New research led by University of the Witwatersrand and University of Southern California paleoanthropologists sheds more light on one of the most debated transitions in human evolution: when our ancestors stopped regularly climbing trees and committed fully to walking on two legs.
Karen Baker runs the Yolo Food Bank in Northern California’s Yolo County, which she describes as the most food-insecure county in the state. When CBS News California Investigates told her, on camera, that California had been sitting on money that belonged to her organisation, she asked one question: was it really hers? It was.
Tens of millions of Americans are in the same position, without a journalist on hand to tell them.
Where the money comes from
Every US state runs an unclaimed property program, which is essentially a lost and found for cash. The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, the body that coordinates those programs across all fifty states, estimates that about one in seven Americans has something waiting. Searching costs nothing.
Nothing glamorous, mostly. Dormant savings accounts, uncashed payroll cheques, utility deposits from a flat someone moved out of in 2009, insurance payouts nobody told the family about, share dividends posted to an address three moves ago, and the contents of safe deposit boxes whose renters died or forgot.
Companies do not get to keep this stuff. State law obliges banks, insurers and other holders to hand it over once an account has gone quiet for a set period, typically three years in California, as the State Controller’s unclaimed property division explains. The state then holds it. There is no deadline to claim, and no fee.
The scale of the pile
California alone is minding about $15 billion in unclaimed property, per the State Controller’s Office, spread across tens of millions of individual records. New York is worse, or better, depending on your perspective: the Office of the New York State Comptroller oversees $19 billion in unclaimed funds, some of it dating back to 1943, and returned $504 million of it in a single fiscal year.
Nationally, the numbers move. NAUPA’s own annual report put total returns at $4.49 billion to Americans in fiscal 2024. That sounds like a lot until you set it against what is still sitting there.
What the states do while they wait
So what happens to the money while it waits to be claimed? In many states, it flows straight into general operations, and the state keeps whatever it earns until someone comes looking.
Citing the California Legislative Analyst’s Office and state budget documents, CBS News reported that unclaimed property is one of California’s top General Fund revenue sources, generating around $1 billion a year, while the state has returned roughly 3.5 per cent of what it holds. The original sum comes back when the owner claims it. The interest does not.
That reporting comes from a single news investigation focused largely on one state, not a national audit.
Washington notices
Sam Liccardo and Mike Lawler agree on very little. Liccardo is a Democrat, Lawler a Republican, and together they have introduced the Safeguarding Americans’ Fairly Earned Retirement Act, which would sharply limit when states can take custody of securities, digital assets and investment accounts. Senator Elizabeth Warren has separately written to NAUPA requesting state-by-state data on how these systems work and how the rules are changing.
Whether any of that passes is anyone’s guess. The databases are already open.
Where the records sit
NAUPA’s search hub links out to every participating state’s official database, alongside MissingMoney.com, the multi-state tool covering 49 states, several Canadian provinces and Puerto Rico. Hawaii runs its own system separately.
Property is reported by the company holding it, which means records often sit in a state the owner left years ago.
Old savings bonds now follow the same route. The Treasury retired its Treasury Hunt tool on 30 September 2025, and unredeemed bonds are handled through state unclaimed property offices instead.
A market has grown up around all this. Private recovery firms, legal in most states, charge a percentage to locate money that sits in the same public databases the states publish for free.
A dollar surrendered to a state in 1994 comes back as a dollar. Not a dollar plus thirty years of compounding, not a dollar adjusted for what groceries cost now, just the dollar. Whoever holds it in the meantime is the only party earning anything.
This article is journalism, not financial or legal advice. Unclaimed property rules, dormancy periods and claims procedures vary by state and change over time. Anyone dealing with a substantial claim, an estate, or a disputed entitlement should consult a qualified professional.
For $995 you could buy a decent second-hand lawnmower, a mid-range mattress, or, if a government spreadsheet has a bad day, a piece of Apollo 11 with moon dust still caught in its seams.
That last one happened. In February 2015, an online auction held on behalf of the US Marshals Service listed a white zippered pouch stamped “Lunar Sample Return”. Nancy Lee Carlson of Inverness, Illinois, bid $995 and won. She knew it had flown on something. What she did not know was that it had ridden along on the first crewed landing on the Moon.
How a moon bag ended up in a garage in Kansas
Blame starts with Max Ary, who ran the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson from 1976 to 2002 and was convicted in November 2005 on twelve federal counts, including theft of government property, wire fraud and money laundering. Investigators searching his garage two years earlier had found a box, and the bag was inside it. As documented by The Hutchinson News, Ary was ordered to pay more than $132,000 in restitution for the space artefacts he had taken, a mix of property belonging to NASA and the museum itself. He always maintained he had simply muddled his own collection with theirs.
His forfeited property went to auction to cover the bill. That is where the mix-up happened. Per the Associated Press, government officials later said two lunar bags had been merged into a single entry when their inventory numbers were combined on spreadsheets. One was from Apollo 17. The other had been to the Sea of Tranquility, and nobody caught the difference before the gavel came down.
What the fabric was hiding
Carlson did the sensible thing and posted the pouch to NASA’s Johnson Space Center for authentication.
Terrible idea, as it turned out. Curators tested the cloth, found lunar material embedded in the fibres, and established that the pouch had served as the outer decontamination bag around the first rocks Neil Armstrong scooped up during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Then NASA kept it, arguing the bag was government property that should be on public display, not sitting in someone’s living room, and asking the Justice Department to reverse the forfeiture.
Carlson sued. Twice, in two states.
The ruling nobody at NASA wanted
In December 2016, Judge J. Thomas Marten of the US District Court for Kansas ruled that Carlson was “a good faith purchaser, in a sale conducted according to law,” as reported by Robert Pearlman at collectSPACE. Marten went out of his way to say NASA had done nothing wrong here, and that the bag only mattered at all because of what NASA’s own people had pulled off in 1969. He also said he had no power to unwind a sale that had already gone through. Space.com later reported that NASA handed the bag back in February 2017.
Sold at Sotheby’s, well short of the estimate
Sotheby’s offered the pouch on 20 July 2017, 48 years to the day after Armstrong used it. NPR put the hammer price at $1.5 million, or $1,812,500 once Sotheby’s premium was added, which sounds enormous until you notice the house had estimated $2 million to $4 million. The buyer stayed anonymous.
Plenty of people thought the sale should never have happened at all. Michelle Hanlon of For All Moonkind, a group campaigning to protect the Apollo landing sites, said in a statement carried by Smithsonian magazine that the bag belonged in a museum where the world could share in the achievement it represents. Carlson told CBS News she decided to sell because she no longer felt it was safe in her home.
The dust went on to have its own career
NASA’s testing had lifted particles off the bag onto carbon tape mounted on aluminium stubs, and the agency held on to them after returning the pouch. collectSPACE reported that Carlson sued again in January 2019, claiming the testing had damaged the bag, dragged down its market value and caused her real distress, and demanding the return of the lunar material itself. That dispute settled out of court, and the samples went to her.
Which is how, in April 2022, five aluminium stubs, each topped with a 10-millimetre disc of carbon tape, came up in a New York saleroom. Bonhams sold them for $504,375, well under a pre-sale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. Bidding opened at $220,000, seven bids came in, and the hammer fell at $400,000. Independent testing found four of the five stubs carried particles matching Armstrong’s first sample.
NASA still holds almost all of the 382 kilograms of rock, dust and core material brought home by the six Apollo landings. Its position on the rest hasn’t shifted in half a century: this material belongs to the public, not to private collectors. That stance holds up fine, right until two rows get merged on a spreadsheet.
