Serena Kocourek dreaded the lullaby. She worked in a hospital, and every time a baby was born, staffers would play the same song over the loudspeaker. She was going through IVF, trying without success to conceive a baby. When the lullaby played, she told me, “I felt like I was two feet further away from finally being a mom.”

One thing helped: messaging her IVF coach, Kristin Dillensnyder. She’d say, “They just played the lullaby thing and I didn’t cry.” “Win,” Dillensnyder would respond. Or she’d remind Kocourek, “Just because somebody else is having a baby doesn’t mean that you can’t have a baby.” Dillensnyder also offered advice for staying hopeful during the grueling process of IVF: She suggested that Kocourek create a playlist of songs to listen to as she gave herself hormone injections. Kocourek liked that Dillensnyder had gone through IVF herself and would help her come up with responses to insensitive questions from family and friends about when she planned to get pregnant. Occasionally, in the middle of her day, she’d think, “I just need to step away. I just need to talk to Kristin real quick.”

IVF coaching may sound niche, but it’s far from the most specialized type of coaching on offer. These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).

[Read: The teen-disengagement crisis]

Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience. Most of the coaching clients I spoke with asked to use only their first name because of the personal nature of the issues they sought help for. One woman, Sarah, sees a meditation coach for $350 a session, justifying it because she does not own “expensive purses or clothes.” Another woman, Liz, has, at various points, had a career coach, an executive coach, a doula (or birthing coach), a co-parenting coach, and two different accountability coaches who focus on diet and exercise. She recently added a Disney “concierge”—a coach for navigating the Magic Kingdom. Each one of her coaches costs at least a couple of hundred dollars a session. She told me that if she hasn’t done something important before and wants to do it right, she tends to hire a coach to help her. “Winging it is so not my style,” she said. “Why not go into it informed if you can?”

People have long sought advice for some of life’s biggest questions—marry that guy or don’t; take or don’t take that job. But over the past few decades, the options for living one’s best adult life have expanded so much that knowing the right or wrong way to do anything can be difficult. Today, many Americans can join a polyamorous triad, remain child-free by choice, launch a new career in their 30s, or dedicate themselves to running ultramarathons, all without ruffling any feathers within their community. “Identities are no longer given,” Michal Pagis, a lecturer of sociology and anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who has studied coaching, told me. “They are now achieved … It’s a project.” A number of people seem to crave sounding boards for all of this identity making, especially if they want to do it “correctly”—i.e., in a way that is still impressive, if unconventional. Erik Baker, a Harvard historian and the author of Make Your Own Job, told me that coaching is the latest example of “the therapeutic culture that emerged in the United States in the 20th century: a sense of needing to have some kind of expert to help optimize your performance.” Being “normal” is no longer enough, so people hire coaches to help them transcend normal.

In some ways, coaching stands in for the free, civic sources of support that over the past decade have been slowly fading away. People are less likely now to be members of the kinds of community groups or religious congregations where they might have previously sought help. In some circles, an idea has taken hold that asking strangers for advice without paying is gauche. Emailing someone to “pick their brain” has become a corporate misdemeanor. (“Set the precedent that you are not comfortable talking without a pre-booked and pre-paid official meeting,” goes some typical advice on how to respond to such an affront.)

People today also have fewer close friends than they used to, and they may be reluctant to rely on those friends for help. Overwhelmingly, the coaching clients I spoke with told me that they would not expect their (few, flawed, busy) friends to provide the same level of guidance that their coaches do. Friends and family members are biased. (“You never know if someone has your best interest in mind,” Liz told me.) A stranger who doesn’t know you seems more likely to be neutral. Friends may say clumsy or unsupportive things as they respond to your texts between meetings; a coach’s job is always to have the right mantra at hand.

[Read: Want to change your personality? Have a baby.]

