “Why do you live here?”

Beck: What were the discussions about parenting in this shared environment like?

TJ: I mean, I think we’re all just on the same page. Bethany and I, we’re going to parent our children how we thought was right. I think it’s really hard to do this if you don’t have some kind of shared value system with another couple. I think you need at least some kind of shared faith system or shared non-faith system to do that.

Bethany: I mean, I think it’s helpful for people to know, “Hey, this is a strategy we’re using when this happens.” We decided early on: TJ and I will discipline our kids, and Deborah and Luke are like their aunt and uncle. They uphold the rules. They don’t encourage the kids to break the rules, right? But TJ and I provide the discipline or consequences. I think that has also helped: just that boundary.

Beck: I wanted to ask Luke and Deborah: How did you feel about committing not to live just with another couple, but with someone else’s kids? I think a lot of us who play the sort of aunt or uncle role to our friends’ kids—at least myself—I know I dip in, I dip out. You know: I show up, I show ’em a movie, I pump ’em full of sugar, and I send them on their way to their parents. But you sign on to be there for all of it, all the time.

Luke: TJ and Bethany were upfront that they were planning on having kids, from our very first conversation about this. We always knew going in, you know, that this was what we were signing up for. But it is humbling that we actually do still have the option of dipping out.

Maybe not quite to the same degree. You know, you can still hear the screaming from the bedroom. But we can actually step away and have some privacy or let TJ and Bethany deal with whatever is happening.

Deborah: I think we thought it would be a great adventure. And on the one hand, we did know what we were getting ourselves into. We’d been around kids enough. But I don’t think we had an idealized or romanticized view of what it would be like to live with kids. We were not planning to have kids. We knew that. But I think we felt like this would be a good way to participate in the life of kids.

TJ: And our kids love them.

Deborah: We love their kids. We are crazy about them.

Luke: They’re very sweet.

Bethany: I think that has been one of the great joys of living together—getting to parent with a community that I think we wouldn’t have otherwise. I think a lot of people feel isolated in their house with their kids. And on the one hand, it is hard parenting in front of the audience, you know. And on the other, I’m so glad that we’re doing it together. And so that has made a big difference.

Luke: We have a two-to-one adult-to-child ratio in the house. And I think a lot of people would hear that and be pretty envious, because it does provide more adults. Not just in terms of safety and keeping an eye on things, but just ... kids are attention sponges. And it’s nice to have more people in the house who can help, you know, kind of nurture them.

And it’s also really fun to hear the kids starting to use crazy words that I use and that Deborah uses. It’s a privilege to get to be playing a role in raising children without actually having had them.

Beck: Do you eat together every night?

Deborah: We do. Whoever is here eats together.

Beck: And the kids, too?

Bethany: Yep.

Beck: What are some of the rituals and rhythms that you’ve established in your house? Kind of week to week.

Deborah: Initially, we did a weekly house meeting. And we still do house meetings, not quite weekly. And I think part of that is just we don’t have the need for them as frequently as we did at first.

We got this idea from another group house in D.C. They said that they do a meeting every week, and they ask, first of all, what’s working and what’s not working. Everyone goes around and has to respond to both questions.

Just the little things that really can grate on you, or things that might be upsetting to you that might just fester for a long time. And so I think that’s been a good practice for us: just sort of getting things out in the open. It provides a forum for that.

Beck: What are some conflict-management strategies in your house? Do you have specific ways that you go about it?

Bethany: Having a structure for regular communication is really helpful, because you don’t feel this pressure to bring something up in the moment when you may or may not be ready to talk about it. Like, Oh, I know we’re having a meeting, and so I can just bring it up there.

Luke: Many of the lessons from marriage also apply, things like “You can’t hold someone accountable to it if you didn’t say it out loud.” You also have to say what’s working, right?

Deborah: Honestly, that question—“What’s working? What’s not working?”—is a really hard question to answer, in part because you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. And, you know, it just really forces you to talk about things that you wouldn’t talk about otherwise. So I think that has forced me to be a better communicator.

I think that’s an added benefit of living with people: You see their life so close up and personal, and you see the way that they resolve conflict and the way that they parent their kids, and all of those things. And so I feel like I’ve learned a lot. And I think I’m a better communicator because I’ve lived with TJ and Bethany.

Luke: Yeah; I would second that. Living in a community challenges you to just be emotionally intelligent, right? Is this a me problem, or is this actually, you know, maybe somebody said something that was hurtful, or they were just not thinking about it? How am I feeling and why? And is it something that I need other people to help me deal with, or is it something that I can, you know, process on my own?

Deborah: Yeah. And I think living in a community forces you to work out your own kind of marriage in the community. And there’s this infamous night where we all sat down to dinner. We sat down, and I said, “You know, Luke and I are fighting, and we need some time. And so we’re going to go work this out, and we’ll be back in 15 minutes.”

Deborah: And Bethany said, “TJ and I are fighting, too!” And I think that TJ and Luke were both like, “we’re fighting?” So we split up into separate areas of the house. And we came back after 15 minutes and finished dinner together.

TJ: I have no recollection of that; that’s hilarious.

Luke: We love each other and that love actually is based on a commitment. Right? And I think that commitment predates a mortgage, but a mortgage is a useful symbol of that as well. And so, yeah: Out of that commitment comes a desire to “Well, let’s make this work.” We want to make this work. And so how do we do that in a way that’s best for everybody?

Beck: I think what’s kind of remarkable to me about the commitment is that friendship culture in the U.S. and maybe elsewhere today is very anti-commitment, I think. And not always in a bad way, necessarily—but I think friendship is defined in some ways by its voluntary nature. You don’t have those formal commitments that you have in marriage, that you have in a nuclear family.

And so there can become this sort of sense of, you know, “I love you and you’re my friend.” But the highest truth is everybody needs to do what’s best for themselves. And I think it is rare that you would put an obligation onto your friend or accept an obligation from your friend.

Luke: Yeah, definitely. I think I’m setting healthy boundaries. Like “I need to do some self-care”—that kind of language. I think we have a kind of shared moral framework that’s based on our faith.

And, at least to my reading, at the heart of Christianity is actually “other-centered love”—that I’m choosing what’s best for you, not for me. And so I think that informs our shared living and our commitment to one another as well. And there are benefits for me. But I also want to love, and I want to serve you and your kids and Deborah, and I think that really is our starting place as a house.

TJ: Yeah; again there has to be a shared vision outside of yourself. Or why else would you be doing it? There’s many days or weeks where you want to be somewhere else; this happens to me all the time just because of my personality. “I want to move to Florida because it’s cold.” I can’t tell you how many times I say that in the winter.

But without that shared vision of something bigger outside of you, it’s not going to last more than a year or two, because you’re going to find a reason to escape. I think it’s really easy to make “community” a theoretical concept. What I’ve learned about community through living with others, including Luke and Deborah, is that community is a real granular thing in real life.

It’s the people you’re with on a daily basis, how you interact with them. It’s how intentional you are with them, and it doesn’t actually come naturally. Building real community is not an ideology. It’s a practice.

And that goes for our house. But that also goes with my other friendships. I want to have lifelong friendships outside of this house, and I have to spend time with those people, or else we’re not actually close.

Beck: Can you all still imagine any scenarios where one of you would want to move out, or two of you would want to move out?

Luke: I mean, I guess if somebody’s got a job—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—somewhere else. And then, something that we have talked about is that the kids are sharing a room right now. At some point they’ll need to not share a room together. And so, would we buy a different house? Would we maybe need to go our separate ways?

Deborah: Initially when we decided to do this together, we signed a three-year contract. And now we’re past that three-year mark, and we have a retreat every year in May where we talk about the future and sort of what the next year looks like, and what our timeline is. And so I think we just have this opportunity to revisit that every year.

TJ: There’s kind of a running clock on a couple of our careers. And so we’ve talked about that openly. It’s not like an elephant in the room or something.

Beck: Yeah. And how do you think you guys would approach it if somebody did want to move out?

Luke: So this was one of the things that we made sure that we really ironed out before we actually bought the house together. We would have the house independently appraised. If there’s one couple that wants to stay in the house, they would have an opportunity to actually buy the other couple out.

If that’s not possible or the other couple didn’t want to, then we would either sell the house and just split the [proceeds]—I think right now our equity would just be 50-50—or we could also rent the house out and split the proceeds from the rent as well. So one of those options.

Beck: Would you recommend your choice to other people?

Luke: Absolutely.

TJ: Yeah; I think they need to go through the process. [Laughter.]

Deborah: Yeah; I think so too. I think you really want to, you know, count the cost. You need to make sure you’re doing it with the right people. But as long as you can trust them in general and trust them financially, I think that’s a big part of it.

Luke: Yeah. Ninety percent of what goes on, right, is very day-to-day and very mundane, and the big questions only come up so often.

Beck: When someone puts microphones in your house and asks them to you?

Luke: Right. [Laughter.]

Deborah: You know, I married a strong introvert who would like to be in his man cave most of the time. Luke is not the only one bearing the burden of my social needs; there’s like a whole house of people to share that.

Beck: Becca, I agree with Deborah. I do think you need different people to fill different roles in your life. It reminds me of a concept called the All-or-Nothing Marriage, which comes from the psychologist Eli Finkel. And he’s kind of theorizing that people just expect even more from their marriages than they used to.

Way back when, you know, it was basically a financial arrangement. Right? And then we wanted love on top of that. And now we even want self-actualization on top of that, and to become our best selves through this relationship. And it could be very isolating if that one person is your sort of be-all end-all.

Rashid: Yeah, you know, I grew up in a multigenerational house as a kid, and my aunt and uncle would come over every weekend. And there were lots of people meeting my emotional needs as a kid, not just my parents. So whenever I saw just two parents and a kid at the dinner table at my friends’ houses, I was always interested in this sort of stark difference with my family that was sort of a chaotic, buffet-style mess of a dinner every weekend.

Beck: Sounds fun.

Rashid: It was. But I realized it’s just a totally different setup when one person or just two people are expected to fill in the gaps of what an extended family, or an extended network of people, can do. It is interesting to me that in mainstream American culture, the romantic partner is expected to be your everything.

Beck: Yeah. Like, help raise your kids and hear all of your work stories that they don’t understand and help you around the house. And they’re your go-to person for every concert and movie and anything that you do. It’s just a lot for one relationship to hold. It’s a lot of weight to ask for from anybody.

Rashid: And actually it’s been shown that relying on a variety of people to meet different emotional needs can be better for people’s well-being.

TJ: To get back to your earlier question, just on our block on this side, there’s three or four shared intergenerational arrangements, whether it’s family or otherwise. It’s actually not that weird, you know?

Beck: Yeah. If I want to suss out a friend to see if they’d be down for this, how should I broach the conversation?

Luke: I think you want to make it a compliment: “I’ve been thinking about living in community and wanting to do that intentionally. And when I thought about that, you were someone that I thought, Wow, you would be a great person to live in community with.”

I would suggest that people talk to your spouse first. “This is what I’m thinking; what do you think about that? How do you think that would impact our relationship? What would be great about it?” Not just: “What are you afraid of?”

Beck: What have you all learned about each other along the way?

Deborah: When you live together, you learn who is coming down the stairs before you see them. You learn kind of their footfall. You learn that TJ lets out a large sigh every morning as he comes down the stairs first thing. So you have that level of intimacy with people.

Luke: I’ll take the more depressing approach.

TJ: Whoa, right on cue.

Deborah: Are you sure?

Luke: Everybody in the house is shocked. Even when you change your living situation, you’re still the same person, right? All of the same things that I struggled with, living with Deborah—like, Hey, whoa, they’re still true. I’m still me. I think there’s always that temptation, like TJ said—to escape, to move somewhere else, to like, enter a new situation—and then I’ll be a new person. No; you’re going to enter in your situation, and you’re going to be the same you that you always have been. And so is that the right situation to move into or not?

TJ: I think I’ve just learned that Luke and Deborah are better people than I even thought. I can appreciate them at a deeper level than I could before we lived together. And even though yeah, we’ve had arguments or disagreements, I still think they’re some of the best, most generous people that I know. It amplifies the good.

Bethany: I like the idea of “We got to choose our family.” I don’t know; it’s just brought a lot of joy.

Rashid: And Julie, there are signs that other models of living, other than single-family homes are also becoming more normalized in our culture.

Beck: Yeah; because there’s something about the nuclear-family household that encourages people to turn inward away from the possibility of that broader community. But if you want to have those other layers of support in your life, then it takes some really intentional planning to resist the pull of that model of home life that is really held up as the building block of society.

Rashid: And maybe even a hint of rebellion.

Beck: Just a hint.

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

How to Talk to People: What Do We Owe Our Friends?

2023-06-05T05:00:00-04:00

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

The terms of friendship are both voluntary and vague—yet people often find themselves disappointed by unmet expectations. In this episode of How to Talk to People, we explore how to have the difficult conversations that can make our friendships richer and how to set expectations in a relationship defined by choice.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The managing editor of How to Talk to People is Andrea Valdez.

Be friends with How to Talk to People. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Charmed Encounter,” “She Is Whimsical,” “Organized Chaos”), Bomull (“Latte”), and Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”).

Click here to listen to additional episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Marisa Franco: “He had a bachelor party, and half of his friends bailed last minute on his own bachelor party. And he was talking about these friends and how one of them lived next to him, and I thought in my head, Those are not friends. How is this guy defining friendship?

Julie Beck: Is this when I get on my soapbox?

Rebecca Rashid: Yeah, you can get on your soapbox.

Beck: Okay, so flaking … I hate it.

Lizzie Post: I think doing the thing where you just don’t show up is really not cool.

Franco: If you think it’s going to happen organically, you’re not going to have friends.

Beck: Hi. I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: Becca, I know it might seem strange to suggest we don’t know how to talk to our friends and need a podcast to tell us how. But actually, there are a lot of common misunderstandings and conflicts in friendship that often go unspoken. The beauty and the challenge of friendship is that it encompasses so many different types of relationships, but that means sometimes friends have clashing expectations of what the friendship should look like. We don’t always talk about that explicitly. Flaking is a prime example of a kind of unspoken friction that can build up in friendships.

Rashid: What is it about flaking in particular that bothers you?

Beck: It’s not just that it annoys me. I don’t think anybody likes being flaked on. It’s this sense that it has become so very normalized in our culture and is just a routine part of social life—that you actually almost have to expect that, like, a good percentage of the time, if you make a plan with somebody that plan is going to change or get canceled.

I think we’re a little too quick to be like, If I am not in optimal, tip-top shape to show up, then I won’t show up. Or that we have to be completely at ease, completely comfortable, completely full of vim and vigor to totally hang out with our friends.

And I’m not upset if you lose your childcare and you have to back out, or if you get sick. Things happen. Life happens. I think we can all be understanding. What bugs me is that it feels just completely fine in a lot of social circles to just cancel with no explanation or the reason is just I’m not feeling up to it today or I’m really tired from work.

I think it’s kind of part and parcel with a big premium that we put on protecting our energy as like the greatest good. But I don’t know if we should protect our energy at the cost of our relationships.

Post: There’s a certain point where it just feels like, okay, do you care about this friendship?

Beck: I think that Lizzie Post could help us. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, who is a famous etiquette expert who wrote a well-known column about 100 years ago. Lizzie is now the co-president of the Emily Post Institute, and she recently published the sort of updated centennial edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette.

There’s definitely no shortage of dating advice columns or parenting advice out there. But I think what we wanted to find was some more etiquette tips, or best practices for managing those tricky conversations in friendships where expectations are less well-defined. And that’s right up Lizzie’s alley.

Beck: I’m going to start with a big philosophical question. What do you owe your friends?

Post: We are such individuals, and just like in relationships, your love language might be different. In friendships, your friendship language is different. So what one person thinks we owe a friend, another person might think, No, that’s ridiculous; no way. So I think it’s a very, very personal question. And that makes navigating those relationships that are our friendships a little bit more difficult, and something that we want to pay more attention to. To recognize that not everyone sees friendship the exact same way that we do.

Beck: Something that I have noticed is that it feels totally normalized to flake on plans. So, for instance, if you and I make a plan today to get drinks next Friday, I’m going to feel like when Friday comes around, I’m going to feel a need to text you to ask, “Are we still on for drinks today?” And it would not be strange for you to text me the day before, or even day of, to say, “You know, actually something came up” or “I’m just not feeling up to it.” Have you observed this too?

Post: Absolutely. I think to a certain degree, it’s always been the norm that if you don’t feel well or if an emergency happens. If you’ve got a stomach bug, that’s understandable. That’s not flaking out. That’s life happening and getting in the way of fun, social plans.

Beck: Yeah.

Post: But I do think that there is a larger trend of being much more willing to let the emotional “Do I feel like it?” play a factor in whether or not they end up committing to or actually following through on plans.

Beck: Or the sense that the plans that we make are not set in stone, or what takes precedence is, like, just needing to do what’s best for you.

Post: Well, and some people even say that it’s like an insult to the friendship of getting together, that it’s like, “Oh, hanging out with me sounds like a chore for you right now?” And there are times where that’s true. We get it; like, we all have learned that bandwidths have capacities. I get it. I don’t know that we need to be leaning into that, like, every week.

Beck: Yeah. And I mean, I’ve been told that I am too curmudgeonly about this. [Laughter.] I remember planning a party and sort of complaining to someone about how I couldn’t really plan like how much food to buy or anything, because half of the people who responded “Yes” to the invite wouldn’t show up.

Post: Yep!

Beck: And the person told me that I was being unreasonable–

Post: What?!

Beck: That I needed to accept and account for the fact that this is just part of social life.

Post: I would not have been pleased if I had been told by a friend to just expect that 50 percent of my guest list isn’t going to show up for a party that they said they would come to. I would let friends know, like, as we talk about entertaining styles and preferences. I mean, these are things friends can talk about.

And you also get to be you. You’re creating your own entertaining style. You’re creating your own adult life in this world. And it might be something that you find you really value in friendship is cultivating a group of friends who really stick to their plans.

Beck: Yeah. Some of it has to be just sort of the deep-seated, like, childhood fear of throwing a party and nobody comes. Right?

Post: I have that too, yes.

Beck: I mean, if something happens often enough, is it just not rude? But just the way that things are … and we need to just deal with it?

Post: That’s a great question. The place where this one doesn’t check that box for me is that there’s enough people like you and me out in the world who don’t appreciate this, who don’t see this as a good trend. You know what I mean? This idea of committing to things and canceling very last-minute for effectively no reason other than just not totally feeling up to it, even though there’s nothing wrong with you.

Beck: Mmm.

Post: I think that this is something that’s frustrating a lot of people the same way for a good 20, 30, 40, 50 ... I think even my great-great-grandmother was writing about it. So we’re going to go ahead and say 70 years. People have been annoyed at the fact that people don’t RSVP well.

Like, there’s always going to be a couple of friends who, no matter what, show up really late. There’s always going to be someone who’s your most likely to cancel.

Beck: Yeah.

Post: There’s also always going to be the person most likely to always show up. You know, the person most likely to offer to bring something or to surprise you. You know, like, there’s the good stuff, too.

Beck: Yeah. We should give those people a medal.

Post: They deserve—yes, gold stars. [Laughter.]

Beck: Becca, there is a really interesting study that I saw a while back where the researchers asked people how they would approach different conflicts with friends versus with a romantic partner. And generally, people expected that you would actively address a problem with a romantic partner. You would talk about it. You know, they say, like, “Never go to bed angry.” But they found that there was more of a culture of passivity in friendships, that people were more likely to say nothing and just kind of hope the issue went away on its own, or kind of quietly put some distance in the friendship rather than talking about a problem.

Rashid: Passivity in my own approach to friendships comes from a fear that being too direct may come across as aggressive, or asking for too much. It makes my desire for a deeper connection with friends, especially in adulthood, feel needy or childish. Or sometimes even inappropriate or, like, overstepping.

Beck: Okay, so can we talk about how to practically handle these situations? If a friend flakes on me, how should I respond? Right now I feel like my only option is to just say, “Okay, I understand.”

Post: I often feel resigned to polite acceptance as well. I think that this is one of those things where, in the moment, that really is the best thing you can do. Because if they’re canceling really last-minute—like, within the day of the party—you’ve got things you’re busy doing, and you’ve got other guests that you have to focus on.

So in some ways it makes your own life easier to take that kind of etiquette high-road route. And say, “Oh, you know, I’m really sorry to hear that. If you change your mind, feel free to come.” You know, especially if it’s that I just don’t feel like it, you know? “Hey, if you find after an hour, you’ve rebounded and you’re ready to come on over.”

Beck: I mean, is there a way to respectfully say that it bothers you? Or would you even recommend doing that?

Post: This is something that I might do at a different time. It might be one of those things where you find a good moment, where you’re talking about your friendship. A moment will present itself and you can say: “Hey, you know, I got to be honest. That’s actually something that, you know, I will cop to. I feel hurt when that happens.”

Beck: This sort of “no worries if not” culture. This is a phrase that I hear a lot, and find myself using and then hate myself for using a lot. [Laughter.] Which is, you know—it feels hard or burdensome to ask friends for help, or ask them to show up for us in some type of way. So: “Lizzie, would you mind, like, pet-sitting my cat while I’m out of town? But no worries if not.” So just immediately giving you an out.

Post: Yeah, yeah.

Beck: It feels like an etiquette thing, because it feels like I’m being polite and deferential. But is being polite really equal to not asking each other for anything?

Post: It’s more so acknowledging that this person might really want to do you a favor and be there for you, and you want to let them know it’s truly okay if they can’t. I think a lot of that is about removing pressure for people. And that, I think, is polite. Like, I can find politeness in that.

Beck: Yeah; it’s very situational, I mean, maybe I just got broken up with. I’m so upset, and I’m like, “Lizzie, can you please talk? But no worries. But then there are some worries, if not.” You know? I also just feel like I don’t understand why you would think of showing up for a friend as a burden.

Post: I think a lot of it is that it can be. If you have a lot going on, if you’re going through a lot, sometimes adding that moment of someone else’s need that isn’t a partner, that isn’t a child, that isn’t a parent—you know, they don’t live with you—that it can feel like something you don’t have the capacity to do.

At the same time, it’s amazing to see what you actually still have in your reserves when you attempt a moment of giving and generosity, when you feel like you don’t have anything.

I think what I really like about modern friendships is the willingness to ask if it would be okay to lean on someone. That’s something I don’t always think has been a part of things. I don’t know that in Emily’s day, when things were really hard, just how much you got to lean into a friend, the way we lean into them now.

