My wife Kelley and I got married in the summer of 2018 overlooking Lake Michigan in a beautiful venue in Harbor Springs, Michigan. Two weeks later, we were scheduled to load up a truck and head down to St. Louis to start a new job and, in many ways, a new life. Given this schedule, we decided earlier in the year to delay our honeymoon until the following summer — what would feel like a long-awaited trip to northern Spain, just a few months before the world locked down.

After flying into Barcelona and spending a few days in the city, we slowly trekked north and west throughout small towns up through the mountains. We sat in the town square of Pamplona, where Hemingway first captured the raw experiences that eventually made their way into The Sun Also Rises. We drove through mountain roads, only to find out weeks later, after receiving a Spanish traffic ticket, that those roads were monitored by cameras

One of the most memorable moments of the trip, though, came when we landed at the coastal destination of San Sebastian, widely known for its culinary scene. Before taking off, we asked a few friends where to eat while over there. Two of our chef friends mentioned Mugaritz — the brainchild of Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz and, at one point, one of the top five restaurants in the world.

The restaurant was set just outside of town, nestled into the hills, and thus required a short drive up onto the farm-surrounded property. Walking into the restaurant, it was clear that the sheer number of people in the kitchen — both their lab for food innovation and the place where they prepared our meals — far outpaced the number of guests sitting down for the meal. It was a moment of culinary luxury I had not experienced before, nor since.

I’ll be honest, there are very few details of that meal I can remember other than a few dishes — even those memories are already a bit vague. But one moment in particular stands out, one particular course. Right in the middle of the meal, our waiter brought over two bottles of wine and poured a small sample from each into our glasses. Just before leaving the table, she left us with a small fact about the wines to discuss.

“I must tell you a bit about two wines you are sampling. Each comes from the same vineyard, the same soil, and the same vines. They were released just a few years apart. There is one thing that distinguishes them that I must leave you with. One of them was produced by a father. The other was made by his son. Please take some time to enjoy these creations, and I look forward to hearing from each of you which you think was which... and why.”

The Decentering of Beautiful Moments

In the years since that trip, I have often struggled to explain why that moment in particular stood out. Honestly, I don’t think it was the wine, since I can’t tell you any details about the actual product.

What I do keep landing on was that this moment had a kind of beauty. It was an experience that pulled something out of us. We had a kind of conversation — this time about each of our parents, and what it means to find yourself apart from one’s lineage — that wouldn’t have happened over any glass of wine without that context outlined.

In her 1998 Tanner Lecture, On Beauty and Being Just, Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry argues that beautiful things do just this to us. They decenter us from our own concerns, and in doing so, create in us a desire to share these moments with others. In other words, doing exactly what I am doing here. The particulars of that product and experience — in this case, two glasses of wine, the setting in which it occurred, and the story told around the product — created something beautiful and, in us, something new.

A similar moment — in this case about beauty’s removal — occurs in Amor Towles’ novel A Gentleman in Moscow. The book chronicles the story of the Count, a former aristocrat long confined to house arrest in a Moscow hotel in the early 1900s, with the Russian Revolution raging outside.

Sitting down to a meal, his waiter Aubrey asks whether the Count will be having a glass of wine to complement his dinner. The Count responds:

“Absolutely. A bottle of the San Lorenzo Barolo, 1912.”

“Will you be having the red or the white?”

“A Barolo,” the Count explained as helpfully as he could, “is a full-bodied red from northern Italy. As such, it is the perfect accompaniment to the osso buco of Milan.”

“So then, you will be having the red.”

Dismayed at the interaction and the ongoing inability to order the bottle, Aubrey finally demurs and allows the Count to come with him to the wine cellar in the basement. Towles’ novel continues:

With its archways of brick and its cool, dark climate, the Metropol’s wine cellar recalled the somber beauty of a catacomb. Only, instead of sarcophagi bearing the likenesses of saints, receding into the far reaches of the chamber were rows of racks laden with bottles of wine. Here was assembled a staggering collection of Cabernets and Chardonnays, Rieslings and Syrahs, ports and Madeiras—a century of vintages from across the continent of Europe. All told, there were almost ten thousand cases. More than a hundred thousand bottles. And every one of them without a label.

All the detail of each particular label, each mark of individuality that stood in contrast to the guiding ideology of the Russian system, had been removed. When I first read this, I imagined the details of our own glasses of wine disappearing — that father-son pairing, each needing to make their own mark on the world. I imagined those paper labels falling from bottles, and with them the loss of those provoked conversations that could never occur at tables like ours, sitting on the outskirts of San Sebastian, Spain.

What does it take to make beauty in the market?

In his book, The Score, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen uses wine as an example of how metrics can push us away from such individuality and the corresponding beauty of the product or even the moment. In an attempt to objectively assess wine, professional wine tasters follow a set of rules, including the requirement to taste wine without food. This has a problem though:

For many people, much of the joy of wine is how it reacts with food. Wine can change and shift with every sip, reacting dynamically to different bites. And there are different relationships it can have with food; it can be a sharp contrast or a resonant match. But this level of variability would create incredible difficulties for an official scoring process. How could you score a “best” wine if one is incredibly good with tomato sauces but kind of listless with anything else, and then rank it against a wine that is moderately good with every food? So we create an artificially stabilized context; we cut out the variability. We score wine without food. But if we follow that wine-scoring system, we have implicitly adopted a value choice: that objective scoring is more important than the relationship between wine and food.

And that value choice feeds back into the wine itself. The wine-scoring system is transforming the winemaking world, pushing it toward “fruit bombs”—wines with big, bombastic flavors. And since high scores mean better sales, many winemakers have started making more and more fruit bombs. But those wines, though they perform better in the sterile, controlled environment of the wine-scoring process, usually don’t react in interesting ways to food. If you grow up in the era of these new fruit bombs, though, you might never know that wine could react so powerfully and variably to food. The wine-scoring system has written itself into reality by transforming the wine-growing industry, blotting out dynamic wines and filling the world with stable and unreactive ones.

In wine, a certain kind of market pressure pushes toward a more homogenous product. While perhaps not as extreme as all products being red or white, it surely does not move toward the kind of attention to how a father and son might produce a product differently.

What these reflections suggest is that beauty has something particular to it, something individual. We crave beauty, but we do not have mass ways to score it. Beauty arises in the moment, particular to the conditions in which it is found – this wine with that morsel of food.

We desire, I think, those moments like Kelley and I had in San Sebastian. We want films, books, and experiences that push us into something new, something unexpected, beyond and apart from any metric or scoring system. We want to be moved. The question is how we learn to build the moments, and what we do to pull people in. And whether, or in what ways, the market can reward what seems fundamentally individual and particular.

I keep thinking of James Beard winner Loryn Nalic’s point from our last essay that someone bringing something beautiful to the market has to have the posture of a teacher. We sometimes have to be told certain things are worth paying attention to. The sommelier points our attention to the father-son differences. The Count had to be aware of possible differences across vintages to know what to notice, especially in its absence. The entrepreneur going to market with beauty faces a challenge — one requiring the posture of the teacher, and perhaps needing to rely on patience to reach resonance — but I think the world needs the provocative beauty just as much as, if not more than, it needs the popular.

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Part 1: “The Market Alignment Problem”

• Chapter 1 - The Craft of Building Deep Value (Part I, Part II)

• Chapter 2 - Misalignment in the Market 1: Bullshit over Truth

• Chapter 3 - Misalignment in the Market 2: Popularity over Beauty

• Chapter 4 - Misalignment in the Market 3: Indifference over Good

Part 2: “Moral Imagination and Action”

• Chapter 5 - The Attention of Craft: Awareness, Insight, and Complexity

• Chapter 6 - The Posture of Craft: Ambition, Curiosity, and Courage

Part 3: “The Architecture of Craft”

• Chapter 7 - Community

• Chapter 8 - Limits

• Chapter 9 - Control

• Chapter 10 - Patience

• Chapter 11 - Choice

• Chapter 12 - Voice

At its core, Frankfurt wanted to clarify the distinction between a “liar” and what he calls the conveyor of bullshit. This distinction hinged on an individual’s relationship to truth. He wrote:

“Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all.”

As I work on this broader project about the “craft” of business as the pursuit of something good, true, and beautiful within a broader market system, it’s hard to read Frankfurt’s work without thinking about a tension between market success and a broader set of values. In this case, the pull toward bullshit pushes against the conveying of something true – the first of three key tensions for the craftsperson.

Looking around, it is easy to find evidence of this cross-pressure. In his book Superbloom, for example, the technology theorist Nicholas Carr draws our attention to an MIT study in which researchers found that, among 126,000 stories, false ones were 70% more likely to be retweeted. Look to traditional media, and you can find evidence of stories optimized for clicks and the corresponding advertising revenue. For a committed bullshitter, the capture of attention is the ultimate currency, regardless of the truth. Bullshitters are neither lying nor telling the truth: what is true simply doesn’t matter. All that matters are the clicks.

For those of us who care about delivering something true, we must be attentive to the pull of bullshit, especially when markets seem so often to reward it.

The Truth of a Life

Tomorrow, I turn 43. While not a milestone birthday, this number has a kind of middle-aged normalcy. Look no further than a subtle shift in my own attention over the last few years to a set of topics I assumed were worthy of people far my senior: retirement funds, raising children with attention, the benefits of resistance training for longevity.

On birthdays, I find my attention migrating to questions of the quality of the life I have lived. But to know whether that life is well lived requires me being clear on the roles I want to play, and the values I want to lean into, something I wrote about previously when discussing family mission statements.

While Frankfurt’s distinction concerned claims—statements that are true or false—there is a broader sense of truth that involves being faithful to a given role. Let’s say, for example, that I believe it is important to be a good father. I even show up at every school pick-up and drop-off. But what if, as soon as I hop in the car, I jump back on the phone and fail to attend to their needs? In this way, I am behaving in ways that suggest I care more about being perceived as family-oriented than actually being true to this role. In many ways, this is no different than seeking out clicks.

But even if we remain committed to living a life authentic to our values, the difficulty is that our roles are rarely singular. My colleague Caitlyn Collins has written about this beautifully in outlining the inherent conflict between our work and parenting ideals, something that is often even more acute for working mothers. Looking at the example above, the authentic version of my story is not that I don’t care about being a good dad, but rather I feel pulled between two roles. I want to be a good dad, but I also want to be good at my job. So, do I pick up the phone? What does it mean to be true to a life that balances a multitude of goods in play?

The Craft of Truth in a Market of Bullshit

If personal decisions in life require balancing trade-offs among competing values, shouldn’t we expect the same of any actor in the market? It is not that a retweet or a viral news article is bad, but wouldn’t something be missing if these artifacts were assessed only by their shareability, or the company merely by its profit?

Late last month, I recorded an interview with three chefs for the upcoming season of The Owner’s Box. One of these chefs is Loryn Nalic of Balkan Treat Box, the recent winner of the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest. One thing that came up in our conversation was how they named their Bosnian dishes. Loryn places an importance on capturing the history of a dish through its name (ćevapi instead of its easier-to-understand title of a flatbread with sausage) and capturing its authentic flavors, even if that could create commercial challenges:

For us, it was important to stick to the flavors and stick to what the food is actually called. We’re in the entertainment business, but there’s also education that happens... it takes a lot of travel and connections to the region to make sure that if I’m going to bring a dish or flavor over, I’ve learned it as well as I can from the people who have been doing it far longer than I have. That’s something we did from the start, and it has served us really well.

Institutionally, a move to pursue craft is a push against the market’s tendency, in Carr’s terms, to merely mine our dysfunctional desire for novelty. But nor can it ignore these impulses altogether. We want a newspaper reporter to care deeply about – here the word is again – their craft. But we also want a good story to be read, which making happen is a craft in itself.

For Loryn and Balkan Treat Box, this requires taking on the role of educator alongside entertainer. And in doing so, they have navigated this potential trade-off to find critical and commercial success.

Perhaps then craft requires balancing the cultivation of attention in the market with the development of a high-quality dish. An idealist might miss the former for the latter, believing that if they build it, others will come. But a bullshitter might be so consumed by the desire to capture attention that they miss a deeper joy that comes from pursuing and conveying something authentic and worth preserving.

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Part 1: “The Market Alignment Problem”

• Chapter 1 - The Craft of Building Deep Value (Part I, Part II)

• Chapter 2 - Misalignment in the Market 1: Bullshit over Truth

• Chapter 3 - Misalignment in the Market 2: Popularity over Beauty

• Chapter 4 - Misalignment in the Market 3: Indifference over Good

Part 2: “Moral Imagination and Action”

• Chapter 5 - The Attention of Craft: Awareness, Insight, and Complexity

• Chapter 6 - The Posture of Craft: Ambition, Curiosity, and Courage

Part 3: “The Architecture of Craft”

• Chapter 7 - Community

• Chapter 8 - Limits

• Chapter 9 - Control

• Chapter 10 - Patience

• Chapter 11 - Choice

• Chapter 12 - Voice

This summer, I caught World Cup fever. Every night, Fitz (age 5), Archer (age 3), and I would walk over to a small corner park in our St. Louis neighborhood, with its weathered soccer goal, to play “World Cup.” Fitz always got to be Messi. Archer would battle and lose for the same role before settling for Mbappé. I got whatever was left over. To avoid tears, I lost every single game.

While not on their radar, one part of my interest in soccer this summer was understanding the fanbase’s disillusionment in the sport’s governing body, FIFA. The other night, over drinks with an investor friend of mine, we got to discussing the addition of the hydration break in each half and the extended halftime show for the final game.

It was, by FIFA, a clear attempt to increase the number of advertisements and thus money pulled from the organizing group.

On that count, it worked. 2026 media rights topped $4B, up more than 20% on 2022

How should we assess this move? From a financial standpoint, it clearly works – at least in the short run for the group that runs it (FIFA, a non-profit at that). From a decision-rights standpoint, regardless of what aghast fans think, FIFA seems free to do whatever it wants, even if it also risks losing its fanbase. For my friend, considered from an enterprise value standpoint, the calculation is mathematically complex (an increase in revenue against the potential loss of future fans) but perhaps philosophically straightforward.

That said, the more complex question is whether this means some kind of diminishment of the beauty of the game, and whether that should matter when considering the move.

Looking back to the previous essay, this “beauty of the game” value as distinct from enterprise calculation might fit into what the philosopher of games, C Thi Nguyen, calls a value that resists easy counting.

