While attending college at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, Suras Nayak knew he wanted to leave his hometown of Hyderabad, India, and travel the world.

“When I was growing up, I always had this idea somewhere behind my head that I always wanted to move abroad, but I was a little bit influenced by the Western media. I watch a lot of Hollywood movies … so I was always influenced and liked the idea of moving to a different country, living there, experiencing how things are like there,” he tells CNBC Make It.

Nayak gained his first experience living abroad when he participated in an exchange program that sent him to China for 45 days as a teenager. And almost a decade later, Nayak got a chance to live abroad when he moved to Dublin, Ireland, in March 2025 to work as a software development engineer at Amazon, where his compensation comes to a projected 122,428 euros (US $144,000) a year.

Growing up, Nayak’s dad was also a software engineer. He introduced Nayak to the field and helped him understand coding and programming, Nayak says.

Nayak landed a six-month internship at Amazon during his senior year of college and joined the company full time upon graduating in 2020, where he received compensation of around 6.8 million Indian rupees (US $75,000) a year. He was working out of Amazon’s Bengaluru office, which is about an hour-long flight south from his hometown.

After a year at Amazon, Nayak learned that if he completed at least two years at the company and reached a certain level on his software engineer track, he could interview for opportunities in another country. He immediately started looking for other positions at Amazon, eventually landing in Dublin.

Nayak looked for open positions in Amazon offices in the U.K., Germany and Ireland, but narrowed it down to the latter because he knew the tech sector was growing there, he says. Google, Meta, Apple and Microsoft all have headquarters in Ireland, according to IT Brew.

“I was so happy when I came to know that I got this opportunity,” Nayak says about landing the position in Dublin. “I immediately went to my parents and I told them and it was such a nice moment. They were all so happy for me, especially my dad, because my dad always supports me in all of this stuff.”

It took about six to eight weeks for Nayak to secure a visa to live and work in Ireland, with Amazon covering all costs, he says.

When Nayak arrived in Ireland, Amazon provided him with temporary housing and hired an agency to help him find a house. The company even helped him ship his possessions from India to Ireland.

“I did a lot of exploring during my first month,” he says. “I was very excited and I was very happy. As I was exploring, I realized that I made the right decision to move here.”

The biggest thing Nayak says he had to adjust to after moving was the weather; he was used to India’s sunny days, long summers and short winters. He also had to get used to Dublin’s cost of living. Compared with Hyderabad, Dublin is very expensive, especially for rent and groceries, Nayak says.

“When I was in India, I did not think about budgeting a lot because I always used to spend less there,” he says. Now, he says he has to set a budget for himself.

Nayak splits a three-bedroom house with two fellow Amazon employees. The total rent is 4,000 euros a month (US $4,725) and Nayak pays 1,450 euros (US $1,713), according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Here’s a look at the rest of his estimated share of monthly expenses. All amounts have been rounded.

• GitHub Copilot: 9 euros (US $11)
• Revolut Premium Plan: 9 euros (US $11)
• Wi-Fi: 15 euros (US $18)
• Phone bill: 15 euros (US $18)
• OpenAI for personal use: 24 euros (US $28)
• Streaming services, including Netflix and Disney+: 25 euros (US $30)
• Transportation via public buses: 30 euros (US $35)
• Electricity and gas: 50 euros (US $59)
• Shopping for clothes and the latest technology: 100 to 150 euros (US $118 to $177)
• Groceries: 150 to 200 euros (US $177 to $236)
• Dining out: 400 to 500 euros (US $472 to $591)

“One thing that I spend more on here is eating out, which I used to not do often back in India,” Nayak says. “I used to either eat at home or eat at the office.”

When he first moved to Ireland, Nayak says he found it hard to connect with people, since in India he was so used to having friends everywhere.

“I never had to actively go out and look for people or connections, but I realized that if you can push yourself and if you go out, you can make good friends. It’s just about making the effort,” he says.

Nayak says he used an app called Meetup to attend various events, which helped him meet people from all over the world.

“The people in Dublin are really friendly. I always get good vibes from people here. I feel quite settled here,” he says. “I have made some good friends and I am really liking my stay here, my time here and even working here.”