Rashid: I think what stuck out to me, Julie, about our conversation with Lizzie is how this balance of sort of the American mainstream culture of individualism and the voluntary nature of friendship is a tough thing to balance. And it’s hard to know what to ask of our friends.

Beck: Totally. I mean, the thing about friendship, right, is that it is purely and entirely defined by choice, and the things we put on each other we have to decide within every single friendship. Etiquette is a really helpful framework for thinking through what to say in specific situations. But a lot of people could benefit from broader, bigger conversations about the foundational issues of their friendships: “How intimate is this friendship? What is our role in each other’s lives? What do we expect from each other?”

Rashid: Mhmm.

Beck: Like, friends are friends because they choose to be. Not because they got a marriage license, not because somebody gave birth to somebody. You choose to be friends, and so you choose to show up for each other. And when we live in a culture that is so individualistic, we can default to that kind of “you do you,” and we’ll just give to each other what we can when we can. Having any sort of understood obligation to one another can be hard. If you are expecting something different than your friend is expecting, or just getting on the same page about what this friendship is and the level of expectation that we have of each other, it can be tricky.

Franco: I had a friend who was coming back from Mexico, and she was arriving at the airport at like midnight.

Beck: Marisa Franco is a psychologist and the author of the book Platonic.

Franco: And this is a friend I really wanted to get closer to. And I know that, you know, going out of your way to help someone in a time of need. Great way to get closer to someone.

Beck: Hot, too-hot tip.

Franco: But I’m like: Oh, my gosh, I hate staying up late. I’m a morning person. I go to sleep at, like, 10:32. Should I pick her up?

Beck: I gotta pause this conversation I was having with Marisa Franco for a second, because while we were talking I found myself thinking about Lizzie Post’s etiquette advice. And I actually think that sometimes we can be too polite to our friends. Like, maybe we’re hesitant to even ask in the first place whether they can pick us up at the airport. And that sort of over-politeness, I think, can hold us back from having deeper friendships. And with her airport example, Marisa offered a straightforward example for figuring that out for yourself.

Franco: And Julie, I literally had to ask myself, Would I do this for a romantic partner? Because of the ways romantic partners have monopolized what my brain associated with, like, deep love. So I had to ask myself that question. And when I did, I said, Yeah, I would pick her up. I would pick up a romantic partner at the airport.

Beck: Marisa is someone who’s thought really deeply about how our culture encourages us to put friendships last on the priority list. And that can lead to us being weirdly, overly polite to our friends, like we’re putting ourselves last before even talking about whether that’s what we both really want. She and I talked a lot about the communication challenges that can happen if you want friendships to be more central in your life.

Franco: The model of friendship that we have is just so threadbare, more threadbare than it feels like it’s ever been—that this is just someone who we go to once-a-month happy hours with.

Beck: Yeah. It’s so interesting to me to see the way that friendship is defined by flexibility, in a way that no other relationship is. There’s no specific role a friend has to play in your life.

If I introduce you to somebody, and I say, “This is my friend Marisa,” that could mean anything from “We’ve known each other since the day we were born and have never been apart” to “We get coffee at work sometimes.”

Every friendship is different, and it has to be designed by the friends themselves. And of course, the endless possibility is a strength of it. But do you think it can also be overwhelming to people?

Franco: Yeah; definitely both things. It’s something that I love about friendship, because it’s like whatever need I have, I can get met through friendship. Like, we could be platonic life partners or we could hang out twice a year.

But the slipperiness of that is that, I think, a lot of the times there is conflict in friendship—because this is my understanding of friendship versus yours. You’re like, “Friendship is trivial and not something to put a lot of effort in,” and “Good vibes only.” And I’m like, “Friendships are deep and sustaining and profound relationships for me.”

And if we have that different view of friendship, you’re not going to show up at times when I really need you. And you’re not going to expect me to get upset, because if I had your expectation, I might not have gotten upset.

I was talking to a friend’s husband. He had a bachelor party, and half of his friends bailed last-minute on his own bachelor party. Everyone had to pay a thousand dollars to go to his bachelor party for like two nights.

Beck: Nooo!

Franco: A thousand dollars to go to his bachelor party for two nights. And he was talking about these friends, and how one of them lived next to him. And I thought in my head, Those are not friends. How is this guy defining friendship? Like, that is not how I define friendship.

And so that made me think of the difference between “good friend” versus “good company.” Good company: I like you as a person. We enjoy our time together. We have good conversations. Good friendship: A friend is someone you invest in. It is a commitment. It is: I’m showing up in your times of need. It is: I’m doing things that sometimes might inconvenience me, because I’m thinking about how much they’ll mean to you. It is: I’m going to celebrate your successes. It’s: I’m going to follow through with what I say that I will do to the extent possible. It’s, basically: I’m considering you, and I’m considering your needs. In a lot of our culture, we’re stuck on “good company” and we haven’t gotten to “good friendship.”

Beck: How do you set those expectations in a friendship when it is a voluntary relationship?

Franco: With communication. Like, I’ve had to tell friends, for example, “I would love to hear from you more. I notice I’m often the one here reaching out. Would you be open to that?” And it’s taking that risk, right? Because it is a risk.

Because that could lead them to say, “This person expects too much. I’m gonna back away.” But it could also lead them to say, “Yeah; I’m going to show up, and I’m going to reinvest, and I’m going to make sure Marisa feels like she’s in a reciprocal friendship.”

It’s also okay to just talk about it in a more upfront way. Like, I went on a retreat with some friends. I guess it was like a series of questions that went around in regards to like, how do we support each other as friends? And one of the questions was like, “Do you like when friends show up at the last minute at your house?” Oh, it’s a helpful question to ask. You know, like sometimes I’m in your neighborhood; I’m like, Should I reach out? Should I not? If I don’t ask, I might assume, No. And then there’s a missed opportunity to connect. So, yeah.

Beck: The showing up last-minute—well, first of all, I feel like that’s something that always happens on TV shows, right? Like on The O.C., they were always just walking over to each other’s house to have a serious conversation without ever, like, calling to say, “I’m coming over.” And it feels very unrealistic.

And at the same time, I do have a friend who lives around the corner who will sometimes text me like, “I’m walking by your place. Do you want to come down?”

I think something that I’ve observed is a sort of strange politeness or formality in the way that people sometimes interact with their friends. For example, you know, we text to set up a time to call instead of just calling. Are we just avoiding inconveniencing each other? Why would that be such a worry?

Franco: Yeah. I think a lot of the times we fear imposing; we fear burdening people. But like, the biggest burden we place can sometimes be our silence, because we want to be polite. And yeah—I think people think This is me not imposing. This is me trying to respect or understand a friend’s boundaries. But the thing is, we don’t actually ask what they are. What I tend to see is it’s more from a place that This friend doesn’t want to hear from me or This friend will be burdened by me.

So thus, It’s the kind act for me to do less. Let me not reach out when they’re going through all this grief, because they probably want their time alone. You know? So one thing that I always talk about with making friends is assume people like you, because it’s going to trigger a set of behaviors—warmth, openness—that is going to make that more likely to be true.

But I also think the more we assume people like us, the more intimacy that we have with them. So the more we assume They’re just going to want to hear from me on the phone. I don’t have to set up this time to call. I’m assuming that you love me.

Franco: I teach a class on loneliness. And one of my students is like, “I just think if I had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night, like, who could I call?” And I’m like, “How would you feel if one of the friends that you made reached out to you in the middle of the night because they needed help with going to the hospital?” He says, “I would feel totally honored that they picked me.”

Beck: Yes.

Franco: And the problem is, when it comes to our glitchy brains, when we’re predicting how we come off, we tend to be a lot more cynical and negative than what is the truth.

Especially with asking for help from friends, I get really nervous about it, and I take myself through that exercise where I’m like, Well, what if this friend asked me for the same thing? How would I feel? That’s probably the more accurate outcome.

Beck: Is there a sense that we feel like we need to be deferential to everything else that our friends have going on in their lives to the degree that we deprioritize ourselves before they have a chance to deprioritize us?

Franco: Yes; I think that’s right. You know, there is this theory basically arguing that we need to operate along two poles: of protecting ourselves and protecting the relationship. And there’s a lot of people who are often in this place of protecting themselves by not reaching out and being overly deferential. Not being vulnerable, not initiating. But they don’t often realize that there is a cost to all that self-protection, which is your relationships.

Beck: I feel like to some degree, there’s a feeling that we’re supposed to just accept whatever it is that our friends are able to offer, Or that the only acceptable response is—“It’s okay; I understand.” That the highest value, or the truest truth, is that everybody needs to do what’s best for themselves. And I think that’s so stars-and-stripes American. I don’t know if it’s that way everywhere. I think maybe it would be helpful if you can explain what individualistic boundaries are, and what the boundaries you’re seeing that you think are overly self-focused look like.

Franco: Yeah. I think the self-focused boundaries look like, in a sort of overarching way: I’m going to fulfill my needs no matter what your needs are. Which looks like, “Hey, you know, if you call me really upset at 10 p.m., I’m not going to answer” or “Hey, like, I don’t need to make time for you, because at this time in my life I’m very, very busy.”

To me, setting a boundary is a communal act. It’s like: “I set this boundary for myself so I can invest in our friendship in the long term and not get burned out.” And it’s: “I’m going to consider your needs when I set this boundary.” And it’s almost like: “I’m going to set this boundary and also offer an offering like, ‘Oh, I’m not free to talk at that time. What about another time?’” Or even like, you know, “I’m not free to come to that, but I’m rooting for you, and I’m supporting you.” Sometimes it’s just for affirmation. That’s the offering.

Beck: Do you have a sense of why you think that is a genre of boundaries that’s become popular? Is it sort of self-care, and “I need to put my own oxygen mask on before I can put on yours?”

Franco: Yeah. I think about a lot of friendship behaviors there’s an emotional incongruity. What I mean is that your experience of this act is very different from your friends’ in a way that you’re not always privy to.

So you might set this boundary, thinking about: Oh, I’m really busy, and this is going to benefit me. But when your friend receives that boundary, they’re feeling like: I’m so alone, and I have no one in this moment when we really, really need someone. And so there’s just this, I guess, this disconnect between our two emotional worlds in that moment.

Because if we’re only thinking about our reality, it makes a lot of sense. But when we think about our co-realities—our reality and the other person’s reality—then we might realize that even if this act benefits us, the costs for our friend are far greater.

You know, when you have a healthy relationship, what happens is you begin to include them in your sense of self. So there’s a disconnect happening when you’re willing to completely upset and let down your friend to meet your own needs.

Beck: Yeah.

Franco: And that’s kind of what I’m referring to with these individualistic boundaries, which is like: I’m going to get 100 percent of my needs met. Even if zero percent of your needs are going to be met.

The communal boundary is to protect the relationship. The individualistic boundary is to protect yourself.

Beck: So, Marisa, I’ve been reporting on friendship for a long time. And when we’re discussing kind of how we make friends, and how do we maintain those friendships, I feel like the conversation often stops at this very simplistic platitude of “friendship takes work,” and that’s very vague and general. But I’m also wondering with your perspective as a psychologist, whether you see anything kind of dicey about suggesting that friendship is labor.

Franco: I think so. [Chuckles.] I mean, what are all our associations with “work”? Like, negative. Something that we have to do, Something that we need to get compensated for to be able to do. And I think when we use those capitalistic terms for friendship, we not only are applying that term, but the web of associations that we add to that term—the baggage of all of those associations.

So I like the idea of friendship taking effort rather than friendship taking work. I want to convey that in friendship, we’re going to be inconvenienced. In friendship, we’re going to do things that we don’t want to do. In friendship, we are going to have to go out of our way and take initiative and be proactive and all of those things. And I think those all fit into the realm of “effort.” But when we say “work,” it’s almost like it’s something that we don’t want.

Beck: I mean, I don’t think most people’s intentions are usually bad. It just seems like some of the norms in our culture are steering us toward undermining our friendships without maybe realizing it. Where if it is something that you really want to prioritize in your life, it feels a little bit like swimming against the current.

Franco: It does. It can feel like unrequited love a lot. But I will say, there’s also subcommunities, like queer communities. [Chuckles.] Where it’s a lot more common for people to put a lot more value on friendship. And there’s talks about asexual communities; there’s talks about platonic life partners. I think queer communities are the pioneers of friendship and could teach hetero people a lot. I don’t know if you’ve heard the term “relationship anarchy,” but it’s, um…

Beck: No; can you explain it?

Franco: It’s one of my faves. It’s this idea that we don’t need to use what society has told us as our guideposts for the value that we place on different types of relationships. We can choose what resonates most with us. And my choice is: I want to value, again, friends as much as a potential spouse. Like, that’s the hierarchy that I would want in my life in the larger anarchy framework. If you start from a place of anarchy, where would you want friends to be in your personal valuing system?

Rashid: So when I was out of town for a week last week, Julie, one of my best friends texted me saying, “Okay, I’m going to be ‘full, needy boyfriend’ when you’re back.” [Chuckles.] And we hadn’t been talking for a week or so, because we were both too busy. And I just thought it was so nice that she sent that little note.

And the first thing I thought was: A lot of times when we’re trying to express to friends how much we miss each other or love each other or need each other, it’s kind of as if we only have the language of romance to express that. And sometimes we use the language of love that we understand through romantic partnerships; [it] expresses that we have that need for our friends at all.

Beck: Right. Like, it was very cute and sweet that she said that. But also, like—you don’t have to minimize wanting to hang out with your friend by, like, pretending you’re acting like a needy boyfriend. Like, you are allowed to miss your friend.

Rashid: Right. Totally.

Beck: That study I referenced earlier that was talking about a culture of passivity—it was sort of focusing on conflict. But I would venture to say that there’s kind of a culture of passivity in the good times as well.

You know, where friendship is too often like a relationship of convenience, or will go with the flow. And “I’ll see you when I see you.” And it’s hard to actually keep up a friendship if you’re being passive in that way and you just expect it to come effortlessly.

Rashid: Right. And I genuinely don’t know how a lot of my friendships would function if we didn’t put in that quote unquote “work.” Because, you know, two of my best friends live outside of the U.S., and we are in different time zones and don’t catch each other easily. And usually one of them tries to call me super early in the morning, my time—which half the time I can’t even pick up the phone.

It’s just emblematic of that sort of small gesture you can make for a friend. And it shows me that, you know—they tried to catch me, and if they could, they would be on the phone with me right now.

Beck: And do you feel like that, quote unquote, “work” and effort that you put in to try to catch each other in different time zones is a burden to you?

Rashid: No, not at all. It’s the smallest, you know, gesture of love that we could sort of show each other, and takes almost no effort.

Beck: Yeah. But that’s why I think it’s so strange that it’s like, “Oh, the work of friendship is some hard or negative or burdensome thing.” Like, you’re so happy to see that missed call. And I’m sure she was so happy to call you.

That’s all for this episode of How to Talk to People. This episode was produced by Becca Rashid, and hosted by me, Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The managing producer of How to Talk to People is Andrea Valdez.

How to Talk to People: The Infrastructure of Community

2023-05-29T05:00:00-04:00

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

Coffee shops, churches, libraries, and concert venues are all shared spaces where mingling can take place. Yet the hustle and bustle of modern social life can pose challenges to relationship-building—even in spaces designed for exactly that.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, we analyze how American efficiency culture holds us back from connecting in public, whether social spaces create a culture of interaction, and what it takes to actively participate in a community.

Hosted by Julie Beck, produced by Rebecca Rashid, edited by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado, and engineering by Rob Smierciak.

Build community with us via email! Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”); Arthur Benson (“Charmed Encounter,” “She Is Whimsical,” “Organized Chaos”); Gavin Luke (“Nadir”); Ryan James Carr (“Botanist Boogie Breakdown”); Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”); Dust Follows (“Willet”); Auxjack (“Mellow Soul”).

Click here to listen to additional seasons in The Atlantic’s How To series.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Host Julie Beck: I think what I’ve observed in public spaces, especially in my neighborhood, is really just a hustle and bustle. And people are going somewhere specific to do something specific with specific people. They’re sort of on a mission.

Eric Klinenberg: Efficiency is the enemy of social life. What kind of place would allow us to enjoy our lives and enjoy each other more than we do today? What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

Kellie Carter Jackson: You know, people say, like, misery loves company. I don’t think that is true. I think that misery in a lot of ways requires company; it requires kinship. It requires community. So that you are not isolated in your pain.

Klinenberg: What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

Beck: I’m Julie Beck, senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Rashid: Though I normally am not making a friend at the café, recently there was a girl that was working on her laptop. She noticed I was, too. We started chittin’ and chattin’, and after a few weeks of running into each other so many times at the café, she finally—slightly awkwardly—asked yesterday, “Hey, do you mind if I get your number if you maybe wanted to get a drink?” Very friendly, sweet sort of way of fighting through the awkward.

Beck: I’m so impressed! Of course, people do connect at cafés like you literally just did. And, you know, in Paris or whatever, they may be happy for people to linger and chat all day. But I think the connection that’s happening in those spaces, like, that’s not the purpose of the space; that’s a by-product. Perhaps a welcome by-product, but like the point of the space is to make money. The point is to sell you something.

Rashid: It’s a business.

Beck: They’re selling you a coffee; they’re selling you a sandwich. There are several cafés in D.C. that I really like that just don’t offer Wi-Fi, or they give you a ticket where you have like a couple of hours of Wi-Fi after you buy something. And I get why they’re doing that, because they want the customers to cycle through, and they don’t want people taking up tables all day when they could get a fresh paying customer in there.

That may well be good business sense. But if those are the only spaces that you have to maybe just mingle and get to know people that are in your neighborhood, what are the spaces where you can just have friendly mingling, and that’s the point?

Beck: Eric Klinenberg is a researcher who is really into all of these questions that we’ve been talking about. He’s a professor of sociology at New York University, and he’s an expert on city infrastructure and urban life.

He wrote this book called Palaces for the People in which he talks about this concept called social infrastructure. That is essentially the physical spaces that are available to the public that are designed to facilitate these social connections.

Klinenberg: If you want to have a transit system like a train, you need an infrastructure to carry the train, right? The rails, for instance, There is also an infrastructure that supports social life: social infrastructure. And when I say social infrastructure, I’m referring to physical places. They can be organizations; they can also be parks. Physical places that shape our capacity to interact.

When you have strong social infrastructure, people have a tendency to come out and linger. And if you live in a poor neighborhood where the social infrastructure is strong, if you’re older, if you’re more frail, if you’re very young, you might spend more time sitting on the stoop in front of your home. You might have a bench that you spend time on, that’s on your street. There might be a diner where you go every day.

And what that means is there are people who are used to seeing you out in those public places on a regular basis. And when it’s dangerous outside, someone might notice that you’re not there. And they might not even know your name. They might just know your face. Maybe they know where you live. They’re used to seeing each other in the public realm.

I grew up in Chicago. And in 1995, just before I was about to start graduate school in sociology, there was a heat wave that hit my hometown and lasted just a couple of days. But the temperatures were quite extreme. It got to about 106 degrees. Chicago did what it always does when there’s a heat wave: It turned on air conditioning everywhere you could go. And the power grid got overwhelmed. And very soon the, you know, electricity went out for thousands of homes.

At the end of this week, in July, Chicago had more than 700 deaths from the heat. And this was the pre-pandemic time. So people dying in a city in a couple of days seemed like an exceptional thing. We hadn’t gotten numb to it yet. I was really curious about what had happened, and the first thing I did was I made these maps to see which people and places in Chicago were hit hardest. And at first blush, the map looked exactly like you would expect it to look. The neighborhoods that were hit the hardest were on the south side and the west side of Chicago. They were the historically segregated Black, poor, ghettoized neighborhoods.

Beck: Right. Chicago’s extremely segregated.

Klinenberg: And when there’s a disaster, you know, poor people living in segregated neighborhoods will fare the worst. So I looked a little more closely at the map, and I noticed something that no one else had seen—which is that there were a bunch of neighborhoods that were located right next to places that were among the deadliest neighborhoods in Chicago. But this other set of places wound up being extraordinarily healthy.

Beck: So these were neighborhoods that were geographically really close to each other and shared a lot of characteristics, but they were having really different outcomes?

Klinenberg: Matching neighborhoods. Like, imagine two neighborhoods separated by one street—same level of poverty, same proportion of older people. The risk factors that we ordinarily look for were equal. But they had wildly disparate outcomes in this heat disaster. That’s the kind of puzzle that you live for when you’re a social scientist.

And so, what I observed is that the neighborhoods that had really high death rates, they looked depleted. They had lost an enormous proportion of their population in the decades leading up to the heat wave. They had a lot of abandoned buildings. Even the little playgrounds were in terrible shape, not well-maintained.

And across the street in the neighborhoods that did better, the public spaces were much more viable. They didn’t have abandoned homes. They didn’t have empty lots. There were community institutions, grocery shops, coffee shops, a branch library, places that anchored public life.

In those neighborhoods in Chicago, people knocked on the door, and they checked in on each other. And as a consequence, if you lived in one of these poor neighborhoods that had a strong social infrastructure, you were more likely to survive the heat wave. People in the neighborhood across the street, the depleted neighborhood—they were 10 times more likely to die in the heat wave. And that difference was really quite stark.

Beck: So you said when we talk about regular infrastructure, we’re talking about what carries the train, right? So what carries the train of our relationships? What are the actual railroad tracks?

Klinenberg: Think about a playground, for instance. We know that one of the core places that families go to meet other families in their neighborhood is a playground. All kinds of socializing happens when parents or grandparents or caretakers of all kinds are pushing a swing and looking for a companion, someone to talk to.

Those conversations at the swing set often lead to a shared little break together on the bench or maybe to a picnic and then a playdate, and then two families getting to know each other and communities growing. If you took playgrounds out of American cities and suddenly there was no playground, our social lives would be radically different.

We act as if, you know, in the Old Testament, on the fifth day, God said, “Today I give you the playground and the library,” and it’s our birthright to spend time in them. We forget that these are achievements. These are human inventions.

We built giant parks, theaters, art spaces. We created a good society based on a vision of radical inclusion. Not quite radical enough. People have always been left out of our public spaces. There’s no history of this idea that is complete if it doesn’t pay attention to how racial segregation works and how racial violence works and how gender excluded some people from some public realms. All of that stuff is there in the history of public space. I think in the last several decades, we’ve kind of come to take all these places for granted.

Beck: What is the connection between having places to just hang out and vibe and having a community rally together and support each other in an emergency like a heat wave?

Klinenberg: Well, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. You can have places where people hang out and vibe and don’t get active and engaged on important civic matters. I generally argue that public spaces and social infrastructure—they’re a necessary condition for having some sense that we’re in it together, and we have some kind of common purpose. But they’re by no means sufficient. And so that has to do with programming; that has to do with design; that has to do with this feeling of being part of a shared project. And some public spaces give us that feeling, and others really don’t.

