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“It’s the same thing that goes wrong if you’re going to ask actors to play in the N.B.A. or the N.F.L.,” Bill Simmons says. “It’s a little unrealistic.”

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Many of us feel like there aren't enough hours in the day. We struggle to make time for all the competing demands at work and at home, and inevitably feel like we're letting someone down. But what if there were a way to reclaim our time and, as a result, get more joy out of our lives? This week, psychologist Cassie Mogilner Holmes explains how we've fallen victim to the illusion of time scarcity, and what we can do to spend our time more wisely.

Additional Resources
Book:
Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Mos t, by Cassie Holmes, 2022.
Research:
Having Too Little or Too Much Time Is Linked to Lower Subjective Well-Being, by Marissa Sharif, Cassie Mogilner, and Hal Hershfield, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021.

Happiness from Treating the Weekend Like a Vacation, by Colin West, Cassie Mogilner, Sanford E. DeVoe, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2020.

Effect of Retirement on Cognitive Function: The Whitehall II Cohort Study, by Baowen Xue et. al, European Journal of Epidemiology, 2018.

Giving Time Gives You Time, by Cassie Mogilner, Zoe Chance, Michael I. Norton, Psychological Science, 2012.

The Pursuit of Happiness: Time, Money, and Social Connection, by Cassie Mogilner Holmes in Psychological Science, 2010.

Mental Retirement, by Susann Rohwedder and Robert J. William, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2010.

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Taking Control of Your Time | Hidden Brain Media

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Many of us feel like there aren't enough hours in the day. We struggle to make time for all the competing demands at work and at home, and inevitably feel like we're letting someone down. But what if there were a way to reclaim our time and, as a result, get more joy out of our lives?

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Sarah Enni: Hi John, how are you doing today?

John Green: I'm doing well. How are you?

Sarah Enni: I am doing so well. I'm so excited to talk today. I had the pleasure of talking to your brother last summer when his book came out. So I feel like I'm getting the whole Green crew in here, which is exciting [ Hank Green's First Draft interview discussing A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, the sequel to his #1 New York Times bestselling debut, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. Hank is, along with his brother John Green, the CEO of Complexly, co-host of the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel and the Dear Hank and John podcast, and is also co-founder of VidCon, DFTBA Records, and Crash Course. Listen to his First Draft interview here.]

John Green: Yeah, I listened to that podcast, I learned a lot about Hank, so it was cool for me.

Sarah Enni: Oh, that's great. I love that. So I have a typical way that I lay out interviews for my show, which is I kind of walk people chronologically through their career. You're an extremely challenging person to interview because you have already been asked just about every question under the sun. And you have plenty of platforms with which to give your opinion on everything under the sun.

So I'm actually going to do a little bit of a different structure with this interview, which is use The Anthropocene Reviews as a way of looking at the course of your life, and we're going to see how it goes.

John Green: Great. I love it. That sounds awesome.

Sarah Enni: All right. So in order to make that work, we're gonna start with a pitch for the book. So do you mind telling us about The Anthropocene Reviewed.

John Green: This is where you're gonna find out how incredibly bad I am at book pitches. This is why I've never been able to write a concise query letter. When people at a cocktail party ask me what my book is about, like I'm still talking when they walk away. The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays about how it felt to be alive, for me, in this time. Seen through the lens of things I care about and find interesting, from viral meningitis to the movie Penguins of Madagascar, to the bird species the Giant Canada Goose.

Sarah Enni: Awesome. I think that was good.

John Green: I mean, I think we both know that it could stand to be improved upon.

Sarah Enni: I won't rate it. But do you mind, just for my listeners, explaining what the Anthropocene is?

John Green: That's another thing that maybe I should have... if we're gonna get to the advice portion of the program: Give your book a title that people can spell. And give your book a title that people can pronounce. Those are two really essential things in a book title. The Anthropocene is a proposed term for the current geologic age when humans have become not just the dominant species on the planet, but such a geologically significant force that we're reshaping the climate of the planet. We're reshaping its biodiversity, and we're making very large-lasting interventions into the landscape itself.

And so it's not a settled term, like not all geologists agree that we are living in the Anthropocene, but I find it to be a helpful lens through which to try to make sense of this weird historical moment when we are hugely, hugely powerful, but not yet really willing, or able, to reckon in a deep way with that power.

Sarah Enni: And that's so helpful. I think human-centered planet is the phrase that you use a lot. And that was a really helpful way to frame how you are looking at everything through this essay collection, which is such an interesting perspective on it.

Okay, as I said, we're gonna do the chronology. So I do want to just start at the very beginning, which is where were you born and raised?

John Green: I was born right here in Indianapolis, Indiana, but my parents left Indianapolis when I was about two months old, so I have no recollection of it. My first memories are of growing up in Orlando, Florida, where I lived from the ages of three until I was 15. And then I spent the summers in Orlando until I was 20.

Sarah Enni: We're gonna get to your writing in just a second, but I'm interested in what reading was like as a young person for you. How was that a part of your coming up?

John Green: I liked reading a lot and I was told that I was good at it. And so I leaned into everything I was told that I was good at because I was certainly, there were a lot of things in school that I wasn't good at. And so whenever a teacher or my parents would tell me that I was good at something, I would jump into it as deeply as I could. And the two things that I was told I was good at were reading and writing.

