Richie Bell stood at the door of an East Village bar, nervous for a singular reason: he had to hand over his phone to a bouncer to get in. At 23 years old, Bell had hardly ever been without a device — he got his first iPhone in elementary school — but when he saw a video on TikTok advertising a queer, phone-free, funk dance party called Who’s Dancing?, he decided to test his limits. He immediately purchased a ticket and planned to attend alone. 

Bell was pleasantly surprised to discover he wouldn’t have to relinquish his phone at all, but simply allow security to place tape on both the back and front-facing cameras. “You can’t scroll Reels because, think about it, on iPhones anyway, if they’re taping the front camera, that’s also the speaker area,” Bell told Vox. Without the temptation of content on his phone, Bell mingled with other attendees, who were similarly unoccupied and also flying solo. Even though event staff kept their eyes peeled for any errant phone usage, no one seemed to reach for them anyway. 

Compared to other bars and parties he’s been to, Bell found this one more conducive to unbridled socializing and dancing. It’s easier to approach a stranger when they’re not hunched over their phone. No one is worried about looking like a fool, immortalized in video, because everyone is a little foolish, moving their bodies without fear of judgment. 

Across the country, clubs, bars, music venues, and other social spaces are encouraging attendees to lock their phones away — or, at least keep them out of sight — for screen-free gatherings. According to event hosting platform Eventbrite, phone-free experiences have increased more than 500 percent globally between 2024 and 2025. Musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Harry Styles banned phones at their concerts; comedians John Mulaney and Bill Burr have followed suit. Clubs from Los Angeles to Miami are creating camera-free dance floors. Bars and restaurants in cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia that have long prohibited phone and camera use have been joined by newer establishments in Charlotte, North Carolina and Fort Worth, Texas. 

The rise of phone-free socializing speaks to a growing exhaustion with an always-connected world. More than half of US adults say they use their smartphone too much, according to a 2022 Gallup survey. Excessive smartphone use has been linked to poor sleep quality and depression, and even the mere presence of a phone lessens cognitive capacity. The ubiquity of devices — and the cameras on them — has instilled a low-grade panic that you might end up going viral for eating a sandwich in the background of an influencer’s video. Even Gen Z, who has always lived under the spectre of technology, is nostalgic for times before everyone was “plugged in” and widely accessible.

Screen-free events are the natural evolution of the cultural desire to break up with tech. By transforming physical spaces, ridding them of distracting devices, event organizers and bar owners aim to foster connection, reclaim attention, and maintain a sense of privacy. Even a short detox from smartphones has the ability to dramatically shape the tenor of a get-together for the better. 

“Exploited for content”

Before X&ND (pronounced “zand”), the funk and soul artist who organized the phone-free party Bell attended, first conceived of Who’s Dancing?, they noticed very few people actually cutting loose at clubs. Instead, they were on their phones. “The second that anybody starts dancing in a club where there’s meant to be dancing, people pull out their phone,” X&ND told Vox. “They’re getting surveilled, they’re getting essentially exploited for content and being put in a position where they’re on display for people that they didn’t necessarily want to be on display for.” X&ND wanted to create a space for women, queer, and trans people to dance and express themselves without the fear of ending up on the internet. 

Since last summer, X&ND has hosted eight sold-out dance parties (and Bell estimates he’s attended seven). Phone-free events, X&ND said, are a reclamation of culture, of attention, of self-expression. “Influencers aren’t able to post anything. Different companies aren’t posting anything about our parties because we don’t give them the material to,” they said. “I think it’s the culture taking the culture back.”

The bar and nightclub scene has struggled in recent years, with many venues closing due to high rent and fewer patrons spending money on alcohol. But perhaps a less obvious culprit is the pervasive anxiety of being captured on video during a moment of vulnerability. Some might be turned off from entering these spaces altogether due to the high risk of embarrassment if they’re captured and mocked online.

In Washington, DC, 28-year-old Jo Vee had similar concerns about privacy and craved an environment where they could be anonymous. Like Bell, Vee has had access to a camera phone since they were a child and can’t remember a time when they weren’t thinking about what to post on Instagram. But when a friend organized a phone-free dance party, Vee jumped at the opportunity to enjoy themselves, free from the pressures of the algorithm — and the potential of accidentally becoming a meme. “There’s nothing more terrifying than thinking that you’re going to a party just to have fun, and then you wake up the next morning and there’s a video of you that has 10 million views that you had no idea about, and now you’re like a GIF reaction on the internet.” (Vee clarified that they do not speak from personal experience, but said that a version of this has happened to a couple of friends.)

Distraction-free connection

Although many people inherently recognize the downsides of excessive phone use, they also realize they’re fighting an uphill battle. Demanding jobs can tether workers to their emails and algorithms are designed to keep us engaged and scrolling. Our attention is constantly being pulled from the real world to the digital one. But even a brief respite from screens can be beneficial. 

In his research, Georgetown associate professor Kostadin Kushlev found that phone usage during a social interaction undermines how much people enjoy spending time with others. “It’s not so much [that] the phone is making us feel unhappy,” Kushlev told Vox, “it’s more like I could be happier if I was not using a phone.” Put another way, people enjoy social gatherings more when they keep their phone out of sight because they can give their full attention to their conversation partner.

Kushlev’s other research has shown that as people curbed their phone usage over a two-week period, their ability to pay attention improved. Even a shorter detox period, like a two-hour phone-free gathering, could minimize overstimulation and encourage greater focus, Kushlev said.

Inside the Charlotte, North Carolina, bar Antagonist, couples on dates engage in heart-to-hearts and neighboring tables of strangers strike up conversations. That’s because the bar has banned phones. Upon entering, visitors are asked to secure their phone in a pouch which they keep with them for the duration of their stay. If they need to use their phone, they can do so outside.

