What we talk about when we talk about genocide.
As the civilian death toll continues to rise from Israel’s war in Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack, more and more voices have warned of genocide.
On November 2, United Nations experts said in a joint statement that Palestinians in Gaza were at “grave risk of genocide.” And on October 28, the director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stepped down because, as he wrote in his resignation letter, “we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes [in Gaza] and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it.”
More than 800 scholars have also recently signed on to a letter aiming to “sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide.” And US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the only Palestinian American in Congress, accused President Joe Biden of supporting “the genocide of the Palestinian people,” in a video on November 3.
These warnings have pointed to the sheer number of civilian casualties from Israel’s bombardment, the effects of the siege, and rhetoric from Israeli officials that demonizes and calls for the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, among other things, as indicators that Israel’s offensive against Hamas could cross the line into genocide. That is an explosive charge, and one that Israel, a nation whose existence is inextricably linked to the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust, has rejected by arguing that the killing of innocents is unavoidable in pursuit of its war aims.
As bloody as the war in Gaza has been so far, it may not fit the popular conception many have of genocide from the 20th century, when the death tolls were far larger and, in retrospect, the intent by perpetrators to wipe out an entire people was undeniable. But there are different ways to define genocide — from the colloquial to the scholarly and political to the strict legal sense. And it is the legal definition, which includes a narrow set of criteria, that ultimately determines formal accountability.
On that score, most experts, with a couple of prominent exceptions, say that it is not possible to prove Israel’s actions meet that legal threshold right now. “I don’t think it’s genocidal yet. I think it can easily be,” said Ernesto Verdeja, an associate professor of political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. “At this point, it’s a little hard to put all the pieces together.”
With more than 10,000 Palestinians dead, according to the latest estimates from the Gaza Health Ministry, the humanitarian situation is unquestionably urgent. Many experts Vox spoke to agreed that war crimes had likely been committed both by Hamas and Israel throughout this conflict. In some ways, the semantic fixation on whether what’s happening in Gaza is or isn’t genocide under the legal framework risks losing sight of that larger picture. Experts pointed out that charges of “genocide” carry no more legal or moral weight than “crimes against humanity” or “war crimes” under international law.
But it’s also true that the words we use to describe the conflict carry real weight. And that is why, at a moment when all the world is weighing the atrocities and victimizations of one side and the other, it is so vital to understand what is meant, and what isn’t, by the term “genocide.”
Four different ways of understanding genocide
There are four main ways to conceptualize genocide, according to Verdeja, and each depends on how and where the term is being used — whether in the legal world, the realm of social science, the arena of international politics, or among the general public. That means what might constitute genocide to many members of the public might not to someone with a background in international law.
First, there’s the legal definition. According to the Genocide Convention, which entered into force in 1951 and has been ratified by 153 states, genocide means “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Notice that there are two components here. One is a physical element — the five acts just listed — which can be empirically determined. But the other is a mental element — the “intent to destroy” a group “as such” — and that’s much harder to prove.
By “as such,” the Convention means that the victims must be deliberately targeted not as individuals but because of their membership in a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group and as part of a broader plan to destroy that group. That second part is key: Not every violent attack against civilians — even if it is motivated by national, ethnic, racial, or religious bias — qualifies as genocide. It has to be intended to eliminate the group as a collective. (Note that genocide can be perpetrated against only part of a group, so long as it’s an identifiable and substantial part.)
To prove that intent exists, court precedent has also required the “existence of a state or organizational plan or policy.” The statements of public officials and other decision-makers can help support that case, though they may not be enough alone. It’s even more difficult to prove that the threshold has been met while the atrocities are still ongoing.
Only three genocides in history have been officially recognized under the definition of the term in the 1948 Genocide Convention and led to trials in international criminal tribunals: one against Cham Muslim and ethnic Vietnamese perpetrated by Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia in the 1970s, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia. (The Holocaust occurred before the adoption of the 1948 Convention.) The mass killings of the Yazidis by ISIS in Iraq and of the Rohingya in Myanmar have been recognized as genocide by the United Nations as a whole. Though the US called the killing of Black Africans in the Sudanese region of Darfur between 2003 and 2005 “genocide,” a UN investigation ruled it was not genocide.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25072344/739937.jpg)
Scott Peterson/Liaison
The prosecution of genocide is rare in part because its definition under the Convention is the product of post-World War II compromise among UN member states and narrow by design so that certain atrocities they had perpetrated would not be recognized as genocide: for example, mass killing and famine in the Soviet Union and lynchings and racial terror in the US. But that definition proved perhaps too narrow to effectively prevent and respond to genocides when they happen. That has left some searching for a more expansive definition.