Overlapping Goods

As soon as one identifies different kinds of values, one natural question is how much they overlap. To put a finer point on this, let’s consider one more example from Nguyen’s book, The Score. The author starts by arguing that one particular metric – health or human longevity – is clearly something we should value. But, in prioritizing that over all other things, we run the risk of diminishing other values that sit orthogonal to that good. Here he outlines that point in particular:

We also lose something when we avoid saturated fats, but those losses are harder to measure. Suppose our country has a long and rich tradition of cooking based around saturated fats—butter, cheese, animal fat. If we focused on cutting saturated fats, we could lose touch with our culinary traditions, disconnect from our food heritage. We could lose out on some profound culinary joys. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care about lifespan and heart attack rates. Those things are absolutely important. I’m just saying that the other stuff is important, too—but they tend to be drowned out because they’re harder to count. Tradition, community, culinary joy—I think a lot of us are tempted to call such things “intangibles.” But actually, what’s more tangible than a good cheese or a heartwarming fondue party with your friends?

If two goods – health and tradition, in this case– overlap fully, then there is no issue in pursuing one fully. But if they diverge, the choice is much more difficult. FIFA hydration breaks may be good for the organization’s bottom line, but could they also come at the loss of something more subtle – and thus fragment what might be a simple win-win?

It is easy to calculate the lost revenue from fewer ads. But how does one measure the “cost” to the game of added hydration breaks? Can or should we measure the diminishment of the sport itself?

I have mentioned this tension in other writing, but it’s worth sketching out here more directly. Think of this as two circles. One circle represents a financial value. The other circle encompasses non-financial value – things like goodness, truth, and beauty. Any choice sits in some position relative to that landscape of overlap.

It gets more complex, however, when non-financial values are not singular but compete with one another. I have framed the non-financial value as a potential loss of the game’s integrity, but what if an alternative way to think about it is protecting player health? Or, let’s say this move was run in women’s soccer where the pay is notoriously lower. In this case, running ads might serve the goal of increasing player pay and closing the gap with their male counterparts. In this way, as shown below, non-financial goals are not singular, nor are they even defined the same. They compete on the same landscape.

How overlapping these circles seem will make a difference for how one considers trade-offs. Interestingly enough, research on the moral psychology of business students suggests that the more time people spend in the market, the less attentive they are to the moral dimension. One study from the Aspen Institute found that people came into business school with the assumption that the purpose of business was to make products that address a given challenge for a particular customer – a kind of social value. When they come out? The purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value – a result that the famous economist Milton Friedman would no doubt be pleased to hear from the grave.

What is primary, and how important is the non-overlap?

That night over drinks, another friend around the table was a doctor and neurological researcher. As we talked about the non-financial good of the beauty of the game, his mind wandered to the non-financial values of his field. In his world, the value is less aesthetic but arguably more consequential: human health.

In discussing his field, I flippantly named this as a secondary value that those in his profession have to pay attention to beyond just how the hospital performs. Rightly so, he quickly pointed out that secondary is the wrong framing. For his guild, this non-financial value is primary and worth protecting at all costs.

This then is the other critical question. Beyond their overlap, what kinds of values should be protected even when they run into conflict with financial outcomes? What other values are nice-to-have but ultimately a matter of personal choice? This impulse seems to be at the core of the pushback from the European governing body of soccer when FIFA recently announced plans to sell a minority stake of the World Cup to a private investor group:

“The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade – especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially. None of us are the owners of football. It is not Fifa’s to sell.”

As my boys and I walked home from our makeshift soccer field, christened with sweat and pasted with blades of grass, was I mourning a loss of something in the game they will never feel – mere nostalgia? As with anything in evolution, we need to learn to discern what is worth protecting. This is craft. It resists the pull to see the financial arc of the universe as inherently bending toward justice, while simultaneously avoiding the trap of baseless nostalgia. It is hard, beautiful work.

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Part 1: “The Market Alignment Problem”

• Chapter 1 - The Craft of Building Deep Value (Part I, Part II)

• Chapter 2 - Misalignment in the Market 1: Bullshit over Truth

• Chapter 3 - Misalignment in the Market 2: Popularity over Beauty

• Chapter 4 - Misalignment in the Market 3: Indifference over Good

Part 2: “Moral Imagination and Action”

• Chapter 5 - The Attention of Craft: Awareness, Insight, and Complexity

• Chapter 6 - The Posture of Craft: Ambition, Curiosity, and Courage

Part 3: “The Architecture of Craft”

• Chapter 7 - Community

• Chapter 8 - Limits

• Chapter 9 - Control

• Chapter 10 - Patience

• Chapter 11 - Choice

• Chapter 12 - Voice

Still, the contrast between that possibility and the observed long march of people unloading from the Metra trains coming back from the city to my Chicago suburb after punching a clock for a middle-management job, eyes bleary, was stark. What was I to make of this disconnect?

If the meaning of work is one puzzle, what the market produces provides another. Take a recent trip, for example. I drafted this piece from the airport in Denver, getting ready to board a flight home. When I did so, I hopped on a Boeing 737, flew halfway around the country, and landed 90 minutes later, all of it innovation emerging from this market system.

At the same time, on my way to that same airport, I drove past a movie theater showing yet another superhero sequel. In the terminal, I walked past newsstand after newsstand, with papers optimized for clickbait rather than conveying the full story. And as I waited to board, I sat under a billboard for DraftKings, one of the fastest-growing addictions in modern history.

How is it that the same market that enables individuals to create things of such deep value is also the one that offers up so much trash? Why is it so full of potential meaning but lacking in practice?

Is There Craft in Making Something of Deep Value?

One of my favorite non-fiction reads of the past year is The Score by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. Nguyen is one of the leading philosophers of games. In this project, he explores how the systems that rate and rank things — systems like the market — go on to impact us as people.

The book is filled with numerous fascinating examples, from the ways college ranking systems flatten out creative institutional design to wine scoring done "objectively" — tasted without food — and how that has fueled the proliferation of big fruit bomb wines.

In making his case, Nguyen suggests that one of the benefits of the market — the ability to forge clarity in a world of irreducible nuance — is itself the source of its liability. He writes:

Mechanical scoring systems offer us a trade-off. We get automatic agreement by using a mechanical evaluation procedure, but there is a price to be paid for that automatic convergence. Mechanical scoring systems will tend to ignore things that are hard and subtle to count. They will tend to change what we score—and what we care about—to what is easy to count mechanically.

These subtle values are often slippery goods. They seem to slide between our fingers the moment we try to grasp them. But the possibility of offering such subtlety is exactly what has drawn me to this creative path, one that often and sometimes inevitably has to take shape inside a market. Making a wine that strikes the consumer as different, distinct, and of real value. Building a college or university that shapes students in deeply valuable ways. Even building a life, a family, a vocation is its own kind of unsteady project.

So what is this thing that I think is so worth pursuing, and why is it so at risk of getting away from us? What does it mean to build something of deep value, and how might this craft be cultivated?

Philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to the modern day, have attempted to name this kind of deep value: the good, the true, and the beautiful. Ultimately, my interest in the good life, whether as an individual or as an institution, is centered on the project of finding out whether it is possible to build around such virtues. I want to know if these subtle, slippery values will inevitably be squeezed out in a market that rewards mechanical metrics of winning and losing, and if not, what can be done about it.

In the end, I have come to believe doing this work is hard, but not impossible. Building something of deep value in a system whose bent is not always toward justice, beauty, and truth is a kind of craft. And, like any craft, it has to be cultivated, refined, and disciplined.

A Shared Project

Soon after Kelley and I hoisted a set of boxes onto a moving truck and headed south to start a life together in St. Louis, a dear friend, Rick, introduced me to Abram Van Engen. Abram is the Stanley Elkin Professor of the Humanities at WashU and the Director of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. He is a thinker I deeply admire and a close friend.

A few years into my time at WashU, when I was presented with the opportunity to co-teach a class focused on the moral dimensions of the market and what can be learned through engagement with literature (more on that class here), I jumped at the chance.

Over the last few years, then, Abram and I have explored many of these questions together. He often draws deeply from history and literature; I bring experience from the market and a training in social science. Over the last year, we have begun to work toward pulling that material into a broader book — one on the craft of seeking the good, the true, and the beautiful in a market that does not always reward these virtues.

Over the next 12 short essays, coming out every week or so, we hope to explore those issues with you. We will ask what we can learn from Benjamin Franklin’s view of thrift and reputation. We will dig into the value we find in constraints pointed to by the poet who handcuffs their language. We will learn from philosophers like Harry Frankfurt on why he thinks we reward bullshit over truth, and pull lessons from fictional characters in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! as they build on the frontier.

In the end, we hope to identify and explicate a set of levers that one might pull if they are interested in pursuing this craft, individually or institutionally. You can think of these as mini-chapters for this broader book project, but, more broadly, as a space to explore these issues together. I say “together” intentionally, as I hope we learn from you just as much as we share what we have learned.

The roadmap of this exploration is below, though I am sure some chapters might take more than an essay to explore. I hope you will read along and let us know what you think. Most importantly, I hope we explore together. At the end of the day, this market — one that seems to be changing more quickly than we might feel comfortable — is what we inhabit, and learning the craft of building something beautiful feels like a deeply valuable project.

Peter & Abram

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Part 1: “The Market Alignment Problem”

• Chapter 1 - The Craft of Building Deep Value

• Chapter 2 - Misalignment in the Market 1: Bullshit over Truth

• Chapter 3 - Misalignment in the Market 2: Popularity over Beauty

• Chapter 4 - Misalignment in the Market 3: Indifference over Good

Part 2: “Moral Imagination and Action”

• Chapter 5 - The Attention of Craft: Awareness, Insight, and Complexity

• Chapter 6 - The Posture of Craft: Ambition, Curiosity, and Courage

Part 3: “The Architecture of Craft”

• Chapter 7 - Community

• Chapter 8 - Limits

• Chapter 9 - Control

• Chapter 10 - Patience

• Chapter 11 - Choice

• Chapter 12 - Voice

1 January 2025

Somewhere in the air between Chicago and Colorado

I write to you from the last leg of an epically joyous and equally exhausting three-part holiday vacation. Note to self (and Kelley): let’s limit this trip to two parts next year. This morning, in the midst of our two boys running relay races through the Home Alone flag hallway at ORD, a dear friend Tarek texted me the following Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, one that Nicholas Thompson had shared earlier that day:

There is a particular joy in a friend who knows you well. As Tarek clearly understood, the idea that life’s limits might give it shape rather than steal from it has been quietly working on me all year.

Still Grounded in Finitude, One Decade Later

Just over 10 years ago, feeling a bit aimless personally and professionally, I made two commitments. One was to start counseling with a therapist, Kirk Brink, recommended by a dear friend, Kat Vinson. The other was to get a dog. I named him Emerson, in no small part because of inspiring quotes like the one above. This new day, I felt then at the start of my third decade, and today, solidly into my fourth, is too dear to waste.

Too dear to waste... nothing like the start of a New Year to remind us of that.

Other than the year of committing myself to running every day (Achilles be damned...), I have never been a big resolution person. I have, however, long loved the start of the new year for its feeling of a deep well of potential. It breeds a kind of optimism that lets you read a 2025 Emersonian text and believe that you can will it into action.

Somewhat unique to this year, the growing sense of time’s limits does make the desire to seize the day more pressing. My dad passed away in August from Lewy Body dementia at the age of 74. That counselor, Dr. Brink, who ended up making a massive impact on my life, also met his end this past month. It is strange to lose two people who knew and held so much of your story. It is humbling how much we are carried by feeble memory, by what slips through our own fingers, and by the inevitable stumbles of those who walk alongside us.

And yet, there still is an opportunity to live as Emerson called us. But what might this mean?

My friend and collaborator on this blog, Abram, and I started this year to work on a book project, some of which we will share here over the next year. At the core of the project is the question of whether the constraint that every one of us faces, of time, of resources, of attention, might actually be that which saves us.

This is likely the project I need to work on. I have long fought against constraints. Even the decade-old initiation into action of that somewhat aimless, counselor-seeking, and Emerson-trained individual was likely motivated, in part, by attention to the gap between life’s ambitions and lived realities.

Perhaps my “resolution” this year, if you can call it that, is not to fruitlessly wish away the gap but to thoughtfully inhabit it. In this way, I find myself inspired by writers like Oliver Burkeman, who in his book Four Thousand Weeks suggests, “the finite nature of human life is not a problem to be overcome, but a condition that gives life its shape and urgency.”

What I’m Choosing to Limit This Year

So what does it look like to form habits and routines that help one lean into Emerson’s call? At 42, with life’s limits entirely in view, it means choosing practices that wake me up rather than lull me back to sleep. Three keystone practices anchor this posture at the start of a new year.

For me, it means a renewed commitment to regular writing. Writing for me is the practice of learning how to think again through a clash of unformed ideas with the written page. In a world where AI is increasingly capable of generating increasingly sophisticated written words and analysis, I want to be a person who still commits to letting the process of writing as thinking shape me more regularly. Today is day three in a row of weekly writing commitments. There is much I want to put into the world in 2026, and it begins with small commitments to process, even as I accept the limits it imposes.

Another process commitment is the continuation of a particular kind of physical development. Two of the most interesting books I read this year were tied, in part, to the emotional and psychological benefits of leaning into routines of physical fitness. Nicholas Thompson’s book The Running Ground is one man’s reckoning with his own history and a recounting of the role of regular running and commitment to physical excellence in supporting that process. Here he is on the insight this practice brings:

Running is the simplest of sports: right foot, left foot, right foot. There’s no ball to focus on, no mat to land on, no one charging toward you with their shoulder down. But the simplicity opens up complexity. As you run, your attention shifts inward. You’re just you—right foot, left foot, and whatever goes on in your mind.

It is this inward opening up that I find intoxicating about running, and one I have no plans to give up. But this year has also been one where I intentionally backed off miles and added more strength work, a rhythm shaped by another favorite book from last year, Casey Johnson’s A Physical Education. This book chronicles one woman’s move from a physical fitness rooted primarily in diet and running explicit organized around cutting weight (one I am all too familiar with) to another rooted in a commitment to developing strength.

Having made a similar pivot in my own life, no doubt informed by watching my dad’s movement disorders, the return to strength training, with its heavy weights and slow daily progress, has been grounding.

But growing in the wisdom of limits means accepting the trade-offs of such a commitment. I read Thompson and want to run a marathon under 3 hours again. I read Johnson and want to get stronger. But with two young boys, an acutely sandwiched generation year, and a finite amount of time each week, I can only optimize so many dimensions at once. I can’t run my fastest marathon while also being faster on the bike and lifting heavier weights. Maturity for me here is being okay with progress in one dimension and regression in the other, a journey that is more aspirational than accomplished.

And finally, 2026 is a year for practicing the finitude of attention. A long hobby horse of mine has been optimizing to-do lists. I hold all of my tasks in a tool called OmniFocus. Once a week, I pull a subset for things to finish in the week ahead. Then, each day, I grab an amount from that list that feels plausibly accomplishable. Finally, even with that day, channeling Oliver Burkeman’s idea of limiting work in progress, I flag only three items from that list, knowing I will only be able to do so much at once.

