Humanity has thrived thanks to a stable cryosphere, but burning fossil fuels has increased the risk of “accelerating and partly irreversible” harm to the planet’s cold places.
Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based onvalue pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out thisanonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
I’m considering moving my family from a red state to a blue state. I’ve lived in a red state my whole life, and as a lesbian with a wonderful trans wife, it is hard. Moving to a blue state could give my wife and I better nondiscrimination protections, better worker protections, and better access to health care.
However, I feel like moving would be abandoning the good fight in my home state. I am well aware of how the red state exodus and the red state brain drain are already affecting our community. It’s hard to weigh what may be best for my wife against what’s best for our fellow red state residents.
Dear Should I Stay or Should I Go,
I feel your question deep in my bones. Not long ago, I made the decision to move with my partner from the US to Canada, where I’m originally from. We’re also a queer couple. And we grappled with many of the same questions you’re wrestling with now.
Is it selfish to leave? If you leave, would you be putting your own family’s well-being above the well-being of your wider community? Does that mean you’re reneging on your values?
A few key philosophical ideas really helped me navigate these questions, so I’ll walk you through them. Whether you agree or disagree, they should clarify the terms in a way that makes it easier for you to decide one way or another.
Let’s start with your concern about how to weigh what’s best for your wife against what’s best for your wider community.
One strain of thought in modern philosophy — promoted by utilitarians like Peter Singer — says that we should aim to maximize the overall good, and that means doing good impartially rather than prioritizing certain people just because they happen to be our nearest and dearest. This perspective has become so influential in the past century that it’s probably shaping your thinking here, even if you’re not explicitly aware of it.
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But I want you to know that other philosophers have pushed back. Bernard Williams, a staunch critic of utilitarianism, argued that it can actually be totally normal and morally appropriate to show partiality toward our loved ones.
In a famous passage, Williams said that if a man sees two people drowning, and one is his wife and the other is a stranger, and he pauses to consider whether rescuing his wife would maximize the overall good more than rescuing the stranger, he has had “one thought too many.”
Williams 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. When you got together with your wife, you made a commitment to ensuring her well-being, over and above your general wish for all people everywhere to be well. Utilitarianism says you have to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for your own family members — but to Williams, that’s just an absurd demand. It alienates you from a core part of yourself, destroying your integrity as a moral agent.
According to this view, putting your wife’s safety first isn’t some moral lapse that should embarrass you. Honoring special obligations to our nearest and dearest is actually part of what makes a life ethical.
Besides, even though living an ethical life does sometimes involve being willing to sacrifice some of our own well-being, it’s important to recognize that everybody exists at a different vulnerability level. We shouldn’t expect someone who’s trans to take on risk to the same degree as someone who is not particularly marginalized or endangered.
Given the assault on trans rights in recent years, I’d be really skeptical of anyone who tries to argue that you and your wife have a moral obligation to stay put and “fight the good fight” if she’d be happier and safer elsewhere. Mind you, I also want to caution you to consider all the factors that go into making a happy life before you come to any decision about moving. If your wife has a robust and loving community of friends in your current red state, but knows nobody in the blue state you’re thinking of moving to, she may end up unhappier there on balance. (Plus, as the recent midterms showed, red states don’t necessarily stay red, and even blue states can pass anti-trans rights ballot measures.)
I also think a bigger reframe is in order here. You say, “I feel like moving would be abandoning the good fight in my home state.” But would it really? I’d argue that the key consideration is: Where can you keep fighting the longest? The hardest? The most effectively?
The work of contemporary philosopher Lisa Tessman is instructive here. In her book Burdened Virtues, she argues that situations of oppression can demand certain traits of people — like sustained anger at injustice, fierce loyalty to one’s group, constant vigilance and sensitivity to others’ suffering — that can damage the people who embody them even though they are real virtues. These traits can undermine the well-being of the bearers over time, keeping them from flourishing. What’s more, they can potentially even warp their bearers’ moral character — for example, when anger grows into an all-consuming state.
You said that you’ve lived in a red state your whole life and found it hard. So I think it’s worth asking yourself: Are the traits you’ve had to develop under those circumstances — however virtuous they may be — actually eroding your ability to keep showing up, both for yourself and for your wider community, in the way you’d like? If you feel that, say, constant vigilance is starting to take its toll, moving might give you a mental reset that allows you to be more — not less — active in enacting your values.
Plus, a quick look at the historical record can defuse the idea that leaving a place means “abandoning the good fight.” Consider what happened in the Great Migration, the exodus of Black Americans from the Jim Crow South. Did those migrants “abandon the good fight”? Absolutely not. Once in the North and West, they built up political power and institutions that ended up feeding into and supporting the civil rights movement.
The point is not that the two situations are exact parallels — they aren’t. The point is that when people leave a place, they can choose to use the affordances of their new home in a way that helps their old home. So, although worries about a red state exodus and red state brain drain are totally understandable, I don’t think they decide the question of whether a move would be net-negative or net-positive for your wider community.
What will decide that is what you choose to do with your newfound resources — including, plausibly, an increased sense of safety, security, and mental health — if you do relocate.
Life gets busy really fast, especially after a big move. (I should know — months after moving, I still haven’t gotten around to putting up any art on my walls!) So, if you leave your home state, my strong recommendation to you is this: Make a plan, in advance, for how you will keep fighting the good fight once you reach your new destination. Will you organize remotely? Can you connect right now with the relevant leaders at red state groups you want to support? Which organizations will you donate to, how much will you give, and when?
