#but there’s still a lot of social class stuff infused in the culture

[a-bottle-of-tyelenol]

EATING YOUR SOUL EATER/EPIC AU MUNCH MUNCH MUNCH

I gotta knowwwww is there black blood in this AU/a crona type character? Hermes gives me the vibes he has black blood....

Also is odysseus part weapon/meister like maka? (Especially cause hermes is his great grandfather!)

Ngl I have not thought about it superrrr in depth bc it’s been so long since I watched Soul Eater 💀

But yeah, tbh I kind of imagine Dionysus with black blood because he’s the god of madness and that makes a lot of sense given the madness that comes with black blood. I think of godly weapons to be a bit similar to death scythes and, specifically, I think of them to be similar to Justin Law in the sense that they wield themselves and don’t strictly need meisters. Dionysus is one that I see as particularly unstable and nearly impossible for any mortal to wield so he’s a bit like Crona in the sense that he’s a weird meshing of meister and weapon, too unruly to be a weapon and not in control of himself to be completely self-wielding. Though, I could also see Hades with a less volatile black blood tbh 🤔

And yeah! The direct children of the gods tend to be meisters (mostly in part so they can wield their parents in times of need), but Odysseus’ mother and grandfather were both weapons passed from Hermes and he gets his meister ability from his father, Laertes. In my head, this is a weird hybrid au that’s semi-modern while still having kingdoms (like a modern fantasy type thing) and it’s very rare for weapons to take the mantle of king unless they are a child of a god that happened to be born a weapon and became self-wielding!

Also not everyone is assigned weapon/meister at birth and there are a lot of people, including the children of gods, that don’t get either. In my head, most of the suitors are actually regular humans and Antinous is the leader that sets himself apart because he’s a self-wielding weapon and a big argument he has for why Penelope should marry him is because she is also a meister— something her father was deeply uncomfortable with because a meister/meister pairing is unorthodox and weapons traditionally aren’t king so either way her future was one he disliked— and having a self-wielding weapon husband would be good optics.

[60b3r]

Memes Kill Creativity?

Memes vs. Genes

In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme' to describe something with symbolic meaning that spreads by imitation from person to person within a culture. This idea is an analogue to the nature of selfish gene, described similarly as a piece of genetic material possessing information required to be able to replicate themselves inside a living. The only key difference in both terms is that the gene is natural, while memes are artificial. The rest of memes' operating schemes completely mimic the genes perfectly. In our current timeline, memes as we know today are taking many forms: as image macros, short videos, and rick-rollicking music. Memes in imageboards and forums have been pushing internet porn traffic into a stalemate and putting our power grid into unnecessary burden. Of course, memes are not to be regretted, but otherwise need to be taken seriously, since they are able to put our current understanding of media industry and economic system into shame.

As with every other thing that have existed, memes are not exempt in its dualistic nature. If you ever venture to the depths of dark web, you may know that memes also took part in the infamous mimetic Tumblr-4chan War. Not only that, some memes are reportedly causing harm towards some users, even though it is often disguised or said to be a dank joke or mere sarcasm. Memes have seen its share of use in online bullying, mass shootings, and hate crimes, cowering behind the freedom of expression tag. Regardless, memes are also an extremely effective form of information transmission. Like all living systems with no set moral standards, memes do evolve and are subject to natural selection. Memes, like genes, actually work like a mindless machine. Again, this is eerily like the performance of DNA in living systems. The last thing we want from this thing is virulence.

Every day, something went viral on Twitter. Hashtags are flaring into the top trends, some videos are being watched billions of times, and another cat vs. cucumber pic garnered thousands of likes. Viral properties of a virus (duh) is defined as the capability to multiply quickly in relatively short amount of time. The term saw a huge increase in usage during the dawn of the internet age and the rise of computer malwares spread through unsecured ports of network protocol. This term is being applied to memes, as it is like a virus (which is a pure embodiment of a selfish gene). Now, a lot of people are utilizing memes to create art, because it enables them to cater the short-attention spans of current internet users. They create shorts, illustrations, inside jokes, and small comic strips. Some of you might not agree with me on this one, but stay with me now and I will explain to you why I would like to treat memes and art as a single unit of interest in this argument.

The dawn of meme-technology

Viral memes and their popularity are now often considered important in defining a time period in the internet culture. Now every netizen can somewhat distinguish the approximate age, sex, and political views of other users from the usage of rage comics, meme songs, and meme platforms they use. Intuitively we can make a generalized difference between the userbase of Reddit, 4chan, 9gag, Vine, and now Tiktok. Others, by the share of relatability with sub-genres of different areas of interest (film memes and game memes). Some others, even, in the perspectives of different social and economic class system (first world problems and third world success memes). Meme preferences to us netizens are ironically giving away our anonymous identity. Identity which the media companies are vying to get their hands on. That's where I would like to come into my opening argument: both memes and genes which originally possesses no intrinsic value, suddenly become a subject of value with technology.

How do we draw the logic, I say? The ones and zeros inside electrical systems are value-free, so does DNA in living cells. As we meddle ourselves with biotechnology to manipulate genetic material for profit, we also simmer ourselves in the computer sciences and tweak physical computation to perform better. We give value in the inanimate object by manipulating them. In our world, we often heard these expressions: that communication is key, sometimes silence is golden, and those who control the information wields the power. What’s these three statements have in common? Yes, information and expression. Memes are the simplest form of both. This is the beginning of the logic: memes are no longer in and on itself independent of external values. The infusion of utilitarian properties in memes as artificial constructs are seemingly inevitable, and for the better or worse shapes our current society.

We might have heard that somewhere somehow, the so called ‘global elites’ with their power and wealth are constantly controlling biotech research and information technology—or, in the contrary, they control these knowledge and resources to keep shovelling money and consolidate their power. Memes are one of their tools to ‘steer’ the world according to their 'progressive agenda', seemingly driving the world ‘forward’ towards innovation and openness. Nah, I am just joking. But, stay with me now. It is actually not them (the so-called global elites) who you should be worried about. It is us—you and I, ourselves—and our own way of unwittingly enjoying memes that are both toxic and fuelling the age-old capitalism. Funny, isn't it? We blame society, but we are society. But how are be becoming the culprits yet also be the prey at the same time?

Middle-class artists are hurt

Now, aggressive marketing tactics using memes are soaring. Media companies are no doubt cashing in the internet and viral memes to their own benefit. Streaming and cataloguing are putting up a good fight compared to their retail, classic ways of content delivery. This is quite true with the strategies of Spotify and YouTube, other media companies alike. They can secure rights to provide high-quality content from big time artists and filmmakers and target these works directly to the end consumer, effectively cutting the cost of distribution which usually goes to the several layers of distribution line like vinyl products, radio contracts, and Blu-ray DVDs. I believe this is good, since it is like an affirmative action for amateur artists to start a career in the art industry. Or is it? Does it really encourage small-time artists to begin? Yes. How about the middle-class artists? Not necessarily.

You might sometimes wonder, “how the hell did I get somewhere just by following the trending or hot section in the feed?”. This toxicity of memes often brings some bad things to our tables. Social media algorithms handle contents (like viral memes) by putting those with high views or likes to the front page, effectively ‘promoting’ the already popular post and creating a positive feedback cycle. By doing so, they could capitalize on ad profits on just few ‘quality’ contents over huge amounts of audience in a very short amount of time. The problem is most of the time, these ‘quality’ contents have no quality at all. They just happen to possess the correct formula to be viral, with the correct SEO keywords and click-bait titles with no real leverage in the art movement. This way, I often find both the talented and the lucky—of which the boundaries between them are always blurred—overshadow the aspiring ‘middle-class’ artists who work hard to perfect their craft.

If you are already a famous guitarist with large fanbase, lucky you, you are almost guaranteed to top the billboards. What, you have no skills? Post a video of you playing ‘air guitar’ and… affirmative actions to the rescue. Keep on riding the hype wave and suddenly you get to top trending with minimal effort, thanks to your weird haircut. Those haters will surely make a meme out of your silly haircut, not even your non-existent guitar skills. But still, hype is still a hype, and there’s no such thing as a bad publication. This also answers why simple account who reposts other people’s content could get much more followers than the hard-working creators. Not only being outperformed by the already famous artists taking social media by storm, now the ‘middle-class’ artists are also dealing with widespread content theft and repost accounts because of the unfair, bot grading system. It is unimaginable how many nobodies got the spotlight they don’t deserve just because they look or act stupid and the whole internet cheers around them. Remember, this is not always about the artist, but also the quality of the art itself. I believe a good art should be meaningful to the beholder.

Why capitalism kills creativity

The problem in current art industry is that we are feeling exhausted with the same, generic, and recycled stuff. We indeed already see there’s less discourse about art now. Sure, the problem lies not in the artist or medium, but is in the viewers—the consumer of the art form—and how the capitalist system reacts to it. The hyper efficient capitalist system doesn’t want to waste any more time and money trying to figure out what’s new or what’s next for you. What we love to see, what is familiar to us, the market delivers them. The rise of viral memes phenomenon in the social media pushes the market system to the point where they demand artists to create the same, redundant, easy art form. Listen to some of The Chainsmokers’ work and we'll see what music have become: the identical 4-chord progression, the same drop, the predictable riser, and the absence of meaningful lyrics. We sat down and watch over the same superhero movies trying hard to be the next Marvel blockbuster. The production companies are also happy not to pay writers extra to come up with new ideas and instead settle with borrowed old scripts from decades old TV drama. Disney's The Lion King and its heavy use of the earlier Japanese Kimba The White Lion storyline is one guilty example.

Despite it initially being an economic system and not a political ideology, it is untrue that many Marxist philosophers usher the suppression of art. While it is ironic that Stalinist policy intends to curb ‘counter-revolutionaries’—in this case his enemies—by limiting freedom of press and media; American propaganda added further so that it seems that the ideology is also limiting art and kill creativity. We all know the Red Scare in the U.S. during the Cold War saw a popular narrative of communism and socialism that is devoid of freedom of expression. This state propaganda then further become ‘dehumanization’ and make freedom of expression invalid under the guise of equality. Marx argue that total equality is not possible, and the uniqueness is being celebrated by having them doing what they do best and provide the best for their community. Thus, an individual's interests should be indistinguishable from the society's interest. Freedom is granted when the whole society is likely to benefit from an action. According to Mao in his Little Red Book, freedom of expression in art and literature, after all, is what initially drive the class consciousness. It is capitalism, not communism, that kills creativity.

If left unchecked, the threat of this feedback loop is going to cause a lack of diversity, resulting in stale content, less art critique, and overall decline in our artistic senses. Artists’ creativity that are supposedly protected by the free internet are destroyed within itself through the sheer overuse of viral memes. Capitalism has successfully turned the supposedly open, free-for-all, value-free platform that is the internet against the people into a media in which they are undeniably shaping new values on its own: the art culture that's not geared towards aesthetics and appreciation, but towards more views and personalized clicks. How social media and media industry caters to the demands of the consumer are, in Marx's own words, “digging its own grave”.

Spare nothing, not even the nostalgia

Well, people romanticize the oldies. The good old days, when everything is seen as better and easier. Look at the new art installations that uses the aesthetics of naughty 90s graphic design to become new, the posters released in this decade but with an art deco of the egregious 80s pop artist Andy Warhol, or the special agent-spy movies set frozen in the Nifty Fifties. Nostalgia offers us a way to escape from the hectic choices of our contemporary: different genres of music, dozens of movies to watch, and different fashion to consider. We choose to settle with our old habits, that we know just works. Remember how do we throw our money on sequels and reboots and remakes of old movies we used to watch during our younger days? We don’t even care about new releases at the cinema! Did you remember how Transformers 2 and their subsequent sequels perform at the box office at their opening week?

The huge sales of figurines and toys of Star Wars franchise—if we could scrutinize them enough—came from the old loyal fanbase of the late Lucasfilm series, not primarily from new viewers. Then suddenly, surprise-surprise. Our love for an old franchise deemed dead enough to be remembered and treasure soon must be destroyed to pave way for three new outrageous sequels (the ones with Kylo Ren and Snoke) by the grace of our beloved capitalism. Sadly, nothing is left untouched by the capitalism’s unforgiving corruption. Nostalgia has become a gimmick that makes people like some art more than they should, because it’s familiar. It is another way of squeezing your pocket dry.

Not that it is bad to make derivatives like covers or remixes, but the trade-offs are far too high. Consequentially, the number of original arts is now very little, because artists don’t bother making new stuff if they just aim for a quick buck. Most of the young adult novels are essentially the same lazy story progression with only different time setting and different character names. Most of them even have the same ending! No more a beautiful journey like the thrillers of Dan Brown or the epic adventures of Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, which defines their respective times. Do we seriously want to consider Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey as a unique work? Isn’t the Hunger Games and the Maze Runner essentially the same?

If you play video games, you must have known that the trend always starts over. Game developers are making gazillions of sequels, and only a few of them that are actually good. Most are outright trash. Oh, wait, old video games like Homeworld are also getting remasters to cater the demand of nostalgic consumers. No new Command and Conquer release from EA Games? Re-release the 25 years old Red Alert because people will re-buy it! Profit!

