The announcement earlier this week that the Minnesota National Guard was standing by to assist local law enforcement and public safety agencies in and around Minneapolis-St. Paul included a surprising detail. If our members are activated, it read, they will be wearing reflective vests to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.
From a design perspective, the whole point of uniforms is to provide an instant visual signal. But that mission has been thwarted in the ongoing besiegement of the Twin Cities by thousands of officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection, and other federal agencies. Most notably, many sport camouflage and gear that civilians tend to associate with the military. The upshot is that its become harder for the average person to understand at a glance who is there to do what.
A Minnesota Army National Guard Captain walks past demonstrators in Minneapolis, Minnesota. January 17, 2026. [Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images]
Certainly the presence of uniformed members of multiple agencies seems out of hand when the National Guard has to start wearing crossing guard vests to distinguish themselves. The situation would be comical if it werent so bleak, as if its apparently become necessary for members of the U.S. military to visually announce, hey were here to help, not an occupying army or a threat.
In a way, this throws into sharp relief how effective the ICE aesthetic has been in projecting a quasi-militaristic version of federal law enforcement. The agencys look has been attracting attention for months as it has pursued undocumented immigrants (or just people it suspects might be) in crackdowns in Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, often showing up at work sites or public spaces in what resembles military tactical gear, body armor, weapons, and masks.
As a GQ assessment of the ICE look pointed out, the agency does not have a single mandatory uniform, just a set of guidelines that give agents latitude to mix street clothes with military-pattern gear, fitted with patches or plate carriers labeled ICE. Most notoriously, many choose to wear gaiter-style masks, to protect their identity and avoid being doxed or otherwise retaliated against. To critics, the upshot of this aesthetic is a lack of transparency and a sense of intimidation: Intentionally or not, the look signals a disruptive, occupying force. You’ve got cops geared up like they’re ready to go fight in Fallujah, one Redditor commented, in order to arrest some cooks and landscapers.
At the very least, the overlapping uniform styles can be a source of confusion. If military veterans have to look very hard at images and footage to figure out individual affiliations, then the average citizen is going to easily confuse what they see as a militarized response rather than a law enforcement one, retired Marine Col. David Lapan, a former spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of Homeland Security, told military news site Task & Purpose. Worst case scenario, Lapan added: It creates the perception that the U.S. military is being used to suppress the American people.
Minnesota Army National Guard soldiers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. January 17, 2026. [Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images]
So far the Guard has not been deployed to city streets in Minneapolis; in a press statement, the Minnesota National Guard said they remain on alert could be called on for traffic support to protect life, preserve property, and support the rights of all Minnesotans to assemble peacefully.
Underlying the potential visual confusion is the question of whether camouflage serves any particular function for federal agents operating on city streets in the first place. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, best known for his blunt-talking style while overseeing the National Guard deployment to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, pointed out to Task & Purpose: Theres nothing that a camouflage uniform can do for you in an urban operation other than [to] portray a sense of authority. His suggestion to non-military agencies currently using camo: Go get your own goddamned uniforms.
If youre a typical American, you get home from work and start flipping switches and turning knobsdoing laundry, cooking dinner, watching TV. With so many other folks doing the same, the strain on the electrical grid in residential areas is highest at this time. That demand will only grow as the world moves away from fossil fuels, with more people buying induction stoves, heat pumps, and electric vehicles.
Thats a challenge for utilities, which are already managing creaky grids across the United States, all while trying to meet a growing demand for power. So theyre now trying to turn EVs from a burden into a boon. More and more models, for instance, feature vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, capabilities, meaning they can send power to the grid as needed. Others are experimenting with whats called active managed charging, in which algorithms stagger when EVs charge, instead of them all drawing energy as soon as their owners plug in. The idea is for some people to charge later, but still have a full battery when they leave for work in the morning.
A new report from the Brattle Group, an economic and energy consultancy, done for EnergyHub, which develops such technology, has used real-world data from EV owners in Washington state to demonstrate the potential of this approach, both for utilities and drivers. They found that an active managed charging program saves up to $400 per EV each year, and the vehicles were still always fully charged in the morning. Utilities, too, seem to benefit, as the redistributed demand results in less of a spike in the early evening. That, in turn, would mean that a utility can delay costly upgradeswhich they need in order to accommodate increased electrificationsaving ratepayers money.
Active managed charging works in conjunction with something called time of use, in which a utility charges different rates depending on the time of day. Between 4 and 9 p.m., when demand is high, rates are also high. But after 9 p.m., they fall. EV owners who wait until later in the evening to charge pay less for the same electricity.
Time-of-use pricing discourages energy use when demand is highest, lightening the load and reducing how much electricity utilities need to generate. But theres nothing stopping everyone from plugging in as soon as cheaper rates kick in at 9 p.m. As EV adoption grows, that coordination problem can create a new spike in demand. An EV can be on its own twice the peak load of a typical home, said Akhilesh Ramakrishnan, managing energy associate at the Brattle Group. You get to the point where they start needing to be managed differently.
