The average person works 80,000 hours over the course of their career. Ideally, that time should be fulfilling, well-paid, and spent doing things that make the world a better place.

Of course that’s much, much easier said than done. In an increasingly fragile job market made still more fraught by AI, there’s no longer such a thing as a safe bet. 

According to Benjamin Todd, most people lack a systematic approach to thinking about their career choice. Todd is the co-founder and president of 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people move into careers focused on tackling the “world’s most pressing problems” — issues that include AI safety, biosecurity, global health, and animal welfare. 80,000 Hours uses the effective altruism framework of importance, neglectedness (how many resources are devoted to the problem), and tractability (or solvability) to decide which causes to prioritize. 

In his new book 80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good, which was released this week, Todd pulls together more than a decade of research and advising into a guide for making career decisions. It’s aimed at people just starting out as well as more experienced workers looking to make a switch, providing a framework to make career choices. 

I spoke with Todd about careers and skill sets that are more resistant or adaptable to AI job disruptions, why “going with your gut” (usually) isn’t good advice, tips for landing a high-impact job offer, and other topics. 

Our conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

There’s a lot of anxiety around advances in AI and job displacement, how that affects people’s job prospects and how they should think about career choices. 

Yeah, I feel like when I talk to people about their careers these days, that’s the main thing that’s on their mind. … I think a lot of the simple answers about which jobs will be best [in the age of AI] are too simple.

How have the last few years — thinking about AI but also other disruptions and changes to the job market — changed your core assumptions about how people should choose their careers?

The main thing that comes to mind is we seem to be getting more and more evidence that far more capable AI will be here soon. 

Then I think that just has a lot of implications for which problems are most pressing, and then potentially also which skills are most valuable. If there’s going to be a lot of change and things will be more unpredictable 10 years from now, then it makes sense to focus on shorter-term plans than to spend 10 years training to do something. Starting medical school now seems a lot more risky than it would have been 10 or 20 years ago. 

When you say AI is coming and going to change things, are you talking about artificial general intelligence (AGI) specifically?

I mean there’s multiple levels. I think [where the technology is now], if it just froze here, would be kind of similar to the internet and how important it was. But the big-picture thing that seems most important is the idea that you could get to some kind of AI that can do a lot of remote work jobs at roughly a human level. That seems like it could bring the economy and science into a significantly different regime.

I’m probably a bit more skeptical than most technologists of mass near-term unemployment from AI, though I also think that most economists are still underrating how big a deal it could eventually be.

You mention in the book that managing AI agents is a skill less likely to be replaced by AI. Why is that?

I talk about four things that could make skills become more valuable in the future given technology and automation. And the second one is complementarity to AI. So it’s not that AI won’t be able to do that, it’s that it’s a skill where as AI gets better, that skill becomes more valuable. Because if AI is more useful and being used to do more things, and you can make it like 1 percent or 10 percent more efficient, then the value of that additional efficiency increases as AI becomes more useful.

Right now, AI is pretty bad at these messy, nebulous, long-horizon things where you need to coordinate between lots of people and decision-makers. I think in an intermediate future there will be a lot of the more routine work tasks that are being done by AI agents, but then there’s human managers who are needed to stitch them together.

That seems to me like that might be a very lucrative job, but that might not add up to a lot of jobs.

That comes down to how much more stuff can get done in total. And those people would be way more productive than people have been in the past, because everyone is running a team of 10 AIs. So we would want many more people doing that type of thing.

One way to think about it is that a lot of things that in the past would have been too expensive to do would become economically feasible because now you don’t need a team of 30 people to start this new nonprofit. You can do it with a team of three people and a bunch of AI. So then a lot of people could start new projects and you just get a lot more total things being done with [the aid of] AI rather than, “Oh, we have to do the same stuff as before, but with only 10 percent as many people employed.”

I think that’s maybe good for people at a mid- or senior level in their career, but it could make things harder for more entry-level people.

I think that’s a little bit too early to say. So there is some research that finds that skilled human managers are also better at managing AI agents, and there’s a kind of correlation in that skill set. There is research about the most junior software engineers, [that finds] their jobs are down 20 percent. But in some ways young people are just much more adaptable to new technology, and I find a lot of college students seem to be significantly more sophisticated at using AI.

So in some ways, and because it’s changing so fast as well, young people might be better placed to learn how to use these tools faster and adapt as they keep changing. I’m a bit less confident it’s going to be bad for the younger workers.

That’s interesting because I’ve seen quite a lot of headlines and quite a lot of anxiety from younger people around their job prospects.

I think it’s very understandable to be anxious because they’re facing far more change to the job market than any recent generation has had to face. No one really knows exactly how it’s going to shake out. I would say one point for optimism is in theory it will mean that many projects are possible that weren’t possible before. That does also open up a lot of extra opportunities for young people who I think in some ways are better placed to take on these more risky and novel things because they’re less set in their ways.

Because better or worse, AI is a force multiplier.

Totally. We were talking about this skill [at managing AI agents] being lucrative. It would also be applicable to a lot of social problems as well.

What does effective altruism get right about career choice — and wrong?

I think most people just aren’t thinking enough about the impact of their career at all, and they actually have this amazing opportunity to at a minimum save people’s lives and maybe do a lot more by helping prevent the next pandemic or being one of the only people working on AI risks. 

When people are thinking about choosing a career, that should really be one of the first things they say: “The world’s facing massive problems. You could do something about them. Wouldn’t that be fulfilling and interesting? Why not do it?”

But people within effective altruism can think too much about their impact. I think people naturally compare themselves to others, but then people who get into effective altruism will tend to compare themselves based on impact. That’s better than comparing it based on how many yachts you have, but there’s still always someone who has more impact than you, and it’s easy for people to have this sense they’re not doing enough. They can potentially go into careers where they think there’s an intellectual case for being really impactful, but it’s not actually a good day-to-day lifestyle for them and they can end up getting pretty demoralized several years down the line. Those are some of the more common pitfalls. 

I think you make a very compelling case that when people go with their gut, when they try to make career choices based on intuition, they aren’t always very good at that. You recommend a more systematic approach to thinking this through. Do you think people usually benefit from an outside observer acting as a sounding board?

I do encourage people to work through a systematic approach, especially when it comes to assessing personal fit. A lot of the advice is really about getting out of your head. I think oftentimes the most useful thing people can do is just apply to lots of positions and see what they get.  

Often the best way to assess your fit is to speak to someone who has experience hiring in [that] area, they’re the people who’ve done the most assessing of who is going to succeed in a path.

In general, getting an outside perspective is super useful. That’s part of one of the big benefits of the one-on-one advice we offer on the 80,000 Hours website. … You can not consider enough options or factors, so getting an outside perspective is one of the best ways to help broaden your frame and make sure you haven’t missed something.

The key is to have a mixture of a more systematic approach and not do something your gut is actively worried about without understanding the reasons. There’s lots of research that shows that guts are bad at stock picking or predicting which person is going to succeed in some 10-year career path. But your gut is really good at things like, “Do I trust this person?” because that’s what we’ve evolved to be really good at guessing, and it’s something you have had a decent amount of practice about over your life. So if your gut is worried about a path, that might be picking up on something that actually you’re not excited about. The advice I give is don’t go with your gut, but do check with it. So I also wouldn’t say to totally ignore your gut either.

I think some people will chafe at the idea that some career paths are far more impactful than others. What would you say to more skeptical readers? People who would be reluctant or unable to retrain?

In the introduction, I mention this study where people were surveyed on how much they thought different charities more effectively save lives than others. They thought the best charity would be about 50 percent more effective than an average one at saving lives. Our intuitions are very bad at grasping big differences in scale. … When you ask experts in global health, they say there’s a hundred times difference between the most effective charity and the average for saving lives. It seems like no one knows about these differences even though it’s a huge deal. It means you could work for 10 years on a path and then retire and do whatever you most enjoy for the remaining 30 years and still achieve what would have taken hundreds of years working in one of the less effective charities.

I would actually advocate that people keep working rather than retire, but because there’s these huge differences in impact, it actually means it should be possible to find something that is both better for you personally and more impactful for the world. 

There is a chapter in the book about what you can do that’s the most impactful thing without changing jobs if you’re already in a career. I talk about donating 10 percent of your income [to effective charities], political advocacy, and even just “slacktivism.” When most people do that they just tweet into their echo chamber … but if you’re talking about something that actually is a huge deal that no one knows about, [it can be effective.] 

Another example I use is if you can help someone else find a really impactful job, then that has just as much impact as doing the job yourself. … I talk about being a multiplier.

How can people realistically transition into higher-impact careers, especially if those paths come with greater uncertainty in the age of AI?

It depends a lot where someone is starting from. … There’s more and more fellowships that are designed to help people transition [into higher-impact careers] quickly. You did the Horizon Institute for Public Service fellowship, which I would say is in this genre.

For more experienced people, if you’re an accountant or something like that, lots of organizations need people doing operations and accounting so they might sometimes hire people from outside the field pretty quickly. If that doesn’t work, it’s more of a case of thinking over one or two years, asking, “How can I best position myself to get one of these jobs?”

For that, you could look at the list of skill sets in the guide and think about whether you could learn any of these skills. There’s also a chapter on types of jobs that are really good for gaining skills quickly. One example is working at smaller, rapidly growing organizations, because you can advance faster and those roles tend to be more generalist. That type of generalist skill set is really useful in a lot of social impact organizations, and it means you can do things with AI earlier and get stuff done using those tools. Whereas if you go to a larger organization instead where the work tends to be more routine, that’s closer to something that AI is going to be able to do sooner.

What advice do you have for people with financial constraints that require them to secure a role right away, even if it may not be the highest impact or greatest fit?

I see impact as one important factor, but your own well-being matters too. You might also have dependents as well. Ultimately, you have to make your list of options and then choose the one that’s best given your goals. If money is a priority for you right now, then I think you should focus on that. There’s no shame in it.

I also talk about the idea of having a plan Z, [if your plan A and B don’t work out] that on some level you’re okay with. If you can’t do that, then you should focus on getting yourself into a stronger position first. Maybe you need to focus more on things like building skills or saving money which will mean you can take bigger risks later.

There’s this axiom that the best time to get a job is when you have a job, so you have more leverage or experience. How true do you think that is?

What most helps in getting a job is doing something as close as possible to the actual work. Obviously being in a job already is a very good way to demonstrate that you can do the work. But people who don’t have jobs already can often find ways to do that, like a portfolio project.

I talk about the “pre-interview” project, where you come to the interview with a specific proposal [to the company you’re applying] for how you would help them with some challenge the organization is facing … most jobseekers don’t have that level of understanding of a position. So you’re already standing out just by having thought about it.

“Elon Musk, Ryan Seacrest, and Chris Anderson of TED, consider yourself challenged,” Bill Gates bellowed from his garden. Beaming, he tugged on a candy cane-colored rope that dumped a barrel of icy cold water over his head. “You have 24 hours. Good luck.”

It was the scorching hot summer of 2014, and the ice bucket challenge — a viral social media trend to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research that involved soaking yourself with ice water and pressuring others to do the same — was in full swing. Gates had been challenged by Mark Zuckerberg, who’d been challenged by then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, with whom Zuckerberg had appeared on Oprah a few years prior to announce a $100 million donation to Newark schools. 

By the time Musk tweeted out a video of his kids drenching him with their own makeshift ice bucket gizmo a day after Gates, the challenge had already reached tens of millions of people worldwide. Among the participants were Jeff Bezos, Justin Bieber, David Lynch — and Donald Trump.

As if under an icy spell, the world came together in a way it never would again. Today, the ice bucket challenge and the litany of surreal, grainy videos it spawned are a time capsule of a bygone era, or at the very least, a bygone internet. 

In the early 2010s, platforms like Facebook “actually had the potential to be this century’s agora, a marketplace of ideas,” said Asha Curran, who co-founded GivingTuesday, a philanthropic counterweight to Black Friday, in 2012. “The social media environment wasn’t this sort of existential threat to our mental health and our democracy and our isolation that it is now.”

But it wasn’t just a different era for social media. Back then, generosity was trendy for the one percent and 99 percent alike, and Bill Gates — alongside both his then-wife Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett — was influencer number one. In 2010, the Gateses and Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince the ultra-wealthy to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. At the campaign’s peak, about one in seven American billionaires — including Musk, Zuckerberg, and a broad swath of the country’s rising tech billionaire class — pledged to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. Together, they promised to usher in a new golden age of philanthropy.

They also aimed to inspire giving from Americans of more modest means, who flocked to viral clicktivism campaigns while sporting TOMS shoes and (PRODUCT)RED iPod nanos. The idea was seductive: You too could help save the world while making a show of your generosity. 