To boost accountability and prevent mission drift, be as concrete and specific as possible, discuss your plans aloud with your wife, and write them down.
And once you’ve done all this? My dear, let go of your guilt and live.
Bonus: What I’m reading
I loved this Aeon essay about “love with nowhere to go.” It notes that, although we have established social scripts for grief that arises in the wake of a death, we don’t have practices for recognizing and working through grief that’s not death-related. That’s a problem because “when we are unable to honor other profound losses, we become strangers to ourselves.”
Noema published an absolutely wonderful piece by Atoosa Kasirzadeh on how AI is changing math — and how it should! In fact, the AI revolution can have the great effect of reorienting the field to things that really matter according to humans. In my opinion, this is a model for how many other fields should adapt, so it’s really worth reading even if you’re not “a math person.”
Most Westerners don’t have a good window into how people in China think about AI. So I was excited to see Persona publishing Jen Zhu on why the West’s habit of thinking about AI as an arms race misses the mark from a Chinese perspective. “When you watch a competitor sprint, you assume the finish line is the same as yours,” she writes. “But China is not running America’s race. It is continuing a 3,000-year-old project of ordering society as a single organism, harmonized rather than unleashed.”
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The apps and platforms that help family caregivers manage their loved ones’ needs are becoming more capable, but the broader issue of caregivers’ well-being remains unsolved.
According to the Pew Research Center, about half of American adults have used a chatbot, and around a quarter do so daily. By multiple measurements, the public has adopted AI faster than they did home computers or the internet. I’m seeing it more and more in my personal life: On video calls, I notice the Claude app in the menu bar of shared screens. An ad on Instagram pushing me to use Meta’s AI assistant revealed which of my friends had already begun doing so (something that might not even be true).
Still, many of the people who are using AI have mixed feelings about it. Pew notes that of the chatbot adopters they surveyed, 40 percent believe AI will have a more negative than positive effect on society; a 2026 Gallup poll of more than 1,500 14‑ to 29‑year‑olds came to a similar conclusion. No one I talk to about their personal AI use seems to particularly like it, but they accept it. In some cases, it’s the least-bad option; asking a chatbot a question is easier than searching, especially as search engines become so enshittified they’re unusable. In other cases, the tech just seems inevitable. Articles, analysts, and executives insist this is the future. Might as well get on board.
This is a familiar story. New technology moves from novelty to necessity in very little time, and adoption continues even though the future this tech promised isn’t as utopian as the marketing made it seem. Eighteen years ago, only early adopters had smartphones; then suddenly everyone had one, and we were all using them to stream, to stay in touch, and to alleviate boredom at every turn.
Plenty of people seem to regret this adoption. You see it in efforts to limit screen time and in the regular waves of nostalgia for physical media. It’s even in the first few paragraphs of this article — as terms like “slop,” “enshittification,” and “brainrot” enter common parlance. We’ve coined and redefined words to describe a future we didn’t imagine and don’t seem to want.
But while we may now have shorthand to describe the problem, solving it takes something more; nostalgia and anger can only go so far. The devices, apps, and tools that are easy to adopt are hard to give up, especially as the world is increasingly oriented around them. In just a few years, the smartphone became a replacement for everything from cash to car keys. Many workplaces assume their employees will be able to read email anywhere and that they will install productivity apps on their personal device (I have a folder with Airtable, Asana, Slack, Teams, Zoom, and other apps I wish I could delete). And new accessories and subscriptions come along constantly to wring functionality and durability out of our phones — wireless headphones, cases, extra batteries, cloud storage. As much as we may dream of living without a smartphone, the most that many of us can do is delete some apps or use a Brick (yet another accessory) to limit our use.
Look around your neighborhood, and you’ll see how this pattern has played out with other conveniences: streets full of Amazon vans, DoorDash bikes, and Ubers; doorbell cameras to track the theft of those deliveries; abandoned electric scooters on sidewalks; cities built for private cars more than for people.
It’s easy to imagine AI following a similar path — fulfilling some simple desires for convenience at first, then overtaking the alternatives, and fitting into our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine and might not want, but accept because it just seems like this is the natural path of technology.
There are, of course, advantages to new technology, but these wane over time as the downsides become clearer. On the personal side, there’s the frustration of stalled advancement: Each new phone upgrade seems to do less while requiring a costly purchase; ride-hailing services, streaming, and delivery costs climb, and the services don’t get better or more reliable; data breaches are a near-daily headline; and scam attempts fill our email apps, DMs, and any other inbox we have. It’s hard to avoid seeing the public consequences of this convenience, too: the exploitation of workers and the planet required to mine the minerals for batteries and other components, then the labor it takes to put those components into new devices; the allegations of wage theft, algorithmic discrimination, and workdays so grueling drivers have to urinate in bottles; the K-shaped economy that gig work is built on and perpetuates.
This makes it all the more essential to approach any offer of improved convenience with skepticism, and with a doubtfulness learned by unfulfilled promises and bad design. No technology is truly inevitable, no matter how much pressure we may feel to adopt it from our peers and from the corporate buzz that insists this is the future.
How to identify false conveniences
So how do we avoid welcoming these false conveniences into our lives? It starts with recognizing them for what they are. In 1987, Wendell Berry caused a minor kerfuffle in the pages of Harper’s magazine with his essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” In the short piece, Berry explained his reasoning behind the title. The computer could do his work faster, but speed wasn’t his concern. He also knew a computer would be expensive and isolating (Berry’s wife worked with him typing manuscripts). He ends the essay with a list of criteria for adopting a new tool, among them that a new tool should be less expensive than what it replaces, and it should be repairable and available at a local shop. He closes his list by writing that a new tool “should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists.”
