On a routine flight from Denver to Houston in early February, a passenger suddenly began pounding the seat in front of him. When flight attendants approached him, he began punching a window, cracking the glass and bloodying his hands. That's according to an FBI affidavit that also said he kept at it until a group of passengers managed to subdue him with shoelaces and zip ties. A month later, on a flight to Washington, DC, from Wichita, Kansas, a passenger shouted violent threats at a flight attendant, another FBI affidavit said, before turning on a fellow traveler, taking his hat and glasses and repeatedly hitting him in the face.

Airline crews have reported 12,900 unruly passenger incidents to the Federal Aviation Administration since 2021. That year kicked off a grim new era of air travel, with a record-smashing 5,973 in-flight outbursts ranging in severity from rude or disruptive behavior to outright violence — a more than 400% increase from 2019. Though 2021 remains a banner year for troublesome travelers, the blight of bad behavior hasn't let up. Last year saw double the number of unruly passenger incidents compared with 2019.

Recent news has left people even more on edge: In a March Harris Poll commissioned by The Points Guy, 65% of respondents said they were more nervous about flying because of recent airplane crashes, a known risk of passenger misconduct. In total, nearly 90% of respondents said they're now afraid of flying.

Air travel can often bring out people's worst tendencies thanks to how much of the experience is out of their control — from inconsistent TSA procedures to the sky-high cost of a sad airport lunch. Researchers have also argued that the modern airplane is a microcosm of society at large, with its divided passenger classes replicating the inequality that plays out on solid ground. On every front, flying demands a healthy reserve of patience and goodwill toward your fellow human beings. It's a pressure test on the social contract — the idea that for humans to coexist in harmony, we need to commit to a set of shared values and behaviors that put the well-being of the group first. Being a member of a well-functioning society means not always getting your way and sucking it up like an adult. Flight attendants have a front-row seat to the state of this unspoken pact in all its glory or disrepair. If society is in upheaval, then the skies will follow suit.

These days, the flight attendants I spoke with say Americans' behavior could use some serious help.

The boom in bad behavior has been decades in the making. In her 2001 book, "Air Rage," the aviation consultant Angela Dahlberg writes that throughout the '90s, the industry steadfastly worked to overhaul air travel in the name of business efficiency and "an economy of safety." These changes came at the cost of comfort and customer service. Economy cabins became more tightly packed, and passenger legroom and complimentary meals became a thing of the past. Between 1995 and 1999, the FAA reported a 58% increase in flight delays due to aviation infrastructure that couldn't keep up with booming passenger demand. It wasn't long before unruly passengers multiplied and their disruptions grew more severe.

In the aftermath of 9/11, as fear around air travel spiked — and airport security became exponentially more frustrating — air rage incidents were widely reported to have surged. Industry veterans say things got bad again in the early 2010s. Kathryn Voge, who worked as a TWA flight attendant from 1977 to 1992 before changing careers to become a crisis counselor, was just another ordinary airline customer when she came face-to-face with an unruly passenger on a 2011 flight from Paris to Philadelphia.

"He was an American, and he was being so obnoxious — he seemed to be inebriated," she says. She could tell that crew members were in over their heads and, as a mental health professional, stepped in to help. "I was able to have a conversation with him and bring him down. But he was just so combative," she says. When she talked to the flight attendants afterward, they told her that incidents like that were becoming more common. Industry analysts again blamed airlines, saying their continued cost-cutting measures had made the passenger experience even worse.

Sunny McLaren, who retired from American Airlines in 2020 after 34 years of cabin service, believes that the proliferation of personal screen devices in the early 2010s was also a factor. Passengers these days tend to sit down, pop on their headphones, and tune out. When a flight attendant approaches to ask whether they need anything, it isn't unusual for the passenger to appear startled or annoyed, or even to lash out.

It's a pattern that both Voge and McLaren see as an extension of broader cultural patterns. "We're a lot more short-fused," McLaren tells me from her home near Phoenix. "I mean the country as a whole but also flight attendants and passengers."

The stats certainly back her up. Gallup polling has found that Americans are more likely to cite stress as a part of their daily lives than at any other point in the past 30 years. And in a 2024 survey by the American Psychiatric Association, 43% of adults said they felt more anxious than they had the previous year. Amid snowballing national distrust of information and public institutions, Pew reported in March that nearly half of Americans in its survey said they believed people have gotten ruder since the pandemic. While violent crime overall has been declining across the country for years, data from the Gun Violence Archive shows that road rage-related gun violence more than doubled between 2018 and 2023.

A few years of being stuck at home, combined with compounding global crises, have done a number on Americans. People are angry, scared, and taking it out on each other. In the skies, the breakdown of the social contract is unavoidable.

"Everyone's just so rushed, and then they sit down to decompress. And it's like, 'Wait a minute, I have to listen to you' — the flight attendant — 'too?'" McLaren says. "These passengers go through so much."

Recent years have supercharged the bad behavior. Public outbursts over masking rules became so frequent that they've earned the name "mask rage." When mask mandates were eventually lifted, air rage incidents held strong. In a 2021 survey of 5,000 flight attendants by the Association of Flight Attendants, the profession's largest labor union, over 85% of respondents said they dealt with unruly passengers in the first half of 2021, while 58% reported facing at least five passenger incidents during that time. A whopping 17% said they'd experienced a "physical incident" while interacting with a passenger.

The disturbances left veteran crew members shaken. "In my 25 years as a flight attendant, I've had maybe five unruly passenger events and only one that you could call 'air rage,'" AFA's president, Sara Nelson, told me in 2021.

That year, the FAA pleaded with airports to crack down on the sale of to-go alcohol, a practice introduced during the pandemic that was widely thought to exacerbate passenger misconduct. Democratic members of Congress went on to introduce the Protection from Abusive Passengers Act in 2023, which would have required the FAA and Department of Justice to work in conjunction with the TSA to maintain a no-fly list of unruly passengers. But nothing has happened with the bill.

The increasing flight chaos — from extended airport security wait times, rampant flight delays, and cancellations to the first fatal airline crash in over 20 years — has only prolonged the issue. By the time Anissa Perales, 27, became a flight attendant for a major US airline in spring 2023, unpleasant and unpredictable customer interactions were understood to be part of a day's work. That impression seems to have also spread to civilians, who often ask Perales for horror stories when they learn what she does for a living. "Whenever the question comes up, you can't think of examples because that's just what happens every day," Perales says.

Most day-to-day infractions are relatively minor — passengers might be talking loudly or watching movies without headphones, disturbing fellow flyers. Many refuse to comply with safety protocols, such as stowing away their tray tables or wearing their seatbelts. Intoxication is often a factor.

Perales tells me that she noticed higher passenger safety compliance immediately following the January collision between an American Airlines flight and a US Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River, which killed all 67 people in both vehicles.

When President Donald Trump blamed the crash on diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring efforts in the FAA, it rattled an already high-turnover workforce. "I know people who've taken leaves and who have quit," says another flight attendant, who was granted anonymity because of an airline policy prohibiting press interviews. "I personally am not thrilled about plane crashes or anything to do with the FAA being less safe. But also, a lot of us are tired of the noise." With the current political climate adding unknowns to flying, some flight attendants now feel the weight of their jobs even after they're off the clock.

