Day: August 31, 2025

• Justine Martin, 54, lives in Geelong, Australia, and has two adult children.
• She struggled with loneliness when they left home and went into therapy to cope with her feelings.
• A new lease on life followed: artwork, travel, and a dachshund who follows her everywhere.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Justine Martin, a single mom in Geelong, Australia. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Ten years ago, my last child left home at 17. Initially, I was shocked — I thought I’d have her around until she was in her mid-20s. I wasn’t ready for her to leave as a teenager, and I also wasn’t sure who I was outside of being a parent. I’d been a mom for 22 years since my eldest — my son — was born.

My daughter and I had also been arguing when she moved out, and she went to live with her boyfriend. It was not how I’d imagined things going.

I became an empty-nester about eight years before I envisaged it, which is part of why I wasn’t mentally prepared. My son left in his mid-20s, so I expected my daughter to do the same. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if I made my children a little too self-sufficient, too soon.

I felt so alone. I had so much time on my hands that I didn’t know what to do with it. As a sole parent, I didn’t have a partner to fall back on. The house was deadly quiet.

I had to find a way to deal with my loneliness

I booked a therapist to help me process my loneliness. I realized I had to reinvent myself as “more than just a mom.” That’d be a long journey, as hard battles were ahead.

I began dog-sitting to help a friend out. It also helped me out and gave me much-needed company through a distressing time: I’d had to leave work due to being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2011, then cancer in 2016. The cancer came less than a year after my daughter left. I couldn’t bring myself to get my own dog; I didn’t know if I’d survive the cancer, so it didn’t seem fair.

Once I went into remission from cancer in 2018, I realized his dog had filled such a void for me — it was time to become a mom to a furbaby myself. I got a mini sausage puppy, Pansy, and she has been my constant companion ever since. Dachshunds are very needy. She follows me literally everywhere — even to the toilet!

I found new ways to fill my time

Even with Pansy, I needed to decide what to do with the spare time. As my grief began to subside, I realized I could go where I wanted whenever I wanted and didn’t have to rush home or get out of bed early for my daughter. Gradually, I went from feeling depressed to feeling liberated.

I traveled across the beautiful, big country I live in — Australia — staying with friends, and my son, who lives interstate. At first, it felt strange traveling solo, without having to book extra flights for my daughter.

Over time, I began noticing things I liked about being an empty-nester. My grocery bill decreased. With the extra money, I was able to buy more supplies for my hobbies. I started painting and sculpting more, then selling my artwork and sculptures. I also began illustrating children’s books.

I didn’t wait for someone else to make me happy

My key to surviving loneliness was not waiting for someone else to make me happy, which is what a lot of lonely people do. I went out there and did it myself. It began with little things, like simply making sure I made the bed every day. It’s a mindset thing; it starts your day right. Then, even if the rest of the day went poorly, at least I’d accomplished that small thing for myself.

No one tells you how it’ll feel when you suddenly become an empty nester, and I was under-prepared. That’s why therapy was so helpful. However, sometimes I still get sad, thinking about how my children are all grown up and that phase of life is over.

These days, though, that sadness passes more quickly than it once did. I’m a grandma now, and my daughter and I have a great relationship again. My grandkids come over to stay once a fortnight, and the house is alive again. I’m so grateful for that.

• This post originally appeared in the BI Today newsletter.
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Welcome back to our Sunday edition, where we round up some of our top stories and take you inside our newsroom. Bringing a Stanley tumbler to the office could date you. Morgan Stanley surveyed more than 500 of its interns to see what brands the younger cohort is buying. The results are a window into Gen Z’s tastes. Their preferences for clothing, shoes, and cars might surprise you.

On the agenda today:

• Locals can live on this Hawaiian island rent-free — as long as they play by the owner’s rules.
• Meta Superintelligence Labs is already losing key staff.
• Gen Z wants to get rich quick. Some are finding it by selling insurance.
• How Ken Griffin is building his legacy beyond Citadel.

But first: It no longer pays to be loyal.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here. Download Business Insider’s app here.

This week’s dispatch

A relic of the past

Loyalty really is dead.

We’ve written a lot about how workplace loyalty has vanished, with AT&T CEO John Stankey all but rubber-stamping the moment in a viral memo this month.

Now, as my colleague Emily Stewart wrote the other day, customer loyalty is dead, too.

Company loyalty programs are actually costing you a lot of money. That’s because shoppers who stick with their favorite brands just aren’t being rewarded the way they used to be. She called customer loyalty “a sham.”

Airlines, internet providers, and banks do a good job of luring in newcomers with flashy deals, while longtime customers quietly pay more. As a result, frequent flyer miles buy less, internet bills creep up after promo rates, and credit card rewards shrink in value.

The parallels are striking. In both work and shopping, institutions that once cultivated long-term relationships now treat loyalty as weakness. Customers are taken for granted; workers are told they’re expendable.

Companies know inertia keeps people stuck, whether it’s the pain of job hunting or the annoyance of switching cell carriers. Switching is a hassle and isn’t easy.

