James' World 2

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Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered that we’d each started an Internet company in high school, and we merged them to form a single, teen-age megacorp. For around six hundred dollars a month, we rented office space in the basement of a building in town. We made Websites and software for an early dating service, an insurance-claims-processing firm, and an online store where customers could “bargain” with a cartoon avatar for overstock goods. I lived large, spending the money I made on tuition, food, and a stereo.

In 1999—our sophomore year—we hit it big. A company that wired mid-tier office buildings with high-speed Internet hired us to build a collaborative work environment for its customers: Slack, avant la lettre. It was a huge project, entrusted to a few college students through some combination of recklessness and charity. We were terrified that we’d taken on work we couldn’t handle, but also felt that we were on track to create something innovative. We blew through deadlines and budgets until the C-suite demanded a demo, which we built. Newly confident, we hired our friends, and used our corporate AmEx to expense a “business dinner” at Nobu. Unlike other kids, who were what—socializing?—I had a business card that said “Creative Director.” After midnight, in our darkened office, I nestled my Aeron chair into my IKEA desk, queued up Nine Inch Nails in Winamp, scrolled code, peeped pixels, and entered the matrix. After my client work was done, I’d write short stories for my creative-writing workshops. Often, I slept on the office futon, waking to plunder the vending machine next to the loading dock, where a homeless man lived with his cart.

I liked this entrepreneurial existence—its ambition, its scrappy, near-future velocity. I thought I might move to San Francisco and work in tech. I saw a path, an opening into life. But, as the dot-com bubble burst, our client’s business was acquired by a firm that was acquired by another firm that didn’t want what we’d made. Our invoices went unpaid. It was senior year—a fork in the road. We closed our business and moved out of the office. A few days before graduation, when I went to pay my tuition bill, a girl on the elevator struck up a conversation, then got off at her floor; on my ride down, she stepped on for a second time, and our conversation continued. We started dating, then went to graduate school in English together. We got married, I became a journalist, and we had a son. I now have a life, a world, a story. I’m me, not him—whoever he might have turned out to be.

“The thought that I might have become someone else is so bland that dwelling on it sometimes seems fatuous,” the literary scholar Andrew H. Miller writes, in “On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives” (Harvard). Still, phrased the right way, the thought has an insistent, uncanny magnetism. Miller’s book is, among other things, a compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been. Miller quotes Clifford Geertz, who, in “The Interpretation of Cultures,” wrote that “one of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” He cites the critic William Empson: “There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep.” We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hand; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time. “While growth realizes, it narrows,” Miller writes. “Plural possibilities simmer down.” This is painful, but it’s an odd kind of pain—hypothetical, paradoxical. Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.

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Workplace flexibility ranks as the most important element to workers today, second to salary, according to global nonprofit The Conference Board. Hybrid work schedules, where individuals split time working from home and from the office, help put work in its rightful place. Such flexible working schedules allow people to prioritize personal goals like physical activity and spend more time with their family. This is significant given that Pew Research Center finds 73% of U.S. adults say family time is one of the most important things in their life.

Beyond the personal benefits, workplace flexibility is also good for workplace diversity. Women and younger generations are more likely to seek flexible work, making it an attractive offering for employers seeking to recruit a diverse workforce and improve workplace equity and well-being.

Yet, amidst the uptick in return-to-office mandates, hybrid work schedules can be an emotional and complex topic. According to Stanford research, hybrid working does not typically affect worker productivity, but some managers simply don’t feel their employees are as productive when working from home. These types of concerns, and not knowing their employer’s stance on hybrid work, can make it awkward for employees to broach the topic of pivoting to a flexible work schedule.

Consider the following scenario:

Allison, a valued part of the leadership team at a large financial organization, recently hit her 3-year tenure. She recognized the company’s broader commitment to well-being but felt like she had previously hit roadblocks when speaking up about efficiency and productivity. Allison wanted to shift to a hybrid schedule but her day-to-day work and life responsibilities left her with little time and space to prepare her best case for a more flexible work schedule. Then, one day, in a one-on-one meeting, her manager told her that she’d love to see her practice diverse thinking, using logic and evidence to challenge thought processes creatively. This got Allison thinking…

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The advent of the birth-control pill around 1960 liberated sex from reproduction and, in doing so, helped spark a sexual revolution. And it was no less a revolution when science learned to do the opposite: liberate childbearing from intercourse through the use of assisted reproductive technology.

