Cooperatives, Sex Ratios and Missing Unification · Morning Gist
Tuesday, October 274 stories · 13 min
Cooperatives, Sex Ratios and Missing Unification
Four essays that swap a familiar explanation for a less obvious one, covering peace deals, sexual mores, anxiety and the forces of physics.
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Peace accords fail when they leave economic relations untouched, argues sociologist Azize Aslan, drawing on fieldwork in Guatemala, Rojava and Colombia. story 1 ↓
Baby-boom births left a shortage of men that fuelled the sexual revolution. Falling birth rates may now be pushing young adults the other way. story 2 ↓
Clinical anxiety is different from everyday worry: the alarm stays on after the threat has passed and lasts six months or more. story 3 ↓
Grand unification of the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces still rests on one suggestive coincidence, and experiments keep finding nothing to support it. story 4 ↓
Blood is not always red: different chemistry gives some animals blue, green or violet blood.
1/4Aeon· Azize Aslan· Oct 26
A Kurdish sociologist argues that lasting peace has to be built through cooperatives
Sociologist Azize Aslan argues that most peace deals only stop the shooting and leave the poverty behind wars untouched. From fieldwork in Kurdish Syria and Colombia, she argues worker-run cooperatives can build lasting peace instead.
Why it matters · It questions an assumption most peacebuilding shares, that democracy plus markets settles conflicts, and stretches the idea of 'violence' to ordinary exhausting work lives.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 28 sec
1 · The Kurds and the PKK
Kurds are a stateless people split across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has fought the Turkish state since the 1980s. Peace talks collapsed in 2015, and new talks have been under way for about two years.
2 · Negative versus positive peace
Johan Galtung, a founder of peace studies, split peace into 'negative peace', meaning no direct violence, and 'positive peace', meaning the removal of the injustices that cause conflict, such as inequality and discrimination.
3 · How peace deals usually work
Since 1989 the UN has used a disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) model: fighters give up weapons, their units are disbanded, and each one gets a short-term stipend and training to find a civilian job.
2/4Works in Progress· Oct 26
Lopsided sex ratios may explain why today's young adults are turning prudish
A Works in Progress essay argues that the pill didn't drive the sexual revolution. A shortage of older men did, and the author reads today's shortage of women as the reason young people are cooling on casual sex.
Why it matters · It swaps a story about technology and values for plain demographic arithmetic, an idea you can test against data and carry over to other cultures.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 30 sec
1 · Sex-ratio theory
Social scientists have long argued that whichever sex is scarcer in a dating pool sets the terms. Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord made the case in their 1983 book Too Many Women?, linking surplus women to looser sexual norms.
2 · The age-gap effect
Couples usually pair an older man with a younger woman. If births keep rising each year, every group of men is matched against a bigger group of younger women. That creates a shortage of men even when the sexes are born in equal numbers.
3 · The usual explanation
The common account says the contraceptive pill, approved in the US in 1960, set off the sexual revolution by separating sex from pregnancy. Liberals tell it as liberation and conservatives as decline.
3/4Psyche· India Sturgis· Oct 26
Everyday anxiety and clinical anxiety are not the same thing
Journalist India Sturgis, who was hospitalised in 2019 for anxiety and insomnia, argues that loose talk of "anxiety" hides real disorders. Clinicians say the difference is whether symptoms last, how intense they are, and how much they disrupt daily life.
Why it matters · When illness words get used for ordinary discomfort, the gap between the two stops showing, and people who are really ill take years to see they need help.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 25 sec
1 · Therapy words in everyday talk
Clinical labels like PTSD, OCD and trauma are now used for small annoyances. Psychologists call this widening of meaning "concept creep". It makes the words cover more, but it blurs the line where an illness begins.
2 · Anxiety as an alarm
Anxiety is the body's threat response: faster heart, alertness, worry. These help in danger or under pressure. In a disorder, the response goes off too easily, too strongly, or doesn't switch off.
3 · Generalised anxiety disorder
GAD is persistent, hard-to-control worry about many things, often with poor sleep, tension and tiredness. Standard diagnostic criteria require that symptoms last at least six months.
4/4Big Think· Ethan Siegel· Oct 27
Do the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces merge at high energy?
Physicist Ethan Siegel explains grand unification, the idea that three of nature's forces merge into one at extreme energies. It would neatly solve several open puzzles, but every experimental test so far has found nothing.
Why it matters · It is a clear case of a beautiful theory that explains a lot and still has no evidence behind it, and of how physicists keep those two things apart.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 28 sec
1 · Four forces, three quantum
Nature has gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force (which drives radioactive decay) and the strong force (which binds quarks into protons and holds nuclei together). Quantum field theories describe the last three. Gravity has no accepted quantum theory yet.
2 · Unification has happened before
In the 1800s Maxwell showed that electricity and magnetism are one force. In the 1960s and 70s physicists showed that electromagnetism and the weak force are two low-energy faces of a single 'electroweak' force.
