In 1985, when I was 9 years old, I watched the first episode of the new Twilight Zone, a reboot of the classic early-1960s TV series. People rarely talk about the ’80s version, which ran for just three seasons. But there must be other viewers around my age who have never forgotten “A Little Peace and Quiet,” the second story in that debut episode. It’s about a woman who discovers a magic pendant in the shape of a sundial that gives her the power to stop time. Whenever she says “Shut up,” everyone and everything in the world except her comes to a halt, resuming only when she says, “Start talking.”

At first she uses the device to give herself a break from her irritating husband and chattering children. But at the end of the episode, she hears an announcement that the Soviets have launched a nuclear attack on the United States, and she deploys the magic phrase to arrest time. In the last scene, she walks out of her house and looks up to see ICBMs frozen in midair, leaving her with an impossible choice: to unfreeze time and be destroyed along with all of humanity, or to spend eternity as the sole living person in the world.

I remember that TV image better than most of the things I saw in real life as a child. It was the perfect symbol of an understanding of history that Generation X couldn’t help but absorb—if not from The Twilight Zone, then from movies such as The Day After and WarGames. The nuclear-arms race meant that humanity’s destruction was imminent, even though no one actually wanted it, because we were collectively too stupid and frivolous to prevent it. We were terrified of the future, like the woman in the TV show—yet we also secretly longed for the arrival of the catastrophe because only it could release us from the anxiety of waiting.

Four years after that broadcast, the Cold War ended in an American victory with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In an influential essay published in the euphoric year of 1989, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the end of history.” But it felt more like the resumption of history. Throughout four decades of nuclear brinkmanship, humanity had been living in fearful expectation, like Brutus in Julius Caesar : “Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.” Now the doomsday weapons had been, if not abolished, at least holstered, and the passage of time could mean progress, rather than a countdown to annihilation.

Somehow, things haven’t turned out that way. Young people today are no less obsessed with climate disasters than Gen X was with nuclear war. Where we had nightmares about missiles, theirs feature mass extinctions and climate refugees, wildfires and water wars. And that’s just the beginning. As Dorian Lynskey, a British journalist and critic, writes in Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, wherever you look in contemporary pop culture, humanity is getting wiped out—if not by pollution and extreme weather (as in Wall-E and The Day After Tomorrow), then by a meteor or comet (Armageddon, Deep Impact), a virus (Station Eleven, The Walking Dead ), or sudden, inexplicable infertility (Children of Men).

[Adrienne LaFrance: Humanity’s enduring obsession with the apocalypse]

These are more than just Hollywood tropes. Lynskey cites surveys showing that 56 percent of people ages 16 to 25 agree with the statement “Humanity is doomed,” while nearly a third of Americans expect an apocalyptic event to take place in their lifetime. Logically enough, people who believe that the world is about to end are much less inclined to bring children into it. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey of unmarried Americans ages 18 to 34, 69 percent say they want to get married one day, but only 51 percent say they want to have children. Around the world, birth rates are falling rapidly; one South Korean online retailer reported that more strollers are now being sold for dogs than for babies in that country. Perhaps this is how the world will end—“not with a bang but a whimper,” as T. S. Eliot wrote in his 1925 poem, “The Hollow Men.”

But the fact that Eliot was already fantasizing about the end of the world a century ago suggests that the dread of extinction has always been with us; only the mechanism changes. Thirty years before “The Hollow Men,” H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine imagined the ultimate extinction of life on Earth, as the universe settles into entropy and heat death. Nearly 70 years before that, Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man imagined the destruction of the human race in an epidemic. And even then, the subject was considered old hat. One reason The Last Man failed to make the same impression as Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lynskey shows, is that two other works titled “The Last Man” were published in Britain the same year, as well as a poem called “The Death of the World.”

In these modern fables, human extinction is imagined in scientific terms, as the result of natural causes. But the fears they express are much older than science. The term apocalypse comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “unveiling,” and it was used in a literary sense to describe biblical books such as Daniel and Revelation, which offer obscure but highly dramatic predictions about the end of days. “A river of fire streamed forth before Him; / Thousands upon thousands served Him; / Myriads upon myriads attended Him; / The court sat and the books were opened,” Daniel says about the Day of Judgment.

Everything Must Go takes note of these early predecessors, but Lynskey mostly focuses on books and movies produced in the U.S. and the U.K. in the past 200 years, after the Christian apocalypse had begun “to lose its monopoly over the concept of the end of the world.” He divides this material into sections to show how the favorite methods of annihilation have evolved over time, in tandem with scientific progress.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Adam Kirsch on the people cheering for humanity’s end]

In the mid-19th century, as astronomers were starting to understand the true nature of comets and meteors, writers began to imagine what might happen if one of these celestial wanderers collided with our planet. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Destruction of the World,” published in 1843, was perhaps the first to evoke the initial moment of impact:

For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things … then, there came a great pervading sound, as if from the very mouth of HIM; while the whole circumambient mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame.

This kind of cataclysmic fantasy hasn’t disappeared—in the 2021 movie Don’t Look Up, astronomers discover a new comet months before it’s due to strike Earth. But whereas 19th-century stories emphasized humanity’s helplessness in the face of external threats, the technological advances of the 20th century created a new fear: that we would destroy ourselves, either on purpose or accidentally.

Hiroshima demonstrated that a global nuclear war could not be won. Radioactive fallout and nuclear winter, in which dust and smoke blot out the sun, would mean the extinction of most life on Earth. This scenario could be played for eerie tragedy: In the 1959 film On the Beach, Australians go about their ordinary lives while waiting for the fallout of a nuclear war to arrive and complete humanity’s erasure. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) staged the end of the world as an absurdist comedy, the accidental result of ideological mania and sheer idiocy. The film closes with the terrifying yet preposterous image of an American airman riding a falling bomb like a rodeo steer.

Technology didn’t just enable us to annihilate ourselves. More unsettling, it raised the possibility that we would make ourselves obsolete. Today this fear is often expressed in terms of AI, but it first surfaced more than a century ago in the 1920 play R.U.R., by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek. Čapek invented both the word robot (adapted from a Czech word meaning “forced labor”) and the first robot uprising; at the end of the play, only one human is left on Earth, an engineer spared by the robots to help them reproduce. Isaac Asimov’s classic collection of sci-fi stories, I, Robot (1950), envisioned a more benevolent scenario, in which robots become so intelligent so quickly that they simply take over the management of the world, turning humanity into their wards—whether we like it or not.

All of these stories can be seen as variations on the theme of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a tale told in ballad form by Goethe in 1797, at the dawn of the age of technology. Because our tools have become too powerful for us to manage, the future never unfolds the way we expect it to; our utopias always lurch into dystopia.

This element of self-accusation is what makes an apocalypse story distinctively modern. When human beings imagined that the world would end as a result of a divine decree or a celestial collision, they might rend their garments and tear their hair, but they could do nothing about it. When we imagine the end of the world in a nuclear war or an AI takeover, we are not just the victims but also the culprits. Like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, we have no one to curse but ourselves: “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

In A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present, the historian and museum curator Glenn Adamson surveys a different genre of stories about the future—the ones told by 20th-century “futurologists.” Where Lynskey’s writers and filmmakers envision the future as an inevitable disaster, these modern seers believed that we can control our destiny—if we only have the good sense to follow their advice.

Adamson applies the term futurologist to a wide range of figures in business, science, politics, and the arts, most of whom would not have described themselves that way. For the designer Norman Bel Geddes, shaping the future meant sketching “cars, buses, and trains that swelled dramatically toward their front ends, as if they could scarcely wait to get where they were going.” For the feminist Shulamith Firestone, it meant calling for the abolition of the nuclear family. We also encounter Marcus Garvey, who led a Black nationalist movement in the early 20th century, and Stewart Brand, the author of the hippie bible The Whole Earth Catalog. The assortment of visionaries is odd, but Adamson accords them all a place in his book because they expanded America’s sense of the possible, its expectations about what the future could bring.

The villains of Adamson’s book, by contrast, are the technocrats of futurism—think-tank experts, business executives, and government officials who believed that they could dictate the future by collecting enough data and applying the right theories. A classic example is Robert McNamara, who serves as a parable of “the rise and fall of technocratic futurology’s unchallenged dominance” in Cold War America.

McNamara became a Harvard Business School professor in the 1940s, and demonstrated a talent “for planning, for forecasting, for quantitatively analyzing, for segregating the trouble spots and identifying the upcoming trends, for abstracting and projecting and predicting.” During World War II, he was recruited by the Air Force to study production methods and eliminate inefficiencies. After the war, he did the same at Ford Motor Company, rising to become its head.

When John F. Kennedy named McNamara as his secretary of defense, the choice seemed like a perfect fit. Who better than a master planner to plan America’s Cold War victory? Instead, McNamara spent the next seven years presiding over the ever-deepening catastrophe in Vietnam, where America’s strategic failure was camouflaged by framing the situation, Adamson writes, as “a series of data points, treating ‘kill ratio’ and ‘body count’ as predictive measures in the war’s progress.”

The conclusion that Adamson draws from his illuminating forays into cultural history is that any claim to be able to control the future is an illusion; the more scientific it sounds, the more dangerous it can be. Yet he ends up admitting to “a certain admiration” for futurologists, despite their mistakes, because “they help us feel the future, the thrilling, frightening, awesome responsibility that it is.”

The future can be our responsibility only if we have the power—and the will—to change it. Otherwise it becomes our fate, a basilisk that turns us to stone as we gaze at it. For a long time, that monster was nuclear war, but today’s focus on worst-case scenarios arising from climate change is not as well suited to storytelling. Lynskey quotes the environmentalist Bill McKibben’s complaint that “global warming has still to produce an Orwell or a Huxley, a Verne or a Wells … or in film any equivalent of On the Beach or Doctor Strangelove.”

[Read: For how much longer can life continue on this troubled planet?]

Climate change is hard to dramatize for the same reason that it is hard to solve: It happens slowly and in the background, until it doesn’t. Compared with that TV image of Russian missiles suspended overhead, our current fears for the future are as intangible and omnipresent as the weather. Confronted with melting glaciers and vanishing species, our promises to use paper straws or shut off the faucet while we brush our teeth feel less like solutions than superstitious gestures.

In a curious way, reading Everything Must Go can serve as therapy for this kind of fatalism. “The unrealized fears of the past can be a comfort,” Lynskey writes, “because the conviction that one is living in the worst of times is evergreen.” There is a difference, of course, between living in fear of the Last Judgment and living in fear of nuclear war or global warming. The former is a matter of faith; the latter are empirical realities. But when impending catastrophes are real, it is all the more important that we not frighten ourselves into seeing them as inevitable. As Edgar points out in King Lear, “The worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’ ”

*Lead-image sources: Sunset Boulevard / Corbis / Getty; Dmitrii Marchenko / Getty; Photo 12 / Alamy; solarseven / Getty; Niko Tavernise / Netflix; Maximum Film / Alamy; Moviestore Collection / Alamy

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Apocalypse, Constantly.”

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Democrats need to build a bigger tent to be competitive. But building a bigger political tent means compromising—and that compromise usually means making someone inside your tent angry.

Take, for instance, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who surprised many and angered some by announcing that he was “excited” by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Asking people to hold off on mocking or disagreeing with RFK Jr., Polis pointed to issues like pharmaceutical reform, nutrition policy, and the use of pesticides. After facing backlash, Polis clarified that he was pro-vaccines, but it left me thinking: What might it look like to open the Democratic tent to vaccine-skeptical Americans, of which there are a growing number?

Today’s episode of Good on Paper is with Dr. Rachael Bedard, a practicing physician who writes publicly about her work, including a recent op-ed arguing RFK Jr.’s critics need to acknowledge the “seeds of truth” to some of his critiques and sit with the fact that many Americans are skeptical of our public-health institutions.

“The pandemic provided this entrée into politics for a kind of person where the combination of sort of the fear of the moment and the trauma of the moment and this sense that people’s bodily autonomy was being violated in some ways by government incursion,” Bedard argues. “There are people who reacted really badly to that, and it changed the dynamics of this conversation.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and has argued that vaccines cause autism. His nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services has spurred opposition from some physician groups and Nobel laureates in various scientific fields.

So it was surprising to come across a New York Times essay by a pro-vaccine, left-leaning physician arguing that instead of spending “four years simply fighting his agenda” opponents should seek to find common ground with RFK Jr.

The author of that piece, Dr. Rachael Bedard, is not just your run-of-the-mill doctor. She’s one with experience treating patients of very diverse backgrounds. The first time I learned about her work was when she wrote an essay about being a physician on Rikers Island during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bedard’s argument is not just one about the political necessity of compromising with people you disagree with. It’s also a warning that, in their zeal to oppose RFK Jr.’s false claims about vaccine safety, opponents risk dismissing and alienating people who have a healthy skepticism of Big Pharma, overmedicalization, and just a generalized distrust of the medical system.

[Music]

My name is 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.

Today’s episode is rooted in Rachael’s own experiences as a doctor, and it contains some controversial advice for public-health officials and political activists worried about RFK Jr.’s rise.

Rachael, welcome to the show!

Rachael Bedard: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Demsas: I am so excited to have this conversation because you are an actual doctor, so I don’t just get to rant with someone who doesn’t have real, lived experience.

Bedard: I am an actual doctor.

Demsas: (Laughs.) So I think most college-educated liberal people have a sort of knee-jerk reaction to RFK Jr. and his arguments about everything from vaccines to fluoride, and sort of his orientation towards science and public health. And I think that reaction is a combination of fear and dismissiveness. I mean, you’re a doctor who’s worked with a variety of populations, and, you know, you’re supportive of vaccines and public health, and yet you wrote an article that I think might surprise some people.

In the Times, you wrote about how people should react to RFK at HHS, and you wrote that you think that there’s common ground between people like yourself—medical researchers and scientists and clinicians—and Kennedy. So what are those areas of common ground?

Bedard: There are a few assumptions in what you said, which I do think is sort of the conventional wisdom around this topic, that might be wrong or deserve to be unpacked. One of them is the idea that most liberals have this knee-jerk reaction to Kennedy.

And what I think is really important to recognize is: Really until the pandemic, a lot of what Kennedy talks about—the idea that government and Big Pharma are in cahoots with one another, and that we’re overprescribing medications to ourselves, especially to our kids; the idea that we’re poisoning the environment with toxins; the idea that food companies are tempting kids with high-sugar, high-fructose, dyed products that then are contributing to a childhood-obesity epidemic—all of those things, I think, coded as liberal critiques of the medical establishment until very recently.

The other thing is the really specific sort of point of dissent between liberals and conservatives in this conversation now, which is around vaccines. Until the pandemic, who did you think of as being sort of anti-vaccine?

Demsas: The crunchy mom who sends her kids to Montessori.

Bedard: Right. And specifically, what color is that mom? That mom’s white—so high-socioeconomic-status, white women who had anxieties about not putting poisons into their children’s body, who didn’t feel themselves to be vulnerable to infectious diseases and didn’t see themselves as sort of responsible to the commons to protect others.

What’s really interesting is that Kennedy was on the same team as those folks until fairly recently. And then what happened in the pandemic is: The pandemic provided this entrée into politics, I think, for a kind of person where the combination of sort of the fear of the moment and the trauma of the moment and this sense that people’s bodily autonomy was being violated in some ways by government incursion—whether or not that’s valid, whether it’s valid to say being told you had to wear a mask in the airport was some kind of huge violation of your civil rights—there are people who reacted really badly to that, and it changed the dynamics of this conversation so that there was this flip.

So instead of being sort of the crunchy mom, it’s now very bro-coded, I think, to be an RFK guy, right? But it’s all the same kind of body-purity politics. So the first thing I would just say is: RFK is who he’s always been, in some ways. And what’s changed a lot is the partisanship of who agrees with him.

Demsas: I think what I would ask you then is: How do you think about how liberals should now engage with this, given that it used to be there was this small fraction of, like, white moms who are kind of preventing their kids from getting some, if not all, childhood vaccines. And now it’s, like, this broader skepticism of public health in general. So what’s your argument then to how Democrats should respond to an RFK?

Bedard: There are sort of two levels in thinking about how you answer that. First of all, there’s a really important distinction to be made between public health and medicine, right? Public health is the creation of policy and intervention meant to apply to groups of people or universally across a population in the interest of the many. Medicine is the practice of helping people improve their own health that’s practiced individually with the patient in front of you.

What we should be doing at the public-health level is not the same thing as what I think we should be doing at the doctor level, necessarily. But some of what best practice looks like at the doctor level ought to be adopted at the public-health level.

Demsas: Can you talk about that more specifically? Like, what does that look like?

Bedard: Yeah, so vaccine mandates work. They’re really important. They’re the only thing that has been shown to work to get meaningful vaccine uptake in a population.

Without them—so for example, the flu vaccine, right? The flu vaccine is not mandated for adults. Forty-four percent of American adults got the flu vaccine last year. That’s not enough to achieve herd immunity, right? We don’t mandate it, because we’ve decided that it’s not worth the hassle.

So we’re pretty choosy about what we mandate. But the things that we choose to mandate, we mandate because we think they’re really contagious, and the consequences of infection are high. And mandates are the only things that help ensure that enough people acquire immunity to something that you’re going to diminish the population burden of that infection, right?

So I don’t think the Democrats should be doing anything different at the mandate level. And that’s a place where I really differ from, say, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, who’s been tweeting in support of RFK with this kind of, like, bizarre zeal and who I think has sort of overstepped where he maybe wants to be. I think he wants to sort of express some understanding of where the folks of Colorado are, where there’s a really growing, pervasive anti-vax sentiment. That’s actually not—it’s bad public policy. It’s a recipe for disease outbreak.

But in communicating with individual patients about vaccines, you don’t tell them that they have to get it, or they can’t come and see you again. That’s not a persuasive way to interact with people, right? At the individual level, when I’m talking to patients, I engage in shared decision making about this. And that starts with offering people the intervention but then really listening to their reactions to it and listening to their fears around it.

Demsas: What sorts of things do you hear when people say they’re scared about getting a vaccine? Is this mostly COVID or other sorts of things?

Bedard: Well, I take care of adults and not kids, right? So I don’t hear people talk about autism and then the MMR vaccine, for example. I talk to adults about the flu vaccine, the COVID vaccine. It’s different, vaccine to vaccine.

So overall, I think one of the things is that people have had the experience themselves of getting the vaccine and then feeling crappy for the next 24 to 48 hours. And they don’t want to do that. The most pervasive thing you hear is, The flu vaccine makes me sick.

Demsas: Yeah. And that’s real. It does make you feel sick.

