Ashley Fitzgerald has a PhD in sociology, and she studied subsistence producers (urban and rural) in the United States who grow at least half their own calories. After living in Uruguay for half a decade, she’s recently returned to the United States and is one of the leading figures in a loose organization (it’s not exactly a movement) called Doomer Optimism. She is heavily inspired by Wendell Berry and has written for FPR in the past. I wanted to talk with her because I find that she reframes many hot-button issues in a ground-level-first sort of way, which helps cut through the omnipresent static of our modern era. We conducted this conversation via voice message, and it has been edited for pith and clarity. Because of its length, we’re releasing it in three sections. This first one focuses on Ashley’s upbringing in a Catholic, working-class Chicago neighborhood and her efforts to pass on the best aspects of that culture to her children today.
Judd Baroff: Please tell me a little about your early life. In what ways did the way you were raised affect your current trajectory?
Ashley Fitzgerald: How I was raised was super impactful as to how I turned out, and I didn’t realize that until somewhat recently. Which is probably true for a lot of people, where they don’t realize how much their upbringing impacted them until they start bringing up your own kids. And then these cycles blossom within their own behaviors that are otherwise intuitive and subconscious.
My father was a Chicago fireman, and that’s important because his schedule at the fire department was 24-hours on and 48-hours off, just lots of time home with a family, and it was huge to have him around. He had side gigs, the main one was being a roofer. So very blue-collar.
My mom had gone to school and worked as a physical therapist assistant but only part time, and she didn’t work at all when we were really little, like under three. So my parents were basically always around. We would have dinners together, they would go to all of my activities, they were always the ones dropping me off from school and picking me up. So I had no significant childcare in my childhood which wasn’t my parents, which was huge because it meant my parents got to pick how I was raised and who I was instead of a paid childcare worker.
I have a brother and a sister, and when we were little, I wouldn’t say we were necessarily struggling for money because the fire department pays pretty well, but when my dad first started, you know, we had a mortgage. They had a bunch of stuff they really wanted to do on the house, a beautiful old house which was very dilapidated. So we were very thrifty growing up and didn’t have a sense of infinite abundance but a sense that everybody chips in, so you need to think about not being wasteful or entitled.
I think there’s a lot of values that come down from forced thrift. My dad was raised very humbly; his dad was a fireman. My mom was raised humbly; her dad was a pipe or sprinkler fitter. Environmentalists in general try to recreate those values out of an environmental ethic, but I think the material economic ethic is just a stronger motivator, and my intuitive environmentalism comes from growing up in a household where we were required to be thrifty for economic reasons, not for theoretical moral reasons. It was just a lot of blue-collar values and ethics, like be loyal to people, be responsible, be trustworthy, be somebody who’s reliable but who can call on other people when you need the help. Your reputation matters a lot when you don’t have a lot of extra money.
All of that put together really impacted my journey. I moved away from them a bit and tried to supplant a totally different ethic after my childhood, like move more into academia. But I’ve come back to the blue-collar values in my middle age. Almost forty!
Judd: Your parents formed you without needing a lot of paid childcare, but if I’m remembering correctly, you did go to public school. How did that affect your formation? Also, through high school, did you go to high school with a large cross-section of people or were you mostly friends with the sons and daughters of union men?
If I’m not mistaken you were also raised Catholic. What was your catechesis like?
Ashley: The neighborhood that I grew up in is the same neighborhood I’m back in now. It’s very heavily populated by working-class city workers. Not just firemen, but cops and sanitation workers, since city workers have to live in the city limits, they find these kind of neighborhoods to congregate in.
I went to public school for grade school, and I think it was important not have gone to a Catholic for grade school, since it would have been whiter and more limited in my social milieu. Public school had lots of diverse races and that actually helped a lot in my tolerance for living with a plurality of cultures. I’m sending my kids to a public school for grade school, so they can just be able to be in a cross section of society. I think that’s really important, to be around people who are different from you culturally and handle that.
I was actually raised Lutheran, but I went to Catholic school for my eighth-grade year and for high school. I would say the Lutheran church experience was kind of just going through the motions. It was just important to my mom that I was baptized and confirmed, and I think it was good for me as a kid to have that experience in church. I’m comfortable in the Catholic Church and in the Lutheran Church both. I didn’t think much about it. I thought it was one of those things: you go to school, you go to church, you go to sports practice.
