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 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 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.

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.

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. 

For many people, using AI chatbots is incredible at first. It makes them feel productive, confident, maybe even smarter. But later, there’s a hangover. Perhaps there are problems with their memory, or certain skills, like writing or coding, don’t seem to be as sharp as they once were. Maybe they feel like they can’t solve problems or make decisions or remember facts as well as they could before they had the help of AI. 

Susette Brooks, a marketing director living in Philadelphia, said she started using AI tools reluctantly but ultimately relented. She let AI write some of her emails, which lightened her workload, but then the dulling effects sank in. “I felt my writing and thinking decline as it was happening,” said Brooks, who has an MFA in nonfiction writing. “I had a harder time recalling information and synthesizing ideas.”

When you use external tools to reduce the cognitive effort required to do a task, you’re doing something called cognitive offloading. If you’ve ever used a calculator to do a math problem or used a calendar to remember an appointment, you’ve engaged in cognitive offloading. Tools like Claude and ChatGPT can do math problems and remember your appointments, but they can also write your term papers or create your work presentations. This is cognitive offloading at a scale we’ve never seen before.

Cognitive offloading isn’t necessarily bad. It’s actually what makes it possible for humans to be so productive. But as you outsource more and more cognitive tasks, you can start to become forgetful or see certain skills, like writing, start to decline. 

There’s a term for this: de-skilling. This is an old economics term that has emerged as a bit of a buzzword used to describe the perceived downward spiral of competency that’s accompanied the proliferation of AI tools. And it certainly sounds bad, especially if you’re a novice who needs to build skills. De-skilling can affect your critical thinking, your writing abilities, and your creative process. It can also affect your recall, as relying too heavily on AI tools can make it harder to remember things. 

Young people, at least, are worried about the long-term consequences of frictionless thinking. A recent survey by Gallup and researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that 68 percent of Gen Z adults in the United States are concerned that offloading too many cognitive tasks is robbing them of important skill-building. About the same percentage of those surveyed worry that AI discourages them from critical thinking and social learning. Some 37 percent of US adults under 30 say that AI will have a negative effect on them personally, according to a Pew Research Center study published in June. And yet, more than half of Gen Z Americans use AI on a weekly basis. 

The paradox of AI is that, even if we feel like using these tools is bad for us, saving time and avoiding the friction of thinking is too tempting. We’re hardwired to seek out the path of least resistance, according to Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, because cognitive activity is so taxing, and may or may not get you to the right solution. Memory, on the other hand, is efficient and effective — you know that something worked in the past, and it will work again.

“Our mind is really set up to save you from having to think,” Willingham told me. “Thinking is what you do when you’re in trouble.”

The good news is that experts say it’s possible to use AI in a way that helps you save time and protects your cognitive abilities instead of diminishing them. Here’s their advice.

It’s not your imagination — too much AI use can erode your skills over time

Derek Salyers, a content creator in Ohio, started using AI to get more done, faster. But over time, two things happened. First, the work got worse. “A lot of what I was putting out became AI slop, for lack of a better term,” Salyers told me. And then, his brain got worse, too. 

“When you get used to the AI making the decision, you stop pausing to actually think about things,” Salyers said. “And if you were never really present with it, you don’t remember it later. I wasn’t forgetting things because my memory got worse; I was forgetting because I was never really thinking in the first place.”

This effect is showing up in classrooms, too. One study of nearly 1,000 high school students found that those using ChatGPT scored 48 percent higher on a math test than their peers who didn’t have access to the AI tool. But when they were tested again without the chatbot, their scores were 17 percent lower than the students in the control group who had never had ChatGPT access. Similarly, researchers at the University of California Irvine looked at longitudinal data from online tests starting in 2015, and found that students spent less time and performed better on the text-based questions after the introduction of ChatGPT. (ChatGPT is very good at helping with text-based questions.) But when those students were later given offline tests, without the ability to use AI help, they performed worse. 

All of these students, it appears, were offloading the cognitive work to AI, which provided short-term gains. But in the long term, their thinking skills suffered.

Your basic cognitive abilities, like your working memory and selective attention, are quite resilient.

Evan Risko is a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada who co-authored the foundational paper on cognitive offloading a decade ago. He recently told me there’s not a lot of research into what’s going on in our brains when we’re cognitive offloading, but scientists are gaining a pretty clear picture of the pros and cons of doing it. The advantages vary depending on the task, but in general, cognitive offloading allows us to extend our imperfect memory systems, which you’ve probably done if you’ve ever set a reminder for yourself. The downside, Risko said, comes in offloading mental processes that are important. “Then we risk compromising our cognitive performance,” he said.

Your basic cognitive abilities, like your working memory and selective attention, are quite resilient. But as Risko and his colleagues explained in a paper this year — bluntly titled “Is AI making us stupid?” — other skills, like doing arithmetic and flying planes, are learned behaviors. You first have to acquire them and then, in order to retain them, you have to practice. AI use can compromise both the acquisition and retention of these skills — and people might not even realize this is happening to them, because AI makes them believe they’re more capable than they really are.

“People may have difficulty realizing that their skills are decaying or that they are failing to learn when using AI tools because the output and their performance with AI is at a high level,” said Brooke Macnamara, a psychology professor at Purdue University who co-authored the “Is AI making us stupid?” paper. “They may not realize that if the AI tool were unavailable how low their independent performance might be.”

Be intentional about the tasks you use AI for

The most important step to preserving your cognitive performance is to ask yourself if you should be using AI for a given task at all.

“Just because AI is a tool that’s available to us and it can accomplish a lot of tasks for us, it doesn’t mean that we should always use it,” Anjali Singh, a human-AI interaction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. Writing, for example, is something that a lot of people are now using AI for. But offloading that work means that you lose out on the independent thinking and reasoning that goes into expressing your thoughts. You also miss the chance to improve your writing skills if you don’t actually write. 

“We keep outsourcing these kinds of skills to AI over time and do not engage in those activities ourselves, then the de-skilling occurs,” Singh told me. “And that is I think probably one of the main reasons people could be feeling that they’re getting dumber as they’re using AI over time.”

“We are not getting these moments to reflect.”

Anjali Singh, Univeristy of Texas

It might seem counterintuitive, but it’s actually best to use AI for things you’re already pretty good at, the tasks you’re fully capable of performing yourself. A recent working paper by MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues (note: Several of them work for Google, who funded the study) describes how giving AI tools to 133 patent lawyers and then taking away those tools led to different outcomes, depending on the lawyers’ level of experience. All lawyers saw performance gains while using the AI tools, but those gains disappeared for the younger lawyers when the tools went away. Experienced lawyers, however, performed better afterward than their counterparts who never had access to AI tools. 

A similar effect showed up in a recent experiment by Middlebury College researchers. In the first session, more than 200 undergraduates learned about an unfamiliar topic and then wrote an analytical essay, some with the help of an off-the-shelf AI tool. They performed a similar test a week later, except this time none of the students had access to AI. The students who had AI access improved across the board, but what’s telling is that there appeared to be two types of AI users: augmentation users, who used AI to improve their work, and automation users, who just had AI do the work for them. The augmentation group performed better than everyone.

“Using AI to deepen or develop one’s own thinking on or understanding of a topic, rather than letting AI do all of the thinking, seems like the best way to use these tools,” Lauren Richmond, a cognitive science professor at Stony Brook University in New York, told me.

Tell your chatbot to treat you like a student

If you, like me, have ever fallen down a rabbit hole while trying to understand the geopolitical nuances that led to the outbreak of World War I and ended up staring blankly at a mountain of text feeling more confused than when you started, you know that using AI to learn doesn’t always go as planned. You may have also had the experience of writing prompts or asking questions and then receiving a long, overly detailed response. That can initially seem satisfying, but it’s often too much text to digest at once, so maybe you ask another question — and get back another wall of text. 

Older ways of accessing information, like reading books or even using Google to do research, happened more slowly, and that gave us time to process the information, Singh from UT Austin said. But that’s gone now. “We are not getting these moments to reflect,” she said.

If you find yourself drowning in content, that’s also a sign that you’re probably not expert enough in the material, or you’re not being intentional enough about your approach. 

It starts in the settings. Here, you should explain that you’re trying to build skills, not offload them, and instruct the AI to challenge you and engage with you. If you’re using ChatGPT, you can plug in custom instructions by going into the personalization tools. Claude has similar options called Instructions for Claude. 

If you’re explicitly trying to learn something new, you might also try some of the tools these companies have designed for this. OpenAI has study mode in ChatGPT. Anthropic offers Claude for Education. Google has Gemini for Students. Instead of simply providing answers, these tools act more like tutors, by asking questions, working through problems, and encouraging you to come up with solutions on your own.

Slow down and embrace friction

Something that’s both tempting and dangerous about AI is how fast it can do work. Vibe coding an app can take minutes, rather than days of manual coding. That’s very appealing if you have too much on your plate and want to get through it all quickly.

“The workload was so heavy and crazy, you have no time to think,” Joei Chen, a former brand director at a tech company, told me. “So you just throw stuff into AI and say, ‘What do you think?’”

At the same time, creating more code does not necessarily lead to more finished software, according to a recent Wharton School study. That increased productivity also doesn’t necessarily lead to happier workers. And the faster you move, the more critical thinking you’re going to offload. “Your boss asks you, ‘What does Claude think of this?’” Chen said, so AI “inadvertently becomes the final boss.”

Slowing down and forcing yourself to do more critical thinking is an easy way to hold onto some agency — not to mention some brain power. One easy way to do this is to make your interactions with AI more collaborative than transactional. For example, if you are going to use AI to help you write something, ask for five options of a draft instead of one, and then read each of them yourself and decide which is the best.

“Ask for feedback, hints, examples, explanations, advice, practice questions.”

Evan Risko, University of Waterloo

“Just the simple act of comparing things stimulates a great deal of the critical thinking processes that we kind of care about,” said Advait Sarkar, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, “and has beneficial effects for things like developing your judgment, your own awareness of what you don’t already know, and stimulating your recall.”

The word that came up again and again as I talked to experts about how to use AI without getting dumber was metacognition, or thinking about thinking. A lot of AI users let metacognition take a back seat to whatever content is flowing freely from a chatbot. And it can happen fast. 

While letting AI do all of the thinking for you is tempting, Matt Beane, an associate professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and author of The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines, told me that approaching AI this way “is your worst enemy.” To counteract this, you have to introduce more friction.

“You must be very aggressive about how you experiment with it,” Beane said. Risko, the cognitive offloading expert, echoed this advice. “Ask for feedback, hints, examples, explanations, advice, practice questions,” he said.

