I really hope you listen and/or read. I’ve put the video directly below, then a summary of the five rules for neighbouring that Jacob came up with (lived out in modern times by Sicilians and recent migrants, but applicable to all of us, and derived from peasant economies of the past), and then the full interview, which is very very long. I hope you all enjoy, and I would love to hear your thoughts.

FIVE RULES FOR NEIGHBOURING (a summary)

Neighboring, in this account, is neither friendship nor charity but a third kind of bond, a relationship you build intentionally with the people who are physically near you. We discuss why a depopulating (and re-populating with migrants!) Sicilian town, forced to consistently make and remake its social world, turns out to be such a good place to learn it from. At my request, Jacob distilled what he observed in his time living there into five rough rules of thumb for neighbouring. They are practical, not sentimental, and each one is designed to dodge a particular way that good intentions might go astray or curdle.

1. Audit yourself, and be economic

Start not by simply giving things away but by taking inventory. Look honestly at your space and your possessions and sort them: what do you want to keep purely for yourself, and what would actually be more fun if it were shared or done alongside other people? Framing it this way matters, because it heads off the biggest misconception about neighborliness — that it is a form of self-sacrifice, a slow surrender of your stuff and privacy. It isn’t. You keep a genuine private core (”this is my home, my thing, I need this”) and consciously open up the rest. Sarah connects this to the distinction between private property (which you use to extract value from others) and personal property (which is simply yours to use), and adds a third category the town illustrates: personal property that you’ve deliberately opened to your neighbors. The lawnmower or the Tupperware stops being a source of resentment (“the neighbor who never gave it back”) because, for this select category of things, sharing is the default, something that brings connection and joy, but also whoever needs to can reclaim it when they need it.

2. Show that you’re present

You must show that you are disponible, available, and what you’re available for. Modern houses, built for self-contained nuclear families, are sealed against the world, the smells and sounds and life kept in, and that seal is precisely what has to be broken. In Sutera, people actively mourn the older ways of living around piazzas and street corners, because they wish they could easily see and feel the presence of others nearby and invite them in and go to others without invitation.

Sans very close quarters, nobody can tell you want to be their neighbor unless you signal it. So you have to do visible, low-key work: keep the windows open, spend time on the balcony, greet people outside, be disponibile, which in this culture counts as a virtue. The trick is to invite without dominating. Jacob’s emblem for this is the half pumpkin: a woman he’d just met knocked with half a squash and said, “I have a problem, this pumpkin’s too big, do you want half?” It’s not a “gift” in the common way modern things are.It creates no debt, it’s dressed as a favor to her (help me not waste this) rather than generosity toward him. That’s the opposite of the modern gift, which is about charity and can make too much fuss of both the giving and the receiving. Sarah ties this to political/community organizing: people bristle at being told “I have help for you” but light up when asked for their help. Presence is an open, standing, unforced invitation to co-create a relationship — the social equivalent of leaving a sign on the door that says what you’re up for.

3. Care for spaces that aren’t yours (but become “ours”)

Rights of “ours” are established by tending the commons. Jacob’s example is a friend who, fed up with uncollected rubbish, started sweeping the patch in front of her house; a neighbor saw her, joined in, and now they share a clean, jointly held space. This is why neighborly solidarity tends to bloom exactly where the state has withdrawn — the informal “ours” has to do the work the public sector no longer does. But it goes far beyond litter: it grows into chairs set out on summer evenings, shared drinks, kids playing while everyone loosely keeps an eye on them. The mindset shift is from individual owners to shared participation. It also requires a skill our culture has half-forgotten: unstructured hanging out. In Sutera people don’t ask “what are you doing tonight?” but “are you going out?”: meaning, are you wandering, will we bump into each other at the usual spot? In this context, small towns aren’t boring because people are brilliant at talking, storytelling, and joking. That art atrophies without practice. In contrast, much sociality in much of modern life is organised around consumption rather than presence.

4. Be aware, shut your trap, and lend a hand

The hardest rule, because nosiness and solidarity are tangled together: to have neighbors is to see into each other’s lives, and the same visibility that lets you help also lets you gossip, judge, and expose. Living close to people means you will learn things abot people’s most vulernable bits: their marriages, their parenting, their grief, their sex lives... What proves you’re trustworthy with that knowledge is handling it responsibly (even when you help). Jacob’s story: someone needed work, and someone who barely knew him beckoned Jacob over, asked only “what are his skills?”, and set a job in motion, all without ever using the man’s name or spelling out his circumstances. The help arrives disguised as coincidence and request (”I heard you’d be good for this”), which protects the recipient’s dignity. This connects to a deeper point Sarah raises: people are rarely afraid of helping; they’re afraid of being helped, of seeming needy or vulnerable exactly when they most are. Good neighboring lowers that cost by keeping the intimacy of vulnerability implicit. You’re saying: you get to share if you want to, but mostly, I’m just here.

5. Rinse, repeat, grow

Neighboring is a muscle. You begin with a modest audit and a few shared things, and as the practice becomes natural you find more you can fold others into and more you actually enjoy doing together, because neighbors exist not only for safety but for pleasure and convenience. Crucially, the “ours” must stay open. A neighborhood that binds too tightly (as when “ours” is just one ethnic group) curdles into something xenophobic and dies; healthy “ours” means whoever is here now, constantly reinvented as people arrive and leave. And in the course of the ongoing climate crisis, which will cause ongoing mass migration, this remaking of sociality over and over again is exactly what we’ll need. The tradition does the work, if we maintain it: the “half pumpkin” outlives any individual, if you teach it to your children (as many Sicilian women have). What you’re really building is not a fixed set of friendships but a implicit durable social ritual — one that can absorb newcomers, survive massive turnover, and be handed on throughout the human population.

TRANSCRIPT (cleaned up for clarity):

Sarah: Hello everyone. Today I’ve got Jacob with me, and we’re going to be talking about neighboring practices in Sicily and what we can all learn from them in the complicated crises of the 21st century. Do you want to tell me — who are you, and what do you research in general?

Jacob: I’m an anthropologist. I’ve researched southern Italy, specifically Sicily. I just finished my PhD, spending about two years in a small town in rural central Sicily.

Sarah: On a mountaintop. What’s it called?

Jacob: It’s called Sutera. It’s beautiful — I suggest you look it up, to picture it. It’s on top of a mountain; on a clear day you can see from one end of the island to the other. But it’s been losing a lot of people. It’s one of those towns that 50 years ago had 5,000 people, and now most of them live either in other parts of Italy where there’s better work, or in Germany, here in the UK, or in the US. Sicily has a long history of that.

Sarah: It’s worth saying — I’m half Sicilian, basically. There was a migration where something like a quarter to three-quarters of Sicilians left after World War II. What was it, half?

Jacob: A huge amount emigrated, also before World War II. It’s a really interesting history of capitalism mixing with feudalism, where no one has a future. I’d love to talk about Sicilian history, but I think that’s not —

Sarah: Yeah, no, we have to get to neighboring practices. Maybe a future podcast.

Jacob: But what ends up happening — and we don’t have to go that far back — is austerity. It’s a very familiar story: here in the UK, but also across southern Europe, and it’s strongly tied to things like structural adjustment in Africa. I have a friend doing really fantastic research on that. This town depopulates, and as a result there’s this desire for neighbors. I was really interested in houses initially. They opened a migration reception center in the early 2010s, and the initial idea —

Sarah: The people of the town opened it?

Jacob: The people of the town, yeah. It was very similar to what took place in Riace, if people are familiar with it: they said, “We have these empty houses, and there are these people who need houses. We can give them these houses, help prepare them.” And I thought, wow, that’s really interesting — passing family homes on. But the social relationships people were invested in, and the spatial metaphors for them, were much more about relationships between houses. Part of the loss people felt can be explained two ways. One is that, in the divide between public and private life, they lost this third space. It’s either mine, or it’s everyone’s, and there isn’t really an articulation of a space that’s ours — not everyone’s, and not mine.

Sarah: What do you mean, “ours” versus “everyone’s”?

Jacob: When everyone has access to something, often there’s a sense that the government is responsible for it, or that no one is. If everyone belongs, no one belongs. Whereas the thing about neighbors is there’s a clear articulation of “this is ours” — it’s the people who are here.

Sarah: Okay. So it’s inclusive, but in the sense that a whole bunch of people were invited — rather than “we’re just leaving this here” or “some institution is taking care of it.”

Jacob: Right. It’s attached to a certain form of presence, of being there. The other part is about the forms of solidarity people were pushed into. What austerity does is that you can really only keep certain links; you have less money to support different kinds of relationships. Increasingly it became: when you need help, you have your family, or you have the nation or the government. And neighbors became this thing that was neither — and that had historically represented what this peasant town turned to in the past, whether it’s trading work days or, in a time of crisis... A lot of anthropologists talk about how neighbors are a form of insurance before insurance existed, in its commercial sense. When a crisis happened, that’s who you had to turn to.

Sarah: So there’s a neighboring practice being developed here. And you mentioned to me — in our conversations in restaurants and so on, because we’ve been hanging out for a bit — that some of this comes from peasant culture.

Jacob: Part of it is that a lot of peasant work you have to do in groups. So a good chunk of it is trading work days: all four of us go work on your farm, and the next day we all work on the next person’s farm, and it cycles through. Similarly with technology — things like looms. Often only one family in the neighborhood would have a loom. And one thing that was insisted on — people did weaving, but for fun at this point; it wasn’t their main source of clothing — was that the weaving was done by women, it required at least three women, and all the product had to be divided up evenly.

Sarah: So the infrastructure is built for working collaboratively, largely based on location. They have this tradition of “yes, we do the work together, then we split the proceeds.”

Jacob: Essentially, yeah. And, as any anthropologist will tell you, the small things you do in daily life and the economic structures of society turn into your cosmic view of the world. So rituals, religious life, celebrations — all of these also have a very strong neighborhood element.

Sarah: And how did you get to this topic?

Jacob: How did I get to this topic? Part of being an anthropologist is that you say “I’m going to study this,” and then you find out people are more interested in something else, or there’s a different way of doing it. You should be surprised as an anthropologist. I was doing my master’s in London in 2019, living with a bunch of people from the Middle East and North Africa and from southern Europe, in the austerity, post–Arab Spring moment. Any headline that brought a little hope was desperately shared over the dinner table, and this was one of those things we passed around quickly — “this is really interesting, these people are welcoming migrants in a particular way.” It’s one of a number of towns in southern Europe that did this. And there are these narratives of dual crises — neither of which are crises — a crisis of immigration and a crisis of depopulation. The vast bulk of that is racist bullshit; a big chunk of it is really “we’re repopulating, but not with the people we want.” So that needs to be taken —

Sarah: And that’s especially funny in Sicily, because many Sicilians look like they’re from Tunisia or Morocco, and many of them look more like me — my grandmother had blue eyes, but that’s seen as, “yeah, that came from the Normans when they invaded.” It’s very Mediterranean. I don’t believe in race, obviously, in any biological real sense, but it looks very multiracial by default.

Jacob: Southern Italy in general has a really interesting history of race. It desperately needs more study, because it’s relevant not just within Sicily and southern Europe, but to these “white, but not quite” classes we see around Europe and the US — who are often the staunch supporters of white supremacy, but also often the number-one allies in solidarity. They can swing both ways, because of that middle space they occupy in the racial hierarchy.

Sarah: They have something to defend, in a way. But not these people in the same way.

Jacob: It changes from town to town — there’s a really different politics. This one is caught up in a Catholic understanding of difference, where someone’s moral strength is attached to their ability to help others. And the more different those others are, the better.

Sarah: Tell me more.

Jacob: The most famous example is what recently went down between the late Pope Francis and J.D. Vance.

Sarah: Great, I’m so glad they’re in this podcast.

Jacob: I bet you didn’t expect this is where we’d end up. So, J.D. Vance — I’m no theologian, so if there’s a theologian watching this, I’m so sorry if I mess it up — there’s this idea of an “order of love,” where different kinds of care for other people require different things. Vance essentially said it’s a hierarchy: you love your family most, then the nation, and basically at the bottom of the list, if you really want, you can help people beyond the national boundary. The correction Francis made — and this is really one of the things at stake here — is: no, your love for your family is attached to your ability to love those beyond yourself. It’s thinking of this almost as a muscle: the more you work it, the stronger you get.

Sarah: Not to get too diverted into theology, but I was thinking about — when I was an undergraduate many years ago, the thing people used to proselytize Christianity was C.S. Lewis, because he wrote these little pamphlets, radio essays. And he says you should start by practicing loving your spouse, because that’s hard enough.

Jacob: But in a way, Francis —

Sarah: — yeah, love your neighbor ideally after that. Like, “oh, it’s really hard to love your spouse” — which I agree with; it’s really hard to not devolve into grumpiness and anger. He says start with your spouse. But Francis is saying the opposite: love the stranger.

Jacob: Well — that these things are tied together. And the example of the spouse is such a good one, because if it’s “just focus on yourself, cut out the other relationships in your life, put all your attention on your spouse, and then it’ll go well” — everyone knows that isn’t true. Relationships are all difficult in different ways, but they reinforce one another. Having really good friends often leads to a really good spousal relationship. There’s an interrelation going on that this kind of theology was really invested in.

Sarah: That’s really cool. Okay — should we talk about some of the neighboring practices? I basically gave you homework for this podcast: come up with five-ish neighboring practices you’ve observed, with examples. And ideally we’ll be able to take these with us — even if we don’t live in Sutera, we’re still taking something from them, lovingly.

Jacob: Being an anthropologist is weird, because everything I write is about this place; it’s so embedded here. This is a nice attempt to say it in a general sense. Okay.

Practice 1: Audit yourself, and be economic. The first rule of thumb is surprising, and I say it with an asterisk, because it’ll become clearer as we go. Take a look at your space and your stuff. What do you want to just be yours? What can you offer to your community? What would be more fun if you shared it, or did it with others? The reason this is first is that it keeps us from thinking of this as self-sacrifice — that we have to give away all our stuff — and instead thinking, “what do we want to have with other people?” It also helps because, when neighborliness is going well, it becomes embedded in space.

Sarah: That’s who your neighbors are anyway.

Jacob: Right — it doesn’t require intentional cultivation. It’s “oh yeah, this is the place we hang out in.” But at some point that became the place you hang out in. Neighborliness is really embedded in the way we describe space. One of my favorite proverbs about this, in this small town, is that the house can hold as many people as the host wants. It’s an absolute refusal of any material limitation — it’s a question of will — plus the fact that most houses open onto streets or piazzas in this town. So it’s very literally as many as you’re willing to support. A lot of people would describe both the decline and their desire for neighborliness in the language of their own house: “we used to have these open houses. I really want an open house, but now houses are closed.”

Sarah: So they can have the guests.

Jacob: Though I think it’s less about guests. It’s this image of a time when people could just walk into your home. The invitation still says “this is my space” —

Sarah: It’s funny, because my Sicilian-American dad does this with neighbors who don’t have the practice. He’ll take a glass of wine at 4 p.m. and walk down the street to the one neighbor. Back when I was a kid, it was the one neighbor who was a European journalist — he finished early because he had to submit for the European timeline. So my dad would be like, “Well, Bert’s available,” and just go down the street with a glass of wine. Dutch people don’t necessarily have this.

Jacob: It’s totally “treat this house as if it’s yours.” It’s wanting other people to feel at home here. And — we often say “take everything, use everything you want,” and I don’t think that’s a good method. You have to know “this is my space, this is my thing, I need to have this,” but I can divide my stuff between what I really enjoy sharing and hanging out with people over, and what I have to keep as my home.

Sarah: It strikes me — to be the political theorist here — as a nice third thing in the distinction between private and personal property. Marxists are always talking about private property, which is a problem not just because it’s yours, but because you use it to extract value from other people. And then there’s personal property, which is yours because you’re using it — your house is personal property if you’re just using it, but it becomes private property if you’re a landlord. There’s a nice thing here: there’s personal property, and then there’s personal property that I’ve opened to my neighbors.

Jacob: Right — there are rights entailed in my personal property as well. “I have this, but if you need it...” And this is the opposite of the classic joke about American gated society: the neighbor who never returned the thing.

Sarah: Right, the Tupperware.

Jacob: Exactly — the Tupperware, the lawnmower. This is instead “oh yeah, we share it. Who cares if it’s at your house? Who cares if it’s at mine? When one of us needs to cut grass, it’s there.” And I don’t have to sit around resenting you for not returning it, because as soon as I need it, I say, “hey, can I take it back?”

Practice 2: Show that you’re present.

Sarah: So this is thing two.

Jacob: This is thing two — my first attempt. Like the discussion about open or closed houses, a lot of the question of neighborliness is about how we build the world. Part of the complaint was that new houses were built for nuclear families. The bonds of interdependence that came with peasant labor were no longer there under wage labor, so the house became a site of familial reproduction closed off to the world. You have to signal to other people that these extra-familial connections are wanted — you have to do extra work, where in the past they thought it was obvious, no one questioned it. There’s a word you used, in one of the things you sent me — disponibile.

Sarah: Yeah — that you’re an available person.

Jacob: Right, it’s a virtue. There are a handful of ways of saying this, but the rule in general is: how are people going to know you want to be their neighbor unless you let them know? At the same time, we fear overly domineering neighbors, so you have to do this in a way where you’re extending an invitation to co-create a relationship. One of my memories — and this is maybe the first example of something that happened constantly — is that I’d just moved into the town, and a woman came over holding half a pumpkin. She said, “Listen, I have a problem. This pumpkin is too big. Is there any chance you want half a pumpkin?” And I said, “Yeah, I could take half a pumpkin.” So the whole thing wasn’t established as a debt. It’s also wonderful in this concept of waste: “No, no, I need your help to keep this from going to waste.” A lot of food-sharing came this way — “I made too much, and you’re welcome to it.” It’s a medium for extending a relationship. And you don’t always have to accept it. It’s even different from “oh, welcome to the neighborhood, I made you cookies.” It’s “I made too many.”

Sarah: Because there’s something in the super-modern idea of the gift that’s like, “I’m being generous to you.” That’s not solidarity, it’s charity.

Jacob: Yeah — this is inviting someone in. “I’ve done this, would you like part of it?” is really different from “I’m giving you part of our collective economy.”

Sarah: And obviously it’s implied: next time, you have too much pumpkin.

Jacob: Exactly. And it shows someone you’re thinking of them. These acts lead to something larger — there’s a big academic word for it, sensorium — but when you’re in a neighborhood where people are close together, everyone knows it. Not because people are saying “we’re best buddies,” but because there are smells and sounds moving through walls. The idea of the closed-in family comes from that hermetic seal — the smell of food doesn’t leave, the sounds of the house don’t leave. So keeping the windows open, greeting people when you see them outside — it helps that Sicily is temperate, so you can keep windows open and spend a lot of time on your balcony — but demonstrating that openness is actually the thing people miss. People often feel, “I’d love for this to be more of a neighborhood,” but there’s no way for others to see they have that desire.

Sarah: You need a little sign outside your door: “here are things I’m up for.” Literally, maybe. That’s often how mutual aid turns into neighborliness — “here’s what I have that I can share,” and relationships come from what you have, as opposed to what you’re doing. In my organizing training, we often say that when you want to recruit people, it’s not good to just tell them “I have stuff for you,” because they can get offended — especially in our society, people will say “I’m fine, I don’t need your help, I’m not that needy.” Whereas if you ask them for their help, they’re like, “oh, I could be involved.” So it seems like there’s work to do here.

Jacob: One of my favorite things — there’s a long tradition in southern Italian organizing of saying “we’re going to do some organizing stuff, and we’re also going to hang out,” and those two things are seen as mutually supporting. The social and the political are both necessary. There’s a group I work with and really love in Palermo, and they have aperitivo con motivo and aperitivo senza motivo — aperitivo with a motive and aperitivo without a motive.

Sarah: I love that. What’s an aperitivo with a motive?

Jacob: “We’re inviting Sarah to speak about her recent book, and then we’ll get drinks and all chat and say what we thought.” And without a motive, it’s “it’s Tuesday, come over.”

Sarah: Cool. So you need to show that you’re disponibile.

Jacob: You have to demonstrate to people that this is the kind of relationship you want.

Practice 3: Care for spaces that aren’t yours — because this helps establish rights of “ours.” Sorry, this is three; I’ll be better. I was just talking to a friend complaining about a lack of public cleanup. She started cleaning up the area in front of her house, and then her neighbor saw her and joined in, and now they have this clean area together. This is why we often see neighborhood solidarity becoming really strong when there’s an absence of something like a state to provide services — that third space becomes really important for maintaining common things. And this can blossom, instead of just being about trash cleanup, into “we have this whole infrastructure of chairs that we put out, and we sit together and have drinks in the evenings, or we let the kids go out and play and we all know someone’s watching them.” A lot of this is about cultivating space and seeing yourself not as the owner but as a participant in it — where old people sit and chat, where young people play. Having some food and drink and sharing something there is really key. And I think that’s one of the easiest things to wrap your head around.

Sarah: But it’s still pretty rare. It’s still hard for people to imagine — “maybe I should grab three people and go clean up that weird strip between the two roads.”

Jacob: Yeah, but it then becomes a space we can use for our activities. I remember in my neighborhood as a kid, you’d finish your homework and go outside and hang out until other kids came, and then you’d meet up there.

Sarah: You were lucky, I think, because even by my time that was seen as a bit scary. I’m 35 — it depends on the place.

Jacob: I’m 31.

Sarah: Wow, you were lucky then.

