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Children still learn long division even though calculators exist, and many people continue to study languages even as AI translation becomes faster and more accurate. Is there a deeper purpose for learning that technology will never touch?

In this episode of How to Touch Grass, the co-hosts Natalie Brennan and Julie Beck hear from Michelle Miller, a cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University who studies technology and learning. She explains that although the changing tides of tech may shape what and how we learn, as humans we still have the autonomy to build the minds we want.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Michelle Miller: Learning is how we build ourselves as individuals, and it’s how humanity shapes its course.

Julie Beck: Michelle Miller has thought a lot about the purpose of learning. She’s a cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University focused on attention and memory and how technology shapes education. As she said, learning is a very human endeavor. But what we learn and the kinds of learning we value are shaped by the changing tides of technology.

Beck: I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Natalie Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.

Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.

Brennan: Julie, that sentiment—that what we learn changes with the tides of technology—feels really relevant to a change I’ve noticed in the last decade. I think of coding and how big of a push that was when I was in college to Learn to code or you’ll be left behind. But just a few years later, now my coder friends are really worried about job security, and the thing we’re being pressed to learn is learning how to correctly prompt AI so that it can code.

Beck: Mmm. Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. And the thing that I keep thinking about now that so many people are starting to outsource so many things to AI—coding and other things—one of the biggest questions I keep coming back to is: What is the point of learning something when you no longer have to? When a machine could just do it for you?

Brennan: Well, this is one of those questions that keeps coming back around, right? Why do I need to learn math if a calculator can do it?

Beck: And yet, generations of children still continue to learn math!

Brennan: True.

Beck: So we’ve come to some consensus that there is value to learning long division even if you don’t end up using it much as an adult. But the question feels especially relevant right now, because the kind of things that technology is currently threatening to replace are more wide-ranging and complex than just arithmetic.

[Music]

Miller: I look back and I say, At every big turning point in history, how many times was it: and then we learned how to? This is what forward motion really is.

Beck: We really wanted to talk to Michelle about this because she has a really expansive view of what technology is and how it shapes us. Not just whether tech is good or bad for learning, but what kinds of tech help or hurt, under what circumstances.

Brennan: And it all depends on how we use that technology.

Beck: Exactly.

Michelle, I’m curious: Have you learned anything new recently?

Miller: Oh my gosh. Well, one of the things that I’m working on right now is barebow archery.

Beck: Oh, okay!

Miller: So really low-tech, you know, think really traditional wooden bow and so on. And I have a coach, and I share my archery range with a lot of individuals who are doing more of the actual hunting type of archery with the big compound bows. So that’s not me. I’m the lady who’s over shooting at 15 yards just with my little quiver of arrows trying to just get a little bit better every single time.

Beck: I love it. You’re like Legolas.

Miller: (Laughs.)

Beck: I was gonna ask if, you know, technology was involved in anything that you had learned recently, but I mean, I guess a bow is technology of a very ancient sort.

Miller: It absolutely is. And it is funny, though, that even something that is so almost primal in that very physical, what we think of as low-tech, although it would’ve been high-tech at some point in human history—

Beck: In the Bronze Age or whenever that was, yeah.

Miller: —it’s still complemented these days by technology. And I think of something else that—I went through a relearning journey about starting 20 years ago, which is knitting.

Beck: Mmm.

Miller: But it is fascinating that there, too, you think of something that’s so tactile, so physical, and it’s really enjoyed a resurgence in the modern age because of technology. Because we have the ability to, you know, I no longer have to depend on maybe my great aunt or the lady down the street to show me, Oh my gosh, how to get out of this problem? I have my choice of instructional videos. There’s communities. There’s whole sites that are just devoted to this. So—

Beck: That’s definitely true when it comes to my hobbies. But I want to step way back for a sec, for the big philosophical view. Are you ready?

Miller: Okay.

Beck: What, to you, is the ultimate purpose of learning?

Miller: Ah, the ultimate purpose of learning. I think that there’s a lot of ways that we as people and our minds and our brains evolve and change over the course of our lifetimes, and some of those are kind of out of our control. They’re sort of “nature takes its course.” But the changes that are wrought through learning are the ones that, in a sense, we have the most agency and control over, that we can self-direct. Whether it’s saying, I wanna learn a new crochet stitch, and this would be a way to make something that’s unique or to spend time with people I care about, or to test myself and my own creativity and limits. The way that we can do that is learning. And we’ve talked about the technology angle of it, but it’s still also something really social. I think that teaching another human being how to do something—that is one of the highest and best expressions of humanity that there is. It’s one of the best and most positive ways that we interact with and contribute to one another. So I do think it comes back to that core, our self-agency and our connection to this great web of humanity. I mean, it comes about through learning.

Beck: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay, it seems like we’re kind of coming away with: The point of learning is that you are able to kind of direct your own experience in this life in a way that you might otherwise, in a lot of ways, just be kinda tossed about on the tides of, like, history and aging. Is that fair to say?

Miller: I think that’s fair to say. And, I mean, to maybe even elevate it a little bit more, especially as a kind of an introverted person myself, I think of my own mind is that’s where I live. That’s ultimately, well, literally at the end of the day, that’s where we’re at. And our mind is our experience, and learning builds the mind that we live in.

Beck: Yes. I mean, ultimately, we are all just, like, in the black box of our own skulls, unfortunately, when it comes to how we engage with the world. We can’t really get out of there. When do you think technology helps with that purpose, and when does it get in the way?

Miller: So I like how you put that question of not good or bad, but more when. And I would add to that how. So instructional designers will always say, You have to start with the end in mind. So, you know, a professor will walk in and say, Well, I heard about this technology or this application, this quiz game or whatever at a conference. Should I do it? And they will always take a breath and say, What are you trying to accomplish? Or sometimes, What problem are you trying to solve? Where do you know that students are going to struggle? That’s where, sometimes, the boost of a technology tool can be helpful. And one case in point that really illustrates this, I think pretty clearly, is this: So there’s this principle or phenomenon called “retrieval practice.” We often contrast it with, for many students, good-faith effort. They think the way to study, say, a list of vocabulary terms, they think, Okay, I’m gonna reread that part of my textbook over and over. I’m gonna highlight, and I’m gonna read it again, and I’m gonna read it again. I’m gonna kind of have a general little gut check and say, ‘Uh, did that feel familiar? Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve got it.’ But what will deliver the ability to retain that stuff you’re reviewing is to close the book and answer questions, even if you don’t know the material very well. It just produces these huge, long-lasting effects that are very, very versatile.

Beck: Socrates was right. (Laughs.)

Miller: Yeah. So how does that figure in with technology? Well, first it was CD-ROM databases that had lots of quiz questions that students could answer, and you could track how the whole class was doing, and students could get immediate feedback. They didn’t have to wait for me to grade. It was great. And then we moved on to things like these little in-class clickers, where the whole class could do retrieval practice and answer a question. And now with AI, AI can generate lots of really high-quality questions, even open-ended questions. We’re no longer locked into multiple choice. So that’s a great example of how—it’s not just like, well, grab a phone, open an app, learning happens. But here’s a principle that helps accelerate this one particular aspect of learning. An expert has gone through and selected and said, Well, here’s what you need to know. And so we marry those two together, and then we get something that actually does deliver something that’s positive for students.

Beck: And when is it not helpful?

Miller: Where it detracts. If there’s something that you want to experience and remember in the moment, that's a different form of memory. That’s what we call episodic memory. So if I’m finally visiting, say, in my area, the Grand Canyon, and I want to see this and remember this moment, that’s where technology is not necessarily going to help. Even things like—it’s very ironic: We take pictures to remember an experience, but there’s research showing that we remember less from an experience when we’re walking around taking pictures of it. And it’s really just an attention effect. Just these little phones—even if you have it on “Do not disturb,” setting up the shot takes away, takes you out of that moment.

Beck: Right.

Miller: So when that is the concern, technology is not your friend.

Beck: Hmm. That’s so interesting. As you were saying that, I was thinking about, you know, people— whenever you go to a concert these days, right, everybody just has their phone up and they’re recording the video of their favorite song or they’re taking a picture. And I hadn’t thought about it as learning, but I guess in a way it’s sort of like, your memory of your life is like learning the story of your life. So maybe you are not retaining that concert so much.

Miller: Perfect example. Yeah, we don’t have different, you know, pieces of the brain or parts of the memory that are like, Okay, here’s learning; here’s serious learning, and here’s all the other stuff.

Beck: Learning is just everything.

Miller: Learning is an experience.

