Best of The Atlantic
-
Why Are My Neighbors Screaming at Me? Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.Dear James,I’m typically quiet and mind my own business. But in recent weeks, I’ve been having conflicts with people over minor things. Just today, I got yelled at twice. I’m not sure if it’s me or them or a phase of the moon.Early this morning, I was driving in my neighborhood. Visibility was poor because of the long shadows of winter morning. A man dressed in black crossed the street, and I didn’t see him at first. I did stop on time, but I felt an apology was in order, so I lowered my window and said I was sorry. He came over to the car, already screaming at me, and leaned in to continue screaming in my face.Then this afternoon, I took my dog to our neighborhood park. I often allow the dog some off-leash time, as many of my neighbors do. This time, my dog took off and ran into the yard of a house bordering the park. The house’s owner, who was outside, ran at the dog, yelling, using some choice words. I put the dog on leash, apologized, and quickly left.In both these instances, I was in the wrong. But I was surprised at the intensity of the reactions. Am I an asshole? Or is everyone about to blow a fuse? Or are these random occurrences, and I’m reading too much into them?Dear Reader,Excellent atmosphere in this letter. “The long shadows of winter morning”—right on. And the whole sense of transgression in the second episode, of instability and triggered boundaries: love it.You definitely don’t sound like an asshole. Assholes cannot write descriptive prose. (That may not actually be true. Good essay topic, though. “Assholes Cannot Write Descriptive Prose: Discuss.”) Also—and less controversially—an asshole has no concept of being in the wrong. Or he does, but he applies it only to the other guy. You, in contrast, are rather haunted by these incidents, and you worry about your role in them.The day you describe, with its yellings and its psychic abrasions, is the sort of day that can make an occultist out of you. You start thinking about astrology, tarot, vibes, telepathy, the underworld. I do anyway. Is some planet somewhere pulling in the wrong direction, like a truculent mule? Is the mass mind devolving? Am I unwittingly putting out some kind of freaky energy, to elicit this response?I relate deeply, for what it’s worth, to the dilemma of your rogue dog. My dog, Sonny, is a born crosser of lines and violator of spaces, and we have both been scolded, shamed, and exiled many times. On balance, I think it’s been good for me. (For him too, possibly, but Sonny—being a dog—keeps his counsel.)I’ve thought a lot about your question: Are these random occurrences? And my considered answer is: It doesn’t matter. Maybe you were a little off, tired, out of sorts. You drove distractedly for a second; your dog moved too fast for you. So what? No harm was done, and in both cases you apologized. Screw that shouty guy in the street, and screw that irritable homeowner and enemy of dogs. Leave them to their little rages and fist-shakings. Leave them to their blood pressure. Do not invest them with the mysterious power of augury.Raising a glass to rebel canines everywhere,JamesBy submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.theatlantic.com
-
How to Not Fight With Your Family About Politics My family includes a farmer and a fiber artist in rural Kentucky, who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; a theater director in Florida; a contractor in Louisville; a lawyer in Boston; and a gay Republican.Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode. What’s always impressed me about our big, mixed-up family is not just that we survive Christmas dinner, but also that the family includes several couples who disagree politically with the people they live with every day: their own spouses. They haven’t voted for the same candidate, much less for the same party, in years.For a long time, those differences were mostly an annoyance that flared around elections, but over the past few years they’ve become far more stressful for those couples to navigate. Especially now, when the country is so divided and angry, when we have pulled so far into our own corners that it feels like the seams holding us together are finally about to snap. Yet all those couples are still together. I wondered how they did it.That question turned into a novel in part about a Democrat and his husband, a Republican who’s running for office. The book is not about politics or campaigns; it’s about marriage and ambition and what happens when who we are in the world doesn’t match how we see ourselves. But in order to write it, I needed to do some research. I could have watched hundreds of hours of Fox News and MSNBC and talked with dozens of strangers in the grocery store. Instead, I decided to talk with the people in my family—about guns, abortion, immigration, and climate change—whose politics I found baffling.[Faith Hill: What if you just skipped the holidays?]These are the conversations most of us spend the holidays desperately trying to avoid. I wasn’t particularly excited about having them either. But I figured it would at least be efficient, and I hoped that maybe I’d learn something.I’ve been a reporter at The New York Times for 15 years, so I have spent many hours of my life asking personal questions about sensitive issues. When I’m working on a story, my job is to figure out what the facts are and what they mean, and then I present the information so readers can decide for themselves. I’ve stopped countless people on the street or in parking lots over the years to ask about politicians or schools, how much they pay in rent, and what they think about ice-skating when it’s 78 degrees in February.The people I interview don’t generally ask me what I think about climate change, or whom I’m voting for, and if they did, I wouldn’t be able to tell them. My role as a reporter is to dig up information, not to convince anybody. (I can’t say what I think about those issues here, either; Times guidelines require that reporters keep their political views to themselves.) I’ve had hundreds of these conversations over the years, and I can’t think of a single interview that got combative, even when I personally disagreed with every word.So I decided to approach my family like a reporter. I wasn’t looking to have a back-and-forth; I was looking for information. I wanted to know what they thought and why.I started with my brother. He lives in Tampa, and sometimes we talk on the phone while he walks around the neighborhood with his dog, a Schnauzer-ish rescue who had a difficult puppyhood and sometimes wears a weighted vest when she gets anxious.We’ve always gotten along, but it had been a few years since we talked about politics in any real way. The last time had been at my parents’ dining-room table, where my mother tried desperately to change the subject while my brother and I shouted over our Chinese takeout. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but I remember what that anger felt like, as though an animal was trying to claw its way out of my chest. I wanted to reach across the table and shake him. I could stay perfectly calm talking with strangers about their views; not everyone is going to agree with me, and that’s fine. But how could my own brother believe these things?When I called my brother to explain that I was working on a book and wanted to talk with him about politics, I told him I wasn’t interested in a debate: This was research, and I just needed to understand.“Okay,” he said. I pictured him walking under a palm tree with his little gray dog. “Shoot.”I began with some basics. If you were talking to a 5-year-old, I asked him, how would you explain what it means to be progressive? How would you explain being conservative to that same kid?I didn’t agree with his answers, but that didn’t matter. Some of my characters would. I asked him to keep going.Tell me about immigration, I said. What do you think is fair for kids who were brought here illegally when they were young?What do you think about affirmative action?What should be done about climate change?What about abortion?As he explained his views, I could feel myself getting to know my characters better. I could see their faces more clearly in my mind. And it was a good excuse to talk with my brother. We both have kids and jobs and marriages to attend to, and we don’t keep in touch as much as I wish we did. But suddenly we were calling more often, and I was enjoying it. Cautiously, I took another step. I would talk to my in-laws.On paper, my father-in-law and I could not be more different. I’m a gay, Jewish New Yorker, and he’s a pickup-driving farmer who lives in rural Kentucky. But we both love to read and we like to kid around, and over the 15 years since I met my wife, her father and I have become close. There have always been topics, however, we’ve had a hard time discussing. I remember one conversation years ago, when we spent nearly an hour late at night taking turns making “just one last point” about the accessibility of guns around the country. He was mystified by my perspective, and it took every drop of my willpower not to shout at him in his own house. My wife lasted only a few minutes before she got up from the table and left the room.His politics aren’t predictable, though. He does not, for example, own a gun. Instead, he likes to say that he keeps giant aerosol cans of wasp spray around the house in case of an intruder. And because there are wasps in the barn.A few months into writing my novel, my wife and I took our kids to Kentucky for a spring visit. As we sat in rocking chairs around the woodstove, I talked to my father-in-law about electric cars and renewable energy. I used the same approach I did with my brother. I listened. It was research. We didn’t worry about who was right. And the conversation was … perfectly pleasant! Really, it was a great success. It gave me more material for my book, and no one said anything they came to regret.So I tried two more members of the family. Sitting around a backyard bonfire in Louisville one evening, I talked with one of my sisters and her husband about how they vote. (Later, I would call this husband to ask about golf and what he would do if he found out his wife cheated on him with a woman.)[Olga Khazan: Why families fight during the holidays]On another visit to Kentucky, I stood with my mother-in-law in her kitchen, as a cluster of white and brown sheep milled around in the pasture out back. I asked her how it felt to be married to someone who voted differently than she did.She sighed, shook her head, and said she didn’t understand it. “But he’s such a kind person,” she said.When I tell people about my family, or about my novel, one thing I hear a lot is: If my spouse voted differently than I did, I’d get a divorce.Maybe you would. But maybe you wouldn’t. Not all of these couples started out so far apart. But slowly, over time, their views shifted, like a shadow tilting in the afternoon sun, until there was almost no overlap remaining. But they continue to share the day-to-day stuff of their actual lives—kids, mortgages, jobs. They take care of each other. And if those things work, if you’re good to each other, would you really blow it all up?None of my family members was so persuaded by our conversations that they switched their party affiliation. But the more of these discussions we had, the easier they became. And for everyone involved, it got harder to dismiss the people on the other side, whose views we often see in caricature. My book is finished, but the way my family and I learned to talk with each other has stuck. We try to remember that, even when we despise each other’s leaders, we are all just people doing our best.theatlantic.com
-
You Are Drinking the Wrong Eggnog For centuries, eggnog has been a part of America’s Christmas festivities. George Washington was rumored to have his own recipe, and the concoction was the catalyst of a riot at West Point in the wee hours of Christmas morning 1826. Today, the grocery chain Kroger sells nearly 3 million gallons of the drink each year.But for a drink with so much tradition, eggnog has long divided Christmas tables. When BuzzFeed ran an article in 2016 titled “Eggnog Is Delicious and If You Disagree You’re Wrong,” it was paired with a missive the same day calling the drink “Absolute Garbage.” In 2017, when the Today show polled its audience about whether they liked eggnog, people were almost evenly split between those who thought it was disgusting and those who found it delicious. And these days, TikTok is laden with videos of people complaining about eggnog’s smell and taste—and with others mixing it into cereal and soda.Growing up, I was never an eggnog lover. The premade, nonalcoholic version my parents would buy from the store wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t good, either. I felt obligated to gulp it down in the name of Christmas, but surely there had to be a better option. These days, eggnog has become my favorite Christmas treat. Everything changed when I discovered that a better eggnog is hiding in plain sight. It is called coquito. The creation, which is sometimes referred to as Puerto Rican eggnog, swaps the drink’s traditional base of cream and eggs for coconut milk and condensed milk. Puerto Ricans traditionally make the cocktail during the Christmas season, and then give some away to friends and neighbors. That’s how classic eggnog died for me: A few years back, a Puerto Rican family moved across the street from my parents and gave us a bottle of coquito. The drink looked and smelled like eggnog, but once it hit my tongue, I realized it was lighter, more flavorful, and just less weird. And yet, in mainland America, coquito remains a novelty. What if the problem with eggnog is just that many of us are drinking the wrong kind?The fundamental deficiency with eggnog is, well, eggs. The drink’s raw eggs turn it into an easy vector for salmonella. That can make for a not-so-merry Christmas, leading to vomiting, diarrhea, and fever. If you’re old or immunocompromised, tainted eggnog can even be deadly. In the early 1980s, five seniors died after drinking homemade eggnog at a New Jersey nursing home.I was determined not to land myself on the toilet this December when I decided to try a number of different eggnog recipes in the hopes of better understanding the most hated Christmas beverage. The exact ingredients vary, but at its core, eggnog is eggs, cream, milk, sugar, and, often, liquor (usually rum or whiskey) that are whisked together. The result, says Dan Pashman, the host of The Sporkful podcast, is more like “drinkable alcoholic cake” than a traditional cocktail. (An eggnog aficionado, he makes the Joy of Cooking recipe every year, which calls for 12 egg yolks, a pound of confectioners’ sugar, and two quarts of cream.)But making homemade eggnog that’s safe is easier said than done. Most store-bought versions use pasteurized eggs, but I couldn’t find those at my local Trader Joe’s. Aging alcoholic eggnog in the fridge has also been proven to kill off the bacteria, but my brain would not allow me to accept that letting anything sit around for weeks could make it safer to consume. I found tempering the eggs to be the most tenable solution, but the process of heating the cream, slowly whisking it into a bowl of eggs, and then letting it cool before serving was one big, messy chore.Eggs don’t just make the drink risky; they are also why so many people find eggnog unappealing. The texture of traditional versions is gloopy, closer to melted ice cream than anything else. Chefs have attempted to remedy this by whipping the egg whites to add some airiness, but even then, the result is plenty thick. Then there’s the flavor of eggnog. James Briscione, a chef and co-author of The Flavor Matrix, told me that most of the flavor from classic eggnog comes from the rum, because cream and eggs “are both relatively flavor-neutral.” Although people with a discerning palate might savor the caramel notes imparted on the rum from barrel aging, all I tasted was booze and dairy. Store-bought eggnog solves this flavor deficit through an extraordinary amount of sugar and spices, perhaps why more than one online commentator has compared it to cough medicine.Either way, there is a better way to sip a creamy alcoholic drink that actually tastes like something without having to resort to saccharine premade nog. Instead of searching for the subtle coconutty notes in eggnog, coquito puts the aroma front and center. And the drink’s main ingredients, coconut milk and rum, go perfectly together. “The fruity esters and tropical notes that are coming from a coconut fit really well with those Maillard flavors—the toasting and roasting—that you see particularly in rum,” Briscione said.Coquito has none of eggnog’s problems. The drink doesn’t need eggs to be luxurious; it achieves that texture through the inclusion of sweet, sticky condensed milk. (Some recipes also call for evaporated milk and cream of coconut, which results in a drink that’s even more luscious.) And it’s remarkably easy to make. When I made the drink earlier this month, I cut my finger opening a can of condensed milk and then dropped a spoon into the blender in a fit of pain-induced negligence. But the recipe still took only five minutes to complete. One classic-eggnog recipe I made, which involved separating out the yolks and egg whites, took three times as long, even without the same mishaps.It might seem odd to adopt a Caribbean cocktail for the holidays if you don’t already live in the tropics. Coconut and rum seem more apt for sunbathing by the pool (hello, piña coladas!), than gathering around a Christmas fire. But don’t let that scare you. The coconut is subtle and balanced with a festive dash of cinnamon. If you crave a cocktail apt for sweater weather, coquito still fits the bill.Christmas is a holiday of tradition: The decorations, the food, and the familiar rituals tend to stay the same. Even the movie selections don’t change much year to year, despite the fact that so many of us already know the dangers of a Red Ryder BB gun, and that “every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.” But the holiday isn’t actually as static as it seems. More than a century ago, goose was served at Christmas dinner. Now turkey is a staple. The candles that used to illuminate Christmas trees have thankfully been replaced by electric lights. And hardly anyone makes figgy pudding anymore, despite whatever “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” says. The core spirits of these centuries-long traditions still exist; they’ve just been updated for modern times. It’s time for eggnog to get an upgrade too.theatlantic.com