Jacob: There’s this whole skillset of just hanging out. People in this town won’t say “hey, what are you doing this evening?” They’ll say, “are you going out?” — meaning, are you wandering around? Because we’ll bump into each other, or we’ll be at our neighborhood spot, and I’ll know where to find you. People think small towns are boring — that’s not my experience, but it’s because people are really good at talking. They’re really good storytellers. It’s an anthropologist’s paradise: just sitting together, people telling stories, making jokes. The art of chatting is really different from “we’re going to make plans to go see this new bar that only does Star Wars–themed drinks.” That becomes about the space you’re trying to visit, rather than just hanging out together in a space that’s yours.

Sarah: And you need to practice, otherwise the town might be boring.

Jacob: Oh, it would be very boring.

Sarah: Okay, so that’s the third one.

Jacob: Practice 4: Be aware, shut your trap, and lend a hand. The fourth is a little trickier. The interesting thing — or perhaps the problem — here, and this is something people like Silvia Federici have thought a lot about, is that something like nosiness or gossip and something like solidarity are often really entangled, even though they’re not the same thing. Part of having neighbors is that you see into their lives. A huge amount of our latent knowledge, almost our proverbs about neighbors, is the fear that they understand: “what if the neighbors see?” is the classic 1960s America — “what would the neighbors say?” If you have a good relationship, they’re going to see. But if you have a bad relationship, they’re also going to see.

Sarah: This reminds me of living in a polyamorous network, because you do know crazy stuff about other people — and people have very different ideas of what should be shared. I remember once mentioning to a group, “oh, this person went to the gym recently with this other person, they’re helping them learn the gym.” To me this was innocuous, but no — even that was seen as, “they’re actually really sensitive about that,” not even getting to sex or love. You learn very quickly to moderate what’s shareable — not that I’m great at it.

Jacob: To a certain extent, whether it’s neighbors or polyamorous relationships, it’s about living with people. You’re just going to find out about things — we’re not that coordinated, stuff’s going to happen. The way you prove you’re worthy of that knowledge is to handle it with responsibility and to try to help. There’s an anthropologist, Clara Han, who has great work on this, but one example from my own field site: someone needed a job. It had reached the point where they were trying to figure out how to take care of their kids. I was their friend, and I was talking with them, and someone who didn’t know them at all — I was out one night — did the finger, the little beckon, “come over.” And they just said, “What would he like to do? What are his skills?” We had a little chat, and this eventually became part of how this person was put in contact with a job. So on the one hand, the person who beckoned me over was doing the absolute minimum verbally — she didn’t use his name, she didn’t say “I heard about this, and therefore that.”

Sarah: And I’m not sure he’s ever known this was part of how it ended up happening.

Jacob: No, I don’t think so. But I think he absolutely knows it came from somebody looking out for him. Because at the end it’s like, “Oh, I heard you’d be good for this job.” Something has happened socially —

Sarah: It’s better, in a way, if it’s made to appear very natural and needed.

Jacob: Exactly. And there’s no acknowledgment of, “Yes, here are your personal circumstances, we need to go into detail about this.” It’s really just keeping it as much of a secret as you can while also trying to help. And that stems from this problem: you don’t want someone exploiting your secrets, you don’t want someone laughing at you. That’s a pretty common fear. And yet place-based solidarity really depends on having knowledge of other people. Trying to work through that tension is always flawed and tricky.

Sarah: Right — because in a way what you need is people who know just a tiny bit more about you than you’d necessarily have divulged, because that’s actually where your point of vulnerability lies. And I think the main reason people struggle with this — I live in London, which is statistically one of the places in Europe where people know their neighbors the least — and my experience as a mutual aid organizer, running a food cooperative in my neighborhood, is that the problem isn’t that people don’t want to help each other. There are a couple of Scrooge-like characters in any neighborhood, but most people really want to help their neighbors. It’s that they’re terrified, or anxious, or unsure — depending on the person — about being helped.

And the worst part for them is they don’t want to seem like scroungers, like they’re needy. And the time when you’re most helped is usually the time when you’re most vulnerable — you’ve lost your job, your spouse is sick, your kid did something tricky. The point where your neighbor can most help you is the point where you’re vulnerable and, in some sense, unable. People are so afraid of being seen as vulnerable and unable.

I’m a secular Jew, to be clear, but I think there’s something nice in the Catholicism on my dad’s side of the family — or at least certain traditions of it — that suggests being able to receive care is also a virtue. That there’s something you need to go through in that experience. How would you even know what care is worth if you’re not humble enough, weirdly, to receive it?

Jacob: Yeah. And I think a huge amount of it is about framing. This is like before, with the half of the pumpkin — it’s about what you’re acknowledging and what you’re not. So often it’s, “Oh, Sarah, I have this extra thing,” or “Any time you want to come over” — and that could be because I know you’re struggling with housing, or you’re in a difficult relationship, but what I say is, “I’d love for us to do a sleepover.” It has the same effect, but what it isn’t acknowledging is actually the most important part.

Sarah: Like — you get to share if you feel like talking about it, but I’m just here.

Jacob: Exactly. And there’s a different kind of trust between neighbors than the trust you have with your best friend. A good neighbor isn’t necessarily the person you go to every afternoon to explain your whole life and let into your most intimate secrets. That might be the relationship you develop — but it might also just be someone you feel you can rely on.

To give you an example that really captures it, and that shocked the way I think about people needing neighbors: I helped set up — there’s a woman I love dearly, whose husband had passed away recently. A family who’d recently migrated were looking for a home, and they moved into the house next to her. And her response was, “I just feel safe again.” They went on to build a more blossoming relationship, but it was that sense of safety — that there’s a place to fall into — that I think is really the key to this history of neighbors. This almost insurance-like network you can trust.

Sarah: That’s so nice — the safety of having other people nearby. Okay, so let’s say the three things again.

Jacob: The three things: be aware, shut your trap, and lend a hand.

Sarah: So “be aware” is knowing what people near you might need, and then addressing it in a tactful way.

Jacob: Yeah. And — I don’t want to say we do this in the US, I think it’s a famously British thing — of averting your eyes when somebody’s having trouble.

Sarah: Would the Sicilians do that?

Jacob: I don’t want to generalize, but working to be a good neighbor means taking into account what’s going on — not having that reaction of shame, and instead acknowledging it.

Sarah: Maybe it’s the person who just hands you a tissue on the train when you’re crying and doesn’t ask you anything.

Jacob: Exactly, that’s such a good example — as opposed to the other people who react like it’s an attack on them: “You’re crying on my train.” No — here’s a tissue.

Sarah: Right. So just being aware without needing to be super involved. And keeping your trap shut, so people don’t feel like everything’s going everywhere —

Jacob: — and so they can trust living near you.

Sarah: And what’s the third one? Lend a hand — or a tissue. Makes sense. We should just have a sign that says those three things.

Jacob: Practice 5: Rinse, repeat, grow. And then the last one gets back to what we were talking about earlier — this really is a muscle. When I talk about “auditing,” there’s this sense of, where do you even start thinking about your neighborhood, your neighbors, the things you can share? As you become more invested in that process, it becomes more natural, and you realize there are more things you can incorporate others into, and more things you enjoy doing with other people. That’s an important thing to stress: people have neighbors not just because it’s a matter of safety, but because it’s fun.

And — it took me over an hour to get here on the subway —

Sarah: No, no — but also, welcome to London.

Jacob: Thank you. Exactly — that’s what I’m saying: it’s way more convenient if you want to hang out with the people who are near you. There’s a reason it goes that way. The other element is that neighbors and neighborhoods die as soon as they become too tightly bound.

Sarah: What do you mean by that?

Jacob: A term I’ve used is “ours” — thinking about our spaces, our things. But that has an almost xenophobic register; it could be taken that way. So it’s about figuring out how to make this a place that can accommodate more people. Whoever is there, it needs to be constantly reinvented and regrown — not letting it become “ours” as in these four people, but “ours” as in the people who are here. Using that space-based designation is really important.

Sarah: Similar to Jewish concepts like doikayt — like, well, we’re here, so this is where we belong.

Jacob: Exactly, because we got here. And this is one of the major shifts between looking at neighbors ethnographically versus philosophically or psychoanalytically. Some of the writing on this says the neighbor could be anyone. But in practice it isn’t anyone —

Sarah: — it’s the people who are there. And you’re right that they could be people who are different from you, maybe someone annoying, but it’s not everyone in the world. It’s not a universal. It’s people who are flesh and blood, in the same space.

Jacob: Yeah, and that’s really important to remember, because that narrative — the neighbor is anyone, the neighbor is universal — is an all-or-nothing thing.

Sarah: It’s either incredibly sentimental and therefore impractical, or it’s terrifying and then you don’t want to do it. Something this connects to for me — I write a lot about organizing and activism, and there’s endless, mostly boring, infighting on the left. One thing people struggle with is they first idealize the movement: “There are all these other people in the movement with me, this is amazing.” They go through a literal new-relationship-energy phase, but for activism. And then there’s the disillusionment phase — “Oh damn, I’m in this movement with these people and they actually suck.” I think there’s something wonderfully moderating about the idea that the person isn’t necessarily your friend, though they may be — and they’re not an enemy, and they’re not a complete stranger. They’re your neighbor. This middle thing. It’s going to be specific and particular and annoying and fun and interesting and weird, all at the same time.

Jacob: And a lot of it depends less on trying to change them or choose them, and more on the kind of infrastructure you build socially to have that relationship. So it’s good for thinking about organizing, because it’s such an infrastructural and space-based question. What’s our half pumpkin? What are our rules for being here, implicitly? How do I tune myself to your needs without letting your needs dominate me? These questions aren’t necessarily about you and me anymore, but about the type of infrastructure we can build together.

Sarah: Right — because we might move, but someone else will need half a pumpkin, and now we’ve got a ritual. That’s so nice. Okay, let’s talk about the relationship to migration, because I think that’s very important and very counterintuitive. Let’s be real — right now we’re in the UK, you actually live in the US, and in both places there’s a huge fear of migration. I’m curious how the folks in the town you’ve been in see what they’re doing with the people who’ve migrated in, and what you think lets them think about it differently.

Jacob: I think they see themselves as working between their own experience and what they see on TV. There’s something we brush aside, which is often, “He’s a really good guy — I see him every day.” And here they’re talking about someone who’s migrated from, say, Africa. Part of the difference is this idea of neighborliness, or reception. It has to host people with very different politics. Often there are people with quite xenophobic stances who are nonetheless attached to the people who are there, who feel a sense of responsibility — because it’s about caring for the place and caring for their neighbors.

Sarah: So there might be a person who’s like, “I’m not even sure how I feel about foreigners, but we have this foreigner here, and we have this tradition of doing this thing, so we’re doing it.”

Jacob: Exactly. And it really started a bit top-down — with a group of organizers in the mayor’s office who said, “Let’s open this up.”

Sarah: This is really interesting to me, because we’ve been talking about this as though it’s a beautiful “history forever” thing, but almost every good social movement has its secret little committee, you know?

Jacob: Exactly. And it still has its own secret little committee — there’s the question of how do we stage this so that it becomes part of that history. Both things are true. It becomes framed in a certain discourse, which is very much the Catholic discourse I mentioned before: the inability to support your neighbors is a you problem. Part of it is the structure of representation and judgment around moral behavior. “This guy’s going through some stuff, and it’s on you if you can’t handle that.” That’s a failing — not something where you should turn to other people and say “this guy sucks,” because you’d be outing yourself as someone who’s unable to handle it. So part of it is: where does the moral onus lie in living together? There are surely still people in the town who opposed the project, but overwhelmingly, once people build their politics up relationally —

Sarah: — it’s a really different demand. Like, we’re starting from the principle that if someone else has a problem with this town, it’s on all of us. And if you’re not here for that, we’re going to judge you.

Jacob: Yes. So you start from “help the guy next door,” get to know that person, and that helps change your political background.

Sarah: And do you think people actually change their politics, or do they make new room in their existing politics that somehow lets these people in — or some combination?

Jacob: In terms of electoral politics, it’s hard to guess. But one of the big problems is that there was such a disjuncture between leftist politics and tradition in southern Italy. There’s an old paradigm called “comrades and Christians” — this is really 1960s Italy, and in all fairness those comrades were awesome; the writing from that period is really great. At the same time, current Italian politics has no major communist movement. The weird thing is that a lot of Catholic social teaching, communist tradition, and small-town peasant tradition have come together, and what they’re now opposed to is largely neoliberal austerity.

This is a really different place from somewhere like London. London’s solution to migration, in much of its major cities, is a kind of cosmopolitanism, a multiculturalism — which, as we know, has both its benefits and its failures. This looks really different. Part of why I’m interested in it is the relationship between the historic peasantry and the newcomer class, and how those two groups might be organized in solidarity with each other — as opposed to what we were talking about at the beginning, where the middle class has to demonstrate its loyalty by pushing outsiders away.

Sarah: And it strikes me that even now, many decades into what we’d call integration projects, they’re uncomfortable projects. They ask a lot of both parties, in ways that are difficult to — I don’t want to say “justify,” because that might sound bizarrely racist — but in a way it asks the immigrants to assimilate, sometimes more than might be desirable, and it also asks a lot of the existing people to think, “Well, we now have these people who are incredibly different living near us.” I’m not saying we shouldn’t do processes of integration, but there’s something nice about the way it’s done in this village, in that both parties are building an infrastructure together. And the infrastructure is about the fact that they’re neighbors — it’s not necessarily erasing difference, nor erasing the sense of placeness.

Jacob: The existential end of the town is terrifying for people — the worry that everyone will leave. The nice thing that makes this work — and maybe this is the difference between types of integration — is that there’s an understanding: we have this tradition we’re attached to, we care about this place, but we also need to rebuild our social world and our social infrastructure. We take for granted in cities that there’s this group and this is their identity, and that group and their identity, and the future will continue regardless. A place with an existential threat of depopulation makes obvious for everyone that forms of social connection have to constantly be remade and reinvigorated. That’s why it’s good to think from — there’s no presumption of social immortality. We’re in a moment where social institutions and social life feel really denigrated, and yet, unlike the people in the town I lived in, we don’t think of it as something that needs to be actively remade. Instead of using integration as a metaphor, it’s really that we need to remake sociality. It’s not just a question about migration — it’s a larger social question about our time.

Sarah: We’re not just mixing existing things together — together we’re going to build something new, even if it has roots. That’s really nice. I was struck by some of your writing about women and families. I don’t know if you want to bring that in here, if it fits.

Jacob: Totally. One reason I’ve liked thinking with the idea of neighbors and neighborliness is that when we talk about social reproduction, we usually talk about it in terms of the family, or we zoom out and talk about society. What thinking about neighbors lets me do is think about how a specific relationship gets remade — one that isn’t the family, and isn’t society in general. And it’s a very informal relationship.

Sarah: It’s also not like there’s a board of neighbors telling you, “You’re not neighboring correctly, stop that.”

Jacob: Well, sometimes there is, and it’s terrible —

Sarah: Like — what do they call it, a homeowners’ —

Jacob: Yeah. You can tell neither of us owns a home, because we don’t know about these things. But not that kind of home. There is that. Though the interesting thing about thinking about neighbors historically is that only bad neighbors make the historical record. The histories we have are of neighbors fighting each other and going to court — that’s the vast majority of it. We don’t have much of “this person had that person’s back,” unless we really read against the grain. So histories of neighboring are really hard to write.

Sarah: Tell me more about these women, and the “amoral family.”

Jacob: So the “amoral family” is an idea that comes from a Reagan-era administrator who got his start in political science by going to southern Italy without speaking a word of Italian —

Sarah: Perfect.

Jacob: — and coming to the conclusion that here, no one helps each other; they only care for their families. And this gets reproduced, because the archetype is: “You’re associating wrong, you’re doing public life incorrectly, and therefore it’s immoral.” He — as one of Reagan’s associates — called it amoral, not immoral.

Sarah: Amoral.

Jacob: Yeah — they have no moral bonds beyond the family.

Sarah: Okay, right. And is this associated with the assumptions people have about big Italian families and the mafia?

Jacob: Exactly. A lot of it is this post–World War II moment where they’re trying to create a certain kind of national politics, and these are people not committed to that national politics. So if you don’t have a recognizable form of public collective life, you’re seen as not having it at all. And somehow, from southern Italy, this gets invented as a diagnosis for, say, inner-city Boston. This is the guy who invents the idea of broken windows policing.

Sarah: Right — so there’s this whole language of “you have to use state violence, because there’s no life here beyond this.”

Jacob: And the interesting thing that gets shown by reading older ethnographies is that a lot of the work of neighboring comes down to women.

Sarah: Did you observe this too, watching?

Jacob: Yeah. There’s an expectation that the head of the family provides the family’s future, so there’s a narrative of investment in the family that’s gendered male, and investment beyond the family that’s gendered female. I describe it that way because there were all these times where men would give something, share something, do something — and they’d describe that action as “well, my mother would do it like this,” not “my father would do it like this.” So it was often men acting through female memory and connection.

One of the most fun things about thinking about neighboring, for me, is that normally when we think about social reproduction we use the family at the small scale, or society at the larger scale — and we say the family is too small, or too heteronormative, or too culturally specific. Neighboring gives me a third option, which is in no way all-encompassing: let’s just follow one type of relation through time and think about how it works. This isn’t absolutely true, but one thing I found is that it’s often these memories of mothers, these memories of female action. The same reason American politicians said “you have no public life” is because it was gendered female — a lot of the actual work of sharing was among women. This probably happens in many places: the informal networks of solidarity and care had this gendered element, and people would often think back on “this is the site of my mother’s action.”

Sarah: And do you think this Reagan guy missed the wider kinds of civic bonds because they didn’t look like what he thought men should be — or were — doing?

Jacob: Yeah. His name is, I think, Edward C. Banfield. And this is a classic — I’m being peak anthropologist here — this guy came in looking for something, didn’t find it, and concluded those forms of social solidarity don’t exist.

Sarah: What do you think he was looking for?

Jacob: Attachment to the nation-state. Something that looked like citizenship —

Sarah: Like: signed petition, vote.

Jacob: Right. And instead he saw — or failed to see — a bunch of women going, “I got some tomatoes from my garden. Also, how’s your baby? You can bring her here for an hour if you need.” It’s really this distinction between formal and informal networks of solidarity. There’s not much going on at the mayor’s office; there’s a lot going on in the side streets, between people’s houses.

Sarah: But he wasn’t there.

Jacob: He wasn’t there. And this has repeated itself in sociological studies. The guy who wrote Bowling Alone —

Sarah: Robert Putnam.

Jacob: Robert Putnam — also starts out doing this in southern Italy, looking at social and symbolic capital and civic participation. His argument is essentially that because of how southern Italy was ruled 2,000 years ago, it never developed a culture of citizenship, whereas the north has this civic involvement. And what people are quick to point out is that in Bowling Alone he says American civic life has changed in the past 20 years, whereas in his story about Sicily it stayed the same for about a thousand years.

Sarah: It’s wild. Especially wild when you think about Sicily — a place that’s been invaded by so many different groups of people, so obviously there are huge changes happening by necessity.

Jacob: Absolutely. So there’s this bizarre link in theories of social life where they point to southern Italy and say, “This is not correct.” It’s the juxtaposition against which we define proper civic participation, proper political life — and then we use that as an archetype elsewhere. And it’s super racialized and super gendered: “Women are doing too much here, and that reminds us of people of color back home.”

Sarah: Yes.

Jacob: It’s this bizarre traffic in political science.

Sarah: And it’s also a very specific idea of what the good life is — a hyper-national, hyper-individual existence. Look, there are of course big problems with Sicilian government, no question. But it’s possible — and in fact true in many ways — that you can get a different bouquet of things. In Sicily, at least in certain parts, they’re actually pretty good at the neighboring part of the good life. And maybe they haven’t got, often because of external forces — the north takes a lot of wealth from the south in various ways — some other forms of governance we might want. But it’s funny that these external theorists can’t even imagine that.

Jacob: It’s important to remember that the background of everything I’ve been saying about neighboring is terrible. It’s forms of austerity and abandonment and forced migration. It’s people making the best of a really difficult situation — very different difficult situations — and they’ve used living together as an idiom to talk about “how do we —”

Sarah: Do you mean the Sicilian — the “native,” in quotes; I don’t like that word, but — people who’ve been living in Sicily for generations, having a hard time because of poverty and other problems?

Jacob: Yeah — forms of rural abandonment, a lack of investment in the community from the government, just a lack of jobs. There’s not opportunity in this community, and there’s a much longer history of the nation, or the region, trying to discipline the center of the island. So both groups are in this position — whether it’s the existential threat of depopulation or the existential threat of forced migration — where no one needed neighbors for good reasons, because everything had gone well.

Sarah: In fact, what we find is that when people gain wealth, they tend to become more isolated — they see their friends less, and they pay for services that pull them away from each other. That’s a very common economic finding.

Jacob: Whereas there — there’s the classic point that when some kind of disaster happens, natural disasters and post-war scenarios, people fall into doing mutual aid because it’s an efficient way of getting things together. That’s really the context we’re talking about.

Sarah: And I think it’s also, realistically, what’s coming for all of us. Unless you’re watching this because you’re a billionaire for some reason, this world — scarred by climate change, migration, and depopulation — is coming for many places. This is a different thing I researched, but birth rates are going down; they just are, in lots of places. And — I’m not using this in a racist way — interestingly, the global south is also taking a big nosedive in birth rate, which will eventually mean population decline. That’s coming for all of us. So the world you see there is, in many ways, a thing we’re all heading toward, whether we know it or not.

Jacob: This gets back to the fundamental point: in those moments — post-disaster, forced migration, depopulation — it’s made clear that sociality, society, what connects us, is something we need to reinvent and remake. It’s not something we can take for granted. And once that becomes marked and explicit, there’s a huge opportunity for creativity. Part of what was interesting about the place I worked in is that it does both: they absolutely say, “We’re not saying we have the same lives as our parents, but we have these moral commitments that we want to figure out how to articulate in a very different context.”