In her book The Outsourced Self, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that when it comes to advice, “anything you pay for is better.” A coach is like a super-friend—someone very smart and attentive who can help you make the best possible decision. Kiya Thompson, a travel coach, refers to her service “like a best friend pre-trip, during the trip, and … after the trip.” Dillensnyder, the IVF coach, told me that she sees herself as kind of like “a big sister”—one whose counsel is, presumably, better than your real sister’s. “Friends and family are really good,” Dillensnyder said. “However, they often give advice that is not helpful.” Another refrain I heard was that coaches allow you to be messy and depressed around them so that you can be bubbly and interesting around your friends. As another woman, Emily, put it to me about her weight-loss coach, “Your friends don’t want to listen to you talk about that all the time.”

But using coaching in this way undermines one important aspect of friendship: reciprocity. During a common type of friend hang, one person shares their problems for a while and the other person offers their best stab at some solutions. Then they switch. Pagis told me that debts—for example, owing someone a few minutes of uninhibited venting—“are important for social relations.” With coaching, however, “you are avoiding creating these debts.” If part of friendship is being there for each other, what becomes of the institution when you don’t have to be? When the well-heeled can afford to take their problems to a coach, friends risk becoming merely the people with whom we have pleasant catch-up brunches before we rush home to pay by the hour to give the real dirt to a stranger.

Yet the advice a coach dispenses may not be as reliable as clients hope. Coaches, who in many cases bear no qualifications other than personal experience, do not need to adhere to official standards. Some coaches might be only dabbling in the practice: A 2023 report by the International Coaching Federation, a credentialing body for some types of coaches, noted that the average coach spent just 12 hours a week coaching.

The casualness of these arrangements, and the lack of standards, can lead to disappointment—and little recourse—when people pay hundreds for coaching that turns out to be lackluster. One woman I spoke with, Maria, told me she was scrolling through TikTok when she came across a bariatric-surgery coach who promised to help her adjust to the dramatically different eating habits the procedure requires. “I booked a call with her,” Maria said, “and she sold me within, like, 20 minutes.” For about $500 a month, the coach would check Maria’s MyFitnessPal food log and text her an emoji assessing her performance—a fire emoji if she was doing well, for example. But during their one-on-one sessions, Maria felt like she was talking with the coach’s TikTok character rather than with a devoted adviser. “She has, like, five things that she repeats over and over again,” Maria said. She quit after two months.

Coaching can also be a problem if it replaces therapy, which, unlike coaching, is regulated and typically covered by insurance. Most coaches take pains to point out that they are not therapists, and most of the coaching clients I interviewed either have or have had therapists. Still, about 25 to 50 percent of coaching clients have a diagnosable mental-health condition, and they aren’t getting any formal mental-health treatment from their coaches, Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, told me. “In my clinical work, it’s a common thing that comes up,” he said. “We recommend a therapist to someone, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, but I’m seeing a life coach.’”

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

I do have a therapist. Even so, the more I dug into coaching, the more I wanted to understand what people saw in it. I soon had the opportunity to find out. In the course of my reporting, I spoke with Nell Wulfhart, a “decision coach” who, for $247 per hour-long session, helps her clients make one big life decision—as varied as whether to have kids or what color to paint their kitchen.

Wulfhart told me that she’s always had a “fixer brain,” and that often, she’s simply listening for what the person really wants to do anyway. “It just helps to have a totally neutral third party to check your work,” she said, “and make sure, ‘Yes, this is not a ludicrous risk you’re taking.’” What qualifications does she have? “Nothing,” she said. “People have said to me, ‘You’re so wise.’ And I was like, I think they mean you’re in your mid-40s.”

I’m allergic to people who embellish their credentials, so I liked that she admitted her lack thereof. I also liked that she has worked as a journalist, a profession I associate with straight shooters. And as it happened, I did have a decision I was struggling with. So I decided to book a session with her.

I told Wulfhart that I couldn’t decide whether to move to Florida or to Texas. She began asking me questions about what was important to me, what else I’d considered, and what each place had to offer me. Unlike my therapist, she didn’t ask about my childhood—in fact, she didn’t seem much interested in my backstory, my neuroses, or any of my usual patterns of behavior. “Why you feel this way is not that relevant,” she said. “The only thing that matters is that you do feel this way.”

It did feel like talking with a super-friend—someone who was smart and likable, but also disinterested and ruthlessly rational. After about 30 minutes, she told me what I should do. It was what I’d wanted to do anyway.

