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When Gabriela Flax left her corporate position managing 40 people to work on her career coaching businesses solo and moved from London to Sydney, the first thing she noticed was the silence. Without the constant movement, office hum, phones, and elevator dings, she says, she could finally bask in the quiet shed always craved. But, she quickly realized, Oh, wow, there’s no one around me. Flax, a career coach and founder of the newsletter Pivot School, says, I initially named my Substack No One’s in the Kitchen. I’d get off a work call super excited [because I] signed a new client . . . go to my kitchen to make a coffee, and no one’s there . . . just my dog looking back at me. Running a business alone can feel liberating, but it can also come with a cost: a unique type of loneliness research suggests stems from acute uncertainty, resource constraints, responsibility, and time pressures. Online, subreddits, creator cohorts, and Discord groups brim with solo founders seeking to manage loneliness. Loneliness is a mental health emergency in many cases, says Dr. Michael A. Freeman, a San Francisco-based psychiatrist who works exclusively with entrepreneurs. Ironically perhaps, entrepreneurs often feel quite alone despite the fact that they have very large networks and communicate with lots of people every week, he explains, because those are largely transactional role relationships and solopreneurs, particularly, are pursuing a uniquely personal vision. The loneliness can come from a lack of people, but it can also come from being the only person who holds your why so tightly, says Flax. Identifying the loneliness loop Particularly in a ventures early days, solopreneurs are living and breathing their new business, explain researchers Ashley Evenson, lecturer of creative enterprise at Goldsmiths, University of London and Beki Gowing, lecturer in fashion enterprise at London College of Fashion, who coauthored a study on entrepreneurial loneliness and burnout. Loneliness, they say, [can be] the catalyst for other mental health difficulties, [eroding] decision-making, creativity, and emotional resilience. Social interactions slip, overwork rises, and a vicious and toxic cycle takes hold. Diane Sullivan, business professor at the University of Dayton, calls this the regulatory loop of loneliness: Some founders respond by building connections and hobbies, while others withdraw, potentially making isolation worse . In Flaxs case, she had to get creativedigital lunch invites via TikTok, long-form writing for other solo-foundersto cultivate relationships in her new role and city. In what Flax describes as an eat what you kill field, solopreneurs can ill-afford to let loneliness derail their purpose. Heres how experts recommend fighting it. Seek deep social experiences Taking the first step to get out of a loneliness rut can feel awkward, but its key to make the effort to engage offline, even if it feels uncomfortable at first. Juliana Schroeder, associate professor in the Management of Organizations group at Berkeley Haas, says one of the major instigators of loneliness is that people are trading deep social experiences for shallow social experiences. Shallower social experiences are those that leverage AI connection, online engagement (particularly on social media platforms), and prioritize more superficial types of interactions, like short text-based conversations, for example, or group conversations over one-on-ones. Other potential connections, like talking with neighbors or disagreeing counterparts (say, talking across the political divide), are starting to disappear entirely, she says. I suggest setting up environments that involve regular contact with community members, having recurring deep conversations to maintain and grow friendships, and stretching outside of your social comfort zone when any opportunity arises. And it may not be as hard we imagine. We find that people’s psychological intuitions about some of these interactions are miscalibrated, she explains, and the awkwardness and depletion we anticipate is often overridden by the pleasantness of the interaction and how good both parties feel afterwards. Flax recommends seeking connection outside of work: If you go to the gym at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, or a coffee shop at 11 a.m. on a Thursday, not everyone in those spaces is going to be self-employed or building their own thing. But . . . chances are they might not have a [traditional] nine-to-five, she explains. It’s hard the first five times you [introduce yourself]. By time number six, you’re like, oh, whatever. Quality over quantity Preempting loneliness, at least initially, may also help proactively manage it, says Freeman, who recommends, engaging in a rich set of relationships that do not involve being a leader and ultimate decision-maker. One of the founders I work with belongs to a football team that is part of a regional amateur league. He has many friends on the team, which he doesnt have to lead, and the camaraderie gives him a lot of social support, he adds. Flax agrees, noting online cohorts, while full of a unanimous understanding of were all in this together, can lose meaningful connection when they exceed six to seven people. Dont just put us all in a room, she says, adding that breakout rooms on a Zoom call, for instance, help foster one-on-one connection. Back to basics, away from the drawing board Tim Michaelis, assistant professor in the department of psychology at North Carolina State University, founded and runs an annual Health in Entrepreneurship Conference. Physical activity and sleep, he says, are two big recommendations, citing additional research that leisure activities can provide a way to detach from entrepreneurial work and improve venture performance. Engaging with a local university or community college can help connect with like-minded people, feel less alone, and improve wellbeing, he adds. A small step could be going to watch a pitch competition or email a profesor to see if they need help with a guest lecture . . . Sometimes its a clear win-win. Ultimately, its worth remembering that loneliness does not increase just because youre a team of one. Claude Fernet, an organizational behavior professor at Université du Québec Trois-Rivires, who studies job stressors in small and medium enterprises, raises an important point. Solo founders may actually have a bit of an advantage when it comes to job stressors and loneliness. Thats because “owner-managers” (or entrepreneurs with a small team of employees) feel the additional responsibility for others wellbeing and salary, leading to, the burden of shielding others from stress. Still, he adds, That said, the psychological toll of isolation remains a significant concern in both cases. Flax, meanwhile, recommends thinking of loneliness in stages. Dont fight [it], she says, Because solitude is a part of building something meaningful . . . The day will come where the work you put into it is seen by others and you can create incredible community off the back of it.
