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How Obligations Can Fuel Happiness

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 06 › how-to-talk-to-people-social-connection › 674513

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Today, the hosts of our podcast How to Talk to People offer advice on making small talk, finding connection, and prioritizing friendships in a world that doesn’t always put non-romantic relationships first.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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Advice, Not Homework

The title of the most recent season of The Atlantic’s How To podcast, How to Talk to People, was sort of a joke—but not entirely, the podcast’s host, Julie Beck, and its producer, Rebecca Rashid, told me recently. Talking to people is not as easy as it might sound. For instance: How does a person make small talk without fainting from awkwardness? And how can we expand our social connections in a society that’s not exactly built for meeting new people? I chatted with Julie and Becca about this season of the podcast, which wraps up next week, and about the value of focusing on the human relationships that tend to get ignored.

Isabel Fattal: Have either of you taken any advice from the podcast back to your own life? Have you met an acquaintance on a train and said, “It’s been so great talking to you. I’m going to go read my book now”?

Julie Beck: I have not been brave enough to use that line yet, but I also don’t know if the situation has arisen. I definitely feel out of my body when I’m doing small talk sometimes now. I have the meta commentary of, Am I doing a good job?

Becca Rashid: I’ve learned from the show more about boundaries for people who don’t always want to be spoken to. I’m the person striking up a conversation with everyone—at cafés I work at, the bus driver, anyone I see consistently enough.

Julie: You took us to your favorite boba shop, and as we walked in, they were like, “Becca!”

When I think about what I’ve learned, it’s less about me changing my habits than just thinking about community a little bit differently. I'm always beating myself up for not reaching out enough or not doing X, Y, or Z. I tend to think, If I was just more diligent and better and did all of these things, then we would have a beautiful, interconnected, happy community utopia. I’ve learned about balancing the reality of life and people’s different needs and competing priorities. Not everyone is going to have the same priorities as you, and that’s fine. I’ve learned to notice what you have and be grateful for that, and not always try to optimize every facet of how you approach your relationships.

Isabel: I love that, because I think, in our self-help-focused era, you can listen to a podcast like this and think, Oh, this podcast is going to help me optimize every moment of my life. It’s good to remind ourselves that’s not the point.

Julie: Right. We want to give you advice, but we don’t want to give you homework.

Isabel: Julie, after conducting 100 interviews with groups of friends for your “Friendship Files” series, you landed on the six forces that fuel friendship. Has this podcast changed your view of those six forces at all?

Julie: I do think all six forces came across in a lot of these conversations—particularly intention, being deliberate and putting effort in, and also grace, which I think is what we were just talking about in terms of “stop optimizing.” One question I had for myself is whether obligation should be added. I think that word has a really negative connotation: It’s something that you don’t want to do, something you are burdened by. But that was a big thread of conversation throughout this podcast, about how so much of friendship culture in America is designed around not putting obligations on one another.

I don’t think we ever used this, because I felt—and continue to feel, even in this moment—like a cheeseball, pretentious person. But there is a C. S. Lewis quote I really love—he wrote a letter to his friend after his wife died, and reflected on having a lot of free time he wished he didn’t have. He wrote, “One doesn’t realise in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied.”

I don’t actually think of all obligations as a bad thing. In some ways, the commitments that we make to our friends and our neighbors fuel our happiness.

Isabel: Is there anything else you were hoping to discuss that we didn’t get to?

Julie: Just that Becca and I really became friends while we made the podcast.

Becca: I’m a big “food is my love language” person. Julie has brought me food at work, but she’s also brought food to my house. I think that was the moment I realized we were true friends, Julie. For me, it was the reception of the food.

Listen to the full How to Talk to People series here.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration’s immigration-enforcement guidelines, which prioritize the arrest of undocumented people who have serious criminal records, are deemed threats to national security, or recently crossed the border. Starbucks workers in Seattle launched a strike, alleging that Pride-month decorations are being banned in some stores, which Starbucks has denied. Employees of more than 150 locations plan to participate over the next week. Temporary I-95 lanes opened today in northeast Philadelphia after a tanker-truck fire closed a stretch of the interstate earlier this month.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: You should try listening to your literature, Emma Sarappo writes. Audiobooks are less demanding than their printed counterparts—and maybe that’s a good thing.

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Evening Read

How a Trip to the Titanic Went So Wrong

found Jun '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 06 › titan-trip-submersible › 674496

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An expedition to see the remains of the Titanic turned into a tragedy. How did it go so wrong?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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Lost Contact

The Titan, a submersible vessel carrying passengers to see the ruins of the Titanic, lost contact with its support ship during a dive on Sunday. The ensuing search-and-rescue mission in the Atlantic Ocean covered some 10,000 square miles. This afternoon, OceanGate Expeditions, the tourism and research company running the voyage, announced that it believed that all of the passengers “have sadly been lost.” The U.S. Coast Guard said soon after that debris from the vessel had been found on the ocean floor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic.

The search-and-rescue effort had become a race against the clock, as the vessel was believed to have had about four days’ worth of oxygen on board. Five people were on the expedition: Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s chief executive; Hamish Harding, a British businessman and explorer; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had traveled to the Titanic site more than 35 times; Shahzada Dawood, a British-Pakistani businessman; and Suleman Dawood, Shahzada’s 19-year-old son. Suleman was a business student in Glasgow.

Over the past week, alarming reports about the vessel have emerged. As my colleague Marina Koren wrote in a story today about the tragic ending to Sunday’s expedition:

Most concerning of all, it is not clear whether the Titan was inspected for safety by outside experts. In 2018, dozens of industry experts warned OceanGate that if the company didn’t put the Titan through an independent safety assessment, its Titanic expeditions could face potentially “catastrophic” problems. Even OceanGate’s own director of marine operations was at the time worried about “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths,” The New York Times reported this week. At least one previous dive had problems too: According to Pogue, a Titan expedition last year got lost on the seafloor for about five hours.

Although officials don’t know what caused the disaster or what regulations might have prevented it, OceanGate’s leaders have argued in the past that innovation can be at odds with safety regulations. In a 2019 blog post, the company wrote, “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.” (OceanGate did not respond to a request for comment about safety concerns regarding the Titan.)

As Marina noted today, the space-tourism industry often draws attention to the safety measures of its craft—at least in public. (What the companies do in private is another story, she reminds us.) But by comparison, “OceanGate’s public approach to safety seems almost cavalier, less like modern-day space tourism and more reminiscent of the rushed and occasionally ramshackle efforts of the space race,” she writes. In the 2018 open letter from industry experts, more than three dozen people, including oceanographers and industry experts, warned that the company’s “experimental” approach “would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

What those consequences might be remains to be seen. At the news conference earlier today, John Mauger, a rear admiral of the U.S. Coast Guard, acknowledged that many questions linger about how, when, and why this happened. “That’s going to be, I’m sure, the focus of future review,” he said. “Right now, we’re focused on documenting the scene.”

Today’s News

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is meeting with President Joe Biden for a state visit to discuss new partnerships between the two countries. The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been detained by Russian officials on espionage charges that he denies, lost his appeal against pretrial detention. Tropical Storm Bret is nearing the eastern Caribbean, moving at just below the speeds of a Category 1 hurricane.

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