A lot of people chase bigger paychecks and fancier titles, convinced that their next role will finally make them happy. I know I did.
Thats why I spent years stuck in a job that, on paper, many would consider glamorous. But deep down inside, I knew it was toxic. I took on more and more responsibilities, kept a chaotic schedule, and bent over backwards to please my demanding boss. All because I thought thats what it took to be successful.
Then I would get home and push myself more, scrolling job boards, tweaking my résumé, and submitting applications. I was working around the clock, and rest wasnt an option. All because I was convinced that a new role would change everything.
But my job was never the real problem. And, chances are, it isnt yours either.
Burnout is the real culprit
The real issue? You work too hard, stress too much, and rest too little. Of course youre struggling.
As a certified health coach, Ive learned that most people misunderstand what burnout actually is. They think theyre just tired and in need of a good sleep or a long weekend. But really, its chronic stress and exhaustion, and that doesnt magically disappear after a few days off. Take Headways recent survey, 24% of people returned from the festive break feeling like they hadnt rested at all.
In the early stages, burnout causes low energy and constant fatigue. Then brain fog creeps in. Your concentration drops, you become forgetful, and your brain slows. So you work harder to compensate, yet get less done, and your workload piles up. You push through anyway, because you dont want to fail, but that only makes things worse.
And that little voice in the back of your head telling you to quit? Thats another clear sign. Burnout breeds cynicism, which fuels disillusionment and distrust towards your employer. When everything is awful, even your dream role can start to feel unbearable.
But chances are, the grass wont be any greener if you dont first change the way you work.
Why quitting your job wont fix everything
Headways recent survey found that 24% of people are looking for a new job or considering an entirely different career path. But handing in your resignation isnt always the fix that you hope it to be.
Starting a new role is a major life change, and 87% experience the “new job jitters.” You want to impress, and you’re terrified of failing, so you work harder than ever. You tell yourself youll rest once youve proven yourself. Then the thrill of quitting wears off, and you somehow feel just as drained (if you’re lucky). Feeling worse off, 30% end up wishing they had never left their old role.
The thing is, the job was never the issue. As human beings, were just not meant to juggle everything and never switch off. Many of us try to do so anyway, and that is a recipe for burnout.
If youre thinking of jumping roles or changing careers, try going easier on yourself first. Give yourself time to recover, and you might just realize that your workplace isnt toxic. You do, however, probably need to change how youre working.
More effort isnt the answer
And that doesnt mean putting in more effort. What you really need is capacity, and you cant magically increase your brains bandwidth by demanding more from yourself. That just drains your capacity further.
This means working smarter with what you have. Start by setting boundaries and building healthier working habits. Log off at 5 p.m., take your whole lunch break, and stop trying to prove your worth through overworking.
Saying “yes” to everything and taking on tasks that arent your responsibility doesnt help anyone. It only wastes energy, and as a result, you don’t have as much energy for the work that you really need to do (and makes the most impact).
Prioritizing yourself and setting boundaries doesnt mean you care any less. It means you understand that you cant work well unless you feel well.
Research shows that burnout causes the hippocampus to shrink and damages the brains neuroplasticity. It literally reduces our mental capacity, harming everything from memory to focus, and impulse control to executive function. But once you stop overworking, you should feel your brain clear, and your mental capacity should grow.
Dont leave burnout in charge of your career
Burnout has a way of convincing us that everything is awful and that only drastic measures, whether moving to Bali or changing careers, will help. But thats just your stress response. After fighting for so long, its easy to see why flight feels like the only option. But youve been fighting the wrong thing.
To do it, its important to address the cause and give your mind time to recover. Only then can you decide with any real clarity whether a career change will actually solve your problems.
Federal immigration agents stationed in Minneapolis need not read polls or confront protesters to know how the city feels about their presence. Walking around just about any neighborhood in the area lately should provide a glimpse into the vast sprawl of graffiti and homemade yard signs expressing residents bone-deep aversion to ICE. One poster in particular, though, has been increasingly decorating the storefront windows of local restaurants, coffee shops, yarn stores, pubs, and bowling alleys, urging in no uncertain terms: ICE out of Minneapolis.
This sign seems to have struck a chord within the community, not just because of its blunt message but the form its riffing on: a familiar red municipal sign highlighting snow emergency routes, already strewn throughout streets in the Twin Cities. While the original evokes the grill of a snowplow truck clearing out roads in the wake of a blizzard, the anti-ICE version includes helmets, rifles and handcuffs in the slushy waste. The new signs growing popularity suggests its tapping into residents regional identity as much as it is their love of creative protest art.
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Reimagining a local icon
Burlesque of North America, a local design studio specializing in graphic arts and screenprinting, created the sign as a response to ICEs incursion into Minneapolis. Owners Mike Davis and Wes Winship had previously created an anti-ICE enamel pin back in November when they first got the eerie sense something like Operation Metro Surge lay on the horizon.
After their friends who run the nearby restaurant Hola Arepa were targeted by ICE in early December, the Burlesque team began playing with ideas for a protest poster. It didn’t take long for them to arrive at a concept rooted in the transportation departments snow emergency sign.
[Photo: Elizabeth W. Kearley/Getty Images]
We’ve been figuring out how to handle literal ice here for centuries, Winship says. And weve got this sign that’s pre-built, alerting people: There’s an emergency and we need to remove frozen precipitation from the streets.
It was clean, crisp iconography, on which to project a message of resistance. On top of that, it was instantly recognizable.
For the locals, everyone knows the sign. Everyone’s been living with it and responding to it, says Davis. But even people from out of town who don’t know the reference, they can still tell what it means and connect with it.
After working on a mockup, the two paused on the project as the holidays kicked into high gear. It remained set aside until January 7, the day an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good. That drastic escalation spurred the pair back into action on their poster. By the following night, Davis and Winship had completed all the design elements. The next day, theyd screenprinted the first of what would become over 5,000 copies to distribute around Minneapolis. They also offered free PDFs on their website, an open-source touch allowing out-of-towners to print signs and shirts of their own.
[Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images]
The power of posters
Although projects like concert posters are Burlesques bread and butter, the team has been rooted in socially conscious art for ages. Amid the Syrian refugee crisis, for instance, they created a Refugees Welcome image that went viral in 2015 when the Walker Art Center featured it and several news outlets ultimately wrote about it. After George Floyd was killed in 2020, Davis and Winship printed out several artists protest graphics for free and handed out copies from their delivery truck at the intersection quickly dubbed George Floyd Square.
