Buying a home is a high-stakes game, often with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. Making a wrong decision can lead to foreclosure and bankruptcy; making the right decision can generate wealth that is passed down for generations.

When people are ready to settle down, they're confronted with all the usual dilemmas: whether to buy a home; where to buy a home; what kind of home to buy; and how much to spend. These highly emotional decisions are all more manageable using the lessons of behavioral economics, which I studied as an economist.

When I took a new tech job offer in 2017, it meant leaving San Diego for Seattle. As I set out to find a new home for myself, my husband, and my mom in my new city, I wanted to avoid getting caught up in the competitive pressure of beating out other buyers and making rash decisions that I might later regret. So I decided to divide my search into two phases. In the first, I would take my time getting to know the city and its various neighborhoods by renting a home. In the second, once I had a clear sense of my preferences, I would begin making offers on properties that met my criteria. By taking this approach, I hoped to avoid the pitfalls of hasty decision-making and make an intelligent, informed choice.

For about five months, I spent a great deal of time exploring the different neighborhoods and assessing their pros and cons. From historic homes dating back to the 19th century to midcentury modern homes from Seattle's post-World War II boom to modern new construction, there were plenty of options.

The most significant tradeoff to be made when choosing is location versus home size. I initially thought of a short commute and a large home as must-haves, but given my budget and the need to have space for three adults and three dogs, I had to sacrifice on the length of my commute. Many homebuyers make this same compromise. According to a Redfin survey, 89% of homebuyers would rather purchase a single-family home with a backyard than a unit in a triplex with a shorter commute.

Soon we focused our efforts on West Seattle, a neighborhood located on a peninsula across the sound from downtown. My commute to the office would take about 30 minutes each way by bus, where I could at least get some work done with the complimentary WiFi. This was a decent tradeoff, given that homes in West Seattle were about $100,000 less than homes closer to the downtown office.

Now in phase two, when I began viewing properties and making offers, I became hyperconscious of how my emotions might influence my decision-making. Common mistakes made by homebuyers include becoming too attached to a particular home, fixating on the list price instead of the market value, following the herd, and letting fatigue cloud judgment.

You must try to avoid falling in love too quickly with a home. Once you start picturing your future in a home, it can become challenging to walk away, and it can suck you into a fierce bidding war. Block out any and all thoughts about hosting holidays or your children playing in the backyard. Yes, it is a good idea to consider whether the home will suit you in the future, but if you become too attached to that future, you're working against yourself. People value a home more if they already feel like they own it.

Behavioral economists have a term for this: the endowment effect. The behavioral economist Jack Knetsch has found that people's willingness to sell an item they own was lower than their willingness to buy an item they did not own, even when the subjects knew ownership was assigned randomly. In one experiment, test subjects were given either a lottery ticket or cash. Most people opted to keep whatever form of compensation they had received first instead of trading it for the other option. For a variety of reasons, whether an aversion to feeling loss or a bias toward the status quo, people tend to get attached to the bird in their hand, even when there might be two in the bush.

List prices can also be misleading. In a hot market, sellers may advertise their homes for significantly less than what buyers are ready to pay in order to spark a bidding war. This amounts to a bait-and-switch.

As a buyer, don't take the bait. Don't anchor your expectations on the listed price. The anchoring effect refers to a person's tendency to focus on the first piece of information they hear while making decisions. In a famous lab experiment by the late Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, research subjects spun a wheel of fortune with numbers from 0 to 100. The participants were then asked to guess the share of African countries that were members of the UN. Participants whose spin landed on a lower number were more likely to guess a low number. Participants whose wheel spin landed on a high number were more likely to guess a high number. The number the needle of the wheel landed on was completely irrelevant, yet the research subjects still used it as an anchor for their guesses.

The list price of a home may contain some helpful information about what the seller believes its value is. But ultimately the value of the house is set by the market.

If you need to, take a break. Losing bidding war after bidding war — which happens a lot — fosters fatigue and impatience, which can lead you to give up too soon or to buy a home you later regret.

Behavioral economists have repeatedly found that the quality of decisions deteriorates when an individual is overburdened with too many options. A study published in Health Economics found that orthopedic surgeons made worse recommendations toward the end of their shifts. Doctors were less likely to recommend surgery for patients who would have benefited just as much from surgery as patients seen earlier in the surgeon's shift.

Also, avoid following the herd. If others are ready to bid high, you could be tempted to do the same and stretch your budget. Herding behavior, another behavioral economics term, can lead to bubbles in the housing market or the stock market and was one of the culprits for the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. The best way to avoid getting caught up in speculation bubbles is to not speculate in the first place and make offers appropriate only to your personal financial circumstances.

After spending a few weeks touring homes in the area, I came across a property that immediately caught my eye. It had everything my family was looking for. But there was one giant red flag: the home had been on the market for nearly a year without any offers.

Upon further inspection, I noticed that the house was located across the street from a strip mall and had a strange layout. Even though I liked the home, I wanted to avoid paying more than other buyers might think it was worth. So I kept looking.

When buying a home, you have no choice but to concern yourself with resale value. Life is unpredictable; there is always the chance you might not stay in the home long term, and you don't want to pay more than what you can resell it for.

There is tension in this advice: a homebuyer must avoid herding behavior by thinking for themself while simultaneously considering how other people might value homes in the future.

The way to walk the middle path is detached observation — recognize the behavior patterns of others without letting it unduly bias your decision-making.

About a month later, we found a home that seemed too good to be true. Ample space, close to public transit, even a view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. However, the home was 70 years old, so we would need to update the electrical, plumbing, and heating. Since we were renting elsewhere, we could delay moving to get this work done.

Things go wrong after you buy a home. Thinking that these problems won't end up costing you significant time and money is what behavioral economists call optimism bias: the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of favorable outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of unfavorable outcomes. The challenge, then, is to consider the risks and whether they are worth the reward.

As I prepared to make an offer to buy a home, I thought back to the hundreds of homeowners going through foreclosure that I interviewed while interning at the Boston Fed. They experienced bad luck on top of bad luck — deaths, divorces, medical emergencies, job loss, and a global recession. Any of those things could happen to me.

With all the repairs the house needed, I determined the maximum amount I could afford to pay was $950,000. I liked this particular home more than any other home on the market priced below $950,000, so I reasoned that this amount must be my value for the home. But I still had a nagging feeling that I was overextending myself and overpaying.

What if the roof sprang a leak? And what if, because I had already spent my savings repairing the plumbing, electrical, heating, and cooling, I didn't have any money left to repair the roof?

I could have kept going down the list of unlikely catastrophes. Instead, I focused on the unlikeliness of the scenario rather than the pain of the scenario. This helped me get out of my head and back to the task at hand. In economics, expected utility theory hypothesizes that individuals weigh uncertain outcomes according to their likelihood and the net benefit of each outcome. I shuddered at the thought of a bad scenario, like being laid off during a severe recession and housing-market downturn. However, according to expected utility theory, I should weigh that feeling against the likelihood of that scenario, which I reasoned to be a once-in-a-century event. In all likelihood, my job was safe, the economy was fine, and the value of homes would keep going up.

The home was listed at $840,000. I submitted my bid on the home for that amount. When you're deciding whether to bid above or below the asking price, look up how competitive the housing market is in the neighborhood and how the home compares to what else is on the market. If the market is cool, it's advisable to come in low. However, if the market is hot, the seller may completely ignore your offer if it's below the asking price.

Even though I offered $840,000, I was ready to go as high as $940,000. Later that day, my agent called me to deliver the good news: we won the home at list price. No one else even submitted a bid.

Daryl Fairweather is the author of "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" and the chief economist of Redfin.

This story is adapted from "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" by Daryl Fairweather, to be published by the University of Chicago Press on April 11, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Daryl Rose Fairweather. Printed by arrangement with the University of Chicago Press.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, may seem like an unlikely site for a YIMBY revolution.

The historic Boston suburb is home to both Harvard University and a bevy of affluent homeowners opposed to any new development. The city even features prominently in the book "Neighborhood Defenders," a seminal work about anti-building, not-in-my-backyarders. Despite all that, the city recently passed a series of laws that could pave the way for a cascade of new housing construction.

Cambridge could certainly use the new units. Data from Zillow shows the city's average rent is $3,400 a month — slightly higher than San Francisco's estimated average rent of $3,200. Homelessness in Cambridge has also been on the rise, particularly since the pandemic. In an attempt to ease this pressure, pro-housing groups that fall under the YIMBY umbrella (short for "yes in my backyard") — particularly the local group A Better Cambridge and the statewide organization Abundant Housing Massachusetts — have been trying to get more homes built in Cambridge for years.

In recent years, that work has started to bear fruit: The city enacted a 100% affordable housing overlay in 2020, which allows developers of below-market-rate apartment complexes to build more densely than would be permitted under base zoning. Three years later, Cambridge rezoned its Central Square neighborhood, allowing apartment buildings to rise up to 18 stories high.

But the latest measure is perhaps the most radical, and most promising. A measure passed in February will legalize the production of four-story apartment buildings across the entire city, with some larger lots zoned for up to six stories. Sure, these newly possible buildings aren't quite as dramatic as an 18-story tower, but this latest change is by far Cambridge's most ambitious. Unlike the geographically confined Central Square upzoning, the newest pro-housing ordinance has the potential to remake the entire city. The city's planning staff estimate that the new law may increase Cambridge's housing development capacity over the next 15 years from 350 units to 3,590 — a more than tenfold increase.

The likelihood that some neighborhoods will become denser has provoked the usual opposition from local homeowners. But viewed from another angle, this densification could make the city a more vibrant and beautiful place to live. There's a reason the Cambridge city councilmember Burhan Azeem has called the city's new plan "Paris-style zoning." As it turns out, Paris is a good model for midsize American cities to follow. By allowing more European-style construction, places like Cambridge can both lower housing costs and look good doing it.

Alongside the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, one of Paris' most iconic architectural hallmarks may be its most ubiquitous: the Haussmann-style building. Georges-Eugène Haussmann (better known as Baron Haussmann) was the famed urban planner who, under Emperor Napoleon III, redesigned central Paris in the mid-19th century. Paris became a city of wide boulevards and midrise apartment complexes with distinctive limestone facades — the aforementioned Haussmann buildings. Thanks in no small part to the prevalence of these structures, Paris has achieved a density higher than any other major city in Europe or the United States — although the city of lights still struggles to keep up with demand for housing.

While Haussmann buildings are specific to central Paris, plenty of other European cities have equivalent structures: four- to six-story apartment blocks with no buffer area between the front door and the sidewalk. Unlike the boxy, cheap-looking American five-over-one apartment building that has come to dominate much of our development — and which many people regard as an eyesore — Euro-style apartments generally contribute to the beauty and charm of dense, walkable tourist destinations like Stockholm and Rome. Plus, they're more efficient: thanks to European building codes and zoning rules, European-style apartment buildings can be built for less, on smaller lots, and with more family-friendly apartments in the interior.

"Sure," you might say, "but what's good for Paris, Stockholm, and Rome won't work in an American context." That's a common refrain from skeptics — citing cultural differences, the need for abundant parking, or their own gut instincts — when YIMBYs propose allowing more European-style zoning in the United States. But these assumptions are incorrect for two reasons.

First, upzoning cities like Cambridge is not the same thing as requiring them to build up to Parisian density. If you own a single-family home in Cambridge, and your lot has been upzoned to allow for the construction of a four-story building, you remain at liberty to keep your single-family home. If you want to redevelop the property into a multifamily building, that's great; if you decide to sell your home to a developer who will replace it with an apartment complex, that's great, too. But nobody is compelling you to do either of those things if you like your existing home.

Second, Cambridge — like many other older cities in New England and the mid-Atlantic region — already has a fair number of dense apartment buildings and townhomes. Rather than destroying the culture or character of these cities, building more Parisian-style housing would signal a return to the pre-single-family era. Many of Cambridge's mid-rise apartment buildings were constructed before single-family zoning became ubiquitous in the United States in the early 20th century. And the ones that have survived are now highly coveted as luxury homes and architectural treasures; yet, for decades, it has been effectively illegal to build more of them. As Azeem wrote on X, Cambridge's previous, single-family-focused zoning laws meant that "85%+ of the existing housing" in the city would be illegal to build. In other words, Cambridge's upzoning may actually help to preserve the city's architectural heritage and New England character. At the same time, it is a model for how other cities can upzone in a manner that actually eases housing costs.

While the patchwork nature of American land-use policy can slow progress in important ways, it can also be an engine for experimentation and friendly, productive competition. Pro-housing activists in cities across the country — in places like Minneapolis, Austin, and Sacramento — and far beyond, in the case of Auckland, New Zealand, have inspired each another, shared insights and tactics, and provided a push to see who can push through the most ambitious land-use overhauls. These pushes can even get a little cheeky: YIMBY advocates in Montana sold zoning changes by urging conservative lawmakers to move away from "California-style zoning." While it will take some years to assess the full impact of these revisions, the early data from places like Auckland is very promising.

Some changes make a bigger impact than others. One lesson from the past few years of YIMBY experimentation is that smaller tweaks to local zoning codes may yield negligible results; ambition is vastly superior to cautious incrementalism. Take Minneapolis, one of the recent YIMBY success stories. Citywide, the production of more housing has helped to keep rents and home prices in check, but as the housing researcher Zakary Yudhisthu has found, there's more going on underneath the hood. The parts of Minneapolis that moved from single-family to duplex or triplex zoning have seen little housing growth, while the corridors that allow for denser construction have seen more permit applications. In other words, going just a few steps further is how you get real results.

But to truly unlock housing production at the necessary scale, high-cost cities cannot stop at upzoning. They also need to reshape permitting rules and other onerous building requirements, such as off-street parking mandates. True European-style zoning would allow for mid-rise apartment buildings with no off-street parking and a single central staircase. (Five-over-ones exist in part because most American cities require multiple staircases in any apartment building over a certain height.)

So while other expensive cities should take inspiration from Cambridge, they should also see if they can go even further. There's still plenty of room for another jurisdiction to take the lead in the race to be America's YIMBY-est city. Any takers?

Ned Resnikoff is an urban policy consultant and writer. He is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and is currently working on a book about cities with an expected publication date of Fall 2026.

Throughout his college studies, Ryan Kim always had a postgraduation game plan. First it was to become a database manager. Then it was to break into fintech as a business analyst. But during his sophomore and junior years, as the tech industry laid off nearly half a million workers, Kim struggled to secure an internship. So he set his eyes on a new career: public service.

Kim was far from the only Gen Zer making the same pivot. Last year, according to the job site Handshake, the share of applications it received from college seniors for entry-level openings in tech dropped by 19% from 2022, while the share to jobs in government nearly doubled. Even younger kids saw the writing on the wall. In surveys, high school students used to cite tech giants like Google and Apple as the places they most wanted to work. But last year, in a startling shift, both the FBI and NASA ranked higher than any of those tech companies. Silicon Valley was out. Capitol Hill was in.

It took Kim only a single application to land a yearlong paid internship at the Food and Drug Administration. His performance reviews were good, and he planned to stay on at the agency after he earned his degree in May. "You hear so many horror stories of people in tech being laid off with little notice," he tells me. "Government jobs are secure. What drew me into it was the stability."

So much for that plan.

This month, with his graduation fast approaching, Kim abruptly lost his internship amid the government-wide havoc Elon Musk has unleashed at DOGE. With most federal hiring on an indefinite hold, he's been scrambling to find a job — any job. "It's been a huge source of stress," he says. "Most of the private industry has already hired their graduating students."

Kim is one of the roughly 2 million students set to graduate this spring into an exceptionally shaky job market. Things were already looking tough for the class of 2025, given the steep hiring slump in industries like tech, finance, and consulting. But now, as Musk takes a chainsaw to the government, many college seniors are in panic mode. Some have seen their offers at federal agencies rescinded; others have received no word on jobs they applied to months ago.

It's not just government positions that are taking a hit — it's jobs at a whole host of businesses, nonprofits, and universities that rely on federal funding and contracts. And going to graduate school — the traditional backup plan for students during times of economic instability — may not even be an option, if the Department of Education winds up being unable to deliver financial aid in a timely fashion. As the government is slashed to the bone in the name of efficiency, the careers of many Gen Zers could suffer for years to come.

"The impact is broad scale," says Saskia Campbell, the executive director of university career services at George Mason University. "There is this sense of grief, of loss of opportunity. This is the first year I'm actually concerned."

To make matters worse, the outlook is likely to get even more dismal in the months ahead, as President Donald Trump's tariff wars spur companies to hold off on hiring. "Two years ago, the bulk of the uncertainty and fear was in Big Tech," says Briana Randall, the executive director of the career and internship center at the University of Washington. "Now it feels uncertain in a lot of areas."

All of that leaves America's soon-to-be new grads unsure of where to turn. Sarina Parsapasand, a public policy major who's graduating from the University of Southern California this spring, was hoping to land a job in government service. But now, given the chaos in Washington, she's switched to trying to land a job in the private sector. "I have bills to pay," she says. "I can't take the risk of being in a job that doesn't guarantee the stability for me to live my life."

It's a sentiment I hear over and over again from the students I speak with. "The job market just seems super unstable in almost any field," says Katie Schwartz, a sophomore at Tulane. "It's less about finding a job you really love now and more just about finding a job that's going to give you job stability."

I'm impressed by the clear-eyed pragmatism of these students — but I'm also saddened by how old they sound. Isn't job stability what you look for when you're middle-aged, with a mortgage to pay and kids to support? When I graduated from college in 2009 without a full-time job, I was panicked but still idealistic. These kids, in contrast, seem hardened by all the chaos they've endured from a young age. In high school, they watched their parents get laid off in the pandemic. In college, they watched older students struggle to land good jobs during the tech downturn — or worse, had their hard-won offers rescinded at the last minute.

The upheaval and uncertainty have taught today's graduates to prepare for the worst. Over the past year, one college senior tells me, she's been intentionally neglecting her studies so she could focus exclusively on her job search, sending out as many as 15 applications a day. The hustle paid off with three offers, including one she accepted from a government contractor. It's her "dream job," she says, because it would enable her to make a real difference in the world.

But now, given the chaos in Washington, she's leaning toward reneging on the offer and accepting a position at a finance company. (That's why she asked me not to use her name.) "I try to keep an optimistic outlook," she tells me. But when I ask her how she feels about taking her first steps into adulthood, she doesn't sound optimistic at all.

"It makes me pretty nervous," she says. "I think a lot of people in my generation have accepted that we're not going to live the same quality of life our parents provided us."

During hard economic times, we expect to hear stories about people losing their jobs. But the greatest casualties often end up being the young people who don't have jobs to lose in the first place. Hiring freezes hurt them the most, making it impossible for them to even get their foot in the door. And research shows just how long a shadow that can cast on someone's career. Five years after the Great Recession, my generation of millennials was earning 11% less than Gen Xers were at a comparable age. And our net worth fell 40% behind theirs, forcing us to delay many of life's biggest milestones: buying a home, starting a family, saving for retirement.

The effects go far beyond money. Students who graduated into the 1982 recession, for example, wound up with fewer kids and more divorces than those who entered better job markets. Even more shocking, the research shows, they were more likely to die early. Whatever gains in efficiency Trump hopes to achieve from DOGE, its most lasting legacy may end up being the harm it inflicts on the careers — and perhaps even the life spans — of his youngest constituents.

That leaves college seniors like Kim scrambling to find a foothold in a job market that is stacked against them. Many companies have already filled their entry-level positions, if they're hiring new grads at all. And he's now competing not only with his fellow students, but also with the flood of young government workers who have been laid off by DOGE — workers who have more experience than he does. As graduation nears, he's trying not to panic. But it's hard to retain a sense of hope when even lower-paying jobs in public service are no longer an option.

"I'm not sure how my future's going to turn out," Kim tells me. And that, when you think about it, is a future that should worry us all.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent for Business Insider.

When June came around last year, Sarah Wong was at the end of her rope. As a social media marketer, much of her day is spent on the phone keeping up with local news and events, and she'd hit a breaking point. "It's just very overwhelming to be bombarded with news every day," the 28-year-old tells me.

Wong and her husband, a software engineer, typically travel every couple of months from their hometown of Austin, spending a few days exploring cities like Las Vegas, San Diego, and Martha's Vineyard. But her regular vacation wasn't going to cut it this time. Wong decided to try a wellness retreat, hoping it would help her unplug and reset her nervous system. She booked a four-night stay at the nearby Miraval Austin Resort and Spa with her husband. "I think anyone who works in social media needs a reset where they don't have to be online," she says.

At the property, staff valeted her minivan and took her bags. Wong and her husband were given the choice between a backpack or tote bag containing a branded water bottle and a "cellphone sleeping bag" to hold their phones during their stay. (Miraval enforces a strict no-phone policy except in designated areas). "It's very 'White Lotus'," she tells me.

Between rope courses, sound bowl healing, and yoga, she and her husband would snag lunch from the build-your-own salad bar or off a menu where "each dish is designed with wellness in mind," per the resort, and lounge by the pool. She tried yoga nidra, a form of meditation that promotes relaxation, which she describes as feeling like "you woke up from the best nap of your life."

"It feels like an adult summer camp," she says.

