Illustrations by Jan Robert Dünnweller

On a late summer’s day in Cambridge, England, the writer Ali Smith sat with me on a wooden bench in a patch of garden across from the brick rowhouse where she works. Her new novel, Gliff, was due out before long; she described it as a “dystopian pony book,” clearly pleased to have invented a new genre. She flashed impatience when I suggested that she frequently expresses political views both in her fiction and outside it. After a tart “Do I?” she continued, “I think I’m always in the realm of fiction.” A pause before she allowed, “Well, I’m a citizen.” At that moment, I knocked over the water glass I’d carelessly balanced on one arm of the bench. It shattered, and Smith said merrily, “See what happens when you talk politics?” I apologized, and she told me, “If you want to break another one, I’ll break one with you.”

Funny, cheerfully provocative, at once friendly and sharp-elbowed: That’s Smith in person, and also in her copious fictional output (13 novels and six story collections over the past 30 years). Her books are challenging—experimental and unabashedly literary—yet welcoming to all, eminently readable even when they’re disorienting; they engage the reader, demanding collaboration. (Her fifth novel, published in 2011, has a fill-in-the-blank title: There but for the.) Most writers with a foot in the avant-garde achieve cult status at best; Smith collects awed reviews at home and abroad, wins prizes and honors, and sells lots and lots of books to avid fans.

She breaks rules with gleeful abandon, mocking convention, asking her publisher to do things that the industry instinctively abhors. After Gliff will come Glyph—a pair of homophone titles guaranteed to trip up booksellers and buyers for years to come. (Smith adores wordplay, the quirks of language: puns, rhymes, bizarre etymologies, neologisms, contronyms—words that have developed contradictory meanings.) According to her publisher, the two books will “belong together.” Could she tell me more about Glyph ? “Absolutely not”—she hadn’t yet started writing. I backed off, reminded of a line from Artful (2012), a novel first delivered as a series of Oxford lectures, much of it literally ghostwritten (that is, written by a ghost): “Sequence will always be most of the word consequence.”

I’ve been thinking about Smith for more than 20 years. In 2006, just after her third novel, The Accidental, was named Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I reviewed it, and did a little research. I found a short essay by her fellow novelist Jeanette Winterson in which Smith asks, rhetorically, “Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?” This is what Smith does: First, she confuses you—Who’s talking? When did this happen? Where am I?—then she hooks you with a flash of storytelling genius or a dazzling formal innovation. You read on, and the world seems strange to you, and you seem strange to yourself. The flimsy illusions offered up by conventional literature seem hollow (life is stranger than fiction), as do the certainties you live by (are you yourself truly a coherent character?). You have been reskinned.

The hook sometimes looks like a gimmick. It’s not. At Smith’s behest, her obliging publisher hurried each of the four books of the Seasonal Quartet (2016 to 2020) onto bookstore shelves only about six weeks after she’d delivered each manuscript—an unthinkably quick turnaround. Smith’s ambition, from the time she conceived the project in the 1990s, had been to graft the rush of current events onto the everlasting cycle of the seasons. Soon after she finally sat down to write the first book at the end of 2015 came the United Kingdom’s Brexit crisis. Galvanized by the shock result of the referendum, she told herself as she began to write, “This book has to meet the contemporary head-on, or there’s no point to this sequence of books.” Hence the superfast schedule: Autumn appeared just four months after the vote.

[Read: Ali Smith’s Autumn is a post-Brexit masterpiece]

Although the press labeled it “the first Brexit novel,” the word Brexit is never uttered in the book. A seemingly random yet oddly menacing chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and security cameras, is erected near an ordinary English village. A woman battles bureaucracy to renew her passport at the local post office; the petty hurdles are dismaying, ominous, comical. Spanish tourists visiting England are heckled at a train station: “This isn’t Europe … Go back to Europe.” Appalled, a sympathetic witness realizes that “what was happening in that one passing incident was a fraction of something volcanic”—a compact summary of Smith’s narrative strategy.