-
The 20 Best Podcasts of 2024 Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2024” coverage here. Throughout 2024, podcast creators asked us to think twice about our preconceptions: They followed stories that were supposed to be over, engaged with people who tend to get dismissed, and toyed with emerging technologies that make some people fear for humanity’s future. They explored city sewers, an historic baseball stadium, momentary fame, everyday household objects. This list represents the 20 best podcasts I heard this year, with a lean toward either new shows, or shows that have a renewed focus. Virtually all of them, even the most entertaining and quirky ones, suggested an underlying preoccupation with the power of narrative to shape our sense of reality. (As with every year, The Atlantic’s podcasts are exempt from consideration.) These series added depth and vitality to the audio landscape—they also packed an emotional wallop, inviting listeners to view the world with more scrutiny and empathy alike.Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)The comedian Jamie Loftus’s previous podcasts have ranged wildly in subject matter—Mensa meetings, Floridian spiritualists, the comic-strip character Cathy—but benefited equally from her attention to detail. With her newest series, Loftus trains her eye on the internet’s “main characters”: people who became short-lived viral sensations. She contextualizes their notoriety within the broader cultural moment that allowed for it, then invites these figures, who included Ken Bone, William Hung, and “Left Shark,” onto the show to reflect on their brushes with this very particular version of fame. By speaking directly with folks who were once known as internet punch lines, Loftus offers listeners a nuanced understanding of their experiences. Sixteenth Minute is a funny, fascinating series that starts by schooling us on memes and ends up displaying a deeply felt empathy.Start with “Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife Pt. 1.”Backed Up As the co-hosts of Backed Up, the Cincinnati Public Radio reporters Becca Costello and Ella Rowen began by investigating a local story—why is sewage seeping into Cincinnati residents’ basements when it rains?—and ended up creating a podcast with wider appeal. This series demonstrates how national access to functional plumbing infrastructure is complicated by bureaucracy and climate change. Costello and Rowen approach the project with humorous gusto as they bring listeners along on a whirlwind six-part journey through city sewers and the local government. Their efforts involve pop-culture references, helpful plumbing metaphors, and a playful bid to discover the “real villain” behind the sewage crisis. But the fun never undermines their more serious aim of detangling the modern marvel of the metropolitan water system, a utility that residents might stop to think about only when it fails.Start with “Episode 1: Sewers Gonna Sue.”Finally! A ShowThe series’s drawn-out name—Finally! A Show About Women That Isn’t Just a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare—brings to mind modern society’s frequent celebration of generic, superficial girlbossery. Jane Marie and Joanna Solotaroff are the stewards of this production, but they’re not its hosts, per se; each episode is an audio diary of a different woman’s day. Listeners hear from a former missionary turned middle-school teacher, a new mother reflecting on growing up with abusive parents, the owner of a plus-size boutique helping clients shop, and many more. Marie and Solotaroff’s complete lack of narrative framing feels fresh: Hosts rarely cut in to set up the who-what-where or to propel the story forward. Instead, the narrator recounts her day as it unfolds, and in unvarnished detail.Start with “Finally! A Show About a 20-Something Chess Master.”Fur & LoathingThe 2014 chemical-weapon attack at the Hyatt Regency in Rosemont, Illinois, had what some may consider an unconventional target—the attendees of Midwest FurFest, a convention of self-identifying “furries” who recreationally dress in anthropomorphic animal costumes. The media roundly mocked the incident, which left 19 people hospitalized, an attitude reflecting prejudicial views of the event-goers’ lifestyle. But the journalist Nicky Woolf and his team of reporters offer this true-crime story the serious consideration it deserves: They lay out the facts of the 10-year-old cold case, explain the failures of the initial police investigation, and seek clarity on the details of the day through conversations with convention-goers. In the process, Fur & Loathing also illuminates a subculture that is often derided but that provides joy and fulfillment for its members.Start with “Broken Glass.”The Sicilian InheritanceThe Italian American writer Jo Piazza created this companion podcast for her novel of the same name, investigating the real-life mystery that inspired the book. She had always been told that her great-great-grandmother Lorenza died under peculiar circumstances more than 100 years ago. But in Piazza’s phone calls with aunts, uncles, and cousins, everyone remembers the story a little differently. The most popular theory is that Lorenza was killed by the Mafia, and Piazza regales listeners with her trip to find the truth in the Sicilian countryside. Part of the charm of The Sicilian Inheritance is its portrait of the chaos of living in a big, passionate family, one that’s full of multicourse lunches and gossipy second cousins. A family’s legends lend color and dimension to its history, and Piazza’s offers plenty of both.Start with “Lorenza.”Long Shadow: In Guns We TrustLong Shadow’s previous seasons investigated the circumstances surrounding September 11 and the rise of the American far right. Season 3, In Guns We Trust, explores how guns came to be such a central part of our national culture. The host and journalist Garrett Graff, himself a gun owner, contextualizes the past quarter century of mass shootings by laying out the political and legislative maneuvers that have eroded gun-control laws over the previous 50 years. These sometimes esoteric actions had palpable effects: The so-called gun-show loophole, for example, allowed the private sale of firearms without a background check—which enabled the Columbine High School shooters to indirectly obtain their guns. Listeners who are all too familiar with Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde might nonetheless find illuminating Long Shadow’s examination of the political backdrop to these tragedies.Start with “A Uniquely American Problem.”Strangers on a BenchThis podcast’s simple premise—the host, Tom Rosenthal, approaches someone he’s never met in a London park and invites them for a chat—creates a surprising level of intimacy. Within minutes, listeners hear a man explain what it was like to lose his father, or a woman reveal how she feels stifled by her family even though they live several countries away. The key to the show’s appeal is Rosenthal’s interviewing style, which keeps him present in the conversation rather than gesturing toward its eventual audience; in other words, his interest appears genuine rather than performative. Strangers on a Bench demonstrates how ready people are to connect with those around them if given the opening, and how we might reach outward to find these conversations for ourselves.Start with “Episode 1: A Fight.”RippleThis series aims to investigate “the stories we were told were over,” and its inaugural topic, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, is a fitting choice. The host, Dan Leone, begins by traveling the Gulf Coast by boat with Louisiana residents as they remember the 11 workers killed in the initial oil-platform explosion; the scene sets up the show’s emphasis on the disaster’s human impact. Leone recounts the various decisions—or lack thereof—made by BP that led to cleanup workers’ later allegations of severe respiratory illness, among other devastating aftereffects. Interviews with chemists about BP’s gross mismanagement of the spill are shocking and edifying to hear, but Ripple’s most compelling feature is how it balances the disaster’s scientific and emotional aspects: It spends ample time, for example, on wide-ranging health issues that some exposed workers and locals have faced for nearly 15 years.Start with “1. Company Canal.”InheritingIn the premiere installment of NPR’s Inheriting, the host, Emily Kwong, makes a bold promise: “On this show, we’re going to break apart the AAPI monolith.” Kwong sets about this mission by offering Asian American and Pacific Islander families in the United States opportunities to reflect on how living through particular moments in history—such as the Japanese incarceration during World War II, the Cambodian genocide, and the Vietnam War—can leave lasting generational effects. Both Kwong and the subjects themselves conduct the interviews, as loved ones open up to one another about operating a business amidst the 1992 Los Angeles uprising or living under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Kwong also offers suggestions to listeners interested in starting these conversations with their own family members.Start with “Carol & the Los Angeles Uprising: Part 1.”The Wonder of StevieThis limited series celebrates what’s considered Stevie Wonder’s classic period (1972–76), when he released his most famed work. Hosted by the cultural critic Wesley Morris, the series layers musical analysis of Wonder’s songs and insightful interviews with industry colleagues and acolytes. Morris, following a conversation with the music critic Robert Christgau, dissects how contemporary (and largely white) critics glossed over the fusion of pop and gospel that made Wonder’s art so revelatory. Musicians such as Janelle Monáe and Smokey Robinson, along with the former president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama, share stories about how Wonder has inspired them. (The Obamas’ company, Higher Ground, co-produced the series.) A bonus episode even features an interview with the artist himself. But the show feels complete without it, following Morris’s own thorough, hours-long evaluation of Wonder’s musical output.Start with “Music of My Mind | 1972.”Serial: GuantánamoSarah Koenig and the Serial team may never replicate the precise alchemy that made its inaugural season a phenomenon 10 years ago. To their credit, they aren’t trying to. Rather than scout out similarly disputed murder cases to investigate, Koenig and this season’s co-host, Dana Chivvis, have instead chosen to experiment with form and scale. Serial: Guantánamo (the series’ fourth installment) uses a wide lens to explore the history of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, from 2002 to the present day. The hosts track down more than 100 people, including both detainees and guards; their accounts of the scandals, interrogations, and protests within the prison provide riveting audio, the kind made possible by waiting on a story until it’s able to be told in full. The narrative further benefits from Serial’s signature flair, as Koenig includes her own uncertainty about and emotional reactions to what we’re all learning.Start with “Ep. 1: Poor Baby Raul.”Never PostThis independently produced podcast covers a range of topics aimed at internet-addled listeners, such as the rise of the “influencer voice” and the emotional experience of abandoning a social-media platform. But its atmospheric sound design differentiates it from similar tech-focused shows. The host, Mike Rugnetta, is a professional audio designer who wants to strip conventional podcast expectations—pithy observations set over marimba music, say—down to the form’s technical studs. A segment about why teens are obsessed with the popular online game Roblox, for example, is bookended by a field recording of someone “touching grass”—that is, experiencing the analog world. Never Post also works as an intriguing exercise in free-associative storytelling: Audio from the Minnesota State Fair horse barn follows a segment about the history of the “Laser Eyes” meme, leaving listeners to interpret the connection between the two.Start with “To BRB or Not to BRB.”Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPDEmpire City reckons with the modern state of policing through the lens of the New York City Police Department. The NYU journalism professor Chenjerai Kumanyika hosts this nine-episode series, which presents nearly 200 years of history—dating back to the mid-19th century, when an assemblage of constables, watchmen, and kidnappers laid the groundwork for the NYPD—as an immersive listening experience. The podcast conjures the sounds of the city during and after the Civil War, as Kumanyika describes how the department began to adopt the structure and aesthetics of a standing army. Weaving in stories of his own entanglements with police officers, and his young daughter’s budding understanding of law enforcement’s role in their daily life, the host argues that if the NYPD too often fails to protect the vulnerable, it’s because that wasn’t what the force was formed to do; its initial goal, he contends, was to uphold wealthy and influential citizens’ definition of “law and order.”Start with “They Keep People Safe.”Shell Game The tech journalist Evan Ratliff confronts society’s anxieties about artificial intelligence head-on with this limited-run series, in which he uses language-learning models such as ChatGPT to replicate his own voice. Ratliff sets up the affectless “clone”—cultivated from his publicly available personal data and vocal clips—to field incoming phone calls from telemarketers, family, and friends alike; the outcome is a series of uncanny conversations that reveal the surprising capabilities (and limitations) of this fast-developing technology. Particularly riveting moments include Ratliff’s daughter chatting with the voice clone, and the AI Ratliff seeking counsel for the real Ratliff’s private concerns in a session with an AI therapist. These experiments use both humor and real insight to envision how we may manipulate the technology we fear could take over our lives.Start with “Episode 1: Quality Assurance.”Road to RickwoodBaseball devotees and non-fans alike have something to gain from listening to this series, about the historic Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama. Co-produced by Baton Rouge’s and New Orleans’s NPR affiliates and hosted by the comedian Roy Wood Jr., the podcast details the 114-year-old baseball stadium’s tenure as the home of the Negro Leagues’ Birmingham Black Barons. Bolstered by both new interviews—with retired teammates and current local baseball coaches—and archival broadcast clips, it successfully portrays Rickwood as a microcosm of the racism, resistance, and revolution that were happening off the field. Wood himself grew up playing baseball in the city including at Rickwood Field, and his personal connection to the material enlivens the show’s recounting—one that, in a rare move, is defined not just by the main players, but also by the communities surrounding them.Start with “The Holy Grail of Baseball.”In the DarkIn the Dark returned after a six-year break with both a new production company—The New Yorker, which acquired the show in 2023—and a greatly expanded scope. The journalist Madeleine Baran and her fellow investigators spent more than four years researching what became Season 3: the continent- and calendar-year-spanning story of the 2005 Haditha massacre, in which members of the U.S. Marine Corps allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians. Although eight Marines were charged for their alleged role in the killings, only one was convicted of a crime. Eyewitnesses in Haditha provide gripping accounts of what they experienced, while the hosts attempt to clarify inconsistencies in various military personnel’s accounts; we even hear one of them chase the producer Natalie Jablonski off his front porch with profanity and threats. In probing this decades-old event, In the Dark makes a powerful case for pursuing a story as far as you can.Start with “Episode 1: The Green Grass.”Second SundaySecond Sunday’s first season premiered late last year and was an intriguing proof of concept; 2024’s more expansive, affecting follow-up is a testament to the value of giving a series time to hit its stride. The co-hosts Darren Calhoun and Esther Ikoro invite guests—focusing on queer Black people—to examine their connection to their religious beliefs, whether they be tenuous, tempestuous, or deeply rooted in family tradition. The subjects detail how, in the process of exploring