Unsurprisingly, they were initially nervous to meet unfamiliar teens from places like Kansas and Louisiana—people they viewed as living lives far different from their West Coast upbringing. But, in just a few days, when it was time to return home, she saw these eighth graders were nearly teary-eyed at having to say goodbye to their newfound friends.

Far too many of the stories about teens in the media suggest they are all emotionally fragile and ill-equipped for in-real-life interactions because they’re anxious and constantly doom-scrolling on their phones.

Our recent “Bridging Differences for Teens and Parents” video series shares stories similar to this teacher’s. Last summer, Anaconda Street Productions brought together five families—parents and their teens—from a range of backgrounds to connect across their differences. They were guided by Dhaarmika Coelho, founder of Camp Kindness Counts, a nonprofit organization that empowers young people, adults, and families to embrace their authentic selves, encourages them to make a positive impact on their communities, and inspires them to become courageous, compassionate global citizens.

While teens today are growing up in the midst of an organized movement to activate an “Us vs. Them” mindset, decades of research points to an alternative where teens can bridge differences with people across culture, ethnicity, race, faith, or political orientation.

“Bridging differences involves seeing the humanity of people from different groups and seeking to understand their perspectives—it’s in opposition to dehumanization,” explains Juliana Tafur, Greater Good Science Center Bridging Difference program director. Our “Bridging Differences for Teens and Parents” video series highlights five ways for parents and teens to build skills to be open to and connect across differences.

In the series, we meet Lee and his 15-year-old son Noah. They’ve had their share of communication challenges despite having a loving relationship. “I’ll stop talking and I’ll just feel like he’s not really listening and he doesn’t want to actually talk about it,” explains Noah about how his conversations with his dad sometimes go. In the video, Lee and Noah learn a new way to have a conversation about an ordinary, everyday topic.

In the next video, 15-year-old Tymofiy and his mother Olena share some of the hardships they experienced as immigrants to the United States from Ukraine. Olena and Tymofiy learn that having a mindset that views people’s attitudes—including negative assumptions about others—as changeable helps us be more open to interacting with people rather than writing them off.

We also meet Legi, who is the mother of 14-year-old Samuel. They’ve experienced many changes in their lives as immigrants to the United States—and Samuel initially struggled to feel like he fit in with his peers. Legi and Samuel learn that exploring and better understanding their own identity can help them feel grounded and secure in knowing themselves—which, in turn, can help us feel better prepared to engage with other people.

Next, we meet 17-year-old Luna and her father Matt. Luna is eager to improve their communication. During a heartfelt conversation, they learn about one another’s vulnerabilities as they explore the role acceptance can play in navigating challenging emotions.

In the final video, Dhaarmika and her two daughters, Sonali and Nina, reflect on having been exposed to many people in their community from a range of backgrounds since they were little, and how that has helped them. They learn about the benefits of having a mindset that appreciates differences as worthwhile.

From these videos, we can distill at least five key lessons for parents (and educators).

1. Listen to teens with compassion. As our teens move toward becoming more independent from us, sometimes they tend to be less inclined to share personal hardships. When they do share, it can be a valuable opportunity to show them our love and desire to understand them. When your teens make a bid to talk to you about their challenges, respond by letting them know you’re available for them. Show that you’re really listening, with warmth and nonjudgment.

2. Help teens recognize our potential for change. Having a mindset that people are mostly set in their ways can lead us to view all people who have negative attitudes about others as forever “bad.” But there’s an alternative mindset: People can change. This belief in growth helps us to be more open to interacting with people who are different from us, even though it could be really difficult. A growth mindset can help your teen recognize that people with prejudiced attitudes will keep learning from their experiences and challenges, which may encourage them to meet and interact with people from different groups.

3. Encourage teens to unpack identity. Beginning to answer the big question “Who am I?” is one of the most important tasks teens face. As parents, we can help our teens learn about and develop positive feelings about the social groups they belong to—like their ethnicity, race, religion, gender—which can be an important way that your teen develops a positive self-concept. Unpacking identity involves parents and teens exploring social identities and reflecting on the ones that are the most important to how they see themselves.

4. Help teens navigate emotions. Meeting and having conversations with unfamiliar people can be exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. Teens may be drawn to try to understand the perspectives of people who are different from them because they value bridging differences—but feeling anxious can get in the way of that process. As parents, we can help our teens learn to navigate emotions by practicing “acceptance” of challenging feelings that can come up when they meet people who are different from them.

5. Nurture in teens a mindset that values diversity. It’s worth nurturing the belief that it’s worthwhile to notice and appreciate a range of backgrounds, experiences, and points of view. As parents, when we talk with our teens about times when different perspectives and life journeys have helped solve both small and large problems, we can help build up their awareness of why and how diversity is valuable.

By the end of their gathering, these families learned not only what it means to bridge differences, but also what it does not mean. Connecting across differences does not require that you put yourself in harm’s way, make convincing others your goal, or mandate compromise or consensus.

In her final reflections, Dhaarmika shares that her favorite part of the experience with these families was seeing the teens being able to bond in a short time. “To be able to hear their heart and their soul speak, it was very powerful for me,” she explains. “It reminded me of the importance of creating deeper connections with individuals and families who have very different life experiences than my own.”

About six months after they initially met, Dhaarmika reconnected with some of these families. The parents she spoke with reflected that they learned how important it is to notice times when there’s a greater openness to listening to begin to bridge differences. They also shared with her that bridging involves taking action. “You need to take your time, be slow, and come in calm,” one parent explained.

Can you teach someone to provide care that isn’t simply accepting of differences, but actually tends to all the ways those differences are impacting a patient’s health? 

The faculty at Samford University’s McWhorter School of Pharmacy can. In fact, they must. They’re required to do so by the accreditation body that sets the standards for the education of pharmacists.

In addition to teaching students information like the physicochemical properties of drugs or the mathematical calculations involved in dosing, pharmacy programs are required to help their students develop complex interpersonal skills such as cultural and structural humility, advocacy, and interprofessional collaboration. The Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education requires that all pharmacy programs prepare students to provide “whole-person care.”

Whole-person care, according to the World Health Organization, requires that providers learn to see that a patient’s health is not just the result of biomedical factors. Psychosocial, cultural, and environmental forces also shape our well-being. Providing whole-person care means crafting treatment plans that address all of those forces. It’s impossible to provide this kind of integrated care without strong interpersonal skills. Graduates of accredited pharmacy schools—like other institutions that train health care professionals—must know how to “actively engage, listen, and communicate” and “to mitigate health disparities by considering, recognizing, and navigating cultural and structural factors.”

How, exactly, does an institution help students engage with each patient as a person with their own needs, beliefs, and cultural norms and as a person whose health might be impacted by structural forces like environmental racism or anti-fat bias? The McWhorter School of Pharmacy offers a helpful model in teaching people to care in complex, comprehensive ways for people who are different from them.

The “other culture” assignment

Jonathan Thigpen has come up with creative, impactful strategies for teaching these skills during his tenure as assistant dean of Samford University’s McWhorter School of Pharmacy.

Thigpen and his colleagues have crafted a curriculum in whole-person care that runs throughout a doctoral student’s time at Samford. One of the assignments he gives first-year students—the “other culture” assignment—is emblematic of this work. Thigpen created the assignment in response to an unsettling observation. Across many years of teaching, he noticed in his students a growing reluctance to get out of their comfort zones. He says he saw an “increasing unwillingness to try something new, to take a risk, to put yourself out there.” It was disconcerting because, as Thigpen says, “you have to be able to do that as a health care provider.”

The assignment involves:

• Visiting a site or event that is part of an “other” culture. It can be any culture about which the student is curious; it just has to be different from the student’s own background. The student should ask permission to attend if necessary.
• Staying immersed and present for at least one hour. The student must go have an individual experience. They can’t bring a friend or go with a group of people from class. The student must stay off of their phone and avoid taking photos, pictures, and notes or do anything else that might take them out of the experience or make them seem like a “tourist” in the place.
• Writing a two- to three-page reflection essay. The reflection should connect the student’s experience to topics they have discussed in class, covered in readings, or analyzed in other assignments. The results were remarkable. Samford is a private Christian university outside Birmingham, Alabama, and many of Thigpen’s students use this assignment as an opportunity to experience a new faith community. Protestant students have attended Catholic services. Catholics have attended Protestant services. Other students have chosen to experience events or spaces associated with classes, races, and genders other than their own. One young woman went to a car auction, an event that’s typically more popular with men. Another student who has a white-collar career ate lunch at a blue-collar cafeteria.

Sometimes the “other” culture a student chooses to experience is one that they’ve been taught to fear or avoid. One student grew up with a family member who had a gambling problem, and they had been warned of the dangers of gambling for as long as they could remember. They had never stepped foot inside a casino but harbored plenty of curiosity. This assignment afforded them the opportunity to better understand a place that held such charge for their family. 

Overwhelmingly, students report having positive experiences and share significant insights about the power of connecting with different people and cultures. An international student who chose to visit a cattle stockyard in Texas noticed there’s a big difference between consuming media about a place and interacting with it themselves. In their paper, they observed, “Even though I have heard and seen a lot about Texas, it felt so different when I experienced it in real life. I think to know a culture, it is not enough to just watch their movies or read about them in magazines. What we feel and experience when interacting with them or join[ing] some of their traditional events is so much more valuable.” 

When a white student visited a Black church, they realized that encountering other cultures can be easier than expected. They noted, “This experience taught me that all my anxiety about being in a different cultural setting was my own issue. I was surrounded by people different from me, yet everyone treated me like family. No one cared about the color of my skin, and I realized that my initial fears had been unnecessary. I had worried that my presence might be disrespectful, but, instead, I was welcomed with kindness.”

After administering the “other culture” assignment for many years, Thigpen made an unexpected observation. Students don’t need to encounter a dramatically different culture or bridge an emotionally charged divide in order for the cross-cultural experience to have a deep impact. Sometimes crossing a small bridge can create big change.

Take Briana Watson’s story. Watson decided to visit a European antique store that happened to be owned by a member of the Samford faculty—a white woman of European descent. Watson is Black and hails from a small town a few hours outside of Birmingham.

Watson recalled feeling a bit guarded as she first entered the store. Her body remembered childhood excursions to stores full of delicate items, being told to hold still and don’t touch anything. But when she stepped through the doors, her professor warmly welcomed her and the tension melted away. Watson and the professor struck up a conversation and discovered they share more in common than they expected.

“There was so much to unpack beyond the antiques,” Watson said. “She comes from a military family as do I,” she remembered, “so really connecting over the understanding of service and the love of service and the work ethic that comes behind that started to bridge the gap.”

Watson started the day thinking I’m going to see my professor, but, by the end of the visit, she had a level of connection and trust that became the foundation for a deep, long-lasting relationship. Watson ended up returning to the store many times. This professor became one of her most trusted mentors, and they even went to Spain together on a study abroad trip.

The experience helped Watson develop an awareness of the ways in which the roles of professor and student or pharmacist and patient can create a structure or hierarchy that isn’t always useful when you need to build trust or ask for support. She explained, “I think when we’re always in these structured learning environments, we tend to look at our relationships as that structured dynamic, too. After breaking away from that and . . . getting to know more about her culture, we’re more inclined now to ask her questions if we need help. We’re more inclined to just sit in her office and talk now.”

The experience also gave Watson a chance to reflect on how someone creates an interpersonal encounter that actually feels welcoming and fosters connection. She wants to carry those lessons into her work as a pharmacist. “What stuck with me the most,” she said, “is how I have to be intentional about creating that space with anyone, whether it be a friend or a patient. . . . It’s more about leaning in and asking the follow-ups and being intentional and also having the humility to accept viewpoints that are different than your own. It’s like, OK, this is the person that I want to be in the world and I’m going to make strides towards that.”

Noticing who we want to be in the world and taking repeated action to become that version of ourselves are important components of character development. It’s clear that Watson engaged with the “other culture” assignment as a character-building experience. That’s no accident.

Designing for character development

Character scientist Elise Dykhuis notes several features built into Thigpen’s assignment that make it more likely that students have a character-building experience instead of a simply memorable one, whether you’re looking to strengthen your own capacity to care across differences or you’re responsible for helping develop the character of others.

Establish trust and relevance. If you’re designing an experience for someone else and especially if you’re making it mandatory, like Thigpen does, take the time to build a foundation of trust. All Samford pharmacy first-year students take the “Foundations of Health and Pharmacy” series, and this assignment comes toward the end of the semester, after students have been through lectures and readings about bias and cultural humility. Thigpen has had time to build trust with his class, demonstrating the curiosity, intellectual humility, patience, and empathy that he wants his students to exercise.

He has also introduced why this experience is relevant to their professional development. He establishes it as an opportunity to do something that researchers call “self-expansion.” Research finds that there are many benefits to understanding difference not only as something to tolerate or to manage, but as an opportunity to learn, to broaden one’s perspective, and to expand the self. When people have strong motives to self-expand and they anticipate growth from an interaction, they report greater interest in engaging with people from different groups and they show patterns consistent with more high-quality contact in their interactions with people from different groups.

Leverage curiosity and autonomy. This assignment is driven by curiosity. Thigpen asks his students to consider their own curiosities. Are there cultures or groups of people that have stoked their curiosity? Curiosity gives students the leverage to get over the barrier of discomfort and take the first step. Students are also afforded the autonomy to choose the experience they want to have. Dykhuis explains that, according to self-determination theory, autonomy is one of the key factors “when we’re thinking about what we can use to promote intrinsic motivation in the long run, which is what we really need as adults in order to change something about ourselves or develop ourselves.”

Reflect. Thigpen’s reflection paper is key to the assignment’s efficacy. Dykhuis notes that multiple literatures about self-development stress the importance of reflecting on an experience right after it happens, but we often struggle to provide ourselves with the opportunity to do it. If we pause, reflect, and make meaning after an encounter, we’re more likely to let ourselves be changed by it. 

Prioritize encouragement and enjoyment. Thigpen’s assignment is a one-time experience, but there are things we can add to the experience to help encourage longer-term development. As Dykhuis and her colleagues explain, the personality and character change research says if we want people to change or develop on their own long-term, encouragement and enjoyment are key. Encouragement comes from being integrated into a community and forming relationships. When we’re part of a community of other practitioners and practitioners-in-training (like the pharmacy students are), we’re reminded to stick with it. When we build connections to people whom we care about, they help keep us accountable. Plus, we’re surrounded by people modeling the attitudes and skills we want to develop.

Don’t forget the fun. Many students report that once they muster up the courage to try their first formal bridging encounter, they realize that it’s not as hard as they thought it would be. It’s actually quite enjoyable to connect with people who are different from them and to have new experiences.

No one is going to learn how to provide whole-person care over the course of one semester. It could take an entire career of deep dedication to live up to the standard of care that professional organizations like the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and the American Pharmacists Association set for their fields. The systemic factors that shape social determinants of health are complex and dynamic. The contexts in which health care providers meet and tend to patients are ever-changing. However, when we focus on developing the character strengths we need to connect across differences, we can keep building our capacity to meet and care for people where they are, in their full complexity. And, as a bonus, we get to bring the courage, curiosity, intellectual humility, patience, and empathy that we’ve cultivated into other areas of our lives, as well. How fun is that?!

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 PhD 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 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 at 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.

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But so many of us don’t, especially when it comes to strangers. We pass by opportunities to extend ourselves even a little to people who cross our path, looking away rather than engaging, staying isolated rather than interacting.

In his new book, A Little More Social, Nicholas Epley explains why that happens and how we can overcome our hesitation. In study after study, his research has shown that we consistently underestimate the benefits of connecting with others, which leads us to reach out less often than we should. By sharing stories of making a choice to engage more regularly with strangers from his own life and from others’ lives, he aims to inspire us to be more sociable and reap the benefits.

“Unlike more punishing self-improvement goals like exercising more or eating better, practicing to become a little more social is a surprisingly positive experience,” he writes. Even for introverts!

Why we resist reaching out

According to Epley, the reason we don’t connect more with others is that we’re afraid of what might happen. Perhaps we’ll be poor conversationalists or other people will reject our attempts—or maybe they’ll just turn out to be jerks!

However, Epley has found that once you do seize opportunities to open up to people, even those who seem unapproachable, they will more than likely respond positively to your efforts. But, he writes, three things tend to get in the way of us testing this out. 

1. Exaggerated uncertainty: our tendency to not like uncertainty and anticipate the worst outcome

We can’t predict exactly how an opening salvo will land; the future is always a little uncertain. But these uncertainties are generally exaggerated, writes Epley, because, as humans, we are primed for reciprocity—of responding to people the way they respond to us. If you approach someone in a warm, interested way, they are likely to return the favor. He writes:

How a social experience unfolds is . . . not as uncertain as we might imagine, generally ending up in a way that is consistent with how it began. If you reach out and treat someone like a friend, then they’re likely to reach back and treat you like a friend in return. If you treat someone like a stranger and ignore them, then they’re likely to ignore you right back.

His research has found that, over and over again, people worry about conversations with strangers being awkward—but they rarely are as awkward as people anticipate.

2. Mismatched perspectives: judging ourselves more harshly than we would others, thinking we’re less competent

People usually judge others by their competence and warmth. But we tend to gravitate toward warm people before learning if they are competent or not, because we assume a likable person can be trusted and has good intentions. Yet, when thinking of starting a conversation with someone new, we can get overly critical of our competence, when that’s less important in that moment.

“Failing to realize that we look at ourselves through a lens of competence while others are evaluating our warmth can leave us underestimating just how positive reaching out can make others feel,” he writes. 

3. Confusing environments: not reaching out becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

If you let your pessimism become a hindrance to testing out hypotheses about what might happen if you talk to a stranger, you end up concluding it will be a negative experience before even trying. This means you can’t learn and grow from real-world encounters, which would otherwise expand your idea of how warm and friendly people can generally be.

“When your beliefs about how others might respond are guiding your decisions about whom to reach out to and whom to avoid, then they’re also constraining the data in ways that make it a confusing source to learn from,” writes Epley.

Talking beats digital communication

Even understanding these hindrances may not be enough to convince you to change. For many of us, engaging with strangers just doesn’t come naturally, especially now that so many of us work and shop online. We’d rather text with our friends or play on social media than risk meeting someone new.

But using our phones to text or email to socialize is less ideal than you might think, even with friends, writes Epley. That’s because when you communicate with someone through writing, you lose the instant feedback, as well as the emotional tone of someone’s response, that can be best understood by talking—both of which foster more closeness.

“Being constantly connected through our phones and the internet, the tools we use to stay constantly connected to others elsewhere can lack the rhythm of synchrony and sound of the human voice that makes interactions as enjoyable, informative, and connecting as they could be,” he writes.

For example, in one study where Epley compared communications between friends and between strangers using texting, emailing, or voice-based ways of connecting (phoning and video), he found that people who used voice-based communication felt more connection with friends and with strangers, alike, despite their expectations to the contrary. This points to our mismatch between what we’re seeking and what we do in real life.

“Although you’d be much happier getting to know someone by actually talking in conversation with them, not appreciating this beforehand might leave you choosing the ease of email or one-sided social media to connect with someone instead,” he writes.

Talking also helps bring connection in situations where we are trying to engage across perceived social divides, like between people of different ages, races, religions, or political affiliations. Interacting with people who are different from us can lessen animosity and stereotyping, creating more warmth and, potentially, happier communities.

Even when there is vehement disagreement (such as in discussing polarizing political issues), Epley writes, people humanize each other more and have more constructive conversations when they hear each other’s voices and exchange information in real time, rather than reading arguments in written form. In this way, conversations can help bridge differences in ways that texting or social media can’t.

“The value of sitting down and talking directly with someone isn’t a new remedy for strengthening our connections and increasing our happiness,” writes Epley. “What’s new is that in order to use this age-old remedy, you increasingly have to choose it.”

How we might connect more

So how can we learn to be just a little bit more social? Recognizing our hesitancy is ill-founded can help us take the initiative and try reaching out. Even bringing up “boring” everyday subjects has been found to be more enjoyable than people expect it be.

It’s also true that we can try to go a bit deeper with people, beyond simple chit-chat, and gain more out of a conversation, writes Epley. His research has found that conversations with strangers don’t have to be as shallow as you may think and, in fact, people feel better when they aren’t (despite predictions to the contrary).

One of the more heartwarming stories in Epley’s book involves trying to enact this magic during a presentation to a group of finance executives. During his talk, he surprises his audience by randomly pairing up participants to have an intimate conversation based on four prompts: what they were grateful for, what they’d want to know about their future if they had a crystal ball, what they looked for in a close friend, and when they’d last cried in front of someone—all pretty revealing topics.

The crowd’s initial reaction was a collective groan—one guy yelled out, “Oh shit!” But, once they got going, the whole room became animated and energized with conversation; there was smiling, laughing, hugging, and even tearing up, in one case. Everyone enjoyed the conversations much more than they’d expected, based on before-and-after surveys.

Of course, Epley was not too surprised. Similar exercises modeled on Arthur Aron’s “fast friends” intervention have been done with a wide variety of groups showing similar, positive results.

How can we move from experiments like these to taking action in the real world?

Epley suggests a few approaches. The easiest and simplest way is to just say hello and smile. Often that’s enough to get the ball rolling, and you can let it go from there, perhaps remarking on something you and another person are both doing at the moment, like standing in line at the grocery store or taking a plane trip to the same city.

There are other prosocial ways to help you initiate conversation with someone. You might try offering them a compliment (“I like your outfit!”), show a bit of kindness (“Would you like to go in front of me in line?”), or express gratitude (“Thanks for making that coffee just how I like it”). If offered genuinely and sincerely—i.e., not as manipulation or to sell something—compliments, kindnesses, and gratitude invite a warm connection with other people. Not only with strangers, but with those we know well, too.

Trying to make reaching out habit-forming is good for us, says Epley. You don’t have to jump off the deep end right away and become a social butterfly. You can start by being just a little more open to noticing easy opportunities to engage. Leave your cell phone, earbuds, and other social distractions out of reach, and pay attention to the world outside, he advises. By experimenting with initiating connection often, and sometimes more deeply, you’ll soon see that talking with a stranger is a gift that will bring you more joy in life and create a warmer, friendlier world, besides.

“Testing your doubts . . . is the first step to learning where misplaced pessimism might be keeping you from doing a little more good in your life by being a little more social,” writes Epley.

The city ended the year with 12 homicides—a stark drop from 2012 when it recorded 67, a per capita rate 18 times the national average at the time.

I’m a professor of criminal justice who wrote a book on police reform efforts in Camden over the last 15 years. The stunning turnaround in violent crime has led Camden and its newly formed Camden County Police Department, which was established in 2013 and replaced the Camden City Police Department, to be hailed as a model of reform. In 2015, then-President Obama visited the city to highlight the progress made.

Positive national and international attention on police reform in Camden continued in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. This attention stemmed from the Minneapolis city council’s unanimous decision to dissolve the Minneapolis Police Department and start anew—much as Camden had done seven years earlier.

Yet one topic that I believe such discussions and commentary often overlook is the role that community and activist groups, as well as local media, played in better policing by the Camden County Police Department.

County takeover of city police department

Under-policing came to define the final years of the Camden City Police Department, or CPD. Police presence in the community was largely absent.

In contrast, the Camden County Police Department, or CCPD, began its new mandate with an aggressive, broken-windows style of policing that included targeting low levels of disorder and quality-of-life offenses, like loitering.

Residents were concerned about this new aggressive stance. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, researchers, and local media used New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act to collect measures of the CCPD’s activity.

This data pointed to a troubling rise in officer-initiated vehicle and pedestrian stops, tickets for low-level violations, use of force, and citizen complaints of excessive force through 2014 and 2015.

CCPD officers in 2014 made 60,352 total stops, including 16,742 of people on foot. The per capita rate of pedestrian stops exceeded the rates in both New York City and Philadelphia during those cities’ peak stop-and-frisk years in 2011 and 2009, respectively, before stop-and-frisk tactics spurred court-ordered reforms.

Beyond the stops, CCPD officers issued more than 6,000 citations from May 1, 2013, when the new department launched, through the end of the year. They issued over 19,000 citations in 2014. During its first year or so, the CCPD’s total number of cases in municipal court increased by nearly 30% relative to the year prior.

Similarly, the number of tickets issued for minor infractions—such as riding a bicycle without a bell or a light, and disorderly conduct—rose steeply. For example, the number of citations for having tinted car windows more than tripled, while citations for not having proper car lights or reflectors more than quadrupled.

Backlash to broken-windows policing

Citizen complaints against CCPD alleging excessive use of force increased from 35 in 2013 to 65 in 2014.

Organizations like the Camden County chapter of the NAACP and the ACLU-NJ drummed up attention to these figures by issuing announcements and press briefings. On the same day in May 2015 that President Obama heralded the CCPD, the ACLU-NJ issued a scathing rebuke to the President’s message. It read, in part: “Before we hold Camden up as a model of community policing, we must address the troubling indicators that point to Camden’s use of practices that appear to take a page from a broken windows approach to policing.”

Mobilized residents and groups, including clergy members, made it clear that they did not appreciate this level and type of aggressive policing. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Star-Ledger/NJ Advance Media amplified the coverage of Camden’s heavy-handed tactics.

What followed was a complete change in behavior among the CCPD from an activity, training, and policy perspective. The numbers and rates of police stops declined. CCPD officers began issuing more warnings compared to tickets, to the point that “warnings over summonses” became an unofficial slogan of the department.

The top brass at CCPD sought out and implemented two types of de-escalation training, starting in the spring of 2015, for all officers. The CCPD also started to explore a complete overhaul of the agency’s use of force policy. It eventually adopted a more restrictive policy that emphasized de-escalation and the sanctity of life, while prohibiting tactics like chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles. The CCPD’s innovative policy even inspired the New Jersey Attorney General to revamp its statewide policy years later.

As a result, complaints of use of force, in general, and of excessive force dropped from 43 in 2015 to 28 in 2016, and declined to 16 in 2017 and just three in 2018. Such complaints have usually been in the single digits each year since.

The CCPD deserves credit for course-correcting. But I believe it’s important to remember where that impetus came from: community and activist groups, as well as local media attention.

Many fewer murders, but persistent challenges

Camden has undoubtedly made progress. The city’s homicide rate in 2025 was four times the national average—a marked change from 18 times the national average in 2012. Homicides across the country have also declined in recent years.

Yet problems persist. Camden is still a perennial contender for the most violent city in New Jersey. Despite a $1.6 billion economic package from the state to the city during the 2010s, which overwhelmingly took the form of tax subsidies to encourage businesses to either stay in or relocate to Camden, almost every census tract is among the most socially and economically disadvantaged in the state. Most companies that receive tax breaks do not employ a meaningful number of Camden residents.

The city is racially segregated from the rest of Camden County and the broader South Jersey region.

In my opinion, Camden, like most other cities, relies too much on the police, giving them a monopoly on public safety. I believe both the city and the CCPD should take a cue from places like Newark, New Jersey, and St. Louis, Missouri, to find innovative ways to collaborate and engage more with community groups, business associations, and other non-police entities. Together they can co-produce public safety and take a more holistic approach to reducing crime, violence, and disorder.

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

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 trade-offs 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 trade-offs, 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, this 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 amidst 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 excepted 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.

Even so, most Americans marry eventually; 87% of women have wed by age 54. In For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, historian Stephanie Coontz outlines the truths and fictions when it comes to the institution, and how the myths are polluting our ideas of what marriage should be.

Marriage today has new rules, argues Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She shows how nostalgia for the past relates more closely to economic anxiety than anything else—and how our outdated views fail to serve us. I spoke to Coontz about the state of marriage and what it really takes to make a successful union today.

Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: What is the real purpose of marriage now? Why are people getting married?

Stephanie Coontz: We are still trying to figure that out, because you don’t have to get married, and you can have a very good relationship without marriage. Women don’t need it the way they used to. Increasingly, men are prepared to do the cooking and home life and stuff that they used to marry a woman to get done for them. So what do we want from marriage? We’re getting a lot of different messages.

One message is that it should be the most important relationship in your life. You should get most of your satisfaction from it. Another is that marriage is a way of supporting each other, and bringing our separate social networks and connections to bear. In a sense, we are doing what marriage developed to be in band-level societies—creating more relatives and more social connections.

HR: Which relationships are replacing marriage?

SC: Living together doesn’t replace marriage. Very few people who cohabit think of it as an alternative to marriage. For many people, cohabitation is a prelude to marriage or a fallback after a marriage fails. We need to think about diversifying rather than replacing.

The majority of people still want to marry, but they only want to marry under circumstances that mean that they can do marriage a little differently and be more confident in it than they have been able to for the past several decades.

HR: Marriage has been transforming for a while. How can history help couples today?

SC: We have new values, but we also have problems putting them into place. A lot of things going on in the economy now really make family life more fragile, more tense, and more difficult.

It’s not new experiments with gender and sex and different living arrangements that are the problem. There are historical origins. For instance: I spent most of my career telling people they should not be nostalgic for 1950’s families. A tremendous pain and sense of loss and discouragement drives this nostalgia. But the pain won’t be solved by getting rid of new gender norms and new marriage norms.

A historical perspective can help people who support those new norms not to demonize the people who don’t––to understand where they’re coming from.

HR: Where are they coming from? What are some of these myths we’ve internalized?

SC: You hear all the time—from progressives, as well as people who oppose the changes—that “men are like this” and “women are just like this.” That women pay more attention to emotions. That men either have to adjust to our caring, or we have to adjust to their inconsideration.

But this isn’t the way it has to be. Men have been doing emotional work in many societies through the ages. They’re quite capable of it. But for at least a century and a half, they’ve been told that it makes them unattractive to women if they do it. And it makes them a target for other men. We women have only had the reputation of being altruistic for about 150, 200 years. Before that we were thought to be more ambitious and more selfish and more self-centered than men are.

HR: I found it interesting that one of the myths is that men cannot express themselves emotionally, when, in fact, they were doing that earlier.

SC: There are tons of letters from the Revolutionary era—men exchanging these letters, crying, complaining the way women are thought to complain. We also have letters that historian Richard Godbeer and others have looked at where men will write like, “I’m not hearing from you enough,” and, “don’t you care about me anymore?”