15 June 2020 8.03 PM

[talesofhawaii]

Estria is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Estria Foundation, which raises social consciousness on human and environmental issues through public art and educational programs. He pioneered a number of programs, including Mele Murals, which focuses on Hawaiian lyrics (mele) that explore stories of place (mo’olelo ‘aina); Water Writes, which highlights critical water issues in 10 cities around the globe; and the Estria Battle, which served as the premier U.S. urban art competition and honored Hawaiian culture and community. Before co-founding The Estria Foundation, he received commissions from President Bill Clinton, MTV, Redbull, and others, co-founded Visual Element, a series of free-for-youth workshops which targets at-risk children, and presented the first ever TEDx talk on muralism. Estria used his 1994 arrest to speak out about graffiti’s sociopolitical impact on CNN, the National Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other platforms. He is the recipient of a number of awards, including Miami New Times’ Best Mural, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s Certificate of Congressional Recognition, and East Bay Express’ Best Graffiti Artist.

As I understand, you’re originally from Hawaii. How did you become interested in graffiti?

When I was a teenager, my mom sent me to the YMCA to volunteer after school and in the summers. My friends were break dancers, and they’d look for stuff with breakdancing. They’d see graffiti on jackets, in the backgrounds, or on trains, and they were like, “what is this?” One day, we got an airbrush kit, and we hopped the fence and went into the canal to paint it after school. It was bright daylight and people were walking by watching. No one was really freaking out over what we were doing. I don’t even think we really realized that it was… illegal. We tried to do the word ‘fresh,’ and because it was a little airbrush kit, we did ‘fr’ and then ran out of air. But, it got us juiced, so we went and got spray paint and started trying that. I fell in love with spray painting and just kept going with it.

Did spray painting speak to your friends too? Or did they just go back to breakdancing?

We spray-painted for a year– or maybe two years. I think I was 16 years old when we started, so I’m pretty sure by 18 they had already quit. But, when I went to college in San Francisco at 18, I think it was probably by the second week that I had gone painting at the project rooftops already. Back then, people had 110 film cameras and little flash cubes on top of them. For every photo, you would think, “it’s going to cost me this much to take this picture.” It wasn’t like digital cameras or cellphones nowadays, where you don’t even think about that– you just click away. So, these guys who I’d just met took me painting. But, at the end of it, no one took pictures of my piece. I was like, “Oh, I suck!” [laughing] I didn’t know I sucked until that moment! It was one of those turning points where I went, you know what? I want to get good at this. I want to be as good or better than these guys. I started painting all the time.

It sounds like you really channeled your frustration into positive energy and motivation, two qualities that undeniably show through your work. Do you think that particular experience shaped your belief in the mission of empowerment?

Oh, yeah! Writing is like a contact sport: you can run into cops, gangs, trains, trucks. You might even have to walk for three miles, in the dark, to get to a wall. It’s kind of crazy to think that we were doing those things. But, you know, it makes you feel alive. You’re in a train…you’re out at night trying to paint cold steel… and there are sound that you just can’t explain. You know they’re from the trains, but they just sound like eerie monster things, I guess as the metal is contracting and expanding with the temperature drop. And so, you’re just kind of freaked out. But, I also think you feel alive– your heart is pumping and your senses are hyper-aware. It’s almost this rite of passage for young people to do this dangerous thing, to know what it’s like to really be alive and out there. And it’s dangerous… so yeah, there was definitely that thrill.

And to be honest, I sucked at doing the lettering, which is the whole main part of style writing. But, I could draw characters and stuff. All of the guys that were really good at the letters were like, “Okay, I’m gonna do my name– you do the background….” Right? They wanted me to do the stuff around their pieces. [laughing] But because of that, I later ended up getting the commissions, because people would say, “Oh, can you paint this Middle Eastern restaurant scene?” or whatever scene their business needed–grapes, pizza, or whatever. The style writer guys could only do letters, so they didn’t get the jobs.

That’s just on a more superficial level. Maybe, looking at past lives, it was almost meant for me to be in a creative expression pathway. You know, having that experience, or working in the YMCA and giving to kids, or taking care of other people at an early age… it just infused that whole idea that you give back, that you take care of others, that you teach others. I always think I was trying to say more than just my name, or that I’m alive, you know? I did my share of that, but I reached a point where that wasn’t gratifying anymore. When you’re going out bombing, and you can bomb a billboard over the freeway or a tunnel of the freeway– you’re just like, “Wow, I’m alive. I can do whatever I want. I have power.” Then, you have to learn to be responsible with your power… like Spider-Man. So, I think that just pushed me towards using art for some kind of purpose– to say something.

What did your mom think of you graffitiing?

Back in the day, we had a Betamax, like a VHS recorder. I remember the first time the news covered graffiti, they were interviewing this guy from a different part of my island. To this day, he’s still world famous– he’s made a good career for himself. But, as I’m taping the interview on the Betamax, my mom is sitting next to me watching the interview, and she’s like, “I hope they catch these hoodlums!” [laughing] I’m not sure she even knew that I was doing graffiti yet. Then, years went by and she could see that, in college, I was trying to make a career of it already. So, she started to want to understand it: she took drawing and photography classes at the local museum just to have a deeper understanding of why I do these things. Now, she’s on my board, and to me, she’s my biggest fan.

On the Estria Foundation website, it seems like there’s a lot of emphasis on incorporating Indigenous themes and even preserving specific language, like mele (Hawaiian lyrics) or mo’olelo ‘aina (stories of place). Do you want to speak a little bit as to some central Hawaiian themes?

Yeah! I think there’s two things I could start with. One is the concept of ‘we.’ When we say the word ‘we,’ we normally refer to we in this room, or our family, or our friends– those that are living right now. And ‘we,’ in a Hawaiian and Indigenous perspective, doesn’t just go laterally– it goes up and down. It means connecting with the earth, connecting with the heavens, connecting with your ancestors, and the belief that you never walk alone: that your ancestors walk with you– your ancestors on your father’s side and your ancestors on your mother’s side. With the Hawaiian and Indigenous ‘we’ comes the idea of being mindful. Are you living a righteous life? Are you making righteous decisions? Being mindful is something that Hawaiians tend to think about a lot. Whereas, in Western society, that’s not always up for concern. [laughing]

Also, in the Hawaiian perspective, things aren’t separate: there’s no separation of church and state, or education and religion. Spirituality, cultural practices, environmentalism– all of those things are connected, not separate. So, the Hawaiian perspective means coming to understand that the Earth is a living thing and that you need to communicate with it in order to take care of it. Our role is not to have this ego and to conquer Earth; our role is to take care of it. Our position is between the heavens and the Earth. In that way, you always set priorities. Is this good for the land and the water? Is this good for people? And then, is this good for business?

That’s really how I think government should set their priorities too– in that order. But, politicians are allowed to say whatever at election time and then do whatever later… without any agenda that they’re actually held accountable to in a way that a CEO or a board of directors would be held accountable. If we held politicians accountable, a whole lot would be different– so many of our decisions would be different. The reason the cultural piece, the environmental piece, and the spiritual piece are all so important to us is because, if we keep going the Western way– we’re not an entire continent, where it’ll take you a long time to destroy it. We’re a small island. You could probably destroy it in our lifetime. So, we need to redefine our notion of ‘success’ from, “How do you go off to college and make a lot of money?” to “How do you become a guardian, or a caretaker, of this place?”

In Hawaii, we have what we call a ‘brain drain,’ where supposedly our best kids go to private school, because their parents will do whatever it takes to pay the tuition, and then private schools are always college-preparatory, so the best kids all go off to college. In my class, only one or two kids didn’t go to college. That’s less than 1 percent. So, a half of my class went to the continent for education. Then, out of that half, a huge percentage of my class never came back to Hawaii. We’re developing our best and brightest kids and then exporting them to the continent permanently, as opposed to using their brain power to solve problems here. For us, redefining ‘success’ would be shifting the idea of a successful person from one who’s financially successful to one who’s grounded in their place, who’s in tune with it, and who knows how to take care of it, or is willing to find solutions to fix it in sustainable ways. That would be successful for us because those people are going to be around for the future generations.

So, on one hand, lots of Hawaiians come to the continent to study and be successful in a Western, business sense. On the other hand, there seems to be a culture of Hawaiian residents who define success differently, who are maybe more community-oriented and in tune with the land. From what you see, how does that dynamic play out more concretely?

I see the hope for Hawaii in the young people. We have a lot of Hawaiian immersion charter schools. In the ’80s, they were saying that Hawaiian, as a language, was going extinct. Then, they started forming these charter schools and teaching the Hawaiian language– Hawaiian perspective and Hawaiian values. Now, it’s not weird to hear Hawaiian out in public.

With the language comes the perspective. In English, there’s usually one word and one meaning. A sentence is defined to be very specific so as to avoid confusion about what you’re saying: this person did this thing to this place. But, in Hawaiian, words are structured around a multitude of meanings. If you’re pregnant, people will say you’re hapai. But, hapai doesn’t mean ‘pregnant’– it means ‘to carry.’ The mountain could be hapai with waterfalls, or the land could be hapai with food growing. So, when you think with hapai in that multitude of ways, you should be seeing how it connects you back to the Earth, or back to ancestors, or back to the stars– it connects you to your place at all times with several different meanings.

For us, we didn’t have a written language. When people have written language, they have secret codes, secret ways to communicate messages to the troops, or from royalty to royalty. But, without a written language, our secret code had to be hidden in poetry. There was language structured for the common folk, or for everyday use, and then there was that poetic, riddlelike way of using the language that was taught to chiefs so that when they spoke in public, only the chief would get what they were trying to say. And the public was like, “Oh, everything’s okay!” [laughing]

How do you connect with your Hawaiian heritage now? Do you just bring the message along wherever you travel?

At this point, I can’t say that I’m a writer anymore– I just say I came from there. Now, the purpose of my artwork is to tell the stories of our places. Most of these stories have never been put down on paper, so they’re being cast from generation to generation. When Westerners came and started settling here, Hawaiians died off by the tens of thousands, and those storytellers went with them. So, they tried to tell those stories. At this point, Hawaiians are about 10 percent of the population in Hawaii, and I would say that most people living here know next to nothing about Hawaiian culture.

That being said, people living here don’t realize that a lot of the daily, little things are Hawaiian. The way we behave in this situation… that’s a Hawaiian thing. [laughing] I tell people that we may be 10 percent of the population, but we should be 100 percent of the voice on the walls. Using the walls as our visual storytelling medium, instead of books or other things, is a more powerful way of communicating our culture; it works perfectly for someone like me that’s a community-based artist, where my work is in the community. I don’t paint highbrow, high-end art. I don’t paint modernism. I’ve gone to archives and all these different art shows around the country, and my takeaway is that modernist art is about nothing and for rich people. It’s got nothing to do with the culture; it doesn’t talk about change; and it’s rare that it’s got really insightful criticism. I think art gets off really easy nowadays on having no content. It’s a shame because I think we’ve got to hold artists to a higher standard. Not to say that I’m better or higher than everybody else, but my art isn’t for that audience: it’s for the commonfolk in the streets, here in Hawaii.

When I see a Hawaiian family stand there and watch us paint, or start crying just by looking at the painting… then you know they’ve never been to an art gallery. They don’t have art. They haven’t studied art or art history. None of them can name five American artists, whereas in Europe, they can name all their favorite artists. But, when a Hawaiian family stands there and takes in what we’re doing, when they start crying and understanding it, when they come up to me and explain what they see, and when I start crying with them– it’s like, “yeah, this mural is for you guys.” If I painted in the gallery, they never would have seen it; I did it in the community, and they get to see it every day. It’s a different purpose, a different intention.

So, in your view, there’s a whole world of untapped potential for art–what’s the disconnect?

Oh, yeah. Art in a gallery is like, “man– get it out!” Even in discussions on a community organizing level… people around the country, and especially museums, talk about breaking the fourth wall and getting into the community– that’s because they tried to get the community into the museum, and they only had so much luck doing that. They know their sweet spot is really people who are over 40, white, and single. Those are the ones that are going to give them the endowment. Those are the ones who are going to sign up for annual membership and come to all the events. The sweet spot, for museums, isn’t Mexican family with 10 kids down the street, or the Black family across the way. These highbrow art museums just aren’t culturally, or historically, part of their daily life. So, instead of trying to get the community to the museum, they’re trying to take the museum to the community. What some museums will do is actually coopt what non-profits are doing. They’ll see what the non-profits are doing, they’ll write a grant for the same thing, they’ll get the project, and they’ll put that non-profit out of business. Then, when that project is no longer in vogue, the museum will move onto the next flavor. It sucks! Trying to do this by the people for the people in the community is a whole different thing.

When Banksy’s painting self-destructed during an auction and a highbrow art collector decided to pay even more for it, how did that make you feel?