Its in that very area where the citys love of protest art is most evidentmade manifest by the iconic raised fist of steel in Floyds memory, designed by artist Jerome Powell-Karis.
The Burlesque team have now seen, once again, how much that love still radiates throughout the city during moments of upheaval. As they handed out their anti-ICE posters, restaurant and shop owners lit up at the sight of it. Davis brought 600 copies to a protest in Powderhorn Park the weekend after Good was killed, and his supply was picked clean within 15 minutes. When the team later asked for donations to cover their ink and paper costs, they hit their goal in three days. Meanwhile, the response on Instagram was unlike anything the pair had ever experienced.
We’re still being contacted almost hourly by someone who either wants one or wants an entire stack to give away at their bike shop or trivia night, Davis says.
The signs seem especially resonant at restaurants, where some owners are now opting to keep their doors locked during daytime hours to prevent ICE from entering. Local service workers seem haunted by recent reports of ICE agents eating at a restaurant in a town outside of Minneapolis, only to detain several employees afterward. The anti-ICE signs add some extra oomph to the locked doors, and let prospective diners know where the establishment stands. (Many restaurants without this particular sign have homemade anti-ICE signage of their own.)
Although the snow emergency poster has started gaining a lot of traction, it feels perfectly at home among all the other protest art on display throughout the citywhether its the signs featuring Minnesota state bird, the loon, melting ice with laser eyes, an image with roots in local lore; all the inventive DIY anti-ICE entries at last weekends Art Sled Rally; or the ubiquitous stickers depicting melted ice. The Twin Cities community has clearly come together around its resistance to the current siege and Burlesque is happy to have helped play some small part in it.
I’m not going to be out there with a gas mask at the Federal Building, catching rubber bullets, Davis says. So, it feels good that I have something to contribute to the cause. Like, I’m a graphic designer. This is what I can do.
Apple will turn its Siri assistant into a full-fledged chatbot by next year. The company is working on a personal AI device to compete with the one OpenAI is building with Jony Ive. And Apple is putting control over its AI strategy into new hands within the company. So say a flurry of new reports, all advancing the larger story that Apple is doing what it can to get itself back in the AI race.
And its doing it in a way that may allow it, in classic Apple fashion, to lead from behind. That is, it may hang back and benefit from the hard lessons learned by others marketing a new technology, then arrive fashionably late with a more polished product.
Apple and Google announced on January 12 that the (notoriously slow) Siri assistant will be powered, at least in part, by Gemini models developed by Googles DeepMind division. Apple has in the past voiced concern about the privacy implications of sending user data to AI models outside its own infrastructure. Apple has said it plans to run its AI models either within a secure Apple cloud, or, even better, on chips inside Apple devices.
Bringing in Gemini
But that may be changing. Bloombergs Mark Gurman reports that Apple is now in talks with Google to run the Gemini models powering Siri and Apple Intelligence features within the Google Cloud. Previous reports said Apple could be paying Google as much as $1 billion per year for access to the Gemini models.
The new Siri is expected to show up with iOS 26.4 in March or April, the report states. The assistant will reportedly gain a better contextual understanding of the user by accessing some types of personal data stored on the users device. It may also have an awareness of what the user is viewing or working on on their screen, as well as better internet search. These are the same Apple Intelligence” features the company promised to deliver in 2024, but later postponed, explaining that it wasnt happy with the performance and reliability of the AI.
Then, in 2027, another upgrade will make Siri feel more like a real chatbot, meaning that users will be able to have extended back-and-forth exchanges with the assistant (including via their voice), as is common with OpenAIs ChatGPT and Googles Gemini chatbots. Apple also plans to integrate the smarter Siri deeper into the operating system, which could make it a more functional intermediary between the user and the capabilities of the device.
The Information reports that Apple is also in the early stages of developing a small personal AI deviceabout the size of an AirTagthat can clip to a lapel and contains two cameras, three microphones, a little speaker, a battery, and inductive charging tech. (A patent search yielded no Apple designs fitting this description.) OpenAI attracted a lot of attention last year after announcing that it was developing a personal AI device in collaboration with Apples former design guru Jony Ive. Its worth noting, however, that other companies have tried selling such a product, notably Humane (founded by some ex-Applers), and none have found much success.
A new AI leader inside Apple
The Google Gemini deal and the AI device reports come in the wake of a pretty major power shift at Apple regarding the companys AI strategy. Apple struggled for years to build its own AI models under the leadership of ex-Google AI chief John Giannandrea (while balancing its historical concern for data privacy), and failed to deliver models that performed like those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Now Apple has reportedly put its consumer AI problems in the lap of software chief Craig Fedherighi, who is known for his tall hair and utilitarian (and somewhat skeptical) views on the new technology. Fedherighi has viewed AI as an enabling technology that should work behind the scenes to make phone features work better. Hes also expressed concern over the predictability and reliability of the technology.
Fedherighi is taking the reins at a pivotal moment. Apple is in a tough spot with AI. It fears the appearance of falling further behind OpenAI (and the punishment it might take from Wall Street), but its also traditionally hesitant to rush into an emerging technology that isnt yet totally proven and reliable (AI chatbots still make mistakes and consumers dont fully trust them). Apple is most comfortable taking a mature technology (like cell phones) and reinventing it for the mainstream with simplicity, utility, and artful design.
So partnering with Google, talking about plans for new Gemini-powered features in the future, and preparing a personal AI device might be just the right moves for Apple right now. The deal with Google buys Apple time while its own researchers find ways to balance the twin needs of data privacy and high-performing models. (It might also shift some of the responsibility onto Google if the new Siri doesnt work as promised.)
Being late has worked out before
Theres precedent for this. Apple relied on Intel processors in its computers while it built up the expertise and experience to make its own. Apple used Intel processors in its Mac computers for 15 years, before switching its lineup to Apple-designed chips. But planning the features of future Macs was difficult because it all depended on Intels roadmap for releasing new chips. Apple became acutely aware of the speed and efficiency gains to be had from designing custom chips that could be deeply integrated with its Mac operating system. Those improvements were first realised in the companys first M-series Macs in late 2020.
Apple also relied entirely on Qualcomm cellular modem chips for the iPhone before it was able to build its own. The first Apple-designed modem, the C1, shipped inside the iPhone 16e in 2025. While Qualcomm says it will continue to supply modems for iPhones in 2026, Apples intent is to build its own modem into the integrated silicon system-on-a-chip processor that powers iPhones, which could yield faster and more reliable cellular connections.
