The prisoners write in carefully lettered script or on old electric typewriters. There are sometimes grammatical errors or misspellings. But the language is direct. They describe facing Stage 4 cancer after their symptoms went undiagnosed for years. The denial of orthotic shoes to treat a diabetic condition that led to a severe wound and amputation. Nineteen years locked in solitary confinement.

Some describe beatings and sexual assaults by fellow prisoners that they say corrections officers failed to prevent. Others say they were assaulted by officers themselves.

The Eighth Amendment, which bars "cruel and unusual punishments," was intended by the founders as a bulwark against prisoner abuse. Over the years it came to mean any treatment that "shocked the conscience." But prisoners and civil-rights attorneys have said that it is now nearly impossible to win such claims in court.

To investigate whether that constitutional protection holds, a Business Insider team read tens of thousands of pages of court records for nearly 1,500 Eighth Amendment complaints, including every appeals court case with an opinion we could locate filed from 2018 to 2022 citing the relevant precedent-setting Supreme Court cases and standards. We reviewed hundreds of pages of training materials, medical records, incident reports, and surveillance footage. We read cases from prisoners convicted of violent and nonviolent crimes — some who have spent decades behind bars for murder or sexual assault, others sentenced to short stints for marijuana possession or third-degree assault. We spoke with more than 170 people, including prisoners and their families, attorneys and legal scholars, correctional staff and prison healthcare providers, and current and former federal judges.

We uncovered a near evisceration of protections for this nation's 1.2 million prisoners, largely propelled by legal standards and laws put into place at the height of the war on drugs.

In our analysis, plaintiffs prevailed in only 11 cases, including two class actions — less than 1%.

"If a right is unenforceable, then it's not much of a right," Paul Grimm, a former federal judge for the District of Maryland, said after reviewing BI's findings. "It is essentially unavailable."

One Tennessee prisoner wrote a letter to the court after failing to overcome these steep odds in his own case.

"To everyone I tried to talk to and ask to file grievances and complaints to bring the wrongs to light," he wrote, "I'm sorry that I tried to bring hope and law and order to a place that has no hope or process of order."

Failed oversight

Over decades, federal and state oversight agencies have repeatedly found that US prison systems have failed to protect prisoners in their care. Just this year, an inspector general found that staff in federal prisons had failed to adequately respond to medical emergencies, contributing to 166 prisoner deaths. The Department of Justice recently found that people held in Georgia state prisons had experienced "horrific and inhuman conditions" stemming from what the DOJ called "complete indifference" by the institutions. "Inmates are maimed and tortured," the department wrote, "relegated to an existence of fear, filth and not so benign neglect."

Some years ago, an oversight monitor found that California prisons' system for disciplining officers accused of excessive force was "broken to the core."

For prisoners inside these systems, the courts are often the only backstop left.

But in the 1980s and 1990s, as the nation's prison population exploded, a new law and a series of revised legal standards radically restricted the ability of prisoners to prevail in Eighth Amendment lawsuits.

The 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act, passed with robust bipartisan support, effectively carved out a separate and unequal system for prisoners who seek to file suit.

It required prisoners to complete a prison's internal grievance process before filing a claim in court — and then survive a screening process. After that, their claims faced exacting Supreme Court standards. Claims that guards had used excessive force were now decided under a 1986 standard that granted broad protections to prison staff as long as their actions were not "malicious and sadistic." Claims that prison staff have failed to keep prisoners safe — whether from violence, negligent healthcare, or inhumane conditions of confinement — were now decided under a Supreme Court standard, refined in 1994, which says such failures violate the Constitution only if officials were "deliberately indifferent."

Together, the standards shifted the focus away from the underlying claims of abuse, however extreme, and onto the question of prison officials' intent.

David Fathi, the director of the National Prison Project at the ACLU, said the emphasis on mindset has become "an enormous barrier to justice for incarcerated people." If abuse or neglect exists in prisons, he said, "that should be enough to violate the Eighth Amendment."

"You shouldn't have to go looking for someone who was thinking bad thoughts."

Altogether, said Kathrina Szymborski Wolfkot, a former appellate attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center, these laws and standards have made federal courts "inhospitable places for incarcerated people." Though some attorneys turn to state courts instead, there they face another set of challenges, such as caps on damages for malpractice claims or, in some cases, weak state constitutional protections.

The Department of Justice, the ACLU, and other powerful litigators have sometimes succeeded in winning Eighth Amendment cases that usher in reforms through consent decrees or injunctive orders. But such outcomes are rare. The DOJ has secured consent decrees in just four prison cases over the past decade.

A separate and unequal system

In restricting access to the courts, lawmakers in the 1990s argued that most prisoners filed suits over "frivolous" matters. Yet only a few dozen of the claims in BI's sample were over minor complaints, such as being denied shoes to wear in a dirty shower.

Among cases that prisoners lost, we logged 161 claims that guards had failed to protect a prisoner from being beaten or stabbed, including four fatalities. We identified 42 failed cases alleging untreated cancer, heart disease, HIV, or hepatitis C. We logged 78 claims of untreated mental illness, including eight that ended in suicide. There were 21 claims of sexual assault by prison staff. There were claims of confinement in extreme filth, including exposure to poisonous spiders, black mold, and feces.

The vast majority of prisoners, BI found, are navigating all of this without attorneys, in part because of the PLRA, which prevents attorneys from recovering their full litigation costs.

In the outside world, most civil suits settle — about 73%, one study found. In BI's sample, only 14% of prisoner lawsuits did, sometimes for paltry amounts or no damages at all. One North Carolina prisoner who said guards beat him while he was in restraints settled for $250.

By the time the cases were settled or decided in favor of the plaintiffs, those in charge — the wardens and medical directors — had almost always been dropped as defendants, limiting the ability of those judgments to drive institutional change.

Billions of taxpayer dollars go to corrections contractors, to run everything from food services to healthcare to staffing to data management, and the legal obstacles introduced in the 1980s and '90s have shielded these for-profit companies as well. For example, hundreds of private prison health providers or their employees were named as defendants in BI's sample. Of these cases, 14% settled and plaintiffs prevailed in less than 1%. One law-review article concluded that the low risk of liability had influenced companies' cost-benefit analysis and "leads to dangerous, ineffective healthcare that is shielded from constitutional challenge."

More than one federal judge described prisoner claims as tragic — before going on to cite precedent or the narrow standards in deciding against the plaintiffs. Several issued fiery dissents. One was issued in an August 2019 case filed by a prisoner who was denied a transfer he said was necessary for his safety. "We do not sentence people to be stabbed and beaten," Judge Robin Rosenbaum of the 11th Circuit wrote.

"The Eighth Amendment does not allow prisons to be modern-day settings for Lord of the Flies," she went on. "The Majority Opinion condones this behavior and ensures it will occur again."

This project was supported by a grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. Data analysis and visualization were supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

If it feels like everybody's betting nowadays, it's because a whole lot of people are. 2024 was the year companies from sportsbooks to prediction markets to trading apps asked, "Wanna bet?" And Americans responded with a resounding yes.

The ground has shifted on gambling in the US in recent years as it's become easier than ever to try your luck at, well, a lot of things. In a survey conducted in July and August for the American Gaming Association, 55% of surveyed adults said they had participated in some sort of gambling over the past year, up from 49% in 2023. Americans are expected to wager some $150 billion on sports this year, up from about $120 billion in 2023. People bet tens of millions of dollars on the 2024 election, with companies such as Polymarket and Kalshi raking in big bucks. The trading platform Robinhood got into presidential-election betting, and it says it's looking into sports gambling now, too.

It's not just explicit betting, either. A lot of "investing" looks very much like gambling nowadays. There's an increasing acknowledgment that the point of bitcoin is really "number go up" (and down), that it's a speculative investment without much of a use case. Small-time investors doing options trading on platforms such as Robinhood aren't banking on a stock's underlying value; they're just guessing at where it's headed over the next little while. And the meme coins are just complete casinolike chaos, full of pump and dumps and rug pulls and meteoric rises and falls.

Even if you're not putting money on the line, it's almost impossible to escape the proliferation of gambling. There are unceasing commercials during sports games and a deluge of ads on our phones. Culturally, the broader acceptance of gambling is on the upswing — betting's positioned as cool and exciting and fun. There's not so much focus on the downsides yet. Betting is in its Marlboro Man era, and a lot of people are dealt in.

"There's definitely a younger cohort that is trying to — I don't want to say get rich fast, but they're looking for ways to get around the system," Chad Beynon, an equity analyst at Macquarie, said.

That can take a lot of formats — betting on a football game or piling into a meme coin because some guy on X said it was the next big thing. It sounds more appealing, though not more realistic, than a traditional 9-to-5 job. That's especially pertinent in an economy where people don't feel particularly optimistic about their prospects. Instead of a "vibecession," maybe what's happening is a "vibe-screw-it."

The most novel — and notable — gambling story in the US remains the explosion of sports betting. Since the Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a federal law prohibiting it, 38 states plus Washington, DC, have legalized wagering on games. The past few years have been a land grab of sorts, with companies such as DraftKings, FanDuel, Caesars, MGM, and even Disney (via ESPN) trying to get a piece of what they hope will be a very lucrative pie.

"That's the one that opened the floodgates in terms of creating a large addressable market and throwing a spotlight on the scale of the US online-gambling opportunity," Chris Grove, a sports-gambling-industry investor at Acies Investments, said.

The top two operators — DraftKings and FanDuel — have managed to amass a lot of market share and start to venture into other arenas, such as lotteries and iGaming, the industry term for online blackjack, roulette, and slot machines, which is thus far legal in only a handful of states. Adjacent products around daily fantasy sports, such as PrizePicks, have taken hold as well. It "just shows that consumers are clamoring for something," Grove said.

There's still room for growth in sports betting, though it's increasingly limited. There are some big holdout markets, such as Texas and California, and only about one-fifth of the population has bet on a sport in the past year, according to the AGA. But the holdout states are holding out for a reason, and at least some aren't likely to change course. Companies sort of have to look elsewhere to get people to open their wallets.

"For the business model to work, you probably need to cross-sell to other areas," Beynon said.

The takeoff of sports gambling has many businesses looking around and wondering just what else people are willing to bet on — and, in many cases, guessing correctly that the list of possibilities is long. Maybe sports betting isn't for you. That's fine, but what about an online lottery? Or sweepstakes casinos? Or a slot machine on your phone? Or the next Treasury secretary of the United States?

"The minute that you got widespread regulated online gambling in the US, it was inevitable that nontraditional stakeholders were going to look at getting in on the action," Grove said. "Robinhood is one example of that, and prediction markets are one of the most likely vectors for that expansion, but they're far from the only brand or the only vector that we're going to see explore online gambling in years ahead."

Beyond sports betting, 2024 was a monumental year for prediction markets and crypto. People spent millions of dollars betting on the election, despite the legal gray area around political gambling. On Polymarket, players — though not Americans — can bet whether the US will confirm aliens exist or if Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO, will plead guilty. In Cryptoland, bitcoin surpassed the $100,000 mark, and despite constant scams, the meme-coin market is as alive as ever. These are not legitimate investments; they're bets people are making that they can get out before everyone else. (Sometimes, in the pump and dump, you think you're the dumper when you're really the dumpee.) Given Donald Trump's election, it doesn't look like tough regulation is coming for the crypto space anytime soon, so hold on to your hats.

Broadly, gambling has been normalized across American culture. Sports leagues used to be anxious about sports betting and worry it would turn off fans. Now they've seen the dollar signs and embraced it. The vibe around elections betting is that it's kind of cool and smart, a wisdom-of-the-crowds way to prove your political chops. With crypto, the hope is everybody's going to get their bag sooner or later, or if not, at least they think they're in on the joke.

"Every consumer has different motivations for why they're doing it," said Steve Ruddock, a gambling-industry analyst and consultant and the author of Straight to the Point, a newsletter about gambling. "Some are doing it purely for entertainment. Some are doing it as a time sink. Some small percentage are doing it because they're addicted."

It's easy — and responsible — to worry about the harms of gambling culture. There's evidence to suggest sports betting in the US is getting people into trouble with debt collectors, leading to missed car payments, and may even cause a spike in bankruptcies. When people are betting on a baseball game, they're not putting money into long-term investments, and households that are already under financial strain are harder hit. And whatever negative impacts occur aren't limited to gamblers themselves.

"The harms radiate out into families, into the economy, into many sectors of social and cultural life," said Rachel Volberg, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who researches gambling. Most research suggests about 1% of adults develop a gambling disorder. But just because you don't meet the clinical criteria for a disorder doesn't mean all is fine and dandy, Volberg said. "To only talk about the tip of the iceberg means you miss 90% of the impacts," she told me.

Gambling companies have mechanisms in place to ensure responsible gambling. (Not to mention that some companies offering crypto and high-flying stock trading say this is not gambling at all.) Reasonable minds can question how effective those are. In the US, there's a lot of impetus placed on individual gamblers to police themselves and set their own limits, and even if you do reach your limit, you can move on to another app.

The sudden boom has pushed public health experts in the US and worldwide to sound the alarm on gambling. A recent report from The Lancet Public Health commission on gambling found that nearly 450 million people around the globe have experienced at least one behavioral symptom or negative consequence from gambling.

"The answer, globally, that the commission puts forth is, 'Come on, guys, wake up,'" said Malcolm Sparrow, a professor of the practice of public management at Harvard and one of the members of the commission. "We are in a very rapid growth period. The assumption is that legalization, which is already running a pace, is going to just continue until it's ubiquitous. And we are not paying enough attention to gambling-related harms."

Here is the thing, though: Gambling is fun. Generally, people do have a right to use their money how they please, and most can gamble responsibly. Exactly how to regulate and where to draw lines is complicated, whether you're talking about an in-game bet or an obscure penny stock or a meme coin that makes zero sense. But public health experts say it's important to figure out where to draw it.

"On many other public health issues, we are, to a degree, paternalistic," Sparrow said. "You must wear a seatbelt. We don't sell alcohol to kids."

Perhaps the weird thing about the current moment is once you start to notice the prevalence of gambling in a few places, you start to see it everywhere — I see it in my own life. I was at a New York Rangers game the other weekend, and not one but two betting apps were advertising on the ice. On a recent trip to New Jersey, I took advantage of an online casino, which is legal in the state. I lost $10 on blackjack in a matter of minutes. Beyond sports, many of my friends and family are at least dabbling in crypto and have taken note of prediction markets. One group I know is talking about organizing a party-bus trip to Atlantic City, New Jersey, just because.

It's hard not to wonder what's going on in culture now that gambling has gone from a no-no to out in the open and even hip. What's getting its claws in us, and why is it working right now in particular?

Natasha Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and the author of "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas," told me she'd identified four shared criteria of products that hook and hold us, from betting apps to dating apps, which are a little bit like gambling. They're antisocial and solitary, so you can get lost in your own flow. They offer continuous, fast feedback, which serves as reinforcement. They're unpredictable, so you can't be exactly sure when a reward will come. And they never come to a close or resolve — you just keep going. The result is that people get pulled into what she describes as a gambling "machine zone," where the world sort of falls away, and people fall into a rhythm of go, then again, then again.

"There certainly is a cultural story to tell here too, where we're living in a context of uncertainty in the world, whether politically or environmental or economic uncertainty," Schüll said. When you gamble, you're diving into uncertainty and chance, but also in an ordered, calm, digital environment that's cordoned off from the outside world. "It might start being about thrill and suspense and imagining a big win or imagining that you're having an encounter with chance," she said. "But once you put yourself in the seat, so to speak, and start having the interaction, the formatting of it and the flow of it gives you this other thing. It gives you this way to modulate your affect and go into a zone that allows you to avoid life."

It could be the case that in 10 years, we'll look back at the current moment and realize this was all fine — it was OK that people were gambling a bunch, that even major athletes were getting caught up in it. Hey, maybe even the meme-coin stuff will work out. The likelier scenario is that we wonder what we were even doing. Or we realize we probably should've done things a little differently.

Volberg, from UMass Amherst, has been studying gambling for 40 years and has seen this story play out before in other countries. Some form of gambling gets the go-ahead, it takes off, and there's a lag in realizing the consequences and getting guardrails in place appropriately.

"It's a pattern I've seen over and over again where it's after the fact," she said. "And if you don't start monitoring impacts before the actual new form of gambling is being used, you really have no idea what the baseline looked like."

The argument many companies will make is that people will gamble anyway — on sports, on elections, on whatever — and that making it legal brings that activity into the light, gets it some oversight, and generates tax revenue for the states. That's true, but also, once the government greenlights it, people who otherwise wouldn't gamble start. It's impossible to argue everyone on FanDuel right now was betting on sports on some offshore account 10 years ago. If it were that easy, sportsbooks wouldn't be investing so much in advertising to draw people in. On the meme coins, I mean, if you got bamboozled by the "Hawk Tuah" girl's crypto shenanigans, that's at least a little bit on you. But also, you probably deserve some protection next time. (But seriously, next time, maybe think that one over a bit more.)

In the meantime, may the odds be ever in your favor, because we're not getting out of gambling-palooza anytime soon.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Many musicians struggled during the pandemic. Lil Wayne wasn't one of them. He sold master recordings from his record label's artists for more than $100 million. He was pardoned for felony gun possession in a last-minute action by then-President Donald Trump. He purchased a $15.4 million mansion in the mountains of Los Angeles.

And, as a Business Insider investigation found, he received an $8.9 million grant from a little-known pandemic-relief program that he used to cover more than two years' worth of spending on luxury hotel stays, designer clothes, and travel to and from nightclub appearances around the country.

The rapper, whose real name is Dwayne Carter Jr., spent more than $1.3 million from the grant on private-jet flights and over $460,000 on clothes and accessories, many of them from high-end brands like Gucci and Balenciaga. He billed taxpayers more than $175,000 for expenses related to a music festival promoting his marijuana brand, GKUA, including clothing for artists associated with his record label.

He also used grant money to cover nearly $15,000 worth of flights and luxury hotel rooms for women whose connection to Lil Wayne's touring operation was unclear, including a waitress at a Hooters-type restaurant and a porn actress.

On New Year's Eve 2021, he was scheduled to perform at a concert in Coachella, California.

But shortly before his set was scheduled to start, a concert employee announced that the rapper would be unable to perform "because of the wind and the flights." The crowd booed. (Wind gusts of 20 to 30 mph were reported in Southern California that night, but data from Flightradar24 indicates four other private jets flew the exact route Lil Wayne was scheduled to fly.)

Instead, posts on Instagram suggest he partied that night at a club on Sunset Boulevard with the rapper 2 Chainz.

For expenses related to the concert he never performed, Lil Wayne billed taxpayers nearly $88,000.

Lil Wayne's publicists didn't respond to numerous requests for comment on detailed questions. Reached by text, Lil Wayne made a sexually explicit overture to a reporter and did not respond to questions.

'An abuse of federal resources'

The money came from a program called the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant. Signed into law by Trump in 2020 and championed by lawmakers including Sen. Chuck Schumer, it was established as a lifeline for struggling independent venues and arts groups during the pandemic.

But pop stars used the program as a piggy bank to keep the party going, reporting by Business Insider shows.

The stars' spending took place against a backdrop of massive pandemic-relief fraud. The Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans gave out as much as $200 billion in suspected false claims, losses that combined with false unemployment-benefit claims amount to what the FBI has called the largest fraud in history. Compared with those better-known programs, the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant had relatively strict eligibility requirements.

Still, accounting firms and money managers soon realized their stadium-filling musician clients might be eligible for grant money via their loan-out companies — corporate entities used to handle the business of touring. Grants awarded to clients of one high-powered entertainment-business-management firm, NKSFB, totaled at least $207 million, BI previously reported. NKSFB itself collected more than $7 million by helping its clients obtain the grants.

NKSFB's managing partner, Mickey Segal, didn't respond to requests for comment. The firm's lawyer Bryan Freedman said NKSFB doesn't comment on its clients' finances.

