Readers of this newsletter will know that I became a mother a little over a year ago. As I was undergoing that enormous life change, I was simultaneously transitioning from a full-time cog in the economic churn, to a full-time caregiver. Like so many of us, I was used to linking my value to my productivity, but in the role of caregiver, I suddenly existed somewhere outside that system. Amidst the challenges of modern motherhood, I started to wonder if a systemic devaluing of care was at the crux of what made those early days so hard.
writes What Do We Do Now That We’re Here?, a newsletter that asks how to live a meaningful life in a chaotic and unstable world. It centers on themes of care, human connection, the climate crisis, parenting, mental health, recovering from overachievement and more.The following conversation was intended to be a conversation about care and the economy. In particular, I wanted to talk about the ways in which our existing assumptions about how an economy should run actually suppress our capacity to care. Unsurprisingly, the conversation kept returning to our experiences of new motherhood, an experience which provides but one good example of this. I hope that, whether you’re a parent or not, you’ll find something in our conversation that resonates with your experience of modern life, and the deep yearning to give and receive care that makes us human.
I want to begin by asking you, what is care? How would you define it?
It's a good question. I think it’s the obligation you have to put someone before yourself. And, maybe like you, I genuinely had never experienced that state of being before I had a child. There was a difficult transition to that way of being in the world that was physically, emotionally and psychologically demanding.
But then I was also like, what world have I been living in? This is what we're built to do. Why have I been able to skirt this for 33 years? And I think it goes back to the value system that I inherited, and was operating under, that completely obscured caregiving.
Yes, when I became a mother, I felt like a lot of the learning that I had done up to that point had left me totally unprepared for caregiving.
Yes. There is not one thing in my adult life, from 18 to 33, that usefully prepared me for that. The only relevant preparation I had was the babysitting I did when I was a teenager.
And it's worth pointing out that that is evolutionarily bizarre. Researchers think that could be one of the reasons why postpartum depression is so much higher in Western industrialized countries. Many mothers don't have experience with hands-on caregiving until the day they go home with their baby. Whereas in evolutionary history it was more common to have exposure to babies from a young age, all the way up until the day you had your own.
Yes, I felt like all the measures of success that I had been given up to the point of having a child were: how busy are you? How productive are you? How many fancy meetings have you attended? When I became a caregiver, all those measures of success made me feel like I was failing, because caregiving can’t be measured in that way.
It’s a totally different kind of stress. When I was a journalist, I could go on the BBC with 15 minutes notice. I could file a story on deadline. I could do all these things that made me seem like this very capable, put-together, grace-under-pressure kind of gal. But those skills did not help.
It's so true. We have so much more control in our careers, and as a parent, that illusion of control is out the window.
Yes, along with respect and autonomy. When you've had no exposure to the reality of caregiving, it’s a huge fall down to Earth. Women are increasingly having children in their 30s, and even 40s, and I say this to my friends: the more successful, the more autonomy, the more travel, the more independence you've had, the farther that fall is.
Absolutely. There is a shock that comes with it. A lot of mothers now are talking openly about the rage that comes with being postpartum and I'm curious if you think there's a link between that shock, and the feeling of anger that can accompany having a baby.
My son's about to turn three, so I'm about two years removed, but I'd say the first year of my son's life, I was in very acute stages of grief, rage, shock, transition. I think at least part of this modern maternal rage has a to do with what I write about in the newsletter, which is that we are doing this in a way that is psychologically and evolutionarily maladaptive.
It’s no wonder that it creates rage, because we weren't supposed to do it this way. We're cultured and socialized in a value system where worth, and merit, and attention, and praise are given for a very particular set of activities that have nothing to do with feeding, or soothing, a baby.
I resonate with that, and I'm curious what you think that says about what is driving our economy versus what drives us to offer care.
They’re just two completely antithetical systems and ways of being. If capitalism asks us to have a product or output as a result of our effort, caregiving doesn't give us that. Or if it does, it's on a much longer timescale, and it's not something that you have anything to show for after a day, or a week, or a month.
Absolutely.
And the way I'm talking about it, I'm aware, makes it sound like I don't enjoy being a mother, or that I had a really terrible time, or that I still do. That's the kind of weird paradox of it. I don't actually feel that way.
