After peaking in 2004 with 64% of the public saying they basically trust the police, confidence sank to a low of 43% by 2022, from which it’s barely recovered, according to Gallup.

But that average conceals a landscape fragmented by race, class, and politics. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly nine out of 10 Democrats support major changes in policing, while only 14% of Republicans do. Two-thirds of all Americans say police treat Black people less fairly than others, a view embraced by almost all Black adults. In general, the lower you go in education and income, the more trust in police falls.

This distrust has an emotional impact on the human beings who comprise America’s police force. As Texas State University crime scientist Tamara Herold describes (based on others’ research), 80% of police are beset by chronic stress; one in four suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression; and suicide rates are 54% higher than in the general population. In many agencies, resignations are rising and recruitment is faltering.

Herold has served as senior advisor to the National Institute of Justice at the U.S. Department of Justice, and developed the pathbreaking Place Network Investigations violence reduction strategy. Her Center for Problem-Oriented Policing serves as a major clearinghouse for law enforcement strategies.

In searching abroad for alternative models of policing, Herold found Colonel Dr. Bernd Burger of the Bavarian State Police in Germany. He introduced her to Markus Ebner, an Austrian psychologist who has developed a new model of “positive leadership” and studied its implementation in police agencies.

I interviewed all three of them at the European Conference on Positive Psychology in Dublin, Ireland, in July. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Tamara, how would you characterize the emotional state of American policing today?

Tamara Herold: It varies across jurisdictions, but overall morale is much lower than it was 10 years ago.

The statistics reflect that. Agencies across the United States are struggling with recruitment, retention, and officer well-being.

Policing has gone through an extraordinarily difficult decade. While many professions face similar challenges, policing occupies a unique role in society. Without a healthy police force, it’s difficult to have a healthy society.

In recent years, police officers have also been heavily criticized in the United States. Some of that scrutiny has been entirely justified. Serious misconduct deserves public attention and accountability.

But one consequence is that many people who have never personally interacted with a police officer now begin those encounters with distrust. That creates an enormous challenge for officers who are trying to help, because successful policing depends on public trust.

JAS: Markus, tell me about positive leadership. What is it?

Markus Ebner: Positive leadership is a leadership style that fosters positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment among employees. It’s measurable, it can be developed, and we can study its outcomes scientifically. We call our model PERMA-Lead.

 

JAS: What are the benefits of positive leadership?

ME: There are benefits at several levels.

For employees, positive leadership is associated with lower stress and fewer symptoms of burnout. Leaders themselves also experience less stress and burnout.

At the team level, people cooperate more, support one another, and create a healthier workplace atmosphere.

At the organizational level, the benefits are measurable, as well. In one study of supermarkets, customers spent more money when stores were led by positive leaders, and employee sick days were lower. So positive leadership isn’t just good for people—it also benefits organizations financially.

   

JAS: You’ve studied positive leadership in policing. What did you find?

ME: We found strong relationships between positive leadership and important outcomes. Teams led by positive leaders reported lower burnout risk. They also felt more responsible for the team’s collective success.

When leaders were less positive, officers focused primarily on their own individual responsibilities rather than the success of the team. I think that’s especially important from a democratic perspective, because policing depends on collaboration and shared responsibility.

JAS: Bernd, how did you discover positive leadership, and why was it relevant to your work as a police commander?

Bernd Burger: I came to it almost by accident.

When I became a commander, I realized that younger officers were very different from my generation. They wanted explanations. The blunt, highly critical leadership style that had been common when I started my career simply didn’t work anymore.

I began giving presentations about younger generations and how police organizations could improve recruitment and retention. Eventually, I realized that leadership was really the central issue. People join organizations because of leadership, and they stay because of leadership.

That led me to Markus’s book on positive leadership. After more than 20 years in policing, I immediately recognized that the best leaders I had worked with naturally embodied the five pillars of positive leadership.

For police officers, that’s especially valuable because we don’t have much time to read scientific research. We need approaches that are practical, understandable, and easy to implement.

I became certified in the approach and now help police agencies throughout Germany and Switzerland integrate positive leadership into their organizations.

Germany also has an advantage in that police officers receive extensive education. Basic officers complete at least two and a half years of training. Middle managers complete another two years of study, and senior leaders earn an additional two-year master’s degree. In total, I received six and a half years of education before reaching senior leadership.

About a year and a half ago, Germany updated its national police leadership regulations. The new guidance emphasizes giving officers meaning and purpose, but it doesn’t explain how to do that. Positive leadership provides exactly those practical tools.

JAS: What are the biggest challenges to implementing positive leadership?

BB: Police organizations are traditionally hierarchical. When people rise through the ranks, they sometimes assume they no longer need to explain their decisions. They simply give orders.

But people need to understand why they’re being asked to do something.

Purpose is especially important for younger officers. People often say that policing’s purpose is simply to provide safety. I ask them, “If that’s all our purpose is, what’s the difference between us and the police in North Korea or Russia?”

 

For me, our purpose is to protect both safety and freedom. We must be transparent. We are accountable under the law. If we make mistakes, we must acknowledge them and learn from them.

That broader purpose helps officers understand why honesty, accountability, and learning matter.

Another challenge is bureaucracy. Police organizations operate within legal systems, and laws are written in very formal, dry language. That style often carries over into everyday communication.

Formal emails rarely make anyone feel appreciated or inspired. Supervisors become accustomed to communicating that way.

One thing I try to do in my workshops is help leaders see that they can give clear instructions while also being warm, respectful, and encouraging. You don’t lose authority by communicating positively. In fact, people usually respond much better.

JAS: Tamara, how can we apply these models and insights to improving American policing?

TH: First-line supervisors are absolutely critical. If you ask most police chiefs who’s really running an agency day to day, they’ll tell you it’s the first-line supervisors.

That’s why we’re focusing on Markus’s PERMA leadership training for those leaders.

We also need to rethink police education. Other countries invest three, four, or even six years educating police officers. In the United States, we often expect someone to be ready after four or six months of training.

At the same time, many people argue that policing is already too expensive. I think that’s shortsighted.

JAS: Yet many agencies seem to be responding with signing bonuses and higher salaries.

TH: Those measures are understandable, but they’re really bandages.

After losing so many excellent officers, agencies are trying to stop the bleeding. Recruitment bonuses might be intended to help fill vacancies, but they don’t address the underlying causes.

We need to ask why the profession reached this point in the first place. That includes investing in better leadership, better education, and more comprehensive training.

As Bernd mentioned earlier, it’s like putting makeup on someone who’s suffering from internal bleeding. They may look better temporarily, but the real problem remains untreated.

Too often, legislation is written in response to the worst examples rather than asking how to help the overwhelming majority of officers who are already doing excellent work every day.

Instead of focusing exclusively on preventing failure, we should also invest in helping good officers become even better.

JAS: Tell me about your work in Austin and with police departments across the United States.

TH: I’m a professor at Texas State University, and much of my work focuses on helping police departments develop evidence-based crime prevention strategies, particularly for violent crime.

What I’ve learned is that even the best strategies require excellent leadership. Successful implementation depends on leaders who know how to guide people effectively.

One concept I’ve learned from Markus’s team is what they call “authentic excellence.” It combines personal strengths with professional competencies.

My work has traditionally focused on building competencies—teaching police officers the science of crime prevention and community dynamics. Pairing those competencies with leaders’ individual strengths has enormous potential.

JAS: What are you hoping to learn through your research?

TH: We already know that positive leadership is associated with lower burnout and healthier organizations.

The next question is whether leadership training actually produces those outcomes over time.

We’ll be evaluating the effects of PERMA leadership training in American policing for the first time. We want to know how long the benefits last, whether some officers benefit more than others, and what kinds of organizational outcomes improve.

Will sick leave decline? Will public complaints decrease? Could positive interactions increase so much that citizen commendations become more common?

These are all empirical questions.

If taxpayers are investing in police training, we have a responsibility to ensure that the training actually works. The existing evidence suggests it will, but rigorous evaluation is essential.

I’m certainly not the only one noticing this kind of vitriolic polarization. Recent polling suggests a majority of Americans believe that the country cannot overcome its current divisions.

As a professor of human development and family studies, I’ve researched and written about traumatic and adverse childhood experiences and existential anxiety for over 20 years. Scrolling through my feed, I was struck by the recognition that both sides had something in common: a profound sense of existential fear.

While political polarization has many potential causes, existential anxiety is one that has received less attention.

What is existential anxiety?

Philosophers have written about the concept of existential anxiety for centuries. My own empirical research is based on the writings of the mid-20th century philosopher Paul Tillich, who outlines three facets of this fundamental human fear:

• Fate and death—fears of nonexistence and uncertainty about one’s ultimate destiny
• Emptiness and meaninglessness—fears about life’s deeper purpose or ultimate concern
• Guilt and condemnation—fears of moral failure or threats to one’s ethical self

Existential anxiety is humanity’s inherent confrontation with mortality, moral responsibility, and search for meaning.

My colleagues and I have found that these fears are very common—between 75% and 86% of participants in our research endorse at least one concern. Higher levels of existential anxiety are associated with indicators of poor mental health, such as symptoms of depression and suicidal ideation. Existential anxiety levels are also elevated among those who have experienced a life-threatening event. For instance, after surviving a natural disaster, up to 94% of research participants reported at least one dimension of this fear.

Importantly, our research suggests that existential anxiety is associated with aggression. In one study of teens, we found that more extreme existential anxiety as measured with the existential anxiety questionnaire was associated with two kinds of aggression: proactive and reactive. Proactive aggression is goal-driven, deliberate, and unprovoked, while reactive aggression comes in response to a real or perceived provocation or threat.

Underlying theme in existential anxiety

Existential fears have their roots in things that pretty much everyone worries about, at least from time to time. But what specifically triggers this anxiety can be different depending on your worldview.

For instance, as I scroll social media, I see friends expressing anxiety about fundamental safety issues, the fate of the nation, cultural erosion, and the loss of traditional values. These concerns are mirrored by other friends’ posts expressing concern that the environment is being destroyed, democracy is failing, and equality is lost.

Though the content of these expressions can be ideologically opposed, each reflects deeper concerns about societal fate, death, or the end of a meaningful way of life. Unspoken but underlying is the fear that the “other side” represents a real and impending threat to one’s very existence.