Since Antagonist opened in March, owner Michael Salzarulo has observed patrons clamoring for a Friday night detox after a long week of screen-mediated work. “Normally Saturday is your biggest day,” Salzarulo said, “but Friday nights are our busiest nights of the week.” While anyone can lock their phone in another room for a few hours, Antagonist provides an element of accountability, Salzarulo said: a dedicated space for distraction-free connection.

Alex Becker was yearning for a break from her phone and her “email, Microsoft Excel job” when she co-founded PA Unplugged, a nonprofit championing policies that advocate for more mindful uses of technology, last year. One of the nonprofit’s initiatives, Screen Free Philly, maintains a calendar of screen-free events and organizes its own gatherings at breweries, parks, and other civic institutions, urging attendees to set aside their phones for discussions, art projects, and board games. At the most recent get-together, dozens of attendees handed their phones to Becker while they completed a series of puzzles throughout the city.

Although these gatherings are still fairly niche, Becker sensed a hunger among participants to seek out further opportunities for tech-free connection. While ditching a smartphone completely may be unrealistic, setting it aside for date night or an afternoon of gaming might be a salve for our tech-addled brains. We can implement these best practices at our own gatherings, too, by encouraging friends to leave their phones in a basket by the door or offering disposable cameras at parties.

“People are just done and ready to take their attention back, take their time back, and encourage more real-world connection,” Becker said.

Like many people, I have a contentious relationship with the Memories feature on my iPhone, the AI-powered nostalgia machine that serves up photos and slideshows from deep in your camera roll, either reminding you of a beautiful day at the beach or surfacing an old photo of your ex. About once a month, for whatever reason, my iPhone reminds me of the time my phone got stolen.

The Memory is a glitchy, fragmented one — an auto-generated slideshow of my first few years living in New York. But because my phone was stolen, the photos in the slideshow are a random assortment of mislabeled JPEGs and grainy images I’d saved from Facebook, all somehow imported from my hard drive to my camera roll at some point and set to sentimental music. 

I used to get mad that I didn’t back up my actual, treasured photos on a hard drive. But now, I just wish I’d printed out the best ones and put them in a box. That kind of thing can survive for generations.

We should all be printing our photos. I’m not just talking about converting your camera roll into a stack of 4×6-inch glossy pieces of paper, either. It’s actually easier than ever to turn the gigabytes of images we carry around in our pockets into physical objects, like albums and books and frames, the kind we can gather around to pore over and one day pass down to our children. Even individual prints that we touch and hold can tell a story in a way that pixel on a screen never could. Real photos are effectively embodied memories that we can casually encounter as we go about our daily lives. And it’s not just because an algorithm decided to send us a push notification to go look at them, either. 

“Printing photos in any form, whether it’s to hang on a wall or to hold in our hands, is effortful,” Brianna Marshall, dean of the Steely Library at Northern Kentucky University, told me. “It requires us to take action to experience the memories in more meaningful ways than an occasional passive scroll of our photo roll.”

In a way, I owe a lot to that phone thief. It was only after losing so many photos that I started paying closer attention to how I managed the new ones I’m taking, which are thankfully backed up in multiple places in the cloud. I’ve made some photo books and some albums of big events, like my wedding. I have a box with some prints inside, although there should be more. 

I now have a couple of kids who do many cute things every day, and my camera roll is getting more crowded. My walls are looking increasingly bare. I know I should be printing even more photos, and you probably should, too. When we commit to a process around curating and printing our photos, we’re also creating a ritual around preserving our memories and giving ourselves a chance to interact with them for years or even decades to come. This is so much more rewarding than taking thousands of pictures indiscriminately and then just uploading a few to Instagram periodically and hoping for some likes.

Why your camera roll isn’t a family history

There’s something magical about sitting down with a family photo album. My mom has made them obsessively for decades, and any time I’m home, I end up pulling one off the shelf. Each page is carefully curated to tell a story about a moment — a dance recital, a vacation, a holiday — and taken together, the album tells a story about our lives at that time. She’s made albums about her own childhood, and she’s started some for my own children. Collectively, they’re a family history that we can gather around.

As much as Apple, Google, and other tech companies have tried, you can’t replicate that feeling with an app. There are a ton of upsides when it comes to backing up your photos digitally, including the ability to access them from anywhere or quickly share images or entire albums. However, cloud storage platforms tend to compress your photos, harming image quality. They can also change their terms of service or their business model at any time, potentially leaving you to pay a monthly fee or face losing your photos forever.

On a more basic level, though, something is lost when you’re scrolling through pictures on a smartphone, where your inbox or your TikTok feed is just a swipe away. The images “seem a little bit more removed and a little less approachable,” said Debra Norris, professor of photograph conservation at the University of Delaware. “It becomes a point of conversation and enjoyment and accessibility that doesn’t exist when an image is on the phone.” 

Your phone is full of distractions, yes, but it’s also probably just overflowing with photos. My camera roll has nearly 30,000 images, which means that finding one specific shot from a certain day on a vacation a few years ago is more of a chore than a point of conversation. Encountering old photos serendipitously would be utterly impossible if not for — I kind of hate to say it — the help of features like iPhone Memories. This software can help resurface some old photos, and that experience can be delightful. 

Try taking things into your own hands, though. Rather than leaning back and letting AI decide which memories you’d like to remember, you can curate your photos as you take them, favoriting the good ones within a minute or two to help you separate the wheat from the chaff later. The end goal here might be printing the very best to put in a frame, an album, or even just a dedicated photo storage box. In doing so, you’re actually crafting the first draft of a visual family history. When you do ultimately print those photos (more on this in a moment), you’ll give that history a physical presence and create a sort of legacy.

