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

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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

Dear Would-Be Optimizer,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: What I’m reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The leap of faith

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

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

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

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

The blank slate problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ironies of automation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real world slop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

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

Dear Hold the Beef, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: What I’m reading

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

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

Editor’s note, October 4, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published last year.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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My partner and I did IVF recently and luckily we ended up with several embryos. One of those will be implanted in me so I hopefully get pregnant. But which one?

My fertility clinic is encouraging me to do PGT-A testing, which would screen for things like Down syndrome and would also let me see the sex of each embryo so I could potentially choose whichever I want. (And to be honest, I really want a girl!) I’m also hearing about these new companies that can test embryos for all kinds of things — like how smart the kid might be, how tall they’ll get, and whether they’ll have a lower chance of getting breast cancer, diabetes, mental illness, stuff like that.

I don’t know how to feel about any of this. On the one hand, it feels weirdly eugenics-y to do so much tinkering with embryos, and I can’t help feeling a little pressured into overmedicalizing everything with these expensive tests. But then again, if I could do something to make my baby healthier and happier, don’t I kind of have to do everything in my power? What does a parent owe their child?

Dear Expecting,

This is such an exciting — and also confusing — time. You’re about to have your first kid, and that comes with all sorts of fears and insecurities and hopes and dreams. You want to do the right thing — no, the best thing! — for your child. It’s a beautiful impulse. Unfortunately, it makes it easy for companies to prey on you.

So let me walk you through what these companies can and can’t really provide. After we talk about the science, we can talk about the ethics. 

The simpler test you mentioned, PGT-A, has been around since the 1990s. It can indeed screen for conditions like Down syndrome and let you see the sex of each embryo. Mind you, that doesn’t predict what gender your child will ultimately end up identifying with — more on that soon.

The newer testing you mentioned is called polygenic testing. The conditions it screens for are complex ones, influenced by thousands of genes. We’re talking about everything from breast cancer to depression. Some companies even offer screenings not for disease prevention, but for genetic enhancement — so you can select for a taller kid or a kid with higher IQ.

Polygenic testing companies claim to predict each embryo’s risk for each condition, and the potential reduction of risk you’ll get if you choose one embryo over another. As the statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev explains, it’s very, very easy to be misled by this claim. If the company claims to lower absolute risk of Type 2 diabetes by 12 percent, you might think this means, “The chance of my kid ever developing diabetes just went down by 12 percent — great!” But really what it means is that, all else equal, a kid who would’ve developed diabetes is likely now at the high end of pre-diabetes instead, or just develops diabetes a few years later. The same holds true for other conditions, like breast cancer. Sure, if your kid is going to develop diabetes or breast cancer, you’d rather they develop it later — but it’s not the bill of perfect health customers might imagine.  

“Typical risk reduction estimates tend to exploit statistical assumptions to overstate their benefits and lead to confusion,” Gusev writes.

It’s also important to note that there’s a difference between a physical disease like cancer, which is straightforwardly and universally negative, and a complex mental health condition like depression. For one thing, polygenic scores don’t perform as well in psychiatry, as the psychologist Eric Turkheimer notes. Plus, most mental health conditions come in mild to moderate to severe forms, and it’s not clear that we should want to get rid of mild or moderate manifestations. 

“Sure, it would be nice if no one ever got depressed, but what would that actually mean?” Turkheimer writes. “People are going to be sad, and the most modern models of psychiatric disorders view most of them as extremes on continuous dimensions of normal behavior. I don’t think we want some kind of genetic version of Soma.”

To give a personal example: I have generalized anxiety with some obsessive tendencies. Is that a major pain in the butt sometimes? You bet. But if I could wave a magic wand and get rid of it, would I? No. In my experience, this trait is linked to another trait I deeply value: my creativity. The same thing that propels me down rabbit holes of worry also propels me down rabbit holes of getting super curious about some topic, researching it into the wee hours of the morning, and then writing a novel or children’s book about it.

That brings me to one other scientific issue: pleiotropy. It’s a fancy term for a simple truth, which is that genes can have an effect on more than one trait. When it comes to behavioral polygenic testing, we actually know very little about which genes cause what — a gene that’s correlated with depression or anxiety may also be correlated with a bunch of other things. So, if everyone were to start selecting embryos to try to protect their kids from depression or anxiety, what would happen? We don’t know! 

Pleiotropy is a scientific issue, but it’s also a moral issue, because in trying to protect your kid from a negative outcome, you could also be accidentally barring them from a positive one.

And that’s just the tip of the moral iceberg.