In 2023, Nayak bought a three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment in Hyderabad as an investment property. The property is worth about 16 million Indian rupees (US $180,000) and he says he plans to eventually rent it out.

“I wanted to make a big investment. Real estate made the most sense to me because in India, real estate is always a booming and growing business,” he says.

However, Nayak doesn’t plan to move back to India for at least another 10 to 15 years, when he feels he has enough money in the bank. He says he would feel comfortable with a net worth of 400,000 to 500,000 euros, but his long-term goal is to reach 1 million euros (US $1.17 million) before moving back.

For now, he plans to stay in Ireland foreseeable future, he says. He enjoys being able to go to a park and just sit and read a book or enjoy the scenery. He also loves how easy it is to travel around.

“My quality of life has improved. Now that I am in Ireland, I have gotten used to certain ways of life that I am really enjoying, which I would not have been able to get if I were back in India,” he says.

Over the past year, Nayak says he has been able to travel just like he dreamed of in college, including taking road trips around Ireland and visiting the U.K. with his parents last year.

“I have always been a little bit of a travel enthusiast, and being in Ireland, I am just exploring all of it whenever I can,” he says.

Conversions were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 euro to $1.18 USD and 1 Indian rupee to $0.01 USD on March 2, 2026. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

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Jonathan Haidt says he wants to bring fun back to college.

The New York University Stern School of Business professor and author of bestselling book “The Anxious Generation” has been teaching college students since the mid-1990s.

He’s noticed a change in the atmosphere on campus over the years, he said at an early-March fireside chat at NYU to introduce the school’s latest initiative, NYU IRL, which aims to help students be more present by offering phone-free spaces, among other efforts.

Haidt said life on campus has grown much more tense over the years. Colleges once felt like places where students could freely explore new ideas, he said, but in the era of smartphones and social media, many worry that something they say could spread online and get them ostracized or “canceled.” Instead of openly debating and learning from experts or one another, students often remain on the defensive.

This change came in tandem with the introduction of social media and the smartphone, he said, as well as the spike in youth mental health issues he has long warned about.

That’s where the new NYU initiative comes into play: an effort to help students become more present and enjoy campus life again. Among his advice for Gen Zers in the audience, Haidt gave three tips for staying off your phone.

Haidt’s advice is to “get all of the slot machine apps off your phone,” he said. Delete your profiles on them altogether, or, if you feel like you still need to use apps like Instagram to communicate with people, delete them on your phone and use them on your desktop computer.

“Don’t waste your time posting,” he told CNBC Make It. “Don’t look at other people’s posts, especially strangers.” If your friends are primarily using Instagram to communicate, fine.

“But get it off your phone,” he said, “because your phone is always with you.”

Next, Haidt would recommend building healthy morning and nighttime routines.

For some people like Harvard professor Arthur Brooks, a healthy morning routine means working out first thing in the morning and doing some analytical meditation by attending Mass or doing a Catholic meditation in his car. Brooks also recommends delaying his coffee intake, he previously said on his podcast, “Office Hours with Arthur Brooks.”

An optimal nighttime routine might mean making a to-do list to ensure you get through your priorities today and get through the rest tomorrow, licensed clinical psychologist Shelby Harris previously told CNBC Make It.  

However you build your waking-up and going-to-bed routines, experts agree to avoid looking at your phone right when you get up and right before you go to sleep.

Finally, Haidt recommends turning off the majority of your notifications. That includes news updates and email notifications.

“Many teens and adults find that turning off all, or almost all, notifications is helpful” to avoid distractions and reduce screen time, clinical psychologist Nicole Beurkens previously told Make It.

Ultimately, there’s no set amount of time Haidt would have Gen Zers use their phones each day. What matters is how they use them.

“If their phones were truly just tools that they used for maps and music and basic texting,” he told Make It, “then I wouldn’t give a fixed amount.”

The key, he said, is avoiding endless scrolling.

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If you’re raising a teenager today, it can feel like every parenting decision carries enormous stakes.