This last one is tough. How do we decide what’s good and not worth disrupting? And on the other side, how do we decide whether the device or convenience that disrupts something we want disrupted — chores, for instance — is worth it?
Here, another list can help. In his 10 principles of good design, the legendary industrial designer Dieter Rams wrote that good design is honest about what it does, and is environmentally friendly, long-lasting, and makes a product useful. The utility of many new devices, tools, and apps may be clear, but often the design is dishonest. It hides the real costs of the convenience, like the environmental waste and lost dollars that come with replacing our phones every couple of years, or the privacy sacrifices inherent in many digital services. Or the design obscures the ways the tech might disrupt something good, like the way social media seemed to connect us with our friends, but now exposes us to scammers and to strangers who post rage bait and gets in the way of staying in touch with the people we actually care about.
As I was writing my book, Against Convenience, I kept turning to these two lists. How should I assess a promised convenience and avoid the early adaptation that leads to reliance on a technology I don’t really like? I came up with my own list for the book: questions that could keep me from being too eager for new tech, and less prone to fall into a cycle of increasingly worse design. It’s more than just saying no or resisting tech to preserve some nostalgic ideal — it’s a way to question what we really get from a new device or app, and what that tech might grow into if the pattern continues.
What does this save me? Does this convenience save me time, money, or effort? If it’s time, what will I use that time for? If it’s money, why has the price dropped? If it’s effort, who is doing the work instead?
What does this cost me? What do I have to give up for this convenience? Will I have to pay in perpetuity?
What does this replace? What is the old process for doing the same task? Is there anything I like about that task? Will I lose something I enjoy? How will I replace that enjoyment?
What problem does this solve? What is the cause of the problem in the first place? Will this solve the problem entirely?
Will I be able to stop using this convenience if I don’t like it? How long will I wait to decide?
Who is making this possible? Do I trust them? Is anyone’s work eliminated in this process, besides my own? Have any workers who make this convenience possible made statements about their working conditions? What is the environmental toll?
Is this necessary? Is this getting rid of something that’s difficult, expensive, or time-consuming? Is there some other way to achieve these savings without this particular convenience?
The list is inconvenient by design. It pushes me to slow down, to consider costs before they’re sunk. And to ask if this is really the direction I want to go in. Most of the time, it isn’t, and I say no. The worst that can happen is life goes on as usual, while a few of my friends have something new to complain about.
I built this list around my experiences of stepping on the rake of tech that overpromises and underdelivers, around many instances of believing hype and holding onto a device in the hope that it will one day work like it’s supposed to. I unraveled all the old cables I’ve kept in a drawer for years, trying to remember what each one was for, and what happened to the device. I went through folders on my phone looking for apps I could do without. I walked around my neighborhood looking at the signs of the digital world’s encroachment on the physical.
My answers to each question are my own. You’ll have your answers, around your own experiences, and this is the point: As new tech twists its way toward profitability, it requires mass adoption, prescriptive uses, and conformity to design. A patchwork of answers — people who resist at different stages — hampers not only tech’s invasiveness, but the very model of how it spreads.
It’s hard to tell exactly when AI slop stopped being just a punchline involving Will Smith eating spaghetti and started feeling dangerous. That’s actually part of the problem.
This year, many of the popular AI tools that used to struggle with the number of fingers on a human hand gained the ability to generate photorealistic video — with audio — that costs users virtually nothing to create. Even trained scientists can’t always tell the difference between what’s real and what’s machine-made in digital form. But the most insidious applications of this remarkable technology are playing out on a much more personal level.
A few years ago, we started to hear more about voice cloning tools, which allow scammers to spoof a loved one’s voice in order to extort money from a victim. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have also made any text-based scams more convincing and much cheaper to deploy. Imposter scams, which include romance scams, tech support fraud, and employment fraud, are on the rise, and thanks to increasingly high-quality AI, it’s harder than ever to know who’s real and who’s an imposter online.
When my daughter’s daycare recently sent us a picture of her entire class smiling in unison, my first thought was, “That’s cute!” My wife told me to look again and said, “That’s not our daughter.” She was right. All of the babies’ faces were AI-generated.
That was the moment I knew that, despite my years as a tech reporter, constantly warning my boomer parents to take cybersecurity seriously, the scammers could get me.
As AI gets better and cheaper, we’re all becoming easier targets. Your boomer parents are susceptible to getting scammed in the scary age of AI-powered fraud — but so is your Gen Z sibling, and so are you.
The amount of money people over 60 have lost in scams skyrocketed from about $600 million in 2020 to about $3 billion in 2025, according to a new Federal Trade Commission report. The overall number of older adults who reported losing money to scammers, however, was actually 14 percent lower than the number of younger people who reported losses. Older adults are historically more likely to report being targeted but less likely to lose money to scammers, the FTC said. When they do lose money, they tend to lose a lot of it.
We should all expect to be bigger targets in the future, too, as scammers inundate us with cheaply produced but very realistic AI slop. “The sophistication of the types of scams that are happening to older adults has definitely moved forward,” Diana Freed, an assistant professor of data science and computer science at Brown, told me. “Having some type of family safety plan around these issues is very helpful.”
