Sia Liilii comes from a big family in Hawaii, the ninth of 11 children. Without her volleyball scholarship at the University of Nevada at Reno, she told me recently, she would never have been able to go to college. So when she got wind this past summer that one of Nevada’s opponents in the Mountain West Conference, San Jose State University, was fielding a transgender player, she rebelled. “It’s not right that this person is taking not only a starting spot but a roster spot, from a female who has, just like us, played volleyball her whole life and dreamt of playing at the collegiate level,” Liilii said.

The story of transgender women competing in female sports is frequently told as one of inclusion—creating opportunities for people to compete as their authentic selves. But for athletes such as Liilii, these rules were a matter of exclusion. Every spot taken by someone with a male athletic advantage is an opportunity closed to a female rival.

Other players in the conference, it turned out, had concerns similar to Liilii’s. In particular, some worried whether a ball spiked over the net by a stronger and more powerful player could injure them. Those concerns would ultimately lead Nevada and other teams to forfeit games to San Jose State, in the largest-scale protest yet by female athletes against the presence of a trans competitor.

More than 200,000 women compete in college sports in the United States, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and more than 3.4 million girls take part in high-school sports, according to the ​​National Federation of State High School Associations. Questions of fair competition tend to resonate intensely with both athletes and their supporters. Sports organizations set rules to minimize unwarranted advantages—witness the restrictions on high-tech sharkskin-inspired swimsuits and running shoes with carbon-fiber plates. But while Nike estimates that its VaporFly sneakers give a 4 percent boost to wearers, the performance gap between men and women is estimated to vary from 10 to 50 percent, depending on the sport. Yet progressives have downplayed that sex difference—which is obvious to many casual observers—because it challenges the idea that transgender women should be treated as women in all circumstances.

[Jonathan Chait: Moderation is not the same thing as surrender]

On Joe Biden’s first day in office as president, he issued an executive order opposing discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Its language did not explicitly address college athletics but declared that all “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” After the 2022 midterms, LGBTQ organizations assured Democrats that Republican attack ads about trans athletes in female sports were ineffective—the issue was too far down voters’ list of priorities, they argued.

Yet by this fall, Donald Trump’s campaign was pummeling the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, with a spot that showed, among other images, a 2012 picture of Gabrielle Ludwig, a 50-something basketball player who had returned to college after transitioning. At 6 feet 6 inches tall, Ludwig towered over her teammates. Harris’s campaign reportedly tested several rebuttals, and found that none of them worked. So how did Democrats move from proudly championing trans inclusion in Biden’s early days as president to finding the topic an unanswerable liability three years later? Why did the left refuse to acknowledge the trade-off between inclusion of some athletes and fairness to others? Why were concerns like Sia Liilii’s so easily ignored?

Many progressives have viewed trans rights as an uncomplicated sequel to the successful campaigns for voting rights for Black Americans and marriage equality for same-sex couples. But the volleyball players were pointing to an issue that affected two traditionally marginalized groups: gender-nonconforming people and women athletes. And the left, which had become attached to a simple, hierarchical ranking of oppression, could find no way to arbitrate between the two groups—or even acknowledge that any conflict existed.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, American women fought for the right to play sports at all. They were excluded by arbitrary rules, inadequate facilities and funding, and the belief that competition was unhealthy and unfeminine. The 1972 passage of the law known as Title IX, which prohibited discrimination “on the basis of sex” in educational settings, began to improve the situation for college athletes. But in recent years, lawyers have argued over what the law means—does sex cover only biological sex, or gender identity and sexual orientation? Almost everyone agrees that, in most sports, men and women should compete in different categories. The argument is over whether the lines should be drawn by athletes’ genes or their experience of gender.

Many articles in the popular press have portrayed the growing visibility of trans athletes as a sign of social progress. In 2021, the New Zealand weight lifter Laurel Hubbard was heralded as the first openly trans athlete to compete in the Olympics. In a lengthy 2022 profile, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas told Sports Illustrated, “I just want to show trans kids and younger trans athletes that they’re not alone. They don’t have to choose between who they are and the sport they love.” Some high-profile female athletes have championed this spirit of inclusion. The former U.S. women’s soccer captain Megan Rapinoe has described restrictions on trans players as “trying to legislate away people’s full humanity.”