Well, it’s a novelty, right? It’s an exciting thing. I think Banksy is cool– it’s a great example of using street art, in public, to exploring new ways of saying something. But, for us, it’s really about going back to who we are. The bulk of education in the United States was designed in the industrial age to create factory workers. And with Common Core standards still in place, we’re actually still trying to produce factory workers. But, we don’t have factories anymore, so it’s not benefitting us to create obedient soldiers: we need out-of-the-box, visionary leaders to do creative problem-solving. Our system doesn’t encourage that; it encourages potential leaders to use their heads, to learn how to take tests, and to study standards. All of that is using your brain, and we’ve forgotten that the other way to access knowledge, to tap ancestral knowledge, is through your gut, through activities like meditation, or talking to your ancestors, or praying. Rather than going through your head, you’re going through your gut to tap into that knowledge.

I’ll give you a good example. We have this canoe called Hōkūle’a, which means “brightest star.” Basically, they built a canoe, using mostly traditional methods, to navigate by the stars; they don’t navigate Hōkūle’a by newer instruments or GPS. So, they’ve gotten all these other nations–Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa–to build canoes too, and they’ve got this whole fleet of canoes to sail around the world. They just completed the trip about a year or two ago. They went all the way around the world to prove that Hawaiians didn’t just end up in Hawaii by chance; we were navigating to places. The message they were trying to spread, everywhere they went, was that we should take care of the ocean. But, the knowledge of how to build that canoe had been lost. There was no one alive who knew how to build that canoe, so they looked at artist drawings. Some of the things they had to figure out–how to carve a certain way, what to carve with, what kind of knots to make, all of these little details–they had to do so by going inside and tapping that ancestral knowledge. They had to meditate in the forest, where trees were chopped, to regain that knowledge. That’s not a project that Western thinking will even allow you to entertain.

It does feel like we’re kind of desensitized in the West, often thinking mechanically with our heads rather than our guts. Do you want to expand a bit more on the difference between the Western and Indigenous perspectives, especially with regards to Hawaii?

Think about how the average person can walk down the street, spit anywhere, and piss anywhere. Western thinking is like, “I want to climb the highest mountain, or I want to climb any peak, so that I can jump off of it with a snow board, or a parachute, or whatever.” Westerners just think they can go anywhere and do anything. But, Indigenous thinking is like, “These are sacred spaces. And you need to ask for your ancestors’ permission before you enter.” You can’t just go. Take Mauna Kea for example. They’re going to build this huge telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea that’s going to affect the wind patterns. It’s the start of the water cycle, so they’re going to pollute their own water on the island. And it’s because they don’t think the earth is sacred. They think that, in the name of science, we need to see farther… “Hello!” You can close your eyes and see farther than that telescope can see.

When we talk about what is ‘sacred,’ most people don’t actually know. I was trying to teach the kids the other day. I asked them, “who determines if a space is sacred?” A kid’s answer was “Oh, somebody said the space was sacred!” and another said, “Maybe somebody was buried there.” Okay. Those are good possibilities… well, what makes a person say a place is sacred? They’re like, “I don’t know, somebody just said.” The thing you’ve got to understand is that if you listen to the land, you will know what parts of the land are more sacred, because the land feels different in each space. So, I try to teach the kids to meditate in different places in order to start to feel the difference in the power, or the mana, of the land. In the olden days, when people built sacred temples, they all built them on portal sites, or on ley lines. I see it in Peru, I see it with the Aztecs, with the Incas, and with the Mayans. I think it’s because they had people who were more in tune and could feel like, “Oh, this is the spot right here!” So, it’s not a person telling you that the space is sacred; it’s the land telling you it’s sacred right here. The land has its power– you’re just trying to tap into that. Since we’re no longer connected to the land in that way, there’s no considering those things anymore. We need to start listening to the land again in order to take care of it, or we’re not going to be around for much longer.

We’ve covered a lot of topics conceptually, but I wanted to give you the chance to speak about projects like Water Writes, Mele Murals, the Estria Battle, or “Sin Armas ni Violencia.” It would be great if you could connect them with some of the central Hawaiian and Indigenous topics we’ve been discussing!

Well, the Estria Battle… Man… I did that out of pocket for five to six years. I was finally like, “Alright, I’m done!” and people just thought I was making money. I’m like, “Dude, it’s free admission! What am I making money on?” From there, I went to Water Writes. We went to all these different cities and countries, where we would partner with people in those places. And I couldn’t get it funded, because the funders couldn’t see how two weeks in a place could make a lasting impact. But Water Writes was the older sibling of Mele Murals, and Mele Murals had a deeper connection to the land and to the community, so that’s the one that’s gotten the most support, both in terms of finances and community support.

Really, people have to go to a Mele Mural, or come to an unveiling, or come to the meditation sessions with the kids, to really understand the project. To see a group of kids meditating outside and getting messages…. What do you think would happen if you got twenty to forty kids to meditate together, and I’m telling them, “Okay! Ask the land what message should be in the mural. Ask the land what it wants.” What are they going to come up with? I’ve sat with groups on the continent for three hours, trying to come up with a concept for the mural while no one has an idea, and I walk out of the meeting clueless. I’m like, “I’m not doing this project!” The groups aren’t grounded, they’re not based in anything, so they don’t know what’s important.

But then you get kids. I remember one kid said, “Oh, I see the hands of ancestors carrying the baby’s spirit to the body of one of our kings.” And then, eight people went, “Whoa, that’s what I got too!” You can’t make that up! Right? We weren’t even talking about that. How did you even get that? Your schools not spiritual, so you wouldn’t talk about spirits and ancestors in that way. But, it’s confirmation: that’s the message they want us to paint about. So, we keep going around, and I circle any ideas that come to more than one person. I circle those ideas because I know we have confirmation. Our ancestors speak in riddles. They don’t give us the message directly, so you’ve got to figure it out. That’s how we arrive at the concepts of the murals, but unless you’ve seen that process, you don’t know what magic it is, or how trippy it is.

Then, each mural is loaded with messages from the spirit realm, and so many trippy things happen that it becomes normal. The first time I did this, I was like, “Oh, please, please work! I’m going to meditate and ask for the concept, and I don’t even know where it’s coming from. Please work!” And now, I don’t even question it. I know it’ll come. The process has built faith in me, and so now we meditate on all the big decisions for our organization. The crazy thing is that I’m often talking to spirits, ancestors, or guardians. Sometimes I see stuff, and sometimes they speak through me. All kinds of amazing things open up once you accept that side of life. But, to accept that side of life, you’ve got to let go of the Western perspective.

Eric Wallach November 21, 2018

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An Interview with Estria, Urban Art Living Legend and Co-Founder of The Estria Foundation Estria is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Estria Foundation, which raises social consciousness on human and environmental issues through public art and educational programs.

[biofunmy]

A New Startup Called Pattern Wants To Make Millennial Burnout Uncool

Up a skinny stairwell in New York City’s Chinatown on a sweltering late-September night, a private dining room overflowed with downtown cool kids. Some were sipping Recess, the CBD-infused sparkling water in distinctive pastel cans whose ads papered New York subway walls for a brief period earlier this year. Others stood in the open kitchen, making their own ravioli, which were then placed into plastic to-go boxes marked with each person’s name: the promise of a weeknight dinner at home.

The jumpsuited and overalled and fashion-forward mom-jeans-wearers were there to celebrate the ongoing launch of Equal Parts, the first of many planned brands from a new (and newly philosophical) company called Pattern. Equal Parts sells “modern” cookware (sturdy frying pans, mixing bowls, spatulas, knives, and a cutting board turned charcuterie plate) accompanied by cooking assistance. At the party, hip millennial cooks hovered nearby to answer partygoers’ questions, but when you purchase Equal Parts cookware, help comes via text message from friendly “coaches” ready to guide you through making a quick dinner when all you have in your kitchen is a can of black beans, some peanut butter, and a bottle of Trader Joe’s wine.

In its previous incarnation, Pattern was a hip boutique digital marketing agency called Gin Lane, responsible for the look of some of the most prominent brands in today’s bourgeois millennial marketplace: Sweetgreen, Harry’s, Everlane. They were trendsetters who made fast-but-fancy salad happen and normcore sustainable clothes cool. Events like the one in Chinatown are the sort of thing that Gin Lane had perfected: gathering cool kids who could help a product, an aesthetic, or a lifestyle choice spiral forth into the world through their Instagram accounts.

There was a lot to be wary of in that loft: the beautiful people; the gift bag, complete with butcher knife; the photo booth and the invitation to share photos from the night “with your community”; the guy with the T-shirt that read “Due to Physical Violence Shitfaced Mondays Have Been Canceled.”

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

An attendee at the September Equal Parts launch party in Chinatown.

I’d first felt that wariness back in July, when Pattern started tagging me on Instagram. The posts were vague and brand-speaky; the hashtags included #enjoydailylife and #wordsofwisdom. At that point, I was used to random brands tagging, emailing, and tweeting me. In January, I wrote a piece about millennial burnout that unexpectedly went viral. Now, every press release I received with the word “millennial” seemed to also invoke burnout — some more obliquely than others.

In August, I found an email from Emmett Shine, founder of Gin Lane and now Pattern, in my inbox. My article, he said, had a profound effect on him and the rest of his company. And now, big surprise, he wanted to tell me about his new company, which had just launched.

“Pattern’s central mission is helping young adults today ��enjoy daily life,’” he wrote. “We’re doing this by raising awareness of burnout caused by work culture, the attention economy, and by creating brands that offer a combination of products and personal guidance around simple, everyday activities at home.” Their first product? Equal Parts cookware.

My immediate reaction was Are you fucking kidding me? A cookware brand seemed like the exact sort of expensive burnout Band-Aid I’d spent the last six months railing against, up there with overnight oats and expensive serums and meditation apps. A brand, with $14 million in venture capital behind it, to fix what brands hath wrought. When the first articles about Pattern started appearing, I tweeted a link: “A start-up….to battle millennial burnout?” The responses mirrored my own: “Please kill me,” “I hate it, thank you,” “This article gave me vertigo,” and “What is it? Why can’t I tell after reading twice?”

But I told Shine I’d meet with his team. There would be pleasure, I thought, in telling the people at Pattern that they were part of the problem. And I was intrigued by the question of what an anti-burnout company, operating within American capitalism, might actually look like. There’s a certain elegant symmetry to Pattern’s mission, after all: Who better to counter the anomie of the bourgeois millennial experience than those who’ve not only lived it — but helped construct it in the first place?

“It’s good that people are talking about burnout,” Shine told me when I visited Pattern’s Chinatown office in September, where a handful of Equal Parts mixing bowls had been positioned to capture dripping rain from the slightly leaky ceilings. “And it’s gonna get co-opted, but that’s not bad. Co-opt away. More brands should totally be pivoting to having their marketing language talk about the role of the attention economy and workism and the endless amounts of human capital and personal optimization.”

The charismatic CEOs and kombucha on tap simply distracted from the fact that the cracked foundations of most people’s lives remain unfixed.

Still. The idea that brands “pivoting” to burnout could meaningfully combat a condition that is first and foremost a product of capitalism requires a serious suspension of disbelief — or at the very least, a tempering of cynicism. That’s a difficult proposition at any given moment, but especially now, against the backdrop of the wreckage of WeWork, which inveigled thousands with open-plan shared offices, fruit-infused water, and the promise of actual community and a “work culture revolution.”

WeWork duped countless venture capitalists and employees. But it’s also become an object lesson on the unbridled tech optimism of the 2010s: Even the companies claiming to subvert the soulless capitalist systems are themselves chasing the dragon of everlasting scale and venture-backed money (or, at least, a massive payout to soften the blow of their failure). The ones who preached self-care — Make your life easier! And more meaningful! While spending money! — have perpetuated the systems from which they claim to offer refuge. The charismatic CEOs and kombucha on tap simply distracted from the fact that the cracked foundations of most people’s lives remain unfixed.

It’s easy to understand, then, why so many of us are so angry. The WeWorks of the world were built on an ethos of positive vibes and unity — replete with what tech analyst Ranjan Roy calls “high-minded, burning man-esque self-actualization language” that, today, feels offensively out of sync with people’s lived realities. So why would Pattern, or any company that applies a superficial layer of burnout-conscious buzzwords to its products, be different?

But beneath Pattern’s soothing, bucolic packaging lies a deep, and deeply generational, frustration. The company’s trajectory hasn’t followed the path of a classic rocket-ship startup but that of a striving millennial: hard work followed by deep disillusionment and now, maybe, guarded optimism. Their products, their financing structure, their work culture, their messaging, even their website and social media are engineered in a way that’s not meant to hack, or optimize, or disrupt so much as consider the question: Can a for-profit venture actually help reverse the cultural affliction it helped create?

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

Emmett Shine, cofounder and executive creative director for Pattern, at the office with coworkers.

The first time Emmett Shine remembers feeling like everything was out of control and overwhelming, it was the 1990s; he was in junior high, and his parents had just separated.

“I had to start working to support me and my family,” he told me. “My way of dealing with tough stuff was just working. In America, that’s conditioned: If you want to get out of something tough, you just work your way through it.”

