Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

I am a (gracefully?) aging mother of three and proud grandmother of four. I keep hearing about how my generation (okay, I am a boomer) is hoarding wealth and failing to pass it down. 

When I look at my lifestyle, I’m facing a fork in the road. Either I splurge on a lovely retirement, or I save so my kids and their kids can have an easier life. We’re all middle-class, so this is not a question of survival. The kids have college funds. Do I owe it to my descendants to scrimp as I age? Surely it’s not right for me to spend my savings on bucket-list vacations…How should I balance spending on myself and on the others that will come after me?

Dear Rainy Day Funder,

I’m so glad to hear you’re not in financial survival mode. But you are facing some economic constraints: You can’t splurge on a luxurious retirement while at the same time saving a substantial nest egg for your kids and grandkids. 

It sounds like this feeling of either-or is causing you some anguish. The instinctual response is, as you suggest, to hoard as much as possible for your progeny to use later on. But at the same time, that feels like it’s zero-summing your own experience in your golden years. 

So I’d like to introduce you to an economic thinker who has some advice that might surprise you. John Maynard Keynes, 19th-century British economist, would say: Don’t save your money!

Keynes wrote that when times are tough, people react by keeping their money close, and not spending it. But this sets in motion what he called the paradox of thrift. One person’s expenses are actually another person’s income, he pointed out; if everyone saved their money, no one would make money either, and a recession could drag on and on. In the end, people’s savings would, paradoxically, go down, even though they were scrimping. 

We can apply the paradox of thrift to your own family as a mini-economy. Inheritance has traditionally worked by setting aside large chunks of your assets to pass along to your children and grandchildren — which could be helpful when the day of windfall comes. But why wait? And would waiting actually stymie your family’s financial potential? 

In past generations, an inheritance like this often happened far earlier. I’m comforted that we are living longer (an average of a decade or more longer) than in the mid-20th century, but this sets up new issues, as you’re stuck in, with when and in what quantity to transfer any extra resources. 

Now, as people retire with decades of good life to enjoy ahead of them, they are often doing so at the very same time their adult children are the most financially stressed: They are trying to buy homes, they’re in the busiest middle part of their careers, and many have children of their own they’re raising and trying to save for. 

This doesn’t mean you have to give away all your money to your family so that they can spend it on the pleasures you have given up. Keynes wasn’t anti-savings so that money could be spent frivolously. He did believe that spending money was one of the best ways to give the greater economy a boost. Perhaps there are ways you could think about spending your money that stimulate your family’s internal economy, that also help you enjoy your retirement. 

For example, you could invest in a lakeside property to kick your feet up at — an asset that will appreciate in value over time and be sold at a profit, or be passed down through the generations to enjoy for many summers to come. Maybe you assist your children in buying a home — one with a comfortable guest suite. You could invest in a business your children want to start, and help them grow something that could accrue more wealth over time. Using your money these ways may even feel more like splurging than scrimping! Yet, it ideally would achieve both: a fun way to spend your hard-earned money now, and create more abundance for your family’s future. 

A hidden bonus of non-traditional inheritance moves like these is that they all involve spending more time together with your family and potentially even strengthening those relationships along the way. The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that there were three kinds of friends. Some are based on utility, and exist only because of what people can get from one another. Other friendships are based on pleasure, when you like doing things with someone. Finally, friendships of virtue persist because you stick by people who inspire you by their strong character. Simply setting aside your money is a relationship that leans utilitarian. Working on a shared meaningful project could help deepen your relationships with your kids and grandkids in those pleasurable and virtuous directions.   

Speaking of, I don’t think you need to be making these decisions alone. 

You used an interesting word in your question: Do you, as an individual, owe it to your family to set them up with a more comfortable financial future, at the expense of personal indulgences? A lot of the discussion around older generations’ money, and whether or how they should pass it on, avoids dealing with this sticky moral component. Why should parents give their kids money? 

I think there’s clarity to be found in thinking more closely about why we owe each other anything.  

There are few better thinkers to turn to than Confucius to consider our obligations to family. The fifth-century Chinese philosopher believed that we can’t understand ourselves only as individuals. You are nobody when you are alone; you only come alive as a mother, a daughter, or a sister. These relational roles each come with specific duties and ways of interacting. Successfully fulfilling these roles within the family has a bigger impact, according to Confucius. It’s what creates the foundations for a harmonious and functional society. For children in this web of relations, it’s critical to uphold filial piety, or the need to respect, honor, and care for parents as well as all of their other elders and ancestors. 