their multifaceted identities, they have often redefined what God means to them. Each conversation comes across as a sort of sermon, setting interviewees’ responses against rich musical backdrops. Regardless of whether they have a personal relationship with faith, listeners may empathize with the desire to seek, as one guest puts it, “spirituality that is unbound by people’s bullshit.”Start with “Mark Miller Plays With the Spirit.”TestedThe writer Rose Eveleth has spent more than a decade researching this timely entry of NPR’s Embedded, whose release coincided with the 2024 Olympic Games. Eveleth interviews athletes such as the sprinters Christine Mboma and Maximila Imali about finding their naturally high testosterone levels—and thus “true” sex—scrutinized by governing bodies such as World Athletics. Their stories provide a personal touch and help illustrate the more harrowing aspects of their experiences, such as the fact that they have had to consider taking body-altering drugs to maintain their competitive eligibility. Beyond stressing the complexities of our biology, Tested questions the notion of “fairness” in sports: Why are some natural genetic variations considered more acceptable than others, and who gets to set the terms? Sex testing is an example of “how we try and impose order on a messy, confusing world,” Eveleth says, and these six episodes highlight the damage that can be wrought by that impulse.Start with “Tested: The Choice.”The Curious History of Your HomeThis podcast explores the creation of genius household inventions that people have long taken for granted, such as clocks, toilets, and wallpaper. Its host, the historian Ruth Goodman, has an infectious interest in domestic history, a focus that’s likely more relevant to the listener than, say, the Napoleonic Wars. Goodman’s animated narration is paired with evocative music and soundscapes that enliven descriptions of modest homesteads; with these flourishes, information as seemingly banal as the evolution of dishwashing becomes mesmerizing. Listeners might come to question the way they wash dishes once they learn that wood ash was once preferred over soap, and that the former can actually have some distinct advantages over the latter. Though it is far from the first “quirky history” podcast, this series’ self-contained concept allows the listener to view the mundanities of daily life with newfound interest.Start with “Wallpaper.”The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers PodcastHearing four comedians get technical about their work is equal parts hilarious and enlightening, especially when they’re all Saturday Night Live alums. The Lonely Island—a.k.a. Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone—chat with the host of Late Night, Seth Meyers, about the trio’s best-known contribution to the long-running sketch show: their “digital shorts.” Those include such memorable shorts as “Lazy Sunday” (a self-serious rap about The Chronicles of Narnia), “Dick in a Box” (an R&B tune about the perfect Christmas gift, featuring Justin Timberlake), and the more recent “Sushi Glory Hole” (whose title is self-explanatory). The group discusses each video’s development and reception, while speculating as to why viewers connected so much with, say, Natalie Portman rapping obscenities. As a former head writer on SNL, Meyers deftly guides the conversation toward craft, while Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone reflect on their work’s legacy with humility.Start with “The Lonely Island Beginnings.”theatlantic.com
-
Are Young Men Really Becoming More Sexist? Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsIt’s conventional wisdom that young people will be more progressive than their forebears. But although young people can often be counted upon to be more comfortable with risk and radicalism, that doesn’t mean they will always express that through left-leaning politics.Young men may have helped hand President-Elect Donald Trump his victory, fueling the narrative about a growing gender gap among young voters. But this is not just an American trend. In South Korea, young men have been radicalized against feminism, opening up a large gender gap; in Poland, gender emerged “as a significant factor … with young men showing a strong preference” for the far-right political alliance; and in Belgium, the anti-immigrant and separatist Vlaams Belang party received significantly more support from young men than young women.Could the Gen Z political gender gap be an international phenomenon?Today’s episode of Good on Paper is with Dr. Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at Kings College London who is writing a book on the root causes of gender inequality across the world. Originally published in June, this episode helps untangle some of the reasons young men may be feeling disaffected and reacting differently than young women to macroeconomic and political trends.The following is a transcript of the episode:Jerusalem Demsas: Following the election, there have been many many arguments made about the growing gender gap between young men and young women. That women are more likely to vote for Democrats has been a consistent feature of my entire life, but this wasn’t always the case.In the year 2000, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris released a paper establishing “gender differences in electoral behavior.” Basically, they showed that women had become a liberal force in small-d democratic politics.That was a notable finding, because in the postwar era, women were, on average, seen as a more conservative electoral factor. Norris and Inglehart looked at more than 60 countries around the world and found that, from the early ’80s through the mid-’90s, women had been moving to the left of men throughout advanced industrial societies. They conclude that “given the process of generational turnover this promises to have profound consequences for the future of the gender cleavage, moving women further left.”[Music]My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.While we’re waiting for the sort of definitive data that can help researchers untangle exactly which men were more likely to vote for Donald Trump and why, I wanted to revisit one of my favorite conversations of the year, with Dr. Alice Evans. Alice is a senior lecturer at King’s College London, whose newsletter, The Great Gender Divergence, has followed research and her own personal travels across the world to understand the root causes of gender inequality.Trying to understand why it is that relations between young men and women seem so fraught can help us begin to understand the downstream political consequences of these cultural shifts.Here’s our conversation, originally published back in June.[Music]Alice, welcome to show.Alice Evans: Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to talk to you because I think we corresponded for a long time, and this is a treat.Demsas: Yes, yes. Twitter DM-to-podcast pipeline. I feel like that’s what we’re creating right here. So we’re here to talk about the divergence between young men and women’s political views, particularly on sexism. But before we get into that, I just want to ask you: What determines whether someone is sexist? What determines whether they hold sexist beliefs?Evans: Wow, okay, big question. So, I think, generally, the entire of human history has been incredibly patriarchal. So to answer that question, I need to explain the origins of patriarchy. For thousands and thousands of years, our culture has vilified, blamed disobedient, naughty women. You know, they were witches. They were terrible people. A woman who was disobedient or who wasn’t a virgin was shamed and ostracized. So there is a long history. Sexism is nothing new. And actually over the 20th century, much of the world — Latin America, North America, Europe, and East Asia — have become rapidly more gender equal. So in terms of human history, the big story is the rise of gender equality in much of the world. But certainly sexism persists, and we do see in Europe, in South Korea, in China, in North America, young men expressing what we call hostile sexism. Now, it’s worth distinguishing between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.So let’s suppose I’m a patriarch in a conservative society, and I think Women are incompetent, and we don’t want to ruin their little heads, and they can’t take care of these things, so I’ll manage these things for the women who just don’t know any better. So that’s benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is a sense of resentment of women’s gains. So when we ask questions like, women’s rights are expanding at the expense of men, or women are getting these handouts, or men are the ones who are discriminated against. It’s a sense of resentment, the thing that feminism has gone too far, that women are getting all these perks, and so you know, every day as a woman, I wake up with a free fruit basket, right?Demsas: Wait, I didn’t get mine this morning. I’ll have to check in.Evans: Yeah, exactly. But this is a real, I think—so I’ve done interviews across the U. S., in Chicago and Stanford and in Montgomery, in California, in New Haven, in New York, in Toronto, in Poland, in Warsaw, in Krakow, in Barcelona, in London. And a lot of young men do feel this sense of resentment. And you can understand it. If you feel that life is hard, if you feel that you’re struggling to get ahead—so we know as college enrollment increases, it’s become really, really hard to make it into a top college place.Demsas: Let’s step back for a second, This question, though, that I have is, you’re raising this question of young men feeling this resentment. Are young men becoming more sexist? Is that what you're seeing in the data?Evans: I think it depends on how we phrase it. So, in terms of, yes, young men are much more likely to say, Yes, women could work, they can go out to clubs, they can do whatever they like, they can be totally free, and young men will support and vote for female leaders. So in terms of support for recognizing women’s capabilities, absolutely, younger generations tend to be much more gender equal, and that holds across the board. The only exceptions are places like North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia where there’s no difference between young men and their grandfathers. But in culturally liberal economically developed countries in the West and East, young men are more supportive. But, sorry, I should have been more clear, they do express this hostile sexism, so this sense of resentment that women’s rights are coming at men's expense. But that’s not all men, right? And so it’s only a small fraction of young men. You know, many young men are very, very progressive and they’ll vote for Hillary Clinton, et cetera.Demsas: I just want to drill down into what exactly we’re talking about, right? Because I think most people know there’s a gender gap between men and women, and let’s start in the American context here. People know that with Trump—you have almost 60 percent of women are supporting Biden, while a majority of men back Trump.What’s actually happening here in the U. S. context that’s new, that’s interesting, that’s driving this conversation?Evans: It’s difficult to know why people do stuff, so everything I say is speculative. What I’m trying to do is when I look at the data, I try to understand, you know, what are structural trends affecting one particular generation that distinct from other generations and why would it be happening in particular parts of the world and not others? So here are three big structural drivers that I’m not a hundred percent sure about, but I would suggest them as likely hypotheses. One is that men care about status. Everyone cares about status. Big examples of status goods include getting a great place at university, being able to afford a nice house, and also having a beautiful girlfriend. Those three things—good education because that matters for signaling for credentials; good place to live; and a pretty, pretty wife or girlfriend—those are your three status goods. Each of those three things has become much, much harder to get. So if we look, as university enrollment rises, as it has, it becomes much harder to get to the top, to get to the Ivy League, right? So only a small percentage of people will get to the top, but those getting to the Ivy League is so important for future networks. Meanwhile, those who don’t even have bachelor’s degrees will really struggle to get higher wages. So one is that men are struggling to get those top university places, which are important for jobs. Then on top of that, housing has become much more expensive. And the gap between wages and house prices has massively increased. Especially if you don’t have inherited wealth. So for the guy whose parents were not rich, it becomes so much harder to get onto the property ladder. So it’s especially hard for these young men to get status. Now, a third and really important factor is that it’s become harder to get girlfriends. So as societies become more culturally liberal, open minded, and tolerant, women are no longer shamed, derided, and ostracized for being single without a boyfriend. You know, in previous decades or centuries —Demsas: I don’t know. Some women are, some women are.Evans: Well, compare over time, over time, right? So this isn’t saying there’s zero stigma. It’s saying, Look at change over time. So in previous decades, a woman who was not married and didn’t have babies by the time she was 30 might be seen as a total loser and totally stigmatized. That’s true in South Korea, China, Japan, the U.S., and Europe. But as women are not facing that pressure and that ostracism, they can become financially independent. Women’s wages are approximating men’s. They can inherit parental wealth and buy their own property. So that means that women don’t necessarily need a man. So demand for male partners has plummeted because of that economic development and cultural liberalization. As a result, Pew data tells us that 39 percent of adult American men are currently unpartnered.Demsas: So basically you have these three buckets here that you’re talking about. You’re saying that you see this divergence with young men in particular because young men, I guess, are concerned with status in a particular way, and that the economic circumstances of our moment in time here in the U.S. have made it more difficult because of home prices, because of diverging outcomes for people with a college degree versus those without. And then finally that because of women’s increased opportunities that they’re able to actually reject men that they feel like don’t give them either economic security or the love or respect. And in previous generations, they would have had to make do because they weren’t afforded that freedom in society. Is that kind of getting at what you’re—Evans: Perfect. You’ve said it far better than me. For example, young women will say to me on dating apps, they just give up because these men are boring, right? So if a man is not charming, then what is he offering? A woman is looking for loving companionship, someone who’s fun, someone who’s nice to spend time with. But if the guy can’t offer that, then—so in turn, this is hurtful for men. Men aren’t these powerful patriarchs policing women. In fact, they’re guys with emotions who—and nobody wants to be ghosted, to be rejected, to feel unwanted. So if men go on these dating apps and they’re not getting any likes, and even if they speak to her when she doesn’t have the time of day, it just bruises and grates at your ego, your sense of worth. And so then, men may turn to podcasts or YouTube, and if you look at that manosphere, if you look at what people are talking about, it’s often dating. And so they’re often saying, Oh, women have become so greedy. They’re so materialistic. We see this vilification of women. So that kind of filter bubble, once you self-select into it, you become surrounded by this sense of righteous resentment and, oh, you know, It’s not your fault for lack of studying in schools, it’s women are getting all this positive discrimination. Women are getting all these benefits, you know, every, all these companies are hiring women because they feel they have to, because that’s woke nowadays. So if you hear all that kind of angry discourse, and the same goes in South Korea where I was earlier this year. There is a sexist, discriminatory law which mandates that men have to go into military conscription. And that’s terrible, it’s very abusive, it’s hierarchical, it’s unpleasant, lots of men commit suicide, and that is now increasingly used as a way of signaling that life is very unfair for men. And so men are facing a tough time, and then social media, which they’re self selecting into, can reinforce the legitimacy of that.Demsas: So I’m glad you broadened this out of the U.S. context because I think that while you’ve told a story that I think is familiar to a lot of people hearing this podcast here in the U. S., this is not just happening here. There is this really interesting study by some Swedish political scientists where they look at 32,000 people across 27 countries in the EU, and they’re finding that young men are particularly likely to see advances in women’s rights as a threat to men’s opportunities, right? So similar to what you. And it’s interesting ‘cause it’s compared to older men, right? Like, the group that expresses most opposition to women’s rights are young men while women across all age cohorts show very low levels of opposition to women’s rights. And older men seem indistinguishable often in their peer groups to women their age. And young men really jump