And yet, the digital tools I use tend to tempt me to rage against them. Drafts, one of my favorite Mac apps, for example, gives me an infinite number of text pages for making notes. OmniFocus also has no embedded limits on the number of tasks I can add, the projects I can dream about, or the commitments I can lean into. Without limits, though, I add endlessly and return rarely.

But a growing to-do list of potential commitments runs directly into the finitude of any of our time. And so, this year, channeling my inner Alan Jacobs, I find myself replacing Drafts with a tool like Tot, a text editor that limits me to only seven files to focus on at any given time. If I run up against this limit, I have to choose what to do with things I said I would revisit—delete, archive, or do— rather than keep adding to an infinite list. There is real wisdom in choosing tools that acknowledge, rather than deny, the limits of our attention.

Small changes, I know. A commitment to writing as thinking. An acceptance of limitations and tradeoffs in physical development. A movement from infinite possibilities to finite attention. But that may be enough for me as I step into 2026. This year, I’m trying to live as if Emerson and Burkeman are both right: that a day, and a life, only becomes ours when we stop trying to make it infinite.

Happy New Year, friends!

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Naperville, Illinois.

Sometimes the most profound insights into the living of a rich life come at its end. My dad, David Lewis Boumgarden, passed away on August 27th, 2025, at the age of 74 after a long battle with Lewy Body Dementia. What follows below are the remarks I made at his funeral yesterday. While a bit long for a traditional newsletter, I wanted to share them with you here for those who didn’t know or were unable to be with us yesterday. For those of you who know me or him personally, I hope you find some peace in these remarks. For those who do not, I hope you see in this particular story one unique path to the rich life that we all aspire toward.

With Love,

Peter

I must begin by acknowledging the irony of being here —standing at the front of a church, sharing stories about a man who devoted 50 years of his life to this work. Big stores. Cosmic stories. Stories of love knitting together couples, standing on the edge of unfathomable promises. Stories of hope and blessing for babies welcomed into the world, doused in water and moved to wailing.

And yes, even stories like this… of endings and closings, ones that feel like they ended too soon.

But telling stories is part of how we love each other. I was reminded of this when reading a lovely Sara Rian poem sent over this last week by our good friend Heidi.

We are carried.

in bellies, in arms.

in caskets, in urns.

in grief. in memories.

our whole lives and into the next.

we are carried.

We are also carried, I sincerely believe, in the stories we share for those we love.

Now, some of these stories are humorous — like the time my dad vowed to give up sugar for Lent, only to be discovered, guilty, in his car, plowing through bag after bag of fruit snacks. Apparently, and the debate may never be settled on this, he truly believed that fruit snacks were more fruit than sugar.

Sometimes the most true and beautiful stories are small, almost mundane. I am thinking of my dad's tendency to talk to every single toll booth collector. He had to be perhaps the only person in the world to mourn the highway system's migration to human-free iPass systems.

I have been thinking about stories a lot lately because that is what many of you have been sharing with me. A few weeks ago, it had become increasingly clear to Dad's care team that we were nearing the end. My family and I live in St. Louis, so I hopped in a car with finicky air conditioning on a blistering hot summer day to head north. We had started to tell a few friends what was happening. What I received in return was the gift of story, small glimpses of the impact he had on people's lives, including each of you.

My good friend Krista texted that she always felt like she was a part of the Boumgarden family-- from the first time they met her. My friend Chris commented on the ease with which my dad smiles. My college roommate and long-time family friend, Will, sent over a memory about our families piled into a minivan driving through a seedy Chicago neighborhood, and my dad hopping out in a starched white button-down to help a man whose car had stalled.

It's remarkable how many of these stories I had forgotten, and how many of each of our touch points in life with those we love fade from view.

Still other responses were less about particular moments and more about what emerges when an abundance of snapshots takes form into a broader sense of a person.

The day after my dad passed, his and my mom's close friend from college, John Lichtenberg, wrote my entire family an email of consolation and memory. In it, he reminded us that dad was, "funny, tender, caring in a sit in the chair with you saying nothing and everything kind of way. Thoughtful and smart in ways one can only admire. Present at so many inflection points of our lives. Inquisitive. Faithful in ways that one can only hope to emulate and trust in divine forgiveness for falling short."

One of the hardest things about my dad’s disease is how it can start to strip away parts of who one is. It has felt at times like my experience with dad the last year or so has felt flattened. And because all of memory is so feeble, I have realized it takes a kind of discipline to see a whole person unflattened - their full life. This has been the gift of stories over the last few weeks, bringing forward memories that have long been held and forgotten.

These last few weeks, one movie that keeps coming back to me is the 1998 film "Pleasantville," with Toby Maguire. I'm not sure if you remember it, but the central idea of the film is that Toby's character exists in a kind of 1950s sitcom, emotionally flattened into black and white. Over the course of the film, as anyone in this town learns more about the world — through books, art, love, and music, moments both challenging and beautiful — color begins to seep into the film. Their skin moves from grey to pink. Lips pop with a color of red matching the flowers outside. In stories, the world, constantly pregnant with meaning, recovers from a kind of flatness.

As the stories tumble in, I haven't been able to get this image out of my head. And they come in so many forms. I woke up early this morning, before the storm, feeling a bit anxious about what I was going to say today, and went down to the kitchen. Sitting on the table was my dad's doctoral dissertation. It was filled with stories of his growing up, his interactions with many of you, and insights pulled from the mountains of books still piled around our house. Color.

My family has had a text thread to share photos for a slideshow my sister created this last week -- one you will see outside after the service. Mustaches at Michigan State. Young love and a growing family. Magnificent sandcastles on sandy Michigan beaches. In every photo, another part of the story that faded from view comes alive once again—beautiful splashes of color.

But as strange as it may seem, that color is not limited to moments before the disease. There is color in how, as his anxiety became more acute, he kept asking my mom how each of us kids was doing. He was attentive to those he loved, even in the midst of his own trials. Or, I recall a moment from last December when he asked my mom to pick up a new suit jacket from Nordstrom so he would look presentable on his floor for any necessary work responsibilities. He carried many of you in his heart until the day he passed away. Color, brilliant color.

I said it was ironic that I get to stand here telling stories, but perhaps it is fitting as well. My dad loved stories. Our home was, and still is, filled with mountains of books on any topic around the sun -- though with a strong bent to theology.

I think my Dad loved stories, mostly, because a good story is about the people. My wife said it best the other day. For my dad, whether sitting with his friend John navigating life's inevitable complexities in the sanctuary of a living room or chatting with a tollbooth collector as traffic piles up behind us, no detail is too small.

That holy attention is what I will remember and miss most about my dad. That is what I have heard repeated in story after story, both today and throughout the last few weeks. My dad had the gift of listening with a deep form of hospitality. When someone's personal story started to drain of color, he had the gift of attention, care, and repair. When someone like my dad sees us, carrying the knowledge that no detail is too small, that is a gift. I would venture to say that this gift is why many of you are here today.

One of the stories we all loved was Hamilton. We went to see it as a family in Chicago during peak Hamilton, sitting high up in the nosebleed seats. In one of the final scenes of the musical, and at the final moment of his life, Hamilton looks back on his life. "Legacy. What is Legacy?" he asks. "Legacy is planting seeds you will never see grow."

But grow it has. Grow in the people he has touched, the family he has grown. Grow in congregations molded, the friendships nurtured, and the spouse he loved. He carried us, but now we get to carry him.

I suppose we do this already. I was struck in looking at the comments on my sibling's posts about my dad and seeing the number of people saying things like .... "I didn't know your dad, but what I know about you...." "I didn't get to meet your father, but I see him in your life."

As a father myself, I am sad that my sons Fitz and Archer won't know Papa in many of the ways you and I know him. But I hope they can feel the ripple of his life in the way I seek to practice holy attention, from family to stranger.

Let me leave you with one final moment of color. Early last month, my own family — my wonderful wife, Kelley, and our two boys, Fitz and Archer — stopped in Naperville on our way back from Michigan. My dad had just been assigned further hospice care, so we knew it was likely the last time the boys would see him. My mom arrived early and had brought Dad to a lovely patio in the back of the building. The boys walked up and gave him a huge hug, calling out "Papa." And, he smiled, bathing in, I hope, one small piece of all he has created in this world. He greeted Kelley and me by name, and we sat together as the boys played who knows what, running around like the tornadoes of destruction they are. We ate Skinny Pop and drank sugary soda like Lent-breaking rebels. We tried, mostly failing, to communicate with words. We settled into the joy of being together on a temperate, sunny day in August. There is beauty in the mundane, to sit in the sun with those you love. There is no detail too small.

It is all of those moments we carry with us—in grief, in memories, our whole lives and into the next — just as the poet reminds us. These are the seeds of his legacy. They take shape in how we meet one another, allowing color to break through in our shared search for meaning in a world pregnant with possibility and longing for reconciliation.

We love you, Dad. We miss you, and we carry you forward.

July 2025

I have long wrestled with what kind of writing fits best in a newsletter versus other more “formal” medium -- a chapter, a journal article, a (hard to find time for, perhaps forever in the future) book. Probably spurred on by the cooler air of a few weeks in the upper Midwest, one point of clarity on that question has emerged. This space, unlike an essay or article, is where less fully formed thoughts belong. This space isn’t for polished arguments. It’s for thoughts still taking shape. Less thesis, more conversation. The kind of ideas you’d share with a friend over dinner. And don’t we all need more of that in our lives?

What also struck me is how much these reflections are shaped by where and when they’re written. Time and place leave their imprint on thought. That insight came into sharper focus as I revisited the author and friend Jeff Chu’s regular newsletter. Each of his entries, like this one noted at the top as coming from summer in Harbor Springs, is grounded, dated, and located in a particular place and time.

And this context matters. My reflections while away from the day-to-day will be distinct from thoughts that emerge as the semester winds up next month. What comes to mind here is different than my meanderings while traveling in Hong Kong later this fall. Place and time matter.

This is why I always liked the idea of a commonplace book. Marcus Aurelius used such tools to gather quotations and chronicle observations relevant to personal development. Seneca used the same concept to collect illustrative examples stumbled upon over the course of a day.

In many ways, this kind of public commonplace book is what I (we) hope to achieve here. The broad topic of this newsletter -- what it means to live a rich life -- is not one I have a clear thesis to which I am trying to convert you. But, I deeply believe in the importance of the question and what progress can be made by exploring it in conversation with you all. Perhaps some of these ideas will find their way into that future aspirational writing project; if not, I can only hope they will take form around a dinner table in your home, and thus shaping something just as meaningful.

Specific to this piece, a newsletter from Harbor Springs sings of summer rhythms. While each summer inevitably takes a unique form, one rhythm that has remained constant for for my immediate family has been a vacation with siblings and our parents.

But rhythms inevitably evolve over time. The unique rootedess of a letter from Michigan in 2025 is different than it would have been in 2015. Over the past decade, as one example, the attendees have changed. My siblings and I have each built lives with spouses and then eventually kids added to clan. This year, my dad's health prevented him from coming with the rest of us, a new and sobering shift to our routine.

Perhaps it is the intimate connection of this season to family that inevitably draws me to novels and books about family during the summer heat. In past years, this has included works by Jonathan Franzen and Marilyn Robinson. This year, my book of choice was John Seabrook's The Spinish King. Focusing on the family lore of the beloved New Yorker author, the book is a Succession-like exposé of the family history behind the frozen vegetable empire, Seabrook Farms, an organization whose patriarch was once called the Henry Ford of agriculture.

There is wisdom in learning from the functions and dysfunctions of other family systems. While my family has its own quirks, I was comforted by the relative ease of our life relative to that of the Seabrooks. Take parenting, for example. It is hard not to hear the cautionary tales as John reflects on his relationship with father. He writes:

I was grateful to my father for my excellent education, as well as for supporting my early literary efforts and life in New York. But we weren’t particularly close. I found it hard to be myself around him. We played father and son as though we were acting our parts in a Restoration comedy.

Still another generation above, John’s father had his own version of a parental rift, one shaped by the family’s rapid climb through very different social classes. It is a story I see regularly in my work with entrepreneurs and family business owners. These individuals often rise from modest beginnings, building successful businesses that give their children lives vastly different from their own.

But if that initial distance also seeded disdain for the class above, such early formation can prove difficult to shake. Here again is Seabrook on that complex relationship:

At least some of the later conflicts between my father and his father can be attributed to their belonging to different social strata. Maybe the Seabrooks came up too quickly from the lower level of the social hierarchy, and their dizzying ascent triggered a psychic case of the bends, caused not by nitrogen bubbles in the blood but champagne bubbles at the dinner table.

Having never been good at sitting the moment, July also whispers of the end of summer and advent of the upcoming academic calendar. As a college professor, I’m reminded that the futures my students are stepping into can be just as tangled with questions of class as the family dinner table dynamics of the Seabrooks.

That thought was front of mind as I read reading Nick Maggiulli’s interesting new book, The Wealth Ladder. Drawing on some light assessment of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, Nick’s book plots the different spending and saving behaviors of people of very different means. While a snoozer for some, I’m fascinated by how this data illuminates the underlying mechanics of class. Take, for example, the chart below on assets held at different wealth levels, divided between income-producing investments (stocks and bonds) and non-income-producing ones (like a car).

For Maggiulli, those differences became all the more personal when he stepped onto campus of one of the nation’s most elite higher education institutions:

I didn’t really start to understand money on a deeper level until I went to college. I was fortunate enough to get into Stanford University right as they rolled out a very generous financial aid policy. If your parents’ income was less than $100,000, you didn’t have to pay tuition, and if it was less than $60,000, you didn’t have to pay room and board. For four years I didn’t have to pay any tuition and for three of those four years I didn’t pay room and board either. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time....

There were also things related to class and etiquette. I’ll never forget the first time eating out with all my freshman hallmates at a restaurant. As the entrées started coming out, I noticed that no one was touching their food. Anytime I was with my family, I always started eating as soon as my food came because it would be hot. But as I discovered that night, eating before everyone else had their entrée was considered rude. So when my plate came, I didn’t do a thing. Then, as soon as the last entrée hit the table, it was as if a starting gun had been fired. Everyone started eating.

More relevant to those things that can drive class-mobility, Nick goes on to share his own ignorance around the importance of the sophomore year internship until running into a friend busy prepping for a set of big interviews. This moment ended up being a wake-up call, and one that got him to start acting in ways that aligned with his eventual professional path.

At the same time, exposure to certain social circles can exert its own pressure, gradually narrowing a broad range of possible futures into a single, standardized vision of what “success” is supposed to mean.