Beck: Yeah. I’m curious about the mechanics of how that even happens. I feel a bit of a divide, where being in public is for being active and relaxing is for home. And so much of the public space around me is bustling—people are engaging in commerce, or they’re just walking from here to there, and there are no opportunities to slow down and talk to each other. And I don’t know that we would. Does that make sense?

Klinenberg: Yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense, because efficiency is the enemy of social life. You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time.

And in fact, one of the really striking things, I think, for Americans when we travel to other countries is to see the extent to which people all over the world delight in sitting around: the culture of the souk or of the coffee shop or the wine bar or the plaza.

Beck: Oh, yeah, the five-hour dinners in France. Like, you can’t find that waiter to get your check. You know?

Klinenberg: (Laughs.)

Beck: He’s gone.

Klinenberg: Because the point is not to pay the check. The point is to be there. And it’s hard for us to come to terms with just how forcefully the ticking clock shapes our capacity to take pleasure in social life.

Rashid: It’s interesting that you see the no Wi-Fi on the weekends as a way to cycle people out of the space. I thought that was the café or coffee shop making a grand gesture in favor of relationship-building.

Beck: Oh. I guess I’m just more cynical than you. But I think it’s because they need to make money. I go to the public pool with friends. I get books from the library. There is a very hot ticket at our local library, which is like a semi-regular puzzle swap that they do. Oh, and my partner and I, we’re very cool.

We go and we swap puzzles with the community. But I don’t feel like I am really building new relationships or getting to know my neighbors at these places, or even at these events. Like, I love these resources. I don’t want to lose them. I enjoy them, but I just kind of use them by myself or with people I already know.

Rashid: Yeah. And I think the norm of keeping to yourself is only fueled more by things like social media and being able to look away and be on your phone. And it’s interesting how just that shared physical presence with people also doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re closer.

Beck: Yeah, just because you go to the café doesn’t mean you’re going to look up from your phone.

—

Beck: Do you think that to some degree we’ve replaced our relationship to social infrastructure with social media?

Klinenberg: I think of social media as like a communications infrastructure. It definitely helps us to engage other people. It’s a kind of impoverished social life that it delivers in the end.

Think about how life felt in April of 2020 when we were in the beginning of the pandemic, because we were all in our homes cut off from each other. We were talking to each other all the time, right? But we were physically isolated, and we were miserable. So that’s life where social media is social infrastructure.

Beck: I do wonder whether there is an individualism that is also affecting our living choices and the way that we engage with the social infrastructure.

Klinenberg: I discovered that the United States is a laggard, not a leader, when it comes to living alone. Living alone is far more common in most European societies than it is in the U.S. It’s more common in Japan. It’s more common in France and England. Scandinavian societies have the highest levels of living alone on Earth, and Germany is higher than the United States.

And what I learned about doing this research is that what really is driving living alone is interdependence. When you have a strong welfare state, and you guarantee people the capacity to make ends meet without being tethered to a partner who they might not want to be with.

Beck: Do you think, then, that solo livers rely on social infrastructure more?

Klinenberg: They do. They’re more likely to go out to bars and restaurants and cafés and to gyms, to go to concerts. I just published a paper in a journal called Social Problems with a graduate student named Jenny Leigh, and we interviewed 55 people who were living alone in New York during the first stage of the pandemic.

We talked to them about their experiences. And it was really interesting. Like, they talked very little about social isolation, and they didn’t complain that much about kind of conventional loneliness, like lacking people to talk to. But they felt physically lonely; they felt physically isolated.

And they really missed the kind of familiar strangers we see when we spend time in a neighborhood who just give us a sense of where we are and that we belong. They felt [an] acute kind of pain that was slightly different than the pain of the common conversation we had at the time.

Klinenberg: One of the problems we have now is most cities, suburbs, towns in America have public libraries there. There’s neighborhood libraries. The building is there. And the buildings are generally not updated there. They need to have new HVACs. They need new bathrooms. They need new furniture, let alone new books.

Some are still not accessible to people in wheelchairs. I mean, there’s all kinds of problems with libraries, just physically, because we’ve underinvested in them. But libraries, unfortunately, have become the place of last resort for everyone who falls through the safety net.

Klinenberg: If you wake up in the morning in an American city and you don’t have a home, you’re told to go to a library. If you wake up in the morning and you’re suffering from an addiction problem, you need a warm place. They’ll send you to a library.

If you need to use a bathroom, you’ll go to a library. If you don’t have childcare for your kid, you might send your kid to a library. If you’re old and you’re alone, you might go to the library. We’ve used the library to try to solve all of these problems that deserve actual treatment.

And how many times have you talked to someone who said, like, it’s basically a homeless shelter. What’s happened is we’ve stigmatized our public spaces, because we’ve done so little to address core problems that we’ve turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a hand. And as we do that, we send another message to affluent, middle-class Americans, and that is: If you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector. So we have a lot of work to do.

Beck: It’s really interesting to me to hear about the ways our environment either encourages or discourages interaction and community-building, because I think on some level I’ve always felt like if I don’t have that ideal sense of community that I really want, then it’s my fault for not trying hard enough. How much of this is just on the government? And there’s not much we can do besides, like, pestering aldermen.

Klinenberg: I think it’s on us to build the political institutions that we want and also to build the public places that we need. So, one of the miracles of American life is that we have these public libraries in every neighborhood.

Nobody would support the idea of a library if we didn’t already have it. It’s like a utopian socialist fantasy, the library. And the miracle is that we have them. If you think about the American public-park system, the public schools, like: We built all these things.

The reason so many of us feel like it’s so hard to hang out and enjoy the companionship of other people is because the signals we get from each other and from the state and from the corporate world tell us that we’re freakish and weird if we want that kind of collective experience. Everybody knows happiness is in your phone. It’s at the $22 cocktail bar. It’s at the $9 coffee shop, the $14 ice-cream cone. Those are the things that are supposed to give us pleasure.

And I think we need to start to imagine what a different kind of society might look like and how to rebuild public spaces that are the 21st-century version of the 20th-century library. What are the kinds of places we’d like to design so that we could be with each other differently?

Beck: Another important piece, Becca, to actually finding community in these spaces, is people acting on the opportunity to connect that they present. It’s hard if I’m going to the puzzle swap, and no one’s talking to each other. I mean, I’m guilty of going in and grabbing my puzzles and getting out and not really making a big effort to chitchat and make a new relationship there.

And it’s hard to feel like you’re just taking that on yourself to try to make that happen. It’s also: Do you see people welcoming you? Do you feel comfortable going up to someone to strike up a conversation? Do you see other people mingling? The design of a place can totally encourage or discourage interactions, but obviously so can the behavior of the people in the place.

Rashid: Right. Like, the friend I made at the café is kind of a rare occurrence, because normally people in the café are working, reading, or, as you’ve said before, with people they already know.

Beck: And the social norms of a café are going to be different than the social norms of a public pool or a local sports team or a church. In a café, everyone kind of has different agendas, like Becca’s out there making a friend. But, like, some people are just reading a book by themselves or having that one-on-one lunch with somebody. But in a church, for instance, like generally speaking, there’s a norm that we want to be in community with each other. We have shared values, and we’re here to connect.

—

Kellie Carter Jackson: My church has been everything to me, because those relationships have just been so transformative and so deep. Every single highlight of my life, although like the church, my church has been there for me.

Beck: Kellie Carter Jackson is a historian and a professor from Wellesley College, and we recently spoke about the culture of care in her community. So in her life, she’s found that places like the church and her kids’ school have smoothed that path to building those deep relationships of support, because both the spaces themselves and the people in them have been welcoming.

Beck: Do you feel like finding a church in the new places where you’ve moved to? Has that helped in getting to those deep relationships quickly?

Jackson: Yes, absolutely. I will say that when we lived in North Dakota, almost all of my friendships either came from the military or the church that we were going to. People were just so warm and so kind. And, you know, you would join like a Bible study group or a mommy-and-me group, and those became fast friendships.

When my husband was going through extensive training, he was in Memphis. He was out of town for like three months. And I was overwhelmed by three kids. They did a meal train and just brought—I hate cooking! [Laughter.] And so my church small group was like, “Hey, how can we take off some of the burdens since Nathaniel’s gone? What can we do?” And so, just to know that people would go the extra mile for you when you’re really taxed is huge.

Beck: Yeah. I guess I see, you know, church as sort of a natural gathering place because it has those kind of communal values built into the institution. How does your faith sort of influence your approach to community with your neighbors?

Jackson: I think that I have always tried to model what it means to be a good neighbor regardless of my neighbors’ religious affiliations. I grew up in the church, so my parents modeled for me hospitality. We always had people over at our house all the time. We have a big family; I’m one of seven. So it’s like, what’s one more? What’s six more? What’s 10 more?

(Laughter.)

Beck: Just bring ’em on in.

Jackson: Bring them on in. That is how I show my friendship, show my love, show my care. It is by making you feel welcome and by giving you a place to rest. And it does not always extend to people we know. Like, when I think of neighbors, I think that extends even into my kids’ school. So my 6-year-old had a real hard time because not only had my mother-in-law passed away, but her great-grandmother had died as well. So we had two big losses—a mother and a grandmother—in about a three-month period.

Jojo is my middle child’s name. Jojo was just distraught by it. Like, she cried for 30 minutes, and I couldn’t calm her down. I sent her teacher an email, and I said, “Hey, Jojo’s having a really hard time. I sent her to school with a picture of her grandmothers. She might keep it in her backpack; she might take it out. But I just want you to know, like, this is what’s going on.”

Beck: Yeah.

Jackson: And her teacher did something—gosh, sorry I’m getting emotional …

Beck: Aw.

Jackson: Her teacher saw her with the picture … and she said, “Jojo, do you want to share that with the classroom?” And so she got up in front of the classroom, and she talked about her grandmothers and just who they were. And the fact that her teacher gave her space to do that—it just meant, like, I don’t know her teacher very well, but I know that she loves my kid. And I know that she created space for my kid when she was having a hard time emotionally, and that she would do that for any kid. I am always overwhelmed by just the goodness of neighbors, and people’s capacity to provide comfort during hard times.

Beck: I mean, I think there’s so much go-it-alone-ness, um, in our culture a lot of the time. And like, sometimes you can get by with that. Like, it seems lonely, but like, you can do it, and—

Jackson: Can, but should you?

Beck: Yeah. But when you are in such a place of intense grief, like, it becomes very clear that you can’t.

Jackson: You can’t, and you shouldn’t. I mean, if I hear one more person say, “God won’t give you more than you can bear,” I will want to punch them. But I think that we have these clichés that are so empty. You know, just giving people the freedom to feel what they feel, to act upon those feelings without feeling judged, to be heard. You know, most people just want to be heard.

You know, I think in the Black community, we care for one another. There is this idea of kinship. This idea that whether you are blood related or not, this is your auntie, this is your uncle, this is your cousin, this is your fam. That we see each other, that we recognize each other’s humanity, that we show up for each other. There is something about that familiarity of Blackness that connects people, that is both spiritual and cultural. And so, if you grew up in the church, I think those ideas are fortified for you of how you should show up and care for other people.

Beck: I mean, how do you get to that place with neighbors and people in your community without a church?

Jackson: I think it’s tough.

Beck: It is tough.

Jackson: I think it’s not impossible. I mean, there is something about a shared set of values sometimes that comes from the church, that allows making friendships to be a little bit easier. But if you don’t have that, sometimes I think that trust can be an issue. Like, I’ve had to let people know who are outside of my faith: You can depend on me; you can trust me. I’m not going to judge you. That our home is welcome to anyone, of all backgrounds.

Because I think people can sometimes be skittish around people that they think are religious. And I never wanted anyone that I connected with to feel like that.

I had a friend who was in graduate school whose mother passed away, and I remember reaching out to her, sending her food or a gift card—like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? You know, here’s some literature that helped me, because my siblings had passed away maybe about a year before. And she was a little startled, actually, by my response, I think. Because she said, you know, “I grew up in a community of atheists.” She said, “We just don’t have a practice or tradition.” That the idea of bringing food or, you know, sort of like ongoing care was not something that was a part of her tradition.

So regardless of people’s faith, my job as a good neighbor is to help shoulder some of that weight, so you don’t have to carry it all on your own. So I try to remember important dates. I try to remember names, which is why when I meet new people, “Oh, man! Okay, give me more capacity!”

Rashid: So, Julie, where do you go to build community, or at least feel this sense of community in a shared space?

Beck: I don’t feel like just sitting out on my front porch, if I had one, or going to a café or going to a specific place is going to make community come to me.

I feel like talking with both Eric and Kellie kind of made me realize that you need both the design of a place and the intentions and the values of the people who are using that space.

The sort of post-college secular world particularly doesn’t feel set up for just spontaneous, easy connection in the same way. If you just have an impeccably designed space where people don’t want to connect, then, like, I guess what you have is the Apple store. And if people really want to connect, and they don’t have anywhere to go to do that, then they’re going to struggle as well.

And even though this is kind of a frustrating takeaway, honestly, it feels to me like if you want that deep, interconnected sense of community outside of a church or a college or an institution that’s built to help you find it, you kind of have to swim against the current a little bit—and find a way to make it for yourself.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Julie Beck. Managing Editor Andrea Valdez. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak.

How to Make Small Talk

2023-05-22T05:00:00-04:00

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

Making small talk can be hard—especially when you’re not sure whether you’re doing it well. But conversations are a central part of relationship-building.

In this first episode of How to Talk to People, we explore the psychological barriers to making good small talk and unravel the complexities of the mutual discomfort that comes with talking to people we don’t know well.

The social scientist Ty Tashiro and the hairstylists Erin Derosa and Mimi Craft help us understand what it means to integrate awkwardness into our pursuit of relationships.

This episode is hosted by Julie Beck, produced by Rebecca Rashid, and edited by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak.

Music by Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Ryan James Carr (“Botanist Boogie Breakdown”), and Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “She Is Whimsical”).

Talk to How to Talk to People—by “talk,” we mean write to us—at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Click here to listen to additional seasons of The Atlantic’s How To series.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mimi Craft: Okay, so we’ll sit here; we’ll start like usual and talk about what you want to do with your hair … because you need a haircut. (Laughs.)

Julie Beck: Does this moment feel awkward to you?

Ty Tashiro: It doesn’t. So I don’t know if it should.

Beck: Great news, great news.

Erin Derosa: If I’m in a five-minute conversation, I’m like, What am I gonna say next? What’s the next thing that I should … Did I already talk about the weather? I get real panicked.

Beck: I feel like I can chat with anybody for, like, five minutes. Right? And then if I run out of things to say in the middle, that’s my fear—because we are trapped here for the duration of this haircut.

Craft: We could stop talking, and I will try to put out a comfortable, chill vibe.

Tashiro: It’s, you know, pretty common. Someone might say something like: “Oh, there’s a really good vibe here.” And to me that is totally bewildering, how they discern that vibe within a few seconds.

—

Beck: Hi. I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Rebecca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: Here at The Atlantic, I oversee the Family section, and I’ve also been reporting on friendship for many years now. So I think a lot about relationships and community.

And I do see often that people struggle to find and form the close relationships that they really want. And I think one of the barriers to that is the dreaded small talk.

Rashid: So I think in this first episode, we have to figure out: How does one even make small talk? And what explains that tendency so many of us have to look down at our phones and avoid conversation, or hide in the corner at a party and only talk to the people we know? So where better to do some research on this than to talk to the ultimate small-talk experts: at the hair salon.

Beck: I feel like, okay, the main thing that I need to ask you is: When I’m sitting in this chair, do you even want to talk to me?

Craft: Oh, yeah.

Beck: You can be honest. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you didn’t want to.

Craft: I have to be here all day, so I do need some entertainment.

Beck: I’ve also wondered: Would you actually be relieved if I was just on my phone the whole time, and then you could have a break from being “on” all the time?

Derosa: I feel like if you want to talk, that’s amazing. It is really entertaining and fun to have a conversation and to have good conversation. But if you don’t want to talk, don’t try to talk. [Julie laughs.] Because then it’s really hard to have a conversation, and then it’s even more work to, like, keep it going and try to, like, fill the silence or whatever.

—

Rashid: I’m curious; what is it about small talk that makes you so nervous?

Beck: Okay—to clarify, I don’t know that it makes me nervous all the time. I think what’s interesting about it is, it’s like you can’t really get around it. Like, any relationship that you’re going to have has to start with a conversation.

So it’s more a situation where I am trapped on the train with an acquaintance I don’t know that well, and we have 20 minutes to fill, and I’ve got five minutes of material …

And you have to kind of navigate: How much are we going to talk to each other? What are we going to talk about? Would they rather I just left them alone, but we’re both too polite to say so?

I do get in my head a lot about that, and I find it very hard to relax sometimes if I am receiving a service. And probably if I was just normal and relaxed and enjoyed the situation, it would make them more comfortable.

Rashid: It can be extra challenging when the terms of that relationship are not really established in any way; like, just having a conversation with that person doesn’t necessarily mean you’re moving toward friendship.

—

Beck: Do you both consider yourself extroverts?

Derosa/Craft: No. Oh, no, no, no. Hard no. Extreme no.

Beck: Well, then, how do you sit here and make small talk all day, every day? Does it exhaust you?

Craft: I am not interested in small talk. I want to get right into the real talk immediately.

Beck: Well, how do you define small talk, then?

Craft: For me, small talk is like: “Oh, it’s cold out.” “Yeah, it’s cold out.” “Oh, do you like cold?” “No?” “Oh, yeah; me too.” And that’s really boring.

Beck: Well, are you coming in hot with your clients? Like, “Do you believe in God?”

Craft: I mean, sometimes I’m coming in hot. Sometimes if I’m like, “Oh, how was your weekend?” “Great.” I will be like, “Did anything crazy happen? Did anybody go to the hospital?” Like, I want to get straight into it.

Derosa: I don’t come in: “Hey, how’s your hair? Do you believe in God?” It’s more like, somehow it’ll come up somewhere in the conversation. You know, you’ll be talking about their family or like their parents or whatever. And then it’s like, “Oh, how were you raised? Were you raised religiously?” It sort of evolves. And then I will say: “Well, do you believe in God?” (Laughs.)

Beck: So that’s a real example that has happened?

Derosa: Oh, yeah; for sure. For sure. But I like to have conversations like that with people.

Craft: She is so genuinely curious that even if somebody maybe was not going into a conversation thinking they were going to reveal a detail, she will get it out of them because of her genuine curiosity.

Derosa: Yeah, ’cause a lot of people are sort of in denial about what is happening in their situation. And because we’ve heard so many stories that are similar, and we are like: “No, like, this is what’s really happening.”

Craft: Because that is the value in good small talk and conversation; it’s that you learn from other people’s experiences. Everything repeats itself. Like, nothing’s really a new thing. So somebody comes in, and you’re like: I know what’s happening there.

—

Beck: I think small talk gets a lot of hate, but even if it’s a little boring, it serves a purpose. So those basic, neutral topics that people love to hate on, like “How’s the weather?”—those serve a purpose of being something neutral that can smooth the path of our interactions.

Rashid: I’m not always as delicate in the way I phrase my questions. And my intent is not to be offensive, but maybe just to connect with the person in the way I know best, or maybe be respectfully personal and try to bridge that gap.

Beck: So your approach to small talk is to try to get personal as quickly as possible.

Rashid: Not uncomfortably so. But I struggle with the repeated “How’s the weather?” with someone I see every day.

Beck: I feel like I thrive on that surface level. Once we transition to something that is a little more personal, that is where I feel like a little bumpy. In our conversation with Erin and Mimi, it really wasn’t that awkward, surface-level kind of small talk that I think people fear.

Rashid: They were really naturally cognizant of people’s different comfort levels and what would be an appropriate story to share, and they were sort of able to read the room and read the space of the conversation.

Beck: I think for those of us who aren’t quite so practiced as they are, I want to understand more so what can cause a seemingly innocuous conversation to take a turn for the awkward, and how we navigate it when that happens.

Rashid: Ty Tashiro is a social scientist who writes about awkwardness, and his book called Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome explores a lot of these social and behavioral trends specific to adults in the United States. And he helps people think through how to be in social spaces and feel just a bit more confident.

—

Tashiro: One of the great things about studying awkwardness is that everybody has had an awkward moment. For example, you’re giving a presentation, and you have an undone zipper. That’s super awkward, super embarrassing, but it’s actually not that big of a deal. It’s just an uncomfortable deviation from actually a small social expectation. But we have this really powerful emotional reaction to it.

Some of my close friends had moved to new cities and I would go visit them, and we’d go out to parties or go to a bar or something. And some of these friends were awkward. And, you know, I’d watch them in these social interactions meeting new people, and it was just heartbreaking. Because they would be their regular awkward self. And you could see the other folks losing interest and saying “I gotta go get another drink” or something.

They ruled out any chance of future social interaction based on three or four minutes of chitchat. And so I had this thought, like, If the awkward person could skip the first five minutes of a social interaction, I actually think they’d be all right.

So I wanted to see—are there ways that the awkward person can navigate those awkward moments a little bit more smoothly? On the other hand, for people who aren’t awkward, can they have a little more empathy for the awkward person’s situation?

Beck: So in your book you write that some people are more prone to awkwardness than others. Where do you think you fall?

Tashiro: Oh, boy. I’m pretty awkward. When I was a kid, I was very awkward. And I think in adulthood, I can pass for socially fluent in most situations. But I certainly still have my moments.

Beck: You’re doing great. I’m curious, can you just walk me through what goes through your mind when you, say, enter a party where you only know one or two people?

Tashiro: So, you know, before the social event occurs, I do get some social anxiety. I think maybe the difference for someone who’s awkward is that these feelings of anxiety aren’t irrational. So I’ll give more thought to small details, like, What am I going to wear? What would be an appropriate thing to bring? What time am I gonna get there?

And so I just have a little self-talk before I go into these situations. I call it my mental preparation, and I’ll just say, Hey, you don’t know anybody; you’re nervous about that. And that’s okay. You’ve been in these situations before, and you can do it. But I need to have a more assertive attitude than would be natural for me.

So let’s say we walk into the party, and it’s in full swing. It’s pretty common; someone might say something like, “Oh, there’s a really good vibe here.” And to me, that is totally bewildering how they discern that vibe within a few seconds.

So awkward people, when they enter a social situation, they’re not all at once kind of evaluating what’s going on. Instead, what they’re doing is looking at individual pieces of information and then kind of putting it together, almost like a puzzle, to figure out what the situation is like, and how they should behave.