This second upheaval has had especially profound consequences for queer couples like me and my wife, Sarah, who can now birth children without heterosexual sex. This outcome feels like a miracle, but the process also involves some sacrifices — for instance, forfeiting the luxury of making babies in the privacy of our own home and embracing the absurdities that can come with becoming pregnant, industrial-style.

First, we needed sperm. While my wife and I tried to work up the courage to ask our close college friend to donate, he made it easy for us — knowing we wanted to be parents, he emailed us offering up his “genetic material.” We joyfully accepted.

Then the real ordeal began.

After some failed D.I.Y. attempts at home using a drugstore syringe, we decided to bring in the professionals. Now our conception journey involved doctors, nurses, lawyers, psychologists and a surprising amount of red tape. There was a six-month quarantine period after our good-sport donor gave additional samples through a sperm bank, in order to protect me from any sexually transmitted infections he might harbor. (Never mind that I would have gotten these already from our D.I.Y. at-home attempts. We weren’t allowed to waive the quarantine.) Nearly every time I showed up at the clinic for a procedure, I had to take (and pay for) a new pregnancy test — “just in case!” the nurses would say. In case of … immaculate conception?

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Ka Young Lee

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Allison Severance cradled an apple in her hand. It looked like a deflated balloon — soft, brown, and leaking. This can’t be what passes for groceries, she thought. Not on my watch.

She was standing in a Dollar General store a few miles from Cascade, Maryland, where she and a dozen other residents are suing a developer to stop a Dollar General from going up. 

“The apples were rotten, the zucchini was rotten, the spinach was slimy,” says Severance, who works as a potter and a ceramics teacher out of a 19th-century barn on her property. “It was horrible.” 

Cascade, a village of 840 people, has three dollar stores within five miles of town. When Severance heard her next-door neighbor was selling his land to put up another one she made yard signs for other Cascadians to plant on their lawns. She walked up and down the highway waving an enormous banner that read “Say no to Dollar General.” 

Along with a dozen others, she hired a lawyer to fight the developer in court. The village quickly racked up thousands in legal fees; Severance held ceramics fundraisers, donating all of the proceeds to pay for the legal bills. 

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Katherine Laidlaw January 12, 2024

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Bob Morris’s father fell in love at the end of his life with a woman who knew her limits.

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The Marriage Proposal That Wasn’t

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With ice-blue caves, kaleidoscopic lakes, and confusing rock formations, Earth is capable of producing some over-the-top scenery. These transportive landscapes are escapes from modern life—sometimes to what feel like other planets altogether. Below are some of our favorite otherworldly natural wonders across the world, from the marvelous to the strange.

Lake Natron, Tanzania

Don’t let the ring of salty marshes along the edge of Lake Natron fool you: This body of water is one of the most inhospitable areas on Earth. Colored a deep red from salt-loving organisms and algae, the lake reaches hellish temperatures and is nearly as basic as ammonia. Although most human settlements throughout history have formed around lakes and rivers, the barren landscape around Lake Natron tells a clear story of a place no one has ever wanted to live in.

Chile Marble Caves, Chile

Carved into the Patagonian Andes, the Cuevas de Mármol are located on a peninsula of solid marble along Lake General Carrera, a remote glacial body of water that spans the Chile-Argentina border. Formed by 6,000-plus years of waves washing up against calcium carbonate, the smooth, swirling blues of the cavern walls are a reflection of the lake’s azure waters, which change in intensity and hue depending on water level and time of year.

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You begin shopping for your future the moment you become an adult in New York City. Rich and well-furnished lives are aggressively paraded about. Parlor windows reveal Noguchi lamps the size of small horses, couples sit for brunch, families haul exploding bags of farmers’-market produce back to their lairs. People are furiously refreshing Resy to pay $27 for spaghetti pomodoro (!) and going, constantly, to Mexico City. Sure, it’s always been ludicrously expensive, and the “what you could get for the same price of this Chelsea studio in Ohio” game is our little way of torturing ourselves. New York is the most expensive city in the world, according to one recent report. Half the households that live here simply cannot afford to, according to another, which says you have to make $100,000 just to reasonably get by — to afford food and transportation to work. A one-pound container of strawberries at Eli’s costs $30.

