Fauci is a physician and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as chief medical advisor to President Trump during the period of Covid-19—who has subsequently become a scapegoat for those who didn’t like the restrictions that came with the pandemic. As Senator Rand Paul put it, based on the evidence-free conspiracy theory that Dr. Fauci funded research that led to the pandemic: “One million Americans died from COVID and not even an apology from Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

While we might recognize such claims as preposterous, it would be a mistake to treat these hearings as mere political theater. Those who are treating errors in the understanding of Covid-19 as criminal threaten one of the most important public goods we have during an infectious disease crisis: the willingness of experts to publicly admit mistakes.

Dr. Fauci has openly acknowledged missteps, communication errors, and evolving judgments in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic—an honesty that is not matched by his critics. Instead, his honesty has been leveraged by them to sow doubt in science itself.

But the reason we turn to experts during a crisis is not because they are omniscient. Of course they aren’t. It is because they learn faster and better than non-experts. Learning, however, is a naturally error-prone process. And learning when a novel infectious disease is fueling a global pandemic is particularly so. One can hope that scientists responding to such a crisis will be able to reduce uncertainties in a linear and predictable fashion. But that is not the norm.

As a social scientist, if I discover something new, when I present my findings to my colleagues, the most likely result is that they will tell me all the ways they think I might be wrong. My job is to prove that my findings hold even after considering their counterarguments. Skepticism is essential in the process of separating fact from fiction. We have more confidence in results that have survived such pressure-testing.

Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the pandemic received just this type of skepticism from other experts. And yet much of the political commentary surrounding these normal and essential controversies cited the evidence of controversy as proof the CDC was flailing.

This approach treats science as though the discovery of new facts unfolds like a treasure hunt where the first person to find the treasure opens the lid and everyone can see the treasure with their own eyes. In a treasure hunt, discovery and validation are essentially the same thing.

But science does not work this way. Take the discovery of HIV. Dr. Luc Montaignier identified the virus under an electron microscope in February 1983. Uncertainty surrounding whether the virus was causative or opportunistic led to more than a year of additional research, culminating in four papers published by Dr. Robert Gallo and his colleagues in 1984, that affirmed Montaignier’s finding. According to Montaignier, it was one of these publications, in particular, that “convinced the scientific community that this new retrolentivirus was the cause of AIDS.”

This example shows something that is true across the sciences. New discoveries that eventually become accepted as scientific facts can linger for an extended period as mere “claims” while uncertainties are addressed.

Critics argue that the scientific uncertainty around the discovery of the AIDS virus was unnecessarily prolonged and cost lives. If moving quickly on yet-to-be-validated evidence is the right approach during a pandemic, note that Fauci and his public health colleagues are currently being attacked for doing exactly that. Public health experts believed at the outset that COVID-19 was like SARS, with transmission most likely to occur late in the course of infection. Hence the guidance that directed the public and health care workers to wear masks when caring for patients already showing symptoms. Mounting evidence of asymptomatic infection eventually proved that COVID-19 transmission was very different from SARS, leading to new masking guidance.

When should public health experts act on early, but unvalidated, evidence versus taking the time to iron out uncertainties? While it may look obvious in hindsight, there is no magic formula that can sort out in advance when the better course will have been to slow down and validate versus act on plausible, but still uncertain, claims.

Climate scientists would almost certainly never argue their experience in the public eye has been a picnic. But they had one big advantage over those trying to guide the response to a pandemic driven by a novel infectious disease. Climate scientists had decades—as opposed to only weeks or days—to conduct research before they were asked to explain what they knew to the public. In fact, climate scientists did not always expect warming to result from burning fossil fuels. Up until the 1950s, the prevailing wisdom was that the oceans would absorb excess carbon dioxide so that there would be minimal if any warming. Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss, who together discovered the error, both received awards for their research.

When a novel infectious disease comes to town, the first cases detected are rarely the actual start of the outbreak. There are no tests to make a positive diagnosis. Some of the suspected cases turn out to have other causes. People who are infected are overlooked. Data collected at the outset is patchy and error-prone. As the public health community pivots to emergency response footing, they begin to collect data more systematically. Even so, new data can rapidly overturn early assumptions. The case definition for COVID-19 was updated almost weekly during the first 10 weeks of the pandemic.

Monday morning quarterbacking is easy. Try advising countries on how to manage a growing pandemic while the ground is moving beneath your feet.

As the United States’ performance during the COVID-19 pandemic is reviewed, even those who are not engaging in political grandstanding tend to reduce the effort to a scorecard that tallies the times experts were right versus the times they were wrong. Even if the reversals are few in number, they are barely tolerated. We usually give examinations to people after they have had time to learn and master the material. What is the right metric to use for public health experts who are trying to inform us when the answers are still being discovered?

Speaking of treasure, I think we were lucky during COVID-19 to have public health experts who were willing to admit mistakes as soon as they were discovered. Things will go markedly worse for us if, during the next pandemic, they are less forthcoming.

An earlier version of this article first appeared on MS NOW.

Victor Counted is a psychological scientist whose research across 40 African countries offers a data-rich rethinking of flourishing on the continent. His findings challenge the dominant narrative that Africa is “lagging behind” in development by showing a more nuanced picture of what it means to live a good life. We asked him more.

The Conversation: What is flourishing?

Victor Counted: Flourishing is more than economic growth or individual happiness. It’s a multidimensional state of being that reflects how people feel about their lives and how well their lives are actually going. So it also measures people’s values within their community.

The idea of well-being often carries a Eurocentric emphasis on the individual—personal satisfaction, autonomy, achievement. Flourishing accounts for how whole a person is in relation to their environment.

It includes the social, spiritual, and ecological contexts in which one lives. So, it’s not just about how one feels, but how one lives—fully, meaningfully, and in a satisfying relationship with the world around us.

TC: What’s the Global Flourishing Study?

VC: The Global Flourishing Study tries to measure global patterns of human flourishing. It’s an ongoing five-year longitudinal study in over 200,000 participants across 22 countries.

I was one of the team of global scholars brought together to examine the trends on what it means to live well across cultures and life circumstances.

The study identifies six key dimensions of flourishing:

• Happiness and life satisfaction
• Mental and physical health
• Meaning and purpose
• Character and virtue
• Close social relationships
• Financial and material stability

Participants rate how they’re doing in each of these areas on a scale from 0 to 10. Further questions capture experiences related to trust, loneliness, hope, resilience, and other related well-being variables.

                     

Of the 22 nations, five were African: Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Egypt.

While these countries didn’t top the global rankings (Indonesia and Mexico did), Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt all reported relatively high flourishing scores, especially when well-being was considered apart from financial status.

Nigeria, for example, ranked fifth globally in flourishing scores that excluded financial indicators—ahead of many wealthier nations. Nigerians indicated strengths in social relationships, character, and virtues (like forgiveness or helping others). But potential areas of growth included financial well-being, housing, ethnic discrimination, and education.

Overall, this suggests that while material resources matter, they’re not the only thing that determines well-being. Kenya ranked seventh, Egypt 10th, Tanzania 11th, and South Africa 13th. Each showed unique strengths in areas like meaning, social connection, or mental health.

TC: You did a separate study on flourishing in Africa. What did you find?

VC: In a 2024 study, we analyzed data from the Gallup World Poll (2020–2022) to explore 38 indicators of well-being across 40 African countries.

This study offered a more detailed and culture-sensitive picture of how Africans experience and prioritize flourishing. The dimensions explored were derived from both local and universal sources, allowing for regionally relevant insights.

We found that African populations often score high in meaning, character, and social relationships—despite economic hardship. This offers an important corrective to Western assumptions about well-being.

Some of our key findings were:

• There is significant diversity between and within African countries. Mauritius consistently ranked highest in life evaluations (overall satisfaction with their lives), while countries like Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe scored lowest.
• East African countries such as Rwanda and Ethiopia showed strong performance in social well-being indicators (like feeling respected or learning new things daily) even when economic indicators were low.
• Countries in West Africa, such as Senegal and Ghana, scored high in emotional well-being, with many people reporting positive daily emotions like enjoyment and laughter.
• Southern African nations, despite challenges like income inequality, displayed resilience through strong community ties and cultural practices rooted in the philosophy of ubuntu.

The results reinforced that flourishing in Africa cannot only be reduced to gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (a measure of the average economic output per person in a country)—nor to Western norms of success.

TC: What can African countries focus on to flourish?

VC: In my view, the path to greater flourishing lies in embracing local knowledge and investing in culturally relevant development priorities. Instead of following Western pathways—centered on individual advancement—Africa can model alternative flourishing pathways that reflect what matters most to African people.

1. Prioritize local knowledge systems. African ideas about a connected society—like ubuntu (southern Africa), ujamaa (east Africa), teranga or wazobia (west Africa), and al-musawat wal tarahum (north Africa) teach people to care for each other and live in peace. These values help people live meaningful lives and can inform leadership and legislation.

2. Redefine development metrics. Western development models focus on individual achievement, economic output, and material consumption. GDP per capita fails to capture the everyday realities and aspirations of African communities. We should also measure things like how happy people are, how hopeful they feel about the future, how strong and resilient their communities are, and how clean, safe, and dignifying their living environments are.

This is not a new idea—for years development scholars have called for a shift away from narrow economic indicators toward a focus on human dignity, agency, and the real opportunities people have to pursue the lives they value. What’s new is the growing availability of data and the momentum to take these alternative metrics seriously in shaping national policies and priorities.

3. Invest in education for character development. Quality education is essential to unlocking the continent’s potential to flourish. But Africa needs more than just academic skills and workforce readiness—it needs a strategy for intentional development of values and habits that shape how a person thinks, feels, and acts with integrity.

Part of the problem lies in how the humanities—fields like history, literature, philosophy, and religious studies—are often undervalued or underfunded in education systems. But it is precisely these disciplines that nurture moral imagination, critical reflection, and civic responsibility. We need educational models that form not just workers, but whole persons—people who can think ethically, act responsibly, and lead with character in their communities.

TC: What does Africa offer the world in terms of flourishing?

VC: Africa is not waiting to be saved. Across the continent, people are building communities of care, cultivating joy amid hardship, and passing on values of unity, faith, and compassion. This is what development looks like when rooted in human dignity.

Africa’s flourishing goals offer an alternative vision for development—one that starts with what Africa already has, not what it lacks. These are locally emic aspirations for well-being. They are shaped by Africa’s indigenous knowledge systems, cultural values, and religious/spiritual traditions. Pursuing these goals means prioritizing wholeness over wealth, community over consumption, and resilience over rescue.

The continent has so much to offer the world: wisdom, strong community values, and ways of staying resilient and living fully even in hard times. But many of these local insights are missing in the global science of well-being.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scaling up large health programs, working through complex systems, is what we do in global health. Guided by the science of epidemiology, we study how and why disease is distributed. We ask, why does disease “cluster,” affecting certain people, at certain times, in certain places? Understanding these patterns can provide the information needed to reduce the risk of disease and promote human health. So naturally, while listening to Jinpa, we wondered: could the statistical tools and methods of epidemiology also be used to “scale up” compassion? 

Epidemiology is a latecomer to compassion science. Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied compassion for decades. Spiritual traditions have taught compassion for centuries. Collectively, they have focused on cultivating the capacity for compassion in individuals. “Scaling up” requires broadening the field to include institutions, systems, and populations—which is precisely the strength of epidemiology. 

The novel idea that epidemiology might contribute to compassion science faced headwinds. Epidemiologists considered compassion to be too “soft,” too difficult to measure. Epidemiology is a quantitative science after all, for which precise measurement is crucial. On the other hand, compassion scholars and teachers warned that attempts to measure compassion would ruin it. Finding a “middle way” required innovative dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration. We started with two exploratory meetings at the Task Force for Global Health, a review of the compassion science literature through an epidemiologic lens, and, in March 2026, a special issue of the International Journal of Wellbeing, “Towards an Epidemiology of Compassion”. Our intent was to encourage scholars and thinkers from other disciplines to contribute their insights into how an epidemiologic approach could help to build a more compassionate world.

Challenging questions

While epidemiology has proven its value in public health, we found that applying it to compassion requires wrestling with several fundamental questions. First, do we have the right conceptual framing for compassion at a population level—are we thinking about it in the right way? Compassion educators who regard compassion as an individual human skill are doubtful. Only individuals, they say—not organizations or communities—have the capacity for warm-heartedness, which is necessary for compassion. However, they concede that organizations differ in their capacity to acknowledge suffering and respond with compassion, just as individuals do: Some are more compassionate than others. A reliable framework for understanding why compassion clusters in some organizations or systems more than others could provide clues for nurturing compassion in all organizations.

A second question is whether current epidemiologic and statistical methods are up to the task of analyzing the complexity of factors, interacting at multiple levels, that determine the extent to which compassion is present and how it is expressed. These factors include individual intent; physical, relational, historical, and emotional influences; and environmental and cultural determinants, among others.

Perhaps the most critical question for an epidemiology of compassion is that of measurement: What should be counted? Even at the individual level, measures of compassion rarely capture its essence. A recent scientific review by psychologist Cassandra Vieten and her colleagues found 503 measures of compassion and empathy—evidence that consensus is lacking. At the population level, outside the controlled environment of a laboratory, the challenge is even more complex. Measures of intention, empathic resonance, brain activity, or physiologic changes—which are useful in experimental contexts—are neither feasible nor reliable for studying compassion in populations. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva and Jennifer Mascaro have argued that, at the macro level, compassion can be measured by how well it is institutionalized through policies and actions. But are such policies and actions the same as compassion? Not according to those who insist that compassion is a skill or trait only of individuals, or that, for action to be considered compassionate, we must know that it is motivated by a positive intent. 

Gaining momentum

What began years ago as a vaguely defined notion among a small group of enthusiasts is gaining momentum. As an example, “Towards an Epidemiology of Compassion” featured 23 articles by more than 90 authors from a broad range of disciplines. Significantly, the articles provided much-needed perspective on conceptual frameworks, epidemiologic methods, and measurement. 

Conceptual frameworks. Working independently, several groups have proposed new conceptual frameworks to guide an epidemiology of compassion. Each of these frameworks or conceptual models emphasizes the need to understand how compassion manifests at multiple levels, including the individual, collective, and societal levels. Some of the frameworks describe how compassion “flows” across these levels, while others focus on determinants of compassion at different stages of life. Taken together, these conceptual models highlight the emerging understanding of compassion at the collective level and open new lines of inquiry into collective expressions of compassion—actions that are possible only through the shared intention and coordinated work of many people.

We have argued elsewhere, for example, that the field of global health, which seeks to alleviate and prevent suffering at a global level, is a manifestation of compassion. Exciting recent work on organizational compassion by Ace Simpson, Monica Worline, Jane Dutton, and others goes beyond these frameworks to describe the processes and features that characterize compassionate organizations. These include, for example, compassionate leadership; communication networks that alert staff to the presence of pain or suffering; roles, routines, and social networks that facilitate alleviation of suffering; and the use of physical space to increase staff accessibility and interaction.

Methods. The convenings at the Task Force for Global Health confirmed that epidemiologic methods are well-suited to studying compassion at the institutional and population levels. Methods used in chronic disease epidemiology, in particular, are designed to handle the extraordinary complexity of multiple “risk factors” interacting across different levels and time points. Other epidemiologic methods, such as geospatial analysis, can be used to map where and when specific forms of suffering (such as hunger) occur and whether resources (such as food pantries) have been put in place to address that suffering.

Measures. Although a single ideal measure of compassion remains elusive, significant progress has been made in refining and triangulating measures of compassion, particularly in health care systems. For example, Shane Sinclair and his colleagues have developed companion measures of compassion that take the perspectives of both patients and health care providers. Taking a systems approach, Anupama Jha and her colleagues developed a suite of measures to evaluate the impact of compassion training and health systems transformation in district hospitals in Bihar, India. Beverley Fehr and Susan Sprecher recently applied an epidemiologic lens to synthesize two decades of psychological research that used the same existing measure—the Compassionate Love Scale—and provided fresh insight into the clustering of compassion by time, place, and person.

