It’s a great detection tool, but if your plant is infested with thrips or spider mites it may not be enough …

The problem
The worst pests are the ones you can’t see; thrips and spider mites are tiny and very good at hiding on the undersides of leaves, in leaf joints and along stems. By the time you notice the damage – silvery streaks, speckling or fine webbing – the infestation is usually well under way. Early detection is the difference between a quick fix and a full-blown outbreak.

The hack
Use a sticky lint roller to pick up pests that are hard to see. The idea is it works as both a detection tool, and a light physical intervention, lifting adults and eggs before they multiply.

Continue reading...

© Composite: Olga Yastremska/Getty Images

© Composite: Olga Yastremska/Getty Images

© Composite: Olga Yastremska/Getty Images

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. 

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.”

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My mom was excited and confused when she opened her Apple Watch at Christmas a few years ago. “What a nice gift!” A pause. “What am I supposed to do with this?” We told her the truth: A smartwatch can do all kinds of useful things.

Fitness tracking became the thing my mom latched onto. She loved counting her steps and seeing how many miles she walked in a day. It motivated her to become more active, too. We didn’t tell her until much later that the Apple Watch’s fall detection feature was the real reason we got her the watch. The feature worked, too.

On the coldest day of the year, this past winter, my mom tripped on an uneven sidewalk and broke her wrist. The Apple Watch called 911 almost as soon as she hit the ground, and we took an ambulance to the hospital, where my sister, who was nearly a thousand miles away, texted and asked what was wrong. She’d been watching my mom’s location on Apple’s Find My app, a fact that we revealed to my mom for the first time when she was in the emergency room. We also had to confess that the Nest security cam we’d set up in her living room was indeed useful in spotting intruders but also let us check in on her from time to time. 

My mom wasn’t thrilled about any of this. She realized that these handy gadgets doubled as surveillance devices, and we’d essentially be spying on her.

But at the same time, she recognized why we wanted to keep an eye on her. If she’d fallen alone at home alone, for instance, an easy way to call for help could’ve been a lifesaver. 

Perhaps grappling with how to spy on your aging parents — ethically! — is something you’re grappling with, too. A growing number of people are weighing the privacy trade-off as boomers get older and their millennial children get more involved. Roughly 59 million Americans now help take care of an adult over 50, up from 34 million a decade ago. A third of those are sandwich-generation caregivers, meaning they’re looking after their parents and their own children at the same time. It can be an overwhelming task. So enlisting a home security system, like Nest, or a wearable, like an Apple Watch, to keep an eye on their parents seems like a time-saving way to gain some peace of mind. It certainly helped my sister and I feel better about our mom aging in place.

It turns out, a growing community of researchers and tech developers has thought a lot about this problem that many of us are now facing. There are labs focused on how technology can make growing older more humane, as well as federally funded research efforts and startup accelerators from groups like AARP working on solutions. All of the experts I spoke to for this story told me the same thing: Good communication is essential.

And there’s a whole cottage industry of tech for older adults, known as age-tech, that includes everything from healthcare gadgets, like the Hero Smart Pill Dispenser, and more futuristic devices, like the social robot ElliQ, that promise to help seniors combat loneliness. Many of these products and services are designed to help keep older adults safe and to help them age in place. Some, like the Haelo smart ring, are designed to do it all, everything from fall detection to health tracking to emergency alerts if something suddenly looks wrong. Others, like Life360, use software designed to track kids to keep an eye on their grandparents.

The big challenge with all of this, however, is finding a way to implement it in a way that respects the aging loved one’s privacy and independence. Boomers and Gen Xers didn’t grow up with as much tech in their lives as younger generations — much less gadgets that could double as monitoring devices — so introducing these tools stands to alienate them. And beyond that, it’s an ongoing challenge to ensure that technology reduces a caregiver’s mental load rather than add to it. After all, too much tech can create new problems rather than solve existing ones. If the overwhelm becomes too much to bear, everyone involved might just abandon the effort. 

“Start with: What do they need support for and what is the best solution for that?” Wendy Rogers, director of the Human Factors and Aging Lab at the University of Illinois, told me. “Sometimes it’s technology, sometimes it’s not.” 

You might be surprised by what technology can do, when it’s purposefully designed and properly introduced into an aging person’s life.

