Gen Z’s retreat from dating and sex | The Gray Area

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]America has always had this idea of like becoming the better person, like achieving your next thing, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, etc. And so you like have to always be becoming your best self or improving yourself, optimizing yourself um so that you can win in a hard world. And looks maxers specifically I think are optimizing themselves for a new landscape in which dating happens via apps where you lead with appearance. Social media is an image first, you know, medium. So your face and your body feel like they're always on display. So they're like optimizing themselves for this particular technological culture that also feels especially harsh at this moment.

[00:01:03]This is the gray area. I'm Sean Illing.

[00:01:06]My guest today is Christine Imba. She's a writer and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Christine writes about sex, dating, loneliness, gender, religion, social norms.

[00:01:20]Basically, all of the anxieties of modern life, or at least most of the moral anxieties of modern life. But really, this is a much broader conversation about why Gen Z is retreating from dating and relationships altogether and how the internet is supercharging all of those trends. Hope you enjoy it.

[00:01:42]Christine Emba, welcome to the show.

[00:01:44]Welcome back, actually.

[00:01:45]>> Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to see you.

[00:01:47]>> I want to start this thing where you started your piece on Gen Z, which is with this incredibly weird male subculture of looks maxing, a word I still >> struggle to say. Um, first of all, I I just have to ask for the sake of anyone in the audience fortunate enough to know nothing about this world, what is looks maxing? How do you describe it for people who are blissfully not online?

[00:02:17]>> Yeah, congratulations to you if you don't know what a looks maxer is. Um, but looks maxing and I'll try and keep it simple because there's always a lot of online lore um and background to these things, but looks maxing is a subculture that emerged from the incel involuntary celibate subculture. Um, incelss believe that due to misfortunes of life, genetics, whatever, they were doomed to be involuntarily celibate forever. um no one found them attractive enough to ever have sex with or be in a romantic relationship with and they were sad about that. In many cases that sadness turned into misogyny and went into very dark places. Um but then there was a subset of incelss who believed that it was their looks holding them back um from getting into relationships with the opposite sex and so they turned to this idea of looks maxing. Um so attempting to maximize their looks, maximize their attractiveness um through really intense and sometimes insane means. You mentioned that you like have trouble saying the term. So it actually of course the term looks maxing comes from another online subculture or a subculture generally like role playing games um you know like Dungeons and Dragons etc where you get a certain number of points and you can assign them to different character traits. Um the idea of looks maxing is maxing out your appearance as the one thing you optimize for in your quest to become a more successful person. So looks maxers took it really far. Um they have come to believe or say that they believe that looks and aesthetics are kind of the only thing that matters in life. Um and on their own sort of forums and discussion groups, they have created um kind of a hierarchy of looks um that's really really detailed down to sort of like what the best width of your jawbone is or like distance between your eyes based on this ideal attractive person. Um and as you get closer to that attractiveness, you can ascend to become a more beautiful person.

[00:04:38]>> It's a whole thing. It's deeply problematic.

[00:04:42]>> Yes, it's uh it is very weird. Um so you say they go to insane means to max their looks. Um I have read that one of those means is smashing their faces with a hammer in order to improve jawline. Um is that a thing that people are actually doing or is that just lore?

[00:05:09]Apparently, it is a thing that people are actually doing. Um, so again, because it's like an internet subculture, uh, they've come up with their own terminology for kind of everything. So, if you're a looks maxer, you can be soft maxing, which is, you know, wearing makeup or going to the gym or sort of normal kind of non-permanent ways of making yourself look better. Or you can be a hard maxer, somebody who like gets plastic surgery or engages in bone smashing, which is the term uh for what you're talking about. Um, basically hitting yourself in the face in order to >> ostensibly create micro fractures in your jaw or bones that then grow back and you have a stronger jawline or better cheekbones. And there is video um of people doing this online in particular Clvicular who I talk about in my piece who is probably the most famous looks maxer at the moment.

[00:06:09]>> Yeah.

[00:06:09]>> How big are drugs and supplements in this world? I assume a pretty big part.