The two most important things to do in this stressful AI scam era: reduce the number of scammers that can get to you, and establish ways to verify that people — on the phone, online, in videos — are who they say they are. Assume that anything can be convincingly faked these days, and that your whole family will need help figuring out what’s real.
Our best chance at getting through this tricky transition unscathed is to do it together.
Why you aren’t wrong to worry about your aging parents
It’s tempting to let generalizations guide your thinking when it comes to internet safety and behavior. Stubborn stereotypes tell us that older people are warm but incompetent, and that makes them more trusting, easy targets for scammers. We’ve all heard stories about someone’s grandma losing her life savings to criminals on the other side of the planet. Now we live in a world where AI can make those criminals sound like a grandchild on the phone, asking their grandparent to send money for an emergency. The same technology can make an aging parent sound like they’re asking their millennial son or daughter for urgent help, too.
“I think the security risks are certainly the same for younger people as well as older people,” said Ed Baig, who covers technology for AARP’s website and magazine.
Still, aging adults do have unique vulnerabilities that you should be aware of.
Some basic tips to avoid scams
Beware of urgency. Any time someone on the phone or online needs something immediately, it’s a red flag.
Establish a verification system. You can use codewords to verify someone claiming to be a relative is who they say they are. Or you can just hang up and call them back using the number stored in your contacts.
Check the account age. If you see something weird on social media, see how long the account has been around. The newer the account, the more suspicious. This is an especially helpful tip when trying to verify AI slop.
As we get older, our brains start to change. Normal cognitive aging leads to declines in processing speed (so you’re a little bit slower), and memory (so you’re a little more forgetful). That doesn’t inherently make an older person more likely to be a scam victim, but some research suggests that low memory function makes people more susceptible to phishing scams. One 2012 study also linked less activity in the anterior insula (the part of the brain that processes disgust, among other things) in older subjects with more trustworthiness. There are other brain changes, like declines in analytical reasoning, that could explain why older adults tend to respond to certain scammer methods, like finding common ground or offering something free.
More than anything, though, older adults tend to have more money — or, at least, they tend to part with larger amounts of it. They are, in this sense, better marks. In 2024, according to the FTC, the median amount reported lost to fraud for people in their 30s was $450, but that number shoots up to $1,000 for people in their 70s and $1,650 for people in their 80s.
In general, nobody likes to admit they fell for a scam. But the stakes are higher for some older adults, who might fear that they’ll lose their independence if they confess to their families that they’ve been a victim. They may also avoid reaching out to younger relatives to verify a shady-sounding exchange — or to ask questions in general — because they don’t want to bother anyone.
None of this is taking the very real power of AI into the equation, by the way. Older adults use AI less often than younger generations. About one in four people over 65 have ever used a chatbot, according to Pew, although a separate survey found that over half of older adults have used voice-based assistants, like Alexa.(Thanks to recent upgrades, Alexa is gaining new AI powers, too.)
So boomers may not be AI experts in large numbers, but they’re getting to know what it’s like to deal with chatbots. That still doesn’t mean they are fully aware of how much more believable scams have gotten thanks to AI.
What to do with all your AI scam anxiety
Assuming we’re all equally doomed when it comes to AI scams — but also, equally capable of resisting — the best thing to do is prepare yourself and your loved ones. Here are some concrete steps you can take.
Look at AI-generated content together to better understand the problem
Travis Bible, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and editor in his 40s, told me he felt the need to alert his parents about potential scams after Google’s AI video generator got uncannily good. The third generation of the software, Veo 3, can turn text into photorealistic video with audio in a matter of moments, and Bible realized that the videos the tool can produce could fool even him.
When simply describing the problem didn’t convince his parents to take it seriously, Bible got creative: He spent three days using AI to make a PSA warning of the dangers of deepfake scams and showed it to them. It worked. “I kind of expected them to be in disbelief, but honestly, they just kind of accepted it,” Bible told me. “Seeing the video made my warning click with them. Like, ‘Oh, it really is that good.’”
There are other PSAs like this floating around, but watching Bible’s made something click for me, too. I can’t really tell if half the clips are real or fake. You can look for tells, like glitches or visual typos, but AI image generators have gotten so good, it can be impossible to spot a fake at a glance. There are also AI tools that will tell you if a piece of media was generated by AI, like the Google-made SynthID Detector. But let’s be honest: When you’re in the heat of a scam, you don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to be testing the authenticity of stuff.
Talk about scams in a stigma-free environment
Older adults don’t want to be scam victims, but they also don’t want to be surveilled by their anxious relatives. To strike a balance, you can take the stigma out of potential victimhood by talking about how scams are creeping into your own life. Feel free to complain about the incessant string of scam texts about unpaid tolls you’ve been getting. If you’re using AI in your daily life, talk about it with your parents or grandparents, and you may learn more about what they’re doing too.
“Older people may turn to technology to ask questions to avoid burdening their children, meaning they may be hesitant to reach out to an adult child to ask for help with AI,” Robin Brewer, an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan, told me. Approaching these topics with generosity instead of judgment might mean your dad reaches out to you the next time he gets a weird text instead of clicking the link in the text to see where it takes him.
Create a family plan for verification
If everyone’s in agreement that we’re living through a scary time, you should create a family plan. This is useful for the older adults in your life, and it can be useful for you or your kids if you’re ever targeted.
The basic idea is to create a chain of verification, so that if someone receives a call or an email — especially one claiming to be from a relative — they have another family member who can give it a second set of eyes. Scammers can easily spoof phone numbers, so it might look like the call is coming from your sister, when really it’s coming from Singapore. Make sure everyone in the family knows that urgency is a scammer’s best friend, and it’s always a good idea to slow down to try and verify.