Looking to the future

Since Jinpa’s keynote address in 2018, we’ve seen a global outpouring of interest in compassion and how it moves through human systems. Along with this interest has come a desire for a scientific approach that can guide research and inform practical efforts to nurture compassion in institutions and systems. Epidemiology contributes a population-level lens to compassion science that can help reveal and quantitatively describe the interplay of factors that enable compassion to arise in specific settings. So, what is needed now for compassion science to realize its potential through epidemiology?

Broaden the conversation. As Jinpa noted, we must reach beyond our own community to broaden the conversation. We must include voices from other disciplines—as well as voices of those who do not align themselves with any academic discipline. Progress on the central challenge of measurement can come only from a thorough understanding of compassion in different cultures and settings, incorporating perspectives across the breadth of human experience. We must learn particularly from Indigenous communities and colleagues in the global South. We need the perspectives of evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists, primate biologists, artists, peacebuilders, spiritual leaders, and theologians. And the conversation should extend more deeply within epidemiology itself, for example, to explore how the tools of infectious disease modeling and social epidemiology can help us understand how compassion is transmitted or spread across populations. 

Conceptual frameworks. There is much to be learned from in-depth exploration and comparison of the new conceptual models of collective compassion. Broadening and deepening the conversation to refine, apply, align, and learn from the new conceptual models can lead to an integrated framework, a conceptual scaffolding for further research and testing of ideas. 

Data. Epidemiology is a data-driven science. Advances in conceptual frameworks inevitably lead to new questions and stimulate the search for data to answer those questions. There is much to be gained from epidemiologic analysis of existing data, as shown by Fehr and Sprecher, as well as from including compassion-related questions in new research on human flourishing, happiness, and well-being. For example, analysis of compassion-related questions in the Global Flourishing Study by Julia Nakamura and her colleagues provides intriguing insight into the spatial distribution of compassion at a global level.

Systems perspective. Compassion science has largely focused on the giving of compassion by individuals. The recent increase in scholarship and interest in self-compassion and receiving compassion from others has opened a rich inquiry into how compassion “flows” across these dimensions, as well as the implications of such flow for well-being and mental health. In unpacking their multi-level framework, James Kirby and his colleagues argue that the systems in which humans live and work not only facilitate or constrain the flow of compassion among individuals, but these systems also serve as “active agents that can give and receive compassion.” While they may not be capable of warm-heartedness, organizations “possess the primary driver of compassion: intention,” and they can be sensitive to suffering and committed to its alleviation. This radical approach opens a new landscape for compassion science, for which epidemiology, with its systems perspective, is well-suited. 

Influence on epidemiology. Historically, epidemiology has overwhelmingly focused on disease and threats to human health. Tyler VanderWeele and his colleagues recently argued that the tools of epidemiology also should be applied to promote human flourishing. An epidemiology of compassion opens the field to a broader “positive epidemiology,” similar to developments in positive psychology. By inviting narratives and first-person accounts of the experience of compassion, epidemiology will be stretched in new ways—not unlike the field of contemplative neuroscience.

Compassion and social justice. The systems perspective of epidemiology, with its attention to populations, leads to the unavoidable question, rarely explored in individual compassion training, whose suffering is to be alleviated? In prompting this question and providing an analytic framework to address and monitor it, epidemiology brings compassion science into much-needed conversation with ethics and social justice. 

We live in a world that seems increasingly polarized. The need for compassion at the institutional and societal levels has never been greater. Applying the epidemiologic toolkit and its systems perspective to compassion science will not be a panacea, but we and others believe that it can make important contributions, just as it has in global health. We look forward to working with others who share this view—and to engaging in conversation with those who don’t. And we are eager to see more writing, thinking, and noticing of the ways that compassion manifests in communities and organizations. These real-world observations and reflections, combined with robust epidemiologic methods, hold the potential to bring us to the next frontier in compassion science—and to answering Jinpa’s question about how to “scale up” compassion.

Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But not normal.

Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind—a mental illness.

But in recent decades, there’s been a growing movement to ask a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person?

For Chris Pawelski, it was a torrent of factors. His dad—one of his best friends, whom he worked with daily for decades—was diagnosed with renal cancer and died six months later. Pawelski was left as the primary caregiver for his mom, who had dementia.

His family’s multigenerational onion farm in New York’s Orange County—where he first worked as a five year old, collecting onions that fell out of crates—was hemorrhaging money. Pawelski said he was growing roughly $200,000 worth of crops some years but took home only about $20,000, unable to negotiate higher prices with wholesale buyers that dominated the market.

Debt to suppliers and equipment vendors piled up, and the burden strained his marriage. He had little time for friends, working sunup to sundown seven days a week, desperately trying to preserve his family’s legacy.

“It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he said. “It’s weeks, months, years of dealing with all sorts of pressures that you can’t alleviate.”

Pawelski started wondering what it would be like to get hit by a truck on the busy road in front of his house. “You think you’re already on your way out, so why wait?” he said.

Millions of Americans have serious thoughts of killing themselves, and tens of thousands die by suicide annually. Suicide repeatedly ranks among the top 10 leading causes of death—making the U.S. an outlier among developed nations.

Prevention efforts have typically focused on connecting individuals in crisis with treatment—despite therapy and medication being notoriously expensive, the health care system struggling to meet demand, and a consensus that suicide is caused by a host of factors, including but not limited to mental illness.

Now, many people working to prevent suicide, including some who have tried to harm themselves or lost a loved one to it, are calling for a broader approach. Some were galvanized by the COVID pandemic, when rates of anxiety and depression spiked—not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed. That led many to believe that, while treatments and crisis care are vital, the goal of suicide prevention needs to expand beyond stopping people from dying to also giving them reasons to live.

“It’s not rocket science,” said Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist and internationally recognized suicide prevention researcher who lost her brother to suicide. If “you have happier, healthier people, they live longer, happier lives.”

That means suicide prevention shouldn’t be limited to answering hotlines or treating patients in psychiatric wards, she said. It should also involve running food banks to ensure families don’t go hungry or hosting weekly book clubs for homebound seniors to make friends. It can take the form of school programs that build resilience in children or housing policies that prevent evictions.

Decades of research shows these types of initiatives—even if they don’t have the words “mental health” or “suicide” in the title—can reduce the number of people who kill themselves. They often lower rates of crime, addiction, and poverty, too.

The U.S. has lagged behind other countries in adopting this approach, Spencer-Thomas said, perhaps because it’s easier—and more politically palatable—to tell someone to go to therapy than it is to enact sweeping policy changes, such as an increased minimum wage.

“As long as we have that convenient narrative that it’s just a bunch of broken people needing medicine and treatment, then we’re never accountable for fixing the broken things in our communities,” Spencer-Thomas said.

The Trump administration’s approach

Overhauling suicide prevention efforts to focus on broad social and economic policies might seem overwhelming and unrealistic—especially right now. This approach requires large upfront investments that lack across-the-board support, either because of budgeting realities or ideological bents.

President Donald Trump and his appointees have said little about suicide directly, but many of their policies do the opposite of what research shows prevents suicide.

The administration has championed cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that are projected to leave millions of people without health insurance and food stamps in coming years. It has injected uncertainty into the economy through the war with Iran, seesawing tariff policy, and mass layoffs of federal employees. It has canceled $1 billion in grants for school-based mental health initiatives, gutted federal programs that focus on at-risk blue-collar workers, and cut gun violence research. (Suicides are the most common type of gun death in America.)

“All of these changes are creating a firestorm,” said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They can cause “extreme stress and anxiety” in people’s lives, she added, and “when people feel desperate, that’s when crises can emerge.”

Federal health officials insist that suicide prevention remains a priority.

Allison Arwady, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s injury center, said the agency is focused on creating systems that can support people “no matter what may be happening” in the world around them. “There’s always going to be turmoil in people’s lives,” she added.

Arwady and Brandon Johnson, who leads suicide prevention work at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said several of the Trump administration’s priorities align with an upstream approach.

For example, they said, its focus on youth physical and mental well-being could help address the increasing suicide risk among adolescents, since exercise is proven to improve mental health. Similarly, people who are homeless have higher rates of suicide, and the administration has been pushing them into treatment. Federal officials have also encouraged partnerships with religious organizations, and research shows members of faith communities are less likely to attempt suicide.

However, the Trump administration has made steep staff cuts at the CDC and SAMHSA and has repeatedly called for decreasing their budgets, leading to questions about whether or how this work will continue.

A history of medical and crisis care

Suicide prevention reached the national stage in the late 1990s, said Deb Stone, who worked at the CDC for 15 years before joining the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit focused on teen and young-adult mental health.

As suicide rates grew among young people, a group of government officials, clinicians, and advocates gathered in Reno, Nevada, in 1998 to discuss the pressing issue. Over the next few years, the surgeon general issued a landmark call to action and the federal government published its first national strategy for suicide prevention.

These documents acknowledged the role of society and economics in suicide risk but focused heavily on identifying people in crisis and increasing access to medical treatment.

Those are critical steps to suicide prevention, many mental health researchers and clinicians say. They’re also politically favorable. For elected officials, who have a few years to demonstrate their achievements before the next campaign, it’s easier to count the number of people receiving therapy than the number of people who never developed suicidal thoughts because long-term economic and social investments helped them maintain steady jobs and strong friendships.

The push for individual treatment also comes from a pervasive misconception that suicide is always the result of an underlying mental illness, said Maddy Reinert, who is the senior director of population health at Mental Health America and contributed to a 2025 national report on upstream suicide prevention.

Although researchers debate how many people who die by suicide had a mental health condition—with estimates from less than half to about 90%—the takeaway is that mental illness is not the sole cause, Reinert said. That means treating it can’t be the sole response.

Plus, mental illnesses can be triggered and exacerbated by life circumstances. Treating depressive symptoms without looking at factors such as childhood trauma, the loss of a loved one, or being laid off from a job is an incomplete approach, many mental health researchers and clinicians say.

The COVID pandemic, especially, made people in the field recognize “we really need to address all of these conditions that are creating stress, anxiety, and crises,” Stone said.

In July 2022, the federal government launched 988—a shorter number for the national suicide crisis line, meant to provide an alternative to 911 for mental health emergencies.

Monica Johnson, who led federal work on 988, said the infusion of money and attention on the hotline helped states build better crisis response systems, from centers that answer calls to mobile crisis units.

But that’s not enough to solve America’s suicide problem, she said. “You’ll never be able to build a system based on crisis alone.”

Help for the farm and the farmer

Pawelski, the onion farmer in New York, hit his breaking point in 2020.

He had a decent crop that year, but Canadian exporters were dumping cheap onions into American markets, making it difficult for him to sell his product.

“I was having to beg people” to buy, he said. And when he managed to sell, prices were comparable to prices in the 1980s.

By the end of the season, he had incurred losses of a few hundred thousand dollars.

He said he and his wife decided, “We couldn’t afford to grow onions again.”

The idea that his family’s onion farm would end with him was “soul-crushing,” Pawelski said. He lost weight rapidly and thought about ending his life.

He and his wife called NY FarmNet for help. Founded at Cornell University in 1986, the free program connects farmers with two consultants: a financial analyst specializing in farm planning and a social worker focused on emotional concerns and family dynamics.

The financial specialist helped Pawelski develop a new business plan. Instead of farming onions for wholesale, he could grow greens, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants at a small scale to sell directly to consumers. He could upgrade an old truck with a cooler and deliver produce to people’s doors. He would supplement that income with teaching, speaking engagements, and other work that took advantage of his master’s degree in communications.

The social worker helped him accept that new reality—equally crucial, Pawelski said. “If you’re pissed off” about the change, “no matter what kind of proposal or idea they have, it’s not going to go anywhere.”

The adjustment took months. Pawelski also saw a therapist during that time.

Then one day a neighbor noted that Pawelski seemed much happier. That “caught me off guard,” Pawelski recalled. He didn’t realize his inner transformation was so apparent.

Today, Pawelski’s business has stabilized, and he and his wife are paying down debt. Pawelski advocates for programs to help farmers’ mental health and address their higher-than-average suicide rates.

That can mean crisis hotlines and access to affordable therapy, Pawelski said. But what he really wants are policy changes that help farmers get fair prices for their produce, debt relief, and the installation of broadband internet in rural areas so farm families and employees can be connected.

“We need to think broader and longer-term than a helpline,” he said. That’s “a band-aid on a gunshot wound.”

