(Sheeka Sanahori) Being an adult comes with a never-ending list of responsibilities: Cook dinner. Scrub the bathroom. File taxes. The tasks grow even longer when sharing a household with a partner, building a family, or taking care of others. No matter how you define “adulting,” getting life insurance tends to be one part of the to-do list that keeps getting set on a procrastination loop.

New survey data backs that up: there are plenty of other tasks adults would rather focus on first.

The Adulting Task Americans Keep Avoiding

According to the 2026 Life Happens Life Insurance Survey, a financial literacy nonprofit organization, 39% of U.S. adults would rather clean out their email inbox than figure out their life insurance needs. Another 31% would rather clean out the garage or basement. One in five U.S. adults would be willing to sit on hold with customer service for three hours before life insurance planning. Even though many adults have it somewhere on their list, nearly half (46%) say they’ll either deal with it later or not at all.

They Know It Matters

Nearly a third of adults have already figured out a life insurance plan, and they feel good about their decision. Others are feeling more conflicted: 14% have a policy, but they’re not sure if they have enough. Another 12% say they either don’t know where to start or they think it’ll be too expensive.

It’s no wonder people are putting it off: Navigating a new-to-them form of financial planning can come with a lot of complicated emotions. Four in 10 feel either overwhelmed, anxious, or some combination of both. Sixteen percent of U.S. adults feel guilty for putting it off, but when the outcome is more procrastination, that feeling lingers.

Why Later Keeps Winning

If you’ve ever faced an important decision without having enough information to make an informed choice, you know how stressful it can be. While the generations have different takes on making major decisions with a gut feeling or “pure vibes,” most of the time, people want to feel like they’re making an informed choice. Forty-five percent of U.S. adults say cost concerns, confusion or procrastination are the main reasons they have delayed or would delay looking into life insurance. For more than one in five, the plan is to seriously look at it when they feel more financially stable. For 12%, they say they’ll do it when they’re older.

Men tend to feel more confident about their life insurance decisions to date; 53% of men vs. 41% of women feel confident their family would be financially protected.

The First Step Feels Bigger Than It Is

Learning more about life insurance, how it’s priced and how it works could help get many consumers out of their procrastination loop. A quarter of people say they’d make a decision if they learned it was easier to get than they previously thought. Thirty percent would make the purchase if they learned it was more affordable than they believed it to be. Others need an experienced professional to talk to or an online calculator tool to give them guidance.

Methodology: Life Happens commissioned Atomik Research to conduct an online survey of 2,000 adults, including 700 Gen Z respondents, 700 millennials, and 600 Gen X respondents throughout the United States. The margin of error for the overall sample is +/- 2 percentage points and +/- 4 percentage points for each generational sample, with a confidence level of 95 percent. Fieldwork took place between July 14 and July 20, 2026. Atomik Research, part of 4media group, is a creative market research agency.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock (couple using computer)

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Design Your Home Workout Space Around the Way You Actually Exercise

(Feature Impact) It’s a tale as old as treadmills: You buy a new exercise machine with the best of intentions, only for it to become an expensive laundry rack that makes you feel guilty every time you glance over at it. When it comes to making lifestyle changes, the key is not to overhaul your whole routine at once, but to figure out what habits match your lifestyle, personality and passions.

Use these tips to create a home workout space you’ll keep using after the novelty wears off.

Figure Out What Exercises You Enjoy

Before you commit to a big equipment purchase, think about what kinds of exercise feel natural and enjoyable (and which ones make you groan).

If you love running, a treadmill may be worth the space it takes up. However, a rack of dumbbells might just wind up collecting dust if you hate lifting weights. Yoga or dance enthusiasts may prefer to design a more studio-like home gym, while bodyweight strength trainers could be happy with a pull-up bar in the doorway and a mat to do planks on. Consider joining a workout class or gym for a month or two to try different kinds of exercises and machines so you’ll have a better idea of what’s worth investing in permanently.

Evaluate the Space You Have

A good home workout area needs to work around the physical realities of your house or apartment. If you have a whole room or finished basement to dedicate to the cause, this won’t constrain you too much. If you’re working with a corner of your home office, bedroom or garage, saving space becomes a more critical factor.

In these cases, it all comes down to priorities. If you only have room for one piece of bigger equipment, get the one you know you’ll actually use, whether that’s an elliptical, strength machine, standing bicycle or rowing machine. Then build out your collection with other items that can be easily moved and stored, like resistance bands and small weights or dumbbells.

Start Small and Expand as Needed

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need to have everything before you can get started. It’s often better to build out your workout space slowly – get a few things at a time, see what you use regularly and figure out what you might be missing along the way. Maybe you realize you enjoy lifting weights and keep wishing you had heavier ones, signaling a need to upgrade.

Add Some Atmosphere

Dark, dismal home gyms are more likely to make your workout feel like a punishment instead of a part of your day worth looking forward to. Creating a space you enjoy being in is just as important as choosing a workout you enjoy doing.