And so, secondly, there’s the way the term “genocide” is used in social science. “The social-scientific approach, I think, tends to be a bit more capacious,” Verdeja said, noting most academics don’t require proving “intent” beyond a reasonable doubt and don’t require victims to be in the Convention’s four protected groups. Social scientists might count a political group as a victim of genocide, for example including the Khmer Rouge’s political victims in addition to the legally recognized victims. “But that’s also partly because the purpose is different, right? We’re not using that for purposes of holding an individual accountable, or holding the state accountable at the International Court of Justice.”
Third, there’s the way “genocide” is used in the international politics and policy world. “They’re thinking specifically around questions of prevention policy and intervention,” Verdeja explained. “Many international organizations and governments will use the term genocide when what they really mean is large-scale violence against civilians.”
That’s because those entities are more concerned with trying to identify instances where there might be outbreaks of grave human rights violations that merit an international policy response, ideally to prevent those violations from worsening, rather than being concerned with the strict legal definition. “So if you spend a lot of time talking to the State Department … that’s kind of loosely how they use ‘genocide,’ even though they know the legal definition,” Verdeja said.
Fourth, there’s the way “genocide” is colloquially used by the public. “There, genocide tends to be used as a stand-in term for the greatest evils, the greatest harms that human beings experience,” Verdeja said. Typically, this is about using the moral and emotional weight of the term to make a political claim: The current situation is unacceptable and something must be done.
For purposes of holding Israel accountable for its actions in Gaza, however, it’s the legal framework that matters most. And that’s why debates have focused on whether that strictest definition of genocide applies.
Evaluating the allegations of genocide in Gaza
Experts in human rights and war crimes are generally hesitant to call Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza “genocide” as understood in international law. That’s especially the case in the absence of “clear evidence verified by a third-party investigation,” said Franziska Boehme, an assistant professor of political science at Texas State University.
But several of the scholars Vox spoke to caution that the violence could certainly become genocidal, may already be perilously close to meeting the threshold, and that the international community must hold Israel responsible for any atrocities it may have committed and prevent further ones, regardless of how we define them.
Israel has already killed and injured Palestinians in Gaza en masse, mostly women and minors. There is no specific threshold number of deaths or proportion of a group killed required under the Genocide Convention or resulting case law, only that they be substantial.
Israel has said its siege and bombardment of Gaza — which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on November 3 will continue with “all of [Israel’s] power” — is intended to eliminate Hamas, after the horrors of October 7. It has denied that it intentionally targets civilians and, in a statement to Insider, the IDF said it is “fully committed to respecting all applicable international legal obligations,” putting procedures in place to ensure as much. Instead, it says civilian deaths are the unfortunate collateral damage of its war on Hamas, which Israel has accused of hiding behind civilian infrastructure.
International law does not outright ban civilian casualties during war. Principles around “proportionality,” for instance, imply that some civilian deaths can be acceptable depending on the military objective. But hundreds of scholars and practitioners of international law have argued that, beyond any one incident, the “widespread killing, bodily and mental harm, and unviable conditions of life” that Palestinians are being subjected to means there is “a serious risk of genocide being committed in the Gaza Strip.”
Beyond killing civilians en masse, Israel appears to be inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about [the targeted group’s] physical destruction,” as prohibited by the convention, said Adam Jones, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia who has written a textbook on genocide. He pointed to Israel’s decisions to let in only limited humanitarian assistance that is far from sufficient to provide for the needs of 2.2 million people; to cut off fuel, water, and electricity; and to deprive people of adequate access to medical care. As of November 5, some 370 aid trucks had reportedly arrived in Gaza since they were first allowed to enter on October 21, but more than 100 trucks daily would be required to meet the needs of the population.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25072356/1764264228.jpg)
Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images
Some human rights lawyers and scholars say that entertaining allegations of genocide against Israel at this point is not just premature, but also cheapens the concept. Dov Waxman, a professor of political science and Israel studies and the director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, writes in Jewish Currents that while there may be a “risk of genocidal actions” in Gaza, claims that it is happening now require “stretching the concept too far, emptying it of any meaning.” Eitay Mack, a human rights lawyer based in Jerusalem, writes in Haaretz that the accusation of genocide is “a false claim not founded in international law” and one that “will not be useful for ending the war or promoting the freedom of the people in Gaza.”
