From & To Sathish #7 - Page 42

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change/earth-co2-record-global-warming-rcna210974?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nautilus-newsletter

Earth's atmosphere hasn't had this much CO2 in millions of years

New data shows that CO2 levels have broken through 430 parts per million, an indication that human-caused global warming will continue to warp the environment.

By Denise Chow and Chase Cain

Earth’s atmosphere now has more carbon dioxide in it than it has in millions — and possibly tens of millions — of years, according to data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the University of California San Diego.

For the first time, global average concentrations of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, exceeded 430 parts per million (ppm) in May. The new readings were a record high and represented an increase of more than 3 ppm over last year.

The measurements indicate that countries are not doing enough to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reverse the steady buildup of C02, which climate scientists point to as the main culprit for global warming.

“Another year, another record,” Ralph Keeling, a professor of climate sciences, marine chemistry and geochemistry at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement. “It’s sad.”

Carbon dioxide, like other greenhouse gases, traps heat from the sun and can remain in the atmosphere for centuries. As such, high concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to higher global temperatures and other negative consequences of climate change, including rising sea levels, melting polar ice, and more frequent and severe extreme weather events.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen sharply since preindustrial times, owing mostly to human activities that pump greenhouse gases into the air.

Decades ago, crossing the 400 ppm threshold was unthinkable. That meant that for every 1 million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, more than 400 were carbon dioxide. The planet hit that grim milestone in 2013. And now, scientists have warned that levels of CO2 could reach 500 ppm within 30 years.

But human society is already in uncharted territory.

The last time the planet had such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was likely more than 30 million years ago, Keeling said, long before humans roamed Earth and during a time when the climate was vastly different.

He said it’s alarming not only how high CO2 levels have climbed, but also how quickly.

“It’s changing so fast,” he told NBC News. “If humans had evolved in such a high-CO2 world, there would probably be places where we wouldn’t be living now. We probably could have adapted to such a world, but we built our society and a civilization around yesterday’s climate.”

Carbon dioxide levels are typically represented on a graph known as the Keeling Curve, named for Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, who began taking daily measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1958 with instruments atop the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

The Keeling Curve famously shows a steep climb since the Industrial Revolution, owing to human-caused climate change.

Ralph Keeling and his colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that average concentrations of atmospheric CO2 in May were 430.2 ppm. NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, which has conducted separate daily readings since 1974, reported an average of 430.5 ppm in May.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are closely monitored to gauge how much humans are influencing Earth’s climate. The readings are also an indicator of the planet’s overall health.

“They’re telling you about your whole system health with a single-point measurement,” Keeling said. “We’re getting a holistic measurement of the atmosphere from really a kind of simple set of measurements.”

https://nautil.us/worm-inspired-treatments-inch-toward-the-clinic-1216182/?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nautilus-newsletter

Worm-Inspired Treatments Inch Toward the Clinic

Infection by certain wrigglers may reduce inflammation and fight obesity and diabetes

By Amber Dance

he experiment was a striking attempt to investigate weight control. For six weeks, a group of mice gorged on lard-enriched mouse chow, then scientists infected the mice with worms. The worms wriggled beneath the animals’ skin, migrated to blood vessels that surround the intestines, and started laying eggs.

Bruno Guigas, a molecular biologist at the Leiden University Center for Infectious Diseases in the Netherlands, led this study some years back and the results, he says, were “quite spectacular.” The mice lost fat and gained less weight overall than mice not exposed to worms. Within a month or so, he recalls, the scientists barely needed their scale to see that the worm-infested mice were leaner than their worm-free counterparts. Infection with worms, it seems, reversed obesity, the researchers reported in 2015.

While it’s true that worms gobble up food their hosts might otherwise digest, that doesn’t seem to be the only mechanism at work here. There’s also some intricate biology within the emerging scientific field of immunometabolism.

After two years, those who received 20 worms had lost an average of 11 pounds.

