Picture a plastic shopping bag that some busy customer picks up in the checkout line of a store—say, the British supermarket Tesco. That shopper piles her groceries into the bag, takes it home to a flat in London, and then recycles it.

Although she’ll think about the bag no further, its journey has just begun. From a recycling bin in London, it is trucked to Harwich, a port town 80 miles northeast, then shipped to Rotterdam, then driven across Germany into Poland, before finally coming to rest in a jumbled pile of trash outside an unmarked warehouse in southern Turkey. It might eventually get recycled, but it just as likely will sit there, baking in the sun, slowly disintegrating over years.

For most plastic bags, this odyssey is invisible. To one particular Tesco bag, however, Bloomberg journalists attached a tiny digital tracker, revealing its months-long, transcontinental journey—“a messy reality,” the reporters wrote, “that looks less like a virtuous circle and more like passing the buck.”

The story of this plastic bag appears early in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, a new book by the journalist Alexander Clapp. The book reveals many such journeys, tracking the garbage of rich countries along hidden arteries toward some of the planet’s poorest places. One dark side of consumerism, it turns out, is all of the discarded wrappers and old iPhones piling up or being burned on the other side of the world.

This dumping exacts a devastating environmental toll—leaching toxic contaminants into water, air, and food, and miring whole regions in growing fields of rubbish. It’s also reshaping economies, having birthed an informal disposal industry that now employs millions of people. Towns in Indonesia are buried in millions of pounds of single-use plastics; communities across India and Bangladesh are populated by armies of migrant laborers tasked with dismantling cruise liners and oil tankers by hand. To describe this dystopian reality, Clapp assembles a narrative that is part history, part sociology, part horrifying travelogue. The result is a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world.

The focus of Waste Wars may be trash, but the book highlights a literal manifestation of a much broader global dynamic: Rich countries tend to pass their problems on to poorer ones. Consider, for instance, the nuclear refuse that the United States dumped among Pacific island nations during the Cold War, which threatens radioactive disaster even decades later. Consider the refugees consigned by the United States to Latin America, by the European Union to Turkey and Pakistan, or by Australia to the island of Nauru. Consider, of course, the most devastating consequences of climate change, such as the rising seas threatening island nations that bear little responsibility for global carbon emissions.

[Read: What America owes the planet]

Waste Wars shows how wealthy, developed countries are, today, not only removing wealth from poorer, developing countries (in the form of materials and labor) but also sending back what the late sociologist R. Scott Frey called “anti-wealth.” In fact, the very places that long supplied rubber, cotton, metal, and other goods to imperial viceroys now serve as dumping grounds for the modern descendants of some of those same powers. This disheartening reality augurs a future in which the prosperity of a few affluent enclaves depends in part on the rest of the globe becoming ever more nasty, brutish, and hot.

Toward the beginning of his book, Clapp describes a counterintuitive consequence of the landmark environmental laws passed in the United States in the 1970s. Statutes such as the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 banned scores of toxic substances, while others, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, made burying hazardous waste in U.S. soil much more expensive. A tricky new problem presented itself: what to do with all of the waste?

“America’s newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret,” Clapp writes. “It didn’t extend to other countries.” As similar laws were passed across Europe and North America, a thriving, semilegal international waste trade soon sprang up. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, wealthy nations exported such unloved materials as asbestos and DDT to impoverished nations like Benin and Haiti, which were desperate to develop their economies yet rarely possessed facilities capable of properly disposing of toxic materials. These countries faced a choice, Clapp writes: “poison or poverty.” By the end of the ’80s, more waste than development aid, dollar for dollar, was flowing from the global North to the global South.

This dynamic was historically novel, yet it emerged from practices stretching back hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, the filthiest trades (such as tanning) were branded nuisances and forced out of cities and closer to those living at society’s margins. Factories, industrial smelters, and dumps were likewise relegated to places where Black and brown people in the Americas, or the Roma in Europe, or Dalits in India, were legally or economically compelled to live. As the historian Andrew Needham has noted, the 20th-century population boom of southwestern U.S. metropolises, including Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, relied on coal both mined and burned on Navajo and Hopi land—coal that by the early 1970s was generating five times more electricity than the Hoover Dam. The air-conditioned comfort of the Sun Belt, in other words, depended on the despoliation of Indigenous land.

By the late ’80s, many developing nations had had enough. The leaders of Caribbean and African states united to draft the Basel Convention, a 1989 international agreement effectively outlawing the export of hazardous waste to other countries. Today, 191 nations have ratified the convention. (The United States is one of the only holdouts.) It’s a spectacular accomplishment—a testament to transnational organizing and solidarity—and also, as Waste Wars demonstrates, a hollow one.

The global redistribution of “anti-wealth” did not cease; in fact, Clapp writes, it “exploded” in the 1990s. The rub lay in a provision of the Basel Convention, which stated that an object sent from one country to another for reuse, rather than disposal, wasn’t waste but a thing of value. Quickly, waste brokers learned to refer to their wares with such euphemisms as “recovered byproducts.” Those on the receiving end of the garbage learned to extract whatever value they could from discarded cardboard and busted laptops—and then dump, burn, or dissolve in acid what remained.

To illustrate the profound consequences of the global recycling economy, Clapp traveled to the Ghanaian slum of Agbogbloshie, where (until it was demolished a few years ago) a shadow workforce of migrants lived at the foot of a five-story mound of discarded electronics. On paper, these items weren’t all waste—some of them technically still worked—but most were dying or dead, and the laborers of Agbogbloshie dutifully wielded hammers to strip old televisions and smartphones of precious metals and incinerate the rest. Clapp highlights the particular irony of Agbogbloshie—a slum “clouded with cancerous smoke, encircled by acres of poisonous dirt”—occurring in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to free itself of colonialism. Despite the high hopes of its revolutionary generation, in some places, Ghana still experiences what Clapp calls “a story of foreign domination by other means.” More and more of these electronic-waste disposal sites are popping up around the world.

Yet the biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem. Derived from fossil fuels, plastic is cheap, convenient—and eternal. When, in the late 1980s, the public started to get concerned about plastic detritus, the petrochemical industry began promoting “recycling.” It was, mostly, public relations; plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle, and it’s hard to make a profit while doing so. But the messaging was effective. Plastic production continued to accelerate.

[Read: The cost of avoiding microplastics]

In the mid-1990s, China emerged as the principal destination for used cups, straws, and the like; the country’s growing manufacturing sector was eager to make use of cheap, recycled raw plastic. As Clapp reports, over the following quarter century, China accepted half the globe’s plastic waste, conveniently disappearing it even as air pollution spiked in its destinations in the country’s southeast. The plastic waste China received was filthy, much of it too dirty to be cleaned, shredded, and turned into new plastic.

The result was not only environmental catastrophe but license for unchecked consumption of cheap plastic goods that can take a few minutes to use but hundreds of years to decay. In the United States, plastic waste increased from 60 pounds per person in 1980 to 218 pounds per person in 2018. There is now a ton of discarded plastic for every human on the planet; the oceans contain 21,000 pieces of plastic for each person on Earth.

In 2017, citing pollution concerns, China announced that it would no longer accept the world’s plastic waste. “There was an opportunity here,” Clapp writes, for the world to finally tackle the problem of unsustainable plastic production. Instead, governmental and industrial leaders chose a simpler solution: “redirecting the inevitable pollution blight from China to more desperate countries.” In just two years, the amount of American plastic waste exported to Central America doubled; worldwide exports to Africa quadrupled, and in Thailand they increased twentyfold.

The international waste trade is a “crime,” Clapp concludes, and the refusal to address its root causes is a dereliction bearing “certain similarities to international failures to address the climate crisis.” Waste Wars demonstrates the mounting consequences of such inaction: Residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing much of the planet in exchange for the freedom to ignore the consequences of their own convenience.

The highest-earning 10% of Americans are powering the economy at the highest levels since the 1990s, according to new data.

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Illustrations by Kimberly Elliott

In the spring of 2022, I was 36 years old and jumping up and down in my bathroom, trying to figure out my future. I had ordered a fertility test online that said it would provide fast results with just a few drops of blood. The videos on the company’s website featured a smiling blond woman jumping—to stimulate blood flow, naturally—and then effortlessly dribbling blood from her fingertips all over a little strip of test paper. All I had to do was be like her. Joyful. Sanguineous. Fertile.

For years, my husband, Rich, and I had gingerly walked the prime meridian between wanting and not wanting kids, usually leaning toward the “no” side. Having a baby had seemed unaffordable and impossible. On days when I finished work at 8 p.m., the thought of procreating made me laugh, then shudder.

Recently, though, I’d begun to reconsider. I was in the midst of an admittedly strange-sounding project: I was spending a year trying to change my personality. According to a scientific personality test I’d taken, I scored sky-high on neuroticism, a trait associated with anxiety and depression, and low on agreeableness and extroversion. I lived in a constant, clenched state of dread, and it was poisoning my life. My therapist had stopped laughing at my jokes.

But I had read some scientific research suggesting that you can change your personality by behaving like the kind of person you wish you were. Several studies show that people who want to be, say, less isolated or less anxious can make a habit of socializing, meditating, or journaling. Eventually these habits will come naturally, knitting together to form new traits.

[From the March 2022 issue: I gave myself three months to change my personality]

I knew that becoming a parent had the potential to change me in even more profound ways. But I had no idea how. My own mother once said to me, “I can’t picture you as a mother.” The truth was, neither could I.

