Greg McKeown:
Welcome everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here with you on this journey to learn so that we can operate at our highest point of contribution. What would you do with an extra hour in your day? Would you use it to be even busier, or would you use it to create space to think? This isn’t a hypothetical question. We are all faced with this scenario now because of the launch of a whole array of AI tools, including ChatGPT, and so this is part one about how to use AI to make a more essentialist, effortless lifestyle. By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to choose wisely how to use AI in your life. Let’s get to it.
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So I’ve studied this a little bit, and the nuclear family, as you’re describing it, is itself an aberration because it grew up with the evolution of television, the idea that there’s one house with two parents with “X” children and that prior to that, and even into the fifties, what was more typical were these multi-generational families. And, in fact, that’s what you meant when you said family, was that you had these multiple generations, perhaps more because of economic concerns, but that this was the norm and that we shifted from that and almost invented the idea of a nuclear family as the way it’s described. Is that consistent with your findings?
Mauro Guillén:
It’s roughly consistent. So, in other words, the nuclear family, it’s really a way of organizing a society in which you have a very large middle class, and it’s a middle class that has all of those attributes that you mentioned in terms of having a comfortable life, having all of those appliances in the home and so on and so forth.
But you see, the previous peak in terms of multi-generational households out of necessity was in the Great Depression in the US in the 1930s. Right. And prior to that, of course, yes, you’re right. I mean, the nuclear family, as we know it today, didn’t really exist. Although there are some records here for England that back in the 13th century, that’s when nuclear families started to grow in numbers and become more frequent. So it’s a complicated history, but you are absolutely right. That is not something that has been a given throughout human existence because, as we all know, in primitive societies, family groupings included several generations.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. It almost seems like for most of us in these times, we think the nuclear family is the core, whereas an intergenerational family and, therefore, an intergenerational sense of self is the natural output. If you grow up with your grandparents in your home, if you grow up with your aunts and uncles, you understand that you are a part of this larger whole. You can hardly think of yourself as separate from that larger whole. And it seems to me, even if the causes of so much of that were financial challenges, that there are some material advantages that come tangible and intangibles. So it’s interesting that we are finding that you’re finding this increase now.
Mauro Guillén:
Absolutely, absolutely. And it goes further, Greg, according to research by the NIH, the Nationalist Institutes of Health in the United States, and some people, some researchers at Columbia University, you actually find better health outcomes in multi-generational households, better mental health as well, and also longer lives. So meaning greater longevity. It’s kind of stunning, right? Kind of stunning.
Greg McKeown:
But just trying to, I mean, I’m trying to make sense of these multiple themes we’re talking about, but one of the things that’s occurring to me is there seems to be a polarization that you’re describing where there’s this increase of two kinds of home, an increase of one kind, that’s single occupant, that’s single occupant and an increase in these multi-generational homes. And what you’re also saying is that there’s research to support that the multi-generational homes seem to lead to better emotional and health outcomes. This means something, does it?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, what this means, I think, is that the assumptions that we’ve been making for a long time are not no longer holding. And we haven’t talked about, by the way, two other types of households, which are single parents and their kid or kids. So just one parental households, which is also on the increase.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. Tell me about the other forms and what’s happening to the trends as you found them.
Mauro Guillén:
Yeah, so this is also increasing. The highest in the world in terms of single parents with one or more kids in the household in the United States. Once again, 23, 1 in 4 of all kids are living with just one parent. Now, that has to do, of course, with divorce rates to a very large extent. And then the other kind of household is parents living with their adult children between the ages of 19 and 30.
Right now in the United States, this is another record as 50%, 50% in the UK is, I think, maybe 31 or 32% of young people between the ages of 18 and 29, they’re still living with their parents. Now, a lot of that, of course, has to do with difficulties in terms of finding housing difficulties, in terms of finding a stable job. But at the end of the day, regardless of the cost, what we’re seeing is that we have all of these different kinds of households in the world right now, and they used to be marginal. Now they are 10, 20, 25% of the total.
Greg McKeown:
Therefore, what?