Throughout the Biden administration, activist groups waved away tough questions, claiming that there was no evidence of “trans athletes” having advantages. But such generic phrasing is deceptive. No one is arguing that trans men have an advantage over biological males; when trans men compete in the male category, they tend to struggle. The actual question is whether natal males have an advantage over natal females. Liilii told me that when she raised the issue with her coaches at Nevada when the players were deciding whether to play against San Jose State, one of the college staff told her to educate herself on the topic, “really implying that we weren’t smart enough to know what is happening.”

For all the plaudits that Lia Thomas received from some quarters, she also came to symbolize others’ concerns. Thomas was a higher-ranked swimmer in the female category than she had been in the male one a few seasons earlier. She had ranked 65th among men in the 500-yard freestyle, for example; she won an NCAA championship in the women’s event. Greater awareness of Thomas and other trans athletes in women’s sports did not translate into greater approval. If anything, the opposite occurred: In 2021, 55 percent of Democrats supported transgender athletes competing in the team of their chosen gender, according to Gallup. Two years later, however, that number had fallen to 47 percent. Overall, nearly seven out of 10 Americans now think athletes should compete in the category of their birth sex.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

By 2023, the Biden White House seemed to be backing away from the sweeping language in its earlier executive order. The administration proposed to give schools and universities more leeway to limit trans athletes’ participation while prohibiting states from enacting blanket bans. The situation remained in flux when the college volleyball season began this year. Under USA Volleyball rules, trans athletes who take “the necessary steps to transition to their adopted gender,” including lowering their testosterone levels, are allowed to compete in the women’s category.

The extent to which hormone suppression negates male athletic advantage is a matter of scientific debate. But when Liilii saw videos of the disputed player during the preseason, she remembers thinking, “The way this person is jumping and hitting the ball—I’ve never seen a woman do that.” (The player has not publicly confirmed her transgender status, so I’m choosing not to name her. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In legal filings, San Jose State has neither disputed that it was fielding a transgender player nor identified the athlete in question. “Our student athletes are in full compliance with NCAA rules and regulations,” a university spokesperson told me by email.)

In September, the San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and the associate coach Melissa Batie-Smoose went public with their concerns about their own team’s trans player. “Safety is being taken away from women,” Batie-Smoose later told Fox News. “Fair play is taken away from women.” Both women told Quillette that they believed players and coaches were being pressured not to make a fuss. The next month, Liilii told me, she and her Nevada teammates voted, 16–1, to boycott their next match against San Jose State. The Nevada players were not alone: Teams from Boise State, the University of Wyoming, Southern Utah, and Utah State also forfeited games rather than face the trans player.

San Jose State kept competing despite all that—and despite a lawsuit aimed at barring the school from the Mountain West Conference postseason tournament in Las Vegas in November. (The lawsuit failed, and the team finished second in the finals.) The season ended in acrimony. “I will not sugarcoat our reality for the last two months,” San Jose State’s head coach, Todd Kress, said in a statement after the tournament. “Each forfeiture announcement unleashed appalling, hateful messages individuals chose to send directly to our student-athletes, our coaching staff, and many associated with our program.” Afterward, seven of the team’s athletes requested to enter the transfer portal. The disputed player, who is a senior, will not compete again.

By the time of the tournament, San Jose State’s roster had become a national political issue. Sia Liilii told me that after her team put out its statement refusing to play the California school, one of their next matches was attended by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic member of Congress whom Trump has nominated to be director of national intelligence; Sam Brown, the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada; and Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. “That was really reassuring,” Liilii said, “just seeing that there’s a lot of support.” Clearly, many on the right felt that a revolt in women’s volleyball had the potential to connect with voters. Meanwhile, on the left, people who questioned the activist line—including the tennis legend Martina Navratilova, a longtime progressive—were being excoriated for their supposed bigotry.