Another issue is the potential psychological harm that can result from commodifying our kids — treating them like consumer objects with selectable parts. Let’s say you use polygenic testing to try to select for high IQ. Even if the company’s predictor is right 80 percent of the time, that means it’s wrong 20 percent of the time. What happens if it’s wrong about your kid, and they end up with a low IQ instead of a high one? How will your kid feel? Unless you hide the truth from them, they’ll know that they are not what you wanted, that they failed to live up to the vision you went out of your way to chase.

The same goes for sex selection via good old PGT-A. I know you really want a girl. But what would happen if you select for a girl, and then your child grows up and turns out to be trans? They may feel an extra sense that they’re letting you down by not conforming to the gender expectations you had for them.

Then there are the ethical questions around unequal access. Polygenic testing isn’t cheap. (One company, Orchid, charges $2,500 per screened embryo. Test 10 embryos and that’ll cost you $25,000.) So, at least in the short term, that raises the specter of entrenching a caste system, where the gap between rich and poor expands dramatically as the rich get smarter and stronger.

Technologies tend to get cheaper over time, so maybe everyone will ultimately be able to afford polygenic testing. But that raises another problem: implicit coercion. If more and more of us make ourselves smarter and stronger, we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their child’s biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse embryo selection would mean to put a child at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for making “suboptimal” kids when optimization is possible. Society may no longer offer health insurance benefits or accommodations for kids with disabilities (or even non-enhanced IQ), reasoning that “it was the parents’ choice.” 

Some philosophers, like Julian Savalescu, already argue that parents have a “moral obligation to create children with the best chance of the best life.” Polygenic testing companies love that argument; Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui tells parents that “the responsible decision” is to “protect their children” from disease, using language like, “What if you could have stopped it…but chose not to?” And we generally live in a culture that’s obsessed with optimization. 

So it’s no wonder that you find yourself asking, “If I could do something to make my baby healthier and happier, don’t I kind of have to do everything in my power?” 

It’s a view that will be very appealing to utilitarians, who believe the right action is the action that maximizes well-being or happiness. But maximizing principles can be dangerous. If we’re laser-focused on maximizing one value, however noble it may be, that can lead us to overlook a host of other important values. Think about diversity, for example; polygenic testing could lead to a less diverse world. 

And it’s not even clear how to maximize well-being given that each embryo will have some downsides: How would you choose between one embryo with a slightly elevated risk for schizophrenia, another with a moderately elevated risk for cancer, and a third with a high risk for Alzheimer’s? You’d have to decide how to rank the importance of each condition, which would require a dizzying bit of moral math: How much weight do you put on the longevity associated with each condition, how much on patient-reported quality of life for each condition, and how much on your own ability to cope with each — and society’s ability (which will change over the years)? Plus, even if the screening does end up optimizing life for your individual child, it could have negative effects on the population level, for the reasons we covered above.

As the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon pointed out, many problems contain way more variables and way too much uncertainty for maximizing along a single axis to be feasible or even desirable. So it often makes sense to just go with an option that’s “good enough.” He coined the term “satisficing” — a portmanteau of “satisfying” and “sufficing” — to describe opting for this good enough choice.

What would satisficing look like in the context of embryos? If there’s a very serious condition that runs in your family — like Tay-Sachs or the BRCA mutation that markedly increases cancer risk — then I do think there’s a strong case for screening for that. These conditions are debilitating and can lead to early death. Nobody wants them. Genetic testing that lets us prevent them is an awesome gift. 

Then there are conditions that can include suffering, like autism, but can also be very compatible with a happy life. Mental health conditions in particular are heavily socially constructed — a lot of the associated suffering comes about because society constructs a certain biological reality as a problem and doesn’t support the people who have it. In these cases, if you want to give your child a “good enough” or even “optimized” life, remember that you don’t have to achieve that by biological means; working to change the social environment can be just as important, and it doesn’t carry the societal risks associated with polygenic testing. 

Ultimately, when considering what counts as a “good enough” life, each parent will draw the line in a slightly different place. And there’s a part of that that can’t be boiled down to objective facts about disease, because this is also about how well-resourced the parent feels — emotionally, socially, and financially — to deal with a certain condition. What feels manageable to one parent may feel crushingly hard to another. 

So, I can’t tell you exactly which screenings to do and which to forgo. What I do want to tell you is to resist being bullied or shamed by others, especially those with a profit incentive to push you in a certain direction.