So it takes longer for me to read the room, I guess, and then feel comfortable enough to get in there and interact smoothly with other people. And then when I get into it, I just try to be honest, actually. And so I would approach people—if you had the uncomfortable situation where you’ve talked to somebody and they’ve moved on to something else, and you’re standing there by yourself—I’ll just approach a group, and I’ll say, “Hey, I’m Ty. I’m new here. Do you mind if I join you?” And that might sound a little daunting to some folks, but I always find that people are really receptive to that. It took a little bit of boldness, maybe, to say something like that, and I think people appreciate that.

Beck: So why do people feel awkward in that awkward moment where they’ve broken one minor expectation? Is it the same thing as social anxiety, or is it a unique feeling?

Tashiro: So, social anxiety is more of a forward-looking kind of emotion. So when we feel social anxiety, the core of that is we have some irrational fear that we’re going to mess up, or we’re going to make a fool of ourselves in a social situation.

With awkwardness, it’s more of this just in-the-moment, very present kind of feeling. And it even comes along with things like a racing heart, or your muscles might tense. Of course, one of the hallmarks is that you might blush, right? And people usually feel horrible about that. They think, I’ve just made this awkward moment worse by blushing.

So blushing actually sends a signal: Hey, I just did something awkward. I feel bad about that, and I’m blushing. I’m sending you this social signal. And people actually really appreciate that. And actually just being honest about the awkward moment that just took place can actually be beneficial for building some trust with another person.

Beck: So do you think that you’ve gotten more comfortable with socializing over time, or do you just feel like you’ve learned strategies?

Tashiro: I think it’s that I’ve learned strategies first, and then the social comfort came after that. So let me give you a quick example, maybe from childhood, about some of these strategies I had to learn.

So when we would go to Wendy’s to get a hamburger, my parents would park the car. And they would turn around, and they’d say, “Ty, it’s time to mentally prepare.” And I would shake my head: Yes. I knew exactly what this meant.

And what it was was this kind of Socratic dialogue where they would ask me a series of questions. And it would help me prepare for what the expectations would be in the social situation, and also help me think about what I needed to do with my social behaviors to handle it well and appropriately.

So they’d say things like, “Well, where are we?” And I’d say, “Well, we’re at Wendy’s!” And “What’s the first thing you need to look for when you step inside the door?”

And I would say, “Well, I need to look and see if there’s a line.” And that’s because sometimes I would go in and just shoot straight to the front, and not because I was trying to cut or cheat.

And this is hard for some non-awkward people to believe, but because I didn’t see the line, or it didn’t register with me. I was so narrowly focused on the hamburger and the fries that I would just not see all of the social information off to the side.

So this would happen not just once. This would happen dozens of times for various kinds of social situations. And my folks would need me to get into the habit of thinking about, Hey, what’s the goal in this situation? What are the small expectations you’re going to encounter? And then, what are the behaviors that you need to execute to be socially fluent in the situation?

For the awkward kid, that’s not intuitive. And so you just need to break it down into component parts. I mean, if you walked with me into a Wendy’s now, I’m pretty smooth. (Julie laughs.)

—

Craft: Like, I didn’t always know how to get into a conversation and connect with somebody. I just learned it when I started doing hair.

Beck: So do you actually want to or feel comfortable talking about yourself with clients? Or do you actively, like, keep the focus on them in their stories, because you maybe don’t want to share?

Craft: I feel comfortable. I will share anything. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have anything that interesting to share, and so then I don’t want to talk about myself, because, like, “Oh, are you taking vacations?” “No.” “Okay, cool.” A lot of people, really—that is their No. 1 personal question: “Do you have any trips planned?”

Beck: Oh, I’m very guilty of that. Because it’s like, it’s not too personal. But maybe it gives us something to talk about.

Derosa: That is my conversation filler when I have pretty much nothing left.

Craft: Like, even the hair salon, it really is, I think, a safe space in the community, because who am I going to tell? I’m not so invested that telling me is going to have, like any major impact in their personal life. So they can get things off their chest and feel safe; that it’s not, like, a risk.

Beck: Yeah. I don’t know how we get to a place where we just accept that feeling awkward won’t kill us. But I’m not there yet.

—

Rashid: I’m curious if part of the stress, too, is that once you start a conversation with someone—and if you do start to feel awkward, and maybe you’re not comfortable being honest right away about the fact that you’re feeling awkward—and you want to dip out of the conversation, it can be hard to do that.

Beck: I would love to tell you about a man that I once knew, an acquaintance of mine from college, who I truly would not remember at all were it not for this moment.

He was a friend of a friend. And one day we were both on the same train going down to Chicago together. I went to school outside of Chicago, and so this was like a good 40-, 45-minute train ride. And he pulled the most, like, amazing Uno-reverse ninja trick I’ve ever seen in conversation.

And so we did the very classic, like: “Hey, how’s it going? How’s the one thing that I know about you?” “It’s still good. How’s the one thing that I know about you?” “It’s fine.” And then we ran out of material. And he just said: “It’s been so great talking to you. I’m going to go read my book now.” And then we both sat down on opposite sides of the train, and we read our books, and we took that half-hour train ride down to Chicago. And when I got off the train, we did like a friendly wave.

And I actually don’t think we ever saw each other again. But I’ve thought about this man so regularly for the past, like, 10 years, because he just handled that interaction in such a smooth way that you almost never see.

Tashiro: I think we feel kind of more awkward than ever about these kinds of things: meeting new people, or the conversation in the elevator. I think maybe some of it has to do with the fact that we don’t have to interact with people as much as we used to. We can do it through our social media, or we can get absorbed in our phones or stay in the comfort of our home and stream some show.

If you’re texting back and forth with somebody, that’s fine. But it’s obviously not as good, right, as sitting down with them for a long dinner and getting into just a deep conversation. In online dating, for example, you might send messages back and forth or whatever. And that kind of gives you a sense of the person; gets the interaction rolling a little bit before you actually meet up. When all you really want to do is get face-to-face and figure out if there might be some kind of chemistry here.

Beck: One consequence of this fear of awkwardness is people go to parties, or they go to bars, and they only talk to people they already know. Have you noticed that in your life?

Tashiro: Oh, for sure. You know, it’s another thing, kind of, that makes me just want to go over and say things I have no business saying to other people.

Beck: Like what?

Tashiro: I just want to say, like, “Go meet other people. You know, you’re standing here in your group of three you came in with, and you look semi-sad. Go talk to these other people you want to talk to.”

You know, there’s all this disconnection going on. So the average person could benefit from more friends, and certainly benefit from more friends that they’ve built some quality intimacy with and they feel they can go to in a time of need.

So if we go with that perspective, then we should break out of our shell, and we should cross that junior-high dance floor of sorts and go talk to somebody new—knowing that this person might reject us, or knowing that the interaction might be a little bit awkward. But that’s okay.

—

Beck: I mean, to some degree it’s a justified fear, right? Like, you probably will feel awkward. Like, you actually aren’t going to make it through this life without being awkward in social situations.

But I think, like, Ty made me realize that part of what makes things so awkward sometimes is trying to pretend that they’re not. Like, all of his advice would boil down to: Just be honest.

Some of what is really challenging about small talk is: It’s so situational. And then there’s also each individual person’s reactions, and whether they want to be left alone, and how open they are to conversation. And how awkward you feel, and how awkward they feel.

But I think there can be a middle path where you read the room a bit. Maybe you have some questions in your back pocket, but you also don’t have to stick to “How’s the weather?” for fear of offending anybody.

Rashid: Yes. And I think that’s exactly what I wonder—if what gets lost is all of us getting used to not trying to start up a conversation with anyone. Out of fear, or out of fear that it won’t lead anywhere, or it doesn’t mean anything.

Beck: Yeah. I remember Mimi and Erin talking a lot about how fueled they actually are by all the conversations that they have at work. And, like, not just purely for entertainment value, but also like feeling like these conversations are meaningful, and they are bringing something unique and special into their lives. They were just interested in people. And just, like, having a genuine curiosity for the person that’s in front of you fuels conversation.

Rashid: As meta as that is, we got to talk about it. (Laughs.)

Beck: On that note, Becca, it’s been so great making a podcast with you. And I’m going to go read my book now.

Introducing: How to Talk to People

2023-05-15T05:00:00-04:00

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On How to Talk to People we explore the barriers to relationship building and why—in a world of endless potential for connection—so many people still feel alone. From the the struggle to prioritize non-romantic relationships, to just feeling uncertain of what to talk about with strangers, host Julie Beck and producer Rebecca Rashid unravel the complexities of putting yourself out there—in hopes of revealing the rewards of showing up.

A New Formula for Happiness

2022-11-14T09:00:00-05:00

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We often follow a misguided formula for happiness—pushing us toward material wealth and other worldly successes. But when our expectations set us down the wrong path, it may be time to reorient ourselves around something new: universal happiness principles we can practice at any age.

In our finale episode of this season, a conversation with psychiatrist Robert Waldinger provides a scientific insight into key elements for happy living, whatever your age.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.

To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by the Fix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), and Gregory David (“Under the Tide”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Arthur, was there some point in your life where you realized that you weren’t where you wanted to be?

Arthur C. Brooks: Well, yeah, of course. Many times, like all of us. Maybe every day. I’m not sure.

But in my 20s I remember when I realized that my childhood dream wasn’t going to lead me where I thought it was. Since I was a little kid, all I cared about was classical music. I wanted to be a professional French horn player.

I went pro, and I was playing, and it was great. And I had this big dream that I was going to get better and better and better and better, because that’s what the world tells you. You’re going to get better and better. And I didn’t.

And so I figured out that I needed to make some big life changes, but that was tricky. That was hard. I just threw in the towel and went and got a Ph.D. and became a college professor. And every night for a long time, and still today, I still dream I’m up on stage playing a concert, and it’s better than ever. And the orchestra’s cranking it up, and we’re doing great and I’m doing my best work. And then I wake up and find out: Nope, no you’re not.

My guess is that most people who are listening to a podcast called How to Build a Happy Life—they’re looking for a formula for a happy life. Just going out on a limb here. And the reason that it’s elusive is because they’re following a bogus formula, which I was for many years.

It’s a very simple, seductive formula that says “love things,” which is a way to measure your own success. Use people, because they’re instrumental in your success. And worship yourself, because everything revolves around you.

And that is almost the perfect formula for misery. And, you know, that’s one of the main reasons that I couldn’t get my mind around being anything other than the world’s greatest French horn player, as absurd as that sounds.

Rashid: Arthur and I sat down with Robert Waldinger, the head of the Harvard Study of Adult Development—one of the longest-running studies of human happiness on record.

Brooks: The data from Waldinger’s study, which began all the way back in 1938, have transformed our knowledge of human happiness.

Rashid: In our season-finale episode, we hope to parse out the key happiness lessons at every stage of life and explore how to adjust our expectations—and our actions—accordingly.

Robert Waldinger: It started with people in their teenage years and has studied them all the way into old age. And now we’re studying their children. And to study the same lives for that length of time is virtually unheard of in the history of science.

Brooks: Let’s talk about the big picture of what you’re finding in this study.

Waldinger: The first one from our study is: You need to take care of your body like you’re going to need it for 100 years. And if you do that, you end up much more likely to be happy, as well as well. And that means exercise. It means eating well. It means when you can, get regular health care. Getting enough sleep.

But the second thing is a little more surprising; at least it was to us. And that’s that the people who end up not just the happiest but the healthiest are the people who have more social connections and warmer social connections. Connections of all kinds—not just intimate partners, but friends and work colleagues and casual relationships. All of that adds up to a happier and healthier life as you get older.

Rashid: What do you tell someone in young adulthood who is sort of trained away from relationships and told that that’s something to focus on at a later time in the future?

Waldinger: I think what we see often is that when we’re young, we get the message that if you just work really hard now, you can defer the emphasis on relationships. And what our data say to us is, “No, you can’t.”

Brooks: We interviewed on the show Omri Gillath. And he was very clear: Don’t put off love. Do not postpone love. It’s an iron law of happiness as far as he’s concerned. Are you on the same plane?

Waldinger: Yes. And in fact, one of the things my predecessor, George Vaillant, said is that maturity involves learning not to push love away, either through neglect or through actively pushing love away.

Rashid: But aren’t most people in young adulthood struggling with immaturity? How do you channel that wisdom into action at such an early age?

Waldinger: Well, immaturity is relative, right? I mean, I’m struggling with immaturity. I still have to take myself in hand and say, Do the wise thing, Bob, because sometimes my instincts pull me in a direction I know is not going to go well.

I’ve heard one marriage guru talk about the idea that some of us grow up with our partners, and some of us grow up and then find our partners. So these are different developmental paths.

Rashid: There are also so many changes in the romantic landscape when you’re talking about choice. Young people today who’ve come up with so many creative ways to build a robust social world because partnership is not in their family tradition; they weren’t raised religious, whatever it may be. A lot of people are polyamorous, nonmonogamous. There are all sorts of ways that people choose to conduct their intimate lives.

So for people that don’t see marriage or long-term monogamous partnership in their future—will they be missing out on this core fundamental relationship that you need to have a sense of well-being?

Waldinger: You’re getting at this basic question of what is the essence of what people need to be well and to feel well. And you’re right that it’s certainly not about a marriage license, and it’s not about cohabitation.

What we think it is about is an attachment to another person. And a sense that another person is there for you, particularly when you need them. We think of relationships as safety nets, as stress regulators.

So I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you have something really upsetting happen during the day. When you go home, let’s say there’s somebody at home or on the phone, or you meet up for a drink—and that person is a really good listener, and you can tell them what happened. And maybe they offer some reflection; maybe they just listen. But often you can literally feel your body calm down.

Stress induces what we call the fight-or-flight response, where the body revs up literally to flee because there’s danger or to meet a challenge. And then there are circulating stress hormones that stay elevated. Blood pressure stays mildly elevated. And that’s how unregulated stress can slowly wear down multiple body systems: the joints, the cardiovascular system, the pancreas, all of these systems. That’s why the diseases of aging may come sooner for people who are chronically stressed, chronically isolated, in the midst of unhappy relationships, much of their lives.

Brooks: You have patients of all different ages. Now let’s talk about a 42-year-old. A person who has kind of an average life, married, a kid or two, a job, a mortgage, a lot of tensions, a lot of pressures, but not the same tensions and pressures that come with the mid-20s. What should our 42-year-old listener be thinking about right now to make the best happiness hygiene decisions?

Waldinger: Forty-two: We literally know from science that it is starting that period of time when the awareness of mortality becomes more vivid, gradually. That when we get into our 40s, death is no longer as much of an abstraction.

But it’s often that time of reevaluation. Of: “Okay, this is what I’ve devoted my time to so far. This is who I’ve become. Do I want to keep going with this?” And so some people abruptly or gradually make changes. Some people stay the course because this is working for them. This is what they want.

Brooks: And I know a lot of people in their 40s who say, “Life passed me by, and I’m just—you know, I was going to work until I die.” Is there something around work addiction that you often see for people in their 40s that really compromises their ability to become happy later?

Waldinger: I will say that when we asked people in our study when they were in their 80s to look back, we said, “What are your biggest regrets?” Many of the men—and remember, in that generation, it was primarily the men who worked outside the home—many of them said, “I wish I hadn’t devoted so much time to work and achievement. I wish I had spent more time with the people I care about.”

And many of the women in that generation who were primarily at home—now, that also meant community activists and volunteers and many other things. But many of them said, “I wish that I hadn’t worried so much about what other people thought of me, and I had done more of what I felt was true to me.” And so I think those are two of the big regrets that emerge from our study.

There was a developmental theorist, Bernice Neugarten, who had a theory about being on time or off time. Her sense was that, developmentally, we care a lot about what our community around us considers normal for the age that we are at, and that it affects us if we feel we are “off time”—if we’re not doing the things right now that other people our age are supposed to be doing. And that is a social influence that’s inevitable.

And so: to pull back from that and to try to listen to yourself, I think, is essential. Because it is your life. Nobody else is going to live your life. And so the world can tell you, “You ought to be doing this at this point in your life.” But you cannot let that be the thing that is your sole driver.

There’s a quote from Joseph Campbell that I love. He said: “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on somebody else’s path.” And it’s really important to remember that just because everybody else says, “You should be doing this at this time in your life,” you have got to do that internal looking that you’re doing.

People ask me things like, “Well, wait, are you crazy? Why aren’t you retired now? You’re 71 years old!” But my internal sense is: I want to be engaged in these things still.

Brooks: So give a little bit of advice to those folks to make sure that by the time they do get to 91, or however many years they get, that they are as happy as their lot can give them.

Waldinger: So the basic advice is stay engaged in the world. What we know is that when people stay engaged—physically, intellectually, socially—they stay more fit, they stay happier, their brains stay sharper. It doesn’t matter how, but: Stay engaged with other people, and stay engaged physically so that you’re physically active.

Learn a language; play an instrument. It could be singing in a chorus. If you are not academically inclined, it doesn’t have to be academic.

One of the challenges of being older is you can begin to feel like you don’t matter anymore, because our society is constructed now in such a way that many people in this culture, as they get older, don’t find a role for themselves. So, finding ways to feel like you matter.

Rashid: Let’s say you’re receiving this wisdom too late, or what feels like too late. How can people with a lot of accumulated relationship regrets sort of make peace at the end of life with the relationships they maybe didn’t keep up with in the way that they wanted? Or they weren’t able to show love in the way that they wanted? Is there something that they can do to reconcile that with the other person, and perhaps with themselves as well?

Waldinger: To go back to someone and say, “I’ve missed you, and I’d love to spend a little more time.” Or “I’m sorry I haven’t been around much.” You know, there are ways to do that—to make amends, if you will. When we think about being really hard on ourselves, looking back on our lives with a lot of regret—remember that none of us gets up in the morning and says, “I’m going to do a bad job on my life today. That’s my aspiration.” We’re all doing what we can in the moment. And sometimes it’s not as we wish we would have done.

Brooks: Many of the concepts we’ve covered in this series create kind of a tension in our lives. There’s lots of things that we’re supposed to be doing, but they’re not always compatible with each other, right? Sometimes work: which is great, it’s a great way to express yourself. It’s an enormous source of satisfaction if you do it right. But it can get in the way of your relationships.

We all know that we have limited time, and then sometimes that means loneliness or isolation. And loneliness, and our need for relationships, can create addictions— suboptimal behavior, dangerous behavior sometimes even.

In other words: Balance is hard, but that’s really what it’s all about. If we can figure out how to get that balance, a happy life won’t be elusive. Now, one quick parenthetical to this, which is: I’m making it sound like we can find the perfect balance and find ultimate happiness. Don’t be fooled by that. Happiness is not really a destination. It’s a journey of balancing and rebalancing and making progress and feeling pain and resolving that pain and being fully alive.

So this is something that I want everybody to remember. You may not be the happiest person in the world, but you can be a happier person. Really, we should call this series How to Build a Happi-ER Life, because that’s really what the struggle is all about. Find your path. Invest properly. Here’s the right formula: Love people. Use things. Worship the divine. Figure out how to do it. And a happier life will be yours. That’s what I wish for you.

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

The Right Choices in Parenting

2022-11-07T08:00:00-05:00

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The mandates of modern parenting can be dizzying. But in the effort to optimize our parenting, we may lose sight of the values we hope to impart to our children—and the skills necessary for individual decision making.

A conversation with economist Emily Oster helps with understanding the nuances of choice-making in parenthood.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.

Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Brooks: You know, being a parent is a little like not seeing a gorilla. There’s this experiment that two psychologists at my university undertook in 1999. It’s a famous paper that they wrote called Gorillas in Our Midst.

It was a psychology experiment that looked at when people are focusing on one trivial thing, how they can become effectively blind to a much bigger thing. Now, that’s what it’s like to be the parent of a little kid.

You’re not paying attention to being happy and having a happy baby. You’re worried about whether or not you boiled that pacifier. You’re not worried about the big picture of what’s going on in your family and the relationships that you’re building, because you’re so completely distracted by counting the number of times the kid went to the bathroom today.

I’m guilty. I mean, when my kids were little, I could tell you every bit of minutia about what was going on in their little lives. But a lot of the time I wasn’t thinking about the stuff that I would really like to remember today, which is: What were we feeling? Where were we going? How were they developing?

Brooks: If there’s any area of life where our expectations for ourselves seem impossible to meet, it’s parenting. We tend to be fixated on parenting outcomes. And that really never works. I want to understand how parents can actually make good decisions or maybe just good-enough decisions and be happy at the same time.

Oster: I’m Emily Oster. I’m a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of Expecting Better, Cribsheet, and The Family Firm.

Brooks: Emily Oster is an author on many sensitive issues in parenting. As a trained economist, Oster takes a data-centric approach to parental decision making, teaching parents how to best understand the data behind the so-called “mandates” of modern parenting.

Oster is an economist, not a mental-health professional. But her analytical approach to this personal subject provides a new lens into the complexities of any individual decision making.

Oster: A lot of my work is on data, and is on data in parenting and using data to make decisions in pregnancy and around child rearing. And then also writing about the decision-making part of it—the part of economics where we think about trading off costs and benefits and trying to have structured approaches to how we make choices. And the sort of central thesis of everything I do is that those tools which we might ordinarily think of as useful in business settings are also pretty useful in our personal lives.

So Expecting Better, which is the first book I wrote, was really a book that I wrote while I was pregnant. Some [pregnant] people are like, Well, could I have a cup of coffee? Like, maybe I’ll read a few different sources and just kind of decide what works for me. But I was like: No, I got to go down the rabbit hole on this. I’m going to find out, what are all the studies about coffee saying? And what’s the interesting empirical issues associated with this question, and how can I explain it to people?

So there’s almost a sort of statistician approach, even more than an economist approach. But at a minimum, the decisions that we make should be made with all of the facts in mind. And it’s almost never the case that the data is going to tell you the decision. But we almost can’t approach the decision without knowing the evidence behind it.

Brooks: Do you think that since subsequent to the birth of your children, that you do a lot of stuff differently with your own kids on the basis of your research? Is this how you’re approaching parenting day to day?

Oster: Particularly when they were younger, yes. So I think that there’s a little bit of a progression. So you know, I—like everyone else—have my first kid, and then I guess they thought I would have time to figure out how to do it. You know, I would have time to do the research. But actually when you have your first kid, there’s no time to do anything except just basically hang on to the roller coaster and hope that they buckled you in correctly, right? And so that was a sort of chaotic mess for a few years.

When we had our second, I felt like I was in a much better position to be prepared. Because it was much easier to focus on the questions or the areas of decision making that I thought were really important.