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Today The Atlantic is announcing the hires of Nick Miroff and Isaac Stanley-Becker as staff writers, and Alex Hoyt as a senior editor. Nick and Isaac both join The Atlantic from The Washington Post: Nick covering immigration and the Department of Homeland Security, and Isaac reporting on politics, migration, and national security.

Below is the full announcement about these hires from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

I’m writing today to share the excellent news that Nick Miroff, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Alex Hoyt are joining The Atlantic—Nick and Isaac as staff writers; Alex as a senior editor. All three are immensely talented journalists operating at the top of their game.

First, Nick: Nick is one of America’s foremost reporters on immigration and knows more about the innermost workings of the Department of Homeland Security than, quite possibly, the department itself. Nick comes to us from The Washington Post, where he spent 18 years as a reporter covering Latin America, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and DHS. He spent seven years as the paper’s Latin America correspondent, based in Havana and Mexico City. He was also part of the Post team whose coverage of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech won a Pulitzer Prize. I am very happy that he has agreed to join us, and to cover immigration, at so crucial a moment in American history.

Next, Isaac: Isaac is a fantastically talented reporter and a natural magazine writer. He also comes to us from The Washington Post, where he has covered an impressive range of stories across politics, immigration, and national security with a focus on holding powerful people and institutions to account. His reporting has taken him to German border towns, where he tracked the international spread of conspiracy theories, as well as to the Arizona desert, where he revealed how a Saudi-owned company pumped unlimited supplies of the state’s groundwater to grow alfalfa as feed for dairy cows in Riyadh. He was twice part of teams that won the Pulitzer Prize—in 2022 for coverage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and in 2024 for documenting the role of the AR-15 in American life. Isaac holds a Ph.D. in history from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His first book, Europe Without Borders: A History, was published last month.

Finally, Alex: Alex is an extremely skilled editor who brings great literary expertise, a genuine love of magazines, and a keen eye for what makes a distinctive feature. He was most recently an editor at GQ, where he worked on profiles, essays, and reported features. Previously he was the editor in chief of Amtrak’s The National magazine, where he brought the writing of contributors including Jacqueline Woodson, Lois Lowry, and Leslie Jamison to millions of train passengers across America. Alex is actually returning to us; he started his career as an Atlantic fellow in 2010. We’re very glad to welcome him back to the team after his journalistic peregrinations.

Please join me in welcoming them to The Atlantic.

Best wishes,

Jeff

The Atlantic announced a number of new hires at the start of the year, including managing editor Griff Witte; staff writers Caity Weaver, Ashley Parker, and Michael Scherer; and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities––instead of being stuck where they are born––is a distinctly American innovation, and in many ways the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy. But now, as deputy executive editor Yoni Appelbaum writes in The Atlantic’s March cover story, Americans are much less apt to switch houses or neighborhoods or cities than they used to be, and are “Stuck in Place.” This sharp decline in geographic mobility, he argues, is the single most important social change of the past half century. Appelbaum also explains why progressives are the ones standing in the way of reviving American mobility and restoring the American dream.

Appelbaum’s cover story is adapted from his forthcoming book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity (publishing February 18).

Appelbaum writes, “Entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, social equality—the most appealing features of the young republic all traced back to this single, foundational fact: Americans were always looking ahead to their next beginning, always seeking to move up by moving on. But over the past 50 years, this engine of American opportunity has stopped working. Americans have become less likely to move from one state to another, or to move within a state, or even to switch residences within a city. In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year—down from one in three in the 19th century, but a frenetic rate nonetheless. In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved.”

Appelbaum continues, “Today, America is often described as suffering from a housing crisis, but that’s not quite right. In many parts of the country, housing is cheap and abundant, but good jobs and good schools are scarce. Other areas are rich in opportunities but short on affordable homes. That holds true even within individual cities, neighborhood by neighborhood. As a result, many Americans are stranded in communities with flat or declining prospects, and lack the practical ability to move across the tracks, the state, or the country—to choose where they want to live. Those who do move are typically heading not to the places where opportunities are abundant, but to those where housing is cheap. Only the affluent and well educated are exempt from this situation; the freedom to choose one’s city or community has become a privilege of class.”

