Thursday, October 31, 2024
Gil Scott-Heron
[ed. Thinking of Gil this morning and this heartbreaking song about the push/pull of addiction. The guitar solo starting around 7:45 is by Ed Brady. Robert Gordon on bass.]
Uncanny Valley
Morale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with freebies from other start-ups, stickers and koozies and flash drives. We escape for drinks and fret about our company culture. “Our culture is dying,” we say gravely, apocalyptic prophets all. “What should we do about the culture?”
It’s not just the salespeople, of course. It’s never just the salespeople. Our culture has been splintering for months. Members of our core team have been shepherded into conference rooms by top-level executives who proceed to question our loyalty. They’ve noticed the sea change. They’ve noticed we don’t seem as invested. We don’t stick around for in-office happy hour anymore; we don’t take new hires out for lunch on the company card. We’re not hitting our KPIs, we’re not serious about the OKRs. People keep using the word paranoid. Our primary investor has funded a direct competitor. This is what investors do, but it feels personal: Daddy still loves us, but he loves us less.
We get ourselves out of the office and into a bar. We have more in common than our grievances, but we kick off by speculating about our job security, complaining about the bureaucratic double-downs, casting blame for blocks and poor product decisions. We talk about our IPO like it’s the deus ex machina coming down from on high to save us — like it’s an inevitability, like our stock options will lift us out of our existential dread, away from the collective anxiety that ebbs and flows. Realistically, we know it could be years before an IPO, if there’s an IPO at all; we know in our hearts that money is a salve, not a solution. Still, we are hopeful. We reassure ourselves and one another that this is just a phase; every start-up has its growing pains. Eventually we are drunk enough to change the subject, to remember our more private selves. The people we are on weekends, the people we were for years.
This is a group of secret smokers, and we go in on a communal pack of cigarettes. The problem, we admit between drags, is that we do care. We care about one another. We even care about the executives who can make us feel like shit. We want good lives for them, just like we want good lives for ourselves. We care, for fuck’s sake, about the company culture. We are among the first twenty employees, and we are making something people want. It feels like ours. Work has wedged its way into our identities, and the only way to maintain sanity is to maintain that we are the company, the company is us. Whenever we see a stranger at the gym wearing a T-shirt with our logo on it, whenever we are mentioned on social media or on a client’s blog, whenever we get a positive support ticket, we share it in the company chat room and we’re proud, genuinely proud.
It’s not just the salespeople, of course. It’s never just the salespeople. Our culture has been splintering for months. Members of our core team have been shepherded into conference rooms by top-level executives who proceed to question our loyalty. They’ve noticed the sea change. They’ve noticed we don’t seem as invested. We don’t stick around for in-office happy hour anymore; we don’t take new hires out for lunch on the company card. We’re not hitting our KPIs, we’re not serious about the OKRs. People keep using the word paranoid. Our primary investor has funded a direct competitor. This is what investors do, but it feels personal: Daddy still loves us, but he loves us less.
This is a group of secret smokers, and we go in on a communal pack of cigarettes. The problem, we admit between drags, is that we do care. We care about one another. We even care about the executives who can make us feel like shit. We want good lives for them, just like we want good lives for ourselves. We care, for fuck’s sake, about the company culture. We are among the first twenty employees, and we are making something people want. It feels like ours. Work has wedged its way into our identities, and the only way to maintain sanity is to maintain that we are the company, the company is us. Whenever we see a stranger at the gym wearing a T-shirt with our logo on it, whenever we are mentioned on social media or on a client’s blog, whenever we get a positive support ticket, we share it in the company chat room and we’re proud, genuinely proud.
But we see now that we’ve been swimming in the Kool-Aid, and we’re coming up for air. We were lucky and in thrall and now we are bureaucrats, punching at our computers, making other people — some kids — unfathomably rich. We throw our dead cigarettes on the sidewalk and grind them out under our toes. Phones are opened and taxis summoned; we gulp the dregs of our beers as cartoon cars approach on-screen. We disperse, off to terrorize sleeping roommates and lovers, to answer just one, two more emails before bed. Eight hours later we’ll be back in the office, slurping down coffee, running out for congealed breakfast sandwiches, tweaking mediocre scripts and writing halfhearted emails, throwing weary and knowing glances across the table.
I skim recruiter emails and job listings like horoscopes, skidding down to the perks: competitive salary, dental and vision, 401k, free gym membership, catered lunch, bike storage, ski trips to Tahoe, off-sites to Napa, summits in Vegas, beer on tap, craft beer on tap, kombucha on tap, wine tastings, Whiskey Wednesdays, Open Bar Fridays, massage on-site, yoga on-site, pool table, Ping-Pong table, Ping-Pong robot, ball pit, game night, movie night, go-karts, zip line. Job listings are an excellent place to get sprayed with HR’s idea of fun and a 23-year-old’s idea of work-life balance. Sometimes I forget I’m not applying to summer camp. Customized setup: design your ultimate work station with the latest hardware. Change the world around you. Help humanity thrive by enabling — next! We work hard, we laugh hard, we give great high-fives. We have engineers in TopCoder’s Top 20. We’re not just another social web app. We’re not just another project-management tool. We’re not just another payment processor. I get a haircut and start exploring.
Most start-up offices look the same — faux midcentury furniture, brick walls, snack bar, bar cart. Interior designers in Silicon Valley are either brand-conscious or very literal. When tech products are projected into the physical world they become aesthetics unto themselves, as if to insist on their own reality: the office belonging to a home-sharing website is decorated like rooms in its customers’ pool houses and pieds-à-terre; the foyer of a hotel-booking start-up has a concierge desk replete with bell (no concierge); the headquarters of a ride-sharing app gleams in the same colors as the app itself, down to the sleek elevator bank. A book-related start-up holds a small and sad library, the shelves half-empty, paperbacks and object-oriented-programming manuals sloping against one another. It reminds me of the people who dressed like Michael Jackson to attend Michael Jackson’s funeral.
But this office, of a media app with millions in VC funding but no revenue model, is particularly sexy. This is something that an office shouldn’t be, and it jerks my heart rate way, way up. There are views of the city in every direction, fat leather loveseats, electric guitars plugged into amps, teak credenzas with white hardware. It looks like the loft apartment of the famous musician boyfriend I thought I’d have at 22 but somehow never met. I want to take off my dress and my shoes and lie on the voluminous sheepskin rug and eat fistfuls of MDMA, curl my naked body into the Eero Aarnio Ball Chair, never leave.
It’s not clear whether I’m here for lunch or an interview, which is normal. I am prepared for both and dressed for neither. My guide leads me through the communal kitchen, which has the trappings of every other start-up pantry: plastic bins of trail mix and Goldfish, bowls of Popchips and miniature candy bars. There’s the requisite wholesale box of assorted Clif Bars, and in the fridge are flavored water, string cheese, and single-serving cartons of chocolate milk. It can be hard to tell whether a company is training for a marathon or eating an after-school snack. Once I walked into our kitchen and found two Account Managers pounding Shot Bloks, chewy cubes of glucose marketed to endurance athletes.
Over catered Afghan food, I meet the team, including a billionaire who made his fortune from a website that helps people feel close to celebrities and other strangers they’d hate in real life. He asks where I work, and I tell him. “Oh,” he says, not unkindly, snapping a piece of lavash in two, “I know that company. I think I tried to buy you.” (...)
Home is my refuge, except when it’s not. My roommate is turning 30, and to celebrate we are hosting a wine and cheese party at our apartment. Well, she is hosting — I have been invited. Her friends arrive promptly, in business casual. Hundreds of dollars of cheese are represented. “Bi-Rite, obviously,” she says, looking elegant in black silk as she smears Humboldt Fog onto a cracker. My roommate works down on the Peninsula, for a website that everyone loathes but no one can stop using. We occupy different spaces: I am in the start-up world, land of perpetual youth, and she is an adult like any other, navigating a corporation, acting the part, negotiating for her place. I admire and do not understand her; it is possible she finds me amusing. Mostly we talk about exercise.
Classical music streams through the house and someone opens a bottle of proper Champagne, which he reassures us is really from France; people clap when the cork pops. My roommate and I are the same age but I feel like a child at my parents’ party, and I am immediately envious, homesick. I send myself to my room, lock the door, and change into a very tight dress. I’ve gained fifteen pounds in trail mix: it never feels like a meal, but there’s an aggregate effect. When I reenter the living room, I suck in my stomach and slide between people’s backs, looking for a conversation. On the couch, a man in a suit jacket expounds on the cannabis opportunity. Everyone seems very comfortable and nobody talks to me. They tilt their wineglasses at the correct angle; they dust crumbs off their palms with grace. The word I hear the most is revenue. No — strategy. There’s nothing to do but drink and ingratiate myself. I wind up on the roof with a cluster of strangers and find myself missing my mother with a ferocity that carves into my gut. In the distance I can see the tip of the famous Rainbow Flag on Castro Street, whipping. (...)
Ours is a “pickax-during-the-gold-rush” product, the kind venture capitalists love to get behind. The product provides a shortcut to database infrastructure, giving people information about their apps and websites that they wouldn’t necessarily have on their own. All our customers are other software companies. This is a privileged vantage point from which to observe the tech industry. I would say more, but I signed an NDA.
I skim recruiter emails and job listings like horoscopes, skidding down to the perks: competitive salary, dental and vision, 401k, free gym membership, catered lunch, bike storage, ski trips to Tahoe, off-sites to Napa, summits in Vegas, beer on tap, craft beer on tap, kombucha on tap, wine tastings, Whiskey Wednesdays, Open Bar Fridays, massage on-site, yoga on-site, pool table, Ping-Pong table, Ping-Pong robot, ball pit, game night, movie night, go-karts, zip line. Job listings are an excellent place to get sprayed with HR’s idea of fun and a 23-year-old’s idea of work-life balance. Sometimes I forget I’m not applying to summer camp. Customized setup: design your ultimate work station with the latest hardware. Change the world around you. Help humanity thrive by enabling — next! We work hard, we laugh hard, we give great high-fives. We have engineers in TopCoder’s Top 20. We’re not just another social web app. We’re not just another project-management tool. We’re not just another payment processor. I get a haircut and start exploring.
Most start-up offices look the same — faux midcentury furniture, brick walls, snack bar, bar cart. Interior designers in Silicon Valley are either brand-conscious or very literal. When tech products are projected into the physical world they become aesthetics unto themselves, as if to insist on their own reality: the office belonging to a home-sharing website is decorated like rooms in its customers’ pool houses and pieds-à-terre; the foyer of a hotel-booking start-up has a concierge desk replete with bell (no concierge); the headquarters of a ride-sharing app gleams in the same colors as the app itself, down to the sleek elevator bank. A book-related start-up holds a small and sad library, the shelves half-empty, paperbacks and object-oriented-programming manuals sloping against one another. It reminds me of the people who dressed like Michael Jackson to attend Michael Jackson’s funeral.
But this office, of a media app with millions in VC funding but no revenue model, is particularly sexy. This is something that an office shouldn’t be, and it jerks my heart rate way, way up. There are views of the city in every direction, fat leather loveseats, electric guitars plugged into amps, teak credenzas with white hardware. It looks like the loft apartment of the famous musician boyfriend I thought I’d have at 22 but somehow never met. I want to take off my dress and my shoes and lie on the voluminous sheepskin rug and eat fistfuls of MDMA, curl my naked body into the Eero Aarnio Ball Chair, never leave.
It’s not clear whether I’m here for lunch or an interview, which is normal. I am prepared for both and dressed for neither. My guide leads me through the communal kitchen, which has the trappings of every other start-up pantry: plastic bins of trail mix and Goldfish, bowls of Popchips and miniature candy bars. There’s the requisite wholesale box of assorted Clif Bars, and in the fridge are flavored water, string cheese, and single-serving cartons of chocolate milk. It can be hard to tell whether a company is training for a marathon or eating an after-school snack. Once I walked into our kitchen and found two Account Managers pounding Shot Bloks, chewy cubes of glucose marketed to endurance athletes.
Over catered Afghan food, I meet the team, including a billionaire who made his fortune from a website that helps people feel close to celebrities and other strangers they’d hate in real life. He asks where I work, and I tell him. “Oh,” he says, not unkindly, snapping a piece of lavash in two, “I know that company. I think I tried to buy you.” (...)