“People like to say that it’s a complicated issue, and I don’t actually think it is … It all boils down to: Do you actually think that trans women and intersex women are real women—and are really female or not?” the transgender cyclist Veronica Ivy told The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah in 2022. “It’s an extreme indignity to say, ‘I believe you’re a woman, except for sport.’” She added that the enforcement of traditional categories was about “protecting the fragile, weak cis white woman from the rest of us.” Noah’s studio audience in New York heartily applauded Ivy’s words. Sports was only one part of a seamless whole: If you believed, as good liberals did, that trans women were women, no carve-outs were justifiable.

In red America, however, a different narrative was developing. The same year that Ivy was soaking up the Daily Show applause, Riley Gaines, a University of Kentucky swimmer who had competed against Lia Thomas, went public with her objection to trans inclusion in her league. She recalls feeling slighted after a race in which she tied with Thomas for fifth place but the Penn swimmer got to hold the relevant trophy. “It took that personal experience,” Gaines told me. “I hate that it took that. I wish I was more bold.” In March 2024, her profile exploded when she was interviewed by Joe Rogan. Here was an everyday Christian girl talking to a sports-mad superstar podcaster about how the left was trying to deny that men are stronger than women. If thousands of YouTube comments are any indication, Rogan’s audience loved it.

Gaines has joined a lawsuit against the NCAA, calling for a nationwide ban on transgender women in female categories. The ACLU and other advocacy groups on the left have intervened to oppose Gaines’s suit, suggesting that conservative slogans about “protecting women’s sports” are a cover for racism, transphobia, and misogyny. The National Women’s Law Center believes that “the work of gender justice is at odds with overbroad generalizations about sex-related traits or abilities” and suggests that the “over-policing” of athletes’ bodies particularly harms minority women.

By contrast, conservatives have welcomed female athletes who feel abandoned by American feminist and civil-rights groups. Today, Gaines, Liilii, and other female athletes who have spoken out on this issue have signed up to be ambassadors for the Independent Women’s Forum, a nonprofit that previously criticized what it saw as overzealous enforcement of Title IX. In 2012, the group’s then executive director wrote that “what is very clear is that legislation in the name of ‘gender equality’ does not actually make men and women the same.” However, the group now fights to “take back Title IX” by separating participation in sports on the basis of biological sex.

People “love to receive information through stories,” May Mailman, the IWF’s director and a former White House adviser to Donald Trump, told me. “The left knows this—George Floyd is one story that sparked immense societal unrest.” During the presidential campaign, the IWF sent its ambassadors on a cross-country bus tour that started in Scranton, Pennsylvania, under the slogan “Our bodies, our sports.” The group’s ambassadors have also testified before Congress and in states considering restrictions on transgender women participating in female sports. The IWF’s ideological opponents may dismiss these athletes as political partisans. But even if some are, so what? Conservatives have a right to speak up, and the institutional left certainly didn’t listen to the players’ concerns. Progressives can’t expect to triumph by silencing dissenters through administrative pressure.

[Helen Lewis: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

One of the most influential IWF ambassadors is Payton McNabb, who says she received a brain injury in 2022, at the age of 17, when playing volleyball against a transgender opponent. A widely circulated video of the incident shows the spike that hit her, but not what happened subsequently. She told me that she was briefly unconscious. “The neurologist told me that I had a brain bleed, partial paralysis on my right side, and a concussion,” she added. (She declined to provide her medical records for me to verify her account.) Her story is the kind that is invisible to a certain type of American media consumer but achieves the status of lore with another. She has been interviewed by Fox News, Megyn Kelly and the New York Post, and on the podcast of Allie Beth Stuckey, a rising star on the religious right who was described in The Atlantic as the “new Phyllis Schlafly.”

In August 2023, McNabb testified in front of the North Carolina legislature after Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed a law that banned athletes “of the male sex” from competing on women’s teams. All of the state’s Republicans, along with two Democrats, later voted to override the veto. During the hearings, it emerged that in the four years that the North Carolina High School Athletic Association had permitted transgender players to choose their teams, only two natal male students had successfully applied to play as girls. That can be read two ways. One is this: Why were Republicans making such a big deal out of an issue that affects so few students? The other is this: Why did Democrats, a few years ago, make such a big deal out of an issue that affected so few students?