“We can take so many photographs on these phones and yet a curated box of images that are especially meaningful, it’s magical really,” Norris said. “And it’s something that your children will save and treasure and share with their children, and that will continue.”

How to get the best photos off your phone

Once you get into the habit of curating your photos as you go, the actual printing part of the process is pretty easy. There are plenty of services that let you upload photos directly from your phone and will then print them in various sizes and ship them to your house or pick them up in a store (like CVS or Walgreens). Finding the right one will depend on your budget and your preferences. Nations Photo Lab and Printique are two that get rave reviews for quality prints and easy uploads. I’ve personally used Shutterfly (which offers discounts to Costco and Amazon Prime members) and Mpix, which are popular and affordable enough, but I do think the price is reflected in the quality.

You may also want to print your own photos, which can be limited and liberating at the same time. I have not tested out any dedicated photo printers, but I would trust the reviews of the good gadget bloggers at Wirecutter and Rtings, who have. You can expect to spend a few hundred bucks on the printer alone if you go this route.

Then there are the album makers. Many companies that will print your photos, including the four I just mentioned, will also print albums and photobooks. Because the layout process for making these objects is both essential and time-consuming, you might be better off going with a company that specializes in albums and books. I used Artifact Uprising to make a book of my wedding photos and loved the results, although the price tag was steep. Mixbook is the service I’d like to check out next.

You could also just get an old-fashioned photo album and put the prints directly in it, as my mom does. This is as easy as buying an empty photo album or scrapbook and filling it with your prints. You want something that is, at minimum, acid-free and lignin-free, and should opt for uncoated polyester, polyethylene, or polypropylene sleeves for the sake of longevity. (In the United States, Gaylord Archival and University Products are top suppliers of these kinds of products to museums and hobbyists alike.) You can add newspaper clippings or ticket stubs or any other physical objects to tell a more complete story, something you definitely can’t do with your phone’s camera roll.

If you don’t want to go the album route, or you already have prints waiting to be transferred over, you should keep them in an acid-free archival storage box. Your finished photo books and albums also benefit from this treatment. (If you’re dealing with old photos or want to take extra measures, check out the Library of Congress’s guide to photo preservation.) You may also want to frame them, an old custom that has also never been easier in the digital age. I have a few things hanging on my wall that I framed through Framebridge, which will let you upload an image and receive a framed print. I’ve also heard good things about Level Frames, and one of my colleagues swears by Frame It Easy. Your local frame shop works too, of course, or you could grab frames at flea markets, garage sales, and thrift stores.

Regardless of who actually prints or frames the prints, the most important thing when it comes to building a habit of curating and printing your photos is to find a process that works for you. If AI-powered tools like Apple Memories do a good enough job of finding the needles in the veritable haystack of pictures on your iPhone, that’s fantastic. Print those photos. Make a book with them. If you prefer favoriting good photos as soon as you take them or putting your best shots in a digital album at the end of every month, keep it up. Just set aside time to print some of those.

“My advice is always just to start somewhere, and not to let any guilt over what you did or didn’t do in the past stall you from moving forward,” Marshall said. “Save the photos that you treasure.”

Some professors might recoil at the idea of looking at their students’ dating app profiles. Not Gurit Birnbaum, a professor of psychology at Reichman University. She saw it as an opportunity. 

Some of the young people in Birnbaum’s classes, as well as close friends, asked for her advice and turned their phones over to her. After poring over their bios and photos, she had some opinions. 

What stood out were a few commonalities in how they presented themselves to potential partners: “Some profiles revealed almost nothing, others revealed too much. Some relied heavily on sexualized images, while many simply blended into a sea of interchangeable, generic profiles,” Birnbaum told Vox in an email. Many people seemed unsure of how to uniquely introduce themselves, instead offering a laundry list of qualities. She wondered which profiles sparked genuine interest and what characteristics these singles successfully transmitted. So she decided to research what more dating app users choose to reveal about themselves and how they go about it.

The results of those studies allowed Birnbaum and her collaborators to zero in on a few concrete strategies for crafting a dating profile that is not only authentic, but would get people to swipe right. Her findings, along with those from other researchers, can help everyday singles put their best foot forward. 

“The goal shouldn’t be to turn yourself into a product,” Birnbaum said. “The real challenge is getting the right kind of attention without losing yourself in the process.”

Get creative — but don’t exaggerate

One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to online dating is that you must impress people and sell yourself, Liesel Sharabi, an associate professor in human communication at Arizona State University, told Vox. That mindset can lead you to present a slightly exaggerated or more idealized version of yourself. “That can be effective for getting a date or starting a conversation, but then by the time you actually end up meeting, it can lead to a lot of disappointment and even feelings that someone’s been misled, even if that’s not actually the case,” Sharabi said.

Instead of embellishing the details of your life, use your creative skills to package reality in an attention-grabbing way. Research shows daters value originality in dating app profiles — it signals intelligence and sense of humor. The profiles that were perceived as original contained vivid descriptions and imagery, metaphors, and frequent uses of adjectives and adverbs. Think: “I’m a star in the kitchen.” (They also contained elements of self-disclosure — more on that later.)

These specifics give daters an opening to start a conversation with you. Instead of simply saying you like running, you can express that same information with a cheeky call to action: “Tell me about your favorite running trails.”

When in doubt, Sharabi said, ask a friend to look over your profile to see if you’re being authentic or bending the truth — and take their feedback seriously.