Grantees received up to $10 million that they could spend on certain "ordinary and necessary" expenses for their entertainment businesses. They had to make a good-faith statement to the Small Business Administration, which oversaw the program, that the grant was necessary to support the loan-out company's "ongoing operations" and show that the company's revenue had fallen by at least 25% between one quarter of 2019 and the same quarter of 2020.

In a statement, the SBA said it followed the law. But the law directed the SBA to examine revenue, not assets. Musicians with huge bank accounts and multiple mansions were still eligible for the awards as long as their loan-out company's revenue had declined.

Thousands of pages of accounting documents reviewed by Business Insider reveal, for the first time, how some wealthy musicians — including Chris Brown, the DJ Marshmello, and members of Alice in Chains — spent grants they received through the program.

The documents include detailed records explaining how celebrity musicians spent their grants, as well as correspondence between their accountants and the SBA. Business Insider has verified the authenticity of the documents.

They reveal how artists directed millions in taxpayer funds not toward touring crew members, but instead toward their own bank accounts, luxury purchases, and entertainment expenses — often while sitting on substantial wealth from other business ventures.

One top government-accountability expert said some of the spending Business Insider identified was questionable — but stopped short of saying it was fraudulent.

"At a minimum, it smells," said David Walker, a former comptroller general of the United States. "Whether it's legal or not is up to a lawyer or ultimately to a court. But it sure smells."

The SBA said it "implemented industry-leading fraud controls."

Sen. Gary Peters, the chair of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said celebrity musicians' use of Shuttered Venue grants was "an abuse of federal resources." Business Insider's findings, he added, demonstrate "the need for continued oversight of pandemic-relief programs."

Pandemic relief was intended to help businesses and workers in need, the senator said — "not super wealthy celebrities."

An $80,000 birthday party

Lil Wayne wasn't the only one to engage in questionable grant spending. Chris Brown spent his grant on a big paycheck — and a big party. Of the $10 million grant Brown's company CBE Touring received, $5.1 million went to Brown personally. He also billed taxpayers nearly $80,000 for his 33rd birthday party.

The blowout, held in a luxe Los Angeles event space, featured a $3,650 LED dance floor and "atmosphere models" — nude women in body paint — who cost $2,100, according to expense reports and a blog post by the party planner. The bill included more than $29,000 for hookahs, bottle service, "nitrogen ice cream," and damages involving burn holes to rented couches.

While the grant was meant to support live entertainment, Brown also charged $24,000 to the grant for the cost of driving his tour bus from the US to Tulum, Mexico, and back in fall 2020 during a monthlong stay for him and his entourage in the resort town, where he did not perform. He spent several days in Tulum filming a video with Jack Harlow for a joint track, but it's not clear if the rest of the trip was for business or pleasure. And more than $179,000 of the grant went toward a celebrity basketball tournament broadcast on YouTube, including a $20,000 payment to the Indianapolis Colts tight end Mo Alie-Cox, who played on Brown's basketball team.

Brown, his attorneys, and managers did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives for Harlow and Alie-Cox also didn't respond to requests for comment.

Others also paid themselves, taking advantage of an SVOG spending category that Business Insider drew attention to last year: "owner compensation."

The SBA's guidance said artists could use grants paid to their loan-out company to pay themselves as long as the check was no bigger than it was in 2019.

Marshmello, whose real name is Christopher Comstock, received a $9.9 million grant. More than a year later, when the SBA asked for proof of where it went, his business manager Steven Macauley, of NKSFB, responded by saying all the money went into Comstock's pocket.

"Because the beneficiary received 2019 Officer Draws/Salary from 365 Touring International, Inc. in excess of the SVOG Grant Award, we therefore, expensed the entire Grant balance to Payroll," Macauley wrote in an April 2023 letter seen by Business Insider.

In other words, because Comstock made more than $9.9 million from touring in 2019, he was able to award himself the entire grant. In doing so, Comstock paid himself more than any other musician who received grant money.

Comstock's publicists and his manager didn't reply to requests for comment, nor did Macauley.

Artists often paid themselves far more than they paid anyone else involved in putting on their live shows.

Steve Aoki's loan-out company, DJ Kid Millionaire Touring, used $2.4 million in grant money on payroll costs, of which $1.9 million was officer pay. Aoki is the company's only officer. Aoki's publicists didn't respond to requests for comment.

Three of the four members of the rock band Shinedown split at least $2.5 million of their $8.3 million grant. On top of those distributions, Shinedown's four members paid themselves more than $100,000 each out of the roughly $1.2 million of the grant that was allocated to payroll.

The band's 15 touring-production workers, meanwhile, received a combined $650,000 of the grant money — less than a single member of the band got. Publicists for the band didn't respond to requests for comment.

Records seen by BI show that a good chunk of the $7.7 million grant to Sremm Touring, the loan-out company for the hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd, was paid to the rappers Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee, whose real names are Aaquil Brown and Khalif Brown. The duo's manager, lawyer, and publicists didn't respond to requests for comment.

On March 23, 2022, records show, the Alice in Chains singer and guitarist Jerry Cantrell took in $1.4 million as an "SVOG distribution." The band's drummer, Sean Kinney, received the same amount, and its bassist, Mike Inez, booked half that sum, about $682,000.

In all, $3.4 million of the $4.1 million the grant allotted for payroll went to the three musicians at the top.

Like other grant applicants, AIC Entertainment — the three band members' touring business — had to tell the government only that the money was "necessary." But the month before they took their grant payments, the band members recorded about $48 million in income from selling the copyrights on their catalog. They made hundreds of thousands of dollars more from merchandise sales and other profit distributions in 2022.

The band spent some money to pay its staff. It paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to sound-equipment-rental firms, videographers, and managers. But the precarious nature of working in the live-entertainment business didn't change for some of its employees. Scott Dachroeden, a guitar tech and tour photographer who had worked with the band for years, received a cancer diagnosis in late 2022. The band, which records show did not spend grant money on benefits like health insurance, circulated a GoFundMe page on Twitter.

"He has no health insurance and now cannot work to pay his bills," the page said. The band's lead singer said on Facebook that Alice in Chains helped out behind the scenes, but a person familiar with the situation said that Dachroeden didn't get much, if any, money from the band during the pandemic and that after his diagnosis, the band connected Dachroeden with a charity that helps with medical bills. Dachroeden died soon after his diagnosis.

Alice in Chain's publicists and manager didn't respond to requests for comment.

Supporting 'middle-class people'

The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program was pitched to Americans as a way to ensure that arts groups would still exist after the pandemic.

In an interview with James Corden on "The Late Late Show," Chuck Schumer cast it as a way to protect "middle-class people" and "young artists" while pandemic restrictions forced closures.

Grant money would "keep these folks going" so that "these live venues will be out there bigger and better than ever" after the restrictions lift, Schumer said. Schumer's press office and chief of staff didn't respond to comment requests.

Ultimately, more than 13,000 arts groups received grants, including some who say they wouldn't still exist otherwise.

"When the shutdowns happened, it was existential. Immediate crisis," said Brandy Hotchner, the founder of Arizona Actors Academy, an acting school in Phoenix. The grant of less than $120,000 the group received, she said, "utterly saved us."

Musicians weren't explicitly categorized as eligible — and initially, the SBA interpreted the law to mean that artists' loan-out companies couldn't qualify for the grant either.

By mid-December 2021, for reasons BI was unable to determine, the agency had reversed that decision, according to an internal memo seen by Business Insider, which cleared the way for federal funding to flow to wealthy artists. The SBA didn't respond to a question about why it reversed itself.

The business-management firm NKSFB also made millions from the program.

Partners at the firm initially believed that their celebrity clients didn't qualify for the grants. At least one partner feared that applying could be perjury, and another, Rob Salzman, thought the whole thing was "bullshit," a court document said.

Later, in an interview with Billboard magazine as part of its list of "Top Business Managers," Salzman said that applying for the grants was an example of the firm's "outside-the-box" thinking.

The change of heart led to a big payday. Court documents show the firm made at least $7.5 million in fees on the grants. Salzman didn't respond to requests for comment.

"NKSFB, one of the most respected business management firms in the world, does not comment on its clients' financial information," said Freedman, the firm's lawyer. "Based on the uninformed questions that BI has asked, it is clear it has little to no understanding on this subject."

Other white-collar professionals also outearned techs and roadies. Lawyers at the celebrity-favorite firms Greenberg Traurig and Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks received up to 5% of their clients' grants. Brown's manager took 7% of his grant, and Shinedown's managers received 20% of theirs. A spokesperson for Greenberg Traurig didn't answer questions about the firm's actions. Partners at Grubman Shire didn't respond to emails or phone calls.

Over $2.1 million of Lil Wayne's grant paid off a debt to a former manager, Cortez Bryant. Another $300,000 went to a former accountant, and his manager at the time, Mack Maine, whose real name is Jermaine Preyan, took $1.7 million. All told, roughly $5.3 million went to managers, accountants, and attorneys as fees and commissions — more than 13 times the amount Lil Wayne paid the drummer, sound techs, and other contractors who helped put on his live shows.

Bryant and Preyan didn't respond to requests for comment.

A music-industry insider who learned from Business Insider about NKSFB's wave of grant applications said he was stunned the Small Business Administration approved them.

"It never crossed my mind that we should be trying to get this money for my artists," said the insider, an artist manager who was involved in lobbying lawmakers to pass the legislation and who asked not to be named because of the issue's sensitivity.

"I was in countless conversations," he said. "No one ever discussed artists collecting this money. It never came up."

Hotchner, the acting-school founder, said she was "speechless" upon learning about Business Insider's reporting on how celebrity musicians spent their grants. Though the amount of money sent to pop stars is small relative to the overall amount of money disbursed through the grant program, she said she worried it would taint the public's perception of government support for the arts — support that's still needed.

"I will never forget how hard-fought-for this funding was," she said. "It's such a disappointment."

'Shut up, sit down. Process the file.'

Soon after Congress created the program, lawmakers began pressing the Small Business Administration to get money out the door. By mid-June 2021, more than 200 members of Congress had signed two separate letters demanding the agency disburse the funds expeditiously, saying arts organizations could go out of business without immediate relief.

The SBA said congressional pressure "was not the driving factor" behind changes that sped up the grant process and merely "coincided" with changes it was already making.

The agency hoped to balance a quick release of funds with a desire to protect against large-scale fraud that had plagued other pandemic programs. Its compromise was to relax some anti-fraud controls on the front end of the grant process, a report from the SBA's inspector general said. Instead, it planned to verify whether the grantees were actually eligible and how the money was spent after distributing the grants. In its response to the inspector general's report, the agency said it disagreed with the conclusion that changes to how it evaluated applications amounted to "weakened" fraud controls.

The approach had mixed results. The Government Accountability Office said that it submitted three phony applications to the program and that all three were rejected. But some of the eight current and former SBA workers who spoke to Business Insider said they felt the agency was too permissive and ignored or misinterpreted relevant rules — for example, allowing grantees to spend federal funds on thousands of dollars' worth of alcohol.

"They were just trying to get money out. If it was fraudulent, if it was not eligible — whatever," a person who worked on the grants said. They asked not to be named because they feared retaliation, but their identity is known to Business Insider.

The SBA's inspector general criticized the agency's decision to spot problems after the recipients already spent the money, saying it "does not provide sufficient fraud prevention and comes at a point when funds are potentially unrecoverable." Some SBA employees said that as the program began to wind down, they were pressured to certify recipients' compliance with program rules rather than dig through detailed records of their spending.

The SBA said in September it had recouped $43 million worth of the grants — an amount that hadn't increased since July. It's not clear how the agency recovered that money. While the SBA has a team to recover wrongfully awarded grants, an organizational chart suggests that as of late September it hadn't assigned any staff to it. Documents obtained in a public-records request said $6 billion worth of grants remain under review for compliance with program rules.

The SBA said "some" of the grants Business Insider mentioned in its reporting "remain open due to ongoing third-party audits that the Agency is resolving." The agency spokesperson didn't respond to questions about recoupment and didn't respond to a follow-up question asking which grants remain unresolved.

Four people who worked on the program said they tried to raise concerns about grantees' eligibility and spending to supervisors, to no avail. "I was never so disappointed in my fellow man than in that program," one of the people said. "The graft was unbelievable."

Two of those people said they were frustrated the agency wasn't doing more to investigate possible misspending and recover funds.

"Everybody kept saying shut up, sit down. Process the file," said a current SBA employee who asked not to be named because they're not authorized to speak to the press.

This person said that while some issues stemmed from the dwindling number of SVOG employees drowning in documentation, other problems arose because of the way the program was administered. "It was our fault because we threw this thing together in five seconds," they said.

An SBA spokesperson defended its processes. "By design, the vast majority of processing staff did not have access to the complete results of fraud checks and, therefore, are not positioned to comment on the internal review process or its outcomes," the spokesperson said in an email.

"Where credible evidence suggests funds were misspent or a grantee misrepresented their expenditures to SBA, the agency's robust fraud and waste oversight structure reviewed such allegations," the spokesperson said. "When substantiated, SBA and its law enforcement partners vigorously prosecute suspected wrongdoing. As a matter of policy, the SBA cannot comment on specific investigations or law enforcement action, whether planned or ongoing."

Meanwhile, the government has recovered at least some money from one musician.

As pandemic restrictions faded, Chris Brown returned to performing. In early 2022, he announced a 27-stop nationwide tour and launched a variety of side projects, including a novelty cereal called Breezy's Cosmic Crunch and an NFT collection.

While the Small Business Administration was disbursing money to Brown's touring company, federal and state tax authorities were becoming very interested in his finances.

In early 2021, the IRS notified Brown that he owed $3.2 million in unpaid taxes. In 2022, the IRS determined that Brown owed an additional $2.2 million, while California's Franchise Tax Board found that Brown hadn't paid $1.3 million in state taxes.

He settled these debts in April last year — but not before American taxpayers had unwittingly paid $80,000 for his birthday party.

Have a tip? Know more? Reach Jack Newsham via email ([email protected]) or via Signal (+1-314-971-1627). Do not use a work device.

When Zillow debuted in 2006, the fledgling site bore little resemblance to the real-estate behemoth it is now. There were no options to find an agent, get a mortgage, or request a tour — the search portal couldn't even tell you which homes were actually for sale. There was, however, the Zestimate: a "free, unbiased valuation" for 40 million houses around the US, based on a proprietary algorithm. Half the single-family homes in America suddenly had a dollar figure attached to them, and anyone could take a peek. Zillow's site crashed within hours as a million people raced to ogle at the results.

The initial rush was a sign of things to come. Nowadays, the Zestimate is arguably the most popular — and polarizing — number in real estate. An entire generation of homeowners doesn't know life without the algorithm; some obsessively track its output as they would a stock portfolio or the price of bitcoin. By the time a seller hires a real-estate agent, there's a good chance they've already consulted the digital oracle. For anyone with even a passing interest in the housing market, the Zestimate is a breezy way to take the temperature. Keep tabs on mortgage rates all you want, but they can't tell you that your house has appreciated 20% over the past year, or that your annoying coworker's property is worth more than yours.

Many industry insiders, however, regard the number as a starting point at best and dangerously misguided at worst. Real-estate agents recount arguments with sellers who reject their pricing advice, choosing instead to take the Zestimate as the word of God. One meme likens its disciples to adults who still believe in Santa. Zillow itself lost hundreds of millions of dollars during the pandemic when it relied on its algorithm to buy homes at what turned out to be inflated prices, part of an ill-fated attempt to flip homes at scale.

The Zestimate is just one of a slew of automated valuation models that are increasingly used by banks, investors, and laypeople to estimate the value of homes. No other model, however, has wormed its way into our culture like the Zestimate. The model, like other consumer-facing AVMs, is prone to errors that render it more of an amusement than a serious pricing tool. But while the algo's price-guessing skills may be suspect, it's undeniably elite at one thing: luring people to Zillow-dot-com.

The Zestimate is both everywhere and an enigma. About 104 million homes, or 71% of the US housing stock, have a little dollar figure hovering above them on Zillow's website. One of them is the house in Austin where I was raised until the age of 10. It's not for sale, but right underneath the address, in bold, is the Zestimate. Next to it is a "Rent Zestimate," or the amount the owner could probably charge a tenant each month. You can click to see a graph of its Zestimate over the past decade — the Zillow-fied value of my childhood home rose a staggering 72% from May 2020 to its peak in May 2022 but has since dropped 24% from that top tick thanks to the chill running through the Austin market. In just the past 30 days, the Zestimate has dropped by $4,455. Ouch.

Just how accurate are those numbers, though? Until the house actually trades hands, it's impossible to say. Zillow's own explanation of the methodology, and its outcomes, can be misleading. The model, the company says, is based on thousands of data points from public sources like county records, tax documents, and multiple listing services — local databases used by real-estate agents where most homes are advertised for sale. Zillow's formula also incorporates user-submitted info: If you get a fancy new kitchen, for example, your Zestimate might see a nice bump if you let the company know. Zillow makes sure to note that the Zestimate can't replace an actual appraisal, but articles on its website also hail the tool as a "powerful starting point in determining a home's value" and "generally quite accurate." The median error rate for on-market homes is just 2.4%, per the company's website, while the median error rate for off-market homes is 7.49%. Not bad, you might think.

But that's where things get sticky. By definition, half of homes sell within the median error rate, e.g., within 2.4% of the Zestimate in either direction for on-market homes. But the other half don't, and Zillow doesn't offer many details on how bad those misses are. And while the Zestimate is appealing because it attempts to measure what a house is worth even when it's not for sale, it becomes much more accurate when a house actually hits the market. That's because it's leaning on actual humans, not computers, to do a lot of the grunt work. When somebody lists their house for sale, the Zestimate will adjust to include all the new seller-provided info: new photos, details on recent renovations, and, most importantly, the list price. The Zestimate keeps adjusting until the house actually sells. At that point, the difference between the sale price and the latest Zestimate is used to calculate the on-market error rate, which, again, is pretty good: In Austin, for instance, a little more than 94% of on-market homes end up selling for within 10% of the last Zestimate before the deal goes through. But Zillow also keeps a second Zestimate humming in the background, one that never sees the light of day. This version doesn't factor in the list price — it's carrying on as if the house never went up for sale at all. Instead, it's used to calculate the "off-market" error rate. When the house sells, the difference between the final price and this shadow algorithm reveals an error rate that's much less satisfactory: In Austin, only about 66% of these "off-market Zestimates" come within 10% of the actual sale price. In Atlanta, it's 65%; Chicago, 58%; Nashville, 63%; Seattle, 69%. At today's median home price of $420,000, a 10% error would mean a difference of more than $40,000.

Without sellers spoonfeeding Zillow the most crucial piece of information — the list price — the Zestimate is hamstrung. It's a lot easier to estimate what a home will sell for once the sellers broadcast, "Hey, this is the price we're trying to sell for." Because the vast majority of sellers work with an agent, the list price is also usually based on that agent's knowledge of the local market, the finer details of the house, and comparable sales in the area. This September, per Zillow's own data, the typical home sold for 99.8% of the list price — almost exactly spot on. That may not always be the case, but the list price is generally a good indicator of the sale figure down the line. For a computer model of home prices, it's basically the prized data point. In the world of AVMs, models that achieve success by fitting their results to list prices are deemed "springy" or "bouncy" — like a ball tethered to a string, they won't stray too far. Several people I talked to for this story say they've seen this in action with Zillow's model: A seller lists a home and asks for a number significantly different from the Zestimate, and then watches as the Zestimate moves within a respectable distance of that list price anyway. Zillow itself makes no secret of the fact that it leans on the list price to arrive at its own estimate.