Home is my refuge, except when it’s not. My roommate is turning 30, and to celebrate we are hosting a wine and cheese party at our apartment. Well, she is hosting — I have been invited. Her friends arrive promptly, in business casual. Hundreds of dollars of cheese are represented. “Bi-Rite, obviously,” she says, looking elegant in black silk as she smears Humboldt Fog onto a cracker. My roommate works down on the Peninsula, for a website that everyone loathes but no one can stop using. We occupy different spaces: I am in the start-up world, land of perpetual youth, and she is an adult like any other, navigating a corporation, acting the part, negotiating for her place. I admire and do not understand her; it is possible she finds me amusing. Mostly we talk about exercise.
Classical music streams through the house and someone opens a bottle of proper Champagne, which he reassures us is really from France; people clap when the cork pops. My roommate and I are the same age but I feel like a child at my parents’ party, and I am immediately envious, homesick. I send myself to my room, lock the door, and change into a very tight dress. I’ve gained fifteen pounds in trail mix: it never feels like a meal, but there’s an aggregate effect. When I reenter the living room, I suck in my stomach and slide between people’s backs, looking for a conversation. On the couch, a man in a suit jacket expounds on the cannabis opportunity. Everyone seems very comfortable and nobody talks to me. They tilt their wineglasses at the correct angle; they dust crumbs off their palms with grace. The word I hear the most is revenue. No — strategy. There’s nothing to do but drink and ingratiate myself. I wind up on the roof with a cluster of strangers and find myself missing my mother with a ferocity that carves into my gut. In the distance I can see the tip of the famous Rainbow Flag on Castro Street, whipping. (...)
Ours is a “pickax-during-the-gold-rush” product, the kind venture capitalists love to get behind. The product provides a shortcut to database infrastructure, giving people information about their apps and websites that they wouldn’t necessarily have on their own. All our customers are other software companies. This is a privileged vantage point from which to observe the tech industry. I would say more, but I signed an NDA.
by Anna Wiener, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Murphy, Gold and Black Circles. 2007, gold leaf and velvet on paper. Courtesy Clint Roenisch Gallery.
Image: Jennifer Murphy, Gold and Black Circles. 2007, gold leaf and velvet on paper. Courtesy Clint Roenisch Gallery.
[ed. What a soul-sucking profession. No matter how rich these people get, they'll someday have to consider the sum total of their contributions to life, the world, themselves. Wouldn't want to be them then (or now)...]
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Paul McCartney Post-Beatles Musical Moments
I love the Beatles—who doesn’t?—but give that bloke Macca credit. He enjoyed a whirlwind second career after the band’s breakup. This body of work would ensure his legendary status even without the Fab Four. (...)
Paul McCartney recreates a duet with John Lennon at Glastonbury in 2022
Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary Get Back on the final days of the Beatles did more than revisit the past. It was also healing—for both fans and the surviving musicians.
The healing moment for me happened when I saw McCartney dancing with Lennon right there in Abbey Road Studios. This took place at the very moment when the Beatles were allegedly rupturing in acrimony and distrust.
The surviving film tells a different story.
Even at the end, these four musicians were deeply attuned to each other (that’s the right word in more than one sense), and shared happy moments of intimacy—just like a family.
They had gone through extraordinary experiences together, akin to comrades in war, that no outsider could possibly understand. Such ties are almost unbreakable.
So I wasn’t surprised when McCartney decided to borrow a film clip from 1970 and use it in live performance more than 50 years later. Seeing this rediscovered footage had psychically reunited him with his old mate.
You can feel it in the clip below. When I first saw it, tears came to my eyes. I’m not ashamed to admit that. But I wasn’t alone. When John Lennon appears on the screen, the audience responds audibly—not applause, or cheers, but just a deep, collective sigh of beatitude.
McCartney singing live in concert with a young John Lennon in 2022 is like an old couple coming together again after years of separation. It’s Yin embracing Yang. The Apollonian merges with the Dionysian. Opposites are reconciled.
So if you want some positive vibes in our troubled times, here it comes. Let everybody have a good year. Let everybody see the sun shine.
Paul McCartney recreates a duet with John Lennon at Glastonbury in 2022
Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary Get Back on the final days of the Beatles did more than revisit the past. It was also healing—for both fans and the surviving musicians.
The healing moment for me happened when I saw McCartney dancing with Lennon right there in Abbey Road Studios. This took place at the very moment when the Beatles were allegedly rupturing in acrimony and distrust.
The surviving film tells a different story.
Even at the end, these four musicians were deeply attuned to each other (that’s the right word in more than one sense), and shared happy moments of intimacy—just like a family.
They had gone through extraordinary experiences together, akin to comrades in war, that no outsider could possibly understand. Such ties are almost unbreakable.
So I wasn’t surprised when McCartney decided to borrow a film clip from 1970 and use it in live performance more than 50 years later. Seeing this rediscovered footage had psychically reunited him with his old mate.
You can feel it in the clip below. When I first saw it, tears came to my eyes. I’m not ashamed to admit that. But I wasn’t alone. When John Lennon appears on the screen, the audience responds audibly—not applause, or cheers, but just a deep, collective sigh of beatitude.
McCartney singing live in concert with a young John Lennon in 2022 is like an old couple coming together again after years of separation. It’s Yin embracing Yang. The Apollonian merges with the Dionysian. Opposites are reconciled.
So if you want some positive vibes in our troubled times, here it comes. Let everybody have a good year. Let everybody see the sun shine.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: Paul McCartney/YouTube
[ed. What were those chords he was playing? (hard to tell backwards and upside down). And check this out:]The barely 15-year-old Paul McCartney used “Twenty Flight Rock” as his first song when he auditioned for John Lennon on July 6, 1957 in Liverpool, England. The 16-year-old Lennon was impressed by the young McCartney’s ability to play the song on the guitar during their first official introductions at St. Peter’s Church Hall prior to a church garden fete. The good first impression of McCartney’s performance led to an invitation to join The Quarrymen – John Lennon’s band that would eventually evolve into The Beatles. On The Beatles Anthology, McCartney noted that: “I think what impressed him most was that I knew all the words.” […]
Rumbles
A book for our golden age of indigestion. In “Rumbles,” historian Elsa Richardson offers a cultural account of the workings and symbolism of the “body’s most fascinating organ.”
If every era has a characteristic condition, ours is indigestion. According to the National Institutes of Health, incidence of inflammatory bowel disease increased by about 10 percent between 2000 and 2019, and intestinal distress is now a badge of cultural relevance, even pride: The writer Charlotte Shane recently noted that women with irritable bowel syndrome make up an “IBS-hot-girl legion,” a league of glamorous sufferers that includes none other than Tyra Banks. Other gastrointestinal complaints are no less in vogue. I should know, I suffer from two: a precancerous stomach condition that prevents me from absorbing vitamin B12 (I get it injected) and an inflammatory bowel disease called microscopic colitis (you probably don’t want the details).
There is something about all this enteric disorder that seems peculiarly contemporary. Bookstore shelves are packed with subtitles like “An Empowering Guide to Your Gut and Its Microbes,” and many of my friends spend hours perched on the toilet in a state of disarray. As Natasha Boyd ruminates in a wonderful essay in the Drift, “Americans of all stripes seem to be experiencing a crisis of digestion” — a crisis that seems obscurely related to our intensifying angst.
“Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut” could not come at a more apt or more dyspeptic moment. Its author, Elsa Richardson, is a historian, and she provides not a medical but a cultural account of the “confederacy of different organs” that jointly achieve “the assimilation of material from the outside world into the substance of the body.” Richardson is interested in the gut’s workings, but she is also interested in its symbolism — in how it “came to be understood as an organ under threat from the forces of the present.” In other words, she is interested in why we are all sick to our stomachs and what exactly the epidemic of digestive disquiet portends.
Richardson makes a number of fascinating forays into corners of history that I had never thought to wonder about: She writes about the institutionalization of lunchtime (a practice that arose during the Industrial Revolution, when advocates for workers’ rights insisted that laborers needed a midday break); the disposal of human waste before the invention of indoor plumbing (achieved, at least in many major cities, by “night soil men” who carried the city’s excretions off to the countryside, where they were repurposed as fertilizer); and the dramatic sanitary reform of a highly unhygienic London (prompted by a particularly smelly period during the summer of 1858 known, vividly, as “The Great Stink”).
In addition to its many charms as a source of information, “Rumbles” is a compelling compendium of ideas. Its discussion of gut disease as an emblem of modernity leaves readers with much to digest. (...)
The gut’s mystique is, in part, a product of its inaccessibility. For centuries, it was maddeningly opaque to medical science: “Obscured by the liver, nestled by the gallbladder, spleen, pancreas and large intestine, it hides from prying eyes and pressing fingers,” Richardson writes. Worse, “the organ really only makes sense when it is in motion” and is therefore difficult to observe.
But if the stomach was long considered “the most enigmatic of organs” by doctors, it was always acutely palpable to nonprofessionals. Unlike the silent thyroid or the quiet kidneys, the gut is “notoriously outspoken,” as Richardson winningly writes. It grumbles and grouses when it is empty and whines when it is overfull. In medieval Europe, practitioners of the art of “gastromancy” exploited its loquacity, attempting to “channel the voices of the dead through the stomach and foretell the future by interpreting its sounds.” But we need not appeal to specialists or gastromancers to understand the gut’s complaints: As Richardson points out, we are in “near constant conversation” with our stomachs. “Choosing what to eat is an everyday intervention into health” that we can scarcely avoid, for which reason the gut has often served as a “site of persistent lay experimentation.” We are all the world’s foremost experts on our own bowel movements.
The question of how to conduct experiments on ourselves — of what to allow into our bodies and what to do with the refuse that emerges at the other end — has often been morally and politically vexed. The gut is the portal from inside to outside, the fragile barricade between self and other. Richardson writes that eating requires “taking something from the outside into the deep interior of the body,” and defecating involves expelling something from the domain of the self. It is not surprising, then, that hygiene has long been couched as a sign of social progress and, more sinisterly, a way of distinguishing civilized insiders from barbaric outsiders.
by Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Pegasus
[ed. Been a sufferer all my adult life with endless tests and zero cures, typical of most I imagine. It's an unpredictable and ever present issue that affects nearly every aspect of life, including social interactions, travel, which foods you're able to eat (or not), etc. Fortunately it also waxes and wanes. I'm pretty sure I'm not interested in reading a book that describes the historic struggle and hopelessness of it all. See also (the excellent): Sick to Our Stomachs|Why Does Everyone Have IBS? (The Drift).]
There is something about all this enteric disorder that seems peculiarly contemporary. Bookstore shelves are packed with subtitles like “An Empowering Guide to Your Gut and Its Microbes,” and many of my friends spend hours perched on the toilet in a state of disarray. As Natasha Boyd ruminates in a wonderful essay in the Drift, “Americans of all stripes seem to be experiencing a crisis of digestion” — a crisis that seems obscurely related to our intensifying angst.
Richardson makes a number of fascinating forays into corners of history that I had never thought to wonder about: She writes about the institutionalization of lunchtime (a practice that arose during the Industrial Revolution, when advocates for workers’ rights insisted that laborers needed a midday break); the disposal of human waste before the invention of indoor plumbing (achieved, at least in many major cities, by “night soil men” who carried the city’s excretions off to the countryside, where they were repurposed as fertilizer); and the dramatic sanitary reform of a highly unhygienic London (prompted by a particularly smelly period during the summer of 1858 known, vividly, as “The Great Stink”).
In addition to its many charms as a source of information, “Rumbles” is a compelling compendium of ideas. Its discussion of gut disease as an emblem of modernity leaves readers with much to digest. (...)
The gut’s mystique is, in part, a product of its inaccessibility. For centuries, it was maddeningly opaque to medical science: “Obscured by the liver, nestled by the gallbladder, spleen, pancreas and large intestine, it hides from prying eyes and pressing fingers,” Richardson writes. Worse, “the organ really only makes sense when it is in motion” and is therefore difficult to observe.
But if the stomach was long considered “the most enigmatic of organs” by doctors, it was always acutely palpable to nonprofessionals. Unlike the silent thyroid or the quiet kidneys, the gut is “notoriously outspoken,” as Richardson winningly writes. It grumbles and grouses when it is empty and whines when it is overfull. In medieval Europe, practitioners of the art of “gastromancy” exploited its loquacity, attempting to “channel the voices of the dead through the stomach and foretell the future by interpreting its sounds.” But we need not appeal to specialists or gastromancers to understand the gut’s complaints: As Richardson points out, we are in “near constant conversation” with our stomachs. “Choosing what to eat is an everyday intervention into health” that we can scarcely avoid, for which reason the gut has often served as a “site of persistent lay experimentation.” We are all the world’s foremost experts on our own bowel movements.