Since the retreat, Wong says she is able to step away from her phone more easily and spends more time outside. "I've been trying to use our patio to just take in the fresh air, look at trees, look at the sky." She and her husband are planning to go again this year. "We want to hit all three properties," she tells me.

Ever since pandemic-era travel restrictions subsided, travel has boomed. More recently, "rest and relaxation" has jumped ahead of having "a fun time" as the main motivation for leisure travel, according to a nationally representative 2024 survey of 1,000 US travelers from the market research firm Longwoods International. A Deloitte survey produced similar results. More people are feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or just want to focus their PTO time on improving their health. A 2023 American Express travel survey found that 73% of respondents were planning vacations around improving their physical and emotional health, with millennials and Gen Z prioritizing wellness travel at a higher rate than older generations.

A growing obsession with wellness paired with mounting uncertainty about daily life is driving demand for relaxation. Welcome to the age of the self-care-cation.

As recently as five years ago, wellness could be classified as a "niche segment" in travel, associated primarily with weekend spa breaks and hippie yoga retreats. But since COVID, people have begun to get serious about their health. McKinsey estimated the US market for wellness — which it defined as including better health, fitness, sleep, mindfulness, appearance, and nutrition — is up almost 7% since 2022, reaching $480 billion. Nearly 60% of respondents to the McKinsey survey said they valued wellness more in 2024 than the previous year. Meanwhile, the number of health and wellness podcasts has grown by 50% in the past five years, Nielsen found, while self-help books are one of the fastest-growing nonfiction genres. Younger generations are now shunning alcohol and driving a boom in bougie wellness clubs.

"The tourism market looks a little bit at what's happening in people's leisure time, looks at the consumer trends and thinks, 'How can we capitalize on this?'" says Melanie Kay Smith, an associate professor of tourism management at Budapest Business University.

Hilton announced in January that it now offers guided meditations, sleep stories, and mindfulness exercises from the mental-health wellness company Calm via their hotel room TVs. It also partnered with Peloton to offer workouts from room TVs. Other brands are investing in new wellness-focused resorts, such as Hyatt's new "art and wellness house" in Panama that's set to open soon. Accor Group plans to open 18 new luxury hotels this year and touts the wellness amenities in five of them. It's also opening a wellness-focused resort in the Caribbean later this year.

The drive for wellness isn't coming out of nowhere. In 2023, nearly half of Americans reported they frequently experienced stress, more than any other point since Gallup started tracking it in 1994. People are also becoming more anxious: In 2024, 43% of adults surveyed by the American Psychiatric Association said they felt more anxious than they had the previous year. "As life speeds up, maybe our vacations need to be slower to compensate," says Smith.

Hotels, resorts, and retreats are stepping in to meet the need for a little TLC. In 2024, Miraval Resorts said it saw a nearly 80% increase in demand for stress management workshops over the previous year. It also said that group arrivals have increased 157% since 2021. "I think the luxury consumer realizes that instead of acquiring things, acquiring experiences is much more rich," says Dina Niekamp, the associate vice president of sales, marketing, and brand for Miraval.

Ella Dixon-Nuttall, a 28-year-old yoga teacher from London, was tired of taking trips that revolved around beach clubs and drinking. So last June, she went on her first yoga retreat in Sicily with a friend. It cost £1,600, or just over $2,000, for the week and included accommodations, three meals a day, and yoga classes in the morning and evening. "You got the benefit of an all-inclusive but then you also have the movement and wellness aspect," she tells me. "I get home and feel filled up and energized by the experience rather than needing another holiday to get over the holiday."

Dixon-Nuttall enjoyed it so much that in February she went on her second retreat, this time with her mother. In March, she went on a third retreat in France. "It's such a wonderful way to travel," she says. "I'm now a retreat convert to the point where if I want to go somewhere I'll look if there's a retreat there." She is looking to book another in India later this year.

Lili Paxton's mother is a similar convert. Growing up, Paxton recalls family ski trips and girls getaways to Palm Springs. But at the end of 2022, Paxton and her mother were looking to book a more relaxing trip. They ended up planning a weeklong stay at Rancho La Puerta, a wellness resort and spa just over the San Diego border in Baja California, Mexico, after a family member recommended it. Weeklong rates for one person start at $5,650. Neither Paxton nor her mother had done anything like it before.

Each day hikes were offered at 5:30 a.m. Classes were available each hour for everything from Pilates to pickleball. Paxton's mother tried Watsu — a type of water therapy that uses massage, stretching, and acupressure — for the first time. "She said it was the most spiritual experience," Paxton says. "She said that she saw my dead father under the water."

When Paxton wasn't hiking or exercising, she was at the spa or relaxing by the pool. "The whole time I was just really happy," she says. "It felt like an escape from reality."

Her mother left the trip transformed. "My mom is committed to going every year until she dies," says Paxton. "She even talked to her financial planner and was like, 'I need you to put this in the budget for the next 20 years.'" They spent another week at the retreat this past Christmas.

While many people are happy to pay a premium for a chance to indulge in simple things like walking in nature or taking a deep breath, for others, wellness is becoming increasingly high-tech. Since 2008, the wellness resort Sha has been at the forefront of holistic health, offering around 1,000 different treatments in nearly 40 different medical and health specialties at its locations in Spain and Mexico. Stays at the resort start at 550 euros a night, or roughly $600, while specialized four-day programs start at 2,500 euros, or about $2,700, with add-ons for treatments focused on sexual well-being, sleep recovery, stress management, gut health, quitting smoking, and more.

The "Leader's Performance" program, for example, starts with an advanced preventive diagnosis that tests body composition, cognitive abilities, and advanced glycation end-product accumulation — compounds that are linked with aging. Guests can also participate in clinical analyses, such as an oxidative stress test and a tailored meal plan with nutritional monitoring.

Almost every type of treatment imaginable is available at Sha: stem cell treatment, advanced plasma renewal, hormone replacement therapy, sleep diagnosis. All guests receive an alkalizing diet tailored to their individual nutritional needs. "Even if you go to see all these different experts in the city, first, it will take you months to see them all, then there will be no coordination between them," Alejandro Bataller, Sha's vice president, says. "We're probably the most comprehensive."

While Sha appeals to a range of health-conscious consumers, Bataller has noticed an increase over the past two or three years in customers he calls "biohackers." These are people who already have a longevity doctor, nutritionist, and functional medicine doctor on speed dial, who take 40-plus supplements a day and invest in the latest high-tech treatments. "They don't want a standard program," he says. "They come to Sha because they know that Sha is always cutting edge."

Bataller describes wellness as not just being healthy, but as an "active, ongoing pursuit" that focuses on improving yourself. "You can see someone with the best car, the best watch, the best suit," he says. "But if he doesn't look healthy, that doesn't seem like luxury."

While there's research backing up some of these treatments, Jessica DeFino, a beauty reporter and culture critic, questions how much is driven by health and how much is simply a medicalized beauty standard. "A better way to think about how we see looking healthy today is actually looking wealthy," she says. "It's looking as if you've funneled thousands and tens of thousands of dollars into your face and body. That's not health; that's products, that's procedures."

Of course, products and procedures are all the rage right now as people look for alternative approaches to well-being. "Our culture is largely unwell," DeFino explains. Only 36% of Americans have at least "quite a lot" of trust in the medical system, a 2024 Gallup survey found, and studies show that Americans are sicker than people in many parts of the world. Only about half of Americans focus on eating healthy and exercising, despite diet and physical inactivity being leading contributors to chronic disease. Wellness gurus have stepped in to fill the gap left by a flagging healthcare system. Across social platforms, they document macros consumed and hours spent in REM, while touting the benefits of cryotherapy, red-light therapy, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. "The draw of wellness for the average person is it offers an individualized solution to a collective issue," DeFino says, adding: "A lot of this is an attempt to intellectualize these arbitrary, oppressive beauty standards and make them seem like smart investments."

That doesn't mean the pursuit of chilling out isn't worth it. A 2023 study that reviewed 68 articles from 2002 to 2022 found that wellness tourism — defined as any tourism activities pursued with the goal of maintaining or improving health — could offer both psychological and quality-of-life benefits. However, these benefits vary from person to person, making it challenging to measure them.

It's easy to get carried away thinking we all need cutting-edge treatments to get by. "It's great to step out of your everyday life and relax," says DeFino. "Collectively, we also have to be focusing on how we create lives that we don't need to step out of all of the time."

Eve Upton-Clark is a features writer covering culture and society.

Shopping for homes online once had the feel of an open-air market: crowded and sweaty, maybe, but free for anyone to drop by and see what's for sale. The experience these days, though, is quickly turning into that of a nightclub, with the hottest new listings sequestered behind velvet ropes. If you want to party with the cool kids — in this case, score access to homes before regular folks — you better know a guy.

The wide-open nature of the housing market has been breaking down for a while. Most real estate agents have traditionally taken a maximalist approach to marketing homes, sharing listings widely through local databases known as multiple listing services. Agents browse the MLS to get details on homes available for sale, while search portals like Zillow pull the data onto their own websites for regular home shoppers to scroll through. The thinking is simple: More eyes on a listing means more potential bidders, giving a homeowner the best chance of selling quickly and lucratively.

This model is even backstopped by the National Association of Realtors, a powerful industry group that sets the rules for most MLSes around the country. NAR instituted a rule in 2020 known as the clear cooperation policy, which says that once a real estate agent starts marketing a home publicly — on a website, through an email blast, or even with a "for sale" sign in the front yard — they must list it on the MLS within one day. The rule was meant to prevent freeloading and encourage participation in the MLS, keeping listings in one place for other agents and their clients to see.

In recent years, however, the clear cooperation rule has been challenged by some of the biggest players in the game, who want to act as the new bouncers for VIP rooms filled with exclusive home listings. In particular, Compass, the country's largest real estate brokerage by sales volume, wants to take charge of the aforementioned velvet rope. Compass agents are increasingly hoarding their listings internally, shunning the MLS and making homes available only to buyers who work with other Compass agents. The company's founder and CEO, Robert Reffkin, has also been crusading against the clear cooperation policy. Reffkin argues that sellers should reject the one-size-fits-all approach of the MLS and exert more control over how their home is marketed. His campaign has stoked fierce infighting among real estate agents and raised a fundamental question: Who should be able to see the homes for sale in the US?

For now, the fight is ongoing. After months of debate, NAR said Tuesday it would leave the clear cooperation policy intact while adding another rule that functions as a small concession to Compass. The apparent attempt at compromise will probably end up pleasing no one. But while clear cooperation remains in place for now, the housing market continues to hurtle toward a decidedly uncooperative future.

Those in favor of clear cooperation argue the rule is responsible for America's uniquely transparent housing market — the reason you can hop on Zillow or Realtor.com and get the lay of the land. The policy was supposed to stem the rise of so-called "pocket listings," homes marketed for sale but unavailable on the MLS. If agents stop contributing listings to the shared databases, many in the industry warn, a once unified housing market could break up into silos, with home listings distributed among clubby groups of brokers known as "private listing networks" or gatekept within brokerages like Compass.

In this world, some agents will have access to a lot more properties than others. Pick the wrong rep, and you could unknowingly miss out on your dream home. And while there are good reasons someone might not want their house touted on the MLS — a celebrity like Brad Pitt, for instance, probably doesn't want their business aired out for everyone to see — conventional wisdom says sharing a home widely is the best way to get top dollar.

"Everybody benefits when we all pool our listings, and we do so in a timely manner," Saul Klein, a longtime real estate executive who's the CEO of the San Diego Multiple Listing Service, previously told me. "And people are hurt, potentially, when we don't do that."

But it's become increasingly clear that the advocates for the open system are losing. Yes, NAR kept the clear cooperation rule in place, but it also introduced an option for privacy-conscious sellers to list on the MLS while delaying their listings from popping up on sites like Zillow or the landing pages for other brokerages. The idea is to give sellers more flexibility to market their homes as they see fit, catering to those who may prefer to "premarket" their home before blasting it out widely. The move doesn't go nearly as far as Compass would have liked, but the company still frames this as a validation of its rallying cry for more seller choice.

"With NAR introducing a new MLS policy to 'expand choice for consumers,' they acknowledged the clear cooperation policy restricted home seller choice," Reffkin said in a statement. "Expanding choice means that NAR is still not letting homeowners choose precisely how to market their homes, but this is a small step in the right direction."

Compass may not be totally happy with NAR's most recent decision, but the company has already succeeded in shaking up the real estate landscape. The brokerage has made plenty of hay by exploiting a glaring loophole in the clear cooperation rules. While an agent has to add the listing to the MLS database once they publicly put the home up for sale, the rule allows agents to share new properties within their brokerages without adding them to the MLS. This method, which Compass dubbed the "Private Exclusive" route, essentially creates a walled garden with homes that can't be found anywhere else. Compass drives traffic to its website, collects a commission from both sides of the deal, and can lure both agents and clients by offering access to its inventory. Private exclusives have become a key strategy for the brokerage giant: Reffkin told analysts in February that 35% of the company's active listings nationwide were only available by working with a Compass agent or visiting Compass.com.

This isn't just some self-serving maneuver, either, Compass execs argue. They say sellers benefit from spurning the MLS and marketing their homes within the safe confines of the Compass network. The MLS and search portals like Zillow show how long a house has been on the market and whether the price has been slashed, data points that buyers can use to put pressure on homeowners in negotiations. The Compass website doesn't show price cuts or days on the market, theoretically allowing a seller to test their ideal price without any repercussions if they have to backtrack. And if they don't sell that way, they can always turn to the MLS and go the conventional route for maximum exposure. Compass likens this strategy to beta testing a product with a smaller audience before launch.

"We firmly believe that homeowners should have full control and flexibility in choosing how they market their home, period, full stop," Ashton Alexander, the head of strategy at Compass, tells me.

Brian Boero, the CEO of 1000Watt, a brand and marketing agency for real estate companies, doesn't buy it. Compass, he says, is really after control. Under the existing rule, the company may be free to pursue its "Private Exclusives" strategy, but it can't, for instance, publicly market a home on its website without also contributing to the MLS.

"They want to make Compass.com a destination where they control the inventory publicly, and they want to have free rein to continue to expand their private listings program," Boero tells me. "So they didn't get what they wanted."

Compass is far from the only large brokerage to employ this kind of strategy — Coldwell Banker, for instance, has "Exclusive Look," Howard Hanna has "Find It First," and one large Keller Williams franchise, KW Go, has dubbed its offering "Private Collection." More companies have threatened to follow the lead and keep listings off the MLS if it helps them compete for agents and clients. The clear cooperation policy has always been tough to enforce, too, with the onus placed on local MLSes to keep agents in line. Some MLSes, fearing litigation, have already backed off enforcement, tacitly allowing agents to market homes however they like. This could enable private listing networks — groups of typically high-achieving agents from different brokerages who share off-MLS listings among each other — to flourish.

NAR's decision to keep clear cooperation is a small victory for those who favor the status quo, but it will hardly end the practices fracturing the housing market. Compass hasn't ruled out the possibility of litigation over the rule, either. For now, the real estate industry is stuck in a sort of limbo. No one doubts that secret listings will continue to rise, but the fight over the clear cooperation policy isn't going anywhere.

"Everybody loses here, in a way," Boero tells me. "Nobody's happy."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon in late February, Ernesto Tey walked from a meeting on the west side of Manhattan to the heliport at 30th Street on the Hudson River. He was early for his 3 p.m. Blade helicopter flight to Kennedy International Airport, so he ordered a drink at the lounge bar.

A self-described "plane geek" who works for a software company and flies single-engine aircraft in his spare time, the Californian says he's taken about 30 Blades to and from Manhattan over the last few years. The nine-minute ride starts at $95 for those with a pass, and when an Uber in rush-hour traffic can take more than an hour and set you back more than $100, it doesn't sound so unreasonable.

Plus, it's fun and the views are wild. "Where else can you fly in a helicopter for between $100 and $200?" he told me.

A few minutes later, Tey and I and two other passengers climbed aboard a six-seat helicopter — just feet from Hudson River Park's busy waterfront walking and bike path — and soared 1,400 feet above the Hudson, around the southern tip of Manhattan, and across Brooklyn.

Helicopter commuter and private charter services are steadily transforming the whirlybird from a plaything of the ultrawealthy to an on-demand rideshare for anyone with access to a company card or willing to blow a few hundred dollars on an Instagrammable experience. "Blading" has become a verb for the Hamptons set, as the industry has expanded its footprint in recent years, particularly in the New York City area.

Less pleased with the rise of whirlybirds are those literally below them.

Over the past few years, New Yorkers have taken to the city's nonemergency 311 complaint line to register their displeasure like never before. Helicopter noise complaints exploded by 678% in two years, from 3,332 in 2019 to 25,916 in 2021, based on 311 data compiled by Business Insider. Complaints more than doubled to 59,127 in 2023. Last year, they dropped to 28,686 — still far above the pre-COVID normal.

The surge in complaints aligns with the rise of private charter and commuter services, on top of a loosely regulated sightseeing helicopter industry and a spike in law enforcement chopper flights. An analysis by the New York City Council of flights and complaints in May 2023 found that trips like the one I took from Manhattan to the airport and tour choppers from New Jersey generated the most complaints. But local, state, and federal leaders have done little to stop the chop in recent years.

For all the hubbub about helicopters, they're only the harbinger of a future of much more crowded skies. The industry is on the verge of transformation by long-awaited electric choppers that the federal government, local policymakers, and helicopter services are already embracing as a way to vastly expand the air-taxi industry and make vertical urban travel mainstream.

Helicopter commuting is nothing new in the Big Apple. Modern helicopters were invented at the start of World War II. In the 1950s, the aviation company New York Airways began offering relatively cheap chopper rides from the roof of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper to the city's airports. A deadly crash in 1977 tarnished the industry's glamorous image, but in the decades since, the city's skies have filled back up with choppers, including so-called "nonessential" charter flights and sightseeing services, as well as "essential" law enforcement, media, and medical flights.

Blade is on a mission to vastly expand rideshare in the skies. Its CEO, Rob Wiesenthal, told me the company's passenger business has grown from about $2 million in revenue in 2014 to more than $100 million last year. Earlier this year, it opened up its $95 airport shuttle service for Long Island and New Jersey commuters — marketing it as a way to skip New York City's new $9 congestion pricing toll on drivers below 60th Street. "If you think about $75 for parking and $9 for congestion pricing and $13 to $26 for whichever tunnel or bridge you take, you actually save money with the pass," Wiesenthal said. (He doesn't mention New York City's vast network of commuter trains. The A train from the airport will set you back a grand total of $2.90).

What struck me about my fellow Blade passengers was how casually they treated the experience. Stephanie Fuhrman, who works for a software company based out of Utah, was in New York for business and opted for a Blade to save time getting back to JFK. "It's like a bus to me," she said. "It's just transportation." Plus, her Uber from the airport to Manhattan in morning traffic had taken about an hour and a half and cost her nearly $200, she said. "I couldn't take the risk going to the airport."

The fourth passenger on our flight, Donal Collins, falls into the other category of Blade customer: leisure travelers seeking a joyride. The 27-year-old, who works at a Brooklyn-based AI startup, loves to fly, but this was his first whirlybird ride. On his way from New York to California, he decided to use the Blade gift card his brother had given him for Christmas. Blade's clientele ranges from C-suite executives to executive assistants. They're Hamptons-goers, commuters, and thrill seekers — and they've gotten younger over the years as prices have come down. Blade's busiest days are Thursdays, Fridays, and Mondays when long-weekend travelers mix with the business crowd.

While the cost of a chopper ride might be low for a well-compensated white-collar worker, the quality-of-life negatives for those they fly over are remarkably high.

Looking down at the tiny skyscrapers from my seat next to the pilot, I was reminded of the similarly beautiful day in late September I'd spent picnicking on Governors Island off Lower Manhattan. What struck me then — and helped inspire my obsession with the helicopter industry — was how difficult it was to enjoy the idyllic car-free oasis with the near-constant chop-chop of helicopters overhead. Like many of the city's waterfront parks, the island has become what one anti-helicopter advocate told me is "ground zero" for chopper traffic.

Critics of the helicopter industry point to the safety hazards of congested skies and the environmental impact of the fuel-spewing machines. But the window-rattling racket they make tops the list of concerns. Loud, disruptive noise can have a range of physical and mental effects "from raising the biomarkers for stress to changing how people's hearts and metabolisms work, and reducing people's lifespan," Nick Shapiro, a professor of biology and society at UCLA who studies the health impacts of helicopter policing, told me. One 2017 study linked aviation noise to disrupted sleep, an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and lower academic performance among kids. Aircraft noise is especially annoying because it's both loud and intermittent, Shapiro told me. Helicopters fly lower than planes and have the least regulated traffic patterns.

Chopper noise doesn't affect everyone the same way. People who've lived in war-torn or hyper-policed areas might have a more acute mental or physical reaction. "Different populations might feel stalked or harassed by that noise in a way that is culturally and historically informed," Shapiro said.

In the case of policing, the noise is often the point. Beginning during the 1965 Watts riots, the Los Angeles Police Department pioneered the use of helicopters to patrol neighborhoods. Flying low, sometimes using spotlights, most of the flights were used to deter crime rather than respond to emergencies. "The sonic impacts are intended and part of its hypothesized efficacy," Shapiro said. "It's about seeing the helicopter, rather than the helicopter seeing what's happening on the ground." A 2023 audit found the LAPD's helicopter program costs about $47 million a year — more than the budgets of 14 city agencies — and found "little evidence" that it reduced crime.

