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.

Proper sleep, a healthy diet, and physical activity can ward off anxiety, so experts recommend getting enough to eat, moving a bit, and prioritizing rest. Try going for a walk or hike as exposure to nature can lower stress and anxiety levels. Grounding exercises can also help you calm down. Hill suggests deep breathing from your diaphragm or picking a color and describing objects of that color in your surroundings.

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.

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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? 

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.

You may not have noticed everything Google’s free software suite offers—especially a web app called Google Vids.

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 post Good Advice for Shitty People is an advice column for the worst people ever appeared first on Boing Boing.

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.

Your cell phone can handle basic language translation, but dedicated translator devices can offer a much more immersive, versatile experience.

It feels like the skies above our AI-frenzied world have darkened in the past month. Employees at Anthropic and Google started quitting, 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 again warned of a bubble.

Yet, a lot has happened recently to make AI genuinely useful for more people. AI agents are getting better and can now make restaurant reservations for you. Walmart made it possible for agents to shop on behalf of humans, a bold move since Amazon banned the practice. Apple announced an AI-ready home display that can turn on your lights. And let’s not forget that AI is also helping scientists find cures for formerly incurable diseases and mathematicians solve previously impossible problems. 

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.

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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! 

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.

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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.

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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Are you mad about everything?

Another needless, endless war. Rising living costs and gas prices. The fact that the richest 1 percent of Americans own more than the bottom 90 percent combined, or the straight-up corruption happening in the White House. As the old saying goes, if you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention. 

But what does spirituality teach us about how to respond to our anger? Is it wise to try to let it go? Should we practice imagining clouds floating gently by and take a deep breath?

I don’t think so. For one, it’s not that simple! There’s way too much happening inside my heart when I’m pissed off to pretend that I’m full of calm and kindness. Plus, this kind of spiritual bypassing is as insulting as it is ineffective. When we try to force a feeling, we fundamentally misunderstand the gift that anger has to give us: a deeper insight into our pain and a genuine compassion that enables wise action for justice.

That said, I don’t want to walk around like a fire-breathing dragon or endlessly stew in my resentment either. So I reached out to some trustworthy religious voices to see what spiritual traditions can teach us about effective responses to our rage — and how it can give us insight without overwhelming us.

Underneath your anger is a broken heart

Lama Rod Owens is a Buddhist teacher in Atlanta and the author of Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. The first thing he tells me is that we have to acknowledge our anger. “A lot of us actually don’t know what anger feels like. We’re just reacting to it,” he says. And that rings true. I’m still learning to notice the physical signs of rage: My head gets hot; my stomach tight; my throat fills with the scream that I’m only just able to contain.

That physicality is central to Owens’s definition of anger: The mental and physical tension out of which aggression arises. And that aggressive response is what gets me into trouble — when I snap at my husband or give demon eyes at those who surely have headphones but are choosing not to use them. If I’m not careful, I won’t even notice how rageful I am until my simmering pot of fury suddenly comes to a boil. 

Noticing that tension can be tricky, Owens says, because “a lot of people get gaslit around their anger, particularly women and femme folks.” It can be radical to simply admit that anger is arising in you. Owens is very careful with language here. Instead of saying that we are angry, he encourages us to say that we feel angry. “I know it’s very nuanced,” he explains, “but when people start thinking about an experience rather than being something, it really opens up space.” 

And that space gives us what we need to take the next step. Which, surely, is to move past our anger?

No, he argues. The path of liberation is through anger — not to “get over it.” Owens learned this through personal experience, as well as through the wisdom teachings of his Buddhist lineage. As a Black, queer man living in America, he’s had plenty to be angry about (while also having to navigate the harmful stereotype that as a Black man he’s inherently angry). But, he writes in his book, “I wasn’t pissed off because of racism or homophobia or something else. I was actually deeply, deeply hurt.” Through disciplined meditation, Owens realized that his anger was a secondary emotion. Meaning, there was a primary experience that sat underneath the anger. And that primary experience was pain and sadness and a deeper sense of heartbrokenness. 

“It’s like you’re not just angry, experiencing anger about the world. You’re hurt by the world, you’re saddened by the world, you’re grieving the world,” he says. 

Learning to sit with that anger shifted things over time. As Owens practiced noticing and naming his rage instead of trying to push it away or acting out in aggression, he found a way to be with it instead. 

His Buddhist lineage taught him to think of anger simply as energy. And like any energy, he learned to experience it rather than to react to it: “In Buddhism, we would consider the essence [of anger] to be empty…it’s just energy that can be shaped or misunderstood by consciousness.” 