After the 2024 election, a handful of Democrats broke ranks. “I have two little girls,” Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” His campaign manager subsequently resigned, protesters gathered outside one of his offices, and he was rebuked by the state’s Democratic governor. But many of Moulton’s fellow Democrats were notably silent. “Asked for comment on Mr. Moulton’s remarks, each of the 10 other members of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, declined to comment or did not immediately respond,” the Times reported. Further evidence that a taboo had been broken came on the Friday before Christmas. The White House abandoned its proposed rule change forbidding blanket bans on trans athletes after 150,000 public responses, acknowledging that the incoming Trump administration will set its own rules.

Meanwhile, many international sports organizations have opted to define their women’s division in biological terms. This past summer, Lia Thomas lost her legal case against World Aquatics, which had barred her from the female competition. A leading contender to be the next head of the International Olympic Committee, Britain’s Sebastian Coe, has said that “the protection of the female category, for me, is absolutely non-negotiable.” Those who favor defining women’s sports according to biology feel confident that their side will prevail. “I have nieces, and I have little sisters,” Sia Liilii told me. She said she was happy “knowing that I did the right thing, and knowing that when they are in my position, they won’t have to deal with this.”

[Read: I detransitioned. But not because I wasn’t trans.]

In my view, the way forward lies in an empathetic compromise, one that broadly respects transgender Americans’ sense of their own identity—for example, in the use of chosen names and pronouns—while acknowledging that in some areas, biology really matters. Many sports organizations have established a protected female category, reserved for those who have not experienced the advantages conferred by male puberty, alongside an open one available to men, trans women, trans men taking testosterone supplements, and nonbinary athletes of either sex. Unlike Veronica Ivy, many voters who support laws protecting trans people from housing and employment discrimination don’t see trans rights as an all-or-nothing deal; in fact, a few limited carve-outs on the basis of biological sex might increase acceptance of gender-nonconforming people overall.

Not everything has to be an entrenched battle of red versus blue: As more and more Democrats realize that they shouldn’t have built their defense of trans people on the sand of sex denialism, Republicans should have the grace to take the win on sports and disown the inflammatory rhetoric of agitators such as Representative Nancy Mace, who responded to the election of the first trans member of Congress by deploying anti-trans slurs. As the second Trump administration begins, the lesson from the college-volleyball rebellion is that institutions cannot impose progressive values by fiat. Attempts at social change will not survive without the underlying work of persuasion.

Sia Liilii and other women athletes said no. Universities and sports organizations needed a better response.

The little boy wandered off from his family and "ran straight toward the 400ft cliff edge" of the Kilauea volcano.

The eruption remains within the mountain's summit caldera inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Hawaii’s Mount Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes on Earth launched jets of a molten lava eruption.

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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.

The past two weeks in South Korean politics have featured enough twists to fill a Netflix K-drama. President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, shocking even some of his own advisers. In a late-night session, the national legislature overturned it. A few days later, the besieged president begged forgiveness from his people, while a corruption scandal engulfed the first lady. Legislators voted to impeach Yoon last weekend and suspend his powers, which have been transferred to a caretaker government run by the prime minister. For now, Yoon remains in office; the country’s highest court will decide whether he can stay.

Korea’s national crisis is far from over. Government dysfunction will likely last well into the new year, entrenching the country’s economic and social problems. The crisis also threatens to undo the substantial progress that Korea has made in strengthening ties with the West, and to leave Seoul woefully unprepared to address Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency, with all the dangers he poses to Korean security.

The proximate seeds of this calamity were planted last spring. The opposition trounced Yoon’s ruling party in national elections in April. Since then, Yoon’s political nemesis, Lee Jae-myung, has helped ensure that the legislature blocks all of the president’s bills, including the national budget. (Lee faces corruption charges, including for allegedly funneling money to North Korea, and an appellate-court decision will determine whether he can run to replace Yoon. He has denied any wrongdoing.) Meanwhile, Yoon’s wife, Kim Keon-hee, became the subject of growing public outrage over allegations of accepting lavish gifts. On December 3, in an apparent attempt to crush his political opposition and silence his wife’s critics, Yoon declared martial law.