However, in other cases, like internet search, Apple has been content to rely on Google as a partner. Who knows, Apple may believe generative AI will become a commodity in the future (models are indeed getting more efficient and cheaper to access), something it would rather buy than build.
he news of an Apple AI device doesnt hurt either. It shows an Apple that still has the appetite to mold emergent technologies into its own image and bring them to the mainstream, even without Ives.
Apples relationship with generative AI is seen as rocky and mainly unsuccessful so far. That narrative may have seeped through the shell of Apples spaceship in Cupertino and caused a rush to ship a technology that wasnt quite baked. The hype around generative AI is so thick now that were quick to judge any technology company that isnt betting the farm on it.
But its part of Apples culture to take the long view on new technology waves (notice that it didnt change the company name when the metaverse was having its moment). Its hesitation, intentional or not, may give it more time to judge the real scale of the AI revolution, and more time to understand what it all should mean to Apple and its customers.
For decades, people with disabilities have relied on service dogs to help them perform daily tasks like opening doors, turning on lights, or alerting caregivers to emergencies. By some estimates, there are 500,000 service dogs in the U.S., but little attention has been paid to the fact that these dogs have been trained to interact with interfaces that are made for humans. A team of researchers from the United Kingdom wants to change that by designing accessible products for, and with dogs.
The Open University’s Animal-Computer Interaction Laboratory in the UK was founded in 2011 to help promote the art and science of designing animal-centered systems. Led by Clara Mancini, a professor of animal-computer interaction, the lab studies how animals interact with technology and develops interactive systems designed to improve their wellbeing and support their relationships with humans.
[Video: The Open University]
The team’s first commercially available product is a specifically-designed button that service dogs can press to help turn on corresponding appliances at home, like a lamp, a kettle, or a fan. The Dogosophy Button took more than ten years to develop and was tested with about 20 dogs from UK charity Dogs for Good.
It gives dogs more control over certain aspects of their home, which can make training them easier and further strengthen the bond between a human and their dog. It’s also taught the team a few lessons about how to design for humans. “I am now a better human designer,” says Luisa Ruge, an industrial designer who worked with Mancini and led the design of the button.
For now, the Dogosophy Button is only available for purchase in the UK (for about $130).
[Photo: The Open University]
The challenges of designing for animals
Anyone who’s ever designed a product for a human client knows the process relies on a perfect storm of variables like gender, age, background, and personal preferences. But these designers also have one advantage they likely take for granted: they can ask their client what they think at every step of the way.
Getting feedback from a dog is much harder and requires an understanding of animal behavior. “Theres a lot of iteration,” says Ruge, “and a huge ethical and reflective component because I can’t be a dog, I don’t [feel] what they feel.”
Ruge began her career as an industrial designer, but as she moved up the corporate ladder, she realized she was fascinated with animals. Her interest led her to train as a service dog trainer at Bergin College of Canine Studies in California. “One of the ways to bond is we had to be tied to our dog with a carabiner and leash for 8 days, 24/7,” she recalls.
Later, she attended a conference on human behavior change for animal welfare, where she met Mancini and became interested in her lab. Ruge immediately enrolled in a PhD at The Open University, and spent the next three years writing a thesis on designing for the animal user experience and proving out her dog-centered methodology.
Ruge followed the five human factors model, a method that helps designers understand the end user’s behavior by breaking down the UX into five factors. The typical list includes physical, cognitive, social, cultural, and emotional factors, but Ruge added a sixthsensoryand then later, a seventh: consent.
To understand the exact characteristics and abilities she had to design for, she focused on Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, as these are the most common breeds for service dogs. Her research led to various correlations that informed the design of the button. For example: since both breeds have long tails, the button should not feature sensors that might accidentaly be activated by it. Since both breeds are predisposed to hip dysplasia and joint problems, the button should also not be designed in a way that requires jumping to activate. And since all dogs see the world in hues of yellow, blue, and brown, the button should be made in one of these colors so it is easy to perceive.
[Video: The Open University]
When Ruge first got involved, the prototype Mancini had developed was square in shape, and looked a bit like the standard metallic button that people with wheelchairs can press to open a door. Nowafter about 20 iterations and five prototypesthe button is round, convex, and blue. It is textured to prevent a dog’s wet snout from sliding on it, and its push depth is such that a more timid dog shouldn’t have to press hard to activate it.
Ruge had to test some of her designs the hard way. The first prototype she ever made took days to develop and the dogs destroyed it “in two seconds,” she recalls with a laugh. But dogs don’t know that a prototype should be handled with care. To them, a work-in-progress product looks no different than a finished product.
Animal design as a discipline
Designing for dogs humbled Ruge’s assumptions. “It lets you know you’re never 100% right,” she says, adding that the only way to confirm her theories was through extensive testing and observation.
It also made her a better designer for humans, because she learned to better spot her biases and assumptions. “Sometimes, I’m assuming you feel a handle like I do, and you don’t,” she says.
In the end, though, animal design is where Ruge’s passion lies. Since earning her PhD, she has moved back to her native Colombia and started a design consultancy called Ph-auna (pronounced fauna) where she focuses on animal centeed innovation. She hosts a podcast called Pomodogo, guiding humans to better connect with their dogs, and is now working on an app that gamifies dog training and inspires humans to be better caretakers. “There’s an immense opportunity for animal design to be its own design discipline,” she says.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Dogosophy Button is available to individual customers willing to buy it, but the team is hoping to broaden its scope beyond the home. Mancini, who spearheaded the button project, says they first installed an earlier version of the button to operate the motorized door of a restaurants accessible toilet, but the restaurant ended up shuttering. Then, they tried installing it at a local shopping mall, but the plan fell through due to budget constraints.
Still, she plans to continue developing new versions and adapt them for the characteristics of other species too. “It is my interest to try and install the buttons in public buildings,” she says. “I would love for whole cities to be more accessible for dogs and other urban animals.”
On my phone, there are already videos of the next moon landing. In one, an astronaut springs off the rung of a ladder, strung out from the lander, before slowly plopping to the surface. He is, alas, still getting accustomed to the weaker gravity.
In another, the crew collects a samplea classic lunar expedition activitywhile another person lazily minds the rover. A third video shows an astronaut affixing the American flag to the ground, because this act of patriotism is even better the second time around. The blue oceans of Earth are visible, in the background, and a radio calls out: Artemis crew is on the surface.