If you’re a caregiver — Rogers prefers the term “care partners” — you should think of this problem-solving project as a collaboration. Start the conversation with your parents or loved ones early and maintain an open dialogue about how it’s working out. Perhaps most importantly, keep updating the plan as time goes on and lives change. And this might go without saying, but try to avoid any big surprises.

Don’t wait until an emergency

It’s difficult to know when to offer an older adult help, even if that help is as simple as a smartwatch. On one hand, you don’t want to offend or infantilize them. On the other, if you wait too long, you might find yourself trying to set up a monitoring system when it’s no longer optional, like after a fall or other health scare. In these instances, you risk rushing to a solution before you identify the specific problem. 

Waiting until an emergency to start thinking about this also necessarily means there’s less time to plan. That sets the younger person up for a situation in which they’re inundated with more information than they can manage. If you set up a smart camera, like a Nest, to notify you every time your parent wakes up and goes into the kitchen, you’re bound to face a huge stack of notifications every time you open your phone and no real strategy for separating the signal from the noise. Good planning helps you to avoid looking at all that raw data and instead look for deviations from the norm. Once I involved my mom in this process, we had the chance to clarify not only the details of her routine but also our goal in keeping tabs on her. In the end, she had no doubt this all came from a place of love.

“In those cases, the technology serves as a safety net, not to check every day what’s going on but to be notified when something doesn’t seem to be happening the way it was supposed to,” said George Demiris, a professor of informatics at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. 

You can imagine the broader implications of this safety net concept. If your goal is to make sure your parent is going about their daily routine, you don’t actually need cameras at all. Motion sensors can do the job just as well, all while maintaining privacy. There are even camera-free systems, like Nomo Smart Care and Silvie, designed to spot worrisome deviations from an older person’s routine. Even still, the benefits of planning — at the very least, identifying a specific problem in need of a solution — will make it more likely that you’ll maximize the technology’s benefit.

Make privacy and empathy central to your approach

The first step in planning to use tech to monitor your parents is simply talking. You should have a conversation with them to find out what worries they have and consider those alongside your own. Ask what level of monitoring they’d be comfortable with. When the time comes, teach them how to use the tech you’re introducing into their life. Give them the agency to make changes and even turn off the tech when they want.

One way to go about this is to try reversing the roles. Consider how you’d feel if someone wanted to install a bunch of surveillance cameras in your home and track your every move. If you’re asking an older loved one to wear a health tracker, think about why a device like that might be useful to you. Heck, you could even buy matching Apple Watches and start sharing your step count in order to show that you’re trying to stay active and healthy together.

“Saying, ‘Okay, let me stop for a second. Let me imagine I’m their age and my kid wants to do this thing — what would that be like?’” said Amanda Lazar, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information. “I think that can help you approach it more sensitively and in a more understanding way.”

The privacy question deserves extra attention. While motion sensor-based monitoring systems can offer extra privacy, there might be situations where you do want a camera. You should talk to your parent or loved one about where they’re comfortable with having a camera and what level of control they’d like to have over it. If you’re thinking about tracking someone with an AirTag or through an app, tell them you’re doing it and explain how it works. They won’t enjoy being surprised if you pull a Big Brother and start asking about specific whereabouts.

All that said, if the person you’re helping care for has dementia or other cognitive issues, these conversations are more complicated. You should talk to their doctor about their individual needs, potential tech solutions, and the possibility of involving professional caregivers.

Start simple and with tech people actually want to use

There’s a reason my sister and I bought my mom an Apple Watch and not a Life Alert pendant. We knew she’d like it, if not for the fitness tracking, then at least as a fashion accessory. And, as a direct result of liking it, she’d wear it. Indeed, we were nervous about her falling, so the fall detection feature was a selling point. But as someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking and writing about gadgets like these, I knew that some of the health tracking features could help be active and have fun doing so. Now, every other time I call, she tells me how many miles she walked that day.

If you’re considering a monitoring device for your parents or an older loved one, think about what they might actually want to use. For many people, smart speakers are a great way to introduce potentially lifesaving tech into the home. Your dad might like asking Alexa for recipe advice, and you might find comfort in the fact that he can also ask Alexa to call 911 if he falls. “Engaging people with technology tools early on and making it part of their everyday repertoire can be very helpful,” said Rogers, “and then as their needs change you can increase the support.” 

