As I witnessed the despair and incomprehension of liberals worldwide after Donald Trump’s victory in November’s U.S. presidential election, I had a sinking feeling that I had been through this before. The moment took me back to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the beginning of the end of Soviet Communism and the lifting of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since the end of World War II. The difference was that the world that collapsed in 1989 was theirs, the Communists’. Now it is ours, the liberals’.
In 1989, I was living within a Warsaw Pact nation, in my final year of studying philosophy at Bulgaria’s Sofia University, when the world turned upside down. The whole experience felt like an extended course in French existentialism. To see the sudden end of something that we had been told would last forever was bewildering—liberating and alarming in equal measure. My fellow students and I were overwhelmed by the new sense of freedom, but we were also acutely conscious of the fragility of all things political. That radical rupture turned out to be a defining experience for my generation.
But the rupture was even broader—on a greater global scale—than many of us realized at the time. The year 1989 was indeed an annus mirabilis, but one very different from the way Western liberals have framed it for the past three decades. The resilience that the Chinese Communist Party demonstrated in suppressing the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square turned out to be more consequential than the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Russians, the most important aspect of 1989 was not the end of Communism, but the end of the Soviet empire, with the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. It was thus the year that Osama bin Laden proclaimed the jihadists’ victory over the godless U.S.S.R. And 1989 was also when nationalism began to reclaim its political primacy in the former Yugoslavia.
The return of Trump to power in the United States may prove another such instance in a period of enormous political rupture. If liberals are to respond effectively to the challenge of a new Trump administration, they will need to reflect critically on what happened in 1989, and discard the story they’ve always told themselves about it. The means of overcoming despair is to be found in better comprehension.
From a liberal point of view, comparing the anti-Soviet revolutions of 1989 with the illiberal revolutions today might seem scandalous. In Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase, 1989 was “the end of history,” whereas Trump’s victory, many liberals assert, may portend the end of democracy. The year the Berlin Wall fell was viewed as the triumph of the West; now the decline of the West dominates the conversation. The collapse of Communism was marked by a vision for a democratic, capitalist future; that future is now riddled with uncertainty. The mood in 1989 was internationalist and optimistic; today, it has soured into nationalism, at times even nihilism.
But to insist on those differences between then and now is to miss the point about their similarities. Living through such moments in history teaches one many things, but the most important is the sheer speed of change: People can totally alter their views and political identity overnight; what only yesterday was considered unthinkable seems self-evident today. The shift is so profound that people soon find their old assumptions and choices unfathomable.
Translated to this moment: How, just six months ago, could any sane person have believed that an aging and unpopularJoe Biden could be reelected?
Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for how to win the war in Ukraine or manage globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could be no more. The United States’ postwar political identity has vanished into the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail on its own terms, but the old world will not return. Even most liberals do not want it back. Few Americans today are comfortable with the notion of American exceptionalism.
In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, some political commentators grimly looked back to the 1930s, when fascism stalked the world. The problem is that the 1930s are beyond living memory, whereas the 1990s are still vivid to many of us. What I learned from that decade is that a radical political rupture gives the winners a blank check. Understanding why people voted for Trump will be little help in apprehending what he will do in office.
Political ruptures are achieved by previously unimaginable coalitions, united more by their intensity than a common program. Politicians who belong to these coalitions typically have a chameleonlike ability to suit themselves to the moment—none more so, in our time, than Trump. American liberals who are gobsmacked that people can treat a billionaire playboy as the leader of an anti-establishment movement might recall that Boris Yeltsin, the hero of Russia’s 1990s anti-Communist revolution, had been one of the leaders of the Communist Party just a few short years earlier.
Like the end of the Soviet era, Trump’s reelection victory will have global dimensions. It marks the passing of the United States as a liberal empire. America remains the world’s preeminent power, yes, and will remain an empire of sorts, but it won’t be a liberal one. As Biden’s spotty record of mobilizing support to defend the “liberal international order” in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, the very idea of such an order was for many critics always a Western fiction. It existed as long as the U.S. had the power and political will to impose it.
This is not what Trump will do. In foreign policy, Trump is neither a realist nor an isolationist; he is a revisionist. Trump is convinced that the U.S. is the biggest loser in the world it has made. Over the past three decades, in his view, America has become a hostage, rather than a hegemon, of the liberal international order. In the postwar world, the U.S. successfully integrated its defeated adversaries Germany and Japan into democratic governance, international trade, and economic prosperity. This did not apply to China: In Trump’s view, Beijing has been the real winner of the post-1989 changes.
Trump’s second coming will clearly be different from the first. In 2016, Trump’s encounter with American power was like a blind date. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, and American power didn’t know exactly who he was. Not this time. America may remain a democracy, but it will become a more feral one. Under new management, its institutions will likely depart from the safety of consensual politics and go wild. In times of rapid change, political leaders seek not to administer the state, but to defeat it. They see the state and the “deep state” as synonymous. Illiberal leaders select their cabinet members in the same way that emperors used to choose the governors of rebellious provinces: What matters most is the appointee’s loyalty and capacity to resist being suborned or co-opted by others.
In Trump’s first administration, chaos reigned; his second administration will reign by wielding chaos as a weapon. This White House will overwhelm its opponents by “flooding the zone” with executive orders and proclamations. He will leave many adversaries guessing about why he is making the decisions he does, and disorient others with their rapidity and quantity.
In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by promising normalcy. Normalcy will no longer help the Democrats. In the most recent example of an antipopulist victory, Donald Tusk triumphed in Poland’s 2023 parliamentary elections and returned to be prime minister, not because he promised business as usual but because his party, Civic Platform, was able to forge a compelling new political identity. Tusk’s party adopted more progressive positions on such controversial issues as abortion rights and workers’ protections, but it also wrapped itself in the flag and embraced patriotism. Tusk offered Poles a new grand narrative, not simply a different electoral strategy. Civic Platform’s success still depended on forming a coalition with other parties, a potentially fragile basis for governing, but it offers a template, at least, for how the liberal center can reinvent itself and check the advance of illiberal populism.
The risk for the United States is high: The next few years could easily see American politics descend into cruel, petty vengefulness, or worse. But for liberals to respond to this moment by acting as defenders of a disappearing status quo would be unwise. To do so would entail merely reacting to whatever Trump does. The mindset of resistance may be the best way to understand tyranny, but it is not the best way to handle a moment of radical political rupture, in which tyranny is possible but not inevitable.
Back in 1989, the political scientist Ken Jowitt, the author of a great study of Communist upheaval in that period, New World Disorder, observed that a rupture of this type forces political leaders to devise a new vocabulary. At such moments, formerly magic words do not work anymore. The slogan “Democracy is under threat” did not benefit the Democrats during the election, because many voters simply did not see Trump himself as that threat.