America is going back to the moon, and NASA is in the final weeks of preparing for the Artemis II mission, which will have astronauts conduct a lunar flyby for the first time in decades. If all goes well, during the next endeavor, Artemis III, theyll finally land on the lunar surface, marking an extraordinary and historical and in some sense, nostalgic, accomplishment. The aforementioned videos are not advance copies, or some vision of the future, though. They were generated with OpenAIs video generation model and are extremely fake.
Still, this kind of content is a reminder that the upcoming Artemis missions promise a major epistemic test for the deniers of the original moon landing. This a small but passionate and enduring community who doubt the Apollo moon landing for a host of reasons, including that (they allege) the government lied or (they believe) it is simply physically impossible for humans to go the moon. Now, when NASA returns to the lunar surface, these people will be confronted with far more evidence than from the last time around. The space agency operation will be broadcast, live, and including camera technology and social media platforms that just werent around in the 1960s.
But theres also a bigger challenge before us. NASA will be launching its moon return effort in a period of major distrust in American scientific and government institutions, and, amid the proliferation of generative AI, declining confidence in the veracity of digital content. Most observers will be able to sort through the real NASA imagery, and anything fake that might show up. Still, there tends to be a small number of people who doubt these kinds of milestones, especially when a U.S. federal agency is involved.
Adding AI to the conspiracy theory cocktail
When the moon landing first came in, AI wasn’t a thing. The sophistication of [the landing] didn’t necessarily make us question it, says David Jolley, a professor at the University of Nottingham who studies conspiracy theories. But now, with the power of AI and the power of images that you can create, it certainly offers that different reality if you want to interpret it in that way.
Its the trust in those sources that we need to kind of really create. Of course, if you haven’t got trust in our gatekeepers and you don’t trust scientists, well, suddenly you are going to lean into: well, this, is this real? Is this just AI? he continues.
The upcoming Artemis missions arent yet a major topic among lunar landing deniers. But there are hints it will attract more attention from conspiracy theorists. During the last Artemis mission, which was unmanned, Reuters had to push back on online posts suggesting the expedition proved that Apollo 11 didnt actually happen. (Skeptics suggested longer Artemis I mission timelines, a product of a change in route, actually cast doubt on the original Apollo timeline).
Other online skeptics have already suggested that, with Artemis, NASA is yet again faking a space endeavor. Some people in internet conspiracy communities suggest the upcoming moon missions will be entirely CGI (computer-generated imagery).
Generative AI stands to introduce even more confusion, says Ben Colman, the CEO of Reality Defenders, a deep fake detection platform. Generating a believable image of a (fake) moon landing is now something any consumer can do. Any astute physicist will be able to tell you if these videos get star placement or physics wrong, as they are likely to do, he says, but even that is getting better with each model iteration.
Conspiracy theories are sticky
There are, of course, many reasons why people say they deny reality of the first lunar expeditions. They are canonical, misinterpreted references, like Van Allen belts, a zone of energetic charged particles that surrounds the planet (critics say the belts are too radioactive for manned vehicles to traverse) and the suspicious flag-in-the-wind (theres no wind on the moon!). All of these pointsand the many other points deniers bring uphave been thoroughly debunked.
Still, this small community of self-appointed detectives are insistent. Even decades after the missions ended, people are still combing through NASAs videos and images, mining for signs of alternations or other surreptitious editing. To them, an expected shimmer reveals a film operation just beyond the view of the camera. A movement that might not look right is a hint that the world has been duped. Open source intelligence (OSINT) becomes the rabbit hole.
Some allege we didn’t go to the moon, perhaps because we were trying to trick the Soviets into thinking that we had superior technology than they did, explains Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who also studies conspiratorial beliefs. Some people think we did go but it wasn’t televised. And that footage that we saw was made later in a sound studio. Some people think Stanley Kubrick was in charge of filming the faked Moon Landing footage.
For its part, NASA is preparing to point to evidence, should any deepfake allegations come their way. Agency spokesperson Lauren Low tells Fast Company: We expect AI experts will be looking closely at all our images and will be able to verify they are real images taken by real astronauts as part of the Artemis II test flight around the Moon. Moreover, Low added, there will be many ways for people to watch the lunar flyby themselves, including live broadcasts, two 24/7 YouTube streams, a new conference, and views from Orion cameras. In other words, the reality of Artemis will be very hard to deny.
Research suggests that conspiracy theories are entertaining, and even serve peoples core psychological needs, like a desire to understand the world or a way of dealing with uncertainty. Finding other people, including on social media, pushing these theories can help normalize them, and make someone feel like theyre part of a broader community.
Some people simply dont trust institutions, and evidence that something did, indeed, happen only raises further questions, and suspicions that it didnt. To an extent, politics matters, too; people outside the United States are more likely to deny the moon landing, polls show.
In the end, says Uscinski, we should prepare for people who are prone to conspiratorial thinking, or prone to mistrusting institutions, to take a skeptical view of any big news event. This may happen again when the Artemis missions finally launch. “The good news is that belief in conspiracy theories isnt likely to get worse,” he explains. “The bad news is that this conspiratorial thinking has always been this pervasive.
People are very good at waving away evidence that tells them things they don’t want to hear, and they’re very good at believing things, either without evidence or with really shitty evidence when it tells them what they do want to believe about the world, Uscinski adds. You don’t need AI or sophisticated technology to provide a justification.
It looks like OpenAI is taking the “new year, new you” approach when it comes to its business strategy. To kick off 2026, the company announced it would soon introduce ads into ChatGPTwhich was a bit of a surprise, considering CEO Sam Altman had previously said ads would be a last resort as a business model.
It’s hard to say how final a resort this is without looking at OpenAI’s balance sheet, but we do know the company is feeling the heat. After Google released Gemini 3 in the fallwhich scored well on leaderboards, market share, and plaudits from the AI communityAltman declared a code red at OpenAI to ensure that ChatGPT is best in class. And as impressive as OpenAI’s fundraising has been, Google is a $4 trillion company. OpenAI needs all the resources it can get.
So ChatGPT users are getting ads. It’s a risky move, since there are strong indicators that consumers are wary of ads in AI answers. A report from Attest, a consumer research company, found that 41% of consumers trust AI search results more than paid search results, suggesting that AI users like that they don’t have to worry about ads in AI summaries, even if their accuracy may sometimes be questionable. Hallucinating is apparently less of an offense than selling out.