Over the past couple of decades, researchers have recognized that the immune system doesn’t just fight infection. It’s also intertwined with organs like the liver, the pancreas, and fat tissue, and implicated in the progression of obesity and type 2 diabetes. These and other metabolic disorders generate a troublesome immune response—inflammation—that worsens metabolism still further. Metabolic disease, in other words, is inflammatory disease.

Scientists have also observed a metabolic influence of worms in people who became naturally infected with the parasites or were purposely seeded with worms in clinical trials. While the physiology isn’t fully understood, the worms seem to dampen inflammation, as discussed in the 2024 Annual Review of Nutrition.

“We’re never going to cure or treat metabolic disease with worm infections,” says Guigas. They cause unpleasant side effects like nausea, and it would be impractical to dose millions of people with parasites. But worms can be valuable tools for scientists to understand the feedback between inflammation and metabolism. The findings could inspire more traditional, less ick-inducing treatments.

The worms we’re talking about are helminths such as flukes and roundworms. While they’ve largely been eliminated from developed nations, an estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide carry them. They can be dangerous in high numbers, and cause symptoms such as diarrhea and malnutrition in those at high risk, including children and immunocompromised individuals, and during pregnancy.

But for most people, infection with a few worms is pretty benign. “Throughout human evolution, I think, there’s been this nice sort of truce,” says Paul Giacomin, an immunologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. As part of that detente, he says, helminths evolved molecules that tell the human immune system, “I’m not here, don’t worry about me.” In turn, people might have evolved to depend a bit on worms to temper inflammation.

Today, metabolic disease is a massive global problem, with obesity affecting an estimated 890 million people. Another 580 million have type 2 diabetes, which arises when the hormone insulin, which controls blood sugar levels, is in short supply or the body’s cells become insensitive to it.

Links between metabolic disease and worm infection emerged from research on human populations. Studies in Australia, Turkey, Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia showed that people with metabolic conditions such as diabetes were less likely to have helminth infections, and vice versa. “This observation is quite strong,” says Ari Molofsky, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Going a step further, scientists observed what happened when they provided deworming treatments. “The overwhelming majority of the studies showed that deworming worsens your metabolic health,” says Giacomin.

Scientists looked to lab mice for additional clues. Molofsky and colleagues, in 2011, reported that when they infected mice on high-fat food with the gut worm Nippostrongylus brasiliensis, the infection improved blood sugar control. Similarly, in Guigas’ study, published in 2015, the worms—blood flukes called Schistosoma mansoni—improved not just weight, but also blood sugar processing. And the worms needn’t be alive: Even molecules collected from crushed worm eggs improved metabolism.

“The parasitic worms are real masters at controlling inflammation.”

The going hypothesis is that metabolic problems kick off a vicious immunometabolic cycle. First, Guigas says, damaged cells in metabolic organs cry for help, releasing molecular signals that call in immune cells. When the immune cells arrive, they morph into forms that promote a type of inflammation called Th1. Th1 responses are good at combating viruses, but they’re the wrong choice here. Th1 can aggravate metabolic problems by impairing insulin manufacture, altering insulin signaling, and amplifying insulin resistance.

Thus, instead of helping, the immune cells cause further stress in the metabolic tissues. So the tissues call in more immune cells—and the cycle repeats.

Worms seem to break the cycle. In great part, that’s probably because their “I’m not here” message causes a different kind of immune response, Th2, that dampens the Th1 reaction and re-normalizes the system. Other mechanisms might also be at work: Worms might reduce appetite; it’s known they can alter gut microbes; and Guigas suspects they can also manipulate creatures’ metabolisms via non-immune pathways.

“The parasitic worms are real masters at controlling inflammation,” says Giacomin, who coauthored an article on helminths and immunity in the 2021 Annual Review of Immunology. Thus, scientists interested in controlling immunometabolic disease might take cues from these wriggly little metabolic masterminds. In fact, researchers have already tested helminths to control inflammation in autoimmune conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease.