Mauro Guillén:
Therefore, what we’re seeing is, once again, this breakdown in the traditional model. The model, once again, that started, as you were pointing out, I would say a hundred years ago, with the disruption of the Great Depression or the great slump as it was called here in the UK. But after the present time, up until 20 or 30 years ago, that was the dominant model, and we would live our lives as a series of sequential steps. We would play when we were little, we would study, then we would leave the home, we would work, start our own family, and then retire. And now what we’re seeing is that that pattern of stages is being disrupted. People of different ages are doing things that, two or three generations ago, people of the same age were not doing.
Greg McKeown:
What is your primary advice to somebody to respond to the trends that you are studying?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, I think there are two issues related to that question. That is a terrific question. One is, so what I’m proposing is that we need to be more flexible about how we live our lives, that we cannot just leave them as a sequence of very orderly steps or stages from one thing to the next. And I say this because of all of those disruptions that we were talking about earlier, all those megatrends, the declining: the number of children that will live longer, and also technological change. Technological change, I think, is going to require all of us to change our ways, maybe to switch jobs, even careers, to get ready for something else, to learn another skill at some point, because whatever it is that we learned when we were young is no longer as useful in the labor market.
So I think the key recommendation is flexibility. We need to gain in flexibility, and it’s a recommendation not just to individuals like you and I; it is also a recommendation for organizations and for governments when it comes to policymaking. We need to introduce more degrees of freedom and more flexibility into the kinds of opportunities that people face in life because we all will need to adapt in real-time to a lot of changes, especially coming from technological innovation.
Greg McKeown:
Let me just speak to that for just a second because I literally just had Bruce Feiler on the podcast in which he talked about the fallacy of the midlife crisis, and he said life is far more accurately described as a series of transitions. So he wrote a whole book about that, but then also worked on a new set of, he did a new set of thousands of hours of interviews about how that insight applies to our work lives and that it isn’t a hierarchy, a single point that goes up, but it is a series of transitions that seems to be, to me a similar point that you are making. Am I right?
Mauro Guillén:
Yes. No, absolutely. I think Bruce is absolutely correct in saying that it will become, if it hasn’t already, part of our lives to have to make all of those adaptations and go through all of those instead of crises, let’s just call them changes or discontinuities. This is going to become so much more frequent in our transitions. And we better get used to that because there’s going to be more than that right now; as you know, it’s only a fraction of the population that experiences very sharp transitions in life, unintended, and some of them really difficult to deal with people who lose their jobs due to technological change or whatever in their fifties. And as you know, those people actually experience many hardships as the deaths of despair and so on and so forth.
But we have so many other people who run into these things. I mean, we tend to forget that not everything is a path of roses for everybody. I mean, we have teenage mothers, we have people who suffer from addiction, and then they recover. We have people who drop out from high school because they don’t see the value of education at that point in their lives. We have people who have to go through the foster care system and all of them, and we’re talking about altogether 70 million in the US, maybe in the UK it’s about 10 or 12 million. That is a sizable proportion of the population who, by definition, have had to go through those really sharp turns in their lives several times.
Greg McKeown:
So we seem to always think about, and these conversations, right, it’s episodes 193 and 195 for those that want to go back and listen to it. It’s like this is really universal so that when you actually go and gather individual stories from people and get their life story, the shape of their career, the shape of their life, it is for almost everyone is having these huge transitions every two or three years. And so we sometimes forget that’s quite normal. And then we feel something’s wrong with us when we are going through another transition. Another thing where we have to get reoriented again. Now you are saying part of the solution is to increase the degrees of freedom so that we can be more malleable to what’s going on. That sounds like almost a government-level or an organizational-level change.
What does the individual do when these transitions likely not just to continue but even increase in the trend that you are describing?
Mauro Guillén:
That is the heart of the matter, Greg. So I’m so glad that you brought it up in the last chapter of the book The Perennials. What I do is I say that the approaches to dealing with all of these are of three kinds. So as you just mentioned, this is policymaking by the government. The second one is organizations changing, but in the thirties, individuals and the culture changing. So, for example, I address the problem of why women continue to be disadvantaged in the labor market. Well, they want to have children, but they, of course, are affected in a very different way than men when it comes to having children. And what we need for that is really cultural change at the level of men like you, and I are doing more in the household.
What we need is also cultural change when it comes to what happens inside of organizations when people are rated in terms of their performance or their potential as those systems that we have in place. Research has demonstrated time and again that they tend to discriminate against women. They tend to underestimate women’s performance and women’s potential in almost every setting where the research has been done. So we need cultural change in addition to organizational change and government policymaking to address the most egregious instances of discrimination or bias.