[00:06:15]>> Again, absolutely. One of the things that made Clvicular famous is that he he's a streamer. Um he live streams talking about how he has looks maxed, the lengths he has gone to and what he wants to do in the future and like gives advice to other guys who want to become more attractive. Um so he talks about how he got into looks maxing at the age of 14 and how he started taking testosterone supplements at 14, how at some points he's done crystal meth to like hollow out his cheekbones. Um when you talk about people when you talk about peptides which have become a big you know point in conversation at this moment weirdly um there's much conversation about what peptide stacks you can use to make your hair glossier like make your physique better um so there are lots of pharmaceutical and off label uses uh that looks maxers go to >> um look there are probably going to be a few more jokes coming from me in this conversation, but this is actually like devastatingly sad and tragic really.

[00:07:25]14-year-olds taking steroids. Um, I mean, it's just deeply sad. Um, you mentioned the incel thing, right? how these are sort of like nextgen incales >> who spent years kind of just cooking in Trump era nihilism and the broader manosphere or whatever and then they were also deeply under socialized during co and I think the under socialization part gets under discussed I mean do you think we're even talking about looks maxing right now if we didn't have the lockdowns and all the social isolation particularly with young people that went down because of it.

[00:08:13]>> That's a good question. I think that we might still have looks vaccine um just because subcultures develop and the incel culture was the incel subculture was sort of already present before the lockdowns but I don't think that it would have spread as far as it had.

[00:08:30]Looks maxing really sort of blew up as a subculture I think during co um in part because during co like you you couldn't go out to meet anyone so you could just sort of stay on a forum or stay online and kind of marinate in your grievances and trade tips and it felt like you were in community with people. Um, and in a sort of postcoid age and a heavily sort of social mediaized like atomized moment, you know, we're still not going outside and meeting people in the same way that we did pre-COVID, especially Gen Z. Um, I think looks maxing remains like a space that feels like community.

[00:09:10]Uh, it's just community that exists on streams, on YouTubes, on forums. It's not sort of in the real world. I mean, one thing that's one thing that I wrote about that seems to differentiate, at least in my mind, sort of the classic incel from the looks maxer is that incels seemed like they wanted to have relationships. Like they were upset that they >> couldn't hook up with the opposite sex and that was the goal at a certain point. Um, looks maxers when they talk about and looks maxing is a mostly male subculture to be clear. Um but like when looks maxers talk about women um they almost seem to view women um having sex and relationships as status markers of how how attractive they are on the looks maxer scale how much they have ascended not as actual goods within themselves like clvicular you know in talking to a New York Times reporter for a profile kind of famously said that he actually sort of prefers the idea of knowing that he could have sex >> with a woman over actually doing so because, you know, it's kind of a waste of time to have sex, but like knowing that he has that status is what's comforting to him.

[00:10:29]>> That's another like just bizarrely pathological part of this, right? Like I mean, is this just for the most part?

[00:10:36]Again, I'm not doing the got to hand it to them move with the incelss, right?

[00:10:40]But they did at least care about human contact. They wanted to have sex and be with people. They just couldn't. And all the resentment came from that. Our looks, Max, for the most part just straight up postsexual. Like we've just we've just moved on from actually being in contact with other people and now it's just all like, you know, narcissistic posturing and and online jockeying and scoring, that kind of thing.

[00:11:10]Yeah, I mean I have been accused of handing it to incelss several times and I I honestly, you know, maybe I have because I do think that it's very natural to want to be loved, to wish that you had relationships with other people if you if you don't. Um, and they are open about that or were open about that and complained about that like I I get it. You're sad. It's okay to be sad.

[00:11:36]it's not okay to, you know, commit mass murder um because you're sad, but the instinct is human. And so I think when you ask if looks maxers are sort of a post-sex subculture, I think what I sort of wondered about throughout my piece was whether they were symbolic of like a a broader post sex culture. Um which really means a post >> being in person with other people culture. Um, and I think co helped to push us closer to that, push that forward. Um, for everyone, not just this particularly outstanding group of people. To me, this is the thing that digital tech is doing to us, right? More screen time means more alone time, which means less contact with other people, which creates anxiety about contact with other people, >> which I think leads to the impulse to avoid >> actual human contact, right? It's just this really doom loop, right? And like that's that's part of the story for me or not part of kind of the story and this is just like that on steroids. Is that kind of your read too?

