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It’s conventional wisdom that young people will be more progressive than their forebears. But although young people can often be counted upon to be more comfortable with risk and radicalism, that doesn’t mean they will always express that through left-leaning politics.

Young men may have helped hand President-Elect Donald Trump his victory, fueling the narrative about a growing gender gap among young voters. But this is not just an American trend. In South Korea, young men have been radicalized against feminism, opening up a large gender gap; in Poland, gender emerged “as a significant factor … with young men showing a strong preference” for the far-right political alliance; and in Belgium, the anti-immigrant and separatist Vlaams Belang party received significantly more support from young men than young women.

Could the Gen Z political gender gap be an international phenomenon?

Today’s episode of Good on Paper is with Dr. Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at Kings College London who is writing a book on the root causes of gender inequality across the world. Originally published in June, this episode helps untangle some of the reasons young men may be feeling disaffected and reacting differently than young women to macroeconomic and political trends.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: Following the election, there have been many many arguments made about the growing gender gap between young men and young women. That women are more likely to vote for Democrats has been a consistent feature of my entire life, but this wasn’t always the case.

In the year 2000, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris released a paper establishing “gender differences in electoral behavior.” Basically, they showed that women had become a liberal force in small-d democratic politics.

That was a notable finding, because in the postwar era, women were, on average, seen as a more conservative electoral factor. Norris and Inglehart looked at more than 60 countries around the world and found that, from the early ’80s through the mid-’90s, women had been moving to the left of men throughout advanced industrial societies. They conclude that “given the process of generational turnover this promises to have profound consequences for the future of the gender cleavage, moving women further left.”

[Music]

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

While we’re waiting for the sort of definitive data that can help researchers untangle exactly which men were more likely to vote for Donald Trump and why, I wanted to revisit one of my favorite conversations of the year, with Dr. Alice Evans. Alice is a senior lecturer at King’s College London, whose newsletter, The Great Gender Divergence, has followed research and her own personal travels across the world to understand the root causes of gender inequality.

Trying to understand why it is that relations between young men and women seem so fraught can help us begin to understand the downstream political consequences of these cultural shifts.

Here’s our conversation, originally published back in June.

[Music]

Alice, welcome to show.

Alice Evans: Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to talk to you because I think we corresponded for a long time, and this is a treat.

Demsas: Yes, yes. Twitter DM-to-podcast pipeline. I feel like that’s what we’re creating right here. So we’re here to talk about the divergence between young men and women’s political views, particularly on sexism. But before we get into that, I just want to ask you: What determines whether someone is sexist? What determines whether they hold sexist beliefs?

Evans: Wow, okay, big question. So, I think, generally, the entire of human history has been incredibly patriarchal. So to answer that question, I need to explain the origins of patriarchy. For thousands and thousands of years, our culture has vilified, blamed disobedient, naughty women. You know, they were witches. They were terrible people. A woman who was disobedient or who wasn’t a virgin was shamed and ostracized. So there is a long history. Sexism is nothing new. And actually over the 20th century, much of the world — Latin America, North America, Europe, and East Asia — have become rapidly more gender equal. So in terms of human history, the big story is the rise of gender equality in much of the world. But certainly sexism persists, and we do see in Europe, in South Korea, in China, in North America, young men expressing what we call hostile sexism. Now, it’s worth distinguishing between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.

So let’s suppose I’m a patriarch in a conservative society, and I think Women are incompetent, and we don’t want to ruin their little heads, and they can’t take care of these things, so I’ll manage these things for the women who just don’t know any better. So that’s benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is a sense of resentment of women’s gains. So when we ask questions like, women’s rights are expanding at the expense of men, or women are getting these handouts, or men are the ones who are discriminated against. It’s a sense of resentment, the thing that feminism has gone too far, that women are getting all these perks, and so you know, every day as a woman, I wake up with a free fruit basket, right?

Demsas: Wait, I didn’t get mine this morning. I’ll have to check in.

Evans: Yeah, exactly. But this is a real, I think—so I’ve done interviews across the U. S., in Chicago and Stanford and in Montgomery, in California, in New Haven, in New York, in Toronto, in Poland, in Warsaw, in Krakow, in Barcelona, in London. And a lot of young men do feel this sense of resentment. And you can understand it. If you feel that life is hard, if you feel that you’re struggling to get ahead—so we know as college enrollment increases, it’s become really, really hard to make it into a top college place.

Demsas: Let’s step back for a second, This question, though, that I have is, you’re raising this question of young men feeling this resentment. Are young men becoming more sexist? Is that what you're seeing in the data?

Evans: I think it depends on how we phrase it. So, in terms of, yes, young men are much more likely to say, Yes, women could work, they can go out to clubs, they can do whatever they like, they can be totally free, and young men will support and vote for female leaders. So in terms of support for recognizing women’s capabilities, absolutely, younger generations tend to be much more gender equal, and that holds across the board. The only exceptions are places like North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia where there’s no difference between young men and their grandfathers. But in culturally liberal economically developed countries in the West and East, young men are more supportive. But, sorry, I should have been more clear, they do express this hostile sexism, so this sense of resentment that women’s rights are coming at men's expense. But that’s not all men, right? And so it’s only a small fraction of young men. You know, many young men are very, very progressive and they’ll vote for Hillary Clinton, et cetera.

Demsas: I just want to drill down into what exactly we’re talking about, right? Because I think most people know there’s a gender gap between men and women, and let’s start in the American context here. People know that with Trump—you have almost 60 percent of women are supporting Biden, while a majority of men back Trump.What’s actually happening here in the U. S. context that’s new, that’s interesting, that’s driving this conversation?

Evans: It’s difficult to know why people do stuff, so everything I say is speculative. What I’m trying to do is when I look at the data, I try to understand, you know, what are structural trends affecting one particular generation that distinct from other generations and why would it be happening in particular parts of the world and not others? So here are three big structural drivers that I’m not a hundred percent sure about, but I would suggest them as likely hypotheses. One is that men care about status. Everyone cares about status. Big examples of status goods include getting a great place at university, being able to afford a nice house, and also having a beautiful girlfriend. Those three things—good education because that matters for signaling for credentials; good place to live; and a pretty, pretty wife or girlfriend—those are your three status goods. Each of those three things has become much, much harder to get. So if we look, as university enrollment rises, as it has, it becomes much harder to get to the top, to get to the Ivy League, right? So only a small percentage of people will get to the top, but those getting to the Ivy League is so important for future networks. Meanwhile, those who don’t even have bachelor’s degrees will really struggle to get higher wages. So one is that men are struggling to get those top university places, which are important for jobs. Then on top of that, housing has become much more expensive. And the gap between wages and house prices has massively increased. Especially if you don’t have inherited wealth. So for the guy whose parents were not rich, it becomes so much harder to get onto the property ladder. So it’s especially hard for these young men to get status. Now, a third and really important factor is that it’s become harder to get girlfriends. So as societies become more culturally liberal, open minded, and tolerant, women are no longer shamed, derided, and ostracized for being single without a boyfriend. You know, in previous decades or centuries —

Demsas: I don’t know. Some women are, some women are.

Evans: Well, compare over time, over time, right? So this isn’t saying there’s zero stigma. It’s saying, Look at change over time. So in previous decades, a woman who was not married and didn’t have babies by the time she was 30 might be seen as a total loser and totally stigmatized. That’s true in South Korea, China, Japan, the U.S., and Europe. But as women are not facing that pressure and that ostracism, they can become financially independent. Women’s wages are approximating men’s. They can inherit parental wealth and buy their own property. So that means that women don’t necessarily need a man. So demand for male partners has plummeted because of that economic development and cultural liberalization. As a result, Pew data tells us that 39 percent of adult American men are currently unpartnered.

Demsas: So basically you have these three buckets here that you’re talking about. You’re saying that you see this divergence with young men in particular because young men, I guess, are concerned with status in a particular way, and that the economic circumstances of our moment in time here in the U.S. have made it more difficult because of home prices, because of diverging outcomes for people with a college degree versus those without. And then finally that because of women’s increased opportunities that they’re able to actually reject men that they feel like don’t give them either economic security or the love or respect. And in previous generations, they would have had to make do because they weren’t afforded that freedom in society. Is that kind of getting at what you’re—

Evans: Perfect. You’ve said it far better than me. For example, young women will say to me on dating apps, they just give up because these men are boring, right? So if a man is not charming, then what is he offering? A woman is looking for loving companionship, someone who’s fun, someone who’s nice to spend time with. But if the guy can’t offer that, then—so in turn, this is hurtful for men. Men aren’t these powerful patriarchs policing women. In fact, they’re guys with emotions who—and nobody wants to be ghosted, to be rejected, to feel unwanted. So if men go on these dating apps and they’re not getting any likes, and even if they speak to her when she doesn’t have the time of day, it just bruises and grates at your ego, your sense of worth. And so then, men may turn to podcasts or YouTube, and if you look at that manosphere, if you look at what people are talking about, it’s often dating. And so they’re often saying, Oh, women have become so greedy. They’re so materialistic. We see this vilification of women. So that kind of filter bubble, once you self-select into it, you become surrounded by this sense of righteous resentment and, oh, you know, It’s not your fault for lack of studying in schools, it’s women are getting all this positive discrimination. Women are getting all these benefits, you know, every, all these companies are hiring women because they feel they have to, because that’s woke nowadays. So if you hear all that kind of angry discourse, and the same goes in South Korea where I was earlier this year. There is a sexist, discriminatory law which mandates that men have to go into military conscription. And that’s terrible, it’s very abusive, it’s hierarchical, it’s unpleasant, lots of men commit suicide, and that is now increasingly used as a way of signaling that life is very unfair for men. And so men are facing a tough time, and then social media, which they’re self selecting into, can reinforce the legitimacy of that.

Demsas: So I’m glad you broadened this out of the U.S. context because I think that while you’ve told a story that I think is familiar to a lot of people hearing this podcast here in the U. S., this is not just happening here. There is this really interesting study by some Swedish political scientists where they look at 32,000 people across 27 countries in the EU, and they’re finding that young men are particularly likely to see advances in women’s rights as a threat to men’s opportunities, right? So similar to what you. And it’s interesting ‘cause it’s compared to older men, right? Like, the group that expresses most opposition to women’s rights are young men while women across all age cohorts show very low levels of opposition to women’s rights. And older men seem indistinguishable often in their peer groups to women their age. And young men really jump out there. And they offer a couple of explanations to that. They say that it’s about whether or not young men feel the institutions in their area are fair or discriminatory. And they say that if there is, you know, downturns in the economy, that that makes young men even more likely to express hostility, this sort of hostile sexism you’re talking about towards women. But why is that affecting young men differently than it’s affecting their older male counterparts?

Evans: Right, great question. And also I was just looking at work by Lisa Blaydes finding that young men in Qatar are most opposed to women in the workforce. And I think it could be this heightened sense of competition. So now, women are outpacing men in terms of education. So they’re a real threat in terms of competition for top jobs, which is also so important for housing. So I think that the competition, right? So if you care about status, if you care about getting to the top, the competition is fiercest now.

Demsas: But aren’t middle-aged men also in competition with women for jobs? You know, 25 doesn’t mean you stop having competition in the labor market. I mean, 30 year old men, 40 year old men, 50 year old men, all these men are still working.

Evans: Right, absolutely, but we now see so many more women who are educated and ready and eager to go into the workforce and aiming for those top jobs with high aspiration and also getting those very top jobs is very important in order to afford decent housing.

Demsas: Gotcha.

Evans: Right, so when people say, Oh, you know, Gen Z have it better than ever because they’ve got higher wages, what we need to think about is people care about status. So they care about their place in the pecking order.

Demsas: And so it’s like if you’re an older man living in an EU country, right? You may see young women now entering the labor force, but, on mass, they’re often not in direct competition for your job. So you feel maybe a benevolent sexism towards them, but you don’t feel this potential zero-sum mindset. And also, maybe you’ve already bought into the market, so you didn’t experience this runup in housing prices in the same way before you were able to buy a home. So that’s kind of what differentiates these groups?

Evans: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I totally agree. I think housing is really hitting young people. And if you look in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders did very well. And he was really campaigning, focusing on young people and their concerns about housing, right? So this is a major, major issue that young people just cannot—so many people in their 20s and even 30s in Europe are still sharing with roommates, right? So they just feel trapped. You’re still in this limbo. You can’t afford your own place. That hits people hard, especially as it then worsens their prospects in dating and marriage, right? So it’s harder to date. If you’re still living with roommates, you’ve got less to offer, so I just think it hits men multiple times, just feeling—no one wants to feel like a loser, right? So anything that makes you feel like you’re not doing so well. So if we see a rise in inequality, a rise in income inequality, a rise in housing inequality, that in turn affects your ability to date, especially as demand for men goes down.

Demsas: But what’s also happening in a lot of these countries, at least in the U.S. context, right, is that it’s not just that men are sort of reacting to these economic circumstances. It’s also that women are becoming more progressive over time. So is it an interaction between those things that’s maybe driving this gender divergence? Or how much of it is just that men are getting more conservative versus women are also getting more progressive?