We decided to put a price tag on the dream lives of a wide range of New Yorkers, all 30 and under and childless. We spoke to dozens of people but narrowed it down to a handful, each reasonably en route to the upper-middle- (and, in two instances, just plain upper-) class life they picture in their heads. We were surprised by how many people fantasize about a life with a partner and kids in brownstone Brooklyn — we expected more to plan lives as single artists or to build households of friends and throuples. We expected a few more to actually want to live in Manhattan. Instead, we heard a craving for high-end domesticity; so many people told us they wanted to be married with “between one and two kids,” a shocking number said they wanted three or more, and nearly everyone said they wanted to own their homes.

We went deep with these nine people on their aspirations for their lives in 15 years. We asked, What, would a “nice life” look like? Do they want extreme levels of well off, or bourgeois comfort, or simply freedom from financial worry with the time to pursue a hobby?

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The dream-life calculator

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Four months ago, while laying under a beach umbrella on vacation with my best friend in Mexico, a complete stranger walked up to us and asked if I was okay. I was reading a book called Regretting Motherhood, recommended by my friend Jordan, who is also child-free. A liter-sized bottle of what looked like tequila—it was sparkling water—sat beside my beach chair. I was two weeks past my initial egg-freezing consultation, and despite my wishy-washy stance on parenthood, I knew I was going to do it. I just wasn’t sure about the rest of it.

My partner and I have been together for more than three years and though I just turned 35, he’s just nearing 30 and we’re just not ready to decide on, let alone have, kids yet. Both of us come from Italian families with inquiring minds, so holidays and get-togethers often meant we’d be pressured to talk about our plans for reproduction. Friends, family, and strangers always told me, often with a hint of condescension, that I’d “just know” or it’d “just happen.” (It hasn’t.) We figured freezing my eggs wouldn’t just be an insurance plan for later, but it’d also take the pressure off us to plan our lives according to my biological clock—and it’d get my aunts off our back. I’d started looking into it again last year, two years after being told at an NYC clinic-that-shall-not-be-named told me that at 32, I was almost too old.

Like a lot of women, I told myself that because I’d been on the pill for 20 years and because I messed it up so many times and still never been pregnant that I must not be fertile. I actually put off my consultation for so long because I could “come to terms” with my inability to have kids, a fact that I completely fabricated and had conflicting feelings about. At the same time, I’d spent years trying to sort out my views on motherhood, as well as how they mingled with my complicated relationship with my own mother: Did I only think I didn’t want kids because she may not have wanted them? Despite being a co-parent for my nephew, could I ever see myself as truly maternal? It’s a crazy feeling to not know if you want to have kids, but to know fiercely that you want to have the option. Apparently, hoards of women had the same thought—or so I’d find out when I shared my first transvaginal scan on Instagram. We decided to move forward with freezing only my eggs rather than embryos, even though we knew that meant accepting a success rate of about 50 percent rather than 70 percent. I’d later find out from one of my nurses—as well as at least a handful of people in my DMs—that it was mostly single women that went that route.

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In July of 1838, Charles Darwin was twenty-nine years old and single. Two years earlier, he had returned from his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle with the observations that would eventually form the basis of “On the Origin of Species.” In the meantime, he faced a more pressing analytical problem. Darwin was considering proposing to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but he worried that marriage and children might impede his scientific career. To figure out what to do, he made two lists. “Loss of time,” he wrote on the first. “Perhaps quarreling. . . . Cannot read in the evenings. . . . Anxiety and responsibility. Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool.” On the second, he wrote, “Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (and friend in old age). . . . Home, & someone to take care of house.” He noted that it was “intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working. . . . Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music, perhaps.”

Beneath his lists, Darwin scrawled, “Marry, Marry, Marry QED.” And yet, Steven Johnson writes, in “Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most,” “we have no evidence of how he actually weighed these competing arguments against each other.” Johnson, the author of “How We Got to Now” and other popular works of intellectual history, can’t help but notice the mediocrity of Darwin’s decision-making process. He points out that Benjamin Franklin used a more advanced pro-and-con technique: in what Franklin called “Prudential Algebra,” a numerical weight is assigned to each listed item, and counterbalancing items are then eliminated. (“If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three . . . And thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies,” Franklin explained to a friend.) Even this approach, Johnson writes, is slapdash and dependent upon intuition. “The craft of making farsighted choices—decisions that require long periods of deliberation, decisions whose consequences might last for years,” he concludes, “is a strangely under-appreciated skill.”

We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities, or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. But how do we actually make those choices? One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. We’re hardly more advanced than the ancient Persians, who, Herodotus says, made big decisions by discussing them twice: once while drunk, once while sober.

Johnson hopes to reform us. He examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences—such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives.

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