When you write things about parenting, and particularly when you write about how to work through the hard parts of parenting—getting your kid to sleep, dealing with discipline—it’s very easy to write what you should do. It’s very hard to implement those things.

Brooks: We’re talking in the abstract about parenting. So give me an example of something where the data say “You got to do this”—and then you wind up never doing this.

Oster: When you are encouraging your kids to sleep or trying to enforce a sleep schedule, particularly with an older kid, data tells you basically three things.

You need to have a bedtime routine. You shouldn’t have screens before bed. And if your child is coming out of the room routinely, disrupting you—which is a common thing that little kids or older kids do—you should be consistent every time in the way you react.

So if you have said, “That was the last hug,” then every time they come out, you should take them back into the room, put them in the bed, don’t do another hug, leave when they come out again, you put them back in the room. Okay.

So it turns out that will work. If you can implement that, that is basically very effective and actually works pretty quickly. It works within a few days. But it is almost impossible, I find, to implement.

One of my kids who is older, she’s a very good sleeper. But with my other kid, it’s like a little more variable. And we have many nights where he will come out a lot of times, and I will say “This is the last time I’m going to do this.” But I cannot follow through on that.

I just know if I just do it one more time, then, like, eventually he will just go to sleep and the investment in the moment of like—do I want to be holding the door closed while he screams? Is that what I want to do with my night? Even though I know that if I do the other thing, it’s going to have these long-term consequences. Things like that are just hard to follow through on.

Brooks: Okay, so the picture that I’m getting here is that you should keep an open mind and be open to evidence. And you, Emily Oster, have a boatload of evidence because of what you do for a living. But parents have evidence too, based on their experiences—and they should be willing and flexible to update what they do and not be dogmatic on the basis of what people are telling them, right?

Oster: I think it’s particularly important as kids get older. So it is going to be much less frequently the case that we can make statements like “The data show X.”

So to give you a concrete example, there’s a lot of really good data showing that introducing allergens like peanuts, eggs to your kids earlier rather than later reduces the risk of allergies later. So it turns out it’s just a really good idea to give your kids allergens early. It’s shown in randomized trials. It’s relatively straightforward to implement. There are more things like that in little-kid parenting, where the data will tell you either “This is important” or “This is not important.”

As your kids get bigger, the things that are coming up are more complicated, and they get really wrapped up in questions around: What are our family values? What are we trying to achieve? What do we want our days to look like? And once you’re in that world, there is, I think, more space for just these differences in the outcomes.

But what I think people should share, or what I think would help people in these spaces, is just being more deliberate in the way they are making those decisions. It’s not that you should or should not rely on the internet. It’s that when you come into some complicated decision or some choice, you should sit down and think about the choice and give the choice the space that it needs in your brain. And I think that’s often what we are missing in this era of parenting.

Brooks: Now, you’re not a pediatrician, and you’re not a psychologist. You’re an economist. What led you as an economist to take up this topic of parenting and families, and how to be parents, and how to be kids?

Oster: I think for me, I kind of came into parenting with the tools from my job. I was familiar or comfortable with the idea of using tools of data analysis and structured decision making in my life before my parenting, and most of the writing that I do about parenting uses those tools, takes those insights.

Brooks: I married a non-American. So my wife’s from Barcelona, and like most people from Spain, she thinks that Americans are all about fads and panics, that all of American culture is a combination of fads and panics. And it’s like we’re all going to do this, we all stand for the current thing, or we’re all freaked out and protesting this thing all the time. So she said, “You know what? I don’t think anything matters that much except love.” And she’s sort of a “monist” in this way. How terrible is that rule?

Oster: I don’t think that’s a terrible rule. We know on the one hand, if we compare across resource levels or we compare across income groups in the U.S., that there are big differences in, say, school achievement for kids based on what happens in the first years. So obviously, something that is going on is really important for various aspects of kids’ development. And yet it’s very difficult to identify any individual piece of that—any individual thing that you, as a parent, could do to enhance this achievement metric or whatever it is.

And I—I think, like your wife—have always sort of interpreted that result as sort of something about not so much love, but even just sort of stability. The idea that there’s a lot of value to a kind of stable, well-resourced home. And that is something that, you know, we could be thinking about policy solutions, too. But that is not the same as, like, “Does your Montessori preschool have only wooden toys?” or whatever.

Brooks: You write a lot about parenting mandates. So give me an example of a parenting mandate.

Oster: So there’s this idea that if you’re making infant formula, you have to boil the water. And it’s an example where it turns out the reason to do that is effectively a hypothetical risk for something that is more or less not, definitely not, going to happen. Or it’s like a tiny, tiny, tiny probability thing.

And I talk about this as, “unfunded parenting mandates.” Things where you are told, “Here’s all of the 57,000 things you need to do.” And if you add up the time for all of those things, it’s, you know, 72 hours every day. And it’s like, Well, I only have 24 hours. Like, which of these things should I do?

Brooks: So what should we do instead? I understand why there are rules. I guess that some of our listeners would say, “Well, what a privileged conversation.” You know, these people that have access to all this good data and were raised in really stable homes.

And they can sit there and say that we don’t need parenting mandates—where a lot of people didn’t have access to this information, and easy rules are the best way to do it. What’s your mandate on mandates?

Oster: What’s hard—and I mean, this is a sort of key issue in public health communication, one that came up all the time in the COVID pandemic as well—we somehow need a way to communicate to people levels of risk.

So co-sleeping is a good example of this. So the kind of rhetoric that we have on co-sleeping is, like, under no circumstance should you sleep in the bed with your baby. This is like public-health advice on this—you know, “That’s extremely dangerous,” and we don’t provide that with much nuance. And in fact, if you look at the data on that, it is pretty nuanced, in the sense that there are safer and less safe ways to co-sleep.

So I think even in the safest [situation], it carries some small risk. But it is much riskier if one of the parents is smoking; if there are a lot of covers in the bed. If the baby is premature, early on in life there’s all kinds of subtleties to that. Which I think could be communicated but aren’t.

And people are left in a situation in which they almost may find it impossible. And you haven’t provided them with another alternative. So people say, “You’ve literally told me I can’t sleep with my baby, and my baby will only sleep with me.”

So there’s no solution for this. And that’s where you get into situations—and this is a real thing that happens—where people say, “Well, I’m going to try really hard to stay awake. I’m going to hold the baby, because that’s the only way it’ll sleep, and I’m going to try really hard to stay awake. I’m going to sit on the couch. You told me the worst possible thing is to sleep in the bed with my baby.”

Well, it turns out the worst possible thing is to fall asleep accidentally on the couch with your baby. That is like 50 times as dangerous as co-sleeping in the safest way. Now, by not providing any subtlety in our public-health messaging, we’ve left people in a situation where the choice that they will make—trying to achieve what you want—is a worse choice.

And I don’t have a solution to that. But I do think that we need to be far more thoughtful about the way we’re sending these messages, because we’re sending them to people and not to autonomous robots who are able to just say the things that we want.

Brooks: I mean, there are really irresponsible ways to throw out the rulebook and say, basically, “I don’t believe any of this, so I’m going to smoke while I’m pregnant.” And there’s a ton of evidence that says you shouldn’t do that, even less should you drink while you’re pregnant, for example. And there are all kinds of ways that you can put your baby at risk.

But there are some people that are more nuanced about that. You know, they’re parents who are kind of countercultural parents, and they say, “I’m going to do these things because I want to do these things, and I want to have a deep connection with my child.” What’s your view on sort of countercultural parenting where you “figure it out” like people did for millennia?

Oster: The broader thing I think a lot of people struggle with is whiplashing between decisions. So probably the worst decision-making approach is to do one thing because one book says it, and then as soon as you read a different book or your mom comes to visit, do the other thing. The more you can make one choice and try to stick to it, the easier your parenting is going to be.

I mean, I think up to these issues that you raised, which is like there are some things, you know, which are very dangerous, you should not do. I think actually that’s completely great. What I think many people struggle with, is that they struggle to implement that.

So in the reality of “I’m just going to go with my gut,” it doesn’t work for everybody. Because for many people that can lead to “Well, I actually wasn’t really sure, and now I’m rethinking it because of the thing that person at the playground said to me.” Then I think we’re in a space where you actually almost aren’t able to “go with your gut,” because the stimulus of the information is the way you want to go, but you haven’t managed to process it correctly.

Brooks: One of the reasons that people don’t follow mandates is, as you point out in your work, because kids force a deviation from the script. There’s lots of cases of this, you know, “I want another hug”—and it’s really compelling.

Oster: Kids are people, too. There’s many moments in parenting—whether it’s sleep or food or something else—where you realize, Oh, I actually can’t force this person to do this thing. It closely relates to a set of questions around how much autonomy your kids have, and how much of the way that your family operates is going to be driven by the things that the kid wants and when you should start thinking about that.

When does your kid get a say in what extracurriculars they do? When your kid is 15, presumably they do get a pretty significant say in what extracurriculars they’re doing. But where’s that line? What’s the time that you make that choice? And how do you know it’s going to be the right choice, or not the right choice, in the long run? I think that part of kid autonomy around decision making is really challenging.

Brooks: You’ve heard about the “free range” parenting debate, which is this debate about whether or not we overstructure our kids’ lives and we overprotect our kids. You know, within normal boundaries of the current conversation, where would you put yourself in this debate?

Oster: So in terms of physical autonomy—which is almost how I think of “free range” parenting—how much do you let your kid walk to the library by themselves, or walk home? I actually think, relative to my peer group, I’m somewhat far on this.

I actually think there’s a lot of value to kids in having them navigate the world outside of your four walls on their own. It’s pretty important.

Brooks: Okay, so you’re more free range than most people of your generation. Most parents of your generation. And you have this not because you don’t believe that risk exists, but because you as an economist are trying to assess risk versus reward. Is that fair to say?

Oster: I think that’s fair to say.

Brooks: I think probably also you would assert—and I would agree with you—that the reason that more people don’t subscribe to this point of view is because all they hear about is the risk. They don’t hear about the reward.

I mean, you don’t hear on the news, you know, “Child walks to the library alone and has a great time and becomes better adjusted.” That’s not a headline, when the kid doesn’t get snatched. And so that’s a problem, isn’t it? When it’s all risk and reward in the way that we hear about parenting?

I had a technique that I used when my kids were in high school. So I made my kids write a business plan. And they made very original business plans, and they all kind of did their own thing. Do you agree with that approach? And how do you feel about trying to tease out the way that our kids can be their own person from the very beginning? Or is that a dangerous way of approaching parenthood?

Oster: I mean, I’m not sure I would tell everyone to make their kids make a business plan—although what I like that you’re getting at, that I really find resonant, is the idea of your kids kind of not being an extension of your dreams fulfilled or unfulfilled.

We all have these images, or these ideas, for what our kids are going to be, or what they’re going to be excited about. And a lot of times they’re the things that we’re good at, or the things that resonate with us.

And for many of us, a part of parenting that is challenging is seeing, you know, Okay, well, this is what my kid wants to do. And maybe it’s not the thing I envisioned for them. Maybe it’s not the thing that I envisioned for myself, but it’s a thing that they like. I need to sort of celebrate the ways in which this person is in fact a person. And that becomes so much more vivid and visual as your kids get older.

And that’s a part of my own parenting I find both very rewarding, and also very hard. You know, it’s easy for me to kind of connect with the pieces of, like my daughter, that we are very similar—but much harder on the things that she’s good at that I’m not. But they’re also the most fun things to be, like, “Oh my gosh, I could never do that. Like, yeah, I could just absolutely never do that. And I’m so impressed that you can.”

Brooks: What do you think is the single biggest mistake that American parents are making today?

Oster: Probably overthinking it. And I mean: I feel like this is such a ridiculous thing for someone like me to say, whose entire thing is like, “Think more about your parenting and be more deliberate.” But probably there is a sort of mistake somewhere in here around planning it too much or relying too much on this idea that “If I could only get this one, like if I could only find the one key, there’s like one key to getting it right.” There’s no key to getting it right.

Brooks: Thank you to our How To listeners who help make this show what it is. We asked you to tell us about your most clever parenting moment. And here’s what you said.

Listener Submission: Hi, this is Marilyn from Oak Park, Illinois. And I think one of my cleverest parenting moments was when my daughter was in middle school and she posted something that we thought she shouldn’t have on social media.

As punishment for her irresponsible use of technology, we took away her phone and told her that for the next week she couldn’t use any technology that wasn’t available in 1976—which was when I was in middle school.

She could only use the landline phone in the kitchen and had to stand next to the wall pretending the phone was on a cord. Years later, we still talk about how fun that week was, and I think all of us learned some good lessons.

Brooks: I remember, for example, that I kept reading that if my baby was crying during the night, you should just let them cry it out. Cry it out. Cry it out. Cry it out. They call it “crying it out”! And it’s like, I don’t want to let them cry it out. I don’t want to do that. And so I decided I wasn’t going to. And it was fine.

He didn’t grow up to be a horrible, spoiled person. You know, he’s great. He did well in school and took responsibility for his actions, despite the fact that I didn’t let him cry it out all the time. And I remember I was kind of worried at the time that I was stunting his growth because I was trying to do something that would satisfy my own desires.

But the truth of the matter was that, as time went on, I realized that there’s just a lot more flexibility in the things that you do. And it turned out that it’s not as bad as they say, or at least I don’t know. I mean, the truth is, I still don’t know. I’ll be a grandfather and not know. So I guess I’m more comfortable with not knowing.

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Subtraction as a Solution

2022-10-31T08:00:00-04:00

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From how we build our cities to how we shop, it can seem as though our natural human tendency is to add. But a culture of accumulation may be exactly what holds us back from the simple solution in front of us: taking things away.

University of Virginia professor Leidy Klotz helps us analyze the benefits of subtraction and how less may create the space for what we truly desire.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.

To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by the Fix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), JADED (“Blue Steel”), and Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Arthur Brooks: What was the thing during the worst of COVID that you missed the most?

Rebecca Rashid: I used to work at a coffee shop before COVID hit and knew that my friends would come in to entertain me on my shift. And basically the life that comes from engaging with others.

Brooks: Now tell me something that’s a little bit harder. During COVID, there were a bunch of things that you didn’t get that you had gotten before. And some of the things you lost you didn’t miss.

Rashid: I definitely did not miss the complexity of getting together with friends [when] people just prioritized seeing one another in whatever the easiest possible way to do that was. And it showed me how much I could simplify things if I care a little bit less about what the activity is and focus on just spending time with other people, which was the whole point in the first place.

And if it wasn’t for this time—where we suddenly had to choose who we were going to rely on in these tough times—if it wasn’t for that forced simplification, I would have continued to be that person who wanted more friends and wanted more people at her birthday party, or whatever it may be. And it was only because having less people around was the only option that I just had to make do.

Brooks: There’s this paradox in which we’re always driven to more, more, more. But a lot of the time, we get more pleasure and happiness from less. Today we’re talking about the happiness we can get from subtraction.

What exactly explains our tendency to believe that more doing, more money, more everything will continue to make our lives better? And what are we afraid of losing when we take things away?

I started thinking about why it’s so hard for us to get to a place where we truly enjoy less after reading a great book called Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. The author, Leidy Klotz, helped me think through why our default mode is more.

Klotz: I’m by title a professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia. Most of my research is in behavioral science and how we design.

Brooks: What gave you the idea that probably the best approach to doing things better—so you can be happier, more content, more satisfied—is by doing less as opposed to doing more?

Klotz: The closest thing I have to an epiphany was playing Legos with my son Ezra, who was three at the time. And we were building with these Duplo blocks; basically making a bridge as a three-year-old might. And the problem we had was that the bridge wasn’t level. And so I turned around behind me to grab a block to add to the shorter column. And by the time I turned back around, Ezra had removed a block from the longer column and had already made the level bridge.

I mean, it’s a really simple story, but right there in my living room was this example of an idea that I had been thinking about. But it brought a new insight into that idea, which was: Why didn’t I even think of this as an option? If my three-year-old wasn’t there, I would have just added the block and never even considered whether subtracting a block could have been a better way to change the structure.

Brooks: And so your conclusion from that—or at least the minor epiphany that you had that one day playing with Legos with your son—is sometimes you can make things a lot more than they were by actually using less.

Klotz: So the fundamental framing of the situation is, hey, we’ve got all these times in our life when we want to take how things are and change them to some way that we want them to be. Right? So whether it’s a Lego bridge, whether it’s your calendar, or whether it’s kind of the mental model that you’re working from, there are these two basic options.

One is to add to what’s already there, which we think of immediately, and exhaust all the possibilities. And the other one is to subtract from what’s already there, which it seems we don’t think of. And then even if we do think of it, it’s hard to follow through with.

Brooks: So your big point is basically: No matter what we’re talking about, you’ve got options. You have options you didn’t know you had by doing less of whatever it is you’re happening to do. Now, this is the simplest thing ever.

I mean, it’s so crazily simple, and yet it’s so unbelievably elusive. So let’s get into some of the behavior behind this. Why don’t we think this way?

Klotz: The first thing from our research is that we just fundamentally think of adding first, right? We’re wired to think of adding first.

One of the studies I mentioned in the book is how pack rats stockpile food. Researchers have done experiments where they take away the stockpile of food that the pack rats have, and they immediately make another stockpile.

And you’re like, Well, big deal, right? That’s what I do when my pantry gets low. But the pack rats aren’t planning and deliberating, right? This is an instinctive behavior to acquire more food because it’s helped them pass down their genes.

I think the other one that ties a lot into my life when I look at the ways that I over-add is this desire to display competence. And competence is actually a very biological thing. I mean, showing that we can effectively interact with the world.

There are birds that build ornate nests just to attract a mate—because the mate then sees that whoever this bird is that built this nest is able to effectively interact with the physical world. So there are definitely some biological reasons why we might be doing this.

Brooks: Let me tell you a story about somebody who was too busy. And the problem was not what I thought it was. This friend of mine was confessing to me that his work schedule was completely out of control. He was traveling all the time, and it was wrecking his marriage, quite frankly, because he wasn’t home with his family.

I kind of realized that actually the causality was reversed. It’s not that his marriage was on the rocks because he was traveling too much and too busy. He was actually keeping himself too busy because his marriage was on the rocks. And then it got me thinking. Sometimes I think that I’m a little bit too busy, because if I’m not, I have to be at home by myself in my head, and distraction is a little bit easier.

We don’t like to take things away, because when you take things away, there’s space. And space is incredibly uncomfortable for a lot of people. It’s like you’ve got to learn how to be comfortable with the white space that you just uncovered when you take things away. And a lot of people aren’t.

Klotz: There’s a famous study by Tim Wilson. They were basically interested in why people don’t like to think, and they studied in all these different ways showing that people just didn’t like to be sitting there with their own thoughts. The nail-in-the-coffin evidence was people could either think or they could shock themselves—and a lot of people chose to shock themselves.

Brooks: It was only six to 15 minutes of doing nothing in a room; just six to 15 minutes. And the only thing they could do was to actually administer a pretty painful shock.

Klotz: There’s a reinforcing cycle here that’s problematic. The more you care about something, the harder it is to subtract. Subtracting from my parenting is one of the things that I came to last, even after doing all this research.

I was actually on a podcast with Yael Schonbrun, who’s a friend, but her podcast is called Psychologists Off the Clock. Our podcast interview kind of turned into a therapy session where she was leading me to the fact that I over-parent my kids—always thinking about how I can interject myself to make my kids’ lives better.

And it led to situations where my son’s playing happily with my daughter, and I’m like, “Hey, what do you guys want to go do?” And it’s like, let’s just let this happen, right? Don’t try to make a happy kid happier. So sometimes it’s to the detriment of the outcomes we actually want.

Brooks: One of the techniques that we developed in the last season of How to Build a Happy Life was the concept of the reverse bucket list. I make a list of all of my cravings and attachments and desires and ambitions. And then I say, if I get it, fine, but I’m going to make a conscious strategy for detaching myself from these things. In other words: If I don’t get this, how am I going to feel? I’m going to be fine. The problem with the bucket list is you’re basically listing your desires and letting them manage you.

Klotz: So instead of saying, “Hey, I want to visit Machu Picchu before I die,” how would I turn that into a reverse bucket list?

Brooks: You say: “I might visit Machu Picchu before I die. But if I don’t, I don’t care.” That’s basically what it comes down to. In other words, it’s not a question of not visiting Machu Picchu. It’s about not caring about visiting Machu Picchu. Subtracting the attachment as opposed to subtracting the thing. That’s the distinction that I’m trying to make.

You can subtract responsibilities from your life. You can subtract a couple of bricks from your bridge, but you can also subtract the attachment to your own desires. In other words, these things might happen. But if it doesn’t, easy come, easy go.

Klotz: We don’t appreciate that it’s hard, right? When you see something that simple—you see somebody who has it all together, this streamlined life—and you’re like, Oh, that looks like it was easy. And all these things that we’ve been talking about, whether it’s more cognitive effort, or a little more physical effort, right. To build something and then to take something away from it.

So if the first point is like, “Hey, this is hidden; we have to see it,” the second point is like, “This is hard.” And we have to know that it’s going to be a little hard and be prepared to do a little bit of the work.

Brooks: I talk to people about this all the time. They’ll say, “You know, the gossipers at work; you know the people that are my deal friends, not my real friends. And it was a relief not having to spend all my time on these certain relationships.” So one of the things that I think is worth thinking about is making a list of all the things that you didn’t miss. On the contrary, you were glad they were gone.

And then saying, “What’s my strategy for getting rid of these things for the rest of my life?” Because you know what? You don’t have to call that person back. You kind of don’t. You don’t have to reestablish the toxic relationship. We have a tendency to think it was displacing. I missed everything, but there’s a lot of good stuff—and this is a Leidy Klotz principle, I think—that taking things away can be generative, can be inspirational, can actually help you to find, to define the person that you really are. But you have to be creative about it.

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How to Spend Time on What You Value

2022-10-24T08:00:00-04:00

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We try to use our time wisely—both at work and in leisure—but we often waste it. We may blame work for stripping us of recreation, but when valuable free time comes around, we can often revert back to more work.

What explains the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? A conversation with Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans helps us analyze our complex relationship with time and how to orient our time use around what we value.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.

Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by the Fix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), Gregory David (“Under the Tides”), and Yomoti (“Nebula”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Arthur, I have a question for you. If you had one extra hour today, how would you use it?

Arthur C. Brooks: How would I use it or how should I use it, Becca?

Rashid: How would you use it?

Brooks: I’d use it to work. I would work more. I love my work. It’s a well-established fact to any listener of How to Build a Happy Life that I’m kind of a work addict or a success addict or something like that, or whatever the pathology tends to be.

