In a 2001 study, college roommates were asked about how well they understood themselves and one another. They tended to believe they knew their roommate better than their roommate knew them. They also believed they understood themselves better than their roommate understood themselves. Both sides, apparently, had privileged access to the more complicated person. The study was part of research by Emily Pronin and colleagues on what they called the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” Across six studies, people tended to think their understanding of others exceeded others’ understanding of them. It is an uncomfortable starting point for an article about self-awareness, because the temptation is already to picture a roommate who needed to read it. I think that temptation deserves some attention. Most of us can identify another person whose description of themselves bears little resemblance to the experience of dealing with them. Recognizing the same discrepancy in ourselves requires acc...
J.D. Power divided the United States into 11 regions for its 2026 auto insurance study. Nine different insurers came out on top. Wawanesa led California. Shelter won the Central region. Florida Farm Bureau led Florida. Erie took three regions. Amica led New England, Travelers led New York, State Farm led the Northwest, and two different AAA organizations topped the Southwest and Texas. That result makes most “best car insurance company in America” rankings difficult to take seriously. Car insurance is unusually local. The insurer that prices a 42-year-old homeowner competitively in Pennsylvania may have no useful offer for the same person in Florida. State regulation changes. Claims patterns change. Weather changes. Repair costs change. Insurers themselves decide how aggressively they want certain kinds of customers in each market. Then there is the driver. Age, ZIP code, mileage, accidents, credit-based insurance scores where permitted, vehicles, deductibles, liability limits and...
On May 13, 2026, Deloitte published a survey containing two figures that look contradictory until the questions are read carefully. Only 6% of Gen Z respondents said reaching a leadership position was their primary career goal. Yet 76% said they were interested in pursuing senior leadership at some point. One answer concerns the priority someone gives leadership now. The other concerns a possibility they might want later. The survey, which included 22,595 Gen Z and millennial respondents across 44 countries, suggests that a lack of immediate appetite for promotion should not automatically be read as a lack of ambition. That distinction changes what workplace adaptation means. A young employee can want a substantial career while questioning the hours, stress and personal compromises attached to the next position. An employer can reasonably expect dependable work without requiring that employee to organize their whole identity around advancement. The difficult part comes when these ...
On May 10, 2024, a 62-year-old woman posted a question in an online retirement community two days before she planned to apply for Social Security. Her retirement date was August 1. She and her husband had pensions, Social Security, savings and money in a 457 plan. She had already run the numbers and thought they could manage. What unsettled her was the permanence of the decision. Waiting several more years would improve her Social Security and pension by about $250 a month, by her estimate, but she did not want to work those extra years. “Do you regret it?” was essentially what she wanted to know from people who had claimed at 62. The replies made the decision less tidy, not more. One widow wrote that her previously healthy husband had died of brain cancer at 60. She had no hesitation about taking survivor benefits when she became eligible because, in her words, time mattered more to her than maximizing the check. Another commenter asked the original poster whether the household w...
Before “adulting” became an internet joke, psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett spent five years interviewing about 300 young people across the United States about what adulthood felt like. One description kept recurring. They felt “in between.” They were no longer adolescents. They were making more of their own decisions, taking responsibility for themselves and separating from the routines that had structured childhood. Yet many still did not feel completely adult. Arnett turned those interviews into the idea of “emerging adulthood,” which he formally proposed in a 2000 paper in American Psychologist . His original theory focused mainly on the late teens through the mid-20s and described a period marked by identity exploration, instability, self-focus, possibilities and the feeling of being somewhere between adolescence and full adulthood. The concept has limits. Arnett himself argued that emerging adulthood is not universal and is most likely to appear in cultures where young peo...
In January 2026, Anthropic published a finding that complicates almost every clean prediction about AI and jobs. Looking across its accumulated Claude usage data, the company found that 49% of occupations showed AI use in at least a quarter of their tasks. That sounds dramatic. Then the researchers adjusted for how often workers actually perform those tasks, how long the tasks take, and whether Claude succeeds at them. The picture changed. Some occupations, including teaching and software development, looked less affected after that adjustment than their raw task counts suggested. Others, such as data-entry work, looked more exposed. That difference matters more than another prediction about which professions will disappear. A job is not a title. It is a collection of things somebody has to notice, produce, check, explain, decide, coordinate and eventually take responsibility for. AI does not have to replace all of those things to change the job. It only has to make some of them m...
In a 2026 study of self-silencing, a university student given the pseudonym Joy described herself very differently depending on who she was with. She spoke openly with her parents. Their relationship felt stable to her, and she associated it with trust. A close friendship had taught her something else. The friend could become aggressive and sometimes hit her when she did not comply. Joy later told the researcher that she had “lost [her] confidence” and no longer knew how to handle conflict in close relationships. What caught my attention was not simply that Joy became quieter. She had not lost the ability to speak her mind everywhere. She still did it at home. Her silence belonged to particular relationships. Christin Grothaus found the same broad pattern among the 53 young adults she studied at international universities in Thailand. Participants often expressed themselves comfortably in one relationship and held back in another. The strongest dividing line was whether the relati...