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One hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.

The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America’s 250th birthday, I’m blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary.

In some ways, the Americas of 2026 and 1926 are eerily similar. In both cases, the country is celebrating a major birthday in the midst of a rising stock market and widespread fears of “technological unemployment” (mechanical power then vs. AI now); giddy wealth is coiled with economic anxiety; technology has transformed the way that people get information, mind-wiring us to a global cacophony of far-flung emotions (radio then vs. social media now); and after years of record-high immigrant entry to the U.S., the government has choked the migrant stream to a trickle.

In other ways, the America of 1926 was another world—practically another planet. Roughly half of the U.S. still counted as rural, and tens of millions of Americans had no indoor plumbing or electricity. Thick smoke from oil lamps filled their homes, and they emptied their bladders and bowels in old-fashioned chamber pots. Women had only voted in two presidential elections. Millions of children still worked for pay. Of the nation’s 27 million households, only 11 million had a phonograph, to listen to music, or a car. The first movie with sound would not come out for another year.

Life is much better in 2026. We live healthier, richer, and longer lives, with better medicine and more self-determination. But if I do my job well in the next few sections, you’ll see both the progress we’ve made in the last 100 years and the progress we haven’t made. Many anxieties that feel electrically charged in the present moment about work, family, and individuality are echoes of our ancestors’ fears. They felt all of our feelings. They just happened to poop in chamber pots.

1. The Average American in 1926

Before we dive into the world of 1926, let’s get into character.

Imagine that you are the typical American in 1926.1 You are a white 26-year-old. (In 2026, the median age is 40.) Since most immigrants have been male, we’ll say you’re a guy. Your name is John. Born in the first term of William McKinley’s presidency, you are raised on a farm without flush toilets or electric lighting. Too young to fight in World War I, you come of age alongside a generation that sees war in Europe as a “useless colossal blunder,” in the words of historian David M. Kennedy. Your life—indeed, your entire generation—is shaped by several notable developments: education, urbanization, automation, and women’s rights. You are the first person in your family to finish high school.

At 19, you move from the countryside to an urban apartment, as one small drop in the migratory flood from farm to city. Jobs in manufacturing and retail are easy to find. They’re also easy to lose. Temporary unemployment is the norm. You earn $100 a month and put some away for a rainy day, confident that the bustling city will provide another job in a few months. (Unemployment insurance does not exist; neither does Social Security.) In the evenings, you “radio”; yes, it’s a verb, too. Every weekend, you visit a cineplex, where the movies are black-and-white and silent. Sometimes, you down a few prohibited cocktails and go dancing with flappers. Several times a week, you drive around in a black Model T.

The year 1926 has been good to you. City life is a blur of high-velocity machines—cars, assembly lines, and radio broadcasts—and you sometimes miss the ancient rhythms of your farmland home. One year from now, Charles Lindbergh will shock the world by flying across the Atlantic. In two years, at 28, you’ll be married. In three years, you’ll have a baby. And in four years, in 1930, just months after the biggest stock market crash in American history, the world as you know it will be over.

II. The Economy of 1926

In 1926, the Roaring Twenties were at their full-throated peak. But America was anxious. If today’s commentators can’t stop talking about “maxxing” and “vibes,” the writers and politicians of the Twenties were vexed by the opposite of single-minded optimization. The watchword of the day was balance. Appearing 30 times in the Recent Social Trends report, balance was the cardinal worry of economic commentators: balance between rural and urban America; between manufacturing and farming; and between rapid progress and traditional values.

America in 1926 was smaller, and its values and identity were more twined with the countryside. The US population was about 120 million—about one-third of its current size—and nearly half of Americans lived in rural areas, compared to about 10 percent today. “In many respects, those country ways of life remained untouched by modernity,” the historian Kennedy wrote. From the Potomac River to the Gulf of Mexico, America looked “little different than it had at the end of Reconstruction”—cotton fields unfurled under a hot sun, hardly touched by electricity or modern plumbing.

The agrarian world was in a double crisis in 1926. The first problem was economic. In the 1910s, the American farmer fed the world. After World War I, global agricultural production came back online, and farmers were stuck with a ruinous surplus. The price of cotton and corn plummeted more than 50 percent from their wartime high. The second crisis was technological. The tractor and mechanical power transformed the farm, automating jobs for horses, as well as for people.2

If rural America was frozen in the ice block of history, urban America was a gushing torrent of change. By 1928, per-capita incomes of urban workers reached four times the average income of farmers. Between 1910 and 1930, the farm population declined while the urban population nearly doubled (see first graph below), thanks to both domestic migration and a wave of European immigrants (see second graph below). Much like today, the fear of historic levels of foreign-born people sparked an anti-immigrant movement. The 1920s saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which dominated the politics of several states, including Indiana and Oregon. “The nativist sentiment that the Klan helped to nurture found statutory expression in 1924,” Kennedy writes, “when Congress choked the immigrant stream to a trickle, closing the era of virtually unlimited entry to the United States.”

City dwellers were proud of their superiority; even haughty. In the previous years Scopes trial, the high-school teacher John T. Scopes had been indicted for violating Tennessee law by telling his students about evolution. Here’s Kennedy:

Urban Americans smiled with satisfaction when street-smart Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow humiliated rural America’s historical paladin, William Jennings Bryan, in the course of the trial… Bryan’s mortification symbolized for many the eclipse of rural fundamentalism and the triumphant ascendancy of the metropolis as the fount and arbiter of modern American values.

As agriculture’s share of employment plummeted from more than 50 percent in 1870 to less than 25 percent in 1926, it wasn’t just manufacturing that absorbed the expanding workforce. The share of jobs in trade and transportation (e.g., moving, storing, and selling goods in wholesale and retail trade) rose from 9 to 20 percent. Clerical services (e.g., retail salespeople and cashiers) exploded from 1 to 8 percent.

Manufacturing advanced faster than working conditions. While the 12-hour workday disappeared in the 1920s—the US Steel Corporation abandoned it in 1923—neither the two-day weekend, nor paid vacations, nor retirement existed for the average American worker.

Modern urban consumerism marched forward thanks to an explosion of chain stores. Between 1927 and 1928, Sears Roebuck sales grew by 20 percent and Safeway sales grew by nearly 50 percent.

Even more than 2026, 1926 saw a bonanza of big-company mergers, which means it was similarly an era of monopoly concerns. Between 1919 and 1928, manufacturing and mining were involved in 1,200 mergers, a record for one decade. Bank mergers were even more frequent. And practically no industry was more concentrated than electricity. By the end of the 1920s, ten public utilities controlled 75 percent of the electric light and power business while 16 holding companies controlled about 50 percent of the country’s gas output.

Nothing in 1926 roared like the automotive industry. In 1900 there were 8,000 cars on the road—or “horseless carriages,” as they were then known. By 1926, the number had grown to 19 million. “It is probable that no invention of such far-reaching importance was ever diffused with such rapidity,” the report’s authors wrote.

The automotive revolution was the great achievement of Henry Ford. It was also the apotheosis of Fordism, the theory of business that braided higher productivity, higher wages and higher spending levels. In 1910, it took roughly 15 hours to put together a single Model T Ford. By 1926, a new car rolled off Ford’s assembly line every 10 seconds. Productivity was the handmaiden of affordability: A vehicle that cost the average worker two years’ wages before World War I cost just 3 months’ earnings in the mid-1920s.

No other country rivaled America’s automotive love affair. According to the historian Bill Bryson, 1920s Kansas alone had more vehicles than France. Car ownership created an entirely new way of thinking about the self in relation to the environment—an “automobile psychology.” Social scientists spoke of the modern “gypsy family,” which seemed to spend more time inside the car than outside it. Travel time surged, and the tourist business swelled, with new “camping grounds, cabins, cottage camps, and roadside camps” dotting the landscape to serve a nation that couldn’t get enough of the road. Just as Airbnb and its brethren pushed the hotel business in the 2010s and 2020s, so did these new makeshift tourist attractions force the hotel industry to upgrade in the 1920s. With “the increase in travel by women which has been induced by the automobile,” hotels added more private bath facilities, more varied restaurant menus, and plusher room furnishings. When America made cars, cars remade America.

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III. Culture and Leisure in 1926

The year 1926 was almost certainly the high-water mark of women’s rights and liberties in American history, to date. The nearly 10 million women who worked for wages represented a doubling of the female workforce since the end of the 19th century. While the share of women working as domestic servants declined, more became teachers and hairdressers. No female occupation grew faster than the salesperson or store clerk.

After the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, women had only voted in two presidential contests by 1926. Still, there was anxiety about their acquisition of political and cultural power, which concentrated on the rise of the legendary “flapper.” These flapper gals “smoked, drank, rouged their shining faces, bobbed their hair (which is to say cut it short and even all the way around), and clad themselves in silken dresses of breathtaking skimpiness,” the historian Bill Bryson writes in One Summer: America, 1927. The shrinkage of chastity was quantifiable: The amount of fabric in the average dress fell from 20 yards in 1910 to 7 yards in the 1920s.

Anxiety about women flaunting their liberties and their thighs was an adjunct to concerns about changes to the family. With the rise of working women coinciding with an increase in divorce, the authors of Recent Social Trends mourned that homes became mere “parking places” for parents and children, whose passions resided in labor and leisure.3

Childhood was transforming just as much as womanhood in the 1920s. For the first time, half of high-school-age students attended school, an eightfold increase since 1900. Declining birthrates along with rising wealth led to fewer children and more resources devoted to each child.

The report’s authors weren’t entirely sure that the new style of parenting—eerily similar to intensive parenting phenomenon of the 2020s—was a good thing. In a passage paragraph that one could imagine reading in the New York Times tomorrow, they worried about the the declining birthrate :

For the first time there were fewer children under five years of age in one census year than in the one preceding.

For the first time also there were fewer children under five years of age than from 5 to 10 years of age. In some cities already there are not enough children to occupy the desks in the earlier grades. This decreasing enrollment has not yet reached the high schools, but it is only a question of time, unless a larger proportion of those out of school are continued in school. Though the supply of children is being restricted, the demand for them continues.

Hovering over the decade’s cultural perturbations was Prohibition, which had been the law of the land since 1920. Prohibition was bad, not only because it shut down a major industry (America’s fifth largest, at the time); not only because it moved billions of dollars from the legitimate economy into the black market, empowering the Mafia and other criminal enterprises; not only because the national murder rate went up by almost a third after Prohibition was introduced; and not only because the federal government lost about half a billion dollars in liquor taxes (10 percent of its national income); but also because it killed people directly. As an ingredient in paint thinner, antifreeze, and other goods, alcohol’s production couldn’t be fully outlawed by the government. To discourage its consumption, the government required that industrial booze be frequently laced with poison. Americans, loving booze, drank that, too.

The results were disastrous. A chemist’s survey in the New York Telegram found that one speakeasy’s spirits contained, among other things, kerosene, formaldehyde, and sulfuric acid. In their book Eating in America, Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont report that nearly 12,000 people died in 1927 from drinking poisoned alcohol. Given that the US population was roughly 66 percent smaller than it is today, that would be the mortality equivalent of 36,000 people dying in 2026 from drinking beer that had been poisoned on purpose by the feds. (That figure is, by the way, roughly the number of drivers who die annually in automobile accidents today.)

Beyond the speakeasies and jazz clubs, sports were becoming a more central part of American life, although the industry was unrecognizable to modern audiences, in large part because 1920s sports were so unprofessional. For example, while it was considered America’s pastime, baseball was a terrible business. Teams relied on ticket sales for revenue, but Sunday games were prohibited in most cities, and electric lights were a luxury. So most games had to be played during the weekdays, when few working people could attend. Ninety-minute games were common; without a big audience or big paycheck waiting for them, players seemed to be in a rush to get things over with. In one doubleheader against the New York Yankees on September 26, 1926, the St. Louis Browns won 6–1 in 72 minutes and then won 6–2 in 55 minutes. (Yes, those were two nine-inning games.) “Quite how they managed it is a wonder,” the historian Bryson writes. “The two teams banged out 25 hits between them in the first game and 20 in the second, so these were hardly classic pitchers’ duels. There was just a lot less messing around.”4

IV. Media in 1926

Unlike 2026, when we are witnessing the decline of reading, 1926 might have been a high-water mark for reading in American life. Never before had so many different print media—books, magazines, and newspapers—swelled at the same time, before sound film and television took over.

Authors were celebrities—people mobbed Sinclair Lewis’s Minnesota home while he was trying to write his novels—and books published annually had doubled since the 1910s. For those overwhelmed by so many titles, the Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926. Magazine advertising revenues grew by 500 percent in the Twenties, thanks to the birth of Reader’s Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, and The New Yorker in 1925. Newspaper sales also rose throughout the decade, and New York City alone had twelve daily papers.

This abundance of literacy was threatened by the arrival of new communications technology. Even more than telephones—which multiplied from less than 2 million units in 1900 to 20 million in 1930—radio defined the decade, evolving “from a mysterious curiosity to a widely diffused and universally accepted instrument of entertainment, business, learning and mass communication, [with] few if any counterparts in social history,” according to the authors of Recent Social Trends.

It is remarkable to read the report’s analysis of radio’s effect on American life, because it reads so alarmingly modern. Above all, the authors were concerned that radio encroached on individuality by mind-wiring each American to a global monolith of news and entertainment. Mass media organizations created “greater possibilities for social manipulation,” they wrote, and radio threatened to turn the individual into what the philosopher Martin Heidegger in this period called a “they-self”—a being who, failing to achieve authenticity, fully adopts the tastes, habits, and beliefs of the universal crowd.5

Today’s commentators sometimes fret about the role that the internet and the smartphone have played in unleashing populism, by elevating the views of the disenfranchised and smashing the authority of the elites. But 100 years ago, the authors of Recent Social Trends also saw the radio as a pure “leveling” technology:

Negroes barred from entering universities can receive instruction from the same institutions by radio; residents outside of the large cities who never have seen the inside of an opera house can become familiar with the works of the masters; communities where no hall exists large enough for a symphony concert can listen to the largest orchestras of the country; and the fortunes of a Negro comedy pair can provide social talk throughout the nation. Isolation of backward regions is lessened by the new agency of communication

Unlike print media, radio works the ear rather than the eye—the ear, which cannot close or even focus with ocular precision, but remains always open to the world. One hundred years ago, we were already making our way in a world where waves of information radiated around us, a proto-internet of sound, waiting for an audience and an antenna to tune in. Wired to the emotional values of far-flung events, Americans breathed air that pulsed with spooky electromagnetism, carrying the stories of people we would never meet. Without knowing what it meant to “log on,” our fellow citizens in 1926 were already learning what it means to never be able to log off.

V. The Future, According to 1926

The authors of Recent Social Trends were astonishingly prescient about the direction of technology. In one paragraph, they somehow anticipated the rise of audiobooks, YouTube, Netflix, smartphone cameras, musical software, ubiquitous air conditioning, and the electric battery revolution:

It may be that the world will find much use for talking books; school and college students may listen to lectures by long-running phonographs or talking pictures; moving pictures may be transmitted by wireless into houses; seeing with that new electric eye, the photo-electric cell, and recording what is seen, appear to have almost unlimited applications; new musical instruments different from any now in use may be given to us by electricity; the production of artificial climate may become widespread; an efficient storage battery of light weight and low cost might produce changes rivaling those of the internal combustion engine. And these are only a few of the myriad possibilities from new inventions in the future!

In an equally oracular section, the authors predicted the emergence of remote work and declining geographic mobility, anticipating that “the transmission of goods, of the voice and possibly of vision may act as a retarding influence on human mobility in the future and may cause a development of more remote and impersonal direction and controls.”

But the social scientists did not see these trends as altogether good. They worried that modern life, defined in equal parts by urbanization and technology, obliterated people’s values and their sense of self. Even as they gawked at the increase in patents—which grew more than 20-fold between the 1850s and the 1920s—they worried that a growing number of discoveries would bring “problems of morals, of education, of law, of leisure time, of unemployment, of speed, of uniformity and of differentiation.”

Social scientists of the 1920s saw machines pushing workers off of farms and competing with workers in manufacturing plants. How long, they wondered, until they would replace human workers in all tasks? “A larger proportion of work by machines, and a smaller proportion of human labor, is to be expected in the future,” they wrote. “There are indeed a few cases of wholly automatic factories and automatic stores and many automatic salesmen.” It is extraordinary to read these fears and not reflect on the AI jobs panic of the present, while also marveling at the thousands of occupations that are possible today precisely because machines made old jobs obsolete.

The dawn of the age of the machine drove us mad. Physicians of the day warned that the frail human mind was no match for the car, predicting at the time that “diseases of the wheel” would afflict the youth who rode bicycles and cars without restraint. It was not entirely obvious that they were wrong. In Germany, the number of patients registered in mental hospitals grew from 40,375 in 1870 to 220,881 in 1910. Over the same period, the share of patients admitted to general hospitals for illnesses of the nervous system rose from 44 to 60 percent.

Most perceptively, social critics of the age recognized that the urban-technological revolution of the early 20th century—what we might even call “modernity”—transformed not only our minds but also our values. Machines and systems that pulled Americans off the farm, away from the family home, and into churning markets of people and products threatened to replace the Judeo-Christian values that had bound the country for centuries with a new system of values dictated by markets. In 1903, the sociologist Georg Simmel anticipated the anxieties of the Twenties—ours and theirs—when he observed that in cities “money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things” and becomes “a common denominator of all values.” Money “hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values, and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair.”

One hundred and twenty years after the publication of that essay, the Wall Street Journal asked thousands of Americans what values were still important to them. While a declining share of Americans endorsed the worthiness of patriotism, religion, community, and children, the share who said “money” was “very important to them” went up. It sometimes seems as if markets and money are the last value standing, the final common denominator beneath all human endeavor.

On its 250th birthday, the U.S. similarly defines itself through markets. Those famous words of Calvin Coolidge, America’s president in 1926, could just as well serve this American president and this American moment: “The chief business of the American people is business.”

The debate about the future of jobs and AI often polarizes into two extreme categories, neither of which I find particularly useful.

On one side, there are the Doomers. They predict that AI will destroy millions of jobs. Most notably, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has sometimes predicted an imminent entry-level white-collar wipeout. The problem with this theory is that it doesn’t really stand up to the current data. The employment rate for prime-age workers in the U.S. is near its all-time high, and a survey of corporate executives found “little evidence of near-term aggregate employment declines due to AI.” Practically every claim of AI’s strong effects on the labor force are highly contested among economists.

On the other side, there are the Deniers. They insist that AI is a scam, a stochastic parrot, and an overhyped category of vaporware. But while the Doomers too often live in a future that doesn’t exist, the Deniers too frequently dwell in a past that’s no longer with us. The generative AI economy, which barely existed four years ago, has now generated between $100 billion and $200 billion in total revenue in the last 12 months, and AI’s facility with coding has transformed the jobs of millions of software engineers.

Between doom and denial, there is the evidence. Through the mists of statistical confusion, a clearer picture of AI and the future of work is finally coming into view. AI doesn’t seem to be obliterating jobs so much as leading to the explosion of a very specific kind of work, which has major implications for the way we think about AI, the future of jobs, and how to get rich in America.

I. Matt’s Story

Matt Rosenberg left his job at Amazon in 2025. He wanted to open a restaurant in the East Bay with his Thai wife, whose family had served food in Bangkok for decades.

Hoping to buy a restaurant, Matt shared his plans with ChatGPT. He shared strategy documents, foot-traffic research, and videos of restaurant kitchens. One day, he said, ChatGPT suggested he look into “micro-enterprise home kitchens,” a little-known rule that allows families to sell food that they whip up at home. Soon, the couple opened a restaurant from their own kitchen called Bangkok Rush Thai Kitchen.

Restaurants can exist without AI; millions have. But Bangkok Rush Thai Kitchen might not. Matt and his wife have used AI to build their website, keep up with compliance, manage their inventory, and analyze customer trends. “Starting a business takes a lot out of you,” he told me. “Without ChatGPT, I think my wife and I might have given up early on in this process.”

Today, the Rosenbergs’ restaurant—whose most popular dishes include khanom krok, a small round coconut pancake—sells out of desserts so frequently that they’re looking to open a brick-and-mortar location. Flush with confidence, Matt has even started a second business: a one-man consultancy that teaches other people how to start a company using AI.1

II. The Rise of the Solo Act—and the Indie Millionaire

This is a golden age for solo acts. There has never been a better or easier time to work independently. And there has never been an easier time to become a millionaire by working for yourself.

I’m going to walk through this phenomenon step-by-step, and then I’ll tell you why it’s happening and whether I think it’s going to last:

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I. The Ring

In December 2024, I received an Oura ring for the holidays. I thought I would hate it.

I’d had a messy relationship with other “wearable” technology designed to monitor my physical activity, or lack thereof. Years earlier, during a period of elevated stress and miserable sleep quality, I’d owned a different fitness device that wouldn’t stop sending me panicked notifications about my insomnia. Sleep was hard enough without the harsh judgment of one’s jewelry, I thought. I threw the thing in the trash.

But the ring I liked. One of the first things I learned was how alcohol affected my sleep. When I had a glass of wine after 8 p.m., my resting heart rate shot up, and my heart rate variability plummeted. This would lower my “Readiness” score, which is prominently featured on the smartphone app. But when I had the same glass while cooking dinner around 5:30 p.m., the wine had no effect on my Readiness number. Like so many elderly Millennials, I am the sort of person who cannot see a prominently labeled scoreboard without devoting myself to climbing it. So, without ever figuring out what heart-rate variability actually meant, I ditched the late-night drinks. (Mostly.)

The demise of the nightcap wasn’t the only way the ring changed my life. More profoundly, it altered my relationship to activity. Before a walk, after a workout, or even after a nap, I would check in with the app to see my Readiness, Activity, and Sleep scores. Each day was now compared with—even set in competition against—the previous day or the previous week. The ring pulled me into a feedback loop with a biometric technology that turned my body into a game board through which I could win or lose points.

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who writes about the philosophy of games and metrics, has said that the modern world’s blizzard of numbers can obscure our wise yet murky questions about life and replace them with easy and legible goals. For example, someone might become a journalist to uncover important truths but then devote each week’s labor to maximizing page views; or she might get into philosophy to think about the deepest life questions but devote her life to maximizing her h-index. “Metrics are useful because they compress information,” Nguyen told me. “They are dangerous, because they compress information.”

At its best, the ring makes me fitter, happier, and, sure, even more productive. I walk more, lift more, sleep more, and drink less. You will be hard-pressed to find a physician who thinks there’s anything amiss in the previous sentence.

But the same doctor might not see how the obsession with winning the measurable games of health can encroach on the less measurable games of life. The best way to sleep more is to see fewer friends in the evening. The best way to lift more during the week is to eliminate social lunches to protect my midday gym time. To become a measurably enhanced self often means eliminating my less quantifiable sources of meaning and happiness.

The ring improved my life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls me away from other people. This left me with a nagging question. At what point is it unhealthy for me—for anyone, for all of us—to be this obsessed with health?

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II. The Enhanced Self

Clearly, I am not the only American who is reconsidering his relationship with alcohol. The share of people who drink hit an all-time low last year, according to Gallup, whose data go back to 1939. Total beer consumption recently reached a 21st-century low, and wine vineyards are reportedly “in crisis.” While many social changes happen slowly, the attitude shift against alcohol has been quite sudden. The share of Americans who say moderate drinking (defined as one or two drinks a day) is “bad for health” doubled in just the last 10 years. Two-thirds of Americans under 35 now tell Gallup that alcohol is harmful in any quantity.

The decline of drinking is one part of a larger cultural phenomenon, a hydra-headed megatrend whose tentacles reach out to touch everything from science and medicine to technology and entertainment, reshaping the way that Americans think about themselves, their time, their friendships, and their future. It is the rise of the Enhanced Self.

The Enhanced Self is the evolution of medicine, technology, and consumer culture from an emphasis on curing illness to an obsession with optimizing normal, healthy life. We see this with the rise of GLP-1s, the explosion in biohacking with peptides (injectables that affect inflammation and gut health and are also the “P” in GLP), and the continued growth of supplements. More Americans are using therapies not only to cure what is wrong with them but also to improve what is not wrong with them. At the layer of leisure, the tendrils of the Enhanced Self touch the white-hot rise of fitness in American life. A record 77 million Americans belonged to a gym or studio in 2024, up 20 percent since before the pandemic. Running clubs on the fitness app Strava nearly quadrupled in 2025 alone. If you don’t believe the industry data, perhaps you’ll believe the federal government: according to the American Time Use Survey, Americans today exercise and play sports more than at any period on record.

At the layer of biology, the Enhanced Self incorporates the belief that the human body is akin to a single-issue hardware device, whose owner should obsessively seek to extend its operating life beyond its scheduled date of obsolescence through relentless work and eagle-eyed neuroticism. At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization, which I have previously called the anti-social century. While running clubs and morning workouts are booming—and I am positive that these are highly social events for at least some of their participants—nightclubs are closing and parties are withering. Young Americans spend about 35 percent less time socializing and 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the century.