Tell a story

Birnbaum’s research has shown that narrative presentations — in other words, short stories — are more effective at garnering empathy and interest than a list of likes and dislikes. Storytelling helps people see you as a person rather than a bunch of traits, which encourages perspective-taking and can foster empathy. “Empathy may be less the initial spark of attraction than the bridge from noticing someone to feeling that you might actually connect with them,” she said.

So consider reframing your best qualities in a way where you’re actively doing, experiencing, or reacting to something. In lieu of describing yourself as simply “funny,” Birnbaum suggests something more illustrative like, “I laugh at my own jokes first. It’s a character flaw.” Or instead of “outdoorsy,” try, “Most weekends I disappear into a trail, come back sunburned, and swear I’ll bring more water next time.”

“Those tiny stories bring a person to life in a way that generic descriptions simply don’t,” she said. And avoid using ChatGPT to craft these bios; people can spot AI-generated writing, and no one knows your life better than you do.

Be selective with how much you share

How much you choose to reveal about yourself is an art. Birnbaum found that sharing too little can be a signal you’re not serious about finding a relationship, while exposing too much may be overwhelming to potential dates. “Moderate disclosure seems to strike the right balance: enough information to create trust and a sense of connection, but not so much that curiosity disappears before the first date,” she said.

In the study on originality in dating app profiles, concrete self-disclosures were rated as more original. Think: “I start every day with waffles and ice cream,” over “I’m a foodie.”

Convey your willingness to get to know someone

Research has shown that feeling known by your partner predicts relationship satisfaction. But often, when singles create their dating app profiles, they can be a little too self-centric. You know what you’re looking for in a partner, after all. But it’s also important to communicate that you’d like to get to know someone else. So, how to signal your openness to understanding someone in your dating app profile? 

In one study, Juliana Schroeder, a professor of management of organizations at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and her co-author found that dating app profiles that attracted the most interest were those who expressed an interest in knowing the person on the other end. In practice, that might look like expressing how you’re a good listener or your curiosity. Something as simple as, “I’m the kind of person who loves to ask questions. Be prepared,” gets the point across.

“Even if it’s something vague and just a signal that you’ll be the kind of person who will actually try to get to know them and try to support them,” Schroeder told Vox. “That’s what I would think people are missing in their profiles, and that’s what the research suggests that they could put in there.”

Use photos to accompany your bio

Photos are often the first thing other daters see on apps, so you’ll want to make sure they’re an accurate representation of you today. Not five years ago. Not with a hat or sunglasses on.

“A picture that would tell me if I show up somewhere, will I be able to recognize them based on the pictures they’re posting?” Sharabi, the human communication professor, said.

Beyond that, pictures can be a means of augmenting or contextualizing the words in your profile. In her research on storytelling in dating app profiles, Birnbaum found that photos that presented people’s lives narratively were more effective at garnering empathy than a random assortment of images. “Rather than posting a collection of disconnected flattering shots, choose attractive but authentic photos that show different facets of your life and, ideally, work together as a coherent slice of life,” she said. Put simply: If you like rock climbing, you may want to include an image of you bouldering at the gym. 

Dating app profiles, if done correctly, can be a savvy way of presenting yourself to other daters. And, as the science shows, there are ways to be a little more strategic at creating them. Just think of your life as a story a potential partner will want to be a part of.

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!

The influencers have started to promise me that they know how to get me to stop shopping: I just have to enter every garment of clothing I own into an app, one by one. “I digitally cataloged my ENTIRE wardrobe,” they swear on videos, routinely pulling in hundreds of thousands of views. 

The selling point of these apps (Indyx, Whering, ACloset, OpenWardrobe, and many more) is seductive; they promise to help users understand exactly what they already own so that they shop less. In theory, that means saving money — and slowing the steady damage the fashion industry is wrecking on our planet.

“Collectively, we are buying and then throwing away more than ever before,” Indyx warned on its website, before reciting dire statistics about how many clothes are produced now and how many of them end up in landfills. Luckily, it said, “We’re here to break the cycle.” 

That idea appealed to me. I am not a fashionista, but I enjoy clothes enough to buy more than I really need, despite what I know about fashion’s impact on the planet. My intellectual understanding of climate change can’t always stop me from clicking “add to cart” when I see a dashing pair of wide-legged trousers, even though there’s a hard limit on the number of times a person can wear wide-legged trousers in one week. 

Still, to make these apps work, you have to individually enter photos of everything you own now and everything you buy in the future, which sounds like a tedious, laborious process. (You can take the photos yourself or hunt down product pictures from the brand.) And because so many influencers are pushing this, it’s hard to tell how life-changing it really is and how much is just marketing speak and hype. So, I decided to test one of these apps — Indyx — for you. I also talked to wardrobe cataloging enthusiasts and experts on sustainable consumption to see what I could learn from them. I wanted to know: Could cataloging our wardrobes actually make us shop less? And, if it can, would it be worth the effort? 

“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less”

Wardrobe cataloging apps did not always advertise themselves as being good for the planet. 

In 2023, the journalist Avery Trufelman investigated the nascent wardrobe cataloging app industry for her podcast series Articles of Interest. She found that a lot of the apps flopped. The issue was the business model, which was based on revenue generated from affiliate links. The idea was that people would click to purchase items they saw within the apps, and the company would take a cut of each sale. But when the apps were well designed, Trufelman reported, users felt less of a need to buy more clothes.

The current generation of wardrobe cataloging app developers has turned this from a bug into a feature. They now market their wares as the solution to overshopping, and they make their money by charging for either the app itself or for its extra content. (Indyx itself is free, but you have to pay a $75 yearly subscription for its enhanced features.)