New Yorkers have long made a stink about helicopters over their streets. Mayor Rudy Giuliani closed one of the city's heliports in 1997 under pressure from incensed residents. In 2016, the New York City Council came close to shutting down two of the city's heliports, but Mayor Bill de Blasio settled on a compromise that halved the number of tourist flights that originate in the city — from 60,000 flights a year to 30,000. Since then, New Jersey has seen a surge in helicopter tour operators, which fly an unknown number of choppers over the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, and everywhere in between, unrestricted by the city's regulations. The New York City Council analysis of 2023 helicopter traffic found that the number of tourist choppers in city airspace that originated in New Jersey and Westchester County was about the same as the number launching from the city.

Melissa Elstein began noticing an uptick in helicopters flying over her Upper West Side apartment and over Central Park in summer 2019. When she found out many were doors-off, shoe-selfie tourist choppers, she was incensed. "It's really insane that this is even allowed, especially given that we're also the most densely populated city and with some of the busiest skies," she told me. So Elstein decided to help revive Stop the Chop NY/NJ, a group pushing for much stricter regulation of nonessential choppers. The group has some high-profile supporters, including members of Congress and local elected officials.

While the city controls what happens at its heliports, only the federal government, specifically the Federal Aviation Administration, controls New York City's airspace. New York Reps. Jerry Nadler, Carolyn Maloney, and Nydia Velázquez have introduced federal legislation to ban nonessential choppers over the city. Some local lawmakers support the federal ban and want to see the city government end tourist and commuter flights from city-owned and operated heliports.

"There's just no reason that we should have city-owned helipads to fly the Uber elite out to JFK or the Hamptons at the expense of the quality of life and well-being of our communities," Lincoln Restler, a Brooklyn City council member, told me.

There's precedent for regulating or banning helicopter traffic. There are no-fly zones above some of the country's most prized monuments — the White House and the US Capitol and, naturally, Disney World and Disney Land. Some major cities around the world, including Paris, have also basically banned nonessential chopper flights. And several European countries have ended short-haul plane flights to help curb carbon emissions.

New York City's Economic Development Corporation, which runs two of the three public heliports, has resisted efforts to further crack down on tourist flights in the city, citing the tourism dollars it brings in. Restler told me he doubts EDC's defense of helicopter tourism, calling it "kind of farcical" and instead motivated by a desire to keep the wealthiest New Yorkers happy. For all the headache, the city-owned heliports only bring in about $3 million a year in revenue, Anton Fredriksson, EDC's director of aviation, told me.

"Essential flights" are also a growing part of the noise problem. Under Mayor Eric Adams, the New York police department's use of law enforcement choppers has risen dramatically. A 2024 Bloomberg investigation found that the force's helicopters spent 60% more time in the air in 2023 than in the previous four years. The NYPD's spending on the helicopter program more than doubled between fiscal year 2021 and 2023 to $12.3 million.

The helicopter industry is on the verge of a major transformation. In 2023, the FAA published a report outlining its path to approving the first so-called electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft for commercial flight by 2025 — and widespread use by 2028. These machines are basically electric versions of helicopters — and have been hyped by the Silicon Valley set for years. Some chopper services, including Blade, want them to replace their use of combustion-engine helicopters.

"This is the first phase of a really exciting new age where instead of moving around on the ground, we're able to move around in the air," Eric Allison, the chief product officer of one California-based eVTOL company, Joby Aviation, told me. Joby has partnered with Uber, Delta, Toyota, and the US government, and aims to launch its air taxi services at Uber Black prices and eventually hopes to bring them closer to UberX prices. It's not clear when they'll get final certification from the FAA to start ferrying people around the US, but they're undergoing approval in Dubai.

After resisting the regulation of traditional helicopters for decades, New York leaders are embracing the electric rotor industry with open arms as the solution to noise and air pollution. Some support lifting caps on flights if they're electric. The mayor and EDC invited Joby and a German company to show off their machines in a test flight in downtown Manhattan in late 2023. Adams predicted at the event that "within our lifetime, many of you are going to own your own personal electric helicopter." There are some clear upsides to the technology — eVTOLs are much quieter than combustion-engine helicopters, and they don't spew jet fuel.

Even some city lawmakers who've led the charge against the helicopter industry are welcoming their electric counterparts. "The future of electric air taxi travel represents innovation, sustainability, and expanded transportation options for our city," Amanda Farías, the New York City Council majority leader, said in a statement.

Restler is more cautious. "Until we actually experience how they work in practice and what impacts they have, we don't know kind of what regulatory structure we need to protect the health, well-being, and safety of our communities," he said.

Earlier this month, Blade announced it's expanding its JFK flight offerings to the downtown Manhattan heliport in an effort to help the heliport's new operator "gather data on consumer demand, flier experience, and logistics" and transition to eVTOLs.

It's clear we're hurtling toward a future of highways in the sky — and we're already there in NYC. But it's not clear it's one that appeals to the average city dweller. It might warrant asking the question: Do we want the 1% taking over the skies?

Eliza Relman is a policy correspondent focused on housing, transportation, and infrastructure on Insider's economy team.

Will Champion was 24 and working at a board game café on New York's Upper West Side in 2021 when he and his friends decided to turn their Dungeons & Dragons hobby into something bigger.

Champion was making a meager $15 an hour at the game café as a dungeon master, the storyteller who often leads the games, and felt like he could do better. "Why don't we just do it ourselves?" his friend, Woody Minshew, then 25, suggested.

The group of four 20-somethings, most of whom had performing backgrounds, began streaming a D&D campaign on YouTube and Twitch under the moniker "The Bards of New York." They found they enjoyed playing together for an audience, and people were eager to join their community. So they started a Discord, began to build relationships with their listeners, and scrapped the idea of working as dungeon masters. "We still had to have muggle jobs," says Kyle Knight, one of the group members, referring to non-D&D jobs, "and DMing, when done well, is very time-consuming." They also wanted to make the game as accessible as possible.

Things took off in 2023 after a clip of their stream went viral. The video, which got 3.5 million views, captured two characters who'd shared a slow-burn romance finally confessing their feelings. Comments flooded in from people who shared their favorite D&D moments or wanted to experience a similarly heartwarming game. The Bards gained a new audience and are now the 19th-most-popular D&D streaming channel on Twitch, based on TwitchMetrics. They had tapped into the growing market of tabletop role-players.

Once considered a niche game for fantasy nerds to play in someone's basement, tabletop role-playing games have entered the mainstream. In 1968, Gary Gygax, a game designer and the cocreator of D&D, organized the first-ever tabletop convention, known as "Gen Con," in his basement with a dozen or so people. Last year's Gen Con conference in Indiana set new attendance records, with over 71,000 attendees and 540 exhibiting companies. In 2020, Wizards of the Coast, the owner of D&D, touted a seven-year growth streak, saying that online play grew by 86% that year.

As its popularity has grown, D&D has inspired a film and a hit TV show and attracted over 50 million players worldwide, Wizards of the Coast says. Other tabletop games such as Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and RuneQuest have seen a similar surge in popularity. Meanwhile, board game cafés owners have seen demand explode over the past few years, with more cafés popping up across the US. For a select few streamers, the boom has been incredibly lucrative. Leaked data from Twitch showed that Critical Role, one of the most popular D&D streaming channels, earned over $9.6 million between 2019 and 2021 from a combination of subscribers, tips, and ad revenue.

The nerds are taking over — and they may have the solution to America's loneliness crisis.

Cherie Wright, a 36-year-old from Virginia, was one of the people who saw the Bards of New York's viral TikTok. She'd never played D&D before but found herself captivated by the storytelling. As she watched the group's streams, she familiarized herself with the game's lingo. " I learned what 'rolling the dice' meant, and what a 'perception check' is, and why everyone gets so excited about a 'natural 20,'" she says.

Wright became an active participant in the group's Discord and Twitch chats, which now have several thousand members. "There's really a love for connecting with other people," she says, describing the community as "enchantingly warm" and "wildly creative."

The community has been a critical support for her, especially when her job as a museum director was busy and she had a hard time getting out of the house. "I didn't realize how close to burnout I actually was," she says.

Since the pandemic lockdowns, lots of people are in a similar boat, with many of us spending more time alone than ever before. In the group chats, fans would talk about the stream, share pet photos, or ask for help if they were having a bad day. " People became regulars and we all learned each other's names," Wright says.

A little over a year after she joined the community, Wright decided to learn more about D&D. In the tabletop role-playing game, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, players design their own characters and set out on a quest. They roll dice to battle enemies, find treasure, and complete challenges in order to reach the end of a campaign that can span anywhere from a single afternoon to a couple of years.

" I walked into my local game store just with the intention of asking about it," she says. There was a one-shot session — a short adventure that can be finished in a single sitting — in progress and she decided to join. She was immediately hooked. "I met some of my now best friends that day," she says.

Playing consistently can be tricky because people's schedules are always changing, but she still manages to make it work.  "At one point, I was playing two or three times a week with different groups and different nights, but right now it's about once a week."

In the past decade, tabletop role-playing games have taken on a new life. The hit TV show "Stranger Things," which first aired in 2016, brought D&D back into the spotlight. "It was such a phenomenon," Knight says. "It broke a lot of stigmas by just placing it into the zeitgeist and making it seem fun and acceptable."

The show's success made Hannah Minshew, one of the Bards, suddenly feel cool. "I was like, 'Oh, I know what a Mind Flayer is. I have this exotic information that you all don't. Let me teach you. I'm the cool guy,'" she laughs.

D&D is far from the only tabletop game that's popular today. Warhammer 40,000, also known as Warhammer 40K, is a turn-based tactical wargame in which players collect, assemble, and battle detailed miniature armies against each other. Based on traffic to its website, the gaming site Goonhammer estimates the game has 2.4 million players each month. In December, Games Workshop, the publisher of Warhammer, announced that it had sold Amazon the film and television rights to the game universe. That same month, Games Workshop made it onto the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 index, a list of the largest UK companies.

Marcus Pascall, a 53-year-old in San Diego, had largely given up role-playing games when "Stranger Things" came out. Pascall's son Ian was 10 years old at the time. "Everyone in school was talking about it, so I dusted off my old books and ran a D&D game for him," he recalls. "It was nice to see role-playing games through the eyes of someone who hadn't played before."

Now in college, Ian continues to play tabletop games with his friends, and Pascall himself has returned to D&D. For the past three years, he's been running a monthly game with his 29-year-old daughter and some of his friends. His daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, drives two hours to make the sessions.

Pascall has noticed a big shift in the culture from when he was playing. "In the '80s, being called a nerd was a massive insult. And you avoided it at all costs, and you felt insulted, you felt almost ashamed," he says. " We're all nerds now. It's all one big group. It's like, 'I don't care if you don't have social skills. Come play with us.'"

For John Edwards, 60, who was active in the role-playing game world for decades, the social experience was always the main draw. " You've got a topic that you can talk about, even if you don't have a lot of other things in common," he says. A large part of the audience is made up of adult men, many of whom, he says, "don't have any good excuses to all sit down together and do something."

Although Edwards has shifted to more traditional board games over the years because of how time-consuming it was to run D&D campaigns, he still values how the games opened up his social circles. " Particularly in a country that is very polarized politically right now, it means you can sit across the table from people that you otherwise maybe wouldn't be comfortable sitting with," he says.

Anna Prosser, a 40-year-old Oregonian who is a streamer on the weekly D&D show "StonesThrow," has found that committing to regular play has had other positive impacts on her mental health.

" A lot of times we grow out of play and out of imagination," she tells me. " It's considered something that's for children." She says that "committing to times of play every week" has helped her to retrain her imagination and improve her creativity, problem-solving skills, and mental health.

Plenty of research backs up the benefits of play for adults, finding that it improves creativity and can help people process stress. In a study published in July, researchers at University College Cork in Ireland found that D&D helped people's mental health by providing escapism, self-exploration, and social support. "The most interesting finding for me and for a lot of people that I've talked to is this exploration of self," Orla Walsh, the study's lead, says. "I can't think of many hobbies where you get to do this."

She says one player who was struggling in a male-dominated work environment created a confident character that helped her practice being confident in real life. Another player, a comedian who lost his grandfather, felt pressure to be the comic relief for his family while struggling with his own grief. As the dungeon master, he created a monster representing his grief, which allowed him to privately process his emotions. " No one else knew that it was happening but he gained so much from it," Walsh says.

Prosser says that using her imagination more brought "a vibrant inner life back into focus" and has helped build her confidence in making decisions. "The stories I've helped write in D&D have helped reassure me that perfection isn't possible and life is good without it," she says.

By acting as different characters with different personality traits and talents, she's also learned a lot about what kind of person she wants to be. " It's really important to have the flexibility of looking at the world and looking at problems through a different perspective in order to either affirm your own or enhance your own," she says. "D&D gives you a really safe place to do that."

Because it's been accepted more broadly in mainstream culture, the game is welcoming to a wider range of people. Prosser says that the expectation of who a D&D player is has changed significantly over the years. While the game is still dominated by men — Wizards of the Coast said in 2023 that "60% of D&D players are male, 39% are female, and 1% identify otherwise" — the demographics seem to be shifting. Prosser used to play in a group that was made up entirely of women players. " People would think it was strange that a group of women performing artists wanted to play D&D. That's not the case anymore," she says. "At least in most of the circles that I run in."

As the internet fosters more avid fan communities, nothing feels as niche as it once did. Being a nerd once meant you were part of a specific subculture of people passionate about comic books or video games. Today, fandom is just the air we breathe. When everyone is a nerd, nothing is really nerdy — that's made it easier to find really special communities in the tabletop game world.

Aimee Pearcy is a freelance journalist who writes about technology and digital culture.

Growing up with a cardiologist dad, Anna always knew she wanted to become a doctor. She had watched her father spend decades building trust with his patients so he could care for them, and she wanted to have that kind of impact.

"I went into medical school thinking I'm going to specialize," says Anna, a 27-year-old in her fourth year as a medical student at Georgetown University. "I thought the best and the smartest pick something specific so that they can really master it."

But after completing her third-year rotations, she found she most enjoyed family medicine — where she could focus on caring for patients long term. But at a school that's mostly focused on specialties, her interest wasn't well received.

"People would say, 'Oh, wow, you're such a competitive applicant. You could do anything you want. Why family med?'" says Anna, who asked to use just her first name to avoid professional backlash. "It made me think I wasn't reaching my full potential."

Like Anna, a lot of Gen Zers want to be doctors — a survey last year found a rising interest in healthcare work among high-achieving high school students, and the number of med students has grown by 17% in the past decade. As boomers get older and AI upends white-collar work, this is really good news. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that we will need far more people working in healthcare over the next decade. And the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis predicts a shortage of about 87,000 family doctors by 2037, a problem exacerbated by an aging doctor workforce and increasing demand for elder care.

But each year, hundreds of medical residencies for primary care programs struggle to find students, and many who enter the field end up abandoning it. Across the medical field, people look down on primary care work — which includes family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, OB-GYNs, and geriatrics — because it doesn't pay as well, is an administrative slog, and isn't considered as prestigious as other specialties. There's even a term for the bad-mouthing of primary care: specialty disrespect. Georgetown notes a study that found it could affect up to 80% of students, particularly those considering going into primary care.

That's leaving Americans without enough doctors to go around.

If you type "Match Day" into TikTok, you'll be flooded with clips of anxious young med students in school auditoriums ripping open letters to find out which residency they landed. It's a nerve-racking process, made even more daunting by the fact that everyone gets their results at the same time — together. Through the National Resident Matching Program, med students are interviewed by representatives from residency programs, and both parties rank each other. On Match Day, based on those rankings, the students learn whether they got into their preferred specialty.

Despite being in an honors society, volunteering, joining clubs, and studying day and night, Match Day didn't go as Dr. Erica Ginsburg had hoped. Ginsburg, 27, did not get matched with her top choice for dermatology, a specialty so competitive that about 20% of applicants don't match. "Some people were screaming, crying tears of joy. Me and my friend were crying tears of sadness," she says. As a child, a dermatologist treated her for eczema, and the results gave her confidence. She wanted to do the same for others. Once she got older, she said, she realized that dermatology also "has it good" when it comes to work-life balance.

"I do want to have both, you know, a career and a family," she says.

While students compete for spots in fields like dermatology and surgery, primary care programs go unfilled. After 2024's Match Day, there were over 600 unfilled spots in family medicine, nearly 500 in internal medicine, and 250 in pediatrics. Meanwhile, about 6.3% of applicants — more than 1,200 med students — were left unmatched. (About 900 of them found positions through a subsequent matching program for unmatched students, but that still left hundreds of future doctors without a residency spot and 164 unfilled primary care positions over the past two years.)

It's not surprising that so many people want to avoid primary care. When third-year med students rotate through underresourced primary care practices, they witness how stressed out doctors are. Even those who may have wanted to go into the field sometimes change their minds.

"I've been in situations where they're saying, 'OK, here's a new patient. You've got seven minutes to try to get an intake on who they are, write their notes,'" says Annelise Silva, the president of the American Medical Student Association, who recently graduated from the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University. "There are family practice clinicians who see upwards of 20 to 30 patients a day." They often spend hours after their appointments writing up clinic notes, she adds.

Dr. Yalda Jabbarpour, a family doctor and director of the Robert Graham Center at the American Academy of Family Physicians, says primary care is the "backbone" of our healthcare system, but the US allocated only $0.05 in 2021 to the field for every dollar spent on healthcare. "Most countries that have a robust primary care system and better health outcomes, longer life expectancy, are closer to double or even triple that," she says. She and other researchers found other wealthy countries spent an average of $0.14 in 2021.

Part of the undervaluing of primary care is structural. Most doctors are paid through the fee-for-service structure — a monetary value is assigned to each service based on the risk and complexity involved. "That system is pretty biased against cognitive specialties and towards procedural specialties," Jabbarpour says. "The specialties where you're taking time to talk to the patient, coordinate their care, think about their complex medical issues, but aren't necessarily doing a procedure on them, are going to be paid less, and that is primary care."

Of course, "tiny violins come out when we're talking about salaries of physicians," she says, adding: "Yes, a cardiologist makes more than a primary care physician. A primary care physician still makes a pretty good salary."

A 2023 Medscape report said family doctors made an average of $255,000 in 2022. That's a far cry from the $619,000 average salary of the highest-paid doctors, plastic surgeons. When you've accumulated over $200,000 in debt to go to medical school, the pull toward a better salary is tough to ignore.

Bias against primary care, like what Anna experienced at Georgetown, can also deter people.

Specialty disrespect was defined by one study as "unwarranted, negative, denigrating, even sarcastic comments made by trainees and physicians about different specialties." It surveyed med students at the University of Washington School of Medicine between 2008 and 2012, and 87.7% of students who matched into family medicine residencies said they had experienced specialty disrespect — a higher percentage than for any other specialty — compared with just under 80% of all respondents. About one-quarter of respondents said the comments had a moderate to strong impact on their choice.

Even among students who wind up in primary care, a good chunk of them don't stay there. In 2021, 37% of all residents started out training in primary care, but after three to five years, only 21% remained practicing it, the Primary Care Scorecard said. Instead, many go on to subspecialize in fields like endocrinology or rheumatology or work in hospitals.

The first doctors most people meet are in primary care. When there aren't enough primary care doctors, diseases aren't caught early and patients have a harder time managing chronic diseases. Already, nearly one in every three Americans lacks reliable access to primary care, the National Association of Community Health Centers found in a data analysis. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and Academia Sinica estimate that the number of people over 50 with at least one chronic illness will double from 71.5 million in 2020 to 142.6 million by 2050, which would add pressure to an already stressed healthcare workforce.

The impact will be felt most acutely by those in rural communities and people of color — a problem that could get worse if the Trump administration cuts healthcare spending. The House of Representatives passed a budget on February 25 that would cut $880 billion from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which includes Medicaid, though it hasn't yet been passed into law. Some medical students interested in maternal health are also avoiding states with abortion bans and practicing OB-GYNs in those places are fleeing.

"Patients don't have access to healthcare. It's really hard for them to get in to see their primary care doctor. Because of that, we have higher rates of chronic disease. We have higher mental health burden. We have lower vaccination rates than we've ever had," Jabbarpour says.

Dr. Amol Navathe, a professor of health policy, medicine, and healthcare management at the University of Pennsylvania, says the shortage is also moving patients away from more holistic relationships with a doctor familiar with their needs and into more fragmented care as patients go to urgent care or seek out specialists on their own. "It's not good for patient health," he says. "It's not good for the efficiency of how our resources get used."

To address some of these issues, Jabbarpour says, the US needs to invest in payment models that value primary care more effectively. Some medical systems are already trying this. Navathe has worked with the Hawaii Medical Service Association, a licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, to design a system through which physicians are paid a fixed rate per patient and then given additional fees for services like providing vaccines or dermatology. The goals are to help patients get better care and reduce the number of patients doctors need to see to get paid.

The new structure, which started as a pilot project in 2016 and is now in place across the state, has had some success: More people got vaccines and cancer screenings, and there were fewer emergency room visits and hospitalizations for chronic diseases. Navathe says Medicare has tested similar pilot projects but would require approval from Congress to roll them out widely.