His cover story argues that reviving mobility offers the best hope of restoring the American promise. But it is largely self-described progressives who stand in the way. Appelbaum writes that we should “blame Jane Jacobs,” whose writings and activism in her West Village neighborhood in New York played a pivotal role in shifting American attitudes toward the preservation of buildings and neighborhoods, and away from growth: “American mobility has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers, seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors.” Appelbaum concludes that “whatever its theoretical aspirations, in practice, progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.”

Appelbaum concludes that any serious effort to restore mobility should follow three simple principles: consistency (rules that apply uniformly across a city will tend to produce neighborhoods with diverse populations and uses); tolerance (organic growth is messy and unpredictable, but the places that thrive over the long term are those that empower people to make their own decisions, and to build and adapt structures to suit their needs); and abundance (the best way to solve a supply crunch is to add supply and in places that are attractive and growing, so that housing becomes a springboard).

Yoni Appelbaum’s “Stuck in Place” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests to interview Appelbaum on his reporting.

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

No matter how much has changed over the past decade, one thing remains true: Saturday Night Live never brings in Dave Chappelle for a filler episode. The comedian has now hosted the show four times in just more than eight years, each stint coming on the heels of a pivotal election. Last night, in the SNL installment preceding President-Elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, Chappelle opened his monologue by detailing his attempts to turn down the daunting gig this time around. The SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels had apparently tried persuading Chappelle to again take the stage following the 2024 presidential election; Chappelle spent the several weeks prior to and after Trump’s reelection rejecting the offer. He eventually relented, he said, so that “I could just get rid of all these old Trump jokes and start fresh.”

That lead-in suggested that Chappelle might spend the rest of his set revisiting familiar comedic territory. But where Chappelle has previously doubled down on his right to offend, he instead used the moment to lay the groundwork for sharp, wide-ranging commentary. “The moment I said yes, L.A. burst into flames,” he quipped, following up with the kind of posturing that audiences have come to expect from him: He acknowledged that it’s too soon to laugh about the wildfires still ravaging Southern California, then threw the camera a mischievous wink. The veteran comic knows where the line is, he seemed to be saying, and revels in crossing it simply because he can. In a marked contrast to his earlier SNL appearances, though—including his one in 2022, for which he received criticism for perceived anti-Semitic remarks—the comedian seemed mellower. And not only did Chappelle demonstrate an interest in unity, but he also offered viewers an unexpected and sincere-sounding plea for compassion.

[Read: Does Dave Chappelle find anything funnier than being cancelled?]

Chappelle wrapped his nearly 20-minute act with a direct appeal to the divided country and its incoming president. He ended with a timely anecdote about connecting with others amid deeply entrenched conflicts. Chappelle said that in the mid-aughts, after walking away from his eponymous hit show, he spent some time soul-searching in the Middle East. The comedian recalled that the late former President Jimmy Carter flew to Israel during that period; Carter was there to promote his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. Chappelle described Carter’s insistence on then going “to the Palestinian territory” despite the Israeli government saying it would be too dangerous. “I will never forget the images of a former American president walking with little to no security while thousands of Palestinians were cheering him on, and when I saw that picture, it brought tears to my eyes,” he said.

He continued:

The presidency is no place for petty people, so Donald Trump—I know you watch the show—man, remember, whether people voted for you or not, they’re all counting on you, whether they like you or not. They’re all counting on you. The whole world is counting on you. And I mean this when I say this: Good luck. Please, do better next time. Please, all of us, do better next time. Do not forget your humanity. And please, have empathy for displaced people, whether they’re in the Palisades or Palestine.