What the marketing gets right is that the fast fashion problem is real. “Anywhere from two to 10 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with fashion,” said Brie Berry, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.

Fashion’s emissions are generated by the factories that manufacture clothing (the water and the fertilizers for growing cotton, the oil for developing synthetics) and the consumers who wear these garments (the slow shed of microplastics from yoga pants, the water and the energy consumed by washing and drying). When we get rid of old clothes, much of it ends up in landfills or incinerated. By some estimates, the fashion industry contributes more to climate change than the aviation industry. 

“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less,” said Katia Dayan Vladimirova, a researcher whose consulting firm Post Growth Fashion focuses on alternatives to growth in the fashion system. 

To buy less, it helps most people to know what they already own, said Alyssa Beltempo, a slow-fashion content creator and educator. Beltempo makes videos guiding viewers through the process of “shopping their own closets” to help them buy less stuff, but she’s found in her work that a lot of people aren’t clear on the contents of those closets. Because of that confusion, they end up buying stuff they don’t need.

That’s where cataloging can be helpful, Beltempo said. “These apps reduce that hurdle of not seeing the clothes you have,” she said.

Personally, what I was looking for wasn’t enhanced clarity so much as a barrier. I wanted to erect a wall between my desire to own a new piece of clothing and the click of the buy button. A searchable, scannable lookbook of everything I owned, I thought, might well do the trick. 

How to catalog every piece of clothing you own

Indyx has been hyping up its new AI feature, which transforms a picture of a garment hanging limply off a hanger into a neat flat lay photo. It sped the process up, but it was also buggy; it garbled text on the front of T-shirts, misread colors, and had a tendency to interpret loose threads as ornamental bows while leaving wrinkles (I am not an ironer) untouched. 

I was also concerned that the process inserted AI, with its insatiable need for water and energy, into a project sold as a way of reducing my environmental impact. But the sustainability experts I spoke to were both skeptical that this sort of light AI use was such a big deal. 

“Taking photos and then asking an app to think about how to arrange your clothing into outfits is probably one of the lighter uses of AI that I could imagine,” Berry said. Vladimirova agreed that using AI for this task is unlikely to be as bad for the planet as buying even one new garment. “But then, there is also no proven causality between using this app and reducing overconsumption,” she added as a caveat.

It’s possible to input your clothes into Indyx without using the AI feature, but the truth is: I don’t know that I could have made myself go through with the whole rigamarole without it. I ran out of free AI processing about 80 percent of the way through and, overwhelmed at the thought of having to do my own flat lays, paid $75 to buy more without hesitating.

All told, it took me about five hours and many old episodes of Top Chef to photograph my summer clothes, not including shoes, jewelry, or accessories. My time spent cataloging did not include the process of entering additional data about each garment (including its initial cost, its fiber composition, where I bought it), a herculean task that I have been tackling much more slowly than the initial entry process.

Doing the shoot properly would have taken longer. Angela Goodman, a 51-year-old marketer from Seattle with a background in product photography, says she ran her own cataloging session like a pro shoot, using art lights and folding and refolding each garment to lie perfectly. It took her 10 hours spread out over multiple weeks. 

As an exercise, photographing every piece of clothing I owned was clarifying, although not significantly more clarifying than going through it Marie Kondo-style. It left me with a small donation pile of items I no longer wanted and a fretful awareness that I own too many white T-shirts. In theory, that’s the kind of insight a wardrobe cataloging app produces by the spade.

“I’m not shopping. I’m building.”

Vladimirova, the sustainability consultant, said that, even though she has a better idea than most of how destructive the fashion industry is, she struggles with over-shopping. She thinks a lot about why people buy so many clothes; her best guess is that it’s a way to self-soothe. 

“A lot of consumption happens in the evening when we feel vulnerable and tired, and we’re trying to reward ourselves with this shot of dopamine,” she said. For some people, these apps can replace the dopamine hit that comes from scrolling through other people’s outfit photos with the dopamine hit of scrolling through your own clothes, neatly folded and filtered until they look like aspirational fashion inspo. 

Part of the satisfaction here is the infographics. After you’ve given Indyx all your fashion data, the app crunches your numbers and tells users how much you’ve bought new versus secondhand, as well as the share of natural fibers as opposed to synthetics in your closet, so that you can track the environmental impact of your shopping habits. (Synthetics tend to have a higher carbon footprint than natural fibers.) It tells you what their cost per wear is on each item to help you track which expensive garment was worth the splurge and which was a waste of money. Users can also plan outfits. You can share your wardrobe with stylists who will plan the outfits for you (on Indyx, the service ranges from $25 a month to “the low hundreds”). It’s like playing paper dolls with your own wardrobe. 

For Goodman, the former product photographer, all this data takes the place of recreational shopping. She describes getting a marketing email from one of her favorite brands about a sale. After a quick scroll through their offerings, she found that she felt no urge to buy. 

“I was like, ‘I do not need more clothes. I’m going to go update my Indyx, because I’m a couple of weeks behind,’” she said. She started inputting the last few outfits she’d worn into one of the Indyx services that is supposed to allow users to track their patterns and see which clothes they actually wear and what they like in an outfit. “I’m playing with clothes,” she said. “But, like, I’m not shopping. I’m, you know, building.”

Over time, all this data is supposed to inform future shopping choices. “There is something very clear about seeing two pieces that you’ve owned for the same amount of time — one that you’ve worn 57 times and one that you’ve worn twice,” said Alexandra, a 29-year-old consultant in Northern Virginia who requested her last name be withheld. She thinks tracking her clothes has given her “a little bit less buyer’s remorse.”

Cataloging your wardrobe can’t prevent a compulsive need to buy, though.

