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It’s all about the energy bills.
Alicia Cruz was homeless before she and her four daughters moved into a newly vacant apartment in Lancaster City, Pennsylvania, about three years ago. As she stood in the kitchen and watched dirty water clog up the sink, the landlord promised he’d have it fixed before they moved in.
But it was just the beginning. The ceiling of her apartment was cracked; the heating was inadequate, so she and her daughters are usually freezing; due to water damage, they regularly deal with roaches. She’s tried to leave but couldn’t find suitable alternatives she could afford.
“If I knew then what I know now, I probably would have ran out the door and stayed homeless a little longer,” Cruz testified to Pennsylvania state lawmakers in December, later adding: “To this day, the landlord won’t fix this place, but he wants to collect my rent money. It’s just really sad.”
The nation’s affordable housing crisis has gotten some semblance of attention — with journalists writing stories on the rising cost of rent, the scarce supply of new housing, the looming threat of eviction — but one aspect of the crisis has gone consistently overlooked. On top of the severe housing shortage that currently exists, nearly 6 million homes nationwide have moderate to serious home health hazards. They require repairs that, if left ignored, will make them uninhabitable, and eventually they’ll disappear from the market altogether.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition, a research and advocacy group, estimates a shortage of 7 million affordable housing units for low-income renters, but those figures don’t account for all the existing affordable units that stand at risk of demolition.
Issues like lead paint, leaky roofs, and knob-and-tube wiring don’t just leave tenants and homeowners in substandard, unsafe housing. They also leave families — mostly poor families — shut out from energy efficiency programs the federal government already funds to upgrade homes. Due to inflexible program restrictions, homes with outstanding repairs aren’t eligible for existing weatherization subsidies, despite those families arguably needing them the most. Addressing this problem could help solve both the affordable housing and the climate crisis at once.
Low-income households in particular have a lot to gain from the federal Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), which provides funds to repair or replace heating and cooling systems, treat windows, or make any of the other upgrades that can not only reduce home energy use but also substantially reduce utility bills. But as it stands now, it’s people living in homes with no mold, asbestos, or structural issues who can access those WAP funds. Low-income homeowners and renters must first find the resources to fix their units, with some repairs running as high as $50,000.
The sheer number of homes barred from weatherization due to outstanding health and safety issues is immense. In Connecticut, for example, between 2017 and 2019, nearly 25 percent of income-eligible homes were barred from weatherization upgrades. Steve Luxton, who heads a nonprofit focused on helping Philadelphians weatherize their homes, told me 55 to 65 percent of those in his city who apply for WAP assistance are denied because of structural issues. And nationally, according to a recently published E4TheFuture analysis, 10 to 30 percent of income-eligible clients are deferred from weatherization upgrades each year for health and safety problems, with those deferrals on the rise.
Not being able to weatherize homes doesn’t just present cost burdens for low-income households, it also has a direct impact on the climate crisis. The energy required to cool, heat, and provide electricity to residential buildings accounts for 20 percent of annual energy use in the US, with older homes emitting more carbon.
Included in the $1 trillion infrastructure bill Congress passed in November was a $3.5 billion investment in the federal weatherization program, with the stated goal to increase energy efficiency, increase health and safety, and reduce annual energy costs for low-income households. A 2015 Department of Energy evaluation of WAP found the energy efficiency upgrades it subsidized led to households saving an average of $283 per year on their bills.
The Biden administration estimates the new infusion of funds from the infrastructure bill will allow the government to help 450,000 households weatherize over a decade. But low-income homeowners and tenants will remain shut out from the new money if they aren’t able to make the repairs they need.
“There will always be a tension, saying, ‘Okay, should I spend a thousand dollars to fix that roof when I could weatherize someone else’s house now?” said Charlie Harak, senior attorney for energy and utilities issues at the National Consumer Law Center. “But I’d go so far as to say that often the houses most in need of weatherization get walked away from.”
It’s certainly not easy to come up with money for those repairs. If you’re a low-income homeowner, you would likely struggle to get an affordable home improvement loan from a bank. You may have less than optimal credit, and depending on where your house is located, the house itself may have low equity. If you’re a renter, your landlord probably feels little pressure to make your unit energy efficient, given that it’s tenants, not the property owners, who typically shoulder the electricity and gas bills.
