When was the last time you played? Took part in an enjoyable activity for the sake of it, with no particular outcome? A moment where you laughed, felt awe, curiosity, creativity? Where time flew by? If you’re over the age of, say, 7, your answer is probably not recently.

According to Mia Sundstrom, CEO of the National Institute for Play, an organization that studies play and champions research-backed playful policies, American society is in a bit of a play drought. Attention spans are shrinking, the country is more polarized than ever, and some people might be more comfortable communicating with AI than other humans. “Our world is really overwhelming, and what we’re starting to see is these almost spontaneous bursts of playfulness infiltrate back into our society almost as a rebellion against the things that feel really hard and scary right now,” Sundstrom told Vox.

That desire for levity might explain the proliferation of “whimsical” online content and unconventional workout classes and events, Sundstrom said. In other words, play, which she defined as both a state (marked by experimentation and risk-taking) and a disposition (a curious, creative, and optimistic way of moving throughout the world). 

Playfulness benefits us all, not just kids. Playful people perceive less stress and have higher well-being, and life satisfaction. It also just feels good to partake in an activity that takes you out of the difficulties of life, if just for a little while. To help push back against the forces of seriousness, Sundstrom outlines three easy ways to imbue your life with more play. 

1. Figure out your “play style”

Play is highly subjective: What one person considers enjoyable might be another’s personal hell. And just because an activity brings you a moderate amount of enjoyment doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for you. (Take mindlessly scrolling on your phone, for instance.) To be a more playful person, you need to consider — or remember — what makes you feel a little silly. The National Institute for Play developed six “play styles” to help people determine what activities light them up. For example, “creators” play through art, music, design, and performance while “competitors” like playing games or sports.

If you struggle to even pinpoint your play style, Sundstrom suggests recalling past memories of play. When was the last time you truly lost track of time or laughed so hard you cried with people you loved? What were you doing?

“Try and recall that vividly, because play is who we are before the world tells us who we have to be,” she said. “Whatever you loved to do early on, there’s a good chance somewhere inside of you that is still in there and is a great little spark for you to re-access play.” It’s likely you gradually stopped these playful hobbies, perhaps due to the demands of adult life, and picking them back up with no expectation can put you in touch with your younger self. 

2. Make your environment more conducive to play

Based on your play style, you might consider low- or no-cost upgrades to your physical space to make play easier. “In physical spaces, the fastest and easiest things you can do are how can you add bright colors or something that feels inspiring to you, whether that’s a picture of your favorite place or a memory that jogs back play, something that is a visual cue to you that brings you back to a play state,” Sundstrom said. You might keep some scrap paper handy to doodle while you’re on the phone, use brightly colored files to organize your important documents, or use a colorful keyboard instead of a standard one. 

Kids can make any space more playful. If you have children in your life, try to adopt their mindset: the curiosity, the wonder. And if you don’t have little ones, take inspiration from a childlike version of yourself and make decisions from their point of view, Sundstrom said.

Many adults, especially moms, feel pressure to curate a high-octane play experience for kids, Sundstrom said. But a more playful environment can simply incorporate an inside joke, a wink whenever you leave the room, or a silly way of greeting each other.

3. Find some bite-sized versions of play that you can add to your daily routine

Once you’ve figured out, say, adventuring and new experiences are what make you feel alive (also known as the “explorer” play style), what tiny measures can you take to regularly engage in play? 

“Even 30 seconds of a dance break or belting your favorite song or creating a handshake with somebody as you enter or exit a room, that is enough to create that play spark and to start those brain activations that do foster the deeper creativity and adaptability and resilience that build the play mindset,” Sundstrom said. 

The best places to infuse play are during moments of boredom, Sundstrom said. To allow yourself space to be bored, put your phone in another room during any downtime and when you would ordinarily feel the urge to pick up your device, do something playful instead. Anything from practicing an accent or turning on a random radio station and imagining what the musical artist looks like.

The world may be serious, but individuals can take ownership over how much whimsy and levity they bring to it. Who knows? You might make someone else’s day more playful, too.

Ever find yourself hunched over your laptop, eyes glazed, slack jawed, and stunned by the quantity of information modern life is throwing at you? You might take a break to stare at your phone. Or you could try switching from one browser tab to the next while checking your email and inching closer to the day’s deadline. 

Some people call this TikTok brain. Others call it brain rot. Either way, it feels like a distinctly 21st-century affliction, caused by scrolling through too many short-form videos and social media feeds that trains your brain to seek out little hits of dopamine and ruins your ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. People with the condition may not be able to read books or even watch feature-length films. They can’t do anything except watch little videos, leaving them prone, catatonic, faces blank and bright in the glow of their smartphone screens. 

I don’t even use TikTok, but I feel this way all the time. Give me one hour to complete a task that requires even a medium amount of mental fortitude, and I’ll find 55 minutes’ worth of other things to do. It’s not that I’m avoiding the task. But once I get started, my mind wanders relentlessly, no matter how hard I try to keep it on track.

You can blame technology for doing this to you — and I do — but the real issue is with how we treat our brains. Generally speaking, the human brain works like an analog computer, processing one thing at a time, and when you switch tasks (which is what we’re actually doing when we say we are multitasking), it comes at a cost: It drains your cognitive resources, which makes it even harder to pay attention in the future. The more you do this, the more ingrained the behavior becomes.

“It’s a myth to think that we should push ourselves to focus as long as possible and we’ll be more productive,” said Gloria Mark, the author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity and the Substack The Future of Attention. 

The human attention span is not one thing. There are different types of attention, including sustained attention (your ability to stay engaged with a task over a period of time) and selective attention (your capacity to take in certain information while tuning out irrelevant details). Alternating attention (the mental flexibility required to switch tasks rapidly) and dividing attention (process multiple things at once) are especially demanding on your cognitive resources. And all of this is managed by the brain’s command center, your prefrontal cortex, which handles executive function. When you’re experiencing cognitive fatigue, there’s a physical reason why: There’s actually less blood flowing to this portion of the brain.

“We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.”

Amisha Jha, University of Miami neuroscience professor

The good news is that the damage is not permanent. The human brain’s capacity to focus is just as intact as it was in the 19th century when everyone spent their evenings reading novels and knitting fisherman sweaters. Lots of things have changed since then, of course. As smartphones have driven us to consume endless amounts of information, psychologists have been working on strategies to put the pieces of our attention spans back together. I called a few of these attention experts hoping that they might tell me the secret to regaining my ability to focus. They all agreed that two things are necessary to solve the problem: Be intentional with your attention and let your brain rest.

“What we need most is the capacity to know where attention is, moment by moment, and greater agency over our attention so we can direct it intentionally,” Amishi Jha, a neuroscience professor at the University of Miami and author of Peak Mind, told me. “We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.” 

Put another way, in order to reclaim your attention span, you first need to be mindful. That means spending less brain power dissociating on social media feeds and more on whatever you’re actually interested in. You also need to give your brain a chance to rest and recover. Staring at your phone will not help you recharge and reclaim your attention span. Staring at a tree, however, will. 

Let your brain rest

One way to think about your own attention span is to consider what is voluntary and what is not. When something like a bright light or a loud noise grabs your attention, it engages your involuntary attention, which is effectively limitless. When you’re deciding to pay attention to something, however, you’re using your voluntary, or directed attention. This is a limited resource. As you’re making an effort to focus on something, like a book, your supply of directed attention runs down, but it can be replenished in specific ways.

This simpler way to understand how our attention works dates back to the 19th-century psychologists, like Williams James, but it’s making a comeback thanks to attention restoration theory (ART). This school of thought, first developed in the 1980s by University of Michigan psychology professors Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, suggests that spending time in nature restores your directed attention. The theory claims that the natural world does this by captivating our indirect, or involuntary, attention and allowing our cognitive resources to recover.

Imagine you’ve gone for a hike and happen upon a waterfall that’s so fascinating you can’t look away from it. Marc Berman, one of Stephen Kaplan’s former students and now a professor at the University of Chicago, refers to such a spectacle as a “soft fascination,” something that can grab your attention without consuming it, thus giving your mind space to wander. You might get the same effect from staring at a campfire or looking up at tree branches swaying in the breeze. Hard fascinations, by contrast, capture so much of your attention that you can’t look away and you can’t quickly recover. Times Square is a canonical example, but being on social media counts, too.

“Doomscrolling, streaming, surfing the internet — they’re activities that maybe seem restful, but we actually think that they’re fatiguing and depleting,” said Berman, who is also the author of the book Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being. 

In one study Berman conducted, he and his team (which included Kaplan) gave research subjects difficult attention and memory tasks, sent them on a walk in nature or an urban environment, and then repeated the tests. The participants who went on nature walks improved their performance in these tests by about 20 percent, Berman said, and the improvements held regardless of whether participants said they liked the walk or not.

“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention.”

Nilli Lavie, University College London psychology professor

Berman said they aren’t entirely sure why nature seems to have this effect on us, but he theorizes that it relates to fractals, or repeating, self-similar patterns whose individual parts resemble their larger whole — tree branches or fern leaves, for instance. Fractals are common in nature, and Berman thinks their orderly arrangement helps our brains to process the information. “It’s easy to get the gist and you don’t need to encode all the details,” he said. “Whereas in the built environment, it’s not very fractal and you might have to encode everything, which might be more taxing.”

Of course, it’s not always possible to zip over a forest in the middle of the work day. If you can’t take a walk in the park, Berman said that even looking at a picture of nature scenes can help. (Try not to do that on Instagram, though, because you might end up just doomscrolling.) 

Be intentional with your attention

Reclaiming your attention is one thing, but holding onto it in the first place is its own distinct challenge. When you find yourself feeling distractable, it might be that you need a break. If that’s the case, you can’t will your way into concentrating.

“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention,” said Nilli Lavie, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at University College London. “It’s not enough to just want to pay attention.”

Instead, you have to put yourself in an environment that makes paying attention not only possible but achievable. That means making a concerted effort to avoid multitasking, which will drain your cognitive resources. Try the alternative: monotasking. 

Monotasking likely requires clearing away clutter, whether that’s literal clutter on your desk, or digital clutter on your screen in the form of extra apps or browser tabs. Turning off all notifications is essential. You should also hide your phone — put it in a drawer or in another room. (A widely cited study published in 2017 found that even having a phone in sight can reduce your cognitive capacity and affect your ability to concentrate.) When you need to take a break, don’t go find your phone: Take a walk outside, or stare at a tree, or look out the window and listen to a song you like.

Monotasking also means being intentional about how you do that one thing, avoiding distractions along the way. At work, this might mean carving up projects into digestible chunks. You might even try the Pomodoro technique: Set a timer for 25 minutes, focus hard on the task until it goes off, take a five-minute break, and repeat. At home, it could mean making to-do lists and prioritizing tasks so that the toughest ones get done first, while you still have some gas in the tank.

If you aren’t ready to turn off all notifications at this point, at the very least turn off all the ones that aren’t coming from humans. You do not need to be alerted of an Amazon flash sale while you’re trying to plan your family’s meals for the week.

Give yourself some constraints

There’s no such thing as being 100 percent locked in to any given task. When there are no external distractions, your brain actually turns inward and finds something else to pay attention to, which can lead to daydreaming and mind wandering. Daydreaming — creating a structured narrative of imaginary scenarios — is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. It can be productive in helping you plan and think creatively. But if you’re just mentally wandering from random topic to topic, you’re getting into the danger zone. 

Some people find that adding constraints can improve their attention. One approach you’ll see in self-help books is the use of a so-called commitment device that restricts future behavior in service of a larger goal. If you’ve read (or seen) The Odyssey, you might remember the scene in which Odysseus orders his crew to tie him to the ship’s mast and ignore his orders so that he won’t steer the boat into the rocks when he hears the Sirens’ call. Odysseus was using a commitment device to avoid killing his whole crew. You might use a commitment device, like a dedicated writing space or the Pomodoro technique, to avoid distractions, both external and internal. 