Today’s billionaires appear more cynical than they used to be, and the rest of us seem to be, too. Gone are the days when tech overlords challenged one another to charity stunts rather than cage matches. If social media once seemed poised to save the world one hashtag at a time — think #Movember, #Kony2012, and #BringBackOurGirls — then today, it feels considerably more likely to tear us all apart. 

For much of the past decade, fewer Americans have chosen to give to charity each year, while most billionaires appear to be giving away a diminishing share of their ballooning fortunes. The Giving Pledge, which held so much promise in 2010, has lost much of its steam and even come under direct attack from techno-cynics like Peter Thiel. The vibes have turned very bad.

It’s no wonder today’s youths yearn for the hopecore, the millennial optimism, of the early 2010s, that mediascape of messy buns, post-recession electropop, and sincere posting about causes everyone cared about for a week or two. The internet’s Earnest Era propelled a culture of giving even among billionaires, who shared a fear of missing out on the next hashtag cause. But today’s more fractured internet has kneecapped that positivity. To some degree, it made even the idea of trying to save the world cringe. The problem is not so much a giving crisis, as it is an attention crisis, one that’s been exacerbated by rising inequality and the decline of generosity as a collective cultural value, the kind of virtue worth signaling. 

“For a while, you almost needed to pick a charity as part of your online persona,” said Scott Harrison, a nightclub promoter turned founder of Charity: Water, a celebrity darling back when “it was really cool” to give in the early 2010s. He has struggled to fundraise in recent years. “It’s not on trend. It’s not what people are doing. It phased out. The cycle ended.”

I wanna be a billionaire so freaking bad

2010 was a transformative year for generosity for two important reasons: The economy had passed through the very worst of the Great Recession, and for the very first time, more Americans were about to be on social media than off of it. 

Surveys of young people in the early 2010s showed that they were stubbornly, discordantly optimistic despite graduating into underemployment.

One of those millennials was Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2010 was named Time’s person of the year at 26 years old for building a platform “fundamentally changing the way the Internet works and, more importantly, the way it feels.”

Social media made the world feel smaller. When a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in January of that year, it became the first major live-tweeted natural disaster. Lindsay Lohan, Lady Gaga, and Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean were among those soliciting their followers for donations in the aftermath of the quake. Within a week, Jean’s own charity raised $2 million and the Red Cross raised $8 million. Celebrities released a “We Are the World” charity cover, and Americans ultimately gave about 15.3 percent more to international aid that year than they did the year prior. 

People who donated told their friends about it — publicly, online — and they told their friends about it in turn, in a charitable daisy chain that thrived under newly digitized social pressures. If you told the internet about your good deed, you’d look cool. If you were the only one of your friends who didn’t, well, you’d look like a bit of a jerk, in a much more visible way than in the past. 

Then, on June 16, 2010, news broke of Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett’s plan to ask the nation’s billionaires to commit to giving away half of their fortunes. One week later, the Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars song “Billionaire” peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was an ode to getting rich not just to get rich, but to give it all away: “Not a single tummy around me would know what hungry was, eatin’ good, sleepin’ soundly.” 

By 2014, the Giving Pledge had 130 signatories, amounting to one in seven of the country’s billionaires, the majority of whom shared their motivations for joining in public letters online.

“People signed it because it was the cool thing to do,” said Aaron Dorfman, CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog that advocates for progressive practices in the philanthropic sector.

The Giving Pledge was perhaps the single biggest manifestation of philanthro-capitalism, or the idea that “rich people can save the world” by applying their business acumen to charitable causes, was “all the rage” at the time, he said. While the pledge was not legally binding — and came with few expectations — most signatories “honestly believed they were going to live up to the terms.”

While the rest of the world heaped praise on the Pledgers, Dorfman wrote a series of articles in the Huffington Post critiquing the Giving Pledge when it was first announced. “I remember thinking this is insane. Everybody thinks this is going to be the best thing since sliced bread and it’s just not,” he told me recently. At the time, he believed that the way billionaires gave was too slow and self-serving to actually make a dent in serious global problems. “There’s no way it can possibly make that much of a difference.”

How to #SaveTheWorld, one hashtag at a time

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only millennial to believe he could save the world. 

Facebook, and other platforms like it, helped inspire a boom in viral kindness and giving campaigns in the early 2010s. While celebrities often acted as superspreaders — some, like Justin Bieber, signed a “Hollywood Pledge” modeled after the Giving Pledge in 2011— social media was not the influencer-dominated, algorithmized cesspool it is today.

When Curran helped launch GivingTuesday in 2012, “it immediately crossed what today we would think of as algorithmic bubbles,” she said. The White House blogged about it, and #GivingTuesday quickly became a top trending topic on Twitter. That first year, the hashtag raised at least $10 million for charity in 24 hours, a 53 percent spike from the year prior. 

“We were catching a wave,” Curran said. “The collective nature of social media and the collective nature of generosity were forming this perfect explosion.”

That same year, over 1 million men grew mustaches — and raised over $100 million — for Movember’s annual men’s health awareness campaign, driven in part by a PSA starring the mustachioed actor Nick Offerman. The charity Invisible Children went viral for its 30-minute YouTube video about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, kindling the #Kony2012 craze, a campaign now chiefly remembered for being offensive and ineffective. 

Few charities mastered social media quite as successfully as Charity: Water, which gained a huge following in part by flying tech entrepreneurs to Ethiopia and convincing celebrities to share their birthday fundraisers. Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith kicked off the trend in 2010, and a year later Justin Bieber asked his Beliebers to donate $17 each for his 17th birthday. By 2013, Charity: Water had raised over $100 million from thousands of people online, enough to build over 8,000 wells and other clean water projects. 

“The beauty was the average birthday fundraiser brought in 10 of their friends and family,” Harrison said. “It almost had an implied virality, and it cost us nothing.” 

By the time a majority of Americans had smartphones in 2013, the internet was being flooded with selfies and short video trends. (Rest in six seconds of peace, Vine.) The Norwegian Army danced to the Harlem Shake in the snow. And golfers were drenching themselves with cold water as a way to bring attention to their favorite charities online. 

In July 2014, one of those golfers, a man named Chris Kennedy, poured a bucket of ice water on his head for the ALS Association, and then challenged his cousin, whose husband had the disease. She accepted, and the videos began pulsating through her social networks until they reached Pat Quinn and Pete Frates, both young ALS advocates.

From there, “it just continued to snowball,” said Brian Frederick, who the ALS Association brought on to help manage the trend. Over 17 million people participated that summer. “There was a period in August where for eight straight days, we were raising over $10 million a day.” The association had to reserve an entire office in its headquarters just to store all of the checks that people were sending in. 

The association raised about $115 million in just eight weeks, money that helped fund 130 research projects in 12 different countries. But while social media moves at light speed, medical research is a bit slower. Only in recent years have ALS patients begun to see breakthroughs in treatment from that enormous infusion of funding for a rare disease that most Americans had never heard of before 2014. By the time their donations started to pay off, most of them had likely forgotten whatever they’d once known about the disease.

“It dramatically accelerated the fight against ALS. It led to new genes being discovered, new research collaborations, new treatments in the pipeline,” said Frederick, but for most people who soaked themselves with icy water that summer, “that was just a one-time thing for them. They’ll never know that they really did make a difference.”

When generosity became cringe

The ice bucket challenge was the last real do-gooder social media trend of its kind. 

A week after it started coursing through the internet, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, drawing an outpouring of grief and outrage on social media. Both the #IceBucketChallenge and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, the hashtag most associated with the protests that followed Brown’s killing, proliferated explosively and “almost simultaneously” across the internet, the writer Jia Tolentino noted at the time, yet they spread “entirely discreetly: twinned channels of wildfire blazing through quadrants of your attention that barely touch.”

Cracks were beginning to show in an internet that would soon become irrevocably siloed, one where digital attention, which felt so boundless and empowering earlier that decade, would come to feel like a precious commodity, monetized and increasingly stretched thin. With the Ferguson protests, that shift coincided with a massive political awakening and major domestic unrest and anger. To some corners of the internet, the performance of mass apolitical acts of generosity began to feel like an irreconcilable distraction in a competition for finite attention. 

As a result, the viral monoculture of the early 2010s fractured, giving way to an internet driven less by personal connections and more by hyper-targeted algorithms designed to keep you scrolling. “I don’t think people feel empowered by these tools anymore,” Ethan Zuckerman, a digital media scholar and professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. “They feel trapped by them. They feel like they want to escape these tools.” 

The vibe shifted, and the internet’s new feeds rarely rewarded the kind of mass earnestness that drove engagement on early social media platforms.

“I wish that I had known that it was the last time so that I could have marked it in my mind,” Curran said. “I’m not sure that a Giving Tuesday could work if it were launched today.” 

That’s not to say that people aren’t generous anymore. But they are significantly less likely to give to charity than they used to: Fewer than half of American households donate at all these days, down from 66 percent in 2000. Those who do give give an average of 1.2 percent of their income, down from nearly 2 percent in 2017. 

America’s richest families have given more to charity in total dollars over the past decade — enough, in fact, to make up for the decline in everyday donors and then some. But as a percentage of their ballooning wealth, most billionaires — including those who signed the Giving Pledge — appear to be giving less to charity than they used to. 

Rising inequality — and the belief that the wealthier should donate instead — explains part of this decline for everyday Americans, among other factors. But it also reflects a broader pattern in which Americans have largely moved away from performing their giving, or earnestness more broadly, at least online. It’s just not swaggy anymore; it doesn’t give you the insane aura that it used to. 

“It’s not in my feed. You’re not getting hit up for charities from your friends the same way you were,” Harrison said. “I can’t tell you the last celebrity that was in my feed asking me to give to their favorite charity, it’s been years. They are selling lipstick. They are selling protein powders. These platforms were really used as a force for good, and now are used as a force to sell more stuff.”

GivingTuesday is actually a much bigger movement today than it was in 2012, raising about $4 billion last year, but it’s no longer primarily a social media phenomenon. “Neighbor-to-neighbor generosity is more important than ever because that’s the way you escape the algorithmic bubble,” Curran said. “You almost have to get offline entirely.” Americans who do give online increasingly do so through ever more individualized channels like GoFundMe, which got its start in 2010, but has exploded in popularity in recent years. More than three-quarters of Americans say they believe that political polarization has made people more reluctant to give, and 60 percent said they’ve personally shied away from charitable activities that may involve people with opposing political views. In the absence of a shared civic culture, deeply siloed — and often distrusted — platforms like GoFundMe have become many Americans’ chosen way to give.

And where have the billionaires been? For the most part, accumulating wealth far faster than they gave it away. Zuckerberg, who once critiqued philanthropists for waiting until old age to fork up their fortunes, has seen his wealth increase by over 4,000 percent since signing the Giving Pledge, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. That $100 million for Newark schools that he announced on Oprah to such fanfare in 2010? It’s now widely regarded as a colossal failure built on a foundation of philanthro-capitalist buzzwords instead of actual community needs. A few weeks after attending Donald Trump’s inauguration and appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic initiative announced that it would stop funding causes like education reform and social justice last year. While Zuckerberg gives much more in total charity today than he did 15 years ago, he gives far less as a percentage of his wealth. Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to Newark in 2010, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of his net worth at the time. Last year, he and his wife donated $608 million, but it amounted to just 0.3 percent of his now gargantuan fortune.

In recent years, a cadre of right-wing billionaires led by venture capitalist Peter Thiel has also begun to actively denigrate the Pledge for what they see as a left-wing bias, despite the fact that it has always been intentionally apolitical. “I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Thiel, who accused the Pledge of being an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club,” told the New York Times. “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join,” he said, claiming that some Pledgers feel “blackmailed” to stay on the list once they sign.

As the rest of America has stratified and become more partisan, so too have the nation’s billionaires. And apolitical promises, like sheer generosity itself, just don’t hold the same allure that they used to. 

“Peter Thiel used to be an outlier, but now many tech billionaires are coming together around this radical anti-social” worldview, said Chuck Collins, program director at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Burned by Billionaires. “They’re opting out of the social institutions that the rest of us depend on.”

You say performative like it’s a bad thing

Craig Newmark is not like those other tech billionaires. The founder of Craigslist is not and has never been a billionaire at all, he says, despite what Forbes might have to say about it. 

“I am a peasant at heart,” he told me, a few days after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times defending the Pledge against its partisan detractors. “My favorite luxury at my age is a walk-in shower with grab bars.” 

Newmark is a new recruit, having only signed the Giving Pledge himself last December. He was already a prolific philanthropist, having donated hundreds of millions of dollars to military families, cybersecurity, pigeon rescue, and my alma mater. So why add his name now? 