Thats where active managed charging comes in. Using an app, an EV owner indicates when they need their car to be charged, and how much charge their battery needs for the day. (The app also learns over time to predict when a vehicle will unplug.) When they get home at 6 p.m., the owner can plug in, but the car wont begin to charge. Instead, the system waits until some point in the night to turn on the juice, leaving enough time to fully charge the vehicle by the indicated hour. If customers dont believe that were going to get them there, then theyre not going to allow us to control their vehicle effectively, said Freddie Hall, a data scientist at EnergyHub.
The typical driver only goes 30 miles in a day, Hall added, requiring about two hours of charging each night. By actively managing many cars across neighborhoods, the system can more evenly distribute demand throughout the night: Folks will leave for work earlier or later than their neighbors, vehicles with bigger batteries will need more time to charge, and some will be almost empty while others may need to top up.
Theyre all still getting the lower prices with time-of-use rates, but theyre not taxing the grid by all charging at 9 p.m. The results are actually very, very promising in terms of reducing the peak loads, said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego, who wasnt involved in the report. It shows big potential for reducing costs of EV charging in general.
Active managed charging would allow the grid to accommodate twice the number of EVs before a utility has to start upgrading the system to handle the added load, according to the report. (And consider all the additional demand for energy from things like data centers.) Those costs inevitably get passed down to all ratepayers. But, the report notes, active managed charging could delay those upgrades by up to a decade. As EVs grow, if you dont implement these solutions, theres going to be a lot more upgrades, and thats going to lead to rate impacts for everyone, Ramakrishnan said.
At the same time, EVs could help reduce those rates in the long term, thanks to V2G, a separate emerging technology. It allows a utility to call on EVs sitting in garages as a vast network of backup power. So when demand surges, those vehicles can send power to the grid for others to use, or just power the house theyre sitting in, essentially removing the structure from the grid and lowering demand. (And think of all the fleets of electric vehicles, like school buses, with huge batteries to use as additional power.) With all that backup energy, utilities might not need to build as many costly battery facilities of their own, projects that ratepayers wouldnt need to foot the bill for.
Active managed charging and V2G could work in concert, with some batteries draining at 6 p.m. as they provide energy, then recharging later at night. But that ballet will require more large-scale experimentation. How are we going to fit in discharging a battery, as well as charging it overnight? Hall said. Because you do want it available the next day.
To cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible, the world needs more EVs. Now its just a matter of making them benefit the grid instead of taxing it.
This article originally appeared in Grist.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
When I tell fellow tech executives that every employee at sunday, from our engineers to our finance team, must complete a restaurant shift before they can fully onboard, I usually get confused looks. “You mean like, shadow someone?” they ask. No. I mean they tie on an apron, take orders, run food, and yes, deal with the 15-minute wait for the check that our product was literally built to eliminate.
It sounds extreme. It is extreme. And it’s also one of the smartest business decisions we’ve made.
Here’s why: business is often removed from the industries we serve. Were keeping that empathy right there.
The Empathy Gap in Tech
I’ve spent 25 years in the tech world, scaling e-commerce unicorns in Europe before cofounding sunday. I’ve seen brilliant engineers build elegant solutions to problems they’ve never personally experienced. I’ve watched product teams debate restaurant workflows they’ve only seen in wireframes. The result? Products that work in theory but fail in the chaos of a Friday night dinner rush.
Using our industry as an example, the restaurant space cant be disrupted from a distance. It’s intensely human. A server manages six tables, remembers who wanted dressing on the side, tracks which kitchen orders are running late, and still needs to radiate warmth when checking on the anniversary couple at table twelve. When we ask them to adopt new technology, we’re not just changing their workflow, we’re asking them to trust us with their tips, their table turn times, and their relationship with guests.
You can’t design for that kind of stakes without understanding them viscerally.
What a Saturday Night Shift Teaches a Software Engineer
Last month, I watched our newest engineer finish his restaurant shift at one of our partner locations. He was confident going in; he understood our API integrations, he knew our payment flow inside and out. But after five hours on his feet, he had a revelation.
“At the end of my shift, I had to manually enter tips from 22 tables into the POS system,” he told me, exhausted. “Twenty-two times typing in amounts, double-checking I got the numbers right, worrying I’d accidentally shortchange myself or mess up the restaurant’s accounting. The whole time I’m thinking about the train I’m about to miss, and I’m doing math in my head to see if my night was even worth it. It took 15 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.”
This wasn’t theoretical anymore. “I finally understood what we’re actually saving people from,” he told me the next day. “It’s not just 15 minutesit’s the mental load of worrying you made a mistake, the frustration of doing data entry when you’re exhausted, the indignity of technology making your life harder instead of easier. When I use sunday now, I know exactly whose time I’m giving back.”
That’s the point. Empathy at scale isn’t built through user research reports. It’s built through experience.
Hospitality as a Business Philosophy
What started as a practical requirement has become central to how we think about everything at sunday. Hospitality isn’t about being nice. It’s about anticipating needs, moving with urgency, and making people feel valued even under pressure.
Those principles translate directly to how we run our business.
