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I sold my clutter for less than it was worth. I don’t regret it.

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Just three weeks before moving day, I looked around my house — at the furniture, the decor, my kids’ plastic dolls and play sets. I didn’t know how I was going to pack it all. And in fact, I didn’t want to pack or keep a lot of it.

Baby clothes? Didn’t need them anymore. The rocking chair in my bedroom? Never used it. Salt lamp? Just clutter.

I listed things for way less than they were worth.

I shrugged when a friend asked, “$30 for that stroller?” examining what was once the $400 star of my baby registry. I wasn’t trying to make a fortune. I just wanted to get rid of stuff, save myself trips to the donation center, and maybe score a small token (usually cash for a Starbucks indulgence) that could serve as an incentive to actually get things out of the house.

By the time I moved, I’d made $571, gotten rid of a ton of stuff, and taught myself the value of letting things go.

I always struggle with spring cleaning

I’ll admit I’m a little bit of a hoarder. It’s not that I’m collecting empty soda bottles and stacks of newspapers, but I do like to hold on to things. I’m always struggling to find free space in my closet, and my cluttered garage has been a point of embarrassment for years.

But with three young kids now, I wanted a yard, something my small townhouse couldn’t provide. This meant a larger place, in a more affordable city, and a big move. My mom recommended selling some stuff, and I liked the idea. Even if I swapped lesser-loved goods for just a few bucks, maybe a little incentive was what I needed.


Kids dresses

Before moving the author focused on decluttering. 

Courtesy of the author



So I walked around my home, taking pictures of things I thought people might want, and posting them on Facebook Marketplace. I wanted to declutter before the move, so I priced everything low. In an effort to get rid of my kids’ old wagon, I looked up listings for similar wagons. The going rate seemed to be $20, so I listed mine for $10.

I kept a little log on my phone of what I sold and how much I sold it for. It was kind of fun. I liked the small feeling of accomplishment I’d get when I both got something out of the house and made some cash.

Selling stuff gave my clutter worth

Whenever someone wanted to buy something, I’d pack the item in a little gift bag, complete with tissue paper, before putting it out on my porch for pickup. Sometimes, if I was selling baby clothes or puzzles, I’d leave a little card in the bag saying, “I hope you enjoy this as much as we did!”

I thought the buyer would appreciate the extra effort, but I mostly did this for me. When I dressed my old stuff up like a present, it made the item feel new again. It felt less like I was getting rid of old clutter, and more like I was passing along a little treasure.


Gift on street

The author sold stuff she didn’t need anymore on Facebook Marketplace. 

Courtesy of the author



As I put gift bag after gift bag on my patio, I realized why I’d always had trouble paring down. I felt sad putting things I once wanted, and even loved, into a trash bag, and tossing them into my trunk before dropping it off in the alley behind the Goodwill.

Sure, it felt good and helpful to donate useful things like clothes and blankets. But a lot of my donations were just “stuff.” And while I liked to imagine the stuffed animal I cherished as a kid would get adopted by some little girl roaming the thrift store, I knew that some of what I donated would sit in a dusty storeroom for months, and plenty would probably end up in the dump.

Now I felt I was giving some of my things worth, or at least knowing they were going to a good home. And I didn’t need money to do that. Some stuff, I gave away for free.

When I posted a big bin of maternity clothes for $20, and a woman messaged saying she wanted them but would need to wait until her husband got his next paycheck, I packed a can of unopened baby formula in the bag and gave them to her for free. The same thing happened with a bag of baby clothes and a new grandmother who was sending clothes to her daughter. I packed some lightweight baby toys and books (easier for shipping) in her bag and said it was a gift.

I want my kids to have a better relationship with stuff

When my 5-year-old asked about the little gifts I was setting out on the porch, I told her we were done using those things, and they were going to the next person.

I felt like this was a good lesson, and I hoped she’d latch on to this idea of items being transient; that we don’t need to hold on to things forever. It’s OK to say goodbye.

When it came time to move, she asked what would happen to our old house now that we were no longer living in it. I told her that, just like the stuff we didn’t need anymore, we were passing it on to another family who would hopefully enjoy it as much as we did.




