Thank you for following our various musings over the past year, and for your insightful comments. We’ve had a good ride. Now, our time with True/Slant draws to a close. If you want to continue to follow our Gen Y-slanted work-life revelries, you can find us at:

www.thelatticegroup.org

And if you want to get involved with The Lattice Group, do let us know. We are looking to redesign the website in the near future, and are also looking for new contributing bloggers. Be in touch at: yelizavetta@gmail.com

Keep pushing the corporate envelope, keep flattening the workplace, keep sharing at home, and keep being honest. Above all, keep the discussion going. Real change begins with real dialogue.

Thank you and goodbye!

- Liz and Astri

Image via Wikipedia

Do you remember that cotton-swab-haired singer with the little girl voice who once implored us all if she was really wanted? Let this blast from the 90’s past remind you:

Well, the reception Stateside may have been hot enough then, but it’s literally steaming now. Robyn is back. She’s so back that she’s coming out with three, I repeat three, new albums this year. Wowee. Someone’s really been working hard. There was a great, and adoring, article on Robyn by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker recently, and a new interview on the Creator’s Project yesterday. She’s everywhere, and she’s phenomenal. Talk about pushing through, persevering in a very real sense. And the Robyn we see now, the idiosyncratic fembot, has a much more mature and original sound than in her young days when she appeared classically engineered like the typical teen pop stars that dominate the airwaves. In fact, her current sound is quite daring. As Frere-Jones remarked, it is unusually versatile. She mixes all kinds of sounds, meaning that every single song coming out of her Konichiwa Records label is more surprising than the one before it. She’s also a refreshing pop star who plays down the sex appeal and spins complicated lyrics about expectation and love– that repeatedly bridge into the robotic…literally. I’m smitten. I bet you will be to.

Here is one of her new songs I can’t get out of my head:

Oh, and did I mentioned she’s Swedish? That obviously makes this Swede love her even more.

- Astri

Julianne and I met when we were at Middlebury College together. Already then, she had a mind of her own. She rented a beautiful apartment in an old wood house above Otter Creek where every possible gastronomical wonder emerged from the tiny oven to all of our great delight. She worked at local Vermont restaurants and studied with a French patry chef. Julianne has always had her eye on sustainability, but also appreciates delicacy. Now, the two have combined in the realization of her dream: Vergennes Laundry, a wood-fired brick oven bakery built in the old laundromat of Vergennes, Vermont. Vergennes Laundry is scheduled to open for business in September. But if you can’t wait til then, Julianne can be found at the Middlebury Farmer’s Market where she sells hand-made croissants, vegetable tartines, chocolate sablés, and more.

But starting a bakery is no risk-free affair. And it demands funds. Right now, Julianne is raising money to build the custom-made wood-fired oven through the fundraising site Kickstarter.com. Go support Vergennes Laundry and Julianne, a 25-year old living, and baking, the dream by going here.

And learn more about Vergennes Laundry here.

Julianne and all you other 20-somethings knowing what you want and going for it– I salute you.

- Astri

Image via Wikipedia

It seems to be that time. Time for re-thinking, re-evaluating, re-fashioning. Our lives.

Liz turned 25 yesterday. My time came back in March. Like a mutual friend said, “We’ve now entered a new demographic bracket.” 25 is half-way to 50. We’re closer to the way we’ll be at 30 than the way we were in high school.

I took a long, healing Saturday walk with another recently turned 25:er this weekend. She was unhappy at her job, was feeling unappreciated, unhealthy, and overworked. The words she hardly dared utter, an ugly cliché she didn’t want to identify with, slipped out like a whisper: “burned out.” She’d woken up to the truth of it when she tried to log 25 hours worked in a row and the computer wouldn’t allow her to enter a number higher than 24, the total number of hours in a day. Another bracket had been broken, and she had slipped through.