[00:12:50]>> Yeah. No, that seems that seems totally right to me. That's kind of my theory, too. And I would also add um I think there's another factor that plays in which is optimization culture. And you know, America has always had this idea of like becoming the better person, like achieving your next thing, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, etc. But also in this particular moment, I think that a lot of people, especially young people, feel like the world is extremely precarious in any number of ways. And so you like have to always be becoming your best self or improving yourself, optimizing yourself um so that you can win in a hard world. And looks maxers specifically I think are optimizing themselves for a new landscape in which dating happens via apps where you lead with appearance. Social media is an image first, you know, medium. So your face and your body feel like they're always on display. So they're like optimizing themselves for this particular technological culture that also feels especially harsh in this moment. the optimization thing. I mean, the language of this world is so cold and weirdly economic, you know? I mean, it's like it's all about value, ranking, body count, status, leverage. I mean, it sounds like people talking about commodities on CNBC. Yeah, it's very >> absolutely >> strange and and it's like it's just to me it's very anti-human like it's you know and which maybe is a dramatic term but that's how it scans for me, right?

[00:14:29]Like it's just it just feels removed from like the flesh and blood world of people and has become something abstract and distant. I think it's sort of representative in an extreme way of a larger phenomenon in American culture and especially the culture of you know younger millennials and Gen Z who were locked down during co like you couldn't really you know experiment with just talking to other people or building relationships in a normal way. you ended up kind of being funneled um towards this consumerist image forward isolated culture and didn't really get practice doing other things and that is affecting the dating outcomes and like relationship formation outcomes um of these generations I think in a big way.

[00:15:23]Let's stick with dating for a second because um I kind of just gave you my theory of the case as to why people are are avoiding people, but you've done some reporting and you you've talked to Gen Z men and women. What are the things you hear most from them about why they don't want to date anymore?

[00:15:44]>> I hear a couple of things. Um, first I think is a a general sense of anxiety around interacting with other people. So, one of the things that I cited in my New York Times piece was this major survey that came out. Um, it was done by the Institute for Family Studies um, and the Wheatley Institute at BYU. Um, and they did a nationally representative study of um, Americans ages 22 to 35. Um, and then they narrowed that down to people who explicitly said that they were interested in relationships or getting married one day and who are currently not married. And they asked about dating. Um, and the first line of the report is so dark to me. Um, they're like topline conclusion is that we are in a depressed dating economy.

[00:16:41]um which like makes me depressed just to say frankly.

[00:16:45]>> Um >> yeah.

[00:16:46]>> And then the reasons that people cited for not dating um were really just like anxiety based. First there was the idea of like money which speaks to the precariousness like dating is expensive. I'm not sure if I have enough money etc to take people out on dates. Um, but then also like 50% of people talked about having issues with what the survey described as dating efficacy, which really when they broke it down meant that they didn't think that they knew how to or were confident enough to approach someone of the opposite sex.

[00:17:25]Um, they weren't confident that they could like read social cues. um they weren't confident that they could accept rejection and like bounce back if you know they dated someone and it didn't work out. So because of their anxiety, it's exactly the cycle that you've that you stated. They were just like opting out of doing it. Um and I hear a lot of this anxiety when I've gone to college campuses and talked to young people myself too. There's just this worry about getting it wrong.

[00:17:56]>> You mentioned the dating apps. I mean, you would think on the surface that should make dating easier. Um, but again, it's that easiness, right? It's the frictionlessness of the whole thing which wipes away the courtship, >> right, >> process where you actually you where you have to encounter the other and learn about the other and allow them to learn about you, which is bumpy and yes, has a lot of friction. Um, but that's life in the world with other people. And again, as that becomes more intolerable, the idea of doing that becomes scarier for understandable reasons. And I have a lot of sympathy for people who have like grown up like become young people in this environment. I mean, it just feels really stacked against social flourishing and emotional well-being, for lack of a better word.