Somewhere out there is a collector nobody can name, holding a cloth bag worth more than most houses, backed by a government receipt for $995 confirming the sale was done by the book.
A sailor burst into a small wooden railway station in the north end of Halifax on the morning of 6 December 1917 and told everyone inside to run.
Vince Coleman, the dispatcher on duty, walked back to his telegraph key instead. As the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic recounts, he was thinking about the overnight passenger train from Saint John, roughly 300 people aboard, due in at 8:55am on a line that ran straight past a burning munitions ship. He tapped out a warning to hold the train, then signed off: “Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye, boys.”
Minutes later the French cargo ship Mont-Blanc, packed with explosives bound for the war in Europe, detonated in Halifax Harbour.
A city with 2,000 dead and no spare hospital beds
Almost every building within half a mile of the water came down, and records held by the Massachusetts State Library put the immediate toll at 1,800 killed, 3,000 seriously wounded and another 10,000 needing medical attention. Later counts settle at close to 2,000 dead.
Halifax was in no position to absorb that. It was a wartime port, and as the medical journal Proto has documented, local hospitals were already carrying soldiers sent home to recover. Doctors worked through the first night and kept going.
Then it started to snow.
Boston did not wait to be invited
News crossed the wires and landed on the desk of Massachusetts governor Samuel McCall around 11am. What he had was fragmentary at best, a few lines about some sort of catastrophe up the coast. Writing in its account of that day, the Massachusetts Historical Society notes that McCall wired back a promise that his state would go the limit, and called an emergency meeting of the Committee of Public Safety.
By 10pm, twelve hours after the blast, a relief train loaded with doctors, nurses and supplies pulled out of Boston. Nobody in Halifax had yet told them what was needed.
A blizzard caught the train en route, hardly a surprise for Maine and New Brunswick in December. It did not turn back. Staff wired ahead for extra supplies while they were still stuck in the drifts, and the Halifax Municipal Archives documents the first American medical train arriving on 8 December, having pushed through snow for most of the trip.
The help kept arriving for years
That first train turned out to be the opening instalment. Author John U. Bacon, speaking to WBUR about his book on the disaster, counted two trains, two ships, 100 doctors, 300 nurses and about a million dollars in supplies, enough to stand up several temporary hospitals.
The medical unit went home on 14 December and formed the Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee on the journey back. The same archive shows it raised half a million dollars, refurnished more than 1,800 homes and set aside $25,000 for the care and education of people blinded by flying glass. Halifax named a block of temporary housing the Governor McCall Apartments, on a newly laid-out Massachusetts Avenue.
One tree in 1918, then a gap of fifty-odd years
Nova Scotia sent Boston a Christmas tree the following December as a thank you, and the tradition quietly lapsed.
It came back in 1971, and not purely out of sentiment. As reported by The Signal, the Lunenburg County Christmas Tree Producers Association revived the gift with one eye on the export market for Nova Scotian spruce. The provincial government took the job over a few years later and has handled it ever since, which is how a one-off act of gratitude became a line item.
What it takes to qualify as the tree
Anyone can nominate one. Criteria published by the Government of Nova Scotia ask for a white spruce, red spruce or balsam fir standing 12 to 15 metres, healthy, good colour, medium to heavy density, uniform and symmetrical, and easy to get a truck near. Officials narrow the field before checking their shortlist with Boston.
Boston’s 2025 tree was a 45-foot white spruce nominated by Ronald and Claire Feener of Lunenburg County. It reached the Common by flatbed truck under police escort, the City of Boston confirmed. Mayor Michelle Wu flew up for the cutting and, as CBC News reported, took a turn with the chainsaw herself on a 42-year-old spruce while a certified tree-felling instructor supervised.
That was a year of tariff threats and cross-border sniping, and the tree went south anyway.
Most international goodwill exists as paperwork nobody reads. This one gets scouted for months, felled in front of a crowd, driven hundreds of kilometres and switched on in a public park every December, all because a train once left Boston into a blizzard for a city that had barely had time to explain what was wrong.
Radium dust settled in their hair and on their coats, so a dial painter leaving the plant in Orange, New Jersey, trailed a faint shimmer down the footpath. Plenty of them thought this was marvellous. They painted their fingernails with it and dabbed it on their teeth before a dance. Nobody in management suggested they stop.
The paint was branded Undark, a mix of radium and zinc sulfide developed by Dr Sabin von Sochocky. In its account of the digitised company files, the National Archives describes how the Radium Luminous Material Corporation opened its Orange factory in 1917, selling the glow to watchmakers and instrument firms. Radium dials were prized in the trenches of the First World War and fashionable everywhere else.
How the paint got into their bones
Brushes were the whole problem.
Camel-hair bristles lose their point after a few strokes, and the numerals on a wristwatch face are minute. So the painters were taught to roll the brush between their lips before each dip. Lip, dip, paint, several hundred times a shift. The Science Museum Group notes that the New Jersey women worked on paper dials with a water-based paint, applied with fine camelhair brushes rather than the metal stylus used elsewhere in the industry. A trace of radium went down the throat with every dial.
Radium behaves chemically like calcium, so the body lodges it in bone and leaves it there, decaying quietly, for a life that just got much shorter.
The doctor who worked it out
Dentists noticed first. From about 1922 they were pulling aching teeth from young women in Orange, finding that pieces of jawbone came away too. A dentist, Theodor Blum, described the condition in 1924 and named it radium jaw.
Harrison Martland, the Newark pathologist who became Essex County’s first medical examiner, took it further. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1925, he measured radioactivity in the tissue of dead dial painters and in the exhaled breath of living ones. A retrospective in Brain credits that work with pioneering the measurement of radioactivity inside contaminated human tissue.
U.S. Radium hired its own experts to challenge his findings. Reasonable enough in 1925, when one man’s diagnosis was still just one man’s diagnosis, though the company kept denying any link to radium for another decade.
Five women, one settlement, no admission
Grace Fryer needed two years to find a lawyer who would take her case. Katherine Schaub, Edna Hussman, Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice joined her, and by the first hearing in January 1928 none of the five could lift an arm to swear the oath.
They settled that June for $10,000 each, an annuity of $600 for life and their medical bills covered. The company admitted nothing, and most dial painters received no compensation at all, the National Archives notes. In 1936, a federal court in New Jersey ruled that U.S. Radium had not fraudulently hidden the danger, a decision that pushed surviving claims outside a two-year limitation period and effectively ended them.
What happened in Ottawa
Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Illinois, the Radium Dial Company assured its painters that the Orange trouble had nothing to do with them, since the radium over there was impure. The firm had been medically screening its own workers since 1925 and keeping the results to itself. As History.com documents, Illinois workers lost in court through the mid-1930s, after which the state passed the Illinois Occupational Diseases Act, effective 1936, requiring employers to carry cover for industrial poisoning.
Catherine Donohue led fifteen women in a fresh suit in 1937. By a hearing the following February she weighed around 32 kilograms and had to be carried into the room, and, as Northern Public Radio reported, she arrived with a box of what she said were pieces of her own jawbone. Local papers took to calling the group the society of the living dead, NPR Illinois reports, and their lawyer, Leonard Grossman, took the case for free because his clients had nothing to pay him. Later hearings moved to Donohue’s home, where she testified from a couch because she could no longer travel.
