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Boston Globe
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Orien McNeill, artist/pirate prankster who made merry mischief on the water, dies at 45
Soon, a cohort of street artists and dumpster-diving freegans -- the anti-consumerist foragers of the late aughts -- who might otherwise have been squatting in Brooklyn warehouses, were drawn to the same lawless territory. It was a last frontier and haven in the ever-gentrifying New York City boroughs. They made art from scavenged materials and held events that harked back to the Happenings of their 1960s predecessors, although the events were intended for no audience but themselves. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up No critics were summoned, and not much was documented. Mr. McNeill was their pied piper, guru, and pirate prankster, who hatched extravagant, loosely organized adventures involving costumes, flotillas of handmade rafts, and, once, a pop-up bar on a sinking tugboat. Advertisement When Caledonia Curry, otherwise known as the artist Swoon, began to conceptualize 'Swimming Cities' -- winsome floating contraptions built from salvaged materials that she launched on the Hudson River in 2008 -- Mr. McNeill, her classmate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, was an inspiration, project architect, and co-pilot. Advertisement 'Some of the funniest and proudest and most exciting moments were with Orien, just making things," said Duke Riley, a fellow traveler in art and antics. Duke Riley/NYT The following year, when she reimagined the project for Venice, Mr. McNeill played the same role. With a crew of nearly 30, Curry sent her materials to nearby Slovenia, where customs inspectors initially held up their shipping containers: They were confused by the contents -- they thought it was garbage. The crew members built their fantastical crafts in Slovenia and sailed to Venice, where they crashed the annual Biennale, enchanting the assembled art crowd as the vessels floated through the canals. Mr. McNeill served as the escort and advance guard, scooting about in a battered skiff in case someone fell overboard. 'Orien introduced me to world building,' Curry said in an interview. 'He was living this beautiful, feral existence on the water -- the center of this artist community. He shied away from the limelight, but his spirit informed everybody.' She added, 'With artists, there's always this thing about what's art and what's life, and nobody held that closer to the bone than Orien.' Duke Riley, an artist known for releasing thousands of pigeons outfitted with LEDs into the night sky above the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as well as building a wooden replica of a Revolutionary War-era sub and launching it at the Queen Mary 2, was a co-conspirator on a variety of adventures. One was the sinking bar, which Mr. McNeill persuaded Riley to help him build in a half-submerged tugboat with a rusted-out floor. The bar opened at low tide, and as the hours passed, guests eventually found themselves waist-deep in water. They swam out before the tide rose too high. Advertisement 'He never let personal safety get in the way of a genius idea,' Riley said. He added: 'Some of the funniest and proudest and most exciting moments were with Orien, just making things. . . . Maybe, in time, people will look back and realize what an important catalyst he was.' Mr. McNeill was irresistible, said Dan Glass, a fellow artist and frequent collaborator. He was like a combination of Auntie Mame and George Carlin -- or like a Martin Scorsese character but in a Wes Anderson movie, he added, noting Mr. McNeill's singular style. (Mr. McNeill favored blazers and jaunty feathered hats.) He made meals into performance art. He once served a roasted alligator to Riley in lieu of birthday cake (there were candles). Another event featured martinis made from Pepto Bismol and garnished with Band-Aids (surprisingly drinkable, by all accounts). He conceived an annual adventure he called 'The Battle for Mau Mau Island,' named for a lump of landfill circled by a creek near Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Hundreds of intrepid people would organize themselves into themed gangs and set out in homemade crafts of dubious seaworthiness through Jamaica Bay to compete, 'American Gladiators'-style, with various props and pseudo-weapons. The 'boats' disintegrated once the shenanigans were over. For McNeill, the intent was to highlight the potential of the city's waterways 'as a frontier of temporary arts and theatrics,' he told Gothamist magazine in 2016, while pointing out the scarcity of free creative space on land. Mr. McNeill's most ambitious project was inspired by Curry's 'Swimming Cities.' He wanted to do the same thing, but bigger, and conceived a 500-mile trip along the Ganges River to Varanasi, the sacred city and pilgrimage site in northern India. He called it 'The Swimming Cities of the Ocean of Blood.' Advertisement Mr. McNeill and a group of collaborators built five metal pontoon boats in Brooklyn -- three of them powered by motorcycles, one by sail and oars, and another by paddle wheel -- which he would captain. The boats