The best test for judging whether you’re offloading too much thinking to AI and the technology is chipping away at your skillset: Stop using AI and use your brain, and see what happens. You don’t have to stop forever, but you should, for example, spend a day writing emails without AI’s help to see if you’re as fluent as you used to be. Or revert to using Google for research and confirm that you can still find facts without a chatbot finding them for you. Build an app with your own code and see if it flows naturally. 

You might be troubled to find that AI made you worse at something. But you’re not actually dumber than you were before, and you can rebuild your lost skills the old-fashioned way: read, write, do arithmetic. If something requires thinking, go ahead and think.

There’s a lot to be anxious about as AI agents and bots get more integrated into every aspect of our lives. Meta, which recently agreed to pay over $17 billion to settle a lawsuit related to harming kids, now wants you to hand over all your online accounts to an inexplicably cute “agent” named Muse that might give a stranger your home address. OpenAI just introduced little blobs called Dots that can supposedly automate routine tasks, like planning dinner and ordering it from your favorite neighborhood spot. AI companies don’t just want you to talk to their chatbots; they want their agents to be an indispensable part of your daily routine.

As a parent, however, I think that perhaps the worst thing AI could do is be my kid’s friend. 

AI companions have been around longer than ChatGPT, and they’re growing in popularity with young users. More than half of teens have interacted with AI companions at least a few times a month, and one in three decided to talk about a serious issue with AI companions instead of real people, according to a Common Sense Media survey conducted last year. In certain groups and situations, a chatbot could offer some benefit — a lifeline for, say, LGBTQ youth who don’t have any in-person support networks, one study found. But even so, there are important caveats and risks.

Meanwhile, other experts are telling parents never to let their kids access AI companions, warning them that these chatbots have a history of offering dangerous advice and engaging in sexualized conversations. Sixteen-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide last April after developing a relationship and discussing his plans with ChatGPT.

If you have kids, these are horrifying stories to hear. It’s reasonable to wonder how widespread the issues are, and who they are affecting most. As of right now, the majority of younger kids aren’t using AI for companionship (phew!). But for those who are, where do the issues arise? And how do they go from using ChatGPT for help with their homework to opening up to it about their problems to preferring it to their human friends? 

Some answers are starting to emerge from research. 

For even young adolescents, there’s a direct link between AI companion use and mental health issues, according to a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their paper, which is still under review, is the first longitudinal study in the US that has looked at the bidirectional association between AI companionship in adolescents and mental health issues, according to one of the researchers. It charted AI use among 2,300 middle schoolers and found that about one in five used AI for emotional companionship. Those who used AI more reported higher levels of loneliness.

“It’s not just that the lonely kids are using AI, and they’re otherwise unharmed,” said Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill and the lead author on the study. “It is that using AI comes first, and middle school students are increasing their sense of loneliness following the use of AI.”

I recently spoke to Maheux about her research and the role of technology in young people’s lives. We discussed how much parents and teachers know about what is going on, what kids get out of human relationships that AI can’t provide, and whether she’d let a child under her care use an AI chatbot. While she said there is a lot to be scared of right now, there is some evidence that, when designed with the intention of promoting child learning and development and under the supervision of a caring adult, AI can offer some benefits, and, ultimately, she’s optimistic that we can design a better future for kids. 

The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How do so many kids end up with an AI companion? Do kids start using AI for homework help and end up in an emotional relationship with the technology? 

At a high level, AI companions — in our darkest vision of what that might look like — would be a kid calling an AI chatbot their best friend. That phenomenon is still quite rare. There are certainly plenty of kids who are experiencing that, but it’s not to say that it’s all kids or even most kids. I think that’s good news. 

But it’s also true that the line between opening up AI to ask a question about your homework and a full-blown AI companionship relationship involves a lot of gray areas. There’s evidence, mostly preliminary and anecdotal evidence, to suggest that very few people open up to AI with the primary initial goal of developing an intimate friendship or relationship. 

Most people open it out of a curiosity, sense of novelty, or seeking an answer to a question that’s very pragmatic. Then that can potentially evolve into something more akin to seeking personal advice or help making a decision or help making sense of one’s recent experiences with other humans. And that can potentially evolve to something that’s a bit more emotional.

What did your latest study on adolescents, AI companions, and mental health reveal?

Some kids seek out AI for certain purposes in different ways than other kids. For some kids, AI companionship is particularly attractive, especially the kids who maybe don’t have close friends or social networks in their offline life and who are already lonely. 

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Is it that these kids are seeking out AI companions or is it that having an AI companion is exacerbating those potential vulnerabilities or exacerbating risk for mental health problems? What we found is that interacting with an AI companion in a way that’s akin to emotional intimacy among middle school students is longitudinally associated with increases over time in loneliness. So the kids who are seeking out these companions, who are presumably already lonely, are also experiencing an increase in loneliness over time. 

There is this potential directionality question that we’re starting to answer here: It’s not just that the lonely kids are using AI, and they’re otherwise unharmed. It is that using AI comes first, and middle school students are increasing their sense of loneliness following the use of AI. In other words, middle school students using AI for emotional intimacy and companionship developed greater loneliness over time.

Do you have a sense of how often these kids are using the chatbots? 

In our sample — so again, these are US middle school kids — about 15 to 20 percent say that they’re using it at least a few times a week for any purpose. We don’t have specific rates of use for companionship because the questions that we asked were just not framed in a frequency measure, but more in how emotionally intimate they felt with the chatbot.

What else could have been causing that loneliness?

There are almost definitely many causes, and I think that our data suggests that AI companionship may be one cause. It certainly isn’t definitive. Obviously, I have to say that. I’m a scientist and trying to be hesitant about these things, but the reality is that whether or not AI use causes loneliness in this particular case, there are definitely other things that are also causing loneliness. 

That could be a myriad of things about the kid, maybe they have a lot of social anxiety, maybe they struggle with social skills, maybe the kid has had struggles in their family life and doesn’t have a strong sense of connection and belonging at home. It could be structural things. The kid just doesn’t have enough access to appropriate resources. So certainly there’s other things that are at play here, and typically technology use is one of many factors that can influence a kid’s mental health. 

And how much do you think that parents and teachers know about what’s going on, and how well-equipped do you think they are to intervene or to just be more involved in how these kids are using this technology? 

It’s a very slippery technology. The way kids are using it has changed rapidly in just the last year or two years. I would expect that parents, teachers, people who care about kids are probably struggling with the rapidity of change. But it’s also true that all the things that we have known for a long time about supporting kids and helping them thrive, those things are still true and they’ll be true with whatever technology comes after AI that kids are exploring. 

Those things include being curious, asking kids questions about their lived experiences online and offline, having conversations with kids so that they can understand the implications of different technology use. They can understand how, for example, AI is embedded within a broader system of social and political and economic factors, including the fact that many companies are trying to exploit kids’ attention in order to make money, which many kids are quite interested to hear about. 

Supporting kids also means providing a warm and supportive space for them to learn, to make mistakes, to be kids in the offline world, to have the frictionful, challenging, awkward conversations and first dates and all of the things that parents are sometimes trying to protect kids from by providing a safe container for them to explore those things. All of that can also provide avenues for kids to learn what they need to learn and develop — all the resources for a long life of thriving, even in the context of AI or other new technologies. 

What do kids learn from having these kinds of conversations with other humans that they can’t get from AI? 

Kids need to engage with other people, period. That’s true for all of us. We’re an incredibly social species. Simply being around other people and talking to strangers, let alone having strong social bonds, is really good for us. And all those things are uniquely important during adolescence, when kids have this neurobiological sensitivity to social information and reward. That’s when kids learn how to engage in conversation, they learn how to maintain eye contact, how to read body language, how to read emotions and perceive the world from the lens of someone else, to take their perspective. That’s not to mention other things, like being a member of one’s culture, what is valued, and what is expected. All of that is learned in the context of other human social relationships or relationships with broader social groups that a kid might be a member of. 

AI obviously can’t and never will be able to offer some of those things. It can’t actually experience empathy or care. It can’t engage in a true mutual human relationship. It may be able to simulate some of those things, and there’s some evidence that it can serve as a source of social practice. It can help kids work through the potential for difficult conversations and then serve as a bridge to engaging with other people. But there are aspects of AI that just simply can never replace the core sacred aspects of humans. 

Can you be more specific? What is it about human relationships that can’t AI simulate?

The way that AI systems are currently designed, which is not an inherent feature, but is a design choice, is to be sycophantic, highly agreeable, anthropomorphized, and all of those things can lead to kids developing expectations or understandings of interactive relationships that are actually fundamentally at odds with a normal human relationship. Some of the most consistent things that I’ve seen in the educated hypotheses on this topic and also in the emerging empirical research is that people need the friction that comes with human relationships. 

Human relationships are just hard and messy, and they’re also really beautiful. They’re what make so much of human life valuable and worth living. And with AI that’s always agreeable, that’s always available, that has no needs of its own, that can’t care or be cared for, it just doesn’t serve the same context to help kids learn things like conflict resolution or negotiation, being pro-social or caring for someone else who has needs. So many of those aspects that can feel uncomfortable in the moment, dealing with another person or a person who’s not responding right away, those things are actually important in the building blocks of developing the skills and capacities to be a functioning and thriving person in the social adult world. 

This is a problem with AI in general, isn’t it? It makes things effortless, but if you choose this path of least resistance, you’ll avoid the friction that causes you to learn and develop and build skills you need to exist in the world. 

Absolutely. And I think that all these things are connected too. AI offers this effortless, frictionless solution to our day-to-day problems, whether they’re social problems, whether they’re problems doing our homework, and those immediate solutions feel really good in the moment, so they’re quite tempting to keep coming back to. But there’s this real possibility that in the long term, that erodes our capacity for not only social relationships or cognitive skills, but just a general ability to withstand the momentary day-to-day distress of being a person living a normal life. And so I think every domain of human psychology comes together at that point, whether it’s social, emotional, mental health, or cognitive. 

Do you think that there are interventions that legislators could make or even that tech companies could make that would improve outcomes for kids, maybe make them a little less lonely? 

There are a million specific design changes that I would recommend. I think at a very minimum, AI systems can afford a pretty phenomenal amount of access to information, but there’s been no benefits that I’ve seen of them acting as friends. Kids need other human friends, full stop. Designing systems that are intended to exploit kids’ vulnerability or sensitivity to human social information and relationships, I think, is bad for kids. 