The question of how to conduct experiments on ourselves — of what to allow into our bodies and what to do with the refuse that emerges at the other end — has often been morally and politically vexed. The gut is the portal from inside to outside, the fragile barricade between self and other. Richardson writes that eating requires “taking something from the outside into the deep interior of the body,” and defecating involves expelling something from the domain of the self. It is not surprising, then, that hygiene has long been couched as a sign of social progress and, more sinisterly, a way of distinguishing civilized insiders from barbaric outsiders.
by Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Pegasus
[ed. Been a sufferer all my adult life with endless tests and zero cures, typical of most I imagine. It's an unpredictable and ever present issue that affects nearly every aspect of life, including social interactions, travel, which foods you're able to eat (or not), etc. Fortunately it also waxes and wanes. I'm pretty sure I'm not interested in reading a book that describes the historic struggle and hopelessness of it all. See also (the excellent): Sick to Our Stomachs|Why Does Everyone Have IBS? (The Drift).]
New Rules for Airlines Could Help Get Speedy Refunds
Under consumer protection rules that the Transportation Department announced in the spring, airlines may owe travelers money back when services that passengers paid for go awry. Some of those rules went into effect Monday.
Here’s what air travelers need to know:
Refunds for canceled flights and big delays
Since May, when President Joe Biden signed the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill into law, passengers have been entitled to a refund without them jumping through hoops if airlines cancel or significantly change their flights and they choose not to rebook or take the changed flight.
Under the law, airlines are required to proactively offer refunds rather than vouchers or credits without passengers having to ask for it. The money is due within seven business days if the ticket was bought with a credit card and within 20 business days for other transactions.
The law also spells out for the first time how long a delay must be to qualify as “significant” enough for a refund: three hours for domestic flights and six hours for international trips.
“This is a protection for airline passengers that’s long overdue,” Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, said in an email.
Before the rule, Murray said, airlines “often slow-walked” refunds they were obligated to provide for cancellations. “That’s not allowed anymore,” she noted.
Murray said some passengers might not want a refund; they might just want to get to their destination as soon as possible. But for those who do want their money back, they should get it without hassle.
“The starting point should be that if you do want a refund, you get it quickly and without delays or marketing tricks,” she said.
Refunds for checked luggage fees
Measures that went into effect Monday cover refunds for other parts of a flight. If a traveler pays a checked-bag fee but their luggage is mishandled, they are entitled to a refund for the baggage if it is not delivered within 12 hours of their arrival for a domestic flight. For international flights, the threshold is either 15 or 30 hours from arrival, depending on how long the flight was.
Refunds for broken WiFi, seating fails
As of Monday, passengers who pay for WiFi, a specific seat assignment or in-flight entertainment are also owed a refund for those fees if the airline isn’t able to deliver what it promised.
Refunds for other changes
As of Monday, travelers are also owed a refund if they choose not to take a flight that was significantly changed because of factors that go beyond delays, including an increase in the number of connections; a downgrade of cabin class or service; departures or arrivals from a different airport or certain changes that make travel less accessible for travelers with a disability. (...)
Airlines for America, an industry trade group, said in a statement in April that the 11 largest passenger airlines in the country had issued $43 billion in customer refunds between January 2020 and December 2023.
by Hannah Sampson, The Washington Post/ADN | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. This is the kind of consumer protection we deserve and need. More please.]
Here’s what air travelers need to know:
Refunds for canceled flights and big delays
Since May, when President Joe Biden signed the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill into law, passengers have been entitled to a refund without them jumping through hoops if airlines cancel or significantly change their flights and they choose not to rebook or take the changed flight.
The law also spells out for the first time how long a delay must be to qualify as “significant” enough for a refund: three hours for domestic flights and six hours for international trips.
“This is a protection for airline passengers that’s long overdue,” Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, said in an email.
Before the rule, Murray said, airlines “often slow-walked” refunds they were obligated to provide for cancellations. “That’s not allowed anymore,” she noted.
Murray said some passengers might not want a refund; they might just want to get to their destination as soon as possible. But for those who do want their money back, they should get it without hassle.
“The starting point should be that if you do want a refund, you get it quickly and without delays or marketing tricks,” she said.
Refunds for checked luggage fees
Measures that went into effect Monday cover refunds for other parts of a flight. If a traveler pays a checked-bag fee but their luggage is mishandled, they are entitled to a refund for the baggage if it is not delivered within 12 hours of their arrival for a domestic flight. For international flights, the threshold is either 15 or 30 hours from arrival, depending on how long the flight was.
Refunds for broken WiFi, seating fails
As of Monday, passengers who pay for WiFi, a specific seat assignment or in-flight entertainment are also owed a refund for those fees if the airline isn’t able to deliver what it promised.
Refunds for other changes
As of Monday, travelers are also owed a refund if they choose not to take a flight that was significantly changed because of factors that go beyond delays, including an increase in the number of connections; a downgrade of cabin class or service; departures or arrivals from a different airport or certain changes that make travel less accessible for travelers with a disability. (...)
Airlines for America, an industry trade group, said in a statement in April that the 11 largest passenger airlines in the country had issued $43 billion in customer refunds between January 2020 and December 2023.
by Hannah Sampson, The Washington Post/ADN | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. This is the kind of consumer protection we deserve and need. More please.]
Monday, October 28, 2024
Boeing's Existential Risk
As it treads water awaiting the end of its machinists’ strike, Boeing (BA-0.69%) just formally announced Monday that it’s raising $19 billion in a stock offering. And in the prospectus for that share sale, it lays out exactly how immensely the work stoppage looms in its conception of the future.
“Some of our and our suppliers’ workforces are represented by labor unions,” the company says. “Work stoppages by our employees are currently adversely affecting our business, financial condition, results of operations and/or cash flows. Future work stoppages by our or our suppliers’ employees could also adversely impact our business.”
That’s putting it lightly, but in corporatese, Boeing reveals its onion layers of stress bit by bit.
Corporatese:
Corporatese:
Corporatese:
Corporatese:
Corporatese:
[ed. The union is not impressed:]
The IAM told its members Sunday that “Your Union has been in communication with the U.S. Department of Labor in an effort to spearhead getting back to the table.” Though the latest contract vote was more in Boeing’s favor than previous tallies, the union said last week that an internal survey shows that members are still not impressed with what they’re hearing for the company’s negotiators.
“While we can’t share the survey results publicly, which would give the company an unfair advantage, please know that wages and retirement security remain top priorities,” it said.
[ed. I'd imagine Boeing's last (unstated) strategy is - 'Government Bailout'. See also: Boeing Sells Shares To Raise Capital Buying Time To Wait Out Strike (Simple Flying); Boeing’s Shareholders Are Complicit in Its Mess (Bloomberg); and, At the heart of the Boeing strike, an emotional fight over a lost pension plan (NPR).]
When companies sell stock to the public, they have to inform the public of the risks inherent to that investment. The biggest one facing Boeing at the moment is that it won’t get workers back to assembly lines soon. In Boeing’s form 424B5, the category of Securities and Exchange Commission filings under which a prospectus falls, the planemaker tees up its fiercest headache under a section headlined “Risks Related to Our Business and Operations.”
That’s putting it lightly, but in corporatese, Boeing reveals its onion layers of stress bit by bit.
Corporatese:
Approximately 57,000 employees, which constitute 33% of our total workforce, were union represented as of December 31, 2023 under collective bargaining agreements with varying durations and expiration dates.Translation: We have a lot of union workers.
Corporatese:
On September 12, 2024, our contract with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751 (“IAM 751”), which represents over 30,000 Boeing manufacturing employees primarily located in Washington state, expired and 96% of IAM 751 members voted to initiate a strike. On October 23, 2024, 64% of IAM 751 members voted to reject our most recent offer and continue the strike. While we continue to engage in contract negotiations with IAM 751, we currently are unable to predict the duration of the strike, which began on September 13, 2024.Translation: A lot of those workers are on strike. Though we thought we were close to getting them to come back to work after a month and a half, we failed to do so and don’t know what will happen next.
Corporatese:
As a result of the strike, production of our commercial aircraft, other than the 787 production in Charleston, and certain of our Defense, Space & Security products has halted, adversely impacting our business and financial position. This work stoppage has had and is expected to continue to have negative impacts on our key suppliers and customers. If we are unable to successfully negotiate a new contract with IAM 751 consistent with our assumptions and the strike continues for a prolonged period, our financial position, results of operations and cash flows would continue to be adversely impacted.Translation: Those workers make pretty much all our planes. Them not being at work is costing us a lot of money, it’s costing our suppliers a lot of money, and the longer the strike goes on the more expensive all this will become for everyone in business with us. (The Anderson Economic Group consultancy estimated Monday that, at $9.7 billion of impact, the Boeing strike is the most expensive one this year — and almost as costly as the United Auto Workers strikes against the Big Three Detroit automakers last year.)
Corporatese:
Specifically, we expect further significant negative operating cash flows in this quarter and in future quarters until IAM 751 employees return to work, production resumes and deliveries ramp up. Furthermore, this work stoppage and the actions we have taken in response to the strike to help preserve our financial condition, including planned workforce reductions, furloughs, hiring freezes and pausing the issuance of certain supplier purchase orders, could negatively impact our ability to achieve our strategic objectives and to maintain our investment-grade credit rating.Translation: We’re doing everything we can to keep the lights on, but we really don’t really have a business without them. In fact, we’re raising all this much-needed cash via stock sale because we’ve nearly maxed out the mega-corporation equivalent of a credit card.
Corporatese:
We may experience additional work stoppages in the future, which could adversely affect our business. We currently have in the U.S. 9 unions with 27 independent agreements and internationally 17 employee representative bodies, and we cannot predict how stable our union relationships will be or whether we will be able to meet the unions’ requirements. The unions may also limit our flexibility in managing our workforce and operations. Union actions at suppliers can also affect us. Current and future work stoppages and instability in our union relationships could delay the production and/or development of our products, which could strain relationships with customers and result in lower revenues.Translation: Just a heads-up that this could happen again sometime in the future. (...)
[ed. The union is not impressed:]
The IAM told its members Sunday that “Your Union has been in communication with the U.S. Department of Labor in an effort to spearhead getting back to the table.” Though the latest contract vote was more in Boeing’s favor than previous tallies, the union said last week that an internal survey shows that members are still not impressed with what they’re hearing for the company’s negotiators.
“While we can’t share the survey results publicly, which would give the company an unfair advantage, please know that wages and retirement security remain top priorities,” it said.
by Melvin Backman, Quartz | Read more:
Image: David Ryder (Getty Images)[ed. I'd imagine Boeing's last (unstated) strategy is - 'Government Bailout'. See also: Boeing Sells Shares To Raise Capital Buying Time To Wait Out Strike (Simple Flying); Boeing’s Shareholders Are Complicit in Its Mess (Bloomberg); and, At the heart of the Boeing strike, an emotional fight over a lost pension plan (NPR).]
At 50, Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition Magnifies the Minuscule
Dr. Bruno Cisterna and Dr. Eric Vitriol, Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, Augusta, Georgia. Differentiated mouse brain tumor cells (actin, microtubules, and nuclei)
Zhang Chao, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Beach sand
Thomas Barlow and Connor Gibbons, Columbia University, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, New York. Cluster of octopus (Octopus hummelincki) eggs
by Kate Mothes, Colossal | Read more:
Images: as noted
Images: as noted
Massive WA Salmon Recovery Plan Scrutinized With Latest $100M Project
Yet even after all this work, salmon wouldn’t be able to swim up most of the stream.
As WSDOT races to replace hundreds of culverts by 2030 to meet a court deadline, lawmakers and at least one tribal leader are asking whether projects like this make sense.
That’s how this project on White Creek landed on the state’s list. By the state’s math, the culvert replacement would open nearly 4 miles of “potential” habitat. But the court-ordered calculation doesn’t account for other problems that affect salmon, including a polluted old mill site, a partial blockage downstream on Ennis Creek and 10 more blockages upstream of the motel.
In reality, many salmon wouldn’t even be able to access White Creek, the state’s own survey shows. Near the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a city-owned concrete slab blocks fish passage under most conditions, according to the survey.
Now lawmakers and tribes are reexamining the court order, proposing new ways to target salmon restoration funds — a delicate “balancing act,” as one tribal leader put it.
The state’s culvert repair program is its largest salmon recovery effort ever, with $3.95 billion already allocated to replace salmon barriers with natural streambeds. To meet the looming deadline, WSDOT last fall asked for up to $4 billion more, prompting fresh skepticism from legislators, who’ve grown increasingly concerned that the state plans aren’t always the best way to help salmon. And just last month, the department revised the request to $5 billion to account for culverts that have structurally failed over the past year.