But I had to go through this grueling transition period to understand what caregiving is. I had to adopt a new set of ideas about what is worthwhile and what I value in my life, which doesn't mean I don't value any of the things I used to, but it's certainly a different set of metrics now.
I feel like often when we have these conversations about the shock and the rage that can accompany new motherhood, there's a little bit of us that feels like we need to caveat and say, no, we really love our children, and there's a lot of really wonderful parts about this. But that doesn't diminish the shock or the contradictions that you run into when you become a mother.
Right, and I’m not trying to do the caveat thing. We're so used to thinking of things as a strict cost-benefit analysis, to use the parlance of business and economics, but having children, and becoming a caregiver, does not fit into that rubric.
I think a lot of the “Oh, modern motherhood is so shit,” narratives suffer from trying to do that cost-benefit analysis. What we're not seeing is the new value system you can gain, and even this new understanding of your human capabilities, right? I now have way more faith in humans because I understand that this is how we got here, and this is how we survive.
Yes, it really wakes you up to something that you can't unknow. It’s interesting then, when we say that care and the economy feel antithetical, because the economy is a human system, and it doesn't exist without humans. It doesn't exist without children. Do you think that the two really have no business with each other, or do we have something to learn from caregiving in terms of how we operate in our broader system?
I think we have to stop letting caregiving hide in the corners of our lives. Right now, care is so obscured that it's almost invisible and yet, nothing would persist, nothing could go on, without it.
I like to think and write about care from the perspective of, “Okay, what can we actually do at the level of our lives when we're tired and burned out?” What I'm trying to animate in my own newsletter is that we all need to take care of each other, and stop thinking of care as something only new mothers do, or something only parents do, or something only paid caregivers do. It is a shared responsibility. It has always been a shared responsibility in evolutionary terms.
And we're complicit in obscuring care when we pretend that we've got it all handled, and then wonder why we're burned out. Everyone, parent or not, child or not, needs the support and care of other people.
Before I had a child, I thought that success meant you didn't need anyone else. I thought that you could be so successful that you'd never have to ask for help. Having a child completely flipped that for me. The more people you have to turn to for help: that's a successful life.
How much power do we have as individuals, or even as small collectives? How much of this is enacting our personal values and how much of this is policy change, that we may have limited ability to affect?
I'm so pessimistic about this that I've become optimistic. I'm pessimistic about the ability of our existing political systems to meaningfully change a lot of the problems that we have. And I'm not saying I'm a nihilist, I'm not saying I don't vote. I do all that stuff, but I have come back around to: the only thing I have control over is how I live my life.
When I was very depressed as a new mother, I might not have had the energy for political engagement, but I might have had the energy to look at ways I could perform caregiving that were more communal, where I felt more supported and less lonely. Those are the things I did, and do, have the power to do.
Sometimes I feel like if I can borrow something from a neighbor, and I don't have to buy the thing on Amazon, I’ve somehow committed this sweet act of rebellion. I've gone outside the system.
Asking your neighbor to borrow the drill, or the tool, is a perfect example. I think we've been trained to minimize those acts, and we've been told over the last decade that the only thing that matters is structural solutions, but if we follow that logic, we end up feeling apathetic and disempowered. I am less tortured about the question of, “Does it amount to anything? Does it matter?” And I'm more attuned to, “How does it feel? How does this affect the quality my life, my parenting, my neighborhood?” That’s my guiding metric.
Do you think that your optimism regarding individual action exists because you have been able to affect change in your own life?
Yes, it's also because I was always waiting for things to get better at the structural level, and they just never did. After having a child, I became really motivated by this question, “Why do I find this so hard?” I had a hunch that it wasn't something wrong with me. I think women are often told that, and I didn't accept that. It happens to enough women, and it happens in our particular cultural context disproportionately. I'm proud of myself for having that instinct, and following that, because to go back to your question, it's definitely led me to a better place.
Even now, when I'm struggling in my parenting, or my marriage, or whatever it is, I will say to my husband, or to myself, this is hard because we're not supposed to do it this way. This is hard because this is too big a job for two people. To have paid work, to keep a household, to make dinner every night, to watch a child… It is too much work. Even just saying that helps with the rage.