Though the triggering circumstances can differ based on personal beliefs, both sides’ perspectives reflect existential concerns about meaning, moral direction, and survival.

But existential anxiety isn’t just the likely root of some of this distress. Research suggests that underlying fear can increase aggression. Left unchecked, fears may spiral into potential violence.

Where do we go?

The good news is that while core existential fears may never fully abate, you can identify them, alleviate them, and possibly even channel them toward adaptive action.

The techniques of cognitive behavior therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy provide a path toward finding common ground and preventing existential fears from escalating into violence.

Core to these techniques is recognizing and facing the fear. They both help participants overcome common tendencies such as seeing only one side of the evidence or catastrophizing that things are much worse than they really are. Acceptance and commitment therapy, for example, teaches participants how to cultivate psychological flexibility, learn to tolerate uncomfortable thoughts or emotions, and practice acting in alignment with one’s core values. Together, these skills foster positive action as opposed to destructive reaction.

As disturbing as my social media feed can be, I’ve also seen real-world instances of people figuring out how to connect across a divide. For instance, one poster appreciated another’s comment for helping her realize the existential value his perspective represented to him. Following that exchange, the second poster acknowledged he’d been seeing only one side. In other words, they each recognized the other person’s existential fear—accepting it as such helped them de-escalate the confrontation and move forward more constructively.

The critical point is that people on all sides of every issue yearn for safety, purpose, and belonging. Recognizing that the core existential concerns we all share underlie polarized fears might be an important step toward bridging divides and reducing the risk of fear-driven aggression.

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

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.

As I moved from my early to late 40s, one feeling resonated: I felt great! My smartest, most confident, and healthiest version of myself. 

The disconnect between what I was expecting to feel and what I actually felt was so large that, at the end of last year, I started a Substack to talk about the notion that, yes, we can be Happier in the Middle. It turns out my hunch is beyond anecdotal and actually rooted in scientific research.

Primetime, by Margie Lachman, the director of the Lifespan Lab at Brandeis University, suggests that we are looking at both life and especially life in the middle the wrong way.

Instead of viewing life as one mountain to climb, the foundational perspective of the “downhill” metaphor, it’s more accurately a series of mountains and the middle a pivotal summit where we get to look back at where we’ve been and make decisions about where we want to go next.

Why do we believe in a midlife crisis?

Based on over 30 years of research, Lachman roughly defines the middle as age 40 to 60 (plus or minus 10 years).

She demystifies the origin story of the “midlife crisis,” tracing it to a 1965 article by a Canadian psychoanalyst who noted that the creativity of artists dipped in their mid- to late 30s, which he linked to feelings of a looming end of life. We also have him to thank for the notion that life after 40 goes “downhill.”

The idea of a midlife crisis was later fueled by a 2008 study showing a U-shape to happiness, with it dipping in midlife. However, when Lachman and her colleagues investigated the data driving this study, they found that “while visually compelling . . . the giant dip in the graph isn’t as significant as it appears from the image.” But the damage of a belief in a midlife dip in happiness had already been done. Add to that media uptake, and we have a full-blown cultural phenomenon that lives rent-free in most of our heads.

However, research by Lachman and her colleagues shows that only 10 to 20% of adults report having a midlife crisis. More importantly, what’s termed a crisis is closer to an introspective life challenge, and one of many inflection points experienced throughout the lifespan, not just in midlife.

Another challenge that amplifies concern about midlife is the belief that who we are is relatively stable by then, in terms of our self-concept (what we think of ourselves) and personality (how we show up in the world), both of which are key drivers to change. Self-concept and personality impact the realm of what we feel is possible for our lives: the goals we can achieve, lifestyle changes we believe we can make, and types of experiences we seek out.

Lachman offers scientific research that counters the belief of a stable and immutable self. Specifically: 1) Personality can change well into midlife and typically only begins to stabilize after the age of 50, and 2) the 50s is a pivotal decade marked by increased introspection and self-reflection. “One of the great opportunities of midlife is that we are in a stronger position than ever before to close the gap between who we are and who we want to be. Using personality change as an avenue for improving the way you think, feel, and behave is a new and underutilized tool,” she writes.

We can have what she calls in one section of the book “a midlife personality glow-up”!

What do we lose and gain in midlife?

A big challenge that I have with the popular midlife narrative is that it’s a deficit-only narrative. We only hear about what we may potentially lose in this phase of life and far less about what is available for us to gain or maintain. Primetime balances the scale in this area.

The book covers various tradeoffs in midlife focusing on potential losses and gains. I’ll share three such examples below.

Cognition. A big concern many of us have, me included, is: Will I be able to maintain my intelligence and memory as I age or not? Lachman helps us to reframe this black-and-white way of thinking about cognition through the lifespan by reminding us there are two components of intelligence, fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. “Fluid intelligence is about quick thinking and innovation. . . . Crystallized intelligence . . . is the epitome of wisdom . . . which relies on experience, semantic memory, knowledge, and the ability to synthesize them all and apply it to the current problem.”

Yes, fluid intelligence may gradually decline as we age, but our crystallized intelligence gets better as we age, through our 60s and 70s. This explains why I feel so confident now: It’s the culmination of life experience, learned knowledge, and my ability to map it on to new situations, all things that we acquire with time.

But if maintaining fluid intelligence is important to us, we are not powerless. Prioritizing activities that encourage neuroplasticity—like learning a new instrument or language, travel to a foreign country, or developing an artistic habit—can help us to preserve fluid intelligence as we age.

Inflammation. In addition to our cognition, another area that gets a lot of attention around midlife decline is our physical health. Everyone from your doctor to well-meaning friends and partners is likely warning you about the potential uptick in illnesses as you age. Their warnings not only are well-meaning, they can also be true. Research does support that as we age, we become susceptible to more physical health problems like cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurodegenerative issues.

A major driver of age-related health decline is inflammation. Inflammation is our immune system’s response to injury, infection, or harm. Lachman reminds us that a key driver of inflammation is chronic stress, something that many of us in the middle may experience due to managing child care, work, and aging parents.

Although we may not be able to control all of the stressors we face at this stage of life, we can mitigate them through our mindset, social support, and healthy behaviors. For example, a study Lachman worked on using Midlife in the United States survey data found that we can employ what she calls “psychosocial anti-inflammatories,” such as cultivating a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives, self-efficacy (believing we can impact change in our lives), optimism, and positive social connections—as well as adopting a regular exercise routine, which has been found to benefit both our physical and mental health as we age. 

Combined, psychosocial anti-inflammatories and exercise help reduce stress and the impact of stress-related inflammation.

Social network. Many of us are likely to have a robust social network by the time we reach middle age, largely due to all of the roles we hold during this period: parent, partner, adult child, friend, boss, coworker, community member, etc. In support of this pattern, Lachman shares data from Pew Research Center that shows that 54% of Americans in their 40s are caring for both children and an aging parent.

With our expanded network comes the potential for a rich and supportive tapestry of social support. But social networks can also add strain and stress stemming from the relationship. Our goal should be to minimize this to the extent possible and capitalize on the social support aspects of relationships. Social support can reduce the impact of life stress and positively contribute to our overall well-being.

An interesting turn that midlife presents for our connection to others is generativity. “Research shows that one of the biggest gains we make in midlife is in the realm of generativity, the way we positively contribute to the world through care and concern for others,” Lachman writes. For example, this might include volunteering, community activism, or mentoring.

It’s in this area that our lived experiences pay in dividends, not just for us but for others. While the concept of generativity places a premium on helping younger generations, this form of support can also be extended to peers and those older than you, as well. A good example is an organization highlighted in the book, Seniors Helping Seniors, where older adults help other older adults across a variety of needs.

The biggest takeaways from Primetime are, first, that our mindset is one of our best assets as we age. It can determine the type of life we will live in midlife and beyond. Second, it’s never too late to start making changes to positively impact our health and well-being. I’m living proof of that, having only recently regained a consistent physical fitness routine in the past couple of years, which has contributed to how good I feel right now, with my 50s around the corner.

We have the capacity to shape how our midlife years and beyond look through the right mindset, decisions, and support; we are not powerless.

With sleep-under-your-desk culture now ascendant, more of us feel compelled to keep pace with people who move at one speed: full throttle. It doesn’t help that we have few role models who are good at incremental retreat. “We don’t learn how to pace ourselves,” one workplace consultant told me. “There’s not a class on that.”

But as elite athletes and endurance experts know, going 110% without respite often sets up a crash that takes months or even years to overcome. It’s far healthier—and smarter in the long run—to manage your energy more deliberately, noticing when you’ve neared the edge of burnout and decelerating before you fall in.

My book The Art of Pacing explores how to pull back thoughtfully and incrementally at work, online, in community service, and more. Pacing yourself in this way doesn’t mean disengaging from what you care about—in fact, just the opposite. By setting a more sustainable rhythm, you can keep making fulfilling contributions to your community and the planet for a lifetime. Here are some everyday pacing strategies to help you do that.

1. Try narrative streamlining

To set an engaged, comfortable pace, it helps to understand just where you are and where you want to end up. By locating the narrative thread that wends through your life, you can get a clearer sense of what’s brought value to your life and what your highest goals are.

“One of the primary ways that we find meaning and make meaning in our lives is the stories that we tell, both to ourselves and to other people,” says the Boston College management professor Ben Rogers.

Rogers has designed what he calls a “restorying” exercise to facilitate this process. Through a sequence of seven questions based on the classic “hero’s journey” story structure, the exercise guides you to reflect on your most significant goals, how you came to pursue them, the obstacles you’ve faced trying to achieve them, and the gift or legacy you’ve been able to leave to your community. (You can try the exercise for free.) In Rogers’s studies, people who completed the restorying exercise saw their lives as more meaningful than they had before.

Restorying guides you to focus more intently on the goals and pursuits that feel most purposeful—and when you do that, each day’s tasks start to feel more energizing than exhausting. The restorying process can also help you pare back on commitments that don’t align with your core goals and values, freeing up more time for rest and recovery.

2. Practice modulation

This science-backed breathing practice allows you to shift your body into a more serene, focused state. Modulation—which researchers call “resonance frequency breathing”—involves breathing at a specific pace unique to you: the speed at which your heart rate accelerates most as you breathe in and slows down most as you breathe out. This pace creates pronounced “heart rate variability,” which promotes a calmer, more resilient nervous system.

