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The apps and platforms that help family caregivers manage their loved ones’ needs are becoming more capable, but the broader issue of caregivers’ well-being remains unsolved.
According to the Pew Research Center, about half of American adults have used a chatbot, and around a quarter do so daily. By multiple measurements, the public has adopted AI faster than they did home computers or the internet. I’m seeing it more and more in my personal life: On video calls, I notice the Claude app in the menu bar of shared screens. An ad on Instagram pushing me to use Meta’s AI assistant revealed which of my friends had already begun doing so (something that might not even be true).
Still, many of the people who are using AI have mixed feelings about it. Pew notes that of the chatbot adopters they surveyed, 40 percent believe AI will have a more negative than positive effect on society; a 2026 Gallup poll of more than 1,500 14‑ to 29‑year‑olds came to a similar conclusion. No one I talk to about their personal AI use seems to particularly like it, but they accept it. In some cases, it’s the least-bad option; asking a chatbot a question is easier than searching, especially as search engines become so enshittified they’re unusable. In other cases, the tech just seems inevitable. Articles, analysts, and executives insist this is the future. Might as well get on board.
This is a familiar story. New technology moves from novelty to necessity in very little time, and adoption continues even though the future this tech promised isn’t as utopian as the marketing made it seem. Eighteen years ago, only early adopters had smartphones; then suddenly everyone had one, and we were all using them to stream, to stay in touch, and to alleviate boredom at every turn.
Plenty of people seem to regret this adoption. You see it in efforts to limit screen time and in the regular waves of nostalgia for physical media. It’s even in the first few paragraphs of this article — as terms like “slop,” “enshittification,” and “brainrot” enter common parlance. We’ve coined and redefined words to describe a future we didn’t imagine and don’t seem to want.
But while we may now have shorthand to describe the problem, solving it takes something more; nostalgia and anger can only go so far. The devices, apps, and tools that are easy to adopt are hard to give up, especially as the world is increasingly oriented around them. In just a few years, the smartphone became a replacement for everything from cash to car keys. Many workplaces assume their employees will be able to read email anywhere and that they will install productivity apps on their personal device (I have a folder with Airtable, Asana, Slack, Teams, Zoom, and other apps I wish I could delete). And new accessories and subscriptions come along constantly to wring functionality and durability out of our phones — wireless headphones, cases, extra batteries, cloud storage. As much as we may dream of living without a smartphone, the most that many of us can do is delete some apps or use a Brick (yet another accessory) to limit our use.
Look around your neighborhood, and you’ll see how this pattern has played out with other conveniences: streets full of Amazon vans, DoorDash bikes, and Ubers; doorbell cameras to track the theft of those deliveries; abandoned electric scooters on sidewalks; cities built for private cars more than for people.
It’s easy to imagine AI following a similar path — fulfilling some simple desires for convenience at first, then overtaking the alternatives, and fitting into our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine and might not want, but accept because it just seems like this is the natural path of technology.
There are, of course, advantages to new technology, but these wane over time as the downsides become clearer. On the personal side, there’s the frustration of stalled advancement: Each new phone upgrade seems to do less while requiring a costly purchase; ride-hailing services, streaming, and delivery costs climb, and the services don’t get better or more reliable; data breaches are a near-daily headline; and scam attempts fill our email apps, DMs, and any other inbox we have. It’s hard to avoid seeing the public consequences of this convenience, too: the exploitation of workers and the planet required to mine the minerals for batteries and other components, then the labor it takes to put those components into new devices; the allegations of wage theft, algorithmic discrimination, and workdays so grueling drivers have to urinate in bottles; the K-shaped economy that gig work is built on and perpetuates.
This makes it all the more essential to approach any offer of improved convenience with skepticism, and with a doubtfulness learned by unfulfilled promises and bad design. No technology is truly inevitable, no matter how much pressure we may feel to adopt it from our peers and from the corporate buzz that insists this is the future.
How to identify false conveniences
So how do we avoid welcoming these false conveniences into our lives? It starts with recognizing them for what they are. In 1987, Wendell Berry caused a minor kerfuffle in the pages of Harper’s magazine with his essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” In the short piece, Berry explained his reasoning behind the title. The computer could do his work faster, but speed wasn’t his concern. He also knew a computer would be expensive and isolating (Berry’s wife worked with him typing manuscripts). He ends the essay with a list of criteria for adopting a new tool, among them that a new tool should be less expensive than what it replaces, and it should be repairable and available at a local shop. He closes his list by writing that a new tool “should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists.”
This last one is tough. How do we decide what’s good and not worth disrupting? And on the other side, how do we decide whether the device or convenience that disrupts something we want disrupted — chores, for instance — is worth it?
Here, another list can help. In his 10 principles of good design, the legendary industrial designer Dieter Rams wrote that good design is honest about what it does, and is environmentally friendly, long-lasting, and makes a product useful. The utility of many new devices, tools, and apps may be clear, but often the design is dishonest. It hides the real costs of the convenience, like the environmental waste and lost dollars that come with replacing our phones every couple of years, or the privacy sacrifices inherent in many digital services. Or the design obscures the ways the tech might disrupt something good, like the way social media seemed to connect us with our friends, but now exposes us to scammers and to strangers who post rage bait and gets in the way of staying in touch with the people we actually care about.
As I was writing my book, Against Convenience, I kept turning to these two lists. How should I assess a promised convenience and avoid the early adaptation that leads to reliance on a technology I don’t really like? I came up with my own list for the book: questions that could keep me from being too eager for new tech, and less prone to fall into a cycle of increasingly worse design. It’s more than just saying no or resisting tech to preserve some nostalgic ideal — it’s a way to question what we really get from a new device or app, and what that tech might grow into if the pattern continues.
What does this save me? Does this convenience save me time, money, or effort? If it’s time, what will I use that time for? If it’s money, why has the price dropped? If it’s effort, who is doing the work instead?
What does this cost me? What do I have to give up for this convenience? Will I have to pay in perpetuity?
What does this replace? What is the old process for doing the same task? Is there anything I like about that task? Will I lose something I enjoy? How will I replace that enjoyment?
What problem does this solve? What is the cause of the problem in the first place? Will this solve the problem entirely?
Will I be able to stop using this convenience if I don’t like it? How long will I wait to decide?
Who is making this possible? Do I trust them? Is anyone’s work eliminated in this process, besides my own? Have any workers who make this convenience possible made statements about their working conditions? What is the environmental toll?
Is this necessary? Is this getting rid of something that’s difficult, expensive, or time-consuming? Is there some other way to achieve these savings without this particular convenience?
The list is inconvenient by design. It pushes me to slow down, to consider costs before they’re sunk. And to ask if this is really the direction I want to go in. Most of the time, it isn’t, and I say no. The worst that can happen is life goes on as usual, while a few of my friends have something new to complain about.
I built this list around my experiences of stepping on the rake of tech that overpromises and underdelivers, around many instances of believing hype and holding onto a device in the hope that it will one day work like it’s supposed to. I unraveled all the old cables I’ve kept in a drawer for years, trying to remember what each one was for, and what happened to the device. I went through folders on my phone looking for apps I could do without. I walked around my neighborhood looking at the signs of the digital world’s encroachment on the physical.
My answers to each question are my own. You’ll have your answers, around your own experiences, and this is the point: As new tech twists its way toward profitability, it requires mass adoption, prescriptive uses, and conformity to design. A patchwork of answers — people who resist at different stages — hampers not only tech’s invasiveness, but the very model of how it spreads.
It’s hard to tell exactly when AI slop stopped being just a punchline involving Will Smith eating spaghetti and started feeling dangerous. That’s actually part of the problem.
This year, many of the popular AI tools that used to struggle with the number of fingers on a human hand gained the ability to generate photorealistic video — with audio — that costs users virtually nothing to create. Even trained scientists can’t always tell the difference between what’s real and what’s machine-made in digital form. But the most insidious applications of this remarkable technology are playing out on a much more personal level.