were designed to lock together for camping on the water. In 2010, they shipped the components to a small Indian university in the city of Farrukhabad, which had agreed to host them while the collaborators reassembled their crafts. Though they had spent two years raising money through events that Mr. McNeill orchestrated, they were still underfunded and under-provisioned. It was an arduous monthslong trip. Marauding monkeys attacked their camp. They often saw bodies floating in the river. At one point they encountered a quarter-mile-wide concrete dam -- a terrifying 'Class 5 rapid,' said Porter Fox, a participant who knew his waterfalls (he had been a white-water guide). Mr. McNeill tackled it first. Fox went next, his boat flipping end over end as it plummeted over the torrent. Clearly, it was not going to be possible for the rest of the boats, or their crews, to survive the dam. Mr. McNeill single-handedly disassembled the remaining boats on shore, somehow found a tractor for hire, and set off on land to bypass the dam. 'I remember seeing him coming over a rise, like Lawrence of Arabia, waving from the tractor,' Fox said. 'It was just so herculean. No one else could have sallied their spirit enough to think about getting out of this jam. Everyone just wanted to go home, and he's, like, 'No, we're not done.'' Advertisement Orien McNeill was born Dec. 7, 1979, in Manhattan, the only child of Van Cleve, a filmmaker, and Malcolm McNeill, an artist, author, and television director. His mother and father are his only immediate survivors. Mr. McNeill's godfather was author William S. Burroughs, with whom the elder McNeill had collaborated on a graphic novel. Burroughs baptized Orien with a dab of vodka from his afternoon drink. He also turned over the lease on his loft in Tribeca to the family. By age 10, Orien was drawing, painting, and sculpting 'as well as any mature artist,' Malcolm McNeill said. He taught his son how to use an airbrush at 12 and a vacuum forming machine, for molding plastic, at 13, because Orien wanted to build a spaceship. 'Otherwise, I got out of the way,' McNeill said. 'He could make anything.' After graduating with a degree in industrial design from Pratt in 2001, Mr. McNeill spent a year traveling, stopping in New Zealand, Borneo, India and Ireland. When he returned, he bought the Chris-Craft, parked it in the Gowanus Canal and began homesteading there. He later lived on a sailboat, which he reconfigured by cutting the mast off to make room for a massive deck -- the kind one might build for a house, cantilevered over the boat's bow -- so that he could host more people. 'He would do anything to create the ecosystem he wanted,' Fox said. For his 10th birthday, Orien had asked his parents to get him business cards. His father still has a few. 'Orien McNeill,' they read. 'All your dreams made real.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Orien McNeill, Artist Who Made Mischief on the Water, Dies at 46
Orien McNeill, an artist and impresario of New York City's DIY and participatory art community, whose work was experiential, theatrical and ephemeral and took place mostly on the water — think 'Burning Man, but with the possibility of drowning,' as one friend put it — died on May 15 at his home, a 52-foot-long ferryboat docked on a Brooklyn creek. He was 46. His mother, Val Van Cleve, confirmed his death, which was not widely reported at the time. No cause was given. Mr. McNeill was an early pioneer of New York's fetid waterways. He was among the first artists to homestead on the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site in Brooklyn, which he did two decades ago in a 1953 Chris-Craft boat that he christened the Meth Lab. (It was not a meth lab.) Soon, a cohort of street artists and Dumpster-diving freegans — the anti-consumerist foragers of the late aughts — who might otherwise have been squatting in Brooklyn warehouses, were drawn to the same lawless territory, a last frontier and haven in the ever-gentrifying New York City boroughs. They made art from scavenged materials and held events that harked back to the Happenings of their 1960s predecessors, although the events were intended for no audience but themselves. No critics were summoned, and not much was documented. Mr. McNeill was their pied piper, guru and pirate prankster, who hatched extravagant, loosely organized adventures involving costumes, flotillas of handmade rafts and, once, a pop-up bar on a sinking tugboat. When Caledonia Curry, otherwise known as the artist Swoon, began to conceptualize 'Swimming Cities' — winsome floating contraptions built from salvaged materials that she launched on the Hudson River in 2008 — Mr. McNeill, her classmate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, was an inspiration, project architect and co-pilot. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Time of India
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Debut filmmaker Neel Soni's Babli by Night earns BAFTA nod