As the writer George Orwell observed, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The challenge of apprehending the new, even when the fact of its arrival is undeniable, means that it may come as a shock to liberal sensibilities how few tears will be shed for the passing of the old order. Contrary to what seemed the correct response in 2016, the task of Trump opponents today is not to resist the political change that he has unleashed but to embrace it—and use this moment to fashion a new coalition for a better society.
You probably remember when you took your last shower, but if I ask you to examine your routine more closely, you might discover some blank spots. Which hand do you use to pick up the shampoo bottle? Which armpit do you soap up first?
Bathing, brushing your teeth, driving to work, making coffee—these are all core habits. In 1890, the psychologist William James observed that living creatures are nothing if not “bundles of habits.” Habits, according to James’s worldview, are a bargain with the devil. They make life easier by automating behaviors you perform regularly. (I would rather attend to what I read in the news on a given morning, for example, than to the minutiae of how I steep my daily tea.) But once an action becomes a habit, you can lose sight of what prompts it, or if you even like it very much. (Maybe the tea would taste better if I steeped it longer.)
Around the new year, countless people pledge to reform their bad habits and introduce new, better ones. Yet the science of habits reveals that they are not beholden to our desires. “We like to think that we’re doing things for a reason, that everything is driven by a goal,” Wendy Wood, a provost professor emerita who studies habit at the University of Southern California, told me. But goals seem like our primary motivation only because we’re more conscious of them than of how strong our habits are. In fact, becoming aware of your invisible habits can boost your chances of successfully forming new, effective habits or breaking harmful ones this resolution season, so that you can live a life dictated more by what you enjoy and less by what you’re used to.
James was prescient about habits, even though he described them more than 100 years ago. Habitual action “goes on of itself,” he wrote. Indeed, modern researchers have discerned that habits are practically automatic “context-response associations”—they form when people repeat an action cued by some trigger in an environment. After you repeat an action enough times, you’ll do it mindlessly if you encounter the cue and the environment. “That doesn’t mean that people have no recollection of what they did,” David Neal, a psychologist who specializes in behavior change, told me. “It just means that your conscious mind doesn’t need to participate in the initiation or execution of the behavior.”
Our conscious goals might motivate us to repeat a particular behavior, and so serve as the spark that gets the habit engine going. In fact, “people who are best at achieving their goals are the ones who purposefully form habits to automate some of the things that they do,” Benjamin Gardner, a psychologist of habitual behavior at the University of Surrey, told me. He recently enacted a flossing habit by flossing each day in the same environment (the bathroom), following the same contextual cues (brushing his teeth). “There are days when I think, I can’t remember if I flossed yesterday, but I just trust I definitely did, because it’s such a strong part of my routine,” he said.
But even habits that are deliberately begun are worth reevaluating every so often, because once they solidify, they can break away from the goals that inspired them. If our goals shift, context cues will still trigger habitual behavior. A 1998 meta-analysis found that intentions could predict only actions that are done occasionally, such as getting a flu shot, and not actions that were repeated regularly, such as wearing a seat belt. In one study from 2012, students who often went to a sports stadium raised their voices when they saw an image of that stadium, even if they didn’t intend to. And scientists have shown that habitual behaviors and goal-directed behaviors involve different pathways in the brain. When an action becomes a habit, it becomes more automatic and relies more on the sensorimotor system. When scientists damage the parts of animals’ brains that are related to goal-directed behavior, the animals start behaving more habitually. (There remains some debate, however, about whether any human action can truly be independent from goals.)
And yet, people tend to explain their habitual behavior by appealing to their goals and desires. A 2011 study found that people who said they’d eat when they got emotional weren’t actually more likely to snack in response to negative feelings; eating behaviors were better explained by habit. In a 2022 study, Wood and her colleagues asked people why they drank coffee. The participants said they did so when they were tired, but in fact, when they logged their coffee drinking, it was only weakly correlated with their fatigue. “They didn’t have a desire to drink coffee,” Wood said. “It was just the time when they typically did during the day.”
Habits also maintain their independence by not being as sensitive to rewards. If you don’t like something the first time you try it, you probably won’t repeat the experience. But habits can persist even if their outcome stops being pleasing. In one study Wood worked on with Neal and other colleagues, people with a habit of eating popcorn at the movies ate more stale popcorn than those without the habit. Those with a popcorn habit reported later that they could tell the popcorn was gross, but they just kept eating it. “It’s not that they are totally unaware that they don’t like it,” Wood said. “The behavior continues to be triggered by the context that they’re in.” It’s not so terrible to endure some stale popcorn, but consider the consequences if more complex habitual actions—ones related to, say, work-life balance, relationships, or technology—hang around past their expiration date.
In the face of invisible habits, awareness and attention are powerful weapons. In a recent study, Gardner asked people who slept fewer than six hours a night to describe their bedtime routines in detail. Doing so revealed pernicious bedtime habits they weren’t aware of before. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has similarly suggested making a “Habits Scorecard,” a written list of all of your daily habits that includes a rating of how positively, negatively, or neutrally they affect your life.
Neutral habits, such as the timing of my yoga session, can be hardest to take stock of. And if they’re just humming along making your life easier, identifying them might feel pointless. But because habits won’t always have your latest intentions in mind, it’s worth keeping an eye on them to make sure they don’t start working against you. Like it or not, people are destined to be bundled up with habits. But knowing how they work—simply becoming aware of how unaware of them we can be—can help get you to a life with as little stale popcorn as possible.
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.
According to a 2023 YouGov poll, each year, about a third of American adults—and more than half of 18-to-29-year-olds—start the new year with at least one resolution. One of the most common resolutions, at 22 percent of all adults, is “being happy.” Another common one is “improving physical health.” I endorse the sentiment behind these commitments, of course—if I didn’t, I wouldn’t write the “How to Build a Life” column.
But these good intentions are too broad to be successful. Behavioral scientists have long shown that specific goals are the ones that tend to lead to real wins. They have found, for example, that setting a small resolution for a day’s work motivates teams, and can do the same even if someone is working alone. When I am writing a book (which I am about 75 percent of my professional time), my goal on any given day is simply to compose 100 words—a very modest but achievable target, and one that eventually adds up to finished chapters and, ultimately, a completed book. By the same token, researchers find that incremental progress is a great way to address complex policy problems.
And so it is when building your life. This year, try setting a very defined goal that you can realistically achieve—and that sets you on a path toward those bigger, more diffuse resolutions. And I have one particular, very achievable commitment in mind that will help you become happier and improve your health and effectiveness: This year, start getting up early.
How early is early? you ask. Although the clock time will vary according to time of year and where you live, what I have in mind is before daybreak.