This point is echoed by current Harvard student Zoe Yu in a recent Slate essay . My colleague and friend from the Provost office shared this earlier in the week as we collectively strategized on what might be done to shape an incoming cohort of ambitious but still (hopefully) wonderfully open WashU students.

Here are a few key excerpts from the article, highlighting the strong pull many students feel toward investment banking and consulting:

Even for those students, it's not hard to understand the appeal. Consulting, finance, and tech are often the arbiters of campus prestige. From the moment a freshman steps on campus, all signs point to the highly selective student organizations that command instant peer respect. One of these clubs, the Harvard Undergraduate Consulting Group, boasts a 10 percent acceptance rate. On LinkedIn, HUCG's "analysts" and "associates"--that's the club's terminology, created to mirror the structure at actual firms--point to a "rigorous application process." Membership becomes shorthand for everything that an Ivy League student has come to value: smarts, exclusivity, social currency. Tack on the trips to New York for recruiting events and the head-spinning direct deposits from summer internships, and suddenly muddling through the uncertainty of "finding yourself" seems like an absurd detour.

I was that student not too long ago, though for me it came in graduate school rather than undergrad. MBB, a meaningless acronym prior to business school, quickly became known (and valorized) as McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group. For my 26 year old self looking to prove I had made it, a role in those firms or a tenure track position as an Ivy+ institution was a sign that I had arrived. It meant I was enough.

But Yu is right to see that such choices can also reflect individual’s outsourcing the hard work of finding meaning to other parties. At the very least, it can be the attempt to delay this process. Harvard Business School Professor Mihir Desai makes a similar point in his book, The Wisdom of Finance. Far too often, the ambitious can become addicted to optionality, judging choices as “good” simply because they keep other doors open. Yu captures this tension well as she reflects on both her classmates and her own pull toward the same pattern.

"It sort of feels like you can delay finding what it is you actually want to do for at least a couple more years," she said. At BCG, where employees can join affinity groups and athletics clubs that call back to college life, and mentors talk frequently about "exiting" the industry, the future feels indefinitely--and blissfully--on pause.

Blissfully on pause — wouldn’t that be nice?

It is still summer in Michigan, but the sunsets are starting to migrate earlier in the evening. Our annual family vacations remain on the calendar, but each of us is a touch older and the crew a bit different. There is a joy in moments where it feels like time is standing still, blissfully on pause as Yu describes. But perhaps there is greater wisdom in realizing the inevitably marching forward. Might we be more in the moment as we give up on the make-believe of a forever summer?

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Reading. Watching. Listening. Reflecting

A few materials that have caught my attention as of late.

• Time up north has made me realize I am often too plugged in. With that said, I love Austin Kleon’s recommendation of “airplane mode as a way of life” and am hoping to lean into it a bit as I return to normal life.

• Thinking a lot about Derek Thompson’s piece on the problems of people becoming increasingly less connected, what he calls the “death of partying in the USA.” What do you think? How are your social patterns different than a decade ago?

• I am so proud of my friend Ryan and his newly launched venture to address US poverty through technologies like AI. It will be great to what they can build!

• In a world of higher education that has long relied on an essay to assess learning, I have been reflecting a lot on what comes after this tool. This piece by Hua Hsu in the New Yorker is a good place to start.

• I love writing, but find it hard to carve aside time in an increasingly administrative and parental life. These lessons from Ryan Holiday were helpful for me in providing inspiration for reset rhythms as I head back into autumn.

I would love to hear what is on your mind as well! In the meantime, be well, wherever you might be!

Peter

On or about 2007, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, human character changed. Steve Jobs released the iPhone, Twitter formed, Facebook opened itself to anyone and changed its algorithm to a news feed, the cloud entered its first year, and a host of other tech breakthroughs occurred—it was “the official start date of the digital age,” John Mark Comer writes in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

Most of these changes came about in the name of efficiency. Speed. The elimination of friction, any fraction of a second, between thinking a thought and sending it out. In Superbloom (Norton, 2025), long-time techno-skeptic Nicholas Carr, author of previous books including The Shallows, joins Comer and a host of others (like The Slow Professor and How To Do Nothing) in wondering aloud what all this rush might be doing to us.

When Facebook released its News Feed, the public initially responded in rage. Previously, Facebook had required users to look up friends and sort through their posts. That took effort. A user had to think of someone, search for him or her, and discover what was what. The News Feed removed that friction. A Facebook algorithm would now decide who you saw, what you saw, and in what order. Users were pissed.

But also pleased. Facebook engagement skyrocketed. As Facebook fielded protests, its numbers boomed. Less friction meant greater use. Soon, everyone became accustomed to the feed. Now we rest contented, fed.

The change in Facebook, Carr claims, defined the era. “Facebook’s News Feed culminated the industrialization of communication,” he writes in Superbloom. “It marked the moment when machines took command of media, when the programming of culture through software routines began to feel normal and even, given the unremitting flows of information, necessary.” Trust the feed. The computer knows best.

Efficiency, however, always comes with costs. Some might assume that the delivery of a message does not change the nature or content of the message itself. Whether you send a thought through letter, telephone, email, or text, it’s still the same thought. Even that list, however, reveals how wrong such a basic idea might be. The form of communication forms the content of what we send. We don’t send in a text what we write in an email or say on the phone.

Consider ye olde handwritten letter. Here was a medium of exchange that took time and effort to send and deliver. As a result, thoughts had to be somewhat worthy of sharing. A filtering process of effort and friction slowed down the writer, created room to reflect. What did we really want to say? And why?

But email costs nothing and goes out as quickly as we can type. “You could air a thought as soon as it entered your head,” Carr writes. “Why wait?” The recipient of your latest mental process encountered it instantly, and could instantly respond. Speed. Efficiency. What could go wrong?

Anyone who has chaired a department or headed a unit, anyone who has had to clean up the mess of someone sharing every thought without thinking about it, might be able to explain. Efficiency might not, it turns out, bring about greater happiness.

Yet such happiness, Carr shows, is always the promise. From the telegraph to AI, each technological innovation has been heralded with grandiosity as the pending salvation of humanity. Tech gurus, it appears, seem to struggle with humility. Meanwhile, unintended consequences dwarf salvific promises.

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The reason, Carr relates, has to do with human nature. His book on tech is really a summary account of our species. And here are a few (unlikable) facts he reveals, based on study after study.

First, our tendency to dislike surpasses our tendency to like. We might have ninety percent in common with our neighbor, but we’ll focus on the ten percent. Moreover, in an age of social media, everyone is our neighbor. We all air opinions. We know too much. As Virginia Woolf already put it in 1927:

“The streets of any large town … are cut up into boxes, each of which is inhabited by a different human being who has put locks on his doors and bolts on his windows to ensure some privacy, yet is linked to his fellows by wires which pass overhead, by waves of sound which pour through the roof and speak aloud to him of battles and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world.”

Information now gets compiled in strange ways through our feeds. “We’ve gotten used to interpreting people as assemblages of traits, as patterns of data,” Carr writes; as human beings, alas, we fixate on the data we dislike. The closer we are, the more we hate.

Second, hate makes hay. If the algorithms want to keep us engaged, they will feed us what we oppose. Anger moves fast. Disgust compels. Carr quotes one study of Twitter that found “posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group.” We prefer to write and speak about the enemy, and the less friction to slow us down, the more readily we can do so. Complex emotions, after all, take time. Empathy requires attention. In a world of greater efficiency, time and attention are precisely what we lack.

Third—and just as distressingly—a falsehood, if repeated, becomes credible. Enter the “retweet” button. In college, I had a professor who used to tell us, jokingly, “I have said so in a loud voice three times; it must be true!” Turns out it wasn’t a joke. That is exactly how truth gets judged. And the more who go along with a falsehood, the more believable it becomes. Social media, in some ways, is tailor-made for giving in to lies. Truth is social.

These dire warnings do not make Carr a Luddite. He uses tech and likes it. He is not opposed to innovation. But Carr, unlike the innovators he examines, has a robust interest in the actual nature of human beings—and a much greater sense of our shortcomings. What are we like? How should what we are like inform the next technological advance? As he notes throughout the book, inventors have often “ignored the perversity of human psychology.”

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The inventors of AI, on which Carr focuses in the end, would seem to suffer from the same shortcoming: as becomes clear in Superbloom, an unregulated artificial intelligence could make anyone a Calvinist. Feed a Large Language Model (LLM) all that has been said and done, and what comes out the other end, probabilistically, will not prove the best of us. In 2016, Microsoft created an experimental chatbot named Tay, designed to mimic a teenager. With machine-learning techniques, Tay learned about human beings through Twitter and developed “conversational understanding.” Then Tay started to speak. Within hours, “Tay was spouting racist, sexist, and other offensive remarks.” Microsoft shut it down and apologized profusely.

Tay may have been early, and AI has greatly advanced, but the basic lesson remains: AI must regulate what goes in as well as what comes out. Those who use it seldom realize how much curation stands behind the answers AI provides. The perversity of the human heart must be checked and constrained and, if possible, filtered out. Our effortless inefficiencies require a great deal of effort we never see or assess.

It may be that human nature did not change on or about 2007. It may be that 2007 just became the year when human nature revealed itself more clearly. The technology of communication may not alter us as a species, but, as Carr observes, it does accentuate certain traits and dampen others. “That’s the tragedy of communication,” Carr writes, in summary. “When there’s too much of it, a reversal takes place. It begins to undermine the very social and personal qualities we look to it to foster.”

What’s the answer then?

Well, Carr suggests, love a little friction. It bestows many benefits.

Think back to those early days of Twitter. Before the retweet button appeared, users would copy a text, paste it, comment, and send. It took, comparatively, some work. Not much, but a little. But consider what was gained: “The time and effort required to share a tweet manually, though seemingly so small as to be inconsequential,” gave people “a moment to reconsider the message they were about to repeat, now under their own name. Once that little bit of friction was removed, people acted and reacted more impulsively. Twitter became more frenzied, more partisan, and much nastier.”

It only takes a minor inefficiency, a little bit more friction, to make us a little less perverse.

Slow down. We move too fast. If you are looking for fun and feeling groovy, the latest advance may be exactly what you need. It will certainly deliver dopamine. But if you want to experience the world, you’ll need to make the morning last. “In this environment,” Ross Douthat wrote recently, in a rather apocalyptic piece, “survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI—not going to make it.”

Carr concludes his book with the old story of Samuel Johnson attempting to disprove idealism, the philosophical idea that the whole world is contained in our minds alone, by going outside and kicking a stone. The real world, Carr says, persists. It can still resist us. And in resisting us, in offering its friction, it can teach us and bend us and better us. We may need to unplug and encounter it. It’s good, now and then, to go kicking down the cobblestones.

Abram published this piece at Arc Magazine last week. Check out Arc Mag for great content.

Universities face an existential crisis. A huge portion of the American public no longer sees their point or purpose. As a result, when the government slashes NIH funding, or cancels $400 million of contracts with Columbia, or forces the layoffs of two thousand workers at Johns Hopkins University, the broader public shrugs. Not their problem. They may even applaud a false sense of eliminating fraud. A new college closes every week, universities are freezing hiring, graduate admissions are cutting back or stopping altogether—and those who benefit from the work of higher ed do not understand why they should care.

I see various forms of response, but all of them seem aimed at the government. What I do not see is a shared campaign targeted at the public. We must return to the basics. We must explain the benefits of the work—not just for those who attend college, but for all.

Such a repositioning requires shifting the way universities present themselves to the public. For many years now, colleges have argued that they are great places to get ahead. Want a higher income? Want power? Want a place of influence? Get a university degree.

Such advertising can understandably breed resentment in the 62 percent of Americans who do not have a college degree. Why should they care when the government takes aim at Columbia?

In focusing on individual consumers, universities have left unstated their importance for society. Many of those college graduates, like doctors and chemists and engineers, are presumably, hopefully, practicing their profession for the public good. Their work improves lives. We need them.

Which means that universities are not just for individuals. Universities are for all.

Consider the Gila monster. Studying the venom of this lizard may seem like just the sort of weird and esoteric research that taxpayers shouldn’t fund. Yet such research led to the development of diabetes medicine and weight loss drugs. It takes a university to study the Gila monster, but it requires no college degree to benefit. Research universities suffer from terrible PR, but here a solution presents itself: make an ad. Show the work.

Medicine is easy to pitch, but countless products flow from university research. Another lizard, the gecko, fascinates engineers. Geckos can generate incredible forces through their toe pads, hanging upside down and sticking to walls, yet they remove their pads without leaving any residue. Most human-made adhesives are either too hard to undo (like superglue) or leave a sticky mess (like duct tape). A branch of “gecko science” aims to build better adhesives. Universities enable the product, but the product is for all. Make an ad. Show the work.

How many agricultural advances have come from universities? Scientists at the University of Tennessee have helped develop soybeans that resist pathogens. You don’t need a college degree to eat soy. Others have innovated cotton crops that fight insects. Pick a dozen more agricultural advances. Are these seeds better than a generation ago? Is your equipment more advanced? Make an ad. Show the work. Universities are for all.

President Trump’s ability to attack universities depends in part on a public that does not understand the link between higher education and basic improvements in life. Imagine an ad that focuses on a single important bridge (pick any!). Who designed it? Where were they trained? What gave them the knowledge to build it? University education enabled the bridge to be built, but no one needs a college degree to drive across it. Make an ad. Show the work.

Infrastructure, health, clinical services, basic products—these are easy wins. But we could also advertise benefits most people, thankfully, do not need. The current chair of chemistry at my university is working out ways to detect chemical weapons without being exposed to them. Do we, as a country, want to uncover agents of chemical warfare without inhaling them? Most would say yes.

Defense technology will appeal to some, cultural amenities to others. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro explains that Robert Moses amassed enormous power because he built parks. Everyone loves parks. Moses made them and defended them, and the public supported him, despite whatever else he did because he gave the people parks.

What else do people love? Zoos. Museums. Places to visit. Something to see, something to do. Guess what stands behind knowing how to nourish and conserve animals in the zoo? Universities are for all. Guess what makes an art museum, a science center, botanical gardens, or the possibility of a play? Universities are for all.

For all that the sciences matter to the improvement of human life, the first federal grant for research was given for work in the humanities. The Founding Fathers, during the American Revolution, understood the importance of history. So they granted one thousand dollars to a man named Ebenezer Hazard to collect and publish important papers—to make an archive and save history from oblivion. The work was not for him; the work he did was for all.

The key is not to divide the public into two camps, those who have gone to college and those who haven’t. We badly need everyone. (My house is held together by a series of contractors with no college degrees.) The point, instead, is to tell people, those with college degrees and without, what universities are doing for the general good. The public gains from higher ed every single day, but they seldom link the benefits to the source. We need to make that link. We need to show our work. The problem with universities is not the content, but the communication.