A Seattle Times investigation this spring highlighted how WSDOT spending is creating stranded restoration projects with limited value today because the state program doesn’t fix other problems in the same watersheds, like barriers owned by other parties. White Creek is a classic case, with its other salmon-blocking barriers upstream and downstream of the state’s culvert. And the potential spectacle of demolishing the motel has raised the question of whether other restoration projects would be more effective and a better use of taxpayer money.
“While we are fixing mistakes of the past, you do it in a more surgical way. You don’t do it with a bulldozer approach, you don’t do it with a meat cleaver,” said W. Ron Allen, chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, whose traditional territory includes White Creek. The tribe was among those who sued the state and won the federal court order. Allen holds firmly to that victory but also sees the need for a flexible and creative approach to realize its benefits for fish.
“My view is, work out an agreement with the state and the court … let’s step back and reprioritize, figure out which ones are the ones that are the most important right now and zero in on that,” Allen said.
He said he also understands there is only so much money and that the public has many needs, as do the tribal nations. “There is that balancing act … and we don’t want to turn the public against salmon.”
Lawmakers are also saying they don’t have $5 billion more to spend now. But even if they found the money, it would be logistically impossible to finish the list by 2030, as required in the court injunction, state leaders have told the tribes.
Rep. Steve Tharinger, D-Port Townsend, said he is using the motel project, which is in his district, to call for change because “it’s a high cost with little fish return.”
“It’s the classic poster child of what we shouldn’t do,” he said. (...)
The motel
Chintu Patel, co-owner of the Olympic Inn & Suites, didn’t even know there was a stream or a culvert under his motel until WSDOT told him about it. Maple trees block the view to the south, where the creek flows through a ravine 30 feet below and into the concrete tunnel in question. To the north, an RV dealership and trees obscure any hint of water, as the stream transitions into lowland vegetation.
Patel and his business partner bought the rundown property in 2020 for $6.25 million and soon started fixing it up. They ripped out carpet, remodeled bathrooms and repainted the 115-room motel tan with burgundy accents. “We’ve completely renovated the property,” said Patel, who employs roughly 20 full- and part-time employees at this motel and has ownership interest in 15 other hotels or motels in the state.
After he received a letter from WSDOT two years ago, he was surprised to learn about the plans to replace the culvert. If he had known, “We wouldn’t have put in all the renovations,” he said.
Patel said WSDOT hasn’t yet broached the subject of eminent domain, the state’s legal power to seize property. But the agency has taken private property to replace culverts and compensated the landowners. He’s concerned an appraisal wouldn’t capture the property’s potential value. (...)
WSDOT may pursue the project anyway, despite the high cost and the stream’s other habitat problems. Otherwise, it would have to replace multiple culverts elsewhere to hit its 2030 target, at potentially even greater cost, WSDOT fish passage manager Kim Rydholm said.
White Creek has “little production potential” for salmon because of its many culverts, according to the management plan by the area’s official watershed planning group. The 10 upstream obstructions are owned by private parties or local governments. Technically, any barrier to potential salmon migration violates state law, but the Department of Fish and Wildlife generally doesn’t require owners to remove them. The department is working on new enforcement rules.
WSDOT asks for $5 billion more
Like stormwater rushing into a swollen creek, revelations about problems in WSDOT’s fish passage program kept pouring in over the past year.
In November, WSDOT unveiled its massive budget request to lawmakers. Then The Times investigation spotlighted some culvert projects, costing tens of millions apiece, that are essentially useless without further, big investments. This summer, Inslee and WSDOT leaders told tribes they were probably not going to hit the 2030 deadline. And now the cost estimates are even higher. (...)
They are rethinking how the state fulfills the court order while still honoring tribal treaty rights and the intent of the federal judge’s ruling. All that while navigating intratribal politics, in which each of the 21 sovereign tribal nations that are a party to the federal case can stake their own position.
U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez in 2013 ordered WSDOT to identify its Western Washington culverts blocking 200 meters or more of potential upstream habitat. Then, by 2030, WSDOT is required to open up 90% of the habitat above those culverts.
But the calculation ignored other culverts and similar barriers on those same streams, including blockages owned by cities, counties and private parties.
Tharinger, the Port Angeles-area state representative, said he recently realized that WSDOT’s list of culverts wasn’t well-vetted, causing him to reconsider the funding and strategy. (...)
“We don’t have the money,” said Tharinger, chair of the House Capital Budget Committee. For what the state does allocate, he sees it in simple terms: “How do we spend the money to recover the most fish, to create the most habitat for fish? That’s really the question — not what the court tells us.”
Instead of plowing ahead according to the court order, Tharinger hopes the tribes and state can agree on a strategy to open up the most actual habitat, taking into account the other barriers on the streams. And he wouldn’t limit it to just culvert replacements. Larger projects, such as entire flood plain restorations, should be on the table, he said.
by Mike Reicher and Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Fiona Martin, Mark Nowlin; uncredited
[ed. Gotta love it. How could a massive program like this ever get started without these types of issues being anticipated and resolved from the very beginning? It's beyond belief. Any halfway competent fish biologist would tell you: there's no one-size fits all solution for culverts that are everywhere, beneath buildings and roads, in various stages of disrepair, and blocked in countless ways . Which brings up the US Supreme Court's recent decision re: the so-called Chevron Deference (NRDC):
"The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling today in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo dealt a severe blow to the ability of federal agencies to do their jobs by ending the 40-year-old precedent of “Chevron deference.” Instead of deferring to the expertise of agencies on how to interpret ambiguous language in laws pertaining to their work, federal judges now have the power to decide what a law means for themselves. As a result, despite not being accountable to the people, judges will now be able to expand their role into the realm of policymaking."See also: Removing WA salmon barriers surges to $1M a day, but results are murky (Seattle Times).]
Saturday, October 26, 2024
The Rapid Descent of Southwest Airlines
The storm’s timing couldn’t have been worse.
In late December of 2022, an “extratropical cyclone” brought all manner of menacing winter conditions to two-thirds of the U.S., including the entire Eastern Seaboard and parts of Canada. Wind-chill warnings, whiteouts, and extraordinary snowfall complicated travel for millions.
Flight cancellations from what was unofficially dubbed Winter Storm Elliott were inevitable, creating chaos at most airlines for a day. But for Southwest Airlines and its outdated crew-scheduling software, the madness dragged on for over 72 hours as the carrier canceled more than 16,000 flights. An undisclosed number of people were forced to sleep in airports or improvise road trips with strangers to salvage their holidays. The meltdown was so bad that Southwest was pilloried by Saturday Night Live.
The company eventually got back to business as usual, until this year, when a barrage of attacks from another Elliott—this one an activist hedge fund—led to a high-profile reckoning and major leadership shakeup.
The battle alarmed Southwest’s loyal flyers, who are legion. Over 50 years, the Texas-based company has built a cult-favorite brand on a combination of economy-class-only flights, free bag checks and flight changes, and often self-deprecating humor. Flight attendants are known for bookending their safety procedure announcements with comedy bits and dad jokes.
But some investors say Southwest’s foundational practices haven’t aged well as industry operating costs have risen. Since the pandemic, Southwest has lagged competitors in financial performance, and its share price is down 50% compared to 2021.
Seeing a turnaround opportunity, Elliott Management, an activist hedge fund with an 11% stake in the $18 billion airline, launched an aggressive campaign earlier this year to push out CEO Bob Jordan, as well as chairman and former CEO Gary Kelly, and replace half of Southwest’s board. Elliott asserted that the company’s leadership is too entrenched in the airline’s existing operating and pricing model to make changes to boost revenue. “Southwest’s rigid commitment to a decades-old approach has inhibited its ability to compete in the modern airline industry,” the hedge fund said in its opening salvo. (...)
No frills and few fees
Herbert Kelleher cofounded Southwest more than 50 years ago as a local, low-cost airline serving Texan cities. As the airline grew, it took a radically different approach to air travel than its competitors. In addition to creating a no-frills, few-fees experience, Southwest adopted a point-to-point routing system, allowing passengers to fly between cities without transferring, rather than the hub-and-spoke model, which requires fliers to stop over in another city. Southwest also used only one type of plane, a Boeing 737, to standardize operations. And most famously, the startup embraced an open seating plan and, until 2007, a first-come, first serve policy.
Over time, Kelleher became known as much for his business prowess as his sense of humor. In a 1994 profile, Fortune called him “the airline industry's jokemeister, the High Priest of Ha-Ha, a man who has appeared in public dressed as Elvis and the Easter Bunny, who has carved an antic public persona out of his affection for cigarettes, bourbon, and bawdy stories.” But he was revered as a strategist too. After Kelleher died in 2019, management guru Roger Martin paid tribute to the founder, writing that he was one of a few who understood that “the only path to distinctive results is with distinctive choices.”
At the time, those choices had been working for decades. There was little deviation, aside from a tweak to its seating policy following increased security requirements after 9/11. And 2015 to 2019 was a particularly heady time for the U.S. airline industry in general, characterized by strong demand and profitability, Nicolas Owens, airline analyst at research firm Morningstar, tells Fortune. Low oil prices were the key tailwinds at the time, Owens argues, since airlines tend to pass on fuel costs to passengers when oil is expensive, and chop ticket prices when fuel costs drop.
But the pandemic and temporary plane groundings brought an abrupt halt to this period. “COVID comes along and totally disrupts the industry,” says Owens. “Planes aren't flying, people aren't flying, etc etera.”
The pandemic briefly sent airline valuations into a free fall. But another change came as the pandemic eased and airlines began ramping up again. Customer preferences shifted, and more Americans chose to fly internationally or revenge-spend on premium services, while taking fewer same-day business trips between U.S. cities.
The airlines weren’t ready for the surge in demand, Owens explains. Just finding pilots was challenging; many of those who hadn’t been furloughed had retired. However, other than Southwest, the large U.S. airlines were prepared to meet the flying public’s new inclinations, having the right travel networks and products in place to take advantage of pent-up demand for Paris getaways or adventures in Tokyo. Before the pandemic, they had built up their capacity through mergers, and given themselves many levers to pull to respond to the marketplace. For example, they had three or more levels of passenger service to sell, along with airport lounge access. They could charge passengers for extra leg room or faster boarding privileges. With their international routes or airline partnerships, they were prepared to serve globe-trotters, vacationers, short-haul business travelers, and anyone else. “You had really strong financial results in general, where you had airlines reporting record revenue compared to 2019,” even with fewer flights, Owens says.
Southwest’s competitors have also been introducing basic economy seats, cutting into its no-frills strategy and “flooding the price-conscious-traveler space with additional seats within their existing networks,” says David Vernon, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. In short, major airlines have been innovative with their fare-segmentation strategies in a way that Southwest has not.
“The Elliott criticism that the Southwest experience hasn't changed much is fair,” he adds.
As a result of the shift in consumer tastes and increased competition for budget travelers, not to mention higher labor and fuel costs, Southwest has been struggling in the post-pandemic environment. This year, Boeing’s own struggles and its expectation of slower production also impacted the company, which was forced to cut its capacity.
Winter Storm Elliott was also a blow, and one that could have been avoided had the company prioritized an update of its crew-scheduling system. The software had no way of automatically reassigning crews to planes following cancellations, and instead required staffers to manually find and schedule crew members. That was a manageable issue when relatively few flights were canceled, but a logistical nightmare when it came to thousands. In an internal report, the company also identified “insufficient winter infrastructure and equipment in key airport locations” as a root cause of the crisis.
CEO Jordan apologized for the chaos, saying in a video message that “we know even our deepest apologies—to our customers, to our employees, and to all affected through this disruption—only go so far.” The airline vowed to refund customers, later spending $600 million to do so.
A cultural blindness
The 2022 meltdown left Southwest with a $140 million fine from the Department of Transportation and temporarily stained the brand. It was also a damning sign of Southwest’s cultural insularity, according to Rob Britton, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and a former American Airlines executive.
Like Sull, he argues that Southwest leaders created and presided over a culture that relied too heavily on past success, and failed to prioritize innovation. To his mind, that’s what led to its failure to invest adequately in technology. Even in its heyday, the company was too satisfied with its own strategies, for example rejecting Wall Street suggestions that it charge for bags as other airlines have done for more than a decade, says Britton. For context, American and United earned $1 billion each in bag fees last year. (Southwest recently shared customer research showing the airline would lose $300 million annually if it charged for bags, based on the number of consumers who would stop flying Southwest.)
Making changes
To escape “active inertia,” according to Sull’s research, companies do need to make drastic changes, but not necessarily by embracing an outsider CEO. Instead, they should look to insider-outside leaders, or executives from the company who have institutional knowledge but also enough distance to see the company’s predicament. That person might run an international business, for example, or a non-core division. Think Jack Welch at GE, who ran the company’s plastics business before taking over, says Sull.