The only part of it that was particularly Catholic was this retreat I did in senior year called Kairos, which is a Greek word for like God’s time. It was a really formative retreat—extremely, extremely important and spiritual. We connected with other girls and got to tell our stories and got letters from our parents and people in our families who got to say—like we’re just on the verge of becoming women—and they’re like we’re proud of who you’ve become and all of that kind of stuff. It was a coming-of-age ritual that everyone who went to the Catholic schools experienced.
The school had lots of Southside girls, the same people who populate my neighborhood, the same city worker families, and that was wonderful. My peers very much had those same kind of working-class values. They were not super consumeristic. We felt like suburb girls would worry about what they were wearing and makeup &c. Among my friends, it was ‘don’t try to stand out too much,’ ‘don’t try to be super materialistic,’ ‘be there for one another’—all that stuff.
We didn’t have helicopter parents either, you know. They let their kids go a little bit, not overprotective. We kind of roamed around the neighborhood with some freedom. So my childhood and high school experience was all very magical and wonderful.
We’re now back in the neighborhood after a period where I turned my back on all those pretty good memories and thought of this place as sort of backwards. Maybe it’s the same way people from rural small towns think they need to go to the city. Now I’m back in the neighborhood and I’m kind of trying to recreate all of that same kind of magical energy for my kids, including going to church.
We are going to the Catholic Church. I did attempt to go to the Lutheran Church, but there are no children, no families, and I don’t want to put my kids in a dying institution with no other children, life, or vitality. So we’re going to the Catholic Church; my husband’s Catholic, and we’re going to start the process of getting them through all the sacraments.
Judd: Have you noticed any major changes in Mass since the early 2000s?
You and I are basically the same age, and I had much the same freewheeling childhood. I’d just take off with friends and walk for hours across town. I don’t really see any children doing that now, and, from what I see on Twitter, that is a general experience. But it’s not one you seem to be having. What do you think has changed in the intervening twenty years?
And, yes please do tell me quite a bit more about the Kairos retreat. It sounds spectacular.
Ashley: So first I’ll talk about Kairos. It’s a Jesuit retreat, and I believe a lot of Catholic schools around the country do it. All the Chicago high schools I’m familiar with do it. The format is somewhat secretive, so people don’t have a good idea of what they’re getting into, which I think is good. They don’t have expectations.
There are a couple of adult leaders, but it’s mostly run by student leaders. They lead these small group sessions on different themes, like family or loss, grief or self-confidence, and you journal about the different topics then talk about them in small groups, about difficult things you’ve experienced in your teen years, big feelings and big conundra. Then we got together in a big group and shared some insights and maybe each one of the leaders would give a talk about their own journey and their own path in front of the whole group, and they play a song that epitomizes their feelings on the subject.
We had prayer and meditation. One thing I really liked about the retreat was that there were no clocks and so you only knew when it was time to go to the next session when somebody would walk through the halls ringing a little Glockenspiel, which was such a wonderful way to experience time.
Then, at the end of the retreat, you got a packet of letters sent to you from a bunch of your family and friends, and basically they’re told ‘write them a letter telling them what you think of them and what your expectations or goals are for their life, what their strengths are.’ So you sit down for a couple hours and just read these letters and get a sense of what your community thinks about you.
Then what comes as a surprise at the end is when you come home, your family and friends come to a reception to receive you back from the long weekend. Everybody who is on the retreat has to get up and say one thing, what they learned or appreciated, one thing in front of the whole community, and it’s like the community recognizes you. Everybody’s family and friends are there and everyone’s crying. A real part of the coming-of-age ceremony is that it’s community based, they participate—your peers, your teachers, but also your family and friends who not only write you letters but receive you back into the home after this time away.
And there’s a little saying: “live the fourth”–Live the fourth day of Kairos–live your life as if you’re still on the Kairos retreat and living the fourth day. So that was really helpful and just thinking about how powerful it is to share your experiences in community.
You know, as I talk about this now with you, I feel like a lot of my approach to sociology is to make it clear to people that the issues they’re facing are not individual issues, but sociological issues, and that they shouldn’t feel alone and shouldn’t have to face those things alone. So I think Kairos, that whole experience, shaped my worldview in profound ways that I still don’t even fully grasp. So I’m definitely sending my kids to Catholic school so that they can experience that.
As for what’s changed in the Mass in twenty years, I wasn’t paying as close of attention to the Mass then, but I can’t tell much difference. That may be because this neighborhood is unique. A lot of people are just sort of legacy cultural Catholics and would not really abide a lot of super harsh changes to the Mass. Even at my local parish, they’re trying to do fancy things with the music and not the tunes and actual melodies that go with traditional chants and stuff, trying to change it up, and a lot of people are annoyed by that. I’m annoyed by it! Like I don’t go here for freaking show tunes, you know. I want things to be basically how they were, how they were when my dad went, when his parents went.
