A scientific narrative about what meditation does can offer a helpful lens on what is happening when you take your seat on the cushion. But no matter the story, there’s no substitute for actually doing the practice. Which raises the question: If you’re interested in exploring deeper meditation, how long will it take you to actually get somewhere? 

There’s no fixed relationship between how much time you put in and how much progress you get out. And even thinking about meditation in these terms — time you spend meditating as an investment in particular outcomes — will earn you smirks from some meditation teachers. But there are clear trends and useful benchmarks to help you think through how much daily meditation might actually deepen your practice.

Meditation is more like learning physics than exercising 

Meditation is often compared to exercise, where the relationship between effort and outcomes is usually clear. The more time you put in, the more results you get. But it’s not quite as straightforward as that, whether in exercise or meditation.

Take the Buddhist idea of “Right Effort,” which is kind of like learning proper weightlifting form. “If you want to lift more weight, but your form is bad, the only thing your weightlifting actually measures is how close you are to injury,” said Tucker Peck, a meditation teacher and clinical psychologist who specializes in working with advanced meditators.  

Given proper form, you might then expect a consistent relationship between how often you work out and the bulge of your biceps. But meditation outcomes can be jagged and unpredictable. As cognitive scientist and meditator Ruben Laukkonen explained to me last year, the amount of time you spend practicing isn’t a reliable indicator of how much progress you’ve made.

Instead, he suggested thinking of meditation like learning physics. There’s a lot to learn that does just require putting in the work — memorizing all those equations and theories, mastering the math that underpins it. And you want to make sure you’re learning correct ideas, rather than wasting your time on fake equations or disproved hypotheses.

But there’s also intuition at play, and flashes of insight can erupt at any point in the learning process. Meditation, too, can be quick and intuitive for some, or a long slog for others. 

Consider the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950). Among the hordes of gurus out there, he’s widely considered one of the least assailable cases of being the spiritual real deal.

At the age of 16 while hanging out at his uncle’s house, with no particular interest or commitment to meditation, Maharshi got the sudden feeling that he was going to die. So he laid down, observed the process, and a few minutes later, stood up, permanently enlightened, as the story goes. 

Now, I’m not sure what that actually means, and I’m skeptical of anyone who says they do. But the point is that some people can spend their entire lives meditating in search of some big psychological transformation, only for nothing much to happen. Others, like Maharshi, can get hit with what some traditions call “sudden awakening,” without any real prior meditation practice to speak of.

And making progress in meditation, at least traditionally speaking, depends on more than just doing the actual meditation. Across almost every school of both Buddhism and Hinduism, getting your ethics in order — sīla, or “moral conduct” in Buddhism — comes before sitting down to practice. 

According to Buddhist scripture, no matter how long you sit for, you won’t be able to access the jhānas — states of deep meditative absorption — unless your mind is relatively free from the five hindrances (which are obstacles to deep concentration like ill will, sloth, or restlessness). And as the Buddha’s teaching of the Eightfold Path holds, establishing moral thought, speech, action, and livelihood all come before getting to mindfulness practice.

All of which is to say, there’s no obvious formula here, and a lot of moving parts. Still, whether you’re looking to drop every ounce of tension you’ve stored up in your muscles, deconstruct some harmful mental habits, or embark upon a first-person investigation into the nature of mind, we can flesh out a bit more detail on different approaches to daily meditation.  

How much of my day will I have to sink into advanced meditation practices?

Let’s assume you won’t spontaneously launch into the deep end of meditation experiences with a Ramana-style sudden awakening (but you never know). There’s no blanket answer to how long you should meditate, of course. But if you’re interested in deepening your meditation practice, there are at least two general principles to follow:

• It’s more important to practice regularly than to sporadically do longer sessions. 20 minutes a day is a better bet than 60 minutes once a week.
  
• Therefore, you should do the most meditation that you will actually do every day (within reason, which we’ll get to).

As mindfulness has gone mainstream, though, much shorter sessions have become the vogue. Many of the stress-relief meditations on popular apps like Headspace or Calm cluster around 10-minute sessions.

Some teachers — especially those coming from non-dual traditions that believe we’re all already enlightened but just don’t know it — say that even short, 5- or 10-minute meditations can be powerful stuff. Nondual meditation teacher Loch Kelly teaches “mindful glimpses” that take no more than a few minutes, but, he told me, can give a real peek into deep states of meditation. Though he added that it then takes about three years of practice to stabilize those glimpses. 

Glimpses, stress relief, and sudden awakenings aside, most meditation teachers I spoke with agree that you’ll have to sit for more than 10 minutes per day to really get acquainted with meditation’s deeper practices. 

Even the formal method of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), which trojan-horsed mindfulness into Western science more than 40 years ago, is an eight-week course that recommends 45 minutes of daily meditation. Jon Kabat-Zinn — meditation teacher, former biologist, and MBSR’s creator — settled on 45 minutes as a middle ground between longer sessions that could get you past the initial fidgety phases of meditation, while being somewhat realistic for people to actually do on their own (though a 2017 review found that people wind up doing more like 30 minutes). 

MBSR’s timeframe is pretty close to that of Transcendental Meditation, a technique based on silently repeating a personal mantra that’s been practiced by a range of celebrities, from the Beatles to David Lynch, which prescribes two 20-minute sessions per day. And meditation teacher Leigh Brasington, who we’ll hear from later in this course, recommends a minimum of 45 minutes per day if you want to get into states of deep concentration like the jhānas.

So if you’re used to shorter meditations, or none at all, work upwards incrementally. Try starting with at least a 20-minute session per day. Jack Kerouac, a writer who introduced much of the 20th-century Beat Generation to Buddhism, wrote to his fellow poet Allen Ginsberg that “it takes twenty minutes to quiet the machine motor of the mind.” Despite his competing infatuation with benzos and wine, I think he was on to something.

If you think back to yesterday’s newsletter, quieting the motor of the mind is equivalent to doing enough focused attention practice to release the mind’s first layer of priors — or habits. A quiet mind is one where attention no longer gets snagged on mental activity, clearing the path to deeper open-monitoring or nondual practices. And 20 minutes can be a helpful benchmark for getting there.

But instead of using a timer, try using a stopwatch, and practicing to intuitively stop around the time you’re shooting for. This might be tricky at first, but it gets easier. And that way, if you find yourself in the midst of a particularly spacious and comfortable meditation, you can stretch it a bit longer without being jolted out by a timer. Or, if your “sit” is getting particularly tortuous, or your back hurts, you can just stop with less grief about not lasting the whole time.

As an added bonus, you’ll begin to develop an internal clock for meditation duration, which is actually something advanced practitioners train to do anyway.

Peck, the meditation teacher and psychologist, suggests that if you’re doing anything more than 45 minutes, you should be checking in with a teacher every now and then. Longer sessions are more likely to send you into deeper states, where meditation shifts from relaxing to potentially transformative. But there’s no guarantee that things change for the better, which is where experienced teachers can help steer your practice. “I’ve seen quite a number of people become psychotic from meditating six hours a day in their room without talking to anybody,” he said. 

A word on the under-studied risks of meditation

Research on the risks of meditation is unsurprisingly lagging behind the benefits. A 2020 systematic review of 83 meditation studies found that the prevalence of “meditation adverse events,” which can include anything from anxiety and depression to suicidal behaviors, hovered around 8.3 percent. But experts I spoke with are all over the map on whether that number looks too high or too low.  

The relative lack of knowledge about the risks has given rise to various organizations trying to fill in the gaps. Networks of scholars and practitioners are looking to educate healthcare professionals on how to support people going through challenging meditation experiences. Communities like Cheetah House offer direct support, alongside training meditation teachers to better handle difficult experiences. And resources like psychotherapist David Treleaven’s book, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, can help guide people through a more supported approach to meditation.

The goals and benefits of meditation change over time

According to the original framework for meditative development presented in Buddhist scripture — the four-path model — as your practice develops, real, durable changes to your psychology set in. Different traditions have their own maps of what making “progress” in your contemplative practice looks like — and yes, some teachers will ridicule the idea of spiritual progress as precisely the goal-oriented approach that undermines development — but most share the idea that if you keep up your practice over time, deeper stages begin to unfold. 