You might also want to agree on codewords to confirm that someone is who they say they are when, say, they call asking for “bail money.”
There’s also a cottage industry dedicated to selling you tech to protect your older loved ones and yourself from scams. You can pay for landline services from companies like Community Phone, Ooma, or teleCalm that protect against unwanted callers, filter, and offer caregivers some basic call monitoring features. Major carriers, like Verizon and AT&T, have filters and scam protection built into their services, and smartphones have features like call screening to help you avoid contact with a criminal. But ultimately nothing is 100 percent when it comes to stopping scammers from calling potential victims, since they’re constantly updating their tactics.
“Technology accelerating concentrates everything in our reality, and fraud will get even more powerful because the technology is getting better,” James Graham, Community Phone’s founder and CEO, told me. “And so you need technology that’s also getting better to prevent it, hopefully at a faster rate.”
So it’s a doom loop. Technology is helping criminals get better at stealing, so we need to invent new technology in order to thwart the thieves — until the next generation of tech comes along, at least. The truth is, we can’t stop scammers from assaulting our phone lines and inboxes any better than we can stop getting older with each passing day.
We can, however, talk to each other about these constant threats. Warn your family and friends about the evolving threats that you’re seeing reported in the news or on social media. If your grandma sends you AI slop, talk to her about how AI slop gets made and how it can be dangerous. If your kid’s daycare sends you AI slop, make sure your spouse knows it’s AI slop, even if it’s cute.
I’m actually hopeful that things will get better. If you look back a couple of decades, when email was new, the volume of spam you’d get made it almost unusable. Spam filters got better, and we got better at spotting scams. Like the scammers themselves, we’ll have to keep adapting. But if we can teach an AI-generated Will Smith to eat spaghetti properly, as a society, we can do anything.
Riders and lawmakers often don’t know the difference, and retailers sometimes muddy the waters on purpose. Here’s how to buy the micromobility vehicle you actually want.
If you’re dealing with election-related stress, you’re not alone.
Editor’s note, November 3, 2026, 3 pm ET: This article was originally published in 2024 and has been updated for the 2026 midterm elections.
If you’re heading to the polls today, you may be among the 30 percent of American voters who say the country’s political situation is the biggest source of stress in their lives right now, according to one poll. This unease makes sense, given how high the stakes are: Americans are voting for representatives who will make decisions about affordability, healthcare, and holding President Donald Trump to account.
Elections are common wellsprings of anxiety because they’re rife with uncertainty, says David H. Rosmarin, the founder of the Center for Anxiety. You’re unsure of the outcome, and unsure of what life may look like for you under a new administration, especially when the difference between the two choices is undeniably vast. Some of the proposed policies may threaten people’s safety and freedoms, resulting in even more anxiety. Research shows political anxiety can impact people who aren’t generally anxious otherwise.
There are key differences between everyday anxiety and election-related anxiety. Sometimes, generalized anxiety is rooted in cognitive distortions, or inaccurate beliefs or fears about the world. But election-based distress isn’t necessarily based on hypotheticals or overreactions, says licensed clinical social worker Jneé Hill. “A lot of the concerns,” she says, “are very real and very valid based on people’s real lives and lived experiences.”
While election anxiety may feel large and existential, mental health experts agree it can be managed. As you wait for results to roll in, here are some strategies that can help quiet your mind.
Get to the root of your anxiety
To properly address your fears, you first need to specify what triggers your feelings of anxiety beyond not wanting the other side to win, Rosmarin says. What specific policies or issues impact you the most? It might be reproductive rights, the economy, immigration, or war abroad. Identify your top three issues, Rosmarin says, and try to share these worries with family, a friend, a supportive online community, or mental health professional.
Knowing the causes of your fears can help you anticipate and gird against them. Research shows when people were asked whether they expected to be stressed about the election the following day, they reported worse moods and were more likely to rate their physical health as poor, regardless of political affiliation, age, or gender.
Knowing the causes of your fears can help you anticipate and gird against them.
You might also ask yourself why these issues concern you, Hill says. If reproductive rights are your top priority, maybe your deeper fears center on being unable to receive lifesaving medical treatments. “A lot of this,” Hill says, “comes down to safety.”
However, you can anticipate your stress and get in front of it. There’s a thought exercise you can do ahead of encountering something upsetting to slow your thoughts and talk yourself through your anxiety, says Shevaun Neupert, a psychology professor at North Carolina State University and author of a study on how to combat anticipatory election stress. Take a few minutes and think about why you’re stressed, how it’s related to the election, and why this contentious issue exists in the first place. “It really is focused on mental engagement, perspective-taking,” Neupert says, “trying to understand where did this thing come from? Why is it here? And to fully understand it rather than trying to solve it.”
This exercise is effective, Neupert believes, because it helps reduce uncertainty. For instance, you may come to realize a source of your anxiety is a decades-long ongoing foreign policy issue. While this realization doesn’t minimize the problem or provide a solution, sometimes it’s helpful to put the issue into its proper context and perspective. “If we feel like we have a better understanding of a problem or of a stressor or we have a clearer sense of it,” Neupert says, “it’s not as scary.”
Take control where you can
Uncertainty about the future is a major source of general anxiety and can lead to a sense of powerlessness. With so much out of an individual’s control, it’s important to focus on areas where you do have authority. You can, of course, vote, volunteer as a poll worker, and get involved with get out the vote or activist organizations in your community.