Evans: Okay, excellent. I want to make two more points. One is that there’s been some nice research about women becoming more progressive. I think that might affect men’s conservatism in two ways. There’s nice research in Spain showing that after the 2018 Women’s March, then there was a rise in hostile sexism, which in turn led to more votes for the far-right party Vox. So that’s a sense of patriarchal backlash. Also, if we look at the data on men becoming more conservative in South Korea, it exactly precisely times #MeToo. So in South Korea—which is a society which idealizes collective harmony, but there’s also been a lot of spycams and sexual harassment and covert pornography—women organized in backlash. They organized for an end to impunity. Thousands and thousands of women marched and mobilized. But that triggered a lot of a reactionary movement of male solidarity, male hostile sexism. So in both Spain and South Korea, it’s women’s mobilization, women becoming more progressive and outwardly saying, We don’t want to tolerate this. We won’t tolerate this anymore. This led to hostile sexism, which in turn, many politicians have mobilized, have used and marshaled for their gains. So in Spain, the Vox party has often said, Well, you know, there are these cases of false accusations. In South Korea too, the president was actually elected on a wave of hostile sexism. He was campaigning to abolish the gender ministry. He was sort of an anti-feminist president.

Also, there’s very nice research by Jay Van Bavel and others, and they show that on social media, it tends to be the most extreme groups that are the most vocal. So if you imagine a distribution of people, people at the 5 percent of either end—the two poles—they’re the ones who shout the loudest. And so if you imagine there’s this very, very extremist feminist person shouting loudly, that person may then get parroted by the right wing media and say, Oh, this is what feminists think. And that can accentuate the backlash. So even though the vast majority of women are much more moderate, much more in the middle, the ones who shout the loudest may then trigger that backlash effect. The most extreme feminist views can trigger a backlash against feminism, even if most women really aren’t on board with those ideas, so I think there’s a social media effect.

Demsas: You’ve identified three large ways that these divides between young men and women are growing. You talk about this and a high-unemployment or low-growth trap, that young men might be feeling more viscerally than young women because of their expectations around status. You talk about—

Evans: Wait, wait, wait. Let me clarify. So in the U. S., you don’t have high unemployment, but you do have that status inequality.

Demsas: Yeah.

Evans: So that resembles—sorry, I should just clarify that. So it can work. As long as you’ve got inequality, then you’re going to have this sense of resentment. I really think it’s inevitable.

Demsas: No, I think that’s a great point because I was literally just going to ask you right then just, you know, U.S. has extremely low unemployment right now and you see varying amounts of economic cases across the EU and the world.

And you’re going from South Korea where you have also really great economic circumstances all the way to countries like Indonesia where things look very different. And so I think that that’s a really helpful corrective. But I want to zero in on these two other things that you were just talking about. But let’s just start with the social media bubbles, right? Because I find this interesting that, if you were to ask me before I’d looked into any of this, whether social media would make you have to hear from and interact with people more different than who you are versus people who are similar to you, I would’ve thought, Yeah, I can’t really control the next tweet that my algorithm shows me if I’m on Tumblr in high school and I’m looking through different blogs. I don’t really know the genders of people immediately when those things pop up on my page. So I feel like it would be a way of actually facilitating a ton of information across genders, right? But what you say is that social media actually allows for you to create these bubbles, and that it creates this feedback loop for people who are young women who are to become more liberal and young men to become more regressive. I mean, you use this term called manosphere earlier. Can you talk a little bit about what that is? What's actually happening there?

Evans: Yes, absolutely. But first, before we get to social media, I think it’s important to recognize that this is part of a broader process of culture where there are many kinds of filter bubbles. So as women have forged careers and become journalists, podcasters, writers, screenwriters, they have championed their ideals of empathy and tolerance and equality. And then on top of that, David Rozado shows that over the 2010s, media increasingly reported more attention to sexism, more attention to racism. So people are becoming more aware of the sense of unfairness and inequalities. On top of that, the social media companies, they want to keep their users hooked. And they do this by making their apps enjoyable and addictive, so they provide content that they think you will like, that your friends and peers also liked. They think that they show things similar to what you’ve already liked, and they also might show sensational content. But the more that they send you things similar to what you’ve already liked, then you become cocooned in this echo chamber of groupthink whereby everyone is agreeing with you. So even if there are these structural economic drivers that push men to become more attuned or sympathetic to Andrew Tate, we then get these echo chambers whereby that’s all you’re hearing.

Demsas: But when you describe the media environment, that’s just one way that people engage in social media, but when you’re thinking about your algorithm, like I said, aren’t there tons of ways then that social media has actually broken that? Because now, you go on your Twitter and yeah, your algorithm may push you more towards certain kinds of content, but it also opens you up to very different views. And the reason I’m asking this is because one of the biggest theories about how people break down prejudice is this thing called contact theory, where you come into contact with individuals of a group that you have prejudice against, and then as you see, Oh, this is just a person just like me, you end up breaking down a lot of your prejudices because they become beaten by reality. So why doesn’t that happen? Why don't you see that sort of interaction happening on social media?

Evans: I think that’s a theoretical possibility of the internet, but in reality, people are much more tribal. They gravitate towards things that they like, towards things that they already know, towards things that already make them feel comfortable. People are incredibly—they do so many things on trust, like, Oh, is this someone I know? Okay, I’ll trust them and listen to them. Is this person part of my group? And I think in America, particularly, you see that ideological polarization. If you’re told that, Oh, the Democrats support this, and you’re a Democrat, people tend to support it. So I think a lot of things are done on a very tribal, trusting basis, and although you and I might idealize a fantasy internet where people mix and mingle and learn from diversity, in truth, people tend to gravitate towards their group.

Demsas: Yeah, for me I diverge a little bit. I think that it’s maybe different for different folks. I mean, this is why, as you said earlier, while you do see young men sort of diverging, as expressing more sexist attitudes, that’s just a portion of young men, right? That’s, as you said, it’s not every single young man. And I would have to think that a lot of them are actually coming into contact with some of these conversations that are happening cross gender, cross ideology, whether it’s online or it’s in their school, in school or whatever it is.

Evans: Okay, excellent, so we know that young people spend a huge amount of their time on their phones—maybe five hours—and a lot of these YouTube shorts or TikToks are very, very short. They could be 30 seconds. They could be a minute. That’s not enough time to cultivate empathy, to understand someone’s particular predicament, why they made those choices and the difficulties of their life. So and then if it’s too short to build empathy, then you’re just going to stick with your priors. So, social psychologists talk about confirmation bias, that we tend to pay more attention to information that fits with our priors. So we seek out information that already fits with our priors, we ignore disconfirming evidence. So on social media where you’re getting all this short information, you’re just looking for things that are nice, that make you feel comfortable.

Demsas: But, you know, one question I actually had for me, that’s part of this is there’s this concept called group threat theory, right? Where you think about someone else as being the cause of your—some other group as being the cause of your misfortune. And identifying who that group is, though, is not just natural, right? That doesn’t happen out of the ether. Because, you know, young men could be experiencing this sort of status threat, they could see this widening inequality, and they don’t have to turn against women, right? They could say instead, Actually, the problem is, you know, Catholics, or, The problem is whatever, you know, people from Namibia, whatever it is. And then you can just create these groups. So it seems like a lot of your argumentation around this has been around looking at cultural entrepreneurs who weaponize these moments to point you at a group. Can you tell us, what’s a cultural entrepreneur? What are they doing?

Evans: So this has existed throughout history. You know, there was a Mamluk Sultan of Egypt called Barsbay. And after the price of bread went up, uh, he blamed it on the women. And he said it was women were responsible for creating public discord. And he banished them back to their homes. And so, you know, women were to blame for all these terrible things that have happened. So throughout history, if you have a vulnerable group that cannot protect itself, it might be blamed, you know, similarly in the count, in the struggle between Protestants and Catholics, then priests would vilify women and identify witches to prove their superior power to vanquish the devil. Right? So if there is this small isolated group that is less powerful, you can vilify them. And so we see that in regards, you know, xenophobia, Islamophobia in India, right? The BJP being anti-Muslim. We see it in every single society, but it’s just a cultural innovation, which group is going to be blamed. But I think—and so people like podcasters might vilify women as getting these handouts, or they might vilify Ukrainian refugees as getting these handouts in Poland, or it’s these migrants at the border that are causing all these sorts of problems. So it’s someone—rather than, you know, a financial entrepreneur is one who looks at the market and thinks, Hey, I’m going to exploit this opportunity and make some money, a cultural entrepreneur is someone who says, Hey, I’m seeing this sea of discontent. I’m going to rise up, build a following, and possibly make money, but also get social respect, etcetera.

Demsas: So these cultural entrepreneurs have a lot of power, right? It’s really contingent on who ends up being more persuasive, who ends up making either the best arguments or swaying the most people over onto their side because they’re charismatic. And one thing that’s been really interesting to me is it’s possible that men could feel like women are an asset, that the fact that they can work wage-paying jobs is an asset to them when there’s an economic downturn. Like, Great. It’s not just my brothers or my dad or my sons that can help me. Now my wife, my daughter, my sisters can help if there’s a problem, too. And I wonder if this also plays into why it’s younger men that are actually the ones that end up being more hostile towards women’s advancing rights because they’re less likely to be partnered already. So why isn’t it that you don’t see actually greater excitement that women can actually be helping bring in money in this context?

Evans: Okay, so that’s a great point, a plausible argument, but I think in previous generations, the younger, unpartnered men might still support this, be less likely to endorse hostile sexism. Maybe because they thought they were going to do better in the labor market. Now, I think an extra factor that’s happening right now that’s really important for explaining this, in terms of statistics: One, it is the women who are the major competition in employment because they’re super, super educated, often more educated than men. Two, these heterosexual men wanting girlfriends. So the people who are rejecting them, the people who they think are snubbing them are literally women. So I think there is a direct confrontation, so I think the idea of scapegoating and vilifying women is inevitable because of that competition of the sexes, so to speak. That said, there’s this nice draft by Thomas Piketty, the scholar of inequality, showing that richer, super educated men are much more likely to vote Democrat. So, when men can achieve these super high salaries, right, those men are super secure, so they don’t have that status competition. Now, I think that the point you made about relationships is really important and—

Demsas: Yeah, because I was just going to think, Is it just about dating? How much of this is just if you were partnered, then basically you don’t feel this way?

Evans: Yeah, I think that’s great. So there’s this very nice paper showing that fathers of daughters were less likely to interrupt Janet Yellen in her congressional hearings. So if you want the best for your daughter and you aspire for her to do well, and then you empathize with women’s concerns, and maybe you’re less of a dickhead, right, in public life. So I certainly see that can happening. But I still think if we look back at the historical record, there are plenty of cases where men might support their wives working, but still be pretty hostile in general. So we go back to the guilds in medieval Europe. A man and a wife might collaborate together. He might bequeath his estate to her, but European guilds that’s a proto-trade union, they might exclude women because they wanted to preserve and monopolize their benefits. The same goes for trade unions in the 19th and early 20th century—very, very sexist. So sadly, I don’t think—that doesn’t seem from the family, from the historical record, that just having a relationship will necessarily mean a benign attitude to women in general.

[Music]

Demsas: We’re going to take a quick break. More with Alice when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: All this gets me thinking, you know, a lot of the explanations are, you know, they’re structural in that they would happen to like basically every generation of young men, obviously, social media is a bit different, but other than that, you would see this in the past, as well, and so my question for you is—we see right now that a lot of people are talking about this potential threat of the great gender divergence between women and young women and men in politics. And I wonder, would young men always have been relatively more zero-sum in their thinking with young women? Even in past generations, we just don’t have the data to compare.

Evans: Okay, so let me say three things. First of all, it’s now that we see this rise of men being unpartnered. So previously the Pew data was showing a far smaller fraction of men were unpartnered. So previously, when women were culturally compelled to marry, you know, when it was just a normal thing to get married and have babies before you are 30, then you’re going to have more demand for men. So the mediocre man was going to do okay with the ladies. So he wasn’t getting those constant rejections and ghosting which grates at the male ego. So today is very, very different in terms of men’s difficulty of getting, you know, all these things, all these things that I’m talking about, uh, are big structural changes, the difficulty of getting to a top university, the difficulty of getting a decent housing in cities, especially the difficulty of getting a pretty girlfriend or a girlfriend at all, all those things are much, much harder for, say, the median guy. The median guy is struggling to get status, and that’s happening now.

Demsas: So one of the things I think is interesting about this phenomenon is that you’re doing a lot of work that looks at what’s happening with young men and women’s attitudes, not just in the U.S. or the U.K., but you’re also looking across a bunch of contexts. So I want to go into a couple different countries to see how these trends are actually playing out given the cultural context that exists there. So, firstly, can you take us to Qatar? And I’m interested in Qatar because it’s a highly developed nation, right? This is not a poor country by any means. So tell us what’s going on there. Why do we see this sort of divergence between young men and women?