A few years ago, we started to hear more about voice cloning tools, which allow scammers to spoof a loved one’s voice in order to extort money from a victim. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have also made any text-based scams more convincing and much cheaper to deploy. Imposter scams, which include romance scams, tech support fraud, and employment fraud, are on the rise, and thanks to increasingly high-quality AI, it’s harder than ever to know who’s real and who’s an imposter online.
When my daughter’s daycare recently sent us a picture of her entire class smiling in unison, my first thought was, “That’s cute!” My wife told me to look again and said, “That’s not our daughter.” She was right. All of the babies’ faces were AI-generated.
That was the moment I knew that, despite my years as a tech reporter, constantly warning my boomer parents to take cybersecurity seriously, the scammers could get me.
As AI gets better and cheaper, we’re all becoming easier targets. Your boomer parents are susceptible to getting scammed in the scary age of AI-powered fraud — but so is your Gen Z sibling, and so are you.
The amount of money people over 60 have lost in scams skyrocketed from about $600 million in 2020 to about $3 billion in 2025, according to a new Federal Trade Commission report. The overall number of older adults who reported losing money to scammers, however, was actually 14 percent lower than the number of younger people who reported losses. Older adults are historically more likely to report being targeted but less likely to lose money to scammers, the FTC said. When they do lose money, they tend to lose a lot of it.
We should all expect to be bigger targets in the future, too, as scammers inundate us with cheaply produced but very realistic AI slop. “The sophistication of the types of scams that are happening to older adults has definitely moved forward,” Diana Freed, an assistant professor of data science and computer science at Brown, told me. “Having some type of family safety plan around these issues is very helpful.”
The two most important things to do in this stressful AI scam era: reduce the number of scammers that can get to you, and establish ways to verify that people — on the phone, online, in videos — are who they say they are. Assume that anything can be convincingly faked these days, and that your whole family will need help figuring out what’s real.
Our best chance at getting through this tricky transition unscathed is to do it together.
Why you aren’t wrong to worry about your aging parents
It’s tempting to let generalizations guide your thinking when it comes to internet safety and behavior. Stubborn stereotypes tell us that older people are warm but incompetent, and that makes them more trusting, easy targets for scammers. We’ve all heard stories about someone’s grandma losing her life savings to criminals on the other side of the planet. Now we live in a world where AI can make those criminals sound like a grandchild on the phone, asking their grandparent to send money for an emergency. The same technology can make an aging parent sound like they’re asking their millennial son or daughter for urgent help, too.
“I think the security risks are certainly the same for younger people as well as older people,” said Ed Baig, who covers technology for AARP’s website and magazine.
Still, aging adults do have unique vulnerabilities that you should be aware of.
Some basic tips to avoid scams
Beware of urgency. Any time someone on the phone or online needs something immediately, it’s a red flag.
Establish a verification system. You can use codewords to verify someone claiming to be a relative is who they say they are. Or you can just hang up and call them back using the number stored in your contacts.
Check the account age. If you see something weird on social media, see how long the account has been around. The newer the account, the more suspicious. This is an especially helpful tip when trying to verify AI slop.
As we get older, our brains start to change. Normal cognitive aging leads to declines in processing speed (so you’re a little bit slower), and memory (so you’re a little more forgetful). That doesn’t inherently make an older person more likely to be a scam victim, but some research suggests that low memory function makes people more susceptible to phishing scams. One 2012 study also linked less activity in the anterior insula (the part of the brain that processes disgust, among other things) in older subjects with more trustworthiness. There are other brain changes, like declines in analytical reasoning, that could explain why older adults tend to respond to certain scammer methods, like finding common ground or offering something free.
More than anything, though, older adults tend to have more money — or, at least, they tend to part with larger amounts of it. They are, in this sense, better marks. In 2024, according to the FTC, the median amount reported lost to fraud for people in their 30s was $450, but that number shoots up to $1,000 for people in their 70s and $1,650 for people in their 80s.
In general, nobody likes to admit they fell for a scam. But the stakes are higher for some older adults, who might fear that they’ll lose their independence if they confess to their families that they’ve been a victim. They may also avoid reaching out to younger relatives to verify a shady-sounding exchange — or to ask questions in general — because they don’t want to bother anyone.
None of this is taking the very real power of AI into the equation, by the way. Older adults use AI less often than younger generations. About one in four people over 65 have ever used a chatbot, according to Pew, although a separate survey found that over half of older adults have used voice-based assistants, like Alexa.(Thanks to recent upgrades, Alexa is gaining new AI powers, too.)
So boomers may not be AI experts in large numbers, but they’re getting to know what it’s like to deal with chatbots. That still doesn’t mean they are fully aware of how much more believable scams have gotten thanks to AI.
What to do with all your AI scam anxiety
Assuming we’re all equally doomed when it comes to AI scams — but also, equally capable of resisting — the best thing to do is prepare yourself and your loved ones. Here are some concrete steps you can take.
Look at AI-generated content together to better understand the problem
Travis Bible, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and editor in his 40s, told me he felt the need to alert his parents about potential scams after Google’s AI video generator got uncannily good. The third generation of the software, Veo 3, can turn text into photorealistic video with audio in a matter of moments, and Bible realized that the videos the tool can produce could fool even him.
When simply describing the problem didn’t convince his parents to take it seriously, Bible got creative: He spent three days using AI to make a PSA warning of the dangers of deepfake scams and showed it to them. It worked. “I kind of expected them to be in disbelief, but honestly, they just kind of accepted it,” Bible told me. “Seeing the video made my warning click with them. Like, ‘Oh, it really is that good.’”
There are other PSAs like this floating around, but watching Bible’s made something click for me, too. I can’t really tell if half the clips are real or fake. You can look for tells, like glitches or visual typos, but AI image generators have gotten so good, it can be impossible to spot a fake at a glance. There are also AI tools that will tell you if a piece of media was generated by AI, like the Google-made SynthID Detector. But let’s be honest: When you’re in the heat of a scam, you don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to be testing the authenticity of stuff.
Talk about scams in a stigma-free environment
Older adults don’t want to be scam victims, but they also don’t want to be surveilled by their anxious relatives. To strike a balance, you can take the stigma out of potential victimhood by talking about how scams are creeping into your own life. Feel free to complain about the incessant string of scam texts about unpaid tolls you’ve been getting. If you’re using AI in your daily life, talk about it with your parents or grandparents, and you may learn more about what they’re doing too.
“Older people may turn to technology to ask questions to avoid burdening their children, meaning they may be hesitant to reach out to an adult child to ask for help with AI,” Robin Brewer, an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan, told me. Approaching these topics with generosity instead of judgment might mean your dad reaches out to you the next time he gets a weird text instead of clicking the link in the text to see where it takes him.
Create a family plan for verification
If everyone’s in agreement that we’re living through a scary time, you should create a family plan. This is useful for the older adults in your life, and it can be useful for you or your kids if you’re ever targeted.
The basic idea is to create a chain of verification, so that if someone receives a call or an email — especially one claiming to be from a relative — they have another family member who can give it a second set of eyes. Scammers can easily spoof phone numbers, so it might look like the call is coming from your sister, when really it’s coming from Singapore. Make sure everyone in the family knows that urgency is a scammer’s best friend, and it’s always a good idea to slow down to try and verify.
You might also want to agree on codewords to confirm that someone is who they say they are when, say, they call asking for “bail money.”
There’s also a cottage industry dedicated to selling you tech to protect your older loved ones and yourself from scams. You can pay for landline services from companies like Community Phone, Ooma, or teleCalm that protect against unwanted callers, filter, and offer caregivers some basic call monitoring features. Major carriers, like Verizon and AT&T, have filters and scam protection built into their services, and smartphones have features like call screening to help you avoid contact with a criminal. But ultimately nothing is 100 percent when it comes to stopping scammers from calling potential victims, since they’re constantly updating their tactics.
