The ad that Hims & Hers Health plans to air during the Super Bowl comes at you with rapid-fire visual overload—a giant jiggling belly, bare feet on scales, X-ray results, sugary sodas, a pie in the oven, a measuring tape snug around a waistline—all set to the frenetic hip-hop beat of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A disembodied voice warns: “This system wasn’t built to help us. It was built to keep us sick and stuck.” The Super Bowl spot is a strikingly dark, politicized way of getting at the company’s latest initiative: selling weight-loss drugs to both women and men. The ad also marks a pivot for the telehealth company colloquially known as Hims, which rose to prominence just under a decade ago, slickly marketing hair-loss treatments and erectile-dysfunction drugs to men.

Since Hims’s founding in 2017, the company has been pointing toward a very particular future, one in which the word patient is interchangeable with customer. The Hims brand has primed people to view both their everyday health and the natural-aging processes as problems that can be tweaked and optimized—as if it were peddling operating-system updates for the human body. Now, as the national mood and the business environment shift, Hims’s message is undergoing its own reboot.

Catering to male anxiety can carry a company a long way: If you’re a man in your 30s, as I am, ads featuring Hims’s signature branding—a hip font on a bright background—have become inescapable across Instagram and Facebook. Hims sells all manner of pills, supplements, shampoos, sprays, and serums. Central to the Hims pitch is the fact that many people, especially younger men, avoid regularly going to the doctor; a recent Cleveland Clinic survey found that less than a third of Millennial and Gen Z men receive annual physicals. Hims markets the telehealth experience as a welcome alternative. After filling out an online intake form and communicating with a licensed provider from its partner group about hair loss, for example, you might be prescribed a Hims-branded chewable. One such offering, advertised at $35 or more a month, contains minoxidil, a medication that first hit the market in the 1980s as Rogaine, combined with finasteride, which most people know as Propecia, plus supplements.

On platforms such as Instagram, under the logic of targeted advertising, if you linger over an ad for one hair-growth supplement, similar ads will follow. In my daily tapping and scrolling through the app, Hims ads began to appear everywhere—and eventually got in my head. Some time last year, my self-interrogation started: How long has my hairline had that peak? Was my forehead always that … giant?

“The job of marketing is to influence behavior, and sometimes that means identifying problems that you may not know that you have, or underlying insecurities that may prevent you from losing social currency down the road,” Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan, told me. A former advertising executive, Collins said that he, too, had been bombarded by Hims ads. He could see how Hims was trying to “elevate itself from being a shortcut that represents a hair-loss solution to being a solution for masculinity, to being an outlet for him, for what it means for manliness.”

In December, after my dermatologist examined my scalp during an annual skin screening, I sheepishly asked her about Hims. She rolled her eyes. When we moved to discussing treatment options, she also warned me that a potential side effect of using oral finasteride for hair growth is decreased libido, erectile dysfunction, or both.

After a few minutes of discussion, a topical solution seemed like a better bet than the pill. But there is nothing special about Hims itself. “If you want, I can just call in a minoxidil-finasteride solution to your pharmacy,” my doctor said. “It’ll be cheaper.” She saw me as her patient, not an e-commerce shopper. Still, the fact that I asked about Hims at all made me feel like the company’s pervasive marketing was working on me. One minute, I was reporting, checking out Hims-branded biotin gummies; the next minute, I was practically at the checkout, ordering some myself.

When I spoke with Mike Chi, Hims’s chief commercial officer, he leaned hard into words such as normalization and empower. I told him that the constant barrage of Hims ads had made me feel almost bullied into doing something about my hair. Chi disagreed with my characterization but acknowledged the high volume of the company’s ads. The goal of its campaigns, though, was “to create an emotional connection with a customer,” he said. “And to create that personal connection with a customer, we often have to have varied messaging to find the way in that connects with them.”

Even though Hims’s ubiquitous stuff-for-dudes marketing campaign has proved effective at tapping into male insecurity, treating masculine vulnerabilities with generic drugs has its commercial limits, and Hims faces growing competition in the space. A company called Ro (formerly Roman) has a model similar to Hims’s; Amazon has an online pharmacy and telehealth business. In the past several years, Hims has steadily expanded its business into a broader array of treatments for both men and women: antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication—and, as the Super Bowl spot indicates, weight-loss drugs that include a version of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy. Semaglutide is currently on the FDA drug-shortage list, a status that allows Hims and other companies to sell their own compounded versions. (The makers of Ozempic are urging the FDA to declare an end to the semaglutide shortage.) Going down the compounded glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) path is a bold gambit for Hims. The market for a monthly supply of hair-growth or erectile-dysfunction pills is limited to men in certain age brackets, but the perpetual quest for thinness and hotness transcends demographics.  

By some measures, Hims’s expansion has been successful. The company has accumulated more than 2 million regular customers and achieved a market cap of $9 billion. Last February, the company announced its first profitable quarter. Marketing accounted for 45 percent of Hims’s operating expenses during last year’s third quarter. Peter Fader, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me that such a percentage is “absolutely high” when it comes to typical marketing costs in a successful operation. “And it’s not sustainable, either,” he added. “A lot of people do question [the company’s] long-term viability,” he said, but he also commended Hims for “rolling with the times.”

Although Hims’s stock has gone up 65 percent in the past month, investment experts seem split over the reason. Some appear confident in the value of the company’s prospects. Others, such as the CNBC host Jim Cramer, suspect that Hims’s surging stock price is the effect of a “short squeeze,” in which speculators’ bet on a future steep decline temporarily boosts the share price.