“I don’t think it cured me of my undiagnosed shopping addiction,” Alexandra said. “You can very quickly go from ‘I’m cataloging what I have’ to ‘I’m seeing a bunch of gaps in my wardrobe that I should fill immediately.’” 

“There just wasn’t incentive anymore”

The main question I had about these apps was whether, with such a labor-intensive process, there comes a time when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. 

Alexandra says that she gradually stopped using her wardrobe app last year, after she moved out of her own apartment and back into her family’s suburban house in the midst of a career transition. 

“I was separated from a lot of my belongings for a very long time, and then, as I started to get things back, it didn’t feel worth the effort anymore,” she said. Who was she going to see in one of her curated outfits? “My job’s on a computer. When I leave the house, I go to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the bookstore,” she said. “There just wasn’t incentive anymore, compared to when I was closer to the city and doing things more regularly.”

Beltempo, the slow fashion content creator, said she doesn’t bother to add every new purchase to her own catalog. 

“I really use it more for my packing,” she said. Before she travels, she makes a list of likely candidates for her suitcase and enters them into the app. “And then, I’ll play, and I’ll make outfits,” she says. 

Vladimirova, the sustainable consumption researcher struggling with overshopping, gave the apps a spin. She tried three of them and found that she was only able to stick with each one for a matter of months. “In the beginning, when the novelty of the app is there, it’s very satisfying,” she said. “It records your outfits in vivid colors. It can crop out the ugly background and keep it very neat, create fancy capsules. They look so lovely.”

But over time, they all began to bore her. “And now, I forget to update when I buy something new — usually from secondhand sources — and it kind of lost its meaning for me,” she said. “But the premise is good!” 

My own experience seems to be closest to Vladimirova’s. I keep having to remind myself to enter my outfits into Indyx. Every time I put on a piece of clothing, I think with dread, “Oh god, if I don’t look up how much I paid for this, I’ll never know my cost per wear and, then, what’s the point?” I keep giving my shoes guilty looks and thinking about how I should really photograph and catalog them — if I’m doing this right. 

“It’s a project,” said Lauren Ludwig, a 41-year-old who has been using her wardrobe apps for the past three years. “But it’s a fun one for someone who enjoys clothing.”

Indyx and its brethren are slick, and their infographics are beautiful. For dedicated wardrobe hobbyists, they’re probably a great option. But for most people who just want to cut down on their clothes shopping, it’s hard to say that the $75 annual subscription is worth it. The free version will give you the same paper doll effect if you are willing to do your own flat lays, or you can recreate it by dragging phone camera pictures of your clothes onto a Google Slides deck. 

If you find, as Vladimirova theorized, that you shop when you don’t feel good, you can try replacing that habit with a “dopamine menu” of small acts that bring you joy, like hugging a pet, doing a puzzle, or going for a walk. And if your closet is filled with brand new clothes you never wear, you’re racking up debt buying clothes, or you just have the nagging sense that your shopping has spiraled completely out of control, therapy is not a bad idea. 

Personally, I found that Indyx could not give me what I really crave when I want to play with clothes: the understanding of the way fabric drapes against my body, the knowledge of its texture against my skin. There is no substitution for the slow analog process of walking into my closet, touching my clothes with my human hands, and learning with my five senses that what I have is already enough.

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.

“Ooooh, a jar, a tiny little jar,” the overlapping voices of the popular social audio say in a hushed, awed tone, evoking an intrusive thought. “Keep the jar with the other jars.”

Jess Lynch, an artist in Toronto, made the audio on a whim. Among her friends, she’s known as the one whose dishwasher is always filled with jars. 

Not just any old jar, mind you. Lynch has standards. “It’s gotta be a solid mason jar,” she said. “It’s gotta have a lid.” Other qualities that make a container worth keeping? A good seal, watertight, completely see-through, no sticky labels. If it doesn’t meet her standards, it goes straight to recycling. 

Still, she savors the chance to take a container for another spin. “I love reusing,” Lynch told Vox. “Why would I go to the dollar store and buy to-go cups that have to go in the garbage when I could take my little pasta sauce jar that I picked out from dinner last night [and] fill it up with a little savvy B?”

When other people started using the clip as a soundtrack for showing off their own jar stashes, she realized she had struck a chord. The community of collectors is legion.

More than half of American grocery shoppers reuse their glass containers, according to an EcoFocus survey commissioned by the Glass Packaging Institute (GPI). Nineteen percent reuse them for food storage, 14 percent repurpose them for tasks such as organizing and crafting, and another 20 percent reuse them and then recycle them later. Meanwhile, about 30 percent choose to recycle them immediately after use. (Whether you reuse it a hundred times or throw it in the recycling right afterward doesn’t affect how recyclable the glass is, per GPI president Scott DeFife, because the material is “endlessly recyclable.”) 

People who stockpile jars, bottles, and other containers often hold onto them with some glorious intended future purpose in mind. What once held store-bought pasta sauce could stow lentils, leftovers, or that pickling project you’re definitely about to start. Perhaps all of those glass olive containers could become a set of chic matching centerpieces for a dinner party you throw down the line. And there’s nothing better to hold a propagating plant stem than a buxom bottle. The container may be empty, yet it’s full of possibility. 

The satisfaction of stashing

Monica Chavez, the content creator behind House of Esperanza, said she began saving jars when she was a kid. “I come from very humble beginnings,” she told Vox. “We didn’t have much growing up, so repurposing, recycling, and finding a use for everything was critically important.” Sour cream containers held leftover food. Old coffee tins became planters. 

And that sensibility stuck with her, which she describes as, “Yeah, this is a cute jar, I am going to get the most out of it. … It’s that human need to make use of the things you spend your money on.”