Now she wanted— needed— a change. She wrote me yesterday that she had decided to leave her job and look for something new, something that would allow her a healthier, saner lifestyle: “Basically the next job I take, whatever it may be, I want to be something where I can prioritize my life first, and then also do my job well.” For this friend, the New York way had gotten the best of her; the endless push to both work and play harder and harder until she no longer had the energy to do either. Reaching 25 for her meant waking up to realize the dream she had been chasing—the bling and the title and the prestige— wasn’t really, truly, what she wanted. She didn’t know exactly what it was she wanted, but she was relieved to know what it was she didn’t want.

Call it the quarter-life crisis, or call it classic Gen Y brattiness, but all around me, other twenty-five year olds are looking at where they are and what they are doing and feeling strangely….out of place. Perhaps it’s the job that wasn’t as satisfying as they thought it would be, the boss who mistreats them, their neglected physiques, the flights they secretly search for but never buy on Kayak.com. For some, it’s the dream they keep having but don’t dare follow.

Over drinks, a friend of mine who works in financial services told me how miserable he is at the job that pays him incredibly well. “What would you do if you could just stop having to live up to this macho idea of the money-making man?” I asked—knowing him well enough to know why he was in his unhappy position in the first place. His answer was immediate: “public planning.” He had been a Geography major in college, a GIS wiz. I had forgotten that. The fact that he wouldn’t do what he wanted because he felt he needed to do what was expected of him was depressing to me. I recalled my friend who’d “burned out,” who’d said she didn’t know what she really wanted. That seemed a million times better than knowing exactly what it is you want and still not doing it.

Another friend told me that up until we’re 25, we think we know it all. After 25, we realize we really know nothing. All the plans we had in college and directly thereafter have given way to a messy reality, where life often gets in the way of our meticulous calculations. You lost your job, you got an unexpected job, you were in an accident, or you fell in love with a boy and that love made you move across the world. At 25, we are beginning to understand, truly, that plans, like rules, are meant to be broken. It is often the spontaneous, the unforeseen, that chisels out our individuality.

Now, at 25, when we’ve started to stir from the frenzied state of our early twenties, when we’ve begun to look at where we’ve come and either feel dissatisfied or just plain antsy, perhaps it is time to stop planning and start doing. To stop fearing side-steps and mis-steps. To, as a wise man I spoke to recently said, breach the minefield and step on the mine, because maybe, just maybe, stepping on the mine is part of it.

That same wise man left me with these words: “You have to live the life you claim you want to have. No one will prevent you.” At 25, it is time to take his advice.

- Astri

This week, painter Lisa Sanditz talks about being able to support herself in a field where financial success is hardly to be taken for granted. Her advice to young artists is:

I would advise young people to apply to shows. And to have your own shows. Take initiative. There seems to be a lot of different kinds of galleries now. Having people into your apartment space as a gallery, inviting friends, seems to work as a way of building dialogue and getting to know other people. I think very few people who wait around will have things happen for them.

The writer Anne Fadiman, descibes her “salad days” like this:

I’m afraid my salad days consisted, so to speak, of smallish piles of rather wilted lettuce. I lived with a roommate on East 84th St. in New York, in an apartment where the roaches outnumbered the paying tenants by a ratio of several thousand to one. My roommate was an editorial assistant whose daily schedule was enviably structured. She strode briskly from our apartment each morning, dressed for success, long before I’d even risen and put on my working garb of old jeans and a T-shirt. We cooked inexpensive meals from the Joy of Cooking my mother had sent me, often purchasing ingredients from the Hungarian food stores that still predominated in our neighborhood in the mid-70s. I stayed up very late every night, occasionally galvanized to action but mostly staring at my typewriter and failing to write.

The journalist and writer Joe Klein tells us you have to have guts:

But if you’re going to do anything that doesn’t involve nine to five, anything that involves creativity, you have to take risks. Because if you’re going to be good at what you do, you’re going to have to stretch what the traffic will bear.