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Oracle to investors: Don’t worry about data center spending, company is ‘very, very good’ at cost-cutting

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Oracle has two magic words for investors concerned with the company’s aggressive data center spending: fast and cheap.

Shares of the cloud giant rose as much as 10% on Tuesday after it surpassed investor expectations for the third quarter and raised revenue guidance to $67 billion for fiscal 2026.

Still, Oracle faced some questions about its AI data center buildout and how it plans to justify the billions of dollars it burns along the way. In February, Oracle announced a $50 billion debt raise to help fund its AI ambitions. In the last year, the company has announced major data center projects in Texas, New Mexico, and Michigan.

On Oracle’s third-quarter earnings call Tuesday, Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler asked, “How comfortable are you with the values you’re creating from the AI data center business itself?”

Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk reassured Moerdler that the company is focused on minimizing the cost of its data center buildout to maximize future profitability.

“We continue to get better and better at running these data centers, delivering them more cheaply, optimizing the amount of cost for networking and hardware spend, as well as power,” said Magouyrk.

He added that Oracle is focused on accelerating the time its buildings spend under construction.

“We’re very good at it,” he said.

“We’re very, very good at reducing those costs during that time period.”

He did not give any other details on how exactly Oracle manages its data center budget.

In 2022, Oracle undertook significant cost-cutting measures, laying off thousands of people in the wake of its $28 billion acquisition of medical records giant Cerner.

In January, Business Insider reported that Oracle was struggling to find financing for Stargate, its $500 billion data center initiative with OpenAI.

Lenders and investors told Business Insider they were growing weary of the project’s lofty ambitions as it races to keep up with the rest of Big Tech amid the AI race.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are on track to spend $600 billion on data centers and AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.




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Popping a multivitamin could reduce your biological age by a few months — but don’t rush to the drugstore just yet

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We’ve all done it: popped a multivitamin and thought “will this actually do anything?”

For decades, the answer you’d typically get from health experts was a big shrug, because of a lack of solid evidence that multivitamins have a meaningful, measurable impact on our overall health or our odds of living a longer, healthier life.

A study published Monday in Nature Medicine suggests that, for older adults, we might be getting closer to an affirmative nod that multivitamins do something, after it showed a daily pill slowed their aging clocks by about four months.

Experts say the finding is interesting, but the effect is very small and it’s premature to change your own supplement stack.

“This doesn’t mean that everyone should go out and start taking a multivitamin,” lead study author and supplement researcher Howard Sesso, an epidemiologist and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told Business Insider. “Rather, this is starting to provide the connecting dots.”

The study is part of a growing body of evidence suggesting older adults might derive some small, marginal benefits from taking multivitamins, especially if they’re not getting enough nutrients in their diet. Another 2023 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that once-daily multivitamins helped improve people’s scores on common memory tests, just a bit.

In the study, taking a once-daily multivitamin slowed down biological age clocks


man taking pills at desk

More is not necessarily better when it comes to taking supplements. In this study, people took one multivitamin tablet per day.

Dobrila Vignjevic/Getty Images



The study, a large randomized control trial, followed 958 older adults (aged 70 on average: men over 60, women over 65). Half were asked to take a standard daily multivitamin for older adults for two years, while the others took a placebo pill. Those who reliably popped the multivitamin each day slowed down their biological aging by about four months over the course of the two years, when compared to their peers on the fake supplement.

The study was funded in part by the multivitamin maker Centrum — it provided the pills for the study cost-free to researchers — but the study was done at independent universities, and supported by federal grants from the National Institutes of Health. The study is more rigorous than most supplement trials out there.

The research team measured how the group aged using biological age clocks, also known as epigenetic clocks, including two called GrimAge and PhenoAge. They use a person’s blood or spit to measure DNA methylation, the changes in how our genes are expressed as we age. The clocks are designed to predict how well we are aging overall, instead of giving a snapshot of health in one area of the body, like a blood pressure reading, cholesterol level, or pulse check would do.