Bedard: And it’s real. And so one of the most important things to do is to say, Yeah, you’re going to feel bad. We expect that. That’s normal. And if you don’t want to take it today, because you have to go, you know, do something tomorrow, that’s okay. You can do it at your next visit. It’s really, really important with folks to do expectation setting, and then it’s also very, very important to not play down their own experiences or the information that they’re bringing to you.

There’s a great piece that was written by a guy that I work with now, Sudhakar Nuti, who wrote about the phenomena of lay epidemiology. Lay epidemiology is, like, the sort of informal information gathering that people do around how the people in their community and in their lives experience a vaccine. So if you have a brother who got the flu vaccine and got Guillain-Barré syndrome afterwards—

Demsas: And can you say what that is?

Bedard: Yeah, totally. It is a known, very rare complication where—it’s a neurologic complication, but it’s pretty serious, where—people experience sort of temporary paralysis.

Demsas: Wow. That’s bad.

Bedard: It’s bad. It’s a bad thing to have happen. It’s very rare. If it happens, you never get the flu shot again. But if your brother got it or your friend got it, then your sense of danger and your ability to sort of evaluate your personal risk changes a lot.

So people make this decision a lot because of the lay epidemiology in their lives, which is, What have they heard about it? What do they know about it? And around some things, like the COVID vaccine, there was tons of either real or sort of misinformation reporting about people who got the vaccine and then got sick afterwards, had consequences afterwards, right?

The sort of—people thought that Damar Hamlin, the football player, when his heart stopped on the field, right? They attributed that to having received the COVID vaccine. That’s not what did that. But there was all of this fear around myocarditis—inflammation of the heart—especially in teenage boys.

Demsas: But it’s funny. I don’t view the—at least from my perspective, and I’m not a public-health researcher. I don’t view, like, the orientation of public-health institutions as having been like, We’re going to give everyone the information, so they can make the decision for themselves. I view it much more as, like, I’m going to tell you it’s safe because I’ve done the calculation but refuse to explain to you what safe means.

So I do think that in some cases it’s maybe both. It’s like, Yes, you need to engage with that emotional side, but also just say, like—I mean, my own personal experience with this is: I remember when I was trying to get an IUD for the first time, and I went to a women’s health clinic. And I just said, like, Hey. I’ve heard some stuff about birth control and cancer risk. Like, I was young. I didn’t know anything, and I just, like, read something online, and I was just asking for some support.

This is, like, a women’s-health clinic. It’s a place where, you know, you’re supposed to—it felt very progressive and open. And the doctor just kind of looked at me and was just, like, No, that’s fine. Don’t worry about that. And that didn’t make me feel safer. That didn’t make me feel like—

Bedard: Totally.

Demsas: I got the IUD, but I was also just, like, It’s not really clear to me that I feel like you’ve listened to me. I didn’t go back there when the IUD didn’t work. I ended up, like, you know—I went on the pill instead and never went back to that. You know what I mean? So it’s all these things where I’m not really clear, you know?

Bedard: Well, so the thing that I would say about that, Jerusalem, is that’s really—what you’re talking about is an experience that’s really specific to who you are. Right? So you’re a “facts maxer.” You want the info.

Demsas: I’ve never heard that before in my life. (Laughs.)

Bedard: You want the information, right? And you’re a person who spends a lot of your day digesting and synthesizing huge amounts of information—primary research a lot, right? It’s your preferred way of understanding things, is getting lots and lots of facts and reading lots of different interpretations, and then making your own judgment about it.

So if you were my patient, and you expressed hesitancy about getting the IUD, the thing that—and I should say, you know, the reason. I have a really different orientation than lots of doctors, and that’s because my training is actually in palliative care, right? And palliative care is caring for people with serious illness or people who have life-limiting disease. And it’s very much attuned to and preoccupied with not just physical suffering but also existential distress. And because you are working with people who are sick in ways where the sort of calculus about what’s important changes a little bit, we do a lot of shared decision making. And I am trained in sitting with people and trying to decide what’s important to them, and given the options and sort of the constraints of reality, what can we do to meet their goals, right?

So that’s to say that my approach with you, if you were to ask me about getting an IUD and expressed hesitation, would be to delve deeper about, What are your concerns? Where did you read that? Where did you hear it? Do you know anybody in your life for whom that’s been an issue? Try to get really to the bottom of the thing that’s worrying you, and then also try to say, Well, what would make you feel better about it? And what would help you make this decision?

And then, for you, I think it’s probably true that the right thing for us to do would be to turn the computer screen towards you and look it up together, right? And then talk that through.

Demsas: I mean, I agree with you. I am now going to use “facts maxer” as part of my bio.

But I don’t know. I feel like I hear a lot from other people who I think maybe spend less time on econ working-paper sites—I hear a lot from them that they’re like, I just want the facts. I want someone to give me the facts. And I think that I’ve seen a lot of the same stuff that you have about, like, people have a difficult time hearing odds. I mean, I don’t think I’m particularly great at this. Like, one in 1,000 and one in 10,000—like, do you emotionally understand the differences between those numbers? Or does it just seem small but, like, there? Like, I know a thousand people, you know. Like, That’s a person.

And do you hear that the same way when you hear, like, There’s a one-in-a-thousand risk you have cancer, versus, There’s a one-in-a-thousand risk that you’ve just won $1,000? Like, do you understand those things in the same way? So I think all those things are true, but do you think that when people are saying, I want more information, they’re not actually asking for that?

Bedard: I think you have to—this is what I’m saying about, sort of: It’s different to be a doctor with a person in front of you, where I think the task is to try to explore that. Is this a person who genuinely needs more information? It would be clarifying to Jerusalem Demsas if I said to her, Actually, that study has been disproven by this subsequent study. That might be something that for you would be reassuring.

Demsas: That would work.

Bedard: It would do it, right? But I will give you the example of the patients that I took care of on Rikers. So I was a doctor on Rikers for six years. I worked in the jail system. I was there during COVID. The public-health agency that I worked for, that provided health care in the jail system, worked very hard to advocate for our patients—for people who are incarcerated on Rikers—to be among the early groups of folks who would receive the vaccine in 2021.

Demsas: I mean, the outbreaks in jails were astronomical.

Bedard: There was a period where Rikers had the highest prevalence rate in the country, at the very beginning. Jails have the worst possible conditions for airborne viral spread. So it made lots of sense to advocate for this. And also, it really felt like this important equity issue that we were saying, like, Look—these people’s lives matter, and their risk is incredibly high, and they should be prioritized.

New York City also, relatively early on in the vaccination rollout to incentivize people to get the vaccine, was offering people $100 if they got their shot. That was true in the community. We advocated hard to have something commensurate offered to people in jail—that if you accepted the vaccine, like any other New Yorker, you would be compensated with some money put into your commissary account. I don’t think it was $100. I can’t remember exactly what it was.

I walked around the jails offering vaccination to folks with one of our head nurses and one of our head physician’s assistants, both excellent communicators and people who had really great trust with our patients. And we would approach guys and say, Do you want to get the vaccine? And they would say, Hell no. And then we’d say, No, it’s really important. We would give them our spiel. And we would say, And we’ll put—whatever it was—$50 into your commissary. And almost to a man, the guys said, Now I’m definitely not getting it. The government’s never paid me to put anything in my body before.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Wow.

Bedard: And that wasn’t a situation where if I had said, No, no. Let me explain to you why this is happening. No, no. Let’s explore the facts around RNA vaccine safety, that was going to change hearts and minds, right?

That was a situation where I was encountering a resistance that was born from entirely different experience than the experience you’re describing, and with entirely different concerns. It was a low-trust environment. To respond to that, often I would joke back and be like, Well, then you should take it the first time that they do, right? And, like—

Demsas: Did that work?

Bedard: Sometimes. You know, mostly what worked was, like, sparring with dudes in a jokey way, in a way that helped them feel grounded in the idea that I, or my colleagues, were not going to try to hurt them. So in other words, their resistance was born out of low trust, and the right strategy was to try to increase trust between us and the folks we were trying to help.

And that’s just to say that there are lots of different reasons that people are vaccine hesitant. Vaccine hesitancy is not the same thing as being anti-vax, and most people are not strongly anti-vaccine. Most people who are in this RFK universe are vaccine hesitant, which means that they’re in this state of sort of vulnerable ambivalence about it.

And what you want to do, as an individual doctor, is sit with someone and try to explore where that ambivalence comes from and then address the source of that ambivalence. That’s really hard to do at the public-health level, right? It’s very different to do that at the policy level. At the policy level, mandates work. And so what you want to do is sort of, I think, have the mandate in place but think about how your communication makes it easier for people to live with those mandates and accept those mandates and feel aligned with them.

Demsas: So you brought us back to RFK and to mandates. And another part of your op-ed is that—and I don’t want this to just be about vaccines—but you say that “there are seeds of truth to some of what Mr. Kennedy says.” And I want you to overview. I mean, you’ve mentioned the mandates here, and you’ve talked a little bit about kind of some of the nutrition stuff, but what are these seeds of truth that you think we should be seeing in what he’s talking about?

Bedard: You know, I think the concerns about the relationship between pharma and government and drug regulation are really valid. They’re concerns that any liberal doctor would tell you they agree with, up to a point.

So when I say that there’s seeds of truth, common ground—the common ground stops at some point, where it’s not like Anthony Fauci traveled to China in order to engineer the COVID vaccine himself or whatever. Like, that’s just absolutely not true. But the idea that there is too cozy a relationship between pharma, pharma-sponsored patient-advocacy groups, the FDA, and the committees that provide drug approvals, and then provider associations—like, that’s definitely true. And there are lots of recent examples of that.

There’s, you know, sort of famously: In 2021, there was a really controversial, high-profile case of approval for a drug for Alzheimer’s that had just been shown not to work, basically. And Alzheimer’s—very common disease, incredibly devastating to families. People are desperate to believe that there is something that they can do for folks. We don’t really have good treatments right now. This was the sort of treatment that had received a lot of hype in advance.

The data was just not supportive of the idea that it was effective. And, in fact, it did obviously cause harm in some small number of patients. It got pushed through the FDA approval process anyway, largely, in part, due to pressure from the Alzheimer’s Association, which was receiving money from the drug company. That is a perfect-storm setup for an RFK-type critique. And it’s true. And at the time, I wrote an op-ed criticizing that process. So that’s a place where he and I totally agree.

There is a lot of truth, I think, in questioning the balance in terms of how much we’re thinking about treating diseases versus preventing them. He talks a lot about prevention. He talks a lot about lifestyle. He talks a lot about working on things upstream before they develop into sort of full-blown organ failure, right? So tackling childhood obesity by changing the food environment and encouraging exercise—it’s pretty hard to disagree with that, right?

Whether that means that, you know, I am a huge booster of the GLP-1 drugs, of Ozempic and its brethren, RFK is not, right? And that’s a place of disagreement. But it’s not a place of disagreement because I think that his premise is necessarily wrong. I think it’s a different idea about what’s realistic in terms of addressing a current prevalent issue.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: How I learned to be skeptical of fluoride in children’s toothpaste.

[Break]

Demsas: I think my Oh my gosh—there’s a seed of truth in something he’s saying moment was when I was reading an article from the Atlantic by our fantastic science reporter Sarah Zhang about fluoride. And the article is titled Why I Buy German Toothpaste Now.

And it’s about how, you know, she buys German fluoride-free toothpaste for her daughter. And it’s because at very high levels, fluoride can lead to fluorosis, which is when your teeth become mottled or structurally weak, but also that high levels of fluoride have been linked to lower IQ in children. And toothpaste contains, you know, 1,000 times more fluoride than recommended in drinking water, and you know, young kids don’t spit that out reliably.

And she talked to a researcher recommended to her from the American Dental Association, which is obviously a pro-fluoride group. And she told her that she would also choose fluoride-free toothpaste for her children. I also learned from that article that Canada recommends holding off on fluoride for most kids under age 3.

And it’s just this moment of just realizing, like: I’m not saying that we should all listen to RFK, but I think it’s strange that that’s the only space where I’m hearing anyone question some of these things. And so then it raises this problem of, like, Oh, is this tamped down? But then, you know, it’s also a weird reaction for me to have that, because I just read this in an article in The Atlantic. So is it being tamped down at all?

So I wonder why you think that dynamic happens, where sometimes, you know, the public is talking about it? Like, these are people who are parts of the public-health establishment who are talking to journalists. Journalists are reporting that. They’re giving people facts. And yet, it feels like the only truth tellers are RFK Jr. and people on these bro podcasts. Like, what is that coming from?

Bedard: I think the operative word is question, right? It’s not necessarily that you feel definitively after reading Sarah’s article—that you understand, with total certainty, what the deal is with fluoride. What you took away from that article was, There’s more uncertainty around this intervention than I initially appreciated.

And what feels difficult is that to learn that, then subsequently makes you feel betrayed, right? That that uncertainty had never been introduced to you before and, in fact, that you had sort of felt, perhaps—I’m projecting, but I think this is probably true—sort of encouraged to assume that anybody questioning fluoride was coming from an anti-science place, was a crank, right? And then you think, I don’t want to be sort of blindly following things that there isn’t good evidence for.

It’s really, really hard for public health to effectively communicate around uncertainty. The pandemic was an incredible example of this. This has been discussed ad nauseam. Lots of mistakes were made, right? Initially, we didn’t appreciate that it was airborne, right? Initially—but even before that, we told people that they didn’t actually need to wear masks, and then we said, Actually, you need to wear a mask all the time, and you can never take your mask off, and you have to wear your mask even when you’re jogging in the park. Then we said, Don’t worry—you’ll get the vaccine, and nobody will get COVID after we have the vaccine. And then we vaccinated everyone, and the Delta wave happened, like, six weeks later.

The way that the public experiences that is as a series of reversals that feel like betrayals, I think. What I think we should do differently, regardless of whether it’s Kennedy or somebody else in charge, is communicate with the public differently about uncertainty—do different kinds of expectation setting.

Another good example is: At the beginning of the pandemic, when people went into what we’re calling lockdown—although lockdown was never really lockdown in the U.S., the way it was in some other places—initially, people sort of said, right, Go in for two weeks, and we’ll flatten the curve. Or, Go in for a couple of weeks, and we’ll flatten the curve.

And actually, we didn’t know what it was going to take, right? We didn’t know how long it was going to take to make a difference or to be safe. We didn’t totally really know what go inside had to mean. Did it mean that you couldn’t go outside at all? There were certainly people who did that. Did it mean that schools shouldn’t open for two years? Did it mean that once we sort of had enough epidemiologic data about average risk of serious illness in kids, we would make a different decision about schools?

There was very little transparency around that decision making. And essentially, there was very little transparency around the uncertainty around that decision making, right? There was a real feeling and sense that the public had to hear clear messaging: You have to wear a mask or it’s unsafe. But actually, everything is sort of a risk-benefit calculus, right? And once some of the things that people were initially told turned out not to be true, they experienced those reversals as a betrayal, and then they were pissed, and they didn’t trust anything going forward.

And that’s what I think sort of your fluoride experience is like a microcosm of, which is this sense of, like, I’ve been duped—and not because you’re convinced now that fluoride is, for sure, bad but more because you think, I thought this was settled matter, because you guys told me it was, and now I realize it’s not, and it makes me wonder what else I should be questioning.

Demsas: I think a lot of, you know, public-health folks have felt really attacked, maybe, post-COVID or even during a lot of the COVID experience. And one pushback I imagine that they would raise to our conversation, and to conversations like this happening everywhere, is that they actually do debate a lot the ethics and need for vaccine mandates all the time.

There’s one study I came across when researching for this episode in the Journal of Medical Ethics, and it was asking whether universities should mandate third-dose COVID-19 boosters. And they estimate that to prevent one hospitalization over a six-month period, you’d have to vaccinate between, roughly, 31,000 to 42,000 young adults. In order to do that, you’re getting a handful of adverse events and up to 5,000 adverse reactions that would “interfere with daily activities.” And as a result of that, they conclude that university booster mandates are unethical because they don’t take into account the low risk this group faces with Omicron, which was the wave at the time, and they’re just not proportionate, among other reasons.

And that’s the exact sort of balancing that I think that a lot of people feel like, I wish public health was like this. And I myself did not know that this was a way that bioethicists were interacting with this question. And so I guess part of that makes me feel like it’s a bit hopeless. Like, is this a problem of whether it’s social media? But also, just the way that you’re kind of describing the scientific iterative process reads as a series of betrayals rather than just, you know, a scientific iterative process, where you’re learning and changing your mind and updating. How optimistic are you that this balance is even possible?

Bedard: A few things. One thing is that I think what you’re describing there, in terms of the really painstaking decision-making process that goes into things like vaccine mandates—that’s the standard, right? And that’s how everything works, with the obvious caveat that in emergency situations where you’re dealing with a circumstance where there’s a ton of uncertainty and unsettled evidence, you have to make decisions anyway that are your best guess in the moment, right?

And so the pandemic, I think, was a little bit of an outlier situation—compared to, say, the way that we think about vaccine mandates for a childhood vaccination—where, in March of 2020, the U.S. government had to make a lot of decisions really quickly with imperfect information. And they had to do that without being able to do all of the modeling you just described, right?

And so, again, what I wish we had done differently then is been more transparent about that uncertainty and talked about how we would then potentially revise that decision making in the future as more information came out. So, This is what we’re saying you should do today based on what we know. As we learn more, this guidance may change. Here’s what we’ll tell you that will help you feel like that change makes sense. If we are wrong, there are potential consequences, and we might do something differently sooner than we’re saying, right? Like, you can sort of—there’s no character limit, right? You can say it all.

Demsas: You can only tweet your public-health pronouncements, and you can’t get premium. (Laughs.)

Bedard: Yeah. Exactly. There was and often is, I think, this sort of mistaken sense that the public needs to hear short, clear, decisive messaging, even when the circumstance that you’re in necessitates a totally different kind of communication. So that’s the caveat case, I think, is that there are lots of times when you don’t have that information that you just sort of described around—by the time Omicron came around, we had tons of information about what the real risk was to 22-year-olds, right? We didn’t have that at the beginning.

But for childhood vaccination, for example, we do have that information. The childhood vaccine schedule is something that has been created with a ton of thought and a ton of data, and a ton of thought and data that’s balancing lots of different considerations—not just safety and efficacy of the vaccines themselves, but information about how often people are willing to come to the doctor, right?

There was a really great piece written in 2009 by Danielle Ofri, who’s a doctor at Bellevue, here in New York. And 2009 was when the H1N1 swine flu outbreak happened. And she wrote this piece about what she calls the “emotional epidemiology of the H1N1 influenza vaccine.” Her patients—patients who generally did not accept the flu vaccine—when H1N1 first broke out began calling her office, being like, When is the vaccine going to be available? When is the vaccine going to be available? And she was surprised because they were generally folks who had not accepted the seasonal flu vaccine in the past.