To be clear, he says, “It’s not like the anger disappeared,” but rather that Owens experienced enough space around the anger that allowed him to name the heartbreak that was underneath it. 

And once he could do that, he noticed a completely different feeling flooding in. 

Moving through anger to tender compassion

Nate DeGroot has seen the same connection. DeGroot is a rabbi based in Detroit and the director of the Shalom Center. In his Jewish tradition, anger isn’t just something only humans experience — God gets angry, too. Think of the flood sent to punish humankind that Noah avoids by building the ark, for example. But, DeGroot explains, God’s anger only lasts a moment.

In fact, in Jewish tradition, the Talmud records people questioning exactly how long God’s anger lasts — with some claiming that it remains only for a 15,888th of an hour (which comes to just under half a second), and others saying God’s wrath lasts as long as it takes to say the word “moment” in Hebrew, a word with two syllables. Either way, it only lasts a short while, because a deeper, more enduring compassion quickly emanates from God’s being.

As the parent of two small kids, DeGroot empathizes with both God’s anger — and the love that supersedes it. When his kids mess around, he says, “I’m frustrated!…why did they fling the blue toothpaste on the white shade in the bathroom and now it’s forever stained? I’ve got to bring the rug into the rug cleaner for the fifth time in two years because they peed on it in the middle of the night!” he says, laughing. But those temporary flares of frustration sit within a wider circle of parental care. “I really relate to… this notion of the moment of anger [being] situated within a broader, more expansive, everlasting love,” he tells me.

Once we’ve properly noticed our anger and named the heartbreak it masks, what will (hopefully!) follow is waves of compassion for ourselves and everyone else that is hurting. And it is from that place that you can actually take action.  

From compassion comes a community for justice

Najeeba Syeed is the executive director of Interfaith at Augsburg in Minneapolis and has a long history of doing conflict resolution work. She explains that in Islam, too, the Prophet Muhammad experiences anger. Early in his mission as he travels from one place to another, he’s stoned by angry villagers who reject him. “He was given a choice,” she tells Vox. “Should the divine force go and destroy this community, or should this community have reprieve for what they’ve done?” 

The Prophet Muhammad chooses forgiveness over revenge. But there’s both spiritual wisdom and strategy at play in that choice: Anger can separate us from the very people we need to be connected to when seeking justice, Syeed says. “It makes us incapable of seeing the experience of others,” she says. And it is precisely the experience of other people we need to be aware of when building coalitions that will be able to solve the problems that make us angry. Inequality and corruption and rising health care costs are not going to change if we remain atomized and mad. We have to work together.

“Okay, you’re angry,” Syeed affirms, “But who is the you? Who is in the collective? Who is impacted? If we don’t have a larger identity than our political affiliation — by that I mean the neighborliness, some sense of community that transcends that identitarian political affiliation alone — then we may actually destroy ourselves in the process.”

“If you [take action] by yourself, is it really going to change at the social level?” she asks. “You still have to be able to build allies, and you still have to be able to build connection.”

That’s what the Prophet Muhammad was doing in exhibiting restraint with the angry villagers. In leaving them unpunished, he was later able to build an alliance with them in his campaign to spread his message through the region. 

In the Muslim tradition, a judge is forbidden from making a ruling when angry because it is understood that justice cannot come from rage. Anger helps us cut through distractions and focus on the work that needs to be done — but that work for justice must come from a deeper place of love. 

So, how should we think of anger? Not as something to indulge — but nor should we try to avoid it. Anger is like an alarm bell, telling us something is wrong. When we notice it arising, we must inspect the heartbreak that lies underneath and allow for our innate compassion to emerge. And then guided by that love — and a dash of strategy — we can decide how to act. 

And act we should! Syeed shares a popular saying in the Islamic world: One must tie their own camel. It means that we humans have to intervene in the world; it isn’t just up to the divine to act for us. So: Have hard conversations guided by your morals! Vote in the midterms and in local elections! Call your electeds! Organize your neighbors and your workplace! But do it out of that deeper compassion that guides wise decision-making. 

Editor’s note, October 18, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in September 2024.

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.

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I think I have a duty to help people much poorer than me, and I give 10 percent of my salary to charities that I think are effective at preventing early death due to poverty. I also live in a city with a lot of visible homelessness, and am often solicited for money. My brain says that this is not an effective way to help people; the people asking might not be the neediest among the homeless in my city, and the people I’m sending malaria bednets and pills to are even needier. At the same time, I feel callous simply ignoring all these requests. What should I do?