Evans: Yeah, this is super fascinating, right? I’ve never been to Qatar, so I am cautious here. But piecing together other materials that I’ve read about the existing published literature: One, I think it’s important to recognize it’s a hugely unequal society. So, even if everyone’s incomes are high, people still care about that place and their pecking order. Second, on social media, I think social media can even amplify people’s perceptions of inequality because the kind of stuff that goes viral—and this goes for both pretty women and successful men—are the superstars, right? So, it’s the beautiful, beautiful women who get thousands and thousands of likes and then trigger anxiety amongst other women. And similarly for men in Qatar, it’s the Sheikhs, the rulers, the crown princes who show off their Lamborghinis and Porsches that are worth several million dollars. And so this sense of, I want to be at the top—because being at the top of society brings status, it brings social respect, it brings prestige, it brings admiration. Other people admire you if you’re doing well compared to others. So, in Qatar, women are now super, super educated, the younger generation of women really want to work, and I think it’s possible that they present a challenge to young men. And what’s really, really fascinating is when I look at data on maths and reading, we see women in Qatar are far outpacing men. It’s not just that they’re more likely to be university educated, but their maths scores are off the board, off the chart. So the gender gap in terms of competence is astronomical.

Demsas: I wanted us to move to a different part of the world. I wanted to move us to Indonesia, and the reason I want to talk about Indonesia is, you know, I remember in 2010 when then-President Barack Obama went to Indonesia and hailed it as this example of a democratic, multi-ethnic, multi-racial society. Particularly at a time where he was trying to tamp down on xenophobia and anti-Muslim behavior or anti-Muslim attitudes in the West and in the U.S. after 2001 and the 9/11 attacks. And so, I was really interested because what ends up happening in the subsequent years is that Indonesia really turns against this example. And you end up seeing that a lot of people, democratically, are wanting actually many more illiberal things. And you actually see young men and young women increasingly pushing towards regressive values, particularly on gender. And so you wrote about this, and you wrote about this survey that the Indonesian government did in 2019. And I want to just talk about this a bit, because I think it speaks to how it’s not just men that reinforce patriarchal attitudes, so that women can have a role in enforcing those as well.

In this 2019 government survey of Indonesian women, they’re looking at 15- to 19-year-old girls, right? And they ask them, When is it justified for a husband to hit or beat his wife? They ask, Is it when she burns his food, when she argues with him, when she goes out without telling him, when she neglects his kids, when she refuses to have sex with him? They tallied up all of those things, and amongst 15- to 19-year-old girls, over 40 percent of them agreed with at least one of those as a justification for domestic violence. And then you look up the age groups, you look at 20 to 24, you look at 25 to 29, you look at 45 to 49, no one is above 40 percent. At 45 to 49, it’s actually only 27 percent agree with at least one of those things. What’s going on there? Why are young women in this context maybe turning against women's rights in contrast with their older peers?

Evans: I was actually listening to Barack Obama’s speech in Indonesia the other day. And he quoted the Indonesian national motto, which is like, Unity in diversity. And it's always had this big history of celebrating their diversity. But what we’ve seen over the past 20 years in Indonesia, and actually in many Muslim countries across the world, is many people increasingly embracing a very strict Salafist interpretation of Islam and adopting very strict ideas of gender segregation and female seclusion, and men and women keeping their distance from each other. And so many people are—so I think what’s caused that? One is: Saudi Arabia has become rich on the back of Western and global demand for oil, and that has enabled it to export these Salafist ideologies through investing in mosques, madrassas.

Demsas: And what’s a madrasa?

Evans: A madrasa is an Islamic school, so you learn about the Prophet, you learn about Sharia law, you also learn about gender segregation—the idea that a modest woman, a good woman, will stay away from men, and she will not laugh, chat, and socialize with them. And that sexes should keep their distance from each other. And one possible reason—even in urban areas, girls are more likely to go to these Islamic educational institutions—and one possibility is that, as men become more religious, they want religious wives. They want wives who will be obedient. In Islam, it says that a wife should obey her husband, 93 percent of Indonesian Muslims say that the wife should obey her husband. And so one: Saudi Arabia funding madrassas. Also: religious righteousness gives people, especially struggling people, a sense of self-worth by doing God’s work. By making these anti-blasphemy accusations, you’ve got moral dignity, you’ve got status, people care about status. And then, as people become more religious, political parties and campaign movements gain votes by courting these preferences. So across Indonesia, in many of the different regions, more schools and more political parties have made laws against blasphemy, mandated hijab laws. There’s been persecution of minorities, and we see this right up until government level and, you know, criminalization of blasphemy being strengthened. So when people say, Oh, it’s a terrible thing, the sexes coming apart. I would say that’s descriptively true, but it’s distinct to economically developed and culturally liberal countries. And when you say it’s a terrible thing, just consider the alternative: what’s happening in many other parts of the world where people think the same thing and sing from the same hymn sheet as they did in the past in the UK and the U.S.

Demsas: One last place I want to take us is a place you’ve mentioned a couple times: South Korea. And the reason I want to ask you about this is because South Korea has the distinction of seeing the lowest fertility rates in the world. Since 2013, they’ve been below everyone else, and right now they’re at 0.72 births per woman, which is really, really low. I wanted to ask if that’s the effect that we might expect to see, because South Korea is a place that’s a highly developed nation, a very rich nation, and at the same time, you see this massive divergence between young men and young women, and I’m wondering is that something that you would expect to see in other nations, if you see this persistence and divergence between young men and women?

Evans: I will say two things. First, on South Korea’s plummeting fertility, I think there are several drivers. First and foremost, the lowest fertility and the most likely to be childless is the poorest South Koreans. So, there’s a great paper by Michèle Tertilt and others, and they highlight the importance of status. And the idea is that South Koreans really care about education. They want their kids to do really well, to get into the top universities—we call them SKY—so they invest enormous amounts in their education, but the poor cannot keep up with the spending of the rich. So maybe you only have one kid, right? You can’t have two kids and educate them well, so that’s one thing, the status competition makes it more exhausting and laborious to have a kid. Secondly, certainly, I think it’s true that as there’s cultural liberalization and people are no longer socially punished if they don’t have a kid, then they can just do their own thing. They can do whatever they like. So for example, when I’m in Zambia or Uzbekistan, the first two questions people will say to me is, Are you married? Do you have kids? And the correct answer is always supposed to be yes, right? But no one in the U. S. will ask me that question. No one has introduced themselves to me saying, Hi, are you married? Do you have kids? No one says that. The way I’m received varies enormously. And so people’s priorities—when I go to conservative countries—people’s priorities, how they want to understand me as a person, first and foremost: Married and kids? Yes or no? So that’s the second mechanism: the less pressure to give birth and have children. And then thirdly, we do see in South Korea many young women saying, Hey, I just don’t want this. I don’t want to be in the same position of my mother who, for Lunar New Year, would have to be the dutiful daughter-in-law serving the husband’s family, doing all the cooking, and not being recognized and rewarded. So: staying single and not wanting to have kids. So for all those three reasons—status, competition, cultural liberalism, and the ideological polarization between young men and women—we might see a fall in fertility, but those three things seem structural and difficult to change. And so I think for those three reasons, you might expect fertility to continue to fall.

Demsas: Well, just so that we don’t leave everyone on the most depressing note possible, I’m wondering, you know, it seems like there’s a lot of malleability and the direction towards making society less gender egalitarian, but that should mean that you could also do the opposite, right? So, what can countries or people do about this? Like, in the 20th century, I imagine there were also a lot of cultural entrepreneurs—whether it’s on TV or the suffragettes or individuals who were, you know, just in daily life really pushing towards a more egalitarian culture. Is that what we need to see now, or are there other things that countries can do to ameliorate the backlash effects that young men are displaying?

Evans: Okay, great. So I maybe sound a little bit Marxian now. I think if you buy my hypothesis that part of this is all about status competition, then one possible mechanism is to reduce that status inequality. So for example, by radically increasing the supply of housing, it’s easier for men to be doing as well as their peers. Right, in both Europe and the US there are a lot of NIMBY restrictions on where you can build and that raises the price of housing. So if housing was cheaper and more affordable and more within reach of young people, then young people would be doing comparably. You wouldn’t have that massive status competition. I think also what’s really important is going back to your point about cultivating empathy and understanding different people’s concerns and perspectives, and that happens through meeting in person. It does not happen through these 30-second TikToks. And so in England, many schools have banned mobile phones. And I think that’s a way, and I think the upside of that is that people will be more present on their interaction with their peers in that classroom. And that’s clearly a collective action problem that Haidt has shown in his new book, you know, no parent wants—

Demsas: Jonathan Haidt.

Evans: Yeah, exactly. No parent wants to do it alone because then their kid is out of the loop. But if everyone is doing it—so I think getting people off their phones and into in-person interactions, you know, hanging out at parties. You know, when I was a teenager, I was always hosting these garage parties. My mother was always away at work and so I was always hosting these garage parties, and people coming over to my house to play Nintendo and, you know—

Demsas: Now, you’d get in trouble for leaving, like, tools hanging up around children.

Evans: I lived a naughty life. I lived in the English countryside, so we had a big treehouse and all sorts of naughty things going on. But anyway, less of my naughtiness, but yes, people interacting in person is really important, going back to the contact hypothesis and building empathy. And then we can also think about these algorithms. So if it’s the case that corporate algorithms are creating a skewed sense of what people see, and creating an unrealistic depiction of social life, then that’s something we could regulate, as we might regulate other areas. So I think those would be the three things for me: the reducing the status competition by boosting the supply of housing, encouraging empathy with more personal interactions by getting kids off their phones, and also thinking about how do you change the algorithm so that people don’t see this distorted sense of humanity, which is just making them think that other people are crazy, when actually, most people are pretty moderate and towards the middle.

Demsas: Well, you were really speaking my language when it comes to housing, so don’t—I have no objections there. Always our final question: What’s an idea that you felt was good on paper, but didn't pan out in real life?

Evans: Oh my god, so much of my life, so much of my life. I mean, how many Alice Evans stories do you want? I travel the world, so this is like everything I do. I can tell you stories from the Democratic Republic of Congo when things went awry, or I can tell you about me being punched in the face in Mexico.

Demsas: Let’s do punched in the face in Mexico. Let’s do that one.

Evans: [Laughs] So I was — this was last year — I was in Oaxaca, and it was going really well. I was going into these little villages and towns with my iPhone, and I was using Microsoft Translate, and I was having these fantastic conversations with indigenous people. It was tremendous. And everyone was super, super kind and wonderful. And then a guy, in the favela, tried to wrestle me for my phone. Now, the sensible thing would just be to hand over my phone, but I did not do that. For some reason, I decided to wrestle him. And so he kept grabbing at my phone and I did not let him have it. And then what happened is—this is a true story, true story—he threw me to the ground, my head slammed back down on the stone—

Demsas: Oh my God.

Evans: Yeah. True story. And then he got on top of me and punched me in the face, right smack between the eyes on my nose. And what I do is I kick back, double legs in his stomach, propelling him off two meters. Then what happens is he—shocked by this—he goes into his pocket, he grabs a large knife, and what I do? I do a Lara Croft roly poly, spinning off to the side. I then jump up, and then he wrestles me again with the knife. And so it's at this point that I think, I’m not going to out-fight a man with a knife who does not care at all about my welfare. So at this point, I hand over the phone, and I sprint, and I'm bleeding, and I'm covered in blood. Yeah, that is something that had not gone to plan. Getting punched in the face was not on the agenda.

Demsas: Not good on paper. I mean, it's just interesting. You said, you know, smartphones—I guess they really, really can cause large harms in society.

Evans: Yeah, we need to be careful about the smartphones and also the idiots that carry them.

[Music]

Demsas: Well, Alice Evans, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We're so excited to have you, and we hope to have you back soon.

Evans: Thank you. This has been a pleasure. You're very kind. Thank you.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Or share it with two friends who you think might like it, as well.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas and we’ll see you next week.

[Music]

Demsas: Great.

Evans: We’re culture entrepreneuring right now

Demsas: We’re culture entrepreneuring right now! That’s the whole podcast.

Evans: (Laughs)

Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts

This episode, from our first season, called How to Build a Happy Life, features host Arthur Brooks in conversation with the psychotherapist and Atlantic contributing writer Lori Gottlieb about how the first step in making room for more joy in your life is learning how to identify it.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Megan Garber: Hey, it’s Megan Garber, one of the co-hosts of How to Know What’s Real. We’re excited to share with you a special series drawn from past seasons of the How To series. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been revisiting episodes around the theme of winding down. This episode is from our very first season, How to Build a Happy Life, and is called “How to Identify What You Enjoy.” It first published in 2021 during the pandemic, even though that was a really challenging time. This is still one of my favorite episodes to this day. Host Arthur Brooks explores how the first step in making room for more joy in your life is learning how to identify it.

[Music]

Brooks: This is How to Build a Happy Life, The Atlantic’s podcast on all things happiness. I’m Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and happiness correspondent at The Atlantic. In this special bonus episode of the How to Build a Happy Life series, I sat down with The Atlantic’s own Lori Gottlieb. We reviewed a lot of what we’ve covered in this series, from enjoyment and emotional management to the practical ways to apply the science of happiness to our daily lives. Enjoy!

Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Atlantic Festival. I’m really delighted because this episode of the podcast, it features one of the top psychotherapists in America today, The Atlantic’s Lori Gottlieb. We’re going to talk through some of the how-tos of navigating the natural ups and downs in life. And later in the episode, we’re going to feature some of my very favorite guest stars, which is you, our listeners.

So let’s start by saying hi to Lori. Welcome to How to Build a Happy Life, Lori.

Lori Gottlieb: Well, thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Brooks: Yeah, it’s wonderful to have you here.

I’ve been looking forward to working with you in some way for the longest time. I teach a class at Harvard Business School called Leadership and Happiness, and on the first day of class, I define happiness. Now, most of my students think happiness is a feeling. That’s wrong. I mean, happiness has a lot of feelings attached to it, and feelings are really important. But it’s not a feeling per se. I describe happiness as more of the way that you would take apart a meal.

Happiness is like a banquet. And you can define it in a lot of different ways, in terms of the ingredients; you can define it in terms of the dishes. But I like to start with the macronutrients of any meal. Now, if you’re eating a, literally, a meal, the three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And I say that, similarly, there are three macronutrients to happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. People who are truly happy about their lives, they have all three. And they have them in abundance, and they have them in balance. And people who are out of balance [with] enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose tend to define themselves as unhappy. They know that something is wrong with their happiness.

And so when I’m talking to somebody who says “I’m really unhappy,” I start digging in on one of those dimensions. So that’s where I want to start. And I want to start with the first of those, which is enjoyment. I define enjoyment as pleasure plus elevation. When you learn something about the sources of your pleasures, it turns into authentic enjoyment, which is a part of a happy life. Do you agree with that?

Gottlieb: I do. I would say that enjoyment plus connection. I really feel like connection—

Brooks: Connection with people?

Gottlieb: Right, right. Well, there are certain solitary enjoyments. You know, let’s say that you’re an artist or let’s say that you’re a musician or let’s say you’re reading a book. You know that’s enjoyable to you, depending on who you are. But I think that when you talk about the ingredients, I think connection really has to be in there. And what I see in the therapy room is that when you look at those ingredients of happiness, if you don’t have connection added to those ingredients, it’s going to be hard. And I love the way that you are talking about happiness—not as a feeling, because I think that happiness as a byproduct of living our lives in a meaningful way is what we all aspire to. But happiness as a goal in and of itself often is a recipe for disaster, because they’re not looking at the ingredients that you’re talking about.

Brooks: Mm. Yeah, for sure. And this is completely consistent with the findings of, you know, Bob Waldinger and George Vaillant and all those guys who have done all that longitudinal work that shows that the happiest people in their 70s and 80s are people who established the most human connections in their 20s and 30s. They got really, really good at love. They’ve got good love chops, is the bottom line. And so this is the No. 1 ingredient probably, in enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, is human connection.

Gottlieb: Well, right, and I think that the question that people ask themselves, I think that we all ask ourselves, when it comes to happiness is: How can I love and be loved? I think that is the essential question. And that’s where the enjoyment, I think, comes from too: What does it mean to not only love someone and be loved, but how do you love yourself too? And so often we don’t know how to do that. We can make ourselves incredibly unhappy by being unloving to ourselves.

Brooks: I want to talk about the specific macronutrient of enjoyment here for a second. One of the characteristics of people who present with clinical depression is a syndrome called anhedonia, which is the inability to experience pleasure and enjoyment. Even if you’re not clinically depressed, clearly if you’re having a hard time enjoying things, you’re going to be unhappy. As we just talked about a minute ago, and even better, if you’re enjoying things in connection, in communion with other people, because that actually creates the most fulfillment.

Do you see patients who because of whatever is going on in their lives—because of an over-sense of discipline or because they’re excessively stoic or for whatever reason—that they have insufficient enjoyment of their lives? And if so, what do you tell them? How can I enjoy my life more?

Gottlieb: Well, this is kind of like a chicken-or-the-egg thing. So anhedonia is when people are depressed; they literally cannot experience joy in the things that would normally bring them joy if they were not depressed. So it’s not that they don’t know how to enjoy things. It’s that because of depression, they aren’t enjoying activities that would normally be pleasurable to them.

But yes, I think that there are people who don’t know how to separate from that. There are people who don’t know how to have fun. I think that we think somehow in our culture today of ambition and moving forward—you know, all sorts of pressures—that people think that fun is frivolous. They don’t realize that it’s actually essential. So when you talk about enjoyment, people think, Well, that’s optional. You know, like if I have time. And then, of course, they don’t make the time because they think that it’s something that’s not necessary, and it absolutely is.

Brooks: So what’s an example of somebody who would come to you and they’re not enjoying their lives. They’re not taking time to have fun. What’s the assignment that you give them? Because, you know, in your show, you give somebody an assignment and then you see how it’s going. So if I came to you and I said, “I just don’t know how to have fun. I work and I work and I work all the time, and I’m not very happy.” And you say, “Arthur, do these three things.” You know: What’s the kind of thing that you would tell me? What’s the assignment?

Gottlieb: Well, actually, on the Dear Therapist podcast, we do a therapy session with people. And then, as you said, we give them a homework assignment that they have a week to do, and they report back to us. We had this 16-year-old who presented this exact issue. She said, “I am just trying to get into college, I’m doing all of these things. I never have any fun.” And so we gave her an assignment where we wanted her to have more balance in her life, and we gave her a specific assignment. This is the Libby episode in season one.

And she was somebody who was very reluctant to do this, because she thought that it would somehow hold her back, that it would somehow make her less competitive for college, that it would affect her in a way. Because nobody around her was having fun, by the way. Everybody was pretending to have fun.

You know, on social media it looks like everybody’s having just a great time. But in reality, everybody was really stressed out, and nobody was making time for fun. And so she did that. And she found that when she made time for fun she not only enjoyed her life more, but she found that actually it made her more productive. It actually helped her to get ahead. And so it was interesting, because I think that we have this idea that, you know, having fun is going to hold us back somehow. And in theory, we want to have fun, but we don’t actually say, “I’m going to put that on my calendar. I’m going to make that a priority.” And I think we really need to.

Brooks: That’s pretty interesting in our hyper-scheduled and and highly schematicized life that certain people have to actually put it in their Outlook: for 45 minutes, have fun. It seems like fun would be the most natural and spontaneous thing that people could have or do. And yet for people who are so scheduled all the way up into the tree, they actually need to treat it like anything else and take time for it, right? Is that what you’re saying?

Gottlieb: I think it needs to be specific too, not just “have fun.” It’s getting in touch with how you have fun. A lot of people don’t even know how they have fun anymore. As adults, they grow up. They forget what fun looks like, because they’re so busy with all of their responsibilities and then all of the things they think they need to be doing. And they don’t realize, first of all, how they’re spending their time.

So many people say, “I don’t have time for this kind of thing.” And yet if they actually do a 24-hour diary—which is what I will prescribe in therapy a lot—where they have to write down everything that they’re doing for 24 hours and sometimes 48 hours. And when they realize that, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I spent like an hour and a half mindlessly scrolling through the internet.” And that actually dampened their mood. It wasn’t a pleasurable activity for them. It was like, “Oh, I’m so behind; look at what everybody else is doing.” Or “Look at that person. They went to Hawaii, and I don’t get to go to Hawaii.” Or whatever it is.

So it wasn’t even a pleasurable activity. That hour and a half could have been spent doing something that would have actually brought them joy. And I want to use the word joy here when we talk about happiness. You’re right—happiness is not an emotion. Joy is an emotion, right? And so what brings you joy? And so specifically, people don’t know. They’re like, If I had the time, what would fun even look like? I don’t even know what that looks like. And so really, being able to identify, how do you have fun? What does fun look like for you? So that when you schedule time to have fun or make time so that it becomes not a thing that you schedule after a while, but just something that’s a natural part of your existence. What does that look like? People don’t even know sometimes. If you said to them, “How do you have fun?,” they look at me like, Fun? What’s that?

Brooks: It’s interesting that people don’t know how to have fun. And maybe they used to, and maybe they’ve forgotten. So if they present to Lori Gottlieb and say, “I’m not having any fun” or “I don’t have enough enjoyment in life,” the first assignment is not to have fun. The first assignment you’re going to give them is Think about the last time that you had fun—what were you doing—so that you can remember how to have fun in the first place. Is that right?

Gottlieb: Yeah, and a good way to figure out what is fun for you is to look at your envy. People don’t like to feel envy. They feel like it’s kind of like a taboo. They don’t want to feel that. They think that they’re a bad person for feeling that. But actually, envy is very instructive, and envy tells us something about desire. And so I always say to people: Follow your envy. It tells you what you want. And so when you are envious of someone or something or some experience, that’s a clue to what might be enjoyable for you. We are so hesitant to look at our desire. We don’t want to give space for desire. We’re so much about the shoulds, as opposed to the “What do I want? What does desire look like for me?” We feel like it’s almost a selfish act.

Brooks: That’s really interesting, because one of the things that I talk about an awful lot in the study of discernment—which is a part of every philosophical and major religious tradition, from Buddhism to Judaism to Christianity and even stoicism—is that discernment is actually not about “What should I do?” Discernment is about “What do I want?” It’s finding the nature of your own desire. And so that is as old as the hills. And yet it somehow escapes us again and again and again. And when I talk to young people, a lot of my students, they think they’re trying to figure out what they want to do. And actually, they should be thinking about trying to figure out what they want. That’s what they really don’t know: what they want. And that’s what you’re trying to get at, right, Lori?

Gottlieb: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there’s so much noise out there where sometimes people can’t hear themselves. So they conflate what society wants them to want, what their parents want them to want, what the culture tells them they should want versus what they inherently want. And if it goes against some of those things—like some of those culturally accepted things of what we should want—it’s very hard for them to even acknowledge that that’s something that they want.

Brooks: Let’s move on to the second pillar, the second macronutrient of a happy life, which is satisfaction. Now this is a killer. Satisfaction is really tough. I mean, Mick Jagger saying “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The truth is you can get satisfaction. The problem is you can’t keep satisfaction. Satisfaction is the reward when you meet a goal. It’s the reward for a job well done. It’s a promotion. It’s the race that you get. It’s the little burst of joy that you get from meeting one of your own personal goals. And the big problem that people have is that they get a little burst of this joy, perhaps—but then it goes away, and then they’re running, running, running, running again.

And there’s a whole lot of neurobiology about homeostasis that helps us understand this, and there’s the metaphor of the hedonic treadmill that shows us why we keep running and running and running, which is really good because it shows that after a little while, you’re mostly running out of fear because if you stop on a treadmill, you know, it’s going to happen.

But the real question then becomes, How do we deal with that? You do need satisfaction to be a happy person, but you can’t keep it. So what do you tell people who are workaholics and are addicted to success—and they’re just trying and trying and trying, as Mick Jagger sang, to get satisfaction, and they’re not getting it? The result is that they’re missing something from their lives. When somebody presents with the dissatisfaction dilemma, what do you tell them?

Gottlieb: Well, as you were talking, I was thinking about the people who present almost like a colander instead of a bowl. So it’s kind of like, you know, something goes in and it doesn’t stay there. The satisfaction gets there, and then, like, it just goes through the holes. It doesn’t stay, like in a bowl, right? And I think that the people who are happiest when we talk about people—and I would maybe use the word contentment—the people who are most content, who feel most full and fulfilled in their lives, are people who are what are called satisficers. And this is Barry Schwartz from The Paradox of Choice. And he talks about the difference between satisficers and maximizers. Satisficers are those people who, let’s say: You’re trying to buy a sweater, and you go into a store and you find a sweater that fits you. It looks good. It’s the right price. You buy it, you’re happy, you’re done. Right? It meets all of your criteria.

The maximizer will see that sweater and kind of put it under another sweater, so nobody will buy it. And just in case, go to the next store. And keep looking, because maybe they’ll find something a little bit cheaper or a little bit more attractive or, you know, whatever it is, right? Just something that’s a little bit better in some dimension. And they keep looking, and then maybe they find it. Maybe they don’t. But if they do find it, they tend not to be as happy with that purchase as if they had just bought the original sweater. And if they don’t find it, then they regret that they didn’t get the original one. And the problem is, even if they buy that first one that met all their criteria, the maximizer might be happy for about a week—and then the next week, they’re walking by a store and they see something else in the window and they think, Oh, that one would have been better. And so they’re just never satisfied.

And you see this in relationships. People do this in relationships all the time, too. It’s not just with things like sweaters. It’s with people, it’s with jobs, it’s with everything. So it’s kind of almost like a personality type, like: Are you a satisficer, or are you a maximizer? Even when you’re shopping on Amazon and you’re trying to decide Which set of cookware should I buy?, you know? And it’s like, the people who will spend like an hour going through all the different options instead of 10 minutes going, Oh, this is good. Let me just get this. And it really takes up your emotional energy in a big way, because it’s almost like it’s a perfectionism type of thing. And it really gets in the way, because it takes up all of your time. And then you’re never satisfied with what you have anyway.