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However, ads in AI experiences look increasingly like an inevitability. Consumers don’t love ads on TV or streaming either, but they’re endemic to the media ecosystem. Google is already serving ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it may someday bring them to Gemini, too, although company executives deny there are any plans to do this. Regardless of what it does with the Gemini chatbot, Google appears determined to weave advertising into many of its AI experiences, which is hardly a shock.
Big Tech, bigger bite
For the media, this isn’t exactly thrilling news. OpenAI entering the ad business means yet another Big Tech player is competing with them for digital ad dollars alongside platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon. And there’s less traffic to go around since those same AI chatbots summarize content, often negating the need to click through. There’s a reason web traffic to publishers dropped by a third last year.
However, advertising tied to AI answers might end up being exactly the leverage publishers need to make their case for compensation. When a publisher’s content is used to create the answer to a query, the line back to revenue is always somewhat indirectafter all, the user likely subscribed to the chatbot well before they ever typed their question, and most AI services have a free tier anyway. But if your content fuels an answer, and that answer directly leads to revenue for the AI company through either impressions or transactions, the chain from content to dollars is clearer.
It’s also more trackable than it’s ever been. Whereas the world of SEO inferred a lot from search terms and clicks, queries in AI search are more specific, and the tools much better at pinning down intent. Understanding which answers, and what content within them, best facilitate transactions is a very knowable thing.
OpenAI did its best to quash fears about commercialization by stating its first principles of advertising, one of them being that ads will not influence the substance of the answers in ChatGPT. The idea is that if, say, Coca-Cola pays for an ad campaign, then any answer will not be any more or less likely to mention Coke than if that campaign didn’t exist. But I wonder if the answer might be more or less inclined to steer the user toward buying a soft drink in general, with the ad providing a little card for you to tap on that does just that.
Optimize and persuade
Even if OpenAI insists that won’t happen, it can’t speak for all the brands and content providers that fuel the answer. How successful such efforts might be is extremely unclear at this point, but it’s a safe bet they’re going to try. The nascent field of GEO (generative engine optimization) seems destined to give rise to a new dimensionnot just how content affects AI answers, but how it convinces users to take action. You’re not just optimizing for presence, but also for persuadability.
All of this is theoretical, of course, and perhaps Google, OpenAI, and everyone else will succeed in keeping the ad-revenue pie all to themselves. But as revenue from AI answers increases, every marketer on the planet will want to know which answers are the most lucrative, and what content they’re made from. If publishers can prove they’re providing the secret sauce, they’ll have more leverage in demanding their slice.
Proving that value is not trivial. Successful bargaining oer this “content-to-click” effect starts with measuring it, and that’s going to take work. Understanding how content appears in and affects AI answers is brand-new science, but it is science: Experimentation, iteration, and leveraging different kinds of toolslike snippets, bot blocking, and dedicated GEO platformsare what’s needed.
Over the past 25 years, Silicon Valley slowly built tremendous platforms that ended up consuming the vast majority of advertising revenue, locking out the media in the process. And let’s be honest: There’s a good chance artificial intelligence will end up continuing that trend. But the irony of monetizing AI answers with advertising is that it may end up creating the best opportunity for publishers to define exactly how much value they bring to them.
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In 2023, Ken Lux found himself in an FBI briefing on child trafficking. The CEO of Luxe Aviation was there as the past commander of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Air Squadron, a volunteer cadre of 50 general aviation pilots supporting police missions and community service. Lux recalls the FBI agent relaying the story of a since-jailed airline pilot who used his credentials to traffic children to clients in the Philippines with chilling negotiations.
I have a girl thats 12 years old for your client, the pilot said.
The clients response: No, we think we need an 8-year-old.
The group was horrified. I have two daughters, Lux says. We said, ‘Wait a minute, really? Where are these people?’ Until that time, I thought it only happened overseas. And they said, ‘No, it happens in every community in the United States.”
The agent showed them photos of girls crammed into squalid rooms, branded with clipped ears, tattoos, and burns, with life expectations averaging just seven years in such conditions.
A lot of times, its just kids that get mixed up with the wrong people, or somehow get tricked into it. And then they dont know how to get out, Lux says.
Lux and his colleagues would learn the extent of the crisisa $150 billion global criminal enterprise whose size trails only that of illegal drugs. Human trafficking involves more than 27 million victims worldwidewho are forced into marriages, slave labor, military service, organ sales, and sexual exploitation. That includes some 200,000 victims domestically, prompting January to be designated as National Human Trafficking Prevention Month.
Flying rescue missions
The briefing so rattled the squadron pilots that they began volunteering for police rescue missions, focusing on victims of sex trafficking. Their first trip shuttled a trafficked teen in Sacramento back home to Oregon. Then came more requests from surrounding counties and district attorneys needing to ferry the rare survivor brave enough to testify against her captor to court.
F2F Chief Pilot Andrew and K9 Beltane [Photo: Flights to Freedom]
Its really hard to pin down and prosecute these guys because they use burner phones and hide behind technology, Lux says. Its not like the drug business, where they find you with so much cocaine in your car.
As demand grew, Lux realized that they needed a more formalized organization. In April 2024, he founded Flights to Freedom (F2F), a nonprofit that matches 200 volunteer pilots nationwide with law enforcement, Child Protective Services, aftercare advocacy centers, and medical staff. We could probably use 200 [pilots] just in California because the problem is so pervasive, he says.
F2F board adviser Kevin LaRosa, the aerial coordinator for films such as Top Gun: Maverick and F1, considers the organization a lifeline to the most vulnerable. Aviation isnt just about speed and connectivityits about human impact, he says. When law enforcement rescues a child from exploitation, swift and secure transport can literally be the first step toward healing and safety.
F2F has organized just over two dozen flights to transport survivors ages 12 to 24 across 11 states. But it can accept only half of its monthly requests due to time constraints or a lack of planes. Because law enforcement cant reserve rescuers, F2F has only a 24- to 48-hour window to organize flights.
If I cant find a pilot available, we have to turn [down requests], Lux says. Its heartbreaking.
[Photo: Suzette Allen]
The nonprofit operates on a $60,000 budget, which covers insurance and an office at McClellan Airport in Sacramento. It is funded by individual donations and an annual fundraiser at the Aerospace Museum of California, where Lux was a past president. Except for a few regional jets, most of its pilots fly smaller airplanes that hold four to six people. (Luxs ride is a Beechcraft 58 Baron, a six-seater twin-engine plane.) On rare occasions, F2F has chartered flights when it hasnt found a pilot. The problem is, we dont have a lot of money, he adds.