Dear Would-Be Optimizer,

Nine times out of ten, when someone’s got an ethical dilemma, I think it’s because a couple of their core values are conflicting with each other. But you’re that tenth case. I say that because I don’t actually believe your question represents a battle royale between two different values. I think there’s one core value here — helping people — and one strategy that’s masquerading as a value.

That strategy is optimization. I can tell from your phrasing that you’re really into it. You don’t just want to help people — you want to help people as effectively as possible. Since extreme poverty is concentrated in developing countries, and since your dollar goes much further there than it would in your home country, your optimizing impulse is telling you to send your charity money abroad. 

Optimization started as a technique for solving certain math problems, but our society has elevated it to the status of a value — arguably one of the dominant values in the Western world. It’s been on the rise since the 1700s, when utilitarian thinkers seeded the idea that both economics and ethics should focus on maximizing utility (meaning, happiness or satisfaction): Just calculate how much utility each action would produce, and choose the one that produces the most.

You can see this logic everywhere in modern life — from work culture, with its emphasis on productivity hacks and agile workflows, to wellness culture, with its emphasis on achieving perfect health and optimal sleep. The mandate to “Live your best life!” is turbocharged by Silicon Valley, which urges us to quantify every aspect of ourselves with Fitbits, Apple Watches, and Oura Rings, because the more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you. 

Optimization definitely has its place, including in the world of charity. Some charitable organizations are much more effective than others trying to achieve the same goal. All things being equal, we don’t want to blow all our money on the wildly ineffective ones. Effective altruists, members of the utilitarian-flavored social movement that aims to do the most good possible, are fond of noting that the most effective charities out there actually produce 100 times more benefit than the average ones. Why not get the biggest bang for your buck? 

The problem is that we’ve stretched optimization beyond its optimal limits. We try to apply it to everything. But not every domain in life can be optimized, at least not without compromising on some of our values. 

In your case, you’re trying to optimize how much you help others, and you believe that means focusing on the neediest. But “neediest” according to what definition of needy? You could assume that financial need is the only type that counts, so you should focus first on lifting everyone out of extreme poverty, and only then help people in less dire straits. But are you sure that only the brute poverty level matters?

Consider an insight from the Jewish tradition. The ancient rabbis were exquisitely sensitive to the psychological needs of poor people, and they argued that these needs should also be taken into account. So they decreed that you shouldn’t only give poor people enough money to survive on — they need to have more than that so they themselves can give charity to others. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “On the face of it, the rule is absurd. Why give X enough money so that he can give to Y? Giving to Y directly is more logical and efficient. What the rabbis understood, however, is that giving is an essential part of human dignity.” 

The rabbis also figured that those who used to be well-off but who fell into poverty might feel an especially acute sense of shame. So they suggested helping these people save face by offering them not just bare necessities, but also — when possible — some of the nicer things that graced their former lifestyles. In the Talmud, we hear about one rabbi who gave a newly poor person a fancy meal, and another who acted as the person’s servant for a day! Clearly, the ancient rabbis weren’t only aiming to alleviate poverty. They were also alleviating the shame that can accompany it.

The point is that there are many ways to help people and, because they’re so different, they don’t submit to direct comparison. Comparing poverty and shame is comparing apples to oranges; one can be measured in dollars, but the other can’t. Likewise, how can you ever hope to compare preventing malaria with alleviating depression? Saving lives versus improving them? Or saving the life of a kid versus saving the life of an adult? 

Yet if you want to optimize, you need to be able to run an apples-to-apples comparison — to calculate how much good different things do in a single currency, so you can pick the best option. But because helping people isn’t reducible to one thing — it’s lots of incommensurable things, and how to rank them depends on each person’s subjective philosophical assumptions — trying to optimize in this domain will mean you have to artificially simplify the problem. You have to pretend there’s no such thing as oranges, only apples.

And when you try to do that, an unfortunate thing happens. You end up rushing past all the unhoused people in your city and, as you put it, you “feel callous simply ignoring all these requests.” Ignoring these human beings comes at a cost, not only to them, but to you. It has a damaging effect on your moral conscience, which feels moved to help but is being told not to.