The study found that the faster someone was aging, according to the clocks, the more that taking supplements seemed to help slow the pace, suggesting the multivitamins might be more beneficial for older adults already lacking in nutrients or in poorer health.

Sesso said there could be something about the “interconnectivity” of the different vitamins and minerals in a daily multivitamin “that might be working together in ways that we just don’t fully appreciate.”

However, the study couldn’t show that the changes to biological age might make us feel better as we age, or determine how soon we’ll die.

“It might turn out that what this is actually measuring is not really improved healthspan, but something else,” the aging researcher Daniel Belsky, an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study, told Business Insider. “Lots of things could cause variation in the epigenetic clocks that are not the biology of aging.”

After all, biological age clocks have shown accelerated aging in people undergoing surgery, and pregnant women, but those changes are temporary, and likely not meaningful indications of a person’s longevity.

Data on younger adults is lacking when it comes to supplements


person eating healthy

One of the authors of the study prefers to get his nutrients from food.

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If the evidence that multivitamins can help older adults maintain their health by providing the essential nutrients becomes stronger, then it may become more common for doctors to recommend them to older adults.

Already, some doctors and scientists, including Sesso, have told Business Insider they have switched to taking multivitamins as a result of new research. Specifically, Sesso was impressed by a separate, decades-long study funded by the National Institutes of Health that showed men over 50 may reduce their risk of cancer and developing cataracts, just slightly, by popping a once-daily multivitamin tablet. So, when he turned 50, he started taking one.

“That’s all I take,” he said, cautioning against taking unnecessary supplements. “The scientific rigor overall for dietary supplements is not as good as it should be. And yet the public continues to take these willingly without knowledge of really what any benefits or even harms might be.”

Sesso tends to prioritize getting nutrients the old-fashioned way, through eating nutritious foods, plus incorporating other habits science shows can boost longevity, like staying active, and connecting to friends.

“I am a firm believer in diet, lifestyle and just healthy living, as best I can,” he said.

The future of medicine could be informed by biological age tests that tell us which pills to take when


blood draw

In the future, a simple blood draw measuring your biological age could help inform a doctor’s visit. But we’re not there yet.

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The hope is, Belsky said, that as our understanding of what’s moving the needle on the “biological age” clocks develops, in a few years doctors could use it to help inform who gets supplements and when, tailoring people’s stacks to their biology.

“It’s looking good,” he said. “Answers are coming, they’re coming soon. They’re just not here yet.”




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Bill Gurley: people who don’t love their jobs are most at risk of losing them to AI

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Passion could be the best defense against AI taking your job, Bill Gurley says.

“The people that are most at risk are the ones that are sitting idly in the job and don’t really have a why or a purpose for it,” the legendary venture capitalist said during the latest episode of the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast.

“I think a lot of the people that go through that college conveyor belt, that are chasing a safe job, that end up working as a widget or a cog in an industry they may not love — I think they are ripe for disruption,” he added.

Advances in AI have spurred numerous high-profile companies to slow hiring or make layoffs in anticipation of cheaper, more productive digital workers replacing human ones.

Technology giants such as Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are also spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure, fueling widespread concerns of future job losses.

Gurley is a general partner at Benchmark who’s known for placing early bets on businesses such as Uber, Nextdoor, OpenTable, and Zillow.

He recently published a book titled “Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love.”

The veteran investor said on the podcast that young people should choose careers they enjoy and care about. Warren Buffett, who famously “tap dances to work” at Berkshire Hathaway, has long offered similar advice.

“For people that are in a job they love, the honing’s free,” Gurley said. He explained that when someone is passionate about what they do, they don’t need to set aside time or convince themselves to polish their skills and knowledge; they naturally prioritize improvemen and feel energized by the process.

“It really becomes an unfair advantage in almost any industry if you’re that person because you’re learning constantly,” Gurley said.

One key thing they should learn is how to harness AI to bolster their efforts, he said.

“Be the most AI aware person in your job,” Gurley said. “And you’re going to then be the last person that they want to get rid of.”