Through a whole lot of history, it was not women’s job to massage men’s egos and take care of the home. Patriarchy was brutal on women, but there was no expectation that men were not emotional, not capable of keeping track of obligations. There was no expectation that women would massage all men’s egos, even their husband’s egos.

They were partners in what was a business, whether it was a small farm or a great big political alliance. Women were considered just as shrewd and ruthless and business-like as men, not particularly that much more emotional.

HR: Really? When were women considered more selfish and ambitious?

SC: Early Christians talked about women’s selfishness, and many societies across the world have talked about women being the ones you can’t really trust, that they’re going to put their own individual and their kids’ interests first. We shouldn’t be glorifying these aspects of our personality and thinking that somehow the men need to catch up with us. We have to be patient with ourselves and our partners and those around us, because these myths have been drilled into our heads.

These are ideas that, ironically, developed with our transition to democracy. As we began to think that all men are created equal, we weren’t quite willing to let women do that. We began to develop these more benevolent excuses for the male dominance.

As men went into the labor force and women had to stay and do things around the home, there began to be this romanticization of women’s domestic expertise. A lot of women began to develop their whole ego and pride around that domestic expertise. It’s a lot to shake off.

HR: You write about the latest period of marriage starting in the 70’s. What was happening then?

SC: By the 1950’s and 60’s, people were discontented with the idea that marriage should be something where the woman was the homemaker and the man got all of his identity from being the breadwinner. As it changed, even though some women wanted to go to work and some men wanted to have more egalitarian relationships, earworms from the past were present.

Up through the 70’s, if a woman earned more money, had more education than her husband, that was a divorce risk. If a woman did less than half the housework, which is now kind of our goal, that was a risk that her marriage would dissolve.

Sexually, men and women were turned off if they had too many egalitarian roles. That showed that all of the ways that we had learned to make marriage work had been internalized in our psyches, that even our sexual ideas were reflecting it.

For complex historical reasons, men decided that they had to be the teachers. They had to be the ones who were stronger. They earned, they were the ones who gave the money. They learned to confuse showing off with showing love.

One of the good points of the changes that have been wrought by feminism and by increasing acceptance of some of the principles of gender equality is that men are beginning to not define themselves purely in terms of knowing more and earning more than their partner.

It’s no longer a divorce risk when a woman outearns her husband, or has more education. And men and women sharing child-rearing are the most sexually satisfied in their lives.

HR: What are the most important insights for couples who want a successful marriage today?

SC: Marriage does not save anyone, economically or psychologically. The most important predictor of whether you’re going to have a successful marriage is if you can organize a successful, satisfying personal life, where you have friends; you keep commitments to friends; they keep commitments to you. And you’re basically happy with what you’re doing. If you find somebody who is also happy, and with whom you enjoy doing things, you’re going to get better.

Another false belief is “cocooning.” The best way to build the kind of rich, supportive relationships we want is to go out and get outside input that you can bring back. Mounting research shows that when couples engage in such egalitarian relationships, their love grows over time instead of the tensions beginning to rise.

HR: What are the practical barriers to marriage today? How can couples make it work?

SC: Because we have much higher standards of marriage than in the past, it takes more negotiation, more time, more attention to one’s own work and expectations of support for that work and attention to your partner’s work and ideas. Marriage is much more personally involved than marriages of the past were, or had to be.

You need patience, you need time—and you need work schedules that allow you to take the time. So a lot of the barriers are in the economy. The increased work pressures that we face and the economic precarity that we face undermines those kinds of skills. Financial insecurity is a bigger predictor of negative communication in marriage than having divorced parents or what happened to you in your childhood, because it pulls your attention away from the things you need to keep going.

HR: Marriages from the 50’s didn’t have the personal satisfaction prerequisite, but the economics were easier, right?

SC: People look back to the 1950’s with nostalgia. You certainly should not feel nostalgia for any of the marriages of that period. But that was a period when real wages were rising, when every economic expansion up to the early 70’s gave 90% of its benefits to the bottom 90% of the population. The rich were not getting richer.

All of those economic and social changes that we think of as separate from our personal lives have really big ramifications now that we are trying to build personal lives that really involve this kind of patience, gratitude, love, and reaching out. A study of families and marriages during the big financial crisis and housing crisis found that domestic violence reports from the most educated, secure women soared up to the levels of their less educated and less secure peers.

HR: How can you explain the nostalgia for an earlier period? What do you make of the trad wife movement?

SC: Well, I used to be pretty contemptuous of it. But I’ve gotten softer in my old age and after seeing what’s been happening over the past 30 years or so. I’ve come to believe that this nostalgia is kind of “referred pain.”

Our brain has trouble figuring out where pain originates. It often gives us the wrong messages. It will tell us that our neck hurts, when in fact we ate too much and the stomach is pressing on the diaphragm. Physicians call it referred pain. You think it’s in one location, but treating it there is not going to work at all.

That is a delightful analogy for what’s happening with so many of the pains that people feel, and the nostalgia they feel for 1950’s families. It occurs at a deeper place in the body politic and in the economy. It occurs in these changes in the economy and in the increasing development of a K-shaped economy where the rich are getting richer and the poor and the middle class are getting poorer. With these things, it’s easy to say, “what went wrong?” and to think “maybe it’s because we don’t have those families that we used to be able to watch on TV and look at how well they organized their lives and how happy they seemed.”

HR: What does it take to build the kind of mutualistic relationship that people want today?

SC: Historical perspective and sociological perspective could be one of the best therapeutic tools that there is. We often treat our male partner as an unskilled assistant, telling him what to do. It’s called gatekeeping. I’ve talked about gatekeeping in my research all my life, but my husband still catches me doing it sometimes. He finds it easier to accept this behavior, which is quite insulting, when I explain to him what an ingrained habit it is, and that I know it’s a bad habit and am trying to shake it.

Historical perspective on where these things come from won’t solve everything, but can create a space in which you can discuss them without having to decide “is this a symptom of some deeper problem in this individual or in our relationship?” It creates space in which you can depersonalize it and say, “but what needs to change?” And let’s stop saying, “why are you doing this, you bad person?” or “you inconsiderate person.”

You are doing this because it’s been ingrained in you that you should do this.

HR: Basically, things don’t need to be as they are today.

SC: That’s the point of all historical and anthropological research. Once you examine the variety of ways that people have experienced and expressed emotions, and related to each other, it gives you a bigger sense of how much of a straitjacket we’ve been put in. Especially by the stereotypes that we inherit, that we’re dealing with now—the manosphere and ideas about toxic masculinity and all of these things—things that make it seem much more permanent and much less changeable than it actually is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trump administration’s approach

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

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

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

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

Federal health officials insist that suicide prevention remains a priority.

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

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

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

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

A history of medical and crisis care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help for the farm and the farmer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF. ]]> If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the U.S. by dialing or texting “988 or find the suicide hotline in your country.” Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But not normal. Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind—a mental illness. But in recent decades, there’s been a growing movement to ask a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person? For Chris Pawelski, it was a torrent of factors. His dad—one of his best friends, whom he worked with daily for decades—was diagnosed with renal cancer and died six months later. Pawelski was left as the primary caregiver for his mom, who had dementia. His family’s multigenerational onion farm in New York’s Orange County—where he first worked as a five year old, collecting onions that fell out of crates—was hemorrhaging money. Pawelski said he was growing roughly $200,000 worth of crops some years but took home only about $20,000, unable to negotiate higher prices with wholesale buyers that dominated the market. Debt to suppliers and equipment vendors piled up, and the burden strained his marriage. He had little time for friends, working sunup to sundown seven days a week, desperately trying to preserve his family’s legacy. “It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he said. “It’s weeks, months, years of dealing with all sorts of pressures that you can’t alleviate.” Pawelski started wondering what it would be like to get hit by a truck on the busy road in front of his house. “You think you’re already on your way out, so why wait?” he said. Millions of Americans have serious thoughts of killing themselves, and tens of thousands die by suicide annually. Suicide repeatedly ranks among the top 10 leading causes of death—making the U.S. an outlier among developed nations. Prevention efforts have typically focused on connecting individuals in crisis with treatment—despite therapy and medication being notoriously expensive, the health care system struggling to meet demand, and a consensus that suicide is caused by a host of factors, including but not limited to mental illness. Now, many people working to prevent suicide, including some who have tried to harm themselves or lost a loved one to it, are calling for a broader approach. Some were galvanized by the COVID pandemic, when rates of anxiety and depression spiked—not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed. That led many to believe that, while treatments and crisis care are vital, the goal of suicide prevention needs to expand beyond stopping people from dying to also giving them reasons to live. “It’s not rocket science,” said Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist and internationally recognized suicide prevention researcher who lost her brother to suicide. If “you have happier, healthier people, they live longer, happier lives.” That means suicide prevention shouldn’t be limited to answering hotlines or treating patients in psychiatric wards, she said. It should also involve running food banks to ensure families don’t go hungry or hosting weekly book clubs for homebound seniors to make friends. It can take the form of school programs that build resilience in children or housing policies that prevent evictions. Decades of research shows these types of initiatives—even if they don’t have the words “mental health” or “suicide” in the title—can reduce the number of people who kill themselves. They often lower rates of crime, addiction, and poverty, too. The U.S. has lagged behind other countries in adopting this approach, Spencer-Thomas said, perhaps because it’s easier—and more politically palatable—to tell someone to go to therapy than it is to enact sweeping policy changes, such as an increased minimum wage. “As long as we have that convenient narrative that it’s just a bunch of broken people needing medicine and treatment, then we’re never accountable for fixing the broken things in our communities,” Spencer-Thomas said. The Trump administration’s approach Overhauling suicide prevention efforts to focus on broad social and economic policies might seem overwhelming and unrealistic—especially right now. This approach requires large upfront investments that lack across-the-board support, either because of budgeting realities or ideological bents. President Donald Trump and his appointees have said little about suicide directly, but many of their policies do the opposite of what research shows prevents suicide. The administration has championed cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that are projected to leave millions of people without health insurance and food stamps in coming years. It has injected uncertainty into the economy through the war with Iran, seesawing tariff policy, and mass layoffs of federal employees. It has canceled $1 billion in grants for school-based mental health initiatives, gutted federal programs that focus on at-risk blue-collar workers, and cut gun violence research. (Suicides are the most common type of gun death in America.) “All of these changes are creating a firestorm,” said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They can cause “extreme stress and anxiety” in people’s lives, she added, and “when people feel desperate, that’s when crises can emerge.” Federal health officials insist that suicide prevention remains a priority. Allison Arwady, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s injury center, said the agency is focused on creating systems that can support people “no matter what may be happening” in the world around them. “There’s always going to be turmoil in people’s lives,” she added. Arwady and Brandon Johnson, who leads suicide prevention work at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said several of the Trump administration’s priorities align with an upstream approach. For example, they said, its focus on youth physical and mental well-being could help address the increasing suicide risk among adolescents, since exercise is proven to improve mental health. Similarly, people who are homeless have higher rates of suicide, and the administration has been pushing them into treatment. Federal officials have also encouraged partnerships with religious organizations, and research shows members of faith communities are less likely to attempt suicide. However, the Trump administration has made steep staff cuts at the CDC and SAMHSA and has repeatedly called for decreasing their budgets, leading to questions about whether or how this work will continue. A history of medical and crisis care Suicide prevention reached the national stage in the late 1990s, said Deb Stone, who worked at the CDC for 15 years before joining the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit focused on teen and young-adult mental health. As suicide rates grew among young people, a group of government officials, clinicians, and advocates gathered in Reno, Nevada, in 1998 to discuss the pressing issue. Over the next few years, the surgeon general issued a landmark call to action and the federal government published its first national strategy for suicide prevention. These documents acknowledged the role of society and economics in suicide risk but focused heavily on identifying people in crisis and increasing access to medical treatment. Those are critical steps to suicide prevention, many mental health researchers and clinicians say. They’re also politically favorable. For elected officials, who have a few years to demonstrate their achievements before the next campaign, it’s easier to count the number of people receiving therapy than the number of people who never developed suicidal thoughts because long-term economic and social investments helped them maintain steady jobs and strong friendships. The push for individual treatment also comes from a pervasive misconception that suicide is always the result of an underlying mental illness, said Maddy Reinert, who is the senior director of population health at Mental Health America and contributed to a 2025 national report on upstream suicide prevention. Although researchers debate how many people who die by suicide had a mental health condition—with estimates from less than half to about 90%—the takeaway is that mental illness is not the sole cause, Reinert said. That means treating it can’t be the sole response. Plus, mental illnesses can be triggered and exacerbated by life circumstances. Treating depressive symptoms without looking at factors such as childhood trauma, the loss of a loved one, or being laid off from a job is an incomplete approach, many mental health researchers and clinicians say. The COVID pandemic, especially, made people in the field recognize “we really need to address all of these conditions that are creating stress, anxiety, and crises,” Stone said. In July 2022, the federal government launched 988—a shorter number for the national suicide crisis line, meant to provide an alternative to 911 for mental health emergencies. Monica Johnson, who led federal work on 988, said the infusion of money and attention on the hotline helped states build better crisis response systems, from centers that answer calls to mobile crisis units. But that’s not enough to solve America’s suicide problem, she said. “You’ll never be able to build a system based on crisis alone.” Help for the farm and the farmer Pawelski, the onion farmer in New York, hit his breaking point in 2020. He had a decent crop that year, but Canadian exporters were dumping cheap onions into American markets, making it difficult for him to sell his product. “I was having to beg people” to buy, he said. And when he managed to sell, prices were comparable to prices in the 1980s. By the end of the season, he had incurred losses of a few hundred thousand dollars. He said he and his wife decided, “We couldn’t afford to grow onions again.” The idea that his family’s onion farm would end with him was “soul-crushing,” Pawelski said. He lost weight rapidly and thought about ending his life. He and his wife called NY FarmNet for help. Founded at Cornell University in 1986, the free program connects farmers with two consultants: a financial analyst specializing in farm planning and a social worker focused on emotional concerns and family dynamics. The financial specialist helped Pawelski develop a new business plan. Instead of farming onions for wholesale, he could grow greens, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants at a small scale to sell directly to consumers. He could upgrade an old truck with a cooler and deliver produce to people’s doors. He would supplement that income with teaching, speaking engagements, and other work that took advantage of his master’s degree in communications. The social worker helped him accept that new reality—equally crucial, Pawelski said. “If you’re pissed off” about the change, “no matter what kind of proposal or idea they have, it’s not going to go anywhere.” The adjustment took months. Pawelski also saw a therapist during that time. Then one day a neighbor noted that Pawelski seemed much happier. That “caught me off guard,” Pawelski recalled. He didn’t realize his inner transformation was so apparent. Today, Pawelski’s business has stabilized, and he and his wife are paying down debt. Pawelski advocates for programs to help farmers’ mental health and address their higher-than-average suicide rates. That can mean crisis hotlines and access to affordable therapy, Pawelski said. But what he really wants are policy changes that help farmers get fair prices for their produce, debt relief, and the installation of broadband internet in rural areas so farm families and employees can be connected. “We need to think broader and longer-term than a helpline,” he said. That’s “a band-aid on a gunshot wound.” This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF. anxiety, death, depression, health care, mental health, policy, politics, society, suicide, 2026-05-22T15:33:00+00:00 https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/podcasts/item/step_away_from_anxiety https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/podcasts/item/step_away_from_anxiety#When:10:00:00Z ]]> Do you have a hard time calming your nerves? Author Raina Telgemeier tries a practice to get out of her head, one step at a time. anxiety, dacher keltner, meditation, raina telgemeier, the science of happiness, walking meditation, 2026-05-21T10:00:00+00:00 https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_you_need_rituals_in_your_life https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_you_need_rituals_in_your_life#When:14:46:00Z We often look to new solutions to solve modern-day problems—but what if one of the most powerful tools is also one of humanity’s oldest traditions? In A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us, Bruce Feiler spent three years traveling the world trying to understand the enduring power of rituals and collective gatherings. Drawing from both ancient traditions and what he calls the new “ritual renaissance,” Feiler explores the many ways people come together to mourn, celebrate, and move into new phases of life.

Feiler, who has written about life transitions and the “nonlinear life,” argues in today’s world, with ever-shifting timelines, we have an even greater need to mark important moments. 

Feiler views rituals as essential. “Whatever the enemy is, ritual gatherings are the answer. If the enemy is loneliness and isolation, ritual gatherings are the answer. If the enemy is political division, ritual gatherings are the answer. If the enemy is AI, ritual gatherings are the answer,” he told me over Zoom.

“The essence of what people are saying is, ‘I want to take back my humanity,’” says Feiler. Rituals, he argues, can help us do that.

Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: When did you realize rituals were so important?

Bruce Feiler: I belong to the tribe of group keepers. I’m the one who leads the family dinner game, organizes the backyard Olympics, leads the family meeting, and gathers the family stories. I think every family, every group, every team, every neighborhood has people who tend to the group.

I wrote books on how to hold your family together and how to make connections across different cultural backgrounds. And what happened was my wife Linda and I went from an empty nest to a full nest in 32 minutes, 21 years ago, when we became the parents of identical twin daughters. And then, 18 years later, we went from a full nest to an empty nest in 32 minutes when we dropped our children off at opposite ends of the same college campus. I walked into our home here in Brooklyn and I felt homesick in my own home. My first reaction was, don’t use this word. That’s what five year olds feel when they go to a sleepover, or teenagers feel when they go to sleep-away camp. Then I thought: I have spent the last 10 years thinking about how we navigate life transitions. I should be ready for this moment. But this was different. And I thought: Oh, what I need is a ritual.

HR: Humans have been conducting rituals for centuries. Why have they endured?

BF: We have 300,000 years of evidence that the earliest thing that humans did was gather to mark moments of pain and confusion. People were burying their dead before we were anatomical humans. For thousands of centuries and every place we’ve ever looked, we have evidence that in times of change, people turn to the group.

When someone comes into the group, like after a wedding or the birth of a baby. When someone leaves the group, like after a coming of age or a death. When someone moves or changes work, the group holds an occasion to mark this moment. That’s until this century, when we’ve abandoned them.

HR: Tell me more about that—what’s new about our present moment?

BF: Birth rituals are declining. Coming-of-age rituals have plummeted. In 1960, 90% of American adults got married. Now it’s under 50%. In 1975, 5% of Americans were cremated. Now it’s 65%. Only one in three Americans are buried or have a ceremony of any kind to honor their life after passing. And so, we are in a kind of challenging moment for group togetherness.

Yet all around the world, people are creating new ways of gathering. They’re pushing back against digital saturation, loneliness, and division. I went to 16 countries on six continents and joined rituals, and found that everyday people are saying: We’re just not going to surrender to our phones and AI. We’re going to push back and hold humanity together.

HR: It seems the core of the ritual is togetherness. Why is that so urgent right now?

BF: We are a generation into the epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The enemies are in our pockets, and they are coming at us at all times. The core enemy is that the newest algorithms that we live our lives by are designed to divide us and to spread hate.

Ritual gatherings are the oldest human algorithm. It is the glue that holds society together. It is the first thing that we did, which was to gather together to bury our dead 300,000 years ago, before we were anatomical humans. In a world in which everything is pulling us further and further apart, the only thing strong enough to hold us together is a ritual gathering.

HR: Can you share an example of a ritual you can create today? What does it take to work?

BF: I was invited to do a ritual at TED in Vancouver, TED 2026. You need three things to make a ritual work: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

What you need at the beginning is an opening “wow.” Rituals have a sense of specialness, of sacred space. They have boundaries. So you invite people into a circle, a garden, a grove, a place on the beach. You’re saying: Come into this special place. Outside we were that, and inside we are this.

At TED, we had a flameless candle because we were in an institute that didn’t allow flames. Everybody took a flameless candle and answered a simple question: What’s bringing you joy today?

There’s this phrase from the Catholic baptism liturgy that I loved; as you know, I went to a group baptism in the Vatican. So, you want to welcome people with joy. Take a flower, take a candle, sing a song—something that makes people feel welcomed and safe, and now we’re going to go into the ritual. Then you define the tension and you set the intention. We’re here to comfort someone who’s having a double mastectomy. We’re here to send people off to college. We’re here to say goodbye to a colleague. We’re here to mark this retirement. We’re here to say goodbye to a loved one who just died. We’re not going to lecture, we’re not going to try to fix it, we’re just going to mark the moment.

For the middle, you need a peace plan. The purpose of the ritual is to kind of resolve a problem. I say that a ritual is—and this is unromantic—a compromise rehearsal.

When my own dad died at 87, there was tension in my family. My mother did not want to throw dirt onto the coffin because she thought it was barbaric. She wanted long-stem yellow roses. My sister said the dirt was her favorite part and thought long-stem yellow roses were too Hallmark. I had to middle-child my way through a compromise. So, we got three dozen yellow roses and we didn’t get dirt. But my dad loved to walk on the beach, so we got little bags of sand. And that’s how the ritual kind of created the conflict and resolved it because it was about something deeper.

So what you want in the middle of your ritual is something that makes everybody feel welcome and calms any divisions.

At TED, I divided everybody into groups of twos, and I gave each person a piece of bitter chocolate, and they were asked to share what’s challenging in their lives right now with their partner. Then I gave everybody a cube of sweet chocolate, and they were asked to define what would be a sweet outcome for their tension. People shared this outcome with their partner. Afterwards, people took their candles and brought them up to the front of the room where we had bowls of water and they stuck the candle in the water and offered a wish for what they hoped their neighbor’s outcome would be. It’s a small way of saying: OK, we’re all going through difficulty. Let’s do it together.

And when the candles touch the water, they turned on—they were water-activated—and the whole room lit up.

Rituals end with a moment of hope. What is the best version of the group that we can be? We’re going to think back when we danced at the wedding. We’re going to think back when we held hands and wept at the funeral. We’re going to think back at how we honored our friend who was about to go have her breast removed because of cancer.

So at TED, we took pebbles. People used Sharpies to write out their hope for themselves. Then they took the rock and they put it upside down on a table in the middle of the circle of 50 people. We went person by person, grabbed someone else’s stone, read it out loud, and then carried that home. What we created in that moment was a kind of web of hope where people are trying to make their own hopes come true and the hopes of someone else.

HR: What are some tools for making a ritual that everyone can get on board with?

BF: It could be a family, an office, a team, a neighborhood. School is a perfect example.  If I were to ask you to imagine some of the most fulfilling experiences you had at school, odds are that you would summon the kindergarteners sitting around in a circle in a ritual that welcomes somebody into the classroom, a sports team that sits around in a circle before they go into a competition, a group of theater kids sitting around in a circle before they go on stage.

In a class of kindergarteners, they’re coming in from varied worlds. They’ve probably had a difficult time getting there. You know the two most difficult moments in every family can be the hour before everyone goes to bed and the hour after everyone wakes up. Those are the moments of great chaos. Everybody coming into the classroom has come from their own moment of chaos. So what happens when we sit around in a circle is that we create a boundary. We say: Outside we were that, inside we are this. We sit together and we re-welcome one another—we enter this space together.

And so those little rituals do what all rituals do: They calm us, they synchronize our heartbeats, they put us in alignment with the people around us. We have all this knowledge now of mirror neurons and other things, and we know we’re responding to the group. When people first started having ritual gatherings 300,000 years ago, they didn’t have this access to the brain and to biometrics, but they understood it intuitively.

Whatever the situation that you are in, where there are people from different backgrounds, you need some sort of transition element that establishes the group as the mechanism to calm the divisions, make people feel present, and then help them feel aligned.

HR: How are people creating new rituals today?

BF: All around the world, people from boomers to Gen Z are creating this “ritual renaissance.” They are saying: I crave being around other people. I was raised with a script of top-down, institutionally mandated, prescripted, meaning-free life rituals on a pre-approved schedule—that I never approved.

What’s happening is that, from the bottom up, people are creating bespoke, personalized rituals.

A millennial ritual designer was talking to her friend and said, “I’m having a double mastectomy and I’m scared.” There’s no pre-approved ritual for that. So this designer invited people over to her living room. They came together, told stories, and brought comfy clothing because of the recovery. What this woman said was: “The purpose of the ritual is to turn fear into hope.”

What I’m trying to do is invite people to take back their own community and stand up and say, “I can do this right now with my family, with my neighbors, with my colleagues, with my team, with my book group or yoga club,” or whatever it is. Reassert the primacy of humanity in a world where humanity feels under threat every hour.

Layoffs often follow increases in economic uncertainty. Executives and consultants pitch “reducing headcount” as necessary, and sometimes even responsible, steps to “protecting the business.” Cutting payroll costs appears, at least in theory, to improve efficiency and restore profitability.

While the term “reducing headcount” does seem to strip away the human reality of layoffs, what if the basic financial evidence behind the effectiveness of layoffs is flawed? What if it is an antiquated assumption that offers short-lived gains that ultimately cost more than they save?

A growing body of peer-reviewed research suggests that layoffs may not deliver the benefits leaders assume—and may, in fact, undermine both organizational health and long-term performance.

Do layoffs achieve their financial aims?

At first glance, the typical reasons for layoffs over the last 30 years seem to make sense.

Companies may need to adjust their operations and cut costs as technology and competition shifts. In the current landscape of layoffs, layoffs are usually justified by the rise of artificial intelligence. But many experts warn of “AI Washing,” the convenient blaming of AI for layoffs that may be driven by other factors—including simple imitative behavior.

“Tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing,” writes Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of the 1998 book The Human Equation and a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior.”

In other words, the introduction of AI may be triggering a fad of layoffs that isn’t necessarily linked to financial performance. In fact, across decades of management research, one finding shows up again and again: layoffs rarely deliver sustained financial gains.

Some studies report short-term gains. For example, one 1998 study by Fayez Elayan and colleagues analyzed 349 layoff announcements and found that layoffs were followed by increases in profit margins and labor productivity. However, improved post-layoff profitability may partly reflect recovery from a low point, regression toward the mean, or accounting effects, rather than layoffs themselves creating long-term organizational strength. 

In a series of longitudinal studies, Wayne Cascio and colleagues compared large corporations that engaged in significant workforce reductions with those that did not. Their findings show that firms with large layoffs often underperformed their peers in profitability and stock price over subsequent years.

Similarly, a broader synthesis of downsizing research by Susan L. McKinley and colleagues concluded that performance effects are inconsistent at best, with many firms experiencing declines in long-term outcomes.

In a 2012 review of 20 studies on corporate layoffs, Deepak Datta of the University of Texas at Arlington found that layoffs tended to have either neutral or negative effects on stock prices immediately after they were announced. He also found that most companies experienced declines in profitability following layoffs—and related research suggested those financial setbacks often persisted for as long as three years.

“Layoffs often do not cut costs, as there are many instances of laid-off employees being hired back as contractors, with companies paying the contracting firm,” says Pfeffer in a 2022 interview. “Layoffs often do not increase stock prices, in part because layoffs can signal that a company is having difficulty. . . . Layoffs do not solve what is often the underlying problem, which is often an ineffective strategy, a loss of market share, or too little revenue.” 

How do humans experience layoffs?

Beyond measurable financial impact, layoffs are often very detrimental to organizational performance. According to results from a 2002 study by Magnus Sverke, Johnny Hellgren, and Katharina Näswall, employees who remained after layoffs experienced steep declines in morale and effectiveness, including a 41% drop in job satisfaction, a 36% decline in organizational commitment, and a 20% decrease in job performance.

Layoffs can also weaken the innovation, inventions, and relationships companies depend on to thrive. In one study of a Fortune 500 technology company, Teresa Amabile found that after reducing its workforce by 15%, new inventions fell by nearly a quarter.

And the damage can extend to customers, as well. Research by Paul Williams, M. Sajid Khan, and Earl Naumann found that customers are more likely to turn away from products or services after layoffs—suggesting that workforce reductions can erode not only internal trust, but brand loyalty, too.

While cutthroat employers might claim, “It’s not personal, it’s just business,” Pfeffer is unequivocal on the impact of layoffs, “Layoffs kill people, literally. They kill people in a number of ways. Layoffs increase the odds of suicide by two and a half times. . . . Layoffs increase mortality by 15-20% over the following 20 years.”

In addition, the effects of layoffs can persist for years. A 2009 Columbia University study found that workers who lost their jobs during the 1982 recession were still earning 20% less than peers who remained employed two decades later.

The harmful consequences extend far beyond income. Research by Kate Strully at the State University of New York found that laid-off employees were 83% more likely to develop a new health condition in the year following job loss and significantly more likely to engage in violent behavior.

Together, these studies suggest that layoffs aren’t just short-term episodes—they have lasting effects for people’s health, financial futures, personal well-being, and relationships.

What are the alternatives?

As Pfeffer cautions, “People don’t pay attention to the evidence against layoffs.” Perhaps it’s time that they do—and so consider the alternatives.

In a now-legendary story about the early days of Southwest Airlines in the 1970s, the leadership had a serious decision to make during a time of extreme financial pressure for the company.  With only three planes in its fleet during the crisis, the choice for cost savings ultimately came down to two options: layoff employees, or sell an airplane. 

To align with their values of trust, loyalty, and operational continuity, Southwest surprised the industry by deciding to sell an airplane, rather than lay off any of its workforce. What followed was an intense but uplifting period where people pulled together and figured out how to shrink the turnaround time between flights in order to fly more flights each day with only two airplanes. This turned into a sizable competitive advantage for Southwest for years to come, helping it become one of the most profitable airlines in the U.S. 

Southwest continued its long “no layoffs” streak for over 50 years, even after most airlines chose to institute layoffs after major shocks like the 9/11 tragedy and the COVID pandemic. (Note: In 2025, Southwest did finally succumb to pressure from investors and lay off employees in combination with other service changes that made their brand less unique, like assigned seats and fees for checked luggage.)

During the 2008 financial crisis, industrial manufacturer Barry-Wehmiller faced severe declines in their revenue. Rather than laying people off, CEO Bob Chapman chose a combination of temporary furloughs, shared unpaid leave, and executive sacrifices (like temporarily cutting his own salary from $875,000 to $10,500). Employees came together and shared the downturn-related losses so that no one person had to lose their job. This path of coming together and sharing sacrifices for the good of the company may, in fact, have enhanced employees’ sense of purpose and organizational commitment. Barry-Wehmiller recovered successfully, became internationally known for its human-centered leadership model, and is now a multi-billion dollar company.