The accumulating evidence linking worms to metabolic benefits in animals and people inspired Giacomin and colleagues to conduct a trial of their own. Commencing in 2018, they decided to try the hookworm Necator americanus in 27 obese people who had insulin resistance, putting them at risk for type 2 diabetes. The researchers applied worm larvae in patches on the subjects’ arms; after passing through the skin, the worms would travel through the blood stream, to the lungs, and then to the small intestine. An additional 13 participants were assigned to placebo patches with Tabasco sauce to mimic the itch of entering worms.

N. americanus is a common cause of hookworm infections across much of the world. While most cases are asymptomatic, the time when the worms are attaching to the intestinal wall can cause symptoms like nausea and low iron levels, especially if there are a lot of worms. So the main goal was to determine if the treatment was safe, trying doses of 20 or 40 worms. Many subjects suffered short-term unpleasantness such as bloating or diarrhea as they adjusted to their new intestinal tagalongs, but overall, most did fine.

After 12 months, the people who got hookworms had lower insulin resistance and reduced fasting blood sugar levels. After two years, those who received 20 worms had lost an average of 11 pounds—though not all individuals lost weight, and some gained.

“It was quite convincing that the worms were having some sort of beneficial effect,” says Giacomin. The subjects were convinced too: When the study was over, the researchers offered deworming, but most participants elected to keep their worms.

Giacomin and Guigas hope to identify worm components or invent worm-inspired molecules to produce similar effects without whole parasites. Giacomin cofounded a company, Macrobiome Therapeutics in Cairns, to develop hookworm molecules into treatments. Such medications might be based on the wriggly parasites, but they’d be an easier pill to swallow.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/28/andre-correa-do-lago-cop30-interview-climate-crisis?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=1d5ed48402-nature-briefing-daily-20250610&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b27a691814-1d5ed48402-499400700

World faces new danger of ‘economic denial’ in climate fight, Cop30 head says

Exclusive: André Corrêa do Lago says ‘answers have to come from the economy’ as climate policies trigger populist-fuelled backlash

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41591-025-00036-6?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=1d5ed48402-nature-briefing-daily-20250610&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b27a691814-1d5ed48402-499400700

Stem cell therapies advance in Parkinson’s disease and beyond Landmark trials using stem cells to treat Parkinson’s disease in the USA and Japan mark a turning point for cell therapy in neurodegeneration. Similar approaches to Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis are also showing early signs of promise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhsU0fd0flg

Uriah Heep - The Park

Let me walk a while alone

Among the sacred rocks and stones

Let me look in vain belief

Upon the beauty of each leaf

There is green in every blade

The tree tops lean providing shade

May poles spin in happy sound

All nature's strength around

And there's a horse that feels no pain

Its iron strength to take the strain

Children rock it to and fro

And gaily drink its colour-glow

Above the sky devoid of cloud

Thinks not to cast a thunder shroud

Upon this place so full of joy

A field of gold of love's employ

So why my heavy heart you say

When tears would stain the sights so gay

My brother's dreams once here did soar

Until he died at the hand of needless war

https://nautil.us/a-movie-camera-for-the-cosmos-854489/?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nautilus-newsletter

A Movie Camera for the Cosmos

The Rubin observatory will allow scientists to see how the cosmos has evolved over time.

By Tom Metcalfe

A movie of the cosmos, updated every three days, is about to start running from a mountaintop in Chile. For the next 10 years, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory—named after the American astronomer who studied the effects of dark matter—will image millions of astronomical objects each day, or more than 100 every second.

Every three nights, the telescope’s advanced mount will reposition and stabilize it to create a high-quality mosaic of the night sky in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light—an unprecedented chronicle that can be crossed-referenced against earlier observations.

The result will be an accurate and updated record of everything that appears or disappears—a precise “movie” that scientists can use to view how the cosmos changes over time, says University of Edinburgh astronomer Bob Mann, who heads the United Kingdom branch of the project.

“We have had wide sky surveys before [and] we have had surveys that go very deep in small regions of sky,” Mann says. “But this dataset will have an unprecedented combination of depth, spectral and areal coverage, and temporal resolution.”

