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Vox
08-06-2025
- General
- Vox
First comes marriage. Then comes a flirtatious colleague.
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: My husband and I have a good relationship. We're both committed to personal growth and continual learning and have developed very strong communication skills. A couple of years ago we were exposed to some friends with an open marriage and had our own conversations about ethical non-monogamy. At first, neither of us were interested. Now, my husband is interested and currently is attracted to a colleague who is also into him. She's married and has no idea that he and I talk about all of their interactions. He doesn't know what her relationship agreements are with her husband. I'm not currently interested in ethical non-monogamy. I see things in our relationship that I'd like to work on together with my husband. I want more of his attention and energy, to be frank. I don't want his attention and energy being funneled into another relationship. I don't have moral issues with ethical non-monogamy, I just don't actually see any value-add for me right now. The cost-benefit analysis leaves me saying 'not now.' My husband admitted that he's hoping I will have a change of mind. I don't want to force his hand, although I am continuing to say very clearly what I want in my relationship. How do we reach a compromise? If he cuts ties with this woman, he has resentment towards me. If he continues to pursue something with her, I feel disrespected, and while I don't want to leave him I would feel the need to do something. Dear Monogamously Married, I want to start by commending you for two things. First, for your openness to discussing and exploring all this with your husband. Second, for your insistence on clearly stating what you actually want — and don't want. I think Erich Fromm, the 20th-century German philosopher and psychologist, would back me up in saying that you'd do well to hold tight to both those qualities. For starters, radical openness is important because, according to Fromm, the basic premise of love is freedom. He writes: Love is a passionate affirmation of its 'object.' That means that love is not an 'affect' but an active striving, the aim of which is the happiness, development, and freedom of its 'object.' In other words, love is not a feeling. It's work, and the work of love is to fully support the flourishing of the person you love. That can be scary — what if the person discovers that they're actually happier with somebody else? — which is why Fromm specifies that only someone with a strong self 'which can stand alone and bear solitude' will be up for the job. He continues: This passionate affirmation is not possible if one's own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate. So far, it might sound like Fromm is saying that to be a good lover is to be a doormat: you just have to do whatever's best for the other person, even if it screws you over. But his view is very much the opposite. In fact, Fromm cautions us against both 'masochistic love' and 'sadistic love.' In the first, you give up your self and sacrifice your needs in order to become submerged in another person. In the second, you try to exert power over the other person. Both of these are rooted in 'a deep anxiety and an inability to stand alone,' writes Fromm; whether by dissolving yourself into them or by controlling them, you're trying to make it impossible for the other person to abandon you. Both approaches are 'pseudo-love.' Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! So although Fromm doesn't want you to try to control your partner, and although he suggests that the philosophical ideal is for you to passionately affirm your partner's freedom, he's not advising you to do that if, for you, that will mean masochism. If you're not up for ethical non-monogamy — if you feel, like many people, that the idea of giving your partner free rein is too big a threat to your relationship or your own well-being — then pretending otherwise is not real love. It's just masochistic self-annihilation. I'm personally partial to Fromm's non-possessive approach to love. But I equally appreciate his point that the philosophical ideal could become a practical bloodbath if it doesn't work for the actual humans involved. I think the question, then, is this: Do you think it's possible for you to get to a place where you genuinely feel ready for and interested in ethical non-monogamy? It sounds like you're intellectually open to the idea, and given that you said you're committed to personal growth and continual learning, non-monogamy could offer you some benefits; lots of people who practice it say that part of its appeal lies in the growth it catalyzes. And if practicing non-monogamy makes you and/or your husband more fulfilled, it could enrich your relationship and deepen your appreciation for each other. But right now, you've got a problem: Your husband is pushing on your boundaries by flirting with a woman even after you've expressed that you don't want him pursuing something with her. And you already feel like he isn't giving you enough attention and energy, so the prospect of having to divvy up those resources with another woman feels threatening. Fair! Notice, though, that that isn't a worry about non-monogamy per se — it's a worry about the state of your current monogamous relationship. In a marriage, what partners typically want is to feel emotionally secure. But that comes from how consistently and lovingly we show up for and attune to one another, not from the relationship structure. A monogamous marriage may give us some feeling of security, but it's obviously no guarantee; some people cheat, some get divorced, and some stay loyally married while neglecting their partner emotionally. 