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In recent years, Americans appear to be getting more and more uncomfortable with intimacy. Why? And is this trend reversible?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The GOP’s unworkable work requirements Why won’t powerful men learn? Just wait until Trump is a chatbot. Disconnected People

When my colleague Faith Hill recently interviewed Michael Hilgers, a therapist with more than 20 years of experience, he painted a worrying picture of intimacy in America: “It’s painful to watch just how disconnected people are,” he said. Even when Hilgers can sense that clients do want to pursue deep social connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there,” he noted.

One might say that America is in its insecure-attachment era.

Let’s back up a little: Insecure attachment is a term used to describe three of the four basic human “attachment styles” that researchers have identified. The framework has risen in popularity in recent years, appearing alongside astrology signs and Enneagram types as social-media-friendly ways to understand the self. Faith lays out the four styles in her recent article:

People with a secure style feel that they can depend on others and that others can depend on them too. Those with a dismissing style—more commonly known as “avoidant”—are overly committed to independence and don’t feel that they need much deep emotional connection. People with a preoccupied (or “anxious”) style badly want intimacy but, fearing rejection, cling or search for validation. And people with fearful (or “disorganized”) attachment crave intimacy, too—but like those with the dismissing style, they distrust people and end up pushing them away.

Over the past few decades, researchers have noticed a decline in secure attachment and an increase in the dismissing and fearful styles. These two insecure styles are “associated with lack of trust and self-isolation,” Faith explains. She notes that American distrust in institutions has also been on the rise for years—it’s well known that more and more Americans are feeling skeptical of the government, organized religion, the media, corporations, and police. But recent research and anecdotal evidence suggest that Americans are growing more wary not only of “hypothetical, nameless Americans,” but of their own colleagues, neighbors, friends, partners, and parents.

The root causes of America’s trust issues are impossible to diagnose with certainty, but they could well be a reflection of Americans’ worries about societal problems. One psychologist who did research into Americans’ insecure-attachment trend “rattled off a list of fears that people may be wrestling with,” Faith writes: “war in Europe, ChatGPT threatening to transform jobs, constant school shootings in the news,” as well as financial precarity. As Faith puts it: “When society feels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships.”

Some researchers argue for other likely suspects, such as smartphone use or the fact that more Americans than ever are living alone. The decline in emotional intimacy is also happening against the backdrop of a decline in physical intimacy. Our senior editor Kate Julian explored this “sex recession,” particularly among young adults, in her 2018 magazine cover story.

A lack of trust is showing up in the workplace as well. In 2021, our contributing writer Jerry Useem reported on studies suggesting that trust among colleagues is declining in the era of remote and hybrid work:

The longer employees were apart from one another during the pandemic, a recent study of more than 5,400 Finnish workers found, the more their faith in colleagues fell. Ward van Zoonen of Erasmus University, in the Netherlands, began measuring trust among those office workers early in 2020. He asked them: How much did they trust their peers? How much did they trust their supervisors? And how much did they believe that those people trusted them? What he found was unsettling. In March 2020, trust levels were fairly high. By May, they had slipped. By October—about seven months into the pandemic—the employees’ degree of confidence in one another was down substantially.

All in all, as Faith writes, “we can’t determine why people are putting up walls, growing further and further away from one another. We just know it’s happening.” The good news is that if humans have the capacity to lose trust in one another, they can also work to build it back up. “The experts I spoke with were surprisingly hopeful,” Faith concludes:

Hilgers [the therapist] knows firsthand that it’s possible for people with attachment issues to change—he’s helped many of them do it. Our culture puts a lot of value on trusting your gut, he told me, but that’s not always the right move if your intuition tells you that it’s a mistake to let people in. So he gently guides them to override that instinct; when people make connections and nothing bad happens, their gut feeling slowly starts to change.”

As Faith argued in an earlier article, attachment styles are not destiny, despite what the internet might lead you to believe. “Your attachment style is not so much a fixed category you fall into, like an astrology sign, but rather a tendency that can vary among different relationships and, in turn, is continuously shaped by those relationships,” she wrote. “Perhaps most important, you can take steps to change it”—and connect with others better as a result.

Related:

America is in its insecure-attachment era. The trait that “super friends” have in common Today’s News Russia’s Defense Ministry said that it had targeted Ukrainian army reserve units with high-precision missile strikes to prevent them from reaching the front lines. A Utah judge postponed ruling on a statewide abortion-clinic ban to next week, following the failure yesterday of two anti-abortion bills in Nebraska and South Carolina. Former Vice President Mike Pence reportedly appeared before a federal grand jury for more than seven hours to testify in a criminal investigation into alleged efforts by Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Dispatches Books Briefing: We need to make room for more voices in philosophy, Kate Cray writes. With a wider canon, enlightenment could come from anywhere. Work in Progress: AI tools are a waste of time, Derek Thompson argues. Many people are simply using them as toys.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Maskot / Getty

A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe

By Frieda Klotz

As Republicans across the U.S. intensify their efforts to legislate against transgender rights, they are finding aid and comfort in an unlikely place: Western Europe, where governments and medical authorities in at least five countries that once led the way on gender-affirming treatments for children and adolescents are now reversing course, arguing that the science undergirding these treatments is unproven, and their benefits unclear.

The about-face by these countries concerns the so-called Dutch protocol, which has for at least a decade been viewed by many clinicians as the gold-standard approach to care for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A cheerful goodbye to the Guardians of the Galaxy Why Hollywood writers may go on strike Nikki Haley’s dilemma is also the Republicans’ problem. Long-haulers are trying to define themselves. Culture Break Graeme Hunter / HBO

Read. “The Renovation,” a new short story from Kenan Orhan about exile from Turkey and longing for a homeland.