That means Rubin is set to detect “classes of time-varying or transient phenomena that could not have been detected before,” Mann says. And these new phenomena could in turn unveil even deeper secrets of the cosmos, from its very beginning to its eventual conclusion.

Rubin will be nothing short of revolutionary in mapping the solar system.

The project will create an unprecedented flood of digital data that will be funneled via the internet to seven specialized data centers around the world, with the expectation that scientists almost everywhere can use it to search for new astronomical phenomena—and in the hope some could lead to new understandings of how the universe works.

Sometime in late September, the observatory’s official “first photons” will flow into a simplified “commissioning” camera, as a test. But the full observatory won’t go online until early next year—including its main 3.2 gigapixel camera, a three-ton device with robotic filters and the largest digital camera ever built.

The observatory will complete a deep survey of the entire southern sky more than 800 times during its initial 10-year mission—a project called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

University of Washington astronomer and data scientist Mario Jurić, who will use Rubin’s data to explore the solar system, explains that changes in the sky can reveal a lot about the objects and processes that cause them.

“Seeing the ‘cosmos in time’ allows us to find objects that change brightness—think variable stars, supernovae, black holes in centers of distant galaxies devouring in gas and other stars,” he says. But Rubin will also detect almost any object that moves in the solar system, including asteroids, comets, and perhaps even unknown planets.

“Rubin will be nothing short of revolutionary in mapping the solar system and helping us understand its formation and evolution,” Jurić says.

This resulting flood of data will need special data centers to handle it: Scientists estimate the observatory will generate about 20 terabytes of data every night, for a total of about 60 petabytes over the 10-year survey—equivalent to 30 trillion printed pages.

University of Oxford astrophysicist Stephen Smartt is leading the United Kingdom’s effort to filter the results, and six other data centers—one in Chile, two more in Europe, and three in the United States—are also being prepared to deal with the data deluge.

Usually, international teams of astronomers and space scientists book time on the world’s largest telescopes to observe the particular astronomical objects and phenomena they are interested in. But the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will pioneer a different approach, by making deep observations of the entire southern sky every few days and providing the data to networks of scientists who can filter it for significant results.

Astronomer Igor Andreoni of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, will use the data to detect variable stars, which can change brightness over the course of several days. Astronomers have identified certain types of variable stars that pulse with predictable brightness over a distinctive period of time, so that they can be used as “standard candles” to measure astronomical distances.

Andreoni is hoping to witness “explosions marking the death of massive stars, collisions of compact objects, stars being ripped apart by black holes, and all sorts of cosmic drama,” he says. “The universe is a very dynamic place, from which we still have a lot to learn.”

University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist Raffaella Margutti will use the same stream of data to search for “transient” astronomical phenomena that might only be visible for a few hours or less—such as the distinctive flashes of light given off by merging neutron stars, which could help scientists determine the exact nuclear processes that took place during the merger.

“The universe is all but static. It evolves, on any time scale,” Margutti says. “We are now in the position to map the sky as it evolves with time.”

https://thewalrus.ca/i-was-born-missing-an-ear/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&PAVED-2025_02_12=&sponsored=0&position=2&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=3aa46fb6-f18a-4d60-a9d9-ba42327b318a&url=https://thewalrus.ca/i-was-born-missing-an-ear/

I Was Born Missing an Ear. To the World, It Was a Problem to Fix

https://www.elle.com/life-love/a63309605/motherhood-decision-essay-2025/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&PAVED-2025_02_12=&sponsored=0&position=5&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=183700cf-e35a-42a4-a58a-12579459f7b6&url=https://www.elle.com/life-love/a63309605/motherhood-decision-essay-2025/

The Purgatory of Being a Fence-Sitter

The decision of whether or not to have kids has become so daunting that women are turning to unusual places for help: TikTok, Reddit, and “Motherhood Clarity” therapists.

By Ilana Kaplan

It began as so many things do: with an inescapable urge to doomscroll. Not long after I got engaged in April 2020, I found my pandemic-isolated brain in a panicked state that couldn’t be soothed by obsessively reading celebrity blind items. As a woman over 30 on the cusp of marriage, I was confronted (or more aptly, tortured) by an overwhelming sense of uncertainty over whether or not I wanted to have kids.

