We're living through a collective scream

How can more of us have a good life?

I love it when someone lowers their voice, leans forward, and says, “can I ask you something?” I interpret that kind of intensity to mean I’m taking a risk here, but I trust you. It’s a prelude to a moment that will be, if nothing else, real.

It’s hard to replicate that posture digitally, but Kristen sure did in an email this week:

Dear Sarah and Beth,

You've said a couple of things recently, mostly in “outside of politics” spaces, that I can't stop thinking about. I feel the weight and truth of them, and I also feel stuck in my ability to live into them. Let me try to explain.

For context, I am a 39-year-old mom of two small kiddos, 2 and 5, and my family moved to the DC area almost three years ago. This means a couple of things: 1) Our cost of living is high, and our income is enough to make our ends meet and save for retirement, but there's not a lot of extra; 2) we're in the thick of little kid years, so every activity outside of the home requires either childcare or schlepping kids along; and 3) making friends/building community in this season of life, in this area of the United States, is just really f*****g hard. I also have an autoimmune disease, which practically means that my energy for "extras"--outside of work, keeping children alive, managing my health, and connecting with my husband--is limited.

Beth, in your More to Say last week, you advised a new mom-to-be to build community around herself and her family. That the single-most important thing she could do is build her community so that she and her little one would have people to lean on as the challenges of life and parenting present themselves. And in last Friday's episode, you both talked about Anne Bogel's advice to do two things a day you love, one thing a week you treasure, and one thing a month you'll never forget. Both of these pieces of advice resonate with me. They're things I want so badly. But, like, how? When? With whose money and whose energy? I just truly don't feel like any of that is available to me right now. And I know I'm suffering as a result, but I genuinely don't know how to fix it. To be clear, it's not like there is no joy in my life. My family brings me great joy, and my children are precious to me. But I know the things that fall into the love/treasure/never forget categories would consistently mean shared experiences with others and/or things that cost money that I can't consistently spend.

So I guess my question is, how do you live a good, joy-filled life (which, for me, and it seems for both of you, means meaningful community and experiences) with so many constraints? I know that my kids won't always be little, but "just wait a few years" doesn't feel like a particularly comforting answer to the sadness and loneliness I'm feeling now. There may not be a good answer to what I'm feeling, and that's OK--I appreciate you holding space for me and the challenging season I find myself in. I'm always appreciative to both of you for your work and your perspectives--in and outside of politics.

Gratefully,
Kristen

Kristen categorized this message as being about our conversations “mostly outside of politics.” Since I read her note, I keep thinking that everything she says here gets to the heart of the core political arguments we’re having right now:

• What makes a good life?

• Why does it seem like other people have more access to a good life than I have?

• Why does everything feel so hard?

• Why do time and money and camaraderie feel in such short supply?

• I’m doing everything I can; why doesn’t it feel like enough?

I don’t have answers. I do have a few observations.

What makes a good life?

Kristen nailed my response: meaningful community. I want to have fun and memorable experiences, but mostly as vehicles for deepening my relationships. I read an essay last week that I keep thinking about entitled “Do you actually have friends? If you’re meeting up for a coffee, probably not.” The piece is more nuanced than the title might suggest, but it underscores something I’ve found to be true: if we aren’t having new experiences with other people, it’s hard to sustain and impossible to deepen the relationships.

Experiences can take a lot of different forms (playing cards is my favorite form, which costs only time), but they are necessary to community. And, for me, community is necessary to a good life. I’m an introvert, but I cannot and do not want to go it alone.

Where are we letting each other down socially and structurally?

Time and money are such tender topics for all of us. It’s so hard to remember that every single person’s resources result from an opaque mix of agency and circumstance. Did you inherit money? Are you saddled with someone else’s debt? Do you happen to have a flexible supervisor, or did luck give you a stickler? In her specific case, Kristen nails it again: time and money are different for Kristen than for me because of where we each live.

Sarah and I often talk about questions we get about our incomes (Can I ask you something? How do you make a living from a podcast?). So much of our ability to do what we do boils down to living in Kentucky. Housing is cheaper for me than for Kristen. Childcare is cheaper for me than for Kristen. I might make less money than many people in our audience but have more disposable income because my cost of living is relatively low.

Place impacts time, too. Sarah explains that she lives in a 15-minute town. Just about anywhere she wants to go, she can get in a car and be there, parked (usually for free), in 15 minutes. That’s not quite true for me, but I can get anything I might need in a 15-minute drive. Whenever I visit a large city, as much as I enjoy the many perks, everything seems harder than in my life.

Kristen shouldn’t have to wait a few years until her kids are older to have a community. That is bananas. It is also what many of us do (including me! I didn’t start forming real, durable community around me until Jane was in kindergarten). Why? When your kids start school, there is a public policy solution to support the rest of your life. It gives back time, money, and energy, increasing the capacity of you and people in a similar stage of life.