It took a little while—and by a little while, I really mean months, not a year, right—for an H1N1 vaccine to become available to her patients. In those intervening months, many of those patients who initially had this sense of urgency lost it and, in fact, changed their minds and ultimately didn’t want the vaccine once it became available. And she talks about—I just want to read this quote that she has in here: “Emotional epidemiology does not remain static. As autumn rolled around,” which is when the vaccine became available, “I sensed a peeved expectation from my patients that this swine flu problem should have been solved already. The fact that it wasn’t ‘solved,’ that the medical profession seemed somehow to be dithering, created an uneasy void. Not knowing whether to succumb to panic or to indifference, patients instead grew suspicious. No amount of rational explanation—about the natural variety of influenza strains, about the simple issue of outbreak timing that necessitates a separate H1N1 vaccine—could allay this wariness.”

I think that this void that Ofri is identifying is really important. When you aren’t communicating consistently with the public in a way that makes the work that you’re doing transparent to them, the thinking that you’re doing transparent to them, and in a way that is in some ways responsive to their feelings, then it feels as though there is a void, and into that void people project all sorts of things and end up relying on information from other sources and changing their mind or deciding that they don’t trust you anymore.

Demsas: So I think it’s an interesting kind of tension, though. Because, you know, I wrote this article in 2022, and the headline was, “Is the FDA Too Cautious?” And part of what the article talks about is that the FDA is way too conservative when assessing clinical trials for therapies of, quote, “terminal illnesses with no existing therapies such as pancreatic cancer.” So these are areas where you would want the FDA to be overly willing to approve therapeutics, because the risk of death and disability are already high for the individual patients.

And there’s this anecdote from Henry Miller, a former FDA physician, that I’m going to read quickly. He says, “In the early 1980s, when I headed the team at the FDA that was reviewing the NDA [New Drug Application] for insulin … we were ready to recommend approval a mere four months after the application was submitted. With quintessential bureaucratic reasoning, my supervisor refused to sign off on the approval—even though he agreed that the data provided compelling evidence of the drug’s safety and effectiveness. ‘If anything goes wrong,’ he argued, ‘think how bad it will look that we approved the drug so quickly.’”

So earlier in our conversation, you mentioned the Alzheimer’s drug, which I think, universally, everyone was kind of condemning as being a situation where the FDA had rushed something through approvals, even though there was not good evidence that it was going to be beneficial for people who needed that drug.

And then when I wrote this article, there were a lot of people who were like, Yes, it’s so important. There were scientists, outside individuals, public-health researchers from the outside who were like, Yes, it’s really a problem that the FDA doesn’t behave this way. There’s tension that we have in this conversation that I can imagine is very frustrating for people in government, where they’re being told, Hey. Why won’t you approve these tests quickly? Even though you’re not sure that they’re good, why won’t you act with greater degree of concern for people who need something right now, rather than trying to get the perfect thing later?

And on their end, they’re saying, We need to increase trust. And trust means provide people things when they’re ready, provide people things when we can actually defend them clearly. And on the other hand, they’re being told and criticized for not doing that. And there’s, obviously, this dynamic here, where you get blamed for things that go wrong much more than you get blamed for things that you don’t do, because people often don’t see those sorts of things.

And so I guess I ask you: You’re, obviously, trying to get to a point where there’s a lot more of this democracy, openness, talking about these individual problems, but it seems to also open up a lot of these institutions to kind of daily critique about how they’re not actually getting things right on a day-to-day basis. Like, Well, yesterday you said this, and now you’re saying this. So I mean, how do you think about that problem?

Bedard: So the first thing I would say is: The science actually matters a lot here. So there are examples, like the one that you just gave, where there are things—there are discoveries, breakthroughs, drugs, whatever—where the evidence is just sort of incontrovertible right out the gate, right? Like, way before sort of a study’s expected end point, it’s very clear the benefit is there, and people are tolerating it well enough, and the condition is serious enough that we should try to expedite it.

Expedited approval really came to the fore during the AIDS crisis, when this was a huge issue, right—where AIDS patients, understandably, were like, We’re dying today, so it doesn’t make sense for us that you have to go through this bureaucratic approvals process. We’re willing to try therapies that are promising, that may not work, even that may have risks, now because—

Demsas: We’re dying.

Bedard: We’re dying. The natural course of our disease is such that we don’t have the time to wait for your process. That’s clearly reasonable, and Anthony Fauci, in response to those very complaints, adjusted the clinical-trials approval process to have a fast-track option. There’s compassionate-use-case approvals, where for diseases that are rapidly terminal, seriously debilitating, etcetera, the threshold to be able to let people try something that’s in development is much lower.

There’s also always the possibility of enrolling in clinical trials, right, as a way to try therapy. And that’s an example of sort of just—there’s both sort of a rigorous system around deciding whether or not somebody is eligible for something, but there are opportunities before something has been proven safe, or not 100 percent, to let people try it. The flip side is that there are lots of things that pharma is working on that don’t work that well, that are for problems that aren’t that debilitating, right, and where rushing approval for those things doesn’t make any sense, because the risk even of sort of minor adverse effects way outweighs the sort of tepid benefit that they might offer.

And so, to me, the challenge for the agency is less about whether they look good or bad, and more about trying to sort out those types of problems, right? When does it make sense for us to err on the side of being as conservative as possible in approving something? Versus, when does it make sense for us to err on the side of being as open to risk as possible because the alternative of continuing to live in an environment without treatment is so devastating to people?

The way that the FDA and other public-health agencies—the NIH, etcetera—have tried to get at this issue that you’re talking about is by having patients involved at sort of every step of the drug-approval process, the research process, etcetera, etcetera. That doesn’t work all that well, I don’t think, because there’s a little bit of an elite-capture problem there, which is that: Any patient who ends up sitting on the committee for drug approval stops actually being a representative of that patient population, knows too much, is sort of influenced by lots of other factors, etcetera, etcetera. And I don’t think just involving patients along the way really sort of solves the problem that you’re talking about, but it’s the way that the agencies try to do it now.

Demsas: So I can imagine that there are people who are very afraid of RFK’s ascent and, like, kind of the increase in skepticism around basic public-health measures that are listening to the conversation and just going, I feel like you’re just sane-washing. People who are serious trust the science people or public-health researchers, or if you’re serious about preventing long-term disability from COVID reinfections—I mean, if you really care about those things, then what you should do is just constantly sort of oppose that.

And so how do you think about the risk of sane-washing, instead of just going, like, Hey—we’re just saying we agree that sometimes Big Pharma is way too involved in the regulatory process. That doesn’t mean we think that X conspiracy theory is true. So like, what is the balance there? Who’s responsible for making it?

Bedard: So I’m a little bit different, I think, than lots of doctors because of my background and my practice experience. One thing is about being a palliative-care doctor. The other thing is that I have always worked with marginalized populations where there’s a high prevalence of substance-use issues. And because of that, I’m very sort of seeped in the harm-reduction approach to problems.

And I don’t think that advocacy from the public-health community or doctors is going to be what prevents RFK from getting through the Senate and being approved to become an HHS secretary. I think he’s gonna end up getting the job. And I also think—because of the sort of way that he is ensconced in Trump World and the fact that he comes with his own constituency that Trump sort of needs—in the outcome where, like, a couple brave senators stand up and decide that they’re not going to vote for him, I think he gets made health czar or something like that. Like, I don’t think he just goes away.

So part of the harm-reduction ethos is just about being real about what the challenges are. And to me, the fact that I don’t want RFK to be anywhere near in charge of the federal government’s health apparatus, it doesn’t make it not so. And my sort of principled opposition to that doesn’t feel like an intervention that has a lot of juice.

That’s really different, I will say, than I felt in 2016 with the first Trump administration, where I sort of felt like there was lots of reason to believe that resistance was the path. I don’t feel that way, and I don’t think we’re seeing that, generally, now, right? Like, we’re seeing a lot less sort of resistance stuff and a lot more trying to figure out how to make the reality of this situation less harmful.

I don’t think it’s sane-washing him to say, Look—if this guy’s gonna be in charge, what does it look like for us to recognize who he is and where he’s coming from, recognize that he has a growing movement of people behind him, who aren’t just going to go away because we yell at them? What does it look like to try to achieve something that doesn’t even have to be consensus but is understanding between us so that the entire sort of public-health apparatus doesn’t just get dismantled?

Demsas: That seems a perfect place to ask our last question, which is: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Bedard: Okay, I have two answers to this.

Demsas: Okay.

Bedard: I thought about it a lot.

Demsas: Lots of “good on paper” problems in your life. (Laughs.)

Bedard: And they were, like—these are not necessarily good on paper just to me. I think that there are two things that I think. The first is the Manhattan Project.

Demsas: What?

Bedard: It’s hard for me to think of anything cooler in the world than taking the best scientists in the country—like, the best scientists from around the world, basically—and bringing them all to the desert and being like, Figure out the hardest scientific problem of the moment, and we’ll give you unlimited resources to do it. Unbelievably sexy proposition. Turned out really bad. You know what I mean?

If I think about the Manhattan Project still, I’m very seduced—maybe you’re not at all, but I’m very seduced by it. It’s also like: You think you’re beating the Germans. It feels really important.

Demsas: Yeah.

Bedard: The other thing that I was going to say is: small plates. (Laughs.)

Demsas: So Manhattan Project and small plates.

Bedard: Manhattan Project and small plates.

So I think one of the major millennial failures is the invention and then rollout of small plates to, like, every yuppie restaurant in every city in the country—which is like: You go. You sit down. There’s, like, this menu of items that are all very expensive and very tiny, and they’re supposed to be for sharing, but they’re not big enough to share.

And then the waiter comes and, like, does this whole explanation, like, Have you ever been here before? Let me explain to you how the menu works. Things at the top are small, and things at the bottom are bigger. And then the menu proceeds from, like, $18 for four anchovies to, like, eventually you get to, like, a whole fish. You know what I mean?

And, like, (1) it’s insane. Like, you can’t—

Demsas: The sharing part is the most annoying part, where there’s, like, three things, and there’s five people at the table, and so you’re cutting each one—

Bedard: Of course! If the concept is you should be sharing, so you can try lots of things, then everything has to be family style. It should be big, not small. Big plates is what you need!

Demsas: Big plates. Wow. This is very attractive to me as an Eritrean because our food is the biggest of plates. It is one big, shared plate. So you know what? Sure.

Bedard: That’s the right approach!

Demsas: Yeah. Not the tapas way—the Eritrean way.

Bedard: Tapas was never meant to be a meal. Tapas is, like, an hors d’oeuvre situation. It’s not supposed to be that, like, it’s 7 p.m., and I’m starving. I’m sitting down with another couple, and we’re, you know, gingerly ripping apart one piece of sourdough between us.

Demsas: You know what? You’ve convinced me. I’m going to launch a tirade against this next time I’m at a restaurant to a poor, unsuspecting waiter. Well, Rachael, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.

Bedard: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. 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.

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“The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus, “and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.” In other words: If it feels good, do it.

Aristippus was a student of Socrates who founded a minor school of philosophy called Cyrenaicism. As Cyrenaic thinking evolved, it centered on two ideas. First, objective reality is unknowable, so we should pay attention only to our own subjective experience of that reality. Second, that experience should be as pleasant as possible, meaning that we should maximize immediate pleasure and avoid pain. Aristippus himself focused especially on the first part, pleasure—preferably involving young courtesans and old wine.

Cyrenaic hedonism still pops up as a significant cultural influence from time to time, as it did during the hippie era in America. That pleasure-first principle sounds a bit quaint today, given all the talk of a sex recession and young people being less adventurous than they used to be. But another form of Cyrenaicism is currently very strong: the idea that besides seeking pleasure, we should avoid pain.

The memetic way that such an idea can spread means that you may have fallen into this philosophy without even realizing it. This column is intended to help you recognize that possibility, and understand why it can be so damaging for your health and well-being—and how you can break free.

[Arthur C. Brooks: There are two kinds of happy people]

A Cyrenaic belief in hedonistic abandon might sound harmless and even fun until we grasp how pleasure works in the brain. Charles Darwin reasoned that pleasurable sensations, which are primal in the way they involve the brain’s limbic system, evolved to help us survive and pass on our genes. For example, humans crave highly caloric foods and fixate on attractive bodies because our brains are wired to give us a biochemical reward for acting in ways that prevent starvation and help us find mates.

Unfortunately, although Mother Nature is good at making us desire what will keep us and our genes alive another day, she does not care at all whether we’re happy. That condition underpins why Mick Jagger sings, “I can’t get no satisfaction … ’cause I try, and I try, and I try.” Or, to put that more scientifically, the gap between wanting and liking is a major neurobiological disconnect. When you think of something that you are programmed to desire, your brain experiences a little spritz of dopamine, which makes you anticipate pleasure—wanting. But if the payoff is what you anticipated, no more dopamine is forthcoming, denying you much liking. In other words, the pleasurable experience has to be better than you expected in order to produce more dopamine. That generally means that you have to keep upping the dose of whatever pleasure you are pursuing, be it booze, candy, gambling, or pornography.

Fruitless pleasure seeking thus easily leads to addiction and misery—what we might call the “Cyrenaic paradox.” If all you do is look for gratification, you will no longer find it. As the psychiatrist Anna Lembke, the author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, puts it, “The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”

The Cyrenaic paradox works in an inverted way when it comes to suffering. Researchers have demonstrated that when people fear their physical pain and strive to minimize it at all costs, by pulling back from daily activities, the pain tends to remain chronic. This is sometimes called the “fear-avoidance model.” Patients who fear physical pain become hypervigilant and make efforts to elude it. This leads to inactivity and disability, and thus greater pain: The cycle continues and worsens. Say, for example, you hurt your back. Fearing the pain, you baby it and load up on analgesics. Through disuse, your back actually becomes weaker, leading to greater, more constant pain. Many studies have shown this pattern.

This cycle of avoidance and worsening pain lies at the center of our drug-abuse epidemic. In the U.S., prescriptions for opioid analgesics to treat pain increased 104 percent from 2000 to 2010. This led to an explosion of opioid addiction and overdose deaths. At that point, crackdowns lowered the prescription levels, but overdoses continued to rise as black-market-opioid use grew.

Obviously, pain treatment is necessary and appropriate for many people. The problem comes when this is the first line of defense because pain is considered something that must be eliminated, not a normal part of life to be managed. Just as pleasure seeking tends to make pleasure unattainable, a strategy of pain avoidance can make suffering worse.

[Read: Pain doesn’t belong on a scale of zero to 10]

The treatment of pain and the avoidance of pain are two very different things. To treat pain effectively requires losing your fear of it and your desire to expunge it as a result. Pain is an unavoidable part of life, and the most effective treatment in many cases involves learning to thrive despite some degree of it. If your back hurts, you may well find healthy ways to increase your mobility and lower your physical discomfort, but your treatment might also include learning to live with that discomfort and manage it at an acceptable level.

So far we’ve been talking about physical pain, but mental pain works in a similar way. For example, people who experience depression do well to treat their symptoms, but striving to eliminate them typically makes them worse. According to recent research published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, a belief that happiness requires an absence of pain undermines happiness itself. Other scholars have found that mental-pain avoidance is positively correlated with suicide attempts among those who are depressed. Unfortunately, these mistaken views are reinforced by professionals who tell patients with any mental distress that their discomfort is a pathology, convincing them that they are ill and defective.

Therapists and clinicians understand that pain is part of life. They advise their patients not to run away from their reality—and certainly not to self-medicate with recreational drugs and alcohol. This better understanding recognizes that only in facing one’s pain can one learn to live fully and treat it successfully. Particularly if you naturally have high levels of negative affect—if, in other words, you tend to have low moods—part of a full and good life might be accepting this fact about yourself.

Several therapeutic treatments explicitly incorporate acceptance, and have proved successful. One is mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, in which patients learn that avoidance can be one of the causes of discomfort itself. This type of cognitive treatment teaches patients to accept their distress as painful but as neither catastrophic nor impossible to lessen. This is very similar to the Buddhist concept that suffering = resistance × pain, which implies that nonresistance is the beginning of effective treatment to reduce suffering. This therapeutic approach is also effective in the treatment of addiction, because it can help an addicted person accept their condition honestly, which facilitates a fuller understanding of the gravity of the problem and a greater capacity to stop using.

Another treatment option that has achieved good results is known as acceptance and commitment therapy. Patients are encouraged to acknowledge and accept their pain, but then to shift their attention toward the positive aspects of their life. This technique relies on reversing our innate tendency to focus on what we don’t like rather than what we do—a phenomenon called “negativity bias.” When mental or physical pain is chronic, this evolutionary bias can make us one-track-minded about it, leading to avoidance behaviors and making things worse. Instead, we can recognize that pain is real, but also learn to focus on what is right in our life. For instance, I might wake up with a lot of pain, but I can shift my focus away from the pain to the facts that I wake up in a home where people love me and that I have a job I value.

[From the October 2018 issue: How to live better, according to Nietzsche]

In either its positive, pleasure-seeking or negative, pain-avoiding forms, Cyrenaicism is a mistaken model for human happiness. Rather than taking the advice of Aristippus, we would do better to follow that of his fellow Greek philosopher, Epictetus the Stoic. In his second-century ethical manual, Enchiridion, Epictetus wrote: “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”

At the start, I called Cyrenaicism a “minor school of philosophy”; Stoicism is better known and far more influential, and justly so. But the larger point is that your philosophy matters—because it will help you exercise control over your life and your happiness. An attitude of acceptance rather than avoidance can empower you to treat your pain appropriately and manage your expectations about what a good life means. That, in turn, will enable you to learn and grow as a person—and truly savor your sweetest experiences.

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This episode, from our first season, called How to Build a Happy Life, features host Arthur Brooks in conversation with the psychotherapist and Atlantic contributing writer Lori Gottlieb about how the first step in making room for more joy in your life is learning how to identify it.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Megan Garber: Hey, it’s Megan Garber, one of the co-hosts of How to Know What’s Real. We’re excited to share with you a special series drawn from past seasons of the How To series. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been revisiting episodes around the theme of winding down. This episode is from our very first season, How to Build a Happy Life, and is called “How to Identify What You Enjoy.” It first published in 2021 during the pandemic, even though that was a really challenging time. This is still one of my favorite episodes to this day. Host Arthur Brooks explores how the first step in making room for more joy in your life is learning how to identify it.

[Music]

Brooks: This is How to Build a Happy Life, The Atlantic’s podcast on all things happiness. I’m Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and happiness correspondent at The Atlantic. In this special bonus episode of the How to Build a Happy Life series, I sat down with The Atlantic’s own Lori Gottlieb. We reviewed a lot of what we’ve covered in this series, from enjoyment and emotional management to the practical ways to apply the science of happiness to our daily lives. Enjoy!

Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Atlantic Festival. I’m really delighted because this episode of the podcast, it features one of the top psychotherapists in America today, The Atlantic’s Lori Gottlieb. We’re going to talk through some of the how-tos of navigating the natural ups and downs in life. And later in the episode, we’re going to feature some of my very favorite guest stars, which is you, our listeners.

So let’s start by saying hi to Lori. Welcome to How to Build a Happy Life, Lori.

Lori Gottlieb: Well, thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Brooks: Yeah, it’s wonderful to have you here.

I’ve been looking forward to working with you in some way for the longest time. I teach a class at Harvard Business School called Leadership and Happiness, and on the first day of class, I define happiness. Now, most of my students think happiness is a feeling. That’s wrong. I mean, happiness has a lot of feelings attached to it, and feelings are really important. But it’s not a feeling per se. I describe happiness as more of the way that you would take apart a meal.

Happiness is like a banquet. And you can define it in a lot of different ways, in terms of the ingredients; you can define it in terms of the dishes. But I like to start with the macronutrients of any meal. Now, if you’re eating a, literally, a meal, the three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And I say that, similarly, there are three macronutrients to happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. People who are truly happy about their lives, they have all three. And they have them in abundance, and they have them in balance. And people who are out of balance [with] enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose tend to define themselves as unhappy. They know that something is wrong with their happiness.

And so when I’m talking to somebody who says “I’m really unhappy,” I start digging in on one of those dimensions. So that’s where I want to start. And I want to start with the first of those, which is enjoyment. I define enjoyment as pleasure plus elevation. When you learn something about the sources of your pleasures, it turns into authentic enjoyment, which is a part of a happy life. Do you agree with that?

Gottlieb: I do. I would say that enjoyment plus connection. I really feel like connection—

Brooks: Connection with people?

Gottlieb: Right, right. Well, there are certain solitary enjoyments. You know, let’s say that you’re an artist or let’s say that you’re a musician or let’s say you’re reading a book. You know that’s enjoyable to you, depending on who you are. But I think that when you talk about the ingredients, I think connection really has to be in there. And what I see in the therapy room is that when you look at those ingredients of happiness, if you don’t have connection added to those ingredients, it’s going to be hard. And I love the way that you are talking about happiness—not as a feeling, because I think that happiness as a byproduct of living our lives in a meaningful way is what we all aspire to. But happiness as a goal in and of itself often is a recipe for disaster, because they’re not looking at the ingredients that you’re talking about.

Brooks: Mm. Yeah, for sure. And this is completely consistent with the findings of, you know, Bob Waldinger and George Vaillant and all those guys who have done all that longitudinal work that shows that the happiest people in their 70s and 80s are people who established the most human connections in their 20s and 30s. They got really, really good at love. They’ve got good love chops, is the bottom line. And so this is the No. 1 ingredient probably, in enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, is human connection.

Gottlieb: Well, right, and I think that the question that people ask themselves, I think that we all ask ourselves, when it comes to happiness is: How can I love and be loved? I think that is the essential question. And that’s where the enjoyment, I think, comes from too: What does it mean to not only love someone and be loved, but how do you love yourself too? And so often we don’t know how to do that. We can make ourselves incredibly unhappy by being unloving to ourselves.

Brooks: I want to talk about the specific macronutrient of enjoyment here for a second. One of the characteristics of people who present with clinical depression is a syndrome called anhedonia, which is the inability to experience pleasure and enjoyment. Even if you’re not clinically depressed, clearly if you’re having a hard time enjoying things, you’re going to be unhappy. As we just talked about a minute ago, and even better, if you’re enjoying things in connection, in communion with other people, because that actually creates the most fulfillment.

Do you see patients who because of whatever is going on in their lives—because of an over-sense of discipline or because they’re excessively stoic or for whatever reason—that they have insufficient enjoyment of their lives? And if so, what do you tell them? How can I enjoy my life more?

Gottlieb: Well, this is kind of like a chicken-or-the-egg thing. So anhedonia is when people are depressed; they literally cannot experience joy in the things that would normally bring them joy if they were not depressed. So it’s not that they don’t know how to enjoy things. It’s that because of depression, they aren’t enjoying activities that would normally be pleasurable to them.

But yes, I think that there are people who don’t know how to separate from that. There are people who don’t know how to have fun. I think that we think somehow in our culture today of ambition and moving forward—you know, all sorts of pressures—that people think that fun is frivolous. They don’t realize that it’s actually essential. So when you talk about enjoyment, people think, Well, that’s optional. You know, like if I have time. And then, of course, they don’t make the time because they think that it’s something that’s not necessary, and it absolutely is.

Brooks: So what’s an example of somebody who would come to you and they’re not enjoying their lives. They’re not taking time to have fun. What’s the assignment that you give them? Because, you know, in your show, you give somebody an assignment and then you see how it’s going. So if I came to you and I said, “I just don’t know how to have fun. I work and I work and I work all the time, and I’m not very happy.” And you say, “Arthur, do these three things.” You know: What’s the kind of thing that you would tell me? What’s the assignment?

Gottlieb: Well, actually, on the Dear Therapist podcast, we do a therapy session with people. And then, as you said, we give them a homework assignment that they have a week to do, and they report back to us. We had this 16-year-old who presented this exact issue. She said, “I am just trying to get into college, I’m doing all of these things. I never have any fun.” And so we gave her an assignment where we wanted her to have more balance in her life, and we gave her a specific assignment. This is the Libby episode in season one.

And she was somebody who was very reluctant to do this, because she thought that it would somehow hold her back, that it would somehow make her less competitive for college, that it would affect her in a way. Because nobody around her was having fun, by the way. Everybody was pretending to have fun.

You know, on social media it looks like everybody’s having just a great time. But in reality, everybody was really stressed out, and nobody was making time for fun. And so she did that. And she found that when she made time for fun she not only enjoyed her life more, but she found that actually it made her more productive. It actually helped her to get ahead. And so it was interesting, because I think that we have this idea that, you know, having fun is going to hold us back somehow. And in theory, we want to have fun, but we don’t actually say, “I’m going to put that on my calendar. I’m going to make that a priority.” And I think we really need to.

Brooks: That’s pretty interesting in our hyper-scheduled and and highly schematicized life that certain people have to actually put it in their Outlook: for 45 minutes, have fun. It seems like fun would be the most natural and spontaneous thing that people could have or do. And yet for people who are so scheduled all the way up into the tree, they actually need to treat it like anything else and take time for it, right? Is that what you’re saying?

Gottlieb: I think it needs to be specific too, not just “have fun.” It’s getting in touch with how you have fun. A lot of people don’t even know how they have fun anymore. As adults, they grow up. They forget what fun looks like, because they’re so busy with all of their responsibilities and then all of the things they think they need to be doing. And they don’t realize, first of all, how they’re spending their time.

So many people say, “I don’t have time for this kind of thing.” And yet if they actually do a 24-hour diary—which is what I will prescribe in therapy a lot—where they have to write down everything that they’re doing for 24 hours and sometimes 48 hours. And when they realize that, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I spent like an hour and a half mindlessly scrolling through the internet.” And that actually dampened their mood. It wasn’t a pleasurable activity for them. It was like, “Oh, I’m so behind; look at what everybody else is doing.” Or “Look at that person. They went to Hawaii, and I don’t get to go to Hawaii.” Or whatever it is.

So it wasn’t even a pleasurable activity. That hour and a half could have been spent doing something that would have actually brought them joy. And I want to use the word joy here when we talk about happiness. You’re right—happiness is not an emotion. Joy is an emotion, right? And so what brings you joy? And so specifically, people don’t know. They’re like, If I had the time, what would fun even look like? I don’t even know what that looks like. And so really, being able to identify, how do you have fun? What does fun look like for you? So that when you schedule time to have fun or make time so that it becomes not a thing that you schedule after a while, but just something that’s a natural part of your existence. What does that look like? People don’t even know sometimes. If you said to them, “How do you have fun?,” they look at me like, Fun? What’s that?

Brooks: It’s interesting that people don’t know how to have fun. And maybe they used to, and maybe they’ve forgotten. So if they present to Lori Gottlieb and say, “I’m not having any fun” or “I don’t have enough enjoyment in life,” the first assignment is not to have fun. The first assignment you’re going to give them is Think about the last time that you had fun—what were you doing—so that you can remember how to have fun in the first place. Is that right?

Gottlieb: Yeah, and a good way to figure out what is fun for you is to look at your envy. People don’t like to feel envy. They feel like it’s kind of like a taboo. They don’t want to feel that. They think that they’re a bad person for feeling that. But actually, envy is very instructive, and envy tells us something about desire. And so I always say to people: Follow your envy. It tells you what you want. And so when you are envious of someone or something or some experience, that’s a clue to what might be enjoyable for you. We are so hesitant to look at our desire. We don’t want to give space for desire. We’re so much about the shoulds, as opposed to the “What do I want? What does desire look like for me?” We feel like it’s almost a selfish act.

Brooks: That’s really interesting, because one of the things that I talk about an awful lot in the study of discernment—which is a part of every philosophical and major religious tradition, from Buddhism to Judaism to Christianity and even stoicism—is that discernment is actually not about “What should I do?” Discernment is about “What do I want?” It’s finding the nature of your own desire. And so that is as old as the hills. And yet it somehow escapes us again and again and again. And when I talk to young people, a lot of my students, they think they’re trying to figure out what they want to do. And actually, they should be thinking about trying to figure out what they want. That’s what they really don’t know: what they want. And that’s what you’re trying to get at, right, Lori?

Gottlieb: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there’s so much noise out there where sometimes people can’t hear themselves. So they conflate what society wants them to want, what their parents want them to want, what the culture tells them they should want versus what they inherently want. And if it goes against some of those things—like some of those culturally accepted things of what we should want—it’s very hard for them to even acknowledge that that’s something that they want.

Brooks: Let’s move on to the second pillar, the second macronutrient of a happy life, which is satisfaction. Now this is a killer. Satisfaction is really tough. I mean, Mick Jagger saying “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The truth is you can get satisfaction. The problem is you can’t keep satisfaction. Satisfaction is the reward when you meet a goal. It’s the reward for a job well done. It’s a promotion. It’s the race that you get. It’s the little burst of joy that you get from meeting one of your own personal goals. And the big problem that people have is that they get a little burst of this joy, perhaps—but then it goes away, and then they’re running, running, running, running again.

And there’s a whole lot of neurobiology about homeostasis that helps us understand this, and there’s the metaphor of the hedonic treadmill that shows us why we keep running and running and running, which is really good because it shows that after a little while, you’re mostly running out of fear because if you stop on a treadmill, you know, it’s going to happen.

But the real question then becomes, How do we deal with that? You do need satisfaction to be a happy person, but you can’t keep it. So what do you tell people who are workaholics and are addicted to success—and they’re just trying and trying and trying, as Mick Jagger sang, to get satisfaction, and they’re not getting it? The result is that they’re missing something from their lives. When somebody presents with the dissatisfaction dilemma, what do you tell them?

Gottlieb: Well, as you were talking, I was thinking about the people who present almost like a colander instead of a bowl. So it’s kind of like, you know, something goes in and it doesn’t stay there. The satisfaction gets there, and then, like, it just goes through the holes. It doesn’t stay, like in a bowl, right? And I think that the people who are happiest when we talk about people—and I would maybe use the word contentment—the people who are most content, who feel most full and fulfilled in their lives, are people who are what are called satisficers. And this is Barry Schwartz from The Paradox of Choice. And he talks about the difference between satisficers and maximizers. Satisficers are those people who, let’s say: You’re trying to buy a sweater, and you go into a store and you find a sweater that fits you. It looks good. It’s the right price. You buy it, you’re happy, you’re done. Right? It meets all of your criteria.

The maximizer will see that sweater and kind of put it under another sweater, so nobody will buy it. And just in case, go to the next store. And keep looking, because maybe they’ll find something a little bit cheaper or a little bit more attractive or, you know, whatever it is, right? Just something that’s a little bit better in some dimension. And they keep looking, and then maybe they find it. Maybe they don’t. But if they do find it, they tend not to be as happy with that purchase as if they had just bought the original sweater. And if they don’t find it, then they regret that they didn’t get the original one. And the problem is, even if they buy that first one that met all their criteria, the maximizer might be happy for about a week—and then the next week, they’re walking by a store and they see something else in the window and they think, Oh, that one would have been better. And so they’re just never satisfied.

And you see this in relationships. People do this in relationships all the time, too. It’s not just with things like sweaters. It’s with people, it’s with jobs, it’s with everything. So it’s kind of almost like a personality type, like: Are you a satisficer, or are you a maximizer? Even when you’re shopping on Amazon and you’re trying to decide Which set of cookware should I buy?, you know? And it’s like, the people who will spend like an hour going through all the different options instead of 10 minutes going, Oh, this is good. Let me just get this. And it really takes up your emotional energy in a big way, because it’s almost like it’s a perfectionism type of thing. And it really gets in the way, because it takes up all of your time. And then you’re never satisfied with what you have anyway.

Brooks: That’s really interesting. And you know, what you’re saying sounds kind of like a Western version of what His Holiness the Dalai Lama always says—which is the secret to enduring satisfaction is not to have what you want, but to want what you have. The satisficer is one who wants what she has, and the maximizer is the one who is always chasing, trying to have what he wants.

And another way of thinking about this, that actually works in the literature on the science of satisfaction, is that you shouldn’t think of your satisfaction as a function of what you have, but rather what you have, divided by what you want. And if you can actually devise a “wants management strategy,” the denominator of that fraction is going to decrease and your satisfaction is actually going to rise.

So when a patient presents with a satisfaction deficit, what assignment do you give them on your show? This is somebody who’s unsatisfied. Or if you have a patient who says, “It’s just, nothing’s good, Lori. Nothing’s good.” What do you tell them to do specifically, starting today?

Gottlieb: I think this is the difference between what a friend would say to this person and what a therapist would say to this person. Because what the friend tends to do is to say, “Look at all the wonderful things you have in your life,” which is not helpful at all because they can’t see it anyway. You know it’s very funny when you look at the difference between how we talk to our friends and how a therapist might approach this. Because I think that people would expect the therapist to say, “Well, look at all these things that you’re not seeing.” But no. In fact, what I would probably do is I would agree with them and say, “Yeah, you know, I can see that you’re really not satisfied.”

And then what happens for them is the more that you kind of go into their mindset that they start to see something new, that they start to say, “Well, actually, I have this really great partner, and I have this really great job.” But then there are a lot of buts with that. And then they start to sort of change their mindset when you’re not arguing with them about whether they should be satisfied or not. You can’t convince someone to be satisfied with what they have. They have to come to it on their own. And I think that a lot of people have very low tolerance for people like this, because they feel like, Well, you have so much, how can you complain? But I think it speaks to something in our culture—which is that we don’t really value what’s important. We don’t really value what’s going to bring us happiness. And so people tend to take for granted all of the things that they do have that would normally bring a person happiness.

Brooks: Hmm, that’s really interesting. And it actually leads—which we’ll touch on briefly before we go to our, before we go to our listeners—about the last macronutrient of happiness, which is maybe the hardest of all, which is purpose or meaning. And the reason that this is really hard is because it’s the most counterintuitive when it comes to the science of happiness. You know, when I ask in surveys—you know, large-scale surveys or experiments using human subjects—“What brings happiness and purpose to life?,” people always talk about the most painful parts of their lives. They never talk about, you know, “that week in Ibiza with my friends”; they never say “That’s when I actually found out my life’s meaning.” You know, they always talk about that divorce, that ugly breakup, when they got fired, that bankruptcy, when their kid had to go to rehab. That’s when they talk about, you know, the stuff that they were made of, and when they really understood the nature of their own souls.

And yet back when you and I were little kids and the hippies were running around in the ’60s and ’70s and the Woodstock generation said, If it feels good, do it, right? But now young people on either side of us—bookended by people like you and me—their mantra seems to be, If it feels bad, make it stop. Paradoxically, if we don’t suffer—if we don’t have pain, if we don’t come to terms with having a life that’s fully alive with the good and the bad—we can’t actually get enough meaning and purpose in our life, right?

Gottlieb: Well, that’s right. And I think that’s why we assign negative and positive connotations to feelings. Even though feelings are neutral, they don’t have a positive or negative connotation. So people say, “Joy is a positive feeling, and anger or anxiety or sadness are negative feelings,” and that’s just not true. All of our feelings are positive in the sense that they tell us what we want. Our feelings are like a compass. They tell us what direction to go in.

And if you don’t access your feelings, you’re kind of walking around with a faulty GPS. You don’t know what direction to go in. And people think that if they kind of numb their feelings —like, Oh, it’s not a big deal because I have a roof over my head and food on the table—that the sadness, the anxiety, this insomnia, whatever it is, is okay. Because, you know, it seems very trivial to them. But it’s not. It’s actually a message. It’s telling you something about your life. It’s telling you about something that needs to change.

And so people feel like numbness is nothingness. It’s not the absence of feelings. Numbness is actually a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. And then they come out in other ways, like too much food, too much wine, an inability to sleep, a short-temperedness, a lack of focus. You see how the feelings are there. They’re just presenting differently.

And so I think it’s really important for people to notice their feelings and to really welcome their feelings and embrace their feelings, because the feelings give them information about if they’re sad, what is not working. If you’re anxious, what is causing the anxiety? If you’re angry, are there some boundaries that maybe you need to set? Right? Is there something you need to change in your life? What is going on? So I think that that’s really important. And when we talk about meaning and purpose, if you don’t listen to your feelings, they’re going to direct you in the direction of meaning and purpose, they’re going to tell you what is important.

Brooks: It’s interesting, you know. Most of the great sages and saints throughout history have talked about the sacredness of suffering, and some pretty wise and interesting people today do too. I mean, there was a famous interview of Stephen Colbert by Anderson Cooper, where Stephen Colbert talks about the most painful time in his life, when his father and one of his siblings were killed in a plane crash. And he talks about how grateful he is even for that experience, because of the sacredness of every moment of his life, including the pain. He says, “Look, if you’re going to be fully alive, if you’re going to have a life, if you’re going to enjoy life per se, you’ve got to take it all.” If you’re thankful for life, you’ve got to be thankful for all of life, because that’s the fabric of your set of experiences. And it seems to me that that is the essence of how you find your meaning and the essence of how you understand who you are as a person according to what you just told me, right?

Gottlieb: I don’t think that you need to suffer tragedy to feel gratitude. I think that sometimes it awakens us to feeling gratitude when you have some kind of tragedy in your life. But I don’t think that you need to have some kind of tragedy. But I do think that you don’t get through life without suffering in some way, so it doesn’t need to be that a relative dies in a plane crash. I think that just being human inherently means that there are going to be times that you struggle.