Filial piety has, over the years, been criticized for being too rigid, and setting overly high expectations for blind obedience and conformity in children. So I’ve been interested to see the concept of reciprocal filial piety emerge. In reciprocal filial piety, children have a genuine feeling of gratitude to their parents for raising them, and any obligation they feel is heartfelt — they want to return the favor and care for their parents too. 

As a half-Chinese person, I find it interesting that in family life in the West, filial piety is often reversed. There’s a lot of air time discussing what parents owe their children, and not so much the other way around.

For example, I noticed that you don’t mention how your family intends to care for you in the future, or what they might feel a sense of owing you. If you do take a Keynesian approach to your family and decide to spend your money in ways that could benefit everyone, it might be worth engaging in some Confucian-tinted conversations not only about what you owe everyone else, but what you all appreciate about each other.

You can reflect, together, on how your family is stronger because of all the ways you’ve chosen to look after one another, not only because of how much money is in the bank. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I think it’s worth having a copy of The Analects of Confucius lying around, which is full of nuggets of wisdom. One morsel I recently read was about how to best get along with others: “The gentleman harmonizes without being an echo. The petty man echoes and does not harmonize.” The lesson is that we don’t gain much by blindly following and copying what other people do. The most harmonious way to be in a society, or even a family, is to have interlocking roles that complement each other, like different pitches do in a choir. 
  
• I thought a lot about getting older when reading this piece on death doulas by Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker. It serves as a reminder that people outside of the immediate family can also help with life’s hardest transitions. 
  
• And, for something fun: I enjoyed this investigation by Natalie Wolchover in Quanta on why she (or anyone) is left-handed. She explores left-handed stigma and neuroscience, as well as a theory about humans using their right hands because they once were better to win fights with. 

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

I’m swimming in information. I have tracking apps to keep tally of my daily steps, minutes online, my calories, my sleep. Throughout the day, I am awash with data — some “actionable” and some useless. I find it a struggle to prioritize. I find myself looking up the latest betting odds for a Senate race in a state where I don’t live. (I didn’t bet on the race.) What I want to know is: What should I know less about? I’ve heard that ignorance is bliss, though I don’t often find that to be the case. But maybe I know too much, or…too little about how much to know?

Dear Un-blissfully Aware,

As a fellow know-it-all, I relate to your impulse to gather as much information as possible. I used to obstinately reject the idea that ignorance was bliss. Even if I learned something that was unpleasant, wouldn’t it be much worse not to know it? 

But, as you may suspect from sharing my temperament in this arena, this approach to life can lead to hoarding knowledge like a frantic animal preparing for winter. You’re acquiring information as if it’s a scarce resource (which it’s not) and as if choosing to know something is neutral (it isn’t). What helped me understand the implications of this sort of approach was learning about the cases when people decided not to know, or the study of “deliberate ignorance.” 

Several years ago, a psychologist, Ralph Hertwig, and lawyer, Christoph Engel, who both work at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, examined what happened in the early 1990s, when the archives of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, opened to the public. Any person who had been living in the German Democratic Republic could check if they had been spied on. There was a pretty substantial catch, though: The spies were often “unofficial collaborators” — friends, family, teachers, or lovers who had been tasked with covertly collecting information. When the files were opened, many elected not to look. Hertwig and Engel estimated that potentially more people chose not to know what their files contained than those who did. 

This goes against what we think we know about humans and how you have described yourself. Even Aristotle seemed quite certain that “all men naturally desire knowledge.” In the 1980s, the psychologist George Miller followed along in this line of thinking. He described humans as informavores: creatures with minds that constantly seek out and consume information. So, it can feel surprising to hear about occasions when people didn’t start grabbing for every available datapoint like squirrels dashing for acorns as the first winds of fall arrive. 

But, as Hertwig and Engel — who collaborated on an entire book called Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know — point out, we’re surrounded by people choosing ignorance all the time. They avoid looking at their bank statements, they skip doctor’s appointments, and they cover their ears and say “no spoilers” if someone is talking about a movie they haven’t yet seen. 