So instead of thinking about meditation as just a daily practice, then, we can also think about what it means to make progress over time. Are there benchmarks of progress in meditation? If you spent 30 minutes a day meditating over the next decade, you’d rack up about 1,800 hours of practice. Would the benefits of that much effort justify the opportunity cost of other things you might’ve done with about 75 days of your life?

One of the few studies to explore the relationship between lifetime hours spent meditating and benefits was published in 2022 by psychologists from the University of Melbourne’s Contemplative Studies Centre. They surveyed 1,668 English-speaking adult meditators with an average of 1,095 lifetime meditation hours. (On the spectrum of expertise, this is still fairly low. For comparison, when Harvard neuroscientist Matthew Sacchet studied an advanced meditator in his lab earlier this year, they had roughly 23,000 hours of lifetime practice).

The psychologists looked at the correlation between lifetime meditation hours and four variables: life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, and psychological distress. Across all four cases, two things immediately jumped out.

First, steeper benefits show up in the first 500 hours of practice. In the cases of life satisfaction and positive affect (basically, pleasure), the sharpest gains registered within the first 200 hours. 

The authors point out a range of limitations to their study, from sampling bias to basing lifetime practice hours on an extrapolation of prior-month self-reported meditation time. But overall, they come away with two conclusions: Meditation outcomes appear non-linear with time spent practicing, and the strongest gains seem to show up in the first 500 hours of practice.

I found that strange. If you look at the range of claims people make about their meditation practice, my read is that they get more intense, not less, as someone’s practice develops.

So I reached out to Nicholas Bowles, PhD student in psychology and lead author of the study, to ask if he really thought the beginning stages of meditation are more potent than the later ones. He explained that in his more recent research, he’s finding that as meditators practice more, their goals and motivations change. “People who have practiced less tend to value mental health, improving relationships, etc, while people who have practiced more tend to value spiritual growth,” he said via email.

Peck said that he sees this pattern of changing motivations with almost every student. “That people’s motivations change is universal. When you first start meditating, your mind is just wasting most of its energy on this idiotic, circular rambling. You have no sensory clarity, you don’t really understand what’s going on deeper in your mind.” 

Which means that there’s no single metric that can capture the thrust of meditation’s effects from 0 hours of practice out to 1,000, let alone 23,000. If you find major improvements to life satisfaction in the first 200 hours that level off afterward, that could be because the category of “life satisfaction” no longer captures the sort of benefits you’re getting out of sustained practice. “Overall then,” Bowles added, “the gains from practice for experienced practitioners probably continue to be quite impactful, but perhaps they’re impactful in different ways.”

How do movement and meditation fit together? Q+A with Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher Chandra Easton

In my early 20s, I spent some time at a Zendo in southern India. During sesshins, which are like Zen’s form of silent meditation retreats, our daily schedule would mostly alternate between periods of sitting meditation (zazen) and walking meditation (kinhin).

After sitting for something like 10 hours a day, walking was obviously crucial for my Western joints, as well as my sanity. But kinhin isn’t supposed to be just a respite from the tyranny of crossed legs — it’s meditation, too. But I struggled to really believe that.

To my mind, the “real” meditation was sitting still, and walking was mostly a concession we make on account of having bodies that need movement. If you think back to our framework for how meditation deconstructs the predictive mind, I saw movement as just a part of the first layer of “focused attention” practices. The deeper stuff requires sitting still.

Now, I think of sitting still in meditation as training wheels for the real practice, which is finding the same states of deeper awareness while your mind is thrashing around and navigating the stuff of daily life, whether the subway in Manhattan, the grocery store aisles the day before Thanksgiving, or while your kids are screaming. That’s when you find out if your meditation practice is actually working. Ram Dass has another good quip: “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”

But moving engages the mind, so if meditative depth is about shutting down the predictive mind, and moving triggers it, aren’t these opposing forces? How’s it possible to progress into deeper open-monitoring and non-dual states while doing yoga poses, walking, or dancing?

To explore these questions, I spoke with Chandra Easton, a meditation teacher, yoga instructor, and translator of Tibetan Buddhist texts. This excerpt of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been teaching a class that combines meditation, mantra, and movement. How do these three fit together?

In Buddhism, the body, speech, and mind are called the three doors, or gates. We can work through each of those different doorways into the same space. There’s one big room: presence.

Sitting in stillness is the ultimate body door. But that’s not easy for a lot of us to do. So in my class, I designed it to touch on those three doors and give people different access points into awareness or presence.

Can you go as deep into meditation during movement as you can when you’re sitting still?

It’s true that stillness allows us to access very deep states of attention. When we move, the mind moves. So we tell people don’t move if you don’t have to, because you’re just stirring up the dust again. But one’s not better than the other, it just depends where you are in the arc of your own practice.

For me, I’ve had some challenging chronic pain issues. So sitting still in traditional meditation posture is not always an option. It’s forced me to find other ways to practice, and it’s been really liberating and helpful.

I’ve practiced through walking meditation, and supine [lying on your back] meditation. I was in such bad shape that I had to lie down while teaching meditation. And that was a really good thing for me to do in public. People would come up and say thank you for teaching us how to tend to our bodies.

A lot of people deal with chronic pain, which can be a boundary for people to get into meditation. There were periods when I was in so much pain that I had to do moving meditation, like yoga, qi gong, or tai chi. For many years, I taught a style called shadow yoga, which is based on Hatha Yoga and South Indian dance and martial arts. There’s a quality of slow, mindful movement.  Currently, I practice Tibetan yoga and shadow yoga adapted for my situation, and I teach elements of these in my courses to help prepare people for meditation. So for people who are facing illness or chronic pain, moving meditation options are really important.   

That’s also why working with a skillful teacher is very important, somebody who can help the student navigate different phases of their lives in different circumstances.

I think I’ve been a little biased against movement meditation because when I think of meditation, I picture the Buddha sitting quietly under the Bodhi tree. 

A lot of people don’t know that after the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and got liberated from the roots of suffering, he got up and he walked. He taught for 45 years, and he spent more time walking than sitting. And that doesn’t get communicated to a lot of us Westerners. 

So we get this perception that seated meditation is the most important thing. And there are times in our life when that should be the case… so we can train the mind to go into deep concentration. 

But then, the advanced practice is getting up from that and blending the meditative state with the post-meditative state. The true advanced practice is to blend the awareness that we steep in and touch during [still] meditation with all our life, our movement or driving or parenting or cooking. All the mundane things.

We’re laying out the latest science of what meditation does to your mind. The better we understand the common mechanisms across how different meditation practices affect the mind, the more meditation science can contribute to broader understandings of human psychology.

More relevant for us non-scientists, we’ll get better at developing and fine-tuning styles of practice that can help us get the most out of whatever we’re looking for in taking up meditation. (It’s possible, after all, that there are improvements to be made on the instructions we received a few thousand years ago.) 

There’s a lot to get into here, but if you walk away from this with anything, it should be that in the past few years, a breakthrough has begun sweeping across meditation research, delivering science’s first “general theory of meditation.” That means very exciting days — and more to the point, scientifically refined meditation frameworks and practices — are not too far ahead. 

Don’t we already know what meditation is?

Over the last decade or two, the rise of mindfulness-related practices as a profitable industry has spread the most accessible forms of meditation — like short, guided stress-relief meditations, or gratitude journals — to millions of Americans.

Which is great — basic mindfulness practices that help us concentrate on the present are both relaxing and useful. But as psychotherapist Miles Neale, who coined the term “McMindfulness,” writes, if stress relief is all we take meditation to be, it’s “like using a rocket launcher to light a candle.” Some meditation practices can help ease the anxious edges of modern life. Others can change your mind forever.

One way to pursue happiness is to try and fill your experience with things that make you happy — loving relationships, prestige, kittens, whatever. Another is to change the way your mind generates experience in the first place. This is where more advanced meditation focuses. It operates on our deep mental habits so that well-being can more naturally arise in how we experience anything at all, kittens or not.

But the deeper terrain of meditation is often shrouded in hazy platitudes. You may hear that meditation is about “awakening,” “liberation,” or jubilantly realizing the inherent emptiness of all phenomena, at which point you’d be forgiven for tuning out. Descriptions of more advanced meditation often sound … weird, and therefore, inaccessible or irrelevant to most people.

Part of my hope for this course is to change that. Even if you don’t want to join a monastery (I do not), there’s still a huge range of more “advanced meditation” practices to explore that go beyond the mainstream basic mindfulness stuff. Some can feel like melting into “a laser beam of intense tingly pleasurably electricity,” and ultimately change the way you relate to pleasure, like the jhānas. Others, like non-dual practices (which I’ll get into later), can plunge you into strange modes of consciousness full of wonder and insight that you might never have known were there. 

