In the climate-change era, everyone who has oil wants to be the last one to sell it. Oil-producing countries still plan to increase production in the near term, and very few economic incentives exist to press them in any other direction. As long as someone else still has oil, they’ll sell it to your customer in your stead. Oil-industry insiders have said this point-blank throughout this year’s United Nations climate talks in Dubai, which are scheduled to end tomorrow.

The economic disincentives to phasing out fossil fuels have been the “elephant in the room,” according to Susana Muhamad, the environment minister of Colombia’s first-ever leftist government, who has emerged as a vocal leader in the meeting’s plenary rooms. Some of the countries most dependent on income from oil and gas are also among the ones most indebted to foreign banks, and so they keep drilling to stay current with payments. Countries such as Ecuador are exploiting their reserves—even in protected rainforest ecosystems—to service their painfully high debt. (Ecuadorians voted this August to block drilling in at least one part of the rainforest, for now.)

As one of South America’s biggest oil producers, Colombia is—or should be—another case like Ecuador. The country has a lot of international debt, so according to traditional economics, it had better keep pumping that oil. Instead of falling into that “economic trap,” Muhamad told me, over an espresso in an Emirati restaurant inside the sprawling COP campus, the country decided to veer radically off course. It announced in Dubai that it would sign on to a novel attempt to fix this seemingly intractable logic, one that has been gaining momentum outside negotiating rooms: a fossil-fuel-nonproliferation agreement.

Modeled in concept after the nuclear-nonproliferation deal signed in 1968, the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty is not official COP business, but is at the center of a growing side conversation. Like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the fossil-fuel treaty aims first to take stock of each country’s resources; the organization Carbon Tracker Initiative has already begun compiling a registry of fossil-fuel production and reserves. Then agreements could be made to mutually halt expansion. So far, 12 countries have signed on to support the deal; Colombia is the second oil-and-gas-producing country to join. (Timor-Leste, an island nation in Southeast Asia with a struggling oil economy, was the first.) Ultimately, the treaty’s signees intend to have it recognized by international law and be legally binding.

Tzeporah Berman, a longtime Canadian environmental activist and the chair of the group pushing for the fossil-fuel treaty, has had “an out-of-body experience” watching the treaty take on a life of its own, she told me when I caught up with her at the conference. “Last year, we walked into COP with one country,” she said. The tiny island nation of Vanuatu called for the fossil-fuel treaty on the floor of the 2022 UN General Assembly. Now, in addition to those 12 countries, 95 cities and subnational governments have signed a call for nonproliferation, along with 3,000 academics and scientists and 101 Nobel laureates. Mark Ruffalo is a fan. Those other entities can’t be party to the treaty when it ultimately forms (only countries can do that), but Berman sees their collective support as a force to move public opinion—much as the nuclear-nonproliferation movement started by turning the moral tide on nuclear weapons. If everyone who thinks that fossil-fuel expansion is morally unacceptable backs a single treaty, that could have major political ripple effects, she thinks.

Berman spent a number of years as a provincial-government appointee working with the Alberta oil-sands industry on climate policy. Though their goals are at odds, she is still friendly with a number of oil-sands executives, and in Dubai, she happens to be staying in the same hotel, so she greets them in the lobby in the morning. Canada put 28 oil-and-gas-industry employees on its official roster for the climate talks. “The industry has made $2.8 billion in profits every day for 50 years,” she said. “They’re trying to hold on to that.” After working with them, she clearly understood one thing: “Anything that out-and-out constrained the production of their products, they would not support.” They have maintained this position in Dubai, where Exxon Mobil’s CEO and others have expressed their preference for agreements that focus on limiting carbon emissions generally—not on limiting fossil fuel production specifically.

Berman saw a similar reticence from countries when she started coming to COPs in 2007, she told me. “I was told by governments, including my own, that oil production was not a climate issue.” When a blockbuster climate deal finally emerged from a COP in 2015, she said she “searched the Paris Agreement for oil, gas, and coal,” but the words weren't there. Every country had committed to tackling climate change, yet none of them officially planned to cut fossil-fuel production. And since then, production has gone up.

So Berman began talking with academics, looking for a political strategy that had worked in the past to break this type of standoff. The nuclear-nonproliferation movement stood out. It was a case much like climate change: The threat at hand had the potential for mutual assured destruction, a danger that many agreed was unacceptable, yet no country wanted to go first in eliminating its part of that danger.  

With a fossil-fuel-nonproliferation treaty, countries could share information on their oil and gas reserves and agree to a mutual drawdown schedule that reflects their individual situations. “It’s also an instrument to look for better and more fair conditions for countries like Colombia,” Muhamad, the environment minister, said. The country has roughly seven years’ worth of oil reserves left, and is expected to run out of gas in this decade. Changing course, she said, would save the country from being locked into a downward spiral of aggressive oil drilling and then a financial crisis when it ran out. Plus, to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate goals, Colombia can’t possibly unearth all its oil. With so many cities and subnational governments also signed on to support the nonproliferation agreement, economic dialogues might be possible among more entities. Muhamad pointed to California, which has supported the nonproliferation treaty. “But who buys 50 percent of their oil from Ecuador in the Amazon? The state of California. So what is California going to do about it? This is the discussion that we have to have.”

Ecuador has not yet signed the treaty, but Colombia, Ecuador, and similar countries are, as Muhamad put it, “not Saudi Arabia,” with its seemingly endless reserves. Colombia and Ecuador will run out of oil. Which means they have less to lose, long-term, from agreeing to leave it in the ground. “We don’t have resources for hundreds of years. We are the ones right now who could do this transition,” she said. But their short-term financial needs are too pressing to leave the oil there for nothing in return. Plus, when her country does try to move in this direction, it is punished in the markets, she said. After Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that the government would cease issuing new permits for oil exploration, the value of its peso dropped immediately. The financial system needs to change, Muhamad said, or countries like hers won’t be able to take meaningful climate action. “And a treaty could be the place where we could negotiate now, not in 15 years, when nobody wants our oil.”