“It seemed to me that signing up for it would be funny,” he said, referring to the “absurd” idea that a “nerd patient zero” like himself could rub shoulders in an elite philanthropy club. “Funny is highly motivating for me. I know I’m not as funny as I think I am, but given the toxicity of our culture these days, anything funny is highly welcome.”

When I pressed him, Newmark conceded that signing the Pledge was also his way of “putting a stake in the ground.” Seeing other billionaires pull away from giving now is “disappointing,” he said, “because the world needs people who have too much money to pitch in” to help improve people’s lives at a time of vast inequality. “There are Americans who are going hungry,” he said, and “that kind of pisses me off.”

But primarily, he insists, he’s just trying to be funny. “We all need positive entertainment these days.”

And maybe that’s the point, because the Giving Pledge, like the ice bucket challenge and #Movember, was built on performance. Newmark is now engaging in that performance with the kind of wry, ironic humor befitting of today’s internet culture, rather than the gravitas and sincerity of the Pledge’s early years. But it was always, to some extent, a performative spectacle. While some signatories have turned out to be extraordinarily generous — MacKenzie Scott and Laura and John Arnold come to mind — there’s little evidence that the Pledge has accelerated their giving or made the ultra-wealthy more charitable as a cohort. 

Having skimmed through dozens of early Pledger letters, I’ve found that many claimed to have already been well on their way to giving it all away prior to making a public commitment. “Until now, I have done this giving quietly,” wrote Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison in 2010. “So why am I going public now? Warren Buffett personally asked me to,” he wrote, for the purpose of “‘setting an example’ and ‘influencing others’ to give. I hope he’s right.”

The Pledge’s original 2010 signatories — including Gates and Zuckerberg —  have donated about $206 billion as of last year, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, most of which went into their private foundations and DAFs, which slowly dole out grants to charity. The Arnolds are the only living original signatories to have given away enough to fulfil their Pledge, and of the 22 Pledgers who have died since 2010, only eight fulfilled their promise to give away at least half of their wealth during their respective lifetimes or in their wills. At the rate that Musk and Ellison are going — they’ve given away 0.06 percent and 0.03 percent of their wealth, respectively, according to Forbes — it seems unlikely that today’s living Pledgers will fare much better. And they’re in good company. Four in five of the wealthiest 400 Americans have given away less than 5 percent of their fortunes as of last year, most under 1 percent.  

Likewise, only about one-fifth of those who participated in the ice bucket challenge actually donated to the fight against ALS. The one in five who did donate gave about $220 million to ALS worldwide, and $115 million to the ALS Association, which raised about $2.8 million in the same period the year prior. While there was a genuine desire to help people through the trend, at the same time, Frederick said, the majority of people were “just doing what their friends were doing.” 

They were virtue signaling, but that’s not such a bad thing — philanthropy, after all, can do good no matter the intention behind the giving. An internet where people feel the need to do charity stunts for clout en masse is still better than one that rewards you for trying to hammer yourself a better jawline. On the rare occasion that earnestness does go viral today, as it did during the Artemis II launch or after Alysa Liu’s ebullient free skate routine, “it just makes me long for a time when communal awe was more prevalent than it is now,” said Curran. But while today’s social media tends to reinforce the idea that Americans “hopelessly hate each other,” she said, “if you get down to the community level, you actually see all these really beautiful things happening.”

Last year, a group of undergraduates at the University of South Carolina decided to revive the ice bucket challenge as a fundraiser for youth mental health. They hoped to raise $100, maybe $200, Alison Malmon, founder and executive director of the charity Active Minds, told me. 

Most of the students were barely out of preschool when the first ice bucket challenge went viral. But suddenly, college kids, beauty influencers, and celebrities were once again racking up views by drenching themselves in frigid water online. The revived ice bucket challenge raised over $500,000 for Active Minds. It never came close to its predecessor’s stratospheric levels of popularity — things just don’t go viral like they used to anymore — but it did, for a moment, revive a sense of earnest do-gooderism that, for over a decade, felt increasingly relegated to the internet’s far fringes. 

The phrase millennial optimism was born a few months later, driven by nostalgia for a bygone and vaguely naive internet culture that most young adults today are old enough to remember, but young enough to romanticize. So far, there’s no indication that Gen Z’s rediscovery of indie sleaze portends a sustained, serious resurgence of viral earnestness culture, from billionaires or from the rest of us. But as MGMT would put it, maybe now it really is time to pretend.

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

Spring is here, which means the pests are back. My parents’ house has an ant problem. I found weevils in my pantry, and I know people with wasp infestations in their places. Tick season has begun, and last year’s bedbug scare was legitimately traumatic. I don’t like killing insects, but if they’re in my space uninvited and I can’t just take them outside and easily prevent them from coming back, I’ll do it.

But I do feel bad about doing it, even sparingly. I think it’s plausible that insects feel pain, so I try to make it quick, yet I’m still making the choice to kill them and it’s not one I’m proud of. I think that pests, like all living things, have some moral weight — but there’s not room enough for the two of us. Is it bad to kill them? Is there a more ethical way to approach this?

Dear Bugging Out,

I love that you’re sensitive to the potential suffering of Earth’s teeny-tiny, creepy-crawly creatures. I hope you never lose that. But I do hope you lose the guilt you’re feeling.

You’re right to think it’s plausible that insects feel pain. We don’t know for sure yet, but in recent years, scientists have been accumulating evidence that suggests at least some insects possess sentience — the capacity to have conscious experiences that are valenced, meaning they feel bad (pain) or good (pleasure). 

Bees, for example, appear to play — just for fun. They also actively seek out mind-altering drugs like nicotine and caffeine, which suggests there may be a mind there to alter. Plus, bees seem to experience pain consciously, not merely flinch from it by reflex. In a 2022 study, bees approached a sugary snack even though it meant facing uncomfortable heat, weighing costs against benefits in what scientists call a “motivational trade-off.” A pure automaton couldn’t do that; it would flee heat in every situation. The capacity to weigh competing drives is one of the markers of sentience.

Meanwhile, fruit flies have shown signs of anhedonia — the loss of interest in previously pleasurable things (like food) that we know as a symptom of depression in humans. Treat the flies with a human antidepressant and it’ll suppress the depression-like state in the insects, too. 

One of my colleagues confessed to me recently that evidence like this makes her feel super guilty: When she goes around killing these insects in her kitchen, she asks herself whether she’s “a fruit-fly Nazi.”

But the key thing to realize is this: Bugs may have some kind of sentience, and sentience may confer some moral status, but that doesn’t mean that provides the last word on how we should act toward them. 

Just because another creature might have moral weight, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how to treat that creature when its welfare conflicts with the welfare of a creature you know has moral weight: you.  

So, how can you know if or when it’s okay to kill a bug? 

I think the most compelling response comes from Elizabeth Anderson, a contemporary philosopher who subscribes to the school of thought known as pragmatism, which sees moral truths as socially embedded and historically contingent, not fixed and objective.

Anderson points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and their energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although some non-Western societies have long ascribed moral worth to animals).

“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals,” she writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”

Anderson has noted that we feel different levels of moral obligation to different species, and that has to do not only with their intrinsic capacities like intelligence or sentience, but also with their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, or whether they live in the wild. It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us.

Thinking about pests is a great (if gross) way to bring this point home. If you find bedbugs in your house, nobody expects you to say, “Well, they’re maybe sentient and definitely alive, so they have moral value. I’ll just live and let live!” It is absolutely expected that you will exterminate the shit out of them.

Why? Because with pests, Anderson writes, “there is no possibility of communication, much less compromise. We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace…Indeed, we have an obligation to our fellow members of society (whether human or animal) to drive them out, whenever this is necessary to protect ourselves.”

Anderson’s point is not that sentience doesn’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.

Embracing this value pluralism makes things tricky. It suggests that the best we can do is look at creatures’ intelligence and sentience and relationships to us as clues about how we should negotiate life with (or without) them. But it doesn’t tell us how to weigh those clues — and what to do when they conflict with the interests of other animals, including us.

“There’s no simple formula,” Anderson once told me. “I think that’s a hopeless quest.”

That is, for my money, the most intellectually honest position. The absence of a fixed formula doesn’t mean you should exist in a state of guilty indecision or paralysis. Instead, the best thing you can do is have the integrity to recognize that sometimes life presents you with trade-offs where you have to make a choice. And when it comes to insects, you’re making that choice from a position of considerable power. 

This is the conclusion Robin Wall Kimmerer reaches in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The scientist describes how she had an algae-filled pond in her yard that she wanted to clear out so her daughters could swim in it. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, though, she believes that all life has moral worth. So as she raked out the muck and found that it was full of tadpoles, she plucked them all out so they could go on living. Then she inspected the pond water under her microscope and saw a ton of teensy organisms, each one a moral dilemma. She writes:

As I raked and plucked, it challenged my conviction that all lives are valuable, protozoan or not. As a theoretical matter, I hold this to be true, but on a practical level it gets murky, the spiritual and the pragmatic bumping heads. With every rake I knew that I was prioritizing. Short, single-cell lives were ended because I wanted a clear pond. I’m bigger, I have a rake, so I win. That’s not a worldview I readily endorse.

But it didn’t keep me awake at night, or halt my efforts; I simply acknowledged the choices I was making. The best I could do was to be respectful and not let the small lives go to waste. I plucked out whatever wee beasties I could and the rest went into the compost pile, to start the cycle again as soil.

In a way, it’s an unsatisfying solution — a lot of us would probably sleep easier if nature came inscribed with clear bright lines and moral instructions. But there you have it. Like Kimmerer, I think you should practice a kind of harm reduction. To the extent that you can “live and let live” with insects, that’s ideal. Try to minimize how many you kill. But when you do make the choice to kill them, try to do it in a way that reduces the risk of suffering (think: quick and painless crushing rather than long and drawn-out poisoning).

That’s not only for the bug’s benefit, but for yours, too. Harming any animal can harm our character if we do it mindlessly or callously, because it desensitizes us to life. But when we let ourselves be touched by life, we can maintain our reverence for it. The reverence — not the guilt — is the thing you want to hold onto. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This piece on “What It’s Like To Be a Worm” taught me that Darwin was obsessed with…worm sentience! He even argued that earthworms are capable of motivational trade-offs: “Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light…and we have seen that when their attention is engaged, they neglect impressions to which they would otherwise have attended; and attention indicates the presence of a mind of some kind.”
  
• This Aeon essay about the history of eugenics is absolutely fascinating. It reveals that some disabled people actually supported eugenics in the 1930s, seeking out sterilization for themselves. I think internalized ableist logic had a whole lot to do with this.
  
• I loved psychologist David DeSteno’s recent piece, “Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?” If you ask me, we keep making the Enlightenment-era mistake of thinking morality is primarily undergirded by rationality. But if it’s undergirded by emotion, it’s a fundamentally embodied human pursuit and the desire to mathematize it is itself irrational.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

There are few animals humans fear more than sharks. This is understandable: Sharks are big, dramatic creatures that have been permanently lodged in our culture as underwater killers since Jaws.

They also kill about six people in a given year. Snakes, on the other hand, kill roughly 100,000. After mosquitoes, which spread diseases like malaria, and humans, who just murder each other, snakes are the deadliest animals on Earth.

The surprise isn’t just that snakes kill so many people, but that the scale of this death and suffering has only recently become clearer. In India, where roughly half of the world’s snakebite deaths happen, official reports had long recorded only about 1,000 snakebite deaths a year. But many victims die in villages, on farms, or on their way to hospitals, and until recently, India did not require snakebite cases or deaths to be systematically reported through its public health system. Researchers using household death surveys and verbal autopsies have more recently estimated that the real number is close to 60,000 a year in India alone.

That gap in data is a big part of the reason why snakebites are so deadly in the first place. Antivenoms exist, and modern antivenoms can work well when given in time. But snake venom differs from one snake species to the next. Different species carry different mixes of toxins that can attack the nervous system, muscles, or tissue in different ways. That means antivenoms often have to be matched to the various snakes found in a given region; an antivenom made for one set of snakes may do little against another. Antivenoms are also expensive to produce and buy, and hard to keep reliably stocked in the rural clinics where they’re needed most.

But medicine is only half the problem. Once a person gets bitten, they have to recognize the danger, reach a hospital or clinic in time, and that clinic has to have an appropriate antivenom in stock, often without anyone knowing exactly which snake bit them. The patient also has to be able to afford the treatment. In poor, rural communities, any of those steps can and often do fail.

And because the people most at risk are also among the least able to pay, there has never been much of a market for better snakebite treatments. In fact, in the last two decades, the market has gotten worse with some manufacturers leaving the field altogether.