[Photo: Suzette Allen]
Luxs focus for this year is recruiting more pilots (who can apply here), partnering with larger charter companies, and increasing awareness of F2F and similar services like Freedom Aviation Network and Wings of the Way. Hes already mapped out a $750,000 to $1 million plan to eventually expand F2F’s operations. Weve proven it works; now its time to push it to the next level, he says.
The first steps in healing
Every F2F flight includes a chaperoneusually a deputy sheriff, a Child Protective Services advocate, or a licensed therapistwho accompanies the survivors and evaluates both their state of mind and ability to fly by means of a customized psychiatric and medical questionnaire. The chaperone also serves as a buffer between the pilots, who are often male, and the very traumatized survivors.
Theyre often on drugs. Theyve been brainwashed. Theyve been abused up to 20 times per day, Lux says. We dont want someone to have a really bad experience on an airplane with a strange pilot and a strange plane going to different places. We follow a sterile cockpit policytypically, the pilot doesnt know who the deputies or survivors are. Its all confidential. Its all safe.
Victims, sometimes rescued in the middle of the night or in sting operations, are given backpacks with a blanket, a change of clothes, hygiene products, and a blue teddy bear. Theyre walked down a red carpet to the plane entrance and treated to a private jet experienceoften their first time on an airplane.
I feel like we really are one of the first steps in healing, Lux says. We hear back from some of the survivors through the agencies, and theyre just, like, ‘We are so grateful to Flights to Freedom, because it was the first time in my life anyone ever paid attention to me.’
Think of your creativity like a high-performance garden: If you focus only on the visible harvest (outputs) and never allow the soil to lie fallow (liminal space) or the bees to roam freely (play), the ground eventually becomes depleted. Boredom is the signal that the soil needs replenishing, ensuring that your next season of work is a flourish rather than a struggle.
In our current “busyness addiction,” we have come to glorify the hustle, over-indexing on output while neglecting the very well-being that fuels it. We treat leisure and rest like guilty pleasures rather than sacred pauses. Yet the truth of the Imagination Era is this: Our best work often happens when we are not visibly working. To flourish in a world of ubiquitous technology and unprecedented burnout, we must stop grinding and start cultivating what I call the “sexy bits” of productivity: boredom, play, and the magical in-between of liminal space.
Boredom: An Invitation to Create
We often reprimand ourselves for feeling bored, yet boredom is not a behavior to repress, its an invitation. It serves as a neurological cue to find new sources of stimulation. When we allow ourselves to be bored rather than reach for a digital distraction, we activate the brain’s default mode network (DMN), the “meaning-making” part of the brain that connects dots, finds patterns, and synthesizes information when we are not laser-focused on external tasks. It acts like a “washing machine” for our ideas, taking deeply felt information and making sense of it.
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By viewing boredom as a trigger for curiosity, we move away from a mechanical “1 + 1 = 2” productivity mindset toward one of cultivation, where we value what is evolving in the dormant, invisible realm.
Consider the following sobering insights from neuroscience and workplace research.
Mind-wandering is your competitive advantage. While we spend 47% of our waking hours thinking about something other than what we are currently doing, mind-wandering isn’t a distraction. It’s a survival mechanism that, when channeled, aids in aha moments for problem-solving. Daydreaming is scientifically linked to an increase in alpha waves in the brain’s frontal cortex, a pattern directly associated with enhanced divergent thinking and creativity.
Yet we’re suppressing it relentlessly. Here’s where it gets urgent: According to a November 2023 Linearity blog post, 80% of people believe that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth. Yet 75% of respondents in a Thrive My Way study reported being pressured to be “productive” (output-oriented) rather than creative at work. We’re systematically shutting down the very neural pathways that drive innovation.
Heres something you could do to carve out time for creativity at work: Institute “thinking hours” in your calendar, protected time (even just 30 minutes daily) where team members are encouraged to step away from their screens with no agenda. A 2021 study by Tork found that 9 out of 10 employees reported being more likely to stay at a company where management encouraged taking breaks. That’s not wellness theater; that’s a retention strategy with a 90% success rate.
So position this carved-out time explicitly as creative work, not procrastination. Measure the impact on idea generation in your next sprint or project cycle.
The Power of Play and Meta-Cognition
To navigate today’s complex systems, we must reintroduce play, which toy designer Brendan Boyle defines simply as “engagement.” The opposite of play isn’t work; the opposite of play is boredom. Integrating play at work, whether through prototyping rough draft mock-ups or gamifying meetings, boosts morale and stimulates critical executive leadership skills like empathy, negotiation, and the ability to improvise.
This playful mindset is enhanced by meta-cognition: the practice of thinking about one’s own thinking. By engaging in what I call “backcasting” (reflecting on past experiences to make sense of skills acquired) we build an “inventory of courage.” This self-inquiry allows us to recognize that our pains plus our gains equal our assets, providing the firm foundation needed to leap into the unknown.
The data on this is striking, and it challenges everything we think we know about efficiency.
That same research by Thrive My Way showed that creativity training delivers a 350% return on engagement. Groups trained in creativity tools and principles generated 350% as many ideasand those ideas were 415% more originalthan those from untrained groups. This isn’t a soft-skill metric. This is innovation measured in the ideas that move your business forward.
But we’re facing an engagement crisis. As of 2024, only 20% of employees are engaged, marking the lowest level of employee engagement ever recorded. We’re grinding harder while our teams check out. The correlation is clear: We’ve optimized engagement out of work entirely.
You can avert an engagement crisis at your own company by launching a “play audit” in your next strategy session. Identify two nonnegotiable meetings per month that will be redesigned around play. Those could be improv exercises, Lego Serious Play, or physical problem-solving. Track engagement scores and idea quality before and after. You’ll likely find that the most serious strategic challenges get solved when your team stops taking them so seriously.
Engaging the Liminal Space Amid Distraction
We live in an age of “stolen focus, where the average knowledge worker now switches tasks every 47 seconds. The shift is staggering: In 2004, the average knowledge worker switched tasks every three minutes. That’s a 73% compression of attention span in less than two decades.
Research from distraction expert Gloria Mark indicates that we spend approximately 47% of our waking hours tinking about what isn’t currently happening, a type of mind-wandering often linked to unhappiness. This constant task-switching drains cognitive resources and spikes cortisol levels, creating a neurological state designed for crisis response, not creativity.
The antidote is to intentionally engage in liminal spacethat transitional “betwixt and between” phase where growth happens under the surface. Liminality can be physical, like a commute, or metaphorical, like the fallow time between project cycles. Instead of filling every gap with a screen, we should embrace restorative ambiguity, where we feel expectant and at peace in the not knowing.