Among those who do see substantial risk of genocide, though, the biggest sticking point in the debate centers on what Israel’s intentions are.
Verdeja said that intentionality is tough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, especially “when you’re looking at these types of atrocities happening in real time.”
Michael Becker, an assistant professor of international human rights law at Trinity College, Dublin, similarly said that “because the requirement of genocidal intent has been construed so restrictively by international courts, it is not obvious that Israel’s actions satisfy the legal definition of genocide, notwithstanding the evidence of mass atrocity.”
The same hurdle of proving intentionality applies to any evaluation of whether Hamas’s October 7 attack constitutes genocide. Hamas, which governs Gaza and is designated by many countries as a terrorist organization, promises the destruction of Israel in its founding charter and has said it has plans for more attacks like the one on October 7. Its “wild and indiscriminate killing” of more than 1,400 people is characteristic of what social scientists refer to as a “genocidal massacre” that should be “acknowledged and condemned as such,” but the intentionality requirement under the law is still a “high evidentiary bar to reach,” Jones said.
Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, said that Hamas’s charter alone isn’t enough to prove intent as required by the narrow definition in the Convention. “I definitely see intent to kill a significant number of members of the group, to instill unbelievable trauma and terror among members of the group,” he said. “But I don’t see intent to destroy in relation to the Hamas attack that would render it an act of genocide.”
Similarly, there is already some support for the notion that Israel is intentionally trying to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza, though, again, proving that intent requires clearing a high bar. Scholars have pointed to statements by Israeli leaders as one piece of evidence that the country’s military campaign may be targeting Palestinians in Gaza broadly.
A short, non-exhaustive list: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to reduce parts of Gaza “to rubble” and invoked the people of Amalek, the foe that God ordered the ancient Israelites to genocide in the Bible, in a recent speech. Defense minister Yoav Gallant called for a “complete siege” on Gaza and stated that “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Army spokesperson Daniel Hagari said forces would turn Gaza into a “city of tents” and admitted that Israel’s “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” in dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza.
These are people directly presiding over or involved in the military operations in Gaza, whose words carry more weight. But Israeli lawmakers and officials have also been invoking dehumanizing language that experts say should not be overlooked in evaluating Israel’s ambitions.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog blamed Palestinian civilians in Gaza as a whole for Hamas’s October 7 attack: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Amichay Eliyahu, the minister of heritage, told a Hebrew radio station that there were no non-combatants in Gaza and advocated for dropping a nuclear bomb on the territory. (Netanyahu suspended Eliyahu, but reportedly gave in to pressure from his other coalition members and did not fire the minister entirely.) Revital Gotliv, a Parliament member from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, called for Israel to use nuclear weapons in Gaza: “It’s time for a doomsday weapon. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza.” Galit Distel Atbaryan, also of Likud, posted on X in Hebrew that Israelis should invest their energy in one thing: “Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth” and forcing the “Gazan monsters” either to flee the Strip to Egypt or to face their death.
Comments like those prompted Segal to argue in Jewish Currents recently that Israel’s actions constitute a “textbook case of genocide.” He told Vox that those statements, indiscriminate bombing of civilians, and cutting off of resources taken together point to the requisite “intent to destroy.”
“If this is not special intent to destroy, I don’t know what is,” Segal told Vox. “How many Palestinians need to die for these statements to be recognized as what they are?”
Israel, for its part, has urged civilians to move south as its troops encircle Gaza City and warned that anyone who remains could be seen as “sympathizers of a terrorist organization.” But some are unable to move or have refused to move, fearing permanent displacement from their homes. Israel is continuing its bombardment, even on corridors to the south. Its reliance on aerial bombing, as opposed to “ground-level, up-close-and-personal killing,” may allow for “obfuscation” about who exactly it’s targeting, Jones said.