And so I loved reading when I was a kid, I loved reading The Babysitter Club books. Those were the books that mattered the most to me when I was an elementary school reader. I also read like Sweet Valley High and other series like that, but The Babysitters Club was the one that really connected with me very deeply.

And then as I got a little older, I remember reading Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers, which I really loved. I remember loving Across Five Aprils. I remember reading really sad books, like Where the Red Fern Grows and really responding to them, I loved a tear jerker. And then by high school I was enjoying... I was lucky enough to be at a high school where we read really great books in English class. And so I read Toni Morrison in English class. And we read Kurt Vonnegut and that's when I really fell in love with books [author of Slaughterhouse Fiveand Cat's Cradle].

Sarah Enni: Oh, I love to hear that because often high school is a tough time for people, even if they become writers later on, a lot of people stopped reading in high school because it's not fun stuff.

John Green: And it feels like an assignment. It feels like you've been told to jump over this hurdle and you're kind of at a stage in your life where you're like, "I'm not gonna jump over this hurdle unless you explain to me why." And often the rationale for why is not particularly compelling. Like I do not find the rationale for why high school students should read The Scarlet Letter to be particularly compelling. I think it's a very important novel in American literature, but I also think there's a lot of things that 15-year-olds can read, and there's world enough in time for The Scarlet Letter.

But I was in English classes where we were reading contemporary literature all the time. We were reading Angels in America and lots of contemporary books. And that made reading feel exciting and vibrant, and also helped me to understand that literature was not some cold, dead distant thing. It was something that was unfolding all around me. When I was in high school, Toni Morrison won the Nobel prize. She won the Nobel prize while we were reading Song of Solomon in class. And so for me, it was really alive and exciting.

Sarah Enni: I love that. I want to talk about your teenage life in a few ways. Also before I get into it, I'm gonna say the rating when I mentioned the reviews, I hope that's not like a spoiler.

John Green: No, no, no. It's not a spoiler at all. And in many cases I will myself be surprised because I don't remember a lot of the ratings and some of them I might disagree with because it's been a couple of months.

Sarah Enni: [Laughs] Okay, I want to talk about your teenage life in a few ways cause like me, you've spent a lot of time mining that age category in your work. And also like me, it seems like a lot of your internal work as an adult is kind of measuring to and against the person that you were at that time.

John Green: Yes.

Sarah Enni: And I want to first talk about creativity and the internet, because your cosmic timing and The Anthropocene means that the two have been somewhat synonymous for most of your life. And In The Internet, which you rate three-stars, you say that as a teenager, you discovered the internet and were hired as a CompuServe teen-forum moderator. And in the QWERTY keyboard, which you give four-stars, you wrote that, "As a kid in the early internet, I loved typing because no one could see how small and thin my hands were, how scared I was all the time, how I struggled to talk out loud. Online, back in 1991, I wasn't made of anxious flesh and brittle bone, I was made out of keystrokes. When I could no longer bear to be myself, I was able to become, for a while, a series of keys struck in quick succession."

I first want to start by asking, you say in there that though you didn't go outside much during that time, you were making friends and reading and writing a lot. I want to hear about what you were writing at that time.

John Green: I was writing little stories about silly stuff. I was writing sort of absurdist stories at the time. That was right around the time when I first got into Kurt Vonnegut and there were some quasi-absurdist writers from the fifties and sixties that I was into. There was this YA novel that I think is called YA Novel that I was really, really into back then. And so I was sort of writing these quasi data-ist nonsense stories that were really fun. But now I've re-read them more recently and I'm like, "Well, unfortunately those are not good. It would be great if they were, but alas, they are not."

But also, because I was writing to my friends, and most of the conversations I was having at the time, the first two summers that the internet was in my house, were written conversations. Because they were instant message conversations, or I was posting on message boards with other kids.

And that was a really creatively productive time in my life because I was discovering the pleasure of creative collaboration, of working from other people's work, having people respond to my work. I remember thinking that was so exciting when I would make some joke and somebody would make a joke based on my joke, like on the message boards. I mean, it was incredibly wonderful. I felt like I was contributing to some great shared work of art and yeah, it was just a huge joy for me back then.

And also a big relief, because like I said in that essay, it was hard for me a lot of times in school. And I really struggled to articulate myself, or even to understand myself, like understand what was going on inside of me. And for me, writing has always been a way of trying to figure that out, trying to understand, trying to map the stuff within, trying to give some kind of form to it.

Especially anxiety and the other kind of nameless abstract forms of psychic pain that were such a big part of my life back then. And part of the reason that they occupied so much space in my consciousness was because I couldn't articulate them. I couldn't find a form for them. I couldn't find language for them. And for me, this isn't true for everyone, but for me, that meant I couldn't understand them, and that made them much scarier.

Because if you don't have the word anxiety, or you don't have the phrase 'intrusive thought', you don't know what the hell is happening. And it's terrifying because you feel like you're not in control of your thoughts, which is a pretty destabilizing position to be in. So I think that's what I loved about writing back then, whether I was writing stories or whether I was writing to friends, was it was a way to try to articulate this teaming mass of thoughts and feelings that I really was struggling with.