Though the situation has improved since its pandemic-era peak, the problem is "by no means gone," Nelson tells me now, adding: "Flight attendants are still facing all-too-frequent — and violent — disruptive passengers attacking us while we are at work just trying to make sure everyone has a safe flight."

As international travel becomes more tense amid Trump's trade war and increased border scrutiny, flying remains at the uneasy center of major social questions. Every active flight attendant I spoke with says they can't imagine doing anything else, but they agree that flying isn't what it used to be.

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

A few months ago, I began noticing an unusual pattern across my digital feeds. Wherever I scrolled, people kept telling me to play Tetris.

Aspiring thought leaders on LinkedIn touted the game as a tool for honing strategic thinking. On TikTok, it was promoted as a salve for workday anxiety. Reddit users sang its praises, saying it may help prevent flashbacks from traumatizing experiences, such as witnessing a stabbing at Grand Central Terminal or watching a surfer swallowed up by a deadly swell. In the past six months alone, dozens of Reddit posts have suggested Tetris to help with PTSD, accumulating thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments.

I was skeptical. But I quickly realized that I was late to the party. Studies on the game's potential to improve players' mental health and cognition date back to at least the early 2000s. Research on how the brain adapts to playing Tetris goes back even further. In recent years, amid the rise of social media and the modern cult of self-optimization, Tetris has gained new momentum as a better-living gambit. The game has shown up in enough personal development content that its self-help status has graduated from the ultrafringe to the almost mainstream. Somehow, while I was busy living my life, Tetris had become a life hack for business bros, wellness gurus, and plenty of others in between.

But how exactly does it work?

Tetris was created in 1984 as an arcade game in Soviet Moscow by the scientist Alexey Pajitnov. The concept was simple: Players pieced together descending multicolored puzzle blocks to form tidy rows that fell away to clear space for even more blocks, which tumbled from above at an ever-increasing speed — a hypnotic, quick-thinking race against a game-ending pileup. Players couldn't get enough. Within a few years, the video game creator Henk Rogers partnered with Pajitnov and secured a deal to bring Tetris to Nintendo's then new Game Boy devices, cementing the game as an international obsession and a staple of '90s childhoods.

It wasn't long before Tetris devotees began reporting a strange occurrence. The game's cascading blocks would follow them off their screens and show up against the walls of darkened rooms, when they closed their eyes to fall asleep, and even in their dreams. A 1991 study of Tetris players' brain scans found that their cognitive processing while playing the game became more energy-efficient the more they played, suggesting that as they grew their Tetris-playing skills, their brains became ever more primed toward solving the puzzle. Players were able to engage with the game so deeply that they stayed in the zone even after they'd finished playing, the study found, and without virtual Tetris blocks to maneuver, their brains conjured up imaginary ones. In 1994, Wired dubbed this the "Tetris effect."

Multiple studies went on to find that playing Tetris within a critical time window following a traumatic event might reduce the onset, intensity, and frequency of PTSD symptoms. A study published last year found that among 164 Swedish healthcare workers who faced work-related trauma during the pandemic, playing a single 20-minute round of Tetris immediately after focusing on the visual aspect of a traumatic memory led to an average 85.9% drop in intrusive memories five weeks after playing. Tetris players continued showing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms at about half the rate of nonplayers in follow-ups three and six months later.

Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and mental health podcaster in the Florida Keys, says that the research on Tetris and PTSD aligns with a broader shift in the clinical understanding of how memory consolidation and trauma work together. Earlier in her career, Morin recalls, she was expected to coax patients "to process and debrief" in the aftermath of possibly trauma-inducing experiences, such as an act of violence in the workplace. Instead of helping people move past the event, this approach often made them feel worse, she says. She and her professional peers now recognize that diving headfirst into processing terrible moments right after the fact can exacerbate distress and give way to rumination, which is a known risk factor for developing PTSD.

Playing Tetris, on the other hand, has been found to have the opposite effect. "Tetris takes just enough brainpower that you have to be much more present and can't be worried about the future or rehashing something in the past," Morin says. "Your brain's kind of like a file cabinet, trying to decide which folder to put these memories into. And something about the way that Tetris works makes it so those things don't end up in the 'let's revisit this later' file." In other words, whether through neurocognitive trickery or the sheer force of distraction, playing Tetris may safeguard against locking in the kinds of memories that might become intrusive thoughts down the line. Morin is so enthusiastic about the therapeutic possibilities of Tetris that she recently devoted an entire episode of her podcast to the subject.

Other studies point to further applications for Tetris' magic. Richard Haier, the psychologist who first uncovered the mechanism behind the Tetris effect, found that the cerebral cortices of frequent Tetris players became thicker over time, which could lead to improvements in associated functions such as memory capacity and cognitive development. Another study, published in 2018, found that playing Tetris may help counteract anxiety by inducing a state of flow, or being able to focus deeply on a task. Further research has indicated that these brain changes aren't unique to Tetris, with gamers reporting Tetris effect-like hallucinations from other video games. Repetition and puzzle-solving alter your perception, whether you're fitting together a cascade of colorful blocks or mining for materials to slay the "Minecraft" dragon. But it's the simplicity and accessibility of Tetris that keep new generations of players discovering — and rediscovering — its hypnotic capabilities.

Will Padilla, a 28-year-old content creator and software-as-a-service sales rep in Scottsdale, Arizona, hadn't heard about any of this research when he discovered that playing Tetris helps him push through the trickiest parts of his workday. It was a happy fluke when Padilla decided, on a whim, to queue up the game to keep himself preoccupied one day during the first nerve-racking round of cold calls on the job.

"Cold calls make me really nervous — and everyone who has to make them — because you're calling someone out of the blue," Padilla tells me. "The person could be really rude to you. But it's part of the job." Padilla tried other means of distraction to ease the process, such as squeezing a stress ball, to no avail. With Tetris, he realized he'd found his ideal solution. "It helped me get over the initial 30 seconds of nerves," Padilla says. He went on to share the tip on TikTok with fellow SaaS sellers.

Padilla's explanation for why the game helped aligns with the research. "You're doing this stimulating thing that's not causing more anxiety but is making you think in a very calm and analytical way," he says.

Abhishek Shankar, the founder of a fertility-planning tech startup in Delaware, plays Tetris to clear his mind and sharpen his focus so he can code. "Its fast-paced decision-making gets me into a flow state that carries over to solving complex programming problems," Shankar, 39, tells me. He's even programmed a version of the game for personal use.

Katherine Yan, a 27-year-old engineering manager at Medium who's based in Los Angeles, similarly says that Tetris helps train her brain to quickly recognize patterns and make decisions under pressure. "It's a constant exercise in prioritization, spatial reasoning, and adapting to imperfect conditions — just like managing competing deadlines and priorities or untangling a legacy codebase." Yan, who began playing the game in high school, says she noticed over the years that after playing for even just a few minutes she would return to her work with more focus and faster decision-making capabilities.

Jamie Krenn, an adjunct associate professor of human development at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University's Teachers College, has students play Tetris in her classes every semester to demonstrate how some games can improve problem-solving, spatial reasoning, and working memory by forcing players to think fast and adapt on the fly. "The way Tetris makes you recognize patterns and plan ahead is basically a workout for your brain," Krenn says.

At least some of the surge in awareness over the science of playing Tetris comes down to simple SEO. In 2018, Rogers and a team of Japanese video game developers unveiled a spinoff of the game called "Tetris Effect" — a sly homage to the cognitive phenomenon. Google searches for the term predictably soared when the game came out, a process that repeated with subsequent releases for new gaming consoles over the next five years. It's all but certain that many of the gamers looking for news on the game stumbled upon the research behind the title.

