For the holidays, Radio Atlantic is sharing the first episode of the Atlantic podcast How to Keep Time. Co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost, an Atlantic contributing writer, examine our relationship with time and what we can do to reclaim it.

In its first episode, they explore the idea of “wasting” time. But first, Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin has a question: Is teaching scheduling to a child a bad idea?

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Becca.

Becca Rashid: Yes, Hanna.

Rosin: I have a story I want to tell you, and I don’t know if it’s excellent or terrible.

Rashid: I’m sure it will be excellent, Hanna. Let’s hear it.

Rosin: Okay. So, this weekend, I was hanging out with a 5-year-old. Actually, four and three-quarters, because you know how little kids are extremely precise about their age.

And we were planning out all the things that we were going to do that day. And what I did was, I sat down with this kid, and I made a schedule.

Rashid: For the child who’s 4 and three-quarters?

Rosin: It was, like, a pictorial schedule. And I thought I was doing something incredibly fun. I was like, No. 1: We’re going to go to the castle playground. No. 2: We’re going to have a food adventure. No. 3: We’re going to have a throwing adventure. And I taught the kid how to write everything down and say how long it was going to take. And then I taught the kid how to cross things out.

Rashid: Oh my God. You were training this child on how to make a to-do list.

Rosin: Yes. Okay. And only at the end of it did I think: Oh my God, I have to ask Becca if I just did a terrible thing.

Rashid: Did the kid enjoy it? Did he appreciate your efforts in mapping out his day for him like that?

Rosin: Well, I think the kid was a natural bundle of chaos. I was trying to sort of organize and rein it in and be like, Look, we’re going to do this for 20 minutes, and this for 20 minutes, and this for 20 minutes.

Rashid: To manage the otherwise chaotic life of a 5-year-old child?

Rosin: Exactly. Instead of letting them kind of stumble from one thing to the next thing, I was trying to organize time. Was that a mistake?

Rashid: I mean, I can understand why that was a natural compulsion for you. You’ve been trained to think that way. I don’t know if a child who is 4 and three-quarters needs to condition himself to think that way.

And I wonder if it maybe stifles his ability to actually figure out, like: How am I feeling? What do I want to do next? Maybe not to conceptualize his day as a “day” quite yet, you know?

Rosin: That’s what I thought your answer was gonna be.

Rashid: (Laughs.)

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin, and that was Becca Rashid, one of the co-hosts of The Atlantic’s How To podcast. Their new season is called How to Keep Time, and there’s a concept in that season called “action addiction.” And all I can say is: I feel seen. Anyway, we at Radio Atlantic are off for the holidays—happy holidays, everyone—we’re going to play Episode 1 of How to Keep Time. Enjoy.

You can listen to the episode and read the transcript here:

How to Keep Time: Try Wasting It

We’re in the coldest season. We’re in the shopping season. We’re in the season of hygge. All the cues point to buying yourself a new cozy sweater. Don’t do it, until you hear what Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull has to say about the cratering quality of knitwear. For years I’ve wondered why my sweaters pilled so quickly, or why they suffocated me, or smelled like tires. And then I read Mull’s recent story titled “Your Sweaters Are Garbage.” It turns out that international trade agreements, greedy entrepreneurs, and my own lack of willpower have conspired to erode my satisfaction.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Mull, who writes about why so many consumer goods have declined in quality over the last two decades. As always, Mull illuminates the stories the fashion world works hard to obscure: about the quality of fabrics, the nature of working conditions, and how to subvert a system that wants you to keep buying more. “I have but one human body,” she says. “I can only wear so many sweaters.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: When it started to get pretty cold, I opened up the drawer where I keep all my sweaters. I have so many sweaters in there. And you know what? I hate all of them. Even the ones that are supposed to be ugly.

Because I was looking at my own closet, in my own bedroom, I figured this was my problem—I was just in my own private hell—until I saw the headline: “Your Sweaters Are Garbage.”

It was an article by staff writer Amanda Mull, who is my guru of consumer dilemmas.

Now, Amanda had done her own thorough sweater investigation, which was inspired by Nora Ephron’s great love letter to cold weather and NY city: When Harry Met Sally.

For sweater lovers, this movie holds a special place. And it has to do with one, enduring image in the movie:

[Music]

Amanda Mull: Billy Crystal is in his new, single-guy apartment, squatting in front of one of the big windows in that apartment, and he is wearing, you know, ’80s jeans and a really beautiful, cabled, ivory fisherman sweater.

And the sweater is, like, it’s incredible. It’s really lush. It’s really, like, oversized in the right ways. It is a great, great sweater.

Rosin: Recently, actor Ben Schwartz recreated the photo on his Instagram.

Mull: And he was wearing jeans and in front of a window and, you know—ivory, cabled fisherman sweater. But it was just like the sweater didn’t have the juice.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

A comedian named Ellory Smith retweeted these two sweater pictures side by side, the one of Billy Crystal and the one of Ben Schwartz, writing, “The quality of sweaters has declined so greatly in the last twenty years that I think it genuinely necessitates a national conversation.” I 100 percent agree.

And the only person I want to have that conversation with is Amanda Mull, because she’ll be able to explain why a sweater is not just a sweater. It’s a window into so many of the problems of our modern consumer culture.

So, here we go.

[Music]

Rosin: Did you yourself go through a prolonged period of sweater disappointment?

Mull: You know, I moved to New York in 2011. I’m from the South. I’m from Atlanta, so I didn’t need any sweater-buying skills for the first 25 years of my life. I had thought about this, like, not a single time because, you know, you put on a hoodie and you keep it moving where I’m from.

But suddenly, I needed to figure out how to buy, like, a whole new cold-weather wardrobe, so I made a lot of mistakes, and I made a lot of sweater mistakes because I figured, you know: Just go to any of the retailers where I’m buying my other stuff and order some sweaters from them, and it’ll be fine.

It was not fine. I got a lot of very itchy, very plasticky sweaters. I got things that pilled up immediately, that just looked terrible, looked really cheap.

I felt like a baked potato wrapped in foil inside of them. I was steaming like a dumpling. I was unhappy. I was itchy. I looked like I was in, like, this weird plastic material. I hated it.

And I did this for years before I realized that it’s the materials. I need to be looking at the fabric labels. I need to be looking at what these sweaters are actually made out of and probably spending some more money and spending some more time looking for better things. But yeah, I screwed up in that way for the better part of a decade, I would say.

Rosin: Okay, so we have sweaters of yore and sweaters now. Can you walk us through how these come into the world differently?

Mull: When you look at Billy Crystal’s sweater, you can make a few assumptions about what’s going on with it. The first thing is it’s almost certainly fully wool.

What kind of wool, it’s impossible for me to say, but there is an almost 100 percent chance that what you’re looking at is a completely natural-fiber sweater.

And it’s also double knit, which is why it looks so much heftier. At the time, sweaters were much more likely to be made of not just natural fibers, but of 100 percent wool.

That is traditionally the material that sweaters have been made out of for, you know, hundreds of years. A sweater like that would almost certainly be made in a wool-producing country.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Mull: So it might have been made in the United States. It might have been made in Scotland, New Zealand, Ireland, one of the places in the world where a lot of sheep are raised, a lot of yarn is manufactured, and then sweaters are then made from that yarn. Because it was almost certainly sold in the United States, in the 1980s there were some import controls on what could be brought into the U.S. and sold as far as textiles go, which means it was almost certainly made in a relatively wealthy country, where garment workers are more likely to have significant tenure on the job, real skills training, good wages—things like that.

So it was probably made by someone who has a lot of experience making sweaters.

Rosin: Interesting.

Mull: By someone who has lots and lots of training, lots and lots of particular skills.

Rosin: So the yarn would be wool, and whoever created it would be someone with sweater skills.

Mull: Right. Making this kind of knitwear is a very, very highly skilled task. It wouldn’t just be a person overseeing the machine; it would be a person manipulating the machine to ensure that you get all of that really rich cabling and all of those details. You know, it takes a lot of yarn to make a sweater that robust.

Rosin: I’m kind of sweating listening to you. Like, I want to be falling into nostalgia with you, but what I’m actually thinking is, like, No, no. Like, I feel too hot and sweaty. So that’s the sweaters of yore. Then what happened?

Mull: Well, in 2005, a trade agreement called the Multifiber Arrangement expired. The provisions within that agreement had been sort of, like, being phased out by design over the course of, like, a decade.

But in 2005, it went away. And what that meant was that the United States had fewer import caps on textile products that were being brought in from developing nations, or less-wealthy nations. And that sort of, I mean, it ended the garment industry in the U.S. as we know it, basically, because what became possible was all these manufacturers and retailers to look for manufacturing overseas in far less-wealthy countries—countries that would allow them to, you know, release more pollution into the environment, that would sort of kowtow to their interests in various ways. You know, the United States is not a perfect country by any means, but there are basic protections on worker safety in the environment that make it more expensive to manufacture here.

So, suddenly, brands could move their manufacturing overseas. Retailers could source inventory from factories overseas that were charging far less. All of these financial incentives just changed apparel as we know it.

Rosin: This sounds like a monumental change, and yet the word Multifiber Arrangement is not something that anyone would stop and notice, even though from what you’re saying it’s completely upended our closets and our lives. Why?

Mull: This agreement was written to expire, and then when it expired, a lot changed about clothing in the United States. What it did, essentially, was placate the domestic garment industry with 30 years of protection but then guarantee that when that 30 years was up, you know, it would sort of be open season. So it got the garment industry to sort of sign off on their own eventual death.

Rosin: So 2005 is a critical year. What does the post-2005 period look like?

Mull: 2005 was a watershed moment, but it wasn’t as stark as it might have been if the protection provisions of the agreement hadn’t been designed to be phased out. But in 2005, it’s basically open season. That is the era where you get a lot of fast-fashion retailers really expanding their presence in the United States.

The first H&Ms start opening in the U.S. You get Forever 21 flourishing. You have this sort of moment when there’s this big rush into this new type of industry that can flourish in the United States, and that rush is built on sort of terrible clothing.

Rosin: Well, now you say terrible clothing. Do you mean terribly made clothing? Clothing with terrible fabrics? Because you could get a lot of trendy clothing cheaply.

Mull: When fast fashion comes to the U.S., it brings with it its sort of internal financial logic. What that means is their goal is to sell as much clothing as possible, and they need to create the prices that allow them to do that. And being able to move manufacturing overseas means that they can vastly reduce their labor costs and also use much, much cheaper materials.

Rosin: So we started with sheep and wool. What do we switch to?

Mull: In sweaters, what this means is you’re getting a lot of what is essentially plastic. That will show up on fabric labels as polyester or polyamide or acrylic. That’s what you’ll usually find in sweater weaves.

You also get what is basically rayon. And in sweater knits, you’re starting to see a lot more of viscose, which is a fiber derived from bamboo, but it’s derived in a way that is really, really deleterious to the environment in most circumstances, and that fabric can be manufactured in other countries with poor environmental restrictions on industry.

So you get a lot more of that material and a lot more plastic.

Rosin: You know, it’s funny: It’s not that I didn’t notice fast fashion—of course I have, and have bought many a thing from its demonic jaws—but somehow the sweater existed in a different category.

A sweater is such a significant thing. If I think sweater, I still think of a Billy Crystal, fisherman, thick sweater, even though I have not worn one or owned one in many, many years. That is what a sweater is. You just, we don’t classify sweater as disposable.

Mull: Right. And the basic designs of sweaters that you see have not changed much in the last, you know, 40 years. You still see cable knits. You still see turtlenecks. You still see the sort of fine-gauge knits more likely to be made from an ultra-soft wool, like a cashmere.

So, because they’ve visually changed less over time, I think that people don’t go into buying one expecting it to be disposable, because it’s still something that has the look and feel of a thing that should be able to be worn for 10 years.

Rosin: Right. Right. What you’re describing has been happening in a pretty rapid way for 20 years. Have we really not noticed that our sweaters were rapidly deteriorating for 20 years?

Mull: Well, I think people have noticed it, but the consumer system is sort of inherently individualistic, and people tend to approach problems that they encounter within the consumer system as something that they can sort of, like, MacGyver their way out of—or if they’re just better educated, or if they look harder, or if they find, like, the secret source for the good stuff, that this is a problem that they can solve. We don’t think about consumption and about clothing and about changes in materials as this sort of collective issue, but that’s really what it is.

So I think that because we are not trained to look for the sort of big, hidden system behind why we have the sweater options we have, it is hard for people to do that.

And it’s just hard to get the type of view on the system that you would need in order to understand what’s happening. Like, if you are sort of a sicko like me, you know, you do a lot of reading about this. You read academic stuff. You read books on the history of textiles. But this history is pretty well hidden.

And the fashion industry goes to great lengths to purposefully hide this type of understanding of how its products are created and how that has changed over time, because fashion marketing works best when you are just thinking about your own aesthetic and sensory experience of a garment.

So there’s a real, concerted effort on the part of the industry at large to encourage people not to put real thought into why suddenly the sweaters are, like, a little scratchier now.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that makes so much sense. I would also say that probably we let it happen because there’s some ways that it’s better. Because laundry is easier. I can have a sense that I’m accessing a luxury item for cheaper. So there are ways in which it’s working for people.

Mull: Absolutely. I think that the fashion industry does a great job of sort of paying off consumers for not thinking about this stuff too hard.