Of course, that logic won’t work for mega-producers such as the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, or even for smaller countries such as Azerbaijan, which gets two-thirds of its wealth from oil and gas, and which was just announced this week as the host of next year’s COP. But, Berman argues, treaties change the culture, even in the absence of the biggest players. The nuclear-nonproliferation deal had limits—the five major nuclear powers, including the U.S. and Russia, still have their arsenals—but it did change the trend of unrestrained weapons production. More recently, a UN treaty banned nuclear weapons outright. No nuclear power signed on, but such treaties can succeed nonetheless: The Guardian notes that the U.S. never signed a UN land-mine treaty, yet aligned its land-mine policy to match. The dangers of using oil are more diffuse than the dangers of nuclear weapons, and the incentives to use it are constant. Decoupling those things will take a monumental effort—something treaties are designed to do.

Ministers at COP28 have spent nearly the past two weeks sitting in large, carpeted rooms negotiating a text that, up until today, contained a call to phase out fossil fuels altogether. John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, had said during the conference that he thinks the world needs “largely a phaseout of fossil fuels in our energy system,” a distinct difference from the less forceful “phase down” language the U.S. previously supported. China said it would commit to some language on fossil fuels, which was better than no language.

For a few days, it felt like a radical new approach to oil and gas might be possible. But Saudi Arabia and the head of OPEC had been attempting to block the phaseout proposal, and today COP President Sultan Al Jaber released a new draft of negotiated text that eliminated the possibility, instead leaning on the much softer language of “reducing” fossil fuels. The European Union has said it will not accept this version of the text, leaving open the door to restoring some stronger language. Yet even the discussion of a phaseout at COP represented a change in the rhetoric of some powerful countries: Once, Berman told me, talking about oil production at all was a nonstarter. Diplomacy might have limits, but it can bring ideas once treated as impossible dreams into the mainstream. A treaty to stop expanding the frontier of fossil-fuel production could go the same way, or further. “At the beginning, it seems to be something on the periphery,” Muhamed said. “But maybe from the periphery, it goes to the center.”

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

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

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

The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

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

Ian Bogost: Okay; great.

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

Bogost: Of course.

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

Bogost: She was going to Crate & Barrel?

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

Bogost: She had a flatware appointment?

Rashid: Yeah, I assume.

Bogost: Wow.

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

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

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

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

Rashid: This is How to Keep Time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rashid: Mm hmm.

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

Rashid: Right.

___

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bogost: Mm hmm.

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

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

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

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

___

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

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

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

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

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

Rashid: Mm hmm.

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

Rashid: Hmm.

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

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

Rashid: Right.

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

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

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

___

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

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

Bogost: Oh my god…

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

Bogost: Right. Feeling bad about it…

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

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

Rashid: Right, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

Rashid: Yeah.

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

Rashid: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

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

Rashid: Hmm.

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

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

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

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

Bogost: Yeah, those are definitely dreams.

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

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

___

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

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

Rashid: Heh heh heh.

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

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

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

Rashid: Hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

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

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

Rashid: Mm hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

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

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

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

Rashid: Right, right.

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

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

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

Rashid: Right.

___

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

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

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

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

___

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

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

Bogost: Right.

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

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

Rashid: True.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rashid: So true.

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

Rashid: At least “less.”

Bogost: Or at least “less.”

___

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

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

Rashid: It’s very time consuming.

Bogost: Oh my gosh.

____

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

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

Please record an audio clip with your phone, no longer than three minutes, and send it to howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Your recording could be featured on an upcoming episode. Please include your name and where you’re based in the email and/or audio file.

By submitting this clip, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity. Again, please send your voice memos to howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Thanks!

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

Political partisans are always dreaming of final victories. Each election raises the hope of realignment—a convergence of issues and demographics and personalities that will deliver a lock on power to one side or the other. In my lifetime, at least five “permanent” majorities have come and gone. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964 seemed to ratify the postwar liberal consensus and doom the Republican Party to irrelevance—until, four years later, Richard Nixon’s narrow win augured an “emerging Republican majority” (the title of a book by his adviser Kevin Phillips) based in the white, suburban Sun Belt. In 1976, Jimmy Carter heralded a winning interracial politics called “the Carter coalition,” which proved even shorter-lived than his presidency. With Ronald Reagan, the conservative ascendancy really did seem perpetual. After the Republican victory in the 2002 midterm elections, George W. Bush’s operative Karl Rove floated the idea of a majority lasting a generation or two.

But around the same time, the writers John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted a decades-long advantage for the party of educated professionals, single women, younger voters, and the coming minority majority. The embodiment of their thesis soon appeared in Barack Obama—only to be followed by Donald Trump and the revenge of the white working class, a large plurality that has refused to fade away.

Recent American history has been hard on would-be realigners. The two parties are playing one of the longest deuce games since the founding. Even with the structural distortion of the Senate and the Electoral College favoring Republicans, the American people remain closely divided. The Democratic presidential candidate has won seven of the last eight popular votes, while the national vote for the House of Representatives keeps swinging back and forth between the parties. Stymied by a sense of stalemate, both now indulge in a form of magical thinking.

Neither side believes in the legitimacy of the other; each assumes that the voters agree and will soon sweep it into power. So the result of every election comes as a shock to the loser, who settles on explanations that have nothing to do with the popular will: foreign interference, fraudulent ballots, viral disinformation, a widespread conspiracy to cheat. The Republican Party tries to hold on to power by antidemocratic means: the Electoral College, the filibuster, grotesquely gerrymandered legislatures, even violence. The Democratic Party pursues a majority by demography, targeting an array of identity groups and assuming that their positions on issues will be predictably monolithic. The latter is a mistake; the former is a threat to democracy. Both are ways to escape the long, hard grind of organized persuasion that is politics.

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Barton Gellman on how Trump’s next coup has already begun]

Two other jarring features define our age of deadlock. One is a radical shift in the two parties’ center of gravity. The signature of elections today is the class divide called education polarization: In 2020, Joe Biden won by claiming a majority of college-educated white voters, the backbone of the old Republican Party. Trump, with a lock on the white working class, lost despite making gains among nonwhite, non-college-educated voters, yesterday’s most reliable Democrats. Meanwhile, on the political stage, cultural and social issues have eclipsed economic issues—even as every facet of American life, whether income or mortality rates, grows less equal and more divided by class.