Medicare funding for graduate medical schools is another bottleneck. "It's going to these large academic hospitals, which aren't necessarily primary-care-oriented," Jabbarpour says. "Most people are not going to the hospital to get their healthcare."

Some schools are trying to address the shortage: Ginsburg says her medical school at Florida State University enthusiastically promoted going into primary care — resulting in nearly half of her class matching into the field. She was one of only three who went into dermatology. "We had all these people who just really love medicine for underserved populations," she says. "So we had all these clubs, organizations that were really geared towards primary care."

At other schools, addressing the issue of specialty disrespect head-on can make a difference. Georgetown's School of Medicine has launched a campaign to combat the issue, with posters around the school featuring common negative tropes about various specialties and rebuttals to these comments. In a 2020 survey of Georgetown med students, 31% of respondents said derogatory comments affected their career decisions, and 38% said they had disparaged a specialty.

Anna says she understands the instinct more experienced doctors have in wanting to protect students from negative experiences. "You don't want to be naive to the realities of their specialties," she says. But she wishes these topics were brought up in a more neutral way.

"Most people come into medical school with an inherent drive to help people and to want to do good," she says. "When you hear these comments, it pulls you further from your values and doesn't allow you to explore and feel good about what you want to go into."

The next generation of doctors has a lot riding on them. The last thing the medical system — and the government — should be doing is deterring them from their job: keeping Americans healthy.

Manisha Krishnan is an Emmy award-winning journalist who covers healthcare. She is based in Brooklyn.

Arnab Dutta, a 40-year-old living in the Bay Area, tried buying a home a couple of years ago with the help of a traditional real estate agent. It didn't go well.

Dutta's arrangement with his agent was the same one Americans have used for decades: The agent agreed to guide him through the process — showing him homes, writing offers, and wrangling stacks of paperwork — in exchange for the standard cut of the final sale price, between 2% and 3%. The commission, likely tens of thousands of dollars, wouldn't come straight out of Dutta's pocket; sellers are the ones who fork over the cash to agents on both sides of the deal after it closes. But Dutta would be indirectly paying for his agent, since the buyer is the reason the seller has any money to hand out, and the agent's threadbare advice made him feel like he wasn't getting much bang for his buck. The whole commission thing didn't sit right with him, either. He didn't see why his agent, who was supposed to represent his interests, should make more money if the price went up, the opposite of Dutta's ideal outcome. After he lost out on several homes, his search stalled out.

Dutta wasn't alone in his dissatisfaction with the traditional agent setup. He didn't know it at the time, but the rules that reinforced this relationship for decades were about to change. Last March, the National Association of Realtors, a powerful industry group that represents some 1.5 million agents around the country, agreed to settle a series of multibillion-dollar lawsuits that claimed this roundabout way of paying agents — and the NAR rules undergirding this system — had forced people to pay unfairly high commissions. The deal included new rules for paying agents, which many real estate experts predicted would nudge buyers and sellers to start negotiating over commission rates and bring costs down.

The results a year later have been underwhelming: There's little evidence that the settlement has put a dent in average nationwide commission rates, and those looking to preserve the old way of doing things have devised workarounds to ensure agents still collect their typical cut. But while many people are still doing things more or less the old way, some are taking advantage of the updated rules to usher in a brave new world of homebuying. They're owners of discount brokerages charging far less than the typical commission, entrepreneurs spinning up new real estate tech, and a small but growing number of savvy consumers flexing their negotiating power to save tens of thousands of dollars on their agents' fees. They're all betting that one day they'll no longer be outliers.

When Dutta resumed the hunt late last year, he tried a different tack. He enlisted the services of TurboHome, a brokerage founded after the NAR settlement whose agents work for a flat fee of between $5,000 and $15,000. Most real estate agents are independent contractors, reliant on hefty commission checks to make up for the lack of a steady salary. But agents at TurboHome are employed by the company — trading the uneven lump sums for consistent pay. The company, which raised $3.85 million in seed funding late last year, uses software tools to speed up mundane tasks like analyzing property disclosures and finding sales of comparable homes. Its tech frees up agents to focus on the finer details of the process while also taking on more clients at a time to make up for the smaller fees they collect on each deal.

Dutta agreed to pay the flat fee of $10,000 out of pocket, which turned out to be a useful bargaining chip in his negotiations with sellers. He didn't have to ask sellers to cover his agent's fee, which allowed them to pocket the sizable chunk of the deal that they would have otherwise had to fork over to his representation. In the pricey Bay Area, where the typical home trades for north of $1 million, that meant savings of $25,000 or more. When one of Dutta's offers eventually won out, it wasn't because he proposed the largest dollar figure; his agent, Donny Suh, tells me other prospective buyers came in higher. But without having to pay out a commission for Suh, the seller stood to net the most money from Dutta's offer. He closed on the three-bedroom home in February.

The success has left Dutta with some what-ifs from his prior home search. He recalls one house for which he was outbid by just $5,000.

"If we had this sort of tool in our hands at that time," he tells me, "we wouldn't have lost."

The battle over commissions — who pays, how much they pay, and when the money changes hands — comes down to information.

It all starts with the multiple listing services — local databases where most homes are advertised for sale. They may sound like unsexy infrastructure, but they've played a key role in propping up the typical agent commission. There are more than 500 of these databases around the country, and the vast majority are operated by local Realtor associations that follow rules handed down by the NAR. While the national organization didn't set commissions and says they've always been negotiable, it did set up rules that helped maintain the status quo. In the presettlement days, a seller who listed their home on the MLS had to fill out a little box saying how much they'd be willing to pay the buyer's agent. Since buyers already had enough up-front costs to worry about, everyone assumed that deals would go more smoothly if the suddenly cash-flush seller just paid out both sides. This setup allowed buyers to basically ignore how much their agent was getting paid — in fact, buyers' agents used to tell clients their services were free until a different legal battle ended that practice in 2020. It also meant that sellers almost always stuck to the industry standard of 2.5% or 3% of the final price for each agent, either because they didn't know any different or because offering less could risk being passed over by buyers' agents, who might "steer" their clients away from properties with lower-than-average commissions.

In the lawsuits against the NAR, the sellers who sued the organization alleged that this whole system was an elaborate scheme to pull the wool over regular people's eyes and force them to pay unfairly high commissions. Given that the median home price in the US is about $419,000, a 6% commission, split between two agents, would mean shelling out more than $25,000. While the plaintiffs pushed for commissions to be "decoupled," with buyers and sellers paying their own agents separately, the $418 million settlement last year didn't go quite that far. But it did offer enough changes to throw the real estate world into flux.

The first change is that sellers and their agents can no longer offer buyer-agent commissions through the MLS. In theory, this should get rid of that steering problem — if sellers aren't offering a commission, buyers' agents can't direct their clients away from the homes with less than the customary fee. But there's a huge loophole here: Sellers can advertise a buyer-agent commission pretty much anywhere else — on the broker's website, over the phone, on sites like Zillow or Redfin. If a buyer's agent wants to see how much they'll make off a home, it's easy for them to check. Given this workaround, many sellers are still offering to pay the standard commission, which makes sense in today's slow housing market. Given the low number of homes changing hands, people are wary of doing anything that could muck up a deal.

Buyers, on the other hand, face more paperwork as a result of the settlement. Before an agent so much as opens a door for a buyer these days, they'll have to get them to sign an agreement stating the terms of their relationship, including compensation. These forms, known as buyer-representation agreements, have historically been introduced much later in the process, if they were used at all. And they vary widely by brokerage and agent — some agreements are simple one-sheeters to tour a few homes, while others lock buyers into exclusive arrangements for months. It's the difference between seeing someone casually and getting married on the first date.

For now, at least, the combination of a slow market, general inertia, and lagging consumer awareness has kept the status quo relatively intact. A study by the real estate brokerage Redfin found that the typical buyer-agent commission was 2.36% in the fourth quarter of the year, down from 2.43% in the first quarter of 2024, when the settlement was announced, and unchanged from the third quarter, when the rules went into effect. But again, it's still pretty early, and many industry insiders expect the changes to eventually start knocking down commissions as agents are forced to compete on price.

"I think our projection still hasn't changed much, which is, over time, that will still come down," Joe Rath, the head of industry relations for Redfin, says. "That downward pressure still exists."

So how, exactly, could buyers and sellers start coming out ahead? A big step is simple consumer education. The real estate firm Clever surveyed 1,000 homeowners and prospective buyers and found that even after the new rules went into effect, 40% of respondents said they either didn't understand the implications or hadn't even heard of the lawsuits.

Old habits die hard, especially when there's so much confusion around these changes. And critics of the settlement say it's actually opened up new pitfalls for buyers. Before, the MLS at least showed you what almost every home was offering in commissions — now that kind of information has been scattered or isn't publicly available at all, which makes it harder to tell whether "steering" is happening. And some of the representation agreements floating around could end up locking buyers into exclusive relationships with incompetent agents.

"All these deceptive practices have been basically turned underground," Tanya Monestier, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, tells me.

But as consumers absorb these new rules and start to negotiate on commissions, both sides of the transaction stand to benefit. For sellers, the main advice boils down to this: Don't offer an exact commission anywhere. Not on the MLS, of course, but also not on a broker's website, via telephone, or a sign in the front yard, Stephen Brobeck, a senior fellow at the Consumer Policy Center, says. Instead, allow buyers to make offers on agent payment, just like they do for the home itself. One buyer might offer to pay 2.5% more than the asking price but ask for that extra 2.5% back in the form of a closing credit so they can pay their agent. Another buyer may offer the same dollar amount but ask for only 1.5% back to pay their agent's commission. Yet another, like Dutta, may not ask for any money back. At the end of the day, sellers should care about their net proceeds — the amount that goes into their pocket once all the pesky fees are settled. They can say they're open to working with buyers on their agent's commission without backing themselves into a corner by suggesting an exact percentage.

On the buyers' side, saving money comes down to asking — you can request a lower commission from your own agent or, if you can't afford to pay it out of pocket, ask for help from the seller in the form of a closing credit. "You can ask for stuff that's not advertised and still get it," Leo Pareja, the CEO of the real estate brokerage eXp Realty, tells me. Buyers make special requests all the time, like asking for a repair or for the pool table in the basement to come with the house. A credit to cover your agent's commissions shouldn't be any different.

Most sellers these days are still offering to pay a commission to the buyer's agent, as they did before the settlement's changes. But buyers who've negotiated a lower commission with their own agent could use that to make their offers more attractive in the eyes of a seller.

"I think what has changed is that there are these sort of savvier buyers out there, particularly in the high-cost markets, that are looking for any advantage that they can get," Ben Bear, the founder and CEO of TurboHome, says. The company mostly operates in California but has recently expanded to Texas and Washington.

Long before they start eyeing homes, buyers should also do some due diligence on their prospective agents. Studies have found that the vast majority of buyers still want a professional to guide them through their purchase, which makes sense — it's a massive transaction that most people will complete only a few times in their life. Some agents may be able to articulate exactly why they're worth every penny of the traditional commission. But there are a lot of agents out there vying for your business, and others may be willing to deviate from the standard commission to win more clients. One recently created portal, known as Fetch Agent, allows buyers to search for agents that match a set of parameters, like years of experience, location expertise, and even how much they charge in commission. In a world where buyer-agent commissions are no longer an afterthought but a key part of sale negotiations, it makes sense to shop around for an agent before shopping for a house.

"What we offer is the ability to transparently see what an agent would be open to when it comes to a work arrangement," Beau Correll, the founder of Fetch Agent, tells me. That kind of transparency — knowing exactly what you're getting from an agent and how much you'll be paying for them — is the kind of thing that could spur more agents to compete on price, which would bring down costs for consumers.

The rollout of the new rules has undoubtedly been a mess — even now, a year after the settlement was unveiled, there are many different interpretations of what is and isn't allowed. But the idea that both buyers and sellers should think about commissions — and maybe even negotiate to get a better deal — is a remarkable reversal from the old way of doing things.

"I would've liked it to go further," Brobeck tells me. "But it represents progress."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

Decades of health campaigns and scientific research about the risks of sugary soft drinks are a big reason that Americans have been drinking less soda since consumption peaked around 2000. A January paper in Nature Medicine found that in 2020, 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide were attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages. But many of us still have not gotten the memo — the average American today drinks about 12 ounces of sugary sodas a day. For each person who doesn't drink any soda, there's someone chugging 24 ounces every day.

Why are we still drinking so much of a beverage that makes people sick?

Eight years ago, two pastors sued Coca-Cola, by far the country's most popular soda company, and the American Beverage Association over "their deceptive marketing, labeling, and sale of Coca-Cola's sugar-sweetened beverages." The complaint, filed in Washington, DC, alleged that Coca-Cola knew about the science linking sugar-sweetened beverages to chronic diseases but obscured those links through aggressive public relations campaigns. Some thought that the suit would finally tip the balance of public opinion against Coke — the same way a court case in 2007 over misleading marketing on OxyContin's addictiveness shifted the tide against Purdue Pharma. But as I cover in my new book, "Sweet and Deadly," every jab by health advocates has been deftly parried by Coke and its allies.

Like the tobacco companies, Coke has spent millions spinning science to hide soda's health costs from the public and downplay the risks of sugar. In fact, Coke has been at this game longer than the tobacco industry. When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee started launching disinformation campaigns in 1954, it imported its staff and strategies lock, stock, and barrel from the Sugar Research Foundation, a nonprofit funded partly by Coke. The soda companies were pioneers of the PR strategy now known as the tobacco playbook.

For decades, the $300 billion corporation has duped consumers by promoting messages that are either misleading or flat-out false. It's used an extensive network of allies and proxy groups to carry its messages, including co-opting scientists and their research, and spent billions of dollars on ads that associate Coke with warm and fuzzy feelings represented by polar bears, Santas, and happy families. Coca-Cola has yet to face a major reckoning for its outsize role in America's health crisis.

One of the dietary falsehoods that Coca-Cola spreads is the concept that a calorie is a calorie. "We don't believe in empty calories," Katie Bayne, Coke's former chief marketing officer, said in 2012. The following year, James Quincey, now the CEO of the corporation, said, "When we talk about obesity, a calorie is a calorie. The experts are clear — the academics, the government advisors, diabetes associations — we need to have balance in the calories. And if you're taking in too many, or burning them off, that is a problem; wherever they're coming from, a calorie is a calorie."

But in the human body, not all calories are created equal — far from it. Research has long shown that a calorie of liquid sugar is not metabolized in the same manner as a calorie of whole grain, for example, or a calorie of fruit or nuts. Those calories have fiber, vitamins, and other nutrients that are not present in soda.

Coke also promotes the related message of "energy balance." The simplest energy balance argument posits that a calorie of food will be metabolized the same whether it comes from cashews, kale, or Coca-Cola, so consumers should focus not on the type of food but on trying to burn as many calories as they consume. Coke has been especially interested in emphasizing the calories-out side of the equation.

This was the focus of the Global Energy Balance Network, an organization launched in 2014 by researchers affiliated with the University of Colorado and the University of South Carolina. One of the academics, Steven Blair, did yeoman's work to shift Americans' focus from the elements of the diet to the concept of balancing calories in and calories out. In a video for the organization, Blair said, "Most of the focus, in the popular media, in the scientific press, is 'Aww, they're eating too much, eating too much, eating too much.' Blaming fast foods, blaming sugary drinks, and so on, and there's really virtually no compelling evidence that that in fact is the cause."

In 2015, a New York Times exposé revealed that the Global Energy Balance Network was simply a front group for Coca-Cola. The corporation had funded it and guided it since its inception but wanted it to appear independent. This prompted a very public apology from Coke's then-CEO Muhtar Kent, who penned a Wall Street Journal column titled "We'll do better." Coca-Cola did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

But it was far from the only misleading messaging Coke had spread. In a May 2013 blog post, Coca-Cola trumpeted its success in removing calories from the American diet through changing its product formulation, portion size, and promotion. "Yesterday, America's top food and beverage manufacturers announced an important milestone: more than 1.5 trillion calories have been removed from the US marketplace," the now-removed post read. "This achievement is the result of efforts made by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), a coalition of 16 food and beverage corporate partners, including The Coca-Cola Company, and over 230 organizations, who are working together to help reduce obesity, especially childhood obesity."

The post ran beneath a photo of the former Department of Agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, Lisa Gable of HWCF, and the author Hank Cardello at an event sponsored by the Obesity Solutions Initiative at the Hudson Institute. While the photo appears to be three independent experts cordially discussing the problem of obesity, the whole event was paid for by Coke, Pepsi, and other food corporations. Coke alone had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Hudson Institute and $5 million to HWCF.

What the company didn't mention is that Coca-Cola could remove far more calories from the marketplace in a heartbeat by taking full-sugar beverages off the market or reducing its advertising of those products. Not only does it aggressively market these calorie-dense drinks, but it continues to introduce new Coke blends that in some cases, such as Coca-Cola Spiced, have even more sugar than the original Coca-Cola.

Coke is in the business of selling sugar water. If it tries to reduce sales of its products, it would be violating its obligations to its shareholders. (Woe to the CEO who announces on an earnings call — "We did it, we finally succeeded in reducing the amount of Coke we sell, thus reducing calories!") What is unexpected is for Coca-Cola to concurrently sell more sugar-sweetened beverages than any other corporation while taking credit for reducing calories.

One front group ended up taking the pro-sugar stance a bit too far. The International Life Sciences Institute, founded in the 1980s by a Coca-Cola executive, spent decades spinning food science in favor of its corporate funders, including Hershey, Kraft, and Kellogg. But when it funded a 2016 research paper critiquing the growing body of science on the health risks of sugar, it was a step too far for some of its corporate members. Matthias Berninger, a Mars spokesperson at the time, said the paper would not help consumers make better choices. When Mars left ILSI in 2018, Berninger said, "We do not want to be involved in advocacy-led studies that so often, and mostly for the right reasons, have been criticized." Two years later, Coke quietly left the group as well.

In 2018, Coke was part of an elaborate front group to help it push back against the soda taxes several California municipalities had enacted. Coke and its soda industry allies, under the guise of a campaign called "Californians for Accountability and Transparency in Government Spending, Sponsored by California Businesses," gathered signatures to support a statewide initiative that would require municipalities to get the approval of two-thirds of voters before implementing any local tax change. By crafting an initiative so abhorrent to municipalities and unions that California lawmakers would do anything to make it go away, Coke gained bargaining power. With signatures in hand, the soda alliance went to Sacramento and swung a deal. We'll withdraw the initiative, they said, in exchange for a law banning new taxes on groceries, including sodas, through 2030. Legislators took the deal and pushed that provision through as a rider on a budget bill. This strategy, known as preemption, has also proven effective for gun rights groups.

Coke has created this elaborate parallel world to mislead consumers about the health risks of sugar-sweetened beverages and take strategic actions like preventing soda taxes. All of the innocuous-sounding, Coke-funded groups named above are part of a plan that has prevented the balance of public opinion from tipping against Coca-Cola, as it has for other corporations such as the tobacco company Philip Morris, Purdue Pharma, and Exxon. In the 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100, which ranks company reputations, Coke placed 27th with a "very good" score compared to Exxon's "fair" score at No. 86. The PR strategy ensures that Coca-Cola appears shrouded in an aura of goodness while staying profitable and steadily rewarding their shareholders.

And that DC lawsuit? It dragged on for years, as Coke's top-notch legal team successfully whittled it down. The plaintiffs finally withdrew the suit in 2019. Coke won again.

Murray Carpenter is a health and science journalist and the author of "Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick" and "Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us."

This story is adapted from "Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick" by Murray Carpenter. Copyright 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When Em graduated from the Pratt Institute in May 2020, two months into the pandemic, there were simply no jobs for a sculpture major, even in New York. "That absolutely set the tone for the rest of my attempt at a career," Em, now 26, says.

So they took an intensive nine-month coding boot camp and started applying for tech jobs. After they got rejected from about 10 roles, the entire tech industry was besieged by mass layoffs in 2022, leaving Em even more dispirited. "It was just another pathway to shit," they recall thinking. Eventually, they found work as an office manager at a nonprofit for a while and quickly lost their coding skills. Last year, Em applied to more than 400 jobs across the communications, administrative, and service industries — and was rejected by every one.

"I am miserable, and it is breaking my body down," Em tells me over the phone from California, where they've been living at a relative's house scraping by on $700 a month from contract work. They add, flatly, "I am not living a life that I feel is worth living at this moment."

Em's experience with such unrelenting rejection may sound extreme, but their story speaks to a panic and despair pervasive among members of Gen Z. Lately, I find that the tone people over 30 most often use when talking about today's young adults is less a reflexively finger-wagging "kids these days" and more a genuine sympathy over (mixed with relief to have dodged) the particular set of historical circumstances they've faced as they've come of age: COVID-19, climate anxiety, the chaos of the Trump administrations, the internet's wholesale usurpation of IRL culture, AI's potential to upend entire industries. Gen Z has been called the most anxious generation, the most risk-averse generation, the most stressed generation, the most burned-out generation, and the loneliest generation. Last year, the World Happiness Report dubbed Zoomers the unhappiest generation.

But there's another superlative — one exacerbating all that stress, anxiety, loneliness, and burnout — that's so far been overlooked. By several measures, Gen Z may be the most rejected generation in human history.