Brooks: That’s really interesting. And you know, what you’re saying sounds kind of like a Western version of what His Holiness the Dalai Lama always says—which is the secret to enduring satisfaction is not to have what you want, but to want what you have. The satisficer is one who wants what she has, and the maximizer is the one who is always chasing, trying to have what he wants.

And another way of thinking about this, that actually works in the literature on the science of satisfaction, is that you shouldn’t think of your satisfaction as a function of what you have, but rather what you have, divided by what you want. And if you can actually devise a “wants management strategy,” the denominator of that fraction is going to decrease and your satisfaction is actually going to rise.

So when a patient presents with a satisfaction deficit, what assignment do you give them on your show? This is somebody who’s unsatisfied. Or if you have a patient who says, “It’s just, nothing’s good, Lori. Nothing’s good.” What do you tell them to do specifically, starting today?

Gottlieb: I think this is the difference between what a friend would say to this person and what a therapist would say to this person. Because what the friend tends to do is to say, “Look at all the wonderful things you have in your life,” which is not helpful at all because they can’t see it anyway. You know it’s very funny when you look at the difference between how we talk to our friends and how a therapist might approach this. Because I think that people would expect the therapist to say, “Well, look at all these things that you’re not seeing.” But no. In fact, what I would probably do is I would agree with them and say, “Yeah, you know, I can see that you’re really not satisfied.”

And then what happens for them is the more that you kind of go into their mindset that they start to see something new, that they start to say, “Well, actually, I have this really great partner, and I have this really great job.” But then there are a lot of buts with that. And then they start to sort of change their mindset when you’re not arguing with them about whether they should be satisfied or not. You can’t convince someone to be satisfied with what they have. They have to come to it on their own. And I think that a lot of people have very low tolerance for people like this, because they feel like, Well, you have so much, how can you complain? But I think it speaks to something in our culture—which is that we don’t really value what’s important. We don’t really value what’s going to bring us happiness. And so people tend to take for granted all of the things that they do have that would normally bring a person happiness.

Brooks: Hmm, that’s really interesting. And it actually leads—which we’ll touch on briefly before we go to our, before we go to our listeners—about the last macronutrient of happiness, which is maybe the hardest of all, which is purpose or meaning. And the reason that this is really hard is because it’s the most counterintuitive when it comes to the science of happiness. You know, when I ask in surveys—you know, large-scale surveys or experiments using human subjects—“What brings happiness and purpose to life?,” people always talk about the most painful parts of their lives. They never talk about, you know, “that week in Ibiza with my friends”; they never say “That’s when I actually found out my life’s meaning.” You know, they always talk about that divorce, that ugly breakup, when they got fired, that bankruptcy, when their kid had to go to rehab. That’s when they talk about, you know, the stuff that they were made of, and when they really understood the nature of their own souls.

And yet back when you and I were little kids and the hippies were running around in the ’60s and ’70s and the Woodstock generation said, If it feels good, do it, right? But now young people on either side of us—bookended by people like you and me—their mantra seems to be, If it feels bad, make it stop. Paradoxically, if we don’t suffer—if we don’t have pain, if we don’t come to terms with having a life that’s fully alive with the good and the bad—we can’t actually get enough meaning and purpose in our life, right?

Gottlieb: Well, that’s right. And I think that’s why we assign negative and positive connotations to feelings. Even though feelings are neutral, they don’t have a positive or negative connotation. So people say, “Joy is a positive feeling, and anger or anxiety or sadness are negative feelings,” and that’s just not true. All of our feelings are positive in the sense that they tell us what we want. Our feelings are like a compass. They tell us what direction to go in.

And if you don’t access your feelings, you’re kind of walking around with a faulty GPS. You don’t know what direction to go in. And people think that if they kind of numb their feelings —like, Oh, it’s not a big deal because I have a roof over my head and food on the table—that the sadness, the anxiety, this insomnia, whatever it is, is okay. Because, you know, it seems very trivial to them. But it’s not. It’s actually a message. It’s telling you something about your life. It’s telling you about something that needs to change.

And so people feel like numbness is nothingness. It’s not the absence of feelings. Numbness is actually a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. And then they come out in other ways, like too much food, too much wine, an inability to sleep, a short-temperedness, a lack of focus. You see how the feelings are there. They’re just presenting differently.

And so I think it’s really important for people to notice their feelings and to really welcome their feelings and embrace their feelings, because the feelings give them information about if they’re sad, what is not working. If you’re anxious, what is causing the anxiety? If you’re angry, are there some boundaries that maybe you need to set? Right? Is there something you need to change in your life? What is going on? So I think that that’s really important. And when we talk about meaning and purpose, if you don’t listen to your feelings, they’re going to direct you in the direction of meaning and purpose, they’re going to tell you what is important.

Brooks: It’s interesting, you know. Most of the great sages and saints throughout history have talked about the sacredness of suffering, and some pretty wise and interesting people today do too. I mean, there was a famous interview of Stephen Colbert by Anderson Cooper, where Stephen Colbert talks about the most painful time in his life, when his father and one of his siblings were killed in a plane crash. And he talks about how grateful he is even for that experience, because of the sacredness of every moment of his life, including the pain. He says, “Look, if you’re going to be fully alive, if you’re going to have a life, if you’re going to enjoy life per se, you’ve got to take it all.” If you’re thankful for life, you’ve got to be thankful for all of life, because that’s the fabric of your set of experiences. And it seems to me that that is the essence of how you find your meaning and the essence of how you understand who you are as a person according to what you just told me, right?

Gottlieb: I don’t think that you need to suffer tragedy to feel gratitude. I think that sometimes it awakens us to feeling gratitude when you have some kind of tragedy in your life. But I don’t think that you need to have some kind of tragedy. But I do think that you don’t get through life without suffering in some way, so it doesn’t need to be that a relative dies in a plane crash. I think that just being human inherently means that there are going to be times that you struggle.

And I think if you look at the world today, if you look at—you know, there’s so much suffering that we hear about every day in the world, but then what are we told? If you look at social media, for example, or you’re at a dinner party, you know, you don’t—nobody talks about that. Nobody wants to talk about that. It’s all like, Let’s pretend everything’s great. And I think it’s both. And if we don’t make room for the both, then you’re right that we don’t see the beauty.

We don’t appreciate the beauty in life. It’s almost like you can’t—you know, people always say, like, “I want to mute the the sadness” or “I want to mute the pain,” and it’s like: You can’t mute the pain and then also feel joy. If you mute one aspect of your emotional experience, you’re going to mute all of that. There’s like one mute button. So, if you mute the pain, you mute the joy. And so I think that that speaks to what you’re saying.

Brooks: And there’s one clarification you made that’s incredibly important that I want to underline for everybody listening. Remember: Lori Gottlieb just said that you don’t have to go out looking for suffering. Don’t worry. Suffering will find you, and that’s adequate, too, for us to find purpose in our lives.

Gottlieb: There’s a difference between pain and suffering, too. We all experience pain. You know: You go through a breakup, you go through a divorce, somebody gets ill, something happens with your job. Whatever it is, right? We all experience pain of some sort, but suffering is something that sometimes we do to ourselves.

So you go through a divorce, and then you’re like, looking on social media at your ex and you see them with their new partner, right? You don’t need to do that. That’s suffering. You’re creating your own suffering. So people do that all the time. And so we’re all going to experience pain in some way or another. But sometimes we are creating our own suffering. And in therapy, that’s a big topic of conversation. How are we creating our own suffering? Even though, of course, pain is inevitable.

Brooks: I want to go now to some of our listeners. I put out a call at the end of my column asking people to tell me the last time they were happy, and what we got back was just pure gold. They were so interesting and so moving. And I wanted to play just three clips of people telling me about the last time that they were happy and get your reaction to what they’re saying and, you know, what it says to you. I could analyze this from [my perspective as] the social-science guy, but I’m a lot more interested in what you’d tell these people if they were coming to see you for help.

Let’s bring up audio clip No. 1, who is one of our listeners: Karl from North Carolina.

Listener Submission 1: The last time I felt truly happy was yesterday. I am a high-school English teacher, and we’re now back in person. We’re lucky enough to be in a school where we wear masks. I was able to actually see their—if not their faces—their eyes light up when they figured out something or they got the point of my lesson. And just seeing their eyes light up and getting to exercise that teaching muscle that I haven’t really got to exercise in over a year and a half. Getting to be in front of the students again makes me feel truly like myself again, something that I really haven’t felt in a long time. So, yeah, teaching makes me happy.

Brooks: Isn’t that beautiful, Lori? And it seems to me that he made your point. It’s connection—that’s the secret! Happiness is love, right?

Gottlieb: Right. Well, it’s meaning and purpose and connection all rolled into one—that was so beautiful. We had someone on our Dear Therapist podcast during the pandemic, a teacher also, and she was talking about this, you know, like, wanting to reach her students and how she was. They said to her, like, “The best part of my day is when I get to connect with you.” Right? And so I think that we learned a lot during COVID about meaning and purpose and connection. Many people think it has to be this big epic thing. It can be, you know, I had this moment with my child and we had this great five minutes together. Or just like with Karl, you know, I had this experience with my students and I saw their eyes light up when they got the lesson. That right there is meaning and purpose, and it doesn’t need to be this grand thing. It’s like it’s the dailiness of it. It’s having lots of bursts of meaning and purpose throughout your day.

Brooks: And that actually speaks to what you talked about with satisfaction. Because satisfaction—if you’re looking for it in one big thing—it’s probably going to disappoint you. But if you’re looking at the little things that happen over the course of a day and over the course of life regularly, you’ve got a shot. That’s important, too.

Gottlieb: Often I will give people this assignment in therapy and even on the podcast, which is: I want you to write down the different moments of the day when you feel something positive. And often there are these moments of meaning, these moments of connection. And there are so many during the day that they didn’t even realize, even if it’s like: “I went to Starbucks, and I saw this barista who’s been there for five years and we used to talk every day, and I missed that during COVID. And it was so great to see each other again. And I realized this is meaningful to me.” You know, it’s like those little moments throughout the day that you don’t even pay attention to. And all of a sudden you say, Wait, those are really important to me.

Brooks: Let’s go to clip No. 2: Kristen in New York.

Listener Submission 2: The last time I remember being truly happy was in the summer of 2019. I had just ended my first year of grad school. I was living in Japan and Tokyo. I’d already been there for five years, so I became quite accustomed to living there and found myself in a great group of friends … And looking back from there, it kind of feels like everything has just been this slow and then sudden descent. Because I got back to Japan, and my friends began to graduate and move away. And then the pandemic came. And like many people, I spent months alone in my apartment, so it was just really lonely. And then my visa was expiring, so I had to leave my community that I had spent six years building into this period of great uncertainty. And then my mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly. And since then, I’ve been living in the after. And I feel like I will never experience that kind of happiness again—like I did that summer. Being so devastated by grief and loss, it just feels like whatever way joy manages to find its way back into my life will always be different.

Brooks: What do you say, Lori?

Gottlieb: Wow. Just so much loss and grief, and what she’s experiencing is so common. Because we think that when we’re in the throes of that, we feel like we will never experience joy again. We will never experience happiness again in the same way. And actually, in my book, in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, there’s one client that I write about. He was talking about how his son was killed in a car accident. And within a week of that, where he was devastated and he thought My life is over, I will never be the same again, he was with his daughter. And they were playing a game, and he laughed. And he said, “I couldn’t believe that. I laughed. I couldn’t believe that I actually could laugh. Like, what was that part of me that could do that, even though the rest of me felt dead and like I would never come alive again?” And so I think what she’s feeling is extremely common, and that’s what grief looks like. And, you know, she’s going to have a lot of grieving to do. And it’s unfortunate that her mother died in the middle of COVID when she was so isolated and she had lost her community, and all of these other things had happened. So she’s experiencing multiple layers of loss. And I hope that she allows herself the space to really grieve all that she has lost, so that she can then start to emerge again.

Brooks: And I think a really important part of your message, Lori—and what you just said and I think that I want people to remember from this and what [I want] Kristen to remember—is that happiness is going to come again. That this isn’t the end. It feels like the end, because that’s how it always feels when you’re in a period of grief. And there’s all kinds of reasons for that. But happiness is going to come again. It just is, right?

Gottlieb: Well, it reminds me of when people are depressed, they feel like they will never be happy. And so I always say to people who are in the middle of a clinical depression You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now. Because their thinking is so distorted in that moment because they can’t see it. They can’t imagine a time when they would experience joy again. And the same thing, I think, when people have experienced a devastating loss, they cannot imagine experiencing joy.

And yet what happens later, just like the man in the book—people go to weddings and they go grocery shopping and they go on Twitter, and their lives move on. There’s this expression like people say, “Well, why haven’t you moved on?” Moved on is not quite right. It’s, you move forward. The loss stays with you, but you move forward and you’re still grieving. You will always grieve that loss. And I think that the grief is a sign of how much love there was with the person who is no longer there, right?