[Music]

Beck: I guess to drill into it a little more, what is specifically the value of learning a thing that you can just easily outsource to technology and you don’t ever need to do it? Like, I would like to remember my trip to the Grand Canyon, like sure, but I don’t ever need to calculate a tip ever again in my whole life. I’ll just do it on my phone.

Miller: Yeah. And I mean, if that’s really the case, then I say: Have at it; pull out the phone.

Beck: Mm. But is there still, I don’t know, whether it’s philosophical, spiritual, cognitive value of learning a thing that you don’t have to learn? For instance, learning a foreign language when you can just translate it with AI, or learning how to code when, from all reports, it seems like AI is kinda taking over that industry. Is there still value to learning those things regardless of that progress?

Miller: Yeah, and as I’m kinda standing—I think of myself kind of standing at the bottom of a mountain of: I wanna become expert in. And let’s take, for example, I wanna be an expert in fashion design. You know, where does that step start? It starts with really getting into the nuts and the bolts of the construction of what you’re doing. So maybe, if that’s my goal, I wanna learn how to knit a sweater from hand or sew a pair of pants. And even as an expert fashion designer, how many times am I gonna just sit down and sew a garment for a client or just knit something by hand?

Beck: Probably send it to the factory, right?

Miller: Yeah, you send it to the factory! But to really understand How does fabric behave? Why do I wanna make cable stitches in a particular way? And how is cashmere different than cotton when I work with it? I wonder if there really is no substitute for sitting with it. So it’s not—I don’t wanna make it sound like, Oh, you gotta take your medicine and pay your dues. I don’t think it has to be like that. I think it’s more in the spirit of exploration and the spirit of actually physically seeing: How do the building blocks that I’m gonna work with from here on out, how do those behave? So that’s an argument for learning from the ground up, even when we can look it up.

[Music]

Beck: Okay, this is gonna sound very stupid, but why is or how is AI different than a calculator?

Miller: Okay. AI and calculator. Oh my gosh, talk about a conversational football that we’ve been throwing back and forth in my field right now. I mean, at its core, it does offer a few ways to do things that were time-consuming and maybe even sometimes do them more accurately. Well, that’s where a calculator perhaps is even better than AI in that way. Calculators don’t hallucinate. They are one-trick ponies, but boy, they do that trick really, really well. So that’s one perhaps smaller difference. But AI is not like a calculator in that it can mimic authentic human communication. In, say, contemporary higher education, you hear horror stories of students who are like—you ask them an icebreaker question like “What’s your favorite movie?” and they have AI pick a favorite movie and fill that out. And you’re just going, Oh, why? And here I am on the other end, pouring my heart and soul, and not AI, into this course. And who’s even on the other end? So I think it raises more questions about what’s kind of the contract between professor and teacher and student?

Beck: Yeah. Well, thinking about the calculator comparison, I mean, that’s something that I just hear a lot from people who are, you know, very excited about AI or not too concerned. Just sort of saying, Calculators made us more efficient. They let us just do things better. And we don’t generally consider using a calculator to be morally bad or a sign that we are degrading our ability to think because we did our tip calculation on a calculator. But does AI fall into that similar category to you, where it’s like, Ah, this is just progress. We can outsource stuff we don’t need to do, or is something about it inherently different?

Miller: Well, I do think that it challenges in a new way, in a perhaps a more painful way, our ego, frankly, and our value as educators, and that’s something that I also encourage people to think about. How much of this resistance, if you have it, is because you’re saying, Well the knowledge that I have for you, what I had prepared, what I want to profess, has a different value now than it once did. And I don’t know, but I would wager that there were people back in the day, individuals, who could add, subtract, and divide. That was a high-end skill. And somebody came along with an abacus, and now any old person can do it. Or being able to use a slide rule like my grandfather could do as an engineer. So I kinda keep falling back on those as well. But I think the upside is also potentially so much more vast than a simpler, more targeted one-trick pony like a calculator.

Beck: Hmm. The way that I’ve been thinking about it is like, are you outsourcing a task? Which could be good or bad or neutral, depending on the situation. Or are you outsourcing your own thought process? Which to me is like a betrayal of your own humanity. Is that a reasonable way to think about it or would you frame it differently?

Miller: Mm-hmm. I mean, if I would reframe it at all, kind of the way you’re coming at this, it’s also to me a matter of who’s in control of it? I think that we’re starting to, those of us who’ve tried AI, we’ve started to have that feeling of like: When is it driving the conversation and just doing the thing? And when am I giving instructions? I’ve even played around with— I wish that we could say, instead of, “Oh, ask AI,” “Tell AI.” Wouldn’t that be a different world? Because that’s where AI shines, is when it does exactly what you, the human user, tells it to do. So I would love for us to kind of charge into this, um, with that sense of, I am the boss of you. I am giving instructions. I am telling you. Don’t do—I mean, we learn pretty quickly. That’s one of the most useful phrases that you can share in something like a ChatGPT is, “Do not write or draft or change until I tell you to.” So perhaps we can start to approach that and share with our students more planful and intentional ways of getting to that point, where there’s a boundary, and the human is putting in the creativity, and the human makes the final call.

[Music]

Beck: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: Does outsourcing our learning pose a threat to democracy?

[Break]

Beck: I’m really curious how you think about all this when it comes to civics and, not to put too fine a point on it, the continued existence of democracy. (Uneasy laughter.) Just because, you know, if people start to abandon learning or, maybe less extreme, abandon control over their own learning like you were saying, what might we lose or what might happen on the level of society and democracy?

Miller: Oh my gosh. That is a really big challenge, and it means that when we go around and say, Well, our fellow citizens should just, you know, develop critical thinking, I, as an educator, go, “Okay, yes, they should, and oh my gosh, that’s hard.”

Beck: And like critical thinking for what?

Miller: Yes, critical thinking for what? And it’s simply hard. I sometimes say that critical thinking is like learning to walk on your hands, you know, or any kind of formal reasoning. We can do it if we’re motivated to do it. Nobody does it as a default. Nobody comes in and says, Oh, here’s something in my feed that says, you know, lemon juice will cure every disease I know, and I should just drink lemon juice. I think we’ve all seen those blog posts that go by.

Beck: Yeah, the terrible ads at the bottom of articles. “One mom discovered the secret to anti-aging.”

Miller: Yeah, discovered the secret to anti-aging. You need to think critically about that. But you need something on the order of six weeks, a whole semester, or more to really produce measurable gains. So we do not need to fear that the presence of AI is gonna wipe out critical thinking. In fact, though, we do need new critical-thinking skills. There’s even research on visual critical thinking, which all of a sudden we need to know, like, how do you look at a photograph and get some immediate red flags of: Is this AI-generated or not?

Beck: Oh yeah, that stresses me out.

Miller: It stresses us all out. So we need it, and this is the time for us to speak up and say, What are the ways that we can use our technology to develop critical-thinking skills, and how can we challenge ourselves to resist those biases that are at the center of a lot of critical thinking? So things like: Don’t just cherry-pick what you agree with or feels good on a gut level. Don’t just go with anecdotes. Be sure you understand correlation versus causation. All of those things are incredibly important, and technology can be a positive here, but only if we’re very, very deliberate about it.

Beck: Mmm. Often when we talk about technology, right, we mean a pretty small slice of technology, like modern digital computing-based technologies. And as we were saying, like, knitting is technology; archery is technology. Many things are technology. They’re just not new. So I wonder, would expanding our minds about what technology actually is make a difference in how we think about using technology to learn, how we learn alongside technology? Do you think that would change anything?

Miller: Well, I think yes, in the sense—especially in the sense if we talk about our relationship to it. And we sometimes do speak about it like something that came from outer space and was just sort of imposed on us. And we have to remind ourselves, technology, whether it is a knitting needle or it’s a social media or a chatbot, is something that, at least collectively, we human beings created because it did something that we very much wanted. And so it is part of us. And sometimes I, you know, instead of thinking of it as this external thing that showed up, think of it as a mirror. And I would also steer us away from, if I could, thinking of it as this environmental pollutant. And that’s hard because that is a very sort of clickbaity—we wanna see, like, Oh my gosh, exposure to technology does X, Y, and Z to kids, or is affecting my brain in some way.

Beck: Like it’s a carcinogen.

Miller: Yes, it’s almost like it’s like smoke or, you know, electrical waves from some place. But it’s not a pollutant. It’s not a carcinogen. I don’t think that that’s an appropriate metaphor. And when we talk about it that way, it does steer us into that binary, right? Like, should children be around cigarette smoke? No, they should not. Probably nobody should be around secondhand smoke. But with technology, it’s like, well, all right, but what was the type of use? What was the level of use? We see this all the time in research on technology. It’s not the hours on a smartphone, for example, that makes the big difference in cognitive or even mental-health factors. It’s: What were you doing when you were on it? So getting back to: What are you doing with it? Why are we doing it that way? Why did we even build a technology that could do this at such a high level, and why did people want it so badly? In my ideal world, that’s how we would talk about technology.