Watch. The latest episode of Succession (streaming on HBO Max), which features the creepiest corporate retreat ever.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last year, Faith wrote one of my favorite Atlantic articles in recent memory, about people with a very unique social appetite: the “nocturnals,” or the ultra-introverts who come alive when most people are fast asleep.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

Last week, a TikTok user named Ghostwriter used AI voice-emulating technology to make a song that sounded like a collaboration between the artists Drake and The Weeknd. The result was surprisingly non-awful. The track blew up on social media, generating hundreds of thousands of listens, before several platforms took it down at the request of the Universal Music Group.

Naturally, the AI song triggered a spasm of panicked hermeneutics: What did this strange achievement in synthetic art mean?

Some observers took things in a dystopian direction. It didn’t take much to imagine a near future where fake songs and real songs intermingled, where, for every authentic Taylor Swift track, the internet was replete with hundreds, thousands, even millions of plausible Taylor Swift knockoffs. Inundated by AI, pop culture would descend into a disinformation hellscape.

Alternatively, one could lean into optimism. Ghostwriter (probably) isn’t one of the great musical geniuses of the world, yet here he had produced something catchy. If anonymous internet users can make bangers in their basement using AI, what does that mean for actual hitmakers? Researchers studying the introduction of AI in the game Go have found that the rise of superhuman machines has “improved human decision-making” as the top players have learned to incorporate the novel strategies of AI to become more creative players. Similarly, one could imagine the best songwriters in the world honing their skills with a superhuman co-writer.

But lately I’ve become a little bored by the utopia-dystopia dichotomy of the AI debate. What if writing a song and dubbing in celebrity voices doesn’t clearly point us toward a disinformation hellscape or a heaven of music-writing creativity? What if the ability to send media that make you sound like a celebrity to your friends is, fundamentally, just kind of neat? As the tech writer Ben Thompson has pointed out, artists like Grimes and Drake could stand to make a lot of money if they sold licenses of their AI-generated voices and let their fans share little songs with one another, provided that any money made from the music would be split between the original artist and the user. Sure, you might get some surprise bangers. But mostly, you’d get a lot of teenagers recording high-school gossip in the style and voice of Drake. That’s not dystopian or utopian. That’s just the latest funny way to waste time.

The time-wasting potential of AI has been on my mind recently, in no small part because my wife told me, in less-than-subtle terms: You are wasting too much time on AI. Midjourney, a program that turns written prompts into sumptuous images, has colonized my downtime and—don’t read this part, boss—my work time as well. I have successfully used it to “imagine” daguerreotypes of historical figures playing pickleball. I gave it an image of my living room and asked it to redecorate. I designed a series of beds in the style of Apple, Ferrari, and Picasso. Then I realized I could drop in URLs of online photos of my friends and ask the AI to render them as funny versions of themselves—my wife as a Pixar character, my best friend as a grizzled athlete, my neighbor as a regal centaur. After a week or so imagining alternate careers as a furniture designer or interior decorator, I settled on using Midjourney to make my friends laugh. Midjourney is glorious, yes; among other things, it is a glorious waste of time.

One might make similar observations about ChatGPT. It’s already co-writing code with software programmers, accelerating basic research, and formatting and writing papers, but I’m mostly playing around with it, like an open-ended textual video game. ChatGPT went viral last year, to the surprise of its founders at OpenAI, not only because tens of millions of people got a glimpse of the end of white-collar work but also because it’s an extraordinarily interesting game to test the limits of synthetic conversation. When you see screenshots of ChatGPT’s output on Instagram and Twitter, what you are watching is people wasting time amusingly.

Economists have a tendency to analyze new tech by imagining how it will immediately add to productivity and gross domestic product. What’s harder to model is the way that new technology—especially communications technology—might simultaneously save time and waste time, making us, paradoxically, both more and less productive. I used my laptop to research and write this article, and to procrastinate the writing of this article. The smartphone’s productivity-enhancing potential is obvious, and so is its productivity-destroying potential: The typical 20-something spends roughly seven hours a day on their phone, including more than five hours on social media, watching videos, or gaming.

We overlook the long-range importance of time-wasting technology in several ways. In 1994, the economists Sue Bowden and Avner Offer studied how various 20th-century technologies had spread among households. They concluded that “time using” technologies (for example, TV and radio) diffused faster than “time saving” technologies (vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines).

The reasons weren’t entirely clear. But Bowden and Offer’s most interesting explanation is that economists and technologists overrate how desperately people want to not be bored. Consumers will go to great lengths to escape the psychic burdens of sensory inactivity. Mid-century buyers got a radio, then a black-and-white TV, then a color TV, then a speaker system, then a VCR, and so on, sending an unmistakable signal to the producers of these machines that they had a nearly infinite demand for “higher doses of arousal per unit of time.”

To see AI as play, or as a distraction, or as a waste of time is not to say that AI will be entirely unproductive or benign. It’s to imagine, rather, that the AI-inflected future contains more texture than mere utopia or dystopia. In Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, the science and technology writer Steven Johnson says that “when human beings create and share experiences designed to delight or amaze, they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people focused on more utilitarian concerns.” For example, the song sheets for self-playing pianos were essentially code for automatons. These code sheets helped establish the modern software industry. Rather than see games and work as opposites, we might try to see them as complements. The way we play with AI today might affect the way we work in ways that are impossible to anticipate.

In the utopia-dystopia dichotomy, advanced AI saves the world with scientific breakthroughs and fabulous wealth until the moment it destroys the world. The future goes: gold, gold, gold, death. Well, maybe. But if the past is any indication, the roads to gold and death will be paved with play and pockmarked with distractions. AI will waste a billion hours before it saves a billion hours. Before it kills us all, it will kill a lot of time.