According to US census data, low-income households spent an average of 8.1 percent of their income on energy costs, compared to 2.3 percent for wealthier households. It’s not uncommon for poor families to pull back on other expenses, like medicine, groceries, or child care to cover their energy bills.
Jeff Genzer, who has served as counsel for the National Association of State Energy Officials since 1986, told me the intersection of housing and energy issues is one of the most difficult problems he’s worked on in his career. Steve Cowell, executive director of E4TheFuture and a longtime energy efficiency advocate, said the problem originates from treating health and safety issues as a footnote.
“The whole energy efficiency world that developed over the last 30 years was focused on pieces of the puzzle, and primarily the costs and benefits of energy on an economic dollar basis,” he said. “The health, safety, and conditions of a home has just been seen in the background, a side deal.”
Experts like Cowell have been trying to urge attention on the so-called “non-energy impacts” of weatherization, such as reduced asthma, reduced missed days of work, and fewer home fires. One evaluation published in 2016 assessed that each weatherized Massachusetts housing unit yielded an estimated $1,381 in combined savings to the individual household and society, with some of those savings coming from literally preventing deaths.
When the energy efficiency movement got its start in the 1970s following the oil crisis, talk of reducing carbon emissions was simply not a salient consideration for policymakers and practitioners, and wouldn’t become one for years.
But as the stakes of the climate crisis have grown clearer, the last 10 years have marked a sea change for the energy efficiency movement. While in prior decades policymakers could ignore home upgrades when they deemed weatherization not “cost- effective,” today they have to wrestle with the fact that the low-income renters living in subsidized apartments are using even more energy than other households, typically because their units are older and built with less efficient tech.
One study published in 2019 by the American Council for an Energy- Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that making energy upgrades — including to residential buildings — could cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050. Upgrades to homes and buildings could save 30 percent on average for most buildings, ACEEE wrote, while installing sensors, automated controls, and other smart software could reduce energy use by another 15 percent.
The carbon emissions produced by old, decrepit housing are not the only environmental threat. A warming planet also threatens to put more homes into disrepair or wipe them out from the existing housing stock altogether, exacerbating our housing shortage. For example, if a fire or natural disaster doesn’t completely destroy a unit, the owner has to decide whether to then repair or demolish it. Affordable rental units are more likely to be demolished than rebuilt, given the tight profit margins they operate on.
Upgrading home energy systems won’t make those homes more capable of withstanding the effects of climate change. As Carlos Martín, the director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me, energy efficiency upgrades are climate mitigation steps; they would help reduce future emissions to make the crisis less severe. But addressing home repairs, like fixing broken roofs, floors, and windows — those investments would strengthen existing housing stock to better withstand more frequent storms, flooding, and heat.
The growing affordable housing crisis has brought increased pressure to this situation. Depreciation is one of the top three threats to preserving existing affordable housing. It’s a hard issue to mobilize around though, because, like global warming, it’s a crisis we’re hurtling toward but haven’t yet reached. Weatherizing affordable homes could help avoid that fate; lowering maintenance costs can improve a property’s cash flow, which can then be used to reinvest in other capital needs.
More than a quarter of American households in 2020 reported difficulty paying their energy bills. Harak, from the National Consumer Law Center, noted that failure to pay utility bills is considered a breach of the lease in most subsidized housing, leaving the renter highly vulnerable to eviction.
“It’s a significant issue from an aspect of equity,” said Andrew Aurand, vice president for research at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “If these people are priced out, where would they actually go?”
In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are exploring a legislative solution to this problem, through a first-of-its-kind bill in the nation. Introduced in March by Democratic state Sen. Nikil Saval, the Whole-Home Repairs Act would provide eligible residents with grants up to $50,000 to make needed home repairs, and small landlords could apply for the same amount in forgivable loans. The bill would also aim to ramp up investments in workforce development, to address the growing shortage of qualified workers able to address the repairs.
By finally fixing up the homes, tenants like Alicia Cruz would not only be able to live in safer and healthier environments, they’d also be finally positioned to access weatherization dollars. More than 280,000 occupied homes across Pennsylvania are estimated to have moderate to severe physical issues, ranging from exposed wiring to failed plumbing and leaky windows. Environmental justice activists note that making the housing repairs would also help those being targeted with offers by property developers, and help more seniors age in their own homes, a strong preference for many elderly families who live on fixed incomes.