Other sites have their versions of the Zestimate, too — there are actually about 25 different AVMs in the market, says Lee Kennedy, the founder and managing director of AVMetrics, a company known for independently testing these models. Realtor.com will show you three estimates, each from a different AVM provider. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, also has its own model. Kennedy has been studying AVMs for more than three decades, but it wasn't until the advent of Zillow that the masses became aware of them. Consumer-facing AVMs, like the Zestimate or the Redfin Estimate (Restimate?) are meant to be used informally, he says, as casual starting points before consulting real experts. They're not supposed to be used for real pricing, which should be left to the big guys — the "business-to-business" AVMs used by banks, investors, and the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lauryn Dempsey, a real-estate agent in the Denver area, gives similar advice to her clients.

"They're tools that provide information," Dempsey says, "but they should not be used in a vacuum to make decisions."

The business-to-business models are so costly to develop, Kennedy tells me, that they'll probably never be offered to regular people for free. But his testing indicates they're much more reliable. His firm has unveiled blind testing that looks at how models perform before taking into account the list price, a method that penalizes those aforementioned bouncy algorithms. The standard measurement breaks down how often the model can get within 10%, in either direction, of the actual selling price. In a highly urbanized area with lots of housing transactions, some of the models can correctly get close to the final selling price about 80% to 90% of the time — "not bad," Kennedy says. AVMs of all kinds work best in areas with a lot of homes that look and feel roughly the same. Cookie-cutter suburbs are heaven; areas with a wide range of home styles and ages, like Boston, pose a greater challenge. The value of a ranch home in the middle of nowhere is even tougher to peg.

So the Zestimate isn't exactly unique, and it's far from the best. But to the average internet surfer, no AVM carries the weight, or swagger, of the original. To someone like Jonathan Miller, the president and CEO of the appraisal and consulting company Miller Samuel, the enduring appeal of the Zestimate is maddening. "When you think of the Zestimate, for many, it gives a false anchor for what the value actually is," Miller says.

Miller is no unbiased observer. Given that he's an appraiser who estimates the value of homes for a living, it should come as no surprise that he's siding with the humans over the robots. But he raises real issues, highlighting the disconnect between the public's continued use of the Zestimate and its actual track record.

I could say that I virtually stalked my childhood home for "research," but let's be real: By the time I scrolled to the bottom of the page, I had fully surrendered to the voyeuristic urges that draw millions of visitors to the Zillow website each month. It's been almost two decades since I've stepped inside the house, and I can only imagine the changes its new owners have made to my old room (sadly, no pics of the interior). But with the aid of Zillow, my trip down memory lane was lined with data: I walked away with intimate knowledge of the home and its occupants. Prior to 2006, no regular person had this kind of power.

The launch of Zillow spawned a whole genre of internet snooping that, if anything, has only intensified in the years since. When I call up John Wake, a former economist and real-estate agent who now writes the newsletter Real Estate Decoded, he reveals that he, too, looked up his childhood home only a few months ago. "That part is really fun," he tells me. Keeping tabs on your own Zestimate, though, can provide less of a thrill. In December 2022, after interest-rate hikes tamped down home prices, Wake shared with his followers on X that his Zestimate was down 18% from May: "YIKES!" In a 2020 column, the Wall Street Journal editor Kris Frieswick opened up about the difficulty of quitting the algorithm: "My self-worth is defined by my Zestimate. Each day I approach Zillow.com filled with hope, and fear." The column reads mostly as tongue-in-cheek, but plenty of people take their number very seriously. As Frieswick pointed out, at least several disgruntled homeowners have actually sued Zillow over Zestimates they said were inaccurate.

Looking up other people's houses, by comparison, is a mostly harmless pastime. Bosses, neighbors, lovers, and exes — all are fair game in the all-seeing eyes of the tool. During the heat of the 2021 homebuying frenzy, a "Saturday Night Live" sendup of a Zillow ad declared: "The pleasure you once got from sex now comes from looking at other people's houses." The skit, which featured a lot of moaning and sultry mood lighting, was mostly about the fantasies of browsing homes for sale on Zillow — as one YouTube commenter observed, "They didn't even get into the naughty pleasure of looking up all your friends' Zestimate values." This kicked off a thread of others chiming in with "guilty!" and lots of cry-laughing emojis. "OMG I thought this was just my kink," another person replied. I imagine all of these people at a raucous dinner party, bonding over their exploits on zillow.com. And here I am, the buzzkill in the corner talking about median error rates.

Virtual spelunking aside, the hazards of the Zestimate are most obvious when a seller actually decides to list their home. Francine Carstensen, a real-estate agent in Alabama, says those in her line of work have a complicated relationship with the Zestimate: "We love it, and we hate it." A lofty estimate might jolt a homeowner into action — "I could sell my house for what?!" — and drive more business her way. But the number can also make it hard to do her job. A few times, she tells me, she's lost clients over a pricing disagreement involving the Zestimate. It can be difficult enough to pry a seller away from their unrealistic expectations without a number on a screen confirming their hopes for a bigger payday.

"I hate it when they tell me, 'Well, this is what Zillow tells me my house is worth,'" Carstensen says. "Because it's very rarely accurate."

Accuracy may not even be the point. It didn't appear to be in 2006, when the beta version of the Zestimate launched. "The Zestimate started out fairly inaccurate, but it didn't matter," Rich Barton, a Zillow cofounder who was then its CEO, recalled in a 2021 podcast episode. "It was provocative." Spencer Rascoff, another cofounder and former CEO, sold his own home in 2016 for 40% less than its Zestimate. The next year, the company offered $1 million to whoever could improve the Zestimate algorithm the most. The winning team, a group of three data scientists working remotely from the US, Canada, and Morocco, beat the Zillow benchmark by 13%.

No misstep appeared more damning, however, than the implosion of Zillow's homebuying business. In 2018, the company launched Zillow Offers, making all-cash offers to sellers looking to move quickly and seamlessly. In theory, Zillow could then turn around and offload the home in short order for a modest fee, plus however much the home had appreciated. The company used a combination of internal algorithms and human analysts to value the home and predict what it could sell for in a few months — in some cases, homeowners could get an immediate cash offer based on their Zestimate with just a few clicks. But the company's forecasts turned out to be way off base. Zillow Offers squandered $422 million in the third quarter of 2021 alone — a Business Insider investigation found that almost two-thirds of the homes listed by Zillow in Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, and Minneapolis were being marketed at a loss. Amanda Pendleton, a Zillow spokesperson, tells me it was the volatility of the market, not the Zestimate, that really led to the program's downfall. Once the losses came to light, the company swiftly shuttered the division and laid off a quarter of its staff.

I remember wondering whether this would be the death knell for the Zestimate, a kind of algorithm-has-no-clothes moment. I was wrong. Zillow and its best-known creation haven't gone anywhere — the company continues to highlight its progress, providing periodic updates as its data scientists tinker away at the formulas. As search portals like Homes.com and Redfin jockey with Zillow for dominance, the Zestimate is too valuable of an asset to give up. People still flock to Zillow for those little numbers next to each home, for the thrill of feasting their eyes upon something that, like salaries, is considered taboo to talk about in person. For Zillow, that's an unequivocal win.

"It's 100% a marketing tool," says Mike DelPrete, a scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the intersection of tech and real estate. "Like, not even 99%. It's a marketing tool."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

The American dream — like a beloved pair of pants you left in the dryer too long — is shrinking.

The idealized image of American life we know today was crystallized in the country's collective imagination in the 1930s. Since then, the idea that anyone can obtain a life that has the house with the white picket fence, 2.5 children, a lucrative career at an office that's a reasonable distance away, and the occasional trip to an enviable vacation spot has loomed large in nearly every facet of cultural and political life.

There's just one problem: The once expansive vision is getting smaller. Not only is it harder to grab a piece of it, like a bag of chips or a roll of toilet paper that has less substance every time you buy it, but even nominally achieving the dream is leaving people unsatisfied. Americans are having fewer kids, their houses are getting smaller, they're schlepping further to work, and they're spending less time on vacation.

Americans are taking notice of the diminishing returns. Among the 8,709 US adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center from April 8 to 14, 41% said that achieving the American dream was once possible but no longer. That's particularly true for younger Americans; 18- to 29-year-olds were the most likely to say that the American dream was never possible, and only 39% said that it's still possible. Their millennial counterparts felt similarly, though they were slightly more bullish on the possibility of the American dream.

At the same time, Americans are increasingly less satisfied with their personal lives, Gallup polling from January found. The share of Americans who are "very satisfied" with their personal lives has been plummeting, the poll found, and sits near record lows — other times it's gotten this bad were during the economic crisis of 2008 and its fallout in the following years. And even among those who might have achieved the American dream — higher earners with college degrees — life satisfaction has slipped.

Call it the shrinkflation of the American dream.

The central element of the American dream is owning a house. Having a roof over your head is the cornerstone of security and stability; research has found homeowners are less stressed than their renter counterparts, and beyond having a place that they can call their own, they have growing equity. But nowadays, the homes that many Americans live in rarely have enough room for a big dog — much less a picket fence.

In 2013, the median square footage of a new single-family housing unit was about 2,460. In 2015, new homes peaked at about 2,470 square feet — and then spent the next six years shrinking. In 2021, homes started to slowly get bigger again, and then they once again constricted. By 2023, the figure had fallen to about 2,180 square feet. An analysis by the National Association of Home Builders found that the share of single-family homes built with two bedrooms or fewer hit its highest level since 2012 — and the share of new homes built with four bedrooms fell to its lowest level since 2012.

Of course, homes getting a little smaller isn't necessarily a bad thing — many advocates for increasing the housing supply argue that the dedication to giant homes has made it tougher to build the number of new units that the country needs. But shrinking homes are coupled with another biting reality: Americans are paying more for less. In the same period that Americans have seen their homes shrink, home prices have grown by nearly $200,000. The median listing price per square foot was $127 in 2016; by 2024, that rose to $224 — meaning Americans were shelling out more per square foot, even as their square footage decreased. By one measure, Americans now need to work 110 hours a month to be able to afford their mortgages — meaning mortgages eat up the bulk of their earnings.

With those prices, it's no wonder first-time homebuyers are older than ever. The National Association of Realtors found that the median age of first-time homebuyers hit 38 in 2024, a record high. In 1981, the median age of a first-time buyer was 29; in 2014, it was 31.

It's not all peaches and rainbows for American renters, either. The median rent price in the US is $2,035, Zillow found. Rent.com, meanwhile, found that median rental asking prices hit about $1,619 in October. That's nearly a $300 increase from May 2019. So if renters are paying more, surely they're still at least getting some bang for their buck? Nope, apartments are getting smaller, too. In 2016, the median square footage of a new unit in a building that had two or more units was 1,105 square feet. Apartments have been shrinking since then: In 2023, new units were clocking in at a median of 1,020 square feet — and the measure reached its lowest recorded level in 2021 as housing prices and demand soared.

A house is just a house until there are people in it; only then, the saying goes, is it a home. But increasingly, American homes are occupied by fewer people. Not only is there a slight rise in single people buying a house, but also the pitter-patter of babies' feet is becoming less common in the hallways of American homes these days. The share of homebuyers without a child under 18 in the house rose to a new high of 73%. That comes as Americans are having fewer kids: The average number of births per woman in the US has fallen from nearly four in 1960 to 1.7 in 2022.

It should come as no surprise that Americans are having fewer children given the economic and social pressures working against them. If it's hard for anyone to break into the ranks of homeowners, it's even more difficult for parents. Housing costs aren't the only deterrent, young parents are also floundering amid rising childcare costs and the loss of the social connections that are critical to raising kids. At the same time, more Americans seem to be on board with choosing to go child-free. DINKs — double-income, no-kid couples — have been on the cultural rise. But just because it's harder for people with kids and more acceptable to forgo them doesn't mean that people are giving up on starting a family. Many Americans want to have children or have even more kids, but it's out of reach.

Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who's researched the gap between the number of children Americans intend to have versus their ultimate childbearing, told me that having kids is often seen as the "last step" in accomplishing the American dream. You go to college, you line up a good job, you get married, you buy a house, and then you fill it with kids. There's a problem, though. "Every step along the way has become less and less predictable," she said.

Guzzo's research has found, in part, that Americans still expect to have children — they just don't actually have them. The way Guzzo describes it is many Americans want kids, but with an asterisk: They want kids if they can find a good partner, a good job with family leave and enough pay to afford childcare, and so on.

"People need to feel confident that the next 25 years of their lives and the world in which their children will be raised and growing and becoming adults on their own. They need to feel confident about those," Guzzo said. "And we do not do a good job right now in the United States of making people feel confident about their futures."

Part of the American dream is the ability to actually enjoy it. You can come home for dinner, spend a nice evening with your family, and maybe enjoy some ice cream in front of the TV before heading to bed at a reasonable hour.

Unfortunately, for many people, the free time is getting sapped by a mind-numbing commute. The average travel time to work in 1990 was 22.4 minutes one way. By 2023, it rose to 26.8 minutes. That may not sound like a lot, but that adds up to nearly 4.5 hours a week just commuting to work, or about 10 days a year, assuming they went in every workday. Even if they're going into the office three days a week, that's still nearly 2.7 hours a week commuting, or the equivalent of almost 6 full days a year. Meanwhile, in 1990, Americans spent just about 3.7 hours a week commuting — about 44 minutes less a week. That's a whole episode of "Real Housewives." Even on a small scale, research has found that every minute added to a commute can reduce one's satisfaction with both their job and their leisure time. Most Americans commuting are doing so by car, which can also weigh on workers' mental health — and how well they're sleeping.

And as more Americans have moved away from urban cores — perhaps in pursuit of buying a house in cheaper areas — they're living farther from work. Young families, in particular, have fled larger urban areas and are finding themselves in the farthest reaches of suburbia. If you want the American dream of that larger, cheaper house, you might be paying for it in minutes stuck behind the wheel.

Reveling in the American dream also includes unwinding away from that house and job. But even as more Americans have access to paid vacation, that doesn't mean they're taking it. In July 1980, over 10 million working Americans were on vacation. At the height of the pandemic, that number had halved. And even as more Americans went on vacation in July post-2020, the number of workers vacationing in July has essentially plateaued over the past few years.

As The Washington Post found in an extensive analysis of eroding vacation time, some of that might be chalked up to another form of shrinkflation: Workers saving their vacation days for when they're feeling sick. In a very Dickensian twist, Americans might not be going on vacation because they're too busy being sick or caring for their ill kids instead.

All of this is not to say that the American dream has gone extinct, but there's a marked shift from the idea that things will get better for each successive generation. In a country where growth, expansion, and constantly improving your lot — and your family's lot — are North Stars, a diminishing and sickly American dream is a bit of an existential downer.

After all, in a March 2023 survey of 1,019 American adults by The Wall Street Journal and NORC, 78% of respondents said they were not confident that life would be better for their kids' generation. The share not confident their kids' lives will be better has soared over the past few decades; in 2000 just 42% said the same. In short: Many Americans are feeling like the dream is slipping through their fingers.

Guzzo said that we're seeing a bifurcation of the American dream. For the ultrawealthy, the ability to accumulate the markers of the dream has never been easier. The top 1% holds just over 13% of all real estate by dollar value in the US, while the bottom 50% holds just about 10%. And, as the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta recounted in its December Beige Book round-up, lower- and middle-income consumers are scaling back their vacation plans; they're renting homes for multiple families and eating in rather than splashing out on hotels or fancy restaurants. Instead, the strength in tourism spending comes from those higher-income consumers exploring and going on cruises. For Americans in the middle, those who might have the college degree and career that could set them on that trajectory, the dream is still possible, though it may come later in life. But Guzzo said others, especially younger men without college degrees, feel the American dream has been pulled out from beneath them.

At the same time, there's a bittersweet parallel running alongside the shrinking of the American dream. For decades, things like homeownership or formal recognition of marriage were out of grasp — and, in some cases, expressly forbidden — for many marginalized groups. It's only in recent history that LGBTQ+ Americans and Americans of color have been able to somewhat catch up to their straight and white peers. But now that the American dream is within reach for these people, it's already shrinking.

Juliana Kaplan is a senior labor and inequality reporter on Business Insider's economy team.

This article is part of "5G and Connectivity Playbook," a series exploring some of our time's most important tech innovations.

In March 2020, Dr. Leigh Hochberg and his colleagues realized two alarming realities: The pandemic was spreading, and clinical research would shut down rapidly.

Hochberg, a Brown University professor, is the director of BrainGate clinical trials. This expansive, multi-institution research program develops and tests brain-computer interface technologies designed to help people who have lost the ability to speak or move — such as translating the brain activity of ALS patients into words on a computer screen and helping paralyzed people move robotic arms with their minds.

Before COVID-19, a wireless version of the system had only been tested with a researcher in the room. Its full potential — and ability to work smoothly without a medical professional on standby — had not been evaluated.

When in-person clinical research stopped due to the pandemic, the team decided to teach the participants' caregivers how to establish the wireless connection and proceed with the project.

Hochberg said the moment felt like fate.

"As the world started to shut down, we realized that if we acted quickly, we had an opportunity to continue with our research," he said. "The wireless technology allowed our participants to remain engaged in the trial and allowed us to record overnight for the first time."

Though Elon Musk's Neuralink put wireless brain implants in the spotlight — in early 2024, Musk announced his company's first implant was successful — the research and development of these devices has spanned decades. The BrainGate clinical trials have been underway for 20 years, and the consortium's wireless implant marks the first time a person has used an implant with high bandwidth capabilities.

Wireless technologies are opening doors in neuroscience, enabling new capabilities in communication, treatment, and research. Because wireless implants can monitor the brain for long periods of time, they offer a unique opportunity to examine neural dynamics, increasing our understanding of the human mind. Their cord-free design also benefits people hoping to use these devices outside a research setting and improve their quality of life.

Powering a new model of connectivity

The first brain implant is credited to neurologist Phil Kennedy, who had the device surgically affixed to his brain. Today, wired implants are less invasive and widely used. They can help prevent seizures, manage OCD symptoms, and treat movement disorders.

Researchers are improving brain implant devices with wireless technology. These devices can transmit information without cables through radio frequency fields, acoustic waves, and light.

For the first decade of BrainGate trials, the system — electrodes implanted in the brain that record neural activity and computers that simultaneously decode those brain signals — required a cable connection between the implant and the computers. This meant participants were physically tethered to the equipment. "It was very clear early on during the clinical trials that we all looked forward to a day where there would be a wireless system," Hochberg said.

That day came in the late 2010s when the BrainGate team started to use a small, wireless neural transmitter developed by Brown University researchers. When placed on a user's head, the transmitter connects to the implant in the brain's motor cortex through a port on the skull. The transmitter then sends the information to a computer system to be analyzed.

"To put something in someone's brain is a very high bar," Jordan McCall, a neuroscientist and an associate professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis School, told BI. He works on creating wireless brain-interfacing devices that are small, flexible, and biocompatible.

In 2021, McCall and his colleagues published a paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering showing how they could remotely alter neural activity in rat brains using a wireless brain implant. With the help of Internet of Things technology, the implant included a Bluetooth microchip and a laser supported by Raspberry Pi, a small, single-board computer.

McCall said the use of store-bought technology was intentional. The goal, he added, was to make devices that are accessible to the scientific community.

However, wireless brain devices are still a work in progress. Some of the hurdles include long-term compatibility with brains, the reliability of wireless communication, and balancing data transmission quality with power consumption. But McCall said we're at a moment when there's plenty of space for new technologies to emerge.

"We're definitely not done, but I no longer think we're at the beginning of this," he said.

Exploring the brain cord-free

In addition to being an assistive technology, wireless implants are also valuable research tools.

Philipp Gutruf, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Arizona, told BI that the information gained through wireless devices could help researchers better understand human behavior and develop improved treatments for conditions like addiction. Gutruf develops devices intended to improve how medical conditions are diagnosed and treated and increase our understanding of the brain.

"The brain is incredibly complex, and we've been trying for a long time to decipher how the brain works and operates," Gutruf said.

Much of the field has focused on deciphering the electrical signals the brain constantly produces. However, the brain also contains chemicals such as dopamine that influence our mood and health. How these factors affect the brain is less understood, and Gutruf and his team are investigating this side of the equation.