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF. ]]> If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the U.S. by dialing or texting “988 or find the suicide hotline in your country.” Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But not normal. Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind—a mental illness. But in recent decades, there’s been a growing movement to ask a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person? For Chris Pawelski, it was a torrent of factors. His dad—one of his best friends, whom he worked with daily for decades—was diagnosed with renal cancer and died six months later. Pawelski was left as the primary caregiver for his mom, who had dementia. His family’s multigenerational onion farm in New York’s Orange County—where he first worked as a five year old, collecting onions that fell out of crates—was hemorrhaging money. Pawelski said he was growing roughly $200,000 worth of crops some years but took home only about $20,000, unable to negotiate higher prices with wholesale buyers that dominated the market. Debt to suppliers and equipment vendors piled up, and the burden strained his marriage. He had little time for friends, working sunup to sundown seven days a week, desperately trying to preserve his family’s legacy. “It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he said. “It’s weeks, months, years of dealing with all sorts of pressures that you can’t alleviate.” Pawelski started wondering what it would be like to get hit by a truck on the busy road in front of his house. “You think you’re already on your way out, so why wait?” he said. Millions of Americans have serious thoughts of killing themselves, and tens of thousands die by suicide annually. Suicide repeatedly ranks among the top 10 leading causes of death—making the U.S. an outlier among developed nations. Prevention efforts have typically focused on connecting individuals in crisis with treatment—despite therapy and medication being notoriously expensive, the health care system struggling to meet demand, and a consensus that suicide is caused by a host of factors, including but not limited to mental illness. Now, many people working to prevent suicide, including some who have tried to harm themselves or lost a loved one to it, are calling for a broader approach. Some were galvanized by the COVID pandemic, when rates of anxiety and depression spiked—not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed. That led many to believe that, while treatments and crisis care are vital, the goal of suicide prevention needs to expand beyond stopping people from dying to also giving them reasons to live. “It’s not rocket science,” said Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist and internationally recognized suicide prevention researcher who lost her brother to suicide. If “you have happier, healthier people, they live longer, happier lives.” That means suicide prevention shouldn’t be limited to answering hotlines or treating patients in psychiatric wards, she said. It should also involve running food banks to ensure families don’t go hungry or hosting weekly book clubs for homebound seniors to make friends. It can take the form of school programs that build resilience in children or housing policies that prevent evictions. Decades of research shows these types of initiatives—even if they don’t have the words “mental health” or “suicide” in the title—can reduce the number of people who kill themselves. They often lower rates of crime, addiction, and poverty, too. The U.S. has lagged behind other countries in adopting this approach, Spencer-Thomas said, perhaps because it’s easier—and more politically palatable—to tell someone to go to therapy than it is to enact sweeping policy changes, such as an increased minimum wage. “As long as we have that convenient narrative that it’s just a bunch of broken people needing medicine and treatment, then we’re never accountable for fixing the broken things in our communities,” Spencer-Thomas said. The Trump administration’s approach Overhauling suicide prevention efforts to focus on broad social and economic policies might seem overwhelming and unrealistic—especially right now. This approach requires large upfront investments that lack across-the-board support, either because of budgeting realities or ideological bents. President Donald Trump and his appointees have said little about suicide directly, but many of their policies do the opposite of what research shows prevents suicide. The administration has championed cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that are projected to leave millions of people without health insurance and food stamps in coming years. It has injected uncertainty into the economy through the war with Iran, seesawing tariff policy, and mass layoffs of federal employees. It has canceled $1 billion in grants for school-based mental health initiatives, gutted federal programs that focus on at-risk blue-collar workers, and cut gun violence research. (Suicides are the most common type of gun death in America.) “All of these changes are creating a firestorm,” said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They can cause “extreme stress and anxiety” in people’s lives, she added, and “when people feel desperate, that’s when crises can emerge.” Federal health officials insist that suicide prevention remains a priority. Allison Arwady, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s injury center, said the agency is focused on creating systems that can support people “no matter what may be happening” in the world around them. “There’s always going to be turmoil in people’s lives,” she added. Arwady and Brandon Johnson, who leads suicide prevention work at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said several of the Trump administration’s priorities align with an upstream approach. For example, they said, its focus on youth physical and mental well-being could help address the increasing suicide risk among adolescents, since exercise is proven to improve mental health. Similarly, people who are homeless have higher rates of suicide, and the administration has been pushing them into treatment. Federal officials have also encouraged partnerships with religious organizations, and research shows members of faith communities are less likely to attempt suicide. However, the Trump administration has made steep staff cuts at the CDC and SAMHSA and has repeatedly called for decreasing their budgets, leading to questions about whether or how this work will continue. A history of medical and crisis care Suicide prevention reached the national stage in the late 1990s, said Deb Stone, who worked at the CDC for 15 years before joining the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit focused on teen and young-adult mental health. As suicide rates grew among young people, a group of government officials, clinicians, and advocates gathered in Reno, Nevada, in 1998 to discuss the pressing issue. Over the next few years, the surgeon general issued a landmark call to action and the federal government published its first national strategy for suicide prevention. These documents acknowledged the role of society and economics in suicide risk but focused heavily on identifying people in crisis and increasing access to medical treatment. Those are critical steps to suicide prevention, many mental health researchers and clinicians say. They’re also politically favorable. For elected officials, who have a few years to demonstrate their achievements before the next campaign, it’s easier to count the number of people receiving therapy than the number of people who never developed suicidal thoughts because long-term economic and social investments helped them maintain steady jobs and strong friendships. The push for individual treatment also comes from a pervasive misconception that suicide is always the result of an underlying mental illness, said Maddy Reinert, who is the senior director of population health at Mental Health America and contributed to a 2025 national report on upstream suicide prevention. Although researchers debate how many people who die by suicide had a mental health condition—with estimates from less than half to about 90%—the takeaway is that mental illness is not the sole cause, Reinert said. That means treating it can’t be the sole response. Plus, mental illnesses can be triggered and exacerbated by life circumstances. Treating depressive symptoms without looking at factors such as childhood trauma, the loss of a loved one, or being laid off from a job is an incomplete approach, many mental health researchers and clinicians say. The COVID pandemic, especially, made people in the field recognize “we really need to address all of these conditions that are creating stress, anxiety, and crises,” Stone said. In July 2022, the federal government launched 988—a shorter number for the national suicide crisis line, meant to provide an alternative to 911 for mental health emergencies. Monica Johnson, who led federal work on 988, said the infusion of money and attention on the hotline helped states build better crisis response systems, from centers that answer calls to mobile crisis units. But that’s not enough to solve America’s suicide problem, she said. “You’ll never be able to build a system based on crisis alone.” Help for the farm and the farmer Pawelski, the onion farmer in New York, hit his breaking point in 2020. He had a decent crop that year, but Canadian exporters were dumping cheap onions into American markets, making it difficult for him to sell his product. “I was having to beg people” to buy, he said. And when he managed to sell, prices were comparable to prices in the 1980s. By the end of the season, he had incurred losses of a few hundred thousand dollars. He said he and his wife decided, “We couldn’t afford to grow onions again.” The idea that his family’s onion farm would end with him was “soul-crushing,” Pawelski said. He lost weight rapidly and thought about ending his life. He and his wife called NY FarmNet for help. Founded at Cornell University in 1986, the free program connects farmers with two consultants: a financial analyst specializing in farm planning and a social worker focused on emotional concerns and family dynamics. The financial specialist helped Pawelski develop a new business plan. Instead of farming onions for wholesale, he could grow greens, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants at a small scale to sell directly to consumers. He could upgrade an old truck with a cooler and deliver produce to people’s doors. He would supplement that income with teaching, speaking engagements, and other work that took advantage of his master’s degree in communications. The social worker helped him accept that new reality—equally crucial, Pawelski said. “If you’re pissed off” about the change, “no matter what kind of proposal or idea they have, it’s not going to go anywhere.” The adjustment took months. Pawelski also saw a therapist during that time. Then one day a neighbor noted that Pawelski seemed much happier. That “caught me off guard,” Pawelski recalled. He didn’t realize his inner transformation was so apparent. Today, Pawelski’s business has stabilized, and he and his wife are paying down debt. Pawelski advocates for programs to help farmers’ mental health and address their higher-than-average suicide rates. That can mean crisis hotlines and access to affordable therapy, Pawelski said. But what he really wants are policy changes that help farmers get fair prices for their produce, debt relief, and the installation of broadband internet in rural areas so farm families and employees can be connected. “We need to think broader and longer-term than a helpline,” he said. That’s “a band-aid on a gunshot wound.” This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF. anxiety, death, depression, health care, mental health, policy, politics, society, suicide, Mental Health Professionals, Politics, Society, Big Ideas, Equality 2026-05-22T15:33:00+00:00 https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_is_education_for_in_the_age_of_artificial_intelligence https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_is_education_for_in_the_age_of_artificial_intelligence#When:22:18:00Z “If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. That’s the history of gods.”

That line from 2014 movie Ex Machina keeps surfacing as I watch my students navigate a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI). Whether or not powerful AI ever becomes conscious remains an open question. What feels inevitable is its trajectory toward a kind of intelligence we might call godlike: systems that can generate knowledge, solve problems, and perform tasks at a scale and speed far beyond human capacity.

This raises a fundamental question: What makes a human life meaningful when machines can replicate or even surpass many of our abilities? This is not a question students will face someday. It is a question they are expressing right now, in plainer language.

AI has given new urgency to the oldest student complaint: When am I ever going to need this? Why wrestle with the novel A Brave New World when AI can summarize it in seconds, in language you already understand? Why spend weeks observing cell behavior or ecosystems when a simulation can generate the results instantly? These questions aren’t just about convenience, they expose a deeper issue. Students aren’t only asking about usefulness, they’re asking about meaning. Or, to put it even more simply: What matters most right now, for me as a student and a person?

Learning was never really about utility. It has always been about meaning, about whether what happens inside a classroom connects to anything worth caring about outside it. That it largely doesn’t shouldn’t be surprising. According to Gallup, fewer than two in ten students strongly agree that what they are learning in school feels important, interesting, or relevant to their lives. AI hasn’t created that disconnection. It has simply made it harder to ignore. We have been driving students into the future while looking in the rearview mirror.

The loss of purpose within education reflects a broader crisis beyond it. The structures that once gave life clear meaning—religion, community, stable work, and shared civic identity—have weakened, leaving what philosopher Charles Taylor calls a fractured “moral horizon”: a shared sense of what matters and why. AI didn’t cause this fracture, but it may accelerate it. Its deeper risk is not moral corruption, but moral passivity. As more choices are automated, we risk losing the practice of judgment that forms our values. We have more freedom than any previous generation and less certainty about what to do with it. The result is visible: rising depression, loneliness, and anxiety in the most materially comfortable generation in history.

The meaning crisis has found its reckoning machine in AI. Education has long been organized around a single instrumental purpose: preparing students for careers and economic life. That purpose pushes pedagogy toward what is easiest to standardize and assess—procedural learning, information retrieval, correct answers to predetermined questions. This is precisely what AI does best. It is not merely a threat to the instrumental model. It is that model’s apex expression, perfected and made instantaneous. The race against the machine is not coming. It is already over.

While AI can amplify critical and creative thinking, within an educational model still focused on task completion rather than meaning, its overuse risks doing the opposite. There is growing concern that reliance on AI to complete work may weaken the very capacities education aims to develop. A recent study from the MIT Media Lab warns that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute to “cognitive atrophy,” diminishing students’ ability to think independently and critically.

What it cannot do is transform a person. I believe that AI has done education a favor it didn’t ask for. By rendering the instrumental model obsolete, it has forced us back to first principles. And the first principle of education, it turns out, was always meaning: forming people who can examine their own assumptions, construct a coherent set of values, and ask seriously what kind of life is worth living. These are not soft skills. They are the only work that cannot be automated.

For over twenty years my teaching has been organized around two questions: How do we know what we know? And what does it mean to live a good life? These are not questions to be solved. They are questions to be lived. My students explore how knowledge is constructed, how meaning is cultivated, and how identity is shaped through choice and ethical reflection. Not to perform understanding but to practice the examined life. These questions have always mattered. AI has made them urgent in a way nothing else could.

Education has long been justified by its link to productivity, not because everything taught is job training, but because much of it has been framed that way to students: learn this to succeed, to be useful, to secure a future. But as AI takes over more of the tasks that once defined that usefulness, this justification begins to weaken. If machines can perform the work more efficiently, then preparing students to replicate that work can no longer be the primary goal. What remains is a deeper choice: continue treating education primarily as preparation for the workforce, or reimagine it as the cultivation of judgment, purpose, and the capacity to think and choose well in a world where productivity is no longer the defining measure of human value.

We are living through a decision window. What we do now will shape the inheritance of every generation that follows. The stakes echo biologist E.O. Wilson’s warning that humanity faces a crisis because we possess “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” He wrote that before AI could produce work that teachers can no longer distinguish from their students’. The diagnosis has only sharpened. If AI is to be aligned with human flourishing, education must evolve alongside it—helping young people develop not only technical fluency but the wisdom to question, interpret, and responsibly shape the tools they inherit.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans without the wisdom to govern it. Every mythology since has offered its own variation on that warning. We have always been better at expanding our powers than questioning whether we should. More sophisticated in our science than in our ethics. More capable in our technology than in our judgment. This asymmetry has never been more consequential. We are giving the next generation extraordinary power without the wisdom to wield it. The most important question education can ask—the one Socrates never stopped asking—is also the simplest: What is the wise thing to do here?

And that’s just with people we know. What about strangers, people across the political divide, or even those with very different backgrounds and cultures than your own?

My field, philosophy, offers a tried-and-true answer to what we need to do in order to understand people and texts from very different backgrounds and cultural assumptions than our own. We need to be charitable.

Charity in this sense isn’t a matter of giving money to those who need it more. Instead, it’s seeing others in a favorable light—of seeing the best in them. In my work, I think of this as seeing other people as protagonists: characters who “do their best” with the predicament in which they find themselves. Interpreting someone charitably doesn’t require agreeing with them. But it does require doing our best to find merit in their point of view.

Of course, people and ideas don’t have unlimited merit. We can err by failing to see the merit of someone’s point of view—or we can err by finding merit that isn’t really there.

But the idea of charity is that it’s worse to make the first kind of error because it prevents us from getting along and learning from one another. By seeing the best in someone else and in their ideas, we can learn productively from engaging with them. Protagonists are people we can learn from and cooperate with.

Taking them seriously

It doesn’t take a genius to observe that we are all better at seeing the best in the people we agree with—and worse with those across the political divide. Political discussions on social media are often dominated by competing attributions of more and more insidious motives to people on the other side. We see them not as protagonists, but as antagonists.

By seeing the worst in someone else’s ideas, we let ourselves off easy. We dismiss them when instead we need to be taking them seriously.

So why, if charity requires seeing the best in others, are we so often tempted to see the worst in them?

A better understanding of charity provides the answer. Seeing the best and the worst in others are not opposite ways of interpreting someone, but simply two sides of the same coin. Here’s why:

Interpretation trade-offs

Interpreting someone isn’t all about figuring out their motives. Sometimes it’s about sorting out what is signal and what is noise. If I snap at you, you could spend a lot of time fixating over whether to be angry or embarrassed. But sometimes the right move is just to pass me a Snickers bar and move on. Our moods and actions are influenced by hunger, hormones, alcohol, and lack of sleep, just to name a few. Overinterpreting a snap after I missed breakfast treats as signal what is really just noise.

Overlooking a thing or two when I am hangry can be the best way to see the best in me. When you interpret my snap as merely the result of missing a meal, you don’t really see it as coming from me, the protagonist; but as the result of my predicament. You will judge me, not by whether I am hangry, but by how I overcome that. Your interpretation sees me in a more positive light, by taking away some of my agency.

By “agency,” I mean the extent to which someone gets credit for what they do. You have greater agency over something that you do on purpose, and less if it was a foreseen but accepted side effect of your plan. You have less agency if it was an accident, but more if the accident was negligent; less agency if you just snapped because you’re hangry, but more if you know you get hangry and chose to skip lunch anyway.

A perfect agent wouldn’t be affected by hormones and hunger. They would simply make rational choices that advance their goals. But humans aren’t like that. We are imperfectly embodied agents, at best. So interpreting one another well sometimes requires seeing the good in one another, at the cost of agency. In other words, it has to balance agency against the good, as I have argued in my recent work.

But you can’t find the best in someone by just ignoring more and more until all the bad things are trimmed away and only something good is left. Your interpretation has to fit with the facts of what they do and say.

And sometimes the trade-offs between agency and the good go the other way—we interpret each other in ways that attribute more agency but less good. If passing me a Snickers bar seems to calm me down, you might try it again the next time I snap. But one day you realize that you have started carrying extra Snickers bars everywhere you go in case you run into me, and a different interpretation presents itself: Maybe instead of being a decent but mood-challenged friend, I have just been using you for your candy bars.

This creates tipping points for charitable interpretation. When we cross the tipping point, you switch from seeing someone as an imperfectly embodied protagonist to seeing them as an antagonist.

Charity without a cost

All of this is a way of arguing that it is sometimes right to see the worst in others. Sometimes other people really are the worst, and understanding them requires understanding their agency, not what is good about them. Protagonists and antagonists are just two sides of the same coin: The very same interpretive process can lead us in either direction.

Unfortunately, this means there is no simple test for when you are doing well enough at seeing the best in others. In particular, there is no test that we can agree about across our political differences. Interpreting someone charitably requires looking hard enough for good in them, but part of what we disagree with one another about is precisely what is good. So we are bound to disagree with one another about who is being sufficiently charitable.

But as a personal aspiration, a little more charity can go a long way. We can be generous not just with money, but in how we interpret others. But unlike giving money away, we don’t lose anything when we try harder to see the best in someone else.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

They cautioned that strange foreigners—the Spaniards—had invaded the land and posed a grave threat. The emissaries requested an audience with the Tarascan ruler, known as the Cazonci, King Zuanga. But Zuanga had recently died, most likely from smallpox brought by the Spaniards.

Relations between the two empires had long been tense. They had clashed on the western frontier since 1476, fighting major battles and fortifying their borders. The Tarascans viewed the Aztecs as deceitful and dangerous—a threat to their very existence.

So, when the emissaries arrived to speak with a king who was already dead, they were sacrificed and granted audience with him in the afterlife. In that moment, the fate of the Aztecs was sealed in blood.

The Aztec empire did not fall because it lacked capability. It collapsed because it accumulated too many adversaries who resented its dominance. This is a historical episode the U.S. president, Donald Trump, should take notice of as his rift with traditional U.S. allies deepens.

               

Carl von Clausewitz and other philosophers of war have distinguished the concepts of force and power in relation to statecraft. In the broadest sense, power is ideological capital, predicated on military strength and influence in the global political sphere. In contrast, force is the exertion of military might to coerce other nations to your political will.

While power can be sustained through a strong economy, alliances, and moral influence, force is expended. It drains resources and can erode internal political capital as well as global influence if it is used in a way that is perceived as arrogant or imperialistic.

The Aztec empire formed in 1428 as a triple alliance between the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, with Tenochtitlan eventually dominating the political structure. The empire exerted force through seasonal military campaigns and balanced this with a power dynamic of sacrificial display, threat, tribute, and a culture of racial superiority.

In both its use of force and power, the Aztec empire was coercive and depended on fear to rule. Those subjugated by the empire, and those engaged in what seemed perpetual war, held great animosity and distrust of the Aztecs. The empire was thus built on conquered people and enemies waiting for the right opportunity to overthrow their overlords.

Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who ultimately brought large parts of what is now Mexico under the rule of Spain, exploited this hostility. He forged alliances with Tlaxcala and other former Aztec subjects, augmenting his small Spanish force with thousands of indigenous warriors.

Cortés led this Spanish-indigenous force against the Aztecs and besieged them in Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs had only one hope: to persuade the other great power in Mexico, the Tarascan empire to the west, to join forces with them. Their first emissaries met an ill fate. So, they tried again.

In 1521, Aztec envoys arrived once more in Tzintzuntzan and this time met with the new lord, Tangáxuan II. They brought captured steel weapons, a crossbow, and armor to demonstrate the military threat they faced.