[Read: South Korea’s warning for Washington]

But Yoon’s decision also reflected deeper structural issues. The Korean constitution allows presidents to sit for a single five-year term, with no possibility of reelection. As a result, about halfway through their tenure, both their own party and the opposition tend to distance themselves from the president as they begin looking for a successor. This process had already begun for Yoon, who took office in the spring of 2022. Alienated and unpopular in the second half of their term, many Korean presidents have sought to clamp down on opponents and consolidate power, with little regard for how the public will respond. After all, they have no reelection campaign to worry about.

That said, even at the height of their powers, Korean presidents rarely have a popular mandate to govern. That’s because, for more than three decades, one-third of the country’s electorate has identified as conservative, one-third as progressive, and one-third as moderate or undecided. Yoon, for example, is a conservative who won election by less than 1 percent and enjoyed no political honeymoon before his approval ratings plummeted. He was deeply disliked long before declaring martial law and apparently saw no other way to reverse his political fortunes.

Presidents are also vulnerable from the start of their term because of elements in Korean culture that promote a zero-sum view of politics. The country’s deep ideological divides contribute to this problem, but it’s also rooted in a concept called han, which is central to many Koreans’ emotional identity. Loosely translated as “resentment for past injustices,” han compels each side to not just beat the other, but destroy it. For example, opposition forces, led by Lee, have ruthlessly attacked the first lady, stirring mass protests and impugning her character. Government forces, meanwhile, are expected to pursue their corruption case against Lee until he’s at least disqualified from running in the next election, if not imprisoned. And in addition to impeaching Yoon, the opposition has opened a criminal case against him for insurrection. Some of these prosecutions may well be justified, but Korea’s politicians are highly motivated to carry them out past the point of reason.

The next step in resolving the crisis falls to the Constitutional Court, which will have final say on Yoon’s impeachment. It has ruled on presidential ousters before. In 2004, the court overturned the impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun, allowing him to finish his term. More recently, in 2017, it upheld the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. The court has up to 180 days to render a decision on Yoon. Politics will inevitably play a role, as all parties jockey to fill the court’s three current vacancies with friendly judges. If none of the spots is filled, the dissenting opinion of only one judge will be enough to overturn the impeachment and reinstate Yoon as president.

In Korea’s history of political chaos, these impeachments hardly rank. Four of the country’s 13 presidents (including Park) have been jailed. One committed suicide after leaving office, one was shot in the head by his bodyguard, and one was forced into exile (in Hawaii) until his death. Some years ago, I attended an event where I saw three former U.S. presidents all in the same place, and I thought: This could never happen in Korea.

Government dysfunction has cost South Korea. The Korean stock market plummeted after Yoon’s declaration of martial law, and the national currency quickly depreciated. (The stock market has since recovered.) Those who would invest in South Korea now price in political instability, just as they do the security threat from North Korea. Other stubborn problems—low birth rates, underemployment among the college-educated, a doctors’ strike that has effectively halted elective medical procedures—have gone largely unaddressed. Korea’s power brokers are too busy fighting among themselves.

[Anna Louie Sussman: The real reason South Koreans aren’t having babies]

Domestic concerns may soon be the least of Korea’s worries. Trump’s imminent return to the White House will put the U.S.-Korea alliance to the test at a moment when Seoul has only a caretaker government in place and no election scheduled in the near term. Without a permanent leader making the case on Korea’s behalf, Trump may be more likely to follow through on his promise to impose tariffs. He may demand to renegotiate America’s standing agreements with Seoul that protect free trade and cost-sharing for defense. Perhaps more frightening, Trump could remove the nearly 30,000 U.S. ground troops in Korea—something he tried and failed to do during his first term. He might also rekindle his friendship with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and make a peace deal over Seoul’s head. All of these things could happen very quickly. As one former senior Trump official told me, speaking about the coming administration on the condition of anonymity, “Things will change not just in the first 100 days, but in the first 100 hours.”

With so much on the line, South Korea will need its leaders to establish early contact with Trump. Indeed, that was Yoon’s plan: He was angling for a pre-inauguration Mar-a-Lago meeting last month. But now Korea has no elected leader to advocate for it in the first months of the new U.S. administration.