When a restaurant partner calls with an issue, our support team doesn’t respond with ticket numbers and SLAs. They respond like servers handling a complaint: with immediate acknowledgment, genuine concern, and a bias toward solving the problem now rather than escalating it later. Our customer success team knows that “I’ll get back to you tomorrow” is the tech equivalent of “your food will be out in a few minutes”a polite deflection that erodes trust.
We’ve also borrowed the restaurant world’s obsession with the guest experience. In hospitality, there’s no such thing as “that’s not my table.” If a guest needs something, you handle it. We’ve tried to instill that same mentality. When a new market launch hits a snag, our engineers don’t wait for the ops team to flag it. When a sales issue arises, our product managers jump in. We move like a restaurant team during a rushfluid, collaborative, and focused on the experience we’re creating.
The Metrics That Matter
Here’s what surprised me most: this policy has become one of our best retention and recruiting tools.
We’ve had a 94% retention rate among employees who complete the restaurant shift program, compared to 78% at my previous tech companies. Employees consistently rank it as one of their most valuable onboarding experiences.
New hires tell us they appreciate working somewhere that values understanding over assumption. They like that leadership doesn’t just talk about customer obsessionwe quite literally make them walk in our customers’ shoes (and sensible non-slip ones at that).
And when we hire, the restaurant shift requirement self-selects for people with the right mindset. Candidates who balk at the idea of working a shift often aren’t the right fit for our culture anyway. The ones who light up at the challenge? Those are our people.
The tech industry loves to talk about disruption, but we’re often remarkably detached from the industries we claim to understand. We optimize for what we can measure: clicks, conversions, load times. And we miss what we can’t, the relief on a server’s face when they don’t have to chase down a credit card, the gratitude of a mom who can split a check without asking for help, the pride a restaurant owner feels when their team has more time to create memorable moments.
Making our employees work restaurant shifts isn’t a cute culture quirk or a team-building exercise. It’s a business imperative. Every hour our team spends in a restaurant is an investment in building a product that actually solves real problems, not imagined ones.
A Challenge to Tech Leaders
I’d encourage every tech CEO, especially those building B2B products, to ask yourself: When was the last time you personally experienced the problem your product solves? Not observed it. Not read about it in research. Actually lived it?
If the answer is “never” or “it’s been years,” you have a dangerous knowledge gap. Your team is making decisions based on assumptions, building for personas instead of people, and probably missing opportunities that would be obvious to anyone who spent a day in your customers’ reality.
You don’t need to make it a formal policy like we have. But you do need to close the empathy gap between your builders and your users. Shadow a shift. Take customer service calls. Use your competitor’s products. Do whatever it takes to remember that behind every user statistic is a human being trying to do their job, feed their family, or simply have a nice dinner without waiting 15 minutes for the check.
At sunday, we’ve learned that great technology in the hospitality space doesn’t come from brillian engineers alone. It comes from brilliant engineers who’ve burned their hand on a plate, forgotten which table ordered the gluten-free option, and felt genuine panic when the payment system hiccups during a Saturday night rush.
That’s not just good culture. That’s good business.
So, youve finally done it. No more putting it off, pushing through the grind, waiting for a more opportune time once things settle down. Alas, youve mustered up the gall to cash in on your paid vacation time. Now you have several days strung together to travel, rest, or do whatever the heck your heart desires. I love that for you.
But before you slam your work laptop shut and Yabba dabba doo! your ass out of the office, theres one last thing. Youve gotta leave behind a message letting folks know youll be gone. You need to draft an out-of-office message.
Out-of-office notes tend to be pretty standardcourtesy auto-replies letting folks know youre not working, when youll be back, and who, if anyone, they can contact in your stead. Sometimes people add a pop of color hinting at a life outside the office. But these things generally tend to be pretty vanilla.
I, for one, wish corporate peeps got more real with this messaging. Treat these notes like early-stage Facebook status updates: Share what youre really thinking, feeling, and experiencing. This year is already a mess; immigrants continue to be targeted by the federal government, unemployment numbers remain dismal, and it seems like everyones got the flu. Why not keep it 100 for whoever reaches out in the interim?
Longtime readers will remember when I presented a list of pandemic-era openers as alternatives to I hope this email finds you well. Here are some OOO notes I wish I had the heart to schedule. Deploy at your own risk.
I am currently out of office, taking advantage of PTO that is technically unlimited but spiritually frowned upon.
I am currently out of office, taking advantage of PTO that is technically unlimited but managerially frowned upon.
I am currently out of office to recharge after running on vibes, caffeine, and anxiety for six consecutive quarters.
I am out of office avoiding the news for my mental health. Please do not forward any think pieces.
I am currently out of office closing the approximately 637 tabs I have openboth literally and mentally.
I am currently out of office, wearing a quarter-zip sweater and drinking matcha. I hope this auto-reply finds you doing the same.
Im OOO using the gym membership I will abandon by February.
I am currently out of office, ignoring my inbox like its a group chat that is doing the most while Im trying to do the least.
Ill be out of the office while my outie binge-watches Severance and realizes this job feels familiar. Upon my return, the work will continue to be mysterious and important.
I am currently out of office, unpacking last year with a licensed professional.