Shine, who just turned 36, grew up in the Hamptons — but think more working-class Long Island, less celebrity summer palace. His mom was an artist; his dad was a fisherman and, eventually, a landscaper. Shine was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome in the second grade and ended up in a mix of special education and what he refers to as “smart kid” classes. When his parents got divorced, he had to balance work and school. “My friends helped me with food, money, everything,” he said. “Being poor is universal, and it universally sucks.”

Shine looks like any number of white kids I grew up with in Idaho, with a boyish crew cut and an omnipresent baseball cap. The night before, he had shown up at the Equal Parts party wearing shiny, knee-length basketball shorts. “Sometimes I dress like I’m in sixth grade,” he joked, before telling me, in all seriousness, that he sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and searches for No Fear shirts on eBay.

But the packaging is deceiving. Part of Shine’s charm is that he’s not slick and he doesn’t glad-hand. His sentences come out in paragraphs, with a winding intricacy that often makes sense only when transcribed, read once, then read again. He’s bad at sound bites, bad at short interviews, bad at Twitter. “I was talking to someone last night,” he told me, “and he said that he’d listened to me on a podcast talking about Pattern and was like, ‘I finally get it!’ And I was like, fuck, it took them an hour and a half?”

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

A Pattern employee works on a couch in their Chinatown office.

Shine’s official title at Pattern is “executive creative director,” which still doesn’t adequately convey how much of the company’s aesthetic and attitude — and how much of Gin Lane’s success, which laid the groundwork for it — has sprung from his cavernous, curious mind. The first time I sat down with him, he quoted from Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing and Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days and Jia Tolentino’s work on millennial optimization in Trick Mirror. This is impressive not just because those books are good, which they are, but because I’ve encountered so few people in his position of corporate power who actually do the reading. But Shine’s current thing — and, by extension, Pattern’s thing — is introspection: trying to figure out why he, and the rest of the millennials he works with, feel the way they do even amid profound, seemingly unending success.

Shine’s current thing — and, by extension, Pattern’s thing — is introspection: trying to figure out why he, and the rest of the millennials he works with, feel the way they do.

When Shine graduated from high school, he said, college “wasn’t even in the cards.” But one of Shine’s mentors advised him: You’re a smart guy. You need to get away from here, or you’ll never leave. Shine took his savings and bought a ticket for the place that was the farthest away from Southampton he could find: New Zealand. It was the first time he’d left the country.

It was October 2001. Shine got a camera. He took photos. His mom told him he should think about applying to college, but he only wanted to be in New York City, where, growing up, he’d ride the Long Island Rail Road in to skateboard with his friends. He got into the Tisch School of Arts at NYU, and, upon returning, slowly integrated into the art world of downtown — and began to take on tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. He dropped out before his senior year and started working as a graphic designer for Rocawear; on the side, he ran a photography business. He worked with smaller artists and avant garde designers, and helped promote art shows — work that, over time, would develop into the agency that officially became Gin Lane in 2008.

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

An old sign from Gin Lane at the Pattern office.

And he was working all the time. “I would sleep in the office,” Shine recalled. “It was classic brogrammer culture, like, in our twenties: You work, then you drink some beer afterwards, eat some Cheetos, order in.” They had a shower in the office, which made it even easier for the 10 or so employees to never leave. “It was just a bunch of people in their twenties who were lost and would find themselves through work.”

It wasn’t until around 2013 that things began to change. Gin Lane hired an account manager, Suze Dowling, and a CEO, Nicholas Ling. “Because I’ve been working for myself since I was a teenager, I didn’t always have people to hold me accountable,” Shine said. “I’m a man-boy in certain regards. But when Suze and Nick got involved, the place professionalized.” Or, at least, there was no more sleeping at the office.

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

Pattern cofounder Nicholas Ling.

Ling, age 34, has foppish chestnut brown hair in the tradition of a young Hugh Grant, and a posh British accent to match. But the accent, he admits, is learned. He grew up solidly middle class in the suburbs of London, where his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was an accountant. He’d eventually end up at Oxford, completing a degree in physics, but only because he tested into an elite school when he was 11. After graduating, he signed on for what he calls a “very traditional job” with the Boston Consulting Group.

Ling’s arrival at Gin Lane was part of the company’s second life, as it transitioned from a company that worked primarily with artists to one that worked with and for consumer brands, producing the marketing strategy that would introduce them to the world — or, in business-speak, “bring them to market.” In practice, that meant creating the client’s aesthetic, vibe, and messaging — the fonts, the subway ads, the slogans, the social media strategy.

“We had this ability to make things that aren’t cool, cool.”

In 2010, the team helped launch Stella McCartney for Adidas, which led to work for Warby Parker, which then asked them to launch their new venture: Harry’s, a direct-to-consumer shaving company that, like so many of the products Gin Lane would help popularize, was positioned less as a brand and more as a lifestyle choice. Same for Everlane, Bonobos, Sweetgreen, denim brand AYR, Hims, Recess, Alma, Dia & Co — the list of names that now haunt your Instagram feeds, largely thanks to Gin Lane, feels endless.

“We had this ability to make things that aren’t cool, cool,” Ling explained. They used the same general alchemy when approaching something like Harry’s razors as they did when designing the campaign for the plus-size styling service Dia & Co. But the better they got at it, the less invested they became. Shine rattled off what they become known for: “You know, clean aesthetics, bold sans serifs, color blocking.”

“What’s the reason people stay doing something?” Ling asked me. “The challenge. Either that or they believe in something so much that they will smash their head against the wall until they get through. Eventually neither of those was completely true for us.”

Pattern Brands

The Pattern team in one of their promotional images, enjoying daily life.

It didn’t add up to something, other than what Ling calls “massive spikes of uncontrollable stress.” The work, sure, they could control. In childhood, at school, the work was always the easy part. It was the stuff outside of work that made everything seem untenable. Specifically, Ling’s mother has been chronically ill for the last 20 years. During one of the most stressful periods at Gin Lane, her leg was amputated. Earlier this year, she survived three strokes over the course of six months. And it felt like there was nothing Ling could do about it.

Millennials have been trained to optimize themselves through any struggle, work through any problem. But it was becoming increasingly apparent that work and efficiency couldn’t fix everything. And Ling and Shine weren’t the only ones who felt that way. Despite the demand for their services, they’d kept Gin Lane purposefully small — just under 30 employees. They didn’t expand to meet demand; they just got more particular about what they agreed to do. The senior leadership had all been with the company for at least five years — and two of them, Camille Baldwin and Dan Kenger, were about to get married. As a result, the company managed to maintain the feel of a small startup or, as Shine thinks of it, an “organism.”

“There’s an innate biological clock,” he said, “and you know when it’s time to shift or change or move. People are like, ‘how did you get your team to buy in on this change? And it wasn’t that we got them to buy in. I think the collective organism was searching.”

People were, well, growing up. Getting married, getting pregnant, getting exhausted. The decision to transition from Gin Lane into Pattern “never felt like a whiteboard session in a meeting,” Ling said. “More of, like, a group of friends talking about what motivates us, what’s happening in our lives, as much as what’s the strategy for the company.”

“We were just trying to be happy.”

It was never them thinking Oh, we feel burned out, we need to solve it. It was Ling talking about cooking, and what it did for him, all the time. Camille kept bringing up Benjamin Franklin’s “13 virtues.” Shine couldn’t shake the feeling that he was like Abe Simpson in The Simpsons: an old man shaking his fist at the cloud, but with no idea what, exactly, he was so anxious and angry about. They kept talking about how they had no skills, no hobbies.

They knew they wanted to do more than just launch a product — they wanted to create it, and control where it went. But they also wanted it to be bigger than a gadget, an app, or a food item.

“We were just trying to be happy,” Shine said. “We were always presenting a good face, and everyone was telling us that we have it so good — but internally there’s just something nagging at you.” They didn’t want to feel the way they’d felt the last decade of their working lives. So they started over.

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

Equal Parts cookware in the Chinatown office.

Outside the door to Pattern’s office, there’s a stack of skateboards; mixed-media posters on the walls bear messages like “What if the future could be more human / Embrace that we’re just sapiens.” A felt message board invites visitors to ENJOY DAILY LIFE. Inside, the office is peak millennial: exposed brick walls, snack cabinets, employees with laptops slouching on couches.

“We were trying to make the knife feel like EVE, from Wall-E,” Shine told me, as we hovered near the office’s display of Equal Parts cookware. “We’re trying to make it approachable. It’s German steel, which is good quality, but there’s one that’s ‘above,’ that’s Damascus steel — but you know, it kinda just looked…Dothraki?” (As in Game of Thrones.) “This one, it has a good center of balance. It’s light.”

He gestured toward the cutting board, which I’d seen in action the night before at the launch party. “It’s solid oak. You can flip it over and use it as a charcuterie board or whatever. It’s like a two-and-one for small spaces.” The cookware is lined with ceramic, which is more stylish than the Teflon-coated stuff most of us buy at Target. It works on convection ovens and standard ones. The cores are aluminum, which makes it more recyclable. It’s all machine washable.

For now, the Equal Parts cookware line is available only in a variety of preset combinations, at price points ranging from $79 for just the EVE-like knife (with coaching included) to $499 for the “complete kitchen.” (For comparison’s sake, an 83-piece kitchen set at Wal-Mart currently retails for $69.97 and includes plates and cutlery. It’s also of significantly lower quality.) This equipment is not cheap, but it’s also not Le Creuset or All-Clad expensive. The imagined customers are people in professional jobs who either want to 1) stock a kitchen for the first time or 2) stock a kitchen like a professional adult for the first time. They’re the sort of people who, instead of stopping in at Williams Sonoma or Target, buy things off Instagram ads — and who responded to the products that Pattern, in its previous life as Gin Lane, specialized in making appealing. An Equal Parts set would be a cool-relative college graduation gift, a generous wedding gift, a “dude deciding he makes enough money to stop eating Easy Mac” gift to himself.

Basically, the brand is marketing to people like Shine. His Instagram account features shots of him sautéing onions and putting together a simple pasta using Equal Parts, proud in the charming manner of a true novice. Cooking never interested him. What did interest him was how Ling talked about it. When Ling’s mom was in the hospital, he’d only speak to her and the rest of his family in the mornings, because of the five-hour time difference between the UK and New York. And that meant there was nothing he could do, at least for his mom, in those hours after work.

“I was like, how do I manage the feelings I’m having?” Ling explained. “That’s when cooking became a very central thing for me, just in terms of being able to relax.”

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

Equal Parts cookware on display at the launch party.

This wasn’t cooking to save money, or to eat healthier, or through a meal-planning service like Blue Apron. It was cooking even when it was ugly, or when it went wrong. It was cooking just to cook. It felt like an antidote, or at the very least, a form of resistance to the feeling that everything you do in your life should be optimized, or monetized, or packaged for social media.

As millennials, “we’ve been trained to do as much as possible, get into the best school possible,” Shine told me. “And that eliminates a lot of ‘unproductive’ free time.” Time spent exploring, goofing off, staring at the wall and listening to music, just hanging out with your own mind — all of that becomes implicitly devalued.

It felt like an antidote, or at the very least, a form of resistance to the feeling that everything you do in your life should be optimized.

“You work on this 18-year-résumé to go this ‘signaling school,’ which your parents, your teachers, your guidance counselor, and everyone else told you that you have to go to, and then you come out 30, 50, 60, 100 thousand dollars–plus in debt,” Shine continued. “And you need to earn a certain amount to pay down your debt, which you might never get rid of, even if you work your entire life. … And that’s how you find yourself at 27, 28, 29, just like I did, and you have no discernible life skills, except knowing how to work.”

Whatever passions you do have, they’re enveloped by work. “Ten, 15 years ago, they started creating these workplaces to promote productivity,” Shine said. “But they made work the place you go to, to hang out and not be productive. So then to finish the expected productivity, you actually have to take it home.” When you can do work anywhere, you feel the compulsion to do it everywhere — and all the time.

“I didn’t skateboard or surf in my twenties,” Shine said. “I didn’t work out. I didn’t travel.” He joked that it took getting a girlfriend from Denmark to actually start having hobbies again, but it’s not really a joke at all. The story is devastatingly familiar: I’m still trying to recover some semblance of the hobbies that, as an Elder Millennial, I’d cultivated before transforming myself into a work robot.

And yes, sure, a millennial might Instagram themselves baking — when they do it once a month. And those who can afford to, “love” to travel often do it for 36 hours at a time, documenting themselves the entire time as people “who love to travel.” What Shine and Ling envisioned was a more holistic change in, well, the pattern of daily life. Cooking, especially given Ling’s experience with it, felt like the place to start.

“We’re trying to be approachable, attainable, regular, routine,” Ling explained. “It’s not saying you have to do it five nights a week. It’s more like, how can we help this become the rhythm of your life?”

“It’s not saying you have to do it five nights a week. It’s more like, how can we help this become the rhythm of your life?” 

They’re trying to cultivate something for millennials that some younger people seem to grasp intuitively: what blogger Venkatesh Rao calls “domestic cozy.” Rao coined the term to describe “an attitude, emerging socioeconomic posture, and aesthetic,” organic to Gen Z, which “finds its best expression in privacy, among friends, rather than in public, among strangers. It prioritizes the needs of the actor rather than the expectations of the spectator. It seeks to predictably control a small, closed environment rather than gamble in a large, open one. It presents a WYSIWYG facade to those granted access rather than performing in the theater of optics.”