But things are beginning to change. Scientists are now running human trials on snakebite treatments other than antivenom, including drugs that may not require cold storage or precise species matching. In February, the World Health Organization issued its first formal blueprint for what next-generation snakebite drugs should look like, including treatments that could be given to victims before they reach a hospital. And in 2024, after years of severe undercounting, India’s health ministry moved to make snakebite a notifiable disease, meaning every case and death has to be reported to public health authorities, and launched a national plan to bring those deaths down.

The field is “witnessing important developments (not sufficient, but important) on various fronts,” José María Gutiérrez, one of the field’s leading authorities on antivenom at the University of Costa Rica, wrote in an email. But whether any of this reaches the villages where most snakebite deaths happen is a separate question.

How the field got stuck

The basic technology behind antivenoms is more than a century old. In the 1890s, scientists figured out they could inject small amounts of snake venom into animals, usually horses and sheep, wait for their immune systems to produce antibodies, and then harvest those antibodies as treatments.

The manufacturing has gotten a lot more sophisticated since then. The basic animal-based method is still widely used, but modern antivenoms are more carefully purified, processed, and quality-controlled, making them far safer and more effective than earlier versions. But the underlying challenge is still the same. Antibodies have to be matched to specific toxins they are meant to neutralize, and making them at scale is still expensive.

This economic challenge of producing antivenom became most visible in 2014, when Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company, stopped producing Fav-Afrique, a vital antivenom for sub-Saharan Africa that neutralizes venom from 10 of the most dangerous snakes in the region, because it wasn’t profitable enough. That breakdown was a clear illustration of the underlying problem: snakebite kills at an enormous scale, but mostly among people who have little purchasing power.

But things are beginning to look up. In 2019 the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based philanthropy, announced a roughly $100 million, seven-year program to bring snakebite treatment into the 21st century. A review commissioned by Wellcome found that global funding for snakebite research totaled just $57 million from 2007 to 2018, averaging less than $5 million a year.

The new commitment was the largest infusion of funding the field had ever seen, supporting both the search for new kinds of snakebite treatment and efforts to shore up existing antivenom supply. Some of that money went to Wales-based MicroPharm to restart production of Fav-Afrique, the antivenom Sanofi had abandoned.

The big shift now is that researchers are no longer just trying to make better antivenoms. They’re also trying to develop treatments that could get around some of  antivenom’s biggest limitations. And the WHO blueprint gives that shift a more concrete shape. It calls for two kinds of next-gen treatments: drugs that could help in hospitals, alongside or instead of antivenom, and simpler drugs that could be given soon after a bite.

The most advanced new candidate is called varespladib, a drug that can be given as a pill that blocks one of the most damaging families of enzymes in snake venom. In a phase 2 trial, it appeared safe but did not clearly outperform standard care. Researchers now see it more as a field aid. 

There are also efforts to repurpose other existing drugs and test them against snakebites, such as marimastat, a cancer drug, and DMPS, a drug used to treat heavy metal poisoning. Gutiérrez says these repurposed drugs are the most promising near-term options because researchers don’t have to start from zero. They have already been tested for other diseases, which means they can move into snakebite trials much faster than brand new drugs. Clinical trials of some of these repurposed drugs are now underway in the US, India, and Kenya. Further out, researchers are also working on new antibody therapies and AI-designed proteins targeted at specific snake toxins.

These drugs are not meant to replace antivenom, which remains quite effective when given in time. But they could finally move the field beyond where it has been stuck for decades.

The hard part

But the new excitement has yet to pay off. Tim Reed, who runs the Amsterdam-based NGO Health Action International, has long argued that snakebite researchers and funders have chased expensive scientific solutions while community needs go unmet. The pipeline looks promising, he said, but it has yet to bring anything to market. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have died from snakebite in recent years, and many more have been left with life-changing injuries, “with a disproportionate representation of children,” Reed said.

The new drugs may eventually arrive, but Reed worries that when they do, they may still be priced out of reach for rural patients. Even varespladib, which is cheaper to develop than antibody-based treatments, is being brought forward by a small biotech company that will eventually need to recoup its investment. Whether it will be affordable for a farmer in Bihar or western Kenya is separate from whether it works in trials, yet just as important.

Reed argues that the global snakebite world still underfunds the work that can help people now: prevention, first response, and community education. His organization has kept a small snakebite program going with its own funds, supporting school-based prevention work in Kenya and research in Rwanda. Its Women Champions of Snakebite network is still active, and it has helped launch a Snakebite Community Engagement Network run by people in the Global South. These programs are small, but they are built around the communities where snakebite actually happens.

A better snakebite response would have to do both things at once: Develop better drugs while also funding the community work that can prevent snakebites and deaths now. There’s been real progress, more so in some areas of concern than others, but, as Gutiérrez put it, “there is still a long road to go to give this problem the attention it deserves.” 

There are many ways to bomb a college commencement speech. 

You can tell everyone you composed the talk while high on ayahuasca, like Chris Pan at Ohio State. You can deliver the entirety of your speech in the voices of your incredibly annoying cartoon characters, like Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke at the University of Vermont. You can even, like my graduation speaker in 2001, admonish the graduating class for depending too much on their parents and generally being an ungrateful lot, before later being convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault and undergoing a dramatic fall from grace. (Yes, that was none other than Bill Cosby, whose convictions were later overturned.) 

But the surest way to turn your graduate audience hostile in 2026 is to refer positively to AI, as speakers ranging from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona to real estate executive Gloria Caulfield at the University of Central Florida to record label honcho Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University discovered. And that’s because AI has — not unreasonably — become the symbol of growing fears that a college degree is no longer as valuable as it once was, and that today’s college grads are uniquely screwed. (The only speaker I could find whose comments on AI were well received was The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng at Harvard, probably because they included the line: “fuck AI, fuck AI, fuck AI.”)

In a late-2025 NBC News poll, 63 percent of voters said a college degree isn’t worth it, against just 33 percent who said it was. A Gallup poll found that the share of Americans who say college is “very important” had fallen to 35 percent in 2025, a huge drop from 75 percent in 2010. And that pessimism has real grounding. Recent graduates ages 22 to 27 had an unemployment rate of about 5.7 percent in early 2026, above the national average of 4.3 percent. Hiring has slowed to the lowest rate outside the pandemic since 2014, while entry-level postings have fallen roughly 35 percent over the past 18 months. 

So there’s no doubt that 2026 will be a rough launch for new college grads. But a rough launch doesn’t mean a rough life, and while the longer-term impact of AI is unknowable, it’s far from the worst time even in recent memory to graduate into the workforce. The data still says, for most graduates, a college degree is more than worth the investment.

The vibes out there for college grads are not good. But when the bad vibes are outpacing the actual reality, that qualifies as qualified good news. 

One of the best investments you can make

Let’s start with the number the college panic ignores. In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York asked the question “Is college still worth it?” and came back with a very specific answer: Yes — to the tune of 12.5 percent. 

That was the median return on investment in a college degree, after accounting for the cost of tuition and the amount lost by not spending those years working. College graduates in recent years have earned a median of around $80,000 a year, compared to around $47,000 a year for high school graduates. Government data in 2024 put median weekly earnings for workers with a bachelor’s degree at $1,543, compared with $930 for workers with only a high school diploma — about 66 percent more. And while it’s true that the growth of this premium has largely flattened over the past two decades, after roughly doubling between 1980 and 2000, it hasn’t disappeared. Graduating from college, even in 2026, still puts you on a better path than skipping it.

It’s telling that when you shift from the abstract idea of college to the value of individual degrees, the vibes change. Asked about their own degree, according to a 2026 Gallup poll, about 80 percent of bachelor’s graduates call it critical or important to their careers, while 71 percent say they landed a good job within six months. It’s a bit like the perennial attitude toward Congress: People hate the institution and yet tend to rate their own representatives highly. Abstract views are influenced by the deluge of content about the crisis of college, while individual views are influenced by what is actually happening to people. 

It’s the timing, not the degree

Speaking as a proud member of the college class of 2001, I can tell you that 2026 is far from the first year when it was tough to graduate into the workforce. My friends one year above me in college entered an economy that had an astoundingly low unemployment rate of 1.4 to 1.7 percent for college grads ages 25 to 34, while real hourly wages for young college graduates had grown at 3 percent a year between 1995 and 2000. My classmates assumed we were headed for the same golden outcome.

“Psych!”, as we used to say back then. By the spring of 2001, the dot-com crash was in full effect, wiping out startups and jobs. More than a few people I knew had lined up lucrative starting jobs at investment banks and consulting businesses, only to have those gigs rescinded as they were preparing to receive their diplomas. (I cleverly avoided this by never getting those offers in the first place and instead entering the thriving field of journalism.) By December 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, the unemployment rate for college grads ages 25 to 34 had jumped to 4 percent.

The class of 2010 had it even worse — recent college grads had a 7 percent unemployment rate. But though both the classes of 2001 and 2010 experienced what economists call “recession scarring” that had lasting effects on their income, those scars largely, though not completely, faded as time passed and the economy improved. The lesson? You can’t control when you graduate college, but you can largely control whether you graduate college at all — and finishing school is likely to still benefit you over the long term.

It’s true that the class of 2026 is facing an extra layer of uncertainty: the fear that AI is eating away at the bottom rung of the career ladder before graduates can reach it. Goldman Sachs finds unemployment among 20- to 30-year-olds in tech-exposed roles is up nearly 3 percentage points since early 2025, while research from Stanford has counted a roughly 20 percent drop in employment for young software developers in highly automatable jobs. 

But every time you think the case has been made that AI is causing a jobpocalypse, new data complicates the picture. Vanguard reports that employment in highly AI-exposed occupations rose 1.7 percent between 2023 and 2025, while a Federal Reserve study this year of more than a million firms found no clear connection between adopting AI and posting fewer jobs so far. At the moment, hiring problems have more to do with a cautious, high-interest-rate economy. And employer hiring plans for the class of 2026 are actually being revised upward — not the move you make while deleting the entry level.  

“To you, the class of 2026, I say…”

None of this data means that college bet is a sure thing for everyone. Tracking by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada finds that 52 percent of graduates are underemployed a year out, and 45 percent are underemployed a decade later. A college grad who takes a first job that doesn’t require a degree is 3.5 times more likely to be underemployed 10 years on. For that group, the earnings premium over a high school grad shrinks to about 25 percent — roughly the same as a college dropout.

Outcomes are also influenced by what a graduate chooses to study: Underemployment runs under 10 percent for nursing graduates and above 65 percent for criminal justice majors. (I realize telling someone who just claimed their diploma that maybe they should have picked a different major is not exactly actionable advice.) And the financing has gotten tougher — for Gen Z, it cost 32 percent of the typical American family’s annual income to pay for one year at a state university in 2021, compared to mid-20s for Gen X in the 1990s and 15 percent for Boomers in 1975. 

But generational comparisons obscure as well. When people say college doesn’t pay like it used to, they may not realize they’re comparing against a past when a far smaller and more homogenous slice of Americans got their degree: Among 25- to 29-year-olds, the share holding a bachelor’s has roughly doubled between 1980 and 2021, from about a fifth to nearly two in five. That much larger and more varied pool of graduates skews the individual outcomes, even if the average largely holds up. 

So what would I tell the class of 2026 if someone were misguided enough to put me on the dais? Mustering my best commencement-grade metaphors, I’d tell them that, yes, they are graduating into a sea of troubles, but that they are far from the first academic sailors to make such a voyage, and that the diploma they hold is still the most oceanworthy raft they can find. (Can you tell I was an English major?) And if I were so bold as to mention AI, I’d lean more Ronny Chieng than Eric Schmidt.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

The story of global health over the last few centuries has generally been one of great progress — vastly longer lifespans, far fewer women dying in childbirth, many fewer children dying from miserable diseases like measles and smallpox. But there is one often overlooked feature of modernity that has brought a new and enormous degree of mortality and injury to everyday life, a risk that falls most heavily on the world’s poorest people. It kills about as many people as the world’s deadliest infectious disease — tuberculosis — and it’s the leading cause of death globally for people in the prime of their lives, aged 5 to 29. It is one of the defining technologies of modern life, one of the 20th century’s most dangerous gifts: the car. 

Around 1.19 million people globally are killed by road crashes every year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (some estimates put the number higher), and many times more — likely between 20 and 50 million — are injured, sometimes leaving them with life-altering disabilities. More than 90 percent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income nations, although these countries contain only around 60 percent of the world’s cars. 

This century, humanity has halved the mortality rate for children under five and reduced AIDS-related deaths from their peak by 70 percent. But the number of people killed by cars has remained roughly the same for the last 20 years. As motor vehicles spread around the world — the total fleet has doubled over the past 20 years — the burden of those deaths has shifted increasingly to lower-income countries. Despite all the progress we’ve made against ancient natural killers, we’re making little against a killer we engineered ourselves. 