It is fun to have, like, a zillion options when you get dressed in the morning or when you are packing for a vacation. Having this type of variety and this type of choice is something that in the past was only available to wealthy people and to celebrities, and getting to sort of star in our everyday life with our own custom wardrobe is fun. Putting on a cute outfit is fun. Buying a new outfit is fun. I love clothing. I totally get why people buy all of this stuff and why it’s just a little bit easier not to look too hard at the man behind the curtain.

There is not a lot of upside to people in looking into exactly where any of this stuff comes from, or why it is ill-fitting, or why the seams split so easily, or why there’s so much of it and there used to not be nearly as much. There’s not really a lot of personal upside to looking into that, except getting depressed.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, Amanda will teach us what to look for if we absolutely need a new sweater. Back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: Before we climb out of the hole—because we will climb out of the hole—besides split seams, what are the other collective costs of this system for us, for people around the world?

Mull: The things that the consumer system obscures are largely bad, especially when it comes to fast fashion. Garment workers overseas work in generally terrible conditions. They work for very, very little money. A lot of them have very little control over their day-to-day lives. Some of them live in in dorms that are, you know, owned by their bosses. There’s very little ability to sort of, like, live a happy, independent, secure life if you’re a garment worker in most of the world. It is a really, really dark system underneath the surface in order to create all of this really, really inexpensive stuff.

You know, if a sweater costs $10, that savings is coming from somewhere, and it’s probably coming from the people in the system with the least power and the least ability to stand up for themselves.

Rosin: Right.

Mull: And then you also get a significant environmental impact from all of this. A lot of the countries that host these types of manufacturing outfits have fewer environmental protections.

So there is a ton of pollution that happens and a ton of human-rights abuses that happen on the front end, when things are being manufactured. And then you just end up at the other end of that manufacturing process with a lot of physical waste. In order for fast fashion to work, companies have to manufacture far more than they can reasonably sell to people, so you end up with a lot of excess clothing that gets dumped, usually in poor countries. There are, in particular, real problems with clothing waste being shipped to Ghana and Chile and then just dumped in these sort of vast piles of waste.

And the stuff we’re talking about here is stuff that was never sold. It was never used. It is pure front-to-back waste. That accounts for a lot of the textile waste in the world. But then also, fabric recycling is really, really difficult. And a lot of things ultimately just cannot be recycled, or it’s not cost effective to recycle them. So because buying habits are sort of decoupled from any actual need or want, people buy stuff that then doesn’t get worn or that gets worn once, and then it ends up being donated, and a huge proportion of that ends up just being wasted. It cannot be recycled.

So you’ve got more stuff for the great clothing-waste piles in these poorer countries that are just essentially a dumping ground for us. You’ve got plastics in waterways. You’ve got hazardous chemicals in waterways that are coming out of these garments that are just wasted. There’s a lot of waste and a lot of human suffering that comes out of this.

Rosin: I’m utterly paralyzed. I’m never going to buy anything again.

I don’t know exactly how spiritually to turn this shift, because everything you said was much more serious than the question I’m about to ask you.

But the reality is: It’s cold. Sometimes I might, maybe, still want to buy a sweater for my niece. Maybe. Or I might have a “friend” who wants to one day buy a sweater. (Not me. I’ll never buy anything again.) How do you MacGyver this?

Mull: There are still places out there where you can find 100-percent-wool sweaters made in factories in countries that have real protections for their garment workers, that are made by companies that care about this type of stuff. It’s a tall order to have to do all that research yourself and try to sort through this. It is, in a lot of situations, maybe impossible.

But sweaters, because they are so deeply tied to certain regions of the world and to long-standing garment traditions that are ongoing in those regions—if you look for sweaters that are made in Ireland, Scotland, or New Zealand, a lot of those are going to be made with real wool from sheep that were treated pretty well and by people that are skilled workers.

And those don’t have to be super expensive. A lot of those, you can have something like that for less than $200. And for a garment that you expect to last year after year after year—and to serve not just a fashion purpose, but a functional purpose in your wardrobe—part of this is just a mindset thing. If you let go of the idea that you need or want to have a new wardrobe every season, I think it’s easier to then go: Okay, I am going to buy one $150 fully wool sweater, and I am not going to get sucked in by the email sales and by Instagram ads and by all of these constant prompts that we receive to purchase additional stuff.

Everybody that I talked to for this story said that their favorite place to get really good, quality sweaters is through secondhand shopping. Because they’re secondhand, you can get a good price on them. You can pay the same amount for one of these that you would pay for a brand-new, plastic sweater in a store. And then you’re also not contributing to this larger issue of the constant cycle of new things that are being put into our physical world.

Rosin: I’m gonna put a Post-it note near my bed that says, “plastic sweater,” because I think if I’m ever tempted, that phrase “plastic sweater” will dissuade me from buying anything new.

I want to ask you about a couple of methods that, now that I’m talking to you, I have used but sound wrong. One thing is price, luxury—that does not necessarily, it sounds like, ensure that my sweater is not plastic.

Mull: Right. One of the most difficult things about the consumer system as we experience it now is that price is pretty much entirely decoupled from any sort of expectation you should have about the quality of an item or the item’s material composition.

Rosin: You say that so casually. That’s so crazy. Like, that is so confounding that you said it’s completely decoupled.

Mull: Right. You know, sometimes a really, really expensive thing is going to be really that much better than its less-expensive counterparts, but usually not. I don’t think there’s really any obvious correlation between the two anymore. It’s pretty much certain that if you’re buying a $20, brand-new sweater, what you’re getting is terrible quality. But there’s not any guarantee that if you’ve spent $3,000 on a sweater that it’s going to be markedly better.

Because the logic of fast fashion has infiltrated a lot of parts of the fashion industry, people expect clothing will look old—trend-wise, if not wear-wise, as far as quality goes—in six months.

They expect to move on. So there’s no real incentive for a lot of luxury brands to make their stuff to be substantially better quality than some of the much cheaper options.

Rosin: So you can’t rely on cost. Can you rely on tags? Like, can I just read the tag and see what it’s made of? Or are there euphemisms there that I might not catch?

Mull: The best thing that you can do is to learn what your fabric tags mean when you look on the inside of a garment. Wool means wool. Cotton means cotton. Linen means linen. Polyamide, polyester, acrylic—those all mean plastic. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Right. What about Mongolian wool? Like, I bought a sweater and it said, “100 percent Mongolian wool.” Is that just wool? Sometimes I’m afraid there’s some euphemism that I never heard of and that’s fake, and there are no Mongolian sheep—just in pictures. It doesn’t really exist.

Mull: Well, wool is sort of a catch-all term. It can come from a lot of different animals. So that level of detail is useful because it might tell you a little bit more about the texture of the garment or how it will look over time with wear. Different wools do have different physical properties, so that can be useful on that level. It doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about quality. But wool is always a good starting point to understanding what it is you’re looking at and what it is you can expect from that garment.

And knowing what the less-definitive words mean as well—viscose, rayon, modal—these types of fabrics are generally the bamboo-derived ones and, while technically a natural fiber, there’s a lot that goes into the creation of that that is not necessarily very good for the environment or for the people working on it.

So learning exactly what those terms mean, too, is useful, and you’ll see the same ones over and over again. Once you learn what all of this means, it is knowledge that you can take with you for the rest of your life and be pretty set when trying to make the most basic decisions about whether or not you want to buy something.

If you can get yourself out of that headspace that says that you need more stuff, that you are missing things, it’s a good idea for everybody to just slow down and go: Okay, I have five sweaters in my closet already. I have but one human body. I can only wear so many sweaters. Do I already have something that’s similar to this and that I just haven’t thought about in a while or that I just haven’t tried on with the new pair of pants that I got that might look great with it?

Making yourself aware of what you already own, and if it fits you, and how it feels on you, and how it might go with the things that you have already is good. Being familiar with your own wardrobe is good. And really, just the problematic behavior here—no matter where you’re getting your stuff—is just buying for the sake of buying.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Before laptops allowed us to take the office home and smartphones could light up with notifications at any hour, work time and “life” time had clearer boundaries. Today, work is not done exclusively in the workplace, and that makes it harder to leave work at work.

Co-hosts Rashid Rashid and Ian Bogost examine the habits that shrink our available time, and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, a professor of Latin American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, offers his reflections on American culture and shares suggestions for how to use the time we do have, for life.

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

The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Ian Bogost: So Becca, many years ago I was driving home from work, and I had a terrible day. I don’t remember why, but I was just cheesed off. And I was, like, white-knuckling my steering wheel, you know, still angry from whatever had happened. As I was driving, I saw a colleague of mine from work walking to the train to go home.

Becca Rashid: Uh huh.

Bogost: And he was just kind of sauntering down the street. And I noticed that he was carrying a book, like, as if it were a lunchbox almost. He was very casually holding this book at his side.

And he had nothing else, not a bag or a backpack or anything. And I remember looking at him and thinking, Oh man, he has it figured out—like, “What is wrong with me that that’s not how I’m behaving, now that my workday is over?”

Rashid: He has it figured out because he’s holding a book?

___

Bogost: Well, the interpretation I had of what was going to happen to him next is that: He had left work, his workday was over, and he was going to get on the train and read his book and go home. And, you know, make dinner, do whatever he did in his evening routine. It just somehow came naturally to him to leave the office and begin the process of not being at work.

In a technical sense, I could do whatever I wanted with my leisure time once I’d left work, but there was something preventing me from really having control over that time.

___

Rashid: Welcome to How to Keep Time. I’m Becca Rashid, co-host and producer of the show.

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

___

Rashid: So Ian, your book story makes me think of how many of us who can’t leave our work at the door, even if you are someone who successfully left work behind with the book on the train. And there’s just this specific dread when you feel like your entire day, and weeks, and potentially your life will be expended at work.

Rashid: I wanted to quickly play this clip for you, of a young woman I saw on TikTok talking about how all her hours in a day go to work. And she’s sitting on the couch, she’s in her sweats, and talking about her very first 9-to-5 job, and she starts shedding a few tears.

TikToker: I know it could be worse. I know I could be working longer, but like: I literally get off, it’s pitch black. Like, I don’t have energy. How do you have friends? Like, how do you have time for, like, dating? Like: I don’t have time for anything, and I’m like so stressed out and—but, like, am I so dramatic? It’s fine.

Bogost: Oh wow; I mean, yeah, she’s got it, doesn’t she? I really empathize with this girl. [Laughter.] I mean, I’m in a very different life stage, but even the situation this young woman is describing—it’s not really new.

Nor is it confined to her generation or anything. It’s just, she’s got fresh eyes on it. Like, what the heck, my whole entire day—my whole life—seems to be taken up by work (or work-related activities, like commuting), and there’s no life for me left. That’s what she’s saying.

Rashid: And the obvious solution would be working less, and winning more time back for yourself. But that seems pretty unlikely as the only solution.

___

Bogost: Yeah, but what if you could live more for yourself even when you’re at work? Rather than seeing that time as totally lost to your boss or your company, as time that’s not yours—even though you’re there, you’re there at work, in your body while it all happens to you.

Rashid: And I do think in her stating it so plainly, it forces us to sort of revisit our mainstream approach to this binary we create between work and life, which is obviously bothering her.

Bogost: Thinking of your work time as something that isn’t yours—like it’s some ghost, other personality—that’s the problem that has to be solved in some way.

Rashid: And it forces us to question whether there are maybe new ways to structure our time.

___

Ignacio Sánchez Prado: But, I also think—I mean, is a job worth not having a minute to think about yourself, you know? I don’t think so.

Rashid: So Ian, you know, maybe our conditioning to prioritize work isn’t just a thing in our heads or because we’re at the whim of our calendars.

Sánchez Prado: My name is Ignacio Sanchez Prado. I go by Nacho, which is short for Ignacio in Spanish. I’m a professor of Latin American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis who researches Mexican culture broadly.

Rashid: Depending on where you work, or the nature of your job, a lot of people’s work require you to leave your life at the door. Ian, Nacho is someone who spends time observing and studying cultural practices. And I wanted to ask him if, and how, time can be understood as a reflection of culture.

I’m wondering if our culture and social practices around our time at work can feel like more of a barrier to using our time in a more cohesive way, where that binary between work and life feels less disconnected.

___

Sánchez Prado: I think that what was surprising actually is that in the United States, people work for working, and I think that one thing that I want to make clear because I don’t want to create this narrative where Americans are hard working and Mexicans are leisure centered. Mexicans work very hard.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: And are very productive in Mexico, in the office [00:10:00] culture, and the university culture. But I don’t think the notion that you are defined by your employment is as strong.

Rashid: Nacho, could you tell me about how that work and leisure-time balance is in Mexico?

Sánchez Prado: So people see their job as a means to an end, and the end is their family life, their social life, their leisure, their hobbies. I think the difference is not the hard working—but also the understanding that putting limits to your work is a right. And if you don’t, you’re just giving up your rights.

I think that leads for people to—I mean, I have friends who drop work at the time that the work is done, and they don’t care if it’s done or not. Or people don’t really think that they should be spending their weekends answering emails. I think that if you have the privilege to access employment, there’s no job that is worth destroying your mind or your life.