And then loss of the community. She loved those people. So that’s going to be there, but it feels different. It has a different flavor over time. It has a different resonance. And there will be times when you’re standing in an elevator and some song comes on and it’s the song that meant something with that person and you just start bawling in the elevator or whatever it is. You know, that’s what grief looks like, even decades later. So I think that’s part of the human experience and what you were talking about earlier, Arthur—about this idea of meaning and struggle and how they’re somehow intertwined in some way.

Brooks: One of the things that’s so interesting when you talk to older people who are happy and well—when you talk to those people, what you find is that they suffered a lot. It’s weird, you know, for young people, people in their 20s, who want to find out how to have a happy life and want to avoid as much suffering as possible. So in their 80s, they’ll be really happy. That’s actually wrong. In the same way, something that’s a really delicious dessert actually has salt in it.

And the afternoon of your life requires that the morning have had a certain number of challenges. And so you find that the happiest people have been fully alive all throughout their lives, and they’ve grieved, and they’ve recovered. And when bad things are happening, they never thought they’d feel better. And guess what—they did. They did! And they allowed themselves to be sad. And that’s one of the secrets, right?

Gottlieb: Right. And I think that the reason that they’ve been through so much is because they engaged in life. So the people who want to protect themselves from pain or discomfort are the people who never really engage in life because they’re so busy protecting themselves to make sure that they’re not going to experience anything that feels bad, right? And so then they never put themselves out there. They never take any risks.

And when you take risks, sometimes, you know, there’s going to be pain involved. And sometimes there’s going to be great joy involved. But if you are protecting yourself the whole time you didn’t really live; you’re not fully alive. And so maybe you think you protected yourself, but you end up feeling very unsatisfied, very kind of empty and lonely.

Brooks: If you’re going to live your life like an adventure, you’re going to have to take some chances. Let’s go to the last audio clip to finish this out, Lori.

Listener Submission 3: Hi. My name is Joel Marsh, and I own Marsh Painting Inc. in Park City, Utah. [I’ve] been painting homes in Park City for over 20 years. And I’m a fourth-generation painter. What I’ve learned is that Arthur Brooks is correct in this column when he states that what matters is not so much the weight of a job—more the “who” and the “why.” One day, as we were staining a home, we took a 10-minute break and hit golf balls onto the adjoining driving range. With the homeowner’s permission, of course. Our work painting houses is hard and boring much of the time. I tell new recruits that more often than not, when you have good music going, some good Mexican food for lunch, and you get into a rhythm with the rest of the guys, our job can feel a little Zen-like.

Brooks: We’re pretty much near the end of the time, so let’s have this be kind of the last word. What’s your big takeaway? And what’s the big lesson that people should get from this incredibly encouraging message from Joel in Park City?

Gottlieb: Yeah, that was really beautiful. I was thinking about how, before COVID, people used to say co-workers are overrated. You know, people are like, “I really want to work from home,” or whatever it is. Co-workers are not overrated. I think that if we’ve learned anything, it’s those small moments like he was talking about—those spontaneous moments of like, Hey, let’s hit the golf balls, right?

The things that you don’t expect, those moments of connection that happen when you’re in the same space with other people and you have a shared experience. And I think that that’s what we need to look for in general these days. No matter whether it’s at work or in our families or in our social circles or whatever it is. How can we show up? When you show up, those moments of connection happen.

Brooks: Well, the practice of enjoyment and satisfaction and purpose through pain and through love and all the experience—that is the beautiful thing that we call life, courtesy of Lori Gottlieb.

Lori Gottlieb is the author of the best-selling book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone,; of the wonderful, wonderful column, Dear Therapist; my colleague at The Atlantic. What a privilege, what a joy it’s been to be with you during this time. Thank you for joining all of us on How to Build a Happy Life.

Gottlieb: Oh, my pleasure.Thanks so much for the conversation.

[Music]

Garber: If you enjoyed this episode, take a listen to our first season, How to Build a Happy Life. You can find all seven episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Our next episode will be the last installment in our Best of How To series. We’ll look at the art of small talk and what tools are available to help reduce social anxiety.

Julie Beck: So do you think that you’ve gotten more comfortable with socializing over time, or do you just feel like you’ve learned strategies?

Ty Tashiro: I think it’s that I’ve learned strategies first, and then the social comfort came after that.

After months of negotiation, Congress was close to passing a spending bill on Wednesday to avert a government shutdown. Elon Musk decided he had other ideas. He railed against the bill in more than 150 separate posts on X, complaining about the raises it would have given members of Congress, falsely exaggerating the proposed pay increase, and worrying about billions in government spending that wasn’t even in the bill. He told his followers over and over that the bill was “criminal” and “should not pass.” Nothing about Musk’s campaign was subtle: “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he posted. According to X’s stats, the posts accrued tens of millions of views.

Elected Republicans listened: By the end of the day, they had scrapped the bill. Last night, another attempt to fund the government, this time supported by Musk, also failed. After spending about $277 million to back Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency, Musk has become something of a shadow vice president. But it’s not just Musk’s political donations that are driving his influence forward. As his successful tirade against the spending bill illustrates, Musk also has outsize power to control how information is disseminated. To quote Shoshana Zuboff, an academic who has written about tech overreach and surveillance, Musk is an “information oligarch.”

Since buying Twitter in 2022 and turning it into X, Musk has reportedly used the platform to inflate the reach of his posts (and thereby his own influence on discourse). Since July, his posts on X have received more than 16 times the number of views as all of the accounts of incoming congressional members combined. He also appears to have transformed the platform to boost conservative posts, in accordance with his own political aims. This is how he can start posting about his displeasure over a bill and then have lawmakers capitulate. At least one Republican member of Congress reported that after Musk’s posting spree began, constituents flooded his office with calls telling him to reject the spending bill. “My phone was ringing off the hook,” Representative Andy Barr of Kentucky told CBS News. “The people who elected us are listening to Elon Musk.”

Some in Congress seem to have no problem with this, and actually enjoy it. Yesterday, Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee as well as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that it might be a good idea to simply make Musk the speaker of the House as a way to shatter the establishment, in Greene’s phrasing. Musk doesn’t have the support of the entire right—his calls to scrap the spending bill frustrated some Republican lawmakers and spurred a round of infighting. But the point is that he has the ear of the person the party listens to: Trump. If you have Trump, Musk probably understands, the rest of the right generally falls in line, however reluctantly.

The power that Musk wields through X was clear even before this week, of course. “Our political stability, our ability to know what’s true and what[’s] false, our health and to some degree our sanity, is challenged on a daily basis depending on which decisions Mr. Musk decides to take,” Zuboff said in a 2023 interview with the Financial Times. Musk’s decisions as to what does and doesn’t have a place on X are part of why the platform has become a bastion for white-supremacist content. He has shown that he can now have a disproportionate impact on politics despite the obvious fact that he’s not an elected official. Reportedly, Trump didn’t initially oppose the spending bill; rather, Musk and his posts may have led Trump to eventually come out against it on Wednesday afternoon.  

Musk may have to tread delicately, though. Trump does not like to be overshadowed. Yesterday, Democrats in Congress repeatedly referred to “President Musk” in protest of how far Musk’s power has gone. (Trump’s incoming press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement to Fox News that “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”) Musk has tried to hide his sway behind a thin veil. After it became clear that the spending bill was going to fail on Wednesday, he posted, “VOX POPULI, VOX DEI,” which is Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of god,” as though the breakdown was not the direct result of his obstinate prodding.

For now, Musk has the Republican Party, and thus a large chunk of American democracy, sitting neatly in his pocket. Part of what makes Musk’s influence so concerning is that his views are to the right of even many Republicans. Early this morning, Musk posted on X that “only the AfD can save Germany.” The Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, is one of Germany’s furthest-right parties, whose jingoistic desires don’t just stop at mass deportations. AfD politicians have reportedly discussed “remigration,” the process of deporting nonwhite residents, including naturalized citizens and their descendants. These views are presumably not just finding their way to Trump; they are broadcast to millions of people who log on to X.

In many ways, Musk’s decision to purchase Twitter for a staggering $44 billion has not proved to be a shrewd financial move. Advertisers have fled the site, as have users—especially since last month’s election, after which liberals have flocked to Bluesky. A recent estimate suggested that X is now barely worth more than $10 billion. Yesterday, Musk tried to point out the “irony” of how the media have remarked on the influence he wields through X and noted the site’s decline in general relevance. Several things can be true at once, though. X is a large platform that still motivates people to spring into action and put pressure on others, even as its influence slowly erodes. There could come a day when X is too diminished for Musk to exert this kind of power, but that’s not the present.

The $44 billion that Musk spent on X has done wonders for Musk’s ambitions. As far and away the wealthiest man in the world, and the owner of one of the most influential platforms for shaping political discourse, Musk has achieved an advantage that outstrips the standards of normal oligarchs. Thanks to X, he has the ability—perhaps second only to Trump’s—to design America’s political reality.

Elon Musk was born a South African, so he’s ineligible to serve as either president or vice president of the United States. But he is swiftly showing, by dint of his enormous wealth and growing influence with the person Americans actually elected as president, that neither of those titles are necessary to dominate Washington.

Over the course of a few hours yesterday, Musk may have single-handedly tanked a carefully negotiated bipartisan compromise to fund the government for the next three months and provide billions of dollars in aid for disaster relief and farmers. The deal was the work of House Speaker Mike Johnson, who, like Musk, is (er, has been) a close ally of President-Elect Donald Trump. To secure support from Democrats—who still hold the Senate for another few weeks—Johnson agreed to add a host of unrelated provisions, including a long-sought but politically dicey pay raise for lawmakers.

Republicans weren’t happy. The 1,547-page bill, written behind closed doors and dropped in their lap a week before Christmas, represented everything they say they hate about how Congress operates. Yesterday, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, not known as a conservative rabble-rouser, called it a “monstrosity.” But Johnson believed that he could get enough Republicans to join most Democrats in passing the bill in time to avert a government shutdown due to start Friday night and allow Congress to adjourn for the holidays.

Then Musk started posting.

“Stop the steal of your taxpayer dollars!” “This bill is criminal.” “KILL BILL!”

With dozens of dashed-off posts, the billionaire co-chair of the Trump-invented Department of Government Efficiency demonstrated the political power he’s amassed in the two years since he completed his takeover of Twitter, the platform he renamed X. He declared that any lawmaker who voted for the bill “deserves to be voted out in 2 years”—an implicit threat to use his money to fund their opponents. This was governing-by-tweet, Trump’s signature method. For several hours, the president-elect was silent; Musk had taken charge. By the time Trump weighed in against the bill yesterday afternoon, his opposition was assumed, even anti-climactic.

[Franklin Foer: What Elon Musk really wants]

Notably, the Republican who spoke for Trump was Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, the vice president–elect, whom Musk has seemingly shunted off to the sideline during the post-election transition. In a joint statement issued through Vance’s X account, Trump and Vance called on Republicans to scrap the “Democrat giveaways” in the bill while adding an increase in the debt ceiling. The demand complicates Johnson’s job: Republicans will be reluctant to pass a politically unpopular hike in the nation’s borrowing limit without significant help from Democrats. And House Democrats immediately vowed to oppose any proposal that wiped away the deal they first agreed to. Government funding runs out tomorrow night, and for the moment, Republicans appear to have no idea what they’ll do.

This is the new reality Johnson will face beginning next year as speaker—if he’s even able to secure reelection when the House reconvenes on January 3. Trump embraced the Louisiana Republican after his win last month, but the mess the speaker created—and Musk exacerbated—has thrown his future into doubt. At least one House Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has vowed to oppose him on the floor. Others are reportedly wavering. Johnson can’t afford to lose many more. His majority at the start of the next Congress will be two seats slimmer than it is now; if more than three Republicans refuse to vote for him, he won’t be speaker.

Even if Johnson wins, his job will be difficult if not impossible. Navigating a sizable majority was maddening enough for a Republican speaker with the mercurial Trump in the White House—just ask the now-retired Paul Ryan. Now slice that margin down to a few seats and add Musk to the mix. Republicans will have a larger advantage in the Senate, but at least when it comes to legislation, that won’t matter much if bills can’t get out of the House.

Johnson’s best hope might be that Trump tires of Musk or takes umbrage at his flex of power. The president-elect does not like to be upstaged. Democrats, too, would like to see Musk pushed aside. They quickly began referring to Musk as “co-president” and “president-elect,” an obvious attempt to drive a wedge between him and Trump.

But some Republicans want Musk to be given even more power. In an X post this morning, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky noted that the speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more,” he suggested, “than electing Elon Musk.”

A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn. Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding. Every so often, I would write about these events or the debates that they set off.

But I haven’t written about this phenomenon in a long time, and I recently realized why: because it isn’t happening any more. Left-wing outrage mobs might still form here or there, but liberal America has built up enough antibodies that they no longer have much effect. My old articles now feel like dispatches from a distant era.

The beginning and end of any cultural moment is difficult to pin down. But the period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. None of the terms or habits will disappear completely; after all, anti-Communist paranoia continued to circulate on the right for decades even after the era of McCarthyism ended in 1954. Nonetheless, the hallmarks of this latest period—the social-media mobbings, the whispered conversations among liberal onlookers too frightened to object—have disappeared from everyday life. The era lasted almost exactly 10 years. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump.