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018, Nicola Sturgeon, then first minister of Scotland, interviewed Smith onstage—since when does a nation’s leader host an experimental novelist at a literary festival?—and read aloud a passage from Autumn that for her perfectly captured the post-referendum mood:

All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland.

The echo of Dickens (the first line of Autumn is “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times”) carries on and on: 46 consecutive sentences begin with “All across the country.”

Every volume of the Seasonal Quartet was a best seller in the U.K.; the most conspicuously topical of the four, Spring (2019), tackled the “migrant crisis” and reached the top of the Sunday Times best-seller list. Migration has been one of Smith’s abiding concerns. “We’re ignoring it,” she said in an interview more than a dozen years ago. “As our countries and our world become smaller … we’re bordered, everything is about the stranger.” She eventually went to see for herself what detainees in the U.K. are put through and was shocked to find “a razor-wire fence so high and encircling such a tiny yard space that it would pass as a literal example of surreality.” In Spring, a brutal Immigration Removal Centre is described in distressing detail—but Smith also imagines a kind of underground railroad for migrants anxious to avoid the authorities.

Bad guys versus good guys? Part of Smith’s appeal is that she shows us warm-hearted progressive ideals in action, a spirit of inclusion feeding hope and healing hurt. As one character in Spring puts it, “What looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open.” But nothing in Smith’s fiction is that simple. In Winter, two sisters are mourning the death of their mother. One says, “It takes a death sometimes to make us all live a bit more.” The other thinks, “Platitude, cliché.” If your sympathy is divided, that’s because with Smith, every either/or is complicated by a both/and. A maxim from The Accidental : “The word and is a little bullet of oxygen.”

[Read: Ali Smith spins modernity into myth in Winter]

The stories she tells spill out of stories that spill out of other stories. She’s an inveterate flouter of chronology—a timeline for almost any of her books, including the quartet, would look like a manic Etch A Sketch scribble: Rather than plot or the forward sweep of the clock’s hands, it is Smith’s voice, her many voices, that propels the reader. As though on a whim, she’ll take an unexpected detour into art history or natural history or literary criticism. Finger-on-the-pulse backdrops are balanced by cultural or historical or scientific deep dives. Against the grim tidings of the day, news of pain inflicted by strangers on strangers, she pits, in Spring, the oddly charming tale of Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke spending several weeks in 1922 in the same small Swiss town—and never meeting. A hack screenwriter wants to rework that non-anecdote into an erotic TV costume drama, the two writers screwing in a swinging cable car high above a picturesque snowy valley. Appalled, the director he hopes to hire flees and ends up in the Scottish Highlands, where he crosses paths with the network of people dedicated to helping migrants.

Like every Smith novel, Spring is about human connection, how hard it is—how damned important it is—to acknowledge humanity in the other and embrace it. Yet Smith has talked about how she loves the spirit of alienation in Mansfield’s writing: “Distance, foreignness, knowing you’re out of place or in limbo … and however much you feel at home, you’re fooling yourself, and however strange you feel in the world … it’s natural, it’s the most natural thing.” Sometimes there simply is no connection. Force it, and you get schlock.

When I interviewed Smith for The Paris Review in 2017, a few years after the Scottish-independence referendum, she told me, “I like edges but not borders.” Born in Inverness in 1962 and raised by an Irish mother and an English father, she calls herself “Scottish by formation” (quoting another of her heroes, the Scottish-born Muriel Spark). “I grew up on the margins,” she said. “I inherited all the value of the margins.” Her working-class parents brought her up in council housing. She was much younger than her four siblings, and looking back, she recognized that she’d had “a remarkably lucky childhood, cosseted and bullied both in that lovely family way, with nobody following me, no rivalries.” Her parents had both won scholarships, but had been obliged to leave school to go to work. They were adamant that their children would be educated. All five graduated from university.