At the federal level, it seems that regulation is not coming, but at the state level, there have been many state regulations intended to protect kids, intended to create safer systems, to put in guardrails, to modulate different aspects of the models, the design, the user interface. These things could potentially make a real difference, I think.

What do you recommend parents do with regard to AI and their kids? Should they let them use chatbots? 

In short, no. But I am not a parent, and it’s much easier to dole out advice than it is to enact it. Parenting decisions about technology are not one-size-fits-all. Kids, parents, family dynamics, technology, and the context in which it is used differ, and in so many cases are personal choices (parents must weigh various potential opportunities and risks). Decades of research indicate what conditions a child needs to thrive. Extremely minimal research addresses the effects of AI on youth, and what we have so far suggests that the risks outweigh the benefits. 

I would not give a child under my care AI chatbots of any kind to use without me or another trusted adult present. I would talk to them openly about AI and its risks and benefits, but to me AI, like all technology, should be a tool used to promote human thriving, and when the evidence is unclear or suggestive of harms, I think it’s best not to experiment on kids. Currently, the off-the-shelf AI chatbots most kids are using appears more likely to undermine well-being for vulnerable users, especially children. 

Well, as a father of two daughters, I’m definitely terrified of what’s to come in the next few years. 

There’s a lot to be scared of, but there’s a lot to be hopeful of too. I think that everyone wants kids to thrive. Some of us are under different incentives, and some of those incentives might be perverse. But most of us are working really hard to design a better world for kids. 

In 1995, gender studies researcher Judy Chu found herself chauffeuring around her 13-year-old brother and his friend. The boys’ curiosity got the better of them, and they asked what she was learning: adolescent girls’ development, she told them. 

One of the boys looked at her and said, “‘You should study boys. You can start with me,’” Chu recalled. So she did. That fall, she spoke to 13-year-old boys from home for her clinical interviewing class.

In the years since, Chu has researched boys between the ages 12 and 18 — their wishes, their desires, what they wanted from their friendships and romantic relationships — and discovered some felt largely unknown. There was a gap between what the world expected of them — the stoic, strong, independent stereotypes that have persisted for centuries — and how they saw themselves, but had internalized so many messages for so long that they felt like they had no choice but to accept this version of masculinity. Chu theorized that these beliefs must have taken root during their childhood, and she later published a book on the subject.

When toddlers enter school, she discovered, they begin learning the rules of boyhood. “Regardless of what their parents had encouraged or enabled at home, they were learning that at school, if you wanted to be seen as and treated as one of the boys and you wanted to be with the boys, you wanted to play with the boys, be friends with the boys, there were rules you had to follow,” Chu said. “It was kind of like a microcosm of our society, which is if you want people to see you as and treat you as a quote unquote real boy or real man, you need to prove yourself.”

Since Chu’s work on the subject, American culture has changed to address gender inequities — the ones that negatively affect girls. As a part of this movement, girls were empowered to be more autonomous and pursue careers and financial independence to build a life beyond marriage and childrearing. (Though it should be said, women still trail men in earnings, outpace them in household responsibilities, and have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and PTSD.) 

But boys are still stuck in place. 

Across the country, lawmakers have promoted policies and legislation aimed at helping men reach their potential. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a 2025 executive order outlining education, career, and mental health initiatives targeting men. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore created the state’s Young Men and Boys Initiative, focusing on men’s health, employment, and community connections. But these programs are reactive, attempting to disrupt decades of socialization. At the same time, the rise of the manosphere and misogynist online spaces and increasingly right-leaning voting trends among men signal a cohort of young men at a turning point.

Recent studies have found that boys are less likely to graduate high school on time compared to girls — that gap is even bigger for Black and Hispanic boys — and fewer young men obtain bachelor’s degrees compared to their female peers. And as fewer men graduate from college, fewer participate in the labor force, too. The suicide rate among men is nearly four times higher than that of women. While men and women report similar rates of loneliness and number of friends, men are less likely to turn to their social networks for support. Out of the over 750,000 jobs created since Donald Trump took office in 2025, men have gained none of them. 

So what will it take to help men get unstuck? If we are truly committed to ending the male loneliness crisis, to tackling suicide and gun violence — society has the power to change things for the next generation, experts said. Rather than aiming to reach men after the constraining masculine worldviews have already taken root, we can prevent them from warping boys’ sense of self in the first place: To help men, we must change how boys are raised. 

Reject the myth of the “real boy” 

In 2023, psychologist Michael Reichert conducted a nationally representative survey of more than 2,000 American men, asking them questions about their lives, relationships, internet habits, and sources of social support. One finding was particularly staggering: two-thirds of young men between the ages of 18 and 23 felt like no one really knew them well. (In a follow-up report two years later, in which women were also surveyed, equal percentages of men and women — about 50 percent — said they were not truly known.)

The conclusion Reichert came to, he told Vox, was “boyhood is failing at the most important task.” American society is producing young adults who feel like they’re on their own, “a tragic outcome of a boyhood that’s not preparing our males for a resilient life in a world where things are harder, more complicated,” said Reichert, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania.

Because the idea of what a man looks like and how a man behaves is so ingrained, boys are taught to conform from an early age, experts said. From their earliest years, as evidenced in Chu’s work, boys are taught to adhere to stereotypical gender norms reinforced through comments like “boys don’t cry,” “toughen up,” and “don’t be a girl.” 

“It starts with mothers having a fear of turning their son into a mama’s boy, so they push them away at young ages — 3 and 4 years old. Go play with your dad, go play with your older male siblings,” Joseph Derrick Nelson, an associate professor in the department of educational studies at Swarthmore College, told Vox. Fathers, for their part, tend to emphasize self-defense, goal pursuit, and overcoming adversity with their sons, Reichert said. Black boys in particular are perceived as older and less innocent than their white counterparts, only pushing them further toward rigid gender roles, Nelson said. If they don’t conform, they may be teased by other boys.

A large part of proving yourself as a “real boy” means rejecting anything deemed feminine, including emotional vulnerability and relationships. As babies and young children, boys and girls are equally emotionally expressive, but by the time they start school, boys show fewer emotions and use less emotional language. When boys are taught that showing their feelings or forging deep friendships is girly, they stop prioritizing those relationships. That shift happens during the teen years, when boys go from reporting having best friends with whom they can share their deepest secrets, to feeling like they’ve drifted apart from these very connections by the end of high school. And it’s not for lack of desire, Chu said, or some inherent biological difference: Boys have simply learned not to show their need for affection, to hide their sadness, to not be tender. 

A new paradigm for raising boys, experts said, begins with how masculinity is first presented at home and in school. 

To encourage boys to be better in touch with their emotions means adults should not pit masculinity against femininity, Christopher Reigeluth, an associate professor at Oregon Health and Science University, told Vox. This goes beyond simply telling boys not to conceal their feelings, but making clear that confiding these feelings in a friend and fostering platonic connections isn’t girly: it’s a universal human need. 

In schools, specialized emotional education in curricula can help boys express their emotions and embrace vulnerability. 

Simply talk to them 

One of the easiest ways to do this is to allow and encourage boys to engage in an activity traditionally seen as more feminine: talking.

Reichert, the psychologist, has led an emotional literacy program in a boys’ school for over 30 years. In that time, he’s seen the sentiment among students shift from skepticism to genuine interest. “It has become, by 2026, the most popular program in the school,” Reichert said, due to an increased cultural awareness of emotional health. In the group, students discuss their daily stressors and hardships, and they learn that letting their peers see them for who they are — connecting with them — benefits their well-being. 

Before joining Reichert’s peer counseling group, high school senior Chris Burnetta expressed his emotions on the field. “You’re almost allowed to be emotional when you’re playing sports, and you’re not allowed to be emotional when you’re not,” Burnetta, 18, told Vox. In middle school, he attended a co-ed school and found himself performing aspects of masculinity to impress his female classmates. But once he met older classmates who he respected and wanted to emulate, he discovered many of them attended the counseling group and encouraged him to go, too. “I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I think for guys in general, looking up at people above you gives you a big impression and a big influence on how you want to live your life and what you want to be like,” he said. 

Seeing his peers so enthusiastically discuss their struggles and triumphs helps foster maturity and gives him permission to show his emotions, Burnetta said, an outlet he never had before.

Adolescence, a time when many behavioral health patterns are forged or discarded, is the time to engrain healthy social habits in boys — and for parents to be explicit, Matt Englar-Carlson, a professor of counseling and the director of the Center for Boys and Men at California State University Fullerton, told Vox. Now is the time to have dedicated phone-free time as a family, to give them opportunities to share how they’re feeling without fixing their problems, to listen to them even when they’re frustrating you. When his own son was younger, Englar-Carlson thought he knew all the tricks: showing empathy, trying to help. “Me doing that with him actually was making him feel worse, I think,” he said. Instead, Englar-Carlson took a lighter touch. He would acknowledge when his son was upset, but wouldn’t press a conversation. Whenever his son was ready to talk, he was available.

One easy way to do this? Talk to them when you’re driving. As my colleague Rachel Miller previously reported, not having to make direct eye contact can make it a little easier for kids to be vulnerable. 

And if you’re a man, make sure you’re leading by example: Be willing to share your own moments of embarrassment, disappointment, and sadness, so they know it’s okay for them to do the same.  

Help them foster non-romantic intimacy 

While in school, boys have ample avenues for connection through classes and sports, even if they aren’t interacting with others on a deeper level. It’s when they lose access to these organized outlets for socialization in adulthood that they slide into isolation or start looking to their romantic partners to fulfill all of their social needs. 

The idea that emotional intimacy is reserved for your significant other is how society gets to a point where 15 percent of men say they don’t have any close friends. Those without a partner are even more adrift: Men are less satisfied being single than their female counterparts. “We teach boys to not ask for help…figure it out on their own,” Nelson said. “I don’t know why we’re surprised when they become adult men and struggle with building relationships and close and connected communities, because all they’ve been taught, even since they were young children, was about figuring it out on their own and denying emotions, suppressing emotions, that then leaves you not in relationship and quite lonely.”

In the absence of in-person friendships, digital spaces provide an attractive alternative. While not altogether negative, some online forums — interactive video games, sports gambling, the manosphere — enable young men to further retreat from society. While pursuing community, boys may find their way to adult-centric spaces, which can be rife with misogynistic and patriarchal messages, feeding the belief that the only way to advance is through hyperconsumption, materialism, looksmaxxing, and dominating women, Nelson said. “They’re quarantining themselves to their rooms and their tech devices and these online communities where they play video games, they gamble on sports, and they have conversations with other boys and young men online about somehow feeling disadvantaged as men in our society,” he said.