These two trends are obviously related, and they have a history. From the late 1970s until very recently, the brains and dollars behind both parties supported versions of neoliberal economics: one hard-edged and friendly to old-line corporate interests such as the oil industry, the other gentler and oriented toward the financial and technology sectors. This consensus left the battleground open to cultural warfare. The educated professionals who dominate the country’s progressive party have long cared less about unions, wages, and monopoly power than about race, gender, and the environment. In the summer of 2020, millions of young people did not come out of isolation to protest the plight of meatpackers laboring in COVID-ridden processing plants. They were outraged by a police killing, and they called for a “racial reckoning”—a revolution in consciousness that ended up having little effect on the lives of the poor and oppressed.

For their part, Republicans have spoken the traditionalist language of the working class ever since Nixon’s “silent majority”; Trump dropped the mantra of low taxes and deregulation that used to excite the party when it was more upscale, and directed his message to a base that votes on issues such as crime, immigration, and what it means to be an American. More recently, Republican candidates have turned to anti-“woke” rhetoric. In losing its voice as the champion of workers, the Democratic Party lost many of the workers themselves, and during the past half century, the two parties have nearly switched electorates.

This remapping helps explain the outpouring of new books that pay political attention to those overlooked Americans of all races who lack a college degree, many employed in jobs that pay by the hour—factory workers, home health aides, delivery drivers, preschool teachers, hairdressers, restaurant servers, farm laborers, cashiers. During the pandemic, they were called “essential workers.” Now they’ve been discovered to hold the key to power, giving rise to yet another round of partisan dreaming of realignment, this time hinging on the working class. But these Americans won’t benefit from their new status as essential voters until the parties spend less effort coming up with what they think the working class wants to hear, and more effort actually delivering what it wants and needs.

The economic decline and political migration of the American working class receive the most compelling treatment in Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, by the New York Times writer David Leonhardt. He describes the rise and fall, from the New Deal to the present, of what he calls “democratic capitalism”—not a neutral phrase, but a positive term for a mixed economy that benefits the many, not just the few. By now, the story of growing inequality and declining mobility is familiar from the work of Thomas Piketty, Gary Gerstle, Raj Chetty, and other scholars. Leonhardt has a gift for synthesizing complex trends and data in straightforward language and persuasive arguments whose rationality doesn’t fully mute an undertone of indignation. He appreciates the power of stories and weaves obscure but telling events and people into his larger narrative: a 1934 strike in the Minneapolis coal yards that showed the political potential of worker solidarity; the mid-century businessman Paul Hoffman, who argued to members of his own class that they would benefit from a prosperous working class; the pioneering computer programmer and Navy officer Grace Hopper, who saw the economic benefits of military spending on technological research.

An economy that gives most people the chance for a decent life doesn’t arise by accident or through impersonal forces. It has to be created, and Leonhardt identifies three agents: political action, such as union organizing, that gives power to the have-nots; a civic ethos that restrains the greed of the haves; and public spending on people, infrastructure, and ideas—“a form of short-term sacrifice, an optimistic bet on what the future can bring.”

All three—power, culture, and investment—combined in the postwar decades to transform the American working class into the largest and richest middle class in history. Black Americans, even while enduring official discrimination and racist violence, closed the gap in pay and life expectancy with white Americans—progress, Leonhardt writes, that “reflected class-based changes more than explicitly race-based changes.” In other words, the right of workers to form unions, an increased and expanded federal minimum wage, and a steeply progressive tax code that funded good schools all reduced racial inequality by reducing economic inequality. But after the 1960s, the economy’s growth slowed, and the balance of power among the classes grew lopsided. American life became stratified. Wealth flowed upward to the few, unions withered, and public goods such as schools starved. In their rush to cash in, elites knocked over taboos that had once restrained the worst extremes of greed. Metropoles prospered and industrial regions decayed. Despite the end of Jim Crow and the growth of a Black professional class, the gap between Black and white Americans began to widen again as the country’s top 10 percent pulled away from the rest.

This economic analysis comes with a political argument that will not be welcomed by many progressives. Leonhardt places blame for the decline of the American dream where it belongs: on free-market intellectuals, right-wing politicians, corporate money. But he also points to the shortsighted complacency of union leaders, and, even more, the changing values and interests of well-educated, comfortable Democrats. Beginning in the early ’70s, they dropped concern about bread-and-butter issues for more compelling causes: the environment, peace, consumer protection, abortion, identity-group rights. The labor movement lost interest in social justice, and progressive politicians lost interest in the working class. Neither George Meany nor George McGovern sang from the New Deal songbook. After the ’60s, “the country no longer had a mass movement centered on lifting most Americans’ living standards.”

Why did the white working class abandon the party that had been its champion? “In the standard progressive telling,” Leonhardt writes, “the explanation for this political shift is race.” Race had a lot to do with it, and Leonhardt affirms that Democrats’ embrace of the Black freedom movement in the ’60s, followed by white backlash (exploited by Republicans with their “southern strategy”) and persistent racism, is a major cause. But the progressive telling falls short on three counts. It’s morally self-flattering and self-exonerating; it’s politically self-defeating (accusing voters of racism, even if deserved, is not the way to convince them of anything); and it fails to explain too many recent political trends. For example, nearly all-white West Virginia remained mostly Democratic decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and only turned indelibly red in 2000. According to one estimate, almost a quarter of the working-class white voters who gave Trump the presidency in 2016 had voted for a Black president only a few years earlier. The stark polarization of the current college-educated and non-college-educated white electorate shows the key role of class. And what are we to make of an openly bigoted president running for a second term and increasing his share of the Black and Latino vote?

Leonhardt’s subtler account is rooted in the working class’s growing cultural and economic alienation from a Democratic Party ever more dominated by elites and activists, and out of touch on the issues that hurt less affluent Americans most, especially crime, trade, and immigration. The financial crisis of 2008 was a pivotal event, leaving large numbers of Americans with the sense that the country’s upper classes were playing a dirty game at the expense of the rest.

That fall, I reported on the presidential campaign in a dying coal town in Appalachian Ohio. To my surprise, its white residents were giving Obama a close hearing, and he ended up doing better in the region than John Kerry had. But at a local party gathering, an older white man told me that neither party had done anything to reverse the decline of his town, and that he would no longer vote Democratic, for one reason: illegal immigration. I listened politely and discounted his grievance—I didn’t see any undocumented immigrants in Glouster, Ohio. Why did he care so much?