But with growing interest comes expanded misunderstanding. Content creators and even journalists don't always have the scientific background to correctly interpret researchers' studies, which can lead to exaggerated or oversimplified claims, confusion, and backlash. "'Play Tetris' is the new 'Have you tried yoga?' for PTSD and I'm not having any of it," a frustrated Reddit user wrote a couple of years ago in a support channel for complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's a problem that spreads far beyond Tetris. "Once an idea that's overly simplistic takes root, it's really hard to challenge that, even if the broader research world knows that that's not true," says Peter Simons, a science journalist and the author of the online publication Mad in America who has written critically about this dynamic. "Once it's in the layperson's mind and culturally out there, everywhere we look, it's really hard for a researcher to say, 'Hey, actually, the literature doesn't support this at all.' Then it sounds like you, the researcher, are the person who has to prove an extreme point of view, even though it's the mainstream cultural view that's extreme and overblown." It's the same hive-mind instinct that feeds conspiracy theories and problematic health advice.

"We'll get interested in pop psychology, and we'll replicate the same error over and over again, spreading misinformation because we don't understand the complexity of what we're reading," he says. "But as we get more excited about it, we'll do it more and more. That, to me, is a societal ill, not a societal good."

Morin sees things differently. From where she stands, the calculus is simple: The research is promising, the game is fun, and, in many cases, it's free to download and play. There's little to lose in trying. "So many other treatments for PTSD come with risks, like medications and even therapy," she tells me. "But who hasn't played Tetris or some other, similar game? You're not out on anything by giving it a shot."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

This year's hottest new consumer tech product isn't a personal robot or a self-driving car — it's a crib.

The $800 Elvie Rise, which debuted in January at the annual CES tech trade show, is an app-controlled bouncer that automatically repeats a baby's unique preferences and can transform into a bassinet after an infant falls asleep. Why exactly should you shell out for a "smart bouncer" when other products do basically the same job for hundreds of dollars less? Elvie says it comes down to infant safety: In a company survey of American parents, a majority of respondents with newborns said they were using products that didn't meet some federal safe-sleep guidelines. Elvie's claims implicitly suggest that dropping nearly a grand on a product that's meant to be used for only six months of a child's life isn't only sensible but also the responsible thing to do.

Elvie is far from the only company cashing in on parental anxiety. Baby-product peddlers have learned that it pays to remind new parents of the myriad dangers that lurk around every corner and threaten their helpless bundles of joy. If they play their cards right, companies can position their wares as the answer to a parent's darkest fears.

Savvy entrepreneurs are also taking advantage of the growing overlap between evergreen parental anxieties and the distinctly modern impulse to always be optimizing through gadgets and apps. CES launched its annual BabyTech Summit in 2016, where the now legendary Snoo smart bassinet debuted the following year with a $1,200 price tag. Since then, the baby-tech market has boomed with products such as the Owlet Dream Sock (an app-linked "smart sock" that lets parents track their baby's vital metrics) and the Nanit Plus smart baby monitor (whose night-vision-equipped video camera can track an infant's breathing), as well as a slew of WiFi-enabled breast pumps (including a nearly $400 model from Elvie). Between 2018 and 2019, submissions to CES's Best of Baby Tech Awards increased by 88%. And in 2024, EMARKETER found that products for babies and children had the fastest-growing digital ad spend of any market category. These days, it's hard to avoid the tens of thousands of moms who have taken to TikTok to show off their favorite devices.

As more millennial and Gen Z "digital natives" become parents, it's no surprise that devices providing real-time data on a baby's squirms, temperature shifts, and even bowel movements are hot commodities. But while this information is reassuring to some parents, it can exacerbate anxiety in others — particularly those already struggling during the fraught, sleep-deprived months of early parenthood. Instead of fueling connection, some of the products might even make parents less attuned to their kids and to themselves.

From the very beginning, the baby-tech industry has been sown in the threat of worst-case scenarios. The first commercial baby monitor — a simple radio-based device — landed in American nurseries in 1938, a mere six years after the nation was rocked by the kidnapping and murder of the aviator Charles Lindbergh's 20-month-old son. In the 1980s and '90s, the devices became commonplace as fear spread about cases of sudden infant death syndrome in babies' cribs. By the early 2000s, baby monitors were getting regular tech upgrades, from cameras and two-way communication to heart-rate and temperature monitoring and even REM sleep cycle detection. Though these updates weren't necessarily filling a void in what parents needed, they quickly found a market.

Becca Susong, a Chattanooga, Tennessee, pediatrician and perinatal care consultant, says fear of SIDS continues to be a major driver behind parents' interest in purchasing the WiFi-connected, app-paired baby monitors that emerged after the rise of smartphones. Some parents — especially those with neonatal intensive care unit experiences or past health scares — say they feel reassured by features like oxygen and heart-rate tracking. But there's no clear evidence linking baby monitors to a decrease in cases of SIDS, so the American Academy of Pediatrics actually cautions against monitoring for it at home.

"I tend not to recommend getting the high-tech kind," Susong says about baby monitors, citing their high costs and unnecessary bells and whistles. Instead, she redirects the discussion to sleep safety like using a firm mattress with nothing else in the crib and putting the baby on their back to sleep — tangible, science-backed methods for averting SIDS.

"I think they give people a sense of control over something that feels very uncertain," says Emily Guarnotta, a Long Island clinical psychologist who specializes in perinatal mental health. "SIDS is terrifying because it's so unpredictable."

Guarnotta says she's observed that type A, control-seeking parents are particularly prone to look for reassurance from baby-monitoring devices. "There are many times when fear of something happening is already present, and then a product comes along or is recommended, and you think, 'This is going to help me. This will make me feel better and keep my baby safe,'" she says. "It can turn into a vicious cycle — you get some relief from using the product, but then the anxiety returns, and the cycle repeats."

David Lesner, a 39-year-old software engineer who lives in Israel, acknowledges that part of the initial appeal of a smart baby monitor was the gadgetry itself. Before his 11-month-old son was born, he spent countless hours descending into Reddit rabbit holes to figure out which models parents liked best. But Lesner says that even his final, meticulously considered pick — the Nanit Pro — is less than perfectly accurate. While he's never experienced one of the monitor's false alarms that his baby had stopped breathing or moving, he says he knows others who have. "It can be very terrifying," Lesner says. "Those three seconds that you are going from one room to another to see that your child is fine can be like an eternity."

Not even a few false alarms could deter Logan Blackburn-Issitt, a 41-year-old entrepreneur in the West Midlands, England, who used infant-movement-detection devices with all six of his children. The four older kids, now between 7 and 13, slept on an Angelcare sensor pad, which sounds an alarm if it doesn't detect movement for 20 seconds. The youngest, 3-year-old twins, wore Snuza Hero movement monitors clipped onto their diapers. If Blackburn-Issitt or his partner forgot to switch off the pad when they lifted their babies out of the crib, or if the Snuzas got jostled out of place, the devices would blare. But if anything, these occasional mishaps only fortified his peace of mind. "If the babies stopped breathing, we would be alerted quickly," he says.