___

Sánchez Prado: My mom didn’t know how to cook, because she was a secretary; she worked six days a week, all day.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: When she comes home, she’s not going to cook—but we would go together to an eatery and eat together. Because it is possible to walk out of your apartment and have 15 places where you can go eat in the vicinity of your neighborhood. And it’s very inexpensive. And it can be a sit-down place; it can be a taco stand.

Traditional Mexican places are not necessarily designed for this kind of expeditious eating. When I came to the U.S., it’s the first time I saw a restaurant telling you that you have the table for a maximum amount of time.

Rashid: Right. You have the timed reservation.

Sánchez Prado: It’s something I had never seen before. I mean, we have reservations, but nobody tells you you have to leave at 11:30, right?

Rashid: Yeah, right.

Sánchez Prado: You leave when you want, or when they close. But nobody’s gonna come and time whether you’re using the table too much.

Rashid: Right.

Sánchez Prado: There’s a word in Spanish called sobremesa; it’s sort of the after-dinner conversation. And that is so much of a social practice that there’s a word for it, and it’s called “over table,” right? So it means that it’s right after eating on the table. It is expected that you will linger and continue conversation, rather than just get up and leave.

Rashid: Right. What’s the rush? What’s the hurry?

Sánchez Prado: Exactly.

Rashid: Yes, where in the U.S., it feels like even our productive approach to work is also when we’re eating.

Sánchez Prado: You know, it is also the fact that dinner or supper also has other social components to it. So it is common that people would go from work, maybe to meet their family, their children, maybe to meet their friends—but I also think that the culture is a little bit more gregarious,

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: That motivates people, even in work spaces, to socialize. One practice that we have, it’s going away because of fast food and stuff like that. But our lunch times are very long—they’re about two hours. Because it’s the main meal, there are various restaurants that offer multi-course meals, and people usually go from their offices to those places to eat as a group.

And the two hours of the break allow you to have more full engagement with your coworkers than a half-an-hour lunch at your desk.

Rashid: This is during the weekdays?

Sánchez Prado: This is the weekdays.

Rashid: Oh! Can you describe this meal to me? I’m so jealous.

Sánchez Prado: Yes. If it’s a working-class place, it’s called a comida corrida. So it’s like a ... I don’t know if it has a direct translation, but like a meal in sequence. You get a soup, and then you get either rice or pasta or something. And then you get a main course with a side and dessert.

Rashid: Oh, sounds so good.

Sánchez Prado: It’s not only the gastronomical practice, which is interesting on its own. But also: If you have office workers that go to a place like this in groups of four or five, sit together, and are sharing a table for an hour or two, the social engagement in that office is different than when everybody’s sitting in their cubicle and their office. But I think that the embedding of social practice in the day makes a big difference in this case, for the nine-to-five or nine-to-seven worker.

In Mexico, we have become more of a victim of the corporate culture the minute we have lost the ability to have that kind of social, gregarious lunch.

___

Bogost: Oh my gosh, Becca. I just had, yesterday, a supposedly social gregarious lunch with a friend in from out of town. And the whole time we were still, like, looking at our watches. He was like, “Oh, I want to make sure you get back for your meeting.” And I was checking to make sure I wasn’t going to be late. So it’s really difficult. We’re still at work, even when we take the time to eat that way.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: I mean, I think one of the things Nacho is pointing out is that it’s too big a burden to ask people to create that time for themselves.

Rashid: Mm hmm. Right.

Bogost: You need to make space for it, socially and culturally. Um, there has to be a kind of common understanding that, you know, hanging out with your friends or even your co-workers in a different setting is important.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: And that’s just how your day plays out, rather than, oh, How can I figure out how to finagle a way to be social with the people who are important to me?

Rashid: Right. And as Nacho was saying, this multiple-course lunch and these additional hours that people give themselves during the workday—there’s this sort of freedom they have, to go have that meal together and really enjoy it.

And you know, some of the happiest countries in the world, some of their primary metrics of their happiness include that freedom to make decisions and social support, both of which could be understood as time-related. They have the flexibility to make decisions about time, and time to invest in strengthening their relationships.

Bogost: I mean, do people in those countries just work less? Do they just have more time on their own to play with?

Rashid: Well, the three happiest countries in the world—Finland, Denmark, and Iceland—aren’t far off from the average American workweek, in terms of average hours worked. And the average American workweek, which is around 38.8 hours, according to data from 2022, is not that far off from Denmark’s average workweek, which is 33.4. Iceland’s is around 35.5, and Finland’s is 35. So it’s not so much a matter of not having enough hours in the day, which was so surprising to me.

Bogost: Which suggests that we don’t require a whole lot of additional time, necessarily, but figuring out a different way of conceptualizing that time in order to experience the kind of enjoyment and freedom that Nacho is talking about.

Rashid: Right, and even though there is a seemingly small difference in average work hours between each of those countries, that may translate into a more serious time discrepancy day to day—that does make finding that one extra hour a little harder.

___

Sánchez Prado: What I find worrisome—and I say it to my students sometimes—is that sometimes you ask people “What enriches you?,” and they don’t have an answer to that question. If you don’t have an answer to that question, I will be worried. I think that that’s a question that you have to find an answer for.

Rashid: What kind of answers do they give you, if any?

Sánchez Prado: Well, sometimes nothing, because sometimes the teachers go on TikTok, right?

Rashid: Hmm.

Sánchez Prado: I’m very addicted to social media, so I’m not gonna bring any kind of moralism to that. It’s okay if you look at Facebook, but you need to have something that is, for you, a little bit more enriching in your leisure time.

Rashid: Mmm.

Sánchez Prado: In order for you to develop a sense of value to it. I had a student that was doing crochet, even in class, and she really loved that. Sometimes they tell me, “I like to paint.”

I think that one of the culprits is universities. And private ones very particularly, because they have this structure of after-curricular social activity that is built and regulated by the university, and it takes over time of the students. So the students never develop the ability to develop that kind of meaningful leisure time on their own. They’re here all day; they live here.

Rashid: Right.

Sánchez Prado: And I think that if you graduate from that, to the world…

Rashid: Right.

Sánchez Prado: I’ve seen some of my students; just they don’t know what to do with themselves after their job is done.

It might be that some people just don’t even develop the skill to begin with. If I were to give practical advice, which I like to do sometimes, is begin by asking yourself—what kinds of things enrich you?

Rashid: Hmm.

Sánchez Prado: And then make a proactive effort to make sure that they’re a part of your day. You have to be proactive about it, in this culture.

___

Bogost: So Rashid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans have more than five hours of free leisure time per day.

Rashid: Wow.

Bogost: Do you feel like you have five?

Rashid: It does not feel like five, for sure, but I believe it.

Bogost: It does not feel like five to me either. Right. And, you know, I think the reason it doesn’t is because we don’t know what to do with those five hours of time, or however much of it we have. And so it just kind of, you know, evaporates into little pieces. Instead of using it well, it just vanishes, between our fingers.

It makes me wonder. I mean, this is kind of an impossible question to answer, but, you know, it only makes sense to talk about leisure time once you have work time to compare it to.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: And so, back before people had leisure. Leisure is essentially an invention of the Industrial Revolution. So, you know, when you would have been a peasant working the land—and your whole day’s worth of time was just taken up with subsistence from dawn to dusk, and then you couldn’t do anything anyway because it was dark—at least you kind of knew, maybe, why you were doing the things that you were doing hour to hour. Less of your time would vanish, because you had so little of it to start with. And also because you were making use of all of it.

Rashid: So you almost would prefer to know what you are going to be doing at every hour? Is there, like, a decision-making component there that makes it harder to know? Like, okay, “If this is my free time, and I just finished my work time, how do I make the decision about what to do now that it’s all mine? I can use it however I want.”

Bogost: That’s exactly it, Becca: “Okay, I’m at work. Oh, and now I’m not at work anymore. And so now I have to figure out what that means. Um, now I’m using my time for myself. And I’m not at work, so I really have to make good on the leisure time that I have. And then by the time I’ve figured out what I want to do, I’ve burned through half of it and don’t have it anymore.”

But you know when you’re a kid and even your leisure time is more structured? “Now is when you can watch TV,” because that’s when your parents allowed you to.

Or “It’s time to go brush your teeth,” or what have you. Something about, you know, that phase of life feels a little better, doesn’t it?

Rashid: Hmm, interesting.

Bogost: Because you know what’s happening next, and why.

Rashid: Yeah. It sounds to me, Ian, like having that authority figure telling you how you should be using your time is helpful in a way. And as Nacho said, his university students have many of their leisure activities baked into their day to day—the place they work is also the place they live, and sleep, and make friends, so that makes it easier to decide what to do.

If everyone is going to the football game or taking breaks between a study session, it guards against the kind of decision paralysis you may have if you have a full Saturday afternoon free. There are so many more variables: Maybe gathering everyone in one place to do it with, schedule it, and making sure you have a good time.

Bogost: And having that external force that is making a decision for you is really helpful, because now you no longer have to make a choice. And when you make a bad choice, and it’s your choice, then you feel guilty for it. You feel, I could have made any choice, and I did the wrong thing with the time I had available.

___

Sánchez Prado: I don’t care about what people think. Not everybody has that privilege, right?

Rashid: Yes.

Sánchez Prado: Some people get pressures because their promotions, their salaries are tied to that, so we don’t have to be frivolous about that.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: But I also think—I mean, is a job worth not having a minute to think about yourself, you know?

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Sánchez Prado: I don’t think so.

Rashid: How do you think someone who doesn’t have that flexibility in their schedule could incorporate some of these practices in their life?

Sánchez Prado: I don’t think you need to be working all the time that you’re at work.

Sánchez Prado: Unless you have a boss on top of you or a computer timing you, which happens.

Rashid: Uh huh.

Sánchez Prado: I mean, if you are in that, you just don’t have a way out, right? You’re just in, like, a work regime of constant surveillance, right?

Rashid: Right.

Sánchez Prado: Since most people are not in that situation, bring a book to your desk and read. Give yourself 10 minutes every hour to read it.

Rashid: Hmm.

Sánchez Prado: Right? I mean, if you’re going to eat and work, you might as well eat while you’re working, and then take your lunch break and do something else.

Rashid: Yeah!

Sánchez Prado: People care that they’re not being perceived as good-enough workers. Because you are aware of a judgment that other people are going to have of you. But maybe you shouldn’t care, right?

___

Rashid: So Ian, as we’re analyzing these work-life boundaries, it made me think about our American cultural values around work and home, and which one people think should have more value, or which one we should allocate more time to. And I found this really interesting data on Americans evolving views about the meaning of life.

Bogost: Oh my gosh. And what did it say?

Rashid: And there was the survey conducted from September 2017 to February of 2021, and it sort of tracked these changes and preferences over that four-year period. And the Pew Research Center asked a sample of adults to answer the question “What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling, or satisfying? What keeps you going, and why?”

Bogost: So what did people say?

Rashid: Of course I assumed it was work.

Bogost: Uh huh.

Rashid: But surprisingly, over the course of those four years, the share of adults who mentioned their job or career as a source of meaning declined from 24% to 17%, which was already significantly lower than I thought.

Bogost: —was already pretty low.

Rashid: And people were more likely than the initial year in 2017 to mention society a source of meaning in life.

Bogost: Yeah, Becca, it almost sounds like we’ve been faking ourselves out.

Rashid: A little.

Bogost: Like, yeah: We believe that everyone else believes that work is where we should derive satisfaction. But, in fact, very few of us in America seem to think that that’s really the case. And instead we want to find it in one another, rather than in our workplaces.

___

Rashid: That’s all for this episode of How to Keep Time. This episode was hosted by Ian Bogost and me, Becca Rashid. I also produce the show. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of our music. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Bogost: We’re taking a quick break next week, and after all this talk about busyness and schedules, I’m really looking forward to some rest. That’s also the topic of our next episode. Talk to you then.

___

Bogost: Becca, I’ve been oversleeping lately, and I finally went to the doctor, and he recommended that I sleep on a bed of herbs.

Rashid: [Laughter.] This is ridiculous. What? What? What?

Bogost: [Laughter.] You gotta give me a “Why?” [Laughter.]

I’ve got another one. You want another one?

Rashid: Let’s do another one, because I started laughing too early.

Bogost: Yeah, you started laughing prematurely. It was a ridiculous setup. [Laughter.]

Bogost: How can you tell when your clock is hungry?

Rashid: [Laughter.] Why aren’t you feeding your clock, Ian?

Bogost: Wow, well, you know… [Laughter.]

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

When my colleague Tom Nichols, who taught at the Naval War College for 25 years, warns people that Donald Trump might be a threat to democracy, they often ask him to prove it. Yes, Trump has said dictator-like things, but if he won a second term, aren’t there barriers in place to prevent him from acting on his rhetoric? Would he really be able to persuade senior command in the military to use force against American citizens? Would he be able to get past the Geneva Conventions? Wouldn’t Congress or the courts intervene to stop him from acting on his worst impulses?

Nichols has never served in the military, but he knows its rules and its culture well. And he has watched over the years as some of his students became more openly partisan. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Nichols explains how a reelected President Trump could bend the military to his will and how political schisms in the military could happen. He emphasizes how close Trump came to achieving some of his goals in his last term, how ill prepared we are as a democracy that assumes a “minimum level of decency in the people who are elected to public office.” And he breaks down his personal nightmare scenario.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Last Tuesday, during a town hall on Fox News, Sean Hannity asked Donald Trump the question, straightforwardly.