Gurley compared AI to “jet fuel” that can expand a worker’s capabilities. Employees can now learn more quickly and thoroughly than ever before, he said, so if they’re focusing their learning on AI, they’re “going to have even better chance of winning,” he added.




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AI skills don’t guarantee your job. Just ask these laid-off Block employees.

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In the months before Block CEO Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of staff on Thursday, workers were embracing AI tools in what one called an almost “celebratory” way.

Dorsey and other company leaders had made no secret of their interest in AI, but the company was profitable, and some workers couldn’t imagine the technology fully replacing humans at scale any time soon, they told Business Insider.

Still, there were pockets of unease. Block, the parent company of financial tech firms including Cash App and Square, had executed a series of smaller performance-based cuts in previous months. At least one employee said he’d had a nagging feeling that the AI tools he was using had gotten really good.

“I had a hunch that, at some point, the company would cut people because of AI. I just didn’t think it would be right now,” Ivan Ureña-Valdes, a data analyst who was laid off after four years at Block, told Business Insider.

When Dorsey dropped the hammer via a memo posted on X, he said AI was the reason 4,000 workers were losing their jobs.

“A significantly smaller team using the tools we’re building can do more and do it better,” Dorsey told analysts on Block’s earnings call on Thursday following the news.

Two hours after the layoff announcement, Dorsey logged onto a video call with the calendar title “gratitude,” sporting a baseball cap that said “love” to address the staff.

As he spoke with employees about Block’s layoffs and his reasoning for the deep cuts, some sent comments thanking him for the opportunity to work at the company. One asked if his hat was appropriate given the context. Dorsey answered that it was about gratitude.

Throughout the meeting, he was flooded with waves of emojis from muted participants, three attendees told Business Insider. Popular reactions were the thumbs-down, thinking face, and crying-laughing emojis, two people said. Dorsey explained the cuts in his trademark monotone and said he was doing what’s best for the company.

Business Insider spoke to seven former Block employees about the internal push to use AI in the last year; many said they were happy to oblige. Some were laid off on Thursday; others lost their jobs in recent performance-based cuts. Though they adopted AI tools to varying degrees, they view the technology as unable, at the moment, to do all the jobs of the thousands of workers who were let go. So it came as a shock to see half the company chopped in one fell swoop.

While some in the tech world expressed skepticism that AI was the true impetus for the cuts, suggesting that Dorsey had bloated Block’s ranks, others saw it as the first wave in a coming tsunami of job cuts across the industry. The alarm over a potential white-collar jobs apocalypse has gotten louder in recent months. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has signaled that AI could lead to white-collar job cuts at the company. Last year, Salesforce made cuts to its customer support team, thanks to the use of AI agents, CEO Marc Benioff said.

Block’s layoffs are so large in scope and more pointedly attributed to AI than most that they added fuel to a fear sweeping the white-collar world: AI is coming for your job, and learning to use it isn’t enough to save you.

“I’ve seen a lot of public commentary about this layoff and how workers need to be using AI to protect our jobs,” said one nontechnical worker laid off on Thursday. “I was actively building with AI and know that many of my impacted colleagues were doing the same.”

Jack Dorsey ‘loves AI’

Dorsey has planted a flag in painting Block as an AI-forward company. He said on Thursday’s earnings call that Block was “one of the first to harness agentic capabilities.” And in July, Dorsey made headlines for using an internal coding tool called Goose to vibecode a “weekend project” that led to the messaging app Bitchat.

Investors appeared to favor Dorsey’s narrative of cutting costs with AI: After being down roughly 16% year to date before the layoffs, Block’s stock ended Friday up nearly 17% on the day.

“Jack loves AI and was constantly pushing us to use it,” Ureña-Valdes said. “I got to use these tools as much as possible every single day.”

He said he’d “felt the rumblings of AI disruption for a while” because he was using it in his work and noticed the tools were getting better.

One former software engineer said that Block had many internal AI demos and that her coworkers’ feelings about AI were “mostly celebratory.”

Another former software engineer let go during performance cuts earlier in February said the company had warned that output expectations for engineers would increase. He said the company’s head of engineering voiced productivity expectations that left them worried quality would suffer. After this week’s layoffs, his team shrank from eight engineers to one.