Genzer, of the National Association of State Energy Officials, told me he thinks Saval’s proposal is an “excellent bill” but that the $50,000 price tag for repairs “tells you a lot” about how difficult this problem can be politically.
Still, it’s not a long shot. Though Saval is a left-wing Philly Democrat, his bill has captured support from some heavyweight Republican legislators in Harrisburg, including Republican Sen. Pat Browne, chair of the state appropriations committee. Another is Sen. Dave Argall, chair of the state government committee, who has worked on blight issues for more than a decade.
“I represent a lot of struggling old mining communities where most of the coal mining stopped in the 1940s and 1950s,” Argall told me. “What I liked about Sen. Saval’s bill is if we help fix up the housing before they completely go to rot, that’s better for the people living in the homes, better for the next-door neighbor, and better for the taxpayer if they don’t have to fund millions and millions in demolition costs.”
Argall said he thinks the bill has “a very good chance” of passage in this year’s budget cycle, though the precise dollar amount is still being negotiated. Saval is pointing to the state’s $6 billion budget surplus and unspent Covid-19 relief dollars as strong sources to seed the new program.
Saval campaigned on affordable housing issues, but his office said data released last spring by the progressive polling firm Data for Progress was particularly instrumental in shaping some of their thinking around the politics. A survey of likely voters across Pennsylvania found 87 percent of respondents supported weatherizing homes to make them more energy efficient, including 83 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of independents.
While the home repairs bill would not itself go toward making energy efficiency upgrades, it would position more homes to be able to access the WAP funds. “We’re trying to make that federal money work more effectively,” Saval told me.
On the federal level, the Department of Energy has been slow to take this problem seriously, though advocates say conversations are starting to happen. The pandemic also elevated the conversation around staying home, indoor air quality, and respiratory illness.
“There’s some new efforts to think through this,” said Cowell, of E4TheFuture. “But they still struggle to decide if weatherization should go beyond just the straight economic savings.” The federal agency still doesn’t require states to report the number of homes deferred from the weatherization program for repairs, and not all states track those “weatherization walkaways” consistently.
Some states can dedicate a portion of their Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funds for weatherization, a pot of money that tends to have a bit more flexibility than WAP funds in how it can be spent. Still, spending patterns for LIHEAP vary dramatically across states, and most of the money still goes for its primary purpose — helping poor families defray the cost of their energy bills. In 2015, less than 10 percent of total federal LIHEAP funds were used on weatherization.
In Congress, weatherization has bipartisan support, but there’s been less momentum to address the home repair issues that prevent energy upgrades. Still, Democratic Rep. Dwight Evans, who represents Pennsylvania’s Third Congressional District, including parts of Philadelphia, told me he thinks Saval’s Whole-Home Repairs Act could become a national model. After all, Pennsylvania is showing how blight issues can bring collaboration across the aisle. And a Data for Progress poll from January found investing in energy efficiency for buildings to be one of the most popular climate policies nationally, especially given high energy prices.
“I think this program has great potential — it can be a vital part of the federal, state, and local investment that we need,” Evans said. “I’ve supported and voted for increased federal investments in affordable housing, and this would fit well with that.”
Rare dissent flares in China’s financial hub as residents struggle to access food and medicine
Shanghai, China’s bustling cosmopolis of 26 million, has been under lockdown since late March under the nation’s strict “dynamic Zero Covid” protocols a system so poorly managed that residents are frequently unable to access basic necessities like food, medications, and medical care, prompting fairly widespread, spontaneous protests both online and in real life.
While the government has touted the Zero Covid strategy, the government’s system of containment using intensive testing and tracing, combined with partial or complete lockdowns when a case is detected, as keeping case counts and deaths low over the past two years, the reports coming out of Shanghai suggest that the local government was unprepared for an outbreak in the country’s economic center and cast doubt on the feasibility of Zero Covid at this point in the pandemic. That’s translated into serious struggles for residents, including hours-long ambulance wait times, dwindling savings, and inadequate or rotten food supplies, among others. Although the central government is reportedly stepping up efforts to get supplies to the city, the overall policy is driving many residents to criticize the government’s policy — and Shanghai’s implementation of it — despite serious potential risks to their safety and freedom by doing so.
“Even the authoritarian governments, they still have to take this mass reaction into account, or else will lose the cooperation from the society. We’re going to expect that [the central government] is going to improve the policy implementation, even though the policy itself is not going to change,” Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox on Friday.