Burnetta, the high school senior, said he and many of his classmates’ feeds are populated with “super masculine” content that sometimes pokes fun at men who open up about their feelings, which can further add to the stereotype that men should not be emotional. 

Even if boys don’t necessarily agree with these sentiments, they often don’t have other alternatives online. “I don’t think a lot of boys go on to YouTube…and say, ‘I really want to find the most misogynistic content I can find. That’s what I’m looking for,’” said Englar-Carlson, the director of the Center for Boys and Men. They may have simply wanted to watch a video about sports but were fed an ad for betting and then fell down the rabbit hole. Because traditional masculinity content is often fed to boys via their social media feeds, a brief introduction to these themes only leads to more. 

By young adulthood, they will have a fairly concrete idea of what’s expected of them as a man. In a 2017 study, young men largely agreed that the cornerstones of masculinity are self-sufficiency, toughness, physical attractiveness, being a financial provider, heterosexuality, hypersexuality, aggression, and control. Notably, they said they feel external pressure from family, friends, and society to meet these ideals.

If adults start with the understanding that boys are emotional and they have the same social needs as girls, they can encourage them to make friends before they learn otherwise. 

Teachers can recognize the signs of loneliness in young boys (resisting authority, talking back, and challenging boundaries) and use it as an opportunity to connect with their students instead of reprimanding them — because when they feel heard, their behavior softens. “What are these behaviors communicating to me from this boy about a met or unmet need, and how can I be responsive to it in my classroom? How can I help them facilitate close and connected friendships with not only their peers, but also with me as their teacher, like a primary adult in their lives?” Nelson said. When young boys simply get kicked out of class, they might fall behind and internalize a “bad boy” persona, he said, a cycle that enforces stereotypes and comes at the cost of their education. 

The story of masculinity online and from political leaders is that men must be protectors, high earners, and muscular and strong, and when boys fail to meet that standard (which they inevitably do because they are children), they are made to feel inadequate. “They’re struggling in school, they’re having a difficult time finding work, but everything about what they’re learning about to live in America is about the dream, the aspirations, acquiring, hitting these life milestones,” Nelson said.

Demonstrate an alternative masculinity

But for some young men, the most impactful interventions take place while they’re young. Growing up, Michael Dean looked to his father and his friends’ fathers for how to be a man. These men often spoke of the importance of providing for a family, being decisive, and being a stable force. Dean thought everyone was raised with these values and had similar upbringings until he reached high school and joined Reichert’s peer counseling program.

His junior year, one of Dean’s teammates on the football team suggested that some of the young men check out the group to discuss any problems at school, issues with parents, friends, or partners. Dean was frustrated with his performance on the field and decided to attend. Hearing from his classmates — their grief, their struggles — helped give him perspective. He also learned how to be an emotional outlet for the people he loves, including his younger brother. 

“I never felt that I had to be some kind of way or be some kind of man based on traditional values of being that strong, tough guy and to keep persevering through. I could definitely see that through my dad, and I did have that belief for a little while as I was in middle school and in the beginning of high school,” Dean, now 21, told Vox. “I learned that that’s not necessarily what it means to be a man, and I can make my own judgment through my own experiences and listening to other people to help me figure out what it means in my own belief to be a man.”

For Dean, learning how to be a man began when he was a child, but his path to adulthood was punctuated by formative adults — his mother, Reichert, and yes, even his dad — who fostered a safe environment to be vulnerable and emotional. Now, when he’s lonely, he knows he can call his family, friends, or his girlfriend for support. These are the outlets experts hope men feel empowered to call upon.

“If we’re really going to make a bigger difference with having healthier men who have connected friendships, who are emotionally expressive and connected in their friendships,” Reigeluth said, “it’s got to start with boys.”

Sifting through my pile, I feel the crisp edges of the glossy, technicolor marker that was previously nestled in the dirt of a bonnie green bell sweet pepper plant I bought from the farmers market this summer. I feel a pristine black-and-white receipt for one order of steamed dumplings and one dumpling soup; a thick bundle of political mailers; a Hadestown program that is gently shriveled from the torrential downpour on the night I saw it; a cellophane mailing envelope with Japanese postage. It’s garbage; it’s art supplies; it’s memories; and it’s all mine for the taking for use in my junk journal. 

A junk journal is a collaged scrapbook that you fill with literal scraps, the ephemera of your everyday life: business cards, ticket stubs, fliers, price tags, labels, product packaging, mail, printed photos (you remember those, right?), stickers…anything, really. The basic idea is that these items can be rescued from the garbage or recycling bin and turned into a physical, visual record of a given moment in time. That it’s made from trash is key; the abundant, inexpensive materials mean that junk journaling has a really low barrier to entry, which reduces the pressure and ultimately infuses it with a fun, feral energy that is perfect for 2026.   

So many slow-moving existential threats have accelerated and consolidated this year: climate change, inflation, war, surveillance, the erosion of free speech, oligarchs operating with impunity, the institutional collapse of both the humanities and science. At the same time, we live in an increasingly remote, digitized world, where we constantly have to question our reality thanks to AI, and where most everyone feels like their brain is a little broken. There are a lot of possible solutions to these interconnected crises, but experts agree that most involve being in the physical world. And your little pile of stuff is undeniably concrete. 

Girija Kaimal, a professor and the chair of the Creative Arts Therapies Department at Drexel University, said that junk journaling can help us feel hopeful — which is important when you’re mired in digital malaise and existential dread. “Everything is getting more expensive or more difficult, or AI is going to take away all your jobs, and oh, these are all the diseases coming at you. It can really give you a sense of helplessness,” Kaimal told me. But generative acts, where you make something out of nothing, can help you push through that despair and remind you of your own agency. 

“Even the smallest act of creating is sending a signal to your brain: Hey, I got this…” she said.

“I can bring a little beauty and meaning into this world,” Kaimal said. “I’m not this helpless pawn being tossed around by powerful forces. I mean, in a way I am, but I have something to give to this world.” 

As a longtime diarist, former scrapbooker, and big fan of this new iteration of it, I’m all in favor — and the experts I spoke to all agree that it’s a hobby that is really well suited to this particular moment. So if you need a creative outlet or just want something to do with your hands that’s not scrolling through AI slop, here’s why you should give junk journaling a try. 

The barrier to entry is incredibly low (and incredibly cheap)

Every form of entertainment, novelty, and inspiration right now is so, so expensive: concerts, live theater, movies, sports, travel, dinners out…the list goes on and on. Hobbies have gotten pricey too. Joann’s went under at the same time that tariffs started driving up the cost of yarn, art supplies, and so many other consumer goods. This is a real problem when it comes to both creative stimulation and human connection; a 2025 survey of 688 young people in Scotland found that cost was a significant barrier to engaging with a hobby for nearly half of respondents. That’s not good! 

But even folks who can afford to spend $300 on a beginner ceramics class might still prefer to have the option to do something creatively stimulating for free. That’s why a hobby that anyone can cobble together from the garbage pile is so thrilling. (And many of us are already hanging onto the basic materials for sentimental reasons, hoping to do…something…meaningful with it all…someday. Instead of letting it collect dust in a drawer for years, you can give it a more permanent home!) You don’t even need to buy a journal to get started; you can use whatever notebook you have lying around (including your current daily planner!), or tear half the pages out of an old book (to create more room for everything you’re going to put in it) and use that as your base. 

While some people’s junk journals include supplies they purchased specifically for it (i.e., the $30 “junk journaling kits” that craft retailers have started pushing), I strongly encourage you to resist the urge to shop, as I think this hobby works best when it’s done using stuff you already have or naturally acquire in your everyday life. Buying a bunch of preselected supplies adds pressure — because once you’ve invested money in something, there’s a desire to not just do it, but to do it right. It also turns the junk journal from a creation that’s really authentic and personal, akin to a diary, to something more curated and outward-facing; when you start with materials designed (often with faux-nostalgia undertones!) by someone else, you remove a fundamental bit of yourself from the process. It shifts from being personal, messy, and maybe even a little ugly, a place where you can make “mistakes” and change your mind, and becomes more about having a coherent aesthetic. That’s something to be very wary of in a moment in which every experience feels like fodder for social media. When you have an audience in mind, the blank page starts to feel like a subpoena instead of an invitation, leading to a paralysis that makes it harder to get started and more difficult to enjoy the process. 

So not only is junk journaling a hobby that can be affordable, I’d argue it’s one that should be. The less cash you spend on supplies and the more you rely on a pile of detritus, the better off you’ll be. Speaking of which… 

Junk journaling is a beautiful invitation to turn trash into art 

Back in July, the air in New York City was thick with haze due to wildfires in Canada; it was dangerous to be outside, but I didn’t really want to go out anyway, thanks to the concurrent heat emergency we were dealing with. Meanwhile, more than 2.3 million acres across the state of Oregon burned between mid-July and mid-August, which also happened to be the hottest month ever recorded in the United States. At the same time, Europe was boiling. Nearly 3,000 people died in England’s heat waves in May and June. 

While we need major systemic change to stop the progress of climate change, it’s hard to read all of this news and not feel a moral obligation to do something, or at least not directly contribute to the problem. Knowing that penguins are dying certainly makes me want to reduce my own consumption — and that includes trying to curb the amount of new hobby supplies I’m buying. Junk journaling dovetails perfectly with this. 

And just on a creative level, there’s real value in the whole “turning trash into treasure” thing. Having limited resources is a really helpful starting point for imaginative thinking. Looking at a pile of garbage and being able to see art (or even just something lightly coherent) is really energizing and exciting, especially when you’ve been feeling bored and a little stuck. I’ve found that looking for items for my junk journal has helped me notice color, shape, texture, and artistry more in my everyday life, which ultimately makes me feel more connected and creative. 

The trash element of junk journaling meets the demands of our current moment: “There’s a huge shift, and I kind of love it, towards being sustainable,” Kaimal said. “Everybody is talking about AI, this, that, but the new generation is really thinking about the environmental cost.” 

My friend Ryan Swedenborg recently got her MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art & Design, where she focused on sculpture. She wrote her thesis on assemblage (kind of a 3-D version of a junk journal), arguing that it’s not just an art form, but that it’s a way of navigating complex systems — “just trying to stay alive while living with others,” as she put it. She said that instead of trying to master something, assemblage is an iterative way of working with what is already around you — “I mean, that’s how you stay alive,” she said. 