The Illinois Industrial Commission ruled for Donohue in April 1938 and confirmed the award that July. She died on 27 July, three weeks later. Radium Dial fought on regardless. The Illinois Supreme Court threw out the company’s petition to overturn the award in June 1939, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined a further appeal that October, more than a year after Donohue’s death.
That refusal to intervene left the award standing, and with it the principle that an employer could be held liable for a disease that surfaced years, sometimes a decade or more, after the job ended. Grossman’s son, three decades a Department of Labor lawyer, traces a line from those hearings to the federal OSHA Act, which he dates to 1971.
The measurements they left behind
Many surviving painters later volunteered their bodies to researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, whose review of the radium cases sets out how those measurements shaped radiation protection limits for the nuclear age.
Radium-226 has a half-life of roughly 1,600 years, so the women are still faintly radioactive in their graves and will be long after everyone reading this is gone. A surprising amount of modern workplace law rests on that fact. None of them were trying to found a legal doctrine. They wanted someone to pay the dentist.
America’s first professionally managed forest finished its first year in the red, and the man running it called that a good result.
The shortfall was $392.40. It sits in a table near the back of Gifford Pinchot’s account of the first year’s work at Biltmore Forest, a slim pamphlet printed in Chicago in 1893 as an exhibit for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Pinchot opened by pointing out that the attempt was the first practical application of forest management in the United States.
What Vanderbilt bought
George Vanderbilt had been assembling land south of Asheville since the late 1880s for a house the size of a small village. The ground came cheap because it was wrecked. As the Special Collections Research Center at NC State University documents, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted advised that the soils and terrain would never support a grand park, and suggested growing timber instead.
Pinchot’s survey put the estate at 7,282 acres, a little over half of it woodland. The families who had farmed the land before Vanderbilt bought it cut anything sellable as fuel, fencing or saw-logs, grazed cattle through the young growth, and burned the woods off for pasture. Asheville had been heating itself on those hillsides for years.
Pinchot summed up the condition of much of it in three words: “deplorable in the extreme.”
A card catalogue for a forest
Pinchot arrived on 2 February 1892, aged 26, trained in Europe because there was nowhere in America to train. NCpedia records that Olmsted put his name forward, and that he and Vanderbilt agreed on three objectives: sell timber at a profit, produce a steady yield every year, and leave the forest healthier than it was.
Then he counted. Crews broke the woods into more than 600 sections of about 5.7 acres each, describing every one in shorthand on a postcard-sized card and filing the cards as a catalogue of the whole property. He grouped the forest into 92 numbered compartments bounded by ridges, streams and old wood roads, then set a rotation of 150 years, meaning the second crop would be ready for the axe a century and a half after the first came out. Nobody involved expected to see it.
What the first year’s books showed
Labourers earned between 90 cents and a dollar a day, mules 75 cents.
The forest sold cordwood to the estate brickworks, ties to the railroad and lumber to anyone who wanted it, at open market prices. Expenses ran to $9,911.76. Receipts and stock on hand came to $9,519.36. Pinchot kept his own salary out of the accounts and conceded that supervision costs for fewer than 4,000 acres were far too high, arguing the same effort would have covered ten times the area.
Two findings mattered more than the balance. Large old trees could be dropped out of dense young growth with very little damage to the crop underneath, and the additional cost of careful work over ordinary destructive logging was small enough to be beside the point. Both were arguments about money, the case Pinchot had to make in a country that still treated trained forestry as a European specialty.
The German who built a school
Pinchot left in 1895 and went on to become the first chief of the US Forest Service. His replacement came from Germany. Biltmore’s own history of the estate credits Carl Alwin Schenck with running and expanding the plan over the next 14 years, and founding the Biltmore Forest School in 1898, the country’s first forestry school, which trained more than 300 of America’s earliest professional foresters before closing in 1913.
How a private estate became public land
In 1894 Pinchot came across the Pink Beds, a valley of rhododendron and mountain laurel in Transylvania County, and told Vanderbilt to buy it. That purchase and others became Pisgah Forest, and the holdings eventually stretched to roughly 125,000 acres.
Vanderbilt died in March 1914. Per NCpedia’s history of Pisgah National Forest, his widow Edith offered the federal government 86,700 acres at $5 an acre, around $200,000 below the price the family had asked a year earlier, and completed the sale in 1915. Combined with other purchases made under the Weeks Act, that land became Pisgah National Forest on 17 October 1916, the first national forest created under the act, as the Forest History Society documents.
The slow part of the work was never the trees. Pinchot enlarged his crews carefully, because the men he hired had only ever cut wood one season at a time, and the idea of protecting a crop nobody present would live to harvest had to be taught one foreman at a time. It took. More than half a million acres of North Carolina now run on a principle that began as a line item somebody had to justify to a very rich man.
A man who died in a Romanian cave about 40,000 years ago carried more Neanderthal DNA than any other human ever sequenced, ancient or modern. His jawbone turned up in Peștera cu Oase, and when geneticists analysed it the result was startling: between six and nine per cent of his genome came from Neanderthals. Because those segments were still long and unbroken in his chromosomes, researchers reporting in Nature could work out that he’d had a Neanderthal ancestor only four to six generations back.
He was simply closer to the event than anyone alive today.
What the first Neanderthal genome settled
For most of the twentieth century the textbook story was replacement. Modern humans left Africa, Neanderthals died out, end of chapter. Anatomists had spent decades staring at skull shapes and reaching opposite conclusions from the same fossils. That held until 2010, when a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, assembled by Richard Green, Svante Pääbo and a large team from bones found in Vindija Cave in Croatia, showed that Neanderthals shared more genetic variants with living Eurasians than with living sub-Saharan Africans. Their estimate put the Neanderthal contribution to non-African genomes at one to four per cent.
Sixteen years of better data have tightened that figure rather than overturned it. Most current estimates sit closer to one or two per cent, with East Asians carrying about a fifth more than Europeans.
The meeting had a duration
How long did the two species actually overlap before Neanderthals disappeared? Two papers published on the same day in December 2024 finally gave a precise answer. A study in Science, led by Leonardo Iasi and Manjusha Chintalapati, compared 58 ancient Eurasian genomes against 275 present-day ones and dated the average moment of mixing to about 47,000 years ago, with gene flow continuing for some 7,000 years. A companion analysis, published in Nature, examined 45,000-year-old remains from Ranis in Germany and Zlatý kůň in Czechia and traced the archaic stretches in those genomes to a single admixture event between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago, shared by every non-African sequenced so far.
Seven thousand years is a long time to call an encounter. It is longer than everything that has happened since the first cities of Mesopotamia.
The parts that did not make it
“These deserts may have formed very rapidly after the gene flow,” Leonardo Iasi, one of the authors on the Nature paper, told UC Berkeley. He was describing what he and his colleagues call Neanderthal deserts, long stretches of the modern genome where archaic DNA is completely absent. Ancient human genomes from roughly 40,000 years ago already show no ancestry in those deserts, which is what led him to that conclusion. Read plainly, it means certain Neanderthal variants were harmful enough in a modern human body to be scrubbed out within a few thousand years.
The Oase man makes a similar point from the other end.
For all his recent Neanderthal ancestry, his population left little genetic trace in later Europeans.
What the surviving fragments do
Picture Neanderthal DNA as a jigsaw dropped and scattered across a crowd. No single person holds more than a sliver, but the crowd between them is still carrying a fifth of the picture. That is roughly what Benjamin Vernot and Joshua Akey found, writing in Science in 2014, when they sifted the genomes of 379 Europeans and 286 East Asians and recovered Neanderthal sequence covering roughly twenty per cent of that species’ entire genome.