So how do you focus just the right amount? Removing those external distractions is a great start. Much like paying attention, ignoring these distractions consumes your cognitive resources, impacting your performance, and causing you to make mistakes. It also takes more effort to stay on task as time goes on. From there, do your best to avoid overtaxing your brain to the point that the internal distractions take over and your mind is wandering. That’s how you know it’s time to take a break.

“For several minutes, give yourself no new input,” Jha said. “Do not reach for the phone while waiting in line. Take a short walk without listening to anything. Look out a window. Let the mind wander without trying to solve a problem.”

Take a walk in the park. Sit quietly and look at a bird. Paying attention has never sounded so relaxing.

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!”

No, that isn’t the latest Heated Rivalry fanfiction — it’s the opening line of a 2,000-year-old erotic poem. Yes, in the middle of the Hebrew Bible, a text that has so often been weaponized to shame sexual desire, there is a collection of straight-up filth: 

“I arose to open to my beloved,

    and my hands dripped with myrrh,

my fingers with liquid myrrh,

    on the handles of the bolt.” 

Girl. Tell me more…

As a gay kid growing up in the 1990s, sex was far from holy. Indeed, it was deemed dirty, diseased, and damned by the church. The shadow of AIDS lingered long and information readily accessible to me was limited to guidance on birth control. Nothing about pleasure; certainly nothing practical about the mechanics of gay sex. It meant that my first time, aged 18 at a youth conference with a Brazilian boy whose name I hardly knew, was both messy and painful.

For years, it didn’t cross my mind to look at what religion had to say about having good sex. Why trust these traditions that have been so callous and cruel to queer people like me? Well, it turns out that those sages of yore were just as horny as we are. And the practice of worship, the experience of divine intimacy, and the sweetness of surrender are as applicable in sex as they are in spiritual life.

To get more insight into this, I called author and Rabbi Jay Michaelson, whose book, God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness, and Embodied Spiritual Practice, first got me thinking about sex as a spiritual practice. In it, he argues that spirit and body are not separate at all, and that our bodies are the very place where holiness expresses itself in the world. 

For Michaelson, there are three key gifts that religion offers us as a way of connecting with our sexual selves. First is the cultivation of presence. Michaelson isn’t just a rabbi; he’s also a meditation teacher, and so Buddhist practice is core to his spiritual life. “I don’t understand how people have sex without meditation!” he jokes. “To miss out on the intimacy with the other person or just with one’s own experience, with one’s own body, is, to me, a shame. … It can be really simple.” He adds that if you can have mindful eating, you can have mindful sex.

How can we practice presence? Take inspiration from religious rituals! Think about the ways in which worship services use incense, music, even mood lighting through stained-glass windows. The incantation of holy words, the eating of special food, the anointing with holy oil…these are all tools to help people be present in the here and now. So, the same is true for sex: Light some candles, use massage oil, tell your partner (or yourself) what you want and how, and put on a playlist to be truly present.

But just like meditating, sometimes being fully present to our sexuality can bring up unexpected negative emotions. Maybe we worry about how we look, or the sounds we’re making, or how we taste. We judge ourselves or get embarrassed about what we want. That’s where the second gift religion can offer us comes into play.

It’s “about really embodying the knowledge that pleasure is a blessing,” Michaelson says. Whether that blessing comes from God or is just the experience of being alive is immaterial to Michaelson; what matters is believing it. “That is something that is easy to read, but, like any other spiritual insight, to actually take it in and really believe it…that takes a lifetime of practice,” he says. 

In a story from the Talmud, a rabbi by the name of Kahana follows his teacher home and hides under the bed in order to learn how he should make love. He waits and listens — and when he’s discovered and scolded for his voyeurism, he tries to defend himself by saying, “It is Torah, and I must learn!” Luckily for us, we have better strategies for learning pleasure these days. 

Court Vox is an intimacy coach based in Los Angeles who helps gay, bi, trans, and queer men learn the language of their embodied pleasure. Through hands-on workshops that center sensation, touch, breath, and movement, Vox teaches men to understand their own nervous system and what feels good. You could try this by simply spending some time moving different objects over your body: a feather, a stone, a fork, a hand. Slow down enough to notice what really feels good, and where. You will likely be surprised by what does and doesn’t give you pleasure as you explore.

Fundamental to Vox’s work is moving people out of a state of hypervigilance so they can actually let go enough to enjoy themselves. “You cannot surrender when you are still managing,” he says. And for many, surrender can be so very sweet. Vox explains that for him, true letting go feels like being inside “some sort of Jell-O or honey, almost like a womb.” But for that to happen, you have to feel safe. If you don’t feel safe, you’re not going to find real pleasure — which means that consent is a prerequisite for everything that Vox does, and it should be for the rest of us too. 

So, if good sex is about presence and pleasure, the final element Michaelson says that we can pull from religious tradition is integration. “It’s not where I want to be spiritually to have great sex and then 15 minutes later…I go on as if it never happened,” he says. Sex shouldn’t be a random experience that’s separate from who we are in every other part of life. Sex connects us to the world; to each other; to the very force of life. 

Religious traditions have often integrated sex into daily living through myths and storytelling. By integrating stories of sex into their own creation myths, sex was deemed natural and necessary. Usually, these myths focus on fecundity — new life literally coming from some sexual activity. For example, the Mesopotamian goddess of the salt sea Tiamat mates with the freshwater god Abzû to birth a pantheon of newer gods. Or the Sumerian god Enki masturbates and ejaculates semen to create the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

So, how might we find stories and rituals that give sex a meaningful place in our everyday lives? Yes, we might entwine our sex lives with the cycles of the moon, or host board game nights with a host of lovers! But some old traditions can find new life when we look at them anew, too.

Father Jarel Robinson-Brown is an Anglican priest. On Sunday mornings he officiates the Mass, or Eucharist, which is a ritual retelling of a story of love, sacrifice, death, and resurrection. This ritual has integrated core theological ideas into worshippers’ everyday lives for 2,000 years.

But for Robinson-Brown, this church service isn’t the only place where God’s presence is felt. Speaking in a personal capacity in an episode of the podcast All Out With Jon Dean earlier this year, he explained that dark rooms and cruising grounds can be similarly sacred. “The space of a dark room [is a] kind of metaphor for what I think a particular experience of God can be and with other people can be in terms of intimacy and safety. … People are not judged on their appearance, or their differences, but come to each other as they are.” In these sexual encounters where individuals are nameless to one another, there is an experience of union that transcends identity, biography, and status. They are simply bodies together. And for Robinson-Brown, being embodied is what Christianity is all about. “Not only does God belong in the bedroom, or wherever the erotic space might be,” he tells me, “God is already in us.”

What Robinson-Brown is modeling here is the integrating of our sex lives into a larger pantheon of meaning. Cruising and sex in a dark room is an affirmation of each person’s sacredness and the necessity of human connection. 

That’s our task: to find ways of narrating (through stories and rituals) the presence and pleasure we experience in sex. To celebrate it; to delight in it; to see its holiness. That’s why there’s an erotic love poem at the heart of the Bible. Its closing words offer us this invitation: 

“Come away, my beloved,

    and be like a gazelle

or like a young stag

    on the spice-laden mountains.“

Whatever you believe, and however you have sex, I hope you find presence, pleasure, and stories that can integrate it all into your life. Good sex is spiritual. And good religion is full of sex. Let us be glad for it!

Editor’s note, August 9, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in April.

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

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I’m trying to decide whether to keep my elementary school-age kid in the neighborhood public school or move him to a more exclusive private school. Our public school is okay, but my partner and I feel that he might be more challenged and ultimately better off moving to a private school.

But I’m very aware of the increasing flow of students around the US out of public schools, and the effect that is having on the children who remain there. For one thing, since public schools get more funding the more students they have, every family that leaves effectively takes money with them. I worry that by taking my child out of public school, I’m contributing to that problem, but I also don’t want my child to bear the personal burden of my politics.

Dear Public School Parent,

The way you’ve framed the question makes it sound like keeping your kid in public school means imposing a burden on him. And if that were the case — if we really were talking about sacrificing your child’s well-being — I know exactly what I’d tell you.

I’d tell you not to be bullied by utilitarian philosophers. They argue we have to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for our own kids, so they’d probably say it’s wrong to give your child a fancy education while consigning other children to a school with fewer resources. But the 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams argues that this sort of total impartiality is an absurd demand — and I agree.

Williams points out that moral agency — the capacity to act on values and commitments — always comes from a specific person. And as specific people, we have our own specific, individual, core commitments. These “ground projects,” as Williams calls them, are the commitments that give a life its meaning and continuity. A parent has a commitment to ensuring their kid’s well-being, over and above their general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Williams would say any moral theory that requires you to ignore such personal commitments severs you from the very things that make your life recognizably yours.

So if keeping your kid in public school really meant hurting him, I wouldn’t say you have to do it.

But you said your neighborhood school is okay. It sounds like it’s not bad and not unsafe. So I don’t have reason to think that it is actually hurting him. In fact, it might be helping him in ways you’re not fully accounting for. 

Education is complicated. If I were to get into all the details about school choice and vouchers and charter schools and magnet schools, I’d have to write a whole book. So let me just stick to the main points relevant to your dilemma, starting with this: There’s a popular narrative that says private schools are better than public schools, but the evidence does not support that — especially if we take a broad look at what we mean by “better.”

Although studies do show private school students outperforming their public school counterparts on tests, the studies also show that private school advantages disappear mostly or entirely once you control for family background. 

Longitudinal research led by Robert Pianta and Arya Ansari at the University of Virginia tracked more than 1,000 children from birth to age 15 in 10 locations nationwide. After controlling for family income, parental education, neighborhood socioeconomic makeup, and other background variables, the private school advantage…vanished.

“If you want to predict children’s outcomes — achievement test scores, the things we care about socially — in high school, the best thing you can use to predict that is going to be family income — regardless of what high school you go to,” Pianta said.

Pianta’s was a modest-sized study with some methodological limitations. But another analysis of two large, nationally representative datasets also found that public school kids did just as well in math as private school kids — or even outpaced them — after accounting for demographic differences. (Math is considered a particularly robust indicator of school quality writ large because, unlike reading, it’s a subject learned mostly at school and not at home.) The researchers suggested that might be because public school teachers have to do stricter certification and can be required to do more frequent professional development, so they may be more reliably up-to-date on the latest pedagogical approaches, like those developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.  

Admittedly, the very fanciest of private schools do offer some special advantages. Network effects are real. Maybe you want your kid rubbing elbows with a future senator. And maybe if you send your kid to ultra-elite Andover or Exeter, he’ll have a leg up if he applies to a fancy private college. 

But that is not the same as ensuring your child actually thrives. I’m sure you also care about your child’s psychological well-being. And here, some of the evidence about exclusive, high-achieving schools is worrying. 

The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.

The unrelenting pressure to compete and achieve can be brutal in those schools. When students constantly compare themselves to others and peg their self-worth to achievement, the results are alarming. Studies conducted over decades by psychologist Suniya Luthar and colleagues found that students attending high-achieving schools are at significantly higher risk for anxiety, depression, and substance use. (These are often private schools, though hyper-competitive public schools can also fall into this trap.) In fact, the National Academies of Sciences now names these students an “at-risk” group for mental health problems, alongside kids who live in poverty or in foster care or who have incarcerated parents.