Last night’s call to presidential action was a stark departure from Chappelle’s earlier comments about Trump during the comic’s SNL debut, in an awkward, unsettling episode following Hillary Clinton’s defeat in November 2016. Chappelle stole the show with a monologue (and a Chris Rock–assisted skit) that conveyed his lack of surprise at Trump’s ascendancy. But Chappelle ended on a more serious note. He waxed poetic about the hopefulness he felt after seeing a sea of Black faces at a party held in the Obama White House: “So, in that spirit, I’m wishing Donald Trump luck,” he said. “And I’m going to give him a chance, and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too.” A few months later, the comic reportedly said he regretted being “the first guy on TV to say, ‘Give Trump a chance.’”

Chappelle deployed his trademark barbed humor to further thoughtful ends last night—even when he wasn’t talking about Trump. After running through a list of famous friends who lost their homes in the L.A. fires, the comic mocked the replies he’d seen on videos of the blazes. “Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, it serves these celebrities right. I hope their houses burned down,’” he said. “You see that? That right there—that’s why I hate poor people.” Chappelle then took a drag from his cigarette, waited for the audience to finish laughing, and got to the real punch line: “’Cause they can’t see past their own pain.” The comic went on to emphasize the country’s glaring economic inequality while expressing concern for people outside his own wealthy milieu. He spoke about the working-class families that found out the week of the fires that their fire-insurance coverage had been revoked; when he seemingly misspoke by saying “health insurance,” Chappelle suggested that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, could help either way. It was a grim joke, one that telegraphed his understanding that many Americans feel exploited by both industries—and reminded viewers that he can still bring people’s experiences into his comedy.

[Read: Chappelle was right]

Of course, Chappelle was still himself, throwing in a handful of musings about how scary it is to be famous right now and making a cringe-worthy comparison between West Hollywood and Sodom. A later sketch also saw him revisiting some of Chappelle’s Show’s most memorable (and outrageous) characters. But the stand-up never took the lazy, condescending tack that’s made him divisive among critics in recent years. (Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer, which premiered on Netflix last month, kicks off with a lengthy segment that rehashes his stalest material.) Chappelle instead drew on his experiences of living in the Midwest—something he also did, to compelling effect, when he hosted SNL after the 2020 presidential election. From this personal angle, he sought to elucidate the similarities between demographics that look wildly different at first glance. It didn’t always work perfectly, then or now, but it felt refreshingly human.

Dale Carnegie, the self-made titan of self-help, swore by the social power of names. Saying someone’s name, he wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, was like a magic spell, the key to closing deals, amassing political favors, and generally being likable. According to Carnegie, Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency partly because his campaign manager addressed voters by their names. The Steel King, Andrew Carnegie (no relation), reportedly secured business deals by naming companies after at least one competitor and a would-be buyer, and maintained employee morale by calling his factory workers by their first name. “If you don’t do this,” Dale Carnegie warned his readers, “you are headed for trouble.”

By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia. People who feel it most severely might avoid addressing anyone by their name under any circumstance. For others, alexinomia is strongest around those they are closest to. For example, I don’t have trouble with most names, but when my sister and I are alone together, saying her name can feel odd and embarrassing, as if I’m spilling a secret, even though I’ve been saying her name for nearly 25 years. Some people can’t bring themselves to say the name of their wife or boyfriend or best friend—it can feel too vulnerable, too formal, or too plain awkward. Dale Carnegie was onto something: Names have a kind of power. How we use or avoid them can be a surprising window into the nature of our relationships and how we try to shape them.

The social function of names in Western society is, in many ways, an outlier. In many cultures, saying someone else’s given name is disrespectful, especially if they have higher status than you. Even your siblings, parents, and spouse might never utter your name to you. Opting for relationship terms (auntie) or unrelated nicknames (little cabbage) is the default. Meanwhile, American salespeople are trained to say customers’ names over and over again. It’s also a common tactic for building rapport in business pitches, during telemarketing calls, and on first dates.

Western norms can make sidestepping names a source of distress. For years, Thomas Ditye, a psychologist at Sigmund Freud Private University, in Vienna, and his colleague Lisa Welleschik listened as their clients described their struggles to say others’ names. In the 2023 study that coined the term alexinomia, Ditye and his colleagues interviewed 13 German-speaking women who found the phenomenon relatable. One woman told him that she couldn’t say her classmates’ names when she was younger, and after she met her husband, the issue became more pronounced. “Even to this day, it’s still difficult for me to address him by name; I always say ‘you’ or ‘hey,’ things like that,” she said. In a study published last year, Ditye and his colleagues searched online English-language discussion forums and found hundreds of posts in which men and women from around the world described how saying names made them feel weird. The team has also created an alexinomia questionnaire, with prompts that include “Saying the name of someone I like makes me feel exposed” and “I prefer using nicknames with my friends and family in order to avoid using names.”

