Keepers of the Flame

Note: I wrote and reported this vignette as part of a UC Berkeley Extension Journalism Workshop course. The original date of the content is October 12, 2015.

An ember of Burning Man blazed on in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco on Sunday.

The daylong event, which was billed as a “Heat the Street FaIRE,” delivered live music, an array of creative costumes, and a sampling of the elaborate art installations for which the free-spirited desert festival is known. According to publicity material, this is the sixteenth year that San Francisco has hosted a “decompression” event following the week-long gathering in the Nevada desert, whose 2015 version culminated on September 6 with the ritual destruction by fire of a 60-foot-tall wooden effigy.

According to event organizer Dave Slater, who also goes by SuperDave, preparations were intense even for the smaller Dogpatch event. It took three months to work out acoustics for the six-block stretch of Indiana Street. Dressed in a purple tee shirt, black kilt, and a leather top hat with aviator goggles, Slater said that the decompression event, like Burning Man itself, was all about fun. “How can we have the most fun?” he posed, “Well, we can build a purple quesadilla-slinging machine.” Which indeed they had.

Jules, a young San Francisco social worker whose “burner name” is Monarch, said in a brief interview that, while she enjoyed the decompression event, some of her friends found it dispiriting for its inability to fully replicate the experience of the bigger festival, which she described as “like an alternate reality.”

Jules had just exited a pink-hued booth labeled “Freak Show,” whose interior was covered in mirrors at all angles and presented a message of self-love. Other set pieces at the street fair promised instant weddings, silent disco, and “forgiveness.”

For Ross and Steba, a forty-ish couple living in Hayes Valley who had never attended the Nevada festival, the event was a welcome piece of local culture.  “This is the closest thing to my Burning Man experience,” said Ross.

Facebook postings by event organizers urged consideration for neighbors and touted an environmentally friendly policy of not selling water in single-use bottles. But not everyone welcomed the Dogpatch event, which was scheduled to run into the night. One neighborhood resident, reached by text message, conveyed her plans to flee the area for the day.

“It happens every year,” she said, linking the Sunday event to broader debates about how tech industry money permeates the San Francisco social scene. “I hate Burning Man in general. It’s just a place for rich white people honestly.”

On the Tech Sector & Vocation

“Detroit hustles harder.” I saw this slogan on a t-shirt in San Francisco recently. This was in Hayes Valley, home of artisanal ice cream stands, a Warby Parker frame shop, and children’s clothing boutiques. The shirt resonated with me. Growing up in a Greater Cleveland that seemed ever lessening in commercial and cultural influence, I absorbed an imperative to do whatever one can to carve out a niche in the face of an uncertain and threatening economic future.

The real question, though, is Who Brands Better?
Image © Aptemal Clothing LLC. I make no claims to ownership.

It wasn’t always true, though, that America's rust belt centers stood for grit and determination. The downfall of the American automotive industry, at least in the cultural imagination, can be traced to workers who had achieved a level of job and economic security that left them unwilling to apply sufficient hustle.

Today’s tech scene seems to celebrate the opposite impulse—concepts like growth hacking or the minimum viable product bring with them instructions to “fake it till you make it,” that is to never stop hustling. And yet the San Francisco Bay Area offers something no longer accessible in the Midwest: secure vocational jobs to those who can train themselves up for them.

It comes as no surprise that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of “vocation.” For one thing, I was introduced to the work of sociologist Max Weber at the right time to permanently freeze his frameworks into my toolkit for understanding the world (Weber’s works include Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation).

Plus, as a good Millennial, I’ve spent the past ten years hung up on the “what am I going to do with my life” question. And, as with many Millennials, I have parents who achieved success by picking a path early and sticking with it (mine are professors of American history).

So what is a vocation to me? I can think of a few ways to answer that question:

On Search Theory, Career Choice, and the Fear of Chance (A draft meditation)

by Max Kornblith

“If you don’t like what’s being said, then change the conversation” – Don Draper

In this essay:

Aziz Ansari on luck and dating

My “passion dilemma”

The unacknowledged co-conspirator in life

Living with messiness

The formula for love

In the midst of a course on probability, my college statistics professor revealed the “solution” to the problem of dating. He told us that, upon granting a few assumptions*, search theory—the statistical toolset honed for the rapid selection of a proverbial needle from a haystack—suggests an optimal approach to picking a mate. Proceed through one third of the maximum number of partners you expect to have the opportunity to date in life, he instructed, and then, having used this experience to set a baseline, settle down with the next candidate whose overall quality exceeds that of anyone you’ve already dated. This approach balances the risk of settling for what’s too easily available versus that of holding out too long for perfection.

The proposal may be computationally simple, but it raises irksome questions:

And now, for something a little different...

Stay tuned...