I am currently out of office, pondering the spiritual meaning of six-seven.
I am currently out of office, updating my résumé just in case.
I am currently out of office, rewatching Sinners so I can feel something again.
I am currently out of office but will absolutely read this message anyway and respond once my brain stops buffering.
I am currently out of office and launching my side hustle. Please subscribe to my Substack.
I am currently out of office, but will be bumping that new A$AP Rocky album until further notice.
Im OOO until my burnout is no longer a personality trait.
I am currently out of office pivoting to my new self. Lets table this and circle back in Q2, when I have the bandwidth to get my ducks in a row.
I am currently out of office, but dont expect a response as soon as I get back. Ill need a few days to remember how to do my job.
I am currently out of office, but unfortunately still mentally available.
We cant afford to maintain the roads we have, so why do we keep building more?
The Highway Trust Fund is the primary federal mechanism for surface transportation. It receives revenue mainly from the federal fuel tax (18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon on diesel) plus taxes on tires, heavy vehicles, and some other sources. The fund has two accounts: (1) the Highway Account (road construction, maintenance, and other surface transportation projects), and (2) the much smaller Mass Transit Account.
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Debates about how Americans should pay for roads are endless:
General taxpayer funding, regardless of whether someone drives
Per-mile charges (vehicle miles traveled fees)
Weight-based fees, since heavy trucks and EVs cause disproportionate damage
And the less common full privatization, letting owners/operators set tolls and other forms of charging road users
But the debates often sidestep or ignore any sense of urgency. The fact is there’s a massive and growing funding gap. Under the current setup, we cant afford to maintain whats already been built, let alone pay to build and maintain new construction projects. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) sounds the alarm, even if its in dry, academic language.
Shortfall
Historically, most federal spending for highways has been paid for by revenueslargely from excise taxes on gasoline, diesel, and other motor fuelsthat are credited to the highway account of the Highway Trust Fund (HTF). For more than two decades, those revenues have fallen short of federal spending on highways, prompting transfers from the Treasurys general fund to the trust fund to make up the difference.
The CBO projects that balances in both the highway and transit accounts of the HTF will be exhausted in 2028. If the taxes that are currently credited to the trust fund remained in place and if funding for highway and transit programs increased annually at the rate of inflation, the shortfalls accumulated in the HTFs highway and transit accounts from 2024 to 2033 would total $241 billion, according to CBOs May 2023 baseline budget projections.
The HTF is in a state of bankruptcy, but we keep chugging along as if theres no real financial urgency. For more than 20 years, taxpayers have been subsidizing roads because the people who use the roads dont pay enough to cover the costs. The fund has avoided collapse only through repeated bailouts from the U.S. Treasury’s general fund totaling more than $275 billion since the mid-2000s.
Who should pay?
Tapping into the general fund might seem fair if all taxpayers put the same amount of wear and tear on the transportation system, but thats obviously not the case.
About 19% of people ages 20 to 24 dont have a drivers license, and 30% to 40% of people older than 85 dont have a drivers license. Not to mention the wide variety of driving contexts of people who are licensed, the types of vehicles used, and how often they contribute to clogged street networks during rush hours.
The underlying revenue problem has to be fixed, which means the debate has to go deeper, from Who should pay? to How do we make sure revenue covers road expenses?
Systemic problem is an overused term in urbanism, but thats the best way to describe the transportation funding debacle. Cars are more fuel efficient, EVs pay no fuel tax, and other taxes have stayed the same since the early 1990s. Im not even arguing in favor of taxes, Im simply drawing your attention to the obvious problem that there isnt enough money to cover the costs of road maintenance or road expansion.
Basic budgeting
If we treated this issue like a household budget facing chronic overspending, the questions would be straightforward:
How can we reduce expenses?
How can we increase revenue?
Is maintenance more important than new construction?
If we can’t even afford to maintain the current system, how quickly can we halt new spending on expansions?
What alternative mobility options (transit, biking, walking, ridesharing, remote work) can ease the burden using the infrastructure we already have?
This fiscal disaster isn’t abstract policy wonkery, it’s a hard constraint on what the U.S. can realistically build and maintain. Ignoring it risks more patchwork bailouts, more maintenance delays, and eventual service breakdowns. Bottom line, we need to ask better questions and vigorously explore and debate the trade-offs.
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While it seems that some agreement has been reached to placate Donald Trumps obsession with taking over Greenland, details are still being revealed. So the possibility that the nascent trade war over the issue that was heating up before the announcement of an agreement could restart.
If it does, leaders in European capitals have looked at what levers are available to pull to try and dissuade the U.S. president from moving toward more aggressive action. Some of the most significant U.S. exports are its tech apps, services, and platforms, putting them first in the firing line. U.S. social media platforms, for instance, account for more than a third of the entire value of the S&Pmeaning any impact on them could be deleterious to the broader American economy.
Within Brussels, the hub of European legislative decision-making, there has been discussion of how to bring some of the U.S.s more outlandish ideas into line with the global order, says Zach Meyers, director of research at the Center on Regulation in Europe, noting, Since they mostly provide services rather than physical products, reciprocal tariffs would not work.
