I first met Ron DeSantis at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention in Las Vegas in April 2016.

DeSantis was then a second-term House member with an eye on Marco Rubio’s Senate seat. Rubio had pledged in 2014 that he would not seek reelection if he ran for president in 2016; he would later change his mind. DeSantis was likely anticipating Rubio’s reversal when he and I sat down for coffee at the Venetian. But other avenues were open to a smart and determined politician from Florida that spring.

By April, the Republican presidential primary had shrunk to a three-way race: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich. Polls showed Hillary Clinton with a 10-point lead over both Trump and Cruz. The GOP seemed doomed to a self-inflicted defeat in November. Forward-looking Republicans were already assessing future talent.

Recently, I was mesmerized by a prep cook. At a strip-mall Korean restaurant, I caught a glimpse of the kitchen and stood dumbfounded for a few minutes, watching a guy slicing garnishes, expending half the energy I would if I were doing the same at home and at twice the speed. The economy of his cooking was magnetic. He moved so little, but did so much.

Being a prep cook is hard, low-wage, and essential work, as the past year has so horribly proved. It is also a “low-skill” job held by “low-skill workers,” at least in the eyes of many policy makers and business leaders, who argue that the American workforce has a “skills gap” or “skills mismatch” problem that has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Millions need to “upskill” to compete in the 21st century, or so say The New York Times and the Boston Consulting Group, among others.

A post-pandemic discussion question: You get home from work on a Friday night and change into sweatpants. It’s been an exhausting week. A text message comes in. Your good friend wants to know if you’d like to meet up last minute for a drink, which is something that’s safe to do again. You’d love to catch up, but you’re pretty tired. Do you go?

This choose-your-own-adventure—or choose-your-own-lack-of-adventure—scenario is one that more Americans will start facing again soon, and their answer will indicate which of two competing post-pandemic impulses they feel more strongly.

On the one hand, people will be freshly aware that they shouldn’t take the ability to attend social gatherings for granted. On the other, they also will have experienced, albeit involuntarily, the occasional pleasures of having fewer social commitments. Introverts and extroverts alike may feel torn between taking advantage of their regained freedom and preserving some of the quiet of pandemic life, but many people will end up in one of two distinct camps.

Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.

Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.

Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived infancy if I’d had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.

If the immune system ran its own version of The Bachelor, antibodies would, hands down, get this season’s final rose.

These Y-shaped molecules have acquired some star-caliber celebrity in the past year, due in no small part to COVID-19. For months, their potentially protective powers have made headlines around the globe; we test for them with abandon, and anxiously await the results. Many people have come to equate antibodies, perhaps not entirely accurately, with near imperviousness to the coronavirus and its effects. Antibodies are, in many ways, the heartthrobs of the immune system—and some 15 months deep into immunological infatuation, the world is still swooning hard.

Frankly, it’s all getting to be a little too much.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

Arthur C. Brooks will discuss the science of happiness live at 11 a.m. ET on May 20. Register for In Pursuit of Happiness here.

In his 1851 work American Notebooks, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.” This is basically a restatement of the Stoic philosophers’ “paradox of happiness”: To attain happiness, we must not try to attain it.

A number of scholars have set out to test this claim. For example, researchers writing in the journal Emotion in 2011 found that valuing happiness was associated with lower moods, less well-being, and more depressive symptoms under conditions of low life stress. At first, this would seem to support the happiness paradox—that thinking about it makes it harder to get. But there are alternative explanations. For example, unhappy people might say they “value happiness” more than those who already possess it, just as hungry people value food more than those who are full.

The hypothetical couple were making $350,000 a year and just getting by, their income “barely” qualifying them as middle-class. Their budget, posted in September, showed how they “survived” in a city like San Francisco, spending more than $50,000 a year on child care and preschool, nearly $50,000 a year on their mortgage, and hefty amounts on vacations, entertainment, and a weekly date night—even as they saved for retirement and college in tax-advantaged accounts.

The internet, being the internet, responded with some combination of howling, baying, pitchfork-jostling, and scoffing. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York quipped that the thing the family was struggling with was math. Gabriel Zucman, a leading scholar of wealth and inequality, described the budget as laughable, while noting that it showed how much money consumption taxes could raise.

When Alexei Navalny boarded a plane to Moscow on January 17, he turned his life into a metaphor. He knew it, his wife knew it, and everybody else on the plane knew it. So did the millions of people who had watched his documentary videos, who had seen the witty interviews he did on the plane, who have since joined demonstrations in his name. So did the leaders of Russia, including the country’s dictator and president, Vladimir Putin. This, Navalny was telling all of them, is what courage looks like.

Navalny is Russia’s most important opposition leader, and he was flying home from Berlin after spending many weeks in a hospital there, following the second or perhaps the third attempt on his life. He’d survived because a German NGO had sent a plane to Omsk to take him out of Russia, because the Novichok nerve agent used to poison him doesn’t always kill you right away, and because the Russian hospital had agreed to let him go, probably on the assumption that he would never return. (For the record: One of the doctors who treated him for poison has since died under odd circumstances, and a hospital official who refused to attribute Navalny’s illness to poison has been promoted to regional health minister.)

There’s a scene in the second episode of Mare of Easttown, HBO’s new crime series, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I watched it. Mare, the show’s titular police detective (played by Kate Winslet), visits a rural spot where a girl’s body has been found and prepares to inform the girl’s father. “I’m on my way over to Kenny’s right now to tell him, and I want John and Billy to meet me there,” she tells her best friend on the phone. “Probably good to have his cousins there for him, you know?” When Kenny (Patrick Murney) learns what has happened, he closes his eyes, shakes his head, then explodes, smashing random objects around him and shoving the other men as they half-hug, half-restrain him. Mare watches them from a distance, her gaze sympathetic but unsurprised. She knew exactly how Kenny would respond, and understood, too, that she would not have been safe with him and his grief.