When Israel first bombed the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza City, where it claimed to have killed a Hamas commander, it did so knowing that many civilians there would die. “This is the tragedy of war,” an IDF spokesperson told CNN. Israel has since rebuffed UN concerns that the bombing could constitute a war crime and bombed the site two more times, leveling every building in an approximate area of at least 2,500 square meters and resulting in reportedly hundreds of deaths and injuries. “Attacking a camp sheltering civilians including women and children is a complete breach of the rules of proportionality and distinction between combatants and civilians,” UN experts said in last week’s joint statement.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25072364/1757594295.jpg)
Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images
Though some have pointed out that Israel could have killed even more people in Gaza if it really wanted to do so, it does not necessarily have to unleash its full arsenal to commit genocide. “It’s quite plausible that the state uses some of its firepower and nevertheless is carrying out the attacks in the context of the destruction of the target group,” Verdeja said.
All of this suggests that Israel’s operations in Gaza are “definitely going in the direction” of genocide, Verdeja said.
How should we describe what’s happening in Gaza?
Ultimately, experts said, the debate over whether what we’re seeing in Gaza is or isn’t genocide risks overshadowing the gravity of the harms that are being committed.
There are other terms that might end up being more appropriate, after independent bodies conduct third-party investigations and scholars evaluate the conditions. In the legal arena, a group of independent UN experts says Israel’s siege and bombardment constitute collective punishment — the harming of a person or group of people based on the actions of another member of their group — which is a war crime prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. Some experts also warn that Israel’s campaign against Hamas might become an “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in Gaza writ large. That term carries no legal weight, but it is used by scholars to describe operations aimed at making a geographic area ethnically homogeneous, often through tactics that can constitute war crimes, like indiscriminate killings or forced displacement.
“Debates about whether Israel’s actions constitute genocide or ethnic cleansing are an unhelpful distraction from the fact that we are witnessing a situation of mass atrocity involving what appear to be egregious violations of international law, and that states need to press upon Israel to adopt a radically different approach in responding to the threat posed by Hamas,” Becker said.
The term “genocide” grabs the world’s attention. But the devastation in Gaza should command attention just as much even if “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity” turn out to be better descriptors from a legal point of view. “These terms also speak to horrible atrocities and should be taken no less seriously,” Becker said.
“It’s important to remember that there is no hierarchy among crimes under international law,” Amnesty International said in a statement. “As stated in the preamble of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court; genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes all are ‘the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole [and] must not go unpunished.’”
Verdeja put it even more simply. “The international community has responsibility already,” he said. “Whether it’s genocide or not I think is a little bit beside the point.”
Preparing yourself for the worst is easier than you might think — and it’s never been more important.
The night before I was supposed to go on a long and well-deserved vacation, something very, very bad happened: I lost my phone. I had a friend over and, I decided, he must have accidentally taken my phone with him when he left. Which was a problem because all methods I had to contact him — including his phone number and address — were in the one thing I now didn’t have.
There’s nothing like spending 30 minutes panicking that you’ve lost your phone to make you realize just how devastating that loss can be … and how poorly you’ve prepared for the possibility. Access to just about everything I wasn’t already logged into on my computer was dependent on access to my phone, with my mobile-device-only password manager and multifactor authentication apps and text messages. Actually, had I even backed my phone up to my iCloud account? Didn’t I delete my backups to free up storage space? Was I logged into iCloud on my laptop? Would it even be possible to log in, since my passwords and authentication tools were only on the phone?
“I don’t think most people prepare for losing their phone,” Sherrod DeGrippo, director of threat intelligence strategy at Microsoft, told Vox. “Which is surprising considering how many people [have] lost their phone, broke their device, or had it stolen. Despite many people having experience here, they aren’t often taking the right precautions.”
Our phones have become our main — in some cases, only — gateway to so many things. If you lock yourself out of your house, you can call a locksmith to get back in, even if it’s the middle of the night on a holiday. But if you lose your phone, you may lose your keys to a whole lot more, and it may take a while, if ever, to get that access back.
Ironically, this is especially true if you’ve proactively taken the kind of basic digital security measures most experts would recommend. My efforts to secure my accounts from bad actors — some of which relied on having my phone — might have made it that much harder for me to get back into them.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do those things — you absolutely should. You just want to make sure you’re preparing for the possibility of a lost device when you set them up. The trick is to make sure you aren’t low-hanging fruit for bad actors, while also not putting that fruit so high up that you can’t reach it if you need it.