Sarah Enni: I can relate to that, that's like the power of language, right? Being able to name a thing gives you some kind of box to put it in and then you're not alone with it.

John Green: Yeah, and also once you have language for it, you discover that there are other people who can relate to it, and that becomes very helpful. I write in that essay about the internet, about talking to a girl who I was friends with, about this feeling that I called the night feeling, which is this feeling of dread and fear and nausea, that would absolutely overwhelm me every night. And in confessing this to her, which I'd never talked about to anyone before, she was very generous and responded that she also knew this feeling. And that was such a gift to me because a big part of the feeling was thinking that I was alone in it.

Sarah Enni: And you say in there, and a lot of this is gonna be me quoting you to you, but I didn't write this quote down. But it was talking about how, in some ways, because the people you met on the internet didn't know you, they got to know you better, which seems like this kind of continual dichotomy in your life.

You talk in the book about how you're not a big fan of crowds, but also on your YouTube channel every-other-week, you get to talk to millions of people. But through the strange function of the internet, it's possible to do that while not exposing yourself too much. I'm just so interested in that kind of strange duality.

John Green: It is very weird and I don't quite have it figured out. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and I don't know that I can explain it. But, I like to talk to people. I like to make stuff for people. In fact, I'm kind of desperate, especially when I was younger, I was quite desperate to make stuff for people. And I really wanted an audience and a big audience. And I really, really wanted that. And to pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. It's not my favorite thing about myself, but it was very, very real, especially back then.

But at the same time, I knew I needed to be alone almost all the time. And so for me, the writing and then making YouTube videos, these are all ways of connecting and reaching out and trying to express myself, while staying in my basement.

Sarah Enni: It's just funny to think too, because you're able to do that now. And it would not have been possible at almost any other time in history.

John Green: Certainly not at this scale, right? When I was a kid, authors felt very distant, they felt very separate from their books. And my idea of an author was heavily influenced by Harper Lee [author of To Kill a Mockingbird], and J.D. Salinger [author of Catcher in the Rye] and this idea of authors, who after their work gets exposed to a broad audience, feel like they have to retreat, and feel like they have to live very separate from the world.

Sarah Enni: The author recluse is kind of a romantic notion.

John Green: Yeah. And I mean, I won't lie, it still has some appeal on occasion. We do have a verb in our family, Sarah and I have a verb, 'Salingering', 'to Salinger.' If I do Salinger someday, please know that I'm okay.

Sarah Enni: It's a choice.

John Green: Yeah, it was a choice.

Sarah Enni: I want to talk about your adolescence, your time that you spent at a boarding school in Alabama. In Academic Decathlon, which gets four-and-a-half stars, you write about your boarding school roommate and best friend Todd, whose love, you say, "Helped carry me through those years and, in some ways, is still carrying me." And in Plague, which gets one-star, you note that when you were 16, you had a friend of yours who died. And those things might sound familiar to anyone that has read Looking for Alaska.

I kind of want to position that as leading us to the choice to revisit that time in your creative work. Because Looking for Alaska became your debut novel. It was obviously many years after you were done with boarding school, but what led you to explore that time in a book?

John Green: I mean, to be honest, I think that I would do it differently now. But also, maybe because I would do it so differently, the book wouldn't be as good, and it wouldn't resonate with people in the way that it does. The short answer to your question is that I was revisiting that period because I wasn't okay. I mean, at that time in my life, I wasn't doing very well in terms of my long-standing periodic relationship with depression. But also, I felt a huge amount of irresolution, if that's a word, around high school.

And so that was part of it. And then part of it was that I wanted to write about teenagers. I wanted to write about young people. I wanted to write a YA novel because at that time I was working at Booklist Magazine and I was reading a lot of YA novels, and I was astonished by them. I was completely enthralled with Laurie Halse Anderson [author of , , and memoir ], and Walter Dean Myers wrote around that time. Jacqueline Woodson's books [author of Brown Girl Dreaming, Locomotion, Another Brooklyn, and many many more], those books just blew me away. I had no idea that YA literature could be the things that it was becoming in the hands of those writers.

And so I think it was a mix of things. Part of it was personal that I wanted to revisit that time, for me, to try to see if I could come to some resolution about it. The question in that book is, is it possible to live a hopeful life that acknowledges the absolute horror and utter injustice of the kind of suffering that is part of human life? And I needed an answer for that question. But then the less personal part of it is that I also knew that there were lots of young people who were interested in that question, and I wanted to explore that for them.

Sarah Enni: One of my favorite things about doing these interviews is, whether it's fair or not, looking at someone's collective works and then drawing conclusions and doing a lot of armchair psychology about it. But I have to say, what you just voiced about what you think Looking for Alaska is about, really what almost all of your books are about, in a really fundamental way, including this essay collection.

John Green: I mean, I think that it's really important to acknowledge...I mean, to try to understand that suffering is real, it's profound. And also to really understand the ways that it's unjust, the ways that it is not evenly distributed, the ways that the demented conscience of our social order ends up playing out in the suffering of people. And I wanted to explore that, definitely in Looking for Alaska and in The Fault in Our Stars.