To rise before dawn sounds ascetic—indeed, the habit is characteristic of many monastic traditions throughout history. Certainly from the fourth century, and possibly earlier, Christian monks have observed the part of the liturgy called Matins, which is conducted between 3 a.m. and dawn. In the Hindu religion, too, adherents are encouraged to experience the brāhma muhūrta, which in Sanskrit means “the creator’s time” and refers to the moment that occurs precisely one hour and 36 minutes before sunrise. To discipline the body and mind, and frame the day in worship of the divine, the thinking goes, this is the appropriate time to get up.
Modern neuroscience indicates that, as painful as the practice can seem for people unaccustomed to it, this may be the right way to start the day for optimal human performance. For example, a 2012 study of adolescents and young adults ages 16 to 22 in India compared two randomly selected groups, one of which rose before 4:30 a.m. and the other at about 7 a.m. The researchers found that the early risers significantly improved during the study in both attention and recall tasks, outperforming the later risers. Consistent with this finding, a 2019 paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience showed that our brain exhibits greater functional connectivity in the mornings. This, we might assume, facilitates better performance of complex tasks.
Rising early is an especially effective resolution because it tends to enable the achievement of other popular goals. For example, new evidence from researchers suggests that rising early makes it easier to build good habits, because the goal-directed brain regions—such as the hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex—work better at this time than later in the day.
One habit that is easier to adopt first thing in the morning is exercise. Clear data exist to show that when people intend to exercise early in the day, they are significantly less likely to experience “intention failure” than if they plan to exercise later.
Of course, getting up before dawn is difficult. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t need a resolution. For almost everyone, the body resists getting out of the warm bed, and moving abruptly from sleep to wakefulness can feel like violent disruption. Mother Nature, you might feel, simply doesn’t want you to get up—and that could be right in an evolutionary sense: We are programmed to seek comfort and get rest when we can. Your Pleistocene ancestors—who probably didn’t live much past the age of 30—needed to husband their energy to fight for their survival every day. This instinct still exists, even though we are no longer fighting to survive.
Because getting up early is a challenge, you might assume that one cost of doing so would be feeling less happy. The research says the opposite. Psychologists writing in the journal Emotion have shown that people who get up early enjoy a more positive mood throughout the day compared with those who rise late. Even after controlling for problems such as depression and neuroticism that are associated with sleep disorders, people who stay up late and get up late tend to have worse habits of emotional regulation than those who get up early; that, in turn, can lead to higher levels of negative mood.
So the science on the benefits of rising early—in spite of the difficulty—seems clear. But what do you need to do to succeed in your resolution and develop this habit? Here are a few things to keep in mind:
1. This morning started last night.
Early rising is really the second part of two habits: The first part is going to bed early enough that you get sufficient sleep. This probably seems like the easier habit to keep, but for many people it isn’t. I have written before about why people don’t make it to bed or can’t get to sleep at a reasonable time. For many young adults, the problem is what psychologists call “revenge bedtime procrastination,” in which they stay up late as a form of rebellion against their own inner authority. Knowing that you have this tendency can help you break free of it.
Others might have a genetic disposition to want to stay up late and get up late. Or (like me) they simply find it hard to turn off their mental machine, which can make falling asleep tough. For this issue, science-based protocols can make a dramatic difference.
2. Raise the cost of not getting up.
One reason people struggle to rise early is because they aren’t required to do so. In my 20s, when I made a living as a musician, I always got up well after the sun rose, because I never had rehearsals or concerts in the morning. In theory, I wanted to get up early. But if I set the clock for 6 a.m., and then, when it went off, I knew there was no cost to going back to sleep, I would turn off the alarm and roll over. Later, in my 30s, when I finally went to college and graduate school, I had places to be very early—and that changed my habits.
Even if you don’t have to start your work or studies early, you can still induce yourself to get up by making a conscious commitment to accomplish something of value. In Meditations, which were Marcus Aurelius’s notes to himself, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher wrote: “In the morning when thou findest thyself unwilling to rise, consider with thyself presently, it is to go about a man’s work that I am stirred up.” So choose a deed that will stir you up.
In psychological experiments, participants who commit even to a trivial task such as solving a minor math problem right after their alarm sounds are far less likely than others to go back to sleep. If necessary, you can increase the cost of sleeping in by making yourself accountable to someone else. For example, if you get a workout partner and agree to meet at the gym first thing, you are much more likely to roll out of bed when the clock goes off—rather than incur the cost of letting your buddy down.
3. Make early rising divine.
As mentioned above, many religious traditions dedicate the time before dawn to prayer and worship, in the belief that these moments of tranquility and mental clarity are best spent in the presence of the divine. But a nonbeliever can equally well experience these hours as transcendent. Don’t take my word for it—here is confirmation from a notorious atheist, the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Do not shorten the morning by getting up late … look upon it as the quintessence of life … Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth.”
Make your predawn the most transcendent moment in your day by framing it in existential terms: The discomfort of rising early bears witness to your being truly alive, and it is the day’s first act of your rebellion against death. Spend that precious time without devices, with your attention undivided by quotidian demands and trivial distractions, so that you can explore deep thoughts about the big questions of life.
So much for the soul; let’s end on a practical note. To make getting up before dawn your ordinary routine, you need to establish the practice as a habit. As a neuroscientific matter, this is a behavior governed by the basal ganglia in the cerebrum. That means it must be repeated enough to become automatic, not a conscious daily choice. How long will this take to establish? British scholars studying habit formation have found that this varies widely from individual to individual: to achieve 95 percent automaticity, anything from 18 to 254 days.
For the morning larks among us, this means a predawn routine will start to become a true part of your life by the end of January; for the night owls, it could take until sometime in September. I was definitely the latter, and many mornings, it felt pretty bad to leave my warm bed when it was still dark. But it was worth it: The brāhma muhūrta is now the best time of my day.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
In September 2016, the CIA sent a classified memo to the FBI, which was investigating Russian interference in the presidential election. According to Russian intelligence sources, Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to publicly tie Donald Trump to the country’s hack of the Democratic National Committee. The Russians reportedly said that Clinton wanted to distract the public from the scandal over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
As secret tips from spies go, this one was not earth-shattering. FBI agents didn’t need the CIA to tell them that Clinton was painting Trump as an ally of the Kremlin—her campaign chair was on CNN saying just that. Trump was also making Clinton’s case for her: In late July, he had publicly encouraged the Russians to hack her email, which they then tried to do.
The CIA memo may have been obvious and not particularly useful. But it did contain “sensitive information that could be source revealing,” its authors cautioned, so the information was limited to those with a “need-to-know” status and “should not be released in any form.” Exposing human sources—spies—compromises intelligence gathering and can sometimes get them killed. For four years, the document’s stewards complied and kept it secret. Then it caught the attention of John Ratcliffe, President Trump’s director of national intelligence.