out there. And they offer a couple of explanations to that. They say that it’s about whether or not young men feel the institutions in their area are fair or discriminatory. And they say that if there is, you know, downturns in the economy, that that makes young men even more likely to express hostility, this sort of hostile sexism you’re talking about towards women. But why is that affecting young men differently than it’s affecting their older male counterparts?Evans: Right, great question. And also I was just looking at work by Lisa Blaydes finding that young men in Qatar are most opposed to women in the workforce. And I think it could be this heightened sense of competition. So now, women are outpacing men in terms of education. So they’re a real threat in terms of competition for top jobs, which is also so important for housing. So I think that the competition, right? So if you care about status, if you care about getting to the top, the competition is fiercest now.Demsas: But aren’t middle-aged men also in competition with women for jobs? You know, 25 doesn’t mean you stop having competition in the labor market. I mean, 30 year old men, 40 year old men, 50 year old men, all these men are still working.Evans: Right, absolutely, but we now see so many more women who are educated and ready and eager to go into the workforce and aiming for those top jobs with high aspiration and also getting those very top jobs is very important in order to afford decent housing.Demsas: Gotcha.Evans: Right, so when people say, Oh, you know, Gen Z have it better than ever because they’ve got higher wages, what we need to think about is people care about status. So they care about their place in the pecking order.Demsas: And so it’s like if you’re an older man living in an EU country, right? You may see young women now entering the labor force, but, on mass, they’re often not in direct competition for your job. So you feel maybe a benevolent sexism towards them, but you don’t feel this potential zero-sum mindset. And also, maybe you’ve already bought into the market, so you didn’t experience this runup in housing prices in the same way before you were able to buy a home. So that’s kind of what differentiates these groups?Evans: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I totally agree. I think housing is really hitting young people. And if you look in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders did very well. And he was really campaigning, focusing on young people and their concerns about housing, right? So this is a major, major issue that young people just cannot—so many people in their 20s and even 30s in Europe are still sharing with roommates, right? So they just feel trapped. You’re still in this limbo. You can’t afford your own place. That hits people hard, especially as it then worsens their prospects in dating and marriage, right? So it’s harder to date. If you’re still living with roommates, you’ve got less to offer, so I just think it hits men multiple times, just feeling—no one wants to feel like a loser, right? So anything that makes you feel like you’re not doing so well. So if we see a rise in inequality, a rise in income inequality, a rise in housing inequality, that in turn affects your ability to date, especially as demand for men goes down.Demsas: But what’s also happening in a lot of these countries, at least in the U.S. context, right, is that it’s not just that men are sort of reacting to these economic circumstances. It’s also that women are becoming more progressive over time. So is it an interaction between those things that’s maybe driving this gender divergence? Or how much of it is just that men are getting more conservative versus women are also getting more progressive?Evans: Okay, excellent. I want to make two more points. One is that there’s been some nice research about women becoming more progressive. I think that might affect men’s conservatism in two ways. There’s nice research in Spain showing that after the 2018 Women’s March, then there was a rise in hostile sexism, which in turn led to more votes for the far-right party Vox. So that’s a sense of patriarchal backlash. Also, if we look at the data on men becoming more conservative in South Korea, it exactly precisely times #MeToo. So in South Korea—which is a society which idealizes collective harmony, but there’s also been a lot of spycams and sexual harassment and covert pornography—women organized in backlash. They organized for an end to impunity. Thousands and thousands of women marched and mobilized. But that triggered a lot of a reactionary movement of male solidarity, male hostile sexism. So in both Spain and South Korea, it’s women’s mobilization, women becoming more progressive and outwardly saying, We don’t want to tolerate this. We won’t tolerate this anymore. This led to hostile sexism, which in turn, many politicians have mobilized, have used and marshaled for their gains. So in Spain, the Vox party has often said, Well, you know, there are these cases of false accusations. In South Korea too, the president was actually elected on a wave of hostile sexism. He was campaigning to abolish the gender ministry. He was sort of an anti-feminist president.Also, there’s very nice research by Jay Van Bavel and others, and they show that on social media, it tends to be the most extreme groups that are the most vocal. So if you imagine a distribution of people, people at the 5 percent of either end—the two poles—they’re the ones who shout the loudest. And so if you imagine there’s this very, very extremist feminist person shouting loudly, that person may then get parroted by the right wing media and say, Oh, this is what feminists think. And that can accentuate the backlash. So even though the vast majority of women are much more moderate, much more in the middle, the ones who shout the loudest may then trigger that backlash effect. The most extreme feminist views can trigger a backlash against feminism, even if most women really aren’t on board with those ideas, so I think there’s a social media effect.Demsas: You’ve identified three large ways that these divides between young men and women are growing. You talk about this and a high-unemployment or low-growth trap, that young men might be feeling more viscerally than young women because of their expectations around status. You talk about—Evans: Wait, wait, wait. Let me clarify. So in the U. S., you don’t have high unemployment, but you do have that status inequality.Demsas: Yeah.Evans: So that resembles—sorry, I should just clarify that. So it can work. As long as you’ve got inequality, then you’re going to have this sense of resentment. I really think it’s inevitable.Demsas: No, I think that’s a great point because I was literally just going to ask you right then just, you know, U.S. has extremely low unemployment right now and you see varying amounts of economic cases across the EU and the world.And you’re going from South Korea where you have also really great economic circumstances all the way to countries like Indonesia where things look very different. And so I think that that’s a really helpful corrective. But I want to zero in on these two other things that you were just talking about. But let’s just start with the social media bubbles, right? Because I find this interesting that, if you were to ask me before I’d looked into any of this, whether social media would make you have to hear from and interact with people more different than who you are versus people who are similar to you, I would’ve thought, Yeah, I can’t really control the next tweet that my algorithm shows me if I’m on Tumblr in high school and I’m looking through different blogs. I don’t really know the genders of people immediately when those things pop up on my page. So I feel like it would be a way of actually facilitating a ton of information across genders, right? But what you say is that social media actually allows for you to create these bubbles, and that it creates this feedback loop for people who are young women who are to become more liberal and young men to become more regressive. I mean, you use this term called manosphere earlier. Can you talk a little bit about what that is? What's actually happening there?Evans: Yes, absolutely. But first, before we get to social media, I think it’s important to recognize that this is part of a broader process of culture where there are many kinds of filter bubbles. So as women have forged careers and become journalists, podcasters, writers, screenwriters, they have championed their ideals of empathy and tolerance and equality. And then on top of that, David Rozado shows that over the 2010s, media increasingly reported more attention to sexism, more attention to racism. So people are becoming more aware of the sense of unfairness and inequalities. On top of that, the social media companies, they want to keep their users hooked. And they do this by making their apps enjoyable and addictive, so they provide content that they think you will like, that your friends and peers also liked. They think that they show things similar to what you’ve already liked, and they also might show sensational content. But the more that they send you things similar to what you’ve already liked, then you become cocooned in this echo chamber of groupthink whereby everyone is agreeing with you. So even if there are these structural economic drivers that push men to become more attuned or sympathetic to Andrew Tate, we then get these echo chambers whereby that’s all you’re hearing.Demsas: But when you describe the media environment, that’s just one way that people engage in social media, but when you’re thinking about your algorithm, like I said, aren’t there tons of ways then that social media has actually broken that? Because now, you go on your Twitter and yeah, your algorithm may push you more towards certain kinds of content, but it also opens you up to very different views. And the reason I’m asking this is because one of the biggest theories about how people break down prejudice is this thing called contact theory, where you come into contact with individuals of a group that you have prejudice against, and then as you see, Oh, this is just a person just like me, you end up breaking down a lot of your prejudices because they become beaten by reality. So why doesn’t that happen? Why don't you see that sort of interaction happening on social media?Evans: I think that’s a theoretical possibility of the internet, but in reality, people are much more tribal. They gravitate towards things that they like, towards things that they already know, towards things that already make them feel comfortable. People are incredibly—they do so many things on trust, like, Oh, is this someone I know? Okay, I’ll trust them and listen to them. Is this person part of my group? And I think in America, particularly, you see that ideological polarization. If you’re told that, Oh, the Democrats support this, and you’re a Democrat, people tend to support it. So I think a lot of things are done on a very tribal, trusting basis, and although you and I might idealize a fantasy internet where people mix and mingle and learn from diversity, in truth, people tend to gravitate towards their group.Demsas: Yeah, for me I diverge a little bit. I think that it’s maybe different for different folks. I mean, this is why, as you said earlier, while you do see young men sort of diverging, as expressing more sexist attitudes, that’s just a portion of young men, right? That’s, as you said, it’s not every single young man. And I would have to think that a lot of them are actually coming into contact with some of these conversations that are happening cross gender, cross ideology, whether it’s online or it’s in their school, in school or whatever it is.Evans: Okay, excellent, so we know that young people spend a huge amount of their time on their phones—maybe five hours—and a lot of these YouTube shorts or TikToks are very, very short. They could be 30 seconds. They could be a minute. That’s not enough time to cultivate empathy, to understand someone’s particular predicament, why they made those choices and the difficulties of their life. So and then if it’s too short to build empathy, then you’re just going to stick with your priors. So, social psychologists talk about confirmation bias, that we tend to pay more attention to information that fits with our priors. So we seek out information that already fits with our priors, we ignore disconfirming evidence. So on social media where you’re getting all this short information, you’re just looking for things that are nice, that make you feel comfortable.Demsas: But, you know, one question I actually had for me, that’s part of this is there’s this concept called group threat theory, right? Where you think about someone else as being the cause of your—some other group as being the cause of your misfortune. And identifying who that group is, though, is not just natural, right? That doesn’t happen out of the ether. Because, you know, young men could be experiencing this sort of status threat, they could see this widening inequality, and they don’t have to turn against women, right? They could say instead, Actually, the problem is, you know, Catholics, or, The problem is whatever, you know, people from Namibia, whatever it is. And then you can just create these groups. So it seems like a lot of your argumentation around this has been around looking at cultural entrepreneurs who weaponize these moments to point you at a group. Can you tell us, what’s a cultural entrepreneur? What are they doing?Evans: So this has existed throughout history. You know, there was a Mamluk Sultan of Egypt called Barsbay. And after the price of bread went up, uh, he blamed it on the women. And he said it was women were responsible for creating public discord. And he banished them back to their homes. And so, you know, women were to blame for all these terrible things that have happened. So throughout history, if you have a vulnerable group that cannot protect itself, it might be blamed, you know, similarly in the count, in the struggle between Protestants and Catholics, then priests would vilify women and identify witches to prove their superior power to vanquish the devil. Right? So if there is this small isolated group that is less powerful, you can vilify them. And so we see that in regards, you know, xenophobia, Islamophobia in India, right? The BJP being anti-Muslim. We see it in every single society, but it’s just a cultural innovation, which group is going to be blamed. But I think—and so people like podcasters might vilify women as getting these handouts, or they might vilify Ukrainian refugees as getting these handouts in Poland, or it’s these migrants at the border that are causing all these sorts of problems. So it’s someone—rather than, you know, a financial entrepreneur is one who looks at the market and thinks, Hey, I’m going to exploit this opportunity and make some money, a cultural entrepreneur is someone who says, Hey, I’m seeing this sea of discontent. I’m going to rise up, build a following, and possibly make money, but also get social respect, etcetera.Demsas: So these cultural entrepreneurs have a lot of power, right? It’s really contingent on who ends up being more persuasive, who ends up making either the best arguments or swaying the most people over onto their side because they’re charismatic. And one thing that’s been really interesting to me is it’s possible that men could feel like women are an asset, that the fact that they can work wage-paying jobs is an asset to them when there’s an economic downturn. Like, Great. It’s not just my brothers or my dad or my sons that can help me. Now my wife, my daughter, my sisters can help if there’s a problem, too. And I wonder if this also plays into why it’s younger men that are actually the ones that end up being more hostile towards women’s advancing rights because they’re less likely to be partnered already. So why isn’t it that you don’t see actually greater excitement that women can actually be helping bring in money in this context?Evans: Okay, so that’s a great point, a plausible argument, but I think in previous generations, the younger, unpartnered men might still support this, be less likely to endorse hostile sexism. Maybe because they thought they were going to do better in the labor market. Now, I think an extra factor that’s happening right now that’s really important for explaining this, in terms of statistics: One, it is the women who are the major competition in employment because they’re super, super educated, often more educated than men. Two, these heterosexual men wanting girlfriends. So the people who are rejecting them, the people who they think are snubbing them are literally women. So I think there is a direct confrontation, so I think the idea of scapegoating and vilifying women is inevitable because of that competition of the sexes, so to speak. That said, there’s this nice draft by Thomas Piketty, the scholar of inequality, showing that richer, super educated men are much more likely to vote Democrat. So, when men can achieve these super high salaries, right, those men are super secure, so they don’t have that status competition. Now, I think that the point you made about relationships is really important and—Demsas: Yeah, because I was just going to think, Is it just about dating? How much of this is just if you were partnered, then basically you don’t feel this way?Evans: Yeah, I think that’s great. So there’s this very nice paper showing that fathers of daughters were less likely to interrupt Janet Yellen in her congressional hearings. So if you want the best for your daughter and you aspire for her to do well, and then you empathize with women’s concerns, and maybe you’re less of a dickhead, right, in public life. So I certainly see that can happening. But I still think if we look back at the historical record, there are plenty of cases where men might support their wives working, but still be pretty hostile in general. So we go back to the guilds in medieval Europe. A man and a wife might collaborate together. He might bequeath his estate to her, but European guilds that’s a proto-trade union, they might exclude women because they wanted to preserve and monopolize their benefits. The same goes for trade unions in the 19th and early 20th century—very, very sexist. So sadly, I don’t think—that doesn’t seem from the family, from the historical record, that just having a relationship will necessarily mean a benign attitude to women in general.