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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Junk journaling is a beautiful invitation to turn trash into art 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Junk journaling is something creative to do with your hands

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

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

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

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

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

A junk journal is proof of something real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem with dating right now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dating with walls up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letting your guard down

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

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

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

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

Why do I cry when I see a donkey? 

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

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

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

But the donkeys keep disrupting that notion.

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

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

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

What religious tradition can teach us about the souls of animals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.