Every cohort believes it has drawn the shortest straw; as Will Smith, a Gen Xer, famously groused, "Parents just don't understand!" But as Gen Zers strain to establish themselves, they face a uniquely fraught tension between unprecedented technology-enabled opportunity — infinite possibilities a click, swipe, or DM away — and an unprecedented scale of rejection. From education to careers to romance, never before have young adults had this much access to prospective yeses. And, in turn, never before have young adults been told no so frequently.

What does the experience of this new scale of rejection do to a young person's psyche, and to Gen Z's collective state of mind? And how will it reverberate through the rest of society as Gen Z eventually takes the reins of power — when the rejectees become the rejectors? In interviews with psychologists, therapists, guidance counselors, career coaches, and more than a dozen Gen Zers (most of whom, like Em, requested I use their first name only to not hinder their job hunt), the ascendant generation's worldview-warping experience of mass rejection in the dating scene, college admissions, and the job market came into focus. At stake is not young adults' egos or sense of entitlement but our expectation of agency in an increasingly mediated world.

Through the 1960s, most Americans got married in their early 20s to partners they met through their social circles. Today, they spend nearly a decade longer dating; the median age for first marriage is 31.1 for men and 29.2 for women. During that additional eon, they're also equipped with an arsenal of apps that can summon — and terminate — new prospects on a daily, if not hourly, basis. If we tallied up the literal sum of all the unreciprocated swipes, DMs, follows, or texts that create today's ambient mode of romantic rejection, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that a typical Zoomer on the apps is getting rejected by, and rejecting, more prospective partners in a week than a typical married boomer has in their entire life.

The paradox of online dating has been thoroughly documented: Despite having more access to potential partners than ever, young people have invented vocabularies to describe the endless purgatorial disappointments of "ghosting," "situationships," "breadcrumbing," and the hellscape of the apps themselves. Last year, Hinge surveyed 15,000 people about their dating views. Ninety percent of Gen Z respondents said they wanted to find love, and 44% said they had little or no dating experience.

"That was a surprising number for me," Logan Ury, Hinge's director of relationship science, tells me. Much of that gap is due to Gen Z's heightened risk aversion, Ury says, something she attributes to a social-media-augmented awareness of the world as a scary place and widespread "overparenting," or helicopter parenting. "Rejection is intimidating for everyone, but Gen Z daters seem to feel it more acutely," she adds. Fifty-six percent of Gen Z respondents said that fear of rejection held them back from pursuing a relationship, compared with 51% for millennial respondents.

So as young people relentlessly reject each other, many are too scared to risk truly putting themselves out there in the first place. "It is so easy to get involved with someone and then detach," Catherine, a recent Barnard grad, says. "I have friends who have been texting with people that they met on dating apps for weeks or months, and yet they have never met in person. I actually had a friend who had a date all set up, and she went to the restaurant, and by the time she got there, the guy unmatched her and blocked her on everything before they even had a date."

Gen Z has normalized mutual risk aversion, says Jeff Guenther, a licensed therapist who counsels millions of lovelorn Gen Z TikTok users as @therapyjeff. "It's this funny situation where it's OK to not get back to people, he says. "Sometimes that's empowering, but then there's the negative effect of all these little mini rejections that eventually cut so deep that somebody might not decide to be vulnerable." No wonder that breakup coaches who talk in therapy-speak and dating influencers who claim they can definitively discern "green flags" versus "red flags" have proliferated, each of them promising to demystify the romantic ambiguity plaguing Gen Z.

Guenther says today's young adults seem quicker to discard connections in favor of the seemingly unlimited reserves of suitors awaiting just a swipe away. "There's the resilience that comes from the frequent rejection that makes them great at moving on, but then they're less equipped for the real-world relational challenges that require compromise and patience," he says.

But Natalie Buchwald, the founder and clinical director of Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, says she sees a distinction between healthy resilience and the blasé, noncommittal attitude she sees many Gen Zers deploy to cope with rejection. "I'm finding there's more of a pervasive numbness that looks like resilience," she says. "But that's not resilience; that's disconnect."

Meanwhile, more technology-augmented opportunity has also bred much more rejection in the college admissions industrial complex. Until 1960, more than half of all college applicants applied to just one school. In the 2023-24 admissions season, the average applicant applied to 6.65 Common App-affiliated schools alone, up 7% from the previous year. Just in the past two decades, the number of applications to the country's 67 most selective colleges has tripled to nearly 2 million a year. Gen Zers are knocking on more doors to their future than ever and, in turn, having more doors slammed in their faces. For some, this is shaping their core beliefs on motivation and merit.

Dylan, a 22-year-old New York University student whose high school credentials included varsity rugby and a 4.7 weighted GPA, tells me that he applied to roughly 20 schools — including most of the Ivies and Stanford — a number he felt "insecure" about compared with his peers. "I know a lot of people who applied to 20 to 40," he says. In the end, he received only three or four acceptances, which was demoralizing. "I just remember feeling like it wasn't necessarily our qualifications that mattered, that it was just like, hopefully, the right person read it on the right day."

Ella, a 20-year-old from Allentown, Pennsylvania, applied to 12 colleges and got rejected from 10. "I had so much hubris and unfounded confidence," she says. "I just thought, well, I'll only want to go to college if I can get into a 'prestigious school.' They ask, 'Why us?' obviously, and I couldn't tell them why besides it's Harvard." In a Substack post she published before her high school graduation, she described how at odds her tenfold rejection was with her belief in simply working hard to succeed. "I thought that I was going to be someone," she wrote. While she's now a junior at Bryn Mawr, Ella tells me she still hasn't gotten over the sting of going to a seemingly less elite school.

Others have taken rejection to court. In February, an 18-year-old from Palo Alto, California, who applied to 18 schools and was rejected from 16, sued the University of California system and the University of Washington, alleging racial discrimination against "highly-qualified Asian-American candidates." "When the rejections rolled in one after another, I was dumbfounded. What started with surprise turned into frustration, and then finally it turned into anger," the student's father told the New York Post.

As a millennial and former teenage overachiever, I also call up the best expert I personally knew: my high school counselor, Kim Klokkenga, who has helped wrangle the collegiate aspirations of the student body at Central Illinois' Dunlap High School for the past 30 years. In her view, the commercialization of college applications is as much responsible as a new generation of helicopter parenting, along with the technologically mediated literal ease of application.

"Back in the day, I would literally ask a student how many envelopes they wanted," Klokkenga says. "I didn't have people applying to 20-plus schools, like now. It might've been 10 or 12, and that was outlandish!" (In case you were wondering, I'd been one of her favorite nut jobs, with a total of nine applications in 2010.)

When I ask if she thinks Gen Z students are handling rejection better or worse than previous generations, she says she can't say for sure. "I have fewer students come in devastated that they didn't get into their schools," Klokkenga says. Perhaps they were already steeling themselves against rejection — another shade of disconnect. "I am hearing students say, 'Well, I wasn't expecting to get in; I just wanted to apply to see,'" Klokkenga adds. "I think they're just throwing them out there sometimes to see what'll stick."

Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who famously observed the relationship between consumer choice and satisfaction in his 2004 book, "The Paradox of Choice," distinguishes two types of people: the "maximizers," who want the absolute best option, and the much-happier "satisficers," who go with the "good enough" option. Today's perceived infinite-choice standard seems to have given rise to legions of maximizers among Gen Z. Per Schwartz's central argument that overabundance of choice tends to lead to more disappointment, this does not seem to bode well for their general well-being.

But what happens when one's choices are preemptively limited, perhaps relentlessly, via rejection? "It's possible there's a kind of resilience that people develop when you're applying to 50 schools and it doesn't hurt anymore to get rejected by 47," Schwartz tells me. But, much like Buchwald says of rejected romantics, he sees the "whatever" reaction among rejected applicants as a "very self-protective response."

"If you minimize the significance beforehand, then the pain of failure will be less consequential," Schwartz says. "It kind of drives me crazy to see people doing this, especially if it's a reflection of their effort to protect themselves rather than just their cynicism about living in modern society."

College is its own gauntlet, but the scale of rejection in the job-hunt is an order of magnitude more hellish. Via LinkedIn, Workday, and the ubiquity of other online job boards, many Zoomers apply to more jobs in a day than many lucky Boomers have in their lives. In February 2025, the average knowledge worker job opening received 244 applications, up from 93 in February 2019, according to data the hiring software provider Greenhouse shared with BI. That's 243 nos — or ghosted applications — for every yes. This scattershot reality is not specific to Gen Z, but it's the only reality that the incoming workforce has known.

Among the Gen Zers I talked to, their "body counts" of submitted job applications were regularly in the hundreds. Christopher, a 24-year-old who graduated with a finance degree, says he'd applied to 400 jobs in finance and 200 in merchandising before finding a job that still wasn't what he really wanted. His computer science grad friends have been sending applications in the thousands, he says.

Even though the logistics of applying are more or less streamlined, Gen Zers note the disconnect between the effort they're expected to make versus the consideration given in return. Colleges at least have to formally tell you no, while jobs, like a dating app match, tend to ghost at any point in the process. Is it really a mystery why some Gen Zers have started ghosting employers back?

Since graduating from Barnard last year, Catherine has applied to 300 jobs and interviewed for 20 of them. The 23-year-old says her college counselor's advice to deeply invest in her job applications — via networking, seeking referrals, getting personalized feedback on résumés — has come to feel ridiculous, given the fact that you could sit through six rounds of interviews, a practice test, and more for a single role and then, after months of waiting, not even get a proper rejection email. For her, the resounding lesson is hard to ignore: It's better not to hope for too much or to try too hard.

"You have no idea if you're even doing it right," Catherine says of the impersonal process, which is often mediated by an unknowable (and highly fallible) screening algorithm. "You don't have any ability to get feedback. It feels like being in a hedge maze, and there's probably a path through, but you feel like you keep running into walls and you're like, 'Man, if I could just talk to the person who built this.'" She adds: "I worked so hard for four years, and I built this great network and support system, and now I'm just sending applications into the void."

For Gen Zers, the disenfranchising reality of chasing entire flocks of wild geese has diminished their self-esteem. Lanya, a 22-year-old who graduated last year with a degree in media studies, tells me she thought she had done everything right as a first-gen college student who counted a Nasdaq internship among her achievements — and feels incredibly guilty that she has yet to find a job. "Self-worth-wise, this is the lowest I've ever felt," she says. "This is my time to say thank you and pay them back by showing them what they sacrificed was worth it, but I can't help them the way I want to."

Dylan, the finance grad, says the job hunt made him modify his expectations for the future. "I just remember applying to so many and feeling like: I don't care what I get. I just need to survive. I'm not scared of failing; I'm just scared of dying."

For others, mass rejection can be liberating. Several Gen Zers tell me their collection of "we regret to inform you's" in their inboxes has inspired them to invest more deeply in passion projects, move abroad, or start their own businesses. For many Gen Zers, the influencer economy is the one job market that seems legible to them — and it's always hiring.

As Gen Z grows older, the rejection and risk they face could easily compound. If you're starting out with a high degree of risk aversion, any pedestrian experience of personal rejection might harden that stance — which means we could end up seeing Gen Z calcify into incredibly risk-averse adults (and parents). Those who are resilient enough to weather the new standard scale of rejection — those who continue to shoot their shots — will eventually gain a firm foothold. But in college, careers, and romance, it's often less a matter of perseverance or merit than it is pure luck. For much of Gen Z, success is increasingly boiling down to a numbers game.

Is the real problem simply the overabundance of options, which puts Gen Zers' expectations on a collision course with reality? No help, of course, is the 24/7 firehose of comparison and fantasy provided by social media — which has shaped Gen Z's construct of reality pretty much straight from the womb. Schwartz, the psychologist, acknowledges that a zillion potential mates, schools, or careers that are seemingly so accessible are liable to make us all feel disappointment. "Some of us live in such a culture of abundance that even if you find some way to limit the options, you are thinking about what's out there," he says. Here, I think of a line from Tony Tulathimutte's aptly titled 2024 book, "Rejection," an interlocking series of horror-esque stories of young people who are puzzled by and rage at the world for their arbitrary exclusion: "His sadness, he knows, is a symptom of his entitlement, so he is not even entitled to his sadness."

But Schwartz also believes that the experience of rejection is markedly different from that of disappointment. When you're underwhelmed by your Netflix selection, or when you order what turns out to be a disappointing entrée, it's easy to have order envy for your table mates' more tantalizing plates. But while making that choice was a matter of your own agency, "a rejection is a comment on you," Schwartz says. "It's very hard to just say to yourself, 'Well, Stanford rejects 96% of its applicants. It's impossible to get in," he adds. "It's not a statement about me; it's a crapshoot.' You can say all that stuff, but my guess is you don't really believe it."

This, for me, is the most tragic element of Gen Z's rejection arc. We can expect experiences with personal rejection to trigger material consequences and a formative reckoning with one's self-worth or belief systems — taken as a collective, it's what shapes each generation so that they can turn around and bray at the next one about what they've survived.

But for Gen Z, their fates are increasingly shaped by the uniquely depersonalized, and depersonalizing, forces of technology, primarily the algorithms that pervade modern dating, college admissions, and the hiring process. These algorithms set the rules of engagement for nearly every aspect of Gen Zers' lives, making once analog processes utterly streamlined yet mystifying. No wonder various corners of the culture have responded with cottage industries of layoff coaches, résumé consultants, professional matchmakers, emotional "courses" and boot camps, and countless influencers who espouse how to "hack" life's algos. For now, the onus is still placed on the individual Gen Zer to buck the system and learn the hacks; it remains to be seen whether Gen Z will collectively reject the very sorting mechanisms that are failing them.

"There's this technology, whether it's the algorithm or AI, that's sort of against you, and that's something to take into consideration," says Guenther, the TikTok-famous therapist. "You're not being rejected by actual people, but you're being filtered out or rejected by technology. And maybe the anger should be directed at Apple and Google and Tinder and Facebook or Meta."

Yet this anger is curiously absent in all my conversations with Gen Zers. For one thing, they're savvy enough to understand that technology itself isn't worth blaming if you aren't addressing the human biases codified in the automation. Instead, the predominant mood was one of resignation, or perhaps acceptance. "It's a numbers game," one current college student says, or a "waiting game."

When we speak again several months after our first conversation, Em has a promising update: After applying to more than 400 jobs, they've found a position at a perfume shop in Oregon. Amid the grueling job hunt, David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs" dramatically reframed their view of careerism. "He talks about how humans feel when they can't make an effect on anything — it is not only psychologically traumatizing, but it creates physical problems," Em says, adding that the perfume shop was one of the best jobs they'd ever had. It's 35 hours a week with no benefits. But, Em says, "every single day in this job, I get the chance to make someone's day — to actually see my impact on the world, even if on a small scale."

Delia Cai is a writer living in New York. She runs the culture and media newsletter, Deez Links.

From the moment Donald Trump was reelected, Harvard University has been scrambling to confront what it views as an existential threat posed by the new administration.

Trump is targeting elite universities on a host of fronts, from their diversity initiatives and handling of pro-Palestinian protests to billions of dollars in student aid and government support. Last year, federal grants accounted for 11% of Harvard's operating revenue and paid for two-thirds of its sponsored research. In addition, Trump has proposed taxing the university's massive endowment of $53 billion by as much as 35% — a threat that Harvard's president, Alan Garber, has said "keeps me up at night." On Monday, due to "rapidly shifting federal policies," the university announced it was instituting a hiring freeze, reducing admissions to some of its graduate programs, and issuing a university-wide directive to limit spending.

"This is a crisis," says Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, which represents 44,000 members at more than 500 campuses nationwide. "It's the greatest mortal threat that the higher education sector has ever faced, without a doubt."

In response, Harvard has been quietly formulating a new lobbying strategy — one unlike anything the university has ever undertaken. According to interviews with more than two dozen lobbyists, funders, professors, and alumni, Harvard's plan is threefold. First, the university has hired Ballard Partners, MAGAworld's leading lobbying firm, to represent its interests in Washington. Second, Harvard is exploring ways to ingratiate itself with Trump's inner circle by building alliances with conservatives he trusts. And third, the school has joined talks with colleges and universities in red states, looking to present a case that Trump's proposed cuts would hurt not just Ivy League intellectuals, but local economies in deep-red districts.

Such moves are out of character for Harvard, which has long considered itself in a league unto itself. "Harvard has a chance to minimize the damage of the Trump administration," says Jeff Hauser, a Harvard alum who serves as executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a government watchdog group. "But it's only going to be in solidarity with other institutions with different public profiles. They're more in it together than they might realize."

Harvard was ramping up its lobbying efforts even before Trump's victory last November. In 2024, the school spent more on lobbying than it had in the past 15 years. But those familiar with Harvard's new strategy say it began in earnest two weeks before Trump's inauguration, when Harvard hired Ballard Partners as one of its leading lobbyists. It was a shrewd move — Brian Ballard, the firm's founder, is a close Trump ally who maintains an office up the road from Mar-a-Lago. What's more, Susie Wiles and Pam Bondi — Trump's chief of staff and attorney general — are both alums of the firm.

Hiring Ballard signaled Harvard's willingness to "play by Trump's rules," says Hilary Braseth, a Harvard alum who serves as executive director of OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks political influence. The lobbying firm, she adds, gives Harvard "a direct line to the Oval Office."

Ballard's first priority for Harvard is to find out where cuts are most likely to come, and which programs might be targeted. "There's a big learning curve that comes with a new administration, particularly a Trump administration," says Dan McFaul, a Ballard lobbyist who's working on the Harvard account alongside the firm's founder. "Information seems to be the most valuable thing. What's the next shoe to drop? How do we address this? How do we respond to the next grant cancellation?"

While the price of Harvard's contract with Ballard won't be public until April, it's not cheap. According to three people familiar with the deal, the university is on track to pay the lobbying firm well into the six figures this year. Justin Sayfie, a partner at Ballard, characterized its agreement with Harvard as "a monthly retainer that is customary for firms of our caliber on K Street in Washington."

Other universities are following Harvard's lead. Public records show that institutions of higher learning are hiring lobbyists at more than twice the pace they did after Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, or when Trump won his first term in 2016. Among those who have brought on new lobbyists in recent weeks are Columbia, MIT, New York University, Oklahoma State University, and Arizona State.

Beyond the hiring of Ballard, Harvard is exploring ways to make inroads into Trump's inner circle. According to two people with knowledge of the discussions, the school is considering inviting Trump loyalists to speak on campus, as a way to blunt charges of liberal bias and to curry favor with the administration. In interviews with BI, some lobbyists and experts in government relations suggested inviting Trump or Vice President JD Vance to deliver the commencement address at Harvard, or hosting MAGA figures at Harvard's Kennedy School. "You make yourself a smaller target if you do this," says one lobbyist based in Washington.

Finally, Harvard is seeking to build alliances with red-state colleges and universities, to present a united front in Washington. The message, according to several people familiar with the talks, is that cuts to federal research grants and student aid will kill jobs and short-circuit opportunities for innovation in all 50 states. "A great way to hurt a local economy is to kick a university in the teeth," one education lobbyist says.

The hope is that the red-state institutions can make the case for supporting higher education to the Republicans who represent them in Congress. Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, for instance, has already spoken out against proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health that would profoundly affect the University of Alabama.

Such alliances, insiders say, are the new norm for universities and colleges. "Strange bedfellows," observes one lobbyist with years of experience in higher education. "Get used to it."

Still, the new strategy is fraught with peril for Harvard. Forging alliances with Trump supporters could anger some of the school's most prominent donors, and provoke unrest among students and faculty. Allison P. Farrell, an opinion writer at the Harvard Crimson, recently called on the university to "not be complicit" with the new administration. "If Harvard survives by acceding to Trump," she wrote, "it has forfeited its raison d'être — it can no longer claim to be an institution dedicated to seeking and defending truth." One education lobbyist — who, like many, spoke with Business Insider on the condition of anonymity to maintain their professional relationships — called Harvard's new strategy "a pact with the devil."

While that might be a popular view on campus, at least a few professors support Harvard's efforts to make its case in Trumpian terms. Avi Loeb, a noted theoretical physicist who was critical of the university's handling of pro-Palestinian protests last year, sees an opportunity to remind Trump that research institutions like Harvard play a crucial role in driving scientific discoveries and American innovation. "Make Science Great Again!" he says. "Science is not the occupation of the elites. The Trump administration should understand that."

Unless Harvard can find a way to maintain the flow of federal support that helps underwrite its operations and research, students and faculty will be the ones who pay the price. Less federal aid could mean tighter budgets, fewer jobs, and less student aid. "It's icky, but Trump can hurt you," says one lobbyist who's based in Washington. "You're trying to mitigate risk."

Beyond traditional lobbying, universities and colleges are attempting to reach out to Trump's core constituencies. Ideas that have been floated include running commercials during the NCAA basketball tournament as well as booking school administrators on conservative outlets like Fox News and on Joe Rogan's podcast. Syracuse University, for instance, is running advertisements on subway trains in the nation's capital, touting its status as "higher education's only national veterans resource center." After the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Ari Berman, delivered the benediction at Trump's inauguration, the school took out ads on Facebook and Instagram to highlight the event.

And while some universities are eager to work with Harvard, others see a value in distancing themselves from Ivy League institutions that have drawn Trump's ire as bastions of "wokeness." Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College who leads the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, says schools should remind government officials to "not conflate higher education in America with Harvard."