Even Nobel Laureates do this. When James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of DNA’s double helix, had his own genome sequenced, he requested that a specific gene be left out: ApoE4, which can reveal an increased Alzheimer’s risk. Watson’s grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and her experience clearly made an impression on him. (Then, many in the scientific world tried to remain ignorant to Watson’s increasingly misogynistic and racist comments, until it was unignorable.) 

Why do people choose not to know? The most common reason: Ignorance can be an extremely effective way to regulate any emotions that might crop up in response to knowledge. You can minimize negative feelings by, for example, not knowing that your otherwise friendly neighbor had been reporting on your comings and goings. 

In a study about romantic relationships, a majority of people said they didn’t want to know if their partner had ever thought about cheating on them (but never acted on it). Other research showed that most people wouldn’t want to know the exact time of their death. Alternatively, someone could cultivate the feelings of joy and surprise by waiting to find out the sex of a baby until it’s born.

Deliberate ignorance can also be used to protect us from our biases. Scientists do blinded studies, because the knowledge of what drugs are being used can unwittingly change the outcomes or research. When orchestras implemented blind auditions, more women musicians were accepted. 

Of course, deliberate ignorance can be problematic when it causes harm to yourself or others, like failing to gather basic information about your financial or physical health. In some cases, for instance, about 10 percent of people who got tested for HIV didn’t come back for their results — which could lead to further spread of the disease. 

But when skipping out on knowledge doesn’t endanger you or those around you, it’s worth asking: How would this information make me feel? 

This sounds like a question that’s missing from your information-ingestion habits. You don’t have to — and shouldn’t — ignore everything that comes across your desk. But your deliberate ignorance filter is turned entirely off; seemingly anything passes through it. To take just one of your examples, you mentioned fitness wearables. It can be useful to be aware of your general activity levels and your sleep, but honestly, don’t you already know enough from your memories of a workout class and how rested you feel in the morning? A quest for more detailed knowledge like this can backfire, making people more anxious, and disconnected from their actual physical experience. 

It’s not just about how much knowledge to take in, it’s also about what kind. The breadth of information that you’re seeking out makes me wonder if you’re not already using knowledge to regulate your emotions by favoring superficial knowledge over the meaningful. When we face difficult tasks (even if they’re important, and we want to get them done), that’s usually when, suddenly, a Senate race in a far-off state starts to become interesting, or you find yourself scrolling a high school acquaintance’s wife’s Instagram. 

In the 1990s, two technology researchers proposed the concept of “information foraging,” which was inspired by early user behavior on the web. A few years later, Webster’s dictionary announced that their word of the year was “infosnacking,” or mindless grazing for useless knowledge online in order to pass the time. 

Snacking sometimes is fine, but you’ll start to suffer if you only eat chips for every meal rather than something more nutritious. I suspect you might be avoiding the slightly more challenging task of taking in other, more nutrient-dense knowledge. If you cut out the step tallies, screen minute totals, and news headlines scrolling, what could you choose to know instead? 

What I’ve learned about myself is that I will always lean towards being an informavore. I can’t help it. I am hungry to know, and there is no need to totally overhaul this valuable part of who you are (as I also tell myself!). This means you don’t need to replace your infosnacking with zenfully staring at the ceiling or emptying your mind through meditation. You can still put new things into it! But you could worry less about your daily information calorie intake and spend more time thinking about the nutrition content of your knowledge diet. 

Take a lesson from our many deliberately ignorant friends, and try disregarding some of the little stuff — the body tracking, the random factoids — for a period of time. But, at the same time, increase your knowledge about other subjects: a neglected hobby or a nonfiction book collecting dust on your shelf. Have a long conversation with your best friend and ask each other questions you’ve never asked before or interview an older relative about their childhood. 

And remember that all of this knowledge relates back to your emotional life. Rather than asking yourself what you should or shouldn’t know, examine how you might be using knowledge to alter how you feel. Knowledge changes us. It can make us happy, anxious, excited, or sad; it impacts our decisions and how we see ourselves and other people. 

