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In the US, around 40–50% of marriages end in divorce. In most European countries, it’s well over 30%. Meanwhile, raising children has become harder, so we have fewer of them. We’re also lonelier than ever. People grow old alone and often die alone.
More than ever before, we build our lives around a single connection: our romantic partner. We expect from one person what we used to get from a whole village. And most statistics tell us that this approach is not working.
In a recent episode, Ezra Klein speaks with author Rhaina Cohen, whose book (see below) explores new models of kinship. The conversation covers a range of interesting topics that help us imagine new ways of connecting with others, many of which we don’t currently have the language to describe easily.
Klein talks about having to leave an extremely close friend behind when he moved to the other side of the country, and how difficult it was to convey to others the emotional toll of this separation. We empathise with the pain of not having our family or romantic partner close by, but we rarely show the same compassion when it comes to friends.
Traditionally, marriage has been understood as a pragmatic union, the union of families. Today, we believe in the ‘self-expressive marriage’, where we want our spouse to unlock the best version of us. Cohen suggests that this modern version of marriage puts enormous pressure on our relationships and has crowded out the room for friendship to be as important as it once was.
Parenthood is a great example of how limiting our current model of kinship really is. There is very little room for close friends to step into a parenting role. In fact, when a marriage ends, there is only one legally recognised way to replace the role of a parent: a stepfather or stepmother. Klein:
“We have created a speedway for one kind that has to clear a sexual/romantic test first, no matter whether that person is a good father or mother to that child. It seems strange. We’ve worked backwards from a problem, but only if we can solve a secondary problem along the way.”
Cohen responds by pointing out that sexual love is an irrational test for parenthood: “The law puts misplaced emphasis on eros (sexual love) and not enough on agape (self-sacrificing love).”
To create new networks of kinship, more and more people are experimenting with unconventional living arrangements. Cohen herself and her partner live with another couple who is raising two children, and she talks about the many rewarding and testing moments of this model.
I loved Klein’s response to this. Referring to a friend who lives in an intentional community where people must deal with the challenges of living closely together: “She’s decided to choose the default in her life being the problems of community as opposed to the problems of not having community. She wants the problems of connection rather than the problems of having to find that connection.”
– Kai
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The Future Is Now SPONSOR
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A newsletter on technology and our shared future
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Apps & Sites
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Read books & learn languages
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With the Linga app (iOS and Android) you can read one of over 1000 books in up to six foreign languages and get comprehensive on-tap translations, including definitions, synonyms, example usage and more. You can save important words to train with flashcards later and track your progress over time. Friends of DD enjoy one month free.
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A workspace to write, organise and collaborate on copy with the help of AI. Inbuilt tools let you create different copy types, reduce or extend the length of copy or adjust its tone based on previous marketing materials.
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Pinterest alternative for creatives
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Cosmos is a design-focused alternative to Pinterest. Via browser extensions you save visual elements into clusters that others can follow. AI image analysis automatically tags every element you save. Currently waitlist only. Friends of DD can skip the waitlist.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Open-source shortcut directory
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A beautifully simple directory of 1411 shortcuts for 101 apps. Add your own through a pull request on GitHub. Explore in three ways: press a keyboard shortcut to find apps that respond to it, search for a specific app or browse a list of all apps.
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Worthy Five: Neef Rehman
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Five recommendations by climate technologist Neef Rehman
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A quote worth repeating:
This quote by Franz Kafka stuck with me: “I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.” As someone who’s had quite a winding career, I’ve often felt pressure to define myself, but now I actually appreciate the lack of definition and learned to embrace it. (Thanks to Erifili Gounari for featuring this quote in her piece Evading Categorization.)
A video worth watching:
I was lucky enough to be at The Conference Malmö last year to watch Sasha Constanza-Chock give her talk Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. She uses personal stories to illustrate how design and technology marginalise people and then talks about the need for communities to co-create their solutions. She shares the principles that underpin design justice. Essential watching for those in the design industry.
A recipe worth trying:
This smoked aubergine and walnut ragu by Rachel Ama is one of my favourites from last year. I don’t think I’ve had a better ragu in my life! I have to improvise an apparatus to keep the aubergine steady over the hob each time, but believe me it’s worth it.