Leonhardt provides an answer. In a comprehensive analysis, he shows that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which liberal politicians sold as nondiscriminatory but still restrictive, opened the gates to mass immigration. The result put downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the economy. Again, racial resentment partly explains hostility to large-scale immigration, but Leonhardt shows that rapid demographic change can erode the social bonds that make collective efforts for greater equality possible: “Low immigration numbers in the mid-1900s improved the lives of recent immigrants by fostering a stronger safety net for everybody.” As Democrats were reminded in 2022’s midterms, immigration is less popular among working-class Americans of all races than among college graduates. The mayor of my very progressive city, a son of the Black working class, recently sounded like that working-class white ex-Democrat in Ohio when he warned that the arrival of more than 100,000 migrants “will destroy New York.”

[David Leonhardt: The hard truth about immigration]

These positions reflect class differences in approaches to morality. Drawing on social-science research, Leonhardt distinguishes between “universal” values such as fairness and compassion, which matter more among educated professionals, and “communal” values such as order, tradition, and loyalty, which count more lower down the class ladder. It shouldn’t be surprising that working-class Americans of color sympathize with migrants but don’t necessarily want an open border, that they fear crime at least as much as police misconduct. But their views confound progressives, who see these issues through the almost metaphysical lens of group identity—the belief that we think inside lines of race, gender, and sexuality, that these accidental and immutable traits dictate our politics.

Illustration by Mike McQuade. Sources: Brooks Kraft / Corbis / Getty; Leif Skoogfors / Getty; Cynthia Johnson / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.

This worldview provided a sense of meaning to a generation that came of age after 2008, amid upheaval and disillusionment. Because the new progressivism flourished among younger, educated Americans who lived online, its cultural reach was disproportionate, making rapid inroads in universities, schools, media, the arts, philanthropy. But its believers badly overplayed their hand, giving Republicans easy wins and driving away ordinary Democrats. Americans remain a wildly diverse, individualistic, aspirational people, with rising rates of mixed marriage, residential integration, and immigration from all over the world. Any rigid politics of identity—whether the left’s obsession with “marginalized communities,” or its sinister opposite in the reactionary paranoia of “white replacement theory”—is bound to shatter against the realities of American life.

Identity politics has been a feverish interlude following the demise of the neoliberal consensus that prevailed from Reagan to Obama. What will take its place? Leonhardt hopes for a Democratic Party that learns how not to alienate the nearly two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. He believes that education can be a force for upward mobility, but that the current version of meritocracy—built-in advantage at the top, underfunding below—has created a highly educated aristocracy. He advises a renewed emphasis on economic populism, a hard line on equal rights for all but reasonable compromise on other controversial social issues, and a general attitude of respect. His hero is the martyred Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1968 presidential campaign was the last to unite working-class Americans of all colors.

[Yascha Mounk: Where the new identity politics went wrong]

A version of the same argument, with less historical depth and feeling but more charts and polemics, can be found in John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Judis and Teixeira have been explaining their earlier book’s thesis for two decades even as the majority of its title kept failing to emerge. Now they diagnose their error: “What began happening in the last decade is a defection, pure and simple, of working-class voters. That’s something that we really didn’t anticipate.” Like Leonhardt, they call on Democrats to embrace New Deal–style “economic liberalism” (but not Green New Deal–style socialism) and to reject “today’s post-sixties version of social liberalism, which is tantamount to cultural radicalism.” In a series of scathing chapters, Judis and Teixeira show how far left the Democrats’ “shadow party” of activists, donors, and journalists has moved in the past 20 years on immigration, race, gender, and climate.

The authors want a return to the party’s cultural centrism of the ’90s. Instead of decriminalizing the border, which most 2020 Democratic presidential candidates advocated, they call for tighter border security, enforcement of laws that prohibit hiring undocumented immigrants, and a way for those already here to become citizens. They show that middle-ground policies like these and others—the pursuit of racial equality that focuses on expanding opportunity for individuals, not equity of group outcomes; support for equal rights for trans Americans without insisting on a gender ideology that denies biological sex—remain majority views, including among nonwhite Americans. Judis and Teixeira are less persuasive on climate change: Although their gradualism might be politically helpful to Democrats, the country and the planet will be at the mercy of extreme weather that’s indifferent to such messaging.

Joshua Green’s fast-paced, sober, yet hopeful The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics argues that a Democratic renewal is already under way. Like Leonhardt, Judis, and Teixeira, Green traces the Democrats’ estrangement from working Americans back to the ’70s; he begins his story with a moment in 1978, when Jimmy Carter abandoned unions for Wall Street. The narrative reaches a climax in 2008, when the financial crisis destroyed home values and retirement savings while taxpayer dollars rescued the banks that had triggered it, convincing large numbers of Americans that the system was rigged by financiers and politicians. Because of policy choices by the Obama administration—Democrats’ last spasm of neoliberalism—much of the blame fell on the former party of the common people.

Yet out of the wreckage rose a new group of Democratic stars who sounded like their New Deal predecessors, many of whom were every bit as radical. Taking aim at corporate elites, Green’s protagonists want to increase economic equality through worker power and state intervention. Though Sanders and Warren failed as presidential candidates, Green argues that their populism transformed the party, including the formerly moderate Joe Biden, who has pushed a remarkably ambitious legislative agenda with working-class interests at its center.

Green is a first-rate journalist, but his book suffers from a blind spot: It ignores the role of culture in the party’s struggles with the working class. His analysis omits half the story until the 2016 election, when, he acknowledges, Trump “reshuffled Democratic priorities. As he moved cultural issues to the center of national political conflict, race, gender, and immigration eclipsed populist economics as the focus of the liberal insurgency.” In the face of Trump’s bigotry, Democrats felt compelled to adopt the “maximalist” positions of activists, assuming that these would align the party with “the groups on the receiving end of Trump’s ugliest barbs,” such as Latino immigrants. Instead, the party’s working-class losses began to extend beyond white voters. Green’s answer is to double down on economic populism: “Rather than fear the Republicans’ culture wars—or respond to them by racializing policies that benefit everyone—Democrats should take the opportunity to reestablish the party as serving the interests of working people of every race and ethnicity.”