Theatre director Anne Bogart admonishes us to keep moving:

The image that I have is all about my feet. I imagine looking down at my feet each and every day walking to rehearsal.  It is the walking, the getting there, on time, that seems to be the key.  Keep moving. Get there on time. This seems to help.

The performer Dave Hill tells us to entertain ourselves first:

I guess it’s a bit of a cliche, but go with your gut and don’t get caught up in what other people think.  And entertain yourself first because if you are not a fan of what you’re creating, it will usually end up sucking.  I think sometimes people put what they think an audience might like or what another comedian, writer, or musician might do in a particular situation [ahead of] what they are truly into.  To me, the result of that is always way less interesting and original than stuff that people come up with just trying to entertain themselves.  And no one ever got as big as the Beatles by ripping off the Beatles.

Actress Jan Maxwell claims she had no other choice but to do what she does:

This sounds really hokey, but a part of me believes that I don’t have any other talents whatsoever. It was in The Red Shoes, where they ask the girl: “Why do you dance?” and she says, “Why do you breathe?” It’s just something I had to do – it’s a passion of mine and I had to persevere.

Others, like writer Sam Lipsyte, briefly entertained other careers:

Other things I wanted to be included a pro quarterback, a nameless drifter in the French Foreign Legion, and a European film director. Later I fronted an art rock band. But I was always drawn back to writing, to playing with language, telling stories. I wanted to write because I loved to read, and I wanted to do what the writers of those books had done. I wrote a story when I was fifteen about a middle-aged man having a terrible divorce and recalling his days as high school shot put champion.  I actually was a high school shot-putter so I didn’t have to research that part. The rest I had no handle on whatsoever. It was utter crap, but I was hooked.

Musician Carl von Arbin encourages us to say “yes!”

And then you have to say yes, it’s so wonderful to say yes. There is so much no in the world. It’s wonderful to give yourself up, to just throw yourself out there. It can lead you somewhere else, somewhere unexpected.

The writer Robert Cohen tells us he was once the kind of student he now loathes to have in class:

I was one of those back-of-class, sitting there with his arms folded, fuck you kind of guys. The kind of people I really hate as a teacher and yet for some reason sort of attract. [laughs] I had ambitions, I had pretensions, I sort of prided myself back then as being this up-against-the-wall radical experimentalist, railing against any kind of bourgeois realism. And I considered it a point of pride that nobody understood what I was doing, and I would have been crushed if they had. Of course I was crushed anyway.  I pursued [writing], I did, but I didn’t get much better. I just kept wanting it, basically.

Comedian Kristen Schaal lists the worst day jobs she had:

I was a character actor at F.A.O. Schwartz; that was the worst one. No one wants to pretend to be happy for an eight-hour shift. It’s mentally unhealthy.

And writer Gary Shteyngart talks darkly about the end of books:

The demise of writers as cultural figures has happened so quickly, I think it is still a shock. It is interesting to look at younger people from generations ahead of mine, because they never counted on that to begin with. But my peers, the people in their late 30’s now, to us literature still mattered when we were in our 20’s. We would discuss the new Martin Amis book with a comrade who was not a writer himself. Recently I was at a dinner with a lot of very young people who just graduated from college and a friend said, “Oh, Gary is a novelist,” and they all looked at me like, what the hell is that? Like in a zoo! And then my friend said, “And he is also a contributing editor to Travel and Leisure,” and they said, “Oooo! Travel and Leisure! That must be awesome, dude!”

It’s been a great summer of interviews so far. And there are many more yet to come.

Happy Monday!

- Astri

Work-life balance as it has traditionally been understood, where there is a discrete separation between work and leisure, and between the professional and the personal sphere, appears to be a thing of the past. To most Gen Y-Fi:ers, work will be an all-consuming thing not because it is forced upon them, but because they choose it. As members of an educated, global elite, Gen Y-Fi:ers are among the privileged workers who can view work as a means to self-fulfillment, not merely survival. They’re part of a small but by some accounts growing segment of the population, which Richard Florida terms “the Creative Class.” Florida, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, defines the Creative Class as a group of workers whose economic function is to think up new ideas, create new technology, and produce creative content based on today’s most important currency—knowledge. Members of the creative class are engineers, designers, artists, writers, planners, analysts, managers, and other “creative professionals.” He estimates that approximately 30 percent of the American workforce is part of the Creative Class (up from 10 percent in 1900 and just 20 percent as recently as 1990).

