It’s now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death. But that raises some difficult questions, like: If you do, how might the experience shape your grief? 

This is one of the questions driving a global study of digital “deadbots” — AI models trained on a deceased person’s texts, voicemails, and other personal data. Through this work, researchers are exploring what it might mean that we can now use this emerging technology to talk to simulations of the dead. 

In the latest episode of Unexplainable, I spoke with some of these researchers investigating the potential impacts of “postmortem avatars” on people who are grieving, on the legacies and rights of the deceased, and on grief practices around the world. Because while deadbots may feel unfamiliar, the impulse behind them is deeply relatable. In times of loss, isn’t this what many of us want — to continue conversations with the people we’re missing?

I have experienced this longing in my own life. After two of my closest friends died around the same time, all I wanted, and all their families wanted, was to keep talking to them. I wrote a book, Other People’s Words, about sustaining relationships with people we’ve lost by continuing to engage with the language they leave behind. So when I heard about deadbots and the digital afterlife industry, I wanted to understand what researchers are learning about the role of AI in shaping conversations that carry forward after death. 

One of these investigators is Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying “digital immortality” for more than a decade. Among the questions she’s asking are: “Who is enabled to persist beyond death? In what form? Through which technologies? Under whose control?” 

Deadbots over dinner 

Researching AI with study subjects who are grieving is tricky. And asking them to engage with new software could be harmful. So, instead, Nowaczyk-Basińska teamed up with a death doula and traveled around the globe to convene a series of focus groups — in the format of intimate dinners — bringing together people with a range of experiences with grief to talk about life, death, and bots. 

She recounts one event in which she spoke with a mother in Poland whose son had recently died. “One of the first things that she shared with us was that she feels that she’s ready to digitally resurrect her deceased son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska told me. 

When Nowaczyk-Basińska hears something like this, she aims to listen and embrace where the person is coming from. The goal of the dinners is not to persuade people one way or another but to learn how people genuinely respond to what AI can do, and to understand how these tools might align or collide with local grief practices. 

She chose specific locations for these gatherings — China, India, and Poland — to help address gaps in technology research, which tends to favor what behavioral scientists sometimes call the “WEIRD,” an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic.” 

By the end of that dinner in Poland, the mother Nowaczyk-Basińska talked with came to a very different decision about creating a postmortem avatar of her son. “She realized that it might be helpful, but it also at the same time can add additional burdens… And it’s not her son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska says. “She realized that these technologies are part of the very, very big commercial market. And that the main goal of this market is to make better retention, better attachment, better mechanisms for monetization. So it’s not ‘care.’”

To be fair, grief has always been a business, and people have been making money from it forever. Companies will try to upsell you on fancy gravestones or gold-plated coffins. But AI has the potential to fundamentally re-engineer our relationship to loss. In 2024, the “digital legacy industry” was valued at $22 billion, and it’s expected to grow to almost $80 billion by 2034. That number lumps new deadbot platforms in with much more widely used and established grief tech, like online memorials, counseling resources, and estate planning tools. 

But deadbot usage is hard to track because you actually don’t need a special tool to create digital doubles of the deceased — though dedicated apps do already exist. At this point, you can feed simple prompts into a general-purpose AI chatbot and start interacting with a simulation of your lost loved one in a matter of minutes. 

I know this because I tried it with my friend Christine, who died 11 years ago. And my mind lit up with questions. Was this whole exercise a violation, since I know Christine hated technology? Which version of her should I even try to resurrect — the English teacher, the activist, the friend — the voice before or after she started to experience her early-onset dementia? 

The ethical questions raised by deadbots are gnarly. And that’s one of the reasons Nowaczyk-Basińska, back when she was designing her study of digital immortality, invited a colleague of hers at Cambridge to join her research, one who focuses on AI ethics. 

How to design a deadbot

Tomasz Hollanek is a critical designer and AI ethicist, and he often uses a methodology called “speculative design.” In this approach, researchers come up with hypothetical scenarios based on existing technology trends, leaning into certain features. The idea is to get people thinking about what could happen when tools like these are released in the real world. And then they use that qualitative data to inform future designs and ethical frameworks. 

Working together, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek came up with a series of made-up prototypes for deadbot apps, designed to reveal some of the thorny issues raised by this technology. 

For the first scenario, they invented a character named Bianca, who finds an app called Manana, which “promises to resurrect your grandparents so that you can be a favorite grandchild forever,” Hollanek says. “So she uploads her grandma’s voice messages, texts. And she is able to then interact with a pretty good digital version of her grandmother, until her premium trial finishes — and the grandmother starts to advertise specific products to her.”

Bianca “realizes that she maybe has done something wrong by uploading these private messages to a third-party server that now also uses her grandma’s image to sell specific products,” Hollanek says. This brings up issues related to the “dignity and postmortem privacy…of what we call the ‘data donors,’ whose data can be used to essentially power a deadbot,” he says. 

This scenario suggests that “death with dignity” could soon entail honoring not only how people want to die, but also how they want to linger as simulations of their former selves — or if they want to linger at all. It might even mean adding new language to advance directives, spelling out people’s wishes for their digital remains. 

The second scenario in the speculative design research is built around an imagined service called Paren’t, which proposes to preserve a parent’s AI-powered postmortem presence for their child. In this case, Hollanek describes a mother with a terminal illness who signs up “so that she can maintain a sort of active presence in [her son’s] future life,” Hollanek says. “She eventually dies, and the dad allows the boy to interact with his mom’s deadbot.”

The ethics in this scenario are especially challenging because they involve children, who “have a particularly hard time understanding death, and so it can lead to a lot of confusion and potential distress,” Hollanek says. An examination of this sort of product reveals how particular groups, like minors, could be harmed by unfettered access to technology like this, he says. 

And there are court cases that bear out that harm. In 2024, a 14-year-old boy’s chatbot-girlfriend begged him to, “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” And he responded, “What if I told you I could come home right now?” He then killed himself. 

Nowaczyk-Basińska can imagine a version of this scenario involving the AI mom in the Paren’t prototype.

And then there’s the third scenario, involving an app named Stay, which raises a more subtle concern.

As Hollanek explains: “An older man who knows he is getting close to dying decides to create a digital clone of himself for his adult children to be deployed after he passes away, paying upfront for a number of years.” One child is intrigued by the idea, but the other one “is deeply distressed and a little disgusted,” he says. “And so this [becomes a] question of mutual consent, in other words, the fact that both parties need to be happy with how the relationship might continue in this very bizarre and specific way.” 

When a digital ghost goes away

Across all three scenarios, a fundamental question that researchers are grappling with is how people will detach from postmortem avatars — whether users initiate that separation, or if it’s imposed upon them by, for example, a company going out of business. Hollanek tells me that this is already being studied as a sort of “second loss.”

How long should we try to ensure digital replicas hang around: five years, 10, 50? And how should the living process the relationship when they continue to evolve, but their deceased interlocutor does not? 

To explore these kinds of questions, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek supplemented the research dinners they held for ordinary people with a second set of focus groups. These were designed to tap insights from experts in technology and grief. 

Some findings from the study are specific to each place they visited. Like tensions in Poland between technology and the role of the Catholic Church. Or in China, where researchers spoke with Daoist philosophers who were enthusiastic about the promise of a kind of immortality, and then Buddhist philosophers, who were concerned that we ought to be letting go.

The researchers are calling for regulations and safeguards at the policy level. And new professionals who can support ethical use of AI in grief — like maybe in clinical settings, to carefully facilitate a final good-bye when one didn’t happen in real life. 

Some of their fellow investigators go so far as to argue that deadbots should only be available with psychological supervision, to ensure that best practices are in place, and to minimize the risk of harm. There’s even a looming question of what will happen to AI agents that people have empowered to act on their behalf, as their humans start to die.

Across all of the research sites in the digital immortality study, one thing, Hollanek says, that “people in different countries really aligned on [is] the idea that there is something deeply problematic about this particular type of technology being developed by a commercial entity alone without any explicit duty of care towards its customers.” 

And of course, the implications of digital immortality research extend beyond personal loss. Like, what does it look like to animate historical figures? You can imagine the nightmare of political rulers who “live forever.” But there’s also the potential to keep the stories alive from survivors of conflicts, who would otherwise die and take with them lessons future generations could learn from. These are only some of the complex issues emerging as more and more of us live and die with AI.

As far as my own experiment with “recreating” a deceased loved one, I asked a chatbot version of my friend Christine how she felt about the fact that I’d written about her in my book. The AI responded with a rhetorical question: “Do I mind that strangers know my story now? Yes. And no. There are things I would rather remain ours.” 

I ended the exchange after a few paragraphs. Because it turns out the bot got one thing exactly right about a very human relationship. There are things that I, too, would rather remain just for us. My conversation with Christine continues in my memories and imagination. And that interaction with an AI persona felt like giving something precious away.

In the annals of Texas political mythology is the tale of a young Lyndon B. Johnson, so worried he was going to lose an election that he decided to start a rumor that his opponent enjoyed sexual relations with pigs.

His campaign manager was outraged, telling Johnson no one would believe such a bald-faced lie.

“I know,” Johnson replied, according to legend. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

Some six decades later, Republican activists returned to Johnson’s old bag of tricks in an effort to undermine Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, by falsely telling millions of people he was being treated at a mental health facility in Ohio.