I wasn’t sure I could get pregnant, even if I wanted to. My age put me in a category that was, in a less delicate time, called “geriatric” for pregnancy, and one doctor told me my eggs were probably of “poor quality.” The fertility test I’d ordered was meant to determine if those eggs were serviceable. In the bathroom, I unwrapped the glossy white box. The instructions said the test would take 20 minutes and require a pack of lancets. I grabbed one and stabbed it into my geriatric forefinger. Two hours, five lancets, and a graveyard of gauze and alcohol wipes later, I still hadn’t squeezed a single droplet out of my finger. Was I not jumping high enough? Was I already failing as a mother?

I was worried I wouldn’t be able to have a baby. I was also scared to death of having one.

Arguably, many things are wrong with me. I was raised by Russian immigrants who constantly worried that the “dark day” was upon us, so hopeful thoughts about the future of humanity don’t come naturally. I’m not a person who is affected by cuteness. I’ve never liked holding—or even really looking at—other people’s babies. I don’t like animals. I couldn’t imagine cooing and smiling at a baby as much as science says you’re supposed to for their brain development.

My neuroticism made it especially hard to decide if I wanted kids, because no process is more rife with uncertainty than parenting, and nothing scares anxious people more than uncertainty. I worried that Rich and I would fight more, and that our relationship would suffer. I worried about sleep deprivation. I felt torn between my lifelong conviction that people shouldn’t create problems for themselves and my (apparent) desire to do just that.

I would wake up in the middle of the night and Google things like percent miscarriage pregnant while 36? ; anxiety pregnancy miscarriage causes; Diet Coke fetal defects; pregnancy brain stops working hands stop working. These searches surfaced horrific anecdotes, but never any conclusive answers about what I should do. One time, I Googled reasons to have kids and found an article that labeled all the reasons I had come up with—like being cared for in old age and having someone who loves me—with the heading “Not-So-Good Reasons to Have Children.”

But then I would remember the times we visited Rich’s mom, who had dementia, in her nursing home. Her face lit up at the sight of him. “My son, my son, my only son,” she’d say, grabbing his arm. He was the only person she still recognized. The visits were a reminder that the people who matter most at the end are your children. The readers of your blog posts won’t make the trip.

Heather Rackin, a sociologist at Louisiana State University, found in a study that the death of a mother or sibling increased the likelihood that a woman would give birth within two years. The proximity of death is, perhaps, a wake-up call. Who will remember us? The study was based on Rackin’s personal experience: When her father died in 2017, she decided not to wait any longer to have kids. His death got her thinking, she told me, about what was important in life: the experience of being loved and the chance to provide that love for someone else. Her first child was born in 2019.

There are many reasons to postpone or avoid having children—the cost, the responsibility, the existence of and use case for the NoseFrida. But in addition to the practical challenges, a narrative has taken hold: Everything changes when you become a mother.

Once they reach their 30s, many people have carefully cultivated friend groups and sourdough starters and five-year plans. They “really have a good sense of who they are, and then having a baby totally disrupts everything that they thought they knew about themselves,” says Lauren Ratliff, a perinatal therapist in Illinois. Of course, this is where I differ from the rest of my cohort. By the time I was ready to have a baby, I’d already been trying to disrupt everything about myself.

For my personality-change project, I had experimented with science-backed strategies to turn down my neuroticism and amp up my extroversion and agreeableness. I had spent hundreds of hours trying out different iterations of mindfulness, culminating in a day-long meditation retreat that almost killed me with boredom but somehow alleviated my depression. Among other agreeableness-boosting activities, I traveled to London for a “conversation workshop,” where I learned techniques that can make even British people show an emotion. And to become more extroverted, I went out as much as humanly possible. I played table tennis. I did improv, and survived.

For the most part, my efforts worked: I no longer thought of talking with people as a waste of time. I became less afraid of uncertainty and disappointment. I made one very good new friend. I drank less.

[Listen: How to Start Over, a podcast with Olga Khazan on navigating the challenges of changing your life]

I had been changing, but it was a type of change that I directly determined. I could go to happy hour, or not. I could meditate, or stop. I was aware that parenthood would transform me further, but what I found unsettling was that I couldn’t know exactly how. Bizarrely, for the biggest disruption of your life, study after study shows there’s no “typical” way that becoming a parent changes your personality. Some studies have found tiny average decreases in extroversion or openness among new parents—but even those findings aren’t consistent.

Despite my progress, I was still too neurotic to feel comfortable surrendering control and letting biology mold me into someone I couldn’t predict and might not recognize.

After doctors pronounced me insufficiently fertile, Rich and I decided to just stop being careful one month and see what happened. We figured we would at least have some fun before we embarked on our arduous “fertility journey.”

A short time later, on a choppy boat tour in Europe, I couldn’t stop leaning over the edge of the catamaran and hurling.

“Do you think you might be pregnant?” Rich whispered as the boat crew force-fed me pita bread.

“Don’t be insane,” I said. Everyone knows that 37-year-olds—especially infertile ones—don’t get pregnant on their first try.

A week after that, I found out that I had indeed gotten pregnant on my first try.

Being pregnant means having your brain replaced with an anxiety T-shirt cannon. I didn’t feel glowy or goddessy; I felt crazy. None of my friends has kids, and many of them reacted to my news like I’d gotten a face tattoo. One sent me a TikTok of everything that can supposedly go wrong in pregnancy, including the possibility that vomit will come out of your eyes. (It won’t.) I spent more and more time by myself, obsessing over which swaddles were best. (We didn’t end up using any.)

Thanks to a king tide of hormones, irritability spikes during the first and last trimesters of pregnancy. People say your baby will remember the sounds they hear in the womb, but I fear mine detected little in there other than me screaming at his father. Every few weeks, something would set me off, at a deafening volume. If they’d overheard me, those couples therapists who say contempt is the most glaring sign of a failed relationship would probably have advised us to start divvying up our furniture.

[Olga Khazan: Doomed to be a tradwife]

Sometimes when I was yelling, being so mean felt amazing—as though I’d finally engulfed Rich in my distress. Obviously you need a travel stroller and a regular stroller! I always apologized, and Rich always accepted my apology. But one time he said, “You know that with a kid, that’s not really something you can take back, right?” Sometimes, late at night, after yet another argument, I would rotate my spheroid belly toward Rich and ask, “What if I turn out to be a bad mother?”

The rest of the pregnancy was horrible. I didn’t think it was possible to feel so tired and still be technically alive. At my baby shower, when some friends asked me how I was feeling, I quoted the Russian dissident Boris Nadezhdin responding to a question about whether he feared imprisonment or death: “The tastiest and the sweetest years of my life are already in the past.” (This is the closest Russians get to excited.)

Three weeks before my due date, after a routine ultrasound, my high-risk ob-gyn walked briskly into the room. She looked around for something to sit on and, finding nothing, plopped down on top of a closed trash can. She told me that something was wrong with my placenta, and that the baby was in danger. And that I should now walk over to the delivery wing of the hospital.

Kimberly Elliott

In the antechamber of the operating room, I hyperventilated in my paper gown and tapped out emails to all my sources and bosses: I’m having an emergency C-section today, so I won’t be available for the next few months. My last day of caring whether people were mad at me.

Afterward, while the medical residents were rearranging my innards, I thought I heard one of them ask me something.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on down there at all,” I said across the blue curtain.

“That’s … probably for the best,” the resident said.

He came out with white hair, a perfectly round face, and a grumpy expression, like the leader of a former Yugoslav republic. I called him “Slobodan” a couple of times, until Rich told me to stop.

Because he was early, we panic-picked a name from our shortlist—Evan. The same day he was born, doctors whisked him away to the NICU; I saw him only a few times before we were all sent home days later. My discharge paperwork said, “Mom is breastfeeding four or five times a day,” which was funny because at that point I had not done it successfully even once. It was also funny because I—quite possibly the least qualified person for the job—was apparently “Mom.”

Once home, we entered the period we now refer to as “Cute Abu Ghraib.” Sleep deprivation addled me to the point that, on a call with the pediatrician, I forgot the baby’s name. When Evan was two weeks old, I bit into a piece of chicken and tasted something bloody and sharp. I had ground my teeth so hard during his NICU stay that I’d loosened a crown.

We agonized over whether the gyrations of the SNOO Smart Sleeper Bassinet would rattle his brain too much, then grew too exhausted to care. I became the CEO of Baby Inc., and Rich was employee No. 1; we communicated only about ointments and ounces. I finally had the big boobs of my dreams, but the only man who saw them was two feet tall and couldn’t read.

But then something interrupted the misery. One night, I was holding Evan while he was sleeping. I had read that singing to your baby was beneficial, so I decided to serenade him with one of the few songs I know by heart: “Forever and Ever, Amen,” by Randy Travis. Except I couldn’t seem to get through the fourth line: “This love that I feel for you always will be.” I, a bad bitch who has never cried at a wedding, kept choking up.

Rich asked me if I was okay.

“Whatever!” I said, tears rolling down my cheeks. “Shut up!”

I thought motherhood would be a forced march through inert babyhood and feral toddler years before we finally reached the golden time of my imagination: having a talking, precocious elementary schooler. But there I was, flooded with adoration for someone who barely registered my presence. I’d hated being pregnant, so I thought I would hate having a baby, too. But I loved him. I loved this.

Recall the research showing there’s no one way that parenthood tends to change people’s personalities. Anecdotally, researchers told me that they do notice certain patterns among new parents. Most moms worry about their kid, more or less constantly, from the minute they find out they’re pregnant. “Signing up to be a parent is signing up to have a lifetime of some degree of depression and anxiety,” Ratliff, the therapist, told me.

[Olga Khazan: Why it’s so hard to know what to do with your baby]

New parents’ satisfaction with their romantic relationship goes down, especially for mothers, and especially in the first year. “Guilt is another universal,” says Aurélie Athan, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who researches the transition known as “matrescence.” The creeping sense that you should be with your kid while you’re working and working while you’re with your kid apparently never goes away.