“I was a proficient, happy, versatile child,” Smith told me. She went to Roman Catholic primary school, then a state-run high school. She read all the time. “I thought of myself as a poet through my teens,” she confessed to another interviewer. “I was pretty dreadful.” At the University of Aberdeen, she studied English literature and language, graduating with highest honors. She then spent five years studying for a Ph.D. at Newnham College, Cambridge. Alongside her studies, she wrote plays; Sarah Wood, who became her life partner, directed five of them. The doctorate, meanwhile, never materialized. Her examiners requested changes to her dissertation on three Modernist masters (James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams); she refused. She was nevertheless offered two teaching jobs, and accepted the one at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow.

That stint lasted 18 months, cut short by a debilitating bout of chronic fatigue syndrome. At the time, the illness felt “like I’d been hit from the back with a baseball bat—after which I … went into a kind of physical breakdown.” Smith returned to Cambridge to recover, but the symptoms lingered, resurfacing intermittently. Though she found it painful to write longhand, she scratched out her first collection, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), which scooped up a couple of prizes. She persuaded her publisher, Virago, to take a chance on her debut novel, Like (1997), and from then on, she was a writer only.

Her second novel, Hotel World (2001), was shortlisted for both the Booker and Orange Prizes, success of the kind that heralds a major career. In The Guardian, the novelist Giles Foden wrote, “I have never seen the tenets of recent literary theory (the impossibility of the coherent subject, or substantive character, for instance) so cleverly insinuated into a novel.” It begins with the voice of a ghost. A teenage chambermaid working at a fancy hotel in a dour northern city has fallen down a dumbwaiter shaft to her death. Her ghost, itching to feel again (“What I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe”), would like to know how long it took her to fall:

(and this time I’d throw myself willingly down it wooo-

hooooo and this time I’d count as I went, one elephant two eleph-ahh) if I could feel it again, how I hit it, the basement, from four floors up, from toe to head, dead. Dead leg. Dead arm. Dead hand. Dead eye. Dead I, four floors between me and the world, that’s all it took to take me, that’s the measure of it, the length and death of it, the short goodb—.

A classic, manically ludic Smith passage, grim and comical, pushing at the edge of too much, yet as easy to swallow as a spoonful of honey.

Having given voice to the dead, Smith takes it away; the ghost girl is losing her ability to speak, losing language. Her last message to the living:

Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf.

When I asked Smith about the legion of ghosts in her fiction, she shrugged and said, “I just don’t think death makes that much difference.” Sounding like Gertrude Stein, she elaborated: “We carry with us all the people who have made us and the people we make and the lives we make, and the world we make continues on from what we make of it.”

The realm of fiction where Smith says she “always” dwells is mostly populated by family and friends, the people we’re most comfortable with, who also drive us crazy. Often the setting is the home we long for and can’t wait to escape. The premise of The Accidental—borrowed from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film, Teorema—is the reskinning of an unhappy bourgeois family: mother, son, daughter, and stepfather. In musical notation, an “accidental” changes the pitch. In the novel, the accidental—the catalyst—is a mysterious character who rings the doorbell and announces, “Sorry I’m late. I’m Amber. Car broke down.” Though she’s very much flesh and blood (her flesh is desired by every family member, young, old, male, female), this uninvited guest might as well be a ghost, an inexplicable apparition with uncanny powers. The daughter thinks of Amber as “the kind of superheroine that can draw things to her and repel them away from her at the same time.”

Jan Robert Dünnweller

The reader watches as the family’s world disintegrates, and the idea, I believe, is that the reader molts in sympathy. The daughter, in her old skin, needs everything to be mediated, filtered, distanced. A bright, lonely 12-year-old, she’s obsessed with her video camera (and has a verbal tic, using i.e. ad nauseam). Amber drops the girl’s camera from a pedestrian bridge onto a busy highway below—deliberately. Amber does everything deliberately. In her new skin, the younger girl accepts that “her responsibility” is about “actually seeing, being there.” That may sound like a New Age mantra, but the transformation, slight and subtle, is also plausible and moving. The parents fare less well; the fractured family will never be whole again. (Smith doesn’t do happy endings.)