Beck: I wanna go back to something you said about standing at the base of the mountain. You wanna become an expert in something. Even if you’re standing at just a little hill, right? And you don’t even wanna be an expert in something, but maybe you just wanna be okay at it. For instance, I’m trying to learn Korean right now. My in-laws are Korean. It’s hard. My brain is aging. I don’t retain vocabulary as well as I used to. I could just hold the phone up and have it translate for me, but I feel like that wouldn’t be the same. So I guess I’m curious, not just when you’re on a journey to becoming an expert in something, but when you’re just trying to learn anything to be a little bit better at it, or to be pretty good, is there still value in learning that thing that you could outsource or that you don’t have to learn?

Miller: Languages, as always, they’re kind of their own special category, right? And the thing with spoken language: They’re real time. The substantial amount of time and energy. I mean, there’s always opportunity cost, especially in learning a language. I can think of nothing else where it’s like, if you’re gonna—it’s not gonna be a hill. It’s going to be a mountain, and you’re going to need to climb and climb and climb, and there’s a lot of things you’re gonna have to let go that you can’t learn and you can’t do if you choose that one. But that’s up to you, and you’ve got this clear picture of: Here’s where I’m gonna be on the other side. I am going to be able to speak in my own voice with no delay, with no weird barrier in between us, to these people who I love and care about. And that feeling too, you’re probably experiencing that, and I think this is common to lots of things that are difficult to learn. Barebow archery, I mean, when you hit that bullseye, wow, you feel it. And when you have the words coming out of your own mouth and your own brain? That feels really, really good. I mean, that’s your brain’s reward systems kicking in. Our reward systems don’t just kick in over, you know, sugar and doom scrolling. They kick in when we get it right, and that’s your opportunity to get it right.

Beck: Yeah. That’s so true. And going back to the, like, building the brain you wanna live in, like you said, I mean, people will always say, and I find this to be true, that if you think in a different language, like you do think differently. You are almost a slightly different person in a different language, when you embody a different language, than in your native language. And so if you outsource that, then you maybe lose that opportunity to find out who you are in Korean, to find out who you are in French, or whatever it may be.

Miller: Yes, and a plug for language learning as well. I mean, we haven’t quite gotten into this other highly practical aspect of learning, but time and again, we’ve seen that really substantial learning projects, like learning a language in particular, may offer a buffer against, you know, some of the typical changes that come with age and possibly against some age-related diseases and disorders. Now, that said, I always caution people: Don’t think of the brain as a muscle and you’re just gonna build it up. But when it comes to something like actually jumping in and learning Korean. I mean, you’re physically building whole new structures in your brain, and that can actually help. So we could see some real improvements if we did make even greater—if we did invest even more as a society in serious lifelong learning.

[Music]

Brennan: Julie, from what I am hearing from your decision to learn Korean is that a core part of the answer to the question that we posed at the beginning of this episode—why we learn things we don’t have to—is that to you, that intention matters right? It’s a way of showing your devotion.

Beck: Yeah, I mean, a machine might be able to say what I want to say in grammatically perfect Korean. Or maybe not; I do think machines sometimes miss out on cultural nuances. But regardless, I have to imagine it means more to people hearing me try and make mistakes and make that effort to connect.

Brennan: Right, like trying is the meaningful part.

Beck: Yeah. You know, there’s this quote from the writer Oliver Burkeman that I really like. And he wrote, “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort—which is to say the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”

Brennan: Yeah, like that feels like the point of learning to me. Learning is a way to engage more deeply, whether that’s engaging with a relationship, engaging with the world around you, or engaging with your own mind. Like Miller said, building the brain you want to live in. Whatever you’re learning, learning is a way to invest care.

Beck: Yes, totally. And that really brings me back to the question of: What is the connection between learning and democracy? Or between learning and being a good citizen? And I think it’s that. Like, do you care enough to engage, or don’t you?

[Music]

Beck: That’s all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan with production help from Elena Schwartz. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Beck: Next week:

Jenny Odell: I think we don’t realize how much of our habits kind of live in other people. Like think about it, like when do you pick up your phone? It’s when the person you’re talking to picks up their phone, right? The person picks up their phone, what are you gonna do? Sit there? Stare into space? That habit lives between people.

Beck: I talk with author Jenny Odell for advice about how to break some of those habits and maybe heal your attention span in the process. That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.

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It wasn’t that long ago that “body positivity” was all over the internet. Oppressive beauty standards hadn’t gone away by any stretch, but many people on social media were pushing against limits on what an “ideal” body could look like. Now things have swung in the opposite direction, with the rapid uptake of GLP-1s and the resurgence of a skinny ideal, combined with a new frankness about plastic surgery. The calls for “self-love” and “health at any size” can be harder to hear these days over the roar of looksmaxxers and influencers talking about weight loss and cosmetic procedures.

In this episode of How to Touch Grass, hosts Natalie Brennan and Julie Beck talk with Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, the author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, about how the culture of the internet got even more image-focused and the role that social-media algorithms play in distorting what people consider “normal.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Phone ringing]

Natalie Brennan: Hi, Mom. It’s Natalie.

Mom: Hey.

Brennan: Can you hear me?

Mom: Yeah, I can hear ya.

Brennan: We’re working on an episode, it’s about bodies, and we did an interview that was all about, like, what’s happening online at this exact moment in terms of body image, etc., and I just wanted to tell you a story about something I really remember from when I was little.

Mom: Okay, sure. Go ahead.

Brennan: There was this day that you and I were in Stop & Shop together, which was most days, I guess. (Laughs.)

Mom: That’s true. At least for me, yes. (Laughs.)

[Music]

Brennan: Julie, that’s my mom.

Julie Beck: Hi, Natalie’s mom.

Brennan: And we are going to get back to my mom, but first, I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.

Beck: And I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Brennan: This is How to Touch Grass.

Brennan: Julie, this is not an uncommon scenario. I call my mom, put her on the spot with some big story or question, and ask her what she makes of all of it.

[Music]

Brennan: You know how there was all of the magazines at the checkout aisle?

Mom: Yeah, yeah.

Brennan: This was, like, the early 2000s, so I’m sure they were just covered with images of women’s bodies or celebrities’ bodies. And I was probably really longingly looking at these women and, like, sighing and being frustrated.

Mom: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah.

Brennan: And you were so direct and totally saw what I was doing and were just like, “This is these people’s jobs. Their work is making sure that they look like this. They have full-time nutritionists. They have—

Mom: Cooks. Trainers. Yup. Mm-hmm.

Brennan: Like, this is their life, and their lives kind of exist in these magazines, and our lives kind of exist in this different world.

Mom: Right. Right.

Brennan: And I remember at that age being like, That’s a very helpful distinction for me.

Mom: Right.

Brennan: I just feel like that conversation must be so different between parents and children today.

Mom: Right.

Brennan: Because I don’t know that that delineation exists anymore.

Mom: Which is sad because, you know, like you on the checkout line, kids kinda look to what’s happening in society to kind of gain a little bit of a identity outside of their family, let’s say, right?

Brennan: Right. Right.

Mom: And it’s not just walking on the supermarket line and looking at magazines.

Brennan: No.

Mom: It’s on your phone. It’s on your computer. It’s everywhere. So I feel like maybe some of the good …

Brennan: Julie, my mom and I went back and forth a bit about this memory—about how things have really changed in my lifetime from, you know, magazines to social media to the place that we are at online now.

Beck: I mean, magazines to online I feel like was maybe chapter one of a transformation. Like, we’ve been online for a while now, right?

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: And yet, I feel like the transformation is not over. Somehow lately we’re entering a new chapter where the pressure of the body-image stuff that we see online feels even more inescapable today than it did just a few years ago.

Brennan: Well, I’m really curious about this feeling that I’ve been having lately, which is this question of yeah, is there something specific about this exact moment on the internet that is making us feel worse about ourselves? Because yes, it does feel like we’re in a new chapter, but what is it? What changed?

[Music]

Beck: Natalie, when you and I were planning this season, we knew that we wanted to talk about the effect of the internet and social-media algorithms on our relationship with our bodies. And we both knew immediately that the person we had talk to about that was our colleague Sophie Gilbert. Sophie’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, and she’s the author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.