Domestic cozy focuses on the cultivation of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, rather than the performance of pleasure. It retreats from the harsh, combative, hyper-political world, rather than engaging it. You can see the manifestations of domestic cozy life all over: in the popularity of Minecraft, in knitting (but not things to sell!), and in a new “inactive wear” company that markets big, pillowy garments to “improve quality of life in the home.”

That’s where Equal Parts fits in: cookware that makes cooking enjoyable for you, personally — nice to use and nice to look at, but not designed with Instagramming in mind. It’s a starter kit, with a low barrier to entry, especially when paired with a cooking coach who communicates with you via text.

When you “onboard” with the service, you answer a bunch of questions: What day do you shop for groceries? What’s your level of skill or ambition? What are your dietary preferences? Then the coach knows when to text, when you need support, how to provide the sort of tips that’ll actually be useful. The coaches aren’t chefs, just people who love to cook — and they’re all boomers, many recruited from cooking schools, from a broad range of backgrounds across the United States. It’s not unlike having a mom-like figure on call to text you tips, only without the baggage of actually texting with your mom.

“We don’t want our coaches to send people recipes,” Ling said. “That’s the antithesis of what we want them to do. They can be like, ‘Hey, what have you got in your kitchen? And then say, ‘Here’s what you could do with what you’ve got, and here’s what you could do if you got one or two extra things.’ Or they’ll send a text that says, ‘Hey, you’re on your way home. You’re feeling tired. Send me a text and tell me how you’re feeling about dinner.’” Those interactions aren’t oriented toward a specific type of meal prep, but getting over mental barriers that keep you from doing things you actually want to do.

Sure, it’s a bougie solution to a bougie problem. A lot of people who are burned out, especially those who aren’t part of the so-called professional class, don’t have the luxury or time to cook for sustenance, let alone fun or relaxation. But one of the things that Pattern is bullish on is that the bougieness doesn’t obviate the problem-ness. You can maintain perspective — you’re not starving, you have a place to live, you have electricity — and also want things to be, or feel, different.

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

The Equal Parts aesthetic in action.

The day before I was set to visit Pattern’s office, I received an email from a youth-trend forecasting company called Cassandra, a division of the global marketing firm Engine. Over the summer, they’d shifted the focus of their quarterly report from “Free Time” to the more pointed “Burnout,” asking questions about how burnout affects daily life and consumer habits among focus groups across the country. The specific findings of the report are behind a paywall, accessible only to brands eager to know how they can begin to pivot to accommodate their customers, and attract new ones, in the months and years to come.

Back in 2015, Cassandra published a similar report focusing on “wellness” — predicting that the new millennial focus would shift, even ahead of the 2016 presidential election, to various elements of what’s become known as “self-care”: in diet, in skincare, in mental health. They’re predicting a similar wave with burnout, which, according to their findings, is already cutting across class, race, and urban/rural/suburban demographics. As Melanie Shreffler, one of Cassandra’s VPs, told me, “Burnout is the green juice of 2019.”

When I told the authors of the report about Pattern, they said that it was “on the tip of the spear” — the sort of brand with which so many others, especially the less nimble ones, would soon find themselves playing a clumsy game of catch-up. But if anti-burnout marketing is poised to become mainstream, brands like Pattern can quickly come to feel exploitative.

After all, our current iteration of capitalism can’t fix the problems that our current iteration of capitalism has wrought. If we’ve learned anything from all the millennial-oriented books on how to unfuck your life, the meditation apps, the organizational apps, and the profusion of $3,000 exercise bikes, it’s that a thing can’t fix what ails both millennials and society as a whole. Maybe Pattern’s pivot to anti-burnout philosophy is just its way of being, once again, perfectly (and profitably) attuned to millennials’ desires.

When I laid out this argument to Shine and Ling, they shook their heads. “I’d rather be accused of being dumb than having malicious intent,” Shine told me. “The way we got to what we got to with Pattern was a form of self-therapy.”

“I’m gonna try and say this in a way that isn’t like, pullquote-y and bad, but I think we found ourselves in a good wave position.”

“Listen,” he continued, the frustration palpable in his voice. “I like surfing. I like waves. Look around and you’ll see pictures of waves everywhere in this office. If you go on Wikipedia and you type in waves, it’s all math. The entire universe is constructed of waves. If you’re surfing, and you’re ahead of the wave, you get toppled over. If your ratios are behind the wave, it just goes underneath you, and you can’t catch it. And I’m gonna try and say this in a way that isn’t like, pullquote-y and bad, but I think we found ourselves in a good wave position.”

The goal for Pattern is not to move fast and break things in order to disrupt cooking — after all, there’s no shortage of direct-to-consumer kitchenware brands already on the market — but to create something meaningful in the long term. “The number one thing is just for us to keep raising awareness,” Shine continued. “And if we can provide solutions, then that’s a bonus. Of course we have to, like, build a sustainable business that makes sense and makes money. That’s gonna take a long time, and we know that. There’s no expectation of, like, a quarterly return. We’re in it for seven to 10 years, minimum.”

Earlier in our conversation, Shine had brought up what he saw as the three pillars of contemporary American society — the three areas where you can affect change: within the community, in politics, and within markets.

“I just keep going back to the fact that I am not a community organizer,” he said. “I am not a politician. I am a goddamn marketer. And I’m good at it! So why shouldn’t I use what I’m good at for what I think will make things one step better, not one step worse?”

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

A participant photographs ravioli-making during a cookware demonstration at the Equal Parts launch party.

Shine’s argument is reminiscent of recent conversations about various presidential candidates on the progressive left: Can a candidate like Elizabeth Warren, who’s open about believing in markets while also advocating for meaningful, systemic moderation of those markets, actually create change? Is antipathy toward capitalism, and true socialist ideals, the only real solution? Or, given the reality of the political and economic realities of the country, is the most productive change made by renovating the existing system?

The team at Pattern understood that if they were going to try and market this sort of from-the-inside change to a mass audience, they needed to reflect it themselves: individually, but also as a company. Because that’s the other reason for the disillusionment with companies that market themselves with a philosophy, from social justice to feminism. When you treat your women employees like garbage, it doesn’t matter how many feminist T-shirts you sell: You’re not a feminist company. When you keep hiring white men for positions of power, invocations of social justice become meaningless.

That means an anti-burnout company can’t be burning out its employees. On the HR side of things at Pattern, that translates to 20 days of PTO, 10 of which are mandatory; completely closing down the office between Christmas and New Year’s; 12 weeks fully-paid leave for primary caregiver leave and 6 weeks to secondary caregivers; flexible scheduling for parents; cultivating a 6 o’clock end to the workday, with Shine and Ling leading by example. Their sacred text is “Pattern’s 10 Simple Steps to Help You Enjoy Daily Life,” which includes “Do one thing at a time,” “Each morning, do something before checking your phone,” “Let your mind wander,” “Take control of your leisure time,” and “Embrace mediocrity.”

An anti-burnout company can’t be burning out its employees.

Every week since launching this summer, the company has oriented itself toward one of those 10 steps; at their weekly meeting, Shine and Ling share their own experiences and failures with each. If an employee shares their personal experience on Slack, they get a raffle ticket for a weekly drawing for, wait for it, a houseplant. When Pattern posted the 10 Simple Steps on its Instagram, the post was “saved” twice as many times as it was shared or liked: proof, Ling says, that it’s maybe, actually, meaningfully useful.

Pattern proclaims that it’s guided by five core values — which, as the company’s website states, “represent our character, our process, and how we push ourselves to be better.” Some of them are easy: hospitality, curiosity, acceptance. But others are a struggle, or at the very least an area for constant improvement. “Responsibility” means considering the impact of their products not only on the people who buy them, but the people who make them — which, in turn, makes the product more expensive, and/or the profit margin smaller. (When I asked if depending on venture capital might eventually put pressure on the team to focus more on profit and less on principles, Shine and Ling told me in an email that their investors “fully support the time and energy we spend everyday on internal culture and making Pattern a great place to work.”)

And then there’s “Equity.” Each Pattern brand will dedicate 1% of its revenue to a local nonprofit organization (for Equal Parts, it’s the Chinatown-based Two Bridges Neighborhood Council). Shine and Ling also foresee themselves working for and collaborating with politicians who aim to address financial inequality. But the staff, at least in its current iteration, is very white — something that, when the first publicity photos of the staff went public, attracted attention. They’re also very international, and hail from a range of economic and educational backgrounds. But for Pattern to meaningful address what “enjoying daily life” might look like for all different sorts of people, they need those sorts of people in the company as well. In other words, there’s still a lot of “equity” work to do.

Shine and Ling are cagey on the exact identity of the next Pattern brand, set to launch in early 2020. It might be something that helps people learn to sew just to sew, but also to make the things you own last longer. Or products to help people do simple handy tasks around the home, not because you want to make it look like a West Elm catalog, but because there’s pleasure in getting something done yourself — rather than looking at the framed piece of art, still on the floor after two years in your apartment, shaming you every morning on your way out the door. The only real stipulations are that it has to make money, and it has to be part of the company’s overall mission to help others “enjoy daily life.”

“I was looking at this Ernst and Young report about how they’re helping people manage their workplace habits better during peak season for accounting,” Ling said. “And I was thinking, why does that feel like it’s really going to make a difference? You know, Ernst and Young, they’re a great company, I’m sure. But not everything about their being is going to catalyze that change. Everything about their being is going towards whatever their mission statement is — like, making sure people have good accounting practices, or whatever. Which is why I think you need companies like Pattern at the center of things like this — to set the standard that we will drag other people to.”

That’s Pattern’s answer to the critique that cookware won’t fix burnout — especially cookware at a price point that’s only available to a particular type of consumer. The cookware isn’t really the point. The overarching Pattern brand, and what it represents, is the point. In her newsletter write-up of Pattern’s launch, marketing analyst Emily Singer pinpointed this exact tension: “I hope that [Pattern] finds way for people who are not customers to engage with the brand,” she wrote. “Its message is meaningful and universally applicable. It would be a shame if the only way to access it was through a transaction.”

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

Camille Baldwin prepares avocados at Pattern’s offices.

At precisely 5 p.m. on the day of my visit to Pattern’s office, the sound of jazz began to filter into the conference room where we were finishing our interview. The rest of the team began to slowly transition from their workplace postures: Some started pouring a low-alcohol aperitif, previously launched by Gin Lane, that’s marketed toward people who wanted to be social but not get wasted. Camille, pregnant in overalls, peeled an unending supply of avocados on the Equal Parts cutting board using the Equal Parts knife. (When I tried to get in touch with a few follow-up questions for her this month, she’d just given birth — and was really and truly off email.)

Everyone at Pattern told me they loved working there — what else would they tell a journalist covering their newly launched company? But they offered convincing testimonies, and not just from the leadership suite: One employee had worked for a startup “industry disrupter” with ads currently blanketing the New York subway; the management and work-life balance was so toxic that Pattern’s philosophy and policy still felt mildly shocking. A new employee, on the job for just three months, was amazed the office actually cleared out at 6 pm. The mom of a toddler twirling around in an office chair told me that her daughter’s presence in the office at that moment is indicative of the Pattern culture. There’s no compunction to pretend that children have no effect on your life, your schedule, or the number of days you have to work from home. Having a kid doesn’t make you a worse worker, or a less attentive one. It just makes you a parent.

Gabriela Herman for BuzzFeed News

A child of a Pattern employee during an all-company dinner in the office.

I walked home to my hotel that night in the rain, flicking at my phone, barely avoiding the traffic on Bowery. Every time I come back to New York, so, too, do all of my worst burnout habits. I stayed up too late scrolling Instagram; I woke up too early; I never drank enough water. The year before, I’d stumbled around the city after working so hard, and flying so much, that I gave myself a case of vertigo that lasted for 10 days.

This time, I tried to be better. I’d gone to SoulCycle for the first time, thinking it might center me. I left feeling mostly just wet. I ate the same Sweetgreen salad for two meals a row. They tasted like robot food, like nothing at all. I realized, when I got home, that I’d left my planner in the Pattern conference room. I emailed in a panic: “It’s the only thing keeping my life together.” They sent it to me the next day, and I opened the package and began to stroke it like it was a lost sacred artifact.

How can we actually change the patterns of our lives — in a way that accommodates their current complexities without capitulating to them? 

What holds your life together? What keeps us going? What if it were a daily practice instead of a planner? How can we actually change the patterns of our lives — in a way that accommodates their current complexities without capitulating to them?

When I flew home to Montana, there was an email from Shine waiting. He rarely talked about his childhood in a public way, he said, and our conversation had loosened some threads he wanted to tie back together. Pattern is, in many ways, a way to redo so much of what he missed: “Making brands to teach myself and people around me the life skills I think so many of us missed, trying to make seeking balance cool, being present cool, and working like a dog to survive not as cool.”