She told me that mothers become more attuned and prosocial—more caring and empathetic toward others. Athan said this is why so many mothers cry when their babies cry and have a hard time watching gory movies. “Moms get a really bad taste in their mouth with violent television or looking at images of war,” she said.

That’s where she lost me. My son had colic; for the first four months, he screamed like the possessed unless he was within the jiggly confines of his SNOO. The doula we hired referred to him, alternately, as “Mr. Cheeks,” “Mr. Crab,” and, sarcastically, “Mr. Wonderful.” If I had cried every time he cried, I wouldn’t have had time to do anything else.

Eventually, Rich and I grew desensitized, or felt like we had to match his chaotic energy with equally intense stimuli. One night, after Evan wailed in our ears for two hours, we shuffled downstairs and collapsed onto the couch. There was only one thing we could think to watch that would serve as a comedown from what had just happened: Saving Private Ryan.

“Did you remember to sterilize the pump parts?” I asked Rich as the entrails of American soldiers spilled out over the beaches of Normandy.

“The sterilizer thing broke, so I had to reset it,” he said as a man stumbled around with his arm blown off.

Even within these supposedly universal rules of parenthood, that is, there’s a lot of variability. That’s because life events like parenthood seem to change everyone differently, and how you’ll change is, in part, up to you. For a recent study, Ted Schwaba, a psychologist at Michigan State University, and his co-authors asked thousands of Dutch people about a life event in the past 10 years, such as a divorce or a new job, that they felt had changed who they were as a person. About 7 percent of the participants identified parenthood as the event that changed them, and on average, they felt that it had made them slightly more agreeable and conscientious.

But the big takeaway for Schwaba, from looking at all the data for all the different types of life events, was that there really was no pattern. Some people became more extroverted when they got a new job. Some became less so. Some people actually became less neurotic—that is, less depressed and anxious—after, say, a cancer diagnosis.

To Schwaba, this research suggests that it’s how you experience an event such as parenthood, more than the event itself, that determines how you’ll change. “The same event, like getting divorced, might be someone’s worst thing that’s ever happened to them, and for someone else, it might be the best thing that’s ever happened to them,” he told me.

Or your personality might change not immediately after an event like childbirth, but through a long process that the event sets in motion. It’s not the cry you hear in the delivery room that changes you; it’s the many years of researching child care and soothing boo-boos that gradually turn you into someone new. To change, you have to take steps every day to do so. Having a baby won’t make you a better person. Behaving like a better person for your baby will.

Of all the things I wanted motherhood to change about me, neuroticism was high on the list. Before I had Evan, I felt like I was personally responsible for making life unfold perfectly, and whenever I “failed” to do so, I had a meltdown. One day a few years ago, I got a bad haircut, got stuck in traffic, and had professional photos taken that looked terrible. My response to this—what my new-parent eyes now see as an 8-out-of-10 day—was to chug half a bottle of wine and scream to my husband through sobs, “I hate everyone and everything!”

[Olga Khazan: This influencer says you can’t parent too gently]

But now so much goes wrong every single day that there’s no time to get upset about any one thing. I recently took a flight with Evan by myself, an exercise that really underscores the first Noble Truth of Buddhism (life is suffering). As I hauled the car seat, the stroller, the baby, the diaper bag, and the trendy, impractical tote from my childless years to the TSA line, an airline attendant took one look at me and said, “I know; it is too much.”

In the middle of the flight, I noticed that the two bottles of formula Evan nervously drank during takeoff had caught up with him, and that he was now soaked with pee. I grabbed him under the armpits and scooted across the seats to change him in the airplane’s postage-stamp-size bathroom. With one hand, I held him, crying, on the changing table, and with the other, I dug a clean onesie out of the bottom of the diaper bag. I fastened a million tiny onesie buttons. Then I saw that I had misaligned them and fastened them again. Next it was my turn. I couldn’t leave him on the changing table, or put him on the disgusting floor. I yanked my leggings down and held him at arm’s length as I peed.

By the end of that ordeal, I felt accomplished and capable. I didn’t feel like sobbing; I felt like high-fiving myself. I’ve let go in other ways, too. I show up at important meetings without makeup on. I say weird stuff to strangers and don’t analyze it obsessively later. Evan has forced me to step outside myself, to break from the relentless self-focus that has contributed to both my success and my unhappiness.

My remaining neuroses are laser-directed on his well-being. I had initially planned not to breastfeed, but once I started, I got so into it that when a doctor suggested that Evan would spit up less if I cut food allergens from my diet, I stopped eating virtually anything but oats and spinach for months. When I was pregnant, we’d signed the unborn Evan up for day care, but as the end of my maternity leave loomed, I embarked on a frantic search for a nanny so he could stay close to me while I worked from home. I had always mentally mocked parents who checked to be sure their babies were still breathing at night, then found myself standing in front of his crib at 3 a.m., feeling for puffs of air from two tiny nostrils.

Kimberly Elliott

I yell at Rich less than I used to, because not only is he employee No. 1 of Baby Inc., but he’s the only employee, and frankly there are no other applicants for the job. In fact, the whole experience has made me kinder and more tender, like the Grinch, post–heart enlargement. I’m less worried about wasting time, because all time with a baby is essentially wasted—the most important nothing you’ll ever do in your life. I even love Evan’s wet, violent “kisses,” which leave his baby-teeth imprints on our jaws. When my friend Anton visited recently, he watched me make horsey noises for Evan for what probably felt like hours. “I can’t believe you love an infant!” he said.

During my interview with Ratliff, I told her that Evan had lately been losing interest in breastfeeding. I had awaited this day through months of bleeding nipples and frustration, but now that it was here, it was making me a bit sad. “Your baby’s moving to the next stage,” she affirmed, “and this one is not going to come back again.” I started tearing up—both at the memory of those bleary, milk-soaked months together and at the realization that he wouldn’t even be a baby for much longer.

During my personality-change experiment, my meditation teacher had tried to hammer home the idea that “this too shall pass” is both uplifting and sad: Nothing bad lasts forever, but neither does anything good. Before I had Evan, I was focused on impermanence’s upsides: This uncomfortable improv show will end; this awful pregnancy will too. But now I’m more keenly aware of its downsides. The sleepless nights will end, but so too will the times Evan squeals at a game of peekaboo, or spends an entire swim class gazing up at me in awe. Every day brings a sigh of relief and a pang of nostalgia. Having someone who loves you, I’ve decided, is a good reason to have kids.

This essay was adapted from Olga Khazan’s forthcoming book, Me, but Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Who’s Your Mommy?”

What do the wealthy actually want? Some billionaires have been startlingly transparent about their intent to shape the systems that govern American life. Some celebrities just need uncomplicated adoration from the masses. In recent years, several prestige shows have examined the psychology of a different, less visible category of the ultrarich. They walk down the street without bodyguards; they splurge on fancy tasting menus; they attend parties full of people with the same social breeding and balance sheets.

But when they interact with those outside their world, their hidden desires and values are inevitably revealed. On The Undoing, the murder of a working-class mother whose child attends a fancy Upper East Side private school exposes the double life of a respected local physician. On Big Little Lies, a close-knit group of rich California moms—and their breezy social norms—is subjected to the judgment of an outsider. And The White Lotus, another HBO series, has poked and prodded at the wealthy guests of luxury resorts scattered around the world, showing how the casual exploitation of others is central to their vision of leisure. Rich and poor characters alike behave badly on the show—but only the former expect to get away with their sins, and usually do.

Season 3 of Mike White’s anthology series, which premieres on Sunday, follows a motley crew of vacationers at a Southeast Asian outpost of the titular hotel. As in previous seasons, guests of the White Lotus land themselves in all manner of compromising situations when they allow their base impulses—the need for sex, or chemical indulgence—to overtake them. But the shift to Thailand also introduces a new avenue for the show’s character studies. While in Asia, some of the guests end up contemplating the role of spirituality and organized religion in their life—and bristling at Buddhist teachings that seemingly run counter to their most ego-driven convictions. The selfish tourists are trapped, as one newly sober expat describes it, on a “never-ending carousel of lust and suffering,” and those unwilling to wrestle with their discomfort may never jump off.

The most obvious conflict of principles emerges among the Ratliff family, who come to the resort because Piper (played by Sarah Catherine Hook), the college-aged daughter, wants to interview a local monk. The Ratliffs don’t spend much time together on a regular basis, it seems, and their vacation becomes an exercise in attempting to reconcile each family member’s competing priorities. Father Tim (Jason Isaacs) is cautiously permissive about his bookish daughter’s interest in Buddhism; mother Victoria (Parker Posey), seems bewildered; her brash older brother mocks it outright. “Buddhism is for people that wanna suppress in life,” Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) says to his younger brother, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), on the Ratliffs’ first night in Thailand. “They’re afraid—don’t get attached; don’t have desires; don’t even try. Just sit there in a lotus position with a thumb up your ass.”

[Read: On failing the family vacation]

To Saxon, the point of life is getting what you want—a worldview without room for avarice isn’t one he respects. That’s a fairly standard outlook for a White Lotus character, and Saxon’s experience seems to graph neatly onto the show’s established patterns: Each season features a rich, conventionally attractive white man who expects the world (or the closest available woman) to bend to his whims. What makes The White Lotus often satisfying to watch is how the show challenges these characters, however briefly, to confront the assumptions they’ve built their life on. It’s not just that they’re attached to their material objects or social status; many of them have never even thought about what their comfort demands of other people. For some characters, imagining a different way of living means being forced to see how insecure they are about their looks or how flimsy their friendships have become; for others, it’s much more existential. These journeys are more complex than a simple tale of rich people getting their comeuppance in the tropics.