'Monogamy can serve as a stand-in for actual secure attachment,' writes therapist Jessica Fern in Polysecure, a book on how to build healthy non-monogamous relationships. She urges readers to take an honest look at any relationship insecurities or dissatisfactions that are being disguised by monogamy, and work with partners to strengthen the emotional experience of the relationship. Since you feel that your husband isn't giving you enough attention and energy, be sure to talk to him about it. Explain that it doesn't feel safe for you to open up the relationship without him doing more to be fully present with you and to make you feel understood and precious. See if he starts implementing these skills more reliably. In the meantime, while you two are trying to reset your relationship, it's absolutely reasonable to ask him to cool it with the colleague he's attracted to; he doesn't have to cut ties with her entirely (and may not be able to if they work together), but he can certainly avoid feeding the flames with flirtation. Right now, the fantasy of her is a distraction from the work he needs to be doing to improve the reality of your marriage. He should understand why a healthy practice of ethical non-monogamy can't emerge from a situation where he's pushing things too far with someone else before you've agreed to change the terms of your relationship (and if he doesn't, have him read Polysecure!). It's probably a good idea for you to each do your own inner work, too. Fern, like Fromm, insists that if we want to be capable of a secure attachment with someone else, we need to cultivate that within ourselves. That means being aware of our feelings, desires, and needs, and knowing how to tend to them. Understanding your attachment style can help with this; for example, if you're anxiously attached and you very often reach out to your partner for reassurance, you can practice spending time alone. After taking some time to work on these interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, come back together to discuss how you're feeling. Do you feel more receptive to opening up the relationship? Do you think it would add more than it would subtract? If the answer is 'yes' or 'maybe,' you can create a temporary relationship structure — or 'vessel,' as Fern calls it — to help you ease into non-monogamy. One option is to adopt a staggered approach to dating, where one partner (typically the more hesitant one) starts dating new people first, and the other partner starts after a predetermined amount of time. Another option is to try a months-long experiment where both partners initially engage in certain romantic or sexual experiences that are less triggering to each other, then assess what worked and what didn't, and go from there. If the answer is 'no' — if you're not receptive to opening up your relationship — then by all means say that! Given you'll have sincerely done the work to explore whether non-monogamy works for you, your husband doesn't get to resent you. He can be sad, he can be disappointed, and he can choose to leave if the outcome is intolerable to him. But he'll have to respect you, and what's more important, you'll have to respect yourself. Bonus: What I'm reading This week's question prompted me to go back to the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was influenced by Fromm. Maslow spoke of two kinds of love : Deficit-Love and Being-Love. The former is about trying to satiate your own needs, while the latter is about giving without expecting something in return. Maslow characterizes Being-Love as an almost spiritual experience, likening it to 'the perfect love of their God that some mystics have described.' In addition to Polysecure, which has become something of a poly bible in the past few years, I recommend reading What Love Is — and What It Could Be , written by the philosopher Carrie Jenkins. I appreciated Jenkins's functionalist take on romantic love: She explains that we've constructed the idea of romantic love a certain way in order to serve a certain function (structuring society into nuclear family units), but we can absolutely revise it if we want.
Vox
02-06-2025
- Vox
My students think it's fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they're onto something.
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I am a university teaching assistant, leading discussion sections for large humanities lecture classes. This also means I grade a lot of student writing — and, inevitably, see a lot of AI writing too. Of course, many of us are working on developing assignments and pedagogies to make that less tempting. But as a TA, I only have limited ability to implement these policies. And in the meantime, AI-generated writing is so ubiquitous that to take course policy on it seriously, or even to escalate every suspected instance to the professor who runs the course, would be to make dozens of accusations, some of them false positives, for basically every assignment. I believe in the numinous, ineffable value of a humanities education, but I'm also not going to convince stressed 19-year-olds of that value by cracking down hard on something everyone does. How do I think about the ethics of enforcing the rules of an institution that they don't take seriously, or letting things slide in the name of building a classroom that feels less like an obstacle to circumvent? Dear Troubled Teacher, I know you said you believe in the 'ineffable value of a humanities education,' but if we want to actually get clear on your dilemma, that ineffable value must be effed! So: What is the real value of a humanities education? Looking at the modern university, one might think the humanities aren't so different from the STEM fields. Just as the engineering department or the math department justifies its existence by pointing to the products it creates — bridge designs, weather forecasts — humanities departments nowadays justify their existence by noting that their students create products, too: literary interpretations, cultural criticism, short films. But let's be real: It's the neoliberalization of the university that has forced the humanities into that weird contortion. That's never what they were supposed to be. Their real aim, as the philosopher Megan Fritts writes, is 'the formation of human persons.' In other words, while the purpose of other departments is ultimately to create a product, a humanities education is meant to be different, because the student herself is the product. She is what's getting created and recreated by the learning process. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! This vision of education — as a pursuit that's supposed to be personally transformative — is what Aristotle proposed back in Ancient Greece. He believed the real goal was not to impart knowledge, but to cultivate the virtues: honesty, justice, courage, and all the other character traits that make for a flourishing life. But because flourishing is devalued in our hypercapitalist society, you find yourself caught between that original vision and today's product-based, utilitarian vision. And students sense — rightly! — that generative AI proves the utilitarian vision for the humanities is a sham. As one student said to his professor at New York University, in an effort to justify using AI to do his work for him, 'You're asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn't I use a car to get there?' It's a completely logical argument — as long as you accept the utilitarian vision. The real solution, then, is to be honest about what the humanities are for: You're in the business of helping students with the cultivation of their character. I know, I know: Lots of students