And I think if you look at the world today, if you look at—you know, there’s so much suffering that we hear about every day in the world, but then what are we told? If you look at social media, for example, or you’re at a dinner party, you know, you don’t—nobody talks about that. Nobody wants to talk about that. It’s all like, Let’s pretend everything’s great. And I think it’s both. And if we don’t make room for the both, then you’re right that we don’t see the beauty.

We don’t appreciate the beauty in life. It’s almost like you can’t—you know, people always say, like, “I want to mute the the sadness” or “I want to mute the pain,” and it’s like: You can’t mute the pain and then also feel joy. If you mute one aspect of your emotional experience, you’re going to mute all of that. There’s like one mute button. So, if you mute the pain, you mute the joy. And so I think that that speaks to what you’re saying.

Brooks: And there’s one clarification you made that’s incredibly important that I want to underline for everybody listening. Remember: Lori Gottlieb just said that you don’t have to go out looking for suffering. Don’t worry. Suffering will find you, and that’s adequate, too, for us to find purpose in our lives.

Gottlieb: There’s a difference between pain and suffering, too. We all experience pain. You know: You go through a breakup, you go through a divorce, somebody gets ill, something happens with your job. Whatever it is, right? We all experience pain of some sort, but suffering is something that sometimes we do to ourselves.

So you go through a divorce, and then you’re like, looking on social media at your ex and you see them with their new partner, right? You don’t need to do that. That’s suffering. You’re creating your own suffering. So people do that all the time. And so we’re all going to experience pain in some way or another. But sometimes we are creating our own suffering. And in therapy, that’s a big topic of conversation. How are we creating our own suffering? Even though, of course, pain is inevitable.

Brooks: I want to go now to some of our listeners. I put out a call at the end of my column asking people to tell me the last time they were happy, and what we got back was just pure gold. They were so interesting and so moving. And I wanted to play just three clips of people telling me about the last time that they were happy and get your reaction to what they’re saying and, you know, what it says to you. I could analyze this from [my perspective as] the social-science guy, but I’m a lot more interested in what you’d tell these people if they were coming to see you for help.

Let’s bring up audio clip No. 1, who is one of our listeners: Karl from North Carolina.

Listener Submission 1: The last time I felt truly happy was yesterday. I am a high-school English teacher, and we’re now back in person. We’re lucky enough to be in a school where we wear masks. I was able to actually see their—if not their faces—their eyes light up when they figured out something or they got the point of my lesson. And just seeing their eyes light up and getting to exercise that teaching muscle that I haven’t really got to exercise in over a year and a half. Getting to be in front of the students again makes me feel truly like myself again, something that I really haven’t felt in a long time. So, yeah, teaching makes me happy.

Brooks: Isn’t that beautiful, Lori? And it seems to me that he made your point. It’s connection—that’s the secret! Happiness is love, right?

Gottlieb: Right. Well, it’s meaning and purpose and connection all rolled into one—that was so beautiful. We had someone on our Dear Therapist podcast during the pandemic, a teacher also, and she was talking about this, you know, like, wanting to reach her students and how she was. They said to her, like, “The best part of my day is when I get to connect with you.” Right? And so I think that we learned a lot during COVID about meaning and purpose and connection. Many people think it has to be this big epic thing. It can be, you know, I had this moment with my child and we had this great five minutes together. Or just like with Karl, you know, I had this experience with my students and I saw their eyes light up when they got the lesson. That right there is meaning and purpose, and it doesn’t need to be this grand thing. It’s like it’s the dailiness of it. It’s having lots of bursts of meaning and purpose throughout your day.

Brooks: And that actually speaks to what you talked about with satisfaction. Because satisfaction—if you’re looking for it in one big thing—it’s probably going to disappoint you. But if you’re looking at the little things that happen over the course of a day and over the course of life regularly, you’ve got a shot. That’s important, too.

Gottlieb: Often I will give people this assignment in therapy and even on the podcast, which is: I want you to write down the different moments of the day when you feel something positive. And often there are these moments of meaning, these moments of connection. And there are so many during the day that they didn’t even realize, even if it’s like: “I went to Starbucks, and I saw this barista who’s been there for five years and we used to talk every day, and I missed that during COVID. And it was so great to see each other again. And I realized this is meaningful to me.” You know, it’s like those little moments throughout the day that you don’t even pay attention to. And all of a sudden you say, Wait, those are really important to me.

Brooks: Let’s go to clip No. 2: Kristen in New York.

Listener Submission 2: The last time I remember being truly happy was in the summer of 2019. I had just ended my first year of grad school. I was living in Japan and Tokyo. I’d already been there for five years, so I became quite accustomed to living there and found myself in a great group of friends … And looking back from there, it kind of feels like everything has just been this slow and then sudden descent. Because I got back to Japan, and my friends began to graduate and move away. And then the pandemic came. And like many people, I spent months alone in my apartment, so it was just really lonely. And then my visa was expiring, so I had to leave my community that I had spent six years building into this period of great uncertainty. And then my mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly. And since then, I’ve been living in the after. And I feel like I will never experience that kind of happiness again—like I did that summer. Being so devastated by grief and loss, it just feels like whatever way joy manages to find its way back into my life will always be different.

Brooks: What do you say, Lori?

Gottlieb: Wow. Just so much loss and grief, and what she’s experiencing is so common. Because we think that when we’re in the throes of that, we feel like we will never experience joy again. We will never experience happiness again in the same way. And actually, in my book, in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, there’s one client that I write about. He was talking about how his son was killed in a car accident. And within a week of that, where he was devastated and he thought My life is over, I will never be the same again, he was with his daughter. And they were playing a game, and he laughed. And he said, “I couldn’t believe that. I laughed. I couldn’t believe that I actually could laugh. Like, what was that part of me that could do that, even though the rest of me felt dead and like I would never come alive again?” And so I think what she’s feeling is extremely common, and that’s what grief looks like. And, you know, she’s going to have a lot of grieving to do. And it’s unfortunate that her mother died in the middle of COVID when she was so isolated and she had lost her community, and all of these other things had happened. So she’s experiencing multiple layers of loss. And I hope that she allows herself the space to really grieve all that she has lost, so that she can then start to emerge again.

Brooks: And I think a really important part of your message, Lori—and what you just said and I think that I want people to remember from this and what [I want] Kristen to remember—is that happiness is going to come again. That this isn’t the end. It feels like the end, because that’s how it always feels when you’re in a period of grief. And there’s all kinds of reasons for that. But happiness is going to come again. It just is, right?

Gottlieb: Well, it reminds me of when people are depressed, they feel like they will never be happy. And so I always say to people who are in the middle of a clinical depression You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now. Because their thinking is so distorted in that moment because they can’t see it. They can’t imagine a time when they would experience joy again. And the same thing, I think, when people have experienced a devastating loss, they cannot imagine experiencing joy.

And yet what happens later, just like the man in the book—people go to weddings and they go grocery shopping and they go on Twitter, and their lives move on. There’s this expression like people say, “Well, why haven’t you moved on?” Moved on is not quite right. It’s, you move forward. The loss stays with you, but you move forward and you’re still grieving. You will always grieve that loss. And I think that the grief is a sign of how much love there was with the person who is no longer there, right?

And then loss of the community. She loved those people. So that’s going to be there, but it feels different. It has a different flavor over time. It has a different resonance. And there will be times when you’re standing in an elevator and some song comes on and it’s the song that meant something with that person and you just start bawling in the elevator or whatever it is. You know, that’s what grief looks like, even decades later. So I think that’s part of the human experience and what you were talking about earlier, Arthur—about this idea of meaning and struggle and how they’re somehow intertwined in some way.

Brooks: One of the things that’s so interesting when you talk to older people who are happy and well—when you talk to those people, what you find is that they suffered a lot. It’s weird, you know, for young people, people in their 20s, who want to find out how to have a happy life and want to avoid as much suffering as possible. So in their 80s, they’ll be really happy. That’s actually wrong. In the same way, something that’s a really delicious dessert actually has salt in it.

And the afternoon of your life requires that the morning have had a certain number of challenges. And so you find that the happiest people have been fully alive all throughout their lives, and they’ve grieved, and they’ve recovered. And when bad things are happening, they never thought they’d feel better. And guess what—they did. They did! And they allowed themselves to be sad. And that’s one of the secrets, right?

Gottlieb: Right. And I think that the reason that they’ve been through so much is because they engaged in life. So the people who want to protect themselves from pain or discomfort are the people who never really engage in life because they’re so busy protecting themselves to make sure that they’re not going to experience anything that feels bad, right? And so then they never put themselves out there. They never take any risks.

And when you take risks, sometimes, you know, there’s going to be pain involved. And sometimes there’s going to be great joy involved. But if you are protecting yourself the whole time you didn’t really live; you’re not fully alive. And so maybe you think you protected yourself, but you end up feeling very unsatisfied, very kind of empty and lonely.

Brooks: If you’re going to live your life like an adventure, you’re going to have to take some chances. Let’s go to the last audio clip to finish this out, Lori.

Listener Submission 3: Hi. My name is Joel Marsh, and I own Marsh Painting Inc. in Park City, Utah. [I’ve] been painting homes in Park City for over 20 years. And I’m a fourth-generation painter. What I’ve learned is that Arthur Brooks is correct in this column when he states that what matters is not so much the weight of a job—more the “who” and the “why.” One day, as we were staining a home, we took a 10-minute break and hit golf balls onto the adjoining driving range. With the homeowner’s permission, of course. Our work painting houses is hard and boring much of the time. I tell new recruits that more often than not, when you have good music going, some good Mexican food for lunch, and you get into a rhythm with the rest of the guys, our job can feel a little Zen-like.

Brooks: We’re pretty much near the end of the time, so let’s have this be kind of the last word. What’s your big takeaway? And what’s the big lesson that people should get from this incredibly encouraging message from Joel in Park City?

Gottlieb: Yeah, that was really beautiful. I was thinking about how, before COVID, people used to say co-workers are overrated. You know, people are like, “I really want to work from home,” or whatever it is. Co-workers are not overrated. I think that if we’ve learned anything, it’s those small moments like he was talking about—those spontaneous moments of like, Hey, let’s hit the golf balls, right?

The things that you don’t expect, those moments of connection that happen when you’re in the same space with other people and you have a shared experience. And I think that that’s what we need to look for in general these days. No matter whether it’s at work or in our families or in our social circles or whatever it is. How can we show up? When you show up, those moments of connection happen.

Brooks: Well, the practice of enjoyment and satisfaction and purpose through pain and through love and all the experience—that is the beautiful thing that we call life, courtesy of Lori Gottlieb.

Lori Gottlieb is the author of the best-selling book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone,; of the wonderful, wonderful column, Dear Therapist; my colleague at The Atlantic. What a privilege, what a joy it’s been to be with you during this time. Thank you for joining all of us on How to Build a Happy Life.

Gottlieb: Oh, my pleasure.Thanks so much for the conversation.

[Music]

Garber: If you enjoyed this episode, take a listen to our first season, How to Build a Happy Life. You can find all seven episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Our next episode will be the last installment in our Best of How To series. We’ll look at the art of small talk and what tools are available to help reduce social anxiety.

Julie Beck: So do you think that you’ve gotten more comfortable with socializing over time, or do you just feel like you’ve learned strategies?

Ty Tashiro: I think it’s that I’ve learned strategies first, and then the social comfort came after that.

If you weren’t aware that Martin Short was hosting Saturday Night Live last night, you might have had a difficult time figuring that out. It’s not that Short wasn’t in sketches—he was, using his natural flair for showmanship as he sang about getting medicated for the holidays. It’s just that a lot of other celebrities were also there. Lots and lots of them: Melissa McCarthy, Tom Hanks, Kristen Wiig, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Rudd.

The evening felt like SNL flexing its muscles as it heads into its 50th anniversary celebration in February, a testament to its might as an entertainment superpower—and the episode capped a fall season during which guest spots have grown from fun cameos to essential elements of the show. Yet this episode’s glut also felt like a criminal underuse of Short, who, after all these years, still gets relegated to sidekick status.

The cold open set the tone. It began with Hanks sitting regally in a robe and explaining the concept of the show’s “five-timers club,” the somewhat hollow honor that is bestowed (along with a robe emblazoned with the number 5) on those who have hosted five times. After Rudd joined Hanks, Short arrived on the clubroom set to cheers, but the applause for his big moment was quickly drowned out by hosannas for the parade of others that followed. In addition to the aforementioned stars came Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Emma Stone, John Mulaney, and Jimmy Fallon.

The sketch emphasized just how much the current iteration of SNL relies on famous faces. Fey turned to Short and said, “First things first, we need to make sure you’re really ready to be a five-timer. Quick: Name three current cast members.” Short paused and then shot off the correct answer: “No idea.”

That self-lacerating gag turned out to be more than a punch line for the episode. Sure, a couple of cast members had breakthrough moments—Bowen Yang killed on “Weekend Update” playing a sassy drone; Marcello Hernandez reprised his fast-talking Sábado Gigante host Don Francisco—but through the night the cameos (such as Rudd playing the Spanish-language game show’s bewildered English-speaking guest) were what sustained the sketches’ momentum.

For another example, just when you thought “Parking Lot Altercation,” in which Short and Mikey Day played Christmas shoppers warring about a parking spot with over-the-top miming gestures, was wearing thin, McCarthy appeared as Short’s aggressive wife. Wearing a wig with a Kate Gosselin haircut, she spit what appeared to be iced coffee on Day’s car window and rubbed her breasts in the residue. Chloe Fineman, playing Day’s bratty daughter, couldn’t help but break.

[Read: Even SNL is all about the vibes]

Later, “Christmas Airport Parade” was just that: a procession of special guests. Yang and Ego Nwodim played enthusiastic TSA agents introducing all of the oddball characters who populate Newark airport during the holidays, but the biggest audience whoops came when Rudd showed up as himself, McCarthy played a gate agent who lewdly mispronounced passenger names, and Hanks reprised his role from Clint Eastwood’s Sully as the “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Clever observations about how people behave while traveling were overshadowed by the blinding lights of Hollywood.

Even “Weekend Update” benefited from the added star power. Michael Che and Colin Jost’s annual ritual of mutual humiliation, in which each co-host reads jokes the other one wrote sight unseen, was amped up with reaction shots from Jost’s famous wife, Johansson, who watched in horror from backstage as Che made him recite jokes at the couple’s expense in a corny “Black voice.”

SNL has been relying on cast alumni and high-wattage friends of the show a lot this season. Election coverage brought out Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg as Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, respectively. And Dana Carvey can’t seem to leave the studio, even though the series isn’t relying on his Joe Biden impression anymore. He was there last night, too, just being wacky in the Sábado Gigante sketch.

On one hand, this celebrity cornucopia feels a little lazy. Rudd and Johansson get automatic cheers that can sub in for earned laughter or applause. On the other, bringing them all out is smart business, serving as a reminder of the show’s brand loyalty and staying power in the run-up to a banner year it hopes can also translate to big-time ratings.

And yet the overuse of this crutch was frustrating last night, most of all because Short suffered for it. In the final sketch of the night, “Peanuts Christmas,” he played a flamboyant director who had no time for the goofy dancing of Charles M. Schulz’s characters. It was a late reminder of Short’s irrepressible dynamism on stage. Short and Yang made a great team shaming the Peanuts children. If only we had gotten to see more of that.

We all have a responsibility to make 2025 a better year for children everywhere.  

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My father-in-law, with whom I was very close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody civil war taking place literally in front of his house. His family experienced a lot of suffering. Some died; others spent years in jail or were forced into exile. He himself spent a year in a refugee camp, an experience that affected him for the rest of his life. Every time he wanted to make a point about society or culture, he always started with: “Well, during the civil war …”

One evening, a few months before he died, he read  in his local paper an article of mine about unhappiness. “You have a lot of complicated theories,” he told me, “but the real reason people are unhappy is very simple.” I asked him to elaborate. “They don’t enjoy their dinner,” he responded. I asked him what he meant. “Well, during the civil war, we were always hungry,” he said. “But one day a year—Christmas—we got to eat whatever we wanted, and we were so happy. Today, people snack all day long, are never hungry, don’t enjoy their dinners, and aren’t happy—even on Christmas.”

That is a somewhat reductive hypothesis about global unhappiness, to be sure. But he was not wrong in his main contention: Happiness rises, paradoxically, when you do not get whatever you want, whenever you want it. Rather, well-being requires that you discipline your will and defer your gratifications. Understanding this and taking action to change your habits can make you a much happier person.

[Read: The politics of a long-dead dictator still haunt Spain]

In the behavioral sciences, the most famous study of deferred gratification is the so-called marshmallow experiment undertaken in 1970 by the psychologists Walter Mischel and Ebbe B. Ebbesen. This research project brought 32 young children into a laboratory, where they were offered either animal crackers or pretzel sticks (the marshmallow was an option that came only in later experiments). Before they were allowed to eat the treat, however, the researchers offered an upgrade: If the children could wait by themselves for 15 minutes without eating the snack, they would get a second one. All of the kids accepted the deal, and the researchers left the room and observed each child through a one-way mirror. Ten subjects succeeded in waiting and got the additional snack; 22 of them gave in to their desire and gobbled up the treat before the 15 minutes had elapsed.

Mischel and his colleagues were interested in the long-term differences between kids who were able to defer their gratification and those who weren’t, so they followed the participants as they grew up. In papers published decades later, the psychologists found that the two groups diverged significantly. For example, the ones who waited went on to get significantly higher scores on their SAT exams. Those who didn’t wait used drugs more frequently in adolescence and got less education. The researchers’ conclusion was clear: Being able to defer gratification leads to a more successful—and ultimately more satisfying—life.

As is the case for much research in behavioral science, these conclusions were later contested, by scholars who used larger, more diverse samples of kids and methods that carefully controlled for family background and cognitive ability. For example, one 2018 study concluded that being able to delay gratification has by itself only a weak effect on educational outcomes, and is insignificant in predicting anti-social behavior. Although these revised findings suggest that being able to say no to your immediate desires might not be a universal panacea, newer research has shown that a capacity to defer gratification does consistently deliver one important increase: in well-being. For example, scholars writing in 2014 in the Journal of Personality showed that people who score a high level of self-control enjoy significantly better mood and life satisfaction than those who lack such self-discipline.

One practical example of this happiness effect involves materialistic values and how people spend money: As I have previously written, borrowing money (for discretionary consumption) lowers happiness, whereas saving raises it. You might predict from that finding that people who see money as a sign of success would likely be savers who prefer to delay gratification. Yet on the contrary, two psychologists demonstrated in a 2017 study that people who regard money as the measure of success tend to be spenders: When they have money, they typically use it immediately to acquire things—because they identify having possessions as a source of happiness. The researchers found that these people were less happy than people who didn’t behave this way.