Which might leave you wondering why it’s mindful relaxation that gets all the attention. For one thing, there’s how much time we imagine deeper meditation practices will take — we’ll get into that later in this course. Another obstacle blocking advanced meditation’s path into the mainstream is that a critical mass of Americans aren’t exactly itching to become full-on Buddhists. But if you turned to science instead of religion for guidance on these meditation practices in the past few decades, you’d mostly find a bunch of scattered neuroscience jargon that doesn’t all hang together.

Buddhism can paint a really elaborate picture of what’s going on with meditation, with ancient models of meditative development still being used today, like the four-path model. Science has struggled to do the same. We know some interesting but scattered things: Meditation makes parts of your brain grow thicker. It changes patterns of electrical activity in key brain networks. It raises the baseline of gamma wave activity. It shrinks your amygdala. 

The problem, as Shamil Chandaria, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Center for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, put it to me, is weaving it all together into a story that shows us the big picture. “In terms of all these neuroscience results,” Chandaria said, “there’s this problem of what does it all mean?”

In a pivotal 2021 paper by cognitive scientists Ruben Laukkonen and Heleen Slagter, that big picture — a model of how meditation affects the mind that can explain the effects of simple breathing practices and the most advanced transformations of consciousness alike — finally began coming together.

A general theory of meditation

Let’s start with plain language. Think of meditation as having four stages of depth, each with a corresponding style of practice: focused attention, open-monitoring, non-dual, and cessation.

Near the surface,“focused attention” practices help settle the mind. By default, our minds are usually snow globes in constant frenzy. Our attention constantly jumps from one flittering speck to the next, and the storm of activity blocks our view of the whole sphere. By focusing attention on an object — the breath, repeating a mantra, the back of your thigh, how a movement feels in the body — we can train the mind to stop getting yanked around. With the mind settled on just one thing, it’s easier to see through the storm. 

“Open-monitoring” practices help us get untangled from focusing on any particular thing happening in the mind, opening the aperture of our attention to notice the wider field of awareness that all those thoughts, feelings, and ideas all arise and fall within.

Once you’ve settled the mind and gotten acquainted with the more spacious awareness beneath it, “non-dual” practices help you shift your mental center of gravity so that you identify with that expansive field of awareness itself, rather than everything that arises within it, as we normally do. (I know this probably sounds weird, we’ll get more into it later. Some things in meditation are irreducibly weird, which is part of what makes me think it’s worth paying attention to.)

And finally, for practitioners with serious meditation chops, you can go one step deeper, where even the field of non-dual awareness disappears. If you sink deep enough into the mind, you’ll find that it just extinguishes, like a candle flame blown out by a sudden gust of wind. That can happen for seconds at a time, called nirodhas in Theravada Buddhism, or it can last for days at a time, called nirodha-sammapati, or cessation attainment.

You can think of this progression as four rungs on a ladder that lead from the surface of the mind all the way down to the bottom. Or, from the beginner stages of meditation, all the way through to the very advanced. You can place a huge variety of meditative practices — though not all — somewhere along this spectrum.

And just about everything that’s grown popular under the label of mindfulness is in that first group of focused-attention practices. The idea that meditation can make you “10 percent happier” is talking about these introductory practices that settle the mind.

But the idea that meditation can make you 10 times happier, like meditation teacher Shinzen Young claims, references the next stages: practices that open up once the mind begins to settle.

Once more, with science

Now, bear with me. We’re going to retell that story, but using Laukkonen and Slagter’s innovation — the general theory of meditation. The key to this framework is a theory that’s risen to dominate cognitive science in the past decade or so: predictive processing. 

Predictive processing says that we don’t experience the world as it is, but as we predict it to be. Our conscious experience is a construction of layered mental habits acquired through past experiences. We don’t see the world through our eye sockets; we don’t hear the world through our ear canals. These all feed information into our brains, which conjure our experience of the world from scratch — like when we dream — only that in waking consciousness, they’re at least trying to match what they whip up in our experience to what might actually be going on in the world outside our skulls. 

The building blocks for these conjured models of the world we experience — the predictive mind — are called “priors,” those beliefs or expectations based on the past. Priors run a spectrum from deep and ancestral to superficial and personal.

For example, say you ventured an opinion in front of your third grade class and everyone laughed. You might have formed a prior that assumes sharing your thoughts leads to ridicule. If that experience was particularly meaningful to you, it could embed deep in your predictive mind, shaping your behavior, and even perception of the world, for the rest of your life.

Similarly, our bodies know how to do some of their most basic functions — like maintaining body temperature around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit — because we’ve inherited priors from our evolutionary history that holding our body in that range will keep us alive. According to predictive processing, consciousness is constructed via this hierarchy of priors like a house of cards.

With all that in place, science’s new meditation story can be put nice and short: Meditation deconstructs the predictive mind.

But hold on. It took billions of years for evolution to slowly, patiently build us these predictive minds. They’re one of the great marvels of biology. Why would we want to deconstruct them? 

Well, evolution doesn’t care whether survival feels good. Conscious experience — as we know it — might be a really useful trick for adapting to our environments and achieving the goals that further life’s crusade against entropy and death. But natural selection cares about ensuring our bodies survive, not that we achieve happiness and well-being. 

Which is why you often hear meditation teachers talking about “reprogramming” the mind. We don’t want to just leave the predictive mind in pieces. Again, it’s one of the most useful adaptations life on Earth has ever mustered. But in some departments, we might want to kindly thank evolution, while taking the reins and revising a bit of its work to make this whole business of living feel better.

“Precision weighting” is the volume knob on the predictive mind

Each step, from focused attention through to cessation, is a deeper deconstruction of the predictive mind. But “deconstructing” doesn’t mean, like, breaking it.

Instead, the key idea is “precision weighting,” which you can think of as the volume knob on each of the priors that make up your predictive mind. The higher the precision — or volume — assigned to something, the more focus your mind pays to it. The more your experience warps around it.

Deconstructing the mind is to progressively turn down the volume on each layer of stacked priors, releasing the grip they ordinarily hold on awareness. By definition, then, the deeper meditation goes, the stranger (as in, further from ordinary) the resulting experience will be.

How meditation deconstructs the predictive mind

So let’s go back to our four-step model of meditative depth. We said the first step, focused attention practices, “settle the mind.” 

Now, we can say that with a bit more detail. By focusing on one particular thing, like the breath, you’re cranking up the precision weighting assigned to it. You’re holding up the volume knob so that your experience settles around it.

By doing so, you also turn down the volume on everything else. You can see this happen in real time pretty easily — just try picking out one specific thing in your current experience. Like your left earlobe — how does it feel right now?

Really, take five seconds and tune into it.

Looking back, you might notice that the more you tuned into that earlobe, the more everything else began to fade into the background. That helps explain why focused attention practices like basic mindfulness can be so relaxing. You’re turning down the volume on everything that’s stressing you out.

Next, in open-monitoring practices, you drop that object of attention and release the volume knob. But it doesn’t twist back to its normal resting position. Since your focusing practice turned down the volume on everything else, the default setting across your mind at large is now lower. 

Focused attention settles your mind onto one object of attention. In open-monitoring, you drop into a more settled mind across the board.

It’s not that you no longer have thoughts springing up. But as those thoughts do, your mind reacts less to them. They’re muted, less sticky, so attention clings to them less. They just come and go more easily. 

That’s why during the open-monitoring stage, you begin to see the entire snow globe that mental activity is happening inside of. The idea of a “field” of awareness is no longer a metaphor; you can see it directly.

“Advanced practitioners are said to be able to effortlessly observe experience as a whole,” write Laukkonen and Slagter, without being ‘caught’ by thoughts, emotions, or anything else that arises in one’s sensorium.”

Focused attention practices are an important step in meditation — it helps to calm your mind before trying to see through it. But on their own, they don’t usually lead to big revelations about how your mind works. Open monitoring is where this “seeing through” process really kicks in.

“There is a space of awareness that’s different from the contents of awareness,” said Chandaria, who’s been meditating for about 37 years. “And that’s something that most people aren’t even aware of. The first time we see that, it’s like, oh, I never knew that there was actually an ocean on which these waves were arising. I never knew the ocean.”