will say, 'I don't have time to work on cultivating my character! I just need to be able to get a job!' It's totally fair for them to be focusing on their job prospects. But your job is to focus on something else — something that will help them flourish in the long run, even if they don't fully see the value in it now. Your job is to be their Aristotle. For the Ancient Greek philosopher, the mother of all virtues was phronesis, or practical wisdom. And I'd argue there's nothing more useful you can do for your students than help them cultivate this virtue, which is made more, not less, relevant by the advent of AI. Practical wisdom goes beyond just knowing general rules — 'don't lie,' for example — and applying them mechanically like some sort of moral robot. It's about knowing how to make good judgments when faced with the complex, dynamic situations life throws at you. Sometimes that'll actually mean violating a classic rule (in certain cases, you should lie!). If you've honed your practical wisdom, you'll be able to discern the morally salient features of a particular situation and come up with a response that's well-attuned to that context. This is exactly the sort of deliberation that students will need to be good at as they step into the wider world. The breakneck pace of technological innovation means they're going to have to choose, again and again and again, how to make use of emerging technologies — and how not to. The best training they can get now is training in how to wisely make this type of choice. Unfortunately, that's exactly what using generative AI in the classroom threatens to short-circuit, because it removes something incredibly valuable: friction. AI is removing cognitive friction from education. We need to add it back in. Encountering friction is how we give our cognitive muscles a workout. Taking it out of the picture makes things easier in the short term, but in the long term, it can lead to intellectual deskilling, where our cognitive muscles gradually become weaker for lack of use. 'Practical wisdom is built up by practice just like all the other virtues, so if you don't have the opportunity to reason and don't have practice in deliberating about certain things, you won't be able to deliberate well later,' philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor told me last year. 'We need a lot of cognitive exercise in order to develop practical wisdom and retain it. And there is reason to worry about cognitive automation depriving us of the opportunity to build and retain those cognitive muscles.' So, how do you help your students retain and build their phronesis? You add friction back in, by giving them as many opportunities as possible to practice deliberating and choosing. If I were designing the curriculum, I wouldn't do that by adopting a strict 'no AI' policy. Instead, I'd be honest with students about the real benefit of the humanities and about why mindless AI cheating would be cheating themselves out of that benefit. Then, I'd offer them two choices when it comes time to write an essay: They can either write it with help from AI, or without. Both are totally fine. But if they do get help from AI, they have to also write an in-class reflection piece, explaining why they chose to use a chatbot and how they think it changed their thinking and learning process. I'd make it shorter than the original assignment but longer than a paragraph, so it forces them to develop the very reasoning skills they were trying to avoid using. As a TA, you could suggest this to professors, but they may not go for it. Unfortunately, you've got limited agency here (unless you're willing to risk your job or walk away from it). All you can do in such a situation is exercise the agency you do have. So use every bit of it. Since you lead discussion sections, you're well-placed to prompt your students to work their cognitive muscles in conversation. You could even stage a debate about AI: Assign half of them to argue the case for using chatbots to write papers and half of them to argue the opposite. If a professor insists on a strict 'no AI' policy, and you encounter essays that seem clearly AI-written, you may have little choice but to report them. But if there's room for doubt about a given essay, you might err on the side of leniency if the student has engaged very thoughtfully in the discussion. At least then you know they've achieved the most important aim. None of this is easy. I feel for you and all other educators who are struggling in this confusing environment. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some educators are suffering from moral injury, a psychological condition that arises when you feel you've been forced to violate your own values. But maybe it can comfort you to remember that this is much bigger than you. Generative AI is an existential threat to a humanities education as currently constituted. Over the next few years, humanities departments will have to paradigm-shift or perish. If they want to survive, they'll need to get brutally honest about their true mission. For now, from your pre-paradigm-shift perch, all you can do is make the choices that are left for you to make. Bonus: What I'm reading This week I went back to Shannon Vallor's first book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting . If there's one book I could get everyone in the AI world to read, it would be this one. And I think it can be useful to everyone else, too, because we all need to cultivate what Vallor calls the 'technomoral virtues' — the traits that will allow us to adapt well to emerging technologies. New Yorker piece in April about AI and cognitive atrophy led me to a 2024 psychology paper titled 'The Unpleasantness of Thinking: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Association Between Mental Effort and Negative Affect.' The authors' conclusion: 'We suggest that mental effort is inherently aversive.' Come again? Yes, sometimes I just want to turn off my brain and watch Netflix, but sometimes thinking about a challenging topic is so pleasurable! To me, it feels like running or weight lifting: Too much is exhausting, but the right amount is exhilarating. And what feels like 'the right amount' can go up or down depending on how much I practice. Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker recently published an essay in Noema provocatively titled ' AI Is Life .' She reminds us that evolution produced us and we produced AI. 'It is therefore part of the same ancient lineage of information that emerged with the origin of life,' she writes. 'Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.' To be clear, she's not arguing that tech is alive; she's saying it's an outgrowth of human life, an extension of our own species.