Sarah: Maybe this is a great note to end on, but you were telling me about some of the older folks there — a lot of old people who die don’t necessarily have children, or the children aren’t there, and so they have cars. And in this reinvigorated, previously peasant economy, the thing you give away is the cars: “I just don’t need these cars — someone else, please, have these cars.”

Jacob: Yeah. And there’s an incredibly complicated Italian car insurance system, but the point is that older cars are cheaper to insure, so to people with limited means these old cars actually have a higher value than a new one. But also — this is a place with no supermarket, no public transit. So it’s a situation of carpooling; people are driving each other everywhere. Just like the half-pumpkin example, the idea that “this is my car and no one else gets in it” would be absurd there. Cars operate somewhat like buses — “Yeah, I’m going to this part of town, I’m going to this town.”

And this is a really interesting story to end on: one of my close friends is a guy from Syria. Someone asked me for a favor — “Can we go to the supermarket, this specific one, because I want to buy stuff for my daughter’s birthday party on Monday? I don’t have family, I’m not Christian.” They knew I would take them on a Sunday, when they couldn’t go elsewhere. The guy walked away, and my friend said, “He shouldn’t do that.” I said, “No, it’s fine, dude, what are you talking about? I can drive on a Sunday, it’s totally fine.” He said, “No, no — you should frame things not as ‘I want you to do this’ or ‘will you do this for me,’ but with we. ‘Would it be good for us to go to the supermarket, because then I can do this?’” A fun thing to do together. So there really are these small frames of language, which are about how you position yourself and others, and what connects you.

Sarah: That’s so nice. And I think it’s really great to recognize that this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as manipulation or insincerity. It’s that both of you are taking on a different mindset about the thing.

Jacob: Yeah — it’s establishing that as a point of view you can think from. And any articulation of “we” is deeply fragile. That’s a classic point, but it’s also what makes this grammatical fiction of “okay, we’re thinking from this postulated point where we are unified.”

Sarah: It’s so nice. Thank you so much for sharing this. I’ll put lots of links to your stuff, if you want. And everyone can comment and ask questions, and you can comment back.

Jacob: Yeah, please do. I’m thinking about how to bring this further — this is the first time I’ve tried to articulate it to a broader public.

Sarah: This is going to be great. I’m really excited to see what people think. Please leave your comments, we’d love to hear. Thank you so much.

I’ve been commissioned to write a few pieces for Krauterreporter—a subscriber-only publication in German. My paid subscribers get access to them in English :)

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Sarah:

Wonderful. Okay. Hello, Sam. Thank you so much for coming here today to talk to us about this report, which I found really interesting. I met you through a sort of network of people interested in questions of connection and loneliness and gender as well. And I was really interested because your research does something that is pretty rare in the field of sociological research on this topic, which is to take research that is usually quantitative and make it qualitative.

And I know that’s a really boring, nerdy way to start this chat. But I think it’s worth acknowledging just how rare that is. Usually people kind of just say like, oh, well, like 78% of people, blah, blah, blah. And they take that as almost like gospel about the world. Like, oh, there’s numbers.

And I think you very helpfully demystified numbers in an interesting way. And I’m really appreciative. And also, I’ve just really enjoyed our chats over time thinking about these issues and a lot more...

I don’t want to use the word like spiritual because I’m a Marxist. But, you know, there’s something... Deep about some of this work.

So I’m really excited to talk about it today. And I wondered if maybe you wanted to give people a little bit of a sense of who you are: both why you’re the person doing this research, but also why it matters to you.

Sam:

Yeah. Thank you. And thanks for having me. And thanks for joining y’all. I kind of came to this work. There’s a lot of different stories, but I think part of it in the US context, my first real job was starting an organization that is now the largest community arts organization in the country for veterans and military and their families in the US.

And that work...It was kind of extremely formative for me, but also relevant to this research for the fact that like veterans are mostly people who went before joining the military didn’t go to college.

It is still both a predominantly masculine culture in the military and be like it’s still more men than women in the military. And so the people who were participating in our programs were folks who if not for the fact that they had served in the military and were kind of in the US context kind of given this like put on a pedestal a little bit and given the privileges of being able to have free community arts programming to like reconnect with this question like who am I now? Where do I belong? What’s next?Like they could have ended up being on the other side of this dividing line in American life, which is the college degree and finding themselves alone.

And so I had this kind of personal experience in building the community and seeing the potential of that community with a group of people who are not necessarily all that different than the people that we ended up speaking to in this research. And then I think there’s the more and this gets into your methods piece, Sarah, like there’s a there’s a direct tie, which was in 2024. Iended up publishing a research project on the, it was a survey report on kind of all aspects of civic life in the US. So do you have places in your neighborhood to gather with neighbors like cafes, restaurants, but also parks, libraries?

Do you, are you a member of community? Are you a member of a religious group? Are you a member of a union? Like, but also looking at friendships,

Like how many close friends do you have and you have people that you can count on in a time of need.

And we found in that research was a significant class divide in all of those domains. The kind of real headline data point from that was a quarter of people without college degrees said they had no close friends compared to 10% of people with college degrees.

And as part of that, we, so that was quantitative research and but as part of that, we did a little bit of qualitative research.

We did interviews with men and women with degrees and without degrees, and it was the three to four men we spoke to without degrees who stood out for being completely untethered. In these interviews, they shared pretty raw, vulnerable stories about their lives — not being in a relationship and not being in community. But because it was first and foremost a survey report, what got published and what ultimately got the headlines were these data points, which then became, as I saw it, kind of sterilized. It sterilized their stories, and it also instrumentalized their stories for clicks on Twitter, hot takes, and op-eds in the New York Times.

I guess to close the loop on this opening: the reason we did this report was a real sense that if you don’t have any friends, you don’t have any relationships, you’re functionally invisible to the outside world. The hope was to take this invisibility and make the invisible visible by just talking to these guys about their friendships, their sense of community, their sense of purpose in life. And so that’s how we ended up getting into it.

Sarah:

I just want to say, first of all, that the study you were talking about before — is it the American Community Life Survey? What is it called?

Sam:

So it was with the Survey Center on American Life, and it’s called “Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life.”

Sarah:

Yeah. I almost just want to pause on that one for one second, because I think, first of all, it’s really worth reading. And actually, I think this is originally where I started reading your research, because in my last book I wrote about social atrophy — the shrinking and changing in the brain when you’re more socially isolated and the way that affects your perception of the world. So I ended up going down that path. I was wondering about the effect of class. And I was struck by the way that education in particular seems to predict all kinds of remarkable things for how people live their lives, things that are almost hard to account for — like, for example, people who have college degrees go on walks more, regardless of where they live. If you have a person living next door to another person, and one of them has a college degree, they’ll just go on walks more around the block. And I found that fascinating.

But I think that while there are many plausible theories to explain that, one of the ones I imagined as I read through your research and writing in this prior study was about the university system as it has worked in, at least in the United States, where it is very often a place where people go away from their hometown. They are mixed up with loads of other people from different backgrounds. They are given a kind of semi-position of equality with other students for a while — obviously with many asterisks, because you’re still living in a stratified world even at university — but there’s something equalizing about it. And you’re also pushed to socialize. I went to a super elite, annoying university and they knew this was the strength of the university system. So they made us socialize. You’re in this dining hall and you have to go every day and you have to talk to people. I remember during university wondering, why? Why do we have to have ice cream time right now? And in retrospect, I’m like, of course we had to have ice cream time. Because ice cream time is both how classes reproduce themselves, but it’s also how you train people in a certain way of being that is in many ways beneficial for them. And I feel like that previous research really brings it out. And as you say, it also brings out the idea that perhaps the most obvious dividing line has nothing to do with gender — it has to do with class.

Sam:

Yeah.

Sarah:

I don’t know if you want to say anything about that.

Sam:

I think that’s — you know, when we went into this research, there was, and there still is, a discourse around a so-called male loneliness epidemic. And we saw there was no data to support that. There wasn’t really any difference between men and women when it came to what we were looking at in that 2024 survey. The dividing line was class. But I think we’re in the US context where it’s important to name where gender fits in: women are just significantly outpacing men in terms of college enrollment and completion. So if we think the dividing line is education and class, the people who are going to make up those on the other side of that dividing line are increasingly going to be men. It’s not to say men are more deserving or actually more disconnected overall — it’s to say that this group in particular is going to be the group most likely to be left behind because of how gender and class are interacting with each other when it comes to the system of higher education.

Sarah:

Yeah. And do you have any — I mean, I don’t want us to get too distracted, but I think it’s always worth painting the picture for people a little bit.

Sam:

The work that is frankly part of being a student is actually something women are just better at, and men are much more attuned to doing very concrete, substantive work. So there’s an element where I think academic fields just reward women more. Women are significantly outpacing men in all elements of the meritocracy — until they have children, and then that’s basically the meteor hitting their ability to participate in the economy.

Sarah:

But for these guys, I do want to say that I think it’s worth being skeptical sometimes of all the evolutionary claims. I don’t personally feel that we can know very clearly how much sexuated difference there is in the human species past a certain point. I’m not saying there’s none — as someone who reads a lot of psychology studies, there’s stuff going on with the human body. But I think it’s also worth thinking about it in cultural and sociological ways: what’s expected of boys and girls, what’s reported in them, and the way parents gender them from literally before they’re born.

Sam:

I think it’s notable just the degree to which colleges in the US are essentially practicing what we used to call affirmative action — though it’s no longer in that form — for men. You’ll talk to college admissions officers and they are literally lowering standards for boys entering college because of how far behind they are, and because they don’t want an 80/20 dynamic in the college. They’re just trying to get to 60/40, so they’ll lower standards to fill out the class.

Sarah:

And I think it’s also worth pointing out that quite a few institutions are falling apart in the US right now — and abroad, and everywhere actually. One of them is the nuclear family: people are much less frequently partnered, especially married. And college is actually part of this story too, because in the United States, for people of a certain class position, that is usually where you find your partner, or at least the social network that will bring you your partner. And colleges know that’s part of what they’re supposed to offer. So they are doing part of this affirmative action because they know that people are looking to the university system to provide them with a mating pool, basically. It’s very interesting how this institution holds so many functions — it gets you into a class position, it finds you a mate, it tells you to go on walks. I’m fascinated by that.

Sam:

Yeah. And I think there are multiple facets to this marriage and family formation piece. One is the fact that up until the late 60s and early 70s, men and women with degrees and without degrees looked exactly the same in the US — 80-plus percent were married. And what you ended up seeing was just the bottom fall off for men and women without degrees. Marriage rates for men without degrees went from around 80% to 53%; for women, it’s like 56%. While people with college degrees have seen only a slight decline, down to around 75%. So that’s largely sustained. And this is the pattern you see across institutions.

Same with union participation — it’s gone up for people with degrees and down for people without degrees. And unions were historically a foundational piece for working class people. That’s part of it. And then there’s the element of the institutional design of higher ed, which includes assortative mating. I went to William and Mary in Virginia and they would brag that 25% of William and Mary alumni were married to fellow alumni. And guess what — I met my wife there; I’m one of that 25%. I always rolled my eyes at that, but it’s playing a real role, and it’s even playing a role after the fact, because now we’ve sorted ourselves by place.

Sarah:

Yeah, I guess I just wanted to highlight this thing about institutions and class because I think it’s going to play into everything we talk about in an important way. It also helps elucidate what class is — it’s not just about how much income you earn, it’s about which doors are open and closed, what codes you know, and who you know.

But I want to get to this thing about quantitative and qualitative for a second, because one of the things that really struck me when I was first talking to you about your research — now going to the report you’ve just released — is that you said you expected that these men who said they had zero or one friend would have zero to two friends or something like that. And many of these men, once you actually spoke to them qualitatively, had zero good friends. And I think the reason this is interesting — and it’s heartbreaking, of course — is that it’s also telling because it asks us to reconsider what it means when we do quantitative research, that we should always be taking this quantitative research with some significant salt. I wondered if you could speak to this a bit and tell us what you found.

Sam:

Oh man. My co-author Soren Duggan is even more into the qualitative side — he’s what you might call qual-pilled. But I can speak from my own experience with this and what I think it means.

Overall, I think there’s a role for quantitative research. The survey gave us a starting point to go deeper, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without it. But I think there’s a challenge when quantitative data shifts from “it’s giving us some insight into reality” to “it is reality.” There is a real distance between those two things. And what we experienced through this qualitative research was so much more nuance, context, and texture.

The first piece around that is what you brought up about friendship. In the survey report, we saw a quarter of people without degrees had no close friends. With the interviews we did, over half of the guys we talked to had no close friends. And again, we talked to 30 people — so we’re not going to make claims of generalizability — but that’s a pretty big gap. And it was one of those things where you start to ask questions, and Soren did the interviews so he could speak to this even better than I can. But you’d ask about a close friend, and someone would say, “Oh yeah, I have a close friend.” And then the follow-up would be, “When’s the last time you talked to them?” And it’s like, two or three years ago. “Can you turn to them in a time of need?” Not really. And that was the group that said they had close friends.

So we kind of left this experience feeling that — I thought maybe the quantitative was overestimating the disconnection — I left feeling that the quantitative was actually underestimating the disconnection. And that only became clear because we were able to have these 45-minute conversations where we were just hearing about people’s lives and the tenor of their lives. That was the first piece that came from a qualitative perspective.

But the qualitative also created room to open up paths we weren’t even considering. When you’re doing a quantitative survey, you’re setting the agenda for what people are responding to. When you’re having a conversation with people, you’re allowed to follow the flow of where that conversation goes. A great example of this is that we didn’t ask any questions about family. We tried to keep it focused — we just wanted to know about friends, community, role models and mentors, and purpose. And the only real bright spot that ended up coming up in this research was family, because people were saying: family is my core source of purpose in life, family is my core source of being needed by others, family are the only relationships I can turn to in a time of need. So by using this open-ended qualitative approach, it created an entry point to get into other parts of their lives that turned out to be limited but genuine bright spots, and it contributed to this broader texture.

Sarah:

Yeah. I noticed it’s quite an interesting report to read, and I encourage everyone to go download it — it’s free, and it has these beautiful illustrations. It’s also not written like a sociology report. It’s written in a way where, as I always joke about my own book, your mum can read it. And there are all these very sad bits, and then there’s a lovely bright spot in the middle about how these men relate to their romantic partners — all women in this report, it seems — and how they relate to parenting, or to being an uncle, for example. That’s the bright bit where they say, “This is my entire purpose in life.” I was really struck by that. And I guess it puts a very human face on what a lot of this data shows.

I’m getting very deep into this data now about lack of partnership for men in America. Men are actually less likely to be in a romantic partnership than women — and I confess I don’t 100% understand how that’s true; I imagine lesbianism is part of it — but more importantly, if men are not in a romantic partnership, they are just way more disconnected from the world. And there’s a very strong relationship with class there. One of the ways I write about this is that once people leave the workforce, they tend to leave the relationship force. They just cannot essentially enact the heterosexual transaction that is relationship, especially if you live in your mum and dad’s house. But in any case, I feel like your report really beautifully illustrates that for the men who are able to have even one core familial relationship — or especially if they’re given any caretaking responsibilities — that immensely enriches their life in a way that nothing else is able to right now, given our lack of institutions.

Sam:

Yeah. If you take a step back, it actually makes sense — particularly fatherhood and becoming an uncle — because it’s like the one real thing you have left. You have to keep this child alive, or you have to support your nephews and nieces. And if you believe yourself to be good and to be fulfilling your role, there’s no way to avoid the sense of being needed and the responsibility that comes with that.

There was one pattern in this that I would describe as transcendence — between not being a father and becoming a father. It was this core transformation for these guys: I was drinking a ton, doing all this bad stuff, and then I have this kid, and I changed. It was a clarifying moment. One guy said he used to be a dishwasher, hated work, would just clock in and clock out. He ended up in a romantic relationship with a girlfriend who already had a kid, and supporting that kid made the day worthwhile. He’s still washing dishes, still riding his bike to and from work, but there was something at the end of that day that made it matter.

And that’s part of it. But there’s also, I’d say, a hopeful piece and a despairing piece. The hopeful piece is that family is one foundational institution that most of these guys still have. From my perspective, that gives you something from which to build. Complete and total isolation would mean no connection to family either. So it gives you a launching point. For a lot of these guys, they valued that enormously, and they saw it as not just receiving benefit but also as a form of reciprocity.

But I think this is where class comes in, and I think if we had talked to women without degrees it would be even more extreme. The place where reciprocity was absent was in caregiving becoming a one-way burden — people working full-time and also having to care for parents with disabilities or parents who are aging, not feeling they were getting anything in return and not feeling they had any room for anything else except work and caregiving.

And I think the story often told about class is: well, you have less if you’re working class or poor, but you band together more. You have to draw on your relational resources to support each other. What we’re seeing is that actually you’re just getting doubly punished — you have less materially and you have less relationally, and so the burden is falling on you even more. And again, one of my curiosities is if we did the same question set with 30 women without degrees, what would we find? I’m so curious.

Can we do this? Sarah, you should do it.

Sarah:

No, no, I’m a theorist. We need some empirical scientists.

Sam:

But I think the caregiving burden would come up even more strongly if we spoke with women without college degrees.

Sarah:

Yeah. And by that, I assume you mean the enormous burden and difficulty of caregiving.

Sam:

Yeah. Can I say one more thing about this?

Sarah:

Please, yeah — I have some thoughts, but I want to hear what you’d say.

Sam:

So the last thing — it was kind of threaded throughout rather than being a specific finding because it was everywhere — is that women often made up an important role in the one tenuous tie that these guys had. Women were doing a lot of work for their men’s relational lives, which is consistently borne out in the research. But they were also, because of that, often the only thing tethering these guys to something. The example I think of first is mothers and sons — mothers doing a lot of work to bring their sons to church. We had three different guys talking about going to church every Sunday and to Bible study because their mum would take them along. And then for all three of these guys, their mum passed away, and they just stopped going. That immediately broke the tie.

So I think there’s this element where, if your parents are aging and they pass away and you’re also not in a romantic relationship, these men were very much relying on the women in their lives to be a relational anchor. And I’d be very curious to talk to those women and understand how they perceive that as part of the burden as well. I think it’s implied that the women in their lives were looking out for their men — and that’s a beautiful thing, and also another thing they’re carrying.

Sarah:

And I think — maybe it’s worth saying here — people who’ll be listening to this are from my Substack and from yours. One of the things I write about, and one of my more popular recent pieces, is basically the argument that it’s not a loneliness crisis and not a population crisis, but a social reproduction crisis. That went viral on LinkedIn and a lot of people came in through that. (Yeah, I didn’t know that was an option. To me, LinkedIn is this weird underworld of horrible corporate jargon, but never mind.)

But just to elucidate what that point is: it’s very common right now for people working in vaguely this world to talk about a loneliness crisis or a population crisis. And obviously there are changes in human population happening right now — the birth rate is declining and the population will eventually decline as a result. But it’s kind of problematic to call that a crisis, for lots of reasons. And what I’m arguing is that both of those shifts — spending more time alone, and having fewer children — can in large part, though not completely, be explained by a big shift in our economy.

Throughout human history, as grumpy Marxists have always liked to explain, there are two streams of labour in human life. There’s the stream that makes new stuff — juice boxes, chemical plants, everything we need, that’s productive labour. And then there’s this other stream of labour about recreating the social world all the time. That’s everything from birthing children to listening to people’s feelings so they feel capable of going back to work.

People are actually doing the same amount of housework, couple by couple, as they used to — but they also pay for a lot more of it, which suggests they can’t do all of it themselves and have to outsource it, directing a significant chunk of their income to solving that problem. Parents are spending a lot more time parenting, in large part because they are parenting alone rather than taking shifts with other parents. There are many other aspects of the social reproduction crisis, but basically we’re spending a lot more time and energy just keeping ourselves going. It also makes parenting so hard that many people either can’t do it or opt out.

And then there’s the gender dimension — the circumstances for men and women to commit to each other for a long period of time are not good right now. Especially in America, it’s much harder for men and women to find a deal that satisfies them, especially at lower income brackets, which is why marriage is very rare there and much more common at higher income brackets. Women say they want a man who can earn consistently, and the men cannot do that. And as a result, women often end up single parenting — which is often criticised, but is perhaps just the outcome given these exchange possibilities.

In any case, what I’m trying to say is that what it sounds like you’re telling me is that you can see this social reproductive crisis happening in the way these men talk about the relationships in their lives. They are not part of institutions of social reproduction that would give them friends, and they perhaps don’t know how to do social reproduction to the same degree themselves — including the work of finding and making friends. I wondered if you could comment on that, and also if there’s anything else going on for these men that makes this so hard.

Sam:

That’s spot on. You use maybe more Marxist material terms than I would, but it’s the same thing. And as I’ve been talking about this project, I want to make sure not to fall into the trap of talking about the guys rather than actually centring their stories. So I think the best way to present this is by contrasting the one flourishing man we talked to with the other 29.

The one flourishing man we talked to, his name is Roger. We did a case study on him, called him the flourishing man. What was notable about him, I would say, came down to three interrelated things.

One: he was born into a set of relationships and associations that he didn’t have to create himself. He was born into church membership, into a rich community life, into deep mentoring relationships. Two: those associations weren’t one or nothing — they were many overlapping webs of association. If one broke, it wasn’t the difference between being connected or isolated, which was the case for most of the other men we talked to. Three: he felt a responsibility to steward these institutions and relationships so that his children could also benefit from them.