That circles back to Shine’s understanding of how change actually happens: Community leaders advocate. Politicians draft and pass regulations and legislation. And the market helps shape the way the public feels and thinks: They make things seem cool and uncool, defensible and indefensible, right and wrong, the future and the past.

Pattern’s Equal Parts brand might, at best, make it cooler to cook for cooking’s sake — might help create personal change. But there’s also a chance that Pattern, alongside other anti-burnout, pro-sustainability industry leaders like Patagonia, might make their vision of corporate culture cool. And if they can change the way other companies conceive of work, and prove that their model creates a better outcome for everyone involved — that won’t bring down the system, but it has the potential to help make living in it more bearable.

I typed that sentence and impulsively opened Instagram. Whoever is running Pattern’s Instagram account has just liked a photo of my dog. The sun is bright outside the window, the sky the clearest October blue. In a few minutes, I’ll close the laptop, and forget my phone, and walk out the front door and into the woods along the creek, with nothing to listen to and nowhere to be.

Later, I’ll come home and make something for dinner that’s ugly but tastes good. It won’t be with Equal Parts cookware, but I don’t think Shine and Ling would mind. I’ll have a thought, and I won’t tweet it. I’ll take a picture, and I won’t post it. I’ll open a book, and I’ll read it. And I’ll tell everyone I know: Did you hear the good news? It’s cool, these days, to enjoy daily life.●

Sahred From Source link Business

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A Week Inside WeLive, the Utopian Apartment Complex That Wants to Disrupt City Living

Katelyn Perry

WeWork is branching out into housing, but can it actually change the way we live?

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re just slightly more alone than everyone else? Like when you’re scrolling through Instagram, and you get that sinking sensation that you’re missing out on some kind of deep human fulfillment? It’s not a specific pang of FOMO; it’s a broader suspicion that your social life would be somehow richer, more populated with actual humans, with fewer nights eating takeout and watching Netflix—if only something changed.

Well, that’s the feeling the “co-living” start-up WeLive believes it has devised the cure for. Or at least that was my takeaway the first time I found myself watching GIFs of happy millennials hugging one another and laughing on its website. WeLive is functionally an apartment building, but with all the amenities listed on the standard Silicon Valley rider. It runs on a very modern set of principles in the urban housing market: The units come fully furnished; there’s a laundry room and a yoga studio. But more, there are the things you might ordinarily need to leave your apartment for—an espresso bar and trendy eateries and happy hours. Most critically, WeLive comes stocked with neighbors who intend to become your real-life human friends. This one building, your home, has everything you could ever need, is the idea, including a built-in community.

From afar, WeLive seemed to be one part social experiment, one part endless summer. It was a market-savvy effort to solve the digital-age loneliness that registers as a low-level yet omnipresent white noise in the lives of young urbanites.

The company has positioned itself as a “physical social network”—an IRL antidote to the dislocation caused by doing so much socializing online instead of in person. WeLive wanted to tackle what sociologist Marc Dunkelman, author of The Vanishing Neighbor, calls the “crisis of urban anonymity.” Dunkelman thinks that people living in cities have lost their sense of community. That people shouldn’t accept as a fact of life that they share a roof with total strangers and never, over the course of months or years, learn more than a name and some basic information—if that even.

WeLive’s pitch dovetailed effectively with this theoretical problem among millennials. That’s why its core idea—What if you really knew your neighbors?—held so much appeal to me. WeLive’s co-founder, Miguel McKelvey, thinks WeLive could provide the physical context for community building that we’ve been lacking. “Religion is no longer a connection point for most people,” he told me. “Our communities were built on coming together in physical locations once a week or twice a week. These institutions have dissipated.” WeLive, consequently, was seeking to fill that void.

Last spring, I couldn’t stop thinking about WeLive. I recognized the appeal in my own life, knowing as I did that the further I climbed into adulthood, the fewer of my friends I saw in person. Half-hearted social-media use had become the default way to keep up with people as professional demands and significant others crowded out the abundant and untethered time of our early 20s. I wasn’t wallowing in aching solitude, but I couldn’t help feeling more alienated the deeper we dug into our phones, watching one another live our best lives on highly edited Instagram feeds.

Something about that idea and the solution that WeLive provided—the social engineering of its bold experiment—seemed radical and appealing, or at least cynically (and smartly, from a business standpoint) tapped into the insecurities of so many people my age. Sure, the incessant networking—while doing laundry or riding the elevator—and the dominance of a social scene fueled by free alcohol might instill some ennui of its own after a while. But I was willing to accept neighbors like these as the cost of living in a true millennial utopia.

So last spring I did what anyone as intrigued and terrified by the idea of “co-living” might do: I packed a bag, rented a room, and moved in.

You can show up to your apartment, as the WeLive people like to emphasize, "with just a suitcase." It comes pre-stocked with books and tchotchkes.

WeWork/Lauren Kallen

Amenity-wise, the place was pretty sweet. The Studio+ at the 110 Wall Street location that I booked for ten days—which usually costs $3,520 a month, a rate higher than StreetEasy’s median rent for studios in the financial district (insane as that is)—was set up with everything I could think of. It had Wi-Fi, pots and pans, bedsheets, towels, toiletries, and even books on the shelves (Joe Gould’s Teeth—a book about a homeless man—struck me as a weird choice). The Studio+ was a bit of a narrow corridor, yes, but personal space in the building was sacrificed in favor of shared luxury spaces: high-quality kitchens where guests are encouraged to cook, a cozy wood-paneled bar, a terrace with two hot tubs, a workout studio, a laundry room with an arcade and Ping-Pong table, a cocktail bar in the basement, and a lobby with distressed couches and a barista making complimentary cortados. Monthly cleanings were included. Cable packages were taken care of. Downstairs was an Honesty Market stocked with essentials if you ran out of TP in the middle of the night or got a hankering for Ben & Jerry’s. I thought it was remarkable how much trust they gave “members,” until I noticed a security camera above the payment iPad, watching closely.

Then there were the people. Early on, I couldn’t quite tell if they were being genuinely friendly or if they felt compelled to enthusiastically playact the role of “neighbor from the future.” On my first night, I wandered down to the laundry room—the de facto equivalent of the common room at Hogwarts—and played Big Buck Hunter on a vintage arcade terminal. There I met and chatted with an attractive young Parsons School of Design student and a chiseled banker from the UK who were both actually doing laundry. I poured myself a beer from the keg while they went on about how great WeLive was and how much I would like it. If there was a strain of earnestness to the whole exchange—a sense that I’d agreed to sleep in a tower where everyone was drinking the citrus-infused Kool-Aid and wearing matching T-shirts with the “Live Better Together” slogan tagged on the front—it didn’t bother me. At least not at first.

The vibe was carefully curated. WeLive is, after all, an offshoot of co-working behemoth WeWork, reportedly the third-biggest start-up in the U.S., with a $20 billion valuation. In just eight years it opened more than 200 locations in 20 countries. WeWork is known for building a “culture” of its own, in part by plying employees who stay late with free drinks and frequent parties. “They want it to be your life,” one former WeWork employee told me. “Everyone there is under 30, hot, and down to party.”

WeLive is perfect for a German consultant on a three-month project–but it’s expensive. WeWork Corp.

It’s clear WeLive has imported some of that vibe to reach a similar target demographic. “People obviously compare it to a college dorm,” a member and WeWork employee named Jordan Niemeyer said. I’d been living at WeLive for a few days at this point—drinking as many free cortados and beers as I could—when I met Jordan at a party on the terrace. “But show me a college dorm like this,” he said. “I wanna go there.”

As if on cue, someone handed Jordan an open bottle of champagne. He was a thirty-something former hedge-funder who’d lived at WeLive’s Wall Street location since it opened for beta testing in 2016, and he quickly became, in my eyes, the WeLive spirit animal. Before I’d even taken a free yoga class I could tell that the place was a haven for people who, as they get into their late 20s and early 30s, didn’t want to give up the kinetic, optimism-fueled party culture of being young in a city. Alongside that crowd, though, were some young families, some students still in college, even a few retirees eager to be closer to the action. The breakdown skewed male and white, but not in a super discouraging way. Lots of skin tones and nationalities were represented.

But the funny part about living inside a techno-utopia is that most of the time you’re actually just doing regular stuff. Sleeping. Scrambling to get out the door in the morning. Maybe throwing together a meal at night (but more often ordering takeout) and, yes, watching Netflix. The one thing that makes it completely different from every other apartment building I’ve seen: WeLive has its own internal app on which members can post announcements or complaints on something called the Buzz page. (“Anyone have a screwdriver and hammer that my roommates can borrow?”) It’s part roommate text thread, part coffee-shop corkboard, but the effect is that even when you leave the building, you have a digital connection tethering you to it. The app, like the meme posters adorning the walls (“Home Is Where the WiFi Is”) and all the WeLive messaging in general, enforced the tone of the place—a superficial sense of humor dressed up in playful graphic art that belied a deeper earnestness and the technocratic kernel at the heart of the business. I’d seen this kind of start-up-y subterfuge parodied on HBO’s Silicon Valley, but I’d never lived inside of it.

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After I’d settled into a routine at my new apartment, I decided it was time to actually leave the building and head uptown to the headquarters to meet one of the founders. Miguel McKelvey looks like a bear that got really into CrossFit, tall and bearded, with a warm, disarming disposition underneath all the tech jargon. I went in still under the impression that WeLive was a trial balloon, sent up to check the weather on this new housing trend called co-living. It had competition in that field. A mess of other start-ups are jostling to corner that market—like Ollie’s all-inclusive tower in Manhattan, Common’s intentional living in various Brooklyn brownstones, and Nook’s human-storage facility in Oakland. But WeLive was convinced, because of existing relationships with building owners around the world, that it had the upper hand.

The typical resident, McKelvey says, is an “entrepreneur looking for a noncommittal way to try out whatever new project he or she is working on and not have to sign a lease.” WeLive, McKelvey feels, is perfect for the itinerant tech worker of this new borderless economy. But co-living was only part of the story for him. As we started discussing WeWork’s longer-term ambitions—expansion into more cities (it already has D.C.; Seattle is next) but also into other industries like education and fitness—I realized that I’d underestimated the extent of what the company was pursuing. WeLive was just one piece in a much larger play.

“When the idea of ‘We’ came in,” McKelvey told me, “it started as a ‘WeBlank: WeWork, WeLive, WeSleep, WeEat.’ That was the premise at the very start. Our aspiration is to be a holistic support system or lifestyle solution for people who are interested in being open and connected.”

A “holistic support system”—frighteningly Digital Age as that sounds—is the total infrastructure of a human life. Here’s a helpful thought experiment for conceptualizing the grand scheme: What if a single company sanded off all the hard edges in life? What if you never had to search for an apartment on Craigslist again? What if you never had to wait for the cable guy, either? Or find a health-care plan on the open exchange? What if it was all just…there? You join the global network, and anywhere you go there are hardwood floors, good coffee, fast Wi-Fi, and, most important, like-minded friendly people interested in engaging and working alongside you. The things people used to have to piece together themselves (apartment, office, insurance, gym membership) would now be packaged and delivered by one provider. A few months after McKelvey and I talked, WeWork opened a fitness and wellness space called Rise by We. Later it announced plans to open elementary schools for young entrepreneurs. It was all happening.

Soon you’ll be able to “feel like you’re staying within your community, within the network, wherever you are,” McKelvey said. “It never feels like it’s holding you back. It’s just always there. It always works.”

The WeThing, then, was a globe-spanning network of cocoons, all sharing the positive vibes of productivity, a frictionless existence where you never have to deal with practical inconveniences or shortages of friends or the feeling of loneliness. And where everyone wears the same T-shirt.

"Sometimes it just feels good to succumb to the niceties and convenience. Even if, in the back of your mind, you know you’re ceding something valuable."

The majority of start-ups these days make a business out of solving one very specific problem. WeWork belongs to the much smaller and potentially more lucrative class of businesses trying to solve literally every problem they can, the way that Amazon will sell you a new 4K television and, if you subscribe to Prime, brand-new content to watch on it.

“When we imagine a future for both WeWork and WeLive and the other things that we’re doing, it really is about unlocking people,” McKelvey told me. In tech-speak, that means it’s setting out on a conquest of Napoleonic scale for a monopoly over the entire breadth of its customers’ primary needs. In theory, I’m repulsed by the idea of being “unlocked” in any fashion, and yet I’m clearly a total sucker for it, too—as proven by the fact that I couldn’t resist moving in, that I gleefully partook of the free coffee and beer, and that when they screened a Star Wars marathon in the lobby, I thought about skipping work. The most successful businesses know what we want and how to give it to us. And sometimes it just feels good to succumb to the niceties and convenience. Even if, in the back of your mind, you know you’re ceding something valuable.

Intellectually, I like the idea of living a life with minimal possessions, moving constantly between cities, confident that I’ll have a welcoming network wherever I go (as long as I don’t stray too far). It’s refreshingly un-American—not focusing all your energy toward owning your own castle. And it plays into a new aspirational aesthetic that values materialism less and focuses instead on experiences, travel, wellness, and professional fulfillment. Of course that’s appealing. Who wants to wait for the cable guy? Or wait out a lease when you’re ready to move?