I guess in some ways in The Fault in Our Stars, I wanted to explore more just the randomization part of it. But yeah, it is a question that is very important to me. Because for me, hope that doesn't acknowledge, or deal with, or confront the realities of those kinds of suffering, that hope is not useful. Because when I need hope is not when I'm feeling good, it's not when things around me are working well, it's when I'm on the edge of despair, or experiencing despair. And I need the kind of hope that can hold up to despair. So yeah, I do think it's an important thing in my books, but also it's something that I think about a lot.

Sarah Enni: I think it was in the essay about the movie. Why can't I think of it.

Sarah Enni: Thank you. Yes. The essay about Harvey that you say that that was a movie that gave you hope that didn't feel like bullshit.

John Green: Yeah, that's it, that's what I'm after. And I don't like to like rain on other people's hope parade. I'm not here to tell you that your worldview is insufficient or whatever. But so much hope, to me, feels like bullshit, it just doesn't work for me. Part of the reason I need to be able to feel hopeful is that despair is so unproductive. In my case, anyway, when I feel despair, I don't work toward a more just social order. I don't work to make the world better for my children and those who will come after me. I just sink into this depth of myself that I can't get out of. Somebody once described despair as, "Initially you fall into a hole and then, over time, you discover that you are the hole." And that really resonates with me.

Sarah Enni: I can relate to that as well. The other theme of your career that started with Looking for Alaska is... it was given the Printz award, it was critically well-received, it kind of grew and grew and grew. It was just turned into a mini-series quite recently. So it has this long life, but it is also a very private book that has led to private questions, I should say, in formats like this one. Which is something I'm very conscious about, so I'm not gonna ask these really private questions cause I love a boundary.

John Green: I appreciate that.

Sarah Enni: But I want to ask about what it has been like for you to have something you wrote that long ago, about that particular time of your life, stay in your life and continue to be a source of exposure.

John Green: It's been good in a lot of ways. I think it's important to say that it's a novel and I made it up and I used aspects of my life, the way that I do when I write any novel, but it is a novel. And I think it's important to articulate that so that people don't try to put names to characters, because that's unfair to those people. But gosh, I certainly never imagined...

One of the weird things about working at Booklist is that I think most first novelists kind of have this hope that their book will hang around for a long time. But by the time Looking for Alaska was published, I'd worked at Booklist for five years. Every two weeks Booklist reviews like 475 books. I'd reviewed hundreds of books that I thought were really wonderful and seen almost all of them disappear within a year or two. Not disappear, but just have not continued to grow. And so, my goal for that book, was for it to make it to paperback. And for me to be in a position where I could write a second novel.

It never, ever, ever crossed my mind - and I know this sounds disingenuous - but I never thought that it would still be in print all this time later. And probably that's good for the book, because if I had thought that it would be in print all this time later, it would have been a different book. But now I look back on it, I mean, my wife and I were just talking this when we watched the mini-series that like, now we look back on it and it takes us back to many different times in our lives.

It takes us back to when we first fell in love when I was writing the book and when Sarah first read a draft of it.. It takes us back to high school, cause Sarah went to the same high school that I went to. It takes us back to when the book came out, it takes us back to the Printz award ceremony. And I'm so grateful for all of that. And I'm so grateful for those memories. And so now I'm able to go to those places and it feels safer to me. And I'm able to see the good in it and be grateful that that book is still finding readers.

Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love that. You kind of had exposure therapy. What is that? The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

John Green: A little bit, yeah.

Sarah Enni: This sounds kind of heavy, but I want to talk about illness really quick... really quick. I want to talk about illness in how it has played into your work, and also your life. Again, kind of moving somewhat chronologically; In Plague you say of your time working as a chaplain at a children's hospital, "Those months of chaplaincy are the axis around which my life spins." Yet it was after three published novels that you kind of delve into that experience in The Fault in Our Stars. I just want to know, from the perspective of someone writing contemporary fiction, what do you think had to happen for you to be ready to look at that time and to delve into it the way that you did in that book?

John Green: I had tried to write about illness and the way that illness affects children for a long time, for 10 years. And there are little pieces of The Fault in Our Stars that were written in 2000 or 2001, but the book didn't come out until 2012. So, I was thinking about it and trying it the whole time. It was always what I would try each time I finished a book. I would be like, "All right, I'm going back to this and I'm gonna figure out a way into it." And I could just never figure out a way into it. I think partly because I was centering myself a little bit. There was always a chaplain character in these stories. That was a problem. That guy needed to go.

And I think what I eventually understood is the reason that guy needed to go is because so many of the stories that we have about illness, especially illness in children, are about the lessons that healthy people learn from sick kids. And that is not what I wanted to write. I did not want to write a book about healthy people. I do not think that sick people exist to teach healthy people lessons, or that kids get sick so that we can all understand that every day is a gift, or whatever. I just don't think that's how it works.

And so I wanted to write a book that didn't have really any healthy kids in it, or any healthy non-family in it, so that it couldn't be that kind of book. I think that was the insight in terms of plot that was important. And then the other thing that happened is that I was friends with a young woman and her parents and her siblings, who died of cancer when she was 16. And I was part of her Make-A-Wish and that changed the book. I wrote a lot of the book in a period of grief after that. And I don't think I would have written the book if I hadn't known Esther and her parents and her siblings.

