1. In this week’s issue of “Gen Z Is Not Alright,” Christine Emba (who will be speaking at our upcoming NYC Conference!) writes for the New York Times about “The Reason Gen Z Isn’t Dating.” There’s a side of the internet, that perhaps you aren’t privy to, in which twentysomething looksmaxxers obsess over “improving their physical appearance through any means necessary.”
One Gen Z internet star (who happens to be the face of the looksmaxxers phenomenon and has a total of 404k followers on Instagram) said that he started injecting steroids when he was fourteen years old and has “dabbled in crystal meth to suppress his appetite.” His Instagram page promotes his one-on-one coaching program in which he “ascends” his followers (his words not mine). The greater end to looksmaxxing? Appealing to the opposite sex.
Not all Gen Zers are quite as intense, nor their attempts at attracting others quite as extreme. In fact, Emba discovers that many young people aren’t even dating at all:
A recent survey of young adults from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that only 30 percent of its respondents were actively dating, despite about half of them indicating that they were interested in finding a relationship. They cited a lack of confidence in what the researchers termed “dating efficacy”: Less than 40 percent believed themselves to be attractive to potential partners or felt comfortable discussing their feelings with them. Only around a quarter felt confident in approaching a potential partner or in their ability to stay positive after a dating setback — a rejection, a bad date or a breakup.
The online world, of course, carries much of the blame for this decline in dating and relationships (and it’s definitely not helped by the new season of Love Is Blind that, unsurprisingly, left us feeling hopeless again). It’s rare to meet your significant other in the “wild” these days. And dating apps are notorious for rejection, hopelessness, and ghosting. Emba concludes:
If trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute. For younger adults, romance has turned into something to be debated, theorized and optimized for but not actually engaged in. As Gen Z retreats into itself while pretending to focus on the other, the delta between the sexes grows wider.
Is there hope for Gen Z? I think so. The more polarizing and overwhelming online spheres become, the more young people search for ways to unplug. There’s a reason we’re seeing the rise of analog, trends of phoneless parties, enthusiasm for granny hobbies, and longing for physical third spaces.
2. Online apps aren’t the only problem with dating in today’s day and age. Freya India, in her most recent Substack, laments the oversaturation of relationship advice on the internet — claiming that it’s “making us worse at love.”
The issue with dating in 2026 is not that we don’t have a guidebook but that the so called “rules” in the guidebook are always changing and subject to the opinions of random influencers on social media. A half-hour scroll on the dating side of TikTok could give you 30 different videos with contradicting advice on “Who Should Text First After the First Date?” or “Five Ways to Tell if Someone Is Interested in You.” Freya India writes,
The problem with dating today is definitely not that we don’t know enough. Being hyperaware of almost anything you’re doing makes you worse at it, like trying too hard to fall asleep. Sometimes it almost seems like a trick, to make us think we are educating and enlightening ourselves when really we are wasting time, getting worse at the thing, forgetting how to do it naturally, and then we need even more advice. Hypochondriacs, all of us: just as obsessing over your health can make things worse, obsessing over relationships can do the same. Knowing all these studies and patterns and statistics can stunt you, make you too serious, make love harder, not easier.
I mean, where are the outcomes, the results? I know about love-bombing and fearful-avoidant attachment styles and have all these checklists for high-value people yet don’t feel I’m any happier, can’t say I’m any better at loving. Are we a more patient, generous, forgiving generation for it, in the end? All I see is a whole load of people so articulate in clinical advice but totally illiterate about love and commitment. And I always wonder where this would all take me, if I took it seriously. If I followed these rules perfectly, what would I be? This ugly, inhumane thing, I think, judging and disapproving, paranoid and vigilant, throwing people out the moment they don’t measure up. I think this about the onslaught of health advice, about productivity and self-optimisation hacks too: I do not believe if I did it all right I’d be more loving and successful and healthy, I’d just be something other than human.
“All I see is a whole load of people so articulate in clinical advice but totally illiterate about love and commitment.” Oof.
Relief from the noise may come when we unplug from the world wide web and start actually talking to the people around us. As India suggests,
You will only learn about love in the presence of real people, in late night conversations talking until your eyes turn red, in getting things wrong and trying to put them right again, in your beating chest when you bet your life on someone else, in the joy and rejection and hope and sting that comes from trying and from living. You will learn about heartbreak from the wounded eyes of your mother and the shaking shoulders of a friend, from the broken and brilliant lives you see all around you. That’s life, and that’s where advice lives, where it comes from, chiselled out of regrets and mistakes, chiselled out of the pain of people you know and love. The rest is useless.
3. Harry Styles’ much anticipated new album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally was released today. I point this out not just because I was a huge One Direction fan (still am) but also because his recent conversation with Haruki Murakami in Runner’s World on the simplicity of running and its impact on the creative life is worthy of note.
Harry entered the public eye when he auditioned for The X Factor UK at the age of sixteen. Since then, he’s been a global pop-phenomenon, exposed to the life of fame and stardom both in One Direction and now as a solo artist. For Harry, running seems to be an escape from such exposure:
For me, one of the things that can be complicated is that, as an artist, say if you’re a novelist or a musician or a filmmaker, you’re an observer — but when you become a known person, you become the observed. You know you’re still the same, but other people can begin to view you as something different.
So something I love so much about running is the simplicity of it. You are the observer once more, and you can go about your day in the most naked form. It’s just you, alone, moving through the world.
That’s what I love about it: You don’t need anything, just a pair of shoes.
One can imagine the kind of pressure that an artist feels on the day of his new album release, what with the countless reviews and reactions, both good and bad. Later on in the conversation, Haruki Murakami asks Harry what he thinks about his albums that have sold well. His answer reveals something hopeful:
I think there’s a point when you’re making something, when it feels so pure to you; a really beautiful moment where it’s finished and it’s just yours.