America’s self-improvement tradition is practically as old as the country. Benjamin Franklin tracked thirteen virtues on a daily scorecard. Sylvester Graham preached dietary reform in the 1830s. The instinct to improve the body, and to moralize that improvement, is anciently American.

These earlier iterations of self-improvement drew their power from religion, community, or characterological projects to promote civic virtue. Temperance, for example, was not just about individual health; it was a social movement to improve the culture, to rescue women and children from alcoholic husbands, and to build a better republic. (That it failed in myriad ways is not to deny that some of its goals were virtuous.) The Muscular Christianity movement of the 19th century paired New Testament virtues with an ethic of manly strength in a way that wouldn’t be so out of step with modern MAGA and MAHA machismo.

But the age of the Enhanced Self is different, not only because many of its elements are distinctly of the 2020s—including peptide shots, social media, and biometric scanners—but also because it does not particularly seek to build anything outside of the self. For all its sins, the temperance movement was focused on national change. But the typical adherent to the Enhanced Self—say, a 50-year-old with a peptide stack and a Whoop—is not trying to improve the country. He’s just trying to improve his score.

The history of alcohol abstention offers another way to see how the Enhanced Self is a truly modern phenomenon. For a long time, abstinence was associated with religion or personal histories, such as addiction recovery or pregnancy. But in the new health culture, abstinence is not about faith or addiction; it is about bodily perfection. On health podcasts and videos, influencers and science communicators talk about alcohol’s association with sleep scores, skin clarity, energy levels, cardiometabolic biometrics, and executive function. The explosive growth of non-alcoholic breweries like Athletic Brewing offers commercial proof in a secular age that the decline of drinking has little to do with faith. Modern sobriety, for better or worse, is not about addiction, but enhancement; not about our body politic, but about our bodies—period.

III. The Three Pillars of the Enhanced Self

The Enhanced Self is defined by three distinct tendencies. None of these ideas are entirely new in the 2020s, but the combination of science, technology, and social media has afforded them special power.

1. OPTIMIZATION AS THE NEW VIRTUE: Many drugs and devices initially invented to cure the sick become instruments to greatly enhance the healthy.

In his book Outlive, which serves as a kind of Bible of self-enhancement, the scientist and podcaster Peter Attia divides the history of medicine into three phases. Medicine 1.0 was the prescientific era of doctors trying and mostly failing to treat disease. Medicine 2.0 is the modern approach, in which doctors cure illness with the full apparatus of science, including randomized drug trials. Medicine 3.0, Attia argues, goes further: it stops chronic illness before it takes hold, through personalized, data-driven preventative care.

This is the medical logic of the Enhanced Self, in which drugs and devices built to cure the sick become instruments to enhance the healthy. GLP-1s designed for diabetics now quiet food noise in millions of people who simply want to eat less. Continuous glucose monitors, originally designed for diabetics, have found a growing market among healthy people who want to know how an afternoon’s potato chip changes their blood sugar. Stacked on top, you have biohacking with off-label peptides1, experimentation with supplements, and hormone therapies, including replacement therapy. Prescriptions for TRT rose from 7.3 million in 2019 to more than 11 million in 2024, a 50 percent increase in five years, with an even steeper rise among men aged 35 to 44.2

Put it together—peptides, supplements, and hormone therapy, connected through the web of biometric data made available by fitness trackers—and today’s self-enhancers are armed with a portfolio of pharmacological and technological tools, allowing them to treat their bodies like improvable machines.

2. FITNESS AS THE NEW CLASS MARKER: We used to compare ourselves based on money. But fitness trackers and biomarkers create a parallel class system that makes us feel superior to, or inferior to, everybody else.

A generation ago, high-status Americans bragged about how little they slept, as a proxy for their work ethic. Today, the even-richer elite brag about how much they sleep, as a testament to their ability to outrun mortality. They toy with sleep stacks of magnesium and melatonin. They try mouth tape, white-noise-cancellation devices, and multithousand-dollar cooling mattresses. I have witnessed adults comparing deep-sleep percentages the way their younger selves once compared GPAs and SAT scores.

If you squint, it looks like health is becoming the new status marker and, perhaps, the ultimate status signal. For centuries, people compared themselves to others based on income, in part because money is standardized, measurable, and visible. If you earn $1,000,000 a year, and I earn $50,000 a year, then we both know where we stand relative to the other in purchasing power. Fitness comparison, by contrast, was more difficult, except in obvious cases of diagnosis (i.e., a neighbor who has cancer) and physical appearance (i.e., an extremely thin or heavy person in the office). But as fitness biomarkers and peptide stacks become part of upper-class conversation, people can more easily rank themselves against others, turning health into a comparative status marker.

Every cultural movement mints a new class of celebrity, and the Enhanced Self is no exception. Attia turned longevity medicine into a mainstream preoccupation. Andrew Huberman built a podcast empire on the premise that every behavior, from morning sunlight exposure to cold-water dips, could be neurochemically optimized. Bryan Johnson became the human embodiment of the movement’s extremes, spending millions of dollars a year submitting his body to hundreds of interventions in a war against aging.

What these figures sell, beyond supplements and programs, is the feeling of superiority along with an insider’s vocabulary: VO₂ max, grip strength, Zone 2 cardio, DEXA scans. These terms have migrated from exercise physiology textbooks into dinner-party conversation, giving ordinary people—or disproportionately affluent people—benchmarks for comparing themselves to others, as they think about their bodies as systems to be monitored and compared.

Once we see bodies as measurable and improvable systems over which we exert a certain amount of control, it is only a small step toward thinking of personal health as an enterprise that requires an almost managerial approach—that is, as yet another job.

3. HEALTH AS THE ULTIMATE JOB: More people are treating health maintenance as a kind of professional occupation, one that makes them behave like the chief executive of their own body.

The historian Alfred Chandler argued in The Visible Hand that the telegraph and the railroad moved information so fast that companies needed a new kind of person to handle it. They were called “managers,” and thus was managerial capitalism born.

Something similar is happening in modern health. The eruption of biometric data from wearable devices, along with the genetic and diagnostic tests that forecast our futures3, produces a flood of information that demands a managerial response. I find it almost impossible to look at my Oura ring without comparing this week’s heart rate and exercise data to last week’s. When I read one day’s numbers (huh, that exercise score looks awful), I feel obligated to adjust my behavior (I should schedule a walk). As more people manage this deluge of information flow, they will face the same problem as 19th century chain stores, and they will begin to think of their anatomical output as a product to be managed. Slowly and then quickly, many of them will come to see themselves as akin to chief executives of their own bodies.4

As strange as this might sound, I think the Self Executive will become an identifiable figure in the next few years. By this I mean: More people will talk about their health, their fitness, and their life extension procedures as if they were a job, a career, or a calling. In the process, they will somewhat invert the historical role of leisure in modern life. In the traditional arrangement, people go to the office, where they focus on being productive, and then go home and relax. But today, fitness and health fixations are colonizing leisure at the same time that our wearable devices gather, sort, and grade the data that our bodies produce. Over time, this trains people to approach their downtime with the very same productivity mindset that they were supposed to leave at the office. In short, the Enhanced Self turns personal health into a second job, one in which the individual serves as both the executive and the firm.

IV. Enhanced Selfishness

In one respect, the age of the Enhanced Self is a triumph. The fruits of this movement will include fitter people, with less disease, who live longer lives. This is not an achievement of mere accounting. It will mean millions of moms and dads who live to dance at their kids’ weddings. It will mean more friendships and partnerships that last into the 90s and beyond. It will mean children who know their grandparents by their touch and their smell and not just by their photographs.

As sure as I am that all health is good, I am skeptical that the Enhanced Self is a purely positive trend. The pursuit of health can go too far, and it can come at the expense of others. The three pillars of the Enhanced Self include optimization, class comparison, and running one’s body like a corporation. These are all individualist endeavors. Many of them are inherently solitary.

Many people have told me that the fitness boom is a direct response to declining social connection. For some, gyms and workout classes serve as the 21st century’s answer to shuttered union halls and molding bowling alleys. They are the new spaces where people, young and old, can go to seek out a social life, to talk to people, to attend events, and to become a member of a community.

But it is no coincidence that the age of the Enhanced Self is also an age of aloneness. Young people, who are seeing the highest increases in exercise time, also say they have fewer friends than any cohort ever; that they spend more time alone than any generation on record; and that they are more anxious and depressed than previous groups. Generation Z has the lowest levels of interpersonal trust of any group ever polled, the author and researcher Ryan Burge reported. “The velocity of their decline in trust already far exceeds any previous generation,” he wrote.

Our bodies want us to be social, even when we act like secular monks. Research by Sandra Weintraub of Northwestern University has found that “super-agers” (individuals over 80 with the cognitive function of people decades younger) shared little in common except for an unusually robust history of friendship and other social connections. A 2025 analysis of 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank reported that living with a partner and frequently visiting family had roughly the same relationship with longevity as exercise.

Our health is our own. It is one of those things that we cannot share with other people. And so, while the pursuit of health does not have to cleave us away from others, the project of delaying mortality is often a solitary undertaking.

V. Coda (Death)

Sometimes, I wonder what the Enhanced Self is all about. Surely, its emergence in American life has something to do with a traumatic pandemic winding down, the rise of the MAHA movement, and the migration of Nietzschean tech executives toward the center stage of internet culture, just as GLP-1s and new fitness trackers made certain kinds of self-improvement reachable for millions. Altogether, I think these forces have, like disconnected weather systems moving into a shared area, created a cyclone of a social phenomenon.

But deeper forces may be at work. In a sensationoal essay, the psychologist Adam Mastroianni notes that over the past few decades, high schoolers have steadily drunk less, smoked less, and fought less. In the same period, serial killers have all but vanished, blockbusters have grown less original, design has grown less distinctive, and cars have gone monochrome. Mastroianni ties these together with a theory he calls “the decline of deviance.” As people get richer and the world gets safer, deviance falls, because “life is worth more now.” When people think that they might live to be 100, the strategy for every life-game is the same: play it safe.

The novelist Karl Ove Knausgård once wrote that an irony of the modern world is that we are obsessed with cultural representations of death and yet terrified of the real thing. In movies and TV shows and podcasts and news, people are constantly dying; dead bodies are the hydrocarbons that power every modern plot. But no amount of represented death can prepare us for the thing itself. When bodies die in real life, we rush to hide them. In the hospital, they are filed away in subterranean basements, at the far end of long hallways that branch out like root systems, where no visitor can accidentally stumble upon them. Enraptured by death’s fiction, we are also terrified of its reality.

At bottom, enhancement culture is a disposition toward death—thinking about death, calculating distance from death, worshipping death like some Aztec priest offering sacrifices to appease the angry sun god. Bryan Johnson’s wellness company, book, and company-and-book-inspired Netflix documentary are not called “Live Better” or even “Live Forever.” It’s called “Don’t Die.” The moment-by-moment obsession with death may extend our lives. But when we cannot stop practicing this lifespan arithmetic—how much time will this drink cost me? how much time will that supplement buy me?—many of us will slip out of the thick appreciation of the here and now and approach life with all the verve of a lonely risk-assessment officer at a life insurance firm.

The fact that the Enhanced Self is often anti-social and the fact that it’s profoundly about death are not two different claims but rather two reflections of the same idea. Our fear of death motivates an all-consuming neuroticism about outrunning mortality, even when the price we pay is putting health optimization above everything else, including other people.

Last week, wrecked from travel, I saw a friend whom I hadn’t seen in months for drinks in Washington, D.C., on a Thursday. We had many things to celebrate—birthdays, babies—and oh how we celebrated. We stayed up too late. I drank too much. My head hit the pillow several hours after bedtime, and when I woke up, the mezcal left a dull ache behind my left eye. Turning toward my nightstand, I saw my Oura ring, which I’d taken off before slipping into bed. Data from the previous night’s sub-optimal sleep, like light particles within a black hole, would never reach the outside world. Thank god for that. I put the ring back on my finger, and I walked downstairs to make coffee. I don’t remember when the hangover ended. Was it one minute, one hour, a day? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I saw my friend. He saw me, too. In more ways than one, we lived.

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I. The Aurelius Trap

Consider the stories of three leaders, each considered peerless in his domain.

1. Rome

Only “once in the history of the world,” Alice Zimmern wrote, has a man fulfilled Plato’s vision of a philosopher-king, a world-class ruler who was also a peerless mind. He was Marcus Aurelius.

As emperor of Rome in the second century CE, Aurelius moonlit as a dispenser of aphoristic gems about life, death, and honor. His private journal, now known as his Meditations, is a compendium of notes-to-self, maxims, and Stoic writings, which Aurelius composed while planning and carrying out a military campaign in Europe. Never intended for broad publication, the book has nonetheless become one of the most-published works of philosophy in history. It is hard to think of a person more powerful in his life whose words have been read so frequently in his afterlife.

One might expect such a person to be a paragon of good judgment. But rather than select a proven statesman to lead the fragile empire—as many good emperors of the previous century had done—Aurelius elevated his troubled biological son, Commodus. In the view of Edward Gibbon, the historian who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Commodus’ reign was the beginning of the end for Rome. Lazy, vain, and self-indulgent, Commodus allowed corruption to fester and order to crumble. “The monstrous vices of the son,” Gibbon wrote, “have cast a shade on the purity of the father’s motives”, as Aurelius “sacrificed the happiness of millions to a fond partiality for a worthless boy.”

I sometimes think about the thousands of executives and entrepreneurs who read Meditations over and over and fail to absorb the lesson buried in its biographical introduction. In the privacy of his tents and chambers, Marcus Aurelius articulated the virtues of judgment as well as anyone. But when it came to the most significant judgment of his own life, Aurelius handed off his kingdom to a nincompoop whose reign accelerated the demise of the Roman Empire.

When, you might think, has a leader so wise ever proven so incompetent at that most essential job: Naming a successor who doesn’t threaten to destroy his legacy?

2. Hollywood

When Bob Iger stepped down as CEO of The Walt Disney Company for the first time, in early 2020, he was coming off one of the greatest runs in modern corporate history. Unlike Aurelius, Iger did not inherit an empire at its peak. In 2005, Disney’s animation studio was a mess, its feature films struggled at the box office, and theme-park attendance had flattened after the post-9/11 slump.

Between 2005 and 2020, Iger went on a triumphant shopping spree, bagging Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Just when Disney’s trunk seemed so stuffed with intellectual property that surely nothing more could fit, he managed to squeeze in the voluminous assets of 21st Century Fox. Throughout the 2010s, Disney pumped out billion-dollar hit after hit, plumbing its unrivaled library of titles for sequels, prequels, adaptations, and reboots that dominated the box office and rewrote the rules of Hollywood.

With the stock at all-time highs, Iger finally named a successor: Bob Chapek, the head of Disney’s theme park division. The results were dismal.

Chapek’s failures, which coincided with the pandemic, extended from box office disappointments to a political mess over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But the failure of Bob II reflected as poorly on Bob I. As the New York Times reported, Iger repeatedly “undermined” his successor and failed to build a credible runway, leaving Chapek weakened, the board unsettled, and Disney without a clear “next chapter.”1

In 2022, Iger returned to the company weakened in part by his own botched succession planning, like a doctor heading back into the O.R. to staunch the bleeding from a wound he helped to inflict. Thus did the smoothest executive in showbiz oversee one of the industry’s most turbulent and least successful corporate handoffs.

3. New England

Bill Belichick is the greatest coach in NFL history. In a league whose rules are designed to promote parity and break up dynasties, Belichick coached Tom Brady and the New England Patriots to the most-ever wins in a 10-year period; the most-ever consecutive conference championship appearances; the most consecutive division titles; and the most Super Bowl wins (six, which is tied with the Pittsburgh Steelers, but accomplished in one continuous tenure rather than over a half century).

But the same man whose fussy mastery of football made him an infamous pain in the ass was significantly less masterful in charting the end of his career. In early 2024, the Patriots elevated Jerod Mayo—then a young linebackers coach and former Patriots player—to head coach, positioning him as Belichick’s successor. The promise of continuity was central. Mayo had grown up in the organization and had Belichick’s blessing; owner Robert Kraft later revealed that Mayo had been identified for the job years in advance, according to Bleacher Report. But the parts of the succession puzzle that matter most—a clear timeline, the transition of authority, and preparation for leadership—were left fuzzy.

The experiment failed almost immediately. Mayo’s first season ended in a 4-13 record, and the team finished last in its division. The board and Kraft pulled the plug on Mayo after just one season, publicly admitting that they had put him in an “untenable situation.” As if to punctuate the awfulness of the initial succession planning, the Patriots made the Super Bowl the very next year under a different head coach. Jerod Mayo is currently not employed by any NFL team.

***

“The major job of leaders is to develop other leaders,” the management expert Noel Tichy once wrote. But corporate and political history is full of towering figures who gave way to fools and incompetents.

Call it the Aurelius Trap. Strong leaders often fail to do the most important thing in leadership, which is to plan for a successor who can extend their time-bound term into a longer legacy. They have a tendency to make themselves indispensable and irreplaceable—and then prove themselves right by handing the reins to a leader who fails to replace them.

The question of why it is so hard for great leaders to finish the job is interesting enough that it does not require a news peg. But its significance will only grow in the next few years, given the advanced age of modern American leadership. As the Yale professor Samuel Moyn writes in his new book Gerontocracy in America, the political and business worlds are older than ever. In the S&P 500, chief executives are ten-times more likely to be over 70 years old than under 40. Boomers have so dominated American politics that we’ve had more presidents born in the summer of 1946 (three: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump) than in all the years after 1946 (one: Barack Obama, born 1961). Our last two presidents have been the two oldest in American history.

A successful handoff from one generation to the next is self-evidently critical in politics. In business, it’s a nine-figure decision. A 2021 study found that the market value wiped out by “badly managed CEO and C-suite transitions” across the largest publicly traded companies was close to 20 percent of annual investor gains. By this measure, the question of why succession planning so often goes wrong is worth, literally, trillions of dollars.

In the reporting for this essay, I read dozens of papers and consulted several leadership researchers. In my best effort to synthesize the wisdom of these resources, I’ve boiled down this literature to four big theories about why great leaders are so bad at what might be their most important job. While no simple summary of their findings can fit inside of one sentence, the best I can offer is this two-sentence summary:

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There are two problems with the famous “male loneliness crisis”—the loneliness part and the male thing.

First, it’s not clear that loneliness is rising. The most careful studies show only a small increase in self-reported loneliness in the last few years, despite the significant increase in alone time among all Americans, especially young and low-income people.

Second, there’s little evidence that men feel particularly lonely. One study by the American Institute for Boys and Men found that women are just as, or more, likely to say they feel lonely “frequently” or “always.” Other studies mostly find the same:

A separate survey from The Argument of more than 4,5000 people found that women consistently said they felt lonely more than men. More than gender, youth was a far better predictor of emotional distress and feelings of social isolation.

What do we make of this ostensible myth of the male loneliness crisis? One interpretation is that there is nothing to worry about, and everybody is fine.

The trouble with that interpretation, however, is the fact that everybody is so evidently not fine. In the last few years, rates of anxiety and depression among young people have set records. Several surveys—including the General Social Survey and the World Happiness Report—have shown US well-being in a ditch. Other surveys that measure Americans’ feelings about the economy (see: the University of Michigan Consumer Survey) and the country (see: Pew Research) indicate an unprecedented level of national gloom.

This all sets up one of my deepest-held hot takes about the state of the country: The problem isn’t that Americans feel lonely; the problem is that too many Americans, who are spending more time alone than ever, do not feel lonely enough.

Loneliness can be thought of as a biological cue to spend time with other people. But many Americans, enraptured by television and televisual media on every screen, are ignoring that ancient signal. They’ve withdrawn from the world of flesh-and-blood friends and replaced them with pixel-and-glass representations. Thus have beds and couches replaced bedrock communities and parasocial life has eclipsed social life.

The number of Americans who say they have six or more friends has declined by about 60 percent in the last few decades, while the share of Americans who say they have no friends has surged. In both cases, it’s men who have lost the most. No, the problem isn’t that men are lonely. The problem is that many men wouldn’t recognize loneliness if it punched them in the gut and poured a beer on their head.

Laurie Santos is a Yale professor of happiness and the host of the podcast The Happiness Lab. In today’s interview, we talk about:

• whether men are worse at making and keeping friends than women

• how modern notions of loneliness and masculinity both emerged from the 19th century

• when solitude is good and when aloneness is bad

• how to talk to people—and the upsides of over-sharing

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Are Men Worse at Friendship?

Derek Thompson: Do you think that men are worse than women at maintaining friendships in adulthood?

Laurie Santos: I think there’s lots of evidence to show that they are. I don’t think this is something deep-seated and biological about being a guy, but if you look at the data, men are doing worse in the friendship department. And we have to couch this in what’s happening generally, which is that over time, everybody’s friendships are going down. If you look at American Time Use Survey data, which has been studying people for decades, pretty much everybody across all age groups and both genders is spending less time in person with their friends than they did a few decades ago.

But that decrease is much worse for men. One study found that if you look at what’s standardly considered a good level of friendship -- do you have six close friends you could talk to? -- men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple of decades. And if you ask how many men say they have no close friendships at all, you see around 15% of American guys in midlife saying exactly that. That’s a fivefold decrease since folks have been running this survey.

Thompson: Let’s get into why. There is an overall structural trend toward aloneness and away from sociality, which I’ve called the antisocial century. But I want to narrow in on why this has been particularly isolating for men. I remember a conversation with Richard Reeves where he said women and even children are more likely to hang out face-to-face, but adult men are more likely to hang out in what he called shoulder-to-shoulder contexts. They require a centralizing activity to provide an excuse for hanging out. Let’s play golf, let’s watch the game, let’s go to the bar. Women are more likely to meet up in contexts that don’t need an excuse. Men need that excuse—video games, sports—which might mean it’s harder for them to come up with a reason to hang out in the first place.

Santos: The face-to-face versus shoulder-to-shoulder distinction is really important. Todd Rogers, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, did a study where he went to the American Time Use Survey—which looks at how people spend their time, whether they’re eating, cooking, shopping, playing video games—and he asked men and women how likely they’d be to invite somebody to do each of those things. For women, it was most categories: “Yeah, I could invite somebody to go shopping, sit and have coffee, come over while I’m cooking.” For guys, it was basically watch sports or do sports. His idea is that it just doesn’t seem culturally acceptable for guys to invite other guys to do the things that time-use surveys show we actually spend most of our time doing. The categories that guys feel okay inviting other guys into are much smaller.

But the deeper question is why it’s so hard for guys to get together and chat face-to-face. And I think this comes back to traditional gender norms—not all guys, there’s lots of heterogeneity here—but more guys grow up with norms around independence, self-reliance, stoicism, not talking about emotions. That makes it hard to have the vulnerable face-to-face conversations that a lot of guys seem to avoid. And these are relatively new values. If you rewind to classical Greece, you find Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, and they are literal warrior dudes who openly wept when a friend died. If you look at early American history, you find our forefathers walking hand in hand, writing effusive poetry to one another. These norms were not always there.

Thompson: When do you think this conception of masculinity and friendship changed?

Santos: It seems like a lot of it changed in the late 19th century, for a couple of reasons. One is real differences in how people were conceptualizing gender. Back in the 1700s, the idea was that men were actually more empathic than women; women were thought not to have the requisite emotions for close friendship. That changes around the 19th century, when women become the caretakers, the providers. There was also more awareness of queer culture at that time, and because that identity was stigmatized, it caused straight men to become more paranoid about closeness with other men. Then into the early 20th century you get the traditional male gender norms everywhere were coalescing. Through the 18th and early 19th century, guys could be friends, openly expressing emotions. Then that changed.

Thompson: That reminds me of the history book Battle Cry of Freedom, whose opening chapter argues that in the 1850s and 1860s, the Industrial Revolution was sending men out of subsistence farming and into a new mechanized economy, where they became seen as being in charge of work. Women became guardians of the home. You had those separate spheres of influence, which had knock-on effects for what it meant to be modernly masculine versus feminine.

Santos: And we see the knock-on effects today. I interviewed the actor Andrew McCarthy, who wrote a book about the history of male friendship after realizing in his own midlife that he’d lost his friends. He went on a road trip to reconnect with old friends and talk with men around the country about their notions of friendship. One thing that struck him was that everybody he talked to, from Texas oil rig workers to guys in cities, talked about the pressure to provide as a key obstacle to male friendship in midlife. That pressure was central to why men just weren’t making time for social connection.

The myths of the male loneliness crisis

Thompson: The decline in male friendships is sometimes called the “male loneliness crisis.” But the evidence that loneliness itself is surging among men is not nearly as clear as the fact that aloneness is surging. You make the additional point that loneliness is subjective—someone can spend a week at a silent retreat and feel incredibly happy; another person can spend 12 hours alone and feel crushing loneliness—and intensely modern. Tell me how you think we misunderstand loneliness.