Thinking back to the episode with Anna Lembke, what should I do with the hour? I should use it to build love in my life. I should use it to pray. To spend time with my wife because now we live alone. To talk to one of my kids, to call one of my dear friends on the phone. That’s what I should do with it.

Many of us are stuck in a kind of vicious cycle with time. Our expectation, our hope, is that time is in our control and we’ll use it wisely, whatever that means. But it doesn’t work that way. The reality is that many of us don’t really know how to use our time at all.

Ashley Whillans: My name is Ashley Whillans, and I’m an assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, and my research focuses on time, money and happiness.

Brooks: Ashley Whillans is a colleague of mine at the Harvard Business School and the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. Ashley studies one side of the time problem, the one that busy strivers face—those who try to make the most out of every waking moment.

She’s a fellow happiness researcher whose work covers time poverty, a term she uses to describe the modern epidemic of people with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ashley walked us through her concept of time traps: the traps that motivate us to spend almost all of our time on work and productivity.

Whillans: As a happiness researcher, I was doing all of this academic research when I started my job five years ago on the importance of prioritizing time for happiness, for personal relationships. Meanwhile, my relationship was totally falling apart. I was inside crying about the dissolution of my most important relationship up to that point in my life, and then preaching about the importance of putting time first.

Eighty percent of working adults report feeling time poor, like they have too many things to do in a day and not enough time to do them. This affects our relationships, our physical health, our ability to feel like we’re making progress in personally important goals.

These are the time traps that can make us time poor. One of them is this busyness as a status symbol—this cult of busyness that’s pervasive in the United States in particular, where if we feel like we have any time in our calendar, we feel like a failure. We feel lazy. When we see our colleagues having a lot of things in their calendar. We confer to those people high status. Wow—if they never have a spare moment, they must be really important and valuable to society.

My data suggests that the most time poor among us are in fact those who are struggling to make ends meet. I’ve done research in Kenya, in India, in the U.S., among single-parent households, and we do see that individuals in those groups who make less money are more time poor, because the system is working against their time affluence. They live further away from their places of employment. They have shift schedules that are constantly changing. They have less reliable access to transportation and childcare.

So this is a whole other conversation: a whole line of work where I’m trying to move the policy conversation on not only thinking about reducing financial constraints, but also thinking about reducing time constraints to help those with less thrive as well.

Brooks: So it’s interesting, here in the United States, you go to a party, you meet somebody and the icebreaker is, “What do you do?”And it’s like, “Yeah, CEO; I work 80-hour weeks.” People think you’re a big shot. In Spain, the icebreaker question is, “Where are you going on vacation?”

It would be kind of odd, almost intrusive, maybe irrelevant to say “How do you make your money?” And yet you’re suggesting that this is really not about money. It’s really about time. It’s about the fact that we’re so busy, which is a way to show ourselves and others that we’re highly in demand. And so the root of this problem is philosophical. Because it’s the philosophy of how we value ourselves, right?

Whillans: Yeah. I’ve talked to so many colleagues about my findings, and they say things like, “I thought when my kids moved out and went to college that I would finally get around to doing those hobbies that I always had wanted to do. And instead, I just filled those additional hours with work, and I don’t know why.”

And then we would have these conversations about how productivity has become our habit, and we don’t even know how to enjoy our free time. And it is like we have to almost retrain ourselves to have leisure as a habit, so that our defaults are not work emails, work meetings—but instead our defaults are family, friends, exercise, active leisure activities. And we really, especially in North American culture, need to be pushing against work as our default mode of operating.

Brooks: This is the key point that you’re making, that work is within boundaries because you’re setting up your budget and you’re living within your budget. Treat [time] like a scarce resource the way that you would if you were on a fixed income, because you’re really on a fixed income on time. So has it hurt your work, or has it made your work better and made you more efficient?

Whillans: So one thing that I learned early on—and there’s research to substantiate this—is that it is better to compare yourself to yourself, as opposed to compare yourself to others. So for me, I think something I did was really heavily guard my attentional resources as well.

What am I going to pay attention to in terms of other people’s successes? Because in my field, there is no “good enough.” Nothing you’re going to do is going to feel like enough, is going to be enough, is going to guarantee success and awards and accolades. In terms of net productivity, yes, I do get less done now. Especially since having a kid. No question I am not as fast.

My ideal self used to look like working all the time, being on a plane every week and publishing as much as humanly possible. That was my ideal self, and my actual time use looked pretty close to that. And then I realized: That might be good on one dimension of my life productivity and really hurt other dimensions of my life—well-being, social relationships—that I know as a happiness researcher matter a lot for happiness.

Brooks: For my last book, I was interviewing this woman who was doing what you were doing five years ago at the beginning of your career, but never stopped. And she’s confessing to me that she’s got a cordial relationship at best with her husband. She doesn’t know her adult kids very well. She drinks too much. She hasn’t been to the gym in a long time. And furthermore, that her young colleagues don’t trust her decision making, because it’s not as crisp as it once was.

She’s like, “What do I do?” And I said, “You don’t need me to tell you what to do. You need to use your time differently than you are!” And I said, “Why don’t you do what you know you need to do?” And she kind of stops and says, “I guess I prefer to be special than happy.” How much of that is going around?

Whillans: At least she admitted it. I feel like something that’s very difficult is that to have this realization, right? You have to understand what you care about and want, like truly, what you value. Maybe for this woman that you talked to, she did truly value being the richest and having this productive life more than she valued gaining or improving in these other areas of life. And she seems like she’s actually somewhat self-aware about that, right?

My economist colleagues say: Write down a model. Ashley, write down a model of exactly how I should spend my time to be happy. I say I can’t do that because I don’t know what you value. So for us to be spending time in the so-called “right ways,” we have to know what we truly value. So we have to do that self-awareness, reflective component first.

Brooks: You know, for a lot of people—they might say they wish they had more free time and they could relax more and spend more time with their families, but they don’t actually know how to do that.

Whillans: Going back to behavioral-science literature, you want to be thinking about setting a concrete goal. In my research, we often trade money for time—so we’ll go after money instead of going after time, because money is concrete. We know the value of $1,000, and we know how to count or track three hours, five hours, 10 hours, and turn that into productivity in our minds. What does it mean to have more free time? That is an abstract concept.

What does having more leisure time even mean or look like? So when we’re trying to actively set ourselves up for success in these domains that are more abstract—like spending time with friends and family—we need to concretely write down what that means.

We like to maximize measured mediums. This is work by Chris Hsee at the University of Chicago. We go after the things that we can count and track. That is the way our brains are wired. So we do that for work. Why can’t we do that for our leisure time, too?

Active leisure is particularly good for positive mood. Active leisure is things like exercising, socializing, volunteering 15 to 30 minutes—mapping out what 30 minutes more of social-connection time looks like for you and being very specific about it and putting it in your calendar. We need to be a little bit careful with that suggestion, because as soon as we start counting our leisure, we enjoy it less.

Brooks: You can overschedule your leisure in such a way that it becomes a task. Now, when I schedule my leisure too rigidly, I find that I start to get stressed out when things start to impinge on it. Part of the benefit that you’re getting cognitively and psychologically is more flexibility in your life and less rigidness in your life, right?

Whillans: Yeah. I love the research that shows that if you schedule too many leisure activities in a day, it literally feels like work and it sucks you out of the present. And then you worry if you have enough time to drive across town and meet your friend for brunch after you’ve had coffee with another friend or family member, and so you want to actually capitalize on this idea of building in flexibility.

It doesn’t matter as much what the activity is, and some leisure activities are generally better for well-being—like exercise, socializing, volunteering—which tend to be better on average than things like passive leisure activities. Like watching TV, resting, relaxing, which aren’t as enjoyable or don’t produce the same gains in mood. But, it also matters how you feel about that activity.

So these people who are walking around convincing themselves to go to church because it’s good for their productivity, are not going to enjoy the experience of church to the same extent as someone who’s going because they truly enjoy it.

When you’re in the moment of the leisure experience, you will enjoy it less if you think you’re doing it for extrinsic reasons. And extrinsic motivation is, definitionally: You’re doing something because someone else told you, or you’re doing it for an external reason like you think you should because it will be good for your productivity.

Brooks: Now say something to our listeners here who might be saying, I don’t know what I intrinsically enjoy. I can’t think of anything intrinsically enjoyable to me because I’ve been so extrinsically motivated for so long. I’m a homo economicus. What do you tell that person on the voyage of discovery? It sounds like you had to go through this, Ashley!

Whillans: Yeah, do a time audit. At the end of the day, ask yourself: What things did you do across the day, and how did you feel while you were engaging those activities? And then look at which activities brought you the most positive mood. You could also do this through gratitude—so there’s research showing that people who take time to reflect on what they’re grateful for tend to be more self-aware.

So at the end of every day, just think of a few things that made you feel grateful. And in that day, maybe that was a quick conversation with the neighbor. Maybe that was, in my case, hanging out with my kid and thinking That was pretty great.

And then you’ll be like, Oh, it seems that I must enjoy those things. I should probably try to do more of them! It seems simple, but honestly, it wasn’t really until I started to create some separation in my life—such that I wasn’t just getting up every single day, working, and then trying to decompress at the end of the day by drinking. Because let’s be real. That’s what happens.

There was no space in that schedule that I used to have of “work, work, work, drink, go to bed, work, work, work, work, drink, go to bed” to even have a thought about what in that day to day enjoy. Because I wasn’t even taking a second to pause, reflect, and think about what was bringing me joy and satisfaction on any one particular day.

Brooks: Thank you to our How To listeners who help make this show what it is. We asked: How you would spend one extra hour per day doing something intrinsically rewarding? And here’s what you said.

Listener Submission: If I had an extra hour each day, I would go home to my studio apartment. I would close the door, put on the little bolt lock to make sure I’m safe. And then I would just sit in that silence and do absolutely nothing.

But I think that within life there are all these things you need to do just to survive and maintain some level of relative sanity. Like eat (which means you have to cook food), and sleep, and connect with people (which means driving your car to see your friends and calling your parents), and doing all these things that I guess we tell ourselves we want to do because we have to. And in a way, it creates happiness, whatever that is. But like, I feel like all of that keeps us from actually sitting in the moment and thinking, What is happening? Why are we here?

Brooks: If you look back in the old days before we were so unbelievably distracted by tech, we were doing something in those days, too. You know, when I rode the subway in the 1980s in New York City, I always had something to do with me. I had a book, I had a newspaper.

Would and should are very different when it comes to our time. So the question is: What’s the disconnect between what we feel like we should do and what we probably would do with that extra hour? And that has everything to do with our expectations for ourselves.

And this is one of the reasons that meditation is really hard for people who are beginning practitioners. People are sitting in meditation, and the only direction that they get is to “Think of nothing; empty your mind.” Well, it’s hard to do.

Rashid: Why is it so hard?

Brooks: Because we’re not made for it. Humans are not wired to do nothing. My colleague and friend, Martin Seligman, is one of the pioneers in the Science of Happiness field.

He says that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens. We should call ourselves Homo Prospectus, because our state of nature is for our brain to engage in all of this incredibly complex stuff about how to build a better future. What am I going to eat for dinner? What am I going to do for a living next year? What am I going to say to my spouse? And that occupies us so much that even when we’re trying to do nothing, we’re not doing nothing.

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic ’s How To series.

The Complexities of Human Love

2022-10-17T06:00:00-04:00

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Dating apps show us what we want—a relationship—without always accurately reflecting the experience of it. Our expectation that tech will create anything more than opportunities for social connectedness may overlook the hard work of coexisting with another human being.

A conversation with University of Kansas social psychologist Omri Gillath helps us parse the divide between what tech promises and how it satisfies our emotional needs.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.

Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Flix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), John Utah (“A Walk on the Mile”), and Yomoti (“Nebula”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Arthur, the real reason I don’t use dating apps is because I don’t want to go about my love life in the same way I do playing some game on my phone.

Arthur C. Brooks: You don’t want to use the same technology that you would for goofing around while waiting for the bus that you do to find your actual life partner, because it seems so incredibly important to you.

Rashid: I almost feel like I’m cheating to get to a human being, someone who I know is going to inevitably be far more complicated and emotional. And the act of finding the person seems so diametrically opposed to what the experience of being with that person would actually be like.

Brooks: This is How to Build a Happy Life. I’m Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.

Brooks: Many of my students have told me that there’s kind of an irony about dating these days. They can get anything they want as consumers at the drop of a hat. Look, you want a hippopotamus delivered to your house? You can practically get it from Amazon Prime. But a lot of the same people who are amazed at that will confess that their dating lives are pretty dry. They’ll often say they don’t know how to date in the right way, where it can be actually successful.

They don’t know what the right procedure actually is, or they’re afraid of what will happen if they put their heart on the line. What explains this incredible irony, where there’s easier access to people all over the world, but at the same time, people are either less prepared or more afraid to engage in love behaviors?

Brooks: Today, we want to explore whether romance facilitated by technology has delivered on its promises and what it means to actually put the work into love.

I believe a lot of emotional dissatisfaction in modern dating can be explained by research. There’s data showing technology-mediated relationships fall secondary to in-person interaction.

Other research suggests that romantic love can blossom when people explore their differences—something I fear dating apps often discourage. It concerns me that many of these apps favor selecting romantic partners based on similar traits rather than complementary traits.

I recognize that technology can create opportunities to connect, and that there is research showing the success of online connections after they jump off the screen. But I also want to examine the potential hazards of the limitless nature of tech, reducing human beings to options, and perhaps even encouraging a certain degree of socially sanctioned game playing.

Brooks: I sat down with Omri Gillath to identify the satisfaction gap between what tech promises and what it often delivers.

Omri Gillath: The fact that it’s easy and accessible doesn’t mean that it’s what people need. So there’s going to be a gap between what the industry and the technology is going to provide us and what we actually need. And between what people are doing for money and what people are doing for the greater good.

The trends, the sociocultural trends, are out there showing that less people are getting married, less people are having kids, less people are having sex—which is kind of weird because you have this plethora of options, right? You can go on Tinder and just swipe and get your next hookup. But despite all that, less and less people are finding themselves in a relationship.

Brooks: And data that I’ve looked at says that people are less likely to get married, but they’re also less likely to cohabitate and, as you suggested, less likely to have intimate physical relationships. We’re not substituting one kind of relationship for another. We’re substituting no relationship for relationship.

Gillath: There’s so many people now that are lonely, that are looking for love but can’t find it. When they find it, they can’t stick with it. And it’s definitely something that we’re trying to understand and figure out the underlying mechanism of, and kind of trying to figure out what happened.

Brooks: In your work, you talk about when you discuss your feelings with somebody in person versus when you discuss your feelings with somebody on social media; it has opposite effects on the establishment of a relationship. Talk to me about that.

Gillath: So what we find when you’re self-disclosing—and you talk about your fears, your dreams, your fantasies, your secrets, all of these things, to people face to face, in person—it usually increases intimacy, increases satisfaction, helps you build the relationship. People are actually over time getting closer.

However, if you do the same thing online, it has the opposite effect. And basically, by “people,” we’re talking about you as a person, and your partner, having a lower level of intimacy, lower level of satisfaction. You kind of feel like you’re left out, right? We can sit together in the same room, and you can tell me something or you can email it to me. And the effect is going to be very different.

I think technology can be very helpful with, for example, filtering up to the first date. But after the first date, it’s got to be in person. It’s got to be face to face. You’ve got to be able to smell the other person, see their body language. You know, we have, for example, research on flirting. It’s so much easier to flirt face to face than to do it behind a computer. I think that we’re happy to rely on technology; we’re happy to even use it as replacements.

Brooks: I mean, is tech going to kill love dead?

Gillath: Maybe it already did. But I think technology on its own is not bad or good. I think technology can be amazing if you’re, for example, highly anxious or if you suffer from social anxiety and stuff like that.

We can still talk and have this interview because of technology. But at the same time, if all of your relationships are online and all your relationships are mediated via computers, then you’re missing a big part of what it means to be human. And human contact.

Brooks: I want to offer up a sort of new framework to think about tech and dating apps and their role in facilitating romantic connections. This is, oddly, a sort of business-school approach to problem-solving, but hear me out.

There are two kinds of problems in life: complicated problems and complex problems. They sound like the same thing, but they aren’t.

Complicated problems in life are problems that are hard to solve. But, once you solve them, you can replicate the solution over and over, like making a toaster. You can get one at Walmart for $20, and it will be your toaster for the next 20 years. It’s unbelievable. It’s human genius.

Well, all the really interesting problems in life—all the things we really care about—are not about good toast. They’re about human love. These are what we call complex problems.

A complex problem is like your relationship with your cat. It wants kibble and a scratch and warmth and to go out from time to time. But you never know what it’s going to do, and that’s because you can’t really simulate the cat.

Here’s the problem with tech in a nutshell, in my opinion. We want cats. But the technology itself just gives us toasters—again and again and again. Tech tends to take complex problems like human love and treat it as if it were a complicated problem of trying to solve a bunch of math. And it just doesn’t work that way.

Brooks: So let’s say now that somebody has had some success and is actually dating somebody, fantastic, right? What actually the data say is that by a couple years in, you should be pursuing companionate love over passionate love.

And this gets us to really a huge area where you’ve been the major contributor in social psychology, which is attachment styles. So tell me, what’s the goal when somebody is now paired up?

Gillath: Often the beginning is around passion. Often people are very attracted to someone else. They don’t look at you and say, “Oh, you have an amazing attachment style.”

There are three styles. There is a secure style, which the majority of people are. Then there are people who are avoidant, who don’t want to be committed, don’t want to be limited; they are worried about other people depending on them getting too close and stuff like that. And then there are anxious people. These are people that are all the time preoccupied about being rejected and abandoned.

So when you’re insecure, either avoidant or anxious, everything is harder. The best scenario that can happen is that you find someone who is secure, who is providing you security and can help you shift over the lifespan to becoming more secure than you were at the beginning.

Brooks: I think one of the key points that you’re making along the way here is that you’ve got to do the work. The idea of simplifying procedures on the basis of apps and tech make it easier than it actually really is.

And that’s probably in and of itself doing a disservice, because it says that finding the most important thing in your life is as simple as swiping right. And it isn’t like that at all. And that actually isn’t even helpful for the beginning of a relationship.

Gillath: Right. And relationships always involve work. And, people have this very strong sense of FOMO (fear of missing out)—there’s always something else that we might be missing out on. Maybe a better partner, a more attractive partner or richer partner or a more sexy partner, or what have you. If you live your life with that sense, you are always going to chase the next big thing instead of being happy with what you have and actually enjoying it.

Brooks: So basically, if you’re in love with somebody, you should say, “I’m in love with you”—and that is authentic, which is super vulnerable. If you’re in love, say you’re in love and take a risk.

Gillath: Yes, what he said. Absolutely. Everything you said is perfect. In a way, from the moment that we are born, right? If you think about it from an attachment perspective: We have this unconditional love from a mother. Nothing is better than that. We need that; we need someone. And often this “someone” is our romantic partner.

I used to have an English teacher back in high school who said, “It’s better to fall in love and fail than to never fall in love.” And the worst thing that people can do is hide behind all these screens. And then they find out that this one-dimensional, uni-dimensional life is not fulfilling and is depressing, and it’s something that you got to be aware of. You have to be prepared to deal with the consequences.

Brooks: Thank you to our How To listeners who make this show what it is. We asked: When was the last time you confessed romantic feelings for someone? And here’s what you said:

Shawn: My husband of many years passed away unexpectedly almost four years ago now. And so I have found myself in the dating pool after about 20 years of being out of it. Actually just last week I had reconnected with somebody I dated shortly after my husband died, and it wasn’t a fit timing-wise. And then we reconnected again a couple of months ago.

About a week and a half ago, we had a conversation in which we said, oh, well, maybe, maybe things are getting a little too serious. And after we agreed that it would be good for us to each take some space, I felt so sad. And as I investigated my sadness, I realized that I had fallen in love with him and that I needed to tell him this. And so I did. I told him, and he felt/feels the same way. My name is Shawn and I live in British Columbia, Canada.

Brooks: What a wonderful example of how humans are different than machines. She had to interrogate her feelings about why she felt so sad; there’s no algorithm that’s going to tell her that. She had to muster up the courage to go tell the man that she’s falling in love with him. That’s uniquely, weirdly, human. One last note, I hope Shawn and that man get together, because happiness is love.

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

When Virtues Become Vices

2022-10-10T07:00:00-04:00

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When the behaviors we thought would make us happy don’t, we’re forced to bridge the gap between where we are and where we want to be. But our happiness goals are often stifled by the disease of addiction—and its complex neurochemical influence on our desires.

A conversation with psychiatrist Anna Lembke helps us understand the gap between the cravings that drive us and the happiness we seek.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.

Be a part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by the Flix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), Dylan Stills (“Queens”), and Yomoti (“Nebula”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: I’m curious about how these things that we’re taught are good habits: How do those things become as harmful as a debilitating addiction or threaten to become that harmful? I’m curious for someone like you—how has workaholism played out in your life?

Arthur Brooks: I’m not immune from anything. And I guess the irony is that I specialize in the science of happiness, and I fall prey to a lot of these things myself.

There’s a lot of vice that we can engage in. Almost everything that we do that’s really good when we push it to the limit, when we pat ourselves on the back, when it becomes a source of pride, when it crowds out love relationships. Virtues can become vices.

Brooks: Today, we want to understand how our expectations of a happy life are complicated by the disease of addiction.

The complexities of addiction and addiction treatment can't be covered in one episode, but we do want to identify our tendencies towards addictive behaviors and how it affects our well-being.

The realities for those impacted by addiction are wide-ranging, but defining addictions’ effects on our identities, behaviors, and desires, may help us parse out the divide between where we are and where we want to be.

Brooks: Anna Lembke sat down with us to talk about her work treating patients with addiction. Dr. Lembke specializes in dopamine—a chemical in the brain that lies behind desire and plays an important role in our addictive behaviors.

In 2021, Dr. Lembke published the book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. She argues that many of our addictions today are not from things we would consider immediately addictive—like drugs and alcohol—but from behaviors that are even thought of as healthy or beneficial: things like exercise and work. Things we thought were virtues. But what you crave and what you want are usually not the same things.

Lembke: I realized that I was actually a bad psychiatrist early on in my career because I was not asking patients about drug and alcohol use. And the reason I wasn’t asking them is because I would have had no idea how to address those problems if they had happened to say, “Yes, I have a problem with that.”

