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

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

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

Dear Fanning the Flame,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: What I’m reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem with dating right now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dating with walls up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letting your guard down

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

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

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

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

Editor’s note, September 20, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published last September.

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

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

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

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

Dear Scrupulous, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: What I’m reading

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

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

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

Even before the latest batch of alarming AI news, a lot of Americans were souring on AI. That may be for big, existential reasons — concerns about widening inequality, mass job loss, and the still-unclear environmental impact of data centers — or for very specific, personal, everyday ones, like being forced to use a worse version of Google search. 

None of this is to say that AI cannot be a useful tool for some people some of the time. It’s just that the untested technology was thrust upon millions of people who didn’t necessarily ask for it and really seem to not like it. More than twice as many Americans distrust AI as trust it, and a growing number of people think it will have a negative impact on productivity and economic growth, according to a recent survey by Gallup and the Special Competitive Studies Project. While about half of Americans now report using chatbots, a majority also think that AI will put their personal information at risk and nearly half think it will have a negative impact on society, according to a 2026 Pew study.

“It’s being forced on users, there’s no clear way to turn it off, and it feels like this unwelcome addition to their lives,” Rory Mir of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that defends digital privacy and free speech, told me. “It’s this kind of continued pattern of disrespect to users that I think is part of the pushback.”

If you want less AI in your life, opting out is not always easy. But there are things you can do to minimize your exposure. 

There are ways to turn off AI features, although the process can be tedious. There are also steps you can take to prevent your data from being used to train AI models, though it’s difficult to keep all of your online data away from web scrapers. 

I talked to five experts — including a computer scientist and a researcher studying AI resistance — who offered distinctive perspectives on what AI is doing to us, and who shared some simple and concrete steps you can take to push back against AI’s creep into our daily lives.

The AI that’s suddenly everywhere

In the early days, which were just a few years ago, you really had to know what you were doing if you wanted to test out AI. Now, it’s impossible to avoid. 

“More and more AI use is through its integration into digital products like search, email, camera apps, and social media,” Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, told me. “It will become increasingly hard to strip these out unless one is willing to forgo digital products altogether.”

What you’re specifically encountering is generative AI, and one of the most common types is a subset called large language models (LLMs), which ingest huge amounts of data and learn statistical patterns to predict and generate text. ChatGPT is powered by an LLM. The AI Overviews that sit on top of your Google search results come from an LLM. The grammar checker in your email app is likely powered by an LLM. Other subsets of generative AI include models that can produce images, video, audio, and software code. 

The data that makes many of these tools work has been scraped from the open web, pirated books, and rare print books that are subsequently being destroyed. Everything from Wikipedia articles to YouTube videos has become training data for LLMs, and in order for the models themselves to get better, AI companies need more fresh data, which is in increasingly short supply. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent. Future Perfect is also funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.)

As a result, some of these companies are venturing into their users’ profiles to find more data. Meta, for example, sparked global outrage in 2024 when it informed some Facebook and Instagram users that it was using their public photos and text to train its AI models. Meta still does this. That your family photos or social media updates are being used to train AI to look and sound more human is, at the very least, very dehumanizing.

Generative AI, of course, is not the only type of AI that’s invisibly moving levers in your digital life. Recommendation algorithms are arguably even more inescapable. They power everything from Amazon to Netflix to Spotify and dictate what we buy, what we watch, and what we listen to. If you have trouble picking out an outfit in the morning, it might be because your brain is used to having algorithms around to help make decisions. This is also dehumanizing. 

All of this — the societal harm, climate impact, the cognitive surrender — should be on your mind as you consider whether it’s worth enlisting these tools to write emails for you or to generate memes, according to Tania Duarte, founder of We and AI, a nonprofit focused on critical AI literacy. 

“People are becoming increasingly aware of not just the impact on themselves but on the impact on the society they want to live in and the future that they want to have,” Duarte told me. “Is it worth all of that?”

How to minimize your AI exposure

If you’re reading this, you’re probably doing so on a smartphone or a computer. So let’s start with the assumption that you’d like to continue using devices like these. 

If you’d like to minimize your exposure to AI, that presents a bit of a paradox. It’s seemingly impossible to use mainstream tech products without engaging with AI. But you can take steps to remove as much of it from your life as possible without going completely off the grid.

“You look for the spaces of agency rather than lamenting the fact that you can’t escape everything,” Dylan Orchard, a researcher at King’s College London who studies everyday resistances to AI, told me. “You can’t expect a perfect escape.”

Let’s start with the easiest options: You don’t have to use ChatGPT or Claude or Copilot. The same goes for Google Gemini and Apple Intelligence. If you’re happy with the way you access information online, save yourself the time. (Note: This will be much harder to do if you’re being required to use these tools at work or at school, so for the sake of this article, we’ll focus on the things you can control.) 

