I could have been a tech entrepreneur, but my parents let me go to sleepovers. I could have been a billionaire, but I used to watch Saturday-morning cartoons. I could have been Vivek Ramaswamy, if not for the ways I’ve been corrupted by the mediocrity of American culture. I’m sad when I contemplate my lazy, pathetic, non-Ramaswamy life.

These ruminations were triggered by a statement that Ramaswamy, the noted cultural critic, made on X on Thursday. He was explaining why tech companies prefer to hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers instead of native-born American ones: It has to do with the utter mediocrity of American culture.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the Valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he observed. Then he laid out his vision of how America needs to change: “More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of ‘Friends.’ More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’”

In other words, Ramaswamy has decided to use the reelection of Donald Trump as an occasion to tiger-mom the hell out of us. No, you may not finish studying before midnight! Put that violin back under your chin this instant! No, a score of 1540 on your SATs is not good enough!

That sound you hear is immigrant parents all across America cheering and applauding.

Maybe Ramaswamy’s missive hit me so hard because I grew up in that kind of household. My grandfather, who went to the tuition-free City College of New York and made it in America as a lawyer, imbued me with that hustling-immigrant mindset. We may be outsiders, he told me, but we’re going to grind, we’re going to work, we’re going to climb that greasy pole.

And yet it never happened for me. I have never written a line of code. Unlike Ramaswamy, I have never founded an unprofitable biotech firm. What can I say? I got sucked into the whole sleepover lifestyle—the pillow fights, the long conversations about guitar solos with my fellow ninth graders. I thought those Saturday-morning Bugs Bunny cartoons were harmless, but soon I was into the hard stuff: Road Runner, Scooby-Doo, and worse, far worse.

As the days have gone by, though, I have had some further thoughts about Ramaswamy’s little sermon. It occurred to me that he may not be quite right about everything. For example, he describes a nation awash in lazy mediocrity, yet America has the strongest economy in the world. American workers are among the most productive, and over the past few years American productivity has been surging. In the past decade, American workers have steadily shifted from low-skill to higher-skill jobs. Apparently, our mediocrity shows up everywhere except in the economic data.

Then I began to wonder if our culture is really as hostile to nerdy kids as he implies. This is a culture that puts The Big Bang Theory on our TV screens and The Social Network in the movie theaters. Haven’t we spent many years lionizing Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman? These days, millions of young men orient their lives around the Joe Rogan–Lex Friedman–Andrew Huberman social ideal—bright and curious tech bros who talk a lot about how much protein they ingest and look like they just swallowed a weight machine. When we think about the chief failing of American culture, is it really that we don’t spend enough time valorizing Stanford computer-science majors?

Then I had even deeper doubts about Ramaswamy’s argument. First, maybe he doesn’t understand what thinking is. He seems to believe that the only kind of thinking that matters is solving math problem sets. But one of the reasons we evolved these big brains of ours is so we can live in groups and navigate social landscapes. The hardest intellectual challenges usually involve understanding other people. If Ramaswamy wants a young person to do something cognitively demanding, he shouldn’t send her to a math tutor; he should send her to a sleepover with a bunch of other 12-year-old girls. That’s cognitively demanding.

Second, it could be that Ramaswamy doesn’t understand what makes America great. We are not going to out-compete China by rote learning and obsessive test taking. We don’t thrive only because of those first-generation strivers who keep their nose to the 70-hour-a-week grindstone and build a life for their family. We also thrive because of all the generations that come after, who live in a culture of pluralism and audacity. America is the place where people from all over the world get jammed together into one fractious mess. America was settled by people willing to take a venture into the unknown, willing to work in spaces where the rules hadn’t been written yet. As COVID revealed yet again, we are not adept at compliance and rule following, but we have a flair for dynamism, creativity, and innovation.

Third, I’m not sure Ramaswamy understands what propelled Trump to office. Trump was elected largely by non–college graduates whose highest abilities manifest in largely nonacademic ways—fixing an engine, raising crops, caring for the dying. Maybe Ramaswamy could celebrate the skills of people who didn’t join him at Harvard and Yale instead of dumping on them as a bunch of lard-butts. What part of the word populism does he not understand?

Most important, maybe Ramaswamy doesn’t understand how to motivate people. He seems to think you produce ambitious people by acting like a drill sergeant: Be tough. Impose rules. Offer carrots when they achieve and smash them with sticks when they fail.

But as Daniel Pink writes in his book Drive, these systems of extrinsic reward are effective motivational techniques only when the tasks in front of people are boring, routine, and technical. When creativity and initiative are required, the best way to motivate people is to help them find the thing they intrinsically love to do and then empower them to do that thing obsessively. Systems of extrinsic rewards don’t tend to arouse intrinsic motivations; they tend to smother them.

Don’t grind your kids until they become worker drones; help them become really good at leisure.

Today, when we hear the word leisure, we tend to think of relaxation. We live in an atmosphere of what the theologian Josef Pieper called “total work.” We define leisure as time spent not working. It’s the pause in our lives that helps us recharge so we can get back to what really matters—work.

But for many centuries, people thought about leisure in a very different way: We spend part of our lives in idleness, they believed, doing nothing. We spend part of our lives on amusements, enjoying small pleasures that divert us. We spend part of our lives on work, doing the unpleasant things we need to do to make a living. But then we spend part of our time on leisure.