So it was a kind of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which, by the way, was completely normative for psychiatrists at the time and is still quite a prevalent practice. Why? Because we don’t learn a lot in medical school or even psych residency about how to screen or intervene for substance-use disorders or other addictions.

Brooks: Our audience should understand that you’re not confessing to having some unusual deficit in your training. Psychiatrists are usually trained to treat people with mood disorders and behavioral problems.

Obviously when people think about addiction, they’re thinking about heroin or alcohol or gambling or pornography. But there are a lot of things that we do, notwithstanding the fact that they’re not entirely good for us.

Let me ask you the most basic question of all. What’s an addiction?

Lembke: So addiction is broadly defined as the continued compulsive use of a substance or a behavior, despite harm to self and/or others. The key piece is really the behaviors and whether or not they cross this threshold of impairing function.

And that is really the key piece for diagnosing any psychiatric disorder. We diagnose it based on what we call phenomenology, or patterns of behavior over time that are very similar across different demographic groups [and] points in history.

And what we see is that despite those differences in individuals, there are very classic patterns or manifestations of maladaptive patterns that ultimately we group in these different buckets: schizophrenia, major depression, OCD, addiction. I always like to emphasize that there’s no brain scan or blood test to date to diagnose any mental illness, including addiction.

Brooks: Tell me about the patients who come see Dr. Anna Lembke. What are they suffering from?

Lembke: So the types of patients that I have are patients struggling with all different forms of addiction. Not just addiction to drugs and alcohol, but also to all kinds of behaviors: pornography, gambling, shopping, digital products. So online pornography, compulsive masturbation is a huge and growing problem. Gaming disorder is something that we’re seeing more and more of, especially among young men. And they often also have co-occurring conditions like depression, anxiety, psychotic disorders.

Even previously healthy and adaptive behaviors—behaviors that I think we broadly as culture would think of as healthy, advantageous behaviors—now have become drugified such that they are made more potent, more accessible, more novel, more ubiquitous. And therefore, they have the potential for addiction where they didn’t have that before. And I use myself as an example in reading.

I think we all grew up with this idea that reading is healthy. And yet, in my early 40s, I actually got addicted to romance novels. And The Twilight Saga was my gateway drug, which is in and of itself embarrassing because it’s a vampire romance series written for teenagers. And obviously, I was a middle-aged woman.

This is very embarrassing, but it was impacting my ability to function. I was staying up later and later at night. I was not fully present for my kids and my husband the way I really wanted to be. And that was really the crazy thing about it—the things I really care about kind of started to be compromised in a way that I wasn’t fully in control of.

Essentially what was happening was that it was a fantasy escape world. And the more I read, the more I wanted to be in that world and the less I wanted to be in the real world. Also, the less interesting the real world became to me. So the salience and the positive and reinforcing qualities of the real world slowly began to diminish.

Brooks: Tell me a more typical story of perhaps one of your patients that comes in. And my guess is they’re not coming in when the elevator is now in the first basement. They’ve gone down 32 floors at this point. And when they’re coming to see you, it’s pretty bad.

Lembke: So for example, a middle-aged man who has used pornography through most of his young adult life. And then in the early ’90s, there’s the internet—and then all of a sudden it’s more available, it’s more graphic. And then the early 2000s comes around, and he gets his smartphone. And now we’re talking 24/7 access to highly potent images, and things start to fall apart.

Now this person is experiencing tolerance, finding that online pornography alone is not sufficient. Starting to, for example, engage prostitutes, lie to his partner—spending more and more time and resources chasing down this particular feeling, threatening his employment by using at work [and] knowing that he’s doing that. And yet feeling such an enormous compulsion that he can’t help himself, feeling horrible about himself. Enormous stigma. Unable to stop, although he tries repeatedly to do that.

And eventually comes to see me essentially feeling suicidal, feeling like, I don’t want to live anymore; I can’t stop this behavior. I have so much shame. I’m so depressed. I don’t even enjoy it. And yet I cannot stop. Will you help me?

And it’s the exact same narrative that we see with people who are severely addicted to drugs, severely addicted to alcohol, which is a drug. People start out using it for fun or to solve a problem. The drug works for them initially, so they return to using it over time. They escalate their use; they build up tolerance. They need more and more. Eventually it stops working, but they can’t stop. And then it even potentially turns on them and causes the very problem that they’re trying to solve, but they still can’t stop.

Brooks: There are a whole bunch of areas of behavior that we’ve been told since we were little kids that are really wonderful, you know—and that if you work hard, that’s always and everywhere, great. Do you see workaholics in your clinic?

Lembke: So typically we will not see patients who come in for workaholism as a chief complaint, because they won’t identify that as their problem. But what we do see is people who come in with serious drug and alcohol problems or pornography addiction, and they also are addicted to work.

And the way that comes out is this kind of “work hard, play hard” mentality where people push themselves so hard at work and exhaust themselves beyond the limits of what their minds and bodies can do, and then reward themselves at the end of a very hard work day or a very hard work week or a hard work month with the kind of a binge or overuse pattern.

One of the most fascinating and enduring themes in the disease of addiction is the role of control—and wanting to have this illusion of control over our lives. Drugs become a way to do that. And even when we get to a point where we know the drug isn’t working, we’re so terrified to let go.

And so this becomes really key to addiction recovery; really it’s an enormous leap of faith. It’s asking people to give up this thing that they have used their entire lives to self-soothe, to get that feeling that they need in order to feel kind of whole. And even when it stops working, just the fear associated with having to let that go. And then not knowing: Well, what will that be like? What will that existence be like for me? I mean, the terror of the unknown is so strong.

Brooks: So what do they do? No. What do we do? Look, I missed a lot of my kids’ childhood because I was on the wheel. I was on this treadmill. I was doing it too.

Lembke: Thank you for your openness and for sharing some of that regret. That’s really powerful—that someone like you is willing to be open in that way.

It’s amazing to me that we have an opportunity to change our lives at any point in our lives. I have seen people with severe, lifelong addictions in their 60s, 70s, and 80s get into recovery and absolutely transform their lives for the better—transform their family and friends’ lives for the better.

So I just want to say that because I think it’s never too late. And we all make mistakes. We all make mistakes, and we all have regrets. But you can change your life at any point in your life. And you can decide to live in a different way and to let go of that thing that you’ve been hanging on to, which you thought was your life raft—but which was really, you know, your anchor.

Brooks: Would you say there are probably a lot more people who are suffering from addiction than those who are diagnosed, or those who even know that that’s the case?

Lembke: I would say that that’s true in the modern age; there’s so much more access to highly potent and reinforcing drugs and behaviors. But also just in general, it’s underdiagnosed because there’s no infrastructure inside of medicine, or there’s a limited infrastructure inside of medicine to treat addiction. We have pretty good treatments that we’ve known about for decades. So it’s not that we don’t know what works. It’s that we’ve not built the infrastructure inside of medicine to deliver that care.

Brooks: We could get into a whole show in and of itself about what recovery looks like, but that’s traditionally about more conventional addictions. But it sounds to me like—given the fact that the primary damage that workaholism and success addiction do is to our relationships—and these are very fear-based addictions itself.

Lembke: Many people have the experience of trying harder at relationships and not having it work out. And so the drug is so much more reliable. Right. And what am I going to give up? This at least gives me some transitory relief or escape for what feels like a big gamble, and kind of not even having the basic tools for knowing how to go about renewing and strengthening those relationships with people in our lives.

This is what we get when we are willing to give up our drug. What we get is these wonderful, quite intangible things that you can’t buy and you can work for—but not in the same way. And chief among them is certainly meaningful and intimate relationships with other people.

How do we make more intimate relationships? We tell the truth to the people that we care about, and we stop lying to them. And that becomes a huge part of recovery. So when people stop using their drug, they’re so terrified to be honest toward their loved one about what they’ve been doing. Especially, let’s say, they told their loved one that they stopped and they really didn’t.

It would be nice to be able to skirt around that and not have to tell the truth. But if you don’t go back and tell the truth and apologize and make amends, then you’re not going to be able to ultimately get to that place where you have those relationships that are so incredibly sustaining and renewing and powerful—and make the need for these drugs so much less.

Rashid: Now that you’ve spent the bulk of your professional career studying how some of your early behaviors and your passion for what you did may have been a certain type of workaholism, what do you think you would have done differently if you knew what you know now?

Brooks: It’s a good question. In the first year of my marriage, I remember being on vacation. We were camping, and I just couldn’t handle it and I had to go home. Because I needed to get back to work.

And the result is, I published a lot of articles and taught a lot of classes. My career went really well, and my family life continued to suffer, quite frankly.

Here’s the key thing to ask yourself. Whether it’s workaholism, or maybe you’re just wondering if you’re drinking a little bit too much, is to interrogate that. A life that’s unexamined is one in which you’re helpless against these ravages that come from addictive behavior.

Here’s the most encouraging thing of all—when people understand what they’re doing and are honest with themselves, they’re willing to own up to the fact that they’re being managed by their desires. That process is the beginning of getting freedom.

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

How To Season 3: When Expectations Don’t Meet Reality

2022-09-28T08:00:00-04:00

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In our pursuit of a happy life, we build, we structure, and we plan. Often, we follow conventional wisdom and strategize. But what happens when our plans fall through and expectations don’t meet reality—when the things that should make us happy don’t?

In Season 3 of our How To series, Atlantic happiness correspondent Arthur Brooks and producer Rebecca Rashid seek to navigate the unexpected curves on the path to personal happiness—with data-driven insights and a healthy dose of introspection.

Listen to the first episode on your favorite podcast player when the season launches on October 10.

This series was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. If you have any questions, stories, or feedback, please email us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com.

How to Forgive Ourselves for What We Can’t Change

2022-07-04T07:00:00-04:00

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When we regret our past, it can feel like we’re incapable of changing our future. But it may be our past “mistakes” that help us realize there is room to evolve.

In the finale episode of How to Start Over, we explore how regret can be a catalyst of change, what holds us back from self-forgiveness, and how to reconcile our past mistakes—and move forward for good. Conversations with Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at the Columbia Business School, and forgiveness expert Everett Worthington help us identify whether regret hinders our growth or serves as a catalyst of change.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Olga Khazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.

Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), JADED (“Blue Steel”), Mindme (“Anxiety [Instrumental Version]”), and Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”).

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

* Before we jump into our finale episode in this series: a note. Our conversation contains graphic discussions of violence, including assault, discussion of PTSD, and suicide. Discretion is advised.

Olga Khazan: Hi, I’m Olga Khazan, staff writer at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.

Khazan: This is How to Start Over. Today, we talk about the origins of regret—what it means, how to get over it, and how we can maybe even learn something from it. We’re going to talk about how regrets can actually be a catalyst of change, rather than the thing that holds us back. I wanted to better understand why we can learn to live with certain choices, but others come back to haunt us. We’ll hear from two experts about how to start over in life by learning from our past choices. And, when regret just won’t release its grip, how we can forgive ourselves and move on.

Khazan: Shai Davidai is an assistant professor at the Columbia Business School. His studies of regret helped me understand which regrets seem to go away quickly, versus which ones can live on in our minds for years.

Shai Davidai: An important thing to remember that psychologists think about is that regret is an emotion that is a time machine. Regret is something about the past that we feel in the present, that is there to guide our future. That’s the function of that emotion. That’s why it evolved.

Davidai: There’s two types of regrets. Sometimes we regret the things we have done; the things we have said. And other times we regret the things we have failed to do or failed to have said. So you can regret saying something offensive, or you may regret not saying something positive.

The most enduring regrets that people have, the ones that kind of stick with us for longer, are those regrets of inaction, those failures to act. These two types of regrets lead to different kinds of emotions.

When people have these regrets of action—when they regret doing something—they’re more likely to feel the hot emotions: anxiety and guilt. And those emotions are a call to action. They lead us to do something. Whereas the other kind of regrets of inaction when we regret not doing something—we feel depressed or we feel sad, but that doesn’t really give us that prompt to step up and change the situation.

Khazan: Huh; okay, interesting. In one of your studies you looked at the difference between the “ideal self” and the “ought self”—can you kind of define what those things mean?

Davidai: Think about all of your goals, all your aspirations: That is your ideal self. Now, that ideal self can change through time, but we all have some sense of—what are our goals? What is the kind of ideal person that I could be?

But we also have our “ought self,” right? That’s the collection of all of the things we feel like we should be doing, the norms we should be following, the rules we should be abiding by.

So we have these tensions, right? We have the person that I feel that I would like to be or that I could be. And then we have the person that I feel like that I “ought” to be—my “should self.” Discrepancies from those two kinds of selves lead to feelings of regret.

Khazan: Let’s say my ideal self is that I’m on TV every night. Everyone in America knows my name, and I’m like a household-name journalist. And then my “ought self” is like, I should really call my mom more; I really don’t call her very often because I get busy. I feel a little bit bad that I put it on the back burner so much. Is that what you’re talking about?

Davidai: Right. Your ideal self’s—the thing that people tend to regret—missed educational opportunities—I could have gone to school or I could have followed my passion at school, but I took the safer route. It could mean missed traveling opportunities. Some people mentioned this “special someone” that they could have married or they could have bonded with and they didn’t.

And then your “ought self,” like you said—they tend to be family related. So I should call my mom more often. But it’s also things that are of a bit of a bigger nature, so not having gone to visit a dying relative before they passed away. In my surveys, [it could be] drug addiction in the past. It could be irresponsible financial behavior.

When we think about regret, we have to think in the short term and long term. In the short term, the “ought regrets”—they are the ones that lead to more intense regret. So if I feel like I should have stepped up and said something in a meeting when someone said something offensive and I didn’t, I feel that that’s a strong regret.

But what typically happens with these strong regrets is because they feel so intense, we end up dealing with them quite quickly. Whereas our “ideal regrets,” because they are not as strongly felt in the beginning—we just kind of put them on the back burner. They simmer and they simmer and they simmer. And then after 20 years, we’re still there.

Khazan: Okay—so knowing that, you tend to deal with these “ought” regrets more quickly when they come up. But you kind of let those “ideal regrets” simmer. Should we just always be doing whatever our biggest, grandest dream is? It becomes hard to differentiate where you should draw the line of I’ll regret this later if I don’t take action.

Davidai: The first point is that we need to remember—and this is something that is almost so obvious, and yet because it’s obvious, we forget it. Regret is a natural emotion that everyone experiences. Just knowing that helps me deal with my regrets in a way that’s more healthy. Because it’s not something about me. It’s not something about my mentality being wrong; it’s that I am going to experience regret.

So your question is, “Should I just go and follow my dreams?” Well, part of me wants to say yes. But another way is asking yourself: Okay, so what have I learned from this regret? What am I regretting that I didn’t do in the past? What can I learn from that moving forward, so whenever the opportunity arises—a big opportunity or a small opportunity—I’ll be there to accept it and embrace it?

For example, you regret that 15 years ago someone said, “Hey, let’s be spontaneous and fly somewhere.” You’re like, “No, I don’t know if that’s responsible.” Well, what if someone now comes up to you and says, “Let’s be spontaneous over the weekend and drive somewhere”? Well, that’s more feasible. If we remember, Okay, that is the regret that I had. Well, I can’t change what I did, but I can change how I will react in the future.

So if someone passed away, we can’t reach out anymore. But that doesn’t mean all is lost. Because now—feeling that regret and feeling the intensity of it—we can take stock of everyone else whom we care deeply about that is still around. And how do we make sure that that doesn’t happen with them?

Khazan: So the key is not to eliminate regret; it’s to process your regrets in a healthy way.

Davidai: Not to come off as Pollyannaish—regret is great! An example that keeps coming up is people regretting having married an abusive partner and having stayed with them for so long. They say: “I shouldn’t have been there.” Like, that’s a big “ought” regret. But what they also say: “But I feel okay about it; because of them, I have my beautiful children.”

So they are dealing with their regrets by seeing the silver lining. I’m not here to judge and say “Your regrets are not real,” but rather “The content of your regret is different, but the process is the same, and we can learn from the process.”

Khazan: But what happens if we just can’t get past our regrets? We keep going over and over something in our heads, but there’s no particular change we can make: Maybe it’s too late, the moment has passed, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

This is where self-forgiveness might come into play. We might just have to accept the things we cannot change. In thinking about self-forgiveness, I was reminded of something I came across a long time ago while researching forgiveness in general. It’s called the REACH method. It’s a system that can help you forgive others—but it could also be applied to yourself, too.

Khazan: Dr. Everett Worthington is a clinical psychologist and an expert on forgiveness. Ev was a professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University for nearly four decades, retiring in 2017. Ev and his students actually created the REACH forgiveness method and other resources to help people forgive themselves. I first interviewed him for a piece in 2015, and though he didn’t remember me, his story was one I’ll never forget.

Khazan: I interviewed you back in 2015. You mentioned that you had your own experience, a very intense and actually tragic experience from your life where you ended up having to forgive yourself for something. I was wondering if you would be comfortable talking about that story today and about how you actually went through the process of forgiving yourself.

Worthington: What happened was, in 1996, my mother was murdered. It was a very brutal murder. It was a home invasion. Apparently a young man, thinking no one was home, broke into her house. But she woke up, and he had a crowbar and ended up bludgeoning her to death. I was able to forgive the young man for doing that. But my brother was the one who discovered my mother’s body. So he was really traumatized. And I think he took a kind of emotional-suppression response to that.

He said, “You know, I am still just having a terrible time with this. I just have these, you know, intrusive thoughts, these images that come back of seeing her body there. I get so depressed and anxious about this.”

I said, “Well, Mike, this sounds like a post-traumatic stress problem. I think if I were you, I would try to get some kind of counseling for this.” When I said, “Mike, I’d get some counseling if I were you,” he said, “I’m not going to any shrink.” I said, “Well, whatever.” And I didn’t bring it up again.

Well, of course, within three months, it turned out Mike committed suicide. He was so upset with the depression and couldn’t get past this PTSD. And so I felt really a lot of self-condemnation, because I could easily look at myself and regret that I did not respond the way that I knew I could respond.

And so I worked through that model, and I had trouble more with the responsibility end of things: How do I make this right? Mike’s dead. I’ve confessed this to God. I feel that God’s forgiven me for my failures—but how do I make this right interpersonally?

Khazan: A lot of your work does deal with spirituality, and you mentioned God a couple of times. I’m wondering: For people who aren’t religious, I think it can be harder to move through some of these steps, because you don’t have an interlocutor. And I’m wondering what advice you have for people who aren’t religious for working through some of these same steps?

Worthington: The only one of those steps that really makes any difference is that first one—about making things right as much as you’re able with what you hold to be sacred. We call this religious spirituality. But then there’s a kind of natural spirituality—where people feel like I’ve gotten out of sorts with nature.

Or there’s a humanistic spirituality, where they feel like I’ve done a crime against humanity; I have disappointed my view of what humans ought to be. And then for some people, there’s just a sense of transcendence that comes with that feeling of awe. We feel like, Well, there’s things that are just bigger than I am. I’ve got to have some perspective on things, because I’m not the center of the universe.

For those people [where] that’s not a very important part of their life, then that’s not really going to cause many problems either if they bypass that step and look at responsibility to people and also to themselves psychologically.

Khazan: There’s this common prompt in therapy to just feel your feelings. I’m wondering whether forgiveness of others or ourselves almost suggests that you shouldn’t always be feeling your feelings. Because you’re trying to remind yourself that you’re being forgiving and that you’ve committed to this forgiveness mindset.

Worthington: I would say it’s more a recognition that all of my experiences are very complex, and that I often have very mixed feelings. Part of wisdom is being able to hold things that are in tension at the same time and have perspective enough to make a decision of which one is most important right now. So, I’m not negating that I’m having negative feelings—but what I’m trying to do is to shift the balance in how much importance I’m going to give the negative feelings versus a more generous, compassionate approach to myself.

The Misgivings of Friend-Making

2022-06-27T11:32:53-04:00

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In the post-social-distancing era, some of us can’t remember how to make a new friend. But for many, making friends has always been a challenge—left as an unfulfilled desire without any clear course of action.

In this episode of How to Start Over, we explore the barriers to friendship formation in adulthood, how to navigate conflict, and why starting over as a better friend begins with getting out of our own heads.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Olga Khazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.

Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), Monte Carlo (“Ballpoint”), Mindme (“Anxiety [Instrumental Version]”), Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”), and Sarah, the Illstrumentalist (“Building Character”).

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Olga Khazan: Hi, I’m Olga Khazan, staff writer at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.

Khazan: This is How to Start Over. Today, we analyze a relationship that many of us need more of but struggle to keep around: friendship.

Khazan: Being an introvert, I feel like I never really want to go out, and I never really want to meet new people, and I never really want to talk to people. But once I do, I’m like, That felt really good. I should do that more often.

Rashid: What’s going through your mind before you have to meet up for a social engagement?

Khazan: I’m probably not going to like these people. They’re probably not going to like me. We’re not going to have anything to talk about. I don’t really have anything to say. I’m so boring. Why am I so boring? I decided to become a journalist so that I would not have a boring life. Yet here I am being really boring. I’m feeling kind of depressed. Are they going to pick up on that? And think that is a sign that I don’t like them even more than I already naturally don’t like them?

I will say, I think a great friend can be such a salve. You can feel so known and loved by having a really good friend. I also think that finding and making and keeping a really good friend is very, very, very hard.

Rashid: There’s a certain volatility to friendship that we’ve discussed on the series before. In romantic relationships, there’s a sense of obligation. There are at least some unspoken rules about how it should go. Whereas friendship is so subjective.

Khazan: It’s very awkward to tell a friend, “I will genuinely miss you. You play a role in my life. It’s not easily replaced. I hope I play a role in your life too.” I think people who are really good at making really good friends have this skill and this ability that I am still working on.

Khazan: Julie Beck is my friend and colleague, and a senior editor at The Atlantic. She recently wrapped a multiyear reporting project called The Friendship Files for which she interviewed, well, friends.

Beck: Making friends as an adult is just different than when you’re young. I mean, one of the main ways that people tend to make friends is just: Whomever you’re spending time with is more likely to become a friend. And so for kids that’s school, and for adults that’s often work.

People that I’ve interviewed for The Friendship Files have said that they were really surprised to make some of their closest friends in midlife. You know, they’re like, “I thought the friends I had were the friends that I had.” And then, through whatever avenue it was—you know, for some people it was a parents’ group. For some people, there was a fantasy baseball camp that they went to, and now they’re all best friends with their fellow campers.

There are a lot of people I spoke to who kind of blur the lines of friend and family. For instance, I interviewed this group of stay-at-home dads, and they all parent their kids together, and their families go on vacations together and all of these things.