“Technology accelerating concentrates everything in our reality, and fraud will get even more powerful because the technology is getting better,” James Graham, Community Phone’s founder and CEO, told me. “And so you need technology that’s also getting better to prevent it, hopefully at a faster rate.”
So it’s a doom loop. Technology is helping criminals get better at stealing, so we need to invent new technology in order to thwart the thieves — until the next generation of tech comes along, at least. The truth is, we can’t stop scammers from assaulting our phone lines and inboxes any better than we can stop getting older with each passing day.
We can, however, talk to each other about these constant threats. Warn your family and friends about the evolving threats that you’re seeing reported in the news or on social media. If your grandma sends you AI slop, talk to her about how AI slop gets made and how it can be dangerous. If your kid’s daycare sends you AI slop, make sure your spouse knows it’s AI slop, even if it’s cute.
I’m actually hopeful that things will get better. If you look back a couple of decades, when email was new, the volume of spam you’d get made it almost unusable. Spam filters got better, and we got better at spotting scams. Like the scammers themselves, we’ll have to keep adapting. But if we can teach an AI-generated Will Smith to eat spaghetti properly, as a society, we can do anything.
Riders and lawmakers often don’t know the difference, and retailers sometimes muddy the waters on purpose. Here’s how to buy the micromobility vehicle you actually want.
If you’re dealing with election-related stress, you’re not alone.
Editor’s note, November 3, 2026, 3 pm ET: This article was originally published in 2024 and has been updated for the 2026 midterm elections.
If you’re heading to the polls today, you may be among the 30 percent of American voters who say the country’s political situation is the biggest source of stress in their lives right now, according to one poll. This unease makes sense, given how high the stakes are: Americans are voting for representatives who will make decisions about affordability, healthcare, and holding President Donald Trump to account.
Elections are common wellsprings of anxiety because they’re rife with uncertainty, says David H. Rosmarin, the founder of the Center for Anxiety. You’re unsure of the outcome, and unsure of what life may look like for you under a new administration, especially when the difference between the two choices is undeniably vast. Some of the proposed policies may threaten people’s safety and freedoms, resulting in even more anxiety. Research shows political anxiety can impact people who aren’t generally anxious otherwise.
There are key differences between everyday anxiety and election-related anxiety. Sometimes, generalized anxiety is rooted in cognitive distortions, or inaccurate beliefs or fears about the world. But election-based distress isn’t necessarily based on hypotheticals or overreactions, says licensed clinical social worker Jneé Hill. “A lot of the concerns,” she says, “are very real and very valid based on people’s real lives and lived experiences.”
While election anxiety may feel large and existential, mental health experts agree it can be managed. As you wait for results to roll in, here are some strategies that can help quiet your mind.
Get to the root of your anxiety
To properly address your fears, you first need to specify what triggers your feelings of anxiety beyond not wanting the other side to win, Rosmarin says. What specific policies or issues impact you the most? It might be reproductive rights, the economy, immigration, or war abroad. Identify your top three issues, Rosmarin says, and try to share these worries with family, a friend, a supportive online community, or mental health professional.
Knowing the causes of your fears can help you anticipate and gird against them. Research shows when people were asked whether they expected to be stressed about the election the following day, they reported worse moods and were more likely to rate their physical health as poor, regardless of political affiliation, age, or gender.
Knowing the causes of your fears can help you anticipate and gird against them.
You might also ask yourself why these issues concern you, Hill says. If reproductive rights are your top priority, maybe your deeper fears center on being unable to receive lifesaving medical treatments. “A lot of this,” Hill says, “comes down to safety.”
However, you can anticipate your stress and get in front of it. There’s a thought exercise you can do ahead of encountering something upsetting to slow your thoughts and talk yourself through your anxiety, says Shevaun Neupert, a psychology professor at North Carolina State University and author of a study on how to combat anticipatory election stress. Take a few minutes and think about why you’re stressed, how it’s related to the election, and why this contentious issue exists in the first place. “It really is focused on mental engagement, perspective-taking,” Neupert says, “trying to understand where did this thing come from? Why is it here? And to fully understand it rather than trying to solve it.”
This exercise is effective, Neupert believes, because it helps reduce uncertainty. For instance, you may come to realize a source of your anxiety is a decades-long ongoing foreign policy issue. While this realization doesn’t minimize the problem or provide a solution, sometimes it’s helpful to put the issue into its proper context and perspective. “If we feel like we have a better understanding of a problem or of a stressor or we have a clearer sense of it,” Neupert says, “it’s not as scary.”
Take control where you can
Uncertainty about the future is a major source of general anxiety and can lead to a sense of powerlessness. With so much out of an individual’s control, it’s important to focus on areas where you do have authority. You can, of course, vote, volunteer as a poll worker, and get involved with get out the vote or activist organizations in your community.
You can also try setting goals in your work or social life that have nothing to do with politics but still might help you feel like you’re making progress in some small way, Neupert says. Maybe that goal is to finish a book over the next two weeks or to make dinner every night with your family. “That goes a long way to boosting perceptions of control,” she says.
Then, consider how you’ll assert autonomy over your life after the election, especially if your candidate doesn’t win. You can plan on leaning heavily on your friends or distracting yourself with hobbies. “There might be situations that are beyond my control,” Rosmarin says, “but that doesn’t take away my power of choice in my life, in my limited way.”
Lean into community
Feeling supported by friends and family helps combat anxiety, so try to avoid spending the next few weeks in isolation. Instead, reach out to friends and family (preferably discussing anything but politics) or attend a safe and affirming community event. Find people who fill you with calm instead of dread and with whom you can talk things through and problem-solve. “What can be helpful,” clinical psychologist Krystal Lewis says, “is feeling all emotions, feeling all the feels, with people who are going through it as well.”
These communities will be especially crucial post-election, too, Lewis says. Find people or groups where you can process strong emotions, whether that’s a dance class or a volunteer organization.
Care for your mind and body
In the days leading up to the election and immediately following, especially if a clear winner is not apparent, stressed-out Americans should pay extra care to their minds and bodies. This might mean curbing your consumption of news and social media. While experts say everyone’s tolerance will be different, it’s important to pay attention to how they feel while watching or reading the news and social media. Engage enough to stay informed, but step away if you feel overwhelmed, Lewis says. “Unless that’s your job,” she says, “there’s no need to be that consumed with it.”
Rosmarin suggests turning off your phone and avoiding all news at least 30 minutes before you go to sleep, including on election night. “You’ll wake up in the morning, you’ll find out what the story is. You watching it isn’t going to change anything,” he says. “The only thing it’ll change is make you more tired and grumpy the next day.”
Engage enough to stay informed, but step away if you feel overwhelmed.
Difficult as it may be, try to incorporate joy however you can, Lewis says. Spend a few minutes each day on pleasurable activities that reduce stress, like listening to music, getting together with friends, or meditation.
Regardless of what happens over the coming days and weeks, remind yourself that your concerns are real, Hill says. What matters is finding coping strategies that work for you — and will continue to be effective no matter the outcome.
Chatbots are often quite good at retrieving the information you want from the web. But sometimes you’ll get better results by typing your query into a good old search engine.
Editor’s note, November 1, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary. The one below was originally published in August 2025.
This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.
I typically eat vegetarian, and have considered going fully vegan out of concern for animal welfare. But lately my on-again, off-again gastrointestinal problems have been acting up, and I’ve had to go back on a more restricted diet to manage my symptoms — no spice, no garlic or onions, nothing acidic, and nothing caffeinated. Sticking to a “bland” diet is hard enough, but doing so while vegetarian is very difficult when things like tomatoes and onions and grapefruits are off the table.
I know a lot of people with these issues eat fish or meat, and some medical professionals recommend drinking chicken bone broth to soothe flare-ups. I don’t want to abandon my commitment to animal welfare while my gut sorts itself out, but my food options are limited right now. How should I approach this?