If you’d asked me when I was a teenager how I saw my life turning out, I would have predicted that by age 30, I’d be married with kids. In my twenties, the idea of having kids shifted to a very malleable “maybe”—I didn’t want anyone to tell me I couldn’t have them, but I also didn’t feel committed to the idea. The topic had resurfaced time and again in my relationship, with both of us on the fence. Now, night after night, while most normal people were sleeping, I found myself wide awake and spiraling in the depths of Reddit and TikTok, praying that some faceless, nameless person would help me find an answer to a question I knew inherently could only be found inside myself.

I spent time on TikTok’s #childfreebychoice, where people who’ve decided not to have kids brag about unlimited sleep and the many things that they can do with their DINK (dual income, no kids) savings. The posts made it hard to see what joy a cute but tiny dictator who needs you constantly could bring, so I would pivot to #MomTok to try to understand why people became parents. I appreciated how candid many women were in sharing their frustrations but also their wins, like when a silly song cured their toddler’s muffin-induced meltdown.

After months of scrolling, I felt like I could win an Olympic gold medal for how informed I was, but I felt no closer to figuring out which side of the divide I was on. I found myself haunted by a 2011 advice column from The Rumpus titled “The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us,” about a man grappling with the idea that all of us have a “ghost ship,” or another path, we could have taken. At least once a week, I would conjure such a ship in my head, and watch with anxiety as the life I had not chosen drifted away. Before long, I found myself seething with envy when friends revealed a sense of certainty about their decisions. Why couldn’t I be sure, too?

Before long, I found myself seething with envy when friends revealed a sense of certainty about their decisions. Why couldn’t I be sure, too?”

Indecision is a lonely—and scary—place to be when you’re starring in your own version of Sliding Doors. My life felt like it had become a constant pro-and-con list, ever-shifting as I weighed factors like job insecurity, abortion bans that have made pregnancy more dangerous, climate change, the rising costs of child care and housing, the recent election results, and the general state of the world. That’s something that haunts Samantha, 33, a former high school teacher who lives in “deep-red small-town” Georgia: “Do I want to put a child through that kind of trauma and experience of just growing up in the United States with gun violence?” she says. She and I definitely weren’t the only ones who felt their stomach fall through their asshole when the election results were called this year. In an instant, all of my torturous indecision came with a stark realization: The choice may no longer be mine to make. After all, we’re living in a world where Vice President JD Vance has called childless people “sociopathic.”

Then there’s the fear of missing out. Friends who’ve had kids have told me how fulfilled raising a child had made them feel; that a parent’s love for their child was like nothing they’d known before. There’s also the “Don’t I want to have someone to take care of me when I’m older?” crowd—I personally believe that’s not a reason to bring a child into the world—and the “Won’t I be lonely?” folks. (Maybe! I do worry about that, but I don’t think loneliness is exclusive to child-free people.) And then, of course, there’s the internal nagging—What about my legacy?—to which I say, There are multiple ways to leave a legacy.

While I felt isolated in my anxiety, I wasn’t actually alone. There’s not only a term for people like me—“fence-sitters”—there’s also a 70,000-plus-member Reddit subgroup of people who pose questions like, “Will being a mom suit my personality type?” Like many corners of Reddit, it’s become a support group. After a devastating breakup initiated because she wasn’t 100 percent sure kids were in the cards for her, Elizabeth Kirsch, 29, a teacher in Ontario, realized she didn’t want to lose anyone to indecision again. That’s when she joined r/Fencesitter. “I figured reading other people’s perspectives would be validating and give me some clarity,” she says. “It’s done both of those things and has been immensely helpful in feeling more solid in being in that gray area of indecision.”

There’s a particular horror of being a fence-sitter today. In our parents’ generation, having kids was the default, at least for straight couples. That made the decision comparatively easy, because there wasn’t much to decide at all—it was just what you did, unless you were infertile. “People were just having kids more easily, because that’s what happened,” says Laura Carroll, pronatalist expert and author of The Baby Matrix. “So the decision process was very different unless you wanted to be celibate—and most people did not.”

