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This new season of How To is a collection of our favorite episodes from past seasons—a best-of series focused on slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives. The first episode in this collection is from our third season, How to Build a Happy Life. The Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans talks with host Arthur Brooks about how to think differently about the time you crave and the time you actually have.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Megan Garber: Hey, it’s Megan Garber. I’m one of the co-hosts from How to Know What’s Real. This new season of the How To series is a special one. We’ve assembled some of our favorite episodes from past seasons: a best-of collection around the themes of slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives—things I know I can use some reminders about. Each week over the next six weeks, we’ll be sharing an episode from our archives. And here’s the first. It’s from our third season, How to Build a Happy Life, and it’s called “How to Spend Time on What You Value.” Take a listen as host Arthur Brooks and producer Becca Rashid explore what might be holding people back from finding and taking advantage of the free time we all seem to crave.

[Music]

Rebecca Rashid: Okay, Arthur, I have a question for you.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah?

Rashid: If you had one extra hour today, how would you use it?

[Music]

Brooks: How would I use it or how should I use it, Becca?

Listener Submission 1: If I had an extra hour a day, I would spend it sitting somewhere in nature.

Listener Submission 2: Wow. I’d find time to FaceTime my mother.

Listener Submission 3: If I had one extra hour every day, I would spend it walking around my city aimlessly.

Listener Submission 4: For me, sometimes my commute requires me to leave when it’s dark and then to get home when it’s dark. But if I had an extra hour, it would be beautiful to walk down, you know, a light-, sunlit-drenched paths with my wife.

[Music]

Brooks: This is How to Build a Happy Life. I’m Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: How would you use it first? And then I’ll ask you how you should use it.

Brooks: I’d use it to work.

Rashid: Oh, no.

Brooks: I would work more. Yeah. For sure. And look, it’s not that bad. I love my work. I’m crazy about my work. I dream about my work.

Rashid: Hm.

Brooks: It’s great. I, I—look, I’m working right now. Can you believe it?

Rashid: Right. [Laughs.]

Brooks: It’s the best thing ever.

Rashid: That’s true.

Brooks: But it doesn’t mean that endless hours of work are going to give me what I need, because it’s a well-established fact to any listener of How to Build a Happy Life that I’m kind of a work addict or a success addict or something like that, or whatever the pathology tends to be thinking back to the episode of Anna Lembke. What should I do with the hour? I should use it in communion to build love in my life. I should use it to pray, to read scripture, to spend time with my wife because now we live alone—now that we’re empty nesters—to talk to one of my kids, to call one of my dear friends on the phone. That’s what I should do with it. And, you know, maybe I would, actually. You know, come to think of it, when we’re done here, I’m gonna call a friend instead of going back to work.

Rashid: The “how you would use time” and “should use time” is the big struggle, right? I think, especially since the start of the pandemic, our relationship with time has changed so drastically. There is either too much time that you don’t use wisely or you feel crunched for time in a way that all the things you would want to do are no longer an option. There’s no right answer, but I’m curious, are you applying yourself in a way that’s useful in every waking moment?

Brooks: When you have a time problem, like the coronavirus pandemic gave us all, where we became incredibly unstructured, we could use our time much, much more according to our own desires than we were ever able to before. It sounds great, but it turns out that it separates people more or less into two groups. You can call them the strivers and the fritterers, and again, you can’t necessarily tell them apart in the workplace when there’s things that you have to get done and there’s an exoskeleton that’s called your workday in the office. You got to get your work done. And so you’re a responsible professional and you do it. You don’t just, like, waste all your time and not go to the meetings and people are waiting for you. You do those things, but when your time is yours, you figure out which is your vice. Now the world pats you on the back when you’re a striver. Congratulations. It’s unbelievable. So it’s a problem when relieved of the exoskeleton of the traditional workplace, your work sprawls across your entire schedule. That’s my problem. The fritterers are a little bit different when you’ve got that extra hour. It’s just too hard to get to the thing when you just have to get your work done. So a lot of people have found that they fall behind. They get a lot less done. They doomscroll a lot …

Rashid: Right.

Brooks: And if you waste it, woe be unto you because that’s the perfect pattern for actually frittering away the day.

Rashid: Mm.

[Music]

Brooks: Many of us are stuck in a kind of vicious cycle with time. Our expectation, our hope, is that time is in our control and we’ll use it wisely, whatever that means, but it doesn’t work that way. The reality is that many of us don’t really know how to use our time at all. How can we bridge the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? Let’s dig into the research on why people like me overschedule themselves and become too disciplined, while others feel like the days, months, and years are kind of slipping away.

Ashley Whillans: I think everyone should go to therapy.

Brooks: I don’t want to! I’m not a Millennial.

Whillans: I am. [Laughs.]

Whillans: My name is Ashley Whillans, and I’m an assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, and my research focuses on time, money, and happiness.

Brooks: Ashley Whillans is a colleague of mine at the Harvard Business School and the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life.

Whillans: You know, a lot of research is “me-search,” and we study the things that we struggle with. And as a happiness researcher, I was doing all of this academic research when I started my job five years ago on the importance of prioritizing time for happiness, for personal relationships. Meanwhile, my relationship was totally falling apart.

Brooks: Ashley studies one side of the time problem, the one that busy strivers face—those who try to make the most out of every waking moment. And you know who you are. She’s a fellow happiness researcher whose work covers time poverty, a term she uses to describe the modern epidemic of people with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ashley walked us through her concept of time traps: the traps that motivate us to spend almost all of our time on work and productivity. So I want to figure out what explains this. And what to do about it.

Whillans: So I had this partner of 10 years. We were going to move to Boston, start a new life together from Vancouver. And this person left me in Boston after three weeks because they said that I was spending all my time in work and that there was no relationship to be there for. And meanwhile, I was giving talks all over the country on the importance of valuing time. I was, inside, crying about this, like, dissolution of my most important relationship up to that point in my life, and then preaching about the importance of putting time first. Eighty percent of working adults report feeling “time-poor,” like they have too many things to do in a day and not enough time to do them. This affects our relationships, our physical health, our ability to feel like we’re making progress on personally important goals.

These are the time traps that can make us time-poor. One of them is this busyness as a status symbol, this cult of busyness that’s pervasive in the United States in particular, where if we feel like we have any time in our calendar, we feel like a failure. We feel lazy. When we see our colleagues having a lot of things in their calendar, we confer to those people high status. Wow. If they never have a spare moment, they must be really important and valuable to society.

My data suggests that the most time-poor among us are, in fact, those who are struggling to make ends meet. I’ve done research in Kenya, in India, in the U. S. among single-parent households. And we do see that individuals in those groups who make less money are more time-poor because the system is working against their time affluence. They live further away from their places of employment. They have shift schedules that are constantly changing. They have less reliable access to transportation and child care. So this is a whole other conversation, a whole line of work where I’m trying to move the policy conversation on not only thinking about reducing financial constraints, but also thinking about reducing time constraints to help those with less thrive as well.

Brooks: And it’s interesting, you know, here in the United States, you go to a party, you meet somebody and the icebreaker is, “What do you do?,” which means What do you do for a living? What do you do to spend your time? And it’s like, “Yeah, I’m a CEO; I work 80-hour weeks.” People think you’re a big shot. In Spain, the icebreaker question is “Where are you going on vacation?” It would be kind of odd, almost intrusive, maybe irrelevant to say, “How do you make your money?” Right? And yet, you’re suggesting that this is really not about money. It’s really about time. It’s really about the fact that we’re so busy, which is a way to show ourselves and others that we’re highly in demand. And so the root of this problem philosophically is—well, it is philosophical, isn’t it? Because it’s the philosophy of how we value ourselves, right? Isn’t that at the root of what we’re talking about here?