That’s not for a lack of known solutions, but rather because there’s been comparatively little attention paid to car crash deaths as a real global health issue until relatively recently. Unlike deadly maladies that are purely bad, cars do add value to society. Perhaps as a result, even though wealthy countries have brought down per capita road fatalities over the course of decades, deaths by car have still often tended to be discounted by policymakers and the general public as the price of progress and economic growth. It’s “one of the few public health problems where society and decision makers still accept death and disability on such a large scale as inevitable,” the late Dinesh Mohan of the Indian Institute of Technology wrote in 2019. 

“You can become very depressed,” James Leather, director of transport at the Asian Development Bank, told me in a recent conversation at the International Transport Forum summit (an event sometimes called the Davos of transportation). “Why is no one taking this seriously?” 

Of course, it’s not that literally no one is taking it seriously, but rather that cars have long been an underrated threat to human well-being. But that is, perhaps, slowly beginning to change. 

Why cars kill so many people in countries with so few of them

I am sometimes known as a bit of a car hater, devoting a lot of my consciousness to thinking about how the United States got locked into car dependence. Our car-oriented development pattern is part of the reason the US has one of the highest road fatality rates of any wealthy country. (But, listen, I own a car too, and benefit greatly from it! I am American, after all.) 

US car fatality rates may be an outlier by wealthy-country standards, but most low- and middle-income nations face far greater risk. Haitians and Ethiopians are more than three times more likely to be killed by a car than an American; Kenyans, Bolivians, and Thais are more than twice as likely. 

That alone is worth dwelling on. If you live in the US, consider that you probably know at least several people who’ve been killed in a car crash or who have loved ones who have, and that this proximity to sudden, violent loss is felt even more acutely in most of the world. Road deaths account for around 1 percent of all deaths in the US; globally, that figure is about 2 percent, and in a typical middle-income country like Vietnam, it is more than 3 percent. 

That might sound a bit surprising — and feels all the more unfair — in light of the fact that poorer nations do not have anywhere close to as many cars as wealthy ones do, and their residents travel fewer miles by car than people in rich countries do. If cars kill so many Americans because we simply drive so much, in the developing world, the problem is almost the inverse: A minority of people who can afford it ride in private cars, while everyone else walks, bikes, or rides a motorcycle, scooter, or three-wheeled vehicle like an auto rickshaw. And those outside of an automobile — known as “vulnerable road users” — often share space in the road with cars and are at high risk of being hit. 

Cars themselves in developing nations are often more dangerous for their occupants than vehicles in rich countries are, too. Weaker car safety standards and a reliance on imported old cars mean that people sometimes travel in vehicles that lack safety features long taken for granted in rich countries, including airbags and frames designed to absorb the force from a crash. 

Amid all this, cars and other motorized vehicles are spreading rapidly in the Global South — much more quickly than that transition took place in North America and Europe — and doing so before governments have built safer roads, vehicle standards, adequate trauma care, or robust traffic regulations. Many nations lack comprehensive laws governing what the WHO considers the five key behaviors that shape road fatalities: high speeds, drunk driving, seatbelt use, helmet use for motorcyclists, and child restraints in cars.  

In Southeast Asian countries, which have seen a massive proliferation of motorized vehicles since 2010, “maybe the infrastructure was designed when you didn’t have so many cars, and now all of a sudden you have twice the number of cars that you did before,” Nhan Tran, the WHO’s head of violence and injury prevention, told me. Road crashes are a major burden on the medical systems of these countries and exact staggering economic costs, amounting to about 5 percent of national GDP in Vietnam, for example. 

Meanwhile, as the total number of global road fatalities has stayed roughly constant for the last few decades, the gap between poor and rich countries has widened. Between 2010 and 2021, high-income countries, particularly those in Europe, saw dramatic decreases in car crash deaths, while deaths in the vast majority of low-income nations (which are predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa) increased, according to the WHO’s most recent report on global road safety. Across lower-middle-income nations, like India, the aggregate number of deaths and the per capita fatality rate stayed roughly flat. 

I asked Leather whether there was an easy, no-brainer intervention that could make a big dent in these deaths. He pointed, among other things, to helmets — in the Philippines, where he lives, national law now requires that helmets be made available with every new motorcycle purchase, though for that to work, people of course actually have to use them.

“If you go to New Delhi today, nearly every motorcycle rider wears a certified full-faced helmet. This was achieved through strong enforcement,” Kavi Bhalla, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Public Health Sciences and an expert on global road safety, told me in an email. “In contrast, most other cities in India don’t enforce the helmet law, have very low helmet use, and this leads to many unnecessary deaths.”  

Poor countries don’t need to wait their turn for safer roads

Twenty years ago, two US economists published what became one of the most influential papers in the field of global road safety, on the relationship between a nation’s wealth and its traffic fatality rate. As countries get richer, they argued, motor vehicle ownership rises, and per capita car deaths rise in tandem. Eventually, as countries become wealthier — and as safer roads, vehicles, and traffic policies catch up with motorization — fatality rates start to fall, as they did across much of the industrialized world beginning in the early 1970s. That tipping point, the authors found, comes at around $8,600 (in 1985 international dollars) of per capita GDP. 

But this “economic determinism,” as Bhalla has described it, might be the wrong way of looking at the problem. It contributes to a sense that traffic carnage is inevitable until a nation becomes rich. But we would never argue that maternal mortality or malaria deaths can’t be significantly mitigated in low-income countries; in fact, we already know they have been. Although Europe, the US, and other high-income nations have steadily reduced car death rates over the last 60 years, Bhalla told me “it is a mistake to think that this has much to do with these countries being rich.”

Instead, “safety improved in these countries once they established national road safety agencies, gave them the authority to regulate what happens on the roads, and gave them a dedicated funding stream,” he wrote to me. “These agencies did what you would expect agencies to do. They identified the most common traffic safety risks in the countries, undertook investigations on how best to address these, and then made investments for large scale interventions focused on safer designs of cars and roads, coordinated enforcement programs, and emergency medical systems. Low and middle income countries can and should do this now.”

The WHO and other global organizations, along with some philanthropies, have been working to speed along such work over the last few decades, but the results have so far been somewhat underwhelming. The United Nations had aimed to halve global road deaths from the baseline of roughly 1.2 million by 2020, a goal we didn’t come anywhere close to reaching. On the other hand, world population has greatly increased in the last few decades, so holding the absolute number of traffic deaths constant is still a meaningful achievement: From 2010 to 2021, the global per capita road fatality rate decreased by about 16 percent. And in that period, Tran said, road safety has at least gained a lot more visibility among political leaders and civil society as a badly neglected public health crisis. 

Having missed the 2020 target, the UN now aims to halve road deaths by 2030. But we will “definitely not” meet that goal either, Bhalla told me. 

A core reason the global road fatality crisis has been so maddeningly obstinate is that the root of the problem is complicated, contested, and depends on one’s perspective. “It’s not the same as when you’re talking about Covid or HIV, where there is a virus” that we want to eradicate, said Tran. “When you talk about road safety, what is the virus?” Is it dangerous individual behaviors — speeding, drunk driving, refusing to wear a seatbelt? Is it deteriorating roads or a lack of sidewalks? Is it humanity’s growing dependence on cars themselves? 

Tran, like many road safety advocates today, calls for an approach that focuses on the most upstream cause of car fatalities — the proliferation of cars — and champions good urban planning designed to prioritize transit, walking, and cycling over the movement of cars. That would make safety an inherent feature of the transportation network and obviate the need for what Tran calls “quick fixes” to poorly designed systems.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed that message in the agency’s 2023 road safety report: “As motor vehicles proliferate, countries are doubling down on transport systems built for cars, not people, and not with safety at their core,” he wrote. 

There’s a lot of wisdom to this, as the American experience over the last century well shows. The US experiment in car dependence has burdened us with a road fatality rate that rivals nations much poorer than us. Urban planners now widely agree that that car-dependent paradigm was a mistake, but now that it’s built out, it’s hard to claw our way out of.

But that lesson also requires some humility: Even a car hater like me can acknowledge that for many people in poorer nations, automobility offers a measure of freedom that rich countries have taken for granted for many years. And it would be a mistake to see simple interventions that can save tens of thousands of lives, and that were instrumental in bringing down car fatalities in rich countries, as mere Band-Aids. We need both approaches. Just as humans did with once-devastating infectious diseases, we will have to learn to see a person killed for simply trying to get somewhere not as a tragic act of God, but as the result of forces within our control. 

Editor’s note, June 7, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on November 3, 2024.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June. In the meantime, submit your own question here.

I’m at an age where I feel like I need to decide whether I want to have kids, but I’m very ambivalent about it and don’t know how to know whether I want them. I don’t dream of parenthood or filling my days with caregiving for a young child. But, does anyone?! That doesn’t seem like a good way to decide whether I truly want to be a parent. But then what is? The main place my mind goes is that I fear my life would be sad and depressing when my partner and I are 70 and childless. I like the thought of having well-adjusted adult children to spend time with when I’m old. That seems like a misguided and selfish reason to have kids. 

A better reason might be that I think my partner and I have good values, and I’d like to bring more people into the world who have those values, but that also seems selfish because there’s no guarantee that a child will embrace your values, and your duty as a parent is to let them flourish as whoever they want to be. I worry that I would be the kind of parent who struggles to support my kid if they rebel against everything I believe in. But I also feel like you just can’t know what you would be like in that situation until you’re in it. How do you decide that such a life-altering decision is right for you, let alone its ethical implications for a person who doesn’t exist yet? 

Dear Fencesitter,

Ah, parenthood ambivalence. So many of us can relate. And, like you, so many of us try to answer the question “Do I want to have kids?” by looking inward for the answer. We introspect, we ruminate, we dig through childhood traumas. We consider what makes us happy now in hopes of predicting whether kids would make us happier or more miserable later. We assume the answer is there within us, a buried treasure waiting to be unearthed.

That’s understandable: Most advice for people considering parenthood encourages us to do just that. Countless articles, books, and yes, advice columns are premised on the idea that the answer exists as a stable fact within us. So is the parenthood ambivalence coach Ann Davidman’s online class, the “Motherhood Clarity™ Course” which opens with a mantra: “The answers will come because they never left … It’s all within me.”  

But there are a few problems with that approach. For one, you could spend your entire adult life auditing your soul for the answer and still end up looking like the shrug emoji. That’s because introspection is an unbounded search process: You’ve got no way to know when you’ve searched enough. 

Another problem is that this approach centers you and your desires too much. As you pointed out, bringing a kid into the world can’t only be about its costs and benefits for you.

Finally, you’re just not well-positioned to predict whether kids will make you happier or more miserable! As the philosopher L.A. Paul notes, you can’t quite know what it’ll be like to have a kid until you have one, and besides, the “you” might become transformed in the process, so that the things that make you happy now are not the same as the things that will make you happy as a parent.

So, what I suggest is a radically different approach: If you want to arrive at a decision, you have to go beyond your own interiority. You have to turn your gaze outward and ask yourself: What is it that you find awesome, thrilling, and intrinsically valuable about being in the world? 

I’m not asking because I think the key is deciding which values you want to transmit to your kid. Like you said, there’s no guarantee that your kid will embrace your values. Instead, I’m asking because this is the basis on which you can make a choice — not “find the answer” but make a choice — about whether to have kids.

Up until now, you’ve been thinking of the kids question as an epistemic one — you say you “don’t know how to know” — but I would think of it as an existential one instead. The existentialist philosophers argued that life doesn’t come with predefined meaning or fixed answers. Instead, each human has to choose how to create their own meaning. As the Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y Gasset put it, the central task of being human is “autofabrication,” which literally means self-making. You come up with your own answer, and in so doing, you make yourself. 

A decade ago, just for fun, my friend Emily sat me down in a park and had me do an exercise that would turn out to be extremely impactful: It was, believe it or not, an online quiz. It listed dozens and dozens of different values — friendship, creativity, growth, and so on — and instructed me to select my top 10. Then it made me narrow it down to my top five. I found that brutally hard, but it was revealing. My number one value turned out to be what the quiz called, somewhat idiosyncratically, “delight of being, joy.”    

I return to that again and again (my mind preserves the punctuation, so I regularly find myself talking to people about “delight-of-being-comma-joy!”) when I have to make tough decisions. It captures a core fact about me: I love being alive in this world! Whenever I snorkel with impossibly colorful fish, or experience deep connection with another human being, or stare up at all the galaxies we’ve barely begun to understand, I feel so grateful that I get to participate in the grand mystery of being.