A book worth reading:
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism lived up to its gripping title. The book helped me realise how stale the idea of capitalism that we cling onto is, and how related discourse keeps us frozen in the arguments of the past. All the while, the rug gets pulled out from under us.
A newsletter worth subscribing to:
I love Devin Kelly’s Ordinary Plots: Meditation on Poems + Verse. Every issue is full of references, study, and feelings, which really enhance the poems for more casual readers (like me).
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Neef Rehman in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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Life with friendship at the centre
As I discuss in the intro, Rhaina Cohen’s new book makes us question why we centre our lives around our romantic partners and explores possible alternatives to this rather new default. “Based on years of original reporting and striking social science research, Cohen argues that we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them, while we diminish friendships by expecting too little of them. She traces how, throughout history, our society hasn’t always fixated on marriage as the greatest source of meaning, or even love.”
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Solutions to repair our planet
Aimed at ambitious young changemakers and published in collaboration with the prestigious Earthshot Prize, this handbook provides context, vision and practical action for repairing a quickly declining planet. The book speaks frankly about greenwashing, raising awareness on the five key areas that we all need to focus on: to protect and restore nature; revive our oceans; clean our air; fix our climate; and build a waste-free world.
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Overheard on Twitter
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DATING: I can’t believe we have so much in common.
MARRIAGE: Please don’t watch your stuff under my Netflix profile.
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Food for Thought
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What kinds of relationships would you want in your life, if you felt you could ask for them? This episode of the Ezra Klein show offers a window into a world of relational possibilities most of us never even imagined existed. Raising a child with your best friend? Sharing a home with a married couple? This episode invites us to rethink the nuclear family, the monogamous relationship and the platonic friendship to live a more satisfying, connected life.
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This is one of the most powerful and expressive readings I have ever watched. In fact, I watched it three times. Author Max Porter on the moral bankruptcy of the arms trade. “Have you met Hugo’s dad? Oh, when not at work Hugo’s dad enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter. Tennis, photography, music and travel. He’s raising money for Ukrainian charities and is a keen environmentalist and grows his own tomatoes. His expertise ranges from small arms through to mortars, artillery, tank, naval warheads and advanced payloads. He’s currently a senior adviser to H.M. Treasury and a trustee of the British Museum. He is drowning in blood, but he mistakes it for the fresh air of the golf course.”
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Noise, particularly from cars, has profoundly altered the Earth’s acoustic environment, impacting our own health and that of countless other species. This essay explores the consequences of our increasingly noisy world, and offers some examples and strategies for limiting noise pollution. “Traffic noise has been altering the songs of urban birds for decades. Ornithologists have shown birds singing louder on weekdays when traffic is heavier; shifting the lowest frequencies of their calls upwards to better contrast with the thrum of the vehicles skidding through their habitat; and holding their dawn choruses earlier in the day to avoid being drowned out by airplanes.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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David Zinn is a street artist who specialises in small-scale, improvised and (mostly) light-hearted chalk art.
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Thanks to a reader for pointing me to the work by Tanya Habjouqa and their exhibition called The Sacred Space Oddity. This project delves into the intricate relationship between the physical and psychological spaces that the term ‘Holy Land’ encompasses, challenging the often reductionist media portrayals of the area.
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In his newest exhibition Extraction/Abstraction photographer Edward Burtynsky explores the disastrous effects of human consumption from distant, often aerial perspectives that at first glance, appear as alluring, colourful compositions.
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Blackest is an inverse contrast wedge serif typeface family that balances quirkiness and playfulness without losing elegance.
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Notable Numbers
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Last week, cocoa prices hit a new peak thanks to the effects of global heating, rising 7.3% to a record £4,660 a ton, more than double the £2,023 a ton a year ago. This comes after the price of popular chocolates had already risen by more than 50% from Christmas 2022 to 2023.
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US consumers returned $816 billion worth of items to retailers in 2022, more than twice the loss in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The return rate rose from about 8% to over 16%. Product returns increase pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste in landfills, where many returned products now end up.
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Ecosia, a search engine that plants trees when you search and click on ads, has announced a milestone of 200 million trees planted.
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The Week in a GIF
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