Vox
05-05-2025
- General
- Vox
My family has money but doesn't give to charity. How do I challenge them without being weird?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I have family and friends who are relatively well-off but don't spend much time thinking intentionally about how to do good. So I've been wondering whether or how much to challenge them to do more good and take doing good more seriously. For example, I've always given a percentage of my income to charity. I've got parents who are lovely people, but they donate basically not at all. It's hard to know how to bring this up to them. They're retired. They have a house and a summer house. They clearly have enough money. I'd love for them to answer the question of 'How much should we be giving back?' I have the sense that they haven't actually thought about it, so the default decision is to do nothing. And especially with people in my generation, it feels uncomfortable to talk about this. I don't want it to feel accusatory or make people defensive. I want people to make an affirmative decision they're happy about and not have it live in the ambient guilt zone. How can I bring it up in a way that makes clear I just want people to be actively making a decision, even if it's not the same as mine? Dear Do-gooder, 'The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,' the 20th-century psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote. I think the same is true about changing other people. Start by accepting them just as they are, and you may find they're a lot more receptive to what you say. It sounds like you're not trying to shove your own ideological commitments down your family and friends' throats, and I think that's great. But I'd encourage you to go even further. Rogers' insights are helpful here. Contrary to the views of other psychologists, Rogers didn't think it took any special therapy for a person to change for the better. He believed that just a few conditions were necessary: The person has to feel that you view them with unconditional positive regard — that you like and accept them as they are, not only if they change in this or that way. The person also has to feel that you're able to truly empathize — that you understand how things feel to them from within their own internal frame of reference. Meet those conditions, Rogers said, and the person will naturally move toward greater consistency between their values and actions, becoming healthier and more integrated. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! You sound like you're already pretty good at the 'unconditional positive regard' part — you write that your parents are 'lovely people' despite not donating to charity. But ask yourself if you've truly understood how the world feels to them from within their own internal frame of reference. Maybe they're nervous about money, and maybe there's a good reason why they're like that. Yes, they've got a lot of resources now, but was there a time when they didn't? That can lead to an enduring scarcity mindset. Take me, for example: I grew up in a family on welfare, and even though I started earning a decent salary as an adult, I kept grappling with money dysmorphia — feeling nervous about money even after becoming financially stable. Or maybe your family and friends just have a different idea about what counts as 'doing good.' It's possible they already see themselves as very committed do-gooders, only their approach isn't about giving charity; it's about volunteering or helping the environment or engaging in political activism. Are you sure your way is better? Or is it possible that there are multiple moral perspectives that are equally valid, even if they conflict with each other? Philosophers call that latter view moral pluralism, and I think it's worth taking really seriously. But even if you do think your way is better or your loved ones are ignoring a pretty powerful way to do good, you'll still want to be very careful about how you express that. I say that because of the Stanford psychologist Benoit Monin's research on 'do-gooder derogation.' Monin's studies showed people tend to feel less warm toward those who are extremely moral and altruistic. And the more people sense that the altruist might judge them, the more they put down the altruist. For example, Monin's study participants rated vegetarians more negatively the more they expected the vegetarians to see themselves as morally superior to meat eaters. People really, really don't like to feel morally judged. And if they get even the slightest hint that you might be judging them, your approach is likely to backfire. Again, a personal experience: In college, a friend who was studying environmental science looked at me with disgust when she saw me once eat my lunch — a vegan lunch, for goodness' sake! — with a plastic spoon. Her reaction turned me off environmentalism for longer than I care to admit. So, what actually works? If you understand what it really feels like to be the other person, a la Rogers, that might give you clues about what it would take for them to become more open to your views. Often, I think you'll find that they need carrots, not sticks. That was the case for me. Because of my money dysmorphia, donating to charity