It was remarkable. Born into the church, he became a leader in that church — in the choir, teaching Sunday school — and raised all of his kids in that church, with the pastor who was also his primary mentor outside of his father. He was trying to pass on to his kids what he’d inherited from the church. He got his job through the church when he was 15, and is now — to your point about material foundations — the chief foreman of a construction site. A significant portion of the people in that workplace are also members of his church. And his three sons work with him on the job site. He literally called us and was so excited — the first thing he said was how thrilled he was because all three of his sons were on the job site that day. He’s passing on the work to his children as well. So you see these overlapping webs of association, inheritance, stewardship — and to your point, he is socially reproducing all of these many overlapping webs.

The 29 other guys we talked to inherited very little, and as a result felt they had to cultivate their relational lives from scratch. The phrase I use is that they talked about their relationships as if they were a prize of entrepreneurial action rather than a gift of generational inheritance. They blamed themselves for being isolated and disconnected. They thought it was their own personal responsibility to fix themselves and build their relationships. And when we zoomed out, that gap just felt too big to bridge. It’s not a gap that someone can bridge on their own, and certainly can’t be bridged at a collective scale.

Sarah:

What do you mean by the collective scale piece? Do you mean that they can’t acquire an entire community through entrepreneurship, for example?

Sam:

Yeah. And maybe one extraordinarily entrepreneurial individual could do that, but if I’m thinking about all men without college degrees, the answer is not to build it anew. The answer — and our answer — was to call people in. Obviously that’s easier said than done, but what we wanted to do was take the responsibility and the blame away from the individual and put the responsibility and obligation on the collective. Now, we also said this is not a quick fix. This took generations to break, and there’s no silver bullet — it’s going to take generations to renew. I’m not hopeful for these guys. That’s the bottom line. Maybe individually, but collectively, I think we’re looking at a reality where we’ve decided to create a society built on this dividing line of class and leave a subset of people alone and unaccompanied. That’s a collective implication and a collective obligation, not something the individual should be forced to deal with by themselves.

Sarah:

Yeah. I so agree. And I think this is where I really admire the ethos of your work, because — look, I’m very unhappy about material inequality for lots of reasons, given all my Marxist sociology. But I’m almost more worried about this. I’m not romanticising poverty in terms of its material effects, but I’m even more worried about its social structural effects. I think a person who is poor is already obviously facing an injustice, but doing it alone is almost dehumanising. One of the reasons I write about social atrophy is that I want people to understand that if they spend less time with other people, if they are less interdependent with other people, they will actually think about the world differently. They will experience other people differently. People who are alone for more hours of the day are more skeptical about other people, more paranoid. They think other people are out to hurt them even when that’s not true. They often have less of a social appetite, which means — in a weird way — the feeling of loneliness, as some of the early researchers I interviewed about this reminded me, is actually a healthy feeling. If I feel hungry right before dinner, that’s good. That means my body is working. And if you feel lonely because you couldn’t see your friends this week, that’s a healthy loneliness. Now obviously there’s chronic loneliness and bad kinds of loneliness. But it’s actually much more worrying when people don’t want to see other people — when that is what our species does. And it’s very worrying that a huge chunk of people who are already experiencing effectively poverty, or something near it, and definitely inequality, are also experiencing a kind of reshaping of their subjectivity and their brain because they are also left alone by society. It’s really scary.

Sam:

I think about this — and maybe it’s overly simplistic — but I think about it in feedback loops. Relationships breed more relationships; community breeds more community. The number one thing that refers us to other relationships and other forms of community participation are the people we already know. So if you’re not in relationship, you’re not in community, you’re going to be in a negative feedback loop. And that doesn’t even get into the psychological dimensions you’re speaking to.

So much of what we heard in the self-blame theme was: I don’t have the skills. I don’t have the self-esteem. I don’t have the confidence. I had a guy, Dionne, who said, “I suck at it. I suck at connection.” And meanwhile, we’re interviewing this guy and he’s extraordinarily personable. It gets to this piece of like — when you’re alone, you feel like your skills are atrophying, your confidence is atrophying, and it digs you into an even deeper hole.

And this is where I think there’s a weird intersection with therapy culture. There were genuinely good elements of therapy in this — I want to say that clearly. There was an emotional openness that I think was due in part to a lot of these guys being in therapy, and a dropping of some less healthy masculine norms around stoicism and all of that. But there was also this sub-thread of, “I need to fix myself before I get back into relationship.” I just need to work on this skill here, I need to boost my confidence a little more. And they were doing that through therapy. I think it just got the order backwards. Therapy makes sense as a useful supplement, but you build your skills and you build your confidence in the container of relationships and community, not the other way around. That came up again and again and again.

Sarah:

It’s an individualist fallacy — not to get on my soapbox — but it’s an individualist fallacy to think that first you are somehow redeemed and then you enter into relationship. I think the really messy and horrible truth, and something I’m trying to write about right now — which is almost embarrassing for someone who is supposed to be offering professional expertise, like I have a PhD, but it’s almost an existential, self-help sort of thing — is that a lot of us have a fantasy. I’m going to go to therapy with this person that no one else in my life knows and they’re going to help fix me. Or I’m going to do whatever — breathing, reading, praying. And to be clear, I’m not dunking on therapy or religion on their own terms. But the reality is that whatever you’re doing there, you’re also only going to be remade if you’re doing it in relationship with other people. And what’s worse is they’re going to see all the ways that you are screwed up and flawed and messed up, and they’re going to have to watch you get through your stuff. And then you are made anew — not perfect, just better in some way. I think our society has made that process shameful. And I think it’s also just harder for people to find. And the most individualist self-help stuff makes it much worse, which of course you see in the manosphere, but there are versions of this for women too. It’s a false and harmful narrative within self-help worlds, and we have to push back against it.

Sam:

100%. I have nothing to add there, but I’ll just say: this was, to me, the most surprising thing. I hadn’t had this clocked at all. I should have. But the degree to which it was just, “I have low self-esteem, my confidence is just too low” — it was glaring in almost every interview.

One thing I did want to respond to: there was a fork in the road. Most of these guys were disconnected, or one tenuous tie away from being completely disconnected. But here’s where the fork came. The majority of guys were yearning to connect, yearning to contribute, yearning to be part of something bigger than themselves. But there was a non-insignificant subset of guys who didn’t — who were just done. We had a chapter called “Hurting,” and this chapter was about a subset of guys who had felt too burned.

One subset had just lost friends, and this is where the opioid epidemic, the suicide epidemic, and deaths of despair comes in, particularly in the US context. Many guys had lost people to opioid overdoses, to suicide, and those guys talked about being hurt so badly by those lost relationships that they didn’t want to expose themselves to the pain of loss again. There was this guy, Douglas, who spoke beautifully about friendship — about friendship as a sacred experience — and he got hurt so badly by losing his best friend to suicide and then his other best friend to prison that he just didn’t want to expose himself to that again.

And then there was a whole other subset who kept coming back to a feeling that they had been used, betrayed, let down — that you just can’t trust people anymore. There’s a material dimension to that too. It felt very cutthroat, very dog-eat-dog. The word “burned” came up again and again: “I’ve been burned too many times, I don’t want to deal with people anymore.” And that distrust, in this subset, was quite strong.

Sarah:

Yeah, and that really rhymes with the research on social atrophy, where people become much more paranoid and skeptical of others. It strikes me also that in the research on paranoia more generally — and I’m using this in what I call the lowercase way, so not people with schizophrenia who believe something that couldn’t be true, but people who just believe more negative things about their social world than are either helpful or accurate — apparently a lot of people have this low-grade paranoia. Most people I know, if you ask when they last felt really skeptical about others, something bad happened to them — they were robbed, they had a breakup, whatever. They have these moments of heightened imagination about all the bad things people could do to them. But some people are in a social world where that’s always their baseline.

Bullying is one of the main predictors. If you were bullied a lot as a child, you apparently carry a kind of low-grade social paranoia all the time, which is horrifying and miserable. So it sounds like these men have also had major scarring experiences where that is now the default way their brain works. And what’s horrible about that — to be clear — is not that we’re saying they didn’t truly have a terrible experience, or even one where someone genuinely let them down. But it makes people very unable to form new connections because they quickly interpret neutral or even positive things as negative.

Sam:

Yeah, 100%. And I think for these guys, the fact that family is the one thing left — that makes sense. I think about this specific subset: a lot of them still had strong familial relationships. As we say where I’m from in New Jersey, blood is thicker than water. This is the one thing they can kind of fall back on.

That was the piece where we have these two directions, and it came up enough that we needed to name it — that not everyone here wants to be in a relationship. The predominant narrative was wanting to connect, wanting to contribute, but there was a subset that were just done.

Sarah:

Yeah. And I just want to say one more thing analytically before we open it up for questions. I think it’s worth zooming out, and I’m sure this is on your mind too — it’s very much on my mind writing this next book — that the picture I’ve just described, at a broad level, is a world where the way people acquire social relationships — which I always describe as the wealth you can never own alone, because you literally always own your relational wealth in collaboration with other people — is through institutions of some kind. And I mean that in the broadest sense: through having gone to university, having joined the military, having gone to a church or synagogue, even a tennis club sometimes, or through the institution of the more or less biologised family — your genetic relatives and people married in and so on.

And everything I’ve just described, pretty much without fail — except maybe the US military, and even there — is shrinking. And I’m not a fan of the US military, but just in terms of relational stuff, all of the things that keep people in a world of social relationships are declining.

To be frank, I would be up for rebuilding a version of the university. That’s within my ethical system, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon, given the increasing precarity of the university system. And I would also be up for, as they say in left social thought, surpassing the family — making a thing that preserves many of the good things about the family but also involves fewer of the bad things. But right now we’re just seeing it disappear.

What we can imagine is a world where the men you’re describing, and the women they heavily rely on, in a few generations have perhaps maximum one close family member and no one else. And so what I see this as — and this is just my view — is that we have to build new institutions, in the broad sense of the word. Otherwise we’re going to have so many people who are done, and so many people who have no one. And I don’t think the traditional family, for various reasons, is going to be able to fill that gap.

The old sense of community is not being replaced as church membership declines. So clearly we have a challenge here as a society. The question is: what are we going to build? And it could be radical, it could be regressive. Obviously I hope for the former. Is there anything else you want to emphasise before we take a few questions?

Sam:

I think we have slightly different views on the role of the family. I think a lot of people who want to abolish the family take for granted the robust family lives they grew up in. The people I know who didn’t have strong family lives — it’s one of the things they wish for most. So I hold that tension.

The tweak I would make is that it’s not just that the institutions have declined. They’ve declined because people have stopped participating in them, because they’re not responsive to people’s needs, because they have competition from synthetic connection through television and now smartphones and social media. For some, the business model just doesn’t work anymore. And what’s taken their place plays into the logic of unfettered capitalism — it has higher financial, cultural, and geographic barriers to entry. So it’s not just a decline of community; it’s a privatisation of the community that is still there. You actually have to pay to play to participate, and that starts with place. In the United States, we once had many mixed-income neighbourhoods, and the number of those has declined by half. In the third places we frequent, in the community groups we have access to in those places, all the way up to institutions of work and higher education — this privatisation is happening throughout.

Part of the hunch there is that there’s a social reproduction happening around that, to use your language. But there’s also this financialisation and privatisation where you actually need to pay to sustain your participation in these institutions. It’s notable that despite the decline in religious participation — and people with college degrees in the US are much more likely to be members of churches, synagogues, and so on — religion is still the one institution where upwards of 30 percent of people without college degrees still participate. And I think that’s because there’s still geographic and financial accessibility to it. So it’s not just that these things are randomly falling apart — they are slowly being privatised.

There’s also no foundation for solidarity, right? You have no institution of which you’re a member alongside people who are different from you by class. And we’ve created, in the US context, a veneer of ethnic diversity while completely missing the class diversity that’s gone invisible.

I think the solution — and there’s no silver bullet; this is a generational project — ends up sounding very progressive and very conservative at the same time. I’m really struggling with this as a writer. The progressive view would argue for new forms and new structures. But I think we’re also dealing with the wreckage of having failed to conserve some institutions that actually played a really important role in the social fabric. And then the conservative view wants to conserve things, and sometimes to go back in time, without recognising that there needs to be some creative destruction too. So I think the answer is both: a renewal of the institutions that are crumbling, some of them for good reason, and a seeding of new possibilities — new institutions that have not yet been imagined. There’s a dynamic interplay between those two, but it can’t be one or the other. It has to be both, and it has to be an institutional play alongside an emergent seeding of new things. I don’t think there’s another way out without holding both of those things together.

Sarah:

I think that’s a really good point. Does anyone want to ask Sam a question? You can put it in the chat and I can read it out, or just unmute yourself. I know Sam has a hard stop at 4:15 PM UK time, so in about 12 minutes.

Participant:

My question was — you probably didn’t quite get to this point — but I think a lot of the problems you both mentioned connect very well to the rise of the far right, in terms of community replacement. I don’t want to make it too political, but there does seem to be a substantial number of people looking for exactly what you’re describing as missing, and finding it in those kinds of environments. Maybe a better question would be: are there any examples of people you could point to that went against those trends? Are there things you looked at and thought, these were great examples of things not going wrong?

Sam:

Yeah. So I’ll speak to it in the particular context of this research, and then I’m curious Sarah’s thoughts. There’s a lot of talk that treats guys like these as if they’re all on the verge of radicalisation. And I don’t want to diminish the fact that even a tiny proportion of a very large population can do a lot of damage. But we did not see any evidence of anything close to radicalisation. There was very little nihilism expressed, very little resentment. The yearning was to contribute to something bigger than themselves and to make a change in their communities. And that is a missed opportunity right now — these guys want to be role models and mentors to future generations, they want to contribute to their communities, they want to feel like their life matters. And yes, if you keep trying to find meaning and there’s nothing there, that becomes a pathway to extremism — “come over here, we’ll give you that.” But we did not see that in our research. Maybe if we did a hundred more interviews we’d find one person, but it was very uncommon within this group.

Sarah:

I guess I would see this as the inverse of what I often have to tell left-wing and radical activists, which is that they like to imagine they can turn these guys into adherents of their political cause. But realistically, in the spectrum of humans on planet earth, there’s usually just this big middle group that aren’t particularly interested in politics in either direction — for better and worse. For worse, because I want people to be politically engaged. But in some ways also for better, because it also means most of them aren’t that interested in becoming far-right radicals either. Let me get to K’s question.

Participant:

Yeah, surely. Well, that’s good news. But if you turn on the news, it does feel like things are moving fast in terms of radicalisation — the situation in Palestine, all types of conflicts. And maybe social media is fuelling a lot of it.

Sam:

I want to get to K’s question, but one thing I’ll add is that there’s an element here of educated people pathologising non-educated people, when actually there are plenty of pathologies among the hyper-educated. The most radicalised people on the right in the United States are hyper-educated. As are, frankly, the most radicalised people on the left. People like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — the richest, most educated people, many of whom went to Stanford. And J.D. Vance, Yale Law School. These are people on the right who are extraordinarily educated. So yeah, I’m curious about your question, K.

Participant (K):

First of all, thank you — fantastic to be lurking in the background, it’s morning, getting a kid ready for school. I’m also a trained sociologist. My question — and I have so many — but I’m thinking about my work in sexual violence education, which I do mostly in a medical school. I’m thinking of a question I got during one of my defences, which is: okay, I hear all of these big-picture things. If you were interviewed by a journalist and the question was “so what do we do now? What do we do with men now?” — and thinking about everything you were talking about in terms of wanting connection, skills before will — I’ve unfortunately dated men like the ones you’re describing. So how do you tether folks who are untethered and maybe want it? What are things we could do on the ground today?

Sam:

Yeah, you’re always balancing this: here’s the generational project, and here are a few first steps — those things have to be in dynamic interplay. And thank you for lurking; the active lurker is a good role.

We have a number of different things. In the coda to this report, we focus on calling people in and starting where people already have relationships. Families are already doing a lot of work for these guys, I think. So my question is: how do we build infrastructure to support families in getting their more disconnected members connected? The institutions that do exist should play a role in that. Local houses of worship should have a specific interest in it. The YMCA, as an example — it was literally created 175 years ago to address this problem. It needs to recommit to its initial purpose while also recognising it has other things it should still do. Community groups across the board.

And — it pains me to say this, but — most of these men are working. They’re working at big employers, places like Walmart, and I don’t trust those employers for much. But if work is their one structured outlet for human interaction, should there be programmes focused on getting their male employees connected to some other community, so that when that thread breaks they have something else to fall back on? It’s almost like what unions were doing, among other things. It’s almost like we shouldn’t have dismantled them all. So there’s that: how do you weave the web outside of work?

I started that answer by focusing on where the relationships already are and how you build on top of those — family and community as a starting point. But then the workplace feels like there’s something there too, even if I still need to think on it more.

The other piece goes back to something we discussed earlier. We had a chapter called “Tenuous Ties,” and what we found is that most of these guys had friends through high school — high school provided a structured outlet for human interaction. High school goes away, they lose that structure. Some of their friends go to college, some join the military, and they have nothing. I visualised it as a friendship cliff — they just fell off a cliff when it came to friends, and nothing was there to catch them. Not college, not the military, not community membership.

So from a policy perspective, there’s something around building alternative pathways — structured, cohort-based experiences during the adult transition. In the US, people talk about national public service; I have concerns about its feasibility, but there’s something in that direction. I was talking to someone in the Department of Labor about building out vocational pathways with structured cohort-based experiences built in, so that you have consistent human interaction as part of that as well. And then there’s all the community experimentation that should happen around reimagining rites of passage into adulthood in local contexts — there’s something missing in the loss of those.

And then, to the materialist point: none of this really matters unless we strengthen the material foundations of working class life. Policy around paid family leave and all the material foundations — those are extraordinarily necessary to give folks a chance. It’s not coincidental that the one flourishing man we talked to also had the one example of a stable working class job: chief foreman of a construction site, with leadership, consistency, and continuity. Most of the other guys couldn’t make and keep friends at work because their jobs were changing all the time, or their friends’ jobs were, or their schedules weren’t consistent. How are you going to build any continuity if that’s your life? Not even getting into the fact that wages haven’t kept up with costs.

Participant (K):
No, just one more question — was your sense that they were or weren’t aware that these were the pathways into that social world? And if they aren’t aware, is the idea that the pathways need to be made for them? Or if they are aware, would they pursue them if they were right in front of them?

Sam:

That’s a great question. We didn’t ask that specifically — our four question categories were friendships, community, purpose, and mentorship. All the other things I’ve been talking about, like family and work, came up in response to those questions. So we didn’t ask this directly. But I hope this report is an opening for people to say, “Oh, I didn’t see that — let’s go do that.” We published 22 of the 30 transcripts precisely to say: here’s exactly what we heard. Critique it. Do your own analysis. We want to be open about this because we think the principles of focusing on people without college degrees and approaching it qualitatively are really important.

He wrote this book called We Built Reality, and his point is that the social sciences are not apart from the field of play — they are on the field of play, actively shaping it. The whole “loneliness epidemic” thing — to the extent it doesn’t map onto actual reality — is partly because someone used a veneer of expertise to say it, and created a reality around it where people started building solutions to a loneliness epidemic that was misdescribed. So we need to name where we’re coming from, because as we do this work we are shaping the field of play. And by the way, I’m hoping to shape the field of play — I’m hoping people pay more attention to this.

Sarah:

No, no, but this is the sneaky normative question underneath almost all social science and theory. On one hand, you’re constantly told to unpack your normative bent. But ultimately, you cannot show up as a blank slate. Everywhere you gaze is shaped by your values.

Participant (K):

Sorry for keeping us over.

Sam:

No, no, no. Thank you. I love that question. I hope you research it.

Sarah:

Sam, I just really wanted to thank you for coming and doing this. I’m going to make this into a video for the public, with participants’ faces taken out and probably a transcript. I really appreciate you and the research you’re doing. I hope more and more people will get attuned to it and start thinking about this problem in a more accurate and humanising way — for the people you interviewed and people like them.

Sam:

Sarah, thanks so much for having me, and for your thoughtful questions. Something that really opened up for me in this conversation was the way you describe social reproduction, because it mapped so well onto what we saw. And I think popularising that framing — getting people thinking in that way — will be really helpful, because what was coming through in this research is precisely this idea of inherited stewardship and the loss of it.

Sarah:

And I think a good way to underline what you’re saying is this: a lot of people went into this thinking there’s a problem with men. And there is obviously something that’s happening to a lot of men, and that’s real. But one of the issues when people frame it that way is that they don’t look at a problem with men using the same tools they’d use for feminist questions. And actually, although I’ve joked that it’s a Marxist sociological theory, it’s really more accurate to call it a Marxist feminist theory — often female theorists after Marx, using some of his language around class systems, but trying to talk about the work women do. And I think that field of theory has so much to offer these questions that affect men. The best feminism is always equally a help to men in some respects. And in a way, what you’re saying is that the thing these men found most important in their lives were the moments where they got to do social reproduction — because it is this fundamental human activity. As much as I think the Marxist jargon makes it sound horrible — it’s just not a fun phrase — fundamentally it’s a part of human flourishing that men are denied, both because of our gender roles and because of our economic system. It’s really important that we recentre everyone’s need to do that, and everyone’s need to do it well and not unequally.

Sam:

And I like the non-zero-sum framing of this. If you want guys to be doing well, that means — and K, this goes to your work — that means all the other people, especially the women in relationship with them, are going to have better lives too. My one piece of feedback for the Marxist feminists is: maybe you need a slightly better word, because “social reproduction” doesn’t sound particularly appealing. I like “stewardship” better. But I get it, and I actually think it’s great — it also connects with environmental language around stewardship.

I didn’t get to thank you, but thank you both for staying on and participating. I truly appreciate it.

Thank you so much for the chat — it was incredible. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks so much for everything. Bye.