They developed a wireless, battery-free implant that can monitor dopamine signals in the brain. The device uses a technique called optogenetic stimulation to activate or inhibit certain neurons in mice and record dopamine activity.

"We created a system that allows us to look at the brain in action while the animal subjects behave naturally," Gutruf said. "This is proving ground for a new type of technology that may lead to human application later."

The implant is powered remotely and transmits data wirelessly using infrared light waves. In other experiments, Gutruf and colleagues have also used near-field communication, a wireless technology commonly used for contactless payment systems or keyless entry. With near-field communication, data is transmitted through electromagnetic radio fields.

A better understanding of neurochemical composition in the brain could lead to earlier detection of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's, as well as personalized therapies for mental and behavioral disorders.

"Right now, we have a reasonable grasp of the rest of the body, but the brain still has mysteries to unravel," Gutruf said. "New tools allow us to see what's going on in the brain in real time, which may allow us to decipher some of these mysteries."

Wireless tech's potential

While brain implants aren't new, McCall said that about a decade ago, there was an "exponential shift in what was possible." Advancements in material science and electrical engineering, along with the financial backing of the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative, which kicked off in 2013, helped accelerate the technology significantly, leading to the current effort to optimize wireless brain implants.

Hochberg said academic institutions and private companies are racing to develop different versions of wireless devices.

But when it comes to implants designed for clinical purposes — like helping a patient express a thought — Hochberg said there are still questions about obtaining the tech outside a research setting. He is part of the Implantable BCI Collaborative Community, a newly launched project where neurotechnology stakeholders can discuss such challenges. The hope is to lay the groundwork for a more accessible future.

Hochberg is excited about BrainGate's potential to decode attempted speech instantly and synch it with wearable soft robotics, allowing for more comfortable and intuitive movements.

"There is tremendous promise for this powerful technology," Hochberg said.

The 1988 buddy-comedy action flick "Midnight Run" had an unexpected impact on the restaurant industry. While the romp about a bounty hunter transporting an accountant across the country didn't make a box-office splash, one line stuck around.

"A restaurant is a very tricky investment," the accountant, played by Charles Grodin, tells the bounty hunter, played by Robert DeNiro. DeNiro's character dreams of opening a coffee shop with his big score, but the accountant shuts him down: "More than half of them go under within the six months."

The idea that restaurants are a bad investment predates the film, but the quote lodged in people's minds. Over the past 20 years as a cook, restaurant critic, and food writer, I've heard Grodin's risk assessment quoted repeatedly, almost verbatim. But if restaurants really are a lousy investment, then why would private-equity firms be dumping billions into the sector? Data from PitchBook found that private-equity investments into fast-casual restaurants grew from $7.7 million in 2013 to $231 million in 2023 — a nearly 3,000% increase.

In 2024 alone, Blackstone purchased 1,400 Tropical Smoothie Cafes and a majority stake in Jersey Mike's — deals that gave the chains multi-billion-dollar valuations. Sycamore Partners also bought 250 Playa Bowls locations. Before its IPO in 2023, the Mediterranean eatery Cava raised nearly $750 million from private investors. Meanwhile, SoftBank Vision Fund has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into restaurant tech over the past decade.

All that cash has led to a boom in places like Chipotle, Shake Shake, and Sweetgreen. Between 2009 and 2018, the number of fast-casual restaurants in America doubled, while sales have nearly tripled. Meanwhile, the amount of money Americans spend eating out has jumped by nearly 60% since 2009. That doesn't exactly sound like a lousy investment.

The trouble is that private equity has a knack for destroying businesses. Red Lobster declared bankruptcy earlier this year after 10 years under private-equity management, Toys "R" Us famously shut down following a private-equity takeover, and even hospitals have struggled after private equity got involved. The cash infusion to wannabe chains and franchises has also made it harder for independently funded restaurants to compete for customers, real estate, and staff. When the gravy train stops, fast-casual restaurants are going to be in trouble.

To understand why private equity is pouring money into restaurants, we have to start with the appeal of the fast-casual model. In some ways, it's the golden mean of restaurants. You can charge twice as much for a meal at a fast-casual spot as you can at a fast-food joint. In Manhattan, a Burger King cheeseburger costs $3.40, whereas a Shake Shack burger will run you $7.79. But when you look at the overhead costs, there isn't much difference. Both restaurants staff a similar number of people and rely on similar ingredients. Chipotle may offer a burrito, a bowl, a quesadilla, and a salad, but it's all more or less the same ingredients: beans, corn, salsa, cheese, and basic proteins. The limited menu enables both fast-food and fast-casual restaurants to be efficient, keep costs down, and avoid losses from food waste and labor. And since fast-casual spots appear to be the nicer restaurants — with gourmet ingredients like brioche buns, healthy-sounding options, and claims of sustainable sourcing — they can charge more. If price and speed aren't priorities, many people would prefer to grab lunch at a Chipotle than at a Taco Bell.

The model also has an edge over sit-down restaurants, which have struggled in recent years. "Casual dining proper is not doing so well," Alex M. Susskind, a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University, says. "Fast casual has provided consumers with a better meal experience that's equal to, or in some instances better than, a casual-dining restaurant, with less of a time and financial commitment."

The food is just as good, but the service is much faster. He says that's helped make the model a better investment than a place like Applebee's. Thanks in part to those higher profit margins, one restaurant analyst said it takes 18 months for a Chipotle to pay back buildout costs, compared to five years for a Cheesecake Factory.

"PE is investing money in the fast-casual market because the economics of a fast-casual concept is much better than any other type of restaurant concept," says Chris Macksey, the CEO of Prix Fixe Accounting, which specializes in hospitality. "Profit margins are anywhere from 10% to 15% as opposed to a full-service restaurant, which is 5% to 8%. Fast casual is just a far more scalable concept."

Scalability is really the brass ring. Investors in fast-casuals aren't buying restaurants; they're buying the potential growth of restaurant brands. Susskind says the boom reminds him of the late 1990s when casual-dining brands like Applebee's, TGI Fridays, and Olive Garden were taking off. He sees the recent shutdown of some of those chains — such as TGI Fridays, Red Lobster, and Smokey Bones — as a market correction for their overexpansion.

"That's what's making the investments in these businesses attractive. Because a lot of the weaker players have been weeded out," Susskind says about fast-casual restaurants. The frenzy has also been encouraged by the successful IPOs of companies like Sweetgreen in 2021 and Cava in 2023. Seeing Cava's stock grow by nearly 250% since its IPO has left investors searching for similar success.

While Sweetgreens and Dave's Hot Chickens are popping up across the country, independent restaurateurs are often left scrambling — not even for a piece of the pie, but for the crumbs.

Tracy Goh is the chef and owner of Damaran Sara, a two-year-old Malaysian restaurant in San Francisco, home of some of the most expensive commercial real estate in America. She's experienced landlords' preferences for fast-casual chains over small businesses like hers. "Especially for me, because it's my first restaurant. I don't have data to convince them that I can stay on a lease as long as they are likely to," Goh says. "They have a preference for the franchises or the big names."

A landlord's job is to generate money from their property. Their business isn't about enriching their community; it's about finding the most reliable tenants who can pay the most rent. In the restaurant real-estate space, that often means fast-food and fast-casual brands backed by major investment firms.

"If you're Chipotle or Shake Shack, you may decide to take a lease above market. You can afford it because you're privately funded," says Talia Berman, a partner at the hospitality advisory firm Friend of Chef and an expert in New York's restaurant real-estate market. "You beat out the competition because you don't care how much money you make in that space because it wasn't meant to be profitable based on the unit economics. It's part of a larger strategy."

That strategy is all about growth, she says. The primary goal of investment-backed restaurants is to expand quickly. "They're typically barreling toward an exit. So they're looking to get purchased by Nabisco or Darden or Levy or one of these huge restaurant conglomerates. And they need to show distribution — that they're operating in many states and that they have high top line," Berman says, referring to high sales volume.

A location that can gross $2 or $3 million in a year can demonstrate to a potential buyer that the eatery is successful — even if a high rent lowers the average unit profit margin. "They're thinking short term. It's a private equity mentality," says Berman.

Investment-backed restaurants also have a timing advantage over smaller shops. When a developer begins work on a new building that might lease space to a restaurant — a strip mall, food hall, or multipurpose apartment complex for instance — it's usually working on a multiyear timeline. Moshe Batalion, the vice president of national leasing for RioCan, one of Canada's largest real-estate-investment trusts, told me the firm starts thinking about who to lease to before it even breaks ground on a new property. Leases might be signed years before the space is even ready for move-in. Independent restaurateurs typically can't plan for a restaurant that won't open for two to three years.

"For independent operators, the real disadvantage is access of capital," Susskind says. "If they have access to a decent level of capital, they can grow, open more units." For chains, that's easy to do. But, he adds, "if I'm an independent, I don't know where I'm going to get $500,000 to ink a deal and build a restaurant."

When small-time restaurants get left out of the real-estate market, diners are left with a food scene that increasingly looks and tastes the same.

Thomas Crosby, the CEO of Pal's Sudden Service, a Tennessee-based chain of 31 burger shops, is all too familiar with the downsides of private equity. It's why he has eschewed outside investment. Millions of private-equity dollars might help triple the number of Pal's locations in five years — but could the chain continue to train and retest staff to remember that the perfect french fry is 3.7 inches long?

"As soon as you start taking investments or go public, you confuse your mission," Crosby says. "It becomes, what metrics can I do to wow stockholders instead of wow customers? And I think that's how so many companies get sideways. It's kind of like cars: You drive down the interstate, and you cannot hardly tell one brand from another. It becomes so homogenous." He adds: "That's what happens in the restaurant industry."

Chasing the success of another restaurant chain means everyone just tries to copy everyone else. "To please the stockholders or investors, they've got to be all things to all people," he says. By maintaining control over his operations, Crosby says, "We don't owe people money. We don't lease land. We have zero debt."

Since the early 2000s, private-equity firms started taking on a bigger role in the companies they'd invested in; these firms didn't just expect returns down the line, they began telling companies how to achieve those goals. This was good for innovation and safety, but bad for job creation and wages, with "sizable reductions in earnings per worker in the first two years post buyout," professors from Harvard and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business wrote in a 2014 research paper.

In the long run, private equity often leaves companies worse off. In 2019, researchers found that public companies that are bought out by private-equity firms are 10 times as likely to go bankrupt as those that aren't — a finding that complicates the argument that companies like Toys "R" Us closed simply because of market forces. Similar to the casual-dining boom before it, Susskind, the Cornell professor, believes that the investment boom in the fast-casual sector will eventually lead to a bust.

Already, the graveyard of private-equity-backed restaurants is growing. BurgerFi, which has 93 locations and 51 pizza subsidiaries, primarily in Florida, received $80 million in investments just a few years ago. But despite last year's plan to update the chain's stores, menus, and technology, the investment has largely transformed into debt. The company defaulted on $51 million in credit obligations this year, and in September, it filed for bankruptcy.

Between 2015 and 2019, Mod Pizza received a total of $334 million in private-equity investments, which enabled the brand to grow to 512 locations across Western states, with over 12,000 employees. In 2019, the firm boasted of being "the fastest-growing restaurant chain in the United States for the past four years," with a plan to hit 1,000 locations in five years. The rapid expansion outpaced realistic sales growth, and earlier this year, the company closed over 40 locations.

Similarly, Rubio's Fresh Mexican Grill, founded in 1983 in California, was acquired by Mill Road Capital in 2010 for $91 million. The new ownership updated the name (to Rubio's Coastal Grill), the interior design, and the menu. Renovations at each location cost about $200,000. The chain ended up declaring bankruptcy twice: once in 2020 and again earlier this year. Though the company attributed the first filing to pandemic lockdowns, it was already struggling to maintain its growth and stay in the green prior to 2020. When it closed more restaurants earlier this year, some employees found they were unable to cash their final paychecks.

Even some of the most visible success stories of investment-based growth haven't borne fruit. Sweetgreen, "the Starbucks of salad" that was heavily backed by venture capital before its IPO, grew from one location in 2007 to 227 this year, with plans to open another 30 a year — though the company still hasn't seen a profitable year. The chain lost over $26 million last year.

At some point, the market taps out and there isn't room for more growth. Americans are already spending 42% more money on dining out than they are on groceries.

Berman says that the high volatility creates opportunities. For one, when a cash-rich restaurant bails on a retail location, it becomes available as a turnkey space, complete with HVAC, grease traps, and floor drains. Berman's company recently made a deal for a popular food brand to build out a research kitchen. It's designed to be an experiment, but they signed a 10-year lease. "Believe me, this place is not going to be around in three years, I promise you," she says. That leaves the door open for other entrepreneurs to take over.

In other words, don't get too attached to the Sweetgreen down the street. It may take longer than six months for private-equity-backed restaurants to go under, but there's a good chance your new fave won't be around in a few years.

Corey Mintz is a food reporter focusing on the intersection between food, economics, and labor. He is also the author of "The Next Supper: The End Of Restaurants As We Knew Them, And What Comes After."

When Russ Schmidt was about 12, he was helping out on his family's farm in rural Kansas when his father looked at him and said, "You're not worth anything if you're not working."

Those words fixed themselves in Schmidt's brain. Decades later — at age 66 — they still have a hold on him.

"I was, I am, a really good employee," he says. Through his two careers in San Francisco, first as an administrator and then as a nurse for 20-odd years, he often did more than what his job required. "I see something that needs to be done, I do it," he says. He rarely took time off, so before he could officially retire in February 2023, he had to use the four months of vacation time he had accrued.

The change of pace of retirement was rough. His life became a cycle of alternating between bed and couch, eating and watching Netflix. He told himself he needed rest and recuperation — "but at some point," he says, "I realized this is settling into depression." After six months, Schmidt found a job working at a sexual-health clinic for two days a week.

When we think of retirement, we often think of endless leisure and zero responsibility. You might imagine yourself relaxing poolside with a book, strolling through a golf course, or binge-watching TV shows. In fact, many retirees live like this. The 2023 American Time Use Survey found that adults between 65 and 74 spent, on average, almost seven hours a day on leisure and sports, with four of those hours spent watching TV. Adults 25 to 54, on the other hand, averaged about four hours of leisure time and about two hours watching TV.

Spending your twilight years lying around might sound ideal — after all, everyone deserves a chance to relax after decades of working. But research suggests a life of pure leisure doesn't make you happier or healthier. About a third of American adults have said they struggled in transitioning to a life without work, and sedentary lifestyles are associated with earlier death. People are living about 15 years longer than they did a hundred years ago, which means we have many more years to spend in retirement. While there's much hand-wringing over how to save up enough money to enjoy those work-free years, much less discussed is how we should spend those years. More and more research is finding that both physical and social activity are crucial for well-being in old age — they keep people happier and living longer.

But that's not what most people are doing. Americans are doing retirement all wrong.

The concept of retirement as we know it came from German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who in 1889 designed a social insurance program compelling the government to care for people who couldn't work because of age or disability. When Social Security was established in the US in 1935, the retirement age was set at 65, though the average life expectancy was about 60 years. The norm was for people to work until they could not work anymore. Today the average life expectancy is about 77, and the age you can start receiving full Social Security benefits is either 66 or 67, depending on when you were born. We're working longer and living longer.

That has created two problems: People need to figure out how to pay for a longer retirement and how to spend their time. Anqi Chen, a senior research economist at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, says people are addressing both by simply working longer. Researchers, she says, have seen more people claim Social Security while they're still earning an income — something that used to be typical only of retirees. Of Americans 65 and older, nearly 11 million, or about 19%, are employed, and that number is projected to rise to nearly 15 million by 2032. Twenty years ago, just under 5 million Americans over 65 were employed.

Schmidt straddles these scenarios. Before retirement, he changed jobs too often to properly build up a pension — something he didn't realize until it was too late. Now finances are tight. "In that sense, retirement has been a letdown and a struggle," he says. He and his husband, who hasn't yet retired, have watched their savings dip even as Schmidt contributes through his part-time work.

Dee Cascio, a counselor and retirement coach in Sterling, Virginia, says the growing urge to work in retirement points to a larger issue: Work fulfills a lot of needs that people don't know how to get elsewhere, including relationships, learning, identity, direction, stability, and a sense of order. The structure that work provides is hard to move away from, says Cascio, who is 78 and still practicing. "People think that this transition is a piece of cake, and it's not," she says. "It can feel like jumping off a cliff."

In an online survey conducted early this year by Mass Mutual, a majority of retirees said they'd become less stressed and more relaxed upon retirement, but as many as a third reported that they'd become unhappier. Research from the Health and Retirement Study from the University of Michigan suggests that some of the negative effects people can experience in retirement are tied to lifestyle changes such as being less active and social in the absence of work.

For some, the solution is to never give up work. Schmidt feels that even if there had been no need for him to make money after retiring, he still would've sought out a part-time job. With it, "I don't feel useless," he says. "I do work that feels like I'm really giving something to the community."

But returning to your old line of work is hardly the only way to stay emotionally and intellectually fulfilled in retirement.

The idea that our personal worth is determined by how hard we work and how much money we make is deeply embedded in US work culture. This "Protestant work ethic" puts the responsibility of attaining a good quality of life and well-being on the worker — if you don't have the time or resources for leisure, it's because you haven't earned it. Or as Schmidt's father put it, "You're not worth anything if you're not working." This pernicious way of thinking prevents people from seeing purpose or value in life that doesn't involve working for a paycheck.

Meanwhile, more and more research suggests that a sense of purpose is a vital factor for health and happiness, especially in older age. "Higher purpose in life is associated with reduced risk of heart attacks and strokes," says Eric Kim, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. For adults older than 50, it's also associated with better grip strength and faster walking speed, better overall health, healthier habits, less loneliness, and a lower risk of depression.

So what does purpose outside a career look like? Paul Draper thinks he's figured it out.

In August 2023, six months before he was set to retire from his job as an enterprise-software product manager, Draper, now 68, made a plan. He liked his job and felt satisfied leaving it behind, but he recognized he still had a lot of energy and wanted to learn new things and meet new people. He was already involved in volunteering — doing prison ministry and working with soup kitchens — but more than that, "I was interested in doing things that I didn't know anything about," he says.

Draper's first thought was to work at a hardware store. He was somewhat handy but wanted to learn more about home repair. So he did. He got a part-time job at his local big-box hardware store handling doors, windows, and staircases. "That was great," he says, "because all of a sudden I had to learn a lot" to be able to answer customers' questions and solve their problems.

The job was never meant to be a forever thing. After 10 months, it began to feel more monotonous and less like a learning opportunity, so Draper decided to move on. He plans to replicate that experience and pursue other areas of work he's fascinated by. "There's a company in my area that builds continuous transmissions for bicycles and e-bikes," he says. "I just want to intern there." His dream role, however, is to lead city tours on Segways.

Since Draper isn't worried about needing an income, he can focus on learning. "There are a million fun things to do, but 99% of them are unsustainable to do as a career," he says. He views retirement as his opportunity to experiment with that 99% without worrying about achievement, a career, and the general hustle. Plus, he says it's been fairly easy to find these gigs. "I have found that there's a lot of employers that love retirees," he says. "One, because they're good with people. Two, because they're very reliable for the time that they have them, and they're calm, and they work well with other employees."

Cascio has found that when helping clients bring purpose back into their lives in retirement, it can help to think about the "six arenas of life": work, relationships, leisure, personal growth, finances, and health. A lot of people have drawn their sense of purpose or identity from work, and they might want to continue doing so through jobs or volunteering in retirement, she says. But any of these arenas can be a source of purpose. "If you haven't attended to your health and that's something you want to improve in retirement, that can become a purpose," she says.

Some activities can provide purpose in several of those areas. Draper's various odd jobs mean that he's more physically active than he would be if he stayed at home, and he's constantly meeting new people. "I've heard of people's circles closing up, but I'm finding I interact with more people, and on a regular basis," he says. Both greater social interaction and increased physical activity are associated with happier and healthier aging.