As these examples illustrate, forward-thinking companies and organizations often have more options than they originally believed—and they can consider alternatives to layoffs when times get tough:

• redeployment (moving people into more needed positions in the company);
• reskilling (teaching new skills that the company needs);
• temporary furloughs (having everyone take a bit of time off to save on payroll);
• reduced hours/pay sharing;
• hiring freezes; and
• natural attrition.

One example of reskilling had very positive effects. In 2008, AT&T had one of the world’s largest workforces—and the company realized it was facing a massive technological transition that would require new skills. Internal research showed that only about half of its 250,000 employees had the science, technology, engineering, and math capabilities the company would need going forward. At the same time, roughly 100,000 employees were working in hardware-related roles that leaders believed would likely disappear within the next decade as the company shifted toward software and digital services. 

Instead of laying off people and paying high labor prices for tech-focused workers, AT&T created a massive reskilling campaign, with thousands earning “learning badges” for their newfound skills, thereby helping the company make a digital transformation. Perhaps a similar program could work in the age of AI? 

Overall, these layoff-avoidant approaches preserve the human ingenuity and energy that powers organizational success, while maintaining trust between employees and their employer—and allowing companies to bounce back faster from future challenges.

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.

According to Robert Enright and Richard Fitzgibbons, although the topic of forgiveness is becoming more popular in the news and on social media, therapists may still need to take an active role in bringing up the topic to clients.

Forgiveness therapy is an approach that is specifically targeted to “help people overcome resentment, bitterness, and even hatred toward people who have treated them unfairly and at times cruelly.” Forgiveness therapy helps clients slowly let go of anger and better understand their offender and their choices, as well as choose a morally good response toward the offender.

As Enright and Fitzgibbons explain, forgiveness therapy provides the therapist with a unique way to help clients learn to resolve their anger without hurting themselves or others. Research suggests that forgiveness can effectively reduce anger, anxiety, and depression and increase hope in various groups of people, including incest survivors and men hurt by their partner’s abortion. Forgiveness therapy can be used in combination with existing therapeutic approaches or as the primary therapeutic approach.

Misconceptions about forgiveness can lead to confusion for therapists who may be reading and hearing very different perspectives on it. With a better understanding of forgiveness therapy, you may be more willing to use it with your clients. Below are evidence-based guidelines for forgiveness therapy based on a 2016 paper I wrote with Tiffany Zarifkar, so you can most effectively help your clients navigate the delicate balance between acknowledging injustice, dealing with their pain, and moving toward healing.

1. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting

A widely accepted definition of forgiveness in psychology is to “willfully abandon resentment and related responses (to which [people] have a right) and endeavor to respond to the wrongdoer based on the moral principle of beneficence, which may include compassion, unconditional worth, generosity, and moral love.” In this definition, the injured person does not deny their resentment but works through it. And the offender does not deserve the injured’s goodwill and compassion because of their hurtful actions, but the injured gives it to them anyway.

A simpler definition states that forgiveness is when there is a decrease in negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward an offender and, perhaps over time, a gradual increase in positive thoughts, feelings, and (sometimes) behaviors. Forgiveness is more than just letting go of anger, hatred, and revenge, although this is often the first sign that forgiveness may be occurring.

Forgiveness also includes accepting the offender’s humanity and value despite their harmful actions, as we recognize the worth in all humans.  As Lewis B. Smedes explains, an offender is more than their worst action, and it is not fair to reduce an individual to only one act. One goal of forgiveness therapy is not to make excuses for the offense and offender, but to better understand how the hurt occurred.

The first part of forgiving involves recognizing and admitting that we were hurt and did not deserve the hurt. Although forgiveness may help us not to focus on the injury as much, it is not the same as forgetting, as new research explains. Despite the popular saying “Forgive and forget,” forgiving does not produce amnesia, and the pain felt after an intense injury may still exist. Clients who are told that forgiveness and forgetting go together may wonder what is wrong with them when they cannot forget their deep hurt. They may also think that they cannot forgive because they cannot forget.

2. Forgiveness is a choice the individual makes for themselves

Forgiveness is always a voluntary choice the client makes. Clients can benefit from being educated about forgiveness, including what forgiveness is, what it is not, and what it means and looks like to forgive. However, you cannot ethically prescribe clients to forgive. Clients also have the right NOT to forgive, even if you believe that forgiving would be healing for them.

There are approaches to decreasing anger that do not include forgiveness, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. If forgiveness feels like pressure, it is not forgiveness.

As one incest survivor said 33 years after a forgiveness intervention that I conducted with Enright, “Learning that forgiveness is an option and a choice one can make for themselves has been very empowering and revealing to me. Since I first heard about the concept, I have thought about it and used it a lot in my daily life.”

3. An apology is helpful but not necessary to forgive

Unfortunately, offenders do not always show remorse, especially sexual or domestic abuse offenders. Forgiveness can help the client see the offender as human, deserving of respect, and “one of us,” even if that person has not apologized or admitted to wrongdoing.

The difficulty in doing this varies depending on the hurt experienced. Abuse survivors and other clients who have experienced very deep hurts may have more difficulty forgiving without an apology compared with clients whose injuries are not as deep. As John S. Klatt and Enright write, “The position here is that the choice to forgive is not based on the deservingness or actions of the transgressor, but rather the injured person’s desire for emotional healing.”

You can help your clients realize that forgiveness is possible even if their offender does not apologize, as well as understand the difference between reconciliation (where an apology may be important and necessary) and forgiveness, which does not require an apology.

4. Forgiveness takes time, and the timing of forgiveness is important

Forgiveness researchers have learned that the timing of forgiveness is very important. Wanda Malcolm pointed out that in hurrying to forgive, people may try to avoid dealing with their pain. According to Everett Worthington and his colleagues, “Anything done to promote forgiveness has little impact unless substantial time is spent at helping participants think through and emotionally experience their forgiveness.” The goal for you or your clients should not be for them to just “move on.”

According to Karl Tomm, therapists need to know that to apply any kind of external pressure to forgive, when a client is not ready to do so, is to perpetrate a further offense against them. Suggesting forgiveness too early can be harmful, especially after trauma. Forgiveness takes time and is not a shortcut to healing. As one participant said 33 years after our forgiveness intervention with incest survivors, “Forgiveness is not a quick fix. If this had been a shorter intervention, it would not have worked for me.”

In research on forgiveness therapy with people who have endured deep hurts, the longer the duration of the counseling or education, the stronger the results. Longer programs, taking 12 weeks or more, tend to have stronger benefits for clients than programs that only include a few sessions and are shorter. Nathaniel G. Wade, Donna C. Bailey, and Philip Shaffer found that clients who have more sessions in therapy improve more in their symptoms of anxiety and depression.

You also need to consider when to introduce forgiveness to clients, as forgiveness cannot be timed by the counselor. Some clients may benefit from more time and distance from their offender before discussing forgiveness as an option for healing—for example, domestic abuse survivors. It may be beneficial to work on self-esteem issues with clients who may have low self-esteem before bringing up the idea of forgiveness in therapy. Research finds that clients who are more confident and able to acknowledge their own strengths are most willing to consider the idea of forgiveness.

As Wade and his colleagues state, “Within the definition of forgiveness is the implicit idea that people possess at least a moderate degree of self-respect, self-esteem, or, perhaps, ego strength to be able to forgive.”

Forgiveness therapy also cannot be considered a lifelong cure. As with most therapeutic approaches, a client may require reprocessing or booster sessions as time goes on. As one domestic abuse survivor said, “Even years later there are days I have to consciously choose to live out forgiveness. There are opportunities for anger, malice, and bitterness.” A participant in our forgiveness intervention with incest survivors echoes this sentiment: “There absolutely ARE long-term effects of incorporating forgiveness into your heart and mind, but I also believe people need to actively work on forgiving. I ‘practice’ forgiveness on a very regular basis.”

5. Forgiveness and justice can both occur

Another common misconception of forgiveness is that justice—like pressing charges—cannot occur alongside forgiveness. Forgiving and seeking justice are compatible in that they may occur together and both hold the offender accountable for their actions. Forgiveness does not erase accountability or justice. In fact, seeking justice or social activism may greatly complement the goals of forgiveness therapy.

In her study, Sharon Chubbuck gave high school students of color two scenarios of people experiencing hurt. One injury was related to sexual violence and the other was attributable to a racially based hate crime. Students were told that one person forgave the crime and the other did not. They were then asked whether the forgiver or the nonforgiver would be more likely to engage in activism to reduce or prevent more violence of that type. The results illustrated that “all but a few of the participants stated that the person who forgave acts of racial/gender violence would be more likely to work to end such injustice because they would be ‘the stronger person’ and not ‘trapped in their anger.’” Other participants stated that the forgiving person “would know they can survive and move beyond their pain” and would “have hope.” According to Chubbuck, “not one student indicated that the unforgiving person would be more likely to engage in activism.” 

You can also help your clients understand the difference between personal justice (seeking revenge) and public justice (holding one’s offender accountable and responsible), as well as discuss with them the idea that justice alone may not provide the relief and emotional healing that they often think it will.

6. Anger and resentment play a role in the forgiveness process

Expressing anger is a critical component of the forgiveness process, as it acknowledges that an injustice occurred and hurt the client deeply. You can validate resentment as a normal and natural feeling after being hurt. Clients need to see that their anger isn’t just OK; it’s healthy. According to Jeffrie G. Murphy, feelings of resentment and revenge are signs of “self-respect, self-defense, and respect for moral order,” and experiencing feelings of resentment after being injured is a sign that “we care about ourselves and our rights.”

Anger and resentment may also have a role in motivating the offender to apologize. In certain situations, offenders might not even know they have done something hurtful. Resentment can serve the purpose of motivating the client to speak with their offender, when safe to do so, thus making the offender aware of the wrongdoing and its consequences. This may possibly lead to an apology as well as forgiveness, rather than revenge or long-term feelings of resentment.

Anger and resentment that we hold on to can be bad for our physical and emotional health. Therapists may need to help clients express their anger in a healthy way and work through their anger before moving on to the work of forgiveness. Some anger may resurface during the forgiveness process, and a bit of anger may remain even after forgiving. It is normal and natural to feel anger when remembering the offense, especially if it was life-changing. However, after forgiving, the anger won’t typically be as intense or as frequent.

7. Forgiveness does not equal reconciliation

Forgiveness may lead to reconciliation, but it does not have to. The client can forgive and choose not to engage with the offender again. Forgiveness is something the client can do all on their own, without any response from the offender. An apology from the offender may make forgiveness easier, but it is not needed for forgiveness to occur. Mental health professionals need to know that forgiveness does not require contact and does not mean that the offender is safe or deserves trust.

As with forgiveness, it is always the client’s choice whether to reconcile or not. Forgiveness does not mean opening oneself up to further hurt or abuse. In cases of abuse, forgiveness should only be brought up if the client is safe from additional hurt. As a survivor of domestic abuse said,  “Forgiveness only became an option to me after I severed the marriage.” Forgiveness can occur entirely within the client, while boundaries remain firm. As one survivor of incest said, “The most fascinating part of the forgiveness concept introduced to me was the fact that I didn’t have to see or associate with the person I forgave.”

Why forgiveness therapy?

Forgiveness therapy is beneficial because it reduces rumination and loosens the emotional grip the offender has on the client. It also restores a client’s sense of agency and dignity as they recognize the choice and power to forgive lies within them. The unconditional positive regard you offer the client and then the client offers the offender is transforming in how forgivers view themselves, the offender, and the offense. Forgiveness therapy aligns with trauma-informed care, supports emotional regulation, and restores a coherent personal narrative. Most important, forgiveness is always optional and needs to proceed at the client’s pace.

Clients cannot choose to forgive unless they know about forgiveness as an option and know what forgiving means and entails. The role of the therapist is critical in educating clients about the forgiveness process as well as supporting clients in their decision to forgive, if they choose, and during their forgiveness journey. Therapists can help their clients by recognizing the role forgiveness therapy can play in helping clients move beyond their anger and live more healthy, fulfilling, and meaningful lives. As another incest survivor said, “Had it not been for the work I completed with you, I truly don’t believe I’d be where I am today—physically, spiritually, and mentally. My experience learning about forgiveness with you changed my life.”

This essay is adapted from the 2016 paper “The psychology of interpersonal forgiveness and guidelines for forgiveness therapy: What therapists need to know to help their clients forgive” in Spirituality in Clinical Practice by Suzanne Freedman and Tiffany Zarifkar.

For example, more people of all ages are meeting on “the apps”—and, not unrelatedly, more of them are complaining about the exhaustion of modern dating. Perhaps as a result for some, many say they are happily single and have no interest in finding a romantic partner.

There’s another change we’ve seen over the past few decades that has been less noticed—many of the people still interested in dating and long-term relationships aren’t in their 20s and 30s (who are often seeking to marry and maybe have children), but rather are middle-aged and older. There are more later-in-life singles than ever before, thanks in part to the rise of “gray divorce”—people in their 50s and older who are divorcing faster than any other age group.

Perhaps in response, we’re starting to see reality-TV shows about this group like Later Daters, The Golden Bachelor, and The Golden Bachelorette. In popular culture, we’re seeing high-profile people in their 50s and older partnering up, including author Anne Lamott, who married for the first time at age 65, and model and pro-aging activist Paulina Porizkova, who recently got engaged at age 61.

In fact, a cultural shift seems to be taking place—the idea that there is no expiration date for the desire for love and sex, or at least romantic companionship. Even so, there are some challenges to finding love later in life, especially for women, who tend to live longer than men and outnumber their male counterparts as they age. Just knowing in advance about these challenges can help you to navigate them—but the bottom line might be that the path to dating happily in later life is to let go of the hopes and expectations you held at a younger age.

Gender and sexuality

The first challenge that may come to mind is a common (and not completely inaccurate) belief that most men prefer youthful beauty. It can be harder for a woman in her 60s and older to find an age-appropriate male romantic partner—often referred to as “silver foxes”—as many tend to skew younger, often 10 years or more, when partnering again. That tendency may no longer be restricted to men, as we see the rise of “the cougar”—older women seeking younger men—which seems to be experiencing a moment.


Older gay men, too, often experience ageism in a dominant gay culture that also elevates youth, fitness, and beauty, which makes partnering a challenge. There’s even some evidence of age gaps in lesbian relationships.

But the desire for youth and beauty isn’t the overwhelming reason why many later in life adults aren’t romantically partnered. Actually, there are many reasons, all of which deserve greater scrutiny—and honesty.

Perhaps surprisingly, they tend to touch upon things like family and gender roles.

A big barrier is caregiving. In social scientist Lauren E. Harris’ 2023 study of how family caregiving responsibilities among single men and women aged 60 to 83 affects their desirability to someone of the opposite sex, an unexpected pattern emerged.

The men often found women in their age group to be less desirable if they were heavily involved in caregiving their adult children or grandchildren or both. The women, however, found men in their age group who were close with their families to be more desirable, perceiving their carework “as a sign of good character and family orientation.”

While the men stated they wanted to be a romantic partner’s top priority, most of the women didn’t demand the same. They did, however, have one major concern—taking care of the men, especially if the women already had caregiving responsibilities.

“Older single women were quite aware of the ways men may require their time, attention, and care,” Harris writes. “Though they were looking for romantic relationships and companions, women prioritized performing less carework over a relationship that required carework like raising a man’s children or nursing him through decline.”

Family matters

There are other family issues that pop up for those dating later in life.

Understandably, having minor children in the house might impact a parent’s re-partnering decisions. But it doesn’t necessarily change when the kids reach adulthood. Although a young child might not have much control over whom their parent dates, lives with, or marries, adult children and stepchildren have much more power in the decision and often aren’t afraid to exert it.

When author Eve Pell married a widower when she was 71 and he was 81, his adult children were resistant at first. She didn’t expect that. But in interviews with later-in-life couples for her book, Love, Again: The Wisdom of Unexpected Romance, many had similar experiences.

Some shared that their adult children liked their family “as is,” with their divorced or widowed parent or parents remaining single. Some adult children didn’t want to let go of their childhood memories. Others feared that a new romantic partner would take time or inheritance or both away from them and their children.

Adult stepchildren can be as disgruntled as younger stepchildren, writes Wednesday Martin in Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel, and Act the Way We Do.  “As the kids get older, issues like estate planning and inheritance can come into play, adding an extra layer of anxiety and resentment.”

In fact, the desire to pass on wealth to their children is why many older single parents won’t marry a new romantic partner, research suggests.

Some adult children who no longer live with their parents react poorly to a new partner and may limit the number of times they visit their parents, not allow their children to visit their grandparents, especially if the new couple moves in together, or refuse to forge any type of bond with the new partner, as a study of middle-aged divorced and widowed people in the Netherlands finds. Some even severed their relationship with the parent altogether.

This is why, the study notes, some single parents choose to be in a live-apart-together (LAT) relationship with a new partner, although not always happily. But even that didn’t always guarantee things went well.

As one 78-year-old woman in a long-term LAT relationship told the researchers, her daughters wouldn’t visit her if her new partner was over, and she was not invited to his granddaughter’s wedding.

While they wanted to enjoy their new love, their adult children’s negative reactions made them feel sad and stressed.

“Children of all ages feel betrayed and abandoned when their parents divorce because their cozy nest is disrupted. This even upsets kids who are already out of the nest,” says psychiatrist Dr. Carole D. Lieberman. “The message their parents are sending is that it is more important for them to have a life of their choosing than to remain in their prior, primary role of mom or dad.”

Not all adult children and stepchildren create complications for their parents, however. In a 2025 study, family sociologist Cassandra Cotton found that two-thirds of the adults (aged 55 to 92) she interviewed shared that their children, grandchildren, or siblings were generally supportive of their search for a new partner. Some even set up a dating profile for them or helped them navigate online dating.

Still, that means about a third of those surveyed experienced some pushback by family, which may prevent them from re-partnering even if they want to. And they tended to see their prospective partner’s family—not their own—as being potentially problematic.

Facing the stress of dating

Beyond family concerns, there are other barriers to a new relationship later in life—they’re stressful, at least at first, according to a 2025 study.

Exploring how later daters manage conflict in newer dating relationships, the researchers found that many struggle to find a way to merge their daily lives and get their routines in sync. Without the history of shared positive experiences and trust that long-married couples typically have, later daters were quicker to have negative feelings about a new partner and often saw small annoyances—ones that might easily be ignored by long-term couples as a way to keep the peace—as threats to the relationship’s future.

While both men and women suffered physically in the early throes of a new relationships when there was tension, women also suffered emotionally, reenforcing what previous studies have found: Women tend to carry a heavier emotional burden in a heterosexual relationship and often are more sensitive about handling conflict.

Still, the study found that while later daters’ well-being may suffer in the beginning, it could be beneficial in the long term as it might prompt them to leave an unhealthy relationship or one in which they have different dating goals—marriage, cohabitation, LAT, something casual, or a committed monogamous relationship—quickly.

Different dating goals is another barrier to later-in-life partnering. Single men in their 60s and older often want and expect to cohabit with or marry their female romantic partner but many women did not, stating that they were unwilling to give in to the “structural commitments” of cohabitating relationships such as cooking, cleaning, and caregiving. While those women said they dated for companionship, they indicated they were willing to be lonely before sacrificing their independence. That often led to the end of otherwise satisfying romantic relationships.

Some struggle more than others

While some of the complications to dating later in life seem to be universal, there are some that are unique to people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ+) people, adults with adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and other marginalized people.

Some lesbians often feel a need to go back in the closet as they age for fear of discrimination, making finding new potential partners a challenge, North Carolina State University professor Paige Averett tells me.

Growing up at a time when society was less accepting and more stigmatizing about being LGBTQ+ than today could influence boomer lesbians’ self-image and thoughts about forming romantic relationships, she shares. Some LGBTQ+ people who came out in mid- or later life, often after having been in heterosexual relationships, feel that they’re inexperienced in dating. It can be hard to put oneself out there and so they often don’t.

For African American women, who are the least likely to marry, dating later in life can be challenging, sociologist Cheryl Y. Judice discovered while doing research for her book, Interracial Relationships Between Black Women and White Men.

There just aren’t that many available single Black men to date, she notes, and they have longer life expectancies compared to Black men. Older Black people are twice as likely as their white peers to live below the poverty line, which has an impact on dating possibilities. In addition, health factors in: Black women have higher rates of disability than white women and both Black and white men, which also can create challenges to finding a romantic partner.

So, too, can socio-cultural issues. For older divorced or widowed Mexican-American women, who make up a substantial portion of the older Latinos in the United States, seeking a new partner could possibly lead to vergüenza (sexual shame) or culpa (guilt) in a culture where a woman expressing her sexuality in later years or outside of a church-sanctified marriage is frowned upon.

Finding a romantic partner can be challenging for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) of any age due to barriers such as caregiver control, often removing the ability for them to make decisions on their own; limited social opportunities; a lack of privacy;  and the potential loss or reduction of essential federal programs such as Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid if they wed or even if they live with a romantic partner.

Because more people with IDD are living longer than ever before, the population of those aged 60 years and older is growing and projected to reach 1.2 million by 2030. Many will have lived much of their adult life without a romantic partner.

Letting go of old scripts

Ultimately, researchers find that later-in-life dating and partnering, while often desired, can be complicated.

“There are many unanswered questions regarding the role of gender, age, and family in the dating process that deserve to be addressed,” Harris writes. “At present, practitioners need to be aware of the hurdles, as well as the stigma, that single older adults face in seeking a romantic partner.”

That said, older singles don’t have a romantic script to follow as many of us do when we’re younger, often without realizing that we are. We all know that script: meet, fall in love, move in together, maybe put a ring on it, and pop out a few kids. Once you’ve hit your 50s and beyond, many have been there, done that. It’s perhaps the first time in life when we can create our own script without societal pressure.

That’s why many embrace the LAT lifestyle. Others seek casual relationships to satisfy their needs—or even embrace polyamory, the practice of cultivating multiple, simultaneous romantic partnerships. As one 84-year-old woman in an ethical non-monogamous relationship shares in the 2023 anthology Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60:

No longer are there many plans for the future or discussions around raising a family. No longer do I feel the need to live with someone or be in an exclusive relationship. … the need for companionship, intellectual connection, warmth, holding, and sex are all still present and central to what I call “old love.”

In other words, our desire for love, intimacy, companionship, and connection doesn’t go away just because we’re older, but it can take on new forms if our expectations of what a romantic relationship “looks like” become more expansive. If you’re looking for love in your later years, perhaps the most important takeaway is to be open to the various ways you may find it.

What he was missing was harder to name. It was not a lack of activity or ambition. It was a lack of connection.

So he started something small. A philosophy group. No curriculum, no credentials required. Just people gathering to discuss a single idea at a time. One word, one question, and whoever showed up.

What began in apartments quickly outgrew them.

Within a year, the New York Philosophy Society was drawing well over a hundred people on a typical night, sometimes many more. Conversations unfolded in small circles across bars, restaurants, and event spaces, rotating every thirty minutes so that strangers could engage deeply and then meet someone new. The group now relies on a team of volunteers to host and facilitate, and has become one of the more surprising social phenomena among young New Yorkers looking for something more meaningful than a typical night out.

But what makes it compelling is not just the scale. It is the tone.

People show up not to perform or network, but to think together. To ask questions about truth, love, purpose, and meaning. To be taken seriously by people they just met.

“It was only after I started doing it,” Ren says, “seeing not only my own life changing, but also the people around me… that I realized the importance of connection.”

What began as a way to fill a gap in his own life became something much larger. A place where people who felt disconnected could experience something rare. Not just being around others, but being known by them. Ren’s story is not unusual.

Points of connection

Across the country, people are creating their own versions of Ren’s gathering. A weekly yoga gathering that grew from 20 people to hundreds showing up in a park. A fitness group where the real friendships form afterward over brunch. A community dinner where strangers end the night sharing stories they didn’t expect to tell.

Participation is not limited to one stage of life. While people in their 30s and early 40s participate at the highest rates, engagement is meaningful across all age groups, including those over 60. The desire for connection, and the ability to build it through shared activity, does not age out.

For many of us, connection used to be built into daily life. School, work, and family created regular opportunities to be around the same people again and again. Over time, relationships formed almost without thinking about it.

That structure has weakened. People move more often. Work is more transactional or remote. Fewer shared activities organize our time. As a result, connection is no longer ambient. It requires intention.

What is emerging in response is not just more socializing, but something more specific. People are building what we call communities of play, groups organized around shared activity.

That is one of the Six Points of Connection, a simple framework created by us at the U.S. Chamber of Connection to capture what people need to build a fully connected life. The six include having someone nearby you can rely on, consistent one-to-one relationships, a sense of belonging to a shared identity, a third place, a role in contributing to others, and being part of a group that gathers around a shared activity.

Among these, community of play often acts as the entry point.

Impact of connection

To understand its impact, we studied more than 2,000 adults across the United States, comparing those who regularly participate in activity-based communities with those who do not. We then interviewed 20 community builders and surveyed nearly 100 leaders like Ren to understand how these groups actually function.

We identified some distinct groupings, and the differences between them are significant.

People who participate in these communities are 28 percentage points more likely to report strong social support and 33 points more likely to report high life satisfaction. They are also more likely to trust others, to form relationships across differences, and to feel a sense of agency in their lives.

And yet only about 30 percent of people regularly participate in any kind of shared activity community.

Most people are not opting out because they do not want connection. They are running into friction. In our data, people who are not part of these communities are far more likely to say they feel uncomfortable showing up, unsure how to start, or worried they will not fit in. Cost and time play a role, but the biggest barriers are social and psychological.

This gap points to something important. The issue is not that we do not know how to build connections. It’s that most people are not engaging in the kinds of structures that make it possible.

One reason activity-based communities are so effective is that they lower the stakes of showing up. You do not have to arrive ready to connect. You arrive ready to do something.

Some are built around fitness or food. Others are built around ideas. Some are intentionally a little strange.

“I’ve always been interested in bringing people together to do kind of little weird things,” one builder says.

From there, connection can emerge more naturally.

This reflects a deeper insight from the science of play and social behavior. Researchers like Stuart Brown have argued that play is a primary way humans build trust and social bonds. It creates a state of openness and shared attention that makes people more receptive to one another. When people move, create, or learn together, they begin to synchronize, both emotionally and behaviorally.

Other researchers have found that shared activities accelerate what might otherwise take much longer to develop. Instead of relying on conversation alone, people build connection through experience. They have something to reference, something to return to, and something that brings them back again.

One community-builder describes it simply: The activity gets people in the door, but the real connection happens afterward, when people stay and talk.

That pattern shows up again and again: The activity is not the point—it’s the invitation. And for many people, that’s the easiest place to begin.

Changing relationships

The impact of these communities is not limited to individual well-being. They also shape how people relate to others.

In our study of community-builders, a large majority reported that their groups regularly bring together people across differences in age, race, socioeconomic background, and political identity. This kind of interaction is increasingly rare in everyday American life.

Sociologists often distinguish between bonding and bridging social capital. Bonding brings together people who are similar. Bridging connects people across lines of difference. Both matter, but bridging is especially important for building trust and resilience in a society.

What is notable about activity-based communities is that they often do both at the same time.

People come because of a shared interest, which creates an immediate sense of familiarity. But because the groups are open and fluid, they also create opportunities to encounter people who are different.

One participant described arriving at an event feeling isolated and unsure, only to realize that others felt the same way. There was a whole group of people who felt like that. They felt less alone immediately.

Another described how, over the course of an evening, conversations moved beyond small talk into something more meaningful. People began sharing stories about their lives, their families, and their struggles, often with people they had just met.

These are the moments when connection shifts from surface interaction to something more durable.

While much of the research focuses on the benefits for participants, our interviews highlighted something else. The act of creating community has its own impact.

Many of the builders we spoke with did not set out to become leaders. They were trying to solve something in their own lives. They wanted more connection, more meaning, or simply a place where they could belong.

In creating that space for others, they often found a deeper sense of purpose themselves.

One builder described finding a handwritten note after an event. Someone had written about how much the community meant to them and how lonely they had felt before finding it.

Experiences like this can be transformative. They shift how people see their role in the world. Instead of waiting for connection to appear, they begin to see themselves as someone who can create it.

Worth the effort

At the same time, this work is not effortless. Many builders invest significant time and energy, often without financial support. Some described the tension between wanting to participate as a member and feeling responsible for holding the space for others.

“I have a tendency to self-sacrifice,” one builder said. “I think at times I wish people knew what I’m putting into it.”

This tension points to something important. These communities are doing meaningful work, but they are largely unsupported.

For individuals, the lesson from this research is not that everyone needs to start a community. It is that connection is more accessible than it often feels.

The most effective entry point is a shared activity. Something simple, repeatable, and easy to join. A walk in the same place each week. A standing dinner. A regular gathering around a shared interest.

The goal is not to create instant closeness. It is to create a setting where familiarity can grow over time.

Psychologists have long emphasized the role of repeated exposure in forming relationships. Seeing the same people again and again, even in low-stakes settings, increases the likelihood of connection.

Activity based communities create that repetition in a natural way.

There is a tendency to look for large scale solutions to the problem of disconnection. New programs, new technologies, new policies.

Those may have a role to play. But what is already happening across the country suggests a more immediate path.

People are creating small, consistent spaces where others can gather. They are building connection through shared experience, not abstract intention.

Platforms like Heylo now support more than 20,000 of these communities, and the number continues to grow. Taken together, they represent a quiet but significant shift in how connection is formed.

Ren’s philosophy group is one example. It did not start as a solution to a national problem. It started as a response to a personal one.

That may be the most important insight.

If you want more connection in your life, the first step may not be to search for it. It may be to create a place where it can happen, and to invite others in.

The Repair Award: Chilli from Bluey (Australian Broadcasting Corporation / Disney+)

When I was a child, I kept a notebook where I would imagine the things I might do to be the perfect parent. Later, when I became a parent, I read books about baby brains and the developing child, attachment styles, gentle parenting, self-parenting, you name it. I was never going to yell at my kids, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!”

And then I did. Sadly, nothing prepared me for the fate that befalls us all: being an imperfect parent. And that’s what makes my favorite TV mom an animated dog named Chilli on the kids’ TV show Bluey. 

Chilli is kind, patient, calm—and also weary, stressed, and fallible.