Even the Super Bowl ad carries pitfalls for Hims. On Friday, Senators Dick Durbin, a Democrat, and Roger Marshall, a Republican, sent a letter to acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner stating that Hims’s “Sick of the System” commercial “risks misleading patients by omitting any safety or side effect information” about an injectable weight-loss medication that appears in the ad. In response, a Hims spokesperson told me in an email, “We are complying with existing law and are looking forward to continuing working with Congress and the new Administration to fix the broken health system.” The person went on to imply that the company’s critics are defending the status quo. “The ad calls out industries that are part of a system that fails to prioritize the health of Americans,” the spokesperson said. “And now these industries are asking to shut the ad down.”

Hims is now doing business in a world where a concept such as “Make America healthy again” has rapidly migrated from a fringe political movement to the center of government. And although MAHA purists might shun pharmaceutical solutions, some potential customers might be sympathetic to Hims’s claim of being an ally against “the system.” The one-note, full-volume message in the Hims Super Bowl spot is that everything is rigged against you—keeping you overweight, making you unhealthy—and that you’re right to be mad about that.

The company could be betting that in a political moment when talk of needing more “masculine energy” is playing an outsize part, this vibe shift in its marketing strategy will help it reach an even bigger audience. Hims has done well selling its own recipes for masculine energy; now it figures it can do even better pushing remedies to help you take back control from the elites and make you feel great again. It’s audacious, possibly cynical, and probably very effective.

Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.

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Dear James,

I have a friend I used to be very close with—I was in her wedding party eight years ago—but life circumstances, life goals, and geographic distance have rendered us a lot less so. We don’t communicate much aside from reacting nicely to each other’s Instagram Stories, which don’t reveal a lot about a person. Recently, her posts, usually just happy photo dumps of her cat and vacations with her partner, have taken a turn; they’re full of odd quotes about being a bigger person, learning not to hate, purging one’s soul. She also posted an Instagram Story that made me think her cat was dead. But I follow her partner, too, and it seems that this person now lives in a separate city with the cat.

I feel called to check in, but all avenues seem awkward. Our last text exchange was just sharing links to news stories from months ago. Who am I to text, “Hey, saw on Instagram that you may be going through something”? I could send her a message on Instagram, but that seems insufficiently serious if she’s indeed going through a dark period as a result of what I presume to be a separation. If my presumption is wrong, then reaching out would be even more awkward. Any insight here?

Dear Reader,

This is why I’m not on Instagram.

You don’t get news about a person: You get shifts in curatorial policy. But it sounds as if your friend—unless she’s working on an elaborate cover story before embedding with a politically suspect performance-art troupe—is going through something. And as you’ve been conducting your own informal probe into her situation, you’ve been keeping in mind the old journalists’ maxim: Follow the cat. The cat has moved. The cat’s in a different city. The self-help quotes are proliferating. I smell brokenness.

The question is: Do you want to help her? Or are you just kind of fascinatedly tracking the downturn in her online vibes? (Another Instagram effect: It turns us into dissociated consumers of one another’s lives.)

If you do want to help her—and you were in her wedding party, which in my book gives you a stake, however remote, in this marriage—then I see nothing wrong with checking in via text, carrier pigeon, whatever. In fact, I would say: Definitely do it. It’s never too late, or too early, or too weird, to see if somebody’s okay. Encourage her, if you can, to give an account of herself that exceeds the pixelated Instagram version.

Rooting for the cat,

James

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

From inside the room, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings felt at times more like an awards show than a job interview. While the health-secretary nominee testified, his fans in the audience hooted and hollered in support. Even a five-minute bathroom break was punctuated by a standing ovation from spectators and cheers of “We love you, Bobby!” There were some detractors as well—one protester was ushered out after screaming “He lies!” and interrupting the proceedings—but they were dramatically outnumbered by people wearing Make America Healthy Again T-shirts and Confirm RFK Jr. hats.

The MAHA faithful have plenty of reason to be excited. If confirmed, RFK Jr. would oversee an agency that manages nearly $2 trillion, with the authority to remake public health in his image. “He just represents the exact opposite of all these establishment agencies,” Brandon Matlack, a 34-year-old who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, told me on Wednesday. We chatted as he waited in a line of more than 150 people that snaked down a flight of stairs—all of whom were hoping to get a seat for the hearing. Many of them were relegated to an overflow room.

Of course, Matlack and other RFK Jr. fans could be in for a letdown. Whether Kennedy will actually be confirmed as health secretary is still up in the air. There was less raucous cheering during the hearing on Thursday, as Kennedy faced tough questions from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whose vote could be decisive in determining whether Kennedy gets confirmed. But the realization of RFK Jr.’s vision for health care in America may not hinge on his confirmation. The MAHA movement has turned the issue of chronic disease into such a potent political talking point that people like Matlack are willing to trek from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., just to support Kennedy. Politicians across the country are hearing from self-proclaimed “MAHA moms” (and likely some dads too) urging them to enact reforms. They’re starting to listen.

Kennedy is best known as an anti-vaccine activist who spreads conspiracy theories. His more outlandish ideas are shared by some MAHA supporters, but the movement itself is primarily oriented around improving America’s diet and the health problems it causes us. Some of the ways MAHA wants to go about that, such as pressuring food companies to not use seed oils, are not exactly scientific; others do have some research behind them. Consider artificial food dyes, a major MAHA rallying cry. Multiple food dyes have been shown in animal studies to be carcinogenic. And although a candy-corn aficionado likely isn’t going to die from the product’s red dye, the additive is effectively banned in the European Union. (Kennedy claims that food dyes are driving down America’s life expectancy. There’s no evidence directly linking food dyes to declining human life expectancy, though one study did show that they cut short the life of fruit flies.)