The Shanghai outbreak is thus far China’s most serious since the beginning of the pandemic; a staggering 200,000 cases have been reported since the outbreak started in March, though that’s likely under-reported, according to the New York Times. What started as a patchwork of temporary lockdowns to limit the spread of disease quickly turned into an interminable, city-wide shutdown with people only allowed out to take PCR tests, as a New York Magazine piece explained earlier this week. Shanghai’s lockdown, two years into the pandemic, is rivaled only by those in Wuhan in 2020 and Xi’an at the end of last year in terms of strictness.
Shanghai residents’ outrage — which they’ve expressed by singing and chanting from their balconies and co-opting anti-American hashtags used by government officials to criticize the US — is borne from the fact that the government isn’t providing the stability it promises in exchange for personal freedoms, according to Rui Zhong, program associate at the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. “I think what makes people angry in Shanghai, and what made people angry in Xi’an is, Covid has been a problem for years,” she told Vox. “I think they’ve been really stunned at the degree to which their local officials haven’t necessarily prepared, including non-supply-chain issues,” like hospital admissions.
Still, the government is asking citizens to sacrifice, without yet having the capacity to ensure access to food and medical care. On Thursday, people in the city’s Pudong district protested their building being taken over by the local government for the purposes of quarantining those who had tested positive. Footage of the incident circulated around Chinese social media before being censored, showing health authorities wrangling protesters to the ground and taking them to a white van, while others shouted, “Bring them back!” The video also captured residents saying, “The police are hitting people,” as they tried to block authorities from taking control of their building, according to NBC.
Shanghai’s local government enjoys a degree of relative autonomy in the context of President Xi Jinping’s China; it’s technically directly under the control of the central government, as a province-level city, but enjoys special status as the country’s financial hub and a showpiece for the rest of the world. Until March, the local government had handled the pandemic well, with no major outbreaks. But the rapid onset of the Omicron variant and the corresponding draconian government measures are pushing some citizens to the brink.
“I have no more money … What am I to do? I don’t care anymore,” one man shouts to his whole building in a viral video on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. “Just let the Communist Party take me.”
Zhong told Vox she had heard similar stories of desperation coming from Shanghai. “I was listening to a recording of an elderly man who was asking about his heart medication to a local cadre, a local CCP official,” she said. “He was basically saying, ‘We have hundreds of these types of cases per day, and I understand, but I can’t do anything.’ A lot of the immediate pressure goes on at the most local levels — a lot of emotional conversations, like ‘I am starving,’ or ‘I just got food but the food is all rotten,’ or ‘I need medication.’ So these are all very, very basic material needs. So people are very emotional that they can’t purchase them, and they don’t have a timetable for when they get these necessities again.”
Wednesday’s New York Magazine dispatch from Shanghai describes neighborhoods and residential complexes bound together via WeChat (essentially, as Zhong said, “an operating system” which serves as a messaging platform, payment system, and more, and is ubiquitous in China) with volunteers stepping up where the government has failed — organizing large wholesale grocery orders for their buildings, helping administer Covid-19 tests, and organizing medical care for those in need. Shanghai’s Covid-19 response system has relied on volunteer efforts throughout the pandemic, to support data collection, contact tracing, and elder care; that worked in the days before Omicron, the incredibly virulent strain of the disease, began ripping through densely populated areas. That, combined with less-efficacious vaccines and lower overall vaccination rates due to the government’s Covid-19 policy, particularly among the elderly, to protect against the virus, was too much for the Zero Covid system to bear.
“Many Shanghai people blame the local government officials for mishandling the crisis, the coordination problems, lack of contingency planning, these issues. Which might be true,” Huang said. “But it is interesting how, within a month, Shanghai degenerated from a poster child of the pandemic control to a pariah of the Covid response.”
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Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
Although the local bureaucrats have borne the brunt of people’s frustration, both Zhong and Huang told Vox, they might not necessarily be the ones to blame for the current crisis. “I think in Shanghai, if you measure state capacity in terms of the fiscal capacity, in terms of also the quality of the bureaucratic officials, the capabilities of the local government officials, I think it’s still relatively high,” Huang said. “I think the fundamental issue remains the Zero Covid strategy itself.”