[Music]Demsas: We’re going to take a quick break. More with Alice when we get back.[Break]Demsas: All this gets me thinking, you know, a lot of the explanations are, you know, they’re structural in that they would happen to like basically every generation of young men, obviously, social media is a bit different, but other than that, you would see this in the past, as well, and so my question for you is—we see right now that a lot of people are talking about this potential threat of the great gender divergence between women and young women and men in politics. And I wonder, would young men always have been relatively more zero-sum in their thinking with young women? Even in past generations, we just don’t have the data to compare.Evans: Okay, so let me say three things. First of all, it’s now that we see this rise of men being unpartnered. So previously the Pew data was showing a far smaller fraction of men were unpartnered. So previously, when women were culturally compelled to marry, you know, when it was just a normal thing to get married and have babies before you are 30, then you’re going to have more demand for men. So the mediocre man was going to do okay with the ladies. So he wasn’t getting those constant rejections and ghosting which grates at the male ego. So today is very, very different in terms of men’s difficulty of getting, you know, all these things, all these things that I’m talking about, uh, are big structural changes, the difficulty of getting to a top university, the difficulty of getting a decent housing in cities, especially the difficulty of getting a pretty girlfriend or a girlfriend at all, all those things are much, much harder for, say, the median guy. The median guy is struggling to get status, and that’s happening now.Demsas: So one of the things I think is interesting about this phenomenon is that you’re doing a lot of work that looks at what’s happening with young men and women’s attitudes, not just in the U.S. or the U.K., but you’re also looking across a bunch of contexts. So I want to go into a couple different countries to see how these trends are actually playing out given the cultural context that exists there. So, firstly, can you take us to Qatar? And I’m interested in Qatar because it’s a highly developed nation, right? This is not a poor country by any means. So tell us what’s going on there. Why do we see this sort of divergence between young men and women?Evans: Yeah, this is super fascinating, right? I’ve never been to Qatar, so I am cautious here. But piecing together other materials that I’ve read about the existing published literature: One, I think it’s important to recognize it’s a hugely unequal society. So, even if everyone’s incomes are high, people still care about that place and their pecking order. Second, on social media, I think social media can even amplify people’s perceptions of inequality because the kind of stuff that goes viral—and this goes for both pretty women and successful men—are the superstars, right? So, it’s the beautiful, beautiful women who get thousands and thousands of likes and then trigger anxiety amongst other women. And similarly for men in Qatar, it’s the Sheikhs, the rulers, the crown princes who show off their Lamborghinis and Porsches that are worth several million dollars. And so this sense of, I want to be at the top—because being at the top of society brings status, it brings social respect, it brings prestige, it brings admiration. Other people admire you if you’re doing well compared to others. So, in Qatar, women are now super, super educated, the younger generation of women really want to work, and I think it’s possible that they present a challenge to young men. And what’s really, really fascinating is when I look at data on maths and reading, we see women in Qatar are far outpacing men. It’s not just that they’re more likely to be university educated, but their maths scores are off the board, off the chart. So the gender gap in terms of competence is astronomical.Demsas: I wanted us to move to a different part of the world. I wanted to move us to Indonesia, and the reason I want to talk about Indonesia is, you know, I remember in 2010 when then-President Barack Obama went to Indonesia and hailed it as this example of a democratic, multi-ethnic, multi-racial society. Particularly at a time where he was trying to tamp down on xenophobia and anti-Muslim behavior or anti-Muslim attitudes in the West and in the U.S. after 2001 and the 9/11 attacks. And so, I was really interested because what ends up happening in the subsequent years is that Indonesia really turns against this example. And you end up seeing that a lot of people, democratically, are wanting actually many more illiberal things. And you actually see young men and young women increasingly pushing towards regressive values, particularly on gender. And so you wrote about this, and you wrote about this survey that the Indonesian government did in 2019. And I want to just talk about this a bit, because I think it speaks to how it’s not just men that reinforce patriarchal attitudes, so that women can have a role in enforcing those as well.In this 2019 government survey of Indonesian women, they’re looking at 15- to 19-year-old girls, right? And they ask them, When is it justified for a husband to hit or beat his wife? They ask, Is it when she burns his food, when she argues with him, when she goes out without telling him, when she neglects his kids, when she refuses to have sex with him? They tallied up all of those things, and amongst 15- to 19-year-old girls, over 40 percent of them agreed with at least one of those as a justification for domestic violence. And then you look up the age groups, you look at 20 to 24, you look at 25 to 29, you look at 45 to 49, no one is above 40 percent. At 45 to 49, it’s actually only 27 percent agree with at least one of those things. What’s going on there? Why are young women in this context maybe turning against women's rights in contrast with their older peers?Evans: I was actually listening to Barack Obama’s speech in Indonesia the other day. And he quoted the Indonesian national motto, which is like, Unity in diversity. And it's always had this big history of celebrating their diversity. But what we’ve seen over the past 20 years in Indonesia, and actually in many Muslim countries across the world, is many people increasingly embracing a very strict Salafist interpretation of Islam and adopting very strict ideas of gender segregation and female seclusion, and men and women keeping their distance from each other. And so many people are—so I think what’s caused that? One is: Saudi Arabia has become rich on the back of Western and global demand for oil, and that has enabled it to export these Salafist ideologies through investing in mosques, madrassas.Demsas: And what’s a madrasa?Evans: A madrasa is an Islamic school, so you learn about the Prophet, you learn about Sharia law, you also learn about gender segregation—the idea that a modest woman, a good woman, will stay away from men, and she will not laugh, chat, and socialize with them. And that sexes should keep their distance from each other. And one possible reason—even in urban areas, girls are more likely to go to these Islamic educational institutions—and one possibility is that, as men become more religious, they want religious wives. They want wives who will be obedient. In Islam, it says that a wife should obey her husband, 93 percent of Indonesian Muslims say that the wife should obey her husband. And so one: Saudi Arabia funding madrassas. Also: religious righteousness gives people, especially struggling people, a sense of self-worth by doing God’s work. By making these anti-blasphemy accusations, you’ve got moral dignity, you’ve got status, people care about status. And then, as people become more religious, political parties and campaign movements gain votes by courting these preferences. So across Indonesia, in many of the different regions, more schools and more political parties have made laws against blasphemy, mandated hijab laws. There’s been persecution of minorities, and we see this right up until government level and, you know, criminalization of blasphemy being strengthened. So when people say, Oh, it’s a terrible thing, the sexes coming apart. I would say that’s descriptively true, but it’s distinct to economically developed and culturally liberal countries. And when you say it’s a terrible thing, just consider the alternative: what’s happening in many other parts of the world where people think the same thing and sing from the same hymn sheet as they did in the past in the UK and the U.S.Demsas: One last place I want to take us is a place you’ve mentioned a couple times: South Korea. And the reason I want to ask you about this is because South Korea has the distinction of seeing the lowest fertility rates in the world. Since 2013, they’ve been below everyone else, and right now they’re at 0.72 births per woman, which is really, really low. I wanted to ask if that’s the effect that we might expect to see, because South Korea is a place that’s a highly developed nation, a very rich nation, and at the same time, you see this massive divergence between young men and young women, and I’m wondering is that something that you would expect to see in other nations, if you see this persistence and divergence between young men and women?Evans: I will say two things. First, on South Korea’s plummeting fertility, I think there are several drivers. First and foremost, the lowest fertility and the most likely to be childless is the poorest South Koreans. So, there’s a great paper by Michèle Tertilt and others, and they highlight the importance of status. And the idea is that South Koreans really care about education. They want their kids to do really well, to get into the top universities—we call them SKY—so they invest enormous amounts in their education, but the poor cannot keep up with the spending of the rich. So maybe you only have one kid, right? You can’t have two kids and educate them well, so that’s one thing, the status competition makes it more exhausting and laborious to have a kid. Secondly, certainly, I think it’s true that as there’s cultural liberalization and people are no longer socially punished if they don’t have a kid, then they can just do their own thing. They can do whatever they like. So for example, when I’m in Zambia or Uzbekistan, the first two questions people will say to me is, Are you married? Do you have kids? And the correct answer is always supposed to be yes, right? But no one in the U. S. will ask me that question. No one has introduced themselves to me saying, Hi, are you married? Do you have kids? No one says that. The way I’m received varies enormously. And so people’s priorities—when I go to conservative countries—people’s priorities, how they want to understand me as a person, first and foremost: Married and kids? Yes or no? So that’s the second mechanism: the less pressure to give birth and have children. And then thirdly, we do see in South Korea many young women saying, Hey, I just don’t want this. I don’t want to be in the same position of my mother who, for Lunar New Year, would have to be the dutiful daughter-in-law serving the husband’s family, doing all the cooking, and not being recognized and rewarded. So: staying single and not wanting to have kids. So for all those three reasons—status, competition, cultural liberalism, and the ideological polarization between young men and women—we might see a fall in fertility, but those three things seem structural and difficult to change. And so I think for those three reasons, you might expect fertility to continue to fall.Demsas: Well, just so that we don’t leave everyone on the most depressing note possible, I’m wondering, you know, it seems like there’s a lot of malleability and the direction towards making society less gender egalitarian, but that should mean that you could also do the opposite, right? So, what can countries or people do about this? Like, in the 20th century, I imagine there were also a lot of cultural entrepreneurs—whether it’s on TV or the suffragettes or individuals who were, you know, just in daily life really pushing towards a more egalitarian culture. Is that what we need to see now, or are there other things that countries can do to ameliorate the backlash effects that young men are displaying?Evans: Okay, great. So I maybe sound a little bit Marxian now. I think if you buy my hypothesis that part of this is all about status competition, then one possible mechanism is to reduce that status inequality. So for example, by radically increasing the supply of housing, it’s easier for men to be doing as well as their peers. Right, in both Europe and the US there are a lot of NIMBY restrictions on where you can build and that raises the price of housing. So if housing was cheaper and more affordable and more within reach of young people, then young people would be doing comparably. You wouldn’t have that massive status competition. I think also what’s really important is going back to your point about cultivating empathy and understanding different people’s concerns and perspectives, and that happens through meeting in person. It does not happen through these 30-second TikToks. And so in England, many schools have banned mobile phones. And I think that’s a way, and I think the upside of that is that people will be more present on their interaction with their peers in that classroom. And that’s clearly a collective action problem that Haidt has shown in his new book, you know, no parent wants—Demsas: Jonathan Haidt.Evans: Yeah, exactly. No parent wants to do it alone because then their kid is out of the loop. But if everyone is doing it—so I think getting people off their phones and into in-person interactions, you know, hanging out at parties. You know, when I was a teenager, I was always hosting these garage parties. My mother was always away at work and so I was always hosting these garage parties, and people coming over to my house to play Nintendo and, you know—Demsas: Now, you’d get in trouble for leaving, like, tools hanging up around children.Evans: I lived a naughty life. I lived in the English countryside, so we had a big treehouse and all sorts of naughty things going on. But anyway, less of my naughtiness, but yes, people interacting in person is really important, going back to the contact hypothesis and building empathy. And then we can also think about these algorithms. So if it’s the case that corporate algorithms are creating a skewed sense of what people see, and creating an unrealistic depiction of social life, then that’s something we could regulate, as we might regulate other areas. So I think those would be the three things for me: the reducing the status competition by boosting the supply of housing, encouraging empathy with more personal interactions by getting kids off their phones, and also thinking about how do you change the algorithm so that people don’t see this distorted sense of humanity, which is just making them think that other people are crazy, when actually, most people are pretty moderate and towards the middle.Demsas: Well, you were really speaking my language when it comes to housing, so don’t—I have no objections there. Always our final question: What’s an idea that you felt was good on paper, but didn't pan out in real life?Evans: Oh my god, so much of my life, so much of my life. I mean, how many Alice Evans stories do you want? I travel the world, so this is like everything I do. I can tell you stories from the Democratic Republic of Congo when things went awry, or I can tell you about me being punched in the face in Mexico.Demsas: Let’s do punched in the face in Mexico. Let’s do that one.Evans: [Laughs] So I was — this was last year — I was in Oaxaca, and it was going really well. I was going into these little villages and towns with my iPhone, and I was using Microsoft Translate, and I was having these fantastic conversations with indigenous people. It was tremendous. And everyone was super, super kind and wonderful. And then a guy, in the favela, tried to wrestle me for my phone. Now, the sensible thing would just be to hand over my phone, but I did not do that. For some reason, I decided to wrestle him. And so he kept grabbing at my phone and I did not let him have it. And then what happened is—this is a true story, true story—he threw me to the ground, my head slammed back down on the stone—Demsas: Oh my God.Evans: Yeah. True story. And then he got on top of me and punched me in the face, right smack between the eyes on my nose. And what I do is I kick back, double legs in his stomach, propelling him off two meters. Then what happens is he—shocked by this—he goes into his pocket, he grabs a large knife, and what I do? I do a Lara Croft roly poly, spinning off to the side. I then jump up, and then he wrestles me again with the knife. And so it's at this point that I think, I’m not going to out-fight a man with a knife who does not care at all about my welfare. So at this point, I hand over the phone, and I sprint, and I'm bleeding, and I'm covered in blood. Yeah, that is something that had not gone to plan. Getting punched in the face was not on the agenda.Demsas: Not good on paper. I mean, it's just interesting. You said, you know, smartphones—I guess they really, really can cause large harms in society.Evans: Yeah, we need to be careful about the smartphones and also the idiots that carry them.[Music]Demsas: Well, Alice Evans, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We're so excited to have you, and we hope to have you back soon.Evans: Thank you. This has been a pleasure. You're very kind. Thank you.Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Or share it with two friends who you think might like it, as well.I’m Jerusalem Demsas and we’ll see you next week.[Music]Demsas: Great.Evans: We’re culture entrepreneuring right nowDemsas: We’re culture entrepreneuring right now! That’s the whole podcast.Evans: (Laughs)theatlantic.com