And hopefully the next step is, “Who can we ask for help?” And we do that now. We message our friends, “Do you want to trade kids this weekend?” We don’t see that as an indicator that we can't manage this. We see that as a healthy thing to do.
A healthy thing to do, yes. I think that’s helpful for other new parents to hear, but honestly, for anyone to hear. I think new parenthood can be such a dramatic lifestyle change that it drives us to finally ask for help; to finally rethink the system. But I think anyone can benefit from either offering, or receiving, help.
I think you’re right. I think early motherhood is one of the only places in our culture where we are starting to question this bizarre, individualist way that we live. And you see it in all kinds of ways: people have more awareness of the fourth trimester, and people hire doulas, and people write guides about how to support people when they've just had a kid, which is all fantastic and necessary, but that spirit of care needs to extend much further, to many more areas of our lives, and certainly amongst people who don't have children, as well.
Yes. Something I think a lot about is how as a society, we have been fixated on the pursuit of infinite economic growth, measured in GDP terms, without consideration for ecological or human well-being. In terms of the economy, we can see how this has led to a climate crisis, and on the individual level, maybe we’re starting to see how this has been denial of our own need for care. Do you think there is something to that?
I think that this historical moment, post-industrial revolution, has created a set of circumstances that have allowed us to become divorced from the fundamentally cyclical nature of life. And I mean life in the most expansive terms, including non-human life, animals and plants. I mean every natural system, from the ones in our own bodies, to the ones that grow our food, to the weather… None of it is linear, none of it is exponential. It’s all cyclical.
I’m an amateur gardener and very enthusiastic about it. Part of my enthusiasm comes from finding it so refreshing to spend time in a system that is cyclical, and to be reminded that I am that, too. These expectations of constant output, and relentless pursuit, are totally not how life works. I find natural systems to be helpful and grounding antidotes to that myth.
I also see so many parallels between motherhood, gardening and community building. People often talk about how time in nature is healing. I think it’s a reminder of something deep inside us that does not align with a system that insists on more productivity, no matter the circumstances. Are there things that prove to you that human beings are turning towards a natural tendency to care?
I kind of go back and forth on whether I think people are seeing the limitations of our culture’s value system, or as you said, not seeing it, but feeling it in their bodies. I do think there is a sense that life is not supposed to feel like this. I certainly feel that in my own life and I see it in people I know.
I stubbornly believe in what human beings are, and that our magic comes from our limitations, and our capacity to care for each other. I know the market forces are trying to convince us of the opposite… So for me, it’s an act of defiance to live that way, anyway.
With my writing, to the extent that I can, I try to make it okay for other people to do that, too. I keep saying this, but even just being human can feel like an act of resistance. It’s saying, “I have limits. I don’t want to be more productive. I don’t want to be younger… I’m going to get old. I’m going to get slower. I’m going to be less relevant. I’m fine with that.”
Either I’m going to be part of a resurgence of people who are bringing us to back to this, or I’m going to go down swinging, because I think it’s a better way to live.
I love that. Thank you. And thank you for the beautiful writing that you do. Your Substack is called What Do We Do Now That We’re Here? and that really is the question it all comes back to. Here we are, this is the system that we’re in, so how are we going to make the most of it?
It’s funny because I chose that title in 2021, probably right before I got pregnant, and I didn’t know what the answer was. But now, having become a mother, the answer is so obvious to me, and it comes back to taking care of each other. That’s what we’re wired to do. We’re good at it, and we’ve just been convinced otherwise. I learned that through motherhood, but I think part of the work is to make people see that that path is available to all of us. There are other paths to come to that same place. The meaning, and the value, and the way of being lies in the unselfish work of caregiving.
Yes, and to bring it back to the parlance of business and economics, what’s in it for us to care?
So much. It’s liberation from the idea that you constantly have to be getting more, faster, better. It’s liberation from the idea that you have to do everything yourself. It’s liberation from the idea that things, and money, and status, and consumption are going to bring you satisfaction and meaning. There’s a lot there.