3 · Symmetry groups as bookkeeping
Physicists describe forces with mathematical symmetry groups. The Standard Model's group is written SU(3) ⊗ SU(2) ⊗ U(1). Grand unified theories place that whole structure inside one larger group, such as SU(5) or SO(10).
Women at an outdoor gathering in Rojava, 2017, the year before Aslan began fieldwork on its assemblies and cooperatives.
In 2017, near Xela in Guatemala's western highlands, the sociologist Azize Aslan met a former guerrilla. He had joined the insurgency at 13 and stayed in the mountains until the 1996 peace accord. "The day the war ended, I cried," he told her, "because I didn't know how to live in peace: I had no home, no job, no trade." In an Aeon essay, Aslan argues his question, What now?, shows what is wrong with how the world makes peace.
The problem with peace deals
Aslan is Kurdish. Her family fled violence in southeastern Turkey when she was seven, and she left Turkey after peace talks with the 1 collapsed in 2015. Guatemala's accord was praised in its day. Its truth commission led to war-crimes trials of former heads of state. But it never redistributed land, the grievance that started the war. Guatemala is still one of Latin America's most unequal countries, and World Bank researchers found it had become more violent since the war ended.
She says this pattern is common. Of more than 30 comprehensive peace agreements signed since the Cold War ended, few have produced durable peace. Most focus on ceasefires and the UN's 2 model, which hands fighters a stipend and a route into the job market. Aslan argues that this assumes markets and elections will do the rest. Her more radical claim is that capitalism is itself a source of structural violence.
Two experiments
Her answer is cooperatives that belong to wider movements, put collective needs ahead of profit, and challenge patriarchy and racism too. In 3, the Kurdish-run self-governing region of northeastern Syria set up in 2014, half a million hectares had been communalised by 2018. People worked until about 2:30pm and spent evenings in assemblies. There they decided how much bread to bake and whether milk went to children first or to a yogurt factory. Women's cooperatives turned unpaid preserve-making into shared, counted work.
In Colombia, the 2016 accord with the 4 rebels led to 5, a federation of about 6,200 former fighters and 154 organisations. Its coffee, fish and textile cooperatives include peasants, Indigenous and Afro-Colombian neighbours.
The limits
Neither case is a clean win. In early 2026 an offensive forced Rojava's forces to give up territory and oil fields in return for cultural recognition only. ECOMÚN depends on the state and on foreign donors, and it never won land reform. Aslan also wants to influence the current PKK–Turkey talks. Still, she argues the same question applies to any exhausted worker: how do we want to live?
The sociologist Azize Aslan begins her Aeon essay with a man she met in 2017, at a community radio station he had built near Xela in Guatemala's western highlands. He joined the Guatemalan insurgency at 13 and stayed in the mountains until the 1996 peace accord. "Despite the deaths and the hardship of the war, I never cried," he told her. "But the day the war ended, I cried – because I didn't know how to live in peace: I had no home, no job, no trade. And I asked myself: what now?"
Aslan treats that question as a charge against the whole idea of peace that was offered to him. Her argument is that peace as it is usually made does not break the cycle of injustice that causes wars. She goes further than most critics: she says real peace needs economies run on a logic other than capital's, and she offers cooperatives as the way to build them.
Why she was looking
The question is personal. Aslan is Kurdish. The Kurds are a people whose homeland was divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria when modern nation-states formed, and for more than a century they have faced bans on their language and the loss of their land. Her family fled violence in Bakur, the Kurdish southeast of Turkey, when she was seven. They worked in fields in western Turkey and lived in a tent. In 2013 Turkey began peace talks with the 1, the armed movement that first wanted an independent state and later autonomy within Turkey. The talks collapsed in 2015. Aslan was a doctoral student researching economic autonomy in Kurdistan at the time, and the work became untenable. She moved to Latin America to finish her studies.
The Guatemala lesson
The peace-studies literature pointed her to Guatemala. Its civil war ran from 1960 to 1996, killed more than 200,000 people and displaced more than a million, over a tenth of the population. It began as an uprising against extreme inequality in land ownership and against discrimination toward the Maya. The 1996 Agreement on a Firm and Lasting Peace was considered innovative. Its Commission for Historical Clarification attributed most atrocities to the state, and partly because of its findings, former heads of state were later tried for war crimes.
Yet no fair land redistribution followed. Guatemala remains one of Latin America's most unequal countries by class, ethnicity and gender. The World Bank researchers Caroline Moser and Cathy McIlwaine wrote that it "has become a substantially more violent country" since the conflict ended.
Aslan says Guatemala is typical. More than 30 comprehensive peace agreements have been signed since the Cold War, and few have lasted. The standard template is the UN's 2 (DDR) model, first used in El Salvador in 1989 and since in more than 30 countries. Fighters hand over weapons, dissolve their command structures and receive short-term stipends and training so that each can find a place in the civilian economy. The assumption is that democratic institutions and free markets will then produce lasting peace.