Sarah Enni: To your point in The Anthropocene Reviewed Reviewed, you talked about - which is a podcast episode that came up. I'll link to it in the show notes - you noted how tempting it can be to use illness as a metaphor, or a symbol. And that that was explicitly what you were working against, or writing against. In The Fault in Our Stars with cancer and in Turtles All the Way Down with OCD. I'm so curious about what your experience of writing about illness was like in these essay formats. Because without the somewhat strict narrative structure of fiction, you could kind of be a little bit more loose with it, or a little bit vague, or more explicit almost, about it's sort of somewhat meaninglessness.

John Green: Yes, for sure. I could articulate my perspective rather than trying to write a novel from the perspective of people who aren't me. And also, I will say, in the opening essay in the book, I wanted to structure that essay like a labyrinth, because I had this inner ear disease, which minimizes how much it sucks, called labyrinthitis that made it completely impossible for me to open my eyes for two weeks. And for a long time after, and even to some extent now, like my balance can fail at any moment and then I'm just on the floor and vomiting. And it's really super, super unpleasant.

But I wanted to structure it as a labyrinth, and then call attention to the fact that I was structuring it like a labyrinth, and call attention to the fact that it's so tempting to use illness as the way that I would use a lot of other things. As a way into a metaphor, or a way into a structure.

But the reason I don't want to do that, or when I do do it, I want to call attention to it and make fun of myself for doing it. Is because I think so often we end up... it's about where we center the experience, for me. Do we center the experience on the lives of sick people and their articulations of their illness, or do we center it elsewhere? And so with illnesses, when I was writing in the book, when I wrote about illnesses that are kind of present tense illnesses, illnesses that are still a big part of the human story, I tried when possible to write about illnesses that I have. There are a couple of times when I wrote about other illnesses, just because I think that they're really, really important to understanding our relationship, especially our historical relationship, but also to some extent, our present relationship with infectious disease.

But I felt like it was only fair to write about that stuff from the inside and so that's why I wrote about meningitis and why I wrote about labyrinthitis and why I wrote about staphylococcus aureus and staph infections, because these are experiences of illness that I have. And I've had a probably above average number of serious illnesses in my life. And I certainly have a really intense, part of my OCD, is having a really intense, overwhelming fear of contamination and illness resulting from contamination, and stuff like that.

So yeah, I mean, part of what ends up getting written about in The Anthropocene Reviewed is just like the stuff that I can't stop thinking about. And so I end up writing about.

Sarah Enni: I thought it was so interesting for you to be able to, and I loved that you focused on how you were kind of structuring it, because it brought to my mind, made me just kind of aware, that I was reading an essay and that you were really able to kind of play with this theme that's a huge part of your life, in this really different way. In a freer way, it felt like, in some ways.

John Green: Yes, definitely. I feel a lot more freedom when I'm writing about myself.

Sarah Enni: Well, that makes sense. But you also wrote about, I'm gonna quote something here. It's a little bit lengthy, a quote from Virginia Wolf [" On Being Ill " by Virginia Woolf], this was in the Review of Viral Meningitis, which gets one-star. And in on being ill, Virginia Wolf wrote, "It's strange indeed, that illness has not taken its place with love, battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza, epic poems to typhoid, odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache, but no."

And she goes on to say that there's a poverty of the language when it comes to illness. And we just talked earlier about needing language about your anxiety on the internet with friends. I wonder how you feel about your role of increasing the language of illness, or contributing to our language of illness.

John Green: I hope I can, in some ways, and I hope lots of us can together. But I also think that we need to be conscious of the places that language simply cannot go. When we are in extreme pain, it often becomes a non-linguistic phenomenon. We moan, we scream and those are the sounds that we make and they aren't descriptive. They are forms of the pain, they are ways of forming the pain, or expressing the pain, but they can't articulate what the pain is really like. And then the other thing is that I think it's extremely hard to empathize with pain. I think it can be hard, even for me, to empathize with my own pain, if I'm not currently having it, which is super weird.

I remember that when I had meningitis, this headache was unfathomably painful. I think I say in the book that when I had the headache, it was all I had. Because it just completely took over my consciousness. And yet, describing it to you now, I don't feel anything of that pain. So, you know, it's obviously a weird function. I think, to some extent, it's built into our biology.

Sarah Enni: I appreciate you speaking to that. Talking about teenage dumb and teenagers and this particular focus on illness, those stood out to me as such important things in your overall work, and also in this book. So now I want to talk about The Anthropocene Reviewed explicitly, and just talk a little bit about the podcast and how it became a book. So can you start with the origin story of the podcast?

John Green: When my brother and I were on tour in 2017 for my book Turtles All the Way Down, we'd sort of had this idea before, but it didn't really come together until we were on tour. We would drive through these national parks, or through these major pieces of America, the American landscape, and we would read each other one-star Google reviews of the places we drove past. I think in the book, I talk about this amazing review of Badlands National Park that got one-star, where the entire review was, "Not enough mountain."

And it was just so ludicrous, and Hank and I started talking about how wild it is that we've let this five-star scale and this way of qualitative analysis just completely take over our critical conversations about, not just books and movies, but about landscape. And so we started joking about that and Hank actually made a video where he reviewed a bunch of things on a five-star scale, like a traffic cone and a few other things.