Who will do this? One can imagine conferences pooling money for the project. They already do so for sports. The Big Ten and the SEC spend heaps of money every semester advertising their conference. They may want to set aside a small pot of money to explain why we need a university at all. Alabama, for example, will be one of the hardest hit states under the current proposed cuts to the NIH indirect costs; football fans there should perhaps worry about the decline of their state and whether or not it’s a hospitable place to study.

Insofar as universities engage in marketing campaigns at present, they advertise primarily to consumers, not to the general public. Ads take two forms: My university is better than others and We have the best sports. Perhaps a few of these universities could band together for a shared campaign.

Private foundations and donors also might help. Those that grant funds for fellowships right now could pivot some of their money to explaining the importance of what we do. The public thinks of colleges and universities as elite other worlds with no effect on their daily lives. Yet universities have improved the lives of everyone, with or without a degree.

One effect of Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” is that he is very good at showing what already has made America great—by attempting to destroy it. American universities are a wonder of the world. Republicans and Democrats have supported federal funding for decades. Long before that, the government invested in building and spreading universities from state to state, recognizing their fundamental importance to the nation. During the Revolution itself, Founders set aside time and money for archival research.

From the beginning, universities have made America great. An assault on American universities is an attack on American society. Universities are for all. Let’s make some ads. Let’s show the work.

(Note: This piece first appeared in Arc Magazine on March 20.)

One of the joys of having a four-year-old is the opportunity to revisit classic kids’ films. On a recent Friday night, our family chose Pixar’s WALL-E, a movie that’s somehow nearly 17 years old.

Set in a distant future, Earth has been abandoned under the weight of its own waste. WALL-E, the film’s rusted, ever-curious robot protagonist, roams the barren landscape, methodically collecting garbage to curate a museum of past human life on that once-vibrant planet.

After a beautifully silent 37 minutes without dialogue (something I suspect I enjoyed more than Fitz), WALL-E is suddenly catapulted into space, landing aboard Axiom, the spaceship where humans have escaped their ruined world. Back on Earth, WALL-E had long seen Axiom’s now-dated advertisements play on repeat—glossy visions of a utopia where technology delivers everything people want, exactly when they want it, in a perfectly customized environment.

What he finds, however, is something radically different: sloth, unchecked consumption, and a society of humans physically and mentally atrophied by their own comfort. If Earth’s wasteland was bleak, this version of the future isn’t any better.

Released nearly 15 years before ChatGPT landed on our desktops, WALL-E feels like a modern Rorschach test for how we perceive technological progress. Is an AI-driven future closer to the hopeful ads WALL-E saw back on Earth, or is it more like the world he finds once he arrives?

On any given day, I find myself wavering between these two visions of what’s to come.

The Growing Role of AI in Higher Education

I’m sitting at the Amsterdam airport on my way home after spending a week in India. I had been in Mumbai, teaching and learning alongside 40 Executive MBAs as part of a leadership course in partnership with IIT-Bombay.

A week before my trip, a student emailed me with a question: Would I address the role of generative AI in leadership? Scanning my assigned readings, I quickly realized that none directly tackled the topic. Reviewing the previous year’s slides, I found the same gap.

In some ways, this oversight makes sense. Two years ago, I knew astonishingly little about ChatGPT. It had just launched the previous fall, and I hadn’t integrated AI into my work in any meaningful way. Today, though, it’s hard to imagine standing in front of a room full of executives without addressing it. The world has changed—and is changing—fast.

So, how does AI shift the context of leadership? And, more specifically to this blog, how might we consider it in the context of a rich life?

From my perspective as an educator, a few things stand out. Over the past 24 months, I’ve noticed that the overall quality of research-informed writing in my classes is both improving and homogenizing. The connecting “and” is the crucial word.

On one hand, AI-generated responses often lead to more informed writing and sharper analysis. A well-crafted prompt—like the one below on leadership—can yield thoughtful, intelligent takes on a topic. In many cases, it serves as a helpful corrective to the muddled thinking and sloppy writing that sometimes emerge in undergraduate and graduate submissions.

AND….. at their worst, these tools have a homogenizing effect on the output. On the final leg of my flight back, I finished grading 30 case submissions for another class I had taught this spring. It’s hard to overstate just how similar they are all starting to sound. We bold the same words, italicize the same concepts, and cite an increasingly similar set of references. Most concerningly, our perspectives are becoming more aligned—sometimes to the point of being bland.

At their best, these tools produce writing that is more informed and well-researched. At their worst, the submissions lack soul, voice, and personality.

Point and Counter-Point on Individual Consequences

Let me share two recent studies on AI that get to the heart of the issue.

The first study, conducted by a group of business school academics in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group, examined the impact of AI on consulting work. In this project, the researchers provided a group of consultants with access to ChatGPT and comprehensive training on how to use it effectively.

Their findings seem like a textbook case on the benefits of equipping individuals with the best tools. On average, consultants with AI access completed 12.2% more tasks and worked 25.1% faster than those without it. Even more striking, the quality of their work improved by over 40% when AI was integrated into the process.

But the most interesting insight was their argument about the frontier of tasks—some where AI outperforms humans and others where it still falls short. When AI was used on tasks beyond this conceptual human frontier—those requiring uniquely human judgment or expertise—consultants relying on AI were 19 percentage points less likely to produce correct solutions than those working without it.

In other words, the effectiveness of AI depends on the nature of the task itself.

But the frontier is not stagnant. This paper, after all, was published in 2023. Even now, just two years later, tasks once better performed by humans have increasingly moved into AI’s domain. And given the pace of technological progress, this shift will likely continue at a rate that is difficult for many of us to fully grasp.

A second study published earlier this year—first brought to my attention through a thoughtful write-up by Erik Hoel—is an important counterbalance to this optimism.

Conducted by a team of researchers, many from Microsoft, the study examines how heavy users of AI engage in the cognitive tasks central to the role of critical thinking. Their key finding? The more confidence users have in generative AI, the less they engage in such critical reasoning, as shown on the six key dimensions below. In other words, many users are leaning too heavily on AI outputs, often without sufficient scrutiny.

Take these two studies together, and you are left with a puzzle. On one hand, our ability to get things done has never been stronger. With access to a smartphone, anyone can tap into an unprecedented power of pattern recognition applied to the vast world of publicly available knowledge. On the other hand, our language is becoming more uniform, our expression more homogenized, and our critical thinking skills may be at risk of atrophying.

As a leader in higher education, I can’t help but see this as a puzzle that demands both an answer and an institutional response.

Where do we go from here?

So, how does this all tie back to the Pixar classic? Is your vision of the future closer to Anxiom’s initial pitch of our technological future or the lived experience that WALL-E encounters on his visit?

While I am by no means an expert, I want to share my working theory on this in the hope that you will do the same.

First, as an educator, I increasingly worry about what happens when AI makes it so easy to traffic in summary versus spending time with primary sources. You can think of this as my moment of shaking my fist at “kids these days.”

I’ll give you just a quick example to share what I mean. At three points in class this week, I referenced plays or novels (Junk, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) that have formed my view of the market and leadership in complex ethical situations. Call me old fashioned, but pulling a summary of these works from LLM doesn’t seem to hold a candle to the formation that happens by deep immersion with the texts. But with a summary always just a click away, I worry about our tendency to take the path less difficult and the corresponding impact on both critical thinking and human formation as a result.

Second, I worry that the benefits and drawbacks of these tools will not be distributed equally. WALL-E shows us a vision with all humans capturing the same negative consequences. In contrast, I am sure some of us will benefit a great deal by leveraging these tools. We will gain more expansive access to knowledge and augmented intelligence without losing critical thinking. What I am less sure of is whether these benefits will accrue equally.

This is often the case with technological progress. Consider the Atlantic's recent cover story on loneliness. While bemoaning the role of technology in driving us to isolation, you can also see in the data the very uneven impact of who is affected. Though we are all getting more lonely, the impact on the bottom income quartile is radically more impacted than the top 1%. Black and Hispanic Americas feel the impact more than whites. Same technologies. Significantly different consequences.

So, where does this leave me as an educator?

It is very clear to me that I need to teach my students—sometimes 18-year-olds and sometimes executives in their 40s and 50s—to effectively use these tools without being overcome by them.

But in practice, this requires very different pedagogical strategies. At times, I ask students to shut down their computers, show me their eyes, and interact with one another instead of a screen. At other times, I request that they pull out their computers and open the most up-to-date model, knowing I need to teach them to use these tools effectively.

Here is one relevant example. In class this week, I shared my use case on AI (shown below if interested) and then asked them to develop their own and share with a peer. For their upcoming final paper, stealing an idea from the economist Tyler Cowan, I am requiring them to both use AI in their paper AND submit how explicitly they did so. The students will be evaluated on the quality of this use case, and I will share all the results of all 40 use cases with one another as a way to aid learning.

But is this me being an educator on the cutting edge or merely moving us closer to Axiom’s dystopia? I am honestly not sure. On a given day, I both love and rely upon a set of tools and worry about what it will do to my thinking, let alone the four-year-old sitting next to me watching WALL-E at the house.

Yet, if we don’t simultaneously explore both the dystopian, WALL-E-like possibilities and the optimistic case for what’s possible, we risk slipping into the naïveté of blind evangelism or knee-jerk pessimism. Finding a balanced path forward is our collective task as we navigate this uncertain future.

Imagine that you have a piece of graph paper sitting in front of you. With a pencil, you draw a line from left to right and label it “time.” Then, on the left-hand side, from bottom to top you sketch another and label it "positivity." 

With this landscape in place, you start to sketch a line of your personal emotional register over time.  Life has its ups and downs, and you try to reflect that in the movement. With confidence, you draw this line looking back in time. Naively and with trepidation, you move your pencil into years yet to come.

In hopes of capturing the causes behind such shifts up or down, you then add a set of key life events– "having a baby," "marriage,” “divorce," "parent getting sick" -- what have you. At each of these events, you show a corresponding impact on the personal “positivity” line. A sick parent dips your line lower as you work through grief. Having a child and seeing them grow drives up stress as the problems get more complex; at the same time, it interjects joy, a balance of emotions that shifts over time, hence the infamous U-shaped curve of happiness. 

Beyond such personal events, you next want to capture what is happening in the world outside of your own bubble, some of which have personal implications. This line is more macro than the last one and is inherently tied to the part of the world you pay attention to. For some, especially coming off a political election, their curve might be tied to the cycles of American politics. Another person’s core macro line might be economic in form, as experienced through their investment portfolio. This one is much more positive today than Monday if they held shares of Tesla or positions in crypto. If only I had known…

But, I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s return to the thought experiment.

With this map built out, here are my questions. How responsive should your personal line be to the life events at the bottom? Moreover, how responsive should it be to the macro state of the world? 

To make this concrete, let’s visually consider two different people. Shown on the left, one individual has a personal line that is relatively disconnected from the macro chart. On the right is an individual whose personal experience is tightly coupled to what they see and feel happening in the world more broadly.

Is there one model that better describes you?

Is there one way you would rather live? 

As I think of my own “rich (emotional) life,” I increasingly think there is a benefit from learning to attend to these shocks without our lives being shocked by their occurrence.

Here is what I mean.  

On the macro line, disruptive major world events inevitably and frequently occur. Candidates get elected and policies change. Wars start and stop. Economies grow and crash. While these events are undeniably important, can we give them too much weight on our personal experience — especially if they are not directly connected to our lives (more on that later)?

Some of the same lessons apply to the personal events register. While there are risks in being emotionally detached from what is happening in our personal lives, so too there is value in building emotional resistance to such shocks— both high and low.

If this sounds like a worthy goal to you, what is a path forward?

Specific to the macro, I have always liked Alan Jacobs's method of being “informed but not absorbed” in events of the world. Alan does this by moving away from daily (or hourly) news cadences and instead getting his knowledge of the world from a weekly like The Economist. For Jacobs, if something rises to coverage in a weekly, it is likely worthy of his attention. If it fails to do this, it is more naturally linked to the camp of things meant to monetize attention than those that are inherently meaningful.

At a place between the macro and micro, I think we also benefit by thoughtfully calibrating when there are real touch points between the world and the personal, and when these are important but ultimately disconnected spheres. Fresh off this presidential news cycle, I think part of the reason why I haven’t felt too emotionally impacted is that my daily experience of teaching, writing, working with clients, raising our two sons, and trying to be a good friend and community member is likely the same today as it was on Monday. How different is yours?

This is not meant to say we can’t or shouldn’t empathize with those whose worlds are impacted directly. I think we should, even more so than I do now! Rather, I think it is to suggest that even this kind of focused empathy benefits from ensuring our own emotional register isn’t anxiously misdirected, flying back and forth amid shifting winds.

And finally, I think there is something to building in a kind of Buddhist-like attention but non-attachment to even those personal events.  Over the past few weeks, I have been reading Oliver Burkeman’s lovely new book, Meditations for Mortals. In a recent chapter, he opens with a Haitian Proverb. “Beyond the mountains, more mountains.” In bringing this up, Burkeman reminds us that life is riddled with personal and global challenges. By accepting the inevitable mountaineering of life, we might be able to better avoid the emotional swings tied to the occurrence of that next rise on the horizon. At the very least, we can hope to recover more quickly when challenges inevitably occur.

As each of us navigates our own trials and tribulations, may we grow to find a way to attach to the things that matter, all while letting other pieces more rationally flow by. 

What do you think? What is your ideal level of attention and engagement with the world around and inside us?

Leave a comment

I recently was interviewed about humility on the Hidden Brain podcast. I relished the opportunity to share about my book, Humble, and discuss more than a decade worth of research on humility. But what value does an ancient virtue have in a modern world, where self-promotion and narcissism are richly rewarded? Turns out, quite a bit. 

The academic research is clear: humility helps people form, repair, and enhance their relationships. We prefer humble dating partners to arrogant ones, and humility helps us navigate the inevitable stress of relationships and conflict. It can help us be more tolerant of people who are different, and even improves therapy sessions. In short, humility is a key ingredient to healthy relationships.

For all the research I know, share, and teach, I still struggle to put this into practice. On the Hidden Brain, I talk about the challenges of humility in my closest relationships:

“This reporter was covering some of my recent research on humility within romantic relationships…she said, ‘You know, would you mind asking your wife how humble you are?’ I'm so excited to go collect the data and prove to the reporter and the rest of the world that obviously someone who studies humility must be extremely humble. So I come upstairs from this interview from the basement, and I say, ‘Sara, on a scale of 1 to 10, how humble would you rate me?’ And she says, 1 to 10, I think I'd rate you a 4.”