Santos: I talked to a historian named Fay Bound Alberti, who has a book on the history of loneliness. She argues that loneliness as we think about it today is actually a pretty new phenomenon. People often talked about being alone, but there were lots of benefits to it : spiritual connection, getting to know yourself, emotion regulation. And for most of human history, there was a sense that you were never truly alone; God was around, or you were one with nature. She argues that our modern notion of loneliness is essentially a 19th century concept that emerged as culture became more secular and more individualist.

She contrasts Robinson Crusoe, from the early 1800s, with the Tom Hanks film “Cast Away.” In Robinson Crusoe, being stranded was a moment of spiritual enlightenment, a chance to find yourself. In Cast Away, the whole point is that Hanks went crazy because he had no one to talk to. There’s a real difference in what we think alone time does.

That’s where psychologists have started asking whether our construal of loneliness is actually creating the feelings associated with it. Researcher Micaela Rodriguez has been studying whether talking about the loneliness crisis makes people more lonely. She runs studies where some people read a typical news article about the loneliness crisis and others read about the benefits of solitude. That simple intervention changes how people experience being alone. Your perception of how bad it is to be alone is making loneliness worse when you actually find yourself alone.

Thompson: When do you think aloneness is therapeutic versus clinically harmful?

Santos: Part of it is intention and choice. How we feel about being alone or with other people might be very different from whether we’re actually alone or with other people. Some of my deepest moments of loneliness have been at a party where I felt disconnected, physically surrounded by people but experiencing real loneliness. Versus a silent meditation where you feel transcendently connected to something larger than yourself. So being physically alone or with other people doesn’t map cleanly onto whether you feel connected. But how we think about it matters enormously. If you’re excited to be alone, if you frame it as solitude rather than aloneness, research shows even those linguistic choices make a difference.

Thompson: Here’s a take you might push back on. A lot of people now spend historically high amounts of time alone, but surveys show they don’t report being lonely. When I see the decline of friendships, of coupling, of time spent with other people, I think they should be lonelier. If they felt a little lonelier, they would socialize more, get off their couch, make friends. Strong social connections are physically and neurologically protective as we get older, and they pay dividends. My thesis is that people are alone because they’re so deluged with entertainment that it’s overwhelming their impulse to be around other people. They’re not feeling lonely in the moment, so they’re not making that next friend. And then 20 or 30 years later, we find out that friendships have declined.

Santos: I don’t think that’s a hot take, because I agree with you. Micaela’s point is specifically that one of the reasons alone time can feel so bad—when people are truly isolated and not entertaining themselves but feeling the weight of it—is how they construe it. Her move is to say: let’s make alone time healthier by changing how we think about it. Her move is not to say: never have social connection.

I think both of us would agree there’s a real problem with how much time people are spending alone compared to 10 or 15 years ago. And I think we saw signs of this even earlier. Think of Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” where he looked at how in the 1950s people joined bowling leagues and had politically and ethnically diverse communities. Then in the late 90s and early 2000s, people weren’t bowling in leagues anymore. And Putnam was already writing this before the internet, before streaming. He was worried about television. And his critics said, “You’re totally underrating the internet. It’s going to transform socialization and bring everyone back together.” Two decades later, socialization has declined further, and the share of people under 25 who say they go to or host parties has declined by 70%. Putnam was prescient and his critics were not.

Thompson: A theme we keep circling: chosen aloneness can be sacred. Aloneness you fall into chronically is what’s harmful. As the father of two young kids, when I’m traveling and I get breakfast alone at a nice hotel, it’s genuinely the most incredible thing in the world, not because I hate my family, but because it’s purposeful aloneness, a brief and bounded ritual before I go back into the chaos of a loud and loving family. Of course aloneness can be therapeutic. But practically every therapeutic molecule can be overdosed. And people can fall into an overdose of aloneness without realizing they’re slowly depriving themselves of the friendships that would pay dividends 20 years down the line.

Santos: That’s exactly right. And someone like Micaela would add that culture can make it harder to get to that Zen-like moment of aloneness. If you’re eating that hotel breakfast thinking, “I’m alone, I must be a freak, something is wrong with me,” it’s very hard to enjoy it. She’s part of a generation that is much more alone than previous ones, and she remembers sitting in a dining hall in college not thinking, “Great, a moment to myself.” She was thinking, “I’m a freak. I don’t have any friends.” What we want is to find healthier ways to have alone time—and that may actually improve our social connection time. When you get that moment alone with your eggs, you come home refreshed. You can be a better partner, a better parent. Healthy alone time can give you the bandwidth to do the sometimes effortful work of building good social connection.

TMI vs. TLI (Too Much Information vs. Too Little Information)

Thompson: You’ve spoken to the University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley, who has done a lot of work on the counterintuitive psychology of connection. Tell me what you’ve learned about how we get this wrong.

Santos: One thing we get wrong about oversharing and TMI is that we often think about it in the context of social media : posting too much, blasting something about your boss on Facebook. And that makes us assume the same cringe judgment applies in real life. But what Nick studies, along with psychologists like Leslie John, shows that sharing more than you think is comfortable in real life is actually good.

Leslie John has been pushing the acronym TLI [Too Little Information] over TMI [Too Much Information]. Her idea is that not sharing enough quietly reshapes your life. If you don’t tell your colleagues about a disability, they can’t give you the help you need. If you don’t tell your partner about the small things needling you, those micro-frustrations add up. Being vulnerable is the path to true connection.

What Nick’s research shows is that people don’t react as negatively as you think when you share something. We worry about how competently others will view us when we reveal a struggle: “Will people think I’m a bad mom? Will they think I’m not good at my job?” But other people aren’t thinking about competence. They’re thinking about your warmth. They’re thinking, “This person shared something with me. They trust me.” And how do you react when someone shares something vulnerable? You tend to reciprocate warmth and openness. But we forget this when we’re the one doing the revealing, and so we share too little.

Thompson: One of my favorite stories from Nick is that he loves to get incoming students at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business into an auditorium and ask them to turn to the person closest to them and share their deepest fears or disappointments. Initially these students start writhing with discomfort. And he says, “We’re doing this.” Fifteen minutes later, he cannot get them to shut up. There are tears streaming down faces. The conclusion he’s driving at is that there’s a latent desire to share that often goes un-acted on because of a kind of social anxiety, a fear that revealing something true about ourselves will trigger judgment. When instead what tends to happen is reciprocity: vulnerability begets vulnerability, kindness, empathy.

What does this tell us about modern psychology? Are we demanding too much of ourselves to be introverted? Do we fear sharing more than we should?

Santos: It shows something I talk about constantly: our minds lie to us. We pursue happiness and social connection incorrectly because we have bad theories about what will make us feel good. Nick’s work shows we’re just bad at understanding the consequences of social connection. We’re bad at predicting how much people like us. We’re bad at thinking about what expressing something vulnerable will do to how we’re judged. And each one of these mistaken theories is preventing connections that would genuinely improve our lives.

One of my favorites is the Liking Gap, from psychologist Erica Boothby. When you ask “how much is this person going to like me after our conversation?” you consistently underestimate the answer. If you look at college roommates or new office hires and ask them how much the people around them like them, they consistently underestimate it.

Beautiful Mess Effect

Thompson: I think social media makes this much worse. Social media is so good at making in-group versus out-group messaging go viral that we can easily mistake the virality of online hostility for the way people relate in the physical world. But these are two completely different worlds with almost different rules. Online, outgroup hatred is a key to virality. In person, reciprocity tends to dictate relationships. If you’re nice to someone on a bus, they don’t say “go to hell.” You get what you give. It’s very hard for people who spend a lot of time on TikTok or Twitter, absorbing the popularity of hostile messaging, to then imagine meeting those same strangers in real life. And many times you don’t even meet them -- you just respond to a critic online and they say, “Oh my God, I love your work.” The moment people can see each other and know they’re being seen, the entire calculus of interpersonal psychology changes.

Santos: Nick makes a related point that doesn’t even require social media polarization. For most of human history, the only way to communicate was face-to-face in real time. Now we have texts, emails, Slack. And one of the things we know psychologically is that text dehumanizes us. It’s very hard to see a full mind in it, because you don’t get the emotional expression you get in person or even on a podcast. This is why you can’t tell if a text message is sarcastic or sincere. And if you think about how much of the human species now connects in text and text-like media, it makes sense that we’re misreading each other constantly.

The second bias I love is what’s called the Beautiful Mess Effect. We think that if we show our vulnerabilities or mess-ups at work or with friends, people will be put off. But what actually happens is that people like us more -- we seem human, more relatable, more like them. Sharing your mess signals trust and invites people to help. So we walk around with an incorrect theory that being vulnerable will make us less likeable, when in fact it makes us more so.

Naming these biases helps. When I’m on the verge of sharing something vulnerable or striking up a conversation with a stranger, I notice the cringe voice saying “don’t do it.” And I’ve developed some evidence-based courage to tell that voice: the data says you’re probably wrong by about 50%.

The Founders’ theory of happiness

Thompson: As Americans, the pursuit of happiness is inscribed into our founding document. But a theme of this episode is that many modern notions -- of male loneliness, of friendship, of what it means to be alone -- are recent inventions. In this 250th year of America, what did “the pursuit of happiness” mean in 1776 versus what we think it means in 2026?

Santos: As you might guess, we’re pretty off. Darrin McMahon, a historian at Dartmouth, has a book called “Happiness: A History” where he looks at this across time. For most of human history, you didn’t think you could pursue happiness, because it came down to luck. Even the word “happiness” comes from “hap” -- happenstance. Then in classical times, Aristotle and the Greeks started to think happiness was achievable, but the way to pursue it wasn’t to go after pleasure -- it was to pursue virtue. Courage, prudence, kindness. What Aristotle called eudaimonia: a life of flourishing. Happiness wasn’t about your own hedonic pleasure.

This changes in the 18th century, around the founding of the United States, for several reasons. Pestilence and disease were receding. Little creature comforts -- better bedding, lighting, chimneys -- were more available. Religious notions shifted away from Calvinist misery-now-happiness-later toward the idea that hedonic pleasure was compatible with a good life. So this is the world in which the founding fathers were operating: the first era in which pleasure was considered genuinely acceptable to pursue. But these were also scholars steeped in classical thought. Darrin McMahon’s idea is that they held a dual notion of happiness -- hedonic pleasure, yes, but achieved through virtue and through seeking happiness for the community, not just for yourself.

Interestingly, the word “pursuit” meant something different in the 18th century. It was connected to prosecution -- the hunt -- with the understanding that in going after happiness, you might kill it. So the preamble gives us an unalienable right to life and liberty, but happiness? You just have the right to pursue it. Implicit in that was the idea that it wasn’t guaranteed. And the work of pursuing it was the classical work of cultivating virtue.

Fast-forward to 2026 and you look at looksmaxxing and TikTok influencers and self-help culture and you think: we got way off track. We forgot the virtue part and we forgot that it wasn’t guaranteed to us.

Thompson: One conclusion I take from that story is that the Aristotelian concept of happiness that may have inspired Jefferson had this patina of virtue that is inherently social -- you are courageous not for yourself but for others. But when I think about looksmaxxing or “good vibes only” culture, it’s entirely an internal monitoring system: “Am I happy now? Is this a good vibe?” That’s a pull inward rather than an extension outward toward other people.

Santos: And two things go wrong when we do that. Psychologist Iris Mauss at UC Berkeley studied what she calls the paradox of happiness: the more we pursue it, the less happy we tend to be. One reason is that people who think of happiness as something social -- cultivating everyone’s flourishing -- are not as subject to hedonic adaptation. We get used to pleasures, we return to baseline. But if you’re pursuing kindness and generosity rather than hedonic pleasure, we’re less subject to that adaptation. The pitfalls of pursuing happiness don’t come up as much if you pursue it in this eudaimonic, social way.

The other pitfall is what psychologists call meta emotions -- emotions about emotions. When we constantly ask “am I happy yet?”, we often feel we come up short, and then comes the frustration, the shame, the “I should be doing better.” That makes us feel worse. The paradox is that the more we chase happiness in this individualist, self-monitoring way, the further we get from it. And the more we’ve strayed from the founders’ notion that happiness is about other people, social connection, and these social goods -- the worse we’ve made the very self we were trying to satisfy.

Thompson: It also seems that when we help other people, we can know that we’ve helped them in a way that we can’t always know that we’ve made ourselves happy. Self-happiness is a difficult endpoint to measure. Was I happy at that restaurant? Was that wine good enough? But if I shared that wine with my wife and we spoke lovingly about our kids -- those things have clear yes or no answers. You did it or you didn’t. But when you’re doing something purely to make yourself happy, the endpoint is impossible to truly know.

Santos: Yes. And we just tend to have fewer of those judgy meta emotions when it’s about other people. If you gift a friend a bottle of wine, you’re not agonizing over whether it was the right choice the way you might if you’d bought it for yourself. We have these built-in mechanisms for the warm glow of doing something for others that are just less prone to self-criticism. We are built to be connected. And the more we get away from connection, we do that at peril -- not just for our sense of belonging, but for our overall pursuit of happiness.

A very brief history of AI—and, by extension, the debate over whether it is a bubble—might go something like this:

1. The age of scaling and praying (Q4 2022 - 2025): After ChatGPT swept across the internet, hyperscalers poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. Despite enormous hopes for the technology, actual AI revenue lagged spending. There was a strong case that supply was outrunning demand, just as it does in every industrial bubble.

2. The age of agents (End of 2025 - ???): With the arrival of Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and other autonomous agents, corporate spending on AI went so berserk that Anthropic's servers started buckling under the load. Suddenly, the story flipped: Demand for AI was demonstrably outstripping the supply of compute, complicating the traditional bubble narrative.

3. The reality check (circa Q2 2026): After months of running up token bills in the millions of dollars, some companies started wondering whether the productivity gains from autonomous agents actually justified the cost. The question shifted from “Can AI generate demand?” to “Can AI backfill supply?” to “Hold on a sec, what are we spending all this money on?”

Thus, the center of gravity of the AI discourse has shifted from concerns about demand, to worries about supply, to a freakout over value. In the last few days, several executives of Fortune 500 companies have confided to reporters that they’ve been out spending on AI tokens like drunk gambling addicts slumped over at the Bellagio craps table. An AI consultant told Axios that one of its clients spent half a billion dollars in one month on Claude. That is roughly what the entire US population spends monthly on shampoo or contact lenses. Uber and Microsoft have reportedly discontinued some of their Claude Code licenses, as costs became unmanageable and productivity proved elusive. AI critics and bubble watchers are circling the news and claiming that this is the backlash that could take down the industry. Gary Marcus, the cognitive scientist who has been warning about AI since ChatGPT launched, wrote this week that “if enough other companies report the same [productivity disappointments], the bubble pops.”

So, what has happened here? And what level of a crisis is this for the trillion-dollar bet that the US economy has made on AI?

It’s worth backing up a half-step to recall how we arrived at this point. The shift from chatbots to agents that took place over the last six months is the central economic event in AI. No matter what story you’re trying to understand—whether it’s the surge in AI use at white-collar companies; the unprecedented increase in AI revenue at frontier labs, such as Anthropic; the degrading of Claude for some Anthropic customers; or even the stock boom in memory chips—everything comes back to the age of agents.

Compared to O.G. tools like ChatGPT, agents are practically another species of technology. While chatbots take one question and give one answer, an agent runs a loop: planning, calling up tools, retrieving results, updating context, and planning again. While this ability to loop back makes agents useful for complicated tasks, such as coding or complex data analysis, every step of every loop burns tokens, or units of computation. Add up all the steps, and you’ll find that agents eat tokens like mammals breathe oxygen. According to data from SemiAnalysis, the typical agent job uses 96,000 tokens before generating an answer, which is more text than the entire novel “The Great Gatsby.”

This explosion of token consumption has several consequences. First, tokens are money, and agents that use a lot of tokens owe a lot of money. The average business is spending 13x more on AI tokens than in January 2025,” said Ara Khazarian, the lead economist at Ramp. At several firms, AI agent spending quickly ran into the tens of millions of dollars—in many cases, more than the team of talented software engineers that some people feared that this technology would replace.

Second, to justify their surging token spending, companies initially conflated AI use and productivity. Firms such as Meta created internal leaderboards that ranked employees by token consumption, which encouraged workers to spend all day throwing projects at agentic AI without regard for efficiency, a practice dubbed “tokenmaxxing.” As token costs soared, the benefits from tokenmaxxing lagged. In many cases, it probably resulted in more work and more burnout for many teams. The engineering analytics firm Faros AI found that “code churn,” or lines of code deleted versus added, increased by more than 800 percent under high AI adoption.

Bubble watchers insist that this burnout and backlash could bring the AI spending boom crashing down to earth. And, since I have no special access to the future, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider the possibility that they’re right. If agentic AI is broadly seen as a waste of money by the major Fortune 500 clients, the great revenue surge of 2026 will slow down and add to the already significant doubt that the hyperscalers can make back the money that they’re outlaying on chips, data centers, electricity, and AI engineers.

Rather than see the agent backlash as a clear sign that AI is a scam, or that it is doomed, it might make more sense to see this development in the context of a normal technological adoption curve. As Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, has said, chief executives who valorized AI without understanding it were also subject to a special kind of AI psychosis—that is, the belief, disconnected from reality, that more AI is always better; that every line of code produced by agentic AI was ready to ship; and that each prototype that Claude Code spits out was another billion-dollar idea.

As SemiAnalysis’s Doug O’Laughlin told me in an interview last week, every new technology requires an extended period of trial and error, as organizations toggle between (a) not enough experimentation or spending, followed by (b) too much experimentation and spending, followed by (c) too dramatic a pullback, followed by (d) the repetition of steps (a) through (c), until firms figure out a long-term balance between labor spending and tech spending. Whether AI skeptics like Marcus are right that the bubble is about to pop depends entirely on a question that, as of today, nobody can definitively answer: Is the bill worth it?

This is just one of the questions that I put to O’Laughlin in a recent interview. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. Among other things we talk about:

• The panic over AI costs and its historical echoes

• The state of the AI-bubble debate

• The business lesson behind Anthropic’s historic success—what whether the company would already be doing $100 billion in annual revenue if it weren’t constrained by compute

• Whether OpenAI is doomed to get boxed in by Anthropic’s enterprise business and Google’s consumer access

• Why agents are to AI what the website was the internet

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The AI Cost Panic

Derek Thompson: Everybody is freaking out about AI agent costs right now. JPMorgan recently published a note entitled “Al Token Costs are Eating Internet Profits Alive.” Several companies, including Shopify, Spotify, ServiceNow, and Roku said in their recent earnings calls that AI is surging as a share of operating expenditures. Now we hear that Uber and Microsoft have blown through their 2026 token budgets in a matter of months, and some of these companies are reportedly dropping their Claude contracts. Where is this heading?

Doug O’Laughlin: I want to take the historical view.

Before the Industrial Revolution, for a lot of companies, all costs were labor costs. Over time, with the rise of machines, companies had to think about capital equipment being a permanent part of the cost of doing business. Now we’re seeing the beginning of a new operating cost. Let’s call it automated intelligence. Even if labor isn’t displaced, this category of automated intelligence is going to be a permanent part of the picture, much the same way that traditional IT didn’t exist 100 years ago and now every company factors it into their operating expenses.

While automated intelligence seems incredibly expensive today, it’s going to make sense for many companies to spend a lot of money on agentic AI in the long run. The challenge will be figuring out the right ratio of labor costs to AI costs. Today there are no benchmarks. Everybody is trying to figure it out on the fly. But despite the news stories, I’d argue that numbers that seem big today might seem small tomorrow. Everyone is going to figure out the effective ratio of compute to labor.

Thompson: How is your company SemiAnalysis thinking about token spending and this ratio between labor costs vs. AI costs?

O’Laughlin: We’re a fast-growing company. But even we’re like, “man, this is a lot of tokens.” [In April, SemiAnalysis acknowledged in a newsletter that the company “reached as high as $10.95 million dollar annual spend rate” on Anthropic Claude tokens.] So we’re figuring out the ratio of compute to labor, just like everybody else. I think it’s important to stress again that agentic AI is not even a year old. It’s been five months! No one knows the right ratio. Clearly there is value to be derived. But if you just go crazy, there are places where you’re boiling the ocean for GPUs, and you’re clearly wasting money.

Tokenomics and Bubble Fears

Thompson: When I first changed my mind about AI being a bubble, I got a lot of notes from people arguing that the unit economics of AI were broken; that consumers weren’t paying full freight for tokens; that the whole thing was being supported by venture capital subsidies; and that AI demand was going to collapse when prices rose.

Do you buy this story?

O’Laughlin: No, I don’t buy it.

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• An IRS audit of Donald Trump’s tax returns, which could have cost him more than $100 million, was curiously wiped away in an agreement between the president’s own Justice and Treasury Departments.

• The Justice Department created a $1.8 billion slush fund that the president can use to pay out to his friends, including lawbreaking January 6 rioters.

• The president used his influence over the IRS to guarantee “immunity” from all ongoing tax investigations into his family.

• The Wall Street Journal reported on nearly $1 billion worth of suspicious commodity trades made just minutes before Trump’s social-media posts about the Iran War caused oil prices to plummet, signaling a possible apperance of insider trading tied to the president’s posts.

Again and again, the president has taken the federal government in his hands, turned it upside down like a child’s piggy bank, and smacked it on the side until billions of dollars poured out of the hole in its back. As Republicans excuse his behavior by alleging misdeeds by the other side, I fear that a warped philosophy of amorality is settling over American politics, where fewer people are arguing for universal principles of decency and more people are perfectly comfortable justifying their own side’s uninterrupted immorality by insisting on the enduring presence of a greater evil on the other side.

This is no way to build a world.

After years of conservatives criticizing the left for “virtue signaling”—that is, cravenly performing a version of virtue for public approval—we now have something even worse than its opposite. The president and his allies are not merely vice-signaling. By empowering a figure who is oblivious to virtue and choosing to ignore his crescendoing depravity, we are creating a mode of politics that openly celebrates the death of morality.

This is the age of vicemaxxing. The question is whether this is our new normal—or, I hope, the sort of cultural overreach that shocks our collective conscience and sets the stage for a more decent politics.

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America in the Age of Vicemaxxing

1. People are good

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes that we can discern “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” by listening to the funny things people say when they argue with one another.

They say things like “that’s my seat, I was here first.” They say “come on, you promised.” They appeal to a moral principle.

What most interests Lewis about these quarrels is that—unless the fight is happening on a playground among cruel children, or in a prison yard among psychopaths—the other person in the fight usually accepts the principle. He rarely says, “I stole this seat because I’m stronger than you,” or “I promised, but promises are for losers.” Rather, the misbehaving person defends his behavior, not by arguing against the standard, but rather by arguing for a “special reason” or excuse to depart from the standard. They say, “I thought you’d gotten up from your seat, and now I’m all settled,” or they claim something has changed since the promise was made.

People behaving badly rarely argue that badness is defensible on its own terms. More often, they argue that the moral standard of goodness broadly applies—just not in this case. To Lewis, the basis of faith and goodness balances on the tip of one idea: Deep down, the soul of humanity is endowed with a glowing kernel of decency, a shared understanding of basic right and wrong.

Some might call this thing herd psychology, or culture. Some might call it evolutionary eusociality, or biology. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis calls it god. I don’t know what to call it. But what we call it is not so important as the fact that it exists. Morality presses on us, even when we pretend it cannot touch us. It’s there, even when people pretend that they are too special to hear it. Morality feels real, because it is. Goodness exists.

2. Trump is bad

Donald Trump is not immoral. The adjective is close but several letters off. The better word is amoral, and the difference matters. His calamitous sense of narcissistic victimhood means he cannot see principles in the first place, and he encourages those around him to imagine that the principles are fake. Ethics whizz past Trump the way sonar waves and high-pitched dog whistles evade the umwelts of ordinary people. The left-wing writer John Ganz put it this way:

His entire notion of the world comes down to personal relationships and he personalizes every concept and event. If the market goes down, someone is trying to screw you, personally. If it goes up, and you benefit, it’s because you’re smart.

Or consider the testimony of a very different source who came to the exact same conclusion. Here’s Steve Bannon from Michael Wolff’s 2017 bestseller Fire and Fury:

Bannon saw again the essential Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight. The battle was between you and someone else who wanted what you had.

Fortified within the armor of his amorality, Trump kicked off his second presidency with an astonishing run of ethically indefensible nonsense:

• Taking crypto money from desperate followers, then taking medicine from dying children: In January 2025, Donald Trump launched $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency meme coin, which allowed his family to earn more than $100 million from trading fees even as more than 800,000 investors lost more than $2 billion, making it one of the most nakedly extractive presidential self-enrichment schemes in history. Three days later, the president signed an executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance, resulting in the estimated death of more than 500,000 people around the world, most of them children.