I also interviewed two couples who bought a house together, and one of the couples has a young daughter, and the other couple that lives with them is really involved in her life. And they have sort of chosen to make homeownership a more communal experience.

Another woman I spoke with was a surrogate for her best friend and actually had her best friend’s babies. And it turned out to be quadruplets. So it was maybe more than she bargained for. But in that case, you know, her kids call the woman who gave birth to them Aunt [Deb]. And she’s super-involved in their life.

Khazan: What are some of the barriers to making friends? I tried to make friends for my personality article. I felt so awkward and basically like a five-year-old on the playground being like, “Do you want to be friends with me?”

Beck: I think much as with romantic dating, and—not to make too many parallels—I think there are slow burns, right? And then there are instant connections. But I think a lot of times friendships, especially as an adult, when you’re kind of fitting things in your schedule, it does end up like dating: where maybe you go on several awkward rounds of drinks, but you kind of like them. But it’s still awkward. But you like them enough to keep showing up, and eventually you get more comfortable and it becomes easier.

Khazan: What are some of the most creative ways that you’ve seen people make friends and keep friends?

The most creative one I probably have heard was an interview I did recently where this woman decided she wanted to create an arranged-friendship group. Basically like arranged marriage. She came from a culture where arranged marriage was really common and said that she knew tons of relationships that had done really well that started in that model. And she wanted to bring it into friendship.

So I guess what she did is kind of go up to women that she knew casually, or one of them was someone she met at a conference, and just ask them if they wanted to join this arranged-friendship group. And they all said yes. And then they had a ceremony, like they all got together at her house and they had a ceremony where they essentially said, “We are committing to be friends to each other.” And so they started from the premise of, Okay, I’m going to show up for these people whom I may not even really know that well and let it grow from there.

Khazan: As Julie’s work shows, there are plenty of ways to make friends as an adult. But why does it still feel like friendships always fall by the wayside in adulthood—no matter how hard we try? And is there anything we can do about it? Am I the only one struggling to make friends in my 30s?

Khazan: Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, walked me through not only what it takes to make a friend, but how to maintain a good one. Jeffrey helped me realize that being a good friend to others is equally as important as knowing how to keep one around.

Hall: So I generally look at this idea that there is a period of time between adolescence and young adulthood—from basically 15 to 25 years of age—where you are going to get the most relationship partners you are going to have in your entire life.

It’s actually one of the things that’s kind of scary—we actually lose about a friend per decade of our lives after 30 years old. We know from several different research studies that the reason that people tend to actually lose their friends in midlife has to do with really important accomplishments in their lives: They get married, they have children, you know, they find someone they want to settle down with and share their space and time with. They find a career that takes them across the country.

So, study after study has confirmed the idea that those are barriers to friendship—moving away, getting married and having children and becoming really dedicated to your career—all push against the possibility of forming new friendships. So one of the things that’s unfortunate is although we keep meeting a lot of new people at that period of our lives, we don’t necessarily find people who are open to the possibility of friendship at all.

So I think people are responding to the idea that it was easy to make friends, but they’re forgetting that their whole life was kind of built on this idea of easy access to people who might be open to developing a friendship.

Khazan: I find myself more drawn to people who have similar experiences as me. If we have no shared experiences in common, I feel like it’s going to be harder for us to really make those friendship bonds. Have you found that as well?

Hall: I would say that similarity is a crucial, crucial force. It doesn’t matter what time of life; even very small children prefer similarity of activities in bringing them together. But I think adult friendships are different in the ways that you mentioned, because what’s not common is for people to have a shared experience that’s external to them.

I took up tae kwon do seven years ago because my son and I did it together and I liked it so much. I stayed with it. And the people who are there, I see a couple of times a week; most of them are people who’ve been around for several years. I talk to them a little bit, but mainly we exercise together. But I would count some of those people as my friends, and they’re people I don’t have to talk about work with.

So I think what’s kind of important about that is that you can take active steps that aren’t like, I have to pick a friend, which is tough. Instead, you can say, “I’m going to go do things [where] there are people who are going to be there over and over again, and they’re likely the same people.” That’s an opportunity to make friends.

Khazan: I think a lot of people have this idea that “I would like more friends, but it’s really hard to prioritize making friends.” And I’m wondering why it’s so hard for adults to prioritize that.

Hall: I’m cognizant of the fact that this takes a constant level of work. And it’s a kind of work that’s actually not dissimilar to the kind of work you have to put into building really good nutritional habits for your health, or building really good exercise habits. It’s rewarding. It’s extremely good for your life satisfaction, your well-being, and your health in the long run. But it’s still work.

Most of the time we do what’s called “negatively forecast,” meaning we expect something that is going to be much less pleasant than [it actually is] in practice. But then you go out and you’re with them like, “Oh my god, I’m so glad I did that. I am happy that I spent [the time].” And my research would suggest for days afterwards you carry the benefit of having connected with somebody.

Khazan: So one thing I’m wondering about is if there’s any research from you or anyone else on how to tell if someone wants to be your friend. What’s the difference between someone saying “Yeah, I’ll get coffee with you,” and you have a good coffee and you’re like, great, and then you ask them out. Should you ask them out again as a friend twice in a row? Or should you wait for them to ask you? It’s very confusing to me.

Hall: In the United States we’re constantly saying, “Oh, we should get together” or “I’d love to do this again sometime.” And you can’t tell if people mean it. And they certainly don’t follow up, which suggests that they didn’t mean it. So it’s really confusing to actually know: What are the signals that say this person is available to continue to work on that relationship?

I think in some ways, one way to think about it is that it kind of doesn’t matter. And what I mean by that is that if you had a good experience with someone, and you by choice went and had coffee with them and you enjoyed that interaction, you should do it again. Like, it kind of doesn’t matter whether or not they initiate or you do.

One thing I’ve become very sensitive to as I’ve studied these things is that there’s a large group of people who really, really appreciate being asked but are really terrible at asking. So I think in some ways, it’s good not to get too caught in our own heads about what’s the right set of protocols and instead recognize that prioritization of it simply means you keep doing it, even if it’s not perfect.

Khazan: Doing things even if it’s not perfect is not my strong suit, but I will aspire to that. So one of your most interesting studies is about the number of hours that it takes to actually make a friend.

Hall: So I did two studies. One looked at this idea of people who had geographically relocated in the United States, usually for work, sometimes for other reasons, and asked them in the last six months. The other study I did was on college freshmen here at the University of Kansas, and I got them within two weeks of when they arrived at KU. I looked at kind of a natural progression of friendship over that time.

So it takes somewhere between 40 and 60 hours to develop casual friendships. And one really critical thing I want to get across is it is not the case that 40 to 60 hours with somebody means they’re your friend. Absolutely not.

In both samples, there were cases in which people spent hundreds of hours with someone and said, “This is just a work mate; we’re not friends,” or “This is still just an acquaintance, even after all of that time together.” Time is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for developing friendship in my argument.

Khazan: How much should you tolerate friendships that have serious flaws? How much are we kind of supposed to unconditionally accept or love our friends?

Hall: You know, one argument is the very definition of a friend as being there when they need us. So if they need you and you’re able to be there for them, you know it may make an enormous impact in their lives.

So in some sense, I think it is important to keep in mind that too much discourse that says that we should only focus on ourselves and our own needs and otherwise may kind of muscle out the realities that there are people who are struggling with serious issues of loneliness and isolation.

So, too much self-focus may forget the idea that what really makes people happy in the long run—in the life-satisfaction kind of way, not in the near-term, “it feels good” kind of way—is kind of enduring through another person’s struggles.

Khazan: Should you ever break up with a friend? And if so, what is the right way to do that?

Hall: I think people should break up with their friends. There are certainly transgressions beyond the pale. The most common ones are true violations of your privacy or your confidentiality: you know, basically sharing your secrets with other people.

Drifting away is actually pretty normal in friendships, and I know people hate being ghosted. But I’m of the opinion that a lot of times [it’s good] to be kind and still compassionate toward another person, but not necessarily being like, “Here is a letter of my grievances, and I want to address them.” I’m not sure that that necessarily is going to get you where you want to go, and it may just end up being something that in the long term says things more directly and more hurtful than you may have ever wanted them to be said.

Khazan: What’s the best way to do conflict resolution within a friendship?

Hall: Open communication about the things that hurt you, especially if there was something that they could apologize for or something that they may have not intended. It’s good to start out with this idea of, “Yeah, I’m hurt and I don’t want to lose your friendship over this, but it’s been bothering me.”

You want to give people an opportunity to explain themselves and treat them with the trust and integrity that your friendship deserves: meaning you want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t do it intentionally or hurtful, but may have done it neglectfully or in a way where they weren’t paying attention to your needs, which is human.

However, if it comes to pass during that conversation, they don’t wanna take any responsibility for it, or they start kitchen-sinking you and start blaming you for all the ways that you’re wrong—that may be a pretty clear moment in which that relationship can’t be repaired.

But if it’s really something that they actively did to hurt you, that’s a little different, right? That’s different than if they’re bad at keeping in touch or they’re always talking about themselves or they’re kind of, you know, not being fully present because they’re distracted or really not available to me in the way I’m available to them. Is it worth being something to actually bring up? Because chances are, any conflict is a two-way situation.

Khazan: What are some universal principles of friendship that you’ve learned by doing this project? What can we do to be better friends with each other?

Beck: I kind of landed on six things, so six forces that help people to form friendships and maintain them throughout the years. Accumulation is the most obvious one. Just simply the amount of time you spend with people.

Attention, which is really just paying attention to when you click with someone. Many of the people who I spoke with found friendship in unexpected places. For instance, there was a woman who stayed friends with her ex-boyfriend’s mom for 30 years, and they’re very close.

And then I also added intention. You really have to deliberately act. I think a lot of times we have to court our friends a little bit, woo them a little bit. And even once they’re established, we still need to put that effort in to make sure that they continue to grow.

Another force that I noticed in a lot of friendships is ritual, just the effort of scheduling things. And that can be as simple as, like, a dinner party, a book club, a monthly hike. I talked to some friends who’ve been playing the same Dungeons & Dragons game for 30 years.

The next force is imagination. Friendship is often on the sidelines of our culture, kind of playing second fiddle to romance and to careers. There are a lot of people out there who are imagining something different for themselves. If you don’t want your friendships to default to this norm, I think it does require some imagination and some creativity.

And then the final force is grace. And the way I think about that is: Everything that I’ve said up to this point is an ideal; we can’t always live up to that. Forgiveness and the space that we offer each other to be imperfect, and not to resent or judge each other when life gets in the way.

When Can a Marriage Be Saved?

2022-06-20T09:00:00-04:00

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Romantic relationships often show us the deep divide between expectations and reality. For any relationship struggling to overcome conflict, the first step to starting over may be identifying how your vision of marriage is out of step with your partner’s.

In this episode of How to Start Over, we explore why some marriages can withstand conflict, why most couples struggle to validate their partner’s needs, and how to think about when a breakup is in order—by better understanding why the relationship is struggling.

Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), Monte Carlo (“Ballpoint”), Mindme (“Anxiety [Instrumental Version]”), Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”), Sarah, the Illstrumentalist (“Building Character”), and Gregory David (“Twist One”).

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Olga Khazan: This is How to Start Over. Today, we explore what makes marriage work, why some people struggle to compromise, and how to start over in marriage—whether that means ending your marriage or revamping the one you’re already in.

We’re going to sit down with two people to hear about their marriages, to help answer our burning question—how do you know when it’s time to break up?

Khazan: Heather Havrilesky is the author of Foreverland: a memoir about her marriage, which, warts and all, is going strong. She’s also an advice columnist for the Ask Polly newsletter on Substack.

Khazan: Why did you marry Bill?

Heather Havrilesky: I married Bill because I was in love with him and we had great sex and he was an adult with a job which was amazing and unbelievable to me at the time. You land in this place of, Uh oh, I can’t walk away from this because it’s obvious that I’m supposed to be with this person. It’s just crystal clear.

With Bill, when I met him, I was very clear about the fact that I was going to show him my flaws in addition to my qualities. And so when we were emailing back and forth before we met each other, I sent him this email that basically said: “I’m a bossy, demanding woman, and you just need to know that up front. If that doesn’t sound good to you, then you should just move on because that’s who I am; apparently I can’t change it.” So it worked for us.

Khazan: This is Matthew Fray, a relationship coach and author of This Is How Your Marriage Ends. In his article for The Atlantic called “The Marriage Lesson That I Learned Too Late,” Matthew implied that his wife left him because he sometimes left dishes by the sink.

Matthew Fray: When you’re from the town I’m from—and raised in Catholicism the way that I was—what you do is, around your college years, you try to find the person you’re going to marry.

I grew up in an environment where my friends and I would sort of playfully mock each other. We’d call each other names. And I brought that same sort of sarcastic, playful mocking to my relationship.

And one of the things that she asked me to do was not do that to her. I thought she was the one that was inappropriately or unfairly complaining about some benign behavior that really wasn’t bad. And I’m like, why should I have to change who I am and what I do?

Khazan: How would you describe to someone, you know, a total stranger—why your marriage ended?

Fray: I would say I spent 12 years of our relationship, nine of them married, not allowing my wife to think and feel the things that she thought and felt—any time I disagreed, or that they became inconvenient for me on some level. Any time she made a request for change and I didn’t intellectually calculate that the problem was as severe as she was making it out to be. Or if I didn’t sort of organically empathize with the emotional experience she might be having, I always chose me over her.

Khazan: In your article, you highlight that you left dishes by the sink—you talk about how it was indicative of larger problems. Can you talk a little bit about your household’s approach to dishes and why that became a problem for your ex-wife?

Fray: The “dish by the sink” was actually a drinking glass by the sink. I just left the glass there because it seemed so inefficient to put it in the dishwasher over and over again. And she just said, “What if you just did this for me?” And I refused. My brain was like, This is not a harmful thing. This is something she’s definitely sort of like overdramatizing. But you know that in and of itself is disrespectful. And it was painful.

Khazan: So you can see how this common problem—my spouse isn’t doing what I want them to do—led to dramatically different outcomes. But it still doesn’t explain how to act on these sorts of issues. Why are some couples able to overcome these petty grievances but others can’t?

Khazan: Are there ways to actually work on a relationship without totally ending it?

Havrilesky: There are lots of ways to make a relationship better. It’s mostly just a question of: Do these two people really want to stay together? And I think that when two people really want it. And they’re both capable of…not change at an essential level…but just growth or openness or just to appreciate and make space for the particular emotional folds of the other person’s experience.

You know, we talk about, like: He’s got to do more housework; she’s got to make more money. A lot of times with marriage, we end up talking about these really concrete “economies” and whether they’re functioning, and how many resources do we have and who’s in charge and who’s the CEO and who’s the manager? But really, it’s the mood of a marriage that matters the most.

If you can’t make space for someone to imagine themselves the way they always wanted to be, or when you can’t make a space where they feel the most like themselves or feel loved—then you have to ask yourself, What kind of a partner am I that I can’t do that? Why can’t I try?

Khazan: In your quote unquote day job, you’re an advice columnist. I’m sure a lot of people have written to you wondering if they should leave their partner. What are some of those typical “I maybe want to get divorced or break up” feelings?

Havrilesky: I’ve been running “Ask Polly” for 10 years, and sometimes people are just adding up all the traits of a person, and they’re sort of saying, I want someone who’s more educated or I want someone who’s more fun or more adventurous. Those are hard letters to answer, because a marriage is built by two people; it’s not a combination of two people’s traits. And when two people are committed to each other and they’re really in it, they can create anything they want from that in many ways.

Khazan: I wanted to talk about the blowback to your book. It seems like they are upset that you said anything negative about your marriage. And I think a lot of people do only talk positively about their spouse. Where do you think that blowback came from?

Havrilesky: I think people want to keep marriage in a very clear binary where there are good marriages and bad marriages. And if your marriage is good, everything should be easy. And if your marriage is bad, it’s doomed and you should get divorced right now. A lot of married people understood, and a lot of married people were like, That’s not how I run my marriage. My marriage is perfect, and I never have feelings of anger or rage. I’m never disappointed in my wonderful, perfect, glorious spouse.

Maybe some people really do have really effective rose-colored glasses that they always use with their spouse, and that’s what works, you know, and they have the best sex in the world because they’re always looking through these filtered lenses at this beautiful person. I mean, in some ways, they’re basically saying the same thing, which is: “I prefer this filter. It helps me to love my spouse more when I reject the idea that there is any hatred in any marriage, except a bad one.”

Khazan: I take Heather’s point: I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing there’s one perfect person out there for you. A soul mate, if you will. Psychological research suggests that this belief in soul mates can actually impact whether we think our relationship is capable of change or if it’s doomed.

Spike W.S. Lee, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, spoke with me about the concept of “love frames” and how different perspectives of love can determine how well your relationship can weather conflict. Specifically, people who see love as a “journey” tend to take the good with the bad.

Spike W.S. Lee: In a journey frame, conflicts become more meaningful. They are part of the growth process. In love fiction, “happily ever after” really appears only at the end of the novel. It doesn’t appear in the middle, because after the happily ever after—there’s not much of a story to tell, right? Before happily ever after is all the twists and turns to conflict that make the story interesting.

People who think of love as a perfect fit—well, when conflicts arise, I start questioning: Are we really such a good fit? Did I choose the right partner? They’re more likely to think about alternatives.

Khazan: For Heather Havrilesky, taking the good with the bad may be the secret to her successful marriage—or at least her ability to see her husband for who he is, and not idealize what he should be. But for Matt’s relationship, the journey had simply come to an end. For his wife, staying in the relationship was more painful than leaving.

Khazan: How did you guys actually know when it was time to divorce? What actually happened that led to filing for divorce?

Fray: I don’t want to speak for her. Unbeknownst to me, trust had been significantly eroded and then my father-in-law died out of nowhere one night—my wife’s father. And it was shocking and awful, but I thought it was just life happening, as life was always going to happen. But what I believe happened is that she recognized in that moment, for however many years we’d been together leading up to that, nine or 10 years: Matt isn’t a safe person, a safe space for me.

She said it at a dinner one night, “Matt, I’m not sure if I love you. I’m not sure if I want to be in this marriage anymore.” She had to make the hard decision to break up the family, to sacrifice time with our son. So, when should people leave? I don’t know when that is, and I don’t know how people decide. But I suspect it’s that moment when the pain of staying in the same place feels like it outweighs the promise or hope of something different, because this is too bad to stay.

Khazan: Have you come up with any ways to better get through to each other about how important this little stuff can be?

Fray: I imagine my son—when he was four, he would wake up in the middle of the night crying, afraid of a monster hiding under his bed: “Dad, I’m really afraid of this monster under the bed.” And all of a sudden I’m like, This is stupid. My instinct, intellectually, is to convince him there isn’t a monster under the bed. I might say something like, “Bud, toughen up. There isn’t a monster there.”

And so, important facts: I’m correct. There wasn’t a monster under the bed. I love that child more than I love anybody. But my son is still afraid. He’s crying—Dad abandoned him to be afraid and to cry alone in the dark. He now trusts me a little bit less.

I just think showing up differently matters. And so I want to hug that kid and say: “Buddy, I don’t think there’s a monster under the bed, but I can see that you’re really afraid right now, and I’ve been afraid before, and I am so sorry that that’s what you’re experiencing right now. And even if we can’t fix the problem, we’re always going to show up.”

I think that is the idea that correlates most closely with our adult relationships when we’re disagreeing with our adult partner. More or less saying: There isn’t a monster under the bed. You shouldn’t think that; you shouldn’t feel that. Even though we believe we’re intellectually correct, there is this erosion of trust that happens. We just have to validate, and there’s a difference between agreement and validation.

Khazan: Is there something you look for from advice seekers. to kind of get a sense of “Can this marriage or relationship be saved?”

Havrilesky: Oftentimes two people will be committed to the distraction of fighting with the other person instead of getting out and living their lives. Sometimes when someone’s in that state, they just need someone else to say: “It shouldn’t be that hard.”

If you feel like someone just isn’t enough for you, then you can take that at face value and say, “I always feel like this person isn’t enough”—and then be gone. Move on.

You just have to make sure that the impatience doesn’t come from actually being with someone who loves you. If you came from a background where people didn’t treat you with that much kindness and that much presence, it can just feel awkward to be with someone who’s crazy about you. It’s just unfamiliar.

Khazan: A question for people out there who are single or maybe marriage skeptics. What’s the case for marriage?

Havrilesky: To really have a person in your life who you trust more than you’ve trusted anyone before. It’s magic. Before I met my husband, I never had a person in my life who I knew that if I said “I really need your help right now,” they would drop everything and give me everything they could.

Having a model of a relationship that you can actually improve, what you put in comes back to you basically because you’re building something that gets better with effort and with love. People feel embarrassed by so many things, and a great marriage makes you less embarrassed; it makes you more daring. And you bring that energy to other people.

Khazan: For many people in long-term romantic relationships, knowing when to end things may come with a better understanding of why things are going the way they are. Like Spike W.S. Lee told us, the issue may be your perspective of how love should work. If you see love as a perfect fit, or a soul mate, you may believe conflict is just not capable of being resolved. If anything, it’s a sign that things will only go downhill from there.

Lee: People who think of love as a perfect fit—well, when conflicts arise, I start questioning: Are we really such a good fit? In a journey frame, these conflicts become more meaningful. In love fiction “happily ever after” really appears only at the end of the novel. It’s the before happily ever after is all the twists and turns to conflict that make the story interesting.

Khazan: Even some of the best relationships have their ups and downs, though, and many good relationships aren’t Instagram-perfect, as much as we might want to believe they are.

Havrilesky: Maybe some people really do have great, really effective rose-colored glasses that they always use with their spouse. In some ways, they’re basically saying the same thing, which is that I prefer this filter. It helps me to love my spouse more when I reject the idea that there is any hatred in any marriage, except a bad one.

Khazan: For Matthew, hindsight is 20/20—he realized that leaving a glass by the sink reflected a broader attitude that left his wife feeling unloved. It’s worth considering whether there are small things either you or your partner do that have spiraled into deeper trust issues—and ideally, work on those before they spiral.

Fray: I don’t think it matters what the thing is, whether it’s a dish by the sink of the recycling or position of the toilet seat or anything like that. These so-called petty grievances, I think, are what destroys trust and love in the average relationship.

Khazan: As Matthew pointed out, validating each other’s feelings is really important. You don’t have to agree with your partner. But you do have to make them feel heard. As Heather said, remember that relationships aren’t just the sum of two peoples’ traits—you have to decide that you’re going to love the whole person, not just the best 20 percent of them. Maybe starting over in your marriage means accepting your partner for who they are.