One employee laid off on Thursday said she had embraced AI at Block, but saw that it required human oversight. The day before the layoffs, she said, she caught errors in a company chatbot. She said the cuts surprised her manager, who was spared from the layoffs. The two sat together and cried it out.

AI is not ‘layoff insurance’

Several researchers and former Block employees say they’re skeptical about AI’s actual role in the layoffs.

“Block must have uncovered a secret sauce, perhaps within the software development process, to claim all of these jobs are AI-related,” said Jason Schloetzer, a business professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. “From the dozens of executives across industries that I’ve spoken with about AI deployment, they certainly aren’t seeing these types of gains outside of the software development process.”

On Thursday’s earnings call, Dorsey said there has been a marked improvement in AI’s capabilities and that “Block wanted to get ahead of this shift rather than be forced into it reactively.”

“The models just got an order of magnitude more capable and more intelligent,” Dorsey said. “And it’s really shown a path forward in terms of us being able to apply it to nearly every single thing that we do.”

Some former Block employees, as well as others in the industry, said pandemic overhiring, rather than AI, spurred the layoffs — a common refrain for Big Tech in recent years.

“Over the course of my time at Block, leadership did repeatedly signal the need for a ‘smaller Block,'” the laid-off nontechnical worker, who worked at Block for two years, said.

Companies like Block are conducting layoffs “with a chainsaw, not a scalpel,” said Chris Kaufman, a leadership consultant in Detroit.

“They’re not conducting audits of who took an AI course,” Kaufman said. “They’re making macro decisions about cost structure and organizational design. That’s usually just looking at headcount and salary across the board.”

Being AI savvy, Kaufman said, “can increase productivity, but I don’t think it is any way layoff insurance.”

Danielle Bell, a business communications professor at Northwestern University, said it’s obvious the workforce — both inside Block and out — is worried about AI. “If this is the new reality that we’re in, executives need to be more honest with themselves, with stakeholders, with the board, Wall Street, and particularly employees about what AI is here to do.”

Whatever the reason, one of the engineers cut on Thursday said there was a feeling in the air that something was coming. This engineer said she noticed that performance reviews were moved up from their February start. She thought she was safe after the earlier performance-based cuts — until she was laid off on Thursday.

“People were tense, even after good news would come through,” she said. “Lots of rumors flying around the office in person.”




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As a father of 2 young kids, I don’t worry much about screen time. I’m more concerned about what’s actually on the screen.

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I didn’t know what chocolate ganache was before watching reruns of an old Food Network pre-teen baking championship with my kids. But I did spot an opportunity to talk with them about how one contestant kept building her cake after it crumbled. We talked about the word perseverance.

That’s the thing about “screen time” as a modern parenting panic: the same rectangle can either be a sedative or a springboard.

But my wife and I are still fairly new at this — our kids are under 5 — so we talk with other parents about evolving opinions on the use of phones, tablets, computers, and TVs.

From those conversations and our own parenting experience, we’re slowly realizing that it’s not about screen time, but more about what type of content we’re letting our kids watch.

We try to keep screen time to a minimum in our house

My wife, kids, and I live in a Philadelphia rowhome. We’ve kept TV out of our bedrooms and devices out of our daily routine. On trips in the car, bus, and subway, we rely on music and games (I’ve come to loathe “I spy”).

In good weather, we enjoy long walks and frequent visits to our neighborhood rec center. Forced into boredom at home, our kids have developed their own imagined worlds: singing karaoke on the couch, lava-ringed obstacle courses, and preparing elaborate meals in a play kitchen.

But especially on freezing days, when you’re stuck indoors, and everyone’s energy is somehow both too high and already spent, screens help. What’s become clear to me is that a screen’s value depends on what we watch.

Governments are cracking down on youth screen time

In recent years, the global discourse has turned aggressively anti-screen.

Governments are now intervening not just in social media but in screens more broadly. France, for example, has prohibited screen exposure for kids under 3 in childcare settings, and Virginia has moved to make schools “cell phone-free.”

Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics has long advocated against the simplistic yardstick of screen time, noting there isn’t enough evidence for a single universal time limit, emphasizing family context and habits instead.

It’s more important to me to monitor what my kids are watching than how much

It seems to me that no one can agree on what the maximum screen time should be for children, so that’s why I’m focusing less on time and more on the content.

Watching a kids’ baking show as a family, especially when we can connect the events to our own lives, can be healthy. I’ve seen the positive effects of a great show on my own kids.

For parents of young kids, the difference between cartoons like “Bluey” and “Cocomelon” is obvious: In one, characters develop over seven to 10 minutes, and in the other, brightly colored, computer-animated characters sing hypnotically rhythmic songs in short bursts.

This holds true for older kids, too. With the right guardrails, I think that screens can be genuinely social and developmental, like collaborating with friends in a shared Minecraft world, building a Roblox obstacle course over a week, or editing a goofy video together that takes planning and patience.

I see “good” screen time often involves characters, cause-and-effect, enough plot for us to talk about it together, and a bonus for when it’s social. I don’t see why there should be a time limit on any of that.




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More people want open relationships, but here’s why many don’t last

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Open relationships have gotten a cultural glow-up among younger adults. In practice, though, they’re hard to pull off.

There’s a lot of social media chatter where people in happy non-monogamous relationships report perks such as greater sexual satisfaction, multiple deep partnerships, and less restrictive love lives.

Still, outside the tweets, threads, and curated Instagram grids, the story is a bit more nuanced. A 2023 Pew Research report found that Americans are divided on open marriages. Of about 5,000 US adults surveyed, 37% found open marriages completely unacceptable. Younger generations approved more than anyone else: roughly half of 18- to 29-year-olds were accepting of open marriages.

Dr. Justin R. Garcia, the executive director of the Kinsey Institute, has also witnessed the growing popularity of non-monogamy in his work.

“People were talking about swinging in the 60s and 70s, but the language and the amount of attention to it changed, particularly over the last decade,” Garcia told Business Insider, citing Amy C. Moors, a sexuality scientist who noticed a steady increase in people searching for terms related to polyamory between 2006 and 2015.

However, showing interest and actually engaging in the activity are two different things. In his new book, “The Intimate Animal,” Garcia said that research from his lab at the Kinsey Institute, one of the most prominent research centers for human sexuality and relationships, found that one in five single adults in the US, out of about 8,700 studied, have had some kind of consensual, non-monogamous relationship at some point in their lives.


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Studies suggest that more people have tried non-monogamy than have maintained it long-term.

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When looking at the past five years in another study of Garcia’s, however, that number dropped significantly, suggesting that “more people try it than decide that it is a lifelong relationship structure for them,” Garcia said. “In my social networks, that’s been my experience as well.”

It doesn’t mean that they never work, he added. According to multiple studies, “while consensually open relationships might not work for everyone, or even for most people, there are many people for whom they do work perfectly well,” he wrote in his book. Those in happy non-monogamous relationships, for example, don’t fare psychologically or emotionally worse than content monogamous couples.

“In terms of who’s a good candidate for it? My cheeky answer, but it’s actually true, is those people who really want to do it,” Garcia said. “It’s similar to ‘What’s the right amount of sex that we should be having?’ It’s as much as you want.”

Still, that doesn’t mean open relationships work for everyone. Based on his research, Garcia shared the most common reasons non-monogamous partnerships don’t work out.

It takes work to balance partners


Three people hugging

Devoting enough time to your partners can be challenging.

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One of the most common challenges to non-monogamous partnerships might be our own biology.

“We have such a fundamental, evolved drive to form intense pair bonds,” Garcia said, ones that biologists theorize helped us thrive as a species over time. In his book, he said that “our brains don’t appear particularly well-suited to processing intimacy with more than one partner at a time,” be it another romantic partner or a sexual fling. Even fantasies of threesomes, Garcia said, more often involve an existing partner.