In addition to potentially providing a less stressful environment, public schools can confer other important advantages. For one thing, your local public school can help you and your child be part of the neighborhood community, which is incredibly valuable for social development and countering loneliness. And being in an environment that’s more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, or class can teach your kid to empathize and get along with a wide variety of people. 

As the American philosopher John Dewey pointed out, these are essential skills and capacities for a flourishing adult life and for a flourishing democracy. Democracy is a way of being in community with people unlike yourself; that’s a mode of life that has to be cultivated, and public schools are great grounds for learning to navigate a shared world.

Plus, public education is free! (Well, “free” — you’ve already paid for it with your taxes, whether or not your kid uses it.) So you could save all the money you’d spend on private school and instead use it on enriching opportunities to expand your child’s horizons. Personally, I’d take my kid to Italy and teach them about Ancient Roman gladiators and Renaissance art and the many flavors of gelato! Or you could collaborate with your child to decide where to donate some of that money to fund education resources for kids elsewhere. 

On balance, since the evidence suggests that a child at a decent public school, with involved parents, probably won’t gain meaningful advantages from switching to an exclusive private school — and may face real psychological risks in a hyper-competitive environment — I don’t see a compelling reason to make the move. If you’ve got the resources to even consider private school, then your home life will probably play the biggest role in your kid’s academic trajectory, regardless of which building he sits in during the day. The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.

That said, I’m not arguing that parents should never pick private school. To some extent, this depends on the unique needs of your kid and your family. Maybe your kid is absolutely in love with music and the private school nearby has an amazing music program. Maybe your kid is being bullied at his current school but has a couple great friends who attend the private school. Or maybe a religious education is very important to you, so a private parochial school makes sense. 

If you do make the choice to send your kid to private school, you’ll have to grapple with the collective action problem you hinted at: Any single family’s departure from a public school barely registers, but when every family with options reasons the same way, the cumulative effect on the school’s funding — and on the kids who remain — can be devastating.

Here, the American political philosopher Iris Marion Young can help you. She points out that our usual model of responsibility — the “liability model,” which says that when something bad happens we should assign blame to a particular individual — is inadequate when we’re dealing with situations of structural injustice. In these situations, it’s a whole system that’s producing predictable patterns of disadvantage. 

Just look at the complex web that breeds educational inequality: Historical housing segregation has concentrated poverty in certain neighborhoods. Poorer neighborhoods generate less property tax revenue, which means less money for local schools. States can try to offset that, but schools in poorer areas still tend to end up with fewer resources. Families with options leave for better-resourced schools, enrollment drops at the local public school, and the school loses even more funding. The kids who remain get less of the materials — from textbooks to counselors — that would have set them on the path to success. There’s a clear downward spiral, but no one person or decision is the villain.

So instead of blaming any one individual for their personal lifestyle choices, Young says that in cases of structural injustice, we should adopt the “social connection model” of responsibility. Under this model, you don’t bear blame if you send your kid to private school, because systemic problems shouldn’t rest on one family’s shoulders. Young doesn’t think you need to discharge your obligations through personal lifestyle choices. 

But that doesn’t mean you owe nothing. 

You do still have a political obligation: to work toward changing the structure that produces injustice. As a participant in the political system that shapes education in this country, you have some power to act on it. You can vote and organize and advocate. You can pressure decision-makers and support reform movements. The more power you’ve got, and the more privileged you are by the current system, the greater your obligation to take action.  

Make the effort to act on that obligation. Let your child watch as you do. Better yet, involve them in the process. Kids learn from seeing what their parents do: Show them that you’re bent on enacting your values, and you’ll be giving them an education for life.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This is a fun piece in Asterisk about how high-school science fairs have become so ridiculously competitive that they no longer give students a chance to do real independent research.
  
• This week’s question prompted me to listen to the podcast series “Nice White Parents.” It’s a fascinating look at what happens when parents think that choosing public school would mean sacrificing their child’s prospects on the altar of their own political ideals. Spoiler: Practically no parent is willing to sacrifice their own child. But they often don’t realize they’ve constructed a false trade-off.
  
• Living life requires making choices. It’s unavoidable that we’ll feel regret about some of the paths not traveled. But this Aeon essay explains how “living in closer alignment with our values and authentic preferences may help us avoid the worst pain of regret.”

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

I have to be honest about something that is a great source of personal shame: I am really, really bad at taking time off of work.

Despite working at a company with unlimited PTO, the last time I took a weeklong vacation was about a year ago, making me a walking cliche of the American who never goes on holiday. You could argue that the reason is cultural, that the Protestant work ethic has me in a chokehold. But I think the root cause is much simpler: For something allegedly relaxing and fun, vacations require a lot of planning and even more money. The price of flights is up, hotel rooms aren’t cheap, you need to factor in the cost of meals, and even that corny souvenir shot glass isn’t going to pay for itself. 

Hannah Sampson, who writes about travel for the Washington Post, says one answer is to take a staycation. “It’s taking the time to do things you normally wouldn’t do in your regular life and put on hold all of the burdensome things that you would do in your daily life,” she told Vox. “You’re enabling yourself to discover something that you might have taken for granted.” 

Plus, she says, a staycation can be “really fun and rewarding while also being budget-friendly and hopefully allowing you to put money aside for the bigger trip that you want to take sometime.”

So how do you make the most of a staycation? And how do you keep your typical day-to-day life from creeping in? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Sampson, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

It sounds like the key to a successful staycation is all about mindset. How do you achieve that mindset shift?

The way to really get into the staycation zone is planning and preparing and getting yourself hyped for what you’re going to do. This is something that I love about going on vacation and it applies to staying home too. 

Read reviews for places that you might want to go. If you’ve picked a restaurant, look at the menu and start to drool over what you’re going to eat. Think about your favorite bookstores or paths or discover a new corner of your neighborhood that you want to explore in advance. The anticipation of that experience will give you that vacation high. 

It’s so hard though, because you’re around the house. How do you make your home feel a little more special?

I think we all got too much practice on this during the pandemic, but there are a lot of things you can do to change the vibes of your house. I have a candle that’s national park-scented, so it’s piney. In my house, we do a lot of things like use audio to set the mood. I have small kids, so we’ll play audio of a ride at Disney World or just ambient sound from a park that we like. 

During the pandemic, my husband and I meant to spend our anniversary at the beach where we got married, but I was pregnant. We couldn’t travel. So we found a webcam that showed the sunset on that beach and we got takeout. It was really sad, but we watched the sunset.

It’s sad, but it’s also quite sweet. It’s like, “We’ll bring the beach to us.”

Exactly. And it was a beautiful sunset.

For me, one of the challenges of a staycation — and for all vacations, if I’m honest — is not letting real life creep in. And that’s beyond taking time to do administrative tasks around the house. That Slack goes off. I get that email. A news alert goes out and I’m just like, “Well, what if I just take a little gander?” How do you keep from letting that happen?

Unplugging is so hard. You could have a couple of small kids and teach them to tell you to get off your phone, which mine have learned to do. My husband actually has a Brick device, which locks your phone for you. The discipline is real there. 

It takes work to force yourself out of that constant need of scrolling through TikTok or just seeing what’s up at work. You don’t need to be on there. If there’s an emergency, they know how to reach you at work. So trust that process. Be super in the moment with whatever you’re doing because you need that mental break, even if you haven’t gone somewhere. 

You need to make the most of the time that you have, especially if you’re taking vacation time and spending it at home. Vacation time is a precious resource that you should be using to the best of your ability. 

At first, it seems innocuous. You’re burned out at work, and an influencer video promising the five steps to find the career you’ve always wanted catches your eye on Instagram. Perhaps you’re also anxious about a big birthday approaching, so while commuting home, you listen to a podcast host explain the seven essential habits you should start today to extend your lifespan by 20 years. Later on, you ask AI assistant ChatGPT to help resolve a debate with your partner. 

In all of these moments, you are temporarily relieving your stress and anxiety. You might even be getting some answers. But with each path you go down, you’re also losing something important: the opportunity to sit with, and tolerate, uncertainty. 

Being able to keep it together when an outcome is unknown is critical to enjoying your life. It’s what helps us manage friction in relationships, allows us to make considered decisions as opposed to acting on impulse, and empowers us to eventually take big leaps. But we’re collectively losing our ability to bear uncertainty.

The proliferation of the internet and smartphones kicked off the trend of reduced exposure, which a 2019 study suggested was linked to an overall decline in our ability to tolerate uncertainty. Now there’s emerging evidence from multiple studies suggesting that AI systems could be weakening our uncertainty muscles further. AI systems not only supply instant answers, but remove the need for us to make meaning of ambiguous experiences. They convert interpretation from something actively done to something that is outsourced, then passively consumed. 

When we strengthen our uncertainty tolerance, what we’re really learning is a new definition of what it means to feel safe and secure.

One study comparing the responses of mental health professionals and chatbots found that the bots were more likely to provide advice than their human counterparts. Perhaps this is because they are designed to give us what we want, rather than what we need: Other research has found that people are more satisfied when their AI therapist provides advice instead of encouraging reflection, and are more likely to continue using it when it’s solution-oriented.

“It’s a skill to manage ambiguity and uncertainty, and if you’re not exposed to it, if you don’t know how to deal with it, you never learn that capacity,” Llewellyn van Zyl, a Netherlands-based wellbeing researcher and AI systems designer, told me. As LLMs supply immediate and sycophantic companionship, validation, and answers, they slowly replace the need to, for instance, practice ambiguity tolerance in the messy context of a human relationship, or to muddle through your own interpretation of an experience. “Friction, effort and struggle are not barriers to wellbeing but are the main ingredients needed for development to take place,” Van Zyl wrote in a paper.

Indeed, tolerating uncertainty often feels like a struggle, and for some people manifests as consistent anxiety or depression over being unable to control or predict the future. It is a state characterized by fear-based decision-making, where the ultimate achievement is avoiding discomfort and surprise at all costs.

But this way of living has an unexpected cost. If you’re especially anxious about a question or decision, that could indicate that you’re wedded to a single idea of what your future could look like, which could mean you close yourself off to other meaningful opportunities. 

If you’ve increasingly found yourself looking for certainty and definitive answers, here’s how to get more comfortable sitting with unknowns. 

How to strengthen your uncertainty muscles day-to-day 

If you’re lifting weights for the first time, you wouldn’t go in and try to deadlift 200 pounds; you’d work your way up to it. Similarly, building uncertainty tolerance starts by integrating small, safe, and low-stakes moments of practice — think of these ideas as your 5-pound dumbbells.  

Identify the small opportunities.

First, look for ways in your daily life to live with short bursts of uncertainty and break out of your routine: For instance, try going to a restaurant without looking at the menu if you typically scour it first. Attend an exercise class with a new instructor if you never stray from your favorite, or grab a coffee with that new potential friend you’ve been meaning to hang out with. 

Choosing uncertainty might lead to discomfort: The cafe could serve food you don’t like, the yoga teacher might be too intense, the new pal could turn out to be dull. 

But as in weight lifting, comfort isn’t the point. It’s about enduring discomfort and getting stronger. 

Find a simple phrase to bring you back to the present.

If you are feeling anxious as you attempt to practice this, you can try a couple of strategies from psychiatrist Judson Brewer’s book Unwinding Anxiety. He recommends learning to weave curiosity into our most stressful moments, asking questions like, “How is this feeling serving me right now?” Even a simple, “Hmmm…” when you feel anxiety can bring you into the present moment, and create the space for curiosity.

In her new book, Prophecy, Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz also identifies curiosity as a salve for our obsession with answers. “If anxiety about the future is the main driver behind our craving for prediction, curiosity is one of its most powerful antidotes,” she writes. “… the more curiosity you can manage to conjure about the present, the less apprehension you’ll feel about the future, because your attention will be in the here and now.”