Kim says retirees who aren't exercising, socializing, or pursuing a sense of purpose may have self-limiting beliefs and pessimistic views of aging. "I've met people who will say, 'I'm X years old, and people who are this age don't really exercise anymore,'" regardless of whether their bodies are capable, he says. Sometimes older adults have to first overcome the idea that because they are older they are limited. A well-known 2002 study — and much follow-up research — found that people with more positive views of aging lived longer than those with more negative views. Kim says it can be tough to surmount those limiting beliefs, especially in a society where aging is seen as something to be avoided. In reality, there's no expiration date for finding new sources of fulfillment.

Of course, some people are perfectly happy with a leisure-filled retirement. "If you're only golfing and watching TV and you don't feel like there's anything missing in your life, you're completely happy, then I wouldn't go and say there is a psychological reason why you need to go and volunteer for a cause you care about," says Yochai Shavit, the director of research at the Stanford Center on Longevity. If you live a life of leisure but are still bored, or if you're ignoring a sense of discontentment, that's when the trouble starts. "The risk I see is that people brush aside those feelings," he says.

There's no "one size fits all" formula to retirement, but experts like Shavit hope that more people approach retirement with the understanding that they still have the ability — and often the time — to find meaning and fulfillment. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that "boredom is a 'natural' part of retirement and having aches, both internally and physically, is just a part of growing old," Shavit says. They're not, and they don't have to be.

Hannah Seo is a Korean-Canadian journalist based in Brooklyn, New York, who writes about health, climate, and social science.

Once upon a time, corporate bosses, associates, and interns alike would set aside their different titles and gather each December for drinks, dancing, and conversation. There would be gourmet dinners, chocolate fountains, DJs, and even live bands. For some, it was a night of merriment and splendor; for others, of awkward small talk, followed by deep regret.

Then the holiday party became endangered. In the wake of #MeToo in 2017, more professionals began rethinking the wisdom of a boozed-up night with their colleagues. The pandemic and remote work delivered a near death blow. In a 2020 survey of about 200 HR representatives by the executive-outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a mere 23% said they opted for seasonal celebrations, nearly three-quarters of which would be held virtually.

But as the return to offices continues, companies are slowly reinstituting holiday parties. Last year, nearly 65% of companies surveyed by Challenger, Gray, & Christmas said they planned to host in-person holiday parties, within sight of the 80% reported in 2016, before the advent of #MeToo. If plans pan out, this year could have before-times levels of corporate holiday cheer.

The return of the office holiday party could be a happier development than many jaded workers are likely inclined to presume. With two-thirds of the American white-collar workforce working remotely either some or all of the time, according to a USA Today survey conducted earlier this year, face time with colleagues and superiors is no longer a default feature of the 9-to-5. That might not be a big deal for everyone, but early-career workers stand to pay the steepest professional price for missing out on the kinds of networking and mentorship opportunities that are likelier to happen organically in a shared physical space. All the while, workers across the board are feeling increasingly lonely, overextended, and disengaged. They need something — anything — to celebrate.

In a work environment punctuated by uncertainty and isolation, it might be premature to let one's inner Scrooge have the final word on the tradition.

From Fezziwig's ball in "A Christmas Carol" to the power-suited backdrop of the 1988 Christmas Eve action thriller "Die Hard," the workplace holiday party has been a fixture of the cultural imagination for generations. But in the mid-20th century, the event garnered its enduring reputation for sloppiness and day-after regret. A 1948 Life magazine photo spread from a Christmas party thrown in the office of a Manhattan insurance brokerage depicts, among other modern-day HR violations, a pantless male executive dancing arm in arm with a young female stenographer and a pair of colleagues leaning in for a smooch beneath a bundle of mistletoe.

Somewhere along the way, festivities evolved from low-key gatherings held at the office to lavish affairs that might include gourmet meals, hired entertainment, and even international travel and accommodation on the boss' dime. The pandemic notwithstanding, the economic pendulum has largely dictated its tilt toward excess or restraint.

As a Toronto-area DJ during the halcyon days of the late-'90s dot-com bubble, Baruch Labunski had a front-row seat to corporate-party splendor. "I went to many and saw a lot of crazy things," he said. He described being flown to DJ holiday parties in far-flung global destinations such as Bora Bora, Palawan, and Ibiza — and, on top of that, getting paid $50,000 to $100,000 per event. (When I asked how many holiday parties he booked in a typical season, he said only "many.") By the time the dot-com bubble burst and the demand for his services cooled, Labunski had tired himself out of the DJ booth and pivoted to a career in marketing.

Economic recovery in the mid-2000s spurred a holiday-party renaissance, only to be dashed once again in the 2008 recession. A few years later, Wall Street firms were reportedly back to enjoying hush-hush holiday festivities reminiscent of their heydays. The free-money firehose of the ZIRP era was in full force, and excess was back in style.

Danielle Kane, who was a reporter for a niche New York City financial-services publication between 2015 and 2017, said that one year her company flew the entire staff of 50 to 75 people to Berlin. "Hotels and flights were paid for, there was an experiential dinner at the Berlin TV Tower, and then they paid for everyone to get into a fancy club afterwards," she said. "It was a late night, and I've never experienced a company holiday party like it since."

For all their fun, these often cringe-inducing affairs earned a bad rap — one that may come to bite younger workers.

Despite some companies' largesse, the general workforce's enthusiasm for holiday parties has long been mixed. In a 2017 survey of American workers by Randstad, 90% of respondents said they'd rather receive bonuses or extra vacation days than attend a company holiday party. "The ideal situation," Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist, told me, "is to offer activities that foster employee social health (such as a holiday party) without asking them to sacrifice their financial health (such as a bonus) or their mental health (such as time off)."

Companies squander the opportunity to make holiday gatherings meaningful in all sorts of small but critical ways. Hadley said the Christmas-specific focus of many company holiday parties could be alienating to workers who follow non-Christian religious traditions. Parties are often held at inconvenient times and places — too late on a weeknight for parents, in a location that has expensive parking or is hard to access. Holiday parties at big firms can also be loud, hot, and crowded, which makes it difficult to have meaningful conversations or meet new people.

Well-planned company holiday parties, on the other hand, can be a boon to employees' overall work experience and even strengthen company culture. A study of workers at several German companies in 2019 concluded that parties could encourage social bonding, especially when employees' feedback steered the planning. The study suggests, for example, that icebreaker activities that get people from different parts of the organization talking help build camaraderie, despite the eye rolls they may initially provoke. Over time, that can contribute to a happier and more cohesive work environment.

For early-career workers, the benefits can be more pronounced. Rick Hermanns, the president and CEO of HireQuest, a global staffing company, said social events could help make up for the "intangible aspects of career growth and camaraderie between colleagues" that younger workers may miss out on when they're partly or fully remote. In a 2023 Adobe poll of more than 1,000 Gen Z workers at midsize and large US companies, 83% of respondents said a workplace mentor was crucial for their career, but only 52% said they had one. While holiday parties aren't the be-all and end-all of workplace networking, they provide a critical opening to build and fortify connections.

"When I look back at my early career in banking in Los Angeles, I appreciated the time I had to walk into a senior executive's office or grab a beer after work with colleagues," Hermanns said. "Those are the intangibles you can't quantify yet ultimately impact your career growth." Simply put, face time matters.

It makes sense that Gen Z and millennial workers would be more enthusiastic about workplace holiday get-togethers than their Gen X and baby-boomer counterparts. "Company leaders need to help Gen Z — as well as millennials, whose workplace experience was hugely disrupted by COVID — to build strong interpersonal workplace relationships," Hubert Palan, the CEO of the product-management company Productboard, told Business Insider last year.

Given that much of the global workforce feels lonely on the job, it's not just the youngest workers who need a social boost. A new study Hadley coauthored evaluating workplace loneliness and remedies found that the loneliest people at work were those who were offered the fewest social opportunities by their employer. "In fact, the number of social offerings provided was one of our most predictive variables in terms of whether someone was socially connected at work or not," she told me. Hadley also found that while fully remote work did seem to increase the risk of loneliness, it was less significant of a variable than whether a person was introverted or worked for an organization that held regular social activities for staffers.

The German study suggests that a holiday party can serve as the ritual capstone for these more routine coworker events, making year-end hobnobbing just a little extra special. While the ideal party activities will depend on an organization's culture, a few basic considerations — such as hosting the event somewhere besides the boring old office — go a long way. Elements of fun help too, whether they take the form of a themed photo booth, a creative dining experience, or, yes, a DJ.

A dash of festive foresight can make the difference between the raunchy affairs of yesteryear and a few hours of meaningful, PG-rated bonding between coworkers. "A nice holiday event gives people a break in their wallets and signals that the leaders value personal connections and socializing," Hadley said.

For a company's youngest workers, the benefits may last a professional lifetime.

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

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• When I adopted my daughter, I had 24 hours' notice to prepare for her arrival.
• I'm a freelance worker, so it was easy to stop taking on work, but it was a big shift in how I earn.
• This article is part of "Milestone Moments," a series about financial planning for major life events.

This summer, my boyfriend and I adopted a newborn daughter — and we had only 24 hours' notice once we had confirmation that she had been placed with us. Between packing baby supplies and installing the car seat we'd already purchased, I notified my freelance clients I wouldn't be available for at least three months.

I didn't want to commit to a specific time period since I didn't know how much care my baby would need. As a freelancer, I'm used to my income varying, but this would be the first time in over 25 years that I wouldn't have any steady gigs. My career is already precarious, and I had to prepare for my income to nosedive.

I tried to squeeze in extra income where I could

I didn't fully quit working, because I still had a few deadlines to catch up on. While the baby slept, I edited a client's novel. In a burst of hubris, I told one client that I could keep writing their newsletter. I assumed I could squeeze in work around my daughter's schedule.

I didn't realize just how much juggling I would do during my spare hours — laundry, dishes, thank-you cards for the influx of gifts we received, organizing my things and the baby's.

Ever since we saved up all our anticipated adoption costs 1 1/2 years ago, I had tried to budget for my eventual time off. I'd been saving any spare income in an investment account that kept my money liquid and paid about 5% interest. On paper, my savings could cover my half of our mortgage and bills for at least a year, and my boyfriend, who has a full-time job, was happy to cover the rest.

But even though I know that I'm saving us the $40,000 to $50,000 a full-time nanny would cost, it's been extremely hard for me to stop working entirely. The idea that my savings might run out and leave me to borrow spending money from my boyfriend feels far too old-fashioned for someone who's considered herself a feminist since she learned what the word meant.

I want to keep working, but I love being a mom

Now, with my daughter sleeping through the night, I've found myself full of creative ideas begging to be put down on paper. I want to work, and I'm very grateful that I can make that choice, rather than having it made for me.

The three of us could live comfortably on my boyfriend's salary. Nevertheless, not having any income isn't something I can handle emotionally. As a child of divorce, in which money was a major factor, I worry that relying solely on him to provide for us could lead to resentment on his part, and leave me behind in the job market if we ever split up.

Because of that, I'm about to return to my part-time work-from-home copywriting job and have been taking on freelance writing assignments. I considered hiring a babysitter to free up my time, but the difference between my hourly rate and theirs wouldn't make it worthwhile. Furthermore, I'm 49 and waited a long time to fulfill my dream of becoming a mom.

I know that "having it all" isn't possible. I can't simultaneously give 100% to my job and 100% to being a mom. In just these first few months, there have been plenty of times when I've been pulled from my work upon seeing my baby's smiling face. Taking the time to have an impromptu dance party or blow gently on her face brings her more joy than I could have thought possible.

I'm earning the amount that's right for my mental well-being

One necessary expense has been my mental health. I had stopped seeing my therapist earlier this year to save money, but within two weeks of our adoption placement, I returned. I also found another provider to finally obtain medication for ADHD to allow me to not feel so overwhelmed by all the tasks on my plate.

Cutting back on work — but not abandoning it — is the compromise I've settled on to fulfill my duties as a mom, satisfy my need for mental stimulation, and stay financially stable. I'm not earning anywhere near what I was before, but it's enough for bills and occasional splurges without having to micromanage my budget. I've mourned grossing six figures annually, but someday, when my daughter's older, I hope I can get back to that level of success.

I've learned that while money is important and valuable, I can be "rich" in other ways — which I recognize is a privileged viewpoint I can afford to hold only because of my partner's income. When I walk into my daughter's nursery just as she's waking up, and she beams her drooling smile at me, I feel wealthy in love in a way no amount of money could ever hold a candle to.

What's given me the most satisfaction, though, is balancing my work projects with taking care of her. I may not be able to physically tend to her needs and work simultaneously, but I have found ways to bring motherhood into my work. Whether that's sitting her on my lap during Zoom calls or writing about the reality of my life as a mom, it has made my dip in income less scary.

Before turning 30, John, a trader in Washington, DC, spent nearly $22,000 to fix his receding hairline, an issue that had long been on his mind.

If not for a high-paying job in finance — in private banking and now trading derivatives for an asset management firm — he said he wouldn't have taken the plunge on two hair transplants.

"I would look in the mirror, I would see my hair receding, and it would just take up some of my emotional and mental bandwidth," John told Business Insider.

After spending $18,600 on his first procedure at 25, he decided on another transplant four years later. He traveled to Turkey to cut the cost, spending $3,250 in cash, which included airport transfers, a three-night stay with breakfast in a five-star hotel, the hair transplant, and postoperative care.

His nerves kicked in when he arrived and realized the 10- to 12-hour surgery would take place at a practice that wasn't as clean, welcoming, or professional as the one back in DC.

Still, the toll of worrying about other people's perceptions of him made it a gamble worth taking.

In his previous role in private banking, John worked in sales with high-net-worth individuals and knew that the way he presented himself in meetings and pitches was "incredibly important."

After his transplants, he said he felt more confident and spent less time questioning how clients and coworkers perceived him. Instead, he used that time to focus more on his work.

"Not thinking about, 'Oh, do they notice my hair thinning?' or 'Do they notice my receding hairline?' really allowed me to free up my mental space," he added.

John isn't alone in making this type of investment in his career. Business Insider spoke to four men in the corporate world who are willing to spend a lot to look good for their jobs, investing in services from plastic surgery to hair-loss treatments and time-consuming self-care routines to gain a competitive edge.

People identified by only a first name were given pseudonyms because they feared career-related repercussions. Their identities are known to BI.

The 'Brotox' boost

Over the past five years, it's become less taboo for men to discuss their desire to undergo some type of rejuvenation, Dr. Daniel Maman, a plastic surgeon with a practice on Park Avenue in New York, said.

"Ten years ago, it was just a topic that wasn't discussed amongst men," Maman said. "We did have some men in the practice, but it was usually quite secretive, discreet. They were very nervous about coming in, nervous about seeing others."

Now, he said, some men view getting work done as basic maintenance — just like "getting a haircut."

A 2023 survey from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons found that the number of men getting cosmetic procedures in the US increased by 8% from 2022 to 2023.

Maman, who's 46 and started getting Botox two years ago, said men in fields like finance, business, and law start coming in their mid-40s when they see signs of aging.

That's when Dan, a 45-year-old corporate lawyer from New York, first got Botox. He's gotten the procedure twice — once at 40, then at 44 — with each round costing about $1,000.

"I want to keep a groomed and youthful appearance, but I also don't mind showing my age because, again, that comes with experience and maturity and authority," Dan said. "There's a little bit of tension between the two, and the sweet spot is balancing both."

Maman said it's also very common for men in high-status fields to want to look fresher and avoid looking tired.

"Your appearance is oftentimes, for better or worse, an indication of the way you feel mentally as well," Maman said.

If you take care of your skin and dress well, people may be more likely to perceive you as someone who has their life together, he said, which benefits you professionally — selling a product or getting people to follow you as a manager can be easier if you look fresh and polished.

There's been a general shift toward minimally invasive procedures across generations. The trend reflects "a societal move toward treatments that provide effective yet less-intensive solutions, appealing to patients seeking quick recovery times and lower risks," the ASPS report said.

The ASPS survey found that Botox procedures increased 5.55% among male patients from 2022 to 2023, while minimally invasive treatments — which include Botox and procedures such as fillers, chemical peels, and laser hair removal — increased 7% for both men and women.

Botox is popular among men who have concerns about looking tired or sad, in part due to frown lines, Dr. Josef Hadeed, a plastic surgeon with practices in Miami and Beverly Hills, said. He said men make up around 10% to 15% of his clientele and about half of those men are corporate professionals who "want to look good in the workplace."

Hadeed said some of his clients told him they feel they could be passed over for opportunities if they don't look as good as younger colleagues — and believe they might gain a competitive edge by having work done.

Though John is only 29, he is already thinking about Botox and isn't ruling it out in the future.

"I feel like I look older than I am," he said. When he was in his early 20s, he'd take it as a compliment when he was told he looked like he was in his 30s. As he gets closer to his 30s, however, he's thinking about what he'll do to maintain a more youthful appearance down the road.

For now, John is taking a less invasive approach. He said he spends around $1,050 each quarter on fitness memberships, hair-loss-prevention medication, and supplements.

Finding a competitive edge

Once Darrell Spencer entered the spotlight as a senior leader launching two companies — the skincare brand Crowned Skin and the hair-care brand Kings Crowning — he also started investing more in his appearance.

The 28-year-old spends around $3,623 a quarter on skincare, hair care, self-care, and a Soho House membership, which he uses for its gym and networking opportunities. He also invests in "cosmetic skin-rejuvenation procedures" — he didn't want to get into specifics — every three to six months, which typically cost between $1,000 and $3,000 a visit.

Spencer most recently splurged on a stylist who's provided advice before conferences and speaking events. Styling for his latest event, a technology conference hosted by Alibaba, cost $9,213.

"Styling is very important because it's how I present myself and how I show myself as a young CEO," Spencer said. "Also, while I'm building these companies, I'm also building a personal brand."

"The return on investment comes from the amount of outreach I am getting," Spencer added.

Having a strong personal brand opens the door to more traveling and speaking opportunities, he said. He's then able to introduce his companies to men who may never have come across his products.

"No matter how high up in the ranks you get, the way you present yourself should always be important for any man, but especially a CEO who wants to put the best foot forward and be the face of their company," he added.

Roy Cohen, a career coach and the author of "The Wall Street Professional's Survival Guide," said his clients are becoming increasingly careful about what they wear and put in their bodies.

"In some industries, age is viewed as a liability," Cohen said. "I don't mean age in terms of young or old, but it's what it implies. Older can be viewed as tired, as slower, as not aware or comfortable with technology. The more you can look energetic and fit and healthy, that will offset any impression people may have."

A recent study from AARP found that about 64% of workers over 50 have either seen or experienced age discrimination in the workplace. Subtle forms of discrimination observed by survey participants included being viewed as less tech-savvy, losing out on training opportunities to younger employees, and having colleagues assume they'd resist change.

"When I see gray hair — and I'm starting to see it — or wrinkles, I'm not necessarily upset by it when I am at work because I think that is generally perceived as being mature and being experienced and respected and trustworthy," said Dan, the attorney. "At the same time, a more youthful appearance is associated with having energy and being a team player and someone who performs well in a fast-paced environment."

He said he feels the pressure to maintain a well-groomed and polished appearance that strikes the delicate balance of looking experienced yet energetic. He spends $219 a month for a boutique gym to stay fit and uses red-light therapy and sauna services at a wellness center — $199 a month — to help him relax, repair muscle tissue, and reduce inflammation.

He gets most of his wellness tips from the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman's podcast, which covers science-based approaches to wellness and everyday life.

Men are also turning to apps for advice: About 35% of men have used apps for suggested beauty products to buy and how to use them, Euromonitor International's Voice of the Consumer 2023 Beauty Survey found.

Tim Peters, a 43-year-old chief marketing officer, has noticed that social media is opening the door for more conversations about self-care regimens among his close circle of male friends compared to 10 years ago. He spends about $1,464 a quarter on fitness, supplements, skincare, and personal upkeep.

