5SR - November 7, 2023

Hitha on mulit-generational living, sin taxes, and routines

Author

Hitha Palepu
November 07, 2023

Today’s curator is the founder of #5SmartReads, Hitha Palepu. She’s a consummate multihyphenate - CEO of Rhoshan Pharmaceuticals, author of WE’RE SPEAKING: The Life Lessons of Kamala Harris and How to Pack: Travel Smart for Any Trip, and professional speaker. Hitha is an unabashed fan of Taco Bell, Philadelphia sports teams & F1, romance novels, and is a mediocre crafter. She lives in NYC with her husband and two sons.

For as long as I’ve been a parent, we’ve been living in a multigenerational household, on and off - and I love it.

The latest census recorded that there were 6M multigenerational households in 2020, a number I expect has gone up since the pandemic. And while this shift is largely driven by increasing cost of living costs and caregiving needs (for elders and children alike), it can also offer significant health benefits and boost one’s happiness.

Something that’s helped our family handle multigenerational living with ease is to play Fair Play - we deal the deck when things feel off-kilter and it helps us know who’s responsible for what during our time together, which helps us enjoy it all the more.

I don’t know if it’s because I came of age during the rise of social media (and had two decades offline), but I find posting my most vulnerable moments - while I’m still processing and working through the immediate emotions - to be deeply uncomfortable, and usually process it offline before I can find my words to share online.

I feel like Gen Z is rolling their eyes at me and saying “okay, Boomer.” And after reading this piece, they’d be right - it is very old school. But I’m also curious in how other generations are using social media to build community and to share, and posting through it - and consuming these posts - impacts our own creation and consumption habits.

“How each of us goes into a specific platform not only shapes how you post and what you do there, but it shapes how you receive other people’s content. That person who shared that, maybe for them, their Instagram occupies a really, really intimate and personal place in their life, but yours doesn’t and that’s where you get that mismatch of expectations versus understanding.

I feel, in my own life and research, that social media is occupying an even more intimate role in our lives now. We’re using platforms that are really familiar to us, particularly Instagram, in way more intimate ways than we ever have — and there are quite a few trends to back that up, for instance, finstas and photo dumps. That’s all signposting us toward a place where the platform has a really intimate role in our lives, and perhaps that shapes what we share and therefore how people interpret that.”

The sin tax to necessary policy investments might be the quiet path to funding robust care infrastructure, education, clean air and water, and healthcare access.

And given its success in Colorado, I hope we begin to see it in other states as well.

And while critics of these sin taxes argue it should come out of the general fund, these funding mechanisms can be an effective way to means test these policies for a transition to being funded from the general fund.

One of my goals with #5SmartReads is to show how intersectional so many issues are, and finding funding sources for the areas we need to invest in - the care economy, healthcare, education - is often the biggest hurdle in making policy a reality. And while it’s icky that tobacco revenues contribute to education investments, it’s making a huge impact for the better.

The Joy of Routine. (Grace’s Substack)

“When I am in a routine, I am my best self: thriving! healthy! happy! When I am out of my routine, I struggle.”

I am struggling right now with my utter lack of routine, which has really been since we returned from Vancouver. And I think I’ve been putting too much pressure on myself to make my routine extraordinary, which is antithetical to the benefits of routine. They are simple and mundane and repetitive by design so you can deploy your creativity and brilliance in the work that matters.

Grace’s own routine was a solid reminder to release myself of the absurd expectations I placed on myself and to embrace the boring. And while my life is utter madness for the next week and half, I’m excited for a very mundane, low-key winter.

One of the biggest impacts on your personal carbon footprint is your home.

And innovative construction firms like Deltec are focused on building homes that both reduce carbon emissions and withstand extreme climate catastrophes.

“Deltec, the company that built Paulson’s home, says that only one of the nearly 1,400 homes it’s built over the last three decades has suffered structural damage from hurricane-force winds. But the company puts as much emphasis on building green, with higher-quality insulation that reduces the need for air conditioning, heat pumps for more efficient heating and cooling, energy-efficient appliances, and of course solar.”

It makes perfect sense that states that have full-on disaster seasons - Florida, North Carolina - are the biggest market for new home construction like these. I hope we see this model expand everywhere (and especially in large occupant dwellings that can help address the housing shortage we’re facing).

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