In some of your newfound spaces of intentional ignorance, you may find just some surprising moments of bliss.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• The ostrich may be famous for its head-burying ignorance, but that’s actually a myth dating back to the ancient Romans. Ostriches don’t hide their heads, but, rather, bury their eggs underground. I highly suggest flipping through the book Ostrich by Edgar Williams, professor of cardiopulmonary science at the University of South Wales, for a natural and cultural history of our largest living bird that is way more interesting than it needs to be. 
  
• In a moving essay in the China Books Review, poet and writer Zhang Er remembers growing up during the Cultural Revolution and receiving “torn books,” or sections of forbidden books, to read from a family member. Even with incomplete knowledge, “my world expanded with each torn book,” she writes. 
  
• Not a book, but a powerful story on the ripple effects of being exposed to new information in East Germany: the 2006 movie The Lives of Others, from director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which I recently saw for the first time. A Stasi officer listens into the life of a playwright, whose own fragile ignorance about his situation in the GDR is becoming challenged.

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

My conundrum is common, I guess. I feel time accelerating as I grow older. I am expecting my second child, and as the days tick down until I meet her, I feel time catching up with me (I’m in my 40s). I want to savor every day, but they go by so fast. I know that novelty is a partial solution to this, so I do lots of new things. I take up hobbies, go to new places, etc. But I still feel an encroaching contraction of experience and memory, and I’m afraid my remaining decades will go by in a blur. I want to prepare to be as present as I possibly can to the new human I’ll work to raise. 

Do you have advice on slowing down time, or wisdom on how to dilate and cherish the moment I’m in? I’ve tried “mindfulness” and various meditation practices. These haven’t caught hold yet, though I’ll keep trying. Daily journaling and getting away from social media seem to help, but the days still fly by.

Dear Time Traveler,

Do you remember how long time felt when you were a child? I certainly do. I remember summer break stretching out endlessly; a whole eternity captured in one hot July afternoon. It’s no wonder that we respond with panic as we get older and weeks snap by so fast no matter what we’re doing — vacation, working, or as you are, growing a family.

There are two ways to think about time: the way it feels when you’re living it, which is called “prospective time.” And then how you remember time, known as “retrospective time.” It sounds like you’re struggling with both. You want moments to feel longer as they’re happening, and to look back and feel like time didn’t just slip through your fingers.

What’s interesting about our perception of time is that there’s no specific organ dedicated to sensing time. Our eyes see, and our noses smell, but feeling time is a vaguer sense, cobbled together by the combination of various inputs. It is also more easily manipulated. 

I took a close look at the work of David Eagleman, who is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and has studied what makes time feel slower or faster. On a basic level, you’re right, novelty does make time expand. When researchers show people a series of the same images over and over, a new picture thrown into the mix feels as though that new image is presented for longer — even if it’s not. He’s argued that this is one of the reasons why childhood feels so long. So much of what you experience is new when you’re younger. Then we create habits and routines, and time starts to accelerate. If you have the same commute each day, it’s easy for it to feel so familiar that parts of it may not even register in your memory on any given day.

Extreme emotions can elongate time too. In one of Eagleman’s more daring experiments, he asked people to free fall from 15 stories above the ground (they fell into a net). When the people were asked later to try to recreate how long the fall was by estimating it on a stopwatch, they overestimated the duration by about a third. He also had them wear a device on their wrists that rapidly flashed images and numbers while they fell. If their other senses had also slowed during their fall, like Neo in The Matrix, they should have been able to see some of the images flashing before them. They didn’t. The sensation that time slowed down didn’t mean much practically, it was simply a feeling.

When time appears to slow, it is perhaps more helpfully explained by how our memory works. Doing something scary or dangerous activates the amygdala, which tells the rest of the brain to pay attention to what’s going on, to remember more of the details later, which makes time seem to stretch out. Swiss geologist Albert Heim once interviewed people who fell while mountain-climbing. He found that while people were plummeting to what they thought was a certain death, time also expanded. When a race-car driver was launched 30 feet into the air after a crash, he told researchers at the University of Iowa that “It seemed like the whole thing took forever. Everything was in slow motion.” 

Some access this feature of our minds when they take up bungee jumping or skydiving. Or, like you, tamer new experiences that the brain takes its time registering more details of. Other people have turned to drugs like hashish or LSD, which can make minutes or hours feel like whole days. 