Dear Would-Be Vegetarian,
You’re not alone in finding it hard to stick to a purely vegetarian diet. Only 5 percent of American adults say they’re vegetarian or vegan. What’s more, one study found that 84 percent of people who adopt those diets actually go back to eating meat at some point. And most of them aren’t even dealing with the gastrointestinal problems you face.
So, it speaks to the depth of your moral commitment that you’re really wrestling with this. I’ll have some concrete suggestions for you in a bit, but first I want to emphasize that how you approach the question of meat-eating will depend on your underlying moral theory.
There’s a classic split in moral philosophy between deontologists and utilitarians. A deontologist is someone who thinks an action is moral if it’s fulfilling a duty — and we have universal duties like, “always treat others as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.” From that perspective, killing an animal for food would be inherently morally wrong, because you’re treating the animal as a means to an end.
Meanwhile, a utilitarian is someone who thinks that an action is moral if it produces good consequences — and behaving morally means producing the most happiness or well-being possible, or reducing the most suffering possible. Utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer argue that we should be reducing, and ideally eliminating, the suffering that animals endure at our hands.
Deontologists and utilitarians are often pitted against each other, but they actually have one big thing in common: They both believe in a universal moral principle — whether it’s “always treat others as ends in themselves” or “always maximize happiness.”
A lot of people find that comforting, because it offers certainty about how we should act. Even if acting morally requires hard sacrifices, it’s incredibly soothing to think, “If I just do X, then I’ll know for sure that I’m being a good person!”
But these moral theories assume that all the complexity of human life can be reduced to one tidy formula. Can it, really?
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Another school of philosophy — pragmatism — says we should be skeptical of fixed moral principles. Human life is so complicated, with many different factors at play in any ethical dilemma, so we should be pluralistic about what makes outcomes valuable instead of acting like the only thing that matters is maximizing a single value (say, happiness). And human society is always evolving, so a moral idea that makes sense in one context may no longer make sense in a different context. To a pragmatist, moral truths are contingent, not universal and unchanging.
I think one pragmatist who can really help you out is the University of Michigan’s Elizabeth Anderson. In a 2005 essay applying pragmatism to the question of eating meat, the philosopher points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although certain non-Western societies did ascribe moral worth to some animals).
“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals (other than our pets),” Anderson writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”
In other words, Anderson doesn’t think there’s some universal rule like “eating animals is inherently morally wrong.” It’s our social and technological circumstances that have made us more able than before to see animals as part of our moral circle. She also doesn’t believe there’s a single yardstick — like sentience or intelligence — by which we can judge how much of our moral concern an animal deserves. That’s because moral evaluation isn’t just about animals’ intrinsic capacities, but also about their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, say, or whether they live independently in the wild.
It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us. Killing bedbugs? Totally fine! They may be sentient, but, Anderson writes, “We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace. To one-sidedly accommodate their interests…would amount to surrender.”
Anderson’s point is not that animals’ intelligence and sentience don’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.
With this pragmatic approach in mind, you can consider how to balance your concern for animal welfare with your concern for your own welfare. Instead of thinking in terms of a moral absolute that would force you into a “purist” diet no matter the cost to you, you can consider a “reducetarian” diet, which allows you to ease your own struggle while also taking care for animals seriously.
The key thing to realize is that some types of animal consumption cause a lot less suffering than others.
For one thing, if you’re eating meat, try to buy the pasture-raised kind and not the kind that comes from factory farms — the huge industrialized facilities that supply 99 percent of America’s meat. In these facilities, animals are tightly packed together and live under unbelievably harsh and unsanitary conditions. They’re also often mutilated without pain relief: think pigs being castrated, cows being dehorned, and hens being debeaked. Oh, and chickens have been bred to be so big that they’re in constant pain; they live miserable lives from start to finish.
A pasture-raised label doesn’t mean an animal has been spared all of the harms of modern agriculture — it doesn’t guarantee that pain relief is used for painful procedures, and farm animals across different production systems have been bred to maximize production, which can take a toll on their welfare. And of course they’ll ultimately meet the same fate as those raised on factory farms — slaughter. But your goal here is to meaningfully reduce, not 100 percent eliminate, the harms. And at least pasture-raised animals have gotten to roam around in a field and engage in natural behaviors up until the end.
It’s a similar story for fish, by the way. More than half of the fish we eat comes from fish farms, which are basically just underwater factory farms. Wild-caught fish is not perfect — slow, suffocating deaths are common — but it’s better than farmed.
The caveat here is that a lot of the welfare labels you’ll see on animal products are basically a con. And some certification schemes have similar names, so you have to pay close attention. If you see the label “Certified Humane,” that’s genuinely higher-welfare — but don’t mistake it for “American Humane Certified,” which is really not. And be wary of putting much stock in labels like “cage-free” or “free-range.” They’re better than nothing, but because the terms are often ill-defined and unenforced, they’re not as meaningful as you might think. Here’s a good guide to separating the real deal from the advertising spin.
Another classic recommendation among animal welfare advocates is to eat bigger animals — in other words, go for beef rather than chicken. That’s both because of how miserable chickens’ lives are on factory farms and because, as my former colleague Kelsey Piper has written, it just takes way more chicken lives than cow lives to feed people. Cows are huge, producing about 500 pounds of beef apiece, while a chicken yields only a few pounds of meat. So, every year, the average American eats about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow.
That said, cows take a heavier toll on the climate than chickens do, so you don’t want to eat tons of beef either. The environment is also one of the key values at stake in our consumption choices, so that has to factor in, too.
Of course, another possibility — to the extent that this works with your gastrointestinal issues — is to reach for low-fiber plant-based foods like tofu, seitan, and the smorgasbord of newer products now available (like Beyond and Impossible burgers).
But assuming you’re going to eat meat, it’s a good idea to set some clear parameters and standards around your reducetarian diet. A lot of reducetarians — myself included — have fallen into the trap of saying, “I’ll reduce how much meat I eat,” but forgetting to quantify what that means. That can lead you to eat more meat than you’d intended. So it’s probably better to commit to something like “weekday vegetarian” or “vegan before six” — you can check out the Reducetarian Foundation for suggestions.
At the end of the day, remember that there’s a plurality of values at stake here, and no one of them necessarily trumps all the others. If you feel that eating some meat is important for your well-being right now, and you try to do that in ways that keep suffering for animals to a minimum, I don’t think you need to feel bad about that. That’s because you won’t be shirking your values: You’ll be recognizing that your values are plural, and you’re doing your best to balance between them. That may be the best any of us can really do.
Bonus: What I’m reading
The blogger Bentham’s Bulldog published a piece titled “How to cause less suffering while eating animals.” It contains some of the same recommendations I mentioned above, but the underlying ethical framework is different and it makes one recommendation I didn’t: “offsetting” your meat consumption by donating to highly effective animal charities. I worry that offsetting might create a moral hazard, as with people offsetting their carbon emissions and then potentially feeling free to fly more. But it’s worth considering, particularly if you pair it with clear parameters around your reducetarian diet.
This Aeon essay answers a question I’ve often wondered about: Why haven’t other animals — say, birds — developed complex civilizations like we humans have? Why don’t they build rocket ships, argue about economic policy, and play canasta? I’m grateful to the evolutionary biologist who wrote this piece for finally giving me a satisfying answer.
I can’t stop thinking about this post on how AI companies may have designed chatbots to play an underspecified “helpful assistant” character who, due to being underspecified, looks to the internet for examples of how to play that role, finds tons of science fiction about cheesy robots, and thus starts to behave like a cheesy sci-fi robot (ChatGPT will say things like, “Gee, that really tickles my circuits!”). This post is mega-long, deeply trippy, and worth reading.
National Trust gardener Emily Taylor-Ryan arranges an autumn pumpkin and squash display in the village of Taplow in Buckinghamshire, England, on October 22, 2026. | Jonathan Brady/PA Images via Getty Images
We often pick up hobbies to add some fun to our lives. We join a book group, take up knitting, or commit to finally learning how to play pickleball. But before long, what started out as leisure can begin to feel like just another obligation to execute and perfect: We fall behind in the reading, can’t stop dropping stitches, or the tournament schedule gets overwhelming.