​In this interactive workshop meant for artists, activists, and interventionists, we considered five possible ways art could contribute to political struggles, as well as difficulties that tend to arise when artists and movements try to do this.

​Together (and individually), we

• ​Analysed whether art is good at motivating people, gathering them together, educating them, and more

• ​Considered where art-based strategies often fail, looking at empirical data

• ​Had a chance to make our own artistic plans based on our own particular ethos and theory of power

​Watch TO THINK ABOUT GIANT QUILTS AND PUPPETS

CONCRETISE YOUR POLITICAL STRATEGY

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I’m still trying to make sense of the question. But it’s difficult to focus, because outside, there are noises that are making everyone ill at ease. Earlier that day, the local trans pride group drew chalk drawings (cheesy, loving ones) on the pavement outside the bookstore and now members of the local far right Facebook group have come and shouted at everyone involved and tried to wash the drawings away. At this hour, the trans community members are back, drawing on the sidewalk yet again while our event happens. Somehow their presence makes me feel slightly useless up on the stage, all my rambling about sociology and methodological triangulation, even though chalk drawings admittedly have somewhat limited utility too. I feel preposterous. And on edge. We all shift in our seats a bit when we hear voices outside. At one point, the voices get louder and the audience member with the data points set gets up to check on things. (It’s okay, she says, returning, Things are fine.)

The event carries on. Next is the book signing. I’ve done dozens, but they don’t really get old. There’s someone who doesn’t like nonfiction but plugged through and ultimately liked the book. There’s someone who disagreed with me about what to do about tech companies. The whole process feels like Christian communion. The reader tells me their thoughts, I ask them a question too usually, I sign the book, we smile, next. But it’s not just pretence or performance; somehow, something is transferred besides the book. It doesn’t feel honestly that different from the work I used to do facilitating therapeutic groups for the School of Life. Maybe it should feel different? Towards the end of the signing, a woman asks me, “why are you here?”

“This is my job,” I tell her.

“But why are you here? We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

And then, from outside, the far right guys are back, this time screaming and whooping, and the trans activists pour into the store shaking and even crying, and the bookstore owners’ daughter goes out to intervene and the upstairs neighbours of the bookstore throw a bucketful of water on her head. It’s a sort of slow motion pandemonium, after that. Someone is shouting “that’s assault!” Someone is shivering and wet. Someone is calling the police, which I personally don’t see much value in but it’s happening. Eventually, the bookstore owner takes me out the back door and drives me to the train station. I get an immigrant-made kebab and take the train back to London. Train, train, tube, tube. I have done enough mental health and activist interventions in my life to know whatever feelings I might have will come later. Home. Partners and friend Max are in the living room. They tell me they’re sorry to hear about it. I tell them it’s just what it is, part of the job description for the job I have now without ever having been assigned it.

I tell them also that it’s only going to get worse, these disruptions and the world that creates them, and that I can’t help but think that none of us really, neither myself nor my audience, have the skills for what comes next.

When I was in graduate school, an ongoing debate in critical and social theory was whether there should be norms that underlie the work of a theorist. Should we, for example, posit a certain set of values and work backwards from there to discern what society should be like? There are obvious upsides to doing so. Having norms allows you to point in a direction you’d like society to go, which is rather more inspiring and possibly more “productive” than simply criticizing everything. Norms also make it easier to articulate why (for example) you don’t want a world run by AI, where humans mostly consume its slop. How to justify this without some conception of the good? How can I argue in my next book that humans being interdependent is good, or justify my automatic sense that the creepy holographic customs agent at the border at Gatwick airport is bad?

On the other hand, once you take on a set of norms as part of your theory, you might steer society too much, or assume too much. You might take on bad norms and use them uncritically without realising it. The history of social theory is littered with examples of theorists who did just this, and who look stupid or evil now. There’s Aristotle’s love of slavery. (There’s a lot of people’s love of slavery, actually.) There are many social theorists who uncritically posit that women are naturally weak or unreasonable. How could you ever properly critique society from within it, as part of it, given how flawed it is? On the other hand, how could you ever do it from anywhere else?

I understand why our professors (and their predecessors in the critical theory tradition) were agonised by the “normative question”. One wants to check oneself for dangerous biases, and simultaneously one wants to be able to confirm that one’s moral system is better than that of a Nazi. But I confess that the “normative” debate feels mildly irrelevant when one is day to day trekking around dodging far right trolls and working directly in the service of social movements. Because in those moments (or more commonly, in the post-neoliberal remaining constellation of fragmented efforts to better the world) the endeavour of theorising about societal change doesn’t appear norms-first, it appears relationship-first. Several days a week, I have a live audience of human beings, and that brings with it a whole other set of interesting problems and questions that shape how I think, questions that involve norms in some way but where the most obvious and perhaps significant challenges lie elsewhere. I am, by necessity, preoccupied with what the audience feel, think, assume, what they are afraid of, what they can imagine, whether I answer their questions… And, of course, will they call the cops, and will they be ok. On the train home, I might also worry about whether they can answer my questions, the questions that are posed, implicitly at times, in the book. It is relational this way of thinking, which is probably why the book signing carries a strange kind of weight.

These questions about my audience keep me up at night much more than any questions about the moral basis for my work. It’s not that the normative question is entirely irrelevant, of course, but it does now seem to me that it takes up an inordinate amount of space in academic conversation while the audience is hardly ever discussed. Or perhaps what I feel is that the normative questions are often best explored after one has thought deeply about one’s audience; that they cannot be disentangled from that.

See Theodor Adorno, who is known for being perhaps the most anti-normative critical theorist. There’s no right life in the wrong one, he opined, and thus, no knowing as a social theorist what the right life might look like. Don’t stand at the front of the protest shouting too many positive demands, then, he might be interpreted as saying. As a social theorist, such a philosophy suggests, one should simply identify what is wrong with society by noting its internal contradictions, through a negative-dialectical approach. His students felt this was all unforgivably passive. (My ‘students’ sometimes do too, especially in the face of climate catastrophe, Gaza, and so much more). And so they attacked him with flower petals while bare-breasted to protest his inaction.

The students saw Adorno as a failure for his avoidance and even opposition to more radical forms of political action. He probably saw them as “left-wing fascists”. When I think of this incident, I see a disagreement about normativity, yes, and also a disagreement about the role of a political/social theorist and their role in ‘right life’. But most of all I see a failure of a theorist to respond to his actual audience, even if that audience is… annoying. Today, Adorno calling the cops is seen as a failure even by my very professionalised professors, a lapse in self-reflection and judgment. One’s audience might be wrong, but maybe there’s no right life without them, and no right life in opposition to them.

If I would not call the cops on the far right guys outside the bookstore, I think it’s also likely that I could not call the cops on my audience as Adorno did, even if they naked flowerbombed me. Frankly, I cannot imagine feeling that far away from my audience, that other to them, because I see them as the other party in the work I’m engaged in, even when they’re mad at me (and sometimes they are).

This ethos towards my audience is partially my professional training. I carry within me the instructional designer’s mantra that the audience is never all wrong, even in their mistakes. If I’m honest, though, it all runs even deeper than this. What I truly feel is this: to write for and speak to your audience well, you have to… love them. I mean this “I have to” in a descriptive, not normative, way: I can’t get through it without that motivation-wise (and many others I know privately tell me they feel the same way). Nothing else would get me to Kent in the rain through four different trains! Nothing else would keep me going as my editor tells me, using polite British euphemisms, that my book sales are only “promising” right now. No, I have to look out into the audience and want their agency and flourishing more than I want to be paid or known or cool or even respected, and I have to want these things for them even if they ask annoying questions, even if their protests seem mild or a little performative, even if they live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and perhaps especially then.

Of course my audience-love also troubles me. After all, isn’t that current of love likely to generate its own unspoken norms for my work? Who is to say those norms are good? What’s so good about the audience in such a broken world? Left wing audiences are not exactly always fountains of wisdom. They are arguably all too fond of chalk drawings and bare breasts as primary forms of action in the face of very grave structural problems, and usually not great at disciplined organisation at the ground level to meet people’s most pressing material needs. I often get why Adorno preferred his books to the crowd.

Still, the view I have these days as I write is neither from “above” or “below” as it was defined and debated in grad school. No; it’s the view from the mic. And, at minimum, this position has probably saved me from a variety of pitfalls. In writing, I can sometimes too easily assume my audience understands or even agrees. As a speaker, my audience will let me know immediately where I’m wrong. The live audience reminds me of the scale and nature of human confusion, frustration, and dissent, including dissent from my own views. And it places that dissent within context and at scale better than any algorithm. In other ways, too, the mic is a nicer place to theorise from than “online”. While one can in theory love an online audience, perhaps one shouldn’t; they’re too vast, and too estranged from you and each other for certain kinds of conversations. If you must love an online audience, I suspect you should probably love them modelled off the way you love an in-person audience. Otherwise, you might lose not just perspective but also a grasp on the task at hand in social theory. One’s online audience is often more charmed by coolness and edgy hot takes. Those may constitute a fun game for a while, but it will realistically feel hollow when the nearby city in Kent has run out of water and there are marches to deport all immigrants happening nearby. Part of what I gain by going to rural England is the audience, and the reality of their problems.

A few days later Max and I are headed back to my house after teaching a five-hour workshop for radical Jews in North London. We head out into the streets and realise immediately that we are not getting home the way we came. In fact, public transit is not really a possibility: it’s the Arsenal parade, and three quarters of a million people have flooded London to celebrate the team’s recent wins. The streets are covered in trash.

People are jubilant, unleashed, deeply relaxed in a strange way one rarely sees in public. There are (I don’t know a less blunt way to put this) many more people of colour out and about than usual, even for London. They, and everyone else, are cheering, whooping, chanting, dressed in red, bringing their kids with them, cycling one another around on city bikes in unsafe, joyful configurations.

“Imagine if this many people came into the city to do something political,” Max said to me. “They’ve shut this whole town down.”

They really had. We felt a strange mixture of alienation from, and curiosity towards, the joyful masses. Could we love them? I found I could, but certainly it took greater imagination. The exercise felt good. After a little while, we both felt something else. “Maybe we’re talking to the wrong people…” The audiences I speak to are still largely bourgeois, overeducated, downwardly-mobile, anxious. What would it mean to speak to an entirely different crowd? Might they do entirely different things in response to radical ideas? One thing I recognise right away: I might not be the speaker for that audience. The view from the mic is limited, and my particular view from the mic is especially limited in some regards. Which is not to say it isn’t also useful that I sometimes have one.

Despite these very unsolved concerns about myself and about my audience, I continue on. There’s work to do. Normative debates go on endlessly because nothing happens that might truly solve them; relational dilemmas go on endlessly because so much changes even while one is thinking. I’m off to the next event in Kent tomorrow. It’s being organised by a Joloff rice cafe, which is about the scale at which these tiny pockets of resistance start right now. I’ll seek perspective there.

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But what I was thinking of, all that time (besides how incongruous I was) was Jane Austen. Hers were the novels that I, an uncouth American, had access to that explained even a small part of what was happening. This was the house of a landowner, and I was in this context a curiosity as much as a guest. In that moment, I realised how well Austen serves as a primer on class and societal norms, especially in the UK of course, but to some degree elsewhere.

I’d first encountered Austen at ten. In a characteristically earnest and intentional move, my (American) parents took turns reading to me before bed. I could read to myself by then, of course, but they wanted to share slightly more “grown up” books with me. My father chose Haroun and The Sea of Stories and Sophie’s World, both of which have stuck with me for life, and both of which I can well hear still in his voice(s). My mother chose Much Ado About Nothing, which we took turns reading out loud, playing different characters. I found Shakspeare’s world of comedy confusing and fascinating in turns. The men and women insulting each other were flirting, I asked? (My mom even spent some time explaining the sex jokes to me…)

Then, for the next book, Mom chose Pride and Prejudice.

Reading is a good way of entering the Jane Austen world, a better way, I’d venture, than watching the many movies and TV series that have since been made. For watching Austen leads one to sink into the beautiful, near-fantasy elements: the estates like the one my friend’s family had, the fluttering lacy dresses, the semi-shirtlessness, the romantic lines that Austen herself would never have penned.

In contrast, when reading Pride and Prejudice, or any of her novels, one is faced with Austen’s directness: this is a story about a world where men are known in large part by their annual income. At the time, I found all the references to “10,000 pounds a year” confusing. In fact, my mother had to explain quite a bit of both subtext and text. I didn’t even quite catch Darcy’s final proposal, so unfamiliar and indirect was the language.

That visit to the countryside struck me, but I returned to London and a world that looked, superficially, a bit less like Austen’s world. Soon it all receded in my memory. Then, this winter, a full quarter of a century after I first read Austen’s work, I turned to her oevre again. Life was feeling a little rocky and tired over the winter in our unconventional household, and for a spell we found comfort and food for discussion watching all the beautiful Austen adaptations, all the frills and bucolic countrysides.

Like my ten year old self, I found I still needed some explanations (I was still googling, “how much is 10,000 pounds a year in today’s terms?”) This time around, though, in ways I had not even during my countryside visit, I began to see the corollaries between Austen’s world and my own. For in my world, (read: the world of Millennial and Gen Z folks who tended to have university degrees in the social sciences and humanities and have found themselves living precariously), people are rarely going to fancy estates for the weekend. They are, however, and far more than ten years ago, struggling to make key decisions related to love and money that will govern the next decades of their lives. They are not far from the Austen heroines in this way.

Here are just a few examples:

• Quite a few friends are stuck in a complex bind around housing and work and dating, where they can’t afford to live except with their families or else in fairly temporary setups. This in turn makes it harder for them to plan ahead in life, date, or find work. Sociological data confirms this trend for our generation and those younger than us; more and more young men and women move home with their parents, unable to find work and especially “ladder” jobs that would lead to a career. And once they are there, they often effectively leave the “relationship force” as well.

When, in the movie version of Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas admonishes Elizabeth not to judge her for settling down with an unbelievably annoying man so that she can have the unexpected good fortune of a home of her own, rather than burdening her parents… her woes do not seem far from the lives of many people I knew. Of course, in the book, Charlotte Lucas does not have to say this; I suspect readers of her time could infer the feelings of both characters on their own.

• Some of my friends and acquaintances are retraining (as therapists, AI trainers, teachers, and even members of the military) in the hopes of rising at least a little in fortune after a failed first shot at another career.

This seems to me not too different from the sailors and military men of Persuasion, many of whom joined in the hopes of rising at least a little, if not a lot, in their class position. And these stories mirrored Austen’s own life, where two brothers joined the navy and became admiral of the fleet and a rear admiral, in part to seek better fortunes.

• Some friends were choosing partners, not wholly for their income or “prospects”, but with an appraisal all the same of how things might go financially.

I have friends staying in marriages because they cannot find work and need to try to keep the visa options related to that marriage. I have friends where, frankly, the income is the better part of what the man brings to the table, and I cannot imagine they’d be there without it. These days, perhaps due to the intensity of “assortative mating” trends, people are perhaps less frequently angling to marry “up”, although the many jokes about, and actual instances of, sugar daddy and mommy-ing suggest we haven’t entirely overcome this either. But certainly people are aware of what it might mean to marry whom, in terms of their long term prospects of owning a home or having things any easier than they do right now. Many a marriage is made between a man in tech or finances who can earn more and a woman with an less lucrative job but other offerings…

• Many, many of my friends and acquaintances keep putting off marriage and/or settling down in the hopes that one more push in a given career, one more move in search of the right thing, will find them a better outcome. As a result, is very common among my friends for their most recent breakup to have to do with location, and that locational problem to have to do with one or more parties needing to seek just slightly better economic circumstances.

There is, in other words, a prolonged longing for and maneuvering towards a better set of prospects, one that may or may not materialise.

This searching for prospects was just as alive in Austen’s time. Among literature scholars, Austen is often described as writing about (the daughters of) “bad dads”, which is to say, fathers that have poorly provided for their children and/or died, leaving them without good options. For Austen’s own life involved such a dad. Her parents married (apparently for love, which was still a newish possibility then) and were relatively precarious. When her father died she and her sister and mother became rather less comfortable and dependent on her brothers. And those brothers themselves were quite varied in their fortunes. Besides the two admirals, there were four others. One was adopted by a rich relative and became rich, one was apparently disabled and given to a local family to care for. One became a rector and took over his father’s parish. One became a militia member and then a banker, and then ran the bank into the ground and then became a cleric. Relying on these men, Jane and her sister Cassandra remained unmarried, perhaps in part because they were without much in the way of a dowry.

In my own set, people are generally in downwardly mobile trajectories not due to a fatherly lack of wisdom or funds, but instead because of failures of the new system of class perpetuation for the “middle clases”: because of the financial ineffectuality of having a university degree (or three). Contrary to what so many were promised growing up, the job market did not care about those degrees as much as was claimed, at least not in the long run. Sometimes this downward mobility has to do with the overall precarity of the jobs market, or the need to keep moving to seek work, or or the unbelievable costs of owning a home, or all three of these things. The combination, in any case, very often means difficult dilemmas around housing, family, love and career.

Among my set it’s not just romantic love that forces these kinds of conundrums, but also romantic love of occupation. For today, many of us romanticise the idea of the right career, that related, imagined moment where we will fully express our potential, just as much or even far more than any romantic relationship. (This, I find, is more true of Millennials than Gen Z, who do not dream of work so much). Today, if one insists on seeking a fulfilling career at the cost of lifelong much-worse finances, one might be called a romantic just as Elizabeth Bennet was when she insisted on waiting for love rather than marrying someone unbelievably wealthy. And then, as now, some of us are still romantics, painfully so. I have friends who moved their entire lives around to be academics, moving from place to place only to lose such a position in the long run and find themselves incredibly precarious and adrift. In many ways those choices are even more heartbreaking than a bad marriage, and often just as final.

There’s something else about Austen’s world that feels familiar: there are older and newer paths to money, with very different cultural signifiers, and where new money sometimes tries to adere to older money’s norms. Austen’s was a time where the entire class structure was shifting rapidly, moving from a land-based system where gentry were tiny kings to a world where a small group of men could earn a fortune in trade (and colonialism, and even slavery). That’s why Caroline Bingley spends so much time talking about breeding – she is trying to show that she knows what good breeding is, even though her family’s fortune was recently earned, rather than long inherited.

Caroline Bingley does not fail to remind me of those in the tech world especially, who make a (rare) upward trajectory due to changes in the economy, often by doing something relatively technical, but then seek to prove they are also valid within the old system, e.g. as “intellectuals” and “thought leaders” and so on. If you look, you will spot who I mean; they’re often adorning themselves with panels, thinktanks, Substacks, and more, even though their work does not require any of that, as is really just coding, engineering, impressing people at venture capital firms with a powerpoint, etc.

And all of the above have to do with the middle-upper classes. But of course, class is so much more than this. As time sped on during Austen’s writing years, and even after she died, this shift in the economy – from land-based agriculture to industrial life – also forced many of the poorest people off their land and into various forms of domestic service, so that England hit “peak servant” in about 1901. As I watch the rise of a million delivery drivers, Uber drivers, waiters, baristas, and part-time cleaners, personal trainers and coaches, and more, I can’t help but wonder how far our own trend will go, as a whole segment of society makes its living creating ease for another class.

I could not understand at ten or even at twenty-four what Austen was writing about, not really. I do now, at least a little more.

***

Austen’s work matters in part because she recognised that to write about marriage ( or long term relationships) is to write about class.

This insight was obvious in her time, but is sometimes lost today. In fact, when I write about marriage and class, readers sometimes respond with horror, and sometimes with a sudden, almost violent and painful recognition. A recent piece of mine, for example, described why marriage rates have fallen and what that does to people’s life prospects (and vice versa). It garnered some wonderful responses from the internet and also some truly heartbreaking ones from those anguished by the way dating has gone for them specifically. Some of the messages I received (especially on Instagram!) were from men who wrote furious comments about how they aren’t being chosen simply because they don’t or can’t make enough money. I think it’s important to stare their worries about class and partnership in the face, which is not the same thing as endorsing all their views. I do not believe women are broadly gold diggers, of course, but it is true that when men lost their presumed ability to “provide”, as wages lowered for everyone and both parties are now enabled and expected to work full time, the appeal of many a heterosexual partnership has declined. Perhaps that is the way it should be for these particular pairings, given what’s on offer, not just materially but emotionally. Nevertheless, it is also true that in this setup, this dire confluence of capitalism and yet-unlearned gender roles, both men and women frequently suffer from a lack of good skills and options for partnership.

More than that, though, I heard in the laments of men and women alike not only that options were bad but also that it was heartbreaking to realise how much decisions that seem (to us, today) like they should be about love are in reality revealed to be about livelihood, “safety”, ease, class. In Austen’s time it was still understood that marriage was in large part a financial transaction; but soon, that changed. Just a few decades later, in the Victorian era, people largely expected to marry for love. (Which is not to say that people stopped choosing, in reality, in large part due to money.) In fact, we might wonder whether romantic love really served in Victorian times, and indeed in the present, as the cultural consolation, the opiate of the masses, promising happiness is coming even as we all scrape by and fight precarity and downward mobility. In any case, then as now, many ended up saying one thing and doing another, angling for a rich husband while believing in soulmates, buying a carriage/car to impress women while decrying women looking for money, and more. That is why, when I read the laments of my Instagram followers, I think not only of Austen but also of a quote that came thirty years after Austen’s untimely death, one that does not sound entirely distinct from her analysis, even as it is more extreme, more polemic: “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

It’s not my favourite way to think about it, but it’s not entirely wrong, as evidenced by the women still looking for a man in finance, or even the men grumbling that women only want a man in finance. Still, I prefer to think of these kinds of questions another Marxist way, which is that men and women make relationship decisions, but not in conditions of their own choosing.