Eventually, baby-tech merchants got a little carried away by the market possibilities. A $3,000 self-driving AI stroller? Yours for the taking, courtesy of the Canadian startup Glüxkind, which launched its first of two smart-stroller systems in 2023. (But be warned: There's a waitlist for its anchor product, the Ella.) How about a Bluetooth-connected diaper sensor that spares caretakers from sniff-checking for number twos? Look no further than the Korean startup Monit, whose smart-baby-monitor system was the talk of the 2019 BabyTech Summit — though the high-tech poo detector proved a little too weird to gain market traction. Or what about an AI-powered changing pad? The startup Woddle is on a mission to bring fresh data insights to the changing table. But it's still to be determined whether there's a real market for a tech-infused mat for changing diapers.

Combining a gloss of scientific credibility with promises of safety and efficiency, the allure of baby-tech innovation outstrips its occasional silliness. The industry meets its target customers at the intersection of some of our most deeply entrenched habits. Millennials, who now make up the largest share of new parents, have entered their child-rearing years amid the proliferation of network-connected home appliances, wearable fitness-tracking devices, and urban infrastructure designed to make everyday tasks more efficient and convenient. In the past several years alone, the "Internet of Things" has evolved from a novel subcategory of consumer products to a term that encompasses so much of what we buy and use that it barely warrants distinction. Add a dose of standard-issue parental worry to this tech-propelled drive toward optimization, throw in a revolving cast of parenting experts and influencers, and you have a consumer base that's perfectly primed to seek solace in stuff.

Of course, there are baby-product innovations that have seriously improved people's lives. Balance bikes, for instance, have been found to better prepare kids for riding a real bicycle than the training wheels most of us grew up with. And countless articles and testimonials have praised everything from the Snoo bassinet to the Doona car-seat-stroller combo as life-changing.

But optimizing everything doesn't always make life easier. Ellie Messinger-Adams, a Southern California mom of two in her mid-30s, used Wyze baby-monitoring cameras for both of her children, now 6 and 3, until about a year ago. While the cameras provided momentary reassurance that her kids were alive and well in the middle of the night, checking them wound up becoming something of a compulsion. "We don't have any of the cameras hooked up anymore, and it sort of feels like freedom," she says.

"If a mom is already feeling overwhelmed, distressed, or excessively worried, adding the responsibility of monitoring data and interpreting its meaning could make things worse, increasing hypervigilance and potentially worsening anxiety or postpartum OCD," Sogand Ghassemi, a perinatal psychiatrist who practices in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, says. In an ideal world, new parents would become more confident in reading and responding to their baby's cues without feeling the need to rely on gadgets and apps. And it's not only the parents whose emotional well-being stands to benefit from a more intuitive dynamic of communication and care. "Over time, this supports the baby's ability to develop self-soothing skills, which is important for resilience," Ghassemi tells me.

When it came to raising her own two children, Guarnotta, the Long Island psychologist, was firmly "anti-baby monitor," she says. It's a matter of personal preference, she tells me. Seeing other parents obsess over surveilling their babies was enough to convince her she was better off going the old-fashioned route: listening for cries and responding to them. A fancy, camera-equipped monitor wouldn't be able to tell her anything she couldn't hear for herself.

"I'm already an anxious person," Guarnotta says. "I didn't really want any part of that."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

When Daphne Gordon first tried MDMA, everything changed. She had grown up steeped in the "just say no" messaging of the '90s, which taught that any amount of illegal drug use was a gamble with your life. But she was also a big raver. Consuming MDMA — also known as molly, ecstasy, or, back in the '90s, E — with people she trusted helped her experience music more deeply and connect with friends and loved ones on a whole new level. When she and her husband became parents in 2009, their drug use didn't stop.

Sixteen years later, the couple, who are in their early 50s and live in Toronto, remain embedded in what Gordon describes as "a drug-positive social culture." Their friend group, which grew out of the electronic dance music fan community, is now made up of middle-age, established professionals with families. Many of them continue to attend parties and DJ events and use drugs on a fairly regular basis. In some ways, Gordon said, drugs are part of the identity of her social life. Having this outlet, and the community that surrounds it, helps her be a more present parent, she said.

But navigating drug use while raising kids isn't always easy.

"Everybody's a parent now, and everybody's coming to the parties, and sometimes people even rent an Airbnb for the kids to stay at and hire a babysitter who is capable of handling five kids," Gordon told me. "People are developing their lives around the drug-positive culture, but then it's like we have to cover our kids' ears when we go back home. It's kind of weird."

Hers isn't the only friend group dancing between nightlife and parenting. A 2022 Department of Health and Human Services report said that between 2015 and 2019, more than 21 million US children lived with a parent who used illicit substances, which the report distinguished from parents who had a substance use disorder. As drug use has become more common in recent years, more adults are regularly partaking of both licit and illicit substances. The Global Drug Survey, a nonscientific survey that has grown into the world's largest annual survey of recreational drug use trends, found that self-reported use of drugs such as cannabis, LSD, and "magic" mushrooms was growing in the US. In 2022, the last year with available data, one-third of 30- to 39-year-olds and nearly one-quarter of 40- to 49-year-olds said they'd taken cocaine in the past 12 months. The same shares reported using MDMA in the past year. In a 2023 study of 226 American parents, 13% said they had used marijuana in the past six months.

In an age when Burning Man is the unofficial wellness retreat for aging tech bros, none of this should come as breaking news. Business leaders have gone on the record in recent years to sing the praises of mind-altering substances such as LSD and MDMA, with some even insisting that "tripping" had made them better at their jobs. At the same time, researchers are discovering therapeutic benefits for psychedelic drugs such as ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms). As the health risks of alcohol become clearer, drugs are increasingly stepping in as the preferred indulgences for a good time.

For a growing number of white-collar parents, getting high has become a critical avenue for staying sane amid the demands of parenthood. And they're hoping to send their kids a better message than "just say no."

This past spring, Katie, 37, rented a cabin with a friend in upstate New York and spent the weekend tripping on magic mushrooms. It wasn't a weekend to get loose with party drugs but a quiet getaway to embark on "a little trip together for more intellectual purposes," she said. While she was exploring the outer edges of her consciousness, her 8-year-old son was home with his dad.

Recreational drug use is a common feature of weekend get-togethers among Katie's New York City circle — a constellation of academics, creatives, and white-collar professionals who are mostly in their 30s and 40s. It's not unusual for her friends to pass around baggies of MDMA or cocaine to fuel hours of dancing at a club or to consume mushrooms for a cozy night of soul-searching. Drugs are a conduit for shaking off the pressures of everyday life, for living in the moment with friends, and for Katie — getting back in touch with herself.

Katie, who asked that I keep her identity private, splits custody of her son with her ex-husband, an arrangement that has allowed her to reengage with nightlife. Before they separated nearly two years ago, late-night parties and drug use were off the table — not because it interfered with being a mother, she said, but because of the societal expectations modeled by her ex and the other parents around her. "The way I am as a parent is maybe different — lighter and easier and freer — because I don't feel like my life is limited in that way," she told me.

Her parents grew up in the Soviet Union, where it was typical to start families in your early 20s while continuing to enjoy late weekend nights of well-lubricated merriment, with friends taking turns staying in to watch everyone's kids. But Katie has found that things are different in the US — American culture doesn't prioritize having a robust social life while raising a family. For parents like her, there's a double taboo: the lingering stigmas surrounding recreational drug use combined with a widespread wariness of parents, especially moms, who manage to lead full, fun lives outside the confines of home. A mother who routinely nurses half a bottle of wine in her kitchen at the end of a long day will likely be judged less harshly than one who takes a psychedelic with friends on the occasional Saturday night.