• Soliciting billionaire donations in exchange for pardons and tax cuts, while cutting health care for the poor: In March, the Trump family sought an investment from the crypto firm Binance; six months later, the president pardoned the company’s founder Changpeng Zhao, whose conviction of money laundering included one of the largest corporate penalties in history. Two weeks later, Trump pardoned the businessman Trevor Milton, who had been convicted of securities and wire fraud, several months after the Miltons donated millions of dollars to his campaign. Four weeks after that, in April, Trump pardoned the Florida tax offender Paul Walczak soon after his wife attended a $1 million fundraising dinner for the president. In July, Trump signed into law a tax cut that will save the top 0.1 percent of Americans about $300,000 a year. The law includes the largest reduction in health care spending on the poor in American history.

• Gutting government oversight while engaging in blatant corruption: In May, Trump thanked the largest buyers of $TRUMP meme coin with a private dinner at a Virginia golf club without lobbying registrations or an ethics review. Trump has fired the head of the US Office of Special Counsel, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, and more than a dozen inspectors general across federal agencies, after handing the FBI over to a conspiracy theorist and personal friend with no record in law enforcement.

In these paragraphs and juxtapositions, one can see Trumpism for what it is—not so much an ideology, or theory of a political economy, or even a political cause, but rather a pure machine of self-enrichment, one that seeks to maximize glory and income for the president, with a casual indifference or outright hostility toward any life form that doesn’t present itself as a supine resource for the extraction of wealth and power.

To point out that Trump’s lurid corruption has been bad sounds almost pathetic in its understatement. But I am trying to make a more solid point: I believe that the above paragraphs represent the kind of bad and wrong that everybody knows is bad and wrong. And by everybody, I mean not only progressive Boomers neurally tethered to primetime MSNBC but also the entire MAGA electorate. Everybody knows, in some part of their heart, soul, prefrontal cortex, or whatever, that there is no moral explanation possible for the stories I have just offered you.

How does Trump get away with it?

As Lewis writes, extraordinary efforts to bend morality require extraordinary excuses. While Trump himself may be uniquely amoral—Lewis’s frame doesn’t seem to quite touch him—the work of excuse-making falls to his followers. To justify the rise of a kleptocratic king, conservatives have to convince themselves that the threat from Trump’s enemies is so existential that it justifies their own side’s actions.

And so, they do.

In his new book The Political Vise, the Republican operative John Tillman argues that the “radical left” has commandeered America’s leading institutions in a despotic attempt remake the country as a radical woke-socialist dystopia. Like similar conceits—c.f., the Cathedral, “the Flight 93 election”—the construct of The Vise serves the purpose of “imagining the Democrats, not as a rival coalition with opposing policies, but as a unified, impersonal force that is always on the precipice of totalitarian control,” the Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Chait wrote. The imminence of this threat leaves Republicans with no choice: They must “destroy that which threatens to destroy them”—and at all costs.

Any time I raise the issue of Trump’s corruption online, the first response is invariably something along the lines of “but Biden was also bad.” This is not a tendency limited to online posting. It’s the standard response among Republican defenders of the administration:

• Asked about the president pardoning January 6 rioters, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) said: “Look at Biden and his pardons. Are you kidding me?”

• Asked about Trump using his presidency to become a cryptocurrency scion, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters, “I’ll talk to you only about [Biden’s] pardons.”

• Asked on CNBC about conflicts of interest in the family business, Eric Trump said, “Wwe’re far from Hunter Biden.”

The reasoning “…but Biden was also bad” does not make contact with an ethical principle. It is a moral blank check made out to the administration that promises to cover the cost of any transgression. The presumption that the evils of our enemies can justify any indecency is the opposite of a moral principle. “I think anyone who follows politics can tell there are no principles left in my party,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. “Even for people who agree with some of the stuff the president is doing, if you are honest with yourself, you know it is not based on principle.”

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3. The post-virtue style of politics

In his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the modern world had lost the shared moral language once provided by virtue systems, such as religion. Several months ago, I sat with a reading group to discuss the opening chapters of the book and admitted that I didn’t quite get it. “Were our ancestors really so virtuous?” I said. “If past generations of institutionalized racism, misogyny, bigotry, and violence possessed a language of virtue, of what use is that language?” I still think I was right about the egregious sins of our parents and grandparents. But I now think that MacIntyre was right, too, and it took a dash of C. S. Lewis to see just how right. In this distrustful, anti-establishment, post-institutional age, too many public conversations about right and wrong excuse the behavior of preferred groups rather than articulate a theory of virtue that extends across all groups.

Several weeks ago, the New York Times rocked the Internet with a controversial interview with the commentator Hasan Piker and the journalist Jia Tolentino, in which they described and tacitly defended the practice of stealing small things from big corporations. Tolentino admitted to pocketing a few lemons from Whole Foods, and Piker approved.

It would be absurd to equate the substance of these comments with Trump’s corruption; a snagged Whole Foods lemon is not a $1.8 billion pot of public funds to dole out to lawbreaking rioters. I am not interested in piling onto the personal attacks that followed this conversation so much as I want us to listen closely to the precise way they talked about virtue. “The rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I?” the interviewer Nadja Spiegelman said. “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers,” Piker said.

Do you hear it? Surely, C. S. Lewis’s ears would have perked up. It’s special excuses all the way down. Rather than begin with a universal imperative (“Stealing is bad, and it would be bad if everyone stole all the time”), followed by a personal decision (“therefore, I don’t steal”), joined by a public policy recommendation (“therefore, I expect others in society to do the same”), you have a series of private justifications for bad behavior, each excused by the fact that some larger societal force is also bad. Instead of “I Play By the Rules, So I Expect the Rich to Do the Same,” the article’s headline offered the perfect inversion: “The Rich Don’t Play By the Rules, So Why Should I?” Out with universalist ethics, and in with individualist excuses for doing what you want.

I am not lumping Tolentino, Piker, and Spiegelman into the same bucket as the spineless corruption-excusers who sit in Congress. I am rather asking that we hear the similarities in the formal logic of their statements: the in-group’s bad behavior is justified so long as the out-group’s behavior is appropriately condemned.

My fear is that the post-virtue style of politics is here to stay. The moral blank check of “we don’t have to argue for our cause, so long as we can argue that our counterparty is worse” might prove too tantalizing for the next generation of conservatives, centrists, liberals, and leftists to resist when they hold the reins of power.

Another way is possible. In April, the political writer Isaac Saul, who has exhaustively documented Trump’s corruption, published an essay entitled “Decency is about to make a comeback.” “Obscenity feels like it has become the norm,” Saul wrote. But just as culture is the continual handoff between trend and countertrend—he notes that the death of malls seems to be reversing itself—perhaps the lurid corruption of our age will inspire a countermovement that successfully returns government to the rule of law. Like a rubber band pulled all the way back, maybe the tensions within vicemaxxing politics will spring us forward in the opposite direction.

What would a revolution of decency look like? I don’t know. I am not ready to predict the imminence of a new social gospel that extends itself across American life. I am only ready to hope for it.

Like Lewis, I think that people know good and bad. A right society cannot build itself on a pile of wrongs, and a country cannot stand on a heap of special excuses that reserve for every insider the right to misbehave on account of some external sin. Maybe one day, when enough people get tired of making excuses for the inexcusable, some leader or group will say the thing that nobody currently wants to say: “We are better than this.” And maybe it will feel good to hear it, too, because it is the rarest thing: the truth.

Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?

This was the subject of last week’s Plain English episode and a new blockbuster report from the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch. In fact it feels like just about everybody has been taking a crack at this question recently.

Some blame it on technology. One week ago, my feed was flooded with a viral video of Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, speaking about the sterilizing effects of modern technology. Among his friends, “no one’s having kids,” said Leahy, who was 30 at the time. “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” If you asked Leahy what the explanation was, “my answer is technology,” he said. “My answer is social media. My answer is AI.”

Others blame a kind of 21st century weltschmerz—a world sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in the New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, entitled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” an excerpt from her forthcoming book Inconceivable, argued that we have “overlooked” the pervasive sense of existential uncertainty among young adults. Between climate change, rising housing costs, political instability, AI, inflation chaos, doomscrolling, and declining social trust, today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.

So who is right? Is this about phones and technology, or is it a reflection of modern anxiety about the world? Or, perhaps, both?

I always like to begin my analysis of the subject here: Any complete and responsible explanation of this phenomenon cannot begin in the 21st century and should never pretend that this is some tragedy brought about by exclusively terrible things. Birthrates have been declining in developed countries for a long time, as child mortality has declined; as women’s education has increased; as female labor force participation has soared; as modern contraception has proliferated; and as modern notions of feminism have empowered women to take more control over their bodies and their economic futures. And birthrates have continued to decline around, or even accelerated in their downturn in developed countries, as smartphone usage has surged; as housing prices of increased; as time spent at home on the Internet has grown; and as socialization and coupling have declined.

The decline is accelerating faster than almost anybody predicted. As Burn-Murdoch reported, UN demographers predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023; the real figure came in at 230,000—a whopping 50 percent miss. The total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in almost every country in North America, South America, Europe, and Southern and Eastern Asia. It’s falling swiftly in most African countries. And birthrates might be set to crash in China. In the 2026 paper “The Rise of Zero Fertility Desire in China,” a Brown University researcher reported that according to the China General Social Survey, the share of young women with “no desire for children” increased from approximately 5 percent in 2012 to 47 percent in 2023.

The epicenters of the baby bust will surprise many people. Europe has a higher fertility rate than Thailand. Tokyo has a higher fertility than Mexico City, Bogotá, or Santiago. China may already a lower fertility rate than Japan.

“Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,” the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. “Everything else is noise. Once you start thinking about these, it’s hard to start thinking about anything else.”

In today’s interview, Fernández-Villaverde explains:

• Demographics 101: Defining total fertility rate, replacement rate, and momentum

• Why the world has probably already passed “peak child”

• Why 2023 was the first year in human history that the global fertility rate likely fell below the replacement rate

• Why the question “why is the birthrate declining?” is so hard to answer quickly

• Why most people underrate the long-term effects of low birthrates on world affairs

• The compounding effects of sub-replacement level fertility: “If Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for the next 200 years without immigration, its population will decline from 63 million to 2 million.”

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WHY DOES FERTILITY MATTER, AT ALL?

Derek Thompson: Why is fertility important?

Fernández-Villaverde: Because demographics is destiny. The number of children born today will determine how our society will look in 30 to 40 years. The year 2023 was a unique year in the history of humanity, because it’s the first time our total fertility rate as a planet fell below replacement rate. That has never happened before in 200,000 years. That means the world population will peak in another 30 years or so if the trend continues. Some things will be good, some will not be so good.

Thompson: Tell me what replacement level means and what total fertility rate means.

Fernández-Villaverde: Let’s start with replacement, which is the easiest. Imagine you have a population of one million people. How many children need to be born for that population to be constant at one million in the long run? It turns out that for every woman in that population, you need 2.1 kids.

Why 2.1 and not 2.0? Two reasons. First, there are a little more boys born than girls, around 105 boys for every 100 girls, if you don’t do anything like selective abortions. Second, not all girls who are born will move on to become mothers themselves. They will die of accidents or other reasons before they enter their fertile ages. So you need every woman to have 2.1 kids on average to keep population constant. That’s the replacement rate.

The total fertility rate is an estimate of how many children women will have in a given population. When we look at the U.S. right now, the fertility rate is around 1.57. That means the average American woman is having 1.57 kids. Because the replacement rate is 2.1, a way to think about it is that we have a shortfall of slightly over 0.5 kids. There is a subtlety I want the audience to understand. The total fertility rate is an estimate. It’s slightly different from what we call completed fertility. Completed fertility is when I go back to women who are already 50 years old and see how many kids they actually had. The problem with completed fertility, which is what we really care about in the very long run, is that by definition it takes decades before we can compute it. So if we are going to make any forecast about the future, we cannot rely on completed fertility.

Thompson: In your Miami speech, you said “peak child” might already be behind us. I want you to explain what that means and why, if peak child is already behind us, the global population isn’t already falling.

Fernández-Villaverde: Let me start with the second and come back to the first. In demography there is something called momentum.

Momentum means the population will keep growing for 15 to 30 years after you fall below the replacement rate. Let me give a simple example. Imagine you have a spouse and only one kid. You are below replacement rate, but you are two. You have two parents, your spouse has two parents. You are not replacing yourselves, but your parents have not died yet. The fact that you have one kid still increases the population. The problem is when your parents die, we have not replaced them.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of women were born on the planet. They had their kids in the 2010s, and that’s why the population is still growing. The grandparents of these girls have not died yet. What will happen is that when these grandparents, the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s, start dying, that’s when the population goes down. The analogy I love to use: think about a gigantic oil tanker. When you start changing the direction of the oil tanker, it has so much momentum that it takes time before it turns, but it is already cooked in. The number of children on the planet has been going down since around 2012. It’s just that their grandparents have not died yet.

And then the first point: yes, as a planet we are below replacement rate. We are not producing enough kids to keep the population constant. There are countries like the U.S. and Western Europe for which we have very good data. There are countries in Sub-Saharan Africa where the data is not so good. So all of this is done with some degree of uncertainty. I’m pretty sure it was 2023, but it may be the case that in 10 years, where we have slightly better data, it may have been 2022 or 2024. The big picture doesn’t change if it is one year up or another. Everything we observe is that fertility on the planet is continuing to go down very fast. In 2024, fertility was below 2023, and in 2025 it was below 2024. My educated forecast is that we are going to continue seeing this drop in fertility for the next 20 to 30 years, nearly for sure.

Thompson: Given your educated estimate, what is the decade when the global population will start its structural decline?

Fernández-Villaverde: At this moment, I would say 2055. In 2055, the world population will start going down.

WHO WAS WRONG?

Thompson: If you go back to the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for public intellectuals to predict the global population would rise and rise until the environment buckled and we suffered ecological disaster and widespread famine that wiped out billions of human souls. That has not happened. Global fertility has declined significantly. It’s falling faster than practically anybody predicted, certainly folks like Paul Ehrlich, author of the infamous book The Population Bomb. Why do you think these so-called experts were both so confident and so wrong?

Fernández-Villaverde: The wording of your question already tells you a lot about the answer, because you used the word “public intellectual.” You didn’t use the word “demographers.”

I’m a professor at Penn, and we have—sorry to brag—what I think is one of the best demographics groups in the world. Had you gone to our population study center in 1968 or 1969 and asked professional demographers what they thought about Ehrlich’s book, they would have probably said, “Eh!” Ehrlich, who was not a demographer, was very good at tapping into a lot of the anxieties people had at the time. I reread the book two years ago, and what surprised me is that all this vocabulary we have introduced is not to be found there. He never wants to define carefully what replacement rate is. He never wants to define carefully what total fertility rate is. He uses the term “birth rate.” The birth rate is the number of children born per 1,000 population. Birth rates are seriously affected by the momentum effects I mentioned before. I would argue the book was not very good at the time, and what a lot of the public intellectuals were saying was not really what the best demographers were saying.

Thompson: I want to push back. It’s not that I want to defend Ehrlich, but rather I want to be clear that your research also seems to disagree strongly with expert demographers today. You’ve said that you think the United Nations is over-estimating the total fertility rate of many countries. Why are today’s experts wrong?

Fernández-Villaverde: You need to understand that the incentives you have when you are putting numbers on the table at a university and at a public policy institution are very different. I’m a professor. Short of me saying something absolutely outrageous and hateful, my dean is not going to complain. My dean is only going to say, “If you think this is what the data says, I’m happy with you.”

But when you’re at a public policy institution, you have to follow an institutional framework, and you need to stick with the party line. The Population Division of the United Nations was created because there was a serious concern that we were having a population bomb. It is true, and I want to hedge a little bit what I was saying about Ehrlich, that fertility was very high in the 1950s and 1960s. What demographers were saying then, which Ehrlich did not, is that fertility was likely to start going down, that it was not such an abysmal thing as Ehrlich was saying.

It’s very difficult for an institution that has spent 60 years saying we had a population bomb to wake up and say, “There is no population bomb.” It’s costly in terms of institutional prestige. It’s costly in terms of communication. It’s costly in terms of even the people working there, who were very committed to a narrative. If you actually look at the UN’s projections, they have been dialing down a lot of their statements about population over the last decade.

In fact, the UN has three scenarios: low fertility, middle fertility, high fertility. My scenario and their low fertility scenario are on top of each other. It’s not that I’m very far away from the UN. We are already fighting about the second decimal. The problem is that these things, even at the second decimal, accumulate over half a century.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING IN SO MANY DIFFERENT COUNTRIES AT THE SAME TIME?

Thompson: I think a lot of people believe falling fertility is mostly a rich country phenomenon. But you point out that’s a misconception. Total fertility rate is lower than the U.S. in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Thailand. If we want to understand why this is happening at a global level, and global synchronized phenomena like this are rare, where do we begin?

Fernández-Villaverde: There are several hypotheses on the table, and I’m going to list them in what I think is their relative importance.

First, there’s been a huge change in social norms worldwide. This probably has a lot to do with social media and cell phones. People watch a TV show about how people live in California or New York, and they say, “Why not something like that for me?” TV changed a little bit of social norms, but Internet, TikTok, X is really a completely different ballgame. In particular, this has mattered a lot in countries where there is not a lot of gender balance in social norms. If you’re in a country like South Korea, or in many Latin American countries, where household work allocation is very unequal, suddenly a lot of younger women are looking at the world and saying, “Why am I going to be working for my husband 24 hours a day?” Social media has really changed that perception.

Second, we have moved to an economy that is much more service-based. Service-based economies, even in India and Africa, mean people don’t work in factories that much anymore, or even in agriculture. They work in shops, they work in offices. Those are jobs much easier for women to have because they don’t depend on physical strength. In Mexico, Brazil, or Colombia, if you are a woman 22 or 23 years old with a decent job in the service sector, and a guy comes to you and tells you, “If we get married, I’m going to be the macho in the home, ruling everything, you are going to work for me all the time, and we are going to have three kids,” you tell the guy, “No.”

Third is what I have called the educational arms race. It used to be the case that a high school degree was the pathway to middle-class life. Those times are gone. Now sometimes not even a college degree is enough for a middle-class life. You need a master’s degree or some postgraduate education. People are staying much longer in school. They are marrying or forming partnerships much later in life. When they are thinking about their kids, they understand they will need to maintain their kids and educate their kids for many, many years. This is particularly true in Asia, in China, Korea, and Japan, where [there is pressure for] your kid to excel in high school and college. Those are the countries with the lowest fertility rates.

The last is housing. In many countries, not in all, housing is at historical heights in relative price. That also limits the ability of families to have more children.

Thompson: Let me summarize what I’m hearing and offer my own framework.

You’re saying that media—phones, the internet, television—have globalized Western values and in particular globalized Western feminism, which has empowered women to determine their own fertility. The ability, the freedom, and the power of women to determine their own fertility has, in country after country, pulled total fertility rate from seven, six, five to around two or one. That’s happened around the world. You also brought in economics: moving from an agrarian to a manufacturing to a services economy might have its own natural effect on lowering total fertility rate, and the cost of housing might also move total fertility rate at the margins.

Two other issues I want to put on the table. First, contraception. Second, socialization rates in the West and throughout East Asia have gone down. People socialize less, they couple up less.

When you put all of this together, having kids has gone from being a necessity or a predestination to a choice. Once having children feels like a social or cultural choice, that rules in other questions such as “can we afford more children?” People were having seven, eight kids when it was difficult for them to afford a house, when they had no money, when food and clothing and home costs were their entire budget, and there was no money left over for pet care and spa days. They were still having seven or eight kids. When economic and cultural norms required high fertility rates, having children wasn’t a choice in the first place. Now it is. In America, you can get married and not have children and still basically live a completely normal economic and social and cultural life.

So I wonder how you feel about this cultural argument that a series of technological and economic and social changes essentially flipped a switch where having children used to be a necessity and a predestination, and now it is a choice.

Fernández-Villaverde: At the very basic level, I fully agree. My PhD dissertation in 2001 was basically an exploration of this mechanism. That’s why I already forecasted back in 2001 that fertility was going to drop a lot. But if you stopped the Jesús of 2001 and told him Colombia’s fertility was 2.8 or 3 then, and asked me where I thought Colombia’s fertility would be in 2026, given all these mechanisms, I would have probably said 1.8, 1.7.

What the Jesús of 2001 would have been enormously surprised by is that it’s not 1.8 or 1.7. It’s 1.1.

Let me put it this way. A fertility of 1.9 basically means most people are having two kids, which is your idea of the perfect suburban family: a boy and a girl, a nice house, and a few people who don’t have kids. A total fertility rate of 1 is really a situation where many, many women only have one kid, and a lot of women have zero. That’s what has surprised me, that we have not gone from seven to two. We have gone down much, much further.

You were mentioning contraception. The US was around 1.9 in 2000. There was lots of contraception in the US in 2000. And in 2000, the U.S. was already a service-based economy. It was already a world where women were empowered, maybe not as much as today, but not very different from today. So why have we gone from the 1.9 of 2000 to the 1.57 of today? That is the mystery.

Thompson: I like that. I haven’t quite thought about it that way: there’s one set of explanations that can explain why total fertility rate in a country might go from five to two, but you might need a separate set of explanations that explain why fertility would go from two, roughly replacement level, to one, a situation where the population is halving itself every few decades.

THE MOST SURPRISING STATISTIC

Thompson: Where is the most surprising fertility collapse in the world?

Fernández-Villaverde: Latin America. If you ask which is the main continent right now undergoing an amazing demographic revolution in terms of fertility collapse that is not covered in the mainstream media, it’s Latin America.

Let me give my favorite example: Guatemala. I love Guatemala. I have many good friends from Guatemala. But Guatemala was not really a shining example of development in Central America. Around 2006 or 2007, I’m quoting from memory, Guatemala had a fertility rate of 3.9, basically the fertility rate of a Sub-Saharan African country. Last year, it was probably around 1.9, 1.8. The fact that in 20 years Guatemala has cut in half its total fertility rate is mind-blowing. At the current speed, Guatemala will have a lower fertility rate than non-Hispanic whites in five years.

Let me give another statistic, now coming to the U.S. The fertility rate of African Americans fell in 2024 below the fertility rate of non-Hispanic whites for the first time since the creation of the Republic. The fertility rate of African Americans was always quite higher, stayed high for quite a long time, and then started going down. The fertility rate of non-Hispanic whites also went down, but the fertility rate of African Americans went down much faster. At some moment in the first quarter of 2024, the lines crossed. If you are asking which are the groups with the lowest fertility rates in the US, my answer would be African Americans, which is completely different from what a lot of the discourse is. Who is having kids in the US? Rich white suburban families. Who is not having kids in the US? Poor African American urban families.

These are the fundamental changes that are hard to explain with a naive, “We went from agriculture where in my farm I needed seven kids to living in a city where I only have two.” That explanation is perfectly fine. That’s what my dissertation was about. Why suddenly in Colombia and Guatemala, in Chile, in Bolivia, in Brazil, have people decided to stop having kids so quickly?

The second region in the world where fertility is collapsing incredibly fast is North Africa and the Middle East. Morocco is already below replacement rate. Tunisia is very low. Egypt is falling incredibly fast. All across the Middle East, fertility is falling very, very fast. Those are the countries that will not come to mind. But coming back to the beginning of the answer, Latin America is really the poster child of, “I don’t have a very good explanation for this.”

HOW FERTILITY SHAPES THE FUTURE

Thompson: I want to move on to implications. Before I do, I want to say clearly that when we discuss the reasons for declining fertility around the world, we listed a set of reasons that combined negative motivators, like affordability and lack of housing, with things I think are objectively good. More education for women is good. More freedom for women is good. I’m very pro-contraception. I’m very pro-access to contraception. So the reasons for the decline of fertility are a mix of, I think, quite clearly good things and arguably bad things. Similarly, the implications of the decline of fertility combine both upsides and downsides. Let’s talk about the upsides first.

Fernández-Villaverde: First and foremost, we can ease the pressure on natural resources. In a world where population doesn’t grow or where population starts going down, we will consume less energy, or the growth of energy consumption will be smaller. We don’t need to build that many highways. We don’t need to build that many new dams. We don’t need to extract that many minerals. That’s good for the environment.

Second, it will help us redesign a lot of cities across the world. Cities, especially in emerging economies, grew very fast from the 1960s to today, and the result is not very pretty. You may go to a Latin American city and it has a pretty colonial center, which is where tourists go and take photographs and take a TikTok video. But when you go to the places where the average person lives, they are not great. If we have much lower population pressure, we don’t need to build as fast as we did in the 1960s and 1970s. I’m originally from Madrid in Spain. A lot of the residential neighborhoods in Madrid are ugly. People don’t see those when they come to visit Madrid, but they are really ugly, because in the 1960s and 1970s when population was growing very fast, you had to build these horrible high-rises just to put people under a roof. We are not going to need those ugly high-rises. We can demolish them. We can redesign our cities, have much more livable cities, medium density, places that are much more pleasant to live.

And then, if people are not having kids because they don’t think it’s in their best interest, who am I to complain? I’m an economist, and economists tend to have, by default, a slightly libertarian view of life. If this is what you want to do, that’s what you want to do.