Even some leaders in effective altruism and the adjacent rationalist community recognize this as a problem and advise people not to shut up that part of themselves. Rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example, says it’s okay to donate some money to causes that make us feel warm and fuzzy but that aren’t producing maximum utility. His advice is to “purchase fuzzies and utilons separately” — meaning, devote one pot of money to pet causes and another (much bigger) pot of money to the most cost-effective charities. You can, he says, get your warm fuzzies by volunteering at a soup kitchen and “let that be validated by your other efforts to purchase utilons.” 

I would also suggest diversifying your giving portfolio, but it’s not because I think you need to “validate” the warm fuzzies. Instead, it’s because of another value: integrity. 

When 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams talked about integrity, he meant it in the literal sense of the word, which has to do with a person’s wholeness (think of related words like “integration”). He argued that moral agency does not sit in a contextless vacuum — it is always some specific person’s agency, and as specific people we have specific commitments. 

For example, a mother has a commitment to ensuring her kid’s well-being, over and above her general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Utilitarianism says she has to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for her own kid — but Williams says that’s an absurd demand. It alienates her from a core part of herself, ripping her into pieces, wrecking her wholeness — her integrity. 

It sounds like that’s what you’re feeling when you pass a person experiencing homelessness and ignore them. Ignoring them makes you feel bad because it alienates you from the part of you that is moved by this person’s suffering — that sees the orange but is being told there are only apples. That core part of you is no less valuable than the optimizing part, which you liken to your “brain.” It’s not dumber or more irrational. It’s the part that cares deeply about helping people, and without it, the optimizing part would have nothing to optimize! 

So rather than trying to override it, I would encourage you to honor your wish to help in all its fullness. You won’t be able to run a direct apples-to-apples comparison, but that’s okay. Different types of help are useful in their own way and you can divvy up your budget between them, even though there’s no perfect formula to spit out the “optimal” allocations. 

Diversifying your giving portfolio might look something like this. You keep a small amount of cash or gift cards on you, which you hand out to unhoused people you encounter directly. You put aside a larger amount to donate to a local or national charity with a strong track record. And you devote another amount to a highly effective charity abroad. 

You might feel annoyed that there’s no universal mathematical formula that can tell you the best thing to do. If so, I get it. I want the magic formula too! But I know that desire is distinct from the core value here. Don’t let optimization eat the real value you hold dear. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I recently read Optimal Illusions, a book by mathematician Coco Krumme that traces the roots of optimization’s overreach. As she puts it, “Over the past century, optimization has made an impressive epistemic land grab.” 

• When torn between competing moral theories, does it make sense to diversify your donations in proportion to how much you believe in each theory? Some philosophers argue against that view, but Michael Plant and coauthors defend it in this new paper.

• This gorgeously written essay by anthropologist Manvir Singh introduced me to the term “cooperating without looking” (or, because it’s a New Yorker essay, “coöperating without looking”). This “tendency to willfully ignore costs and benefits when helping others” — to help without calculating what you’ll gain from the altruistic act — is “a key feature of both romantic love and principled behavior.” When we help this way, people trust us more. 

If there’s one thing a busy person doesn’t need, it’s more information. More emails, more notifications, more infinite feeds — the steady drip of data spells doom for the overstimulated American. And if you’re a busy parent, like me, sometimes it feels like a flood: school emails, doctor’s appointments, so many little things to buy.

Even things that used to be simple are harder. I recently listed an item on Facebook Marketplace, which quickly meant I was replying to offers and getting ghosted for the better part of a weekend before finding someone who, after a detailed back-and-forth about the most likely place to find a parking spot in my neighborhood, finally took my old baby swing away.

If only I’d had Muse. You’ve probably seen the ads on Instagram promising “AI that gets it done for you.” The new personal AI agent app from Meta can not only automate your Facebook Marketplace tasks, but also sort your emails, manage your calendar, and buy your groceries. And it’s free — unless you’re using it most of the day or you want access to Meta’s most powerful models, at which point it costs $20 or $100 a month. It all sounds, in a word, magical.

Muse is probably the personal AI agent you’ve heard of — and it’s currently the market leader with more than 8 million downloads in its first month, according to one estimate — but there’s now a small army of these bots: OpenAI recently announced Dots, X has Grok Bot, and there’s Instinct, which is currently invite-only and operates entirely in iMessage or WhatsApp. They all offer the same promise: to remove friction from your busy life.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been handing over more and more of my life to AI agents in pursuit of making my life a little simpler. What I found is that AI is unpredictable, and so are AI agents. When I first began using Muse, it started doing things I didn’t ask it to do. It offered to help with random email threads and created dossiers on people in my work meetings. It generated a detailed report on nearby apple-picking destinations based on a calendar invite from my wife. To me, an AI agent doing these things without prompting isn’t helpful. It’s unnerving. 