It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the United States. Our obsession with productivity may feel new, especially when it crosses over to our hobbies, but according to Gary Cross, a historian and author of the book Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal, Americans have been trying to make the most of our time for a while now. “A lot of it is that old Protestant work ethic that was part of the early migration to the United States,” he told Vox. “They were predominantly Protestant Christians who saw work as a kind of a special calling from God.”
As Cross explains, this attitude kicked into high gear alongside industrialization. “The capitalists really were all about increasing productivity. Time away from work begins to be seen as in some ways wasted time,” Cross said. And when the labor movement helped win workers some free time for hobbies around the turn of the 20th century, the same mentality made the jump into our leisure time.
That time is something that writer Jenny Odell has thought a lot about and explored in her books Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock and How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. “I think both of my books came out of observing the daily experience that I and the people I knew were having, where our relationship to time felt so painful — this unending intensity that was so exhausting,” she said. “There has to be another way.”
Odell says that one of the ways to shift our relationship with time is through cultivating hobbies — without falling into the trap of relentless quantification and optimization. So how do we learn to truly enjoy our leisure time, and why should we all consider failing a little more along the way? We learn that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Odell, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
How is our pursuit of hobbies connected to how we think about time?
Hobbies are a place where you can see different ways of thinking about time battling each other. There’s a very fine line between someone who pursues a hobby for the sake of doing it versus someone who feels that they need to optimize it, perhaps even make money off of it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but these are different ways of thinking about the activity that you’re doing.
People read the title How to Do Nothing and they think that I’m a person who literally doesn’t do anything. I love to do things and I love to learn things. I think a lot of people start hobbies because they want to learn.
In American culture, a lot of us stop being given opportunities to learn after we’re children or after we’re students. I think it’s really beautiful that adults seek out ways to learn, often leaning into communities where they’re learning with other people. And learning has progress in it. You do get better at things when you learn them.
My feeling is just that that sense of forward movement and learning gets co-opted by this larger culture that we exist in that is also very American: needing to have something to show for your time. What starts out as wanting to learn something turns into something that you’re giving yourself a score on, without your ever having decided to do that.
I spoke with a historian who said part of the reason that we relate to our free time in this particular way in America specifically is the history of the Protestant work ethic. It’s just so ingrained in us. How do you help yourself break out of that mentality?
I have to shout out this book called The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. He talks about this very question. In that book he talks about games and how when you play a game, you take on a whole new set of values, and you do that for whatever couple of hours and then you put it away. It’s kind of this practice in taking values, putting them on, taking them off, putting them away.
For me, either literally playing games or trying to have a more playful, experimental mindset about what it is that I’m doing can break that cycle. When you get closer to [a goal], it gets more and more seductive. Like “I want a higher number.” You just need something to break you out of that and be like, “What is this number even measuring?”
For me, I’m a writer. Words per day are a measure. You think you want more words per day, but all words are not the same. There have been moments where I was trying to optimize words per day. I have to stop myself and think about what other ways I could value the situation. Like, “What were those words? Did I make some sort of breakthrough?”
There’s all these other different ways that you could think about what it is that you’re doing.
Something I think a lot about when it comes to hobbies is failure. For instance, I’m getting back into photography. I did film photography in high school and this year I picked it back up with the goal to shoot a roll of film per month.
The year’s almost over. I’ve done three rolls of film, one of which I must have unloaded incorrectly because it was completely blown out. What role does failure play in our hobbies and how we interact with that?
I love failure. I think it’s so underrated and games are very useful here. A good sports person is open to failure and knows that that’s fun.
I think that along with not having opportunities to learn as adults, we also aren’t given opportunities to fail. That’s probably been the case for a long time, but now with social media and things being more visible for a lot of people, we really are not used to failing. We think we don’t want it.
I feel like I am actively now seeking out things that I’m bad at just so I can have that feeling. I’m a failure addict.
That is true. Once we leave school, what opportunities do we have to safely learn things and fail and try it again?
I don’t know how else to describe it: It’s really fun to be bad at something. Once you accept that you are bad at it, your reason for doing it has to be something else.
I’ve been going to this native plant restoration thing for two and a half years now, so I definitely know my weeds and I am better than the day that I showed up, but I don’t go there to be the best at something.
I showed up on day one and I wasn’t wearing the right clothes. I didn’t have gardening gloves. I had never gardened in my life. I had no idea what I was doing. It was this fascinating feeling. It’s just so different from being an adult who’s specialized in something.
What’s a way to help yourself fall back in love with hobbies if it’s been a while or if you’ve optimized so much, you want to find the joy in it again?
It’s like the equivalent of being right-handed and trying to write with your left hand. Anything you can do to relax the perfectionist grip that you have on this thing.
That means throwing obstacles in your own way or trying to do things in a way you’ve never done them before. Rediscover the same thing from a new angle or in a different context with new people.
Whenever I need a good laugh, I look at an Instagram account called Good Advice for Shitty People. This satirical account is like an advice column for the worst people ever, determined to stay that way. Every time I start reading through it, I can't stop because it's so ridiculous and funny. — Read the rest
The iOS app Oh My Hours takes a new approach to curbing screen time. It splits up your day into hour-long blocks, then shows which ones you wasted on Instagram and TikTok.
It feels like the skies above our AI-frenzied world have darkened in the past month. Employees at Anthropic and Google startedquitting, citing fears that the AI was spiraling out of control. After a string of agents started hacking websites, researchers used AI to discover vulnerabilities in critical systems, leading to large swaths of the web going dark last week and giving rise to a scary term: Black October. At the same time, as it continued to ramp up AI spending, Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 employees — over a quarter of its workforce — and economists once againwarned of a bubble.
It’s hard to reconcile the incongruity between the recent bad news and good news. For most of us, the state of AI is anxiety-inducing — especially when it comes to our livelihoods. According to a Pew Research Center study published in August, 71 percent of Americans think AI will lead to fewer jobs in the next two decades. That figure is up 7 percentage points from where it was two years ago. Sure, in the best-case scenarios, AI could erase inefficiencies at work, streamline our daily lives, cure diseases, and generally improve the human condition.
But what if you are the “inefficiency” at work that gets erased?
That tension is at the heart of Ethan Mollick’s latest book Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI. If there is such a thing as an AI sage, it would be Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School and faculty director of its Generative AI Labs. To the nearly half a million subscribers to his Substack newsletter, One Useful Thing, he delivers semiweekly updates from the jagged frontier of the technology’s development. His message in any medium is resoundingly clear: You need to use AI in order to understand it. And to get the most out of using it, he argues that you have to accept that AI is not going away; it’s only going to become more important.
That ethos doesn’t make the existential threats of AI any less daunting, but that’s not the point. Unless you’re an early Anthropic employee or a United States senator, there’s probably not much you can do directly to rein in AI’s potential harms. But you can, according to Mollick’s worldview, decide how the technology could fit into your life and think about how you fit into an AI-dominated future.
I recently spoke with Mollick about his new book, what life and work might look like in the agentic AI era, and what it means to be an artisan when even knowledge is industrialized. His theories about living with AI are meant to help you navigate the future, regardless of the latest forecast. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
We’re entering a new era for AI, and the vibes are different. AI agents are something that many of us will encounter, interact with, and maybe even embrace. I’ve always known you as someone who jumps on the cutting edge of this technology to figure out what it can do. What do you think most people don’t understand about the next generation of AI?
I really think people haven’t internalized what agents do. Agents mean many things, and we can talk about personal agents, like Muse. But the fact that the problems that plagued working with AI agents before — you had to guide them each step of the way, they made mistakes, hallucinated constantly — that’s kind of gone. You can regularly get hours, days, weeks of work out of a system.