Some of what gives The White Lotus its charge is the show’s insistence on pushing its characters into thorny erotic terrain. Season 3 slowly upends Saxon’s understanding of himself, as the easily attained passions he’s always taken for granted—professional success, attention from women—cede ground to unspeakable, unacknowledged yearnings. The White Lotus has often portrayed sex as an exchange of power, and Saxon’s storyline shows the haunting aftereffect of unnamed desires. Later in the series, a different character regales a former friend with memories from an era in his life when he discovered an appetite for role-play. Considered alongside Saxon’s journey, these scenes underscore how inextricable sex is from the characters’ sense of self—and how their identity is attached to invisible hierarchies. Without others affirming their superiority, be it in the bedroom or in the boardroom, they wind up adrift.

Part of why the White Lotus characters are pushed toward cataclysmic (if also fleeting) personal revelations is how the series traps them in contained, unfamiliar settings. Every season of The White Lotus opens with the killing of a character whose identity is only later revealed. The hotel guests are sometimes too self-absorbed to notice, but this season amps up the terrors lurking around every corner in the week leading to the mysterious death. The music is eerier, and the environment seems more foreboding. Even the animals pose a threat—a number of the season’s most suspenseful moments involve patrons either running away from, or getting overly friendly with, the local wildlife. And yet, most of the peril that the rich guests have encountered thus far is of their own making.

There’s only so much catharsis that a show about the ultrarich can offer. The White Lotus may be a show about wealthy people behaving reprehensibly, but it still exults in depicting their luxurious lifestyles, at a time when average Americans have been warned to prepare for economic hardship ahead. When one character says that having access to a yacht is worth the risk of being killed, her blithe assessment doesn’t land as a shocking provocation; the camera seems to be in love with the boat too. The characters are not wholly irredeemable, and some do arrive through meditation and self-reflection at meaningful answers about their compulsions, even as others remain unwilling to consider such questions about their motivations (and how their actions affect other people). But no matter how many internal crises they face, they usually end up sailing off into the sunset.

We explore rising class consciousness among Gen Z and millennials and the growing awareness of economic inequality.

Elon Musk has brazenly dismantled government agencies because he can feel assured of his insulation from the law. By the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, he may well receive a pardon. That’s what many recent pardons (Paul Manafort, the Biden clan, the January 6 insurrectionists) suggest: Presidential loyalists and family members are, in effect, immune from prosecution. On the most disturbing scale, they have become like diplomats who can park wherever they want.

The dawn of this age of impunity can be dated to any number of administrations. In his new book, The Pardon, Jeffrey Toobin makes a compelling case that a primary culprit is the 38th president, Gerald Ford. Toobin’s thesis is brashly revisionist; Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon has gone down in history as a great act of beneficence. According to conventional wisdom, by immunizing Nixon from prosecution, Ford short-circuited years of polarizing legal proceedings against the former president that would have torn the nation asunder. But Toobin argues that this overpraised act of catharsis established a precedent of lawlessness. The road to Trump begins, in some moral sense, with the absolution of Nixon.

At a glance, the amiable Ford, a college football star and World War II veteran, seems impossible to villainize. Compared with Trump or Nixon, he was the picture of humble decency. On the day he became president, he lumbered out of his suburban-Virginia house in a bathrobe to pick up the paper. In the White House, he toasted his own English muffins. He told dad jokes, played in celebrity golf tournaments, and had a reputation for basically wanting to do the ethical thing.

Having stumbled into the Nixon presidency, as the replacement for the venal vice president Spiro Agnew, he stumbled into the presidency after Watergate. As Chevy Chase portrayed him on Saturday Night Live, dooming him in popular memory, he was always stumbling. The shtick drew on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous aperçu, “Jerry Ford is so dumb that he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” (Johnson also declared, “There’s nothing wrong with Jerry Ford, except that he played football too long without his helmet.”)

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Ford made it his mission to learn as little about it as possible. He defended Nixon in the vaguest terms, and essentially ran in the other direction when Nixon asked him to examine evidence in the scandal. Ford stubbornly, and somewhat inexplicably, refused to prepare for the possibility that he might become president. He had initially accepted the vice presidency in the hope that it would be a capstone to his long political career. Indeed, that was the reason Nixon picked him: He knew that Ford had so little appetite for the big job, and so little political guile, that he was unlikely to conspire to oust him.

[Read: Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message]

In the days leading up to his ignominious departure, Nixon hatched a very Nixonian plot to exploit Ford’s goodwill and naivete. He wanted to pressure the future president into pardoning him without ever making a direct ask—a strategy he conceived with the White House counsel Fred Buzhardt, under the cover of attorney-client privilege.

On August 1, 1974, Nixon told Alexander Haig, his chief of staff, that he wanted him to begin preparing Ford to assume the job. “Tell him what’s coming,” he instructed. Nixon knew that Haig would check in with Buzhardt before sitting down with Ford. This was the twist in his scheme: Buzhardt had prepared a memo for Haig, listing six “endgame” scenarios for Ford to consider. In classic Washington style, he arrayed the possibilities so that every plan entailed a messy, prolonged handoff except for one: “Nixon could resign and then Ford could pardon him.” This was the elegant solution, but it had the whiff of corrupt horse-trading.

The pardon wasn’t something that Ford had ever considered, so he peppered Haig with questions about it. Although they didn’t agree to anything in the course of conversation, Ford’s interest had been ignited. He came to believe that a pardon genuinely served his own interests. When he finally assumed the job, he wanted to be more than a pleasant placeholder, and he could never be his own man without first disposing of the looming presence of Richard Nixon.

And so Ford talked himself into the pardon. He read a 1915 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that the acceptance of a presidential pardon is tantamount to admitting guilt, and convinced himself that the public would accept that legal logic. He would tell aides that he felt sorry for poor old Nixon, who he worried was in physical decline.

Ford pushed the process forward without really debating the merits of a pardon with his staff. His poorly argued, nervously delivered speech announcing the decision to the nation was so rushed that aides didn’t have time to prepare a teleprompter. Ford barely gave congressional leaders a heads-up, and none of them could quite grasp his reasons for haste. Tip O’Neill, the majority leader in the House, asked Ford, “Then why the hell are you doing it?” He posed that question minutes before Ford went on national television.

In the most outrageous passage of the speech, Ford declared the fate of Richard Nixon “an American tragedy in which we all played a part.” The public, having been accused of complicity, took its revenge. In a single week, Ford’s popularity plummeted 21 percentage points. His party suffered catastrophic collapse in that year’s midterm election.

[Jeffrey Crouch: O]ur Founders didn’t intend for pardons to work like this

With the benefit of time, however, Washington revised its opinion of the decision. Bob Woodward, of all people, eventually concluded, “Ford was wise to act. What at first and for many years looked like a decision to protect Nixon was instead designed to protect the nation.” Ford slowly remerged with the reputation of a healer, a man of grace.

That revisionism is nostalgic gloss. Toobin makes a damning, nuanced case against Ford. Nixon had, at that point, committed the worst crimes in the history of the presidency, vividly and irrefutably captured on tape, and he escaped without any punishment. He received absolution without displaying remorse. “The pardon was just a free pass handed from one powerful man to another,” Toobin writes.

Despite his earnest desire to undo Nixon’s legacy, Ford’s pardon was itself an assertion of the imperial presidency. That’s because the pardon is an inherently Caesarean implement. In every other facet of the American system, carefully installed safeguards are designed to limit the authoritarian exercise of power. But there is no curb on the pardon other than the conscience of the executive issuing one. Presidents tend to tacitly admit that they are misusing this authority when they sheepishly hoard pardons for the final hours of their administration, waiting for the moment when there’s no political price to pay and hoping that their shabby behavior is drowned out by the inaugural hoopla.

By absolving his former patron, Ford helped create a new Washington ritual: the moment when presidents release their cronies, friends, and family from the bonds of justice. George H. W. Bush sprinkled his magic forgiveness dust over Casper Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, and Elliot Abrams, among others, letting them off the hook for the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton bailed out the financier Marc Rich, whose alleged crimes included buying oil from Iran in defiance of an embargo. (Rich’s wife was a generous donor to Clinton.) And then Joe Biden had the temerity to pronounce himself a defender of the rule of law before he used his presidential powers to insulate his own family from potential prosecution.

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has exposed the flimsiness of American institutions. Pressure-tested by his audacious assault on the civil services, those institutions instantly folded. But when a bridge tumbles into a river, the rivets and bolts don’t suddenly fail. They erode over generations. This is what happened in Washington: The unfettered power of the president kept expanding, Congress entered a state of sclerosis, the parties became apologists for their leaders, and courts fell into the hands of ideologues. As Toobin depressingly shows, even upstanding nice guys like Gerald Ford played their part in the collapse.

Should you find yourself invited to a sex party, it might be helpful to know that you are not obliged to have sex. You can listen to music or watch performances, observe your fellow guests, and, with permission, touch them. But no one will consider it rude should you leave without having sex. If you’re invited to an orgy, however, that’s a whole different ball of wax, and people will most certainly be offended if you don’t participate. Especially if you are the sixth person in the room, in which case your presence is technically crucial. An orgy requires six to 20 people. Fewer than six, and the encounter is simply categorized by the number of participants: threesomes, foursomes, and so on. More than 20, and we’re back in the terrain of the sex party.

This isn’t information that I, personally, ever felt I needed to know. Among other things, I have an aversion to crowds, especially in the bedroom. The performative aspects of sex parties that participants seem to enjoy most are, to me, a turnoff, another way that social media—and the image-driven FOMO culture it spawned—has made life into content.