Happy hours hosted in the Whiskey Bar are a good way to get to know your neighbors. Katelyn Perry

But like the perma-freelance future we’re all racing toward, WeLive gives me this sinking feeling that what I’m giving up in security and commitment, I’m not necessarily getting back in freedom. Take it to its logical conclusion: At some point, the youthful gig-economy worker of tomorrow is going to have babies, and she’s going to need to put them in a WeDayCare while she pursues her latest consulting job. Pretty soon our offspring will be learning, living, working, and dying all inside one monolithic company: the many-tentacled WeOctopus. And that gives me the creeps.

Once I was keyed into this bigger game, I saw everything WeLive did through a different lens. It’s a social experiment on a scale we haven’t really seen before, except maybe in the Israeli kibbutz, in which WeLive’s other co-founder, Adam Neumann, was raised. The crucial distinction, though, and the reason the WeThing isn’t a real “utopia” per se, is that it asks nothing of its members by way of shared responsibility or decision-making. It’s purely transactional. You just pay in, show up, enjoy the perks, and go about your merry way. In the end, that capitalist DNA might be the thing that gives it the legs to last longer than, say, the hippie communes of the ’60s.

Then again, it’s also possible that real utopian shit might grow in the artificial setup. I was doing laundry one night and lost track of time playing Big Buck Hunter. When I turned around, a dude my age was folding my laundry for me because, he claimed, he needed to use the dryer and he didn’t want anyone to abscond with my clothing. That kind of sappy altruism was, at first blush, borderline offensive to the standoffish, self-reliant ethos I’d picked up while living in New York City. But after we started talking, I could tell it came naturally to this guy, who, despite living in New York, had clearly not yet adopted its notoriously callous ways. “People think WeLive is a bunch of entitled millennials who want someone to clean their room,” he said. “But it’s not.”

Living at WeLive was relatively conflict-free. The biggest scandal to date on the internal app’s Buzz page was about the smell of marijuana, a whiff of which I’d caught seeping through the vent in my bathroom. The community manager, who plays a tricky hybrid role of landlord, dormitory R.A., and neighbor, reminded everyone that smoking in units was grounds for eviction. Members chimed in to add their weed-related complaints. Others got defensive. One guy responded: “This is New York.” Another said simply: “Grow up or get out.”

There’s an implicit promise that all WeLive members exist on the same chill frequency. Katelyn Perry

Tiffs like that don’t really detract from the experience, members told me. They certainly don’t stop WeLive from gearing up for expansion—albeit at a slower pace than it had initially hoped. The company just announced that the third WeLive will open, in Seattle in 2020, with 36 floors of living and working space. WeWork hired an executive from Starwood to run the WeLive business, and there are rumors that it has its sights set on London next. The broader WeWork company just got a $4.4 billion investment from the nearly $100 billion Vision Fund run by Japan’s SoftBank.

As for whether WeLive can help with the increasing loneliness of my generation, it’s still too early to tell. We seem to socialize better online than in person, and we’re definitely worse, at least statistically, at the stuff young people used to do—like have sex and not live with their parents. Silicon Valley’s inclination is to try to solve those problems by reaching in and re-engineering our social lives. But even if it can get you to a kegger, WeLive can’t actually make your friends for you. The same way Tinder can only get you into the same room as a potential mate—you still have to do the talking.

Ironically, the most organic social incident I witnessed while in residence at WeLive was something that happens at every building in the city—a fire alarm. One warm night in late April, everyone had to evacuate the building. We all milled around outside the lobby, suspended between the reassuring idea that it wasn’t a real fire and the sneaking possibility that it might be. A young mother of two stood away from the fire trucks, watching her kids run around. She explained with a conspiratorial look in her eye that she hoped that the alarm was caused by someone smoking pot. That way they would finally have a culprit for the persistent smell. She was worried about her kids, and she thought this might bring about stricter enforcement.

It’s an example of one of the many basic things WeLive will need to solve as it expands around the world: families with young children and twentysomethings who wish they were still in college, attempting to live side by side, as one. Which is, of course, a problem familiar to any apartment building in any neighborhood in America, ever.

"And what, really, is the end goal of all that streamlining, anyway? What do you do with all the time you’re not “wasting” anymore? Work on your app? E-mail till you fall asleep?"

A bigger problem might be that there’s something dehumanizing at the core of what WeLive encourages—at the center of this whole society-wide movement toward maximum performance. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not as taken with optimization as the Soylent-guzzling, fitness-tracking set. For instance, I’d like to pick out my own wall art and books. And I don’t mind running out to the store, because I enjoy going outside. And what, really, is the end goal of all that streamlining, anyway? What do you do with all the time you’re not “wasting” anymore? Work on your app? E-mail till you fall asleep?

After I moved out, WeLive kept evolving and I burrowed back into my own, non-utopian life. Six months later, I was unexpectedly back on the New York City housing market after a sudden breakup. I find it telling that it didn’t once cross my mind to return to WeLive. It’s not WeLive’s fault, necessarily. The apartments there are nice enough, if a bit pricey. The beer is good and the coffee is strong. It’s probably exactly what a lot of folks are looking for. But I’m reminded of the old Groucho Marx line, the one about never joining a club that would have you as a member. WeLive is great—as long as you don’t mind becoming the kind of person who hangs out at a WeLive.

Benjy Hansen-Bundy is a GQ assistant editor.

This story originally appeared in the March 2018 issue with the title "Can the WeLive Experiment Actually Change the Way We Live?"

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[junker-town]

Soccer’s ugly sexism is keeping women from coaching the beautiful game

by Stephanie Yang | June 27, 2017

Amanda Cromwell is one of the most well-known names in women’s collegiate soccer. But, she says, you wouldn’t know it from the way male NCAA referees have treated her.

“The refs go to my male assistant coach before the game assuming he’s the head coach,” Cromwell says. “Still now. Last year. After winning a national championship and everything, the refs will go to the male assistant or go to the male on the staff.”

At 47 years old, Cromwell has been a head coach longer than some of her UCLA women’s soccer players have been alive. She’s got 14 NCAA tournament appearances and a D-I championship under her belt.

“I had a game in Memphis years ago,” Cromwell went on. “Fifteen minutes into the game there was a bad call, and I dropped the F-bomb and the ref came over. The center ref didn’t even hear it. The sideline guy was going crazy ... The center comes over and gives me a straight red 15 minutes into the game. Meanwhile the other coach ... he’s like Mister F-bomb. My players afterwards told me, that coach was cussing the whole game and didn’t even get a yellow. It’s like oh, ‘Don’t yell at me missy,’ and come over with their card or something. It’s like a blow to their ego that a female coach is yelling at them.”

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

The soccer landscape in the United States is expanding for female players. There’s a burgeoning youth system, including a new U.S. Soccer developmental academy, a top-flight women’s professional league that finally beat the three-year lifespan of its predecessors, the growing prominence of NCAA soccer, and of course, the ballooning popularity of the senior national program. But that growth is not equally reflected in coaching opportunities for women. Although the U.S. Women’s National Team has a female head coach, men dominate the coaching ranks at every other level of the sport.

Of the 10 teams in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), only one team — the Seattle Reign — has a female head coach. Out of the top 50 ranked D-I women’s programs in 2016, 14 had female head coaches. In 2015, across all divisions, 338 women’s soccer programs out of 1,047 had female head coaches. The National Soccer Coaches Association of America has a membership of over 30,000, but only 15 percent are female. In USSF’s recent pro A license course, this picture from its pilot course of all men, mostly white, pretty much speaks for itself. The sequel wasn’t much better; out of 17 participants, only one was a woman: USWNT head coach Jill Ellis.

Participation rates of girls in soccer from youth to college level have been robust for the past 10 years, showing that a large pool of interested, talented players who are educated on the basics does exist. According to U.S. Youth Soccer, the gender breakdown of 3.14 million registered players in 2008 was 52 percent boys and 48 percent girls. That same year, 23,357 women and 21,601 men participated in NCAA soccer across all divisions.

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

Soccer is growing, but not for everyone, and that’s a problem. The ugly truth of the beautiful game is that bias, cultural expectation, and lack of opportunity keep it out of the hands of women who want to help it flourish.

“Nothing’s going to change unless we keep talking about it,” Cromwell says. “That’s how years and years of inequality and social injustice happen and people are silent. You’ve got to talk about it. You have to bring things to the forefront.”

Long before Lori Chalupny was a gold medalist and a two-time World Cup participant for the USWNT, she started out as a 5-year-old whose abject shyness disappeared on the pitch playing against boys. Chalupny rose through the U.S. Soccer system to earn 106 caps and seven years of professional playing experience. Now the soccer lifer says her coaching career, unlike her playing days, has been mostly self-guided.

Photo by Brian Bahr/Getty Images

Chalupny is currently an assistant coach at D-II Maryville University, where she will assume head coach duties after the 2017 season. But even with a USSF class B license, the path she has taken toward becoming a head coach has been crawled at a measured pace, dictated in part by her limited resources.

“[The USSF] B license itself was pretty costly,” Chalupny says. “And it’s a 10-day course, so you have to get a hotel for 10 days and fly out to California. It was a pretty costly endeavor, but definitely worth it.”

Most coaches get certified through the National Soccer Coaches Association of America or U.S. Soccer, which develops coaches through an eight-level training progression from USSF F license (which anyone over 16 can complete online for $25) all the way up to the Pro license (only open to current MLS, NWSL, NASL, USL, or U.S. National Team coaching staff). At every stop, the requirements expand into clinics with rising costs — $1,000 for a Class C license; $4,000 for Class A — both in terms of time and money.

Photo by Kim Klement/Getty Images

Any player with five years’ playing experience “on a FIFA recognized 1st Division professional team,” can go straight to the Class B, but not all players are aware of that option. Chalupny says she didn’t know about the option until she began researching it herself. “Nobody ever told me that when I was researching getting my license,” she says. “I stumbled across a little asterisk that said that was the case. I think we have to make sure that people know that.”

Non-pros pour thousands of dollars in fees, travel costs, and missed work into getting licensed. “Very few of us can afford to be a club coach full time, and so you’re taking time off your own work schedule and doing vacation to go do this,” says Angela Harrison, who has been coaching club soccer in Portland for 20 years and is licensed through the NSCAA.

Sharolta Nonen is the new head coach of women’s soccer at Florida International University and a former Canadian international with 10 years of national team experience. She has a USSF C license. “I was actually in a class that had quite a few females,” says Nonen, but “quite a few” women wasn’t very many at all. “I believe there were five of us. Which, for us, we were amazed that there were that many and super excited. So it was probably five out of 40 or 50 men ... and we were all amazed that there were that many of us.”

“That was without doubt the hardest thing, the most uncomfortable thing about the B license,” Chalupny says. “Now I did it, fortunately, with two other friends of mine that I played with, so there were three of us in the course with, what, 25 guys. It is a little bit intimidating.”

It wasn’t always this hard for women to break into soccer coaching. Perhaps one of the factors that most impacted the number of female coaches was Title IX, the landmark 1972 education amendment that decreed that federally funded institutions cannot discriminate on the basis of sex. Athletic programs had to provide equitable opportunities for athletic participation to their male and female students, including funding coaching staffs equally. The infusion of money into women’s sports caused a boom. According to The New York Times, in the year before Title IX was enacted, about 310,000 female athletes played high school and college sports. By 2012, there were more than 3.37 million.

As women’s programs began to grow in support and prestige after Title IX, men found coaching jobs more and more attractive. In 1972, women coached 90 percent of women’s teams. By 2012, that figure was down to 43 percent and hasn’t budged much since. Women didn’t cross over in equal measure: Only 3 percent of men’s teams are coached by women.

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

Dr. Nicole LaVoi, Co-Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, gave a presentation on women coaches in soccer at the 2017 NSCAA convention, in which she discussed several of the reasons for bias in hiring.

Sparse media coverage conditions the public to associate sports with men. People in charge of hiring tend to hire people like themselves in what Dr. LaVoi calls “homologous reproduction.” And someone may simply have preconceived ideas about hiring women (or, just as problematic, no ideas about hiring women because the concept has not occurred to them).

Many women are simply made to feel like outsiders in their sport by the men in charge. “I can’t tell you how many situations I’ve been in,” Harrison says, “that have been super uncomfortable, where as a woman I’m with maybe one other woman but like 10 guys, and you feel like ‘I got to kind of keep up with these guys’ and you’re going out and you feel like you have to drink or you feel like you have to listen to these terrible misogynistic jokes and things like that because you have to be part of a network.”

Who are the federation board members, the college athletic directors, the team managers and owners, the club directors? Those responsible for hiring head coaches overwhelmingly tend to be men, and men tend to hire other men.

Nonen says she has definitely seen men get jobs she knew she was qualified for. “I’m fortunate because of my playing days I know a lot of not only former and current great players, but also great coaches,” she says. “So I’d ask my friends that were head coaches, what are the administrators looking for? What do they want? If they don’t want [me], what I see as professionalism and experience and all this kind of stuff, what do they want? And they all had the same answer: Nobody knows.