Beyond 'positive peace'
3, often called the founder of peace studies, distinguished "negative peace", the absence of direct violence, from "positive peace", which means dismantling the structures of injustice. Aslan argues that even Galtung and other liberal theorists propose reform, redistribution and inclusion within capitalism, the very system that movements in places like Guatemala took up arms against. She asks whether capitalist relations of production can produce peace if they are themselves a structural source of violence. Her answer is what she calls "anticapitalist peace".
Her tool is the cooperative. The International Cooperative Alliance, founded in 1895, defines cooperatives as democratic, autonomous bodies that people form voluntarily to meet shared needs. Aslan admits the tradition, running from the Rochdale weavers of 1844 to modern credit unions, includes groups that "simply reproduce market logic under a different name". The kind she means has three features. It belongs to a broader social or territorial struggle. It puts collective needs ahead of accumulating capital. And it challenges patriarchy, racism, colonialism and state power along with exploitation. The idea comes partly from 4, the bottom-up, feminist and ecological political theory of the PKK co-founder Abdullah Öcalan.
5: how a commune decides
In 2014, during Syria's civil war, Kurds in the north-east declared de facto autonomy. Instead of forming a state, they built a system of assemblies, communes, cantons and cooperatives, later formalised as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, known as Rojava. When Aslan arrived in early 2018, half a million hectares had been communalised with collective-use rights. Women's economic committees were pushing the slogan "one cooperative for every commune".
What struck her first was how people used their time. They typically worked until 2:30pm, went home to eat and rest, and returned at 5pm for assemblies of the cooperative, the commune, the women's congress or the municipality. She says almost nobody stayed home. She contrasts this with what Marx called 6: work that uses up people's time and leaves them no say over their own lives.
Her example of how this worked is concrete. To answer "How many loaves?" the commune counted families and how much bread each ate. "How will we produce it?" was harder. Syrian wheat subsidies and ration cards had made people dependent on cheap state bread, and many said "we are a society that no longer knows how to make bread". So a bread cooperative had to relearn the craft. A livestock cooperative had to decide whether milk went to children first, to neighbours, or to a yogurt factory. Aslan says the political, religious and ethnic differences blamed for Syria's war became the commune's "social wealth" in these debates.
The feminist part was central. Care and domestic work was treated as the foundation of the economy. Kurdish women's seasonal preserves, such as cheeses, pickles and dried produce, had never counted as economic activity. Cooperatives turned that work into a shared enterprise whose surplus could be traded or sold.
Colombia: 7
The second case is the 2016 accord between Colombia's government and the 8, its largest rebel group. The Kroc Institute at Notre Dame rated it the most comprehensive of 34 post-Cold War agreements. The FARC had rejected DDR as individual adaptation to an unjust labour market and won "collective reincorporation" instead. The result was ECOMÚN (Social Economies of the Commons), founded in 2017. It has about 6,200 signatories and 154 organisations in 26 of Colombia's 33 administrative divisions, running coffee, cattle, fish-farming, textile and rural-tourism cooperatives. None is made up only of former fighters. Peasants, Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities take part, which members call a "pedagogy of peace".
The contradictions
Aslan does not hide the weak points. ECOMÚN's leaders admit that land reform, the core of the FARC's struggle, was never guaranteed. The cooperatives must survive in the capitalist market, depend on foreign donors with neoliberal conditions, and operate under state oversight. Rojava fared worse. In early 2026 Syrian government forces, jihadist groups and Turkish-backed militias launched an offensive. A January ceasefire made the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Rojava's armed forces, give up territory and oil fields and join the Syrian army as individuals. In return, Damascus offered recognition of Kurdish culture but no self-government. Aslan reads the offensive as proof that Rojava was threatening enough to destroy. She also argues Rojava shows that negative peace is "not indispensable" to anticapitalist peace, though she does not say how such a project survives sustained military force.
Her goals are open. She wants cooperatives on the table in the current PKK–Turkey talks. She also argues that the ex-combatant's What now? belongs to the exhausted commuter, the unpaid carer and the indebted professional as much as to people in war zones. Whether Rojava's evening assemblies can work beyond a revolutionary setting, she leaves as a hope, not a demonstrated result.
Remember
Guatemala's 1996 accord prosecuted former heads of state but never redistributed land, and the country grew more violent after the war.
In Rojava, a commune deciding how to make bread first had to relearn a skill that state subsidies had wiped out.
ECOMÚN's leaders admit their cooperatives must survive inside the market they hope to move beyond.
Ending pregnancies based on the fetus's sex, usually to avoid having daughters. In India it skews the sex ratio toward males.