But the real issue comes down to a question of how you want to be spending that very time you feel passing you by. Is it obsessing over optimizing for activities that promise maximum time stretchage? I think that might degrade your experience of the life you have in front of you. 

As you note yourself, adding novelty for the sake of novelty doesn’t seem to be helping your life feel more time-rich. In fact, it sounds like you’re ending up with “time urgency,” or trying to achieve as much as possible in as short of a period of time as possible. Being anxious, burnt out, and multi-tasking can, in some cases, make time feel more sped up. This is because you don’t have the bandwidth to pay attention and build detailed memories around what you’re doing. 

Plus, constructing days where time always feels slow means never getting caught up with friends or children, or being engrossed in a well-loved hobby, where you look up at the clock and discover hours have passed in what felt like no time at all. There’s something bittersweet about that, but something to relish too. In fact, there is useful wisdom in acknowledging the difficult fact that as we get older, our time is running out. 

Many ancient philosophies advise to remind yourself of death in order to focus on the importance of life. In Stoicism, this is called memento mori, or remembering that you will die. I slightly prefer Buddhism’s Five Remembrances, which are mantras about accepting that change is inevitable and it’s our destiny to grow older. There’s nothing like having children to make you confront that reality. “I am of the nature to grow old, I cannot escape old age,” is the first remembrance. We might add onto it: “And I cannot escape the passage of time.” 

If you give up trying to slow down time to a halt, it doesn’t mean you can’t find some more spacious ways to live in the time you do have left. Meditation is often pulled off the shelf as a trick for paying more attention, but rather than sitting with your eyes closed and listening to your breathing, I suspect a more quotidian mindfulness would help you. 

Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, wrote about taking back the time spent on everyday life through being mindful when doing the stuff that we tend to rush through. 

Nhất Hạnh reminds us that these things are also our life. When we wash dishes, for example, we might find ourselves thinking only about our list of what we’re going to do next. Then, “we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes,” he wrote. Instead, “we are sucked away into the future — and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.” Rather than adding another new class or going on another trip, try making parts of your routine life new again. When doing the dishes, Nhất Hạnh suggested putting the future out of mind, and focusing on the sensations of washing, of each cup and each plate. He also recommended reserving one day per week to do as little as possible, called a lazy day.  

These days are actually hard work because it can be difficult to do nothing, but within them something else opens up and expands time: boredom. (Remember those endless summer days as a kid? For me, at least, boredom certainly was a common tune in making that time — for better or worse — feel so long.) 

Several years ago I heard about a productivity expert named Chris Bailey who created a “month of boredom,” where he spent an hour each day doing the most boring thing he could think of: staring at the ceiling or watching his turtle swim back and forth in her tank. He found that creating gaps in the day with dull activities sometimes led to creative mind-wandering and the feeling that time was indeed ticking by more slowly than if his day was filled to the brim. 

I’m not always capable of carving out time to actually watch grass grow as Bailey did or of achieving the serene state while doing the dishes that Nhất Hạnh described. But I do try to force myself to be bored in micro-moments throughout my day and pay closer attention when I’m doing routine things, like walking to the train, or doing chores. This practice makes me more aware of how I’m spending my time, and occasionally even makes that time feel a little more expansive. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

Last week I read A Month In the Country, a lovely summer novel, which I realized is all about being in one place and letting time do what it will. 

What if we didn’t have a way to calculate the passage of time at all? I highly recommend reading the first section of the historian Daniel Boorstin’s masterful classic book, The Discoverers. It’s all about how time was measured from early human civilizations to now. “The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience,” Boorstin writes. 

Since I’ve become interested in the Luddites, as well as craving more time for tasks that require working with my hands (woodworking, gardening, lock picking, you name it), I have worried that I’m idealizing manual labor — hard activities that used to consume all of people’s time. This essay by the philosopher Joshua Habgood-Coote in Aeon explores this idea, which he calls “skill nostalgia.” We shouldn’t take the romanticizing too far, but Habgood-Coote writes that there’s reason to yearn for skills that we were never taught.

Hi readers! I’m Shayla Love, a science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal while she’s out on parental leave. I’ll be diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send me any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have. 

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My mother is religious, and I can tell that it brings her peace of mind to think I share some of her religious views. For this reason, I currently attend church with her on Sundays. However, I hesitate to tell her directly that I do not necessarily share her beliefs, as this would likely upset her and would not substantially improve my own quality of life. 