To begin your own modulation practice, determine your resonance breathing pace by using an app like Elite HRV, or by breathing along with paced videos on YouTube to see which speed feels most comfortable. (Most people’s resonance pace is between four and six breaths per minute.) Once you’ve figured out your own ideal pace, breathe in time with a paced video or track for a few minutes each day, or whenever you’re feeling anxious or spun-up. After a few days, you’ll learn your resonance pace by heart and will no longer need the track to guide you.

I learned modulation from the psychiatrist and researcher Joseph Arpaia, who’s taught the practice to overwhelmed clients for years. The day we met, Arpaia clipped a heart-rate monitor on me and had me breathe at my own resonant breathing pace, 5.2 breaths per minute, for about five minutes. As I kept breathing, I saw my spiky heart-rate pattern relax into U-shaped waves, a sign that my nervous system was relaxing, as well. When I was done, Arpaia remarked that even an IV sedative would not have calmed me that quickly!

In addition to its benefits in the moment, modulation primes you to make well-thought-out decisions that facilitate smart pacing over the long term. When you’re in a calmer mental and physical state, you’re less apt to fire off a thoughtless remark that torpedoes a relationship or make an impulsive choice you regret—and you spare yourself the repair work you’d need to do in the wake of such snap decisions.

3. Manage your energy

Time management is all the rage in some influencer circles: mapping your entire day into 30-minute or one-hour blocks, for instance. But while this strategy can help you feel in control of your day or week, it’s also highly vulnerable to collapse. One unexpected event—a family crisis, a meeting that runs long—means having to re-jigger the whole intricate calendar, a process that can itself become a time drain and source of frustration.

Energy management, which many top athletes have embraced, is more flexible and accessible than time management. It involves structuring your day around your natural energetic highs and lows. When middle-distance runner Ajée Wilson is preparing for a big meet, she schedules her main workout of the day to coincide with her highest energy peak: from mid-morning until about noon. Afterward—in a variation on the siesta tradition—she takes a long afternoon nap to allow her body to recover from the intense training session.

To take advantage of your own high-energy windows, think about what time of day you tend to be more engaged and focused, whether morning, late afternoon, or night. Then plan to do your most demanding and absorbing work within that general window. (No need to map things out down to the minute; your exact starting time doesn’t matter as much as whether your deep work “pulse” coincides with your energy peak.)

When you hit a natural energy lull, as many people do after lunch, take a break or turn to less demanding work, like filling out forms or replying to messages. By working with your natural energy fluctuations instead of against them, you’ll make meaningful progress on your goals without feeling like you’re pushing a truck uphill.

4. Light “brief candles”

We often assume that “generativity”—the kind of social contribution that strengthens well-being—requires a sustained infusion of time and effort. However, certain white-hot moments of encounter, which I call “brief candles,” last only a few minutes but are profoundly generative all the same. Because their impact far outlasts the time they take, they allow you to contribute in meaningful ways without exhausting your energy reserves.

Brief candles may be dramatic encounters, like an intervention that convinces someone who is fighting mad to stand down. More often, they’re moments of total attention that light up ordinary exchanges: offering crucial words of encouragement to a mentee who’s flailing, or giving timely advice that sets someone on a new life trajectory. The effects of brief encounters like these may go on to reverberate for decades.

Some Zen Buddhists practice “mindful listening”: focusing completely on another person in their vicinity, even if just for a few moments. Lighting brief candles calls for just this kind of listening and responsiveness—and the rewards of such attentive moments compound over time, for receivers as well as for those passing the flame.

When you light a brief candle, pause to reflect on the experience. How does it feel to re-awaken something in someone else that they may have forgotten was there, or to avert a disaster that would otherwise have occurred? By deliberately “taking in the good,” as psychologist Rick Hanson calls it, you can prime yourself to create more such moments on a regular basis.

5. Ask yourself, “What’s the wise choice here?”

When I began pacing myself more deliberately, I considered what thoughtful pacing would look like over various time frames—a day, a month, or a year. I pictured myself devising sophisticated pacing plans like those athletes make to map out their training seasons.

But I’ve learned that when I feel overwhelmed in a daily, ordinary sense, my long-term pacing plans recede into the background. Instead of projecting too far into the future, I ask myself a simple question: “What’s the wise choice here?”

This is a strategy the coach and sports psychologist Amy Baltzell taught me. It’s perfect for overloaded moments because it guides you to focus on two things: what you realistically need in a given moment, and how best to address that need. After an unexpected crisis, do you need a full day off, or do you need to consult with your boss before planning your next move? Identifying the wise choice and carrying it out has a way of leading you to the next wise choice, and the next, which becomes its own form of responsive pacing.

To my right, a friend of Jamie’s struck up a conversation with my mom. They looked like an incongruous pair: a five-foot-tall Chinese American grandmother, with short silver hair, and him a six-foot-plus-tall white young man, bending his head so he could hear her faint voice over the music and party chatter. I leaned closer to listen in. She inquired about his undergraduate major in economics and philosophy, and shared that she’d received a Ph.D. in economics herself, with a focus on demography.

Their conversation struck me at the time as an anomaly. He listened with courtesy and interest, asked polite follow-up questions about her demographic interests, and didn’t seem the least bit eager to cut it short to join his peers. Did he realize that Gen Z wasn’t supposed to behave this way? According to social media and many commentators, they are supposed to be scared to talk to strangers and buried in their phones, too stunted by social anxiety and naval gazing to engage with the world around them. After all, this generation grew up in a “challenging and constantly changing global environment,” as Nisreen Ameen and colleagues note in a 2023 paper—which is one of the factors that led them to experience higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness than prior generations. 

But over the course of the weekend, I encountered young person after young person who seemed open to learning and evolving. They were engaged in creative discovery and expression, seeking to change their community for the better, deeply caring about their peers and the relationships they had made in the previous four years.

“Obies” (as Oberlin students are called) aren’t alone. A series of in-depth interviews on multiple college campuses found that “the typical Gen Zer is a self-driver who deeply cares about others, strives for a diverse community, is highly collaborative and social, values flexibility, relevance, authenticity, and non-hierarchical leadership,” according to research led by Stanford University professor Roberta Katz. A McKinsey & Co. analysis of the newest members of the workforce, a few years ahead of this year’s graduating seniors, describes them as “socially progressive dreamers” who are pragmatic, seeking purpose, and deeply concerned about climate change and inequality.

As these new graduates navigate the months and years ahead, I reflected, these characteristics will serve them as well as any of the facts and figures they’ve learned in college. I left the graduation weekend thinking that, perhaps, the future is in good hands after all with the newest generation of workers and future leaders. Could it be that the reinforcements have arrived?

A gloomy future?

This graduation season has been marked by doom and gloom. Amid the bleak job market, disruption from artificial intelligence, and global violence, new graduates could be forgiven for embarking on their foray into the working world with trepidation. Indeed, commencement speeches on the promise of AI drew boos from the graduating seniors at other universities, such as the University of Arizona, where former Google CEO Eric Schmidt received a not-so-warm response.

I admit that I’ve harbored some fears about how my children will navigate the future, too. After all, I wrote an entire book about the dramatic increase in mental and behavioral disorders in this generation, and spent over a decade in journalism covering how economic disruption affected working families and their pocketbooks.

It’s a perfect storm of uncertainty: social, economic, geopolitical, and technological change like a black cloud over this time of transition. One student told me that she’d sent out over a hundred resumes, with not a single response. Throughout the graduation weekend, I resisted asking seniors I encountered about their plans for the future, for fear of bringing up an anxiety-laden topic. It gave me a pang to sense the unease in the air, when I’d wish that new graduates feel the world is at their feet, with many possible promising paths ahead for career and life.

Oberlin holds a unique place among institutions of higher learning, being the first to admit women and the first to admit Black students. The tradition of social action continues today. The college achieved a goal of carbon neutrality in 2025 and hosted student demonstrations against the war in Gaza over the past two years.

Students continue to push the administration on divestment from war, support for undocumented and immigrant students, preventing sexual assault, and supporting student-run housing and meal cooperatives. They complain that the college leadership focuses more on revenue and growth than Oberlin’s core values, both the president and the board of trustees, which denied the student divestment proposal.

At this year’s graduation ceremonies, when the chair of the board of trustees took the stage, the graduating class stood up and turned their backs to him. For the duration of his remarks, they held white pieces of paper in the air bearing a variety of messages, such as “Protect Trans Students” and “Divest from Genocide” and “Become a Sanctuary Campus.” When they crossed the stage to accept their diplomas, a number of students handed the paper to Oberlin President Carmen Ambar before shaking her hand. I was impressed at the respectful display of their principles, a compromise between outright boos and doing nothing.

At a picnic hosted by the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, I saw this confident leadership on display again. The student-run, non-profit corporation feeds and houses many Oberlin students, including my son, serving up giant vats of lentils, trays of bread, and other hearty fare three times a day through the school year. The commitment is significant: five shifts a week on a planning, cooking, or clean-up crew, and shared decision making.

Jamie had already told us about the experience of voting on policy changes, which had to be unanimous—meaning deliberations could truly drag on. His coop involvement made sense with our family’s values of hard work and community service: My husband Brian served as a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service, which paid for the vast majority of Jamie’s college tuition, through the G.I. Bill.

The outgoing OSCA president, a graduating senior, gave a speech as professional as any I’ve heard through most of my career, thanking that day’s crew for feeding hundreds of alums, graduating students, and families; sharing the organization’s mission; and updating the assembled picnickers on lease negotiations with the college administration. She thanked her leadership team and her mother, and her poise gave me a flash-forward of the future day when she might be leading a political campaign or acknowledging donors to a nonprofit.

Creativity and connection

Art and music threaded throughout the graduation weekend. We walked through the senior art studios and photography lab, admiring the innovative collages, black-and-white photography, and textured prints exploring a range of themes: identity, relationship, nature, and design. At a showcase for graduating film students, we watched short films exploring interpersonal relationships, the impact of a hoarder’s death on her daughter, and an Oberlin conductor’s connections between his Venezuelan roots and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, who composed under the thumb of the Soviet government.

One short documentary about couples who met late in life, filmed at the Kendal retirement community abutting the campus, struck me in its portrayal of how these relationships can be ones of convenience or deep love, depending on the situation. I felt surprised that a college student would find old-age love a compelling topic, and that the filmmaker succeeded in drawing out 80-somethings to discuss their sex lives, loneliness, and other intimate topics. Talking later to the student, I discovered that her professor had encouraged her to trim the film to 15 minutes, but she couldn’t bear to cut any more portions of her interviews.