There is an episode called “Sticky Gecko” that is so accurately stressful that I can’t bear to watch it more than once. Chilli navigates a situation you may be familiar with: trying to get anywhere on time with young children. She and her kids find themselves caught in a terrifying time loop by the front door—finding their shoe, brushing teeth, spitting out gum, finding a hat, playing a quick game, finding shoes… Is this forever?

Chilli eventually steps on a spiky toy, slams the front door, and angrily tells the kids they’re not going anywhere. Bluey approaches and begins to ask questions: Why do we have to go now? Why do we have to be on time? Why, why, why? Sitting down in a chair, Chilli addresses her questions one by one, with honesty and humility, until Bluey opens up, too, and together they learn why they can’t get out the door. And then they do.

Chilli validates feelings, plays with her kids, and holds firm boundaries. She also messes up and embodies the art of repair, giving us all an example to follow. — Lauren Lee

The Helping-Kids-Find-Themselves Award: Violet Bridgerton of Bridgerton (Netflix)

Amidst their lavishly stylized, corseted, culturally diversified 19th century Regency London milieu, the widowed Dowager Viscountess Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell) does the seemingly impossible: single parenting eight children spanning 10 to 30 years old.

Based on the novels by Julia Quinn, Bridgerton follows the fortunes of Violet’s offspring as they navigate high-society London in search of suitable matches. Sure, she doesn’t do the clotted cream or the laundry—Lady Bridgerton has servants for all that—but she actively sees, honors, and very genuinely nurtures her perfectly dressed brood as they gossip, promenade, dance, horse-back ride, lean back on garden swings, read in uncomfortable chairs, and more.

When she’s not wrangling manners with a well-directed stink-eye or smoothing local township drama, Violet is asking her children to discover what truly matters to them and whether the person they are trying to love really brings out their inner passion, fuels their purpose, or makes them feel belonging, contentment, or fulfillment. As she tells one daughter, “You must simply marry the man who feels like your dearest friend.”

Stewarding self-discovery while offering clear, heartfelt, and trustworthy insight, Violet makes the viewer forget to be skeptical about the absurdity of excessive privilege. Perhaps in a future season, Violet will expand the circle of her mother’s love to encompass a wider expanse of humanity? Stay tuned! — Emiliana Simon-Thomas

The Persistence Award: Deborah on Hacks (HBO)

My favorite joke from Hacks is a work of perfect comedic patience. In the first episode, we meet comedian and actor Deborah Vance’s adult daughter, DJ—but we have to wait until the end of episode seven to find out what DJ’s initials stand for: Deborah Junior.

By the time the punchline drops, it’s been firmly established; Deborah Vance is too self-obsessed to be a good mom. Indeed, beyond making her daughter into an extension of herself, she’s always letting DJ down. Deborah Senior seems far more interested in bestowing her limited supply of maternal attention upon her writing-partner-turned-BFF, Ava. Mentoring an employee is more appealing than mothering, and there’s certainly more in it for Deborah.

Of course, DJ’s no angel, either. She’s petulant. She sells unflattering photos of her mom to TMZ.

But Deborah and DJ won’t give up. They fight for a real relationship. They’re willing to have hard conversations. They’re willing to get hurt. To fail. Do you know how hard it is to keep doing a thing you’re bad at doing? In every other facet of life, Deborah kills. It can’t be easy to keep bombing as a parent.

As the series goes on, this persistence brings growth—incremental, but realistic. At the end of the third episode of the third season, DJ has just performed a blisteringly funny stand-up set at her mom’s roast. She tells Deborah, “I finally get it—why comedy was always the most important thing to you. You know, I spent my whole life thinking you were a narcissist, but turns out, you’re actually an addict. Like me. You’re addicted to getting laughs. . . . I feel so much better.”

It’s an insight that comes from empathy, self-compassion, and wisdom that only DJ could muster. Deborah isn’t magically transformed by it, but she manages to listen and offer a heartfelt apology for her most recent transgressions.

The truth is, sometimes parents and kids have to grow up together. Thanks, Hacks, for making that reality so funny and moving. — Kelly Rafferty

The Wise-Witness Award: Sarah on Heartstopper

The great Olivia Coleman plays the mom of teenage jock Nick Nelson (Kit Conner), one of Heartstopper’s two main characters.

Hearstopper began as a wildly popular graphic novel by Alice Oseman, and was inventively and perfectly adapted for the screen by her, as well (she wrote every single episode of the three seasons available now on Netflix). It tells the story of Nick’s slow but deep plunge into first true love with Charlie Spring (Joel Locke), an openly gay, brave, gentle figure at their British boys’ school. The two are surrounded by a cast of brilliant and fun adolescent misfits who form a strong subculture of their own amidst the wider social world of toxic masculinity and fakery.

Nick’s single mom, Sarah, has this way of wisely watching what happens without being overbearing. She seems to sense her son’s evolving identity underneath the hustle and bustle of adolescent life—rushing out the door in the morning while wolfing down his cereal, running across the rugby field, going out to parties—and waits for him to come to her with the necessary disclosures. Somehow you don’t get the sense that she’s checked out, or passive, but instead a steady, unconditionally loving witness.

Her tool is titration of her presence and her questions—never too much, never too little. When Nick finally does come out to her, she’s loving and curious, still following his lead into new social unknowns, dynamics that she probably felt unprepared for (with an older son who was not only straight, but possessed some of the stereotypical male certainty and anger of their absent father). And when Nick and Charlie’s relationship grows more complex due to Charlie’s mental health struggles, she is still there, faithful and trusting witness, leaning in, but never weighing him down with her own fears.

The series will finish with a feature-length finale scheduled to appear on July 17, 2026. — Courtney Martin

The Doing-Her-Best Award: Margo on Margo’s Got Money Troubles (Apple TV)

Unlike almost all the other mamas discussed in this article, Margo Millet (Elle Fanning) is no one’s maternal ideal.

She’s a 20-year-old community-college student who gets knocked up by her married-with-kids literature professor. The show’s title sums up its premise: After the baby is born, Margo does indeed develop some quite serious money troubles. Through the first season, we see how she starts to address them through paid sexual performance on the platform OnlyFans.

While that might sound lewd and sensationalistic, that’s really not the tone of this gentle, psychologically insightful show—which is about, yes, money, but also about the ways money shapes familial relationships.

The most interesting thing about it is how the story draws direct parallels between Margo on OnlyFans and her father Jinx’s work as a professional WWE wrestler. After he finds out about the OnlyFans, Jinx (Nick Offerman) is angry. Later, he says to her: “I was so wrong to judge you before. I’m sorry. I was feeling protective of you. But what you’re doing? We’re all just putting on a show. Entertaining.”

Jinx has made his money with his body, and now so is his daughter—and he invites the audience to consider how little difference there is between their lines of work. I don’t believe the point of the show is to hold up Margo or her own mother as ideal, or to show Jinx as a perfect father (he’s a drug addict who abandoned them both when Margo was a toddler). Rather, it’s to compassionately portray people we might be inclined to judge as real humans struggling to do their best with what they have—as so many moms have had to do. — Jeremy Adam Smith

Dueling Motherhood Archetypes Award: Samantha and Terry in Paradise (Hulu)


Paradise is a dystopian drama that centers around a community of more than 20,000 people that feels not quite right, somehow. The power behind the throne in the town of Paradise is Samantha Redmon (Julianne Nicholson), who goes by codename Sinatra—and she seems to be hiding something, as well. 


Sinatra is a self-made tech billionaire who holds a deep-seated grief after losing her son at a young age to cancer—a loss that casts a sadness over her throughout the show. Perhaps guided by her motherly instincts toward her surviving daughter or maybe the desire to protect her investments, Sinatra makes a series of ruthless decisions to keep the community secure and functioning, ranging from murder to kidnapping.

Her counterpart is Terry Collins (Enuka Okuma), wife to the show’s intense and observant hero, Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown). A Ph.D.-level mycologist, she’s a thoughtful co-parent to her two kids and a devoted partner to her husband. But she also values her work and prioritizes it along with her family duties; so much so that it was a work trip that pulled her away from her family the day before a global disaster.

Separated from her family for all of season one, Terry must fight to stay alive in hopes of seeing them again. One way she does this is by gaining strength from her motherly instincts by unofficially adopting an orphaned child she crosses paths with, Bean. She cares for Bean like he’s her own and brings him with her to reunite with her family.

Sinatra and Terry show that there are many faces of motherhood, each bringing its own set of joys, pains, and tradeoffs. — Shanna B. Tiayon

The Mama-Bear Award: Dana Evans on The Pitt (HBO)

The emergency department in HBO’s The Pitt is not a place for the faint of heart—and presiding over all the blood and chaos is one of TV’s most understated yet memorable mother figures: the charge nurse, Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa).

Dana is not, of course, the literal mother of any of the doctors, nurses, techs, and paramedics in The Pitt, but in every scene she vibrates with fierce mama-bear energy. That goes even for interactions with the man ostensibly in charge of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, attending physician Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle). At one point, he actually says to her, “You’re not my mother!” Dana, who never gives an inch, fires right back: “Yeah? Well, too bad. You need one.”

What makes Dana the mama bear of The Pitt? It shows up in the way she juggles a million tasks, protects her nurses against physical and professional threats while nurturing their growth, and makes sure everyone takes their medicine, no matter how bitter it is. Dana shines most in the second season of The Pitt, when she takes recent nursing grad Emma Nolan (Laëtitia Hollard) under her wing. In the course of a single shift, Dana subdues a patient who attacks Emma, guides her through caring for an unhoused “frequent flyer,” and instructs her on tasks that range from preparing a body for viewing to collecting evidence for a rape kit.

Throughout the day, no matter how bad things get, Dana is unfailingly compassionate and tough. It’s sometimes thrilling to watch, and sometimes hard—and that’s what makes Dana one of the most compelling characters in a very compelling show. — Jeremy Adam Smith

Career-Oriented Motherhood Award: Jax in Reasonable Doubt (Hulu)

Jax Steward (Emayatzy Corinealdi) is a formidable Los Angeles power attorney who makes no apologies about prioritizing her career and being excellent at what she does. She’s married to Lewis (McKinley Freeman), a computer game coder, and they have two kids, a pre-teen daughter and teenage son. She’s also the primary earner in the couple. Jax is the only female and Black partner at her law firm, a position she works hard to protect, despite inter-office biases against her. Her prowess comes through sharp commentary, quick retorts, and uncanny ability to turn cases in her favor.

Her career ambition caused a brief separation from Lewis, who wanted her to prioritize the family more over her career, which introduced a new level of complexity to their marriage (including infidelity on both sides). While Jax was deeply affected by the separation, she maintained a stable home for her children, invested in her close female friendships, and took care of herself—all while continuing to navigate office politics and win cases.

When Lewis and Jax reconciled, it was under the condition that she would not be asked to dim her professional ambitions again. Subsequent seasons depict the couple continuing to navigate marital changes, but together and with an appreciation for what each brings to the table, even if it’s not in the traditional sense. — Shanna B. Tiayon

The Large-in-Absence Award: Tia in Shrinking (Apple TV)

Will viewers care about a character they only see in brief flashbacks?

That’s the challenge Shrinking takes on with Tia (Lillian Bowden), a mother who is killed by a drunk driver before the show even starts. Her story is told through her absence, and we see the richness of her life and relationships through the huge hole her loss creates. Over time, we come to understand that the show’s mix of joy, pain, humor, and growth reflect Tia’s personality. 

We see her husband Jimmy (Jason Segel) come completely unglued without her, and then slowly accept his new reality. He finally starts to find his footing by connecting with people who knew Tia and who can join him both in grief and forward motion.

Their daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) copes with her mom’s death as best she can, but as she tries to move on with her life and have typical teen experiences (dating, dress shopping, learning to drive, etc.), we feel the ache of the moments where her mother might have been there for her. 

Over time, the show reveals that Jimmy and Tia did not always have an easy relationship. In an early episode, several friends shower him with praise for his marriage, emphasizing what a great couple he and Tia were. These words land uncomfortably, and flashback scenes show they actually had a lot of arguments and conflict. Despite this, Tia’s best friend Gaby (Jessica Williams) reassures Jimmy that Tia continued to adore him, even when they were clashing.

Although we only learn about Tia in her absence, we come to care deeply about her as the show rolls out and we see the way her love (and her imperfections) affected those around her. — Christopher Pepper

Emotional Intelligence Award: Faith Mitchell in Will Trent (ABC)

Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson) exemplifies emotional intelligence in motherhood.

Like a skilled hand at the wheel, Faith is steady, attentive, and responsive to the shifts of life rather than reactive to the fear, most of the time. And when she is not, she is compassionate with herself.

Faith is a single mom. While single motherhood is often framed as exceptional and dysfunctional, roughly one in five U.S. children are raised primarily by their mothers. Among the working middle class, this rises to closer to one in three children. Faith gives narrative form to this common reality, portraying single motherhood not as instability or lack, but as a site of competence, steadiness, and emotional security.

Her life is also shaped by a complicated relationship with her own mother. As the show progresses, we navigate this complexity with her in a way that illustrates deep, meaningful bonds with the women around her. These bonds situate her within a lineage of Black motherhood that honors both strength and vulnerability.

In one scene, she’s angry with her son because he lied. However, it’s through stories like this one that we come to understand that her child is not simply loved, but seen, heard, and guided with consistency. This is an experience of attachment that feels secure precisely because it is practiced.

This emotional intelligence carries over to her job and with her extended family. We also see when she fails and comes to understand that emotional intelligence is not a destination, but a journey that we take with daily intentional practice.

Faith is a refreshing depiction of motherhood that is not idealized and yet is somehow still ideal, something we should imperfectly strive to be. She is not a caricature of the “strong Black mother,” but an authentic embodiment of one. — Tyralynn Frazier

You’d think, given my professional focus and personal interests, that I would fall into that 12% of self-aware people. But in some areas of my life, I’m not. For example, I think of myself as a healthy eater. But when I wear a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), which gives me clear data on how my body responds to sleep, stress, and food, I behave differently than when I’m not wearing one.

It’s not that I don’t know that a blackberry cream scone is going to shoot my blood sugar out of range; I do. But if I’m not wearing a CGM, I don’t think about it. I keep that truth conveniently outside of my awareness. If I am wearing a CGM, however, I know I won’t be able to avoid the alarm signaling that my blood sugar is too high, and, therefore, I won’t be able to avoid the truth. I will be aware of what is going on within me, and that awareness will motivate me to skip the scone—rather than avoid the truth.

For all our self-focus, it can be genuinely hard to keep reality in our range of vision. But when we do, we’re much more likely to follow through with our habits for health and happiness.

What self-awareness is not

Self-awareness requires more than navel-gazing. Psychologists draw a sharp line between helpful inward-looking and two unhealthy modes of self-focus. One is rumination—when we replay our failures, rehearse anxieties, and return repeatedly to the same bruising thoughts. Another is closer to narcissism: a preoccupation with our self-image that is mistaken for self-insight. Both feel like self-knowledge, but neither improves our health, habits, or happiness. (To the contrary, both increase depression and anxiety.)

Self-awareness is the capacity to non-judgmentally observe ourselves: what we’re doing, feeling, and thinking. Rumination is a loop of distress; self-awareness asks What is happening for me right now? What am I doing? What am I feeling? Reflective, curious, non-judgmental self-examination predicts personal growth, while rumination and self-consciousness actively undermine it.

There are many reasons we don’t turn inward to mindfully observe ourselves. The demands on our attention from the outside world are loud. It can be painful to look closely at ourselves, our lives, and our habits. We become so practiced at managing the external world that our internal worlds quietly go unexamined. This is unfortunate because people high in self-awareness tend to be happier, have higher self-esteem, and are more resilient.

Self-awareness is a superpower

When we want to get into a new habit, most of us approach it as a willpower problem, willing ourselves to change through sheer force. A more effective path starts with self-awareness. Here’s why:

Self-awareness can help you catch triggers before they catch you. Two-thirds of our daily behaviors happen on autopilot—like mindless snacking, sitting too long, and reaching for our phones. Self-monitoring (a direct application of self-awareness) can bring those automatic behaviors into conscious view. You can’t interrupt a pattern you can’t see, and so a critical first step in changing unwanted behavior is recognizing what sets it off.

As you notice patterns in your thoughts and emotions, you’ll better understand when and why you do certain things. Understanding that you reach for unhealthy snacks when you’re bored versus when you’re anxious opens the door to different solutions. Similarly, understanding that you are more likely to exercise when you do it with a friend can help you follow through more often.

It motivates you. Heightened self-awareness leads people to be more conscious of the gap between where they are and where they want to be—and more motivated to close that gap. This type of noticing isn’t about self-criticism; it’s about being clear-eyed.

Also, research consistently shows that intrinsic motivation—doing something because it aligns with your own values and interests, not because someone else told you to—produces more lasting change. Self-awareness is how you access that intrinsic drive, because you have to understand yourself to know what you genuinely care about.

It rewires your brain’s reward system. When self-awareness allows us to align our behaviors with our deeper values, those behaviors actually feel better to the brain. When a new behavior is encoded as more rewarding, we start doing it more effortlessly.

How to be more self-aware

Measure the behaviors and outcomes you care about. Like me with my CGM, in studies of people trying to change their eating habits, participants who tracked their food reported genuine surprise about their eating patterns, which motivated them to change. Simply tracking what you’re doing is one of the most consistently effective tools for behavior change we have. Wearables like Oura Rings allow us to see and improve dozens of behaviors within our control, and when we pair what we learn from a wearable with self-reflection about how we feel after doing something good for us, we give the brain the information it needs to update its reward system—making healthy choices feel better and easier to repeat.

Practice self-compassion when you fall short. One of the most surprising bridges to genuine self-awareness is self-compassion. BetterUp research shows that it is the single best predictor of a person’s ability to manage stress, with people high in self-compassion showing 26% lower stress, 33% more resilience, and 24% lower burnout. Why? Self-compassion lowers the psychological threat of looking honestly at yourself.

When we approach our struggles, failures, and blind spots with kindness rather than judgment, we no longer need to protect ourselves from our own criticism or embarrassment; a willingness to look without flinching makes hard truths bearable enough to learn from.

Ask yourself “what” questions, not “why” questions. When we want to understand ourselves better, the instinct is to ask why: Why did I do that? Why do I feel this way? But “why” is surprisingly ineffective as a self-awareness question. “Why” questions tend to produce stories and justifications rather than genuine insight, and often send us straight into rumination. “What” questions work differently. Instead of Why am I so stressed?, try What situations are making me feel stressed, and what do they have in common? Instead of Why can’t I stick to this habit?, try What is getting in the way, and what would make it easier? “What” keeps us curious, specific, and forward-facing—which is the posture self-awareness requires.

Ask a coach or trusted friend what they see. The path to self-knowledge is often interpersonal: Feedback from people who know us well and have our best interests at heart can reveal aspects of ourselves that introspection alone cannot. We all have blind spots, and no amount of looking inward will show us what we can’t see. Seeking honest observations from others is a reliable way to close the gap between how we see ourselves and how we actually are. It can be as simple as asking a friend or a spouse after a hard week: What do you notice about me right now that I might not be seeing?

Try meditation. Meditation has many cognitive benefits and can lead to brain changes that increase self-awareness. Even a few minutes of sitting quietly, noticing what you’re thinking and feeling without trying to change or suppress it, trains the helpful kind of inward attention needed to truly “know thyself.”

Self-awareness is a skill that improves with practice. But we don’t need to overhaul our lives or spend hours in meditation to develop it. We just need to be curious and nonjudgmental about what we’re doing, feeling, and thinking in any given moment.

In a world that rewards busyness and performance, turning inward can feel indulgent or even risky. But self-awareness isn’t a detour from your best life; it’s the fastest route to it.

So, why do we still crave these committed, romantic relationships when they can be so fragile? And how can we make them work better and remain satisfying over time?

To find out, I spoke with evolutionary biologist Justin Garcia, director of the Kinsey Institute and author of the new book The Intimate Animal. In his book, he explains some of the biological forces acting upon our most intimate relationships and how that affects everything from modern dating to marriage to polyamory, and more. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

Jill Suttie: In your book, you make a case that intimacy is a biological drive, akin to other biological drives, like hunger or sex. But most of us don’t think of it that way. Why do you?

Justin Garcia: By training, I’m an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, and I think a lot about the role of evolution and selection in shaping who we are. That means thinking about the reality of our being a social primate.

We know we have a desire to engage in sexual activity for reproduction; it’s important for existing into the next generation. And so much of human social life, reproductive life, and sexual activity is couched in terms of long-term bonds. If we think about sexual desire as one lever that selection is acting on for survival and reproduction, then we also have to recognize that long-term bonds—within which a majority of sexual activity occurs for most humans around the globe, historically—had to be selected for, too.

My goal in The Intimate Animal was to really dive into that and take the role of intimacy in relationships seriously. For me, the social and the biological contexts of relationships are one and the same. There’s so much about connection, whether physical or emotional, that is tied into our story as mammals and, particularly, as social primates. Too often we ignore that to our detriment.

JS: There seems to be a widespread view that men and women have different sexual needs. Is that supported by science?

JG: This debate happens in the public sphere, but it’s also one that happens in academic journals. There’s a wonderful argument and series of articles by the feminist psychologist Janet Hyde called the Gender Similarities Hypothesis. Her work shows that many of the psychological sex differences we talk about between men and women aren’t very big. In large samples, something like 5% can be statistically significant, but does it tell us something meaningful about differences between men and women? Not really.

One of the more consistent findings, though, is that men on average have a larger interest in casual sex than women. So, there are some differences around sexual behavior, particularly around sexual desire. But it’s not as large as people think. Similarly, 20 years ago, everyone said that men engage in infidelity more than women. But in newer studies that are asking the questions in more complex ways, we actually see very small gender differences. So, short answer, there are some differences, but men and women are much more similar than we are different.

JS: One of your arguments in the book is that we are biologically wired for monogamous intimacy but not for monogamous sex. What do you mean by that?

JG: When people talk about monogamy, they often mean a monogamous relationship or a monogamous person. In behavioral and evolutionary biology, though, we don’t talk about monogamy as one term. We talk about two elements: social monogamy and sexual monogamy. Part of what I wanted to do in this book was bring that framework to our understanding of humans and relationships.

Social monogamy is a relationship structure, what we call pair-bonding, involving mutual territory defense, nest-building, and raising of offspring. That mutual piece is the key element of a pair-bond that’s different from sexual monogamy or sexual fidelity with one partner. And the reason we separate that is because there are different mechanisms, including in the brain, and different evolutionary pressures shaping them.

In some species, including ours, these are not totally aligned, although often partners attempt to enforce sexual fidelity in social monogamy. But when we look at the genetic parental evidence and make behavioral observations, we see that many animals that form pair-bonds sometimes sexually stray. By separating these pieces out, it gives us a new lens to think about our relationships and the tensions that exist between the safety that comes with deep intimacy and the excitement that comes with sexual variety.

So, say you’re in a long-term bond, where you feel intimacy, you feel connected; but you have this craving for excitement pulling you away from your primary relationship. Sometimes we can bring that tension into our relationship and harness it, instead. In our studies on couples that have long-term passion, they take vacations, have rituals, and do novel things with each other. There are ways we can integrate that into our relationship, to keep a sense of passion and excitement.

Too often, though, we move around like zombies, being pulled by the pressure in our romantic and sexual lives without understanding where it’s coming from and without consciously making decisions. It isn’t only about love, connection, safety, or the quality of a relationship. It’s about these multiple drives that have evolved to serve different functions.

JS: So, these tensions help explain why there is a lot of infidelity in the world. But at the same time, 85% of the world considers adultery immoral. So, is infidelity bad or should we accept it as a consequence of our biology?

JG: I think infidelity is a problem, because it’s a betrayal of a relationship agreement. That can include people who are in open relationships. You can also have infidelity in those contexts, because in polyamory or in sexually open relationships, most people still have a set of rules they’re abiding by. And those rules can be violated, whether that’s a rule about not having sex with someone in your friend network or always using condoms with someone else.

One of my goals was to explore the tensions, but also let people know they have options that don’t involve betrayal, whether that’s saying a relationship doesn’t work for you and separating, or experimenting with an open relationship, or—instead of letting the desire for spontaneity and novelty pull you away from your primary partner—finding ways we can integrate that into our relationship.

Betrayal almost always causes damage, often for both people—and often to their social networks, as well. When people ask me about infidelity, they often assume it happens because there’s something wrong with their relationship. But in our studies, a lot of infidelity happens for reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not someone loves their primary partner. That doesn’t make it any less painful. But it is a good reminder that sometimes it’s about things outside of your primary connection. When we understand that, we can manage our behaviors and relationships better, I hope.

JS: Polyamory seems like it could be one way to solve that tension. But you argue that many of us are not prepared to enter polyamorous relationships. Can you say more about why not?

JG: Different relationship structures work remarkably well for people, whether it’s being socially and sexually monogamous, in a polyamorous relationship, or single and enjoying singlehood. But we have a tendency to sometimes think that the grass is greener. We may think being poly has all these advantages, and we can romanticize those and forget that, just like in any relationship structure, there are people with high and low satisfaction, people that it works well for and people it doesn’t work well for.

Researchers used to call polyamory “ethical non-monogamy;” then they started calling it “consensual non-monogamy,” because whose “ethics” is it? But consensual is kind of a loaded term, too—are both partners always totally consenting to this? Now, increasingly, researchers are calling it “negotiated non-monogamy” or “disclosed non-monogamy.”

JS: I guess that sort of points to the problem…

JG: Exactly. It points out that often there are asymmetries in the desire for these different relationship structures.

In our studies, we found that about one in five Americans have at some point had some version of a disclosed non-monogamous relationship—whether it’s sexually open, like swinging, or polyamory love. In the case of polyamory, it’s interesting. It’s different than a sexually open relationship in that you’re attempting to manage multiple pair bonds. We find there are some people who do it remarkably well. It really satiates their desire for emotional connection and sexual connection. But, for other people, it’s a challenge to maintain multiple relationships—to balance jealousy, gift giving, quality time with multiple partners, etc.

It’s not that polyamory is good or bad. But, as I wrote about in The Intimate Animal, I’m cautious about the way we imagine different relationship structures to be great without recognizing that they just come with different kinds of effort, negotiations, and compromises.

JS: I’m at an age where many of my friends have young adult children looking for romantic partnerships. But it seems more fraught than it was for us at their age. Why is that? And what advice would you give young adults today?

JG: Dating culture has changed dramatically and in a relatively short period of time. That includes the trajectory of a relationship. Just a few decades ago, for instance, young people would often marry fairly early in their courtship process, and marriage was about starting a grand adventure with someone that you were attracted to and could imagine a future with. Young people today think of marriage as the finale, after you already know everything about someone and have fully investigated them.

We did a study with the Match Group, and we found that about 80% of Gen Z-ers said that they believe they will find true love in their life, but about 45% said they don’t think they’re ready for a relationship—they need to work on themselves first. This highlights that they think being ready is a linear process. If you just go work on yourself, one day you’ll wake up and be ready.

But that’s not how we really show up socially or romantically or sexually. In the best case, your romantic partners are there to help you take risks, explore the world, catch you when you fall. That goes back to the mutual part of all pair bonding, of having a copilot to experience life with. When we put too much emphasis on having to be perfect before being in a relationship, we neglect the fact that relationships are containers within which we can grow and make mistakes and experience the world.

This is a challenge that’s showing up on dating apps and in the offices of matchmakers. Dating apps are a remarkable opportunity to find someone with the same hobbies, kinks, religious background, but it’s more data than the human brain can process. We have an information overload. And that means we’re seeing fewer people interested in second and third dates and getting to know someone. After a first date, they’ll say: “Well, you were wonderful, but you held your fork a little funny during lunch, and I can get back on my app and find someone who doesn’t.”

When the brain has a sense of an unlimited resource, we keep going back to the well to find someone who’s perfect. But if we understand that our brain is playing a dirty trick on us, then we can say, “I found someone I like, and, yes, they did this funny thing with the fork, but I’m going to go on a second date with them anyway, because there’s a whole lot that I liked about them.” We have to grab biology by the horns in those moments and focus more on the deal-makers than the deal-breakers.

JS: Many people believe that what’s hurting them in the dating market is that they’re not attractive enough. What does science say about attraction?

JG: In our Singles in America study, we ask people what they’re looking for in a partner. And what’s been heartwarming for me is that in the last few years, in particular, the number one thing that single men and women are looking for in a romantic partner is someone they can trust and confide in. Yes, people say attraction, humor, sexual confidence, and intelligence are important. But number one for men and women is having someone you can trust and confide in.

I think it’s a powerful reminder, but it’s also something hard to determine on a first date. Often it takes a little time to really see if you can trust and confide in someone. It also goes back to why infidelity is such a problem. Betrayal corrodes the number one thing so many people want in a relationship, a partner you can trust.

JS: Are there other practical implications of your work you want to share?

JG: I’m not a clinical psychologist or physician, so I’m often cautious about giving advice. I’m in the business of “how come,” not “how to.” But I do think that when we understand more about ourselves, we can change our approach to our romantic and sexual lives.

One way is by having a lot more empathy for ourselves and those around us. Especially in the case of breakups and romantic dissolution, when people ask, “Are you ready for someone else?” or “Why don’t you get back into the dating market?” or “Try to focus on the things you didn’t like about the person.” We wouldn’t say that to someone who was going through bereavement. But, for some reason, people will tell us we can just move on. We all have to recognize the intense grief people go through when they lose a relationship. It’s why we’ve found 50% of people have a yo-yo relationship; they go back after they breakup.

Another thing is when we’re first dating and falling in love, feelings of limerence [infatuation] are a complete mind-body experience, impacting the brain, hormones, heart rate, and how we perceive our beloved’s behavior. This colors our understanding of what’s going on around us and the decisions we make. Are you making risky decisions or thoughtful ones? Are you balancing the intensity of first excitement with long-term intentions?

I believe that the more that we understand ourselves, the better decisions we can make in our intimate life, really prioritizing the role of close connection. These relationships hold the answer to our loneliness epidemic, to our accumulated anxiety about everything—including the environment, politics, the economy, and health. It all comes down to the power of meaningful, intimate social connections.

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Given these pressures, it’s no surprise that parental stress is on the rise. In 2023, nearly 50% of parents surveyed reported feeling overwhelmed most days.