There is love, there is personal choice, sometimes at grave costs. But while we get to make some choices, when it comes to our personal lives, we do not get to choose what our choices will be. This is the bitter part of the theoretical freedom a capitalist system offers. It is also, realistically, why so many care about the bank accounts of their partners. Realistically, it will matter, even if they wish it didn’t, and realistically, they will only get a few options.

This awkward reality about human choice when it comes to love and money is, in Austens’ novels, what allows her to play moralist. For a true moral dilemma is never about encountering ideal options, but about sticking to some kind of principles or wisdom even when one is sorely tested by a lack of good options. Lizzie Bennet turns down an outrageously good deal financially to avoid marrying a man she thinks has harmed her family. That Austen eventually ties that up tale with a better beau (pardon the pun) does not negate that earlier moral dilemma one bit. Furthermore, one can really best understand Austen by reading all the novels together. In that full body of work, one repeatedly sees a world where people are frequently in positions where they choose, or even “have” to choose, money over love. Dashing men choose to propose to a wealthier woman rather than the one they love (Persuasion). People choose marriage poorly because of money and then end up turning to affairs instead (Mansfield Park). I look at my friends, and they are often leaving places, jobs, even people they love for financial or visa reasons, choosing the sensible option with a bit of a sigh, cheating on their jobs with some side hustle. Or else abandoning the “sensible”(in the modern sense!) path, with a worried backward glance. Plus ça change…

Austen is a moralist, not an activist. She would not have written rants about the bourgeoisie – and in many ways that is her strength. Not just because polemics can be tiring, but because novels do something else: they illustrate how the class system feels. Most of us – those of us smart enough not to become social theorists anyway – do not run around living our lives thinking about why the class system is bad all day long. We don’t experience it at that level. We spend our time hoping to marry off our daughters, or at least ourselves. We obsess over what schools our children will get into (which is the modern equivalent, in many ways, of Mrs. Bennet’s worries). We try out a new career, even if it means we have to be months away at sea, or move to Chicago. We tell our friends: imagine, 10,000 pounds a year. Imagine, six figures at that age. Today, I have no doubt Austen would have written about people and their failed startups, silly flexes, strange situationships, and more with a clear-headed realism and a tongue in cheek that few writers get right today.

Although she is not a polemicist, not an activist, Austen’s works have one advantage over many in our own time—she can name things as they are without fliching when it comes to love and money, and do it without losing heart. That’s what I could not understand at ten, but see now. Her characters struggle to figure out how to be moral in a system that isn’t. Sometimes they settle, sometimes they don’t, but Austen is always alive to the reality of what’s at stake, what’s possible, how many people sell out and make poor choices, and how many of us don’t quite get what we want. Jane had herself turned down a marriage offer after accepting it when she was 27 and probably knew she was choosing a life of precarity. (She may have been protecting her ability to write).

Austen portrays the world where many don’t get what they want because of the class system with great wit, without drowning in bitterness and without looking away from harsh reality. She managed it even though her own life involved being single and financially precarious. I admire it. I think about it a lot lately.

Austen’s dining room, with her writing desk.

Thanks to Deborah Stein for her help with this piece!

This was amazing for the coal industry, and for “productivity.” It was also (of course) ultimately horrific for the planet.

You know what else is subject to a version of the Jevons Paradox, such that the more efficient it is, the more (or at least, unexpectedly constant) demand there is for it? Domestic labour within a household, which is of course often “women’s work”. Economists have found that even when you introduce new technological efficiencies within the home, very often the household simply finds new demands to place on that time (so yes, on women’s time especially). This, in turn, is often called the Cowan Paradox, first described by historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan in her 1983 book More Work for Mother. Cowan noted that the amount of time spent on domestic labour had remained surprisingly stable between 1870 and 1970, despite the introduction of, you know, all those washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and more. These innovations, and their widespread distribution, did not lead to more leisure time, but instead increased expectations about what domestic labour should happen, leading to higher standards of cleanliness and more frequent work on various domestic tasks. When you get a washing machine, for example, you should end up spending way less time on chores, but what actually happened historically is that people begin to wash all their clothes far more, while also coming up with many new domestic tasks (maybe we can have cute tablecloths and more rugs, then, now that we have a dishwasher!…). You think you’re saving time; you’re actually just intensifying your expectations. Domestic labour hours have continued relatively constant since Cowan’s book was published (yes, despite the introduction of the Roomba, and even my beloved bread machine…) The paradox holds its power.

I’ve been thinking about this paradox in part because it helps explain why people find “adulting” so difficult—no matter how much technology we have, we keep adding new demands on ourselves when that “productivity” technology arrives (gotta text everyone back!). Very few technologies avoid this effect (the bicycle being perhaps a notable exception, as the philosopher Ivan Illich noted). Versions of this paradox can also help explain why we mostly keep using renewable energy to add new kinds of productivity to the world, rather than reduce carbon usage, and also why AI use is likely, in the long run, to re-arrange work and increase employer demands but not necessarily eliminate human labour. Humans tend to respond to efficiencies by creating more productivity and more work. Which makes sense, in a way—we can dream big about what we want. If your robot servant became more efficient, wouldn’t you ask it to do more with its newly spare time? The problem, of course, is that right now, even with our robots, the servant is still ourselves.

As I mentioned, I’ve been thinking about this paradox because I live communally, with a few of my partners and an ongoing rotation of houseguests. When people visit, they often tell me, “I couldn’t do this!” They feel this way not because my house is filthy (it’s… mostly just a little chaotic) but because they recognise, right away, that I do not get to choose as much about the day to day logistics or happenings of my household. The many dancers, for example, did something genuinely ridiculous and stored food in our oven in ways that are not hygienic and truly grossed me out. But, you know what? I asked to throw out the food, did so, sighed, and then moved on. I also had them get more groceries for the houe. It was simply a moment in my day, a set of trade-offs but not a crisis.

Similarly, two other partners are planning to install solar on our roof together this summer, and I only found out about it after that decision was made. “I admire that you’re just letting that happen and not trying to control it,” my best friend said, noting she’d feel the need to be in charge of something that complex and important herself, or at least updated constantly.

But I’ve lived communally nearly all my adult life, I’ve been reshaped by it, and I’ve learned by now that the way one lives well communally is to fully let things sit with other people, even if they mess things up. If I fill my hours with domestic work and oversight it will help no one in the long run, because I won’t get back the leisure time I wanted to get from sharing domestic life, and they won’t own the tasks they’re doing fully. Both technology and communal life have cut down the hours I must spend on domestic labour; the goal is now to let that really let that leisure time (or, at least, substacking time) happen rather than fill up those hours with new domestic productivity expectations.

Thinking about these paradoxes of time and control and domestic life can also help place our current obsessions with individualist ways of living into both economic and historical perspective. Again, people will often say “I could never live that way” when it comes to the possibility of further sharing home space, time, and/or chores with neighbours, family or friends. They could never, they feel sure, share a backyard, or a kitchen, or finances. (People also tend to say this about polyamory, “I could never do that”! and I suspect their reasons are not a million miles apart).

But here’s the thing: they absolutely could. Until really recently, we all did live very close together in domestic space (check out the long lost tradition of communal sleeping) and we had entirely different standards for chores, too. Houses were smaller, so even when the number of people wasn’t bigger, we were closer together. And while the nuclear family has been dominant in Europe for about 700 years or so, in many, many other regions of the world and time period, other practices have taken precedence, from extended family living to other kinds of larger households (servants, etc). Humans can actually just live lots of different ways, even if it’s not obvious from the infinite scroll of influencers in their perfect domestic setups. And our current mode might have real costs, ones we struggle to see at first glance. There are hidden trade-offs to domestic optimisation for individual preference and solitude, as with the hidden costs of cheap coal.

To be clear, I don’t think most people can or even necessarily should live communally in the exact way I do right now.

But, I think it’s worth saying this when it comes to controlling one’s household: a little bit goes a long way, yes, and after that…

It will never be enough, that work of making your household perfectly clean and perfectly your own way. When researchers look at the way people make decisions they often find they can be grouped into “maximisers” and “satisficers.” Maximisers tend to try to continuously optimise for the absolute best outcome even if it means spending a lot of time researching, comparing, analysing, double checking and so on. Satisficers choose a criteria, make a selection and get on with their lives. They do often choose worse options, technically speaking—but they are generally happier with their choices, because they don’t go back and compare what they’ve got to other options and plague themselves with doubt. Maximisers live with a lot of FOMO, self doubt, and regret. (Maximisers are also great targets for a certain kind of cosumerism). Satificers have old pizza stored in the oven, worse shoes, worse technological purchases or maybe even worse spousal matches (!) but they are measurably more content. Our happiness with what we get is in this case, as in so many cases, is not about exactly how good what we’ve got is, but rather how we are holding it in our consideration.

Like coal, like domestic labour, it’s easy to just keep going with attempting to enact all our personal preferences, wanting more and more of this or that specific kind of order, finding more and more ways to optimise our lives. The exact right curtains, technological setup, shoe placement, grocery order, stacking of the dishwasher, even setup of the household schedule. That’s why it can feel so addictive almost, at first, to live alone (as I have done, briefly), and place everything just so, that’s why it’s appealing to keep finding new domestic tasks to optimise the home one more degree. But that impulse, in the long run, is also part of how we lose the hours of our lives and even become estranged from other people.

I’m not saying that it isn’t better to have clean laundry, of course. Nor am I saying no one should live alone. But I am saying that our current model of many people doing nearly all their chores alone, living and cooking and eating alone more than ever, doing life with the help of machines but without the company of others, seems to be making us a bit more clean, but no less busy, and a lot more overwhelmed and miserable (read about that here). In a recent workshop on this problem, I asked participants what chores they did with other people, and what they did with friends specifically. A few people could think of chores they did with a partner; approximately no one could think of chores they did with their friends. Yet doing chores with your friends is really fun!

When people tell me that they just couldn’t bear to group order most of their groceries as I do with a network of 20 neighbours, even if it would be cheaper and less work, because it wouldn’t be quite fit all their exact preferences, I think: you have maximised for personal preference and I get it, but suspect the long term consequences of that setup will not bring you the joy you deserve.

Not all of our laborious adaptation to technological possibilities in modernity truly benefits us in the long run. I like my fridge a certain way too, (I really do! The fridge is my pet peeve!) But a slightly cleaner fridge won’t bring me the connection or meaning that leisure time will.

Many of us will need to learn the skills of communal living in the future, anyhow, when we are likely to return to intergenerational living due to the housing crisis, and/or expand into various forms of communal life with our neighbours and friends, even if that’s due to economic pressures or major global crises rather than entirely unfettered choice. So the seduction of individual preference-maxxing matters because our reluctance to deal with the mess and compromise and inconvenience of other people up close is likely going to hold us up when we face the big crises of the 21st century. It’s also almost certainly contributing to social atrophy. And, finally, it matters because our ability to tolerate each other, even in daily banal ways, is part of what allows us to organise politically in the long run. Politically, any shift away from an economy run for the ultrarich, or away from an environment hurtling towards disaster, will involve immense collaborative work together to fight back against the direction of our current moment. Hell might be other people, but our salvation is too.

My house is not set up according to my preferences, but that wouldn’t make me all that happy, or all that free. My house is not set up according to my preferences, but my life is.

If you liked this post, you might also like these posts by me on Why Adulting is Hard, and Why It’s Not A Loneliness Crisis. You might also like this post by Liz Oldfield on upskilling in communal life, as well as her point about communal living and preferences in her NYT opinion column.

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“There isn’t really a loneliness crisis,” I said. “At least, not in the way people often imagine.”

What I mean, specifically, is that there is not good evidence people are getting lonelier. You can see data here, or, you can talk to Paddy Maher, a loneliness researcher interviewed in my next book who wrote an article on this topic here. (Tragically paywalled…) The short version of the evidence is:

“Americans are spending less time together in person — that does seem to be true. Face-to-face socializing has declined…documented by the famous 2023 U.S. Surgeon General advisory. But notably, despite this, there is no crash in our number of close social connections…long-term analyses show no corresponding surge in self-reported loneliness. A meta-analysis of every published dataset the researchers could find revealed just a tiny increase in self-reported loneliness among young people (0.13 standard deviations per decade, across four decades). In the U.K., longitudinal data shows no changes in loneliness levels at all.”

And, when it come to number of friends, rather than the feeling of loneliness, the main study that shows people have fewer friends than they used to is methodologically flawed:

“Researchers didn’t carry out a fair comparison between 1990 and 2021. Among other, more subtle changes, the 2021 edition was also carried out online instead of over the phone. Think about how hard it is to admit you have no friends. Admitting that to a pollster who might judge you is harder than admitting it to an online, impersonal survey. That could create the illusion of a huge drop in friendship.”

As I often put it in my work on social atrophy, then, it’s not that we’re getting lonelier. We’re just getting more alone. We are spending more hours of the day alone and (possibly) having fewer friends, although Paddy thinks probably not. We can’t really know right now either way unless we get a better study going.

I tried to explain to the woman in the audience. “I think the UK wanted to pursue this “loneliness” theme in part because the US’s surgeon general was on a kick with calling it a ‘loneliness epidemic’”, I explained. “They maybe wanted to ‘keep up’ with trends across the Atlantic.”

“Oh,” she said. “Was that all it was?”

“Not only that,” I said. I am not quite that cynical about liberal policymakers. “It’s also that very often loneliness is the closest word that we have, as a society, to another problem that is really a change in society and is really serious. Which is that we’re having a crisis of ‘social reproduction.’”

This particular audience was an audience of nearly all women, so I took the reasonable shortcut in explanation. “Social reproduction is basically what moms do. It’s the reproductive labour that keeps society going, from teaching people to feeding them to listening to their feelings. It’s what we do for ourselves when we go to the gym or do our own laundry. And right now, we’re living in a time period where people are far less embedded in social networks and relationships of care, particularly and especially marriage, but also clubs and organisations and churches. People spend less time together, and they do many of the crucial activities of self-care and child-care on their own. And this makes taking care of ourselves much harder, which means, from a government or employers’ perspective, that very often people become less productive. So governments are concerned about what happens to people who are not feeling more lonely, but are isolated and eventually drop out of the cycle of life where they can produce and reproduce. Does that make sense?”

In truth, I don’t know if I made sense, though I hope so. If I didn’t make sense to that lady, I hope I can make sense here. We are living through a time period where several key societal trends and/or crises are very poorly framed and understood. The loneliness crisis is just one. There’s also the “population crisis” that is often asserted as looming for the Global North. My suggestion is that both these apparent crises are, in significant part, actually social reproductive crises; they are poorly characterised without this analysis and misleadingly framed in the media and even by academics.

When it comes to both issues, what’s really happening is that there’s not enough social reproductive resourcing, mostly for the middle and lower classes, for an intersecting set of reasons that includes:

1) functional downward mobility for younger people especially that often means they end up not only out of the workforce but also out of the “relationship-force”, if you’ll allow me to coin a term

2) isolation itself causing people to do care work alone, which makes it much harder

3) other harmful phenomena that occur in relation to these first two, like an increasingly unskilled population when it comes to social reproductive tasks.

Allow me to put it all more simply: we don’t have a loneliness crisis, and we don’t have a population crisis. We have a world where, unless you’re fairly rich, being together is rarer, and caring for each other and ourselves is harder. The looping, self-reinforcing effects of these two realities means people are isolated but interestingly not necessarily feeling lonely. It also makes them functionally less able to have children. And once one makes this narrative and cognitive switch much makes sense that didn’t quite before.

Before I get into the details of how points 1), 2), and 3) caused people to spend more time alone and/or have fewer kids, it’s worth noting that lot of these claimed “crises” simply don’t hold up factually; that even what a lot of academic-ish publications might say about all this is, well, wrong.

• the loneliness “crisis”/”epidemic” is, in fact, not borne out in the data, as described above

• The loneliness “crisis” is not significantly more “male” (in most studies, men do not report being lonelier than women!)

• the population “crisis” where birthrates are declining (even in the Global South, by the way!) may cause economic problems down the road, but it’s unclear just what it will mean. And the decline in birthrate is often misrepresented as, for example, women just don’t want to/people just need a bit more money. In reality, many cite either not being able to find the right partners and/or afford it, but interestingly, cash subsidies and other direct economic incentives don’t seem to help all too much.

Let’s start by thinking about marriage, a still-popular institution for interdependence and care. Heterosexual marriages have, traditionally and to this day, performed a key but rarely acknowledged social function: getting men to work. Consider this article from the Dallas Federal Bank Reserve, which shows men start working more in the lead up to marriage, and keep working more after. Of course, it’s possible men with more paid work are more likely to get married (causation A); AND/OR that men work harder in preparation for marriage because they know they’ll have “mouths to feed” (Causation B). But after controlling for a variety of factors, the Fed concluded that it’s mostly causation B. Consider what this says about what marriage does to men, making them into “good” workers! But I’d like to add a bit of analysis that fits equally well with that data: for each of these soon-to-be married men, there’s someone doing a lot of work to help him do his best at work (yes, even before marriage)—from cooking to listening to feelings. It’s easier to be productive when someone does “upkeeping” for you.

What I’ve just described is the traditional “heterosexual exchange”: men offer productive labour, women offer reproductive labour in return. I have written about this in my piece on non-monogamy, where I note that, especially among the working classes, women are now often refusing to permanently pair up with men because the old heterosexual implicit contract is broken; it’s not possible to find a man who will do the productive labour outside the house well enough to provide for you to in turn focus more on the reproductive labour inside the house. That’s because men are earning less compared to their prospective female partners than they used to, which gives them less to bring to the table in some ways (they are also a lot less educated than them). Worse, it’s statistically unlikely a male partner will be willing and/or able to do an equivalent amount at home. That makes for a bad deal for women, who often choose to be single mothers or remain childfree, often in hopes of finding a better deal down the road.

This is the heterosexual social reproductive crisis of our times, at least a significant part of it. This heterosexual exchange has, of course, almost never worked out neatly in history, but as both a partial reality and ideal, it does appear to drive quite a bit of human behaviour. And the effects of people exiting the relationship-force are huge. The Dallas Fed notes “currently married men work at least 30% more annual hours than men who have never been married, a gap which has remained roughly constant since 1975.” It’s an economic problem (for the capitalist economy, anyway) that men are getting married at lower numbers every year, especially in America.

In fact, people in general (and I’m going to stick with my fellow Americans for the next few numbers, but it’s true more broadly) are increasingly single, in the sense of not living with a partner. Over 50% of American adults are single, up from roughly 22% in 1950. By 2019, about 38% of adults aged 25–54 were unpartnered, a sharp rise from 29% in 1990. Notably, young men (18-29) are especially single, with roughly 63% unpartnered in 2023.

Okay, but does this really have to do with people’s isolation or loneliness? Well, firstly—yes in the most basic sense, because it appears that a good deal of people’s isolation is due to their rising rates of being single, simply because single people just spend a lot more time alone, especially if they don’t have a platonic housemate, and even if they do.

But more than this, both the “loneliness crisis” and the “population crisis” are really referring to a world where people are less connected and less interdependent and spend more time alone. This is a problem for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that when people are alone, they care for themselves less well. People who live alone are less likely to exercise, less likely to access medical care when they need it, less likely eat in healthy ways, and more. This makes them less productive, which is a big part of why governments care.

And while causation runs in multiple directions, it’s most likely that living alone makes the people worse at “upkeeping themselves”—for reasons I covered in my last article on this substack, and because of the way these studies control for some of that effect. In fact, even if you don’t live alone, if your social network is smaller, you’re far more likely to struggle, especially in a crisis. It’s hard to know if people’s social networks have shrunk, because of the data problems Paddy described earlier. But here’s some other data that doesn’t have the flaws Paddy mentioned: it does seem Americans trust and know their neighbours less, and are increasingly parenting alone, which also seems to make them much less happy about parenting. So even if people have roughly the same number of connections (and we don’t know!), they may well be relying on these connections far less for practical or even emotional support.

And it’s not just that people are turning away from each other, of course. We’re facing a shortage of care because previous structures for social reproductive care have been dismantled: for example, much of the welfare state, as well as an economy where a family might survive on one income while the other adult did the “upkeeping”. Financially, these shifts have largely occurred because productivity gains in the economy have almost entirely gone to those at the very top earning bracket, while wages for everyone else have stagnated, taxes have been cut, and long term inflationary pressures have hugely increased the cost of living.

This complex thing about economics and the heterosexual “deal” is not the only reason we’re seeing shrinking birthrates. There are other factors. But a lot of them boil down to social reproductive problems. As a recent Reddit Post put it, “The whole kids versus no-kids debate isn’t actually about kids…it’s about resources….if more people COULD afford them without essentially kicking themselves down a few rungs on the socioeconomic ladder we wouldn’t see birthrates in developed nations plummeting [at] breakneck speeds.”

Pretty much:

• The number one reason people give for not having kids in my generation (I’m 34), at least after “I just don’t want to,” is finances. If you look at Gen Z and Millennials together, the home ownership rate is half the historical norm. Even those who say they “just” “don’t want” kids often bring finances into it. They (often) don’t want kids because not having them is a means to having enough to one day own their own home, or do something else meaningful like travel or further education. Some just feel that kids would kill their limited ability to cope—and that, too, tends to have significant economic components.