Sean Hannity: Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?

Rosin: Now, Hannity is friendly to Trump. So this seemed like a question that was supposed to quiet some worries. Because lately, Trump and his allies have been sending a lot of strong dictator-like signals, saying they would “come after” or “crush” people who are unfriendly to them or disloyal. But Trump did not treat it like a softball. And the exchange continued:

Hannity: You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.

Donald Trump: Except for day one.

[Crowd cheers]

Trump: He’s going crazy.

Hannity: Except for?

Trump: Except for day one.

Rosin: But Trump was not done.

Trump: We love this guy. He says, “You’re not gonna be a dictator, are you?” I said: “No, no, no. Other than day one.”

Rosin: If you ask people who study how dictators rise, they’ll often say that would-be dictators don’t hide their intentions. It’s just that the people they’re talking to fail to take them seriously until it’s too late, which honestly makes a whole lot of sense to me.

Because I have read about the many recent dictator-like statements by candidate Trump. And yet, I experience them like I’m watching a movie about the rise of a dictator somewhere else or, like, in some other time, not right now in the country I actually live in. But I want to take this more seriously.

I’m Hanna Rosin. And in this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Tom Nichols. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he often writes about the U.S. military.

Now, Tom wasn’t in the military himself, but he spent 25 years teaching officers at the Naval War College, and a big part of his job was to talk to them about the Constitution and their role in American democracy.

Tom Nichols: You know, over the years when people like me have said, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, well-meaning people, people of goodwill, have said, Okay, I get that you’re concerned, but what would that actually look like?

[Music]

Rosin: Tom recently wrote a story with the headline: “A Military Loyal to Trump.” And in our conversation, he fills in a critical part of the Trump-as-dictator scenario, which is how a reelected Trump could bend the military to his will.

[Music]

Nichols: It’s easy to just get your hair on fire and say, Oh, Trump’s a fascist. He’s a threat to democracy. He would do terrible things. I think it was important to say, Here’s how it could happen in a concrete way. Here are the steps he would have to take. Here are the things he’s done that would get him closer to that goal of being an authoritarian leader.

Rosin: You’ve said that if he’s elected, Donald Trump will attempt to make the U.S. armed forces loyal to him, and not to the Constitution. That’s a very big thing to say. Why are you so sure about that?

Nichols: Well, if you look at Donald Trump’s first term, he viewed the senior command of the U.S. military and the senior civil servants of the Defense Department as obstacles and opponents to things that he wanted to do, including using force against American citizens in the streets. So I have no doubt that he views the military, and particularly senior commanders, as obstacles to his exercise of power.

He’s talked about wanting Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, executed. You know, we don’t have to think very hard about Trump’s intentions because he says the quiet part out loud all the time.

Rosin: I know. That’s the hard part about Trump, I feel like. It’s like, it’s hard to understand what’s talk, how plausible anything is. And whenever he says things like this, I immediately think, Well, this is America. We have a system in place. That system keeps somebody like that, a president even, in check.

Nichols: Except that at the very end of his first term, he actually did try to purge the senior ranks of the Defense Department by dumping the secretary of defense. He tried to install Anthony Tata, this retired one-star general who’s kind of a kook and a conspiracy theorist, into the number-three slot in the Defense Department.

He’s made pretty plain that he’s actually willing to engage in those kinds of personnel changes to get what he wants. The difference is the first time around, he didn’t really know what he was doing and there were people around him who were determined to stop him.

This time around, there just won’t be anybody determined to stop it.

Rosin: Tom, you know a lot more about military culture and operations than most people. Inside that culture, how does politics or partisanship—how does it get expressed?

Nichols: When I began teaching at the Naval War College, I was there long enough ago that I actually had people who were prior-enlisted folks in Vietnam. And the thing I’ve noticed is that our officers are resolutely nonpartisan. They serve the Constitution. But the willingness to think in very partisan terms was growing over the years. By the time I retired, in 2022, I was hearing officers saying things almost verbatim from, you know, talking points from Fox the night before. You know, officers, for example, you know, were asking me about why we’re not doing more to reveal the Chinese George Soros hoax about climate change, kind of stuff.

And that worried me. I started hearing a lot more kind of fever-swamp, conspiracy-theory stuff. Because, you know, the military, we have a citizen-soldier military. It’s one of the great strengths of our democracy, but every military, to some extent, lives in something of a bubble. And I feel like over the years that I was teaching, that I could see that bubble getting thicker and thicker and more detached from society in general, I think—at least among a relatively small number of officers, but much more than I would have expected and certainly more than I was comfortable with by the end of my career.

Rosin: What was your sense of their understanding or your students’ understanding of civic duty, how the Constitution works, you know, things like that?

Nichols: Yeah. I think that’s an important question. And I don’t want to be overly alarmist about the men and women that I’ve been teaching and working with for some 30 years. They are resolutely patriotic people who understand that they do not swear an oath to any individual president.

But I think there’s enough concern about that, that Mark Milley, when he retired, made it a point to repeat that, to say, And remember—he said on his way out the door—we do not swear an oath to a particular president.

But I do worry that the lack of civic education in the United States in general has also extended to the military. And I have a particular concern that it will become too easy to smudge the difference between loyalty to, or not loyalty, but obedience to the president’s orders and obedience to the Constitution, because Trump will say, as he has done in the past: I am the ultimate authority on what is constitutional. I am the ultimate authority on what is to be obeyed or not to be obeyed. He has said, you know, If there are things in the Constitution I don’t like, I’ll just terminate them.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Nichols: And, again, you only need a very small number of people at the top to agree with him about that.

And then what they will do is put hope in that the chain of command, that obedience, that if a sergeant gets an order, he assumes that the lieutenant who gave it is giving the right order and that the lieutenant who got it from the captain, that she is giving the right order, and so on, all the way up to the chain of command. If things don’t get stopped at the very top, they can spiral out of control as they go down through the chain of command because you don’t want a bunch of people in the military having to stop and say, No. Wait. I have to go consult the constitutional law books about whether or not I should carry out that order.

That’s something that should happen very close to the president, at the White House, between him and his senior military leaders. Trump has made it clear he just might not care about anybody telling him that something is illegal or unconstitutional.

Rosin: Right, right. Okay, so he doesn’t care. Can we get into some specific examples? Like, how would this actually play out? I just need some specific scenarios to understand it.

Nichols: Well, one thing to consider is that Trump will want to issue orders that are probably unlawful, certainly an ethical problem for the military.

So Trump could, for example, order people to commit war crimes, because he clearly has no compunction about whether our forces actually commit war crimes. Take the example of Eddie Gallagher. Eddie Gallagher was a Navy SEAL, right. The best of the best. He was court-martialed for war crimes, for shooting at civilians, potentially for murder.

The only thing he was actually convicted of when it was over, after the testimony even of his own comrades in the SEALs, was photographing himself with a dead body. Trump intervened to make sure that Gallagher could keep his Trident, his badge of being a Navy SEAL, which is a huge kind of trespass, because normally only the SEALs decide who gets to keep that Trident. So imagine that in the future Trump says, You know what? Let’s desecrate bodies. Let’s commit war crimes. Let’s put the fear of God in these people, whoever they are, wherever we are, by doing, you know, terrible things and photographing it. And don’t worry—I’m the commander in chief. Your obedience to me removes the stain from you. I won’t let you be court-martialed for it.

Rosin: Yeah. But what’s the larger significance of doing something like that, of the president allowing something like that to happen?

Nichols: Because the message from the president will be, especially when it comes time, if we get to that terrible moment where if the president wants to use force against Americans (for example, if there’s another January 6), then he says, Listen, I’m going to send in the Army, and none of my people are going to get arrested. You’re not going to disperse them. The Capitol police are not going to arrest these people. And if they want to march into the House, then they’re going to do it. And if there are protests against me, I will tell them to shoot at people.

You acclimate an institution to getting used to that by issuing these terrible orders and getting them to fulfill them over and over and over again over time. I worry that he will just kind of corrode the norms and traditions. The U.S. military—and I feel that I need to say this again—the people for whom I have intense admiration, their culture is built on honor and loyalty and duty. And if Trump chips away at that every day with a small number of people at the top, I worry about what happens at the ultimate moment when Trump says, You know what? I didn’t lose an election, and we are marching to the Capitol, or, I don’t feel like having any protests against me in Washington today.

Remember, he actually wanted to call out troops against the protesters in Washington, and his own secretary of defense said, That’s a really bad idea. Don’t do that.

He won’t make that mistake again. The next secretary of defense is going to be somebody who nods and says, That’s a great idea, sir. Let’s get ’em out there.

[Music]

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: What barriers normally exist against these nightmare scenarios?

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, we’re back. So Tom, in Trump’s first term, we got used to the idea that certain institutions of government held off some of his worst impulses. What would stop him in a second term?

Nichols: There are two institutions that are the most likely to stand in Trump’s way, if he returns to power, when it comes to attacking his opponents, undermining democracy, breaking the rule of law, and squelching any kind of dissent or protest against him. He needs to control two institutions: the Justice Department and the U.S. military. And if he can get control of both of those, he’s most of the way there to be able to do whatever he wants.

And I’m not hypothesizing. We saw him try to do it. We came within a whisker of it just before January 6, where his own appointees of the Justice Department walked in and said, If you do these things—including appointing people like Jeffrey Clark, you know, making him the acting attorney general—you’re going to have mass resignations. Now maybe that would work, but Trump at this point, I think, would say, Great. Mass resignations, and I’ve got a whole list of people now who will step into those jobs. I think lists of people who would take these jobs are already being compiled by Trump loyalists. And I think the answer would be, if someone walks in and says, Mr. President, if you do this, I’ll resign, he’ll say, Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

We always talk about, Well, the Senate won’t confirm these people. That’s the bar. Well, what if Trump says, as he already has—it’s not a what-if; he’s actually done this—Okay, fine. You didn’t confirm him. I’m sending him over to the Pentagon to sit next to the guy who’s in that job?

That’s a lot of pressure on appointees to say, you know, to be the people to stand up and say, I am not going to follow the orders of the president of the United States, and especially in a military organization where that is just anathema. That’s heresy.

And in normal times, that’s a good thing. In a normal democracy, you don’t want military officers saying, I have your order and now I’ll think about it.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: Donald Trump, he wanted to kill Bashar al-Assad. He called the Pentagon and said, Let’s take this guy out. And the then secretary of defense said, We’ll get right on that, Mr. President. And then he hung up the phone and he turned to an aide and he said, We’re not doing any of that.

And I think there will be more and more of those, kind of, fork-in-the-road moments where Trump, if Trump is president, he’ll say, I want to do this, and someone behind a desk or in uniform is going to have to sit back and say, Am I really going to do that?

Rosin: Right. I mean, I like to think that there are a lot of Jim Mattises, a lot of Mark Milleys out there—these are people who had some power, appealed to their own conscience at some point, you know, understood who they were serving, which was the Constitution in the end—and that there are more of them.

Nichols: I would like to think there are more of them too. And I think most of the military is like—the people that I knew are certainly a lot more like Mark Milley and Jim Mattis than they’re going to be like some of the other people that surrounded Trump. But as I’ve often wondered, you know, how many more of these people are like Anthony Tata, the guy that Trump tried to, you know, stick into the third slot at the Defense Department? Or this retired colonel, Douglas MacGregor, that he tried to make an ambassador to Germany and then, when that failed, sent him over to the Pentagon?

Again, there are a lot more Milleys and Mattises out there, but there’s also a lot of Tatas and MacGregors out there—not as many, I think, but as I keep wanting to emphasize, you only need a handful. That’s the real problem, that if you control a handful at the top, you can gain control of a lot of the institution very quickly.

Rosin: So if Trump gets what he likes to call “my generals,” and then he wants to do something that feels blatantly unconstitutional, are there not checks in place that would stop him if he gives an unlawful command?

Nichols: Well, the first barrier to an unlawful command is the officer to whom it is given saying, I decline that order. Let’s just take an example: I don’t know, you know, Commit a war crime, right? Kill POWs, which is flatly illegal. (We are signatories to the Geneva Conventions. You can’t do that.) And Trump, as he often did during his rallies, for example, would say, Go ahead and do it. I’ll cover you. I’ll be your top cover for this.

That first barrier is an officer or a secretary of defense, even, who says, I am not going to transmit that order. And in a normal country, back when America was, you know, in the pre-Trump days, even the threat of that would be enough to stop a president from considering some of these things.

But what if Trump says, Well, okay. You’re relieved, as he did with so many of his national security advisors, or with Secretary Esper, who he fired. You know, Great. You’re not on board; you’re out. I’m gonna take the next guy behind you and the next guy behind him, until somebody fulfills this order.

The next barrier to that would be, what? A court? The Senate? The Congress? But again, what do you do if the president of the United States says, I am the Article II power. Article II, Section 2, says I’m the commander in chief of the armed forces, and I don’t recognize your authority. I don’t care?

Rosin: Is that a thing? Do we misunderstand something fundamental?

Nichols: I don’t know. We’ll find out, right? If the president says, I don’t recognize your authority to do this, and so I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, what does Congress do at that point? Congress says, Well, we cut off funding to the Defense Department? We use the power of the purse?