But as increasing numbers of people may have chosen not to procreate—the national birth rate has been on the decline since 2007, and reached a historic low in 2023—what was once a given is now an open question, with plenty of room for debate. Women having more control over their own destinies is unquestionably a good thing, but it also means there are a whole lot more of us stuck in the middle. According to 2023 survey data from Pew Research Center, roughly a third of U.S. adults under 35 without kids revealed their uncertainty about having them, and nearly half of adults under 50 in the U.S. who are currently child-free think they will ultimately remain that way. The biggest reason they cite? They just don’t want to have kids.

Like me, Olivia Bellon, a PR executive in Chicago, always thought a “moment of clarity” would come once she met her “person.” “Now I’m 33, still single, and I am more unsure than ever,” she admits. Still, the looming age of geriatric pregnancy is haunting her: “That’s in two years!” she exclaims. “I don’t even have a boyfriend, let alone a husband, let alone a prospect.”

The indecision has started to pervade our culture, with podcasts like Should We Have Kids? and The Kids or Childfree Podcast, as well as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator Rachel Bloom’s forthcoming ABC comedy Do You Want Kids?, which will explore the alternate universes of a couple who are parents in one world and child-free in the other. There are also “Motherhood Clarity” therapists and coaches, and a deck of cards from the Gottman Institute that offers “52 Questions Before Baby.” Deep down, I knew I needed more than Reddit to find an answer, so after years of agonizing, I decided to consult the professionals. Could this finally cure my years-long agita about procreating?

For 34 years, Ann Davidman, a marriage and family therapist, author, and “Parenthood Clarity” mentor, has been helping people decide if parenting is right for them. Speaking to her was a wake-up call for me—there is no shortcut to ending what she calls “unending torturous mental gridlock,” but she did provide a plan, which gave me a sense of control that I’d been missing. She encouraged me to watch a video on her website that featured a series of exercises for anyone ready to begin the decision-making process. With her meditative lilt, she told me to close my eyes and write down my gut reactions to a series of questions she posed; suggested putting a moratorium on discussing having a child with my husband or with friends; and explained why this decision wasn’t one I could merely think my way out of—I had to put in serious work in therapy. “It’s about identifying your fears and beliefs and details of your life so that you can put them on the sidelines, just temporarily,” she says, which allows you to get to the root of what is making you feel stuck.

Davidman has also observed that sometimes the indecision is rooted in one’s own experiences in childhood. That rang true for Leah Forney, 37, a sexual assault advocate in Maryland. “I wasn’t raised by my parents; my grandparents adopted me,” she says. By her early twenties, she came to the realization that she had “deep abandonment issues.” “That was the first time I realized I don’t necessarily want to be a mom,” she says. I could relate: It was so obvious to me that my long-floating fears ranging from financially supporting a child and being a mentally and emotionally healthy parent stemmed from the scars of my own upbringing.

“Perhaps I might get postpartum depression, or I would be unfit to be a mother because I have these struggles, and I don’t want to put my kids through that,” says Sophia Meyer, 29, a dating and mental health podcast host in Portland, Oregon. Watching TikToks of squishy babies tugs at her heartstrings, but that’s countered by the idea of coming home to a screaming child after a difficult day of work. “I constantly think about how lucky I am to not have to deal with that,” she says. For now, she’s approaching her indecision by spending time with her sister and her children and asking herself how that makes her feel: “Do I want to be in this big home with four kids celebrating holidays together, or do I want to be in a villa in Italy by myself with my husband?”

Women having more control over their own destinies is unquestionably a good thing, but it also means there are a whole lot more of us stuck in the middle.”

I, too, can’t deny that I relish my freedom—the ability to meet friends for a spontaneous brunch, plan a last-minute getaway, and travel for writing assignments on a whim. The thought of having a child and being restricted gives me anxiety and, at worst, makes me worry I’ll be bored. Meyer tells me when she hears mothers describe their perfect day, “It’ll often involve something like, ‘Oh, I want to be able to sleep in, have a quiet day, and read my book.’ And I think to myself, ‘Wow, that’s your ideal day, and I’m able to live that every day right now as it is,’” she says, laughing. “Because I don’t have children.”