Until recently, concerns over food additives, such as artificial dyes, were the domain of Democrats. In 2023, California became the first state in the nation to ban certain food additives: red dye 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil, and propylparaben. But now food-additive bans are being proposed in Donald Trump country, including West Virginia, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Some of the efforts, such as the Make Arkansas Healthy Again Act, are an explicit attempt to enact Kennedy’s agenda.

In other states, something a bit more Schoolhouse Rock is happening: The purported dangers of food ingredients are riling up Americans, who are then going to their lawmakers seeking change. Eric Brooks, a Republican state legislator in West Virginia, told me that he decided to copy California’s food-additive bill after being prodded by a constituent. “I said, Well, I don’t normally look out West, especially out to California, for policy ideas, to be honest with you,” he told me. “But once I had done the research and I saw the validity of the issue, I said, Okay.” Although his bill, which was first introduced in January 2024, did not move forward in the previous legislative session because, in his words, “there were bigger fish to fry,” Brooks hopes the national interest coming from the MAHA movement will motivate West Virginia legislators to take another look at the proposal.

Other red-state efforts to follow California’s lead have similarly not yet been passed into law, but the fact that the bills have been introduced at all signifies how motivated Republicans are on the topic. The MAHA moms may be enough to propel Kennedy to the job of health secretary. One Republican, Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, told Kennedy on Thursday that he plans to vote to confirm him because doing anything else “would be thumbing my nose at that movement.” Republicans are not only introducing bills to ban food additives; they’re also taking up Kennedy’s other MAHA priorities. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently asked the federal government for permission to forbid food-stamp recipients in her state from using their benefits to buy junk food—a policy Kennedy has repeatedly called for.

Over the past two days, senators seemed shocked at just how loyal a following Kennedy has amassed. One pejoratively called him a prophet. MAHA believers I spoke with made clear that they want RFK Jr.—and only RFK Jr.—to lead this movement. Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer who goes by “Food Babe” on Instagram, told me that, if Kennedy fails to be confirmed, there “will be an uprising like you have never seen.”

But at this point, it seems that the movement could live on even without Kennedy. On Wednesday, the Heritage Foundation hosted a press gaggle with MAHA surrogates. Heritage, an intellectual home of the modern conservative movement, is now praising the banning of food dyes. This is the same pro-business think tank that a decade ago warned that should the FDA ban partially hydrogenated oils, trans fats that were contributing to heart attacks, the agency “would be taking away choices,” “disrespecting” Americans’ autonomy, and mounting “an attack on dietary decisions.”

Republicans have generally been a bulwark for the food industry against policies that could hurt its bottom line. Democrats and Republicans in Washington today seem more aligned on food issues than ever before. “When you have members on both sides of the aisle whose constituencies are now extremely interested in understanding fully what’s in their food products, it does shift the game a bit,” Brandon Lipps, a food lobbyist and a former USDA official under Trump, told me. After all, even Bernie Sanders, despite chastising Kennedy multiple times during this week’s confirmation hearings, professed his support for aspects of the MAHA movement. “I agree with you,” Sanders told Kennedy on Thursday, that America needs “a revolution in the nature of food.” During the same hearing, Cassidy said that he is struggling with Kennedy’s candidacy because, despite their deep disagreements on vaccine policy, on “ultra-processed foods, obesity, we are simpatico. We are completely aligned.”

Although MAHA has shown itself to be a unifying message, the real test will come down to the brass tacks of any political movement: passing actual legislation. How willing lawmakers—especially those with pro-business proclivities—will be to buck the status quo remains to be seen. Politicians have proved eager to speak out against ultra-processed foods; in that sense, MAHA is winning. But policy victories may still be a ways off.

Perhaps you’ve heard: Young people aren’t dating anymore. News media and social media are awash in commentary about the decline in youth romance. It’s visible in the corporate data, with dating-app engagement taking a hit. And it’s visible in the survey data, where the share of 12th graders who say they’ve dated has fallen from about 85 percent in the 1980s to less than 50 percent in the early 2020s, with the decline particularly steep in the past few years.

Naturally, young people’s habits are catnip to news commentators. But although I consider the story of declining youth romance important, I don’t find it particularly mysterious. In my essay on the anti-social century, I reported that young people have retreated from all manner of physical-world relationships, whether because of smartphones, over-parenting, or a combination of factors. Compared with previous generations of teens, they have fewer friends, spend significantly less time with the friends they do have, attend fewer parties, and spend much more time alone. Romantic relationships theoretically imply a certain physicality; so it’s easy to imagine that the collapse of physical-world socializing for young people would involve the decline of romance.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near its all-time low, while the share of women under 65 who aren’t living with a partner has grown steadily since the 1980s. The past decade seems to be the only period since at least the 1970s when women under 35 were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse.

People’s lives are diverse, and so are their wants and desires and circumstances. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single. But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.