"I definitely feel more comfortable asking friends, 'Hey, are you taking certain supplements, or what are you doing?'" Peters said.

Wall Street's best-kept secret?

Many men still remain uncomfortable discussing more extensive procedures — especially with people they work with. After all, Maman said remote work and camera-off meetings could make it easier for people to get procedures and recover from them, with colleagues none the wiser.

Remote work was partly why John took the leap on his first hair procedure because he could "afford to look like Frankenstein for a few weeks" if he kept his camera off in meetings, he said.

"There was a time period where I wasn't the prettiest," he said, adding that he was back in the office on day 10 following the second procedure when he still had some scabs and facial swelling.

Most men just don't talk about the work they get done, said Dr. Catherine Chang, a plastic surgeon and the founder of Privé Beverly Hills.

"It's really hard for me to get men to let me share their photos, which is why I don't have a ton, but they're coming in the door, which I think is the first step," she said, referring to before-and-after pictures of procedures that she provides as examples for potential clients. She told BI that men make up around 30% of her clientele.

Men may confide in professionals like Chang or Roy Cohen, the career coach, about their insecurities and anxieties around their appearance and possible procedures but may not share them openly with colleagues — especially in competitive fields where having an edge is important.

"It's a secret everyone knows about," Cohen said. "Wall Street is very competitive, so why would I share that information with somebody who could be competing with me?"

"There's swagger that often defines how people want to appear at work," he added. "You can't have swagger when people think you've been artificially enhanced."

The first Yeti coolers arrived in America in the spring of 2008. They had spent weeks at sea, traveling from a factory in the Philippines to a leased warehouse in the hills south of Austin, Texas. Molded from a single piece of plastic, the coolers were porcelain white, with two black latches that gave them the rugged, field-ready look of an old Willys Jeep.

The 65-quart model of the cooler, the Yeti Tundra, was three times sturdier than lesser brands, and retailed for around $300. If you put a block of ice in one on a Monday, the payload would still be cold that Friday. Stout enough to withstand the prying jaws of a grizzly bear, the Tundra also looked right at home in your backyard on game day, a couple dozen Lone Star beers up to their necks in slush. It was perhaps the greatest ice box in the history of humankind.

Demand for the Tundra quickly exceeded expectations. Before long, a shipping container's worth of the coolers was arriving from the Philippines every week.

Two years had passed since Roy and Ryan Seiders (pronounced SEE-ders) launched Yeti out of their father's backyard, just a few miles down the road from the warehouse. Roy, 31 and fresh out of business school, was the company's pioneer with a passion for product development. Ryan, three years older, was the outdoorsman of the family. Scruffy and charming, he made the rounds at hunting and fishing shows, and lent Yeti its backwoods authenticity.

But the Seiders brothers didn't create the Tundra alone. They borrowed design tricks and styling from the best coolers on the market. And they brought it all together with the help of a collaborator who seldom makes an appearance in the company's legend — Ivan Royal Brown, a gifted Australian designer who produced the Yetis at his Outback Five Star factory in the Philippines. During those early months of 2008, Roy and Ivan spoke daily, working out the kinks in the new cooler and fine-tuning its manufacture on the fly.

One day that September, Roy emailed Ivan a question. When he didn't receive an immediate response, he grew concerned. "It wasn't like him," Roy recalls. He eventually managed to get in touch with Ivan's new wife, Gloria, who broke the shocking news: Ivan had been murdered, she said, shot four times while driving home from the factory.

Roy put down the phone and felt sick to his stomach. Not only had he lost his friend and mentor, but the future of his new company was now in jeopardy. "We didn't have a whole lot of confidence that we could move forward without him," he recalls.

As the brothers grappled with the fallout from the tragedy, things grew even more dire. Ivan had died without a will, and it wasn't clear who was in charge at the factory, putting the entire production line in jeopardy. Six months after Yeti's launch, it looked as though the cooler would vanish from store shelves just as suddenly as it had arrived.

Today, Yeti is worth $3.5 billion. This is the untold chapter of one of the great success stories in American business, and how it was very nearly stopped in its tracks.

Cold things don't stay cold for long in the Texas Hill Country. Summer here begins in April, when porch thermometers hit the 90s. For the next six months, you could fry a tortilla on your dashboard and dip it in the hot queso in your cup holder. If you're out working in that heat, all you can think about is your next ice-cold drink.

At the Seiders' home in Driftwood, 20 miles southwest of Austin, Roger — the family's 79-year-old patriarch — keeps a refrigerator out back stocked with cold drinks for the UPS drivers when they stop by with a delivery. "They can have anything they want, except for beer," Roger tells me one afternoon as we rock in a swinging chair, watching a parched driver make his way to the fridge. That's Texas hospitality for you. It's something Roger always tried to instill in his four kids, including Ryan and Roy.

The brothers were Texans before the state of Texas existed. Eight generations later, their name still means something to old-timers. "When they decide to build something, it's top shelf, the best you can get," says Jay McBride, who runs the fishing department at McBride's Guns, an Austin institution since 1960.

Back in 1977, when Roger was working as a high school shop instructor, his search for a flexible epoxy finish that wouldn't crack on his fishing rods led him to start his own business. Today, Flex Coat sells up to $1 million of product each year. "I never dreamed it would be so big," he says.

Just like their old man, Ryan and Roy loved to brainstorm ways to improve the products they depended upon. After Ryan graduated from Texas A&M in 1996 with a degree in wildlife management, he started a specialty fishing rod company, Waterloo Rods, in Roger's backyard shop. The 10-foot Launcher could fling a line over 100 yards, while the Scrape Rod was tough enough for fishing in thick grass. Fishing celebrities like Flip Pallot, host of "The Walker's Cay Chronicles" on ESPN, would phone Ryan up for gear advice and invite him out turkey hunting.

After Roy completed his degree in management information systems at Texas Tech, he, too, returned to the Austin area determined to follow in his father's footsteps. "I had this passion for wanting to do something on my own like my dad," he tells me. "I knew I wanted to start my own business." He loved being out on his boat, and he became preoccupied with designing a cooler that could double as a casting platform — one durable enough to withstand his adrenaline-charged style of fishing.

The best coolers on the market came from Australia, where packing up the Land Rover and "going bush" was a national pastime. While American coolers were typically manufactured by injecting melted plastic into a static mold, high-end Australian coolers — "eskies" in Aussi slang — deployed a technique called rotational molding, which produced stronger coolers with more complex designs and fewer material flaws.

The closest approximation to an eskie you could find in American stores was the Icey-Tek. Roy tracked down the man who was importing them from Thailand and suggested they team up. But he wound up being more impressed with the cooler than with his new business partner. So he decided to partner with Ryan and strike his own import deal with the producers of Icey-Tek. Ryan invested $130,000, and the brothers shared an email address and a single desk. To brand their cooler, they looked for a name that would evoke a harsh terrain — and that would look good on a hat or a T-shirt.

Yeti, they would call it — as in the Himalayan ice monster. "We may not have found the Yeti," they wrote on their website, "but we make a really great ice-chest."

And it was a great ice chest. But it was a far cry from perfect. The original Yeti, which the brothers called the Roughneck, was boxy and utilitarian. The sharp corners were no fun to bang a knee on. Some of the coolers had a puzzling red stain on the bottom.

That's when Ivan Brown entered the picture.

In 2006, the Seiders brothers traveled to Thailand to see the production of their coolers up close. The disappointing results suddenly made sense. Production was sloppy and haphazard. Workers at the factory were plopping fresh coolers onto the red dirt floor, which explained the stains.

As the brothers tried to figure out how to fix the problem, the name they kept coming back to was Ivan, an Aussie designer whose work was a cut above everyone else they knew. From his factory in the Philippines, he could manufacture a cooler or a kayak or a truck camper shell at a fraction of what it would cost in America. So Roy and Ryan set up a meeting and hopped on a flight from Bangkok to Manilla. Within hours they were in a car with Ivan, driving south toward his factory in Angeles City.

After the factory tour in Thailand, Ivan's production line was a welcome sight. Cement floors meant no more red stains. Like the Roughneck, Ivan's Downunder coolers were constructed from a single piece of plastic, for strength. But they also had rounded-off corners and other thoughtful features, such as rubber feet to prevent them from sliding on a boat deck and a removable basket to keep food from getting wet.

What's more, Roy and Ryan recognized a kindred spirit. Ivan was the kind of guy who enjoyed being outdoors, and he wanted to make stuff that worked, stuff you could pass on to your kids. And, like Yeti, his was a family business.

Ivan had been in his 50s when he decamped for the Philippines, seeking a new start. Back in Australia, he had launched a business manufacturing auto accessories, including fiberglass tops for trucks. "He was a risk-taker," recalls his first wife, Suzanne Handley. His self-confidence only grew when he obtained a patent for a flip-up sunroof he had created, which would go on to receive a prestigious Australian design award.

The problem was, Ivan had a habit of living beyond his means. He had a thing for flashy watches and nice restaurants. "The more you earn, the more you need," he liked to tell his eldest daughter, Clare. He ran up so many debts that tax collectors and creditors spent years pursuing him in Queensland courts. "He was a terrific designer, but hopeless in business," says Malcolm, Ivan's younger brother.

Like Roy and Ryan, Ivan and Malcolm were tight. Malcolm, who made a small fortune in trucking, supported Ivan through the lean times. The two brothers bought homes facing each other at a marina on the outskirts of Brisbane. "I could look into his kitchen," Malcolm says.

Amid his financial troubles, Ivan's marriage to Suzanne disintegrated, and the separation left a wedge between him and his daughters. The Philippines, which had a thriving Australian expat community and generous tax benefits for foreign entrepreneurs, offered a chance to start over.

But it was also a dangerous place to do business. The murder rate was four times greater than in Australia, and it was said that a killer could be hired for as little as $500. Filipino police and prosecutors tended to favor the well-connected, and many expats opted to live in gated communities under 24-hour security.

Ivan convinced Malcolm to join him. Divorced and bored with life in Queensland, Malcolm jumped at the chance for an adventure — and, perhaps, to make another fortune. In 1999, the brothers signed the papers establishing Outback Five Star. The company's articles of incorporation listed Ivan as president and Malcolm as vice president. Each received an equal share in the venture, splitting 99.2% of the stock.

Malcolm signed the lease on Outback's factory, a long metal building with a peaked roof. It was located at the Clark Freeport, a former US military base in Angeles City that had been transformed into a tax-free zone.

But the company struggled to survive. From 2004 to 2006, according to financial records, it lost nearly $150,000. "Every dollar Ivan earned, he spent two," Malcolm recalls. "It got so tight that we were making cello cases to survive." Since Ivan was essentially bankrupt, Malcolm had to tap his personal funds to cover payroll and buy equipment.

By the time the two brothers from Texas showed up on Outback's factory floor, the two brothers from Australia were barely scraping by.

On that initial visit, the straight-laced Seiders brothers weren't exactly taken with Angeles City. As much as Roy enjoyed Ivan's company, he was grateful Ryan was with him. "I was not about to go to the Philippines by myself," he recalls. Angeles City was the Wild East, the vice capital of the Philippines, a dizzying wonderland where you always had to be looking over your shoulder.

Malcolm could see how uncomfortable Roy and Ryan were one humid evening when Ivan took them out to the Tom Cat, a seedy nightclub Malcolm owned on a neon-lit street known as "Blow Row." Like many expat hangouts, the Tom Cat swarmed with bikini-clad girls and white-haired men. Foreigners looking for sex would pay $20 to escort girls to a more intimate setting, where further transactions might ensue.

Malcolm isn't shy about admitting that profits from the sex trade helped keep Outback afloat. He insists that the girls at his bars were of age and there of their own free will, but stories of sex trafficking are common in the Philippines. "Everybody portrays it as a sleazy business," Malcolm says. "But I looked at it as the matchmaking business."

According to Malcolm and other family members, it was under such circumstances that Ivan met his future wife, Gloria. In October 1998, Malcolm was celebrating his 48th birthday at the Firehouse, a bar in Manila's red-light district. Gloria, then a single mother, was there that night. Ivan bought Gloria a drink and, by Malcolm's telling, took her to Swagman's, an Australian-themed hotel nearby, where they spent the night.

To those who witnessed their courtship, there was no doubt that Ivan was enamored of Gloria. "She was the only girl I ever saw him with," says Bryan Hammer, an American businessman who assisted Ivan and Malcolm in establishing Outback. But Hammer wondered if the feeling was mutual. "She was mean to him, even in public."

As Ivan and Gloria's relationship developed, she became increasingly entwined in his business. Under Philippine law, the role of corporate secretary at a foreign company must be filled by a Filipino. By the time Roy and Ryan Seiders showed up, Gloria had taken on that role at Outback, giving her the power to review and sign off on the company's financial records. Her influence expanded further when Ivan decided to buy a home. Since foreigners couldn't buy property, it would need to be in Gloria's name. So Ivan asked Malcolm to temporarily transfer his half of the company to Gloria, effectively padding her assets so she could qualify for a mortgage.

The details of what happened next are murky. Over the next six months, a confusing game of musical chairs ensued. In addition to Gloria's recently acquired shares, three members of her family — her daughter, her future son-in-law, and her half-sister — were awarded positions as dummy shareholders in the company. In the process, Gloria went from owning less than 1% of Outback's stock to controlling a majority of the company.

In 2008, in the midst of all the stock reshuffling, Ivan and Gloria surprised their friends when an ordinary party was revealed to be their nuptials. After nine years together, they were at last husband and wife.

But a few weeks after the wedding, Outback's fortunes took another turn. Ivan evidently hadn't known about the stock transfers until his accountant brought them to his attention — and he wasn't happy about it. On May 2, 2008, he wrote the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission: "This is to inform you that GLORIA F. BROWN has resigned as Corporate Secretary." Malcolm reclaimed his shares in the company and his title as vice president. The remaining dummy shares were transferred to three members of Malcolm's extended family. Gloria was left with nothing in her own name, apart from her joint assets through marriage.

In late 2007, a few months before Ivan and Gloria's wedding, the Seiders brothers had returned to Angeles City, where they spent 10 days at Outback's headquarters. As monsoon rains pounded on the factory roof, Ivan and Roy hustled back and forth between the office and the production floor where the workers would fabricate prototypes out of Bondo putty and fiberglass. "These guys are artists," Roy says. "It was a ton of fun."

Ivan showed them how he had improved the design of his Downunder cooler. He had bulked up the foam insulation, given it a leak-proof drain plug, integrated the hinge to make it more robust, and added a freezer-style gasket for a better seal. Roy and Ryan incorporated those same ideas into the Tundra. They also borrowed the contours from Ivan's line of fiberglass coolers and extended the hinge to stretch the full length of the back of the cooler. "For whatever reason, I just liked that look," Roy says.

Some of the old Icey-Tek features, including the rope handles and tie-down slots on the base of the cooler, also made it into the new design. "That was a big deal," Roy says. "Being able to strap your cooler down and still open and close the lid." All the tinkering reminded him of the projects he had worked on in his father's workshop, but on a much larger scale. "After four years being in the cooler business, I had all these ideas built up in my head about what makes a perfect cooler," Roy recalls. "I saw this opportunity to build a cooler from the ground up."

The collaboration also worked out well for Ivan. By the time the Tundras started popping out of their molds in April 2008, he was on the path to financial success. Outback, which employed some 150 workers, soon hit $1.5 million in sales, with another half million in assets. "He was turning a corner and starting to make money," Malcolm says.

On the afternoon of September 23, 2008, Ivan left work and climbed into his forest green Toyota Land Cruiser. The sky was hazy and rain droplets flecked against the windshield as Ivan crossed the two-lane Friendship Bridge and neared his turn-off to his home. Suddenly, a Honda motorbike zipped up along his left side, as if to pass. There were two men on the bike, their faces hidden by helmets.

The rider in back raised a 45-caliber handgun and fired at least four shots through the window of Ivan's Land Cruiser. The car veered off the road and rear-ended another motorcycle, sending its driver tumbling onto the ground, before slamming into the wall of the Serra Monte Lodge, an establishment that rents rooms by the hour. Ivan slumped in his seat. Blood pooled in his mouth and soaked into the fabric of his plaid shirt.

Malcolm, who lived in the same gated community as Ivan and Gloria, was at home when a friend called to say that a green Land Cruiser had been in an accident on the main road. Malcolm rushed over to his brother's house, but no one answered the door. He was getting ready to drive to the scene of the accident when Gloria appeared. Ivan had already been taken to the mortuary, she told him. Together, they drove off to see Ivan's body.

The next morning, Malcolm got to the factory at around seven. As vice president, he felt he had to assume the reins at Outback. He told the employees to go home until Ivan's affairs were sorted, and left.

But within the hour, Gloria arrived and announced that she was in charge. She countermanded Malcolm's decision: The factory, she said, would stay open. "I asked Gloria what gave her the right to say this," Malcolm said in a statement prepared for legal filings. Gloria responded that she was now the president and major shareholder.

That afternoon, after meeting with his lawyer, Malcolm returned to the factory with his son and placed a padlock on the factory's gate. But the next time they came back, the lock had been cut. An armed guard pointed a gun at Malcolm and his son and ordered them to leave.

As Gloria and Malcolm battled for control of the company, production ground to a halt. Outback's accounts were frozen, and employees could not be paid.

Gloria appealed to the bank to grant her full access to the company's funds. "My husband, Ivan Brown, had long speculated on his fate (he was brutally murdered by still unknown assailants)," she wrote. "He indeed made sure that the corporation's papers are in order and that I can easily take charge of its operations. Unfortunately, greed and opportunity prevailed over the mind of Mr. Malcolm Brown and his cohorts." (Gloria and Outback did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Eight thousand miles away in Texas, the Seiders brothers had begun a frantic search for alternative suppliers, hopping on planes and visiting other factories. Their business had just gotten off the ground, and suddenly its entire future was at risk. But given their relationship with Ivan, they were still hoping they could stick with Outback.

"If the factory cannot supply soon, Yeti will lose US market share and it will be almost impossible to recover," they emailed Malcolm. "If this fight continues it will inevitably get tied up in Philippine courts for many more weeks if not months and therefore everybody loses. Could you help us by temporarily allowing the factory to resume production while resolving ownership?"

Malcolm was incensed. "Ivan was murdered for greed," he replied. "I will continue to fight for what he would have wanted me to do… You guys are more than welcome to find alternative suppliers for your market if you wish to do so."

"We too have a strong feeling for finding justice for Ivan," the brothers wrote back. "But also, continuing the successful manufacturing business that he has started."

From the start, police considered Ivan's killing a textbook murder-for-hire. But without a murder weapon or any forensic evidence, they had little to go on. The most promising lead came after Malcolm offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

A cigarette vendor came forward, claiming to have seen the trigger man before he put his helmet on. According to police, when the vendor was shown a book of criminals known as the "Rogue's Gallery," he picked out a Maoist guerrilla named Alvin Salas, suspected to be a member of a "gun-for-hire" gang. That October, the Northern Philippine Times reported that police had filed murder charges against Salas — and Gloria.

"We have circumstantial evidence against somebody whom we suspect to be the mastermind," announced Pierre Bucsit, the local police chief. "The capture of the suspected gunman will complete our investigation toward arresting the author of the crime."

But the case quickly fell apart. When a police investigator named Romeo Amarillo had first showed up at the factory, he found Gloria to be defensive and uncooperative. But any link to her was purely circumstantial. Prosecutors ultimately dismissed the charges against Gloria due to insufficient evidence. Until the police found Salas, whose connection to the crime was limited to the single eyewitness, they had nothing else to go on. That hope vanished in October 2014, when Salas was killed in a police shootout.

Whoever murdered Ivan, it's clear who benefited the most from his death. Ivan didn't have a will, which under Philippine law meant his estate would likely be shared by Gloria and his two daughters from his first marriage. In a court filing, Gloria wrote that Ivan's shares were being "settled among his heirs." But Ivan's daughter Clare told me that neither she nor her sister received anything from their father's estate. "I got nothing," she says.