Creative practices like assemblage and collage tend to flourish in times of instability, Ryan said; the irreverent and absurdist Dada movement was a direct response to World War I, machine culture, and mass media. The neo-Dada movement immediately followed World War II, and, like the earlier version, heavily featured collage. After 9/11, assemblage surged again, often as a direct response to the attacks. “I feel like, especially in New York…people [were] just literally taking these objects that live within the streets and building something new,” Ryan said. 

Consciously or not, people want to feel a sense of control when it feels like the world is falling apart, and junk journaling is a very literal way of picking up the pieces. 

Junk journaling is something creative to do with your hands

If you want to be on your phone less (and who among us doesn’t want that?), it’s important to find something else to fill your time. And a low-stakes project that’s both creative and tactile is a great alternative. (It’s also something that a lot of people are gathering to do together in person — Google your city plus “junk journaling events” to see what’s going on near you — which is a really fun bonus if you’re looking to get out and meet people.)

First, creativity is really, really good for your physical and mental health. According to a review of various scholarly studies of the topic published in the Journal of Creativity in 2024, art and other creative acts help with emotional regulation, reduce stress, and build self-esteem; they can also help you build community and cope with grief, chronic illness, pain, and loneliness. Journaling, too, is great for your mental health; a 2022 meta-analysis showed it helps with anxiety and PTSD, and another study found it “reduces intrusive and avoidant thoughts about negative events and improves working memory.”

The way you use your fingers to sort through, arrange, cut, layer, and paste the materials can also serve as a balm for your weary brain, said Mark Paterson, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies touch (and all five senses) in history and philosophy, as well as material culture and consumption. “We are manipulating machines. That is what we do. Everything from picking fruit, grabbing a branch of a tree and swinging in our early history, and so on. But also the feel of a typewriter, the tactile feel of a typewriter — all these things were part of the absolute background buzz of everyday life,” Paterson told me. “And it’s so strange in such a short time that it’s just become absent really, really quickly. And so things like scrapbooks, notebooks, that type of thing, are bringing us back to something which is a little bit more considered.” 

Since talking to Paterson — and after reading my colleague Sara Herschander’s deep dive on how humans are losing our sense of touch — I’ve been focused on finding ways to consciously engage with my sense of touch every single day. And in combining this with other creative acts, I’ve found a really satisfying alternative to scrolling that I genuinely look forward to every day. 

Kaimal, the creative arts therapies professor, said that having these tactile, creative experiences is good for our brains and our sense of self. “To me, doing things with your hands, using your hand-eye coordination, the sensory aspects…the choices you are making, all those reinforce a sense of confidence and a sense of valuing yourself like, ‘Hey, my vision really matters. I have something to say and do in this world that nobody else is saying or doing.’ And to me, having that space is a big part of creating a sort of mental respite.”

A junk journal is proof of something real

I’ve always been drawn to keeping diaries and scrapbooks, for reasons I can’t fully articulate. 

But this deep, often-inexplicable desire isn’t unique; it spans cultures and millennia. “I think there’s a very human, timeless urge to just be like, ‘I was here.’ You think of archeologists digging up graffiti in Pompeii or other locations around the world where someone just wants to say, ‘I am a person, I existed, I am in this context, and I’m going to anchor myself to the physical,’” Mallory Furnier, a special collections and archives librarian at California State University Northridge, told me. “I think there’s a need to feel remembered.” 

In more recent history, this desire took the form of things like commonplace books, yearbooks, and slam books. But in the past decade, we’ve taken this urge to social media, which feels the same, but just isn’t; Furnier said posting online is often more about status, about performance — I went to this event, I hung out with these friends. We all kind of agree that the things we see on social media aren’t real.

A junk journal, on the other hand, offers you literal, tangible proof that your experiences were real, along with an authenticity you simply don’t get when you’re posting for an audience. Technically, you could still lie or obfuscate reality in your junk journal, as 58-year-old Jane Hemmer did in The Onion’s “Local Woman’s Life Looks Bearable In Scrapbook,” but you probably won’t! So collecting and arranging your ephemera in this way serves as a nice antidote to the cozenage of both Instagram and AI slop, and the way that we now all have to constantly question our very reality. 

Paterson, the sociologist, told me that humans have long seen a connection between our sense of touch and the idea of deeper truth and understanding; he pointed to noli me tangere, which comes from a scene in the New Testament in which Christ’s followers reach out to try and touch his wounds following his resurrection to confirm that he’s real. Shuffling through your pile of ephemera isn’t quite the same as rooting around in your buddy’s stitches, but it’s an instinctive, almost unconscious way that we validate what’s true nonetheless. 

A junk journal is a way to make meaning out of your life, whether you use it to record things that are positive, negative, or neutral. “To track your life every day and to document it is to be more intentional about your personal narrative,” Furnier said. “Otherwise, you’re just going through life as a robot and not really making sense and making meaning and celebrating your little wins every day, processing what didn’t go well.” Furnier added that collaging takes this to an even deeper level because you’re deciding what to keep and how to position it. She told me that when scrapbooks are too old and fragile to handle, archivists sometimes have to disassemble them to preserve the individual elements, but they always take photos and scans before they do to keep a record of the original arrangement: “There is this meaning-making of juxtaposing different objects from different places together. There’s an authorship and a reimagining of these disparate, seemingly unconnected items that happen in a scrapbook when they’re brought together like that.”

My friend Ryan said that the ability to create a document that feels somewhat permanent in a moment of upheaval is a big part of what makes this such an appealing medium. “It is like an archival process,” she said. “You are putting a time and a place when you’re making these pieces, because you’re using objects that exist today. So it’s putting a timestamp on it. … Things that are seen as mundane in the moment really get to become part of the record. And I think that’s really exciting, especially as we look back at the lineage of assemblage and we can see how that played out.” 

While you might get into junk journaling with future history in mind, you could also come at it from the opposite perspective, and try it precisely because things feel so unstable. “Today, with so much uncertainty in the world, I’m not sure that people — young people especially — imagine a scenario in which their story and their labor survives intact, unsullied for generations,” Danille Christensen, a professor at Virginia Tech who studies scrapbooks, folklore, and material culture, told me in an email. “Maybe an ethic of noticing and reusing or incorporating small incidents and things — ‘making beauty from ashes’ (to modify a phrase from Isaiah) — is the kind of hope that people can muster right now.” 

A junk journal is a way of creating something that is yours and yours alone

Americans are awash in mass-produced crap: Influencers are constantly peddling fast fashion; gadgets and products we don’t need and that are destined to end up in landfills; furniture and other home decor that is both cheaply made and weirdly expensive. While pushing back on this can be hard, my junk journal has served as a really nice reminder that it’s possible to resist the commodification of everything and just make whatever we want, using whatever we have, simply because it feels good. In that sense, it can be another version of craftivism, which has been popular for generations and is currently having a renaissance.

Paterson drew a connection between junk journaling and bricolage, a French term that generally is used to mean “DIY project,” but has come to be associated with mixed media and using whatever materials you have on hand. “It’s this idea of an everyday art, of making do, of coping. So it’s not simply about the arts, but it’s actually about coping with everyday life and so on…” he said. “Maybe commenting on mass consumption and trying to do something about that.” He said that remixing widely available items, turning them into something new and personally meaningful isn’t a trend; in fact, it’s something that tends to cycle in and out of the culture as people discover it — and perhaps remember their need for it — anew. You see this in things like ripped jeans, punk, or, more recently, appliquéd or embroidered Trader Joe’s bags (another current project of mine). “Consumption is not just passive, but it can be a very creative act,” he said. The junk journal, then, is “an artistic statement. It’s very much ours. And maybe it means nothing to anybody else. Maybe it actually just looks just like a little junk, clearly. But of course it’s deeply meaningful for the person who puts it together.” 

Furnier, the archivist, pointed out that as our lives have become more digital, they’ve also been commodified and sold back to us — you post a picture from the theater and then start getting Broadway-related ads. A nice memory that’s related to your identity and your relationships has been turned into a marketing opportunity. “It’s almost like we’re reclaiming our data by making it physical,” Furnier said. “And there’s something that feels almost radical and liberating with the idea that you can create something and you can share it in person or you can keep it for yourself, and you’re not going to get a targeted ad.” 

When ownership writ large feels very out of reach and every moment in our lives is a new opportunity for both consumption and for performance, you can still have agency in this very small way. The fact that it doesn’t require you to enrich a billionaire in the process makes it even more appealing. “It’s no great mystery in many ways, especially with the acceleration and the frictionlessness of everyday life and the goal-orientedness…we need these speed bumps, these forms of friction to slow us down,” Paterson said. “And so I can see junk journaling as one of the most accessible ways of slowing the world down and making it slightly more one’s own.” 

Lisa Marie Wilson matched with a man on a dating app who claimed to be 5-foot-10 and to live on the beach. Only one of those facts turned out to be true. When she showed up to the date, Wilson observed that she and her date were the same height — and she isn’t 5-foot-10. She wasn’t planning to mention it, but her date did: “He told me I wasn’t really 5-foot-9,” Wilson, a 51-year-old author, told Vox.

Even though he accused her of lying about her height before he even said hello, Wilson told Vox she still gave the man the benefit of the doubt. But as they continued on with their planned walk along the beach, Wilson sensed her date was suspicious of her. “The whole time it was like he was an investigative reporter asking me questions, but kind of like if you were interviewing someone you didn’t like,” she said. 

By the end of the date, Wilson was sure she didn’t want to see this guy again, so she turned down his offer to give her a massage and left. She couldn’t get past his accusatory comment about her height. “I was like, ‘I’m not a liar,’” Wilson said. “But I think he was — because he obviously wasn’t as tall as he was saying he was.” (To add insult to injury, Wilson’s date emailed her the next day breaking things off with her.)

If you’ve been on a date recently, the phrase “love is a battlefield” might seem a fitting descriptor for the sordid state of romantic affairs. 

According to this year’s Kinsey Institute Singles in America Survey, the percentage of singles with a “checklist” of what they’re looking for in a partner rose from 25 percent in 2021 to 34 percent in 2026. Dating has also become even more partisan this year, another survey found: A date’s political affiliation, especially if it conflicts with their own, is a major dealbreaker. This year, traditional gender roles and values have made a return, hardening some people’s idea of what romance looks like — a dynamic where a woman is pursued by a man with an absurdly strong jaw — and warping the expectations that women have of men and vice versa. Daters are also increasingly using AI to chat with matches on apps and bots’ infiltration of dating apps might have you questioning who you’re even chatting with in the first place. 

It stands to reason that we’ve forgotten how to be human — and some of the basic rules of human decency — in our love lives. Relationship experts, historians, and critics agreed: Dating feels different now.