[00:18:54]Like many of the technological developments over the past 10 to 15 years, I think that dating apps were something we were all very excited about um when they first happened, like yeah, this should make things easier and then they've kind of turned out to be a social cancer. Um, you know, one thing that I also hear um from younger people about dating apps and I mean also from older people honestly um is that first especially men seem to feel like they experience just so much rejection on dating apps because you know you're swiping through people like a deck of cards. you see that there are so many people out there and then you try and match with them and they don't match with you or you start a conversation it doesn't go anywhere or they unmatch and it's like a volume of rejection that is kind of abnormal for a human person to experience and I think that kind of sour people on the use of the apps and sometimes on the opposite sex. Um, women experience this rejection too, but also experience a lot of harassment. Um, and sometimes like really scary things on the apps and the way that people approach them and talk to them. Um, and so I think that can dim their view of the opposite sex. Um, and then there is also just like the way that the apps are set up, right? I mean, like, you really are swiping through hundreds of people.

[00:20:22]Like, you don't know what they're looking for. Uh, they don't know who you are. It's very easy to treat people poorly or casually or waste people's time. Um, and so it begins to feel like a slog. Yeah. You're shopping for commodities, which is not how you want to be related to as a human person. Um, and also kind of crowds out other, I think, more healthy options for dating that we used to have in the past. You know, like if you go to a bar these days, you realize that people aren't sort of mixing up and, you know, talking to each other, buying people drinks, there's almost this stated assumption in many public places that like, okay, we know that the apps are where romance happens, so I'm not going to bother anyone in real life. I'll just wait to see if they're on the app.

[00:21:12]>> Um, but then if you're not matching with people, like you don't get that practice. There's not that human interaction. And so, yeah, things begin to feel very cold.

[00:21:20]>> I've heard you say that that men and women at least seem to be withdrawing in different ways, certainly on the surface, right? Like men more into grievance and and the self-optimization we've been talking about. women in a lot of cases seem to be just desentering men altogether. Um, do you see those as parallel responses to the same world or is there something importantly different about the way Jensy men and women are adapting or reacting to the conditions?

[00:21:53]I think, and this is not totally separate from dating, but also a larger uh sort of question and phenomenon in and of itself, we're seeing a real gender divergence in younger generations. Um, and this became really notable during the 2024 elections, right, where young men tended to remain in the center or move in a slightly more conservative direction and young women voted far to the left. Um, and that seems kind of representative of how uh the sexes are separating in real life, too. Um, when I talked about sort of dating apps and other situations sort of turning men and women off of each other, um, I think younger women especially are more primed to think that men are sort of dangerous, bad, gross, too conservative, kind of a risk. Um, and men are, and again, I guess I'm going to like hashallmen, hashtag notallomen. um tend to see women as like not liking them, man bashing um and also like kind of users and untrustworthy themselves.

[00:23:16]And I would say that a lot of this is fueled by social media too. And again, the amount of time that people spend on social media in this moment. Like if if you're on YouTube and you're watching sort of I don't know what might be considered male centered videos, right?

[00:23:32]like you're watching sports clips or whatever, it doesn't take you very long for the algorithm to suddenly take you to like Andrew Tate or some like dating advice guru >> who tells you that, you know, like women only want one thing or women only want men who are 666 and also all women are constantly sleeping around and are untrustworthy and you know you can call women FODs and whatever all of this stuff. Um, >> wait, what? What is 666? I'm sorry.

[00:24:03]>> I know.

[00:24:05]>> My brain is rotted from researching this. Um, you know, this idea that women only date men who are >> six feet tall, make or over, make six figures, and have a six-pack or something else. Um, but like all these stereotypes about women that are false first of all, but make them seem like the enemy who you're sort of always fighting with and have to control and demeaning. Um, and then women on the other side are often getting a lot of advice about or a lot of conversation we could say, um, about how bad the patriarchy is and how, you know, unsafe relationships can be and how many, you know, narcissists there are out there.

[00:24:53]And so they're like, I don't want to deal with that either. So both of the sexes are sort of in opposition to each other and end up because they're not spending time in person, you know, taking in these stereotypes and avoiding each other even further.

[00:25:09]It's not just that they're not spending time together in the real world. It seems the problem is also that online they're just shadow boxing with caricatures of the other sex, right?

[00:25:21]It's mostly men talking to other men in their online corner and women talking to other women in their corner and they're both sort of grappling with like cartoon versions in a lot of cases of each other which again just feeds into the the cycle of of distrust and and anxiety. I mean it just again I guess this is a recurring theme. Lots of doom loops here but this is another one I think.