So I’ve put together a little guide on how to best protect yourself from losing everything if you lose your phone. One thing to keep in mind: These are recommendations for the average person with the average security concerns. If you’ve got different considerations because you’re, say, storing valuable company secrets on your phone, this is not the guide for you.
Make sure you have something to restore: Back that phone up
If you aren’t backing up your phone, there may not be anything to get back if you lose or break it. Some of those things, like photos, may be lost forever. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to back up your phone.
“Backup of data in the digital reality we’re in now is paramount. The impact of no backups is just too dangerous,” DeGrippo said.
The old-fashioned way is to connect your phone to your computer. You can find directions on how to do this for your iPhone here and your Android here. This is fine, as long as you remember to back it up regularly and you aren’t in a situation where both your phone and your computer are lost or destroyed at the same time.
That’s why you may want to consider backing it up to the cloud. You can set it to do so automatically and frequently, and your data will be housed in a separate and secure location. There will also, most likely, be a price attached: Apple and Google, for instance, offer a tiny bit of cloud storage for free. For most people, that’s not enough, and you’ll have to shell out for a paid tier.
“This is generally worth it to seamlessly transfer to another device without data loss in case your handset goes missing forever,” DeGrippo said.
Your device manufacturer or carrier may have backup options, too, if you want to do some price and feature shopping.
If you’re especially afraid of losing your backup, you can do what I do: back it up to the cloud as well as your laptop, and then back your laptop up to a password-protected external disk drive that you store in a water- and fire-proof safe. This is probably excessive and unnecessary for most people, but it does protect you from many of the worst-case scenarios.
But your work isn’t done yet. You also want to make sure you know how to access that backup if you need it. As I learned, your phone can’t be the sole point of access to your backup. That may also mean making sure that the passwords or authentication codes you need to log into your cloud account can be accessed outside your phone (more on this later).
Your phone may not be as lost as you think
These days, phones and many other devices come with locator services, like Apple’s “Find My.” Make sure you’ve both activated it and know where and how to access it on another device (assuming you have one) if the worst happens.
This was how I got my phone back, by the way: after a half hour of panicking, I remembered I had Find My set up on my phone and laptop, and used my computer to find my phone (it was under my pillow a few feet away the whole time). You might not be so lucky, but locator services are good for that, too: They often allow you to remotely wipe your device if you fear it’s fallen into the wrong hands. (Hopefully you’ve done your backup homework so you aren’t actually losing anything if you do have to wipe your phone).
You can even put a message on the device for whoever has it to see. I can personally attest to the usefulness of that: I left my laptop on a bus years ago. I put a plea for its return (and a reward offer) on the laptop screen. I got my computer back. Instructions on how to use Apple’s “Find My” service can be found here, and Google has an option for finding Android devices.
“Test out these kinds of features so when you really need them, you’ll know exactly how to find them. Further, make sure to enable the find feature on all your devices, so when you lose one, the others can locate it for you,” DeGrippo said.
You may also want to consider sharing your location (which is really your device’s location) with someone you trust. This concept is bizarre to me, a privacy reporter, but it’s something plenty of people do, and that experts recommend. And not just for finding a lost phone, either.
“I do this with my friends and family and it makes me feel safer knowing someone always has a general idea of where I am,” DeGrippo said. “Only share this with people who you trust, under the idea that it is always safer for that person to know where you are.”
Remember, you can revoke that access anytime for whatever reason.
The cybersecurity measures that could make you life harder (but you should still do them)
Now that you’ve done everything you can to back your phone up and possibly even locate it if it goes missing, you should think about if and how you can get into all of the apps and services you’ve put on your phone if you don’t have said phone.
If you use the same password for virtually everything and don’t have multifactor authentication on your accounts, then it’ll be easy to get back into them, assuming they have a web version and you have access to a second device. Enter that one password that you’ve surely memorized by now and you’re in.
But! This is also a terrible plan, because it makes it easy for anyone else to get into your account, too. Your password is only as safe as the worst company you’ve entrusted it to. All you need is for one of the countless websites and apps you use that password for to have a data breach, and you’re screwed. I speak from experience. Trust me, you don’t want to log into your bank account and see that most of your life savings has been wired out of it because Tumblr got hacked.
Choose unique, strong passwords for all of your accounts. That way, if a password is exposed in a data breach, the damage will be limited to just one account. Of course, that would mean you also need to remember all of those passwords. And that’s where a password manager comes in.