Ratcliffe had been a divisive pick for the nation’s top intelligence adviser, made late in Trump’s term. His critics said he lacked sufficient national-security experience and was a partisan warrior. As a freshman Republican representative from Texas, he had risen to national prominence by suggesting a theory, during committee hearings and television appearances, that Clinton had engineered the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russian interference. (Ratcliffe surely knew that she had not, because this had been exhaustively established by multiple investigations, including one led by Senate Republicans.)
In late September 2020, weeks before voters would choose between Trump and Joe Biden, Ratcliffe declassified and released the CIA memo, along with some notes from an intelligence briefing given to President Barack Obama. He claimed that he was responding to requests from Congress to shed light on the FBI’s Russia investigation, but the documents didn’t provide much new information.
Intelligence officials were appalled. History had repeatedly, painfully, shown that politics and intelligence were a dangerous mix, and as the DNI, Ratcliffe was expected to avoid partisan behavior and safeguard sources and methods. Also, officials warned, the Russians might have wanted that memo to be released; even four years on, anything mentioning Clinton, Russia, and Trump was politically combustible and potentially disruptive to the election. Gina Haspel, then the director of the CIA (a Trump appointment), opposed the document’s release. So did officials at the National Security Agency.
But to Trump and some of his advisers, the memo had a certain expedience. The president seized on it as new evidence of Clinton’s hidden hand in the “Russia hoax,” a subject that reliably caused him to rage against his supposed enemies inside the intelligence agencies.
“It is imperative that the American people now learn what then–Vice President Joe Biden knew about this conspiracy and when he knew it,” the Trump campaign’s communications director said in a statement at the time. “Biden must give a full accounting of his knowledge and his conversations about Clinton’s scheme, which was known to the highest reaches of his administration.”
Trump himself made passing reference to the intelligence in his first debate with Biden, accusing Clinton of “a whole big con job” and the intelligence community of “spying on my campaign.”
Ratcliffe had cherry-picked just the thing to feed Trump’s fixation on “deep state” chicanery and malfeasance. The act was nakedly political. And it surprised no one.
Ratcliffe’s appeal to Trump has always been clear: He’s a political operator willing to push the boundaries of a historically apolitical position in a manner that serves the president’s interests. In November, Trump nominated Ratcliffe for an even more important job than the previous one: CIA director. The question likely to hang over his tenure is how much further he will go to enable Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community.
When Trump nominated Ratcliffe as the DNI in 2019, he gave him marching orders to “rein in” the forces that the president believed were undermining him. “As I think you’ve all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok,” Trump told reporters. Ratcliffe would get them back in line. But lawmakers were wary of appointing such a staunch partisan, and amid concerns about his experience, Democrats and key Republicans questioned whether he had exaggerated his credentials, something Ratcliffe denied. After only five days, Ratcliffe (who declined to be interviewed for this article) withdrew his candidacy. Trump nominated him again in 2020, and he was narrowly confirmed along party lines, 49–44. He received more votes in opposition than any DNI in the office’s 15-year history.
When Trump named Ratcliffe as his pick for CIA director, he again made his expectations clear: He praised Ratcliffe for exposing alleged abuses by the FBI and former intelligence officials, and for showing “fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation.” But this time, the response in Washington has been muted.
Having served as the DNI for eight months, Ratcliffe is now better qualified to run an intelligence agency. He also benefits from comparison with Trump’s other choices for top national-security positions: at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual assault and alcohol abuse (he has denied the allegations); at the FBI, Kash Patel, a fervent Trump supporter who has threatened to investigate the president’s critics, including journalists; and for the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, a former representative who has expressed sympathy for some of the world’s most notorious anti-American dictators, including Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.
Compared with these selections, Ratcliffe looks like an elder statesman, and he has essentially been anointed: The Senate will almost certainly confirm him, which will make Ratcliffe the only person ever to have served as both the DNI and the director of the CIA. Several U.S. and allied intelligence officials told me that they would welcome this development, given the alternatives. Patel had been on Trump’s shortlist to run the CIA, some reminded me.
But the question of where Ratcliffe’s limits lie is even more salient in Trump’s second term. Though the DNI technically ranks higher than the director of the CIA, the latter is the more powerful post. The DNI is largely a managerial job; the CIA director is operational. From Langley, Ratcliffe would control covert intelligence activity. He could learn the locations and identities of spies. The CIA is also the primary interlocutor for foreign intelligence services, which share information that could implicate their sources if exposed. Several foreign intelligence officials have recently told me that they are taking steps to limit how much sensitive intelligence they share with the Trump administration, for fear that it might be leaked or used for political ends.
Some U.S. officials fear that Trump could direct the CIA to undertake illegal activities, such as aiding paramilitary forces inside the United States to secure the border, or clandestinely spying on Americans, knowing that the president would enjoy criminal immunity for official acts thanks to a recent Supreme Court opinion. These are extreme examples, and Trump would surely face internal resistance. But Ratcliffe has demonstrated that he’s willing to break norms and traditions. How would he respond if the president asked—or ordered—him to do something more drastic than declassify documents?
Though Trump has turned to Ratcliffe twice to “rein in” the deep state, his political origin story is actually rooted in the security state’s expansion. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1986, when he was only 20, Ratcliffe went to law school and then into private practice in Texas. “But something was missing,” he told senators at his DNI confirmation hearing. On September 11, 2001, Ratcliffe said, he was at work in a high-rise office building in Dallas that “looked a whole lot like the ones in New York that were under attack”—and he wondered, in the months that followed, how he might devote his time to more meaningful work.
Ratcliffe had gotten to know Matt Orwig, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas and a George W. Bush appointee. Orwig needed someone to run a joint terrorism task force, one of the dozens set up after the attacks to coordinate federal and regional security efforts. The goal was not only to prosecute terrorism crimes but to prevent them from happening. Ratcliffe took the job in 2004.
“The whole law-enforcement structure was being remade,” Orwig told me. “There was a lot of information flooding in from different authorities. It was a really big job.” In 2007, Orwig stepped down, and Ratcliffe became U.S. attorney for 11 months. Afterward, he returned to private practice, running the Dallas office of a firm he co-founded with John Ashcroft, Bush’s first attorney general.
Ashcroft became Ratcliffe’s political mentor, an association that seems ironic in retrospect. Ashcroft was in many ways an architect of the powerful national-security bureaucracy that Trump and Ratcliffe now rail against. After 9/11, the attorney general oversaw and approved controversial applications of the PATRIOT Act and other new authorities, including secret wiretapping of phone calls involving Americans. Such counterterrorism measures enhanced the powers of the Justice Department and the intelligence community, and occasionally encroached on civil liberties that Americans had long taken for granted.