Image: Works in Progress
In January 2022, TikTok turned on "West Elm Caleb", a man who had strung along several women with Spotify mixtapes and then ghosted them. The women identified him, tried to get him fired, and a dating app put up a billboard about him. A new Works in Progress essay points out what was new: in the 1 2010s, cads were treated as a fact of life, but these women felt morally wronged. Polls back up the change. Young people are less keen on first-date sex and one-night stands and more interested in marriage. The author argues the explanation is demographic.
The pill didn't start it
The standard story says the contraceptive pill, approved in 1960, launched the sexual revolution. The author points out that premarital sex had been rising for decades before then; by 1953 half of American women reported it. Contraception is also widespread in India and Japan, and neither had a casual-sex revolution.
A baby boom makes men scarce
Men usually marry women about two years younger. When each year's births exceed the last, each group of men faces a bigger group of younger women. The essay's example: 3.7 million babies were born in 1950 and 3.9 million in 1952. Roughly 1.85 million boys from 1950 were matched against 1.95 million girls from 1952, about 105 women per 100 men. US births rose every year from the end of the Second World War until 1961, so this "false shortage of men" lasted from the 1940s into the 1990s.
Behavior changed over the same years. One in seven women of the 1920s had premarital sex, against half of young people by 1950, and 2 doubled. Before the war, when immigration left 104 men per 100 women, men paid for dates and premarital sex stayed uncommon.
Other markets fit the pattern
Indian 3 tripled from 1930 to 1975. Sex-selective abortion has since reversed the ratio, and "bride buying" has appeared.
Fast-growing ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, which use arranged matchmaking, have 112 women aged 19 for every 100 men aged 22, a "4 crisis". 5 groups, where both sexes start matchmaking at the same age, have no such crisis.
On colleges with more women, women date less and are less likely to have a boyfriend, but are more sexually active.
Now it's reversing
US births have fallen since the mid-2000s. That leaves 104 men aged 20 per 100 women aged 18, about the pre-war ratio. The author reads the TikTok shaming, the return of Why Men Love Bitches to the charts, and trends that encourage women to make men pay as early signs of it, and predicts earlier marriage ahead.
The author admits she may be "seeing it everywhere." The evidence is mostly trends that happen to line up. Rivals such as smartphones get little attention. And a gap of four or five per hundred may be too small to explain everything; she herself calls the theory "partial."
In January 2022, TikTok found a villain. "West Elm Caleb" was a six-foot-four man with a mustache who had strung along several women at once. They compared notes on Spotify mixtapes followed by 1, worked out exactly who he was, and tried to get him fired. A dating app even bought a billboard about him.
A new essay in Works in Progress points out what was new here. Cads have always existed, but these women felt morally wronged. In the 2 culture of the 2010s, the "fuckboy" was a fact of life, closer to weather than to wrongdoing. Polling cited in the essay shows the shift: young people today are less likely to have sex on a first date or have one-night stands, and more interested in marriage. Older commentators find this confusing. The author doesn't, and offers a demographic explanation.
The problem with the pill story
The usual account says the contraceptive pill arrived in 1960 and upended the nuclear family. The author argues that the timing is wrong. Premarital sex had been rising for decades before the pill. By 1953, half of American women reported having had it. Contraception also fails to produce a sexual revolution elsewhere. India has condoms, the pill and sterilization widely available, yet only 3 percent of unmarried women admit to having had sex. Japan has practiced abortion and contraception widely since the 1950s without a turn toward casual sex.
The essay's history of dating
In the early twentieth century, middle- and upper-class courtship ran on etiquette, chaperones and introductions arranged by elders within one's own class. Dating as we know it spread upward in the 1920s from working-class people who had moved to cities, away from mothers who issued invitations and parlors to host callers in.
In those first decades America had more men than women. Mass immigration left 104 men for every 100 women in 1920. On the author's account, women held the advantage. Men paid for dancing and milkshakes, people married a bit younger, and some "necking and petting" happened. Premarital sex rose but stayed a minority pursuit.
How a baby boom creates a shortage of men
After the Second World War the US had surplus women for the first time. The cause was arithmetic, not war deaths. Men tend to marry women about two years younger, and from the end of the war until 1961 every birth cohort was larger than the one before it.
The essay works through an example. About 3.7 million babies were born in 1950 and 3.9 million in 1952. Assume roughly half of each year's births are boys and half girls. Then the 1.85 million boys born in 1950 are matched against 1.95 million girls born in 1952, which gives 105 women for every 100 men two years older. The author argues that this "false shortage of men" shaped dating from the 1940s through the 1990s.
The essay also tracks behavior over the same period. Only one in seven women of the 1920s had sex before marriage; by 1950 half of young people did. Without reliable contraception, this showed up as 3. In the early 1960s, a sixth of first-born children of married couples had been conceived before the wedding, compared with a twelfth in 1920. The essay leaves the mechanism mostly implicit. In standard sex-ratio theory, when men are scarce they can hold out for less commitment, and the norms shift to match.
