If family is no longer the plan, what are we working for?

The first episode in our new "What Now" mini-series, exploring the questions people are asking themselves when the old rules of work and life no longer apply.

For generations, adulthood came with a promise. Work hard, progress in your career, buy a house, start a family. Our latest guest, strategist and writer Chloe Alana Williams, co-founder of 8th Day, describes it as a three-legged stool. And for anyone entering the workforce now, all three legs have been kicked out.

"There's no job security. It's seemingly impossible to buy a house these days. And as you know, birth rates are declining rapidly at the same time. So really what are adults working for right now is the big question."

Kaleidoscope lives

Chloe has spent years exploring the changing relationship between work, ambition, identity and family, and this conversation went everywhere: why we used to live in sync with each other and now live what she calls "kaleidoscope lives", doing the big life milestones out of order or not at all. Why one woman might have her first child at 25, another at 35, another at 45. Why Japan's decision to support families from birth to age 18, rather than a one-off baby bonus, is starting to move the numbers where almost nothing else has.

The stat that stops you mid-walk

A US survey asked young men and women what a successful life looks like. For some groups of men, having children came top. For women, regardless of who they voted for, it didn't make the top ten. And Chloe's concept of "Generation Zero" is the one that stays with you: a possible first generation in which half the population doesn't have children, and the catch that we can only measure it after it has happened.

Futurists in our own lives

But this is not an episode about doom, and it is not an episode about blaming women, a narrative Chloe firmly dismantles. It's about choice, and what work is for once the old script no longer applies. Chloe argues women need to become "futurists in their own lives", planning backwards from the future they actually want rather than the one they were handed. And somewhere around the half-hour mark, Alice floated a brand new framework for building a portfolio career, live on air: something you know, something to grow, and somewhere for flow. Dan demanded a timestamp. You heard it here first.

What work was quietly for all along

The conversation lands somewhere surprisingly hopeful: that what work has always quietly provided, connection, community and people in each other's orbit, might be exactly what we should be redesigning it around.

Find Chloe's writing on her Substack, Natalism Nudges, on LinkedIn, and at chloealana.com