As the epidemiologist Abby Lippman has noted, genetic testing is supposed to offer parents more choice, but it too often has the opposite effect. When someone like Orchid’s Siddiqui says about a disease, “What if you could have stopped it…but chose not to?” — well, that language preys on parents’ worst fears and insecurities. It holds parents hostage while pretending to be giving them more autonomy. 

You are nobody’s hostage. You are a moral agent free to look at the many different relevant factors, weigh them all in the balance, and then make the choice that works well enough for your family.   

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Silicon Valley is obsessed with IQ, so it’s no surprise that tech execs there are using polygenic testing in hopes of creating supersmart babies. This article shows the kind of mental pretzels customers get into when trying to figure out whether to select the embryo with the highest predicted IQ or that with the lowest risk of disorders. One couple asks: “How much additional risk of ADHD cancels out against 10 extra IQ points?”

• Rereading “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” Sarah Zhang’s 2020 Atlantic feature on prenatal testing, it struck me that when people think “prenatal testing,” Down syndrome is often the first condition that comes to mind, even though it’s not the most severe or straightforwardly negative (it’s compatible with a happy life). It’s just that Down syndrome was easy to test for, so we started testing for it early. I wonder if that built up the condition as a bogeyman in the expectant parent’s imagination — if the fact that we could screen for it shaped the public’s perception of Down syndrome as something that should be screened for and potentially screened out.

• One trait that many people assume we should select for is a great memory. But I highly recommend the short story “Funes the Memorious” by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a reminder that having too good a memory is not always a benefit.  

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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.

Fed up with paying to stream music you’ll never actually own? Give the little silver disc a spin. Here’s how to start a CD collection or get more out of one you already have.

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.” 

Consumer advocate Lindsay Owen’s new book, Gouged, traces how corporations use software—from ever-changing prices to opaque algorithms—to squeeze every penny from you.

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

My best friend confessed his love for me one year ago and I rejected him because I was unhappily in love with another man, and I was never really physically attracted to my best friend. He was devastated. I am happy our friendship survived.

Over a year later, I find myself thinking about how it would be like to be in a relationship with my best friend. He is the only man who ever showed me genuine love and support, and I wonder what if I try…maybe I will fall in love with him. However, I am concerned about hurting his feelings again. Is it selfish of me wanting to try this love out because it promises security and appreciation?

Dear Fanning the Flame,

I can’t blame you for being curious about the common “friends to lovers” storyline. It’s often portrayed as the best kind of pairing: Two people have the foundation of their friendship plus a newfound love; the romantic relationship is like a soaring addition to an existing sturdy house. 

But real life is not always like the movies, and it sounds to me like you haven’t actually had an awakening of desire for your friend. In fact, it’s the opposite: He once expressed feelings for you, and you confronted a lack of physical attraction for this person. Now you’re wondering if it would be possible for you to fall in love if you tried. I think you’d agree that your timing is suspect. After a breakup, it’s common and understandable to seek out comfort and intimacy. Still, I detect a philosophical streak in your question beyond the issue of whether or not this would simply be a rebound. 

If your friend has always appreciated you, made you feel safe, and loves you — could that be a form of love that’s better than what you had in your last relationship? Maybe that is what love is.

Is it? Over a long night of drinking some 2,400 years ago, one group of thinkers allegedly debated the true nature of love, as Greek philosopher Plato describes in The Symposium. 

Aristophanes, a playwright, tells a story that most closely aligns with the love we see in the rom-coms of today. He said that humans used to be larger creatures with four arms and four legs. After annoying the gods, Zeus cuts all the humans in half, creating the two-limbed bodies we have today. The result is that people wander the world looking for the one person who used to literally complete them. If you followed Aristophanes’s fable, you shouldn’t try to be with your friend unless you felt that deep longing that one has when meeting their other half. 

The rest of the dinner party companions have more circumspect ideas. Phaedrus, a Greek aristocrat, thought that true love inspired people to become the best possible version of themselves. Pausanias, a military man, thought that love driven only by attraction to someone’s body was “vulgar love”, and that “noble love” was the love of someone’s values. Eryximachus, a doctor, asserts that love is also about moderation, and it needs order, much in the way the natural world does. Finally, Socrates says that even if you start out with physical infatuation, you can eventually transcend that and end up loving wisdom itself, the highest form of love. As I read it, the men are grappling with how to make love make sense, while acknowledging that it can make us lustful and impulsive. Shouldn’t its best manifestations instead be practical and virtuous?   

You could easily justify trying to date your friend with these theories that try to wrangle and tame love. For example, if your friend inspires you to be the best version of yourself, you could decide that’s enough to go for it. You could also decide that because you admire your friend’s character, and not his body, that’s a noble love, and better than the vulgar love of attraction. 