In Stankey’s corporate culture memo, he said AT&T employees shouldn’t expect promotions based on tenure. The company is shifting from a “familial” culture, one that coddles its employees, to a “market-based” one that emphasizes performance.

In a recent CNBC interview, Stankey said he wasn’t sure why his memo went viral. But he added that it has spurred “the right kind of dialogue” within AT&T and that it was “very well understood within the business.”

The upshot: Loyalty just doesn’t have the prestige it once did. For workers, that means potentially being ready to walk for greener pastures. For customers, it means negotiating bills, shopping around, and ditching brands that exploit complacency.

Whether it’s your employer or your favorite brand, perhaps the lesson is: If they’re not loyal to you, why should you be loyal to them?

Living rent-free in paradise

On the “Forbidden Island” of Niihau, generations of Native Hawaiians have preserved a culture largely untouched by 20th and 21st century development. They live rent-free as invited guests of the island’s owners, the Robinsons, who are some of the largest landowners in the state.

There’s a catch, though. Niihauans can stay on the island as long as they observe the Robinsons’ old-world rules. Getting tattoos, drinking alcohol, or having long hair are considered offenses — and can get them kicked off the island forever.

“Everything is funnelled through the Robinsons.”

Meta’s bleeding talent

Less than two months after the establishment of Meta Superintelligence Labs, Meta’s AI unit has already lost eight employees, BI exclusively reports. These include researchers, engineers, and a senior product leader.

Most of the recently departed had been with the company for years, a Meta spokesperson said, although some recent Meta hires left, too. One former employee told BI that some at Meta AI felt that work was unstable at times because of constant reorganizations.

Some are going to OpenAI.

Your next real estate agent might be a teenager

Gen Zers are changing the definition of an aspirational career. Instead of pursuing a four-year college degree and working a 9-to-5, some are turning to blue-collar work, influencing, or licensed white-collar professions, like real estate or insurance.

Several Gen Zers told BI’s Amanda Hoover they find the appeal in working in real estate because there’s no ceiling on what they can earn. Plus, autonomy is huge. A big draw to this career is that the younger generation gets to be their own boss.

Anything but an office job.

Ken Griffin’s vision for America

Those close to Griffin say he hasn’t sought out more publicity in recent years. But the billionaire founder of Citadel and Citadel Securities has a bigger profile than ever.

His increased political clout, thanks to his ever-expanding wealth, has given his words more oomph. Griffin is also using his foundation, Griffin Catalyst, to lay out his priorities and shape the country.

A legacy beyond finance.

This week’s quote:

“That could play into things where, why am I paying $25 for a burrito and chips and guac when I could pay maybe a little bit more and have full service?”

— Alex Fascino, senior equity research analyst at CFRA Research, on restaurants like Olive Garden offering more value to customers than a fast-casual restaurant like Cava.

More of this week’s top reads:

• Exclusive: Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war. This internal document reveals why.
• Five biggest takeaways from Nvidia’s Q2 earnings call.
• “Don’t ask, don’t tell”: How Hollywood is using AI on the hush.
• MrBeast tries to cut down on his massive spending without killing the magic.
• In staff all-hands meeting, Google highlights how many managers it has cut to be more efficient.
• Worried about Trump’s attacks on the Fed? Watch these 3 market signals.
• Labubus are a billion-dollar bubble ready to burst.

• Uber now allows you to pay with cash. Drivers worry that it will lead to awkward moments or make them theft targets.

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  The BI Today team: Steve Russolillo, chief news editor, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York. Akin Oyedele, deputy editor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in New York. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York.

• Google’s chief scientist tends to “steer away” from conversations about artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
• That’s because “lots of people have very different definitions of it,” he said on a recent podcast.
• In any case, he thinks we’re not that far from AI being able to make more breakthroughs than people in some areas.

There’s at least one AI-related topic that Google’s chief scientist tries to avoid.

Jeff Dean, who focused on AI advances for Google DeepMind and Google Research, explained why he steers clear of the conversations about artificial general intelligence, or AGI, during an episode of “The Moonshot Podcast” released earlier this month.

“The reason I tend to steer away from AGI conversations is lots of people have very different definitions of it, and the difficulty of the problem varies by like factors of a trillion,” he said.

He said AI models today are “probably already” better than the average person at most non-physical tasks.

“Most people are not that good at a random task that they’ve never done before, and some of the models we have today are actually pretty reasonable at most things,” he said. But, he added “they will fail at a lot of things, they’re not human expert level in some things so that’s a very different definition than being better than the world expert at every single task.”

When asked how far we are from AI being able to make breakthroughs faster than humans, Dean said, “We’re actually probably already close to that in some domains.”

“There will be a lot of domains where automated search and computation actually can accelerate progress — scientific progress, engineering progress,” he said. “All these things I think are going to be important for advancing what we as people can do over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years.”

The definition of AGI varies depending on who you ask.

Many AI labs and researchers define it, more or less, as a form of AI with human-like intelligence and the ability to understand and learn like a person can. Others define it as a point where autonomous computer systems can do better than humans at most economically valuable work.

Top AI researchers have varying predictions on when we might expect AGI. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expect it within years, while others, like Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and AI researcher Andrew Ng say it could be decades away.