At the same time, attending church while knowing I do not fully believe feels somewhat disingenuous. I am unsure whether continuing this practice is the more ethical choice or whether honesty, despite its potential emotional cost, would be the better path. On the other hand, would it not be selfish to prioritize my own sense of integrity over my mother’s peace of mind, especially when the “cost” to me is relatively small: attending church once a week in order to preserve this tacit understanding? 

Dear Pew-Warmer,

Your question raises two interesting issues: whether to tell your mom that you don’t share her religious beliefs and whether to still attend church with her, even if you don’t share the faith. They might seem to be part of the same quandary, but teasing them apart a little more, we’ll see that your church attendance doesn’t necessarily require as much dishonesty as you may think. 

First, no matter what you decide, it could be helpful for you to know that you’re far from alone in managing different beliefs within a family. The amount of mixed-faith families has been steadily increasing, often because — like you — children grow up to have different beliefs from their parents. And this includes people who decide to no longer follow any prescribed religion at all. A Pew Research Center survey done in 2007, for example, found that 44 percent of Americans had changed or left the religion they were raised in. Relationships between people of different religious leanings are common now, too. A different Pew survey from 2015 found that 39 percent of couples married after 2010 identified as mixed-faith (again, including people who identify as non-religious). 

How do all of these people deal with being married or related and believing such different big things? It’s not easy. In a more recent Pew survey from 2023, more than a third of parents said it was extremely or very important that their children have the same religious views as them, which is in line with your sense that your mom would like to share her faith with you. And this is where much of your tension seems to lie. But, perhaps, I can bring you some solace by sharing that the overall data on all of this is more nuanced. I reviewed some qualitative studies — which include interviews — on religion in families to hear from people on both sides of precisely what you’re grappling with. 

In general, parents do seem to wish for their kids to have the same faith as them. As a highly religious Christian father said in one study: “How to pass our belief to our next generation is a burden to me. … We want them and their next generations to have God’s blessings.” And that makes sense, especially for a parent who belongs to a faith tradition that comes with everlasting consequences for people depending on their beliefs and behaviors. 

But, of course, religion is more than a narrow set of rules and consequences. Each contains an elaborate offering of traditions, beliefs, and values. Many very religious parents responding to the same survey said they understood it was up to their children to choose whether to continue in the tradition or not and that what truly important to them was knowing that their children shared the same values. Religion served as a proxy for that. That same 2023 Pew survey referred to earlier found that the majority of religious parents thought it was more of a priority to pass on ethics and values, as well as traits like ambition and being hardworking, than religious belief alone. 

There can even be upsides for relationships when some core beliefs differ, as one 2022 study suggested. Interfaith families — by having to accommodate multiple beliefs — have the opportunity to actually become stronger. The authors concluded that such “families are not more turbulent or problematic than other family relationships” but actually had many additional strengths, like improved communication skills. 

I won’t try to predict your mom’s response based on others’ replies in a study. Nevertheless, I think these findings suggest, at the very least, that it’s not automatic that parents cannot handle it when their children don’t follow their own faith. From the experience of these families, I suggest, if you decide to be more honest with your mom about this, you should emphasize the moral qualities you have in common — and that you plan to maintain. It could be helpful to stress that your decision is a genuine one; taking any other position wouldn’t be true to what you really feel. 

No matter the outcome of this conversation, though, your quandary about whether you should go to church at all won’t be solved. You say that it might feel disingenuous or pose a problem for your integrity to attend church services if you don’t believe. That assumes that your presence at the church is endorsing a belief in God, or in the theology of that religion, or that the latter are required for the former. 

I wasn’t raised with religion, and, instead, grew up around several atheists who worked as scientists. A few had a pretty disparaging view of the belief in God, which they saw as empirically unsound. Yet, as I got older, I began to notice some streaks of religiosity in their positions, like a dedication to the idea that science is the only tool with which to understand the world, a view that’s sometimes called “scientism.” Science is an excellent way to figure out how the world works, but there are other aspects of life — like art, music, spirituality — where it can fall short. I bring this up to say that religious thinking can rear its head even in the non-religious. And within a religious framework, you may discover non-religious elements too. A sociologist from the late 19th and early 20th century, Emile Durkheim, would push back on the idea that going to church means you believe in God, which helps me understand what I saw in my family.  