Evidence from other marriage markets
The author tests the idea on very different systems:
India. Dowries, payments from the bride's family to the groom's, tripled between 1930 and 1975, during and after the population boom. Sex-selective abortion has since reversed the ratio. There are 13.5 million 24-year-old men for 12.3 million 19-year-old women, and "bride buying" has become a problem in the most skewed regions.
Running the clock forward
American births rose until 1961, which on this theory meant growing sexual freedom into the 1990s. They then hovered around four million a year until the mid-2000s, giving stable norms into the 2010s. After that, births fell. With each new cohort smaller, the age gap now produces a shortage of women: 104 men aged 20 for every 100 women aged 18. The author notes this is close to the pre-war ratio.
The author sees the expected renegotiation under way. Teenagers post videos shaming adults kissing in parks. Why Men Love Bitches, an early-2000s manual telling women to demand more, is back on the bestseller charts through TikTok. The "Sprinkle Sprinkle" trend encourages women to treat men as a source of money, with participants boasting about boyfriends paying apartment deposits. The author predicts earlier marriage next, and a West Elm Caleb-style reckoning for a man who stalls on proposing: "a return to 1930s dating."
What to weigh
The author raises the main weakness herself: "having cooked up a theory, I'm just seeing it everywhere," reading statistics "like they're a Rorschach test." Most of the evidence lines up two trends over time rather than isolating cause and effect. The campus and Hasidic comparisons come closest to natural experiments, but the essay doesn't cite the studies behind them.
Rival explanations get little attention. Smartphones come up only as what "a lot of people" blame for falling sex rates. Economics, immigration and changing gender politics are not weighed. The surplus is also modest: four or five people per hundred. The essay doesn't explain why such a small imbalance would move the norms of a whole country, beyond the implied point that people at the margin set the terms for everyone. The author calls this "a partial explanation," and that is the fairest way to read it: a reframing worth testing, not a settled account.
Remember
Premarital sex in the US tripled before the pill arrived, which undercuts the idea that technology alone drove the revolution.
Rising birth rates plus a two-year marriage age gap can create a shortage of one sex without any war or migration.
Groups that match people at the same age, such as Hasidic communities, avoid the imbalance. This is a useful natural control.
Someone spills a round of drinks and calls it their "PTSD". A car backfires and "gives them anxiety". The journalist India Sturgis argues in Psyche that this casual talk does two kinds of harm. It treats normal nerves as illness, and it hides how disabling real anxiety disorders can be.
Sturgis knows both sides. In 2019, after seven years of struggling on and off, she was diagnosed with 1 (GAD, persistent worry that is hard to control), 2 (PTSD) and chronic insomnia. She ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
Some anxiety is useful
Nerves help us weigh risk and perform under pressure. Sturgis quotes Tiger Woods, who said in 2015 that the day he stops feeling nervous is the day he quits. The hard part is telling when anxiety has stopped helping.
Where the line falls
There is no lab test. Doctors look at three things: how long symptoms have lasted, how severe they are, and how much they interfere with daily life. The consultant psychologist Elena Touroni puts the key difference in time. Everyone feels the knot in the stomach. In clinical anxiety, the feeling does not lift once the threat is gone. The nervous system either stays on high alert or starts going off with no trigger at all. If that lasts six months or more, clinicians look seriously at a disorder.
Touroni says many patients don't see it because they have adapted. Years of high anxiety become "just how they are". Sturgis only sought real help at the very end. By then she was sleeping about three hours a night, having panic attacks at night, getting ill often, and having intrusive thoughts about suicide and self-harm.
The numbers
About one in three people will have an anxiety condition in their lifetime.
7.5% of adults in England currently have GAD, according to NHS data.
Only one in four people with an anxiety disorder worldwide get any treatment, even though these disorders are among the most treatable.
What helped, and what recovery looks like
Sturgis credits four things: two weeks away from home, medication (the antidepressant 3 in the morning and 4 at night for sleep), 5 (CBT), and learning how anxiety works in the mind and body.
The psychologist Nick Grey sets the goal clearly. You can't cure anxiety, because it is part of being human. You can overcome a chronic anxiety problem you are stuck in. Recovery takes months or years, not weeks, and it goes up and down. Sturgis now sees her anxious streak as part of why she enjoys life so much.
Words that have lost their weight
India Sturgis starts her Psyche essay with how people talk now. A car backfires and someone says it "gave them anxiety". Spilled drinks become "PTSD", or "OCD" until someone cleans them up. On TikTok she has seen syrup stains on a hardwood floor called severely traumatic. She argues that this casual use of illness words for minor discomfort makes it easy to underestimate how disabling anxiety disorders are. It also helps no one, least of all the people who really are ill.