"Using drugs doesn't necessarily feel at odds with parenting," Katie said. "In many ways, it feels complementary or helpful."

Though her son is a constant presence in her plans, during conversations, and at the dinners she hosts for friends, the majority of her inner circle is child-free. Other parents she's encountered don't seem to have a blueprint for the kind of community she has — one that isn't centered on the kids.

Drug taboos get tricky to navigate when other people's children may be involved. "It becomes this thing you don't talk about because kids can't really be explaining to their friends on the schoolyard what Mommy and Daddy said last night about drugs," Gordon said. "It's such a socially enforced taboo. Any kind of conversation about anything good about drugs is seen as encouraging experimentation — like, 'Can't wait until you get to do some!'"

The taboos are a major reason many parents keep their drug use confined to a close-knit group of friends. Joyce, a 44-year-old mom of three in Melbourne, Australia, said it's not unusual in her high-income neighborhood to gather at someone's house, open up a nice bottle of wine, and discreetly visit the master bathroom for a line of communal cocaine. She and her neighborhood friends have been doing it for years.

"These are the same people who are taking vacations two, three, four times a year," Joyce told me. "They drive nice cars. They live in beautiful homes. You walk down a street in the nicest suburbs, and you would never even think that the people behind the gates would be having themselves a little '70s disco party in the kitchen. It's totally seen and not heard, but everybody does it." All the while, everyone's kids are squirreled away somewhere else in the house, preoccupied by movies and snacks, happily oblivious.

Despite the live-and-let-live attitudes in her immediate friend group, Joyce — who asked that we keep her identity private — is well aware of the legal and reputational risks that come with using drugs. Getting found out might not affect her as severely as it would if she were not a well-off white mom, for instance, but it wouldn't be trivial, either. The penalty for cocaine possession in Australia carries a fine of 2,000 Australian dollars, or about $1,240, and/or up to two years in prison. The social ramifications could be higher if the wrong person caught on. Joyce said she knows that her occasional sharing of "a little plate of something" with friends would be seen as irresponsible, or even flat-out reckless, by many others in her extended community. For these reasons, Joyce and her friends are stringent about concealing their recreational drug use from their children — even those who are now adults. Making sure the kids know nothing is the absolute rule.

There have been some close calls. "Once I had my best friend over, and I said to her, 'Can you watch in the hallway just in case little footsteps come running while I prepare something?' And, well, she was not fast enough," Joyce said, chuckling. "One of my kids slammed on in. But the beauty of hiding is that you're sort of always ready." By a stroke of luck, her secret escaped notice.

"It's kind of like a naughty little secret that I guess keeps everybody feeling attached to their youth — the good fun days," Joyce said.

Most of the parents I spoke with hadn't let their kids in on their drug secret, saying they would maybe disclose details on a need-to-know basis. But Gordon and her husband are working to establish a more open dialogue about drugs with their teenage son. Before going out, they've begun talking through their substance-use game plans for the evening in front of him: "Like, 'How are we going to drink tonight? You know, let's not because I'm going to bring a joint,'" she said. He might not chime in, but they know he's listening. Mainly, they're focusing on the harms that could come from the substances he's likely to encounter within his friend groups — cannabis, vapes, and, especially, the tobacco pouches whose bright, round canisters poke out from the trash bins of his hockey rink. Gordon has also self-published a zine to help guide other families' conversations about conscious substance use, informed in part by new research that suggests the cognitive dissonance between antidrug messaging and the way substances are presented by peers and on social media makes scare tactics ineffective.

Rhana Hashemi, a coauthor of the drug education study, is the founder and executive director of Know Drugs, a nonprofit aimed at replacing the D.A.R.E. model of antidrug education in US schools with a harm-reduction curriculum that speaks frankly and nonjudgmentally about the role of mind-altering substances in people's lives — legal and illegal, good and bad.

"There's a difference between normalizing drug use that's healthy and normalizing drug use that's problematic," Hashemi told me. As she sees it, that distinction depends on the role that a particular substance is playing in a person's life at any given time. A healthy adult life revolves around competing priorities: romantic relationships, social relationships, a career, and physical and mental health. Healthy drug use happens in harmony with the bigger picture. It's the pinch of a certain something that helps make memories with friends without becoming the crux of the relationship, or that washes away the residues of a tough week at work without becoming a contingency plan for getting through the next one. It's the ability to be honest and step away if and when drugs begin disrupting the balance between everything else — turning into a need instead of an occasion.

Hashemi said it's also critical to emphasize that different substances carry far greater potential for harm to the still developing brain of a person in their teens or early 20s: "There's a difference between a parent using cannabis on a regular basis — or psychedelics or MDMA — and a child. These are all nuances that should be very explicit."

The drug talk is still a few years away for Katie, the single mom in New York City. But when the time comes, she plans to be forthright about her experience using drugs. She wants her son to know how careful she is about what she takes, the amounts she ingests, and where she gets her product. She wants her son to have the information he needs to make smart decisions. "I'll tell him how it's an important part of my life," she said, "and I'll explain to him why."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

About a decade ago, I loaded a couple of midsize suitcases, three large Ikea bags, a pair of 10-gallon Rubbermaid totes, a laundry basket, and two heavily sedated cats into a U-Haul and moved from Toronto to New York City. All my belongings fit neatly into my tiny new Brooklyn bedroom, with plenty of square footage to spare. Turns out, my relative lack of stuff was right on trend.

At the time, millennials like me were buying and owning less, purportedly breaking the mold of American consumerism. We Instagrammed our sparsely furnished, overly beige interiors. We eschewed car ownership and suburban McMansions in favor of bikes, car-share memberships, and big-city apartments with roommates. We were spending our money not on things but on experiences — and blogging about it, too.

"If the millennials are not quite a postdriving and postowning generation, they'll almost certainly be a less-­driving and less-­owning generation," declared a September 2012 article in The Atlantic titled "The Cheapest Generation." Our reputation quickly found a nifty shorthand: Millennials were a generation of minimalists.

As I write this from the same tiny Brooklyn bedroom, I can see my closet doors straining against the weight of a nearly bursting trash bag filled with cast-off clothing I keep meaning to recycle. The three Ikea bags are stacked full of dirty laundry, which my partner or I would probably get around to washing if we didn't have plenty of other stuff to wear. Our dresser top is strewn with impulse buys you'd find in a drugstore checkout line. I can think of a few descriptors for the state of my surroundings, but "minimalist" isn't one of them.

While my fellow 28- to 43-year-olds have yet to shake our association with less-is-more living, that old stereotype doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny anymore. Consumer-spending data suggests we have no trouble dropping our hard-earned cash on goods and services — experiences and things. As we've built careers and started families, our buying habits increasingly resemble those of Gen X and boomers when they were the age we are now.

Millennials haven't been minimalists in years. In fact, we may have never been minimalists at all.

The minimalist-millennial myth began in the early 2010s in the aftermath of the Great Recession. As the "next generation" of leaders, workers, and spenders, my contemporaries' behavior was of keen interest to marketers, business leaders, and economists. So when my generation, rattled by a catastrophic recession, wasn't buying as much as our predecessors, concern spread that our diminished purchasing power — or worse, our somehow radically different priorities and values — might signal the end of the consumer-spending spree that had powered the nation's economy since the end of World War II.