To what degree the ability to defer gratification is down to nature or conditioned by nurture is unclear, but what we do know—because neuroscientists have demonstrated it—is that those who postpone their pleasure exhibit different brain activity when facing temptation from those who want to get their jollies right away. One study, from 2011, showed that people good at delaying indulgence have more activity in the prefrontal cortex (indicating that executive decision-making is taking place) when doing so than people who give in to their desire more easily, who in turn have more activity in the ventral striatum (a region that processes reward). Suggestive also are animal studies that have shown how mice taught to delay a reward enjoy a smoother, more regulated dopamine release than mice without this skill.

[Read: Why rich kids are so good at the marshmallow test]

Although the evidence is mixed on the long-term implications of the marshmallow test, being able to defer gratification is clearly valuable for well-being. Even if some people may be naturally better at postponing rewards, we also have some evidence that the skill can be cultivated from an early age. If this is something you could work on, here are two ways to get started. They may appear contradictory, but done right, they in fact complement each other.

1. Think about the future.
A research-proven approach to improving your capacity for deferred gratification is to imagine yourself in the future. In 2011, a team of researchers interested in how to elicit saving behavior employed digital aging techniques and virtual reality to enable people to interact with elderly versions of themselves. They found that after doing so, the participants were more willing than other people to accept awards of money at a future date rather than immediately.

You can use this finding in creative ways. For example, if you are hankering for a portion of junk-calorie carbohydrates at 4 p.m., have a conversation with a 6 p.m. version of yourself who forwent the snack and is hungry for a good healthy dinner. Or say you are in college and have a big exam tomorrow but have just gotten invited to a party: Have a chat with the unhappy future you who took the exam after partying instead of studying.

2. Don’t think about the future.
Paradoxically, a second technique for delaying gratification is to stop thinking about the future, in the form of purposeful mindfulness, the practice of paying attention nonjudgmentally to the present moment. Scholars in 2018 undertook an experiment in which a group of participants were asked to complete a survey of their willingness to defer rewards. Half of the group were then given an exercise in mindfulness breathing, while the other half (the control group) watched a music video. Afterward, when both groups retook the survey, the mindfulness practitioners were significantly more likely than before to defer rewards (whereas the music-video watchers showed no change).

Despite any initial impression otherwise, this second result is not at odds with the first finding: Its conclusion is that being more conscious when you make decisions will lead you to optimize your choices. So you can bring the two injunctions together and combine them to best effect: Think clearly about what you’re doing right now, and then think clearly about how you will reflect on your action later.

So before you buy that sweater, think about how you are feeling at this moment. Do you really need this sweater, or are you just self-soothing with a bit of retail therapy? Next, imagine yourself looking at the sweater in two months’ time. Does it give you delight or remind you that you have to make a credit-card payment?

[Arthur C. Brooks: Four rules for identifying your life’s work]

My father-in-law was right that deferring gratification leads to greater happiness. The good news is that you don’t need to be in the middle of a civil war to make this skill worth cultivating. But I always wondered whether he was right in his specific example: Does snacking lower well-being by ruining your enjoyment of proper meals? I have been unable to find any studies of this precise curiosity, so I had to triangulate some related research findings to come to a convincing answer.

Researchers who were studying the eating behavior of children reported in 2017 in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior that kids enjoyed food more when they followed structured meal settings—such as eating at the same times each day and dining in a family setting. They also tended to be less fussy about what they were eating. This is broadly supportive of my father-in-law’s theory. And I certainly never saw him eat a snack.

What I did see, however, was his complete unwillingness to save money and a reckless openhandedness about spending it. And this negative example supported his theory even more—though in a sad way, as he constantly ducked creditors and struggled to meet his basic needs in old age. Perhaps the inability to save was also an effect of the privations of his 1930s childhood: If you never know whether you’ve got enough to get through the month, why save the money you have now? Even though he suffered as a result of his spendthrift ways, I took a valuable lesson from his example in this too.

So my seasonal advice: Go to your holiday dinner good and hungry. But don’t buy your holiday feast on credit.

Everything, as Charles Péguy said, begins in mysticism and ends in politics. Except if you’re Bob Dylan. If you’re Bob Dylan, you start political and go mystical. You start as an apprentice hobo scuffing out songs of change; you become, under protest, the ordained and prophetic mouthpiece for a sense of mass disturbance otherwise known as the ’60s; and then, after some violent gestures and severances, you withdraw. You dematerialize; you drop it all, and you drift into the recesses of the Self. Where you remain, until they give you a Nobel Prize.

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, like all the best movies about rock stars—Sid and Nancy, Bohemian Rhapsody, Control—is a fairy tale. It takes liberties: Dylanologists will scream. It dramatizes, mythicizes, elides, elasticizes, and tosses twinkling magic showbiz confetti over the period between Dylan’s absolutely unheralded arrival in New York in 1961 and his honking, abrasive, ain’t-gonna-work-on-Maggie’s-farm-no-more headlining appearance, four years later, at the Newport Folk Festival, where his new electric sound drove the old folkies berserk and the crowd (at least in Mangold’s movie) bayed for his blood.

Timothée Chalamet plays Dylan, and he does it very well, with a kind of amnesiac intensity: He mooches, twitches, mumbles, makes things up, as if the young Robert Zimmerman, in the ferocity of his effort to shed his history and become Bob Dylan, has temporarily cauterized his own personality. Ed Norton, his high forehead glowing with benevolence, plays Pete Seeger, the folk-activist father figure whom Dylan will betray. Scoot McNairy, in an amazing wordless performance, plays Woody Guthrie, immobilized by Huntington’s disease at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, in New Jersey. Dylan makes a pilgrimage to Greystone with his guitar and fumbles through a beautiful, uncanny bedside version of “Song to Woody”:

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born

How did he do that? How did this nobody from nowhere, at the age of 20, contrive to sound simultaneously like the creaky religious past and the howling incoming future? It wasn’t his musicianship: As a guitarist, he was stumpy and street-level, and his god-awful harmonica playing now sounds like a kind of comic punctuation, the harmonica less a musical instrument than a place to put his face after delivering an especially jagged line. But his young-old voice, with its swoops and smears and its relentless edge, was a vehicle for cutting through: The world would have to wait for John Lydon of the Sex Pistols to hear another voice so crystallized with frozen wrath.

And when his words, or his visions, reached the pitch of nightmare—I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding—he sounded not scared but aroused, as if by imminent and gleeful vindication. The musician Robyn Hitchcock, listening to Dylan while pent up in an English boarding school, felt the full revelation. As he describes it in his recent memoir, 1967, Dylan seemed “to have accessed (or created?) a world outside morality, faith, rules or superstition: [he’d] found the sad, doomed kingdom where things simply are—for no apparent purpose—and whose denizens haplessly await their fate.”

One of the young Dylan’s foundational fibs, as he skulked and sputtered around Greenwich Village, was that he had learned his songcraft while traveling with a carnival. This is important, because I’ve begun to suspect that a major division in American life, perhaps the major division, is the one between carnies and non-carnies; that is, between those who understand instinctively—animalistically, sometimes—that life is theater, that people will believe what they want to, and that all the most essential things happen in the imagination, and … everyone else. Carnies don’t have much respect for reality, because they know they can bend it and knock it around. Non-carnies are condemned to the facts—to what Stanley Elkin called the “plodding sequiturs.”

Was young Bob a carny? He wanted to be, and compared with the courageous and sweetly high-minded Seeger, he certainly was. His identity was a performance. His writing was sleight of hand. He wowed and bamboozled his own audience. And when, in A Complete Unknown, he tries out the carnival story on Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro), embroidering it freshly with the addition of a cowboy guitar player called Wigglefoot, she looks at him and says—thrillingly deadpan—“You are so completely full of shit.” Which is exactly what you say to a carny.

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (Macall Polay / Searchlight Pictures)

And it was all very theatrical, very over-the-top, the way they lauded him and garlanded him and made him the Voice of a Generation. (Don’t all those contemporary cover versions of his songs—with the exception of Hendrix’s smoking “All Along the Watchtower”—now sound like misunderstandings, mistranslations?) The earnestness and humorlessness of the folkies was unbelievable. He had come to save us all. The line would be unbroken: From Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan, the torch had been passed.

Except that, if you were Bob Dylan, there was no torch, and no one to pass it to, anyway. So he had to be perverse and disruptive and ungrateful and electrified, and make a noise that would horrify poor old Seeger: punk rock avant la lettre. A Complete Unknown makes an especial villain out of Alan Lomax, which is interesting: The venerable activist-archivist becomes, in the movie, a thuggish folk enforcer, cursing Dylan for his impurity and tussling with his manager Albert Grossman during the set at Newport.

It’s in the Newport scenes, with the crowd roaring in distress, that the movie really does some fancy shuffling of events. History records that Lomax did actually brawl with Grossman. But no one at Newport shouted “Judas!” at Bob Dylan: That wouldn’t happen until the following year, when he played the Free Trade Hall, in Manchester, England. And Ian Bell, in his Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan, makes the point that most of the festivalgoers at Newport—a hip audience, after all—would have known what to expect from Dylan that day: “ ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ supposedly the main cause of all the Newport trouble, is neither a secret nor a surprise to anyone with the slightest interest in Dylan by the time the festival begins.” (Dylan’s keyboardist Al Kooper has said that “85 to 90 percent” of the crowd was enjoying the Dylan performance.)

But so what? A Complete Unknown is a movie, and a movie—or a movie like this, which in one sense is a parable of artistic ruthlessness—needs a climax. And Bob Dylan, more than most rock stars, is a myth. In all senses of the word. He made himself up, he disappeared himself, and in doing so, he became a lens: Rays of otherworldly insight poured through him, and he trained them upon us like somebody frying ants with a magnifying glass.

He had shimmering visions and torture chambers in his mind; he could make God and Abraham talk with each other like two hustlers on a street corner; he let everybody down, ditched everybody, and then taught them how to be exhilarated by that abandonment. Something in me wants to talk about the hard rain that is falling right now, and to wonder who will step up to sing about it: who will be our minstrel of the End Times; our guiding, undeceivable voice; and so on. But to ask that kind of question—to think in those terms—is to lapse into the great mistake, isn’t it? And here endeth the lesson of Bob Dylan.

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “Bob Dylan’s Carnival Act.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

During his fourth time hosting Saturday Night Live, Chris Rock brought a particularly magnetic and mischievous energy—one that showed his mastery of being a good-natured troll. In the show’s best moments, it followed suit: The episode was packed with sketches that feinted toward seemingly familiar premises before upending them, and many of Rock’s characters tapped into his punchy stand-up persona and button-pushing sense of humor. References that seemed outdated ended up feeling current; a sketch about a car based on Herbie, the sentient ’60s Volkswagen Beetle that hasn’t been featured in a movie in nearly two decades, wound up confronting the racism of older generations. The result was a night that was oddly refreshing for its idiosyncrasy. Even the show’s most unpolished, truly not-ready-for-prime-time moments proved to be hilarious.

In Rock’s first (and strongest) sketch, he played an elf greeting customers visiting Santa Claus at the mall—only in his case, he was offering two Santas for them to choose between: one played by a white actor and the other by a Black one. The question was obviously meant to make people—especially white people trying to not appear racist—squirm, but Rock delivered every line like he was a salesman inviting his customer to embark on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “All you gotta do is tell me which Santa you want to go to,” he said, grinning. “Which Santa do you want your daughter to get a picture with, a picture you’ll cherish for the rest of your life?”

The couple he spoke with, played by Heidi Gardner and Mikey Day, probably shouldn’t have responded. But Rock, a seasoned comedian and SNL veteran, specializes in characters unafraid to rile others up into realizing their own hypocrisies. When Day’s character asked for the “regular” Santa, Rock feigned ignorance: “‘Regular’? ‘Regular’ as opposed to ‘extra crispy’? You’re going to need to be a little more specific than that.” His knowingness was reminiscent of one of his most popular SNL appearances, when he played a guest at a 2016 Election Night party where most attendees assumed Hillary Clinton would win. Rock’s character, along with a character played by the episode’s host, Dave Chappelle, were the only nonwhite guests—and therefore the only ones who weren’t shocked that so many Americans would vote for Donald Trump, a candidate whom the other guests thought only “racists” would support. Unbothered, Rock smiled widely throughout the sketch while the partygoers around him grimaced. “Don’t worry,” he assured them sarcastically, “it’s going to be all white.”

[Read: The fury of Chris Rock]

Rock’s opening monologue last night was playfully deceptive too. Unlike some of the other comics who have hosted SNL, he didn’t present what felt like a collection of bits he was excerpting from a forthcoming special. As he riffed on headlines, he baited the crowd into expecting mundane observations only to slip into a provocative punch line. He offered condolences for the family of the assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO, letting the audience fall completely silent at his apparent earnestness. Then he revealed his sadness to be an act: “You know, sometimes drug dealers get shot.”

Again and again, Rock toyed with the crowd’s expectations. As he mocked the outrage that some Americans expressed over Trump’s reelection, the stand-up worked the room into agreeing with him about how unsurprising Trump’s win was, pointing out that America has long celebrated less-than-savory leaders. “People are like, ‘He’s going to be so undignified. It’s the presidency of the United States,’” he said. “Come on, man—this is not the most dignified job in the world. You know we’ve had presidents show up to the inauguration with pregnant slaves, okay?” He seemed poised to deliver a serious history lesson—and then he unveiled a more contemporary target. “And I’m just talking about Bill Clinton!” he said in an apparent reference to the former president’s misconduct in office. By the time he declared that “nobody knows how to get rid of people like a South African”—a joke about Elon Musk’s close ties to Trump, and Trump’s plan to deport undocumented immigrants—the crowd was simultaneously laughing and groaning, swept up by Rock’s sheer confidence and rug-pulling delivery.

Later, that rebellious energy coursed through a sketch about a Secret Santa exchange. In it, Rock played a character who received what he considered “the best gift I’ve ever gotten in my life”: a cartoon portrait of him, drawn to look like he was a character on The Simpsons. He initially appeared to be the odd man out, the overenthused guy at the party who wouldn’t stop talking about what his character’s episode of The Simpsons would be like. But Rock imbued his role with such uninhibited certainty about his importance to The Simpsons’ lore that everyone started playing along. Instead of being about a bunch of observers helplessly tolerating their peculiar friend, the sketch became an absurd illustration of the way groupthink manifests.

But one of the most memorable moments of the episode came from something that seemed entirely unplanned. In “Gallbladder Surgery,” Adam Sandler guest-starred as a patient whose artery began spewing an absurd amount of blood onto the surgeons surrounding the operating table, who were attempting to fix the mistakes of an anxious nurse. As in the Simpsons sketch, one character—here, the nurse in question (Sarah Sherman)—was positioned to take over the bit with loony catchphrases. As the scene progressed, though, Sandler’s patient took over the spotlight because a technical malfunction forced the actor to say the same line three times while waiting for the blood-gushing mechanism to work. By the time Sandler finally delivered a series of fourth-wall-breaking lines—“Not sure what your role in this skit is, but so happy you’re getting airtime,” he told the doctor played by the new cast member Emil Wakim—the sketch had begun threatening to unmoor all of the performers. While they held it together, Sherman still managed to end the proceedings with a goofy punch line.

SNL produced a night of controlled chaos, in other words. Rock may not have been the strongest host this season, but the comic delivered an audacious monologue that seemed to inspire a similarly gleeful approach in the night’s sketches. Like the greeter introducing two mall Santas, Rock had no trouble trolling the audience with unpredictable turns. They kept guessing. And then they started laughing.

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Car-dependent suburban sprawl. Home prices and rents skyrocketing. Brewing discontent from young people angry about being locked out of homeownership. I’m not talking about the United States—I’m talking about New Zealand.

Just as the U.S. has struggled with a housing affordability crisis, so has New Zealand. But the Kiwis have it worse. Although America still retains regional housing markets that are significantly more affordable than those of our most productive job centers on the coasts, New Zealand, like most countries, is much smaller and has many fewer metropolitan areas.

“Housing politics is local,” is a common refrain in the U.S. Sometimes it comes from local elected officials being territorial over their considerable land-use authority, but sometimes it comes from federal actors who may want to wash their hands of the problem. But the Kiwis showed that intervention from federal officials was necessary to spur local governments to make it easier to build more housing.

As a result of the national government’s efforts in Auckland alone, up to 43,000 housing permits were issued over six years, yielding a whopping 28 percent reduction in rents compared with what they would have been without those changes.

In today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Eleanor West, a housing-policy expert and activist from New Zealand who has been one of the most outspoken voices in trying to bring the lessons learned from her home country to the rest of the world. We talk about what our two countries have in common and the pitfalls New Zealand still faces in addressing its housing crisis.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: One of the best ways to understand policy debates happening in your own country can be to talk to people in other places. After all, if the same problem exists in both Germany and Tanzania, it can help eliminate explanations that rest on the specific languages, cultures, or practices of either country.

The housing crisis is like this. There’s a lot that’s important about the specifics of America’s history, culture, and institutions in understanding our housing crisis. But other countries have experienced housing crises, too. How they have chosen to address them can help us understand how we should act, as well.

Today’s episode is going to take us to the other side of the world: New Zealand, a country whose housing crisis rivals our own or even outpaces it. In 2019, according to one international comparison of eight wealthy, Anglophone countries, New Zealand was the country with the second-least affordable housing. The U.S. was eighth.

And similarly to the United States, New Zealand is heavily suburbanized. In fact, more than 80 percent of residents live in detached, single-family homes, 20 percentage points higher than the U.S. And again, similarly to the U.S., zoning and land-use regulations are choking the supply of new housing. So there’s a lot to compare.

But unlike the United States, New Zealand has taken ambitious, national steps to address this problem. Steps that led to a “building boom,” as economics writer Joey Politano put it. Joey compares New Zealand with two of America’s largest metro areas: the Los Angeles and San Francisco regions, which have more than three times as many people as the Pacific nation. Even so, New Zealand permitted more housing units than both cities combined last year.

The effects of these policies have been dramatic. In the places that made it easier to build more housing, rent-to-income ratios have declined, proving that building a lot more housing is both possible and a clear way to make rents and home prices more affordable.

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

My guest today is Eleanor West. Eleanor is an activist from New Zealand, a former member of the Generation Zero, a youth climate-campaign group, and a housing-policy researcher who has worked to bring the example of New Zealand to the rest of the world—both the policy wins and the political pitfalls. I’m so excited to have her here.

[Music]

Demsas: Hi, Eleanor. Welcome to the show.