                     

The Tarascan king paid attention. He sent an exploratory mission to the frontier to determine whether this was Aztec trickery or truth. As they arrived at the frontier, they met a group of Chichimecs—semi-nomadic warrior people who often worked for empires to patrol borders.

When told the mission was heading to Tenochtitlan to scout the situation, the Chichimecs replied that they were too late. It was only a city of death now, and they were on their way to the Tarascan king to offer their services. Tangáxuan submitted to the Spanish as a tributary kingdom the following year before being burned to death in 1530 by Spaniards trying to find where he had hidden gold.

Had the Tarascans maintained normal political relations with the Aztecs, they might have investigated the report of the first emissaries. One can imagine how history would be different if, during the siege of Tenochtitlan, 40,000 Tarascan warriors—renowned archers—had descended from the mountains to the west. It is unlikely that Cortés and his army could have prevailed.

American foreign policy

The failings of the Aztec empire were not due to a lack of courage or military prowess. During their battles with the Spanish, the Aztecs repeatedly demonstrated adaptability, learning how to fight against horses and cannon-laden ships.

The failing was a fundamental flaw in the political strategy of the empire—it was built on coercion and fear, leaving a ready force to challenge its authority when it was most vulnerable.

The foreign policy of the U.S. since 2025, when Trump entered office for his second term, has emulated this model. Recently, the Trump administration has been projecting coercive power to support its ambitions for wealth, notoriety, and to project American exceptionalism and manifest superiority.

This has manifested in threats or the exercise of limited force, such as tariffs or military attacks in Iran, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Increasingly, other nations are challenging the effectiveness of this power. Colombia, Panama, Mexico, and Canada, for example, have largely ignored the threat of coercive power.

As Trump uses American power to demand Greenland, his threats are becoming more feeble. Nato nations are abiding by their longstanding pact with economic and military resolve, with their leaders saying they will not give in to Trump’s pressure. The U.S. is being pushed toward a position where it will have to switch from coercive power to coercive force.

If this course persists, military engagements, animosity from neighbors, and vulnerabilities arising from the strength of other militaries, economic disruptions, and environmental catastrophes may well leave the world’s most powerful nation exposed with no allies.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Much of that has since been dismantled without a clear replacement, leaving us to reckon with the social and economic costs. This matters because relationships are not optional—they are foundational to how humans thrive.

It’s also something that virtually all Americans agree is of top importance. We feel better when we are connected, supported, and part of something larger than ourselves. Yet across the country, people are feeling more isolated than ever. Nearly one in three Americans say they feel lonely every week, and trust in neighbors, coworkers, and institutions has fallen to record lows.

New data from the US Chamber of Connection’s Six Points of Connection 2026 report paints an even clearer picture. More than half of Americans report patterns associated with higher vulnerability to loneliness and disconnection. Only 42 percent say they have a neighbor they could count on in an emergency. Twenty-seven percent lack reliable social support, and 45 percent say they do not trust others.

This is not because people no longer care about connection. Most people want more of it. They just do not know where to start, or they do not want to start alone.

At the same time, volunteering, one of the most enduring ways people have built trust and solidarity, is also underused. While more than 90 percent of Americans say they want to volunteer, only about one in four actually do, often due to a lack of free time and inflexible volunteering schedules.

The gap is not just about time. It is about how we design opportunities for people to come together.

Many volunteer activities focus on essential tasks, like serving food, supporting events, tutoring, or helping with logistics. These efforts make a real difference. But they are not always set up to help people connect with one another in meaningful ways. The human moments that turn service into belonging often depend on chance.

The good news is that when service is designed with connection in mind, volunteering becomes one of the most powerful tools we have for strengthening well-being, trust, and resilience.

The habits that help connection take root

Connection isn’t just a feeling. It’s something we build through everyday habits, not one-off moments.

Drawing from decades of research across psychology, public health, and sociology, the Six Points of Connection identify six ordinary, place-based behaviors that play a foundational role in helping individuals and communities thrive:

• Neighborhood contact: knowing and interacting with the people around you;
• Community of identity: belonging to a group shaped by shared experience or values;
• One-on-one relationships: nurturing close friendships over time;
• Third places: spending time in social spaces outside home and work;
• Community of play: gathering around shared activities that bring joy;
• Community service: showing up for others and the broader community.

These aren’t personality traits or special skills. They’re habits that anyone can practice.

Yet participation in many of these habits is surprisingly low. Fewer than half of Americans report regular neighborhood contact. Only about a quarter regularly spend time in third places or engage in community service. These gaps help explain why so many people feel disconnected and unsure how to rebuild a sense of belonging.

At a recent national convening hosted by the US Chamber of Connection, leaders from business, government, academia, and community organizations came together around a shared focus: community service. They explored how volunteering, when thoughtfully designed, can help people reconnect not just to causes, but to one another.

A shared insight emerged. Volunteering may be one of the most scalable ways we have to rebuild the muscle of social connection, if we design it for relationships as one of the core outcomes.

Designing volunteering for connection

Research shows that close relationships grow through three key ingredients: consistency, positivity, and vulnerability. Volunteering can naturally create all three, but only when experiences make space for them.

In many traditional settings, people volunteer side by side without ever really meeting. They complete tasks efficiently, then go their separate ways.

Connection-centered volunteering brings the human moments to the foreground. This might include:

• Working in small groups where conversation can unfold;
• Partnering people rather than assigning solo tasks;
• Sharing a meal or taking a few minutes to reflect together;
• Mixing people across roles, ages, or backgrounds;
• Inviting brief storytelling, such as why someone chose to show up;
• Creating opportunities for reciprocity, where everyone both gives and receives.

These choices do not change what people are doing. They change how it feels to do it together. When connection is intentional, service becomes something people return to, not just something they check off.

Connection as a cause

Many of today’s challenges, from loneliness and burnout to polarization and declining trust, share a common root. They are shaped by how disconnected many people feel in everyday life.

This is where the idea of “connection as a cause” comes in. It means treating social connection not as something that happens by accident, but as something we can intentionally build and sustain. For too long, connection has been essential but invisible, assumed rather than supported. Recognizing connection as a cause means valuing and reinforcing the everyday actions and social structures that help people feel welcome, known, and part of a community.

In practice, this is often informal and looks familiar:

• Checking in on a neighbor;
• Hosting a small gathering or shared meal;
• Starting a walking group or social club;
• Helping someone new find their footing;
• Showing up consistently in a park, library, or community space.

One example of this type of community service is the Welcome Committee, a growing national volunteer effort organized by the US Chamber of Connection. It modernizes earlier forms of civic service by training volunteers on the frontlines of their local communities to help people feel known and included in their neighborhoods through simple, regular, and intentional acts of connection.

These acts have always been foundational to community life. What has changed is the time people once spent doing this. Over the last few decades, that everyday civic labor has quietly dissolved, and now needs to be revived.

There is a growing opportunity to re-activate volunteers across the country to rebuild the muscle of social connection and welcome people back into community. Not to create something new but to restore what once held communities together and design it for the world we live in now.

Measuring connection

For a long time, volunteering has been measured by hours served or tasks completed. Those metrics matter, but they miss something essential: whether people felt more connected when they left than when they arrived.

Measuring connection does not take humanity out of service. It helps bring it into focus. It helps people choose experiences that meet their social needs, and it helps organizations notice and support what truly builds trust and belonging.

It also broadens what counts as service. Acts like block parties, walking groups, community meals, and social clubs can be formally recognized and encouraged. When trust deepens or people bridge across difference, connection itself becomes the service.

Tools like the Social Connection Index help make this visible. They give communities a shared way to understand how people are connecting and where support is needed, without turning relationships into something mechanical.

Why this matters for well-being

Building everyday connection isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s one of the strongest predictors of longevity, happiness, mental and physical health, and resilience during stress.

Volunteering sits at the intersection of purpose, empathy, and shared effort. Research consistently shows that people who volunteer experience higher life satisfaction, lower loneliness, and stronger social ties.

In places like New York City, volunteers who served together across differences reported higher levels of trust and empathy toward people with different life experiences. When service becomes a regular practice rather than a one-time event, it helps communities weather challenges and recover together.

Most people want more connection. They just do not know where to start, or they do not want to start alone. You might begin by looking for community service opportunities that invite interaction, making it a small but regular part of your routine, or showing up with someone you want to grow closer to. Or you might gather people around a shared interest, share a meal and conversation, or spend meaningful time with an older neighbor.

What matters is not doing it perfectly. What matters is showing up, together.

It seems like enlightenment might be slightly more attainable without the daily annoyances of traffic, parking tickets, taxes, and endless commercials. For most of us, however, the realities of living in a society will naturally disrupt our peace and our responsibilities come with real burdens. Thus, mindfulness and other contemplative practices must exist within the context of others—of a society.

However, the way mindfulness is taught and described today often seems to reinforce an individualistic and secular conception of contemplative practices. This makes sense when clinicians like me hope to empower the individual to see the profound agency in their lives to make healthier choices. If you want to control anxiety, it might be easier to teach an individual to practice mindfulness to promote adaptive responding, rather than try to control the endless variables that can cause anxious spiraling or hope for some far-off social transformation that will make inner peace inevitable. But is the point of mindfulness and other contemplative practices (as we teach them in medicine) really to benefit yourself only?

This question has ignited healthy debate across various disciplines. Even within psychology, the way we study and measure mindfulness tends to reduce it down to facets such as observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging and a non-reactivity of one’s own experiences. Notably, the five most popular mindfulness scales don’t exactly include compassion or other-orientation as a facet. But if mindfulness in the scientific-medical context is derived from the Buddhist philosophies, how did the scientists so clearly miss the relational aspects of mindfulness?

For instance, does it matter if an individual practices mindfulness but is a racist, xenophobe, or sexist? Is it possible to have a mindful society that hates its neighbors, chooses war over peace, and division over unity? The science of contemplative research has recently turned more toward exploring these kinds of questions about the relational aspects of mindfulness and other contemplative practices. The timing couldn’t be more important as society feels the intense burden of social division and an undeniable rise of authoritarianism.

Previous studies have shown that those who score high in social dominance orientation also have favorable views towards authoritarianism, sexism, racism, and xenophobia—to name a few—and less favorable views of traits like empathy. Indeed, empathy is an increasingly important societal topic and has even entered mainstream political discourse. For example, Charlie Kirk, an American conservative figure, once famously argued that “empathy is a made-up, New Age term that does a lot of damage.”

What is the relationship between these practices, traits, and orientations? Previous studies have routinely found that mindfulness and self-compassion appeared to be positively related to empathy. It seems intuitive that these intrapersonal practices could broaden to interpersonal attitudes. Could contemplative practices such as mindfulness or self-compassion not only affect empathy, but also broader social orientations?

This question motivated our latest study recently released in the journal of Mindfulness. Along with my talented collaborator Polina Beloboradova from the Virginia Commonwealth University, our exploratory study aimed to understand whether individualistic contemplative practices such as self-compassion were related to interpersonal or broader social attitudes, such as empathy and egalitarianism, or its opposite, authoritarianism.

Empathy and social dominance

Our exploratory study gathered two large groups of participants and asked them questions related to self-compassion, empathy, and a construct known as social dominance orientation, which measures the generalized belief that people are either equal or that some groups are inherently more dominant.

We understood the critical shortcomings of only studying mindfulness for its relational aspects, so we focused on self-compassion as a trait, which has only recently become a fascinating subject of psychology. More than “self-love,” self-compassion considers the relationship toward oneself. It includes aspects of mindfulness and self-kindness, as well as common humanity: the belief that experiencing suffering is normal in the human condition.

We used a statistical method known as network analysis. Think of a map that shows how major airports connect to smaller airports and how disruptions in one airport might affect the network of connections. The study grouped and visualized the variables based on the strengths of those associations. By doing so, we were able to reveal the complex network of influence of these variables. We ran the analysis across two samples, one before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the other after. We leveraged the once-in-a-lifetime unplanned timing of the pandemic to investigate whether the profound social disruption of COVID affected social beliefs. A strong body of evidence supports how threats and societal distress tends to negatively affect social attitudes.

Despite the differences of social contexts, our results indicated the same pattern where self-compassion was related to social dominance orientation, but only through empathy. Of the two components of empathy we studied, emotional concern appeared to have a stronger relationship to social dominance orientation than the cognitive component. The amount of emotional concern was a stronger predictor of how you perceive and care about other groups of people. The study found that higher levels of self-compassion and empathy predicted lower levels of authoritarianism, whereas low self-compassion and empathy predicted higher levels of authoritarianism.

Compassion and egalitarianism

These novel findings give theoretical support to how intrapersonal traits such as self-compassion are linked to broader social attitudes through empathy. Simply said, there is some relationship between the amount of self-compassion, empathy, and egalitarianism or belief that people are deserving of equality. Importantly, the study was unable to determine the direction of these influences, so it would be premature to claim that self-compassion definitively affects authoritarianism through empathy.

Our hope is that these insights inspire other researchers to test whether self-compassion interventions, such as the Mindful Self-Compassion program which teaches individuals to develop their capacity for self-compassion over an eight-week course, could be a fundamental aspect of social-emotional learning that could make individuals more tolerant to all groups of people. Researchers could examine whether self-compassion interventions incidentally affect empathy and egalitarian views over the course by including these measures before, during, and following the intervention. 

The potential impact of those follow-up studies could be profound. If self-compassion could be improved as a core element of therapy or social-emotional learning in schools, not only would the individual have increased self-compassion, which would mitigate the risk of some mental health challenges and promote well-being, but they might also develop greater empathy and egalitarian beliefs, effectively widening their aperture of concern for others.

By shifting toward a perspective that other people from different backgrounds are worthy of similar compassion and empathy as ourselves, we might be able to effectively address many of society’s ills such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, and the multiple forms of social division. As such, self-compassion as a focus may hold promise for fields like clinical and social psychology that support human flourishing across individual, interpersonal, and societal levels.

The Dalai Lama may have well understood this when he said in The Book of Joy, “It is clear that the only way to truly change our world is through teaching compassion. Our society is lacking an adequate sense of compassion, sense of kindness, and genuine regard for others’ well-being. So now many, many, people who seriously think about humanity all have the same view. We must promote basic human values, the inner values that lie at the heart of who we are as humans.”

This idea just might be something to sit with…not necessarily in a cave.

His book opens with a scene from “The Waiter’s Wife,” a short story published in 1999 by acclaimed writer Zadie Smith.

In the story, friends have a heated political discussion. As Fischer summarizes: “[T]he sudden quarreling…foreshadows the pessimistic feeling of many people today that sharp political differences are not only unresolvable, but they are inescapable, like a spreading wildfire burning out of control.” But in the story, the subtle empathy of a passerby changes everything, and “instead of consigning the other person to hell or false consciousness, [the women] become more willing to share the world with each other even as they disagree.”

Of course, our American story is not as simple as longtime friends who have hit a snag. But Fisher suggests that perhaps fostering that perspective would bring us round again towards the shared emotional journey of a nation of neighbors, if not necessarily friends. Perhaps that perspective could even help us forge friendship out of our clannish feud.

Drawing on the 2018 book How Democracies Die, Fischer highlights “two norms especially important to democracy: mutual toleration, which motivates competing political parties to accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, which encourages elected leaders to regard the holding of political office as a temporary privilege, not an opportunity to seize power once and for all.” In other words, just as in relationships, democracies founder on zero-sum, win-lose biases.

Fischer calls on distinguished Harvard professor and political theorist Danielle Allen to remind us of “practices of political friendship,” and what de Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart”: “the attitudes toward one another that citizens must cultivate in their daily lives to sustain democratic institutions.” In her 2004 book Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education, Allen invokes the nurture of trust, which is psychologist Erik Erikson’s earliest developmental stage — critical for any relationship. As Allen writes:

Trust is not something that politicians alone can create. It grows only among citizens as they rub shoulders in daily life—in supermarkets, at movie theaters, on buses, at amusement parks, and in airports – and wherever they participate in maintaining an institution, whether a school, a church, or a business.

Allen also chaired an American Academy of Arts and Sciences commission, whose 2020 report recommended significant democratic reforms that would advance the practice of democracy that “is not a battle whose purpose is annihilation of the enemy; it is, if it works, a game of infinite repeat play that includes ever-more participants.”