Things get more complicated when you consider how your existing devices or software have recently been AI-ified. If you’re using an iPhone, for instance, you might be aware that the latest operating system comes with an updated version of Apple Intelligence, a layer of AI that does everything from summarize your notifications to power a new Siri. Earlier this year, Google launched its own version of this layer called Google Intelligence, which it says will make Android transition “from an operating system into an intelligence system.” The same push toward cramming AI into every corner is also happening on Windows 11, where Microsoft Copilot promises to be helpful.

If you were happy with your phone or laptop when it was slightly dumber, however, you can turn these features off. You can also opt out of other AI features built into your device’s operating system. Here’s a helpful guide that gets into the weeds of how to do it; it covers Apple Intelligence; Google Gemini, including AI Overviews and AI writing help in Gmail; Microsoft Copilot; Meta AI; and Samsung Galaxy AI. Turning off the AI features on Android devices is more complicated than flipping a single switch, but it can be done.

A lot of your AI exposure will happen in your web browser, though, so you should consider ways to bypass those features or switch browsers. Here’s another helpful guide that explains how to remove AI content from search results as well as AI features built into Chrome and other browsers, along with Microsoft Office. If you want a quick fix, adding “-ai” to a Google search should get rid of AI Overviews and some AI content in the search results, but none of these hacks will guarantee that you avoid AI slop altogether. Using a privacy-focused browser, like DuckDuckGo, might do a better job at it than Google, though.

When it comes to other online activities, like shopping or scrolling on social media, avoiding AI gets even harder. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube lack a master switch that lets you opt out of all the many AI features on offer. Still, you can try to tone down the algorithmic sorting that all the apps use to serve you content by switching to a chronological feed or removing suggested content from your feed. (Try tapping the Instagram logo in the app and then hit “Following” to see just the accounts you follow.)

Unfortunately, once you dig into the various user agreements and privacy policies, you’ll find that it’s very difficult to avoid AI exposure on social media platforms. If you’re posting publicly, you should assume your content is being used to train that company’s AI models. (You can keep some of your data away from Meta’s crawlers by setting your Facebook or Instagram account to private. X also allows you to opt out of having your data used for training its AI.) If you want to turn off video summaries on Instagram Reels, too bad. You can’t. If you want to turn off comment summaries on Facebook, you’ll have to go four menus deep in your settings to find the right switch. The most straightforward way to avoid being used as training data is to stop using these apps entirely. Or at least stop posting your own content, which is easier said than done, but worth considering if you really want to resist the AI takeover.

There’s a programming term that describes the inundation of AI features and slog of opting out: “user-hostile.” It’s a play on the term “user-friendly,” and it describes software that values the company’s priorities over the end users. You may love AI, although that’s doubtful if you’ve read this far. If it drives you crazy, though, you should feel at least a little bit empowered to know that there’s a way to reclaim the experience you had and loved without AI — or to use AI on your own terms. 

“Ultimately, I think the important thing for folks to keep in mind is that AI is just a tool,” said Mir from EFF, “and it makes sense to want control over your own tools, including the option to not use a tool if it’s not right for you.”

It’s frustrating that we have to deal with this at all, if only because most of us did not ask for our cyber existences to be sullied by untested tech. But it’s actually refreshing to consider that, because of a never-ending onslaught of annoying features, AI might actually discourage us from using social media so much.

If anything, the extent to which we feel the need to flee from AI also reflects our craving for something real, that makes us feel more connected and more human. So when AI summaries interrupt your time on Instagram, consider texting your friends a handful of photos from your week or calling them on the phone. If you’ve finally seen one too many AI slop videos on TikTok, put on a classic movie or TV show. 

At the very least, put down your phone and take a walk outside; your attention span will thank you for it. Yes, your individual rejection of AI might be a drop in the bucket for these huge tech companies, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing anyway.

Correction, September 21, 2:10 pm: The way this story originally represented Tania Duarte’s comments has been revised to clarify her concerns with AI.

Why do I cry when I see a donkey? 

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

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

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

But the donkeys keep disrupting that notion.

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

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

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

What religious tradition can teach us about the souls of animals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My wife says I’m a people pleaser. I want to turn over a new leaf (maybe to please her?!) so I’m making a resolution to be less of a weathervane and stand up for myself more. But it’s hard — I love to fit in. I’m a joiner and a collaborator. It’s not that I’m passive, it’s more that I find other people’s “ways of being” contagious. Sometimes I catch myself slipping into imitation of the friends or colleagues I’m talking to.

What’s a chameleon to do? Or, more scarily, who am I when I’m alone? How do I find out who I really am?

Dear Identity Crisis,

At first glance, it’s a bit funny to be accused of being a people pleaser as if it’s entirely a bad thing. It sounds like you have others’ interests genuinely in mind, and that seems like a nice way to build connection.

But I find the term people pleaser to also be a sneaky euphemism. Do you want to know how this sort of behavior is often discussed in the psychological literature? In studies, it’s not always called people pleasing; it’s called lying. 

In fact, wanting to please other people is an incredibly prevalent motivation for lying; it’s more common than lying for personal gain or pleasure. When psychologists evaluated the top reasons that people lied in their everyday life, many wanted to seem more agreeable. Their lies support seemingly magnanimous goals, like complimenting a friend or making sure a social interaction went well. But they were lies all the same, defined by the researchers as a “message that one gives to another in which they are deliberately deceiving them.” 