Thompson: What are the downsides?

Fernández-Villaverde: We need to adapt, and adaptation can be costly. The obvious thing that comes to mind is Social Security. Everything related to retirement benefits, Social Security payments, the equivalent of Medicare and similar health programs for the elderly across the world, that’s going to impose a tremendous amount of cost on the planet. But also you are going to start being forced to close primary schools. The school district here in Philadelphia, where I live, was just forced to announce a couple of weeks ago that they are closing a lot of primary schools because there are no kids. That’s a serious disruption for a lot of local communities. Many parts of Philadelphia do not have such a nice environment as they could have, and the local school not only plays the role of an educational institution. It also plays the role of a social club. You use the gym for a lot of social events. Now that the school is closed, you are not going to have the gym to do social events. That causes a lot of disruption. You will be forced to close hospitals. You will be forced to close a lot of other public services.

Finally, if fertility really stays at 1 or 1.1 for a long time, I don’t think we appreciate how big a change this is. Now I’m going to make a crazy forecast, and I want everyone to understand this is a crazy forecast. Let’s suppose Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for 200 years. Thailand right now has 63 million people. At the end of 200 years, it will be around two million people.

Thompson: Sorry, two million?

Fernández-Villaverde: Two million. How do you wind down a society of 63 million people into two million? When population starts falling a lot, countries may do crazy subsidies for having kids, things can change. Maybe the people who are still having kids tend to have more kids and they grow as a share of the population. All those things can happen. I’m just highlighting that these things compound over time. You are going from a society that has 63 million people to a society that has two million. It means you need to close 98% of the hospitals of the country. It means you need to close 98% of the schools of the country.

Thompson: What’s the population of Philadelphia?

Fernández-Villaverde: Philadelphia is around one and a half million right now, maybe a little less.

Thompson: One and a half million is not so different from two million. You’re talking about the nation of Thailand having a population in 200 years that’s a little larger than the city of Philadelphia. It’s not even possible for me to comprehend.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly. People have the idea this is going to be about closing some hospitals. No, this is not about closing some hospitals. This is about closing 98% of the hospitals.

Thompson: Or it is about closing hospitals in the next five years. But you’re saying this is a phenomenon that’s like a tectonic plate.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly.

Thompson: It’s going to keep moving. History is going to play out on top of that tectonic plate. And if it doesn’t stop moving for 100, 200 years, you have a situation where Thailand becomes Philadelphia.

I want to keep pulling on this thread because this conversation reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Rob Meyer, who’s the editor-in-chief of Heatmap. We were talking about climate change. He said, “Derek, the problem with climate change, the most interesting problem of climate change, the most significant problem of climate change, is not the fact that temperature goes up. It’s the second and third-order effects. Temperatures going up increase the likelihood of famines. A famine in Syria creates a population flow into the Mediterranean. That creates a refugee crisis at the borders of European countries. That creates an immigration influx into Germany under Angela Merkel. That creates a populist backlash across Central Europe.”

After just four easy steps, and this is not a hypothetical, this happened 10 or 15 years ago, a phenomenon that sounds like it’s about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is actually about the rise of populism in Europe. Taking that as inspiration, I wonder whether there are other knock-on effects that you and other demographers thinking in the span of decades and centuries worry about. One quick example to me would be a lot of modern liberalism is built on the presumption of positive-sum interactions. But a positive-sum philosophy requires growth. In a world without growth, my earning more income is not positive-sum. I’m taking income from somebody else because it’s a zero-sum environment. A world where population is declining and productivity is not increasing is a world where GDP growth on a year-to-year basis is something like zero to negative 0.5%. You’re talking about a permanent stagnation or recession. That’s a world of zero-sum growth, and that’s a world where a lot of values I consider positive liberalism are no longer feasible because in some cases they might not be true. So without necessarily endorsing that particular fear, what do you see as some of the more interesting or scary second-order effects?

Fernández-Villaverde: Let me give an example that is a very close analog. Let me take Spain because I know it very well. We have had very low fertility for a long time. That means our Social Security payments have ballooned, which means the younger population needs to pay a tremendous amount of taxes to sustain that elder population. People are not happy about it. People are saying, “I’m happy to pay 25% of my income in taxes to pay for Social Security, but I’m not happy to pay 50%.” It’s not that I want to pay zero, but I don’t want to work half of my day just to pay taxes. In Spain right now, there are two conservative parties. Europe is slightly different from the US because we have proportional representation, while the US has first past the vote. In political systems with proportional representation, political change happens by the appearance of new parties. We have a mainstream Conservative Party, which would be the Republican Party of the Mitt Romneys, George Bush father, your country-club Republican, who likes to talk about lowering taxes and breaking investment. And there is a radical right-wing party, and this radical right-wing party is, among other things, about these redistribution issues you are mentioning.

Look at all the electorate in Spain that votes right, and divide it between those under 50 and those above 50. Those under 50, the radical party is the larger party by a very long margin. Those above 50, the country-golf-club Conservative is the dominant party. It’s not just a little difference. If you go for those under 25, no one under 25 is voting for the mainstream Conservative Party, and no one over 65 is voting for the radical right-wing party. The demographic change and the pressure this has put on the Spanish government budget basically means the way right-wing votes in Spain have allocated has changed drastically, and that has completely changed the policy of Spain among tons of things.

Thompson: It also seems to me that the politics of immigration become a significant and unavoidable part of sustaining the welfare state, because what do you need to sustain a welfare state? You need taxable income. Where does the income come from? It comes from people. And if you’re running out of people, you need to import people, and that’s called immigration. But in my experience as someone who lives thousands of miles away from Europe, it seems to me like practically every country that allows immigrants to become a certain share of their population almost always has a populist backlash. I’m not rooting for that outcome. It’s just what I often see.

It means you’re stuck in this almost like a Chinese finger trap, where you need to increase taxable income on the one hand, but doing so in a low-fertility environment can only require either slashing Social Security or adding immigrants. But adding immigrants increases populism. Slashing Social Security creates another backlash. So you find yourself in an environment where there is no long-term popular solution to your political problems. That’s what I see as an outsider.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly. When I talk about these problems, someone always raises their hand and says, “Yeah, we will just bring in a few immigrants and that will fix the problem.” Let’s go back to the example of Japan. Japan right now is around 98% ethnically Japanese. If we wanted to keep the population of Japan constant in 200 years through immigration, in 200 years Japan will be 5% Japanese and 95% non-Japanese. This is not about bringing in a few immigrants. This is about changing your country. That country will not be Japan. You may say, “I’m perfectly fine. I’m not attached to the idea of Japan in the abstract.” But I can see a lot of Japanese say, “This is not about being a xenophobe. This is not about being anti-immigrant. This is about not having a country anymore.”

Let me give a concrete example. In Spain, in addition to Spanish, we have regional languages like Catalan. The problem is Catalonia is getting a lot of immigrants. The immigrants are not Catalan speakers. Their kids may learn Catalan in school, but they don’t speak Catalan. Given the current level of immigration, Catalan, I have forecast, is doomed as a language. It will not exist. Some people will always speak it in a small village in the mountains, but as a working language of day-to-day life, Catalan is doomed. You see it in all the statistics. Look at people under 25, look at people under 30, very clearly the language is dying. If you’re a native Catalan speaker, this is existential. So this is not about being anti-immigrant because I’m a nasty guy. This is not about being racist. This is just about saying, “Don’t I have a right to my language to still exist?” I’m an immigrant myself, so it’s not that I’m against immigration. But like everything, it needs to be within a reasonable degree.

Thompson: You’re making what seems to be an almost mathematical point. A population that does not replace itself with fertility will either die off or find itself replaced by people born in another country. There’s no other way for the math to work out. This is why over the centuries, low fertility becomes not just a numbers problem, not just an economic problem, not just a welfare-state taxation problem, but a political problem and a cultural problem.

You said only two things that matter in the world. We’ve spent 99% of this episode on one of them, fertility. The other one is deep learning, AI. If Korea’s total fertility rate is 1.0 or below in the 2020s, 2030s, and 2040s, its population is going to be shrinking fast by the 2050s and 2060s. But AI also benefits from this principle of scale. This technology that in 2022 often failed to do basic arithmetic is now identifying cybersecurity vulnerabilities better than the best coders in the world. How do these trends intersect?

Fernández-Villaverde: They intersect to some degree, but not as much as sometimes people think. Let me tell you where you are absolutely right. If thanks to artificial intelligence and robotics, a lot of jobs can be done by computers and robots, and that generates a lot of economic growth and that helps us to pay for Social Security, that will make the transition much easier. I’m a bit of a techno-optimist in that sense, and I’m glad this is happening. I think it’s going to give us more degrees of freedom to adapt our society.

But coming back to my point before, this is just not about GDP. My wife and I love to go to a small village in England to spend some time on vacation. It’s a lovely English village. They recently closed the local pub because of population decline. The problem is the local pub in an English village is not just the place you go for a beer. It’s the place where you meet your neighbors. It’s the social gathering place of the village. How are you going to substitute that with artificial intelligence?

That’s what worries me. A lot of the things that make us human are not about being able to produce a lot of widgets with robots. It’s about our social interactions. Thinking again about Thailand, if we are going to be two and a half million, we pretty much need to abandon most of the country and make it empty, because to run things like hospitals you need scale. So we are going to abandon 90% of the country and leave it to the wild side. Artificial intelligence is not going to be able to do much about that. Those are the challenges I don’t think people quite appreciate. I’m a techno-optimist. I love artificial intelligence. I do a lot of artificial intelligence in my own work. But we need to be careful about what it can and cannot deliver in terms of fertility.

In this edition, I’m trying something a bit more ambitious. I’ve organized the morsels of information under several themes—let’s call them: “megatrends”—that define the 2026 news cycle and that I think will continue to shape the world in the months, and years, to come.

Today’s megatrends span economics, health, artificial intelligence, culture, politics, and media. Free subscribers will get to read the first two megatrends, on economics and health—plus a “historical interlude” that was too interesting to leave out. Only paid subscribers will get to read more about the state of AI, a paradox in politics, and an eerie new trend in the media.

Megatrend #1: CULTURE
The Anti-Social Century

A little announcement that probably won’t be surprising to folks who’ve followed my work in the last year: I’ve signed a contract for my next book, and it will be about the ideas I’ve worked on for the last year that I’ve been calling “the anti-social century.” I see this as a natural follow-up to Abundance. If abundance is a critique of, and solution for, the problems of material flourishing—how do we build homes, reduce energy costs, power technology, and invent scientific breakthroughs, all of which can make people’s lives easier and better?—the anti-social century addresses the cultural, or “post-material,” problems that are often beyond the scope of political economy. The last few years have seen an astonishing decline in happiness and sociality in the U.S., which has coincided with a rise in alone time, anxiety, mental distress, and a toxic form of individualism that I described in “The Monks in the Casino.” I want to better understand how this happened and what “we”—at the level of individuals and institutions—can do to fix it.

1. Life as “time spent with.” One of my favorite graphs from the miraculous Our World in Data site is this breakdown of how the typical American spends their day between the ages of 15 and 80. One way to read this chart is that time spent with our parents peaks in our late teen years; time spent with friends peaks in our early 20s; time spent with coworkers peaks in our mid- to late-20s; time spent with our children peaks in our 30s and 40s; time spent with our partners peaks in our 60s and 70s, and time spent alone increases steadily as we get older. One way to think about the anti-social century is that it is a kind of society-wide conspiracy to increase alone time, due to a phalanx of forces that are reducing time spent with practically everybody who isn’t “just me.”

1. Time spent with partners, children, coworkers, and friends declines as Americans couple less, have fewer children, work alone, and spend less time with friends. Partner time declines as Americans are dating and marrying less. While parents are spending more time with their children, fewer Americans are having kids in the first place. Between 1976 and 2024, the share of women 40-44 years old without children increased by 80 percent and the share of “never married” women increased by more than 50 percent. With the rise of remote work and sole proprietor firms, or one-person startups, there is less time spent among coworkers. As for teenage friendship, the numbers are dire. The share of 12th graders who “ever go on dates” has declined by 47 percent since the 1980s; the share who “visit friends weekly” has declined 22 percent; and the share who “go to monthly parties” is down 40 percent, according to the Institute for Family Studies.

Put it all together and Americans are spending more time alone than in any period for which we have good data. This is especially true for young Americans, who have historically been the most social group.

3. There are many forces to blame, but just for now, let’s blame American parenting. According to the Institute for Family Studies, one in ten teenagers isn’t allowed to leave the house without an adult companion, and 80 percent aren’t allowed to leave the neighborhood without an adult. The latchkey generation of kids who came and went without supervision gave way to a helicopter model of intensive parenting and strictly guarded childhood. Homebound and phone-bound, today’s adolescents and teens spend more time in their rooms and less time playing with friends than any cohort ever studied.

3. There are some reasons to be optimistic. I see more people paying attention to the problem of solitude and thinking about socializing as social fitness—something that you “should” do not only because it’s fun but also because it’s physically and neurologically good for you. I’m also seeing more policies to increase socializing. If the last 20 years has been an uncontrolled experiment to roll out phones to children without much care for how it would affect their mental health, we might be in a new phase of controlled experiments to deprive young people of those same devices. A giant study of school phone bans published in April found that “lockable phone pouches” did not significantly improve school attendance or self-reported classroom attention, while average effects on test scores were “consistently close to zero,” with high schools seeing modest positive effects. That all sounds rather dispiriting. But the lasting effects on happiness seemed real: phone bans seem to cause first-year disruptions followed by real increases in subjective well-being.

The philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote in The Technological Society that new technologies shape us as much as we shape them; what they make efficient becomes what we value. A child, or an adult, or an entire civilization might think that they are using a new technology neutrally or instrumentally, but over time institutions reorganize themselves around what technology makes expedient. I think this is essentially what phones have done to the modern world. College students and study participants consistently claim that they regret much of their phone use, but the technological capability of the phone to command and hold attention consistently overrides the traditional communal value to spend more time with books, in nature, or around other people.

There is another way. Toward the end of my reporting for the anti-social century cover story for The Atlantic, I came across a reference to the novel Seveneves, in which Neal Stephenson coined the term “Amistics.” Derived from the notoriously anti-tech Amish, the word refers to the practice of carefully selecting which technologies to accept or reject. Far from dispensing with all new technology, the Amish take pains to adopt only those new products that uphold their existing values. So, solar and wind energy is allowed, because it enables useful work, but television is out, because it interferes with family time. As I wrote:

If the Amish approach to technology is radical in its application, it recognizes something plain and true: Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment…

We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification?

MEGATREND #2: HEALTH
Building the Do-It-All Drug

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic (semaglutide), made by Novo Nordisk, and Zepbound (tirzepatide), made by Eli Lilly, have demonstrated extraordinary effects beyond the treatment of type-2 diabetes and obesity. In the last few months, randomized studies have shown GLP-1s can reduce psoriasis severity by up to 80%, treat addiction disorders, ameliorate several kinds of mental distress, and melt fatty liver disease. New and better GLP-1 drugs are waiting in the wings. Let’s review what these drugs can and can’t yet do—and what’s coming next.

1. Help with addiction disorders? Yes. A placebo-controlled, double-blind trial of Ozempic found that the drug reduced both heavy drinking days and overall alcohol consumption among people seeking treatment for addiction.

2. Help with mental distress and anxiety? Yup. An April study of more than 100,000 people in Swedish electronic health registers found that semaglutide use was associated with lower risk of worsening mental illness, self-harm, depression, anxiety, and worsening substance use disorder.

3. Crush fatty liver disease? 100%. (Er, well, 80%.) The next big GLP-1 drug coming down the pike is retatrutide. While the first generation of GLP-1 drugs targets the GLP-1 hormone exclusively, Lilly’s popular Mounjaro drug (a.k.a., tirzepatide) targets two hormones: GLP-1 and GIP. Retatrutide is a triple agonist that targets three gut hormones: GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. Reta is most celebrated for its historic weight-loss effects, which seem even more dramatic than tirzepatide or semaglutide. But in a recent study, patients on retatrutide saw an 80 percent reduction in liver fat. Fatty liver disease affects millions of Americans, and there is no FDA-approved treatment for it other than admonitions to lose weight. But retatrutide’s targeting of glucagon seems to melt liver fat even more effectively than it causes weight loss.

4. Stop Alzheimer’s? Not yet. A Novo Nordisk-funded trial of oral semaglutide among elderly Americans found that the drug did not seem to slow worsening Alzheimer’s symptoms. In the charts below, you’ll see two groups—BLUE on semaglutide vs. RED on a placebo. The nearly identical declines on a cognitive test over 156 weeks indicate that GLP-1s failed to make much of a difference in the progression of the disease. (It’s still possible that the use of GLP-1s earlier in life reduces the likelihood of ever developing Alzheimer’s, but this hasn’t been studied yet, and a high-quality study could take many years, or even decades.)

5. Fuck everything, we’re doing five agonists. The Onion once published an article entitled “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades,” in which an imaginary Gillette executive proposes adding a fifth blade to the company’s new razor. (”I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!”) Well, somebody from pharma took that essay as inspiration. While semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide target one, two, and three hormones, respectively, scientists are now exploring a quintuple agonist “that combines the body weight-reducing and blood glucose-lowering effects of GLP-1R–GIPR co-agonism with the insulin-sensitizing and anti-inflammatory effects of lanifibranor via its targeted delivery into GLP-1R- and GIPR-expressing cells.” As scientists add targets, one could imagine a GLP-1 drug that both melts fat, fights inflammation, and even preserves muscle tone. In other words, I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth agonist in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!

Historical interlude: Creativity secrets of Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas could write. What the man couldn’t do was stop writing. By his death, Dumas had produced more than 100,000 pages of book text, which is the equivalent of writing a novel the length of War and Peace every seven months, for four straight decades. In his miracle years of 1844 to 1846, Dumas wrote both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—the latter of which is both incredibly long (more than 1,200 pages in most modern editions) and also considered by many one of the greatest novels of all time.

How did he do it? Dumas was “often accused of operating a fiction factory,” Michael Dirda writes. But the fact that none of his research assistants achieved anything of note on their own strongly suggests that Dumas was the final hand to put pen to paper. His workflow:

[Dumas’s] particular genius lay in transmuting dry historical records into vibrant page-turners through his mastery of dialogue, pacing, and dramatic confrontation. Dumas would first talk over a book with an assistant, perhaps ask him to do some research and prepare an outline, then follow up with further discussion of the action and plot, this time in more detail. Only when he had settled the whole are of the novel in his own mind did Dumas put pen to paper. As he once said, “As a rule I do not begin a book until it is finished.” He then wrote fast, a single draft on blue paper, never bothering about accents, commas, and punctuation, working long hours at a time.

“Do not begin a piece of writing until it is finished” is a fun idea. Personally, I think my best essays are similarly “finished” before they are “started.” That is, if I begin the writing process without really knowing what I want to say, I wind up not saying much of anything but rather circling, circling, circling a strong contention that would have been better developed if I had done more research or talked to more people. My best essays are sometimes the ones whose theses I can describe in detail before I write the first sentence of the final draft.

MEGATREND #3: THE STATE OF AI
Apocalypse Nope

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Pancreatic cancer kills nearly more than 50,000 Americans each year. By the end of the decade, it may be the single most lethal cancer in the country. Millions of people around the world have, like me, lost family and friends to the disease.

There are three reasons why pancreatic cancer has evaded modern science.

1. The first reason is genetic. Most pancreatic cancers are driven by a mutation in a gene called KRAS, and for forty years KRAS has been considered “undruggable” — a smooth, slippery target that no doctor’s molecule could grab onto.

2. The second reason is our immune system. Pancreatic cancers carry relatively few mutations, which means they don’t wave many red flags for our T cells to go out and kill. They grow quietly, in the dark, for years.

3. The third reason is that the signs of pancreatic cancer are so subtle that they’re practically invisible on normal scans. Even best radiologists literally cannot see it until it has metastasized, at which point it is often untreatable.

But in just the last few weeks, we’ve gotten remarkable news on all three front fronts.

1. In April, a company called Revolution Medicines reported “unprecedented” results from a small trial of a new drug that target genetic mutations directly. In patients with late-stage pancreatic cancer, the drug shrank tumors in nearly half of those treated. Last week, the FDA gave Revolution Medicines a green light to expand access to the medicine.

2. A team at Memorial Sloan Kettering and the German company BioNTech reported follow-up data on something even stranger and potentially more remarkable: a personalized mRNA vaccine, built using the same technology behind the COVID shots, that teaches the immune system to recognize a patient’s own cancer. These so-called “secondary vaccines” could be administered to patients after a surgery to prevent regrowth.

3. Last week, a team at the Mayo Clinic, led by Ajit Goenka, published a new paper in the journal Gut, proving that a new AI system called REDMOD could read and identify subtle signs of pancreatic cancer in years-old screenings that even the best radiologists had missed.

In the Mayo study, scientists went back through the records of roughly 5,000 patients who had already been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and pulled up old CT scans taken years before anyone knew their cancer was coming. To test the AI system, they added a control group of patients who never developed cancer, matched by age, sex, and scan date, at a ratio of about 6-to-1, to simulate the conditions of real-world screening.

The results were remarkable: On an independent test set of 493 scans, REDMOD detected the invisible signature of future pancreatic cancer with significant accuracy at a median lead time of 475 days before diagnosis. In other words, this AI program could detect cancer 40 months before the best doctors. Most importantly, REDMOD didn’t cheat. The team prevented the AI from cheating in several ways by making it impossible for the AI to use electronic records to identify scans where a mass was determined to be “present but overlooked.”

Put it all together: (1) A drug that targets the gene driving most pancreatic cancer; (2) a vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognize the disease after surgery; (3) an AI system that can find cancer in scans years before any human radiologist would catch it; and (4) add to that a new concept we discuss later in this interview called “preclinical interception” … and, for the first time, the deadliest cancer in America looks like it is on the way to becoming a treatable condition that is detected early, intercepted, managed, and even cured.

Dr. Ajit Goenka is a radiologist at the Mayo Clinic who studies AI imaging and was the lead author of the new AI radiology study. We talk about his research, why AI seems so good at finding cancer, whether this news is (as some AI stories turn out to be) too good to be true, and what medicine might look like in a world where artificial intelligence can read our bodies better than human doctors can. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity with additional annotations.

How AI Found Cancer That’s Invisible to Human Eyes

Derek Thompson: Your remarkable new study of AI, radiology, and pancreatic cancer was published in the journal Gut. Give me the headline.

Ajit Goenka: More than 80 percent of patients who develop pancreatic cancer hear the words “you have cancer” at a stage where it is too late for them to do anything about it. What we are trying to do is flip that equation. We are trying to find mathematical signals in images that can tell us well before a visible tumor appears whether or not we can cure a particular patient. AI is just a tool we are utilizing to solve that problem. Our goal is early detection. And what this study shows is that it is eminently possible.

Thompson: Why is it so hard for even expert human radiologists to see pancreatic cancer on a screening?

Goenka: A lot of people believe is that maybe those radiologists are not competent or not paying enough attention. I can tell you through data-driven evidence that both of those assumptions are wrong. The real answer is that pancreatic cancer at its earliest stages is too subtle to be detected by the human eye alone, when it matters most.

Thompson: What makes AI so good at seeing what expert radiologists cannot see on their own?

Goenka: You can think of a CT scan image as a mathematical signal. Every pixel has a number. What the AI does is detect patterns in those numbers that reveal cancer developing in tissue that looks completely normal to an experienced radiologist.

To see how Goenka’s lab used AI to catch pancreatic cancer more than two years early—and I mean, literally, to see it—this is the money shot from their paper:

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1. The Fundamental Question

In April 2025, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor published an essay entitled “AI as Normal Technology.” Narayanan and Kapoor, a professor and PH.D. candidate in computer science at Princeton, did not claim that artificial intelligence was boring or unimportant. Rather they argued that AI was a general-purpose technology in the lineage of electricity, the car, and the internet. To AI’s boosters and doomers—those who see AI as the end of work, the end of history, or the end of human life—they countered that AI will not be the end of anything. Its evolution and its effects are more likely to fit inside the grooves dug by previous generations of technology.

While many AI builders and commentators have argued that AI might displace millions of workers, or become a big economic bubble, or kickstart an arms race among governments to build a cyber Swiss Army Knife for hacking their enemies’ digital infrastructure, Narayanan and Kapoor calmly pointed out that, as a matter of technological history:

• … it is normal for a new technology to create bubbles, or winner-take-all markets, or powerful monopolies that require government intervention, or all three (e.g., railroads, Standard Oil, and AT&T).

• … it is normal for technology to displace some jobs and create others, producing short-run pain and long-run growth (e.g., the internal combustion engine and farm employment).

• … it is normal for technology to go through an early period of safety chaos before regulations eventually catch up and impose order (e.g., US meatpacking and coal mining).