felt genuinely scary to me for a long time. I worried: What if I need that money for myself down the line? Then I got a job where my colleagues were super-excited about donating. They seemed to genuinely derive a lot of joy and meaning from giving to charity. I wanted that joy and meaning, too! So I started small, giving in increments of $10, then $50, then hundreds and thousands of dollars. And believe it or not, I enjoyed it so much that Giving Tuesday actually became one of my favorite days of the year. If I'd felt pressured to donate, I would have pulled back in fear and resentment. But because it was fine to approach it in a way that felt safe to me, and I was given the sense that there was an awesome feeling waiting for me on the other side, I willingly made the change. As for environmentalism, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I didn't reengage until, as an adult, I was re-exposed to the beauty of nature and of the animal kingdom. It started when someone invited me to try birding. To my surprise, I fell in love with birds! They turned out to be a gateway drug: I soon found myself watching monkeys, listening to bugling elk, and snorkeling with colorful fish. And caring deeply about the natural world they inhabit. In other words, sometimes people need to feel safer or to have positive experiences that show them just what's at stake for them personally before they'll engage. The research bears this out. As psychologist Molly Crockett has shown, when people judge how good a 'good deed' is, they consider the benefits that those deeds bring about — but they also consider how good it feels to perform them. If anything, Crockett's data suggests that people put more weight on how good it feels to them. So they might think that a good deed that brings very little benefit but gives them a really warm, fuzzy glow is actually more praiseworthy than a good deed that feels detached and emotionless but brings about a lot of benefit. That's a bit bizarre — but that's human psychology! And you can work with it by talking about the personal satisfaction that you get from donating or other ways that you do good. Don't emphasize the moral arguments (lest you fall victim to do-gooder derogation). Instead, emphasize joy. Since it's tough to find ways to slip this into conversation organically, you'll probably be better off doing this as part of a ready-made ritual that you share with family or friends. That could be, say, your birthday party. But, since neuroscientific research indicates that practicing gratitude can prime our brains to be more altruistic, I'd suggest piggybacking on a holiday traditionally associated with feeling thankful for all we have — whether that's a religious holiday, like Judaism's Sukkot, or a secular holiday, like Thanksgiving. Say you offer to host Thanksgiving. (In the invite, give people a heads-up that you'll be doing a short reflection.) After people have had something to eat but before they're totally comatose, ask everyone to reflect on what they're grateful for. Then say, 'I feel really grateful that I've been able to donate 10 percent of my income to charity X this year. I just got an update from the charity, and it said that my money helped 10 poor families put food on the table and send their kids to school. It felt amazing!' Then you can ask everyone, 'What makes you feel amazing? Is there something helpful you've done this year that felt super-satisfying? Do you want to set an intention to do more of that between now and next Thanksgiving?' Don't expect people to magically change their entire personality then and there. More likely, you'll be planting a seed that will germinate over months or years. This patient approach might take longer than direct persuasion, but it typically creates more sustainable change and preserves your most important relationships in the process. If you want to nudge the seed along, remember Rogers's advice about providing the optimal growing conditions. Help people feel safe. Help them feel understood. And then help them fall deeper in love with the world by putting them in contact with what's beautiful and good. Chances are they'll naturally gravitate toward it. Bonus: What I'm reading Thanks to this week's question, I went on a real Carl Rogers bender. In his book On Becoming a Person , which you can read online, he observes that we typically don't engage in good communication because it requires real courage. 'If you really understand another person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself. ... This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.' Written by a psychologist, this piece in the magazine Psyche offers some more granular tips on how to make other people feel heard. Validating someone's opinion doesn't mean you agree with it; in fact, the author notes it can 'increase the probability that people will seek you out and act on what you suggest.' Nautilus magazine recently published a very interesting piece called ' Why Our Brains Crave Ideology .' Psychologist Leor Zmigrod, who studies the neurobiological origins of ideological thinking, explains in it why ideology is the 'brain's delicious answer to the problem of prediction and communication' — and how to avoid becoming an ideologue.