There is a second archaic contributor in the mix too. Priya Moorjani of UC Berkeley, a senior author on the 2024 Science paper, is now studying people of East Asian descent, who carry both a larger Neanderthal share and up to 0.1 per cent of their genome from the Denisovans, a population known mainly from a handful of bone fragments and an enormous quantity of statistics.
Some of the surviving Neanderthal DNA is doing useful work. The variants that reached high frequency cluster around immune function, skin pigmentation and metabolism, which fits a group that had spent a few hundred thousand years adapting to Europe’s winters and its pathogens before anyone else showed up.
Some of it is a liability. In a paper published in Nature in 2020, Hugo Zeberg and Svante Pääbo showed that the strongest genetic risk factor then identified for severe COVID-19 was a stretch of roughly 50,000 bases on chromosome three, inherited from Neanderthals and carried by about half the population of South Asia and around sixteen per cent of Europeans. One paper, one chunk of chromosome, and the biology behind it is still being argued over. The provenance, though, is not really in dispute.
What to call an ending like that
Extinction normally means a line stopping. Neanderthals did stop existing as a distinct population, around 40,000 years ago, and no amount of genetics changes that. What the genetic evidence changes is the shape of the ending. A population that dies out and a population that gets absorbed look much the same in the fossil record and nothing alike in the genome.
That leaves an odd little fact sitting in the middle of human prehistory. The last Neanderthals were not necessarily childless. Some of them had children, those children had children, and the arithmetic has been running quietly ever since, through a few hundred million bedrooms, down to whoever happens to be reading this.
Kiruna’s church went for a walk in August 2025, at half a kilometre an hour, on 224 wheels.
The trip took two days and included a daily stop for fika, the Swedish afternoon coffee break, because some traditions outrank engineering schedules. One driver steered the entire building with a handheld control box across roughly twelve hours of travel, along a route crews had spent months preparing. The Associated Press, in coverage carried by CTV News, reported that a main road was widened from nine metres to 24 and a viaduct was dismantled to clear a new intersection. State-owned mining company LKAB, which paid for the whole performance, lists the church at 672.4 tonnes and 40 metres across. Thousands of people stood in the wind to watch a building do the one thing buildings are designed never to do.
Norwegian contractor Veidekke built the road the church rolled along and the foundations waiting at the far end, as documented by Dezeen. It was not the first tenant to make the trip. By July, AP counted 25 buildings already jacked onto beams and wheeled east, with 16 still queued behind them.
Why the ground is giving way
Beneath the town sits the largest underground iron ore mine on the planet. White Arkitekter, the practice behind the masterplan for the new city, describes daily extraction as the equivalent of six Eiffel Towers of ore, and notes that two thirds of Kiruna’s residents depend on the mine for work. Digging began in 1910. The church was completed two years later, a gift from the company, built on a hill so the congregation could look out over the town the company had also built.
Take enough rock out from under a place and the rock above fractures, sags and follows the hole down. Crews are now working towards a main level 1,365 metres deep, and the surface has been reporting back for years in split walls and buckled roads. In 2004 LKAB told the municipality that the centre would have to be picked up and shifted east, since the alternative was to stop mining.
Then came the sequel. LKAB has since published an expanded impact area that adds a further 6,000 people and 2,700 homes to the queue over the next decade, and CNBC has put the company’s estimated compensation costs across that period at 22.5 billion kronor, roughly 2.4 billion dollars.
Not all of it reads as loss. The Institution of Civil Engineers treats the relocation as a rare chance to redraw a city from scratch: a denser centre planned around good lighting through the long polar dark, 3,000 new homes, and streets arranged so nobody lives more than three blocks from open country. The same assessment records that the rebuild has squeezed Sami reindeer herders, who were working the land long before LKAB arrived.
The residents who cannot be loaded onto trailers
Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen chairs Gabna, the reindeer-herding Sami community whose grazing corridors have already been carved up by the mine, the railway and the town. Speaking to Swedish public broadcaster SVT, he said a new mine at the Per Geijer deposit would mean the end of reindeer herding as they know it, because the ore sits beneath the last narrow passage his herds use between seasonal pastures.
Per Geijer is the reason the arithmetic keeps changing. A report by the Stockholm Environment Institute, covered by ArcticToday, found the project carries significant risk of breaching the Indigenous rights of Sami community members, in the words of senior research fellow Rasmus Kløcker Larsen. That is one institute’s assessment rather than a court ruling, and permitting has years to run. The deposit holds 1.2 billion tonnes of mineral resources including 2.2 million tonnes of rare earth oxides, which is why the European Union has flagged it as strategically important for cutting its dependence on Chinese supply.
Reindeer, unhelpfully, cannot be rerouted by memo.
What happens to the building
Henning Larsen’s circular town hall anchors the relocated core, and the church is due to reopen at its new address, between the cemetery and the new town centre, in 2026. Parts of the stone wall that ringed the old site will be moved across to join it. Where it used to stand becomes a mining town park, kept as a quiet green space until the ground beneath it is needed, at which point the fences go up and the park goes the way of the neighbourhood.
Kiruna has become very good at a peculiar skill: treating permanence as a logistics problem with a budget attached. Beams, jacks, 224 wheels, a control box and a coffee break. A church can be lifted onto a trolley and driven down the road. A migration route cannot.
Bar soap moved a lighthouse. Crews smeared ordinary Ivory soap along the steel beams the tower rode across, because it turned out to be the ideal lubricant for a job involving thousands of tons of creeping brick, a detail recorded at the time by the Lighthouse Directory.
Everything else about the job was considerably less homely.
Why a lighthouse ends up in the surf
When Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was finished in 1870, it stood a comfortable 1,500 feet from the Atlantic. Then Hatteras Island did what barrier islands do, which is travel. Storm tides strip sand off the ocean side and dump it on the sound side, and the whole island shuffles westward, a process the National Park Service traces back at least 10,000 years.
The island moved. The lighthouse stayed exactly where the builders left it.
Underneath sat yellow pine timbers resting in fresh water on compacted sand, a floating foundation improvised because pilings could not be driven through hard sand barely eight feet down. Ingenious for 1870, and considerably less reassuring once the surf reached the door. By the late 1990s the ocean had closed to within 60 feet of the base, per the park service’s account of the light station, and decades of groins and sandbags had mostly made the erosion worse.
How to move five thousand tons of brick
Very slowly, and with an enormous amount of hydraulics.
Crews cut the tower free of its foundation, all 4,830 tons of it by the park service’s own retrospective, and replaced it with a grid of seven main beams, each 70 feet long and weighing 11 tons, fitted with 100 hydraulic jacks, as documented by Island Free Press. Those jacks raised the lighthouse 5.34 feet, just enough to slide roll beams underneath and give it a road. Horizontal push jacks then nudged the tower forward about five feet, backed off, shifted position along the beams, and pushed again, a sequence the park service sets out in its move FAQs. Each shove took about a minute, in coverage by the National Parks Conservation Association, and beams the tower had already passed over were carried round to the front to extend the track.
Progress ran to roughly 100 feet a day, with crowds cheering pushes that were barely visible to the naked eye, as Our State magazine later described the scene.
Twenty-three days, 2,900 feet, $11.8 million, and one American Society of Civil Engineers award the following year. International Chimney Corp of Buffalo held the contract. Expert House Movers of Maryland did the shoving.