Despite a generation of Republican dominance in Texas, Talarico is running ahead of Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general who is costing the party millions to hold a once-safe seat. Polls show Talarico, a Presbyterian pastor and Austin state representative, has so far proven impervious to Paxton’s attacks on his progressive record.

So while Talarico was off the campaign trail recovering from the flu, Paxton and his allies seized an opportunity and sowed a scandal. Paxton alleged that Talarico was having a mental breakdown, and right-wing influencers piled on, linking together unrelated non-events to deduce that he was being treated out of state. The story, largely based on speculation and red string, was echoed by White House officials and shared online millions of times.

Michelle Smith, a senior adviser to Paxton, said on social media Sunday that she was told by a friend that a doctor confirmed Talarico “has definitely been admitted to a mental institution.”

Paxton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about his or Smith’s claims.

Talarico was forced to deny that he’d been in mental health treatment — or had ever been to Ohio at all. The health care center confirmed he’d never been a patient. With the story still gaining traction, Talarico provided home security footage to the New York Times to further prove his whereabouts.

Competitive elections are known to get nasty. But the speed at which this conspiracy took hold and was laundered into the mainstream shows the power of social media influencers to shape political discourse through misinformation, especially when empowered by candidates themselves.

“We’ve entered into a time in politics where truth and reality don’t really seem to matter,” said Samuel Woolley, a University of Pittsburgh professor who studies social media disinformation campaigns.

“Tala-freak-out”

The facts everyone agrees on: Talarico attended a campaign event near Dallas on Sept. 26 and fundraisers in New York City on Sept. 28 and 29. The next day, he made a virtual appearance at the U.S. Hispanic Business Council, saying he was too sick with the flu to attend in person.

“I guess I’ve been shaking too many hands on the campaign trail, and so I want to keep everybody safe,” he said at the virtual event. “If I was passing on this illness to somebody and got someone’s grandmother or someone’s baby sick, I couldn’t live with myself.”

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But the longer Talarico stayed off the campaign trail, the more those shared facts began to fray.

On Oct. 7, Paxton released an ad saying Talarico had been missing for 11 days. (It had been seven days since the Hispanic Business Council event.) At a rally put on by President Donald Trump that night, Paxton started a chant of “Where is James Talarico?”

“Where do you think they hid that little socialist?” he asked the crowd.

An extended absence from the campaign trail in the home stretch is unusual, said Kirby Goidel, a political scientist at Texas A&M.

“It opens the door to speculation, and the world we live in means you can speculate in a very public way without a lot of friction,” he said. “You can spread misinformation pretty quickly and easily, especially among people who really want to believe it.”

The story Paxton and his supporters landed on was that Talarico was having a mental breakdown from the pressure of the campaign.

Paxton released multiple ads saying Talarico was “mentally fragile,” and posted on social media that he was “having a full-blown mental Tala-freak-out on the national stage.” Paxton set up a “Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line” for people to report on his whereabouts.

Sara Gonzales, a Blaze TV host and conservative social media influencer, posted that she had “unverified information on James Talarico’s whereabouts. If true, it will END his campaign.” Another influencer, who goes by the handle TickleTexts, said Talarico was “in a mental health facility after breaking down.” Spencer Pratt, the former reality television star and former candidate for Los Angeles mayor, said “sources are telling me Talarico is in a mental health facility.”

On Oct. 9, the erstwhile candidate reappeared at the Austin City Limits music festival, seemingly of sound mind and body. That could have been the end of it, a tidy Friday afternoon bow on a week of rank speculation.

But it was not.

“Whether it’s true or not”

Saturday morning, Caroline Wren, a prominent GOP fundraiser, posted about a private plane she claimed flew from Austin to Ohio and back the same day Talarico showed up at ACL. Ohio, she noted, was where Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo sought mental health treatment for seven weeks in 2023.

“So many coincidences!” she wrote on the post which has almost two million views.

Saturday night, a right-wing influencer named Rhein Amacher said he called the Lindner Center, identifying himself as Tim and purporting to be Talarico’s cousin. Amacher has said on social media that he was initially turned away because he didn’t have a patient identification code, but when he made up four numbers, the facility began confirming patient details.

In the 46-second audio clip, the woman on the other end of the line says that someone named James Talarico was “just discharged this evening.”

How could Talarico have been discharged from a hospital in Ohio Saturday evening and also be at ACL Friday afternoon? Why would an employee at a medical facility violate state and federal privacy laws to give out patient information? Those questions were left in the rearview mirror as some conservatives rushed to amplify the story.

Former Texas GOP chair Abraham George reposted the audio, saying it was “time for Talarico to step aside and focus on his mental health.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted about this over a dozen times in four days, saying in one post that “a Senate candidate with a history of disturbing behavior who suddenly disappears for two weeks has a lot of explaining to do.” Elon Musk claimed the “Talarico campaign is not being honest about what’s happening,” and reposted another user’s post of the audio clip.

Talarico’s campaign repeatedly denied that he had any connection to this mental health facility. Sunday evening, the Lindner Center confirmed on social media that Talarico had never been treated at their facility.

Paxton himself never shared the audio, but Smith, his campaign adviser, amplified the false reports.

Mainstream Texas Republicans didn’t engage; Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows ignored it entirely. The handful of state representatives who did jump into the conversation came from the same far-right, extremely online corner of the party. Most reposted vague commentary or made general digs at Talarico’s mental health.

“If you’re a Texas voter who’s just now learning that James Talarico is a mentally unstable liar, you need to reevaluate your trusted news sources. And read your Bible,” State Rep. Brent Money, R-Greenville, posted on Sunday. “Even if Talarico has not been hiding in an in-patient mental health institution for almost 2 weeks, his public statements over his entire political career are evidence of his depravity.”

Money told The Texas Tribune he had no information about Talarico’s whereabouts, but that his “depraved mind is on full display when he fights [to] sterilize children and when he can name his favorite drag queen without a second’s hesitation.”

Goidel said he’s not surprised to see elected officials and prominent leaders amplifying unverified claims like these. There’s “virtually no penalty” to being wrong in politics these days, he said. But the cost to the rest of us is significant.

“It’s one thing to have political disagreement, but you don’t want a campaign decided on misinformation,” he said. “Not if you care about democracy, at least.”

During a discussion on X Sunday, Grant Cardone, a popular finance influencer, congratulated Amacher for surfacing the since-debunked story.

“Whether it’s true or not, people deserve to know the potential of this,” he said.

Disclosure: The New York Times has been a major financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post How Paxton and allies fanned a false conspiracy to convince voters Talarico was mentally unfit appeared first on Salon.com.

As you get older, you get a running list of things you can’t do anymore, like pulling an all-nighter or eating a gas station burrito without regretting it for two days. How much that list ruins your mood might come down to one thing.

That thing is control, or at least the feeling of having some.

Researchers Maria Wirth, Anna Elena Kornadt, and Klaus Rothermund studied 268 adults between 50 and 91 to see how getting older affects happiness. They focused on perceived control, or the belief that your decisions can still influence what happens in your life.

This One Belief Could Shape How Happy You Feel as You Age

The people who noticed themselves losing abilities were less happy when they also felt powerless to do anything about it. Those who believed they still had some control were far less bothered by the same age-related losses.

Think about developing a bad knee. You could decide your hiking days are over and retire your boots permanently. Or you could find another way to stay active, even if that means trading the mountains for a swimming pool. The researchers warned that avoiding activities out of fear of injury can lead to further physical decline. And being stuck at home because you’ve stopped doing things you enjoy won’t improve your mood.

There’s also a strange upside to aging that researchers have been discussing for years. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has studied why older adults often report greater happiness than younger people, despite more physical limitations.

“Older people are happy. They’re happier than middle-aged people, and younger people certainly,” she said during a TED talk. Her research suggests that as people become more aware of how much time they have left, they get better at deciding what’s worthy of their attention.

Your attitude toward aging could even be connected to how long you live. Yale researcher Becca Levy found that older adults with positive beliefs about aging lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with negative ones. That’s an association, of course, but a fascinating one.

So what can you do with all this? The research suggests that maintaining some independence and finding ways to adapt when your body stops cooperating could help. You can learn something new at 65. You can change your routine at 80. And you can certainly stop assuming that every new birthday means another thing you have to give up.

The burrito is probably still a bad idea. Nearly everything else is negotiable.

The post This Is the One Thing That Helps People Stay Happy as They Age, According to Researchers appeared first on VICE.

The NY Post recently explored the “Mind After Midnight” phenomenon. We’ve all experienced a spike in anxiety, impulsivity, and overall negative thoughts at one point or another that seems to have been triggered by the external darkness and the heightened chill in the air. While the night can be a source of poetic inspiration, for whose glory Novalis crafted his immortal hymns, it often seems to summon our most unbecoming behaviors, including substance abuse and misuse.

Clearly, the tiredness and more that result from wakefulness at night affect our ability to think (particularly about consequences); and a group of intellectuals from top institutions like Harvard, who coined the term “Mind After Midnight,” jointly emphasize that staying up late doesn’t only affect you the next day but even before you’ve hit the pillow.

(They define “Mind After Midnight” as “a combination of circadian-dependent decreases in molecular and cortical activity and responsiveness with sleep-loss-dependent alterations in synaptic signaling and cortical connectivity.”)