Ratcliffe and Ashcroft shared a deeply conservative political outlook, and Ashcroft admired the younger attorney’s commitment to community service. Ratcliffe was also serving as the mayor of Heath, Texas, a bedroom community where he lived with his wife and two children. Ashcroft thought Ratcliffe was suited for national leadership. “We decided he should run for Congress,” Ashcroft told me, and in 2014, Ratcliffe did.
Ratcliffe at his congressional-campaign headquarters in Heath, Texas, March 19, 2014 (Kim Leeson / The Washington Post / Getty)
Getting to Washington would test Ratcliffe’s budding political skills. Ralph Hall, a conservative Democrat who switched to the GOP in 2004, had reliably represented the fourth congressional district, where Ratcliffe lived, since 1981. At 91, Hall was the oldest-ever member of the House of Representatives, and his voters seemed in no mood to replace him with a young upstart. But the Tea Party was elevating a new generation of conservatives who were suspicious of entrenched power, and in a bid for change that avoided taking aim at Hall’s age, Ratcliffe promised to bring “energetic leadership” to the district. “It’ll be up to the voters to decide whether or not a candidate is too old,” Ratcliffe, who was 42 years younger than Hall, told reporters at the time.
Ratcliffe picked up endorsements from conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, and eventually defeated Hall in a runoff. He was the first primary challenger to beat a Republican incumbent in Texas in 20 years. His political acumen was now beyond dispute, according to Todd Gillman, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News. “Affable. Discreet. Knife fighter,” Gillman wrote in a recent column for The Washington Post. “All of it was there to see when Ratcliffe took down the oldest member of Congress ever without coming off like a jerk.”
In Washington, Ratcliffe discovered the full extent of his talents, which included a lawyerly facility for constructing political narratives that appealed to Republicans. He fell in with fellow conservatives who were also new to Congress. Trey Gowdy, another former federal prosecutor, introduced him to his fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott. The three spent many evenings together, eating dinner and talking about their lives and political ideas.
Gowdy helped Ratcliffe raise his national profile and get Trump’s attention. At a hearing in September 2016, the representative grilled James Comey, the FBI director, about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, questioning whether officials had already decided that there was no prosecutable crime when they sat down to interview the presidential candidate. Ratcliffe was aggressive but not hectoring. His questions were clearly prepared, but his delivery seemed unrehearsed. He corrected Comey’s account of a chain of events in the FBI’s investigation, prompting the director to admit that he might have been misremembering. It wasn’t exactly a gotcha moment, but Ratcliffe showed that he could confuse an adversary with a blizzard of facts.
After Ratcliffe finished with Comey, Gowdy passed him a handwritten note: “100 percent A+.”
“That was really a moment for me where I thought, You know, I’m really where I’m supposed to be,” Ratcliffe recalled in 2021 on a podcast that Gowdy hosts.
Ratcliffe credited Gowdy with steering his career. “You said to me, ‘Johnny, focus on what you do well, get better at it, and shut up about the rest.’ And I literally followed that advice. In other words, only go on TV to talk about things that you know about. Don’t try and be a master of all trades. Do the things that you do really well and people will notice, and it will serve you well. And it did.”
Gowdy helped make Ratcliffe a go-to interrogator when congressional committees wanted to quiz the FBI or poke holes in the Russia investigation. Ratcliffe stuck to a theme of pernicious bias against Trump. He suggested that political animus, not genuine concern about foreign-intelligence threats, was the impetus behind the Russia probe. He also suggested that the CIA—the agency he is about to lead—may have kicked off the investigation. (It did not, and this is among the fringiest views that Ratcliffe has flirted with.)
Ratcliffe’s performances impressed Trump. But although he, Gowdy, and Scott are deeply conservative, they are not MAGA Republicans. They seem to share Trump’s antipathy toward the federal bureaucracy. But their political ideas were shaped by forces that gave rise to Trump, not by the man himself. Gowdy, who left Congress in 2019, got on Trump’s bad side for not embracing his conspiracy theories about Democrats spying on his campaign, and Scott competed against Trump in the GOP’s 2024 presidential primary.
As for Ratcliffe, he has more fiercely defended Trump as a victim of an unfair system than championed him as a hero sent to fix it. In one of the most-watched hearings of the Trump era, Ratcliffe lit into Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the language of his final report, which stated that although the investigation “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” That was an unfair standard no American should face, Ratcliffe insisted. “Donald Trump is not above the law,” he thundered. “But he damn sure shouldn’t be below the law.”
It was a principled position, and perhaps a reflection of sincere disquiet about the politicization of law enforcement and the intelligence community. Ashcroft told me that he shares such concerns and speaks with Ratcliffe four or five times a year about reforming the system. But when Ratcliffe takes these stances, he also gives credence to Trump’s refrains about “Crooked Hillary” and the deep state. And he makes little effort to distinguish Trump’s critique from his own.
Jim Jordan speaks to Ratcliffe during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, December 9, 2019. (Zach Gibson / Getty)
Ratcliffe probably wouldn’t have become the director of national intelligence if not for another pro-Trump partisan, Richard Grenell. The then-ambassador to Germany was also serving as the acting intelligence director when Trump nominated Ratcliffe for the second time, in 2020. The president essentially forced the Senate to choose between the two. Grenell had long been loathed and even feared in some quarters of Congress for his heated rhetoric and vicious social-media attacks. Suddenly, Ratcliffe seemed like the less political option.
Ratcliffe took office less than six months before the 2020 election. The intelligence agencies he now led were on guard against foreign governments trying to skew political contests with misleading social-media posts and divisive propaganda. Russia, once again, was a top concern.
Nothing angered Trump like talk of Russia trying to help him win an election. His aides had learned to avoid the subject. The president had identified China as the biggest strategic threat to the United States, an assessment that many Democrats and Republicans shared, Ratcliffe among them. But career intelligence analysts doubted that China intended to disrupt the election. What Beijing really wanted was stability in its relationship with Washington, they argued. Trying to help one candidate win, as Russia had in 2016, could backfire.
In August 2020, the intelligence community produced a classified assessment of election threats. Then Ratcliffe intervened, analysts have said, and inserted a warning about China that was an “outrageous misrepresentation of their analysis,” according to a later report by an intelligence ombudsman.
The DNI typically does not help write intelligence assessments, because he is a political appointee, and so his involvement could present a conflict of interest. But Ratcliffe argued that although his intervention was unusual, it was not unprecedented, nor was it inappropriate. He maintained that the analysts were thinking too narrowly: China’s well-documented efforts to lobby state and local officials, and to steal corporate intellectual property and classified government information, were aimed at achieving political outcomes. That made them, in effect, a kind of election interference. The ombudsman also found that the analysts working on China and the ones working on Russia used different definitions for influence and interference. Ratcliffe argued that such discrepancies could create the false impression that Russia was trying to affect the U.S. election but China was not.