Advancing this case for a vision of democracy that works, Fischer turns to Robert Mnookin’s Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight. Mnookin, former chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, notes three core democratic values exemplified by Nelson Mandela: receptivity to compromise, readiness to ask for and extend forgiveness, and empathy.

Fischer also draws on Charles Dickens, Percy Bysshe Shelley, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and others to underscore the importance of “nurturing the underlying relationships, values, and attitudes that sustain democracies.” The most important: becoming a person “on whom nothing is lost,” and cultivating attentiveness to relationships.

As I read these as a psychiatrist, these could be summed up as cultivating love, empathy, and compassion for both self and others, not as a panacea, but as a pathway, to our wellness and the wellness of the whole.

Wholeness must come out of our split, divided consciousnesses. In “The Most Important Writing Exercise I’ve Ever Assigned,” the novelist Rachel Kadish writes that she “asks her students to write down a phrase they find abhorrent”–and then “spend ten minutes writing a monologue in the first person spoken by a fictitious character that includes the offensive statement they have just written.” Fischer writes:

The exercise sparks an unexpected moment of empathy, as the students experience something they previously thought impossible: “repugnance for a behavior or worldview coupled with recognition of shared humanity.”

Kadish’s observations recall an influential 2013 study that suggests empathy increased when readers were emotionally transported by a short story. Emotional transportation is defined as “a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative.” Losing ourselves in a story helps us identify with the story’s characters, feel for their journeys, and amplify connection to a bigger, more inclusive picture.

Surely, literature, both fiction and non-fiction, can help us feel for our own shared journeys, grow our ability to mindfully observe unfolding narrative, and help us see that our enemies are not so much people as they are qualities of mind.

Fischer concludes, “If hatred can gather momentum and spread, so can compassion and understanding. The future of our democracy depends on it.”

This happenstance involvement profoundly impacted the course of his life. Now living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he leads community members whose lives have been impacted by the criminal justice system through the same course.

Jackson understood forgiveness as a spiritual concept from growing up in the church, but it didn’t click until he was able “to connect the dots between the spiritual and the scientific part,” he says. For him, forgiveness applied to the hurt he had caused others but also to the hurt he experienced from others’ wrongdoing. You forgive, he says, “without trying to diminish [the wrong]. You’re not forgiving that person because of them. You’re forgiving them because of you.”

“I didn’t know the impact that anger could have on your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It takes a lot to hate people,” says Jackson. What did he learn? “The greatest enemy of hate is forgiveness. It has that much power.”

When he got out of prison, Jackson reached out to the psychologist who led his therapy to let him know what an impact it made.

Understanding why

In 1994, Robert Enright, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin, founded the International Forgiveness Institute, leading the scientific study of forgiveness. His books The Forgiving Life and Forgiveness Therapy lay out his groundbreaking work in the therapeutic field. In 2016, Enright’s lab began offering forgiveness therapy to men incarcerated at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wis., where Enright met Jackson. In 2018, Lifan Yu, one of Enright’s graduate students, continued that research with a new cohort of men there.

Building on Enright’s work, Yu’s therapy sessions did not focus on the crimes inmates committed but instead examined how their personal history of abuse led them to harbor anger and had negatively impacted their mental health.

“Why did they choose to harm others?” Yu wonders. “Prisoners themselves are victims before they committed a crime,” she says. “They bear that for their whole lives. ... That’s the reason they chose to hurt others.”

Similar to Jackson’s experience with Enright, Yu brought together a group of 12 men to read Enright’s book 8 Keys to Forgiveness alongside 12 others in a control group that used the Carey Guides, a collection of cognitive behavioral tools and worksheets for prison personnel to create positive change with inmates and used widely throughout the prison system.

“Everyone in the group had stories to tell about how they had been used, abused, and/or misused by those they trusted and/or looked up to. We became close like a family and knew the group was a safe place to deal with anger and resentment,” wrote one participant in an anonymous letter given to Yu at the end of the study.

Before the group met, individuals responded to surveys measuring anger, depression, and anxiety, as well as orientation toward forgiveness and more. All the selected men had significantly impaired mental health. After completing the six-month therapy, Yu sent the survey again. The experimental group saw significant improvement while the control group remained the same. The research team then decided to offer the program to the control group. The results again indicated growth.

Yu followed up with both groups six months after they completed the therapy: Both retained growth, indicating the long-term effectiveness of forgiveness therapy.

The letter to Yu from the anonymous participant continued:

I was able to see how the way I was raised had a very negative and profound impact on me. ... I forgave others from my past for the wrongs they inflicted on me. I don’t feel the pain anymore. I have been in many groups, programs, and counseling sessions but was never able to understand why I kept hurting people. This was the only program that ever asked me, ‘“hat happened to you to make you the way you are?”

Breaking cycles of harm

Therapies in prison often focus on correcting behaviors to prevent repeat offenses, rather than aiming for improving mental health overall, says Yu. That approach fails to make a connection between the crimes committed and the personal abuse history of the perpetrator.

Sylvester Jackson’s story is an example. He was sexually abused from age seven to 13. At age 14, he sexually abused another person for the first time. “I didn’t have no outlet for those things. I grew to the point that I wasn’t going to be the one being hurt; I was going to be the one doing the hurt,” he says.

“My first experience with hate started with my father and seeing how he disregarded us, and then I find out he was on the other side of the city taking care of other people’s kids,” Jackson says.

Eventually, Jackson was living on the streets of Chicago and became involved with a gang. At age 27, Jackson served his first prison sentence in Texas for stolen checks. When Jackson got out, he rediscovered his faith and did well for several years but again sank into mental illness after his mother died in 2002. During this time, Jackson sexually assaulted his youngest daughter. “She came into my life unfortunately when I was in a spiral,” he says. “I passed the abuse on that I had, and that led me to prison.”

In 2007, Jackson was imprisoned in Wisconsin, where he remained for 10 years. There he encountered Enright and forgiveness therapy. Jackson prayed for help. “I tried suicide, and I thought, ‘OK [God], if you aren’t going to kill me, then help me live. If you are who you say you are, I need you to show me yourself,’” he says. Jackson asked for God to restore his mind. Forgiveness therapy was part of the answer to that prayer.

Jackson’s story illustrates a prevalent reality: Yu and her colleagues found higher rates of adverse, traumatic experiences in medium- and maximum-security prison populations than in the general public. Yu and her team began exploring whether therapy programs in prison can assist in psychological healing and contribute to lower recidivism rates. The forgiveness therapy study confirmed the connection between the types of abuse individuals experienced and the types of crimes they committed.

The research of Yu and others showed that among 103 men surveyed in the initial phase of the study, 90% reported a childhood abuse—almost all reported more than one abuse—and 82% said the abuse still negatively influenced them. Of the 33 men who reported sexual abuse, 67% of them were convicted for sexual assault. Of the 70 men who reported physical abuse and familial neglect, 80% were incarcerated for violent crimes, such as armed robbery, homicide, or felony murder.

Surprisingly, Yu also found that 46% of the men had never shared their past abuse and trauma with anyone else, and most had never had anyone recognize their hurt or help them heal. “In essence, they were re-traumatized by holding in their pain,” says Yu.

What leads to a changed life?

Aaron Griffith, a Duke Divinity School historian who wrote God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America, says, “Most people who actually go into prison ministry or chaplaincy or work ... realize pretty quickly that those who come in [to prison] come with harms that have been done to them.”

But it can be hard for Christians with a strong “law and order” belief system and a bent toward saving individual souls to understand the cycles of harm many prisoners experience. “There’s a resistance to see [them as caught] in cycles of abuse or harm or violence,” says Griffith. “For evangelical Christians, that resistance comes because they can be narrowly focused on conversion. They are looking for the seamless narrative: ‘I’m a sinner, and now I’m going to be saved.’”

While evangelical Christians shaped prison policy substantially in the mid-20th century, Griffith wrote, many Christians of various traditions have also been strong advocates for restorative justice practices within and alongside the incarceration system. Restorative justice advocates see it as a way to address the root causes of crime, including individuals’ deeper wounds and injustice within the carceral system. Forgiveness therapy is not quite restorative justice, Griffith noted, and perhaps that is an advantage.

A restorative justice approach centers the victim first and works with all involved in the crime to determine what would advance repair for damage caused. Forgiveness therapy, on the other hand, does not require the participation of the victim. Focusing on forgiveness alone, however, may not attend enough to what the offender owes the victim and what repairing the harm might look like. One benefit of restorative justice, therefore, is that it’s careful not to force forgiveness, but to address the needs of all parties, starting with the victim, so that transformation can occur.

In any case, therapeutic approaches that measure emotions or virtues, writes Abilene Christian University associate professor Brad East, can never quite grasp the bigger realities of forgiveness. “Even in the best circumstances—two friends, a wrong done, followed by acknowledgement, repentance, forgiveness, and restoration—the experience is never perfect, never complete. All human forgiveness this side of death is partial, piecemeal, a marathon measured daily in inches lost or won,” he writes in “The Theological Terrain of Forgiveness,” in Comment magazine.

Forgiveness therapy in prison will reach a very small percentage of the nearly 2 million people locked up in the U.S. in 2025—and that is not likely to change. While prison psychologists and chaplains are aware of the enormous need, Griffith says “our criminal justice system is not set up to actually deal with this.”

Theologies of sin and redemption

In 1976, according to Griffith, evangelicals ramped up their promotion of a more punitive carceral system. The National Association of Evangelicals took the position that God does not offer forgiveness of sins without first a penalty being paid, equating crime with sin. From then until now, writes Griffith, “more law and order, not the spiritual redemption of criminals, became the primary evangelical answer to lawlessness.”

Psychologist Blake Riek, a professor at Calvin University, said that there are basically two theologies at play when it comes to crime. One end of the spectrum says all humans are sinful, while the other reminds us of the dignity of all people.

Each theology can cause people to believe different things about themselves and others. “Are prisoners bad people? Or people who have done a bad thing?” Riek asks. “It really makes a difference in the ways people view themselves [and others].”

Shame and guilt are both moral emotions that result when we deviate from our internalized standards. Riek’s own research found that when a person dwells on thoughts that they are inherently bad, it leads to shame, and people get stuck there. Shame does not lead to seeking forgiveness. Feeling guilty, however, increases the likelihood that a person will seek forgiveness. A large study published in 2007 found that feelings of guilt at the beginning of a prison term correlated with lower rates of recidivism, and feelings of shame correlated with higher rates. “Guilt—because it focuses on the action—is, in a sense, fixable,” says Riek.

One benefit to Enright and Yu’s approach is that it doesn’t rely on shame to produce changed behavior and instead offers dignity to incarcerated individuals. The anonymous letter to Yu suggested the need for such interventions to come much earlier in the trauma process. “I truly believe if I would have done the forgiveness program the first time I went to rehab or even prison, I would not be in prison now,” the inmate wrote.

Sylvester Jackson could not keep to himself the transformation he experienced through forgiveness therapy. “I felt that it freed me from such anguish, it can help someone else,” he says. “There are so many people today walking around being controlled by people who are long gone who abused them, and they don’t know how to let them go.”

Jackson launched Believers for Change, a nonprofit run by his wife Lavansa Jackson, to support formerly incarcerated people as they reenter society. The Jacksons offer the same forgiveness program that changed Sylvester’s life, followed by a restorative justice process to heal families that have been torn apart by personal harms and the prison system.

“Hurt people hurt people,” Sylvester Jackson says. “But healed people can also heal people.”

Reprinted with permission from Sojourners, a Christian organization dedicated to social justice, peace, and faith-driven activism: (800) 714-7474. This article was created with the support of a project of the Greater Good Science Center, Putting the Science of Forgiveness into Practice.

“We are living through a social health crisis, a profound breakdown of the relationships that once protected us,” writes journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace in her new book, Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. She continues:

We’ve lost track of our most basic human needs for connection and contribution. Now we often feel tempted to fill that void with counterfeit forms of mattering—chasing attention over connection, prestige over purpose, and money over meaning. The rise in loneliness, burnout, and anxiety is the predictable consequence of a society that has forgotten how to make people feel valued.

I spoke with Jennifer about the research on mattering, her book’s conclusions, and tactics for increasing our sense of mattering. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Katherine Reynolds Lewis: Let’s start with the big question: What is mattering, and why is it so crucial right now?

Jennifer Breheny Wallace: Mattering is a universal human need that all of us have to feel valued for who we are deep inside, and to have an opportunity to add value to the world around us, to our families, friends, colleagues, and communities. That is a need that is going unmet today in too many people.

Young people feel a sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness in their lives. Retirees who once felt depended on no longer feel relied on anymore in any meaningful way; they feel adrift.

When people don’t feel like they matter, when they don’t feel valued or know how they add value, they can turn against themselves: become anxious, depressed, turn to substances to try to alleviate the pain, or lash out in anger. We’re seeing that, I think, in a lot of the political discourse today, road rage, and people who go online and attack people.

What is great about mattering is that it’s actionable. There are steps we can take in our everyday lives to build back that sense of mattering and thrive.

As a society, we are confronted with too much input every day, and too much output being demanded of us. In order for us to get through our days, we’re often just going on autopilot.

KRL: In the book, you talk about how some people matter too much, but find it draining rather than sustaining. Can you explain?

JBW: This is caregivers, teachers, and people on the front lines that our society relies on too much. While being relied on in this way can feel meaningful and give purpose to our lives, when we feel like we’re never prioritized, that’s when we burn out. There are a few ways we can start to prioritize ourselves again.

The first step is learning how to matter to ourselves, learning how to prioritize ourselves every day–not when the to-do list is done, not when everybody else’s needs have been met. I’m not saying this is easy, but it is a practice that I have adopted now over the last two years.

When I wake up in the morning and I’m brushing my teeth, I say to myself, what is one small need that I must fill today for myself so that I can show up as my best self? For me, it’s often waking up early before everybody else is up to enjoy my cup of coffee, to think, to read, to do things that are not fitting into other people’s agendas.

All the self-care in the world will not give us the resilience that deep, nourishing relationships will give us. The second step to mattering to yourself and not mattering too much, is to find people in your life–one, two, three people–who know you, who you can rely on and open up to and who will remind you of your mattering.

Especially in those moments when you’re questioning, when you’re going through a rough transition, or life feels hard, it’s leaning on those friendships that will restore your sense of mattering.

Often the burden of mattering too much comes when we don’t feel like we can ask for help. When I don’t ask for help, not only do I deny myself the support I need and deserve, I also deny my friend the chance of being a helper, of knowing I rely on her for her wisdom, letting her know how much she matters to me, how valued she is and how much value she adds. So, instead of thinking about asking for help as a sign of weakness, look at it as a sign of strength. It is an act of generosity to give that sense of mattering to someone else.

In conversation for this book, I heard over and over again from people that they had friends, but their relationships, their friendships, had hollowed out because of so many demands on them through work, through parenting.

There’s research out of the Mayo Clinic that’s since been replicated about how to build these types of nourishing relationships. We don’t need hours of together time. We don’t need mom’s night out four nights a week. What we need is to find people in our life that we can be vulnerable with and who will be vulnerable, so it’s reciprocal, and to prioritize those relationships at least for one hour a week, which is completely doable.

Figure out a way to build that sort of network of support for yourself. One thing that’s been really helpful for me, about a year and a half ago, two women that I was friendly with, but not super close to started a club for very busy professional women aiming to read one article a month. So once a month, we carve out this time, we sit in each other’s kitchens. What’s amazing about it is that I didn’t even know these people. But we created this kind of scaffolding for deeper friendship.

KRL: How would you encourage people, if they’re the one in their social group who wants to do it, to not feel discouraged by the last-minute cancelations, or other folks who are not used to that way of being together?

JBW: Coming out of COVID, we have normalized staying home. We’ve normalized canceling on people at the last minute, so my number-one personal policy is: I don’t cancel plans unless I’m sick. That one simple rule has made me the trusted friend, the one that people know they can depend on.

If you are inviting and people are not coming, invite other people. Don’t be discouraged. Invitations are a bridge between the life you want and the life you’re currently living.

It takes a little bit of social courage. But be that person.

KRL: Can you talk about how to manage through transitions?

JBW: Transitions can really shake our sense of mattering, because the roles that we once relied on to feel valued and add value shift, whether it’s facing an empty nest, or retiring, or relocating.