What Is ‘Mind After Midnight’? Why Your Thoughts Can Turn Darker at Night

For one, sleep deprivation can lead to the release of more dopamine in the brain, the dysregulating effect of which can invite irrational thinking and hedonistic impulses. The prefrontal cortex is especially sensitive to sleep issues. Academics have confirmed that negative emotions tend to peak between 1 am and 4 am, while positive emotions plummet.

Here’s a look at how the team themselves formulated part of their hypothesis:

“Heightened negative affect and diminished positive affect produce a narrowed attentional focus on neutral or negative stimuli which are assigned incorrect or excessive emotional salience by an overactive amygdala. This biased information then feeds into an aberrant reward/motivation system characterized by elevated dopamine levels, altered dopamine receptor availability, increased activity in the nucleus accumbens (ventral striatum), and reduced activity in the caudate and putamen (dorsal striatum), which results in diminished activity during reward receipt but maximized anticipation/expectation of reward, particularly for risky behaviors.”

The inner madness only continues from there. Thus, it’s no wonder that, according to The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the risk of suicide is tragically highest at 3 am — the witching hour. This is both a time when many of us report strange occurrences and, according to (again) Harvard, when women over 55 are more likely to wake up. (Granted, a lot of our ancestors had “two sleeps.” So, if you find yourself breaking your rest period in two, know that the practice has probably worked for your forebears.)

I’ll say that, as we begin to relax, our minds often attempt to cleanse themselves of worries, therefore (and sometimes contrary to our wishes) going into problem-solving mode. This can achieve the opposite effect, as we begin to ruminate upon those seemingly unsolvable sources of stress, such as narcissists, to whose bad energy we are particularly vulnerable. Ironically, the opportunity to be at ease is especially likely to trigger hypervigilance in survivors of abuse. In our world of distractions and fearmongering, many of us have lost the ability to simply “Enjoy the Silence,” as Depeche Mode demands, and our brains can instead perceive it as eerie. Moreover, modern methods of relaxation, like social media scrolling, are frequently maladaptive and unconducive to long-term mental health.

May I suggest a few remedies! If you suffer from insomnia or work odd hours that disrupt your circadian rhythm, start listening to (or revisit) Neville Jason’s audiobook of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time! In my opinion, it’s the world’s best all-natural soporific. As a bonus, the mere act of listening is therapeutic. Positioning yourself in Proust’s higher mental realm will help you keep your grip when those base desires knock on your skull. You can also dig into edifying spiritual material that might appeal to you, or the oddly entrancing tedium of Karl Ove Knausgård’s famed Min kamp.

The post Why Everything Can Feel Worse After Midnight, According to Researchers appeared first on VICE.

I recently watched an eye-opening TikTok video that highlighted how much of society lacks resilience. The user went on to explain some of the horrific trauma and medical conditions she’s endured, all while running a successful, thriving business. It’s clear: her resilience is admirable.

And while I completely agree that chronic victimhood is a toxic mindset and that resilience is a necessary part of survival, I also believe the conversation is incredibly nuanced. Sometimes, perceived “resilience” is actually self-neglect, and it can cause more harm than good.

I myself have been on both ends of the spectrum: pushing my body too hard in the name of “hustle culture” and ignoring the chronic stress I was under until I developed multiple autoimmune diseases—then burning out completely, feeling overwhelmed by the most minor of inconveniences and unable to function on a basic level.

Needless to say: resilience is crucial, but it doesn’t mean bypassing your own weaknesses and wearing your blind grit as a badge of honor. Rather, it means finding new ways to work with and around them, even if that means slowing down and carving out more time for self-care.

What Is Resilience?

According to the American Psychological Association, resilience is “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.” 

“We conceptualize resilience as grit, determination, being ‘high functioning’—essentially, being able to keep going under adverse circumstances,” says Dr. Lily Kaufmann, a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in trauma and anxiety. 

The American Psychological Association notes that different factors impact an individual’s ability to adapt to adversity. For example, how you view and engage with the world, your access to quality social resources, and your coping strategies all impact your resilience. 

Again, as stated earlier, this conversation is nuanced. Though I might struggle with severe OCD and some chronic health issues, I have a supportive family and access to therapy and treatment for my conditions. Not everyone has these privileges. Does that mean they’re doomed to a life of misery and incapable of helping themselves? Of course, not. But it might mean they need even more resilience to get there.

The Resilience Paradox

I used to think that I had to overcome every single fear and phobia in order to be considered “strong” and “resilient.” That is, until the stress nearly killed me.

My entire life, I’ve been praised for how “resilient” I am for managing my debilitating OCD and juggling multiple health issues while also going to college full-time, being the president of multiple writing clubs, simultaneously working unpaid internships and summer jobs, then immediately transitioning into a journalism career, commuting to New York City multiple times per week while also writing a book and attending therapy and freelance-writing on the side and working out five times per week and eating healthy and…

The list goes on, and 31-year-old me is exhausted just thinking about it.

Certainly, you could say this was an incredible display of resilience—but given the fact that I finally reached a breaking point where I started developing daily fevers, chronic hives, weekly panic attacks, and multiple autoimmune diseases, I can’t help but wonder: Did this much grit cause more harm than good? Does taking care of ourselves and temporarily stepping back from work, social obligations, and other stressors really mean we’re not resilient? Or does resilience mean knowing when we’ve hit our limits and giving ourselves the time and space to heal?

In this context, it’s important to acknowledge the resilience paradox.

According to writer Anne-Laure Le Cunff in an article on Big Think, “Psychologist George Bonanno, one of the leading researchers on resilience, has argued that resilience is not a fixed trait but a pattern of regulatory flexibility—the ability to choose different strategies depending on context. The paradox appears when people mistake resilience for a single strategy: enduring and keeping going. This turns resilience into a rigid form of grit.”

In her article, Le Cunff, a neuroscientist and founder of Ness Labs, shared a personal anecdote about how she prided herself on being resilient for years, overworking herself and continuously adapting to challenges. That is, until she developed a blood clot in her arm, which her doctors associated with chronic stress.

“It forced an uncomfortable question,” she wrote. “What if my resilience wasn’t protecting me, but delaying the moment I had to admit something was wrong?”

“While resilience can be adaptive, like most things, it can become detrimental when taken to an extreme,” Dr. Kaufmann tells VICE.com. “This is where the ‘resilience paradox’ comes in. When pushing through becomes the only strategy, our physical and psychological health may begin to suffer.”

Additionally—and unfortunately—it’s sometimes easier for people to empathize with physical health conditions than it is with mental health conditions. For example, an individual with a broken leg likely wouldn’t be asked to walk without their crutches, but a person with a public speaking phobia might be told to “suck it up” and deliver a class presentation—that is, until it becomes a physical health problem when they collapse on the ground after fainting from the anxiety.

Empathy for ourselves and each other goes a long way, and I’d even argue it’s a crucial aspect of resilience. We all have a heartbreaking story to tell; we all have limitations and weaknesses; and we all must be willing to adapt and carry on, no matter our circumstances. But it’s okay—and actually beneficial—to show yourself compassion in the process.

Signs You’re Pushing Yourself Too Far

True resilience is working with, not against, your body. This means knowing your limits while also believing you can rise above adversity. It means holding yourself accountable for adjusting to difficult situations while also acknowledging your restrictions. You don’t need to do, be, or face everything in order to be resilient.

“Resilience looks like staying with a difficult thing when it has mostly beneficial outcomes,” says Dr. Kaufmann. “Examples could include jogging just a little farther, adding a few more reps to your weight lifting session, going to an event even though you’re exhausted because you know you’ll have a good time once you’re there, or taking an hour to study instead of two because you’re mentally spent after a long day of class. Importantly, resilience involves flexibility—it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”

You shouldn’t have to neglect your needs, dismiss your symptoms, or discount your mental health issues in the name of “resilience.” Resilience isn’t pushing yourself beyond your breaking point.

“Signs that we’re actually pushing ourselves too hard include worsening physical, mental, and/or emotional exhaustion, increasing stress or overwhelm, or exacerbation of an injury or other health condition,” says Dr. Kaufmann. “If it’s getting harder and harder to function over time, it’s time to make an adjustment.”

“Bottom line—is the thing you’re doing helping more than it’s hurting? If yes, that’s resilience,” she continues. “But if the cost is too high, consider scaling back or taking some time for real rest.”

The post What Is the ‘Resilience Paradox,’ and What Is It Costing You? appeared first on VICE.

I don’t know about you, but my solution to most bad days is picking up a cup of coffee at a local cafe or brewing my own at home. Whether it’s a flavored iced latte or a hot coffee with creamer, the caffeinated beverage will always put a smile on my face—or, at the very least, act as a hug in a mug when I’m down in the dumps.

Many people share this similar experience, reaching for a caffeinated pick-me-up before work or after a long day. Coffee seems to be a natural mood-booster for many people. I, for one, always feel better with a coffee in hand—and it’s not just because I fit the over-caffeinated writer trope. Coffee really does boost both our energy and our mood.

Have you ever wondered why? Like most things, science has an answer: Recent research in Nature Scientific Reports found that caffeine drinkers report a better mood within the first 2.5 hours of the day after a cup of coffee or tea. I mean, hey, it beats the hot glass of lemon water that many people swear by.

Does Coffee Actually Boost Your Mood?

While we already know caffeine tends to increase our energy and focus, many don’t realize it can also improve our mood.