“One of the things that I believe is just that we don’t have enough representation at the administrative side,” Nonen says. “And there aren’t as many women that are ADs and therefore we’re not hiring as many female coaches.”

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

Men have better, more established networks in other male coaches, giving them the edge in mentoring and job placement. Without an obvious route in, aspiring female coaches have difficulty picturing themselves being able to break into the boys’ club, even when they’re as qualified as male applicants, as U.S. Soccer Women’s Technical Director April Heinrichs can attest.

Heinrichs was a two-time National Player of the Year at North Carolina and one of the first USWNT members. She captained the team that won the first-ever women’s World Cup in 1991 and coached the USWNT to silver (in 2000) and gold (2004) Olympic medals. When she scans the candidates for jobs within the U.S. program, she sees this discrepancy play out.

“[Women are] more confident on the surface, but when you scratch sort of a little bit below, there’s a lot of self-doubt,” Heinrichs says. “Men don’t have that doubt. They’re missing four qualifications; they still think they’re the best applicant for the job. I don’t try to be funny there; I literally have read applications where a guy has not coached one day in women’s soccer and they feel like he can translate and coach women easily. Or he’s never coached internationally, ever, at any level, and he feels like he could coach a youth national team program.”

Once women get their foot in the door, advancement can be just as difficult, at any level, as entry.

“What tends to happen [in youth clubs],” Harrison says, “is either they give up control and let a woman coach a team and maybe the results aren’t there right away, and so they get impatient and pull them off, or a woman starts to have a little bit of success with a team and pushes them up into a little bit of a higher level, and now the men in the club come in and take the team, because there’s a little bit more prestige in that team.”

The prestige that Harrison mentions is especially prevalent in the U15 and U16 age groups — kids who are getting scouted for college. Coaches in these age groups want to both impress scouts and make their own connections for future jobs.

At the pro level, women get yanked when the results aren’t there, while male coaches get more leeway. Lisa Cole was head coach of the Boston Breakers in 2013 but was unceremoniously fired after about eight months on the job. The Breakers finished fifth that year, one spot out of playoff contention. Yet her replacement, Tom Durkin, spent two years with the Breakers. His team finished eighth out of nine teams in his first year, then dead last in his second. Randy Waldrum of the Houston Dash finished ninth, fifth, and eighth out of 10 over three seasons. Waldrum was only fired when he went 2-5-0 in 2017.

“I know women who have gotten out of coaching because they can see that all they’re going to be given are the younger teams or the very oldest teams and not given the chance to develop a team through the middle part of the age groups,” Harrison says, meaning the prestigious college-scouted teams. Women simply aren’t given the same chances to succeed or fail as men.

Family is a career hurdle for women more often than men because the expectation of child-rearing is largely placed on mothers in American society. In a 2008 NCAA survey, 73 percent of female coaches agreed with the statement that “careers in athletics conflict with family duties,” and 58 percent of them said family commitments were the main reason women decide to leave careers in coaching.

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

Female head coaches with young children are not the norm, but former USWNT player Marci Jobson has four children under 7 years old. She was head coach at Baylor but transitioned to volunteer assistant coach to spend more time with her children, with her husband assuming the head coach role in her place. For Jobson, the extreme time commitment of being a head coach forced her into tough choices. “You have to make the decision of traveling all the time,” Jobson says. ”If you’re not traveling, somebody else is traveling. Some other program is going to get that recruit.”

According to Jobson, Baylor’s support allowed her to keep working in the program. “My children have come on the road at different times ... they’ve allowed me that freedom at times to do that. It’s not a big deal if I have a sick kid and I have to bring them up to the office for a day or I maybe can’t get a babysitter or something like that. They’re very flexible and supportive in that facet.”

Heinrichs mentioned another problem with coach retention that ties into family: fatigue. “I have found unfortunately that a lot of women step away from coaching around 40 years of age,” she says. “I think that 40 years of age is kind of a threshold for a lot of women. If they decide to have children, they’ve done it up until they actually have kids and now their kids are starting to play soccer and starting to be that soccer mom. I think if you decide to not have kids, then it’s just fatigue from saying yes to everything because you felt like you had to say yes to everything.”

Jobson was aware that what was provided at Baylor isn’t necessarily the case for all universities, and that, depending on the timing of a pregnancy, it can be logistically difficult to take a true maternity leave. “You got to keep getting your team better, you got to keep improving things, you got to keep your recruiting, all those things. So it’s really hard to just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to take two months off and kick back,’” she points out.

For all the problems that exist in the hiring and promotion of female coaches, they’re worse for black female coaches. There aren’t many women in the game at the highest levels as players, coaches, owners, or administrators, and that problem is even more acute for women of color. A 2015 NCAA report said that “ethnic minority females,” not just black women, accounted for less than 7 percent of administrators and coaches across all three divisions. According to NCAA demographic data, in the 2015-16 season, 4.5 percent of all NCAA female soccer players were black, making low minority participation in the sport a continuing problem across all levels.

The high price point of participating in elite soccer contributes to the dearth. But as players are more likely to grow up to be volunteers, assistant coaches, or grad assistants before they become head coaches themselves, that scarcity means the pool for black female coaches is quite limited.

Former USWNT starting goalkeeper Briana Scurry was the most visible black player during the ’90s runs, which ignited grassroots soccer participation. She made the save before that Brandi Chastain penalty kick that won the 1999 World Cup and was a founding player in WUSA, America’s first professional women’s soccer league.

Photo by David Madison/Getty Images

The seeds that Scurry herself planted during her playing career from 1994 to 2008 have only now come to fruition, as the girls who saw her play are now professional players in their own right. Scurry helped lead the way for increased numbers of black women in the national team pool, among them Christen Press, Crystal Dunn, Mallory Pugh, Lynn Williams, Jess McDonald, and Casey Short.

“I’m disappointed at how long it took for more African-American young women to feel like soccer was an option for them,” Scurry says. “These things do take time, and right now you’re taking a snapshot and you’re seeing some change occur right before your eyes, but you’re not going to see a whole lot of African-American women coaching soccer at the highest collegiate levels for another five or 10 years, maybe longer.”

The lack of access for black women is compounded by a lack of outreach. “I don’t think that USSF or high-level programs are particularly trying to increase diversity within the game,” says Kia McNeill, head coach of women’s soccer at Brown. “I have seen no real evidence of that, and I continue to see a lack of diversity in soccer at the highest level. I think that you are starting to see more minorities in the game these days because the game itself is growing and there is a lot more exposure around it.”

That 2015 NCAA study reinforces the importance of visibility. The No. 1 response when asked why more “ethnic minority women” weren’t in leadership positions: “lack of ethnic minority women in leadership roles.” You cannot be what you cannot see.

“I think that right now there are just so few of us that are even looking at this as a possible career path,” Nonen says, emphasizing the importance of visible diversity. “When I’m recruiting kids now, if they’re black kids, they say, ‘Oh, Sydney Leroux.’ That’s their favorite player. They know Sydney Leroux. She’s the only one. Older players might remember Bri Scurry still. But younger players, they see Sydney Leroux and decide they want to be like Sydney Leroux.”

The rise of future Lerouxs might be more attributable to the growing black middle class than to soccer programs making their ranks easier to access, a fact that Scurry also noted. But with the attrition rate for female coaching candidates already high, the list of high-level black female coaches who make it from player to coach is embarrassingly short.

The women surveyed in that 2015 NCAA report agreed that perceived bias in hiring prevents some women of color from applying to jobs in the first place. Only 19 percent of “ethnic female respondents” agreed with the statement: “The most qualified applicants are being hired in athletics regardless of race/ethnicity”; 18 percent agreed with “the most qualified applicants are being hired in athletics regardless of gender.”

Nonen described attending a Alliance of Women’s Coaches meeting, with roughly 100 women present. “It was a sort of the same makeup in the coaches as it was in the administrators, where of those hundred, there were maybe 10 of us that are black.”

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

As Scurry has pointed out, many of the problems with hiring and promotion will take time because they stem from ingrained cultural attitudes toward women and people of color. Cultural shifts don’t happen overnight.

In the meantime, there are actionable steps toward improving the pipeline for female coaches. The women are there, getting licensed and learning despite the barriers inherent to the licensing system. FC Kansas City’s Yael Averbuch is doing her best to start up a licensing program through NWSL, where players can take a course that works with their schedule. With the league’s help, they were able to set up an E license course open to all FC Kansas City players who came to their field and spread out the course requirements over a longer period based on their in-season schedule.

“There may have been one or two [players] in the room who didn’t necessarily think, ‘I want to be a coach,’ but after going through the license realized, ‘Oh wow, I see how this works now; it’s something I’d be interested in continuing to learn about,’” Averbuch says.

That improved access is important for female players, who are the best resource for growing the coaching pool but don’t always have the time during their playing careers to devote to long coaching courses. It’s also critically important that players are made aware of their resources. U.S. Soccer needs to be especially proactive in reaching out to women of color. It’s telling that neither Scurry nor McNeill perceive U.S. Soccer as particularly working toward more diversity.

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

“[They] don’t make us aware of what we can do,” Scurry says about Chalupny having to figure out the shortcut to the B license on her own. “It’s sad that she didn’t know that because she’s a brilliant soccer mind, too. ... U.S. Soccer needs to be more proactive with stuff like that because having players like Chalupny and [Averbuch] and all these women who played on the national team being active in the soccer community after they’re playing is a good PR thing.”

U.S. Soccer may want to consider flexibility in its licensing, as well. Both Cromwell and Harrison were dissatisfied with USSF not accepting equivalency from NSCAA coaching courses as they once did. Some coaches find NSCAA more accessible than U.S. Soccer in terms of both time and money. U.S. Soccer wants to maintain certain standards, and it’s understandable that it wants a particular style of coaching to maintain consistency across all its teams. But there must be some aspects of coaching that translate between courses, and a little bit of flexibility helps ease the burden on coaches who have finite resources.

What many female coaches really need is for people in hiring positions to expand their job searches beyond the usual pool of white male candidates. Could that mean a Rooney Rule or something similar for hiring in some circle of women’s soccer? “A lot of these clubs are private [or] non-profit organizations,” Harrison says. “The ECNL (Elite Clubs National League) can’t necessarily mandate when a coaching director position comes open in their club. They have to interview just as many qualified female candidates as they do men. I don’t know that legally they can do that.”

But as she pointed out, they can encourage it, and NWSL, the NCAA, and USSF can certainly mandate that coaching searches must include diverse candidates. Right now, that doesn’t always happen. “When there’s a male in charge of the search, they often don’t do that,” Heinrichs says. “If you really want to find a woman, all you have to do is commit to it.”

Photo by Robert Cianflone/ALLSPORT

Above: USSF Technical Director April Heinrichs

Heinrichs also encourages women to ask their employers for the resources they need to better themselves as coaches, including having their clubs or colleges pay for their coaching licenses. “They’re going to be an investment,” she says. “So it’s paying for the license is an investment that will give back to their club, their team.”

Dr. LaVoi suggests several other methods of keeping women in the hiring loop, including using gender-neutral language for coaching positions of both boys’ and girls’ teams and a “succession planning list,” an organized plan for when a coach moves on, which includes women in the queue.

“I have a few coaches around the country, I’d say they know they can reach out to me and give them some insight and advice and I love that,” Cromwell says. “In the end, the women have to help the women and encourage them and promote them and try to hire them as much as we can, and in situations recommend them for jobs and all that.” Her former assistant coach, Louise Lieberman, is now head coach at San Diego.

It’s an uphill battle to push the people in charge of hiring to become more inclusive of women in their job searches and promotion decisions. But many of the women interviewed for this piece heavily emphasized the power of mentoring and being examples for the next generation. Dr. LaVoi says that a commitment to hiring diverse coaches as role models would lead to tangible benefits to players, including increased self-perception, positive self-esteem, and insight and advice from someone who knows their background. And of course, diverse coaches are role models, showing players like them that coaching is a possibility.

Nonen was looking for a way to remain close to the game when she decided to retire, but she didn’t feel confident about coaching. “I didn’t feel that I was anything like even the good male coaches that I had. I just didn’t see myself in them,” she says.

However, she encountered her only female head coach during a stint in Denmark — Eli Landsem, head coach of the Norwegian women’s team from 2009 to 2012 — who “ended up being one of the best coaches I’ve ever had.” Landsem’s advice and example helped put Nonen on the path to becoming a head coach.

The visibility and presence of women can help influence attitudes toward their place in sports and how their work intersects with their personal lives. Between men taking on more equal shares of responsibility in child-rearing and more child-friendly attitudes in the workplace like the one Jobson described at Baylor, it’s possible that the 40-year wall that Heinrichs described will start to come down.

Changes can be built from both the bottom up and the top down to help make a real, pervasive, and lasting difference. But people in positions of power have to want it, too. Women are already trying to get over, around, and through the barriers in their way. Clubs, schools, and federations should be doing their best to tear down the walls. They are, after all, the ones who put them there in the first place.