None of these books offers a shortcut to a new Democratic majority. The erosion of working-class support is too old and too severe to be easily reversed. In fact, it’s the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, in Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, who imagines a coming realignment—for Republicans. Ruffini can’t resist making the case that, in addition to transforming the party, this coalition could become the next permanent majority. To do so, he breezes through some of the same history, and reaches a similar conclusion: Democrats have fallen into a “cosmopolitan trap,” losing their hold on a key constituency in the process.

Ruffini’s most original contribution is to apply close statistical analysis to the past few election cycles as he builds his case for a Republican multiracial coalition. He supplies strong evidence of the moderate social views of most Black, Latino, and Asian American voters. On that basis, Ruffini doesn’t think Democrats can win back their lost supporters just by changing the subject to class. “Democrats may calculate that, simply by focusing on economic issues, they can keep cultural issues from eating into their base,” but they’re wrong, he writes. “When voters’ economic views and social views are in conflict, one’s social stances more often drive voting behavior … Cultural divides are what voters vote on even if politicians don’t talk about them.” Ruffini offers no data to support this conclusion, but it underpins his counsel for a politician like Biden. Never mind his legislative accomplishments that benefit the working class; what he really needs, Ruffini advises in political-operative mode, is a “hard pivot against the cultural left”—he seems to have in mind a Sister Souljah moment—to neutralize Republican attacks.

Though Ruffini doesn’t spend much time on economic policy, it’s worth noting that a few high-profile Republicans have recently discovered that monopolistic corporations can be oppressors, that capitalism tears communities apart. Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as other politicians, limit this insight to their partisan enemies in Silicon Valley, but a few conservative writers, such as Sohrab Ahmari, the author of Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It, are open to ideas of social democracy. This internal party battle between the old libertarians and the new egalitarians doesn’t seem to interest Ruffini; oddly, given his populist ambitions, he remains unmoved by the anti-corporate critique. Nor does he have much to say about the Republican Party’s descent with Trump into authoritarian nihilism.

Ruffini’s formative years as a professional Republican came during the George W. Bush presidency, and his thinking hasn’t kept up with the America of fentanyl and Matt Gaetz. The populist future of Ruffini’s desires is a wholesome mixture of culturally conservative, “pro-capitalist” families and low taxes. His “commonsense majority” would combine white people who didn’t graduate from college and nonwhite people of all classes, because “the education divide makes a much bigger difference in the attitudes of whites than it does among nonwhites.” It sounds like a twist on the Judis-Teixeira emerging majority of two decades ago. Demography as destiny seduces realigners on both sides.

Ruffini recognizes that Republicans are a long way from attracting enough nonwhite voters to achieve his majority. But, he argues, if the party battles job discrimination based on a college degree, makes voting Republican socially acceptable among Black Americans, and apologizes for the southern strategy, his goal could be realized by 2036. By then, the Democratic Party would presumably be a pious rump of overeducated white people demanding open borders and anti-racist math.

These writers are all trying to solve a puzzle: One party supports unions, the child tax credit, and some form of universal health care, while the other party does everything in its power to defeat them. One president passed major legislation to renew manufacturing and rebuild infrastructure, while his predecessor cut taxes on the rich and corporations. Yet polls since 2016 have shown Republicans closing the gap with Democrats on which party is perceived to care more about poor Americans, middle-class Americans, and “people like me.” During these years, the energy on the left has been fueled by an identity politics that resisted Trump and became the orthodoxy of educated progressives, with its own daunting lexicon. Many Democrats fell silent, out of fear or shame or confusion.

Now, encouraged perhaps by the excesses and failures of a professional-class social-justice movement, and by the relative success of Biden’s pro-worker agenda, they seem to be finding their voice. Judis and Teixeira cite polling data from Wisconsin and Massachusetts as evidence that Americans are less divided on cultural issues than activists on both sides, who benefit by stoking division, would like: “If you look at the country’s voters, and put aside the culture wars, what you find are genuine differences between the parties’ voters over economic issues.” The real disagreements have to do with taxation, regulation, health care, and the larger problem of inequality. Democrats’ way forward seems obvious: emphasize differences on economics by turning left; mute differences on culture by tacking to the middle. If the party can free itself from the moneyed interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the cultural radicalism of campus and social media, it might start to win in red states.

I want Leonhardt, Judis, Teixeira, and Green to be right. Having long held the same views, I’m an ideal audience for these books and other new ones making related arguments, such as Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke, and Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. Yet the solutions that some of them propose for the Democrats’ working-class problem leave me with a worrying skepticism. In an age of shredded social bonds and deep distrust of institutions, especially the federal government, we can’t go back to New Deal economics. If Ruffini is right, the culture wars aren’t easily put aside. “Guns and religion,” in Obama’s unfortunate phrase, are genuinely held values, not just proxies for economic grievance; conservative politicians manipulate them, but they aren’t inauthentic. Race and gender are more important categories than class for millions of Americans, especially younger ones. Illegal immigration legitimately vexes citizens living precarious lives. Social issues aren’t manufactured by power-hungry politicians to divide the masses. They matter—that’s why they’re so polarizing.

The working class is immense, varied, and not all that amenable to being led. It’s more atomized, more independent-minded, more conspiracy-minded and cynical than it was a couple of generations ago. Although unions are gaining popularity and energy, only a tenth of workers belong to one. Abandoned to an unfair economy while the rich freely break the rules, bombarded with images of fame and wealth, awash in drugs, working-class Americans are less likely to identify with underdogs like Rocky and Norma Rae or the defeated heroes of Springsteen songs than to admire celebrities who pursue power for its own sake—none more so than Trump.

The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, can’t easily separate the two. All of it—wages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flag—can be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain? The working class isn’t a puzzle whose solution comes with a prize—it isn’t a means to the end of realignment and long-term power. It is a constituency comprising half the country, whose thriving is necessary for the good of the whole.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “What Does the Working Class Really Want?”

When you order a pair of sweatpants online and don’t want to keep them, a colossal, mostly opaque system of labor and machinery creaks into motion to find them a new place in the world. From the outside, you see fairly little of it—the software interface that lets you tick some boxes and print out your prepaid shipping label; maybe the UPS clerk who scans it when you drop the package off. Beyond that, whole systems of infrastructure—transporters, warehousers, liquidators, recyclers, resellers—work to shuffle and reshuffle the hundreds of millions of products a year that consumers have tried and found wanting. And deep within that system, in a processing facility in the Lehigh Valley, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.