Humility is hard work. It takes practice. But it has incredible value. We also know that ambition, with self-promotion, often paves the way to achievement. In a world designed to reward those who promote themselves and master the art of effective “branding,” is humility more of a liability than an asset? 

Some more recent work has begun to highlight the limitations of humility. In one study, my students and I found that holding core beliefs about deep, existential issues with humility undermines our well-being. If we’re too open and willing to revise something as critical as our belief about what happens to us after we die, it erodes our confidence and opens us up to anxiety. Certainty and security are appealing.

Another line of work was led by one of my bright undergraduates. While working in our lab, she argued that women face the burden of a double-bind. They are unfairly expected to be humbler than men and are punished when they aren’t. Her brilliant idea turned into a senior thesis, which later became a highly valuable publication. As she predicted, women are seen as more arrogant (mostly by men) when they share about their accomplishments to the same degree as other men. Put differently, women pay an arrogance penalty that men don’t. Humility can be especially costly for women. 

So should we all set aside humility in endeavors like work and ambition? 

The evidence suggests otherwise. For men and women alike, research has shown that humble leaders are more likely to have productive and creative teams, healthier and happier followers, and better organizational outcomes. In one study, our team found that humble (vs. arrogant) leaders elicited greater willingness to donate to their organizations. The reason? People trust them far more.

The value of humility in a world of self-promotion remains real, but not without balance, and not without considering the costs. 

Most basically, humility is being the “right size” for each situation. For many (maybe most), this means downsizing self-promotion to be appropriately modest, opening space for others–making room for healthier and happier followers. But for others, especially those marginalized or lacking in power and privilege, it means sizing up, embracing a well-earned confidence. The key is knowing how we show up, and what kind of correction we need. And critically, it means inviting input about our “right size” and how humble we are. But, we have to be open to hear that feedback.  

At one point in the podcast, I reflect on Sara giving me feedback on where I actually stood in my own humility. She clarified why she rated me as a 4 out of 10. And though it was fully justified, it was hard to hear at the moment.

“So looking back, four was probably a pretty gracious and compassionate response. It was probably higher than I deserved at the moment…It was still lost on me. Even as she's painting me this picture, I still am trying to marshal my defense for, ‘Well, on average, aren't I a humble guy? Don't I usually take your feedback? Don't I usually listen to you?’ And her blood is boiling because she said, ‘You're literally not listening to me right now. I'm giving you feedback and you're not being responsive. You're responding defensively, if anything. You're confirming that you're a four.’”

We need honest people in our lives to help us know how and where we need to grow. But when they speak, we need to listen. Otherwise, our insecurity and defensiveness will entrench us further in arrogance. 

After all, the evidence shows that humility can be liberating. Originating from a source of psychological security, it empowers us to pursue bold, ambitious ideas and goals precisely because we’re unfettered by the dogged need for the approval of others. We know that we’re loved, worthy, and valuable, just as we are. We avoid misplacing our sense of self in the hands of others or in our fleeting accomplishments. When you’re not ensnared by the traps of a narcissistic world, you’re free to pursue ambitious endeavors that make the world a better place. In the end, humility feeds ambition, and ambition requires humility. They are not enemies, but allies.

Every month or two, a group of friends in St. Louis get together at one of our houses for a drink.  While inappropriately named a “book club” given that we have never actually read a book, it is a group of high-performing, Type-A folks that likes exploring ideas.

At our last gathering, we turned our attention to craft. When does it make sense to focus intensely on perfecting a craft at the expense of other interests? While this can obviously be linked to personal ambitions and vocations – such as when the craft is something like a career – our focus gravitated to one of these parents reflecting on his son’s natural talent in his sport.

For this junior in high school, what had started as a hobby had turned quickly into a high national ranking and an emerging set of college scholarships from some of the top programs in the country. For my friend, supporting his son with the singular focus of achieving excellence was how he saw his role and responsibility as a parent. After all, how many of us get a chance to truly seek greatness?

His case, and I think a fair one, is that a singular focus on excellence in that sport, even at the expense of balancing it with other hobbies or interests, is a fair trade-off for a time. How else would he know what he could achieve unless he gave it his all? 

As the conversation went on, I could see myself in my friend’s son. As a high schooler, I sought excellence as a swimmer. To achieve this, I gave up a great deal of time and many other possible pursuits. But I still didn’t do it as much as some of my peers who took their skills to the next level. To this day, I still wonder what I might have been able to achieve had I gone to the best club in high school, trained under the top coaches, and swam with the best athletes. 

Achieving Excellence

When does it make sense to push hard in the direction of singular excellence? After all, our societies do benefit from individual greatness. We have all enjoyed the fruits of labor from artistic and scientific achievements that came at great toil and expense. Meanwhile, recent scientific work suggests that greatness might be in decline, as seen in these pieces in Nature and the New Statesman (h/t Erik Hoel). Have we overly tolerated a goal of “balance” at the expense of developing the next Einsteins?

We need a model for thinking about when one should double down on focus. Here, then, are some initial considerations that may help decide whether to focus on a single craft:  

• Does my pursuit of focused excellence flow from an authentic interest in that area, versus being something projected from the outside?

• Will this pursuit of excellence supply life lessons outside of that area, such as the virtue of discipline gained by pushing myself to the edge of my capabilities?

• Does the acceleration of this pursuit provide an opportunity to achieve greatness?

The last point may be the hardest to assess. In college, my time in the 100 fly put me a few tenths of a second off an Olympic Trials cut. I felt on the cusp of something special. But was this really greatness? After all, in the 2004 Trials, I still would have landed over four seconds behind Michael Phelps. How, then, can someone who is good at high school math know if they stand at the start of a road leading to becoming the next Einstein? Is it really possible for anyone to know how close they are?

Tradeoffs

Despite good arguments for the pursuit of singular excellence, there are several reasons why it might not be worth the focus. 

For one, even if one seeks excellence, the writer David Epstein makes a case that the best strategy to get there is the path of the generalist. Contrasting Tiger Wood’s singular focus on golf from a very young age with Roger Federer’s multifaceted childhood beyond tennis alone, Epstein argues that narrowness pursued rigorously may not develop the “range” of skills required for the most complex problems in the world.

Diminishing returns also weigh against singular focus. Will hours seven and eight on the soccer field really drive as much improvement as hours two and three? Rather, each additional hour may lead not to improvement, but instead to a higher likelihood of burnout.

Yet the most poignant critique concerns outcome.,  Specifically, what if achieving this excellence isn’t as fulfilling as you think? If this achievement comes at the expense of broad development in other areas you value, is it worth the tradeoff?   

A Case for Multifaceted Craft

And this is ultimately what I tried to articulate with the group on that hot summer night in St. Louis. If excellence at a single craft can be a worthy pursuit, but not always worth it, what is an alternative model? Rather than making a case for settling for something “good enough,” perhaps a healthier goal for the naturally ambitious is the balanced pursuit of excellence across a range of domains.

Last night, a few weeks after the initial gathering, I went on a bike ride with a friend who embodies multifaceted excellence. While successful in his career, he also maintains a commitment to health, seeks to be a loving parent and spouse, and is heavily involved in his community. Coasting through the city streets of St. Louis as the sun set behind us, we collectively explored how to navigate tradeoffs effectively. What are those lessons?

First, even if you are interested in multifaceted craft, it is important to note that at the end of the day, no one can do everything. Wisdom requires acknowledging our finitude, as Oliver Burkeman so well explains.. The first step then seems to be the picking of areas where you are uniquely skilled, or domains that that reflect a deep sense of values – even if you are not naturally talented. One of my focal areas might be a particular part of my career, one where I am uniquely well-suited to create value. Another might be my focus on parenting, not because I am uniquely talented but simply because I deem it a worthy pursuit. 

With those areas identified, the next step is creatively finding overlap across interests. For example, if you desire excellence in health and relationships, can you go on that bike ride with a friend on a beautiful night in the city, as he and I did? If you are committed to being an excellent manager, how might lessons in that domain guide how you think about parenting? While believing that every pursuit has natural overlap is naive, seeking opportunities for strategic crossover feels wise. 

Finally, and most importantly, how do you accept the inevitable tradeoffs? Paths do diverge. Hours spent in one pursuit are not hours spent in another. Ultimately, the pursuit of balance requires the acceptance of loss–- less time with loved ones, less work, or less skill at a certain craft. Seeking excellence well balanced across multiple areas requires a psychological adjustment to the level of excellence achievable in any one area.

As we pulled up to my house at the end of the ride, my friend reflected on a recent trip to San Francisco where he was asked to give a talk. Lately, he has taken to bringing one of his kids on these trips. But he is also honest about the trade-offs in that choice. An evening where you might have put in a bit more work on the talk is now spent heading out for a walk with your daughter or visiting a museum. The talk, in other words, might not be as good as it would have been were he to be alone. A singular focus has been lost. But a trip to the museum with his daughter has been gained. 

What are the tradeoffs worth making?

What do you think? How do you go about building a craft of a life well lived?  When is a singular excellence worth the sacrifice of balanced pursuits? And when does balance come at too much cost to craft?

Do you think of college as a right or a privilege? 

Your answer will shape how you perceive the role and place of higher education in American society today. How much should college cost, for example? Who should have access? What role should the government play?

More importantly, your answer may depend on what you think college is for. As Peter pointed out in a recent column, many these days see college as an investment opportunity, a large down payment on a good job that had better produce solid returns. College is about careers—high paying, powerful careers, to be precise. 

If that is the case, one straightforward but perhaps limited measurement of universities will concern how well they accomplish these objectives for the price. Raj Chetty and colleagues, for example, assess colleges by their relative effectiveness in moving someone from the bottom to the top quartile of the income distribution, with schools like City University of New York (CUNY) and UT Rio-Grand Valley rising to the top. 

While this question is interesting and empirically tractable, it seems to undercut a broader possible sense of purpose. Let’s consider this question instead: Do you think a strong system of higher education is essential for a healthy society? A healthy democracy?

Broader Purposes

The founders of the nation thought education and a healthy society went hand in hand. Despite massive disagreements, political enemies found themselves concurring on the importance of education. An “informed citizenry,” they argued, was essential to a healthy republic. Thomas Jefferson believed that “the foundation for a working democratic republic had to be an educated electorate,” while his friend and enemy John Adams repeatedly urged education as essential to liberty.

Such views fueled the eventual rise of public universities and their spread across the nation. New states out west (now the Midwest) were pockmarked by tiny towns and public schools of higher education.

What the original founders imagined as “education,” however, may be a far cry from today’s circumstances. Colleges like Harvard were still reserved for gentlemen. Public grammar schools taught history, which was considered useful and necessary for citizenship, while private schools taught classics to train gentility. Social mobility was not part of the plan. These founders wanted all people to be educated—and all to know their place.

Even so, I wonder how much questions of citizenship, democracy, and social good surface in discussions about the purposes and outcomes of college. Such concerns have historically been a larger part of the picture. In “Live and Learn” from 2011, for example, Louis Menand helpfully articulated three common visions of higher education’s purpose:

1. Meritocratic: College is all about the grade, the selectivity, the sorting out of talent through hard work, discovering who rises and rewarding them accordingly.

2. Democratic: College is about the content, access to common materials across society, civic lessons and ideas useful for the life and strength of society.

3. Vocational: College is all about the job.

Other purposes might be added. But how we imagine the purpose of college today (and perhaps the loss of imagining its larger role in society), seems to owe a great deal to debt.

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The Pedagogy of Debt

In my first year at WashU, I met with a young student who loved literature and history. The subjects fascinated her. She wanted to major in one, but she faced a real problem: if she did, her parents would not pay for college. What should she do?

Money matters. And leaving school with no loans makes a huge difference. I wished for this student to pursue her passions, but I advised her to appease her parents. 

Appeasing them, however, could still entail aligning on a few shared facts, many underappreciated by the “consumer” of higher ed. First, while the choice of a major can make a difference to income, what matters most is a graduate degree. That just makes sense. An English major who goes to law school will likely earn more than a bio major who never gets another degree. Stopping at the bachelor’s, according to some charts, means those who major in the humanities actually make a slightly higher income than those who major in life sciences.

On other charts, English hangs close to biology, but earns less than business, economics, or chemistry. Still the earnings potential may not be as dramatic as some assume. It varies over time. Life as lived seldom turns on a college major, and a great deal depends on whether graduate school ensues.

For all the facts and stats gathered, for all that the story has been told in major outlets, my student’s parents, like most parents, were not persuaded. The student shifted to business, though eventually, I heard, she added a history major as well.

But again, while potential income remains an important question, in what ways was our discussion flattened by looking early and only at economic returns?

In an extraordinary piece on “The Pedagogy of Debt” (unfortunately paywalled!), Jeffrey Williams lays out the larger story of what my student experienced. Debt shapes majors, sure. But more importantly, debt teaches society to view college in a certain way. It focused our attention on the vocational and credentialing parts of education, but perhaps at the expense of the democratic. The higher the debt, the more apt we are to believe higher education exists just to pay it off. I might educate my students, but debt educates their parents.

I knew this lesson myself. In my senior year of high school, I applied to two colleges: Calvin and Princeton. Why two? Money, primarily. Calvin, I knew, would be free. Even if I got into Princeton (I didn’t), I doubted that it would be worth the cost. Calvin was a good school. It offered a broad and confident engagement with the world. It excelled in the humanities. And every year, it sent a large number of graduates into great PhD programs. Why pay for college when I could have all that for free?

Cost mattered to me clearly, and it constrained what colleges I even considered. But it also liberated me. With no student loans, I did not have to think about how to pay them back. I did not consider income when I considered a career. I took a part time job after college and worked on a novel in coffee shops all over Grand Rapids. Why not? I always wanted to try it. And I could.

Romance and the Bill

By disposition and experience, I tend to have a romantic notion of college. Here is the place to gather a broad, new knowledge of the world. Here is a space set aside to think with thinkers across thousands of years. Here is a world unto itself—a universe at the university—to get perspective on what the world is all about before launching into it.

Yet for all my romantic notions, I realize that debt often holds sway. My own pedagogical attempts run up against the pedagogy of debt.

Is higher education a privilege or a right? Is it about personal gain or communal good? Does it serve democracy? Does it have a social purpose? Does it liberate students to pursue their passions, including lives of service to others, or does it constrain them to careers that promise certain outcomes?

How we answer such questions may depend a good deal on how much college costs.

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In the other corner were my parents. While understanding this draw, as any empathetic parent would, they were attuned to other factors. Four years my senior, my sister was preparing to graduate from Calvin College – a small liberal arts school in Michigan. Calvin was a good school. It was safe and known. It aligned with the core values of my parents and our broader family. And meaningfully, it was a lot cheaper than Northwestern, even with this small swimming scholarship. 