Greg McKeown:
And what can the individual do? So I don’t mean the individual’s effect on the broader culture. I mean, when you look at all these trends that you are studying, when you try to imagine the future, what does the individual listening to this need to do to be able to survive and to thrive in these great transitions that are happening around them?
Mauro Guillén:
So I don’t specifically deal with that in the book at that psychological level, but I think that the single most important thing is to be open-minded and not to assume that all of those practices and customs that we have inherited from the past should be continued. So be open-minded about the possibilities, and by all means, be ready to be flexible. I frequently say that the single most important aspect of this is to keep your options open. Never make a decision that is irreversible; never make a decision that is going to drive you into a dead end. That is what I think individuals should do.
Greg McKeown:
I want to come back to that word in a moment, irreversible. This idea that we have to keep our minds open. It doesn’t sound radical, but it’s certainly counter-practical. It’s not what people normally are doing. I was just reading some research recently that showed that the older someone gets, the less curious they tend to be speaking collectively, not individually. And one possible explanation postured is that as you grow, you get more knowledge, and therefore you have less things somehow to be curious about. You can do the basic things of your life without asking new questions. For one, find that really awful, the thought of it that I will become less curious. I am quite determined that this is not going to be the case for me. But I wonder if you’ve thought about that in terms of, well, if you have to become more, if you’re saying we need to be open-minded, how can people change the trend of becoming less curious over time as the evidence seems to suggest they do?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, I think as we grow old, you’re absolutely right. We are creatures of habit. So we get into our habits, and if we grow up successfully and as we get older successfully, then that just prompts us to reinforce the behavior that brought us to that point. So people who experience hardships are more likely to be more open-minded and to look for alternatives. But nothing is more, I think, powerful than the inertia that we as human beings are subject to. Because when we see something working, we just keep on doing that over time.
But to your point about curiosity, I think this is really important because what’s going on essentially is that, as somebody said, I quote that this person in the book, we don’t grow old. We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing, and you can substitute there, play for curiosity. We stop being curious, and that’s what makes us grow older, not in the chronological sense, but rather in the sense of becoming less active, becoming less inquisitive about what we do in life.
Greg McKeown:
Well, I completely concur with that. In Essentialism, I devoted a chapter to play because I think it’s essential in and of itself, but in this conversation, it highlights that because of the temptation there is to just get into routines that are in fact not just suboptimal, but in fact really damaging to our actual cognitive function and therefore the quality of life and the relationships and everything else.
You used an interesting word before you said you don’t want to make a career decision that’s irreversible, and I can’t help when I hear that, thinking again of your tenure as director at Cambridge, can you tell us what were some of the challenges you faced in adapting to the new cultural and academic environment of Cambridge?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, I think it’s the usual things, right? So I came from the United States after working over there for 31 or 32 years. So you have several layers. So you have several layers of adaptation that are needed because first, you’re crossing an ocean, you’re going into a different country with different institutions, with different ways of things. Then you’re moving into a different organization, of course, and not just any kind of organization, but one that has been around for more than 800 years. So there’s a lot of things that you have to learn. There’s a lot of traditions that you have to internalize.
A lot of, I would say, implicit understandings that people who know the institution well can tell you about. But that you have to learn very slowly over time. But I wouldn’t say that those difficulties are as important as, of course, they always are the ones that prompted me to return. I mean, once again, it was more to find the balance between work and family because commuting back and forth between the US and the UK was extremely difficult. But when you cross so many boundaries, right? Cultural boundaries, national boundaries, organizational boundaries, the adaptation is just a tall order, becomes a tall order, a very tall order.