• As important as this direct economic calculus is, the other side of this social reproductive crisis is people’s ideas about what “success” and/or parenting should look like. For much of human history it was normal to expect your kids might be only as well off as you, maybe even less well off. But in an individualist, capitalist society, we may feel we’ve accomplished too little to have kids, worry about how it will interfere with our career, etc. The capitalist value system doesn’t support raising kids in the conditions capitalism actually creates, which include people’s expectations for what they “should” be able to get and what’s not embarassing, essentially. It’s entirely possible to raise kids with the father doing more, for example, on average, but it’s not what tends to happen, because people often won’t accept those terms. Same with raising kids knowing they’ll be downwardly mobile - you can, but most won’t if they can help it. People’s economic expectations and their economic conditions have very specific relational effects, and they won’t get together, nevermind reproduce, when the conditions aren’t right.

I want to be extra clear: I don’t think people “should” or “shouldn’t” have kids. (I also don’t think they “should” get married.) It’s all too personal and existential. However, it’s sad that on average, today people end up having fewer kids than they want—sometimes significantly, and often just because they can’t afford it, because they can’t arrange good conditions for a combination of cultural and economic reasons.

To return to the woman’s question about the loneliness crisis: I think a lot of the discourse about it is in fact fueled by this, interlocking set of gendered, economic problems. Politicians and policymakers want productive workers and they don’t want unemployed people to claim/use benefits. This is, in my view, the simplest explanation for why the “loneliness crisis” is so often coded male, even though men don’t consistently report being lonelier. Sure, policymakers are worried about a population experiencing the health effects of feeling lonely (which are, sadly, remarkable). But they’re also worried because they know that men without certain kinds of “upkeeping” in their lives cause problems. Unmarried men are more likely to commit crimes, drop out of the workforce, and more. (The causation here is not as neat as conservative policymakers imagine, but still relevant to their considerations). An increasing percentage of men are likely to be unemployed in ways that put them permanently out of the workforce (often because they get priced out of housing and move home to parents, and sometimes also due to illness, disability, and/or general maladjustment to working life). And leaving the workforce causes people to leave the relationshipforce.

Another reason it makes sense that discourse about this is gendered, even though men are not generally lonelier, is that “upkeeping” labour itself is gendered. In modern patriarchal systems, men are in charge of the “productive” labour (they go bring home the bacon and supposedly are the engine of the wider economy), while women are more frequently tasked with social reproductive labour (keeping the men going, from feeding them to tending to their sexual and emotional needs, etc). During a crisis of “upkeep”, both men and women are less well “kept”, but since our cultural imaginary understands men as the recipients of this kind of care more than women, and because it’s their productivity that is often more affected by this crisis, a lot of discourse gets framed as concern for men.

Needless to say, the anxieties that these problems generate also contributes to ongoing culture wars related to gender, where men and women can resent each other for not fulfilling roles in the old contract (e.g. “there’s no good men/women out there”). But that’s not the only place where language tries to awkwardly address this problem. The idea that there is a “male loneliness crisis” is also an attempt to capture this problem, a well-intentioned liberal response to an ongoing culture war about gender roles. It provides a story that allows for some empathy for men’s suffering but also allows many to express some frustration at men’s potential lack of social skills and connections.

But it’s not true that there’s a male loneliness crisis as it is often described, and, I suggest, it’s ultimately not helpful to say so, because it does not offer us structural solutions for social reproduction.

Just as we don’t have a loneliness crisis, we don’t have a “population” crisis. While a low birthrate might cause some economic problems, there are ways of addressing those problems, from robotics and AI to intentional living in a lower-growth economy to elders caring for each other. Creating unwanted humans and forcing people to reproduce is a bad solution.

So, as a first step, I’d suggest that every time someone mentions the loneliness crisis or the population crisis, you kindly smile back and say “but we don’t have a loneliness/population crisis. We have a crisis of social reproduction, of ‘upkeeping,’ of care.” And you can always send them here to read this. Once we reframe, a lot of the solutions look a lot clearer, even if they’re hard. “Loneliness” sounds like a problem that can be solved by AI chatbots, it sounds like a passing feeling, it sounds like something that could be sorted with a couple of coffees. But our true problem is about the economy and gender roles, about individualism and people’s fear of living with and depending on others, about the lack of infrastructure and an absent welfare state, and so much more. What I’ve just laid out does not mean we should all go live in a nuclear family (which is often oppressive, and in any case unlikely given ongoing economic changes). It just means that our current system is broken, and that those who can’t find a way to fit in it really suffer as a result.

As we fight the larger system that got us here, those of us who care about this very real set of problem will, I think, have to work towards a shift in cultural norms and living arrangements and gender roles so that people can make new “deals”—heterosexual or not—that enable them to care for themselves, others, and even new humans. Because without functioning ecologies of “upkeeping” work/social reproductive labour and the material supports for it, people begin to lose the ability to have relationships, community, even children. That’s where we’re at now: our current economic model, and the gender roles that accompany it, are simply not a viable foundation for these very crucial, very human things. .

You can also support me by coming to my online interactive lectures. The next two are:

The Science of “Social Atrophy” and what Isolation Does to the Brain-TOMORROW April 21st, 5pm UK time Noon EST

Why Adulting is So Hard (using social science)- April 30th, 4pm UK time Noon EST

Paid subscribers attend these for free!

The “catching up” work I’m describing has a name in sociology: social reproductive labour: the various, often unpaid, activities and social processes that sustain life, maintain communities, and regenerate the workforce daily and across generations. This includes childbearing, childcare, cooking, cleaning, healthcare especially mental healthcare, and education… and it’s all that “life-making” work that allows human life to function. There’s real joy in the work of social reproduction at times, but there’s also a lot of picking up groceries and scheduling appointments and wiping kids’ bottoms.1

Without this unglamorous yet meaningful stuff, life simply does not go on.

If I’m honest, I find “social reproduction” a bit jargony for most people, and find it can be helpful to use other words to get at the same thing. On the internet, among people my age and younger, large parts of this kind of labour are sometimes referred to as “adulting”, especially when one is “socially reproducing” oneself. One might hear someone say: “I did some adulting today and finally registered myself for the doctor” or “I’m really struggling with adulting lately and ordered some takeout instead.” It’s often the latter sort of statement. For people seem to have a lot of trouble adulting lately, without fully knowing why. Maybe they have ADHD, (they wonder); maybe they’ve just given up because the economy is in such a state?

This essay is about why adulting is so hard, why it might feel impossible. To get to that answer, though, we have to dive a little into the theory of social reproduction. Stick with me, if you don’t mind; I think there’s a moment of clarity to be had about what feels inconvenient about adulting versus what is actually making it inconvenient and even impossible.

[And if you like this piece and want to think more about this, come to my event on this topic later this month, where we’ll go through all this in much more detail, with data, examples, and a group discussion! Paid subscribers attend my lectures for free…]

Because “social reproduction” can sound vague or jargony, and “adulting” can sound sort of ageist, I sometimes prefer to call this type of work “upkeeping”, a term that has a pleasingly multiple set of connotations. “Upkeep” not only reflects the way this work is daily and somewhat banal, but also the way that a lot of this work in practice is not just about creating people or getting them ready to go to work, but in fact about keeping people in a certain class position, as in “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses”. A lot of up-keeping explicitly or implicitly is about this; not just maintaining life but maintaining a certain kind of life for oneself and one’s dependents. A great deal of modern bourgeois helicopter parenting, for example, is simply trying to get little Odile or Theobald to enough squash practices that they will get into the right school, and eventually the right university…

This is one of several reasons it can be interesting to think about this upkeep work. Here’s a more complete list of reasons that social theorists like me tend to care about “upkeeping” and how it is done:

1. To start with, this “upkeep” is incredibly central to everything else in our lives. We all rely on it intensively, from cradle to grave.

2. Capitalism relies on this labour, too. Many social theorists have argued that, if one were to deny capitalism this essential labour, or even charge appropriately for all that capitalism makes use of, the whole system might come to an end. “Upkeep” has sometimes been thought of as a kind of lever to pull in the fight against oppression. (More on this shortly).

3. Much of this “upkeep” helps to maintain class inequality, as alluded to just above with my mention of posh kids and their ongoing fancy “enrichment”. That’s because in a class society, people get up-kept or socially-reproduced differently. Some get given screentime while their parents work the second shift and later get sent to technical school, or worse, jail; some get organic snacks and violin lessons before they go to a fancy university. This is part of what allows for the class system to continue; it is often used as a justification for the system too (after all, all that social reproductive work done for richer kids is what shapes them into an applicant who can then be ‘meritocratically’ accepted into various schools and jobs).

   And remember, it’s not just kids we’re talking about when we talk about upkeeping or social reproduction, but also ourselves, day to day. Some of us are doing yoga and meditation before our networking drinks, all to get ourselves ready to go back and be top performers in the office, and some of us are warming up a cheap ready meal and taking painkillers because our back hurts from Amazon shifts and long bus rides.

   The more one looks at processes of social reproduction, the more one realises they’re the essential maintenance humans do for themselves and each other which effectively get them ready to do what capitalism needs them to do. That, and the creation of new humans who will be set up to do this too.

4. It is both unjust and remarkable how much women and people of colour tend to take on this upkeeping labour; and how both groups (but women especially and distinctively) tend to do it unpaid and unappreciated, or unpaid and heavily romanticised. Much of this “upkeeping” work is bound up with love, such that to protest about it can be seen to be cruel, selfish, unnatural. If you love your children, of course you care for them, clean up after them, teach them things, people have argued. If you love your spouse, of course you listen to their feelings and cook for them. How could you wish you were paid for this? Why are you complaining? Of course, of course, many of us love the people we do this labour for. And yet, some of us end up doing an extra shift of this far more than others, to the detriment of our health, our other dreams, our sense of self.

   All this love-turned-into-crucial work holds the economy together in remarkable ways. Consider this graph, which (arguably), shows how men tend to make more money once their wives take some of the labour of upkeep off their hands.

If the “boss makes a dollar, and you make a dime”, in many marriages, a similar dynamic occurs where men make extra because women take on stuff at home. Or, to continue the analysis using catchy sayings, consider the feminist adage, “marriage is the institution through which even the poorest man can get a maid”.

Workers and their bosses both have long tried to optimise at home so as to optimise at work. That makes sense: the more things are in order at home (in theory and often in practice) the more we can take some extra time to educate ourselves, work the extra hours, get the raise, apply for and change jobs, etc. Social reproduction is the base on which productive labour is generated. Of course, when one isn’t getting enough of this at home, it’s also very hard to “get ahead” or even “keep-up.” As a result, there are a million ways people try to create “up keeping” shortcuts, especially when things get harder economically: automating things, buying services, batch cooking, eating a cheap and easy meal, and so on. Many of these “hacks” work a little. Few work well enough to stop people from going under in the long run, as wages stagnate and inflation climbs. That’s a big part of what we’re going through now.

Those who want to end the current system rather than perform well in it have, relatedly and conversely, sought to hold reproductive labour hostage until working conditions change. The historical Wages for Housework movement, for example, hoped that by demanding wages for women’s housework, they might prove the unviable nature of a wage system, and break the system in the long run, such that capitalism itself might destabilise or even collapse.

But both those who seek to make social reproduction better so more work can happen and those who seek to hijack it to end capitalism have struggled to reliably reach their ends. This is probably, in part, because “productive” and “reproductive” work have an uneasy relationship, not entirely symbiotic, not entirely detrimental to each other. Yes, improve home life and the worker is often a better worker; but, equally, they might decide they now have time to organise a union or, now that they’ve got the resources to have a kid, they want to spend more time with that kid. And so far, the Wages for Housework movement has yet to take down capitalism, perhaps because our family lives are so much of the little we have that disrupting them can feel like a form of self-immolation.

Most people, of course, are engaged in the first, less extreme activity: not activism, but trying to make the “upkeep” or adulting a little easier for themselves. But this is harder than it looks, once again because of the strange relationship between “upkeeping” and productive work/the money it generates. For although “upkeeping” work can be directly and indirectly turned into money and money into “upkeeping”, the exchange-ability of these two things is… unpredictable, and uneasy at best. Some aspects of “upkeeping” are difficult to assign financial value to or purchase. Sure, if you really have the money, you can have nannies, therapists, and more. (And, as I’ll get to in a moment, we’re increasingly doing this with some parts of our lives). But this is, firstly, likely far more expensive than if you found the same labour another way. That’s why today many mothers and indeed some fathers stay home rather than work—their wages can barely cover the costs of childcare, and anyway, the type of time employers want fits uneasily with the reality of care.

For it’s not just that social reproductive labour is expensive to hire—it’s also that, when you buy it, you usually get an imperfect substitute for what you would do yourself…That’s in large part because upkeep is a weird kind of labour, one where it can matter quite a lot who does it, and not just that it’s done. If someone can sell derivatives or mow the lawn it may not really matter who they are; not so with this kind of work. The best nanny or therapist does not, somehow, quite replace a parent. Even a really good elder careworker does not fulfill the same function as one’s own child spending time with one, when one is old. Part of this is about hyperpersonalised knowledge and the level of concern a person doing the labour would ideally have. Even if you have a lot of money for eldercare, you’ll still find you’re personally checking the carer actually showed up to care for your parent at the time they said, that they got the memo about the problem with the medication, that they understand that when your parent complains that it’s ‘stuffy’ they really mean…and so on. (Read Emily Kenway’s work for more!) I do not say this, to be clear, to tell women to go back to the home, but to tell all of us to remake the home—which will have to remain an article for another day.

And, then of course, past these kind of strange logistical problems, there’s the matter of love and connection. Your parent or child might not want that care from someone else. And you might not want to outsource it. For all these reasons, when it comes to social reproduction, it matters who it is doing the work. This is true even when we socially reproduce ourselves. The best personal trainer or therapist cannot make us really do what we need to do for ourselves; only we can do that.

And, of course, all this outsourcing only matters if if one has the money for financial replacements for any of this, and people mostly don’t.2

My argument here, though, isn’t just that we can’t buy our way out of these problems. It’s that we are facing new versions of these “upkeeping”, adulting, social reproductive problems today. Of course, as previously theorised, up-keeping work is still heavily feminised, unpaid, and, when it is paid, even then handed off to women, people of colour, and other minoritised groups. However, the crisis of social reproduction/upkeep that we’re facing today has new features, ones that extend beyond these two classic points. Today’s social reproduction isn’t just gendered and unpaid or racialised and made into exploitative paid labour, it’s not just invisibilised or equated with love (although it is all those things). It’s also arguably harder than ever and in new ways. Here are some reasons why:

1. Today, when we engage in “upkeep”, we’re doing it alone. We’re parenting alone more than we used to, and (probably) exercising alone more than we used to, and cooking and eating alone more than we used to, and so much more. This is because of an ongoing thinning of the social fabric that has been happening for over 70 years, driven by a variety of factors that include wealth inequality and ongoing forms of oppression, people moving for work leading to the breakdown of extended families, the decline of organised religion and the organised workplace, the dissolution of social spaces, and much more. (This is broadly my beat, and I encourage you to peruse this substack if it’s of interest). Sadly, every time the social fabric weakens, we end up doing more and more of our lives alone. And this is really unfortunate, because doing “upkeep” alone makes it much, much harder. As nearly all my parent friends rush to tell me, parenting is much, much easier with just a few more hands on deck. Even having a relative around to hold your kid while you shower or check that thing in the oven is helpful; if grandma can take the kid for an afternoon, you (comparatively) have it made. This isn’t just true for small children, either; if you basically trust your neighbours to keep an eye on the collective kids, you can let your kids run around, play outside, and adventure in small groups. If you don’t know your neighbours, it’s far more likely your older kids will be inside on devices. Social reproduction essentially consumes far, far more of one’s life in an isolated world.3

   Even if you’re not a parent, though, you might be experiencing the way that more and more life upkeep is done alone, and how this makes for much more of it. It’s simply less work for one person to cook a big meal than several people to individually cook many smaller meals. When people combine their efforts, they can specialise in what they’re good at, and save money by creating economies of scale. It’s also often more fun to do these things together, or at least, well, less wearing on the soul. Staying up with a newborn, going on a jog, or painting your house, is just much, much more bearable when someone else does it with you. It can even be truly joyful to do a big chore together with other people, as you may know if you’ve ever had a potluck or had friends round to unpack with you.

When people say “it takes a village”, they don’t (or shouldn’t) just mean “it’s nice to have support”. Rather, most life-sustaining activities are literally easier, in the sense of both “there’s less to do per person” and “there’s more expertise to go around” and “thank God I’m not alone.”

In a way, then, we’re living in the worst of all possible worlds when we do our “upkeep” on our own. There’s now more upkeep, more solitary upkeep, and more miserable upkeep, all in a time of economic downward mobility. Yikes.

2. We’re all deskilling and unspecialising when it comes to the upkeep, and this makes “upkeep” exhausting. Deskilling, because many of us spent our high school and early adult years learning and specialising only in terms of our careers. This often means we haven’t spent any time learning to do domestic skills like oh, cooking! Or fixing the sink or mending our clothes.

It’s also tricky to know what we should learn. I don’t have much good to say for gender roles, but when it comes to upkeep, they interestingly do bring with them the benefit of having each person in a household learn to do a few things well, and then outsource other things to others (albeit in ways that privilege men in a variety of ways). Today, in contrast, many more people live alone than in pretty much any point in human history, and many of us live in households where we just don’t know how to do various tasks and don’t have anyone to turn to who does. This can make the whole idea of upkeep feel totally exhausting and impossible, and then we let the sink leak and throw away perfectly good clothes because they have small tears in them.

I don’t think we should revert back to strict gender roles, but we probably should find ways to specialise in a few things and then build social networks where we can usefully trade—which, again, requires doing “upkeep”/social reproduction together, not alone. I am staying at my mother-in-law’s house right now, and she mended a shirt for me in just a few minutes using expertise I don’t have. (Meanwhile, I baked for her). I’m grateful; we’re both better off. We need whole networks like this.

3. Paid work has gotten unpredictable, which means “upkeeping” has gotten unpredictable too. Precarity and gig labour have taken over a chunk of the labour market. This means the demands on workers outside of home are extremely unpredictable, and many people spend a lot of their adult lives intermittently cycling phases of work and nonwork. As a result, in practice, everyone is tasked with both upkeep and earning-their-keep, but only in very unpredictable ways that are extra exhausting. Exhausting because fewer people who can specialise in upkeep (by, for example, becoming intentional stay-at-home parents). Exhausting because working for long stretches may wear you out more in the long run than work with expected intervals of rest built in. Exhausting because the uncertainty of not knowing when work will come again causes burnout and depression even when one theoretically has “free” time. Exhausting because applying for jobs all the time is work. Even if households have a division of labour, gendered or otherwise, it’s not unlikely that it will be regularly thrown into flux by instability in the employment market. Dad might prefer to grill and DIY or he might prefer to cook and clean, he and Mom might have a whole system worked out in theory, but regardless, he might just end up driving an Uber for 14 hours instead, then crashing exhausted while everyone else scrambles to sort out the rest.

   And, of course many people who live alone and work this way have no one to support them in working these unpredictable shifts, and so essentially come to live in states of total disrepair between huge bouts of work.

4. As a result of all this isolation and instability, and because we’re less skilled at the “upkeep” than we used to be, and we tend to hire professionals for a lot of our “upkeep”, further deskilling us and depleting our bank accounts. Hence the rise in food delivery, gig workers, cleaners, drivers, therapists, coaches, personal trainers and even influencers who show you how to do the basics of domestic life and “self-care.” People in my generation and younger are apparently far more likely to call in a professional to solve basic DIY problems that they could fix with a very small amount of knowledge on their own. Apparently it’s costing us a lot of money. We also tend to pay more for all the physical and emotional upkeep we need; people spend increasing amounts of money on therapists and personal trainers, for example, when a generation ago they might have spoken to friends or worked out with a friend or gotten DIY advice from a handy friend etc.

These are just some of the reasons that adulting is very, very hard right now. It’s not your imagination if things feel particularly difficult.

What’s to be done? I hope you’ll explore that with me, at my events and in reading later pieces. But at a minimum, before we get to the nitty gritty of solutions, it’s worth pointing to one more thing: people often complain that social life and communal life is inconvenient. And in some ways, they are right. I know, because I live communally, and it is often inconvenient to coordinate my schedule with other people, to listen to their feelings, to make polite chitchat with houseguests when I get home even when I’m tired, to let go of a great many preferences for how things will be set up and run and what’s for dinner and what’s on the TV. It is inconvenient. It is.

But if social life and communal life are inconvenient, doing upkeep alone is also incredibly inconvenient. Perhaps even more inconvenient, just inconvenient in ways that are harder for us to recognise in the moment, or to properly attribute to our isolation.

Isolated life means paying for things that we used to gain simply by being parts of groups. It means paying for expertise we could have gained through friends. It means motivating ourselves to do things alone that were much easier to do together. It means each of us doing things individually rather doing a fraction of the work within economies of specialisation and scale. It doesn’t feel like it right away, and sometimes it won’t feel like it at all, but doing things isolated is very, very inconvenient.

What will probably help us all in this regard is to make a 21st century village. It doesn’t need to be quaint; it doesn’t need to be nostalgic. It might look like a bunch of people who have, or feel like they have, ADHD doing their taxes together one evening while “helping” each other eat leftovers. It might look like letting your neighbour get both your kids from school, or like jogging together rather than going to the pricey gym alone. It probably will look really different for each person. I hope we build a lot of these together-systems, before we all burn out, before it’s too late.

Again, If you want to talk about this more, come to this event on April 30th! Or listen to the recording. Lectures like this are also free to my paid subscribers, so you can become a paid subscriber and attend for free :)

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Finally, this is likely a part of a series on social reproduction—if you liked it, let me know, and I will continue on this topic…

This is part THREE about TikTok, Instagram Reels, and other shortform video content. You can read parts One and Two here.