Gloria also moved quickly to take control of Ivan's company. A week after he was killed, she submitted a document to the securities commission claiming that an unscheduled meeting of Outback's officers and shareholders had taken place in mid-August, a little over a month before Ivan's murder. Malcolm, who was still listed as a board member, was not notified of the meeting. According to the document, Ivan had given himself control of 80.8% of Outback's stock, and Gloria now owned 18%. That left Malcolm with just 2,000 shares — a fraction of a percent of the company. The new board, composed largely of Gloria's relatives, unanimously named her as president, and her daughter as vice president.

Malcolm filed a complaint against Gloria with the prosecutor's office, claiming she had forged the document. Nathaniel Colobong, Ivan's longtime accountant, is listed in the papers as the company's external auditor. But he tells me that he was unaware of Ivan making any of the stock transfers Gloria claims he made. In fact, he told investigators that Gloria had "started to get angry with her husband" after she had been stripped of her shares earlier that year. But Colobong was unwilling to testify. "I was also afraid for my life," he says.

Regulators accepted Gloria's version of events, and the lead prosecutor in the forgery case ultimately declined to bring the charges against her. The relevant documents, he tells me, were destroyed during a typhoon. According to Outback's subsequent filings, Gloria now controls 99.6% of the company's stock.

For the first year after Ivan's death, Malcolm remained in the Philippines, protected around the clock by armed guards. Eventually he gave up the fight and returned to Australia. His biggest mistake, he tells me, was putting his faith in the Philippine justice system. "You and I come from countries where you get justice," he says. "If I had to do it over again, I would have had her shot. I'd do the same thing to her that she did to my brother."

After Ivan's murder, some of Outback's clients sided with Malcolm and refused to do business with the company. "We decided not to place any further orders due to the rumors and uncertainty of dealing with Gloria," recalls Terry Tate, a former buyer for Ray's Outdoors, who had visited both Ivan and Gloria in the Philippines.

But the Seiders brothers continued to contract with Outback. Whatever they felt about Ivan's murder, they were focused on doing what it took to keep their company alive. To get the Outback's employees back to work, the brothers even prepaid Gloria for their orders. Soon, brand new Yeti Tundras were once again being unloaded in Texas. "Never for a second did we think Gloria was involved in Ivan's death," Roy tells me.

Other business decisions they made may have been born of crisis, but proved equally shrewd. To make the most of their dwindling inventory, Roy and Ryan bumped up the price on their coolers. Remarkably, none of their buyers balked. Roy came up with a pricing strategy he called "10x" — as in, charging 10 times what their competitors were asking. Like Balenciaga sneakers and Sub-Zero fridges, the eye-popping prices of Yeti's products wound up making them more — not less — desirable.

The brothers also found a US-based supplier to ensure that their supply chain could never be held hostage again. "As tragic as Ivan's death was, all of a sudden we are a much stronger company," Roy explained on a hunting podcast.

The success of the Tundra, along with Yeti's viral marketing, helped turn the company into a kind of redneck Patagonia. Yeti Coolers went public in October 2018, and Roy and Ryan earned hundreds of millions of dollars after selling most of their shares.

Yeti's success has been good for Outback. The year that Ivan was murdered, according to the company's financial statement, it had $1.9 million in sales. Ten years later, thanks in large part to Yeti, its sales were $9 million.

At Yeti's headquarters, a conference room is named for Ivan Brown, to honor his contribution to the company. Every few years, Gloria or her representatives from Outback travel to Texas to meet with Yeti's management. But, in the past, when Gloria has invited the Seiderses to return to the Philippines for a visit, they've politely declined. "They make their employees go," their father Roger tells me. "But they don't go."

Brendan Borrell is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.

• Despite the democratization of music in the streaming era, it's still very expensive to record an album.
• A veteran music lawyer said it can easily cost $250,000, while a Grammy nominee estimated $300,000.
• Although many artists are forgoing record labels, it's nearly impossible to become a superstar without one.

It's no secret that artists yearn for creative freedom, and in recent years, musicians like Raye, Tinashe, Laufey, and Little Simz have opted to release their music independently instead of via the traditional major-label system.

But that creative freedom comes at a price — literally.

In Business Insider's new feature, "Want to make money as a pop star? Dream on," singers, songwriters, managers, and music lawyers explain why making money as an independent artist is especially tough, particularly for those who are early in their careers.

Thanks to streaming services and social media, it seems easier than ever to become a star. Artists no longer need distribution deals to upload their music online, or expensive marketing campaigns to get noticed on TikTok.

"You've got this democratization of the music business where there's not the same barrier for entry," said Donald Passman, a veteran music lawyer who is the author of the music-industry bible "All You Need to Know About the Music Business." "The problem is that everybody's got that access."

About 100,000 new tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day, per Passman. "So how do you break through the noise? That essentially is what the labels have become," he explained.

Labels typically offer artists advances as a signing incentive, which they expect to recoup over time. They'll also often front the cost of recording an album — a key benefit for any artist who wants to work with high-quality producers and sound engineers.

"If you want to be a worldwide superstar, so far, nobody's really done it without a label," Passman said. "People can get along pretty far down the path, but they don't really do it without a label."

Muni Long, a Grammy-winning R&B singer and songwriter who's also written hits for artists such as Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, and Fifth Harmony, recently broke down these expenses for Apple Music 1's Nadeska Alexis.

By her back-of-the-napkin estimation, which included studio costs ($1,200 per 12-hour block, plus a session engineer at $75 to $100 an hour), mixing and mastering (anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 a song), and paying for beats (anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000), the baseline cost to record a full-length album like her 2022 breakthrough, "Public Displays of Affection: The Album" would be about $300,000.

"That eliminates 75% of the people who are aspiring," Long said. "I didn't realize how much money that it takes to actually be an artist."

Long's estimates align with Passman's; he said it can "easily" cost $250,000 to record an album, especially for pop and hip-hop artists, who tend to collaborate with larger teams.

That price tag is a key reason many artists still opt for a record contract, even if it means signing away their masters (the original sound recordings of their songs) or agreeing to a lopsided division of royalties. Getting cash up-front gives the artist freedom to make music without worrying about the often astronomical price tag — at least not right away.

Rachel Chinouriri, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter from London, told me that signing to Parlophone/Atlas Artists in the UK was the only way she could afford to make music her full-time job. The contract offered a supportive team and a financial safety net. Otherwise, she would've had to write songs on the side while fueling her income with another gig — not an uncommon practice for independent artists.

"My manager was just like, 'Here are the amount of costs you'll need,' and I'm someone who is paying rent and can't live at home with my family," she explained. They both agreed the indie route wasn't feasible.

While creating her debut album, "What a Devastating Turn of Events," Chinouriri was able to execute her vision on her label's dime, instead of fronting the money herself.

"I've never had to sit and think, 'How much has this studio session cost?' When I did my album, I don't even know how much the producers got paid — it just was done," Chinouriri says. Her plan is to build a following and recoup over time; she notes she's still being loaned money from her label and is not yet in the black.

"I don't know how I'd be able to do all of this and then have to think of the cost," Chinouriri adds. "I don't know how Raye does it, I don't know how Tinashe does it. It's such a mission."

While Raye and Tinashe are independent artists, neither began their careers that way, splitting from Polydor and RCA respectively after negative experiences.

By the time they severed ties with their major labels, both had already built loyal audiences, networks of collaborators, and teams they could rely on when the purse strings tightened. And even that doesn't necessarily mean they're bringing in a profit.

In June, Raye told me she was "breaking even," while Simonne Solitro, Tinashe's longtime manager, said they've had to figure out how to make songs and music videos on a "microbudget."

"Every single dollar that you make needs to funnel back into your project," Solitro said. "You essentially become a startup business."

As thousands of employees prepared to move into Tesla's new Gigafactory outside Austin, Omead Afshar had to decide what kind of coffee they were going to drink.

Afshar, then operating as a chief of staff for CEO Elon Musk, was overseeing the construction of one of the largest vehicle-manufacturing facilities in the world. He approached picking which beans to brew in the break rooms with the same rigor he applied to more-consequential decisions.

"He had 20 different companies submit, and he went through all of them personally," one of his former skip-level reports said. "He wants everything to be perfect."

It has served him well. This October, Musk elevated Afshar to vice president of North American and European operations, cementing Afshar's status as one of the automaker's most important leaders.

The 38-year-old's rise to power comes at a critical moment for Tesla. The automaker faces increasing competition from other EV makers, slumping delivery numbers, and pressure from unions in both Germany and the US. It will also contend with the administration of President Donald Trump, who has brought Musk into his inner circle while simultaneously signaling plans to end electric-vehicle tax incentives, increase US oil production, and roll back emission standards.

As Musk increasingly turns his attention to politics, Afshar is set to help shepherd Tesla through this volatility.

A representative for Afshar declined to comment. Musk and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the seven years he has spent working for Musk, Afshar has emerged as one of the billionaire's most loyal lieutenants, driven and singularly focused on his goals. Musk has long trusted Afshar's managerial capacity and attention to detail, four current and former colleagues say.

A former Tesla employee, Seth Sharp, said Afshar gave out his personal cellphone number and invited conversation with employees, adding that Afshar "always answered" Sharp's texts.

Afshar has thrived at a company with considerable executive turnover. Eight of Musk's direct reports have left Tesla over the past year, including Drew Baglino, the carmaker's senior vice president of powertrain and electrical engineering, and Rebecca Tinucci, the senior director of Supercharging.

In May, Tom Zhu stepped away from his duties overseeing global manufacturing in North America and Europe. Zhu, whom some have considered a potential successor to Musk, returned to his former position as Tesla's China chief.

In his new role, Afshar will be taking over many of Zhu's former responsibilities.

"Supporting Elon, who notoriously has a short fuse, isn't easy," Sharp said. "Omead has essentially proven he can stand close to the sun without getting burned."

Afshar, another former employee said, "is like the final boss on the way to Elon: Everything goes through him first." (This employee, as well as several others interviewed for this article, asked not to be named. Their identities are known to BI.)

Years before Tesla, Afshar studied biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and worked as a ski instructor. In 2009, several months after he graduated, Afshar, then 23, was driving in the Westlake Village neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Shortly after 11 p.m., Afshar lost control of the car. A local news report said he crossed into the median, knocked down several trees, and finally hit a larger tree.

Emergency personnel took Afshar and a passenger, a woman in her 20s, out of the car and to the hospital in critical condition, an incident report said. His cousin Behrad Vahidi told BI that Afshar had "kissed death" during the crash.

Afshar has never spoken publicly about the crash. But in a 2019 interview with his younger brother at an event for his alma mater, Afshar defended Tesla's mission of making driving safer and more sustainable.

Tesla, he said, is unfairly maligned by journalists reporting on crashes involving the company's vehicles. There are over 100 automobile deaths per day, he said, but if a Tesla "runs into someone's garage, that's going to be the headline."

Afshar seemed exasperated that some people couldn't grasp what he saw as the larger picture. At Tesla and other Musk companies, he said, "the mission is good, and what we're trying to do is right."

He joined the company in 2017 as a project manager in the office of the CEO in San Francisco. He moved to Texas in 2020 to oversee the construction of the Gigafactory, which he took from groundbreaking to grand opening in less than two years.

Bloomberg reported that there he was part of a project involving plans for a large glass structure. The Wall Street Journal reported that the project, known as "Project 42," was internally believed to involve building a glass house for Musk. Tesla launched an internal investigation into Project 42 in 2022, Bloomberg reported. The Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission also launched separate inquiries into Project 42, the Journal reported.

The status of those investigations is unclear. The SEC declined to confirm the existence of such an investigation. The DOJ declined a request for comment. Musk has previously said he does not plan to build a glass house.

The four current and former colleagues said Afshar became lower profile at Tesla in 2022 but continued to work closely with Musk. Afshar was named a vice president at SpaceX in late 2022. The Financial Times reported that Afshar also assisted with Musk's acquisition of Twitter, now X, and with cost-cutting initiatives at the social-media company in 2022 and 2023.

Records of text messages from Afshar to Musk, included in a lawsuit related to Musk's purchase of Twitter, underscore their close relationship.

"We all love you and are always behind you," Afshar wrote in April 2022, the day after Musk made an unsolicited offer to buy the social-media company. "Not having a global platform that is truly free speech is dangerous for all."

If Musk responded, there is no record of it in those court documents. Other court documents show that Afshar later invested in Twitter through a limited partnership.

Afshar had formally returned to Tesla by early 2024, five former employees said, though two of those people said Afshar was regularly operating in the background even before his official homecoming.

In recent photos of Afshar, he is nearly always at Musk's side: onstage at Tesla's Cyber Rodeo party; at a meeting with Tesla's manufacturing executives in Shanghai; and at a dinner for brainstorming robotaxi designs.

"Omead is similar to Elon: You have to be prepared to talk about anything or everything in a meeting with him," Afshar's former skip-level report said.

Like Zhu and Musk's family office manager Jared Birchall, Afshar has left barely a trace in the public record.

He's given only two known on-the-record interviews to journalists: one to Walter Isaacson, for his 2023 biography of Musk, and another to Time magazine when the publication named Musk "Person of the Year" in 2021. Election and campaign-finance records indicate Afshar has made no political contributions and has voted only once, in the most recent election.

Outside work, Afshar appears to lead a modest existence in line with his corporate reputation for cost-cutting and efficiency.

When he moved to Austin in 2020, he rented a one-bedroom apartment. That year he received $10 million worth of Tesla shares as a bonus, and in 2021 he paid $1.6 million for a newly constructed three-bedroom home in what a real-estate agent described in a listing as an "eclectic" neighborhood. For at least a year after Afshar moved in, the home across the street had broken windows and stripped siding.

Former colleagues said they observed occasional micromanaging tendencies in his Texas Gigafactory role, but they also emphasized his warmth amid Tesla's high-octane corporate culture.

Some workers praised Afshar for working to improve the employee experience, including buying Texas-style belt buckles to celebrate the factory's launch and planning a factorywide party after the site received a certificate of occupancy from the state.

In the 2019 interview with his brother, Afshar described his devotion to the automaker, saying he had missed birthdays and felt anxious about being away from his phone for even an hour.

Tesla, he said, was a good fit for him. "I like high-pressure environments," he said. "And this is definitely one of them."

Do you work for Tesla or have a tip? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email and device at [email protected] or 248-894-6012

On a hot summer night in downtown Manhattan, Raye was exhausted and excited. The British pop singer had just finished a series of performances of her new single "Genesis" as small groups of devoted fans cycled in and out of the Conrad hotel. She'd barely stepped off the stage before a member of her team handed her a plaque to commemorate the sale of 2 million US copies of her 2022 single "Escapism."

By nearly any metric, the 27-year-old singer and songwriter is a star on the rise: 2 million Instagram followers, 27 million monthly Spotify listeners, three Grammy nominations, a single-year-record six Brit Awards, a writing credit on Beyoncé's most recent album, and coveted performance slots at Coachella, "Saturday Night Live," and Taylor Swift's Eras Tour.

But in 2024, artists who want a sustainable career can't survive on talent or even fame alone. They now have to strategically post on social media, design cost-efficient tours, and navigate the complex web of legal and financial bureaucracy necessary for their work. And oftentimes, even that's not enough to turn a profit.

"We're breaking even and it's beautiful," Raye says in one of the Conrad's many boardrooms, one hand resting casually on her plaque.

Music has always been a business, but streaming, TikTok, inflation, and the ballooning costs of touring have dramatically altered a musician's traditional routes to making money.

Even the world-famous billionaire musician Taylor Swift has acknowledged she can't focus on songwriting alone to build her career. "I'm sick and tired of having to pretend like I don't mastermind my own business," she told Rolling Stone in 2019.

"You've got this democratization of the music business where there's not the same barrier for entry. The problem is that everybody's got that access," says Donald Passman, a veteran music lawyer who is the author of the music-industry bible "All You Need to Know About the Music Business."

"The real challenge for artists now is to get yourself an audience before you go to a label, if you decide to go to a label at all," Passman adds. "You've got to do it yourself."

Or as Kevin Baird, the bassist of the Northern Irish indie rock band Two Door Cinema Club, tells me: "You have to be the CEO of your company. You have to understand what is going on in every single facet of the business."

A chart-topping hit — or 2, or 3 — isn't always a golden ticket

The formula for success in the music industry appears simple: Release a hit song, climb the charts, rake in the cash.

The reality, of course, was never that straightforward. Predatory record deals existed way back in the 1950s, when, for example, Chuck Berry was forced to split the songwriting checks from his first hit, "Maybellene," with people he'd never met. But a lot has changed since streaming usurped radio play as the kingmaker of a rising musician's career.

Streaming numbers can help a song top the charts or act as a bellwether for internet virality, boosting the artist's profile in the process. But while it's still possible to live lavishly off the back of one song, like a classic sitcom theme or a holiday staple, that's the exception, not the rule: Whether the artist actually makes money on a song depends on a myriad of factors, including complex copyright rules.

Royalty distribution — how artists and others who own copyrights get paid — is a many-headed beast, but reliable industry estimates have put Spotify's payout rate at less than half a cent per stream, while Apple Music in 2021 was said to have told artists it paid about one penny per stream.

Even the hitmakers who dominate your "For You" page are getting paid "almost nothing" from TikTok, as one music exec told Billboard. (Apple Music and TikTok didn't respond to requests for comment. A Spotify spokesperson directed me to a Q+A section on their website, which notes, "In the streaming era, fans do not pay per song, so we don't believe a 'per stream' rate is a meaningful number to analyze.")

There are perks unique to the streaming era — Two Door Cinema Club's Baird notes that it provides a level of granularity to data about listener interests and tastes that can help artists decide how to market and create music — but mostly, it's a lot of work for not a lot of payoff.

The veteran songwriter and performer Tayla Parx knows this problem acutely. In addition to her solo career, she's cowritten plenty of earworms, including two of Ariana Grande's biggest hits on the Billboard Hot 100 — "Thank U, Next" and "7 Rings" — and Panic! At the Disco's top-five hit "High Hopes."

But songwriters typically only take a small slice of the small streaming payout: Billboard reported in 2022 that, on average, songwriters could expect to earn 9.4 cents for every dollar a streaming service paid in royalties. If more than one writer is credited — "Thank U, Next" has eight — they all split it.

It's also not standard practice for songwriters to charge a base fee for their work. That means if Parx spends eight hours writing a song with a pop star, but that song ends up on the cutting-room floor, she's earned nothing for that full workday.

Parx tells me her biggest slice of income doesn't come from her work as a performer or as a Grammy-nominated lyricist. Instead, her bank account is buoyed by a shrewd investment outside the music industry.

"What I can make off of one of my rental properties from a one-month or two-month rental could pay for a whole tour," says Parx, who self-released her third studio album, "Many Moons, Many Suns," in July through her umbrella company, TaylaMade Inc. "That's very different than showing up in the music industry for work every single day for free."

Parx's experience is not uncommon. For many musicians, especially independent artists, diversifying one's income is necessary to make ends meet, whether that's getting a gig editing videos, teaching art, or stocking milk at a coffee shop.

Record labels can offer cash up front — but artists still need a solid business plan

For musicians to actually profit from their work, revenue — which includes royalties — must outweigh expenses. The problem? Recording an album can be eye-poppingly expensive.

Muni Long, a Grammy-winning R&B singer and songwriter who's also written hits for artists such as Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, and Fifth Harmony, recently gave an interview to Apple Music 1's Nadeska Alexis in which she broke down how expensive it could be to write and record an album.

By her back-of-the-napkin estimation, which included studio costs ($1,200 per 12-hour block, plus a session engineer at $75 to $100 an hour), mixing and mastering (anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 a song), and paying for beats (anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000), the baseline cost to record a full-length album like her 2022 breakthrough, "Public Displays of Affection: The Album" would be about $300,000.