Learn to ask the right questions 

Curiosity is fueled by questions. But not all questions are created equal. 

A good question, the Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Sutherland told me for my recent book, “will always make the room bigger, or open a door in the room to let something else in, or blow down the walls of the room entirely.” Obsessing over finding fast, easy answers to your biggest life questions can give you tunnel vision, eliminating possible futures by keeping fear and anxiety at the wheel. 

From the stories and research I explored in my book, I’ve learned that great questions — the best curiosity fuel  — have a few key attributes:

Avoid yes or no questions in favor of something more expansive.

First, as Sutherland explained, the best questions grow your set of possible solutions and futures. Sometimes, a binary question — e.g., Am I in the right relationship? — can make you feel stuck because it’s artificially limiting the options. A better question opens up possibilities, so instead you might instead ask yourself, “How would my partner and I both need to change in order for us to stay together?

Make sure your question is your own.

A great question serves as an internal GPS leading you back to your own needs and values, not what someone else might want or expect of you. 

Take, for instance, a question like, Am I ever going to get married or Should I have a second kid? Not only are these binary questions, but they also could be questions that a family member is pressuring you to answer. 

The best questions are the ones you create. They are rooted in self-compassion, allowing you to build yourself up rather than tear yourself down. Try to ask yourself questions that take the pressure off, that give you space to breathe.  

Find a question that propels you forward.

Ah, regret. It plays an important role in our lives, but should be used sparingly, if at all, as question fuel. Think about questions like, What if I had just done it differently? or Why did we break up? If great questions open up a window or a door, these kinds of queries board them up. They keep you stuck in a stale, ruminative loop, rehashing the past rather than moving on and considering possible futures. If what you’re seeking is clarity or answers, these kinds of questions won’t provide them.   

Take the pressure off

The last way to get comfortable with uncertainty is more subtle. It’s a mindset shift rooted in a 120-year-old piece of advice that the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke offered to an aspiring poet, Franz Kappus. 

Kappus had written to Rilke asking him all kinds of questions about how to live his life. Rilke responded:

I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now: they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer.

Part of what can make uncertainty so uncomfortable is the sense of urgency it creates in us. We treat questions like problems that need immediate solutions. Rilke offers a powerful reframe: Questions are not tormentors, but teachers. And finding answers, especially to our most challenging questions, is not something that can happen instantly. Questions must be lived. 

This advice is an invitation to pause and take a breath. You do not need to have all of the answers today, tomorrow, or next week. In fact, when it comes to the big questions of our life, it’s better if you don’t seek the answers immediately. 

It is also a reminder to go out and live your life. It’s easy to let anxiety about uncertainty stop us from pursuing new experiences — even seemingly small steps into the unknown can feel very scary. When we strengthen our uncertainty tolerance, what we’re really learning is a new definition of what it means to feel safe and secure. Instead of defining security as being protected from challenge, we can define it as being ready to face whatever the future holds. 

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who find it acceptable to be a little tardy and those who consider it an affront to all that is decent. As someone who frequently runs late, I’m often relieved when someone else is, too. And I don’t mind if a friend is a bit behind; the worst-case scenario is I have a few minutes of peace in which to stare at my phone. But the perpetually punctual see this as disrespect, as showing up late is a sign you don’t value others’ time, that you believe what you’re doing is more important.

The reality is often much more banal. Chronically late people may overestimate how long something will take them (like getting ready or commuting), are perhaps multitasking, or lose track of time. 

Of course, few people would be satisfied with waiting at a restaurant for an hour while their date swears they’re only ten minutes away. Is there a socially acceptable sweet spot for tardiness that satisfies both the need for punctuality while giving grace to the time-challenged? To answer that question, I enlisted the help of three people with unique viewpoints: an etiquette expert, a researcher who has studied lateness, and an extremely punctual guy who has strong feelings on the matter.

Answers have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The etiquette expert: You get a 15ish-minute buffer to casual events, 5 minutes for everything else

“Five minutes late to a Zoom call or a scheduled phone call for work is, in my mind, really late. Five minutes late to meet your friend at a restaurant is not very late and very forgivable. Five minutes late to their house, super forgivable. Half an hour late to dinner and they won’t seat you and now you’ve lost your table, that starts to be a bit annoying. Late to a surprise party is unforgivable. I’ve seen hosts get really upset about that one because you can likely ruin a very well-planned surprise. There’s a 15-to-30-minute arrival period for most gatherings. You push past that and you’re showing up really late. If you are going to be late, let somebody know, whether it’s a phone call or a text message.

If you were only getting together for an hour and you’re starting to push the half-hour mark, you might want to check in with someone about whether you’ve really messed up and it’s not worth it for them to stay and meet with you for 20 minutes by the time you arrive. 

There are definitely friends who take advantage of other people’s time and that would be something to talk with someone about if it’s chronic and to the point where it starts ruining the experience. You could say, ‘I know that you’re often 20 to 30 minutes late when we get together for something. It would mean a lot if you could try to be on time at seven for this one.’ We can’t control how other people react. They might feel offended. They might start rattling off reasons why they’re always late and you can say, ‘I know and I understand it really does happen, but it’s been consistent enough and this one’s important. I would really love to have you get there at the start time.’ I think that can make a difference.”

—Lizzie Post, co-author of Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Centennial Edition

The lateness researcher: It depends on the cultural norms of the people involved

“Being late differs across the world. We have wide windows of time or very narrow ones depending on the culture. In our research, we were comparing Dutch, South African, and Pakistani norms. We knew that there would be differences, but we had no idea how much. Pakistanis really have a different idea about lateness. They’re much more flexible about it. The window’s much wider. For the Dutch and South Africans, the window is about 15 minutes. After that, people will start thinking they’re not coming anymore or start calling. But for Pakistanis, that moment arrives much later.

For people who grew up in cultures that are more aligned with the Protestant work ethic, we would say there’s a deal between two people about the time frame. If you don’t conform to that, then you violate that norm and then you are late. For Pakistanis, it is a time frame that aligns with the clock, but it depends on who is there, not so much as a deal between two people. The Dutch are very egalitarian. Everyone, it doesn’t matter what status you have, is allowed about 15 minutes. But we saw that for Pakistanis, if you’re meeting a very important person, then they can arrive much later.

There’s also a bit of the emotional side or the feeling that you are personally responsible and you’re rude if you don’t stick to those norms. I discussed this in class with my students because a lot of them show up late. I was saying, ‘I think it’s very rude when there’s somebody presenting and they get interrupted by doors opening.’ A lot of them said, ‘I don’t think it’s rude.’ They had different norms about that situation. Some of them agreed with me, but not everyone.

In practice, I think that it depends on how important the appointment is. In our class, we emphasized that we as teachers find being on time important. The norm violation becomes more important when it is explicit. And I have a sense that now the students are more apologetic.

In developing intercultural skills, ‘bridging’ is often trained. One of the things in bridging is to make expectations explicit. It involves explaining how violating the norms surrounding them are experienced, and then trying to find solutions that are acceptable for both sides. Often, this leads to people agreeing that it means give and take, but it can also mean changing procedures or rules.”

—Wendelien van Eerde, associate professor at Amsterdam Business School at the University of Amsterdam

The punctual guy: Actually, just be early

“For a home-hosted dinner party, no more than 30 minutes late before it’s inconsiderate. 

For dinner reservations at a restaurant, five minutes before is inconsiderate as normally your party can’t be seated until everyone is there and making everyone wait for you isn’t cool. 

For house party gatherings, show up whenever unless specifically asked by the host to be there at a specific time. 

For work-related situations, like being on set ready to shoot at your scheduled call time, be there five minutes before your call time. The crew got there on time to prepare for you. Show them the same respect. Your time is not more valuable than theirs.”

—Bobby Berk, interior designer and host of HGTV’s Junk or Jackpot?

The bottom line: Be considerate and communicate

Try as we might to get everything done, leave the house in a timely manner, and hope for no traffic, life often has other plans. Lateness happens. But as long as you make a good faith effort to be on time, openly communicate when you’re running behind, and don’t make a habit of it, consider a 10-to-15 minute window an appropriate buffer. Any later and you might start to lose goodwill.

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

I’m swimming in information. I have tracking apps to keep tally of my daily steps, minutes online, my calories, my sleep. Throughout the day, I am awash with data — some “actionable” and some useless. I find it a struggle to prioritize. I find myself looking up the latest betting odds for a Senate race in a state where I don’t live. (I didn’t bet on the race.) What I want to know is: What should I know less about? I’ve heard that ignorance is bliss, though I don’t often find that to be the case. But maybe I know too much, or…too little about how much to know?

Dear Un-blissfully Aware,

As a fellow know-it-all, I relate to your impulse to gather as much information as possible. I used to obstinately reject the idea that ignorance was bliss. Even if I learned something that was unpleasant, wouldn’t it be much worse not to know it? 

But, as you may suspect from sharing my temperament in this arena, this approach to life can lead to hoarding knowledge like a frantic animal preparing for winter. You’re acquiring information as if it’s a scarce resource (which it’s not) and as if choosing to know something is neutral (it isn’t). What helped me understand the implications of this sort of approach was learning about the cases when people decided not to know, or the study of “deliberate ignorance.” 

Several years ago, a psychologist, Ralph Hertwig, and lawyer, Christoph Engel, who both work at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, examined what happened in the early 1990s, when the archives of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, opened to the public. Any person who had been living in the German Democratic Republic could check if they had been spied on. There was a pretty substantial catch, though: The spies were often “unofficial collaborators” — friends, family, teachers, or lovers who had been tasked with covertly collecting information. When the files were opened, many elected not to look. Hertwig and Engel estimated that potentially more people chose not to know what their files contained than those who did. 

This goes against what we think we know about humans and how you have described yourself. Even Aristotle seemed quite certain that “all men naturally desire knowledge.” In the 1980s, the psychologist George Miller followed along in this line of thinking. He described humans as informavores: creatures with minds that constantly seek out and consume information. So, it can feel surprising to hear about occasions when people didn’t start grabbing for every available datapoint like squirrels dashing for acorns as the first winds of fall arrive. 

But, as Hertwig and Engel — who collaborated on an entire book called Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know — point out, we’re surrounded by people choosing ignorance all the time. They avoid looking at their bank statements, they skip doctor’s appointments, and they cover their ears and say “no spoilers” if someone is talking about a movie they haven’t yet seen. 

Even Nobel Laureates do this. When James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of DNA’s double helix, had his own genome sequenced, he requested that a specific gene be left out: ApoE4, which can reveal an increased Alzheimer’s risk. Watson’s grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and her experience clearly made an impression on him. (Then, many in the scientific world tried to remain ignorant to Watson’s increasingly misogynistic and racist comments, until it was unignorable.) 

Why do people choose not to know? The most common reason: Ignorance can be an extremely effective way to regulate any emotions that might crop up in response to knowledge. You can minimize negative feelings by, for example, not knowing that your otherwise friendly neighbor had been reporting on your comings and goings. 

In a study about romantic relationships, a majority of people said they didn’t want to know if their partner had ever thought about cheating on them (but never acted on it). Other research showed that most people wouldn’t want to know the exact time of their death. Alternatively, someone could cultivate the feelings of joy and surprise by waiting to find out the sex of a baby until it’s born.

Deliberate ignorance can also be used to protect us from our biases. Scientists do blinded studies, because the knowledge of what drugs are being used can unwittingly change the outcomes or research. When orchestras implemented blind auditions, more women musicians were accepted. 

Of course, deliberate ignorance can be problematic when it causes harm to yourself or others, like failing to gather basic information about your financial or physical health. In some cases, for instance, about 10 percent of people who got tested for HIV didn’t come back for their results — which could lead to further spread of the disease. 