That stress doesn’t just affect parents—it can ripple outward. Research suggests that stress can take a toll on well-being, contributing to depression, heightened anxiety, and strain in relationships. And its effects don’t stop there.

A recent review from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), which analyzed 153 studies, found that high levels of stress in a child’s environment can shape their development in lasting ways. Chronic stress can influence brain development, strain parent-child relationships, disrupt learning, and even contribute to physical health problems.

The good news, however, is that interventions, even small ones, can make a meaningful difference—for both children and their caregivers.

Greater Good spoke with Nicki Bush, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCSF and the lead author of the review, about how stress affects families—and what can help.

Juli Fraga: How does exposure to stress affect children’s ability to regulate their emotions?

Nicki Bush: When children are highly stressed, especially for long periods, it can lead to chronic activation of their biological stress response systems. This stress response helps us all cope with threats in the short run. But when this activation system goes on for too long, a child is at greater risk of developing behavioral, emotional, and learning challenges.

For example, children might become hypervigilant about potential threats or respond with anger in neutral situations, such as when another person asks them a benign question.

Notably, many stress-affected processes that impact emotion regulation also affect our immune system and bodily repair and growth. So, chronically stressed children may become physically ill, or the stress may exacerbate prior medical conditions (like asthma) due to overactivation of their stress biology without sufficient time for the body to rest and recover.

JF: Can you talk about how parents’ stress might affect their children’s response to stress?

NB: Children, especially when they are young, rely on caregivers to help them manage their interpretations of threat, as well as their bodily and behavioral responses to stress.

When parents manage their own responses to adversity in a healthy manner, a child is more likely to feel safe. We also know that modeling healthy coping helps children learn these skills and fare better.

Healthy stress management helps parents prevent overwhelm and work through their own life challenges and emotions in an adaptive manner. And when the stress volume and negative reactions get turned down, parents and caregivers have greater bandwidth to respond to their child’s emotional needs. This, in turn, protects kids from the health and behavior risks linked to experiences of adversity.

JF: What are some ways parents can manage their stress, especially when families are facing many hardships?

NB: In an ideal world, our society would support caregivers and children through policies and programs that meet families’ needs. The current lack of resources is one reason the former U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, declared parental stress a public health issue.

As we work towards that goal, there are many tools parents can use to handle stress. And I want to clarify that coping doesn’t need to be a heavy lift for overly burdened parents. Not every parent has a lot of financial resources or time flexibility, but even a few minutes of slow breathing, listening to an uplifting song, a short walk, or calling a friend to troubleshoot a problem can have a powerful impact on your mental well-being.

This is especially important to try right before picking up your child from day care or school. Taking time to rest and reset better equips parents and caregivers to hold space for what their child needs and enjoy the interaction more themselves!

In today’s busy world, it’s easy for parents to overlook their own well-being in order to prioritize their children. But self-care isn’t selfish. By tending to your own needs, you model healthy ways to cope with stress and optimize your capacity to be a better parent.

JF: After adverse life experiences—such as divorce, family violence, or serious illness—how can parents support their children in working through their stress so it doesn’t negatively affect their physical and mental health?

NB: The most critical thing is to ensure that children feel safe and to acknowledge the trauma or major stressors that may be ongoing, such as from divorce or loss of a loved one.

Since it’s painful to talk about loss and trauma, many parents may believe that doing so will upset their kids. Acknowledging what happened and their child’s emotions about it validates their reality and reminds kids that the entire family can work together through hard moments.

Furthermore, addressing trauma directly while supporting a caregiver’s capacity to have a positive relationship with their children is a powerful component of a child’s healing. Science also shows that supportive relationships with caregivers, friends, teachers, and peers can buffer children from the effects of adversity.

While stress can be particularly harmful to children, adversity isn’t destiny, explains Bush. Not all children experience long-term harm. Our bodies evolved to manage stress responses and many children are remarkably resilient.

Still, if children have been exposed to major trauma or seem to be struggling even after relatively minor events, the key is to seek support. Trauma-informed therapies like Child-Parent Psychotherapy can improve children’s behavior, mood, and biology, which can prevent kids and their parents from developing more serious stress-related conditions over time.

In places like California, many families can receive family-focused trauma-informed therapy that is covered by their insurance. Some programs even support families in accessing such care without a formal diagnosis—recognizing that support shouldn’t come only after problems become severe.

“Investing in the well-being of parents and children improves the lives and health of our population,” says Bush.

You might reach for warmth and attunement, affirming what you heard and helping the speaker feel less alone. You might feel pulled to “zoom out,” offering a fresh frame or new possibility that helps the group make sense of the story. You might process internally, quietly connecting what was said to your own experience. Or you might scan for the facts, silently checking details for accuracy and wondering how this story translates into a tangible next step.

None of these instincts are wrong, but they represent four very different ways of processing the world. Whether conversations open up or harden often comes down to something we rarely name: what we’re listening for. Noticing your filter can help you adjust in real time, so you can really listen (and be listened to) in return.

Listening is a habit—and habits aren’t fixed

Graham Bodie, professor of communications at the University of Mississippi, describes listening as a habit-based behavior. Like other habits, he says, “listening becomes ingrained through repetition, often runs below conscious awareness, and remains malleable.”

That framing matters. If listening were a fixed trait—something you “have” or “don’t have”—we’d be stuck with our defaults. But if listening operates like a habit, we can strengthen it. We can notice our filters, experiment with new choices, and adapt our listening to what the moment requires.

Listening intelligence (LQ), a framework developed by Bodie and several colleagues, invites us to build three capacities:

• Understand ourselves. What do I naturally listen for first? What do I tend to miss?
• Connect with others. What might my conversation partner listen for first—and what might they need to feel understood?
• Adjust in real time. How can I shift what I’m listening for so we understand each other better right now?

I direct the Bridging Differences program at the Greater Good Science Center, where we help people build practical skills for staying in relationship, and collaborate on things that matter, across differences. In this work, you usually can’t get far without listening first, since high-quality listening can reduce defensiveness.

One of the most helpful things about Bodie’s listening intelligence framework is how it reframes misunderstandings in general. Many breakdowns don’t start with bad intentions; they start with two people listening to different things. That’s also a helpful reminder for bridging work: the differences we navigate aren’t just differences of identity, ideology, or politics—they’re also differences in listening habits.

Mapping our filters

To investigate our filters, my colleague Kelly and I took a research-validated assessment called the ECHO Listening Profile, which builds on earlier work on listening styles (including the Listening Styles Profile from Kitty W. Watson, Larry L. Barker, and James B. Weaver). The results gave us a map of our listening habits, including our strengths, our blind spots, and the adjustments that help us show up more skillfully in conversations.

The ECHO tool measures four filters, and everyone uses all four to some degree:

• Connective: Listens for what information means for people and relationships; tracks feelings beneath the facts.
• Conceptual: Listens for ideas, patterns, possibilities, and big-picture meaning.
• Reflective: Processes internally; filters information through experience, purpose, and personal relevance.
• Analytical: Listens for accuracy, facts, details, feasibility, and what is measurable.

According to Bodie and his colleagues, connective and reflective listening evaluate how people make relational meaning out of the message, whereas analytical and conceptual listening evaluate how people focus on different components of a message’s content.

For example, imagine a teammate says, “I’m worried we’re moving too fast. Some people in the group looked uncomfortable, and I don’t think our plan will land the way we want it to.”

• A connective listener may pick up first on the relational signal—people looked uncomfortable—and think, Who needs follow-up? What would help people feel safer or more seen?
• A conceptual listener may go to possibilities: What’s another way to structure this so it invites more buy-in?
• A reflective listener may quietly compare it to past experience and try to make meaning: I’ve seen this dynamic before—what helped then?
• And an analytical listener may want clarity and evidence: What exactly tells us we’re moving too fast? What information do we have?

None of these are “better.” They’re different entry points—and knowing them helps us listen better. Each combination brings strengths and challenges. My highest preference is connective, with conceptual close behind, which helps me connect big-picture thinking to impact. My colleague Kelly leads with conceptual, with a strong secondary preference for connective, which helps her generate possibilities without losing sight of how they land for people.

Recognizing these different “entry points” also helps us widen our own range, so we can pause, shift our attention, and lean more toward listening habits that don’t come as naturally. It also helps us draw on our other teammates. Analytical listeners, for example, help us test feasibility and accuracy by asking, What do we know to be true? What evidence supports this? Reflective listeners bring meaning and perspective, often speaking after they’ve processed internally, helping us move more carefully.

From filters to practice

According to research, high-quality listening can shift what happens inside the speaker. Studies find that when listeners display this kind of listening, speakers feel more connected and at ease, supporting deeper reflection and self-insight.

In our Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, we refer to this as “listening with empathy,” and we break it into five behaviors:

• Be curious: Ask questions that encourage the other person to elaborate on their thoughts or feelings. “Tell me more” can be extremely powerful in moving a conversation along.
• Be present: Stay engaged and mentally focused. Refrain from overthinking or passing judgment, interrupting, and rushing to give advice.
• Affirm feelings or intentions: Affirm the other person’s experience, by saying things like “I can see why you would feel that way.” Note: We can affirm other people’s feelings or intentions and still disagree.
• Express empathy: Consider why they feel or think the way they do. Think less about how you would feel in their situation, and more about them.
• Use engaged body language: Use posture, eye contact (when culturally appropriate), and gestures to convey listening.

Where the two frameworks connect

The ECHO filters help us name our default “first move,” the kind of information your attention naturally prioritizes. Our listening with empathy practice gives us a set of behaviors we can choose once we notice that default, so we can respond skillfully.

For example, if we notice we’re listening primarily through a conceptual filter, we might feel pulled to reframe or generate possibilities right away. Listening with empathy invites us to start with presence and affirmation before offering ideas. Or if we notice we’re listening primarily through an analytical filter, we might want to clarify facts and feasibility. Listening with empathy invites us to pair that clarity with curiosity and empathy so the other person feels listened to, not just corrected.

Once we can identify our default filter and choose a behavior intentionally, we can start to adjust our listening in real time—based on what the conversation needs, not just what our habits reach for.

The sound engineer approach

Bodie explains that many misunderstandings start with selective attention. “In the heat of an argument, we blurt out, ‘You’re not listening to me!,’ but under the framework of Listening Intelligence, we ask a new question: Is the way that I habitually listen supporting or hindering the desired outcomes of this interaction?”

Bodie compares skillful listening to sound engineering. A sound engineer doesn’t move every knob; they adjust the knobs that matter for the mix at a given moment. “Not doing every technique at once,” he says, “but choosing the right knob for this mix, at this moment.”

Just as a sound engineer doesn’t adjust every knob, we don’t treat listening (or bridging) as the right move in every situation. We practice with guardrails: we don’t ask people to listen to others who deny their humanity or threaten their safety. We understand that sometimes the most skillful choice is to pause, set a boundary, or disengage.

Building our listening awareness

The good news is that you don’t need a listening assessment to start building your listening awareness. A tool can give you a clearer map, but you can learn a lot just by noticing what your attention reaches for first. Here are a few quick cues:

• If you find yourself tracking feelings and relationships (“How is this landing? Who feels unseen?”), you may be leading with connective listening.
• If you find yourself reaching for ideas and frames (“What’s the bigger pattern? What’s another way to see this?”), you may be leading with conceptual listening.
• If you find yourself processing internally (“What does this mean for me? What does my experience tell me?”), you may be leading with reflective listening.
• If you find yourself scanning for facts and feasibility (“What’s true? What’s the constraint? What’s the next step?”), you may be leading with analytical listening.

Here’s a simple three-step loop:

1. Set an intention to notice: Before an interaction, decide to notice what you tend to listen to, and what the other person tends to listen to. Don’t fix it yet, just set your intention.
2. Notice in the moment: Use patience to slow down enough to catch your “first move” and curiosity to pause judgment. Ask: What am I listening for? What are they listening for?
3. Reflect afterward: Take a moment to look back: What did I notice? What did I miss? What might I try differently next time?

That last step matters. As Maureen Spelman, coordinator of character initiatives and professor in the educational leadership program at North Central College, points out: “Taking time to engage in the reflective process supports deep understanding and can prompt individuals to examine their own values, beliefs, biases—leading to greater self-awareness and personal growth.”

Most of us try to listen harder when a conversation gets difficult. Here’s a more useful shift: Listen more deliberately. Notice your listening filter, practice listening with empathy, and reflect afterward so it becomes a habit.

And remember: The goal isn’t to determine if one listening style is “best,” or to perfectly match how another person listens. Different moments may call for different kinds of listening, and we can all tune these forms of listening up or down, even if we don’t naturally lead with them. What matters is becoming more aware of our habits and more flexible in how we respond, asking ourselves what kind of listening would best serve this person, this purpose, and this moment.

If you want one simple place to start, next time a conversation is getting off the rails, ask yourself: What am I listening for right now, and what might I be missing? Then choose one small adjustment—one “knob” to turn up or behavior to turn to.

As Spelman notes, “When people take time to truly listen, they’re far more likely to act in ways that restore dignity, reduce harm, and strengthen trust.” Practiced over time, this kind of listening doesn’t just change conversations; it changes us.

For parents and educators, this solution may feel easy and effective, as it appears to involve restoring social harmony quickly while also teaching children responsibility and compassion. But, although we may believe that we are encouraging moral behavior and helping students feel better, we are actually teaching them that forgiveness and apologies result by simply saying the words without understanding the meaning and process behind these moral actions, according to May Yuan and her colleagues in a 2021 article.

In fact, forgiveness and apology require emotional readiness, perspective taking, and empathy. According to Emma Kemp and her colleagues, who examined children’s emotional forgiveness in another 2021 study, these skills develop with time and gradually throughout childhood and adolescence. It goes beyond just saying the words “I’m sorry” or “I forgive you.”

Specifically, forgiveness involves a willingness to abandon one’s right to resentment, negative judgment, and negative behavior toward one’s offender, while fostering the undeserved qualities of compassion, empathy, and goodwill toward the offender. Notice that in this definition, one has a right to resentment and that the offender does not deserve compassion and goodwill because of their hurtful actions—but we give it to them anyway.

Although frequently confused with forgetting, acceptance, condoning, excusing, pardoning, and denying anger, forgiveness is none of these. When we forgive, we decrease our negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward the offender. Over time, we may increase our positive thoughts, feelings, and sometimes behaviors toward the offender. We can also only forgive for the way that we were personally impacted by an offense. Depending on the situation, sometimes forgiveness involves simply wishing the offender well.

Although students are expected to give and receive forgiveness, often on demand, few have been educated on what forgiveness truly means and looks like. In this article, I use quotes from college students who took my interpersonal forgiveness class to illustrate their thoughts about apologies and forgiveness. These highlight how important forgiveness education is for students of all ages. For example, a student in my interpersonal forgiveness class reflected on what she learned about forgiveness and apologies growing up:

When conflicts arose between my sisters and me, we would often say “sorry” simply because it was expected of us or because an adult told us it was the right thing to do, not necessarily because we fully understood the meaning behind the apology. At that age, forgiveness felt more like a routine than a heartfelt process. It was not until I grew older that I began to grasp the deeper emotional and relational aspects of forgiving someone: acknowledging the hurt, understanding their intention, and choosing to let go for the sake of healing and growth.

Many students report similar early lessons in “forgiveness on demand,” which often lead to misconceptions about forgiveness as compliance rather than a process or a choice. They also report that they wish they could have received forgiveness education earlier in their schooling. In a 2024 paper, Corinne Den Hartog discusses her research with teachers, illustrating that forgiveness education can be beneficial for students and that schools can play a critical role in teaching students what forgiveness means and how to forgive, and what effective apologies look like.

Here are my research-based thoughts on how to better teach forgiveness and apologies.

The problem with premature forgiveness and coerced apologies

I began studying interpersonal forgiveness in 1987 as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the guidance of Robert Enright. At that time, forgiveness was primarily a focus of philosophy and religion and had not been widely examined from a psychological perspective. Our main goal was to define forgiveness as a psychological construct and moral virtue, distinct from concepts such as reconciliation, forgetting, and condoning, and then to clarify what the process entailed.

We developed one of the first comprehensive models of forgiveness, known as the Enright Process Model. The model includes four phases, as described by Robert Enright and colleagues in a 1991 book chapter:

• The uncovering phase, where individuals admit that they were hurt and recognize and explore painful emotions;
• The decision phase, in which the decision to forgive is made after exploring what forgiveness is and is not;
• The work phase, which involves expanding one’s view of the offender, recognizing the offender’s humanity, and developing empathy and compassion for them; and
• The deepening phase, in which individuals find meaning, emotional relief, and freedom from resentment.

When parents and educators put pressure on children and adolescents to forgive immediately, both parties feel compelled to skip phases and use scripted words before they genuinely feel remorse or understand their behavior. Research shows that young children can distinguish genuine from coerced apologies, and that forced apologies often fail to reduce negative feelings or may even increase resentment. As Craig E. Smith and his colleagues argue in a 2018 paper:

Coercing your child to apologize is going to backfire. Other kids don’t view that apologizer as likable. The teachable element of having the child apologize has gone away and the goal of the apology prompt—to help your child express remorse, soothe someone else’s hurt feelings, and make your child more likable—is lost.

The other problem with forced situations is that the injured party is pressured to forgive immediately after receiving an apology. Research has illustrated that forgiveness does not usually occur immediately, as it is a gradual process that involves emotional awareness and regulation, moral choice, and cognitive understanding as discussed in the curriculum. Asking a child to forgive before they’ve had time to process their pain and express their feelings short-circuits important emotional work and teaches them to suppress their feelings instead of understanding, expressing, and then moving beyond them. A student in my forgiveness class related to being pressured to forgive before she was ready:

One thing I really connected with was the reminder that forgiveness takes time. I grew up hearing phrases like “just forgive and move on,” but that never worked for me. Trying to rush it only made me feel like I was failing at forgiveness. Learning that quick forgiveness doesn’t always lead to real forgiveness makes me feel validated. My process was slow, and maybe that’s why it felt real when I finally reached it.

Although parents and educators often want to jump to the last phase of forgiving, peace and reconciliation (if possible), a more effective approach encourages the injured to take as much time as necessary to work through their emotions before forgiving. As discussed in my and Eva Chen’s 2023 paper, true forgiveness requires time and self-reflection. It cannot be demanded by others or achieved instantly through words alone. Skipping steps fails to recognize the complexity involved in the process of forgiveness. It also teaches children that forgiveness and relationship repair are more about listening to adults than listening to their hearts.

In our 2010 study on a sample of the general population’s understanding of forgiveness, we found that another common misconception about forgiveness is that one cannot forgive unless they receive an apology from the offender.

That may be true for reconciliation, but not forgiveness. Forgiveness is something individuals can do all on their own, for their own well-being, without any response from the offender. Forgiveness can sometimes lead to reconciliation between the injured party and the offender, but it does not have to. One may require an apology for the friendship to continue, but if that is not desired or possible, forgiveness can still occur. If we require the offender to apologize before forgiving, we give the offender control and power over our forgiveness and healing.

Uncomfortable emotions and validation

This entire process can involve some powerful and uncomfortable emotions. As psychologist Lisa Damour reminds us, unpleasant emotions are not “bad”; they are normal, healthy, and necessary. She prefers the term uncomfortable emotions to “negative” ones because the latter implies that feelings like anger, sadness, or anxiety are wrong. She writes that “psychological health is not about being free from emotional discomfort, but about having the right feeling at the right time and being able to bear the unpleasant ones.”

As Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, explains in a 2025 conversation, our skill in dealing with emotions influences how much success and well-being we can achieve. Educators and parents can nurture this skill by teaching that all emotions are normal and natural, and it is what we do with our emotions that can be considered good or bad. When we teach children that uncomfortable emotions are normal and survivable, we empower students to express, rather than suppress them, a crucial part of forgiveness.

Phase One of Enright’s forgiveness process model helps individuals process their feelings after experiencing hurt from or conflict with another. Having an adult validate their feelings helps children recognize that their emotions are acceptable and important. Without validation, students may learn to suppress and distrust their feelings. As described by Sarah Gonser in a 2022 article, emotional literacy is the ability to recognize, name, and express emotions in healthy ways and is an important part of social-emotional learning.

As child therapist Violet Oaklander emphasizes in her 2007 book, Windows to Our Children, it’s important to help children recognize and express all emotions, including anger. “Anger is an honest, normal feeling,” she writes. “Everyone gets angry. I get angry. You get angry. It’s what we do with these feelings—whether we can accept them, how we express them—that causes all the trouble.”

Unfortunately, children often receive mixed messages about anger. They experience adults’ anger but are discouraged, and sometimes even punished, from expressing it themselves. As a result, they learn to suppress, deflect, or deny anger, which, as Oaklander observes, can become a “hidden block to one’s sense of wholeness and well-being.”

Helping kids choose apology and forgiveness

There is an alternative. When adults validate children’s emotions, they model that forgiveness is not denial of pain, but healthy processing of it. It also teaches children that they can handle their pain and helps them develop resiliency for future challenges.

Consider two seventh-grade students, Amelia and Andrew. During a group project, Andrew made a hurtful comment about Amelia’s presentation skills in front of their classmates. Amelia felt embarrassed and angry, and the teacher told Andrew that he was out of line. After reflecting and discussing with the teacher, Andrew sincerely apologized: “I’m sorry for what I said about you in front of everyone. It was mean, and I shouldn’t have done it.”

Although Amelia appreciated the apology, she still felt hurt and wasn’t ready to forgive. Instead of insisting she do so immediately, the teacher validated her feelings: “It’s OK that you’re still upset, Amelia. What Andrew said was hurtful, and it’s natural to need some time.”

That simple validation allowed Amelia to process her emotions. Over the next few days, as Andrew treated her with kindness and respect, her hurt subsided. Eventually, when she felt ready, Amelia told Andrew she forgave him. This experience not only repaired their friendship but taught both students that forgiveness takes time and is a personal choice when one feels ready, rather than a response to pressure.

As we see in Andrew’s example, a sincere apology requires acknowledging specific harm, taking responsibility, expressing remorse, and making amends. When these components are present, apologies are associated with reduced anger and greater empathy, as found by Andrew Howell and colleagues in a 2012 study on guilt, empathy, and apology. Here is some practical guidance for parents and educators in helping children craft good apologies, as described by Kara Newhouse in a 2023 Mindshift article and podcast:

• Pause and validate. Normalize all feelings. When a child is hurt, start by naming and validating their feelings: “You look really upset. That makes sense—I’d feel angry, too, if someone did that.”
• Encourage empathy through reflection. Ask the child who caused harm to reflect: “Tell me what happened from your point of view. How do you think that made your _____ feel?” and “What can you do to make amends?”
• Teach a complete apology. Example of structure to use: “I’m sorry for [specific behavior]. I see that it made you feel [hurt/angry/sad]. I will [action to make it right].”
• Avoid forcing closure. Give children time to process their feelings and behavior before asking them to forgive or apologize. Healing does not occur on a timeline. Encourage the injured child to respond honestly: “Thank you for apologizing. I’m still hurt and need more time.”
• Model emotional honesty. Adults can share their own feelings calmly and respectfully. Children will learn that expression of all feelings requires strength, not weakness.
• Celebrate progress, not perfection. Praise effort toward understanding and the development of empathy and compassion, not just compliance with expected behavior.

These steps show that forgiveness is a process and unfolds gradually, not immediately. Children need time to build up their moral muscle, and education on forgiveness and effective apologies help children develop these skills—and learn to make their own choices. Children benefit when they understand that forgiveness is voluntary, something they can choose after working through their emotions. As one student in my Interpersonal Forgiveness class emphasizes:

Another thing I would want the educator to be sure to stress is the involvement of choice. Unless it is the hurt party’s willful choice to forgive another, no true emotional or personal healing will start. They will keep harboring the feelings of anger and resentment, without giving them the space to be expressed. Forgiveness happens on our own timelines. No one else can decide how we move through the process.

Forgiveness and apology are powerful, but only when they are sincere and reflect emotional honesty. By teaching children that forgiveness is a process, not an obligation, adults help them develop moral strength and emotional literacy.

The caveat, though, is that the size of the impact varies by nation, as does its nature.

Researchers with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science enrolled more than 200,000 participants to complete annual surveys about forgiveness practices and 56 measures of well-being one year later.

They found a connection between regular acts of forgiveness and a rise in the sense of psychological, more than physical, well-being and prosocial and character changes.

“We did find evidence of psychological effects, like happiness, and mental-health-related things like depression,” said Richard Cowden, an IQSS research scientist and lead author of the study. “But we also found, in some cases, stronger associations for character and prosocial behavior outcomes like gratitude and an orientation to promote good. I thought that was interesting: Forgiveness is a pathway to building character and other aspects of one’s volitional life.”

The work was published in January in the journal npj Mental Health Research and builds on results from the program’s initial survey, released in 2024, which examined the distribution of forgiveness in those nations, which represent between 50% and 60% of the global population.

The first survey established baseline values for the survey nations and included questions about childhood to illuminate predictors of forgiveness. The second wave, conducted a year later, allows researchers to examine potential effects over time, Cowden said.

The survey was designed to evaluate levels of forgiveness as a practice and personal characteristic rather than a single discrete act, asking, “How often have you forgiven those who have hurt you?”

“I would characterize this as a measure of dispositional forgivingness, which is the tendency to forgive others across time and situations, the habitual practice of forgiveness,” Cowden said. “It’s capturing more of a disposition than a state-like quality.”

Data from the third yearly survey have already come in and await analysis. In addition, researchers are gathering data for the fourth wave, Cowden said. Five annual surveys are planned.

Cowden said the results so far are multilayered and complex.

High levels of forgiveness appear to be a national or cultural attribute of some nations, like South Africa. Other countries, like Japan and Turkey, displayed lower levels.

While the research generally indicated an association between higher forgiveness and greater well-being a year later, the strength of the association varied country to country and in some cases was counterintuitive, requiring a closer look at local circumstances.

For example, South Africa, Cowden said, had high national forgiveness but somewhat weaker associations with well-being about a year later. With high rates of poverty and crime, that could be a case of local circumstances overriding a broader trend.

Similarly, nations with high rates of forgiveness may also have cultures that encourage the behavior, so its benefits potentially could be tamped down because it is widely expected.

“You find more consistent evidence of associations in some countries across the outcomes than others,” Cowden said. “Part of the beauty of the study is that it is trying to consider culture and context.”

Cowden said the overall association, drawn from the results of different nations for 56 well-being variables, was not strong but not trivial either, particularly when considering its impacts at a population level.

The study seeks a deeper understanding of something that cultures and religious traditions have valued as a moral virtue for thousands of years, Cowden said.

Though forgiveness is commonly practiced, we don’t fully understand either its personal impacts or its global contours, he said.

“We’re social beings, and we don’t exist well without social relationships, and if relationships are part of what it means to be human, we’re inevitably going to experience hurts along the way because nobody is perfect.”

Cowden described forgiveness as a “muscle we can build” through practice, and that would be relatively simple to deploy as an intervention under appropriate conditions.

He cited a study published in 2024 that tested the effectiveness of a self-directed forgiveness workbook, based on the widely studied REACH forgiveness model. The three-hour resource was given to people in South Africa, Hong Kong, Colombia, Indonesia, and Ukraine. Respondents reported improved forgiveness, anxiety, depression, and overall well-being.

“If everybody who had unresolved hurts were to experience more forgiveness, the population-level benefits to health and well-being could be quite substantial,” Cowden said.

This article was originally published on Harvard News. Read the original article.

But a new book by journalist Lewis Raven Wallace, Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Creating Change From Within, argues we can’t always think our way out of our biases. Rather, loving relationships and community more reliably provide the foundation for shifting our views and unlearning bias and oppressive thinking.

Wallace is an Abolition Journalism Fellow at the organization Interrupting Criminalization, author of The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, and host of the podcast The View From Somewhere. I spoke with them about research related to unlearning, stories of change from the tiny to transformative, and strategies for all of us to open ourselves to other ways of thinking and being. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Katherine Reynolds Lewis: Why don’t we start with the question of what do we as individuals, and as a society, need to unlearn?

Lewis Raven Wallace: I came into this project about unlearning thinking about transphobia and racism because those are two areas that immediately affect my life and my activism. I’ve dealt with a lot of learning and unlearning around transphobia within my family as a trans person who came out quite young. I also have been in a many decades-long process of my own unlearning around racism. I’ve always been really interested in family roots, and I come from a many generations white family in South Carolina, where there’s a lot of tension and unspoken challenges around racism, and that’s something that I was interested in surfacing through conversations with my mother and my grandmother.

I’m not interested in telling other people what they should unlearn. For me, it’s been a lot about the systems that underlie the harms we’re experiencing today. Even underlying systems like transphobia and racism, it’s capitalism and ideas about private property and individualism and all the structures and assumptions that make up so much of the day-to-day toxicity that circulates in U.S. society. I wanted to understand more about what is required of us when we want to unlearn, especially things that are ongoing, systems and structures that we’re still living with.

KRL: Can you talk about the role of love when it comes to unlearning?

LRW: One of my first interviews was with Adrienne Johnson Martin, a Black woman in her 50s. What created the conditions for her to unlearn around policing and anti-Blackness was her connection with her family, in particular her son, who has a disability. Through her love for her son, she had undergone all this transformation that she identified as a big part of what made her open to unlearning throughout all parts of her life.

As I read the psychological and neuroscience research for the book, a lot of that was about the neuroscience of connection, the hormonal reactions that happen, and the neuroplasticity that we can access when we’re in loving, connected relationships, how that lays the foundation for unlearning. A lot of that research is actually about trauma, trauma healing, and unlearning trauma.

More and more over the last couple decades, researchers have been finding that it’s not enough to talk about your trauma, it’s not enough to just revisit your trauma, you have to actually experience different kinds of connections and relationships. That can be in a therapeutic relationship, or it can be in a loving relationship in your life. Trauma healing is actually love and unlearning in one.

That was so inspiring to me because trauma is probably the hardest thing to unlearn. It’s really, really deep; it creates these automated reactions in us. It’s uncomfortable to look at; it’s painful. The ways in which experiences of connection to other people can facilitate trauma healing, to me, that was a clue on this journey of trying to figure out the science of unlearning overall.