Chavez will go out of her way to acquire the right container. She finds that the jar for the Rao’s sauce sold at Costco, for instance, is a more useful shape than the one at grocery stores. She’ll even pay a little bit more if it means she can hold onto the vessel. For example, she buys Oui yogurt, which comes in glass jars with a foil top. “I bought a set of bamboo lids and now I repurpose those,” she said, adding that the jars can store overnight oats, salsa, or other food, or be used by her daughter when she’s watercoloring. Chavez has noticed companies being more savvy about packaging “their products in a way so that the product can continue to live on in those people’s homes…and then it kind of becomes free branding for them.”

“If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time.”

Monica Chavez, content creator, House of Esperanza

Yoplait, the manufacturer of Oui, is definitely aware of the appeal of its container. It has an entire page on its website dedicated to “jar crafts” such as wedding table centerpieces, mini topiary trees, and beauty organizers. Jam company Bonne Maman similarly has a webpage filled with DIY “hacks” for its iconic jars with red gingham tops. “Reusing your empty jars is the perfect way to enjoy Bonne Maman, even after the last spoonful!” it says.

While Chavez has “a lot of jars in rotation constantly,” she also regularly culls her collection. “If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time,” she said. She’ll often list them on Facebook Marketplace or in a “buy nothing” group. “Let them live on somewhere else instead of immediately trying to recycle them,” she said.

Rachael Engelhardt of Trader Joe’s Kitchen and Food With Hardt is a big-time stockpiler who said she’s currently “at max capacity” with her jar collection. But when one of them goes home with a friend or the lid gets rusty, there’ll be an opening in her cabinet for more. She regularly puts them to use because “I have to justify keeping them all in my kitchen.” One of her most coveted containers to reuse is a spice grinder — if she buys one that holds, say, black peppercorns, it might end up grinding up an entirely different seasoning later. 

Lynch, Chavez, and Engelhardt all seem to actually take advantage of the various jars and bottles they stash. But for others, that’s not quite how it goes.

“I’ve seen desirable jars and I’ve saved them, like, one-off,” Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist and a principal at Design With Science, told Vox. “Only usually, in fact, always in the past, it comes to a point where I’ve had it for a while and I realize, I’ve never put anything in this jar. I think it’s time for it to be recycled, and off it will go.”

Augustin said that many of these containers seem “inherently potentially useful” but, when it comes down to it, “we probably actually have better options.” As she sees it, jars might appeal to people’s nostalgia, or folks might like the look of it, or want to believe they are the kind of person who will reuse vessels. But when those containers gather dust rather than color-coordinated art supplies or heirloom seeds, it might be time to admit defeat. You don’t need an increasingly crowded shelf of empty jars reminding you of your failure to meal prep or make eye-catching terrariums. In that case, the ultimate container — the recycling bin — can relieve you of this burden.  

The impact of reusing jars on the planet

Even though this practice falls under the dictionary definition of “reuse,” is it actually helping the planet? Not particularly. Paul Ferraro, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies human behavior and public policy, said that this kind of “consumerism-sided decision-making has very little effect on the environment, positively or negatively.”

Ferraro gets the impulse. “These minor decisions make us feel better psychologically,” himself included, he told Vox. But individual choices such as plastic versus glass or paper versus plastic “do not matter in a meaningful way compared to collective changes in how we manage our environment,” he said. It’s not that these decisions are utterly meaningless; more that they’re overall “without significant impact,” he said. 

If reusing jars you already have keeps you from buying a slew of Tupperware online, great. But if the hunger to acquire new and better reusable vessels has you ordering glass containers from e-commerce sites and getting them shipped overnight, you might be canceling out any of that good when you account for packaging, emissions, and manufacturing.   

Ferraro “would not encourage anybody to waste much time” agonizing over specific decisions like glass versus plastic —“worrying about whether there’s an optimal choice for packaging is misplaced energy.” The calculations that go into it are complicated and very variable, with little to show for it in the end. Glass has higher upfront environmental impacts than plastic, per Ferraro: producing it is energy intensive, and it’s heavier so it costs more to transport. The concern with plastic, meanwhile, is what happens after its disposal — if it’s treated as litter, it’ll break down and leach microplastics into the environment. And your ability to recycle it depends on the recycling practices where you live. “So by and large, the rule of thumb is if I’m going to reuse that glass and it’s going to displace other purchases that I would have made, then the glass can be a better choice,” he says. “But the difference is going to be tiny.” 

Of course, it’s much easier to commit to reusing containers than, say, utterly changing the way the United States manufactures products — the latter feels a little above our individual pay grade. But if you want to do your part as an individual to stop climate change, Ferraro says forgoing a cross-country plane ride “would be vastly more impactful on the environment than any of my consumer decisions throughout the whole year,” he said. Ensuring your home is well-insulated is another more effective choice. 

So if you’re torturing yourself by holding onto containers you’ll never use for the sake of Mother Earth, release your chains and toss them in the recycling bin. But for many collectors, it’s not about that. 

Lynch said that she thinks of the spirit of her grandmother whenever she puts something from her jar collection to good purpose. “Every time I find a new use for something that I have hung onto for a while, I feel vindicated,” she said. “Like, oh, I knew there was a reason I was keeping this.”

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. 

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

Update, July 20, 2026, 2 pm ET: This story, first published July 17, has been updated with the current case numbers and developments in the search for the source of the outbreak.

Have you been looking at the lettuce aisle at your grocery store with a wary eye since the diarrhea outbreak began? You’re not alone. This is the summer, which should be high time for fresh produce. But the ongoing emergency has even doctors asking themselves unthinkable questions: Should I stop eating salad? Are any fruits and vegetables safe?