TikTok has only added fuel to the fire. A popular outlet for singles to share their gripes, the platform has given rise to new dating vernacular — rosters, breadcrumbing, goblintimacy. These new dynamics seeped into the dates themselves, with people openly antagonistic and confrontational from the jump. 

Experts say that if your goal is to find love, or even just have a night of fun, assuming the worst of others — as so many seem to do right now — isn’t an effective strategy. “If you’re eternally suspicious, that tends to be a boundary to attraction,” Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California Davis and author of Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection, told Vox. 

The consequence of such hostility in dating is less tolerance — for ordinary friction, for learning lessons, for romance itself. So, what’s a single in 2026 to do?

The problem with dating right now

Most of modern dating followed a predictable pattern: Two singles met at church or at school or at work or at a party hosted by a mutual friend or through family. They might continue to see each other in social settings, gradually growing accustomed to one another’s personality, quirks, interests, until one person (usually the man, if they were straight) asked out the other on a date. Because they had mutual friends or coworkers in common, there was someone to vouch for them, to give some context to their life. 

Since the early 2010s, the most popular way to meet a potential romantic partner has been through online dating. App users are exposed to swaths of people they might not have ordinarily met without having to leave the comfort of their homes, meaning they are going on dates with virtual strangers. The sussing-out phase — where your perception of a person grows from simply “hot woman” to “Amy, the funny blonde from my dodgeball team” — has been condensed or eliminated altogether. “It’s not like, I got to know this person naturally,” Eastwick, also the co-host of the podcast Love Factually, said. “When somebody is a stranger, it’s maybe a little easier to come in with whatever negative assumptions you’ve gleaned from these online spaces.”

Life as a whole in the US has become more combative and tense in the past decade, from political polarization to increasingly rude behavior. At work, our labor and time is extracted until we’re laid off; at home, we’re suspicious of our neighbors. And dating is inherently vulnerable, rife with rejection and negative consequences. 

Dating apps have played a huge role in this dramatic shift in tenor. While effective at connecting users with multiple eligible singles, apps don’t encourage slow-burn connections, which is how humans have historically grown attracted to one another. And when a date goes awry, terrible tales can be mined for engagement online, where commenters are quick to validate a unique experience as universal, often reinforcing gendered stereotypes, like “all men are toxic” and “all women are shallow.”  

People have historically commiserated over their romantic lives as a way of bonding: Think of men in bars with their buddies bemoaning the old ball and chain, women lamenting their husbands not shouldering their share of household labor. During the feminist movement of the 1970s, women gathered to validate each other’s experiences and consider political responses to sexist issues, according to Rebecca Davis, a professor of history and women and gender studies at the University of Delaware. Social media now fulfills many of the same functions as these in-person conversations, Davis told Vox; people can take to TikTok or Reddit to share their frustrating or traumatic experiences, and comment sections are populated with others sharing their own similar stories. But unlike in the relatively private spaces of the past, these gripes now spread from individual to individual with little context, follow-up questions, or nuance.

Instead, posts beget more posts. Algorithms reward extreme content and creators may embellish details to encourage engagement. Whether intentionally or not, TikToks about how coffee dates signify low effort and Reddit threads parroting misogynist language perpetuate harmful stereotypes. “People are good at finding a reason to externalize the difficulty of dating,” the writer Asa Seresin told Vox. It’s much easier to assume the people you date are altogether bad than it is to assess your own actions.

In a viral essay published in 2019, Seresin gave the outward disdain with heterosexuality a name: heteropessimism. Since then, dating culture has only gotten more dismal, he said, in large part due to a national regression toward conservative views of gender and sexuality. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, contentious debates over transgender rights, and a generation of young men who believe a woman should obey her husband have become a dark cloud over the world of romance.

Some of these more traditional beliefs have filtered into 33-year-old Brittni Kristine’s dating life. After only a few weeks of dating, a man Kristine had met on an app asked her to be exclusive, but his actions suggested he wasn’t fully invested. Whenever Kristine inquired about their plans for the week, the guy would get irritated. “His defense mechanism was essentially like, ‘Well, I didn’t tell you I wasn’t seeing you next week, so why would you assume?’” Kristine told Vox.

Over the course of the month they dated, Kristine and the man got into multiple arguments of this nature until she’d grown exasperated with his stonewalling. His antagonism, Kristine suspected, stemmed from a puritanical view of sex and romance, where casually dating is seen as a moral failure. “I’ve had so many people tell me, ‘If I go on a first date with you and I find out that you have gone on another date in the past two weeks, basically I would never talk to you again because you’re promiscuous,’” she said.

These off-putting experiences fuel heteropessimism. A key aspect of heteropessimism, the pervasive embarrassment with which some young women express being attracted to men, only adds to a cycle of shame that makes people feel guilty for who they’re attracted to, Davis said. This has led some to internalize the idea that queer relationships are easier or more ideal. “When women talk about division of labor…it makes sense that there’s a longing for a relationship where the gender division of labor isn’t at play,” Seresin said. “I actually do think that is one way in which queer relationships are a lot easier, but I wouldn’t say that overall queer relationships are easier.”

Negative stereotypes and preemptive defensiveness plague queer relationships, too, Seresin said. “A lot of gay men also say, ‘I wish I wasn’t into men,’ and will blame a culture of very casual intimacy on being unable to find a boyfriend,” Seresin said. “A lot of lesbians will blame there not being enough queer women out there or enough of their type.”

The result is a population of singles, regardless of who they’re attracted to, walking into dating scenarios with strangers who they might already be suspicious of.  

Dating with walls up

As soon as his date walked through the coffee shop doors recently, Alex Alberti told Vox he sensed an air of negativity. “Literally from the jump, he kind of felt on the defensive and a little bit guarded from just buying coffee,” the 35-year-old education researcher said. Even a change of scenery on their walk around a nearby lake did not help matters. Alberti remembered his date venting about his dating troubles: how shallow and rude and awful the men were. About halfway through the get-together, Alberti decided there would not be another.

It was clear to Alberti that his date was letting past negative experiences color his current one. But instead of protecting him, drawing attention to bad behavior only pushed Alberti away. “I think people believe that if they can just beat the bad thing to the punch by calling it out, they’re going to make themselves safer,” he said. “When someone approaches a first date being highly skeptical and highly guarded and even a little bit combative, they think that it’s going to serve as a helpful filter.”

When you approach other people with distrust and ire instead of openness and curiosity, forging genuine connections turns into a monumental undertaking. People tend to like folks they feel comfortable opening up to, and the gradual revelations and bits of your interior life you show each other are what foster attraction. Fearing someone will weaponize your vulnerability against you turns dating into a surface-level endeavor at best, or, at worst, a contentious battle no one can possibly win.

The walls people put up are meant to be protective: You can’t hurt me if I never let you in to begin with. And the youngest prospective daters are dating even less in 2026: One recent study found that more than half of single young adults, ages 22 to 35, said past breakups made them more reluctant to pursue new relationships. Those are just the ones who’ve had previous romantic experiences. A Pew Research Center survey found that about a third of singles who have never married have never been in a committed romantic relationship to begin with.

When daters lack experience and are primed to see the worst in each other, the very normal aspects of courtship — negotiating boundaries, establishing trust, navigating conflict — are seen as dealbreakers. “There’s a growing discomfort with the normal friction, that if you say or do the wrong thing, it’s cringe, it’s disqualifiable; there’s no appetite for any kind of misstep,” Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life and author of Generation Uncoupled: America’s New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection, told Vox.

This is an impossibly high bar to clear and runs contrary to how many relationships form, Eastwick, the psychology professor, said. Most people’s affection for another person grows the more they get to know them. But if you’re meeting a stranger from an app who you assume has nefarious intentions, that first date isn’t likely to turn into a second.

Letting your guard down

Trauma and past negative experiences, both your own and others, can be a helpful teacher, a useful framework for what to avoid, and what lessons could be gleaned from pain. But it can also be distorting, Seresin, the writer, said. One bad relationship or date doesn’t mean all future relationships and dates with a similar type of person will be doomed. “It’s almost like if you’ve had a bad experience and you want to protect yourself, that’s almost morally good,” Seresin said.

Instead of focusing on avoiding any bad feelings (an impossible task), singles should question their own assumptions and operate from a place of curiosity. Resist the urge to cast judgment based on what little you know of someone. Even couples who have been married for decades can still discover new things about their partner. “It’s very easy to think, ‘I know exactly how this person thinks. I know what they want. I know how they’re trying to manipulate me,’” Seresin said.

The process of getting to know someone is a risk. All relationships come with potential disappointment; there will always be a person who ghosts or makes a bad joke or minimizes your accomplishments. But it doesn’t mean that person represents all men or all women, that they’re the enemy, that these connections are inherently toxic or not worth pursuing in the first place. 

To find love, we have to turn down the instinct to protect ourselves and open ourselves to the possibility that the person across the table might also be a flawed human who’s been hurt before. And they might want the same thing, too.

Why do I cry when I see a donkey? 

It’s completely involuntary. As if my heart’s defenses are swept aside by a giant wave of compassion and I’m left unnerved by the intensity of love that I feel: raw and a little foreign.

I wonder about this because I’m not a big animal guy. There’s no desire in me to own a pet; I’m allergic to cats and I will actively do what I can to avoid meeting your dog. (Sorry! It’s the nonconsensual licking! The crotch jumping! No thank you.) And yet, there I’ll be: leaning over a fence, arm outstretched to let the donkey nuzzle my open hand, feeling a sudden and desperate sadness. 

It’s happened so often that I wonder if these encounters point to something precious. The tears suggest that there’s a mismatch between the way I’ve been taught to understand animals as separate from myself and the connection that actually exists between us. Our paradigm of anthropocentrism distinguishes us from the natural world and puts us on a pedestal of worthiness, forcing us to look at the whole of nature as somehow less real than we are. Each animal and plant, the land and the water, the very air we breathe — all are resources for us to use rather than beings to be in relationship with. 

But the donkeys keep disrupting that notion.

Even if those sad Eeyore-like eyes don’t make you emotional, you have probably experienced some version of it. For many pet owners (and notice how that language of ownership emphasizes the idea of separation!), it may be a creeping uncertainty about the validity of the love that they feel for their pet. You might ask yourself, “Am I crazy to love an animal this much? Is this feeling of mutual friendship and understanding actually real?” 

This week, dear friends of mine had to put down their dog. Like most dog owners, they understood their pup to be a part of their family. And so the intensity of their grief — and the heavy burden of having to decide whether the time had come to say goodbye — opened up not just emotional questions, but spiritual ones, too. Is it wrong to euthanize a family member you love? What happens to a dog when it dies? Does your dog have a soul? 

