Sarah Owen

“What’s aspirational has changed,” says Beth McGroarty, research director at the nonprofit Global Wellness Institute. Pressures to be perfectly happy, beautiful, and “healthy” are being replaced with a more realistic, relaxed, and less consumerist culture.

Social psychologists have known for decades that people are motivated to work harder when others are watching. When they are observed, people run faster, are more creative, and think harder about problems.

“Non-self-coercion” is the conceptual distillation of several converging threads of what you could call productivity criticism (if not outright backlash).

“In actual fact, [BeReal] is trapping us in an endless, 24-hour cycle – one in which every user knows that everyone else is carefully curating their casualness”

University of Cambridge researchers successfully used algae to power a computer chip for six months. The blue-green algae perform photosynthesis and generate a small electrical current that “interacts with an aluminum electrode and is used to power a microprocessor,” according to an official release.

It reported less use of every social media app last fall, except for TikTok, according to Piper Sandler's most recent Gen Z consumer survey.

What defines new relational stages today, given they’re always mixed together with old ones on platforms eager to keep you engaged? How do you mark a new “era” when you’re keeping tabs on the day-to-day lives of hundreds of people who will never tangibly occupy your day-to-day life again?