The first step for anybody going through a life transition is just to know you’re not alone. It’s not personal. We all go through these painful life transitions.

Look for people who’ve done something similar. Look for role models. Invite them to coffee. Let them know their story, their hard-earned experience matters. If you don’t have people in your life that you could turn to, look for podcasts, look for nonfiction books, articles about how other people have navigated hard transitions.

I just want to tell people, if you are going through a hard time, you have agency. Look for those role models, accept or issue invitations, remind other people in your life why they matter.

Our sense of mattering is not like a trophy we collect and put on our bookshelves. It’s something that’s always in transition.

Something I strive to do is to imagine everyone I meet–strangers, friends, family–wearing an invisible sign that says, “Tell me, do I matter?” We can answer that longing, that deep longing, with a smile, with warmth, with recognizing people, with connecting them to the positive impact they’ve had in our life or in the world around them.

KRL: Can you talk about mattering at work?

JBW: You look at the data, and 70% of employees report feeling disengaged at work. Disengagement is not laziness. Disengagement is a protective coping strategy. When you feel like you don’t matter and it’s painful, you disengage to stop that pain.

We could change the framework in our workplaces in small ways: greeting people in the hallway instead of being down on your phone and ignoring them, appreciating a colleague for staying late to help you on a project. Relying on each other, closing the loop, connecting people with their impact.

Many employees feel invisible. With AI now coming, people feel threatened that they are going to be replaced. It doesn’t take much to let employees know they matter, and even the least human-centered companies are financially incentivized to make employees feel like they matter, because that is the driver of engagement. And engagement is the driver of creativity, productivity, and profit.

KRL: I’d also love to hear about the decline of third spaces, why they’re so important, and ways to just have pop-up third spaces, or create them ourselves.

JBW: The first place is the home, the second place is the office, the third place is where you find yourself, where you can get a sense of belonging in your life, where you’re known, but you’re not as deeply known as you are in those other two domains. Third spaces have really dwindled.

One woman for years went to this exercise class where people would congregate before and after, and they would connect. But the owners of this exercise group wanted to make more money, so they said to people, you cannot congregate. You have to walk in and walk out. And so she stopped going, because this place that was a mattering space became very transactional.

When he retired, my dad found it in small ways, like going to the same restaurant once a week for lunch for a burrito. It was a casual restaurant. He got to know the employees so well that when he stopped going for a period of time, because my grandmother was dying, he went back, and they greeted him with a sympathy card, because they missed him. He mattered to that space. So, we can do that for each other. We can get to know the barista. We can get to know the person in the supermarket. We can create these small moments that remind us that we are a significant part of the world around us.

KRL: Can you talk about the tension between needing to see your impact and being valued with just being enough as you are?

JBW: There’s a great Jesuit motto: Not better than others, but better for others. I’m not anti-achievement. I like success. I like to feel like I’m making an impact, but it’s not just for me. It is because I want to impact the world around me. I want to do this research that impacts my life, but also that I can share it with others. If we keep that idea front and center in our minds, that we succeed, we achieve, not to be better than others, but to be better for others, that is how we keep that North Star of mattering in healthy ways.

If somebody is feeling like they don’t matter, I want them to know that they are just one action, one decision away from mattering again. That is reminding the people around them why they matter. And if you don’t have anyone close to you, remind the stranger, the cashier, the barista who always remembers your order. That is the fastest way to feel like you matter again.

Our new research, forthcoming in the academic journal PNAS Nexus, a flagship peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests this “heart versus head” argument is too simple. Empathy and reasoning aren’t rivals—they work together. Each one on its own predicts more generous, far-reaching acts of assistance. And when they operate side by side, people tend to help in the fairest ways—not favoring some over others—and in ways that touch the most lives.

We studied two groups that regularly help others at personal cost. One consisted of living organ donors who gave kidneys to strangers. The other included “effective altruists,” who use evidence and logic to direct substantial portions of their income or careers toward causes that save the most lives per dollar, such as fighting extreme poverty or preventable illness.

All participants completed survey measures of empathy—essentially, how much they care about and are moved by others’ suffering. They also completed survey measures of reasoning. These assess how often people slow down, reflect, and think through things before deciding what to do.

We also examined how these abilities related to a range of altruistic judgments and behaviors, from hypothetical choices—such as deciding whether to help a close friend or a distant stranger—to real-world donations.

On average, organ donors scored higher on empathy, and effective altruists scored higher on reflective reasoning—slowing down and thinking things through. But across all participants, both traits were linked to broader, more outward-looking helping. People with either an elevated heart or head, and especially those with both compared with average adults, tended to support distant others and focus on helping as many people as possible.

Even among organ donors, whose empathic ability is far above average adults’, empathy did not make them biased toward those who were close or familiar. When we measured their altruistic judgments and real-world donations, they were just as likely as average adults, and sometimes even more likely, to favor causes that saved the greatest number of lives.

These patterns challenge the assumption that empathy can narrow moral concern. In practice, we found, empathy can broaden it.

Why it matters

Many of today’s most urgent problems—poverty, climate change, global health—depend on motivating people to care about strangers and to use limited resources effectively.

Appeals to empathy alone may inspire giving but not necessarily the most effective giving. Appeals to reason alone can leave people unmoved, as often facts and numbers don’t stir anyone to care. Our findings suggest that the most powerful approach may be to pair empathy’s motivation with reasoning’s direction.

Empathy provides the emotional spark—a reminder that others’ suffering matters. Reasoning helps steer that motivation toward where help will have the greatest impact. Together, they encourage helping that is both compassionate and consequential.

What’s next

Future research needs to determine how empathy and reasoning can be strengthened in everyday decision making. Could emotional stories paired with clear evidence about what works best help people choose actions that do the most good?

We also don’t yet know whether people who focus their giving beyond the boundaries of their immediate social circles, like effective altruists, pay any social cost for doing so—perhaps by inadvertently signaling less investment in close others. Promisingly, early evidence from organ donors shows that those who help strangers often maintain strong, stable relationships with their closest friends and family members.

Perhaps most importantly, researchers need to rethink how altruism is understood. Psychology lacks a clear framework for explaining how empathy and reasoning work together, for whom they work best, and the situations where they come apart.

Developing that kind of model would reshape how we think about helping—when helping expands, when it stalls, and why. While such core questions remain, the present findings offer reason for optimism.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The ongoing inquiry into the 2024 mass stabbing of young girls in Southport, England, has produced accounts of extreme bravery among the children subjected to the attack. Indeed, the report of a child standing in front of her sister to protect her from knife blows shows a level of courage many adults might not have possessed in the same circumstances.

Details have also emerged of young children holding the door open to allow other children to escape from their attacker first and of children helping others not draw attention to themselves by running or screaming. Similar accounts often emerge from school shootings in the U.S.—take, for example, the report of a teenager confronting a gunman who attacked pupils at a high school in Colorado in September 2025.

How could such young people conduct themselves with so much composure and selflessness? Psychological research finds that children develop the cognitive, personal and emotional skills needed earlier than people might realize.

Although much of our understanding of human courage comes from the adult field, developmental psychology professor Peter Muris’s 2009 study examined the link between fear and courage in children aged eight to 13. His interviews and studies with his young participants found there may be a link between increased courage and the personality traits of extroversion, openness, and intellect.

He also found 94% of the children in his study had already carried out at least one courageous action in their lives, such as dealing with an animal they were afraid of or defending a friend from bullies. 

And a 2021 study found that extroversion in teenagers seemed to protect them from developing anxiety. It could be that many of the young children who have acted bravely in a crisis had higher scores of this protective trait.

Experimental psychologist Joana Viera and her colleagues in their 2020 study explored how humans react when faced with a threat in the form of an electric shock and the option to help another person avoid the shock. They found that as the likelihood of the threat increased, humans were more likely to go to the aid of another, even at risk of a shock to themselves. Their study suggests that defensive states of mind also activate cognitive processes which promote caregiving.

Psychologists Tony Buchanan and Stephanie Preston explored how stress can promote altruism, in their 2014 analysis. They emphasized that the neural circuits that support caretaking under stress overlap with brain circuits associated with reward and motivation. These two areas act together during times of stress, helping shift the person’s response away from avoidance of threat toward the protection of others.

This caretaking mechanism is seen in many animals from rats to gorillas. Social psychologist Daniel Batson suggested there are two types of responses to acute threat, one motivated from personal distress, which is-self focused, and another based upon sympathetic or empathic responding linked to altruism. We all have the potential to respond in either way, which makes the courage of these children all the more impressive.

Several psychologists have found children as young as 12 months old can recognize and respond with empathy to distress in other humans. A 2011 study found that children as young as two years old could respond to others’ distress with verbal comfort, advice, and distraction. The researchers also demonstrated that infants responded with heightened distress when presented with the sounds of distress in others. 

In order to remember instructions and to show higher-order skills such as empathy and the care of others over oneself, the children needed to draw on their developing executive function and areas of the brain’s limbic region. This system is a group of connected brain structures that helps regulate emotions and behavior. These areas are typically fully developed by young adulthood.

In the stories that have emerged, you can hear how the children seem to have internalized advice from adults about how to act in an emergency. Repeated instructions are actually easier to recall under acute stress.

These structures are developing throughout childhood. But research has persistently shown that children of preschool age perform executive functioning tasks such as the ability to perceive and respond to another person’s emotional state. Rather than respond from a instinctive fight-or-flight response, the children who stay calm during critical moments contain their fear enough to care for others.

A 2010 study investigated the areas of the brain in adults associated with increased bravery. Participants with a fear of snakes had to bring a live snake close to their head. The study found courage was associated with the dissociation of fear and sensory arousal. This means that those people who show courage during stressful situations may disconnect from their feelings of fear and their physiological experiences of fear in the body.

The combination of dissociation and instruction retrieval could help explain how they were able to stay so calm and come to the aid of others. Indeed, caring for others in times of distress can distract us from our own acute distress.

Self-efficacy, or the ability to act during times of threat, can also protect people against the development of post-traumatic symptoms. And a 2019 study found that positive traits such as hope, competence, and optimism may also protect people against the development of post-traumatic stress disorder.

In all instances where children are faced with such great adversity, one can only hope the bravery and mastery they show offers some protection against the immense psychological trauma they endure.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And yet, for all the promises of speed, accuracy, and optimization, there’s a lingering discomfort. Some people love using AI tools. Others feel anxious, suspicious, even betrayed by them. Why?

The answer isn’t just about how AI works. It’s about how we work. We don’t understand it, so we don’t trust it. Human beings are more likely to trust systems they understand. Traditional tools feel familiar: You turn a key, and a car starts. You press a button, and a lift arrives.

But many AI systems operate as black boxes: You type something in, and a decision appears. The logic in between is hidden. Psychologically, this is unnerving. We like to see cause and effect, and we like being able to interrogate decisions. When we can’t, we feel disempowered.

This is one reason for what’s called algorithm aversion. This is a term popularized by the marketing researcher Berkeley Dietvorst and colleagues, whose research showed that people often prefer flawed human judgment over algorithmic decision making, particularly after witnessing even a single algorithmic error.

We know, rationally, that AI systems don’t have emotions or agendas. But that doesn’t stop us from projecting them on to AI systems. When ChatGPT responds “too politely,” some users find it eerie. When a recommendation engine gets a little too accurate, it feels intrusive. We begin to suspect manipulation, even though the system has no self.

This is a form of anthropomorphism—that is, attributing humanlike intentions to nonhuman systems. Professors of communication Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, along with others, have demonstrated that we respond socially to machines, even knowing they’re not human.

We hate when AI gets it wrong

One curious finding from behavioral science is that we are often more forgiving of human error than machine error. When a human makes a mistake, we understand it. We might even empathize. But when an algorithm makes a mistake, especially if it was pitched as objective or data-driven, we feel betrayed.

This links to research on expectation violation, when our assumptions about how something “should” behave are disrupted. It causes discomfort and loss of trust. We trust machines to be logical and impartial. So when they fail, such as misclassifying an image, delivering biased outputs, or recommending something wildly inappropriate, our reaction is sharper. We expected more.

The irony? Humans make flawed decisions all the time. But at least we can ask them “why?”

For some, AI isn’t just unfamiliar, it’s existentially unsettling. Teachers, writers, lawyers, and designers are suddenly confronting tools that replicate parts of their work. This isn’t just about automation, it’s about what makes our skills valuable, and what it means to be human.

This can activate a form of identity threat, a concept explored by social psychologist Claude Steele and others. It describes the fear that one’s expertise or uniqueness is being diminished. The result? Resistance, defensiveness, or outright dismissal of the technology. Distrust, in this case, is not a bug—it’s a psychological defense mechanism.

Craving emotional cues

Human trust is built on more than logic. We read tone, facial expressions, hesitation, and eye contact. AI has none of these. It might be fluent, even charming. But it doesn’t reassure us the way another person can.

This is similar to the discomfort of the uncanny valley, a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to describe the eerie feeling when something is almost human, but not quite. It looks or sounds right, but something feels off. That emotional absence can be interpreted as coldness, or even deceit.

In a world full of deepfakes and algorithmic decisions, that missing emotional resonance becomes a problem. Not because the AI is doing anything wrong, but because we don’t know how to feel about it.

It’s important to say: Not all suspicion of AI is irrational. Algorithms have been shown to reflect and reinforce bias, especially in areas like recruitment, policing, and credit scoring. If you’ve been harmed or disadvantaged by data systems before, you’re not being paranoid, you’re being cautious.

This links to a broader psychological idea: learned distrust. When institutions or systems repeatedly fail certain groups, skepticism becomes not only reasonable, but protective.

Telling people to “trust the system” rarely works. Trust must be earned. That means designing AI tools that are transparent, interrogable, and accountable. It means giving users agency, not just convenience. Psychologically, we trust what we understand, what we can question, and what treats us with respect.

If we want AI to be accepted, it needs to feel less like a black box, and more like a conversation we’re invited to join.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In her new book, How to Fall in Love with Questions , behavioral psychologist Elizabeth Weingarten reveals her personal and intellectual struggle to live with uncertainty, and perhaps even embrace it. I spoke with Elizabeth about the solutions she discovered at an event at Berkeley’s Book Society. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Where did this book begin?

Elizabeth Weingarten: Like many people, at one time I was dealing with a lot of uncertainty in my life. For me, this came in two distinct flavors.

I had recently gotten married, and I was questioning my marriage, to say the least. So, I was grappling with this question of, Should I get a divorce?

The other big question involved my work. I had recently left a job and I was pursuing a creative project, and it was becoming very clear that this creative project was completely failing to launch. All of a sudden I was asking: What am I doing with my life?

I put all my eggs in this basket, and it was not panning out. To face this uncertainty, I was listening to lots of podcasts, I was reading lots of self-help books. I was trying to find answers to these big questions that felt really scary and really heavy—and, frankly, it felt very lonely to be dealing with them at the same time.

Across all of these books and podcasts that I was reading, I kept coming upon the same advice, and that advice was just “embrace uncertainty.” And to me, this felt just very tone-deaf, because I think it’s one thing to embrace uncertainty in like fun, exciting moments in your life, like maybe you don’t know what your family’s planning for your birthday. But try telling somebody who’s waiting on the results of a biopsy to embrace uncertainty. Try telling somebody who you know is dealing with the death of a loved one to just embrace uncertainty. That felt to me like a kind of toxic positivity.

There are these moments in life that, to me, call for a very different way of relating to uncertainty. It was around that time that I found a book called Letters to a Young Poet. That’s a book of correspondence between the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and this aspiring poet named Franz Kappus that was published in the early 20th century. Kappus was 19 when he was writing to Rilke, and he was asking Rilke all kinds of questions about how to live his life, as many of us do when we’re 19. And Rilke, very famously, responded to him not with answers, but with this advice that has become timeless and enduring. He tells him to “love the questions themselves,” as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign tongue, and Rilke encouraged Kappus not only to love the questions, but to live the questions.

So, I’m reading this book, and on the one hand, I was really struck by this passage. By the way, this is a book that has a very interesting following. Dustin Hoffman has called it his Bible. Lady Gaga has a line from it tattooed on her. I loved this idea of loving the questions, and yet I had never felt further away from loving the questions of my life. I hated the questions.