As far as my neighborhood goes, there are still kids who walk to school and ride their bikes around and play outside. We’re in favor of that to the point that we basically self-select other families who are like that. If anyone has a problem with that, then they can just do whatever they want with their kids, but our kids are not going be limited in what their freedoms are just because other parents limit their kids.
So, for example, our neighbors across the street send their kids on their bikes every day. They make them keep going on their bikes until it’s below freezing. And we were talking about that the other day. They let their kids stay home with their older brothers who are teenagers. We’ve left our kids home, our oldest is in sixth grade, for less than an hour before.
We let them go to the park by themselves, which is six blocks away, so long as the older one’s with them. That kind of freedom is very important to how we want to raise our kids. And there are a decent number of other families who raise their kids like that here, and I don’t have a really strong sociological explanation except that this is still a neighborhood with a lot of blue-collar union workers. And even though there are a lot of new entrants to the neighborhood who are different culturally, neighborhoods and cities are just like so dense. there’s just so many people. Even in a small town you just find your group and you find your people who want to raise their kids like you do. Even in Uruguay we were in a small town, but we had a core group of like six to eight families who resonate with us and let their kids run and let them be in nature and have them play outside and give them freedom.
So a lot of people get down on things because they see the mean is shifting. And sure, the mean is shifting, but that’s not everybody, it doesn’t describe everybody in the whole world. So, I don’t know, there’re always points of agency. People are so quick to denounce society based on some calculation that kids on average spend less time outside or on average are more anxious.
Like, I was just talking to a lady this weekend who’s a parent I really like. I said, ‘I think I might start working with my middle child,’ who’s friends with her oldest child, ‘to walk over to your house,’ which is like six blocks. I’d teach her how to do that, maybe give her a walkie-talkie, get her comfortable with it and see if she could pull it off.
Let her try to do it, try to get some responsibility. And if she’s not trustworthy, then she gets that responsibility revoked. But we could try it and see how she does. And the lady says, ‘have you met the anxious generation?’ And I said, ‘Well… yeah, isn’t that kind of up to us, whether or not they are the anxious generation?’ If we give them freedom and responsibility, they’re not going to be anxious. This is the whole thing. This is our obligation as parents to not just say, ‘they’re anxious and therefore I’m going to just continue coddling them.’ I don’t get it, you know?
Yeah, there’s maybe been a lot of change. I’m sure there are a lot of places that are a lot worse than my neighborhood. My neighborhood is special in a lot of ways. And part of the reason we wanted to move back to our neighborhood is because it had retained this character that was similar to how we were raised. But also, there are a lot of people in the world, and you can find your people, even if it’s just one family that’s with you saying, ‘everybody else is nuts, but like let’s let our kids walk to school together.’ That’s great. That’s amazing. It’s not all lost. It’s actually not really as bad, certainly not as I thought.
Judd: What’s so striking to me as I hear your answer is that you’re presenting your parenting style not defensively exactly, but as if it were unusual. And it is unusual! But your description is just a version, perhaps even a helicopter parenting version, of how we were raised. I obviously can’t speak for you, but, when I was eight, several friends and I, the oldest of whom was eleven, would walk across the bridge into the relatively crime-ridden city (this was still the 90s) to go to a comic book shop. And when I was in sixth grade myself, I’d walk alone, across town over the main street with heavy traffic and become a latchkey kid for an hour or three. And none of that was exceptional. And there were no cell phones or even walkie-talkies involved. And now all of this sounds like it’s approaching child neglect.
As you said, it’s on us. We are the parents. If we give them freedom and responsibility, they won’t be anxious. Anyway, that’s just me answering my own question. Feel free to react to any of that or none of it.
I want to go next exactly where you suggested we go. And I’ll use your framing because I loved it. You loved your neighborhood as a child. You love it now. So how did you fall out of love with it in the meantime?
Ashley: So this part of the story is not very unusual and maybe not that interesting. But just coming from my own words, my family is working-class. And so because my dad worked with his hands as a firefighter, repairman, roofer, he said things to me throughout my childhood like, ‘learn how to make a living from a pen rather than a hammer.’ And so he would say, ‘you go get your education and travel’ and that kind of stuff; ‘go get the best job you can.’