Down the line, it’s relatively seamless to connect cameras, motion sensors, smart locks, or smoke alarms to systems like these. And because the older adult has been in the loop from the start, you can teach them how to use these devices, and they can remain aware of what you can see on your end. Again, the empathy-focused approach is more likely to win someone over.

Change your plan when life changes

Like anything related to tech, you’ll need to do some software updates along the way. And I don’t mean making sure your Nest camera firmware is up to date. You’ll want to revisit your conversation about monitoring with your parents or loved ones at least once a year. You might try doing it over the holidays when you’re all together or when there’s a need for some tech support. Regardless, it’s essential to communicate about what’s working and what’s not.

These conversations can also be opportunities to talk about other ways you might help. Beyond monitoring their physical space, some aging parents could benefit from some help in the digital world, especially as they’re being targeted by a growing number of AI-powered scams. Do they need help managing their finances or keeping track of login credentials? Do your parents know what a passcode is? They might not ask you for help with these things, and again, it’s better to get out in front of issues before an emergency happens.

“Everyone’s in denial,” said Amelia Hay, a vice president at AARP Innovation Labs. “Everyone’s thinking their parents are fine, whatever, and then something happens where you’re in a state of emergency.”

So don’t wait. And don’t be in denial. Aging, as much as some tech billionaires would like to deny it, is one of those things in life that’s inevitable. If everything seems fine now, that means it’s a great time to start planning for when things go sideways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Exploited for content”

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

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

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

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

Distraction-free connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With advice from infectious disease experts, I tested a low-effort way to pasteurize eggs at home.

Salmonella outbreaks are seemingly everywhere right now. A good temperature probe is the last and best line of defense.

Editor’s note, August 23, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in February.

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.

I’m a woman in my 30s and I think I want to have a child, but I have a health condition that makes it harder (not impossible) to get pregnant than for most women. It would also make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people. It wouldn’t be permanently disabling, but the physical effects would be bad enough that I really don’t want to be pregnant.

I’m fortunate enough that I can probably afford to get a surrogate through a reputable agency. But surrogacy is frowned upon and often considered unethical. Long ago, I knew someone who said she loved the idea of being pregnant and providing gestation as a service to other people, so maybe in theory, it is possible for someone to freely choose to be a surrogate without being coerced by financial need? But even if it could be done ethically, there’s such a stigma around it and I fear being judged by friends and family. There seems to be a sense that there’s something wrong, unnatural, selfish, or unwomanly in wanting to have a biological child but not wanting your own body to be the vessel for it. 

Plus, it’s not like I’m the only person in the world for whom pregnancy would suck. I think my experience probably would be worse than average, but pregnancy is just an unpleasant thing overall so I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body. I’d love your help with this.

Dear Really Don’t Want To Be Pregnant,

There are some ethical questions about surrogacy that it’s genuinely worth asking, and some that I don’t want you to devote another second to — so let’s start there.

As you said, there’s a cultural stigma around not wanting to turn your body into a vessel for childbearing — it’s deemed “wrong” or “unwomanly.” But that idea is pure garbage. The idea that there’s some “proper” way to be a woman is a patriarchal construct; anyone who tells you you’re “unwomanly” for not wanting to gestate is reflecting sexist expectations that women’s bodies should be available for reproductive labor.

So to the extent that your fear of being judged is about that, please don’t give it another thought. But of course, there are real moral questions that surrogacy brings up.

I’ll tell you right off the bat that I do think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable in some situations. First, it helps that surrogacy is not one monolithic thing. There’s a big distinction between commercial surrogacy (where you pay someone to carry a baby) and altruistic surrogacy (the unpaid version, where the surrogate carries the baby as a literal labor of love). It’s not easy to find an altruistic surrogate — after all, pregnancy is dangerous business — but I agree with your intuition that if you’re lucky enough to know someone willing to volunteer for the role, opting for that is a good way to avoid most concerns about commodification or exploitation. 

Within commercial surrogacy, a second distinction has to do with where the surrogate lives. There’s a moral difference between hiring a surrogate in a developing country and hiring one in, say, the US. In countries like Georgia, for example, surrogacy agencies have been known to recruit at domestic violence shelters — some women see surrogacy as the only way to win financial freedom from an abusive spouse. Ukraine, Cyprus, and several others are also known to have ethically problematic surrogacy industries.  