The European Union could use what has been described as its big bazooka: the so-called Anti-Coercion Instrument. Thats specifically designed to deter and address this type of geopolitical bullying, says Meyers, and includes a huge menu of other restrictions on how Big Tech [companies] operate in Europe, such as limitations on exploiting IP rights, on being able to compete in public procurement, and constraining incoming investment.
However, European leaders have held off deploying the bazooka in this current skirmish, fearing that it could raise the geopolitical temperature and invite an equally (or more) harmful response from Trump.
But the inability to use one method, and the skittishness about using another, doesnt mean there arent ways to try and bring Trump back to reality.
Unlike the brash, geopolitics-altering Truth Social posts that twist the world on its axis, any European response would likely be much more subtle, though no less significant, experts argue.
There will be no ‘slamming of the door, as banning major U.S. platforms would anger a lot of European consumers, disrupt businesses, and undermine Europes own digital economy, says Francesca Musiani, senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Researchnot to say what it would do to the U.S. presidents blood pressure. Subtler strategies give Europe some room to keep the market open but make success inside it progressively harder.
Musiani adds, If a trade war between Europe and the United States were to spill into the tech sector, it probably would unfold more like a slow, grinding campaign: legal, relentlessly procedural, and very expensive for American firms. Such a war would likely be waged through the European Unions comprehensive tech-focused laws, including the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act; both were passed in 2022 but more recently began being enforced.
Europe is also considering a handful of other legislative packages, including a Digital Networks Act, which would govern telecommunications providers, and an amended Cybersecurity Act proposed this week.
The continents proclivity for cracking down on tech has already prompted plenty of noise from Trump allies, who have called it foreign censorship. But enactment and enforcement could be ramped up significantly if European legislators deemed it necessary. Nothing would be framed as retaliation, rather as consumer protection or competition, but the targets would be obvious, Musiani says.
Indeed, long before Trump stepped up his rhetoric on acquiring Greenland, Europe had been considering implementing taxation on tech firms operating in Europe. That would likely be the next lever to pull, Musiani believes, including digital services taxes that could expand or be harmonized across more member states, hitting online advertising, cloud services, and marketplaces.
Those are all short-term measures designed to act as a stopgap while the longer-term, larger goal is achieved: decoupling Europes tech stack from an overreliance on U.S. entities.
In the long run, the huge loss of transatlantic trust caused by Trump’s threats will almost certainly support the growing push for Europe to act more assertively to boost its own tech sector, says Meyers. That could take the form of buy European rules, but is already shaping up in the movement to develop a European tech stack that doesnt require paying money to, or the threat of being held hostage by, U.S. hardware providers.
For Trump, whose focus tends to be on his own personal short-term and immediate gains, that longer-term impact might not be front of mind. But it ought to be for the Americans he represents.
Below, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein shares five key insights from her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.
Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of 10 books of acclaimed fiction and nonfiction and has held various visiting professorships and fellowships at elite academic institutions. Her first novel was The Mind-Body Problem.
Whats the big idea?
We all want to feel connected to others and know that we matter. The ways we go about making our lives matter shape who we are, the meaning we find, and the mark we leave on the world.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Goldstein herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea app.
1. Our need to feel that we matter in the way that most matters to us is one of the two prime motivators of human behavior.
The other prime motivator is our need for connectedness. Theres a tendency to confuse these two, since they both have to do, in a certain sense, with mattering. Connectedness is our need to feel that there are certain others who will pay us special attention, whether we deserve it or not. In other words, we need to feel that we matter to certain people. These are the people whom we regard as in our lives, and we crucially need people in our lives typically our family, friends, romantic partners, sometimes our colleagues, neighbors, or community members. We are born into a helplessness unmatched in the animal kingdom, and if, in our prolonged immaturity, no caretakers regard us as deserving of their special attention, we die. Our need for connectedness, in its most fundamental sense, begins here and continues throughout our life.
We are social animals. But thats not all that we are. Which brings me to the mattering instinct. Unlike our need for connectedness, which intrinsically concerns our relationship to others, the mattering instinct intrinsically concerns our relationship with ourselves. It consists of our longing to prove to ourselves that we are deserving of our own attentionthe monumental attention we have to give ourselves in pursuing our life. And unlike connectedness, which is a trait that humans share with other gregarious species, the mattering instinct characterizes us humans alone. It comes to us by way of our evolved capacity for self-reflection, and it provides us with our existential dimension. The mattering instinct forces us into the sphere of values without equipping us to see our way through. We are social beings, yes, but we are also, because of the mattering instinct, existentially questing creatures.
2. Connectedness and the mattering instinct are essential to life satisfaction, which is a far deeper desire for us than our desire for happiness.
Its life satisfaction that provides us the sense that we are flourishing in our lives, and we can tolerate a great deal of unhappiness, frustration, and disappointment in pursuit of our flourishing.
In one of his most famous statements, Sigmund Freud said, Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness. Freud was right about the duality at our core, only I would amend his statement. For Freuds love, I would substitute connectedness, since our need to feel that we are being paid special attention by those whom we regard as in our lives can assume forms quite distinct from love. And for Freuds work, I would substitute the sense of mattering, which in Freuds case, derived from his work.