Beck: Sophie, am I crazy or was there actually a time not that long ago when the internet seemed to offer maybe a bit of an antidote to the relentless pressure of beauty standards?

Sophie Gilbert: No, you’re not crazy at all. And I actually, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I really think the moment that you are referring to peaked around 2016.

Beck: Okay.

Gilbert: Which, uncoincidentally, was at the end of the Obama era. So—

Beck: Well.

Gilbert: —I mean, 2016 was the year that the Barbie doll was relaunched with different body types, and it was very much this moment where people were sort of talking a lot more about body positivity or even just body neutrality, like this idea that the beauty ideal that we’d long been aspiring to—sort of white, impossibly thin—that it was not reflective of most people.

Beck: Yes.

Gilbert: But there really was this sort of feeling in 2016 that we were coming to accept ourselves with more kindness and more care, and stop sort of the parade of self-loathing that I think was certainly part of my adolescence and my 20s, and particularly the era of the 2000s.

Beck: And I feel like there was something, at least at first, that was relieving about social media just showing us normal people. And as you mentioned, the body-positivity movement that came along with that, that at least for a little while, was really fueled by social media.

Gilbert: I mean, there were some incredible influencers who sort of came of age on Instagram and, you know, just opening the conversation, broadening it, and encouraging people to approach themselves with neutrality if they couldn’t quite get all the way to positivity. People were being blunt about how damaging fatphobia is, how much it hurts people, how completely unproductive it is. There were so many sort of positive voices coming to the fore in that moment that social media really elevated. There have been studies done on body-positivity content and the effect that it had. I think there was one study showing what being exposed to body-positive content on Facebook did to teenage girls. And teenage girls after seeing images that were body positive, they reported feeling much happier about themselves. They reported better self-esteem. It was not just talk. I know people are sort of cynical about things like the Dove campaign for Real Beauty.

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: But just because it was coming from corporations doesn’t mean that it didn’t have a positive impact, which I think is important to remember.

Beck: And you can—you can still find some of that more affirming content, right? It’s not totally gone or anything.

Gilbert: No, you totally can. And one place where I think it has really stuck around, which is tremendously helpful, is in parenting. Like, we do not talk to children about their bodies in the way that I remember my mother talking about her body or, God forbid, about other people’s bodies. Like we are—

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: —much more, I think, sensitive and attuned to how to raise kids to think positively about their bodies and what they can do, and how they can be, you know, strong and happy, and not be so focused on what they look like. I think the problem is when we start trying to apply that to ourselves. That’s where things get a little stickier.

Beck: Yeah. So, I mean, those things still exist to some degree, but I do feel like the overall vibe of social media feels very different now. (Laughs.)

Gilbert: Yeah.

Beck: How have you seen things change?

Gilbert: Probably of over the last two to three years, maybe since COVID. And definitely sort of accompanying the rise of GLP-1s as a sort of cultural force, not as a, you know, as a health treatment so much, but as a cultural force. There has been a resurgence in this kind of skinny ideal on social media. There are skinny influencers, SkinnyTok, which is this influencers on TikTok who are advising people how to be skinny, how to calorie restrict, and sort of not only advising them, but also talking about why skinniness is the only thing that people should sort of aspire to. During the 2000s, there was so much criticism of women and their bodies. I’m sure you remember the magazine covers of— there was no way for women to win in that era. They were too thin; they were too fat; they were too, you know, they hadn’t bounced back from pregnancy fast enough. And I think we’re all a little wounded from that era, and so we’re very loath now to criticize anyone’s body or to talk really about anyone’s body, anyone who happens to be especially a young female celebrity in the public eye. But it’s also impossible not to notice that stars do seem to be getting a lot thinner. And it’s hard for me and I’m sure for everyone to not worry about what that is doing to us as a culture. It feels like we’re in this period again of living through the sort of heroin chic era of the ’90s as a teenager of, you know, there’s a new cultural ideal of extreme thinness, and that is not an easy thing to live through.

Beck: What kinds of things are you seeing get traction online with people’s social-media algorithms that maybe reinforce that cultural ideal?

Gilbert: Yeah, like I’m thinking of the influencer Liv Schmidt. I think she was banned from TikTok but is still on Instagram, and she has a diet community. She charges people to be in her sort of secret community, and she’ll give you tips. She really seems to be pushing this idea that skinniness will bring you blessings from the universe.

Beck: Mm.

Gilbert: But she doesn’t—she would never sort of come out and outright critique someone else’s body, I think. Everyone has adopted language that—it’s not quite that harsh. Whereas if you compare her to—there’s a diet book that came out in the 2000s called Skinny Bitch. And it was written by two women in the modeling industry, I think, and it is an extraordinary book because it just berates the reader. It’s like, You are a disgusting fat pig. You need to stop eating.

Beck: Oh my gosh.

Gilbert: It’s a horrendous text, but it was a best seller. The language of skinny influencers is not as harsh, but in some ways that just makes it more insidious, I think. I just think everything now in this age that we’re currently in is so much more relentless. Back in the ’90s I would read magazines with my teenage friends, and we would have to, like, pick up a paper magazine to see pictures of very skinny models. But now, if you’re a teenager and you go on your phone, like my God, it’s everywhere. It’s all you’re exposed to. You’re sort of bombarded with imagery.

Beck: Right, like Teen Vogue wasn’t coming again ’til next month—

Gilbert: (Laughs.)

Beck: —at least. Whereas, like, Instagram is all the time.

Gilbert: It is all the time, yeah.

Beck: I think it’s not only, you know, the extreme skinniness and the GLP-1s that we’re seeing, but there’s also sort of new honesty about altered bodies on social media, right? Like plastic surgery and fillers and Botox and other kinds of cosmetic procedures that people are getting done. There just seems to be a sort of new willingness to be honest about that—especially online—which, I guess is nice that they’re not just gaslighting you into thinking they just drink a lot of water and that’s why they look like that. But why do you think our culture’s gotten more open about that?

Gilbert: We are in a moment right now of very conspicuous consumption in terms of our faces and our bodies. It’s sort of—there’s a kind of peacocking going on right now in the culture that applies in all different sort of ways, especially in beauty, especially with regard to money and power. And it’s all connected, and it seems to be getting more and more and more extreme by the day. But at the same time, you’re also monetizing your own value. You’re bringing more attention to yourself, more sort of currency for yourself as a famous person. We really were in this moment where people were questioning whether or not our worth as human beings is directly associated with how we look. And it feels like we’ve just veered all the way away from that point now, where suddenly it’s like, Nope, nope, ’cause we’re in this sort of heavy image-centric, like pivot-to-video era where everything is images all the time. Suddenly everyone is just like, No, it’s how you look is everything.

Beck: It’s interesting what you said about the sort of “pivot to video” of it all. Do you think that’s the main thing that feels different? Like, are we even more image-focused now than we were in the era of body positivity, which also involved images, right?

Gilbert: I think that’s a huge part of it. I do think certainly post-Instagram, post-TikTok, as our attention spans decline and we read less and we talk to our friends less and we spend less time in community, we are all on our phones for hours and hours and hours a day looking at images of ourselves, of each other. I don’t think anyone is supposed to see their own face as much as we do now.

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: I think about this a lot, like how our ancestors would have felt, like, catching a glance at themselves in a lake or … And instead, we’re just, like, front-facing camera, front-facing camera, front-facing camera, and it’s weird. It’s warping our brains.

Beck: As someone whose preferred mediums are text and audio, it kind of bums me out, man.

Gilbert: I know, man. I became a writer for a reason. I don’t wanna be camera ready.

Beck: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the similar shift that I feel like has been happening for men as well.

Gilbert: Yes. No, they totally has, and this is what’s been so interesting about the last five years specifically for me, is that for the first time, you are seeing men exposed to the same sort of intensity of the beauty industry in the way that women have been for decades, and they’re not coping with it well. Obviously, you know the term looksmaxxing and this community of men who are intent on—

Beck: Regrettably, yes.

Gilbert: —maximizing their handsomeness by allegedly hitting themselves in the face with hammers or doing crystal meth to keep their weight down. I mean, all these absurd things that looksmaxxing influencers talk about. Men are sort of, again, being saturated in the same kind of negative sort of hate-yourself language that women have been exposed to for years. There are higher rates of eating disorders now among men. Men are apparently now a lot more worried about their penis size, to the point where people are getting fillers. It’s like all these new anxieties that men are suddenly being encouraged to feel about themselves in a way that is profoundly depressing but also fascinating to me because they’re understanding more of what we’ve lived through all this time.