Of course, it's very typical Hank. We have this idea, we talk about it a little bit, Hank makes a funny YouTube video [" Hank Reviews Everything " video on the Vlogbrothers channel], and that's the end of it. And it's very typical me to be like, "I think I'm gonna spend the next four years doing nothing but this." And like, "It's gonna be not quite as funny your video and a lot more in-depth." So, yeah, that's where it began. But then when I got home, about two weeks after I got home, I got labyrinthitis. And then I was like in bed with my eyes, I mean, one of the things that happens with this disease is, your eyes literally shiver in their socket, so your eye is like moving all the time.

And so you really can't read or look at a TV or do anything. And I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time thinking like, "I don't know the extent to which my quality of life is gonna return." And the doctors couldn't tell me, and I really felt like I didn't want to write a novel. And that surprised me. I thought I wanted to write a novel, like my intention was to come home and write a novel. And I realized I really didn't want to, I just didn't want to write in code. I didn't want to have to deal with some of the kind of difficult things about publishing novels for me. And I wanted to write these reviews.

I'd actually written a couple of them years earlier. Hank and I had been playing with this idea for a long time, various versions of it. And as I sent them to my wife and she was like, "These are okay, but you're pretending that you're like an expert. You're pretending that you're like outside of earth, examining earth, like an alien, like a sentient alien would. And you're not God, buddy. You better put yourself into these reviews and acknowledge that your perspective, and your bias, fundamentally shapes how you understand the world."

And that was the critical thing for really having a way into making it a podcast. And then it was a podcast and I was really happy with it being a podcast for a long time and never thought of it as a book. It wasn't really until the pandemic hit, that I started to find myself going back to old essays, adding stuff to them, putting them in order in the context of other essays. And then at some point I was like, "Oh, I think I'm writing a book."

Sarah Enni: Isn't it funny how that happens? So it actually was within 2020 and our COVID-19 pandemic year that you started to put it all together.

John Green: Yeah, it was in April that I first started to think, "Oh, well, maybe this is a book."

Sarah Enni: That's interesting, that's a kind of a short time ago. That's a pretty quick timeline to get this together.

John Green: Especially by my usual standards of five to seven years. So yeah, I wrote a lot of it in kind of furious push, especially the rewriting of the old essays. And some of that rewriting I'd been doing, just because I fiddle. Just because something is done, I can't stop working on it, or fiddling with it, or trying to like fix what I didn't like about it.

And the weird thing about the podcast, that I'd never really experienced before, is that there are these monthly deadlines. And so I would meet the deadline, and I'd do the piece, but it wouldn't feel finished to me and I wouldn't be satisfied with it at all. So I would just kind of keep working on it. And so that was, I think, I'd done a lot of the writing before March or April of 2020. But yeah, no, a lot of the book was written after that.

Sarah Enni: Which had been a question I was gonna ask cause a lot of the book does talk about COVID, specifically the Plague chapter, which I read a few times. It's one of the kind of standouts, I think, in the book, because it really is tackling... essays feel timeless and immediate, the good ones do, and this book was very much of a moment. So what was it like to be able to write about this while going through it?

John Green: I mean, it was really helpful for me because so much of how I understand the world is through writing, or even understand myself, is through writing. And so it was useful for me, but also it was very strange because I've never written about current events. All of my books are essentially set in like an amorphous time, you know? Nothing happens in them historically. And I've started to do this less as I've gotten older, but like in the early ones, I would try to remove any sense of time, like remove technology and minimize as much of that stuff as I could.

And I started to think about that differently as I got older, but this was the first time I was kind of, I mean, I was writing the book until, I think the last parts, the intro and the conclusion, I was writing them in April, and the book came out on May 18th. So it was weird. It was very, very different and much, much, much more stressful than publishing on a novel schedule. And I don't think that that part I will do again.

Sarah Enni: That's so interesting, and publishing can move lightning fast when it wants to, and it can also take forever.

John Green: I've been very, very lucky to have the same editor my whole career, so for almost 20 years now. She started editing Looking for Alaska, in I think in 2003. And I was saying to her that the galleys for Looking for Alaska came out like 13 months before the book did. The book was completely finished for a year and a half before it came out. And The Anthropocene Reviewed was finished for like five minutes before it came out. It was a very different experience for sure.

Sarah Enni: And I think it's somewhat, you know, as you say, essays aren't news, but they are sort of best consumed by your peers, functionally, like people who are experiencing this at the same time as you.

John Green: And it was very important to me to try to write from inside of something, because a lot of my favorite books of essays do that, they're inside of a time or an experience. And if you can read it inside that time or experience with them, it's exciting and really interesting. But even if you read it much later, it's still reflective of that time. It can take you back to that time, but in a way that almost feels safer. There's something about being able to go back to, I think I say in the book that there's something about how, if I can go back to something after I've survived it, it feels so much more manageable to me.

Sarah Enni: Survivable.

John Green: Yeah. And so I think I wanted it to be both. I wanted it to be something almost like a time capsule, even for my kids to try to help them understand someday, how it was for me. So I was thinking about all that.