-
A Spray of Glowing Filaments NASA, ESA, M. Stute, M. Karovska, D. de Martin, and M. ZamaniDay 23 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: a spray of glowing filaments. R Aquarii is a symbiotic binary star that lies roughly 700 light-years from Earth, surrounded by a large, dynamic nebula. The primary star is an aging red giant, and its companion is a compact, burned-out star known as a white dwarf. When the white dwarf swings closest to the red giant along its 44-year orbital period, it gravitationally siphons off hydrogen gas. This material accumulates in the accretion disk surrounding the white dwarf, until it undergoes an energetic outburst and jet ejection. This outburst ejects powerful jets, seen as filaments shooting out from the binary system, forming loops and trails as the plasma emerges in streamers.See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.theatlantic.com
-
Dear Therapist: My Mom Is Guilt-Tripping My Boyfriend Dear Therapist,This holiday season, I’ve been navigating some major challenges with my older sister and my boyfriend. The difficulty started last winter, when my boyfriend wanted to buy an investment property in the state where I’m from and my sister currently resides. My sister became very upset with me and my boyfriend for investing in a place where she lives. We received angry phone calls and disparaging text messages from her. We were shocked at her response. I have yet to make up with my sister as she never apologized, but I have been cordial with her when around the rest of our family.Recently, my sister told our immediate family that she was pregnant. She had previously had two miscarriages, so we were all quite excited. While my boyfriend and I were visiting home, he asked my parents if my sister had told our extended family about her pregnancy. Unfortunately, he was overheard by one of my aunts. We immediately requested that she keep mum, and my aunt never told anyone. But when my sister shared her news with the wider family, this aunt mentioned that she’d already known because she had heard my boyfriend mentioning it to my mom. This resulted in angry text messages from my sister about me “taking her thunder” for this announcement.I’ve since blocked her on text and social media, but as we head into the holiday season, I’m unsure what to do. My mom is guilting me about my boyfriend not spending the holidays with us, but he doesn’t feel comfortable around my sister.I would love your thoughts on how to deal with this situation without making it worse, while also protecting myself and my partner from unwanted hatred from my sister.Dear Reader,Feeling caught between family loyalty and your relationship with your boyfriend is a challenging position to navigate, especially during the holidays. You’re being pulled between your mother’s desire for family harmony, your sister’s emotional demands, and your boyfriend’s legitimate need for respect. This kind of triangulation is exhausting and can lead to resentment on all sides. The key is to stop trying to be the mediator and focus on transparency with all parties—and then directly communicate what kinds of requests you’re willing (or not) to meet.To help you figure out the limits you’d like to set, you’ll need to consider the family dynamics underlying the recent tension. What stands out in your letter is how quickly a series of relatively minor incidents escalated into a profound family rift. You say that this conflict “started last winter” with the real-estate investment, but such intense reactions rarely emerge out of nowhere. The vehemence of your sister’s response to an investment you and your boyfriend made suggests that she struggles with unspoken feelings, possibly around sibling envy or competition or perceived abandonment as you spend time with your boyfriend. Sometimes it’s safer to get angry indirectly—in other words, to direct your anger at someone adjacent to the person you’re actually angry with. Your sister appears to be channeling her feelings toward you into conflicts with your boyfriend, perhaps because at this point in her life, she sees your happiness while she feels unimportant, invisible, or overshadowed.I see this too in her reaction to the pregnancy announcement: She felt that you were stealing her thunder. Of course, for someone who has experienced the pain of two miscarriages, controlling the narrative around a successful pregnancy might feel like one of the few aspects she owns on an otherwise uncertain journey. Even so, your boyfriend didn’t intend for others to hear his question, and you took immediate steps to contain the information—so the fact that your sister hasn’t realized that her reaction was disproportionate to the harm and has made no attempts to apologize for her outburst indicates that deeper sibling wounds are at play.[Read: Couples therapy, but for siblings]Meanwhile, your mom is playing an unhelpful role by asking you to make things right despite the way you’ve been treated. Sometimes well-meaning parents try to alleviate sibling tension by encouraging one sibling to take what they see as the smoothest path to ending disharmony without holding the other sibling responsible for her part in creating it. The thinking goes: It’s easier to pressure the more reasonable and adaptable party to accommodate the difficult one than to address the underlying problematic behavior. Your mother might believe she’s promoting family harmony, but in reality, she’s enabling your sister’s behavior while unfairly burdening you with the responsibility for maintaining family relationships.Your boyfriend, for his part, is entering this family system as an outsider. But if your relationship with him continues to grow, he will become part of your family—and these early patterns of interaction could set the tone for years to come. Your boyfriend’s desire to avoid the holiday gatherings is understandable, but it’s worth considering the long-term implications of this decision. Complete avoidance, while providing temporary reprieve from conflict, might inadvertently cement a rift with your family and make future reconciliation more difficult.With this context in mind, let’s consider what you might do.First, with regard to your sister, I encourage you to shift your perspective from “protecting myself and my partner from unwanted hatred” to “understanding and potentially healing a wounded relationship.” This doesn’t mean enduring abuse; instead, it’s about getting to the core of what’s causing it with the hopes of eliminating it. Being “cordial when around family” and blocking communications might reduce immediate stress, but something else needs real attention. Neither you nor your sister has created space for the difficult but necessary conversation about what’s really going on here. Your sister hasn’t apologized or explained her intense reactions, and you haven’t had the opportunity to express how her behavior has affected you and your relationship with your boyfriend. This pattern of avoidance—managing surface interactions while letting the underlying tensions simmer—can lead to exactly what you’re seeing: Each new incident becomes charged with the accumulated weight of unresolved feelings. Until both you and your sister are willing to have an honest, potentially uncomfortable conversation about your relationship, these cycles of conflict will likely continue to escalate.[Read: What if you just skipped the holidays?]Consider writing your sister an email that acknowledges her feelings without accepting blame for perceived wrongs. You might say something like “I miss our relationship, and I know that you’ve been feeling hurt. I’m sorry that recent events have created such distance between us. I’m truly thrilled about your pregnancy, and I think these times of transition present an opportunity to bring people closer. I’m hoping we can find a way forward by having a conversation that feels safe and respectful for both of us, with the goal of understanding what’s bothering each of us.”If she’s willing to do this, you can start the conversation by expressing your genuine interest in repairing the relationship: “I’ve been surprised by what’s been happening between us. I want to understand more about what’s upsetting you in our relationship, and I hope you’ll try to understand how I’ve been feeling too, so we can clear the air and communicate more calmly and openly in the future.”To your mother, you might say: “Mom, I understand you want everyone together for the holidays, but right now that would create more tension than joy. I know you’d like me to fix this, but this is about something going on between me and my sister—not my boyfriend, not you—so the most helpful thing you can do is to let both of your daughters try to work this out as the adults that we are, no matter what choice gets made this holiday season and no matter what our relationship looks like going forward.”You can then talk to your boyfriend about how he envisions his relationship with your family, and what steps he feels comfortable taking now to work toward that vision. Perhaps he would feel comfortable attending part of the holiday gathering for a limited time, or participating in some family events but not others. Often, small, manageable steps toward engagement are more sustainable than either total avoidance or forced togetherness, and taking these steps would demonstrate a willingness to engage with the family while still maintaining healthy boundaries that work for him. Remind him that your goal is to support his decisions about maintaining his own limits while ensuring that your relationship with him doesn’t become collateral damage in this family conflict.Remember that you can’t control anyone’s behavior, but you can control your response to it. If your sister isn’t willing to engage respectfully, you can leave the door open: “I care about you, but I won’t accept hostile messages about me or my boyfriend. I’m happy to have a calm conversation about our relationship when you’re ready.” If your mom continues to guilt-trip you about your boyfriend, you can say, “I know it’s hard to see your daughters not getting along, but I’m done discussing this. Please don’t bring this up again.”By having these conversations directly with each party, you release yourself of the burden of being assigned to single-handedly fix a complicated family dynamic and allow yourself to focus on a more reachable and healthy goal: making clear, thoughtful decisions that are in the best interest of your relationship with both your family and your boyfriend, even if they disappoint some people in the short term.Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.theatlantic.com
-
Best of How To: Identify What You Enjoy Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket CastsThis episode, from our first season, called How to Build a Happy Life, features host Arthur Brooks in conversation with the psychotherapist and Atlantic contributing writer Lori Gottlieb about how the first step in making room for more joy in your life is learning how to identify it.The following is a transcript of the episode:[Music]Megan Garber: Hey, it’s Megan Garber, one of the co-hosts of How to Know What’s Real. We’re excited to share with you a special series drawn from past seasons of the How To series. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been revisiting episodes around the theme of winding down. This episode is from our very first season, How to Build a Happy Life, and is called “How to Identify What You Enjoy.” It first published in 2021 during the pandemic, even though that was a really challenging time. This is still one of my favorite episodes to this day. Host Arthur Brooks explores how the first step in making room for more joy in your life is learning how to identify it.[Music]Brooks: This is How to Build a Happy Life, The Atlantic’s podcast on all things happiness. I’m Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and happiness correspondent at The Atlantic. In this special bonus episode of the How to Build a Happy Life series, I sat down with The Atlantic’sown Lori Gottlieb. We reviewed a lot of what we’ve covered in this series, from enjoyment and emotional management to the practical ways to apply the science of happiness to our daily lives. Enjoy!Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Atlantic Festival. I’m really delighted because this episode of the podcast, it features one of the top psychotherapists in America today, The Atlantic’s Lori Gottlieb. We’re going to talk through some of the how-tos of navigating the natural ups and downs in life. And later in the episode, we’re going to feature some of my very favorite guest stars, which is you, our listeners.So let’s start by saying hi to Lori. Welcome to How to Build a Happy Life, Lori.Lori Gottlieb: Well, thank you so much. It’s great to be here.Brooks: Yeah, it’s wonderful to have you here.I’ve been looking forward to working with you in some way for the longest time. I teach a class at Harvard Business School called Leadership and Happiness, and on the first day of class, I define happiness. Now, most of my students think happiness is a feeling. That’s wrong. I mean, happiness has a lot of feelings attached to it, and feelings are really important. But it’s not a feeling per se. I describe happiness as more of the way that you would take apart a meal.Happiness is like a banquet. And you can define it in a lot of different ways, in terms of the ingredients; you can define it in terms of the dishes. But I like to start with the macronutrients of any meal. Now, if you’re eating a, literally, a meal, the three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And I say that, similarly, there are three macronutrients to happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. People who are truly happy about their lives, they have all three. And they have them in abundance, and they have them in balance. And people who are out of balance [with] enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose tend to define themselves as unhappy. They know that something is wrong with their happiness.And so when I’m talking to somebody who says “I’m really unhappy,” I start digging in on one of those dimensions. So that’s where I want to start. And I want to start with the first of those, which is enjoyment. I define enjoyment as pleasure plus elevation. When you learn something about the sources of your pleasures, it turns into authentic enjoyment, which is a part of a happy life. Do you agree with that?Gottlieb: I do. I would say that enjoyment plus connection. I really feel like connection—Brooks: Connection with people?Gottlieb: Right, right. Well, there are certain solitary enjoyments. You know, let’s say that you’re an artist or let’s say that you’re a musician or let’s say you’re reading a book. You know that’s enjoyable to you, depending on who you are. But I think that when you talk about the ingredients, I think connection really has to be in there. And what I see in the therapy room is that when you look at those ingredients of happiness, if you don’t have connection added to those ingredients, it’s going to be hard. And I love the way that you are talking about happiness—not as a feeling, because I think that happiness as a byproduct of living our lives in a meaningful way is what we all aspire to. But happiness as a goal in and of itself often is a recipe for disaster, because they’re not looking at the ingredients that you’re talking about.Brooks: Mm. Yeah, for sure. And this is completely consistent with the findings of, you know, Bob Waldinger and George Vaillant and all those guys who have done all that longitudinal work that shows that the happiest people in their 70s and 80s are people who established the most human connections in their 20s and 30s. They got really, really good at love. They’ve got good love chops, is the bottom line. And so this is the No. 1 ingredient probably, in enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, is human connection.Gottlieb: Well, right, and I think that the question that people ask themselves, I think that we all ask ourselves, when it comes to happiness is: How can I love and be loved? I think that is the essential question. And that’s where the enjoyment, I think, comes from too: What does it mean to not only love someone and be loved, but how do you love yourself too? And so often we don’t know how to do that. We can make ourselves incredibly unhappy by being unloving to ourselves.Brooks: I want