Parents are bombarded with alarming headlines about adolescent mental health: rising anxiety, loneliness and depression. Social media, smartphones and academic pressure are often cited as the causes. Every week seems to bring a new explanation for why teens are struggling.

The message many parents absorb is simple: Don’t make things worse.

After hearing that often enough, many parents start to worry that one wrong move could make things worse. They try not to push too hard or enforce too many rules, fearing that doing so might add to their kids’ stress.

But in the process, something important can get lost. In today’s parenting culture, many parents have quietly grown afraid to claim their authority.

We see this tension every day. As clinical psychologists who have spent decades working with parents and adolescents — and as parents of teens ourselves — we have a front-row seat to how uncertain many parents feel about claiming authority as part of their job.

One of the most stabilizing forces in a teenager’s life is knowing that the system around them has structure — and that capable adults are holding it.

When parents provide that structure, teens feel something psychologists sometimes call “containment”: the sense that big emotions and messy moments are held inside something steady and reliable. Without it, all that intensity can start to feel exposed. It’s like an egg without a protective shell.

That matters because adolescence is a time when feelings get bigger before self-control fully catches up. Teens feel things intensely and react quickly. They care a great deal about friendship, belonging, status and independence.

This means that big emotions are part of adolescence. Teens are supposed to push limits and argue about rules. They may slam doors or act like your boundary is the most unreasonable thing that has ever happened to them.

Big feelings often lead to big behaviors. A parent’s job is to stay steady inside them. Here are a few ways that can look in real life:

• Stay calm. This means remembering: I’m the grown-up here. Your teen may be turbulent, but you don’t have to be. Sometimes it helps to pause, take a breath and remind yourself: I’m the pilot, not the turbulence.
• Validate the feeling while holding the limit. You can say, “I know you’re really upset, but answer is still no.” Two things can be true at the same time: Your teen’s feelings are real, and your boundary still stands.
• Say less. When teens escalate, more words often add more chaos. Resist the urge to explain, defend or lecture. A simple “I hear you” or “You’re really mad” can go further than a long explanation.
• Give space when space helps. Sometimes the steadiest thing you can do is step back. You might say, “I’m here when you’re ready to talk,” and then give them room. Giving space can help everyone settle.

A lot of confusion today comes from how we think about autonomy.

Autonomy means gradually learning to make decisions within the safety of a clear, steady structure.

Teens push for autonomy. Parents hold the boundaries that make it possible. Inside those boundaries, teens test limits, negotiate responsibility and learn to tolerate frustration — experiences that build judgment and resilience over time.

Without that structure, teens aren’t really practicing independence. They’re just unmoored. And deep down, even when they push against limits, most teens feel safer when a parent is willing to hold the line with calm and care.

Every family’s structure looks different. It might include where phones live after 9:30 at night, what “I’ll be home later” really means, or whether a party requires a parent present.

It also includes the norms that shape family life, like how people treat one another, how conflict is handled and what accountability looks like.

Remember, structure gives teenagers something to grow inside of — a shell that holds things together while something stronger and more independent forms within.

Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist, mom of three, and the founder and CEO of Good Inside, a parenting company and next-generation movement. Through her bestselling book, “Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be,” TED Talk and podcast, she has built a community of millions of parents who turn to her for practical, sturdy and compassionate advice.

Dr. Sheryl Ziegler is a licensed clinical psychologist with over two decades of experience working with children and families in private practice. She is the author of “Mommy Burnout: How to Reclaim Your Life and Raise Healthier Children in the Process,” and the forthcoming book, ”The Crucial Years: The Essential Guide to Mental Health and Modern Puberty in Middle Childhood.”

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Greg Abel, the new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, announced on March 5 on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the company would start repurchasing shares of its own stock.

For Berkshire, this is a relative rarity — the company hasn’t bought back shares since the second quarter of 2024. But for companies like Berkshire, a financially mature conglomerate worth more than $1 trillion and with plenty of excess cash, the move has become increasingly common.