Sarah Enni: In the book, there's a lot of explicit discussion about what it means that we're inside of history and that history is not an inevitability, which it can feel like when you just read stuffy textbooks. So in this way, you are having your opportunity to contribute your voice to how we remember this time.

John Green: I hadn't thought of it that way, but I hope that's true. The main thing that I would love for history to acknowledge more of, is that the people who were living inside of it had absolutely no idea what was going on and it did not feel inevitable to them. And it can be hard to talk about that when we talk about these historical timelines, because only one thing happened, but many things might've happened.

And to the people, like to us right now, we are hoping that we are very near the end of the pandemic in the United States, or at least it will see a dramatic reduction in disease burden in the U.S. over the next year. And that is one thing that might happen, but there are also many other things that might happen. And it is precisely that uncertainty that is so flipping difficult to live with.

And I worry that once these historical narratives get calcified into what happened, people forget that what made it so difficult and unmanageable is that we didn't know the right way through. There was so much we didn't know that you now know. And so I do spend a lot of time worrying about that. Not least because we, at our educational channel Crash Course, we teach history, or make stuff to help history teachers. And I worry about like, how do we reflect that reality?

Sarah Enni: The last question I have about The Anthropocene Reviewed is about the evolution of the rating system. So give me a second, this is a long question, but it's getting to the point. In The Hall of Presidents, which gets two-stars, you write, "As a teenager, I began to define myself primarily by what I disliked, and my loathes were legion." And in Sycamore Trees, which get five-stars, you say that, "As a teen, I reveled in nihilism. More than that, I liked being certain about it. Certain that everyone who believed life had inherent meaning was an idiot. Certain that meaning is just a lie we tell ourselves to survive the pain of meaninglessness."

But in the introduction to The Anthropocene Reviewed you write, "It's taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world. But I started to feel it in the last couple of years." This is by no means a small question, but I'm interested in that within the context of giving yourself permission to give five stars.

John Green: Yeah, so for the first year-and-a -half I made the podcast, nothing got five stars. And I don't really know why. I don't have a good answer. After I wrote an essay about the Lascaux cave paintings and my wife called me after she listened to it. And she said, "If you don't give the Lascaux cave paintings, five stars, I'm not sure what gets five stars. But also, more importantly, I'm not sure that I can continue listening to your podcast."

[Both laugh]

John Green: And a friend of mine, the wonderful poet Katrina Vandenberg, also wrote me around the same time. And she was like, "You've really painted yourself into a corner here with this four-and-a-half star business." And she made a pretty compelling case that while the ratings are silly and they're not obviously the center of the project, or anything. That what you're trying to do is you're trying to protect yourself from saying that anything is perfect, or saying that anything is lovely.

You're trying to keep up a little tiny bit of irony, a little tiny shield of irony, from trying to reckon earnestly with the beauty in the world. And maybe part of that was because I was thinking, "Gosh, if I open myself up to the beauty of the world, it might feel like I'm somehow dismissing, or minimizing, the injustice in the world." Maybe part of it was me feeling like, "Gosh, when you're earnest, when you're really earnest, when you really drop everything and you make yourself vulnerable to beauty, and you talk about that honestly, people might make fun of you. People might say it's cringy and they might say it's a little lame."

Cause it kind of is a little cringy. I get that. I get why people feel that way. And I know I felt that way when I was young, you know? And so I think that was all part of it. And then I was writing this essay about sunsets which had started years earlier as a Vlogbrothers video. And I was trying to rework it and I was still trying to protect myself, I was still trying to make fun of sunsets a little bit. And I remember Sarah was talking to me, my wife Sarah, was talking to me about this idea of the Claude glass, this thing in art history that I didn't know anything about. Which is that in the 19th century, people would turn themselves away from a beautiful landscape and look at it in this mirror called a Claude glass that made the landscape look more like a painting and kind of dulled out some of the tones and just made it look more like what was then considered beautiful.

And this idea of turning yourself away from the most beautiful thing imaginable to engage with it in a way that made it like less embarrassing in its beauty, really struck me. And I was like, "That's what I've been doing this whole time." Not just this whole time writing these essays, but this whole time since I was 12 years old. And I need to turn around, and I need to look at the sunset, and I need to acknowledge that it is phenomenally beautiful. And the fact that it is cliched in its beauty, and the fact that it has been beautiful for a long time and that lots of other people have commented on its beauty, doesn't matter. It's enough. It's beautiful.

And so I did, I tried for the rest of the podcast, and also for the rest of the book, the way the book is organized, I tried to lay down that shield of irony that I keep up all the time. And I tried to just reckon earnestly with the world as I find it, and to celebrate what is really, really wonderful and beautiful about it. Which is a lot, there is a lot here that is beautiful. There is a lot of wonder to find. There is so much awe to experience. I just need to do the work to experience it.

Sarah Enni: I love that. It was a cool experience for me because I listened to all of the podcast episodes, before I got the chance to get an early copy of the book, and then listened to the book all while packing up one apartment and moving into this new place. And so I was at Home Depot, I was in my car, I was painting. So then to listen to the podcast and then to get into the book and see what had changed was so interesting. And then at the end of Sunsets, when you decided to have five stars, I was [pauses and gets choked up]. Sorry. I was just like, painting a wall and erasing the impact that I had on this apartment. And that contrast, was awesome. It was really hopeful for me.

