No, you cannot have it all

Failing to recognize that life involves tradeoffs doesn't mean those tradeoffs don't exist

Credit: Jim Dalrymple II

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In my last post, I recalled how as an adolescent, I worked on weekends with my grandpa. I also mentioned that my grandpa was only in his late 50s when we started working together. I included his age to make the point that a person can be an elder in a family or community without being particularly old.

But also, it’s wild to me that my grandpa was only in his 50s when I was in middle school. He has since died, so I had to go look this up rather than ask him, but it turns out he was only 47 when I was born. My mom was 22 when she had me.

I, on the other hand, have made different choices. I was 36 when my first child was born. My mom died many years earlier, but she would have been 58 at the time. By the time my oldest daughter is 12, my mom would’ve be 70.

It’s easy to simply look at numbers like these and chalk them up to changing times.

But what I’ve only gradually come to realize is the magnitude of the trade-off I made by having kids so much later. The generation above me is in a totally different life stage relative to their grandkids compared to what I experienced while growing up. At 58, many people are still quite capable. They can still do manual labor. They drive. Their minds are alert. At 70, that’s starts to be less the case, and I think a lot of us who delayed various traditional adult milestones ended up missing some of the prime years in which the older people in our lives could have served as elders.

In other words, the knife cuts both ways. My last post criticized grandparents for shirking their responsibilities and abandoning their villages. But in my case I also haven’t spent my youth doing the things that typically result in a supportive community. I made tradeoffs like moving to new places, delaying milestones, and focusing on a career — things that made sense at the time but which came at a cost of diminished investment in the type of community I’d eventually need down the road. So it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise that, when I actually got down the road, my community was lacking. Eventually — and here’s today’s thesis — you get what you put in. Every choice in life involves trade-offs, and plenty of people in my cohort have traded away our villages.

We’re trying to convince ourselves that trade-offs don’t exist

The idea of trade-offs is grossly under-appreciated in popular culture. Take for instance this piece in The Atlantic that was provocatively titled “Want Closer Friendships? Move Away From Your Friends.”¹ The underlying premise of this piece is that sometimes you face a choice between living near the people you love or moving away for some reason, such as a job.

There’s nothing wrong with moving away. Plenty of people — myself included — have made that choice because it’s the most rational thing to do in a particular moment. But The Atlantic piece essentially argued that there was no trade-off at all in such a choice. You can move away and keep your friend group intact. You can have it all. What a reassuring message!

Maybe that does work for some people, but it cuts against everything I’ve read about friendships, and everything I’ve experienced first-hand. I think it’s more likely that in a lot of cases you can choose to invest in the village you have, or you can sacrifice it to get something else.

The failure to acknowledge the importance of trade-offs pops up constantly once you start looking for it. That’s what rubbed me the wrong way about Hunt, Gather, Parent about raising kids in a more traditional and less taxing way. I enjoyed the book, but it seemed to go out of its way to avoid telling people they might have to sacrifice some of their modern ideas and lifestyles in order to raise their kids like hunter gatherers. This was also the same complaint I had about the movie Somebody I Used to Know, which was entertaining enough but which gave its protagonist everything she wanted without requiring her to give anything up.

My point here is that we’re suffering from a chronic refusal to accept that life involves a series of sacrifices.

Ignoring trade-offs is costing my generation our villages

The reason I’m harping on this idea of trade-offs is because I think that I and a significant proportion of my cohort have effectively been doing what’s happening in The Atlantic article. We’re moving away from our villages, often literally but also figuratively, and then expecting those villages to remain intact.

The problem is that they’re not staying intact. “Where’s our village?” many of us are wondering, after many years of not investing in a village. Put another way, I spent the first decade or so of my adulthood as a committed individualist, only to later discover later that individualism isn’t necessarily great for community building.

This is an idea that author Louis Perry wrote about back in September, and I’ve been thinking about this line ever since I read it: “Liberal individualism is great for people when they don’t depend on others. It’s not so great when they do.” The line sums up well the predicament of my generation.

Perry continues:

I have bad news on this front: those things are irreconcilable. You cannot promote a culture of optionality, and then also expect people to choose you when you become a dull and onerous option. You cannot buy solitude when it suits you, and then try and buy back company when it does not, because company of the sincere and intimate kind cannot be bought.

In other words, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be a self-centered individualist right up until the moment you need people. By that time the trade-off is made, the deal is done.

I made those trade-offs in plenty of ways. I began this post talking about my decision to delay having kids. A lot of people my age did the same. And when we started asking “Where is the village?”, the answer is that we missed it.

I want to be clear that plenty of people have delayed milestones for good reasons. I myself put off having kids over financial concerns. I’m not arguing that these kinds of choices were necessarily wrong. Rather, I’m saying that even good decision sometimes have tremendous costs. Maybe we traded our villages for something better, or maybe we traded it because we had no other choice. Maybe we traded it just to survive. But it was nonetheless still a trade.

In my case, the same goes for decisions about where to live, how many kids to have, how religious I was going to be, or how I approached my education. At each crossroad, I was faced with options that might have been better for me, the individual, and options that might have been better for the community. I consistently chose the ones that benefited the individual, not fully grasping how making one choice also inevitably means rejecting the other. Maybe my choices were mistakes, maybe they weren’t. But fair or not, they were trade-offs. Eventually I got out what I put in.

The message here is that villages may be lacking because people chose to focus on other things.

But I also want to end on a hopeful note and a little story: Around the time my first child was born, I got an exciting job offer to work at an English-language newspaper in the Middle East. I love adventures and travel, so the prospect of moving across the world to experience a totally different culture was thrilling. Even today, years later, I often imagine what life might be like wandering through crowded souks or jetting off on the weekends to Africa and Asia.

In the end, though, I turned down the job because it meant I’d be further away from the people I love². Obviously I’m a tremendously lucky person to have the luxury of job offers I can turn down. And plenty of other people have made similar decisions in their lives, so I don’t want to present this as some unique or remarkable thing. But for me, it was kind of remarkable because it was the first time as an adult that I came to a major crossroads and didn’t go down the path of individualism. It was a trade-off, and in some ways a painful one, but this time I made a different choice. I’ve tried to make similar subsequent choices, and I think it’s mostly worked out well; I don’t have the village I want, but I have much more of a village than I did when all my choices were inadvertent rejections of community.

Like I said, the specific choices will be different in every person’s life. But everyone comes to different crossroads that require trade-offs, sacrifices, and giving up one thing to pursue another. In the end, I’ve discovered that I can’t have it all, but I can have a village if that’s the thing I choose.

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Update: This post was updated after publication to fix a few typos and also to remove a redundant line that was repeated at the beginning and middle of the post.

1. An earlier version of this post included a lengthy rebuttal to The Atlantic piece because I think its absolutely ludicrous to argue that seeing your friends once a year is preferable to seeing them more often. The piece is an argument in favor of going on vacations with your friends. The obvious problem with such an argument is that its comically classist; very few people have either the time or the resources for vacations with friends (plenty of people don’t vacation at all). The piece also focuses on young-ish adults in their 30s, but never explores what happens to those friends in their 40s, 50s, or 60s — or, critically, when any of the friends start having kids. Are they still closer over time, or is this vacation-with-friends idea just a way to extend one’s youthful bacchanalia a little longer? And the piece was not convincing on comparative grounds; vacationing with friends probably does strengthen ties generally speaking, but how does such a relationship stack up to one that exists between people in close proximity? The author makes the argument that quality time is better than quantity, but in my experience quality comes out of quantity.

2. In fairness, my wife also wasn’t into the idea of moving to the Middle East.