Every single person that I interviewed, in one way or another, talked about love, connection, community, and relationship. Not necessarily just romantic love, not just familial love, but experiences of connection as an aspect of their own learning.

KRL: Can you talk about attunement and co-regulation as motivating forces that facilitate unlearning?

LRW: There’s this really wonderful thing about human design, how we are made to survive together. Obviously you see it in parenting relationships, the phenomenon that the baby comes and you have to change as a person, you have to change all your lived patterns, you have to give up sleep and sacrifice a lot. So we’re actually neurologically designed to feel this sense of connection and interconnection in a way that makes us more open to change. At a neurological level, they call it rewiring the brain.

The more you use a certain circuit, the more likely you are to react in that same way in the future. We have these windows of opportunity where we are more open, more flexible to changing our reactions. Those windows can be created by oxytocin and the other hormones that are associated with love and connection and attunement. It opens us up at a biological level.

The way that humans tend to react to new information that contradicts us is one of two paths. Either we shut it down and shut it out, and that’s a very common and likely reaction, or we try to resolve the contradiction. The discomfort that’s required by trying to resolve the contradiction is very hard to go through on your own, especially if you’re going through a loss of identity or loss of sense of self. It’s hard, maybe even impossible to do that without a sense that other people are going to be there with you. It’s not just that being in relationship with other people can introduce you to new ideas, but it can actually make you a more flexible person.

So feelings of safety are a really important condition for long-term unlearning. You don’t have to feel safe the entire time, but you have to have some feeling of safety that you can go back to in order to process the things that are hard.

KRL: Your grandmother had a lot of unlearning to do, and your mother to some extent. Can you talk about the tension that you describe in the book between love and fear around your gender identity, and how that came to play in their unlearning?

LRW: When I was coming out as queer and then trans in the late 90s and early 2000s, for my grandmother, who was born in the 1920s, it was just confusing. And she’s a very loving person and she’s also, like a lot of people, kind of stuck in some of her ways. For my mother, it was more an experience of fear. She wasn’t particularly homophobic and there wasn’t really such a thing as transphobia in the way that there is now, because people just didn’t know what it was.

One of the few preconceived notions at the time was this would be a dangerous life, this would be a hard life, to be trans. Both of them had to do a lot of inner confrontation with discomfort and fear in order to relearn how to love me and stay in connection with me. That was not at all an overnight process.

KRL: Talk a bit about the role of generative somatics in unlearning.

LRW: Our bodies and minds are interconnected. We can’t just think our way out of things. In order to re-track our brains, we have to change our practices. Sometimes we even start doing the different thing before we’re totally mentally comfortable. That happens a lot around something as simple as pronouns. People might feel like, “I don’t really feel comfortable with it. I don’t really see it, but I’m just going to practice saying the right word.” And the more that you practice, the more it becomes second nature.

The field that I looked at, of politicized somatics, is taking this idea that change happens in the body and engaging with that as a political act. So asking, how can we strengthen our movements for justice? How can we strengthen our processes of unlearning? How can we become better listeners and unlearners ourselves through developing a kind of awareness of breath, of body, often very subtle things like, “Where do you feel tension as you talk about this? Or where does the energy in your body focus?”

I had experienced something traumatic with a group of people, and we went through a politicized somatic healing process collectively. We had this really incredible experience of somatically releasing an acute, traumatic event, which had been a physical assault by police. I actually felt in my body, I felt the experience of release.

It sounds complicated, and maybe a little woo-woo. But in some ways, it can actually be a shortcut compared to talking about something for years and years in therapy. To get into the physical embodiment of it, you then break the pattern in your body.

KRL: I’d love you to tell the story of Adrianne Black and how she evolved and unlearned the neo-Nazi beliefs of her community and her family of origin.

LRW: She had been raised by a family of activist white nationalists in Florida, and then she had gone to school at the New College of Florida, which is a public, alternative kind of college. She essentially was confronted, often in a very harsh way, by people who said, “Your beliefs and your family’s beliefs are not OK.” On the other hand, a small group of people embraced her and spent a lot of time with her, getting to know her and facilitating this unlearning and trying to talk her out of being a white nationalist.

The year after her graduation, she publicly renounced her family’s views. She alienated herself from her whole family of origin and apologized to a lot of people for the many years that she had spent holding these beliefs that she had come to see were really harmful. She changed through this combination of love, friendship, being loved by these people who spent time with her, and very uncomfortable confrontation, which she’s really come to terms with. She came out as trans a couple years later, so in some ways, her unlearning around racism and white nationalism had opened her up to a whole other world of who she would then become.

KRL: I’m curious about how you reconcile living in our flawed reality, while recognizing that there’s a lot of past inequity and harm that has not been resolved?

LRW: I grappled a lot with what I was going to say about settler colonialism in a book about unlearning. As somebody who’s living on stolen land, I own a home. I almost want to put it in quotes, “own.” I don’t believe that land should be parceled out and owned by people. How do I speak about unlearning something like that, when here I am sitting with all the privileges of it? Nonetheless, what I came to for myself is that there is no reconciliation. You actually remain in an acute awareness of the cognitive dissonance. Let that be motivating in trying to make change at every step. Sometimes those changes are really small and marginal, making a donation or paying a land tax, but over time, I think there’s something to be said for just not trying to resolve cognitive dissonance, letting it be really uncomfortable, and that is emotionally harsh.

Often, people who are in the settler position, or the colonizer position or the white position, we don’t have a lot of tools for looking at and actually feeling the pain of contradiction inside of ourselves, that I will never walk this earth in the kind of right relationship that I want to be in. That part of the story always brought me back to my grandmother and how, as she was essentially on her deathbed, she was still grappling with the impacts of her own internalized oppression, and it was painful to her. She wanted to feel this love and openness, she wanted to feel connected, she wanted to not be racist. But she couldn’t quite let go of all these things. There is a cost, even to the people who are privileged by it and who benefit.

KRL: What would you like readers to take from this book?

RLW: I want it to be a reminder that unlearning is really possible. It’s work that any of us can do. I want it to be a tool for people who want to have these unlearning conversations in their communities and with their families. It’s a very different kind of tool than the dominant narrative of We should talk to each other across the aisle. I find that framework very limited because it doesn’t acknowledge the kind of trauma that may be playing out in some of those interactions. It doesn’t acknowledge the painful fact that we’re not talking about systems of oppression that have ended. We’re talking about ongoing, structural harm. A different set of tools says, Hey, let’s start with ourselves. Let’s start with people right around us that we love and trust, and let’s build outward from there. It’s really possible for anybody to help cultivate these conditions.

Maybe you and your mom are long overdue for a conversation, or maybe you and your best friend haven’t been acknowledging something, or maybe in the work that you do, there’s room to cultivate just a little bit more space for unlearning. I want it to be empowering for people to think about the diversity of ways that we can create those conditions. I certainly have let go of the idea that unlearning is just a hard, crappy slog, and I want other people to feel that.

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?

Some studies are finding support for this idea. For example, one study done with consumers using digital companions trained to respond with empathy found that doing so helped them alleviate their feelings of loneliness immediately after the interaction. As the researchers found, “being heard” and supported seemed to help people in this regard, and chatbots could mimic that well—in some ways, better than humans.

Another recent study found that people felt as good chatting with a bot as they felt talking with people face to face or online (though they felt more similar to and liked their human chatter better). Since better moods can be helpful for reducing loneliness, chatting with a bot could have an indirect impact on helping people who feel isolated. Research also suggests people may prefer talking with chatbots to people, particularly in the short term and in certain situations (such as when the real people in your life don’t seem very supportive).

These results are promising for sure. However, some even newer research should give us reason for pause. These studies are showing us that, despite expectations, chatbots don’t reduce loneliness in the long term. In some cases, interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) may even hurt our social well-being.

Chatbots don’t reduce loneliness over time

In one 2026 study, 275 first-year students at the University of British Columbia reported on how lonely they felt, their sense of social isolation, and their mood. Then, they were randomly assigned to send at least one meaningful message a day (for two weeks) to either a randomly selected student or to a chatbot named Sam that had been trained to be empathic and responsive. A third (control) group of students were told to write a short summary of their day each day in a private chatroom, to see the potential benefits of self-reflection.

At the end of every day, the students reported on how socially connected they felt while interacting with their conversation partner (or writing in their journal), as well as on their positive and negative feelings. Then, at the end of the two weeks of texting or writing, they reported again on their loneliness, mood, and social isolation.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that only students interacting with a random student felt more positive emotion and less loneliness and sense of isolation after the two weeks. Those interacting with a chatbot or writing in their journals didn’t.

Lead author Ruo-ning Li of the University of British Columbia says her finding suggests that a chatbot is a poor substitute for a real person—even if that person is a stranger.

“A low-tech, simple intervention—just texting with another random human peer they didn’t know before—reduced loneliness significantly after two weeks, while the highly supportive chatbot we designed didn’t even move the needle,” says Li.

In many ways, this finding surprised Li. She’d thought a chatbot that could provide validation to people and be available anytime would mimic the benefits one gets from interacting with people you don’t know well—a type of connection sometimes called “weak ties” by researchers. These kinds of interactions have been shown in the past to help people feel more connected and less lonely. But in this study, she found that chatbots don’t provide the same advantages as weak ties with humans.

“We set up this experiment to compare whether AI can bring us as much benefit as talking to a weak tie. It cannot,” she says. “Even with all of these features that have been shown by relationship science to make people feel good and connected, an AI simulation doesn’t really translate into a long-term psychological benefit.”

Interacting with a person improves mood better than chatbots

Students who interacted with humans and chatbots tended to feel better right after the interaction. But only those interacting with a human had overall positive feelings at the end of the two weeks, suggesting people still hold an edge over AI.

On the other hand, chatting with a chatbot did reduce negative emotion as much as chatting with a person over time, a potential benefit. Li thinks this suggests chatbots could be useful in certain situations or with certain populations that are more isolated. In situations where someone needs immediate comforting, perhaps chatting with a chatbot would be better than nothing, she says, though probably not a good long-term solution.

In a post-study analysis, she and her team went back to participants to see if they’d continued journaling or chatting with chatbots or strangers a week later. She found that significantly more people continued interacting with their human partner (33%) than with their chatbot (14%), with only 3% continuing to journal.

“This is super interesting, because it seems like human interaction doesn’t only reduce loneliness, it sustains connection,” she says.

Though Li hasn’t conducted this study in other settings yet, she suspects her results would hold in other circumstances where someone might be feeling disconnected, like moving to a new town or starting a new job. If so, she says, lonely people might also benefit temporarily from interacting with a chatbot, but get more out of interacting with a real human.

“If you just go out to talk to anyone around you—someone at work, your neighbor who walks their dogs, or a coworker you’ve never talked to—it can [likely] help you reduce loneliness better than AI chat bot,” says Li.

Why chatbots don’t cut it

Li doesn’t know why people get more out of chatting with strangers than a chatbot, but she believes it could have to do with how chatting with a real person makes interactions more dynamic and rewarding. While chatbots seem to have the advantage of always being available and empathic, they don’t initiate contact themselves, she says.

“With a human, both sides have the opportunity to start the conversation, which is more likely to sustain engagement.”

There’s also something about connecting with a real person that carries more emotional weight for people, she says. Chatbots don’t have to take time from their busy schedules to talk to you, making their interactions less valuable. Plus, they can’t be vulnerable or share any real emotion like people can, something useful for creating real intimacy.

Li adds another reason humans may have the advantage: People often have an extended social network, which could help someone expand their own social circle.

“Introducing you to a broader social network makes you feel connected and gives you even more opportunity to build new, deeper, better connections,” says Li. “That’s a fundamentally unique [aspect] of human interactions that the advanced technology cannot replicate yet.”

The future of chatbot companionship

While Li’s results aren’t the last word on the matter, they add to a growing body of research that suggests caution when trying to replace human interactions with AI companions. People using AI can form unhealthy dependence, sometimes leading to harming themselves or others.

For example, another 2026 study found that the way chatbots are designed to use sycophancy (agreement, flattery, and validation) to increase people’s willingness to engage with them can have detrimental effects on their well-being, social interactions, and decision making.

As part of the study, people were given an opportunity to check out whether some of their past misbehavior was questionable or not by getting feedback either from AI sources or from a group of humans (from a Reddit forum, “Am I the asshole?”).  Researchers found that “AI affirmed users’ actions 49% more often than humans on average, including in cases involving deception, illegality, or other harms.” This suggests that AI, by being too agreeable, is inadvertently promoting anti-social interactions and even self-destructive behavior.

Additionally, the researchers in this study found that people preferred AI feedback to human feedback. This doesn’t seem too surprising—after all, who wouldn’t want to be told that they’re right or that they aren’t the “asshole” in a situation? But that suggests sycophantic AIs may be giving people an unearned sense of validation, leading to poorer self-understanding and less accountability in their interactions with others. This could, ultimately, hurt people’s well-being and ability to form relationships.

While quite different from Li’s study, research like this points out how tricky it can be to design AI chatbots to be both helpful for users and better for real-world interactions and the common good. Now that there are a series of lawsuits around chatbots, the Federal Trade Commission is seeking more information from companies about how they assess potential harms of using AI chatbots, especially in children, who may not have the sophistication to understand potential pernicious effects.

For now, though, the question remains about the benefits of using chatbots to alleviate loneliness. Li, for one, is not giving up on their potential, but based on her findings, she’s considering alternative uses for them. Rather than substituting for human interaction, a chatbot could be designed to encourage users to initiate conversations with real people, build confidence in their ability to interact, or help them rehearse difficult conversations—all skills that could strengthen real-world relationships, she says.

“Even the most highly supportive chatbot by design couldn’t match the interaction with a random paired human peer,” she says. “So, rather than design it to be the best companion, maybe the future of AI should be to help us build connection with each other.”

That slippery, elusive quality of reasonableness is the topic of Lawlor’s new book, Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue.

In a comprehensive exploration of what it means to be reasonable, Lawlor argues that being reasonable is about being able to reliably see what matters in the greater scheme of things. This trait helps us to understand other points of view, communicate what we care about, and respond thoughtfully to others, whether in setting curfews with teenagers, resolving disputes with neighbors, or handling conflicts with a partner.

Reasonableness is also foundational to Anglo-American law. Juries determine negligence through the “reasonable person standard,” in which they consider whether a person acted with the level of care and caution that a “reasonable” person would exercise under similar circumstances. But as Lawlor found across her research, legal theorists themselves worry about what the standard means.

Lawlor draws on dozens of cases to show the real-world stakes of using reasonableness as a standard for evaluating behavior, including Hattori v. Peairs, a case about the tragic 1992 killing of the 16-year-old Japanese exchange student Yoshihiro Hattori, who mistakenly approached the wrong home for a Halloween party. He was fatally shot by property owner Rodney Peairs, who said he perceived his life was in danger. A jury had to decide whether his response was reasonable, given the circumstances. Peairs was acquitted of manslaughter, though a subsequent civil trial found him liable.

“Matters of tremendous importance are being decided every day in courtrooms around the country on the basis of the reasonable person standard, but legal theorists seem to be saying, ‘we don’t really know what it means,’” Lawlor says.

A misunderstood virtue

Lawlor argues that reasonableness gets misunderstood, partly because of its malleability: “‘Reasonable’ is a highly context-sensitive word that elicits different criteria in different settings,” Lawlor explains. “What makes a request reasonable is different than what makes a doubt reasonable. So, it can seem that what counts as ‘reasonable’ is up to the speaker.”

And, because most people think they’re being reasonable, it can seem there’s no real way to adjudicate differences among people. “But we know from our own experience there are people who are flat out being unreasonable,” Lawlor says.

Take the case of Rudy Stanko, who in the mid-1990s was pulled over for driving 85 miles per hour on a curvy and steep two-lane highway in freezing conditions. At the time, Montana law had no explicit speed limit; instead, limits were based on what was “reasonable and prudent.” But as the officer who cited Stanko explained, had there been an obstruction on the frosty road, there would have been no way for Stanko to stop in time.

Stanko appealed the ticket, claiming the law was unclear. His case was ultimately heard by Montana’s Supreme Court, which, in a 4-3 ruling, determined the law “void for vagueness.” The court was thinking along the lines of Lawlor’s teenage son, finding the term “reasonable” provided no real guidance. And yet when Montana rewrote its traffic laws, it saw fit to continue including a demand for “reasonable care.”

Reasonable vs. rational

Lawlor sees “reasonable” as different from “rational.” Rationality implies a detached, value-neutral calculation, independent of fairness or relationships. Reasonableness recognizes that these commitments can profoundly shape how we think, act, and behave.

Lawlor encountered the distinction when she had her students enact the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic thought experiment in which two accomplices are arrested and interrogated in separate rooms. While mutual silence ensures a light sentence for each, there’s a deal on the table: if one person confesses, they get to walk free.

Game theorists posit that, rationally, it is in the prisoner’s self-interest to betray the other person. But to some of Lawlor’s students, mutual cooperation felt like the reasonable thing to do.

Shaping their decision was their ability to identify what mattered most in the situation, which Lawlor claims is the foundational trait on which reasonableness is based.

“A reasonable person ​acts in a way that promotes what is important,” Lawlor says, noting how being reasonable is fundamentally a matter of how well a person understands and responds to the values at stake in a situation.

Reasonable people disagree

Throughout the book, Lawlor identifies other common aspects of a reasonable person. For example, a reasonable person grounds their belief in evidence because they want to get the facts right.

But reasonable people can interpret the same facts in strikingly different ways, even when presented with the same evidence—as demonstrated in the Stanford course Democracy and Disagreement, which features experts on opposing sides discussing a political topic.

The explanation, as Lawlor sees it, is that what feels “reasonable” depends on one’s beliefs about what is valuable. And it’s often when we come into conflict with another that those beliefs get sharpened.

“We only truly understand what we value when our beliefs are tested and challenged by perspectives diverging from our own,” Lawlor says.

On this point, Lawlor draws on John Stuart Mill, who, in his classic 1859 book On Liberty, argues that we need others to challenge and criticize our views. It is by defending our beliefs about value that we ultimately come to understand ourselves better. “We all have to learn from each other, because no one of us has a big enough brain to understand it all,” Lawlor says.

In our polarized times, Lawlor says, reasonableness is a much-needed tool for productive discussion that supports and strengthens what is important to us.

Tips for being reasonable

According to Lawlor, reasonableness helps us live cooperatively.

“If we’re reasonable, we can harness the power of our emotions when we deliberate together about what matters,” she says.

Lawlor outlines certain qualities that reasonable people possess. They are curious, flexible, and open-minded. They acknowledge the limits of their own perspective and remain open to learning from others. Here are some tips to cultivate reasonableness:

• Notice and manage your emotions: Emotions can help you see what matters to you, but they can also prevent you from seeing what matters to others.
• Engage with those you disagree with: Engaging with others helps you understand what matters to you, and why. By listening to critical perspectives, you actually sharpen your reasoning and deepen your understanding of why you value what you do, not just what you reflexively believe.
• Critically evaluate your own position, not just that of the person you disagree with. Instead of thinking defensively—anticipating objections so you can counter them—look for the strongest fair objections to your own view. “What would another person reasonably object to in my position?”

This article was originally published on Stanford News. Read the original article.

During a nightmarish two weeks, my daughter was diagnosed with bacterial sepsis. She lived and is now a healthy eight year old, but for years, I felt stuck in remorse and guilt for not trusting my first instinct to call the emergency line.

A new study explored why some people can forgive themselves after a wrongdoing or failure, while others remain stuck in perpetual guilt and shame.

When the past is present

The researchers surveyed 80 U.S. adults online and asked them to describe in writing in as much detail as possible a time they could—or could not—forgive themselves, ranging from betraying another’s trust to neglecting an obligation to accidentally causing harm or staying too long in a toxic relationship.

One of the study’s coauthors, Lydia Woodyatt, describes self-forgiveness as “the process of understanding our failure or wrongdoing and its impact, and taking that seriously, while also being able to move forward and release ourselves from a sense of self-condemnation.”

Participants also answered follow-up questions about why the event still affected them, what they had done to move forward, what got in the way, and how they feel about it now. Most participants spent about seven to 10 minutes writing their responses. The research team then analyzed these answers to identify recurring emotional and psychological patterns.

Participants who struggled to forgive themselves often felt trapped in the past, replaying events and living with guilt. Many constantly re-experienced the event in their minds, including the intense emotions it evoked. One participant wrote, “It is just something that plays over in my mind a lot, and it’s like the event keeps happening and I feel all the emotions all over again.”

Others said the event still affects their relationships, work, and self-esteem years later. This is because rumination can trap us in a guilt cycle, says therapist Saba Harouni Lurie. She recommends “reality testing” as a way to see that you may be partially to blame for something, but that there are likely other factors at play.

In the study, those who forgave themselves described making a conscious choice and concerted effort to do so. “I needed to forgive myself so I could stop blaming myself and stop looking toward the past when I needed to be looking toward the future,” wrote one participant.

Those who experienced self-forgiveness seemed to have less intrusive emotions than those who were unable to forgive, though some admitted they still harbored negative emotions around the event itself.

The weight of personal responsibility—how much guilt a person carried for what happened

In the relationships they wrote about, many participants experienced a heightened obligation for the other person’s well-being, especially when it involved family, friends, or caregiving roles. Participants often struggled with the belief that they should have foreseen harm and prevented it.

In one account, a participant reflected on his father’s suicide. “All I would have had to have done is talked to him more that morning or offer to go on a walk with him. I still feel immense loss and guilt. I can never undo what was done.”

In the study, participants who were able to forgive themselves often reached a turning point when they accepted the limits of their control, recognizing that while they may have regrets, they could not have predicted or prevented everything. Rather than erasing their sadness or regret, this reframing seemed to help them move past self-blame toward a more realistic understanding of their role in what happened.

For example, one participant wrote: “The only real barrier to forgiving . . . was coming to the conclusion that things don’t always work out the way you want them to. So the barrier was trying to get over the idea that I could do something that just wasn’t doable at the time.”

When our choices clash with our values

Many participants said their mistakes felt incompatible with the kind of person they believed themselves to be, and felt they didn’t deserve self-forgiveness because what they had done couldn’t be undone.

“I never thought I was the kind of person who would ever cheat,” one participant admitted.

Psychologist Lisa Larsen says it’s vital to be honest about our mistakes without letting them define us—to recognize a bad choice and know you’re capable of better ones.

Self-compassion plays a central role, too. Lurie says, “Offering yourself care and kindness, even and especially when you’re in the wrong or have done something you regret, is crucial.” Taking accountability doesn’t have to mean self-punishment.

Participants who forgave themselves tended to accept their imperfections and recommit to their personal values.

One mother admitted, “In order to be the best parent I could be, I had to forgive myself and focus on my daughter. I just had to make myself understand that there were many factors that contributed to my daughter’s depression, and I was not solely to blame.”

How we cope matters

Those who forgave themselves didn’t avoid their pain but worked through it. Although participants used similar strategies (e.g., conversing with friends, attending therapy, staying busy), people who forgave themselves processed emotions rather than being distracted from them.

Different therapeutic strategies for this might include narrative or cognitive processing therapy, mindfulness, journaling, art therapy, and EMDR, suggests Chloë Bean, a somatic trauma therapist.

Bean invites her clients to notice what arises physically when they contemplate self-forgiveness: “What ideas, images, words, or behaviors come up? Does a part of you want forgiveness while another part resists it? Is there confusion around that inner conflict?”

When we can approach life as an ongoing practice of learning rather than obtaining perfection, Bean says, we create room for curiosity and openness, rather than fearing our mistakes.

Avoidance or suppression, by contrast, often reinforces unpleasant thoughts. As one participant shared, “I have to just put the situation out of my mind. It’s not very effective.”

But self-forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting, says Larsen. Instead, it’s about working through the emotions and choosing self-compassion.

The ongoing work of letting go

Woodyatt hopes this emerging research on shame and regret helps clinicians, counselors, and mental health support workers to improve their practice.

As the study suggests, self-forgiveness isn’t a linear process, but one that requires time, reflection, and self-kindness.

This dynamic becomes especially visible during periods of heightened immigration enforcement. Parents weigh whether it is safe to take their child to the doctor. Teenagers in a mixed-status family reconsider applying for college. Families avoid public spaces. Over time, these decisions accumulate, reshaping how families care for one another and imagine their futures.

For many immigrant families, separation—whether by force or by choice—is not a single moment. It becomes a psychological rupture that reshapes how they experience safety, belonging and identity.

For many, separation starts with the act of immigration itself, often forced by desperate circumstances. Diana Ortiz Giron, director of programming and education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is the youngest of three siblings raised by a single mother who had to make a difficult choice: In 1996, she left her children with their aunt and grandmother and moved across the border, from Tijuana to Azusa, a city in Southern California, in search of economic opportunities.

“I remember very little from my time in Mexico, but what I do remember is people telling me that I would hold onto my mom’s leg when she would leave back to the States,” she says.

If families are reunited in the United States, even legal immigrants today face intensified fears of family separation, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains more and more lawful residents with no criminal records.

Researchers note the phenomenon is not new. For decades, U.S. immigration policy has created conditions in which physical, emotional, or anticipatory separation is a recurring part of life for many Latino families—and increasingly, all immigrants today. The current enforcement landscape builds on that history, amplifying pressures that continue to shape health, decision-making, and family relationships.

Studies show that experiences with immigration enforcement, from racial profiling to knowing someone who has been deported, are linked to delays in healthcare—such as postponing doctor visits, avoiding hospitals, or forgoing preventive care—and increased psychological distress. Each additional encounter increases the likelihood that individuals will postpone care or report worse health outcomes.

Gustavo Carlo, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies Latino youth and family relationships, says the effects of enforcement-related separation can be especially damaging for children and adolescents.

“This form of forced separation is powerful and potentially destructive to health and well-being,” Carlo said. “It’s not only involuntary, but it often violates basic human rights. When it happens at a large scale, it intensifies fear, anxiety, and stress in ways that can disrupt the lives of children, families, and entire communities.”

Together, these findings suggest that today’s enforcement tactics do more than create isolated fear; they shape how people navigate everyday decisions about their health and well-being. According to advocates, today’s immigration policies reflect broader choices about who is protected in American society—consequences that reach far beyond migrant communities. But those communities are not helpless in the face of these forces. Families, advocates, and local organizations are working to buffer their impact and reimagine systems of support.

A long history of separation

Family separation in the United States dates back to the 18th century.

From the forced separation of enslaved families to exclusionary immigration laws that limited entry and family reunification, these practices have disrupted family networks across generations. Early federal policies, including the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, restricted migration and, in many cases, prevented families from remaining together or reuniting. 

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, immigration enforcement became more formalized through expanded detention systems and increased coordination between federal and local authorities. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 reorganized immigration enforcement under a national security framework. Programs such as Secure Communities and 287(g) agreements enabled local law enforcement to work more closely with federal immigration agencies.

These changes broadened the scope of enforcement into routine settings. Encounters such as traffic stops or other local law enforcement interactions could lead to detention or deportation, increasing the risk of family separation beyond border crossings.

The Trump administration marked a significant increase in the scale and visibility of these practices. The 2018 Zero Tolerance Policy mandated criminal prosecution for unauthorized border crossings, resulting in the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border. At the same time, expanded interior enforcement, workplace raids, and efforts to rescind programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) contributed to increased uncertainty for mixed-status families.

In recent years, tens of thousands of spouses and children have been separated due to immigration enforcement actions. Many more families live with the possibility of separation, and some make difficult decisions about whether to remain together or apart in response to enforcement risks. Family separation continues to be a recurring outcome of immigration policy in the United States.

Anxiety and anticipatory grief

Today, Ortiz Giron is a newly naturalized U.S. citizen who was once undocumented and later became a DACA recipient. She says she constantly worries about what might happen if her husband, a brown Latino man, were to encounter ICE.

These fears shape even ordinary moments. “We have conversations about what would happen if we were detained,” she says. “The baby’s in the car seat, I’m in the back, he’s driving—and if they ask him to get out, we’ve already said: don’t intervene. Let them take you. I’ll find a lawyer. I’ll find resources to get you out.”

Psychologists and family researchers increasingly ask: What happens when family separation is to be expected?

To investigate, researchers distinguish between three interconnected experiences. Forced separation occurs when a parent is detained or deported. Separation by constrained choice happens when families preemptively separate in response to danger or instability. Fear of separation, often overlooked, describes the chronic anxiety of living under the constant threat that family unity could be shattered at any time.

These experiences do not occur in isolation; they accumulate and are increasingly shaping the psychological lives and cultural experiences of Latinos in the United States.

Ortiz Giron’s childhood experience reflects separation by constrained choice—one shaped by survival and economic necessity. While difficult, she says separations caused by deportation feel more like an unexpected death.

“You don’t expect it. You’re not prepared for it,” she says. “There’s grief and a loss of that connection to that family member, and there is deep pain throughout the whole process. I cannot imagine the fear that parents carry, knowing this could happen and that they could be separated from their children.”

Living with constant uncertainty

Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young is an immigrant health scholar who studies how immigration policy shapes family well-being. Her research shows that uncertainty itself can become a powerful force, influencing how people assess risk and make decisions about care.

“One of the big challenges that communities are facing at this time is having the ability to plan and make plans for their own future,” she explains. That uncertainty reaches into daily life, influencing whether parents seek medical care for their children or whether young people pursue higher education.

Young emphasizes that this instability does not begin with high-profile enforcement actions. It’s built into the policy landscape.

“The baseline in this country…is one of exclusion,” she says. Federal and state policies often limit access to basic services such as healthcare, particularly for undocumented immigrants. Even before recent increases in enforcement, many families were already navigating a system where access to care, education, and work opportunities was uncertain.

That broader context matters. It means families are not just reacting to isolated events, but adapting to an environment where risk is constant.

Researchers have begun to describe this as more than a “chilling effect.” Rather than simply avoiding institutions out of fear, many immigrants experience repeated, direct contact with enforcement systems, from workplace raids to traffic stops or the detention of a family member. In some cases, a single deportation reverberates across an entire social network, affecting how neighbors, relatives, and friends assess risk.

Those encounters accumulate over time, shaping how people move through the world and how they make decisions about safety and health.