It’s easy, and to an extent, even logical, to blame supply chain strain — a global problem throughout the pandemic — for lack of access to food and medicine, but it doesn’t work the same way when the problem is getting an ambulance to come to address an emergency, or getting access to a hospital bed. “The problem is not lack of capacity, but the single-minded pursuit of Zero Covid,” Huang told Vox.
“I think what makes some of the outcry in Shanghai distinctive is, the grievances are not new,” according to Zhong. Previous lockdowns in Wuhan and Xi’an produced some of the same effects, albeit at a smaller scale, she told Vox. “You had these gaps in care, services for people, so, making sure everybody gets their prescription medication, making sure that food supply lines are ok, making sure that people who need to go to a hospital for non-Covid emergencies have options. Some of these problems go back as far as Wuhan in 2020.”
Both Zhong and Huang told Vox that the protests against the Shanghai lockdown — both in person and online — are spontaneous, rather than an organized effort. “In terms of protests, anything that’s really organized, centralized, or has some kind of clear leader or group, those are really, really difficult to organize in China because anybody that seems to be a protest leader, basically paints a target in terms of law enforcement,” Zhong said. “It’s sort of tacitly known in mainland China that something, even to the degree of 2014 or 2019 Hong Kong protests are really difficult to materialize because of the quick law enforcement responses.”
As authorities’ response to Thursday’s protest shows, law enforcement and government reaction to dissent is indeed swift; whether it’s shuffling screaming protesters into white vans, banning hashtags, or censoring videos, the Chinese government has little appetite for dissent.
“When people take to social media, it’s not the first resort people want, because social media is so easily identifiable and people don’t want their accounts shuttered,” Zhong noted. However, there are online efforts to use the government’s own online tools against them, she told Vox: “People are doing really unorthodox things, like using hashtags that state government typically uses to say how bad America is — except to complain about Shanghai.”
Social media also serves as an important form of record keeping, which is important in a state known for repressive censorship. The online so-called “lockdown diary” has been part of the Chinese public’s response to Covid-19 and the government’s containment policy since the very beginning, Zhong said. It’s a form of record-keeping for people, to say, ‘This is what happened. This is what happened to my mother, my grandmother.’ Or, ‘This official was pushed so hard and pressured so hard that they took their own life,’” she said.
As to whether this outburst of desperation and dissatisfaction could portend further, more sustained protests, Zhong is circumspect; it’s far too early to tell what effect the Shanghai protests will have on the city’s future, the Zero Covid policy, or the nation. But it does open a window for criticism of the policy, as Huang noted.
“There’s already more than 44 cities that have been under full or partial lockdowns, and many more cities have started mass PCR testing that impose limits on people’s movements. It’s fair to say that a large percentage of the population has been affected by this policy,” he said. And that criticism does, at least push the government to improve delivery of core goods and services, if only to ensure stability and quiet dissent, Huang said.
But ultimately, though experts within and outside the government — as well as China’s own citizens — are saying that the Zero Covid policy no longer works in a radically different pandemic landscape, adjustments and concessions from the government won’t alter the core policy. It’s too tied to the “superiority of the Chinese model,” as Huang said. “It’s certainly a strong incentive to continue that success, because the failure would mean that you essentially give up halfway through, and all this legacy will be gone. But in the meantime, I think it is less about legacy, the policy, and more about not allowing the perceived failure undermine personal leadership, or regime legitimacy.”
If you think a pal is way less (or way more) invested than you are, here’s what to do.
Kristen’s 12-year relationship with her best friend Heather was put to the test during the pandemic. (Both women’s names have been changed at Kristen’s request to protect their privacy.) Their experiences during the past few years couldn’t have felt more different: Kristen, a single, 35-year-old behavioral researcher in San Francisco, was unbearably lonely during the lockdown. Her best friend, Heather, also 35, married and living in Los Angeles, gave birth to her first child. Kristen expected Heather’s priorities to shift as she adjusted to being a new mom, but Kristen wasn’t prepared for how upsetting it would feel to be shuffled to an outer ring of her best friend’s life precisely when she needed Heather most.
They tried to keep in touch, agreeing to hop on a phone call every other Sunday at 8 am. But Heather was a no-show week after week. “She just would get really busy and overwhelmed and kind of just forget about me,” Kristen says. With every phone date Heather blew off, Kristen’s resentment grew. “It just got so painful that I was like, ‘This is not working,’” she says.