Michael is one of dozens of material handlers—the official job title—at the Inmar Intelligence returns-processing center in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania. Inmar is a returns liquidator, which means that popular clothing brands and all kinds of other retailers contract with the company to figure out what to do with the stuff that customers end up not wanting. Much of that process involves complex machinery and data analysis, but the more than 40 million returned products that the facility sifts through annually still must pass in front of human eyes. Material handlers are charged with determining a return’s ultimate fate—whether it goes back to the retailer to be sold anew, gets destroyed, or something in between.

I wandered by Michael’s workstation on a trip out to Breinigsville last month to see one of the great mysteries of American consumer life in action: what actually happens to your unwanted purchases when you send them back. Michael, who was on the clock and would only share his first name, had just begun evaluating a pink button-down, plucked from a box of identical shirts. In the space of barely more than a minute, he confirmed the item number on the fabric label, unbuttoned the shirt, gave it the same kind of smell test you’d perform on your dirty jeans to see if they have one more grocery-store run in them, turned the shirt fully inside out and back again, eyed it for stains or other imperfections, ripped the price off the paper tag, rebuttoned it, lint-rolled it, folded it to the precise dimensions of a new clear plastic bag, and deposited the shirt inside. A brand’s contract with Inmar can stipulate details down to exactly how many pieces of tape are used to seal a perfect (or very close to it) item into new packaging. The pink shirt, an overstocked design destined for a discount store, got two.

Reverse logistics—basically, the business of moving unwanted products back up the supply chains from whence they came, or into different supply chains entirely—is a ballooning global industry that was valued at nearly $1 trillion in 2022. Before the advent of online shopping, return rates for even finicky products like clothing were in the single digits; now 20 to 30 percent of all purchases come back. Beyond the behemoths—Amazon, Walmart—very few retailers undertake the messy, fiddly work of evaluating the deluge of products themselves. Instead, the prepaid shipping labels you print out guide most of your returns to third-party facilities like Inmar, where they’re stacked six feet tall in palletized bins known as gaylords, along with thousands of other retaped cardboard boxes and poly mailers, all waiting to be ripped open, eyeballed, and searched by hand.

When I arrived at Inmar’s facility, on a sunny morning shortly before Thanksgiving, I did so alongside a fleet of trucks pulling in to pick up or drop off loads of UPS packages or ShopRite groceries or Coca-Cola products at a sea of other surrounding warehouses. Breinigsville is the kind of place where logistics facilities tend to crop up. Just outside Allentown, it’s in an area with plenty of open, inexpensive land, which has allowed for the construction of wide, low-slung warehouses near highways for moving tractor trailers full of consumer goods between there and Philadelphia or New York City in a couple of hours. ProLogis, the industrial real-estate company that operates this sprawling campus, boasts to potential tenants that it is situated within a day’s drive of nearly a third of American consumers. The scene was industry for postindustrial America. No smokestacks rose into the sky; the grounds were neatly manicured; the buildings were uniform shades of white and pale gray. The Bridgestone facility on campus doesn’t make tires. It moves them around.

Inmar stakes its claim as the largest returns liquidator in North America. The company says that it processes half a billion returned goods a year across 17 facilities. At the Breinigsville facility alone, Inmar’s material handlers process more than 100,000 consumer goods each day on behalf of all kinds of retailers—e-commerce giants, big-box discounters, drugstore chains, clothing brands, purveyors of home decor. Inside, the first thing to greet me on the processing floor was an enormous cardboard bailer, fed by a conveyor belt running high above the ground. Cardboard, just as much as returned products themselves, is an inescapable material reality of Inmar’s business; at times, it looked as if almost everything was cosseted by layers of repurposed cardboard or industrial-grade cling wrap. Beyond the conveyor belt, I found towers of pallets stacked to the ceiling as far as I could see, each box stuffed with throw pillows or defective toasters or skinny jeans that are no longer cool. Some were new arrivals awaiting final judgment; others had already been sorted and were waiting for their truck to come in.

I spent a little more than three hours in the facility. Some of that time was in a room with Inmar executives, dutifully scribbling notes as they answered my questions and expounded on the industry. For most of my visit, though, I simply meandered around the warehouse with them in tow, peeking around every corner, prodding at piles of returns, and watching staffers work. The facility was in the middle of a sleepy second shift. Occasionally a forklift would dart in or out of the aisles of pallet towers, depositing another load ready for transport or fetching a fresh set of home decor or sporting goods for inspection. Product examinations happened in a series of distinct work areas, each nestled in a clearing that I would encounter occasionally in the shelving forest. The zones dealt with different types of returns. Rugs had their own area. So did clothing and shoes. Near the bailer, I watched employees sort through the fleece blankets and sets of fake eyelashes that had been sent in from a large chain pharmacy. All the way in the back, special care was taken to separate out the different brands of small appliances sold by a major discount department store.

I’m not identifying the pharmacy or department store, or any of the dozens of other brand names that I saw floating through the facility, because I had to agree to that up front to be allowed inside. All of Inmar’s clients have confidentiality agreements in their contracts that prevent Inmar from publicly naming the companies it serves. Retailers have a fraught relationship with reverse logistics. They rarely acknowledge the system in public. Consumerism has always required a certain amount of abstraction. Originally, this was accomplished through the invention of the department store and the advertising industry, which goaded shoppers into associating new dresses with the limitless possibilities of the self, not with the exploitation and grime of garment factories. As consumer industries have changed, that abstraction has gained new layers: overseas production, online shopping, free shipping and returns. When you order something on Amazon, it’s not so much an act of buying a specific thing, or even of buying an idea of yourself. Instead, you’re buying an idea of a product, and one in every three or four of those ideas doesn’t pan out.