Still, Harvard's deep pockets and its affiliation with Ballard mean that red-state universities are unlikely to reject an invitation to work together. "There's strength in collective action, and that goes both ways for Harvard," says one education lobbyist.

The threat to elite schools is likely to mount in the coming months. The Trump administration is investigating 60 schools, including Harvard, for their handling of "antisemitic harassment and discrimination" during campus protests against the war in Gaza. Last week, the administration announced it was canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia — another school on the list — and warned that more cuts are likely. In a statement to Business Insider, the White House decried what it calls "a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse" of taxpayer money in higher education. (Harvard declined requests for comment.)

In the meantime, the university remains a favorite punching bag for the right. Last month, Steve Bannon — a Harvard alum — came to a conference held near Harvard Square to bash the university. "We need to go into these elite institutions and cut out all the money," Bannon told an assembly of conservative students. "Once you cut that money off, that's a bitch slap. They'll start paying attention."

The conference was sponsored in part by the hedge funder and billionaire alumnus Ken Griffin, a megadonor both to Harvard and to Republican causes. Griffin, whose name appears on Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has announced he is withholding new contributions until Harvard decides to "embrace Western values," ignore "whiny snowflakes," and end what he calls a "DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame."

Given the current political climate, Harvard and other elite schools have no illusions that they can fully fend off the tsunami of cuts being proposed by the White House. For now, Harvard is focused on ways to limit the damage. And for that, the more of Trump's allies it can enlist, the better. "This will be a delicate dance," says a prominent Harvard donor who supports Trump, "and Harvard can't afford to stumble."

Dave Levinthal is an investigative journalist in Washington, DC. He was a reporter and editor at Business Insider until 2022.

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.

For America's managers, 2025 is shaping up to be the Year of the Low Performer.

When Mark Zuckerberg laid off some 4,000 employees last month, he said the goal was to "move out low-performers" and "make sure we have the best people on our teams." Around the same time, Microsoft axed scores of employees with low performance ratings. And Elon Musk has been firing thousands of federal workers he claims have failed to meet performance standards. Never mind that many of the targeted employees turned out to have high ratings. Bosses all across the country are sending the same message: Raise your performance, or you're next.

"They're trying to create more accountability," says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and professor of management at the Wharton School. "They're worried that people are a little too comfortable and complacent. They're hoping that some people will even opt out, because they realize they can't live up to the performance standard."

There's only one problem with cracking down on low performers: It doesn't work.

As decades of rigorous research have demonstrated, aggressive efforts to "raise the bar" on performance, as Zuckerberg put it, tend to backfire with remarkable consistency. CEOs may think they're creating a meritocracy, but in reality they're marching their companies straight into a trap of sunken morale, high turnover, depressed profits, and reduced innovation.

"In the short run, you might be creating some heightened performance standards and some accountability," says Grant, who serves as the chief work-life expert at Glassdoor. "In the long run, you may be shooting your organization in the foot." The evidence on making employees fear for their jobs, he adds, is clear: "They're very shortsighted decisions."

What motivates workers to do their best? It's a question managers have been wrestling with for as long as managers have been around. Back when America was first industrializing, the prevailing belief was that the best tool for driving employees was fear. The influential management theorist Frederick Taylor argued that workers were inherently lazy and in need of constant supervision. Swooping into factories, he set brutally high productivity standards — and summarily fired anyone who fell short. Everyone else had no choice but to buckle down and grind, no matter how unsafe the new standards might be, or how much misery they provoked.

As Taylorism swept the country, it made things worse rather than better, contributing to a wave of strikes that left factories idle for long stretches. By the 1950s, many companies were trying out a kinder, gentler philosophy of management. Instead of using fear to drive workers, they drew on a host of other motivating forces identified by organizational psychologists: a sense of connection and community, interesting and varied tasks, the desire to be useful. But in the early 1980s, as globalization began to erode American competitiveness, management by fear came roaring back. At General Electric, Jack Welch famously ordered his managers to rank 20% of their employees as A players, 70% as B players — and the remaining 10%, many of whom were fired for low performance, as C players. The practice, which came to be known as "rank and yank," spread throughout corporate America.

As a management philosophy, it proved to be a disaster. Take what happened at Microsoft, where the rank-and-yank system was known by another name: stack ranking. By the early 2010s, the once dominant company had watched its market cap plunge by more than 50%. One of the primary culprits? Its Welchian management system, which treated performance as a zero-sum game. If you wanted to succeed, someone else had to fail.

"Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed," the journalist Kurt Eichenwald found. "As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses — such as e-book and smartphone technology — were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays." By 2013, when Microsoft finally abandoned stack ranking, much of corporate America had as well — including GE, where it all started.

The long history of management by fear has given scholars a lot of data to scrutinize. So what has all the research found? For starters, using terror to motivate your staff works in the short run: When their jobs are hanging in the balance, employees work harder and faster. But the initial surge in productivity, studies have shown, comes at the expense of quality. As workers rush to keep up, their output is inevitably shoddier, and riddled with mistakes.

What's more, work in the performance pressure cooker becomes less innovative. Take a study that took place in the 1990s, at a Fortune 500 tech company with more than 30,000 employees. After a series of layoffs, the remaining high performers became less creative and generated fewer new ideas for inventions. Organizational psychologists call this a "threat-rigidity response" — our tendency to respond to fear by clinging to the familiar. The anxiety generated by job insecurity becomes so overwhelming, studies suggest, that it actually impairs people's cognitive functioning. That might not matter so much when you're completing routine tasks, but it's debilitating when it comes to problem-solving.

"People focus very narrowly on protecting their jobs," says Grant. "They stop taking risks and thinking creatively and innovating, which is exactly what you need them to do in a turbulent environment."

Making employees fear for their job security also causes them to flee: One study estimated that laying off just 1% of a workforce would, on average, lead to a 31% spike in voluntary turnover. That might not sound so terrible for a company that's trimming its head count, but the departures aren't random. High performers, who have the most options, leave in far larger numbers than mediocre employees. Creating a culture of fear also makes it harder to recruit high performers. In one study, businesses that conducted layoffs slid in Fortune's rankings of the most admired companies. The more you slash your low performers, the fewer high performers you'll wind up with.

Pretty much every study that has ever crunched the numbers has found the same thing: Contrary to what leaders like Zuckerberg and Musk believe, instilling fear in employees actually hurts a company's profitability in the long run. That effect is particularly large in R&D-intensive, high-growth industries like tech. The feelings of uncertainty that job cuts engender end up paralyzing businesses instead of turbocharging them.

"It's a destructive practice," says Sandra Sucher, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies layoffs. "If Mark Zuckerberg thinks that this is inspiring to people to do a better job, he needs a primer on how it is that people are motivated. Most people aren't sufficiently motivated by fear to actually do better."

That's not to say that CEOs should run their companies like Montessori preschools. There were a lot of things that Taylor got right a century ago: setting high standards, monitoring employee output, rewarding people who do well. Those remain the cornerstones of good management today. During the pandemic, some companies may have swung a little too far to the gentle side, suspending performance reviews altogether. It was an expression of empathy that recognized the extraordinary stresses of the crisis — but it left some managers with no idea what their employees were doing, let alone how well they were doing it. High performers weren't getting recognized and rewarded, and low performers weren't getting the help they needed. Many bosses blamed the chaos on remote work, and ordered everyone back to the office. But the real problem was the lack of a properly functioning system of performance management.

"There's a big difference between being demanding and being demeaning," says Grant. "Demanding is about saying: 'Look, we have extremely high expectations. We hired you because we believe you're capable of meeting them. Here are your goals. Let's talk through what I can do to help you achieve them.' Then, if somebody is not pulling their weight, you give them feedback — you let them know what they need to change. If they're not willing or able to change it, yes, of course, at some point you let them go."

The demeaning way? It's basically the approach being taken by Zuckerberg and Musk. Setting arbitrary quotas of the number of employees who should get cut. Forcing managers to fire people who were consistently told they were meeting and exceeding expectations. Publicly labeling them as "low performers," which hurts their chances of landing a new job. And above all, failing to recognize that an employee who isn't working out isn't just a failure of the individual. It's also a failure of management.

"Unfortunately," Grant says, "what seems to be in vogue right now is a more demeaning approach to leadership."

Given the overwhelming evidence against management by fear, it's puzzling why Silicon Valley is trying to revive it. The tech industry, after all, was founded on the belief that everything should be dictated by data. Grant blames ignorance. "When I talk with CEOs, many of them are just unaware of the evidence," he says. "They haven't thought through the unintended consequences of their decisions."

Surely, though, it shouldn't be difficult for a company like Microsoft to remember just how poorly things went the last time it went after low performers — and how much better it did once it replaced stack ranking with Satya Nadella's softer approach of "model, coach, care." Microsoft post-2013 is one of the great success stories of the past decade — an ailing giant that actually managed to become relevant again. The tech industry boomed, in no small part, because starry-eyed startups motivated their coders and product managers and salespeople with the promise that they were changing the world. Eager millennials were happy to devote their nights and weekends to make that mission a reality, and they turned their underdog employers into some of the largest businesses in history.

"It's hugely frustrating, because we become smart for a while and then we become stupid," says Sucher, the Harvard Business School professor. "But if you've been in business for a long time, which I have now, you get used to the fact that it goes in cycles like this."

Perhaps using performance-based cuts to instill fear in their employees is just the CEO version of a threat-rigidity response. In the 1980s, the threat was global competition. Today, it's the winner-takes-all war over AI. Under siege, history teaches us, bosses behave the same way employees do: They keep reverting to the same tired methods that just don't work, no matter how many times they try it.

Even the famously cutthroat Jack Welch, toward the end of his life, repudiated the rank-and-yank phrase that had become synonymous with his name. Low performers, he said, should never be surprised when the conversation turns to dismissal. And they should never be "summarily shown the door." Instead, he said, their managers should "help them find their next job with compassion and respect." Today's low performers, it turns out, may not be the employees who are being laid off, but the CEOs who are firing them based on an outdated — and counterproductive — system of management.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

Virgílio Bento was in a bind. He wanted to spread the word about his growing healthtech company, Sword Health, but the entrepreneur hated the traditional public relations playbook. He'd hired a PR agency before, which in retrospect "seems moronic," he says. "For a comms person to understand what you're saying, they need to be in the weeds." But when he tried hiring someone to run comms internally, he says, "that also sucked."

Then he shared his frustration with Delian Asparouhov, a cofounder of the spacetech startup Varda and a partner at Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund. Asparouhov told him there was only one PR person he should be talking to: Lulu Cheng Meservey, a communications executive who has led messaging at companies including Substack, Anduril, and Activision — with unusual flair and aggression.

From the outset, Cheng Meservey struck Bento as radically different from other comms people. She had a no-nonsense approach. Her first piece of advice to him was: Don't let your message get diluted by your comms team, and don't depend on PR agencies to bait the media's interest. You are the founder — own your company's narrative. In short, go direct.

For Bento, it was a refreshing tack, if a little beguiling. A PR manager proselytizing the mission of "going direct" would seem to obliterate the whole point of having a PR manager in the first place. But this is Cheng Meservey's defining doctrine, and it has made her one of today's most sought-after communications gurus in Silicon Valley and beyond, particularly among high-wattage founders. Her website includes personal endorsements from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and the Free Press cofounder Bari Weiss, all three of whom attempted to hire Cheng Meservey in-house before she launched her own firm in 2024. "i super value her advice," Altman wrote to me in a text. "she is someone i love talking to."

As more tech founders follow the examples of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — shedding their communications teams and taking their messaging directly to social media and the chatty podcast circuit — it's easy to see why someone who encourages founders to unapologetically be themselves would be in demand today. "She has gotten good at teaching founders how to fish," Asparouhov says. Or as Ryan Delk, the CEO of the education startup Primer, tells me: "Lulu is the Steph Curry of comms."

Significantly less charmed by Cheng Meservey are many of her peers in the PR industry that she's set on disrupting. "People bring up Lulu all the time," one communications executive who knows Cheng Meservey tells me. "They say, 'Do you know Lulu? Isn't she the worst?'" Another snipes: "She does not have a thriving business. What she has is a thriving Twitter following."

Some of the vitriol is owed to the rumor-churning nature of PR. "If somebody is effective at communications and has a good point of view, then the industry will react to it," says Brooke Hammerling, who experienced a wave of resentment among her peers after her tech-PR firm, Brew, was featured in a splashy New York Times story. "They will feel uneasy about a new approach, so they'll criticize it."

Cheng Meservey invites the spite; it's core to her brand. The sparse landing page of her new firm, Rostra, declares: "TRADITIONAL PR IS DEAD." Beneath is an 850-word "Go Direct Manifesto," in which she smears "corporate communications" as "an oxymoron, as nothing meaningful can be communicated by a faceless committee." "A founder's passion, vision, and conviction," Cheng Meservey writes, "can't be simulated by other — least of all the press-release-enjoying middle managers already scouting for their next jobs." On X, she offers her 100,000 followers barb-filled, Harvard Business Review-like mini case studies on PR triumphs and blunders of the day. A recent United Airlines post was "lazy and patronizing," she declared. A memo from the founder of CrowdStrike was full of "cowardly and callous" and "legalese doublespeak," she said.

"Some people would call this self-promotion, but what Lulu does is marketing in a smart way that resonates with founders: She shows them how she thinks," Rachael Horwitz, the chief marketing officer at Haun Ventures, says. "This flies in the face of what many tech comms people think is OK. Comms is a bit of a snake pit in this way. It's like Fight Club. They do not want you to talk about comms." (Most of the communications executives I spoke with requested anonymity.)

Cheng Meservey's vision for communications neatly aligns with today's shifting media paradigm, in which everyone — from competitors to customers — can publish their stories and screeds about companies online without depending on publicists or journalists. While there are obvious upsides to a "go direct" strategy, there are also obvious reputational risks, and it's difficult to execute at scale. For it to work, you need to stand out in the oversaturated ideas marketplace, a feat that's only becoming more challenging: "How many thought leaders do we really need? This is information overload," says one communications executive. "At the very least, you're subscribing and curating your own echo chamber."

After graduating from Yale and then the Fletcher School at Tufts University, Cheng Meservey worked for JPMorgan as a financial analyst before cofounding her first communications firm, TrailRunner International, in 2016. Its clients included the blue-chip venture firm Founders Fund and fast-growing corporations like Spotify. Even then, Cheng Meservey was known for bucking traditions.

During one 2018 meeting about a coming announcement with a corporate client, Cheng Meservey "said something along the lines of, 'You guys shouldn't put out a press release — press releases are so boring,'" Hannah Guenther, a director at TrailRunner who was on the call, says. To Guenther's surprise, the client agreed. "They were like, 'You're so right. I couldn't agree more, but we're stuck in this routine and no one wants to change,'" she says. This tendency for challenging convention stood out to a TrailRunner client that was looking to challenge the media industry, the newsletter company Substack, which Cheng Meservey joined as vice president of communications in 2021.

Cheng Meservey happened to be entering the arena of tech communications at a pivotal moment. For years, the communications divisions of the world's most influential tech companies, in an attempt to be taken more seriously by the media, hired massive teams made up of Washington-imported policy wonks and attorneys. They specialized in what one former Meta communications executive describes as "the Hillary Clinton style of communications: We figured out what people wanted us to say; then we said it." The person adds, "Sheryl Sandberg used to tell us all the time, 'As long as journalists hold the pen, you have to endear yourself to them.'" (Sandberg did not respond to a request for comment.)

It was a conciliatory strategy that relied, almost entirely, on milquetoast corporate statements and communication managers equivocating behind the veil of anonymity. To avoid public outrage at the height of cancel culture in the late 2010s, companies were instructed to deflect criticism and never own up to their mistakes. "It was all about keeping your head down, getting the press to like you, and trying to win a game that the average tech founder isn't inclined to play very well, much less win," that same former Meta exec says.

Eventually, these tactics led to an overwhelming public mistrust in the tech industry, which fueled an increasingly negative press. "The relationship collapse between media and tech came in part from the fact that tech was spewing so much bullshit through press releases that the media said, 'We can't trust direct company communications. We can only listen to disgruntled former employees,'" says Eric Newcomer, a longtime reporter who runs the tech news Substack Newcomer.

So when Cheng Meservey joined Substack and began immediately playing offense, it stood out. If, in her view, reporters got the story wrong, she called them from her personal Twitter account. "It was like, 'Oh, look, the Substack flack is going off on Twitter again," says one tech reporter who asked to speak anonymously because he wasn't authorized to talk on the record. "She was always getting into hot water, spouting off about free speech, deplatforming, that kind of thing." When The New York Times ran a critical story about Substack's "growing pains," Cheng Meservey tweeted that the piece was filled with hearsay and cherry-picking. When Wired suggested that Substack "paid extremists," she fired off a series of tweets saying the reporter put out misleading information, which eventually led to a correction on the story. Soon after, Fox News published a story under the headline "Substack executive explains journalism to Wired writer."

Cheng Meservey's unabashed stance seemed tailor-made for one particularly embattled tech company: Activision Blizzard. When she became Activision Blizzard's chief communications officer in April 2022, The Wall Street Journal had recently published two especially searing investigations involving several accounts of sexual harassment and a toxic workplace at the video game giant. The company was also embroiled in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission in an attempt to block Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition. (In July 2023, a federal judge ruled against the FTC's bid to delay the acquisition. In December 2023, Activision paid $54 million to settle a workplace discrimination lawsuit.)

Activision's future depended on its resurrection from the rubble of public opinion, and Cheng Meservey threw herself headfirst into the onslaught. Less than a month into her tenure, she became headline news after she was accused of union busting. After more than a dozen Blizzard quality assurance testers secured the right to hold a union vote, she told staff on Slack that unionizing might result in smaller raises and difficult conflicts with management. Her Slack messages were leaked, and Cheng Meservey doubled down on her position on Twitter. Ethan Gach, a reporter at Kotaku, wrote a story with the headline "Activision's Newest Exec Has Decided to Post Through It." In response, Cheng Meservey subtweeted Gach, inferring that he was obsessed with her.

The reporter had never before been dragged on Twitter by the chief communications officer of a multibillion-dollar company. "It was unusual," Gach says, but so was everything about the way Cheng Meservey was running comms at Activision. "Here was the head comms person for the biggest video game publisher in the United States having casual conversation about policy on Twitter."

Months later, a pitch from Activision arrived in the inbox of Stephen Totilo, a veteran gaming reporter at Axios. "It was a weird, tortured" attempt at blowing a hole in the FTC's antitrust case, Totilo says: It suggested that the HBO adaptation of Sony's video game "The Last of Us" was proof that Sony wouldn't be weakened if Microsoft bought Activision. Totilo figured he'd take Activision up on its offer to speak with Cheng Meservey. "From her work at Substack, the vibe I was expecting was, 'OK, you idiot reporter, let me tell you how wrong you are,'" he says.

Instead, he discovered the opposite: Cheng Meservey not only was more vulnerable than he'd anticipated but also answered tough questions with a sense of "humanity and thoughtfulness," he says. "She functioned radically different from any other comms person I've ever encountered in 20 years of covering gaming," he adds.

Early into her time at Activision, it was obvious that Cheng Meservey was having an outsize effect on how the company was covered. "She facilitated more journalism being done," Totilo says. For one, the company switched from dodging the press to actively, and frequently, engaging with reporters, often by text message. "I found her very charming," Totilo says. "Whether that makes me an astute observer or a chump, I'm not sure. But I prefer her strategy to the traditional approach."

Today, Cheng Meservey's growing list of clients has included people known for their bold, contrarian approach to business like Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, Safe Superintelligence Inc. cofounder Ilya Sutskever (formerly of OpenAI), and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, who stoked controversy this past summer when he said that he planned to forgo DEI policies and instead hire for MEI: "merit, excellence, and intelligence." Her advice has been essential to founders in moments of public scrutiny, like Varda's Asparouhov, whose company launched a capsule into space in September 2023 that was unable to return on its planned schedule because of regulatory restraints.

At the time, Asparouhov says, he was in a state of "extreme cortisol panic." Cheng Meservey was able to clearly navigate the complexity of company messaging dealing with military regulation, space travel, and, of course, announcements on X. She broke down various tactics for approaching reporters and regulators, along with a strategic narrative for company messaging. "She summarized it in this way of like, 'Look, make sure that any time you're thinking about comms, at the end of the day, your job is to make the company successful.'"

When I first reached out to Cheng Meservey, she seemed — despite her public persona — not all that into the idea of having a story written about her. "I'm not sure if I'm as interesting as your editor thinks I am," she said. "I would urge them to reconsider." Then she shifted into strategy mode. Had I considered pitching a profile of her to The New York Times?

I asked whether some of the well-known names cited on her company website, like OpenAI's Altman, might be interested in speaking with me. "Neither he nor I will want to talk about that, unfortunately, which is annoying because the work I did for them is really interesting," she said. "[Sam] has offered to pay me, but I haven't taken a penny. And OpenAI and Worldcoin are always in litigation." Then she rattled off a few names of people who might talk, including The Free Press' Weiss, who had encouraged Cheng Meservey to start her own company. ("Things are hectic here but Lulu is the best :)," Weiss wrote in an email.) Given how unusual it is for a communications executive to dish about her high-profile clients on the record, I was surprised by her candor. Was this gossipy transparency the new model of going direct?