But ultimately, I came away believing that AI agents can make your life easier. 

That might mean giving an AI agent more access than you’re comfortable with — handing over lots of login credentials and possibly even your credit card. The more you rely on an AI agent, the more you risk outsourcing your decision-making. This raises real questions about how much agency we want to hold onto in our lives — even the tedious parts. 

The leap of faith

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: To make an agent work for you, you’ll have to sacrifice a tremendous amount of privacy and grant it permission to access a lot of personal information. 

Muse and its competitors can do the classic generative AI tricks, like draft emails or make you a fitness plan. If you’d like the agent to send one of those emails, however, you’ll have to grant it permission to access pretty much everything in your Gmail account. If you want it to schedule workouts, it will need access to your calendar. If you want the agent to buy anything on your behalf, it will need your credit card. If you want it to book your doctor’s appointments, it will need the credentials to log into your healthcare portal. The more permission you grant it, the more the agent can do for you, but that also opens up more opportunities for the agent to misunderstand you or your instructions (more on this in a moment). 

This process of sharing your digital life with an AI agent means you’re giving an untold amount of personal information to tech companies, who don’t always behave ethically, and who sell user data for profit. For now, Meta says that it does not share Muse data or conversations with its ad systems, although privacy experts warn that doesn’t really matter since those systems monitor what Muse does on your behalf. Nevertheless, Muse’s early days were filled with security and privacy blunders.

But without all of this info and access, the AI agents aren’t very useful. So if you’re not comfortable letting a bot into all of your accounts, an AI agent is probably never going to be the solution to your digital administrative exhaustion. But even if you are willing to hand that over, there are still other barriers to an agent’s efficiency and effectiveness. 

The blank slate problem

AI agents, like a lot of new software tools (including chatbots), suffer from the blank slate problem. The blank slate problem essentially means that people don’t know how to get started. This might be because you don’t know about the tool’s capabilities, or because you simply don’t know what would be helpful. There might be some trust issues, too.

As with AI in general, we don’t exactly know how AI agents work. That means we don’t know exactly what they can do or how they’ll do it, according to Pattie Maes, a professor of media technology at MIT — so it’s necessary to do a lot of babysitting. “I feel like I’m not gaining a lot of time because I can’t completely trust the system,” Maes told me about her experience with Muse, “and I can’t predict how it will behave and what it will do.” 

Some advice I heard from early adopters of these tools, however, is to start small. “In the beginning, it’s very hard to trust that it’s going to just magically do a really big thing,” Julie Zhuo, founder of the AI company Sundial and an early Facebook employee, told me about her experience using personal agents. “So you give it smaller tasks, and once you see it succeed, then I feel like you develop more trust that it can tackle bigger things.”

This is surely why Meta decided that Muse needed an Ideas tab full of small tasks the AI agent can do. Muse will also send you a lot of push notifications to prompt you to do stuff, like reply to specific emails or prepare for a meeting. That detailed report on apple-picking destinations? That was a notification about something I didn’t ask Muse to do. Muse also sent me a notification about a show hosted by a podcast I don’t listen to and another one with details about a Halloween party I wasn’t invited to, as well as several evening digests that included lists of things it had already bugged me about that day. Notifications are either helpful nudges or time-consuming attention thieves, depending on your worldview. However, if you fall into the latter category and turn off the notifications from your always-on personal agent, you’re inevitably forfeiting some friction reduction opportunities.

This gets to the heart of one of the big questions I have about AI agents: How helpful are they, really, if it’s this difficult to know what to do with them?

These agents worked much better when I drove the conversation. While wondering what to do with my new agents, literally staring at the blank slate, cost me some time, I found myself thrilled at how easy basic productivity tasks became. Adding events to my calendar, making to-do lists and then being held accountable for stuff not getting done, being reminded to reply to an email — it was these kinds of simple, administrative chores where I saw personal AI agents really start to save me time. 

Other tech journalists seemed to have similar experiences. Eli Tan at the New York Times raved about Muse handling a call to his insurance company. Nicole Nguyen saved time by enlisting Dots for help canceling unwanted subscriptions. Allison Johnson at The Verge had Muse do a whole list of “pebble-in-your-shoe annoyances” she’d been putting off, and among other things, the agent succeeded in helping her buy an entire camping kitchen. Still, she wrote something that stuck with me: “the dirty secret of productivity hacks is that doing more stuff often doesn’t feel like things are being removed from your plate; somehow it just invites more tasks.” 