The psychological toll of separation on children

One longitudinal study followed more than 300 recently immigrated Latino adolescents in Los Angeles and Miami over the course of a year, surveying them at multiple points about their experiences of discrimination, depressive symptoms, and social behavior.

The researchers found that experiences of discrimination and chronic stress were linked to increases in depressive symptoms over the course of the year, which in turn were associated with lower engagement in helping and cooperative behaviors. Indeed, decades of research show that family separation is associated with increased anxiety, depression, and trauma, with effects that can persist into adulthood and shape educational attainment, social relationships, and long-term well-being.

In some communities, enforcement actions extend into spaces meant to provide stability, like schools and the courts. This disrupts school attendance, undermines feelings of safety, and disfigures the broader social fabric of schools and neighborhoods.

One reason family separation is so damaging is that it often creates what psychologists call ambiguous loss, a concept developed by family therapist Pauline Boss. She describes it as a uniquely stressful form of loss because it lacks clarity and closure, making it difficult for families to grieve or adapt.

Research on immigrant families has applied this framework to experiences of deportation and prolonged separation. Studies by Luis H. Zayas find that children in mixed-status households often experience persistent fear, anxiety, and disruptions to family roles when a parent is detained or deported.

As he explains in one paper, “The constant dread of the possible arrest, detention, and deportation of their parents sets the context that places citizen-children at risk for negative psychological effects and disruption of their developmental trajectories… [and] the actual arrest, detention, and deportation of parents serve only to complete the trauma.” This situation is shaped as much by uncertainty as by separation itself. In this context, a parent who has been deported may still be in contact, yet their absence remains unresolved and ongoing.

Ambiguous loss prevents closure. Families remain suspended between hope and grief, unsure whether reunification will ever occur. Over time, this unresolved stress can fracture family dynamics and isolate households from broader community support.

Exclusionary environments can intensify this isolation. Fear of immigration enforcement leads families to withdraw from social networks built through institutions such as schools and religious places of worship resulting in deepening loneliness and reinforcing vulnerability.

Familismo and the weight of separation

These effects extend beyond individual well-being. Gustavo Carlo points to the concept of familismo, which reflects the central role of family in many Latino children’s lives.

“Family is the training ground for children’s development,” he said. “It provides not just support, but shapes their sense of self and their sense of obligation to one another.”

These values can foster resilience, encouraging individuals to support one another even in the face of adversity. At the same time, they can heighten the emotional toll of separation, as disruptions to family unity strain entire support systems. This tension between resilience and strain defines many families’ experiences.

Carlo also emphasizes that these challenges do not define outcomes for all families.

“In spite of trauma and tremendous barriers, some individuals are able to overcome these risks,” he said. “There’s always the possibility not only to cope, but to contribute in positive ways, to support family members, strengthen communities, and advocate for future generations.”

In many immigrant communities facing the constant threat of deportation, separation is not an abstract possibility. It is a shared reality, an ongoing condition that shapes how families think about safety, belonging, and the future.

Supporting families and imagining humane enforcement

Despite the challenges of separation, Latino families and community organizations are finding ways to reduce harm and build resilience.

Legal aid, know‑your‑rights workshops, and case management help families stay together and access healthcare, education, and housing, while peer groups, faith communities, and culturally grounded mental health services provide emotional support and reduce isolation.

Inside the home, families are also developing strategies to navigate the possibility of separation. A recent study by Mahsa Rafieifar and Hui Huang examines how undocumented parents talk with their children about legal status and the risk of family separation. The researchers found that these conversations are often carefully planned and emotionally complex, with parents weighing how much to disclose and how to protect their children from fear.

Some parents frame these discussions through stories of migration, explaining why they came to the United States and emphasizing hope and opportunity. Others make deliberate efforts to avoid being perceived as “lawbreakers” by reassuring their children that their actions are rooted in care for the family’s future. In many cases, conversations about legal status are intertwined with discussions about long-term goals, helping children make sense of uncertainty within a broader narrative of sacrifice and aspiration.

Some of the most difficult conversations center on contingency planning, particularly the possibility that a child may need to live with another caregiver. The study finds that while some parents identify trusted guardians and prepare their children for that possibility, others avoid the topic altogether, reflecting the emotional weight and uncertainty surrounding these decisions.

These strategies highlight the quiet, often invisible work families do to maintain stability under conditions of chronic risk. They also underscore the limits of what families can manage on their own.

At the community level, organizations like Freedom for Immigrants and UnidosUS advocate for policies that prioritize family unity, reduce deportations, and invest in community services rather than detention. Advocates and service providers increasingly emphasize that reducing harm requires not only individual coping strategies, but systemic change.

How communities can buffer the effects

What would it take to ease the toll of family separation for families and the communities where it has become part of everyday life?

Researchers and practitioners point to a growing body of evidence showing that community-based support and policy changes can meaningfully buffer the effects of immigration enforcement on children and families.

Studies in public health and social work have found that access to stable legal representation, community health services, and school-based support systems can reduce psychological distress and improve long-term outcomes for children in mixed-status families. Programs that provide universal legal representation, for example, are associated with higher case success rates and greater family stability, allowing parents to remain with their children and maintain access to work, housing, and care.

Mental health researchers also emphasize the importance of culturally responsive, family-centered care. Interventions that include peer support, trauma-informed therapy, and community-based counseling have been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression among children experiencing immigration-related stress. These approaches work in part because they rebuild trust and social connection, two factors that are often eroded in enforcement-heavy environments.

At the policy level, scholars argue that shifting away from detention-based systems is key. Community-based alternatives to detention, such as case-management programs, have been found to support high rates of compliance with immigration proceedings while allowing families to remain together. Limiting prolonged confinement and reducing the use of enforcement in sensitive spaces like schools and hospitals can also help restore a sense of safety in the institutions families rely on most.

Advocates, including organizations like Freedom for Immigrants and UnidosUS, argue that humane enforcement must center family unity and child well-being. That includes investments not only in legal systems but also in education, healthcare, and economic opportunity, factors that shape whether families can remain stable in the face of uncertainty.

Research suggests that the harms of separation are not inevitable. They are shaped and can be reduced by the systems surrounding families. With the right support in place, communities can buffer the effects of enforcement, protect children’s development, and create conditions in which families are able not only to endure but to thrive.

These policies could help make life better for all Americans. Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young emphasizes that immigration policy does not just affect immigrants.

“Even before 2025, in multiple studies I found that in states with many anti-immigrant policies, the health of U.S.-born citizens—regardless of whether they are white, Black, Latino, or Asian—is worse,” she says. “We need to understand that immigration policy is not just about immigrants; it reflects choices about how we treat people in society. Choosing to be anti-immigrant has implications for the well-being of everyone.”

What is character education? The definition varies from place to place, shaped by history and culture, and can be integrated into curricula in many different ways, as we will discuss. Moreover, there’s tension in many countries between traditionalist and progressive education approaches.

Traditionalist viewpoints see character as being rooted in a culture’s history, customs, and practices, often based on passed-down authority and group norms. Traditional approaches to character education emphasize identifying specific virtues through a moral storytelling framework.

Those coming from a progressive standpoint view character as a civic and political obligation—and it may even ask students to question cultural standards and received wisdom. For progressives, there is a stronger focus on a democratic process that encourages exploring which morals feel most relevant to the student, often through discussion.

There may not be a single model to replicate, but our interviews with educators in many countries reveal key insights about how character education is shaped and taught. It can be understood as a return to one of education’s original purposes—and for many, character education responds to the reality that many teachers have been reduced to only teaching content, when their deeper vocation is to form people.

The educators we interviewed shared the core need for an integrated approach that orients students toward “something that’s larger than ourselves,” says Cheryl Maurana, provost and founding director of the Kern National Network for Flourishing in Health. What’s often missing is not the values themselves, but the structures that allow them to be practiced and shared at school.

These differing approaches offer educators the opportunity to learn from one another, discover commonalities, and implement these practices in their own culturally responsive ways.

Character takes root when it’s woven into everyday learning

In Singapore, this type of education is referred to as character and citizenship education, standing at the intersection of Eastern and Western traditions. It is understood that these teachings are integral to the holistic development of students and they are included in the national classroom curriculum.

Ng May Gay is a research fellow at the Singapore Centre of Character and Citizenship Education who works on establishing the theoretical and philosophical foundations of character and citizenship education through education research. She stresses the importance of having parents who support discussion about character and its growth.

May explains that they have adopted an integrated approach to address students’ development of values, character, social-emotional well-being, and citizenship dispositions. From this framework, flourishing is not just about individual success or subject well-being, but also valuing the importance of social harmony, collective responsibility, and the common good.

“Singapore affirms personal aspirations and excellence, but at the same time we are also a communitarian society,” Gay says. “As [students] grow in character and competence, they remain grounded in belonging and responsibility to the community.”

By placing greater emphasis on including educators, students, and their families in ongoing conversations about values and growth, character education in Singapore becomes deeply interwoven with teaching and learning itself.

This holistic approach to character education intentionally builds reflection into every lesson and experience, with students being prompted to think about who they are becoming, how they relate to others, and the choices they make. This offers a framework that can work in classrooms around the world.

“I really feel very strongly that this form of assessment actually will create a meaningful shift in the teaching and learning by moving from an outcome-driven to a process-oriented approach,” Gay says. “It really positions assessment as being ongoing, collaborative, reflective, and I feel that this is essential for nurturing responsible, reflective citizens.”

Verónica Fernández Espinosa is a professor at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria and director of the Virtues and Values Education Centre. She explains that in Spain character education is rarely named explicitly in policy as a standalone field—but it still tends to be embedded within a competency-based curriculum. Specifically, in areas such as citizenship, school climate and relationships, well-being, tutoring, and digital competence.

“From my research perspective, this creates an important reality: Character is present in intentions, but it is often diffused in implementation and can be reduced to ‘values talk’ or civic content unless schools adopt an intentional whole-school approach,” Fernández Espinosa says.

In this way, character education is not just a missing element, but the thread needed to hold the learning experience together.

Character can be formed through cultural and spiritual traditions

Maneeza Dawood, a research scientist and program specialist at Stanford SPARQ and research director of Muraqaba Education, explains that Islam sees character as inherent in our nature—the concept of fitrah. Dawood says:

It comes from a space of abundance rather than deficit, with the goal of character development to refine what already exists in our nature. In contrast, a lot of contemporary character education tends to focus on the deficit and correction side. Starting from that place of abundance rather than deficit could really change the way character education is approached in schools today.

From an Islamic perspective, concepts like patience, gratitude, and jihad al‑nafs—the battle against one’s lower self or ego—are not just “nice traits” but religious duties that help build a relationship with God and promote moral accountability. This tradition of moral formation and ethical behavior is framed as part of worship, naturally infusing character education into daily life. 

In many African countries, according to research, the idea of Ubuntu plays a key role in character development. One researcher writes that Ubuntu “defines the individual in terms of humanity or interdependency with others…and leads to the expression of certain virtues, namely those of hospitality, friendliness, caring, and sharing or compassion and generosity, openness or accessibility to others, sympathy and empathy.”

Peter Kingori is the director for character education programs at the Center for Character and Leadership in Nairobi, Kenya. He explains that in their programming, they emphasize Ubuntu and discussion about love.

“In Africa you have to talk about love,” Kingori says. “Love goes beyond boundaries—boundaries of tribes, boundaries of race, boundaries of ethnicity, and trying to embrace each other as brothers and sisters.”

Rather than working alone and driving the element of individualism and selfishness, this manifests in encouraging students and educators to raise their consciousness beyond self-interest and focus on what can bring people together. Kingori says:

How can they build relationships—the relationships between the teacher and the principal, the school and the community, the teachers and our teaching staff, and, of course, the teacher and the learner. How can they be mentored? How can they be guided? How can they be connected with each other? We always say that a problem shared is a problem half-solved.

Students need agency to internalize values

The drive to ensure that students are able to form core values as part of their own desire to maintain a sense of self is often the topic of discussion when it comes to character education. It raises the question: How do educators ensure that students feel an innate sense of self when it comes to their values and their morals—and not as another requirement or box to check off?

Verónica Perez Mendoza, director of the Dandelion Center for Character and Leadership in Argentina, aspires to transform education and promote a culture of virtues that fosters human flourishing. She emphasizes the importance of surrounding students with meaningful role models and creating environments where they can reflect and grow alongside each other.

Central to her approach is giving students greater autonomy by inviting them to reflect on why they act the way they do so that virtues become internalized as part of their identity.

“It empowers students in a way, because it’s telling them—what you do matters,” Perez Mendoza says. “Who you choose to become, and who you choose to be really matters. Not only does it matter to society, but also it matters for your own happiness.”

This presents special challenges in highly individualistic societies like the United States. Maurana points to polarization and widespread disconnection as signs of a system that has prioritized productivity over the human qualities that sustain individuals and communities. Those cultural forces can make it challenging for students to share and internalize positive values.

“We’re in a period of profound uncertainty and strain,” says Maurana, “But that’s where you really need to have your own inner set of strengths. If you don’t want to be told what to do, you’ve got to have some core value that you’re part of a greater good.”

Even in deeply individualistic societies, she argues, people still seek meaning, contribution, and belonging. Internalization begins when we are able to connect our personal goals to a shared purpose, whether that’s a belief in community, democracy, or even hoping that our contributions benefit future generations.

When dealing with societies that have this engrained individualistic nature, it’s important for educators to highlight that they are not encouraging students to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others, but rather that their flourishing is bound up in the flourishing of others.

Character education is not a new idea, but the urgency surrounding it is. As educators around the world grapple with systems that have overemphasized outcomes at the expense of human development, the question is no longer whether character belongs in education, but how it can be meaningfully and sustainably embedded.

Horrified, the woman worries the dog will jump on them and that they will judge her for breaking the rules. To her surprise, the group is not upset at all. Instead, they smile and say, “Thank you for letting us share in your dog’s joy.” If you imagine yourself in this situation, what would you notice first: the joy of the dog or the violation of the rules?

That’s an anecdote shared in Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity, by Cas Holman. This kind of story raises an important question about the lenses adults use to navigate the world. Our daily experience is shaped by what we look for: If we remain open to joy and lightness, we are more likely to see them. But if we have lost the ability to embrace playfulness, we may instead become preoccupied with fear, judgment, and self-criticism.

Holman, a toy designer, educator, and “play expert,” suggests that embracing play can act as a metaphorical filter that helps adults see the world more positively. She argues that rediscovering play allows us to reconnect with our authentic selves and navigate adulthood with greater freedom and happiness. In her words, “play is a necessary nutrient for us to survive well and not be toxic to one another.” Adults can reclaim a sense of “free play” by following three key steps: embracing possibility, releasing judgment, and reframing success.

Her book makes the case that cultivating playfulness has meaningful emotional, social, and developmental implications for individuals of all ages, despite popular belief.

How adulthood pushes play away

Holman begins by describing why adults need play. As we grow older, we become goal-driven and efficiency-oriented to the point that “we run past the roses.” Obligations related to career, family, and achievement often make adults overly self-critical and preoccupied with failure.

Yet Holman argues that play is a primal instinct, as fundamental as fear or desire. Children naturally engage in play in ways that reflect their personalities and preferences. From a developmental standpoint, play supports creativity, curiosity, and learning; these are qualities that adults also need but tend to suppress.

She also notes that a lack of play can have profound consequences. Holman references the case of Charles Whitman, the mass murderer at the University of Texas, Austin, whose childhood was notably devoid of free play. While not suggesting play alone prevents harm, she highlights how environments without play can contribute to emotional disconnection.

Conversely, play often serves as a therapeutic tool in moments of fear and trauma. After 9/11, for instance, therapists encouraged children to use toys, such as planes and buildings, to process their anxieties. Similarly, children with cancer often respond better to treatment when laughter and play are integrated into their care.

Despite these benefits, adults gradually shift away from play. Holman explains the tension between the “play voice” and the “adult voice,” noting that during adolescence and emerging adulthood, we become increasingly conscious of how our behavior is perceived. By adulthood, opportunities for free play are severely limited.

Certain forms of structured play, such as video games, drinking, sex, and sports, persist into adulthood, but Holman argues that these do not fully capture the exploratory nature of free play. Rules and social expectations introduce pressure rather than freedom. To counter this, she proposes different styles of adult play: problem-solving play, like escape rooms, embodied play, like dancing, and misbehavior play, like harmless pranks. She emphasizes that adults often have more room for play than they realize.

How adults can reclaim play

In the second half of the book, Holman explains how adults can cultivate what she calls the “playful mindset.”

The first step, she argues, is to embrace possibility. That involves choosing to engage in play and lightness, even when others may not. It requires stepping back from rigid thinking and allowing space for abstraction, unfamiliarity, and rediscovery. When we open ourselves to new experiences, we regain access to the parts of ourselves shaped by curiosity.

The next step, releasing judgment, is equally important. Adults often worry about whether they are playing the “right” way, but Holman emphasizes that there is no correct way to play. Children form identity through exploration, and the same is true for adults. Holman’s toy “rigamajig,” a “glorified pile of construction debris” that can be assembled in infinite ways, illustrates how freedom from boundaries encourages creativity. Releasing judgment also includes questioning social norms, creating before critiquing, and flattening hierarchies that limit autonomy.

The final step, reframing success, involves shifting from a fear-of-failure mindset to one centered on learning. Holman discusses Anji Play, an educational approach from China that encourages children to explore, take risks, and reflect on their learning rather than their performance. Adults, too, often value perfection over curiosity. Holman encourages embracing failure as part of the creative process, citing Thomas Edison’s remark that he simply discovered “10,000 ways it doesn’t work” on the path to inventing the lightbulb.

In Playful, Holman encourages adults to re-engage with their inner “play voice” and to reconnect with the joy, exploration, and imagination of childhood. She argues that “play can encompass and amplify all the things that make us human: our sense of self and identity, our ability to connect and collaborate, and the complexity of our beings, environment, society, and world.” Ultimately, her work suggests that playfulness is not merely enjoyable, it is essential for well-being, growth, and meaningful connection in adulthood.

The realization that dating can be a valuable activity in and of itself, rather than a zero-sum game where a “bad” date means a waste of time, led me to become a dating coach in 2020. I became a different kind of dating coach. Not one who says, “let’s figure out how to manipulate someone into wanting you,” but rather someone who cheers you into viewing every single dating interaction as an opportunity for empowerment. And fun, too, because that’s an essential part of dating successfully. If the goal is to create a fun and fulfilling relationship with another human, the process should reflect it!

But in a world where humans often treat each other as objects of entertainment, disposable ego-boosts, or “needs-fulfilling machines,” what does it actually look like to date with integrity and meaning? Are there steps and principles for creating a hopeful paradigm of dating? Taking things a step further—can dating be used for the greater good?

As a scholar and a coach, the most satisfying thing in the world (at least, to my brain) is to create frameworks that bridge theory with practice. To take big problems, and to be able to say, “I’ve got a framework for that.”

Enter my framework: The six pillars of mindful dating.

In this context, mindful refers to one’s commitment to awareness and integrity, versus the outdated rulebooks, automatic responses, and bad behaviors that often prevail in the dating sphere.

Practicing mindful dating is about letting go of old scripts around love, seduction, and roles, and instead, using the entire process of dating—online and offline—as a playground for developing the authentic presence and relational skills you need to love well in each moment.

Mindful dating actually lays the ground for relationships that are based on truth rather than performance, and true intimacy rather than transactionality. It is particularly resonant for people who practice mindfulness elsewhere in their lives—but might feel at a loss when it comes to dating with integrity rather than self-abandonment.

Deep visioning: owning your WHY

Hiroko came into my virtual office declaring she was ready to get married. She wanted to find her person, and to live the dream of a wedded life—yesterday. She had decided to recruit a dating coach to help her locate her future husband.

Her dating life had been a self-proclaimed disaster so far. She went on many dates, but they never progressed into any kind of commitment. I started asking questions about her deeper motivations: “Why do you want to get married?” Hiroko responded emphatically, “Because it’s that time of life! All my friends are getting married, and I want it too. The wedding, the dress, the Instagram pictures… It seems like the right thing to do. I’m 30 years old!” I further inquired: “What kind of relationship would you like to have? How do you feel about living with someone under the same roof and sharing the mundane parts of daily life?”

The response was illuminating. She expressed that she was dreading the daily realities of partnered life. Part of her was afraid of feeling stuck with the same person, of entering a “boring, sedate life.” She also wanted a life of inspiration, the freedom to focus on her art, and the freedom, potentially, to have more than one partner. At the same time, she craved the social advantages of traditional marriage.

Hiroko wanted two things at once: the social approval, validation, and status that would come with marriage as a major marker of “success” at her stage of life. Another part of her wanted to retain her autonomy, be free, and live alone.

The first step in developing a mindful dating approach with Hiroko was to come to terms with what she wanted from a deeper place—and getting clear on her personal and relational values. After a few sessions, she owned a deeper truth: she wanted the perks of marriage, but not the reality of it. She would redirect her dating efforts towards finding romantic partners with whom she could embody her values of freedom and independence, rather than attempting to fit herself into the traditional mold.

Owning our truest WHY for dating is the first step in creating an aligned dating life. If you are dating on auto-pilot and feeling disappointing results, ask yourself: Why am I dating? What does love and intimacy really mean to me in the spectrum of my life’s purpose? What am I hoping to experience? What are my socially conditioned values, versus my chosen values? Would dating with more integrity require disrupting a social script, and if so, am I willing to do so?

There are no right or wrong answers here, but a sincere inquiry into these questions leads to deeper intentionality with dating, and more aligned results.

Cultivating an empowered self-concept

A big part of dating, online and offline, is deciding how to communicate about oneself. Research shows that how we conceptualize ourselves, and particularly, with what degree of clarity, directly impacts our chances of selecting a compatible mate. Two retrospective studies by McGill University graduate students in experimental psychology found that people with lower self-concept clarity experienced more challenges making dating decisions and were more likely to date incompatible people.

Of course, what we believe about ourselves is going to deeply influence our communication. Many of us have learned to conceal our tender and vulnerable sides in order to be accepted by others, so we show up on the dating scene hiding our true selves. While that’s completely understandable, too much hiding means that no one can truly see you—making it nearly impossible to generate vibrant emotional intimacy.

Mindful dating is an opportunity to practice empowered self-expression, beginning with adopting an empowered self-narrative.

For example, one of my dating coaching clients was an exceptionally funny, bubbly, and spiritually engaged gay man who practiced meditation regularly. When I initially looked at his dating profile, I was shocked to see overly generic statements. It read something like this:

“I’m an accountant, financially stable. I like walks on the beach and travel, and I’m looking for a long-term relationship.”

Also, he was wearing sunglasses in all his pictures—making it impossible to see the brilliant spark in his eyes. When I pointed out he seemed to be hiding his true self from potential suitors, he revealed that he had repeatedly been rejected and mocked for his spirituality and humor—both by his family of origin and by previous partners. He realized that he was now preventing folks who would honor and adore these qualities in him from finding and recognizing him. He then courageously took steps to show the broader range of his true self—adding clear photos of him meditating, being goofy, and reading books, and disclosing his wide array of interests and passions within the profile. Almost instantly, the quality of matches and connections he experienced on the app started to rise!

Learning to embrace and express an empowered self-concept is not arrogance. It’s about leading with your gifts—and what Ken Page would call core gifts in his book, Deeper Dating. According to Page, core gifts are those precious parts of us that we often learn to repress during childhood, to make people around us comfortable—for example, our thirst for love, our sensitivity, our empathy, or our exuberance—but these are the parts that constitute our deepest spark, and are foundational to our ability to experience true intimacy.

Removing the veil from one’s wholesome expression is a healing journey that begins with self-reclamation, and leads to much more compatible dates. Sharing one’s gifts in dating can be vulnerable, but it can be a definitive movement away from old patterns of self-repression, and towards a commitment to authenticity.

Developing an authentic dating strategy

The third pillar is all about action! As you clarify your dating why and develop an empowered self-concept and narrative, the next question becomes: How do I integrate dating into my life in a way that is congruent with my values, interests, and lifestyle?

Forgive the financial analogy—but my recommendation is to develop an aligned dating portfolio. This is about selecting an assortment of ways you can meet new people, so that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket (just like stocks!)

This will most likely include online and offline components.

For example, one of my dating coaching clients decided to attend two in-person events per week, prioritizing dating events—and to use a dating app for 10 minutes per day. He also reached out to his community to ask for introductions to single friends they would vouch for and match his criteria. That way, he would avoid focusing entirely on online dating, and would try out different events where he could also meet new people locally—art openings, volunteer days, dinner clubs, hiking meetups, and singles’ nights. He would use this time not only to scan the room for possible love interests (although that was definitely part of it), he also utilized these opportunities to practice communication skills like asking powerful questions and listening more deeply.

As you might guess, this client built a rich social life and met lots of single women, with common interests, both online and offline. By not over-relying on dating apps, he kept dating fun, vibrant, and alive.

Practicing mindful swiping

I get it: Online dating can feel soul-sucking and dehumanizing. Algorithms gamify dating and make us feel as if we are products on a shelf, rather than whole, complex human beings with intrinsic values. Psychology researchers have even coined a word for this transactional mentality: Relationshopping. Adding the prevalence of dating app burnout to the mix, it is fair to say that dating technologies have an uncanny ability to throw us into swirls of negativity and powerlessness.

That said, most couples do meet online nowadays—and, remarkably, some research shows that relationships originating from online dating are more successful than those that started offline. In a nationally representative sample of 19,131 respondents, the late social psychologist John T. Cacioppo and colleagues found that marriages that began online were slightly less likely to result in a breakup, and reported slightly higher marital satisfaction than their offline counterparts. Perhaps a reason to not ditch dating apps just yet?

I argue that it is crucial to develop a mindful approach to social technologies—and this pillar can help you do just that. Even if you do not select online dating as part of your “dating portfolio,” you may use the principles of mindful swiping to bring mindfulness and digital hygiene into any technology use, particularly social media.

Mindful Swiping is a framework to help us use online dating as a mindfulness practice. I have created an entire workshop and blog on this, but here are the Cliffs notes.

Ritualize your use of the apps. Stop swiping “mindlessly” (dopamine-seeking, addiction-like, or angry swiping)—and create a ritual time and space around your use of the apps. I recommend turning off notifications, so that you are in charge of when and where you swipe. Every time you use the apps (and I suggest no more than 15 minutes per day), breathe deeply; be aware of your somatic state and physical posture, and reconnect with your intentions.

Creating an authentic and empowered profile. Your profile is your canvas! Use the process of profile creation as an act of genuine and truthful self-expression. Pick photos that feel like the real you, and tell a visual story. In the writeup, communicate unique qualities, interests, and values that convey the breadth and range of who you are.

Practice discernment while swiping. When swiping, use your rational mind AND your embodied intuition. What types of emotions, character, and values do they convey? Do these align with yours? Observe yourself and why you tend to swipe right or left. Remind yourself what you’re looking for.

Practice loving-kindness. Online dating is an opportunity to practice loving-kindness—a Buddhist meditation focused on sending goodwill to oneself and to others. It can rehumanize online dating by helping us remember there is a three-dimensional human on the other side of the app—a soul, a heart, a body that’s longing to be loved, just like you.

Communicating to connect

Communication in early dating can be tricky. When a connection is new, it is naturally precarious, and ripe for misunderstandings. The fact that most people rely on texting to connect with new love interests means the non-verbal elements of early interactions easily get lost. That’s why learning to communicate with clarity, authenticity, and deep curiosity is one of the most crucial skills in developing trust and intimacy.

Before you can communicate truthfully, you have to discern what it is you really feel, want, and need—not imagining and complying with what other people expect you to say. In psychological terms, that ability is called differentiation of self: It is at the core of having a sense of agency and empowerment, and is vital to building healthy partnerships and relationships of all kinds.

Once you identify your needs and feelings, you must gather the courage to express them directly (and kindly, of course). Stating your real desires means you might hear “no” for an answer, which can be terrifying. Many people do not communicate clearly because they are sensitive to rejection. On the other hand, hearing “yes” might be just as terrifying—but oh, so exciting!—because that means actual intimacy, and being seen in your truth, is within reach.

In any case, communicating with clarity is an act of kindness—to yourself, and to the other. It is a crucial part of laying a path for success no matter the outcome!

Navigating challenging emotions and integrating learning

Dating has a way of bringing up challenging emotions: Rejection, comparison, loneliness, shame, disappointment, envy, jealousy, judgment, anger, hopelessness. There is no way to completely avoid challenging feelings while keeping one’s heart open.

However, what we can do is change our relationship to those feelings. We can learn to embrace these emotions, and utilize them to grow, learn, and transform, rather than hide away and judge ourselves. In Buddhism, there is the idea that life unavoidably brings pain, in the form of loss, disappointment, or other challenging experiences: That’s the first arrow. But when we judge and condemn ourselves for feeling these emotions, that is the second arrow—the suffering we inflict upon ourselves. The first arrow is inevitable; but the second is optional.

In dating, we cannot avoid challenging emotions altogether—but we can be kind and compassionate to ourselves, and learn to become better friends with ourselves while doing it.

I always invite my clients and workshop attendees to practice positive defiance. That means choosing to keep an open heart and to practice love, kindness, and self-compassion in the face of emotional challenges and negative self-talk. It’s choosing to approach life from a lens of acceptance, growth, and liberation—rather than constantly evaluating whether we got the short or long end of the stick.

What truly supports folks in that realm is to create a love-filled life with abundant friendships, community, activities, mutual care, and passions. When one is engaged with love, generosity, and kindness on a daily basis, romantic disappointments still hurt—but they take a much softer landing, and do not feel like existential loss.

In sum, dating doesn’t have to feel like a means to an end: It can literally become an art form when you leave the old beliefs and patterns behind, and learn to act from a deeper source of self-expression, authenticity, and self-love.

Despite seeing how delightful and even life-changing talking to strangers can be, it isn’t something I readily do myself. Sure, I’ll smile and say hello or thank someone who helps me. And I’ll offer assistance to strangers needing help, like giving directions or picking up a spilled grocery bag. But am I eager to just converse regularly with strangers? Not really.

According to researcher Gillian Sandstrom, my hesitancy means I’m missing out on something important. In her new book, Once Upon a Stranger, she explains why talking to strangers is both good for our own well-being and helpful for society at large. The book offers ample stories of how talking to strangers can provide surprising gifts—even for introverts—with the science to back up those claims.