And that’s what made me decide I want to be a mom one day. Choosing to have a child feels like one of the biggest ways I can say YES to life, at a time when many doubt the worthiness of perpetuating human life on this planet. It’s a way to affirm that being alive in this world is a gift, one I want to pass along to others. 

So allow me to be your Emily. Let me present you with an inventory of values (one of many similar inventories available online) and urge you to select your top five. Then ask yourself: Would having a kid be a good way to enact my values — or is there another way to enact my values that feels more compelling to me? Which path is the best fit for you personally, given your specific talents and your physical and psychological needs?

This depends a lot on the individual. Imagine three women who all rank “personal growth” as their top value. They might still arrive at totally different conclusions about kids. For one woman, that value may feel like a great reason to have a kid, because she believes childrearing will help her grow as a person and that she’ll get to guide a new person in their development. The second woman might say her primary mode of growth is art-making, so she wants to focus on that while being an active auntie to her friends’ kids on the side. A third woman might feel that, for her, the most promising path is to become a nun. All three are completely valid!  

A lot of people struggling with parenthood ambivalence say they’re scared that if they don’t have a kid, they’ll miss out on something sui generis — a completely unique experience, a sort of love to which nothing else compares. It sounds like this FOMO is playing a role for you, too; you mentioned that you fear your life would be sad and depressing when you and your partner are 70 and childless. 

But there are plenty of parents who will tell you that, while they adore their kids, the kid-parent relationship is not magically more meaningful than anything else in their life. In the excellent new book What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, the former writes: 

While the relationship between a parent and child is doubtless unique, what if I told you that, phenomenologically speaking, it is not really grand and tremendous? That it’s not even particularly extraordinary? … To love your child isn’t like nothing you’ve ever known. It isn’t unimaginable. If you have known love, you have also known it, or something like it … What is so special about this love isn’t how exotic, mysterious, or astounding it is but how simple and familiar.

So, if you just like the thought of having children because you want lovely people to spend time with when you’re old, try first experimenting with other ways to get that same need met. You might find that it’s not something that only a child can provide. As the author (and my friend) Rhaina Cohen documents beautifully in The Other Significant Others, some people find that deep friendships meet their need for connection perfectly well, with no child-shaped hole or partner-shaped hole left over. 

But even if you believe having a child is a sui generis experience, the point I would make is: Other things are too! An artist might tell you there’s nothing that compares to the creative thrill of painting. Someone involved in political work may tell you there’s nothing quite like the feeling of fighting for justice and winning. Lots of things in the world are unique and incommensurably good. 

So don’t be pushed around by societal narratives of what the ultimate good looks like. Let your choice flow from your own sense of what’s most valuable about human life. Whereas what makes you feel happy or miserable can change a lot over time, core values are relatively stable, so they form a more enduring basis for making major decisions. Yes, it’s conceivable that even those values might shift a little over the decades, but making a choice that flows from your values means you will at least be confident that you had a very solid reason for doing what you did — no matter how you end up feeling about it in the future. 

And as for the future? You really can’t control it. So, your goal is not to control every possible outcome. Your goal is to live in line with your values.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, often called the “father of existentialism,” proposed the idea that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. This week’s question prompted me to revisit that idea. 

• As I wrote this column, I went back and reread a great New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman about how we make major decisions. It discusses philosopher Agnes Callard’s idea that “we ‘aspire’ to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess.” In other words, you don’t decide you want to be a parent — you decide you want to be the sort of person who’d want to be a parent, and lean into that. I found the idea interesting but too complicated by half: Why would I ground this decision in values I hope to one day possess instead of grounding it in the values I already hold dear?

• Lots of people bring up climate change as a reason not to have kids. I think that’s misguided. Having a kid is one of the things that can push you to take heroic action on climate change — so I was interested in this piece in Noema Magazine, which argues that we need to evoke heroism, not hope, with regard to the climate — and finds a prime example of that in … JRR Tolkien.  

Editor’s note, June 14, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on June 8, 2025.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June. In the meantime, submit your own question here.

My husband and I have a good relationship. We’re both committed to personal growth and continual learning and have developed very strong communication skills. A couple of years ago we were exposed to some friends with an open marriage and had our own conversations about ethical non-monogamy. At first, neither of us were interested. 

Now, my husband is interested and currently is attracted to a colleague who is also into him. She’s married and has no idea that he and I talk about all of their interactions. He doesn’t know what her relationship agreements are with her husband.

I’m not currently interested in ethical non-monogamy. I see things in our relationship that I’d like to work on together with my husband. I want more of his attention and energy, to be frank. I don’t want his attention and energy being funneled into another relationship. I don’t have moral issues with ethical non-monogamy, I just don’t actually see any value-add for me right now. The cost-benefit analysis leaves me saying “not now.” 

My husband admitted that he’s hoping I will have a change of mind. I don’t want to force his hand, although I am continuing to say very clearly what I want in my relationship. How do we reach a compromise? If he cuts ties with this woman, he has resentment towards me. If he continues to pursue something with her, I feel disrespected, and while I don’t want to leave him I would feel the need to do something.

Dear Monogamously Married,

I want to start by commending you for two things. First, for your openness to discussing and exploring all this with your husband. Second, for your insistence on clearly stating what you actually want — and don’t want. 

I think Erich Fromm, the 20th-century German philosopher and psychologist, would back me up in saying that you’d do well to hold tight to both those qualities. For starters, radical openness is important because, according to Fromm, the basic premise of love is freedom. He writes:

Love is a passionate affirmation of its “object.” That means that love is not an “affect” but an active striving, the aim of which is the happiness, development, and freedom of its “object.” 

In other words, love is not a feeling. It’s work, and the work of love is to fully support the flourishing of the person you love. That can be scary — what if the person discovers that they’re actually happier with somebody else? — which is why Fromm specifies that only someone with a strong self “which can stand alone and bear solitude” will be up for the job. He continues:

This passionate affirmation is not possible if one’s own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate.

So far, it might sound like Fromm is saying that to be a good lover is to be a doormat: You just have to do whatever’s best for the other person, even if it screws you over. But his view is very much the opposite. 

In fact, Fromm cautions us against both “masochistic love” and “sadistic love.” In the first, you give up your self and sacrifice your needs in order to become submerged in another person. In the second, you try to exert power over the other person. Both of these are rooted in “a deep anxiety and an inability to stand alone,” writes Fromm; whether by dissolving yourself into them or by controlling them, you’re trying to make it impossible for the other person to abandon you. Both approaches are “pseudo-love.”

So although Fromm doesn’t want you to try to control your partner, and although he suggests that the philosophical ideal is for you to passionately affirm your partner’s freedom, he’s not advising you to do that if, for you, that will mean masochism. 

If you’re not up for ethical non-monogamy — if you feel, like many people, that the idea of giving your partner free rein is too big a threat to your relationship or your own well-being — then pretending otherwise is not real love. It’s just masochistic self-annihilation.

I’m personally partial to Fromm’s non-possessive approach to love. But I equally appreciate his point that the philosophical ideal could become a practical bloodbath if it doesn’t work for the actual humans involved. I think the question, then, is this: Do you think it’s possible for you to get to a place where you genuinely feel ready for and interested in ethical non-monogamy?

It sounds like you’re intellectually open to the idea, and given that you said you’re committed to personal growth and continual learning, non-monogamy could offer you some benefits; lots of people who practice it say that part of its appeal lies in the growth it catalyzes. And if practicing non-monogamy makes you and/or your husband more fulfilled, it could enrich your relationship and deepen your appreciation for each other.

But right now, you’ve got a problem: Your husband is pushing on your boundaries by flirting with a woman even after you’ve expressed that you don’t want him pursuing something with her. And you already feel like he isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, so the prospect of having to divvy up those resources with another woman feels threatening. Fair! 

Notice, though, that that isn’t a worry about non-monogamy per se — it’s a worry about the state of your current monogamous relationship.

In a marriage, what partners typically want is to feel emotionally secure. But that comes from how consistently and lovingly we show up for and attune to one another, not from the relationship structure. A monogamous marriage may give us some feeling of security, but it’s obviously no guarantee; some people cheat, some get divorced, and some stay loyally married while neglecting their partner emotionally.  

“Monogamy can serve as a stand-in for actual secure attachment,” writes therapist Jessica Fern in Polysecure, a book on how to build healthy non-monogamous relationships. She urges readers to take an honest look at any relationship insecurities or dissatisfactions that are being disguised by monogamy, and work with partners to strengthen the emotional experience of the relationship. 

Since you feel that your husband isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, be sure to talk to him about it. Explain that it doesn’t feel safe for you to open up the relationship without him doing more to be fully present with you and to make you feel understood and precious. See if he starts implementing these skills more reliably. 

In the meantime, while you two are trying to reset your relationship, it’s absolutely reasonable to ask him to cool it with the colleague he’s attracted to; he doesn’t have to cut ties with her entirely (and may not be able to if they work together), but he can certainly avoid feeding the flames with flirtation. Right now, the fantasy of her is a distraction from the work he needs to be doing to improve the reality of your marriage. He should understand why a healthy practice of ethical non-monogamy can’t emerge from a situation where he’s pushing things too far with someone else before you’ve agreed to change the terms of your relationship (and if he doesn’t, have him read Polysecure!).

It’s probably a good idea for you to each do your own inner work, too. Fern, like Fromm, insists that if we want to be capable of a secure attachment with someone else, we need to cultivate that within ourselves. That means being aware of our feelings, desires, and needs, and knowing how to tend to them. Understanding your attachment style can help with this; for example, if you’re anxiously attached and you very often reach out to your partner for reassurance, you can practice spending time alone.

After taking some time to work on these interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, come back together to discuss how you’re feeling. Do you feel more receptive to opening up the relationship? Do you think it would add more than it would subtract? 

If the answer is “yes” or “maybe,” you can create a temporary relationship structure — or “vessel,” as Fern calls it — to help you ease into non-monogamy. One option is to adopt a staggered approach to dating, where one partner (typically the more hesitant one) starts dating new people first, and the other partner starts after a predetermined amount of time. Another option is to try a months-long experiment where both partners initially engage in certain romantic or sexual experiences that are less triggering to each other, then assess what worked and what didn’t, and go from there.

If the answer is “no” — if you’re not receptive to opening up your relationship — then by all means say that! Given you’ll have sincerely done the work to explore whether non-monogamy works for you, your husband doesn’t get to resent you. He can be sad, he can be disappointed, and he can choose to leave if the outcome is intolerable to him. But he’ll have to respect you, and what’s more important, you’ll have to respect yourself.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This week’s question prompted me to go back to the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was influenced by Fromm. Maslow spoke of two kinds of love: Deficit-Love and Being-Love. The former is about trying to satiate your own needs, while the latter is about giving without expecting something in return. Maslow characterizes Being-Love as an almost spiritual experience, likening it to “the perfect love of their God that some mystics have described.”

• In addition to Polysecure, which has become something of a poly bible in the past few years, I recommend reading What Love Is and What It Could Be, written by the philosopher Carrie Jenkins. I appreciated Jenkins’s functionalist take on romantic love: She explains that we’ve constructed the idea of romantic love a certain way in order to serve a certain function (structuring society into nuclear family units), but we can absolutely revise it if we want. 

• Many people are already revising the traditional view of romantic love. As a piece in Wired documents, millennials and Gen Z are increasingly forming non-hierarchal relationships with multiple partners and friends. This is often referred to as “relationship anarchy,” a term coined in 2006 by writer Andie Nordgren, who said it “questions the idea that love is a limited resource that can only be real if restricted to a couple.”

Friendship breakups are never easy, but few are as messy and expensive as the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s once thriving tech bromance, which has — for now — reached a legal end.

On Monday, a jury ruled against Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, which contended that Altman and other executives “stole a charity” (as one of Musk’s lawyers put it) by turning much of what was once a nonprofit research lab into a corporate behemoth. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) For three weeks, lawyers on both sides deployed an increasingly unhinged body of evidence in an attempt to discredit both men and prove they’re untrustworthy and power-hungry. 

Musk claimed he was duped into donating roughly $38 million to OpenAI under false pretenses, and was suing for $150 billion in financial restitution alongside major changes to OpenAI’s leadership and governance structure. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s decision that Musk failed to bring his lawsuit within the three-year statute of limitations, given that OpenAI first added its for-profit arm in 2018. However, it’s possible that the evidence put forth at trial will still be enough to convince state regulators to revisit the agreements that allowed OpenAI to restructure into a for-profit enterprise to begin with.

Lawyers tell me that Musk will likely choose to appeal the ruling, meaning the catfight might not be over yet. But even beyond the outcome, the trial shone an often uncomfortable spotlight on the inner workings of Silicon Valley and the AI industry. Here are five major revelations from the trial.