But when skipping out on knowledge doesn’t endanger you or those around you, it’s worth asking: How would this information make me feel? 

This sounds like a question that’s missing from your information-ingestion habits. You don’t have to — and shouldn’t — ignore everything that comes across your desk. But your deliberate ignorance filter is turned entirely off; seemingly anything passes through it. To take just one of your examples, you mentioned fitness wearables. It can be useful to be aware of your general activity levels and your sleep, but honestly, don’t you already know enough from your memories of a workout class and how rested you feel in the morning? A quest for more detailed knowledge like this can backfire, making people more anxious, and disconnected from their actual physical experience. 

It’s not just about how much knowledge to take in, it’s also about what kind. The breadth of information that you’re seeking out makes me wonder if you’re not already using knowledge to regulate your emotions by favoring superficial knowledge over the meaningful. When we face difficult tasks (even if they’re important, and we want to get them done), that’s usually when, suddenly, a Senate race in a far-off state starts to become interesting, or you find yourself scrolling a high school acquaintance’s wife’s Instagram. 

In the 1990s, two technology researchers proposed the concept of “information foraging,” which was inspired by early user behavior on the web. A few years later, Webster’s dictionary announced that their word of the year was “infosnacking,” or mindless grazing for useless knowledge online in order to pass the time. 

Snacking sometimes is fine, but you’ll start to suffer if you only eat chips for every meal rather than something more nutritious. I suspect you might be avoiding the slightly more challenging task of taking in other, more nutrient-dense knowledge. If you cut out the step tallies, screen minute totals, and news headlines scrolling, what could you choose to know instead? 

What I’ve learned about myself is that I will always lean towards being an informavore. I can’t help it. I am hungry to know, and there is no need to totally overhaul this valuable part of who you are (as I also tell myself!). This means you don’t need to replace your infosnacking with zenfully staring at the ceiling or emptying your mind through meditation. You can still put new things into it! But you could worry less about your daily information calorie intake and spend more time thinking about the nutrition content of your knowledge diet. 

Take a lesson from our many deliberately ignorant friends, and try disregarding some of the little stuff — the body tracking, the random factoids — for a period of time. But, at the same time, increase your knowledge about other subjects: a neglected hobby or a nonfiction book collecting dust on your shelf. Have a long conversation with your best friend and ask each other questions you’ve never asked before or interview an older relative about their childhood. 

And remember that all of this knowledge relates back to your emotional life. Rather than asking yourself what you should or shouldn’t know, examine how you might be using knowledge to alter how you feel. Knowledge changes us. It can make us happy, anxious, excited, or sad; it impacts our decisions and how we see ourselves and other people. 

In some of your newfound spaces of intentional ignorance, you may find just some surprising moments of bliss.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• The ostrich may be famous for its head-burying ignorance, but that’s actually a myth dating back to the ancient Romans. Ostriches don’t hide their heads, but, rather, bury their eggs underground. I highly suggest flipping through the book Ostrich by Edgar Williams, professor of cardiopulmonary science at the University of South Wales, for a natural and cultural history of our largest living bird that is way more interesting than it needs to be. 
  
• In a moving essay in the China Books Review, poet and writer Zhang Er remembers growing up during the Cultural Revolution and receiving “torn books,” or sections of forbidden books, to read from a family member. Even with incomplete knowledge, “my world expanded with each torn book,” she writes. 
  
• Not a book, but a powerful story on the ripple effects of being exposed to new information in East Germany: the 2006 movie The Lives of Others, from director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which I recently saw for the first time. A Stasi officer listens into the life of a playwright, whose own fragile ignorance about his situation in the GDR is becoming challenged.

It’s the act that’s defined a generation, an experience so common it’s become memeified: canceling plans. Bailing is a litmus test of sorts; who and what events you back out of says a lot about you as a person. Are you the type who commits and only bails when absolutely necessary? Or are you a frequent flake looking to change their ways? (No judgment here: The occasional canceling of plans is acceptable, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about it.)

Call it a byproduct of overscheduling, a facet of introversion, or a condition of mild social anxiety, but bailing is a popular tool in our social arsenal. Regularly deployed mere hours ahead of a previously scheduled engagement we’ve come to dread, canceling was once considered a get-out-of-obligation-free card. In recent years, though, general consensus around bowing out has seemed to shift, perhaps spurred by the growing attention paid to the dangers of social isolation or simply because being consistently bailed on feels like garbage. All of which is to say, canceling requires much more tact than simply rattling off a text 30 minutes before you’re supposed to meet up with a friend.

There are, of course, valid reasons to skip a movie night (you’re sick, for instance) and very few excuses good enough to justify not showing up to a wedding you RSVP’d to. But rather than giving in to the impulse to flake when the urge hits, it’s important to make a more considered choice based not on how much you think you’ll enjoy a social event but on the consequences of skipping. 

Consider this your canceling checklist, a bailing thought experiment, a toolkit for bowing out. Taken together, the following five questions will help inform your decision on whether to skip a social engagement.

Who are you bailing on?

Before flaking, take your audience into consideration — namely, whether this is a person you’d be comfortable inconveniencing. Because we’ve already invested significant time and energy into close relationships with family and friends, we’re more likely to want to preserve those relationships by upholding plans. This past history can influence how comfortable we are with bailing.

“How important is this person?” Julian Givi, an associate professor of marketing at West Virginia University, tells Vox. “Do I value this person’s friendship, or are they someone that I’m okay with canceling on? Have they canceled on me?”

Close friends are complicated. In a study, William Chopik, an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, found that participants reported being most upset when a best friend canceled on them, compared with when a good friend or acquaintance canceled. Ironically, though, that closeness gives us latitude. People also tend to be more forgiving when close friends cancel on them, Chopik says. By virtue of knowing someone so intimately, we understand the constraints on their time and can intuit they’d only cancel for a good reason. It’s also safe to assume we’ll likely see them again soon, too.

We may feel less obligated to those we don’t know well. The participants in Chopik’s study said they’d only be “a little” upset if an acquaintance canceled plans. So, if this is someone you don’t know very well, and don’t necessarily plan to, you might feel more comfortable ditching them.

What’s the occasion? 

A monthly game night and a funeral don’t carry the same significance. You can probably guess which one is acceptable to skip. The formality of the event will give you a signal on whether it’s alright to bail. “People are more likely to cancel informal things,” Chopik says.

It’s fine to bail on a coffee hang, but think twice before ditching a wedding, funeral, retirement party, or other event of importance where someone might’ve paid money for you to be there, even if you don’t necessarily deem it a monumental occasion. “If it’s super important to this person, I’ll go, I’ll move mountains, I’ll traverse seas, I’ll travel as much as possible or inconvenience myself a lot,” Chopik says. “But then if it’s more informal or you don’t know them very well and the burden to get there is high, those things are the things that’ll lead you to likely cancel.”

While it may seem acceptable to ghost on a group occasion — who would notice you’re missing anyway? — your absence might alter the vibe. Take a bachelor or bachelorette party: If five of seven invitees back out, the celebration has shifted from a group affair into an intimate gathering. “Those last two left are in such a weird situation where it’s like, now I don’t want to go as much because it’s a smaller bachelor party,” Givi says. Your bailing signals to the stragglers that the event isn’t fun enough for everyone to attend.

How annoying is it for you to attend?

How often do we schedule a hangout only to remember later how much of a burden it’ll be to get there? The costs — financial, logistical, and energetic — all factor heavily into which plans we see through. A long and expensive commute for a short, casual hang when you’re already exhausted may not seem worth it. 

The problem is, we’re bad at predicting how much fun we’ll have. We tend to overestimate the costs and underestimate how enjoyable the event might be, which leads us to cancel plans. In reality, our worst fears almost never materialize. “If you’re really anxious about it, it’s probably not going to be as bad as you expect. And that’s a pretty consistent finding,” Ella Moeck, a lecturer at Adelaide University in South Australia, tells Vox.

Everyone’s bar for what constitutes “too far” or “too much effort” varies, though. Your canceling over a 15-minute drive across town runs the risk of pissing off a friend who doesn’t consider that a hassle at all. 

Concerning money, when people have already paid up front, they’re more likely to stick with plans. In that case, canceling would create more problems instead of quelling them. “That’s why anytime I’m planning anything, especially if it involves money, I make people Venmo me weeks in advance,” Givi says, for, say, a show or concert. 

What’s your excuse?

In his study on canceling plans, Chopik found the most reasonable excuses for canceling were being sick, dealing with a family emergency or childcare issue, or having a work obligation. The worst justifications were mentioning something better came up, not being interested in the activity, and straight-up lying. 

Surprisingly, participants weren’t sympathetic when someone canceled because of financial constraints. Chopik suspects the framing matters more than anything else: “I bet if you communicated that ‘I would’ve loved to go to this concert and spend time with you…but I just really can’t squeeze this right now,’ that’s a way more understanding excuse than being like, ‘That’s too expensive. I’m not going,’” he says.

The excuses themselves carry weight, but what they signal is also crucial. By telling a friend you’re bailing on them because you’d rather hang out with someone else, you’re communicating that they might not matter to you. But if you provide clarity about why you can’t make it and try to reschedule, that’s a sign you value the relationship. “If it’s just like, ‘I’m tired,’ come on, you committed already,” Givi says.

What are the consequences?

Canceling plans comes with potential fallout. Bowing out of a recurring group event isn’t likely to ruffle many feathers, but sending a “Sorry, can’t make it!” text minutes before a dinner reservation with out-of-town family members might not fly. Think about the position you’d leave the other party in, Givi says. “You could imagine it’s probably more acceptable the more time that there is before the event, the less meaningful the event, the less it’s putting them in a bind,” he says.

But recent research suggests these social consequences may be overblown. In an unpublished study, researchers found cancelers tend to overestimate how upset others are when they back out and underestimate how much canceling impacted others. “Realizing that canceled-on persons are more understanding than expected can reduce social stress,” the authors write. 

However, this isn’t permission to back out of events with abandon. If you do leave people in a tough spot — they need to cover your concert ticket, they’re scrambling to find another way to get to an event you said you’d drive to — be prepared for scorned parties to share some choice words about you behind your back. “There’s this social penalty, too, that sometimes if you bail, people aren’t crazy about that,” Givi says.

Being in a relationship with someone — friends, family, romantic partners — requires us to honor our commitments. To be there. If we fail to uphold that simple promise, the invites will inevitably dry up. Who wants to keep making plans with someone who seemingly doesn’t value them? How can a friendship blossom when you don’t see one another? 

“If you want a friendship, you have to honor those commitments and show up,” Chopik says. “You have to honor the non-important stuff.”

When I first heard about the new Apple Upgrade program, which lets you lease devices like iPhones and MacBooks for a monthly fee, I was offended. It amounts to paying a tithe to one of the world’s richest companies just to borrow devices for a couple years, rather than buying them outright. You could then choose to purchase the device, which is outdated at that point, or upgrade and keep paying that monthly fee. You may never own an iPhone again.

Then, as my mind wandered to the stack of old phones in my closet, it occurred to me: What’s so great about owning these things to begin with? 

Apple, of course, would love to sell you a new iPhone for keeps. Its most advanced model, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, will set you back $1,200, a price that’s expected to rise soon due to the global shortage of storage and memory chips. You can sign up for an installment plan — most carriers offer these, as does Apple through its credit card — and pay it off in two to three years. Or you could lease the thing for $35 a month under the new Apple Upgrade program. You can pick a 12-, 24-, or 36-month lease, depending on the device, and you don’t get to keep the phone at the end of the term unless you decide to buy it by paying off the remainder of the retail price in one lump sum. (This is similar to the controversial rent-to-own model you find at places like Rent-a-Center.) 

