Good morning. The dream of cohabitating with a group of friends is an attractive fantasy, but we can benefit from its lessons, regardless of our living situation.
Acquired tastesI can’t stop thinking about a recent guest essay in The Times by Elizabeth Oldfield. Oldfield is 41 and lives in a house in London with her husband, their two children, a couple with a baby on the way, another woman and a cat. Each time a particularly enticing story of co-living surfaces (see: this one about a women-only community in Texas), my friends and I share the link and fantasize about how someday we’ll all live together, like the Golden Girls, or like a hippie commune, or just in the same neighborhood. I dated a guy who seemed seriously committed to co-purchasing homes around the world where different configurations of friends could live at any given time. (We broke up before I got to see if this ambitious dream could be realized.) When we imagine living in a group, we think of all the practical things we’ll get in the bargain: a perpetual dinner party, shared household expenses, someone to drive us to the airport or sit by our bed when we’re ill. Oldfield acknowledges these benefits, but she goes further, holding up communal living as one solution to the perennial problem of loneliness and division. We increasingly “avoid ties of mutual obligation in favor of frictionless transactions,” she writes. This results in a weakening of our connection-making muscles, what she calls “relational decay.” She presents several habits she’s picked up from co-living that might help stave off this decay, regardless of one’s living situation. The advice I keep returning to is her suggestion to “loosen your grip on your preferences.” Living with others, Oldfield has had to compromise on her strong opinions on décor and how to store cheese. She’d prefer not to have to clean up immediately after using the kitchen, but consideration for her housemates requires she adjust. The older we get, the more comfortable and calcified we get in our preferences and quirks. We like things the way we like them — the thermostat at 68 and not a degree warmer, the aisle seat, steak medium-rare but closer to medium, don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee. This self-knowledge is comforting, and central to forming an identity, but it’s also limiting. We are used to controlling our environments, to minimizing variables so that we can avoid discomfort. “No hothouse-flowering,” I’ll silently admonish myself when I notice I’m making my life smaller because of some arcane preference, behaving like an exotic plant that needs too much coddling. Usually it has something to do with my physical comfort — if my levels of hunger, body temperature, caffeination and restedness are not calibrated, I might be grumpy, I might decline a social invitation. Our grip on our preferences can be so tight that our lives constrict around it. Living with others isn’t, in Oldfield’s telling, continuously joyous. She describes frustration and conflict, concessions that could be avoided in a more conventional setup. But I think one thing that’s so attractive about it, and why I and so many people I know keep returning to the fantasy, is a desire not only to live with friends, but also to be people who can happily and companionably thrive in that setting. We like the idea of ourselves as people who can share and compromise, who prioritize community over comfort. Deep down, we don’t want to be hothouse flowers, requiring very specific conditions in order to bloom. We know, as Oldfield has come to realize, that “the relentless enhancement of experience does not usually bring inner peace. Avoiding minor annoyances becomes addictive, and it can lead to a life perfectly optimized to our preferences, all alone.”
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The photojournalist Doug Mills, who began covering the White House in 1983, has been in the Oval Office thousands of times. Even for him, though, The Times’s nearly two-hour interview with Trump this week was extraordinary, as he explains in a new Q&A. Here’s an excerpt: Do you like shooting in the Oval, or is it hard to make something fresh and new in a place that has been photographed so much? Doug: Every time you go in that room, you see something you didn’t see the last time you were there. He adds something weekly if not daily. People give him things, or he sees something that he likes. There’s a fairly new Jackie Kennedy small little 8-by-10 beautiful painting hanging up near the fireplace; I had not seen that before. I pinch myself every time I come in there. It’s just an incredible office to be in. It’s a unique place to be able to photograph in. Did you start shooting a lot right at the beginning because you were worried about getting kicked out? Or do you take it slowly, wait for your moment, so as not to attract too much attention? I’m the quietest one in the room. My cameras are completely silent. I’m not moving around a lot. You’re limited because he’s sitting behind the desk. There’s a recorder in the foreground — that’s an obstacle. I had four reporters — those are obstacles. Karoline [Leavitt, the press secretary] had said it’s OK if you come in at the top and then peel out, so I thought at any time she might say, OK, I think you have enough. Thankfully, Karoline never asked me to leave. I think that’s mainly because the president’s very comfortable having me around. If there’s something that comes out, a folder that says “Top Secret” on it, I put my cameras away. I know I can’t photograph that stuff.
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