Vernon, the Bernstein analyst, suggests that Southwest’s leadership might not have been burying their heads in the sand as much as “hoping that things would go back to the way they were”—that is, with more people taking cheap, high-frequency, short-haul flights.
by Lila MacLellan, Yahoo News/Fortune | Read more:
Image: Fortune · Bob Jordan:Christopher Goodney/Bloombe'rg-Getty Images, Southwest airplane:Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto-Getty Images; Clouds; Jason Hosking-Getty Images
[ ed. Guess they didn't get the 'rip off the consumer' memo and are now being schooled by some merciless hedge fund who knows exactly how to do that.]
In late December of 2022, an “extratropical cyclone” brought all manner of menacing winter conditions to two-thirds of the U.S., including the entire Eastern Seaboard and parts of Canada. Wind-chill warnings, whiteouts, and extraordinary snowfall complicated travel for millions.
The company eventually got back to business as usual, until this year, when a barrage of attacks from another Elliott—this one an activist hedge fund—led to a high-profile reckoning and major leadership shakeup.
The battle alarmed Southwest’s loyal flyers, who are legion. Over 50 years, the Texas-based company has built a cult-favorite brand on a combination of economy-class-only flights, free bag checks and flight changes, and often self-deprecating humor. Flight attendants are known for bookending their safety procedure announcements with comedy bits and dad jokes.
But some investors say Southwest’s foundational practices haven’t aged well as industry operating costs have risen. Since the pandemic, Southwest has lagged competitors in financial performance, and its share price is down 50% compared to 2021.
Seeing a turnaround opportunity, Elliott Management, an activist hedge fund with an 11% stake in the $18 billion airline, launched an aggressive campaign earlier this year to push out CEO Bob Jordan, as well as chairman and former CEO Gary Kelly, and replace half of Southwest’s board. Elliott asserted that the company’s leadership is too entrenched in the airline’s existing operating and pricing model to make changes to boost revenue. “Southwest’s rigid commitment to a decades-old approach has inhibited its ability to compete in the modern airline industry,” the hedge fund said in its opening salvo. (...)
Not long ago, such activist drama at Southwest would have been unthinkable. The airline’s remarkable growth story from startup to a top-four U.S. airline—along with American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines—made it a business-school case-study favorite. And before the pandemic, Southwest was profitable for 47 straight years. No other domestic or global airline can claim the same profitability streak. In fact, all three of Southwest’s main U.S. competitors have gone bankrupt at least once in the past half-century.
But the same unique traits that made Southwest soar—its egalitarian seating and anti-fee stance—have paradoxically weighed it down, says Donald Sull, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor of business practice and author of Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Can Remake Them.
Sull, who has followed Southwest’s story for years, tells Fortune that the airline’s current crisis is reminiscent of companies like Blockbuster and Compaq. In short, Southwest has been responding to changes in the business landscape by doubling down on its existing strategy.
“Business history is littered with the corpses of companies that have fallen prey to active inertia,” he adds. (...)
As a result of the shift in consumer tastes and increased competition for budget travelers, not to mention higher labor and fuel costs, Southwest has been struggling in the post-pandemic environment. This year, Boeing’s own struggles and its expectation of slower production also impacted the company, which was forced to cut its capacity.
Winter Storm Elliott was also a blow, and one that could have been avoided had the company prioritized an update of its crew-scheduling system. The software had no way of automatically reassigning crews to planes following cancellations, and instead required staffers to manually find and schedule crew members. That was a manageable issue when relatively few flights were canceled, but a logistical nightmare when it came to thousands. In an internal report, the company also identified “insufficient winter infrastructure and equipment in key airport locations” as a root cause of the crisis.
CEO Jordan apologized for the chaos, saying in a video message that “we know even our deepest apologies—to our customers, to our employees, and to all affected through this disruption—only go so far.” The airline vowed to refund customers, later spending $600 million to do so.
But the same unique traits that made Southwest soar—its egalitarian seating and anti-fee stance—have paradoxically weighed it down, says Donald Sull, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor of business practice and author of Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Can Remake Them.
Sull, who has followed Southwest’s story for years, tells Fortune that the airline’s current crisis is reminiscent of companies like Blockbuster and Compaq. In short, Southwest has been responding to changes in the business landscape by doubling down on its existing strategy.
“Business history is littered with the corpses of companies that have fallen prey to active inertia,” he adds. (...)
As a result of the shift in consumer tastes and increased competition for budget travelers, not to mention higher labor and fuel costs, Southwest has been struggling in the post-pandemic environment. This year, Boeing’s own struggles and its expectation of slower production also impacted the company, which was forced to cut its capacity.
Winter Storm Elliott was also a blow, and one that could have been avoided had the company prioritized an update of its crew-scheduling system. The software had no way of automatically reassigning crews to planes following cancellations, and instead required staffers to manually find and schedule crew members. That was a manageable issue when relatively few flights were canceled, but a logistical nightmare when it came to thousands. In an internal report, the company also identified “insufficient winter infrastructure and equipment in key airport locations” as a root cause of the crisis.
CEO Jordan apologized for the chaos, saying in a video message that “we know even our deepest apologies—to our customers, to our employees, and to all affected through this disruption—only go so far.” The airline vowed to refund customers, later spending $600 million to do so.
No frills and few fees
Herbert Kelleher cofounded Southwest more than 50 years ago as a local, low-cost airline serving Texan cities. As the airline grew, it took a radically different approach to air travel than its competitors. In addition to creating a no-frills, few-fees experience, Southwest adopted a point-to-point routing system, allowing passengers to fly between cities without transferring, rather than the hub-and-spoke model, which requires fliers to stop over in another city. Southwest also used only one type of plane, a Boeing 737, to standardize operations. And most famously, the startup embraced an open seating plan and, until 2007, a first-come, first serve policy.
Over time, Kelleher became known as much for his business prowess as his sense of humor. In a 1994 profile, Fortune called him “the airline industry's jokemeister, the High Priest of Ha-Ha, a man who has appeared in public dressed as Elvis and the Easter Bunny, who has carved an antic public persona out of his affection for cigarettes, bourbon, and bawdy stories.” But he was revered as a strategist too. After Kelleher died in 2019, management guru Roger Martin paid tribute to the founder, writing that he was one of a few who understood that “the only path to distinctive results is with distinctive choices.”
At the time, those choices had been working for decades. There was little deviation, aside from a tweak to its seating policy following increased security requirements after 9/11. And 2015 to 2019 was a particularly heady time for the U.S. airline industry in general, characterized by strong demand and profitability, Nicolas Owens, airline analyst at research firm Morningstar, tells Fortune. Low oil prices were the key tailwinds at the time, Owens argues, since airlines tend to pass on fuel costs to passengers when oil is expensive, and chop ticket prices when fuel costs drop.
But the pandemic and temporary plane groundings brought an abrupt halt to this period. “COVID comes along and totally disrupts the industry,” says Owens. “Planes aren't flying, people aren't flying, etc etera.”
The pandemic briefly sent airline valuations into a free fall. But another change came as the pandemic eased and airlines began ramping up again. Customer preferences shifted, and more Americans chose to fly internationally or revenge-spend on premium services, while taking fewer same-day business trips between U.S. cities.
The airlines weren’t ready for the surge in demand, Owens explains. Just finding pilots was challenging; many of those who hadn’t been furloughed had retired. However, other than Southwest, the large U.S. airlines were prepared to meet the flying public’s new inclinations, having the right travel networks and products in place to take advantage of pent-up demand for Paris getaways or adventures in Tokyo. Before the pandemic, they had built up their capacity through mergers, and given themselves many levers to pull to respond to the marketplace. For example, they had three or more levels of passenger service to sell, along with airport lounge access. They could charge passengers for extra leg room or faster boarding privileges. With their international routes or airline partnerships, they were prepared to serve globe-trotters, vacationers, short-haul business travelers, and anyone else. “You had really strong financial results in general, where you had airlines reporting record revenue compared to 2019,” even with fewer flights, Owens says.
Southwest’s competitors have also been introducing basic economy seats, cutting into its no-frills strategy and “flooding the price-conscious-traveler space with additional seats within their existing networks,” says David Vernon, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. In short, major airlines have been innovative with their fare-segmentation strategies in a way that Southwest has not.
“The Elliott criticism that the Southwest experience hasn't changed much is fair,” he adds.
As a result of the shift in consumer tastes and increased competition for budget travelers, not to mention higher labor and fuel costs, Southwest has been struggling in the post-pandemic environment. This year, Boeing’s own struggles and its expectation of slower production also impacted the company, which was forced to cut its capacity.
Winter Storm Elliott was also a blow, and one that could have been avoided had the company prioritized an update of its crew-scheduling system. The software had no way of automatically reassigning crews to planes following cancellations, and instead required staffers to manually find and schedule crew members. That was a manageable issue when relatively few flights were canceled, but a logistical nightmare when it came to thousands. In an internal report, the company also identified “insufficient winter infrastructure and equipment in key airport locations” as a root cause of the crisis.
CEO Jordan apologized for the chaos, saying in a video message that “we know even our deepest apologies—to our customers, to our employees, and to all affected through this disruption—only go so far.” The airline vowed to refund customers, later spending $600 million to do so.
A cultural blindness
The 2022 meltdown left Southwest with a $140 million fine from the Department of Transportation and temporarily stained the brand. It was also a damning sign of Southwest’s cultural insularity, according to Rob Britton, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and a former American Airlines executive.
Like Sull, he argues that Southwest leaders created and presided over a culture that relied too heavily on past success, and failed to prioritize innovation. To his mind, that’s what led to its failure to invest adequately in technology. Even in its heyday, the company was too satisfied with its own strategies, for example rejecting Wall Street suggestions that it charge for bags as other airlines have done for more than a decade, says Britton. For context, American and United earned $1 billion each in bag fees last year. (Southwest recently shared customer research showing the airline would lose $300 million annually if it charged for bags, based on the number of consumers who would stop flying Southwest.)
Making changes
To escape “active inertia,” according to Sull’s research, companies do need to make drastic changes, but not necessarily by embracing an outsider CEO. Instead, they should look to insider-outside leaders, or executives from the company who have institutional knowledge but also enough distance to see the company’s predicament. That person might run an international business, for example, or a non-core division. Think Jack Welch at GE, who ran the company’s plastics business before taking over, says Sull.
Vernon, the Bernstein analyst, suggests that Southwest’s leadership might not have been burying their heads in the sand as much as “hoping that things would go back to the way they were”—that is, with more people taking cheap, high-frequency, short-haul flights.
by Lila MacLellan, Yahoo News/Fortune | Read more:
Image: Fortune · Bob Jordan:Christopher Goodney/Bloombe'rg-Getty Images, Southwest airplane:Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto-Getty Images; Clouds; Jason Hosking-Getty Images
[ ed. Guess they didn't get the 'rip off the consumer' memo and are now being schooled by some merciless hedge fund who knows exactly how to do that.]
Friday, October 25, 2024
Thursday, October 24, 2024
What’s Missing in Our Sex Lives in 2024
Esther Perel’s trajectory from private-practice psychotherapist to internationally renowned relationship expert is deeply entwined with technology. (...)
But the same technological forces that have helped Perel’s ideas reach the masses also have begun to mold and meddle with modern-day relationships: We swipe to oblivion on soul-sucking dating apps, disappear like ghosts from our romantic interests’ lives and are lured from our partners by our smartphones at crucial moments for connection. (...)
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How do you think technology has shifted the romantic landscape since you began writing about it?
The predictive technologies that are promising to unburden us of the inconveniences of life are also creating a situation where we are gradually more anxious, not less anxious. Because we don’t get to practice the things that actually make us less anxious: experimentation, meeting with the unknown, dealing with uncertainty, the unexpected, dealing with the lessons that you learn from bad choices. That’s what makes you less anxious, not an algorithmic perfection.
If you spend so much time with algorithmic perfections, you begin to experience and create warped expectations, and you carry those expectations for perfection into your relationships with other people, and you become less able to deal with conflict, friction, difference.
Many studies say that Gen Z is having less sex, with fewer partners. A UCLA survey from 2023 said that a little more than 47% of people between the ages of 13 and 24 feel most TV shows and movie plots don’t need sexual content, and want more focus on platonic relationships. What do you make of this?
It’s symptomatic of something that is happening in society, in our changing culture. Technology being one piece of it. Relationships are imperfect and unpredictable. So is sex. And you’re vulnerable and you’re exposed, even. And, by the way, sex is never just sex. Even if you hook up.