Vox
20-04-2025
- General
- Vox
Political news is making me miserable. Is it wrong to tune out?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: Lately, in order to help with my mental health, I've been avoiding news about the current political situation, and it's been really helping. I haven't totally buried my head in the sand; I still get some info from others and the stuff that leaks into my social media (which I've also been using less) and stuff like John Oliver, but overall, I haven't been giving it all much thought, and focusing on my hobbies and the people around me have seriously helped. But obviously I do feel a bit guilty about it. I see people constantly talking about how everyone needs to help as much as they can, about how apathy and resulting inaction is exactly what people in power want. I guess my dilemma is that question: By choosing to take a break, am I giving them exactly what they want? Part of me knows that I probably can't help very effectively if my mental health is terrible, but another part of me knows that the world won't pause with me. Dear Attention Overload, I think your question is fundamentally about attention. We usually think of attention as a cognitive resource, but it's an ethical resource, too. In fact, you could say it's the prerequisite for all ethical action. 'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,' the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil wrote. She argued that it's only by deeply paying attention to others that we can develop the capacity to understand what it's really like to be them. That allows us to feel compassion, and compassion drives us to action. Truly paying attention is incredibly hard, Weil says, because it requires you to see a suffering person not just as 'a specimen from the social category labeled 'unfortunate,' but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.' In other words, you don't get 'the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself' — you have to recognize that you're a vulnerable creature, too, and tragedy could befall you just as easily as it's befallen the suffering person in front of you. So, when you 'pay attention,' you really are paying something. You pay with your own sense of invulnerability. Engaging this way costs you dearly — that's why it's the 'purest form of generosity.' Doing this is hard enough even in the best of circumstances. But nowadays, we live in an era when our capacity for attention is under attack. Modern technology has given us a glut of information, constantly streaming in from all over the world. There's too much to pay attention to, so we live in an exhausted state of information overload. That's even truer at a time when politicians intentionally 'flood the zone' with a ceaseless flow of new initiatives. Plus, as I've written before, digital tech is designed to fragment our focus, which degrades our capacity for moral attention — the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately. Just think of all the times you've seen an article in your Facebook feed about anguished people desperate for help — starving children in Yemen, say — only to get distracted by a funny meme that appears right above it. Have a question for this advice column? Fill out this anonymous form or email The problem isn't just that our attention is limited and fragmented — it's also that we don't know how to manage the attention we do have. As the tech ethicist James Williams writes, 'the main risk information abundance poses is not that one's attention will be occupied or used up by information…but rather that one will lose control over one's attentional processes.' Consider a game of Tetris, he says. The abundance of blocks raining down on your screen is not the problem — given enough time, you could figure out how to stack them. The problem is that they fall at an increasing speed. And at extreme speeds, your brain just can't process very well. You start to panic. You lose control. It's the same with a constant firehose of news. Being subjected to that torrent can leave you confused, disoriented, and ultimately just desperate to get away from the flood. So, more information isn't always better. Instead of trying to take in as much info as possible, we should try to take in info in a way that serves the real goal: enhancing, or at least preserving, our capacity for moral attention. That's why some thinkers nowadays talk about the importance of reclaiming 'attentional sovereignty.' You need to be able to direct your attentional resources deliberately. If you strategically withdraw from an overwhelming information environment, that's not necessarily a failure of civic duty. It can be an exercise of your agency that ultimately helps you engage with the news more meaningfully. But you've got to be intentional about how you do this. I'm all for limiting your news intake, but I'd encourage you to come up with a strategy and stick to it. Instead of a slightly haphazard approach — you mention 'the stuff that leaks into my social media' — consider identifying one or two major news sites that you'll check for ten minutes each day while having your morning coffee. You can also subscribe to a newsletter, like Vox's The Logoff, that's specifically designed to update you on the most important news of the day so you can tune out all the extra noise. It's also important to consider not only how you're going to withdraw attention from the news, but also what you'll invest it in instead. You mention spending more time on hobbies and the people around you, which is great. But be careful not to cocoon yourself exclusively in the realm of the personal — a privilege many people don't have. Though you shouldn't engage with the political realm 24/7, you're not totally exempt from it either. One valuable thing you can do is devote some time to training your moral attention. There are lots of ways to do that, from reading literature (as philosopher Martha Nussbaum recommends) to meditating (as the Buddhists recommend). I've personally benefited from both those techniques, but one thing I like about meditation is that you can do it in real time even while you're reading the news. In other words, it doesn't have to be only a thing you do instead of news consumption — it can be a practice that changes how you pay attention to the news. Even as a journalist, I find it hard to read the news because it's painful to see stories of people