I spoke to her about her book and why she is such an advocate of stranger-to-stranger interactions. Here is an edited version of our conversation.

Jill Suttie: Why should we try to talk to strangers—let’s say, in comparison to other, closer people in our lives? What are the benefits of doing that?

Gillian Sandstrom: The first benefit that we’ve found consistently is just that it puts you in a good mood. When you talk to a stranger, you usually walk away feeling a bit happier and more connected, which we know is so important for humans.

Another thing from the research is that we tend to learn more than we expect to when we talk to strangers. It brings novelty into our life, makes our life richer. There’s research about how well-being can arise from not only happiness, purpose, and meaning, but this third source: psychological richness. I think talking to strangers gives you richness, because it brings novelty and learning and those kinds of things into your life.

Obviously, interactions with close others are special and important and give us all sorts of things that maybe we can’t get from some of these more minimal social interactions. But having a diverse array of conversation partners is important for well-being, as well. There’s research showing that interacting with a diversity of social partners is a good thing and associated with greater life satisfaction; it’s not just about how many social interactions we have.

We also know that weak ties—for example, acquaintances—give us access to a wider range of information. Strangers can do that, too, because weak ties and strangers are not as similar to us; they know things that the people we’re close to don’t know.

JS: Does talking to strangers have any social benefits, beyond the personal?

GS: I’ve been working recently with Taylor West and Barbara Fredrickson, and we’ve been looking at the societal benefits of talking to strangers—like how they widen your perspective. We’re starting to find that spending time and having deeper conversations with close others doesn’t make any changes in this respect. But talking to strangers regularly for three weeks changes people’s sense of intellectual humility and makes them more open to hearing alternative perspectives.

I did some work during COVID and found that, after people had just a single conversation online with a stranger, they reported feeling a greater sense of trust in other people.

In my personal experience, these tiny interactions are often nothing special, although some of them are really great. But they add up, they accumulate, and I can walk through the world and see it differently. I feel safer, more trusting, like the world is a better place.

JS: What are some of the misconceptions about connecting with strangers that keep people from doing it more?

GS: I think our biggest worry is that people don’t want to talk to us, that we could be rejected. We’ll reach out, we’ll say something, and people will just ignore us or shut us down. But, according to the research, that just doesn’t happen very often. And, even when it does happen, it probably doesn’t feel as bad as we think it will.

We also worry that we don’t know what we’re doing. Many of us walk around with a voice in our head saying, You’re no good at this. People don’t like you. We worry about talking to strangers because we feel like we don’t know what to say. Maybe we’ll have awkward silences and it’s going to go horribly wrong. But the research finds that, actually, these things we worry about don’t tend to happen. We enjoy it more than we think, and people like us more than we think.

JS: These days, many interactions with other people are happening online—especially with the younger generations. I wonder if that prevents us from feeling comfortable reaching out to strangers in person and how that affects us.

GS: I think we have fewer opportunities to talk to strangers, because we’re working at home and we can buy everything online. We’ve designed out a lot of those interactions that normally would’ve just happened, that we couldn’t really avoid. But with technology, we can choose to avoid lots of interactions, right? That means we have a lot less practice connecting with strangers.

I’m an introvert. I have not been doing this my whole life. I saw my dad doing it, and I thought he had special skills that I didn’t have and would never have. Then, in a roundabout way over many years, I’ve become a bit like my dad. That makes me think it’s not necessarily something we’re born with. It’s a skill that we can develop.

I’ve seen this in my research, too. In a study that I ran with Erica Boothby and Gus Cooney, we got people to talk to strangers every day for a week. We saw that, gradually, day by day, people were becoming less worried about rejection and feeling a bit more confident about their skills. So, it does seem like practice makes progress.

But if we’re not getting any practice, that’s a big problem. And how that plays out long-term is scary to me. How do you go on a date if you don’t know how to talk to a stranger? How much more intimidating will it be to attend a job interview? There are so many things that are going to be harder if people are uncomfortable talking to each other.

JS: Aren’t there situations where you should be cautious about reaching out to strangers or where you might feel like you shouldn’t push it because they’re closing down?

GS: Everybody’s heard the term “stranger danger,” so I don’t recommend doing it in situations where you don’t feel safe. The kind of thing that I’m talking about is done in a public place when there’s other people around.

But sometimes the conversations that have turned out the best for me have been with people who don’t look receptive. One of my favorites stories was from when I was on the tube in London, kind of buzzing, because it had been an exciting morning for me. So, I said something to the woman sitting next to me, “How’s your morning going?” And she was polite and said, “Fine, thank you.” And I thought, That’s it. She doesn’t want to talk.

But then, after a pause, she turned to me and asked, “How’s your morning going?” And I said, “Well, actually, this exciting thing has happened. I was on the radio.” And, because I opened up to her, she opened up to me and told me that she had just found out that she was pregnant and was heading back to work.

I imagined she was going to the office and not planning to tell anyone, because you usually wait to make sure everything’s OK with a pregnancy first. But she could tell me because I don’t know her, and she’s never going to see me again. It was a really moving thing to be able to share that moment with her and, hopefully, help her celebrate it.

JS: You’ve found that it’s helpful for people to just start talking to strangers repeatedly to realize how good it can feel. But, for those who are hesitant to jump in, your book has a section with tips on how to get started. Can you share some of your tips?

GS: This came from combing through a list of hundreds of conversations that I’ve had with strangers that I started collecting and putting out on social media, just to show people how easy it is and how many opportunities there are. I came up with three themes for starting a conversation, which add up to an acronym, QUICK.

The QU stands for “QUestions.” The single most common question I’ve used is, “Whatcha doing?” For example, I saw a man who looked like he was taking a picture of a fence, and I asked, “Whatcha doing?” I saw a group of people in a park huddled over a piece of equipment they were fiddling with and asked, “Whatcha doing?” Coming from a place of curiosity, right?

But you could see someone with binoculars and ask, “What are you hoping to see today?” Or ask someone if there’s a story behind their tattoo. There are all sorts of different questions you can ask.

The IC stands for “In Common.” It’s why we talk about the weather so much, because that’s something we have in common. Other than that, I might talk to people if I’m at the theater, asking why they chose to come to this show and what other things they’ve seen. You can bring people’s attention to your shared environment. I love dogs; so, I’ll say to a stranger, “Did you see those dogs? They’re having such a good time.”

K stands for “Kindness.” That could be giving someone a compliment, but it could also be offering someone directions or offering someone a seat or your company.

There are lots of different ways to do this and probably more opportunities than people realize. We’re just not noticing them as much as we could. One of the first studies I did was at a coffee shop. When you go in and you buy your coffee, there’s a certain amount of time that it’s going to take to prepare your order. And, during that little window, you can either just be on your phone, not paying attention, or you can have a little chat with the cashier or the barista. It makes a difference to have that little chat, and it doesn’t take any more time. You’re still waiting for that coffee one way or the other.

JS: Why do you think conversing with strangers is so important?

GS: I like to think that when you have a conversation with a stranger, you’re spreading kindness. You have the benefits to yourself, but the person you’re talking to enjoys all those same benefits. When you have a conversation, it puts you both in a better mood; it helps you both feel more connected; it helps you both feel seen. It helps us feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.

I was part of a big public science project at the University of Sussex called “The Kindness Test.” Sixty thousand people filled in our survey about the most recent time someone was kind to them, and about 10% said that their most recent act of kindness had come from a stranger. When we asked people what someone did for them, it included things like, “They stopped and had a chat,” or “They said hello,” or “They gave me a compliment,” or “They asked how I was doing.” Those little things are seen as acts of kindness. They can build this sense of trust in other people, this sense that other people are OK.

In a world that feels increasingly isolating, talking to strangers is a small thing that any of us can do to feel more connected and to put something positive out there.

I also knew that I wasn’t alone. In fact, one in four adults in their 40s and 50s are doing “sandwich generation caregiving.” By 2030, all Boomers will be over 65, and even more of us will be taking care of kids and aging parents simultaneously.

But here’s the thing—while it’s true that the time I’ve spent touring memory care facilities for my dad with dementia, driving my mom to orthopedic appointments for her knee replacement, and picking up prescriptions for them at the pharmacy (among so much else) has taken time and attention away from my kids, I honestly believe that caring for elders in this season of life has made me a better parent.

For starters, it’s made me so much less delusional and perfectionist about what I can get done in a day, which makes me a less anxious, hovering parent. Plus, it’s given my kids daily access to their grandparents, which is a win-win for everyone (if only my mom would stop letting the kids watch inappropriate SNL sketches!). 

And there are so many overlapping insights and strategies on care for both generations. Here are just a handful I’ve discovered.

1. Less words, more presence

When I first became a parent, I remember hearing that babies and toddlers should optimally hear about 20,000 words a day. I processed that factoid as gospel.

It wasn’t until I started taking care of my dad, who was suffering from advancing dementia and losing so many words every day, that I started to think in a more nuanced way about how my parenting had progressed. My eight- and 12-year-old daughters were far beyond the golden window of early childhood brain development, and while I loved talking with them both about everything under the sun, I think I was clinging to some idealistic notion of what our interactions were supposed to sound like. My 12 year old, in particular, is a more internal person; she has eruptions of sharing, almost like unpredictable geysers, but much of the time she is quieter.

As I learned to sit with my dad, watching the sunset, long minutes of silence and awe stretching easily between us, I realized that I could do the same with my kids, especially my more internal daughter. These days, we sit and make art side by side in silence or bake something in the kitchen while listening to our song, “All Too Well” (10-minute version), without much direct communication, and I know that’s not a sign that our relationship isn’t healthy or I’m not filling her brain with enough vocabulary.

I know its presence. It’s gentle. And it’s attuned. Taking care of my dad, learning how to spend more and more wordless time with him, taught me that.

2. Grace in public is holy

As my dad’s dementia advanced, it became harder and harder to know where I could take him in public. As I would check out the coffee counter, he might grab a day-old muffin and just start unwrapping it without paying for it. He had lost the circuitry that knew how to function in a capitalistic economy where everything was not up for grabs. The cashier might be horrified and I might be forced to explain what was going on. Some were kind, others acted inconvenienced.

And yes, sometimes our neurodiverse family, friends, and neighbors slow things down, surprise us, or get weird. But if I have learned anything from the way people responded to my dad in these moments, it is that there is a special place in heaven for people who have enough grace to know they can’t possibly know what’s going on with the quirky strangers they meet—whether they appear to be a three year old having a tantrum on the bus or an 83 year old stealing a muffin at the cafe.

Caring for my dad has made me want to teach and model for my kids what it looks like to be a compassionate and humble stranger, more concerned with our collective humanity than efficiency and “normal” expectations. When people “yes and…” neurodivergent people in public of any age, they are often rewarded with a delightful surprise, a laugh, a discovery, a great story. Resistance isn’t just futile and unkind, it’s boring.

3. Needing professionals isn’t a failure

When we decided to take my dad to memory care, our hearts broke a little. We really thought we could create a loving, imperfect village that would be able to handle his progressing dementia—if only we did enough pattern-keeping, communicating, and creative problem solving.

But ultimately it turned out to be too much for even our earnest and enterprising crew. My dad seemed to be suffering despite all of our best efforts. So, we found a community with a beautiful garden full of butterflies, an ethos of elder dignity, and a distinctly Buddhist feel—all of which seemed like a perfect fit for who he was. Once he was there, I learned so much from watching professional caregivers take care of him and honoring their labor with a fair wage and their wisdom with our eternal gratitude.

Family caregivers matter! And we often can’t do it alone. That’s not failure; it speaks to the magnitude of some of the diseases we face (like dementia, which neurologist Bruce Miller calls the “blackbelt of caregiving”) and the limitations of loved ones. Each professional caregiver that now works with my dad meets him as he is now, not lugging all the grief alongside like I do.

The same is true for our children when they go to daycare, school, and even sports. We need teachers, daycare providers, coaches, and others who come with their own expertise, but also who see our kids with new eyes, with more fresh energy, and with less projection.

4. Grief is inevitable

My kids were becoming themselves just as my dad was unbecoming himself—such a wild juxtaposition.

But the truth is, there has been grief in both. Of course I grieve the loss of who my dad was, the long conversations we’d have about faith and ethics, the hours we spent in dark movie theaters together watching films or hiking through the New Mexican desert. But I also grieve the tiny baby my daughter once was, who now has my shoe size and never needs me to hang her upside down to blow dry her neck so she doesn’t make breast milk cheese in her abundant folds. I will never wear my daughters in a baby carrier again, or watch them taste their first food, or take a nap where their entire body fits on my torso.

Even though my children’s trajectory is more “hopeful” than my dad’s, more additive, it is still a trajectory characterized by excitement and grief. And, weirdly, my dad’s trajectory isn’t without excitement if I look at it with enough equanimity. My dad is going to die soon—be released from this body that is no longer functioning the way he needs it to. He will be free, as free as one can get, really. I don’t know much, but I know that, and I’m excited for him.

And I will miss him forever and ever, just as I will miss my babies forever and ever. The evolution of our relationship is always both things—excitement and grief.

5. Shared awe is the whole thing

Some of my favorite recent memories with my dad have been moments when he was mystified by the natural world. We’d be walking around our neighborhood and he would point at a random tree and say, “I have no idea how this got here!” I would laugh, but then think, “Well, I don’t either. I mean I know it was a seed, but I don’t know who planted it. Was it intentional? How long ago was that? What kind of tree is it? How big is it now?”

When you see the world through dementia-colored eyes, there’s a season—at least there was for my dad—when its awe is more available. One time my dad looked out at a wildly bright sunset, streaked with orange and pink and black, and said, “Who did this?” Again, I chuckled, but then realized, that was the right question to be asking. Indeed, Dad, who? It was an extension of the conversations about sacred mysteries that he and I had been having my whole life, but in a less academic or cynical form.

These moments all reminded me of similar exchanges I’ve had with my daughters over the years. There is nothing more delightful than a slow walk with a toddler, who is noticing every little thing along the way and trying to fit it into her rapidly expanding schemas. Even more recently, my kids sometimes take my breath away with a random comment, like a recent car ride home from Target when my nine year old told me matter of factly about her religion, in which there are three gods—one male, one female, and one non-binary. Each has a role each day—one controls her body, one controls her language, and one makes sure the other two are making good choices. There is no boss. They switch roles every day, but one of them always makes sure the other two are making good decisions. Talk about check and balances!

The truth is that all of these lessons are really about reverence for how much is inside of those we care about, and how much it just keeps changing. The more we can evolve with them, not try to pin them down with words and egos and expectations, the more we can all enjoy the heartbreaking, heartbursting co-created adventure of it all.

In fact, when word got around that I was researching humility, I suspect more than a few choked on their coffee. 

And even though I have spent over a decade exploring the concept as an attribute and as a practice, it wasn’t until I recently reflected on my own professional challenges that I truly understood how to embrace humility.

I want to share my journey, but first it is important to understand what humility is—and isn’t. It’s been extolled as a virtue for centuries, but it’s often mischaracterized.

In today’s culture, it can be mistaken as a humblebrag, which disguises a boast as modesty—for example, “I really hate talking about myself, but people keep asking how I managed to run a marathon while working full-time.” Or it can resemble impostor phenomenon, the persistent experience of feeling intellectually or professionally fraudulent despite clear evidence of competence or success.

But research finds that humble people hold accurate views of their own abilities and achievements. They openly acknowledge their mistakes and limitations, and are receptive to new ideas. Overall, they recognize their places within a larger whole and genuinely appreciate the value of others.

Humility doesn’t always earn praise. Sometimes the humble may be seen as meek, subservient, or self-abasing.

For instance, many people praised former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s empathetic, self-effacing leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an openness and deference to experts. But some critics dismissed it as weak or soft. These negative views show the various ways people “see” humility.

Generally, though, when humility is understood as grounded self-awareness rather than self-erasure, it’s viewed as something worth cultivating and practicing. We see openness, curiosity, acknowledgment of others, and a lack of ego in fictional characters like Ted Lasso, hero of the same-titled Apple TV series; Samwise Gamgee in the Lord of the Rings books; and Jean-Luc Picard, commander of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Humility is also evident in public figures, such as former President Jimmy Carter, children’s television host Fred Rogers, and Nelson Mandela, the Black nationalist who served as the first Black president of South Africa. 

I’m a sociologist with a focus on medical education and health care providers. At Arizona State University’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, I explore issues including causes of burnout, elements of team-based care, and opportunities for emphasizing the human side of health care. In recent years, my work has focused on humility.

From my research and my own experience, I’ve learned that true humility isn’t self-erasure. It’s a sense of security and confidence that your value doesn’t depend on recognition and that you are just one member of a larger system with a multitude of contributors. By removing the need to dominate, humility fosters openness to collaboration, innovation, and an awareness of how the systems around us work.

Still, in a world of Instagram likes and LinkedIn accolades, humility can be the virtue everyone seems to admire but few practice. It’s the one we say we want—until it requires us to confront the parts of ourselves that crave affirmation.

Climbing the professional ladder

I tend to stand out in a crowd. I’m 6-foot-4, with close-cropped hair, a heavy beard, and tattoos. I also push myself to stand out professionally.

Starting in graduate school, I was determined to make my voice heard and sought after. I pursued nearly every opportunity, committee, and position that came my way. No role was too small for me to accept.

I strived to present my work in top-tier journals and at conferences, and I cold-called prominent scholars to propose working together. And I constantly shared my findings and thoughts on social media.

Like many workplaces, the academic world has a set of defined success metrics, such as publications, citations of your work, grant funding, and teaching evaluations from students. School culture and leadership influence what each college or university considers more or less valuable among those measures. To advance and get promoted, particularly to get tenure, it’s important to learn at an early stage what one’s department, college, or university truly prioritizes.

I wanted to get tenure but also to be seen as an active citizen of academia—energetic, outspoken, and unafraid to push boundaries. When my department chair described me as having my hair on fire, I took it as a compliment. I called it “making positive noise.”

Initially, the system rewarded that noise. I earned tenure at the University of Delaware and received departmental, college, and national awards. I also was appointed to serve as associate dean and to direct a new research center. I felt validated, visible, and valuable.

The sociology department at the University of Delaware had a typical academic culture that’s often summarized as “publish or perish.” The most important measures of scholars’ work were writing, publishing their work in respected journals, and having other researchers cite those studies. Securing external funding from government, private companies, or foundations was valued but was not as high a priority as publishing.

A new beginning that felt like an end

In 2020, I received a new opportunity at Arizona State University, a much larger school that branded itself as a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship. I was offered the chance to direct the Center for Advancing Interprofessional Practice, Education, and Research and to step into the shoes of a leader I deeply admired. I arrived expecting to be a big fish in a bigger pond.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I showed up imagining there’d be a bit of buzz around my arrival given my time at the University of Delaware. But reality didn’t match the script: No greeting, office, or nameplate marked my place when I arrived.

Early conversations with administrators weren’t about my research or teaching visions—the things that I thought set me apart. Instead, I felt they tended to focus on how much external funding I could raise from foundations and government agencies. My new colleagues often spoke in a shorthand of grant-based acronyms when referring to what projects they were working on, a “language” I was woefully unfamiliar with.

To make matters worse, I arrived during COVID-19, with classes either canceled or taught online and faculty members working mainly from home. The hallway chatter, open doors, and spontaneous collaboration that I was accustomed to were absent. I began to feel alienated and disoriented as a scholar.

Even after ASU resumed in-person classes in the fall of 2021, I felt like the silence and distance lingered. No students waited for office hours. I struggled to make connections with my colleagues. I eagerly proposed collaborations when really everyone was just trying to find their footing in this new era of education.

My proposals for new classes and curricular programs hit up against institutional barriers I was unaware of. At one point, a college administrator asked, “How do we get you on other people’s grants?”—a question that I took to imply that they felt my research wasn’t strong enough.

It appeared that my colleagues in Edson College were accustomed to these values and spoke the language. I was a stranger in a strange land. Although I was producing some of my best work, measured in terms of publications and citations, I felt no one seemed interested. I had come from an environment where I felt known and valued to one where I seemed to be a nobody.

I felt as though I needed to staple my resume to my forehead and parade around the hallways asserting, like Ron Burgundy in the movie Anchorman, “I’m not quite sure how to put this, but . . . I’m kind of a big deal. People know me.” 

The impact of feeling unseen

For people who have built careers by being highly engaged and visible, suddenly feeling unseen can be devastating. In any profession, a fear that you don’t belong at your workplace can be debilitating and make you question your own value.

I sought advice from peers and college leaders, and even hired a professional coach. Things only worsened. Curricular proposals were stalled or turned down. My center was shuttered in a restructuring, although it was meeting its goals and earning international recognition.

At first, I blamed ASU and Edson College for my feelings of disconnection. I thought the leadership structure and style was dysfunctional; that many colleagues were cold, unfriendly, and conformist; and that the college’s stated values were inauthentic. 

This series of what I came to call “unacknowledgments” sent me into a personal and professional tailspin. Negativity and self-doubt consumed me, and I truly worried that my career was over. Had I been blackballed? Why did it feel as though no one cared?

When the noise turns inward

I had spent years studying empathy—the ability to understand and feel what someone else is feeling—and how to cultivate it among health care professionals and students in order to support more patient-centered care. To that end, at the University of Delaware I had developed a program designed to foster empathy across health professions. It aimed to help students see one another as collaborators, build shared respect, and recognize their collective role on the same health care delivery team.

But when I further analyzed the program’s outcomes from my office at ASU, I realized that empathy wasn’t enough. It could help students feel with others, but it didn’t necessarily help them see themselves, or others, differently.

I realized that what I really wanted the students to develop was humility. This step would require them to recognize their limits, accept that they were fallible, see themselves as part of a larger team, and value others’ contributions.

That realization changed my research trajectory—and eventually, my professional life.

Research becomes a mirror

Initially, I approached humility solely as a scholar. I examined the history of the concept and gaps in existing research on it, and I analyzed how humility was connected to uncertainty and the impostor phenomenon. I explored how humility could enhance team-based care and developed a new way to define humility among health care professionals in order to promote more collaboration and patient-centeredness.

As my own professional world began to unravel, and as I dived deeper into the concept of humility through my research, something unexpected happened. I realized that humility wasn’t just an idea to study—it was becoming a mirror that made me rethink my own perspective.

Slowly, I began to see how pride and insecurity were entwined in my reactions to my new setting at ASU. I realized that my need to be noticed, and my insistence that others validate my worth, represented my own kind of arrogance.

Perhaps my ambition had been less about contributing and more about gaining external validation. I had lost the selfless wonder and awe that drive scholarly inquiry and curiosity. And now I had to confront what remained when the spotlight dimmed.

Humility, I began to understand, wasn’t just an abstract concept to explore “out there” among others. I needed to hone it internally by thinking beyond myself. By decentering my ego, I realized that I could nurture and sustain curiosity in its own right. 

In short, I needed to practice what I was preaching. It wasn’t an easy lesson. I assume that cultivating humility never is.

To that end, I felt that it was essential to develop a program to help build humility “muscles.” In 2024, I developed HIIT for Humility, an online training package for individuals or groups, modeled after the fitness concept of high-intensity interval training. This program provides evidence-based strategies to help users start building “habits of humility,” such as acknowledgment of others and self-awareness.

Just as physical exercise requires consistency to produce results, so does the cultivation of humility. Leaning into HIIT for Humility workouts gradually eased my sense of alienation and defensiveness. I became more appreciative of others, less quick to judge, and better able to listen to others’ perspectives. In doing so, I started to feel more confident and secure.

While I still took pride in my work, I began to see that my contributions were not the only ones that mattered. I also found that I could stretch into unfamiliar but necessary tasks, such as working harder to win federal and foundation grants and seeing the value of my colleagues’ contributions to science.

Why am I here?

Only a few years into this process, I can see that ASU and Edson College have unintentionally taught me humility by signaling, often quietly, which contributions are deemed essential and which forms of success carry the most weight. Navigating stalled proposals, shifting priorities, and structural reorganizations have required me to recalibrate my ego, expectations, and identity.

Not being seen as a “big fish” and being expected to persist without consistent recognition have required me to understand my work as part of a larger system with differing values and, at times, challenging constraints. Shifting to ASU forced me to rethink my identity as a professor and to reevaluate my sense of purpose from the inside out.

A colleague of mine often asks students who he feels are coasting along, “Why are you here?” Lately, I’ve taken that question personally. What is the point of being a professor—writing papers, submitting grant proposals, teaching courses? Why did I choose this path in the first place?

When I feel unseen, unheard, or unappreciated, pondering why I’m here helps ground me. For anyone who is struggling to feel visible or valued at work, I strongly recommend considering this simple question.

Over time, I’ve stopped needing to be the big fish in the pond and measuring my worth in titles and awards. I now see that my responsibility as a scholar, teacher, and human being is to stay curious, listen more deeply, and make space for others’ voices.

Embracing humility, and consistently using my humility muscles, have helped me realize that I’m here to be part of the creative energy of academia, do the work, and cultivate curiosity in my students, my peers, and myself.

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

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Implicit is the idea that differences should not be entertained, that they are somehow threatening. To a growing extent, children are beginning to believe that differences should not be explored or embraced, but rather should be feared.

While there is no research examining these trends directly over time, there is no doubt that rates of anxiety are climbing in both American and U.K. youth and that contributing factors are the misinformation and social comparisons children encounter in mass media and social media. Children do not embrace cognitive complexity, so they try to construct a predictable and non-threatening reality. This reality can include the mindset that “difference” is a threat.

In 1994, Sally Smith, one of the most acclaimed educators of children with learning disabilities and the founder of the Lab School in Washington, DC, anticipated our current concerns with difference. She did not want children with learning “differences” to be regarded in any negative way, or to be excluded or shunned because of how they learned or expressed themselves. She wrote a book called Different Is Not Bad, Different Is the World targeted for children in grades two to six.

Because Smith was an innovator, her work was derived from case studies of the implementation of her methodologies, both her work with individual students and other people’s work with her Lab School model in other places. But subsequent research has supported her approaches to dealing directly with difference through supportive peer relationships and promoting an appreciation for varied students’ cultures and contexts.

Her book translates into a series of activities, all designed to illuminate the many meanings of the word “different,” and create a positive mindset toward it.

Definition of “different”

Begin by asking students to define the word “different.” Note that dictionary definitions have two foci—“not the same as” and “separate from.” 

The key point is to have students understand that difference is not “bad.” This can be emphasized by asking students, in small groups and then sharing with the whole class, to note all the things in the classroom that can be considered “different.” This would include things on the walls, books and other materials, and, of course, the students.

Follow up by asking students, with regard to what they have noticed as “different,” what are things about them that are alike. Using the earlier examples, “different” things on the wall, books, and students also share some qualities.

For example, if you focus students’ attention on where books are in the room, ask them what are all the things they notice about the books that are different. You can do this as a pair share or in small groups and have students report out. Then, ask them what is the same about the books. They will find that some of the things that are different also are commonalities (such as covers, binding, pages, author’s names, etc.). This helps them pay attention and, indeed, look for similarities alongside differences.

Things that are different

Then, ask students to generate examples of things within various categories that are different. For example, things that can be driven, favorite family foods, colors, ways to play, needing help, aspects of hair, things you are good at, hobbies, feelings. You also can add things relevant to curricular areas you are focusing on (e.g., people in certain historical periods, names of elements, types of clouds, poets).

The main point to communicate with this activity is that differences are not bad; they simply are “different.” In fact, “variety” can be an advantage. This leads to another activity.

Have small groups of students pick an area where they discussed differences and have them creatively generate new examples based on what they discussed—a new type of vehicle, new colors, a new way to play, new ways to give help, something new about hair, a different hobby, etc. With this activity, which brings about creativity and activates all of students’ social-emotional skills, you want to reinforce the value of variety.

People with differences

In her book, Smith identifies a number of individuals who made significant accomplishments despite differences in learning or particular abilities. Here is her list, but you should feel free to add people that would be more salient to your students. Better still, have your students do some research to find examples in various fields (e.g., science, entertainment, politics, sports, the arts, writing and poetry, computers, economics).

• Thomas Edison: invented electric light, had learning difficulties
• Auguste Rodin: sculptor who carved The Thinker, had learning difficulties
• Ludwig von Beethoven: composed many pieces of music while deaf
• Franklin D. Roosevelt: president of the United States with physical limitations due to polio
• Helen Keller: earned a master’s degree and became a writer while deaf and blind
• Nelson Rockefeller: governor of New York and vice president of the United States, had learning difficulties
• George Patton: general who helped win World War II, had learning difficulties

Here are some additional examples:

• Whoopi Goldberg: famous actress and Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award winner, had dyslexia
• Agatha Christie: wrote (or dictated) many mysteries despite dysgraphia
• Carly Simon: songwriter and performer, was affected by stuttering
• Keira Knightley: Academy Award–winning actress, had dyslexia

Create a quilt based on differences

Working in small groups, have your students generate a list of things they do well and things they have difficulty with, up to 30 in total. For example, students will mention hobbies they enjoy, subjects in school in which they do well or struggle, social situations they don’t feel comfortable in, and household tasks they do or don’t feel confident in, like cooking. Items students mention always stimulate additional ideas from classmates, either as things they also do well or things that are challenges.

Tell them they will be creating a quilt made up of both parts of this list, arranged as they wish. Give them 8.5” by 11” pieces of paper and have them put the name of one of these things on each piece of paper and, ideally, draw something on that paper to make the page colorful. Once completed, have each group arrange the pieces as they wish, in a six by five pattern, and share with the rest of the class, explaining how they chose to arrange the pieces as they did. Of course, if your circumstances allow and the students can use fabric instead of paper, you can strive to create a real quilt.

During the sharing, underscore how the collective quilts were all different, and yet all show how every group had a mix of things they did well and things they did not do so well. Help them see that this also is true of each person. Every student could make a quilt with things they are good at and not so good at. Everyone’s quilt would likely be different, but, to use Smith’s phrase, everyone’s quilt would be good.

Through these relatively innocuous activities, educators can set the stage for students to recognize differences, appreciate them, and not fear them or see them in a negative way. This will be of particularly great value to young students as they enter the middle and high school years, and encounter yet wider ranges of difference than they will have seen in their lives to that point.