“I highly recommend everybody has a password manager and learns how to use it,” Casey Oppenheim, co-founder and CEO of security and privacy software developer Disconnect, said.
Apple and Google have password managers built right into their services, which makes creating and storing those passwords a quick and simple process. A few taps and you’re good.
You can also try a third-party app like LastPass or 1Password, though you might have to pay for them. I used the free version of LastPass, which meant I only had access to it through my phone (the paid version lets you use it on multiple devices). Which was fine until I thought I lost my phone and realized it wasn’t.
“Ideally, it’s a password manager that is not just on your phone, but you can access it on the web,” Oppenheim said. “That’s not as secure, but I think for most people, you want to be able to access your password manager not just locally on your device.”
When you set up one of these third-party password managers, you’ll have to give your account a master password — the password to get into your passwords. Do not store this password on your phone, for reasons that should be obvious by now. Keep it somewhere safe and ensure that you’ll remember it if you ever happen to need it.
Even if you can’t get into your password manager, it won’t be the end of the world. Humans are fallible and forgetful, and so we have password reset options. Just make sure you have access to whatever you’ll be getting those reset codes and links on if your phone is gone. If the reset code comes via a text, for example, that’s not very helpful.
That brings us to the second security measure that you really should do, but could make things difficult if you lose your phone: multifactor authentication. If you do this through texts (a strategy you might want to rethink) or an authenticator app, you risk losing access to your accounts if you lose your phone. Getting that access back may be difficult, if not impossible.
If that’s why you’ve been avoiding using multifactor authentication in the first place, it shouldn’t be. There are easy ways to get authentication codes even if you lose your phone. The trick is to make sure you’ve set that up. Instructions to do so for Authy, for example, are here. Google Authenticator finally made this option available in April. If your authenticator app has a master password, save it somewhere safe that isn’t your phone, just like you should for your password manager’s password.
If you’re one of the many people who rely on text-based authentication, you can always connect a second device, like a tablet, to your messaging app so you’re still getting texts even if you don’t have your phone. Just remember that’ll mean all of your texts, not just the authentication code ones, will go to that device, too.
Finally, when you set up multifactor authentication on accounts, you should also get recovery codes that will let you back into your account even if you can’t access your authentication method. Here’s how to get them for your Instagram account, for example. But you have to print those out or write them down and keep them somewhere safe — again, that place is not your phone. You could even take screenshots and put those on another device. There’s a bit of a debate within the security community on whether you should be storing master passwords and recovery codes on other devices or offline, but the general consensus seems to be: use the method that works best for you and is relatively secure.
This is the last step in a process that some people already think has too many steps, but I assure you that, for most people, it’s not that hard and you’ll be very glad you did it if the need ever arises … or very sorry that you didn’t.
Put a second layer of protection on your apps
While we’re on the topic of your phone getting lost or stolen, this might be a good time to make sure that someone else still can’t get the keys to your life even if they get into your phone — which is a possibility even if you’ve locked it with something like Face ID.
Many apps give you the option to add an app-specific lock. When you think about all of the really important things that can be accessed through your phone and the consequences if they fell into the wrong hands — bank accounts, payment apps, password managers, and authentication apps, to name a few — you may find that’s very much worth the few extra seconds it takes to unlock the apps when you need them.
If you use Face ID, it really couldn’t be easier. A passcode takes a little longer, and if you go that route, just make sure the code isn’t the same as what you use to unlock your phone, and isn’t something that can be easily guessed. Setting this up is easy (here’s the instructions for Venmo, for example), and most apps that have the really important stuff, like financial data or access, offer it.
Finally, once you’ve got all of these measures in place, take a little bit of time to make sure you know what you have, where, and how to use it. When you first realize your phone is lost, broken, or stolen, panic might make you forget all the things you set up to protect and prepare yourself. The tool I ultimately used to find my phone was right there the whole time, but it took half an hour before I remembered it was an option. Part of the reason why is that I hadn’t used the “Find My” app on my computer in years.
Hopefully, you’ll never need to actually use any of these things, although the chances that you’ll lose access to your phone at some point — even if it’s just lost in your home for half an hour — are pretty good. If you’ve done the work to prepare for the worst, you’ll be in a much better place if it ever happens.