suffering — I end up feeling what's usually called 'compassion fatigue.' But I've learned that's actually a misnomer. It should really be called 'empathy fatigue.' Compassion and empathy are not the same thing, even though we often conflate the concepts. Empathy is when you share the feelings of other people. If other people are feeling pain, you feel pain, too — literally. Not so with compassion, which is more about feeling warmth toward a suffering person and being motivated to help them. Practicing compassion both makes us happier and helps us make other people happier. In a study published in 2013 at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, researchers put volunteers in a brain scanner, showed them gruesome videos of people suffering, and asked them to empathize with the sufferers. The fMRI showed activated neural circuits centered around the insula in our cerebral cortex — exactly the circuits that get activated when we're in pain ourselves. Compare that with what happened when the researchers took a different group of volunteers and gave them eight hours of training in compassion, then showed them the graphic videos. A totally different set of brain circuits lit up: those for love and warmth, the sort a parent feels for a child. When we feel empathy, we feel like we're suffering, and that's upsetting. Though empathy is useful for getting us to notice other people's pain, it can ultimately cause us to tune out to help alleviate our own feelings of distress, and can even cause serious burnout. Amazingly, compassion — because it fosters positive feelings — actually attenuates the empathetic distress that can cause burnout, as neuroscientist Tania Singer has demonstrated in her lab. In other words, practicing compassion both makes us happier and helps us make other people happier. In fact, one fMRI study showed that in very experienced practitioners — think Tibetan yogis — compassion meditation that involves wishing for people to be free from suffering actually triggers activity in the brain's motor centers, preparing the practitioners' bodies to physically move in order to help whoever is suffering, even as they're still lying in the brain scanner. So, how can you practice compassion while reading the news? A simple Tibetan Buddhist technique called Tonglen meditation trains you to be present with suffering instead of turning away from it. It's a multistep process when done as a formal sitting meditation, but if you're doing it after reading a news story, you can take just a few seconds to do the core practice. First, you let yourself come into contact with the pain of someone you see in the news. As you breathe in, imagine that you're breathing in their pain. And as you breathe out, imagine that you're sending them relief, warmth, compassion. That's it. It doesn't sound like much — and, on its own, it won't help the suffering people you read about. But it's a dress rehearsal for the mind. By doing this mental exercise, we're training ourselves to stay present with someone's suffering instead of resorting to 'the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself,' as Weil put it. And we're training our capacity for moral attention, so that we can then help others in real life. I hope you consume the news in moderation, and that when you do consume it, you try to do so while practicing compassion. With any luck, you'll leave feeling like those Tibetan yogis in the brain scanner: energized to help others out in the world. Bonus: What I'm reading
Vox
06-04-2025
- Business
- Vox
My boyfriend wants to pay my expenses. Am I a bad feminist if I let him?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I'm getting married and struggling with what is 'fair' when it comes to combining incomes and sharing expenses. My boyfriend makes twice as much as I do, but isn't necessarily harder-working or more successful (would you believe that having a PhD in a technical field can just…lead to more money?). Accordingly, he wants to pay for more of our shared expenses, like rent. I understand why this would be considered 'fair' but am really resisting it. When others pay, it feels like they're trying to control me or encroach on my independence. Yet I do think that there is something obstinate and rigidly, falsely 'feminist' in the way I insist on 50/50 in our relationship. What should I do? Dear Fair Fiancé, There's a very normie way to answer this question: I could advise you to make a list of all the ways your boyfriend is actually dependent on you — emotional labor, household chores, whatever the case may be — so you won't feel like you're disproportionately falling into a dependent role if he pays for more than half of your shared expenses. In other words, I could try to convince you that your relationship is still 50/50; it's just that he's contributing more financially, and you're contributing more in other ways. Which, to be clear, could be true! And it could be a very valuable thing to reflect on. But if I left it at that, I think I'd be cheating you out of a deeper opportunity. Because this struggle isn't just offering you the chance to think about stuff like joint bank accounts and rental payments. It's offering you a chance at spiritual growth. I say that because your struggle is about love. Real love is an omnivore: It will eat its way through all your pretty illusions. It will, if you're lucky, pulverize your preconceived notions. As the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector once wrote in a wonderfully weird short story: Few people desire true love because love shakes our confidence in everything else. And few can bear to lose all their other illusions. There are some who opt for love in the belief that love will enrich their personal lives. On the contrary: love is poverty, in the end. Love is to possess nothing. Love is also the deception of what one believed to be love. What are the illusions that love destroys? Chief among them are things you mentioned: independence, control. Believe me, it brings me no joy to say this, because…I love feeling independent! I love feeling like I have control! And I, too, really struggle if I feel like anyone is encroaching on those things. But, alas, I do think they're illusions that we use to shield ourselves from our own vulnerability. No one is truly independent Many philosophers have long recognized that, however independent we like to think we are, we're actually