John Green: Oh, that's so lovely.

Sarah Enni: Yeah. Sorry. It's obviously been a crazy time.

John Green: No, that means the world to me. And can I tell you why? The thing about writing, and I'm sure you experience this too, the thing about writing is that it can't work unless the reader makes space for the story, like make space and connects their own experiences and their own feelings and their own moments, to the work.

And so it means so, so much to me that you shared that with me, because it's an example of what I dreamed would happen with the book, which is that it might make space for people where they can co-mingle their own experiences and their own moments of joy and of loss, with mine. And so, yeah, I mean, that's the most generous response to the book I've had. So thank you.

Sarah Enni: Well, it was really special, so I'm really glad that I could share it. It's been helpful through this whole experience.

So, usually I wrap up with writing advice, but I have been completely preoccupied with The Super League ( official website, woof. Explained so well in this New York Times review and this podcast episode of as well as the three-episode breakdown of Men In Jackets ( ep 1, ep 2, ep 3). And you are one of the top people. I was like, "What an opportunity." You've generously agreed to give us a review of The Super League, but I also want to make sure that we explain what it is.

John Green: I was gonna say, I mean, do your listeners know what The Super League is?

Sarah Enni: Unclear.

John Green: So you're a soccer fan, I assume.

Sarah Enni: A little bit. I'm getting into it.

John Green: Okay. Do you have a team yet? Or can I still win you over for Liverpool?

Sarah Enni: I'm open to pitches.

John Green: Okay. I would really appreciate it if you become a Liverpool fan, obviously, no pressure. But like I tried to write in the book about what a joy it is. It's also horrible, but there are moments of joy, and the moments of joy are magical. And I will take you to a Liverpool game. I will do whatever is necessary to make you a Liverpool fan.

Sarah Enni: I want to sing that song!

John Green: You want to sing You'll Never Walk Alone with 60,000 people? I'll tell you what, if you do that, it's over for you. It's like falling in love. It's incredible. But so Liverpool, and several other of the sort of richest clubs in England, got together with some of the richest clubs in Spain and in Italy and decided to form this European Super League. This was gonna replace an existing competition between... every year, the best teams in each country of Europe play in a competition called The Champions League.

And it's one of the most prestigious competitions in world football and winning The Champions League is one of the best things that can happen to your club. I know because Liverpool have won it six times and it's a huge, huge deal. But they were going to just end The Champions League and replace it with this European Super League where all these clubs would play each other every season. The central problem, I mean there were a lot of problems, but one of the central problems of the European Super League is that in order to qualify for the Champions League, the existing competition, you have to finish in one of the top places in your national competition.

So you have to be one of the best teams in England that year to play in The Champions League. The idea of being able to play in to a competition, and not buy into a competition, is the main thing that makes European football different from American sports franchises. Now, in a way you can buy your way in because there are clubs with billions of dollars that spend billions of dollars on players, but there are still always surprises in the Champions League. There are always clubs that somehow find a way to go on a run, and that's what makes the sport amazing. And you should not be able to have a situation that a club cannot get relegated, or cannot fail to qualify, because then it's just like baseball, where if your team doesn't make the playoffs, nothing bad happens. They just get to go and try to make the playoffs again next year.

One of the things that makes football so magical for me, is that there is real peril all the time. I follow a club in the third tier of English soccer that my brother and I helped sponsor. And this year they survived in their league by only two points out of the whole season. And so if one or two games had gone differently, they would have been relegated to the league below.

I didn't enjoy that process. I didn't relish that experience. But it is because of peril. It is because of, you know, you have to play your way in, that we love the game. And the European Super League tried to take that away from us and tried to make football into something very similar to American sports and people hated it. And rightly so.

And it was a great reminder that billionaires think that they own these assets. And in some ways they do, but the power of the people is always greater. Fans decide. Fans still have a lot of control and say in these clubs, and they need more say. And the steps that we need to take are not steps toward billionaires having more control over their football club assets, but fans having more control over their clubs. So I give The European Super League, a solid, unambiguous, single star, putting it right on par with Viral Meningitis

Sarah Enni: [Laughing] And The Plague.

John Green: And The Plague. It's just right there at the bottom with a bunch of other things that are utterly horrible.

Sarah Enni: I love that. It was a triumphant, weird, short 72 hour story that I just can't get enough of.

John Green: Oh, it was incredible. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it was nuts. Wild, wild story.

Sarah Enni: This has been such a pleasure, John. I so appreciate your time this morning.

John Green: Thank you so, so much for having me. This was really lovely. And again, thank you for those really kind words about that essay. It just means the world to me. Again, please consider Liverpool.

[Both laughing]

Sarah Enni: I will absolutely. Bye John.

John Green: Take care.

[Liverpool fans singing You'll Never Walk Alone]

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John Green - First Draft With Sarah Enni

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John Green , #1 New York Times bestselling author of many young adult novels, including The Fault in Our Stars and Printz-winning Looking For Alaska , joins to discuss his new essay collection, The Anthropocene Reviewed . He is also one half of the vlogbrothers on YouTube and co-creator

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The Farmer's Dog: Forever 2023 Super Bowl Commercial