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 — and what we build in their place.
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 underunderstood, 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 contains essays, books, and personal notes on one question. The chapters are being developed in sequence, beginning with Chapter 01. 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.
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.