But American surrogates are typically not low-income; they’re usually middle-class white women with husbands and kids of their own, and they have other economic opportunities available to them. The better surrogacy agencies screen out poor women, who are at risk of coercion. That empirical context means there’s less (though not zero) potential for exploitation in the US, compared with international surrogacy.

Another reason I think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable is that for many, many people, the urge to have kids — including ones who are biologically related to them — feels like a need and not just a want. 

Many opponents of surrogacy argue that nobody has a “right” to a biological child, so if you can’t or don’t want to be pregnant, too bad. And those opponents are right that nobody has an absolute right to have a baby — otherwise, the state would be obligated to ensure surrogates, egg donors, and sperm donors were made available regardless of their own willingness to participate! But people may still have a qualified right — the kind of right that we generally honor but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others. 

When it comes to people who are physically unable to create a biological child — when they have what doctors call a “medical indication” — I think the qualified right to have a kid means that surrogacy can be ethical, provided it meets certain criteria like informed consent.

But your situation is trickier because it’s not impossible for you to get pregnant — it’s more that, for certain reasons, you don’t want to. Typically, your case would be referred to as “elective surrogacy.” Some professionals will refuse to arrange surrogacy if they deem it elective rather than medically indicated.

And yet, doctors are increasingly recognizing that the line between “medically indicated” and “elective” is not so tidy. 

While elective surrogacy is often associated with vanity — it brings to mind a celebrity who doesn’t want to be pregnant because she doesn’t want to “mess up” her figure — it’s not like everyone in the elective camp is there for cosmetic reasons.

What about someone who could get pregnant but is deathly afraid of giving birth because she had a traumatic experience — like, say, her best friend dying in childbirth? Or what about someone who’s trans and who physically could carry a pregnancy, but who knows it would cause such gender dysphoria that there’s a risk of serious psychological harm? Shouldn’t a mental health need be considered a type of medical need?

These are not hypothetical experiences — real people have testified to them — but they often haven’t been taken seriously as medical needs. I suspect that these people have endured what the contemporary philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “epistemic injustice.” 

Epistemic injustice refers to “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” When society denies someone the credibility to assess their own life experience, or discounts an important part of that experience because of a gap in our collective interpretive resources, that can be an example of epistemic injustice. I think people who fall in between medical categories are too often at risk of being wronged in this way, and I don’t want to see that happen to you.

So I want to acknowledge that I don’t know what health condition you’re referring to when you say you have a condition that would “make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people.” Since I don’t know the details, I’d encourage you to ask yourself: How much more uncomfortable? How much more disfiguring? And how heavy and lasting a toll would that discomfort or disfigurement take on your overall well-being?

Only you can really try to answer that last question, because the same effects can land differently for different people, depending on how well-resourced we are financially, socially, psychologically, and even spiritually. 

Once you’ve thought about how big and enduring the risk of harm is to you, try asking yourself this: Is the risk to you so much greater than the risk to a woman of average health that you feel comfortable transferring the risk of pregnancy and childbirth onto her?

Some people will tell you that question is irrelevant. They will say that the only value that matters here is autonomy — yours and the potential surrogate’s — and if you and she both consent to a surrogacy contract, and she is not coerced into it by financial desperation, then that’s that!

But there may be another important value at stake here: justice. 

As far as I can tell, your case is in a gray area — surrogacy is neither obviously “medically indicated” nor obviously “elective” based on the information you shared. If you ask yourself, “Do I think there’s a significant risk that carrying a child would significantly harm me?” and you answer “Yes!” — then some doctors would say surrogacy is medically indicated. But if the answer you feel bubbling up is, “Well…no, not really,” then you may be closer to the “elective” side of the spectrum. And then I think it becomes reasonable to inquire whether it feels fair to ask another woman to take on the considerable risks of pregnancy and childbirth.

You wrote of pregnancy, “I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body.” That suggests that you currently see yourself as more in the elective camp. I urge you to give yourself the space to really interrogate that with an equal measure of honesty and self-compassion. If honesty compels you to say you don’t feel justified in putting someone else’s body in harm’s way in a situation where she otherwise wouldn’t be, then maybe you’ve got your answer. 