The argument that came first
None of this was settled quietly. Relocation had been on the table since the National Academy of Sciences recommended it in the late 1980s, and North Carolina State University reached the same conclusion in a review published in January 1997, as Coastal Review later recounted, but plenty of locals were convinced the tower would shake itself to rubble halfway down the track. Congress funded the move anyway in 1998. The lawsuit that followed now sits in an administrative record held by the State Archives of North Carolina, a tidy paper monument to a very loud argument.
What the ocean has done since
The tower now stands about 1,500 feet from the water, the same margin it enjoyed in 1870, and should not be threatened again for something like a century, according to the State Library of North Carolina’s history project on the relocation.
Nearby property has fared worse. At least 32 privately owned beach homes have collapsed onto Cape Hatteras National Seashore since 2020, most of them at Rodanthe and Buxton, with the latest counted by National Parks Traveler in June. Each one brings a notice from Cape Hatteras National Seashore warning visitors about nail-studded debris drifting for miles down the beach. Superintendent David Hallac has pointed out that earlier generations built smaller and shifted buildings when the surf came for them, which is a polite way of saying the island never agreed to stay still.
Cracks the sea did not cause
Scaffolding went up in 2024 for what was meant to be an 18-month restoration costing $19.2 million, and the work has turned up something awkward. Crews expected 30 to 40 cracks in the cast-iron brackets carrying the gallery deck near the top. They found 116, spread across all 16 brackets, Stone & Lime superintendent Josh Brundige told a media tour in July, in reporting by Outer Banks Insider. Most were hidden under seven layers of brick, and the documentation of them predates the 1999 move.
Nobody can say what caused the cracking. Brundige offered thermal expansion and water damage as candidates, with generations of whale oil flame heating the lantern room and winter cooling it down again.
So the lantern room is currently missing from the tower altogether, a temporary beacon is doing the work, and the repair has added about a year and $10 million, taking the project to roughly $30 million. Moving a lighthouse five feet at a time was, in the end, the easy part. Whatever quietly split the ironwork at the gallery deck was already there, decades before anyone thought to look.
Researchers have identified more than 1,200 locations in the human genome associated with personality traits, offering the most detailed look yet at the biological underpinnings of traits like sociability, anxiety and curiosity.
Ultrahuman announced that it has raised $70 million, thanks to investments from Qualcomm Ventures, Labcorp, Alpha Wave, and more.
The company says these investments will help push its desires to create a world where human computing helps us and our health.
Ultrahuman says it wants computational platforms that can understand the human body, delivering important, crucial pieces of actionable intel.
This afternoon (Sept 3), Ultrahuman announced another substantial investment from several companies. The announcement comes at a time when Ultrahuman wants to push the envelope for human computing.
A press release reveals that Ultrahuman has received $70 million in investment funding from Qualcomm Ventures, Labcorp, Alpha Wave, Blume, Nexus, Alteria, and more. As stated before, human computing is where Ultrahuman is placing its focus. Moreover, Ultrahuman states this investment will help it shift from "a wearable health company into a human-computer interface company built around the body."
Ultrahuman highlights several features daily users will know well: Jade AI, its smart rings, and M1/M2 Live continuous glucose monitoring. These features nail Ultrahuman's goal: systems that understand the state of the user's body. The company no longer wants features that "wait for human input." Through AI and newer computing systems, Ultrahuman wants more proactive, smart features that deliver true aid.
The company states the future of computing platforms should "understand the human body continuously... and turn those signals into intelligence that meaningfully improves a person’s life."
The company discussed how it's continued to evolve the smart ring form factor with science and computational platforms. Ultrahuman drew attention to Pulsomics, which was launched this year. This research platform aids its software and smart rings with the tools required to turn the body's complex signals and information into actionable intel for the user.
Power ahead with intel that means something
(Image credit: Ultrahuman)
The investments Ultrahuman has received in September will help continue the work it's trying to complete. It says "development across sensing, AI, miniaturised electronics and health algorithms" will deepen and accelerate.
PowerPlugs are another major part of the Ultrahuman experience. The company describes it as a feature that brings "specialised health capabilities" to the platform. Take Ultrahuman and Les Mills' partnership from April. It brought workout sessions that rivaled what you'd find in a traditional studio right to your phone. The app would also take advantage of your biomarkers to understand key data, so you know when to push yourself and when to let off.
On the other hand, we have Ultrahuman's significant Emerald update from July. The "decision engine," otherwise known as the UltraSphere, felt like Ultrahuman's next step into this "human computing" world for our health. It can deliver over 60 "Next Best Action" suggestions to users using sleep, HRV, recovery, weather, location, and more.
In a study of 2,266 workers in Finland, evening-type people, or night owls, were up to three times more likely to be treated for depression or anxiety than morning types, with poor work-life balance identified as a key contributing factor.
Walk into any kitchen where a group of old friends has gathered, and you can spot them within ten minutes. The kettle is going, someone is loudly relitigating a bad date, someone else is asking whether the wine in the fridge is open. And then there is the quiet one at the end of the counter, refilling everyone else’s glass, remembering who takes oat milk, laughing at the right moments, needing absolutely nothing. They are the easiest person in the room. They are also, often, the most misunderstood.
The group has a name for this person. Low-maintenance. Chill. The reliable one. Sometimes it is said with affection and sometimes with a kind of relief, as though the rest of the group is grateful not to have to worry about them. What almost no one says out loud is that the person in question rarely worries about themselves in front of others either. They have made a lifelong practice of being the one who does not need much. And that practice, in most cases, started long before adulthood.
The friend who never asks for anything is usually the friend who learned not to
Psychologists who study attachment have a specific term for the pattern behind this. It is called avoidant attachment in childhood, and it often shows up in adulthood as a dismissive-avoidant style. According to clinical research summarised by psychologist Lisa Firestone, roughly 30 percent of people carry some version of this pattern, and it tends to develop when a child does not consistently feel safe, seen, or soothed by the adults raising them.
The child adapts by becoming what Firestone calls pseudo-independent. They meet their own needs, because depending on someone who keeps failing to respond is more painful than going without. Over time, they stop registering the needs at all. It is easier to feel nothing than to feel repeatedly disappointed.
By adulthood, this looks like competence. The person is efficient, self-contained, warm in a slightly reserved way. They rarely ask for favours. They rarely complain. When something is wrong, they process it privately and present the group with the finished thought. Everyone assumes this is temperament. Often it is training.
What actually happens in the child’s nervous system
The clearest picture of this pattern comes from a study designed in the 1970s by Mary Ainsworth, and it still holds up. In her Strange Situation experiment, a child plays with a parent in a room, the parent leaves, and the child’s response to the reunion is observed. A securely attached child gets upset when the parent leaves and seeks comfort when they return. An avoidant child appears unbothered when the parent leaves and does not seek comfort when they come back.
The catch is what the heart monitor shows. The avoidant child shows physiological signs of distress the entire time the parent is gone. The distress is there. It has simply been separated from any outward request for help. As contemporary attachment research puts it, the internal working model formed in these early years quietly guides expectations of self and others for decades afterward.
Translate that into a friend group in your thirties or forties. The person who never seems to need anything is not calm. They are regulated at the surface and activated underneath. The performance of being fine is so old and so practiced that even they cannot always tell the difference anymore.
The specific belief that keeps the pattern running
What the child learned was not simply that adults are unreliable. The child learned something more corrosive, which is that having needs made the adult withdraw further. So the needs themselves became the problem. Firestone describes the internal script bluntly: the child begins to believe they are not worth paying attention to, and disconnects from their wants to avoid the shame of them going unmet.