Yoon did enact some policies that were widely admired, and that linked his country more strongly to the world, particularly to the West. Under Yoon, South Korea improved relations with Japan, advanced trilateral cooperation with Japan and the U.S., joined the Chips 4 Alliance for semiconductor supply chains and export controls, invested in electric-vehicle-battery production in the United States, and supported Ukraine. Now these and other policies will be tainted by his impeachment and subject to partisan attacks, while Seoul likely retrenches on all fronts.

So far, America’s reaction to the political crisis in Seoul has been subdued and cautious; in a statement, it simply emphasized the importance of democratic resilience and rule of law. The European Union was somewhat more forceful, urging a quick and democratic resolution to the crisis, suggesting the importance it places on South Korea’s supply chains and support for Ukraine.

For many Koreans who have known only democracy, Yoon’s declaration of martial law introduced them to the country’s history as a military dictatorship. Instead of a K-drama, the No. 1 Korean title on Netflix earlier this month was a film about the last time martial law was declared, in 1979. Apparently real life—both past and present—supplied more than enough excitement.

In the early months of 2023, the astronomer Željko Ivezić found himself taking part in a highly unusual negotiation. Ivezić is the 59-year-old director of the Vera Rubin Observatory, a $1 billion telescope that the United States has been developing in the Chilean high desert for more than 20 years. He was trying to reach an agreement that would keep his telescope from compromising America’s national security when it starts stargazing next year.

This task was odd enough for any scientist, and it was made more so by the fact that Ivezić had no idea with whom he was negotiating. “I didn’t even know which agency I was talking to,” he told me on a recent video call from his field office in Chile. Whoever it was would communicate with him only through intermediaries at the National Science Foundation. Ivezić didn’t even know whether one person or several people were on the other side of the exchange. All he knew was that they were very security-minded. Also, they seemed to know a great deal about astronomy.

The Vera Rubin is housed in a sleek building on a mountaintop in the Atacama Desert. The chamber that holds its primary mirror juts up from the end of the elongated structure like the head of a sphinx. The observatory represents a freakish augmentation of human vision. Like the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA launched a few years ago, it will be able to see to the far edge of the universe. But the Webb can observe only a tiny region of sky. The Vera Rubin will be able to lock onto a tile of sky that is much larger and, after 30 seconds, return an image of that tile that extends 13 billion light-years into space. Then it will pan over and lock onto an adjacent tile of sky and do the same thing. After just three nights of going tile-by-tile like a handyman redoing a bathroom wall, it will have captured a deep image of the entire sky.

National-security types worry about what the Vera Rubin will be able to see. Ivezić told me that each of its full-sky images will contain more than 40 billion objects. That’s several times more than all previous surveys of this sort combined. When the Vera Rubin sees an object that it hasn’t seen before, it will alert astronomers. If a star explodes billions of light-years away, an algorithm will spot it, and the community will be notified. If a near-earth asteroid comes hurtling right toward us, scientists will know to zoom into it, immediately, with other observatories. The problem is, if a spy satellite, or some other secret spacecraft, moves into view, that too could get flagged and have its location distributed, in real time, to people all across the world.

The Pentagon doesn’t like much of anything to be known about its satellites. During the Cold War, the United States was more secretive about what it did in space than what it did in the nuclear realm, says Aaron Bateman, a historian at George Washington University and the author of Weapons in Space. The U.S. acknowledges the general contours of its nuclear arsenal—how many weapons and delivery vehicles it has—but tends to be far more circumspect about its military space capabilities. Bateman told me that the very existence of the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency responsible for developing U.S. spy satellites, was classified until 1992. The NRO still operates a fleet of these satellites, but exact details about how many, and what kind, remain secret.

The Vera Rubin Observatory will likely make awkward eye contact with some of them. Many of them are telescopes in their own right, but instead of tilting up toward the sky, they point down at Earth. This dual nature of the telescope dates back to its inception; after inventing his, Galileo wrote to the ruler of Venice about its ability to spy enemy ships. He also vowed to keep the device a secret. During the early Cold War, the British government monitored Soviet satellites and missile tests with the Jodrell Bank Observatory, in Manchester.