In 2025, companies in the S&P 500 spent about $1 trillion buying their own shares, according to estimates from investment research firm Morningstar, up from a record $942 billion in 2024. Last year was also the fifth straight year in which companies spent more on buybacks than on cash dividends, Morningstar reports.

Buyback programs, like dividends, are touted by companies as a way to return cash to shareholders, and, under the right circumstances, can be viewed by investors as a positive sign for the stock, says Rob Leiphart, a certified financial planner and vice president of financial planning at RV Capital Management.

Investors should do some research, however, before buying on buyback news, he adds, since some companies purchase shares as a way to make short-term numbers look better.

“It is a form of financial engineering,” Leiphart says.

Say you’re a company with plenty of free cash flow — money that’s left over after making all the necessary expenditures to maintain the business. How do you use that cash to create value for shareholders? Maybe you plunk the money into research and development or use it to acquire another firm.

For many large, financially mature firms, the answer is to give some money back to the people who own your stock. One classic way to do this is to pay a dividend, a regular (often quarterly) cash distribution to shareholders.

Over the past half-decade, though, companies have been more inclined to spend their money on buybacks. Last year, Apple announced a $100 billion share repurchase program, and Alphabet authorized $70 billion in buybacks. Both companies also pay a modest dividend.

Under buyback programs, instead of making cash distributions, companies repurchase their own shares on the open market. While not as tangible as having cash in hand, reducing the number of shares effectively means that each share an investor owns is a bigger piece of the overall pie. And because corporate earnings are expressed as earnings “per share,” taking shares off the market can make the stock look more attractive to other potential investors.

The latter feature can incentivize corporate executives to initiate buybacks to create a short-term bump, rather than making moves that will benefit shareholders over the long term, says Leiphart.

Companies that issue a lot of compensation in the form of stock options may also use buybacks to keep the value of those shares from diluting, Leiphart says.

So what should investors make of it when a company announces a buyback program? As long as the company isn’t taking on debt to fund a buyback, it’s a generally positive sign for a company’s financial health, says David Sekera, chief U.S. market strategist at Morningstar.

“It’s just the way that management is letting the marketplace know that they are generating excess free cash flow above what the internal needs are for the company,” he says. “And in fact, probably even generating more free cash flow than what they necessarily need to spend on growth to be able to maintain their long-term guidance targets.”

When it comes to buybacks — like all investing — the goal is to buy low and sell high, Sekera says. If a company buys shares when they’re trading below their true value, it’s a boon to shareholders. If they buy when they’re overpriced, “it’s value-destructive,” he says.

“Management teams seem to perpetually think that their stock is undervalued,” he adds.

Abel’s announcement came with the context that Berkshire rebuys shares “at any time we believe the repurchase price is below our intrinsic value, conservatively determined.”

It’s one of many reasons why financial pros would caution against buying any stock on the sole basis of a buyback announcement. It’s also smart to speak with a trusted financial professional before making any changes to your portfolio.

Overall, it’s important to consider any buyback program in the context of your overall outlook for the underlying business, says Leiphart.

“Do they have a market leading product? Do they maintain that leadership with that product? Has the corporate brass been there for some period of time and good leadership is in place that has had success and will continue to have success hopefully in the future?” he says. “Along with those considerations, [a buyback is] maybe one thing that you add as an ingredient when you put it all together.”

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When Gabriela Nguyen wanted to do some spring cleaning as a teenager, she’d organize the apps on her phone.

“That was cleaning; it would make me feel better,” the 24-year-old tells CNBC Make It. “My actual room was in complete disarray, but it would feel better because my life was on my phone.”

Conflating her real and online lives was one of “a series of cracks” signaling her technology use had gotten out of hand, she says. “The apps became the center of gravity of my life in which the other things would orbit.”

Today, Nguyen has no personal social media. She practices what she calls appstinence, a play on “app” and “abstinence” that refers to “a firm push for young people to remove social media from their personal lives,” according to the website for her advocacy group of the same name, where she and other members of Gen Z help their peers take the leap. Founded in 2024 as a student organization at Harvard, the group encourages what it calls the 5D method: decrease, deactivate, delete, downgrade and finally depart social media.