I find this shift in perspective helpful, if a little harsh, if you’re looking to break a people-pleasing habit. It’s one thing to think about yourself as dedicated to keeping other people pleased. But when you consider that actually, all of your interactions are suffused with lies, the approach becomes a bit more unsavory. 

Imagine the situation in reverse: What if you found out that all the time you had spent with a close friend, they were keeping their real thoughts and feelings from you? You might feel differently about the time you’d spent together. I can bet it certainly wouldn’t feel as authentic. 

I used to be a bartender, and I would be nice and mildly obsequious to frequent customers. Several of them I genuinely liked. But I’ll never forget the uncomfortable moments of running into a regular elsewhere — and their figuring out that we weren’t actually friends. There’s a distance between two people when one’s main role is to please the other. You are creating that distance, even if you may not realize it, and not even getting tipped for it. 

So for starters, try trusting that the people around you are able to handle your real thoughts and feelings. But what are your real thoughts or feelings? This points to the bigger conundrum you face: Who is your true self? 

You’re in good company worrying about this. Religious figures, philosophers, and scientists alike have been trying to figure out if there even is a continuous self, and if there is, what is it made up of? 

Scientifically speaking, there’s not a part of your brain that’s “truer” than others, or where the true self resides. But your ideas about your true self matter, according to research by Rebecca Schlegel, a social scientist at Texas A&M University. She has found that people have greater well-being and find their lives to be more meaningful if they think that they’ve made choices that align with who they “really” are. 

When people make a decision that they think aligns with their own true self, it regularly leads to feeling more satisfaction with that decision — more so than choices steered by considering what other people want, by religious belief, or by advice from others. 

Doing this yourself can be remarkably simple. In one experiment, Schlegel asked participants to make an arbitrary decision and told some to “use your true self” to make up their minds, and others to “use rational thinking.” Those who framed their choices as being guided by their true self were much happier with their selection. For you, it could be that just introducing the question — what would my true self do? — can start making your life feel more like it belongs to you. 

If it feels odd to ask your true self what to do, defining your truest self as what’s moral about you isn’t a bad place to start. Researchers have found again and again that when they ask people which of their traits feel the “truest,” it’s usually the parts that are morally good. When I call my mother on her birthday, that’s my true self. When I say something hurtful to my friend, that’s a deviation from my true self, who knows better. I wasn’t myself this morning, I might say as an apology. So you could make a list of your best qualities, like your generosity or your creativity. Then, when you ask what your core self would do, you’ll have even more specific guideposts to follow. 

Of course, if having a true self still doesn’t feel relatable, you can turn to an approach I’ve found helpful in my own life from Eastern traditions, like Buddhism and Taoism. They endorse the idea that there is no rigid self at all. In Buddhism, this is called anatman, which translates roughly to “no self.” This teaching emerged in response to an earlier Hindu belief: a concept called “atman,” which asserted that all people had an eternal and unchanging core, similar to a soul. Anatman was a rebuttal to that idea.

I’ve found that anatman relieves some of the pressure around all of this. We feel as if there should be an essence to us, some permanent quality that persists over time that you can point to. But anatman reminds us that there’s no aspect of the self that doesn’t change.  

Life is long, and we transform throughout it. As we grow, we learn new physical skills like playing soccer and the piano, and eventually acquire back problems and wrinkles. Our minds evolve too. We read novels, maybe we can do calculus, and we develop political convictions. Hopefully, we gain the skills of being kind and patient. In all of these developments, change is the only constant. This is why the Buddha thought that you couldn’t find the singular, stable self in any of these places — not the mind, the physical form, our habits, or our perceptions. “What is impermanent, subject to change…cannot be taken to be ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ or a ‘self,’” the Buddha taught. 

You asked what you, as a chameleon, should do? You could frame everything you do as being in service to your deeper self. Or you could try halting the search for a strictly defined, enduring version of you, and start making decisions based on who you want that person to become.   

Bonus: What I’m reading

• My book club just read Love, Always, a novel by Ann Beattie, about a group of people who start a magazine in rural Vermont. It’s a summery tale, though somewhat frustrating, about what happens when people don’t change themselves, and only follow their worst instincts. 
• This is a fascinating story of multiple selves in Popular Mechanics by Michael Natale. It documented what happened when seven men confessed to being the culprit of a plane hijacking in 1973 in the Pacific Northwest.
• Over the course of several nights recently, I watched the 1926 silent movie, Faust, directed by F.W. Murnau. It’s a haunting tragedy about the consequences of wanting to hold onto a quality of yourself indefinitely — in this case, staying young forever. I was amazed by the special effects they pulled off for that era! An evergreen reminder that if someone promises you something that’s too good to be true (especially if he looks like the devil), it probably is. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One person’s loneliness is another’s business opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Masking” a symptom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting a price tag on relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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