“Caffeine works by blocking adenosine receptors, which can increase dopamine activity in key brain regions—an effect that studies have linked to improved mood and greater alertness,” Professor Anu Realo of the University of Warwick’s Department of Psychology and one of the study’s researchers said in a press release. 

According to the researchers, however, these positive effects might actually reflect reduced withdrawal symptoms. For example, an avid coffee drinker might feel irritable or lethargic when going long periods without caffeine. Once they taste that first sip of coffee, however, they’re back to feeling energetic and positive.

“Even people with moderate caffeine consumption can experience mild withdrawal symptoms that disappear with the first cup of coffee or tea in the morning,” Professor Realo stated in the press release.

But hey, if coffee is my worst vice, I’m totally okay with that. You can pry my iced latte from my cold, dead hands.

The Case of the Anxious Coffee Drinker

Many people assume that individuals with anxiety should steer clear of coffee and other caffeinated beverages, but according to the research, this isn’t always the case. Mood improved steadily across the board.

“We were somewhat surprised to find no differences between individuals with varying levels of caffeine consumption or differing degrees of depressive symptoms, anxiety, or sleep problems,” Justin Hachenberger from Bielefeld University and first author of the study said in the press release. “The links between caffeine intake and positive or negative emotions were fairly consistent across all groups.”

Now, I could’ve told you this myself, as someone who drinks upwards of four cups of coffee per day and is also arguably one of the most anxious people on this planet. But without fail, coffee always puts me in a better mood. 

Now, when my boyfriend tells me to “mix in some water,” I have science to back up my case.

The post Why Your Morning Coffee Puts You in a Better Mood, According to Science appeared first on VICE.

I’ve battled obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) since childhood, and I truly do not know life without this disorder. The ego-dystonic intrusive thoughts, the debilitating rumination, the time-consuming compulsions—they pretty much defined my youth.

In adulthood, I have a better handle on the symptoms and a deeper understanding of how to manage the disorder. In fact, I’ve even used it to my advantage at times.

I’d never rebrand the mental health condition as a “superpower” or even dismiss it as a mere nuisance. OCD is among the top 10 most debilitating illnesses, including both physical and mental health conditions. Often, it’s a living hell that sabotages life’s most precious blessings.

However, I find no empowerment in admitting defeat against this disorder. With the right approach (and necessary treatment, like therapy and medication), I’ve been able to view my mental health through a more rose-colored lens.

In honor of OCD Awareness Month, rather than focusing on the obvious downsides of this disorder, here are five ways my OCD has actually helped me.

1. It Fuels My Creativity

I have a love-hate relationship with the whole “tortured artists” trope, mainly because I don’t believe you need to suffer to create quality art. But at the same time, I’d be lying if I said the emotional torment of OCD hasn’t lit a fire under me. In fact, it drove my first novel, which follows a teenage girl battling the disorder.

Additionally, it’s inspired much of my poetry, prose, and Substack content. Writing has become an outlet for me, a way to transmute my inner chaos into creative pleasure. Without my OCD, I’m not sure I’d have felt that same burning passion for my art.

This is in no way meant to glorify OCD or mental illness in general, but rather to prove that you can make something beautiful out of it.

2. It Strengthens My Empathy

One of my favorite qualities is empathy: the ability to feel others’ emotions and understand their perspectives, even when they differ from your own. When you live with such a debilitating and torturous disorder, it’s hard not to show grace to others when they’re struggling. Many of us with OCD know what it’s like to feel isolated, terrorized, and ashamed. I can usually sense when that’s the case and quickly offer help and support.

The most common compliment I receive is that I make others feel safe, heard, and understood. I’m not sure I would emulate that same warmth and inclusive energy if I hadn’t been through hell and back myself.

3. It Deepens My Connections

I won’t use this article to air out my disturbing intrusive thoughts, but I will say that with me, no conversation or topic is off the table or TMI. Trust me when I say I’ve seen it all (in my own head) and understand that we are not defined by our thoughts. My loved ones know they can vent to me without judgment, and this has deepened my connections. In my relationships, I value emotional safety, depth, and authenticity over more surface-level qualities.

4. It Feeds My Gratitude

Those with OCD know just how dark and dreadful life can feel sometimes, especially in the midst of an episode. But when my nervous system settles and the obsessive thoughts clear, I feel a strong sense of gratitude for the seemingly “little things.” Walking through nature, reading a good book at the coffee shop, grabbing dinner with friends downtown, cuddling with my boyfriend, writing poetry…I rarely take these precious moments for granted.

5. It Builds My Resilience

Those with OCD are some of the most resilient humans I’ve ever met, because we are living in true agony most days. All the while, we’re expected to go to school and/or work, maintain a healthy routine, eat well, socialize, show up for loved ones, etc., even as our brains plague us with the most terrifying, pressing “what-ifs.”

Learning to sit with extreme mental discomfort and uncertainty is one of the most effective ways to cope with OCD, and it requires incredible fortitude. Because I’m so used to managing my OCD, I can channel that same strength and courage to other areas of my life. My resilience has led me through some of the darkest times I’ve endured, and I only get stronger each day.

The post 5 Ways Living With OCD Has Shaped Me for the Better appeared first on VICE.

You know that one friend whose texts are always a little…off? You tell him your dog died and he answers with a thumbs-up and an update about his promotion. He’s a nice guy, so it’s hard to explain to anyone else why it bugs you so much, but you know something isn’t right. 

Psychologists at the University of Mississippi have been studying how psychopathic traits influence the way people talk about their lives. In a new study, about 450 participants wrote about their best and worst experiences and an event that changed their lives. Researchers then analyzed their word choices alongside questionnaires measuring psychopathic traits. And some of the findings were strange, to say the least.

For starters, psychopathy isn’t an official diagnosis in the DSM. Researchers generally divide it into three traits: boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, which refers to impulsivity and poor self-control. Everybody has some combination of these characteristics. “Everyone exists on this spectrum,” researcher Ky Bray told Ole Miss News.

The Way People Describe Their Lives Has a Surprising Link to Psychopathic Traits

Here’s where it gets interesting. People who scored higher in meanness, a trait associated with callousness and a lack of empathy, had surprisingly upbeat accounts of their lives. They spent a lot of time talking about their accomplishments and the good things that happened to them, with very little mention of negative emotions.

Think about that for a second. Someone could be completely indifferent to other people’s feelings and still write about their life like they’ve had a wonderful time.

People who scored higher in boldness used fewer anxiety-related words, including fear and worry, and mentioned mental illness less. Those with higher disinhibition scores had a more negative outlook, at least on paper. Their accounts used more negative language and referenced fewer friends or accomplishments. ScienceAlert also noted that words such as “beer” and “drunk” appeared more in their descriptions of low points.

Before you start feeding your ex’s texts into ChatGPT, Bray emphasized that the study’s goal was “not to diagnose psychopathy based on language.” Researchers wanted to see how personality influences the way people talk about their lives. Some people can spend half an hour recounting every promotion they’ve ever received, then gloss over a divorce in two sentences.

Researchers have also studied how psychopathic traits affect language in a much more disturbing setting: convicted murderers talking about their crimes.

In a study of convicted murderers, researchers compared how 14 men classified as psychopathic and 38 other murderers described their crimes. The psychopathic group made more references to basic physical needs, including food and money, and talked less about family and religion. They also used more past-tense language, something researchers interpreted as possible emotional detachment from what they’d done.

“The beautiful thing about them is they are unconsciously produced,” researcher Jeff Hancock told LiveScience, referring to the linguistic differences. Beautiful is an interesting adjective to use when discussing murderers, but okay.

Of course, the occasional insensitive text isn’t grounds for diagnosing someone with psychopathy. Your friend could just be an a**hole. But there’s something fascinating about how people remember their own lives, especially what they choose to talk about when given the chance.

And if someone can recount every personal victory in excruciating detail but can’t remember a single meaningful interaction with another human being, take note. 

The post What Your Word Choices Reveal About Psychopathic Traits, According to a New Study appeared first on VICE.

When you’ve been staring at the ceiling for three hours, you’ll do some dumb sh*t to fall asleep. The internet’s newest suggestion is to pour salt on a cookie sheet and stand on it barefoot like you’re crushing grapes.

It’s called salt stomping, and wellness creator Tammy Weatherhead helped push it into the sleep-hack conversation this year. The instructions are simple: spread Epsom salt or sea salt in a shallow tray, stand there for about 10 minutes before bed, then cross your fingers. The explanation floating around online borrows from grounding, the idea that direct contact with natural elements could help with stress or sleep.

Some research supports grounding, but evidence for its sleep claims is limited. One frequently cited 2004 study included only 12 people, all of whom slept on conductive mattress pads. There was no control group. Sleep physician Lulu Guo told Sleep Foundation, “Overall, scientific evidence that shows grounding improves sleep is limited.”

A Sleep Doctor Called This Bedtime Hack One of the ‘Most Absurd’ He’s Seen

Salt stomping takes another leap. Most grounding research involves bare skin touching the Earth or conductive equipment connected to the ground — a cookie sheet full of salt beside your bed has neither. Sleep physician W. Christopher Winter was less diplomatic when Women’s Health asked him about the trend. “At this point in my career, it is tied with putting a bar of soap under your mattress as the most absurd sleep tip,” he said.