Leisure, properly conceived, is a state of mind. It’s doing the things we love doing. For you it could be gardening, or writing, or coding, or learning. It’s driven by enthusiasm, wonder, enjoyment, natural interest—all the intrinsic motivators. When we say something is a labor of love, that’s leisure. When we see somebody in a flow state, that’s leisure. The word school comes from schole, which is Greek for “leisure.” School was supposed to be home to leisure, the most intense kind of human activity, the passionate and enjoyable pursuit of understanding.

The kind of nose-to-the-grindstone culture Ramaswamy endorses eviscerates leisure. It takes a lot of free time to discover that thing we really love to do. We usually stumble across it when we’re just fooling around, curious, during those moments when nobody is telling us what to do. The tiger-mom mentality sees free time as a waste of time—as “hanging out at the mall.”

A life of leisure requires a lot of autonomy. People are most engaged when they are leading their own learning journey. You can’t build a life of leisure when your mental energies are consumed by a thousand assignments and hoops to jump through.

A life of leisure also requires mental play. Sure, we use a valuable form of cognition when we’re solving problem sets or filling out HR forms. But many moments of creative breakthrough involve a looser form of cognition—those moments when you’re just following your intuition and making strange associations, when your mind is free enough to see things in new ways. Ninety-nine percent of our thinking is unconscious; leisure is the dance between conscious and unconscious processes.

The story Ramaswamy tells is of hungry immigrants and lazy natives. That story resonates. The vitality of America has been fueled by waves of immigration, and there are some signs that America is becoming less mobile, less dynamic. But upon reflection, I think he’s mostly wrong about how to fix American culture. And he’s definitely not getting invited to my next sleepover.

Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk argue for skilled visas, but not all Trump supporters are pleased with their immigration views

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Yesterday, a tantrum from the world’s richest person swayed events in Congress. First, Elon Musk launched a blizzard of X posts denouncing a bipartisan spending bill designed to keep the government open. Calling the bill “criminal,” Musk threatened: “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years!”

Panic ensued among the notoriously skittish congressional GOP, who quickly bowed to their master’s voice. Musk, of course, is not actually the president-elect. He received approximately zero percent of the votes in last month’s election. But for a few hours this week, Musk didn’t just act as if he, and not Donald Trump, will soon hold the reins of government power; the GOP also responded as if he will.

As Russell Berman noted in The Atlantic earlier today, Republicans were not happy with the proposed version of the spending bill, but House Speaker Mike Johnson “believed that he could get enough Republicans to join most Democrats in passing the bill in time to avert a government shutdown.” It turns out, though, that the person he really needed to persuade was Musk. “I was communicating with Elon last night,” Johnson said yesterday on Fox & Friends. “Elon, Vivek [Ramaswamy], and I are on a text chain together, and I was explaining to them the background of this.” The pleading and lobbying to the unelected billionaires went on for a while. Johnson added, “Vivek and I talked last night [until] about almost midnight … [He and Musk] understand the situation. They said, ‘It’s not directed at you, Mr. Speaker, but we don’t like the spending.’ And I said, ‘Guess what, fellas? I don’t either.’”

Johnson’s attempt at appeasement failed. Within hours, the pseudo president-elect had kneecapped Johnson. Trump and J. D. Vance weighed in yesterday afternoon, releasing a statement denouncing the spending bill. The government was on the edge of a shutdown. As of this writing, Trump has praised a new, slimmed-down version of the spending bill (as has Musk), opening the possibility of averting that outcome. But Musk’s place at the center of this process offered us a preview of the political dynamics of the Musk-Trump-GOP era: razor-thin legislative margins, chaos, governing via social-media rant, and a Game of Thrones–style jockeying for power between Musk and Trump.

Musk’s day of prolific posting was also a reminder of how little he comprehends about the U.S. government. His feverish 100-plus posts were riddled with disinformation and false claims that revealed his lack of understanding of the basics of budgeting. He got details wrong about a congressional pay raise and taxpayer funding of an NFL stadium in Washington, D.C. He pushed misinformation from a January 6 rioter who falsely claimed that the spending bill would block Republican investigation of the January 6 Select Committee. Musk exulted in the prospect of a complete government shutdown, posting that a shutdown “doesn’t actually shut down critical functions.” Although it is true that “essential functions” would continue (and that Social Security checks would still go out), contra Musk, shutdowns are neither painless nor cheap. Large swaths of the government would indeed be forced to shut down, and government employees would see delayed paychecks.

Wherever the spending bill lands, this week may mark another dramatic shift in GOP politics. For years, as a signal of their commitment to fiscal prudence, conservative Republicans have opposed raising the debt limit. Today, though, after Musk had stolen a march on him, Trump called for doing away with the debt ceiling altogether (possibly because he wants to clear the way for massive tax cuts next year). That sort of demand will force members of the Freedom Caucus to—once again—choose between fiscal conservatism and their sycophantic loyalty to the incoming president. The latest version of the spending bill, according to Trump’s social-media posts, would suspend the debt ceiling until January 2027.

Meanwhile, the president-elect has to deal with the specter of Elon Musk. As Politico’s Jonathan Martin noted on X yesterday, Musk’s moment brings with it a few potential downsides for Trump: “The Elon risk here is he’s not just diverting attention from Trump, he’s also threatening to deliver him bad press if the gov’t shuts down.” This week, Musk solidified his influence over the systems of U.S. government, but the clock may be ticking on Trump’s tolerance of that fact.

Related:

Musk makes a mess of Congress. What to expect from Elon Musk’s government takeover

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Work in Progress: America is suddenly getting healthier. No one knows why, Derek Thompson writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: The winter solstice is a pristine time for the simple act of noticing, John Hendrickson writes.

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