In the film showcase and throughout the campus, visual arts shone, as well: delicate animations that conveyed the passing of time and eye-catching graphics and murals. Our oldest daughter remarked that students generally seemed engaged in conversation, not buried in their phones. When festivities hit a lull, I’d often turn around to find my son and his friends engaged in a game of cards or Scattergories.

Their house seemed like a revolving door of housemates, relatives, neighbors, and friends, including recent graduates returning to celebrate the next crop of Obies. Everyone was unfailingly friendly and kind, greeting me and my parents with interest, engaging Jamie’s sisters in conversation, and open to getting to know anyone who happened to be in the same space. When tables or counters became crowded with dirty plates and cups, there always seemed to be a student taking out the trash or doing dishes. And they cheered each other on by attending each other’s screenings, recitals, concerts, sports games, and open studios.

I left the weekend feeling unexpectedly moved by the other students, in addition to seeing my own accept his diploma, of course. The thousands of 20-somethings on this campus aren’t alone in creating art and music that probes who we are as a society and what our relationships mean, or in taking action to change their communities. This is the generation that walked out of elementary school to protest gun violence and launched the careers of David Hogg and Greta Thunberg. This is what young people have always done, push human society to be the best version of itself. It’s often when times are the darkest and most uncertain that we turn to them for comfort and hope. Whether the writings of Anne Frank in the Holocaust or the voice of Joan Baez in the Vietnam War era, these voices carry unexpected and needed messages. The answer is in our relationships, in our commitment to and caring for each other.

As author Rebecca Solnit argues, the hero is often the collective, not a lone charismatic figure. We ignore at our peril “that individual actors and collective forces can suddenly emerge or implode, that history often takes sharp turns, that something that has held for decades or centuries can suddenly snap,” she writes.

Ultimately, none of us know what the future holds. We are building it in the present, every day. With these idealistic, creative, community-minded young people joining the ranks of changemakers, I feel optimistic for the first time in a while.

For some families, long hours are a necessity. But for others, the pressure to keep working can be rooted in a sense of obligation—to be ever more successful, maintain a certain lifestyle, or simply keep up with expectations shaped by a consumeristic and highly individualistic culture. No matter what the motivation, over time, these pressures can accumulate, leaving parents feeling stretched thin, chronically stressed, and out of balance.

So how should we think about balance?

We are seeing conversations about shorter workweeks and changing norms gain traction—and, in fact, average work hours have been falling. Unfortunately, however, many experts say these trends are driven by serious burnout. According to Gallup, “overall employee well-being has been on the decline” and “employees now have less trust in institutions in general and feel more detached from their employers.” Employee engagement is plummeting.

Perhaps in response, many people appear to be seeking jobs that allow for more balance. Many of us now carry an implicit vision of a “balanced” life as one in which we are living a “perfect” life: thriving at work, fully present with our families and friends, and consistently caring for our own well-being. That vision can be inspiring—but it can also be exhausting. Many wonder if balance is possible or even desirable. For most, the perfect balance seems out of reach.

Situations vary, but life inevitably involves tradeoffs and “imperfections.” We are constantly deciding what to prioritize and, at times, what to let go—at least for a while. It’s no surprise that many parents report struggling to meet the demands of both work and family. But what if the challenge isn’t simply about achieving balance? What if it’s about how we’re approaching it?

In a recent article, researcher Jamie Alexander and her colleagues propose that when it comes to navigating work and family, it may be more helpful to begin with a different question: What gives my life a sense of purpose?

How purpose can help

Purpose is often defined as an enduring life goal that is meaningful to us personally and contributes to something beyond ourselves. Studies have found that people with a greater sense of purpose tend to experience a range of benefits, including greater life satisfaction and optimism, better sleep, healthier habits, and even reduced risk of certain health problems.

But what does this have to do with work-family balance?

Researchers suggest that work-family conflict—the sense that the two domains are interfering with each other—often arises from a few recurring patterns. These patterns include: stress spilling over from one domain into another, demands piling up beyond what feels manageable, shifts in long-established roles or responsibilities causing discomfort, conflicts between roles requiring difficult tradeoffs, or a sense of being stuck in a role. These tensions don’t just affect parents—they can ripple outward, shaping how we connect with and respond to our children.

A strong sense of purpose can act as an anchor in the midst of these competing demands.

Imagine coming home after a long day, already feeling depleted, only to discover your child hasn’t done their homework. You try to get them to do it, but instead they get upset. In that moment, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed or frustrated. But if part of your purpose is to raise a child who feels supported and grows into a compassionate, capable adult, that same moment may begin to look different. Instead of just another stressor, it can become an opportunity to live out that purpose—with patience, guidance, or curiosity.

Purpose doesn’t remove life stressors. But it can change how we interpret and respond to them.

One study found that people with a stronger sense of purpose don’t necessarily experience fewer daily stressors—but they tend to show smaller increases in difficult emotions, like anger, frustration, and loneliness, as well as physical symptoms, like headache, fatigue, or cough, in response to those stressors.

In that way, purpose might help to buffer against the stressors at the root of work-family conflict, making it easier for us to respond in ways that align with who we want to be. In doing so, a sense of purpose doesn’t just support individual well-being—it can ripple outward, strengthening parenting, deepening family relationships, and fostering the conditions in which children can thrive.

Of course, some conflicts require real sacrifices. Time is finite, and we can’t do everything.

Alexander and her colleagues’ model suggests that instead of asking, “How do I perfectly balance all my responsibilities at work and at home?,” we might ask a different question: “How do my choices align with what matters most to me?”

When we use purpose as a guide, decisions about what to prioritize—or let go—can become clearer. Rather than striving for an idealized balance, we begin to organize our lives around what feels meaningful, which in turn can help reduce the tension we feel when trying to balance our work and family life. Research finds that people with a stronger sense of purpose report experiencing less conflict between work and personal life—and are more likely to experience these domains as supporting one another, rather than competing. 

How to cultivate purpose

For some, this idea may feel reassuring—you already have a sense of purpose but haven’t fully used it to guide your decisions. For others, it may feel uncertain; especially if you don’t feel clear about your purpose, you may be wondering what this all means for you.

The good news is that purpose can grow and evolve over time. Research points to a few practices that can help. At the heart of each of these practices is reflection.

1. Reconnect with your purpose as a parent. Parenting often asks us to keep showing up through uncertainty, stress, and moments when progress is hard to see. When challenges pile up, it’s natural to question ourselves and lose touch with the deeper meaning behind our efforts. Taking the time to pause and reflect on our role as parents—and the hopes we have for our children—can help us reconnect with that deeper sense of purpose and stay invested even when things feel difficult.

2. Create a plan for your life. It’s easy to move through life on autopilot, simply trying to get through the day amid competing demands of work and family. Making space to reflect on our values, identify our goals, and create a plan for how we will pursue those goals can be especially meaningful when we feel disconnected from a sense of purpose. These steps help us realign our lives with what matters most in a way that feels more manageable.

3. Practice gratitude. Reflecting on the future and what we want for ourselves or our children can feel especially difficult when we’re pulled in many directions. If we’re not ready to start there, gratitude can offer a simpler place to begin. Taking a moment to notice and reflect on what we appreciate—small moments of connection with our children, support from a colleague, or a moment of laughter with our family—can help ground us in what matters most. Over time, these reflections can make it easier for us to identify where our sense of purpose lies.

Aligning work with purpose

Of course, not all of us have the freedom to change our circumstances in major ways. Financial needs, job constraints, and family responsibilities can limit our options.

But even within these constraints, small shifts can make a difference. Research on “job crafting” suggests that people can enhance the meaning of their work by making changes in three areas:

• Tasks: adjusting what they do, when possible;
• Mindset: reframing how they think about their work and its impact;
• Relationships: building stronger connections with others.

For those of us with limited flexibility in our roles, we might focus on changing how we think about our work and investing in relationships at work to make our days feel more meaningful. One study found that hospital cleaners who saw themselves as part of the care team—recognizing that their work contributes to patients’ health—reported greater enjoyment and meaning in their jobs. It’s the difference between seeing your role as simply mopping the floor versus seeing it as helping to prevent harm by keeping patients’ environments clean and safe.

These shifts, while sometimes small, can help align our work with a broader sense of purpose—and in doing so, these shifts may ease the tensions between work and family. Research finds that parents who experience greater meaning in their work—scholars distinguish meaning from purpose, purpose forms part of one’s sense of meaning—also report less work-family conflict, lower strain, and a stronger sense that their work and family lives enrich one another.

Work-family balance may be best viewed as something we aren’t expected to fully “solve” once and for all. When we ground our choices in our purpose, we can move away from an exhausting search for equilibrium—and toward a life that feels more coherent, intentional, and connected to what truly matters.

This is what’s known as “anticipatory grief”—a reaction to loss that hasn’t yet occurred. While it’s fairly common to experience it for a loved one facing a terminal illness, you can also experience it in other potential loss situations, like retiring from a fulfilling career, a child going away to college, or divorce. It often involves a liminal state of being, like what I experienced, that can wreak havoc with your well-being and interfere with your ability to be present.

While similar to after-loss grief, anticipatory grief has its own issues and trajectories that can make it hard to manage, says Alan Wolfelt, director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and an expert on the topic. While you may lean toward ignoring or pushing away these complex emotions, denying your grief and suffering silently will probably not help you or your loved ones cope better.

“Too often, people are trying to be happy at times when they should be sad, and that inhibits their ability to fully integrate a life transition into their world,” says Wolfelt. “We can better cope with realities we face by acknowledging them.”

Anticipatory grief, like after-loss grief, can be painful. But by understanding what it’s like and giving yourself permission to explore its many facets, you might be able to mitigate some of the pain and move through it with more intention.

Similar and different from regular grief

Like grief after a loss, anticipated grief can involve strong and varied emotions. You may feel happy, sad, angry, confused, worried, relieved, guilty, and more, and the feelings may arise at seemingly random moments, sometimes overwhelming you. Your feelings can be hard to explain even to yourself, let alone others.

For example, imagine your teenage son is applying to colleges. Suddenly, you’re hit with the reality that he’ll be leaving home soon and your life will change dramatically. You may feel sad anticipating losing your son’s everyday presence, look forward to a new, freer chapter in your life, or both. You may feel pride and joy for his bright future, but fear losing your close relationship and your role as his parent.