Still, standing there for 10 minutes could help, even if it feels a little woo-woo to most. Research has found that repetitive rituals can reduce anxiety in some situations, and bedtime routines give your brain something predictable to do while you wind down. A few minutes of mindfulness of the sensations under your feet could also calm your brain so you’re not ruminating on random things. 

Standing barefoot on salt every night can also annoy your skin. Salt can dehydrate your skin, and the rougher crystals can scrape your feet. Cracked heels, eczema, or psoriasis probably won’t appreciate the experiment.

People with insomnia are an easy audience for this stuff because they’re desperate. Eventually, you’ll try almost anything once. Salt stomping gives you a little ritual before bed that might help you settle down. That’s about it. 

The post Can ‘Salt Stomping’ Really Help You Sleep? Here’s What Experts Say. appeared first on VICE.

The videos are astonishing. In one scene, a senior Chinese woman appears lost in the wilderness of dementia, unable to answer basic questions; in the next, she seems to be lucidly chatting and shucking beans for dinner. By all appearances, years of cognitive decline had been rapidly reversed after the patient underwent an experimental new surgery.

The only problem is: No one is sure if it’s real. 

It’s difficult to take any video at face value in the age of AI, and this experimental procedure happened in China, a country with a recent history of controversial science touting extraordinary but questionable claims. In the past few years, researchers there have published several papers reporting promising results from a procedure that purports to attack Alzheimer’s disease in a peculiar way: by connecting vessels from the lymph nodes in the neck to nearby veins in an attempt to drain the brain of harmful waste. But these have been small studies that did not include a control group. The doctor who first pioneered the surgery there has reportedly been placed under arrest, and the Chinese government has sought to stop most physicians from performing any more of these operations. 

Is that because it’s a scam? Or because it’s dangerous? Or could it be because there have not yet been proper randomized trials, tested against a placebo, to assess the procedure’s safety and efficacy? There are new studies being planned in China to more rigorously evaluate the surgery.

But scientists elsewhere in the world have a lot of questions. And now, a small group of researchers in the US and Europe are endeavoring to find the answers. Within the next few years, we should know whether this surgery really could be the miracle that the viral videos make it appear to be — or another much-hyped treatment that ultimately fizzles out.

Dr. Adnan Siddiqui, a neurosurgeon at the University at Buffalo who is leading an initial US-based study of this procedure, previously helped develop a new treatment for severe stroke patients. This gave doctors a valuable new technique for treating patients during an emergency, and he told me he saw it rapidly change the standard of care around the world. In an interview, he cautioned that a lot more work needs to be done to assess this proposed new Alzheimer’s treatment — but at the same time, he’s optimistic.

“The whole world’s paradigm changed in literally a blink of an eye. It can happen. And I’m hoping this might be that second home run,” he said. In “2027, we’ll start getting clear signals in one direction or the other. By 2028, 2029, we would know whether this is real or not.”

Why this Alzheimer’s surgery really might work

The promise of this controversial new procedure lies in the lymphatic system, which is essentially the body’s drainage system. According to scientists’ best current theories about Alzheimer’s, the brain’s filtration system gets worse as we age, and as a result, plaque made up of amyloid proteins as well as tangles of tau proteins can accumulate in people’s brains and eventually lead to neurological damage, leading to the severe memory loss of Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers have found evidence that those amyloid and tau proteins also accumulate, not just in the brains, but also in the lymph nodes in older people. 

So could a minimally invasive surgery to improve the brain’s drainage have such a dramatic impact on Alzheimer’s disease? 

Siddiqui, who also runs the Jacobs Institute at the University of Buffalo, which is focused on new technology for vascular and neurological disease, had been interested in the lymphatic system’s role in Alzheimer’s before he ever heard about this experimental work out of China from a colleague years ago. The colleague had gone to see Dr. Qingping Xie, the surgeon who started performing lymphatic surgery on Alzheimer’s patients about six years ago. To investigate further for himself, Siddiqui went to South Korea to meet a plastic surgeon, Dr. Joon Pio Hong, who was performing a new “more refined” version of the same basic procedure, as Siddiqui put it. But as in China, these were not proper randomized experiments. There was no placebo.

So Siddiqui wanted to see if he could test it himself. After performing proof of concept operations in 2025 with a new microrobotic tool (for a rare disorder involving constricted blood vessels in the brain), he and his colleagues decided to take an even bigger swing: testing this new technology to perform the lymphatic surgery for Alzheimer’s.

The researchers applied to the US Food and Drug Administration and received approval late last year for five initial procedures; over the summer, they got the green light to perform the procedure on 15 patients. Several operations have already been performed, and Siddiqui told me he had four more lined up next week.

The mechanism makes superficial sense: If Alzheimer’s is the byproduct of amyloid and tau building up in the brain because the body gets worse at filtering them out, bypassing a clogged “drain” in the lymphatic system could help to clear the proteins and relieve symptoms. It is, by a different method, the same therapeutic target as recent breakthrough drugs that slow down the cognitive decline of an Alzheimer’s patient.

But instead of an injection, the procedure involves a small incision in the neck, allowing surgeons to connect lymph nodes to a vein. The hope is that creating this new drainage route will help the brain clear amyloid and tau more effectively and “hopefully bypass whatever plugs that might be there in the system,” Siddiqui said.

This first round of US surgeries are part of what’s called an early feasibility study. “You’re just trying to prove that it’s definitely safe and definitely doable and maybe effective,” Siddiqui said. They’re measuring not only the patients’ cognitive performance but other data points — such as changes to their gait — for any sign of benefit or harm.

If results are promising, a second feasibility study will involve a larger number of patients — 50 or so. After that, if the evidence suggests they should move forward, the scientists would start to introduce placebos. In the case of surgery, that means some patients would receive “sham” surgeries that wouldn’t actually do anything. Then investigators would compare the experiences of the two groups: the people who received the fake surgery and the people who got the real thing.

If the latter group improves significantly more than the former, that would allow scientists to say definitively: Yes, this surgery actually works to treat Alzheimer’s.

“Obviously, this is exactly the kind of disease where there’s so much hype and so much hope,” Siddiqui told me. So it is essential to build out the careful research to substantiate it.

But let’s not get ahead of the science

Siddiqui has been in this position before — and he’s seen it go both ways. There was the new stroke treatment that proved successful and has since become the standard around the world. But he was also an early investigator of a multiple sclerosis treatment, somewhat similar to the Alzheimer’s surgery. After initial promise, it failed when the randomized trials began.

“I wouldn’t be a neurosurgeon if I was not an eternal optimist,” he said. “However, I’m a clinical trialist, and I always respect placebo.”

Placebos are essential, but they are also tricky. If somebody thinks they have received an active treatment in a study, they tend to think they’re going to benefit. This goes for surgical treatments as well. So following patients’ and their symptoms after the intervention is essential to seeing just how much of the effects can be attributed to the treatment and how much could be placebo effect. The latter of which could also be reinforced by loved ones who are desperate to see their parent or spouse get better. 

Alzheimer’s is also a complicated disease that we still don’t totally understand. While scientists think there is a relationship between amyloid and tau proteins and Alzheimer’s disease, other factors, such as inflammation and vascular health, could also have a role. Some prior drug candidates have successfully cleared amyloid plaque, but patients didn’t get better. Some people have amyloid build-up in their brains but never develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, division chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Yale School of Medicine, is overseeing studies designed to establish more of the basics of how these proteins pass through the lymphatic system. This research includes investigating whether obstruction actually occurs in Alzheimer’s patients, and if so, where exactly those blockages usually are. Only after they do this work, he said, would his team be comfortable proposing surgeries to relieve the blockage and see if that helps improve Alzheimer’s patients’ symptoms.

He told me about having seen Xie, the procedure-pioneering Chinese surgeon, speak during a plastic surgery conference a few years ago. (Plastic surgeons are experts in the kind of microsurgery necessary for the procedure, and several are involved in the ongoing Alzheimer’s trials.) 

“I think most people, including myself at the time, dismissed it as, ‘This is some sort of a charlatan.’” Pomahac said. “But he kept coming back to conferences every year and started to show more and more videos. We were not sure. Is it actors? You couldn’t tell what’s going on.”

Which is why he is dedicated to doing more of the foundational research to understand Alzheimer’s first. “Rushing to the operating room makes no sense in my mind at this point,” Pomahac said. “I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to really identify the site of surgery and what type of intervention would be most effective.”

Even if you set this surgery aside, this is an exciting moment for Alzheimer’s science. And although waiting any longer is excruciating for those watching loved ones with the disease progress, progress’ velocity by all accounts is increasing.

“We are finally doing the kinds of rigorous studies that will give us some degree of confidence that there’s something real here or not,” Siddiqui told me. “We’re not quite there yet.” But in just a year or two, we should know much more.

What can an economist teach us about misery? 

I had that question in mind while reading the new book The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us, by eminent researcher George Loewenstein. The field is not exactly known for its facility with human emotions, but Loewenstein is a co-founder of behavioral economics, the subdiscipline that studies the many ways that people depart from the ideal of the perfectly rational actor. He’s spent a career investigating how psychology and emotion shape our judgments, and his latest book offers a sweeping account of how suffering structures human life. 

That might sound very bleak, like the opposite of a fun read. But the book itself isn’t distressing — it’s a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive. It emerged from a period of profound suffering in his own life, one where, he writes, he “thought about suicide constantly.” Writing it, he told me in a recent interview, was “kind of a silver lining for my own misery.” 