The illiberal norms that took hold a decade ago have gone by many terms, including political correctness, callout culture, cancel culture, and wokeness—each of which has been co-opted by the right as an all-purpose epithet for liberalism, forcing left-of-center critics of the trend to search for a new, uncontaminated phrase. The norms combined an almost infinitely expansive definition of what constituted racism or sexism—any accusation of bigotry was considered almost definitionally correct—with a hyperbolic understanding of the harm created by encountering offensive ideas or terms.

Whatever you want to call it, two main forces seem to have set this movement in motion. The political precondition was the giddy atmosphere that followed Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, which appeared, based on exit polls—although these were later found to have been misleading—to reveal a rising cohort of young, socially liberal nonwhite voters whose influence would continue to grow indefinitely. The rapid progression of causes like gay marriage seemed to confirm a one-way ratchet of egalitarian social norms.

The technological precondition was the rapid adoption of iPhones and social media, which allowed the memetic spread of new ideas and terms. Twitter in particular was the perfect forum for political correctness to flourish. It favored morally uncomplicated positions. It encouraged activists and clout-seekers to gain audience share and political influence by mustering braying crowds to render summary judgment on the basis of some fragment of video or text. The instant consensus that formed on Twitter felt like reality to those absorbed inside of it, an illusion that would take years to dispel.

Numerous analyses have identified 2014 as the year when the trend achieved exit velocity. It was in December 2013 that Justine Sacco, a publicist with only 170 Twitter followers at the time, dashed off a clumsy tweet attempting to make light of her white privilege before getting on a flight to South Africa. By the time she landed, a social-media mob was calling for her to lose her job, a request that her employer soon obliged. That same year, #cancelcolbert swept through social media, in response to a tweet by The Colbert Report that used cartoonishly over-the-top Asian stereotypes to make fun of the obvious racism of the Washington Redskins. Stephen Colbert wasn’t canceled, but the premise that one misplaced joke could be punished with a firing was now taken seriously. (Both cases also demonstrated social-media mobs’ difficulty distinguishing irony from sincerity.) That spring, Michelle Goldberg wrote possibly the first column diagnosing the rise of what she called “the return of the anti-liberal left” for The Nation.

The censorious elements of the new culture could be hard to acknowledge at a time when many of the same energies were being directed at deserving targets—most notably, police mistreatment of Black Americans (#handsupdontshoot) and sexual harassment and assault of women in the workplace (#MeToo). Partly for that reason, or out of a general discomfort with criticizing their allies, some progressives insisted either that nothing new was afoot in the culture and that reactionaries were manufacturing a moral panic out of thin air, or alternatively that there was something new, but it merely involved overdue accountability (or “consequence culture”) for racist and sexist behavior.

Over time, both defenses grew untenable. Student protesters began routinely demanding that figures they disapproved of be prohibited from speaking on campus or, when that failed, shouting down their remarks. Seemingly innocent comments could generate wild controversy. In 2015, for example, Yale erupted in protest after a lecturer suggested that a school-wide email cautioning students about offensive Halloween costumes was infantilizing.  

[Jennifer Miller: What college students really think about cancel culture]

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 accelerated the dynamic. Everything about Trump’s persona seemed to confirm the left’s most dire warnings. He gleefully objectified women and had boasted about groping them. He made statements deemed racist even by fellow Republicans and inspired active support from white nationalists. And yet, at the same time, his victory seemed tenuous and reversible. He had squeaked into office on the tailwinds of a hyperventilated email scandal, and still lost the national vote by two percentage points.

The prevailing interpretation among Democrats was that Hillary Clinton had lost because she had failed to turn out enough nonwhite voters. The key to energizing those constituencies, many liberals believed, was to ramp up identity-based appeals to drive home the stakes of Trump’s racism and misogyny. The retrograde behaviors Trump exhibited were simultaneously threatening enough to present a crisis, yet vulnerable enough to be defeated if the opposition could summon enough energy.

That energy took many forms, not all of them equally productive. Protesters tried to shut down campus appearances by right-wing speakers such as the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and the conservative race-science theorist Charles Murray. These tactics ignored the possibility that any charge of racism might be erroneous, or that it might be possible to overreact to its scale, and had no limiting principle.

Inevitably, the scope of targets widened. Harvard fired the first Black faculty dean in its history after students protested his work for Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense, establishing a new norm that the sins of misogynists and racists would now attach to the defense lawyers who represent them. Censoriousness also applied retroactively. In 2019, the comedian Sarah Silverman said she was fired from a movie over a resurfaced 2007 photo from a sketch in which her oblivious character wore ludicrously offensive blackface in an effort to see whether Black or Jewish people faced worse treatment. (The whole joke was that she mistook angry reactions to her racist getup for anti-Black discrimination; once again, a satirical take on racism was treated as racism itself.) A NASCAR driver lost a sponsorship over a report that his father had used the N-word—in the 1980s.  

This is just a tiny sample of the kinds of events that had become routine. If you think we are still living in that world today, you have forgotten how crazy things got.

The mania peaked in 2020. By this point, Twitter’s influence had reached a level where large swaths of reporting in major newspapers were simply accounts of what Twitter was talking about. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, social media almost totally eclipsed real life—especially for liberals, who were much likelier than conservatives to stick with social distancing. This gave the summary judgments delivered by online crowds a new, inescapable force. George Floyd’s murder seemed to confirm the starkest indictment of systemic racism. Progressive Americans, many of them white and newly aware of the extent of racism in American life, set out to eradicate it. Much of that energy, however, was trained not outward, at racist police officers or residential segregation patterns, but inward, at the places where those progressives lived and worked.

Many of the most famous and consequential cancellations played out during this period. A New York Times op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for deploying the National Guard to stop riots was deemed “dangerous” by Times staffers, leading to the ouster of James Bennet, the editorial-page editor. Bennet’s critics insisted that Cotton’s argument would pave the way for attacks on peaceful protesters, but even criticizing violence became risky behavior in progressive circles. The Democratic data analyst David Shor lost his job after retweeting a study by a Black academic suggesting that violent demonstrations had helped Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968.

In classic witch-hunt logic, the guilt often spread to those who failed to join in the condemnations of others. In June 2020, The Washington Post published a surreal story about how its cartoonist, Tom Toles, had hosted a Halloween Party two years earlier in which one attendee had shown up dressed as “Megyn Kelly in blackface.” (The costume, intended to lampoon Kelly for her comments defending blackface, did not go over well at the time, and the designer apologized shortly afterward.) The article, which resulted in Toles’s guest being fired from her job as a graphic designer, implied that Toles was guilty of secondhand racism for not confronting her. The next summer, a contestant on The Bachelor was found to have attended an antebellum-themed fraternity party during college, and when the show’s longtime host defended her as having been caught up in rapidly changing social norms, the ensuing uproar forced him out of his job. (Again, these cases reflect just a tiny sample.)

But by late 2021, with COVID in abeyance and Joe Biden occupying the presidency, things began calming down quickly. Trump’s (temporary) disappearance from the political scene deescalated the sense of crisis that had fueled the hysteria. And Elon Musk’s disastrous 2022 Twitter takeover accelerated the decline. By driving away much of Twitter’s audience and suppressing the virality of news reports and left-leaning posts, Musk inadvertently shattered the platform’s monopolistic hold on the political attention economy, negating the most important arena for identifying and punishing dissidents.

The aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel further chipped away at the foundations of left-wing illiberalism by showing how easily its premises could be co-opted by the other side. Many Jews who had previously supported the left’s approach to racial issues began to apprehend that their allies considered them oppressors, rather than the oppressed. Meanwhile, the response from supporters of Israel turned the cancel-culture debate on its head. In the face of anti-Israel protests, congressional Republicans hauled several university presidents into hearings, where they were berated and urged to adopt sweeping policies not only against anti-Semitic conduct, but against any speech that made Jewish students feel threatened. Suddenly, the rhetoric of safety and harm that had been used by the left was being deployed against it, and principled free-speech defenders were sticking up for the right of protestors to chant “Death to Israel.” This put even more strain on the already unraveling consensus that allegations of racial discrimination must be treated with total deference.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free-speech Culture]

In the end, progressive illiberalism may have died because the arguments against it simply won out. Although a handful of post-liberal thinkers on the left made an earnest case against the value of free-speech norms, deflections were much more common. It was just the antics of college undergraduates. When it began happening regularly in workplaces, the real problem was at-will employment. And, above all, why focus on problems with the left when Republicans are worse? None of these evasions supplied any concrete defense for sustaining dramatic, widely unpopular culture change. Eventually, reason prevailed.

Much of blue America is now experiencing a determined reaction against the excesses of that bygone period. Many important organizations that had cooperated with mob-driven cancellations came to experience regret, installing new leaders or standards in an explicit attempt to avoid a recurrence. The New York Times, perhaps liberal America’s most influential institution, has made a series of moves reflecting implicit regret at its treatment of figures like Bennet and the science writer Donald McNeil, including publishing a pro-free-speech editorial and defying demands by activists and writers that it stop skeptically covering youth gender treatment.

Corporations have pulled back on the surge in spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that began in 2020, and some universities may follow. Many elite universities have stopped requiring job applicants to submit DEI statements, which have been widely criticized as a de facto ideological screening device. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has found that the upsurge in attention by scholars and journalists to race and gender bias peaked a few years ago, as did reports of cancellations.

One interpretation of these shifts, suggested by the conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat, is that the trend has merely settled in at an elevated plateau. The repressive machinery might be less fearsome than it was a few years ago, but it is still far more terrifying than in, say, 2010.

I believe that the illiberal-left movement has not merely declined. It is dead, or at least barely breathing. When was the last time you saw a social-media mob have any effect outside social media? Who is the last person to be publicly shamed and unjustly driven out of their high-status job over some misunderstood joke or stray comment? Indeed, the roster of cancellation victims has not only stopped growing, but begun ticking downward. Five years ago, Saturday Night Live fired the comedian Shane Gillis before his first appearance on the show in response to outrage over offensive jokes he had made on a podcast. This past February, he was brought back as a guest host. David Shor, who lost his job in 2020 for suggesting that violence is politically counterproductive, helped direct advertising by the Democratic Party’s most powerful super PAC this year.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab?]

Douthat and other critics of left-wing illiberalism suggest that bureaucratized diversity represents a kind of consolidated machinery of the social revolution. But this misses the sheer hysteria that was the hallmark of the cancellation era. What made social-media mobs so fearsome was the randomness of their actions, and the panicked submission that often followed. Bureaucracy, however annoying it can be, inherently involves process. A corporate department is unlikely to terminate an employee simply because he was guilty of a “bad look” or failed to “read the room,” or any other buzzword that once swiftly turned people into nonpersons.

One reason the demise of political correctness has failed to register fully is that critics have redefined it as “wokeness.” And wokeness can mean a lot of things, some of them noble, some of them silly. Land acknowledgments are woke. Hate Has No Place Here yard signs are woke. But those forms of wokeness are not illiberal or coercive.

The left-wing ideas about race and gender that spawned the recent era of progressive illiberalism remain in circulation, but this fact should not be confused for the phenomenon itself. The repressive effect of political correctness may spring from ideological soil, but it requires other elements in order to grow and spread. And the political atmosphere that fostered the conditions of 2014–24 has grown chilly.

Many anti–political correctness moderates feared that another Trump victory would revive left-wing illiberalism, just as it had in 2016. Instead, the immediate response on the left has been almost diametrically opposite. Rather than confirming the most sweeping condemnations of American social hierarchy, Trump’s second election has confounded them.

This time around, Trump managed to win the popular vote, making his victory seem less flukish. More important, he won specifically thanks to higher support among nonwhite voters. This result upended the premise that undergirded political correctness, which treated left-wing positions about social issues as objectively representing the interests of people of color. Now that the election had confirmed that those positions alienated many minority voters themselves, doubts that had only been whispered before could be shouted in public more easily. On Morning Joe, for example, Mika Brzezinski read aloud a Maureen Dowd column blaming the defeat on “a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation” that featured “diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like ‘Latinx,’ and ‘BIPOC.’”

Establishment Democrats were not alone in reaching such conclusions. “We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality, told The New York Times. “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.” Cassie Pritchard, a labor activist in Los Angeles, conceded on X that the left had miscalculated. “I think there was a time where it felt like the liberal-left coalition had essentially won the culture war, and now it was simply a matter of enforcement,” she wrote. “But that’s clearly wrong. We didn’t, and a lot of us overestimated our power to enforce our preferred norms.”

Once political correctness had expanded to the point where it could affect candidates for office at a national scale, it would inevitably begin to self-destruct. A small group of committed activists can dominate a larger organization by intimidating a majority of its members into silence, but that tactic doesn’t work when people can vote by secret ballot.

Trump’s success reveals the limits of a political strategy that was designed to impose control over progressive spaces on the implicit assumption that controlling progressive spaces was enough to bring about political change. What will come after the era of political correctness within the left is, hopefully, a serious effort to engage with political reality. While the illiberal left is in retreat, the illiberal right is about to attain the height of its powers—and, alarmingly, some of the institutions that once gave in too easily to left-wing mobs are now racing to appease the MAGA movement. A new era of open discourse in progressive America cannot begin soon enough.