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Tiny fragments of microplasticsfrom clothes, car tires, packaging, and other sourcesslip through most water filters. But at a water treatment plant on the coast in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where plastic-filled wastewater would normally flow into the ocean, new technology has captured hundreds of millions of microplastic particles over the past year. The technology, from a startup called PolyGone, can also clean microplastic out of lakes and rivers or treat wastewater at factories. The startup spun out of research at Princeton, where the founders drew inspiration from aquatic plants that can naturally attract microplastic. The plants have fibrous roots coated in a hydrophobic gel that pulls in pollution. We managed to imitate the geometry and hydrophobility of the aquatic plant root, says cofounder Yidian Liu. It has a lot of unevenness on the surface that creates little cavities for smaller pollutants to be trapped inside.” [Photo: PolyGone] Wastewater treatment plants are a pathway for microplastic pollution to enter the ocean, which is now filled with trillions of particles. Most wastewater plants in the U.S. don’t use advanced treatment before releasing water back into nature. Of those that do, most existing filters only catch larger microplastic, between 1 and 5 millimeters. Tinier fragments, invisible to the naked eye, slip through. Another type of fine mesh filter in use in some plants captures more, but then the plastic just ends up in landfills. In lab tests, PolyGone’s system captures 98% of microplastic. After the filters are full, they can be cleaned and reused. The plastic is concentrated and sent for reuse. In Atlantic City, where the company launched its first wastewater pilot in September 2024, it has already captured more than 520 million particles of microplastic, exceeding performance targets. The plastic goes to other companies: one that turns it into chemicals, another that is beginning to use it to make fuel. [Photo: PolyGone] The utility now plans to expand the pilot into a full-scale operational system. PolyGone, which recently raised a $4 million seed round of funding, designed a new filtration unit that automatically lowers itself into water and cleans itself on a schedule. The unit fits inside a standard shipping container, with all of the tech fully assembled inside so it can be deployed in a day at a wastewater plant. The company also designed another version of the technology that fits into wastewater pipes at factories. The first pilot of that system just launched at an industrial plant in Dubai. “This system is a very simple way for them to plug and play and get rid of microplastic before the water goes into their effluent,” says Liu. Other manufacturers are also beginning to test the technology, including clothing companies working to cut microplastic pollution from synthetic fabric. Cost varies depending on the system, but ranges from roughly $15,000 to $50,000. The technology is much less expensive than other advanced filtration, in part because the filter works passively to “dramatically reduce energy consumption compared to traditional advanced filtration systems that rely on high-pressure pumps,” Liu says. The open design avoids clogging, so it needs less maintenance. It also can easily be added to existing infrastructure, she says, rather than requiring expensive retrofits. [Photo: PolyGone] The tech can also be used directly in nature, and the company has tested a Roomba-like robot that filters water as it moves across a lake. But funding is harder to secure for this approach. There’s more demand for industrial use, especially from brands that are trying to tackle sustainability goals. And at wastewater treatment plants, some states may soon consider new regulations that would require better pollution filtering. “California is leading on microplastic regulation,” says Liu. The state already requires microplastic testing in drinking water and is working on a new drinking water standard, though wastewater filtering isn’t mandated yet. “A huge reason is they don’t know what methodologies or systems are available for [wastewater plants] to quickly adopt for microplastic removal,” Liu says. “Our pilot is actually giving them a very good case study to understand okay, it is a problem that can be solved.”