These myriad emotions can be disorienting—but it’s important to honor them, however they show up, says Wolfelt.

“The more open acknowledgement you can have of what your genuine, authentic emotions are, the better,” he says.

While grieving a death may seem natural and expected, anticipatory grief may come with some resistance, like telling yourself (or other people telling you) there’s no reason to feel what you’re feeling. However, according to Wolfelt, denying your pain only adds to it, negatively affecting your everyday well-being. A better way to handle anticipatory grief is to own it and process it through mourning.

“Grief is the internal response, the thoughts and feelings inside,” he says. “In contrast, mourning is the shared social response or grief gone public; it’s taking your grief and putting it into action. That creates change or movement.”

The importance of mourning

There are known, socially acceptable ways to mourn someone who’s died, like funerals, sitting Shiva, Dia de los Muertos, and other rituals. While there may be fewer structured ways to manage anticipatory grief, we can help ourselves through the experience by understanding the importance of mourning in processing grief.

“Mourning helps you integrate loss and be transformed by your grief,” says Wolfelt. “You get stuck if you grieve but don’t mourn.”

The very nature of anticipatory grief (or any grief) is that it can feel different from one moment to the next, and from one person to another. That means our mourning needs may change over time. No one needs to follow a specific pattern, says Wolfelt, but we all need to pay attention and take our grief seriously.

This may be easier or harder, depending on several factors. How close you were to a person, your cultural or spiritual beliefs, and differences in your personality and gender can all influence how you mourn and how effective you are at managing grief versus staying stuck in it.

“If you have low social support, a history of anxiety, a history of a [strongly] dependent relationship with the person (for example, you haven’t expanded your social support system beyond the person who’s dying); those are risk factors that research clearly shows can make it more challenging for you,” he says.

A healthier way to mourn

While no one needs to mourn in the same way, Wolfelt suggests in his guidebook on the topic that people try to meet six specific needs to get through the experience:

1. Acknowledge that you are grieving and the reality of your loss. You may feel it’s too hard to acknowledge the impending loss, but denial doesn’t help. Instead, acknowledging all emotions is a better path toward well-being, even in the midst of grief. Facing your reality more squarely can help you figure out what you need.

“Thinking of yourself in this way will help you be both self-compassionate and honest about how challenging your current circumstances are,” he writes.

2. Embrace all of your emotions, pleasant and unpleasant. Anticipatory grief is marked by changing, intense emotions. Naming them can help to tame them, making them less overwhelming. You can also try reframing the meaning of your feelings to make them less problematic, such as recognizing grief as a facet of loving someone deeply.

If you’re feeling emotionally overwhelmed by grief, Wolfelt recommends dosing it—meaning, letting yourself fully experience your emotions, but limiting how long you do that. When not focusing on your grief, it’s fine to distract yourself, evade thoughts, or do whatever you want to keep your grief from being so dominant, he adds.

“There’s a balance to be had between doing the work of anticipating loss and in balancing that with the ability to stay present in the here and now,” he says.

This may be especially important when taking care of someone you will be losing, as caregiving often requires a more outward than inward focus. Having a way to care for your emotional needs outside of that role can be helpful.

3. Explore memories of the love or attachment you’re losing. This may seem like a step to avoid, but Wolfelt says it’s important for managing anticipatory grief. Reviewing past memories allows you to create a narrative around what is happening, something humans need to help make sense of their lives and feel congruency. Research suggests that allowing ourselves to feel nostalgia for the past has many benefits, including putting us in touch with our authentic selves and what matters in life.

“The more time and attention you devote to exploring memories and sharing and discussing them with others, the more your sense of peace will grow,” writes Wolfelt.

4. Develop a new self-identity. Often our relationships are part of our identity—we are a partner, a mother, a daughter, or a colleague. Our impending loss may make us question who we are in the world. It’s important to recognize that and address it.

For example, if you’re losing your wife of many years, through divorce or death, your friendships may be affected and your social circle may shrink; once-shared activities may no longer appeal or be possible. While you may grieve this transition and the changes it brings, it also opens up possibilities to embrace new roles in life.

“Change is often both a loss and an opportunity, even if it’s an opportunity you would never willingly have chosen,” writes Wolfelt.

5. Search for meaning in the experience. When facing loss, many of us begin to question the meaning of our lives. “It’s important to focus on meaning and purpose, both in the attachment that is ending and in your continued living,” writes Wolfelt. This might take you into spiritual territory, stimulating questions about why you exist, what it all means, and how you can go on.

Seeking meaning from your experience can help one cope in the present with difficult future losses as well as later on, after the loss has occurred. To help explore that, Wolfelt suggests reading inspiring texts, meditating or praying, talking with spiritual advisors, journaling, or spending more time in nature. Whatever puts you closer to your own sense of meaning will help you find peace, and more reasons to get up in the morning if you are feeling dragged down.

6. Reach out to others for support. As mourning is an outward experience of inner pain, finding other people who can listen as you grapple with your emotions, memories, and questions about life’s meaning can be soothing and helpful.

“You might feel undeserving of attention because the ultimate loss hasn’t really happened yet. But I’m here to tell you that your current grief is completely real, valid, and necessary. And there are others who will understand,” he writes.

Look for someone who can listen empathically without trying to guide you (or bully you) into feeling better, he says. No one experiencing anticipatory grief should ever be pushed into something that doesn’t feel right or given pat phrases that discount their pain.

“Cliches can be very painful to somebody who’s experiencing grief—trite comments like, ‘You’re holding up so well, time heals all wounds, think of what you still have to be thankful for,’” he says. “While well intended, they’re often misinformed and are a projection from the outside in.”

Choosing whom exactly to share with can be tricky. But you can look to family and close friends, support groups experiencing the same types of anticipated loss, spiritual advisors, or professional counselors, writes Wolfelt.

“Find people that can walk into the metaphorical wilderness of grief and honor that you’re in a liminal space, without feeling the need to pull you to the left or right or to pull you out,” he says. “Those are the genuine, compassionate people that we need in our lives.”

If approaching someone with your grief feels too daunting, you can still help yourself by just being around people more generally. We all need social connection for our health and happiness, and having a fun night out with friends, small interactions with neighbors, or a coffee at the local café can make you feel less alone, even if you don’t explicitly talk to anyone about your grief.

Dealing well with grief is a life skill

We will all face loss at some point in our lives—but we’ll only anticipate grief when the loss involves someone we love. Love and grief go hand in hand, says Wolfelt, making it central to a life well-lived.

“The capacity to give and receive love means we will likely mourn someday,” he says. But living in a “mourning-avoidant, emotion-phobic” culture, he adds, we don’t always have the right tools handy for guiding ourselves or others through it.

To be better prepared, it’s wise for us all to cultivate the skills that will serve us well in times of grief and loss. Having greater emotional intelligence, mindful attention, meaning and purpose, social connection, and hope can all help, says Wolfelt. Fortunately, these can all be deliberately practiced long before a loss comes along, helping us lead healthier, happier lives overall.

“These are central needs. The more you can befriend those needs, the more you integrate loss into your life,” he says.

A multitude of studies have linked spending time in nature with different aspects of mental health and wellness. For example, immersing oneself in outdoor natural spaces seems to lift depression and influence brain activity patterns. The effect may be especially relevant in children. But most research on this question has looked at people living in so-called WEIRD societies—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

As environmental psychologists based in the U.S. and in Germany, we were part of a team of more than 100 researchers who set out to examine this phenomenon on a global scale and determine how consistent it is around the world.

Across countries as diverse as Brazil, Japan, Nigeria, Germany, and Indonesia, we saw a clear pattern: People who felt more connected to nature also reported higher well-being.

Worldwide oneness with nature

Researchers who study people’s relationship with the natural world often use the term “nature connectedness.” This phrase doesn’t simply mean going hiking or visiting a park. Nature connectedness refers to the extent to which people see nature as part of who they are—whether they feel an emotional bond with the natural world and experience a sense of oneness with it.

Someone who has a high degree of nature connectedness might agree with statements like “My relationship to nature is an important part of who I am.” It reflects identity and meaning, not just exposure.

We drew on data collected between 2020 and 2022 from more than 38,000 participants through a large international collaboration that was established to gauge how people responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants came from 75 countries and were on average in their teens, 20s, or 30s. They completed questionnaires that explored the link between people’s bond with nature and several aspects of well-being.

The questionnaires probed people’s sense of purpose in life; their feelings of hope, life satisfaction, and optimism; their sense of resilience; and their ability to cope with stress they felt; as well as whether they practice mindfulness as they go through their everyday life.

Across this large international sample, we found that people who felt more connected to nature consistently reported higher levels of well-being and mindfulness. This was true not just for feeling satisfied with life but also for deeper aspects of flourishing, such as having a sense of direction and meaning. And these associations held even when accounting for age and gender.

Does national context matter?

We also explored whether specific characteristics of a country strengthen the benefits of feeling connected with nature.

For example, we looked at things such as how well countries take care of their air, and water systems and ecosystems, as well as whether citizens have equal access to education, democratic participation, and other key social and financial resources, and whether cultures tend to prioritize collective well-being over individual priorities. There were some differences, but the main takeaway was pretty clear: A connection with nature and well-being shows up across a wide range of economic, cultural, and environmental contexts.

In other words, the psychological benefits of feeling connected to nature do not appear to be limited to wealthy Western nations or specific cultural worldviews.

Why might connection matter?

One reason why feeling a connection with nature may be linked to well-being is that nature connectedness fosters mindfulness—the ability to be present and attentive.

In our data, people who had a stronger sense of nature connectedness tended to have a higher degree of mindfulness, which is itself strongly linked to mental health.

Another possibility is that bonding with nature may also make people more resilient. People who feel connected to something larger than themselves may find it easier to cope with stress and uncertainty. A sense of belonging—even to the natural world—can provide psychological grounding in a world characterized by stressors. There may also be a feedback loop: Feeling better may encourage people to engage more deeply with nature, strengthening the bond over time.

Implications for policy and everyday life

These findings matter beyond academic debates. Around the world, policymakers are increasingly recognizing the links between human health and environmental sustainability. International agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, a landmark treaty signed by 196 countries in 1992, emphasize the importance of restoring humanity’s relationship with nature.