Greg McKeown:
Well, there’s so many things you said that I think I can either understand or at least relate to. I mean, first, let’s just talk about this, the institution and its traditions. I’ve literally worked now, and as I’m sure you have with hundreds of organizations, but it’s the first time I’ve worked with an organization that’s 800 years old. And one of the things that occurred to me after I’ve been here a few months is that there’s nobody at Cambridge who understands how Cambridge works. Nobody. Because even someone who’s been there 40 years, I remember speaking with your assistant, for example, who I think has been here 40 years. And so she knows if someone knows, she knows. But 40 years is nothing when an institution is 800 years old. When she first came here, it was already working. When all of us came here, it was already in full bloom. And so trying to understand a system that is so much older than the oldest person in the system is, I think, a unique challenge. Do you have thoughts?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, I think it’s a matter of degree, Greg. It’s not just a black and white or zero or one. Right? So it’s a matter of degree. Obviously, yes. Somebody hypothetically who had been able to experience an institution such as this one for 800 years would be in the best position to really that perspective. But that we know that unless somebody in the Silicon Valley comes up with the switch that essentially turns aging off, that may happen at some point, right? Who knows with all of the technological advances? But unless that happens, I think it’s just a matter of degree. And, of course, time spent, even if it’s not that the entire history of a particular institution, will help.
Greg McKeown:
You’re going to understand more the longer that you’ve been there, just as you say now.
Mauro Guillén:
Absolutely. And at that point, by the way, of prolonging life, as you know, I also refer to this in the book; this is really important. We have managed to increase the lifetime of a worm 10 times over, right?
Greg McKeown:
Good grief.
Mauro Guillén:
But I’d rather be a mortal human being than a worm. I don’t know what choice you would like to make, but that’s the choice I would like to make. Having said that, I also believe that it’s probably far more important to increase not our longevity but to increase or keep on increasing our health span. That is to say, the number of years, let’s say beyond age 50, that will remain physically and mentally fit. I think that’s even more important. And you see, in Europe, for example, the health span has been increasing faster than longevity. So we have been gaining, in other words, healthy years to the total number of years that we live on average.
The big exception among developed countries in the world is the US for all sorts of reasons that perhaps would be or would make for a great topic for another podcast is where longevity has actually been increasing faster than the health span. And that’s, as you know, has to do with the fact that we don’t, Americans don’t take care of certain things that are going to ruin their lives once they get older, problems with obesity, with chronic diseases, and so on and so forth. So I think there’s also that balance in terms of how we allocate resources in the world. Do we allocate resources to increase our longevity, or do we allocate resources to make sure that the highest possible percentage of whatever number of years we live are in good health?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. What you just said is such an interesting trend and so important, and as you think about quality of life, I’ve thought about the unintended consequence of coming to Cambridge, and it sounds similar to what you’re describing in your own experience.
We have been traveling as a family all here and all going back, and so even with that, the disruption is non-trivial, and I would say greater than I expected. That’s with us all going together. It sounds like I’m not trying to put words in your mouth. It sounds like that’s been true for you, too, that it was more disruptive than you originally expected. Is that correct?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, disruptive in the sense that I found it very time-consuming and energy-consuming to keep on having the family life that I want to have because of the distance, the physical distance.
Greg McKeown:
Do you mean practically on a day-to-day basis? Do you mean sort of just trying to be on the phone with people that late hours here? Do you mean those kinds of things, or do you mean just the amount of time it took when you got back to the US every time to feel like you were connected again? Or both
Mauro Guillén:
With both things? Both things, yeah.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I can really relate to this. I remember speaking with a senior executive of a major pharmaceutical company and to his wife, and they said, well, the research shows that it takes three or four days to reconnect with somebody if you’ve been away. So he would travel every week, and so it meant they said, look, after years and years of doing this, 30 years of doing it, 40, maybe they’re either away from each other or just trying to get reconnected, and it really seems to have affected it. They’re brilliant people. They’re great people, but it has come as a strain. It’s come as a strain. Do you relate or no?
Mauro Guillén:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think I agree that it takes two to three days to actually feel that you are in a different setting and relate to even people that you know very well in a normal way or usual way.
Greg McKeown:
Would you say the biggest challenge of being here wasn’t anything to do with the university, Cambridge, or anything? You literally would say it’s just this unexpectedly great strain of the transition for the family? This was just way more difficult than I expected it to be?
Mauro Guillén:
Yes. I underestimated the costs of that. Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
Thank you. Really, thank you for listening to this episode. What is one thing you can do immediately in the next five to 10 minutes to be able to turn this conversation into action in your life, and who is one person that you can share that action with so that they can help you be accountable, and you can help them?
For all of you that have written reviews on Apple Podcasts, thank you. If you haven’t done that already, you have the chance to get free access to the Essentialism Academy simply by writing a review, posting it there, and letting us know about it. Go to gregmckeown.com/essential for more details. Thank you, and I’ll see you next time.