This gets to the heart of one of the big questions I have about AI agents: How helpful are they, really, if it’s this difficult to know what to do with them? There’s a learning curve, sure, where succeeding at one thing gives you an idea to try something else and have some certainty about how well the AI agent will handle the task. But as the notifications roll in, and you spend more and more time texting with a piece of software, how much time are you really freeing up by using these tools? At a point, enlisting an agent with its own computer to do your chores still amounts to using one app to save yourself from using a different app.

The ironies of automation

Even when they have access to a lot of your information, and you’ve come up with some things for them to do, AI agents can be unpredictable. Because despite reading every email in your inbox or scanning every purchase on your latest bank statement, AI agents still can’t read your mind, and you can’t necessarily guess how they’ll interpret your commands. They can misunderstand you and, armed with the keys to your digital life, do some real damage. 

Some people are already learning about the unpredictability of AI agents the hard way. One early adopter, Matt Robb, gave Muse the keys to his Facebook Marketplace account and was surprised when buyers started showing up at his front door ready to pick up their purchase. Muse, without asking Robb, had told them where to go. It turns out, without realizing it, Robb had given the agent permission to do so, and the agent had simply decided that the most efficient way to get buyers to Robb’s door was to give them his home address.

This dilemma is an example of a decades-old set of concepts known as the “ironies of automation.” Identified by psychologist Lisanne Bainbridge in a paper published in 1983, the ironies of automation help explain why things go wrong when humans give a machine too much control. As Vera Liao, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at the University of Michigan who studies human–AI interaction, explained to me: More advanced automation leads to more consequential errors, and the more humans rely on automation, the worse we get at catching those errors. “Even in simple tasks like judging whether AI output is wrong, people consistently accept wrong AI outputs even if they could have gotten it right on their own,” Liao said.

In some cases, like the time Muse read a journalist’s private messages, things go wrong as a result of poorly designed software, but more often than not, it’s the fault of the user who gives instructions that are too vague, giving the agent space to get creative, which isn’t always a good thing.

I had my own misunderstanding with Instinct. In a text message, the agent reminded me about a couple of emails I’d received and prompted me to follow up. When I replied to the text, I asked Instinct to show me possible replies to these emails. The AI agent instead just sent the responses it wrote. I audibly gasped. 

Looking back at our chat history, I could see why Instinct interpreted my instructions that way. I effectively gave the machine too much control and then failed to manage the automation properly. 

Leaning on AI to do your thinking is an example of what psychologists call cognitive offloading, where you employ an external tool to reduce your effort to complete a task. It makes completing the task easier, sure, but you also open yourself to mistakes. In this case, an AI agent took my instructions too literally, and I failed to catch the error. I can only imagine how a small oversight could turn into a cascade of catastrophes that need cleaning up. All it takes is one poorly worded email sent to the wrong person, and you might have hours of explaining to do — all because you were trying to save yourself 30 seconds of writing.

The real world slop

While I was testing all these agents, I talked to a mix of experts and early adopters. Their opinions were decidedly split about whether these tools were useful out of the box, without a ton of oversight and training by the user. The experts, who had all studied AI in academic settings, all brought up the ironies of the automation problem, where AI makes errors that humans can’t catch. And Maes, the MIT professor, pointed at another consequence: By outsourcing so many tasks to agents, we’re actually creating more work for everyone, including the human service workers who have to interact with this technology instead of us.

“There’s just more and more slop,” Maes told me. “We risk, in a world where agents do all the tasks for us, becoming so dependent on them that the world also isn’t created for us to interact with anymore, but it’s only created for our agents to interact with others, with services.” (We’re already seeing versions of how dominant tech platforms can fundamentally reshape real-world spaces: Think of how Starbucks no longer looks like a coffee shop where you can hang out all day, and is instead built and staffed around mobile order pick-up.)

The early adopters were decidedly more optimistic. Matt Van Horn, an entrepreneur who co-founded the ridesharing service that became Lyft, has been tinkering with agents since the craze started late last year. He’s currently telling his friends and family to use Instinct, which he described to me as “the most ambitious and aggressive” AI agent. 

“I’ve been pushy with my mom and my wife,” Van Horn told me, “and saying, ‘Hey, you should sign up for this. It’s magical.’” 

“My wife does not care about living in the future, but we have four kids,” Van Horn continued. She recently took a picture of a parking ticket and sent it to Instinct, no description, no instructions. Instinct, which had her credit card, just paid the ticket.