The glorification of dangerous thinness is a long-standing problem in American culture, and it is especially bad on the internet, where users can find an unending stream of extreme dieting instructions, “thinspo” photo boards, YouTube videos that claim to offer magical weight-loss spells, and so on. There has always been a huge audience for this type of content, much of which is highly visual and emotionally charged, and spreads easily.

Most of the large social-media platforms have been aware of this reality for years and have undertaken at least basic measures to address it. On most of these platforms, at a minimum, if you search for certain well-known keywords related to eating disorders—as people who are attracted or vulnerable to such content are likely to do—you’ll be met with a pop-up screen asking if you need help and suggesting that you contact a national hotline. On today’s biggest platforms for young people, Instagram and TikTok, that screen is a wall: You can’t tap past it to get to search results. This is not to say that these sites do not host photos and videos glamorizing eating disorders, only that finding them usually isn’t as easy as simply searching.

X, however, offers a totally different experience. If you search for popular tags and terms related to eating disorders, you’ll be shown accounts that have those terms in their usernames and bios. You’ll be shown relevant posts and recommendations for various groups to join under the header “Explore Communities.” The impression communicated by many of these posts, which typically include stylized photography of extremely skinny people, is that an eating disorder is an enviable lifestyle rather than a mental illness and dangerous health condition. The lifestyle is in fact made to seem even more aspirational by the way that some users talk about its growing popularity and their desire to keep “wannarexics”—wannabe anorexics—out of their community. Those who are accepted, though, are made to feel truly accepted: They’re offered advice and positive feedback from the broader group.

Technically, all of this violates X’s published policy against the encouragement of self-harm. But there’s a huge difference between having a policy and enforcing one. X has also allowed plenty of racist and anti-Semitic content under Elon Musk’s reign despite having a policy against “hateful conduct.” The site is demonstrating what can happen when a platform’s rules effectively mean nothing. (X did not respond to emails about this issue.)

This moment did not emerge from a vacuum. The social web is solidly in a regressive moment when it comes to content moderation. Major platforms had been pushed to act on misinformation in response to seismic events including the 2016 presidential election, the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the rise of QAnon, and the January 6 insurrection,but have largely retreated after backlash from Donald Trump–aligned Republicans who equate moderation with censorship. That equation is one of the reasons Musk bought Twitter in the first place—he viewed it as a powerful platform that was operating with heavy favor toward his enemies and restricting the speech of his friends. After he took over the site, in 2022, he purged thousands of employees and vowed to roll back content-moderation efforts that had been layered onto the platform over the years. “These teams whose full-time job it was to prevent harmful content simply are not really there,” Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist who formerly led a safety team at pre-Musk Twitter, told me. They were fired or dramatically reduced in size when Musk took over, she said.

[Read: I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside]

Now the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, Vaishnavi J, an expert in youth safety who worked at Twitter and then at Instagram, told me. (I agreed not to publish her full name because she is concerned about targeted harassment; she also publishes research using just her last initial.) “Despite what you might say about Musk,” she told me, “I think if you showed him the kind of content that was being surfaced, I don’t think he would actually want it on the platform.” To that point, in October, NBC News’s Kat Tenbarge reported that X had removed one of its largest pro-eating-disorder groups after she drew the company’s attention to it over the course of her reporting. Yet she also reported that new groups quickly sprang up to replace it, which is plainly true. Just before Thanksgiving, I found (with minimal effort) a pro-eating-disorder group that had nearly 74,000 members; when I looked this week to see whether it was still up, it had grown to more than 88,0000 members. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment.)

That growth tracks with user reports that X is not only hosting eating-disorder content but actively recommending it in the algorithmically generated "For You feed, even if people don’t wish to see it. Researchers are now taking an interest: Kristina Lerman, a professor at the University of Southern California who has published about online eating-disorder content previously, is part of a team finalizing a new paper about the way that pro-anorexia rhetoric circulates on X. “There is this echo chamber, this highly interlinked community,” she told me. It’s also very visible, which is why X is developing a reputation as a place to go to find that kind of content. X communities openly use terms like proana and thinspo, and even bonespo and deathspo, terms that romanticize eating disorders to an extreme degree by alluding fondly to their worst outcomes.

Eating-disorder content has been one of the thorniest content-moderation issues since the beginning of the social web. It was prevalent in early online forums and endemic to Tumblr, which was where it started to take on a distinct visual aesthetic and set of community rituals that have been part of the internet in various forms ever since. (Indeed, it was a known problem on Twitter even before Musk took over the site.) There are many reasons this material presents such a difficult moderation problem. For one thing, as opposed to hate speech or targeted harassment, it is less likely to be flagged by users—participants in the communities are unlikely to report themselves. On the contrary, creators of this content are highly motivated to evade detection and will innovate with coded language to get around new interventions. A platform that really wants to minimize the spread of pro-eating-disorder content has to work hard at it, staying on top of the latest trends in keywords and euphemisms and being constantly on the lookout for subversions of its efforts.

As an additional challenge, the border between content that glorifies eating disorders and content that is simply part of our culture’s fanatical fixation on thinness, masked as “fitness” and “health” advice, is not always clear. This means that moderation has to have a human element and has to be able to process a great deal of nuance—to understand how to approach the problem without causing inadvertent harm. Is it dangerous, for instance, to dismantle someone’s social network overnight when they’re already struggling? Is it productive to allow some discussion of eating disorders if that discussion is about recovery? Or can that be harmful too?

[Read: We have no drugs to treat the deadliest eating disorder]

These questions are subjects of ongoing research and debate; the role that the internet plays in disordered-eating habits has been discussed now for decades. Yet, looking at X in 2024, you wouldn’t know it. After searching just once for the popular term edtwt—“eating disorder Twitter”—and clicking on a few of the suggested communities, I immediately started to see this type of content in the main feed of my X account. Scrolling through my regular mix of news and jokes, I would be served posts like “a mega thread of my favourite thinsp0 for edtwt” and “what’s the worst part about being fat? … A thread for edtwt to motivate you.”

I found this shocking mostly because it was so simplistic. We hear all the time about how complex the recommendation algorithms are for today’s social platforms, but all I had done was search for something once and click around for five minutes. It was oddly one-to-one. But when I told Vaishnavi about this experience, she wasn’t surprised. “Recommendation algorithms highly value engagement, and ED content is very popular,” she told me. If I had searched for something less popular, which the site was less readily able to provide, I might not have seen a change in my feed.

When I spoke with Amanda Greene, who published extensively about online eating-disorder content as a researcher at the University of Michigan, she emphasized the big, newer problem of recommendation algorithms. “That’s what made TikTok notorious, and that’s what I think is making eating-disorder content spread so widely on X,” she said. “It’s one thing to have this stuff out there if you really, really search for it. It’s another to have it be pushed on people.”

It was also noticeable how starkly cruel much of the X content was. To me, it read like an older style of pro-eating-disorder content. It wasn’t just romanticization of super thinness; it looked like the stuff you would see 10 years ago, when it was much more common for people to post photos of themselves on social media and ask for others to tear them apart. On X, I was seeing people say horrible things to one another in the name of “meanspo” (“mean inspiration”) that would encourage them not to eat.

Though she wasn’t collecting data on X at the moment, Greene said that what she’d been hearing about anecdotally was similar to what I was being served in my X feed. Vicious language in the name of “tough love” or “support” was huge in years past and is now making its way back. “I think maybe part of the reason it had gone out was content moderation,” Greene told me. Now it’s back, and everybody knows where to find it.

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The days of tech CEOs tussling with Donald Trump are fading. After distancing themselves from Trump during his first administration—and publicly rebuking him after the events of January 6, 2021—many Silicon Valley leaders are now taking a softer approach. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have each pledged, through their companies or their personal coffers, individual $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration fund. The Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who protested Trump’s immigration policies in 2017, apparently dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, this month; Bezos, along with the the heads of TikTok and Netflix, are reportedly on the schedule there this week too. As Trump put it in a press conference today: “In the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Friendship may not be exactly what these tech CEOs are after. Self-preservation seems to be playing a role—these companies don’t want to lose out on government contracts or face retribution from a man known for threatening to punish his critics. For years, Trump was no friend to tech, and vice versa: During his first term, he used Twitter to lob insults at Amazon and its then-CEO Bezos. And as recently as this past summer, Trump was hurling unfounded accusations at Zuckerberg. Ambition is likely part of the calculus too; CEOs hope that Trump will go easier on the industry than the Biden administration did, including on crypto and AI. Now, as Trump prepares to take office a second time, tech executives seem eager to please the president-elect—and to start a new chapter in their relationship that elides the past.

Throughout Trump’s 2024 campaign, tech executives were privately speaking with Trump about their interests and policy preferences; after the election, the public congratulations quickly rolled in. Business leaders attempting to get on good terms with an incoming administration is not unheard of. But the machinations here are happening out in the open. As my colleague Ali Breland wrote last week, “Until recently, elites and politicians who worked together feared the scandal of the sausage-making process being revealed, and the public backlash that could come with it.” Now, with Elon Musk setting a new standard for blatantly self-serving political participation—including attempts to influence the outcome of an election—his peers are operating more brazenly than they once did. Beyond the tech CEOs who are donating to and hobnobbing with Trump, several prominent venture capitalists who stumped for Trump are now advocating for their fellow tech leaders to be nominated for roles in the Trump administration. The venture capitalist David Sacks, an outspoken Trump supporter, has been named the “A.I. and Crypto Czar” for the incoming administration. And of course, the vice-president-elect was once a venture capitalist too.

Donating to any president-elect’s inauguration fund is a standard way for corporations to signal goodwill. Some tech companies, including Google and Amazon, quietly gave relatively small amounts to Trump’s first inauguration fund, according to data published by OpenSecrets. Firms such as Google and Microsoft donated to President Joe Biden’s inauguration fund. And a  seven-figure tech donation is not unprecedented—Microsoft gave more than $2 million to President Barack Obama for his 2013 inauguration. The flow of such large sums from multiple executives this year, Margaret O’Mara, a historian of Silicon Valley, told me in an email, is “both a reflection of the growth of inaugural spending generally” and “the surging profits and net worth of tech’s biggest names.” And the meetings with and warm statements from tech leaders who are donating this money signals a new chapter of cooperation between Big Tech and Trump.

The tech industry has always relied, to an extent, on the federal government, but its political allegiances have shifted. A free-market libertarian strain has long run through the region and industry, though in the 2010s, the industry cozied up to the Obama administration, a relationship that benefited both sides. During the first Trump term, the government-tech relationship became uneasy: Social platforms attempted damage control after blowback from employees and users who blamed them for Trump’s ascent to office (remember Zuckerberg’s national listening tour in 2017?). As Trump enters his second term having received close to half of the country’s vote, support for him may not risk that same level of public outrage: In many circles, the Trump taboo is over. As O’Mara put it, the social consequences of supporting Trump are lesser, and the business risks of crossing him are higher.

When Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago on the evening before Thanksgiving, he and other guests reportedly stood with hands over hearts while listening to a recording of the national anthem sung by people accused of January 6–related crimes. Whether Zuckerberg knew who the singers were is unclear. But the scene was uncanny given that January 6, when it happened, was a bright-red line for the tech industry. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch banned or suspended Trump, and companies such as Amazon paused donations to election deniers. Now, with the arrival of Trump 2.0, that red line has been erased entirely.

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Maybe Democrats didn’t do so badly after all. The technology that actually runs our world The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research, Helen Lewis argues.

Today’s News

At least two people were killed and several others were injured by a shooter at Abundant Life Christian School, in Madison, Wisconsin. The suspect, who was found dead, was a student at the school, according to the Madison police chief. Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet. She wrote that Trudeau told her on Friday that he wanted to move her to another role in the cabinet, and that she disagreed with him on the best path forward in the face of Trump’s threat to implement new tariffs. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence; the country will face snap elections next year to form a new coalition government.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: These books and movies will entertain even the most fleeting of attention spans, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Pete Gamlen

What If You Just Skipped the Holidays?

By Faith Hill

For years, ahead of family holiday gatherings, Alicia Dudley would wake up anxious. Since she’d gotten married, her relatives and her husband’s had wanted them at multiple different celebrations for each occasion. Bundling up her small child and toting him about was a pain. Dudley, a creative director in Virginia, couldn’t believe that on her rare, precious days off, she was doing what she always did: running around.

Eventually, she made a simple but major decision—she quit the holidays.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Has your cat closed its rings today? Oliver Sacks’s lifelong search for recognition Conor Friedersdorf: How to move on from the worst of identity politics The health-care system isn’t hopeless. How Democrats lost their way on immigration

Culture Break

Rosalind O’Connor / NBC

Have a laugh. This week’s Saturday Night Live highlighted Chris Rock’s talent for trolling, Shirley Li writes.

Watch. Spend some time with six binge-worthy movie series recommended by The Atlantic’s writers and editors.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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