to talk about the specific macronutrient of enjoyment here for a second. One of the characteristics of people who present with clinical depression is a syndrome called anhedonia, which is the inability to experience pleasure and enjoyment. Even if you’re not clinically depressed, clearly if you’re having a hard time enjoying things, you’re going to be unhappy. As we just talked about a minute ago, and even better, if you’re enjoying things in connection, in communion with other people, because that actually creates the most fulfillment.Do you see patients who because of whatever is going on in their lives—because of an over-sense of discipline or because they’re excessively stoic or for whatever reason—that they have insufficient enjoyment of their lives? And if so, what do you tell them? How can I enjoy my life more?Gottlieb: Well, this is kind of like a chicken-or-the-egg thing. So anhedonia is when people are depressed; they literally cannot experience joy in the things that would normally bring them joy if they were not depressed. So it’s not that they don’t know how to enjoy things. It’s that because of depression, they aren’t enjoying activities that would normally be pleasurable to them.But yes, I think that there are people who don’t know how to separate from that. There are people who don’t know how to have fun. I think that we think somehow in our culture today of ambition and moving forward—you know, all sorts of pressures—that people think that fun is frivolous. They don’t realize that it’s actually essential. So when you talk about enjoyment, people think, Well, that’s optional. You know, like if I have time. And then, of course, they don’t make the time because they think that it’s something that’s not necessary, and it absolutely is.Brooks: So what’s an example of somebody who would come to you and they’re not enjoying their lives. They’re not taking time to have fun. What’s the assignment that you give them? Because, you know, in your show, you give somebody an assignment and then you see how it’s going. So if I came to you and I said, “I just don’t know how to have fun. I work and I work and I work all the time, and I’m not very happy.” And you say, “Arthur, do these three things.” You know: What’s the kind of thing that you would tell me? What’s the assignment?Gottlieb: Well, actually, on the Dear Therapist podcast, we do a therapy session with people. And then, as you said, we give them a homework assignment that they have a week to do, and they report back to us. We had this 16-year-old who presented this exact issue. She said, “I am just trying to get into college, I’m doing all of these things. I never have any fun.” And so we gave her an assignment where we wanted her to have more balance in her life, and we gave her a specific assignment. This is the Libby episode in season one.And she was somebody who was very reluctant to do this, because she thought that it would somehow hold her back, that it would somehow make her less competitive for college, that it would affect her in a way. Because nobody around her was having fun, by the way. Everybody was pretending to have fun.You know, on social media it looks like everybody’s having just a great time. But in reality, everybody was really stressed out, and nobody was making time for fun. And so she did that. And she found that when she made time for fun she not only enjoyed her life more, but she found that actually it made her more productive. It actually helped her to get ahead. And so it was interesting, because I think that we have this idea that, you know, having fun is going to hold us back somehow. And in theory, we want to have fun, but we don’t actually say, “I’m going to put that on my calendar. I’m going to make that a priority.” And I think we really need to.Brooks: That’s pretty interesting in our hyper-scheduled and and highly schematicized life that certain people have to actually put it in their Outlook: for 45 minutes, have fun. It seems like fun would be the most natural and spontaneous thing that people could have or do. And yet for people who are so scheduled all the way up into the tree, they actually need to treat it like anything else and take time for it, right? Is that what you’re saying?Gottlieb: I think it needs to be specific too, not just “have fun.” It’s getting in touch with how you have fun. A lot of people don’t even know how they have fun anymore. As adults, they grow up. They forget what fun looks like, because they’re so busy with all of their responsibilities and then all of the things they think they need to be doing. And they don’t realize, first of all, how they’re spending their time.So many people say, “I don’t have time for this kind of thing.” And yet if they actually do a 24-hour diary—which is what I will prescribe in therapy a lot—where they have to write down everything that they’re doing for 24 hours and sometimes 48 hours. And when they realize that, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I spent like an hour and a half mindlessly scrolling through the internet.” And that actually dampened their mood. It wasn’t a pleasurable activity for them. It was like, “Oh, I’m so behind; look at what everybody else is doing.” Or “Look at that person. They went to Hawaii, and I don’t get to go to Hawaii.” Or whatever it is.So it wasn’t even a pleasurable activity. That hour and a half could have been spent doing something that would have actually brought them joy. And I want to use the word joy here when we talk about happiness. You’re right—happiness is not an emotion. Joy is an emotion, right? And so what brings you joy? And so specifically, people don’t know. They’re like, If I had the time, what would fun even look like? I don’t even know what that looks like. And so really, being able to identify, how do you have fun? What does fun look like for you? So that when you schedule time to have fun or make time so that it becomes not a thing that you schedule after a while, but just something that’s a natural part of your existence. What does that look like? People don’t even know sometimes. If you said to them, “How do you have fun?,” they look at me like, Fun? What’s that?Brooks: It’s interesting that people don’t know how to have fun. And maybe they used to, and maybe they’ve forgotten. So if they present to Lori Gottlieb and say, “I’m not having any fun” or “I don’t have enough enjoyment in life,” the first assignment is not to have fun. The first assignment you’re going to give them is Think about the last time that you had fun—what were you doing—so that you can remember how to have fun in the first place. Is that right?Gottlieb: Yeah, and a good way to figure out what is fun for you is to look at your envy. People don’t like to feel envy. They feel like it’s kind of like a taboo. They don’t want to feel that. They think that they’re a bad person for feeling that. But actually, envy is very instructive, and envy tells us something about desire. And so I always say to people: Follow your envy. It tells you what you want. And so when you are envious of someone or something or some experience, that’s a clue to what might be enjoyable for you. We are so hesitant to look at our desire. We don’t want to give space for desire. We’re so much about the shoulds, as opposed to the “What do I want? What does desire look like for me?” We feel like it’s almost a selfish act.Brooks: That’s really interesting, because one of the things that I talk about an awful lot in the study of discernment—which is a part of every philosophical and major religious tradition, from Buddhism to Judaism to Christianity and even stoicism—is that discernment is actually not about “What should I do?” Discernment is about “What do I want?” It’s finding the nature of your own desire. And so that is as old as the hills. And yet it somehow escapes us again and again and again. And when I talk to young people, a lot of my students, they think they’re trying to figure out what they want to do. And actually, they should be thinking about trying to figure out what they want. That’s what they really don’t know: what they want. And that’s what you’re trying to get at, right, Lori?Gottlieb: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there’s so much noise out there where sometimes people can’t hear themselves. So they conflate what society wants them to want, what their parents want them to want, what the culture tells them they should want versus what they inherently want. And if it goes against some of those things—like some of those culturally accepted things of what we should want—it’s very hard for them to even acknowledge that that’s something that they want.Brooks: Let’s move on to the second pillar, the second macronutrient of a happy life, which is satisfaction. Now this is a killer. Satisfaction is really tough. I mean, Mick Jagger saying “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The truth is you can get satisfaction. The problem is you can’t keep satisfaction. Satisfaction is the reward when you meet a goal. It’s the reward for a job well done. It’s a promotion. It’s the race that you get. It’s the little burst of joy that you get from meeting one of your own personal goals. And the big problem that people have is that they get a little burst of this joy, perhaps—but then it goes away, and then they’re running, running, running, running again.And there’s a whole lot of neurobiology about homeostasis that helps us understand this, and there’s the metaphor of the hedonic treadmill that shows us why we keep running and running and running, which is really good because it shows that after a little while, you’re mostly running out of fear because if you stop on a treadmill, you know, it’s going to happen.But the real question then becomes, How do we deal with that? You do need satisfaction to be a happy person, but you can’t keep it. So what do you tell people who are workaholics and are addicted to success—and they’re just trying and trying and trying, as Mick Jagger sang, to get satisfaction, and they’re not getting it? The result is that they’re missing something from their lives. When somebody presents with the dissatisfaction dilemma, what do you tell them?Gottlieb: Well, as you were talking, I was thinking about the people who present almost like a colander instead of a bowl. So it’s kind of like, you know, something goes in and it doesn’t stay there. The satisfaction gets there, and then, like, it just goes through the holes. It doesn’t stay, like in a bowl, right? And I think that the people who are happiest when we talk about people—and I would maybe use the word contentment—the people who are most content, who feel most full and fulfilled in their lives, are people who are what are called satisficers. And this is Barry Schwartz from The Paradox of Choice. And he talks about the difference between satisficers and maximizers. Satisficers are those people who, let’s say: You’re trying to buy a sweater, and you go into a store and you find a sweater that fits you. It looks good. It’s the right price. You buy it, you’re happy, you’re done. Right? It meets all of your criteria.The maximizer will see that sweater and kind of put it under another sweater, so nobody will buy it. And just in case, go to the next store. And keep looking, because maybe they’ll find something a little bit cheaper or a little bit more attractive or, you know, whatever it is, right? Just something that’s a little bit better in some dimension. And they keep looking, and then maybe they find it. Maybe they don’t. But if they do find it, they tend not to be as happy with that purchase as if they had just bought the original sweater. And if they don’t find it, then they regret that they didn’t get the original one. And the problem is, even if they buy that first one that met all their criteria, the maximizer might be happy for about a week—and then the next week, they’re walking by a store and they see something else in the window and they think, Oh, that one would have been better. And so they’re just never satisfied.And you see this in relationships. People do this in relationships all the time, too. It’s not just with things like sweaters. It’s with people, it’s with jobs, it’s with everything. So it’s kind of almost like a personality type, like: Are you a satisficer, or are you a maximizer? Even when you’re shopping on Amazon and you’re trying to decide Which set of cookware should I buy?, you know? And it’s like, the people who will spend like an hour going through all the different options instead of 10 minutes going, Oh, this is good. Let me just get this. And it really takes up your emotional energy in a big way, because it’s almost like it’s a perfectionism type of thing. And it really gets in the way, because it takes up all of your time. And then you’re never satisfied with what you have anyway.Brooks: That’s really interesting. And you know, what you’re saying sounds kind of like a Western version of what His Holiness the Dalai Lama always says—which is the secret to enduring satisfaction is not to have what you want, but to want what you have. The satisficer is one who wants what she has, and the maximizer is the one who is always chasing, trying to have what he wants.And another way of thinking about this, that actually works in the literature on the science of satisfaction, is that you shouldn’t think of your satisfaction as a function of what you have, but rather what you have, divided by what you want. And if you can actually devise a “wants management strategy,” the denominator of that fraction is going to decrease and your satisfaction is actually going to rise.So when a patient presents with a satisfaction deficit, what assignment do you give them on your show? This is somebody who’s unsatisfied. Or if you have a patient who says, “It’s just, nothing’s good, Lori. Nothing’s good.” What do you tell them to do specifically, starting today?Gottlieb: I think this is the difference between what a friend would say to this person and what a therapist would say to this person. Because what the friend tends to do is to say, “Look at all the wonderful things you have in your life,” which is not helpful at all because they can’t see it anyway. You know it’s very funny when you look at the difference between how we talk to our friends and how a therapist might approach this. Because I think that people would expect the therapist to say, “Well, look at all these things that you’re not seeing.” But no. In fact, what I would probably do is I would agree with them and say, “Yeah, you know, I can see that you’re really not satisfied.”And then what happens for them is the more that you kind of go into their mindset that they start to see something new, that they start to say, “Well, actually, I have this really great partner, and I have this really great job.” But then there are a lot of buts with that. And then they start to sort of change their mindset when you’re not arguing with them about whether they should be satisfied or not. You can’t convince someone to be satisfied with what they have. They have to come to it on their own. And I think that a lot of people have very low tolerance for people like this, because they feel like, Well, you have so much, how can you complain? But I think it speaks to something in our culture—which is that we don’t really value what’s important. We don’t really value what’s going to bring us happiness. And so people tend to take for granted all of the things that they do have that would normally bring a person happiness.Brooks: Hmm, that’s really interesting. And it actually leads—which we’ll touch on briefly before we go to our, before we go to our listeners—about the last macronutrient of happiness, which is maybe the hardest of all, which is purpose or meaning. And the reason that this is really hard is because it’s the most counterintuitive when it comes to the science of happiness. You know, when I ask in surveys—you know, large-scale surveys or experiments using human subjects—“What brings happiness and purpose to life?,” people always talk about the most painful parts of their lives. They never talk about, you know, “that week in Ibiza with my friends”; they never say “That’s when I actually found out my life’s meaning.” You know, they always talk about that divorce, that ugly breakup, when they got fired, that bankruptcy, when their kid had to go to rehab. That’s when they talk about, you know, the stuff that they were made of, and when they really understood the nature of their own souls.And yet back when you and I were little kids and the hippies were running around in the ’60s and ’70s and the Woodstock generation said, If it feels good, do it, right? But now young people on either side of us—bookended by people like you and me—their mantra seems to be, If it feels bad, make it stop. Paradoxically, if we don’t suffer—if we don’t have pain, if we don’t come to terms with having a life that’s fully alive with the good and the bad—we can’t actually get enough meaning and purpose in our life, right?Gottlieb: Well, that’s right. And I think that’s why we assign negative and positive connotations to feelings. Even though feelings are neutral, they don’t have a positive or negative connotation. So people say, “Joy is a positive feeling, and anger or anxiety or sadness are negative feelings,” and that’s just not true. All of our feelings are positive in the sense that they tell us what we want. Our feelings are like a compass. They tell us what direction to go in.And if you don’t access your feelings, you’re kind of walking around with a faulty GPS. You don’t know what direction to go in. And people think that if they kind of numb their feelings —like, Oh, it’s not a big deal