These policy actions seek to protect Earth’s ecosystems, but our results suggest they may also benefit people’s psychological well-being. Similarly, designing cities with accessible green spaces, incorporating nature-based experiences into schools, and supporting community engagement with local environments may do more than beautify neighborhoods—they may also help people flourish.

Across cultures, languages, and economic systems, feeling connected to the natural world is consistently linked to living a more hopeful, purposeful, and resilient life. At a time when mental health challenges are rising globally, reconnecting with nature is not a luxury but a fundamental—and widely shared—human need.

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

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?

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.

“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.

Other times, they take a little more practice and work. That’s the case with many of this year’s top scientific insights, which deal with big topics like forgiveness, trust, morality, meaning, and purpose. While we probably can’t cultivate these overnight, they are no less important to living a good and happy life—and especially important for thriving societies. 

The final insights were selected by experts on our staff, after soliciting nominations from our network of nearly 400 researchers. We hope they help you consider what you’d like to invite into your life and your community as we head into 2026.

1. Feeling hopeful—even more so than just feeling good—may bring us a sense of meaning

Some of us may struggle to find a sense of meaning in life, especially when times are tough. But according to a new set of studies published this year in the journal Emotion, one important pathway to a meaningful life is by cultivating hope. 

Over the course of a college semester, students who felt more hopeful at one moment in time reported higher levels of meaning later in the semester. The researchers found unique effects for hope—general positive emotions didn’t have the same effect. In other words, among all the good feelings we can have, hope may play a particularly important role in a meaningful life.

Moreover, just feeling hopeful—even if we don’t necessarily think it’s realistic—seems to be beneficial. In one survey, the emotion of hope had a stronger link to meaning than did people’s beliefs about whether they could attain a good outcome.

In another study, researchers asked some participants to read an optimistic news story, while other participants read a pessimistic story. Those who read the optimistic article tended to report feeling more hope, and, in turn, readers who felt more hopeful reported a greater overall sense of meaning in life. This tells us that our feelings of hope and meaning can shift moment to moment, and they are influenced by the things we encounter in daily life.

When we’re facing tough times, taking time to cultivate hope—for example, by seeking out positive news or reminding ourselves that tough circumstances can improve—can help us to see the world around us as more meaningful.

2. A strong sense of right and wrong makes for a happier, more meaningful life

Does striving to be a good person feel good? Or does making ethical choices entail a certain amount of self-sacrifice?

Philosophical debates about the relationship between morality and happiness are longstanding, but this year a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology weighed in with evidence that doing good and feeling good go hand in hand.

Across three different studies, researchers asked groups of adults, from undergraduate students in the U.S. to engineers in China, about how happy they were, including how often they felt positive and negative emotions, and how satisfied they were with life. The researchers also asked how much they had a sense of meaning and purpose. Finally, participants nominated people they knew (like friends, partners, family members, teachers, and coworkers) who could weigh in on how moral the participants were. While there are many ways to think about morality, for the purpose of this paper it included traits like being compassionate, respectful, fair, loyal, dependable, and honest.

The result? In general, they found, people who were seen as more moral by family and friends themselves reported being happier and having a greater sense of meaning in life. 

Why would being moral make us happier? “Highly moral individuals might be happier in part because they have better relationships with other people,” the researchers found in some initial analyses. But because these are correlational studies, it could also be that being happy promotes more upstanding behavior. What’s clear, at least, is that being moral and being happy don’t seem to be in conflict.

In other words, treating people well doesn’t have to come at your own expense—which is perhaps more evidence that everyone’s well-being is interconnected.

3. Your well-being influences your mitochondrial health

Centuries of thought have been dedicated to the mind-body connection: the idea that mental states like contentment or distress directly influence the body in ways that shape physical health.

In a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, researchers identify one new pathway through which this may be occurring: our mitochondria.

Mitochondria, the tiny organelles in our cells that convert energy from nutrients in the blood into currency that the body can use, are sensitive to what is going on in our mental lives. They ramp up production to strengthen defense to threats; they trigger inflammatory responses to help the body fight off pathogens. Subjected to intense or long-term stress, they weaken and toss DNA debris into the bloodstream.

In the paper, the researchers highlight evidence that our psychological and social experiences affect our mitochondria in important ways. For example, they share the finding that people with a greater sense of purpose and more social support in life have higher levels of mitochondrial proteins in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, a region that supports paying attention as well as reinterpreting and expressing emotions in agile and constructive ways. Other research finds that factors like how big our social networks are, our social activity later in life, personal growth, and self-acceptance may make a difference to our mitochondrial health, too.

Currently, we tend to evaluate and treat mental and physical health independently, as separate conditions, rather than considering them as integrated or interdependent. While it may seem obvious that how we think and feel would impact how our bodies work, there is still some mystery around exactly how mental and social factors translate into physical processes that affect health. Looking more closely at mitochondrial function could help us better understand the mind-body connection and come up with better practices to support holistic well-being.

4. Just about every activity is more enjoyable in the company of others

Students use body doubling (online or in-person) to power through final exam studying. Reading and knitting groups congregate in coffee shops and on porches to engage in hobbies together—often in silence. Why this impulse to be together?

A study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that almost anything we do is more enjoyable with other people. Researchers at the University of British Columbia looked at surveys from 41,094 participants over four years, who rated 105,766 activities they engaged in. These fell into more than 80 categories of daily activities, from eating to yard work to crafting. For every single activity, participants consistently rated it as more enjoyable when engaged in alongside another person.

“Whether we are eating, reading, or even cleaning up around the house, happiness thrives in the company of others,” the authors conclude.

Not only does happiness thrive in the company of others, but another study this year suggests that happiness experienced together may be even better for our health than happiness experienced alone.

A study led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, analyzed interactions between couples in Germany and Canada (642 people total, all 56 to 89 years old). Multiple times a day, participants rated their mood, froze a sample of their saliva to be tested for cortisol, and noted whether they were with their partner.

The results were striking. Couples who experienced emotional resonance, meaning they were together and experiencing higher than usual connection, also measured lower cortisol levels as compared with their personal norm for that time of day—and lower than when they experienced positive emotions by themselves. Persistent high levels of cortisol can cause high blood pressure, high blood sugar, weakened immunity, and other harms to our health.

“Sharing in positive emotions with your relationship partner is really meaningful,” says the lead author of the study, Tomiko Yoneda of the University of California, Davis. “Even those small moments of joy or social connection can have a supportive effect on your physiology and, basically, support better health as we age.”

5. When you forgive, your memories don’t fade, but your misery does

When we’ve been wronged, it can be hard to forgive. Perhaps we worry that forgiveness means forgetting what happened to us, letting other people off the hook somehow.

But a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that this isn’t the way forgiveness works. Rather than helping us forget, forgiveness seems to keep our memories intact while lessening the suffering we feel recalling them.

In the study, participants recalled and wrote about a time when they were harmed by another person, noting how severe the transgression was and whether or not they’d forgiven the person. Then, they filled out questionnaires on the specifics of the harm (such as where it took place, how vivid it was in their minds, and sensory details) and its emotional characteristics (such as the intensity of the feelings they had at the time and how they felt now recalling the event).

By running analyses, the researchers found that people who had forgiven recalled just as much detail as those who hadn’t, but also felt less emotionally burdened thinking about the event. This implies that forgiveness does not equal forgetting.

“One possibility is to think that when we forgive, we change our judgment of what happened during the wrongdoing. But I think that’s just wrong,” says De Brigard, one of the study coauthors. “We still consider the people that wronged us as being culpable and morally responsible for what happened to us.”

This suggests that forgiving someone can protect our well-being without impacting our pursuit of justice or amends for the harm we’ve suffered.

6. Trusting in other people and institutions can improve our well-being across our lives

Trust is paramount to a functioning society, where we depend on each other to make things work. Yet a recent Pew Research Center poll suggests social trust may be eroding in many places.

A new paper published in Psychological Bulletin shows us how problematic this is. In an analysis of over 500 studies involving over 2.5 million participants around the world, researchers found that people who tended to trust others more at any level (i.e., within their relationships, institutions, or government) were happier and more satisfied with life than those who trusted less—and experiencing greater well-being fostered more trust down the road, too.

This suggests that fostering greater trust would be a worthy goal for bettering our lives. But how to do that? One simple way might be to realize that our distrust of others is sometimes misguided, as another 2025 study published in Nature Human Behaviour found.

In the study, students living in some freshman dorms saw a series of posters providing accurate messages about their classmates’ willingness to engage in positive social behavior (e.g., “95% of undergraduate students are likely to help others who are feeling down”). These students also attended a one-hour freshman workshop where, in addition to the regular curriculum, they were educated about their peers’ empathy and social goals. Some dorms had the campaign posters and added lessons, while others didn’t.

All first-year dorm residents took surveys later in the semester, reporting on how empathic their peers seemed, how much they themselves took social risks, and how much time they spent socializing. Those whose misconceptions had been corrected estimated their peers’ empathy levels more accurately and were more likely to take risks and socialize—a sign of social trust.

This finding tracks well with past studies finding that correcting wrong assumptions can improve trust and social interactions. For example, research has found that people generally share a desire to protect democracy, are more ethical, and want to connect across difference more than we think, and correcting those misperceptions has positive consequences. Perhaps, understanding that people are more trustworthy than we give them credit for might help build bridges between people, making us all better off.

7. Where purpose comes from and how it benefits us may be similar across cultures

Research finds that people with a sense of purpose in life tend to enjoy greater health, happiness, and economic success, among other benefits. Yet much research on purpose has been conducted in Western cultures using general surveys of purpose, making it unclear if cultural influences affect these claims.

But a study published this year in The Journal of Positive Psychology offers new insights, suggesting that people prioritize similar sources of purpose across very different cultural backgrounds, and benefit in much the same way from having a sense of purpose.

In the study, over 1,000 people from Japan, India, Poland, and the United States reported how happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich their lives were—all aspects of “the good life.” They also rated how 16 different sources of purpose guided their behavior and decision making, considering both self-focused sources of purpose (like health, wealth, and inner peace) and more outward-focused sources of purpose (like caring for family, having a positive impact, and serving your country and community).