It’s not just a theoretical thing anymore. I talk to coders all the time who are a hundred times or more productive than they were before. And in other fields, we’ve kind of moved past the theoretical discussion about AI being, “This is going to be a big deal,” to, “It’s here.” From a whole kind of co-intelligence perspective, we’ve gone from, “Here’s how we use AI and work with a chatbot back and forth,” to, “These systems are now doing real work in ways that matter to real people and are reshaping real fields for better or worse.” And if you’re used to using AI a year ago, if you’re not paying for one of these systems, it’s really easy to have lost track of what’s going on.
What about the practical, everyday ways that AI is disrupting our lives? And what do you think are the limits of that disruption?
So outside of the job world and homework cheating, I think life has changed only a little bit for people, partially because these systems were kind of complicated to use and you had to decide what you were using them for. But I think the advent of personal agents, like Muse and Dot, are going to lead to a very rapid change in a lot of ways.
Most people I know who aren’t experts who use these systems, like my parents, are using these things spontaneously. They’re finding that once you know how to prompt the AI to do something, it can do things spontaneously and come back to you because it has your email and everything else. Just as one example, I was unable to figure out how to cancel my standing $8-a-month wifi subscription from my airline, and I was like, figure this out. And it went to customer service, joined chats, then I have no idea what it did, but now I don’t have a subscription to wifi anymore, thank goodness.
“I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work.”
So there is this sort of lowering friction piece that’s super interesting, with good and bad elements to it. The bad side of lowering friction is both that every article gets written by AI, so there’s no human thinking in it anymore, and that companies don’t want 10,000 customer service agents coming to them demanding new things. So I think we’re just on the edge of seeing the mass change in everyday life. Right now, AI is a really good second opinion on everything. As agents become more popular, they start to take action.
How do you know when to let AI do the work, though? We know that offloading certain tasks to AI can make you worse at doing those kinds of tasks in the future. How do you take advantage of AI’s ability to do drudgery but also hold onto your own expertise?
If there’s a personal theme underlying Co-Existence, it’s that one. That is an incredibly hard choice to make, and we’re historically very bad at making it.
Students are the No. 1 case because they’re willing to offload homework because homework sucks and because the incentives for doing any piece of homework are terrible. But overall we need to do it to learn. So people offload that, but even if you’re trying to do the right kind of thing, like using AI only to help you learn and not to replace learning, it turns out that when chatbots are in assistant mode, as opposed to using them as a tutor, it feels like you’re learning even though you’re not. You feel like you’re in the loop even though you’re not. And so that assumes that we both know we want to offload and we do it intelligently and that we do it in a way that helps our long-term gain.
I am worried about us being able to do that. You have to draw lines for yourself about what skills matter to you or not, and you have to be thoughtful, in a way that we’re usually not, about what we’re giving up and what we’re not. Technology’s designed for us to give up stuff. We don’t walk 50 miles a day anymore in forced marches. I don’t know how to weave clothes. There’s a lot of stuff I’m very happy to not know: how to maintain my computer in some ways, even though that’s dangerous. I let Codex scan for security issues because it does a better job than me faster. But I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work.
So I don’t have an easy answer, but I think that that will be the defining question for most people in their career paths right now and their lives: What do I give up? I think we can be too sentimental about things that we’re giving up. It’s okay, but we don’t know the full chain of consequences. I think that struggle is going to be central to a lot of people’s experience. I wish I had an easy answer, but now that AI can do so many things, de-skilling is a real problem at this point.
We’re living through a huge transformation. That’s increasingly clear. Besides losing their jobs, a lot of people are scared of losing the sense of what makes them human and what makes them valuable. How do people hold onto that in the years to come?
There’s a transformation happening, and for some people, the work will get more satisfying. There’s a lot of coders who did not like writing lines of code, but they did like summoning software and figuring out what they wanted to build. Their lives are much better because the AI does all the tedious work. They can command things to be built, and it’s so much more exciting than it was before. It lets people who didn’t code start to do incredible coding projects. So on one hand, that’s deeply freeing of the kinds of work that we did. On the other hand, there are people who love writing those lines of code and that’s gone now. You’re a hand-weaver in a world of power looms. Your stuff might be elegant and beautiful, but it is not going to last in a world where industrialization happens.
Industrialization versus craft is a way to think about this. There’s a lot of craft that we’ve grown to really appreciate, like the handcrafted sentence. Those things will be under threat from the logic of industrialization, which is that we need to do more of it. I think that there’s going to be a shift. There’s satisfying work to do, but I think a lot of what was satisfying human work will be under pressure to disappear, because you took pleasure in something that was not automatable, but now is.
We’ve been through this in industrial revolutions before. This is happening at a very large scale to intellectual work, where craft was a very important part of what we did. Mathematics was craft, software engineering was craft. I think that we’ll be under pressure to produce more of it, which is what industrialization’s about, even if that destroys the value of doing this as a person. You get paid to do it now, but you’re not getting the same value you did before.
“We’re no longer in a place where AI is going away.”
I think we’re going to find lots of crises of meaning. Some people are going to find huge amounts more meaning in their work, either because the work itself is now much more interesting. Work is a lot of crap, too. We can say great things about it, but people spend a quarter of their work life saying they’re bored. It’s not like this was a great job for everybody. So some people will have much more excitement in craft. Some people will have it extracted out of their job, and it’s all going to be happening at once. I know it’s not a satisfying answer, but that’s what’s happening.
Forgive me for saying so, but that was an anxiety-inducing answer. It’s an anxiety-inducing time. I wonder what advice you have for us anxious people?
I think anxiety is real, and there’s different levels of anxiety. We’re going through a wrenching change, or we will be going through one that we’re on the edges of now. There is also existential risk about whether AI will kill us all, where we clearly need more regulation. The answers are unclear. Smart people seem to think that that’s a real danger. It’s hard to know. But leaving that aside, there’s anxiety about our own transformation, our jobs. I mean, the industrial revolutions worked out great in the end, but during it, [that] was the time of Marx and anarchists and Dickens writing about London. There’s a transition we have to go through here.
I don’t think we can pretend it’s not happening, and I see a lot of people taking comfort in the idea that maybe this all will collapse and AI will go away. Even if there was a bubble financially, we’re no longer in a place where AI is going away or stopping development. I worry a lot about people doing that. Once you face that, though, I find people often reconstruct meaning in very exciting ways. Thinking about what more you can do and where you find joy in this is actually quite exciting. So I think that anxious optimism is a reasonable place to be.
What I worry about is sticking your head in the sand saying, “I’m not going to learn AI. This will go away. I’m going to pretend it’s not happening.” I mean, I wish I could give you that option. I think there’s a lot of people who wish we could slow things down or turn a dial down, but there’s also a lot of exciting things. There’s a lot of hard problems in the world that are unsolved.
If you lean into the positive pieces, you can ask how we mitigate risk but also think about how we can build a better world. Part of what makes me nervous is people sitting out that second question and just filling up with anxiety rather than believing we have a tool that can rebuild things. How do we rebuild a better world for journalism or for nonprofits or whatever it is? I think it’s a reasonable question to ask, and I worry it’s asked too little.
Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
I am someone who notoriously struggles with big decisions. Over a year ago, I found a wonderful partner, who very much feels like they could be my soulmate. We’ve been dating three time zones apart for a while. Being near our families, communities, and aging parents is a shared value — unfortunately one that makes it hard to compromise on location. Either way, I have to give up something I want and value — a wonderful partner who I can see a life with (the first time I’ve felt this way about someone), or the place I’ve always imagined settling down and that represents the person I am becoming and values I want to live. Two good things are pulling me toward opposite paths and there’s not much room for compromise. How do I make the “right” decision?
Dear Fork in the Road,
You’ve found a place in the world that you feel connected to and you met a person you envision spending the rest of your life with. Geographically restless and lonely people everywhere are jealous! But with your good fortunes seemingly at odds with one another, it feels that by choosing one, you’ll forsake the other — and doom the choice you did make to feel like a sacrifice.
When circumstances have forced me to make a tough decision, I’ve daydreamed about a thought experiment: the Many Worlds Interpretation.