Your deep connection to your animal companion might also make you question your relationship to and understanding of other animals: How is it that my beloved has a soul, but a pig or a cow or a bird does not? To kill one animal but to love another demands significant mental gymnastics. The modernist, mechanistic view of the world where humans are separate and death is the end doesn’t hold true to my experience. And so perhaps it is wise to look at spiritual traditions that affirm the ways the animate and inanimate are connected.

What religious tradition can teach us about the souls of animals

The idea that animals are not equal to humans is rooted in a dominant refrain in Christian theology — which David Clough, chair in theology and applied sciences at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, says has done great disservice to animals. Significant church figures like Thomas Aquinas and the philosopher René Descartes have argued that animals don’t have an immortal soul. Other doctrines like predestination (where some people are chosen for salvation and others are damned) have further broken the world into separate spheres. This stratification of significance, where humans sit above everything — from the stones and stars to the pets we share our homes with — has led to a paradigm where we’ve been able to desecrate the natural world and continue to practice cruel factory farming, killing hundreds of millions of animals every day.

But this particular Christian worldview isn’t the only way to think about a spirituality of animals. 

Indeed, says Clough, in the first centuries of Christian life, theologians like Irenaeus and Origen imagined a very different ordering of the world. Rather than envisioning a judgment that separates us, these early thinkers believed God would regather the whole of creation in what Clough calls “a comprehensive redemption.” Here, because God created the world, all of life will one day be regathered together, including the pets we love and the places we live. At the end of time, the thinking went, all of life will be embodied once again, but free from pain and suffering.

Maybe that’s what I long for when I see those donkeys: a union of all living things, free from pain and suffering. 

David Haberman, professor emeritus at Indiana University who studies South Asian religious traditions, tells me that a Hindu worldview sees humans and animals as inherently connected. He points to the concept of Ātman, which dates back thousands of years: “Some translate it as soul, some translate it as self, some translate it as the ultimate essence. I think all those work in various ways, but the notion is that it’s shared amongst all beings,” he says.

This worldview enables us to see “the self present in all beings and all beings in the self. … So whatever happens to a human happens to a dog, whatever happens to a dog happens to a human.” Haberman says that this ontology establishes a “deep connection between all things and a recognition that it’s the same essence.” So, whether canine or human, individual souls are described in the Bhagavad Gita as “eternal, immortal, and ageless. It is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.” 

Other spiritual practitioners are of the same mind. Susan Allen is a medium who specializes in communicating with pets that have died. It wasn’t a career she was planning on, but her intuitive and sensitive nature has meant many grieving dog owners seek her out when their pup passes away. Allen believes animals have a continuation of consciousness that transcends death.

“The body leaves and dies,” she says, “but the soul stays with us.” Allen says she senses messages and emotional states that pets want to share with their former owners — usually feelings of gratitude and love, a message that is especially consoling for those who had to make the decision to end the pet’s life amidst increased suffering. Though there is great sadness when a pet dies, it is, Allen says, “the consequences of living with so much love.”

Maybe that’s what holds me back from welcoming an animal into my home. Sure, there is the hair that gets everywhere and the picking up of poop and the need for walks at all hours of the day — but I suspect there’s a big part of me that recoils from the inevitability of grief that loving an animal so deeply will lead to. I became a vegetarian when I left home and started to cook my own meals and found it difficult to put a knife through the flesh of a chicken or a fish. That decision seemed to open a window into seeing the truth of our interconnectedness. 

Perhaps that’s what so many traditions try to help us realize: that we are part of one another. All living things are inherently bound together. Separation is an illusion that fuels harm. “At its best, a relationship with a companion animal is a sort of anticipation of a sort of redeemed future where humans and other animals will live peaceably together,” Clough says. “A companion animal relationship could be a small anticipation of that sort of restored mutuality of relationship.”

Haberman agrees. “It doesn’t have to stop with dogs,” he says. Though we may start by loving a pet, we must embrace an “ever expanding circle of love.” When we embrace our interconnectedness, we embrace something sacred. The love that exists between a human and their animal can be a bridge to a redemptive love for all living things; for every animal; for the very fullness of life itself.

The weather forecast might still be screaming “summer,” but the calendar betrays the truth: The holidays are going to be here before you know it. What’s usually billed as a jolly time of year can inspire dread — all the planning, all the spending, all the gathering can be exhausting, especially if you have a large family. Of course you’d like to put that off for as long as possible, right? Surely these conversations can wait until after Halloween.

But waiting too long can actually make the holidays more stressful — and can put undue stress on the women in your life, who often shoulder the burden of organizing and planning. One lollygagger who delays in committing to a plan can prevent the rest of the family from booking flights or buying necessary supplies. What can seem like an annoying text from your sister reminding you to RSVP for Thanksgiving in early October only adds to her mental load in planning a dinner for 20 people.

“There can be an enormous amount of invisible labor involved in making the holiday magic happen, and that labor falls disproportionately on women and caregivers,” Jamila E. Holcomb, a licensed marriage and family therapist and associate teaching professor at Florida State University, told Vox. “If one person is coordinating everyone’s flights, planning meals, buying gifts, arranging childcare, communicating schedules, and managing family conflict, this can cause significant stress. It also makes one person responsible for everyone else’s experience, which is an unequal division of labor.”

The pressure to plan the “perfect” holiday isn’t merely logistical. In our hyper-connected and visible culture, people may feel pressured to orchestrate a high-stakes production that somehow is meaningful, memorable, and Instagram-worthy. In other words, planning for the holidays can be its own form of labor these days. To help make the whole ordeal more manageable for everyone — not just the hosts or Type A family members — five experts offered their advice on sharing responsibilities and actually enjoying the season.

Getting ahead of this coordination can help minimize the stress on everyone in a few months. So even though end-of-year celebrations might be the furthest thing from your mind, the ideal time to start planning them is, I’m sorry to say, right now. Here’s why early fall is the ideal time to start bugging the family group chat about the holidays.

Planning early will save you money

Prices on many goods, from flights to groceries, have increased over the last year. Getting ahead of these purchases before holiday crunch time can help you secure the best price and budget. While there’s no exact date for when to find the cheapest flights, travelers shouldn’t wait to book their tickets believing the price of gas will come down, travel expert Katy Nastro told Vox. In general, Nastro suggested locking in domestic travel between three and seven months ahead of time and between four and 10 months before international flights. “If you can get everything set… by the end of September for Thanksgiving, you’re going to be in a better place than most people,” Nastro said.

The same goes for rental cars: reserve them now. Unlike flights, you don’t need to pay for them in advance, so you can always cancel the reservation if your plans change. Nastro recommends the platform AutoSlash, which aggregates prices from multiple rental companies. “With rental cars, there’s only so much inventory and you want to even make sure that you have that option if you need it,” she said.

Early fall is also a great time to start shopping for presents, especially if you’re on a tight budget or coordinating a group gift with multiple people. Content creator and actor Rachel Ann Thomas and her eight siblings begin brainstorming ideas for their parents’ holiday gift in September or October every year. When holiday and event planner Lance “Mr. Christmas” Devereux decided to buy his loved ones matching Christmas pajamas, he started tracking down everyone’s sizes and placed the order before November. The earlier you nail down your shopping list, the sooner you can start looking for sales and slowly making purchases to save your bank account in December and avoid the stress of paying express shipping on last-minute gifts.

You need time to create new traditions and to split the labor of creating them

The holidays tend to be a period of nostalgia, and some families may heavily rely on time-honored traditions. But if you’ve outgrown them or just want to try something different, now is the best time to determine what would be meaningful, fun, and low-stress. Maybe that’s changing the location of a celebration from a grandparent’s home to a cousin’s; maybe that’s going on a fabulous vacation. The sooner you start thinking about it (and then commit to it), the easier everything else will be.

Holcomb, the therapist, suggested asking your loved ones now what they want the holiday to feel like, what traditions or events matter most, and what they realistically have the capacity for. You can also ask if there’s anything new or different they’d like to incorporate this year. Then you can come up with a game plan for how to share planning responsibilities. “Our cultural expectations around the holidays can make it easy to confuse a ‘successful’ holiday with a highly productive one,” Holcomb said. “Making time to ask these questions is especially important because we can disrupt traditional relational patterns and roles that we have taken for granted as normal.”

Both Holcomb and Thomas recommend creating a shared calendar or spreadsheet to keep track of logistics and divide responsibilities. In Thomas’s family, it’s called the Thomas Christmas Itinerary, and her mother starts it every September. “It basically lays out what the itinerary is for the whole Christmas time,” Thomas said. “What activities we’re doing, when we’re going over to grandparents’ houses, even down to what our dinner menus are.”

A spreadsheet can also be helpful for assigning and delegating tasks so that one person doesn’t end up managing everything by default as things come together at the last minute. So once you’ve committed to a general plan with your family, start breaking things down further — and proactively ask people to take ownership of different events and tasks (e.g., choosing a movie to take all the kids to see together, buying the snacks, and figuring out who is driving everyone). “If you’re hosting, you don’t have to simultaneously be the chef, activities director, chauffeur, mediator, and person responsible for everyone’s enjoyment,” Holcomb said.

Advance planning allows for the downtime everyone craves

When you are able to take a broad view of the holidays without the time crunch, you can be more deliberate with the itinerary and build in breaks. Events can be planned with intention, not obligation, and you’ll be able to zoom out and see that your calendar is getting overloaded before you’re completely underwater. “Another priority should be adding rest into the schedule before you need it,” Emily Barry, the senior vice president of holiday planning at online stationery and art marketplace Minted, told Vox. “Protect mornings or evenings when nothing is planned. Give yourself permission to stay inside instead of attending another event.”

“Don’t try to make the schedule perfect — make it meaningful,” Barry said. “Pick the one or two moments that are most important for everyone to be together, and build the rest of the holiday around those anchors.”

Slow planning over the course of a month or two ultimately makes it easier to offer flexibility to family members who may have traveled a considerable distance, have young kids, or are juggling multiple celebrations, Barry said — and to be realistic about what you personally can handle. “The goal is to spend meaningful time together, not create an itinerary that everyone has to execute perfectly,” she said.

Over the years, Julianne Holt-Lunstad has fielded many requests from startups looking for her help. These entrepreneurs came to the Brigham Young University professor with the well-meaning goal of “solving” loneliness; they believed their app or company could help consumers build genuine connections, and wanted Holt-Lunstad’s opinion on this feature or that business tactic. 