Reverse logistics is, in some sense, the process of unwinding those abstractions—of turning ideas and possibilities back into physical goods that must be dealt with. Figuring out what to do with the stuff that people rejected is unglamorous work, but retailers know how necessary it is. They also tend to be terrible at handling all of it themselves. It’s difficult to process returns profitably without the benefit of enormous scale and the data-analysis capabilities that create it, not to mention a lot of regular people in exurban America making sure you didn’t accidentally include your underpants when you sent back that pair of jeans—the most common stowaways that Inmar’s material handlers find in returned clothing. (They also come across errant vape pens and the occasional wedding ring in garments’ pockets.) Returns “are not what the companies want to do, or what they built themselves to do,” Thomas Borders, Inmar’s vice president of product-life-cycle solutions, told me. “They were built to sell.”

Inside the facility, stripped of context and pretense and marketing, the goods I encountered seemed a lot more similar than they do when gleaming and new on a store shelf. Luxury area rugs probably won’t meet the same fate as the stuffed animals sold at chain pharmacies, but their futures are governed by the same unsentimental practicality. What actually happens to them hinges on a bunch of different factors: whether they were returned by a buyer or by the retailer itself, whether they’re still in their original packaging, whether they show signs of use, whether they’ve been reported by the buyer as damaged or defective, whether they’re high- or low-margin products, whether their original manufacturer is willing to take them back from the retailer, whether they bear a desirable brand name.

Where a product was purchased can play a major role too. Of the brands that Inmar processes, those that sell their own products directly to the general public put more than 90 percent of their returns back into their inventory on average, according to Inmar. Meanwhile, retailers that sell a bunch of different brands do so with less than half of their returns, according to Inmar’s data, largely because the logistics of multibrand retail are more complex and the brands carried by these stores tend to be less desirable. In the best-case scenario, what can’t be sold again by its original retailer will be liquidated to wholesale buyers, eventually stocking discount stores or resale platforms domestically or small retailers in poorer countries. The stuff that doesn’t find a buyer will be donated, recycled, or destroyed. (Destroyed is the preferred industry euphemism for products that end up landfilled, incinerated, or otherwise trashed.)

Inmar says that its donations go to a whole range of charities—food banks, shelters, animal-rescue organizations. But just like donations and recycling that come from individual households, there’s no guarantee that any particular product will find a willing recipient, or that it can be effectively remade into a safe, useful new material. Lots of things that aren’t immediately deposited in landfills still end up in them, even if they pass through the hands of multiple middlemen first.

In the Breinigsville facility’s garment-inspection sector, where Michael was sorting pink shirts, the work of determining any particular product’s destination is more complicated because the potential outcomes for clothing are more numerous. Many different types of wholesalers and discounters are willing to buy up liquidated clothing, and brands can be very picky about where goods bearing their name are allowed to show up. Inspections take place at a bank of about two dozen identical, brightly lit workstations where employees attempt to discern how honest you were when you filled out your return slip—or, in the highly likely event that you declined to fill it out at all, what that return slip should have said. The centerpiece of each station is a white tabletop, above which is mounted a computer monitor that will explain the precise level and type of scrutiny that different items from different retailers require. Employees are armed with an arsenal of very analog tools—lint rollers, box cutters, sanitizing wipes, an array of plastic bags. Behind each station, five colorful, waist-high bins represent the possible futures of each garment: liquidation, donation, recycling, destruction, or, if everything is perfect, a speedy trip back to the retailer’s main inventory.

Inmar collects huge tranches of data on what gets returned and why, which can be incredibly valuable to retailers desperate to cut down on their return rates or catch faulty products before they irritate even more customers. But really, information about customer returns can only do so much for retailers’ bottom line. Most of the returns that Inmar handles actually aren’t things that anyone bought and rejected, or that anyone bought at all. Instead, they are excess inventory—a surplus of goods that comes directly from retailers themselves. Their hope is to squeeze at least some value out of everything their customers didn’t want by selling it off or returning it to the wholesaler or manufacturer from which they bought it.

Consumer behavior isn’t cleanly predictable. Sometimes trend projections fall flat or the weather behaves in strange ways or sizing doesn’t work out as planned, and the velvet skirts or patio furniture or redesigned hiking boots just don’t move. Or, worse, they do move, but then they all come back. The system as currently constituted requires the circulation of much more stuff than will ultimately find useful purpose in people’s homes; the shelves must always be full, the sizes and colors must all be available, and there has to be surplus to satisfy consumerism’s promise of convenience and abundance. If your retailer doesn’t provide this—the excess that the industry itself taught people to expect—then your competitors will.

All of this—the high return rates, the extra stock, the endless shipping, and the enormous numbers of workers sniffing and buttoning their way through careful decisions—doesn’t come cheap. That expense drives up the prices of consumer goods for everyone, no matter what your personal shopping and returns habits are. Lately, retailers have started to take more pointed measures to try to close Pandora’s cardboard shipping box. Most notably, many have started to charge for return shipping, rolling back the free, open-ended policies that persuaded so many people to adopt online shopping in the first place. But these changes aren’t designed to dissuade people from shopping online; they’re simply asking shoppers to start subsidizing the process. So far, the tactic seems to be working. At the end of my visit, I sat down with Borders, the Inmar VP, in the Inmar facility’s lone conference room, readjusting to the scale of a space meant for humans after a couple of hours in those meant for industry. He told me that retailers’ new policies have so far not affected the volume of returns that Inmar processes at all.

When inflation started to spike in 2022, the Federal Reserve made the only move it could: raising interest rates. Over the course of 18 months, rates shot from near zero to above 5 percent and have remained there since. Now inflation appears under control, having fallen steadily since July 2022. But while the Fed may be done raising rates, it’s not cutting them back to zero anytime soon.

According to the central bank’s most recent projections, rates will stay where they are for most of 2024 and will fall only slightly in 2025, ending the year at about 4 percent—more than twice as high as in late 2019. Activity in the bond markets suggests that rates could stay near that level for the better part of a decade. Wall Street has begun summing up the situation with a simple phrase: “higher for longer.”

As jarring as 5 percent interest may seem, by historical standards it is pretty modest and, believe it or not, represents a healthy adjustment. America since the Great Recession has been living through an anomalous period of super-low rates that contributed to widening inequality and speculative-asset bubbles. Higher-for-longer should herald a fairer, more sustainable economy. Americans just have to survive the transition. Because before we get to the good place, higher-for-longer is going to feel bad—or at least very weird. Rates haven’t been this high since George W. Bush was president and Taylor Swift was in elementary school. At this point, nearly every facet of the American economy has reshaped itself around near-zero interest rates. As with any dependency, withdrawal will be painful.