So you’re less prepared for the vulnerability, for the unknown, for the consequences, for the challenges of communication that sex demands. If everything needs to be negotiated, as things are today, in relationships, and there is no longer a major religious or social hierarchy that tells you how to think, you have to make your own choices and decisions yourself.
Then in order to negotiate everything, you need to be able to communicate, and those very communication skills — the ability to deal with uncertainty and the unexpected — are the very skills that are weakening in the digital age. Sex is the messiness of human life, the bumps, the smells, the caring.
This, to me, is one of the central questions for the future: How are we going to manage the messiness of human life? That’s the opposite of an algorithmic perfection.
But the point is not that Gen Z wants less sex. They want less sex because they’re more isolated to begin with. They have less friends. They don’t go out, they work alone the whole day. You can go on an app, you can hook up, and after a while that gets a little boring for some. So it’s not the sex, it’s everything that sex is interwoven with.
Do you think it’s possible to foster that kind of intimacy you’re describing on digital platforms?
Yes and no. For a lot of people, it allows them to meet in ways they could never have met. But I do think that this is emotional capitalism, in which you have 1,000 choices at your fingertips, in which you partake in a frenzy of romantic consumerism, in which you are afraid to commit to the good because you fear that you’re going to miss out on the perfect.
We find ourselves evaluating ourselves like products, and that commodification is soulless. Do people meet on dating apps? Absolutely. I think 60% of people these days meet online. But I think there’s going to be a generational shift. There’s more and more attempts by people who are done with the apps to meet in person, even if it’s speed dating, even if it’s meeting in other circumstances, or even if it’s coming to my show.
My most important message in response to this is: Don’t go on a date in a bar, in a restaurant, at a table face to face, that resembles a job interview where you’re asking each other a set of stale questions that tell you nothing while you’re waiting to see if you’re getting butterflies.
Go do something with your friends and bring your date along. Integrate the dating into your life. You will have 1,000 data points by just seeing how this person interacts with people, how they answer questions or how they make comments. But primarily, you’re not isolating yourself, cutting yourself off from your life to go play the lottery, to then lose, and to then have to come back with your shame, to your life, to your friends, to tell them it didn’t work. We can do better.
You’ve talked about how, once you walk into the bedroom, you should throw political correctness out the window. But these days we see a lot of online shaming related to that very thing. How do conversations about sexual politics on social media influence our personal intimate lives?
There’s two questions in what you’re asking. One is: Is there a new type of moralizing that is occurring? And then the second one is: What is the nature of erotic desire?
I see sexuality as a coded language, as a window into the self, into a relationship that demands deep listening, and that listening is that actually sexuality is a coded language for our deepest, emotional needs, wishes, fears, aspirations, wounds. That’s why I always say: Sex is never just sex. Even when you think it’s hit-and-run and it’s supposed to not mean anything, the effort not to make it mean something is meaningful.
In that sense, it is irrational. Why we like certain things, we don’t fully know. We don’t fully know why what I like, you find disgusting. We don’t fully know why this memory turned into a fantasy. We don’t fully know the inner workings of the erotic mind. The brain is a black box as it is, but this adds a whole other layer to its sexual fantasies. It’s a uniquely human production that makes no sense sometimes, because it defies our values. It defies our perception of reality. It defies our perception of who we are as good citizens.
Nobody wants some of these things in real life, but turned into play they can become highly arousing, exciting and satisfying. And it goes even further when you go into the world of kink. The erotic mind is often politically incorrect, meaning it doesn’t abide by the rules of good citizenship that you yourself abide by in the rest of your life. (...)
Here’s one thing I say in the tour, and I say it in the courses too: Relationships are stories. What I would like to invite you to do is to consider your stories with a new curiosity, with more nuance and ambiguity. I want you to think about what are the parts of your story, relational and sexual story, that you want to keep and develop further, and what are the parts of your relational story that you want to leave behind or change? That’s my invitation.
by Alyssa Bereznak, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Maggie Chiang / For The Times
But the same technological forces that have helped Perel’s ideas reach the masses also have begun to mold and meddle with modern-day relationships: We swipe to oblivion on soul-sucking dating apps, disappear like ghosts from our romantic interests’ lives and are lured from our partners by our smartphones at crucial moments for connection. (...)
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How do you think technology has shifted the romantic landscape since you began writing about it?
If you spend so much time with algorithmic perfections, you begin to experience and create warped expectations, and you carry those expectations for perfection into your relationships with other people, and you become less able to deal with conflict, friction, difference.
Many studies say that Gen Z is having less sex, with fewer partners. A UCLA survey from 2023 said that a little more than 47% of people between the ages of 13 and 24 feel most TV shows and movie plots don’t need sexual content, and want more focus on platonic relationships. What do you make of this?
It’s symptomatic of something that is happening in society, in our changing culture. Technology being one piece of it. Relationships are imperfect and unpredictable. So is sex. And you’re vulnerable and you’re exposed, even. And, by the way, sex is never just sex. Even if you hook up.
So you’re less prepared for the vulnerability, for the unknown, for the consequences, for the challenges of communication that sex demands. If everything needs to be negotiated, as things are today, in relationships, and there is no longer a major religious or social hierarchy that tells you how to think, you have to make your own choices and decisions yourself.
Then in order to negotiate everything, you need to be able to communicate, and those very communication skills — the ability to deal with uncertainty and the unexpected — are the very skills that are weakening in the digital age. Sex is the messiness of human life, the bumps, the smells, the caring.
This, to me, is one of the central questions for the future: How are we going to manage the messiness of human life? That’s the opposite of an algorithmic perfection.
But the point is not that Gen Z wants less sex. They want less sex because they’re more isolated to begin with. They have less friends. They don’t go out, they work alone the whole day. You can go on an app, you can hook up, and after a while that gets a little boring for some. So it’s not the sex, it’s everything that sex is interwoven with.
Do you think it’s possible to foster that kind of intimacy you’re describing on digital platforms?
Yes and no. For a lot of people, it allows them to meet in ways they could never have met. But I do think that this is emotional capitalism, in which you have 1,000 choices at your fingertips, in which you partake in a frenzy of romantic consumerism, in which you are afraid to commit to the good because you fear that you’re going to miss out on the perfect.
We find ourselves evaluating ourselves like products, and that commodification is soulless. Do people meet on dating apps? Absolutely. I think 60% of people these days meet online. But I think there’s going to be a generational shift. There’s more and more attempts by people who are done with the apps to meet in person, even if it’s speed dating, even if it’s meeting in other circumstances, or even if it’s coming to my show.
My most important message in response to this is: Don’t go on a date in a bar, in a restaurant, at a table face to face, that resembles a job interview where you’re asking each other a set of stale questions that tell you nothing while you’re waiting to see if you’re getting butterflies.
Go do something with your friends and bring your date along. Integrate the dating into your life. You will have 1,000 data points by just seeing how this person interacts with people, how they answer questions or how they make comments. But primarily, you’re not isolating yourself, cutting yourself off from your life to go play the lottery, to then lose, and to then have to come back with your shame, to your life, to your friends, to tell them it didn’t work. We can do better.
You’ve talked about how, once you walk into the bedroom, you should throw political correctness out the window. But these days we see a lot of online shaming related to that very thing. How do conversations about sexual politics on social media influence our personal intimate lives?
There’s two questions in what you’re asking. One is: Is there a new type of moralizing that is occurring? And then the second one is: What is the nature of erotic desire?
I see sexuality as a coded language, as a window into the self, into a relationship that demands deep listening, and that listening is that actually sexuality is a coded language for our deepest, emotional needs, wishes, fears, aspirations, wounds. That’s why I always say: Sex is never just sex. Even when you think it’s hit-and-run and it’s supposed to not mean anything, the effort not to make it mean something is meaningful.
In that sense, it is irrational. Why we like certain things, we don’t fully know. We don’t fully know why what I like, you find disgusting. We don’t fully know why this memory turned into a fantasy. We don’t fully know the inner workings of the erotic mind. The brain is a black box as it is, but this adds a whole other layer to its sexual fantasies. It’s a uniquely human production that makes no sense sometimes, because it defies our values. It defies our perception of reality. It defies our perception of who we are as good citizens.
Nobody wants some of these things in real life, but turned into play they can become highly arousing, exciting and satisfying. And it goes even further when you go into the world of kink. The erotic mind is often politically incorrect, meaning it doesn’t abide by the rules of good citizenship that you yourself abide by in the rest of your life. (...)
Here’s one thing I say in the tour, and I say it in the courses too: Relationships are stories. What I would like to invite you to do is to consider your stories with a new curiosity, with more nuance and ambiguity. I want you to think about what are the parts of your story, relational and sexual story, that you want to keep and develop further, and what are the parts of your relational story that you want to leave behind or change? That’s my invitation.
by Alyssa Bereznak, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Maggie Chiang / For The Times
What It’s Like to Work on a Megayacht
Working on a yacht, you’re in a very intimate space with these extremely wealthy people. What is that like?
You’re a fly on the wall, but it’s very one-sided. You learn so much about the owners and guests, and they’re not learning anything about you. As a stewardess, I was doing food service and housekeeping and going through people’s personal belongings, folding their underwear and putting it away. I would overhear conversations, on the phone or in person. This is kind of graphic, but you even learn stuff like how frequently they poop. In yachting, anytime somebody washes their hands, the stewardess dries out the sink afterward. If they put something in the trash, you empty it right away. Every time you go check the bathroom, you make it look untouched. So you learn all their habits. With my previous boss, I would get a sense, like, “oh, he hasn’t eaten in a few hours. He probably wants a snack.” And I would put together a snack for him, and he’d come out and say, “Oh, I was just about to ask you for this.”
How did you get into the industry?
I met a friend of a friend who was on a yacht crew. At the time, I was one year out of college, working a miserable office job and paying student loans. I had always played it really safe, and I was itching to break out of my shell. I thought, I have 40 years to work at a desk job. I’ll give this a try for a little bit. Then, I ended up doing it off and on for 12 years.
I started in Fort Lauderdale, which is the U.S. capital of yachting, and I rented a bed in what’s called a crew house. It’s like a hostel for yacht crew, and people stay there when they’re between jobs. You typically pay by the week. I took a weeklong course called the STCW, which teaches things like basic firefighting, basic first aid, sea survival. When you complete it, you can start looking for work. At the time, I think the course cost about $1,000, and you have to take a refresher every five years. I also took an additional course that teaches about how to handle pirates.
What was your first job?
I didn’t know what I was walking into. I worked for a bachelor who had multiple boats and used them exclusively to throw parties. It was wild. In most cases, we were just tied up to the dock, because then you can have more people onboard. The guests were typically girls in their early 20s, blonde, skinny. They would all say they were models. Then, there would be a small handful of 45-ish-year-old men, lots of vodka and diet Red Bulls. We were always hiring bathroom attendants to try to limit drug use on board. The captain had to have talks with the owner about it, too, because his license would be impacted if anything were to happen. One morning, I woke up, went upstairs, and saw a girl giving a guy a blowjob on the deck. Nobody saw me, so I just turned around and walked back down. I never saw anything that seemed involuntary. I think the girls were aware that they weren’t going to find the love of their lives there.
I never had any issues with how people treated me on that job. I’m not that tall — no one is going to mistake me for a model — and I was wearing a uniform. The problem was that it was just messy. Most yachts have white carpets and white couches and white bath towels, and here were all these girls with self-tanner rubbing off on everything, spilling drinks, and leaving half-drunk cups everywhere. At a certain point that felt almost disrespectful. We had to schedule crew to be awake 24 hours because there was usually some straggler up until dawn. One morning, I was cleaning up this huge mess, and I remember looking out over the water and thinking, What am I doing with my life? Why did I leave my friends and family behind to work on this boat, cleaning up after people who don’t even know my name? We were working all the time, constantly on call. If the owner wasn’t around, he’d tell his friends to use his boat. When I left, I swore I would never do parties like that again — I just wanted to work with families.
My next job was working for a really old guy, over 85. Older owners are very different. Unless they have grandkids, they don’t use water toys, like inflatables and Jet Skis. And you wouldn’t believe how much time it takes to set up water toys, take them down, clean them, and maintain them. Inflatable slides are the worst. Yacht crews hate them. They’re very heavy and they take a long time to put up. And, of course, you’ll spend all this time setting it up, and then the owner or principal guest will say, “You know what? I don’t like the spot. Let’s move the boat.” And you have to take it all down again.
The older guy I worked for, he was very routine and polite. But he was also very flirtatious with me, even when his wife was around. I was 25 at the time, and he said to me on multiple occasions, “You can come down to my cabin after you’re done tonight.” I never felt threatened by it, and the captain was aware of it. But there’s no doubt that I was sexually harassed for the year I worked for him. It was mostly just annoying — the awkward smile, nervous laughter. But aside from that, he was great to work for.