Sturgis is a journalist and wrote a book on anxiety, How to Eat an Elephant (2026), for which she interviewed experts and people living with the condition. She also writes from her own experience. In 2019 she was diagnosed with 1 (GAD, persistent and hard-to-control worry about many things), 2 (PTSD) and chronic insomnia. It took her months and years to recover.
Anxiety is supposed to exist
Sturgis does not want anxiety treated as something to get rid of. She argues it is a normal part of hard moments and big changes. Nerves help people decide fast, weigh risk and perform. She quotes Tiger Woods in 2015: "I care about what I do and when I'm not nervous is the day I quit … I want to feel the rush, I want to feel the nerves."
So the question is not whether you feel anxious. It is whether anxiety has stayed too long or grown big enough to change your life. The essay gives these figures:
About a third of people will have an anxiety condition at some point, making it the most common form of mental illness.
NHS data suggest 7.5% of adults in England currently have GAD, the most common anxiety disorder.
Worldwide, only one in four people with an anxiety disorder get any treatment.
The last figure bothers Sturgis most, because these disorders respond well to treatment.
Why the line is hard to see
The consultant psychologist Elena Touroni says one word now covers a huge range. "Anxiety" can mean nerves before a presentation. It can also mean anxiety that shapes every decision, shrinks someone's world, and damages their sleep, relationships and ability to function. Without a specialist, Touroni says, the line between normal and clinical "can feel quite subjective".
She points to a particular trap: adaptation. She regularly sees people who have lived with significant anxiety for years without seeing it as anything but "just how they are". It has become their baseline. To use an analogy (not one from the essay): it is like a smoke alarm that has beeped for so long the household stops hearing it.
How clinicians decide
There is no foolproof test. Doctors weigh three things: how long symptoms have lasted, how severe they are, and how much they disrupt daily life. Touroni says having anxious thoughts, jitters or "that horrible knot in the pit of your stomach" is not what marks a disorder. What matters is what those symptoms do over time. In clinical anxiety they are stronger and last longer. Crucially, they do not lift once the perceived threat has gone. The nervous system either stays on high alert long after the trigger, or starts going off with no clear trigger at all. If this has gone on for six months or more, she says, clinicians look seriously at a disorder.
Here is how that plays out, as an illustration. Two people dread a work review. One sleeps badly the night before, gets through the meeting and feels normal by the weekend. The other is still lying awake weeks later, now worrying about the next review, about money, about not sleeping. Six months on they are turning down invitations. Both felt the same knot at the start. Only the second has the pattern Touroni describes.
One case, from the inside
Sturgis's own story follows that second pattern. She spent seven years struggling on and off with insomnia and anxiety before she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 2019. She got real help only at the very end. By then she was sleeping about three hours on several nights a week, sometimes not at all, and having intrusive thoughts about suicide and self-harm. She writes that it felt easier to carry on, pretend nothing was wrong and hope it would pass, partly because she knew so little about anxiety.
The warning signs built on each other. Lack of sleep wore down her immune system, so she kept getting ill. Her mood dropped. Panic attacks came at night. She became anxious about being anxious and about not sleeping, and she wanted to go out less. Touroni's description of a world "narrowing" fits closely. Touroni also says that getting the right name for the problem "is not a small thing": a diagnosis changes what seems possible.
What treatment looked like
Sturgis lists what helped most in the crisis:
Time away: about two weeks out of her home environment.
Medication:3, an (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a common class of antidepressant), in the mornings. Amitriptyline, an older tricyclic antidepressant that can help with sleep, in the evenings.
For keeping well, she relies on ordinary habits: putting sleep first, a sane balance between work and life, managing stress, eating well, saying no, and being kind to herself.
Cure versus recovery
The psychologist and researcher Nick Grey separates two goals. If someone wants never to feel anxious again, that won't happen, because anxiety is part of being human. If the goal is to get out of a chronic anxiety problem they are stuck in, "then absolutely, that can happen." Sturgis also quotes 6's The Meaning of Anxiety (revised 1977): anxiety can't be avoided but can be reduced to normal levels, and then used to sharpen "awareness, vigilance, zest for living."
She takes that view of herself. Seven years after hospital, she says anxiety is no longer a defining feature of her life, just "another brick in the wall" of her personality. She credits her anxious tendency with making her quick to think and feel, and says she wouldn't change it. What has changed is how she treats it. She now pays attention to what her mind and body are telling her instead of pushing the feeling away.
On timing
Her practical advice for readers who see themselves in this essay is about pace. Learning to manage problematic anxiety takes months or years, not days or usually even weeks. Grey warns that people lose hope when change is slow. He calls recovery an "up and down rollercoaster", with hope even after decades.
What the essay doesn't do
This is a personal essay with expert voices, not a survey of the evidence. Sturgis doesn't compare how well different treatments work. She doesn't explain why three in four people go untreated, beyond hinting at stigma and not knowing the signs. She also doesn't say whether calling everyday discomfort "anxiety" actually stops ill people from seeking help, or just annoys those who are. Her two claims sit together without being reconciled: we should take anxiety more seriously, and we should take it less seriously.