[From the April 2023 issue: An ode to nicknames]

Names are a special feature of conversation in part because they’re almost always optional. When an element of a conversation isn’t grammatically necessary, its use is likely socially meaningful, Steven Clayman, a sociology professor at UCLA, told me. Clayman has studied broadcast-news journalists’ use of names in interviews, and found that saying someone’s name could signal—without saying so directly—that you’re speaking from the heart. But the implications of name-saying can shift depending on what’s happening at the moment someone says a name and who’s saying it; we all know that if your mom uses your name, it usually means you’re in trouble. Even changing where in the sentence the name falls can emphasize disagreement or make a statement more adversarial. “Shayla, you need to take a look at this” can sound much friendlier than “You need to take a look at this, Shayla.” And, of course, when someone says your name excessively, they sound like an alien pretending to be a human. “It may be that folks with alexinomia have this gut intuition, which is correct, that to use a name is to take a stand, to do something—and maybe something you didn’t intend,” Clayman said. Another person could misinterpret you saying their name as a sign of closeness or hostility. Why not just avoid the issue?

In his case studies and review of internet forums, Ditye noticed that many people mentioned tripping up on the names of those they were most intimate with—like me, with my sister. This might sound counterintuitive, but saying the names of people already close to us can feel “too personal, too emotional, to a degree that it’s unpleasant,” Ditye told me, even more so than saying the name of a stranger. Perhaps the stakes are higher with those we love, or the intimacy is exaggerated. People on the forums agreed that avoiding loved ones’ names was a way to manage closeness, but sometimes in the opposite way. “I think this is pretty common among close couples,” one person wrote. “It’s a good thing.” Using a name with your nearest and dearest can feel impersonal, like you’re a used car salesman trying to close a deal. If I say my boyfriend’s name, it does seem both too formal and too revealing. But if I use his nickname—Squint—I feel less awkward.

[Read: Why we speak more weirdly at home]

Alexinomia is a mostly harmless quirk of the human experience. (It can cause problems in rare cases, Ditye told me, if, say, you can’t call out a loved one’s name when they’re walking into traffic.) Still, if you avoid saying the names of those closest to you, it can skew their perception of how you feel about them. One of Ditye’s study participants shared that her husband was upset by her inability to say his name. It made him feel unloved.

As Dale Carnegie wrote, “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Pushing through the discomfort and simply saying their name every now and then can remind your loved ones that you care. By saying someone else’s name, even when it’s awkward, you’ll be offering a bit of yourself at the same time.

For The Atlantic’s February cover story, staff writer Derek Thompson explores “The Anti-Social Century”: why Americans are spending more time alone than ever, and how that’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. Thompson argues that self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of 21st-century America, and that the nature of our social crisis is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people.

Thompson writes: “Day to day, hour to hour, we are choosing this way of life—­its comforts, its ready entertainments. But convenience can be a curse … Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching.”

If two of the 20th century’s most significant technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the smartphone continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak, with screens occupying more than 30 percent of American kids’ and teenagers’ waking life. We’re also spending much more time at home, alone. In 2023, adults were spending an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003; a home developer told Thompson that “the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time.”

And “all of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals,” Thompson writes. “It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional.” While home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections––the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy), and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities)––it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the village of people who live around us but who may have different views from us. Thompson writes: “The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy. So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics, in which every election feels like an existential quest to vanquish an intramural enemy.”

Thompson concludes: “Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment. But dopamine is a chemical, not a virtue. And what’s easy is not always what’s best for us. We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification? And if technology is hurting our community, what can we do to heal it?”

Derek Thompson’s “The Anti-Social Century” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests to interview Thompson on his reporting.

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com