Eleanor West: Kia ora. It’s so great to be here.

Demsas: So New Zealand has made a series of big housing moves that have made so much noise that they’ve, I think, impacted American housing debates. As someone who’s very involved in them, I think many other people haven’t heard about this, but it culminated in sort of a big policy shift in 2021.

But I want to take us all the way back to what I think is probably the beginning of these modern policy debates, which is the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, which if folks don’t remember, that’s a really devastating natural disaster. The estimated cost was like NZ$40 billion to rebuild, not to mention, of course, all the lives lost—185 victims. It is a quite depressing place to start, but it’s the beginning of New Zealand’s modern experiments with upzoning.

So of course, Christchurch has to rebuild, and the national government steps in. Eleanor, can you take the story from there? What happens?

West: Yeah. Sure. So as you were saying, there was this massive earthquake in Christchurch, and the city lost a huge portion of its housing stock just overnight. And so immediately, house prices started spiking because there was a shortage, and we had a conservative government in at the time—the National Party—and they were very receptive to advice from economists and the New Zealand Productivity Commission that one of the ways they could kickstart the rebuilding Christchurch would be to relax the zoning regulations down there and suspend parts of the primary planning legislation to trigger developers to get involved and make it an affordable place to build.

They did that, and it worked spectacularly well. Christchurch grew out quite a lot, quite rapidly, but it meant that there was a really sudden supply shock into the market there. And consequently, house prices in Christchurch have been kind of flatlining for quite some time since then, while they’ve been skyrocketing in the rest of the country.

Demsas: Can you help put some more detail into there for us? What specifically did the government have Christchurch do?

West: Okay. So Christchurch is actually made up of multiple smaller cities. There’s Christchurch city, and then there’s Rolleston and other places around. So one of the things they did was they encouraged the city council in Christchurch city itself to raise building-height limits and allow higher-density buildings, which was mostly terraces and walk-up apartment buildings.

But something else that they did was they forced the councils in the area—so not just Christchurch but in the surrounding area, part of the metropolitan area—to rezone a bunch of rural land for housing that had always been intended to be drip fed into the planning system over the next few decades. But kind of overnight, they were like, Okay. This land that was planned to be for housing in the future is going to be for housing now, and it was just a free-for-all. Like, This land is available. You can build.

And so the city sprawled outwards because growing up was quite difficult. I’m sure you can imagine, post-earthquake, people didn’t really trust the ground. There were huge liquefaction issues that made building taller apartments challenging. There were still a lot of uncertainties about the engineering involved in that.

Something I don’t think a lot of people realize about the earthquakes that we’ve been having in New Zealand—like the Christchurch earthquake and I’m pretty sure the Kaikōura earthquake, as well—I’m pretty sure both of those earthquakes happened on fault lines that our earthquake scientists weren’t actually aware of. So it was quite an uncertain time.

Demsas: And was there a lot of opposition to trying to make it easier to build a lot more housing in Christchurch at the time? Or did everyone understand, There’s been this big earthquake. A lot of buildings have been destroyed. Obviously, we need a bunch of housing for people who were already living here? Is there that sort of synergy between local and national officials? Or why not?

West: Yeah. I’m not sure that I can talk to that with great authority, because I wasn’t very involved in this debate at the time, but my recollection of it is that the supply crunch was really felt. We went from talking about the Christchurch earthquake to talking about the housing shortage in Christchurch very quickly. And so I think people definitely recognized that this was a problem.

And people who lived in Christchurch who lost their homes, they were desperate. They were at the coalface. They wanted to rebuild. They wanted to remake their lives there. A lot of people ended up leaving the city, and I don’t think that that was always a pleasant or happy experience for them. So there was a lot of demand to make it easier to build.

Demsas: And I think this is something that—we have talked about this on the show, but I always like to go over it again: Can you just explain how upzoning leads to lower rents and home prices? And by upzoning, I mean I’m referring to exactly what Eleanor just talked about, which is just intensifying land use.

So basically, like: On a plot of land, we can say that you can only build a single-family home. But if we say, Oh, you can also build a duplex, we’ve upzoned. And if you take a piece of land where you could previously build a duplex and say you can only build a single-family home, you’ve downzoned. That’s what we’re talking about there.

But, Eleanor, how does that actually affect home prices?

West: Yeah. So if you wanted to take a really simplistic view of the housing market, you can apply the classic model of supply and demand: When supply is constrained and demand is high, there’s a lot of competition for a scarce resource, and that pushes the prices up.

So I think that that’s quite commonly understood now to be one of the key drivers for the housing crisis in New Zealand and in many other Anglosphere countries—is that there has been a huge supply shortage in recent decades. And one of the reasons why we’ve had that supply shortage is because we’ve had overly restrictive land-use regulations in our cities, that they inhibit the ability of the market to respond to growing demand.

The population of New Zealand is growing. It’s a great place to live. People want to move here. People are having kids. But a lot of our cities are very low density. They were built relatively recently during the automobile era, so it’s a lot of motorways and sprawl. And, like, the Kiwi dream is you want to have your quarter-acre section with your standalone home and your backyard, and you want to have the amenities of living in a city, but you definitely want to have a backyard.

And so for a long time, we’ve had zoning regulations in New Zealand that kind of restrict the ability to build anything other than a standalone home, usually two stories. And so as the population has grown, there’s been a lot more demand for housing, but developers haven’t been able to build housing in the places where people want to live, like the inner city, because these zones restrict the ability to build up, and there’s kind of no more space to grow out in the inner city. And so there’s just a lot of competition for these houses in the highly desirable areas. Unless we address the supply constraint, that competition is just going to keep driving prices up.

Demsas: It’s very funny to hear the Kiwi version of the American dream. It’s like, yeah, white picket fence, backyard, but also you get the amenities of having a main street with accessible amenities to you. Glad to know that’s not just an American phenomenon.

West: No. Not at all. I think that’s colonization, right? We’re all the same in our bones.

Demsas: So a few years after the Christchurch experience, Auckland does a really ambitious upzoning. Can you talk about how that went and also how Christchurch’s experience influenced what happened in Auckland?

West: Yeah. Auckland is the biggest city in New Zealand. It’s home to about a third of the population of the country. And prior to 2010, it was actually a bunch of smaller cities. And then the central government forced Auckland to amalgamate into a supercity.

And in that process, they directed the new council that was formed there, the Auckland Council—they directed them to draft a new plan for the city, encompassing all of these new satellite cities that had been incorporated into Auckland. So they could have merged their existing plans, but instead, they decided that they were going to have a fresh start and draft a completely new plan. So they started that process in about 2010, and the final plan was published in 2016.

So the first draft of the plan—I’m pretty sure that was published in 2012—was very ambitious. So the councilors had decided they wanted a big change in Auckland. And at the time, congestion was a real issue. I was just talking before about how our cities have been sprawling outward for a really long time. The primary mode of transport for most New Zealanders is their car. So congestion was crazy.

And it was a really hot-button issue—you know, getting a lot of media attention, scary headlines. That, among other issues, was really driving the councilors to want to be more ambitious about how they designed the city going forward. They had gotten very excited about this compact-city model that was kind of taking off internationally. You know, “15-minute cities” are very buzzy at the moment, but the buzz back then was the compact-city model. So they decided that they wanted to adopt this, and as a way of encouraging a compact city, they thought, Well, we’ll just raise building-height limits in the inner city. That was not well received by the population of Auckland when they released the plan.

Demsas: Why not?

West: Surprisingly, people don’t like apartment buildings popping up next door. They call them “sun stealers.” I think that’s one of the more charitable terms that people have used. But also, part of the problem is that because New Zealand cities were built really recently, the old parts of the cities—i.e. the pre-1930s character areas that are full of the beautiful wooden bungalows, a bit like San Francisco, a city that I’ve never been to, but I’ve heard it’s very similar—but these historic suburbs are really close to the inner city, which is the perfect distance to walk to work.

And these areas, in particular, because housing has been constrained in these areas due to character protections, house prices were already quite high there. And they’re quite a wealthy part of the city to be living in, and so there was a lot of organized opposition to the draft plan. Consequently, several councilors got cold feet. They’re in a really tricky position. The voter turnout in local-body elections is not high in New Zealand. It’s usually around 40 percent, and it’s pretty dominated by homeowners. So when homeowners are angry with you about something, you backpedal fast. So a few of the councilors got cold feet. They backed down. They ended up releasing another draft of the proposed unitary plan that was much less ambitious about its upzoning.

But by this point, the central government in New Zealand—we only have two layers of government really: local, central; no states. The central government, by this point, was getting really concerned about house prices. They had been rising steadily since the financial crisis. And they had been receiving advice from economists, the Productivity Commission over the years preceding—like, during the development of the Auckland Unitary Plan, I suppose—telling them that one of the drivers of the housing crisis is the supply constraints from planning regulations.

And so they really took the opportunity to pressure Auckland Council. They installed an independent hearings panel to oversee the process of developing the new unitary plan. And this panel was supposed to make recommendations to the councils—like, expert recommendations based on the consultation process and everything. And they were also pushing the council to raise building-height limits.

So the Auckland Unitary Plan that was adopted, finally, in 2016 was actually quite ambitious in the end. So it ended up upzoning about three-quarters of Auckland city, which is massive. As far as I’m aware, it’s the first case of broad upzoning in an Anglosphere country with similar planning systems to New Zealand. Yeah, so that was a pretty, pretty major change for the city that wouldn’t have happened, probably, without the central-government intervention.

Demsas: Yeah. I feel like, in the American context, we’re used to seeing a lot of headlines about, Minneapolis has ended single-family zoning, or, Berkeley tackles single-family zoning, or, Parking minimums ended, in a variety of cities. And a lot of these are great reforms, and people are chipping away at a problem. But there’s nothing like what Auckland did, where you see this massive, across an entire metropolitan area, large, broad upzoning.

And so what we’ve seen in many places is more piecemeal. And so a lot of the research and studies have been done on more piecemeal upzoning changes and making it easier to build more housing in kind of these smaller ways. But Auckland presented this very different experience for research. And I think the impacts of this are pretty remarkable, right?

So there have been a few studies on this now. One shows that you see nearly 22,000 housing permits, which is 4 percent of the housing stock, increased after these changes. You see another study says it’s even more: 43,000 housing permits are basically given. And then a final study shows that its effect on rents is pretty significant too, that six years after this all happened, rents are 28 percent lower than they would have been otherwise. So this is pretty remarkable.

How was this sort of thing received? When all this starts happening, does everyone start accepting the gospel of housing-policy nerds?

West: Well, I think it depends. How was it received? In Auckland, people were pretty bitter about it. It was a change that was forced onto them, and I don’t think that the people who are engaged in local council elections are necessarily motivated by house prices. So even though this is a good thing for the city and arguably for the country, there are local costs to those distributed benefits. So I don’t know. The residents of Auckland—it probably wasn’t so well received at the time.

But I think over time, there has been a growing acceptance that it has been a good thing for the city. There is all this new housing popping up all over the place. And because it’s new housing, it’s built to the building code, which means that it’s warm, dry housing. And it’s become quite desirable, especially among young people—like, people my age. Now that there’s the option, you can live in a beautiful new terrace home or in an apartment in the city. That didn’t used to be an option. And now that it is, people can try that for themselves and think, Oh, actually, this is way better. It’s so nice to live in the middle of the city and have access to all of this amenity.

So I think that the culture is changing. And I think that—we’ll get onto this when we talk about New Zealand’s wider upzoning policies later—but this sense that people were coming more accepting of the changes over time was one of the things that motivated central-government politicians to push harder on upzoning.

Demsas: And as I mentioned, this is a pretty broad upzoning. And what we’ve seen a lot of the time in the U.S. is that some shifts to policy changes on housing don’t lead to a lot of output. You don’t see a bunch of new homes get built because Minneapolis legalizes triplexes or something like that.

Were there specific reforms that Auckland pursued that you think had a large effect or some interaction between a few different policies? What sorts of things do you actually point to that you think actually led to a lot of the new homes being built?

West: I think it was this broad raising of the building-height limits, definitely. They also did some stuff around reducing the ability of the council to set minimum car-parking requirements. That helped. But I do think it was the building-height limits and the fact that they did it broadly across the whole city.

I think that really helped with the affordability aspect because the thing about upzoning, when you were talking earlier about how it’s often piecemeal—what I would call targeted upzoning—when planning permissions are scarce (like, there aren’t very many developable sites where you’re allowed to build an apartment building, say), then developers have to compete with each other for those sites, and it makes the price of that land go up.

So when governmental councils change the rules and only allow a small section of the city to build apartment buildings—so when they only upzone a small section, targeted upzoning—the land prices in those areas spike. Whereas in Auckland, because they upzoned three-quarters of the city all at once, it meant that these developable land parcels, they weren’t scarce. So upzoning didn’t have such a big effect on land prices as it would have if the upzoning had been more targeted, which is really good for affordability. So you get the supply response, which helps with affordability. But you also reduce the spike in land prices, which is another good outcome for affordability.

But it wasn’t uniform upzoning. Like I said, it was only three-quarters of the city, and some of those wealthier character suburbs that I was talking about earlier, they managed to escape quite a lot of the brunt of that upzoning. Quite a lot of the new housing supply is being delivered in outer suburbs, so not that close to the inner city. They’re connected on transport lines, but they’re not in walking distance of the jobs and whatnot, which I think is also a factor, definitely.

Demsas: Okay. We’ve talked about Christchurch, and we’ve talked about Auckland. These are both in the early 2010s. It feels like the national government is getting very emboldened by these efforts.

I think that one of the big dynamics that you talk about in your work and something that we’ve talked about on the show, as well, is this interaction between local and national governments. And I wanted to ask you why you think giving local governments more power to manage development seems to inexorably lead to building less housing.

You know, in 1976, Harvey Molotch writes this really, really famous piece called, “The City as a Growth Machine,” where he theorizes that “each unit of a community strives, at the expense of the others, to enhance the land-use potential of the parcels with which it is associated.” Essentially, shopkeepers are competing for where the bus stop is going to be placed, because if the bus stop is near you, then more people come to your shop, or hotel owners are going to fight to get the convention center built nearby. So his theory is that all of these different units, particularly business interests, are pushing for growth, are pushing for more things to be built near them, for land use to be intensified, and for upzoning to happen.

This is not what we’re seeing, though, and the dynamic you’re describing here, where there’s a lot of some very legitimate local costs, seems to push in the other direction. But I wonder why you think that is.

West: I think there are several things. I think those economic benefits you talk about, they’re less tangible to regular, everyday people. You don’t necessarily see the impacts of that in an easy, relatable way, whereas the costs that come with new housing in your area, those are very tangible. They’re felt.

An apartment building goes up next door—you get less sun on your property. Suddenly, there are 10 extra cars on your street, and it’s congested, and there’s more air pollution. Suddenly, your doctor’s office is really full, and you can’t get same-day doctor appointments anymore. Your kid’s class goes from being 20 kids to 30 kids, and it’s unmanageable, and performance at school goes down. Those negative effects are very tangible. And people also—I think this is a pretty well-established phenomenon in psychology, that people weigh negative effects stronger. I think that that’s got something to do with it.

In a perfect world, everyone who had a stake in local government would vote in local government, right? Everyone would be involved in that process, and they would be keeping an eye on what these regulations are and what they do and be engaged in the process. But in reality, I think people who don’t own homes don’t really feel like local government is for them. They don’t really see clearly how the decisions made by local government affect their lives, because it’s kind of pitched to everyone as, These are the people who charge rates on property owners. And they deliver libraries and swimming pools, and that’s all that they do. So if you’re not a property owner, why should you care?

So we get really low voter turnout in local elections, which contributes to the problem. And then you end up with the system—like, our councils are populated by councilors who are just regular, normal people. And they mean extremely well, but the people that they’re hearing from all the time are homeowners—homeowners or people with the financial resources to turn up to council meetings during the day, when other people who don’t have those financial resources are, for instance, at work. I think in that regard, you hear a lot from retirees who have a lot of time on their hands to participate in these processes—people who understand the system, who have the education levels to be able to game the system, you know, to know when the consultations are happening and what you need to write in a consultation so that your submission doesn’t get ignored. All of these avenues are available to them, and they use them because those local costs are so tangible.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: America’s role in New Zealand’s housing crisis.

[Break]

Demsas: And I feel like, hearing you talk, people probably feel it sounds a lot like the American context. And this is part of why I wanted to have you on the show. I think that the Anglo world’s shared political heritage, but also just sharing the language, facilitates a lot more copying. But I think that this shared history is something that is often not really well known.

Part of the context we’re talking about here, of these reforms, is—these reforms are happening because, like, 50 years ago, both of our countries pursued downzoning of some of our major cities. So can you talk a little about that history in the 1970s and New Zealand’s decision to make it harder to build more housing?

West: I think that a lot of that came out of this growing environmental-protection movement. You know, you have Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and all the birds are dying, and then everyone gets concerned about the environment, and that has flow-on effects into every policy area, including urban planning. So you get a lot of people who are rightly concerned about these things and fighting the good fight, trying to stop greedy developers from building on nature reserves in the city or concreting over everything, because it’s bad for the environment, so there’s this real push.

I think it also came from—I don’t know—the advocacy of people like Jane Jacobs, standing up to the man and to the corporate machine that’s making all the decisions. And there was this big push towards more participatory planning. Like, if you’re living somewhere, you should have a say over what’s happening in your somewhere. And I think you could argue that the pendulum has swung. It was very in favor of, I guess, developers—of big business. And now it’s swung more in favor of the local residents, you could argue possibly too far.

But I think this experience has happened in the U.S., in New Zealand, in the U.K. So in New Zealand, this culminated in updates to the Town and Country Planning Act. They really restricted the zoned capacity in cities, and this was, at the time, seen as a good thing. This was a fight for progressive cause, and: We’re going to make our cities more beautiful and pleasant and easy to live in. And those economic costs were not understood at the time, I would say.

And I think something that’s worth touching on if we’re talking about the shared history, but also culture, between places like New Zealand and the U.S.—I guess being relatively recently colonized countries, New Zealand more so—New Zealand has a really strong culture of individualism. Like, it’s very, You’re out there for yourself. You put yourself and your family first. And so you defend the borders of your property, and then you think about the community.

And there are pros and cons to an individualistic society. I think it drives a lot of innovation, and you move away from groupthink and that kind of thing. But I think this is one of the costs, is that we’re not as community minded as I would like to see. And so people are prepared to, I guess, cause costs to their neighbors and to the city and to New Zealanders as a whole if it means that they avoid some costs, you know?