Durkheim wanted to understand how religion functioned in society. He dismissed the idea that religion, at its core, was about supernatural events and God (or gods). In his 1912 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he examined Australian Indigenous religions to come up with theories about what all religions had in common. He argued that religion emerges when a group of people get together and agree upon what is sacred and what is profane, and then they act in ways that support those categories.

I’ll add that Durkheim’s views on religion have been questioned over the years. For starters, he vastly oversimplified the Indigenous religions he focused on. Yet, I think one of his central ideas — that religion is primarily an expression of agreement within social groups — is useful in making the act of your going to church less about your individual endorsement and more about participating in a group with shared values. 

Durkheim didn’t think that the concepts of “sacred” and “profane” applied only to those within organized religions; it was a more general principle in how societies were organized. Secular groups like sports fans and political parties also gathered together to perform rituals about their shared definitions of what is sacred. Following Durkheim, you could see your choice as less a theological one and more a social one. There could be plenty of values at your mom’s church that mean something to you, like community, taking care of others, and acting morally. 

Durkheim’s theory does require you to be a participant, however, in upholding these values. If that doesn’t apply to you, there is still a way to engage with those with differing beliefs with curiosity, like the psychologist William James. 

His book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, was based on a series of lectures he did at the University of Edinburgh. He was assigned to do 20 talks, and he thought he would dedicate the first 10 to describing “man’s religious appetites” and the rest on various philosophical interpretations. Instead, he became so engrossed with recounting people’s religious experiences that the subject took up all of his lectures. 

James was not a very religious man himself, and so, his thirst for learning about religion is remarkable. In the introduction to The Selected Letters of William James, the novelist and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote how James’s tolerance for “nuts and cranks, his mediums and table-tappers, his faith healers and receivers of communications from the dead” sometimes confused his peers. How could a man of science be so interested in visions and conversions? 

Like Durkheim, James wasn’t focused on whether religion was true. He had very little interest in theology itself; he fixated on the psychological — the feelings that came with being religious. 

James thought that these feelings — which we all share — were the deeper source of religion. All organized religions came later; they were emotions transformed and organized. He recognized that there were true emotions at the heart of religious conventions, and that people turned to religion to solve human concerns: melancholy, uncertainty about the future, morality, the need for community, expressions of joy. Yet, he was an outsider. He didn’t require himself to be a convert in order to be curious.

James and Durkheim have different approaches, but they both offer clues as to how to turn toward shared social values and how to be curious about others’ emotional lives while not having to commit (or pretend to commit) yourself to beliefs that you don’t have. 

You say that the cost of going to church once a week would be relatively small for you, and, so, I’ll assume that your concerns don’t include participating in a religion that is openly hostile to you or your identity. It would be difficult to participate in shared sacred-making with a group of people that places you in the “profane” category. And being curious about others is a highly generous act that, if not reciprocated, feels dismissive. I hope that by opening yourself up to your mom’s emotional life that underpins her faith, she can do the same in return, even if your own interior landscape isn’t transmuting into religious belief. And it may well be that a genuine connection is what she wants — not a false one. 

A final thought related to Durkheim: He came up with a lovely concept called “collective effervescence”: when many people have the same big feelings together, and the emotions crash together into one big collective firework of expression. To see an easy example of this, watch videos of what happens at events like World Cup matches as teams and fans celebrate big wins. This experience comes about by shared feelings of any kind. If it still feels discomfiting to go to church with your mother, perhaps you can find another way to share ecstatic emotions together and come up with a new definition of the sacred.  

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Speaking of family, Jonathan Weiner writes in this ethereal piece in the American Scholar about how his robust memory skills compare with his brother’s patchier recollections as they both remember their father. 
• In Harper’s Magazine, Katie Thornton tries to learn the utopian, universal language of Esperanto. 
• And my favorite thing I read last week: an older piece of prose from the poet Elizabeth Bishop that I came across in a used bookshop in London, called “The U.S.A. School of Writing.” (It was originally published in The New Yorker.) Bishop takes a scammy job as a writing tutor over the mail and finds surprising connections with oddball students and co-workers.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.