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his 19th-century essay “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” that he distrusted the feeling of being desperately in love. He considered romantic love to be a biological drive disguised as a real emotion — one whose goal is to trick us into procreating. You could even see your lack of attraction as an indication that you’re able to act more rationally, and not be deceived by that cunning trickster, passion. 

I know you’ve recently gone through a breakup, but I hope you can feel how bleak these views can become: to see love only as the window dressing for the propagation of a species, or as just a bridge to the love of wisdom. 

This cynicism has other consequences. Wondering if you could redefine love in a relationship with your friend isn’t like a wine-fueled dinner party bouncing around thought experiments. It involves your best friend and his own feelings too, and could risk not only hurting him, but also robbing him of a better romantic partner. 

For Simone de Beauvoir, the 20th-century existential philosopher, the most important aspect of life was freedom: We are technically free to do whatever we want, and it’s the choices we make with that freedom that determine our authenticity, or lack of it. De Beauvoir worried about forms of love that stole freedom from other people. In narcissistic love, she wrote in The Second Sex, a partner doesn’t love the other person, but loves the fact that the other loves them. It’s a relationship built on the self-interest of one of its members. 

I want to gently point out that it sounds like there may be aspects of the narcissistic relationship in your dilemma. While it may be intriguing to consider what it’s like to date a friend, you don’t seem to be as romantically interested so much as you are interested in his interest in and support of you. Actually involving yourself in such a dynamic could take his freedom, as well as your own capacity to learn from your break-up, then find a partner you’re genuinely drawn to for their own merits.  

I’m not saying friendship isn’t an important ingredient in love. Many of the most successful, very long-term partners I know have developed a deep friendship with one another. This friendship helps them stay kind to each other and have fun over many years when work, health, or stress can interrupt more passionate times of connection. But those same couples also had the undeniable spark of attraction at the start of their relationships too. They didn’t have to try. Sometimes they tried not to feel as strongly as they did, and still weren’t able to stop. 

Even in cases when a relationship first launches platonically, if something more is there, the undeniable, reciprocal pull tends to emerge soon thereafter. In H.G. Wells’ 1911 novel, The New Machiavelli, which was largely based on a real-life affair Wells had, he writes about a college graduate called Richard who meets a young woman, Isabel. The two become friends and are entranced with each other’s minds. But they quickly start to notice more between them, despite trying to push such thoughts away.

They fail at this attempt. Richard has a moment of realization, when he turns to look at Isabel’s face one day. “And something — an infinite tenderness, stabbed me,” Wells wrote. “It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. …From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.” I think you owe it to yourself, and your friend, to pursue connections that have this quality, especially at the start. 

You should also make room for and appreciate your friendship. If it never becomes romantic, that doesn’t make it a lesser relationship. The couples therapist, Esther Perel, calls friendships their own kind of love story. She once described a simple exercise to help appreciate that bond. Take a few minutes and think about a friend who isn’t a family member or romantic partner. “Recall a time when that friend reflected you back to yourself, created space for joy, or helped you remember who you are,” Perel suggests. Then, send a message to that friend about that moment, and thank them. 

Having a good friend by your side in the aftermath of a breakup is a gift. Work on maintaining and nurturing that friendship, and make sure you spend some time helping him with his life too. Don’t fixate on whether you should attempt to fall in love. The truth is, for better or for worse, if you love him, you won’t have to try.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I’ve always been interested in the history of love, by which I mean the differences over time in how love has been expressed and discussed. William Reddy, a historian of emotion, has an excellent book called The Making of Romantic Love; you can also check out a syllabus for a class at Duke University he taught on the subject. 
• For a deeper dive (and refresher!) on Plato’s Symposium, I found that there was no better person to turn to than Melvyn Bragg and his guests on the BBC In Our Time episode on the philosophy of love. 
• Arranged marriages are an interesting window into understanding the growth of love. Mansi Choksi’s nonfiction book, The Newlyweds, follows three couples in India who attempt to marry for love; here’s an excerpt that was published in Harper’s Magazine. 

These free iOS and Android apps create the physical friction you need to put down your phone.

The free add-on Tuck brings one of the best features of modern email—the ability to hide something for a bit—to that tangle of tabs in your browser.

The built-in tools on your phone—as well as some inexpensive apps—let you share whatever you’re doing with others.

The app Paperman gives your screen some added texture in an effort to make it easier on your eyes. It works best for reading, writing, or otherwise working with text.

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.