Whillans: Yeah. This doesn’t happen in European countries like Italy, where actually it’s the opposite. People who have more vacations seem to be doing something right in life. I’ve talked to so many colleagues about my findings, and they say things like, “Well, I thought, you know, when my kids moved out and went to college that I would finally get around to doing those hobbies that I always had wanted to do. And instead I just filled those additional hours with work. And I don’t know why.”

And then we would have these conversations about how productivity has become our habit, and we don’t even know how to enjoy our free time. We’ve lost this habit. And they asked me, “How do I start to pursue a passion? So that I don’t fill every spare moment I have with work, because that’s all I’ve been doing.” And it is like we have to almost retrain ourselves to have leisure as a habit so that our defaults are not work emails, work meetings, but instead our defaults are family, friends, exercise, active leisure activities. And we really, especially in North American culture, need to be pushing against work as our default mode of operating.

Brooks: For happiness reasons, is what you’re talking about.

Whillans: For happiness.

Brooks: Yeah, for happiness reasons. Let me get back to this really interesting question of you. So you were thinking about time and then you experienced the bitter fruit of not having enough time for your personal relationship. So, you know, no doubt it was more complicated than that. But did you make any life changes pursuant to that really terrible experience?

Whillans: Yeah, but I think my life changes don’t sound that dramatic. I’m just trying to adjust a little bit around the margins to make sure I have time for things that matter to me outside of productivity. So I don’t work on the weekends very much anymore. I have a kid who’s one year old. I have a husband that I love. I also don’t work for the first hour in the morning. I will use that time to invest in myself, read, meditate, go for a walk, exercise. That first hour is mine, not my employer’s. And as a function of those two rules, I have to be a lot more careful about what I say yes and no to. But I’ve tried to almost have a quota strategy. I’m not hard-and-fast about this, but I will work on one paper at a time where I’m really working on it every day, not 15 papers that I’m sort of working on, kind of all the time. So I think the experience of being at the lowest point in my life and trying to put some of these strategies into practice are about small things that I do every day that are nonnegotiable for my happiness.

Brooks: You’re clearly putting your work within boundaries, and this is a key point that you’re making, is that work is within boundaries because you’re setting up your budget and you’re living within your budget. Treat [time] like a scarce resource the way that you would if you were on a fixed income, because you’re really on a fixed income of time. So has it hurt your work or has it made your work better and made you more efficient? Is there a cost?

Whillans: So one thing that I learned early on—and there’s research to substantiate this—is that it is better to compare yourself to yourself, as opposed to compare yourself to others. So for me, I think something I did was really heavily guard my attentional resources as well. What am I going to pay attention to in terms of other people’s successes? Because in my field, there’s “no good enough.” Nothing you’re going to do is going to feel like enough, is going to be enough, is going to guarantee success and awards and accolades. In terms of net productivity, yes, I do get less done now. Absolutely. Especially since having a kid. No question, I am not as fast.

But I also don’t hold myself to those same standards as when I was working all the time, and I think that’s really key for my own feeling of satisfaction. My ideal self looks different now—there’s research on this too—my ideal self used to look like working all the time, being on a plane every week, and publishing as much as humanly possible. That was my ideal self, and my actual time use looked pretty close to that. And then I realized that might be good on one dimension of my life, productivity, and really hurt other dimensions of my life: well-being, social relationships that I know as a happiness researcher matter a lot for happiness.

So I changed my ideal. My ideal now looks like publishing a couple of impactful papers on projects I care about that I think are going to matter. Not traveling very much and making sure I have time to spend with my friends and family and investing in myself every day. So I also had to change the aspirational goal. I had to change what my ideal self looked like so that my time use now is matching a different ideal than what my ideal was before.

[Music]

Brooks: For my last book, I was interviewing this woman who was doing what you were doing five years ago at the beginning of your career, but never stopped. And she’s confessing to me that she’s got a cordial relationship at best with her husband. She doesn’t know her adult kids very well. She drinks too much. She hasn’t been to the gym in a long time. And furthermore, that her young colleagues don’t trust her decision making, because it’s not as crisp as it once was.

She’s like, “What do I do?” And I said, “You don’t need me to tell you what to do. You need to use your time differently, you know, than you are!” And I said, “Why don’t you do what you know you need to do?” And she kind of stops and says, “I guess I prefer to be special than happy.” How much of that is going around?

Whillans: At least she admitted it. I feel like something that’s very difficult is that to have this realization, right? You have to understand what you care about and want, like truly, what you value. Maybe for this woman that you talked to, she did truly value being the richest and having this productive life more than she valued gaining or improving in these other areas of life. And she seems like she’s actually somewhat self-aware about that, right?

My economist colleagues say: “Write down a model, Ashley. Write down a model of exactly how I should spend my time to be happy.” I say, “I can’t do that because I don’t know what you value.” So for us to be spending time in the so-called right ways, we have to know what we truly value. So we have to do that self-awareness, reflective component first. And then once we know what we truly value, research suggests that the more that our lives on a regular basis look like our ideal. So what your last seven days looked like in a time diary, and how close that is to your ideal time use, minimizing that discrepancy is hugely important for life satisfaction and for the amount, on average, of positive mood you experience on a regular basis.

Brooks: You know, for a lot of people—they might say they wish they had more free time and they could relax more and spend more time with their families, but they don’t actually know how to do that. Using your time in leisure is a very special thing. It’s, you know, you look at it philosophically: Aristotle made a big comparison, or made a big distinction, between work, recreation, and leisure. Now, work is productive activity. We all know what that is. Recreation is a break from work to make you ready to go back to work. Leisure is, in and of itself, something worth pursuing. Now, Josef Pieper, the great 20th-century philosopher said that leisure is the basis of culture. I mean, these are people who elevated leisure, and yet, you got to know how to do it.

Whillans: Yeah, absolutely. So I think it’s something that we do have to build a habit around, and that’s where trying to change 10, 15 minutes, 30 minutes seems a lot more possible and achievable. Going back to behavioral-science literature, you want to be thinking about setting a concrete goal. And part of the reason, in my research, we often trade money for time—so we’ll go after money instead of going after time, because money is concrete. We know the value of $1,000, and we know how to count or track three hours, five hours, 10 hours, and turn that into productivity in our minds. What does it mean to have more free time? That is an abstract concept.

What does having more leisure time even mean or look like? So when we’re trying to actively set ourselves up for success in these domains that are more abstract, like spending time with friends and family, we need to concretely write down what that means.

We like to maximize measured mediums. This is work by Chris Hsee at the University of Chicago. We go after the things that we can count and track. That is the way our brains are wired. So we do that for work, why can’t we do that for our leisure time, too? Setting a goal of one hour of exercise.

Active leisure is particularly good for positive mood. Active leisure is things like exercising, socializing, volunteering 15 to 30 minutes—mapping out what 30 minutes more of social-connection time looks like for you and being very specific about it and putting it in your calendar. We need to be a little bit careful with that suggestion, because as soon as we start counting our leisure, we enjoy it less.

Brooks: And now at the same time, of course, I mean, exactly the contrary: You can overschedule your leisure in such a way that it becomes a task. I was a CEO before, and it was just, it was a grind, man. I mean, it was. I missed a lot of my kids’ childhood. I just did. But at the same time, I made a commitment. So I get up in the morning. I exercise every morning for an hour. I go to Catholic Mass every morning with my wife, and I do travel most weeks. I travel about, you know— I make about 50 weekly trips a year and that’s a lot, but I’m never traveling on the weekends. I probably missed three weekends a year, and I don’t work at night. And part of the reason is because I learned all these things that you learned at 32—I learned at 55.