And then there’s non-dual experience

As you sink into open-monitoring practice, the predictive mind has loosened its grip on experience. But there are still deep priors at play.

For example, in open-monitoring practice, it probably still feels like there’s a “you” doing the meditating. And that “you” is experiencing “your” awareness. There’s a subject — you — aware of an object, the field of experience. 

But according to heaps of meditators and mystics through the millennia, this, too, can be deconstructed.  

Non-dual meditation aims at turning down even those deep priors that construct distinctions between subject and object altogether. As well as basically every other possible distinction. During non-dual experiences, there’s no self/other, good/bad, here/there, now/later. All these dualities that underlie ordinary cognition basically melt into a big soup of the Now.

This is the thing — the big soupy Now — that you’ll quickly hear a ton of platitudes about in meditation circles. The illusion of separation, the truth of universal oneness.

That’s because there’s just no great way to describe it — it’s either incredibly weird, or incredibly trite. But if you’re after more descriptions anyway, philosopher and meditator Thomas Metzinger recently published a book containing over 500 different accounts of non-duality, or “minimal phenomenal experience” as he calls it, from advanced meditators across 57 countries. Metzinger is usually at least a decade ahead of the field, so it’s worth a read.

If open-monitoring practice is where meditation’s hefty insights begin kicking into gear, non-duality is where they ramp up. It’s often described as “coming home.” One meditator from Metzinger’s research described it as: “the realization of having finally found home after an eternal search. The pathological searching, the agony of control, comes to an abrupt end, and for the first time you realize what it means to be alive.”

According to Laukkonen and Slagter’s framework, non-duality is the baseline of all experience. It’s always beneath our ordinary experiences — awareness in its least constructed form. Non-dual meditation practice is about “creating the conditions that reduce ordinary cognition that normally ‘hides’ non-dual awareness.”

But even non-duality isn’t the end of the road. It’s still a mode of consciousness. And according to predictive processing, wherever there’s conscious experience, there’s an underlying prior, or expectation, that’s holding it up. This, too, can be deconstructed.

When the mind has no priors left: Cessation

In the past year, meditation researchers have begun to corroborate long-standing claims from Buddhist scripture that if your meditation goes deep enough, the whole show of consciousness can be extinguished — temporarily, that is — altogether.

Nirodha-samāpatti, or “cessation of thought and feeling,” is a summit of meditative attainment in Theravada Buddhism, the oldest surviving form of Buddhism most commonly practiced in Southeast Asia. Cessation is like going under general anesthesia, but without any drugs. Consciousness can be switched off from the inside, for — according to the scriptures — up to seven days at a time (though the first lab data on cessation looked at a more modest 90-minute stretch).

Cessation is a bonafide advanced meditation thing — I’ll make zero effort to convince you it’s accessible to us non-monastic folks. But according to neuroscientist Matthew Sacchet, who leads the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, the early data collected from studying cessations with neuroscience gizmos supports the idea that meditation deconstructs the predictive mind. 

“Cessation could thus reflect a final release of the expectation to be aware or alert,” Luakkonen and Slagter write. It’s like a bottoming-out of the predictive mind.

Coming out of cessation, meditators can observe the reconstruction of the predictive mind, prior by prior. “That puts us in a special state,” Chandaria said. “You can call it reprogramming mode. And in reprogramming mode, we can start to reprogram ourselves in ways that could be more conducive to human flourishing.”

Why does this matter?

For those of us who aren’t neuroscientists, or don’t care about “predictive processing,” what good does this model of meditation do?

It’s not the objective truth about what meditation actually does. It’s just a story. It’s not comprehensive — there are styles of meditation that wouldn’t fit neatly onto this framework. And meditation doesn’t always follow this trajectory — you can go straight into non-dual practices, or try out open-monitoring before focused attention.

On a personal note, I find this framework really helpful. Immediately after reading Laukkonen and Slagter’s paper, it gave me a way to see my own practice that clicked with my experience better than other stories — which stem from other cultures — about what meditation does.

Now, I usually spend the beginning of my meditation sessions doing focused attention practice to settle the mind. And when I notice my concentration is stable enough, I release the focus and drop into open-monitoring practices. And when my mind falls into an especially weird place that words don’t really capture, I figure, maybe that’s leaning into this non-dual stuff? Just having the labels helped kindle my interest in playing around with things.

And as a scientific framework, this model is generating all sorts of new hypotheses to test. More broadly, it also gives us a way to think through how it’s possible that so many people are trying meditation, but so few are having the big transformative experiences that more advanced practitioners talk about.

Even if some 60 million Americans tried meditation in 2022, if most of them only do some sort of focused attention practice, they’re never trying anything beyond the first step. That’s like concluding that running probably won’t make you significantly healthier because you laced up your sneakers and nothing transformative happened.

When I asked Chandaria how this new scientific model compares to religious models that have been around for ages, like Theravada Buddhism’s four-path model, he said that “Ultimately…all these stories are pointing to the moon. But [contemplative traditions] were pointing with their fingers. Now, we have laser pointers.” And as science progresses, “we’ll be able to work with what we’re finding out about the brain,” he added. “It’s actually about making progress, and by progress, I mean more useful stories.”

The sweet, odorless gas technically called nitrous oxide has many names: laughing gas, galaxy gas, hippy crack, whippets, even “the atmosphere of heaven.”

Nitrous itself has just as many common uses as it does names. Doctors use it as a mild anesthetic, sending patients off into brief and largely pain-free dissociative euphorias before having a tooth pulled or dislocated finger yanked straight. Inhaling nitrous gives a loopy, giddy sort of high that can last up to five minutes. As a pressurized gas, nitrous also powers rockets, race cars, and whipped cream dispensers.  

The gas is both legal and widely available. It comes in small pressurized canisters intended for kitchen use; large tanks for heavier applications, like medicine or car engines; or even as the gas that shoots out of whipped cream canisters when there’s no cream left (hence: “whippets”). 

Thanks to being both accessible and cheap, nitrous has been used as a recreational drug for decades, from Grateful Dead concerts in the ’60s to raves in the ’90s. Lockdowns during the Covid pandemic seem to have set off a new wave of recreational nitrous use. Today, “People on Nitrous Gas” has its own TikTok discovery tab, with videos racking up millions of views. Celebrities are putting the risks of abuse on display, from Kanye West and SZA, to Steve-O of the stunt show Jackass fame. The Mormon mothers and social media influencers of “MomTok,” whose faith shuns any drug use, recently said that part of the draw of all the Botox they’ve gotten is getting the nitrous first. “It’s a party,” one said.

Inhaling nitrous is considered relatively safe for people who don’t use it often and don’t take too much. But there are definitely risks, and more so in recreational contexts. As recreational use rises, particularly among teenagers, those risks are gaining more attention. 

The primary one is vitamin B12 deficiency. Nitrous inactivates B12 in the body, which coupled with long-term use can lead to nerve damage across the brain and spine. Without intervention, that can develop into paralysis or brain damage. There’s currently no consensus as to whether nitrous should be labeled an addictive substance. While it doesn’t seem to build the same physical dependency as opioids, it does still carry the risk of habit formation in some cases.

And while nitrous doesn’t have a known fatal dose, deaths from use have been known to occur, usually from accidents that can happen while high on nitrous or from asphyxiation. Across the UK, where statistics on nitrous are more detailed, there were just 56 deaths attributed to nitrous between 2001 and 2020, including both recreational and medical settings. (To put that in some perspective, there were nearly 10,000 deaths in the UK attributed to alcohol in 2021 alone.)

But while the rise in using recreational nitrous for its brief highs is prompting new concerns, the drug is actually one of the oldest stories in the Western history of mind-altering substance use. 

Through the centuries of up-and-down nitrous use across the US and UK, you find a rich, at times hilarious, trail left by this so-called atmosphere of heaven. Theaters across the US in the early 1800s filled with members of the public, watching volunteers inhale nitrous on stage and provide a delirious form of entertainment for the crowds. Traveling caravans brought nitrous shows on the road. Poets celebrated a new form of pleasure, while philosophers tried nitrous in Harvard laboratories, frantically scribbling down rushes of insight. 