At the same time, outsourcing certain chores to AI agents causes real-world problems. Some of these AI agents can make phone calls, for instance, which can lead to some confusion when a human is on the other end of the line. Van Horn told me about the unfortunate time he enlisted an AI agent to reserve a room at a karaoke bar. “The karaoke place said, ‘Are you an AI?’” Van Horn said. “‘I don’t want to talk to an AI. Please connect me to Matt, the person.’ And so Muse had failed to book that for me.” Van Horn, undeterred, found something called Fo, an AI agent that will bring in human help to complete a task. Fo succeeded at making the reservation, although the entire ordeal surely took longer than if Van Horn had picked up the phone himself and talked to the karaoke bar himself. 

At best, the times these tools worked and actually saved me time were rather mundane. I made a doctor’s appointment online using Instinct. Zhuo, the early Facebook employee, planned a party for her college reunion — everything from tracking down everyone’s emails to sending out invitations via Paperless Post. But she’s also said these kinds of applications of agentic AI “read more like vitamins than painkillers.” In the startup world, “vitamins” refers to a product that offers a vague benefit, and “painkillers” solve a big, immediate problem. If you’re a startup, you want to sell painkillers. 

If you’re ready to give an agent a go, be prepared for the bot to make mistakes, and assume you won’t catch all of them. As Liao, the University of Michigan professor, put it, “Choose to use agents for tasks that you can tolerate the consequences of errors.” 

In an effort not to create more emails or alerts or feeds to sift through, I’ve stopped using Muse. Like any new tool, it will get better and more useful as more people use it, so maybe I’ll revisit it in the future. I still have a text thread going with Instinct, however. It messages me from time to time, flagging an email or offering to help with an upcoming event. When there’s a clear payoff to giving the agent the go-ahead, I reply. Otherwise, I leave it on read.

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.

My child, age 9, has decided she’s vegan. Neither of her parents are even vegetarian — we’re “free range chicken/grass fed beef” types. She has learned about veganism from friends at school, and seems to have come to her position more or less on her own. I want to encourage her ethical choices, but her mother and I agree that children should be introduced to new foods and flavors at this age. She has no allergies or intolerances that we know of. I worry that making accommodations for her dietary restriction may lead to a lifetime of picky eating, even if hers is a reasonable and ethical approach. She seems to be uncomfortable when her mother or I cook meat for meals we share, even if we make her another option. What should I do to support my daughter?

Dear Hold the Beef, 

When I was around your daughter’s age, I went to Hawaii with my parents. One night, we ate dinner on the beach, and we watched as a pig was dug up from an underground steam oven. I was horrified to see its face and nose; most of the meat I had eaten so far in my life didn’t resemble the animal it came from. A few years later, I became a vegetarian, and then in my 20s, a vegan. 

I share this story to reveal my slight bias in answering your question, but also my understanding of the ethical awakening your daughter might be experiencing. As you figure out how to talk to your child about what she decides to eat, we can at least table discussing the pros and cons of veganism itself. Instead, you should think about what amount of autonomy your child should have, and whether the moral decision-making she wants to engage in matches with her current stage of development. 

People don’t turn 18 and then suddenly start engaging morally with the world. As we grow up, we try to understand right and wrong in fits and spurts. Lawrence Kohlberg, a 20th-century American psychologist, is best known for attempting to track a person’s moral development throughout their life. 

Kohlberg presented people with hypothetical dilemmas in order to come up with six moral stages. In one example, he asked people of different ages about a dying woman who could be cured by a drug that was cheap to make, but that a manufacturer was charging an exorbitant fee for. The woman’s husband ends up stealing the drug. Is that right or wrong?

Kohlberg observed that in answering questions like this, young children have what he called a “preconventional morality”: Their notions of right and wrong are dictated by what their parents think, and the avoidance of punishment when breaking those rules. For instance, the main reason not to throw your dinner on the ground or hit your brother was to avoid consequences from parents, not a feeling that there’s something wrong about that action. 

Kohlberg thought this stage lasted until around age 9, and in the next period, children began to understand that there isn’t just one correct action, but that people could have different moral ideas based on their social context. To sum up the rest of the stages quickly, each one progresses to encompass more views — like the moral agreements necessary to make a society function — and more complexity — like the realization that a seemingly immoral action can ultimately be moral, like stealing medicine for one’s wife. 