Florida wrote a series of influential books (The Rise of the Creative Class; Cities and the Creative Class; and Flight of the Creative Class) documenting the make-up and impact of the creative workforce. His and other studies show that cities that attract and retain members of the Creative Class prosper and grow, while those that do not stagnate.  Florida’s theory, which is not without critics, is that the presence of certain types of individuals—rather than businesses—is the key to economic growth. Moreover, the Creative Class—the future of the American economy, if you buy his argument—envisions their work and lives in a different way than other groups. In a 2003 Washington Monthly article titled “The New American Dream,” Florida wrote that:

The rise of the creative sector has also changed the way people work, as well as their expectations. The American Dream is no longer just about money. Better pay, a nice house, and a rising standard of living will always be attractive. But my research and others’ show another factor emerging: The new American Dream is to maintain a reasonable living standard while doing work that we enjoy doing.

Theoretically, Florida’s analysis and conclusions about the importance of the Creative Class should give its members quite a bit of agency and power. And there is anecdotal evidence that some businesses are increasingly striving to meet the needs of a creative workforce. Urban planners have been the most visible group to embrace Florida’s message: city’s across America are trying to improve their ranking on Florida’s “creativity index,” which includes tolerance (presence and acceptance of diverse communities), talent (basically a crude measure of individuals with at least college degrees), and technology (tech infrastructure and firms), in order to attract the Creative Class.

Still, despite all the attention given to the Creative Class in recent years, so far the ability of this group of workers to command the kind of workplace, policy, and cultural changes that they would need to really flourish has been limited. This is because those workers that find themselves part of Florida’s Creative Class on paper, have no sense of group identity in real life. Creative Classers don’t organize; they don’t agitate or lobby as a collective whole for increased workplace flexibility, for example. Workplace realities seem to happen to them, rather than by them; and when potentially negative changes occur, they have almost no recourse individually.

In the CNN article , “Welcome to the Weisure lifestyle,” Thom Patterson attributes the new term weisure to New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, who claims that: “Activities and social spaces are becoming work-play ambiguous.” In his book, “Elsewhere USA,” Conley claims that Americans are working more and more, which necessitates the mixing of work and leisure. But, in addition, people are “more willing to let work invade their leisure time because, for a lot of Americans, working has become more fun,” Patterson writes.It isn’t as though everyone’s job is suddenly more enjoyable. There are still plenty of tedious jobs out there. The people who are having more fun, according to Conley, are the professionals defined by Florida as the Creative Class.

Creative Classers have embraced weisure, upping the ante once again on their commitment to work. But what has been the response from employers and society? Are workers getting anything back, in the form of an easier time with the “life” part of the equation, in exchange for their renewed commitment?

What are your experiences?

- Astri and Liz

Image via Wikipedia

I was thrilled that the New Yorker online chose to write up a little ditty on the site the Days of Yore yesterday. As I’ve mentioned here before, the Days of Yore interviews artists about the time before their breakthrough. The goal is to inspire young artists currently struggling to find an audience by showing that those we idolize now were once doing grunt work and living in pest-filled apartments too. This week, we are featuring one of my absolute favorite writers, Anne Fadiman. Fadiman is the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Book Review prize, and the L.A. Times Book Prize. Fadiman has also written two books of essays, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2007), and edited Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (2005), and the 2003 edition of Best American Essays. She has won a National Magazine Award for reporting, a John S. Knight Fellowship in Journalism, and has written for a wide array of publications, including Civilization, Harper’s, Life, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Fadiman was a founding editor of Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress, and is a former editor of The American Scholar, the Phi Beta Kappa quarterly. She is currently the Francis Writer in Residence at Yale University.