The financial toll of ignoring this is substantial, and something we all need to hear.
Burnout is an economic crisis masquerading as a personal problem. Workplace stress is not just a personal issue but a massive economic one, costing U.S. industries more than $300 billion annually in absenteeism, turnover, and diminished productivity. Some 71% of knowledge workers reported experiencing burnout at least once in 2020, with burned-out employees taking 60% more sick days and being 2.6 times more likely to seek a different job.
Many of us are performing productivity instead of creating it. The pressure to appear busy is pervasive, with 83% of full-time U.S. workers admitting to engaging in “performative work behaviors” (productivity theater) in the past year. Your teams aren’t actually more productive, they’re just better at looking busy while running on fumes.
Whether it’s a two-minute daydream break or a weeklong sabbatical, these pauses allow us to unburden the cognitive load on our neocortex. By valuing the dormant times as much as the growth spurts, we transform our work from a series of tasks into a progression of cultivated learning experiences. In this new operating system, rest is not a soft perk, its a fundamental human right and a critical tool for sustainable, innovative leadership.
Try mapping your organization’s task-switching velocity. How often are meetings scheduled back-to-back? How many channels are teams expected to monitor? Implement “no-meeting blocks, similar to what Zapier did when it instituted a get stuff done week. These could be two-hour windows weekly where no meetings are scheduled. Explicitly frame these as liminal space where people can complete deep work or simply think. Monitor retention and productivity metrics over a quarter. You’ll likely see both move upward.
The Bottom Line
We stand at a crossroads. We can continue grinding our teams into burnout while generating incrementally better ideas, or we can cultivate organizations that honor boredom, play, and strategic pause as the foundations of sustainable innovation. The choice sounds simple until you realize it requires us to fundamentally redefine what “productivity” means.
The organizations that will outthink their competition in the next five years won’t be the ones that eliminated downtime. They’ll be the ones brave enough to design it in. They’ll be the leaders who understand that creativity isn’t a luxury, it’s infrastructure. And they’ll be the companies that attract and retain the best talent because they respect something far more valuable than productivity theater: the human capacity to flourish.
Your move.
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Henry Ford famously noted, Whether you think you can do it or not, you are usually right. His point was that beliefs, especially about our talents, performance, and even luck, can be self-fulfilling. Irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, they will become true by influencing objective success outcomes.
Ford was hardly alone. Along the same lines, decades of psychological research show that beliefs matter, often profoundly so. Perhaps the most influential work comes from Albert Banduras theory of self-efficacy, defined as peoples beliefs in their capability to organize and execute the actions required to manage prospective situations. Across hundreds of studies, higher self-efficacy has been linked to greater motivation, resilience, learning, and performance. People who believe they can improve are more likely to set challenging goals, invest effort, persist in the face of difficulty, and recover from failure.
Closely related ideas emerged from attribution theory and expectancy value models, which showed that individuals who attribute success to effort rather than fixed ability, and who believe their actions will make a difference, tend to perform better in school and at work. The most popular variant of these, at least in the world of HR and management, has been Carol Dwecks research on growth versus fixed mindsets, which popularized the idea that believing that abilities can be developed encourages learning-oriented behavior, greater perseverance, and better responses to feedback.
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Taken together, this body of research persuaded a large number of people of the importance of mindset, implying a counterintuitive causal chain whereby beliefs shape performancerather than the other way around. Specifically, the story goes, irrespective of how rational our thoughts are, they will likely shape attention, effort, emotional reactions, and behavior, which in turn impacts tangible results and outcomes.
A mental software update
Suitably, much of the self-help industry has run with this idea at full speed. Bookstores, podcasts, LinkedIn feeds, and corporate off-sites are now saturated with advice urging us to reframe, manifest, believe harder, and upgrade our mindset. According to this logic, success is largely a mental software update away. Change your thoughts, and the universe will follow!
This is where things start to get a little silly. Mindset does not suspend physics, probability, or competence. It still matters whether you can actually cross the road without getting hit by a bus. And even if you firmly believe you are Serena Williams on the tennis court, lacking the ability to play tennis means you may be the only person on earth who shares that belief. Confidence does not magically produce a serve, a backhand, or a Grand Slam title.
Motivational cosplay
At its most extreme, mindset culture drifts into motivational cosplay: people repeating affirmations in the mirror while ignoring the inconvenient details of skill, preparation, competition, and luck. Worse, it can quietly turn failure into a moral flaw. If you didnt succeed, you must not have believed enough, visualized hard enough, or optimized your morning routine sufficiently. Structural barriers, unequal opportunities, and plain bad luck are written out of the story.
The irony is that the science never claimed mindset was omnipotent. Beliefs help when they are tethered to reality. They amplify effort, persistence, and learning, but they cannot substitute for ability, practice, or opportunity. Positive thinking works best when paired with negative feedback, deliberate practice, and a sober assessment of constraints.
In short, mindset matters (a bit), but not in the magical way the self-help industry sells it. Thinking you can do something helps you try. It does not guarantee you will succeed. And no amount of positive thinking will turn wishful confidence into world-class talent.
Modest effects
Indeed, a closer look at the scientific evidence indicates that popular interpretations on the power of mindset and positive thinking have gone too far.
First, the effects of mindset are actually not that large. Meta-analyses show that growth mindset interventions produce small to moderate effects, particularly when compared with structural factors such as prior ability, socioeconomic status, quality of instruction, or access to opportunity. Put differently, believing you can improve is helpful, but it is no substitute for actually improving. Between thinking you are as good as Lionel Messi and being half as good as him, the latter is unequivocally preferableunless your goal is to impress people who dont understand soccer, in which case you can hope to deceive or fool them! Confidence without competence may feel empowering, but it rarely wins matches, promotions, or championships. (It does make for popular sitcom characters like Michael Scott or David Brent, though.)
Second, beliefs do not operate in a vacuum. Confidence helps most when it is paired with real skills, feedback, and environments that reward effort. The problem with overvaluing confidence or self-belief is that, roughly half the time, it is correlated with actual ability. When people are genuinely competent, their confidence is often earned, which is why Muhammad Ali could plausibly claim that it isnt bragging if you can back it up. In those cases, belief is less a psychological trick than a reasonably accurate signal of underlying skill.