For you, that might look like choosing an area of the home with plenty of natural lighting to make you feel more awake – or adding string lights and color-changing wall sconces for a relaxing yoga session. Maybe it means adding art on the walls or a floor-to-ceiling mirror so you can check your form. A large rubber floormat with a cheerful design, a sound system to play your favorite hype songs or a daily calendar of motivational quotes could be the magic ingredient to get you into the right mindset so you can crush your workout. As long as it works for you, anything goes.

For more tips on home design that fits your life, visit eLivingtoday.com.

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Hilary Smith, University of Denver

Lactose intolerance makes drinking milk or eating ice cream a literal pain. For some people, eating a dairy treat can lead to bloating, nausea and diarrhea. You might’ve experienced its effects yourself. If so, you may think of lactose intolerance as a defect rather than the norm.

But did you know that most people in the world today are lactose intolerant – and that the condition itself was invented in the 1960s?

“Surely you mean discovered, not invented,” I hear you saying. I don’t. As a historian who has traced the origins of nutrition-science ideas, I have chosen the word “invented” on purpose.

Inventing lactose intolerance

Variations in people’s ability to digest lactose first came to scientists’ attention after American dairy producers found a way to rid themselves of a postwar milk surplus. To offload what they couldn’t sell, they looked to the government to intervene. And it did, buying the excess and embedding it in school lunches and other places with publicly funded meals.

Suddenly, many people who had not habitually drunk milk were consuming it regularly, including not only some Americans but also people overseas. Part of that same milk surplus found its way into school lunches in places such as Japan and Taiwan in the 1950s as the American government began to sell milk to allies during the Cold War.

Many of the groups drinking milk regularly for the first time did not like it. In fact, it made them feel sick. Intrigued, scientists set up experiments to figure out why. In a 1966 study comparing how Black and white people incarcerated in Baltimore metabolized lactose, researchers found that Black participants had lower levels of lactase – the enzyme that breaks down lactose – in their guts.

To the white scientists conducting this study, the trouble that the Black prisoners had digesting milk looked like an “inborn error of metabolism.” They assumed that the normal human state was lactose tolerance and that the lactose intolerant had inherited a genetic mutation.

It was only after years more work with research participants of many races that experts realized that, as one National Institutes of Health official put it in 1981, “lactose intolerance is a normal physiological condition, shared by every adult animal except for certain ethnic and racial groups in man.” People of northern European descent, it turned out, were the weird ones. It was their ancestors who had passed down a genetic mutation – one that made them able to digest milk after infancy.

In short, what scientists discovered in the 1960s was that different bodies process milk differently. What they invented was the idea that lactose intolerance is a defect. Accepting that framing would mean nearly two-thirds of the human population – the estimated prevalence of lactose intolerance worldwide – is defective.

Instead of acknowledging that dairy-free diets can be healthy, people innovated ways to overcome this supposed disability so everyone could consume more.

Nutritional imperialism

Lactose intolerance is one example of what I call nutritional imperialism: a way of thinking that treats white diets as the norm and everyone else’s as an aberration.

Nutritional imperialism was common in the 20th century, when scientists thought that not only milk-rich but also meat-heavy diets were best; they considered diets outside of the United States and Europe too vegetarian. Some also argued that wheat flour, not rice, ought to be the universal staple.

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The same bias applied to bodies. Besides faulty lactose digestion, nonwhite bodies were accused of other failures, too, such as aldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency, an inability to digest alcohol quickly. The less technical term for this may be more familiar: Asian flush.

Such differences might have been thought of as variety, just another way of being human. Instead, each became a deficiency.

Many people today have inherited and perpetuated this way of thinking without knowing it, including those who are deemed deficient by it. In 1959, the director of Japan’s nutrition bureau declared that “rice-eating peoples” such as the Japanese were “resigned and passive” and could correct this by imitating Western diets and switching to wheat.

Today, the most prominent scientist promoting the idea that Asian flush is a disease is a geneticist of Taiwanese descent who started a research consortium to study “the most common human enzymopathy in the world.”

The Chinese Nutrition Society placed a tall glass of milk next to its 2022 Food Guide Plate – never mind estimates that the vast majority of Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China and worldwide, are lactose intolerant.

Turning sickness back into difference

Science that pathologizes difference helps racism persist.

In recent years, white supremacists have embraced the concept of lactose intolerance as a distinguishing debility of nonwhite people. Social media users have copied and pasted a map of the geographic distribution of lactose tolerance originally published in the scientific journal Nature into racist chat threads on the online discussion forum 4chan.

In 2017, internet trolls disrupted an anti-racist art installation with neo-Nazi chants and messily downed jugs of milk to accentuate their white identity.

Turning a lactose-digestion difference into a deficiency has done more to reinforce narratives of racial hierarchy than to improve public health. So here’s a suggestion: If you enjoy eating dairy, keep doing it; if you don’t, don’t – and know that there is nothing wrong with you.

Hilary Smith, Professor of History, University of Denver

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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