And so, you know, woe be on to me. Nonetheless, my quality of life has dramatically increased for exactly putting those boundaries in place. Now, when I schedule my leisure too rigidly, I find that I start to get stressed out when things start to impinge on it, which is one of your points as well. You got to stay flexible on these things. Part of the benefit that you’re getting cognitively and psychologically is more flexibility in your life and less rigidness in your life, right?

Whillans: Yeah. I love the research that shows that if you schedule too many leisure activities in a day, it literally feels like work and it sucks you out of the present and then you worry if you have enough time to drive across town and meet your friend for brunch after you’ve had coffee with another friend or family member. And so you want to actually—exactly—capitalize on this idea of building in flexibility. So if we start to be too rigid with our personal goals, that makes them feel like work, and basically what my research shows is that when you’re in the experience of doing something, you have some free time, you want to do activities that you say are intrinsically motivating, that you feel like you’re doing because you enjoy it. That’s how you’re going to capitalize on leisure.

It doesn’t matter as much what the activity is. And there are some leisure activities which generally are better for well-being—like exercise, socializing, volunteering, tend to be better, on average, than things like passive leisure activities, like watching TV, resting, relaxing, which aren’t as enjoyable or don’t produce the same gains in mood. But it also matters how you feel about that activity. So really what matters is whether you feel like you’re doing the leisure experience because you want to, or you feel like you’re doing it for some other reason. So these people who are walking around, convincing themselves to go to church because it’s good for their productivity are not going to enjoy the experience of church to the same extent as someone who’s going because they truly enjoy it.

Brooks: How about, you know, we’ve touched on this a little bit, these semi-leisure activities. You know, there’s leisure and then there’s leisure. Remember, Aristotle says there’s work, there’s recreation, and there’s leisure. And recreation is to get you ready to work. And so, yeah, restorative to what? Restorative to life? No. Restorative to go back to work. And a lot of people will say, “Why do you work out so much?” They say, “You know, it’s just great for my work.” But what about people who are using work as a pretext for leisure? Are they sucking the life and happiness out of their leisure by turning it into just recreation?

Whillans: When you’re in the moment of a leisure experience, you will enjoy it less if you think you’re doing it for extrinsic reasons. And extrinsic motivation is, definitionally: You’re doing something because someone else told you, or you’re doing it for an external reason, like you think you should because it will be good for your productivity; you think you should because your mom wants you to—

Brooks: Are you going to make money? Are you going to get more fame? Are you going to get more power? Or whatever down the line. And a lot of the studies will assume that spending time with your family is intrinsic and going to work for money is extrinsic, but that might be exactly the opposite. Is there a difference in time scarcity and busyness and status between people my age and people, let’s say, in their early 20s today?

Whillans: My data suggests that we get better with time as we age. So this is also consistent with Laura Carstensen’s work on socioemotional selectivity theory. We start to gravitate toward things that are meaningful as we get older and we’re less likely to seek out, do this novelty-seeking exercise. And so in my data, reliably, people who are older tend to be more likely to value time over money and happier as a result. And part of what’s driving that isn’t simply the realization of what matters to us. It’s also that we’re typically more financially secure. So there is this very real component in my data whereby financial insecurity, not feeling optimistic about our financial futures, drives this need to fill every single moment with productivity. And that is more common among younger people with school debt trying to move up the career ladder.

And research suggests that we undervalue our future time. So this can also make it difficult for us to choose time in the future when we’re planning our schedules. We know that the value of $500 is going to be as good as—well, okay, we might have to inflation adjust these days, but okay—the basic idea is that the value of $500 now is going to be the same now, three months, six months, a year from now, that’s how we think about money. We just know it’s going to have value across time. That’s pretty invariant. Now, when it comes to time, we’re like, Time right now really matters. I’m so busy, overwhelmed, a million things to do. Time in three months? Nah, I don’t really need more time then. Look at my calendar; it looks free compared to now. Six months, even freer. So the extent to which we value or give our lives meaning through work directly is correlated with how time-poor we feel and the extent to which we fill our calendars as a way to give our lives meaning.

Brooks: Now say something to our listeners here who might be saying, “I don’t know what I intrinsically enjoy. I can’t think of anything intrinsically enjoyable to me, because I’ve been so extrinsically motivated for so long. I’m a Homo economicus. I’m just, I’m a machine.” What do you tell that person on the voyage of discovery? It sounds like you had to go through this, Ashley.

Whillans: Yeah. do a time audit. At the end of the day, ask yourself: What things did you do across the day, and how did you feel while you were engaging those activities? And then look at which activities brought you the most positive mood. You could also do this through gratitude—so there’s research on this showing that people who take time to reflect on what they’re grateful for tend to be more self-aware.

So at the end of every day, just think of a few things that made you feel grateful. And in that day, maybe that was a quick conversation with the neighbor. Maybe that was, in my case, hanging out with my kid and thinking That was pretty great. Maybe it was listening to a really interesting podcast on a topic you hadn’t heard before. And then you’ll be like, Oh, it seems that I must enjoy those things. I should probably try to do more of them.

It seems simple, but honestly, it wasn’t really until I started to create some separation in my life such that I wasn’t just getting up every single day working and then trying to decompress at the end of the day by drinking. Because let’s be real. That’s what happens. There was no space in that schedule that I used to have of “work, work, work, drink, go to bed, work, work, work, work, drink, go to bed” to even have a thought about What in that day did I enjoy? Because I wasn’t even taking a second to pause, reflect, and think about what was bringing me joy and satisfaction on any one particular day. And this is also good for work, right? Because it’s going to give you a sense of the things at work that you love and enjoy. And maybe you should try to do more of those and less of all the other stuff.

[Music]

Brooks: Thank you to our How To listeners who helped make this show what it is. We asked how you would spend one extra hour per day doing something intrinsically rewarding. And here’s what you said.

Listener: If I had an extra hour each day, I would go home to my studio apartment, I would close the door, put on the little bolt lock to make sure I’m safe, and then I would just sit in that silence. And do absolutely nothing. But I think just that within life, there are all these things you need to do just to survive and maintain some level of relative sanity—like eat, which means you have to cook food; and sleeping; and connecting with people, which means driving your car to see friends; and calling your parents; and doing all these things that, um, I guess we tell ourselves we want to do it because we have to, and in a way it creates happiness, whatever that is. But I feel like all of that keeps us from actually sitting in the moment and thinking, like, What is happening? Why are we here?

Brooks: If you look back in the old days before we were so unbelievably distracted by tech, we were doing something in those days too. You know, when I rode the subway in the 1980s in New York City, I always had something to do with me. I wasn’t just, I’m going to go on the subway and stand there doing nothing. I had a book. I had a newspaper. I was, you know, whatever—I was listening to my, to my Walkman. Remember those?

Rashid: Yes.

Brooks: And I have to say, I get the sentiment of the caller, which is, Here’s what I would do if I had an extra hour. Well, guess what? You have 10 minutes where you could do that and you probably aren’t. And that’s the difference between would and should. Would and should are very different when it comes to our time. So the question is, what’s the disconnect between what we feel like we should do and what we probably would do with that extra hour and that has everything to do with our expectations for ourselves. And this is one of the reasons that meditation is really hard for people who are beginning practitioners, people who are sitting in meditation and the only direction that they get is “think of nothing.” You know, “Empty your mind.” Well, you know, it’s hard to do.

Rashid: Why is it so hard?