Demsas: I always think this is a very interesting part of the debate, though, because in one way, you can think of the individualistic expression on housing policy as being, I don’t want anything to change in my neighborhood, because that will destroy my quality of life. Who cares what happens to rents? Who cares what happens to house prices? Who cares what happens to homelessness? I don’t want to deal with that here.

But then there’s another thing where it’s like, people who are property-rights maximalists are often very pro making it easier to build more housing, because, essentially, what these zoning regulations are is the government telling you that, like, you own a piece of land, and you’re not allowed to do what you want with that piece of land.

And so—I don’t know—that tension always feels very interesting to me because it’s both individualistic, but it’s almost like you don’t just have the property right to the property that you own but also to your whole neighborhood.

West: Yeah. I always find that quite funny, right? When you talk to people about their neighborhood changing over time, and they’re like, Well, I bought my house at this point in time, and it was like this, and I expected it to stay that way. And it’s like, Why? Why did you expect it to stay that way? To me, that seems like quite an unreasonable assumption.

But I guess there’s a whole generation of people where, for several decades, that was just the case. Things stayed the way that they were. And we got used to that. And we expected that. And there was enough room that we could expand out, so there wasn’t so much pressure, and the demand for the inner city hadn’t come yet. And so yeah, things could stay the same.

Demsas: Yeah. You know, you mentioned that in cities in New Zealand, they decreased zone capacity. In your article that you wrote in Works in Progress magazine, you wrote that in the center of Auckland, zoned capacity for new housing was cut in half. Comparing that to the U.S. in 1961, actually, New York City reduced its zoned capacity by 79 percent, and Los Angeles slashed the potential population capacity from 10 million to 4 million. Often, I think people do not realize this.

I wrote an article a while back about Minneapolis, in which I just put in the end statistics about how Minneapolis is smaller than it had been roughly 50 years ago. And I think people don’t realize it. Like, Oh, my gosh. All this growth is happening. All this stuff is happening, but cities’ population capacity has shrunk over this time period, and it’s become harder and harder to actually accommodate the people who want to move there, even as there’s been this job boom and the suburban build-out in these places.

But we actually haven’t gotten to the biggest policy shift that I think really got New Zealand a ton of attention. So we had these Christchurch and Auckland changes, but then there seems to have been a decision to go even bigger. So New Zealand 2021—what happens?

West: Well, actually, taking it back to 2017, we’d had this conservative government that had been in place since the 2008 financial crisis, and then through the Christchurch earthquakes period. They were pushing in Christchurch and Auckland for upzoning. They also introduced this policy around special housing areas, where they realized that supply constraints were a problem.

And so they introduced this policy where they were going to work with local governments to identify areas that were suitable for high-density development and, I guess, create shortcuts, easier pathways for developers to build in those areas. So that was kind of an interesting experiment that happened under that conservative government. But ultimately, I think that this conservative government that we had up until 2017, they were moving in the right direction. They were tinkering with this stuff, but they weren’t necessarily being brave enough to actually override councils.

In 2017, we had a change of government, and the Labour Party came in. And with the Labour Party, we got a few new ministers who had their moment in the sun. A couple of those—Phil Twyford, David Parker, in particular—they, in their time in opposition, had spent a lot of time looking into this issue of land-use regulations. I think they had been particularly influenced, actually, by a couple U.S. academics. Ed Glaeser and Alain Bertaud both came to New Zealand in 2013 and 2014, I think it is. They did lecture tours around the country. These politicians attended those lectures. They were persuaded about the need to relax land-use regulations. Phil Twyford, when he was elected in 2017, when Labour was elected, he became the minister for housing and urban development and transport.

Phil Twyford is an interesting guy. He’s very open to conversation with anyone, not very bound by the usual left-wing political boundaries, I suppose. So he had been talking to quite a few right-wing, you might say, or libertarian economists on this issue, for instance. And so he developed this platform where he wanted to go hard and fast on addressing land-use regulations. The first thing that he came into government wanting to do was to introduce a new national policy statement on urban development and force councils to upzone in the major cities.

He came in with this idea pretty fully formed in his mind, and he made it happen. In 2020, they introduced this policy, the National Policy Statement on Urban Development. Essentially, it made the councils in New Zealand’s biggest cities—they had to raise building-height limits around mass-rapid-transit stops in city centers and in urban centers, so, like, the little towns in the suburbs. And that was a massive change. So that was a very directive policy that councils didn’t have a lot of flexibility on.

And then following that, a year later, in 2021, they then introduced the Medium Density Residential Standards, which set a new default zone in all our major cities of three homes of up to three stories on any section by right. So those two policies, they were introduced, like, Bam, bam, one after the other, during the pandemic, so everyone was extremely distracted and not really paying attention to these massive changes in our zoning system.

And they were also both introduced with support from the National Party, the conservatives, who were now in opposition due to some—what I think was some pretty brave actions from a few key figures in the National Party who decided, on behalf of their party, that these policies were good, and that they were aligned with what National had been doing when they were in government, and that it would be silly to oppose them for the sake of being oppositional. And so they agreed to support them, which was—I mean, it’s not unheard of in New Zealand, but it’s still not very usual to pass major policies like that with bipartisan support.

Demsas: Okay. So the two major changes that you’re outlining here are transit-oriented development, so basically making it easier to build more housing in transit corridors, and then, secondly—and correct me if I’m wrong—you’re saying on any plot of land, you have to allow up to three stories if it already allows housing to exist? So a place that has any type of residential development has to allow up to three stories?

West: Yes. There were exceptional cases included. For instance, if it’s in a hazard area for floods or whatever, or if you can attest to the character of your neighborhood. Some areas were exempt due to their character status, because they have beautiful old homes or whatever.

But for the most part, unless you had a good reason not to, the new default zone had to become three homes of up to three stories. But these policies—they were introduced in the central-government level, but then they were handed over to councils. So councils were given a time frame in which they had to implement these policies in their plans. So it wasn’t an overnight change. It was going to take a few years to bed in.

Demsas: And I think one thing to note here, for anyone who is less in the weeds on zoning policy here—when these changes happen, it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden, like, all these homes need to be redeveloped and turned into three-story buildings. It just means they are allowed to be turned into anything up to three stories. So that’s one of the most important—I think that often, when people have these debates, they’re like, Oh, a bulldozer is coming to your single-family home to turn it into an apartment building. And no, it’s just what is now legally permissible includes not just single-family homes but also some more-dense housing.

West: Yes. That’s a very good point.

Demsas: So what is the effect of this shift? How much of this actually gets implemented at the local level? I think you’re kind of foreshadowing that a bit here.

West: Yeah. So these two policies—when the National Policy Statement on Urban Development was introduced, it came with a timeline in which councils had to implement these policies in their plans. The Medium Density Residential Standards that followed, they follow the same timeline as the NPSUD. So there was just one round of changes that councils had to make. And I would say that many councils have been quite resistant. I think the NPSUD, like, the first policy, that transit-oriented-development policy—I should add, also, that policy made it that councils are no longer allowed to apply minimum car-parking requirements.

That’s another aspect of that policy.

But that policy was actually taken on a roadshow around the country during consultation. You know, councils were talked to, they got submissions. It wasn’t a secret policy. People knew it was coming. It just didn’t really get very much attention, because, I think, it wasn’t very tangible. It was going to take a few years to bed in. But also, because of the pandemic, no one was paying attention. And so councils knew that that policy was coming, and it seemed like they didn’t love it. But it was smart. It was justifiable. It wasn’t going to broadly change every part of the city. It was just transit corridors and inner-city areas.

The Medium Density Residential Standards were kept secret from local government until the day they were announced to the public. They were not consulted on until they were announced to the public.

Demsas: Why?

West: Well, there are multiple reasons. I think there was a sense that local governments would hate them, which was an accurate sense. They don’t like being forced to do things. Fair enough. But also because when the National Policy Statement, that first policy, was introduced—at the time that it was released, Labour didn’t know that the National Party was going to support it. They opted to support it after the announcement, post its release.

And I think that getting the support from the opposition party really emboldened the Labour ministers, and they were like, Oh, we could actually push way further on this because National might support us. And so they entered secret talks, secret conversations behind closed doors with the National Party, and they developed the Medium Density Residential Standards in partnership. And because of this, I think, is one of the reasons why they kept it secret.

So even the government agencies—I know if you weren’t directly working on those policies, you didn’t know about it. I was working in the Ministry [of] Housing and Urban Development when this policy was announced. And I had no idea that it was happening, so it was a very, very closed tent. And part of the reason was that, I think, between the two parties, they wanted to be on the same page before they were exposed to external pressure from voters, which is, you know—fair enough. (Laughs.)

Demsas: Well, perhaps not fair enough, because it seems like the backlash ended up really hurting this policy. Can you talk about how that backlash played out?

West: Yeah. As part of my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people, and the word blindsided came up a lot—that local government felt that they’d been blindsided by this policy and that it really ruined a lot of already pretty-fragile relationships with central government.

We were coming out with the pandemic, so people had more time and attention on their hands to pay attention. And it was a really easy policy to describe to people. It’s like, Next door, you’re going to get a three-story apartment building or three terraces. And anyone can do that at any time. And so part of the problem of this secret tent between Labour and National is that they didn’t involve any of the minor parties in these debates, because, you know: small tent, easier to keep a secret.

As a result of that, the ostensibly libertarian party in New Zealand, ACT, they saw this as an opportunity to win votes off National. They hadn’t been included in the debate. It wasn’t their policy. So they ran a pretty intense campaign against the Medium Density Residential Standards, which put the National Party in a really awkward position, because around this time, Phil Twyford, who had been the housing minister for Labor for various reasons, had been kind of demoted to the back bench of the Labour Party. So he had been, like, the architect and the biggest advocate for these policies. And he was kind of a bit muffled now on the back bench of the Labour Party, which meant that the National politicians who had stuck their necks out to support the Medium Density Residential Standards were kind of being left high and dry to defend them on their own.

And when I interviewed some National Party politicians, that’s what they told me. That’s how they felt: that they had been left on their own without the support of Labour, even though it was Labour’s policy. Various reasons why that happened, but it made them extremely vulnerable to this negative campaigning from ACT.

And so when the leadership of the National Party changed in 2021, right as the Medium Density Residential Standards had been going through Parliament, and the new leader—my understanding is that he, Christopher Luxon, in particular, got cold feet about the issue. They were heading into an election year, and it wasn’t his policy. He hadn’t been involved in it. And I think he just decided on the Medium Density Residential Standards, at least, that he would make a captain’s call and pull the plug on them. So he announced that they were withdrawing their support, which I understand was not a popular decision within the National Party. There was quite a lot of upset with the people who had supported that policy. But I guess that was the result of the secrecy and the speed with which they introduced these policies.

Demsas: From your perspective, this cross-party coalition that was very, very fragile—it broke down because of the backlash to the secrecy. Do you feel like most of what people are reacting to is the process and the lack of transparency, and that a better process could have led to more cohesion here? Or that, really, the problem is that people are opposed to upzoning, and this is just one way of creating backlash to that?

West: It’s a bit of a catch-22 because, on the one hand, people were angry about the secrecy and the speed with which this policy was introduced. But on the flip side, there was a moment for that. We were right at the height of the pandemic when this policy was going through Parliament. We’d normalized urgent policymaking to some extent, so it became possible to do this.

And also, house prices had just skyrocketed over the pandemic. I think they went up something like 40 percent between the start of the pandemic and this point at which the Medium Density Residential Standards were going through Parliament. And so people were really, really upset about house prices. It had become a No. 1 issue polling across the country. And there was, I think, the sense in central government that doing something would be well received. And if they had taken too long to respond to the crisis, I think there is a chance that the backlash could have been even worse.

I don’t know. It’s hard to know if it could have been different. I think that there is just this big contingent of people who are opposed to upzoning because of those local costs, regardless of the distributed benefits. And unless we can give them an incentive to say yes to upzoning—if we can provide them some local benefits, which I’m not sure the government is doing enough to provide those carrots, essentially, at the moment—we’re going to continue to see this opposition.

But I do think it’s changing. I think there is, perhaps, even a generational shift happening at the moment. I think that the issue of upzoning ’90s regulations is becoming more salient among my generation, the younger generation, you know? People who are locked out of the housing market—people are becoming more accepting. I know my mom, for instance, is now a YIMBY.

Demsas: Oh, yeah?

West: Yeah. She’s upset about the effects on her house price, but she’s happy, for me, for the city. (Laughs.)

Demsas: This is something that I think is really interesting—your personal background here—because one thing you mentioned earlier is that a lot of the 1960s, ’70s backlash to development is driven by environmental concerns. But your background is also as a climate activist as part of Generation Zero. Can you talk a little bit about the climate politics in New Zealand?

Because here in the U.S., when I’ve done reporting on this, you see a generational split. You see kind of younger—particularly, people who grew up under, The environment is about caring about carbon emissions, it’s kind of like a tech response: You want to get electric vehicles rather than gas-guzzling cars. You want to make sure you have passive houses or things like that built. You want renewable energy built.

That sort of vibe is very, very different than the environmentalists of maybe the Boomer generation and maybe early Gen Xers, as well, for whom environmentalism is often anti-development, really focusing on conservation and wildlife and things like that. Is that a similar story in New Zealand? Or is Generation Zero kind of a representative of the entire environmental movement there?

West: Definitely not representative of the entire environmental movement. It is a similar story to what you’ve just told. You do have this generational shift or divide, I guess, in what is seen as environmentalism.

To my background, I’m a qualified environmental scientist. That’s what I studied, and I spent years involved in this organization, Generation Zero, that you’ve mentioned, which is a youth-led climate-action organization in New Zealand. Generation Zero was responsible, for instance, for pressuring the central government into passing New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Act in 2019.

And I think what’s interesting and different about New Zealand is that Generation Zero, in particular, when they conceived of this project to have a Zero Carbon Act in New Zealand, they understood very early on that this policy was not going to be enduring if it wasn’t passed with bipartisan support. So the intention, right from the start, was to win over parties on both sides of the political spectrum to addressing climate change. And so Generation Zero’s founding principles revolved around this idea of nonpartisanship and of being pragmatic and reasonable and, I guess, professional. And so this Zero Carbon Act campaign was their big project.

But at the same time, the Auckland Unitary Plan was going through, and Generation Zero has always had quite strong local branches. And so the Auckland unitary plan kind of became the project of the Auckland local branch, that they understood the carbon implications of compact urban form. And so they were a really big influence on the debates in Auckland, getting young people interested and excited and participating in these consultations and voting on these issues.

And so I think that that’s had a big influence on the wider movement in New Zealand around urbanism, is that we kind of—I mean, I get the sense that it’s a bit different in the U.S. But I think this issue of compact urban development and upzoning has often been approached with an environmental flair, when people in the U.S. seem very fixated on the affordability arguments—which, I mean, we have been as well. But there has also always been this narrative of, This is how we achieve emissions reductions, is by building up.

Demsas: I feel like the political dynamics here are really interesting. From the U.S. context, the stringent land-use regulations are often really conceived of as Democratic state and city problems. So our liberal party feels, I think, a lot of the brunt of the criticism about, you know, high home prices in San Francisco, California writ large, Washington State, Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, all the way down. And you see much more affordability in conservative states. And there’s a debate about this. Part of it is, Okay. Well, many conservative states don’t really have the kind of population pressure as Democratic states, right? So they don’t actually have to face this problem.

It’s been hard to really continue that defense, given that you see a lot of population shifts towards places like Texas and Florida, which are Republican controlled. And I wonder, in the context you’re talking about here, it seems like the conservative party was kind of the spearhead of upzoning in New Zealand. And do you think that’s because the conservative politicians are more amenable to these sorts of arguments? Or do you think Labour would have also done the same thing in that position if they were in charge during Christchurch and during the Auckland upzoning?

West: Well, what I think is important to understand about the New Zealand context is that this debate around relaxing land-use regulations didn’t start with upzoning.

It started with relaxing land-use constraints on growth out. It was kind of sparked by this paper published by a New Zealand economist in—I think he published a working paper in 2008, Arthur Grimes. He did this paper looking at Auckland’s urban-growth limit, which was essentially the boundary beyond which they refused to zone for residential.

And he found that house prices were 10 times higher inside the urban boundary than they were outside. And he was like, This regulation, this boundary on growth outwards is having a massive impact on house prices in Auckland. And that really caught the attention of central-government politicians. And I think you’re right, perhaps because they’re more receptive to these arguments about free markets, property rights, You should be allowed to do what you want on your land. People should be allowed to build wherever they want, whenever they want, whatever they want.

So I do think that there was an element of that. Upzoning was an afterthought, in some regards. I think there was this understanding that if the problem that we’re trying to address is affordability, then we need to relax constraints on growth out. And I think it was only later that upzoning was also understood to be a policy that would help with affordability.

Demsas: So densification was mostly seen, as you said, in the climate context, whereas conservatives are basically like, You could just sprawl. You could always get affordable housing if you continue building out into the suburbs and suburbs and suburbs.

West: Yeah. Kind of. And I think, yeah, the density was in the climate considerations, but also things around like livability, congestion, that kind of stuff, as well. But I think that by the time that Labour came into government, upzoning had started to be understood, at least by politicians or policy wonks in those circles, as a housing-affordability policy, not just an environmental policy, which meant that they had two avenues, among others, that they could sell this policy on. It was the same direction of policymaking as National had been taking, but Labour just put a more left-wing spin on it, I’d say.

Demsas: Well, Eleanor, always our last question: What is something that you thought was a good idea at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

West: Oh, yeah. To take us completely away from housing policy and land-use regulations: workplace Secret Santa. It always seemed super fun when I was younger, but I’ve come to understand in my old age that I just do not have space in my heart or mind to accept another novelty mug into my life. I just can’t do it.

Demsas: (Laughs.) What did you last get that radicalized you on Secret Santa?

West: It’s just that I’ve received more than one novelty mug in my lifetime.

Demsas: Okay.

West: Or those Lindt gold chocolates with Nutella in them, which is perfectly in the price range. So it’s just like a group of people gifting those to each other. I don’t know. I’m just not into it.

Demsas: So it’s not that you feel like you’re burdened by having to give gifts. You are burdened by these low-quality gifts that you’re receiving.

West: I’m burdened by the gifts. I’m burdened by having to give the gifts because it’s hard with your colleagues. You don’t want to be too thoughtful, because that could be awkward and weird.

Demsas: Agreed.

West: But if you’re not thoughtful enough, people are like, Oh, you just popped to the supermarket over the road and bought a box of chocolates, didn’t you? Don’t you care about your colleagues? Don’t you care about team culture? Don’t you care about workplace Secret Santa? You know, I’m not into it.

Demsas: Well, Eleanor, thank you so much. Right for the holiday season, a perfect “good on paper.” Thanks for coming on.

West: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a delight.

[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, and 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.