[00:25:49]>> Yeah. No, I think shadow boxing is like the exact correct term actually. Like men are arguing with other men about women who they are not in contact with.

[00:25:59]Um women are talking about men who they're not in contact with. And the you know the way that you would correct this, right, is by spending time with an actual woman if you're a man and being like, "Oh, is this correct or incorrect?" Like this real woman in the world could tell me something about how women are. Um, but if you're spending all of your time online and also if you know algorithmically you're pushed into the specific like male content or female content funnel, you're you're not really doing any of that. And like I've it's funny. I've had this experience and I see this online, not infrequently, where, you know, some guy posts something about how all women want is X, Y, and Z, and a bunch of women are like posting under his ex thread like, "No, actually, as a woman, I can tell you that's not true." And he's like, "I don't believe you. Women lie. We know this." And it's like >> the the women are here, but you'd rather listen to like Fresh and Fit tell you about women or something like some podcast. Do you think most Gen Z people actually still deep down want intimacy but just feel like they lack or actually lack the social skills or the emotional resilience which you only get by going out into the world and kind of falling down and learning from it? But do you think that deep down most the overwhelmingly like overwhelmingly most people even at that age still want intimacy? They just don't know how to get it.

[00:27:36]>> Yeah. I mean, I think I think this goes back to my sort of sympathy for the incel, right? Like people I do believe that most people all people really want to be loved, you know, they want to be seen. It is nice to be known by someone else and, you know, have intimate relationships. Like in the dating survey that I cited um a majority of the people you know who were spoken to said that they wanted to be in relationships you know they wanted to be with somebody. It was more that they didn't know how to get there. They didn't feel confident almost in their skills and understanding um to make it happen for themselves.

[00:28:17]>> I don't know how long have you been really reporting on this thinking about this? I mean I Do you feel like things are getting worse increasingly quicker or is it just sort of kind of holding steady? Right? I mean, I does it feel like like things are are really deteriorating pretty quickly and just sort of in again a kind of self-fulfilling dynamic driven by all these factors. Uh, yeah. I mean, as you can as you can probably tell, I've maybe been reporting on this too long. Um, but I think I started writing sort of on gender and relationship and sex topics accidentally. I was at the Washington Post. I was an opinion columnist. Um, and there was the Elliot Rogers sort of incel shooting spree and I wrote a piece about like the incel phenomenon and kind of felt inklings of like, oh, there's something weird going on here.

[00:29:22]>> Just to jump in real quick, was this a guy at UC Santa Barbara?

[00:29:26]>> Yes, the guy at UC Santa Barbara who was upset that like cheerleaders and sority girls wouldn't date him and so went driving around shooting at them. And then, you know, me too happened and I was writing about that. And I ended up writing my first book, Rethinking Sex, a provocation about how women especially felt like they were experiencing a dating scene that felt bad to them. Like dating apps were sort of confusing, um, weren't leading to the relationships that they wanted. Even though, again, we had at first hailed dating apps as wonderful. um that there were like all these expectations around sex that were influenced by social media, by porn. Um and you know, I went on from that to write about masculinity and how that seemed increasingly influenced by sort of both a lack of real world experience and kind of mentors and the online world. And I think one thing that I've noticed as like I keep reporting on this is that substitutions keep popping up in increasingly I think worrisome ways. Um and I think that that may make the cycle worse.

[00:30:48]>> What do you mean by that? Substitutions.

[00:30:50]>> So So when I say substitutions, I guess I mean substitution effects are something that I worry about more than I used to in the past. Um, I think that people really do desire and companionship and like to be in community with other people, to be with someone else, but doing that is kind of hard. Um, especially if you didn't necessarily learn the skills or spent a lot of your time isolated. um you know like going out putting on the right clothes like figuring out how to talk to girls say is kind of a slog and you might get rejected a bunch of times and it feels bad. Um but in the past you kind of had to do it if you like wanted to have sex or like experience some kind of sexual relief. But, you know, for men, I think especially first you could kind of not do it and find a bunch of guys to whine about your problems within a forum and give you like an excuse not to do it because like women won't want you anyway, etc., etc. Or you could just sort of watch porn, which is like not as good as being in a relationship, but, you know, for the moment maybe suffices.