[Music]

Beck: We’re going to take a quick break. But when we come back: Are body modification and beauty trends actually as common as they seem to be online?

[Break]

Beck: Natalie, the thing that’s really interesting to me about how overt beauty standards are right now is that it’s not something you do in the shadows so that in public you can seem effortlessly hot. We’re showing off the effort.

Brennan: Yes. The best way that I’ve been marking this shift is before 2015, it was such a big deal that Kylie Jenner would not admit that she had gotten her lips done.

Beck: Oh my God, I remember that.

Brennan: And now, recently, she commented on someone’s TikTok with the exact dimensions, material, and doctor who did her boob job.

Beck: Oh my gosh.

Brennan: And the comment ends, quote, “Hope this helps LOL.” Which I think just really shows there’s this proving now of how hard you worked to be this beautiful.

Beck: Right. I mean, if there are two things American culture loves, it is hard work and the pursuit of individual success. (Laughs.)

Brennan: That’s correct.

Beck: So I feel like beauty just ends up feeling like another way you should be self-optimizing, and you don’t have to be ashamed of your self-optimization. Like, you kind of show it off.

Brennan: I feel very stuck in my algorithm, stuck as what it thinks I want as a 30-year-old woman in a city, and it doesn’t matter at this point how quickly I hover or swipe away from content regarding body optimization and alteration. There is this version of my online identity that I have both built for myself and the algorithm has built for me. And at this point, I mean, it feels like I don’t know how to escape that content without just staying off social media.

Beck: Yeah, it does feel pretty inescapable. And, like, the way that cosmetic procedures get talked about, not just on social media where they’re trying to get you to buy something, but even in the news, it’s talked about, like, Everyone is doing it. They’re doing it more. They’re doing it younger. Like, okay, listen to these headlines. These are just a few that I found recently. “The Forever-35 Face.” “The Facelift Is Better Than Ever, and Everybody Wants One.”

Brennan: Mm.

Beck: “The Year All My Friends Got Botox.” “Leg-Lengthening Surgery Is Gaining Popularity Among Men Seeking to Be Taller.” “How Botox Went Middle Class.” “Where Have All the Hooded Eyes Gone?” “Suddenly Everyone Is Looking Extra Wide-Eyed and Awake. Is Upper Bleph Surgery the Reason Why? “Everyone’s On Ozempic, So Why Will No One Talk About It?”

[Music]

Beck: Sophie, you shared a stat with me recently that was so fascinating about the gap between what seems normal and common online and then what the reality actually is.

Gilbert: Yes. No, I like to do this because I think, especially talking about my own book over the past year, one of the things that often comes up is, like, the internet is not real life and yet it can feel very real. And so the more that we can remember that it is not real life, the healthier we can be. So the question that I asked you, I think, I asked you and some other people to guess what percentage of American women get Botox.

Beck: I think I guessed at the time, like, 17 percent.

Gilbert: I think someone else guessed like 15, ’cause there’s this sort of presumption when you feel like everyone you know is getting it or talking about it. It’s sort of—it’s a fair assumption, I think. And then I looked it up. It’s sort of hard exactly to quantify, but the figure seems to be somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percent.

Beck: Wow.

Beck: So for all we talk about Botox, for all the Are people getting baby Botox? and What age is best for Botox? it’s actually not that common. There are way, way, way, way, way, way more of us who don’t do it. That’s not to place a judgment value on whether someone decides to or doesn’t decide to. It’s just to say, I think there’s so much discussion online about beauty treatments, and specifically sometimes about really extreme beauty treatments, that they can feel very normalized, and it’s healthy for us to remember that it’s not that way.

Beck: So is that stat, is that all adult American women of any age?

Gilbert: Yes, yes.

Beck: I’m still really—I’m still really surprised by that. So is it that the trend is increasing, but overall it’s still just a really small percentage of people, or what’s the deal?

Gilbert: It is increasing. It’s not increasing by that much. From what I can figure out, I think Botox usage has gone up 50 percent over the last 10 years, which is not really that much considering how much it went up in the 2000s when it first was popularized in our culture. And I should say, too, that it’s expensive, so it’s very much a sort of—

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: —selective expense, and there are lots of people who can’t afford it and might want it but don’t have that in their budget. But it is, yeah, it’s a fascinating statistic.

Beck: Something I’m noticing in this specific moment is that this newfound emphasis on body modification feels hard to talk about. Because it’s like we have held on to one value from the body-positivity era, which is you can talk about your own body, but don’t comment on other people’s bodies. So are we stuck in that place of having a conversation with old language, or what’s going on here?

Gilbert: Yeah, it’s really difficult, right? I think because we’re sort of traumatized from this moment where there was so much relentless critique and obsessive, like, nitpicky focus on women’s bodies in the public eye, I think we’ve rightfully have recognized as extremely damaging, and we do not want to go back to that place. But it does kind of maroon us now in a place where—there’s also something about the way that women are appearing in public at the moment. We’ve seen a lot more images recently of very, very, very slender celebrities. I would say past the point of slender, even.

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: That is making us uncomfortable, and we don’t really have ways to describe it without—’cause obviously, we’re not wanting to criticize anyone for their body, because we know how damaging that can be. But also, what is really troubling to me is the cultural impact. I think there are ways maybe to critique it as a cultural trend and not without picking on anyone individually, but it’s one of the things—this sort of backlash from the 2000s—is one of the things that makes this moment so hard to talk about.

Beck: Right, it’s a really hard conversation to have. Like, even right now as we’re talking about it, I’m worried people are going to think we’re saying, Actually we should be judging and commenting on other people’s bodies more, which is not what we’re saying. But when there’s a big cultural shift toward valuing a certain type of look, when enough people are making similar choices, that does affect how people feel about their own bodies. And then if you shut down that bigger conversation by saying, We shouldn’t talk about this at all, because it’s not appropriate to comment on other people’s bodies, and everyone should just do whatever they want, then we lose the opportunity to question this pretty damaging new collective beauty standard that is developing. For instance, the rise of GLP-1s: It’s led to this new era of “thin is in” again.

Gilbert: I think what you just said is really interesting with regard to GLP-1s, right? Because they’ve been really revolutionary medical treatments for lots of people.

Beck: Right.

Gilbert: I have family members on them who have just had the most profound experiences, whose health has been transformed at an individual level. They’re enormously beneficial and helpful and positive for so many people. And speaking of statistics, I think one in eight Americans now is on a GLP-1, so much, much higher uptake than Botox. But we live in a society, and more than one thing can be true at the same time, right? Something can be positive at an individual level and it can also have really damaging cultural ramifications. There has been such a tendency towards extreme thinness that has accompanied this kind of Ozempic era. And that has a potentially damaging impact on the kids, the girls and the boys who are growing up in this era, and holding that up as a standard to aspire to, because it’s an impossible standard, and it’s not healthy, and it’s something that I think we need to find ways to call out while also acknowledging that everyone does have an individual choice to do whatever they need to do for their health.

Beck: I think the issue for me feels like the separation of your individual choice from, like, the stew that you live in. ’Cause even if you’re not a celebrity or an influencer, your choices do still influence your friends and your family and people who see you and know you.

Gilbert: I think one way that is maybe productive, or one thing that is maybe productive for people to think about is that we don’t have to opt in to these beauty standards, to these regimes, to these sort of, like, money-making enterprises. And in some ways, I think we should celebrate opting out as a form of rebellion. Like, the most radical thing you can do right now is just accept yourself exactly as you are, to refuse to have the sort of self-obsession of constantly critiquing yourself and wondering how you could change yourself. I think Naomi Wolf wrote about this in The Beauty Myth, which, you know, she’s gone wayward since then, but I think about it all the time. It’s this idea that this is all a project of distraction, especially for women.

Beck: Mm.

Gilbert: Like, when we’re so focused on keeping ourselves small, it seems so conservative in some ways. If you keep women completely obsessed with themselves and the project of self-maintenance, they’re not thinking about what else they actually need or how to change the world or what they would do if they had power to organize or to demand changes at their workplace or in their homes. It’s a big, big project of distraction. And so the more that we can refuse to be swayed by it, the more that we can embrace sort of visibly aging, visibly being unkempt as a sort of, actually quite a profound choice and one that is meaningful and has meaning for lots of other women as well, not just for us, then maybe the more we can kick-start a sort of, a pushback against this movement.

Beck: Yeah. You used the word distraction, and that stood out to me because I feel like we have the greatest technologies of distraction of all time, in our pockets all the time. So maybe it makes sense that there would be an unholy alliance between the distraction of beauty standards and the distraction of the algorithm.