Let’s now fast forward. I went to my parent’s preference (and had a great experience), but now teach in a place much more like what my high school self wanted.

But what I didn’t see at the time was that my parents and I were wrestling with an important question. What is college for, and to what extent does institutional brand matter?

The Value of Harvard and “Making a Bag”

Campus protests. University presidents turning over. Large donors questioning the value of the institutions they came from and pulling purse strings in response. Higher education, particularly elite higher education, has had a rocky year.

In a recent piece in the New York Times, Francesca Mari profiles students at Harvard traversing higher ed and the path toward work. For many around these students, something has changed. She writes:

But in the last five years, faculty and administrators say, the pull of these industries has become supercharged. In an age of astronomical housing costs, high tuition and inequality, students and their parents increasingly see college as a means to a lucrative job, more than a place to explore.

What are these jobs? 

In 2022, the percentage of Harvard students landing jobs in banking, consulting, and big tech hit 60%. Last year, it stayed close, hovering just under 55%. In the student's eyes, these paths are the route toward “making a bag (of money)” that is a worthy “sell out” – a phrase that no longer is a bad word. 

A job in one of these sectors is a path toward proving the worth of a $400,000 investment. It is a natural extension of a well-cultivated muscle of achievement. Getting into Harvard was hard. Maybe making Partnership at Goldman is the next rung on that ladder. For others, especially those drawn into the worldview of effective altruism, it is a way to make a lot of money and then maximize the amount you give away. Here is one student from Uruguay reflecting on her lessons: “What (we) learn at Harvard… is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money.” 

With students as customers to please, the university’s key product becomes a grade that serves as a signal to the market. It should perhaps not surprise us that the average GPA at places like Harvard has gone from well below 2.8 in 1950 to 3.8 today.  

But, are these students wrong to see this kind of school as the golden pathway? 

Recent research suggests they might be on to something. Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman look at the difference between those who receive the “treatment effect” of an Ivy-Plus education (Ivy League schools and institutions like Chicago, Duke, etc.) versus those who just made the waitlist and went to a highly selective state school (e.g., Michigan, Virginia). The former “increases (their) chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm.”

As I read this article, I couldn’t help but feel sad for these students. Are they not thinking big enough? Might they benefit from the creative life of following a Frostian road not taken?

But perhaps my criticism is because I can see myself in the mirror of their career pragmatism. After all, I do teach in a business school. I understand the lure of these paths. I feel their pull. As a faculty member, I know that our rankings are in part tied to the starting salary of our BSBA and MBA grads. The more we place at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, the better my institution looks.

Do I have a hard time critiquing this approach because I still struggle to answer the question my parents and I struggled with 20 years ago – what is college for? 

A More Expansive Purpose of Higher Education

Last week, I accepted a part-time role at WashU as an Assistant Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education. Ultimately, my desire to take this role is to generate a better answer to this question and help us offer a compelling institutional response.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for helping people find a job. Having a job that is personally meaningful and financially rewarding is wonderful. It taps into one’s skills. It can be intellectually stimulating. It meaningfully provides ways to support people and causes you care about in life. Any school that charges families the rates that many schools do and fails to prepare their students for a vocation in a fast-changing marketplace is failing one part of its mission.

But this can’t be the only part of a school’s purpose. Intuitively, it feels too narrow. I want to believe that a degree at Harvard (at $83,000 a year before aid) – or a Hartford Community College (at $6,000 in tuition) – should stretch people intellectually. It should challenge their worldview and prepare them to think about the world in fresh ways.  

So, what might it mean to conceive of the purpose of elite higher education with that expanded worldview?

First, although I don’t think that “making a bag” is an unworthy goal, it’s hard for me to believe this is the only way to conceive of value creation. In my view, the biggest challenge of 60% of Harvard alumni going into tech, strategy consulting, and finance is that 40% is not enough to cover all the other meaningful paths available for students. A university experience and the portfolio of intellectual and social experiences involved should fragment the paths people choose rather than forming them into three common molds.  

Put another way, it is hard for me to believe that 60% of students have found some kind of authentic fit with their interests in this pursuit. I don’t think each of us has a single ideal match – like the vocational equivalent of finding “the one” in romantic relationships; that said, I do agree with the economists that finding a match between one’s skills, interests, and values and the job one slots into matters. Match drives satisfaction. It enhances productivity.

But if that is the case, conceiving of a university’s role in career success is more complex. Turning the aspiring investment banker into a secondary education major is not better or worse than the opposite. We can only determine “better” by understanding one path as being more likely to drive alignment. 

Finally, even those who go into finance, consulting, and tech are likely to benefit from a more holistic formation  – historically, culturally, and philosophically. I want the leaders in firms developing the newest cutting-edge technology to see the world more broadly than the important but narrow technical skills needed to enhance market share.

Ted Gioia is my role model here. The famed jazz critic, and writer of the fantastic Substack “The Honest Broker,” spent years working at Boston Consulting Group all while spending his mornings before work navigating the modern literary canon, amongst other areas. Indeed, he credits that informal education with his career success. Though understanding how markets work, he can also step outside this bubble and offer thoughtful critique. He was in this world, but not fully of it. Consider this post on modern-day technology as something that might revive a new romanticism. You don’t get these kinds of insights – the kinds our market economy desperately needs– by merely applying the technical tools for tool development and deployment.

So, perhaps this is the call to action for education. If we can’t move beyond vocational preparation or an especially narrow set of what a “good job” means, might we be missing our own vocation? 

If it makes you happy,
It can't be that bad.
If it makes you happy,
Then why the hell are you so sad?

Good question.

People have been preoccupied with the pursuit of happiness for millennia. But even with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom, hard-earned through trial and error, have we made much progress? The evidence suggests not.

For those who view happiness as a future state where all needs are taken care of, consider the classic study comparing lottery winners with paralyzed accident victims—two groups you would presume would be at the tail ends of the happiness distribution. Shockingly, it turns out although the winner were descriptively happier than the accident victims, they did not significantly differ in reported happiness from control participants (who hadn’t won the lottery). They also reported less mundane happiness than control participants. Instead, the findings point to the fact that we adjust to our surroundings. 

While the original study suffered some methodological limitations, other studies have replicated and extended this work. Using a framework called affective forecasting, researchers ask people to predict how happy they would be if an event happened (or did not happen). They then follow up after the event occurs (or doesn’t). They find people are usually wrong in estimating both the intensity and duration of their emotional states—positive or negative. 

For example, studies have found professors who fail to get tenure tend to be less miserable than they expected, and sports fans whose teams win championships tend to be less ecstatic than they predicted; and, these emotional states run their course faster than we anticipated. After a tenure denial, we still have friends who love us and hobbies that enrich our lives. And after our team takes home the trophy, we still have to clean up after the dog and take out the trash. Similarly, if the candidate for whom we voted doesn’t get elected, our daily happiness isn’t as negatively affected as we thought. There is more to life than the focus of our attention. Life tends to average out (see Figure 1).

But apart from life being fuller and richer than we often predict, we are also more psychologically resilient than we expect. Researchers call this immune neglect. Our “psychological immune system” is pretty powerful, and it helps us bounce back from the bad. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the same psychological tendencies make us inaccurately predict how positively we’ll feel in the future, and how long we’ll feel that way. That means we often overestimate the hedonic benefits of our choices. We think our decisions will bring more happiness than they do and for longer than they do. 

Why does this matter? Consider all of the decisions you’ve made because you thought a particular outcome would make you extremely happy. Now, think of what sacrifices were required to pursue this path. Perhaps you gave up sleep, didn’t invest in relationships, or reorganized your priorities in ways that were inconsistent with your values–just because you thought, in the end, you’d be happy. Chances are, you probably were a bit happier, but not as much as you thought—and not for as long as you hoped. So, was it all worth it?

As Sheryl Crow wisely points out, we can pursue happiness and still be sad. Life has a way of bringing us to a baseline. We adjust to a new normal. But because that cuts both ways, we can take some of the pressure off our big decisions. Even if we “get it wrong,” we tend to bounce back. That’s not to say that our choices are without consequences, but in terms of our own emotional well-being, we often put too much pressure on ourselves.

Knowing this research and the finite nature of happiness as something pursued, might there be another set of factors to weigh more heavily in a set of choices? “If it makes you happy” but not for long, suggests approaching choices with a lens beyond maximizing happiness. Consider approaching a choice and asking whether doing something enhances relationship quality, or whether another option enhances purpose and meaning. If an interesting life, and not merely a happy life, is appealing, what about seeing choices in light of their curiosity-maximization? Breaking free from a focus on happiness alone might yet open up other parts of the rich life.

FOR MORE…

For those of you interested in this writing, I want to point you to a project put out by another member of this group. In his podcast, “The Owner’s Box,” Peter narratively knits together interviews with business owners to explore what it means to be strategic in the ownership of an enterprise. Tomorrow’s episode is with the Taylor family of Enterprise Holdings about their attempt to balance purpose and performance in the launch of Major League Soccer’s newest Club.

The Owner's Box Podcast

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Building upon a set of interviews with entrepreneurs, the paper offers a prototypical emotional arc of this individual post-sale. For many, shortly after a moment of elation, many entrepreneurs fall into a deep low, bottoming out 12 months after the transaction. While the chart outlines the potential recovery, they rightly note that this recovery is not inevitable.

Why so much despair? Here’s what entrepreneurs say::

“I might never have this moment again.”

“It was hard to return to my family and reintegrate.”

“I don’t know what to do all day.”

“You can do anything you want for the rest of your life but have no idea what to do.”

“I do not feel important anymore, and nobody cares where I am or what I do all day.”

This arc is not reserved for entrepreneurs. Curiously, in another part of my world, academics who achieve tenure tend to slump into depression as well. For many, the moment of achievement is but a kick-off for a longer emotional rollercoaster. 

It may feel strange to pity success. After all, selling a business and reaping financial rewards, or finding stable employment for life in a precarious academic job market, hardly merits a sense of sorrow or sympathy. But the emotional trajectory following such successes suggests something deeper about the human condition and our relationship to achievement. 

Can we learn something similar from failure?

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FROM SUCCESS TO THE CONFEDERACY OF THE HUMBLED

Far from reflecting a traditional life of success, Amor Towles’ A Gentlemen in Moscow centers on a Russian aristocrat’s thirty-two-year experience of state-sanctioned house arrest in a Moscovian luxury hotel.

Eight years into his sanction, the Count walks into the hotel lobby to see his on-again off-again lover, the actress Anna Urbanova. But the Anna of 1928 is not the same Anna that the Count met years before. Discovered in regional theater in 1919 and soon thereafter cast as a leading lady role in a firm garnering critical and popular acclaim, Anna rapidly gained access to both party and public support. 

But the premiere of her fourth film garners displeasure from General Secretary Stalin, and Anna’s connection to the world of power and fame would be severed soon after. By the age of 29, at this chance encounter with the Count, Anna has become a hasbeen – an experience with its own kind of emotional arc. For Anna, even her social world and the plentiful suitors had shifted drastically. “Having mastered the art of descending the stairs to a gathering of admirers, she had yet to master the art of ascending the stairs alone.”

But here, Towles mines the moment of failure for the potential wisdom it offers:

When one experiences a profound setback in the course of an enviable life, one has a variety of options. Spurred by shame, one may attempt to hide all evidence of the change in one’s circumstances. Thus, the merchant who gambles away his savings will hold on to his finer suits until they fray, and tell anecdotes from the halls of the private clubs where his membership has long since lapsed. In a state of self-pity, one may retreat from the world in which one has been blessed to live. Thus, the long-suffering husband, finally disgraced by his wife in society, may be the one who leaves his home in exchange for a small, dark apartment on the other side of town. Or, like the Count and Anna, one may simply join the Confederacy of the Humbled. 

Like the Freemasons, the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.

The confederacy of the humbled is not the valorization of failure often touted in a start-up and business community. In those conference rooms, stories of failure are too often meant to generate the currency of a person capable of performing vulnerably, and followed shortly after with a sequel of rising from the ashes. No, joining the confederacy of the humbled is the acknowledgment of a new normal. For Anna, it is a realization that she will never again be the Anna of 1920, but perhaps with an ability to move in the world afresh.

HUMILITY AND BALANCE IN THE PATH TOWARD INTEGRATION

As a part of a current project on ownership transitions with the Brookings Institution and a newly launched podcast on decisions “in the owner’s box,” I found myself digging up that email from my friend. Upon a second review, I realized that the authors offered a second framework buried more deeply in the paper that I had initially missed.  

In explaining the dip in the entrepreneur’s arc, and prescribing what might tilt it back up to baseline, the authors highlight the value of building a portfolio of purpose. For many entrepreneurs, a lead-up toward the sale can feel as if it necessitates a singular professional focus and identity. I AM a business owner. I AM an entrepreneur.  But these choices are not without consequences. Their lives sometimes feel disintegrated because they aren’t spending much time on the other parts of life. It is hard to reintegrate with friends and family because, for some of them, they haven’t been that present along the way. 

Put graphically, without conscious boundaries, entrepreneurs can tend to live a life on the left – with the majority of their time and attention invested in one space. So, too, you can imagine that Anna’s life and core identity are wrapped up in the success her vocation has offered – whether in financial or social capital.

For the authors, the path toward recovery is a movement to the right, building a life endowed with a higher degree of balance. With a professional identity shrunken to size, the pie is balanced by pieces not previously given appropriate space to breathe. 

But the confederacy of the humbled goes beyond suggesting a balanced portfolio. The wisdom won by the Count and Anna in having things pulled away is in the gift to hold any one aspect of that portfolio lightly – whether professional or personal, individual or relational. This wisdom is forged in the understanding that “beauty, influence, fame, and privilege (are merely) borrowed rather than bestowed.”  

In this holding of one’s identity lightly, one avoids the posturing to “hide all evidence of the change in one’s circumstances,” perhaps freed up to live authentically in the spaces we inhabit, however disjointed that tapestry. An entrepreneur can speak of their struggle to build back the muscle of connecting with loved ones and grieve the trade-offs of having but one life to live. An actress can grieve the fall from the heights of fame but, in doing so, find meaning in a relationship taken for granted. 

May we all be so lucky to build a life in the shadow of both failure and success. 

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Ten years ago, my wife asked what I wanted for my birthday. “To be left alone,” I said. And I meant it.

I was a man defined by purpose. I had work goals to advance, a book to finish, a deadline to meet. But at the same time, I had a four-year-old son who always wanted to play and a six-month-old daughter who never wanted to sleep. The noise, the nights, the needs. In that moment of my life—in those long dark months of my life—I came to see my family as an inconvenience.