You can also try setting goals in your work or social life that have nothing to do with politics but still might help you feel like you’re making progress in some small way, Neupert says. Maybe that goal is to finish a book over the next two weeks or to make dinner every night with your family. “That goes a long way to boosting perceptions of control,” she says.
Then, consider how you’ll assert autonomy over your life after the election, especially if your candidate doesn’t win. You can plan on leaning heavily on your friends or distracting yourself with hobbies. “There might be situations that are beyond my control,” Rosmarin says, “but that doesn’t take away my power of choice in my life, in my limited way.”
Lean into community
Feeling supported by friends and family helps combat anxiety, so try to avoid spending the next few weeks in isolation. Instead, reach out to friends and family (preferably discussing anything but politics) or attend a safe and affirming community event. Find people who fill you with calm instead of dread and with whom you can talk things through and problem-solve. “What can be helpful,” clinical psychologist Krystal Lewis says, “is feeling all emotions, feeling all the feels, with people who are going through it as well.”
These communities will be especially crucial post-election, too, Lewis says. Find people or groups where you can process strong emotions, whether that’s a dance class or a volunteer organization.
Care for your mind and body
In the days leading up to the election and immediately following, especially if a clear winner is not apparent, stressed-out Americans should pay extra care to their minds and bodies. This might mean curbing your consumption of news and social media. While experts say everyone’s tolerance will be different, it’s important to pay attention to how they feel while watching or reading the news and social media. Engage enough to stay informed, but step away if you feel overwhelmed, Lewis says. “Unless that’s your job,” she says, “there’s no need to be that consumed with it.”
Rosmarin suggests turning off your phone and avoiding all news at least 30 minutes before you go to sleep, including on election night. “You’ll wake up in the morning, you’ll find out what the story is. You watching it isn’t going to change anything,” he says. “The only thing it’ll change is make you more tired and grumpy the next day.”
Engage enough to stay informed, but step away if you feel overwhelmed.
Difficult as it may be, try to incorporate joy however you can, Lewis says. Spend a few minutes each day on pleasurable activities that reduce stress, like listening to music, getting together with friends, or meditation.
Regardless of what happens over the coming days and weeks, remind yourself that your concerns are real, Hill says. What matters is finding coping strategies that work for you — and will continue to be effective no matter the outcome.
Law enforcement officers detain an activist outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building during a protest opposing ICE operations, in Minneapolis on March 1, 2026. | Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images
Let’s say that you’re savagely beaten by a federal officer despite the fact that you committed no crime. Or maybe your home is ransacked by FBI agents who didn’t even bother to get a warrant. Or maybe you’re shot in cold blood by immigration officials engaged in a paramilitary occupation of your home city.
Now, the Court is poised to finish the job. On November 9, the Court will hear Nielsen v. Watanabe, a case that could eliminate all remaining hope that someone targeted by a federal officer with no regard for the Constitution might be able to hold that officer accountable in court. Among other things, the justices could use Nielsen to overrule its decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), which established that federal law enforcement officers may sometimes be sued if they violate someone’s constitutional rights.
Bivens was rooted in something very similar to the Spider-Man Rule — with great power comes great responsibility. As the Court explained in Bivens, a federal officer who acts unlawfully “in the name of the United States possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual trespasser exercising no authority other than his own.” And thus the Constitution must offer some remedy to people who are injured by such an officer.
But Bivens quickly fell out of favor in the Supreme Court as its membership moved rightward. The Court’s current, Republican majority is so unrelentingly hostile toward Bivens that it is hard to imagine any plaintiff prevailing in a Bivens suit before this Court. The Court’s most recent decisions have described Bivens suits as a “disfavored judicial activity.” In one decision, they’ve said that it is “doubtful that we would have reached the same result” if Bivens were “decided today.” And they’ve instructed judges to reject Bivens claims if there is “any rational reason (even one)” to do so.
In Nielsen, the same justices who wrote these lines are now being asked to overrule Bivens altogether. Even if they decide not to go that far, they’ve already done so much to carve up Bivens that there is virtually no hope for anyone who sues a federal officer for violating their constitutional rights.
The last time the Court ruled in favor of someone who sued a federal officer under Bivens was Carlson v. Green (1980), a decision that allowed the estate of a man who died in prison due to poor medical care to sue prison officials under Bivens. The Nielsen plaintiff, a formerly incarcerated man named Kekai Watanabe, raises a similar claim to the one in Carlson. Watanabe was assaulted by fellow inmates, and received some medical care for “severe back pain.” But when he asked to be treated in a hospital, that care was denied.
He claims that, for months, he “received only intermittent and short-term treatment for pain, often over-the-counter medication,” despite repeated requests for more care. After seven months, according to his brief, Watanabe was finally given an X-ray, which revealed that he had a fractured tailbone and that “bone chips had migrated into the surrounding soft tissue.” Watanabe also claims that he was never given treatment by a medical specialist, and “remains in tremendous pain today.”
A federal appeals court concluded that Watanabe’s legal claim “is identical to Carlson in all meaningful respects,” and thus his lawsuit against a prison health provider could move forward. Though the Supreme Court “has cautioned against extending Bivens remedies,” the lower court explained, “it has consistently maintained that” Carlson is “still good law.”
On the one hand, the appeals court is correct that Watanabe alleges a legal violation that is very similar to the one in Carlson. In both cases, someone incarcerated in a federal prison alleged that their Eighth Amendment rights were violated because the prison did not provide them with adequate medical care. So that does suggest that Watanabe should be allowed to bring a Bivens claim for as long as Carlson remains good law.