In a time when loneliness is more pervasive than ever, why not extend an invitation?
When a friend from college told Melissa Chan that he was coming to visit her in New York City, she was thrilled. It was 2018; she hadn’t seen him in four years, when they had studied abroad in Vienna together. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is a big deal. Let me throw you a party,’” Chan remembers. This friend didn’t know anyone in New York, but that didn’t matter. Chan invited a bunch of her friends, and told them all her usual encouragement to “just bring whoever.” Leading up to the party, her friend mentioned that he had chatted a lot with the two young people in his row on the flight over. “He was like, ‘Oh, is it weird if I invite them to the party?’ And I was like, ‘No, no, that’d be so fun.’”
And it was fun. Having two strangers who were totally unconnected from anyone, save for the serendipitous flight seating plan, made for a great icebreaker, and it sparked a lot of dynamic conversation. Although Chan didn’t keep in touch with the pair, she and her visiting friend remember that night fondly. It sort of encapsulated Chan’s general philosophy when it comes to parties and socializing: Be free and easy with your invitations. “When there’s more of a melting pot at an event, it’s just a more interesting environment and way more conducive to diverse conversations and making new friends,” she says.
The idea of hosting or even attending a large social event where there will be plenty of strangers, or people from disparate friend groups, can generate a lot of anxiety for some. It can be easy to overthink about who may not get along, or catastrophize the potential awkwardness of talking to groups of people with whom you have little in common. Research, though, suggests that a reluctance to reach out and connect is unwise, that we underestimate others’ interest in connecting, and that people like Chan are really onto something. Of course, you cannot invite everyone to everything; an intimate game night will by definition include only a few people, and your dinner parties will be constrained to your number of place settings. If you are able to include more people, though, research suggests you should, and that it could benefit all involved. Especially in a purported epidemic of loneliness and isolation, putting yourself in a place to form new and surprising connections could lead to revelations. So why not broaden the invitation?
Broadening the invitation means more than just including new acquaintances or strangers at social events. It can also mean reaching out to people you haven’t spoken to in a while, welcoming neighbors who you haven’t really socialized with before, or just encouraging your friends to bring plus-ones.
Inviting someone to an event where they may not know others can feel awkward, especially if it’s been a long time since you last spoke or if you just don’t know them very well. But research shows that you should take heart — chances are that person will be way happier to hear from you than you expect. One study found that people we know are consistently happier to hear from us than we anticipate, especially when the overture is more surprising and unexpected. “People are much more reluctant to reach out to old friends than they should be,” says Lara Aknin, a professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University in Canada who studies how relationships affect well-being. But despite the research, “It’s surprisingly hard to get people to move the needle on this.”
Another thing people commonly find challenging is reaching out to people when it seems like they aren’t very close. Still, asking to hang out with those beyond your closest circles of friends can reap so many other rewards, Aknin says. “I think it’s intuitive to us that our strong relationships matter. But we overlook all these possibilities for contact with people who are all around us all the time,” she says.
For example, one study found that people who mingled with more loose acquaintances or strangers in a day reported better moods and a higher sense of communal belonging. Similarly, a paper assessing people’s “social portfolios” found that people whose regular social interactions ran the gamut of closeness (all the way from family members to coworkers to strangers) reported higher life satisfaction and better quality of life than those with less diverse social lives. Researchers have also documented what they call “the liking gap,” where after conversing with a stranger, “people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company.” Some introverts may expect to feel worse after a social interaction, but even they benefit; all but the extremely introverted tend to feel happier and more energized after socializing.
Interacting with a wide circle of loose friends and acquaintances is also valuable because each person provides more information about the world outside your bubble, says Robin Dunbar, a psychologist and author at the University of Oxford. A lot of important context gets to us “through the information percolating through the friends in your network,” he says. This can be anything from the next fashion fad to a different worldview or philosophy.
In other words, even people with little regular presence in your life can have a big impact on your happiness. So for people who tend to have diverse but disparate friend groups, this means that hosting events where you bring all your worlds together not only benefits yourself, but also “could reasonably be interpreted as a kind of service to others,” says Aknin.
“Generally, the more connected our networks are, with lots of tendrils and different camps, the better individuals feel and the higher they report their well-being to be,” she says. And there’s “a ton of work about how just belonging to multiple groups is strongly associated with health and happiness.” Researchers have linked belonging to multiple social groups — like recreational sports teams or book clubs — with higher self-esteem and lower rates of depression.