In quantum physics, particles behave differently than us mortals. For example, an electron can be in more than one place at once until it’s measured. How can it be in multiple locations and then be observed to be in a single position? In the 1950s, the American physicist Hugh Everett proposed an explanation: The universe splits into alternate versions of itself, one for each place a particle could be measured. To apply this theory to your life, if you chose to move cities, don’t worry, another universe would be created in which you didn’t choose to do this, and you’ll stay right where you are!
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Yes, I know you can’t transport yourself into such a quantum realm, but there is something helpful in thinking about alternative universes. Did you have an immediate reaction to which universe you would be upset not to inhabit? Take that information to heart, because it’s likely you’re not ultimately going to make your choice based on a tidy pro-con list.
The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky won a Nobel Prize for pointing out that most of our decisions are not based on rationality. People use two systems for decision-making: System one is faster and emotionally based, and system two is more logical and slow. But even the slower, more deliberate decision-making can fall prey to any number of cognitive biases.
In your case, one called loss aversion may be especially relevant. People have the tendency to worry more about what they’ll lose, even if what they stand to gain is equal in value. For example, it will likely feel worse to lose a $10 bill from your pocket than it would feel good to find a $10 bill on the ground. This bias is relevant in people’s social lives too: They hold onto older, maybe fading, friendships because the thought of losing them is too painful, but don’t seek out new friends with equal effort. Or, they stay in a meh job because it feels scary to let it go, rather than applying that same energy to finding a new one. Once you accept that your decision-making process will be subject to messy feelings and biases, you can let go of trying to make the perfect choice.
You opened your question by sharing that you struggle with big decisions, and it makes me wonder if you simply feel anxiety about making a choice at all. This is called analysis paralysis. When outcomes are uncertain, anxiety wakes up, and a voice in your head tells you to avoid taking risks. People with analysis paralysis overthink their options, over-research, and second-guess their first instincts. These actions have more to do with stress over committing to any decision rather than the content of what you’re deciding on.
A surprising finding from psychology may ease your paralysis. Researchers told people to make a big life decision — on the order of ending a relationship or quitting their job — by flipping a coin. Heads, they made the change; tails, they didn’t. For those who followed the results of the toss, the people who made the change were overwhelmingly happier, even though their decision to do so was made by pure chance. These random-flip outcomes also show “that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices,” the authors wrote. The coin helped the participants resist the bias of tending to stick with the status quo, even if it doesn’t make them happier.
To begin to loosen your paralysis, something that might assist you, paradoxically, is to introduce more options into the mix. Jacques Derrida, the 20th-century French philosopher, is known for the concept of deconstruction, a way of analyzing texts or ideas more critically, and showing they’re not as stable as they seem. He pointed out that we often think in binaries and false opposites: good vs. evil, man vs. woman, nature vs. culture. This can set up an easy dichotomy in which one of the items is good, and the other, by being its opposite, is bad.
You’ve created a binary situation, and you don’t actually have to be in one. What if there’s a third option, or a fourth? What if you and your partner move to a brand-new city, and set out to create new community, together? What if you and your partner find a way to split your time between your respective hometowns? Now you don’t have only two good things pulling you in opposite directions, you would have different options you can be more creative with. You also don’t have to commit to the decision you make now for the rest of your life. You can always move cities again, or try to find another mate.
You are with a partner you love, and live in a place that you love. You might reframe your situation as a win-win, rather than a lose-lose. And remember that if you don’t make a choice, you’re not successfully avoiding a decision — it’s a choice of its own. Your partner may get tired of long-distance or end the relationship for another reason. Or, you could start to resent the place you live since you have to travel so much to spend time with your partner.
I also want to point out how you describe your partner. Don’t turn your nose up at finding someone who you can see making a life with, especially as you note, if you’ve never felt that way before. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has said that there were two most important moments in his life: when he came out of the womb, and when he met his wife. “What happened with me would not have happened without her.” Buffett’s view is supported by research that shows that people with supportive spouses tend to take on more rewarding challenges throughout their lives, and end up having more personal growth and happiness.
Another quantum idea that might interest you is spooky action at a distance. This is when two particles, even far apart, become connected to one another. Measuring one affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. If your partner feels like your “soulmate,” perhaps you have become entangled already. Don’t fret about making the perfect choice about the next phase of life, but do make a choice (any choice!) that considers your futures as bound up together. For the other details, maybe it’s time to find a coin to flip.
Bonus: What I’m reading
I’m currently re-watching The Twilight Zone and recommend the episode Mirror Image, about a young woman who encounters her double from a parallel universe. The show’s creator, Rod Serling, was inspired to write the script when he saw a man at the airport who looked suspiciously like him, and had a similar suitcase and jacket. What if he approached the man, and it turned out to be himself? The dreamy story also inspired the movie Us by Jordan Peele.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for their work on “handedness”: how molecules can have variants that are non-identical mirror images of one another. These variants are their own kind of dark doppelganger; only one can exist in the body. The science writer Ann Finkbender wrote a charming essay about understanding this principle of life in Last Word on Nothing.
If you haven’t yet read Stoner by John Williams, just put down whatever you’re currently reading and do it. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you don’t act, and let your passivity make choices for you.
A complaint I hear a lot from my millennial peers is that our parents didn’t teach us enough about money. I can say that personal finance wasn’t dinner table conversation in my house, and even as I went off to college and started fending for myself, it was almost a taboo subject. When it came to money, people either had it or they didn’t, and you definitely didn’t talk about it.
Maybe this is why the average American isn’t exactly fluent in personal finance, and the situation is getting worse. Americans can only answer about 50 percent of basic questions about borrowing, savings, and risk on a financial literacy survey, according to a 2026 study by TIAA, a retirement services company. About a third of those surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet and are debt-constrained. These figures have remained relatively unchanged for nearly a decade, but dropped to their lowest level in this year’s study.
It makes sense: It’s hard to learn about money when it’s not taught in schools, and it’s such an intensely private topic. It’s also hard to make good financial decisions when you’re one of the growing number of American households struggling to pay bills, repay debts, and save for the future — and feeling very stressed about it.
In a perfect world, each of us could sit down with a financial adviser to get help — but most of us can’t afford that. Instead, average Americans tend to find personal finance tips on TikTok, in Reddit threads, by watching Suze Orman on YouTube or How to Get Rich on Netflix, or by Googling their questions.
Now we have AI tools, too.
With access to an internet’s worth of information and financial advice, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots can answer any question you ask. They can help you put together a basic budget or, armed with your bank statements and the details of your student loans and your retirement accounts, tailor solutions to your specific situation. Or, at least, that’s the promise.
Key takeaways
More people are turning to AI for financial advice:One in five Americans have used AI to help manage their money, and some experts think chatbots could be better than the status quo.
AI works best if you know what questions to ask: Those with basic financial literacy will be able to make the most of these tools, while those without it — who might need help the most — could be led astray.
Better advice comes with greater risks: Sharing your financial information with a chatbot helps personalize its recommendations. This raises privacy concerns, so you might want to delete your data when you’re done.
Think of AI as a financially savvy friend:Chatbots can answer money questions you might be embarrassed to ask someone else and use that context to help build your budget.
AI could create a more utopian, more equitable future, where reliable, hyper-personalized advice is just a prompt or two away for people who can’t afford to meet with an expert in real life. But machines are built by people, and there’s good reason to be concerned that these machines will simply replicate the biases and disparities built into our current system.
Here’s what experts say about how to make the most of these tools — and how to think about all of the inherent risks of uploading a lot of personal financial information to a chatbot or, worse, giving an AI agent the keys to your bank account.
The steep rise, risks, and rewards of AI financial advisers
Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used AI tools like ChatGPT for financial advice, and close to 25 percent for Gen Z adults and millennials have tried it, according to an August Gallup poll. These numbers could tick up too: In October, OpenAI started rolling out a dedicated personal finance tool to its ChatGPT Free and Go users in the United States, which effectively means anyone can try it. ChatGPT Finances lets you securely connect your bank account to the tool using a platform called Plaid, and then you can basically have a conversation with the chatbot about your real-time finances down to the penny. It’s like an AI-powered Mint (RIP) that you can talk to directly.