In analyses, researchers found that happiness, self-sufficiency, and family were in the top five sources of purpose for each country, while religion and recognition were in the bottom five. There was also large agreement on which sources of purpose went along with elements of “the good life.” For example, people who said their purpose came from mattering were the most likely to have a more meaningful life, while people pursuing inner peace, positive impact, and physical health felt happier. Those pursuing service to others had the strongest sense of psychological richness (a form of well-being involving diverse, challenging, and interesting activities that evoke complex emotions and change your perspective).

While there were variations, too, the most striking parts of the study were the unexpected similarities.

“What stands out from our finding is just how much agreement there was within these four quite different countries about what kinds of purposes are associated with a good life,” says coauthor Stephen Heine. “Though the goal of our paper was to highlight many sources of purpose, our take-home message is that having any kind of purpose is key to having a good life.”

8. Children as young as five prefer adults who express doubt to those who are overly confident

Intellectual humility involves recognizing the limits of our own knowledge and staying open to changing our minds in light of new information. It helps us get along better with others and bridge differences, making it a virtue worth cultivating in our children.

While it may seem like intellectual humility is beyond the understanding of young children, a study published this year in Developmental Psychology found that even five and a half years olds already recognize the value of humility and prefer humbler adults to more arrogant adults.

In the study, 111 children were presented with an ambiguous object (e.g., something that could be a sponge or a rock) or an ambiguous word (e.g., “bat,” which could be an animal or sports equipment). Then, they watched two adults identify the object or word and express doubt (or not) about it.

Each adult presented themselves as amiable and initially identified the object or word in the same way. But the humbler person modeled more uncertainty, saying their identification could be wrong, while the more arrogant person said they were sure they were right.

Afterward, the children rated who they thought was smarter and nicer, and whom they liked more and would rather learn from. In analyses, the researchers found that children five and a half years and older, no matter their gender, preferred humbler people to arrogant people in every way, with that preference growing stronger with every additional year of age.

This suggests that young children recognize the benefits of humility and that adults can model uncertainty for children. Learning it’s OK to admit you don’t know something could help children in their future relationships, including across group differences.

“There is power in saying, ‘I’m not entirely sure and my knowledge is fallible and so is yours; maybe we can come together and talk,’” says coauthor Shauna Bowes of Vanderbilt University. “I think the earlier in life kids learn to do this, the better.”

9. People are forming relationships with robots—whether we like the trend or not

Artificial intelligence has invaded almost every aspect of human life, from media creation to food systems to transportation. Personal relationships are no exception.

AI companies such as Xiaoice and Replika explicitly market their chatbots as companions, boyfriends, and girlfriends. That label rings true for tens of millions of users who are developing bonds with these robots, whose algorithms are built to validate our feelings and respond to our bids for attention instantly.

About 20% of high school students have formed a romantic relationship with a chatbot, or know someone who has, according to a survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology. Among U.S. adults, about the same percentage have chatted with an AI simulating a romantic partner, with usage higher among young adults aged 18 to 30, about 31% of men and 23% of women, according to a study by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University.

Users describe daily lives intertwined with AI romantic partners, from watching television together to relying on them for nonjudgmental emotional support, according to a systematic review in Computers in Human Behavior Reports that examined 23 studies on romantic AI. While these interactions can foster self-reflection and personal growth, they also raise dangers such as emotional manipulation and erosion of real-life, human relationships.

An article in Perspectives on Psychological Science assessed the degree to which AI chatbot relationships mimic the functions of human relationships, and explored the risks. The authors, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, concluded that humans and their chatbot partners can influence each other, generate feelings of closeness, and facilitate growth.

However, they identified areas of concern, including the risk of chatbots responding inappropriately in moments of crisis, normalizing problematic behavior, and creating dependency.

“Because chatbots make only superficial requests of their users, relationships with them cannot provide the benefits of negotiating with and sacrificing for a partner and may reinforce undesirable behaviors,” they wrote.

These developments “expose gaps in human connection and show how intimacy can be shaped by technology,” Sahar Habib Ghazi writes in Greater Good. “Understanding AI love may help us better understand ourselves, and the human bonds we continue to seek.”

10. If we put a country’s wealth aside, we can see what other factors bolster happiness

Every year, the World Happiness Report ignites conversations about which countries are thriving and which ones seem to be struggling—and why that might be. While in general wealthier countries tend to be happier, some nations do far better than their economic resources would predict, while others underperform despite relative affluence.

In a paper published in May by the European Journal of Social Psychology, psychologist Mohsen Joshanloo took the conversation to a new level with an idea called wealth-adjusted life satisfaction (WALS). Instead of asking simply “how happy is this country?,” WALS asks “how happy given its wealth?” By statistically isolating the portion of life satisfaction explained by a country’s GDP per capita, this measure reveals how effective each society seems to be in converting material resources into well-being.

The results are revealing. Countries like Nicaragua, Nepal, and Kyrgyzstan far outperform expectations, reporting levels of life satisfaction that rival or exceed those of much wealthier nations. Conversely, places such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Bahrain score lower than their GDP might suggest, indicating that wealth alone isn’t enough.

What distinguishes the happiness “over-achievers”? The study highlights several non-economic forces that seem to matter: job quality and meaningful work, a sense of autonomy and freedom, social connections and community engagement, and everyday enjoyment. These factors help explain why some societies—despite material limitations—are still able to sustain high levels of life satisfaction.

This study suggests that instead of focusing narrowly on economic growth as a key to human flourishing, governments and corporations might make targeted investments in community, meaningful work, personal freedom, and livable, lively cities and towns.

As Joshanloo concludes in a Greater Good essay, “Ultimately, building societies that prioritize the wise use of resources for human well-being may be the clearest path toward a more hopeful and humane future.”

Alas, no. Or at least, not all of them are very insightful about human goodness or adept at conveying how we become better. We’re sure most readers are familiar with the hits, especially the recent ones. Some of them are pretty great; others, not so much.

Here, we’d like to turn the spotlight on classics you may have forgotten, movies from outside the United States, a couple of controversial ones, and recent movies that we think are worth your time. These are movies that tackle some of the tough stuff behind the holidays, and they do it, in the estimation of our writers, with intelligence and wit.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Every Christmas for several years, I’ve seen people complaining about one of my favorite movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, which is about a small-town banker named George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart, who had just returned from flying combat missions during World War II). At the start of the movie, George is contemplating suicide—until an angel helps him to see his life in a new way.

The critics suggest that this story sends horrible messages: Sacrifice your dreams, don’t try; live small, eat dirt, and then smile and say it was caviar. In my opinion, however, It’s a Wonderful Life is about a man who gets few of the things he WANTED, but everything he actually NEEDED.

Oh, George had dreams of traveling and building great buildings and bridges, having adventures and seeing the world, getting out of Bedford Falls. And if those were the most important things to him, his life would indeed be a failure.

George has his “dark night of the soul” when someone he trusts makes a terrible error, and his nemesis Old Man Potter (Lionel Barrymore) finally crosses the line between “amoral” and “immoral.” Potter sacrifices his soul for petty revenge, and George is tested.

In stories like this one—tales of faith and miracles—it is reasonable to expect an appropriately symbolic divine intervention. An angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) magically reveals an alternate world without George, and George, being George, is ripped from his self-pity into an awareness that he had made his choices, is proud of them, and cannot be destroyed by Potter’s evil.

This is what George discovers, with the angel’s help: Our WANTS are transitory and often trivial, but our NEEDS are far deeper and more critical. It’s a Wonderful Life is about how one man learns to differentiate between his wants and needs.

And what is his need? That’s spelled out in one of the very first scenes: to be a man like his father, whom he admired above all others. A man of integrity, intelligence, and charismatic strength, the only force capable of standing against Old Man Potter, who symbolizes amoral wealth and power.

And against the siren song of ego, George stands strong. At every turn, every time he’s tempted and has a chance to “escape,” his real values emerge. Nobody and nothing “forced” George to stay in the town where he grew up and make sacrifices for those around him. He chose. He decided. And it HURT, like life sometimes hurts. For him, it simply would have hurt more to do otherwise. By his own values, stated in almost every scene, George really is “the richest man in town.” 

His ego hadn’t run his game; his true self had—his higher self. This, to me, is why this movie endures. George gets what he needs, not what he wants. I get that entirely, and could wish for no more for myself or my children, especially in this, the season of miracles.

May you all live so fully, and so well. —Steven Barnes

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

I’ve been watching A Charlie Brown Christmas for my entire life, first as a child, then as a parent. Now that my kids are preparing to leave the nest we’ve feathered, it shocks me to realize that I’ll probably watch it many more times before I finally kick the bucket.

One of the most interesting things about A Charlie Brown Christmas is that it’s a splendid example of American Christianity before it was infused with politics, a relic from a time when the story of the birth of Jesus was one that bound people together instead of tearing them apart.

The plot is simple enough: Christmas triggers a crisis of meaning in the depressive Charlie Brown. To lift his spirits and give him a purpose, his friends put him in charge of a school play—but that doesn’t go as well as anyone hopes. Things look bad until Linus takes the stage and explains “what Christmas is all about,” which is, he concludes, “peace and goodwill toward men.” The children call Charlie Brown back into their community, and together they decorate his bedraggled Christmas tree and sing carols.

It’s all so sweet that no one in their right mind, it seems to me, could argue with its message, which is that the followers of Jesus Christ have a responsibility to lift others up and to make everyone feel welcome, no matter how much they’re struggling. I may not be a Christian myself, but I definitely think that’s an idea worth considering! —Jeremy Adam Smith

The Snowman (1982)

In retrospect, the ’80s and ’90s were a strange time for Christmas movies. The ones we remember today—the “classics”—tend to deal explicitly with themes of greed, cynicism, and alienation.

In Edward Scissorhands, for example, an outsider finds he has no place in human society. Gremlins and Die Hard are good movies that are both nightmarishly violent. The cartoonishly brutal Home Alone has a nice speech about family that fuels reconciliation with the scary neighbor; but in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the yuppie neighbors are viciously satirized right up until the end. Movies like Scrooged and Trading Places are about ’80s-style avarice.

That’s why the 30-minute cartoon The Snowman stands out to me (you’ll find the entire thing embedded above, but you can also watch it on Amazon). In the English countryside, a young boy named James builds a snowman who magically comes to life. The two of them run wild through James’s house as his parents sleep, and then fly with a squadron of other snowmen to meet Father Christmas. The next morning, James awakes to discover that his friend has melted.