But as I continued to report, Cheng Meservey eventually declined to speak any further on the record, save a boilerplate statement she sent over email: "I appreciate the interest and wish I could be more helpful, but we don't discuss client details. I will say that the most gratifying thing about building Rostra has been getting to see 'going direct' become a default in modern communication. The best founders are building their own platforms and their own narratives, and that's the story worth watching closely!"

Given Cheng Meservey's lively online presence, I'm certain she has far more nuanced thoughts on what it means to "go direct" in the new media paradigm. But for those, you'll have to follow her on X. Which may be the gist of Rostra's modus operandi. Why speak with a reporter when you can distill your thoughts, directly, on your own terms using social media?

Therein lies one of the obvious downsides to Cheng Meservey's strategy. Much like the founders she represents, Rostra is building a brand that's genuinely compelling, with an expressive, opinionated leader at its helm. It reminds me of something Delk, the microschool founder, told me: "If what you're building isn't interesting and you don't have conviction, then Lulu's strategy doesn't work."

Zoë Bernard is a feature writer based in Los Angeles. She writes about technology, crime, and culture. Formerly, she covered technology for The Information and Business Insider.

Stop me if you've heard this before: Millennials have gotten screwed by the housing market.

The lack of affordable homes is one of the biggest reasons for the generation's economic shortcomings — why they can't catch up to their parents financially, live in cities near their friends, or even have as many kids as they want to. Several suspects have been blamed for this, including house-hoarding baby boomers and greedy corporate landlords. But the main issue was timing: A huge number of millennials reached their prime homebuying years after the 2008 financial crisis, right as the housing-market bust was pushing builders to cut back on construction. When it came time for millennials to claim their share of the American dream, the homes simply weren't there.

While the country's housing shortage, now measured in the millions of units, seems intractable, there are growing signs that it may not be a permanent state of affairs. Sure, lots of people have struggled to become homeowners over the past few years, sending prices to record highs and deepening the housing crunch. But population forecasts for the coming decade suggest a monumental shift is on the horizon. And millennials, after finally lifting themselves onto the homeownership ladder, may wind up with the short end of the stick yet again.

There's no denying that Americans are getting older. Slower population growth over the next decade and beyond, with more deaths and fewer births, will mean weaker demand for housing. This slowdown could come to a head in the 2030s, when members of Gen Z — a slightly smaller cohort than millennials — take over as the primary contingent of first-time homebuyers. Baby boomers will simultaneously be aging out of the market (economist-speak for dying), freeing up millions of homes nationwide. Unless immigration picks up dramatically to compensate, the combination of more supply and less demand could cause home prices to flatline or even drop.

Don't get me wrong: Cheaper housing is a good thing. But while a dip in home prices probably sounds like a godsend to the millions of renters hoping to become owners, it could be devastating for those who bought a place in the past few years. These homeowners, mostly millennials, are counting on their properties to grow in value and deliver a hefty financial return — the gilded path enjoyed by baby boomers. Like generations before them, millennials have tied up most of their wealth in their homes, which they'll rely upon to fuel their retirements or fund the purchases of bigger places down the line. Instead, when it finally comes time for them to sell, they may find that their nest eggs have turned out a lot smaller than they'd hoped.

Population trends, unlike the constant ups and downs of the economy, follow a steady drumbeat: People grow up, settle down, and eventually die. Demographics can't tell us exactly how many homes we'll need in a decade or two, but they can offer a pretty good idea. Builders and policymakers, however, haven't been great at reading the tea leaves. A recent paper from a team of researchers led by Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, argues that the lever pullers who control the housing supply have been out of touch for decades, relying on old data or focusing too much on the short term at the expense of the more distant future.

Take the current housing crunch. For years, demographic forecasts made it clear that a huge chunk of millennials would be looking to settle down in the late 2010s, signaling a need for a lot more houses. But homebuilding activity in 2011 dropped to its lowest level in 60 years, and credit availability tightened, making it harder to get a mortgage and creating more pent-up homebuying demand. Cue tough times for millennials.

But some real estate experts are starting to pay more attention to the underlying realities. I recently had lunch with Nik Shah, the CEO of Home.LLC, a housing analytics, consulting, and AI conglomerate. Shah and his team have gained prominence over the past few years for accurately predicting changes in home prices despite a tumultuous market. I was surprised, then, when instead of talking about the coming months, he mostly wanted to discuss the long term. Shah told me he's bullish on home prices for the next handful of years, forecasting mild year-over-year increases. But based on the demographic data, Shah expects home prices to stall out in the 2030s.

"Demographics play a critical role in home prices," Shah says. "And right now, the future projections on demographics are not rosy."

The biggest factor is deaths. In the coming decade, baby boomers will begin "aging out of the market" in droves. The size of the generation's adult population is second only to millennials, with roughly 66 million members who range in age from 61 to 79. But their numbers are projected to shrink by about 23%, or 15.6 million people, in the next decade, and by another 23.4 million people from 2035 to 2045. Boomers own about 41% of real estate nationwide, worth roughly $20 trillion, per the Federal Reserve. Their exodus will represent a sea change in the housing market.

All those boomer deaths, combined with a slight decline in birth rates over the next two decades, will work out to slower population growth. The result will be a lot less demand for homes. Data from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies indicates that the total number of households in the US is expected to increase by 8.6 million over the next 10 years. In the past three decades, that figure ranged from 10.1 million households, in the 2010s, to 13.5 million, in the 1990s. From 2035 to 2045, household growth is expected to retreat even more, to a net increase of just 5.1 million, which would be the lowest growth rate in a century.

With more deaths and fewer births, the total number of US-born people in the country will shrink. The trajectory of the country's population, Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the center, wrote in a report, will therefore be "entirely dependent on future immigration." Those household-growth projections from the Census Bureau assume that net immigration holds steady at 873,000 people a year for the next decade, roughly in line with the past 30 years. But even if you assume significantly higher immigration, McCue tells me, household growth is expected to decline over time.

The next generation of new homeowners won't represent a steep dropoff in demand. Harvard JCHS estimates there are now roughly 68 million Gen Zers, aged 16 to 30, compared to 68.8 million millennials. McCue says the real problem comes from the other end of the population equation, since a steady handoff to Gen Z homebuyers won't offset the wave of boomers exiting the housing market.

"It's not going to be enough to keep up with the pickup in losses, because the baby boomer generation is just so much bigger than previous generations," McCue tells me. "The pickup in mortality is going to outpace that."

Given the shifting demographics, the center says America probably needs to build about 11.3 million homes over the next decade and just 8 million new units between 2035 and 2045 to keep up with demand from new households (not factoring in the current shortage). These are fairly modest goals — in the 2010s, which included the weakest years for new construction in more than half a century, builders still finished almost 10 million units. In the 2000s, they built 17 million. As demand for homes slows down, McCue says, construction should have a chance to catch up.

That possibility should sound tantalizing to anyone hoping for an end to our housing shortage. But the imbalance between supply and demand has fueled an extraordinary run-up in home values — if that lopsidedness goes away, millennial homeowners may not see the same financial windfalls as their predecessors.

Millennials aren't young upstarts anymore. In 2030, they'll range in age from 34 to 49, according to Pew Research's cutoffs, which means many will be looking to move up the rungs of the housing ladder as they buy their first places or upgrade to bigger homes. They've already made up considerable ground in this department, with more than half the generation now owning their homes. For these fortunate millennials, the past few years of home-price gains have padded their net worths and contributed to a sunnier financial outlook.

While things are looking up, that may not last. A slowdown in home-price growth, or even outright declines, could leave a large chunk of millennials in a weird spot. Sure, for those who don't yet own a home, a breather in home-price appreciation could offer a chance to play catch-up. But among the millennials who are actually doing pretty well financially, most wealth is tied up in real estate and retirement accounts. An analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests that from 2019 to 2022, the typical person born in the 1980s, otherwise known as an elder millennial, saw the value of their assets balloon by a whopping 57.3%, even after adjusting for inflation. Most of that increase — 41 percentage points — came from real estate.

So let's say household formation slows down as expected, relieving some of the pressure on home prices to keep going up, up, up. The team at Home.LLC projects that in this scenario, even if immigration holds steady, home prices will stay flat, maybe increasing by about 1% in some years and dipping slightly in others. That's a long way from the kind of market crash we saw in 2008, but it would mean far less wealth gains for today's millennial homeowners.

To illustrate this tension, compare a hypothetical baby boomer with a hypothetical millennial. Each buys a $300,000 home during their heyday. The boomer bought the house in 1994. Thirty years later, it's fully paid off and sells for about $1.21 million — a stunning gain of 305%, based on the typical home-price appreciation in the US over those decades. The millennial buys the house in 2010 and also holds on to it for 30 years. Its value grows by 2.5% each year from 2025 to 2030 and by just 0.5% a year from 2031 to 2040. The home ends up being worth about $813,000, a 171% increase. That's nothing to sneeze at, but you'd take the boomer's gains any day of the week.

"Obviously, the difference is pretty huge," Sid Samant, Home.LLC's lead economist, tells me.

But even the elder millennial in this example is lucky, because they got to ride out the historic home-value increases from the the pandemic. In Home.LLC's model, someone who bought a house in 2022 — say, a millennial who finally found their foothold in the housing market — would see their home's value increase by just 31% through 2040.

Forecasting home prices a decade from now is a fraught endeavor. Nobody expected baby boomers to stay in their homes as long as they have, throwing the housing market out of whack for everyone else. For policymakers, immigration is the easiest lever to pull in counteracting demographic realities, which also makes it the biggest question mark. And there's no way of knowing how future changes in the economy will alter construction activity or the homebuying calculus.

But demographic change is inevitable. And even McCue, the Harvard researcher who lives and breathes this stuff, is still wrestling with the downstream effects of our aging population.

"The extent to which we're going to start losing households was very eye-opening," McCue tells me. "I think we still need to get our heads around the implications of that."

If the housing shortage does indeed go away, it will hardly be mourned. But any big shift usually comes with some collateral damage. In this case, it could be homeowning millennials who get burned.

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

What makes a successful business successful? Every management consultant and startup founder and financial analyst can tell you, and they'll all tell you something different. Service leadership! Culture of innovation! Diverse workforce, sound business fundamentals, the quality of the snacks in the break room — who knows?

Now, in the biggest undertaking of its kind, a bunch of economists have compiled a comprehensive database of the origins and fates of 50 million American companies. Which ones, they wanted to know, became the largest employers in their industries? Which ones succeeded?

The team's leader, John Haltiwanger, is an economist at the University of Maryland who studies "dynamism." That means he seeks to understand changes over time — why some things surge while other things flame out. He and his team looked at the lifespan of American companies founded from 1981 to 2022. They examined an impressive range of factors: owner demographics, management structure, startup financing, profitability, even the aspirations of the founders. It's nothing less than a complete accounting of what turns a business into a behemoth — "the best database in town," as Haltiwanger puts it.

So, O great and powerful database, what makes the numbers go up and to the right? What makes a company successful?

The answer — you will be shocked to hear — is money.

The strongest correlation between business success and the factors Haltiwanger analyzed is how much financing a company is able to raise before it launches. Starting with $1 million boosts the probability of success by a whopping 25 percentage points. It's like the old Steve Martin joke: Here's how to become a millionaire: First, get a million dollars.

But Haltiwanger found that it also matters where the money comes from. If you self-finance with credit cards, your chances of success actually decrease by 2 points. If you get a loan from a bank, your chances improve by 9 points — but that's been harder and harder to do over the past couple of decades. So the best bet is if you're backed by venture capital: VC investment increases your chance of success by 5 points.

Just as Silicon Valley is always boasting, venture-backed startups really have been the most economically dynamic and productive companies in America. They have the most innovation, the most patents, the biggest R&D budgets. And they have often grown to have the most employees — the metric that Haltiwanger's team used to indicate success.

And therein lies a problem: Almost no one gets venture capital. Of the 1.5 million companies that launch every year, only a few thousand are blessed with VC investment. And the best way to get venture capital, Haltiwanger found, is to be a young, white man.

Now, Haltiwanger isn't the first to discover venture capital's built-in bias. As I've written, VCs are mostly white and mostly male, and they tend to give money to people they know and like, who turn out to also be mostly white and male. Last year, four out of every five venture deals went to an all-male founder team.

But Haltiwanger's study confirms the pattern. Women and nonwhite owners, he found, are less likely to have outside investors — and young founders are more likely to have them. The secret to succeeding in business, the data shows, essentially boils down to: Be a tech bro who gets money from other tech bros.

"There's so much that has to go right for you to be successful," says Florian Ederer, an economist at Boston University who studies startups. "That's always going to privilege people with better networks and better initial starting conditions."

I know! Not great. The data confirms the lived experience of millions of entrepreneurs: The richer you start off, the richer you're likely to get.

But Haltiwanger hopes to use his database to answer a question even deeper than why some companies succeed. That is, why more and more companies don't. Haltiwanger's data shows that the legendary energy of Silicon Valley startups — the origin story of a couple of geniuses back in the 1980s building something in a garage that metastasized into an Apple or a Microsoft or a Google — well, that just isn't happening much anymore. The VC money is still there; the dynamism ain't.

Young, fast companies used to be major sources of employment. In 1981, 15% of working Americans were employed at companies four years old or younger. In 2022, Haltiwanger's team found, it was down to only 9%. And those companies aren't growing as fast as they used to. In 1999, the most dynamic companies outstripped the median rate of growth by 30%. By 2012, they were expanding at pretty much the same rate as other companies.

If the tech sector were as dynamic as it was back in the 1990s, when a cohort of startups grew into Big Tech, it would be sending a constant stream of new challengers onto the field. But that hasn't happened. "Have we seen a remarkable cohort like that in a while?" Haltiwanger says. "The answer is no — and we don't know why." Figuring that out, he adds, will take some more number crunching. But he has some theories.

Theory No. 1: Maybe people are starting different kinds of small businesses nowadays — not high-tech firms, but things like restaurants and pool cleaner services and yoga studios. Those businesses are more likely than tech firms to be owned by women and people of color. From 2002 to 2021, Haltiwanger found, the share of young companies run by women rose from 10% to 18%, while those run by people of color jumped from 10% to 27%. But those owners almost never get venture funding, and they're more likely to self-finance with credit cards. So they're less likely to get big, the way tech companies do.

Theory No. 2: Now that a handful of companies like Google and Meta dominate the tech landscape, maybe the kind of people who might otherwise have been hard-charging founders are instead getting high-paying, low-stress gigs in Big Tech. After all, the older, slower-growing companies are where the jobs are. Small businesses got less dynamic, in other words, because a few big companies now employ all the aspiring dynamos.

Theory No. 3: Big Tech companies aren't just employing all the talent — they're also buying up all the most promising startups. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, innovative startups were more likely to go public than get purchased; by 2001, the reverse was true. In 2019, there were only 100 IPOs — compared with 900 acquisitions. Most of the startups were bought by the half-dozen Big Tech companies you'd expect. The newbies didn't get big. They got eaten.

The question Haltiwanger is asking — why young companies aren't growing as fast as they used to — is an important one. Before 2000, when businesses were able to get bigger, America's aggregate productivity growth was a bit more than 2%. Since then, it's more like 1%. Less dynamism acts as a brake on the economy.

Now, it's possible that all those little startups swallowed by the bigger companies are still creating intellectual property and jobs and new products, goosing the economy in ways the numbers have missed. "The evidence is not definitive yet. That's something we want to go investigate," Haltiwanger says. "But if innovation was proceeding in the same way as before — startups were contributing as much as they did before, just in a different way — then why is productivity growth so low? Something has changed."

Which brings us to Theory No. 4. Maybe, Haltiwanger thinks, the lull in business growth is a good thing. Maybe, just maybe, it's the calm before the innovative storm.

The conventional story, as told by Silicon Valley, is that tech startups got big thanks to the bold, risk-taking vision of the venture capitalists backing them. Haltiwanger thinks it's more complicated than that. For one thing, startup-driven productivity and tech innovation happened long before the invention of modern venture capital. And for another, periods of innovation are usually preceded by a noticeable lag in growth. Go back and look at industries that boomed in the past century — chemicals, cars, robotics — and you see that there's a period of dormancy before the new tech gets implemented at scale. Startups quietly work out the kinks in their crazy ideas, bursting forth like cicadas when the tech is ready.

If that's true, Haltiwanger theorizes, maybe the current slump in business growth is a signal of a boom to come. And maybe this time around, the new tech that's about to explode on the scene is artificial intelligence.

"We are clearly seeing a surge in startups in the last few years," Haltiwanger says. "We see in the data that it is closely tied to AI. The really hard question is: Is this a new platform, a pathbreaking change in the way we do business and the way we work and how we live? Or is it not going to have the same kick as IT?" That's what Haltiwanger is looking to answer with his monster database. The productivity slowdown of the past 10 years might just be the shakedown period before an explosion of nifty new AI stuff, and we'll experience another period of dynamism.

Of course, explosions also cause a lot of damage. Cheaper and lighter AI systems from China like DeepSeek could nullify the capital-intensive machinations of wannabe incumbents like OpenAI. Or AI could eliminate millions of jobs, sparking all sorts of economic upheaval. Or the most innovative AI startups could get consumed by the Microsofts and Googles before they're able to grow into tech giants of their own. The economy might get more dynamic with the rise of AI. But if the new technology moves fast and breaks things, as so many of its predecessors have, will that still count as success?

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

After a long workday, a too long doctor's appointment, a lingering cold, or a visit to the emergency veterinarian, canceling plans can be an understandable relief. Or as the comedian John Mulaney put it in his 2012 stand-up special: "In terms of like instant relief, canceling plans is like heroin. It is an amazing feeling."

The hedonistic benefits of canceling plans have in recent years gained a more philosophical underpinning. As the new mantra goes: You don't owe anyone anything. The thinking is that self-care is key — your needs should come first, even if you've committed to plans. So go ahead, ignore that party invitation, ghost a friend's texts (or block their number completely), or cancel that dinner reservation.

Many Americans, particularly young people, have taken this idea to heart. In a YouGov survey conducted in June 2022, 36% of respondents said they often agreed to plans far in advance but realized closer to the date that they didn't want to participate. Among respondents 18 to 29, 56% said they very or somewhat often made plans and then realized they didn't want to go.

But as another adage tells us, everything is good in moderation. As it turns out, that applies to backing out of the plans we make with other people. William Chopik, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, has studied why people feel relief when they cancel plans — and how to best do that.

"We were like, 'Well, why do they feel that way?' Because, in a way, you're kind of rejecting another person," Chopik said. "You know, you're telling another person you don't want to hang out with them."

While this might seem like an easier way of living, it has more sinister effects on our relationships and economics. If we don't owe anyone anything, we may start to view service workers as input-output machines to be screamed at rather than as human beings. We can pull the plug on a friend's Friday-night plans via a text message saying we vaguely don't feel up to it — we don't have to view or hear the friend's disappointment. On a sociopolitical level, we might throw support behind movements to benefit ourselves even if they prove harmful to other people.

"This leads to all sorts of effects for ourselves, from loneliness and isolation to also just a lack of deep meaning," said Richard Cowden, a research scientist who studies topics including forgiveness. Cowden said there's an idea called relational meaning, where your meaning in life is fundamentally rooted in relationships — with family, friends, and broader communities.

"Without fulfilling this fundamental need, we struggle in different ways," Cowden said.

There are many good reasons to cancel plans: an illness, a family emergency, a work meeting gone awry. A society where people feel able to adjust plans for legitimate reasons is a step forward. But for every emergency-driven cancellation, there are dozens more nebulous ones — where, yes, you could go, but a little voice in your head is telling you not to.

All these little decisions to cancel add up to a lot more alone time. In 2010, Americans spent an average of about 5.6 hours a day alone; by 2023, that had risen to nearly seven hours.

Chopik tells me there are two big forces undergirding some of our newfound flakiness. One is the proliferation of what he calls busy culture, a nasty offspring of hustle culture. Modern conveniences make life easier, but constant connectivity pushes us to work more, not less. And when our jobs consume every corner of our lives, we start to view social outings as a special privilege or event rather than something we should weave into our daily routine. Busy culture, Chopik says, is this illusion that we simply don't have enough time for each other, or that that time is overlaid on the rest of our lives rather than an integral part of them.

The other reason is grimmer: We're getting in our heads about whether we're even worth spending time with. After all, one byproduct of the pandemic was a pronounced increase in anxiety disorders and social anxiety.

"People have started to doubt the fact that people want to hang out with them," Chopik said. Indeed, research suggests we underestimate how positive we feel when someone reaches out to us. We may think that if we strike up a conversation with a stranger on the subway, they won't want to chat or it'll make the commute worse. But the opposite is true. We like talking to each other — we just don't think people want to hear from us.

This insecurity runs counter to what most people want.

"A good test is to think about how you would react to it if a friend reached out or wanted to hang out with you — you would probably be positively disposed to that," Chopik said. "But then if I asked you, hey, reach out to a friend and just, like, ask how their day was, you'd be like, I don't know, I don't want to bother them."

Niki Meyari, a 20-year-old college student in Arizona, chalks some of that up to residual social fallout from the pandemic.