The history of nitrous use is a history of shifting cultural attitudes about the mind. More specifically, about the value — or rejection — of chemically altered states of consciousness. Today, as the gradual return of legal access to psychedelics is sparking renewed conversation around the potential benefits, and harms, of mind-altering drugs, seeing the many different iterations of nitrous use across history can help us think more expansively about what, if anything, the strange experiences of nitrous mean and what the future of recreational nitrous might look like.

“A new pleasure for which language has no name”

In late 18th-century industrial Britain, the air was foul. Coal smoke and the odor of feces were abundant. Respiratory diseases were rampant, like tuberculosis, which had come to be known as “the robber of youth.” 

The deadly air inspired the founding of the Pneumatic Institution in 1799, a medical facility in Bristol intended to study whether gasses could be used as medicines, too. It was there that the first experiments with nitrous began in earnest.

The chemist Joseph Priestley discovered nitrous oxide in 1772, but dismissed it as toxic. Humphry Davy, a young lab assistant at the Pneumatic Institution, had a hunch that Priestley’s discovery had been confused with a chemically similar but highly irritating compound: nitric oxide. 

In April, Davy repeated Priestley’s experiment, and wrote to a friend afterward that he had “made a discovery which proves how necessary it is to repeat experiments,” prefiguring the role of replication in science today. Nitrous oxide, when purely synthesized, was perfectly breathable. Davy then set out to breathe as much as he possibly could.

He sealed himself inside a box that was designed to boost the inhalation of gasses. He sat for over an hour while a steady flow of nitrous oxide filled the chamber. When he stepped out, he grabbed a giant silk air-bag full of more nitrous and huffed that too, just for good measure. Then, his mind peeled away from his body, and he “lost touch with all external things,” entering a strange, revelatory world of flashing insights. 

That summer, Davy invited dozens of curious writers, physicians, and philosophers to visit the Pneumatic Institute in the late evenings after normal operations had ceased. They all huffed nitrous, experimenting with entirely new regions of the mind.

According to historian Mike Jay, author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, nitrous gave Western scientists one of the first chemical means of reliably accessing mystical states of consciousness. Against the banality of our ordinary experience, nitrous delivered a shocking contrast, a state of mind full of unfamiliar pleasures that often carried a sense of insight into the nature of the cosmos. The poet Robert Southey, after his first hit of nitrous, wrote to his brother that “Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name.”

Within a year, however, most who had come to try nitrous lost interest. Its pleasures were new and exciting, but rarely stuck with users once they returned to sobriety after a few minutes. Others who tried the gas just ended up with an upset stomach and the giggles. Davy, who would go on to become president of the Royal Society, stayed with his experiments, eventually producing a hefty book on the chemistry and philosophy of nitrous.

He predicted that since nitrous temporarily extinguished pain, it could be useful during surgeries. No form of anesthesia existed yet, so surgeries were very painful, and very dangerous. But the idea failed to gain momentum. Instead, nitrous became something else: entertainment.

How nitrous became entertainment, and then medicine

Though the early enthusiasm for nitrous fizzled, it was easy enough to produce that, as word got out, chemists learned they could make it in their home laboratories. This turned nitrous into something of a party fixture.   

“Maybe it will become the custom for us to inhale laughing gas at the end of a dinner party, instead of drinking champagne,” a young German chemist speculated in 1826, after participating in a garden party where guests enjoyed nitrous under the afternoon sun. 

Public nitrous shows began taking place as early as an 1814 lecture series in Philadelphia. First, a doctor gave a discourse on the effects of nitrous to the assembled crowd. Then, a series of young men volunteered to inhale balloons of nitrous onstage, putting on a raucous spectacle.

While Davy and his friends had been interested in the mental side of what being on nitrous felt like, these public shows put a spotlight on the uninhibited bodies that the chemical set loose. After inhaling the gas, volunteers would clumsily dance, fight, sing, or even strike up the occasional fencing match. Sometimes, the first row of a theater was kept empty to protect onlookers from the mayhem.

“On stage, the subjective experience was incidental,” writes Jay. “The moment of return to waking consciousness was not interrogated for mystical revelation, but held up for confused hilarity.” 

Soon, nitrous shows were taken on the road, carried by traveling carnivals to new, hooting crowds each night. Volunteers were charged around 25 cents per huff, bringing in good profit for those who’d invested in the necessary gas tanks, tubes, and breathing bags. One traveling nitrous show, put on by Samuel Colt (who would go on to invent the pioneering Colt firearm), dosed roughly 20,000 volunteers from Canada to Maryland. 

It was during a show in 1844 that the American dentist Horace Wells witnessed a teenager on nitrous slam into a wooden bench. The boy, Wells noticed, felt no pain, which led him to wonder whether he could give the gas to clients to numb the pain of having a tooth pulled.

Wells first tried on himself, inhaling nitrous and having another dentist pull his own wisdom tooth. It was a great success: Wells felt no pain, and proclaimed “a new era in tooth pulling.” He successfully performed the procedure on a few of his patients, before convincing a surgeon at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital to let Wells administer the gas during an operation, doubling as a demonstration for a strictly medical audience.

It didn’t go well. Nervous in front of a scrupulous crowd, Wells pulled away the nitrous balloon a little too quickly. During the operation, the patient appeared to groan in pain (though it was later deemed an involuntary and unconscious response). Onlookers nevertheless booed Wells out of the theater, and the embarrassment pushed him into a depression that culminated in suicide.

But the demonstration inspired Wells’s former partner to try a similar procedure, only with a different substance: a solvent called ether. 

After a few successful experiments using ether as an anesthetic, another demonstration was arranged in the same theater where Wells’s had failed. This time, ether was successfully administered as a pain-vanquishing anesthetic, prompting one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the century, as well as a revisitation of Wells’s work with nitrous.

The hospital theater was renamed “The Ether Dome,” while anesthetic use of both ether and nitrous began to spread across the country.

The next 150 years of nitrous

The rise of anesthetics like nitrous in medicine was accompanied by a decline in their use as recreational drugs. 

Physicians began to think of nitrous-induced revelations as gibberish, closer to delirium than real insight. Too much interest in their short-lived pleasures, doctors began to write, could pose a public health risk.

Recreational anesthetics like nitrous would “delight the animal sensations, while they destroy the moral sentiments; they introduce their victims to a fool’s paradise; they mock them with joys which end in sorrows.” Jay describes the mid-1800s arc of nitrous as a “shift away from subjectivity,” prefiguring the same trajectory across a variety of disciplines, including psychology.

Through the middle of the 19th century, nitrous settled into dentistry while falling out of philosophy, with at least one major exception that ultimately proved the rule: the eccentric American philosopher Benjamin Blood. 

In 1860, during what he expected to be a very normal visit to the dentist, he awoke from a routine dose of nitrous with the vague sense that he’d glimpsed the essence of all philosophy, the “secret or problem of the world,” as he later wrote. 

Blood asked dentists and doctors why their gas had given him a spiritual epiphany. He learned two things. First, that “nearly every hospital and dentist office has its reminiscences of patients who, after a brief anesthesia, uttered confused fragments of some inarticulate import which always had to do with the mystery of life.” Across the country, patients returning from anesthesia had been asking their doctors something to the effect of, “What does it all mean, or amount to?” 

Second, the doctors and the dentists couldn’t care less. Blood received smiles and shrugs, but no explanations. So he spent 14 years reviving the tradition of nitrous self-experimentation, eventually publishing a pamphlet: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy.

It didn’t get particularly famous, but it did catch the attention of Harvard philosopher William James. Inspired by Blood’s curious writings, James followed Humphry Davy’s old protocol, heating a beaker of ammonium nitrate in the Harvard chemistry laboratory, capturing the escaping gas, and inhaling deeply with pen and paper in hand. His subsequent experience of “intense metaphysical illumination” informed the rest of his life’s work, where he would go on to become known, today, as the father of American psychology. 

Meanwhile, innovations in the delivery mechanisms for laughing gas were starting to ramp up its use in dentistry. George Poe, cousin of the poet Edgar Allen Poe, figured out how to manufacture nitrous in liquid form. This allowed for packaging and distributing it in easy-to-use canisters. By 1883, he was supplying 5,000 dentists with canned nitrous oxide across the country.   

Once nitrous came in a convenient package, people began finding all sorts of new uses for it. In 1914, American rocketeer Robert Goddard filed a patent suggesting it could work as a rocket propellant, where it’s still used today. 