These things take time. Remember, Donald Trump tried to create an entirely separate foreign policy regarding Ukraine than the one his own administration was publicly committed to. Like, in public, he said, Of course we support Ukraine. They’re our friends. And then privately, he said to a handful of people, Forget all that. Call Ukraine. Tell them that unless they investigate Joe Biden, they’re out of luck. And then he denied it.

I mean, I guess the bottom line for all of this is our system of government, and our Constitution, is not set up to deal with intentionally and flagrantly criminal behavior from the president of the United States. Our entire Constitution is based on a minimum level of decency in the people who are elected to public office. It’s not designed to cope with somebody like Donald Trump.

And in the end, the only weapon that you would have against Donald Trump would be impeachment and removal, which, I suppose could get ugly if Trump said, Well, I’m not leaving the White House. Then you literally have to go in and drag him out. But as we’ve already seen, the Republicans are not going to be a break on Donald Trump’s behavior.

He was impeached twice and the Republicans have acquitted him twice, and I just don’t see any of those guardrails functioning this time around if Trump is returned to office, in part because he’s going to make the case of: The country is with me. The people are with me. The Army is with me. He used to say that, which, you know, is a pretty uncomfortable thing to hear. And I just don’t—is it a thing? That’s a great question. I hope we never find out.

Rosin: Can I ask you—it sounds like you are genuinely worried—what is your actual biggest fear? Like, if you actually let your mind wander to the worst place, what is your scariest scenario?

Nichols: Two things keep me awake at night. One is that Trump provokes a schism within the armed forces in the United States—that we have pro- and anti-Trump factions within the armed forces that don’t necessarily come to open blows with each other but that paralyze our effectiveness as a military.

There may be talented and experienced officers who will simply resign or refuse to carry out orders that are unconstitutional, and then operations that we actually may need to be conducting get bogged down in internal fights about who’s giving which orders, and Who am I supposed to listen to? Do I listen to the guy that was the appointee, or do I listen to the guy who’s obviously the president’s pick, who’s sitting right next to him? What do I do if the chief of staff in the White House calls me, who has no power, but says the president wants X?

And that can happen even in the best of times just through miscommunication. I really worry about what happens if that becomes something that happens because of a partisan political divide within the military. I can’t even imagine the words partisan political divide in the American military.

Like, I’ve never really—I’ve spent years lecturing at the Naval War College saying how fortunate we were not to have that problem.

Rosin: Mm- hmm.

Nichols: But Donald Trump will actively try to create that problem if he thinks it serves his purposes.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Nichols: The other thing that keeps me up at night is Donald Trump in control of nuclear weapons.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: There’s no way around that. Nuclear weapons, colloquially, are referred to as the president’s weapon. Only the president of the United States can authorize the use of nuclear weapons. I just worry about the fact that Donald Trump, who I think is a deeply unstable person, shouldn’t be anywhere near America’s nuclear arsenal. And if he’s commander in chief, he will have that daily code, that little biscuit in his pocket that lets him unleash nuclear disaster if he really wants to.

We are relying on people who have been trained to follow the orders of the commander in chief. We are relying on men and women in uniform to say, I’m not going to do that.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. And that’s not in their nature, generally.

Nichols: And it’s not in their nature, and it’s not fair to them.

[Music]

Rosin: Tom, thank you for laying that out in such great detail. I feel like one of the issues we have with this Trump-as-dictator discussion is a failure of imagination. Like, we just can’t get our heads around what it would actually look like, and you definitely help with that, and I appreciate it.

Nichols: Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sara Krolewski, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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.

____

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Donald Trump and American evangelicals have never been natural allies. Trump has owned casinos, flaunted mistresses in the tabloids, and often talked in a way that would get him kicked out of church. In 2016 many people doubted whether Trump could win over evangelicals, whose support he needed. Eight years later, a few weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, evangelical support for the former president and current Republican frontrunner is no longer in question. In fact, there are now prominent evangelical leaders who have come to believe that Trump is “God’s instrument on Earth,” says Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

How did evangelicals shift from being reluctant supporters of Trump to among his most passionate defenders? How did some evangelicals, historically suspicious of politicians, develop a “fanatical, cult-like attachment” to Donald Trump? And what happened to the evangelical movement as some bought into Trump’s vision of America and others recoiled?

Alberta is a political reporter and also a Christian himself. After a dramatic and unexpected conversion, Tim’s father became a pastor at a prominent church in Michigan, which means Alberta grew up playing at the church, inviting dates to Bible study. He remains a believer. But he has watched with concern over the last few years as a lot of worship services have started to sound like “low-rent Fox News segments,” as he puts it—and as his own father, before his death, began justifying some of Trump’s behavior. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk to Alberta about the alliance between Trump and evangelicals, and what it means for the church he loves.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: The Iowa caucuses are coming up in just over a month, and despite the primary challengers, it’s very likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.

Now, a lot has changed since 2016, when Trump first ran. Back then, one of the biggest questions he faced was whether he could win over evangelical Christians.

After all, he was a casino owner, used to hang out at the Playboy Mansion, and he was on his third wife. If he preached anything, it was the gospel of wealth.

Trump needed evangelicals back then and, eventually, they held their noses and voted for him.

Now the dynamic is very different. In this election, evangelical support is no longer a question. In fact, so popular is Trump that some evangelical leaders have come to think of him as a kind of messiah, the leader they have always been waiting for.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. And today: how Trump has transformed the evangelical movement.

[Music]

In the early 2000s I was a beat reporter for The Washington Post, and my beat was evangelicals. George W. Bush was president, and he was a self-declared born-again Christian. And I watched his relationship with evangelicals up close, but that’s nothing like what we have today.

Many evangelical leaders now have an intense devotion to Trump that I find mystifying.

So today on the show, we have Tim Alberta to help explain it. Tim is a staff writer at The Atlantic who just wrote a book called The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

Also, Tim’s dad was a pastor, which meant Tim grew up in the Church.

Tim Alberta: So when I say that I grew up in the Church, I mean literally physically grew up inside the church. My mother was on the staff there. I spent my childhood playing hide-and-seek in the storage spaces, doing my homework in my dad’s office.

Tim Alberta watched the movement change during the Trump years. He watched his own dad change. It unsettled him. But it also gave him a unique insider’s perspective. Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: So first basic question: Why write a book about evangelicals right now? It’s not like they’re a new force in American politics. They’ve, you know, been around for a while. They’ve had influence for a while. So why now?

Alberta: Well, I guess I would have to give you both the macro and the micro answer. So the macro answer is that I really do sense that something new and something urgent and something dangerous, frankly, is happening in the evangelical world—specific to not just its alliance with Donald Trump, its alliance with the Republican Party, but its processing of everyday, run-of-the-mill, partisan political disputes through this prism that’s no longer red versus blue, no longer even, you know, conservatives versus progressives, you know, God-fearing Christians versus godless leftists. It’s good versus evil.

There is really a sense within American evangelicalism today that the end is near, that the sky is falling, that the barbarians are at the gates, and that if we don’t do something about it now, then this country, this ordained covenant country that God has so uniquely blessed, that we’re going to lose it—and that if we lose it, we’re not just losing America. It’s not just a defeat for America; it’s a defeat for God himself. So that is the macro.

The micro as to why I wrote the book now is because, I suppose for lack of a better way of putting it, I finally found the courage to do so. I finally found my voice in addressing this thing that I have known for a very long time to be a problem but just wasn’t brave enough until now to really speak out about it.

Rosin: So, okay, let’s get down on the ground and paint a picture for people. And possibly this is starting at the extremes, but there’s a church you wrote about called Floodgate.

Alberta: Floodgate is a church in Brighton, Michigan, which is my hometown. They had about 100 people, 125 people on an average Sunday for their worship services. So it’s a pretty small church—roadside congregation—in my hometown.

And I grew up, like, a few miles from there. I had never heard of it. Fast-forward to COVID-19: Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, had issued shutdown orders that implicated houses of worship. And most of the churches in the area, including very conservative churches—theologically, culturally, politically conservative—they decided to shut down for some period of time.

And that included my home church, where my dad had been the pastor—the church that I grew up in, you know, spent my whole life in. They closed down, and basically at that moment, this massive schism was opened in the community, not only in the community I grew up in, but in the faith community that I grew up in, sort of universally speaking when we talk about evangelicalism in America.

Because this same thing that happened in Brighton, Michigan, was happening all over the country, which was to say that churches that closed down had some number of their congregants who were up in arms, who were furious, who basically believed that the pastors there were cowards and that they were succumbing to the forces of secularism that had the Church in the crosshairs.

And meanwhile, churches like Floodgate that took a bold stance against the government and stayed open, those churches were doing the Lord’s work. And so what you saw at Floodgate was a congregation that had about 100, suddenly within about a year had gone to 1,500. And now they’re even much bigger today than they were at that time.

And so when you go into Floodgate on a Sunday morning, as I did many times, instead of some of the traditional Sunday-morning worship rituals—you know, the church creeds and the doctrines being read aloud, the doxology sung, you know, some of the standard stuff that you would become accustomed to in an evangelical space—really what you would see was the pulpit being turned into a soapbox and the worship service turning into a low-rent Fox News segment, with the pastor just inveighing against Anthony Fauci, against Joe Biden, against the Democratic Party, against the elites who are trying to control the population—very dark, very angry, very conspiratorial. And that’s what you would see inside of a church like Floodgate.

Rosin: It’s not exactly an evolution. It’s more like an intensification. And I’m curious how the dots got drawn between a theological argument and COVID-19 masking, and then went all the way to Fox News.

Alberta: Well, you’re right that it’s intensification. It is also evolution. I’ll explain, I think, what is the arc that led us to this place. To understand this moment is to understand the sweep of the last 50 or 60 years in the evangelical world. So, during the mid-to-late ’70s, and certainly into the ’80s through the Reagan years, the Moral Majority is ascendant.

You’ve got tens of millions of evangelicals who are suddenly energized, galvanized, mobilized politically. And then you begin to see, after the Iron Curtain falls and the Cold War ends and we move into this period of a kind of peace and prosperity, that some of that panic starts to fall away a little bit.

A lot of churches sort of ratchet it back, and things return to normal for a period. And you see that, you know, really into the early 2000s, with a notable exception, I would add, of the Bill Clinton impeachment, which I think was a major moment for a lot of evangelicals—certainly my own father, my own church, where a lot of evangelicals wanted to take that moment to emphasize that character matters, morality matters, and that our political system depends on having moral leaders.

And then you kind of fast-forward, and things are still at kind of a low simmer for a while there.

Rosin: I think at the same time during the period that you’re describing, we do come to think, in our cultural imagination, of evangelical as equivalent to conservative, eventually as equivalent to Republican conservative, and then eventually as equivalent to white Republican conservative. Those definitions are also getting hardened during the period that you describe as quiet.

Alberta: I think that’s right, and I think that some of that owes to just a self-identification phenomenon. So, you know, during George W. Bush’s presidency, he’s talking about his relationship with Billy Graham. He’s talking about evangelicalism. And so that is becoming a part of the political lexicon all over again.

I think really what starts to trip the alarms inside of evangelicalism is the end of the Bush presidency and the election of Barack Obama, for some reasons that are obvious (i.e., we’re talking about a white evangelical movement, portions of which, perhaps significant portions of which, are deeply uncomfortable with a Black president).

I also think that during Obama’s presidency, you see a significant move in the culture. I mean, even just on the issue of same-sex marriage, for example, Obama runs for president in 2008 opposed to same-sex marriage, and by the time he leaves office, he is in favor of it and the Supreme Court rules to legalize same-sex marriage nationally. All of that is happening in the space of, like, less than a decade, and you’re seeing major cultural movement toward the left. And a lot of evangelical Christians during this period of time are really beginning to sound the alarm.

They’re really hand-wringing, saying, Okay, this is it. This is the apocalypse we’ve been warning about for 50 years. Even if that apocalypse was once sort of an abstract thing, something that they gave voice to but maybe didn’t really believe it, suddenly this convergence of factors is causing a lot of churches to become not just more conservative, not just more Republican, but really more militant in a lot of ways—in the rhetoric you hear from the pulpit, with the tactics that they will choose to engage in some of the culture-war issues with. And so that leads us to Trump coming down in the golden escalator.

And Donald Trump is not exactly a paragon of Christian virtue. The thrice-married, casino-owning Manhattan playboy who parades his mistresses through the tabloids and uses terrible, vulgar rhetoric—I mean, this is not someone who the rank-and-file evangelical would point to as an ally, much less as a role model.

Rosin: Right.

Alberta: And I reported extensively in 2016 on a really well-organized, well-financed effort to rally evangelical leaders around Ted Cruz, because they at least viewed him as one of their own. But he also had all of that same pugilism, all of that same attitude, that We’ve been pushed around too long, and now it’s time we fought back and we did something about this.

Donald Trump secures the Republican nomination, and then he realizes that he can’t get elected president without the support of these white evangelical voters and, frankly, without overwhelming support of those voters. And so, methodically, he starts his courtship of them.

He chooses Mike Pence as his running mate. He releases this list of Supreme Court justices. He promises explicitly that they will be pro-life Supreme Court justices, something that had never been done by a presidential nominee. He’s doing all of this signaling to evangelical voters. Perhaps most importantly, he goes to New York in the summer of 2016, and he meets with hundreds and hundreds of these prominent evangelical pastors from around the country, and he basically promises them, he says: Look, I will give you power. If you elect me, I will give you power, and I will defend Christianity in this country.