But I decided to do my journalistic due diligence on sex parties because I kept reading about them in the news. For instance, New York’s former COVID czar acknowledged participating in what the New York Post called “drug-fueled sex parties”—during the first year of the pandemic, no less. (It’s probably not worth a letter to the editor, but given that he said his parties were limited to 10 people, we now know that technically the proper terminology for such a gathering is not sex party but orgy. Each participant, he says, took a COVID test before having sex. Turnoff doesn’t even begin to describe nasal-swab foreplay.)

In the course of my research, I did not—I would like to be clear here—participate in any sex parties. I think it’s wise not to get that close to your sources. I learned that “play parties” can take place in people’s homes, but many happen under the auspices of private clubs. I reached out to a number of prominent ones, wondering if the sex-club boom was real, and what actually goes on at them. One of my major findings: People, especially rich people, come up with extremely elaborate justifications for getting laid.

To be clear, these clubs are not brothels—guests have sex with one another, not with the club’s employees. Some say that they are putting on performances of “high erotic art”; others want to promote “equitable pleasure.” They all try to sell erotic experimentation less as a means of gratification than as a moral virtue. They are creating, they insist, not so much a venue for sex as a gathering space of “like-minded individuals.” People who are “liberated” from social mores. People who think differently. People for whom the normal rules don’t apply.

Snctm, a members-only sex club in Beverly Hills inspired by the movie Eyes Wide Shut, opened about a decade ago, and growth “was slow and steady” at first, Robert Artés, the club’s managing director, told me. “But the last three to four years, there’s been tremendous growth in this space.”

Snctm members pay $12,500 or more a year for access to masquerade parties that can cost upwards of $2,000 a ticket. KNKY Rabbit, a sex club in L.A., offers annual memberships that range from $10,000 for the “Fluffy Tail” level to $250,000 for the “Burrow Elite Membership.” NSFW, an exclusive sex club in New York, also has a tiered membership. The most basic, a reasonable $300, gets you access to a members’ chat group and invitations to parties. The “Tribute” and “Status” tiers can range from $750 to $2,500. Members, referred to as “lovers,” can purchase VIP-party upgrades for $1,000 a piece, or hire NSFW to create custom play experiences for themselves and their friends, starting at $5,000. Memberships are for life.

NSFW stands for New Society for Wellness, its owners say. The club claims more than 10,000 members around the world, and considers itself as much a movement as a club, dedicated, according to its mission statement, to helping members “Live Adventurously”: “We believe sex is a gift that should be explored, honored and mastered through experience and education. Knowledge gained from expanding your sexual wisdom is one path to real happiness.” Among the people seeking real happiness through such ends are CEOs, politicians, and celebrities, Daniel Saynt, the club’s founder and “chief conspirator,” told me. “We’re looking for the most creative, most interesting people. We’re trying to collect individuals who see sex as something that needs to be prioritized.” A 14-point questionnaire evaluates people on categories such as hygiene, goals for their “sexual journey,” wealth, career accolades, and travel history. An applicant must hit nine or more points of “attraction.”

This is not a key party with your schlubby neighbors. Members are not just rich and influential; they’re beautiful. Particularly the women, who at many parties are eligible for reduced-price or free admission. At clubs like KNKY Rabbit, applicants submit photos in addition to describing their sexual desires. Artés confirmed that Snctm screens “based on appearance”: “While we are inclusive of race, religion, gender identity, and everything like that, we do want a party of beautiful people.”

Snctm’s big selling point is anonymity. Artés said that its members are “affluent and prominent leaders in their field or in business, entertainment, or arts.” Some of the guests “keep their masks on all night long.” (Does a little mask over the eyes actually make a celebrity unrecognizable? Perhaps the illusion of anonymity is part of the fantasy.)

Putting on a show is essential. Guests arrive, mingle, and then take in performances—elaborate burlesque, shibari demos, flogging. NSFW exhibits highly produced erotic performances that make you feel “like you’re in a gallery,” Saynt told me. Snctm’s black-tie masquerades incorporate “erotic theater.” KNKY Rabbit combines “artistic innovation and exclusive experiences.”

Club owners say it’s just like interactive theater—except instead of giving a standing ovation at the end of the show, you can lie down and have sex with your fellow patrons of the arts. “What we do, you can’t do onstage at Lincoln Center,” Artés said.

It’s easy to draw a line from the libertines attracted to high-end sex clubs to the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley technocrats. And the kink industry is thriving in the valley. In a Medium post, the product designer Chris Messina, famous in some circles for “inventing” the hashtag, described nonmonogamy as nothing more or less than a design solution: “Out here, we’re data-positive and solution-oriented and if your product (i.e. marriage) is failing for 50% of your customers, then you need to fix it or offer something better.”

In Brotopia, Emily Chang’s 2018 book on Silicon Valley, she writes about tech bros who speak frankly and “proudly” of their frequent industry orgies—“about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule.”

A 2007 survey of individuals worth $30 million or more found that 70 percent felt like their wealth gave them a “better sex” life, and that the majority felt their sex life was more “adventurous and exotic” than other people’s. Threesomes are the most common sexual fantasy among Americans. For most people, they remain just that, but among the rich and famous, abundance is the word.

One of the things that draws people like these to sex parties is the fact that the standard rules don’t apply, that they’re places where the answer to every desire seems to be yes. These are people who are “chasing the rainbow,” as Jan Gerber, who runs Paracelsus Recovery, one of the most expensive rehab centers in the world, put it to me. Gerber has a front-row seat to the sex lives of the ultrarich because his clinic, which is based in Zurich, provides rehabilitation and psychiatric services to billionaires and the globally famous. It’s possible, he suggested, to become desensitized even to pleasure. You can do “something very exciting the first time,” he told me—whether it’s skydiving, shopping, or sex—but the brain’s “tolerance” builds. Soon “plain vanilla sex” just isn’t so “exciting anymore.” He said he sees a “higher incidence of narcissism” among “people of wealth, especially self-made ones.” They feel they deserve to be indulged.

Clay Cockrell, a therapist who specializes in working with the very wealthy, says he sees a lot of patients who feel like, “I’m bored. I’m numb.” Eventually, “you’ve flown on the private planes, eaten at the best restaurants … What else is there? Some of this then gets transferred into high-risk behavior, kink sexual behavior, because they’re bored and they want more.”

To each his own, I guess. But I can’t help but see these people’s dismissal of the simple joys of life—their insistence that monogamy is dull and middle-class—as a tragically snobby form of cynicism. In the course of my reporting, I often found the marketing of the clubs comic and absurd, but I came to see the people joining them as deeply sad.

Club managers stressed to me that even the rich and entitled have to follow the rules—that rules are in fact central to their business.

Touching other attendees requires affirmative consent. Touching paid performers is strictly forbidden. Some clubs, such as Snctm, don’t allow drugs and have strict rules for alcohol. “Whenever you have sex involved, you have consent issues,” Artés told me, “so we can’t have anybody on drugs or intoxicated.” This is not just about protecting guests; it’s also about staying in business. Performers have to sign contracts, and the club has a 38-page policy manual laying out the rules: “They cannot touch any of the guests. They cannot touch other performers because, otherwise, you could be in violation of prostitution laws.” The businesses already struggle against the biases of the financial industry, club runners told me. “We’ve had difficulty with banking, with credit-card processing,” Artés told me. “There are tax companies that have turned us down.”

Everyone I spoke with mentioned the importance of consent. Saynt told me he wanted to “create a space that feels safer than a bar … where you can walk around naked and you don’t feel like anyone’s going to harm you.” In this context, consent is not meant to be restrictive, but liberating. You can feel free because you’re told that nothing will happen to you that you don’t want to happen.

But no one stressed consent as much as Luis Cortes, at Sucia NYC. He and his wife, Morgana, started throwing their own parties after finding themselves uncomfortable in much of New York’s play-party scene, which he described as “very white,” not just in terms of demographics, but in terms of relationships to privilege and standards of beauty. They founded Sucia NYC in 2020 after the sex parties they were hosting in their own apartment got too big for the space. (“It was a lot,” he told me. “Like, we live here, right? I use the couch during the week.”) They now run the club out of a 2,200-square-foot space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and charge a relatively affordable rate—$100 to $150 per event, with a sliding scale for teachers, artists, and activists. Their Instagram account emphasizes “community” and “decolonizing your pleasure.”

Sucia, Cortes told me, aims to center “the joy and pleasure of Black and Indigenous women and Black and Indigenous LGBTQI-plus populations.” It eschews traditional beauty standards and welcomes bodies of all shapes and sizes. It doesn’t charge men more than women, a practice Cortes objects to: “If you have women coming in for free and men are paying X amount of dollars,” he said, those men are “coming expecting something.” He sees consent as especially paramount because Sucia caters to a population that has historically “had less connection with bodily autonomy”—people who haven’t always been taught that they can say no.

Cortes said he’s seen people have breakthroughs and breakdowns at parties as they process shame, religious guilt, or past sexual trauma. The club offers aftercare workshops, and brings in experts for talks about sexuality and religion and combatting heteronormativity.

Cortes was also one of the only people I spoke with who never used the word fantasy. When I brought it up myself, he seemed offended. “That is lazy,” he told me. “That is dangerous. That is some fucking, like, knight-in-white-armor bullshit. It’s like, no—this isn’t fantasy; this is real things.” Then he said it even more emphatically: “We don’t, we don’t, we don’t, we don’t sell fantasies.”