There is a strong tendency in all of us, including Freud, to universalize our own way of responding to the mattering instinct, to assert that my response to the mattering instinct must be, if it is right for me, the right response for everyone.
3. Humans display dazzling diversity in responding to our shared mattering instinct.
I represent this diversity with what I call the Mattering Map, an idea which goes back to that first novel. The Mattering Map is composed of a multitude of regions, each of them premised on a different answer to the question of what matters in making a life that matters. The Mattering Map is where we amuse, bemuse, and sometimes absolutely appall one another by our life choices in responding to the mattering instinct.
Depending on where were situated on the Mattering Map, we pursue different mattering projects, which, in channeling the mattering instinct, propel us into our future, giving us, in a sense, our reason to live. Our mattering projects can be selfish or altruistic, individualistic or communitarian, competitive or cooperative, religious or secular, creative or destructive. But whether its tending ones garden or ones cause, ones relationships or ones reputation, ones immortal soul or ones net worth, these mattering projects become the loci of some of our deepest emotions.
We judge how well our lives are going by how well our mattering projects are going. Its our mattering projects, at least insofar as theyre working for us, that yield our lives a sense of coherence, purpose, and meaningfulness. While our shared mattering instinct expresses our distinctiveness as a species, our individual mattering projects express our distinctiveness from one another. Just as the language instinct resulted in the great variety of human languages, requiring the art of translation, so the mattering instinct results in the great variety of incommensurable forms of human life, requiring the art of interpretation. But beneath all this diversity among us, there are some general patterns to be discerned.
4. There are four general mattering strategies.
These are transcendent mattering, social mattering, heroic mattering, and competitive mattering. We may employ more than one of these strategies, depending on the circumstances, but typically one of them prevails in us, determined by our individual temperament and life experiences. This sorts us into transcenders, socializers, heroic strivers, and competitors. You can think of these as the four continents of the Mattering Map:
Transcenders seek their mattering in religious or spiritual terms, striving to matter to the transempirical spiritual presence which, according to their belief, exists and which they may or may not call God, but which they believe has purposefully created them. They look to their mattering from on high. This is the premise of all the traditional religions as well as those views that dub themselves SBNRspiritual but not religious.
Socializers seek their mattering from other humans. They essentially collapse the two cornerstones of our humanness into one. To matter existentially, for a socializer, is to matter to those who are in their lives.
Heroic strivers arent seeking their mattring from othersneither from humans nor from on high. Rather their sense of mattering comes from seeking to satisfy their own standards of excellence. These standards may be intellectual, artistic, athletic, or ethical.
Competitors conceive of mattering, either their own or their groups, in zero-sum terms. To the extent that they matter, others must matter less.
5. Our mattering instinct is responsible for humanitys greatest achievements and greatest atrocities.
Notice that in speaking of greatest achievements and greatest atrocities, Ive switched to evaluative terms. For most of the book, I confine myself to non-evaluatively mapping out the differences between uswe creatures of matter who long to matterhoping to provide a framework for how we might be able to see past our deepest and most fraught differences to our even deeper commonality. But inevitably, we have to confront the question of whether some of these ways of responding to the mattering instinct are better than others.
We are the same in our longing, but stubbornly diverse in our responses to that longing, making it imperative that, if we are to live together in recognition of the dignity of human life in all its incommensurable forms, we find an objective standard to distinguish between better and worse ways of responding to the mattering instinct. The very science that explains how we evolved into creatures of matter, longing to matter, also suggests an answer to the evaluative question.
At the heart of the explanation and the suggestion lies the law of entropy, formally known as the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all physical systems are internally heading toward disorder and dissolution. Life itself is a counter-entropic struggle, and the best of our mattering projects are, like life itself, counter-entropic. Everything worth living forlife, love, health, knowledge, peace, compassion, creativity, beauty, flourishingare highly ordered states that must be hard-won local reprieves from the law of entropy. A life well-lived is a life that, while pursuing mattering in a way that best accords with a persons individuality, allies itself with lifes own counter-entropic struggle. What better answer could there be to the age-old question of the meaning of life?
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This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
My daughter, Ivy, recently joined a swim club. As a former competitive swimmer, it’s been a delight to witness. Every time I take her to practice, I feel a wave of nostalgia that reminds me of all the many years I spent in the pool and all the many teammates I collected along the way. It excites me to think that she, too, will have her own experiences and life lessons, just as swimming taught me. But something peculiar struck me as I watched her practice: 45 minutes of their one-hour training was spent on the basics. Kick drills. Pull drills. All the essentials about swimming that we don’t think very much about, the foundational techniques that make for a good swimmer.
When I think about my time as a swimmer, I don’t remember that part very muchthe boring basics. Yet, like Ivy, I most certainly spent an exorbitant amount of time developing those fundamentals in the early stages of my swim tenure, the parts of swimming that I took for granted, i.e., the obvious stuff. The same applies when it comes to our organizations; far too often, we take the obvious parts about leading people for granted. With the growing complexities of shepherding modern organizations, we tend to forget about the basicsthe obvious stuff.