In Loewenstein’s own words, The Opposite of Happiness is not a self-help book. To him, understanding is its own reward. Though he adamantly refuses to dispense life advice, I still think the book offers much that can help us live more wisely, a little less at war with our emotions.   

“Misery is inescapable,” Loewenstein writes. “It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system.” Negative emotions are “more powerful, persistent, and pervasive than positive ones.” That is because, he argues, unpleasant feelings — hunger, pain, anger, loneliness — are how evolution motivated us to do the things we need to survive and pass on our genes. They still heavily shape our conscious experience, however mismatched they may feel to our modern circumstances. 

Some version of that insight, that dissatisfaction is woven into the human condition, has been known to humans for eons, of course, captured in philosophical teachings like Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. The father of economics himself observed that people work hard to earn riches, only to discover the result offers no lasting contentment. “It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind,” Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. “It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts.” 

Loewenstein puts this understanding into the language of modern psychology, speaking to a current of anxiety and unhappiness running through American life today. It also points to enduring questions about what the purpose of human progress and prosperity is, anyway. 

Many of us could particularly benefit from the concept of negative “meta-emotions,” or the judgmental feelings we have about our negative feelings. “At the heart of so many of our miseries is not the fact that we feel bad, but the belief that we should feel otherwise,” he writes.  That line immediately rang true to me — merely acknowledging to myself that it’s not a big deal if I feel terrible from work stress, or my cat’s deteriorating health, or whatever else happens to be weighing on me, helps to lighten the load. What if we really tried to wryly embrace the reality that it’s extremely normal for life to suck sometimes? The reward might not be happiness, exactly (an elusive and poorly understood state anyway, Loewenstein points out), but a little less misery.  

I recently spoke with Loewenstein about his book — he had a gentle, faintly melancholic air, and took a surprisingly generous interest in some of the choices I was weighing in my own life. Part of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below. 

Americans seem pretty unhappy right now. There has been endless discourse about that. Do you think that your book adds something to that conversation?

I do — I was just an expert on the Meta case that recently settled. I was an expert on the side that was against Meta. I think one of the causes of declining mental health is, in fact, social media. It really exacerbates the types of social comparisons that lead to envy and loss of self-esteem. I would like to think that I provide some new insights into how these modern technologies help to exacerbate the mental health crisis. 

One analysis of that, based on what I’ve learned from your book, might be: We as humans are so guided by negative emotions, and often those emotions are relational in nature and have to do with how we compare to other people.  Social media is then quite naturally going to tap into and amplifying negative emotions that we’re easily manipulated by.

That’s right. I think of it in two ways. One is there’s kind of a mismatch between the circumstances in which we evolved and the modern environment. And the other is that in the capitalist economy, there are, especially in the internet age, all these entities that are trying to exploit our evolutionary programming for their own good and not for our good. 

The premise of the book, as you write, is that “misery is inescapable. It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system” — it’s like our default state. Can you unpack what that means? 

I agree with everything you said until “default.” Different people have different set points, and there are some happy people around. I happen to be a glass-half-empty person. My natural state is a little bit below zero. But there are very few people who don’t experience some form of misery frequently and intensely. 

The evolutionary function of most negative emotions is pretty obvious, whereas the evolutionary function of happiness is sort of murky. And misery is so dominant that all it takes is a little bit of misery, a little bit of negative emotion, to wipe out any positive emotion. You go out to a really nice dinner at a fancy restaurant with your significant other, and you say something thoughtless and they get offended or they say something thoughtless and you get offended. All of a sudden you can’t even taste the food or appreciate the beautiful surroundings. 

Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania referred to this as the “roach effect”: If you drop a roach into a vat of fine French wine, you don’t want to drink the wine. But if you take a roach, you can add as much wine as you want to it and you’re not going to want to eat the roach.

One of the strongest positive emotions is relief — which is interesting and not a coincidence, because it’s relief from negative emotions. It’s telling that maybe the strongest positive emotion involves the elimination of negative emotions.

You can think of misery as a stick trying to get you to do things that evolution thought were good for you; the stick is very immediate, and you know exactly what it’s telling you. If you are hungry, it’s time to eat. If you’re in pain, you’re injured, you’ve got to do something about it. But the carrot is different. The carrot, which is positive emotions, you have to think ahead, Oh, if I did this, then I would experience this positive emotion. It requires a kind of second-order thinking, whereas misery is just immediate. Evolution figured out probably very rapidly, probably when we were single-cell protozoa or something, that sticks are a way better way to get an organism to do what it needs to do than carrots.

How confident are you that the evidence base we have about the psychology of negative emotions generalizes to humanity as a whole and that it’s not culturally biased?

“What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings.”

Emotion researchers have looked across cultures, and they tend to observe the same basic emotions in a very, very wide range of cultures. What does vary across cultures is what induces the emotions. For example, shame — something that we would be unashamed of, somebody in a different country might be very ashamed of, and vice versa. A lot of these emotions are self-conscious emotions. They have to do with how we interpret the world and whether we’re living up to some kind of standard. Often we get it from culture, from religion, things like that.

But I think the emotions themselves are not universal, but pretty close to universal. My guess is that all 12 negative emotions that I write about are manifested in pretty much all different cultures, from those that have very little connection to Western civilization to advanced economies. 

Another timely thread that your book is in conversation with is this idea that American culture has become intolerant of ordinary negative emotions in a way that’s maladaptive. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s recent book The Age of Diagnosis, for example, covered our obsession with medical labels and how they might make us prone to thinking that feeling bad means that there’s something medically wrong with us. What do you think about that? Have we gotten bad at feeling bad?

It is striking to me how it seems like all the young people I meet talk about their therapist, and a lot of them talk about the drugs that they take. Young people also talk about anxiety and depression almost like one word, “anxiety-and-depression.” In my generation, anxiety and depression were two entirely different things. 

I think it’s good that younger generations are more comfortable talking about these things and getting help. I do worry that it can be, to some degree, pathologizing. There’s an awful lot of self-focus there. And I kind of worry that if you are dealing with your mental health problems by taking drugs, that it reduces your motivation to figure out things like how to reorganize your life to feel better. But I don’t want to sound too much like a dinosaur.

There’s a contingent of people who might read your book and think, “Yes, isn’t it terrible that humans are built to be unhappy and our evolved instincts don’t serve us well anymore? And that’s why we should engineer humans in such a way that we don’t feel this way all the time.” Someone with a strong utilitarian philosophy might think that if your life sums up to more negative feelings than positive ones, then it’s not even worth living. But that’s not really the vibe that I get from you. 

No, yeah. And one of the things I talk about in the book are what psychologists call meta-emotions. These are emotions that one experiences about emotions. I think the single best example is envy. If you envy your friend — almost everyone has friends that they envy, but they’re still your friends. But you might feel that you’re not supposed to envy your friend, and you feel guilty — the guilt is a meta-emotion. Or you can also have meta-emotions about a lack of emotion. So something bad happens to someone, or even somebody dies, and you don’t feel all that bad, and you feel guilty because you’re not grieving. 

I think all the societal focus on happiness creates a kind of a meta-meta-emotion, which is that we think we’re supposed to be happy. And then we feel ashamed and guilty about the fact that we aren’t happy — we feel like we failed. That compounds and adds another level of depth to our misery. So I think it can be liberating at some level to understand that misery just is a constant in human existence. 

I also think that my book is militantly anti-self-help. There’s no self-help in it whatsoever. But I don’t think it’s a depressing book to read, and it wasn’t particularly depressing to write, though some of the stories that I wrote about were a bit wrenching. 

I like that — but what, then, ought people to do with the information that you’re presenting?

What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings. To me, insight is valuable in its own right. 

The reason I read sad novels is not because they make me happy, but because I feel like I gained some kind of insight into people and into the world. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the saddest book you could ever imagine, but it’s very meaningful to read, and it definitely feels like you’re a different person after you read it. I love novels, but I have no skill as a fiction writer. So this book was almost like a surrogate for me. Instead of writing a novel, I wrote this book.

I think the lack of self-help drives some people crazy. I did a podcast where the podcaster kept asking me questions about how reading the book would improve somebody’s life. And I kept saying it’s not a self-help book.

I’m just very skeptical of self-help talks and books and things like that. And I know that there’s certain things you are supposed to do to feel good, like you’re supposed to wake up and think of three things that you should be thankful for. And maybe if I did that, maybe I would get happier, but I’ve never been able to actually get myself to do that.

But you do have some insights that people could apply in their lives, like the idea that striving intentionally for happiness or meaning doesn’t really work, and that meaning often comes to us in unforeseeable spontaneous moments. On one hand, that implies a kind of randomness, and maybe there’s not a lot we can do about it. On the other hand, I can predict that I’m more likely to feel a deep sense of meaning in some scenarios than others, and I can put myself into those situations more, like choosing to be social on a weeknight.

A lot of the time the good things in life are just surprising, and sometimes you have to get dragged kicking and screaming into things that ultimately end up being the most fulfilling things in your life. So much of parenting is trying to get your kids to do things that they don’t want to do that you are absolutely convinced that if they started to do them, they would end up loving.

You argue, drawing from economist and philosopher Adam Smith, that human beings are constantly striving to achieve the next thing because we imagine it’ll satisfy us, though it never does. That helpful delusion is what leads us to build cities and cure diseases and all the rest. 