In my mind, the 12-year-old from The Accidental reappears, four years older and much sadder (her mother has died), in my favorite Smith book, How to be both (2014), a novel in two parts published in vice-versa editions: with the same cover, but with the order of the parts reversed—in effect, different novels packaged identically and released simultaneously. This older girl, George, is also bright and lonely, and she’s pedantically fixated on correct grammar—“a finite set of rules,” she insists. George, too, will be reskinned. Among other things, she slowly discovers her erotic love for another girl. Her evolution is watched over by the ghost of an actual Italian quattrocento painter from Ferrara, Francesco del Cossa.

One part of How to be both is narrated by the bewildered painter, who can’t comprehend 21st-century England and decides he’s in an afterlife “purgatorium,” condemned to traipse after George, whom he mistakes at first for a boy. The other part is told from George’s perspective, close third-person. She remains unaware of the ghostly observer who’s following her around. Which part you read first depends on which edition you happen to have bought, and to discover which sequence works best, you’ll have to reread. Should the tale of a 600-year-old artist, with its technical asides on the art of the fresco, come before the tale of modern-day teenage angst? Do the parts of the puzzle fit either way?

The painter’s confusion about George’s gender is an ironic echo (or foreshadowing) of the backstory Smith has invented for him: He was born a girl but disguised himself as a boy to become a painter. (“Nobody will take you for such a training wearing the clothes of a woman,” warned his father, a brickmaker.) The adventures of this talented cross-dresser make a mockery of binary ideas about gender. What the painter learned centuries ago in Ferrara, what George learns in 21st-century London, is that no finite set of rules applies.

Back on the sunny Cambridge bench, Smith told me about the origins of Gliff, which is full of characteristic quirks and revisits her abiding concerns—gender, boundaries, the importance of unmediated engagement with the world. But it’s darker fiction, with some acutely painful passages. It began as a short story written “very fast” in August 2023, a commission for an anthology: “I was supposed to write something that was tangentially Kafkaesque,” she explained, after which she turned to work on a new novel. But she was ambushed by a “horrendous” bout of insomnia, “three months of almost no sleep,” and realized that she was writing the wrong book, and that the short story “was not going away, was waiting, rather like characters do, at the back of your head.”

Where did the title come from? “I was playing about online one day thinking, Is this a nonsense word or not? And I looked up the word that sounded like glyph but was spelled differently, and found out it wasn’t a made-up word—it was actually a northern word, a Scottish word.” It has many meanings, among them a glimpse, a sudden fright, or a brief moment. It’s also the name of the horse in this dystopian pony book, but we’ll get to that.

A glyph is a mark—as Smith said, “The smallest unit of meaning,” a scratch on a cave wall, an ornamental carving on a primitive tool. In the Paris Review interview, when I asked about the building blocks of her prose, Smith explained that “the rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it—the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.” Now she’s taken the next step, training her attention on the gesture that precedes even the syllable. In Gliff, she shows us prehistoric cave art and the head of a horse carved many thousands of years ago onto a rib bone.

She also steps for the first time into the near future: A brutal totalitarian state has been rounding up, interning, and reeducating people whom the regime deems “unverifiable.” The climate is as much Orwell as Kafka: 24/7 surveillance, grotesque euphemisms, justified paranoia. Britain’s not quite there yet—but, Smith insisted, “could be.” She added, sitting up taller, “If we just raise our heads from thinking it’s not happening, we’d see that most of the book is happening right now somewhere.”

The authorities have started drawing red lines around the unwanted unverifiables—literally. They have a comically low-tech machine called a “supera bounder” that applies paint around houses, around vehicles. Demarcated houses are demolished, vehicles towed away: rapacious capitalism combining punishment and profit.