As we juggle the demands of this ongoing pandemic, friendships have shifted in all sorts of unexpected ways. Many people now seem to have less stamina for socializing, says Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together, a book about cultivating friendships in adulthood. Vellos believes folks became used to having smaller social circles, and some realized they prefer keeping it that way. As a result, these people might be more choosy about the friendships they do invest time in. That’s mostly a good thing, but it can be painful for the people who are hurt that they are no longer a priority.
A lopsided friendship happens when one friend is more active in maintaining contact and the other friend is more passive about keeping the connection going. It’s understandable to be sad or upset if you’re the one constantly reaching out, sending thoughtful messages and asking if you can schedule brunch or happy hour together. According to a 2010 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, social rejection can feel as distressing as physical pain.
“We live longer if we feel connected and supported,” says Kasley Killam, a Harvard- trained social scientist who specializes in connection and loneliness, and founder of the nonprofit Social Health Labs. “So when someone expresses that they’re perhaps not as interested in being friends with us or they need a break or whatever, that can trigger this innate fear inside of us that we’re going to be alone or that we’re not of value.”
Psychologist Ayanna Abrams says having a lopsided friendship doesn’t automatically mean that your friendship is unhealthy or toxic. It’s only a problem if someone is feeling negative emotions about the pattern. To help figure out whether you’re in a lopsided friendship and how to deal if you are, Vox spoke with four friendship and connection experts.
It’s easy to jump to conclusions and assume that if we don’t hear from someone as often as we’d like to, Killam says, “that means they don’t like us, or they don’t value our friendship.” More likely: The other person is just busy — it’s not that deep.
It’s seductive to tell yourself stories when a close friend has gone quiet. “Once that seed is in our minds, it is hard to let go,” says Danielle Bayard Jackson, a friendship coach and host of the Friend Forward podcast. Concocting a narrative about why your friend isn’t reciprocating is a common reason, she says, for a lot of friendships ending prematurely. People think to themselves, for example, “Oh, I guess she’s not as invested in this friendship as I thought. I guess her new boyfriend’s more important.”
“All of that stuff is a self-generated story,” Jackson says. You might find yourself behaving in response to a story you made up out of thin air.
The solution? Challenge these beliefs, which are likely way off-base. Are these negative thoughts based in reality, or is this your insecurity speaking? When clients express these worries to Abrams, she asks the person to imagine what their friend would say about the friendship. Next, imagine the demands and commitments the friend is juggling. This exercise usually helps bring the temperature down so the client can see that their friend is likely busy and isn’t intentionally blowing them off.
People often wait to alert their friend to an issue until it’s boiled over from annoyance to full-on anger. The best time to address the issue “is when you begin feeling that distance or imbalance in the relationship,” Abrams says. She recommends pinpointing what you want more or less of and then verbalizing it.
You might be tempted to blurt out, “Hey, I haven’t heard from you in a while. What gives?” But that could put your friend on the defense. Instead, “let them know you’re reaching out to them out of a desire for their company, and not accusing them of what they’re failing to do,” she says, “which doesn’t really feel good to anyone and is not a good motivator to get them to act.”
Jackson suggests proposing plans using what she calls the movie trailer method: You should preview the experience so the other person has a taste of what’s to come. Instead of saying, “Hey, let’s get together sometime,” with them replying, “Absolutely,” and then crickets for two months, maybe say, “Hey, do you wanna get together Saturday around 7 for an hour or two? We can try this new wine bar in town. Let’s get dressed up and sip something bubbly.” In doing this, you’re giving a visual of being there, like a scene from the movie that will be your Saturday night hang.
Designing the plans that way makes it easier for people to commit. “And if they can’t, a friend who is equally interested will negotiate with you and say, ‘Dang, I can’t do Saturday, but let’s try Tuesday,’” Jackson adds.
Your friend may be feeling like this is more of a logistics problem, and isn’t aware that you’re open to changing your established routine. So the next time you reach out, you could say something like:
Your friend also might prefer to change the mode and frequency of communication. Maybe texting is better for them instead of taking phone calls. Or they might want to talk on the phone once a week instead of exchanging DMs on a social platform they’re no longer using. Ask!
At this point, if you’ve tried a few different strategies and you’re hearing radio silence, Vellos says you should assume the universe is telling you to put your attention elsewhere. “That could be another person, another friendship, another hobby, whatever,” she says. Redirect your energy so you’re not wasting your time and getting your hopes up for something that’s unlikely to happen.