Throughout the decade, a breadcrumb trail of survey data seemed to back up these concerns. In a 2016 Harris Poll, 78% of millennials said they would rather pay for an experience than material goods, as opposed to 59% of baby boomers. A 2015 Nielsen survey similarly found that millennials went out to eat at nearly twice the rate of their parents — they would rather eat their riches than stockpile them. The 2014 English-language translation of Marie Kondo's "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" sold over 9 million copies, spawning a cottage industry of aspiring millennial declutterers.

The minimalist trend wasn't entirely bogus from a cultural standpoint. "The recession was a real force for people fetishizing simplicity and turning frugality into a virtue, making the best of what you have rather than prioritizing consuming more or consuming flashier things," said the writer Kyle Chayka, whose 2020 book "The Longing for Less" digs into the perennial appeal of a more pared-down way of living.

The postrecession era also saw the rise of smartphones, which ushered in digital sensory overload. Seemingly overnight, apartments and Instagram grids were awash in the clean lines and open spaces of midcentury-modern design (or, at least, Ikea's approximations of it). "There's so much chaos in our phones," Chayka said. "Why would you want more chaos in your physical surroundings?"

Millennials' minimalism became an economic-anxiety Rorschach test. Depending on the beholder, our perceived underconsumption might have signaled a virtuous departure from the poisoned cycle of production, purchase, and disposal. For others, it affirmed the widely held suspicion that we were a generation of coddled Peter Pans who refused to put down the avocado toast; buy some cars, houses, and house-sized volumes of stuff; and just grow up already. Though it was largely an aesthetic trend, the myth of millennial minimalism was so central to my cohort's cultural identity that it may as well have been real.

But in reality, this theory of arrested economic development was always a bit of a mirage. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, consumer spending accounted for roughly 60% of US GDP; since the early 2000s, despite millennials' purported lack of spending, it's held steady at just under 70%.

Take one of the most talked about large purchases that millennials were eschewing: cars. Automobile ownership has been a central tenet of the American dream since the '50s, when the health of the automobile industry became closely tied to the country's economic growth and prosperity. No longer needed for building tanks and munitions to ship overseas, factory assembly lines "newly renovated with Uncle Sam's dollars" were repurposed to build tens of thousands of new cars, which American consumers eagerly bought up, the Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen wrote in her 2004 book, "A Consumers' Republic." Even now, demand for cars is looked at as a bellwether for consumer spending and the US economy more broadly.

It's no coincidence then that millennials' apparent resistance to car ownership, in particular, jumped out as evidence of our radically shifting consumer ethos. One widely circulated data point came from a 2010 CNW Group analysis, which reported that 21- to 34-year-olds in the US were responsible for just 27% of new-car purchases, down from a high of 38% in 1985. News outlets cited this data as proof that millennials, as a whole, were less interested in buying cars than their boomer parents or their older Gen X siblings. What they failed to consider was how present circumstances — such as the ripple effects of a then very recent economic crisis, especially among young adults just entering the workforce — might alter how people spent their money, especially on big-ticket items like brand-new cars.

In 2016, the Federal Reserve Board issued a report that sought to set the record straight by pointing out that the anti-car narrative about millennials didn't take the Great Recession into account. The report argued that the economic downturn almost certainly shaped people's spending as much or more than the technological and cultural changes that were happening at the same time. Proving the point, young adults were back to buying cars by the mid-2010s. Nowadays, millennials have fully caught up: Since 2020, we've accounted for almost 30% of the nation's new-vehicle registrations, a rate that's roughly on par with baby boomers and only slightly below that of Gen X, Experian research found. But by the time the Fed report was released, it was already too late. The truism of millennials as minimalists was entrenched.

So if millennials aren't minimalists, what exactly are we? Sociologists would likely tell you that's the wrong question to ask — people's behaviors and lifestyles change over time, as do societal norms and priorities. The question isn't how to best define millennials as consumers but whether millennials' young-adult spending was markedly different from that of prior generations.

For answers, we can turn to consumer-spending records. Since 1984, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been conducting its Consumer Expenditure Surveys to see how different American age cohorts spend money. Granted, the picture it paints is somewhat incomplete; by 1984, most boomers were well past their early 20s, making a direct comparison with millennials challenging. Still, it offers a useful baseline for comparing different age groups' spending over time. Sure enough, when adjusted for inflation, Americans under 25, between 25 and 34, and 35 to 44 have spent roughly similarly across most major consumer categories for the past four decades, with momentary dips overlaying periods of recession followed by bounce backs. While it's true that millennials are spending more of their budgets on airfare and vacation rentals than older generations did at the same age, the same can be said for Gen Zers, Gen Xers, and baby boomers — everyone is splurging on travel right now.

Because younger adults tend to have fewer family responsibilities and far less wealth than adults in their professional prime, they spend less overall. As their expenses and income accrue over time, they spend more — especially once kids enter the picture, bringing new mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, and hobbies to equip. Now that millennials have families of their own, they're even more overwhelmed by clutter than their boomer parents before them, buried under piles of ever-cheaper toys.

In other words, millennials' style of spending isn't special; it's cyclical.

To further the point, millennials now account for the largest share of homebuyers, making up 38% of the homebuying market, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors. Our tilt toward homeownership isn't new, either. We'd nearly caught up with our boomer parents way back in 2019, according to Freddie Mac; 43% of us owned homes, just shy of the 45% of baby boomers who were able to buy their first homes between 25 and 34. Whatever we weren't buying in our 20s, we are making up for in our 30s and 40s.

"There's the ongoing narrative that millennials can't afford housing or don't own houses, that they're renters, but when you look at the data, 25- to 34-year-olds are just as likely to be homeowners now as they were in 1993," said Bryan Rigg, a BLS economist who oversees Consumer Expenditure Survey microdata for public use. "Really, a lot of the expenditure patterns are similar." One major exception is that today's 20- and 30-somethings are a lot more comfortable taking on debt to buy things — like cars and homes — than in the past.

For better or worse, public memory is short. Many of today's young adults might not even be aware that the current crop of 30-somethings were ever considered minimalists in the first place. There's evidence that the rest of us are starting to forget, too. Maybe you've read about the new TikTok trend sweeping Gen Z: a mindful alternative to the "haul" culture that's grown around ultrafast fashion and ultracheap e-commerce platforms. It's a whole new approach to stuff. Some have said it might even slow down the economy. This time around, we're calling it "underconsumption core."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

Once upon a time, corporate bosses, associates, and interns alike would set aside their different titles and gather each December for drinks, dancing, and conversation. There would be gourmet dinners, chocolate fountains, DJs, and even live bands. For some, it was a night of merriment and splendor; for others, of awkward small talk, followed by deep regret.

Then the holiday party became endangered. In the wake of #MeToo in 2017, more professionals began rethinking the wisdom of a boozed-up night with their colleagues. The pandemic and remote work delivered a near death blow. In a 2020 survey of about 200 HR representatives by the executive-outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a mere 23% said they opted for seasonal celebrations, nearly three-quarters of which would be held virtually.

But as the return to offices continues, companies are slowly reinstituting holiday parties. Last year, nearly 65% of companies surveyed by Challenger, Gray, & Christmas said they planned to host in-person holiday parties, within sight of the 80% reported in 2016, before the advent of #MeToo. If plans pan out, this year could have before-times levels of corporate holiday cheer.