Two siblings, a young teenager and a younger sister, more or less abandoned in an empty house, find themselves on the wrong side of the red line. The older sibling—our narrator, Bri, cautious and protective—worries about the meager supply of canned food, and tries hard to lift the spirits of the younger one, who finds seven horses in a nearby field, one of which, a gray gelding, she adopts (or is adopted by). She gives him his name.

Gliff the horse is the moral center of Gliff the novel, and also the occasion of some arresting descriptions:

The grey horse’s bones were close to its skin all over it and it seemed huge even though it was quite a small horse, the smallest one in this field. It moved with laidback strength and with a real weightiness though it wasn’t weighty at all, it was as spare as a bare tree …

The eye was shocking.

It was really beautiful.

You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen together in one place, gentleness, and—what?

Five years later, in a moment of crisis, Bri realizes that the missing word is “equanimity.”

When Smith was a child in Inverness, about 4 or 5 years old, she discovered a stable behind an ice rink. “Between the age of 7 and 11,” she said, “I went every Saturday in the summer and hung out. We did do a little grooming—very small ponies in my case. What I know about horses all comes from that place at the back of the ice rink, where 12 or 13 horses lived in the field.” She paused. “You know, being on the back of a horse teaches you everything about everything.”

The writing about Gliff the horse does more than bring the living creature into focus. “His mouth was decisive without force, a soft lipped line. It made him look resigned, noncommittal, but also poised, as if waiting.” That “soft lipped line” is the antithesis of the supera bounder’s garish, excluding red. Yet Smith is in the business of complicating binaries as well as erasing boundaries; she won’t tolerate a simple dichotomy.

Which brings us back to the two siblings. The younger one is Rose, wild, fiercely loyal, fiercely stubborn. Bri, kind and caring and, like so many of Smith’s characters, obsessed with words and their meaning, is also Briar or Brice. (“Why did I myself really like having more than one name, as if I had more than one self?”) When asked, bluntly but without malice, “Are you a boy or a girl?,” the answer is, “Yes I am.”

Flash-forward five years and—a spoiler follows—Bri now serves the state. Reeducated? Lured by the promise of elevated status? Tortured? It’s not clear what has happened, but Bri is complicit in the horrors of the regime, and this lover of words has been silenced: “That’s as much of that story as I care to tell. One line about it is more than enough.” The unspoken, the unspeakable, is more frightening than anything else in the novel.

Four cats patrol the alley next to where Smith and her partner live and work. The cats came and went, occasionally pausing near our bench to lick a paw and ignore us ostentatiously. I wondered which ones were hers, and she said, approvingly, “They kind of live everywhere.”

[From the April 2023 issue: Adam Begley on why you should be reading Sebastian Barry]

I asked again about politics, suggesting mildly that sometimes she deploys her dazzling skills in the service of ideology. In Winter, she quotes Keats: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Does she agree? “Fiction’s only agenda is to be fiction,” she replied, “but lies have an agenda.” Her soft, lilting voice was buttressed by quiet conviction: “All you do is tell the story. What you do is write and write, and you tell the story that arrives—and it really is like being on the back of a horse.” But what about the wild complexity of her narratives, the abrupt swerves and unannounced excursions? As though to allow for nuance, she said, “Of course it will be political when it’s written, because everything is. But I believe deep in my own bones that story is about something that cancels division between us.” She added, “We cross those lines every time we listen to someone or are heard by someone.”

Some early reviewers of Gliff have complained that it feels too “on the nose.” The book’s horrors—climate catastrophe, internment camps, genocidal wars, high-tech surveillance—are too familiar to serve as prophecy. Is it fair to complain that the future is almost already upon us? Who needs prophecy when dystopia is now? The novel thrums with Smith’s urgent need to tell a story about where our divided present could lead us. “We cannot look away at the moment,” she said to me. “We must not look away from the darkness. And if I didn’t look at the dark, what kind of a writer would I be?”