"That eliminates 75% of the people who are aspiring," Long said. "I didn't realize how much money that it takes to actually be an artist."

Of course, these are estimates of the cost to record an album within the mainstream music industry, something artists are increasingly forgoing. But these numbers illuminate what still makes a major-label record contract so appealing: Getting cash up front gives the artist freedom to make music without worrying about the often astronomical price tag — at least not right away.

For the London-based singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri, signing to Parlophone/Atlas Artists in the UK was the only way she could afford to make music her full-time job.

Not having to worry about the cost of making her debut album gave Chinouriri the space to focus on the music while getting her career off the ground. She says her debut album, "What a Devastating Turn of Events," wouldn't exist in its current form, with its high-quality production and its glossy cover art, without her label's investment.

"I've never had to sit and think, 'How much has this studio session cost?' When I did my album, I don't even know how much the producers got paid — it just was done," Chinouriri says. "I don't know how I'd be able to do all of this and then have to think of the cost."

Labels typically offer an advance as a signing incentive, which they expect to recoup over time. The actual dollar amount depends on many factors — the artist's social-media following, how well their music is projected to perform, and the length of the agreement, to name a few. Some contracts offer an additional sum to record an album, which can easily total $250,000 or more for pop and hip-hop artists, per Passman.

Though Chinouriri did not share specific details of her record deal, she did say that despite tens of millions of streams on Spotify and critical acclaim, she still is being loaned money from her label and is not yet in the black. "The plan is to recoup and hope that this thing or brand that we have will eventually start bringing in profit," she explains.

But is Chinouriri's situation typical? The better question may be what a "typical" record deal even means these days.

Derek Crownover, who specializes in IP rights and other music-related assets at the law firm Loeb & Loeb, says that out of thousands of label contracts he's helped negotiate, advances have ranged from $0 (if the artist wants to keep their masters, which are the original sound recordings of their songs) to $5 million (if executives believe the artist is destined for superstardom).

"It's really all over the map," Crownover says. "A record deal right now is, 'We're going to write out a business and marketing plan for this artist, and we need funding for it.'"

Without a good business plan, Crownover adds, good luck getting noticed: "You might be able to break through because you're sheerly talented, but that chance is getting smaller and smaller."

The alternative — working outside the major-label system — can yield more creative control, but it requires artists to compete with Goliaths.

Ten years after making her first appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 with "2 On," from her major-label debut, "Aquarius," the alternative R&B singer Tinashe reemerged this summer with "Nasty," her first bona fide hit as an independent artist.

The song's hypnotic chorus first took off as a TikTok meme, which helped it climb the charts. It also gave Tinashe's team the confidence to invest more than usual in a radio campaign and more leverage to land high-profile media placements and lucrative brand deals.

That was only the beginning.

"Even being the No. 1 song on TikTok doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things," Tinashe's longtime manager, Simonne Solitro, explains. It needs to translate to dedicated fans who will spend hard-earned cash. For Tinashe, that meant doubling down on "Nasty" with a remix EP, releasing her new album "Quantum Baby" on the heels of her hit song, and taking advantage of the buzz by embarking on a world tour.

"It's a lot of pressure, especially for her," Solitro says. "Her peers are Doja, Normani — all the big, amazing, pop-R&B girls — and they all have 70 million times larger budgets for these things and she still has that expectation for herself."

"She doesn't want the product she puts out to be like, 'Oh, yeah, that's my version of a budgeted video,'" says Solitro, who declined to estimate budget numbers. "She still wants it to be that caliber of a project."

Live shows are key to building a dedicated fan base, but many artists break even or finish tours in the red

Going on tour is a way to build a connection with fans, but it's hardly a guaranteed money-maker. Nearly all artists who aren't Taylor Swift are getting hit by the rising costs of touring.

In a market flooded with demand in the wake of the pandemic, costs for everything from bus rentals to hotel rooms to hiring a lighting technician or manning a merchandise table have ballooned. (Not to mention that venues take a cut of merchandise profits these days, too — sometimes as much as 40%).

When artists as big as Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and The Black Keys are canceling tour dates or entire tours amid reports of weak ticket sales, what hope is there for everybody else?

Tessa Violet, a Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, and former vlogger who's been performing live for a decade, estimates she hasn't made a profit on a tour in roughly six years. "That's not just me," Violet tells me, "that's literally every single artist I know."

While fan complaints about rising ticket costs abound, Violet says very little of that sum is going to the artists. They have no input on those notorious service fees, which are split between venues and behemoth sellers like Ticketmaster and StubHub. Meanwhile, the base ticket price goes toward things like production, marketing, and booking costs. Promoters also take a cut of sales, and that's all before the crew gets paid.

Even for a signed artist like Chinouriri, the stacked costs have proved insurmountable. One month after we spoke, she canceled her planned US tour dates, citing the "financial risk it would entail."

If touring is a logistical and financial nightmare, why bother?

It goes back to Tinashe's manager Solitro's risk-reward assessment. A well-executed concert is an investment that promises to yield something every business owner wants: consumer loyalty. It can deepen the connection between performer and listener and, the performer hopes, invite new fans into the fray.

"Establishing a direct connect like that — an actual 'in real life' connection with fans — that's what gets people dedicated champions of you for the long haul," Solitro says. "They're the ones that will continually stream your music."

Violet puts it more simply: "It's the best high in the world."

Musicians must be social-media influencers, not just performers

On one hand, finding an audience for your art via social media has never been easier. On the other, it reassigns a draining and unpredictable task, promotion, to the artists.

For independent artists like Violet, building a following for your music online is a new reality that comes with the territory. "Somebody can't be a fan of something they don't know exists," Violet says.

Social media has changed the game for musicians at all levels, signed or not. The chart-topping pop star Halsey made headlines in 2022 for accusing her label, Capitol Music, of holding her new song hostage until she could manufacture a "viral moment" for its release. (Capitol later apologized and released the single in a show of support; a year later, Halsey was dropped from the label. She's since signed a new contract with Columbia.)

For Chinouriri, being on a label meant having to build and maintain an online following to show her value to label execs. "I had to put in the legwork of three to five TikToks a day for over a year just to prove that I'm worthy enough of keeping on the label," she says. Atlas Artists declined to comment.

A high-profile cosign can be a godsend in the pursuit of growing a following. Chinouriri, who's earned shout-outs from stars like Adele, Sophie Turner, and Florence Pugh, noticed a spike in her online engagement after Pugh starred in the music video for her single, "Never Need Me." The music video's announcement in January racked up more than 600,000 likes on Instagram, nearly five times Chinouriri's follower count at the time. By the end of that month, Chinouriri's monthly listener count on Spotify had grown by more than 300,000, according to data provided to BI by Chartmetric.

Chinouriri said that Pugh had freely offered her time and acting chops and that the two had become friends — a friendship that she said started when they followed each other on social media. All those posts and DMs became worth it.

Still, social-media savvy can do only so much to help you stand out amid erratic algorithms, the perpetual demands of content-hungry fans, and the crowds of other talented musicians jostling for attention.

"There are three things you need to be a successful artist," Violet says. "One, you need great art. Your art needs to be better than your influencing, so it needs to be really exceptional. Second, you have to be a salesman. And for people who are artists entering the influencer world, that's a really hard pill to swallow."

"The third thing," she adds, "is you have to be lucky."

When "Sex and the City" debuted in 1998, the series captured public fascination for more reasons than what its title might imply. It wasn't just that the show's central foursome were women having lots of sex; they were women over 30 having lots of sex, and they were single. A "mid-30ish crowd of bed-hopping, hedonistic female night crawlers," a Los Angeles Times critic pointedly wrote. Their singlehood painted a picture of a titillating, and even threatening, new woman.

Through the '90s and '00s, American women "pioneered an entirely new kind of adulthood, one that was not kicked off by marriage, but by years and, in many cases, whole lives, lived on their own outside matrimony," the journalist Rebecca Traister wrote in her 2016 book, "All the Single Ladies." Now, unmarried women are no longer part of an edgy cultural vanguard — they're the official status quo. As of 2021, a record 52% of American women were either unmarried or separated, according to a report by Wells Fargo Economics. Single women also have single men outnumbered: A Census Bureau analysis of 2019 data found that for every 90 unmarried men in the US, there were 100 unmarried women.

While some women feel cornered into being single, citing a lackluster dating pool or the demoralizing experience of trawling apps, a growing share, call them Samantha Nation, are happy being on their own. In a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Center, only 38% of single women reported looking for dates or a relationship, compared with 61% of single men.

The rise of happily unmarried women has steadily shifted standards for what American adulthood looks like. But it hasn't come without a fuss from people who hold to a specific vision of the family. When JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, drew ire this summer over a years-old remark about "childless cat ladies," he doubled down on his insinuation that single women were symptomatic of Democrats' "anti-family and anti-kid" platforms; they were opting into a lifestyle that was fueling the erosion of the nuclear family, making them deviant by association. But research suggests it's misguided to pin the trend on shifting social mores. Women's newfound freedom to choose — not just whom they marry, but whether they marry at all — is due less to a cultural shift and more to a shifting economy. As men drop out of the workforce, American women have hit a new milestone: In August, the share of prime-age (25 to 54) women in the labor force hit a record high of 78.4%. Meanwhile, the median age of American women's first marriage has crept steadily upward, from 20.8 in 1970 to 28.3 in 2023.

The shift toward the single life has been a great development for women; for men, though, things aren't as peachy.

The way people feel about women's relationship patterns has a lot to do with a false cultural memory of what was normal in the past. The Rockwellian poster family of mid-20th-century Americana, with its happily married husband and stay-at-home wife raising 2.5 children in the picket-fenced suburbs, sank its hooks so deeply into the American imagination that it's easy to forget it was a historical fluke. In the immediate aftermaths of World War I and World War II, the nation saw momentary spikes in the proportion of single-income, male-breadwinner US households. The booms were over nearly as soon as they began. By 1970, 40% of the nation's married women, and more than half of its unmarried women, had jobs outside the home, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Even before 1970, it was far from unusual to see American women working for a living. The economist Claudia Goldin, who won a 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize for her work unpacking gender differences in the labor market, has noted that the gender gap in US labor-force participation steadily shrunk between 1890 and 1990. As more and more women were working for pay, deindustrialization in the '80s and '90s drove scores of men out of the labor market, shrinking the pool of those who could support a family.

Jess Carbino, a relationships researcher who formerly worked as a sociologist for Tinder and Bumble, told me that many people ascribed to a model of the family popularized by the economist Gary Becker in the early '80s, which said that single people were looking for partners whose market strengths complemented their own. By applying economic theory to the prevailing cultural ideas of the time, he concluded that because men were good at earning money and women were good at having babies and raising them, it's only logical that the two should join forces in the household.

The problem with that arrangement (besides its blatant sexism) is that men today are losing their economic footing.

"We're seeing men's labor-force participation rates really plummet, since the 1990s especially," said Elizabeth Crofoot, a senior economist and principal researcher at the labor-market-analytics firm Lightcast. "That gives women greater impetus to actually work on their careers and put in more time and effort to make themselves financially stable and not have to rely on someone else."

Of course, women's relative workforce gains have not translated into equal earning power; on average, US women still earn $0.84 per every $1 earned by men, according to the Census Bureau. However, a 2021 Pew survey found women were outpacing men in educational attainment. And a Pew analysis of government data found that in 2019, women began outnumbering men in the college-educated labor force. There's evidence that these shifts are fueling the move away from marriage. In a 2023 survey from the American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life, almost three-quarters of single, college-educated women cited "not being able to find someone who meets their expectations" as a reason they were romantically unattached. Only 54% of single women with no college degree said the same.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense why a growing share of Americans are single simply because they enjoy being single. Carmindy Bowyer is one of them.

"I'm very independent," Bowyer, a makeup artist and beauty entrepreneur in New York City, said. "I don't want to live with somebody. I don't want to have children. People out there don't realize that they have a choice."

Bowyer, who is 53, didn't always feel this way. While she always knew she would never have children, she caved to social pressure to marry in her 30s. Even her parents — who were happily married for over 50 years — questioned whether she was cut out for married life. "We were walking down the aisle, and my dad was like, 'You can always get divorced.' And I was like, 'Thanks,'" she recalled. "Sure enough, marriage didn't work out for me. And I was happy about it." Bowyer said she realized that she felt truer to herself when she was making day-to-day decisions about how to live her life entirely on her own terms. She just needed to give herself permission to do it.

For other women, the dating market has become a major turnoff. "Single women that I work with can feel very compromised by the whole process of trying to find a partner," said Stephanie Manes, a licensed psychotherapist who works with individuals and couples in New York City. "It can mean being treated in ways that are totally at odds with how these women see themselves — as smart, self-sufficient, empowered grown-ups. It can require them to lower their standards in pretty fundamental ways and force them to suffer through some really bad behavior."

Cultural attitudes have been slow to catch up to the not-so-new normal of singlehood. Traister's book quotes a passage from 1997 in which the writer Katie Roiphe, then 28, described her cohort of unmarried 20-something professionals as evidence of Americans' widespread failure to achieve adulthood on schedule. And being single today still generates some social stigma. A 2020 analysis published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that prejudice toward singles was viewed as more acceptable than prejudice toward other groups.

For women, however, the societal sense that they should be married has slowly but surely waned. In Pew's 2019 survey, just 35% of single women said they felt pressure from society to be in a relationship — a slightly larger share of single men said they felt the same.

Singledom also appears far more beneficial for women than men on average: Numerous studies have found that single women tend to be happier and healthier and live longer than married ones, while unmarried men have been found to experience markedly higher rates of depression, addiction, and loneliness than those with spouses. "If you are a man, you should probably get married; if you are a woman, don't bother," the author and behavioral scientist Paul Dolan quipped in a 2019 interview.

There are many hypotheses on why single men fare so much worse. Theories put forward by economists such as Richard Reeves and Nicholas Eberstadt suggest that male gender roles have been slow to catch up to labor-market realities, perhaps at the expense of many men's ability to thrive in the soft-skills-based 21st-century knowledge economy. Others theorize that men's loneliness starts in childhood and stems from societal pressure to keep their feelings hidden. While there are likely many factors at play, a common thread lies in the asocial and infantilizing mores of a patriarchal society that, in some crucial respects, may harm men even more than women.

Women, meanwhile, are finding joy and purpose in discovering new ways of living outside the nuclear-family norm. Platonic coparenting and cohousing arrangements between friends and the return of the multigenerational family home are just two recent examples of the changing face of the American household.

"In my book, I make the case that people who are single at heart are happy and flourishing because they are single, not in spite of it," Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist and the author of the 2023 book "Single at Heart," said. She has said that even within the past decade, there has been traction in what some call "a singles positivity movement." Now 71 (and still single), DePaulo said that current attitudes toward single professionals, in particular, are a far cry from her experience as a single 30-something woman in the workplace.

"Single people are still stereotyped, for sure, but now there is a greater awareness that some single people choose to be single and are happily single," she said.

Bowyer believes that social media plays a significant role in moving the needle. When she recently posted on TikTok about enjoying being single and child-free, the video attracted more than 4 million views and a flurry of positive feedback. It's a radical departure from the cultural feedback she and her Gen X peers received as young adults.

"We're so much more open and compassionate now — a more elevated society in some ways," Bowyer said. "You can find your tribe and be inspired by people that came before you."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.

When Wex, a payments platform based in Portland, Maine, set an ambitious goal to double its revenue, to $5 billion, within five years, it recognized that achieving this would require changes in its operational approach and strategic focus. In 2022 it created the role of chief transformation officer and tapped Kristy Kinney, who previously led the company's pandemic response, for the job.

Kinney's mandate touched every aspect of Wex's operations, including adopting generative artificial intelligence in call centers, standardizing project-management systems, and identifying new revenue streams. Wex says Kinney's led 230 initiatives, hit 2,300 project milestones, and worked with and advised more than 100 leaders across the organization.

"We were intentional about not just delivering outcomes," Kinney said, adding that a lot of the change "was about building a culture of always-on transformation in our workforce."

As companies across the US confront complex challenges that require overhauling strategies, reimagining business models, and adapting workforce dynamics, many are appointing chief transformation officers to drive these changes. Boston Consulting Group said it found that CTO hiring surged by more than 140% from 2019 to 2021, led by companies in consumer and industrial goods and financial institutions.

Alicia Pittman, the global people team chair at Boston Consulting Group, said the trend reflected a shift in how organizations manage change. She told BI these specialized leaders are appointed to head up specific cross-functional projects and eventually integrate their work into everyday operations. The role is often transitional.

"Their job, in my opinion, is to sort of put themselves out of a job," Pittman said.

Ravin Jesuthasan, a global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer who wrote the book "The Skills-Powered Organization," said that while this position was relatively new in the array of C-suite roles, it was emerging as "one of the most pivotal for navigating the future of work."

"It used to be that an organization would do a major transformation every eight or nine years or so, but today, due to the velocity and volatility of change, companies no longer have that luxury," he said. "They now need a dedicated leader whose job it is to look around corners, stress-test existing strategies, and figure out when to pivot if necessary."

So what exactly does a CTO do?

The C-suite has expanded over the past few decades and now brims with new titles.

The core figures, including the CEO, the chief operating officer, and the chief financial officer, focus on delivering quarterly results. Other positions center on functional areas like technology, human resources, and marketing, and strategic areas like employee engagement and sustainability.

Jesuthasan said that among these newer roles, the transformation officer stands out as forward-looking. They're tasked with preparing the organization for the future. "They help see what's coming and identify potential disruptions," he said.

In addition, he said, they must deeply understand strategy and its implications for the organizational structure. They need to be adept at connecting different areas of the business. "CTOs help the organization develop a mindset of perpetual reinvention," he said. "They have the curiosity and willingness to challenge the status quo."

He added that strong people skills are also critical for CTOs. They need to have credibility with other executives, the ability to run experiments and test new ideas, and the skills to execute effective change management while bringing employees along.

Being a chief transformation officer, Jesuthasan said, is akin to "building the train while you're driving it down the tracks."

Brandon Batt, the chief transformation officer at Quadient, a company focused on digital transformation, knows this all too well. Batt, who was appointed in 2019, helped orchestrate sweeping changes at Quadient, including streamlining the company's divisions and simplifying the workflows in various departments.

"At the end of the day, my function is here to be the support, the glue, and sometimes even the driver behind change that's needed in the business," he said.

Change is a process, of course. Can a CTO's transformation efforts ever truly be complete? "In today's dynamic landscape for technology companies, I am not sure we will ever say, 'Mission accomplished,'" Batt said.

"We just announced a new plan for 2030," he said. "It's demanding, but leaning into it is where the magic happens."

'Change is hard'

The demands of managing organizational transformation are great, especially when initiatives span disciplines and address issues such as technological advancements, industry shifts, and evolving customer trends.

"Change is hard, and it can burn people out," said Chengyi Lin, an affiliate professor of strategy at Insead who studies digital transformation.

Lin believes the CTO role should be viewed as transient, ideally lasting two to five years. "I say this with empathy and sympathy for the individual as well as for the organization," Lin added.

C-suite titles have an important "signaling function," he said. Appointing a CTO sends a message to workers and stakeholders that the organization is committed to change. Making the role permanent could dilute its significance and risk suggesting the company is in a constant state of flux rather than pursuing meaningful transformation.

Lin argued that concluding the role after a finite period doesn't mean the transformation is complete — "it means that it's eventually folded into business as usual."

He described this approach as critical for maintaining employee engagement. Gartner has found that the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022; in 2016, that number was two. It also found that workers' enthusiasm for supporting enterprise change dropped significantly over the same period.

Kinney recently wound down her role as chief transformation officer at Wex. The company is continuing to work toward its $5 billion revenue goal; revenue was $2.55 billion at the end of December last year. And Kinney has transitioned to a new position as SVP of health & benefits growth. This role involves integrating her transformation work into Wex's daily operations, what she refers to as "operational excellence."

"I used to joke that if I was in that job after two years, I ought to be fired," she said.