Still, the Court’s recent cases tell judges to rule against Bivens plaintiffs if there is “any rational reason” to do so. And there are certainly some distinctions that can be drawn between Carlson and Nielsen. The plaintiff in Carlson, for example, had an asthma attack and died within hours, while Watanabe is still alive and his medical condition played out over many months. The defendants’ lawyers in Nielsen also argue that Congress has changed the law governing suits brought by federal prisoners in ways that make their case meaningfully different from Carlson.
These distinctions are fairly minor. But if judges are really supposed to look for any rational reason to deny Bivens claims, then these distinctions are almost certainly enough. Again, it’s hard to imagine this Supreme Court ruling in favor of any Bivens plaintiff, including Watanabe. In Nielsen, the lawyers asking the Court to overrule Bivens claim that, since Carlson, the Court has rejected 13 different suits raising Bivens arguments.
For what it is worth, the legal debate over Bivens focuses on whether Congress must specifically authorize suits against federal officers before those suits can move forward. The Court’s Republicans claim that the absence of such a law means that no suits against federal officers are allowed (a federal law does authorize suits against state officials who violate constitutional rights).
Meanwhile, proponents of Bivens argue that the 1971 decision merely added coherence to a long line of pre-Bivens decisions permitting suits against federal officials — some of which stretch back to the early 1800s. As the Court said in Larson v. Domestic & Foreign Commerce Corp. (1949), “the principle that an agent is liable for his own torts ‘is an ancient one and applies even to certain acts of public officers or public instrumentalities.’”
But it matters little who is correct about this debate, because Republicans control six seats on the Supreme Court, and those six justices are fully dug into their opposition to Bivens.
The biggest open question in Nielsen, in other words, is whether the Court will take the defendant’s lawyers up on their invitation to overrule Bivens in its entirety. Just a few years ago, a decision overruling Bivens would have been a very big deal. But, in light of the Court’s decisions holding that judges should look for reasons to deny Bivens claims, little of Bivens remains to be further undermined by this Court.
Federal officials already enjoy such broad immunity from suit that an opinion overruling Bivens will probably do little more than rescue judges from the menial task of hunting through legal records in Bivens cases, searching for a reason to rule against the plaintiff.
Chatbots are often quite good at retrieving the information you want from the web. But sometimes you’ll get better results by typing your query into a good old search engine.
Editor’s note, November 1, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary. The one below was originally published in August 2025.
This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.
I typically eat vegetarian, and have considered going fully vegan out of concern for animal welfare. But lately my on-again, off-again gastrointestinal problems have been acting up, and I’ve had to go back on a more restricted diet to manage my symptoms — no spice, no garlic or onions, nothing acidic, and nothing caffeinated. Sticking to a “bland” diet is hard enough, but doing so while vegetarian is very difficult when things like tomatoes and onions and grapefruits are off the table.
I know a lot of people with these issues eat fish or meat, and some medical professionals recommend drinking chicken bone broth to soothe flare-ups. I don’t want to abandon my commitment to animal welfare while my gut sorts itself out, but my food options are limited right now. How should I approach this?
Dear Would-Be Vegetarian,
You’re not alone in finding it hard to stick to a purely vegetarian diet. Only 5 percent of American adults say they’re vegetarian or vegan. What’s more, one study found that 84 percent of people who adopt those diets actually go back to eating meat at some point. And most of them aren’t even dealing with the gastrointestinal problems you face.
So, it speaks to the depth of your moral commitment that you’re really wrestling with this. I’ll have some concrete suggestions for you in a bit, but first I want to emphasize that how you approach the question of meat-eating will depend on your underlying moral theory.
There’s a classic split in moral philosophy between deontologists and utilitarians. A deontologist is someone who thinks an action is moral if it’s fulfilling a duty — and we have universal duties like, “always treat others as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.” From that perspective, killing an animal for food would be inherently morally wrong, because you’re treating the animal as a means to an end.
Meanwhile, a utilitarian is someone who thinks that an action is moral if it produces good consequences — and behaving morally means producing the most happiness or well-being possible, or reducing the most suffering possible. Utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer argue that we should be reducing, and ideally eliminating, the suffering that animals endure at our hands.
Deontologists and utilitarians are often pitted against each other, but they actually have one big thing in common: They both believe in a universal moral principle — whether it’s “always treat others as ends in themselves” or “always maximize happiness.”
A lot of people find that comforting, because it offers certainty about how we should act. Even if acting morally requires hard sacrifices, it’s incredibly soothing to think, “If I just do X, then I’ll know for sure that I’m being a good person!”
But these moral theories assume that all the complexity of human life can be reduced to one tidy formula. Can it, really?
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Another school of philosophy — pragmatism — says we should be skeptical of fixed moral principles. Human life is so complicated, with many different factors at play in any ethical dilemma, so we should be pluralistic about what makes outcomes valuable instead of acting like the only thing that matters is maximizing a single value (say, happiness). And human society is always evolving, so a moral idea that makes sense in one context may no longer make sense in a different context. To a pragmatist, moral truths are contingent, not universal and unchanging.
I think one pragmatist who can really help you out is the University of Michigan’s Elizabeth Anderson. In a 2005 essay applying pragmatism to the question of eating meat, the philosopher points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although certain non-Western societies did ascribe moral worth to some animals).