because I have a roof over my head and food on the table—that the sadness, the anxiety, this insomnia, whatever it is, is okay. Because, you know, it seems very trivial to them. But it’s not. It’s actually a message. It’s telling you something about your life. It’s telling you about something that needs to change.And so people feel like numbness is nothingness. It’s not the absence of feelings. Numbness is actually a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. And then they come out in other ways, like too much food, too much wine, an inability to sleep, a short-temperedness, a lack of focus. You see how the feelings are there. They’re just presenting differently.And so I think it’s really important for people to notice their feelings and to really welcome their feelings and embrace their feelings, because the feelings give them information about if they’re sad, what is not working. If you’re anxious, what is causing the anxiety? If you’re angry, are there some boundaries that maybe you need to set? Right? Is there something you need to change in your life? What is going on? So I think that that’s really important. And when we talk about meaning and purpose, if you don’t listen to your feelings, they’re going to direct you in the direction of meaning and purpose, they’re going to tell you what is important.Brooks: It’s interesting, you know. Most of the great sages and saints throughout history have talked about the sacredness of suffering, and some pretty wise and interesting people today do too. I mean, there was a famous interview of Stephen Colbert by Anderson Cooper, where Stephen Colbert talks about the most painful time in his life, when his father and one of his siblings were killed in a plane crash. And he talks about how grateful he is even for that experience, because of the sacredness of every moment of his life, including the pain. He says, “Look, if you’re going to be fully alive, if you’re going to have a life, if you’re going to enjoy life per se, you’ve got to take it all.” If you’re thankful for life, you’ve got to be thankful for all of life, because that’s the fabric of your set of experiences. And it seems to me that that is the essence of how you find your meaning and the essence of how you understand who you are as a person according to what you just told me, right?Gottlieb: I don’t think that you need to suffer tragedy to feel gratitude. I think that sometimes it awakens us to feeling gratitude when you have some kind of tragedy in your life. But I don’t think that you need to have some kind of tragedy. But I do think that you don’t get through life without suffering in some way, so it doesn’t need to be that a relative dies in a plane crash. I think that just being human inherently means that there are going to be times that you struggle.And I think if you look at the world today, if you look at—you know, there’s so much suffering that we hear about every day in the world, but then what are we told? If you look at social media, for example, or you’re at a dinner party, you know, you don’t—nobody talks about that. Nobody wants to talk about that. It’s all like, Let’s pretend everything’s great. And I think it’s both. And if we don’t make room for the both, then you’re right that we don’t see the beauty.We don’t appreciate the beauty in life. It’s almost like you can’t—you know, people always say, like, “I want to mute the the sadness” or “I want to mute the pain,” and it’s like: You can’t mute the pain and then also feel joy. If you mute one aspect of your emotional experience, you’re going to mute all of that. There’s like one mute button. So, if you mute the pain, you mute the joy. And so I think that that speaks to what you’re saying.Brooks: And there’s one clarification you made that’s incredibly important that I want to underline for everybody listening. Remember: Lori Gottlieb just said that you don’t have to go out looking for suffering. Don’t worry. Suffering will find you, and that’s adequate, too, for us to find purpose in our lives.Gottlieb: There’s a difference between pain and suffering, too. We all experience pain. You know: You go through a breakup, you go through a divorce, somebody gets ill, something happens with your job. Whatever it is, right? We all experience pain of some sort, but suffering is something that sometimes we do to ourselves.So you go through a divorce, and then you’re like, looking on social media at your ex and you see them with their new partner, right? You don’t need to do that. That’s suffering. You’re creating your own suffering. So people do that all the time. And so we’re all going to experience pain in some way or another. But sometimes we are creating our own suffering. And in therapy, that’s a big topic of conversation. How are we creating our own suffering? Even though, of course, pain is inevitable.Brooks: I want to go now to some of our listeners. I put out a call at the end of my column asking people to tell me the last time they were happy, and what we got back was just pure gold. They were so interesting and so moving. And I wanted to play just three clips of people telling me about the last time that they were happy and get your reaction to what they’re saying and, you know, what it says to you. I could analyze this from [my perspective as] the social-science guy, but I’m a lot more interested in what you’d tell these people if they were coming to see you for help.Let’s bring up audio clip No. 1, who is one of our listeners: Karl from North Carolina. Listener Submission 1: The last time I felt truly happy was yesterday. I am a high-school English teacher, and we’re now back in person. We’re lucky enough to be in a school where we wear masks. I was able to actually see their—if not their faces—their eyes light up when they figured out something or they got the point of my lesson. And just seeing their eyes light up and getting to exercise that teaching muscle that I haven’t really got to exercise in over a year and a half. Getting to be in front of the students again makes me feel truly like myself again, something that I really haven’t felt in a long time. So, yeah, teaching makes me happy. Brooks: Isn’t that beautiful, Lori? And it seems to me that he made your point. It’s connection—that’s the secret! Happiness is love, right?Gottlieb: Right. Well, it’s meaning and purpose and connection all rolled into one—that was so beautiful. We had someone on our Dear Therapist podcast during the pandemic, a teacher also, and she was talking about this, you know, like, wanting to reach her students and how she was. They said to her, like, “The best part of my day is when I get to connect with you.” Right? And so I think that we learned a lot during COVID about meaning and purpose and connection. Many people think it has to be this big epic thing. It can be, you know, I had this moment with my child and we had this great five minutes together. Or just like with Karl, you know, I had this experience with my students and I saw their eyes light up when they got the lesson. That right there is meaning and purpose, and it doesn’t need to be this grand thing. It’s like it’s the dailiness of it. It’s having lots of bursts of meaning and purpose throughout your day.Brooks: And that actually speaks to what you talked about with satisfaction. Because satisfaction—if you’re looking for it in one big thing—it’s probably going to disappoint you. But if you’re looking at the little things that happen over the course of a day and over the course of life regularly, you’ve got a shot. That’s important, too.Gottlieb: Often I will give people this assignment in therapy and even on the podcast, which is: I want you to write down the different moments of the day when you feel something positive. And often there are these moments of meaning, these moments of connection. And there are so many during the day that they didn’t even realize, even if it’s like: “I went to Starbucks, and I saw this barista who’s been there for five years and we used to talk every day, and I missed that during COVID. And it was so great to see each other again. And I realized this is meaningful to me.” You know, it’s like those little moments throughout the day that you don’t even pay attention to. And all of a sudden you say, Wait, those are really important to me.Brooks: Let’s go to clip No. 2: Kristen in New York. Listener Submission 2: The last time I remember being truly happy was in the summer of 2019. I had just ended my first year of grad school. I was living in Japan and Tokyo. I’d already been there for five years, so I became quite accustomed to living there and found myself in a great group of friends … And looking back from there, it kind of feels like everything has just been this slow and then sudden descent. Because I got back to Japan, and my friends began to graduate and move away. And then the pandemic came. And like many people, I spent months alone in my apartment, so it was just really lonely. And then my visa was expiring, so I had to leave my community that I had spent six years building into this period of great uncertainty. And then my mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly. And since then, I’ve been living in the after. And I feel like I will never experience that kind of happiness again—like I did that summer. Being so devastated by grief and loss, it just feels like whatever way joy manages to find its way back into my life will always be different. Brooks: What do you say, Lori?Gottlieb: Wow. Just so much loss and grief, and what she’s experiencing is so common. Because we think that when we’re in the throes of that, we feel like we will never experience joy again. We will never experience happiness again in the same way. And actually, in my book, in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, there’s one client that I write about. He was talking about how his son was killed in a car accident. And within a week of that, where he was devastated and he thought My life is over, I will never be the same again, he was with his daughter. And they were playing a game, and he laughed. And he said,“I couldn’t believe that. I laughed. I couldn’t believe that I actually could laugh. Like, what was that part of me that could do that, even though the rest of me felt dead and like I would never come alive again?” And so I think what she’s feeling is extremely common, and that’s what grief looks like. And, you know, she’s going to have a lot of grieving to do. And it’s unfortunate that her mother died in the middle of COVID when she was so isolated and she had lost her community, and all of these other things had happened. So she’s experiencing multiple layers of loss. And I hope that she allows herself the space to really grieve all that she has lost, so that she can then start to emerge again.Brooks: And I think a really important part of your message, Lori—and what you just said and I think that I want people to remember from this and what [I want] Kristen to remember—is that happiness is going to come again. That this isn’t the end. It feels like the end, because that’s how it always feels when you’re in a period of grief. And there’s all kinds of reasons for that. But happiness is going to come again. It just is, right?Gottlieb: Well, it reminds me of when people are depressed, they feel like they will never be happy. And so I always say to people who are in the middle of a clinical depression You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now. Because their thinking is so distorted in that moment because they can’t see it. They can’t imagine a time when they would experience joy again. And the same thing, I think, when people have experienced a devastating loss, they cannot imagine experiencing joy.And yet what happens later, just like the man in the book—people go to weddings and they go grocery shopping and they go on Twitter, and their lives move on. There’s this expression like people say, “Well, why haven’t you moved on?” Moved on is not quite right. It’s, you move forward. The loss stays with you, but you move forward and you’re still grieving. You will always grieve that loss. And I think that the grief is a sign of how much love there was with the person who is no longer there, right?And then loss of the community. She loved those people. So that’s going to be there, but it feels different. It has a different flavor over time. It has a different resonance. And there will be times when you’re standing in an elevator and some song comes on and it’s the song that meant something with that person and you just start bawling in the elevator or whatever it is. You know, that’s what grief looks like, even decades later. So I think that’s part of the human experience and what you were talking about earlier, Arthur—about this idea of meaning and struggle and how they’re somehow intertwined in some way.Brooks: One of the things that’s so interesting when you talk to older people who are happy and well—when you talk to those people, what you find is that they suffered a lot. It’s weird, you know, for young people, people in their 20s, who want to find out how to have a happy life and want to avoid as much suffering as possible. So in their 80s, they’ll be really happy. That’s actually wrong. In the same way, something that’s a really delicious dessert actually has salt in it.And the afternoon of your life requires that the morning have had a certain number of challenges. And so you find that the happiest people have been fully alive all throughout their lives, and they’ve grieved, and they’ve recovered. And when bad things are happening, they never thought they’d feel better. And guess what—they did. They did! And they allowed themselves to be sad. And that’s one of the secrets, right?Gottlieb: Right. And I think that the reason that they’ve been through so much is because they engaged in life. So the people who want to protect themselves from pain or discomfort are the people who never really engage in life because they’re so busy protecting themselves to make sure that they’re not going to experience anything that feels bad, right? And so then they never put themselves out there. They never take any risks.And when you take risks, sometimes, you know, there’s going to be pain involved. And sometimes there’s going to be great joy involved. But if you are protecting yourself the whole time you didn’t really live; you’re not fully alive. And so maybe you think you protected yourself, but you end up feeling very unsatisfied, very kind of empty and lonely.Brooks: If you’re going to live your life like an adventure, you’re going to have to take some chances. Let’s go to the last audio clip to finish this out, Lori. Listener Submission 3: Hi. My name is Joel Marsh, and I own Marsh Painting Inc. in Park City, Utah. [I’ve] been painting homes in Park City for over 20 years. And I’m a fourth-generation painter. What I’ve learned is that Arthur Brooks is correct in this column when he states that what matters is not so much the weight of a job—more the “who” and the “why.” One day, as we were staining a home, we took a 10-minute break and hit golf balls onto the adjoining driving range. With the homeowner’s permission, of course. Our work painting houses is hard and boring much of the time. I tell new recruits that more often than not, when you have good music going, some good Mexican food for lunch, and you get into a rhythm with the rest of the guys, our job can feel a little Zen-like. Brooks: We’re pretty much near the end of the time, so let’s have this be kind of the last word. What’s your big takeaway? And what’s the big lesson that people should get from this incredibly encouraging message from Joel in Park City?Gottlieb: Yeah, that was really beautiful. I was thinking about how, before COVID, people used to say co-workers are overrated. You know, people are like, “I really want to work from home,” or whatever it is. Co-workers are not overrated. I think that if we’ve learned anything, it’s those small moments like he was talking about—those spontaneous moments of like, Hey, let’s hit the golf balls, right?The things that you don’t expect, those moments of connection that happen when you’re in the same space with other people and you have a shared experience. And I think that that’s what we need to look for in general these days. No matter whether it’s at work or in our families or in our social circles or whatever it is. How can we show up? When you show up, those moments of connection happen.Brooks: Well, the practice of enjoyment and satisfaction and purpose through pain and through love and all the experience—that is the beautiful thing that we call life, courtesy of Lori Gottlieb.Lori Gottlieb is the author of the best-selling book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone,; of the wonderful, wonderful column, Dear Therapist; my colleague at The Atlantic. What a privilege, what a joy it’s been to be with you during this time. Thank you for joining all of us on How to Build a Happy Life.Gottlieb: Oh, my pleasure.Thanks so much for the conversation.[Music]Garber: If you enjoyed this episode, take a listen to our first season, How to Build a Happy Life. You can find all seven episodes wherever you get your podcasts.Our next episode will be the last installment in our Best of How To series. We’ll look at the art of small talk and what tools are available to help reduce social anxiety. Julie 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? Ty Tashiro: I think it’s that I’ve learned strategies first, and then the social comfort came after that.theatlantic.com
-
Optimism Survives Even in Venezuela Maduro is still in place, but a pro-democracy movement is transforming the beleaguered country.theatlantic.com