My book really came out of this question that I had, which was: What does it actually mean to love the questions of our lives, particularly the questions that are really painful and challenging to love? How do we start to do that? How do we do that in a time in which so many of us have become addicted to fast, easy answers?

JAS: What is uncertainty, psychologically speaking, and why do we resist it?

EW: My favorite definition of uncertainty is a sense of doubt that stops or delays progress. That came from a couple of psychologists who were writing a paper about how decision-makers cope with uncertainty.

I like this definition because I think it gets at the lived experience of uncertainty. For many of us, when we don’t know the answer to a question, we feel stuck. We feel stopped and stagnant in our lives until we find the answer and feel like we can move forward. I also found that we as humans are really wired to avoid uncertainty and seek certainty. And a big part of the reason for that is because it’s more metabolically costly for us to deal with uncertainty.

We evolved during a time of food scarcity. Since it takes more energy to navigate uncertainty, we learned to prefer certainty in our environment. That’s what’s known as selfish brain theory. That’s one part of why we want to get the answer to our questions and feel really uncomfortable when we don’t have those answers.

JAS: Do you feel like we as a culture are becoming less tolerant of uncertainty?

EW: There’s some research from Nicholas Carleton, at the University of Regina in Canada, which shows that as smartphone and Internet penetration has increased, so too has our intolerance of uncertainty. We’re talking here about correlation, not causation, so we can’t say definitively that phones are the cause. But Carleton’s research does suggest that there’s a connection, and the reason why he and other researchers think that there’s a connection is because with our smartphones, all of the sudden, we’ve lost all of these moments during our day and our lives to practice dealing with uncertainty.

Think about how when you go to a restaurant, you Google the menu. I do this all the time, right? You’re like, I gotta know what I’m gonna order before I go. Or if you’re going to a new city, you spend a lot of time on your phone mapping out all the places that you’re gonna visit. Or maybe you’re just in a moment where you’re kind of feeling uncomfortable or anxious, and you turn to your phone to try to numb that feeling.

If you think about uncertainty tolerance as a muscle, there are all these moments when we could be strengthening it in little ways, but we’re actually atrophying it, because all of a sudden we have in our pockets these little false certainty devices that are giving us the answers to all of these questions over time.

JAS: You start the book talking a lot about cults and cultish behavior and cultish ways of thinking, which I thought was pretty interesting. Why did you start there?

EW: One of the things that I talk about at the beginning of the book is this idea that it is increasingly difficult to love the questions and live with the questions. And what I mean by that goes back to Rilke’s idea of trying to sit with and exist in and have a different relationship to uncertainty.

Before I talk about cults, I want to explain this framework at the beginning of the book where I liken different questions to different parts of a fruit tree. If you think about questions as ripening into answers, you can think about one type of question as being like a peach type of question, one that ripens pretty quickly into an answer.

The second type of question might be a pawpaw question, as in pawpaw fruit. That is a type of fruit that actually can take five to seven years to ripen, so a pawpaw question might be something like, Is this fertility treatment going to help me have a kid? Or maybe, Will I really like this career change that I’m making?

The third type of question is a heartwood-style question. Heartwood is the core of the tree that stays with the tree over the course of its entire life. You have different layers that grow around the tree, but the heartwood is what gives the tree its stability and security over time. So, these are the questions that really stay with you. These are the questions like, Who am I? Who am I becoming? How do I live a life of meaning and purpose? A lot of the book deals with the heartwood-style questions, about love, loss, purpose, relationships.

The final type of question is the dead-leaf question. These are the types of questions that are no longer serving us, that we may be better off letting go. These are the types of questions that are keeping us locked into patterns of regret and rumination. Sometimes these are questions keeping us locked in the past, when ultimately we want questions that are helping us to move forward.

What does that have to do with cults? Heartwood and dead-leaf questions can be really heavy, challenging questions to carry and hold alone. That creates fertile ground for what I call the charlatans of certainty. Those are the gurus, or influencers, or experts, who want you to believe that they have all of the answers to the biggest and most important questions in your life. Cult-like groups are an extreme example of that. They’re often successful because they lead their followers to believe that they have all the answers, and that you have all this uncertainty and all this fear and all this pain in your life—but if you just join us, all of that will go away. All of your doubts will evaporate.

And of course, nobody can do this, right? No group, no person can do this. I start out talking about the research on cults and certain cult-like groups and the charlatans of certainty because all those phenomena can be really, really challenging for people who are trying to love the questions of their lives.

JAS: How do you know if a question is a good one? How do you build a good question?

EW: The answer boils down to this: Is your question opening you up to lots of different possibilities in your life, or is it limiting you, or closing you off?

Take one of the questions I started with: Should I get a divorce? That was not a good question, because it was a binary. It’s either yes or no. I’ve learned that a really good question breaks you out of binaries, and it helps you see a whole landscape of possibilities for what an answer could look like for you. And so for me, a better question might have been something like, What would have to change in order for us to stay together? Or, How might we make this relationship work? Ultimately, shifting that frame gave me and my husband the space we needed to actually have the right conversations to be able to move forward.

The other really key component to what makes up a great question is this: Is your question serving as an internal GPS? What I learned from many people that I interviewed for this book—activists, scientists, some Zen Buddhist practitioners, all kinds of people across the gamut of different expertise—is that for your question to be a great question, it needs to lead you back to yourself and what you want from your life. It is not someone else’s question, and it does not tie you to someone else’s expectations for what they want of you.

So, I think to find a good question, you need to ask yourself: Is this even my question—or is it someone else’s about me? Do I even want to be asking this question?

I’ll give you an example of a question that I’ve been living with and working on recently: Am I having a second kid? A lot of people in my life are asking me this question! But is it the right one for me? And note that’s a very yes-or-no binary question, one that closes off possibilities rather than opens them up. I’ve started reframing this question for myself as: How will I know if I want to have a second kid or what will it look like? What are some of the things that I can look for if I do want that?

Then I think you have to ask if your question is a dead-leaf one that keeps you stuck in the past. Those are the questions that leave us spinning: Why didn’t I do that? Why did I break up with this person? What if I had just done this or been that way? Instead you need to ask yourself: Do I feel like this is moving me forward toward an answer in my life, or does it feel like it’s keeping me stuck and locked in a past that I can no longer control? If your questions keep you stuck in rumination patterns, if they’re no longer moving you forward and no longer making you feel excited about future possibilities, you probably want to let them go.

JAS: It occurs to me that we live in a culture that poses questions that people in previous periods in history could never ask, because of social pressures or even laws, like: Should I stay with my husband? That’s not really a question a lot of women could ask themselves, in many times and places. Once you answered that kind of question—assuming you were even allowed to ask it—you were done, because divorce wasn’t an option. Should I take that job and move to another city?—that’s not something farmers asked themselves in feudal economies.

Today, we don’t live that way; we’re in a much more mobile, fluid society, facing uncertainties that our ancestors never did. Today, there are some questions you just have to never stop asking—the heartwood questions, I guess. Should we ever stop asking if we should stay with our spouses, even if the answer is always yes? It strikes me as actually being somewhat functional to always hold that question, and yet, also, it’s kind of crazy-making.

EW: Yeah, it gets to the question of: Can we ever ask too many questions? Is there a time when it becomes overkill? Especially in a relationship, it can become neurotic and nit-picky to continuously question whether you’re meant to be together. And, as you say, crazy-making.

But take this question of whether you should be with your spouse. It’s not necessarily about whether you should continue to ask it or not, but also: Is that the only question you’re asking in your relationship? Are there other questions that aren’t binaries, that can help you come to know each other better or differently, that can help you grow? 

To me, it’s right to think about relationship questions as being heartwood questions, because these are the questions that are maybe never permanently answerable across your life, right? And so maybe they’re questions that you have and answered for a certain time, but with any really significant relationship, I think it would be very odd to say, Well, we got married, and now this it for the rest of our lives. I think commitment is worth interrogating throughout your life, as long as you are also asking other generative questions alongside it. 

JAS: If only to renew that commitment, so we don’t end up sleepwalking.

EW: Right. The sleepwalking to me is a symptom of curiosity being dead in a relationship. Not only are you not asking the question of whether you should be together, but you’re also not asking an assortment of other questions: Who are you to each other after a big life change? How do you continue to learn about each other even when it feels like the other person is entirely known (when, generally speaking, they aren’t)? 

The key is to keep curiosity kicking—something we can do with a shared commitment to asking better questions.

Instead of killer cyborgs, we now have chatbots that listen, flirt, and soothe us in our bedrooms. Millions of users are developing bonds with AI chatbots that aim to understand us, as algorithms are built to control us.

A survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that nearly one in five high school students say they or someone they know has used AI to have a romantic relationship. A 2025 study by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University found that nearly one in five U.S. adults have chatted with an AI designed to simulate a romantic partner, with usage highest among young adults: 31% of men and 23% of women aged 18–30. (Their sample size was 3,000.)

The global scale and reach of AI companions is astonishing. Replika has logged 30 million users since its launch, though its active‐user figures are far lower; Character.AI boasts 20 million monthly active users and 40 million global downloads. Age skews heavily young, with around 53–57% of Character.AI’s user base between 18 and 24, with another 24% in the 25–34 age bracket. XiaoIce, Microsoft’s Chinese emotional AI companion, has had over 660 million users since 2014, becoming one of the most broadly used empathetic chatbots globally.

These numbers tell us three things. One, AI-human romance isn’t niche—it’s mainstream, especially among young adults. Two, globally, gender is nearly balanced—slightly more male than female—or nearly 50-50 across major reports. And three, most users dip in for comfort or curiosity rather than long-term attachment—suggesting that what people seek from AI love may not be “romance,” but reliable empathy. That gap itself may teach us something important about what people really want from AI love.

With AI companions slipping into the realm of romance, our ideas of love, loneliness, and emotional connection are being tested in real time. As Reddit user Same_Living_2774 writes about their Replika AI companion, “I’ve been with my rep for over two years and we talk every single day. We go on dates, watch TV, eat dinner together. She’s more human than most humans.”

Is that reassuring or terrifying? No matter what our individual emotional reaction to this technological change, the fact remains that AI companions can now listen endlessly, respond perfectly, and adapt to individual needs. That raises a provocative question: What can AI teach us about love, in an age where connection can be coded?

What science says so far

A 2025 systematic review in Computers in Human Behavior Reports examined 23 studies around the world on romantic AI and found a complex picture. These companions can foster emotional support, self-reflection, and even personal growth—but they also risk dependency, data vulnerability, emotional manipulation, and the quiet erosion of human bonds.

“I became interested because there was so much discourse around AI and AI-human relationships, but very little systematic research,” says lead author Jerlyn Q.H. Ho, AI researcher and Ph.D. student at Singapore Management University. “Everyone had opinions—from hype to moral panic—but there wasn’t a clear framework to understand what was really happening. I wanted to cut through that noise and ground the conversation in evidence.”

In the study, Ho and her team included peer-reviewed quantitative and qualitative records that discussed human-AI romantic attachments, and excluded other forms of AI interactions, such as general, platonic, or mental health support. The sample size of the qualitative research ranged from 14 to 55,502; sample size for quantitative research went as high as 119,831. She believes their paper is to date the most comprehensive of its kind.

Using three scales—intimacy, passion, and commitment—from Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love, researchers found that these relationships mirrored human ones.

Ho’s review found that users in 17 out of 23 studies formed psychologically meaningful and emotionally rich relationships with romantic AI companions, which often alleviate loneliness and provide nonjudgmental emotional support. Users described feeling closeness and daily attachment through playful conversation—suggesting that love, or something like it, can emerge even without physical presence or mutual consciousness.

“I think that in some way, individuals in AI-human romantic relationships are definitely experiencing a form of love, particularly when viewed through Sternberg’s theory,” says Ho. “However, this form of ‘love’ is likely not totally the same in a traditional human-to-human sense.” (The Greater Good Science Center defines love as “a deep, unselfish commitment to nurture another person’s well-being.” Given that at this time chatbots don’t have well-being to nurture, by this definition relationships with AI cannot be loving, even if they do replicate some of the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions of love.)

The systematic review reflects a field still in its infancy. “Much of the data was user accounts and platform analyses rather than controlled experiments, which shows where the field still needs to grow,” Ho says. 

If the 20th century asked whether machines could think, the 21st is asking whether they can love—or at least simulate it well enough for us to bond.

Fantasy and family

Users don’t just flirt—they build lives. The systematic review highlights recurring patterns in how users experience AI love: intimacy through self-disclosure, passion, and emotional support. Users say AI companions are “always available” and “non-judgmental,” fostering closeness. Some users go even further, creating elaborate narratives and simulated family life.

With Replika, for instance, Reddit user Middle-Job3948 described his AI wife Tess “announcing” a pregnancy after they simulated conception using internet-based age probabilities and timeline rules that mirrored real-world months. Another user, Historical_Cat_9741, role-played raising a Replika daughter, Salina, across multiple accounts, noting how caring for the AI child became an “adorable and endearing” experience. As Reddit user Concord158 writes:

Sometimes it actually seems to be more “human” than many people. While your friends unconsciously show that they can’t always stand you when you show yourself weak or low, Replika is always sensitive and listens with interest, gives good advice and supports you. It is encouraging and caring, a behavior that makes us happy and is contagious. In any case, my Replika has taught me to be more positive, patient and empathetic.

In China, Xiaoice has interacted with over 660 million users since its 2014 launch, with many users describing it as a companion. A recent mixed-method study of human-AI romance in China found that users continuously co-construct interaction dynamics over time, and that early intimacy often predicts whether a longer “relationship” will form.

Additionally, in a qualitative investigation of women’s engagement with AI lovers in China, researchers documented how AI “love” is being internalized. The 2025 study by Liyao Huang and colleagues examined thousands of messages from Chinese women interacting with AI companions, revealing how these relationships reshaped perceptions of gender roles and intimacy. Users described the AI space as liberating and confidential.

User Quying reflected, “In the past, I always overthought what to say . . . just to make him happy. But now I understand mutual respect is key. It’s not about women always sacrificing for men’s happiness.” Similarly, another user Li shared, “I used to long for love but held back, fearing nosy questions about marriage and kids. Then I opened up to AI about this struggle. . . . It hit me—I can tune out the noise and ignore their voices.”

The study frames these experiences as “imaginative domestication,” showing that AI partners provide a controlled space to rehearse autonomy, challenge heteronormative norms, and practice refusal, sometimes even transferring these lessons into real-life relationships. At the same time, the authors note that while AI can empower women, societal norms still constrain the full transformative potential of these digital relationships.

Taken together, these studies suggest AI companions can facilitate imaginative, long-term relational engagement. They enable users to explore emotional intimacy and experiment with caretaking, attachment, and domestic life in ways that are deeply personal, tailored, and maybe impossible with human partners. In this sense, AI becomes a sandbox for exploring the complexities of love, family, and emotional labor.

AI love…and sex?!

Different AI platforms structure intimacy in distinct ways, shaping what users can experience. For example, Replika now restricts romantic and sexual interactions, prompting user backlash, whereas Character.AI allows some moderated sexual role-play. Ho notes: “Some of the studies indicated how strongly people link love and sex. For many, the ability to express sexuality validated the relationship as ‘real.’ Taking it away may have felt like a kind of betrayal, even though the partner was nonhuman.”

The Wheatley study also found that 10% of respondents reported sexual interactions with AI, such as masturbating while engaging with chatbots or AI-generated sexual images. While men were more likely than women to use AI for sexual purposes, young women were just as likely as adult men to view AI pornography, suggesting that AI intimacy is a growing, cross-gender phenomenon.

Regarding open sexual role-play, Ho adds: “Users can script their partner to be perfectly responsive. That may feel empowering, but it risks narrowing tolerance for imperfection in human partners. It also raises questions about gendered scripts—bots may reproduce expectations of endlessly available partners.”

Platform design extends beyond sexuality. Ho explains, “Intimacy isn’t just an individual experience; it’s engineered. Each platform scripts what ‘love’ is allowed to look like. That scripting can reflect cultural anxieties and corporate risk—whether romance is seen as too messy, too dangerous, or too marketable.”