It’s useful to pinpoint where your daughter finds herself on Kohlberg’s timeline. It sounds like she’s in the shift from the first stage and into the later ones. What you’ve decided — that it’s okay to eat meat if it’s free-range or grass-fed — is no longer sufficient for your daughter in terms of guiding her own actions. That can be a jarring moment for a parent, but at least, according to Kohlberg, it’s a sign of maturation. Your child should, at this age, start to consider her friends, as well as the experiences she’s had without you, when making an ethical choice. 

But I’m her parent, you may protest. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your job is to exclusively provide black-and-white directives. 

Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and philosopher at the University of California Berkeley, has written about the unique perspective and personhood of children (including babies). In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, she questions how people have come to define the act of parenting as having specific goals in mind for their children. This approach is like being a carpenter, she writes, who follows instructions to assemble a predetermined piece of furniture. She argues that parenting is more like gardening: You cultivate the soil and the environment and realize that you could produce any number of different flowers, fruits, or vegetables. Growth is the point, not a by-the-book final product. 

I see Gopnik in alignment with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher whose novel Émile, or On Education surprised its readers by advocating for a freer and child-centered approach to teaching. Émile, a young wealthy boy, is tutored — in high contrast to the expectations of the day — without strict rules. Rousseau thought you couldn’t make a child turn into an adult any faster, and it was foolish to try. He also thought that children had to learn by having their own experiences out in the world, and learning from those, rather than just overly didactic lessons. 

As your daughter dips her toe into the morality of eating meat, Rousseau would also remind you not to expect her to have the most mature ideas about veganism or her meal plan. She is still young, and may just have come across an idea that feels ethically important to her. Your role as her parent is to help her develop her nuanced morality, a process Kohlberg suggests will continue, and not steer her towards one way of eating over another. Be Gopnik’s dietary gardener, not carpenter. 

Of course, parents do have rights over their children, and an obligation to keep them safe. When we’re young, we’re not always equipped to make the right choice (some would argue this continues into adulthood, too). If your daughter decided to take up smoking cigarettes, for instance, you would step in because her choice would negatively affect her health. As her parent, you should still guide her to build healthy habits. 

You say you’re worried about your daughter becoming too picky, or not being exposed to enough foods if she becomes a vegan. But rather than push back on the choice itself, you can explain what else her choice entails. You can do so in an age-appropriate way. Talk about the nutrients that she might be missing out on if she stops eating meat, dairy, and eggs, and find books or videos about what foods might be a good substitute. 

For me, becoming vegan actually exposed me to all kinds of foods that I might not have eaten otherwise: from Asian and Indian cuisines that are very veggie-friendly to many other protein- and iron-rich plant-based foods. You could collaborate with your daughter to cook vegan meals for the whole family; no challenge sparks a budding home cook more than making delectable tofu. 

I should add that I’m no longer a vegan. I learned a lot from committing to a diet that wasn’t always convenient or tasty, in support of my values. Then, after more than a decade, I incorporated eggs and fish back into my diet. It’s likely that your daughter will continue to change the choices she makes as she tries to align her actions with her maturing moral views about the world. 

Whether or not she eats grass-fed beef with you in her teens, you should be glad that she seems to care about what impact she’s having in the world. It means you’re raising a person whose ethics are developing strongly, even as what’s on your dinner plate may change while she figures it all out.  

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Speaking of tofu, I revisited an essay that George Stiffman (a self-proclaimed “tofu guy”) wrote for Asterisk Magazine about how soybean curds are prepared in China. Warning: This article will make you hungry! He dives into all the creative culinary preparations of tofu that are tragically absent in the West. 
• Several years ago, I bought a plant-based cooking book especially for children, The Vegan Cookbook for Kids: Easy Plant-Based Recipes for Young Chefs. It was a present for a non-vegan family, but the kid in question was interested in learning how to cook, and when kids cook vegan, parents don’t have to worry about them handling raw meat! Looking over these snacks and meals again, I see several tasty things that I wouldn’t mind making for myself, even as a non-vegan, and non-child. 
• When I was a vegan in New York City in the 2010s, I wasn’t constrained to sad tofu and sprout sandwiches. It seemed like every week a brand-new vegan restaurant opened up, covering every cuisine, and with star chefs at the helm. But lately, all my favorite vegan restaurants have been closing. Turns out I’m not imagining it, as Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova wrote in her article: “Where did all the vegan restaurants go?” She investigates why these establishments have become rarer, and what we’ll miss out on if they completely disappear. 

Setting personal boundaries at work rarely means saying no. Change one standing default, answer requests with a tradeoff, and know what it can't fix.