Regardless of where you encounter a chatbot or how much data you give it, experts say these tools could genuinely help improve financial literacy. You can talk to them about money problems you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family, or ask questions and receive actionable, personalized information. There are real upsides to using AI this way.
Taha Choukhmane, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying outcomes when people turn to chatbots for financial advice. In general, these AI tools give pretty good advice, and that advice gets better as people become more practiced in asking the right question, according to research he published earlier this year.
“We were actually quite surprised that relative to the status quo, the average American would be better off if they were to follow the advice,” Choukhmane told me. But he added a caveat: “Just following the advice without understanding the advice puts you at risk of not fully understanding the risk.”
But you shouldn’t trust everything a chatbot tells you and should verify everything before making any decisions.
Chatbot advice has some significant limitations. First, it’s not impartial. The finance industry has a vested interest in steering you toward certain ways of managing your money, and that typically means selling you products, like loans. If you’ve ever searched for personal finance tips on Google, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the top results come from banks and other financial institutions. This is by design, according to John Campbell, an economics professor at Harvard. But because AI is aggregating all of that advice, the specific influences and possible bias is less obvious.
“AI is very promising for providing low-cost financial advice in plain English that will arguably be better than what many people would be able to do on their own,” said Campbell, who’s also the co-author of Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone. “One caveat is that chatbot advice is quite likely — unless a model has been carefully trained — to reflect the average of whatever’s being posted on the internet, and that may or may not be first-rate advice.”
An example Campbell gives is the question of when to start taking Social Security benefits. While you’re eligible at age 62, many economists agree that you should delay your benefits, which, based on the way the government calculates your monthly payouts, will allow you to enjoy much higher benefits later in life. But paid financial advisers can recommend starting as early as possible, since waiting longer reduces the amount of money that needs to be managed, which reduces the adviser’s fees. That means there’s a lot of conflicting advice online, much of it supplied by the finance industry. And that’s the information used to train AI models.
“The advice is much more mixed,” Campbell said. “And so if a chatbot is learning from that, it may not actually give the best advice.”
It can be hard to recognize bad advice anywhere in life, but especially when you’re talking to a machine that’s programmed to please you. A chatbot could encourage you to consider a balance transfer, to lean in on credit card rewards, or to refinance your mortgage — all decisions with upsides and downsides for you, but definite upsides for banks — without you realizing how much of its training data comes from the finance industry selling these products. What’s worse is that if you do end up taking bad advice, it might be years before you realize it. You won’t know that you refinanced a mortgage at a bad time until a better time comes along.
That leads me to the other major issue with using chatbots for money advice: People who lack financial literacy are the most likely to fall for bad advice, because they simply don’t recognize it as such. They also tend to be less wealthy, which means they can’t afford big mistakes.
One way to mitigate risk, oddly enough, is to give the AI chatbot more personal information. The more details about your situation it has to consider, the more it can offer personalized advice. More context also means better advice, according to Choukhmane.
“There’s a trade-off there,” Choukhmane said. “There’s real risk around privacy, and so I think everyone needs to find their level of control.”
Don’t assume your data is safe
Any time you’re talking to a chatbot, you’re putting a lot of trust in tech companies to take care of the personal details you’re sharing. Sending sensitive financial data is an especially risky proposition. While tech companies, including OpenAI, promise to keep your data secure, there’s already a long list of breaches, leaks, and privacy violations that serve as cautionary tales.
It’s also impossible to know what tech companies might do with your data in the future. Most of them will use it to train their models, unless you tell them not to. Some of them will use the data to serve you personalized ads.
Then there’s the risk of bad actors getting into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account. If you’ve been using a chatbot for financial advice and uploading your bank statements, a hacker could gain access to a stunning amount of information that could enable them to do all kinds of terrible things to your life.
“They could steal your identity and open accounts and then quickly bankrupt a person,” said Delicia Reynolds Hand, a senior director at Consumer Reports. “It’s not even so much the primary underlying accounts that could be at risk, it’s more just access to this information.”
The steady march of AI progress is making this situation even more complicated. The previous era of chatbots offering financial advice is quickly bleeding into a new phase of AI agents logging into bank accounts on users’ behalf. If you’re using a tool like Claude Cowork or even an AI assistant like Muse, you can give an agent the login credentials to your bank account, and because the agent is operating its own computer, it can actually make transfers, apply for loans, or really do anything in your account. This is reportedly driving major banks wild, since they don’t know which logins are coming from humans and which are agents. And because we know that AI agents are unpredictable, it’s hard to know how that access might go wrong.
Beyond data security and privacy, you should also be aware of the simple fact that nobody’s really at fault if you end up losing money using these tools. Chatbots are not regulated in the way that human financial advisers, who have a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest, are.
“If I get bad tax advice from H&R Block or a tax adviser, there are a clear set of rules and guardrails in place to manage what I can expect in that relationship and where the service they use has liability and where that liability ends,” Hand said. “Currently, that’s not the case for these tools.”
Trust but verify — and then delete your data
In the final years of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan popularized an old Russian proverb: Trust, but verify. The phrase is somewhat nonsensical, since trusting someone implies that you don’t need to verify what they’re saying, and verifying what’s said implies you didn’t trust them in the first place. But if you are willing to shoulder a bit of risk, consider approaching AI this way, especially when your life savings are on the line. I’d also suggest adding a coda to the phrase: And then delete your data.
Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you.
The great paradox with tools like ChatGPT and Claude is that they’re very good at generating truthy text. It sounds authoritative and looks correct — and usually is. Except when it isn’t. AI is famously unpredictable and prone to hallucinations. You can ask the same question twice and get two different answers. That doesn’t mean these tools are useless. It just means you have to approach them with caution. You have to interrogate these chatbots, challenge whatever advice they give you, and then crosscheck that with other, more reputable, sources.
“If you’ve never used these tools, I would not encourage you to just change all your financial plans based on your first conversation,” Choukhmane said. “You want to be quite careful. Start using these tools, start understanding, ask a lot of follow-up questions.”
When it comes to mitigating risk, consider giving ballpark figures for your income or spending when you’re talking to a chatbot about your finances. Uploading financial documents, even if they’re redacted, is inevitably filling a tech company’s vault with your sensitive information without necessarily knowing what will happen to it next. You should also dig into your privacy and security settings to make sure you’ve turned on multi-factor authentication and that your personal data is not being used to train AI models and gets deleted after 30 days.
Ethan Bloch, the product lead for ChatGPT for Financial Services, made a similar set of recommendations when I talked to him recently. Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you. They’re designed to inform and help you think through complex topics.
“You should liken it to just talking to a friend who has some very informed opinions about finance,” Bloch told me. “But if you’re actually making some large financial decision — your portfolio or retirement — you still need to seek out the help.”
Regardless of how experienced you are with chatbots or how much data you’re prepared to hand over, remember what Campbell, the Harvard professor, said. If your financial literacy isn’t great, AI chatbots can be trouble. And if you’re like most Americans, you could probably stand to learn a little bit more about things like mortgages and interest rates.
Yes, Chatbots can be a good way to brush up on financial literacy. You can ask them the money questions you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family. But you can also learn about money the old-fashioned way: Reading books and websites written by reputable, independent sources. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has a portal of financial education resources, including games and quizzes. Khan Academy has a course that covers everything from credit scores to college savings. There’s a personal finance subreddit that I joined years ago and read almost daily. There are budgeting apps, like YNAB which has its own huge Reddit presence.
Whatever you do to learn more about personal finance, simply doing something is progress. Talking about personal finance isn’t the taboo it once was in the US, and it’s even a required course in the vast majority of American high schools now. And while AI won’t magically solve your money problems, it can help get you started. Just be careful. Your livelihood could be on the line.
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