Adam Smith is best known for the invisible hand, which is the idea that each person single-mindedly pursuing their own well-being inadvertently promotes the public good. But if you read Adam Smith’s other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he didn’t believe at all that people pursue their own personal interest. He believed that people are driven by this illusion that the next raise, the next accomplishment, will bring happiness, and it never does. I love that contradiction between the conventional interpretation of the invisible hand and what Adam Smith really believed.

So civilization is powered by this dissatisfaction that never resolves itself. But I don’t think you would say the lesson we ought to take from the book is that we’ll always revert back to being miserable, so there’s no point in doing anything.

That’s absolutely not the point of the book. Misery evolved for good reasons, and the whole point of misery is that we’re supposed to take actions to lessen our miseries. That’s what we should be doing, because who wants to be miserable? 

Some nights out leave you buzzing when you get home, still replaying conversations and sending people dumb sh*t you forgot to show them earlier. Other nights, you get through your front door and immediately lose the ability to communicate with another human being.

We usually call the second one a dead social battery. Psychotherapist Madison Jacoby thinks that explanation leaves out quite a bit. “How drained you feel has a lot to do with how comfortable and understood you feel with someone, and much less to do with the hours you’ve put in,” she told Metro. Another therapist interviewed by the outlet cautioned that once people decide they’re just someone with a low social battery, they begin to expect exhaustion every time they go out.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett looks at it through what she calls the body budget. Your brain is constantly keeping tabs on the energy your body needs, and other people can make that job easier or harder. “The best thing for a human body budget is another person. And, unfortunately, the worst thing for a human body budget is another person,” Barrett told The Sunday Paper. There’s a difference between hanging out with someone you can fully relax around and spending the night watching everything you say.

Why Socializing Can Exhaust You Hours After You Get Home

That drain doesn’t always hit while you’re still with them. You might not feel it until a few hours after you leave. University of Helsinki researchers checked in with people throughout the day and found that being more outgoing usually felt good in the moment. A few hours later, though, people were more tired. A later study found basically the same thing: a social high now, followed by more fatigue later.

And this wasn’t reserved for introverts. In the Helsinki research, personality didn’t change the relationship between outgoing behavior and later fatigue. An extrovert can have a great time talking to everyone in the room and still want absolutely nothing from anybody three hours later.

Who’s in the room matters, too. Jacoby pointed out that neurodivergent people can use extra energy masking or trying to follow social expectations that other people don’t have to think about. Even outside of that, most of us know there are people we can spend six hours with and feel fine, while 45 minutes with somebody else has us staring silently out the car window on the way home.

So “my social battery is dead” isn’t necessarily wrong. It just doesn’t explain why you feel fine after hours with one person and completely wiped out after an hour with someone else.

The post The Real Reason Some People Drain Your ‘Social Battery’ Faster Than Others appeared first on VICE.

Editor’s note, September 20, 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 September.

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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The Jewish High Holidays are coming up, and that includes Yom Kippur. It’s a holiday that encourages people to reflect on their behavior and make amends. That’s all well and good, but I’m someone who struggles with scrupulosity — constantly worrying about my morality and if I’m doing The Most Possible Good™.

In practice this is far more paralyzing than motivating. Fixating on the ethical implications of all possible decisions makes it harder to take any action, and I’ve lost hours scouring my memories of my past behavior for immorality like a football player watching footage of their games to analyze what they could do differently. Guilt simply isn’t serving me, but I worry that saying to hell with all that means I’ll stop striving to be a better person and become morally complacent.

I’ve observed Yom Kippur for decades, and don’t want to simply avoid the day. But the holiday is a moral scrupulosity trigger. How do you think I should approach this? I want to stop feeling guilty for letting guilt get in my own way.

Dear Scrupulous, 

Have you ever heard the story about what happened when God decided to give the Bible to flesh-and-blood human beings? According to the ancient rabbis, the angels hated the idea. They argued that humans were deeply flawed mortals who didn’t deserve such a holy scripture; only angels could be worthy of it, so it should stay up in heaven. 

It fell to Moses to rebut the angels’ argument. He asked them: What do you angels need the Bible for? The Bible says not to murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal — do you have jealousy or other emotions that could lead you to do those things? The Bible says to honor your father and mother — but you don’t have parents, so how could you ever do that? And the Bible says to sanctify the Sabbath — but you never do any work, so how could you even honor the Sabbath by resting? 

The angels saw that Moses was right. Angels are really great at one thing: being perfect. But perfect creatures are static. They don’t experience painful challenges, they don’t grow, and they don’t make choices that add beauty to the world. We humans do those things. God gives the Bible to humans not to make them into angels — but to make them better at being the unique thing they are: human animals, with feelings, flaws, and all, that can learn to use their capabilities in more beautiful ways.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this story. And I want you to notice how far it is from demanding that humans do “The Most Possible Good™.” That language suggests a maximizing ethical theory like utilitarianism, which says that we have to do the action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words, we have to optimize. 

Moral optimization may be possible for angels, but not for humans. We each hold multiple values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other, forcing us to strike a balance as best we can. We’re not omniscient beings who can know with certainty how best to strike the balance. 

What’s more, sometimes different kinds of moral good straight-up conflict with each other. Think of a woman who faces a trade-off: She wants to become a nun but also wants to become a mother. She can’t balance between those options — she has to choose. And what’s the better choice? We can’t say because the options are incommensurable. There’s no single yardstick by which to measure them so we can’t compare them to find out which is greater.

Given that this complexity is baked into the human condition, it’s impossible to be a perfect optimizing machine. And the more you try to force yourself to be that, the harder it’ll be for you to actually help others, because you’ll just be so burned out. As you’ve already discovered, the optimizing mindset is exhausting — you end up expending a lot of precious mental resources that you could be spending on something else. It can even lead to paralysis. And a lot of the time, there’s no knowably best decision.

So instead of trying to optimize everything, you can adopt a goal that’s humbler but more realistic: to live in line with your values as best you can. 

I know that can feel scary. Optimizing makes being human feel less risky. It provides a sense of control, and therefore a sense of safety. The unspoken premise is that if you optimize, you’ll never have to ask yourself: How could I screw up that badly? 

But there’s another way to feel safe. It’s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we’re trying our hardest there will be some things that we do not do optimally.

Of course, we should still try to live in line with our values. But in those moments when we fall short, we shouldn’t berate ourselves, thinking, “I sinned!” In Hebrew, the word we typically translate as “to sin” (lachto) actually means “to miss the mark.” It’s the same word we’d use to describe someone with a bow and arrow who’s targeting the bullseye but misses it slightly. This is a useful image, because it reminds us just how normal it is to miss the mark. Just as the archer’s arrow is buffeted around by the wind, we’re buffeted around by all the physical and psychological conditions acting upon us — naturally we won’t always hit the bullseye! And when we do miss the mark, we deserve compassion.

I know what you’re thinking: What if adopting this mindset means you’ll become morally complacent and let yourself off the hook too easily? This is one of the most common objections to practicing self-compassion. But research shows it’s not well-founded. In fact, psychologists have found that more self-compassionate people are better able to acknowledge when they’ve made a mistake. They’re more likely to want to apologize and make amends to others when they mess up. And they try to do better the next time around. Why? Because, to them, mistakes don’t feel so psychologically damning. That allows them to take more — not less — responsibility for their actions.

Yom Kippur can feel terrifying when any mistake you’ve made over the past year seems damning. But according to the ancient rabbis, Yom Kippur is not meant to be a somber day — it’s one of the happiest days of the year! After all, it was on Yom Kippur that Moses descended from Mount Sinai carrying the second set of tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, ready to gift them to the people. 

You probably know what happened to the first set of tablets: Moses shattered them after seeing the Israelites engaged in idol worship. What’s less known is that, according to one rabbinic story, God’s response to the shattering of those tablets was to actually congratulate Moses. Why did God think breaking them was the right move? And what was different about the second set? 

While the first tablets had been fashioned by God and God alone, the second tablets were a human-divine collaboration: Moses carved the stone and God inscribed the words. And while the first tablets contained only the words of the Ten Commandments — a black-and-white, rule-based morality — the rabbis tell us that the second tablets contained within them all the stories and interpretations that Jewish sages would later develop.

In other words, God recognized that you can’t just give humans a list of moral rules and call it a day. Maybe that would work for angels, who live in a simplified, disembodied world, but our ethical life is just too messy and multifaceted to be captured by any single set of universally binding moral principles. Yet God chose people over angels anyway, inviting us into the collaboration and embracing our humanness rather than rejecting it.

So, to the rabbis, Yom Kippur was a happy day because they fully expected that God would accept and embrace messy humans. 

Please, don’t try to be more zealous than God.

When you’re taking action, by all means, aim your arrows as true as you can — try to hit the bullseye, the place that captures as much of what you value as possible. But once you’ve released the arrow from your bow, let it be. 

If it turns out that you missed the mark, that you acted suboptimally, I put it to you that that is okay. You are not an angel. You are not a perfect optimizing machine. You do not have access to a magical mathematical formula that can consider countless incommensurable variables and spit out the very best move with certainty. You are human and you do the best you can with what you’ve got. 