OpenAI’s board members questioned Sam Altman’s honesty

Musk’s legal team sought to paint Altman as a deeply untrustworthy person, prone to lying to his co-founders, employees, and board members if it meant advancing his interests.

Multiple former OpenAI employees and board members testified as much in the courtroom. Altman’s “pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor” led directly to his temporary ouster as CEO in 2023, said Helen Toner, a former board member, in a video deposition. He had a tendency of “saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person,” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, testified. In one instance, she said, Altman explicitly lied to her about the safety review required to vet a new AI model.

Greg Brockman kept a diary — and he probably wishes he hadn’t

Some of the more salacious evidence entered into trial came from a personal diary kept by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who chronicled his “stream of consciousness” as he weighed whether it would be “morally bankrupt” to pivot OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise.

“Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” he wrote in one 2017 entry. “It’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him,” meaning Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and provided most of its start-up funding. “He’s really not an idiot,” Brockman later wrote. “His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end.”

Brockman was also candid about his personal ambitions; “It would be nice to be making the billions,” he wrote. He later received a stake in OpenAI now estimated to be worth about $30 billion.

Surprise, surprise: Elon Musk is difficult to collaborate with 

OpenAI built a bot in 2017 that was so advanced, it could beat top professional players at strategic multiplayer battle game Dota 2, a major milestone for the budding lab. “Time to make the next step for OpenAI. This is the triggering event,” Musk emailed Brockman. 

Musk gave Brockman and cofounder Ilya Sutskever new Tesla Model 3 cars, presumably to “butter us up,” Brockman testified. The Tesla CEO then summoned them to his self-described “haunted mansion” for discussions of a possible OpenAI for-profit arm, where whiskey was served by Musk’s then-girlfriend Amber Heard. 

At one point, Musk became so irate at his guests’ insistence that they share control of OpenAI — rather than cede absolute control to Musk — that “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me,” Brockman testified. In the following months, Musk repeatedly pitched having Tesla absorb OpenAI, Altman testified. And, in one “particularly hair-raising moment,” he mused that OpenAI should pass on to his children. 

Musk ultimately left OpenAI in 2018 to begin building his own competitor. During an all-hands meeting, Musk got into another tense verbal tussle with Josh Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, over the race to develop artificial general intelligence. “He snapped and called me a jackass,” Achiam testified. For Achiam’s valor, two OpenAI employees — including Dario Amodei, who later departed to form Anthropic — awarded him a small golden statue of a donkey’s rear end, inscribed with the message, “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”

Microsoft cozied up to OpenAI to avoid being left behind in the AI race

Musk first funded OpenAI because of another friendship breakup, this one with Google cofounder Larry Page, who Musk says mocked him at his own birthday party for preferring humans over computers. Microsoft — which is named in Musk’s lawsuit for aiding and abetting OpenAI’s abandonment of its nonprofit mission — later became OpenAI’s first major corporate investor in 2019, because it, too, wanted to compete with Google as the AI race heated up. 

“I don’t want to be IBM,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote to executives, referring to that company’s decline in the personal computing race, according to emails revealed at trial. “It was becoming even more core and important that we had real agency at every layer of the stack,” Nadella testified.

That meant ingratiating itself in every corner of OpenAI’s world. Microsoft played a crucial role in bringing Altman back to power after the failed board coup in 2023, which Nadella referred to as “amateur city, as far as I was concerned.” In a text thread revealed at trial, Altman asked Microsoft executives to vet various members of OpenAI’s reconstituted board of directors, who now control both the for-profit company and the original nonprofit. 

By this summer, Microsoft will have invested over $100 billion in OpenAI, one of the company’s executives testified. The company was awarded a 27 percent stake in OpenAI last fall. 

Everybody wants to rule the world (of artificial general intelligence)

Microsoft. Musk. Altman. Brockman. Almost everyone who testified at trial pointed fingers at a different boogeyman whose motives were too impure and whose character was too corruptible, to be trusted with control of what all agreed would be an extremely consequential technology. By contrast, their own introspection mostly took a back seat to ambition.

“We don’t want to have a Terminator outcome,” Musk testified, to apparent eyerolls from Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who tried and sometimes failed to steer the trial away from discussions of AI’s existential risks. “If you have someone who is not trustworthy in charge of AI,” Musk said, “I think that’s a very big danger for the whole world.”

Over a decade ago, Musk came together with OpenAI’s cofounders to build a charity equipped to take on a different threat then poised to lead the AI race: Google, which had recently acquired Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Now, like Altman and Brockman, who testified that they resisted Musk’s dictatorial attempts to secure absolute control of artificial general intelligence, Musk portrayed himself as someone selfless and transparent enough to be put in charge. 

“It is ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that is in the exact space,” Gonzalez Rogers at one point told Musk’s lawyer, in reference to xAI, which has come under fire this year for facilitating the mass creation of nonconsensual deepfakes. “I suspect there are plenty of people who wouldn’t like to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands.”

Update, May 18, 2026, 2 pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect the conclusion of the trial.

Of all the hot-button social issues in America, there’s one that often flies under the radar but can unleash a torrent of strong feelings — swirling with apparent contradictions — when it surfaces: meat. 

Case in point: Last month, the popstar Billie Eilish argued that you can’t say you love animals and eat them. Her comments made sense, though they set off a heated, weeks-long debate among X and Instagram users, who responded with a flood of strange justifications for eating meat, despite the terrible treatment of farmed animals. 

The spat vividly illustrated a psychological phenomenon called the “meat paradox”: the cognitive dissonance and deep discomfort people feel when their behavior of eating meat and other animal products clashes with their fondness for animals.

This paradox has proved an exceedingly difficult hurdle to overcome in encouraging people to change how they eat — and even for having productive conversations about meat without things quickly getting heated (as they did for Eilish). But some research also suggests there are ways out of the meat paradox, which could help relieve the psychological strain for people, as well as the suffering of animals in factory farms. 

How we really feel about eating animals: It’s complicated

Two recent polls reveal just how confusing American attitudes about animal products are.    

The first of those polls asked close to 1,000 US adults for their views on several near-universal practices in animal farming, including stunning pigs unconscious in Co2 gas chambers before slaughter, grinding up newborn male chicks, separating calves on dairy farms from their mothers, and searing off the ends of hens’ beaks without pain relief. 

The vast majority of respondents to this survey, which was conducted by the animal welfare research group Faunalytics, consider these practices “somewhat unacceptable” or “very unacceptable.” 

A separate poll of more than 12,000 US adults, conducted by the Pew Research Center, asked respondents about whether they find a range of behaviors immoral. Those issues covered adultery, gambling, having an abortion, and eating meat. More than almost any other issue in the survey, respondents considered eating meat “not a moral issue.” It ranked as close to the most “morally acceptable” behavior offered, on par with using IVF.

These numbers seem to show just how deep in the meat paradox we are. And that doesn’t surprise Hank Rothgerber one bit. He’s a professor at Bellarmine University who studies the psychology of meat consumption. Rothgerber and other psychologists have conducted dozens of studies that have uncovered the cognitive dissonance people feel when confronted with the fact that their behavior — like eating meat — clashes with their beliefs, such as that animals shouldn’t be harmed.

One possible explanation for this disconnect, he told me, is simple ignorance.  

Most people, it seems, truly don’t know that the cruel practices asked about in these surveys are quite standard on US factory farms — and that nearly all animal products come from factory farms. And so, when people are asked if eating meat is morally wrong, “what’s being done to the animals is not coming to their mind,” Rothgerber said. 

But chalking it up to mere ignorance suggests that “if you just inform people, enlighten them, then everything will be okay, right?” he said. Not quite. “I think the deeper issue with it is that the ignorance is motivated — basically, willful ignorance. People don’t want to know.” 

Rothgerber and other psychology researchers consider willful ignorance, or avoidance, a strategy some people deploy to resolve their feelings of cognitive dissonance.

In a 2017 study, one-third of respondents chose to look at a blank screen instead of a picture showing pregnant pigs housed in tiny crates (a pervasive practice in factory farming), with some participants explaining their choice as wanting to avoid feelings of guilt. In another study, some people said that learning about pig farming could contradict their views on animal welfare or force them to change their meat consumption.

There are several other strategies people use to alleviate the discomfort of living with the meat paradox. One is lowering the moral status of animals. In a clever 2010 study, participants were randomly given either cashews or beef jerky to snack on while filling out a short questionnaire about what they thought of the snacks. Then, the researchers asked a number of follow-up questions, including how much moral consideration cows deserve.

Participants who had been randomly assigned to eat the beef jerky, “viewed the cow as significantly less deserving of moral concern” and with a lower capacity to suffer than did participants who ate the cashews, the researchers reported. This experiment suggested that rather than people’s thoughts and values driving their actions, it might often be reversed.

Researchers have also found that some people work to dissociate meat from its animal origins, or actively try not to think of animals when eating meat. Others try to neutralize their discomfort via ideas that either avoid the problem of animal suffering or absolve them of their complicity, for example, asserting that eating meat is their right, that they only eat free-range meat, or that they hardly eat any meat at all.

The meat paradox puts animal advocates in an extremely difficult position. No one seems to like the cruelty involved in meat, milk, and egg production, yet they like what it produces: cheap animal products. A lot of people feel guilty about what it takes to produce those items, but respond with defensiveness, evasion, or arguments that don’t stand up to scrutiny when asked to consider not consuming them.

This has led some academics to consider the problem of factory farming and animal welfare a “wicked problem,” what’s been defined as “a complex, multifaceted issue that lacks a single, definitive solution due to the interconnectedness of its components.” Other such wicked problems include climate change, economic inequality, and global health. And many, many tactics to reduce global meat consumption have failed to move the needle. But a few, backed by new research and results, could work.

How to escape the meat paradox

One way to address the meat paradox is to accept its durability and try to work around it by changing conditions on farms, rather than trying to persuade people to eat less meat. 

For example, a lot of anti-factory farming activists work to make meat and eggs less cruel by lobbying for corporations and governments to ban the very worst farming practices. This has proven quite effective. For example, almost half of the US egg supply now comes from cage-free farms as a result of a number of state laws and corporate animal welfare policies.

Such bans don’t result in humane conditions, but they’re certainly an improvement. And the fact that most people support these measures when they can vote on them shows how we’re much more open to changes in animal welfare when we’re acting as voters instead of consumers.

This approach has its limits, though, because there are dozens of cruel practices to potentially ban in meat, milk, and egg production, and the companies that make up these industries lobby aggressively against such measures, making them difficult to change.  

But outside of avoiding the meat paradox altogether, there are two promising approaches to helping people change their behaviors and are far less likely to cause them to put up defenses. The first involves changing people’s food environments, such as making plant-based meals the default main dish at university and hospital cafeterias (as opposed to merely an option off to the side), making plant-based milk the default milk at coffee shops (so you have to request cow’s milk if you want it), or working to make plant-based meat and milk products taste better and cost less. 

Some research suggests that gently confronting people about animal welfare as they decide what to eat can also be effective. For example, a 2022 study conducted at a Dutch zoo’s cafeteria found that posting the question “Do you consider animal welfare to be important?” above a veggie burger menu item doubled its sales.

In a new study conducted at a university cafeteria in the UK, researchers put a photo of an animal next to a menu item that used their meat — pigs, chickens, fish, and cows — and the odds of diners instead choosing a vegetarian meal increased. 

“Linking meat to its animal source can produce measurable behavioral changes,” the researchers wrote. In other words, this short circuits the meat paradox by making it all but impossible to dissociate meat from animals. Small nudges like this may seem to produce small results. The group that was exposed to menus with pictures of animals ate 3.2 percent less meat. A modest effect, but scaled up by cafeteria directors and restaurant owners across the globe, that one change alone could prevent billions of animals from being factory-farmed for meat. 

The second approach involves deeply engaging with people on the issue. Three interventions that have proven effective in getting people to reduce their meat consumption, at least in the short term, include watching a segment from the animal rights documentary Dominion, wearing a VR headset that puts people inside a pig factory farm, and taking a course on the ethics of eating meat. But such involved interventions would be difficult to roll out on a mass scale. 

Many animal advocates have also written about how to better approach these charged issues so as to have more productive and healthy conversations. One of them is Björn Ólafsson, who recently wrote about the Billie Eilish dustup and included a counterintuitive recommendation: When all else fails, change what you’re asking of people. For example, instead of trying to persuade someone to eat less meat who really doesn’t want to, that person could help instead by making a donation to the very underfunded anti-factory farming movement. 

It’ll take a lot more clever interventions and tactics like these — and people willing to implement them — as well as more robust government and corporate policies to make factory farming a thing of the past. But, along the way, more of us might find our way out of the uncomfortable meat paradox — for good. 