The return of the office holiday party could be a happier development than many jaded workers are likely inclined to presume. With two-thirds of the American white-collar workforce working remotely either some or all of the time, according to a USA Today survey conducted earlier this year, face time with colleagues and superiors is no longer a default feature of the 9-to-5. That might not be a big deal for everyone, but early-career workers stand to pay the steepest professional price for missing out on the kinds of networking and mentorship opportunities that are likelier to happen organically in a shared physical space. All the while, workers across the board are feeling increasingly lonely, overextended, and disengaged. They need something — anything — to celebrate.

In a work environment punctuated by uncertainty and isolation, it might be premature to let one's inner Scrooge have the final word on the tradition.

From Fezziwig's ball in "A Christmas Carol" to the power-suited backdrop of the 1988 Christmas Eve action thriller "Die Hard," the workplace holiday party has been a fixture of the cultural imagination for generations. But in the mid-20th century, the event garnered its enduring reputation for sloppiness and day-after regret. A 1948 Life magazine photo spread from a Christmas party thrown in the office of a Manhattan insurance brokerage depicts, among other modern-day HR violations, a pantless male executive dancing arm in arm with a young female stenographer and a pair of colleagues leaning in for a smooch beneath a bundle of mistletoe.

Somewhere along the way, festivities evolved from low-key gatherings held at the office to lavish affairs that might include gourmet meals, hired entertainment, and even international travel and accommodation on the boss' dime. The pandemic notwithstanding, the economic pendulum has largely dictated its tilt toward excess or restraint.

As a Toronto-area DJ during the halcyon days of the late-'90s dot-com bubble, Baruch Labunski had a front-row seat to corporate-party splendor. "I went to many and saw a lot of crazy things," he said. He described being flown to DJ holiday parties in far-flung global destinations such as Bora Bora, Palawan, and Ibiza — and, on top of that, getting paid $50,000 to $100,000 per event. (When I asked how many holiday parties he booked in a typical season, he said only "many.") By the time the dot-com bubble burst and the demand for his services cooled, Labunski had tired himself out of the DJ booth and pivoted to a career in marketing.

Economic recovery in the mid-2000s spurred a holiday-party renaissance, only to be dashed once again in the 2008 recession. A few years later, Wall Street firms were reportedly back to enjoying hush-hush holiday festivities reminiscent of their heydays. The free-money firehose of the ZIRP era was in full force, and excess was back in style.

Danielle Kane, who was a reporter for a niche New York City financial-services publication between 2015 and 2017, said that one year her company flew the entire staff of 50 to 75 people to Berlin. "Hotels and flights were paid for, there was an experiential dinner at the Berlin TV Tower, and then they paid for everyone to get into a fancy club afterwards," she said. "It was a late night, and I've never experienced a company holiday party like it since."

For all their fun, these often cringe-inducing affairs earned a bad rap — one that may come to bite younger workers.

Despite some companies' largesse, the general workforce's enthusiasm for holiday parties has long been mixed. In a 2017 survey of American workers by Randstad, 90% of respondents said they'd rather receive bonuses or extra vacation days than attend a company holiday party. "The ideal situation," Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist, told me, "is to offer activities that foster employee social health (such as a holiday party) without asking them to sacrifice their financial health (such as a bonus) or their mental health (such as time off)."

Companies squander the opportunity to make holiday gatherings meaningful in all sorts of small but critical ways. Hadley said the Christmas-specific focus of many company holiday parties could be alienating to workers who follow non-Christian religious traditions. Parties are often held at inconvenient times and places — too late on a weeknight for parents, in a location that has expensive parking or is hard to access. Holiday parties at big firms can also be loud, hot, and crowded, which makes it difficult to have meaningful conversations or meet new people.

Well-planned company holiday parties, on the other hand, can be a boon to employees' overall work experience and even strengthen company culture. A study of workers at several German companies in 2019 concluded that parties could encourage social bonding, especially when employees' feedback steered the planning. The study suggests, for example, that icebreaker activities that get people from different parts of the organization talking help build camaraderie, despite the eye rolls they may initially provoke. Over time, that can contribute to a happier and more cohesive work environment.

For early-career workers, the benefits can be more pronounced. Rick Hermanns, the president and CEO of HireQuest, a global staffing company, said social events could help make up for the "intangible aspects of career growth and camaraderie between colleagues" that younger workers may miss out on when they're partly or fully remote. In a 2023 Adobe poll of more than 1,000 Gen Z workers at midsize and large US companies, 83% of respondents said a workplace mentor was crucial for their career, but only 52% said they had one. While holiday parties aren't the be-all and end-all of workplace networking, they provide a critical opening to build and fortify connections.

"When I look back at my early career in banking in Los Angeles, I appreciated the time I had to walk into a senior executive's office or grab a beer after work with colleagues," Hermanns said. "Those are the intangibles you can't quantify yet ultimately impact your career growth." Simply put, face time matters.

It makes sense that Gen Z and millennial workers would be more enthusiastic about workplace holiday get-togethers than their Gen X and baby-boomer counterparts. "Company leaders need to help Gen Z — as well as millennials, whose workplace experience was hugely disrupted by COVID — to build strong interpersonal workplace relationships," Hubert Palan, the CEO of the product-management company Productboard, told Business Insider last year.

Given that much of the global workforce feels lonely on the job, it's not just the youngest workers who need a social boost. A new study Hadley coauthored evaluating workplace loneliness and remedies found that the loneliest people at work were those who were offered the fewest social opportunities by their employer. "In fact, the number of social offerings provided was one of our most predictive variables in terms of whether someone was socially connected at work or not," she told me. Hadley also found that while fully remote work did seem to increase the risk of loneliness, it was less significant of a variable than whether a person was introverted or worked for an organization that held regular social activities for staffers.

The German study suggests that a holiday party can serve as the ritual capstone for these more routine coworker events, making year-end hobnobbing just a little extra special. While the ideal party activities will depend on an organization's culture, a few basic considerations — such as hosting the event somewhere besides the boring old office — go a long way. Elements of fun help too, whether they take the form of a themed photo booth, a creative dining experience, or, yes, a DJ.

A dash of festive foresight can make the difference between the raunchy affairs of yesteryear and a few hours of meaningful, PG-rated bonding between coworkers. "A nice holiday event gives people a break in their wallets and signals that the leaders value personal connections and socializing," Hadley said.

For a company's youngest workers, the benefits may last a professional lifetime.

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

When "Sex and the City" debuted in 1998, the series captured public fascination for more reasons than what its title might imply. It wasn't just that the show's central foursome were women having lots of sex; they were women over 30 having lots of sex, and they were single. A "mid-30ish crowd of bed-hopping, hedonistic female night crawlers," a Los Angeles Times critic pointedly wrote. Their singlehood painted a picture of a titillating, and even threatening, new woman.

Through the '90s and '00s, American women "pioneered an entirely new kind of adulthood, one that was not kicked off by marriage, but by years and, in many cases, whole lives, lived on their own outside matrimony," the journalist Rebecca Traister wrote in her 2016 book, "All the Single Ladies." Now, unmarried women are no longer part of an edgy cultural vanguard — they're the official status quo. As of 2021, a record 52% of American women were either unmarried or separated, according to a report by Wells Fargo Economics. Single women also have single men outnumbered: A Census Bureau analysis of 2019 data found that for every 90 unmarried men in the US, there were 100 unmarried women.