[Read: At group sex parties, strict rules make for safe spaces]

But all club runners sell something. Everyone, including Cortes, is in the “sexpitality” industry. At a Sucia party, after a talk about consent, you can listen to Afrobeat and take in a performance. Cortes shared with me a list of some of his favorite acts: “Eli the naked trumpeter. They do flogging. They do impact play”; “You know Sir Marvelous. His thing is he does forced orgasms”; “Clavel Marchito, she is a sex-workers’-rights advocate out of Chile … and she’ll come in and do fire play and some flogging and stuff”; “Selena Surreal … She walks on glass. She does a knee dive into Lego bricks.”

Yes, these acts are real. Personally, I can’t imagine enjoying watching someone walk on glass, and playing with fire sounds less erotic than a Tony Robbins retreat. But these acts seem to offer another version of what Gerber and Cockrell were talking about—a way to break through all the boredom and numbness. Rich people might go to a sex club because they’re deadened by excess and privilege. Working-class people might go because they’re tired of being ground into dust. Either way, they all want to feel something again. Whether the club is promoted as a “path to real happiness,” art appreciation, or social justice, these are all businesses finding an ideological or class-appropriate way to market the pursuit of pleasure.

For some patrons, the party may not be an excuse for the sex at all; the sex may be the excuse for the party. Saynt told me that he’s noticed that younger patrons, especially Gen Z, are mostly interested in the “performance of eroticism.” “They’re not having sex at these parties as much,” he said. “They’re just coming for the costumes.”

All of this is in contrast to many of the sex-party stories I’d been reading in the news, about events such as Sean Combs’s “freak-offs,” at which he allegedly coerced drugged women into having sex with male prostitutes. That’s not a sex party: That’s a crime. (Combs “denies as false and defamatory” claims that he drugged and sexually abused people.) Recently, The New York Times reported on a document prepared by federal investigators showing “a web of payments” among former Representative Matt Gaetz and associates “who are said to have taken part with him in drug-fueled sex parties.” Court filings also accuse Gaetz—who was briefly Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general—of having sex at one of the parties with a 17-year-old girl. Also a crime. (Gaetz denied any wrongdoing and called the allegation that he’d slept with a teenager “a false smear”; the DOJ investigation was closed without any charges.)

And yet it’s not hard to imagine someone enjoying a sex party at Snctm or KNKY Rabbit, chafing against their limits, and then going off to do their own, independent thing. Saynt described to me a benign-sounding version of this: Members might meet for the first time at a play party, hit it off, and start “going on trips and going on yachts and boats and having little sex parties everywhere.” But presumably no one’s monitoring those sex parties in the middle of the sea to make sure the sex is safe and respectful.

We’re talking, as Cockrell put it, about rich people who are in “control of every aspect of their life. Nobody’s going to tell them no. And if somebody does, they’re just going to go build a castle where no doesn’t exist.”

People do bad things in castles like that.

Sex clubs promise people that they can push the limits of sexual freedom without going too far. They sell rule-breaking sex in a rule-bound environment. They say they’re breaking barriers—not repackaging the world’s oldest profession. As in any business, their promoters are hunting for an audience and building a brand.

Speaking of branding. I learned something at the end of my reporting that seemed to highlight the thin line between the sexual freedom promised by these parties and the darker impulses that the rules of our society exist to contain. When Robert Artés shared with me Snctm’s policy manual, full of rules to ensure the safety of its employees and guests, I saw another name listed on the front: Robert Testagrossa. After going down a few rabbit holes, I learned that Artés was a pseudonym, and for good reason. In 2007, Testagrossa pleaded guilty to assault and served five years in prison for what he acknowledged to me “were serious events, for which I accepted serious consequences.” He expressed regret for choices that were “driven by misguided passion and a lapse in judgment.”

His girlfriend at the time had lured a man who had ghosted her after sex to a hotel room. There, Testagrossa and another man Tasered the victim and held him down, while the woman heated up a piece of metal that had been twisted into a four-inch letter R. She then seared it into her former lover’s skin.

You can’t do that at Lincoln Center, either.

The first time I recall my mother mentioning Amway, we were in the car late at night, coming back from a meeting at her boss’s house. Ten years old, I’d gone upstairs to play and missed the whole point of the whiteboard sitting on an easel downstairs. My mother, however, had been rapt. Riding home with my brother and stepfather, she seemed almost to glow, as if she were throwing off sparks in the darkness.

The name Amway, she told me, was short for the “American Way.” We could sign up and buy products we already needed for the house, then sign up friends and neighbors to buy things, too. We would get rich by earning a little bit from everything they sold.

It was 1978. I didn’t realize that this was one of those moments, like Waterloo or Watergate, after which nothing would be the same. Amway—or, as we soon began to call it, the business—would become the load-bearing beam of my mother’s existence for the next four decades.

The business as then practiced in our West Virginia river town had its own culture. I found myself plunged into religious nationalism, anti-communist obsessions, denunciation of the very idea of public schools, and the worship of money. Across my lifetime, versions of these ideas would be marketed again and again to working-class Americans. Amway leaders would help elect presidents. Familiar characters from my childhood—the Amway celebrity Doug Wead, members of the DeVos family, which co-founded the company—would reappear in Republican administrations. In many ways, Amway adherents embraced a fusion of conspiratorial thinking and populism that would remain a central thread of America’s political story, prefiguring the Trump era.

But for many years, I had no context for what had swallowed my family. I had no way to understand how I’d managed to lose my mother.

Amway products began to appear around the house. We changed our laundry detergent to SA-8 and swapped our toothpaste for Glister. I rode with my mother to upline distributors’ houses to pick up the boxes that had been shipped from headquarters in Michigan. My mother and stepfather sponsored people into the business, who in turn came to our house to pick up their own orders: makeup, hair spray, a liquid soap you could use to clean anything, a portable medicine case of expensive daily vitamins called Nutrilite Double X.

My stepfather, who ran a local charity, began to introduce himself as a businessman. My mother was even more smitten with the beautiful future that Amway offered. Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.

My mother and stepfather stayed out late on weeknights and weekends, bringing new recruits to see “the plan.” They paid to go to meetings and rallies. I had no idea at the time that these events were hosted not by corporate Amway but by high-level distributors, who were technically independent business operators. We bought books and cassette tapes by the Amway personalities Doug Wead and Dexter Yager, with titles such as Tales of the Super Rich and Becoming Rich: Eleven Principles of Material and Spiritual Success. Wead had been an evangelical minister before gaining a higher profile with Amway. Yager had sold cars and Utica Club beer before becoming one of a handful of top distributors. Their wives wrote a book together. We bought that, too.

We ended up collecting more “motivational tools” than cleaning supplies. A few people sold soap or makeup to their friends at parties, Mary Kay–style. But for us, the business mostly meant recruiting people to sign up and buy products they would use themselves, while earning points toward advancing to the next level and higher bonuses.

We became students of success, advised to set goals of a bigger house and more expensive cars, as if wishing alone could make it happen. But by this point, whatever cash we had was spent on Amway. I had a pair of bell-bottom jeans with three bright satin stripes sewn diagonally across one knee. They were the only pants I owned.

One weekend during the summer of 1980, we packed jars of peanut butter, loaves of bread, and fruit into our car, then drove 300 miles east for a rally at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. On the road, my mother and I imagined what we would do when we reached the Diamond level of the business, when true wealth would arrive.

After we checked in, my brother and I were left to our own devices, running the halls and playing in the elevators. I read a pamphlet about how John Lennon’s “Imagine” threatened America as a Christian nation, which introduced me to the (dangerous) phrase secular humanism. I listened as leading Amway distributors denounced public schools for brainwashing children.

In the hotel ballroom, distributors sang along to songs like “Rut Job Blues,” about how stupid it was to work a regular job: “I feel so D-U-M-B / I’ve got a J-O-B.” Cheers went up at any mention of Ronald Reagan, who had embraced Amway for years—and would soon be president. (A few years earlier he’d told a crowd of Amway distributors that “for me to come here and talk to you about free enterprise is like saving souls in heaven.”)

We went to more rallies—in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other faltering Rust Belt cities where people were laid off and looking for hope. We ate up testimonials to God’s grace and to his desire that everyone should become as rich as possible. High-ranking distributors encouraged low-level distributors like us to Drop that stinkin’ thinkin’ and Fake it till you make it.

At one rally, my brother and I ran into Doug Wead’s son, who was about our age. After walking around the hotel, the three of us sat in our room and talked. I said how great it would be when our mother and stepfather became Diamonds, so we would be rich, too.

He told me I had it all wrong. His dad didn’t make serious money through Amway products. Most of what he earned came from writing books and recording talks. That was how people got rich in Amway—selling motivational books and tapes to distributors like my parents. Didn’t I know?

He spoke honestly, without malice, and the words rattled around in my brain for the rest of the trip. I picked at the upholstery on the seat of the car on the ride home. We would never be rich. There was no other plan. We were doomed.

What was it about Amway that so captured a bright, extroverted woman like my mother? Abandoned as a child when her own mother ran off to become a nightclub singer, she’d been raised by her grandparents. She graduated high school with a journalism scholarship to college, but met my father that summer and never left town. She became a stringer for the local paper, later working as a lunchtime anchor and interviewer for our local television station. When I was a preschooler, she took night classes and earned a bachelor’s degree in social work. By the time she discovered Amway, my mother had divorced and remarried. My stepfather had a more fundamentalist view of religion than I had been raised with—a view that dovetailed with many Amway leaders’ emphasis on biblical literalism and wives submitting to their husbands.

My mother couldn’t imagine life without a husband. More crucially, she believed herself destined for something extraordinary. But how could someone achieve greatness in Parkersburg, West Virginia? Amway promised to deliver what nothing else in our town could—or at least to give her a community that would pretend along with her.