A marriage or romantic partnership can be many things: friendship, love, sex, someone to gossip with, someone to remind you to take out the trash. But, practically speaking, Stone told me, marriage is also insurance. Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income,” Stone said. “Women do not typically invest in long-term relationships with men who have nothing to contribute economically.” In the past few decades, young and especially less educated men’s income has stagnated, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. For single non-college-educated men, average inflation-adjusted earnings at age 45 have fallen by nearly 25 percent in the past half century, while for the country as a whole, average real earnings have more than doubled. As a result, “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” he said.

In January, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch published an analysis of the “relationship recession” that lent strong support to Stone’s theory. Contrary to the idea that declining fertility in the U.S. is mostly about happily childless DINKs (dual-income, no-kid couples), “the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest,” he observed. I asked Burn-Murdoch to share his analysis of Current Population Survey data so that I could take a closer look. What I found is that, in the past 40 years, coupling has declined more than twice as fast among Americans without a college degree, compared with college graduates. This represents a dramatic historic inversion. In 1980, Americans ages 25 to 34 without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than college graduates to get married; today, it’s flipped, and the education gap in coupling is widening every year. Marriage produces wealth by pooling two people’s income, but, conversely, wealth also produces marriage.

Contraception technology might also play a role. Before cheap birth control became widespread in the 1970s, sexual activity was generally yoked to commitment: It was a cultural norm for a man to marry a girl if he’d gotten her pregnant, and single parenthood was uncommon. But as the (married!) economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen observed in a famous 1996 paper, contraception helped disentangle sex and marriage. Couples could sleep together without any implicit promise to stay together. Ultimately, Akerlof and Yellen posit, the availability of contraception, which gave women the tools to control the number and the timing of their kids, decimated the tradition of shotgun marriages, and therefore contributed to an increase in children born to low-income single parents.

The theory that the relationship recession is driven by young men falling behind seems to hold up in the U.S. But what about around the world? Rates of coupling are declining throughout Europe, as well. In England and Wales, the marriage rate for people under 30 has declined by more than 50 percent since 1990.

And it’s not just Europe. The gender researcher Alice Evans has shown that coupling is down just about everywhere. In Iran, annual marriages plummeted by 40 percent in 10 years. Some Islamic authorities blame Western values and social media for the shift. They might have a point. When women are exposed to more Western media, Evans argues, their life expectations expand. Fitted with TikTok and Instagram and other windows into Western culture, young women around the world can seek the independence of a career over the codependency (or, worse, the outright loss of freedom) that might come with marriage in their own country. Social media, a woman veterinarian in Tehran told the Financial Times, also glamorizes the single life “by showing how unmarried people lead carefree and successful lives … People keep comparing their partners to mostly fake idols on social platforms.”

[Read: The happiness trinity]

According to Evans, several trends are driving this global decline in coupling. Smartphones and social media may have narrowed many young people’s lives, pinning them to their couches and bedrooms. But they’ve also opened women’s minds to the possibility of professional and personal development. When men fail to support their dreams, relationships fail to flourish, and the sexes drift apart.

If I had to sum up this big messy story in a sentence, it would be this: Coupling is declining around the world, as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall; this combination is subverting the traditional role of straight marriage, in which men are seen as necessary for the economic insurance of their family.

So why does all this matter? Two of the more urgent sociological narratives of this moment are declining fertility and rising unhappiness. The relationship recession makes contact with both. First, marriage and fertility are tightly interconnected. Unsurprisingly, one of the strongest predictors of declining fertility around the world is declining coupling rates, as Burn-Murdoch has written. Second, marriage is strongly associated with happiness. According to General Social Survey data, Americans’ self-described life satisfaction has been decreasing for decades. In a 2023 analysis of the GSS data, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman concluded that marriage was more correlated with this measure of happiness than any other variable he considered, including income. (As Stone would rush to point out here, marriage itself is correlated with income.)

The social crisis of our time is not just that Americans are more socially isolated than ever, but also that social isolation is rising alongside romantic isolation, as the economic and cultural trajectories of men and women move in opposite directions. And, perhaps most troubling, the Americans with the least financial wealth also seem to have the least “social wealth,” so to speak. It is the poor, who might especially need the support of friends and partners, who have the fewest close friends and the fewest long-term partners. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy the things that buy happiness.

In a Massachusetts cellar in 1873, Lydia Pinkham first brewed the elixir that would make her famous. The dirt-brown liquid, made from herbs including black cohosh and pleurisy root, contained somewhere between 18 and 22 percent alcohol—meant as a preservative, of course. Within a couple of years, Pinkham was selling her tonic at $1 a bottle to treat “women’s weaknesses.” Got the blues? How about inflammation, falling of the womb, or painful menstruation? Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was the solution. Pinkham’s matronly smile, printed on labels and advertisements, became as well known as Mona Lisa’s.

Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was one of thousands of popular and lucrative patent medicines—health concoctions dreamed up by chemists, housewives, and entrepreneurs—that took the United States by storm in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These products promised to treat virtually any ailment and didn’t have to reveal their recipes. Many contained alcohol, cocaine, morphine, or other active ingredients that ranged from dubious to dangerous. Dr. Guild’s Green Mountain Asthmatic Compound was available in cigarette form and included the poisonous plant belladonna. Early versions of Wampole’s Vaginal Cones, sold as a vaginal antiseptic and deodorizer, contained picric acid, a toxic compound used as an explosive during World War I. Patent-medicine advertisements were unavoidable; by the 1870s, 25 percent of all advertising was for patent medicines.