inherently interdependent. This was one of the Buddha's key ideas. When he lived around 500 BCE in India, it was common to believe that each person has a permanent self or soul — a fixed essence that makes you an individual, persisting entity. The Buddha rejected that premise. He argued that even though you use words like 'me' and 'I,' which suggest that you're a static substance separate from others, that's just a convenient shorthand — a fiction. Have a question for this advice column? Fill out this anonymous form or email In reality, the Buddha said, you don't have a fixed self. Your self is always changing in response to different conditions in your environment. In fact, it's nothing but the sum total of those conditions — your perceptions, experiences, moods, and so on — just like a chariot is nothing but its wheels, axles, and other component parts. In Western philosophy, it took a while for this idea to gain prominence, largely because the idea of the Christian soul was so entrenched. But in the 18th century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume — who was influenced not only by British empiricists but also potentially by Buddhism — wrote: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. He added that a person is 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.' Why does this matter? Because if you're nothing but a bundle of different perceptions in perpetual flux, there's no 'you' that exists independently of your boyfriend and all the other people you're in contact with: They are literally making 'you' in every moment by furnishing your perceptions, experiences, moods. That means the idea of a you that's separate from others is, at the deepest level, just an illusion. You are interdependent with them for your very you-ness. The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who died just a few years ago, had a lovely term for this: interbeing. He would say that you inter-are with your boyfriend: You are made, in part, by all the ways that his actions and words have affected you (just like you're also made by your ancestors, teachers, and cultural heritage). At first glance, this might seem hard to reconcile with feminism. Aren't we supposed to be strong, independent women? How can we do that without the 'independent' bit? But take a closer look at feminist thought, and you'll see that that's a serious misinterpretation. From Simone de Beauvoir onward, feminists haven't been trying to eliminate interdependence altogether — they've been fighting against structurally unequal interdependence, where women have no choice but to rely on men financially because their work outside the home is underpaid relative to men, and their work inside the home gets no pay at all. That's a nonconsensual, unequal form of interdependence, and the goal was a world where partners can meet as equals. The goal was never a world where we all live as islands. In fact, many feminist philosophers argue that being fully 'independent' is neither desirable nor possible. As thinkers like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings have pointed out, we all depend on others at different points in our lives — as kids, when we're sick, as we get older. They champion a world that acknowledges the reality of interdependence. That would include government policies like appropriate pay for child care and elder care, as well as greater social recognition for the value of emotional labor and household chores, like I mentioned above. But we still don't live in that world. American society is especially hyper-individualistic. It recognizes interdependence neither on the metaphysical level (à la Buddha and Hume) nor on the social policy level (à la Gilligan and Noddings). No wonder many women are still wary of financial dependence! Even though you live in that wider context, I'd encourage you to take a close look at the specifics of your personal situation and consider a crucial distinction: real financial dependence versus felt financial dependence. If you have your own job or could readily return to the workforce, you're not actually financially dependent on your boyfriend, even if he's covering more than half the rent. In that case, the real fear here is not about finances at all. It's about facing up to the terrifying, beautiful, messy fact — a fact that love is now revealing to you — that you are and have always been interdependent. Believe me, I know that's not easy. It feels painfully vulnerable. Yet if you trust that your boyfriend genuinely sees you as equals — if he's demonstrated that through both his words and actions — then at some point you've got to trust that he won't weaponize your vulnerability against you. If you don't, you will be cheating yourself out of the benefits that come with accepting interdependence. And in an important sense it will be you, not your boyfriend, who'll be making you poorer. Bonus: What I'm reading Related to the idea that the self is a fiction, this week, I read a near-apocalyptic short story titled ' And All the Automata of London Couldn't ' by Beth Singler, an expert on the intersection of AI and religion. I don't want to give too much of a spoiler, but suffice it to say it contains these sentences: 'Descartes' little automata daughter, the clockwork doll that scared a bunch of sailors so much that they threw her overboard in their terror and superstition. A lovely bit of gossip to puncture the great philosopher's pride! How dare he describe man as a machine!' The starkest manifestation of human vulnerability is our mortality, and I wish people would do the hard work of facing up to loss instead of turning to AI-powered deadbots — new tools that, as the New York Times explains , supposedly allow you to feel you're communicating with dead loved ones. In my experience, losing someone shatters your assumptive worldview — your core beliefs about yourself and about life — and that's extremely painful but also extremely generative: It forces you to make yourself anew. This Guardian article about a woman who quit her job, closed her bank account, and lives without money is quite something. I think I'd be too terrified to live her lifestyle (and I also think her lifestyle is built on a bedrock of privilege), but this bit stuck out: 'I actually feel more secure than I did when I was earning money,' she said, 'because all through human history, true security has always come from living in community.'