“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals (other than our pets),” Anderson writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”
In other words, Anderson doesn’t think there’s some universal rule like “eating animals is inherently morally wrong.” It’s our social and technological circumstances that have made us more able than before to see animals as part of our moral circle. She also doesn’t believe there’s a single yardstick — like sentience or intelligence — by which we can judge how much of our moral concern an animal deserves. That’s because moral evaluation isn’t just about animals’ intrinsic capacities, but also about their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, say, or whether they live independently in the wild.
It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us. Killing bedbugs? Totally fine! They may be sentient, but, Anderson writes, “We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace. To one-sidedly accommodate their interests…would amount to surrender.”
Anderson’s point is not that animals’ intelligence and sentience don’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.
With this pragmatic approach in mind, you can consider how to balance your concern for animal welfare with your concern for your own welfare. Instead of thinking in terms of a moral absolute that would force you into a “purist” diet no matter the cost to you, you can consider a “reducetarian” diet, which allows you to ease your own struggle while also taking care for animals seriously.
The key thing to realize is that some types of animal consumption cause a lot less suffering than others.
For one thing, if you’re eating meat, try to buy the pasture-raised kind and not the kind that comes from factory farms — the huge industrialized facilities that supply 99 percent of America’s meat. In these facilities, animals are tightly packed together and live under unbelievably harsh and unsanitary conditions. They’re also often mutilated without pain relief: think pigs being castrated, cows being dehorned, and hens being debeaked. Oh, and chickens have been bred to be so big that they’re in constant pain; they live miserable lives from start to finish.
A pasture-raised label doesn’t mean an animal has been spared all of the harms of modern agriculture — it doesn’t guarantee that pain relief is used for painful procedures, and farm animals across different production systems have been bred to maximize production, which can take a toll on their welfare. And of course they’ll ultimately meet the same fate as those raised on factory farms — slaughter. But your goal here is to meaningfully reduce, not 100 percent eliminate, the harms. And at least pasture-raised animals have gotten to roam around in a field and engage in natural behaviors up until the end.
It’s a similar story for fish, by the way. More than half of the fish we eat comes from fish farms, which are basically just underwater factory farms. Wild-caught fish is not perfect — slow, suffocating deaths are common — but it’s better than farmed.
The caveat here is that a lot of the welfare labels you’ll see on animal products are basically a con. And some certification schemes have similar names, so you have to pay close attention. If you see the label “Certified Humane,” that’s genuinely higher-welfare — but don’t mistake it for “American Humane Certified,” which is really not. And be wary of putting much stock in labels like “cage-free” or “free-range.” They’re better than nothing, but because the terms are often ill-defined and unenforced, they’re not as meaningful as you might think. Here’s a good guide to separating the real deal from the advertising spin.
Another classic recommendation among animal welfare advocates is to eat bigger animals — in other words, go for beef rather than chicken. That’s both because of how miserable chickens’ lives are on factory farms and because, as my former colleague Kelsey Piper has written, it just takes way more chicken lives than cow lives to feed people. Cows are huge, producing about 500 pounds of beef apiece, while a chicken yields only a few pounds of meat. So, every year, the average American eats about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow.
That said, cows take a heavier toll on the climate than chickens do, so you don’t want to eat tons of beef either. The environment is also one of the key values at stake in our consumption choices, so that has to factor in, too.
Of course, another possibility — to the extent that this works with your gastrointestinal issues — is to reach for low-fiber plant-based foods like tofu, seitan, and the smorgasbord of newer products now available (like Beyond and Impossible burgers).
But assuming you’re going to eat meat, it’s a good idea to set some clear parameters and standards around your reducetarian diet. A lot of reducetarians — myself included — have fallen into the trap of saying, “I’ll reduce how much meat I eat,” but forgetting to quantify what that means. That can lead you to eat more meat than you’d intended. So it’s probably better to commit to something like “weekday vegetarian” or “vegan before six” — you can check out the Reducetarian Foundation for suggestions.
At the end of the day, remember that there’s a plurality of values at stake here, and no one of them necessarily trumps all the others. If you feel that eating some meat is important for your well-being right now, and you try to do that in ways that keep suffering for animals to a minimum, I don’t think you need to feel bad about that. That’s because you won’t be shirking your values: You’ll be recognizing that your values are plural, and you’re doing your best to balance between them. That may be the best any of us can really do.
Bonus: What I’m reading
The blogger Bentham’s Bulldog published a piece titled “How to cause less suffering while eating animals.” It contains some of the same recommendations I mentioned above, but the underlying ethical framework is different and it makes one recommendation I didn’t: “offsetting” your meat consumption by donating to highly effective animal charities. I worry that offsetting might create a moral hazard, as with people offsetting their carbon emissions and then potentially feeling free to fly more. But it’s worth considering, particularly if you pair it with clear parameters around your reducetarian diet.
This Aeon essay answers a question I’ve often wondered about: Why haven’t other animals — say, birds — developed complex civilizations like we humans have? Why don’t they build rocket ships, argue about economic policy, and play canasta? I’m grateful to the evolutionary biologist who wrote this piece for finally giving me a satisfying answer.
I can’t stop thinking about this post on how AI companies may have designed chatbots to play an underspecified “helpful assistant” character who, due to being underspecified, looks to the internet for examples of how to play that role, finds tons of science fiction about cheesy robots, and thus starts to behave like a cheesy sci-fi robot (ChatGPT will say things like, “Gee, that really tickles my circuits!”). This post is mega-long, deeply trippy, and worth reading.
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