And I got a full academic scholarship to the University of Chicago that they set aside for the children of firemen and police. That catapulted me onto this more elite path, and so I’m around all of these people from wealthy families, in college, and doing what my parents told me to do, make money, garner status. I have a distinct memory about another girl who was from my neighborhood. I remember talking about the South Side Irish Parade, which I always loved as a teenager and a kid, and she said, ‘oh that’s so backwards and lame.’ Our neighborhood is basically something to be embarrassed about was the subtext. And I was just like, ‘Should I, though?’
And I got a bunch of messages like that. Like my uncle left the far south suburbs of the city and moved to New York City and got a big fancy corporate job. And he just said, ‘you don’t want to settle in this neighborhood, that’s not for you, these people are just not interested in the things you’re interested in. Like, you’re going places, you’ve got more to contribute to the world than what you could contribute from this neighborhood.’
From the point at which I went away for college probably until when I came back from Uruguay, from 2007 to 2023, I was on this journey, this big, long arc of following my father’s advice, even though it actually caused me a lot of pain. I fought with my parents a lot in those years about my life choices. Like I went and traveled, and they were really unhappy with that. I think when they said, ‘do big things,’ they were thinking more like ‘get a prestigious career,’ not ‘go travel the world on a shoestring budget.’ But I was like, ‘you guys told me to explore.’ And so now I’m getting mixed messages, and I fell out of touch with them for a while.
Then I went to grad school and just followed this path that was intuitively laid out for me. ‘You’re special, you’re talented, you’re smart, you need to go do this thing.’ But then while doing it, I was experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance, including those challenges connecting with my family, but also alienation and loneliness. So on top of it I would say a lot of the process of the things I learned throughout those years were somewhat Spreadsheet Brained. Those who increased knowledge, increased sorrow. Understanding of the environmental crisis, understanding of social problems, all of that stuff made me consider abstract knowledge as holding a higher place than local and specific and intuitive knowledge.
And so the abstract knowledge of, for example, the state of America in the course of empire, environmental issues, social issues, like Adderall in schools, that kind of stuff, all of that taken together, that rational abstract knowledge informed our decision to go live in Uruguay. But the intuitive knowledge of belonging in a place where all of our family is, and we have many family members around, and we have many people we know and many people we grew up with, none of that was, in my mind, a worthwhile reason to do something. And so I say this Spreadsheet Brain meme all the time, because I am and have had my own intuition hijacked in favor of rational thinking.
And then there came a point at which it was clear that despite all the rational thinking in the world, Uruguay was not the place we’re from. And we had to decide, do we want to stay in this place where we are fundamentally alienated from the culture because it’s not our mother culture, all for the sake of our own children being from that place. Or do we go back to our mother culture and live our lives there and not be alienated; do we feel connection and belonging but then risk our kids growing up in a somewhat dysfunctional culture?
I don’t think that the answer to that is cut and dry, for the record. I just think that on net the intuitive sense of belonging, meaning, connection, and culture that we have in the United States makes it easier for us to navigate this somewhat confusing and very rapidly changing world. Because we have more power in navigating a world we know and more agency in that. Part of what was the challenge in Uruguay is that I didn’t have as much agency there because I didn’t know the culture well enough. I didn’t know all the institutions. I didn’t know all the points at which I could make changes or moves. And I also didn’t feel very confident doing that in a different place. You know, I felt more reserved and was more respectful of that fact that I was not from there. I shouldn’t come in and determine what should happen in this society.
Whereas here in Chicago, I’m from here. I’ve grown up in all of these institutions. If anyone has the right to step in and make changes in this culture and this specific place, it’s my husband and me. It was like stepping into our power in that way. And so, when I think about the points of agency, I’m not really defensive as much as I am frustrated by this widespread feeling that things are out of our hands. People are just so resigned; ‘this is the anxious generation.’ It isn’t the anxious generation unless we failed them.
I just can’t even imagine thinking of my kids as inevitably subject to some social force that I don’t have any say over. I’m sure that they will be subject to some social forces, but there is always some pushback that I can do as their mother and my husband as their father, where we can navigate these things. Not that it’s going to be perfectly straightforward, but I will go down fighting, you know what I mean? So that’s my defensiveness. It’s my whole posture on Twitter, too, we have agency, we are empowered, we can do these things, and not only can we but it is our responsibility to do these things.
Judd: What it seems to be is ‘learned helplessness.’ This belief that things just inevitably happen. So I’m wondering where the spirit of the American pioneer, where the culture of the can-do man has gone? Likewise, what do you make of your father’s advice? Obviously you have a good life, so to that degree, he gave you the right advice. Would it have been better for you, do you think, to wield the hammer over the pen? And what advice will you give your own children?