Remember
Clinical anxiety is defined by persistence: the alarm stays on after the threat passes, typically for six months or more.
People often miss their own disorder because years of anxiety come to feel like their normal personality.
The realistic goal is getting free of chronic anxiety, not never feeling anxious, and that usually takes months or years.
The Standard Model's particles, with lines showing which particles feel which forces.1 / 4
Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force turned out to be one force in disguise. Physicists have long wondered whether the strong nuclear force joins them at still higher energies. In a Big Think essay, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel lays out why this idea, 1, is so appealing and why it still has no evidence.
The precedent
The tidy textbook picture says each force has its own carrier: photons for electromagnetism, W and Z bosons for the weak force, gluons for the strong force. Siegel argues the details are subtler. In the 2, physics' current theory of particles, the symmetry structure is SU(3) ⊗ SU(2) ⊗ U(1). It's tempting to read these as strong, weak and electromagnetic. In fact the SU(2) and U(1) pieces mix: part of each describes electromagnetism, part describes the weak force. Together they form one electroweak force, which the 3 splits apart at everyday energies. The strong force's SU(3) piece doesn't mix with the others at all.
What a bigger theory would buy
Grand unified theories, or GUTs, fit the whole Standard Model inside a larger symmetry group such as SU(5) or SO(10). They predict extra superheavy particles, and with them several effects:
Proton decay. Protons would eventually fall apart, for example into a pion plus a positron. Japan's Kamiokande detector was originally built to look for this.
Matter over antimatter. Heavy "X" and "Y" bosons decaying slightly unevenly in the early universe could explain why matter won out. The Standard Model alone can't do this.
Restored symmetries. GUTs predict 4 (isolated north or south magnetic poles), which could explain why electric charge comes in fixed units. They also predict right-handed neutrinos, which could explain why ordinary neutrinos are so light.
The coincidence
Each force has a 5 that measures its strength. Today these are roughly 1/137 for electromagnetism, 1/30 for the weak force and 1/9 for the strong force. The values shift with energy: electromagnetism strengthens and the strong force weakens. Near 10¹⁵ GeV (billion electron-volts), the three almost meet. That point is 27 orders of magnitude above everyday energies, and they miss by less than three orders of magnitude. Siegel calls this suggestive but stresses that the Standard Model alone already predicts this running. Making the lines meet exactly takes extra hypothetical particles, such as those from supersymmetry.
The verdict
The simplest model, SU(5), predicted a proton lifetime around 10³⁰ years. Experiments now show it is at least 10³⁴ years, which rules SU(5) out. No monopoles have turned up. Searches for 6, a rare process GUT-style neutrinos would allow, have found nothing. Siegel's conclusion: grand unification stays speculative until it produces a hint stronger than coincidence.
Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist who writes the "Starts With a Bang" column for Big Think, takes on one of the oldest hopes in particle physics. The hope is that the strong nuclear force merges with the electroweak force at high enough energies. That idea is called 1. His answer is careful: it is mathematically attractive, it would explain a surprising amount, and so far there is no evidence for it.
Unification that already happened
Siegel starts with the one unification beyond Maxwell's that we know is real. The usual picture of the 2, the theory covering every known particle and the three quantum forces, gives each force its own carrier. The photon carries electromagnetism and acts on electric charge. The W and Z bosons carry the weak force and act on "weak charge." Gluons carry the strong force and act on "color charge," a property of quarks and gluons.
Siegel says this picture is mostly right but hides the interesting part. Weak charge isn't one simple quantity. In the 1960s physicists borrowed isospin, an older idea from nuclear physics that treats the proton and neutron as "up-ish" and "down-ish" versions of one particle. They built a weak version of it, weak isospin. A theory built only on weak isospin and W bosons failed, though: it left particles massless and made CP symmetry exact. CP symmetry is the rule that swapping particles for mirror-image antiparticles changes nothing.
The working theory needed three changes:
a neutral Z boson alongside the charged Ws;
charged particles that mix left-handed and right-handed versions, which lets them have mass. Handedness, or 3, is a basic property of particles;
a second quantity, 4. Neither it nor weak isospin is conserved on its own, but one combination of them is conserved, and that combination is electric charge.
The Standard Model's symmetry is written SU(3) ⊗ SU(2) ⊗ U(1). It's natural to read these as strong, weak and electromagnetic in that order. "But that can't be true," Siegel writes. Part of SU(2) describes electromagnetism and part of U(1) describes the weak force. Only together, as SU(2) ⊗ U(1), do they make sense, as one electroweak force. The same 5 that produces the Higgs boson splits it into two at low energies. The strong force's SU(3) never mixes with this electroweak piece.