* Lead-image sources: Lorentz Gullachsen / Contour by Getty; Leonardo Cendamo / Getty.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “The Experimentalist.”

What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux.

The result: Mid-morning, I found myself standing on the Knippel Bridge between the Danish foreign ministry and the Danish Parliament, holding a phone, waiting to be told which direction to walk. Denmark in January is not warm; I went to the Parliament and waited there. The meeting was canceled anyway. After that, nobody wanted to say anything on the record at all. Thus have Americans who voted for Trump because of the putatively high price of eggs now precipitated a political crisis in Scandinavia.

[Read: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property. The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.

At the same time, Denmark is also a country whose global companies—among them Lego, the shipping giant Maersk, and Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic—do billions of dollars worth of trade with the United States, and have major American investments too. They thought these were positive aspects of the Danish-American relationship. Denmark and the United States are also founding members of NATO, and Danish leaders would be forgiven for believing that this matters in Washington too. Instead, these links turn out to be a vulnerability. On Thursday afternoon Frederiksen emerged and, flanked by her foreign minister and her defense minister, made a statement. “It has been suggested from the American side,” she said, “that unfortunately a situation may arise where we work less together than we do today in the economic area.”

Still, the most difficult aspect of the crisis is not the need to prepare for an unspecified economic threat from a close ally, but the need to cope with a sudden sense of almost Kafkaesque absurdity. In truth, Trump’s demands are illogical. Anything that the U.S. theoretically might want to do in Greenland is already possible, right now. Denmark has never stopped the U.S. military from building bases, searching for minerals, or stationing troops in Greenland, or from patrolling sea lanes nearby. In the past, the Danes have even let Americans defy Danish policy in Greenland. Over lunch, one former Danish diplomat told me a Cold War story, which unfolded not long after Denmark had formally declared itself to be a nuclear-free country. In 1957, the U.S. ambassador nevertheless approached Denmark’s then–prime minister, H. C. Hansen, with a request. The United States was interested in storing some nuclear weapons at an American base in Greenland. Would Denmark like to be notified?

[Read: Trump is thinking of buying a giant socialist island]

Hansen responded with a cryptic note, which he characterized, according to diplomatic records, as “informal, personal, highly secret and limited to one copy each on the Danish and American side.” In the note, which was not shared with the Danish Parliament or the Danish press, and indeed was not made public at all until the 1990s, Hansen said that since the U.S. ambassador had not mentioned specific plans or made a concrete request, “I do not think your remarks give rise to any comment from my side.” In other words, If you don’t tell us that you are keeping nuclear weapons in Greenland, then we won’t have to object.

The Danes were loyal U.S. allies then, and remain so now. During the Cold War, they were central to NATO’s planning. After the Soviet Union dissolved, they reformed their military, creating expeditionary forces specifically meant to be useful to their American allies. After 9/11, when the mutual-defense provision of the NATO treaty was activated for the first time—on behalf of the U.S.—Denmark sent troops to Afghanistan, where 43 Danish soldiers died. As a proportion of their population, then about 5 million, this is a higher mortality rate than the U.S. suffered. The Danes also sent troops to Iraq, and joined NATO teams in the Balkans. They thought they were part of the web of relationships that have made American power and influence over the past half century so unique. Because U.S. alliances were based on shared values, not merely transactional interests, the level of cooperation was different. Denmark helped the U.S., when asked, or volunteered without being asked. “So what did we do wrong?” one Danish official asked me.

Obviously, they did nothing wrong—but that’s part of the crisis too. Trump himself cannot articulate, either at press conferences or, apparently, over the telephone, why exactly he needs to own Greenland, or how Denmark can give American companies and soldiers more access to Greenland than they already have. Plenty of others will try to rationalize his statements anyway. The Economist has declared the existence of a “Trump doctrine,” and a million articles have solemnly debated Greenland’s strategic importance. But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.