"You get used to that loneliness and that isolation or maybe only interacting digitally in ways that fully can't be replicated in real life," Meyari, who was a teen when the pandemic started, said. "And I think that desensitized a lot of people."

While it may seem trivial to send that "I can't come" text, we lose more than just a canceled plan when we back out of a scheduled meetup. For one thing, there's a counterintuitive hierarchy of cancellations. While you might assume it's not as big of a deal if a close friend cancels — you'll probably see them again — Chopik has found that that's more likely to faze you than a casual acquaintance canceling. That's partly because we expect the people close to us to honor their commitments — they do, in fact, owe us something.

"I think that a lot of people have taken this concept, and they're applying it to everyone in every situation, and I just don't think that's productive," Ashley Corbo, a 27-year-old content creator, said.

Chopik has found that when it comes to canceling plans, there are better and worse ways to go about it. For those getting canceled on, excuses such as dealing with health or family issues are more reasonable than not feeling like it or poor planning.

Pulling the rug out from under those closest to us and leaning on dubious health reasons is starting to affect our friend groups. Americans are increasingly less likely to have a best friend — perhaps we're filling our social circles with acquaintances we might not be upset with when they cancel.

And the idea that canceling plans is a form of self-care may be backfiring. Chopik said the people we're closest to are actually included in our sense of self. The time we spend with friends is precious, and it feels costly to lose out on that.

"We have placed comfort and convenience on a pedestal that it does not need to be on," Meyari said. "In turn, actually, in the long run, it makes us more uncomfortable, because we don't really have others to be with."

Economically, places for socializing, like restaurants, have instituted new measures to protect their bottom lines from our flaky tendencies. Look no further than the dominance of restaurant reservation fees or no-show charges. In a survey conducted by OpenTable in 2021, 28% of respondents in the US said they hadn't shown up for a reservation over the past year. In 2022, OpenTable launched its reservation-deposits feature designed to help restaurants avoid no-shows, citing their thin profit margins. The company told BI that, from January 2024 to December 2024, they found the global volume of no-shows for restaurants using the deposit feature was about 50% lower than for those that don't require a deposit. A spokesperson for Resy, another popular restaurant booking app, said that in September 2024, nearly one-fifth of New York City restaurants on the platform charged at least one cancellation fee. Nationally, it said, 12% of restaurants charged a fee that month.

"Most restaurants are small businesses — every table that sits empty can have a significant impact, especially when the average profit margin of restaurants is razor thin," the Resy spokesperson said.

Our newer isolationist tendencies — or the rarity of social gatherings — might also be giving people a shorter fuse. In a 2022 survey of workers in the restaurant industry by the advocacy organization One Fair Wage, 46% of women said they'd experienced increased harassment from customers or supervisors during the pandemic. Anecdotally, service workers have said that customers generally treat them worse than they used to.

"I noticed that customers were starting to act almost like they were taking stuff out on us," Cristian Cardona, who left her job in fast food in 2021, previously told BI. "They would get upset, angry. Sometimes they would get violent, yell stuff at us, and it made it a hostile environment for us a lot of times."

On an intellectual and transcendental level, as Cowden said, there's a line of thinking that we become more human the more we depend on others and spend time together. And when you're stuck thinking you don't owe others anything, you might not have someone to help reel you back into reality.

While flakiness can be frustrating, the rising tide of cancellations is not inevitable. The event companies Evite and Eventbrite said that people on the platforms were increasingly showing an interest in attending health and fitness events, fandom festivities such as cosplay events, and alternative-music festivals.

"We've seen a ton of traditional things, people reverting back to book club, game nights," Olivia Pollock, a hosting and etiquette expert at Evite, told BI. They may find, in those cases, that they owe it to each other to read that book or show up to play that game.

As individuals, we might also need to lean into something that modern luxuries aim to alleviate: discomfort. Feeling a bit uncomfortable — whether that means showing up to a party we're not enthusiastic about or trekking to a friend's house — can pay off in the long run. On the other side may be a friend or a party full of new friends. While it might feel more comfortable to stay home or go into facilitated digital interactions where you can disappear in a moment's notice, it's worth having to suffer through some small talk or meeting a stranger.

Meyari recalled a piece of advice she received on balancing discomfort: Are you uncomfortable with actually going to something, or with the transition of having to get up and go?

"For a lot of people, those lines just get blurred; they think just because they don't want to transition from place A to place B, it means they don't want to go to place B at all," Meyari said. "And they don't want to figure that out — because discomfort is just naturally such a bad thing to them — that they don't want to look deeper and say, like, oh, this thing is actually good for me. I'm going to be uncomfortable for a little bit, but that's OK."

Juliana Kaplan is a senior labor and inequality reporter on Business Insider's economy team.

When Louis Chiappetta started working as a ski instructor at 19, he saw it as a way to turn his hobby into a job. Growing up in central Maine, he'd already spent his winter months on the slopes. So a paycheck and a free ski pass were enough to seal the deal.

"There are not many people who, when asked what they do for fun, say, 'Well, I go back to where I work,'" he said.

After one of his friends got established as a ski patroller in Utah, Chiappetta followed, taking a job in 2021 in the rental shop at Canyons Village, one of the two ski areas in Vail's Park City Mountain resort. The pay was meager — $12.25 an hour — but he got three days off a week to ski the mountain's long, powdery runs. If the price of entry was couch surfing at friends' places, so be it.

His view on that trade-off quickly changed. Park City Mountain is one of 42 resorts owned by the international conglomerate Vail Resorts. The cost of a lift ticket at Canyons climbed 25% from $230 in 2022 to $290 for the current season, making it one of the most expensive resorts in the country. Chiappetta said he remembered ringing up customers for $2,000 to $3,000 worth of equipment, "making money hand over fist" for the resort. It was hard to ignore the gap between what people were paying for the experience and what he was making as an employee. "It was like getting my nose rubbed in it," he said.

Through a scholarship, Chiappetta was able to get his EMT certification and join the ski patrol, something he had always wanted to do. But the $20-an-hour entry-level salary still wasn't enough for him to get by. He joined the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association, the union representing ski patrollers at Canyons, to push for a livable wage that took into account the specialized medical training and avalanche-prevention work he and other patrollers were asked to do. Starting on December 27, he and the union went on strike for 13 days. It worked; Vail agreed to raise their pay by $2 across the board, with additional increases for training, certifications, and experience.

Now 31, Chiappetta is in his third season as a ski patroller and makes roughly $29 an hour. He feels much more confident in his ability to support a future family on a ski patroller's salary. "There's nothing I'd rather do," Chiappetta said.

Since 2020, people across industries have been rethinking their relationship to work. Frustrated with their bosses' lack of loyalty and support, many have quit, changed positions, or found ways to claw back their autonomy by quiet quitting, secretly working multiple jobs, slyly outsourcing parts of their jobs, or unionizing. The Economic Policy Institute says 16.2 million American workers were represented by a union in 2023, an increase of roughly 400,000 since 2020.

Lately, workers in jobs that were always sold as a dream experience — the kinds of jobs Meryl Streep's character in "The Devil Wears Prada" says "a million girls would kill for" — are realizing that they, too, have gotten the short end of the stick. In exchange for these people "living the dream," companies paid very little: The job itself was supposed to be the reward. Now these workers, including ski patrollers, Minor League Baseball players, Disneyland character performers, and Chippendales dancers, have decided that the dream is no longer enough. They want a real living wage.

America's ski industry has been one of the most visible examples of how workers are trying to turn their dream jobs into careers. During the busiest time of the year, the ski patroller strike shut down most of Park City Mountain. Guests were furious — not at the workers but at Vail for letting the strike happen. It brought attention to how little ski patrollers are paid. In 2023, the average hourly wage for lifeguards, ski patrollers, and other recreational workers was just $15, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Until recently, ski jobs were primarily seen as seasonal work for college kids or ski bums — people who would tolerate low wages in exchange for a romp on the mountain. Vail still bills its mission as creating "the experience of a lifetime" for its employees.

Over the past six years, workers have pushed to make ski work a sustainable career. Unions representing ski patrollers and lift mechanics have formed at more than 16 resorts across the US. A major concern for these workers is the rapidly growing cost of living near resorts. As of December, it cost about 33% more to live in Park City than in the average US city, the Economic Research Institute found in its research. As of 2023, census data shows the median income in the city was more than $101,000, while the median salary for ski patrollers was just over $30,000. While Vail provides some affordable housing options for its workers, there isn't enough to go around. To make ends meet, some patrollers have had to work second jobs.

Meanwhile, the ski industry has been consolidating. In the past decade, American companies have acquired nearly 100 ski areas. Since 2019, Vail alone has purchased 19 resorts. Those massive investments haven't gone unnoticed by the rank and file.

Mike Reilly, 33, moved to Park City about 10 years ago after graduating from college in Ohio. He didn't know how to ski when he arrived but practiced in his time off from working as a barista at a local coffee shop. About a year in, he took an entry-level ski patrolling job, making $13.25 an hour.

Initially, Reilly and Chiappetta both had to find work in the offseason to make ends meet. Reilly led youth backpacking trips, worked as a bike patroller at the resort, and occasionally picked up shifts as a barista. They didn't see their ski jobs as a side gig. "The longer I lived out here and saw that it was possible, the more I wanted to do this as a career," Reilly said.

Since the union ratification, that's become more of a possibility.

Before Minor League Baseball players unionized in 2022, they made between $290 and $500 a week, weren't paid during spring training, and had to find other jobs during the offseason. Despite the fact that nearly every major league player has to start in the minors, the finances never added up.

Gavin Lux, a second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds, told The Nation that when he was with the Los Angeles Dodger's Single-A affiliate in Rancho Cucamonga, California, there were five or six players sleeping on air mattresses in a single apartment. The situation didn't get much better as he progressed to Triple-A. "I had to pay for my new place, plus an apartment that no one was living in anymore," Lux said.

After winning their contract in 2023, players saw their wages more than double to between $675 and $1,200 a week. They also secured a salary during spring training and the offseason, better healthcare benefits, and control of their name, image, and likeness rights, allowing them to make money off brand deals. It was a game-changer.

Paul Clark, a professor of labor and employment relations at Penn State University, said the unionization effort represented a shift in the way society views so-called dream jobs. For decades, there was a consensus that people working these jobs shouldn't complain about wages because they got to play a game for a living, Clark said. That has changed as Major League Baseball has become more profitable. Last year, the MLB earned $12.1 billion in revenue, a 15% increase since 2012. Meanwhile, minor league teams have continued to go up in value, prompting a wave of acquisitions.

"The players are what fans pay for, and therefore they are the game," Clark said.

Entertainers are having a similar realization. Nothing says "dream job" like spending all day in a Disney park making little kids' dreams come true — as many as 900 people might audition for a single role as a Disney character. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows for those hired at the Southern California theme parks. The Actors' Equity Association says the base pay for Disney characters at Disneyland is $24.15 an hour and that many workers face unpredictable schedules and unsafe working conditions, like limited water breaks and long hours wearing heavy costumes in the California heat.

To change things, 1,700 employees who dress up as characters, march in parades, and train performers voted to unionize in May with the Actors' Equity Association. The union, known as Magic United, began negotiations this past fall for higher pay, medical coverage for injuries sustained while in costume, and better insurance benefits.

Other Disneyland employees, represented by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 324, filed an unfair labor practice charge last year alleging that about 28% of cast members faced food insecurity, 42% did not have enough sick time to see a doctor, and 64% were spending more than the recommended 30% of their income on rent and utility costs. After filing the charge and threatening to strike, the union secured a higher base rate of $24 an hour and better policies around sick leave.

Over in Las Vegas, the city's famous Chippendales dancers are hoping for a similar win. Despite the group's popularity and the talent required to be a performer, they're paid a flat fee of $100 a show, a rate that has not changed in more than a decade. Dancers are not paid for rehearsal time unless it exceeds 15 hours a week and are expected to perform eight 80-minute shows each week. They are also expected to take pictures with guests after each show — photos that cost fans $35 but earn dancers just $0.50. They receive no benefits. In October, the Sin City dancers voted to form a union with AEA to make their jobs more manageable.

"It's a competitive market. And unfortunately, the entertainment industry breeds this concept of disposability, you know — one in, one out," one of the dancers who organized the union told In These Times. Chippendales did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Wilma Liebman, who served as chair of the National Labor Relations Board during part of the Obama administration and teaches as an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law, said she expected some of the unionizing activity to continue and perhaps increase. "If employers become emboldened to oppose unionization because Trump is in the White House, and they think it's going to be pro-business, it may incentivize workers to keep up the activism," she said. "There comes a point where you might be frustrated or you might be fired."

Even if the work is great, it's still work. Despite the tough labor market, these campaigns might just encourage other people working hot jobs to try their hand at getting a better deal.

Robert Davis is an award-winning journalist who lives in Denver.

When I heard that coffee futures were reaching record highs, I got a bad case of the jitters. What would happen to my morning cup of Joe? How expensive could it get? Could I afford enough coffee to get me through the day?

I set out on a mission to find out.

Caffeine is the world's most popular drug, and coffee is the second-most-traded commodity after oil. On the futures market, traders buy coffee shipments months or years in advance — so price spikes can indicate what the rest of us might be paying down the road. After the pandemic began, prices for coffee futures rose, along with everything else. Accordingly, the consumer price index showed a steep increase in prices for store-bought coffee throughout 2022.

The problems didn't stop there. Thanks to severe droughts in 2023, major harvests in Brazil and Vietnam did badly, and water in the Panama Canal ran low, slowing ship traffic. Coffee futures started to tick up. Then, this past November, the commodity skyrocketed. Brazil, which exports the lion's share of the industry's preferred arabica beans, was beginning its growing season as the country's worst drought on record stretched into a second year. The clouds that usually shade coffee trees went missing. It would be the second bad harvest in a row. When the news hit, traders rushed to lock in arabica contracts, sending prices to all-time highs in December. Now prices are more than double their 2023 peak. Robusta beans, often used in instant coffee, hit their own record high this month.

Is this the end of coffee as we know it?

Climate experts say the underlying supply problems aren't going anywhere. Over the next two decades, bad harvests could become the norm, wild arabica coffee could move from thriving to endangered, and the land available for coffee cultivation is expected to shrink by half or more. While the coffee market has some flexibility to keep prices down, the long-term outlook for America's favorite beverage is bleak.

Coffee prices have already been going up for a few years. This past summer, brands like Folgers and Maxwell House raised their prices to pass on previous commodity increases to customers. Prices at my local café went up $0.35, so I started grinding my coffee at home. But, the addict that I am, I kept caffeinating. We all did.

This "inelastic demand" gives companies plenty of wiggle room to raise prices without worrying that people will stop buying coffee entirely. Both Folgers' parent company, J.M. Smucker, and Maxwell's parent company, Nestlé, reported higher coffee sales in the US last year despite raising consumer prices. But how much higher could prices get?

People who brew their coffee at home "are going to feel it," Jay Zagorsky, a professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, said. Since coffee beans are the only ingredient in a tub of Folgers, commodity price increases have a direct impact on grocery prices. Two decades ago, US Department of Agriculture economists looked at how commodity coffee price swings affected grocery shelves. They found that every $0.10 increase in futures led to an immediate $0.02 increase in prices for canisters of ground coffee. When commodity prices stayed high, the rest of the increase was passed on over the course of a year. According to consumer price index data from January, grocery coffee prices are already more than 3% higher than they were this time last year — instant coffee alone rose 7%. And Illy recently told Bloomberg that a 25% hike in prices in the next few months was not out of the question.

To counteract low supply, coffee retailers can fudge the quality: Robusta beans, which have a harsher flavor than arabica, can be mixed into blends, for example. Smucker recently told investors that for Folgers and its other coffee brands, the company had "the ability to flex formulas and still deliver the exact same consumer experience." In Indonesia, coffee shops are even mixing corn and rice with their coffee beans to stretch supplies. Some people have called this phenomenon of companies swapping in cheaper and lower-quality ingredients "flavorflation."

In cafés, Zagorsky said, commodity price swings have a less noticeable impact because most of the cost of a latte is not beans but labor. "If I was Starbucks, I'd worry much more about the unionization drive," he said. Massive companies such as Starbucks can manage the uncertainty around commodity prices by locking in multiyear contracts, playing the market, and hedging their bets. Last year, Starbucks actually came out ahead on coffee futures. The company expects that it has enough beans in storage or contracted to last through at least September. In December, its CEO said it would not raise its North American store menu prices before then — though it is removing some discounts.

Small roasters buy quality beans for more than the commodity price, but unlike Starbucks, they are more sensitive to price swings. Over an Americano (her) and an afternoon decaf (me), Daria Whalen, a coffee buyer for Ritual Coffee in San Francisco, admitted she's worried.

She opened a 12-ounce bag of coffee and poured a handful of beans onto the table. She pointed out slight variations in their size, explaining that these beans came from five different farms in a family co-op that pays coffee pickers Colombia's minimum wage. In an industry rife with shady labor practices, from child labor to human trafficking, buying from farms that pay decent wages is "one of the only things we have left," Whalen said.

This bag retails for $25, more than five times the price of Folgers at Costco. It's not clear how much more consumers would be willing to pay. Thankfully, the more flexible part of that price is the flavor: Coffee beans are rated on a point scale, like wine. To adapt to a temporary price spike, Whalen said, she will choose beans that taste good but fall lower on that scale.

The big question for Whalen is what happens when the climate crisis makes these supply shocks more frequent. "I have anxiety, like probably 85% of the population," Whalen said. "So on some days, you catch me at cup four of coffee and I'm like, 'There's not going to be any coffee anymore.'"

The climate crisis is already changing coffee growing. The past two years have been the hottest on record, bringing more evaporation and making droughts more severe. Coffee harvests have suffered. "In the last year, I saw scorched coffee beans. Coffee beans that were shriveled because of extreme heat," Whalen said. She has also seen warmer temperatures nurture a disease called coffee leaf rust, push back growing seasons, and affect shipping logistics.

A 2022 data synthesis projected double-digit losses over the next few decades in the land that's good for cultivating coffee beans. Some areas will become newly available for coffee, but that won't be nearly enough to balance the losses. Unfortunately for connoisseurs, that new land will likely work best for robusta beans, not arabica beans.

In response to the changes, more growers are drying beans rather than washing them to save on water. That changes flavor profiles, favoring fruity flavors like blueberries, Whalen said: "Sometimes you can get a ferment-y flavor that we would call a defect, but a lot of people really love that."

There's some adapting that farms and supply chains can do, but these efforts may still fall short if countries don't aggressively limit their fossil fuel emissions. One study found that under a business-as-usual scenario, even with best practices in place for coffee growing and logistics, Starbucks could see persistent bean shortages as early as 2029. In its most recent annual report, Starbucks acknowledged that the climate crisis could materially influence its financial performance, particularly if it meant the company couldn't meet demand.

"If you care about your coffee," Regina Rodrigues Rodrigues, a Brazilian climate scientist, said, "you can't support any policies that allow the continued burning of fossil fuels. That's the thing."

Environmental concerns also popped up the last time coffee futures spiked, back in 1977. One environmentalist called the price increase "merely another way of telling us that the 4 billion souls on this planet must compete for a steadily shrinking supply of farm produce." That prediction turned out to be wrong. Since the 1960s, agricultural production has grown every decade. In fact, so much new land has been used for coffee that prices haven't even kept pace with overall inflation — Zagorsky pointed out that, adjusted for inflation, 1 pound of coffee today is still cheaper than 1 pound in 1980.

Looking back, it's tempting to hope that the world is crying wolf, but adaptive measures came with downsides. Agriculture boomed thanks to the clearing of forests and an unprecedented application of fossil fuels, both in fertilizers and as fuel for transporting food along vast global supply chains. One study estimated that most of the growth in agricultural production since the 1970s has not been in line with safe environmental practices. Now, as the world warms, agricultural growth is starting to slow, even as demand for coffee continues to rise. We have not solved our coffee problems; we have merely postponed them.

Is sad, watery 1950s diner coffee our fate? Or will we find new ways to make coffee growing productive and resilient? Zagorsky said that the futures market predicts a price decrease. But beyond that, he doesn't want to make any predictions. "Economists are terrible at guessing the future," he said.

So I took my fears and uncertainty to someone willing to predict the future: Dr. Honeybrew, a coffee fortune teller in Manhattan's East Village. Honeybrew took a look at the coffee dregs in my tiny espresso cup to read the future of coffee itself.

"Everyone is plunging a straw down in the ground and just sucking up all of the richness, all of the life, all of the power from the soil," he said. "This is Mother Nature's way of saying, 'You know what? In return, I'm going to give you guys the shittiest beans.'"

Honeybrew foresaw the sting of change. The chaos of revolution. And a shared love of coffee that, against all odds, could bring Americans back together. Really, he said, coffee's future hinges on the leadership of Melania Trump: "If the Trump family brings to the White House a cocker spaniel," Honeybrew said, "it will be a very good omen."

What Honeybrew didn't speculate on is the future-shaping potential of the Trump administration's recent activity: how new tariffs might increase coffee prices, whether cuts at the National Weather Service could make it harder to predict harvests, and how leaving the Paris agreement could make the underlying problems worse. Without a major course correction, even a cocker spaniel in the Oval Office probably won't save coffee.

Meg Duff is a reporter covering climate change and the environment.