And so there’s sort of this transactional relationship where Trump gets the votes from these people, and they get not just the policies in return, but they get the protection in return. It’s almost as though Trump becomes, like, this mercenary who, on their behalf, is willing to fight the enemies out in the culture, in the government.

Anyone who is hostile to the Christian way of life as they view it, Donald Trump is going to fight on their behalf.

Rosin: Now, you use the word transactional. Did everybody understand it was transactional? I mean, from how you described it, Trump certainly understood it was transactional: I’m going to come out there and get your vote. How did evangelical leaders understand what was happening?

Alberta: The incredible part, Hanna, is that they really did. I mean, I have all of the reporting on the record from the time to back this up. I wrote about it in my first book, American Carnage. They understood exactly the relationship that they were entering into with Donald Trump. They were under no illusions that God’s hands were on him. They didn’t believe any of that.

They didn’t even bother trying to sell that to their flocks. Really, what they said was: Look, this is a crummy situation. We’ve got a binary choice. There are multiple Supreme Court justices hanging in the balance here. And if you care about abortion—which is the number-one issue for a lot of these folks—then you have an obligation to vote for this person, no matter how gross and wretched we find his personal conduct to be.

Rosin: This is the beginning of the first election. This is their attitude. Now we’re just at the beginning of the Trump administration.

Alberta: That’s right. And so what starts as this transactional relationship, it morphs into something else entirely. What we see today is this fanatical, cult-like attachment to Donald Trump in some quarters of the evangelical universe. Now, I say some quarters because I really need to stress this point. When we talk about white evangelicals in this country, we’re talking about tens of millions of people, right?

They are not a monolith. We have to understand that these are points plotted across this vast spectrum. So on the one hand—on the one end of that spectrum, I should say—of course you have some of these folks who are just all in on Trump. They have almost sold their souls for Trumpism, and they view him as a messianic figure. They really do. And they’ll tell you that.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have some of these white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016, held their nose, begged for forgiveness after doing so, but they still cared so much about the abortion issue that they felt compelled to do so.

And then pretty quickly thereafter, they walked away from it all and washed their hands and said, I cannot be a part of this. Right?

And then in the middle, you’ve got the great majority of these folks who are floating somewhere in the middle of this, trying to figure out, you know, I find this guy abhorrent, but I’m also terrified of what I see from the left. I can’t possibly vote for Trump again, but I can’t vote for somebody who’s pro-choice either. What do I do?

There’s this identity crisis now deep inside the evangelical movement, where a lot of these folks feel completely lost and completely homeless. And their relationship with Trump is not something that can be sort of caricatured, because for a lot of these folks, even folks who voted for him a second time, in 2020, they find the man to be completely immoral and reprehensible.

And yet they still voted for him twice.

Rosin: Yeah, I understand the second group, the bargain they’re making. I understand the third group that regrets the bargain that they made. It’s the first group that is a mystery to me, how people came to be all in. So can you try and describe that first group to me?

Like, how did they morph from holding their nose and choosing a flawed leader to deciding that he was the messiah? How did that evolution happen?

Alberta: There are many, many, many Christians in this country who are deeply invested in the idea of sort of supernatural intervention and transformation and the idea that God speaks to us through the unlikeliest of sources.

And so for some chunk of that first group that you’re asking about, there’s no question. And I’ve talked with plenty of these folks. They believe Donald Trump is God’s instrument on Earth. And not only that, they believe that Donald Trump has become a Christian, that Donald Trump underwent a transformation while he was president, And why else would he be fighting for us the way that he’s fighting for us?

And it’s difficult to overstate just how meaningful that language of transformation is to people whose entire lives revolve around notions of transformation and of holy intercession.

Rosin: Can I ask, is there any part of you who’s familiar and knows that language that can believe that maybe he did have some kind of transformation?

Alberta: No.

Rosin: No.

Alberta: The short answer is no. And I don’t want—listen, I don’t want to be disrespectful. I don’t want to be cute in my answer here. But, you know, scripture says that by their fruit you will know them. You know, a good and healthy tree bears good and healthy fruit. If one were to just spend a day studying the language Donald Trump uses, the behavior he exhibits, the way that he treats others—you know, Jesus tells us to love our enemy and pray for those who persecute you, to turn the other cheek, to love your neighbor as yourself.

I have studied Donald Trump as closely as anyone in the last decade, and I have yet to see him exhibit any of those qualities or follow any of those biblical commands. So, I’m sorry, but no. It strikes me as entirely improbable that he has had a real encounter with the risen Christ and has committed his life to Jesus.

Rosin: One thing that is mystifying me is that now that evangelicals are so deeply in that us versus them—sort of, It’s us in a war against the evil Americans. The rest of you are not even Americans. You’re our enemies, basically—what is evangelizing?

I mean, I recall that when I spent a lot of time around evangelicals (and I am Jewish), there was nothing I could say or do or confess about myself that would prevent them from wanting to evangelize me. Like, I was always a reachable soul. Everybody was always a reachable soul. And now it seems like, What is evangelizing?

There’s a whole swath of America that just isn’t—they’re beyond contempt. You know, they’re the enemy. And so that seems very different to me than what it used to be.

Alberta: Hanna, first and foremost, people will ask, understandably, Well, what does it mean, evangelical? What does that even mean? Right? There’s always been some disagreement over the terminology itself.

And what I like to say is, Listen, at its core, there’s a verb in there, which is “to evangelize.” It is to take the gospel of Jesus Christ out to all the nations and to reach the unbelievers and to share with them this story—of not only of God’s perfect love, but of humanity’s brokenness and how God ultimately had to take on flesh and be fully God and fully man in the form of Jesus, and that Jesus was the mediator between a broken humanity and a perfect God—and to share that message with an unbelieving world so that they might see him and they might believe in him.

The problem today is that we, in the modern American context, have taken the New Testament model of what a church should be, and we have completely flipped it on its head. What I mean by that is if you study the New Testament model of what the early Church looked like and how it operated, there was boundless, abundant grace and forgiveness and kindness shown to those outside of the Church, because the thinking was: They don’t know God. They don’t know any better, so we can’t possibly hold their behavior against them. We need to show them the love of God.

But inside the Church, for fellow believers there was strict accountability. There was a very high standard. In fact, they basically said, You are held to the highest of standards for your behavior, for your language, for your conduct inside of the Church, because you do know God. You do know better.

What we see today in the American context is the complete opposite. We see, inside of the Church—despite all of the scandal, the abuse, the misconduct, the terrible behavior, the damaging rhetoric—we see forgiveness. We turn a blind eye to it. We enable it. We justify it.

But when we see those outside of the Church who disagree with us, it is nothing but condemnation. It is nothing but fire and brimstone. There is no grace. There is no forgiveness. And I just—it breaks my heart because, in so many ways, the entire identity of the Church is rooted in that mission, in that purpose of evangelizing. But we today cannot reach the outside world with that gospel of Jesus Christ, because the outside world looks at us and says, We want nothing to do with you guys. We want nothing to do with evangelicals. And it’s just, it’s tragic.

Rosin: And also vice versa, I have to say. I mean, that’s so interesting what you just said. But I was thinking, as much as I resented the millions of times that as a reporter and, you know, a Jewish person I’d have to sort of sit through people trying to evangelize me as I was trying to do my work, at least they were talking to me.

Like, at least that was like a—that was a bridge, you know? That was like, they were interested. And now I look back at that and think, like, If I were out there now, that wouldn’t happen. You know, a lot of people just wouldn’t be interested. I might be the enemy.

Alberta: Yeah, they would view you with hostility. Right?

Rosin: Yes, exactly.

Alberta: And suspicion.

Rosin: Yeah, exactly.

Alberta: Right. Which is, you know, listen, I plead guilty at times to probably—although I was just talking with a dear friend of mine, a journalist friend who’s Jewish, who told me, You know, I’m only about halfway through the book, but I have to say, you’re kind of, you’re intriguing me with your case for Jesus here.

And I said, Listen, you know, I figured that I might be annoying some of my non-Christian friends with parts of the book that are unapologetically trying to evangelize. But, ultimately, that is what we are called to do, and if we annoy people in the process, so be it. But boy, I’d rather annoy people with the gospel than denigrate them and antagonize them and dehumanize them with a twisted version of the gospel.

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, so we’ve talked about the evangelical movement as a whole. Let’s talk about your own story. Your father was a pastor.

Alberta: Yes, he was. The Dr. Reverend Richard J. Alberta. My dad was an amazing guy who would have been the unlikeliest candidate to ever become a pastor. He was an atheist, actually, and he was working in finance in New York and making a lot of money and had a beautiful house and a Cadillac and a beautiful wife, my mother, and they had it all. They were flying high, living the dream.

And my dad, he just felt this rumbling emptiness. Something was missing in his life. And what could it possibly be? I mean, you look from the outside in: What could you possibly be missing? And so, he set out looking. And that search led him to a little church in the Hudson Valley called Goodwill. And it was there that he heard the gospel for the first time, and he gave his life to Jesus that day.

And it was a pretty radical transformation in his life. Suddenly he was waking up at 4 in the morning to read the Bible for hours, silently meditating, praying. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. She was not a Christian at the time. And then things got even weirder, because not long after that, he felt the Lord calling him to enter the ministry. And my mom had just become a Christian at this point, but she and his brothers and parents and their friends—everybody who knew him—thought that he’d lost his mind. And he just said, Listen, I don’t know what to tell you, but I feel an anointing from God to do this with my life. And so he did.

They left everything behind. They sold all their possessions. They spent the next couple of decades living on food stamps, working in little churches around the country. And eventually they put down roots at a church called Cornerstone, in Brighton, Michigan, which is where I grew up.

Rosin: Wow, you know, no matter how many times I’ve heard conversion stories like that, it’s very hard for me to, like, know or understand what that spark is.

Alberta: It’s hard to describe just how radical of a change that was for him and for his life and how much he sacrificed for it.

And my dad’s always been my hero because of that, because I think there are very few people in this life with the courage to follow a conviction in the way that he did.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so let’s take those feelings that you have about your dad, and it seems like belief has lived on in you, and overlay them on the political transformation that you’re describing. Because it sounds like from what you write in the book, your father went through that whole political transformation.

He started out suspicious of politics. He started out thinking Trump was a narcissist and a liar. And then over time, you watched him go through the same changes that you watched the rest of the evangelical community go through, right? Like, it started to feel to you, as you write in the book, like he was justifying some of the things that Trump has done. Did I get that right?

Alberta: Yeah, that’s right. And I would be clear—not just, like, to defend my dad’s honor or whatever, because I’ve been very open in discussing all of this, and I try to just be completely transparent in the book—but my dad was never, like, a Trumper, but he did become sort of defensive around Trump.

And I think the explanation I ultimately reached there was that my dad felt guilty, frankly, about voting for Trump. I think he felt vulnerable almost, because, again, here was someone who had lived his life in such an incredibly upright manner, who taught his kids to know right from wrong, who wouldn’t cheat anybody out of a penny.

It just, like, you know, he set a standard for us. And then he votes for this guy who was, in so many ways, just, like, a walking rebuke to everything that he’d ever taught us about how to be a man, how to be a husband, how to be a neighbor. And I think he felt guilty about it.

And he and I would sort of go back and forth on this and, ultimately, I would say that to him, which I think was, like, the deepest cut of all.

I’d say, Pop, like, you’re the one who taught me right from wrong. Like, Don’t be mad at me for acting on it. Like, This guy, what he’s doing, what he’s saying, it’s wrong.”

And I think that when we would have those conversations, I could sense in him this feeling that, you know, attacks on Trump’s character became an attack on his character, that he processed criticisms of Trump as criticisms of him personally.

And I think a lot of evangelicals felt that way. And in some strange sense, that almost drove them deeper into the Trump bunker, where if they were to concede any criticism, any attack on Trump as being legitimate, then it was sort of ipso facto a legitimate attack on them. And that was the sort of weird dynamic that took hold in my relationship with my dad.

Rosin: So, okay, here we are coming on another election. What do you think the future of evangelicals is in the near future, the next election?

Alberta: So Trump is obviously the runaway favorite to win the Republican nomination, and that is due, in no small part, to his continued stranglehold on the evangelical vote. What’s interesting, I would add as a quick aside, is that we really saw, for the first time, Trump’s support with those voters beginning to dip after the 2022 midterms, when Republicans underperformed so badly.

And then Trump responded to the results of the midterms by throwing the pro-life movement under the bus, basically saying it was their fault that Republicans had lost all these races. And Trump saw his numbers decline pretty noticeably with those voters.

But then something happened. Alvin Bragg delivered that first indictment of Donald Trump, which was, of course, then followed by all these subsequent indictments. And you saw Trump’s numbers with those same evangelical voters who had started to bail on him, they went right back up, and they have continued apace.

And I mention all that just to say that this idea of a persecution complex is so deeply embedded in the evangelical psyche. When Donald Trump goes to these rallies and says, you know, We are under siege. They’re coming for us. They’re coming for me first so that they can get to you, these people, they believe that deep in their bones. That is their entire political consciousness at this point.