Fadiman has more charm as a writer than anyone I’ve read in years. I mean, when was the last time you couldn’t put an essay collection down– an essay collection!– because you were laughing so much?? Exactly.

Here is some gold from her interview:

I’m afraid my salad days consisted, so to speak, of smallish piles of rather wilted lettuce. I lived with a roommate on East 84th St. in New York, in an apartment where the roaches outnumbered the paying tenants by a ratio of several thousand to one. My roommate was an editorial assistant whose daily schedule was enviably structured. She strode briskly from our apartment each morning, dressed for success, long before I’d even risen and put on my working garb of old jeans and a T-shirt. We cooked inexpensive meals from the Joy of Cooking my mother had sent me, often purchasing ingredients from the Hungarian food stores that still predominated in our neighborhood in the mid-70s. I stayed up very late every night, occasionally galvanized to action but mostly staring at my typewriter and failing to write.

Read the entire interview here!

Go get inspired.

- Astri

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve spent the last week at the annual conference of the International Time Use Research Association.  You laugh, but this year’s conference is in Paris. Win!

I’m typing this up from a computer lab at Sciences Po (an elite French university that has educated most of the country’s presidents but  doesn’t believe in air conditioning). Also, the keyboard is silly.

Time– it may very well be our most important and, uniquely, most equally distributed resource. Of course, how we spend it is another matter. The economists, sociologists, and developmental psychologists here have disected time use up the wazoo and here are some highlights:

Mothers still do about three times as much housework as fathers: In the United States, Liana Sayer (Ohio State) found that mothers do about 2.5 hours of housework per day while fathers do about 45 minutes. Other researchers used fancy models to confirm that when women marry and when they transition to parenthood, they increase the amount of time they spend on housework significantly. Men reduce the amount of time they spend doing housework at both transitions. Gents: 1, Ladies: 0.

Highly educated women compensate for smartness by throwing themselves into housework: Martine Dribe, of Lund University, found that even in egalitarian Sweden when highly educated women have children they increase the amount of housework and childcare that they do more than less educated women and far more than their male partners. This is especially the case for women who have higher degrees than their men-folk. Though economists like to predict that the partner with the highest earning potential will be the one to continue working more and pass on the housework, it doesn’t play out that way. Non-traditional women apparently try to compensate for being smart and awesome by taking on traditional roles to the extreme. Female absurdity knows no bounds.

Lots of TV watching isn’t necessarily bad for kids, as long they don’t have a TV in their room and especially if they watch TV with their parents: This comes from Australian data and links to outcomes in literacy and school performance. Now watch Law & Order.

Instead of learning the value of a dollar, encourage your kids to learn the value of pi: My own little contribution (with Suzanne Bianchi) compared the time use of immigrant and native-born teenagers in the U.S. We found that immigrants work less (about 3.5 hours less per week than native-born American teens) and study significantly more (again a difference of about 3.5 hours per week.) While there may be somthing uniquely American about encouraging your children to hold down a part-time job during high school–that good old Protestant work ethic–our findings suggest that one way immmigrants achieve better upward educational mobility than Americans who have parents with equally low education levels is by eshewing burger flipping to hit the books. Even though their parents might need the financial help just as much, if not more, than working class native-born American parents, there may be a value placed on education in immigrant families that really pays off.

And now, I’m on vacation! Best use of time ever.

- Liz

Image via Wikipedia

“Anne Bogart is one of the most innovative and influential American theatre directors working today. The former Artistic Director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Jon Jory, has called her “the most important acting and directing theorist since Stanislavski and Brecht.”