Lately, I spend a lot of time on zoom calls with progressive organisations. Usually they start when someone pops into view and tells me about their area of the UK where Reform and far-right flag operations are happening. Everywhere you look, there they are, they tell me. Miles and miles of English flags. I nod, because I’ve seen them myself visiting the outskirts of London. You can drive and drive for miles and they’re every couple meters.

The flags intimidate minorities, they proclaim Englishness, white Englishness. What do we do, ask the folks at the other end of the line. I don’t always know, even as I piece together approaches with them.

That’s the first variant of call; the second type looks only a little bit different. On this second type of call, instead of discussing literal flags, the folks at the other end of the call are concerned about a kind of metaphorical flag: the shortform video. The internet is flooded with shortform right-wing content, and if you open a new account or don’t curate your algorithm, you’ll drown in it soon enough. In the same towns where the flags hang, people come into community centres repeating lines from these videos, alarming the minorities and others who use the same spaces. The videos and the flags hang together, demarcating worldviews and the places to which those worldviews lay claim.

The flags were hung by coordinated efforts and recruitment, often directly coordinated by people like “Tommy Robinson” (not his real name). The videos were “hung” this way too, at least in many cases.

For being a paid political influencer right now is big business. Not just in the UK, and not just for the right, I might add. A thinktank in the US paid a cohort of influencers 8,000 a month to work for the Democratic party (without disclosing this financial relationship to their viewers, I might add). Similarly, the Israeli government appears to pay some influencers about 7,000 dollars per post to promote their interests. Netanyahu repeatedly told an audience recently that if Israel somehow loses evangelical support in America, it will need another groundswell of support from somewhere else: ““We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers…they are very important.”

But while both far right and soft-left can funnel money into influencing, unfortunately, all the very worst people seem to have figured out how to use this influential tool well. Statistically, even accounts that look at progressive content get fed far, far more far-right content. In Germany, researchers ran an experiment where they created five new TikTok accounts and had each follow content from each of the five major parties. Even the four accounts that intentionally followed other parties go fed up to 75% content related to the AFD, the German far right party.

There is no single account of why the right/far right might dominate so much on these platforms. Perhaps they are better at ragebait and sincerity, both of which tend to do well, as I’ve outlined in previous parts of this series. Perhaps these right wing groups win because they’re very well funded. Perhaps it’s because they don’t police themselves for the exact correct formulation before they click post, and thus can generate far more quickly. They have certainly gotten very good at the kind of speedy responses that other groups are bad at. As one commentator has noted,

Keir Starmer announced his ID card plan around 3pm on Thursday.

Around 3 hours later, Nigel Farage and Reform had video response content on Tik Tok, Instagram and YouTube.

Thanks to Reform’s new Westminster Social Media studio (Stop calling it a TV studio!)

24 hours later these 3 posts had around 800,000 views and 60,000 likes.

Labour posted a basic graphic 12 hours later on Instagram. They’ve said nothing on TikTok or YouTube. It has around 1000 likes.

The right probably have the ability to win on these platforms for many reasons. I particularly consider how they can play fast and loose without generating the same kind of puritanical in-fighting, for there are far fewer standards for what is politically “correct” within their movements. It’s also possible the right are especially well positioned to gather momentum through messages of anger, panic and fear. These seem to spread particularly fast online, as does misinformation, and the right’s messages about (say) migrants and trans people often fit these criteria.

Whatever the exact advantage the far right has, shortform video is so popular right now (as popular and often more popular than “normal” television!) that it can feel important not to cede all of it to the extensive reach of right. I feel a tug to step into the strange world of shortform video in response. And yet - what really one can we do with the format? Is it really possible to fight flags with more flags?

Hang on, you might be thinking, don’t you think this world of online content is more or less irrelevant? Look at your last book! Aren’t you the “debating doesn’t matter” lady? Don’t you think “talking” about politics is irrelevant really?

Yes, indeed, I have written about how just being exposed to ideas on their own isn’t much of an influence on people’s political views. (And empirical studies demonstrate this, too). It is very rare that someone goes online and does a radical 180 on their views. However,

• It is probably true that shortform video is pretty good for recruitment and mobilization when it comes to causes people are already inclined to be sympathetic towards. (Notice this is different than persuasion!). (There’s remarkably little direct research on this - but it certain does seem to work to, for example, drive donations…)

• Videos like this might be good for mobilization and recruitment because the way social media currently works means that we don’t just consume content, we repost and share it and defend it and connect with it - and those actions that we do ourselves may in fact change our minds. (Check out a nice article on this here). Being online leads people to make new friends, reinforce bonds based on political disagreement, argue back with people who write them to tell them they are wrong, share posts in a way that makes them feel “active” and thus more committed to a line of thought.

• Finally in some cases videos get people offline - into the streets to protest, to (yes) hang flags, to peel stickers off buildings or to put new ones up, to help each other or attack each other, and so much more. As I note at the end of my book, Stephen Bannon has perfected getting people to act first online, then offline and to turn their smaller actions into bigger ones, until they are part of his movement. As he puts it, “[These days in America] There’s no civic bonding. There’s no national cohesion. There’s not even the Lions Club [a previously popular social membership club] things that you used to have before. [And so, political organising can work if it mobilises people towards each other and a social world they’ve been lacking…] People [I’ve recruited through my strategy] tell me all the time: ‘You changed my life. I ran for the board of supervisors, and now I’m on the board of supervisors.’ They have friends that they never had met before, and they’re in a common cause, and it’s changed their life. They’re on social media. Every day, they have action they have to do…”

Oof. Bannon has it down, strategically if nowhere else. If social media matters, it matters because it reaches the right people with that powerful algorithm, gets them to become micro-activists online, and then as useful gets them to go offline for the cause where they further transform. Andrew Tate similarly got young men to join his community and with it his way of thought by giving them videos of himself to post online, promising them a cut of any of his course sales that came through their posts. Even if these young men sold nothing, they became committed to his cause through their posting, and doubtless more in line with him ideologically on the whole. I have no doubt many of the young men hanging flags across the UK were recruited with tactics that are not that different to that of Tate, and which may literally have been strategised by those working cross-Atlantic with Bannon. Videos are reposted, then created and posted, flags are hung, people are brought into the fold and further mobilised. Who knows what happens next? And meanwhile, most of us are scrolling, scrolling, scrolling between work and on the toilet and before bed.

Back in the 50s, Frankfurt School theorists like Theodor Adorno worried that “mass culture” would feed a kind of slow, quasi-to-fully-fascist sludge directly to us, numbing us to capitalist reality, to our shared “wrong life.” (The kind of “wrong life” I feel most sure of when I’m in Stansted airport, eating terrible food and helping to destroy the environment.).

These older theorists imagined that “mass culture” reinforces wrong life in part because it stunts our subjectivity, our perception, our sense of self, scripting it and enclosing us in just a few possibilities. A few giant Hollywood companies could not only script most everything you’d ever watch, but also your internal script: your own kiss scene, your own idea of a hero. It’s not just that you conform; it’s that you can no longer imagine another kind of first kiss, or another kind of love outside of the scripted romance. You soon think you need a particular kind of lover, rather than a wholly different form of life.

Nowadays, we live less according to the scripts of a few movie studios or advertising companies and more in an infinitely-niched-down, ironic and post-ironic internet culture. A single script for anything is less clear, at least outside of a particular subculture.

But, interestingly, though the precise words of our lives may be less scripted, the format for communication has become almost uniform nevertheless. I can tell this is true because I find I have to teach a “format script” to my students, who are learning to make shortform videos, usually for progressive and radical causes. A good video has a hook, I tell them. And it’s true; that is simply crucial. Other, only slightly less crucial bits: an explainer of some kind, a joke, suspense, “layers” and punchline at the end, plus ideally something to make you share it. It works. All this is effective; it is also, for both viewer and creator, comically and painfully repetitive. Scroll for a little while and you’ll feel like you’re losing your mind. Create videos for a while and you will lose your mind. After you lose your mind, you’ll return to scrolling and also find the repetitive format weirdly soothing and discomforting at the same time.

Today’s mass culture replacement seems to be the mass platform, and the format that this particular shortform video algorithm requires. Adorno and co thought the script ultimately only helps fascists, for it limits the imagination of anyone who might oppose them to few cultural memes.

When I’m making videos, I can’t help but wonder if I’m feeding the modern imagination-limiting machine. At the same time, I fear leaving the most popular format on earth to those who don’t even blink before they post.

You might, then, be wondering what I plan to do now. I will tell you, in shortform. I am still going to write on Substack, first of all, and more frequently than I do now. I need longform content to think, and my book tour season is ending for a bit, so I finally have time to think alongside writing my next book. Some ideas need more than 90 seconds, many require thousands of words.

I will probably also continue to make TikToks/reels. I do this not because I think this will persuade those that disagree with me (it won’t), but rather to continue to build an audience (Instagram seems to be what’s selling my book), as well as to bolster those who might agree or come to think more deeply as they do as they scroll along. Whenever people write me and tell me interesting things in response to these videos, I begin to feel less caught up in the bind of the stilted format, more drawn into a shared reality that is dynamic, open-ended, even intriguing.

And that alone certainly makes up for the many trolls…

That said, I’m also taking one step back until my paperback release, just to refresh my brain. Which means for the moment, I’ll be posting videos a bit less and waiting till inspiration strikes.

In this lull, I’ve yet to fully answer, even for myself, this crucial question: is the solution to right-wing videos left-wing videos?

Here’s my first pass at an answer, however: If so, only somewhat. We are ultimately not in a simple turf war. More flags, especially on their own, will not help. For if we think about the “left” as a group that broadly seeks the end of exploitation, greater equity, and a variety of kinds of freedom (not just “freedom-from”), then the left and right are facing entirely different kinds of strategic goals. The right mostly needs to catalyse people’s fears into compliance and endorsement of the rule of the powerful-posing-as-underdogs; the left, however, needs to bring people together to engage in slow, scary, annoying collaboration across difference. If those of us on the left decide to use the same format for some of our work (the shortform video) even if only for recruitment, we still have to do it with a twist for this reason. We can’t just use fear of others. We have to get people offline to do much more challenging stuff than the right wants them to do. Not fun little flag-hanging escapades, but boring, challenging stuff they’ve not done before, like talking to their neighbours, redistributing food supplies, going on strike, interrupting bad infrastructure and building new ones. Notably, for all this we need them to be brave and skilled and resilient and willing to keep going, rather than fearful.

I often think about how the algorithm of (for example) TikTok particularly downrates any piece of content that makes you quit the app. If you tell your viewers to quit the app now, and they do, your videos will not be shown to futher people. And so, if you want to get people to leave the digital world and do something in the real world, you have to get them to do something incredibly counterintuitive: hear your message, then scroll to the next video, and then sneak offline to do something in the real world, while leaving your video in a place where more people can still see it in the future. As awkward as that sounds, that’s what I think we must do - use the number one medium that people are watching right now according to its rules yet against itself, and against those who have thus far used it best. Weirdly to do that we need them to watch, then scroll more to help us get our message out (!) and then quit. Adorno would groan.

Should you make shortform video in line with this strange challenge? Only, I think, honestly, if you’re willing to take the challenge on full force, with all it involves. The trap of content of this type is that it looks effortless to produce; it is in fact a specialist’s game, or (weirdly) sometimes a game of luck, where some (currently very sincere and rageful people) do accidentally hack it. Producing this kind of shortform video also involves a huge toll on the self, as I’ve outlined in previous parts of this piece.

To do well in this format, one has to embrace all this: the intense strategic analysis, the showing of your face in most cases. the harassment, the being misunderstood, the annoying-ness, the labour, the bleak overconsumption and repetition these platforms instill. The best we can do against the virtual flags of the right is to understand the structure of the thing deeply, and dive in when the moment is right, driving people offline as the right does does but to very different ends.

I’ll be writing a bit more about that challenge here sometimes. If you need help, let me know.

Now I’m going to consider how this new stronger algorithm created a new form of social media content, nonfollower content, and how this new audience shift makes for an especially high amount of “context collapse” for viewers.

(Finally, next time, I’ll think about the work of a “creator” and consider what this hyper-shortform, low-context communication environment means for popular culture and people who operate within it.)

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Strikingly, what has emerged from a new, super-strong video algorithm is a world of “non-follower” content. For a powerful enough algorithm can, in effect, in a very specific scrolling-addiction sense, come to know you better than you know yourself, and be better at recommending you addictive content than you are at curating that for yourself. This is why TikTok and Instagram have the “for you” or “explore” pages and why these pages really work, why people can scroll through them for hours in the way few would ever do in older formats. It’s not that we didn’t have somewhat powerful algorithms before, but they weren’t powerful enough for this. Remember, in previous formats of social media, while we might scroll, we scrolled a timeline primarily filled with accounts and/or people we had chosen to follow, with content we had at least somewhat curated for ourselves. Now many users find themselves uncomfortably drawn to and even addicted to a feed curated entirely by this powerful algorithm, one that is mostly a range of total strangers and unknown people, even people they don’t follow - but, notably, those accounts and people are not random, because the algorithm is sending content to exactly who it thinks might like it.

Content is now primarily for non-followers-with-similar-interests. (For most pieces of content, that is who it is shown to most of the time!) And that means that successful content looks differently now.

Here are some curious features of this world of non-follower, dislike-button-organised content:

• This type of content rewards not so much videos people like (as when we mostly got content from people we followed) as videos that keep them watching to the end, intrigued, enraged, and of course ultimately wanting to share. (This possibility to get people to watch whether or not they technically like the content like has meant a huge rise of suspense and contradiction-driven video content, notably the many negative and contradiction-heavy hooks, which build intrigue, like “ten things I would NEVER do as a…”)

I often think about what the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate said as cited in this book about how a really successful video will upset 60% of people, make 20% of people laugh, and cause 20% of people to agree. I have seen this firsthand--often my content does well when it (far more accidentally) generates controversy, because that keeps people watching, whether or not they like what I’m saying, and also generates engagement. This type of content is only really possible to create at scale in a world where content primarily reaches non-followers (after all, followers tend, on average, to be following because they like your work; curiosity and hate-watching is at least more commonly often the activity of a non-follower).

Frankie, the influencer who creates “Meditations for the Anxious Mind”, tells me that, in the sociology PhD thesis he’s working on, he writes about “the algorithm being a self-deforming cast - influencers have to shape themselves into a more inflammatory, attention-grabbing version of themselves to get audience retention (to stop them from clicking off)!...Inflammatory by saying something really controversial at the start of a vid, or ‘front-loading’ the vid with the most shocking part at the start so people watch the full reel until the end.” This is a trend one sees over and over again.

All of which points to something I hold close to brain as I work in this medium, an insight from this book - which is that “content” is something that circulates. Content is a type of communication (if it can be called that) whose primary technological and financial incentive is to be shared far and wide. Structurally, it almost doesn’t matter what is ‘inside’ the content, what it’s actually “saying”. From the lens of “content strategy”, much of the time, the way one distinguishes effective content from ineffective content is not about the quality of the thinking, but rather whether the algorithm, or individual people, keep sharing it, whether it gets around. Whatever makes content deeply watchable and/or shareable (even if it’s meaningless) is what makes it circulate, and that is what the platform needs and what it rewards as it behaviourally conditions its creators into producing more and more.

In 2007, Jonah Peretti, the founder of Buzzfeed, noticed how important this circulation was and wrote “If people don’t share the work with their friends, it is a failure regardless of the creator, critics or other elites.” Yet while circulation being key has remained constant, the algorithm now also and increasingly shows you what your friends secretly watched but were too embarrassed to share. It’s all much weirder today than it was when Buzzfeed started. (Not unrelatedly, Peretti just made a new manifesto, which seems to be a stunt to promote his new AI slop platform).

• This new nonfollower content is a format we watch alone, as with all content that we primarily watch on a small screen. When we used to watch TV shows, people might have their dirty secrets they watched alone; today, we have our dirty seconds, which we can sneak in without even our partners knowing. Nonfollower content works well in this regard; we don’t know what we’re watching, but we don’t really need to; we can tell ourselves we just stumbled upon it. And all that’s kind of ok, in that we’re unlikely to have to explain what we’re up to anyone else or co-ordinate watching something together.

• Perhaps most crucially for a lot of the work I do, non-follower content world is a world where viewers have very little context for who you are. And this, in turn, changes what one can express. In this hyper-shortform (as I’ll detail below) nuance is nearly impossible, only certain kinds of humour flourish, and anything that requires context or contradiction becomes nearly impossible in the crush of context collapse.

“Context collapse” is a term I mentioned earlier. It refers to “the phenomenon in digital communication where distinct social spheres or contexts intersect, leading to challenges in managing audience expectations, privacy boundaries, and self-presentation.” When I made a video with Frankie, yes aforementioned Frankie of the Meditations for the Anxious Mind, a subset of people, both followers and nonfollowers, were somehow upset to see me there. I was doing a takedown on their sacred cows (centrism and fuckboys) with blithe confidence and it offended them. This reaction was generated in part through context collapse. They were not from my social context, I was not from theirs. I did not speak to theirs very much, and they were not expecting to see me on their page. Specifically, in this case, many of those used to watching Frankie’s videos clearly saw his page not as him making fun of his own lefty social milieu (which is how I have interpreted it from our many, many chats over the last few months), but rather as an account for punching left from the center. They experienced me as an aberration within that, or possibly as part of an intentional project of left-bashing where I should also be bashed. That is why some wondered if I were an intentional parody of myself for expressing the views I hold. (Frankie’s view is also that many of those who were angry were angry in ways they would not have been at any of his male guests, and that he has seen this trend before with other women he interviews).

These folks, who saw me as an aberration in their favourite entertainment, went after me. These were, presumably, centrist and right wing folks who liked Frankie’s work but hated lefty ideas and felt personally attacked.

I give this example because it was among the harshest reception I’ve encountered, and the craziest set of misunderstandings. And part of what made that possible was that most of those watching were, at minimum, not my followers, and had no context for me. In fact, given that setup, I sort of get these folks’ confusion and anger, in that in those clips I am my punchiest self, reciting lines from a piece that my own followers love. These folks had no background for me or these statements, they were used to seeing comedians in my spot, and generally had not watched our longer, more serious and less playful interview; this led to many interesting and often very negative comments.

Context collapse means we can be heavily misunderstood and under- or over-interpreted. Perhaps most of all, context collapse and a nonfollower content environment means one is heavily disincentivised for saying anything too nuanced, because there is no time for that, nor any background or shared context or further audience time later on (they’re not following you after the clip in most cases) that might allow that nuance to develop.

In other words, the world of reels and TikTok is one where content is made by and for people who don’t know each other, and probably never will. Not just in that in-person sense, but also in the sense they’re not even stopping to follow each other.

The result is a type of content that either rewards misunderstanding or adopts a terribly sincere posture to dodge it.

It is these two ways of operating (ragebait and sincerity) that allow creators to dodge the secret dislike button. Think of it this way: for those happy to ragebait, a lack of context and a wide audience works well. You will likely find your 60% enraged, 20% amused, and 20% in disagreement, and that can mostly only be generated by people who don’t follow you. People will watch to the end for one of these Tate-given reasons, and comment, like, and share to drive the algorithm too.

At the other end of the spectrum, sincerity also works. A certain kind of sincerity (here I am specifically thinking of those who do not layer any potentially negativity-inducing nuances or contradictions or ironies in their videos) makes it easier to communicate with a wider audience, one with less context. I am thinking here of Zohran Mamdani’s highly effective social media campaigns. His videos may have in-jokes, and his campaign has certainly upset people who dislike social democratic politics, but on the whole the videos are positioned with a certain good-humoured sincerity and structured to be understood at whatever level of context, so that people watch to the end out of a certain kind of curious wholesome playfulness, rather than secret-dislike-swipe-away. It is difficult to deny that this, alongside charm and good lighting, has worked wonders for Mamdani and his team.

This latter type of context-light simplified sincerity is, interestingly, precisely the opposite of what many “intellectuals” consider to be sophistication. In fact, many people consider this kind of sincerity a bit “cringe”, especially when someone is less skilled at it than Zohran Mamdani. (One can see the great sincerity and potential for cringe in the many, many people who go viral by mistake when making videos for their immediate friends and family). And given my history working in this format, I am not even a little bit surprised that many “intellectuals” dislike it. I have been given the cold shoulder at many a lefty intellectual party for engaging in popular content production. It is simply not considered cool in that world. Interestingly, though, it is now largely what succeeds in the digital world, even over edgy memes and sometimes even over contrarian takes. We are (I suspect) facing a content format that, at least at mass scale, may be pulling us away from certain kinds of (still-popular, but possibly shrinking) in-group scathing irony.

In-group ironic humour may get out-competed by accounts that can cater to non-following audiences and navigate this context collapse (this world of strangers talking to each other in 90-second clips, this bizarre somewhat permanent estrangement-from-one’s viewers). Irony may be outcompeted in this format by either nuanceless outrage or hardcore sincerity. It further interests me to see that the comments of these successful ragebait and sincere videos are still filled with often reactionary or bitter versions of sarcasm, and with arguments where people who have no shared context frequently misunderstand one another as a result. The comments section has often not caught up with the frequent high-sincerity “vibe” of the algorithm. (Although there are many strange, overly-earnest comments too). But perhaps the comments section never will “catch up” with this straightforward sincerity. Comments are a different ‘game’; commenters have more to work with. After all, your reply guy always has at least the context of your 90 second video to build on. In some ways, he can always have more “nuance” than you, and has more tools to engage in sarcasm and irony, too.

Which leads me to wonder: how will the far right, who have long loved their irony, manage in this new system? (They are, so far doing exceptionally well in this new ecosystem! In fact, they seem to be able to ever play the role of the reply-guy, in any context...)

I don’t know what will happen to the far right in this contextless context. But they are a big part of what’s driven me to make video content. And I can tell you all about that—see you back here next time!