That belief does not evaporate at eighteen. It shows up at brunch, at group chats, at the office. It shows up as the friend who insists they are fine while going through a divorce. It shows up as the colleague who quietly absorbs an unreasonable workload and only mentions burnout after they have already accepted a job somewhere else.
The core conviction is not that other people are cruel. It is that having a need, out loud, is the fastest way to become inconvenient. And no one wants to be the inconvenient one.
Why this looks like a virtue from the outside
Culture rewards the low-maintenance friend. They get invited more, complained about less, and praised for being easy. In a world where many people are quietly carrying some form of insecurity, the person who asks for nothing feels like a gift.
But the reward system is part of the trap. Every time the friend group praises the quiet one for being so easy, it confirms the original lesson: your value here is your lack of need. This is how the pattern survives into middle age. It is being reinforced by the very relationships that are supposed to make the person feel safe.
It is worth saying plainly. Being easygoing is not the same as being avoidantly attached. Plenty of secure people are also low-drama. The difference is whether the person could ask for something if they needed to, and whether they would trust the room to respond. The avoidant friend usually cannot, and does not.
How it shows up in romantic relationships
The friend-group version is the softer face of the pattern. The romantic version is where it tends to break things. A February 2025 piece in Forbes on attachment and partner selection notes that people with a dismissive style tend to hold positive views of themselves and negative views of others, which reads at first like confidence but functions like a wall.
In a relationship, this looks like the partner who is present but somehow unreachable. They plan the holidays. They remember birthdays. They are physically there. And yet a partner can spend years feeling as though there is a room in the house they have never been allowed into. When the more expressive partner asks for closeness, the dismissive partner reads the request as neediness, dramatics, too much.
What makes it hard to name is that the dismissive partner is not consciously withholding. They are running the same program they ran at four years old, which is: notice nothing, need nothing, do not give the other person a reason to pull away. The tragedy is that this is often exactly what causes the other person to pull away.
The physical cost of never being inconvenient
Suppressing a need is not free. The nervous system still registers the want, still fires the stress response, still processes the disappointment. It just does so silently. Over time, this shows up as vague physical symptoms, sleep problems, low-grade resentment that has nowhere to go, and a strange sense of loneliness in rooms full of people who love you.
The loneliest people in midlife are often not the ones without partners or children. They are the ones surrounded by people who only know the version of them that shows up when everyone else needs something. The low-maintenance friend is often that person. Beloved, and unknown.
Why the pattern can pass to the next generation
Attachment researchers have found that the way a parent processes their own history matters more than what happened to them. If we do not make sense of and feel the full pain of our past, we are much more likely to repeat it. The parent who was raised in an emotional desert and never grieved that fact tends to raise a child in a slightly greener version of the same one.
The findings extend into how people build families in the first place. A study covered by Scientific American found that attachment style may even influence how many children people end up having, with insecure patterns correlating with different family sizes than secure ones. The influence runs deeper than most people realise.
This is not a life sentence. It is a pattern that responds to attention. But it does not respond to willpower or to being told to open up more. It responds to a slow rebuilding of the belief that a need, expressed out loud, will not cost the person the relationship.
What a secure version of this friend actually looks like
Descriptions of what secure attachment looks like in children tend to emphasise a specific balance. The child explores confidently and comes back for comfort when they need it. They do not have to choose between independence and closeness. They get both.
In adulthood, the secure version of the low-maintenance friend is still calm, still competent, still not prone to drama. But when something is genuinely hard, they say so. They do not perform crisis, and they do not perform fineness either. They tell one or two people what is going on, they let those people help, and they trust that the friendship will not shrink because of it.
The difference is small on the outside and enormous on the inside. One version is regulating alone in a room full of people. The other version is actually with them.
Signs the pattern is running, in a friend or in yourself
A few markers show up consistently. The person can list what everyone else in the group is going through, but goes vague when asked about their own life. They deflect care by redirecting the conversation. They apologise for taking up time before saying anything hard. When someone offers help, they refuse it reflexively, then feel a private flash of resentment that no one pushed harder.
Descriptions of the dismissive-avoidant style in adult partnerships often note this reflex specifically. The person genuinely believes they are protecting others by not burdening them, while the others often feel shut out by exactly this protection.
A more painful version of the same wiring, sometimes called fearful-avoidant attachment, involves wanting closeness intensely and pulling away from it in the same breath. The internal experience is exhausting. The external presentation, again, often looks like someone who simply does not need much.
How the pattern actually loosens
The change does not come from a dramatic disclosure. It comes from small experiments in being slightly more inconvenient than usual, and noticing that the room does not empty out. Saying, out loud, that you had a hard week. Asking a friend to come with you to an appointment. Letting someone drive you home when you could have taken a cab. These sound trivial. For someone whose nervous system was trained to hide need, they are not.
Firestone’s clinical work emphasises building what she calls a coherent narrative, which is essentially the ability to tell the story of what happened to you as a child without collapsing into it or dismissing it. People who can do this tend to raise more securely attached children, and tend to form warmer adult relationships, regardless of what they started with.
The friend group rarely notices the shift at first. What they eventually notice is that the quiet one at the end of the counter is talking a little more about themselves, asking for the thing they actually want, letting someone else refill their glass for a change. It looks like a personality change. It is closer to a homecoming.
A last thought about the person who never seems to need anything
If someone in your life fits this description, the useful move is not to interrogate them or to praise them harder for being so easy. It is to ask specific questions and to stay in the room when the answer is slow. What was hard about this week. What would actually help. What would you want if you thought you were allowed to want it. Then wait.
The person who learned early that having needs made them inconvenient did not choose that lesson. They inherited it from a room that could not hold them. A different room, decades later, can teach a different lesson. It just has to be willing to keep asking, and to mean it.
The people most likely to describe themselves as lonely in midlife surveys are often the ones with the fullest calendars. They have adult children who call on birthdays, colleagues who invite them to dinners, a spouse who has slept beside them for twenty-five years, and a phone that lights up all day with requests. And still, when the house goes quiet, something feels missing in a way that partnership and parenthood were supposed to have solved.
The loneliness of the useful person is a specific kind. It doesn’t announce itself as absence. It shows up as a low, background hum of not-quite-being-met, even in rooms full of people who love you.
The version of you that gets invited
By the time most people reach their fifties, they have accumulated decades of evidence about which parts of themselves the world rewards. The competent one. The calm one. The fixer. The listener who never quite becomes the one being listened to. The parent who solves logistics for three generations at once. Each role, taken alone, is fine. Stacked over thirty years, they harden into something else: a public self so well-practised that the private self starts to feel like a stranger even to its owner.
Loneliness is not simply about being alone; it is the perceived gap between the connection you want and the connection you have. It is about being unknown while surrounded.
The person in their fifties who is celebrated as reliable, capable, or endlessly generous is often the person whose inner weather nobody has asked about in years. Their usefulness is what gets invited into rooms. Their interior does not.
How instrumental relationships quietly replace intimate ones
Relationships fall on a rough spectrum. On one end are instrumental relationships, built around what a person does or provides. On the other are expressive relationships, where the point of the relationship is the person themselves. Most social lives contain both. The trouble starts when the ratio tips, slowly, over decades, until nearly every relationship a person has is instrumental in some way.
