Kathryn Schulz
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kathryn Schulz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Like that's insane. You gave us a human being, right? That's incredible. I mean, to be clear, like we, you know, my partner grew that human being for nine months.
But it kind of has that feeling of like, wow. I mean, we just go home and raise these children and they are their own creatures. And having new minds to interact with feels incredible to me. Yeah. I think I've also found, and I feel based on our earlier conversation about kind of what's been lost from past generations that perhaps you'll appreciate it.
I have found a tremendous satisfaction in duty. I can't say that duty is something I thought about much before this. I'm not of a generation where duty like thrift was an obvious value. I didn't join an institution like the military where duty is an obvious value, but
But I'll tell you, no matter how tired you are, at 7.30 in the morning when your kid wakes up, you go in and you help her get dressed and you make sure she has a good breakfast.
Oh, God bless her. She has for every day since she was like three and a half months old. The littler one, iffier. But... Oh, I just, you know, it's not always what you want to be doing. I mean, my number one fear about parenthood is I am so deeply not a morning person. I mean, my favorite hours to write are 10 p.m. to 4 in the morning.
So on some fundamental level, everything I had been doing for my entire adult life was deeply at odds with the task of parenting, which is frankly being up at the crack of dawn many days in a row. And yet it's a deep kind of satisfaction to feel like this is what you do. You do it for yourself, you do it for your children, you do it for your partner, and you do it because you have to.
And that's a kind of liberation and a kind of wonderfulness and a whole category of existence I found because I had children that I had never appreciated, let alone kind of valorized before.
Oh, yeah. I think that actually a real imperative of parenting and a real imperative of being human is you are present for those around you who need you most. And you provide stability and security and you find hope because actually it's crucial to foster hope for the next generation. And So yes, of course, I mean, it's very tricky.
You know, there are children the age of my children whose parents vanished overnight. And that's horrifying to me. We are living in trying times, let us say. That said, you know, again, depending on where you look, all times are trying times. There's never been a shortage of suffering in the world. But I am troubled by the...
forms of suffering that are happening all around us now and I feel complicit in some of them and I want to be giving them my undivided attention and not ignoring them even when it's not obvious to me how I might positively intervene on them. I certainly don't want to just pretend they don't exist. Um, and yet I still have to be joyful for my kids and goofy for my kids.
And those are hard emotions to hold together all at once. And yet I find that to be a necessary and productive friction, not least because as I said earlier, it reminds us that actually we should always live that way. You And we have the resources and the lives to even have the possibility of ignoring the suffering in the world.
We should be grateful for everything that reminds us not to and reminds us like we should experience this kind of friction in our lives all the time.
I think that's almost certainly true. I mean, it's so interesting. You said you were reading Melting Point and there's an arresting moment in there when one of the sources in the book who we're hearing from talks about how, you know, you used to read one newspaper and you'd get 20 minutes of news in the evening or maybe you'd get 10 minutes of newsreels before a movie and that was it.
And I put down the book when I read that. I thought about it for a long time because, I mean, there was not a shortage of news in the world. This was in the middle of the Second World War. And she goes on to say something I found equally arresting and highly related, which is the world seemed much bigger and more mysterious than...
So I think you're right, although I also think it's a little bit more complicated than that because in this kind of tragic way, I feel like we simultaneously know more about the world and less about our own communities in a certain sense. Oh, yeah. bits of news from all over, much of it tragic, some of it just inflammatory for a deep and connected knowledge of our own immediate communities.
And that does feel tragic and upsetting to me. And this kind of absolute flattening of distinctions. So
Happiness routinely gets not only less attention, but also more criticism than its opposite number.
Contemporary thinkers sometimes dismiss it as a shallow fixation of modern life, but to condemn it on those grounds is to mistake it for proximate but different phenomena, either superficial forms of itself, like amusement and pleasure, or superficial means of trying to achieve it, from substance abuse to so-called retail therapy.
I can't believe you're asking me to define happiness on the fly in your podcast as required.
Well, you know it when you feel it. I mean, I think that happiness is a state of profound appreciation for what you have in that exact moment. I guess if I were going to generate a spontaneous definition, that's what it would be. I mean, I was moved to write about it because I was lucky enough to find myself extremely happy. And...
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