For some Americans, joining the business might have been harmless. For us, it was not. Soon my mother and stepfather had no other job. Their bad decisions ricocheted in the echo chamber of Amway culture, where they were encouraged to dedicate themselves more deeply. Surely, any day now, we would make it. Within three years, we were living in a filthy house without electricity, eating food out of a cooler that we kept filled with ice. Then we were evicted, and my mother and stepfather declared bankruptcy. Ordinary people might have thought twice about sticking with Amway. But by that point, we had left the small dreams of ordinary people behind.

A few months later, we climbed in a van headed to New York to stay at another Hilton. It was New Year’s Eve. My parents went to see the Rockettes and to hear the same speakers they’d cheered on in other cities, singing songs, giving glory to God, and talking about his vision for America.

When I was a teenager and my mother was in her early 40s, she stopped talking to me about Amway. She filed for divorce from my stepfather and started a graduate-school program in behavioral psychology in hopes of becoming a therapist.

Despite being more than a decade older than her classmates, she was well liked and a good student. My brother and I had already escaped to college, thanks to cobbled-together loans, grants, and multiple part-time jobs. I didn’t talk to either of them often, because in 1988, long-distance phone calls were expensive. But my mother called one day to chat.

“Going crazy isn’t like being hit by a car,” she said in the middle of our conversation. “People make a small but conscious decision to give up. At some point, it’s easier than living in reality.”

She was deep in clinical work with the mentally ill at the time; I assumed she was drawing on that experience. Still, the line stayed with me. In recent years, I’ve wondered whether she was talking about herself, and whether there might have been some way to intervene that I didn’t see. Because, just two years later, in the last semester of her Ph.D. program, my mother decided to quit and marry a third husband, one who would do Amway with her.

Only much later would I hear stories about distributors like us who had declared bankruptcy and begin to understand how common our experience was. A 1980 study of tax returns conducted by Wisconsin’s attorney general showed that the top 1 percent of Amway distributors in that state had lost, on average, $900 in the business. In 1994, Dexter Yager and Amway faced a class-action lawsuit claiming that they had fraudulently misrepresented how much distributors were likely to earn and illegally pressured people to buy books and tapes. The case was settled with Amway promising compensation and changes that would require distributors to make clear that motivational tools were optional and didn’t guarantee success. The FTC had determined in 1979 that Amway was not a pyramid scheme, but the company continued to face allegations to the contrary. In 2010 it settled another class-action suit alleging that it operated a pyramid scheme. The company did not admit to guilt but did agree to pay plaintiffs $56 million, in the form of cash and Amway products.

In the years that followed, my mother and I would sometimes talk about real life—a birth, a death, a grandchild—and flashes of who she used to be would shine through. But she also shared long lists of people the Clintons had supposedly murdered, and continued to insist on Amway’s tremendous potential. She always sounded a little embarrassed by the things she said, as if she understood that they were hard to believe. I think she wanted me to see that she knew that the most cultlike aspects of the business were over the top, that she hadn’t been taken in entirely, that she wasn’t some kind of fool. But it didn’t matter. In the end, Amway owned her as fully as if she’d believed every word. Despite interventions my brother and I attempted, despite the money she continued to lose year after year, our mother never gave up on the business.

Illustration by Anthony Gerace

When I tell people how I grew up, I get a few different reactions. Sometimes I meet people who thought about joining Amway, and are relieved they never signed up. Sometimes they’re surprised that Amway still exists—they thought it disappeared decades ago. Most barely know what it is. And why should they? They themselves might never fall for such a hustle. But whether they know it or not, Amway has deeply influenced American politics for decades.

Amway supported Reagan’s candidacy in the 1980s. In the ’90s, a co-founder of the business, Rich DeVos, gave the GOP what was believed to be the largest-ever-recorded individual political donation. Less than a decade after I first listened to him on Amway tapes, Doug Wead became Vice President George H. W. Bush’s liaison to right-wing Christians. The Bush-era term compassionate conservatism may have been an Amway invention—Wead is said to have coined it. Dexter Yager, who had paid Reagan and Bush to speak at his events, reportedly mass-distributed voicemails pushing support for Republican candidates and accusing Bill Clinton of trying to “force the emergence of deviant lifestyles, of a socialist agenda.”

I grew up hearing rumors about the satanic influences motivating Procter & Gamble, which Amway considered a business competitor—stories that led to another lawsuit and required distributors to pay $19 million in damages. Amway didn’t invent the art of communal delusion via disinformation—the John Birch Society had already perfected it in the 1960s. The Birchers’ influence was in decline by the time we joined the business, but Amway’s culture helped carry their unhinged style into the digital era.

In 2021, Doug Wead died. At the time, he was under federal indictment—not for anything related to Amway, but for allegedly funneling Russian money into Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. In Trump’s first administration, he nominated Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. An advocate for school choice and religious education, she is married to Rich DeVos’s son, Dick, who was president of Amway himself in the 1990s, and whose family still co-owns the company. She said she’d be open to returning to the post, “with the goal of phasing out the Department of Education.” The rallies leading up to Trump’s latest election, with their euphoric resentments and tent-revival energy, recalled nothing so much as a 1980s Amway function.

My mother had fallen so deep into the delusional communities of Amway and religious extremism that I took a while to realize she was developing dementia. Her Alzheimer’s manifested in part as paranoid psychosis. Over time, as her memory failed and her sense of her own importance ballooned, she exchanged my actual childhood for one in which we’d been staggeringly wealthy. She had once been engaged to Trump, she told me. When a court-appointed attorney came to assess her legal competence, my mother threatened to have Trump fire her. For months, my mother believed she was working as Trump’s campaign director for Ohio and Michigan. They had met through Amway, of course.

It’s hard to leave a delusion behind. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, I noticed the ways in which Trump’s political followers likewise struggled to abandon him. Some prominent Trump supporters may see him as a means to wealth or power. Others find meaning and community—or even vindication—in accepting the lies he tells. Maybe, eventually, when they see what his second administration delivers, some voters will peel away.

That’s what happened with Amway. The company is still a multibillion-dollar, global enterprise, though its domestic profile is now so much smaller that it has a page on its own website answering the question: “Does Amway still exist?” In the end, more people left than stayed. Those who came to their senses or were unable to sustain the delusion eventually quit. But things can get bleak in the middle.

My mother was an outlier. As the illness devoured her mind, she stopped recognizing her friends. But she still remembered the business. At the beginning of 2020, just three weeks before the pandemic began, I brought her to live with me and my brother in Virginia. She set off the fire alarm and constantly announced that the belongings she’d misplaced had been stolen. But the hardest part was her insistence that we all inhabit her imaginary world—one where she lives in grievance and terror, a place of invented enemies.

When I cleaned out her old house for her, I found storage shelves in the basement filled with Amway binders, makeup tutorials, old catalogs, and hundreds of motivational CDs and cassettes. Like some ritual to release the dead, I emptied the binders one by one. I filled a dozen Hefty bags, and then more. When the outdoor bins could no longer contain the trash, I stacked the rest on the ground by the curb: relics that would help no one, souvenirs of a lost life.

At least the fever came on a Friday. Or at least that’s what I, an absolute fool, thought when my nine-month-old, Evan, spiked a 102-degree temperature after I picked him up from day care recently. That meant he’d have three days to recover and would be back at day care on Monday.

When the fever rose to 104 on Saturday, my husband and I grew concerned, and when it persisted on Sunday, we took him to urgent care. They diagnosed Evan with an ear infection and prescribed antibiotics, which should take “a day or two” to work, the doctor said.

Okay, fine; we would miss a day of work. Our jobs, thank God, are flexible about such things.

Except on Tuesday, Evan still had a fever. His ear infection had not gone away, and in fact had worsened to the point that he refused to eat or drink and screamed whenever he was laid down. On Wednesday, the doctor switched him to a new antibiotic. That Friday, a mere 48 hours away, I had to go record my audiobook, in a recording session that my publisher had already booked and paid for.

[Annie Lowrey: Why I can’t put down the vacuum]

Before we had Evan, my husband, Rich, and I had discussed such exigencies using Fair Play, a popular system—in the form of a book and card game—for divvying up chores. It aims to help women in heterosexual relationships, who tend to take on more household cognitive and physical labor, offload tasks onto their partner. Rich was assigned researching backup child care, for whenever our son was inevitably sick and could not attend day care.

The thing is, Rich never did research backup child care. Before people have kids, they don’t realize that parenting is like running a complex military operation in addition to holding down your regular job. He figured we wouldn’t need backup care, and because I was tired and pregnant and swamped with millions of other tasks, I didn’t do the research for him. So here we found ourselves.

Which is why, when Rich asked me, four days into Evan’s fever, as we were syringing Tylenol into his wailing mouth at 2 a.m., “What are we gonna do?” I very reasonably responded, “I don’t know, dickhead! What the fuck are we gonna do?”

I had done what the pop-feminist chore-management gurus suggested. I had tried to reduce my mental load by foisting ownership of and accountability for tasks onto my husband. The only slight hiccup in this plan is that if your husband doesn’t do the tasks, the system falls apart.

The problem, as both Fair Play’s author, Eve Rodsky, and I, and probably lots of other women, see it, is the men. Our husbands or male partners, enlightened though they may be, don’t notice what needs to be done, or they forget to do it, or they don’t know how to do it. This requires the woman to act as project manager, reminding her husband to clean the baby’s humidifier or to grab the yogurt snacks, and so on and so forth, as long as you both shall live.