Lots of people may find themselves on the opposite side of the spectrum: They’re the ones who are too snowed under to invest in their friendships. In this case, it is your responsibility, as a friend, to let the other person know about what they can expect from you for the foreseeable future. It saves a lot of heartache for everyone if you tell them the truth about what is going on with you, Abrams says. Know that you don’t have to be in a stressful or busy place to explain you need space; you can set boundaries around your time and energy even if you technically could hang out with this person more often.
When Jackson was pregnant, she messaged her friends and let them know her availability was shifting but she’ll be back soon. She communicated, “I’m thinking of you. I want to get together. I can’t for the next few months, but man, I cannot wait to see you soon and catch up then.” Her friends not only appreciated the heads-up, but were reassured that she valued their bond.
If you need to let a friend know you won’t be as available in the future, Abrams suggests saying something like:
The important thing is to be open, honest, and focused when you do connect. Aim for quality over quantity here — so when you do engage with your friends, they’ll feel valued and secure, knowing the friendship is meaningful to you too.
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Russian warship: Moskva crew ‘shown for first time since sinking’ - Russia’s defence ministry releases a video purportedly showing the crew of the Moskva in Sevastopol.
Ukraine war: Trucks stuck at Poland-Belarus border as EU sanctions deadline passes - An 80km queue formed on the Polish border ahead of a deadline for Russian trucks to leave the EU.
Ukraine war: No quick return to normal for scarred Bucha - Everything has changed in this town since the Russians came, and horrific memories will not easily be erased.
Chernihiv is silent, after having been under constant attack from Russian forces - The Ukrainian city of Chernihiv was under constant attack until suddenly Russian forces withdrew.
Climate change: ‘We’re making wine in Norway’ - Vineyards are moving further north, but new winemakers say they struggle to be taken seriously.
How plants turned predator - Carnivorous plants fascinate as much now as when their gruesome diet was first discovered. - link
NASA to roll back its mega rocket after failing to complete countdown test - NASA has options for what to do next, but all will involve schedule delays. - link
The weekend’s best deals: Google Chromecast, Apple AirPods, and more - Dealmaster also has Intel and AMD CPUs, Tile trackers, and tons of video games. - link
Steph Curry stars in new Nope teaser airing during NBA playoff games - We still don’t know much about the plot, but it’s a savvy marketing move - link
The rise of brand-new, second-hand electric vehicles - Global chip shortage has triggered a surge in demand for prized, pricey used EVs. - link
He finds his way to a bar stool and orders a shot of Jack Daniels.
After sitting there for a while, he yells to the bartender, ‘Hey, you wanna hear a blonde joke?’
The bar immediately falls absolutely silent.
In a very deep, husky voice, the woman next to him says,
’Before you tell that joke I think it is only fair, given that you are blind, that you should know five things:
The bartender is a blonde girl with a baseball bat.
The bouncer is a blonde girl.
I’m a 6-foot tall, 175-pound blonde woman with a black belt in karate.
The woman sitting next to me is blonde and a professional weight lifter.
The lady to your right is blonde and a professional wrestler.
Now, think about it seriously, do you still wanna tell that blonde joke?’
The blind Marine thinks for a second, shakes his head and mutters, ‘No…not if I’m gonna have to explain it five times.’
submitted by /u/MarionScott
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“What?” I asked. “Hot and sweaty?”
“No,” she replied. “Only a few members use it regularly.”
submitted by /u/incredibleinkpen
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They said they wouldn’t mind if we did it the old fashioned way as they weren’t man haters!
For six months now we’ve been trying but I just don’t have the heart to tell them I had a vasectomy last year.
submitted by /u/YZXFILE
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The doctor explains his wife is probably over heating and needs to find a way to cool her down.
The guy goes to his best friend and asks him to waft a towel over him and his wife while they have sex to keep them cool.
The friend agrees and the next day he shows up and wafts the towel while they bone down, but hours go buy and the guy has climaxed several times but his wife not even once.
The man gets frustrated and tells his friend to pork her while he wafts the towel.
After just minutes the wife begins moaning and screaming as she’s wracked over and over again by waves and waves of orgasms’.
When she finally stops, the man looks to his friend and smugly tells him “See, now that’s how you waft a fucking towel.”
submitted by /u/JesterEric
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A stormtrooper.
submitted by /u/Grasshoppa01
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