In A Gentleman in Moscow, the central character, Count Rostov, finds his singular purpose–the pursuit of pleasure–utterly annihilated. That’s where the book begins. The delights that once filled his days have been completely erased by the Russian Revolution. Caught up in that great sweep of nobility, the Count finds his life spared, but stripped bare. He will live the rest of his life in a Moscow hotel.

Amor Towles’s brilliant novel asks how a man moves forward under such conditions. If all he had ever known was a life of luxury and leisure, what happens when the luxuries are taken away but not the endless, empty leisure of every day?

These days I dream of leisure. My calendar runs from meeting to meeting to home. I choose the deadlines I will not make. I sort and re-sort an expanding list of tasks. I walk fast. I tell myself that the day will come when I will finally be able to slow down, relax, take a breath, take it in, do what I want to do.

Such days will come, no doubt. The slowing of life comes for us all. But by then, I imagine, my kids will be fully grown.

Purpose and Inconvenience

When we teach A Gentleman in Moscow to 75 first-year students in “Markets and Morality,” we dwell on the idea of purpose. At the Count’s lowest moment, when he is about to give up, he takes a job. Count Rostov becomes a waiter. In that work, he discovers a sense of purpose, and from that purpose, he starts to build a rich, full life.

That moment turns the plot. Amor Towles emphasizes it whenever he talks about the novel. Recently, for example, A Gentleman in Moscow has been made into a mini-series on Showtime. And when Ewan McGregor, who plays the Count, talked with Amor Towles, Towles dwelt on “the Count’s journey to rediscover purpose.” The novel has no message, Amor Towles always insists, but it does turn on the centrality of purpose.

Our students seize on that theme as well. And the work of the Count, as a waiter, becomes the most obvious place to fix their gaze. As a server, he finds fulfillment—not just in the perfection of the food and the setting of the plates, but also in the camaraderie of the working class who meet in the restaurant kitchen.

Yet something else happens to the Count as well. Unexpectedly, he becomes a father. He takes in an orphaned girl. And she does what my kids did to me: she upends his days. She suspends his routines. She interrupts his plans. She defeats his pleasures with her needs.

The science of happiness is a booming business these days, and scholars seem to agree that a sense of purpose matters immensely. Work is a good place to find it. But one thing matters even more than discovering one’s purpose: nurturing deep relationships. In the largest and longest study of happiness, Harvard’s tracking of 268 sophomores from 1938 to the present day, relationships clearly came front and center. As the Harvard Gazette summarized, “Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.”

The trouble with relationships, however, is that they are terribly inconvenient. They seldom comply with other purposes. A friend in need does not plan that need in accordance with your schedule. Sudden injuries or surgeries in one’s family do not check in with work. A sick kid, or a kid who simply wants to play with his dad, does not care about your deadline.

Relationships keep their own time. And that time seldom syncs with the rest of life. How we respond to an out-of-sync relational time has a great deal to do with how we imagine and pursue a rich life.

Framing Inconvenience

A decade ago, I asked myself a simple, but devastating question: How many inconveniences and interruptions can a person abide? I loved my work, and I love it still. So how could I ever learn to let it go?

Speaking with his lover toward the end of A Gentleman in Moscow, the Count lists a series of conveniences he once had and has long since lost. Listing pleasure after pleasure—most of which involve the keeping of his own time and schedule as he wished—the Count says, “These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end,” he concludes, “it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

The first convenience that went for me were the magazines. Each morning, before kids, I’d sit with coffee and read The Atlantic, or Harpers, or The New York Review of Books. But when my eldest was born, the mornings had to be employed otherwise. My wife and I, unable to afford daycare, split the day at noon. I had only the morning hours to write a dissertation. Our subscriptions ran out, and they have not yet been renewed.

Now I have three kids, ages 14, 10, and 5, and so many subscriptions in life have lapsed. It reminds me of “The Mother,” that brilliant song by Brandi Carlile, whose verses rehearse the radical change she undergoes:

The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep
She broke a thousand heirlooms I was never meant to keep
She filled my life with color, canceled plans and trashed my car
But none of that is ever who we are

I do not always know who I am. But I do know my commitment to my kids. And I know, too, that in six weeks they will all be let out of school with no real plans for the first half of June. We are staring down the vacuum of a summer where they have almost nothing on their slate.

I, however, have plenty on mine. I have work to do, goals to meet, projects to complete. I have writing that I very much look forward to taking up. What will I do with the children? How can I manage both?

It is a terrible inconvenience.

Yet these days, a decade after that awful birthday, I try to ask myself a very different question instead: How many inconveniences and interruptions can a person enjoy?

For in the end, as Count Rostov remarks, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.

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In our final essay in this series on what we might learn from the cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, we turn over the authorship of “A Rich Life” to our good friend Sara Showalter Van Tongeren. Sara is the founder of a Telehealth based mental health group practice, The Flourishing Collective. She is the co-author of the book, The Courage to Suffer, and has explored the academic foundations of her work in a peer-reviewed theory paper on the Existential Positive Psychology Model of Suffering and a chapter on a model of existential hope in The Handbook of Existential Psychology. She is currently working on an upcoming book to be published in 2026 by APA on helping therapists support their clients through religious change. Her blog at Psychology Today has over 125,000 readers.

I hope you enjoy hearing from Sara and the other voices we bring into this platform over time.

Peter, Abram, and Daryl

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The Therapeutic Power to Create

Sara Showalter Van Tongeren, LCSW

Having been a psychotherapist for 15 years, I enjoy when my clients use cultural references to express their experiences. It helps me know my clients more deeply and understand how they interact with culture. Presently, Taylor Swift is the primary cultural referent in my office–both for my clients and for me. 

While I began as a casual fan, it was only when I watched Miss Americana in January 2020 that I officially converted. This was the first time I heard Taylor share her own experience in words my clients have shared with me for years: the pressure to reinvent themselves, feeling trapped by others’ narratives and a capitalistic pressure to remain silent, trying to recover from sexual assault and objectification, shrinking their bodies to be perceived as beautiful. I understood for the first time that she was expressing the experiences of being a girl turned woman in this very public world. I was captivated.

Part of the work of being a psychotherapist is reflecting on how countertransference (the therapist’s own feelings, both conscious and below consciousness) shows up in the therapeutic relationship. This became exponentially more difficult during the COVID-19 lockdowns. For the first time in my career, I was going through the same experiences as my clients concurrently. 

However, what became especially interesting was this shared experience combined with the shared cultural references. Taylor Swift’s twin albums, Folklore and Evermore, found me and my clients (and most of the world) at a time deep in the lockdowns that lacked creative expression, play, connection, and pleasure. These experiences overflowed into the therapy sessions: desire, longing, and fantasy. She met us when we were alone and scared in a drastically changing world. 

I was one of the lucky ones who won the lottery to purchase a ticket to the Eras tour. And I do mean lucky! That night was truly utopia. I remember the early college-age women sitting next to me who offered me a friendship bracelet and complimented me on my folklore-themed outfit (thank you very much!), took my pictures, and chatted about their past Taylor Swift concerts. When they got up to use the restroom, they asked us to watch their stuff and open container drinks without any concern. This is the type of world I want to live in. 

Then it was my turn to leave my seat, and turn after turn women and men and everyone were one: joined in excitement, talking about what bonded us, what our hopes were. We were together. In fact, there were so many women at the Detroit concert that they shut down most of the male restrooms, but that did not stop women from telling the men to come in and stand in line. We were in this together. I was overwhelmed with the sparkles, femme energy, and power - all of that with kindness, encouragement, connection, and belonging. This was the new world order, even if just for 3.5 hours.

A recent study on epigenetics revealed that trauma is transferred uniquely between generations, which involves passing along increased stress responses. Less discussed in my field is how love, connection, and belonging are also transferred and responded to epigenetically. Trauma is not the only thing remembered by our bodies. Connection, happiness, and belonging can also be embodied, embedded, and remembered through the activation of our limbic systems, even if we are existentially alone. 

Consider the power of passing along something like this:

And I saw something they can't take away

'Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned

Everything you lose is a step you take

So, make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it

You've got no reason to be afraid

You're on your own, kid

Yeah, you can face this

You're on your own, kid

You always have been

[You’re On Your Own, Kid by Taylor Swift, Midnights (3am Edition)] 

The work of therapy is the courage to envision and then create something else, even if we have not experienced it before: in our families, our relationships, or even within ourselves. What if we gave ourselves permission to see ourselves just as we are, so we can take a step toward dismantling the definitions of fear, power, shame, dominion, and success we were handed from the generations before us? What if we handed on something else? Maybe we could disentangle what we were given from what we desire to create.

During this last visit to see my eight and three-year-old nieces, we watched the Eras tour on Disney+. The felt experience of happiness and connection overwhelmed me as we sang along to the songs, and I simultaneously realized that they will grow up in a world with Taylor’s voice in it: a voice of empowerment, connection, and artistry. A woman who is brave enough to create, even when she is constantly evaluated and criticized, a woman who will look inward and share her feelings and experiences outward - can then help them find their voice over and over again so that they can create this new world, where they then can create their own stories. Uniquely connecting them to each other. She has helped to usher in a world in which they can express the evolution of their story, and the ability to create it for what they want rather than what they have been told. 

Any large-scale change usually begins with the deep, hard work of personal change of individual actors. Therapy invites and empowers you to do the good and vulnerable work of retelling your story. Creating a better world usually begins with nurturing a better you.

I am not, perhaps, your typical Swiftie. An over-educated, uncool, 40-something English professor, my ideal evening involves a cup of tea and a tome of old literature that no one else ever reads. But I love Taylor Swift. And some of my over-education may help explain why.

In the great song, “All Too Well,” Taylor describes sitting next to a silent lover waiting for him to name what they have together. To call it love. But he never does. “You never called it what it was,” she sings. That line, tucked in the middle of a ten-minute rhyming ballad, identifies for me what makes Swift who she is: in the way of any good poet, she calls things what they are.

“To name is to know and remember,” writes the poet Dana Gioia. It is one of the great gifts and powers of poetry—a gift Taylor Swift possesses as well. She names. She knows and remembers. Sometimes she remembers all too well. Song by song, she identifies with surprising and accessible lines certain experiences and emotions that resonate for millions. It’s not just the music; it’s the poetry I want to note.

The Proto-Poet

In a podcast I co-host, called Poetry For All, we dwell on the power of poetry to name with precision the world in which we live. And in a forthcoming book called Word Made Fresh, I link that power to Genesis.

Genesis 1 and 2 may not be the first thing that springs to mind when you talk about Taylor Swift, but go with me for a moment. Consider that story of creation. The writer imagines a God who makes a cosmos out of language, and who then, surprisingly, loans that language to us. In the very first act after creation, God brings everything to Adam “to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.”

It’s a strange moment in a strange story. The God of Genesis longs to see what this breath of mud, this human being, will do. And his first task is to name the world.

For ages now, poets have turned to this story to explain themselves (whatever they think of the Bible itself). W. H. Auden, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, described Adam as the world’s first poet, “the Proto-poet,” the person tasked with proper names. As Auden explains, “A Proper Name must not only refer, it must refer aptly and this aptness must be publicly recognizable.”

Taylor Swift’s songs take up this task. They spill over with apt names, publicly recognizable. She takes up the art of Adam with a simple poetry that both surprises and identifies.

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Naming the Age

Start with that much-quoted shrug of Shake It Off: “Haters gonna hate,” Taylor sings. “Shake it off.” It’s not complicated. It identifies a verb with the verber: players gonna play and haters gonna hate. Yet it’s exactly the kind of simple phrase that names a needed nonchalance where it seems impossible to please. In all kinds of contexts now I see people shake it off with a simple phrase: “haters gonna hate.”

Better yet, consider Swift’s seeming definition of her generation in 22: “We are happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.” Those adjectives don’t seem to sit together. Yet they do. According to social media, we are happy all the time. According to marketing, we are free to be and do whatever we want to do and be. Yet in the swarm of choices, confusion ensues. And in the longing looks at others’ pictured bliss, we have stumbled into an epidemic of loneliness. “We are happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.”

Taylor Swift names our age many times and in many ways, but perhaps she does so most aptly in a song about social media: You Need to Calm Down.

You are somebody that I don’t know
But you’re taking shots at me like it’s Patrón
And I’m just like “Damn, it’s 7:00 a.m.”
Say it in the street, that’s a knock-out
But you say it in a Tweet, that’s a cop-out
And I’m just like, “Hey, are you okay?”

We know by now that internet anger overflows. In fact, one of the best predictors of heart disease is a county’s quantity of Twitter rage. Taylor names that rage and calls it crazy. It is Twitter-specific fury that would never happen in offline. Like 22, this song recognizes and names a phenomenon with a missive for our social media age: “You need to calm down.”

Taylor Swift Speak Now Tour Hots Sydney, Australia, creative commons

Simple Complexity

For all I admire the way Taylor names the age and makes shareable its experiences, perhaps I am most grateful for how she models owning up. Taylor’s characters are complex. And they apologize. Not always. Not exclusively. She accuses and excuses as well. But several songs take ownership of wrong and hold out hope for forgiveness—a naming that seems both desperately rare and needfully resonant.

In Betty, for example, a lover has royally screwed up. The sorry singing lover knows it, owns it, and hopes to make things right, but has no idea what Betty will do. She’s free to forgive—or not.

You heard the rumors from Inez
You can’t believe a word she says
Most times, but this time, it was true
The worst thing that I ever did was what I did to you

Here and elsewhere, easy rhymes and playful lines surprise us with ownership of wrong: “In my defense, I have none,” she sings. Or: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” In the song Illicit Affairs, Swift tracks the lies of a certain kind of love and the moment it explodes in truth.

My favorite lines in Taylor’s music all come from her simple naming of complex feelings and moral conundrums. Best of all, I think, is Treacherous. The singer resists and falls for a love she wants and does not want at the same time. Singing from that slippery slope, she puts the case this way:

I can’t decide if it’s a choice

Getting swept away

I hear the sound of my own voice

Asking you to stay

Those lines pin precisely the moral dilemma so many Americans face. On the one hand, we believe that love is free. We choose it. Nothing pre-arranged for us. We can love anyone we please. It’s our choice.

On the other hand, we believe love happens to us, sweeps us away. We fall in love. And if we have fallen, then who could be at fault? How could we help ourselves? We had no choice.

Where does responsibility lie in love? Can we decide if it’s a choice: getting swept away? The singer seems separated from herself as she falls in love, hearing the sound of her own voice.

I could go on and on, but let me just say: it’s not only the music that makes Taylor great. It’s her names. Those apt identifiers, publicly recognized, shared from one to another and made one’s own. It’s enough to make an old English professor set down his tea, close his book, and dance in the living room—feeling 22 as I sing the many songs, the many names, of Taylor Swift.