Then there’s almost a sadness at the handing-over. You have to let it go, like sending your kid off to school, and then it feels somewhat detached from you.
But only in the last couple years have I realized how much of people’s responses to it are not necessarily about me at all. I think I’m of less importance.
And that can be quite scary, realizing that it’s not about me, but it can also be really freeing to know actually, my job here is to just remain a person, and to keep recording that. That’s what my job is. Rather than me being supposed to deliver the answer and let everyone know what life is about.
4. For kicks and giggles, here’s McSweeney’s “I Am Dyeing My Hair Brown.”
Some may say that dyeing my hair brown is not the way to signal to the world an emotional transformation — that duty belongs to getting bangs. But I would contend that bangs are experiencing a renaissance and no longer signal surviving an emotional car crash. Consider the bob: Once the uniform of an older, career-oriented, sexless woman, it is now the signifier of a spectacular divorcée entering a libidinous second act. Similarly, bangs — once the external manifestation of internal chaos — now signal a fluffy playfulness, sexily bopping around to Sabrina Carpenter in baby-doll pajamas. Bangs are the phoenix, rising flirtily from the ashes. But brown hair … brown hair is the ashes.
See also: the Daily Mash’s “Man Nostalgic for His 20s, Which at the Time He Hated” and the Hard Times’ “Study Shows 85% of Americans Would Drink Kerosene if the Word ‘Prebiotic’ Was on the Label.”
5. In his Substack, Tim Kreider shares about the lesson he gave his writing students on authorial persona. Authorial persona, or the tone that a writer takes on to relate to their readers, is most present in memoirs and autobiographical writing.
According to Kreider, sixteenth-century French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne is a near perfect example of someone who could actually pull off autobiographical writing — not due to any of his accolades but because he was just a regular guy:
Not being special is a stealth strength for a writer, I tell them, a paradoxical superpower; because if you are not special, then whatever is true of you is probably true of most other people as well, and likely to resonate with someone else out there. Unless you are pathological, even your tawdriest, most shameful secrets are probably boringly ordinary (and even most pathologies are so common they’ve been named and classified). Whereas your everyday experiences, mundane memories and embarrassing inner life, no matter how seemingly tedious or trivial, will probably fascinate them. This is Montaigne’s operating principle, and it’s an assumption I bank on as a writer myself, one that seems validated by the letters I get from readers to the effect of: Oh my God I thought it was just me, I’ve always felt that but never knew how to say it.
Contemporary writers are much freer to be what Montaigne called “naked” on the page than he was in his time, and yet I wonder how many ever really avail themselves of that freedom. A lot of memoirists purport to tell all, spilling secrets and unloading traumas, and get blurbed as “honest” and “fearless” for their efforts, but I sometimes suspect that even the worst things they choose to divulge are mostly calculated to make themselves look honest and fearless.
Truly vulnerable writing is not about appearing honest or fearless, in fact, it’s not about you at all. As Kreider aptly puts it, writing with humility is a “gift to the reader”:
Just as it takes a high level of artistry to simulate artlessness, it takes something greater than genius — a greatness of character — to encompass the whole continuum of human experience from high to low, and to accept oneself as no different, and no better, than the next guy. One of his tossed-off asides that struck me as a Galilean revelation was: “all wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common ignorance.” This isn’t, as I interpret it, just an admonition to remember to dumb it down for the crowd; Montaigne recognizes that just because you’re a genius doesn’t mean you can’t also be an idiot. That unassuming humility is a model for any writer, not because it’s honest or fearless so much as because it is generous, a gift to the reader, to admit to being flawed and contradictory, hypocritical and dumb. Montaigne is neither some moral exemplar who could never conceivably be called out or cancelled, as Alice Munro or David Foster Wallace were back before they got called out and cancelled, nor a charismatic rascal like Celine or Bukowski, but a regular guy. No one special. Just another person in the world.
6. To close, Kirsten Sanders reveals “Slogans I Don’t Believe In,” a list of three unhelpful phrases that are often used to describe the world or the human condition. The first two are appropriately spicy, but the third slogan was the one that gave me pause, at least at first. It’s a lyric from Leonard Cohen’s 1992 song “Anthem”: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the lights gets in.”
Cohen’s lyric is often used to grapple with the problem of suffering and evil. It’s true that beautiful moments can occur in the midst of our suffering, we see it in the world and may experience it personally. But what of the suffering that offers no beauty? No light to slip through the cracks? What she has to say is brilliant:
Resurrection is not a making-beautiful of something ugly; it is making something out of what was not. It’s not a home renovation or a new makeover. It is not a new set of glasses that you can see in a new way out of. It is the thing you thought was lost, restored. It is coming to the end of your rope and then, a hand. It is falling asleep in the dark and waking up in a room bathed in glorious light.
When we imagine that heaven is just this world, with the bad things taken out, I think we misunderstand how much suffering is already written in to this world as we know it. Cohen’s slogan is beautiful, and rings true to a lot of people. This is because suffering is for many an invitation to see the world in a new way. But there are those whose suffering goes on and on, without a kintsugi gilded edge. For them, eternity is a relief. A discontinuity between this life and the next brings with it the promise of something different, something new, for those who have suffered. Promising that the life to come is simply an extension of this world is a promise for privileged people. When you talk about heaven, remember that people need to be delivered. God is beyond, drawing us out of our suffering. Only a God who is other can do this. What he gives us is not more, but something altogether different.
Strays:
- The Atlantic’s “Boredom Is the Price We Pay For Meaning“
- Comment’s “Enduring the Cross of Contradiction“
- Big Think’s “From myth to machine: The technological evolution of storytelling“