But the innovation that brought nitrous back into style as a contemporary recreational drug was a little more mundane: whipped cream canisters. It turned out that dispensing cream out of a nitrous gas cylinder delivers the perfectly fluffy whipped cream we can so easily buy in grocery stores today.

These whipped cream canisters are also where the name “whippets” comes from, and how we’ve landed in the awkward situation of rising nitrous use among teenagers.

Nitrous, today and tomorrow

In the neighboring arena of psychedelic drugs, many advocates are pushing for wider accessibility to these mind-altering substances. With nitrous, that accessibility is already here, and now, attracting strong criticism.

The UK recently reinstated a shade of prohibition, making possession of nitrous oxide for “unlawful use” illegal. You can still use it to dispense whipped cream and other culinary delights, but if you’re just interested in a giggly high, or even seeing whether it might reveal, as Blood thought, the world’s philosophical secret, that’s unlawful. But prohibition inevitably pushes drug use underground, where it’s guaranteed to be riskier and less well-informed than legal, regulated, and educated use.

And with a substance like nitrous that has relatively few risks when used responsibly and occasionally, there’s an opportunity to work on promoting more responsible forms of use through public education (such as awareness that the gas impairs the body’s ability to take in oxygen, so doing whippets in a tight, closed space is probably not as safe as in a backyard). 

Since nitrous-related substance abuse is such a small problem relative to opioids and alcohol, it hasn’t received all that much study. The past few years of data, however, have prompted a new conversation around whether nitrous should be considered addictive. It doesn’t seem to form a physical dependence, like opioids, and has no physical symptoms of withdrawal. But it does seem capable of forming a more psychological form of dependence (dissociative pleasure basically on tap does obviously pose some habit-forming risk), prompting concerns around how exactly to label it.

Either way, ensuring support and harm reduction is available to those who need it may prove to be a challenge. But if we can’t figure out how to handle recreational use with nitrous, it’s difficult to imagine how we’d do it in a world where LSD and psilocybin mushrooms become widely available, too. 

More broadly, though, set against the long history of different approaches and interpretations of nitrous, our current situation isn’t all that new. Today’s social media spectacles of nitrous use are just digitized versions of the same nitrous shows from the 1800s. Back then, some people believed that wild behaviors while on nitrous revealed “the volatility of the democratic masses.” What might it say about our own cultural moment that recreational nitrous use is returning as a sort of performative delirium? 

As far as the philosophy of nitrous goes, I imagine curious experimenters today are working with different substances, like extended DMT. Maybe someone like Benjamin Blood will come along and make the case that we still have much to learn from nitrous. Maybe dentists will begin to read up on metaphysics and begin engaging with their woozy patients rather than dismissing their experiences. 

Or, maybe nothing much will happen with nitrous. The social media hype will die down as new drugs take its place, and it will sink back into relative obscurity, propelling rockets and numbing minor surgeries, inspiring the occasional dorm-room conversation about God and the nature of pleasure. At the very least, as its long history shows, nitrous will always remain capable of giving us a great story.

In 2021, the US cut child poverty by as much as 40 percent using one of the most effective anti-poverty tools the country had ever devised: the expanded child tax credit (CTC).

By sending unconditional monthly checks of up to $300 per child to the nation’s poorest families — including those with little to no income who had typically been excluded from such programs — the “child allowance” lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty who would’ve otherwise been left behind.

Arguments against such programs that give unconditional cash usually assert that it’ll drive low-income people to quit their jobs, ultimately harming the economy. But research found little to no drop in employment rates as a result of the expanded CTC. Yet despite a flurry of support from prominent economists and recipients alike, politicians failed to reach an agreement to make the temporary expansion permanent, and Congress let it expire at the end of 2021.

Some concerns that sank the program’s political chances, like Sen. Joe Manchin’s worry that recipients will spend the cash on drugs, don’t hold up to the abundant evidence. But there are still some economists who remain skeptical, unmoved by the steady stream of positive research on short-term programs — which they concede looks very good. Their concern, however, is with the distant future.

“My main problem with a permanent CTC,” said University of Chicago economist Bruce Meyer via email, “is that it would reverse the work-based welfare reforms of the ’90s that dramatically increased employment and were associated with a decline in the share of kids growing up in single-parent families.”

The thinking goes like this: As parents receive strings-free cash, many of their incomes will indeed be pushed above the poverty line. At first. But some will also choose to work less, others will divorce more, and fraying the twin threads of marriage and work in low-income communities will ultimately harm children’s prospects for upward mobility. The initial anti-poverty benefits would, generations down the line, be swallowed up by unintended consequences. 

By concentrating their concerns on the far future, they render much of the growing base of short-term research moot, especially in terms of convincing holdout politicians, like Manchin, whose insistence on adding work requirements to any expanded CTC is what killed the child allowance.

Enter a new working paper from Elizabeth Ananat and Irwin Garfinkel, two economists at Columbia University. Expanding on work they first published in 2022, their research surveys long-run cash and quasi-cash transfer programs (like food stamps) in the US in an effort to predict the overall effects of a child allowance over the very long run. Instead of the grim and jobless future forecast by expanded CTC critics, they find that a future shaped by a permanent child allowance is well worth the investment.

Ananat and Garfinkel found that the total long-run benefits to society of making a child allowance permanent outweigh the costs by nearly 10 to 1. While the paper may not sway skeptical economists, the dramatic returns could still help build political momentum to pass the policy. And it at least shows that researchers are now taking the long-run concerns raised by critics seriously.

What a return on investment of 10 to 1 for an expanded CTC actually means

Ananat and Garfinkel’s original cost-benefit calculations did not make for light reading. Although the paper was well-received by her colleagues, the problem, Ananat said, is that no one else read it. 

So they built a homepage for their research on Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy’s website, and as new relevant studies on the subject come out, they’ve been updating their findings. This most recent 2024 working paper reports on the updated results of their earlier work, while trying to offer a more widely accessible version of their research.

Their promise of a 10 to 1 return is, frankly, massive. For every $100 or so billion the child allowance would cost the government each year, society would reap additional long-term benefits of about $929 billion. Those dollars represent benefits like improved child and parent health and longevity, higher future earnings for children, and reduced crime and health care costs. There would be an effect from the small dip in employment that their calculations predict, and a resulting decrease in tax revenue — but it would amount to just $2.4 billion. That’s a drop in a bucket overflowing with almost a trillion dollars in benefits.

But the nuances of such long-term returns can be difficult to convey. “A little bit shows up in the first few years in the form of reduced [child abuse and neglect], reduced hospitalizations, and those sorts of things,” said Ananat. “But most of it doesn’t show up until the kids grow up. So that requires a very patient type of investor.”

Imagine Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidential election in November, and immediately upon taking office implements a child allowance (as her recently unveiled economic agenda intends). That would cost roughly $97 billion for 2025 alone. But at the end of the year, if you tallied up all the benefits, you wouldn’t see that $929 billion that Ananat and Garfinkel calculated anywhere. It could be decades before the full value of that nearly one trillion is actually realized. 

Notably, though, it’s not a one-time deal. According to Ananat and Garfinkel, every year that the child allowance is in place will reap another $929 billion in long-term benefits. So if you take the Tax Foundation’s estimate that Harris’s child allowance would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years, Ananat and Garfinkel’s work suggests over that same time period, it would accrue something like $9.3 trillion in long-term benefits. 

“The CTC is worth so much money in the future, that even though some of it only happens 50 years from now, it’s still worth $10 for every dollar you spend today,” said Ananat.

The child allowance is fully refundable, meaning the full value goes to the poorest families, without a work requirement. (The current CTC is only partially refundable, which means that parents must first earn income before qualifying for the benefit.) But Ananat and Garfinkel also crunched a second set of cost-benefit calculations on a partially refundable CTC, matching recent CTC compromises that boost the payment amount while keeping a work requirement of some sort. 

They find that doing so would reduce the annual cost to $31 billion, while also reducing the total annual social benefit to $131 billion. That means that adding work requirements shrinks the program from a nearly 10 to 1 return on investment, to just over a 4 to 1 return. And those benefits would exclude children who are in the deepest poverty — the very ones who need such help the most.

Now, converting a variety of outcomes into dollar valuations, and assigning benefits that will come in the future a value for the present, is tricky business. These estimates should be held lightly. But if they’re even in the right ballpark, then every year we don’t implement a child allowance is an absolutely massive missed opportunity. We’d experience as much as a 40 percent drop in child poverty immediately, and begin layering on trillions of dollars in long-run benefits.