As many millennials can attest, we were essentially raised to have our careers consume our identities. Rumor has it becoming a parent transforms who you are at your core, which is terrifying to me. While I’m cheering for those who make being a mom their personality if it makes them happy, it’s not something that I want for myself. That’s also what’s most daunting for Bellon. She’s fiercely independent and career-oriented. “The idea of losing all that scares me. I love my life, my independence, and my freedom, and the idea of having that taken away is not appealing,” she says.

As I lean into being an auntie and watch my friends parent, I’m also haunted by the reality that even in the most equal-seeming partnerships, women carry most of the load. Sometimes I barely have the mental capacity to put together a meal for myself, so how will I manage doctors’ appointments, peewee soccer games, and parent-teacher conferences? Kirsch is keenly aware of how much work many women do at home when they have kids, on top of their other responsibilities. “They work full-time jobs; they go pick up the kids; they take them to extracurriculars; they come home; they do all the cooking and all the cleaning—it just seems like they almost lose their identity in motherhood,” she says.

In the face of such realities, I sought the guidance of Merle Bombardieri, who is an active participant in the Reddit fence-sitter group. She is also a clinical social worker and author of The Baby Decision, and Baby or Childfree?, coming in 2026. Bombardieri understands the decision I am up against—she even initially turned down a marriage proposal from her husband, Rocco, because she wasn’t sure if kids were in her life path. (They have two grown daughters.) Now people from all over the world clamor to hash out their indecision in one of her highly coveted coaching sessions, which cost between $200 and $300.

After listening to me spew every anxiety I have about parenting, Bombardieri suggested that, in addition to traditional therapy, I try the “empty chair technique,” where I sit in one chair and argue why I should have a child, before moving to the other chair to declare why I should be child-free. According to Bombardieri, people “realize that their voice is stronger, their posture is stronger, they feel more authentic in one chair than in the other.” The idea isn’t that you’ll reach 100 percent certainty, Bombardieri says, but if you can get to 60 percent in favor of one or the other, that is the beginning of the decision. She also helped me think of my indecision in a refreshing, less doomed light: “If you’re having trouble deciding, that means that you have a capacity for happiness with either choice.”

Most aspects of making this decision felt like things I may ultimately be able to work through, but the nagging fear of regret felt especially insurmountable—you simply won’t know until you’re there. I realized I’d perhaps find some relief from speaking with someone in their golden years who was child-free: Enter Marcia Drut-Davis, 82, author of Confessions of a Childfree Woman and What?! You Don’t Want Children? Drut-Davis decided to be child-free in 1974, though she tells me that she’d known this from a young age. She saw the work and worry that went into taking care of not just a baby, but a human. “The lifestyle turned me off,” she says. “I just didn’t want it.”

Parenting is undoubtedly a lot of work—there’s the mantra “It takes a village” for a reason, and modern society doesn’t provide much of a village. Speaking with Drut-Davis reminded me how child-free people could find joy in bonus family roles. As a longtime teacher, she “adored” her students— “four of them are in my will,” she adds. Some of the little ones in her life even call her “Marma,” as in “Marcia grandma.” It reminded me that I could be important to kids even if I don’t have my own.

By the end of my soul-seeking journey, I considered all of the experts’ advice and felt more at ease about having the tools to craft a plan. I accepted there wasn’t ever going to be an easy answer, and thinking about it constantly wasn’t going to help. Now, when that familiar ache of indecision lingers, something Bombardieri says plays in my mind. “Whatever you decide, you’re going to grieve and let go of all the pleasures of the other choice.” While I already feel like I’m grieving both versions of myself, she said it was simple: Go with the choice you will regret the least. “That’s where you get your answer.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbkPV48mw_k

Baakiyalakshmi | Episode Promo | 12th June 2025