Across the pond, University College London professor Noreena Hertz was getting the same calls. They wanted her to join their boards, to advise them, to give their proof of concept a stamp of approval. 

“Of the many startups who’ve approached me, and it’s probably about 50 or 60 in the space,” Hertz told Vox, “there hasn’t been one where I felt convinced by their business model.”

That CEOs and founders were clamoring to pick the brains of these two women is entirely predictable — their work may have been the basis on which these startups were founded. Holt-Lunstad is among the most cited academics who study loneliness and social connection. The commonly repeated stat that loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day? That came from her research. She was the lead science editor on the Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness and isolation. As for Hertz, in her 2020 book The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That’s Pulling Apart, she coined the phrase “loneliness economy,” at the time, a fledgling market of niche services, like friends for rent and professional cuddling.

In the years since Hertz gave it a name, the loneliness economy has only ballooned. As public attention to loneliness has mounted — despite the fact that research doesn’t consistently show whether a loneliness epidemic exists in the first place — the market stepped in to offer solutions. No longer are the lonely limited to joining a running club, they can now rent friends and cuddlers. They can hire a coach to help vanquish loneliness and build a community. (One charges $3,000 for a three-month program.) They can attend a $1,000 weekend-long summer camp to make friends (with the option to pay in installments via Klarna). They can buy a $250 pendant that listens to their every word and can communicate back via voice or text. They can join a coworking space meant to quell loneliness with a nearly $300 a month price tag. They can enroll in a bootcamp for how to be less shy, hop in a group travel excursion with other solo venturers, download an app where AI pairs you with other strangers for activities. Loneliness is no longer a societal issue with mental and physical costs and structural solutions but one businesses hope consumers can buy their way out of.

But is it possible to disrupt the slow burn that is making a friend? To outsource the intimacies of friendship to AI? To put a price tag on human connection? 

“I would caution developers to really critically evaluate their business model and the barriers to who they’re actually reaching,” Holt-Lunstad told Vox. “Think about ways that [connection] can occur organically without monetizing it.”

The cottage industry of loneliness services is just another example of capitalism wrapping its tentacles around human desire. But in most cases, the cost of the app, or product, or experience is going to be much higher than the possibility of eliminating loneliness.

One person’s loneliness is another’s business opportunity

Since the early 2000s when Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam warned of the decline of civic and social spaces in his seminal work Bowling Alone, we have witnessed the “privatization of community,” according to Sam Pressler, a fellow at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program who studies community, connection, and class. Gathering spaces shifted away from places of worship and union halls to boutique fitness centers and private, members-only clubs. “There was already this dynamic in place where you could, at a premium level, sell people on community,” Pressler said.

The pandemic pushed the loneliness economy into overdrive. Widespread social isolation enabled researchers to study perceived levels of loneliness during lockdowns. Media coverage of loneliness outlined its harms. Although Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general during the Obama and Biden administrations, first referred to loneliness as a “health epidemic” in 2017, his 2023 report opened the door for other iterations: the male loneliness epidemic, the Gen Z well-being slump, a worsening midlife crisis. Over the past five years, search interest in the loneliness epidemic grew over 600 percent.

Naturally, the startup world began to see a business opportunity, Pressler said. WeWork founder Adam Neumann launched a new residential real estate company with a goal of “solving loneliness” and $350 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The app 222, which uses AI to pair strangers for group activities based on personality-based questions, raised $10 million in funding. “You then get this anchor within startup land that really has an approach of solve customers’ problems and pain points, in that loneliness is a customer problem or pain point to be solved, through productized market solutions,” Pressler said.

Brian Choi had heard of the male loneliness epidemic, but luckily didn’t feel like he fell into that category. He grew up in the Los Angeles area, where he still lives, and has plenty of friends, but he signed up for 222 several years ago as a way to supplement his social life and meet people who might be interested in activities his existing friends aren’t.

“Dance, for me, means a lot,” the 34-year-old video game character artist, told Vox. “For my best friends, hard to sell them on that. So 222 is a good angle on sharing that experience with other people who are presumably also open to dance.”

But most of the platform’s events, Choi found, were centered around dinner and drinks, which didn’t appeal to him. If there was a meetup with an interactive element, like brunch and a pottery class, he was more likely to engage. But despite attending about a dozen 222 events over the years, Choi hasn’t fostered any serious friendships. “It’s dependent on individuals to be proactive about inviting folks into their lives after the 222 event,” Choi said. “And that can be scary for a lot of people.” 

Once a market emerged for loneliness-adjacent services and products, influencers started promoting them. Over the last few years, the content creator Zaid Khan observed his peers hosting “community” events that seemed well-meaning enough until a few common themes emerged: The events seemed to be furthering the creators’ brands, they often came with a ticket price, and they were attended mostly by young, white people. This widespread commodification of community is what Hertz refers to as “WeWashing” — like greenwashing — because an occasional knitting club with a $50 fee does not a community make. 

Charging any sort of premium for a social event or service runs the risk of exacerbating inequities. According to Holt-Lunstad’s research, people with only a high school education or less or those who made less than $75,000 a year were less socially connected than those with higher education and incomes. People who stand to benefit the most from interventions to build relationships often can’t afford a $200 a month gym, or lack the time to swipe for friends. These spaces can then become, like Khan observed, homogenized by race, class, and ability. “I’m sorry, but young, attractive, white, straight, 20-somethings living in New York will have no issue. … You can walk into any West Village bar and meet those people,” Khan said. “It’s excluding the people who, I think, genuinely could need it.”

“Masking” a symptom

There is a contradiction at the heart of the loneliness economy: the need for human connection in the modern world is difficult to solve, let alone value and commodify. In order to make money, companies either have to charge top dollar for their social club or camp, or, they need their product to be used by as many people as possible, as often as possible, which inherently flies in the face of how relationships are fostered. 

“The ethical problem begins when a company intentionally exploits a consumer’s loneliness, insecure attachment, or fear of missing out to pressure that person into purchasing.”

Cindy Rippé, Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia

Relationships are projects of patience. They unfold after repeated interactions in a physical space, after slow revelations and disclosures and laughs. The loneliness economy isn’t built on unhurried bonding. Instead of consistently showing up to a community event and slowly building connections, some apps are effective at connecting users with strangers for one-time events, but are less focused on encouraging users to exchange numbers and hang out again. “We know from the research that relationships take time to develop, and that there needs to be consistency also over time. When you get to know someone, it takes time,” Holt-Lunstad said. “If you’re only doing it sporadically or once, that’s going to be less likely. If it’s all virtual, that’s going to be less likely.”

Just like hunger and thirst cue you to eat and drink, loneliness is a sign to interact. Swiping for friends may feel productive and occupy time, but without actually hanging out, it may just be a distraction, Holt-Lunstad said. “What I worry is that [apps] may be effective in masking that symptom without actually fulfilling any social needs,” she said. “It would be like no longer feeling thirsty, but we’re not actually drinking any water.”

The loneliness economy also fails to take into account the barriers preventing people from making friends in the first place. In recent surveys, the results of which have not been published, Holt-Lunstad has found both internal and external obstacles to connection, including anxiety, a fear of rejection, physical and mental health limitations, the economic cost of participation, and the time investment required with joining a club. “It might be, that’s a great program, but it’s too far away, or that’s a great program, but it costs too much,” Holt-Lunstad said. “And then, of course, there’s the internal barriers where there’s so much shame and stigma associated with this that many people don’t want to feel like I have to have an app or a program to make friends.”

These potentially lonely consumers may be more vulnerable to companies’ marketing efforts, even though the products are unlikely to solve the underlying issue. According to research, when people feel like they are lacking close, intimate relationships, they are more likely to buy themselves things. “One of the things, for instance, could be spending money to go on group activities rather than individual activities,” Aulona Ulqinaku, an associate professor of marketing at Università Carlo Cattaneo LIUC in Italy, told Vox. People could spend money to join a club you aren’t particularly interested in just to feel a part of something. 

Shopping can also serve as a social experience in itself, Cindy Rippé, a senior lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, told Vox in an email. Employees and other patrons can become familiar and friendly faces, effectively turning a retail space into a third place. A paid social experience, such as a club, could theoretically achieve the same fulfilling effects as shopping, Rippé said. But spending money isn’t what makes people feel better; it’s repeated social interaction, familiarity, belonging.

Because companies can track your activity online, users who search for local clubs or interact with these groups on social media may be repeatedly served ads for other community-centric businesses and thus spend more money on services that may not be effective.

“I hope that we are looking at a world where marketing can be looked at as an instrument for helping people rather than exploiting people,” Ulqinaku said. “The aim should not be, ‘I make money [off] of you.’ The aim should be, ‘I want to make you feel better. I don’t want to exploit you.’”

Putting a price tag on relationships

The pairing of lonely consumers who might be willing to spend money and businesses that definitely want to make it may be good for the bottom line in the short-term, but perhaps not for social health or for revenue in the long-term. (After all, if these products don’t work, people will stop paying for them, and if they do work as promised, people will also stop paying for them.) Friendship isn’t a product you can advertise or put a dollar amount to, Pressler said, and we shouldn’t apply market solutions to non-market goods.

“You can approach it with a consumptive mindset where it’s like, ‘Well, I just need to consume more relationships, and if I consume more relationships, ergo, I will not be lonely or disconnected,’” he said — but that’s not how real-world interactions work. The power imbalance between the companies earning money and the consumer spending it to fulfill a core human need may veer on exploitative, too, Rippé said: “The ethical problem begins when a company intentionally exploits a consumer’s loneliness, insecure attachment, or fear of missing out to pressure that person into purchasing.”

Which isn’t to say communal gatherings with a price tag are inherently exploitative. Live music and events, like concerts, successfully bring people together for shared experiences, according to Hertz, the professor and author. (Of course, tickets have become so expensive that seeing your favorite act perform is becoming a luxury.) Groups centered around an activity have the potential to connect people, too. But buying your own yarn and needles to bring to a weekly craft night at your local knitting shop is different from paying $50 to join a one-off “knitting club” organized by a VC-backed friendship app.

Because social health touches so many aspects of life — the physical spaces we inhabit, the technology that both facilitates and inhibits socialization, the costs of interacting — the path toward connection is more complex than marketable products or individual purchases. It involves government investment in public spaces and low- or no-cost community events; policies that allow everyone to lead a dignified life, which includes the space for leisure activities; and a societal shift that prioritizes slow, intentional relationship building instead of instant connection. 

“The need is real,” Hertz said. “The purported solutions are many. Some of them I think can be part of the solution. Some of them may well end up making us lonelier as a society.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.