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E-Commerce
AI models have a voracious appetite for data. Keeping up to date with information to present to users is a challenge. And so companies at the vanguard of AI appear to have hit on an answer: crawling the webconstantly. But website owners increasingly dont want to give AI firms free rein. So theyre regaining control by cracking down on crawlers. To do this, theyre using robots.txt, a file held on many websites that acts as a guide to how web crawlers are allowedor notto scrape their content. Originally designed as a signal to search engines as to whether a website wanted its pages to be indexed or not, it has gained increased importance in the AI era as some companies allegedly flout instructions.In a new study, Nicolas Steinacker-Olsztyn, a researcher at Saarland University and his colleagues analyzed how different websites treated robots.txtand whether there was a difference between sites measured as reputable versus not reputable, specifically in terms of whether or not they allowed crawling. For many AI companies, “It’s kind of a do now and ask for forgiveness later thing, Steinacker-Olsztyn says.In the study, more than 4,000 sites were checked for their responses to 63 different AI-related user agents, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, and Google-Extendedall of which are used by AI companies in their effort to soak up information. The websites were then divided between reputable news outlets or misinformation sites, using ratings devised by Media Bias/Fact Check, an organization that categorizes news sources depending on their credibility and the factuality of their reporting. Across all 4,000 sites assessed, around 60% of those deemed to be reputable news websites blocked at least one AI crawler from accessing their information; among misinformation sites, only 9.1% did so. The average reputable site blocks more than 15 different AI agents through its robots.txt file. Misinformation sites, by contrast, tend not to shut out the crawlers at all. The biggest takeaway is that the reputable news websites keep well up-to-date with the evolving ecosystem as it pertains to these major AI developers and their practices, Steinacker-Olsztyn says. Over time, the gap between those who are willing to let bots crawl their sites and those that arent is widening. From September 2023 to May 2025, the proportion of platforms locking out crawlers increased from 23% to 60%, while the share of sites peddling misinformation stayed flat, the study found. The result, Steinacker-Olsztyn says, is that less reputable content is being hoovered up by and then spat out of AI models used routinely by hundreds of millions of people. Increasingly these models are also being used simply for information retrieval, replacing traditionally used options such as search engines or Google, Steinacker-Olsztyn adds. The conundrum over legitimate data For AI models to stay up-to-date on current events, they are trained on reputable sites, which is exactly what these sites dont want. The war over copyright and access to training data between AI companies and news sites is increasingly spilling into courtsThe New York Timess lawsuit against OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, for example, carried on into last week. Those lawsuits are prompted by allegations that AI companies are illegally scraping data on news websites to act as regularly updated, ground-truth-based training data for the models powering their AI chatbots. In addition to litigating their disputes, reputable news websites are blocking AI crawlers. Thats good for their businesses and rights. But Steinacker-Olsztyn is concerned about the broader impact. If reputable news is increasingly making this information unavailable, then this gives reason to believe this can affect the reliability of these models, he explains. Going forward, this is changing the percentage of legitimate data that they have access to. In essence: It doesnt matter to an AI crawler whether its viewing The New York Times or a disinformation website run out of Hoboken. Theyre both training data, and if one is easier to access than the other, thats all that matters. Not everyone is quite so certain about the negative impact of blocking crawlers. Felix Simon, a research fellow in AI and digital news at the University of Oxford-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, says he wasnt surprised to learn that sites trafficking in misinformation would want to be crawled, whereas traditional publishers have an incentive at this point to prevent such scraping. Some of these traditional publishers, he adds, still allow some scraping for a plethora of reasons. Simon also cautions that just because misinformation sites are more likely to open their doors to AI crawlers, it doesnt necessarily mean that theyre polluting the information space as much as we may fear. AI developers filter and weigh data at various points of the system training process and at inference time, he says. One would hope that by the same means by which the authors have been able to identify untrustworthy websites, AI developers would be able to filter out such data.
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