Notes on an Emerging World
A book in five editions, written in public, on what happens when the professions, systems, and structures we relied on to navigate life begin to dissolve.
These five questions arrived mostly in the order I lived them. After becoming a mother, I grew insatiably curious about care — why the work of raising children feels so siloed and under-understood, when social reproduction is more foundational to culture and economy than almost anything else. Then came work: like many mothers, I began grappling with what it means to return to paid labor when childcare costs nearly as much as the salary it enables, and what it costs to step away. News came next. As a journalist who has always had questions about the media industry, I began to understand information less as a product and more as a means to wellbeing and agency — especially as the information landscape transformed around me. Then AI, because I live in San Francisco, at the center of that particular disruption, and as someone grounded in thinking about both humanism and productivity, I've become urgently curious about what it will mean to navigate life alongside intelligent tools as the social structures we relied on simultaneously crumble.
And then, woven through all of it: the question of me. AI has surfaced something I didn't expect — big questions about what it means to know yourself, trust yourself, locate yourself when the tools around you are becoming more capable and the structures less reliable. This has coincided, not accidentally, with being the parent of a young child and the child of aging parents at the same time. The sandwich generation question turns out to be an identity question. What comes after me feels like the right place to end.
Each chapter below contains essays, books, and personal notes on one question. New essays are published here as the thinking develops — earlier thinking lives in my newsletter, Time Spent. Completed chapters will be available in print through Time Spent Press.
My truest reckoning with invisibility came when I paused my career to pursue motherhood and writing — two forms of work that are rarely recognized as work at all. Both are unprofessionalized categories of labor that can consume a life while sustaining many others.
What rules govern this universe of the invisible? Are they the same rules that govern the world of professions and measurable work? As I watch you, barely two years old, witness a world emerge all around you, I feel compelled to document my own witnessing. Neither of us belong to society in a recognizable way, and yet how we spend our time seems to be the subject of society's greatest moral questions.
The following notes are an attempt to find out how we might think about the worlds emerging around us — you, entering the constructed world; me, observing the one I once knew, dissolving.
I hope they help you choose how you would like to see.
— Mom
Observing a young child emerge has made me want to better understand our biological foundations. And being siloed in the domestic sphere has made me want to better understand care work for the public consequences it has — what feminists have long called social reproduction. This chapter is about what happens to your identity, your body, your partnerships, and your sense of time when you take on the work of raising another person. It's also about how those lessons, examined honestly, turn out to be foundational lessons for all of public life.