Brooks: Because we’re not made for it. Humans are not wired to do nothing. My colleague and friend Marty Seligman, who teaches, who’s one of the pioneers in the science of happiness field. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He says that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens; we should call ourselves Homo prospectus because our state of nature is for our brain to engage in all of this incredibly complex stuff about how to build a better future. “What am I going to eat for dinner? What am I going to do for a living next year? What am I going to say to my spouse?” And that occupies us so very, very much that even when we’re trying to do nothing, we’re not doing nothing.

Ashley Whillans told us about how to use our time in a smart way. That means scheduling these things that are ordinarily unscheduled. How funny we go through life and say, I’m going to treat my happiness as a nice-to-have. And if I have a little bit of extra time, I’ll think a little bit about it. No, no. [Laughs.] This is serious business. Put it in your schedule. Put it in your schedule. Absolutely. Every single day. Learn how the science works, and then take the serious time that it takes. Be time smart, as Ashley Whillans calls it, and take the time to do that work, because the payoff will be potentially greater than the payoff for anything else you could do in that time.

[Music]

Rashid: That’s all for this week’s episode of How to Build a Happy Life. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A. C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson.

[Music]

Garber: If you enjoyed this episode, take a listen to Season 3, How to Build a Happy Life. You can find all seven episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Next up in our special best-of collection about how to slow down, we’ll look at what it means to really rest.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: There is a very long history across pretty much all cultures and religious traditions about things like the spiritual value of rest, right? The idea that there are connections that we can make or things we can understand about ourselves, our place in the world, the nature of our lives that only come when we’re resting or, you know, when we’re still.

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The question of whether to have kids sits at the awkward intersection of intensely personal decisions and important policy issues. That dynamic can lead to societal confusion. Policy makers and researchers debate how economic policies can stop birth rates from declining, while individual people ask themselves how they want to live their life and whether that includes children.

To express overt concern about why women are having fewer children can imply that the good life requires childbearing and rearing. As a result, those left of center—especially those who value pluralism—have largely opted out of debates about the merits of parenthood. After all, a fulfilling and valuable life can include children, but it doesn’t have to.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Anastasia Berg, a philosopher and co-author of the recent book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. Berg wants to rid the left of any discomfort it might have with engaging in conversations about, well, what children are for.

“If we look at the kind of things that leftists are committed to, be it climate change or significant social and political reform—if it’s education, if it’s welfare—these are the kind of things that presuppose the possibility of a human future,” Berg argues. “And what we hope to do in part, at least, is to liberate people who identify themselves politically in that way to also just have the courage to embrace the role of children in human life without thinking that … immediately commits them to a conservative, anti-women, anti-progress, anti-equality stance.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: In 2023, nearly half of childless adults under 50 didn’t want kids. That was a 10-point jump from five years earlier, according to Pew Research Center. In that time, the public conversation about having kids has felt dominated by conservative voices—whether it’s Elon Musk, who has at least 12 children with three different partners and called the birth decline “one of the biggest risks to civilization,” or J. D. Vance, who seems to have a particular disdain for the childless.

J. D. Vance: We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.

Demsas: As a result, I’ve seen many on the left begin to disengage from caring about this issue at all.

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My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

This is a very different conversation than our usual episodes. My guest is Anastasia Berg, philosopher and co-author of the new book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. Anastasia isn’t focused on investigating the economic or other structural factors for why people are increasingly opting out of parenthood.

Anastasia rejects the focus on the causes of declining birth rates. She even rejects the idea that she particularly cares what the birth rate is. She instead heads down to the level of the individual. How are individual people understanding, explaining, and avoiding the conversation about child-rearing? And why should the left view itself as part of the project of caring about this at all?

I hope this episode gives you a different way to engage if you’re visiting with any pushy relatives this week.

[Music]

Anastasia, welcome to the show.

Berg: Thank you so much for having me.

Demsas: So your book is kind of provocatively titled What Are Children For? I want to start with why you wrote this book. And who is it for?

Berg: So the book came out of conversations that my co-author and best friend and I, Rachel Wiseman, were having in our late 20s and early 30s, respectively, and we were both dealing with the personal ramifications of this question, wondering what shape our own lives are going to take and also struck by a certain kind of shallowness or dissatisfying qualities of the way we saw the public conversation about the role of children in human life was happening at the time.

And so we started off with a short article called “On Choosing Life” that really focused, in particular, on kind of the satisfactions we had with a discourse around climate change and how climate change is giving us reasons not to have kids. And then we just saw the public response to it, the enthusiasm for a kind of investigation that was both sort of stylish and interesting and provocative and thoughtful, but also one that wasn’t sneering. And that, combined with the sense that we ourselves just started to scratch the surface of the sources of ambivalence and what kind of ethical and philosophical resources we might have to address that ambivalence to help people work through it—that kind of combination seemed like a good ground to write a book.

Demsas: So the focus on birth rates or why people aren’t having more kids has largely been, I think, seen as a concern dominated by right-wing thinkers and spaces—whether it’s sort of, like, rationalist, tech right people, and Elon Musk has been a big part of this conversation, or more of those trad-wife, classic conservative right people. Even kind of registering concern about the decline in fertility codes as right wing. But you see this as a progressive issue, one that left-leaning thinkers should engage seriously with. Why is that?

Berg: Yeah. That’s a great summary of where we stand on the political positioning of this question. So I think there are two things we need to notice. While there are a lot of aspects of the conversation, our children are indeed political.

There are two things that I think transcend politics: The first is that what is at stake really is just the shape of one’s own personal life. And when I say that, I don’t mean that is not, in itself, political and has political aspects. But the idea that we should decide what our personal lives will look like just because of our political allegiances—like, that’s something I think we should be suspicious of. And the second thing is that what is at stake is also a deep philosophical, ethical question, which isn’t just, Should I have children? Is it morally permissible for me? But it’s the question of the value of human life in the present and in the future.

So one thing I like to point out is that despite many differences between people on the left and the right, most of them are still in agreement about the following, and it’s a commitment to just the bare idea of a flourishing, robust, good human future. And I think from that perspective, we can recognize that this question—Should we concern ourselves with the future of humanity? Is human life the kind of thing that we should perpetuate into the future, despite suffering and despite our own failures, ethical and political?—that is a question that I think that people who are liberal or progressive, the answer is a robust yes.

If we look at the kind of things that leftists are committed to, be it climate change or significant social and political reform—if it’s education, if it’s welfare—these are the kind of things that presuppose the possibility of a human future. And what we hope to do, in part, at least, is to liberate people who identify themselves politically in that way to also just have the courage to embrace the role of children in human life without thinking that, as you were saying, immediately commits them to a conservative, anti-women, anti-progress, anti-equality stance.

Demsas: But there’s this view that the declining number of kids actually represents progress—that progress for women, in particular, who aren’t anymore saddled with, like, one vision of the good life, which is to get married, have a family, pop out as many kids as possible, and then find your meaning in that. But then, of course, the secondary aspect: No matter how egalitarian men or workplaces get, there’s just no way to equalize the costs of having kids to a woman’s body for being pregnant and birthing children, particularly, I think, under a regime where we no longer have Roe v. Wade.

And people have often seen this as a narrative of progress, and of course we see these sorts of correlations between highly educated groups and declining birth rates. So why isn’t this just a standard story of progress? Why don’t you see this as just another step in feminism liberating women from having to consign themselves to motherhood?

Berg: Let’s begin with where the book begins every time it picks up a possible explanation or a narrative that is driving ambivalence about having kids. And it starts with the kind of concerns that people themselves are raising. So it was really important for us not to start with the kind of explanations for declining birth rates you might hear that are kind of purely causal explanations. So people say, Women are more educated, or, The sperm counts are declining.

And one of the things we noticed is that no one—when they’re talking about their own ambivalence or their own uncertainty—no one starts by talking either about their own declining sperm counts, or no woman that I’ve spoken to has said, I’ve reflected on my years of education, and hence, I can’t make up my mind, or, This kind of gives me an answer to the question of how many kids I should have.