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Purpose, mission, conviction
For instance, intuitively we know that people are more engaged when they feel connected to something with greater meaning, call it purpose or mission. I like to think of it as conviction. Regardless of the nomenclature, this meaning gives the organization a strategic North Star to guide its way and a reason for being that people can buy into, giving their labor more meaning.
However, many businesses rely on external incentives, like the carrot and stick of promotions, and superficial metrics like stock prices and productivity as the primary drivers of work motivation. But people want more from their organizations than the transactional exchange of labor for wagesa transaction that, in itself, seems unbalanced these days on account of burnout and quiet-cracking. No wonder workers in the United States are increasingly declining promotions on the job; “moving up the ladder” is no longer seen as the ultimate reward of work.
People want to belong. They want to feel safe. They want to feel appreciated. They want their labor to matter. This is all basic stuff, right? Its obvious, and that’s the problem. The obvious nature of “the basics” can cause leaders to inadvertently ignore them. In doing so, they subsequently foster environments where people feel disconnected and detached from their work. And no one wants that.
Back to basics
So, what are we to do? Our conversation with Nadia Kokni, vice president of global brand marketing at Puma, for the latest episode of our podcast, From the Culture, provides a clear recommendation: Get back to the basics. Get back to the obvious stuff that isn’t so obvious until someone points it out to you. That is to say, we have to remind ourselves of all the things we inherently know but have forgotten along the way amid the onslaught of information life presents us with on a day-to-day basis. When the foundation begins to break down, so goes everything else.
Take music acts, for instance. When a band loses its way after a successful run of album releases, what do they do to rekindle their good fortune? They go back to basics. They reunite with the producers and songwriters from the first album. They go back to the studio where they first recorded. They try to summon the spirit that got them into music in the first place. They hearken back to all those things that got them where they arethe foundational things they likely took for granted on the road to their ascension.
Now that I’ve gotten back in the water as a fortysomething-year-old, attempting to stick to a New Year’s resolution to live a healthier life, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Ivy’s practices. During my morning workouts, I’m much more conscious of my stroke technique and foot placement while kicking, making adjustments here and there to be better. Despite all my years of swimming, I’m still working on the basicsand the same goes for how we think about our work.
When things get off course, you have to go back to basics. If we aim to improve how our organizations function, perhaps we should start with the deceptively simple things that we know but often forget. I know it’s obvious, but the obvious typically isn’t obvious until someone points it out to you. And that’s the point.
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Six families are suing TikTok after their children died emulating the so-called “blackout challenge” they had seen on the social media platform.
The lawsuit alleges that TikTok’s algorithm exposed the teenagers, ages 11 to 17, to content that encouraged them to choke themselves to the point of passing out.
Each of the children were found dead with some form of binding around their neck, hanging or otherwise attempting the challenge, according to the lawsuit.
Filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware, the lawsuit names two TikTok legal entities and its parent company, ByteDance. ByteDance and one of the entities, TikTok LLC, are incorporated in Delaware.
The suit claims the children’s deaths were “the foreseeable result of ByteDance’s engineered addiction-by-design and programming decisions,” which were “aimed at pushing children into maximizing their engagement with TikTok by any means necessary.”
TikTok is bidding to dismiss the filing, arguing that because five of the families are British, the court has no jurisdiction over defendants mainly based in the U.K., and under the First Amendment and the current law called the Communications Decency Act, which shields internet companies from liability for third-party user-posted content.
Matthew P. Bergman, the plaintiff’s attorney, countered that the lawsuit is about product liability and dangerous design choices, according to reporting from the Delaware News Journal.
We appreciate the Delaware Superior Courts careful attention to the arguments presented yesterday, said Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, in a statement to Fast Company.
The families we represent have waited far too long for accountability, and they deserve the opportunity to uncover how and why TikToks product targeted their children with this deadly Blackout Challenge content.
Bergman continued: We look forward to a ruling that allows this case to move forward into discovery so we can finally hold TikTok responsible for the harms its platform has inflicted on these kids and their families. Justice won’t be fully served until these families have their day in court.”
Fast Company has reached out to TikTok for comment.
The bereaved parents say they hope the lawsuit will bring accountability and clarity around their children’s death.
Ellen Roome, the mother of Jools Sweeney, has been campaigning for legislation, called Jools’ Law, since her 14-year-old sons death in 2022. The campaign calls for the automatic preservation of a childs online and social media data within five days of death.
Without preserved digital evidence, harm to children cannot be properly examined, and social media companies cannot be held to account, the campaign website reads.
The parents still don’t know what their children were exposed to on the social media platform, alleging that TikTok won’t release the information. TikToks community guidelines prohibit videos depicting, promoting, normalizing, or glorifying dangerous acts that may lead to serious injury or death.
In a statement posted to social media, Roome wrote: “We now have to wait for the judge to decide whether the case is dismissed or whether we are allowed to proceed to the discovery stage.
“For the court, this is about motions and procedures. For us, it is about our children. Our dead children.”