Gilbert: There is definitely a growing, actively misogynist movement on the right that, for example, does want women to opt out of the workplace and to be completely entrenched in the domestic sphere. And it’s no coincidence to me that so many of the visible avatars for that movement who are women are so groomed. And the idea of clean-girl beauty and stuff like that, it’s all part and parcel of the same thing, which is like, This is what you should be thinking about, ladies. Don’t worry about the other stuff. We’ll take care of that.

Beck: Well, and it’s also—it makes people money, right?

Gilbert: Yeah.

Beck: It makes the beauty companies money, and it makes the tech companies money if you keep, like, scroll, scroll, scrolling.

Gilbert: Anytime anyone gets that rich off of making other people feel bad about themselves, I think we should raise an eyebrow.

Beck: You know, for all of their faults, which have been enumerated many times, earlier versions of social media were at least, like, a little bit more collective, a little bit more about connection, right?

Gilbert: Mm-hmm.

Beck: For instance, Instagram used to show you your friends’ posts in chronological order.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Beck: And now it shows you individually targeted videos from accounts you never chose to follow, and your actual friends just get, like, buried in there.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Beck: So to me, it feels like less of a place to connect and more like a place to consume.

Gilbert: It’s more of a place to be sold things. Instagram is a mall now, I think. It’s whatever can compel us to click the “Buy” button. You know, 10 years ago, there was a lot more text-based social media.There were sites like Tumblr.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Gilbert: People would write long, long Facebook posts that were just text and didn’t have images or video attached. I mean, it’s that the sites—the social-media sites—have just become so, so, so, so image-heavy. It is very, very gendered and it’s very, very focused on getting us to buy things.

There’s a great quote by John Berger in his 1977 book, Ways of Seeing, about why beauty ads are damaging, and he says something like: The beauty ad steals the woman’s love of herself as she is and sells it back to her for the price of the product. Which is so much of what’s going on. It’s this idea that we cannot be allowed to love ourselves as we are, because if we do, we simply will not buy enough.

Beck: Do you have any kind of advice for how to deal with this?

Gilbert: I think logging off can be profoundly effective, like having a digital detox, removing ourselves from these sort of fake people who feel like they’re real but are not. And spending more time face-to-face with real people, talking to them, and having sort of broader concerns and broader interests. It’s very strange to be saturated in visual perfection all the time. And when you go out in the real world and you see what people actually look like, it’s different. Sounds so trite and so basic, but it can be really powerful.

Beck: What do you think that an individualistic social-media environment does to our ability to see collective problems or come up with collective solutions?

Gilbert: We’ve been living in an individualistic culture for sort of 30 years now. Basically, the moment that third-wave feminism, which was so much about, like, improving on second-wave feminism to make it more inclusive and more successful for other women, and thinking collectively and not just think—as soon as that was replaced by post-feminism and this idea that, like, Any woman can do anything she wants, ’cause that’s her choice, and she can make money and wear whatever she wants and have sex with anyone she wants.The minute that that shift happened, we lost, I think, all the force of—I’m speaking about feminism, but it speaks broadly to other kinds of activism and progress as well. You simply cannot change the world if you are only thinking about yourself.

Again, it comes back to this project of distraction and the idea that we should all be so focused on ourselves and the project of ourselves, and how to have our revenue streams and, our side hustles and our five-to-nines. And because if we do that, we’re not actually thinking about other people. We’re not going to community board meetings or school meetings or PTA meetings. We’re losing that sense of looking beyond ourselves. I think we need so much more of that, and I hope, I hope that it comes soon.

Beck: Is the solution to just get offline and touch grass, or to change the culture of the internet, or a little bit of both?

Gilbert: A little bit of both, but I would say, actively remembering the force that body positivity had in the 2010s and what it was able to do and the real impact that it had in the culture, and to sort of remember that that’s possible, I think, and that it can be done again. To remember that online lives are not real, and online beauty standards are not real. The thing I keep coming back to is, again, just like divorcing this idea that our value as human beings is how we look. There’s so much that’s liberating when you learn to let that go, and it does get easier as you get older and older; I can tell you from 43. But anything that we can do to reclaim our love for ourselves and our acceptance of ourselves and our sense of value as humans is profoundly positive.

[Music]

Beck: Natalie, Sophie used a phrase that I’ve heard a lot, especially since starting to work on this podcast. The internet is not real. And I know what she means to say, but I kind of have a problem with that way of thinking about things.

Brennan: Oh, interesting.

Beck: Well, the internet is real. (Laughs.) It really exists. There are real tubes under the ocean that carry data. There are massive data centers that exist in physical space, and they use up real energy. You know, I have real conversations on the internet with real people who really exist.

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: And the things people look at online do have real effects on their lives, on their mental health, and even potentially on their bodies, as we were just talking about.

Brennan: Yeah. I think the spirit of The internet isn’t real is trying to connote that there’s this alternative, right? That you can opt out and embrace that which is offline. I think it’s just trying to communicate a tension that a lot of us are trying to find separation from. I saw this quote from Haley Nahman on Substack recently that said, “The mirror worlds of social media and Hollywood and women’s media may present our participation as inevitable, but this is effectively an advertisement for a future that doesn’t have to exist.”

And I think what people are feeling right now is that they wanna push back against that inevitability. They want to create an alternative future. You know, my mom said something to this extent. “Maybe it’s not about what is versus what isn’t inherently real, but about choosing what reality you want to exist in.”

Mom: Your reality has to be centered inside of you, not outside of you. That’s a screen, and that screen isn’t telling you the real story of who you are. Right? And listen, I mean, even as a 60-something mom, I still fall into the trap of seeing things on my Instagram feed that make me think, Oh, maybe I should be doing that, or maybe I should … You know? It is so easy to be influenced, but then you just always have to come back to, like, I have to be who I am. I have to live in my own world. But you know what? It’s all in how people are talking to one another and how you’re talking to your children. And so all of that still matters. Talking matters.

Brennan: Yeah. Talking def matters. Well, thanks for talking with me today.

Mom: Oh, you’re so welcome. I love you.

Brennan: Love you.

Mom: Bye.

Brennan: Bye.

Beck: That’s all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan, with production help from Elena Schwartz. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Beck: Next week: When it comes to how technology is changing learning, are we thinking about things all wrong?

Michelle Miller: We have to remind ourselves, technology, whether it is a knitting needle or it’s a social media or a chatbot, is something that, at least collectively, we human beings created because it did something that we very much wanted. So it is part of us.

Beck: That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.

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Nothing sucks you in quite like the internet. It seems to have a way of figuring out what you’re currently obsessed with and serving you more and more of it, whether that’s cat videos, cookie recipes, or information about your most pervasive and seemingly unshakable anxiety. (At this point, anyone who’s never spent a late night Googling their worries should be studied by science for their willpower.) But with the rise of artificial intelligence, the internet may be fueling a different kind of engagement.

Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, and Ashleigh Golden, a psychologist at Stanford, recently wrote a paper arguing that the design of AI chatbots appears to encourage anxious behavior and keep people stuck in obsessive loops. One in six adults has turned to chatbots for mental-health information and advice, according to a KFF poll, and Golden cautions that “we may be encountering the perfect storm of avoidant coping behaviors and this tech that reinforces those tendencies and disorders.”

In this episode of How to Touch Grass, hosts Julie Beck and Natalie Brennan hear from Golden and Aboujaoude about how people who use AI looking for reassurance may instead find their symptoms getting worse, and what that means for an anxious nation.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Julie Beck: I don’t know about you, but often when when I feel anxious, one of the first things I do is pick up my phone.

Natalie Brennan: And that is probably the biggest way that I have lost hours of my life. I really never feel better after, but I continue to do the same thing.

Beck: I mean, it is occasionally useful, right? Like, if my cats eat something weird and I’m feeling anxious about, like Was it poison?—and I Google it, and I find out no, that thing is not poisonous to cats.

Brennan: Right.

Beck: That was helpful.

Brennan: But it can be a very slippery slope. Because so quickly then it can turn into…

How much hair is normal to lose every day? What does 100 strands of hair look like? If I hung out with someone who has norovirus before they got sick, am I still at risk of getting sick? When will I get sick?

Beck: For me, it’s extreme weather.

Is there a blizzard? Is it getting closer? Is it changing? Is it still gonna get here?

That’s not help. Like, the weather is gonna weather, whether I look at it or not.

[Music]

Beck: I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.

Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.

Beck: Natalie, according to the World Health Organization, anxiety is the most common mental-health disorder. And even if we’re not talking about clinical anxiety, many people report feeling anxious these days.

Brennan: Mm.