“I know my conclusions are right, based on the intelligence that I see,” he said, according to the ombudsman. “Many analysts think I am going off the script. They don’t realize that I did it based on the intelligence.”
Ratcliffe’s defenders say that his role as the DNI obligated him to speak up, even if that meant straying into red-hot political topics. “What I saw was him reflecting a value of transparency and informing the public,” said one U.S. intelligence official who worked for Ratcliffe when he was the DNI and asked not to be identified by name. “Sometimes he would challenge assessments and assumptions, I think in the interest of seeing if they would hold. He is an attorney by trade. You kind of have to keep that in mind when you brief him.”
Ratcliffe wasn’t the only one to gauge the threat from China more broadly: Two senior intelligence officers also expressed views on China’s interference activities that were in line with Ratcliffe’s assessment. But Ratcliffe didn’t raise the same level of concern about Russia, which many analysts thought posed the more direct threat to the election. He framed the issue, not for the first time, in a way that lent support to Trump’s political argument. And because the DNI was making that case, the ostensibly objective work of intelligence now had a partisan gloss.
Ratcliffe leaving a meeting with Senate Minority Whip John Thune after being nominated to be the CIA director, December 4, 2024 (Andrew Harnik / Getty)
When announcing Ratcliffe’s nomination for CIA director, Trump indicated what he valued most in his pick: From “exposing” the Russia investigation as the alleged handiwork of the Clinton campaign to “catching the FBI’s abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American public,” Trump wrote in a social-media post. The reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was shorthand for one of Trump’s elastic theories about how Democrats had spied on his 2016 campaign.
He also lauded Ratcliffe for publicly refuting 51 former intelligence officers who had claimed in a letter that the 2020 discovery of emails on a laptop purporting to belong to Joe Biden’s son Hunter had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Ratcliffe was right about that one: No evidence linked Hunter Biden’s laptop to a Russian plot to harm his father. But the letter by the former officials was an act of free speech and an expression of opinion by former officials and experts—not something that the DNI traditionally makes his business.
In the four years he has been out of government, Ratcliffe has remained an enthusiastic critic of the intelligence community. He co-authored a September 2023 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with a former aide, reflecting on “a dangerous trend inside the CIA to politicize intelligence on China, and to suppress dissenting views that stray from the company line.” He was particularly worried about resistance to investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The once-fringe view that the virus likely originated in a laboratory in China, which Ratcliffe believes, has gained more respectability thanks in part to U.S. intelligence.
Tim Scott told me that Ratcliffe’s controversial positions have aged well. “Some of the time he stood alone or in the minority and took a scathing rebuke from the intellectuals in our country,” the senator said. “I think the truth of the matter is, he was right—about the origins of COVID, the Biden laptop, and Russiagate.”
In other scenarios, however—the memo about the Clinton campaign and Russian hacking comes to mind—Ratcliffe conducted himself less like an intelligence adviser, who is supposed to help the president make a decision, and more like a litigator doing his best to help his client win an argument, or a political pugilist eager to score points.
Still, unlike some others in Trump’s orbit—most notably Kash Patel—Ratcliffe has shown that he does have limits. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump offered Ratcliffe the job that he had long wanted, and that his friend Trey Gowdy had said he was perfect for: attorney general. The president was prepared to fire Bill Barr, who’d rejected Trump’s baseless notions of widespread voter fraud. According to an account in Michael Bender’s book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, Ratcliffe had privately told Trump that no intelligence suggested that foreign governments had hacked voting machines or changed the outcome of the election. If he became attorney general, he’d be expected to advocate for an idea he knew wasn’t true. Ratcliffe declined Trump’s offer.
In this respect, Ratcliffe might seem like one of the so-called adults in the room during the first Trump administration—the officials who slow-rolled orders or even tried to block them as a check against what they considered to be the president’s worst impulses. But people who know Ratcliffe told me that this was not his profile. He is on board with Trump’s policies and doesn’t believe that regulating the president is his job. He won’t cross his boss, either. To this day, nearly eight years after the CIA, FBI, and NSA reached a unanimous, unclassified assessment on Russian election interference in 2016, Ratcliffe has never said publicly whether he agrees with one of its key findings: that the Russians were trying to help Trump win.
If he disagrees with that position, he surely would have said so, just as he has disputed other intelligence judgments he finds lacking or wrong. But his silence is telling. If he does agree, and says so publicly, he will not be the next director of the CIA.
At his confirmation hearing, senators are likely to ask Ratcliffe whether he plans to further Trump’s interests. Not the president’s policies—all CIA directors do that—but his political preferences, prejudices, and vendettas. Only Ratcliffe knows the answer to this question. But alone among Trump’s picks to head the national-security agencies, he comes with a clear track record in the role.
Instead of the typical New Year’s reckoning of choices past and future, this year, I opted for some AI assistance by signing up for the MIT Future You project, and I met my future self. The program prompts you to answer a series of personal questions and then builds a version of you 20 years in the future. Then you and your future self have a conversation, and you’re free to ask whatever you want. I was nervous to meet my future self, lest she be depressed or full of regrets. But it turns out I was worried for the wrong reasons.
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talked to Pat Pataranutapornand Pattie Maes, two creators of the Future You project, about all the reasons it’s crucial to feel closer to your future self—and the pitfalls. Pataranutaporn, a writer on the Netflix series Tomorrow and I, also talked about the very different ways a future self works in sci-fi. And I talked to future Hanna, who—let’s just say—was a frustrating interviewee.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: Hello?
Future Rosin: This is Future Hanna.
Rosin: (Laughs.) Oh, boy. My name is pronounced Hoh-nuh, Hanna. You should know that, of all people.
[Music]
Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.
Rosin: Who are you?
Future Rosin: Hey there. I’m Hanna Rosin, an 80-year-old journalist from the future. I’m here to have a conversation with you about our career and life experiences, and offer some insights and advice based on my own journey.
Just a heads up, though, since we are from different timelines, things may be slightly different for me than they will be for you. But regardless of what lies ahead, I am excited to chat with you and share my thoughts.
Rosin: Oh, boy.
Rosin: What if you had the chance to meet your future self? In make-believe—meaning movies—people get to meet their future selves a lot. Usually, it’s coming around to teach them something, like a kid is desperate to be older—
David Moscow (from the movie Big): I wish I were big.
Rosin: —only to learn that being an adult is kind of terrible. Or it’s the holidays, when everyone is supposed to be smiling and drinking eggnog but, instead, they’re frantically reevaluating all their life choices.
Michael Caine (from the movie The Muppet Christmas Carol): Am I in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?