In theory, Fair Play offers a good solution. The best-selling 2019 book, and its companion card deck, lay out all the chores a family could conceivably have—everything from buying birthday gifts to doing the dishes to taking out the trash—on 100 cards, which the couple is meant to divide. Though the resulting division might not quite be 50–50, it should feel equitable. Rodsky writes that the man in the relationship should take at least 21 cards. She told me that a popular way to keep track of who has which card is through the software program Trello.

Each person is to take complete “ownership” of their card, including its “conception, planning, and execution.” The same person remembers that it’s time to clean the countertops, finds the cleaning liquid, and actually uses it.

Of course, people’s definition of “clean” varies, and many women have higher standards when it comes to tidiness and caretaking. Single, childless women tend to do more housework than single, childless men. Rodsky addresses this through something called the “minimum standard of care,” or a basic level of competence for each task that both spouses agree upon in advance. This means no cramming all the Tupperware into a Jenga tower if the MSC, as it is known, calls for it to be stacked neatly. (Left mostly unresolved is what to do if you can’t agree on a minimum standard of care, or if one partner doesn’t live up to it.) You maintain this system through regular check-ins with your spouse, at which you assess how things are going and re-deal the cards if necessary.

Sure, this may sound like romance by McKinsey—a friend of mine called these chore check-ins “deeply unsexy”—but hundreds of thousands of people have bought the book or card deck. Couples seem to really need a way to talk about household labor, and Rodsky offers one.

Rodsky, a married mother of three based in Los Angeles, worked as a lawyer and philanthropic adviser before she developed Fair Play. She got the idea, she writes, when one day after she had hustled out the door with a bag of snacks, a FedEx package, a pair of kids’ shoes to be returned, and a client contract—literally with her hands full—her husband texted her, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries.” She was doing so much, but apparently she should have been doing the blueberries too.

It made her realize that despite a successful career, “I was still the she-fault parent charged with doing it all, buying the blueberries and masterminding our family’s day-to-day life while my husband … was still not much more than a ‘helper.’”

For the book, she interviewed hundreds of couples and immersed herself in research about the division of household labor. She came away with a set of facts and observations that may make you want to set your bra on fire and run off to a lesbian commune. Men hate to be nagged but, Rodsky writes, when pressed in interviews, they admit that they wait for their wife to tell them what to do around the house. Countless studies show that women do much more unpaid labor—housework and child care—than men do, even when both work outside the home. Rodsky cites a study showing that after couples who claim to be egalitarian have a baby, men cut back on the amount of housework they do by five hours a week. In part because of this disparity, working women, on average, see their incomes cut in half after having children.

You may be thinking “not all men,” but it’s an awful lot of men. Several studies show that women score higher on two facets of the conscientiousness personality trait: orderliness and dutifulness. In layman’s terms, this means women like things neater than men do, on average, and they pay more attention to the rules and structure of home life.

Explanations for this phenomenon vary. It could be that women are socialized from girlhood to be cleaner and more organized, and are judged in adulthood for having a messy home more than men are. Socialization might have contributed to my own orderliness: My parents are immigrants who, from what I can tell, have never taken a gender-studies course. When I told my mom about the Fair Play system, she said, “That’s dog nonsense. Men don’t know what to do with kids. Especially your man.”

It could be that because women bear disproportionate costs of childbearing in the form of pregnancy, birth, and in many cases breastfeeding, many feel more invested. They may pay greater attention to their children, and their various needs and proclivities, than the kids’ father does. And men tend to earn more than women, so when one person’s work has to take a hit for the kids’ sake, it’s usually the woman’s. Rodsky quotes one father as saying, “I’m so proud of how well my wife balances work with her family life.” Her family life.

I heard about Fair Play during the pandemic, and I thought it could help settle the chore wars that had been simmering between Rich and me for years already. Within a few weeks, we’d read the book, bought the cards, and scheduled a weekly check-in on our Google Calendars. It worked for a while. But after I got pregnant, I suddenly felt the need to, for example, research the difference between strollers and “travel systems,” while Rich did not. We thus found it virtually impossible to play fairly for more than a few weeks at a time. After Evan was born, it didn’t seem possible at all.

To name just a few of 10,000 examples: Rich was in charge of cleaning the floors, but he forgot to do it unless I asked. We hired a cleaning lady. He forgot to pay the cleaning lady. The cleaning lady texted me to ask about getting paid. I would task him with taking Evan to a doctor appointment (which I had made), and he would forget the diaper bag. Mentally, I willed Evan to have a huge blowout in the waiting room, just to teach him a lesson.

Perhaps these are personal foibles, specific to me and my husband. But the broader system—and indeed, any system of this kind—seems like it would crumble for any couple operating under the pressures of modern life, especially if you don’t live near family.

Let’s say you’re holding the “dinner” card, but you really need help with the execution part—peeling the potatoes—because you got stuck on a work call. According to Rodsky, what you’re supposed to do in this case is ask for help from “someone in your village other than your partner.” The problem, of course, is that I, and so many other moms, don’t have a village. My parents live a flight away. Rich’s parents are dead. We have no other family nearby, and we have to drive an hour to see most of our friends. Often, I’m “assigning” Rich tasks, even if they’re technically my “job,” because I’m literally holding a crying baby and no one else is available to help.

Rodsky herself seems deeply empathetic to people who don’t have the money or time to maintain a perfectly run household. She grew up with a single mother, so financially pinched that they used trash bags as luggage. She told me that when she would go into the kitchen at night to get her disabled brother some water, she would close her eyes for a second to allow the cockroaches time to scatter off the piles of dirty dishes.

On our call, Rodsky suggested that one solution might be thinking of your village as a neighbor or even a friendly security guard at a local store—two individuals her own mother relied on for occasional help when she was a girl. But I don’t know my neighbors or my local shopkeepers well enough to do this.

Rich and I have also struggled with the minimum standard of care. At one point, Rich tried to convince me that floors don’t actually need mopping. They can just be dirty! Rodsky suggests that, in situations like these, you should “collaborate on what is reasonable within your own home,” ultimately reverting to a “reasonable person” standard from jurisprudence. But the problem is that in our home, and in many others, there is no judge or jury. We are prosecutor and defense attorney, and there’s no verdict in sight.

A recent study of the Fair Play system conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California found that the system did work—at least among the couples who actually applied it. When participants in the study completed the Fair Play program and divided the household labor more equitably, their mental health improved, their burnout decreased, and their relationship quality improved. But here’s the rub: Only about a quarter of the participants actually completed the Fair Play program. Darby Saxbe, a USC psychologist and an author of the study, told me that participants might have dropped out because they didn’t pay for or even actively seek out the program; they were offered it. Or perhaps being overwhelmed with parenting and domestic labor didn’t leave a lot of time for divvying up parenting and domestic labor. Still, Saxbe thinks the program is worth considering, especially before couples have kids. “We know domestic labor is a huge reason that a lot of women initiate divorce and separation, but we don’t have a lot of great solutions,” she told me.

Allison Daminger, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who studies the division of household labor, told me Fair Play is the program she tends to refer people to when they tell her they’re struggling with chore management. But people who seek it out, she said, often struggle with “overload, maybe some conflict in the relationship.” These are the very things that become hurdles to doing Fair Play.

I asked Rodsky what to do if your partner just doesn’t do his cards—the issue that my husband and I keep running into. Rodsky told me this can mean that the partner who does do their cards has poor boundaries. “They haven’t really done that internal work yet to really understand what a boundary means,” she says. “What are they willing to accept?” Rodsky says that for her, setting a boundary meant telling her husband, “I’m not willing to live like that anymore.”

But I am willing to live this way. I’m not getting divorced, because there is too much work to do. Right now a helper is worse than a co-pilot, but it’s better than nothing. And, well, when we’re not screaming at each other about Clorox wipes, we do like each other.

Daminger also suggested doing some “deep work” to understand why a (hypothetical) husband (but actually mine) wasn’t doing his fair share. It could be that “you and your partner have very different underlying goals and intentions,” Daminger said. “And I think if that’s the case, then systems for dividing up tasks better are probably not going to be effective.”

[Joe Pinsker: The gender researcher’s guide to an equal marriage]

When reached for comment, Rich called this article “very good” and “delightful,” but admitted that he has “a vastly different thinking pattern around what is clean and what isn’t clean.” Then he pointed out that he, unbidden, cleans “both sides of the garbage-disposal cover.” Then we got into a fight about how often he initiates Swiffering without being asked.

The more I talked with Rodsky and Daminger, the worse I felt. I felt bad for having an imperfect husband and an imperfect life. Why didn’t I know my neighbor well enough for her to be my village? Why did I marry a sloppy guy who doesn’t Swiffer? Why did I have a baby if I don’t have good boundaries, or even a Trello account? I came away with the conclusion that Rich and I are just not very compatible in this way, and that to approach compatibility would take a whopping amount of couple’s therapy that we don’t have time for right now.

Instead, our strategy is not one that Rodsky would like. I bark out orders, and Rich kinda-sorta fulfills them, most of the time. He doesn’t understand Evan’s needs the way I do, and it would be too hard for me to explain them to him. I’m pickier and cleaner than he is, and it will probably always be this way. Rodsky referred to this kind of thinking as being “complicit in your own oppression.” I call it getting our kid to middle school in one piece.

There is another element to it, though. During that frightening, feverish week, I spent hours swabbing Evan’s forehead with a cold washcloth and, because it hurt his ears to nurse, giving him sips of breast milk from a cup—his first-ever drink from something other than a bottle. I had to admit that part of me liked cuddling him and easing his distress—even if it was technically Rich’s turn to be on duty. It was mental, emotional, and physical labor that didn’t pay and that I, on some level, enjoyed. It wasn’t fair. But life rarely is.