[00:32:08]It's frictionless. It's easier than doing the real thing. Um, you know, dating apps have made sort of the asking someone out on a date feel frictionless and can feel like kind of a substitute. Like, well, you know, I tried dating, but I didn't match with anyone. So, I guess I'll give up now.

[00:32:29]Like, I I'm not going to pursue this further. I'm I'm worried now about sort of AI and how that's going to play into it in the future as people, you know, enter into sort of emotional entanglements with these chat bots who will never, you know, tell them that they're wrong. Like you don't really have to practice relationship skills because like these the bots affirm you and agree with you. Like you don't learn how to how to argue, how to have friction. And then women, I think I'm very interested in the rise of romantic, what is really kind of like written softcore as a way to sort of engage romantically without putting yourself out there. Um, or this idealization of a sort of like soft detached life or bedrotting or whatever, you know, self-optimization and wellness as almost in lie of forcing yourself out there. um and the discomfort of other people.

[00:33:27]>> I really do think Christine, if you ask the aliens on whose supercomput I presume our current simulation is running, if you ask them to build a social environment most likely to destroy the conditions of human connection, I feel like this is the program they would write. Now that I've just said those words out loud, do you think I sound hysterical?

[00:33:55]>> I do not think that you sound hysterical. In fact, I agree with you.

[00:34:00]Um, and I have felt >> about the aliens or the uh >> Okay, the aliens did sound a little bit crazy. I'm not going to lie to you there. Um, but the social conditions like I I have become increasingly radicalized. um not really just the internet, but actually social media specifically in the >> interaction styles um that it preferences um and increasingly like doesn't even preference. It just forces upon people, >> you know, as far as the internet goes, I don't know that we were ever meant to have this much information at our fingertips or be in contact with this many people. Um, and then social media and the way that it prioritizes and raifies sort of fear, anger, you know, takes you out of the real world, gives you faximiles of the real world that you can live in. Um, I think it's been bad.

[00:34:56]I think we I think we made some mistakes, some big mistakes. Well, I mean, look, I you know, there humans have never been super great with uncertainty, but the internet has just turned ordinary uncertainty into an endless feedback loop of analysis and insecurity. You know, it's like we've all become Doysteski characters or something. But all these pathologies we're talking about, I mean, do they seem genuinely new to you or maybe just a case of the internet amplifying old anxieties? I think a bit of both is the right way to put it. I mean, the problem of humanity, right? Like the problem of being mortal has been sort of trying trying to be seen and understood by people, trying to find connection and failing, feeling alone and trying to make meaning of it, etc. Like that we have all always felt misunderstood and not un like not able to fully understand the world. That's the human condition. Um, but yeah, I think that the internet and social media and dating apps have supercharged specific aspects of that and made them feel even worse and also given them sort of outsized prominence in our day-to-day lives. You know, like again, I think it's the human condition to think about the future and perhaps be a little bit worried about what's coming down the pike. That's always the case, right? But today you have that and then it's like, oh, every second of the day you're going to get a news alert about how some major crisis it is happening in some other country. You can't do anything about it.

[00:36:33]It might be coming for you. You don't know, but you're just going to know about it, you know, or a crisis happening in your country or some bad statistic about how bad dating is. Um, and before like you know you might have anxiety about the future and all those things might be true but you weren't constantly being bombarded with that fact every second.

[00:36:52]>> Well, it makes you feel anxious and impotent at the same time.

[00:36:56]>> Not good.

[00:36:57]>> You can't do anything about all all of those terrible things. And so having it bombard your brain >> cannot be good. And again, all these platforms, dating apps or social media, what do they all have in common? Well, probably several things, but certainly one of them is that they monetize insecurity.

[00:37:15]>> Yeah.

[00:37:16]>> Basically, and that's all of this comes if you follow all of these things back to like the source, it's insecurity.

[00:37:24]>> Yeah.

[00:37:24]>> To me, that's that's that's the beginning and the end of of the thing.