• … and it is normal for technology to create an arms race between offense and defense—guns vs. armor, locks vs. lockpicks, viruses vs. antivirus software—that leads to a new equilibrium, without destroying the world.

The case for “AI as normal technology” seems to fit much of the evidence before us. Three and a half years after ChatGPT debuted, GDP growth is average, and unemployment is still under 5 percent. Even jobs that recently seemed vulnerable to automation, such as radiologists, are still seeing rising employment and wages. As François Chollet, a French AI researcher, has said, AI still “cannot operate without supervision,” which is why “there is still zero job from 2022 that can be performed end-to-end by AI, not even translator or customer support associate.”

The “normal” essay is simply one of the best and wisest pieces of writing I’ve seen about AI, which is high praise because that is an awfully crowded category.

But what if it’s wrong?

Taking the other side of the debate is a phalanx of technologists, philosophers, and writers who believe that AI is on a glide path toward superintelligence, a powerful system that will have unprecedented and transformative effects on society. As AI develops the ability to write its own code, this group believes, it will spark a cycle of recursive self-improvement, or RSI: a model that builds a better model, which builds a better model, whose capabilities and intelligence create a historically unique period of technological disruption. Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark has written that the RSI threshold has a 60 percent chance of arriving by 2028. (For comparison’s sake, that’s exactly the same odds that prediction markets give Democrats to win the next presidential election.)

If the superintelligence argument is correct, AI-by-AI could rapidly develop terrifying capabilities that strain our economy, our laws, and even our systems of governance. The geopolitical consequences would be enormous: Whatever country first crossed the self-improvement threshold might gain a durable advantage, not just in economic terms, but in global power. It would race ahead of their adversaries, powered by a force capable of improving itself in a way that has no precedent in history. Cars changed the world, after all. But they did not transform themselves into fighter jets and coronaviruses.

2. The Debate Behind the Debate

The debate over whether AI is “normal” is so much more than a war over a word.

I think that the most urgent discussions about AI policy happening today are fundamentally disagreements about how people think about the normality of AI. In fact, I think that understanding the debate over the concept of normal is essential to understanding why so many smart people bitterly disagree with each other about this topic.

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Today’s essay is an adaptation of David Epstein’s excellent new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, which is about the downsides of too much freedom in life and work and the art of designing the right constraints.

In 1798, the economist and reverend Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he claimed that population growth would inevitably outstrip the food supply and doom human civilization to cycles of poverty and mass death. This prediction was, to be kind, hogwash. When Malthus’s essay was published, the world held about 1 billion people, and many of them were frequently starving. Today’s global population is more than 8 billion, with the typical person alive today far better fed, clothed, and paid.

But Malthus’ essay was not merely wrong. It was usefully wrong. Decades later, it spurred a revelation in science that Malthus could never have foreseen.

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"In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population,” Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography, published in 1876. As he explained, the economist’s grim view of mammalian competition partly inspired his theory of how species evolve:

“Being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work."

The most astonishing thing about Darwin’s breakthrough is that he was not even the only Englishman to read Malthus and apply his ideas to the origin of species. His fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace came up with a similar theory about species competing for survival in a competition that led to the survival of certain genes, and Wallace also credited his aha moment about evolution to none other than the morbid Malthus. In his own words:

Something led me to think of Malthus’ Essay on Population ... It then occurred to me that these checks must also act upon animals, and keep down their numbers ... While vaguely thinking how this would affect any species, there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest.

The serendipity was so unbelievable that Darwin himself could scarcely believe it. In a letter to a mentor, he wrote: “I never saw a more striking coincidence.” Two Englishmen co-invented one of the most radical and significant theories in scientific history by adapting lessons from the exact same economic essay. How strange is that?

Not strange at all, as it turns out.

Most Good Ideas Are Born As Twins

The most remarkable thing about the simultaneous discovery of evolution is just how utterly unremarkable it is. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find a groundbreaking creation that wasn’t simultaneously invented. Several people are credited with conceiving of the telegraph, the electric motor, the thermometer, photography, the telescope, the jet engine, the discovery of oxygen, the periodic table, and the theory of infection by microorganisms. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently invented calculus, while Newton and Robert Hooke independently arrived at the mathematical law describing gravity. The transistor was invented by teams in the United States and France within months of each other. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed with a patent office on the very same day.

What is true in science is also true for art. In his 1962 book The Shape of Time, the historian George Kubler argued that art history advances not through individual genius but through a kind of invisible hive mind of inspiration and influence. Artists work, often unknowingly and in parallel, on “linked solutions” to the same aesthetic problems. The early 20th century is one dramatic illustration of this in modern cultural history. Between roughly 1905 and 1925, abstraction in visual art, atonality in music, and fragmented interiority and “stream of consciousness” writing in fiction emerged largely independently and nearly simultaneously across the arts. In many cases, artists believed that they were inventing a style only to discover that somebody else was plugging away at the same invention. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that her 1922 experimental book Jacob’s Room represented “a new form for a new novel” with its fragmented approach to perception, only for her avant-garde work to be overshadowed by another modernist masterpiece published several months later: Ulysses by James Joyce.

The sociologist Robert Merton has called this phenomenon “multiple discovery.” Most breakthroughs in science and art are born as twins and triplets.1 As the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber summarized: “The whole history of inventions is one endless chain of parallel instances.”

The Frame Is More Important Than the Answer

You will sometimes see or hear critics criticize an idea for not being sufficiently original. But what would it mean for an idea to be valuable only if it were entirely new, with no rivalrous twin? We’d have to throw out evolution, ignore gravity, forget calculus, and discard, among other things, trains, electronics, airplanes, and the entire modernist art movement.

The world is built atop things that were discovered independently, often at almost precisely the same time by people working in widely disparate conditions. This is reality, whether we like it or not. What does it tell us about invention, creativity, and originality?

The popular concept of genius and breakthrough is wrong. We want to believe that great new ideas come from non-obvious leaps of creativity; that genius means one individual seeing what no one else can. But the true history of innovation suggests the opposite. Great ideas start to become a little bit obvious when the problem is framed in just the right way.

Darwin and Wallace are often seen as breaking completely with everything that had come before them. In fact, they were applying the ideas of Malthus to the obvious and pressing questions of their time. Why does breeding work so well? Why do we keep finding fossils of creatures that don’t currently exist on Earth? Why do the bones in the flipper of a whale, the wing of a bat, and the arm of a human have so much in common? Before Darwin and Wallace, breeders already recognized that random hereditary changes occasionally appeared. They even had a word for them: “sports.” Darwin and Wallace were mining and connecting the knowledge of their day, rather than dispensing with it. When they discovered Malthus’s theory of human existence as a grim competition between species and environment, what clicked into focus was the concept of evolution as a competition between rivalrous traits, selected for their environmental fit.

The figures we remember as geniuses are usually the ones who were standing closest when a well-framed question came due. The figures we forget are the ones who did the framing; people like Malthus, who don’t solve the problem but state it clearly enough that someone else does. Malthus was wrong about a lot. But he was wrong with such useful precision that two naturalists could each pick up his idea, turn it sideways, and see something he hadn’t.

This is what the history of multiple discovery is actually telling us. The great bottleneck of progress is question-framing. Once a problem is framed with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost wants to be found. Once Malthus articulated his grim theory of resource scarcity and competition precisely enough, two scientists on opposite sides of the world arrived at the same revolutionary solution within years of each other. The answer was, in some sense, already waiting.

Malthus being catastrophically wrong about almost everything is almost beside the point. You could even say it is the point. You don’t need the right answer to unlock a breakthrough. You need a frame precise enough that the right answer becomes findable. As Demis Hassabis, cofounder of Google DeepMind and a 2024 Nobel laureate, put it: “It’s harder to come up with a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.” The unsung heroes of intellectual history are the Malthuses, the ones who were wrong about the answer but right about the frame. Perhaps every brilliant idea is just that: an ordinary answer to an extraordinary question.

Adapted From INSIDE THE BOX: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein. Copyright © 2026 by David Epstein. Published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Today’s article was written with Aziz Sunderji, an economic analyst and data whiz who writes at Home Economics.

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American fatherhood has transformed in the last few generations. Compared to their Boomer parents, childcare time among Millennial dads has more than doubled. Compared to their Silent Generation grandparents, it’s nearly quadrupled. You will be hard-pressed to find any part of day-to-day modern life that has changed more in the last half-century than the way today’s parents—and fathers, in particular—spend their time.

In 1965, the typical married father barely spent half an hour each day actively engaged in childcare, according to the best time-use data we have1. Today, Millennial thirty-something dads typically spend more than 80 daily minutes changing diapers, reading and playing with their children, driving them to soccer practice, and going over homework. To make time for kids, modern fathers have reduced their daily office work by more than an hour—not to mention, cut down their TV time by 30 minutes—as they pour more of their waking life into being at home.

For those familiar with the parenting norms of the 20th century, the rise in childcare might seem like a violation of tradition, as if we are moving away from the natural state of fatherhood. But as the psychologist Darby Saxbe writes in her forthcoming book Dad Brain, the role of fathers has always varied significantly around the world, much more than the role of mothers. In African tribes that require men to do lots of hunting, dads often play a small role in the lives of their kids. But barely a few hours’ drive away from these tribes, one can find hunter-gatherer societies, like the Aka community in the Congo, where fathers are constantly around their children.

The working-husband-and-housewife norm is not a biological inscription in our genes. It is an invention of the Industrial Revolution. And it is disappearing around the world. In addition to the U.S., fathers’ childcare time is surging in Canada, across Europe, and in other rich countries, such as Japan.

WHERE DID MODERN FATHERHOOD COME FROM?

The simplest explanation for the global surge in fathering is that it’s largely about the mass entry of women into the workforce.

Since the 1960s, the female labor force participation rate has risen, which meant fewer moms stayed at home to take care of the kids. As households moved toward dual earners, someone had to cover the remaining childcare— and that someone, in most households, turned out to be the dad.

As pat as this theory seems, it has some interesting flaws. If caring for children required a fixed set of hours, then we’d expect to see dads taking parenting-time hours from moms. Except, mothers’ childcare time hasn’t gone down in the last half century. It’s gone way, way up, as well. What’s more, if the decline of the “male breadwinner” household were the primary reason for the increase in fathers’ childcare time, we would expect to see these two trends happen simultaneously in the 20th century. But they didn’t. The “male solo earner” household—that is, families where the dad works and the mom stays at home—declined fastest as a phenomenon between the 1950s and the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, the steepest sustained increase in male childcare happened decades later, between the 1990s and early 2000s, during a period when household structures were relatively stable.

Even if the rise of working mothers didn’t automatically and instantly transform fatherhood, it may have set in motion a slower-moving shift in norms. In the second half of the 20th century, men who expressed more egalitarian gender attitudes were among the first to shift their time toward direct childcare, as the sociologist Scott Coltrane wrote. As a result, the definition of a “good dad” morphed—or, perhaps we should say, expanded—from the strict and narrow norm of “just a breadwinner” to the broader, multi-part role of “earner and co-parent and diaper-changer and chaperone and baseball coach and, and and …” With the rise of women’s participation, the job of being a mom became more complex, and the role of being a dad got more complex, too.

But we think the rise of modern fatherhood is about more than the rise working moms. So, let’s consider three additional explanations.

1. Maybe childcare time went up because dads … enjoy parenthood?

This can’t be it, your cynical side is telling you. So cheesy. Too simplistic.

But let’s consider. In a 2008 paper, “Parental Education and Parental Time with Children,” Jonathan Guryan, Erik Hurst, and Melissa Kearney found that, in the U.S. and across the developed world, it has been the most educated parents who have most increased their time spent with children. Our own analysis shows that the increase in fathering time is significantly driven by changes among college-educated fathers under 45 years old. In the 1960s, fathers with a bachelor’s degree only spent about 9 additional minutes taking care of their kids, compared to dads without a high school degree. In the last 60 years, that education gap has quintupled to 46 minutes.

The most educated parents are typically the richest. They could do anything with their time. If one thinks of childcare as just another form of housework, like vacuuming or dusting shelves, it seems awfully strange for the most educated and wealthy to fill their lives with the drudgery of diapers if they don’t have to. The rise of dad time makes more sense if parents regard childcare as a form of leisure.

In fact, Guryan et al. found that “parents report that spending time with their children, especially in recreation or educational child care, is among their more enjoyable activities, especially when compared with other standard home production activities.” Our analysis of government data concurs. According to the American Time Use Survey well-being questionnaire, fathers say that little brings them more joy than being with their kids, other than hanging out with friends.

The fact that richer and better-educated parents are freely choosing to pour more of their valuable time into childcare makes raising children sound practically like a “luxury good,” akin to buying a Rolex watch or a fragile Fabergé egg.

Parents reading along might wonder if we’re overrating the unalloyed bliss that is fatherhood. Perhaps, a skeptic might think, it’s not mere love and joy that’s motivating all this extra time spent with kids. Rather, it’s anxiety—and status anxiety in particular.

2. The rise of intensive parenting isn’t just about love. It’s also about fear.

In their 2010 paper “The Rug Rat Race,” the economists Garey and Valerie Ramey tried to understand why childcare time soared among college-educated parents in the 1990s. One of their more controversial findings was that surging childcare was a rational response among anxious parents who were desperate for their kids to get into the best colleges.

The Millennial generation was the largest in American history. But the number of seats in prestigious undergraduate schools did not keep up with the population boom. The mad scramble for scarce college seats—and, by extension, for scarce entry-level jobs at prestigious companies and organizations—inspired an extracurricular arms race among college-educated parents, which cashed out in much more parenting time. In this interpretation, the increase in childcare isn’t just about love. It’s about fear—fear of our children disappointing us, and fear of us disappointing ourselves (not to mention our friends, family, neighbors, and online group chats)2.

As highly educated parents in the late 20th century and early 21st century have come to regard their children as adorable assets worthy of our precious investment, childcare has become a visible status signal. Dads who enthusiastically coach one kid’s basketball team and drive another child to ballet on the weekends aren’t just investing time and resources to enhance their kids’ likelihood of getting into the best schools and entry-level jobs when they grow up. These fathers are also demonstrating to other parents just how impressively involved they are in their children’s lives. As high-income parents compete to show who can be The Most Parenting Parent, it can create a logistical arms race of scheduling, transporting, and coordinating … until we all look up and see that this yuppie status competition has created more work for everybody.

In short, with the rise of this new “intensive” style of parenting, we replaced the old-fashioned breadwinner ideal with the lofty co-parent ideal, and then we raised the difficulty setting for everyone by turning childhood into an intensive investment project.

3. Modern fatherhood might have something to do with the decline of socialization, too.

Since the 1950s, Americans have spent less time socializing and more time alone. As the researcher Marc Dunkelman has pointed out, many families during this period have increased their closeness. Partners can text each other hundreds of times throughout the day and track their kids’ credit card spending on their phones. While many close ties are tighter than ever, weaker ties to community and the outside world have melted away. Phone time has topped off television time, and more of our lives have gone indoors. As adult leisure shifted from public life to home life, men are now physically present in the home more often, and childcare rose partly as a byproduct.

Saxbe, the psychologist, writes about how traditional hunter-gatherer societies defray the burden and joy of childcare across “alloparents”—that is, extended family, siblings, and community members who help raise kids. In America’s more atomistic and isolated society, we put more pressure on the nuclear family now that those networks have shrunk. That means dads are taking on some of the extra care burden that a grandparent, aunt, and older sibling might have shouldered in previous generations.

There’s probably a bit of truth to all of these explanations. Fathers’ childcare time increased fastest in the generation after women stormed into the workforce, as the dual-earner household model required that parents spread the labor of raising kids. Childcare time continued to increase when many fathers realized that it brought them deep satisfaction. At the same time, the surge in intensive parenting among educated moms and dads was also a stress response, with many parents fearing that anything but the most over-scheduled childhood would mark them with a scarlet letter—A for “apathetic parents.” And all of this is happening in a period when socialization is in decline, which means parents’ lives are more likely to revolve around their children than in the 1950s and 1960s, when parents were (sometimes infamously) more interested in their own lives than in the careful pruning of their children’s extracurricular calendar.

DON’T FORGET ABOUT MOM

Despite the large increase in dads’ childcare time, there is no question that mothers still spend much more time raising children. This is especially true when we look at solo parenting. According to the American Time Use Survey, mothers’ solo childcare time is still twice that of fathers.

It’s not just that moms spend more time with kids. They also pick up the most stressful responsibilities. While fathers spend more time playing sports with their children, mothers spend more than twice as much time providing medical care, planning appointments, and taking care of the so-called mental load of parenting (i.e., not just driving your kid to the birthday party, but also remembering that classmate’s birthday party existed in the first place and buying a present ahead of time). In fact, the more stressful the childcare activity is, the more likely mothers are to do it.

Perhaps relatedly, moms feel more stressed about parenting than dads do. Moms are more likely to say that parenting is harder than they anticipated; more likely to say they “often feel tired”; and more likely to say they feel frequently nervous about being a parent.

HOW FATHERHOOD CHANGES MEN’S LIVES

When a person becomes a dad, what does he lose? What does he gain?

American guys watch a lot of television. When you become a dad, it’s very hard to keep up with all the movies, TV shows, and sports that you followed before you had kids. The rise of childcare time most directly seems to replace TV and similar forms of leisure. What’s more, becoming a dad seems to turn many late-night owls into early birds, as dads spend much more time sleeping between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. to account for lost sleep in the early morning.

Does becoming a dad make people health and happy? It’s complicated. Saxbe, the psychologist, points out that new parents often have short-term loss of brain volume, but older parents tend to have larger and healthier brains than their childless retired friends. This might have something to do with the fact that caring for young children can be exhausting at first, but over time parenting is intensely social, and socialization tends to be neuroprotective in the long run. It is scientifically valid, therefore, to argue that becoming a father is both a brain-shrinking and brain-expanding life choice. Parenthood is anything but simple.

As our research shows, dads are less likely to say they’re well-rested than non-dads. They have less free time, are more overwhelmed, and are more likely to be exhausted while feeling like they didn’t finish everything they wanted to. But this burden of time pressure comes with significant joys. Dads in the same surveys are more likely to say that life is “close to ideal” and that they would “change almost nothing.”

Survey results do not always offer deep wisdom. But here at least, their findings are wise. The lost hours of sleep are easy to count. The joys are harder to quantify. But they are profound.

“The United States was a reasonably happy country for a long time,” the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman wrote in a 2026 paper. “It is not happy now.”

Crunching data from the General Social Survey, Peltzman documented “a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population” after COVID that “mainly persists” through 2024. He called it a “regime change” in national sentiment. After 50 years of mostly steady levels of self-reported well-being, American happiness plunged. And it’s hardly bounced back at all.

Peltzman’s analysis is not a lonely voice; there is a veritable chorus of gloomy sentiment. This week, the Federal Reserve’s measure of US worker satisfaction fell to its lowest level since the survey began in 2014. One week prior, consumer sentiment had fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in the 70-year history of the University of Michigan economic survey. Once again, the index plunged around 2020 and, like a hiker on the far side of a mountain, continues down step by step. Americans are telling pollsters that they are more depressed about this economy than they were during the depths of the Great Recession or the painful stagflationary years of the 1970s.

Finally, the U.S. has also fallen to its lowest ranking ever in the World Happiness Report, largely due to the astonishingly swift decline in well-being among young people in that international survey.

If you are looking for a sympathetic ear to explain this phenomenon, certainly do not seek counsel from your local economist. The American blues seem awfully curious to those who view the world through the keyhole of employment or income statistics. The unemployment rate has been below 5 percent for practically the entire decade, which is basically as good as you can ask for. For this entire decade, the US economy has significantly outgrown the Eurozone and other rich countries, such as Japan and the UK. Americans are rich and getting richer, by most conventional measures. More Americans are breaking into the upper middle class, and workers at the bottom of the income distribution have seen their wages grow faster than those at the top in the last few years.

So, those who privilege economic statistics over self-reports might be tempted to summarize the situation this way: America’s resilient economy is a fact, while Americans’ sad-sack survey results are mere irrational feelings. There is something to this; the gap between so-called “hard data” (e.g., the unemployment rate) and “soft data” (e.g., a survey) is certainly wide and widening. But a feeling is an important kind of fact. Feelings don’t just shape consumer behavior. They shape political attitudes; and attitudes influence voting; and voting determines policies; and policies shape the economy. To understand the future of the US economy and the United States writ large, one cannot afford a haughty indifference toward sentiment.

And on the sentiment front, what we’ve got are four survey results—four facts, you might even say, of American lugubriousness—all of which point to one unmistakable conclusoin. This decade has been the very opposite of “roaring.” We are mired instead in the Tragic Twenties.

2. Who Killed the Vibes?

One of the more remarkable discoveries in Peltzman’s paper is that the decline in self-reported well-being since 2020 has not been concentrated among young people, poor people, or unmarried people—three of the groups typically afflicted by higher levels of anxiety and sadness. Instead, the decline in happiness has been an across-the-board 10- to 15-point decimation experienced by practically every demographic. (In the graphs below, BLUE refers to happiness levels before 2020; PINK is happiness levels post-2020; and BLACK is the decline, which is remarkably uniform across groups.)

Something significant has bludgeoned Americans’ well-being in the last six years without discriminating much by age, ideology, education, or gender. What is it?

The culprit has to fit the crime. Most importantly, it has to fit the timing of the crime. What we’re looking for is something that happened around 2020 (uh, seems obvious) and then didn’t recover (ah, that’s the hard part). This timing rules out several otherwise plausible suspects.

• It’s probably not about cultural shifts, such as the decline of religion. Cultural conservatives might try to explain the Tragic Twenties by citing the rise of secular individualism among American liberals and pointing to the fact that religion seems to be a tonic for unhappiness. But the rise of religious non-affiliation in America has been a steady 30-year trend, whereas this falloff in well-being started in 2020, when secularism reached its recent peak. So, that explanation won’t do.

• It’s probably not about old-fashioned wage inequality. Someone on the left might be inclined to argue that American misery is the reasonable and automatic societal reaction to severe class inequality. But low-income wage growth has been unusually strong since the pandemic, as the economist Arin Dube has taken pains to point out. Median household incomes are higher now than they were 10 years ago. What’s more, Peltzman’s analysis finds that some of the largest declines in happiness seem concentrated among well-to-do demographics, like older people, white people, and college graduates. So, here’s another suspect that doesn’t fit the crime.

• It’s probably not just about phones and social media. When the subject is American anxiety and unhappiness, the most obvious suspect is smartphones, social media, and the surging negativity of the American news cycle. As I explained in a long essay last month, I am quite persuaded by the argument that phones and social media are associated with—and, probably, actively causing—a decline in well-being among young people in the U.S. But the rising misery of young people—often rightly associated with rising phone and social media use—has been going on for about 15 years. The more sudden collapse in general wellness that we see in the GSS and University of Michigan data points to an emotional break that happened around 2020. So, even if phones aren’t blameless here (I’ll return to them in a moment), they don’t make sense as the primary culprit.

If neither cultural decadence, nor material inequality, nor phones and social media seem to fit the shape of this particular phenomenon, we have to keep looking for what broke our brains in the 2020s. The simplest explanation I can offer is this: As a cultural-political force, the 2020 pandemic never ended.

3. The Permademic

The Pandemic Never Ended, Part I: The Sheer Shittiness of Inflation

One cannot even pretend to explain the happiness crash of 2020 without starting with the crisis that arrived in 2020 and never quite departed. The COVID pandemic unleashed more than a coronavirus upon the planet. The biological antagonist of the disease gave way to a cavalcade of economic disasters, from supply chain disruptions, to global inflation, to surging interest rates. We are still are living in the midst of an aftershock.

While the official rate of annual inflation has gone up, then down, and then up, again, the typical family does not experience price changes as a 12-month average with monthly updates. What they feel at the grocery store, or the restaurant, or the online checkout page, is something more like holy shit, this cost what?! And that holy shit moment is best understood as the accumulation of years of above-average inflation.

Think of it this way: Consumer prices, which had increased by 25 percent between the summer of 2007 and the summer of 2020, surged by the same amount between the summers of 2020 and 2025. In housing, the 50 percent increase in the Case-Shiller US national home price index between the summers of 2020 and 2025 was equal to the 50 percent increase in home prices between 2004 and 2020. In both cases, it is fair to say that Americans in the 21st century have experienced roughly triple the typical rate of inflation in the 2020s compared to what they’d grown accustomed to. Everything that people buy feels like it is constantly slipping out of the zone of affordability, and that is absolutely maddening to many people, no matter what the economic statistics suggest they should feel.

The economics writer Matt Darling has traced the relationship between actual consumer sentiment and “predicted” sentiment, based on unemployment, inflation, and interest rates. Around 2020, the relationship broke down and consumer sentiment nose-dived into what Kyla Scanlon famously dubbed a “vibecession.” In the graph below, the plunging dark purple line shows actual consumer sentiment while the light dotted line shows were consumer sentiment “should” be.