If romance is most often defined by sustained attention and effort, then it becomes more difficult when one or both partners have other people to focus on. Introducing a new partner into a shared home can cause friction with a spouse, as can skipping dinner with a spouse to spend it with another significant other.

Garcia said one of the “prevailing rationales” for consensual non-monogamy is having “too much love to give.” However, he wrote, the opposite is true: “Most people don’t have the biological, psychological, and social tools to love more than one person at a time.”

Extra communication can be a turn-off


Couple holding hands

Healthy non-monogamous relationships require extra communication, which some people find off-putting.

Tom Werner/Getty Images



In his research, Garcia said the happiest non-monogamous couples have the same thing in common: “They tend to engage in a lot of communication.”

One 20-person polycule, for instance, uses a software engineer strategy called “agile scrum” to resolve any relationship issues. It involves monthly reviews, discussion questions, and action points.

“Even casual polyamorous encounters take substantial effort and negotiation,” Garcia wrote, including lots of communication. “Who needs more touch? Less? Who is feeling neglected? Who needs more time with whom? What is the state of things between each member of the polycule and each of the others?”

Some people find that level of frequent, in-depth communication builds their intimacy and brings them closer. Still, for many people, it’s just too much work.

It can magnify issues instead of fixing them


Couple hugging

Non-monogamy can heighten existing issues like jealousy and mismatched libidos.

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In any healthy relationship, Garcia said there’s a basic framework you have to follow: “There’s me, there’s you, and there’s us.” What might make one person happier, like having more romantic partners, might make the other feel neglected.

For a non-monogamous relationship to work, “you want to be able to both navigate your feelings of jealousy,” Garcia said. Furthermore, he added, it helps if you actively enjoy knowing that your partner is with others.

The last reason you should be in a polyamorous or open relationship is because you want it to “fix” your current relationship. Often, he wrote, “the same issues that plague monogamous relationships — mismatched libidos, jealousy, boredom, and more — tend to surface in consensually non-monogamous ones.” In fact, he added, they can multiply when partners aren’t communicating or devoting enough time to each other.

“As one of my friends who had attempted to form a polycule once told me, ‘It didn’t work,'” Garcia wrote. “‘I just pissed off two women instead of one.'”




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Bank employees, rejoice: 60% of finance CEOs don’t see head count shrinking because of AI

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  • Of the 240 financial CEOs EY surveyed, only 28% see AI reducing head count in 2026.
  • Nearly half of the CEOs said AI is the most critical factor in their company’s ability to adapt.
  • Some Wall Street leaders have said AI will eliminate some roles, but ultimately increase head count.

Banks’ analyst classes probably won’t swap fresh-faced college grads for bots — at least not this year.

Some 60% of the 240 financial services CEOs that EY surveyed for its Quarterly CEO Outlook Survey said they think investing in AI will maintain or even increase their current head count in 2026. Only 28% of those surveyed predicted head count would drop this year.

Leaders at some of the biggest banks, including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, have said that they’re resisting hiring growth where it makes sense to prioritize efficiency. They, along with some other bulge-bracket leads, have predicted that AI could grow head count in the long run, though. Still, some roles are becoming obsolete: Citi CEO Jane Fraser said in a recent internal memo that some jobs “will no longer be required” as AI advances.

For their part, the financial services CEOs that EY surveyed are similarly bullish about AI’s capacity to transform the workplace, and nearly half see AI and digital investment as the most important factor in their companies’ ability to thrive and adapt this year.

Around a quarter said their AI initiatives have significantly beaten expectations, and 57% said they’ve shown results faster than expected. Just more than half said they expect the biggest transformations to come from generative AI.

When it comes to hiring for AI talent — itself a highly competitive market — 87% of CEOs in EY’s survey are optimistic about their ability to attract and keep talent in 2026. The question of returns on the AI investment, for talent and in general, also seems top of mind for the financial services leaders. Seventy-six percent of boards in the survey said they’ll review transformation ROI metrics as often as financial results.

Firms of all sizes are being asked to justify their AI spends, as analysts and investors begin to wonder whether the sometimes billion-dollar bets will show up on balance sheets.




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