Speaking of capacity, managing a chronic healthcare condition is, for the vast majority of people in this country, practically a full-time job. It is expensive. It is stressful. It requires Herculean resilience just to navigate systems to meet your most basic needs.

I’m all for conversations about individual priorities, choices, and agency. I don’t want to leave the social fabric’s role behind. I interpret much of what’s happening in the U.S. today as a collective scream over how more of us can have a good life.

What can I do?

I don’t mean, “Let’s give up until we have a more functional childcare system/healthcare system/housing/everything!” There are steps we can take, right now, to help each other. Kristen took steps by sending this message: thinking about what makes a good life, identifying how she’s hearing us answer that question, leaning forward with the brave can I ask you something? These are risks in service of connection, and being willing to take risks in service of connection is our sharpest tool.

Another listener similarly took risks in service of connection this week when she asked me about the prices for products and experiences Sarah and I advertise. Her question caused me to pause, organize, and share my thoughts, which opened up some candid, fruitful, inspiring discussion.

Risk-taking is my best advice for building community in all circumstances. Be willing to ask the question, to say something real, to follow up, to share your own tenderness. All of that invites others to do the same.

Beyond that, others write more specifically and skillfully than I can about practical, affordable steps to building community and having meaningful experiences with your people:

• Kat Vellos’s “We Should Get Together” is a must-read newsletter for me, and I’ve bought and loved her Better Connections Calendar.

• I liked Shannan Martin’s Start with Hello so much that I wrote this endorsement: "Fellow wallflowers, Shannan Martin has written our guide to come to the dance floor in a way that feels possible, alluring, and bursting with potential. In terms that are both poetic and practical, Shannan makes a compelling case that we all can find our people and our places in community. Start with Hello invites us to see the people around us as whole and generous and just waiting to be known and loved. You'll want to mark up your copy and pass it to a neighbor."

• Laura Tremaine’s books (Share Your Stuff and The Life Council) are go-tos for me. I recommend them constantly. I made my daughters read them.

• Anna Goldfarb’s Modern Friendship is fantastic. I think about the taxonomy of friendship she lays out often. My daughter, Jane, is reading it right now and marking it up as she goes. You can hear us discuss the book with Anna in this episode.

I value all of the people trying to help answer Kristen’s questions so much, and I value the people in my own life who’ve been willing to say can I ask you something? I especially value the people who reach back to me: my friends who say yes to dinner where we all just bring something we like, yes to seeing a play, yes to card games, yes to taking a walk in a cemetery (not an exaggeration; it’s on my calendar right now), yes to debriefing a meeting at a Mexican restaurant, yes to working through this deck of conversation cards. I especially value the people who say yes to me and then start asking me: Would you like to come over for cupcakes? What if we watch Survivor together? I need to pick out a new couch; want to go look at options with me? Do you need anything from Target or want to go? These are the bricks for meaningful communities.

Like Kristen, I think we’re all out here trying our best and wanting other people to see that and acknowledge it and embrace us in the process. We want other people to allow us to see and acknowledge and embrace them. And we need our politics to provide a landscape where that’s true and possible and a little easier for everyone. Again, I don’t have all the answers, but I hope that, like Kristen, I’m willing to lean forward and pursue the questions.

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More to Say About the Continuing Resolution

We have More to Say than can fit in two podcast episodes a week these days. If you want to hear Sarah and Beth’s thoughts about the Senate vote on the continuing resolution this week, you can hear that conversation here.

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If you're struggling to make sense of the latest Middle East headlines—from Hamas hostage negotiations to West Bank escalation, Kurdish-Israeli alliances, Syrian violence, and Houthi attacks—our Tuesday conversation with Kerry Anderson provides valuable context. Kerry, our resident Middle East expert and membership editor at War on the Rocks, helped Sarah unpack these complex regional developments, including Syria's post-Assad challenges and what US strikes in Yemen might signal about Iran relations. It's a helpful overview if you're trying to understand this rapidly evolving situation.

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Something Nice to Take You Into the Weekend

A little ode from

Penn & Kim Holderness

to Sarah’s new love:

theholdernessfamily

A post shared by @theholdernessfamily

What We’re Reading and Listening To This Week

• Sarah: Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke

• Beth:

  • Hate Won't Win by Mallory McMorrow

  • Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

  • Good Enough by Kate Bowler

• Alise: When I want a real escape, I check out what is popular in YA fiction. Right now, I'm enjoying The Inheritance Games series by Jennifer Lynn Barnes.

• Maggie: Healing the Heart of Democracy: the courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit by Parker Palmer

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