At an estate in New York’s Hudson Valley, seven successful professionals gathered to discuss what success had done to them.

They came from banking, marketing, healthcare, consulting, and technology.

They had titles.

They had money.

They had arrived.

The difficulty was that arrival felt surprisingly similar to being trapped.

The retreat, described by Lauren Weber in The Wall Street Journal, cost $4,000.

It was organized by Punks & Pinstripes for leaders seeking change.

The participants ranged from their mid-30s to their late 50s. They talked, meditated, and lay on the floor for a sound bath.

Corporate America had apparently become so exhausting that accomplished people were now paying four figures to lie down together and consider hardware stores.

A bank vice president said that a person can acquire the title and the money only to discover that the achievement feels hollow.

A marketing director said she was tired of waiting every day for the day to end.

A hospital executive whose position had been eliminated imagined opening a hardware store or becoming a science teacher.

When he pictured that life, he said, his nervous system relaxed.

This was not a gathering of people who had failed.

Failure might have made the problem easier to name.

These were people who had succeeded long enough to wonder whether success had been the problem.

The American job market is improving.

The economy added jobs for four consecutive months.

The unemployment rate declined to 4.2%.

The large numbers were behaving themselves.

Nearly two million Americans remained outside the celebration.

According to a recent report by Harriet Torry in The Wall Street Journal, these workers had been unemployed for at least 27 weeks.

In June 2026, the long-term unemployed represented 27.3% of all unemployed Americans—four percentage points higher than a year earlier and near the highest level since the labor market was recovering from the pandemic in 2021.

The labor market can improve without improving for you.

This is one of the cruelties of economic statistics.

The chart rises.

The applicant remains seated at the kitchen table, adjusting a résumé for a position that will receive hundreds of applications.

A construction-company manager in Alaska recently fired a 24-year-old employee.

The young man had arrived late—or not arrived at all—four times during his first week.

The conversation was brief.

A few hours later, the manager had to fire him again.

This time, he spoke with the employee’s mother.

She called to request another chance for her son. When the manager declined, the conversation became heated.

The employee had been dismissed.

His mother had filed the appeal.

This incident appears in a recent report by Ray A. Smith in The Wall Street Journal about parents entering the professional lives of their adult children.

They are contacting hiring managers. They are submitting applications. They are attending interviews and lingering just outside the camera’s view during Zoom calls.

They are asking why their children were not hired.

Some are calling employers about benefits, negative feedback, and disappointing performance reviews.

A few are calling in sick for their adult children.

Apparently, adulthood now comes with authorized representation.

On a rainy morning in Austin, twelve young people sat on couches in an Airbnb and considered why their parents wanted them to work.

Their families were worth, collectively, $7 billion.

The question was not whether they would survive without employment. That question had been settled before they entered the room.

The question was what work might provide once money had removed the requirement for it.

The young people offered several answers.

The money belonged to their parents. Work taught the value of a dollar. Work gave a person purpose.

Purpose was the preferred answer.

It was also the only thing their parents could not place in trust.

The gathering was described by Juliet Chung in The Wall Street Journal.

It was organized by R360, a membership group for families worth at least $100 million.

These young folks were in college or in their twenties. They ate eggs in the morning.

They listened to presentations about entrepreneurship and real estate.

They prepared for a startup-pitch competition. They played pickleball. A private chef cooked rib-eyes.

They had come to learn how not to be ruined by money.

This is a problem that sounds indecent when stated plainly.

Most parents worry about tuition, rent, medical bills, and whether a child will find work that pays enough to make adulthood possible.

These parents had already solved those problems.

They were left with another.

What happens to a child when necessity itself disappears?

Therapy is supposed to help folks understand difficult relationships.

But what happens when the therapist begins helping the client end one?

A provocative new Wall Street Journal reportexamines whether some therapists are too readily encouraging adult children to cut off parents and other relatives in the name of self-care.

The question is combustible because estrangement is sometimes necessary. Families can be violent, abusive, coercive, addicted, or chronically destructive.

Nobody should be required to remain available for further harm simply because the person causing it has the same last name.

But the Journal is asking a more difficult question.

Has the threshold for permanent estrangement changed? And are some therapists helping to lower it?

Somewhere in America, a perfectly contented couple is worrying that they are not having enough sex.

They do not know who established the quota. No physician handed it to them.

It was not included with the marriage license.

Nevertheless, they have absorbed the idea that happy couples have sex frequently, unhappy couples have it rarely, and everybody else should be monitoring the situation like an underperforming retirement account.

The result is a peculiar form of intimate anxiety: two people may be reasonably satisfied until they begin wondering whether they are satisfied often enough.

The Wall Street Journal recently examined several popular beliefs about sex that do not sit comfortably with the available research.

One of the most persistent is the assumption that more sex necessarily produces a happier relationship.

It does not appear to be that simple.

There are many ways to watch a society become quieter.