Auburn Scallon, a writer in Jackson Heights, New York, loves socializing with diverse mixes of friends. For her, hosting these events brings an added ease of scheduling: “If I met up with everyone I loved only one-on-one, I’d see each person once a year,” she says. Getting everyone together in a big to-do means “I can see the people I love more often.” Not everyone you invite will be able to attend everything, but that’s okay, Scallon says — she makes it clear her invites are low-stakes, and she doesn’t take a “no” personally. She remembers a friend in the early 2000s who, after turning down the fifth invite in a row said: “But please keep inviting me! I’ll make it eventually.” That sort of response is totally welcome, she says; she’d love to see them, but if not now, there will always be next time.
It can also be cool to observe how people are when they’re talking to people whom they likely wouldn’t have met otherwise, says Scallon. It’s another thing she loves about mixing her friends: “You see a different side of people.” And it’s always thrilling when people end up connecting and tell her, “I enjoyed meeting so-and-so,” she says. Science, again, backs her up. Research from 2014 found that playing friend matchmaker increases happiness and well-being. And the more unlikely the match, the more rewarding facilitating that connection is.
If you have two friends who you think might get along, it can be easier to introduce them in a larger, more casual group setting, says Chan. Counterintuitively, it seems like larger groups can put people more at ease because it takes the pressure off of every little interaction, she thinks. Regardless of whether those bonds turn into long-term relationships, “it’s still a moment of human connection enjoyable in the moment, and that’s inherently enjoyable.”
If two friends do hit it off, that opens up doors for you to invite them both to something smaller and more intentional, Scallon says. It can be trickier and more awkward to invite two people who don’t know each other to hang out when it’s just the three of you. But if they’ve already met and got along, then you’re in the clear.
Regardless of the size and scale of your social planning, Scallon says it’s important to stay mindful of certain things. She remembers living in Seattle and asking a friend along to a function — it was only when they got there that Scallon realized her friend was “the only person of color in a room full of white people.” She felt so apologetic and now tries to think about these things in advance. If she invites someone shy to a big gathering, “I try to be intentional about introducing people and providing context for who they’re talking to.” She’ll host things with open-ended time periods so that friends with work- or family-related time constraints can come whenever they prefer, and she’ll try to communicate as clearly as she can what vibe people can expect.
Part of communicating that vibe includes Covid-safety expectations. Scallon is still extremely Covid-conscious, so social gatherings for her have been few and far between ever since 2020, and it’s been several years since she’s organized a large social event. These days, if she does socialize, it’s as a guest — “it’s easier to be safe on my own than to impose precautions on my own guests,” she says. But it’s not the same. Taking precautions while it seems that others have resumed socializing with abandon is isolating, says Scallon, and over the past few years she’s felt a slight shift in herself; she thinks she’s become a little more reserved and introverted as her social muscles grow cold from disuse. But “I do miss it,” she says — the hosting and organizing and bringing friends together. It’ll be exciting when the time comes to resume the practice and reconnect.
Socializing in big groups of people is intimidating. And people are terrible at predicting what social situations will make them happy, says Aknin. “Honestly, I also think we have overly pessimistic views of other people,” she adds. It comes from a reasonable place: “We’re trying to avoid the worst-case scenario which could be a big flop, an awful conversation. But many times we are really positively surprised by other people, by their kindness, by their warmth, by their appreciation, and by our own abilities.”
Thankfully, the research suggests that the more we practice interacting with strangers in novel situations, the easier it becomes and the more positively we begin to view future interactions. “The more we’re exposed to something, the more we like it,” says Aknin.
Being more open to mixing your social groups and extending invitations to people even if you don’t know them very well is about giving yourself, and your friends, more opportunities for connection. You simply cannot make friends with someone if you never cross paths with them, or if you don’t allow for time to converse and find common ground, says Aknin.
Yes, broadening the invitation can mean embracing unknowns, Chan says, but who’s to say those potential unknowns won’t be great? By extending invitations beyond your inner circle, beyond what is known and familiar, you at least give yourself the possibility to make a new or interesting connection. If you don’t, those possibilities are zero, and that would be the greater shame, she says: “People are more capable than you give them credit for.”