It is tempting to think: Well, this just shows how terrible inflation is for the poorest Americans. But the most interesting and confounding piece of Darling’s analysis is that it’s actually the richest third of households whose consumer sentiment has plunged most significantly relative to where we would expect it to be. Darling’s explanation is clever but depressing: Full employment, especially in an era of elevated inflation, has increased the cost of everything that involves other people, and it’s created a nation of grumps. Here’s Darling:

I think part of what happened is that many middle- and upper-income households were used to being able to afford low-wage labor on demand - for childcare, for food service, for home health care. Middle- and upper-income households found this frustrating and assumed it was part of the broad story throughout the economy; not realizing that much of this frustration was driven by low-wage workers finally earning a little more bargaining power.

Putting it all together: In the last 40 years, Americans have come to expect and prize affordability without even having to think about it. But in the last five years, prices for all sorts of things, including housing, have increased about three times faster than the rate Americans are used to; meanwhile, full employment has put upward pressure on the cost of services. The US public has responded by not only screaming at pollsters about their misery but also by rushing to the polls to vote out every incumbent who failed to do something about the “affordability” crisis of the 2020s. And Americans are not alone: The year 2024 was a bloodbath for incumbent parties around the world, as fury about high prices went as global as the pandemic itself.

Which raises a good question: If it’s been a Tragic Twenties for the United States, what about the rest of the world?

Interlude: Of Phones and Anglophones

According to the latest World Happiness Report, well-being has actually increased in the last few years in many countries, including China, India, and Vietnam. But well-being has fallen in much of the west, particularly in English-speaking nations, such as the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.1 As John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report, told me: “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries, and for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”

Change in Happiness Score: 2012 - 2025

There are several reasons why Anglophone countries might have larger declines in well-being in the last decade. Led by the U.S., these countries share several or all of the following features: (1) a culture of individualism that often correlates with less time spent around other people; (2) a high degree of diagnostic inflation, meaning expanded psychiatric guidelines for anxiety, ADHD, and other mental health disorders, which mechanically increases diagnosed anxiety and raises awareness about negative mental health; and (3) high levels of negativity in the news ecosystem and on social media.

The graph above shows the decline in happiness among Anglophone and other rich countries since 2012. But what happens when you narrow the time period to the subject of this essay—the change in happiness after in the 2020s? You get this:

Now that is interesting. In Portugal, Italy, and Spain, happiness increased in the 2020s. What do these countries have in common? They had some of the lowest average inflation rates throughout the 2020s in the west, while Germany and the UK had some of the worst inflation in central and western Europe.

I think this interlude strengthens two arguments: first, that there is something uniquely problematic about mental health in the Anglosphere; and second, that higher rates of inflation are a major contributor to the Tragic Twenties phenomenon, both in the U.S. and throughout the west.

The Pandemic Never Ended, Part II: Institutions Down, Individualism Up

The word pandemic comes from the Greek pan, meaning all, and demos, meaning people. But while the etymology hints at wholeness, the effect of pandemics has historically been to break apart social trust. In one recent analysis of the Spanish Flu, researchers found that the disease had “permanent consequences on individual behavior in terms of lower social trust.” So, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that, in his paper, the economist Peltzman found that confidence has fallen throughout the 2020s for just about every institution, including the federal government, the military, major companies, education, and organized religion. Other studies have found that trust has plummeted for the CDC, higher education, science, and medicine.

It’s not just that Americans have lost trust in august, faraway institutions. Their faith in one another has suffered even more dramatic declines. For decades, the General Social Survey has asked Americans the same basic question: “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans overwhelmingly agreed that other people are more or less trustworthy. That confidence in strangers has plummeted since 2020, according to Peltzman. The share of respondents who say other people are “fair” has declined by even more than overall happiness.

Just as Americans’ trust in institutions and strangers has declined, at least one measure of ecstatic individualism has ascended in its place. Americans now spend an unprecedented amount of time by themselves, along with an abnormal amount of time inside our homes. This means that their engagement with other people is disproportionately mediated, not by real-life experiences in the outside world, but rather by algorithmic media on their screens. As the NYU psychologist Jay Van Bavel has pointed out, online conversations prize and reward negativity and out-group animosity, which convert people who might otherwise enjoy (or tolerate) one another’s presence in a bar or office into antagonists.

It’s not that I think the decline of institutional trust and the rise of solitary individualism ought to produce unhappiness for all who experience it. But trust, companionship, and community are shock absorbers in times of personal and national crisis. And the final thing that must be said about the 2020s is that it really has been one damn crisis after another.

The Pandemic Never Ended, Part III: The Permacrisis Decade

In his 2023 column “The Economy Is Great. Why Are Americans in Such a Rotten Mood?” the Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip wrote that Americans’ economic pessimism was akin to the biological phenomenon of “referred pain.” He wrote:

Just as one part of your body can hurt because of injury to another, pessimism about the economy may reflect dissatisfaction with the country as a whole. Lately, there has been a lot to be dissatisfied about: intensifying political and cultural conflict and intolerance, the pandemic, the border, mass shootings, crime, war in Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East.

Indeed, the decade has pretty much been a dumpster fire, hasn’t it? A once-in-a-century pandemic yielded to a once-in-a-generation inflation crisis. Wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and the Persian Gulf followed one another in a steady martial drumbeat. Existential fears of climate change gave way to existential fears of artificial intelligence. And all of this took place during a period when Donald Trump hovered over the political realm like some kind of unearthly specter—representing the imminence of fascism to roughly half the country while, to the other half or so, signifying a secular savior come to save traditional values from the demonic scourge of leftism. That is all quite a lot.

In this decade of permacrisis, the news has become exceptionally dire, and we have data to show just how much. A 2024 Brookings analysis of news sentiment found that “news tone has been more negative than the fundamentals would predict during 2018 to 2020 and even more negative than predicted in 2021 to 2023.” Today’s news is more surprisingly negative than at any period of news on record.

The historic pessimism of the news cycle is both a reflection of the permacrisis decade and a driver of the impression that we are constantly on the verge of crisis. As a global health emergency, the COVID pandemic may have ended, but the state of crisis that Americans feel in their day-to-day lives when they make contact with the news has not gone away. The infection rate went down, but the feeling that the world is constantly pulsing with emergency didn’t go anywhere.

4. The Tragic Twenties: A Verdict

And so, this is as close as I can get to a unified theory of the Tragic Twenties. American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feeling of, a permanent unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today’s life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people’s triumphs on social media had made tomorrow’s success feel harder to achieve. The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside of their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust, as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.

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In the last few weeks, I have sensed a trembling in the air and a turning over of narratives in the realm of artificial intelligence. Think of it as a double vibe shift in AI.

The first shift has occurred at the level of AI models—from an emphasis on speed to an atmosphere of paranoid caution. For years since ChatGPT debuted in 2022, the frontier labs have raced to put their latest technology in the hands of consumers as fast as possible. But two weeks ago, Anthropic claimed that its newest AI model, Claud Mythos, is too powerful and dangerous to release to the broader public. Mythos appears to be so skilled at cyberhacking that the company’s current safety and monitoring methods do not seem sufficient to stop something catastrophic from happening if the software were to be released to hundreds of millions of people at once. Instead the company has made Mythos available to a handful of companies, including Microsoft and Apple, to “find and patch security vulnerabilities in critical software programs,” as Kevin Roose reported in the New York Times. OpenAI is also looking to restrict access to its most advanced models.

The second shift has occurred in the realm of AI supply and demand—from “AI is surely a bubble” to “for now, it surely is not.” For much of last year, the AI bubble case was easy to make. The AI capex buildout—that is, the cost of all those chips, data centers, and electricity—amounted to the largest private-sector infrastructure project in history. And since many of the similar-but-smaller projects turned out to be bubbles, it naturally followed that this, the mother of all capital expenditure projects, would become the mother of all capex bubbles.

But it now seems that the biggest problem facing AI is not a shortage of demand—that is, a shortage of customers—but rather a shortage of supply—that is, consumer demand is so white-hot that the hyperscalers cannot provide sufficient compute to keep up with customer needs.

This dual vibe shift is a seismic development. For years, skeptical analysts have analogized AI to the 19th century railroads—a transcontinental tech program that crashed the economy with popped bubbles over and over again, on its way to changing the world. But I now think it might be useful to study AI as akin to something more like the dawn of electricity in the early 20th century, when builders struggled to keep up with demand but nonetheless created a set of enormous financial and political headaches for the U.S.

THE BUBBLE THAT WASN’T (OR: WHY I CHANGED MY MIND)

In the last few months, three big things have pushed me toward thinking that AI might be the opposite of a bubble. Each of these developments has pushed me back into the history books to look for the right historical analogy for AI, which I’m particularly excited to tell you about.

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The late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was troubled by a paradox of progress. People alive today have more sophisticated machines, medicines, and systems for organizing the world. So why haven’t these advances made us happier? “The gods of the Greeks were like helpless children compared to humankind today and the powers we now wield,” he wrote. And yet “we do not understand what happiness is any better than Aristotle did, and as for learning how to attain that blessed condition, one could argue that we have made no progress at all.”

So, Csikszentmihalyi set out to bring progress to the field of happiness research. Starting in the 1960s and continuing for decades, he interviewed thousands of people about what defined the “optimal” experiences. He recorded interviews with just about every profession and walk of life—from men and women, young and old, “Navajo shepherds, farmers in the Italian Alps, and workers on the assembly line in Chicago.” He heared in these diverse testimonies a kind of singular melody—a description of how, in the best parts of life, a feeling of self, time, and anxiety melt away in the face of deep immersion in an activity. He named this phenomenon “flow.”

Today you might hear self-help gurus talk about flow so constantly that the monosyllable has become a cliché without a clear definition. Csikszentmihalyi summed it up this way:

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

That’s pretty good. But of all the passages in his 1990 book Flow, I think this one comes closest to capturing the nearly spiritual quality that he was trying to convey:

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives

Flow suggests a waterway—something liquidly effortless, an unimpeded stream. But the wisdom of Csikszentmihalyi was to recognize that well-being is no lazy river. It is neither ease nor effortlessness that leads to the highest happiness. It is something close to their opposite. It is immersion in an activity that is hard, but just hard enough; it is the discovery of comfort at the outer realm of difficulty. Life feels best, not when it is smoothed with frictionlessness, but when it is filled with achievable challenges.

FLOW AND FAMILIARITY IN CULTURE

I found Flow when I was writing my first book Hit Makers, in which I was trying to understand the psychology of popularity in culture. I was curious why some things—movies, songs, TV shows, art, and even political figures—become so popular while similar ideas and products fail to find an audience. To boil that book down to a very long sentence, my thesis was what I called “the law of familiar surprises”: Most of the time, audiences want to discover new things, but they are deeply enamored by familiar things, and so the critical challenge for most cultural producers is to make something that is optimally new; familiar but not too familiar; seemingly surprising but quietly traditional; a window to a new world that paradoxically shows you home.1

I was thrilled by Flow because its conclusion seemed in harmony with my own. The similarities between Flow is an achievable challenge and Popularity is a familiar surprise seemed to suggest a Goldilocks zone in human experience2.

In the years since Hit Makers was published in 2017, I’ve watched these two ideas—familiarity and flow—evolve, interact, and merge in strange ways. Familiarity, for its part, has overtaken pop culture, and I would not say that this has been an altogether positive development. Hollywood’s hit machine notoriously specializes in sequels, adaptations, and reboots—or, it might be just as accurate to say that movie-going audiences have, in an age of abundant content, reserved their small handful of annual tickets for familiar IP that they trust to entertain them. Even HBO, once prized for its bounty of original content, has caught the bug. Today, its most popular series include several Games of Thrones spinoffs, a Stephen King prequel, a video game adaptation, and, emperor of all familiarities, a Harry Potter reboot.

Beyond film and TV, it’s the same story in video games (see headlines such as: “Why the Gaming Industry’s Reliance on Sequels Is Killing Innovation”) and music. As The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber reported, every year, a higher percentage of the albums streamed online is “catalog music,” meaning it is at least 18 months old. The triumph of familiarity in pop culture has itself become an overly familiar phenomenon. Everybody knows that everybody else knows that this is happening.

But something else is happening that deserves our attention—something that is simultaneously obvious and also almost too obvious in a way that makes it hard to see clearly. On our phones, the principle of familiarity is merging with flow to produce a new kind of high-tech passivity that resembles the experience of flow without fulfilling the meaning of it.

THE RISE OF ZOMBIE FLOW

The algorithmic newsfeed—from TikTok to Reels—is carefully engineered to organize compulsive short-term videos around the user’s revealed interests, for the purpose of maximizing the display of advertising squares. Scrolling has a funny way of immobilizing its user, numbing their mind, and producing a kind of disembodied timelessness.

The information systems researcher Shishi Wu coined an interesting term for the effect of short-form video platforms: “Passive Flow.” In her 2024 dissertation at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Wu wanted to understand why so many young users spend more time on social media platforms than they intend to. “This phenomenon cannot be fully explained by addiction or self-control failure,” she wrote. Instead, Wu proposed the theory of passive flow, which has three features. First, users engage without clear goals. The platform mindlessly pulls forward their attention, and they rarely pause to reflect on why they’re doing what they’re doing. Second, they lose self-awareness. They notice their body less, and disconnect with the world around them. Third, they experience “time transformation”—that is, they don’t just spend more time than they intended on the site, but also they lose track of time entirely.

“Csikszentmihalyi didn’t say that flow needs to be pointed towards something great,” the author Brad Stulberg told me on my podcast Plain English. “You can experience flow when you’re falling in love or when you’re writing a book. But you can also experience flow scrolling on Twitter, gambling at a slot machine.” In fact, the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who studied Las Vegas casinos, found that gambling addiction is less about winning money than about achieving a “trancelike state” at the machines where the body’s sense of material reality melts away.

The psychologist Paul Bloom coined yet another term to describe the experience of being in the sort of weightless state of scrolling that you later come to regret: “shitty flow.” In shitty flow, time feels like it’s melting away, but upon reflection, it’s melting away from the direction that you want to live. “During these experiences, you may feel relief or calm and undergo some hallmarks of flow, such as losing a sense of time and perhaps even losing a sense of yourself,” Stulberg wrote in the new book The Way of Excellence. “But when you come out of them, you are left with the sobering reality that your time could have been better spent.”

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen once told me that games can have both a goal and a purpose. The goal of a game is a win; the purpose of a game is to have fun. In toxic games, the goals overwhelm the purpose. You can win a game by mastering its rules, but also feel miserable by failing to see that there is a larger game of well-being whose rules you have broken in order to feel like a winner.

I’ve come to believe that something similar has happened in pop culture. Entertainment and tech companies have gotten smarter about putting consumers into bastardized flow states that leaves people feeling drained and sad rather than challenged and enlarged as selves. Modern leisure recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose, which Csikszentmihalyi summarized as “to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful.” Algorithmic flow is flow without achievement, flow without challenge, flow without even volition. What Wu calls “passive flow” and Bloom calls “shitty flow” deserves a harsher and more specific label. To be lost in the lazy river of algorithmic media is to be lost the current of life without a mind. Zombie flow.

THE RIGHT KIND OF HARD

To talk about zombie flow as a failure of will—just put the phone down; just go outside—is to fixate on individual behavior. But one thing Csikszentmihalyi understood much better than the modern gurus who quote him is that individuals often rely on external structures to encourage them to seek out activities that make life more rich, intense, and meaningful. Without endorsing any particular theology, he respected world religions for giving people a sense of higher purpose that organized their lives. He also surveyed global cultures to understand how groups engineered healthy feedback loops in the absence of a specific belief in god.

Drawing from the Canadian ethnographer Richard Kool, he described the Shushwap tribes of British Columbia. Their habitat was rich in salmon, elk, and edible plants. But the tribal elders developed an unusual practice for encouraging their people to avoid the passive laziness that might be caused by this easy abundance of food.

The elders said, at times the world became too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life. Without challenge, life had no meaning. So the elders, in their wisdom, would decide that the entire village should move, those moves occurring every 25 to 30 years. The entire population would move to a different part of the Shushwap land and there, they found challenge. There were new streams to figure out, new game trails to learn, new areas where the balsamroot would be plentiful. Now life would regain its meaning and be worth living. Everyone would feel rejuvenated and healthy.

The British Columbian natives understood the difference between goals and purposes. The goal of life may be the achievement of ease. But the purpose of life is the overcoming of difficulty.

To end where we began: “If we’re so smart, why aren’t we happier?” Csikszentmihalyi asked. Zombie flow is a perfect answer. It is progress without pleasure. It offers the sensation of optimal experience while scooping out its meaning. The Shushwap had moral elders whose authority derived from their obligation to the community’s flourishing. Our entertainment elders specialize in the opposite aim, to remove every friction and keep us floating in the lazy river of the scroll. It is everybody’s job these days to bring the fish to the village. There is no one left whose job it is to move the village.

Ten years ago, when I stumbled on Csikszentmihalyi, I was convinced that the great challenge of living was the ability to get into flow. These days, I wonder if a crucial skill to maintaining sanity and self-awareness is rather the ability to get out of zombie flow. “Without challenge, life had no meaning,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote. The elders knew it, too. Life is supposed to be the right kind of hard.

Perhaps you’ve heard the news: America is experiencing a religious revival and it’s concentrated among young people who are flocking back to the fold.

The Economist declared that “The West has stopped losing its religion.” The Washington Post noted that “Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men.” The Wall Street Journal chronicled “A Church’s Campaign to Teach Lost Boys How to Be Men.”

If true, this would mean the abrupt end to the largest wand fastest period of secularization in American history. But Ryan Burge, the author of the Graphs About Religion Substack, says something weirder is going on. Yes, the share of Americans who say they have “no religious affiliation” has stopped rising—for now. But the religious revival among young people is more mirage than divine miracle.

Graphs about Religion

Tons of data analysis about religion and politics. Mostly in the United States but a little bit of international stuff, too.

By Ryan Burge

There is a story that I thought I knew about the state of religion in America. On one side of the god divide, you had secular Americans who were anti-institutional, skeptical of traditional authorities, and struggling to build new systems of belief to organize their lives. On the other side, you had religious Americans who were fond of tradition and proud of centuries-old institutions of faith. But Burge told me that the fastest growing phenomena in American religion—the rise of the non-believers and the rise of new “non-denominational” Christian churches—are being powered by the same phenomenon, which he calls the “Substack-ification” of religion.

In today’s interview, which is luxuriously adorned with Burge’s graphs—we discuss the history of religion in America, the rise and pause of modern secularism, how America’s fastest growing churches are often personality cults, and why religious people seem to be happier, according to practically every measure.

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Derek Thompson: Throughout the 20th century, America was, by all accounts, the most religious, rich country in the world by far. Four hundred years after the Scientific Revolution, 100 years after Nietzsche declared, “God is dead,” in America, God was not dead. What’s the deal with America and religion?

Ryan Burge: We are an insanely religious country and it becomes even more prominent when you do a scatterplot of GDP on one axis and religiosity on the other axis. All the other wealthy countries on earth—especially our Eastern and Western European neighbors, Scandinavian neighbors—are significantly less religious than we are. Our closest comparison is Switzerland in terms of GDP. But only 17% of the Swiss say religion is very important. In America, it’s about 50%. So we are three times more religious than we should be compared to our European neighbors. We’re more religious than basically any industrialized country on earth at this point.

Thompson: Why?

Burge: The Christian nationalists are going to hate this answer, but it’s because we did not have a state church at the founding. Really you can thank Thomas Jefferson for this. There’s a theory in religious economy—Finke and Stark wrote a book about it, called The Churching of America—that argues that, without a state church monopoly, competition between religious groups forces religions to compete to be the best, the most interesting, the most charismatic, the most attractive. We had the most robust religious market of any country in the Western part of the world. Add to that the fact that America was founded by deeply religious people. Religiosity is woven into the DNA of American culture. So I think that created the fertile soil, and then the fact that we had this marketplace just allowed that soil to be even more productive.

THE RISE—AND PAUSE—OF AMERICAN SECULARISM

Thompson: Between the 1940s and 1980s, the share of Americans saying, “I have no religious affiliation” is a flat line. And then, suddenly, the flat savannah becomes Mount Kilimanjaro. The lines starts going up linearly. What happened in 1990?

Burge: I call it the venture capitalist graph. Every VC wants to see that hockey stick. The nones were hanging around for a very long time. There was a paper written in 1968 by a sociologist called “The Nones: The Neglected Category of Analysis.” No one was even thinking about it.

The one factor that a lot of people in this field point to is the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you grew up in America in the 1950s, ‘60s, or ‘70s, you could not say you were an atheist because it meant you were a communist. When the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War was over and atheism was no longer so toxic.

Second, the rise of the internet allowed people to say what they really believed online and find others who agreed with them. The example I give: Imagine you were a kid raised in Mississippi in the 1950s and you did not believe in God. You’re probably never going to tell another human being. But now you can go online and find the Atheists of Mississippi Facebook group or sub-reddit, and that emboldens you to say what you really are.

The last thing I’ll say is that it has to do with politics. I really do think Newt Gingrich is one of the worst politicians we’ve had in terms of the trajectory of America. He decided he’d rather win than be a good person, and dragging the Democrats through the mud was how he’d do it. Republicans won the House majority in 1994 for the first time in years. Then both sides started going in the mud. The Republican Party started calling Democrats evil because they’re not the party of evangelicals, and began courting evangelicals and conservative Catholics. That set off what we call the God gap — the idea that the Republican Party is the party of people of faith and the Democratic Party is largely becoming the party of the non-faithful. I think that might be the most important political-religious phenomenon in America right now.

Thompson: So it was this dual connotation shift. Atheism went from a negative reputation during the Cold War to no reputation, or even a positive reputation, and Christianity became fused with Republican politics in a way that alienated liberal young people.You have a really compelling chart in one of your essays on the religion gap, looking at who watches Fox News versus MSNBC. According to your analysis, atheists are more liberal and more likely to watch MSNBC than white Catholics or Mormons are to be fviconservative.

I want to continue telling this story. We’ve explained why America is so religious and why the inflection point happened in the early 1990s. But at some point between 2019 and 2022, the share of Americans who said they have no religious affiliation, which had been rising for 30 years, just stopped. What happened in 2020?

Burge: If you’ve watched Fox News, you’d know about what they call a massive religious revival. But no — it’s not a revival, it’s just a pause. What we’re seeing is that older Americans are more likely to say they’re religious today than they were even five years ago, and you’re seeing that with Gen X too. A slight return to religion among middle-aged and older Americans is driving the aggregate number to stay flat or maybe even tick down a little.

Thompson: Why?

Burge: We don’t know exactly why. I do think at some level it’s politics. A lot of older Americans are Republicans, especially white older Americans. Part of the return of religion is: “I’m a Republican, I’m a conservative, and that’s why I say I’m religious.” But they’re not actually going to church. They just say they’re religious because that’s what their tribe does.

The crucial point is that the share of Americans who are non-religious will go up in the future unless something dramatic changes—something we've never seen before in the history of modern polling. Millennials are about 40% non-religious. Among Gen Z, it's around 45%. Boomers are going to die eventually. For every boomer who dies and is replaced by a Gen Z, the aggregate number of nones rises through generational replacement.

Thompson: There’s one interpretation of what’s happening right now that says young Americans — and in particular young men with no clear political affiliation — are swarming back into the churches. Is that happening?

Burge: To parse out young people from a polling standpoint is really hard. They’re a hard group to poll, because they’re hard to contact and they don’t want to answer surveys. People don’t realize that even the gender gap thing among Gen Z is mathematically hard to parse. You’re cutting a sample from everyone down to just Gen Z, then cutting it in half again between men and women. You’re talking about a subgroup of a subgroup. Seeing a change there that’s statistically significant would take a sample size so large we can’t collect it.

All these anecdotes are interesting, but the idea that young people are coming back to church en masse is just not supported by any data I’ve ever looked at.

THE SUBSTACK-IFICATION OF AMERICAN RELIGION

Thompson: What religions and denominations are growing the fastest right now?

Burge: There’s a thing in American evangelicalism called non-denominationalism. For those who don’t live in that world, these are the churches you drive by that look like factories or office buildings. They’re called things like The Journey, The Ramp, The Bridge, Life Church. There’s one called I Heart Church; that’s literally their legal name. There’s one called Enjoy Church in St. Louis. Those non-denominationals were a rounding error in American Christianity 50 years ago: 3% of Americans were non-denominational then, and now it’s 14% of all Americans. That’s 35 to 40 million people.

For comparison, the largest denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention at 12.5 million. Non-denoms are probably three times that size. One-third of all Protestants are now non-denominational. The reason Evangelicalism is still 20% of America — the same size it was 50 years ago — is because of the rise of non-denominationalism.

Thompson: Talk to me like I’m a Reform Jew who knows nothing about non-denominational Evangelicalism — in part because that’s exactly who I am. What’s special about these non-denominational churches that explains their unique growth at a moment when so many other, more traditional faiths are declining?