The cashier becomes a screen. The menu becomes a QR code.

Directions come from a pleasant disembodied woman who never becomes irritated when we miss the turn.

Coffee is ordered before we enter the shop. Groceries arrive on the porch without requiring anybody to put on proper trousers.

Each innovation saves a little time. It also removes a small human exchange.

Now researchers have attempted to measure what may be disappearing.

A 2026 paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Sciencereported that we appear to be speaking substantially fewer words than we did at the beginning of this century.

Not writing fewer words. Not texting fewer words.

Speaking fewer words aloud.

We have become highly communicative and increasingly silent.

Online dating has traditionally been compared to finding a needle in a haystack.

The usual advice is to search patiently.

Keep an open mind. Give people a chance.

Perhaps the man holding a dead fish has hidden depths.

Perhaps “fluent in sarcasm” is merely covering a tender heart.

Perhaps the profile consisting entirely of gym photographs and complaints about women will reveal itself, over coffee, to be an early draft of Middlemarch.

The Burned Haystack Dating Method proposes a more efficient solution.

Burn the haystack.

The method was created by Jennie Young, a professor of rhetoric and women’s and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.

Instead of endlessly swiping past unsuitable profiles, users learn to identify troubling language patterns and block decisively.

Metal does not burn.

When the hay is gone, theoretically, the needle remains.

There was a time when looking foolish was considered part of falling in love.

You called too soon. You laughed too loudly. You sent a note whose emotional temperature now seems medically concerning.

You stood outside someone’s apartment holding flowers and the fragile remains of your dignity.

Sometimes it worked.

Sometimes you went home alone and spent three days listening to music specifically engineered to worsen the situation.

Either way, you survived.

Modern dating has improved many things. We have more choice, more freedom, more language for boundaries, and far less obligation to marry whoever happened to live near our father’s hardware store.

But we may have lost one essential romantic capacity along the way:

The willingness to look a little ridiculous.

According to the 2026 State of Our Unions report, only 28% of the young adults surveyed said they could remain positive after a bad date or romantic setback.

More than half said previous breakups had made them reluctant to begin another relationship.

The numbers deserve some caution.

The report comes from the Institute for Family Studies, an organization with a distinct perspective on marriage and family life. But the pattern it describes is recognizable far beyond any single survey.

Humans still want love.

They simply do not want to be observed wanting it.

Apparently, people have stopped kissing.

Not everyone, obviously.

Somewhere, even now, two people are making regrettable decisions behind a Cheesecake Factory. Civilization staggers on.

But a new report in The Guardian describes what might be called a kissing recession.

More than a third of British adults surveyed said they kiss less frequently than they did five years ago.

Among younger adults, kissing has become entangled with social anxiety, fear of rejection, diminished nightlife, digital communication, uncertainty about consent, and a general reluctance to do anything that cannot be withdrawn, deleted, or explained later in a group chat.

The kiss, once considered the opening bid of romance, has become a high-risk transaction.

This would be merely curious if it concerned kissing alone. It does not.

We may be watching a culture become exquisitely articulate about intimacy while losing confidence in the physical, unscripted practice of it.

The casket had not yet arrived, and someone was already furious about the flowers.

Another relative was contesting the obituary. A third wanted to know why she had not been asked to speak, despite having avoided the deceased with considerable success for most of the previous decade.

Then the family narcissist entered.

Within minutes, the funeral was no longer merely about the person who had died. It was about who had loved them most, who was grieving hardest, and who would control the official version of the past.

Funerals do not create dysfunctional family dynamics.

They place them in formal clothing.

For someone with strong narcissistic traits, death presents an especially difficult psychological problem. It redirects attention toward someone else, exposes helplessness, and rearranges a family system they may have spent years controlling.

The narcissistic person may respond by trying to possess the mourning process itself.

A necessary caution about the word “narcissist”

Not everyone who behaves badly at a funeral has narcissistic personality disorder.

Grief can make ordinary people irritable, self-absorbed, forgetful, or strangely invested in the placement of hydrangeas. One regrettable eulogy does not establish a personality disorder.

The casseroles had barely stopped arriving when the widower began calling his daughter three times a day.

His wife had handled the bills, remembered the birthdays, softened his quarrels, and translated his anger into language the children could tolerate. Now she was gone, and he was shattered.

But what, exactly, had shattered?

He spoke constantly about how lost he felt without her.

He spoke less often about what she had loved, feared, wanted, or endured. His grief was unmistakably real. So was the dawning realization that his wife had not merely been his partner.

She had been the entire emotional infrastructure.

When a highly narcissistic person loses a spouse, they may genuinely mourn the person who died.

They may also grieve the admiration, stability, status, domestic labor, emotional regulation, and dependable audience that partner provided.

Sometimes the person is mourned.

Sometimes the function is mourned.

Usually, it is an uncomfortable mixture of both.