For the financial side of the new program, Apple has partnered with none other than Klarna, the “buy now, pay later” giant. When you go to lease a new device, Klarna runs a soft credit check and decides if you’ll be able to cover the monthly payments. When I asked Klarna, the company did not tell me where it draws the line here, but it’s worth noting that critics have accused Klarna of a lack of underwriting and of lending to people with subprime credit scores. If you miss three consecutive payments, Klarna will terminate the lease agreement and possibly send a collection agency after you.

“How do I know people aren’t getting a good deal here? If they were, Apple wouldn’t be offering it.”

Aaron Perzanowski, University of Michigan law professor

While there was some speculation last week that Apple might lock people out of leased devices if they failed to pay their bill, Apple confirmed to me that it will not put limitations on device functionality due to missed payments or default. If you want to cancel the lease, you face an early termination fee. If you choose to keep paying the monthly fee, you can keep upgrading with new lease agreements for new devices every few years, existing in this cycle indefinitely.

“I don’t think people are getting a good deal here,” said Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy. “How do I know people aren’t getting a good deal here? If they were, Apple wouldn’t be offering it.” 

Buy an iPhone? In this economy? 

If you’re someone who likes to get a new iPhone or MacBook on a regular basis, Apple’s new leasing option might make a lot of sense. The monthly fee to lease these devices is cheaper than the payment plan to buy them, and electronics are depreciating assets. If you own one, you can sell it or trade it in for credit toward a new device, but they’re all worth less and less as time goes on. Furthermore, Apple eventually stops supporting old devices through software updates, so they might just stop working at a certain point. Put another way: You may own the phone, but you’re still just licensing the software that makes it work.

Renting an iPhone does sound bleak, though. The United States is suffering through an affordability crisis as prices across the board rise in the face of new tariffs and new wars. Meanwhile, AI is promising to transform the way we work if it doesn’t simply steal our jobs first, adding further insecurity, and the data center boom is making electronics more expensive. This era of economic anxiety is pushing people to use “buy now, pay later” services like Klarna and Affirm to pay for groceries or a tank of gas. (These companies faced scrutiny by state attorneys general a few years ago for operating like predatory lenders.) And now Apple, surely suspecting that many people can’t afford to pay full price for new phones, is inviting us to rent our devices at a monthly fee that undercuts the path to ownership. 

Apple could have just called this the Apple Rental program, by the way. Lease sounds nicer, though, like something you do with a car. 

“It is funny that they frame it as not a loan but as a lease,” Louis Hyman, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink. He added that “leasing” has class implications, suggesting that you’re either someone who needs to have the newest things but can’t afford them, or that you’re so wealthy, you’re indifferent to money.

Suffice it to say, the bulk of people who will soon be leasing their iPhones are probably not the ones who are indifferent to money.

Apple adopts its final form

The new Apple Upgrade program is the company’s latest customer acquisition strategy. As the rising price of hardware has made cheaper Android devices or the refurbished market more attractive, Apple is offering upgrade enthusiasts and budget-minded users, including people who simply couldn’t afford to buy Apple products in the past, a deal to join the company’s ecosystem. After all, keeping people supplied with new iPhones and MacBooks also helps keep them subscribed to Apple services, like iCloud, which now makes the company more money than Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, and other accessories combined.

If Apple’s financial future hinges on getting more and more people to subscribe to these services, it’s only natural that the company would want to lower the barrier to entry. So Apple is betting that by letting people use but not own its products, it will extract more profit in the long run through lease payments and subscription fees. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that it seemed like nobody was interested in upgrading their iPhone, since the new phones looked so much like the old ones. Now, Apple is just trying to get everyone on autopay, effectively subscribing so that they get the latest devices when they come out.

There’s not necessarily any harm in giving people a cheaper way to access expensive but useful products. For more than a century, installment plans have enabled people to buy modern conveniences like sewing machines, radios, and eventually, televisions. Leasing is a popular way to keep yourself in a new car, sometimes with free maintenance. Meanwhile, cellular carriers have a long history of helping their customers buy phones. Nearly two decades ago, you could get an iPhone 3G for $199, thanks to subsidies from AT&T, which the company recouped in service fees over the course of your contract. Sprint and T-Mobile have even offered unlimited upgrades through leasing programs of their own in years past.

Apple previously worked with Citizen One Bank to offer loans to customers who wanted the option to upgrade their iPhones every year. The payments were higher and they included a fee for AppleCare, but every year, you could trade in your current phone for a new one. If you didn’t want to upgrade, you could simply keep paying the installments, and you’d eventually own the phone. Most carriers now give you the option to set up a payment plan to purchase a new device that simply amounts to the retail price of the gadget divided by the number of months you’ll need to pay it off, usually 24 or 36, with zero interest. That makes it easier to get your hands on an iPhone Pro Max, and if you pay it off in full, it’s yours for life — or until Apple convinces you to buy another new iPhone.

The difference between paying those monthly installments and paying a monthly lease agreement, of course, is that the former puts you on the path to ownership. The latter simply puts you on a path to make a decision: Do you want to buy the thing and recoup some of the money you’ve already spent, or do you want to keep making payments?  

“What ownership ideally gets us is independence,” Perzanowski said. “It gives us autonomy. It gives us the ability to function in the world without relying on third parties.” He went on to explain how moving from owning a product to leasing it means you’re stuck with that third party. “I’m tied to that manufacturer in a way where they get to exert a fair amount of control over my behavior,” Perzanowski said. “Historically, we’ve been primed, especially in the United States, to resist and reject that kind of control.”

One great thing about owning an iPhone or a MacBook outright is that if you lose your job to AI, you don’t have to come up with a monthly payment in order to keep using those devices to apply for new jobs. Another great thing about ownership is that should you need a couple hundred bucks, you can sell that old phone or laptop and pocket the cash. Maybe the best thing about owning these devices is that you can repair them and keep using them for many years — or at least until Apple stops supporting them. 

That doesn’t mean leasing never makes sense. If your digital life revolves around always having the newest devices and you upgrade every year or two no matter what, you might actually save money by doing so through Apple’s leasing program. If you need an iPhone or MacBook right away but can’t afford to pay full price or even cover the monthly payments on an installment plan, a one-year lease could be a good solution. 

Invariably, when you lease anything, you’re entering into a contract, one that comes with consequences if you break it. Leasing an iPhone means you’re tied not only to Apple but also to Klarna for the next 12 to 36 months. If something goes wrong — you lose your job, you lose or break your phone, or you simply don’t want the device any more — you’re subject to the terms and conditions of these big tech companies. If you keep renewing your lease, you may very well end up spending more on a phone than you would have if you’d bought it outright. That would be fine with Apple, of course. It has shareholders to please.

Correction, July 30, 1 pm: This story originally misstated how the previous Apple upgrade loan program worked; it allowed phone trade-ins every year, not every two years. 

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

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My mother is religious, and I can tell that it brings her peace of mind to think I share some of her religious views. For this reason, I currently attend church with her on Sundays. However, I hesitate to tell her directly that I do not necessarily share her beliefs, as this would likely upset her and would not substantially improve my own quality of life. 

At the same time, attending church while knowing I do not fully believe feels somewhat disingenuous. I am unsure whether continuing this practice is the more ethical choice or whether honesty, despite its potential emotional cost, would be the better path. On the other hand, would it not be selfish to prioritize my own sense of integrity over my mother’s peace of mind, especially when the “cost” to me is relatively small: attending church once a week in order to preserve this tacit understanding? 

Dear Pew-Warmer,

Your question raises two interesting issues: whether to tell your mom that you don’t share her religious beliefs and whether to still attend church with her, even if you don’t share the faith. They might seem to be part of the same quandary, but teasing them apart a little more, we’ll see that your church attendance doesn’t necessarily require as much dishonesty as you may think. 

First, no matter what you decide, it could be helpful for you to know that you’re far from alone in managing different beliefs within a family. The amount of mixed-faith families has been steadily increasing, often because — like you — children grow up to have different beliefs from their parents. And this includes people who decide to no longer follow any prescribed religion at all. A Pew Research Center survey done in 2007, for example, found that 44 percent of Americans had changed or left the religion they were raised in. Relationships between people of different religious leanings are common now, too. A different Pew survey from 2015 found that 39 percent of couples married after 2010 identified as mixed-faith (again, including people who identify as non-religious). 

How do all of these people deal with being married or related and believing such different big things? It’s not easy. In a more recent Pew survey from 2023, more than a third of parents said it was extremely or very important that their children have the same religious views as them, which is in line with your sense that your mom would like to share her faith with you. And this is where much of your tension seems to lie. But, perhaps, I can bring you some solace by sharing that the overall data on all of this is more nuanced. I reviewed some qualitative studies — which include interviews — on religion in families to hear from people on both sides of precisely what you’re grappling with. 

In general, parents do seem to wish for their kids to have the same faith as them. As a highly religious Christian father said in one study: “How to pass our belief to our next generation is a burden to me. … We want them and their next generations to have God’s blessings.” And that makes sense, especially for a parent who belongs to a faith tradition that comes with everlasting consequences for people depending on their beliefs and behaviors. 

But, of course, religion is more than a narrow set of rules and consequences. Each contains an elaborate offering of traditions, beliefs, and values. Many very religious parents responding to the same survey said they understood it was up to their children to choose whether to continue in the tradition or not and that what truly important to them was knowing that their children shared the same values. Religion served as a proxy for that. That same 2023 Pew survey referred to earlier found that the majority of religious parents thought it was more of a priority to pass on ethics and values, as well as traits like ambition and being hardworking, than religious belief alone. 

There can even be upsides for relationships when some core beliefs differ, as one 2022 study suggested. Interfaith families — by having to accommodate multiple beliefs — have the opportunity to actually become stronger. The authors concluded that such “families are not more turbulent or problematic than other family relationships” but actually had many additional strengths, like improved communication skills. 

I won’t try to predict your mom’s response based on others’ replies in a study. Nevertheless, I think these findings suggest, at the very least, that it’s not automatic that parents cannot handle it when their children don’t follow their own faith. From the experience of these families, I suggest, if you decide to be more honest with your mom about this, you should emphasize the moral qualities you have in common — and that you plan to maintain. It could be helpful to stress that your decision is a genuine one; taking any other position wouldn’t be true to what you really feel. 

No matter the outcome of this conversation, though, your quandary about whether you should go to church at all won’t be solved. You say that it might feel disingenuous or pose a problem for your integrity to attend church services if you don’t believe. That assumes that your presence at the church is endorsing a belief in God, or in the theology of that religion, or that the latter are required for the former. 

I wasn’t raised with religion, and, instead, grew up around several atheists who worked as scientists. A few had a pretty disparaging view of the belief in God, which they saw as empirically unsound. Yet, as I got older, I began to notice some streaks of religiosity in their positions, like a dedication to the idea that science is the only tool with which to understand the world, a view that’s sometimes called “scientism.” Science is an excellent way to figure out how the world works, but there are other aspects of life — like art, music, spirituality — where it can fall short. I bring this up to say that religious thinking can rear its head even in the non-religious. And within a religious framework, you may discover non-religious elements too. A sociologist from the late 19th and early 20th century, Emile Durkheim, would push back on the idea that going to church means you believe in God, which helps me understand what I saw in my family.  

Durkheim wanted to understand how religion functioned in society. He dismissed the idea that religion, at its core, was about supernatural events and God (or gods). In his 1912 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he examined Australian Indigenous religions to come up with theories about what all religions had in common. He argued that religion emerges when a group of people get together and agree upon what is sacred and what is profane, and then they act in ways that support those categories.