While some women feel cornered into being single, citing a lackluster dating pool or the demoralizing experience of trawling apps, a growing share, call them Samantha Nation, are happy being on their own. In a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Center, only 38% of single women reported looking for dates or a relationship, compared with 61% of single men.

The rise of happily unmarried women has steadily shifted standards for what American adulthood looks like. But it hasn't come without a fuss from people who hold to a specific vision of the family. When JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, drew ire this summer over a years-old remark about "childless cat ladies," he doubled down on his insinuation that single women were symptomatic of Democrats' "anti-family and anti-kid" platforms; they were opting into a lifestyle that was fueling the erosion of the nuclear family, making them deviant by association. But research suggests it's misguided to pin the trend on shifting social mores. Women's newfound freedom to choose — not just whom they marry, but whether they marry at all — is due less to a cultural shift and more to a shifting economy. As men drop out of the workforce, American women have hit a new milestone: In August, the share of prime-age (25 to 54) women in the labor force hit a record high of 78.4%. Meanwhile, the median age of American women's first marriage has crept steadily upward, from 20.8 in 1970 to 28.3 in 2023.

The shift toward the single life has been a great development for women; for men, though, things aren't as peachy.

The way people feel about women's relationship patterns has a lot to do with a false cultural memory of what was normal in the past. The Rockwellian poster family of mid-20th-century Americana, with its happily married husband and stay-at-home wife raising 2.5 children in the picket-fenced suburbs, sank its hooks so deeply into the American imagination that it's easy to forget it was a historical fluke. In the immediate aftermaths of World War I and World War II, the nation saw momentary spikes in the proportion of single-income, male-breadwinner US households. The booms were over nearly as soon as they began. By 1970, 40% of the nation's married women, and more than half of its unmarried women, had jobs outside the home, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Even before 1970, it was far from unusual to see American women working for a living. The economist Claudia Goldin, who won a 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize for her work unpacking gender differences in the labor market, has noted that the gender gap in US labor-force participation steadily shrunk between 1890 and 1990. As more and more women were working for pay, deindustrialization in the '80s and '90s drove scores of men out of the labor market, shrinking the pool of those who could support a family.

Jess Carbino, a relationships researcher who formerly worked as a sociologist for Tinder and Bumble, told me that many people ascribed to a model of the family popularized by the economist Gary Becker in the early '80s, which said that single people were looking for partners whose market strengths complemented their own. By applying economic theory to the prevailing cultural ideas of the time, he concluded that because men were good at earning money and women were good at having babies and raising them, it's only logical that the two should join forces in the household.

The problem with that arrangement (besides its blatant sexism) is that men today are losing their economic footing.

"We're seeing men's labor-force participation rates really plummet, since the 1990s especially," said Elizabeth Crofoot, a senior economist and principal researcher at the labor-market-analytics firm Lightcast. "That gives women greater impetus to actually work on their careers and put in more time and effort to make themselves financially stable and not have to rely on someone else."

Of course, women's relative workforce gains have not translated into equal earning power; on average, US women still earn $0.84 per every $1 earned by men, according to the Census Bureau. However, a 2021 Pew survey found women were outpacing men in educational attainment. And a Pew analysis of government data found that in 2019, women began outnumbering men in the college-educated labor force. There's evidence that these shifts are fueling the move away from marriage. In a 2023 survey from the American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life, almost three-quarters of single, college-educated women cited "not being able to find someone who meets their expectations" as a reason they were romantically unattached. Only 54% of single women with no college degree said the same.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense why a growing share of Americans are single simply because they enjoy being single. Carmindy Bowyer is one of them.

"I'm very independent," Bowyer, a makeup artist and beauty entrepreneur in New York City, said. "I don't want to live with somebody. I don't want to have children. People out there don't realize that they have a choice."

Bowyer, who is 53, didn't always feel this way. While she always knew she would never have children, she caved to social pressure to marry in her 30s. Even her parents — who were happily married for over 50 years — questioned whether she was cut out for married life. "We were walking down the aisle, and my dad was like, 'You can always get divorced.' And I was like, 'Thanks,'" she recalled. "Sure enough, marriage didn't work out for me. And I was happy about it." Bowyer said she realized that she felt truer to herself when she was making day-to-day decisions about how to live her life entirely on her own terms. She just needed to give herself permission to do it.

For other women, the dating market has become a major turnoff. "Single women that I work with can feel very compromised by the whole process of trying to find a partner," said Stephanie Manes, a licensed psychotherapist who works with individuals and couples in New York City. "It can mean being treated in ways that are totally at odds with how these women see themselves — as smart, self-sufficient, empowered grown-ups. It can require them to lower their standards in pretty fundamental ways and force them to suffer through some really bad behavior."

Cultural attitudes have been slow to catch up to the not-so-new normal of singlehood. Traister's book quotes a passage from 1997 in which the writer Katie Roiphe, then 28, described her cohort of unmarried 20-something professionals as evidence of Americans' widespread failure to achieve adulthood on schedule. And being single today still generates some social stigma. A 2020 analysis published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that prejudice toward singles was viewed as more acceptable than prejudice toward other groups.

For women, however, the societal sense that they should be married has slowly but surely waned. In Pew's 2019 survey, just 35% of single women said they felt pressure from society to be in a relationship — a slightly larger share of single men said they felt the same.

Singledom also appears far more beneficial for women than men on average: Numerous studies have found that single women tend to be happier and healthier and live longer than married ones, while unmarried men have been found to experience markedly higher rates of depression, addiction, and loneliness than those with spouses. "If you are a man, you should probably get married; if you are a woman, don't bother," the author and behavioral scientist Paul Dolan quipped in a 2019 interview.

There are many hypotheses on why single men fare so much worse. Theories put forward by economists such as Richard Reeves and Nicholas Eberstadt suggest that male gender roles have been slow to catch up to labor-market realities, perhaps at the expense of many men's ability to thrive in the soft-skills-based 21st-century knowledge economy. Others theorize that men's loneliness starts in childhood and stems from societal pressure to keep their feelings hidden. While there are likely many factors at play, a common thread lies in the asocial and infantilizing mores of a patriarchal society that, in some crucial respects, may harm men even more than women.

Women, meanwhile, are finding joy and purpose in discovering new ways of living outside the nuclear-family norm. Platonic coparenting and cohousing arrangements between friends and the return of the multigenerational family home are just two recent examples of the changing face of the American household.

"In my book, I make the case that people who are single at heart are happy and flourishing because they are single, not in spite of it," Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist and the author of the 2023 book "Single at Heart," said. She has said that even within the past decade, there has been traction in what some call "a singles positivity movement." Now 71 (and still single), DePaulo said that current attitudes toward single professionals, in particular, are a far cry from her experience as a single 30-something woman in the workplace.

"Single people are still stereotyped, for sure, but now there is a greater awareness that some single people choose to be single and are happily single," she said.

Bowyer believes that social media plays a significant role in moving the needle. When she recently posted on TikTok about enjoying being single and child-free, the video attracted more than 4 million views and a flurry of positive feedback. It's a radical departure from the cultural feedback she and her Gen X peers received as young adults.

"We're so much more open and compassionate now — a more elevated society in some ways," Bowyer said. "You can find your tribe and be inspired by people that came before you."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.