Burge: It’s what I call the great reversal in American society. We used to be very top-down, very hierarchical. If you wanted to be a pastor, you had to go through an ordination process, get approval from a denomination, and then they would place you in a congregation. This is the absolute opposite of that. They don’t ask permission to start a church. A lot of them aren’t ordained. A lot have very little or no theological training. It’s almost like the social media internet model — you can build a following online and then that becomes the whole thing.

These churches are popping up by the thousands all across America. They’re the most grassroots form of religion you could possibly have. A lot of these churches were literally started by a guy in his basement having a Bible study with two or three couples. He might have been a real estate agent, an insurance broker, a construction company owner—and he just starts a Bible study. Then it grows from eight people to eighteen to eight hundred, and it just becomes this organic thing.

Some of those pastors are proud of the fact that they didn’t have to seek permission to start the church, that they had very little formal training. They say ”God did this.” And people like the accountability too. When you put $100 in the plate, that $100 is decided upon by people sitting in that room. The elders, the deacons, the pastor are all right in front of you and you can talk to them any Sunday. Whereas if you gave money to the Catholic Church, some of it goes to some diocese, to the Vatican, and it goes away and we don’t know where. Non-denoms have almost no bureaucracy. It feels renegade: “Screw what everyone else wants. We’re going to start a church because God wants us to.” And that has been incredibly successful and has really changed the trajectory of American religion.

Thompson: It’s interesting, because I would have thought that a resurgence of Christianity would be a counter-movement to the larger theme of declining institutions. I expected you to say, “Look, institutions are declining in media, but they’re strong in religion because of the religious revival.” And what you’re telling me is: No, the same thing that’s happening in media is happening in religion. You used to have to start as a beat reporter at a local paper, slowly work your way up to the New York Times; that has been demolished. Now you go online, start a Twitch, a YouTube, build an audience.

Some of these media startups are, if not personality cults, certainly personality businesses. Are these fast-growing non-denominational churches better understood as personality cults? Or are they better understood as tweaks of Protestantism that catch on because they feel grassroots rather than because they tapped into a 500-year-old tradition?

Burge: Many of them are personality-driven, without a doubt. And there’s an interesting problem coming in a couple of years, because a lot of these churches were started in the 1990s and 2000s, and those pastors are getting to the age where they don’t want to be pastor anymore. How do you hand that off to someone who is half as charismatic?

There are actually famous examples of this going wrong. There’s a church in Chicago called Willow Creek, which was one of the first non-denominational megachurches in America. Their pastor was Bill Hybels, and he had a five-year plan to retire and hand off to a new generation, including both a male and a female pastor. He had the whole thing planned out. Then it came out that he was involved in sexual harassment, and everything fell apart. Both new pastors resigned. Most of the elder board resigned, accused of covering it up. The church declined 30 to 40% in attendance. That is the weakness of this whole model.

Denominations will continue to endure because they have structure in place to carry you over the chasms of uncertainty. Non-denominationals have no structure. It’s all based on who the pastor is. It’s the Substackification of American religion. You start your own thing. You go outside the ecosystem, you don’t need all the structures. That’s almost exactly what these non-denominational churches are doing. You’re not here for Methodism or Lutheranism. You’re here for my flavor of American Christianity and the way I preach it. And people are drawn to that by the tens of thousands. It’s the only major segment of American religion that’s growing.

Thompson: You’ve really changed my mind in the last few minutes. I came into this conversation with the frame that the rise of secularism in America was all about the decline of institutions and the rise of individualism. But the story you’re telling is that many of the biggest success stories within Christianity right now are about anti-institutional individuals building a broadcast that is one-to-one-million audience. So the same underlying sociological phenomenon that one could use to describe the rise of the nones is the same thing powering the renaissance of Christianity in some parts of America. It just shows how unbelievably powerful some of these zeitgeists are — that they can explain and power movements that seem, in terms of their outcomes, to be entirely opposite. On one hand, people are becoming less religious. On the other, people are becoming more religious. But it’s the same anti-institutional zeitgeist powering both.

Burge: Think about Donald Trump too. He ran outside the party — “They don’t want me to be the candidate, they’re actively working against my candidacy.” He used that as a badge of honor, just like those pastors say, “Yeah, I don’t need to get ordained. I don’t need permission to start this church. God wants me to.” He was a bottom-up, grassroots president. That’s the great reversal.

All the power in society now comes from building a following on social media. If you build a big enough following, you can literally change the world, whether it be religion, politics, or culture. I don’t think we fully grasp what that means in terms of how we think about where power comes from. We destroyed all the gatekeepers. Is that necessarily a good thing? I would argue a little bit of gatekeeping is what kept us safe. Ivermectin is not the solution to all your problems, but when you destroy all the gatekeepers, it can seem like it. It’s almost like we’re living in a relativist world where no one has the truth. The destroying of hierarchy and leadership in all the structures we had are leading us into a new era, changing everything about what authority looks like, who we listen to, and what the truth is. And I think American religion, whether it realizes it or not, led that charge with the rise of these non-denominationals.

Thompson: The idea that anti-authority philosophy is powering the revitalization of Christianity as much as it’s powering the rise of secularism is a strange idea. I like it.

THE FOUR TYPES OF NON-BELIEVERS

Thompson: I want to talk a little bit about the “nones.” The same way that non-Christians see Christianity as one big monolith, people looking at non-believers think it’s just one big group of people who hate Christianity. But you’ve done a really good job explaining how there are four subcategories of non-believers. I’d love you to run through those four categories.

Burge: We got a Templeton grant and did a survey of 12,000 non-religious Americans. For a long time the nones were just one group. When you’re 5% of America, you can be a monolith. empirically speaking. But you can’t go from 5% to 30% and still call the whole group “the nones.” There have to be internal categories. So we did this 12,000-person survey and created a four-part typology, myself and my coauthor Tony Jones.

One is called SBNRs: spiritual but not religious. These are the woo-woos. They don’t believe in Jesus, Muhammad, or Buddha, but they want to know your astrological sign. They think believing in Jesus is absolute nonsense, but they believe the star sign you were born under changes your entire life trajectory. That makes more sense to them.

Thompson: To make fun of myself: In my 20s, I certainly wasn’t very religious. And when I was dating, I believed I had a lucky pair of socks. If I wore those socks, it would be a really good date. After months, maybe years, of believing quite fervently in the concept of lucky socks, I realized: My theology is that there is no God, except a god of socks. The Almighty has no control over anything in the world, except that after creating the heavens and the Earth and the animals and the humans, His only domain of care is the degree to which these striped socks lead to an enjoyable date. Individual theologies can sometimes make absolutely no sense when you look at them from 30,000 feet up. A lot of human belief comes from a place of instinct that isn’t exactly well-planned before it’s articulated.

So anyway — I interrupted your four-part breakdown. We’ve talked about the spiritual but not religious. Keep going. What are the other three subcategories?

Burge: The second is more methodological. I call them the NINOs, nones in name only. A quarter of the nones are NINOs. A lot of these people say they have no religious affiliation, but then you ask them questions about religious practices and they actually do a bunch of religious things. Those first two groups — SBNRs and NINOs — make up 60% of the nones. We think those groups are generally more open to religion based on our questions about religious openness.

The bottom two groups are not at all open to religion. One we call the “Dones,” because that’s exactly what they are. They’re as far from religion as you can be: 1% believe in God, less than 1% pray at all, 2% go to church once a year or more. And we asked them, “What happens when you die?”, 77% of them said say, “When I die, my existence ends.” They’re also the oldest of the four groups. The boomer atheists, in my mind, are the dones. They make up about a third of all nones.

And then the last category — only 10% — might be the most fascinating. We call them zealous atheists. If you go on Reddit’s r/Atheism subreddit, that’s who you’re seeing: people who are atheist and angry about it, and who want you to become an atheist too. We asked all the nones, “Have you tried to convince someone to leave religion in the last 12 months?” On average, 5% of nones have tried to de-convert someone. Among zealous atheists, it’s a majority.

So it’s much more nuanced than “all nones hate religion, all nones are atheists.” A significant number of nones do believe in God or a higher power at some level. A lot say they’re spiritual, a lot have quasi-religious practices whether they realize it or not. Very few people are completely aspiritual and areligious. It’s more of a gradient than an on-off switch.

Thompson: I want to circle back to the spiritual but not religious. You have a really good picture of how they differ from the rest of the none category. They’re more likely to do yoga, meditate, believe in astrology or horoscopes, use crystals or tarot cards, burn sage, use mind-altering substances. It’s interesting to me that there’s this category of Americans who have gone into religion as if it’s a foreign country, harvested certain souvenirs, and brought them back to the world of secularism. They practice yoga but have no interest in understanding its religious origins. They meditate but are not remotely interested in any Buddhist version of nirvana. Tell me about this group. Who are they? Are they growing? And what do we misunderstand about them?

Burge: People think that a lot of people who aren’t religious are still very spiritual. That’s a big misconception. Among all nones, 25% said spirituality was very important to them. Among the religious, 61% said spirituality was very important. So the idea that lots of non-religious people are replacing religion with spirituality is actually not true. Most people who are non-religious are also non-spiritual at the same time. SBNRs are one manifestation of non-religion, but they’re not the dominant one.

What you were describing, Derek, is a concept that Christian Smith pioneered about 20 years ago called moralistic therapeutic deism. This was the idea that “God wants me to feel good about things.” You take your lucky socks, or astrology, or you go to mass once a year at Christmas. You pick and choose the theology that makes sense to you and push away whatever doesn’t make you feel good. I think that’s what SBNRs have done. They pluck out certain practices from major religious traditions—”I’ll take the parts I like and leave the rest”—not realizing that one of the reasons religion has been so successful throughout human history is that it requires doing everything together.

There was a big media story 10 or 15 years ago about something called Sunday Assembly. It was “Church Without God.” A bunch of atheists got together on Sunday morning, had coffee and donuts, sang pop songs, heard a TED-style talk, and built community. It was a huge story. But most of those Sunday assemblies folded. They only wanted the parts of religion they liked and left the others behind. They were afraid to ask for money because it felt scammy, so a lot of them didn’t have the money to pay the musicians, or pay for the rental hall.

You can’t just pick and choose. It’s like a three-legged stool. You need all three legs. If you pull one out, it falls apart. A lot of people are doing that with religion right now. They’re walking down the buffet line, picking one piece, putting it on their plate, and calling it a spiritual life. That doesn’t endure.

RELIGION, HAPPINESS, AND THE ‘MOST CONCERNING TREND’

Thompson: Some people say: “If you knock God off the pedestal, it creates a vacuum for spirituality that has to be filled with something.” But what you see in the data is that in many cases, that vacuum is filled with more vacuum. People who are least likely to go to church are most likely to feel somewhat empty in their lives. Dropping out begets dropping out.

Burge: This might be the most worrisome trend I see in all the data. Twenty percent of Americans tell Pew that their religion is “nothing in particular.” This group is struggling economically. They have the lowest socioeconomic status of any religious group. They’re also the least likely group to participate in politics: putting up a yard sign, going to a political meeting. They are struggling in every possible way, because in many ways they’ve dropped out of the social fabric that holds American society up.

Here’s what people don’t understand about how religion works in America. The people most likely to attend a house of worship this weekend are those with graduate degrees. The people least likely are those with a high school diploma or less. I have never seen a single data source where that relationship is reversed. More education leads to more participation in everything in American life—not just religion, but politics, culture, society. And if you think about what religion does that’s invisible to the average person, it gives you the opportunity to move up in life by building a network of people who run businesses, who are managers, who can get your foot in the door at a new company. Whereas if you’re a nothing-in-particular who dropped out of everything, you’re putting your resume in a stack with a thousand others and no one knows who you are.

This dropping-out phenomenon makes their lives demonstrably worse in ways they don’t see or feel. Religious people are doing well because they’ve built a social network that is not fully visible to them, but is there to support them through their darkest times — when they lose a job, when they lose a spouse, when they’re going through depression or anxiety. Those social organizations carry them through.

This is creating a bifurcation in American society between the haves and the have-nots. What’s even scarier: among young people 18 to 22, the most popular response to “What is your present religion?” is nothing in particular. One-third of 18-to-22-year-olds say that. You’re setting yourself up for failure as you move into adulthood because you don’t have the social networks that your parents and grandparents had. What are you going to rely on? For many of them, the answer is Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok. They’re not going to get out into the world and try to make it better, because they have no social connection.

Thompson: You had a really striking graph that showed that the happiness gap between the religious and non-religious has roughly doubled between the boomer generation and this generation of young people. Why do you think that is?

Burge: I think it’s about divide between liberalism and conservatism. No one wants to have this conversation, but liberals are not as happy as conservatives. You can cut the data however you want, control for whatever you want, run whatever math you want. Conservatives are happier than liberals. Part of it is this idea I hear constantly online: We live in the worst timeline possible, and everything is catastrophized. The polar ice caps are melting, Social Security is going bankrupt. You and I both came of age during the Obama ascendance, and Obama was a hopeful politician. He was good at instilling the idea that democracy could be good, that America could be a beacon for the world. Think about the politicians who have run for election since. How many are truly inspirational? Not very many.

You know where I hear the most inspirational stuff? At church. That’s where I get inspired to feel positive about things. It helps reorient me toward the positive. Whenever I give a talk, the last question I always get is, “Ryan, where’s your hope?” And for me it always comes back to faith.

This also connects to the fertility gap and the marriage gap. Married people are happier than unmarried people. People with children are happier than people without children. That’s not a conservative talking point, that’s just what the data says. And at some point we’ve got to say the true thing in the data: being religious, having kids, getting married, having an education—all those things tend to make people happier. And they’re all correlated with each other in this causal matrix. Being more religious means you’re more likely to be married, more likely to have kids, more likely to have social trust. If you’re more likely to have social trust, you’re more likely to be religious, more likely to go to college. All of these things are tangled up in a web that generates positivity. And if you’re not in that web, it feels like you’re going to struggle on metrics like happiness.

Thompson: I want to add one more ingredient: People who have more money are happier.

The cycle flows two ways. People who are educated, and therefore on the higher end of the income bracket, are more likely to get married. So not only do they have financial security, they also have relationship security, and that confers happiness or acts as a kind of vaccine against misery. There’s also research from the sociologist Kathryn Edin suggesting that men who were religious or went to church and then get divorced often lose their association with church, because it was the woman in the relationship managing the social calendar, including church on Sunday. Which meant that divorce precipitated disengagement with religion, rather than religion being the thing that dictated the relationship in the first place.

So rather than a clean domino effect—believe in God, then get married, then make money, thus be happy—I think about it as a complex cycle that keeps touching back on social connection. What is marriage? A social connection. What is a religious congregation? Social connections. What is one of the key differences between people with money and without? People with means can afford the experiences that protect social connections, rather than staying inside doing cheap things on their phone. To me, it all comes back to the fact that people need people, and we have a handful of institutions—marriage and religion—that are very good at keeping people attached to people. Folks who disengage from both aren’t doomed to misery. But there’s a lot you have to build on your own without institutions that are really, really good at keeping you connected to community. If you don’t have them, you have to build it yourself, and that’s just really damn hard to do.

Burge: There was a tweet a couple of years ago where someone wrote, “I wish there was a place to hang out that wasn’t expensive, with no alcohol, where we just make friends.” And I thought: “Oh, you’re going to hate my answer, but there’s probably one less than a mile from you right now that would absolutely love to have you show up.” All the comments were like, “No, not like that.” That’s the problem. People are waiting for some perfect social organization to fulfill all their loneliness needs and maybe find a partner. Your grandparents knew how to do this inherently, and we’ve forgotten how to just go and be social.

I speak to secular groups all the time, and they ask me, somewhat awkwardly, “Do you think our way of living is defective or inferior to yours?” I tell them: “I don’t want to speak about philosophical or theological things. I have my own theology and you have yours, and I’m not going to convince you I’m right. What I can tell you is: unless and until you create the social organizations that religion has provided for American society for the last 250 years, I’m going to think your way of living is not as good.” And by the way, that’s not just Christianity. That’s Judaism, Islam, Latter-day Saints. The community of people meeting together regularly to share their lives, create a mutual aid society for each other, and serve people in the community—that is an objectively good thing.

Religion always has a vertical component — you and God, your understanding of higher things — but it has a very strong horizontal component too: just hanging out with other people. Rodney Stark talked about this in the context of the Black Plague. A third of Europe died. But the death rate in Christian communities was lower, not because God was protecting Christians, but because Christians did not leave other Christians behind when they got sick. They tried to take care of them, feed them, nourish them. And by doing that, they actually lowered their own death rate. So it’s not magic, it’s science. Just taking care of other people is in some ways a miraculous thing, and that is how religion operates. You don’t have to believe in any woo-woo, any resurrection, any miracles to understand the miracle of what it means to hang out in community with people for a long period of time who want to help you and you want to help them. We’ve forgotten that part. There is a value in just showing up and being part and building a community. If you believe in none of it, it won’t matter, because those other people believe in you and you believe in them. I really do believe that if the average person goes to an average house of worship on a regular basis for a year or two, their lives will be demonstrably better in multiple dimensions—in ways they won’t even understand—because of being part of that community.

Thompson: I like the idea that “the strength of the vertical predicts the strength of the horizontal.” Strong beliefs in a higher purpose lead to strong connections with other people. That seems true outside of religion. Why does everyone make their best friends from school, or work, or their children’s school? Because they are obligated by law to attend school. That’s a very thick connection.

It might also explain the difficulty of forming a church without God. If the vertical is going to be weak, the horizontal is going to be weak. If you have a book club with people who don’t really love the same novels, it doesn’t last long. Whereas with church—if you have people who at least somewhat believe in a higher power and believe in the structures of Catholicism, or Protestantism, or some non-denominational thing—it’s the strength of the vertical that explains the strength of the horizontal.

As I’m working on ideas about the antisocial century, I want to hold onto this: if you don’t have that central spine of purpose, the community won’t last. If your only purpose is “let’s get together,” that’s not enough. You need that higher purpose—that vertical spine—in order to build a truly strong horizontal community.

Americans spend more time alone—and less time socializing in-person—than any period in recorded history.

Some people think this is a story about technology. The post-war construction of the suburbs spread us out. Television keeps us in our living rooms. Phones keep teens in their bedrooms. Others think this is a story about values. Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, has pointed to the social gospel of the early 20th century as an example of how communitarian values can sweep the world. In the last 60 years, however, the cult of individualism has turned the ethic of “we” into an ethic of “me” across politics, sports clubs, and family habits.

These technology- and values-based narratives have merit. But they’re missing a big piece of the puzzle. They’re missing a fundamental law of modern economics.

Look across the U.S. economy. Cinemas are fighting to stay relevant, but Netflix is a growing juggernaut. Restaurants feel squeezed, but DoorDash has healthy profit margins.

This is a consistent pattern. Companies in the business of bringing people together for shared experiences are struggling. Meanwhile, products that increase the time we spend alone are doing great.

Alone time has surged in the last 60 years in large part because of changing economics that made it profitable to run businesses that keep people apart and expensive to run businesses that bring people together. If our social lives seem sick with solitude, that’s because they suffer from a disease with a name. It’s called Baumol’s cost disease.

YOU CAN’T ‘INNOVATE’ YOUR WAY TO A THREE-PERSON QUARTET

In the 1960s, the John F. Kennedy administration wanted to understand why so many theaters and artists were struggling financially. They turned to the economist William Baumol to investigate. An avid painter and sculptor, Baumol was the man for the job. With a colleague, he tracked down data by poking around backstages, sending questionnaires to theatergoers, and interviewing Broadway producers.

Baumol soon developed an elegant, data-­backed theory that explained much more than why artists were starving.

His insight was that agriculture can become more productive in a way that theater cannot. While a single farmer produces far more food today than a century ago by making use of machines and improved fertilizer, the business of putting on a play or an opera cannot benefit from similar labor-saving technology. “The output per man-­hour of the violinist playing a Schubert quartet in a standard concert hall is relatively fixed,” Baumol observed, “and it is fairly difficult to reduce the number of actors necessary for a performance of Henry IV, Part II.”

Baumol recognized that this principle extended across the entire economy, beyond farms and opera houses. Some sectors, such as growing corn and making electronics, have become more efficient and productive thanks to new technology, trade, and automation. But other sectors— especially services, such as haircuts, theater performances, and watching toddlers in daycare—still require as much labor as they did before the Industrial Revolution.

To be clear, this is mostly good news! This is the story of economic progress. In 1960, the average American family spent 17% of their disposable income on food. Over the next four decades, that fell below 10%, even as the average family dined out more often. People used to brag about the size of their flat-screen TVs. Now huge TVs are too affordable to be a status symbol.

The trouble is that productivity growth doesn’t just make goods cheaper. It made the economy richer. It raised the economy-wide price of human time—which is a fancy way of saying “wages.” As these industries became more productive, they could pay workers higher salaries. As wages rose, restaurants, operas, and childcare centers had to offer higher pay, as well, to keep their workers from leaving.

This created a sticky problem for businesses that didn’t benefit from new technology, or trade, or automation. Without productivity growth, they just got more expensive. After all, no one can finish five beard trims in the time it used to take to complete one. No ballet company can put on 10 Swan Lake performances in the time it used to do just one. Still, in order to keep their workers from switching careers, theaters and childcare centers had to offer higher salaries. And therefore increase their prices. (Sure, many teachers, cellists, and social workers accept lower salaries to do work they love. But if the salary gap gets too big, they will switch.)

When opera houses and theaters beg wealthy patrons for donations—even as the ticket prices are prohibitively expensive and many singers and actors can barely afford rent—you’re hearing Baumol’s cost disease at work. What they’re saying is: “The rest of the economy has technology, trade, and automation. We don’t. So please make up the difference with tax-deductible donations!”

THE CENTURY OF ANTI-SOCIAL BUSINESSES

If you read this newsletter, you’re probably familiar with Derek’s idea that we are living in an anti-social century. I think he’s right. But—and Derek allowed me to say this!—I don’t think he’s focused enough on the economics of the anti-social century. He’s been missing something big: In capitalism, it often pays to be anti-social.

TV and smartphone-based activities are, after all, very much part of the ever-more-productive economy. They benefit from technology gains: Actors once performed every night for a small local audience. Then TV networks aired one program at a time for national audiences. Now Netflix streams an ever-growing library of content for a global user base. The world of digital, solitude-inducing entertainment is scalable, so investors give founders millions to build the next short-form video app, delivery platform, or AI companion company.

But concerts, independent bookstores, and restaurants (with table service) are in the humans-only economy. They are labor intensive. When they get more efficient over time, it’s generally by becoming less social, like the fast-casual restaurant chains that have customers order by kiosk and sit on uncomfortable metal chairs that prod them to eat quickly and leave promptly. And definitely not linger over dessert or one more drink, the conversation reaching an emotional frontier in the warm glow of a long meal.

Cost disease doesn’t mean people have to be less social. Going on a hike with friends is still free. So is organizing a potluck. Meeting for coffee is a little pricey, but not prohibitively so.

But cost disease and the profit motive shape our choices. Free, social activities compete with cheap, engaging, and high-quality entertainment (like For All Mankind on Apple TV—why is no one talking about this show?!) and even cheaper doomscrolling. The profit margins for a restaurant or cafe whose owner aspires to create a “third space” are vanishingly thin. The marketing budget for Marvel movies is more than $100 million.

Because of cost disease, most of the world’s most powerful corporations and most driven entrepreneurs are well capitalized and incentivized to increase our solitude, while purveyors of long nights with friends are outliers who succeed despite strong headwinds.

Even Facebook’s evolution fits in with cost disease. In the Aughts, people used to ask, only half jokingly, why we were all working for free by creating content for Facebook. But like other labor-intensive services, our free labor did not get more efficient every year. Facebook could only wring so many more posts from each user’s social network. So, to achieve efficiency gains, Facebook had to design an algorithm that displayed the most engaging and relevant-to-you content created by anyone, anywhere in the world, including by more and more professionals. To become more productive, Facebook had to become more anti-social.

THE CURE FOR COST DISEASE

It may sound like Baumol’s cost disease dooms certain industries to get less affordable forever. But the malady he named has a dependable solution. Progressive taxes in a growing economy can be used to subsidize key services so that average Americans can afford them.

For example, there is a strong economic argument for subsidizing health care, education, and even child care.

But should we also subsidize sit-down restaurants? Bowling alleys and the local dive bar? Coachella!

Of course, I’m joking about Coachella. (Kind of.) But my serious point is that if solitude has a social cost, it’s not crazy to think that local, state, and federal governments should be thinking about creative ways to make it cheaper to hang out. Some policy solutions would be familiar, such as local governments providing more public pools and community spaces. Others might sound a little odd, like making pro-social businesses, such as restaurants, qualify for tax-deductible donations, the same way that Puccini fans can write checks to their favorite opera house.

Cost disease is real, and it has a known cure. Today we’re seeing that one price of a successful economy is the rise of anti-social businesses. But if we want our rising living standards to include friendships and shared experiences—and not just a nation of couch potatoes scrolling on their phones for 10 hours a day—then we’ll need to choose our social future. And pay for it.