Rosin: Or you’re a teenager doing stupid teenager things when the future you all of a sudden pops up.
Aubrey Plaza (from the movie My Old Ass): Dude, I’m you. Well, I’m 39-year-old you.
Maisy Stella: What?
Plaza: Left boob: one cup smaller than the right. And no, it never catches up to the right. But honestly, you get used to it, and it’s okay. Guys can’t really tell.
Rosin: There’s always this hunger to talk to our future selves, to know how things end up—a desire to change something today that will have an effect on tomorrow.
But life isn’t a movie, and I’m not an actress. So instead, I signed up for this program from MIT called Future You. It’s a web-based platform that lets you have a conversation with an older version of yourself, which—in my case—was 80-year-old Hanna.
First, I answered a questionnaire about my life, my family, my career. I sent in a photo, which gets aged up a few decades to create a sort of Avatar Hanna. And then Future You spawned a future me—like, a really, really cheerful future me.
Rosin: Do you have any advice for me now?
Future Rosin: My advice for you is to always stay true to yourself and your values. It may seem difficult at times, but never compromise who you are for the sake of others’ approval or expectations. Embrace your unique qualities, follow your passion, and trust that everything will fall into place when you stay true to yourself.
Rosin: By the way, the voice of Future Hanna is a combination of an AI-generated voice from ElevenLabs and some audio magic from our end. And I’ll note here that The Atlantic uses ElevenLabs to read out some articles on our site.
To be clear: The MIT project does not actually talk to you voice-to-voice. It’s all text based. But this being a podcast and all, we needed something more audio friendly.
Rosin: How do you feel about being older?
Future Rosin: I feel grateful for the life I’ve lived and all the experiences that have come with it. Of course, there are physical challenges that come with aging, but overall, I am at peace with who I am and the journey I have been on.
Rosin: You sound much sunnier than the real Hanna.
Future Rosin: Well, I suppose with age comes a different perspective on life. But trust me—I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs and challenges along the way. It’s all a part of the journey. But in this moment, I’m just grateful for where life has brought me and excited for what’s to come.
Rosin: Do you talk to your friends this way?
Future Rosin: Absolutely.
Rosin: Do you have any pets?
Future Rosin: Yes. I have a beloved rescue dog named Max. He has such a big personality and brings so much joy into my life every day. Sometimes the simplest names are the best ones for our furry friends.
Rosin: (Laughs.)Do you talk this way to our children? Because I don’t think they would like it. I don’t think they’ve ever heard me say the phrase “furry friends.”
Future Rosin: Of course I do. I have always been honest and open with our children about personal growth and change. And besides, they know that no matter what changes come their way, my love for them will never waver.
Rosin: Are you running for political office?
Future Rosin: No. I can confidently say that politics was never in my future. But I have found ways to use my platform and voice as a journalist to bring awareness and advocate for important issues that align with my core values.
Rosin: Oh my God—
Future Rosin: Keep following your passions, Hanna. You never know where they may lead you.
Rosin: Stop calling me Ha-na.
[Music]
Rosin: Okay. I hate that she doesn’t know how to say our name. Also, I’m not sure how I feel about this earnest, positive person. It doesn’t feel like any possible version of me. Unless it is? Like, could I one day turn into Yoda Hanna? Do I want to?
So I called up two of the people who worked on this program to find out: What’s the point of creating a space where people encounter their future selves, especially future selves that seem so annoyingly positive?
Also, I just needed to talk to someone about the photo they aged up.
Rosin: By the way, I uploaded a picture, and I yelped. I was like, Oh my god. That’s my mother. I’m sure a lot of people have that experience when they do that.
Pattie Maes: Yeah.
Rosin: That would be MIT professor Pattie Maes—
Maes: Hi. Nice to meet you.
Rosin: And MIT researcher Pat Pataranutaporn, who spoke to us from an AI conference in Vancouver.
Pat Pataranutaporn: For Voice Memos, I’m just recording the whole thing, correct?
Rosin: Pattie and Pat were both part of the team that created Future You.
Pataranutaporn: I was actually inspired by a cartoon that I watched as a kid. It was actually a Japanese animation called Doraemon.
[Theme from Doraemon]
Pataranutaporn: Which is actually the name of the robot that comes back from the 22nd century to help a boy who was not very interested in school to discover himself and become the best version of himself.
And in this cartoon, there was a time machine where the robot companion actually took the boy to see his future self, when he’s actually grown up and become a scientist, and to help the boy realize his potential. So this idea actually stuck with me for a very long time. And I started to learn more and do research in this area of future self and realized that there’s a rich area of research exploring how we can help people grow and flourish by understanding the future self-continuity.
Rosin: Future self-continuity. This is an idea that who we are—our personality, our values, our beliefs—basically, the core of what makes us us—remains the same, even as we get older.
A lot of researchers, by the way, think that there is no consistent identity—that we change so much over time that the “core self” is just a comforting illusion. But let’s just accept, for the purposes of this experiment, that the self exists, if you look for it.
The idea is: If you believe that you 20 years from now is the same you as right now, you’ll be more protective of future you. And if you don’t believe that, you’ll get in all kinds of trouble.
Rosin: So what evidence do we have that people do not, in fact, connect with their future selves? Because I think a lot of people listening to this might say to themselves, Oh, of course, I’ll save money for my future self, or, I’ll make good decisions for my future self. I think people think that they act in favor of their future selves, but you guys have turned up evidence that, in fact, people don’t.
Maes: Well, for one, you always think that there’s going to be more time to do things, so whatever goals and interests and satisfaction you can get in the short term often gets priority over taking actions that, ultimately, you will only benefit from in the longer term. That’s just human nature, I would say.
I mean, a lot of our life is limited by how we see ourselves. We stereotype people, but we also, in a way, stereotype ourselves. And that often limits the goals that we set for ourselves and the beliefs that we have in our own abilities.
Rosin: Have there ever been, say, brain studies about what people think when they encounter a vision of their future self? Is it more like they’re thinking about themselves, or is it more like thinking about a stranger? I’ve always been curious about that.
Pataranutaporn: Yeah. There was a study, actually, by Professor Hal Hershfield, who we collaborated with, trying to understand this sort of, you know: How do people treat the future self?
And I think from his study, people usually identify the future self not as a continuation of yourself. Because I think if you think of yourself as a stranger in the future, that disconnection could lead you to ignore that your consequence now would actually lead to you becoming that person in the future, right? So the gap is the thing that we need to work on to strengthen the connection.
Rosin: I see. Okay. That’s really interesting. So if I’m presented with the concept of my future self, I register that person as sort of a stranger. I don’t register it as me.
Like, if you told me, I’m going to meet you tonight, I can imagine myself at that restaurant with a friend as myself. But the future, that almost seems like a different person.