For more than 60 years, contraception has been almost exclusively a womens responsibility. Today, women have more than 14 modern contraceptive options, while men have just two: condoms and vasectomies. That imbalance has pushed women to shoulder physical side effects, financial burden, medical risks, and the career impact of family planningcosts that have been accepted as the status quo for far too long.
But the tide is shifting. Men are increasingly vocal about wanting to participate in family planning, and new science is finally catching up. For the first time in history, there are multiple male contraceptives in clinical trials, some only a few years away from approval. For companies and investors, this isnt just a public health opportunity, its a multibillion-dollar business opportunity in modern healthcare.
A $25 Billion Opportunity
The numbers are staggering. In the U.S. alone, there are approximately 70 million sexually active men ages 19 to 60. A landmark survey of 6,313 men in the U.S. found that 82% would try a new male contraceptive at some point in their lives. The same survey found that 49% of men would try a new male contraceptive within 12 months of it being on the market. A downside case looks like 34.3 million potential male contraceptive users. Some estimate that there are 17 million early adopters.Reaching just a fraction of the men interested in male contraception would result in a blockbuster product: For example, 5 million prescriptions for male contraception in the U.S. annually (half of the number of women who are on the Pill) would result in $10 billion-plus of annual recurring revenue.
Globally, the opportunity is even larger. There are roughly 2.5 billion sexually active men in the world, and surveys indicate that interest in male contraceptives is even higher in countries like the U.K., Europe, Canada, and Australia. This market potential is why Amboy St. Ventures highlighted male contraception as one of the largest ghost markets in womens health.Sexual health is routinely underestimated by investors, yet the category routinely proves its commercial strength time and time again. Viagra and Cialis each scaled to blockbuster status with annual revenues of $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion for Pfizer and Eli Lilly, respectively. Truvada for HIV preexposure prophylaxis generated approximately $3 billion for Gilead in 2018 by enabling safer sexual activity. Meanwhile, testosterone and hormone-replacement therapies represent another multibillion-dollar sector, driven largely in part by the desire to preserve libido and sexual well-being.
Theres no reason male contraception cant become the next big sexual health blockbuster.
A Digital-First Model
We are in the age of telemedicine. Hims & Hers (valued at $8.7 billion today) launched by targeting mens health needs, such as erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, and hair loss. It proved what many underestimated: Men will seek out healthcare when it is accessible, discreet, and convenient. The early adopters who want male contraceptives are similarly digitally native. They wont need their doctor to recommend a new contraceptive; theyll be actively searching for it on their phones.
On a recent episode of the podcast Cheeky Pint, Dave Ricks, the CEO of Eli Lilly, said that the reason why LillyDirect works so well for GLP-1s is because The diagnosis step [is] dead easy. Everybody knows the biomarker tool in their bathroom. It’s called the scale. They can know if the drug’s working, and we can offer telehealth post-pandemic at scale. In other words, a straightforward condition and clear feedback loop make remote care feasible. Male contraception fits that mold perfectly: No complex diagnosis or workup is neededa simple at-home sperm check can provide confidence that the method is working.
Furthermore, the need for contraception is even more universal than reducing obesity and presents a massive opportunity for a first mover to capture the male birth control market via a direct-to-consumer, digital-first approach.
Whats in Development
After decades of little progress, several novel male contraceptives are now in clinical trials, addressing a range of preferences:
NES/T (Nesterone-Testosterone gel): The most clinically advanced product, NES/T is a topical gel applied to the shoulders daily. Inspired by products in the TRT and HRT space, NES/T delivers a combination of hormones to suppress sperm production while maintaining normal hormone levels and minimizing side effects. A Phase II b trial including 462 couples was recently completed to evaluate its safety, efficacy, and reversibility. Contraline, which secured the development rights from the Population Council, is now preparing for a Phase III trialthe first Phase III male contraceptive trial in history.
YCT-529: The nonhormonal daily pill temporarily halts sperm production by blocking a vitamin A pathway in the testes. The first human safety study showed promising tolerability, and now YourChoice Therapeutics is testing whether it reliably suppresses sperm in a Phase I b/II a trial. This compound could become a convenient oral contraceptive for men if it proves safe, effective, and reversible.
ADAM: This is a long-acting, reversible contraceptive implant (essentially an IUD for men). ADAM is a nonhormonal hydrogel implanted into the vas deferens, blocking sperm passage until the gel dissolves or is removed. A first-in-human trial showed ADAM is safe and effective for two years. Contraline, the company behind ADAM, is advancing the device toward a larger trial.
Given the potential $25 billion-plus market size and mens desire for having multiple options to choose from (just like women do), it is unlikely that male contraception will be a winner-takes-all market. Each of these products may be a blockbuster in its own right.
In 1960, the launch of the female Pill sparked a social revolution and created one of the most profitable drug categories in history. Sixty-plus years later, the next sexual health revolution is overdue. This time, it may be led by men.
(Disclosure: Foreground Capital is an investor in Contraline and YourChoice Therapeutics, and Amboy St. Ventures is an investor in Contraline.)