Critics and the econometric alternatives

There are basically two ways to try and predict the effects of a child allowance in the deep future. Either way, you’re dealing with serious ambiguity.

Like Ananat and Garfinkel, you can scour the existing evidence from similar long-run programs that have raised family incomes in the US, tabulate a comprehensive list of all their documented benefits and costs, calculate a per-$1,000 effect size for each cost and benefit, and then apply those values to a hypothetical child allowance.

To do that, they looked at past long-run programs like pension programs for mothers from before the New Deal, the 1960s rollout of food stamps, a series of US guaranteed income experiments through the ’70s, and expansions in the 1990s to the earned income tax credit.

Notably, none of these programs are actually a CTC. And although each policy was chosen because it does a similar thing — effectively raises a family’s income — each took place in a different social and economic context than whatever the 2030s and beyond will look like. 

The other way to try and predict hypothetical economic futures is to use the economist’s version of a magic eight ball: the econometric model. These are mathematically constructed versions of reality, where fuzzy human behaviors have been translated into precise probabilities and equations. In these computational worlds, you can plug in a variable of interest, like a child allowance, and statistically churn out a prediction of its impact.

Then, economists scrutinize the assumptions of the model, and debate how much insight those results can offer about the actual meatspace world that we all live in. 

That’s how Bruce Meyer, Kevin Corinth from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and their colleagues predicted that replacing the old CTC, which incentivized work, with the expanded CTC that provides low-income families the benefit no matter whether they’re already working or not, would ultimately “do more harm than good.” Specifically, that it would drive 1.5 million working parents to quit their jobs altogether, and cap the anti-poverty impact at 22 percent, rather than the 40 or so percent seen during the temporary expansion.

Those numbers all hinge, however, on controversial assumptions coded into the model about how likely people — low-income single mothers in particular — are to stop working if they get an extra few hundred bucks per month from the CTC. Other models using different assumptions find much lower reductions in work, including Corinth’s own colleagues from the AEI, who predicted the effect on employment would be only a fifth as strong, with 296,000 parents quitting their jobs rather than 1.5 million. 

In each case, these models are reflections of their coded-in assumptions. Like extrapolating from other policies in different historical eras, “Taking a given change in the [child] tax credit’s incentive to work and plugging in a labor supply elasticity is a fraught enterprise,” Jain Family Institute research associate Jack Landry told me last year. 

When I asked Meyer about the Ananat and Garfinkel study, he dismissed it as “very selective” in its literature review. And Scott Winship, who directs the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the AEI, said via email that “you’re more likely to find that a policy is worthwhile if you simply assume the largest potential costs don’t exist (in this case, worsened child outcomes in the long run from reduced parental work and increased single parenthood). That’s what they do.”

There is, of course, no perfect way to predict the future. Otherwise I’d have cashed out of the stock market with millions by now. But that’s where critics of a permanently expanded, fully refundable child tax credit are now situating their case. Advocates can either follow them into the future, arguing that long-run benefits will outweigh long-run costs. Or, they could instead focus on building the political momentum necessary to pass a policy that will always have its detractors, while unambiguously helping millions of kids in the present.

Will a child allowance in the US ever exist anywhere other than the future?

Vice President Kamala Harris has already announced that bringing back the expanded CTC is part of her planned presidential economic agenda. 

Ananat emphasized that “this isn’t a politically motivated” study, but that even if her research won’t convert skeptical economists, it can still be helpful to those working on political organizing. She said,“People can see this and feel inspired, like, ‘Oh, 10 to 1, that’s worth making more phone calls for.’”

I’m not optimistic that economists will ever strike a unanimous agreement about the future of an expanded CTC (though it’s worth emphasizing that to the degree consensus does exist, it certainly is in support). Even if they did, how much stock should we really place in specific predictions that span decades? The world is unpredictable, and seemingly more so every year. 

The decision to implement a child allowance will always have to be made under some degree of uncertainty. Trying to predict the impact of a child allowance decades into the future is always going to be a balancing act of ambiguity and speculation. Peering into the economic models that raise concerns about how desirable a future shaped by a child allowance really is, you find a latticework of tenuous assumptions. Similarly, critics say that when you look under the hood of the 10-to-1 return on investment claim, you find a selective literature review.

But the flood of research on the temporary expansion washed away most uncertainty about the short term. Canada’s had a child allowance for years, and it doesn’t look to be hastening a grim and jobless future. A guaranteed huge drop in child poverty in the short term, plus the potential accrual of trillions of dollars in additional benefits, sounds like a worthwhile bet to me. And even if slouching employment among recipients did start to cause concern in a decade or two, and researchers came to suspect the child allowance was to blame, the wonderfully certain thing about public policy is that it can always be changed.  

Earlier this year, projections from UN Tourism put international travel on track to recover to pre-pandemic levels — putting a swell of tourism on a collision course with the increasing danger of climate disasters, from wildfires ripping through Greece to megaquake warnings in southern Japan. While peak tourism season is mostly behind us, off-season travel is swelling, which may or may not be evidence of a backlash against the “summer industrial complex.” Volatility is in the air, as well as, apparently, the ground, seas, and forests. Plus, some extreme weather patterns, like the Atlantic hurricane season, are just kicking off.

And 2024 isn’t an anomaly (at least, in terms of climate patterns). Last winter, a 7.8 earthquake in Turkey and Syria leveled over 6,000 buildings and killed thousands. In the spring, a half-year’s worth of rain in Italy’s Emilia Romagna region led to floods, canceled a Formula One Grand Prix, and killed 17 people. In the final dregs of summer, devastating wildfires closed the beaches of Hawaii and displaced thousands of locals in Maui. 

And then there’s all that lies in wait, like the “Really Big One,” a projected earthquake reaching up to a 9.2 on the Richter scale and subsequent 700-mile seismic wave that will, on some unknown day, devastate North America’s West Coast. Or that Nankai Trough Megaquake that southern Japan braced for earlier this month, now projected to kill 230,000 people whenever it strikes.  

Now look, the odds that you’re vacationing in a spot where an anticipated natural disaster finally happens are very low. But as the climate of the planet changes, disaster patterns are shifting and are occurring in unprecedented locations. Even traveling to places that have been historically mellow, at least in terms of climate, still doesn’t guarantee a smooth ride. Tornado Alley — the oval-shaped epicenter of tornado formations in the US stretching from northeastern Texas to western Missouri — is traveling eastward, spreading concentrated storms to new places. And hail, I kid you not, is getting bigger. 

And if your travels aren’t thwarted by a long-awaited supervolcanic eruption, even a modest thunderstorm, particularly in drought-stricken areas where the soil can’t absorb new moisture, can still cause flash flooding by your hotel and throw a wrench in your plans. (Moab, Utah, home of a popular hiking spot called the Morning Glory Arch, saw extraordinary flooding earlier this year during peak season.)  

That said, this doesn’t all mean that disasters themselves are on the rise. Despite very high-profile organizations repeating the claim that the rate of natural disasters has quadrupled — or more — in the last 50 years, the nonprofit Our World in Data finds that it’s actually unclear whether that’s just a byproduct of better technology enabling more reporting of disasters, or reflects a real increase in catastrophes. In fact, disaster deaths per capita have actually been on a steep decline in recent decades, thanks to improved infrastructure, early warning systems, and more adeptly coordinated responses.  

But regardless of the overall rate or deadliness of natural disasters, climate change is pushing those that do occur to their extremes. A warmer climate is an increasingly unpredictable one, and the planet is on a 14-month streak of setting record-high temperatures. More disruptive heat waves, wildfires, flooding, droughts, tropical cyclones (the world is just now moving into the upswing of the Atlantic hurricane season, which is projected to be one of the most intense on record), and landslides are all in the forecast. 

“We’ve seen with climate change that severe weather threats, including extreme heat, are happening outside of the time of year and places that people typically associate with these extreme weather events,” said Jon Porter, weather forecasting company AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist. “Do not be lulled into any false sense of security.”

So unless you have an in at a billionaire’s bunker to shield you from unexpected climate surprises along your journey, here’s how to be a bit more prepared for travel and learn to navigate a more unpredictable, disaster-prone world. 

Before you travel, consider planning for chaos

I’ve been fortunate to do a fair bit of travel in my lifetime, and whether going to Southeast Asia or Latin America, my natural disaster preparation has generally held steady: pay it no mind, travel anyway, and leave my fate up to the gods.