After the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, the newly created Food and Drug Administration cracked down on miracle elixirs. But one American industry is still keeping the spirit of patent medicine alive: dietary supplements. In the U.S., vitamins, botanicals, and other supplements are minimally regulated. Some can improve people’s health or address specific conditions, but many, like the medicines of old, contain untested or dangerous ingredients. Nevertheless, three-quarters of Americans take at least one. Some take far more. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist who’s awaiting Senate confirmation to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has said he takes a “fistful” of vitamins each day. Kennedy has in recent years championed dietary supplements and decried their “suppression” by the FDA—an agency he would oversee as health secretary. Now he’s poised to bring America’s ever-growing supplement enthusiasm to the White House and supercharge the patent-medicine revival.  

The newly created FDA eventually required all pharmaceutical drugs—substances intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease—to be demonstrably safe and effective before they could be sold. But dietary supplements, as we call them now, were never subject to that degree of scrutiny. Vitamins were sold with little interference until the “megadosing” trend of the late 1970s and ’80s, which began after the chemist Linus Pauling started claiming that large amounts of vitamin C could stave off cancer and other diseases. The FDA announced its intention to regulate vitamins, but the public (and the supplement industry) revolted. Mel Gibson starred in a television ad in which he was arrested at home for having a bottle of Vitamin C, and more than 2.5 million people participated in a “Save Our Supplements” letter-writing campaign. Congress stepped in, passing the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which officially exempted dietary supplements from the regulations that medications are subject to.

Since then, the FDA has generally not been responsible for any premarket review of dietary supplements, and manufacturers have not usually had to reveal their ingredients. “It’s basically an honor system where manufacturers need to declare that their products are safe,” says S. Bryn Austin, a social epidemiologist and behavioral scientist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. The agency will get involved only if something goes wrong after the supplement starts being sold. As long as they disclose that the FDA hasn’t evaluated their claims, and that those claims don’t involve disease, supplement makers can say that their product will do anything to the structure or function of the body. You can say that a supplement improves cognition, for example, but not that it treats ADHD. These claims don’t have to be supported with any evidence in humans, animals, or petri dishes.

In 1994, the dietary-supplement industry was valued at $4 billion. By 2020, it had ballooned to $40 billion. Patent-medicine creators once toured their products in traveling medicine shows and made trading cards that people collected, exchanged, and pasted into scrapbooks; today, supplement companies sponsor popular podcasts, Instagram stories are overrun with supplement ads, and influencers make millions selling their own branded supplements. The combination of modern wellness culture with lax regulations has left Americans with 19th-century-like problems: Pieter Cohen, an associate professor of medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance, has found a methamphetamine analogue in a workout supplement, and omberacetam, a Russian drug for traumatic brain injuries and mood disorders, in a product marketed to help with memory.

Last year, Kennedy accused the FDA of suppressing vitamins and other alternative health products that fall into the dietary-supplement category. But “there is no truth about the FDA being at war on supplements over the last several decades,” Cohen told me. “In fact, they have taken an extremely passive, inactive approach.” Experts have repeatedly argued that the FDA needs more authority to investigate and act on supplements, not less. And yet, Kennedy continues to champion the industry. He told the podcaster Lex Fridman that he takes so many vitamins, “I couldn’t even remember them all.” Kennedy has vocally opposed additives in food and conflicts of interest in the pharmaceutical industry, but has failed to mention the dangerous additives in dietary supplements and the profits to be made in the supplement market. (Neither Kennedy nor a representative from the MAHA PAC responded to a request for comment.)

In an already permissive environment, Kennedy’s confirmation could signal to supplement manufacturers that anything goes, Cohen said. If the little regulation that the FDA is responsible for now—surveilling supplements after they’re on the market—lapses, more adulterated and mislabeled supplements could line store shelves. And Americans might well pour even more of our money into the industry, egged on by the wellness influencer charged with protecting our health and loudly warning that most of our food and drug supply is harmful. Kennedy might even try to get in on the supplement rush himself. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that, according to documents filed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Kennedy applied to trademark MAHA last year, which would allow him to sell, among other things, MAHA-branded supplements and vitamins. (He transferred ownership of the application to an LLC in December. Kennedy’s team did not respond to the Post.)

A truly unleashed supplement industry would have plenty of tools at its disposal with which to seduce customers. Austin studies dietary supplements that make claims related to weight loss, muscle building, “cleansing,” and detoxing, many of which are marketed to not just adults, but teenagers too. “Those types of products, in particular, play on people’s insecurities,” she told me. They also purport to ease common forms of bodily or mental distress that can’t be quickly addressed by traditional medical care. Reducing stress is hard, but ordering the latest cortisol-reducing gummy on TikTok Shop is easy. Your doctor can’t force vegetables into your diet, but a monthly subscription of powdered greens can.

Judy Z. Segal, a professor emerita at the University of British Columbia who has analyzed patent-medicine trading cards from the 19th and 20th centuries, told me that supplement-marketing strategies “have not changed that much since the patent-medicine era.” Patent medicines appealed to ambient, relatable complaints; one ad for Burdock’s Blood Bitters asserted that there were “thousands of females in America who suffer untold miseries from chronic diseases common to their sex.” And the makers of patent medicine, like many modern supplement companies, used friendly spokespeople and customer testimonials while positioning their products as preventive care; according to one ad for Hartshorn’s Sarsaparilla, “The first deviation from perfect health should receive attention.”