The housing abundance movement has won more of the intellectual argument than anyone might have predicted a decade ago. Across much of American politics, even in Zohran Mamdani’s New York (listen, I love the guy), it is now at least possible to say out loud that we have too many pointless rules making it impossible to build enough housing. But that doesn’t settle the politically harder questions of…where exactly should the housing go, and what should it look like?  

There has often been disagreement among housing reformers on that point — or at least a difference in emphasis. Should advocates try to add homes in already vibrant urban and suburban areas, which would add density but run into a buzzsaw of zoning codes and angry neighbors? Or should the focus be building at the urban fringe, in the form of sprawl, where land is cheap and plentiful and obstacles to building are fewer? 

These approaches, known respectively as infill and greenfield development, aren’t necessarily opposed; with America millions of homes short, most housing experts would say that we need both. But there are many reasons to prefer building in over building out. Building on top of or in between existing development reduces the toll on the environment and wildlife, minimizes commute times, and better supports compact, walkable, livable communities. And a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing policy initiative, the World Resources Institute, and the research firm ECOnorthwest advances another, less appreciated reason to favor infill: It could help keep your city solvent and maybe even keep your property taxes down. 

How? The researchers simulated different future housing construction scenarios across 10 diverse states, including fast-growing ones like Arizona and Texas and slower-growing states like Pennsylvania. They then compared the public costs of essential services like roads and sewer lines for homes built within existing communities versus those built at the edge of cities. 

Each home developed near jobs, shops, and transit, according to the report, would require upfront infrastructure expenses about $21,000 less on average than those added at the urban fringe, amounting to a one-third reduction in the cost of that infrastructure. (The categories used in the report are more complex than just an infill-versus-greenfield split, but for simplicity, I’ll use these terms as shorthand.)

The ongoing maintenance for all that infrastructure, meanwhile, added up to about 50 percent less on average for homes built within established communities, while communities developed this way would raise about 13 percent more in property taxes per acre on average because they have more households concentrated in the same land area. 

Urban analysts have made variations of this observation many times before, and the logic is mostly basic geometry: Compact housing development allows cities to spend less per person on physical infrastructure like roads, and to spread the costs of that infrastructure across more households. Yet American land-use policy is set up to discourage precisely that kind of growth. As a result, we build many more single-family homes than apartments or condos, and increasingly in low-density areas outside of major population centers. 

Meanwhile, the US is fast hitting fiscal limits — higher interest rates, an aging population, and amid it all, a nationwide revolt over property taxes. Fiscally efficient growth matters more than it has in a long time, and that might be the invitation we need to rethink America’s abiding instinct to grow ever outward.

Sprawl costs cities more, but it’s not everything

To understand how this works, it helps to picture it through real-world examples: Take the largely middle-class suburb of University Park, Illinois, which is home to about 681 people per square mile, and compare it to nearby Chicago, which is nearly 18 times as dense. That means University Park serves many fewer people per mile of road or foot of piping, providing a thinner tax base to pay for the infrastructure on which the community depends. 

As Pew’s report notes: “Home construction in established areas relies primarily on existing infrastructure and often includes apartment buildings, duplexes, townhomes, and accessory dwelling units (ADUs), all of which require less infrastructure per unit than detached single-family homes.” While the report relies on modeling, its findings comport with more empirically grounded research on the question.

Cheaper infrastructure, however, does not mean lower costs across the board. Arpit Gupta, an associate professor of finance at New York University Stern School of Business, has pointed out that physical infrastructure like roads, bridges, sewers, and water services makes up only a small share of local governments’ costs in the US. Social spending, on things like healthcare and education, are much more fiscally important. That’s one reason why even though the governments of blue cities like Chicago benefit from the economics of density, they are often costlier to build and live in, thanks to factors like higher public sector wages and more onerous environmental review and permitting processes. 

Nevertheless, while a sprawling community may be able to shoulder the burdens of more extended infrastructure so long as it continues growing, should growth begin to stagnate, the costs of years of greenfield development can really start to hit. And in the US, one need not even venture outside the suburbs to see it. Earlier this year, I spoke with John Zeanah, the chief of development and infrastructure for Memphis, Tennessee, about what this pattern has meant for the city. “Memphis lived it firsthand,” he said. “There are significant costs associated with sprawl that ultimately are unsustainable.” 

Many sprawling American cities — Houston, Dallas, Phoenix — are growing quickly in population, but there are also many others whose populations have stagnated or declined in recent decades and that are now burdened with figuring out what to do with an overly large geographic footprint. In the late 20th century, Memphis grew by literally annexing nearby unincorporated developments, but in recent years its population has been declining.

By 2015, compared to about 50 years prior, “the city’s land area grew by over 50 percent with virtually no population growth. This meant 50 percent more infrastructure to service and maintain,” Zeanah told me in an email. The costs of this go well beyond just hard physical infrastructure, Zeanah explained, extending to services like police, fire, and transit, all of which must serve a larger area than they would otherwise and need to be supported by a stagnant tax base.

Memphis is now trying to undo these mistakes. Its latest comprehensive plan, Zeanah wrote to me, recognizes that “the city’s most viable path was to concentrate investment in existing neighborhoods and corridors where land and infrastructure capacity was available, relative costs are lowest, and the return on public investment is highest.” In other words, exactly what Pew’s research points to.     

Can we overcome the barriers to density?

The challenge is that American cities and suburbs hoping to make that philosophical change in how they grow — adding infill to already thriving neighborhoods rather than sprawling outward — face a gauntlet of regulatory and cultural barriers. 

There are, of course, local zoning codes and parking minimums that bar dense home construction and have become a political albatross for cities trying to reform their approach to housing. There are NIMBYs who don’t want sudden changes to their proverbial neighborhood character and wish to push any development further afield. And municipalities also have structural incentives to grow outward, because it can be easier to find money for new infrastructure than for maintaining existing infrastructure. “Local jurisdictions can access funding for upfront infrastructure costs (from federal, state, and private sources) relatively easily but face limited options for paying for long-term maintenance, making greenfield development appear fiscally attractive in the short term,” Tushar Kansal, a senior officer for Pew’s housing policy initiative, said in an email. 

Ultimately, fiscal sustainability may be a relatively minor argument in favor of building homes as infill in established neighborhoods, albeit one with particular salience at the moment, given the American cost of living crisis and anger about taxes. But the US remains a very rich country that can afford the material costs of sprawl and exclusionary zoning if we really want it. 

The stronger case for infill is based not on fiscal thrift, but rather on human freedom, quality of life, and the bigger benefits to our economy of allowing population growth in our most prosperous cities. We should legalize more housing in places where people already live, because more people want to live there — and that alone should be enough. 

In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood at a podium and in a voice that sounded as if he was reading from the phone book, recited a set of numbers that brought a roomful of cancer doctors to their feet for 42 seconds. Adam Feuerstein, a biotech correspondent for the health news site Stat who has covered cancer conferences like this for two decades, said he had never witnessed anything like it. The applause lasted so long that Wolpin, caught off-guard, ad-libbed: “That time was not built into my talk.” 

What Wolpin had just shown attendees at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting was a simple line graph: a drug called daraxonrasib had nearly doubled median overall survival in a 500-patient trial of a form of previously treated advanced pancreatic cancer. ASCO’s chief medical officer Julie Gralow termed the result not a home run but a “grand slam.” Toronto oncologist Jennifer Knox called it a “game changer.”

Wolpin received such a rapturous response at ASCO because pancreatic cancer is among the most pernicious and treatment-resistant cancers in existence, killing more than 50,000 Americans a year, among them Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The cancer has a five-year survival rate in the low teens. 

Wolpin, who began his career in the mid-2000s at the world-class Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told The Bulwark: “I think I saw several patients that first year of fellowship who had pancreatic cancer, and they all died in like three months. It’s not supposed to happen here, right? You’re supposed to have figured this out.” For decades after President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” deaths continued to mount and medical progress on many cancers remained all too limited. 

But a change is well underway. The US death rate from cancer has fallen 34 percent from its 1991 peak through 2023, and the five-year relative survival for all cancers combined reached 70 percent for people diagnosed between 2015 tto 2021, up from 50 percent in the 1970s. And while daraxonrasib got the standing ovation, it was only the loudest moment in a week — and a decade — of steady, compounding victories over cancer.

The immune system, turned up

One major driver of the shift is immunotherapy. Rather than attacking a tumor directly as conventional chemotherapy does, these treatments use a patient’s own immune system to hunt and kill cancer cells. You can see immunotherapy’s powerful effects through the story of former President Jimmy Carter, who was diagnosed in 2015 at age 90 with metastatic melanoma that had spread to his liver and brain. That should have been a sign for newspaper editors to update their planned obituaries immediately; yet after being treated with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, as well as surgery and radiation, Carter watched his tumors vanish and managed to live another decade. 

And scientists keep pushing the frontier further. Moderna and Merck reported that the combination of a personalized mRNA vaccine — the technology behind the Covid shots, retrained on each patient’s own tumor — and an immuontherapy drug (pembrolizumab) reduced the risk of recurrence or death for high-risk melanoma by 49 percent after five years. In a small, early Memorial Sloan Kettering trial of a similar vaccine appeared to help some pancreatic cancer patients stay cancer-free longer after surgery. Seven of the eight patients who responded to the vaccine were still alive four to six years later, with a larger trial now underway.

A Memorial Sloan Kettering trial of a similar vaccine in 2024 kept pancreatic cancer at bay in patients whose immune systems responded to it. And for blood cancers, a single infusion of reengineered immune cells — called CAR T-cell therapy — has begun producing something that looks close to a cure: Emily Whitehead, the first child with cancer ever treated with CAR T, is now more than a decade cancer-free and attending college. (I wrote in more detail about immunotherapy and CAR T last year.) 

From treatment to prevention

And scientists’ ambitions are growing, from treating cancer to stopping it before it starts. Last week, a team led by the Francis Crick Institute’s Charles Swanton reported that a blood test measuring 14 proteins, combined with basic risk factors like age, smoking, and lung disease, could help identify people likely to develop lung cancer years before diagnosis. They also found an intriguing clue from an older drug trial: An anti-inflammatory drug seemed to cut lung cancer risk nearly in half among people with the highest inflammation levels. 

This is still early evidence — not yet a blood test and prevention treatment doctors can offer patients — but Swanton compared it to how statins work for heart disease. Just as cholesterol tests can predict a person’s risk of heart disease, and then statins can be given to lower cholesterol, the protein test identifies lung cancer risk and the anti-inflammatory drug reduces it. 

And no story on modern medical miracles would be complete without an appearance from GLP-1 drugs, which truly do seem to do everything. A University of Pennsylvania study of more than 110,000 women, also reported at the ASCO meeting this week, found that taking GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic was associated with about 30 percent lower breast cancer incidence.

Both findings are early, so we shouldn’t expect major changes overnight. It took decades between the development of a test for LDL cholesterol levels, the introduction of statins, and the undeniable proof of heart disease prevention. But oncology is clearly moving toward catching cancer before it takes hold, just as we have with heart attacks. 

Beyond the numbers

Medical advances come with a literal cost. The new medicines are brutally expensive, with the average monthly price of a new cancer drug more than doubling between 2009 and 2019, while about half of surveyed American cancer patients and survivors have to take on debt to pay for treatment. 

Many of those high prices will eventually fall, once patents run out and generic versions emerge. But a greater worry is that the scientific engine driving these advances is being throttled. Almost every advance I’ve mentioned can be traced back to federally funded basic research, which the Trump administration has been attacking relentlessly.

In 2025, the administration froze or canceled thousands of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, while new NIH awards fell by billions of dollars. Congress later rejected the deepest proposed NIH cuts, but the damage was already real: Hundreds of NIH-funded clinical trials were disrupted, and early-career scientists became much less likely to win major grants. In saving dollars with those cuts, we risk losing discoveries that would save lives, at the very moment when cancer research is paying off.

The cost of those lives was made visceral at the ASCO meeting. In the opening address, ASCO’s outgoing president Eric Small spoke about his partner, Amy Lin, a University of San Francisco San Francisco oncologist. Lin had died in December of metastatic clear cell ovarian cancer, a deadly disease that still has few treatment options. He brought on the grief expert and author David Kessler to give a talk on compassionate end-of-life care.   

Perhaps more than any other medical specialty, grief and loss have always been an inseparable, if rarely discussed, part of oncology. Brian Wolpin started his career watching pancreatic patients die within months and feeling certain it wasn’t supposed to happen at a place like Dana-Farber. The ovation he got was the sound of a room realizing he might be right — that the disease that once seemed untreatable is starting to lose its terrible power.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!