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

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

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

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

Who are you bailing on?

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

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

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

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

What’s the occasion? 

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

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

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

How annoying is it for you to attend?

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

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

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

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

What’s your excuse?

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

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

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

What are the consequences?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron Perzanowski, University of Michigan law professor

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

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

Buy an iPhone? In this economy? 

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

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

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

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

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

Apple adopts its final form

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Pew-Warmer,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: What I’m reading

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

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