Going bigger
Group theory has several families of symmetry groups: unitary, special unitary, orthogonal, special orthogonal, symplectic and exceptional. Siegel notes that once you move to large enough groups, such as SU(5) and up, SO(10) and up, or most of the exceptional groups, the entire Standard Model fits inside. These larger groups also predict new superheavy particles at the "GUT scale" (GUT stands for grand unified theory). Those particles carry properties of both quarks and leptons at once, which leads to three main consequences.
1. Protons decay. In the Standard Model the proton is stable, because a quantity called baryon number is conserved. GUTs break that rule, and lepton number breaks by the same amount. The proton would then decay into something lighter while keeping its charge. One route gives a neutral meson (such as a pion or kaon) plus a positron or anti-muon. Another gives a positive meson plus an antineutrino. This prediction led to Kamiokande in a Japanese mine. Its name first meant "nucleon decay experiment." It never saw a proton decay, but it caught neutrinos from a supernova in 1987 and helped start neutrino astronomy. It has since grown into Super-Kamiokande and is being upgraded to Hyper-Kamiokande.
2. Matter beats antimatter. The universe holds far more matter than antimatter, and Standard Model physics alone can't produce that imbalance. GUTs offer a recipe. The hot early universe makes many heavy X and Y bosons and their antiparticles. These decay into quarks and leptons. If CP symmetry is broken, the X's decay pattern differs slightly from the anti-X's. That leaves a small surplus of quarks over antiquarks and leptons over antileptons, which Siegel says is enough to match the observed ratio of baryons to photons.
3. Lost symmetries return. Our universe is lopsided in several ways. It has electric charges but no magnetic ones. Left-handed and right-handed particles feel the weak force differently. No right-handed neutrinos have ever been seen. Larger GUTs like SO(10) remove these asymmetries:
They require 6, isolated magnetic charges. These would make Maxwell's equations symmetric and could explain why electric charge comes in fixed units.
The one suggestive hint
Each force has a 9, a number for its strength. Today these are about 1/137 for electromagnetism, 1/30 for the weak force and 1/9 for the strong force. These values "run" with energy. Electromagnetism gets stronger, the weak coupling moves toward it, and the strong force gets weaker. Around 10¹⁵ GeV (billion electron-volts), the three nearly meet. That is 27 orders of magnitude above everyday energies of about a milli-electron-volt. They miss by less than three orders of magnitude.
Siegel treats this carefully. The running itself is "perfectly within expectations of the Standard Model alone." Exact meeting appears only when you add hypothetical particles, for example those from supersymmetry, a proposed theory that gives every known particle a heavier partner. Even an exact meeting wouldn't prove unification. Still, he argues, three randomly chosen curves rarely cross at a single point. The near miss is a "very, very circumstantial" hint and a puzzle about naturalness.
What experiments say
The evidence is all negative:
Proton lifetime. The simplest model, SU(5), predicts about 10³⁰ years. Experiments now set a minimum of 10³⁴ years. Siegel writes that raising that limit by about three more orders of magnitude could rule out SO(10) as well.
Monopoles. None have been found.
Neutrinoless double beta decay. This is a nuclear decay in which two neutrons turn into protons without releasing neutrinos. It is only possible if neutrinos are Majorana particles. Every search has come up empty.
Siegel's conclusion is that grand unification may still describe our universe at some level. Until there's a hint beyond coincidence, though, it belongs "firmly" in the speculative category. The essay leaves open what that stronger hint would be. A proton decay seen at Hyper-Kamiokande, a monopole, or a 10 event would each count, and so far none has appeared.
Remember
Electroweak unification works because the SU(2) and U(1) symmetries mix, not because each one maps neatly onto a single force.
Experiments show protons live at least 10³⁴ years, which already rules out the simplest grand unified theory, SU(5).
The near-meeting of the three force strengths at high energy is expected in the Standard Model, so it is weak evidence for unification.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the US. This community uses arranged matchmaking (4) and grows about 4 percent a year, so younger cohorts are much larger. For every 100 men aged 22 there are 112 women aged 19. The community calls this the "shidduch crisis", and nose jobs have become a common gift for girls before matching. The control case is the most telling: 5 communities, where men and women enter matchmaking at the same age, report no crisis.
College campuses. The author calls these the cleanest evidence: hundreds of small dating markets with very different sex ratios. On campuses with more women, women go on fewer dates and are less likely to have a boyfriend, but more likely to be sexually active. They also think less of men.
4
CBT:5, which targets the thought patterns and avoidance that keep anxiety going.
Learning: understanding how anxiety works as an illness in the mind and body.
They add right-handed neutrinos, which enable a 7. In it, one very heavy right-handed partner pushes the familiar neutrino's mass down to the tiny but non-zero values we measure. Neutrinos then become 8, meaning each is its own antiparticle.
Mirror symmetry, called parity, holds exactly at high energy. The parity violation we see would come from spontaneous symmetry breaking, much as the electroweak force splits in two.