So Donald Trump is almost surely going to win the Republican nomination, but transitioning to the general election next November, I don’t necessarily foresee any great defection of these white evangelical voters away from Donald Trump. He’s won roughly 80 percent of them in the last two elections. And if he is the Republican nominee in 2024, as we expect, he’ll probably win about that same rough percentage.

However, the thing that I have observed, and the thing that I would point out to our listeners to keep a very close eye on in the coming year, is that this is the first post-Roe v. Wade presidential election held in this country. And for so long, for 50 years, single-issue evangelical voters have been mobilized to turn out in presidential elections because of the abortion issue, because of the federal stakes, because of Supreme Court vacancies hanging in the balance. This is the first election where that will no longer be the case.

We now have abortion as a decentralized, defederalized issue. So you see all of the mobilization at the grassroots level in the states over abortion, but not in a federal framing.

Now with Roe v. Wade having fallen, there’s real consideration being given by a lot of these folks to either vote for a third party or even just perhaps to stay home and not vote at all, because they no longer feel obligated, they no longer feel compelled to choose the lesser of two evils in a presidential context because the abortion issue is pretty much off the table.

So you could see some significant drop off in terms of the raw votes cast by evangelicals in this upcoming election, and that would be unprecedented.

Rosin: Interesting. Okay, so what happens if Trump wins? What happens if Trump loses? What do those two scenarios look like?

Alberta: Well, if Trump wins, the folks around him who are advising him, they have made no secret of the fact that there will be elements of an explicitly Christian nationalist agenda pursued in a second Trump term. In fact, the West Wing will be populated by some individuals who would openly identify as Christian nationalists.

Some of them would probably even openly identify as theocrats, or at least if you stuck the needle of truth serum into their veins. So when Donald Trump, for instance, recently on the campaign trail, floated this idea of no longer allowing non-Christian migrants to enter the country, Trump said that a few weeks ago, and I mean, we just barely even batted an eye, right?

But that is the sort of idea now circulating inside Trump’s orbit, and there are a lot of people around him who really, truly, deeply believe in this idea now of partisan politics as a proxy for good versus evil.

And these are the folks who will be helping to shape the legislative agenda inside of the Trump White House. I think we need to buckle up if, in fact, Trump is elected, because some of this talk of a holy war, of a spiritual battle, good versus evil—we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of what we could see if Trump were to be elected again.

Rosin: Oh, that sounds very undemocratic and un-American to me. Okay, and what if he loses?

Alberta: Well, if he loses, boy, I mean, I think the question becomes, for a lot of these folks, you know, Donald Trump was able to sell himself as a martyr once, right—in 2020 with the “Stop the Steal” and “the election was rigged” and all of this—and if he loses again, does the label of “consistent loser,” does that somehow break the spell?

Is there some opportunity here for some of these evangelicals to sort of step back and reevaluate their relationship with Trump and wonder? Okay, maybe we’ve been investing too much in the political arena. If, in fact, we believe that there are these great moral problems in America, then maybe the solutions aren’t political. Maybe we need to reevaluate.

That could happen. I pray that it does. Or the exact opposite could happen. There could be a doubling down or a tripling down. And there could be an attempt to—I mean, I hate to even voice this, but I mean, January 6 was not an outlier. It was not something that we should have been surprised by.

And if you study some of the behavior, some of the calls to arms—figurative and literal—that we see coming out of some of these far-right evangelical spaces, this could turn into something really dangerous.

And I think that is why, even if you are not an evangelical Christian yourself, even if you are not a believer, even if you are not an adherent to any sort of religious tradition, you should be paying very close attention to this. And I wrote this book for you as much as for anyone else, because we have to understand that in the interest of holding together a pluralistic society, these schisms inside the Church, they have to be addressed, and they have to be addressed soon.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. I think we’re going to hang on to the phrase, or it sounds like you’re going to hang on to the phrase, break the spell. I mean, that’s what you’re hoping for.

Alberta: That is what I’m hoping for. I think we should all be hoping for it, but I’m not holding my breath at the same time.

Rosin: All right. Well, Tim, you’ve explained a lot to me. Thank you for coming on the show.

Alberta: Thank you for having me, Hanna. This has been great.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sam Fentress, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost explore our relationship with time and how to reclaim it. Why is it so important to be productive? Why can it feel like there’s never enough time in a day? Why are so many of us conditioned to believe that being more productive makes us better people?

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

The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Becca Rashid: So Ian, when I sent you that voice note yesterday, I just wanted to let you in my head a little bit.

Rashid field tape: Hello, Ian. Alas, I’m waiting at the bus stop, and it seems it will never come.

Rashid: A small glimpse into how anxious I am just waiting for anything.

Rashid field tape: I don’t know what to do. Do I just start walking? Do I give up? Do I walk to the Metro?

At this point, who really knows? It’s been probably four minutes. Oh!

Ian Bogost: It was only four minutes, Becca. It’s not very much time.

Rashid: It’s embarrassing, and I’m standing there, and while I’m waiting I’m switching between two modes, of like, I should be making the most of this time. Let me read that article my friend sent me. Or check my emails.

Or, like: This is insane. It’s only been four minutes. I should be a bit more mindful. But I know that I don’t want to be wasting my time just standing there.

Rashid: I’m Becca Rashid, producer of How to Keep Time, and I’m here with my co-host, Ian Bogost.

Bogost: Hey, Becca.

Rashid: Hey, Ian. A lot of your writing and reporting here at The Atlantic is about technology and all the ways it’s changed how we understand ourselves and the people around us.

But I also think about how much tech has changed our relationship with time.

Bogost: Technology tends to make things faster.

Trains and airplanes get you places faster; factories and machines build things faster.

But communications technologies—like telephones and the internet and such—allow us to send and receive information faster. And a lot more frequently, too.

Rashid: And all those emails and texts and posts and notifications give us more stuff we can do. And it makes it easier to do something all the time, right? That makes it harder to tolerate wasting time—just doing nothing, or being alone with your thoughts.

Bogost: Oh gosh, it’s so true, Becca. You know, your laptop, smartphone—all of those devices make it easier to get more done. Work, socialize, or do banking, or kind of anything at all.

So on one part, we’re more efficient but continue to feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. And you know, Becca, in your last season, you talked about the difficulty of building meaningful relationships. And when it comes down to it, most people just need more time to do that kind of thing.

Rashid: But even when we do have enough time, we don’t know how to lean into the moment the way we used to—we’re either anxiously planning for the next task, or we’re being compulsively productive because we’re sort of nervous about free time in this new way, when we’re just sort alone with our thoughts.

Like, why does it feel like time is moving too fast at certain points and other days not at all? Or how do we reconcile regrets over losing time or wasting that that we do have?

Bogost: Yeah, I mean all this time stuff can feel really slippery —one moment, you know what you want to do and you just can’t find time to do it.

But then the next moment, you’re absolutely swimming in time that you don’t know what to do with. So hopefully we can make sense of some of those problems this season.

Rashid: This is How to Keep Time.

___

Bogost: Becca, when you’re thinking about wasting time, what do you mean? Wasting time compared to what? To do more work? Or like, waiting to get back to your desk to do more work? So that you can, what … send more emails? Isn’t that just a waste of time, too?

Rashid: No, I know. I know. But I always have the thought in the back of my head that my time is limited. There’s actually something called chronophobia.

Bogost: Chronophobia.

Rashid: Where some people really worry about that experience of time passing. I can understand that impulse to feel like time is withering away if you’re not doing something productive with it.

Bogost: Sure.

Rashid: I don’t know; it makes me wonder how we got to this point of measuring our own time and other people’s time. How do we actually spend less of our time measuring how much of it is being wasted?

Bogost: When you think about it, it isn’t all your time always being put to use. You’re there in your body and your mind. You’re living through your day and your life no matter what you’re getting done. And your time is finite.

Your years on Earth are numbered. And, uh, you’re never going to be able to do everything. You want to do everything possible because of that. So maybe we, rather than chasing it, need to figure out how to be in time. Being in time rather than chasing time.

___

Oliver Burkeman: I was completely freaked out when I first did this calculation and figured out that, uh, the average lifespan in the developed world is around 4,000 weeks.

Obviously, you don’t know how many weeks you’re gonna get in any individual case. It’s more this fact of it being finite is something that I think we obviously intellectually understand, but we don’t behave on a day-to-day basis as if time were finite.

Rashid: So Ian, I talked to Oliver Burkeman—a journalist and an author. He used to write a column for The Guardian where he wrote a lot about productivity hacks and personal development.

Burkeman: This fact of it being finite is something that I think we obviously intellectually understand, but we don’t behave on a day-to-day basis as if time were finite.

Rashid: And during our interview, he mentioned what he called a disillusionment with all the self-help solutions.

Bogost: Yeah, yeah; I feel that.

Burkeman: So I think an awful lot of that kind of conventional productivity advice is really based on keeping this fantasy alive that very soon—next few weeks, next few months, at some point—you’re gonna get to this place where you are on top of things, where you have got your arms around everything, you’re the sort of air traffic controller of your life, you know?

Rashid: But then one day, after years of being in the weeds of lifestyle advice, he had a kind of epiphany on a park bench during a really stressful week when he realized that none of the time-management hacks were working.

Burkeman: I was trying sort of increasingly frenetically and frantically and desperately to come up with the set of techniques and scheduling tricks that would enable me to get through this ridiculous quantity of stuff and just being hit by the thought like, Oh, oh, it’s impossible. Oh, I see. Right. It’s impossible.

Bogost: Becca, I mean I’ve definitely spent years CHASING time myself and not knowing exactly how to be in it, but maybe the trick is to just accept what Burkeman is saying … that it’s impossible.

Rashid: Burkeman wrote a book in 2021 called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, where he walks readers through his personal journey with trying to get on top of it all, on top of time, and failing miserably.

___

Burkeman: We’re constantly trying to reach a kind of godlike position over our time.

Rashid: Okay; when you say “a godlike position,” I’m thinking, like, all forgiving, most merciful. But when you say “godlike position over time,” what do you mean by that?

Burkeman: I think—and again, to some extent this may just be the hang-ups and screwups of me and some other people—but I think that a lot of what we’re doing when we claim that we’re engaging in becoming more productive, more efficient, getting on top of things, getting organized, is really an attempt to kind of feel unlimited with respect to time, with respect to the tasks, responsibilities, goals, ambitions we might have for using our time.

It’s a way of sort of not having to feel what it really feels like to be finite, to have to make tough choices, to have to acknowledge that there are always going to be more things that it would be meaningful to do with time than we’re ever going to have the opportunity to do.

Rashid: It’s interesting; I went through this phase, you know, in my early 20s where I realized if I wanted to be amazingly accomplished at anything I would have had to have started when I was three years old. You know, whether that’s like gymnastics or ice skating or what have you; I was already decades behind. It can be really hard to cope with the realization that that time is gone, and you may not have ample time to get there in the future.

Burkeman: I think obviously it is possible, in a very sort of down-to-earth way, to use one’s time well for some future goal, right? But I think that on a sort of deeper level, what a lot of us are doing when we’re trying to use time well, in that sense—when we’re sort of deeply committed, as American culture is especially deeply committed, you know, to the idea that every moment must be used maximally well—it’s not only that that becomes a very sort of capitalistic idea where the only real benefit is is the profit motive.

It’s also just the fact that it’s focused on the future, right? It’s all-defining: Everything about now in terms of some more important moment coming later, when it’s going to actually have its value. It’s going to cash out, you know; it’s going to have been worth doing.

And so because what happens when you do this is that you end up, like, missing your life. You end up missing the present. Or to speak to what you were saying, you know, focused on regret that you didn’t start using your time in this rigorously instrumental way earlier in the past, you get to this very strange conclusion.

The only real way to use time really well—to actually find meaning in the present—is by some definition of the term to waste it.

I think that in many ways, because of the world in which we live, that is so completely committed to the idea that time must be used for future benefits, everything we think of as “wasting time,” as pure idleness, is really defined as that because it doesn’t lead to something in the future.

Rashid: Right, and I’m even referencing my childhood as wasted time, when I should have been training to be a gymnast, instead of just, like, a childhood. But in adulthood it’s harder to see it that way, because efficiency, time management, and productivity are all essential elements in how we make a living.

So, how can we approach this idea of wasting time and how we’re conditioned to think about it—not as something pulling us away from productivity, but just as a part of life?

Burkeman: It’s something that takes a positive effort. It feels like you shouldn’t just be using your leisure time to go on a run. You have to be training for a 10K or something.

Rashid: Yeah, right.

Burkeman: You have to have fitness goals. It’s kind of a bit embarrassing, in some way, maybe, to have a hobby these days, but it’s really not embarrassing to have a side hustle. And the only real difference is that one of those is something you’re trying to turn into a business.

Whereas, you know, if what you like doing is collecting stamps from around the world, right? That doesn’t really work anymore. I’m not sure what happened to stamp collecting these days, but you know.

Rashid: Like, a nonproductive hobby for sheer enjoyment, but there’s nothing materially valuable about that. Maybe, with the stamps.

Burkeman: Right. Yeah, the philosopher Kieran Setiya, he uses the phrase “atelic activities.” So, activities that are not given their meaning by their telos or where they are headed.