The Snowman is beautifully drawn and scored with haunting music by Howard Blake; there are no words, but the playful story doesn’t need them. Like the 1978 picture book by Raymond Briggs on which it’s based, the cartoon is aimed at preschoolers—and underneath the childish adventure, there’s a serious message about how the world works.

“I don’t have happy endings,” said Briggs in a 2012 interview. “I create what seems natural and inevitable. The snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There’s nothing particularly gloomy about it. It’s a fact of life.” Of course, you don’t need to state that message so baldly to your children. You can just watch The Snowman beside them, and then talk with them about what they saw. —Jeremy Adam Smith

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

My buddy Cianna argues that The Muppet Christmas Carol is the most faithful of all adaptations of the Charles Dickens tale, best capturing the original’s tone and structure. This is an amusing thought, given that it’s a musical and a substantial part of the cast consists of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Animal, Fozzie Bear, and the rest of the Muppets ensemble. The actor Michael Caine famously plays Ebenezer Scrooge straight, lending pathos and depth to the hijinks.

Somehow, it works—and I believe that’s largely because director Brian Henson and writer Jerry Juhl understood what A Christmas Carol is about. Scrooge is not really greedy, a trait many contemporary interpretations have highlighted; he only asks of other people what he asks of himself, and he seems to genuinely believe that if everyone were as miserly and small-hearted as he is, then they would not be poor. (A Christmas Carol is very much about capitalism and inequality!)

In fact, Scrooge suffers from profound isolation and sees the resulting unhappiness as natural and inevitable; he simply can’t envision an alternative because he lacks the imagination to do so. Thus, the mission of the three ghosts who visit him on Christmas Eve is to reveal to him how other people live and what impact his actions have had, are having, and will have on them. It’s this cognitive and affective empathy that drives his personal transformation. This is something another film on this list, Spirited, got right about A Christmas Carol: seeing the value of other people’s experiences and values opens up possibilities for ourselves.

As Scrooge proclaims to the Ghost of Christmas Future, “These events can be changed! A life can be made right.” —Jeremy Adam Smith

Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

My teenage son turned me on to this Japanese anime, which is about what happens when a makeshift family living on the streets in Tokyo finds a newborn abandoned in a pile of garbage. It is a holiday movie, but one that is well outside of the American paradigm.

It’s a lot rougher, for one thing. In many ways, the story is about mental illness and its consequences. An American movie would make the characters misunderstood but lovable. In Tokyo Godfathers, they are lovable, but I think everyone in the story understands in an unsentimental way that serious mental illness can make love extremely hard to accept and express.

That love actually does triumph in the end is a given; what’s interesting is the lurching, violent, funny path the movie takes to get to that point. Everything changes for the three primary characters when a baby is thrust upon them. They all feel, in their different ways, a primal drive to take care of this helpless creature—but they lack experience and skills, both practical and emotional, and they each must fight against their own (often confused) needs in order to put the baby first.

The result is a fascinating, entertaining psychological study, and a meditation on family that starts out seeming silly and gradually becomes genuinely profound. —Jeremy Adam Smith

Love, Actually (2003)

That’s right, haters: It’s Love, Actually.

This is probably simultaneously the most loved and most reviled Christmas movie of the 21st century, for some really good reasons on both counts.

Why reviled? Well…Love, Actually is as much a romantic comedy as a Christmas movie, and most of its nine distinct storylines peddle some of the rom-com genre’s most sexist, heterosexist tropes. In addition to women being too often valued for only their looks, there’s a lot of bad behavior on the part of men that is never punished and is sometimes even rewarded.

Why loved? Oh, boy. Let’s start with the related facts that it’s pretty damn funny and extremely well-crafted. It’s tricky to weave together so many different kinds of stories in a way that stays compelling, and Love, Actually pulls that off with panache.

But what lifts Love, Actually above so many other rom-coms and Christmas movies are the peculiar balances it strikes between sordid and uplifting, vulgar and elegant, compassionate and cruel, thoughtful and stupid, ugly and beautiful, happy and melancholy.

There’s something cold at the heart of Love, Actually—and that’s good, in this case, because it cuts through so much of the movie’s abundant schmaltz. People in this movie are what they are, good and bad, and love is what wraps itself around all our good and all our bad. It’s a worldview crystallized in the famous opening voiceover by the fictional prime minister of the United Kingdom (played by Hugh Grant):

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge—they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion love actually is all around.

In the final scene, the movie returns to Heathrow, where most of the disparate characters converge, having found ways to connect over some chasms that were once very wide indeed. And that’s what makes Love, Actually a very Greater Good kind of Christmas movie. —Jeremy Adam Smith

Happiest Season (2020)

My partner Angela loves Christmas movies. Her theory is that most contemporary American Christmas movies are all about leaving your socially safe urban bubble to go “home” for the holidays. There, you have to re-integrate with family you don’t really know anymore, who don’t know you anymore, because you’ve been geographically separated and changing as time passes.

That very American dilemma definitely applies to Happiest Season, one of her favorites. It’s the story of a closeted lesbian (MacKenzie Davis) who brings her girlfriend (Kristen Stewart) home for Christmas, where they have to pretend to be straight with politically and culturally conservative parents. Hijinks ensue.

Happiest Season was a hit for Hulu back in 2020, when we were all caged up in our houses and Netflixing (without the chill) every single night. It seems to me that it’s largely forgotten today by everyone but Angela, who has watched it (by her estimation) about 25 times, which means I’ve re-watched it more than once.

It’s a very funny, charming little movie, despite how it touches upon some very serious issues (watch the clip embedded above). My own theory about why straight people are drawn to coming-out stories is that they dramatize every person’s internal debate about how authentic to be around the people they grew up with. If we show our true selves, we might fear, then they’ll stop loving us.

Happiest Season has a happy ending, of course; this isn’t the kind of movie where everyone ends up sad. It’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy about family reconciliation that doubles as a wish for Americans to bridge their political and cultural divides. It suggests—not unlike another movie on this list, 2022’s Spirited—that people can and do change for the better, but for that change to happen, we have to be brave. —Jeremy Adam Smith

Just Another Christmas (2020)

Tudo Bem no Natal que Vem (Just Another Christmas) is a lighthearted and comical Brazilian spin on a time-honored classic, A Christmas Carol.

The main character, Jorge (Leandro Hassum), is a self-proclaimed hater of Christmas, born on Christmas day. He grew up detesting the holiday because of how it detracted from him being able to fully celebrate his birthday; he remarks that there was no contest between a celebration of Baby Jesus’s life or his. His disdain for Christmas holds even when he marries and has a family of his own.

Through a mystical intervention involving the otherwise stoic grandfather of the family (Levi Ferreira), Jorge develops a 364-day amnesia that prevents him from remembering anything, except for one day of the year. You guessed it: That day is Christmas.

Through the course of what seems like more than a decade, he is only present and aware of his experiences on Christmas. That becomes the one day he is the most like himself, while on the other 364 days of the year he is quite literally on autopilot.

Through these experiences, Jorge realizes how much of “life” he was missing out on and how much he took for granted, including love, family, and presence. It’s a lesson we all can benefit from, hopefully without the need of a 364-day amnesia. —Shanna B. Tiayon

Spirited (2022)

And the award for most Greater Good Christmas movie of 2022 goes to…a postmodern musical bromance starring Will Ferrell as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Ryan Reynolds as the “perfect combination of Mussolini and Seacrest” that, weirdly, ends up being a sequel to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Spirited starts with a question: “Do people really change?” The rest of the movie explores the answer, in some very entertaining ways. It imagines the afterlife as a kind of singing-and-dancing nonprofit agency that selects self-centered, mean people for visits from the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, with the aim of helping them evolve in a more positive direction.

The plot goes into motion when a public-relations monster named Clint (played by Reynolds) is picked for haunting. Clint is a very 21st-century, very American villain—an amoral right-wing social-media manipulator whose motto is “People never change” and whose company “specializes in creating controversy, conflict, and disinformation for his clients worldwide.”

“Oh, my God,” says the Ghost of Christmas Present, more than a little smitten. “He’s perfect.”

“Why do we do it?” asks “Present” (as he’s called, though his name when he was alive in the 19th century was Ebenezer). “We do it for the ripples. See, it’s a documented fact that one person’s kindness can have a ripple effect.” Unfortunately, however, in this case the ghosts don’t know what they’re getting into, for Clint proves himself to be a very clever and tenacious adversary.

There’s a lot of truth in Spirited, it seems to me, and despite the movie’s zippy, feel-good vibe, some of its truths are actually quite hard. The message is that people do, in fact, change, but that change is really, really difficult to accomplish, and none of our self-improvement makes suffering and death go away. Maybe that’s not what everyone would want to hear—but, by my (Christmas) lights, it’s what we all need to hear. —Jeremy Adam Smith

The Holdovers (2024)

At first glance, The Holdovers may not seem like a feel-good holiday movie with an uplifting story-line. The main character, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), is a curmudgeonly classics teacher at a Northeastern private boarding school for boys, whose haughtiness and better-than-thou attitude are off-putting to students and staff alike.

Yet, in many ways Paul resembles a classic Christmas tale anti-hero: Ebenezer Scrooge, the protagonist of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which makes a very frequent appearance on this list. Maybe Paul’s not rich like Scrooge; in fact, he’s a poorly paid teacher who’s resentful toward his wealthy, privileged students. But, much like Scrooge, he’s about to learn some hard lessons over the Christmas holiday that just might change his life.

Paul is being punished by the school’s headmaster for failing an important school donor’s son in his class by being assigned to watch the “holdovers”—kids who have nowhere else to go over the Christmas holidays and must remain at school. This puts him in charge of students who resent being there and can’t escape his harsh treatment, which he obviously relishes meting out.

But soon Paul finds a kindred spirit in Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a cafeteria worker also stuck at school for the break. Mary has recently lost her son in Vietnam and is bitterly grieving. Yet, unlike Paul, Mary can look beyond her own pain to feel sympathy for the abandoned students. Her example helps Paul to soften, at least a little.

To the movie’s credit, this change in Paul doesn’t happen in an overnight epiphany like Scrooge’s. Instead, it’s subtler, messier, and more authentic-seeming. As Paul navigates a new way of relating to the students, he begins to see them less as caricatures, and more as real people who, like himself, are suffering and who deserve more compassion than cruelty. Paul discovers, not unlike Scrooge, that it’s better to be generous than heartless. — Jill Suttie