In 1905, the muckraker Samuel Hopkins Adams lamented that “gullible America” was so eager to “swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.” Compounds and elixirs go by different names now—nootropics, detoxes, adaptogens—but if Adams walked down any supplement aisle or browsed Amazon, he’d still find plenty of cure-alls. He could even pick up a bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Herbal Supplement, which is sold as an aid for menstruation and menopause. Pinkham’s face smiles at buyers from the label, though its advertised benefits are now accompanied by a tiny disclaimer: “This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.”

The #Democrat and #Democrats hashtags, on Instagram, are affixed to a lot of low-quality content: a crying Statue of Liberty; Elon Musk with a Hitler mustache; other, worse memes that aren’t even decipherable. But for a short time last week, these posts were blocked from view. Donald Trump’s second presidency had only just begun, and suddenly—suspiciously—any platform search for #Democrat or #Democrats returned an error message: “We’ve hidden these results,” it said. “Results from the term you searched may contain sensitive content.”

TikTok, too, was soon accused of censoring anti-Trump dissent, and of changing up its algorithmically generated feeds to favor right-wing content. Back on Instagram, and also on Facebook, many people said that their accounts had auto-followed Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, while posts from abortion-pill providers were getting blurred out or removed from search results. To some, this pattern was as unmistakable as it was malicious: Social media was turning against Democrats.

For years, such worries went the other way. Right-wing figures groused that their views were being hidden, or moderated more heavily than their rivals’. It seems like only yesterday that Donald Trump Jr. was reposting copypasta on Instagram in an effort to suss out whether he’d been shadowbanned. That was around the same time as the former Twitter regime’s botched management of a radioactive news story about Hunter Biden, which gave rise to an enduring symbol of anti-Republican censorship. Now the roles are reversed, and Democrats are feeling paranoid.

Then and now, the particulars have never really matched people’s sense of persecution. Despite some high-profile incidents that suggested bias, Republicans do not appear to have been intentionally and broadly censored by the major social-media platforms. Last week’s incidents have been similarly overinterpreted. For starters, the funny business with the #Democrat hashtag was almost certainly a technical glitch (as Meta told reporters). (If Instagram really meant to launch a crackdown on left-leaning speech, would it choose to block just two generic hashtags?) And TikTok users should not have been surprised to see “Free Palestine” videos suppressed in their TikTok feeds: That platform has often erred on the side of minimizing the visibility of even lightly controversial political issues. (TikTok denies having changed any policies or algorithms since the inauguration.) As for the auto-following of Trump and Vance, that was just a product of the transfer of official president and vice-president accounts to the new administration. Meta acknowledged that some of the blocked abortion-pill content had resulted from “over-enforcement.” A spokesperson told several news outlets, including The Atlantic: “We’ve been quite clear in recent weeks that we want to allow more speech and reduce enforcement mistakes.”

[Read: Why Hunter Biden’s laptop will never go away]

This doesn’t mean people are wrong to say that something feels different. Much has been written about the tech world’s recent warming to President Trump. It was on full display at the inauguration, where Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and other famous tech-world figures stood together with the Trump family. This visual—accompanied by sizable donations and kind words—stands in contrast to the reception that the industry gave Trump when he was first elected, in 2016, or when he tried to stay in power after losing in 2020.

Official policies are changing too. Zuckerberg has made a number of significant management decisions in the past several months: He got rid of Meta’s DEI team; he ended fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, explaining that the checkers had become too politically biased in favor of liberals and the left; and he overhauled his company’s hate-speech rules to “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender” that were, as he put it, “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg described the “journey” he’d been on for the past eight years, from disillusionment with the media during the first Trump administration to a loss of faith in the federal government during the Biden administration. Both, he claimed, had tried to force his hand and make his platforms more censorial.

Zuckerberg hasn’t indicated any desire to interfere with Instagram moderation at a granular level, or do any other editing of political speech. Still, users are right to wonder whether his personal political views may influence the operations of the multiple enormous platforms over which he has nearly unfettered control. The same reasonable doubts apply to TikTok. This was never a free-speech-oriented platform, but its users could hardly avoid being made aware of the company’s new coziness with Trump. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!,” they were told by the app on January 19, after it had been very briefly banned. (The same evening, the company sponsored a glitzy party for social-media influencers who had aided the Trump campaign.) And X, of course, is run by one of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers. An ongoing user exodus from that platform saw another burst last week amid the controversy over whether Musk did or did not intend to give a Nazi salute at the inauguration.

How the CEO of a social-media company thinks and acts may be taken as a clue to how their platform operates. (Until recently, Zuckerberg was known as a Millennial liberal, and an ally to mainstream Democrats. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, had a similar reputation.) But these signals only go so far: The actual maintenance of a social network unfolds behind the scenes; what rules exist aren’t nearly as important as how they get enforced, which has always been opaque.

Social-media users today are just as in the dark as ever. We know only what we’ve been told, and even then, we don’t know whether we should believe it. A kind of folklore has emerged around what’s really going on, flavored by anxiety and dread, and shifting with the news. The specific stories may be changing, but their overarching paranoia has some basis in the truth. There is no great conspiracy to bottle up a hashtag—but the people in charge of social media can do whatever they want.

During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an election, limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate. In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds political parties, proportionate to their number of elected parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track election-­related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates, as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people; in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania, or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—­and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political advertising. Meta, which announced in January that it is abandoning fact-checking on its sites in the U.S., also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or TikTok.