Sometimes, the wives can feel threatened by pretty stewardesses. But I think I’m just unattractive enough that no wife is going to be threatened by me. You do see some interesting marital setups, though. I’ve worked for more than one couple with separate master rooms. There’s one boat in particular where the owner, who is pretty well known, had a long-term mistress. When he would use the boat with his family, they’d have family photos out and all the wife’s things in the closet. And then when the mistress came, the crew would have to put away the family stuff and replace the wife’s things with hers. They were always flip-flopping.
What about privacy? Did you ever work with celebrities who were worried about paparazzi?
Most yachts are very private, and even the outdoor areas have some level of privacy. The bigger issue is on land. Paparazzi will hang out at the private airports or near certain restaurants. But not that many celebrities own yachts, actually. Their net worth aren’t high enough. Yacht-owning money is next level. Yachts are so expensive that most of the owners are just businessmen you’ve never heard of. You couldn’t tell them apart from some other grandpa. I definitely had celebrity guests from time to time, but they were always friends of the owner or charter guests.
Did you always live onboard?
Yes, almost always. The free housing was important to me. Most crew cabins are set up with a bunk bed. About half the time, I was sharing with another crew member, and half the time, I wasn’t. The cabins have very little storage, so I barely had any stuff — just the bag that I lived out of, the uniforms I wore. I was fine with it. Some crew members get a storage unit, but I just kept a couple of things at my parents’ house, like a nice pair of leather boots and a long winter coat that I obviously didn’t need on the boat.
The last boat I worked on was really small; it was for weekend travel, and the crew cabins weren’t set up to be truly livable. So we all stayed ashore in the Hamptons. That’s actually quite common out there; a lot of people have smaller boats, and they rent housing for the crew. But the housing in the Hamptons is absurd. One of the places they rented for us was a two-bed, one-bath apartment with no air-conditioning, and it was $12,000 a month. It was covered by my employer, but paying for my half would have wiped out my salary. Another house where we stayed was listed at $75,000 for the summer.
What were your hours like?
When you don’t have guests onboard, a typical day is 8 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m. A lot of people don’t realize how much time you spend at the dock or anchored with no guests. These yachts are full of equipment that needs repairs all the time. Things need to be taken apart and cleaned and maintained. You have to wash the whole boat regularly.
Then, when you do have guests on, you’re typically working 16-hour days, every day, for the duration of the trip, which could be three weeks or longer. I often worked from 5 or 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. I’m a morning person, so if there was another stewardess, I’d take the early shift and she would do nights. You have a stewardess available at every hour that guests are awake. Sometimes, you have certain guests who get up early and others who stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. having drinks. If you’re a solo stewardess, you might not get a break. (...)
What kind of salary did you make?
You’re salaried by the month, typically. Pay is largely influenced by the size of the boat and your experience level. Starting salaries for stewardesses are between $2,500 and $3,500 a month. I got lucky in my first job and was making $4,000 out of the gate with no experience. I was paid up to $7,500 or $8,500 by the end of my career, especially if I was working on a bigger boat. And your housing and food are covered, because you’re living on the boat. You also get health insurance. My take-home pay could vary a lot. I think the most I ever made was maybe $120,000 a year. Which, especially in your 20s, not paying rent, is good money. It’s also pretty common to get an annual bonus, sometimes one month’s salary. (...)
Was it crazy to watch how some of these people spent money?
I worked on a 47-meter boat that chartered for $250,000 a week. And that just covers use of the boat and crew; it doesn’t include fuel, food, or other fees. So, you could see how these numbers add up very quickly, especially if people are taking a private jet to and from the boat, which they often are.
I worked for one family who was incredibly cheap. They drank off-brand soda, like the grocery-store brand. They would also steal towels from resorts. If they ever went to a beach, they would come back with the towel from the lounge chair. Other people weren’t intentionally cheap — they were just no frills. I worked for a family from the Midwest who, if you saw them, you wouldn’t know that they were multimillionaires. They’re just meat-and-potatoes, vanilla-ice-cream kind of people. Their kids shop at H&M. At one point, we needed a new welcome mat on the boat, so I asked the owner’s wife if I could buy one, and she just went to Kmart and bought one herself.
Another owner was an elaborate spender. He always wanted to outdo his friends. He would have these hugely over-the-top birthdays. One year, he spent more than $50,000 just on a fireworks show. He wanted the premium version of every water toy, the fastest Jet Ski with the most features. He would go to a restaurant and order everything on the whole menu, even if it was just two people at the table and they were going to throw most of the food away.
Did it ever affect the way that you spent money, to see how these people were living?
I was always careful with my money. But some crew members aren’t. Part of the problem is that the places where yachts go are very expensive, so as soon as you get off the boat, you’re spending a lot. A gallon of milk in the Bahamas is like $11. If you take a taxi ride, it’s easily $100. Then, some people get caught up in the lifestyle. For guys, it was always about the watch. The owner’s got a nice watch; the captain has a nice watch; they want to get a nice watch too. Which is fine for them, but it wasn’t something I cared about. Who am I going to impress? Not the owners; they have millions of dollars and $100,000 Rolexes. The area where I spent money was travel. I’d work for a couple of seasons and then take a break. I backpacked around the South Pacific and in Asia several times. And I was a budget traveler, so I was able to stretch my money really far.
Were you able to save money?
Yes, quite a bit. When I left, I had over $100,000 in cash and over $350,000 invested. It’s good money, but there are so many sacrifices that come with it. When you break it down to an hourly rate, the pay is not great. And you don’t have control over when you’re working. That was a big reason why I finally left; your whole life is very much dependent on another person’s movement. And they always want to have their options open. I knew someone who had to quit a job because the owner wouldn’t let her take time off to go to her best friend’s wedding. I knew another guy who missed his brother’s wedding. The owner was like, “You need to be here,” and then he didn’t even end up using the boat that day.
by Charlotte Cowles, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photo: Getty Images
You’re a fly on the wall, but it’s very one-sided. You learn so much about the owners and guests, and they’re not learning anything about you. As a stewardess, I was doing food service and housekeeping and going through people’s personal belongings, folding their underwear and putting it away. I would overhear conversations, on the phone or in person. This is kind of graphic, but you even learn stuff like how frequently they poop. In yachting, anytime somebody washes their hands, the stewardess dries out the sink afterward. If they put something in the trash, you empty it right away. Every time you go check the bathroom, you make it look untouched. So you learn all their habits. With my previous boss, I would get a sense, like, “oh, he hasn’t eaten in a few hours. He probably wants a snack.” And I would put together a snack for him, and he’d come out and say, “Oh, I was just about to ask you for this.”
How did you get into the industry?
I started in Fort Lauderdale, which is the U.S. capital of yachting, and I rented a bed in what’s called a crew house. It’s like a hostel for yacht crew, and people stay there when they’re between jobs. You typically pay by the week. I took a weeklong course called the STCW, which teaches things like basic firefighting, basic first aid, sea survival. When you complete it, you can start looking for work. At the time, I think the course cost about $1,000, and you have to take a refresher every five years. I also took an additional course that teaches about how to handle pirates.
What was your first job?
I didn’t know what I was walking into. I worked for a bachelor who had multiple boats and used them exclusively to throw parties. It was wild. In most cases, we were just tied up to the dock, because then you can have more people onboard. The guests were typically girls in their early 20s, blonde, skinny. They would all say they were models. Then, there would be a small handful of 45-ish-year-old men, lots of vodka and diet Red Bulls. We were always hiring bathroom attendants to try to limit drug use on board. The captain had to have talks with the owner about it, too, because his license would be impacted if anything were to happen. One morning, I woke up, went upstairs, and saw a girl giving a guy a blowjob on the deck. Nobody saw me, so I just turned around and walked back down. I never saw anything that seemed involuntary. I think the girls were aware that they weren’t going to find the love of their lives there.
I never had any issues with how people treated me on that job. I’m not that tall — no one is going to mistake me for a model — and I was wearing a uniform. The problem was that it was just messy. Most yachts have white carpets and white couches and white bath towels, and here were all these girls with self-tanner rubbing off on everything, spilling drinks, and leaving half-drunk cups everywhere. At a certain point that felt almost disrespectful. We had to schedule crew to be awake 24 hours because there was usually some straggler up until dawn. One morning, I was cleaning up this huge mess, and I remember looking out over the water and thinking, What am I doing with my life? Why did I leave my friends and family behind to work on this boat, cleaning up after people who don’t even know my name? We were working all the time, constantly on call. If the owner wasn’t around, he’d tell his friends to use his boat. When I left, I swore I would never do parties like that again — I just wanted to work with families.
My next job was working for a really old guy, over 85. Older owners are very different. Unless they have grandkids, they don’t use water toys, like inflatables and Jet Skis. And you wouldn’t believe how much time it takes to set up water toys, take them down, clean them, and maintain them. Inflatable slides are the worst. Yacht crews hate them. They’re very heavy and they take a long time to put up. And, of course, you’ll spend all this time setting it up, and then the owner or principal guest will say, “You know what? I don’t like the spot. Let’s move the boat.” And you have to take it all down again.
The older guy I worked for, he was very routine and polite. But he was also very flirtatious with me, even when his wife was around. I was 25 at the time, and he said to me on multiple occasions, “You can come down to my cabin after you’re done tonight.” I never felt threatened by it, and the captain was aware of it. But there’s no doubt that I was sexually harassed for the year I worked for him. It was mostly just annoying — the awkward smile, nervous laughter. But aside from that, he was great to work for.
Sometimes, the wives can feel threatened by pretty stewardesses. But I think I’m just unattractive enough that no wife is going to be threatened by me. You do see some interesting marital setups, though. I’ve worked for more than one couple with separate master rooms. There’s one boat in particular where the owner, who is pretty well known, had a long-term mistress. When he would use the boat with his family, they’d have family photos out and all the wife’s things in the closet. And then when the mistress came, the crew would have to put away the family stuff and replace the wife’s things with hers. They were always flip-flopping.
What about privacy? Did you ever work with celebrities who were worried about paparazzi?
Most yachts are very private, and even the outdoor areas have some level of privacy. The bigger issue is on land. Paparazzi will hang out at the private airports or near certain restaurants. But not that many celebrities own yachts, actually. Their net worth aren’t high enough. Yacht-owning money is next level. Yachts are so expensive that most of the owners are just businessmen you’ve never heard of. You couldn’t tell them apart from some other grandpa. I definitely had celebrity guests from time to time, but they were always friends of the owner or charter guests.
Did you always live onboard?
Yes, almost always. The free housing was important to me. Most crew cabins are set up with a bunk bed. About half the time, I was sharing with another crew member, and half the time, I wasn’t. The cabins have very little storage, so I barely had any stuff — just the bag that I lived out of, the uniforms I wore. I was fine with it. Some crew members get a storage unit, but I just kept a couple of things at my parents’ house, like a nice pair of leather boots and a long winter coat that I obviously didn’t need on the boat.
The last boat I worked on was really small; it was for weekend travel, and the crew cabins weren’t set up to be truly livable. So we all stayed ashore in the Hamptons. That’s actually quite common out there; a lot of people have smaller boats, and they rent housing for the crew. But the housing in the Hamptons is absurd. One of the places they rented for us was a two-bed, one-bath apartment with no air-conditioning, and it was $12,000 a month. It was covered by my employer, but paying for my half would have wiped out my salary. Another house where we stayed was listed at $75,000 for the summer.
What were your hours like?
When you don’t have guests onboard, a typical day is 8 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m. A lot of people don’t realize how much time you spend at the dock or anchored with no guests. These yachts are full of equipment that needs repairs all the time. Things need to be taken apart and cleaned and maintained. You have to wash the whole boat regularly.
Then, when you do have guests on, you’re typically working 16-hour days, every day, for the duration of the trip, which could be three weeks or longer. I often worked from 5 or 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. I’m a morning person, so if there was another stewardess, I’d take the early shift and she would do nights. You have a stewardess available at every hour that guests are awake. Sometimes, you have certain guests who get up early and others who stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. having drinks. If you’re a solo stewardess, you might not get a break. (...)
What kind of salary did you make?
You’re salaried by the month, typically. Pay is largely influenced by the size of the boat and your experience level. Starting salaries for stewardesses are between $2,500 and $3,500 a month. I got lucky in my first job and was making $4,000 out of the gate with no experience. I was paid up to $7,500 or $8,500 by the end of my career, especially if I was working on a bigger boat. And your housing and food are covered, because you’re living on the boat. You also get health insurance. My take-home pay could vary a lot. I think the most I ever made was maybe $120,000 a year. Which, especially in your 20s, not paying rent, is good money. It’s also pretty common to get an annual bonus, sometimes one month’s salary. (...)