And so we wanted to start with the things that they really cared about. When we talk about women and men, about the things that would have made it easier for them to navigate the decision, about why they decided as they did, the question of the role of motherhood in a woman’s life—with the possibility of leading a fulfilling life, of determining one’s own future, of being equal to men—that was one concern, but it wasn’t the only one.

And so the first thing that we want to say is that we need to understand that we’re faced here with a lot of women and men who are having difficulty, so much as thinking through this question. That’s really our concern. So our concern is not an objective concern with a declining birth rate. We kind of leave it to others. Economists can explain to you what is the problem with an aging population, and other people can explain to you why a society can sort of overcome those issues.

But what we thought is a problem is that there is a question of incredible significance to human life, both, as I was saying, on this very subjective level and on this grand level—a huge existential question. And people are expressing a real difficulty of navigating it. And we thought, Here’s a place where we can help.

And so on particularly the question of progress, I think that we are many—and we were naming them—there are many arenas of progress in this kind of field. There are also things we wanted to point out that we think more progress can be made, even from a feminist perspective. So one of the things that we point out is that, at least in liberal and progressive circles, there is a growing understanding that men should take equal part in domestic labor, in housework and childcare. But there is a very different understanding of what men’s role is when it comes to the deliberation and decision making around children.

And in particular, we’ve placed almost a taboo—kind of it felt taboo on liberal and progressive men to even consider this question as one that is relevant to their life, let alone raise it in conversation. So we’ve spoken to men who said, you know, When I think about raising the question of kids with a potential partner, I immediately feel creepy and oppressive and controlling. Now, that seems like, on the one hand, a right kind of impulse. On the other hand, we’ve spoken to the women who are partners to those men who are telling them, Whatever you want, honey. And they describe being very frustrated and isolated, alone with that decision.

Demsas: But I think many people on the left, maybe even folks who have not, you know, come across your work yet, are open to the idea that people may just choose not to have children and that they might be ambivalent about having children, and that would be fine. Why are you seeing this as something that people should be concerned about?

Berg: So to be clear, again, the very fact of the declining birth rates is not something that we’re directly concerned about, nor do I, in putting forward the book, hope to help people embrace children in their own lives. I hope to help them navigate the kind of ambivalence that we found many are finding troubling.

So we’ve spoken to hundreds of Millennials and Zoomers and Gen Xers, and they’ve talked about the difficulty and hardship of navigating that question. And that means not knowing how to raise it with themselves, not knowing how to raise it with their partners, not knowing when they meet the kind of standards of readiness that can seem only higher and higher and murkier and murkier in their professional lives, in their personal lives, in their romantic lives, so much so that they never know if it is appropriate for them to raise the question of children. So for those who feel like they are in a happy place vis-à-vis the question of children, it doesn’t matter if that means a confident yes or a confident no. That’s great.

We found that there is a large and, in fact, growing swath of the population that is finding this question harder to navigate. It’s them that we wanted to offer a kind of space, a kind of dialogue to enter into in the same way that we wanted to find it when we ourselves were and still are, in many ways, grappling with the different aspects of this question.

Demsas: You’ve sort of glanced on this answer, but I guess I want to get it directly: Why do you think people aren’t having kids? And I don’t mean that in the sense there have always been reasons why people haven’t had children. But why do you think we see a clear decline in the number of children that people are having in younger generations?

Berg: I think to answer that, I’ll take us a little bit through the things we think about in the book. What we always try to do is start with the kind of reasons that people are finding very salient (i.e., they’re in the forefront of their minds), the things they’re thinking about, the things that give us an answer to the question, Why are you not having kids?

However, we also find ourselves wanting to push a little further than the kind of way that an argument first presents. Let me give an example: One thing that looms very large in the U.S., certainly, and also in places like the U.K. is the economic reasoning. People are worried, ostensibly, about the affordability of children. When you start talking to people more, you find that, at least as often as people are worrying about actual affordability, what they’re more worried about is meeting a standard of readiness. And that standard of readiness is very, very high. So one of the things we like to point out is that there is a cliché kind of stereotype of millennials, in particular, as immature—they’re eternal children. And as part of that narrative, they point to the fact that they’re having fewer kids, and they’re saying they don’t want to have kids. They’re kids themselves.

Against that, we want to point precisely to what I was talking about a second ago, which is the fact that they hold themselves to such high standards of maturity, of success and readiness, suggesting that, in a way, they’re almost too mature, as opposed to immature. And we see that across different aspects of their life.

So we see that in their financial and professional sense of self. We see them in their personal growth, so the idea that, My 20s have to be about self-exploration and self-fulfillment, and only when I’ve accomplished all of that, only when I am myself, only when I am sufficiently psychologically kind of come to my own self can I think about having children.

The same thing happens romantically. People are postponing the milestones of relationship and are holding their relations to very high standards of readiness, of stability and security, before they so much as think about having kids.

I mention all of these because I think one of the phenomena that we’re not thinking about seriously enough is not so much how any one of these explanations drive someone to make a kind of very intentional decision, Okay. I’ve considered my options. I’ve decided not to have kids. That happens. People certainly do that. But for a lot of people, that’s not what happens. What happens is that this self-evidence of a logic of postponement—postponement until we meet those standards—is putting off not just having kids but so much as thinking about having kids.

And so what happens is that people are starting to think about children as something that they should actually kind of concern themselves with quite late—and, in fact, later and later. And as that is happening, we see the decision whether or not to have children—and certainly how many children people are going to end up having—decided for them, not by them.

That’s what I care about. What interests me is the sense that people are having this decision made for them in a way where they are then left frustrated by it, not the case where somebody has weighed their lives and decided, I have a greater calling. I have a different vocation. I’m consciously making the choice early on, resolutely, that I would like my life to take a different shape.

Demsas: This is sort of the thesis of your book, and it’s even the tagline, “on ambivalence and choice,” this idea that ambivalence is really a driving reason for your concern for why people are putting off children. As you’ve said, it’s not that people have decided, I don’t want kids, but that there is this kind of failure to be able to even engage fully with the question. I wanted to ask you how—

Berg: Let’s just qualify that. I do not think that it is never the case that no one makes a conscious, intentional decision. They certainly do, in the same way that we still have people embracing kids, and people are telling us, It was never a question for me. It was so obvious. I lived my life accordingly. What we’re focused on is a growing part of the population for whom this is not the case.

Demsas: And I think that what I wanted to ask you about is where you learned that ambivalence was really driving a lot of people’s decision making here, or lack of decision making. Can you talk to me about the surveys you did or what sorts of research you’re pulling on?

Berg: Sure. Our approach in the book was wide-ranging, which is to say it was very important for us to hear from people. So we invited them to answer, first, written surveys, and then we followed up with a few dozen of them in kind of longer interviews.

This was mostly educated, middle- and upper-middle-class Americans that mostly leaned to the left, so liberals and progressives. In our conversations with them, we found evidence for it, but we also looked at kind of a wide array of both social studies data—so looking at people who have investigated directly the growing ambivalence, the lifting of a parenting mandate in America and globally, the kind of wide-ranging surveys of people’s life priorities—and also some of the stuff that is most rewarding for Rachel and myself, given our own interests, has been looking at things like the motherhood-ambivalence literary genre.

So this was a literary genre that grew over the past couple of decades. It’s associated with figures like Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Rivka Galchen, and others. In the writing, for the first time, they’re taking motherhood, the difficulty of thinking through the choice, and then the difficulty attending the experience of growing up, mothering early infants—young infants, excuse me—and making it the focus of their artistic and intellectual explorations, so much so that the genre got its own title, this kind of genre of domestic or motherhood ambivalence.