In truth, no one knows if any platforms really comply with political-funding rules either, because nobody outside the companies can fully monitor what happens online during an intense election campaign—and after the voting has ended, it’s too late. According to declassified Romanian-intelligence documents, someone allegedly spent more than $1 million on TikTok content in the 18 months before an election in support of a Romanian presidential candidate who declared that he himself had spent nothing at all. In a belated attempt to address this and other alleged discrepancies, a Romanian court canceled the first round of that election, a decision that itself damaged Romanian democracy.

Not all of this is new. Surreptitious political-party funding was a feature of the Cold War, and the Russian government has continued this practice, sometimes by offering deals to foreign business­people close to pro-Russian politicians. Press moguls with international political ambitions are hardly a novelty. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who has U.S. citizenship, has long played an outsize role in U.K. politics through his media companies. John Major, the former British prime minister and Conservative Party leader, has said that in 1997, Murdoch threatened to pull his newspapers’ support unless the prime minister pursued a more anti-­European policy. Major refused. Murdoch has said, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything,” but one of his Conservative-­leaning tabloids, The Sun, did endorse the Labour Party in the next election. Major lost.

That incident now seems almost quaint. Even at the height of its influence, the print edition of The Sun sold 4 million copies a day. More to the point, it operated, and still does, within the constraints of U.K. rules and regulations, as do all broadcast and print media. Murdoch’s newspapers take British libel and hate-speech laws into consideration when they run stories. His business strategy is necessarily shaped by rules limiting what a single company can own. After his journalists were accused of hacking phones and bribing police in the early 2000s, Murdoch himself had to testify before an investigative commission, and he closed down one of his tabloids for good.

[McKay Coppins: Europe braces for Trump]

Social media not only has far greater reach—Musk’s personal X account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power to set the news agenda around the world—it also exists outside the legal system. Under the American law known as Section 230, passed nearly three decades ago, internet platforms are not treated as publishers in the U.S. In practice, neither Facebook nor X has the same legal responsibility for what appears on their platforms as do, say, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. And this, too, has consequences: Americans have created the information climate that other countries must accept, and this allows deceptive election practices to thrive. If countries don’t have their own laws, and until recently most did not, Section 230 effectively requires them to treat social-media companies as if they exist outside their legal systems too.

Brazil broke with this pattern last year, when a judge demanded that Musk comply with Brazilian laws against spreading misinformation and political extremism, and forced X offline until he did. Several European countries, including the U.K., Germany, and France, have also passed laws designed to bring the platforms into compliance with their own legal systems, mandating fines for companies that violate hate-speech laws or host other illegal content. But these laws are controversial and hard to enforce. Besides, “illegal speech” is not necessarily the central problem. No laws prevented Musk from interviewing Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on X, thereby providing her with a huge platform, available to no other political candidate, in the month before a national election. The interview, which included several glaringly false statements (among others, that Weidel was the “leading” candidate), was viewed 45 million times in 24 hours, a number far beyond the reach of any German public or private media.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

In the past, the EU has not hesitated to try to apply European law to tech companies. Over the past decade, for example, Google has faced three fines totaling more than $8 billion for breaking antitrust law (though one of these fines was overturned by the EU’s General Court in 2024).

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”

Does America “winning” mean that European democracies, and maybe other democracies, lose? Some European politicians think it might. Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and a leader of that country’s Green Party, believes that Musk’s frenzies of political activity on X aren’t the random blurts of an addled mind, but rather are “logical and systematic.” In his New Year’s address, Habeck said that Musk is deliberately “strengthening those who are weakening Europe,” including the explicitly anti-European AfD. This, he believes, is because “a weak Europe is in the interest of those for whom regulation is an inappropriate limitation of their power.”

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.

A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them and their organizations—­whether it be online trolling and harassment or lawsuits—­is too great. Still, both advisers said that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty, and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”

At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers more control over what they see, and more information about what they don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal framework—­rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as viral as one of Musk’s tweets.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Can Europe Stop Elon Musk?”

In my psychology practice, when tears enter the room, they have a way of cutting through the noise—all of the defenses, all of the pretenses. A client’s carefully constructed walls fall away, allowing something deep to emerge. I’ve seen this happen time and again, and it’s why for years I saw crying as one of the purest forms of vulnerability—until I discovered crying TikTok.

The trend is exactly what you might expect: People post videos of themselves crying (or trying not to). Some of these videos are slickly produced; some feature moody music; many rack up hundreds of thousands of views. These displays of vulnerability are, of course, not restricted to TikTok (whose fate, under the new Trump administration, is uncertain). They can also be found on YouTube, Instagram, and other apps, part of a broader online aesthetic. Influencers and celebrities strip down to what can seem like the rawest version of themselves, selling the promise of “real” emotional connection—and, not infrequently, products or their personal brand. In a post titled “Reacting to My Sad and Lonely Videos,” the YouTube star Trisha Paytas watches old footage of herself sobbing and is moved to tears all over again; this sort of post shares space in her channel with clips in which she pitches her own merch. On Instagram, influencers toggle between montages of sadness and sponsored videos that show them cozily sipping fancy tea.

The weepy confessions are, ostensibly, gestures toward intimacy. They’re meant to inspire empathy, to reassure viewers that influencers are just like them. But in fact, they’re exercises in what I’ve come to call “McVulnerability,” a synthetic version of vulnerability akin to fast food: mass-produced, easily accessible, sometimes tasty, but lacking in sustenance. True vulnerability can foster emotional closeness. McVulnerability offers only an illusion of it. And just as choosing fast food in favor of more nutritious options can, over time, result in harmful outcomes, consuming “fast vulnerability” instead of engaging in bona fide human interaction can send people down an emotionally unhealthy path.