Was it crazy to watch how some of these people spent money?
I worked on a 47-meter boat that chartered for $250,000 a week. And that just covers use of the boat and crew; it doesn’t include fuel, food, or other fees. So, you could see how these numbers add up very quickly, especially if people are taking a private jet to and from the boat, which they often are.
I worked for one family who was incredibly cheap. They drank off-brand soda, like the grocery-store brand. They would also steal towels from resorts. If they ever went to a beach, they would come back with the towel from the lounge chair. Other people weren’t intentionally cheap — they were just no frills. I worked for a family from the Midwest who, if you saw them, you wouldn’t know that they were multimillionaires. They’re just meat-and-potatoes, vanilla-ice-cream kind of people. Their kids shop at H&M. At one point, we needed a new welcome mat on the boat, so I asked the owner’s wife if I could buy one, and she just went to Kmart and bought one herself.
Another owner was an elaborate spender. He always wanted to outdo his friends. He would have these hugely over-the-top birthdays. One year, he spent more than $50,000 just on a fireworks show. He wanted the premium version of every water toy, the fastest Jet Ski with the most features. He would go to a restaurant and order everything on the whole menu, even if it was just two people at the table and they were going to throw most of the food away.
Did it ever affect the way that you spent money, to see how these people were living?
I was always careful with my money. But some crew members aren’t. Part of the problem is that the places where yachts go are very expensive, so as soon as you get off the boat, you’re spending a lot. A gallon of milk in the Bahamas is like $11. If you take a taxi ride, it’s easily $100. Then, some people get caught up in the lifestyle. For guys, it was always about the watch. The owner’s got a nice watch; the captain has a nice watch; they want to get a nice watch too. Which is fine for them, but it wasn’t something I cared about. Who am I going to impress? Not the owners; they have millions of dollars and $100,000 Rolexes. The area where I spent money was travel. I’d work for a couple of seasons and then take a break. I backpacked around the South Pacific and in Asia several times. And I was a budget traveler, so I was able to stretch my money really far.
Were you able to save money?
Yes, quite a bit. When I left, I had over $100,000 in cash and over $350,000 invested. It’s good money, but there are so many sacrifices that come with it. When you break it down to an hourly rate, the pay is not great. And you don’t have control over when you’re working. That was a big reason why I finally left; your whole life is very much dependent on another person’s movement. And they always want to have their options open. I knew someone who had to quit a job because the owner wouldn’t let her take time off to go to her best friend’s wedding. I knew another guy who missed his brother’s wedding. The owner was like, “You need to be here,” and then he didn’t even end up using the boat that day.
by Charlotte Cowles, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photo: Getty Images
Main Character Syndrome
Driving on one of New York’s poorly maintained and crowded roads, I found myself in a situation one can more safely observe through numerous YouTube ‘bad driver’ videos: a driver for whom all other traffic apparently ceased to exist confidently pulled into a lane I already happened to occupy. After a quick manoeuvre that probably spared me a role in one of the aforementioned videos, I said, perhaps louder than was necessary, to nobody in particular: ‘Is this [deleted] aware of anything but his own [deleted]?’
Because I am a philosopher, and thus tend to be rather bad at letting go of ideas – especially ideas without good answers – my close brush with YouTube fame led me to consider other instances of what has come to be called ‘main character syndrome’ (MCS) or, perhaps more annoyingly, ‘main character energy’. Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, and popularised by a number of social media platforms, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best. Only the star’s perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey.
You have probably heard of MC behaviour – or perhaps even witnessed it online or in person. A TikToker and her followers physically push aside those inconvenient extras ‘ruining’ their selfies – and then post their grievances on social media. A man on a crowded subway watches a loud sports broadcast without headphones while ignoring other commuters’ requests to turn it down a bit. This is no mere rudeness: in the narrowly circumscribed world of main characters, the rest of us are merely the insignificant ghosts who happen to intrude on their spaces. Akin to chess pieces, or perhaps to animatronic figures, we have agency only in the development of the MC’s story. In current parlance, we are non-player characters (or NPCs) – a term that originated in traditional tabletop games to describe characters not controlled by a player but rather by the ‘dungeon master’. In video games, NPCs are characters with a predetermined (or algorithmically determined) set of behaviours controlled by the computer. Rather than agents with a will and intent, NPCs are there to help the MC in his quest, to intersect with the MC in preset ways, or to simply remain silent – a kind of prop, or perhaps human-shaped furniture, a part of the scenery. Another way to view NPCs is to imagine what the philosopher David Chalmers calls a philosophical zombie, or p-zombie, a being that, while physically identical to a normal human being, does not have conscious experience. If a p-zombie laughs, it’s not because it finds anything funny – its behaviour is purely imitative of the real (main character!) individual. For someone convinced of their MC identity, the rest of us are, perhaps, just so many zombies. (...)
As a philosopher and a narrativist, I am an unabashed supporter of the view that selves are something that we create together, through shared stories. What is a narrative? In short, anything that can be read, spoken, heard, written, viewed or otherwise expressed – and this certainly includes social media. In telling stories, we create and reveal who we think we are; in listening to the stories of others, we help to mould and sustain them as persons. Stories are thus foundational to how we view the world and our place in it, and through them we can make ourselves morally intelligible to ourselves and to others. (...)
MCS offers the wrong kinds of stories: harmful, isolating, solipsistic, amoral. And it begins, in large part, with the assumed superiority of the main character’s self-conception.... Daily, social media denizens are sold the idea that becoming the heroes of their lives is the only thing that matters. (...)
Absorbing these messages and mimicking the voiceovers of lead characters in films and other media, we also try to narrate our lives – often, directly into our smart phones – and share with the world all the ways in which our paths, our storylines, our perspectives, are the ones that matter, the ones worth paying attention to; our voices the voices that are worth hearing. We demand from others, both directly and indirectly: ‘Stop everything, and watch me – the hero!’
But isn’t it a bit too easy to blame media for our growing obsession with our own importance? Long before the internet, let alone social media, people have shared their narratives in diaries, autobiographies, poems and so on, bringing their lives to centre stage. Generations of Americans have been taught to pursue happiness – individual, personal happiness – above all else. There have always been solipsists, narcissists, sociopaths and simple attention-seekers – social media did not invent the me-first typology.
And yet, can we help ourselves in this time of global access to others, and to ourselves? Can we – well, some of us, anyway – resist demanding an audience when one is always there, ready to be engaged? Perhaps not. As the clinical psychologist Michael G Wetter said in a Newsweek interview in 2021, main character syndrome is:
Of course, blaming all media, or only social media, for MCS would be inaccurate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, main characters have emerged in places where psychopathy and narcissism have always reigned: in politics, academia and other public-facing institutions. From a US president who claims that ‘I alone can fix’ the nation’s many crises, to news and manipulative media personalities who insist that they and only they are telling the truth, to politicians who cannot – or do not wish to – tell the difference between being famous and being effective, MCS is becoming the norm.
There are worse offenders still. As an academic, I would be remiss if I did not include those within academia, or those solipsistic enough to call themselves ‘social leaders’ or, even worse, ‘thought leaders’. (...)
I take self-creating narratives to be fundamental to who we are – by telling and hearing stories about ourselves, about others and about the world, we come to understand who, why and how we might be. Yet the kind of main-character storytelling that is presently ascendant does very little to form mutually constructed identities and, instead, reduces the complexity of human relationships to simplistic binaries of ‘me’ and ‘not me’, ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘hero’ and ‘villain’. Instead of co-creators and co-authors of each other’s selves, what remains is an anxiety-producing, shallow, consumerist competition for the ring of the one true self, the one true main character. We thus become rivals, competitors and players in what looks like a zero-sum game of winners and losers.
Because I am a philosopher, and thus tend to be rather bad at letting go of ideas – especially ideas without good answers – my close brush with YouTube fame led me to consider other instances of what has come to be called ‘main character syndrome’ (MCS) or, perhaps more annoyingly, ‘main character energy’. Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, and popularised by a number of social media platforms, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best. Only the star’s perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey.
As a philosopher and a narrativist, I am an unabashed supporter of the view that selves are something that we create together, through shared stories. What is a narrative? In short, anything that can be read, spoken, heard, written, viewed or otherwise expressed – and this certainly includes social media. In telling stories, we create and reveal who we think we are; in listening to the stories of others, we help to mould and sustain them as persons. Stories are thus foundational to how we view the world and our place in it, and through them we can make ourselves morally intelligible to ourselves and to others. (...)
MCS offers the wrong kinds of stories: harmful, isolating, solipsistic, amoral. And it begins, in large part, with the assumed superiority of the main character’s self-conception.... Daily, social media denizens are sold the idea that becoming the heroes of their lives is the only thing that matters. (...)
Absorbing these messages and mimicking the voiceovers of lead characters in films and other media, we also try to narrate our lives – often, directly into our smart phones – and share with the world all the ways in which our paths, our storylines, our perspectives, are the ones that matter, the ones worth paying attention to; our voices the voices that are worth hearing. We demand from others, both directly and indirectly: ‘Stop everything, and watch me – the hero!’
But isn’t it a bit too easy to blame media for our growing obsession with our own importance? Long before the internet, let alone social media, people have shared their narratives in diaries, autobiographies, poems and so on, bringing their lives to centre stage. Generations of Americans have been taught to pursue happiness – individual, personal happiness – above all else. There have always been solipsists, narcissists, sociopaths and simple attention-seekers – social media did not invent the me-first typology.
And yet, can we help ourselves in this time of global access to others, and to ourselves? Can we – well, some of us, anyway – resist demanding an audience when one is always there, ready to be engaged? Perhaps not. As the clinical psychologist Michael G Wetter said in a Newsweek interview in 2021, main character syndrome is:
the inevitable consequence of the natural human desire to be recognized and validated merging with the rapidly evolving technology that allows for immediate and widespread self-promotion … Those who exhibit characteristics consistent with the experience of main character syndrome tend to want to create a narrative that is dependent on an audience to validate their story. What good is a story or movie if there is no audience?Media, social and otherwise, has made it easier, cheaper and, importantly, more socially acceptable to act out our MC monomyths. We can upload photos, videos, entire films about ourselves – and we can choose how we are perceived through clever tricks of light and angles, apps and filters that tell exactly the stories we want told. All this because we want to get noticed, we want to be seen – and seen as someone who matters, as the main someone who matters. As the influencer Ashley Ward noted on TikTok in 2020:
You have to start romanticising your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because, if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed.Not being seen, not being noticed as someone who matters means relegating oneself to NPC-dom – a nobody, a nothing, a mannequin without a personal story or agency, going through a prewritten script of a grey, insignificant life. To be seen, on the other hand, is to be happy. This happiness requires making sure that others know that one is happy, successful, better than those NPCs – in other words, it calls for constant curation of one’s image, one’s narrative, one’s self. If one is not the MC, someone else surely will be. This is, for many, simply an intolerable fate.
Of course, blaming all media, or only social media, for MCS would be inaccurate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, main characters have emerged in places where psychopathy and narcissism have always reigned: in politics, academia and other public-facing institutions. From a US president who claims that ‘I alone can fix’ the nation’s many crises, to news and manipulative media personalities who insist that they and only they are telling the truth, to politicians who cannot – or do not wish to – tell the difference between being famous and being effective, MCS is becoming the norm.
There are worse offenders still. As an academic, I would be remiss if I did not include those within academia, or those solipsistic enough to call themselves ‘social leaders’ or, even worse, ‘thought leaders’. (...)
I take self-creating narratives to be fundamental to who we are – by telling and hearing stories about ourselves, about others and about the world, we come to understand who, why and how we might be. Yet the kind of main-character storytelling that is presently ascendant does very little to form mutually constructed identities and, instead, reduces the complexity of human relationships to simplistic binaries of ‘me’ and ‘not me’, ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘hero’ and ‘villain’. Instead of co-creators and co-authors of each other’s selves, what remains is an anxiety-producing, shallow, consumerist competition for the ring of the one true self, the one true main character. We thus become rivals, competitors and players in what looks like a zero-sum game of winners and losers.
by Anna Gotlib, Aeon | Read more:
Image: xkcd.com
[ed. More than just another term for narcissism (a subset of the type). What's particularly galling is that this behavior is constantly rewarded - with fauning accolades for celebrities, sports stars, musicians, CEOs/billionaires, and anyone else who somehow manages to grab a momentary piece of public attention (an important value metric - along with money. Lots of money).]
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