I’ll add that Durkheim’s views on religion have been questioned over the years. For starters, he vastly oversimplified the Indigenous religions he focused on. Yet, I think one of his central ideas — that religion is primarily an expression of agreement within social groups — is useful in making the act of your going to church less about your individual endorsement and more about participating in a group with shared values. 

Durkheim didn’t think that the concepts of “sacred” and “profane” applied only to those within organized religions; it was a more general principle in how societies were organized. Secular groups like sports fans and political parties also gathered together to perform rituals about their shared definitions of what is sacred. Following Durkheim, you could see your choice as less a theological one and more a social one. There could be plenty of values at your mom’s church that mean something to you, like community, taking care of others, and acting morally. 

Durkheim’s theory does require you to be a participant, however, in upholding these values. If that doesn’t apply to you, there is still a way to engage with those with differing beliefs with curiosity, like the psychologist William James. 

His book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, was based on a series of lectures he did at the University of Edinburgh. He was assigned to do 20 talks, and he thought he would dedicate the first 10 to describing “man’s religious appetites” and the rest on various philosophical interpretations. Instead, he became so engrossed with recounting people’s religious experiences that the subject took up all of his lectures. 

James was not a very religious man himself, and so, his thirst for learning about religion is remarkable. In the introduction to The Selected Letters of William James, the novelist and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote how James’s tolerance for “nuts and cranks, his mediums and table-tappers, his faith healers and receivers of communications from the dead” sometimes confused his peers. How could a man of science be so interested in visions and conversions? 

Like Durkheim, James wasn’t focused on whether religion was true. He had very little interest in theology itself; he fixated on the psychological — the feelings that came with being religious. 

James thought that these feelings — which we all share — were the deeper source of religion. All organized religions came later; they were emotions transformed and organized. He recognized that there were true emotions at the heart of religious conventions, and that people turned to religion to solve human concerns: melancholy, uncertainty about the future, morality, the need for community, expressions of joy. Yet, he was an outsider. He didn’t require himself to be a convert in order to be curious.

James and Durkheim have different approaches, but they both offer clues as to how to turn toward shared social values and how to be curious about others’ emotional lives while not having to commit (or pretend to commit) yourself to beliefs that you don’t have. 

You say that the cost of going to church once a week would be relatively small for you, and, so, I’ll assume that your concerns don’t include participating in a religion that is openly hostile to you or your identity. It would be difficult to participate in shared sacred-making with a group of people that places you in the “profane” category. And being curious about others is a highly generous act that, if not reciprocated, feels dismissive. I hope that by opening yourself up to your mom’s emotional life that underpins her faith, she can do the same in return, even if your own interior landscape isn’t transmuting into religious belief. And it may well be that a genuine connection is what she wants — not a false one. 

A final thought related to Durkheim: He came up with a lovely concept called “collective effervescence”: when many people have the same big feelings together, and the emotions crash together into one big collective firework of expression. To see an easy example of this, watch videos of what happens at events like World Cup matches as teams and fans celebrate big wins. This experience comes about by shared feelings of any kind. If it still feels discomfiting to go to church with your mother, perhaps you can find another way to share ecstatic emotions together and come up with a new definition of the sacred.  

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Speaking of family, Jonathan Weiner writes in this ethereal piece in the American Scholar about how his robust memory skills compare with his brother’s patchier recollections as they both remember their father. 
• In Harper’s Magazine, Katie Thornton tries to learn the utopian, universal language of Esperanto. 
• And my favorite thing I read last week: an older piece of prose from the poet Elizabeth Bishop that I came across in a used bookshop in London, called “The U.S.A. School of Writing.” (It was originally published in The New Yorker.) Bishop takes a scammy job as a writing tutor over the mail and finds surprising connections with oddball students and co-workers.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

Editor’s note, July 26, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in December 2025.

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

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I’ve worked in communications for the past decade helping get important ideas out to the public. I’m good at what I do, and I think it’s useful, but I don’t really feel like I’m having a grand impact on the world.

Meanwhile, some of my friends have built their entire careers around the goal of having the biggest positive impact possible. They’re busy pulling big levers — doing global health work that saves lives, shaping federal policy that protects the environment, etc. I feel like my contribution is tiny in comparison.

I know life’s not a competition, but I grew up being told I was smart and had so much potential to change the world, and I worry I’m not living up to that. On the other hand, I also value work-life balance and relationships and experiences outside of work. Should I consider switching careers to something more impactful? Do I need to have an extraordinary career, or is it okay to just do an average amount of good and live a small(ish) life?

Dear Impact-Minded,

How do you feel about the fact that you’re going to die one day?

That might sound like a weird place to start, but I ask because I think fear of our mortality is what drives a lot of our modern quest for extraordinary careers. 

In fact, the American anthropologist Ernest Becker argued in his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, that one of the main functions of culture is to offer effective ways to manage the terror of knowing that we’re going to die and eventually be forgotten. 

The prospect of absolute annihilation is so terror-inducing, Becker argues, that we come up with all sorts of ways to convince ourselves we can achieve immortality. In the pre-modern era, most people looked to religion for this. It promised us literal immortality, in the form of an eternal soul that could enjoy a happy afterlife in heaven or maybe a nice reincarnation here on Earth. 

In the modern era, as religion’s dominance waned, we’ve had to come up with new types of “symbolic immortality.” That can come in the form of publishing an autobiography, being part of a great nation, or — especially popular starting in the 18th century — achieving social progress “at scale.” As the Industrial Revolution propelled globalization, and it became possible to think about affecting people halfway around the world, utilitarian philosophers argued that our actions are good to the extent that they create “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”

The idea that we could use our working lives to maximize the good gave people a new way to be extraordinary and thus achieve a lasting legacy — that is, a sense of immortality. By belonging to the grand project of social progress, we could live on well past our physical death.

On the one hand, the tacit promise is comforting. If we all chase these superlative lives, we can participate in the great forever! But on the other hand, it creates a crushing amount of pressure. There’s a sense that you need to be engaged in a maximally heroic quest; otherwise, your life is basically meaningless. 

Not everyone, however, sees things this way. 

For an alternative, consider Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Born in France in 1873, she only lived to the age of 24, and the last nine years of her life were spent cloistered in a convent. She was an extremely pious young woman who prioritized kindness. But she was acutely aware of her own imperfections and limitations. She didn’t believe she was a great soul capable of great, heroic deeds. She definitely didn’t think her vocation was to have a positive impact “at scale.” 

Instead, she developed a very different approach to goodness, which she called her “Little Way.” It wasn’t about trying to reach a wide swath of people. It was about trying to go deep on little, daily actions, infusing every glance and word with the purest love. 

When the other nuns in the convent annoyingly interrupted her with chit-chat while she was trying to write, she made sure “to appear happy and especially to be so.” When one made exasperating clicking noises during prayers, she worked so hard to conquer her irritability that she broke into a sweat. She made lots of sacrifices lovingly, and trusted that through that, she could achieve holiness — and, yes, eternal life. 

Saint Thérèse compared people to flowers. Although most people want to be a big, showy flower like a rose or lily, she wrote, she was content to be a little flower at the feet of Jesus:

If all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord’s living garden. He has been pleased to create great Saints who may be compared to the lily and the rose, but He has also created lesser ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets flowering at His Feet.

Saint Thérèse became known as the Little Flower. After she died of tuberculosis, her spiritual memoir grew famous. People fell in love with her theology of the Little Way, and she ended up being one of the most popular saints in Catholic history.

I suspect she struck a chord with people because she offered them a strong counterpoint to the idea, which was gaining traction at the time, that it’s not enough to do good — we have to do the most good possible.

But, personally, I’m satisfied neither by the utilitarian perspective nor by Saint Thérèse’s perspective. Both are extremes: one says “you absolutely must do the most good,” and the other says “don’t even bother trying to help more people — just give the few people in your cloister the deepest love possible.” 

Yet, it’s a feature of our modern life that the fortunate among us have the capacity to go both wide and deep — to consider both scale and other dimensions of value. People who go all-in on just one of these tend to feel regret, whether it’s the effective altruist who’s so focused on helping at scale that he ignores everything else or the monk who spends decades in deep contemplation but doesn’t do a thing to help others.

So, when you consider your own potential, I’d encourage you to consider the full picture. I don’t think you should obsess over finding a career that’ll allow you to do “the most good.” But doing “more good”? Sure! If you can find a job like that, why not? 

But, as you look around to see whether there’s a job where you could have a bigger positive impact, you have to be mindful of a few things. For one, there are many different kinds of “good,” and you can’t always run an apples-to-apples comparison between them. (Is your current job doing more or less good than, say, being a journalist or an educator? Hard to say.) Also, there’s more to life than just “doing good” — a life well lived includes reveling in other precious things, like art or relationships, so you don’t want a job that’ll bar you from that. Plus, you don’t want a job that’ll be unsustainable for your physical or mental wellbeing or that’ll wreck your integrity by contravening other values you believe in. 

Ultimately, what’ll probably work best is settling on a career that lets you achieve a decent balance among multiple criteria: doing substantial good, allowing for a pluralistic enjoyment of all life’s riches, feeling sustainable, and fitting with your values. (And after scanning the landscape, you just might find that the best career for you overall is the one you’ve already got!)

You’ll notice that this doesn’t sound as “grand” as either the utilitarian recommendation or the Saint Thérèse recommendation. But that’s the point: Those are extreme visions of life, and if you ask me, they’re not even really about life at all. They’re about death and achieving a legacy that you think will earn you a kind of eternal life after death. The assumption is that you need to do something “grand” in order to make your time on Earth not worthless.  

There’s a radically different starting assumption available to you: What if life is just a gift, and the time you have on this mysterious, weird, wondrous Earth is inherently precious, even if it’s temporary? When you get a gift — like, say, a box of candy — the point is not to try to make it last forever. The point is to appreciate the candy! To savor it yourself, and also savor the pleasure of sharing it with others. 

If we embrace this view, then we don’t feel like we need to do something grand or extraordinary. Life is extraordinary, and living it well means relishing all the goods it offers us — and extending those goods to other beings so they can relish them too. Not out of fear that we’ll be worthless and forgettable otherwise, but simply because we realize we’ve been given talents and resources and, feeling grateful for them, we naturally want to share those gifts with others.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Were people in the past just like us, with emotions just like ours? Or did sadness, say, feel very different to a medieval peasant than it does to us? In this article, Gal Beckerman explores the fascinating idea of “experiential relativity.”

• “How did choice become a proxy for freedom in so many domains in modern life?” asks this Aeon article. There might be better ways to make people freer than giving them a huge array of choices. 

• What a time to be alive! We all have access to the text that sculpted the personality of one of the world’s major AI chatbots. Behold, Claude’s “soul doc.”

Chances are good you live with another person. Over half of American adults cohabitate with their spouse or significant other. Older adults are increasingly living with roommates. Multigenerational households have more than quadrupled over the last decade. And about a third of adults under 35 live with a parent. 

If you’ve found yourself living communally at one point or another, you know that sharing space comes with its quirks and potential headaches. Who gets to use the only bathroom first in the morning? Who’s responsible for taking out the trash? Do you actually need to be friends with your roommates? 

Being a better roommate or family member isn’t just about minimizing daily annoyance — it’s about transforming your relationships and overall well-being. According to the 2025 World Happiness Report, a household of about four members is predictive of higher happiness levels and better relationships. Older adults who cohabitate are more satisfied living with others, and have higher well-being and happiness than those who live alone, research suggests.  

Whether you live with a romantic partner, roommates, parents, grandparents, or other family members, experts (including therapists, authors, friendship experts, and researchers) — who have firsthand experience of their own — have concrete tips for how to communicate, declutter, and split finances with the people you share space with. 

Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Communicate, communicate, communicate

“I will live and die on the hill of communication being the most important aspect of successfully living with other adults. That comes from my experience living with my parents in adulthood, and from working on my anthology about communal living and interdependence. If good communication can ultimately lead to progress, any challenges that come up around logistics, habits, preferences — the things people tend to think are most important to consider when sharing space with others — can be addressed. Understanding that living with other adults doesn’t require perfect compatibility, but rather a shared willingness to work at it, opens up so many doors.”

—Samantha Paige Rosen, editor of Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection

Accept everyone’s unique (and probably wrong) ways of doing chores

“How someone loads the dishwasher is the biggest differing personalities button-pusher ever. Know this. And accept it.”

—Lauren Palmer Jansen, communications coordinator for L’Arche GWDC, a community where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together

Get regular meetings on the calendar

“I always recommend having a designated time — weekly, monthly — for house meetings. It feels odd initially because we believe that everything with friends should happen organically. But when you’re sharing something as sacred as a home, you have to be aligned on what creates a safe and joyful experience. This also helps with any anxiety you might feel about bringing up hard topics, like washing the dishes or inviting guests over, because you have the security of knowing that there’s dedicated time to check in.”

—Danielle Bayard Jackson, friendship educator and author of Fighting For Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women’s Relationships

Mark your territory

“In a shared home, peace isn’t about square footage, but it’s often helped by each person having one space that’s truly their own. That single boundary, like a door you can close, is often what makes the togetherness feel like a choice you’re happy to continue making.”

—Juli Ford, multigenerational living expert and founder of Home After 50

Discuss decluttering

“Clutter is a common household stressor, and our research suggests one reason why is that people living together buy things independently but hesitate to get rid of things independently, often over-involving each other in disposal decisions. Our proposed fix: Set disposal rules up front, the same way you might set buying rules. Let each person freely toss items only they use, or create a ‘staging area’ where items sit briefly before leaving the house. People can weigh in if they want, without letting clutter linger indefinitely.”

—Peggy Liu, professor of marketing at the University of Pittsburgh School of Business, and Theresa Kwon, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Hong Kong Business School

Agree to the “uncomfortable rule”

“Roommates who want to get along will find a way to get along. The second you stop wanting to get along, the dynamics shift. Agree to the uncomfortable rule. The uncomfortable rule says that if anyone is uncomfortable, you all agree to talk about the problem and listen. This way no one needs to hide the truth when uncomfortable situations come up. This also makes it easier to have conversations instead of confrontations.”

—Harlan Cohen, author of Win or Learn: The Naked Truth About Turning Every Rejection Into Your Ultimate Success

Divide chores equitably, not equally

“Don’t divide housework equally, divide it explicitly and equitably. In an intergenerational home, people have different amounts of time, energy, and physical capacity, so the goal isn’t identical workloads but a shared agreement everyone considers fair. Use a shared system to make the work visible. Track what gets done and by whom, then check in regularly before invisible labor turns into resentment.”

—Peter Askjær Drejer, founder of Tody, a chore managing app

Get clear about money up front

“From a financial therapist perspective, one of the biggest sources of conflict in shared living situations is the meaning people attach to money, fairness, and responsibility. Talk about expectations from the very beginning. You want to reduce the possibility of resentment forming, which can often happen if there were no conversations early on discussing what is or is not acceptable behavior and what is expected of everyone within the shared space. Most often people will wait until they’re already frustrated to discuss sharing finances or household responsibilities. But it is highly unproductive to engage in a conversation when it starts emotionally charged. Instead, schedule regular check-in conversations where you discuss not only who pays for what, but also whether the current arrangement still feels fair.” 

—Kiki Jacobson, licensed mental health counselor specializing in financial therapy

Find the good in tough situations

“My best advice is to see good intentions everywhere, even if you’re experiencing bad outcomes. For the most part, no one wants to be a bad roommate, so if someone is acting in a way that’s driving you insane, you want to approach the situation as if both of you want to fix the situation. Offer help rather than accusations. And, importantly, sometimes you can help teach others how to show up to a conversation by modeling good behavior. Sometimes people just don’t know how to have a mature, helpful conversation because they’ve never done it before. Staying regulated goes a long way.”

—Katie Rose, licensed clinical social worker

Don’t compromise, get creative

“Every recurring argument is an invitation to redesign the system rather than blame the person. Stop asking who’s right and start asking, How could we make this easier? The happiest households aren’t conflict-free — they’re creative. They develop rhythms, rituals, and agreements that work for the people actually living there rather than trying to squeeze themselves into someone else’s idea of how a household should function. One person cooks while the other cleans. Mornings become a quiet zone. Everyone gets an hour alone before reconnecting. Creativity is often a far better relationship skill than compromise.”

—Jane Garnett, licensed marriage and family therapist

Invest in a white noise machine

“Get an industrial strength white noise-maker. The app on your phone won’t cut it. It needs to be the kind you find in therapy offices so you can drown out at least some of the annoying sounds around you. Keep it on all day, not just for sleeping. Buy two if needed.”

—Mary McLaughlin, licensed clinical social worker

If you’re looking to wean yourself off social media and replace it with a more productive habit — and who among us isn’t — a lot of the common advice can sound like it’s coming from a drill instructor: Go outside and touch grass. Routine is key. Get your butt in the chair and don’t get up until you’ve done the work. They might as well be telling you to do a hundred pushups while they’re at it.

As valuable as that advice may be when you need a kick in the pants, these imperatives create an uneasy tension between leisure and labor. It’s all well and good to try to turn away from the siren song of your phone, but how likely are you to stick with the alternatives — reading books, drawing, meditating — if they feel like homework? 

It’s a lot more fun, and a lot less arduous, to try to beat social media at its own game instead, and harness your curiosity. 

Social media apps work in part by playing off our natural curiosity. Every time we refresh the endless scroll, they promise to give us new information, capturing the parts of our brains that always wonder what’s about to happen next. But they rarely actually satisfy that curiosity. They just repeat it endlessly: What’s going to happen when I scroll this far? Or this far? Or this far? The answer is almost always: the same thing as last time.

Away from social media, however, the world works differently. If you get curious about a question off the algorithm, it can lead you somewhere new and interesting. 

Even when we begin with a utilitarian goal, curiosity can take us in surprising directions. A few years ago, I got interested in running. At first I would just lace up my shoes, do a few perfunctory stretches, and jog straight out of my front door. But I gradually became curious about the mechanics of what I was trying to do. I began investigating running form, which led me to theories about how you should be doing different kinds of running every week. From there I learned about how strength training was important to support running, and then weight lifting led me to nutrition. I’m still not a particularly fast runner, but I am a data bank on all the ways there are for a person to make themselves just a little bit faster, and I know there’s more for me to keep looking into.

The goal here should be to get away from simple goals (running more, as in my example) to a more open and adventurous experience of what interests and engages us (understanding how I can support my body when I’m running). The experience is simple: Find something that fascinates you, learn a little more about that — whether from your friends, a documentary, or even an old-school internet search — then try to figure out what new questions that opens up and keep asking them. It’s a process that allows us to become our guides, whether we know where we’re headed or not.

In a recent essay, the writer John Paul Brammer explains that that’s exactly how he got himself to read more. 

“Curiosity is a child,” Brammer writes. “When it wants something, when it truly wants something, it’s nearly impossible to keep its hands away.” Brammer found his way to reading by getting curious about David Foster Wallace, which in turn led him to Wallace’s influences: from Donald Barthelme to Thomas Pynchon to Clarice Lispector.

“I read out of strict obedience to curiosity, the desire to know what these words in this sequence might hold,” Brammer writes. “I had to make it fun at first. This was messy. I sipped from this book, then that one. It wasn’t formal or rigorous. I read whenever I felt like it.”

Where habits are mindless and rote, curiosity is something to be indulged: It’s fun, even hedonistic. Embracing curiosity means finding ways to play with art and ideas, as if they’re clay, instead of chipping away at them, as if they’re solid stone.

“The relevant science isn’t something I’m qualified to parse,” Brammer writes in his essay. But when I looked into that very science, I found that his experience aligned with it quite well.  

“If you link curiosity to the accumulation of knowledge, you can actually self-boost your curiosity over time, with the end result of more continued interest.”

Kou Murayama, University of Tübingen

“People have likened the state of being curious about something to an aversive state,” says Celeste Kidd, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. “It’s unpleasant, akin to something like an itch. When you have that aversive state, when you really want some piece of information, it feels very satisfying to scratch it. There’s all sorts of positive feelings that come with satisfying specific curiosity.” 

The endless scroll of our phone apps can function like a hydrocortisone cream, offering a balm for the irritation without really dealing with the cause. It’s not actually scratching the itch. To do that, you have to get curious about a question that can guide you through an idiosyncratic and looping itinerary that is never fully determined in advance. 

Writer and tech designer Celine Nguyen has written about letting her curiosity guide her down rabbit holes in her essay on “research as leisure activity,” a phrase she borrowed from librarian Karly Wildenhaus. Speaking to me, Nguyen describes getting interested in the way the rise of vibe coding is affecting app design. 

“This idea around shifting design processes made me think of this art historian Claire Bishop,” Nguyen says. Bishop’s most recent book deals with the way technology changes our response to contemporary art, and Nguyen says that “after reading that, I was like, ‘I really like reading about contemporary art and performance. What else can I read in this vein?’” 

Nguyen followed her new interest in dance to a fixation on choreographer Pina Bausch, and soon found herself scouring the internet for still images from Bausch dances. 

“It’s sort of like this pleasantly fizzy, almost like ADHD brain thing,” Nguyen says. “It sort of feels like I’m wandering around this massive information landscape and I’m just coming off all these images or all these reference points or quotes that speak to me, and maybe at the end of this process I can sum up what it is I’m interested in.”

The point at which you satisfy your curiosity can be dangerous. Once the itch is gone, the desire to learn can disappear completely — even if you don’t know as much as you think. 

Kidd describes a study in which she tried to motivate people to learn a new fact about something they thought they already completely understood, but were actually wrong about.

“When we paid them to look up the right answer, they weren’t motivated to seek out more information,” she says. “They did it, but it was like they were out to lunch. They were thinking about something else. That information did not go in.” 

According to Kou Murayama, a professor of psychology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, the best way to maintain your momentum is to marshal your ephemeral curiosity into long-term interest by letting the answer to one question prompt a new one, as if you were figuring out where to eat each meal in a new city by asking your waiters where they like to eat. 

“If you link curiosity to the accumulation of knowledge, you can actually self-boost your curiosity over time, with the end result of more continued interest,” Murayama says. “Curiosity is basically short-lived, but if it’s linked to accumulating knowledge, or if you can link it to your self identity or importance, then you can self-booster interest.”

The trick is to, like Brammer and Nguyen, guide your curiosity toward a topic that can keep surprising you over time. What that usually means is to look for a topic that you already know a little bit about that can keep surprising you.

“We’ve done studies with 7-month-old babies, and they’re seeking out particular kinds of things in the world that violate their expectations, just a little bit but not too much,” Kidd says. “It tends to be the case that people want to elaborate on knowledge they already have as opposed to going into other domains. If there’s some way to relate a desired new set of expertise to something that you already have some background in, that’s a thing that you could absolutely do intentionally.”

So if you want to find some creative outlet for your time — or even if you just want to read more — there are straightforward steps to take: Look for something that excites your curiosity. Look for something that you are uncertain about, something so maddeningly unclear that you can’t help but itch at it. 

This mystery doesn’t have to be about science or philosophy. It could be about what happens to a character in a particular thriller, or how to capture a likeness in charcoal, or what a certain part of your city looks like. The point is that it should be the kind of question that you can’t let go of.

Then indulge in finding the answer — and let that question prompt another one. Then another. Then another.