But if you’re discounting the risk of psychological harm to yourself because you don’t think that “counts” as real need, please know that mental health is just as medically legitimate as physical health. And if you talk to a medical professional about the option of surrogacy, please talk to more than one so you’re less at risk of getting boxed into a category that doesn’t capture you right. 

At the end of the day, perhaps none of us can be a perfect interpreter even of ourselves. But you get to be the interpreter-in-chief — with both the power and responsibility that implies.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This horrifying New York Times Magazine story about the global fertility industry captures why I do think it’s unethical to work with a surrogacy agency in a country like Georgia. These surrogates are not in a position to give informed consent.  

• “Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?” asked Shayla Love in the New Yorker recently. I now feel cognitive dissonance about all the times I thought I was feeling cognitive dissonance!

• Don’t miss “I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.” This essay by Marcus Olang’, explaining why his writing is often mistaken for AI slop, is both surprising and maddening. Turns out it’s really hard to not write in the Queen’s English when an entire colonial legacy has drilled that style into you from birth. 

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

From halting my doomscrolls to automating air-quality checks, Apple’s streamlined Shortcuts app is my favorite iOS 27 feature.

It is possible to achieve your desired work-life balance on your smartphone. Just set up separate accounts using this built-in Android feature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why your camera roll isn’t a family history

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to get the best photos off your phone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What originally looked like clutter turned out to be my new favorite gadget for organizing my family’s life.

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

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

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

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

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

Get creative — but don’t exaggerate

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

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

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

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

Tell a story

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

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

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

Be selective with how much you share

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

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

Convey your willingness to get to know someone

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

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

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

Use photos to accompany your bio

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

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

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

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

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

I am a (gracefully?) aging mother of three and proud grandmother of four. I keep hearing about how my generation (okay, I am a boomer) is hoarding wealth and failing to pass it down. 

When I look at my lifestyle, I’m facing a fork in the road. Either I splurge on a lovely retirement, or I save so my kids and their kids can have an easier life. We’re all middle-class, so this is not a question of survival. The kids have college funds. Do I owe it to my descendants to scrimp as I age? Surely it’s not right for me to spend my savings on bucket-list vacations…How should I balance spending on myself and on the others that will come after me?

Dear Rainy Day Funder,

I’m so glad to hear you’re not in financial survival mode. But you are facing some economic constraints: You can’t splurge on a luxurious retirement while at the same time saving a substantial nest egg for your kids and grandkids. 

It sounds like this feeling of either-or is causing you some anguish. The instinctual response is, as you suggest, to hoard as much as possible for your progeny to use later on. But at the same time, that feels like it’s zero-summing your own experience in your golden years. 

So I’d like to introduce you to an economic thinker who has some advice that might surprise you. John Maynard Keynes, 19th-century British economist, would say: Don’t save your money!

Keynes wrote that when times are tough, people react by keeping their money close, and not spending it. But this sets in motion what he called the paradox of thrift. One person’s expenses are actually another person’s income, he pointed out; if everyone saved their money, no one would make money either, and a recession could drag on and on. In the end, people’s savings would, paradoxically, go down, even though they were scrimping. 

We can apply the paradox of thrift to your own family as a mini-economy. Inheritance has traditionally worked by setting aside large chunks of your assets to pass along to your children and grandchildren — which could be helpful when the day of windfall comes. But why wait? And would waiting actually stymie your family’s financial potential? 

In past generations, an inheritance like this often happened far earlier. I’m comforted that we are living longer (an average of a decade or more longer) than in the mid-20th century, but this sets up new issues, as you’re stuck in, with when and in what quantity to transfer any extra resources. 

Now, as people retire with decades of good life to enjoy ahead of them, they are often doing so at the very same time their adult children are the most financially stressed: They are trying to buy homes, they’re in the busiest middle part of their careers, and many have children of their own they’re raising and trying to save for. 

This doesn’t mean you have to give away all your money to your family so that they can spend it on the pleasures you have given up. Keynes wasn’t anti-savings so that money could be spent frivolously. He did believe that spending money was one of the best ways to give the greater economy a boost. Perhaps there are ways you could think about spending your money that stimulate your family’s internal economy, that also help you enjoy your retirement. 