But appstinence is not “a hard and fast line,” Nguyen says. “The idea is that you’re moving in that direction.”

Nguyen’s own road to appstinence was winding. She grew up in San Jose, steeped in the “techno-optimism of Silicon Valley,” she says. “It’s the local culture.”

She got an iPod Touch when she was 9 and her first social media account at 10. Her “trinity,” as she calls it, was Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was your “public-facing portfolio,” she says. Snapchat was “where the business really went down in the day-to-day.” And TikTok was the “the maximal brain rotty thing.”

Nguyen felt like they degraded her attention span, sleep, energy, self-esteem and confidence, she says.

Social media companies have fought back against accusations over the years that their platforms are harmful to young people’s mental health.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified in February, as part of an ongoing, landmark social media trial, that he doesn’t think people can be clinically addicted to social media. However, he said some people may experience “problematic use” of Instagram, including “spending more time on Instagram than they feel good about.”

In response to a lawsuit in 2024 alleging TikTok had “addictive features” and was “harming young people’s mental health,” TikTok said it was “proud of and remain deeply committed to the work we’ve done to protect teens,” citing “safety features such as default screentime limits, family pairing, and privacy by default for minors under 16.”

In 2024 testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in prepared remarks, “We want Snapchat to be safe for everyone, and we offer extra protections for minors to help prevent unwanted contact and provide an age-appropriate experience.”

But Nguyen says her experience on the three apps had a harmful domino effect in her life. “It’s not just that the scrolling itself gets worse; your perspective on the world gets worse as the doomscrolling keeps going,” Nguyen says. Still, she felt, “You can’t lose the only way that you know how to find out things that are going on or things that you like or keep in touch with people.”

A straight-A student in high school, Nguyen’s final straw was when she “couldn’t focus.” She recalls doing an assignment at 14 that took much longer than expected because of this “technological distraction,” she says.

Nguyen tried temporary digital detoxes and screen time limits for years; none worked. So she cut back more drastically. Early in college, she deleted Instagram, thinking, “This is kind of nice.” But then she spent more time on Snapchat. For a while, she says she had “a toxic relationship” with Snapchat and TikTok, repeatedly deleting and redownloading them.

She had a realization that “my real life had to outweigh the draw” of those apps, Nguyen adds. That meant “pursuing what I felt like they were giving me, but in the real world,” so she joined more clubs and student communities in her senior year.

Over time, she says, she got off social media for good.

One initial challenge was convincing friends she wasn’t cutting ties with them by going offline but rather that she wanted to invest more time and attention in her relationships in real life, Nguyen says.

“Me not wanting to Snap you anymore doesn’t mean that I feel like we’re drifting or you’re a bad friend or whatever,” she explains. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite.”

After getting off social media and being better for it, Nguyen says, she wanted to help others do the same. She and her appstinent colleagues offer what they call “digital lifestyle planning,” or peer-to-peer coaching to help people “re-design [their] relationship with technology,” the website says.

Nguyen says they’ve seen “overwhelming” demand for the service, with “several hundreds of people” reaching out to express interest in appstinence and roughly 2,000 people attending the organization’s in-person events worldwide.

One key element of it is that the coaches are digital native Gen Zers. “It’s not, ’Okay we’re here on the top of the hill preaching down to you,” she says. “I know how it is; I was literally there as well.”

And sometimes Nguyen still struggles with it. Her own de-entrenchment, as she calls it, will likely be lifelong, she says.

Today, she uses a “dumb” phone, which can call and text but has no internet, and she’s dropped streaming services. (It’s okay if a friend puts on a Spotify playlist when they’re together, she says, but otherwise, to listen to music, she has her car radio.) She uses ad-free browsers, keeps her bedroom screen-free and only checks email at a computer.

To talk with friends or family, she calls or texts. That way, she says: “There’s no ads, no algorithms, no AI slop.” Nguyen says she now has “much deeper relationships with a lot fewer people” than before.

Many of her friends today are off social media, too. “If we were all to suddenly make an Instagram, that would just be redundant because I already see them and talk to them on the phone,” she says. “What else could we possibly do on Instagram?”

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