The core irony of raising rates to tame inflation is that higher rates can make major purchases—like a car or, especially, a house—more expensive, because most people take out loans to make them. In other words, the cure for inflation may itself be experienced as inflation. In January 2021, the interest rate on a 30-year fixed home mortgage reached a record low of 2.65 percent. Today, it is just over 7 percent. In theory, higher borrowing costs are supposed to cool prices. Instead, they’ve hardly budged. With rates spiking, many homeowners have decided to stay put to preserve the cheap mortgages they secured when rates were low. The resulting restriction of supply has led to the slowest pace of existing home sales since the height of the Great Recession, keeping sticker prices high even as the cost of a mortgage has ballooned. This double whammy has produced the most punishing housing market in at least a generation: Buyers can’t afford to buy, and owners feel stuck in place. As my colleague Annie Lowrey points out, the market could be bleak until the 2030s.

[Annie Lowrey: It will never be a good time to buy a house]

Higher borrowing costs can hurt in less obvious ways, too. Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton ZERO Lab, estimates that higher-for-longer will increase the cost of renewable-energy projects by 20 to 30 percent. In just the past few months, two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey and three in New England—which together would have accounted for nearly one-fifth of President Joe Biden’s 2023 offshore wind-power target—have been canceled because of soaring costs. The world’s largest borrower is also feeling the squeeze. Thanks to rising rates, the U.S. government will pay $659 billion in interest on the national debt this year, nearly as much as it spends on Medicare or national defense.

But the most alarming potential consequence of higher-for-longer lies in the pressure it puts on the financial system. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature Bank earlier this year was largely a story about interest rates: When rates went up in 2022, existing government bonds, which had lower rates, lost value. That inflicted huge paper losses on Silicon Valley Bank, triggering a bank run. A wider crisis was averted, but banks remain vulnerable to future shocks. Regulators worry that additional pressure on balance sheets—from, say, a collapse in commercial real estate—could trigger a larger round of bank runs, with damage spilling over into the broader economy. “Eventually,” says Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, “something could break.”

And yet, higher-for-longer appears to be worth the risk. To understand why, it helps to go back to the origins of the previous regime. In 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis, the Fed cut interest rates to zero as part of a desperate bid to avert a second Great Depression. (It also began buying securities itself in an effort to push effective interest rates below zero, a program called “quantitative easing.”) This “zero interest-rate policy”—which became known as ZIRP—was meant to be a stopgap. But as it became clear that the economy needed more help, and a Tea Party–controlled Congress wasn’t going to pass any more stimulus spending, the Fed decided to keep ZIRP in place indefinitely.

The idea behind ZIRP was to encourage spending and, in turn, create new jobs. At the most basic level, the policy made borrowing money extremely cheap. But the flip side was that investors could no longer earn nice returns by simply stashing their money in safe assets such as U.S. Treasury bills. With rates at or near zero, they had to find riskier investments—things like publicly traded stocks or leveraged buyouts or luxury-condo developments. The Fed believed that this would trigger a flood of new investment that would send asset prices soaring and generate what economists call “wealth effects.” People who owned property or stocks would see the value of their portfolios rise, encouraging them to go out and spend more money, ultimately helping to speed along the recovery.

The Fed got the first part right. Almost every single asset class, whether real estate or private equity or cryptocurrency, soared in value in what became known as “the everything bubble.” The stock market more than tripled from 2009 to 2019, and the value of Netflix, Tesla, and Amazon each grew by more than 2,000 percent. But the robust recovery did not materialize. For much of the decade, GDP and wage growth were anemic. The share of working-age Americans with a job didn’t recover from its pre-crisis levels until the fall of 2019.

Instead, because assets like stocks and real estate are disproportionately held by the rich, ZIRP helped produce the largest spike in wealth inequality in postwar American history. From 2007 to 2019, according to calculations by the economist Austin Clemens based on Federal Reserve data, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their net worth increase by 46 percent, while the bottom half saw only an 8 percent increase. A report from the McKinsey Global Institute, not exactly known as a bastion of economic populism, calculated that from 2007 to 2012, the Fed’s policies created a benefit for corporate borrowers worth about $310 billion, whereas households that tried to save money were penalized by about $360 billion. The journalist Christopher Leonard wrote in his 2022 book, The Lords of Easy Money, that “no single policy did more to widen the divide between the rich and poor” than ZIRP.

ZIRP transformed the American business environment in jarring ways. With borrowing cheap and the market booming, established corporations realized they could exploit financial tactics such as stock buybacks to boost earnings per share without improving their underlying business. Meanwhile, riding a wave of cheap money, Uber, WeWork, and other start-ups burned through billions of dollars of venture capital, pushing entire industries toward hard-to-sustain business models in the process. The private-equity industry, infamous for its debt-heavy leveraged buyouts, began eating up more and more of the economy. Desperation for higher returns also allowed speculative assets including cryptocurrencies and NFTs to attract trillions of dollars, only to collapse spectacularly.

[Rogé Karma: The secretive industry devouring the U.S. economy]

The return of higher rates should help the economy course-correct. More money will flow to long-term investments and sustainable companies instead of speculative assets and impractical start-ups. Companies looking to boost their stock price will have to win new customers or develop better products instead of relying on financial engineering. The gains of economic growth will be more widely spread because less money will be funneled into assets owned mostly by the rich.

Today’s higher rates also signal an underlying economic health that the ZIRP era lacked. The Fed is only comfortable keeping rates higher for longer because America’s post-pandemic recovery has been so strong, thanks to a generous helping of fiscal stimulus. Unemployment has remained at historic lows. Manufacturing is off the charts. Wage gains for lower-paid workers have rolled back about 40 percent of the rise in income inequality that has occurred since the 1980s. In terms of growth, inflation, and employment, the U.S. is doing much better than other rich countries.

Americans used to cheap mortgages and a bonkers stock market understandably might not see all of this as good news. And the risk remains that higher rates trigger the kind of financial crisis that necessitated low rates in the first place. But we shouldn’t pine for the ZIRP era. That was the product of a crisis that our leaders failed to solve. As strange as it is to say, higher-for-longer is what it looks like when things are going right.