We also look, similarly, at a growing, kind of exploding literary genre of what’s called “climate fiction” or “eco lit,” so ecological literature, seeing the kind of evidence for ambivalence, not directly about having kids, although sometimes, but ambivalence about the very value of a human future. So these are works that consistently represent human beings as kind of completely abject, which is to say they’re neither deserving of a future nor are they capable of bringing a better future about. For us, that was also a very interesting touchpoint in this exploration of this growing ambivalence.

And then we also looked at the popular cultural examples. For example, we wanted to figure out not just how pregnancy, let’s say, or motherhood are depicted, but also looking at questions like: What kind of women do we see represented in our popular films and media? And in that context, we point out that, if until recently, women would play the roles of the second fiddle. They would be the mother and the wife and the secretary. We now have them taking center stage. They’re protagonists of their own dramas and action and comedy.

However, it is remarkable how rarely those protagonists are mothers. So whether or not they’re the stoners of Broad City or they’re political operatives, like in Scandal and House of Cards, or they’re spies in Homeland or they’re superheroes, you can be anything you want to be as a woman, if you would just kind of watch the TV for the message, unless you try to be a mother.

And the mothers who are depicted are either highly, highly ambivalent—so Homeland, I think, is an example where she is a mother, but she’s abandoned her child, in effect—or they’re very, very bad ones. Fans of Succession can reflect on how we see the character of Shiv get pregnant at the very end of the show and how hard it is to be happy for her—let’s just put it that way.

So we want to point to the fact that we’re also having this kind of cultural messaging that is signaling that there is a big conflict between the possibility of any kind of self-fulfillment, in particular to women, and the possibilities of motherhood, which we think are incredibly important.

And maybe I’ll add one of my favorite pop-culture examples, and it’s that both Friends and Girls, which are both kind of age-defining shows in their own way for Millennials, they both basically end on the trope of an unexpected pregnancy. In Friends, it’s Rachel almost at the end of the show. In Girls, it’s Hannah having an unexpected pregnancy, and the minute she gives birth, the show ends.

And they suggest two things that I think are representative of a big mood in our culture. And the first is that once you have a child, our interest in you, as an adult, ends in a way that is particularly threatening to women. Your life as an intellectual, creative, socially exciting person that we would have an interest in—that’s over for you. And secondly, I think the fact that it’s an unexpected but embraced pregnancy speaks to the anxiety of choice. I think there is such a fantasy—I don’t think it speaks to some direct wish for everyone to get accidentally pregnant. I don’t want to suggest that. I do think it speaks to a kind of indulged-in fantasy—of, Maybe this could just be decided for me.

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Demsas: After the break, Anastasia helps us figure out if the choice to have kids can ever be a rational enterprise.

[Break]

Demsas: I think this ambivalence is something. I mean, I do not have children. I do want to have children at some point. And I think this ambivalence is something I’ve noticed in conversations with friends and people in my peer group about when they’re thinking about having kids. And when I read your book, I saw a lot of that reflected, but I tried to go and look and see if there was some data that would help illuminate how ambivalence was playing a role.

And one surprising thing I found—and I wonder how you would react to this—is there’s a Pew poll earlier this year that looked at adults over 50 and adults under 50 who did not have children. And when asked why they never had kids, people 50 or older were most likely to say, It just never happened. But for those under 50, they say pretty clearly that they just don’t want to, or they want to focus on other things, or they list specific concerns about the world, affordability, or the environment.

Doesn’t that sort of indicate, contra to maybe our experience here and what I’m talking about in my experience with my friends, that rather than ambivalence, younger people are actually pretty clear about why they don’t want to have kids?

Berg: Yeah. So I thought that the poll is very interesting. It’s interesting because that’s not how I interpreted that particular data point, although you could.

So what I saw is the possibility of speaking about one’s experience—let’s call it kind of a journey of figuring out what one’s with children—with a way that was, I actually thought, in many ways, less defensive of older people who are able to say It didn’t work out for me.

So one of the things and this just corroborates that data: Until very recently, the second most common reason that people gave in the U.S. and the U.K. for why they didn’t have children—so people who are childless—was, I just didn’t find the willing and suitable partner, after, I didn’t want to have kids. What we see, which I think is consistent with the thesis of ambivalence, is that there is a growing embrace of other kind of, as you’re saying, priorities and projects and other shapes that a life can take, and less of a possibility of embracing the circumstances of life.

And why I think that is significant is that one of the things that we point out in the book is that many times when you talk about why people aren’t having kids, they talk about opportunity costs. Until not very recently, people thought of themselves essentially intergenerationally, and they thought of children as something that belonged to the very framework of human life.

So we can think of, at a moment—maybe it’s a moment that’s eroding, itself—but the way college featured in the lives of many Americans, so it’s the kind of thing that you do no matter what it will take from you. Maybe it’ll be easy. Maybe you’ll have to take on incredible, crippling amounts of debt. But you’re going to go for it. And that’s what children were. It wasn’t the thing that you put this question mark over and you weigh against your other project, you weigh against your other goals. It was something that you participate in because it belonged to the very framework of life.

And in lieu of that, what we see today is the fact that the children question becomes a question like any other question—like a career question, like an education question, like a Where am I going to live? question. The kind of things that we bring this framework, we compare it to other things, and once we start doing that, we’re going to be feeling the cost of making this very difficult and completely life-altering decision.

Demsas: What that raises for me, though, is: Why is that bad? Why is ambivalence about having children bad?

Berg: Put it this way: The very fact that this is a kind of question that’s going to be very hard to navigate—it’s going to bring up a lot of things. A person is going to want to consider many, many things before jumping into it. None of that is bad.

The bit that seems bad is the bit where that ambivalence becomes debilitating—where, because it’s so hard to navigate, on the one hand, and because there’s a kind of celebration of the ambivalence for its own sake, as if that’s the sophisticated position to take if I’m intellectually and professionally and artistically ambitious. If I have those kinds of aspirations, then being unsure about kids is almost how I’m supposed to be responding to this question.

When we combine these things, what we find is a kind of unhappiness, not the unhappiness of the proverbial childless cat lady. That’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is the unhappiness of feeling, I don’t know how to start thinking about this question. I don’t feel comfortable raising it with my partner.

That is a huge problem. I don’t feel that there are the kind of public resources to navigate this question, because anything that I find when I look for them is conservative and reactionary. So I think that is the problem, which is why, when we thought about the subtitles or how to talk about the book, every time somebody said, Well, do you want to talk about overcoming ambivalence? I said, Well, I don’t want to. You know, ambivalence is worthwhile. We want to take it seriously.

Demsas: You’re ambivalent about overcoming ambivalence.

Berg: I’m ambivalent about the ambivalence. And one of the things I like to remind us of is actually the original meaning of ambivalence. So ambivalence, kind of originally in psychoanalysis, it meant the ability to have opposing feelings about one of the same objects, a positive and negative. I think today when we talk about ambivalence, a lot of times what we really mean and refer to as a kind of negativity. It’s like a courage of negativity. So when we say the eco lit novels or climate fiction are ambivalent, what we really mean is that they’re very, very negative about human beings.

And I think a lot of times when we talk about ambivalence about motherhood, what we talk about is the kind of the courage of negativity, which, in some ways, is long overdue. True ambivalence, the ability to really have and contain and work through both valences—the fears that attend a decision to have children, the things it can raise for us personally in terms of our ambitions, in terms of our families, in terms of the kind of big ethical concerns we care about—that doesn’t seem to me to be bad. When it’s debilitating us, when it’s—again, I really like this phrase—when it’s contributing to having that decision made for us and not by us, that’s when I worry about it.