[00:37:27]>> They monetize insecurity and also they are volume plays in a in different ways. And I think that is I'm not sure that the human psyche has caught up to that. Uh and so that adds to our anxiety. Like if it's news apps, it's sort of receiving all this information that you don't know how to handle. If it's dating apps, it's seeing like the volume of people who are out there in the world not dating you or who you should be trying to talk to but you can't. Um, >> yeah. I think that's sort of hard for people to handle, but we don't really know how to express that maybe.

[00:38:10]>> Like you said, you sort of made this whole world your beat and you think deeply about it, even spiritually. I think about it. Um, do you still think of yourself as just a journalist or a writer covering a beat or is this more like a a moral or religious project for you? And I mean that like in the in the in the best most good faith sense possible. I started out as a person as an ideas writer, you know, because I just was sort of have a lot of questions about what is going on in the world and what people are talking about and wanted to sort of explain them to myself and in the process to other people. Um, and I think I started writing about gender, um, dating, sex, because I had a lot of questions about it personally. Like I like was a am hopefully a young person like out there in the world um, living in a major urban center like trying to meet people of the opposite sex and feeling that things were weird in a number of different directions. And so I was writing about it kind of I was reporting almost to like understand it myself and then in the process help other people understand it. And one of the most rewarding things about writing some of these pieces is getting feedback in the comment section from letters when I speak in public where people are like, "Oh, I thought I was the only person who felt this way." Or like, "I noticed this too, but I didn't know how to explain it or where it was coming from." And honestly, this beat can be kind of a bummer these days, um, as you can probably tell by our prior conversation.

[00:40:02]But in a certain way, it does feel kind of vocational in the sense that like maybe this is something that I'm supposed to be doing and supposed to be talking about to like help other people make sense of their lives and like help us all try and figure out a way to sort of overcome some of these things and find that, you know, love and community and human flourishing that I believe that we're actually made for I think I mean religiously and also you know personally I think I do think that humans were made for love and you know connection is part of human flourishing. So I guess by reporting about this, helping people understand it, ideally maybe helping us make better decisions in the future, I think that that's like a a service, a good that I can provide and so I should do it even even if it kind of depresses me sometimes.

[00:41:07]I find this to be tragic really and I have enormous sympathy for Gen Z and younger generations who have been thrown into a world that is so weirdly disconnected and so shaped by shitty institutions with perverse incentive structures. It is no wonder they are the way they are. But they did not come out like this. Like the world they inherited made them like this. And that's not their fault. And so I just feel like that's a note on which to end. At least for me. I would echo that too. I think that's actually really important to say.

[00:41:39]Um I feel like a lot of people feel like there is something wrong with them. Um >> yeah, >> and yeah, it's not their fault. Like the this culture is is bad. Um and has become bad for human connection in ways that we didn't choose. Um, you know, I am hopeful though that in recognizing that the culture is off, that something is off, that can give people some motivation or impetus to try and change it. Um and I think that the first thing that we have to start doing um is and this is a very internety suggestion just touching grass just going outside and like trying perhaps even failing to talk to people by seeking out that in-person connection because everybody wants it.

[00:42:37]Like you think that people don't want it but if you want it someone else wants it too. Um, and like you don't have to be perfect. Um, you don't have to get it right. You can just try. Uh, and that's the first step.

[00:42:52]>> Amen. Do you have any projects you want to plug? Where can people find your writing?

[00:42:58]>> Yeah. Um, so I am writing about once a month New York Times in the opinion section. Um, but I also have a substack um that I update. It's called the edit tricks and it's just christine.substack.com.

[00:43:13]>> All right. Right on. Well, um, it's good to to speak again. It's been a while.

[00:43:18]Um, I enjoyed it as I knew I would. So, thanks for coming in.

[00:43:22]>> Thanks for having me.

[00:43:24]>> Thanks for watching. Each week, we'll be in your audio and video feeds with interesting interviews and a philosophy-minded look at culture, tech, politics, and more. Episodes of the gray area drop every Monday and Friday on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite listening app. Comment below and let me know what you thought of this conversation. And if you enjoy our reporting and want to hear more from Vox Journalist, then help support our journalism by becoming a member of our Vox community on Patreon at patreon.com/vox.

[00:43:55]Thanks for joining us.