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.

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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.

Ever wonder what would happen if the police just stopped enforcing traffic laws? New Jersey State Police ran a sort of experiment along those lines, beginning in summer 2023—about a week after the release of a report documenting racial disparities in traffic enforcement. From July of that year to March 2024, the number of tickets issued by troopers for speeding, drunk driving, and other serious violations fell by 61 percent. The drop, The New York Times reported last month, “coincided with an almost immediate uptick in crashes on the state’s two main highways.” During 2024 as a whole, roadway fatalities in New Jersey jumped 14 percent even as they dropped slightly nationwide. The obvious conclusion: The withdrawal of enforcement in the Garden State led some motorists to drive more recklessly. For better or worse, law enforcement is necessary for traffic safety.

In the past decade, though, an ideological faction within the road-safety movement has downplayed the role of law enforcement in preventing vehicular crashes. This coalition of urbanist wonks, transportation planners, academics, and nonprofit activist professionals has instead fixated on passive measures to improve drivers’ vigilance and conscientiousness: narrower lanes that encourage drivers to slow down, curb “bumpouts” that widen sidewalks and shorten crosswalks, and other physical changes meant to calm vehicular traffic.

For good reason, progressives have been alarmed by racial inequities in law enforcement, and New Jersey’s experience to some degree validates those concerns: Troopers eased up on writing tickets because they apparently were unhappy about outside scrutiny of discriminatory practices. But the episode is also a forceful demonstration of the value of enforcement as a public service. If you take coercive measures off the table, you must agree to share the road with people driving under the influence or at double the speed limit.

[M. Nolan Gray: L.A.’s twin crises finally seem fixable]

In many communities, the effort to promote safer driving through the physical redesign of streets comes under the banner of Vision Zero, a movement whose goal is to eliminate all traffic fatalities. But the design-first approach has become a substitute for individual responsibility rather than a complement.

Historically, design was only one ingredient in Vision Zero; in practice today, it is just about the only one. Enforcement is expressly denigrated by even mainstream organizations. In 2022, when launching an initiative called “Dismantling Law Enforcement’s Role in Traffic Safety: A Roadmap for Massachusetts,” the nonprofit LivableStreets Alliance claimed that “traffic stops do not meaningfully reduce serious and fatal crashes.” (Some grieving families in New Jersey might disagree.) The umbrella group Vision Zero Network, another nonprofit, asserted in November that “despite some achievements” associated with law enforcement, “there is ample historical and current evidence showing the harms and inequities of some types of enforcement, particularly traffic stops.” (This is clear and troubling; the question is what conclusion to draw.) Some activists even criticize automated speed cameras—which require no intervention by potentially biased officers—because of the financial burden on low-income drivers.  

Shrugging off driver misconduct is the wrong prescription for racial and economic inequities. People in disinvested communities disproportionately become victims of reckless driving. Black pedestrians face a mortality rate more than double that of white pedestrians. More than anyone, vulnerable people need the vigorous protection of the law, not an abdication of that paramount public service.

The U.S. has the deadliest roads in the rich world. About 40,000 Americans a year now die in traffic, and a growing proportion of them are pedestrians and cyclists who don’t even benefit from our car-first paradigm. I understand why safety advocates favor solutions beyond writing tickets. As I have previously argued, driving is both cheap and a prerequisite for daily life in most of the country; vehicles are large, heavy, and underregulated; laws against their misuse are inadequate; and roads are wide, conducive to speeding, and unsafe to cross on foot. Transportation planners and legislators have gone too far in reshaping our landscapes and our laws to accommodate the automobile, with damaging consequences for racial equity and other priorities.

[Gregory H. Shill: Americans shouldn’t have to drive, but the law insists on it.]

Yet the growth in vehicle deaths is difficult to explain simply in structural terms. For starters, nearly all of the surge in U.S. pedestrian fatalities since 2010 comes from collisions at night. Changes to street design simply do not address the leading causes of crash deaths: failure to wear a seatbelt, drunk driving, and speeding.

Today’s Vision Zero incorporates some useful insights about design’s power to influence behavior. The goal of reconfiguring streets is to “nudge” people toward better driving, much as calorie counts on menus are supposed to promote healthier eating. These ideas, seemingly everywhere in the early 2000s, draw on a pop version of Nobel Prize–winning behavior-economics research. With the benefit of additional evidence, we now know that their effectiveness is easier to show in a TED Talk than in real life.

In the case of traffic safety, the overemphasis on nudging has warped our thinking. For example, street-design essentialism presumes that the most dangerous driving behaviors are unconscious, when we know that many drivers actively choose to be reckless. No country that has improved its safety record—including Sweden, where Vision Zero was born in the 1990s—has made it infeasible to drive a car dangerously if you want to. What our peer countries have done is pair targeted design improvements with targeted and even intensified enforcement campaigns.

American street-safety activists used to demand better enforcement. Now, rather than focus on curbing dangerous conduct by individuals, many of them cast about for bigger villains, placing the blame for high roadway mortality on indifferent state highway departments and greedy automakers who profit from oversize SUVs. In this view, individuals are merely passive users of the transportation system, hostage to invisible forces. Coupled with activists’ obsession with street design, this approach frequently leads to a weird 21st-century form of progressive patronage: commissioning like-minded nonprofits and consultancies to produce reams of reports and unrealistic renderings; holding interminable, democratically unrepresentative listening sessions; and minting white-elephant projects that defy parody.

Street redesigns have their own pitfalls. For starters, they are far easier to plan than to execute. Changes to the built environment must run the NIMBY gantlet twice: first to get built, and then a second time to withstand the post-installation backlash. All of that became clear in the 2010s, when conditions were uniquely favorable to infrastructure building. Today, borrowing costs are several times higher, and the construction industry is short about a third of the workforce that it had before the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, input materials have skyrocketed in price. The combination has doubled roadbuilding costs in some cases. New tariffs, if implemented, would exacerbate these problems.

[M. Nolan Gray: City planning’s greatest innovation makes a comeback]

Beyond street design, what should communities focus on to improve safety? Half of vehicle occupants killed by crashes were not wearing their seatbelt. Drunk driving is a factor in nearly one-third of crash fatalities. The same is true of speeding. Not all speeding is the same, though; going 55 miles an hour in a 50 zone generally isn’t the problem. Super speeders—motorists driving, say, double the limit—are likely overrepresented in traffic deaths. Street design, which seeks to make the average driver more conscientious, does nothing to target the anti-social behavior of outliers.

Rather than justifying a permissive approach to reckless driving, social justice demands a more focused campaign. Just who is helped by letting reckless drivers (many of them affluent suburbanites) speed through working-class neighborhoods? Speed cameras can’t do everything—they may not deter super speeders, for example, and they’re useless against stolen cars and counterfeit plates—but where they are effective, they can remove bias from enforcement. There is no contradiction in saying that neither dangerous driving by private citizens nor abuses of police power will be tolerated. Road-safety activists should redirect some of their energy away from promoting the design-industrial complex and toward targeting the deadliest behaviors.

Design is only a tool. Just as a beautiful office renovation cannot boost morale at a failing company, many grave transportation-safety problems cannot be solved through design. Let’s start a new era of safety by ticketing unbelted motorists, talking more about super speeders (and seizing their car and license), and renewing the decades-long push against driving while intoxicated. America’s enormous traffic-death rate is a complex problem. As New Jersey has recently reminded us, enforcement must be part of the solution.