Demsas: You view your project with your co-author as trying to kind of lift the ambivalence so that people can make a decision, so they can actually engage fully with this question about whether or not they should have children on their own. And in order to do that, you sort of attack some of the reasons why people say they don’t want to have kids. Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker calls your book “a corrective to liberal neuroses about having kids.” How do you feel about that tag?

Berg: Yeah. That’s a great question because, as I was saying before, I think there are parts of Jay’s characterization—we also went on his podcast—that we were happy to embrace, and part of it we wanted to kind of hold off on. He said, This really gratifies a debate bro in me. I think that’s not in The New Yorker. That might just be on the podcast. And we said, Oh, that’s nice, Jay. That’s really not all that we want to do.

And that kind of goes to what I was saying before. A lot of people are taking cheap shots at people not having kids today, including our newly elected vice president. And it seemed to us, as people who were ourselves struggling with the question of the role of children in our own lives and in human life, that that kind of attitude would not guide us through our own ambivalence. So it is true that we look at the kind of dominant narratives and scripts and arguments that are not helping people think through this, that make this decision harder to navigate. But I wouldn’t say we attack them, and certainly not the people who hold them. And in fact, what we often do is allow people to, I think, productively move through them.

So notice, again, I’ll recall an example and use a new one. When I was talking about the financial concern, the point isn’t to just say, Well, look—by the way, the Nordic countries. Look at them. Every material hurdle to having children has been lifted. They’re not having kids. End of story. So whatever people are saying when they’re talking about finances might just be bad faith, and that’s it.

No, I don’t think it’s just bad faith. I think those concerns are looming very large for people. What we wanted to understand is why and how. What we found was, as I was saying, a concern with a kind of ideal—a mirage, perhaps—of sufficient readiness that was underlying what often presented itself as just talk of money. The mirage is that I can ever be so rich, so successful that I would be completely confident in my choice to have children. That is the potential mirage, because a standard could be so high that we’ll never know if we’ve ever reached it.

Demsas: And so why did those standards change?

Berg: I think that’s a great question. The reason why it’s hard to answer is because we see it across very different arenas of life. Like I was saying before, people, when they think of their own personal development, they’re thinking, I need to be very mature, very stable. It’s kind of jokes around adulting—so, I’m not there yet. We see that in romantic relationships, so the idea that we have to be in a relationship for a very, very long time before we ever progressed to the next stage.

So people are taking longer to vet potential partners, taking longer to go exclusive, taking longer to introduce them to their parents, taking longer to move in, to get the pet, to get the child. So how to explain the change? More locally, we can think about the kind of upheavals that the Millennial generation, in particular, had undergone. It does seem to be very much the case that there is this myth of readiness that we certainly didn’t see before that I think is truer and more interesting than the kind of dithering, immature, Millennial caricature that we’re used to.

Demsas: Well, one of the big concerns—and this is, as you mentioned, what really kicked off your decision to write this book—is this idea that people are afraid of bringing children into the world because of climate change, that they’re worried about the idea that you are consigning your kids to a world where it’s unclear how their stability will look like, whether that’s literally the changes that will occur with weather, whether it’s floods or droughts or hurricanes or whatever it is, but also just that there’s tons of costs that children may add to the planet by increasing pollution.

You know, you cite one person saying that this is a good reason that people can proffer, but it’s hiding their actual underlying ambivalence. Why isn’t that, by itself, a reason that you find credible that many people are using to not have kids?

Berg: Again, I definitely don’t characterize anything through the paradigm of, like, they’re hiding one explanation with another. And that’s really important to emphasize.

What we do is we quote a kind of academic, ecological activist who had studied the decision processes of people who are environmentalists vis-à-vis the decision to have kids. And what he found was that for those for whom children were a positive prospect—they’re leaning towards kids—they will talk about climate change as a reason to have children. They’ll say, I’m having children so I can raise people who are responsible vis-à-vis the environment.

And people who are leaning against having children will cite the environment as a reason not to have children, along the lines that you mentioned. And moreover, they consistently said that they will then emphasize that reason of their deliberations in order to affect positive change around them. That doesn’t seem to me as something to be sneered at, and I wouldn’t call that as hiding. I would call that as trying to use your personal choice to have these larger ramifications to show other people that the damages of climate change—the cost that it exacts from us are not something in the distant future. It’s something that is happening right here and right now.

Briefly, the reason why we think that that is the case for most people is because all the data—both our kind of more local and qualitative conversations, as well as large surveys of how people are ordering their preferences and how much is climate change figuring in their procreative choices—as of yet, climate change is not featuring as a significant driver of the decision to have kids or have fewer children.

Although, of course, there wasn’t a month that would go by without us being able to find in The New York Times an op-ed along the lines of, Can I have children, given climate change? So it was very much the way that the public conversation was framed, but it just wasn’t what was—and still isn’t what is—driving the personal, deliberative choices.

Demsas: One implication of your book, I think, is that ambivalence can sort of be cured by more rumination. When Rachel, in the intro, asks her mother about how she decided to have a family, her mother responds, “I always knew. It was never even a question.” And to me, part of what your book is trying to do is it’s trying to help you shed some of these mirages around whether you could ever be ready financially to have a kid, or this idea that, you know, climate change necessitates you not having children. But is it really a rational enterprise, whether or not people choose to have children?

Berg: That’s a fantastic question. So the way I think about our project is as one that can actually do something quite limited. Does it have anything to say about what is the shape that your own life should take? No. I hope the book can show people that for most people, it is the case that they are, in fact, committed to the possibility of a good human future. And as such, that might be something they want to contribute to directly in some way. But what way you do that, that’s up to a person to navigate.

As for how to navigate that choice, I do have something to say about that, but we don’t say it in the book, which is: I’m a big pluralist as to the actual personal reasons for people to have children. And the reason I am is not just because I’m generally a pluralist, and it’s a very personal, fraught decision you shouldn’t judge people about. These are all good reasons to be a pluralist, but that’s not why I’m a pluralist here. It’s because one thing that you can realize without having kids—but having a child, really, this is one thing it really brings home—and it’s the fact that whatever it is that you’re thinking you’re doing it for, whatever you’re trying to get out of it, whatever was your motivating reason, having the child can never be reduced to that.

So maybe you did it because you really like the company of kids, but no matter how much you like the company of kids, parenting is going to confront you with a lot of things that are not just the joys of the company of children. Maybe this is your vanity project—you wanted the child to do everything that you never could do. Well, no matter how many times that child succeeds in doing that, parenting is never reducible to the vanity project, inherent, you know, that one can find in having a child.

And I think that’s true for anything. You wanted a pension plan? Trust me—there are other ways of going about it. And this one is going to bring a lot more. And it’s because what’s at stake in having a child is not any of your goals. It’s another human being that you’re going to enter into one of the most intense and intimate relationships that human beings can enter into. And so that’s why I’m, really—I’m a pluralist.

And I’m with you in thinking, in some sense, that means that you can’t quite enter this rationally, not necessarily, as we hear sometimes philosophers say, Because it will transform you. That’s one thing that can happen. It’ll transform you so much that how could you even kind of rationally choose it? You don’t know who you’re gonna be on the other end. I think it’s because whatever you’re trying to get out of it, another human being and that intensity of a relationship and that responsibility that you’re going to be taking for them is going to absolutely exceed that. So whatever is helping you jump over that ledge, that’s really cool by me.