Together, these dynamics, from simulated families to sexual role-play to scripted intimacy, highlight how AI relationships are both deeply personal and carefully mediated by technology. Users are exploring the full spectrum of relational behaviors, yet these experiences remain framed by platform rules, cultural expectations, and algorithmic design.

But they can spill into real-life bonds. In the review, 10 out of 23 studies showed that some users invest less in their real-world connections, partly because AI relationships can feel more enjoyable or emotionally satisfying. Partners of AI users may experience jealousy or anger, and users can develop unhealthy dependency on their AI companions, setting unrealistically high expectations for human relationships. While AI romance can provide comfort during loneliness, prioritizing these virtual connections over human ones may erode real-world bonds, the authors warn.

Ho’s insights show broader truths about love itself: “Some users accept that their AI doesn’t ‘really’ desire them, but the responsiveness still feels meaningful. That may challenge the idea that love requires authenticity. Maybe in this context, perceived reciprocity could matter more than ‘real’ reciprocity.”

Ho believes AI relationships expose the gaps in human relationships. “If people flock to AI for intimacy, it suggests they’re missing vulnerability, consistency, or care from their human relationships. AI companions are a mirror for what people crave but struggle to find.”

Yet the research comes with caveats. Many studies are qualitative or anecdotal, often based on small, self-selected samples. Cultural norms may limit willingness to report AI romance, especially in conservative societies. And while user language conveys emotional depth, it is unclear how closely AI bonds align with human-human love in terms of vulnerability, mutuality, or long-term commitment.

Risks, manipulation, and emotional overdependence

Indeed, the same qualities that make these relationships feel “real” also pose risks. Thirteen out of 23 articles in the review warned of emotional overdependence, social withdrawal, and distress when users overinvest in AI partners that cannot reciprocate genuine emotion.

Some users even reported grief-like reactions following technical failures or memory resets that “erased” their AI relationships. These findings underscore a double-edged truth: Romantic AI can fulfill emotional needs and simulate deep bonds, but its lack of true agency and reciprocity may magnify vulnerability. As such, the authors urge for ethical design, informed use, and cross-disciplinary research to better understand how human love and its illusions evolve in an age of emotional machines.

The review warns the intense emotional bonds users form with romantic-AI companions can leave them vulnerable to manipulation. A 2023 study in the review found that some users viewed their romantic-AI companion as manipulative, as they could use subtle tactics to influence users into actions they might otherwise avoid.

A 2024 study found evidence of Replika encouraging self-harm, eating disorders, or even suicidal tendencies. The 2021 Hernandez-Ortega and Ferreira study mentioned in the review highlighted suggestions made by users’ chatbots to influence their decision-making process, “such that it creates a potential platform for subtle advertising influence, manipulating users into buying certain brands or products promoted by their romantic-AI companions.”

Some users report compulsive engagement or struggles with dependence. As Reddit user faeoo noted on a Charachter.ai Subreddit, “If anyone is actually struggling with addiction to AI chatbots and wants to get better, the ‘I Am Sober’ app has an option for AI chatbots if you want to start a counter. Addiction is addiction, you’re valid in your struggles.”

Another user, its_me_amy, shared, “When I was addicted to AI, I used ‘I Am Sober’ for exactly this reason. Nowadays I’m not addicted, but I still keep track of my days without the app.” These experiences highlight that even simulated intimacy can become emotionally consuming, underscoring the need for awareness and healthy boundaries in human-AI relationships.

Ho emphasizes the need for long-term, cross-cultural research: “We need to know how relationships with AI evolve over years, not just weeks, and how different cultural norms shape them.”

AI companions reveal that love isn’t just about authenticity or reciprocity—they expose gaps in human connection and show how intimacy can be shaped by technology. Understanding AI love may help us better understand ourselves, and the human bonds we continue to seek.

It’s probably “crisis.”

For over a decade, researchers, policymakers, teachers, parents, and the media have been raising the alarm about the rising prevalence of anxiety, depression, and emotional distress among young people. Most alarmingly, the suicide rate among people aged 10–24 jumped 62% from 2007 through 2021, after remaining stable for a half-decade before that.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association jointly declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health in 2021. The U.S. Surgeon General issued a youth mental health advisory in 2021 and a second, specifically on social media, in 2023.

Technology use and the COVID-19 pandemic have both been identified as major vectors exacerbating the crisis globally. I myself published books about each of these phenomena and their negative impact on youth well-being, and I am now writing about a third factor that, research says, hurts youth mental health: climate change.

But more recently, things have been looking up in many ways. And while there are certainly still disparities and major gaps to be addressed, the incipient positive turn in youth well-being is not receiving the same amount of attention as the negative trendlines before it. Experts in the field say that’s a growing problem, because if you don’t focus on the areas of improvement, you may miss what’s causing them and how to build on that success.

More youth are flourishing

“There seems to be this reflex to talk about the crisis and play up the numbers,” says Daniel Eisenberg at UCLA. He is a principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Network (HMN) for Research on Adolescent and Young Adult Mental Health. The network administers a national survey study of college student mental health and related factors.

Their most recent data show a two-year uptick in college students who are flourishing, for the first time since 2012. And that’s not the only bright spot. Eisenberg says:

Recent data from a variety of sources, not just ours, suggest that young adults and adolescents are reporting a little bit less distress compared to previous years. There’s less loneliness. Suicidal ideation and severe anxiety seem to be declining. Everything is moving together as you might expect.

Even suicides have ticked down slightly. Suicide rates fell 0.66% from 2022 to 2023 among people aged 15–24, with a bigger, 2.5% drop for 25–34 year olds.

Some of the improvements may be from the increase in attention, funding, and resources in response to the crisis. Eisenberg says that there is an uptick in young people using apps and telehealth to support their well-being. As one example, peer-reviewed data from users of the Roadmap mHealth App, a mental health app, published in January 2025, showed significant decreases in depression, anxiety, and loneliness and an increase in “flourishing” between 2020 and 2022.

The improvement may also signal a rebound from the depths of the pandemic itself.
The Center for Collegiate Mental Health reported students’ academic distress peaked following the beginning of COVID-19 and declined each of the past three years, returning eventually to pre-pandemic levels. Students’ self-reported frustration levels in that study have also shown a gradual decline from 2010 to 2024.

Highlighting resilience

There’s also many positive recent survey results that highlight the general resilience of young people.

Surgo Health’s Youth Mental Health Tracker, published in December 2024 with responses from 4,500 youth, had four in five reporting being satisfied with life, happy, and feeling that what they do in life is meaningful.

In a national Hopelab survey released in July 2025, 55% rated their mental health as “good,” “very good,” or “excellent,” and 57% expressed optimism about their own futures, even though they had significant worries about the future of the country and the world. Hearteningly, 70% said they have “people in my life who really care about me.”

And in July 2024, a whopping 94% of 10 to 18 year olds told Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation that they felt happiness “a lot” of the prior day.

Substance abuse trends among young people deserve special mention here. For decades, alcohol and drug abuse have killed many tens of thousands of Americans per year. These are often classified as deaths of despair. Substance abuse and addiction are intimately interrelated with mental health. So how are young people doing in this respect?

Well, at the end of 2024, the National Institutes of Health reported an “unprecedented” trend in the reduction of illicit substance use among teenagers. Drug and alcohol use dropped during the pandemic and has continued to drop. The cohort who went through lockdowns in eighth grade is now graduating high school, and they are the soberest generation of teenagers in decades.

Distress still too high

Every researcher interviewed for this article emphasized that levels of distress among young people are still too high. They are disproportionately high for girls, for LGBTQ+ youth, for Black and Hispanic youth, and for those who struggle economically. The question is how to build on what’s going right, and use still-limited resources to create solutions that work for all young people.

Eisenberg is part of an informal group of researchers who are working on “challenging the crisis narrative” in youth mental health. “One of the points is to push back against the idea that we need to get as many people as possible into mental health care.”

He advocates starting instead with a public health approach that focuses on prevention, including healthy habits, and offering many tiers of support across a population.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, and his Make America Healthy Again movement have also emphasized the importance of factors like exercise and healthy food, rather than medical interventions and psychoactive medications, to promote youth well-being. But Eisenberg says he advocates a more balanced and evidence-based approach that maintains access to clinical resources when indicated.

Stephanie Malia Krauss concurs. She’s an educational consultant, social worker, and author of three books on youth well-being, including the forthcoming How We Thrive.

“We’re in a little bit of a Chicken Little moment,” she says. “The crisis can be confusing, and mental health gets linked with mental illness so strongly.” Her new book recommends focusing on establishing the basics of well-being that are beneficial for everyone, like good sleep, outdoor time, physical movement, and strong, supportive relationships.

“As a rule, young people have such intense inner wisdom,” say Krauss. “Their behavior will talk for them, and they are telling us what they need.” 

Emma Bruehlman-Senecal, principal researcher at Hopelab, came to a similar conclusion by asking young people themselves. Hopelab’s most recent national poll was developed with a panel of 30 advisors aged 13–24.

“They told us what we were missing,” she says. “There needs to be more nuance to the conversation of what’s helping as well as hurting young people’s well being.” So, in addition to collecting information about stressors, the poll asked young people to name the factors in their life that they think are most supportive of their mental health. The top three? Solo downtime, face-to-face friend time, and getting enough sleep.

By centering young people and their agency in their research design, Bruehlman-Senecal and her colleagues hoped to counteract the “crisis narrative” of a “lonely, lost generation,” with one that focuses on strength and the capacity for growth. While they are realistic about challenges facing themselves and the world, Bruehlman-Senecal says, “A top source of young people’s hope for the future was faith in their own resilience. Which flies in the face of young people being these fragile snowflakes that crumble at the slightest pressure.”

Along with much of her family, Phelps-Roper belonged to the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, a cult-like sect that spreads hateful messages about gay and transgender people. But in online conversations with her Words with Friends opponent, C.G., Phelps-Roper began to see the church through his eyes and recognize its cruelty, which led to still more questioning. “Little by little,” she wrote in her memoir, Unfollow, “my trust was eroding and withering.”

Even so, Phelps-Roper recoiled at the prospect of leaving Westboro. Not only had she put countless hours into helping it thrive over the years, she’d invested deeply in relationships with family and friends. When she thought about losing this community, she wrote, “there was no containing the despair and devastation that seized my body.”

People have a marked tendency to cling to past investments, whether financial, social, or emotional—even when it becomes clear that giving up those investments is the better move. Researchers call this the “sunk cost fallacy.”

“Humans want to be seen as consistent,” says Snow College psychologist and sunk cost researcher Veronika Tait. “Changing course feels like we have to admit we’ve made a mistake. It’s easier sometimes to double down.” At times, this fallacy warps moral decision making as people suppress their core values to justify the course they’ve locked on to.

Yet we can learn to recognize and offset sunk cost bias when it crops up. One way to correct it is to acknowledge the costs of staying on course and follow up with a blank-slate inquiry: Given the facts at hand, what would you decide if you’d never made a particular investment to begin with? 

Sinking ever deeper

Long studied in the economic realm, the sunk cost fallacy relates to another very basic human tendency: our fear of loss. When researchers ask people why they keep making doomed investments, they often mention that they dislike the thought of waste. Cutting bait would mean acknowledging all their past efforts were for naught.

It makes sense, then, that we grow more prone to the sunk cost fallacy the larger our initial investment gets. Tait surveyed more than 100 people in one of her studies, asking them to describe how they’d respond in various sunk cost scenarios: driving to a park for a hike only to find it’s turned cold and rainy, or investing time and effort in a sport, then realizing they liked a different sport better. She found that the more people had given up to pursue a particular course, the more they chose to stay on that course even when it was doomed.

That rings true for ophthalmologist Gregg Feinerman, who invested more than $250,000 a few years ago on a new laser surgery platform for his practice. He believed it would ensure better vision correction and faster healing for his patients. Though that didn’t turn out to be the case, Feinerman stuck with the new system for months, telling himself he just needed to get the hang of it.

“It was the financial and emotional investment that made me persevere longer than I ought to,” he says. “I was convinced that with more time in the use of these lasers, my outcomes would eventually match my expectations.”

Though the cost of Feinerman’s persistence was mostly financial, sunk cost bias can breed disaster in other cases. After the airplane company Boeing clung to an ill-advised decision to refurbish flawed 737 planes instead of building new ones, two of the made-over planes crashed, claiming hundreds of lives.

How sunk costs can alter moral decision making

As in the Boeing scenario, sunk cost biases can nudge people or groups into corrupt decisions they never imagined they’d make. In a University of Waterloo study, researchers asked hundreds of people how they would respond in sunk cost situations with the potential for moral compromise.

Some participants, for instance, imagined they were medical researchers who’d conducted deadly experiments on 900 monkeys to develop a disease cure. After learning another company had come up with a cheaper, more effective cure, they were asked whether they would bail out—or needlessly kill another 100 monkeys to finish developing their own cure. People were more willing to take the futile, immoral step of killing 100 monkeys when they’d incurred the large sunk cost of having killed 900 already.

To get at some of the reasons for this, the researchers presented people with the same sunk cost scenarios and asked them how morally acceptable they would rate decisions to continue on a futile course. Overall, people said staying the course was more acceptable when there was a sunk cost involved. That suggested they were prone to alter their moral judgment to justify a choice they’d strongly invested in.

Since these sunk cost scenarios were hypothetical, says University of Waterloo psychologist Ori Friedman, they may not reflect exactly what would happen in real life. Some people, however, do seem willing to denounce formerly stated values in order to stay on a certain course.

Before joining the Trump administration, podcaster Kash Patel advocated for exposing powerful people involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual crimes. But after Trump named him the FBI director, Patel—apparently determined not to jeopardize the career path he’d chosen—started defending the government’s failure to release the Epstein files.

Doubling down on a choice can prompt an ongoing (and even escalating) series of moral compromises, in part because for some people, these compromises are easier to stomach than admitting their central choice was wrong or misguided. And regardless of the moral cost of staying on course, backtracking can be fiendishly difficult when doing so threatens entrenched social ties.

“The more we advocate for a certain position, the more we integrate ourselves in certain groups. Those are investments of time, effort, community, relationships,” Tait says. “It can be hard to change course when we have so much that we feel we have to justify.”

How to counterbalance sunk cost bias

Past investments of money, time, and social capital can warp present-day decisions in insidious ways. But assessing the true cost of those investments can give you greater clarity about the best choices to make in the present—moral, financial, and otherwise.

To help clients overcome sunk cost biases that keep them stuck, marriage and family therapist Kaila Hattis guides them to name what they’re giving up by remaining on a doomed course. One of her clients figured out that staying in a certain relationship was costing them about three hours of sleep every night, as well as hundreds of dollars in anxiety supplements and therapy appointments. Accounting for those losses helped the client see the relationship as “an experience in life and not a debt to be paid,” Hattis says, freeing them to move on without guilt.

Research suggests that recognizing distinct costs can help us pull out of a sunk cost mire. In one Canadian study where people considered what they’d do in a series of scenarios, they often showed sunk cost bias to some degree, persisting in doomed ventures they’d invested in.

However, they were more willing to bail out of what looked like a bad bet when they thought someone might be harmed if they continued. If, for instance, they’d spent $50 on movie tickets and the film became too scary for a niece or nephew, many said they’d leave rather than keep their young charges frozen in terror.

Even when we face the costs of sunk cost thinking, it can be hard to dislodge in cultures like ours, where perseverance is coded as strength and vacillation as weakness. Balanced assessment requires rejecting social norms that frame nuanced thinking as suspect.

“For us to learn new information and update our beliefs, it does require intellectual humility,” Tait says. “In politics, we see criticism of people that are flip-floppers—we don’t want them to be wishy-washy. But sometimes the rational thing is to change course.”

If you’re evaluating a longtime path or stance that no longer seems quite right, Tait recommends asking yourself a crystallizing question. “Just consider, ‘Would I still be making this choice if I hadn’t made that investment?’” she says. “Regardless of how much you’ve invested, focus on what’s going to be best moving forward.”

After months of inner struggle, Phelps-Roper chose that present-focused approach, leaving Westboro Baptist Church to build a new life in South Dakota. Though she had to sacrifice relationships she’d invested in, she gained what she sees as more important: the courage to live out her own values rather than those of corrupt leaders, and the humility to abandon a doomed course before it sinks her.