[Read: The new empress of self-help is a TikTok star]

Not long ago in American culture, vulnerability was largely associated with weakness. To be vulnerable meant to be helpless or susceptible to harm. Then came Brené Brown, the social worker and research professor who, with her viral 2010 TED Talk, became one of the most prominent voices transforming the perception of vulnerability for a new audience. In her book Daring Greatly, Brown defined vulnerability as the “birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity,” and as a crucial element in personal growth—a liberating message for people raised to suppress their feelings and show toughness.

This was well before the consumerist blending of therapy-speak and personal branding that has become commonplace on social media. It was four years before The Body Keeps the Score got the masses talking about trauma, and it was eight years before Nicole LePera launched the Holistic Psychologist on Instagram, today one of the platform’s most popular therapy accounts. But in the past decade and a half, vulnerability’s trajectory has come to mirror that of many psychological concepts—such as mindfulness, boundary-setting, and self-love—whose lines of insight have been tangled up with the attention economy and the free market.

McVulnerability is perhaps an inevitable outcome of what the sociologist Eva Illouz identifies as a modern-day landscape of “emotional capitalism.” “Never has the private self been so publicly performed and harnessed to the discourses and values of the economic and political spheres,” Illouz writes in her book Cold Intimacies. Emotional capitalism has “realigned emotional cultures, making the economic self emotional and emotions more closely harnessed to instrumental action.” That is, not only does emotionality sell goods, but emotions themselves have also become commodities.

As people’s vulnerability proxies—podcasters, celebrities, crying YouTubers—pour out their heart while shilling for their favorite cashmere brands, consumerism becomes unconsciously tethered to the viewing or listening experience. Studies have found that when people spend more time on social-media platforms, they are more likely to buy more things and to do so impulsively—especially when they feel emotionally connected to the content they watch. This is, perhaps, one of the more insidious effects of McVulnerability: It helps encourage a self-perpetuating cycle of materialism and loneliness, in which one inevitably spawns the other.

Yet McVulnerability’s practitioners are also offering supply to satisfy a real emotional demand. As Derek Thompson wrote earlier this month in The Atlantic, more and more Americans are retreating from in-person social interactions, turning instead to smartphones and other devices in search of intimacy. Yes, they may be communicating with friends and family. But they are also spending a lot of time “with” people they don’t know at all.

[Read: ‘Close Friends,’ for a monthly fee]

The rise of momfluencers serves as a perfect example. Many new mothers find themselves isolated and exhausted as they make the transition into parenthood. Maybe their families live across the country, or their friends are too busy to stop by. Starved for community, they might be struggling to find people with whom they can sit down and say, This sucks. On social media, they find influencers sharing tearful confessions about mom guilt or mom rage. But these posts aren’t a substitute for actual community and support. Once the isolated moms put down their phone, they’re just as alone as they were before.

Not all of the vulnerability shared online is devoid of authenticity. It can be genuinely helpful when someone describes their personal trials publicly, such as a survivor of abuse who shares their story, galvanizing others to seek safety. Vulnerability caught on video can also offer a powerful glimpse into the gravity of collective tragedy. An emotional clip about losing a home to wildfires can, for instance, bring to life the human cost of crisis in a way that headlines and statistics cannot. And of course, some parents who share their difficult experiences online do provide a valuable service, offering validation and practical insights (on, say, postpartum depression) that aren’t always accessible elsewhere.

Next to those videos, it’s not hard to see the ways in which McVulnerability, melodramatic and consumption-driven, merely masquerades as a chance to connect. McVulnerability offers a fleeting, convenient, and comfortable digital experience, allowing the people who consume it to skirt past the complications of being in a relationship with another person—although for some viewers, truth be told, that might be part of the appeal.

In my years as a therapist, I’ve seen a trend among some of my younger clients: They prefer the controlled environment of the internet—the polish of YouTube, the ephemeral nature of TikTok—to the tender awkwardness of making new friends. Instead of reaching out to a peer, they’ll turn to the comfort of their phone and spend time with their preferred influencers. At a talk in 2023, the psychotherapist Esther Perel touched on this impulse while discussing what she calls “artificial intimacy”—pseudo-experiences of emotional closeness that mimic connection but lack depth. These “digitally facilitated connections,” she said, risk “lowering our expectations of intimacy between humans” and leave us “unprepared and unable to tolerate the inevitable unpredictabilities of human nature, love, and life.” I understand where my young clients are coming from: Putting yourself out there is uncomfortable. But for the reasons Perel articulated, I also worry that by relying mostly on social media to encounter other humans, they’re forfeiting opportunities to develop the skills that could help them thrive in the flesh-and-blood world.

One of my psychology mentors has a point she repeats often: “Vulnerability is generous.” It can be easier to project invulnerability, to pretend we don’t believe strongly in an issue, to act as if we don’t want. But being vulnerable—exposing ourselves via the unfiltered messiness of life—is one of the biggest emotional risks we can take, and one of the greatest gifts we can offer another person. When you choose to be vulnerable, you are essentially saying: I’m going to stand here as my full self, and I invite you to do the same.

McVulnerability, from whichever angle you look at it, is the opposite of generous. It doesn’t require risk. It may pretend to give, but ultimately, it takes. And it leaves most of its consumers hungry for what they’re craving: human connection—the real thing.

This story incorporates reporting fromTechCrunch.

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The Facebook and Instagram owner says the official profiles were updated to reflect the new position holders.