Assistance of this kind has also flowed in the opposite direction, from the spies to the civilians. During the Apollo missions, NRO spy satellites captured images of potential landing sites on the moon. They also inspected damaged panels on SkyLab, NASA’s first space station. In 1981, during the space shuttle’s maiden flight, a NASA astronaut flipped the shuttle over so that an NRO satellite could grab a close-up of its heat shield, to see how it had held up through the atmospheric friction. Only a few people at the agency were aware of the operation.

The public learns about the true extent of the government’s seeing powers only after a long lag. The space historian Dwayne Day recently told me that the intelligence community operated large optics in space before NASA even started working on the Hubble, in 1977. He said that the technology helping today’s ground-based observatories see through the blur of the atmosphere was first developed by the military, and then later shared with civilian astronomers. The NRO may have all kinds of telescopes. In 2012, the agency even gave NASA a Hubble-class observatory as a surprise gift. It had just been lying around.

Ivezić knew that the Vera Rubin Observatory would need to avoid revealing the full extent of America’s space-based surveillance apparatus. He agreed to set up a system that would remove classified information from the telescope’s images, but he and his mysterious interlocutors did not initially agree about how it should work. Some of their concerns were easy to assuage. The Defense Intelligence Agency sometimes asks to be informed when foreign nationals use America’s most powerful radio observatories, in case those people were to point them at something sensitive, presumably. No such protocols would be necessary for the Vera Rubin’s Chilean operators, because the telescope has a fixed, 10-year observation plan. Ivezić said he showed it to his government counterparts and assured them that no one would be able to deviate from it.

Ivezić was most worried about the possibility that he would be made to adopt a system like one that he said the Air Force had imposed on a much less powerful astronomical survey called Pan-STARRS, about a dozen years ago. The images taken by that project’s telescopes in Hawaii were routed to a military facility—“the dark side,” as Ivezić put it—where they were edited before being sent on to astronomers. The edits weren’t especially surgical. “You would get back your image, and all the military assets would be blacked out,” Ivezić told me. “It looked like someone had streaked a marker across it, and it had a huge impact on the science that people were able to do.”

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After some back-and-forth, Ivezić said, he and his counterparts came up with a less invasive way to remove secret American assets from the observatory’s instant alerts. A government agency—no one told him which one—would chip in $5 million for the construction of a dedicated network for moving sensitive data. Each time the telescope were to take one of its 30-second tile images of the sky, the file would be immediately encrypted, without anyone looking at it first, and then sent on to a secure facility in California.

Next, an automated system would compare the image with previous images of the same tile. It would cut out small “postage stamp” pictures of any new objects it finds, be they asteroids, exploding stars, or spy satellites. It would filter out the postage stamps that might depict secret U.S. assets and, one minute later, send all the rest, together with their coordinates, to an alert service available to astronomers worldwide. Three days and eight hours later, the entire tile image would be released to astronomers, untouched by black marker or any other technology of redaction.

By then, the spy satellites would likely have gone somewhere else. They are elusive, after all. Their orbits are irregular, and they shift direction often. Not even the world’s most accomplished astronomers would be able to infer their present locations from a line of light streaking through a three-day-old image.

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Ivezić told me that the length of the data embargo was the most difficult term to work out. He had initially asked for the full images to be released after 10 hours. He said that his negotiating partners wanted it to be closer to seven days. In the end, Ivezić was happy with the middle ground that they settled on.

This account of the negotiation comes primarily from Ivezić. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy staff confirmed some of the general outlines of his story but would not disclose with whom he’d been negotiating, or the name of the agency that paid for the encrypted network. The Space Force declined to comment on the process. The NRO said that it had no information to offer me about any observatories.

Ivezić had nothing bad to say about his mysterious interlocutors. To the contrary, he told me that they seemed genuinely concerned about the risk of compromising the Vera Rubin’s science mission. “They did not come and say, ‘The law is on our side; you must do this, and that’s the end of it,’” Ivezić said. “After all, we are spending $1 billion of the government’s money,” he added, with a laugh.

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