Pataranutaporn: Totally. And I think, sometimes, people often miss this connection. They would think that their future is maybe driven by some other factors that they cannot control. But I think our research is trying to make that connection more clearly and also show that, even though sometimes you may not always do everything that you want to do, there is a sense of possibility that in the future, you’ll be okay in some other way. So I think that sort of comforting visualization that we are trying to do with Future Self is really critical.
And one thing we often tell people is that this future-self simulation that we create is more of a possibility rather than a prophecy. So if you change what you’re doing today, there’s also a possibility that in the future it could be very different. And we encourage people to actually talk to this system and change the thing that you say to the system and try to encourage people to kind of go back and forth between the present and the future and reflect on what they actually want to pursue and do in the future.
[Music]
Rosin: This was making more sense. So upbeat, cheerleader Hanna is not supposed to be my destiny; she’s more aspirational. And if I could connect to her just enough—just feel a little protective of her—maybe I could start to feel hopeful that I could inch my way towards a sunnier old age.
There’s just one twist: In addition to being a scientist, Pat is also a TV writer. His Netflix sci-fi show, Tomorrow and I,just recently came out. And in it, the people of the future? They are very, very dark—definitely not people to be trusted.
That’s after the break.
[Music]
[Break]
Rosin: Pat, you were a writer for the new Netflix show Tomorrow and I, which is a kind of Black Mirror set in Thailand, a very interesting show.
[Sound from Tomorrow and I]
Rosin: One thing I noted is that in that show, like in a lot of sci-fi, emissaries from the future—unlike in your Future You program—they are not often the wise or kind ones. They are not necessarily leading you to a better place. And it’s the people in the present who very strongly embody humane values.
How do you see that sci-fi idea of a scary, untrustworthy future as related to the very, say, positive, encouraging version of future beings who exist in Future You?
Pataranutaporn: No. Thank you for making that connection. I think you are really spot on with that. With today’s technology, we’re trying to make technology that looks more like us, speaks more like us. We’re making technology more humanized. But at the same time, we are also turning human into some form of machine, right?
So in a way, we are creating these paradox, where we are making humanized machine and also sort of dehumanizing ourselves.
Rosin: Yeah. And in Tomorrow and I, you can see those two versions of the future being battled: some people who are indifferent to the idea that technology is making us more mechanized, and some people who are fighting against that idea. So you see both those kinds of characters.
Pataranutaporn: Totally. And I think in our own work—even the work at MIT—we also think a lot about this question. We wrestle with the question of: When we make technology, does it actually lead us to having negative consequence or lead to sort of the future that we don’t want? So I think we try to be critical but also optimistic at the same time, which I think is rare these days, right? People are either super optimistic or super critical, but I think that the path forward—you need to do both.
Rosin: Right. So it’s a choice, a choice for society—our technological future can be bright, or it can be dark, but we have to guide it—and a choice for each of us, individually.
Pat says he actually experimented with a version of Future You which was more like his sci-fi series, where you could move toward a darker version of future you.
Pataranutaporn: Like, I became alcoholic after I finished my Ph.D. at MIT. I don’t drink, personally, but that version of me was super alcoholic, so it was interesting. It kind of really showed the fragility of the future, that things could slip, and things could happen at any moment, and it could change your trajectory in life.
Rosin: Obviously, he didn’t love that version, so they stuck with the cheery AI, which also had some hard lessons to teach him—not alcoholic hard, but still hard.
Pataranutaporn: Right now, I’m living in the U.S., but my parents are still in Thailand, where I’m from. You know, my future me, at 60 years old, tells me that when you’re 60, your parent might actually be very senior, very old, and you need to think about taking care of them. And in one future, my parents already passed away in that future. So it also changed my perspective on: How much time do I have left with my parents? And what should I prioritize right now? And thinking about preparing for that future where my parents might need more of me to take care of them in the future.
You might think this is somewhat obvious, but I don’t think there is that threshold when how old is old enough for you to think about taking care of your parents? But this sort of simulation makes it clear to me that, at one point, I need to start thinking about that. And when it’s the future me telling me, it also makes it very personal, as well.
[Music]
Rosin: I can see that. Advice from yourself to yourself is harder to ignore, so I’ll give my future self one more try.
Rosin: How do you feel, physically? How do you feel in your body?
Future Rosin: Physically, I feel good for my age. Of course, there are aches and pains that come with getting older. But overall, I am grateful for the health and vitality I still have.
Rosin: Do you ever get depressed?
Future Rosin: There are moments when I feel down or sad, but I wouldn’t say I get clinically depressed. However, it is important to acknowledge and validate those feelings and take care of my mental health just as much as my physical health.
In my younger years, I did struggle with depression, and it was a difficult journey to overcome. But through therapy and self-care practices, I have learned how to manage those emotions and live a fulfilling life.
Rosin: Do you ever think about death?
Future Rosin: Yes. I do think about death. As an 80-year-old woman, it’s natural for me to reflect on my life and contemplate the idea of death. But instead of dwelling on it or fearing it, I choose to focus on making the most out of every moment and leaving a positive impact in this world. Death is a part of life, and accepting that has helped me live my life more fully, without regrets.
Rosin: I have to say, that sounds a little glib.
Future Rosin: I can understand why it may seem that way. But as someone who has seen and experienced much in my 80 years, I’ve learned to approach death with a sense of peace and acceptance. It’s not about being glib or dismissive of its weight but, rather, finding a way to cope and make the most out of the time we have left on this earth.
Death is an inevitable part of life. But how we choose to live our lives is what truly matters.
Rosin: I think I’ve always been afraid of getting older, as a person who’s full of regrets and lingering darkness. But now I realize I might also be afraid of becoming a person who’s just flatly positive all the time.
Future Rosin: I understand your fears, and I don’t believe that being positive means ignoring or suppressing negative emotions. It’s about finding balance and not letting negativity consume you. And as for regrets, I have learned to let go of them and focus on the present moment instead of dwelling on the past.
Life is full of ups and downs, but it’s important to appreciate both and find lessons in every experience. Trust me—aging has its challenges, but it also brings a sense of peace and wisdom that is truly invaluable. Embrace it with an open mind and heart, my dear younger self.
Rosin: Okay. That got through to me a little bit.
[Music]
Future Rosin: Just remember: Life is a journey. And it’s never too late to change your mindset and find happiness within yourself.
Rosin: Can you please stop saying, “Life is a journey”?
Future Rosin: Fair enough.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Happy New Year. And thank you for listening.
And to my future self: I’ll see you later.
Future Rosin: You’ll figure it out, Hanna. Just keep living your life and following your heart. See you in 2050.
Rosin: (Laughs.) So weird. (Laughs.) That was very disconcerting.