The trouble starts when confidence drifts away from competence. Underconfidence, while uncomfortable, can be oddly functional: It pushes people to prepare more, seek feedback, and close gaps they suspect (or know) they have. Accurate confidence, by contrast, reflects self-awarenssa realistic calibration between what one can do and what the situation demands. Delusional confidence is different altogether. It may help people impress, persuade, or temporarily fool others, but this is usually a short-lived strategy unless everyone else is equally deluded. When confidence consistently outruns competence, the cost is eventually paid, either by the individual when reality catches up or by everyone else who has to deal with the consequences.
Third, an excessive focus on mindset risks slipping into a form of psychological moralizing, where success is credited to the right attitude and failure is blamed on the individuals thinking rather than on constraints, inequality, or bad luck. This becomes especially problematic when people are encouraged to believe not only that they live in a meritocracy, but also that their outcomes hinge primarily on how strongly they believe in themselves. In such a world, effort and optimism are not just virtues but moral obligations, and when success does not materialize, the only plausible culprit left is the self.
The result is a quiet but corrosive form of self-blame. If belief is supposed to be the main lever of success, then failing to succeed feels like a personal deficiency of character, motivation, or mental toughness. Structural barriers fade into the background, while disappointment is internalized as guilt. Ironically, this narrative can be demotivating, not empowering.
A better way
A more helpful alternative would be to focus less on upgrading peoples beliefs and more on developing their actual skills and competence. This remains valuable even when individuals start out with low confidence in their abilities, which may simply reflect an accurate awareness of the gap between their current and ideal selves. Closing that gap through practice, feedback, and learning does more for long-term performance and well-being than insisting people feel confident before they have much to be confident about.
Needless to say, there is also evidence that positive beliefs can backfire when they become detached from reality. Inflated self-beliefs are linked to poor calibration, overconfidence, and reckless decision-making. In organizational settings, confidence without competence can be costly, especially when it crowds out learning, dissent, or accurate self-assessment.
In some cases, acknowledging that you are simply not very good at something is not an act of pessimism but of strategic realism. Persisting in a poorly matched role or career path on the basis of false hope can be actively harmful. Psychologists refer to this as false positive self-beliefs or miscalibrated optimism (which appear to be the norm), where individuals overestimate their likelihood of success and continue investing in goals that are unlikely to pay off. By contrast, recognizing limits early allows people to redirect their effort toward domains where their abilities, interests, and opportunities are better aligned.
There is also a social cost to miscalibration. If others realize you are less capable than you believe yourself to be, the reputational penalty is typically higher than if you had reached that conclusion first. Self-awareness signals judgment and maturity; obliviousness signals risk. In practice, what matters most is not how good you think you are, but how good others think you are, because it is other people who allocate opportunities, responsibilities, promotions, and trust.
Ironically, some of the best performers are those who initially underestimate themselves. Mild underconfidence can motivate preparation, learning, and skill acquisition, leading to steady improvement and positive surprises. Conversely, people who overestimate their abilities often stagnate, mistaking confidence for progress and reassurance for feedback. Over time, belief divorced from performance does not just fail to help; it actively prevents development.
The science, then, supports a more nuanced conclusion. Mindset matters, but it is not magic. Beliefs are best understood as enablers rather than engines of success. They help people make use of their abilities and opportunities, but they cannot substitute for them.
And yet, we tend to praise self-belief far more enthusiastically than self-knowledge. Confidence is celebrated as a virtue; realism is often mistaken for negativity. But from the perspective of everyone else, self-knowledge is usually the more valuable trait. Most of us have worked with at least one person who is spectacularly pleased with themselves, modestly competent at best, and blissfully unaware of the gap between the two. Their confidence may be admirable in the abstract, but it is considerably less charming when they are making decisions, leading teams, or presenting their vision.
If we evaluated the world from other peoples point of view, we would quickly realize that it is not in anyones interest for the unjustifiably confident to succeed because of those very flaws. When people advance on the strength of misplaced self-belief rather than demonstrated competence, the costs are externalized: Colleagues pick up the slack, organizations absorb the damage, and reality eventually intervenes, often expensively.
A healthier mindset, then, is not blind optimism but informed confidence: knowing what you can do, what you cannot yet do, and where your effort will actually pay off. In short, self-belief may feel good, but self-knowledge gets things done.
Reality rewards competence, not confidence. The only role of belief is to signal whether you know the difference.
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If youre a millennial and youre going through your midlife crisis, this post is for you.
So begins a viral TikTok video posted last month by comedian Mike Mancusi. Many millennials are now in their forties, with the youngest about to turn 30, putting the generation at the beginning of the unofficial age bracket when midlife crises traditionally hit.
But Mancusi argues that the millennial version is a singular experience.
For past generations, a midlife crisis followed a familiar blueprint: graduate college, climb the career ladder, get married, have kids, thensomewhere between roughly 40 and 60confront mortality and blow it all up for a red sports car or a younger trophy partner.
That is not the case for millennials, many of whom missed those milestones due to economic and social upheaval during their formative years. In fact, according to a 2024 study from mental health platform Thriving Center of Psychology, 81% of millennials polled said they couldnt afford to have a midlife crisis.
Can you imagine having a midlife crisis while owning your home, easily paying all your bills, and saving for retirement? one user commented on Mancusis post. Like what?
Mancusi suggests theres another reason at play.
Other generations’ midlife crisis has been built off of looking forward, he says in the clip. Ours has been built off of looking back.
Where midlife crises were once triggered by a sense of fading youth, millennials are reckoning with something else entirely. We look back and go, Wait a minute, I was told to do all these things. I did them, and still I’m not happy, Mancusi explains. And that is a way different crisis.
The stability that previous generations found stifling rarely exists in the same way today. The social contract between employees and employers has fractured. Millennials who followed the prescribed path and climbed the ladder are now realizing that the stability and success they were promised is largely a pipe dream.
A majority of U.S. workers (60%) dont have a quality job that provides basic financial well-being, safety, and autonomy, among other things, according to Gallup research. These days, 71% of millennial employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, according to a separate Gallup report, and about 66% of millennials report moderate or high levels of burnout, according to a recent Aflac report.
The problem for millennials is we listened, one commenter wrote.
As another put it: Our crisis isnt mid-life, its existential.
Mancusis recommendation for anyone who fears a midlife or existential crisis coming on: You have to find something else to do, he says. I don’t know what you’re into, but you need to find that thing and build it into every single day, because that is what’s going to allow you to move forward in a way that you feel in control of and that you feel passionate about.
In other words, instead of a sports car, get a hobby.