Living in Uruguay must have in some way supported your environmentalist tendencies, the enforced thrift of your childhood, because it’s hard for that attitude to thrive when you can just buy your way out of any hardship as we mostly do here. So has your transition back to the United States been difficult in that way, or any way?
Ashley: Hammer versus Pen is such a good question, and I’m thinking about this so intensely right now, literally in this moment, because I just came across this tweet by my good friend Andy Hickman. And he is musing about how he might find his ultimate satisfaction in life being a writer but being intentionally off the grid. Like having an assistant type up his essays. And he would cobble together various forms of earnings through hosting students or doing a forest school or doing whatever and spend his days chopping wood and taking care of the babies. And that was basically our life in Uruguay, which was enabled by me having a PhD.
This is the nuance or the difficulty of the world we live in which, the fact is it is really difficult to make a living without an education. Credentialism has run amok, and I was able to have freedom of time because I had my PhD and I was able to earn enough from these school field trips to make do with my family.
So now I’m thinking if I could radically cobble together like that, because my living now is stuff I don’t love, but it’s also enabled by the PhD. It’s remote work, and it’s just tons of computer work and writing things and filing reports. And that is the life of the pen, the computer jockey, the email worker. And it feels incredibly alienating. And I wonder, my postdoc is ending in a couple months, could I get back into the field-school work? And that’s something I’m working on, although that requires more typing and grant writing. But it would have a large in-person component.
I’m just thinking about this a lot now. The hammer versus the pen. And like in some ways, yeah, the hammer is a life of toil. But it’s also somewhat less alienating overall. You know, the work of physically working on a roof during the day. And then you come home and the work is done—done. Maybe your back and knees hurt, but you’ve accomplished something real. You’ve done it with your hands. So I really don’t know the answer.
This is fundamentally the question of ‘is modernity good.’ I always argue with people about this, but it’s not super straightforward. I guess the real answer is it’s nice to make a nice living and have the luxury to choose to do something with your hands that is meaningful and creative and active. When you’re forced into too much toil, of course, that’s oppressive too.
But when it comes to making community, that was the craziest thing. I went to Uruguay and I found the same kind of community that I left, which was a community of people who were working class enough that they needed each other. People are interdependent by necessity, and it’s crazy because I went all the way across the world to find what I came from, and I was slowly realizing this during my seven years there. I realized — wait, actually everything I was looking for I have already at home. And I would say my transition back hasn’t been that bad because my neighborhood retains a quality of this working-class culture.
The actual Chicago life and culture has been great. Just to paint a picture of my daily life, the kids ride their bikes to school, including my four-year-old and I go with her. The older two go by themselves and they see all their neighbors on the way to school. I do my work. I have the four-year-old. I can schedule my meetings as I wish, which is great. And then my dad drops by regularly and he’s got something that he fixed for me. He drops it off and then we sit down and chat for fifteen minutes about whatever’s on his mind.
And I go over to my parents for dinner, or we go over to Pat’s parents for dinner, or we take a bike ride over to my sister’s who’s two blocks away. The neighbor kids get home from school on their bikes, independent, and they run over to the neighbor kids’ house. And then they’re running back and forth on the street and playing make-believe outside, and I’m making dinner. We sit together and eat dinner as a family. There’s sports. Pat is coaching golf. It’s all the values we cultivated by being away but also leaning into the best parts of city life here. And there’s the social life we’re afforded from our families being here and finding similar people to us.
So like the day to day is really actually a lot more connected and pleasant than Uruguay. In Uruguay, we were kind of isolated out on nine acres. And we’d still have activities and similar kind of structure, but not the same as kids just running from their doorstep with their friends, and not as many family members. So we didn’t have as many heartfelt or deep conversations with people, partially because of the cultural and language barrier.
And Patrick took a job at the local Catholic high school as a Spanish teacher and he loves it. He loves his students. He loves the school. I feel like he could be a real leader in the Catholic school community and the Catholic high school he’s in in a few years, because he’s got a real leadership quality to him and he could lead Kairos retreats, for example.
You’ve just read the first part of this three-part interview. Next week (2/19) we will publish the continuation of this interview. It’ll be called “Against Spreadsheet Brain and For Taking Action”, and it’ll be about the more public facing aspects of Ashley’s work, including Doomer Optimism which is the loose community she helped start.
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