For example, you could invest in a lakeside property to kick your feet up at — an asset that will appreciate in value over time and be sold at a profit, or be passed down through the generations to enjoy for many summers to come. Maybe you assist your children in buying a home — one with a comfortable guest suite. You could invest in a business your children want to start, and help them grow something that could accrue more wealth over time. Using your money these ways may even feel more like splurging than scrimping! Yet, it ideally would achieve both: a fun way to spend your hard-earned money now, and create more abundance for your family’s future. 

A hidden bonus of non-traditional inheritance moves like these is that they all involve spending more time together with your family and potentially even strengthening those relationships along the way. The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that there were three kinds of friends. Some are based on utility, and exist only because of what people can get from one another. Other friendships are based on pleasure, when you like doing things with someone. Finally, friendships of virtue persist because you stick by people who inspire you by their strong character. Simply setting aside your money is a relationship that leans utilitarian. Working on a shared meaningful project could help deepen your relationships with your kids and grandkids in those pleasurable and virtuous directions.   

Speaking of, I don’t think you need to be making these decisions alone. 

You used an interesting word in your question: Do you, as an individual, owe it to your family to set them up with a more comfortable financial future, at the expense of personal indulgences? A lot of the discussion around older generations’ money, and whether or how they should pass it on, avoids dealing with this sticky moral component. Why should parents give their kids money? 

I think there’s clarity to be found in thinking more closely about why we owe each other anything.  

There are few better thinkers to turn to than Confucius to consider our obligations to family. The fifth-century Chinese philosopher believed that we can’t understand ourselves only as individuals. You are nobody when you are alone; you only come alive as a mother, a daughter, or a sister. These relational roles each come with specific duties and ways of interacting. Successfully fulfilling these roles within the family has a bigger impact, according to Confucius. It’s what creates the foundations for a harmonious and functional society. For children in this web of relations, it’s critical to uphold filial piety, or the need to respect, honor, and care for parents as well as all of their other elders and ancestors. 

Filial piety has, over the years, been criticized for being too rigid, and setting overly high expectations for blind obedience and conformity in children. So I’ve been interested to see the concept of reciprocal filial piety emerge. In reciprocal filial piety, children have a genuine feeling of gratitude to their parents for raising them, and any obligation they feel is heartfelt — they want to return the favor and care for their parents too. 

As a half-Chinese person, I find it interesting that in family life in the West, filial piety is often reversed. There’s a lot of air time discussing what parents owe their children, and not so much the other way around.

For example, I noticed that you don’t mention how your family intends to care for you in the future, or what they might feel a sense of owing you. If you do take a Keynesian approach to your family and decide to spend your money in ways that could benefit everyone, it might be worth engaging in some Confucian-tinted conversations not only about what you owe everyone else, but what you all appreciate about each other.

You can reflect, together, on how your family is stronger because of all the ways you’ve chosen to look after one another, not only because of how much money is in the bank. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I think it’s worth having a copy of The Analects of Confucius lying around, which is full of nuggets of wisdom. One morsel I recently read was about how to best get along with others: “The gentleman harmonizes without being an echo. The petty man echoes and does not harmonize.” The lesson is that we don’t gain much by blindly following and copying what other people do. The most harmonious way to be in a society, or even a family, is to have interlocking roles that complement each other, like different pitches do in a choir. 
  
• I thought a lot about getting older when reading this piece on death doulas by Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker. It serves as a reminder that people outside of the immediate family can also help with life’s hardest transitions. 
  
• And, for something fun: I enjoyed this investigation by Natalie Wolchover in Quanta on why she (or anyone) is left-handed. She explores left-handed stigma and neuroscience, as well as a theory about humans using their right hands because they once were better to win fights with. 

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

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

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

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

1. Figure out your “play style”

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

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

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

2. Make your environment more conducive to play

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amisha Jha, University of Miami neuroscience professor

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

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

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

Let your brain rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nilli Lavie, University College London psychology professor

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

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

Be intentional with your attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give yourself some constraints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I arose to open to my beloved,

    and my hands dripped with myrrh,

my fingers with liquid myrrh,

    on the handles of the bolt.” 

Girl. Tell me more…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come away, my beloved,

    and be like a gazelle

or like a young stag

    on the spice-laden mountains.“

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