But, like many others, I’m starting to lose faith in that strategy. So I went looking to see how more prudent travelers might handle things. I expected to find a bunch of totally reasonable steps that I nevertheless couldn’t actually imagine myself doing. I’m stubborn, after all. But it turns out, there’s a number of pretty simple things a traveler can do to help lower the odds of getting caught unprepared during a disaster. I’m learning that the beginning of wisdom, at least when it comes to travel, might be something like downloading the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) app. 

Just like getting some Duolingo in to polish your Spanish before heading to Spain, you might browse some basic hurricane protective strategies before heading to Puerto Rico. Or peruse this earthquake preparedness guide before going anywhere near the Pacific Northwest. FEMA’s app bills itself as “your personalized disaster resource,” which rings pretty dystopian. But easy access to FEMA’s disaster resources — from real-time emergency alerts to help finding nearby shelter during a rushed evacuation — can help prevent a bad situation from getting worse. Although it’s a US agency, FEMA has resources for global travel, too.

When planning a trip, you could pop open the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, a joint project between the United Nations (UN) and European Commission that shows real-time global disaster alerts from the past four days on a handy map. In addition to not literally traveling into an active disaster, knowing the seasons and usual suspects of your destination can help you decide which among the FEMA app’s preparation guides you might skim beforehand.

Once you know where you want to go, you could even enroll in the State Department’s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program, a free service that registers your trip with the nearest US embassy to your destination. They’ll keep you updated with safety alerts in your destination country, and help the US embassy contact you if a natural disaster strikes while you’re there.

The usuals of travel obviously still apply, like sending your itinerary to family or close friends, or making copies of important documents like your passport. But as extreme weather spreads to places that aren’t accustomed to it (like Vermont, which just experienced a magnitude of destructive rainfall that is expected only once in every 1,000 years), some unusual steps might also be helpful. For example, you might look for social media accounts of local organizations that provide emergency alerts, so that you aren’t reliant on official communication channels that may not be prepared to get information out fast. Or, if you really want to hedge your bets, you can travel with a satellite phone so that you don’t lose the ability to communicate even if the area you’re in does.

In addition, FEMA recommends adding an emergency kit to your packing list, with things like nonperishable food, first aid kits, flashlights, power banks for your phones, and flares. Ready.gov, a public service campaign that helps Americans prepare for and respond to disasters, also has a sample family emergency communication plan you can have everyone in your party fill out before traveling. That way, if you do get separated or cut off from communication, everyone has contact numbers, emergency meeting places, and medical information on hand.

But there’s a limit to the kinds of things you can really plan ahead for. The varieties of disaster may never cease to surprise us, like Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919.

If you happen to be a tourist during a disaster

All right, so what if you actually are hanging out on Vancouver Island when the Really Big One does rumble and splash across the Pacific Northwest? What if you were traveling through the state of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil when flooding killed over 100 people in May, forced 160,000 more from their homes, and effectively shut down a city of 4 million people?  

Some rules of thumb: If you aren’t literally caught in the middle of what’s going on, try to assess the situation before springing into action. If you’re staying with a hotel, they’re usually in touch with local authorities, and are a good source of information. “It’s important to listen to local and state officials,” said Jaclyn Rothenberg, FEMA public affairs director. “Carefully monitor local radio, television, social media, and other local sources for updates.”

The US Bureau of Consular Affairs website advises, shockingly, that “the best time to leave a country is before a crisis.” In this specific scenario, that’s hard to know. The US government’s main commitment is to keep citizens informed of both safety developments and travel options — only in limited circumstances will they actually help evacuate citizens. Specifically, if there are no commercial transport options, and consular officers are nearby, and conditions permit, then the government may help identify and/or arrange transport. 

But keep in mind that if you do wind up in a US government-assisted evacuation, it won’t foot the bill. If you don’t have money on hand, you’ll have to sign a form promising the government you’ll pay it back before getting on the transport. Just imagine; there could be a tsunami rushing around your dwindling plot of high land while you’re stuck in a line to get on the escape bus as each American fills out the IOU paperwork. I doubt — I hope — that’s not how it plays out in practice. But when you’re dealing with bureaucracies, you never know. Also, pets are not allowed on the transport (but service animals are).

Let’s say things happened too fast, and you’re still on the ground when disaster sets in. If you’re facing flooding or a tsunami, seek out high ground. If it’s an earthquake, get away from buildings, the collapse of which kills far more people than the actual quake itself. During wildfires or volcanic eruptions, make plans to evacuate, and cover your mouth and nose if the air is already thick with ash (N95 masks certified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health are best, and make a good addition to your travel packing list).

Travel insurance can add another layer of protection — though it can nudge up the overall cost of your trip. Policies usually cost between 4 and 10 percent of your trip’s price, but they often have an emergency assistance number you can call. They can help refer you to local medical providers, make emergency travel arrangements, or even get you emergency cash to get out. If you go this route, take care to check whether disaster-related expenses are included in your policy.  

If phone lines are down and communication is cut off once you’ve found immediate safety, one of the most common recommendations across government agencies is to take to social media. Post that you’re all right, saving your family the trouble of waiting on the State Department’s hotline to make sure you’re okay. 

The economics, and ethics, of disaster travel

So, you made it home. But let’s say the first-hand brush with disaster, and seeing the havoc it can wreak, particularly on less developed areas with fewer resources which will disproportionately shoulder the brunt of climate change’s extreme weather upticks, left you unsettled. What can you do to help?

At an institutional level, economic development can help make communities more resilient in the face of disaster. A powerful way to soften the impact of an extremifying climate is, for example, to reduce poverty.

The UN’s 2019 Human Development Report looked at this relationship more broadly, using their Human Development Index (HDI) that measures a combination of health, education, and standard of living. They found that from 1980 to 2017, natural disasters led to a 0.5 percent annual drop in the HDI of developed countries, but a larger 1.2 percent drop for countries with fewer resources.

The world has excelled in many measures of development and progress through recent centuries (while others are backsliding). But zooming into more recent times, progress on things like the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals that would raise HDI — like ending global poverty, or abolishing hunger and improving nutrition worldwide — is slowing to a crawl.

But neither you nor I can end global poverty or cut emissions worldwide on our own (though individual choices can still influence structural problems). One strategy is to consider how visitor presence and tourism dollars will interact with the local economy, and either align with the local community’s well-being, or not. 

For example, during the Maui wildfires last year, local officials all but begged tourists to stay away. Part of the problem was the sheer absurdity of tourists snorkeling in the same waters that crews were still searching to find missing residents who’d jumped in to avoid the flames. Tourists were sucking away resources that residents of the Lahaina area badly needed.

But tourism makes up roughly 40 percent of Maui’s economy. So a month after the fire, losing about $13 million per day in visitor spending relative to normal, residents, government officials, and business owners began asking tourists to come back, at least to the parts of Maui that weren’t most affected by the fires. Still, overtourism is a major issue across Hawaii at large. Even when there’s no disaster fallout demanding extra resources, many locals and government officials alike have been trying to slow the tide of tourists, whose hordes have clogged infrastructure, deprived residents of resources as they’re diverted to high-demand areas, threatened endangered species, and trampled sacred land. 

Sometimes, though, locals are more unified in their embrace of tourism, even in the immediate wake of a disaster. When a 6.8-magnitude earthquake hit rural parts of Marrakesh, Morocco, in September 2023, thousands died, villages were devastated, roads were closed, and locals continued to welcome the flow of tourism that, ultimately, helped fund relief efforts. 

There’s no blanket recommendation here — different areas have different situations. Government officials and business owners might even send mixed messages on whether your presence would be welcomed. Cultivating a habit of trying to understand at least a little about the state of the local communities on our travel lists can help align trips with the well-being of more vulnerable places. 

Even as tourism rates trend toward a full rebound, the world is warmer and less predictable. “Extreme and severe weather events in the United States and around the world are becoming more frequent, having a greater impact, and affecting places where people may not be as prepared to handle them,” AccuWeather chief meteorologist Jon Porter said.

Uncertainty is becoming the kind of travel companion you just can’t get rid of. Globally, we’re already on a path toward making natural disasters less and less deadly. We’ll need to keep up that momentum, while maybe even doing the unthinkable: changing our own personal travel habits, at least a little bit.