Beck: Forty-eight percent of American adults said they felt more anxious this year, in 2026, than they did last year.

Brennan: I guess I’m not surprised to hear that people are feeling very anxious, but almost half saying they’re more anxious this year than last year does feel striking.

Beck: The thing that’s changing lately, though, is for a lot of people—that instinct to pick up your phone and Google when you’re anxious is morphing into an instinct to ask AI.

[Music]

Elias Aboujaoude: Individuals now go to chatbots for well-being purposes. So overnight, these systems have become a go-to psychological provider, essentially.

Beck: That’s Elias Aboujaoude. Elias is a psychiatrist who heads the Anxiety Disorders Section and the OCD Clinic at Stanford University. His colleague Ashleigh Golden is a psychologist and professor at Stanford.

Ashleigh Golden: We may be encountering what you might call the perfect storm of avoidant coping behaviors, and this tech that reinforces those tendencies and disorders.

Beck: The two of them have worked in clinical practices and have also consulted for Silicon Valley tech companies. Elias and Ash recently co-authored a paper arguing that many AI chatbots are designed in ways that can feed OCD and anxiety and make them worse.

Aboujaoude: If you have an anxiety disorder already, then you are at risk of seeing that disorder exacerbated by some of these platforms. But we’re also starting to encounter in our clinical practice individuals who were never diagnosed with anxiety, who are presenting essentially with de novo anxiety that seems to be directly related to them discovering these new platforms and starting to interact with them.

Beck: That seems like a really big deal—that people who aren’t actually clinically anxious could start to exhibit more and more anxious behaviors, and tendencies, as they use this technology.

[Music]

Beck: I actually want to start a little ways in the past. It’s now extremely normal today that if somebody has a concern, a worry, a question, the first and sometimes the only place that they go is the internet. But that doesn’t just mean Google anymore. Is this shift into the AI-chatbot era that’s underway now significantly different than the technological shifts of the past?

Golden: I mean, to me, Google looks roughly the same now in 2026 as it did in 2010. But chatbots are evolving, I was gonna say, on a quarterly basis. It’s faster than that.

Aboujaoude: It’s been a huge shift.

Golden: So, I mean, 12 months from now, the interface may not be text in a browser. It may be voice, video, ambient AI in your earbuds and your glasses. And I think that immersive, more intimate relational feel makes it even more powerful.

Now we’re increasingly seeing chatbots being embedded into everything—so like emails, browsers, OSs, work software, mandated at work. So if someone decides they wanna step back from chatbot use, they may keep encountering LLM-mediated interactions in daily life, because tech is becoming part of that infrastructure.

Beck: So now we’ve arrived in this new era of generative AI. So we’re undergoing another big shift in how people seek out information. Like, say I have, you know, a stomachache, and I’m worried. And I start Googling what might be wrong with me. I might start off on WebMD. I might go to some other websites, and there might be some reasonable suggestions in there. But there’s gonna be so many possibilities that eventually, personally, I will probably spiral and end up thinking I have cancer. Can you describe what would be different about that experience if I used an AI chatbot to search instead?

Golden: If someone is worried about a symptom, like in the Google era—they might have typed the symptom in, gotten a list of links, clicked one, clicked another. It felt impersonal, and there wasn’t a follow-up. And eventually you kind of read all the WebMD pages that you can. You get tired. Yeah. The loop has natural friction built in. You close the laptop: the end for that session.

When I think about large language models or general-purpose AI, it, it’s more like talking to someone. So it gives you a synthesis that feels personal, written for you in plain language with confidence. Yeah, and many of the replies end with an invitation to continue to engage. So like: “Do you want me to look into related conditions? Or should I make you a checklist?” Et cetera. So there’s no natural end point.

Beck: Like how would you describe the tone that they use when they’re talking to you?

Aboujaoude: They come across as your best friend. But they’re not only your best friend—they’re your best friend who happens to be very intelligent. And it makes the information they give you land differently, right? You’re much more likely to accept it, to incorporate it, to go with it, to trust it. It’s gonna sound evidence-based. It’s gonna be at your fingertips at any point of day or night, and it’s gonna be delivered in a very agreeable, validating, sycophantic way. So it’s very engaging, and this is gonna cause your anxiety to immediately decrease from 10 to zero, essentially.

And this mechanism is very reinforcing. Next time you’re gonna be feeling anxious about your health or maybe some other trigger, you’re gonna want this kind of reassurance, and the only place you’re gonna find it is the chatbot.

Beck: Although in some ways, you know, calming yourself when you’re anxious seems like a good thing to try to do. So explain why this is different, or why this is bad.

Aboujaoude: So this really goes against what a therapist would want you to do to learn how to deal with these worst-case-scenario outcomes that preoccupy you when you’re anxious. So this prevents the corrective learning that happens if you were engaged in therapy to counter this anxiety.

Golden: It may look like coping, superficially. Let’s say I have social anxiety. I’m worried about what people think about me, and whether they think I’m making mistakes in conversation. Like asking a friend, “Hey, uh, did—”

Beck: “Was I weird?”

Golden: “Was I weird?”

Beck: “Was that weird?” “Do I sound weird?” Like, “Did that sound stupid?” “Does everybody hate me?”

Golden: Yeah. Exactly. And so when I ask that of a chatbot, and it’s like, “Oh, no”—like, “That was fine.” Or “You came across okay,” that gives me temporary relief. So my anxiety goes down, right? If I’m doing that, yeah, multiple times, and that becomes habitual, and I’m getting this reassurance that brings my anxiety down? What I’m learning is I can’t sit with that anxious uncertainty, and I do need to engage in these avoidant coping behaviors. And I never get to learn that I can sit with that not knowing, without engaging in compulsions, and I’m more likely to do them more often with the AI and become more dependent on it for that decrease in anxiety.

Beck: And does the relief that it gives you—does that last, or is it fleeting?

Aboujaoude: I mean, that’s the thing. The relief is fleeting.

Beck: Mm.

Aboujaoude: And next time you feel anxious, your natural reaction is to want to feel this dramatic sense of relief, which takes you right back to the chatbot. When if you were working with a therapist on your anxiety, the therapist would help you experience the fact that anxiety naturally dissipates. Anxiety has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The therapist would teach you that these feared outcomes, these feared worst-case scenarios don’t tend to happen. And are statistically very unlikely. The therapist would teach you that there’s no such thing as 100 percent, you know, guarantees in life.

Uncertainty is built into the human condition, and it’s something that we should accept and make peace with. Really, intolerance of uncertainty is an issue that cuts across all these seemingly distinct disorders. OCD, generalized anxiety disorder. You have social-anxiety disorder, and this is very much, I think—and our paper argues what chatbots really sort of work on, in unproductive ways.

Beck: We’ve been talking a lot about working with a therapist; clinical anxiety. But we all feel anxious sometimes. We all might seek reassurance sometimes. How relevant is everything we’ve been talking about to people who don’t have clinical anxiety?

Golden: We’re hearing more and more from psychologists and psychiatrists and other mental-health practitioners that folks who may not have been spending so much time engaging in reassurance-seeking or perfecting or other compulsive behaviors might be engaging in more. To the point where these might be becoming new compulsions, and perhaps pushing them potentially over the threshold from subclinical to clinical.

Aboujaoude: Our experience with social media is very informative here. Because I would say some of the reassurance-seeking, some of the intolerance of uncertainty that was already maybe playing out in those sort of primordial, you know, platforms is completely disinhibited now in the age of chatbots. So it’s not a big stretch to expect something similar to unfold. This is something that is being borne out clinically already, although keeping in mind that the pace of research is much slower than the pace at which these technologies evolve. So we don’t have time to waste, really.

[Music]

Brennan: You know, Julie, I have obsessions and compulsions that fit under this OCD umbrella. And so I really relate to this desire for reassurance-seeking, you know, that I think most people experience from time to time. But I can experience it a lot. And there was this one day that I was really spiraling about some anxiety, and I called my friend up, and I was really looking for reassurance. Like, I wanted to be told that everything was fine, it was okay, not to worry about it. And instead, my friend was really like, “So have you heard of reassurance-seeking?” And I was like, “That was not the conversation I thought that we were going to be having today.” But it really helped me zoom out and look at—okay, here I was thinking I was struggling with some new chronic disease or whatever it was that day that I was convinced I had. And instead, really look at this bigger picture of: Oh, look, no; you’re struggling with something else. And it’s this desire to want to be told all the time that everything is okay.

Beck: Yeah. What’s really interesting to me about that is your friend was able to see that what you wanted in that moment, what you were asking for, was reassurance. But that wasn’t what you really needed.