Demsas: Well, so you just glanced at it, but I think one of the reasons why I feel that it’s very difficult to even enter into the idea of whether or not to have children in sort of a cost-benefit analysis is, is L.A. Paul’s work on transformative experiences. Just to summarize briefly for our listeners, the idea is that, you know, before undergoing a transformative experience, you cannot imagine what it would be like. If your cost-benefit analysis is wholly changed by the event, your preferences, your goals, your personality—it’s just completely different once you’ve entered into parenthood. If this is right, doesn’t it kind of call into question even the idea of trying to figure out if you’d be happier or not with a kid? And I know that you are a bit skeptical about this line of reasoning, so I’m curious for your take here.

Berg: Right. So you said, if this is right. So if this is right, yes, that’s correct. I don’t think it’s right—not that it’s not right sometimes. I think it’s not necessary.

And we should say, to Laurie Paul’s credit, her biggest claim, I take it, is about transformative experiences and the challenges they present to rationality. Parenthood, and particularly motherhood, is an example. And the reason why I kind of use a funny tone to use that is, I think, something that L.A. Paul definitely did not intend, but oftentimes culturally we talk about motherhood as a transformative experience, by that, meaning exactly what you mean and more.

We even sometimes mean that not only do you get a new identity you could not predict the significance of in advance, but, in fact, this comes at the cost of your other identities, perhaps identities that you liked and worked very hard to cultivate. And so somebody is now telling you: Not only you’ll have new preferences you can’t predict, but maybe you’ll lose touch with the things you care about most.

One thing that’s really important to notice, even before we get to my own kind of objections to the necessity aspect of this claim, is that it has a very strong kind of, I think, ultimately, a sexist undercurrent. We don’t talk about fatherhood as being transformative, nowhere as frequently as we do about motherhood being transformative.

Again, it’s a case where the intention is right—we want to be able to see women, acknowledge the special challenges that they undergo. But in the process, oftentimes what we’re doing is we’re sort of reifying the tie between parenting and women. And we’re reinforcing the idea that for them it is significant, meaningful, and important in ways that it might not be for men. So that’s something I really want to push against.

And then I just want to introduce the claim that motherhood can be all those things, but it might not. And luckily, the way to show the falsity of a universal claim is you just need one counterexample, so I do it in my own person. And so I share that, in fact, I don’t think that the experience of motherhood has been a rupture in my life. I have no problem recognizing myself after having children. The same things that I cared about before, I care about now.

However, one of the things that I thought was so interesting is people who said to me, you know, I have been transformed by motherhood, but it didn’t happen in the way that you usually hear about it, which is either instantaneous with birth or something that’s kind of lodged in that first year of parenting, which is often how we portray parenting today. It’s all about being a parent to a baby. The transformation is one that happened over decades. It’s one that happened over the life of my child.

And I thought, Oh, wow. That is very poignant. That’s very interesting. And then I thought, But over decades, we all change. So the childless will, too, be transformed over decades of their life, by the projects they undertake, by the relationships they enter into. So that’s kind of my caveat now, is that I am more open to the long-term transformative potential of entering into such a significant relationship. It’s not a necessary one.

And I think this is so important to emphasize for two reasons, and I’ll rest there, which is, first I alluded to: It’s very anxiety provoking when the framing of the possible choice is whether or not to take on a new identity that might erase all others. And insofar as that’s not a necessary framing, I think it’s very important to introduce it to others.

And the other thing is that once you undergo the experience—and you see the prevalence of this narrative of sort of utter, complete, rupturous transformation—but you yourself don’t recognize yourself in it, you might feel like you’re doing it wrong. And in looking at responses to the book, it has been really interesting and, I admit, gratifying to hear from other women who are mothers, I have found in what you described a narrative that I could identify with more than I could identify with many of the narratives that I saw around the idea of the necessarily transformative power of motherhood.

Demsas: I wonder, then, how you think about what happens to someone when they finish reading your book, right? So let’s say they’ve removed the mirages that you want to take away from them, and they’re free now to engage fully in the question of whether or not they actually want kids.

At some level, I feel like, if I were to just—and you know, I guess this is hinted in my earlier questions—but if I was just, like, to kind of tally up the costs of having a kid, even putting aside sort of the transformative-experiences point, I think that if I were to just say, Okay, the potential risk of what will happen to my career, to my body, and then, of course, just the necessary risk, even if everything goes well, of all the costs of raising a child, of saving up for their future, I think even freed of some of the ideas that you’ve talked about here, most people would rationally assume that children don’t fit in with their lives. Do you agree with that, or do you think that that’s not what you find in your experience?

Berg: Well, it’s not what I found in my experience, given the choices I’ve made. But my hope is that while reading a single book cannot transport you to a different age to which we do not want to be transported, for many other reasons—where having children, you know, you just a kind of unthinkingly engage in this activity and make the choice—I do hope that the fact that we provide an analysis, that helps them see that the frames of evaluation that they’re bringing to the children question are not the only ones possible, that by reminding them that what’s at stake is, in fact, not just this personal experience for them, not just sum some satisfaction that they’re going to be enjoying in their own lives, but that what’s at stake is ultimately how they will or will not be contributing to a human future, which by the end of the book I hope to have shown is something that most of us are, in fact, concerned with to one degree or another.

So once you’re at the end of the book, and you kind of realize, Actually, I’m not indifferent to what happens, to put it a bit crudely, after my death. I’m not indifferent to the possibility of there being not just more human beings but, in fact, human beings that live a kind of existence that I, as a human being, can be proud of, not just something I should be ashamed of, as we kind of talked about is represented in that eco lit.

I think then you are confronted with the questions: What are you going to do about this? How are you going to be contributing to that future? This is vague, because, as I said, this is not a book for somebody who wants, at the end of it—I got, recently, a question about a decision procedure. There is no decision procedure that we can offer you, by the end of which you’ll be like, Oh yes. Okay, I see now. It makes sense for me to have kids.

In fact, I would put things more strongly than you did. I think considering the kind of risks a person takes on themselves in having a child, which, just to kind of remind all of us listening to this conversation, is every possible horrible, bad, and tragic thing that can happen to you can happen to your child. And then, bringing a child to the world, you’re becoming that much more vulnerable. Like, for every child, you’re becoming vulnerable in another person. I think it never makes sense if what we think about making sense is this kind of weighing of pros and cons or an instrumental calculation of how to increase satisfaction or minimize risk. It does make sense once you think of your own existence as something that’s not reducible to you just maximizing your satisfaction across your own lifetime.

And I think the book helps you recover a sense of that perspective and raises that question for you, and how you’re going to answer it is up to you. Although, it is a conversation that one-on-one I do love having, so people can reach out to me for heart-to-hearts about what shape their own lives should take.

Demsas: Well, that’s a great part to go to our last and final question. What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Berg: I really wanted to answer this by saying, “having children,” but just in the sense of, like, I love my children. I stand behind my choices.

I wanted to use the question, though, to say basically what we were just talking about, which is that the considerations of the book, those lifting of norms, those reminding us of different perspective, reorienting us to the fact that what’s at stake is the future of humanity—all those things can only get you so far. And the nitty gritty reality, not of, I don’t know, the diapers and the crying that we see—as I was saying, we see parenting today represented just through infancy—but of the whole arc of the life of a parent.

And in particular, the one thing I think is truly universal in parenting—this is my big controversial claim—is that nothing is universal in parenting. You don’t necessarily become a better person. Only some people do. You don’t necessarily relive your happy childhood. Only some people do, etcetera, etcetera. What’s universal is that you become inalienably vulnerable to the risks, pains, sufferings, and tragedies that can befall another human being. And in doing that, in entering this incredibly intimate and demanding relationship, it’ll always sort of exceed in its wonder, in its joys, but also in its pains and in its horrors, anything that we can write in a single book.

Demsas: Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Berg: Thank you so much for having me.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.