Bogart is the winner of two Obie Awards for Best Director for No Plays No Poetry But Philosophical Reflections Practical Instruction Provocative Opinions and Pointers from a Noted Critic and Playwright (1988) and The Baltimore Waltz (1990), and the Bessie Award for Choreographer/Creator for South Pacific (1984). She was a 2000-2001 Guggenheim Fellow, and won a National Endowment for the Arts Artistic Associate Grant in 1986-87. In 1992, she co-founded the Saratoga Theatre Institute (SITI), where she currently serves as Artistic Director. She also heads the Graduate Directing Program at Columbia.

She has written several works on the theatre, including, Anne Bogart: Viewpoints, A Director Prepares, and And Then, You Act. Today, she and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints method is one of the most consistently studied in the country. ”

That is what I wrote for the Days of Yore, where Anne Bogart is being featured this week!

Here are some snippets from the interview:

I do not feel avant-garde. Yes, it’s true that I am often described as experimental or avant-garde but really I do not think about making anything new, rather I am totally invested in the past. I mostly study the past. I study history and I believe that the job of the theater is to give voice to dead people who have things left to say. If the word theater were a verb, I think it would be “to remember.”

(…)

When I was younger there was definitely resistance to my work and it was palpable and challenging. There is still resistance to my work. I think that I have made a perfectly good career from consistently bad reviews. And then the reviewers are always asking why I am not doing the kind of work that I was doing five years ago. Well, I want to remind them that they did not like it then.

Read the full interview here!

Now it is time for me to try my hardest to follow Bogart’s advice: “Do not wait for the right circumstances to make your best work.  Make your best work with the circumstances you are in right now.”

Happy soon-to-be 4th of July!

- Astri

Dad shredding, being awesome

So my family, rarely all together under one roof anymore, settled into our old habits: dad and bro on the couch, watching the game; me on the couch, pretending to watch the game but actually doing some work on my laptop; mom…in the kitchen, making cold borsch, fried potatoes and mushrooms, and grilling salmon for next week’s meals.

If, as the New York Times claims, “Dad Feels as Stressed as Mom” my dad is doing a pretty good job hiding the stress. But I suppose you can’t teach an old (beloved) Soviet dog new tricks.

The younger dad set is another story. There’s a fantastic article, also in the Times, about the rising popularity of paternity leave in Sweden (In Sweden, The Men Can Have It All).

I highly recommend you read it. And as you do, try to avoid relegating Sweden to some fantasy-land. Yes, it’s a small country, but that doesn’t negate the amount of civic engagement and political will that goes into constantly seeking to improve a country that already boasts a vibrant economy, progressive policies, and generous benefits.

The gist of the article is that though Sweden has long had paid parental leave (the article claims 13 months, but my understanding is that it is actually 18) that parents can split however they want, in the last 15 years, the government has increasingly encouraged more men to take parental leave.

Today, two of the months must be taken by the father, or the family loses those benefits. Though I’m sure some of you don’t appreciate this strong-arm approach, it’s working. Today, 85 percent of Swedish fathers take paternity leave. This is an enormous shift from just 20 years ago, before the “daddy months” were introduced, when just 6 percent took parental leave.

It appears that Swedes have achieved some sort of tipping point or critical mass, which has catapulted paternity leave from a progressive ideal to an almost quotidian reality. This is great from a gender equality standpoint–the article notes that “a mother’s future earnings increase on average 7 percent for every month the father takes leave”!–but also from a family and personal well-being perspective. Dads get to be hands-on parents, nurturers not just providers. Couples don’t divorce as much. Children have two grown-ups to take care of them instead of one.

It’s not all vikings and unicorns, but  I get the sense that if you asked most Swedish men if they would rather go back to a rigid gender division of labor they would politely decline (“Nej, tack.”).

After digesting this article, I’m left feeling both hopeful and deflated. It’s remarkable how quickly change can happen. On the other hand, we’re so breathlessly far from anything like this in the U.S. We don’t even have guaranteed paid parental leave for anyone, let alone fathers!

I’m certain, if my dad had the opportunity and our culture’s blessing, he would have loved to stay home with us. Pretty sure my mom would be okay with someone else peeling the potatoes once in a while, too.

- Liz