A woman in her fifties may have twelve people who call her regularly. Her mother needs help with medical appointments. Her adult son needs a co-signer. Her boss needs the report by Friday. Her husband needs her to remember his sister’s birthday. Her friend needs to vent about her divorce. None of these people are villains. Each of them loves her, in the way people love a reliable source. But not one of them, on any given Tuesday, is calling to ask how she actually is and then waiting for the real answer.
The pattern is not new, but its recognition is recent. In caregiving populations, a specific phenomenon has emerged: social alienation, distinct from loneliness, in which a person’s role so completely defines their contact with others that the person underneath the role disappears from view. A 2025 study of caregivers of stroke patients in China found that caregivers experience high levels of social alienation, with living arrangements, caregiving burden, and loneliness all significantly predicting the depth of that alienation. The caregivers weren’t isolated in the ordinary sense. They were embedded in family. They were simply no longer being met as themselves.
Why the fifties are the decade this bill comes due
Several life stages converge in the fifties in ways that intensify the useful-person trap. Parents are aging and often need active help. Adult children are launching, or failing to launch, and either state generates demands. Careers reach the phase where seniority means being the person others come to. Marriages, if they have lasted this long, have often settled into a division of labour where each partner handles a fixed set of tasks and stops asking the other about anything outside that division.
The result is a person whose days are structured almost entirely around what other people need from them. There is nothing wrong with any single demand. There is something quietly corrosive about the cumulative one.
Grandparent caregiving offers a useful case. A scoping review of grandchild caregiving and depression found mixed effects, with the relationship between caring for grandchildren and mood depending heavily on whether the grandparent felt they had chosen the role or been assigned it, and on how much of their identity remained outside it. The finding that matters here is simple: the same activity can be nourishing or depleting depending on whether the person doing it feels seen inside it.
The tell, the childhood pattern, and what being met actually requires
There is a small experiment worth trying, though it is not really an experiment. Ask a person in their fifties, in a moment of genuine attention, what they have been thinking about lately. Not what they have been doing. What they have been thinking about.
The pause tends to be long. Often the first answer is a logistical update, because logistics is the language most of their relationships operate in. If you wait past the logistics, something else usually surfaces: an old regret they have not spoken aloud in a decade, a fear about a parent, a question about whether the second half of life is going to feel any different from the first. The material is right there, close to the surface. It has simply not been invited out in a long time.
In a recent piece on the lie of omission, Space Daily explored how people can spend years telling only the safe true things about themselves, until friendships of a decade contain nothing that would let either person recognise the other in a crisis. The useful person’s loneliness is often built out of exactly this material. Every conversation was pleasant. Every conversation was true. None of them touched the parts that most needed touching.
Not every fifty-something who ends up in this position started in the same place, but a striking number of them describe a common childhood: they were the calm one, the one who did not add to their parents’ load, the one whose emotional needs got quietly filed under “can wait.” They learned early that being low-maintenance was rewarded and being needy was expensive.
Building on attachment theory, the babies in Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation study who looked most composed when left alone were the ones whose heart rates were racing the entire time. Their calm was a strategy, not a state. John Bowlby, who built attachment theory in the 1950s, argued that the undemanding child is often the one who learned that asking for less kept the peace. Those children grow up to become spouses who rarely voice needs, managers who remain calm under pressure, and parents who carry burdens silently.
Emotional intimacy, in the clinical literature, is not the same as time spent together or affection expressed. It is the specific experience of being known and having that knowledge received without correction. Research on emotional intimacy suggests it requires three ingredients most useful people have quietly starved themselves of: undistracted time, a willingness to redefine intimacy on the participants’ own terms, and treating vulnerability as strength rather than as a tax on the relationship.
The trouble for the fifty-something who has been useful for decades is that vulnerability has been coded, in their nervous system, as burden. Sharing an actual worry feels like adding to someone else’s plate. Answering “how are you” with anything other than “good, you?” feels like an imposition. The muscle for being known has atrophied from disuse, and rebuilding it feels awkward, embarrassing, sometimes physically uncomfortable.
Why AI companions are not the answer, and the modest fix
The commercial response to midlife loneliness has been swift and lucrative. Chatbot companions are now used by hundreds of millions of people globally. The appeal, especially for the useful person, is obvious. A chatbot never needs anything back. It listens without waiting for its turn. It never has a bad week that overrides yours.
But Stanford researchers who analysed conversations from more than 1,000 users of Character.AI found the opposite of relief. People with smaller in-person social networks who used chatbots intensely reported worse well-being, not better, and those who shared the most sensitive personal information with the bots scored lowest of all. Researchers found that using chatbots to fulfill social needs does not substitute for human connection, according to the study. The researchers noted that AI companions are designed primarily to keep users engaged rather than to meet genuine social needs.
The researchers described what the bots offer as brief, unsatisfying interactions—like junk food for the social appetite. Filling in the moment, hollow by the next morning. For a person who has spent decades being the one everyone else confides in, a chatbot that finally listens can feel like a discovery. It is not one. It is a mirror that has been polished to reflect back whatever the user brings, which is the exact opposite of being met by a different mind.
There is a well-known finding in social psychology that two strangers can generate deep mutual closeness in under an hour by working through a specific series of escalating questions. Arthur Aron’s 1997 study on the 36 questions found that the pairs who completed the full protocol reported feeling closer to each other than many people feel to their oldest friends. The mechanism was not chemistry. It was structured, mutual, escalating disclosure.
The finding is often cited as a hopeful one, and it is. But it also contains a quiet indictment. If two strangers with a list of questions can generate more felt closeness in ninety minutes than a fifty-something feels with the people they have shared a house or an office with for twenty years, the problem is not a lack of available connection. The problem is that most long-standing relationships never renegotiate their scripts after the scripts get set. Whatever role a person was assigned at the beginning is the role they are still playing, three decades in.
The interventions that actually change this pattern are almost insultingly modest. They involve saying, out loud, to one person, one true thing that would not normally get said. They involve answering “how are you” with an actual sentence about an actual state, not once as a stunt, but as a slow policy change. They involve letting a friend see the version of you that is tired, unsure, or angry at someone you’re supposed to love.
They involve, most uncomfortably, tolerating the pause when the other person doesn’t know what to do with the real answer. Because they won’t, at first. They have been in a relationship with the useful version of you for years, and the useful version is who they came to see.
Some of those relationships will adjust. The person on the other end will lean in, relieved that the pretence is finally dropping. Others won’t. They will keep asking the useful version to show up, and the choice about how much of your time to give those relationships is a choice you get to make, possibly for the first time.
A recent Human Element piece on people who downsize their lives in their sixties looked at exactly this reallocation, the way people begin, later than they wish they had, to notice which parts of their life were costing them without earning their keep. The relationships that only wanted the useful version fall into that category more often than people expect.
Who this loneliness looks like from the outside
The person in their fifties who fits this description is often the last person a casual observer would identify as lonely. They have a partner. They have children who love them. They have a job that respects them and a phone that never stops. They are, by every visible metric, connected.
They are also, in the quiet hour after everyone else has gone to bed, aware of a specific ache that partnership and parenthood were supposed to have eliminated. The ache is not for more people. It is for the experience of being asked a real question by someone willing to hear a real answer, and for the strange, slightly frightening recognition that the version of themselves that would give that answer has not been out of the house in a long time.
Loneliness in midlife is not always a problem of scarcity. Sometimes it is a problem of composition. A life full of people who only know the useful version of you is a life in which the rest of you is still waiting to be met, and the waiting gets heavier the longer it goes on. The relief, when it comes, tends to arrive through the smallest door: one honest answer, given to one person, on one ordinary afternoon.