Burkeman: And that’s absolutely true in kind of listening, really listening, to other people. Incredibly hard. It’s really hard not to just spend a conversation thinking about what you plan to say next when the noise coming from the other person ceases for a bit, which is of course not really listening. And so for me, a big part of this is just understanding that this does not feel second nature to too many of us.

Rashid: I hear you. I mean, even in this moment I find myself thinking about what you’re saying and also ahead to all the questions that I have left to get through. It’s sort of like when someone asks me what my name is, and then I tell them, and they tell me theirs—but all I can remember is my name that I said out loud.

___

Bogost: So, Becca, maybe it’s a problem in our culture, rather than in us. We’re just all, like, so wound up over making the most of every moment. So much that we don’t even really know anymore what “making the most of a moment” would even mean.

Rashid: And you know, Ian, I’ve even had friends tell me they’re on dating apps almost as a way to productively use their time. Instead of scrolling on Instagram, at least they’re, you know, building toward a relationship.

Bogost: Okay, it’s been a long time since I’ve dated, and I never use dating apps. Are you saying your friends are like, “Well, got some downtime; I better get my dating in”?

Rashid: Yes, definitely. Dating is its own version of a productive hobby, in my opinion.

Bogost: I guess it makes sense in a certain way, like dating as productivity or as an investment in your future partnership, or whatever it is that you’re after. Like, maybe that’s where that idea comes from. You know, “I don’t want to waste my time if this isn’t going anywhere,”—that sort of sentiment is about progress. Like, that a relationship is about moving forward and building into whatever comes next. God forbid your relationship isn’t going anywhere, right?

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: But, like, where is “anywhere,” anyway?

Rashid: I don’t know. I feel like I’m happiest when I’m just wasting time with people. So, when I’m trying to make the most of my time with someone, anyone—romantic or otherwise—I’m not at least trying to think about how much of my time they’re taking up, or the most efficient way to be with them, or whether it’s going somewhere, or whether it’s productive.

___

Burkeman: If I am just sort of around the house with my son and my wife, it’s very easy to fall into “what needs doing next”—you know, this chore, that chore, preparing for the next day. I think if you can do anything to sort of put yourself in a position where you have, you know, all gone on a walk, or all gone to visit something, or all watching the movie, or whatever it is—if there’s a sort of a framework around that—it’s a little bit easier to step away from that instrumentalist mindset.

When I remember, I think also bringing attention to the senses, as opposed to thought, is really important. You know: just literally paying attention to sights, sounds, touch, smell, whatever, is a way of reducing the power that otherwise naturally—for people like me anyway—goes to kind of compulsive thought.

Rashid: So how can I be both mindful and engaged with my time more generally, without having to go full Zen mental-shutdown mode?

Burkeman: Just to be clear, I find being in this mindset—rather than the instrumental future-focused one—really difficult. And I think, you can certainly get lost in thought. And I’m not sure I want to condemn that, because I think sometimes that can be a perfectly meaningful thing to do, but understand and expect that it’s going to feel uncomfortable at the beginning. A lot of people these days say they don’t have time to read anymore.

Rashid: Right, right.

Burkeman: And I think what they often really mean is that they don’t like the experience of sitting down with a book, because their minds are so conditioned to moving fast that it feels unpleasant. I’ve certainly had that experience.

All I can do—and I find it extraordinarily effective, but it doesn’t feel like an incredibly great insight or anything—but all I do is I remind myself that this is how the first couple of pages feel when you’re wired for speed and you’re just sitting down and you’re just beginning to read a novel. And you know, that’s fine, but the discomfort does not kill you, and it lifts.

___

Rashid: So, Oliver, most of our conversation has been about the necessary mindset shift that’s required to be more in tune with each moment. And, you know, it makes me think about my friends with kids, because they have to be super-present with their child in the moment, be present with themselves (enough to be patient with their kid). And they also need to keep up with all the productive tasks and demands to make the most of their time in their own lives.

I mean, how do we balance these competing priorities when there is a sort of instrumental goal to, you know, raise your child and make them into a compassionate human being in the future who can exist and thrive in the world on their own, and also be present with them in the moment?

Burkeman: I find parenting to be an extraordinary crucible for all of this, just because there is so much pressure, both internally and externally, to treat all questions of what it means to be a good parent as questions about what you need to do in order to create the most successful future adult. Um, you know, my son’s learning to play the piano a bit.

I’m trying very hard not to turn into a sort of tyrant form of parent insisting on so much practice that it takes all the joy out of the experience. And when instead he’s banging around on the piano and I’m banging around on the xylophone that we have in the house.

Rashid: A band!

Burkeman: Exactly. You know, I don’t think that there is any part of me, in that moment, that is thinking, How can we make this band really good so that we can...

Rashid: ...start a world tour?

Burkeman: From touring and downloads, right? I mean there is something about the letting go into those moments that is absolutely fantastic. But where I would most naturally go would be like, “Okay, piano practice for this many minutes. Have you gone through these exercises?”

With parenting and life in general, it always feels like you’re learning just too late. But I am learning that there’s value in the sort of ridiculousness of making those noises in the present, rather than where they might be leading.

___

Bogost: So Becca, the other day I met a colleague of mine for a drink after work, and we went to this sort of weird pub in this hotel. And there was no cell signal, no Wi-Fi network, and I was just sitting there waiting for him.

So I just looked around at, you know, the people coming in, and I looked at the menu a few times, and I realized, This is so rare.

I finally couldn’t do anything else, and so I didn’t feel like I should be doing something else. Because there was nothing else I could really do.

Rashid: Oh, interesting. I feel like if I was in your shoes, I would still feel like I should be doing something else.

Bogost: I probably did feel that way, in truth. But that sensation that, like, it’s worse to do nothing than to delete emails on your phone? Right? But you know, it wasn’t always like this. I wrote a piece earlier this year about this. What did people do before smartphones? I don’t mean for work or for entertainment—what did they do during those off times? When they were waiting for the dentist, or whatever, and it was actually terrible? We were super bored, you know.

I remember being a kid, and you’d look through the Highlights magazine a hundred times before the doctor finally called you. Or like, reading anything you could find: signs on the wall, staring at clocks. You know, in the past, when you had a magazine or whatever, you would burn through it. It would be expended. There were only so many pages, and once you’d read them or skimmed them, you were done.

And your phone, your Instagram, whatever it is: There’s always something new. Maybe it’s not interesting to you, but it’s new. And that feels like a difference.

So that discomfort associated with having nothing new to see in the moment, that’s kind of gone away. Now there’s always something new. And I think that makes it easier for us to think, Well, I should be doing something new at every moment.

Rashid: Right. And that pressure to do something new at every moment—I’ve been at so many dinners and we just sit down, it’s a group of people. And if there’s even a brief lull in conversation, someone says, like, “Where are we going after this?” But we just got there. We’re at the place, we’re at the dinner.

Bogost: You know Becca, I wonder if it’s hard to tolerate wasting time because we’re always looking forward to something—what comes next. Or we have things like smartphones now that make waiting more tolerable, because we can do something new all the time.

But you know, I mean, we didn’t used to know the bus was coming in four minutes, because you could look at your phone and see it. I mean it would come eventually, perhaps, and you would be forced to kind of deal with the fact that the bus, you know, it’s not just there for you, that you’re just one person in the world, and you might have to just wait.

___

Rashid: Patience, patience. We’re always being tested ... like right now. We’ll be back right after a quick break.

___

Burkeman: The art historian Jennifer Roberts points out that patience these days is actually a kind of really important form of control. It used to be that patience was something that people, rather condescendingly, had recommended to people who didn’t have power, right?

So in the days when women were much more likely to be sort of obliged to remain at home doing domestic things, while men were out working in the world, patience was a virtue—because it’s the kind of thing that keeps people from complaining about their situation.

But as society has sped up, patience changes its role. Like now, the default is that we’re all moving incredibly fast. and it becomes a form of agency to be able to sit with a problem, sit with an experience, and not need to bring things to the next stage or figure out where they’re headed.

Rashid: As a little kid, and even now sometimes, just feeling like everything I wanted to do in life needed to be done today. Like—the concept of “more time tomorrow” was never my default. And I remember my parents would always say, “Why are you rushing everything? You’re so young; you have so much time.” Is it helpful to teach kids that time is limited or unlimited? And which one leads to kids having a better relationship with time as they get older?

Burkeman: Yeah; there is a way of interpreting all this talk about time being limited and life being short, which is incredibly stress inducing, right? It basically says, like, “There’s no time. You’ve got to get moving now. You’ve got to fill your life with a million extraordinary activities every day, because otherwise, will you really have lived?”

Burkeman: I think, firstly: Kids, in my experience, have a very natural affinity for being more present and less sort of fixated on maximizing efficiency. But then, obviously in an age-appropriate way, the message here is, “Yeah, time is finite.” But that’s not a reason to start hurrying and fit the absolute maximum into a single day or a single lifetime.

It’s a reason to cherish the time that you get, and to really show up for it and to enjoy it. I definitely went through a significant period of early adulthood where I was deep in the kind of time-maximization efficiency mindset, and maybe one has to go through that to, you know, come out the other end with some kind of insight.

Rashid: So Oliver, for families or people who do have serious time constraints, they don’t always have the luxury to choose when to spend time with their children, or when they need to be at work. Is there anything that can help make the inability to choose feel less painful?

Burkeman: I think a lot of this is easier for me to say than it will be for some, and it’s much worse if for somebody, the decision they have to make is between keeping food on the table and spending quality time with their kids, for example. They’re just in a worse position than me.

They’re in the identical position to me only in the sense that in every hour, they can do one thing with any moment, realistically, and all the other ones they have to let go. It doesn’t mean that the choices, the options that you have open to you, are good ones. That depends on your situation in life and society, absolutely.

But it does mean that you can let go, to a significant extent, of being haunted by indecision or by guilt or by the sense that you ought to have been doing something else with it, right? Or that you somehow ought to be doing more than you can do. Nobody should ever feel that they ought to do more than they can do.

Rashid: I feel that way more often than not. But how do I begin to step outside this productivity mindset with my time?

Burkeman: You can decide to adopt a certain hobby or change how you apportion your time, so as to spend more time nurturing a particular relationship or something.

You’re not committing to it for the whole of the rest of your days; you just have to take a bit of your time now, or very soon, to do something that matters to you. Even if it’s only 10 minutes; even if you are not confident that you’re going to be able to do it every day for the next month or anything like that. But to just do some of it.

And I think actually, this is a place where the focus on habit-building can be quite counterproductive. Because if you tell yourself you’re going to start meditating every day, forever, that’s quite a burden. And it’s quite tempting to sort of put it off for a few more weeks until your schedule clears up. If you tell yourself you’re going to do it for 10 minutes today, and that’s it, then that is the point at which things start changing interestingly in one’s life, I think.

I think we all experience, sometimes, that sense of simply being in the flow of time, rather than having this kind of clock or calendar, or however you visualize it, hounding you. Or that you’re constantly sort of fighting.

It’s just for itself. Well, that’s obviously very close to a pretty deep sort of spiritual, Buddhist-sounding, Daoist-sounding idea: about how actually only the present is real, and that you have to sort of find value in it if you’re going to find value anywhere. There’s a real argument that “wasting time” in the way we define that these days is something that is extremely important for us to learn to do.

Rashid: Oliver, thank you so much again for your time. I’ve learned so much.

Burkeman: Oh, it’s been a pleasure.

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Bogost: So, Becca, I think what Oliver is saying isn’t that we should try to capture the literal present moment; that’s impossible now. Always vanishes. It’s gone. It’s gone. But it’s like a slightly bigger “now”—like a little trunk of the moment that you can be in and you can feel happening.

Rashid: I hear what Oliver is telling us being something more like, “When I’m off the clock and I’m at home, I don’t need to be rearranging my pantry immediately as my grandma would love to have me do.”

Bogost: I need to do that too.

Rashid: I’m just so conditioned to be productive and feel like when I have a minute of downtime, if I’m not working toward one of those goals, that it is being wasted.

Bogost: Mmm. So Becca, our show is called How to Keep Time. So “keeping time”: I was thinking about that phrase. You know how you use it in music, like you keep time in music?

Rashid: Like with a metronome? Yeah.

Bogost: Yeah, like the rhythmic sense of keeping time. Like tapping your foot.

Rashid: Yep.

Bogost: If you could feel the beat or hear the metronome, that is as close as we get to sort of being in the moment. Yeah; you can’t capture the present, but you can kind of feel it moving from present to present to present.

Rashid: And I guess that’s the goal, right? I mean, it’s something I’m definitely bad at, because I’m always thinking about maximizing my 4,000 weeks, if I’ve even got that much time.

And I think for me, I just need to start thinking of my time as my own—not something that needs to be maximized or proven to other people as something that I’m using properly.

What does that even mean?

Bogost: Right. Because you’re just using it, “properly” or not.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: You know, you might not be productive all the time. You might feel like you’re wasting time. But the time that you spend ... it’s still yours, even if you’re not making something of it. I mean, maybe we need to make that absence of productive satisfaction okay.

___

Bogost: Hey, hey Becca, they’re finally making a movie called Clock?

Rashid: What?

Bogost: It’s about time.

Rashid: Oh god.

Bogost: Yeah.

Rashid: Stay with us for next week’s episode, where we explore why we pressure ourselves to look busy … even when we’re not.

Bogost: That’s on our next episode of How to Keep Time.