This instinct—to ignore existing borders, laws, and treaties; to treat other countries as artificial; to break up trade links and destroy friendships, all because the Leader wants to look powerful—is one that Trump shares with imperialists of the past. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has also crowed over the alleged similarity between the U.S. desire for Greenland and the Russian desire for territory in Ukraine. Lavrov suggested a referendum might be held in Greenland, comparing that possibility to the fake referenda, held under duress, that Russia staged in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Of course, Trump might forget about Greenland. But also, he might not. Nobody knows. He operates on whims, sometimes picking up ideas from the last person he met, sometimes returning to obsessions he had apparently abandoned: windmills, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and now Greenland. To Danes and pretty much anyone else who makes plans, signs treaties, or creates long-term strategies using rational arguments, this way of making policy feels arbitrary, pointless, even surreal. But it is also now permanent, and there is no going back.

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“My job is a Kafkaesque nightmare,” a young friend told me. I understood him to  be referring to Franz Kafka’s famous 1915 surrealist novella, The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is trapped in a life as a traveling salesman that he finds monotonous and meaningless. “Day in, day out—on the road,” Gregor reflects. “I’ve got the torture of traveling, worrying about changing trains, eating miserable food at all hours, constantly seeing new faces, no relationships that last or get more intimate.” His life seems no more significant than that of, well, maybe a cockroach that mindlessly scurries from place to place and ultimately dies in complete obscurity. And this is where the author’s surreal genius enters: Gregor actually turns into a giant bug (often rendered in pictorial adaptations as a cockroach).

I assumed that my friend was making a figurative comparison—and didn’t think I needed to check whether he had met Gregor’s fate. Instead, I judged that he needed to change his situation and offered some social-science-based advice on the best way to hit the job market. Perhaps you in your working life can relate to my friend’s feeling of alienation and helplessness. Or perhaps you would simply like to be earning more. Either way, you are not alone: At any given time, a substantial proportion of American workers are looking for a better job.

Even so, you may be hesitant to take the leap, in an uncertain economic environment, out of doubt about whether a change will make things better or worse. So let me share the advice I gave my friend, as a way to help you structure the search for a job that suits you better by understanding your fears and facing them logically.

[From the July/August 2024 issue: Stop trying to understand Kafka]

For most people, changing jobs is a significant cause of stress. According to a study that used the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory standard assessment tool, altering your employment creates on average about a third as much stress as the death of a spouse, half as much as divorce, about the same amount as the death of a close friend, and 50 percent more than quitting smoking. No surprise, then, that normal people with steady jobs are reluctant to quit them, even when their work-life experience is not great.

People resist big life changes, such as finding a new job, partly for biological reasons. For example, the brain is more efficient, using less energy, when it can rely on consolidated memory—when it does not have to process too much new information. One neuroscientific hypothesis is that this explains why some people are dogmatic and closed-minded; it also explains people’s resistance to novelty—why they can be reluctant to learn new job skills, meet a group of new colleagues, figure out how to stay on the right side of a new boss, and work out a faster new commute.

Psychologists have studied the characteristics of people who are most reluctant to quit. As expected, they found that this applies to those who have risk-averse personalities. In a 2015 study of German IT employees, for example, researchers showed that even when the employees had an equally high intention to quit their job, those resistant to change were about a third as likely to jump, compared with those open to change.

My late father belonged to this resistant category. I remember him looking once at employment listings for his profession and saying, “I would love to apply for one of these jobs.” “Why don’t you?” I asked. He looked at me as if I were insane to even suggest such a thing. But my dad had another characteristic, which explains his reluctance to change jobs even better: high conscientiousness. Psychologists in 2016 theorized that people high in this positive personality trait may be especially reluctant to be seen as job hoppers and are more likely to make the best of the position they have.