The Jung line about self-acceptance being the most terrifying task circulates so often on social media that it has almost lost its edge, and yet the moment you sit with it honestly, really sit with it, past the coffee-mug aesthetic, you notice something uncomfortable. The sentence is not asking you to love yourself. It is asking you to stop editing.
That distinction matters. Loving yourself is a project. Accepting yourself is a surrender.
One flatters the ego. The other dismantles it.
What Jung actually seems to have meant
The line, in the version that circulates most widely, reads: the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. It moves through quote collections and social feeds largely without a citation attached, which is part of why it travels so easily.
Jung is also the psychiatrist people reach for when something has broken. In July 2025, days after news of his separation from Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom posted a screenshot of an article about Jung to his Instagram Stories, highlighting the line about loneliness coming not from having nobody around you but from being unable to say the things that seem important to you.
Bloom is not unusual in reaching for Jung during a period of upheaval. People tend to find the Swiss psychiatrist when the usual self-improvement scripts stop working.
The reason is structural. Most advice tells you to become better. Jung suggested you first stop pretending you are not who you already are.
Why acceptance feels worse than change
Change gives the mind something to do. There is a plan, a target weight, a new job, a version of yourself twelve months out who will finally be acceptable to you.
Acceptance offers none of that. It asks you to look at the envy, the small cruelties, the parts of yourself you have hidden even from your closest friends, and to say: yes, that is also me.
Alli Spotts-De Lazzer, a licensed therapist writing in Psychology Today, has argued that self-acceptance may matter more than high self-esteem for living a contented life. Her point is about the scoring system. Self-esteem depends on evidence: grades, promotions, praise. Self-acceptance does not require the evidence to be flattering.
That is why it is harder. There is no scorecard.
The parts we refuse to claim
Jung’s term for the disowned material was the shadow. He meant the qualities a person cannot bear to see in themselves and therefore projects outward, onto a spouse, a colleague, a political opponent, a stranger on the internet.
You can spot your own shadow by noticing what enrages you disproportionately in other people. The trait you find unforgivable in a coworker is often the trait you have most carefully denied in yourself.
This is why acceptance terrifies. To accept yourself completely means retrieving those projections. It means admitting that the person you have been criticising is, in some measurable way, a mirror.
Loneliness and the unspoken self
Jung linked the refusal of self-acceptance to a specific kind of loneliness. Not the loneliness of empty rooms, but the loneliness of unsaid things, the idea that isolation grows sharpest when you cannot say what actually matters to you.
A person who has not accepted themselves cannot communicate themselves. They can only communicate the acceptable version.
Everyone in their life is talking to a spokesperson.
Over time, this produces a strange grief: being surrounded by people who love a curated character, while the actual self stands quietly behind the curtain, unwitnessed.
The research that backs Jung’s instinct
Contemporary psychology has been slowly circling what Jung intuited a century ago. A 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychology, led by Yuting Li and colleagues at Shanxi Medical University, followed university students across two measurement points six months apart and found that self-esteem fully mediated the relationship between self-acceptance and prosocial behaviour. Self-acceptance did not push people toward kindness directly. It did so by changing how they held themselves, and that shift carried the entire effect.
The sample was narrow, medical students at a single Chinese university, with a heavy gender imbalance the authors flag themselves. It is a suggestive finding rather than a settled law. But the direction is the interesting part.
The mechanism makes sense. If you are not spending psychic energy hiding from your own contradictions, you have more energy available for someone else’s.
The reverse also holds. People who cannot bear their own flaws may struggle to tolerate the flaws of others. Judgment turns outward when it cannot be metabolised inward.
This is the quiet cost of refusing Jung’s task. Not misery, exactly. Just a permanent low-grade grievance with the world.
Why growth requires acceptance first
There is a common misreading of Jung that treats acceptance as resignation, as giving up on becoming better. The research points the other way. Susan Krauss Whitbourne, professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has argued that the path toward self-growth is paved with self-acceptance rather than blocked by it. Reviewing a set of University of Zurich intervention studies that pitted self-improvement against self-acceptance, she notes that both produced similar gains in wellbeing, and that trying and failing to change can generate its own trouble, what those authors call false hope syndrome.
The reason is practical. You cannot change something you refuse to look at.
Denial keeps a trait frozen in place. Acceptance thaws it enough to work with.
People who try to become better without first accepting who they are tend to build a shinier surface over the same underlying pattern. The behaviour changes. The compulsion driving it does not.
The mechanism of the fear
Why is this so terrifying? Because complete acceptance dissolves the story you have been running about who you are.
Most identities are constructed by exclusion. You know who you are partly by knowing what you are not. The moment you accept that the excluded traits are also yours, the identity loses its clean edges.
That is disorienting in a specific way. It is not despair. It is closer to vertigo.
Jung believed this vertigo was the entry point to genuine individuation, the process of becoming an actual person rather than a bundle of inherited roles.
The face you have not met
There is a small experiment that gets at Jung’s point without any theory. Look at an unreversed photograph of yourself, not a mirror image, but the version everyone else sees. Most people find it slightly wrong, slightly stranger than expected.
The person the world knows is not quite the person you have been looking at.
Acceptance works similarly. The self you have been curating is a reversed image. The self other people encounter, and the self that lives underneath, is closer to the real thing.
Meeting it feels like meeting a stranger.
What acceptance is not
It is worth being precise. Accepting yourself completely does not mean approving of everything you do. It does not mean abandoning ethics or discipline.
It means refusing to lie about what is there.
A person who accepts that they have a temper can work on the temper. A person who insists they do not have one will keep being surprised by their own outbursts.
Acceptance is honesty about what is actually present. Nothing more, nothing less.
The everyday texture of the task
Most people do not confront Jung’s terrifying task in a single dramatic session. It arrives in small increments: a midlife morning when the ambition you have been performing suddenly feels borrowed, a conversation with an adult child where you notice you have been playing a role for twenty years, a health scare that reorders what you say you care about.
The pattern is similar. A person stops pretending certain things matter to them, and the external life reorganises around the admission.
That is Jung’s task in domestic form. Not a breakdown. A quiet subtraction of what was never really yours.
Why it stays terrifying
Even people who have done years of work on themselves report that acceptance keeps arriving in new layers. There is always another disowned piece.
The envy you thought you had processed returns in a new form. The old grievance you believed you had released surfaces during a family dinner. The version of yourself you thought you had left behind reappears under stress.
Jung was not describing a one-time event. He was describing a lifelong posture.
The terror is not that acceptance is difficult once. It is that it is difficult continually, and that most people, at some point, decide they would rather manage the surface than face what is underneath it.
The quiet reward
People who do keep at it tend to describe a specific change, and it is not happiness in the ordinary sense. Acceptance is not a mood. It is a lowered resistance.
The people who have done this work are not conspicuously cheerful. They are just harder to destabilise.
Criticism does not shatter them, because they already know what is true about themselves. Flattery does not inflate them, for the same reason.
They have become, in Jung’s sense, actual. And the terrifying thing turns out to have been the doorway, not the destination.
Where to start, if you want to
There is no clean method. But there is a first question that tends to open the door: what do you find most unforgivable in other people?
Sit with the answer for a week. Do not defend yourself against it. Do not rush to conclude anything.
Notice, quietly, where that quality also lives in you.
That is the beginning of the task Jung called the most terrifying. Not because the material is horrifying, since most of it is ordinary human stuff. But because meeting it, without flinching, changes who you take yourself to be.
Which is, in the end, the only thing worth changing.
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