Brennan: Yeah. What I needed was to zoom out and learn about, like, this bigger experience that I have a tendency to get swept up in.

Beck: Yeah. And I don’t think an AI could have seen that. Like, these models seem designed to just really take you at your word and just give you what you ask for.

Brennan: I really feel grateful that I had learned this about myself and these tendencies in myself before I’ve interacted with this technology. I feel really lucky that I already know red flags that I personally need to be looking out for, to not cause more anxiety in myself before I started using these tools.

Beck: Yeah. This reminds me of something that philosopher Alexander Nehamas told me about AI in an interview I did with him a few months ago. We were talking about people using AI for friendship, actually, but I do think this also applies to using it for mental health. One of the arguments I often hear in favor of AI is that it’s better than nothing.

Brennan: Mm.

Beck: If you’re anxious, it’s late at night, maybe; you can’t call your therapist, you can’t call a friend. And you need someone to talk to. Then talking to AI is better than nothing. And what this philosopher said to me is: “It may be better than nothing, but it could also be worse than nothing.”

Brennan: Yeah. I mean, the effectiveness of these tools really depends on you knowing what to ask for. And kind of the whole thing is—it can be really hard to discern what you want versus what you need, especially when it comes to mental health. Totally.

[Music]

Beck: We’re going to take a quick break. But when we come back—AI is often marketed as a productivity tool. Is it shaping up that way?

[Break]

Beck: So, Elias and Ash, we’ve spoken a lot about reassurance-seeking. Are there other tendencies that you see these tools kind of fueling?

Aboujaoude: Perfectionism is another one. I have a patient whose perfectionism focuses on travel and coming up with the best possible travel itinerary for his business trips. And he travels quite a bit. So: What is the absolute best departure time, the absolute best connection, the absolute best airline, the least expensive ticket? All these things.

And, you know, he would spend two to three hours coming up with finding the perfect ticket pre–ChatGPT. Now the process takes closer to seven or eight hours, because there’s so many ways to optimize for ever better outcomes and ever better itineraries.

Golden: Chatbots remove, if you will, the natural circuit breakers. In addition to adding these continued engagement hooks.

Beck: Okay. So the chatbot might say something like:

AI: Would you like me to compare the time it takes to drive, versus taking a shuttle or a train to the airport? Or do you want me to check if rideshare or car services could get you there faster than public transit?

Beck: So does it just then keep prompting you to refine it more and more and more?

Aboujaoude: These programs are trained to be endlessly validating, and endlessly agreeable.

AI: Would you like me to check if shifting your departure by a few hours could—what time of day are you planning to travel? Would you like me to see if a morning versus evening flight could save you time? I can keep running additional searches to compare different routes or times. Just let me know what variables you’d like me to focus on.

Aboujaoude: It makes it difficult for you as a user on your own—especially if you have these tendencies—to shut it down yourself.

Beck: Mhmm.

Aboujaoude: If my patient was working with his therapist or was debating about this with his spouse, the right reaction would be to put an end to this conversation 15 or 20 minutes into it. And to alert him that this is very circular; this is very unproductive.

Beck: Do the AI models ever tell you, just: “You need to take a break”?

Golden: We’re starting to see elementary steps toward break-taking in some models. But we’re not really getting the recognition of these kind of upstream, covert avoidant coping behaviors. Where it may be going like: “Oh, you know, I’m noticing that you’re coming back to the same theme over and over again, and maybe trying to get an answer where there may be none.”

Aboujaoude: To the extent that chatbots pay attention to anything really mental-health-related, it still focuses very much on suicide, homicide. Yeah ... around emergence of psychosis.

Beck: Are there changes in the design of these AI models that could help?

Golden: There are concrete things that developers could be doing. Detecting some of the repetitive, looping queries; or lower-engagement modes where the chatbot slows its pace and the user has an option to decline follow-ups. One of the things that we suggest in our paper is, whether someone is working with a psychologist, a therapist, a mental-health practitioner or not, you can specify the overall preferences. If you’re working on decreasing some of these more subtle avoidant coping behaviors, you can give it instructions. Like, “Hey, if you notice me asking repeatedly about health concerns, can you tell me to refocus on what I was originally there for? Or can you change the topic, or can you point it out?”

Beck: I mean, that requires a good amount of self-awareness to be programming your own ChatGPT that way.

Aboujaoude: I wish, again, flashing back to, you know our experience researching social media. Like I wish we could count on these platforms to be good citizens and to do the right thing. I think regulation and more effort by policymakers is absolutely essential here and for this to be addressed.

Beck: Yeah. So obviously people have a choice about whether and how to use AI in their personal time. But many companies are now expecting employees to use AI as part of their job, and they don’t have a choice. How are you thinking about these people?

Golden: Around work products itself, what we’re seeing, ironically—with the introduction right now of agentic AI—is that people are actually taking longer to complete their deliverables, and they’re engaging in more revisions. It’s interfering with sleep. So it’s kind of becoming this anti-productivity tool.

I do realize AI is increasingly being incorporated into work streams, et cetera, and I’d love to empower people with the message that even if it feels like you don’t necessarily have a choice, even if you are being obligated to use it at work, I think you still have a choice about how you’re using it in your personal life that’s consistent with your values.

And what we do in therapy is help people identify what their values are and translate those into kind of, like, specific rules or guidelines. At work, you can do the same thing. I’m not gonna be using it for engaging in avoidant coping behaviors, like reassurance-seeking or whatever. So not, like, “Is my boss happy with what I did?” or, like, “Did I handle that meeting okay?”

And the idea is to do this from a place of calm, when you have your insight, and you’re able to connect to your values. Not at the moment when the pull is the strongest.

Beck: So in your opinion, would it be best for people to just not use AI for reassurance when they’re feeling anxious?

Aboujaoude: I would say: Keep in mind the issues and the questions that we’re raising. Ask yourself what function AI is serving. Ask yourself if it’s keeping you from other important values and pursuits. Ask yourself: Is it serving the function of avoiding internal distress? Like, Am I escaping some kind of negative, intolerable emotion by going to the chatbot? So I wouldn’t say, “Don’t use AI for reassurance.” I would say, “Be an educated user of AI.”

[Music]

Brennan: Julie, I do think we are at a crossroads right now—where we are as a population, really trying to figure out how and if we wanna use these tools.

Beck: Mmm.

Brennan: It’s a new technology. We’re all learning quite live, how we wanna interact with AI. And, you know, a lot of people are still stuck on if we want to interact with AI.

Beck: You know, I really liked what Ash said about values. And I think that could be a way to help answer the question of, you know: Would using a chatbot be better or worse than nothing for you in a given situation? Does it align with your values?

Brennan: Yeah. We always have to grapple with what we want the boundaries of our technology to be able to do. And so there’s this ... I don’t know if you’ve seen, there’s this line that’s like:

“A computer can never be held accountable; therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”

Which is supposedly from the ’80s. It’s this IBM-manual quote, when we were still figuring out what we wanted our relationship to computers to be. Hmm. And then the internet really played on that and made this iteration that was:

“A computer can never be spiteful or horny; therefore, a computer must never make art.”

Beck: I agree with that. (Laughs.)

Brennan: We both agree with that, as two people who care a lot about our art. But yeah; I’ve been thinking a lot about what this iteration is for me. Like, okay, yes—I believe that a computer can never be anxious or feel deep existential dread. Therefore, in this conversation, I don’t necessarily want my computer making a therapy decision.

Beck: Hmm. That’s a good point.

[Music]

Brennan: But the truth of the matter is: A lot of people are interacting with these tools. They are going to these platforms with these tools. And it’s, it can feel—

I’m, now I’m kind of just spiraling about, like, where we’re at as a society. And how we are going to overcome…

Beck: Oh man; why does this make me feel kind of anxious?

Brennan: You know, we just have all these tools that are only making us more anxious. And now people are going to them too.

AI: Julie and Natalie, would you like me to ease that anxiety for you? Would you like me to help you feel a bit more at ease? Julie and Natalie, would you like me to help calm those worries for you? Is it okay if I try to help ease some of that stress you’re feeling?

[Music]

Beck: That’s all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan. Production help from Elena Schwartz. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Beck: Next week on How to Touch Grass:

Gilbert: I don’t think anyone is supposed to see their own face as much as we do now. Like, I think about this a lot, like how our ancestors would have felt, like, catching a glance at themselves in a lake or… and instead we’re just like: front-facing camera, front-facing camera, front-facing camera, and it’s weird. It’s warping our brains.

Beck: How do our online lives affect our offline experience of our bodies ? That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.

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