Given such resistance, what people really want to know is whether a job change, with all the disruption and uncertainty, is likely to lead to greater happiness. The answer is probably. Obviously, a final determination depends on how miserable you are in the old gig and the quality of the new one. But as I have written in a previous column, according to one study, job changers typically rated their satisfaction with the position they’re leaving at 4.5 on a 1 to 7 scale. The new job earned a 6 during the first six weeks, but that tended to decay over the next six months to about 5.5. Still, a long-term net gain of one satisfaction point is nothing to sneeze at.

Much more interesting to the Gregor Samsas in the workforce is what happens if you don’t quit your job. Although you can probably count on not turning into a cockroach, chronically low job satisfaction has been shown in research to provoke mental-health problems. In a 2019 study of Japanese civil servants, psychologists looked at the effects on workers’ mood a year after they reported job dissatisfaction. They found that job dissatisfaction was significantly related to depression at the one-year follow-up.

Not surprisingly, the quality of one’s work suffers as well. Researchers studying “off-the-job embeddedness”—when a person stays in a particular employment because of such extrinsic factors as convenience for a child’s school or a home-purchase location—found in 2017 that this behavior lowers job performance and commitment, and increases absenteeism.

[Rogé Karma: The California job-killer that wasn’t]

If the American labor market were in recession, any worries you might have about quitting could be well justified. In present conditions, however, you might want to find a way to deal with your anxiety and take the plunge. The best way to do this is by starting with the recognition that worrying is a form of unfocused fear. To make good decisions in an uncertain situation with less anxiety, you need to focus your attention on exactly why you are unhappy and on exactly what you want instead. This way, the whole job-switching process is less amorphous and frightening.

A helpful guide for doing so comes from my Harvard colleague Ethan Bernstein and his co-authors Michael B. Horn and Bob Moesta. Their new book, Job Moves, documents the experiences of hundreds of job changers, and finds that their switches are motivated largely by one of four “quests.” Your principal job dissatisfaction probably falls under their schema—just as one of their quests may fit how you should assess a new opportunity.

Quest 1: Get out.
Your job feels like a dead end, and your future looks very cockroach-like as a result. This may be because you see no room for advancement or change, and that may include a boss who makes progress impossible. The aim here is to look for a new job in which you believe you can be both supported and challenged. Make a point of asking about that opportunity when you are interviewed for a position.

Quest 2: Regain control.
Here, the problem is that you don’t have any say in the way you work. The zoological metaphor is less cockroach, more hamster. Generally, this indicates a rigid company culture or a controlling boss. The goal in your employment search is to find a new spot that will allow you more of a voice in how, when, and where you work.

Quest 3: Regain alignment.
Your dissatisfaction may instead stem from being misunderstood, disrespected, or undervalued. This almost always reflects a management problem and is extremely common. According to the Harvard Business Review, 54 percent of American workers report that they don’t get enough respect from their boss. The way to find a better match is not just to assess your potential manager in an interview, but also talk with employees of the organization. When you do so, be sure to ask specifically about whether the institution fosters a culture of respect and recognition.

Quest 4: Take the next step.
In this case, your job dissatisfaction is not your employer’s fault; you have simply outgrown your old job or career path. This realization tends to occur when you hit a life milestone, such as turning 50 or when your kids leave home. The telltale sign here is low-level boredom with the status quo. Diagnosing this requires some discernment: You will need to listen carefully to your gut feeling to figure out some different options.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The secret to happiness at work]

The authors of Job Moves urge their readers to keep one especially important point in mind as they change employment: Look for improvement, not perfection. When you are feeling stuck in life, it is easy to see a job change as a panacea for all of your troubles. Of course, things are rarely as simple as that. As we saw earlier, the realistic scenario is that, over the first year of a job move, you will go from a 4.5 to a 5.5, not all the way to a 7, on the satisfaction scale. A new job won’t fix your marriage or help me grow hair. And you should probably expect to find some things you like less in a new position—a better job can be a more demanding one, for instance.

When you think about it, finding a new job that is perfect in every way would actually be rather surreal. Like turning into a roach.