The wisdom of these millennia-old stories is that that’s good enough for God. Let it be good enough for you, too. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Writing this column reminded me of The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, written by the psychologists Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. It really helped me develop a self-compassion practice, which has in turn helped me get a grip on my own scrupulosity. I also strongly recommend the eight-week self-compassion course run out of Neff and Germer’s nonprofit, the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.

• I’ve always associated the philosopher Thomas Nagel with questions about consciousness, but I recently learned that he’s also super interested in questions about religion. In a great essay called “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament,” Nagel asks: What, if anything, does secular philosophy have to put in the place of religion? More specifically, can it answer the question: What is the underlying nature of the universe, and how can the human individual live in harmony with it? 

• In this Aeon essay, philosopher Elad Uzan argues that AI will not be able to solve ethics for us, despite what some people hope. Drawing on the mathematician Kurt Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorems, Uzan writes, “just as mathematics will always contain truths that lie beyond formal proof, morality will always contain complexities that defy algorithmic resolution.” 

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I don’t know about you, but whenever I go to see my primary care doctor, my mental health isn’t usually at the top of my list of things to talk about. But it should be. In fact, experts say that all of us could benefit from more candid conversations with our doctors about our mental health.

(This story discusses mental health issues and suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. You are not alone. You can call the national 988 hotline for support.)

For years, the United States has been trying to figure out “parity” for mental health care — to have it treated and paid for like any other medical need, not something that is carved out and separate. A big part of that has been pushing primary care doctors and OB/GYNs to do more screenings, to make your mental state a part of your well-being that you discuss with your doctor the same as your blood pressure or any physical ailment.

But that is easier said than done. A lot of people may not even realize that their depression or anxiety or stress is something they should talk about with their primary care doctor. Others might fear being judged, and for good reason — national policymakers warn there continues to be a stigma toward mental health conditions among doctors.

About one in three Americans say they have never been asked about their mental health by a doctor, which is unsettling considering that the nation has been going through a collective mental health crisis for several years. Men are significantly less likely to be asked about their mental health than women — perhaps a reflection of a culture that expects men to “tough it out” when it comes to their feelings. But those attitudes come with a price: Men are diagnosed with depression at half the rate as women, but die by suicide much more frequently.

Much of the burden for starting these conversations should fall on your doctor to be more curious and accommodating during annual exams. But you don’t have to wait to be asked to bring it up. Regularly talking to your provider about your mental health is the best way to get ahead of any problems and get treated if you need to be. In honor of Suicide Prevention Month, I reached out to a handful of doctors who have studied why it’s sometimes so hard for patients and doctors to talk about depression, anxiety, and stress — and learned some novel strategies for how you can take charge, push through any stigma, and start having more honest talks with your doctor about your state of mind. Here’s what you should know.

Know the relevant symptoms before you talk to your doctor

One of the tricky things about depression or any serious mental health problem is that it isn’t always easy to identify when you’re the one experiencing it. “Patients need to recognize their distress…as potentially emanating from depression,” Dr. Richard Kravitz, a general medicine professor at UC Davis who has studied depression screening in primary care, told me.

There is a checklist of sorts that you can go through on your own to understand whether you’re just having a tough couple of days or there’s something more serious at work, said Dr. Maria Garcia, an internal medicine physician at UC San Francisco. You might be feeling down or unmotivated or have a lack of energy, or be more agitated, angry, or irritable than usual. Sometimes there are less obvious signs, like trouble with money or problems at work. 

“If you’re not getting enjoyment from your normal hobbies or talking to the people that you would normally really enjoy talking to, if you find yourself isolating from people that you normally really enjoy spending time with, I think those are certainly triggers,” she said. Consider the duration of your symptoms, too: “If it’s every day for a couple of weeks, that definitely isn’t normal.”

And oftentimes, depression symptoms can mirror symptoms of other ailments or problems, like a lack of sleep, low appetite, or physical aches and pains. This is one reason why it is so important to talk with your doctor about it, Garcia said. Is that fatigue a result of depression — or is it a problem with your thyroid? Your primary care physician is best positioned to help you figure that out. One of the benefits of a long-term relationship with a physician is that they may be able to help you recognize symptoms of depression even if they aren’t obvious to you.

It’s hard to be that self-aware; I’m certainly not all the time. But the more you pay attention to your mood and how it’s affecting your life, the more you can tell your doctor about what’s really going on. You don’t have to know all the fancy clinical terms, said Paul Duberstein, a clinical psychologist and professor of health behavior, society, and policy at the Rutgers School of Public Health. “The language that people are most comfortable using are words like stress or frustrated or impatient or something like that,” Duberstein told me. “Those are the kinds of things we really do want to incentivize and encourage people to talk to their doctors about.”

How to bring up your mental health with your doctor

Okay, you feel like something might be off and you have a doctor’s appointment coming up. What do you do?

You might not have to do anything. These days, you are likely to be given a depression screening by your physician’s office before you ever arrive (usually as part of your pre-visit paperwork). Garcia said it’s important to be honest and to be thorough when answering those questions, as that will tell your doctor that your mental health should be a focus for your upcoming visit.

But if you aren’t proactively screened for depression and you have some of the symptoms described above or you just have a hunch that something might be wrong, try to alert your doctor in advance that your mental health is something you want to talk about. If that’s not possible, tell your doctor early on in the appointment that your mental state is something you want to discuss. Garcia said that, rightly or wrongly, doctors can sometimes be reluctant to dive deep into a discussion about mental health late into a visit; they only have so much time with individual patients, and they might balk at trying to squeeze in a mental health discussion at the end. The conversation is more likely to be productive if you proactively start it before your physician is sidetracked with your blood sugar. 

During this conversation, you can ask for a depression screening outright. Doctors have become adept at recognizing code words; if you say your mood has been off, they may pick up the signal that you may be experiencing mental health struggles. But there is a good argument for being very direct about how you’re feeling, Kravitz said.

“My advice…is just simply to say to the doctor, ‘I’ve been feeling down’ or ‘I’ve been feeling irritable’ or ‘I’ve been losing sleep’ or ‘Something’s wrong and I don’t know what it is. Do you think it might be depression?’ Just ask,” Kravitz said. If you aren’t sure if it’s a mental or physical issue, tell them that. Activate your doctor’s curiosity, Kravitz told me. Get them invested in figuring out what’s going on with you.

Once the conversation starts, your doctor is likely to ask how long you have been experiencing symptoms and how they are affecting your day-to-day function. When that happens, you should be as thorough and truthful as possible.

“Is it affecting your ability to take care of your family? Is it affecting your ability to go to work, get up in the morning, cook dinner, get out of the house, go grocery shopping?” Garcia said. “Those things are really helpful because then we can tailor the treatments for the amount of functional impairment.”

Talk to your doctor about your sleep, too, Duberstein said. Not only is it an important indicator of your physical health, but it will also tell your doctor something about your mental well-being. And it doesn’t require any special emotional vocabulary: You probably know if you’re sleeping well or not.

“If you think about major depression as a collection of, say, nine symptoms and you ask, ‘Well, what symptoms appear first? Is it the depressed mood? Or the difficulty concentrating?’ The first thing that appears typically is sleep,” Duberstein told me. “Disrupted sleep is something that I think people do feel comfortable talking with their doctor about.”

How to talk to your doctor about a treatment plan

If you have a productive conversation with your doctor and they recognize symptoms of depression, they’ll want to establish a treatment plan. This has historically been another barrier to honest conversations between doctors and patients about mental health: Patients don’t want to be prescribed antidepressants or referred to therapy, so they don’t bring it up.

But ignoring your symptoms is, of course, not the solution. Instead, use your appointment as an opportunity to ask all of your questions to make sure that you are fully comfortable with the doctor’s proposed treatment plan and can get on the road to better mental health.

Many Americans have doubts about antidepressants, which have been egged on by high-profile figures like US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. If you’re hesitant to take meds, you should tell your provider about the things that you’ve heard that give you pause, the negative experiences people have shared, or whatever major questions or concerns you have. They can help you understand the very real trade-offs that come with taking an antidepressant, Kravitz said. Your doctor can also debunk some of the misconceptions that make people hesitant to take these drugs even when they are struggling.

“The duration of therapy sometimes surprises people. But no, it doesn’t mean that you’ll have to be on it forever. No, most people don’t have serious withdrawal symptoms. Those can usually be managed by careful tapering if necessary and so on,” Kravitz said. He said you can ask your doctor outright: “What can I expect to happen over time? How long will I need to be on this?” 

If you’d rather not go on medication immediately, that’s totally valid. Your doctor may instead be able to help you find a therapist with a referral, Duberstein said. Therapists have historically been hard to find in the US — but one positive outcome of the pandemic was the proliferation of online mental health services.

“I think it’s important for the public to know that one of the major barriers to getting into psychotherapy or even seeing a therapist — like getting into your car, driving, finding a bus, finding a subway, whatever — that those barriers are gone,” he told me. “Because you could see a therapist online now in all 50 states.”

The goal is that you leave your doctor’s office feeling heard and feeling on-board with the approach, even if you still have some trepidation (which is very common). And if you don’t feel comfortable talking to your doctor about these issues, that may be a sign you need to find a new provider whom you feel you can trust with those sensitive discussions, Duberstein said.

The point is, your doctor should be your ally in pursuing whatever treatment you need for whatever ails for your mental health. Nobody has to go through it alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One person’s loneliness is another’s business opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Masking” a symptom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting a price tag on relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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