The disease in question, cyclosporiasis, is caused by the parasite cyclospora, which can infect people when it is attached to fresh produce and then consumed. Watery diarrhea — described by public health authorities as “frequent” and “sometimes explosive” — is the most common symptom.

Michigan health officials said last week that they suspect lettuce or bagged salad to be the culprit for the parasite-driven outbreak in the state that has sickened more than 6,100 people. But identifying the specific products to blame has been a challenge. On Thursday, the Washington Post, citing anonymous federal officials, reported the outbreak may trace back to Taylor Farms products that were used by Taco Bell. But then, on Sunday, the FDA said that the tests showing the Taylor Farms product contained cyclospora had been false positives. As of Monday afternoon, the source of the outbreak is still unclear, although Taylor Farms has continued a voluntary recall of its iceberg lettuce products.

I live in Ohio, where there have been nearly 1,200 cases, and I love salad kits. The current outbreak is a major cramp on my lunch plans — and I know I’m not alone. 

So, what do we do? I’ve consulted with a food safety expert and a dietitian to get the answers. The topline message is: Don’t stop eating your fruits and vegetables. They’re good for you. But be smart with your food hygiene.

“I don’t think we’re at that point of shying away from eating your green vegetables,” Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, told me. “The benefits overall still outweigh the risks.”

How can we still enjoy our summer produce in this time of cyclospora? Here’s a guide.

Here are the “red light” foods linked to prior outbreaks

While we don’t know for certain the cause of the current outbreak, cyclosporiasis has been linked with specific foods in the past. Let’s start with that list:

• Basil
• Bagged salads and salad mixes
• Cilantro
• Mesclun lettuce
• Parsley
• Raspberries
• Snow peas
• Sweet peas

These foods — either because of where they’re grown or their texture or both — have historically had a higher risk of carrying cyclospora. It might be wise to steer clear entirely for the time being — especially the prepackaged salad products.

The Michigan health department, for example, is urging people to avoid bagged lettuce and salad kits and to purchase whole heads of lettuce instead. And since the outbreak is impacting most states now, it’s advice we’d all be wise to heed.

Then there are “yellow light” foods that need careful cleaning

But for a lot of fruits and vegetables, including whole lettuce, you should still wash them thoroughly — because that’s always a good idea. If you need tips for washing your produce, we’ve got them. For heads of lettuce, for example, cut away the outer layers and wash in between each leaf as best you can. 

“Fresh produce is still generally safe, delicious and nutrient-dense,” Rosemary Trout, a food scientist at Drexel University, told me over email. 

But she gave a yellow light for any leafy greens or fruits and veggies that have textured edible skins. The more texture there is, the more of a risk there is because the parasite can stay attached more easily — even if it’s been diligently washed. Raspberries carry a higher risk than blueberries, for example, and those have been associated with earlier cyclosporiasis outbreaks.

Another point of emphasis: Several doctors have told me that, even if an item says it is prewashed, you should wash it again. And again.

But there are lots of “green light” foods you probably don’t need to worry about

Trout gave a green light to any canned fruits and vegetables, any produce that you cook — importantly, at high heat — at home, and any frozen fruits and veggies.

In general, these are Trout’s safety tips for prepping fruits and vegetables at this uncertain time:

• Be consistent and thorough — at least 20 seconds — when washing your hands and always use hot, soapy water. 
• Peel or remove the outside layer of the fruit or veggies — the rind of a watermelon or cantaloupe, for example, or the outer layer of a head of lettuce.  
• Don’t consume damaged, bruised produce. 
• Keep produce cold in storage, ideally for a relatively short amount of time. 

Get creative with your recipes

If you want to steer clear of any questionable produce or take the safest preparation route that you can, you might want to get a little creative with your recipes. With your lunch salad, for instance, “peeled, shredded carrots, thinly sliced radish, or thinly sliced cooked beets might be a nice substitute for leafy greens,” Trout said.

Heat remains the most surefire way to eliminate any cyclospora parasite that might be lingering on your produce. So look through your cookbooks for any dishes that feature grilled vegetables. Vox Even Better editor Rachel Miller (a more accomplished cook than I) suggested a few recent New York Times Cooking recipes, which you can check out via these gift links:

• Grilled halloumi and vegetables
• One-pan orzo with spinach and feta
• Orzo salad with peppers and feta

Peppers, eggplant, squash, and zucchini are your friends. They respond well to heat, and they are easy to clean. And even some leafy greens — like spinach — hold up nicely to sautéing. 

Support your local farmer’s market

Right now is also a great time to check out your local farmer’s market for produce. 

Dr. Kathleen Linder, who is the hospital epidemiologist at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, told me that she has been buying locally since the outbreak began. Prior outbreaks have been linked to produce that was grown elsewhere — whether in the US or internationally — and shipped long distances before it arrived on our grocery shelves. Summer is a crucial season for small farms and farmers’ markets; they shouldn’t be penalized for a health emergency that they had nothing to do with.

Buying locally could reduce the risk that your produce has been exposed to the parasite. Trout said you can ask your local growers about their water supply to make sure that what you are buying is safe.

“Single-source produce from a local farm with good manufacturing/farming practices in place, with a safe water supply, are good,” Trout told me. “Commercially processed, pre-packaged foods are likely combining produce from various farms, which may increase risk, despite good manufacturing practices in place.”

So while cyclosporiasis is an unwelcome concern as we plan our summer cookouts, it doesn’t need to stop you from enjoying fresh fruits and vegetables. Be a little more diligent about your food hygiene, get a little creative with what you’re preparing, maybe stop by a farmer’s market — and you’ll be fine.