Neel Soni Delhi-based 23-year-old filmmaker and wildlife conservationist Neel Soni 's debut documentary Babli by Night has been longlisted for the 2025 BAFTA Student Awards in the Documentary category. During a recent conversation, he spoke about the film, which has already screened at the Rome International Film Festival and will have its North American premiere at the New York Indian Film Festival next month. 'By day, Babban is a forest guard. By night, Babli emerges. I wanted to capture that story' One evening in the Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand, Neel Soni, then a teenage wildlife photographer, spotted a forest guard in uniform, holding a rifle and standing in a rigid posture. Hours later, on his return from the safari, the same individual appeared again. But this time, in a salwar kameez, dancing - the forest guard he met before, Babban, was now Babli. He became Babli by the night. That memory stayed with Neel, which, years later, would become the idea for Babli by the Night, a 24-minute documentary that has now found its way onto the BAFTA longlist. And this debut filmmaker says that he wasn't even sure he wanted to be one. The title - Babli by the Night is a nod to that very first moment. 'By day, Babban is a forest guard. By night, Babli emerges. I wanted to capture that.' 'I didn't go into it thinking this would be a film,' says Neel Soni, now 23. 'I met Babban when I was 13. Back then, I didn't know what filmmaking was. I just knew that this person had a story,' he says. 'Every choice was made keeping Babban's safety, comfort, and dignity at the center' Neel Soni, who graduated from Pratt Institute last year, began shooting the film long before it became a student project. He says,'I met Babban over many trips during my travels as a wildlife photographer through the forests of Uttarakhand. We built a friendship. Slowly, I began to understand just how layered and remarkable this person was - a Muslim transgender forest guard from Ramnagar.'Every choice was made keeping Baban's safety, comfort, and dignity at the center. That was non-negotiable.' During their conversations, it became clear to Neel that this story needed to be shared. And Babban wanted this story to be shared. Set in Uttarakhand, Babli by the Night chronicles the remarkable story of Babban, a Muslim transgender forest guard who confronts societal and familial indifference by finding solace in nature - all while grappling with an unexpected HIV diagnosis. Neel says the film sheds light on the sanctuary that nature offers to those marginalised by society, aiming to spark conversations around identity, resilience, and empowerment. Were there any moments where artistic vision clashed with ethical responsibility, as Babban entrusted him - a debut filmmaker - with his life's story? 'Of course,' Neel says. 'There were moments I could've leaned into something more sensational - things that might have made the documentary juicier. But I didn't. Because this wasn't about drama. It was about trust.' Neel adds that permissions were taken, and the forest department was very supportive. 'The story is personal. It's not about their job. And I hope it's seen that way,' he says. 'I don't want to be labelled a documentary filmmaker or a commercial filmmaker' While Neel isn't interested in being boxed in, he says, 'I don't want to be labelled a documentary filmmaker or a commercial filmmaker. I want to tell honest and meaningful stories." Talking about making his first documentary, Neel says, 'No film is easy. Especially your first. You give everything to something you're not even sure will see the light of day. It's terrifying. But it's also the most rewarding experience.' The film is executive produced by Leena Yadav, acclaimed for Parched and House of Secrets, and Swati Thiyagarajan, producer of the Oscar-winning My Octopus Teacher. Neel says, 'They guided me with their extreme generosity.' Check out our list of the latest Hindi , English , Tamil , Telugu , Malayalam , and Kannada movies . Don't miss our picks for the best Hindi movies , best Tamil movies, and best Telugu films .
Time of India
12-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
From stairs to restrooms: How a Palestinian-American designer's iconic symbols helped us make sense of the everyday modern world?
It's hard to imagine walking through an airport, train station, or even a shopping mall without being silently steered by the familiar icons that tell us where to go—where to find a restroom, an elevator, or the baggage claim. These everyday visual cues have become so seamlessly integrated into public life that we rarely stop to ask: who created them? The answer lies in the quiet brilliance of Rajie Cook , a Palestinian-American graphic designer whose revolutionary work still shapes how we move through the world today. #Operation Sindoor The damage done at Pak bases as India strikes to avenge Pahalgam Why Pakistan pleaded to end hostilities Kashmir's Pahalgam sparks Karachi's nightmare A Name, a Journey, and a Vision Born Rajie Suleiman in Newark, New Jersey, on July 6, 1930, he was the son of Christian Palestinian immigrants from Ramallah. His surname, like much of his early identity, was shaped by a series of colonialisms and cultural translations—first Turkish, then British, and finally Americanized into 'Cook.' Even his first name was changed by a schoolteacher who decided 'Rajie' was too difficult, opting instead for 'Roger.' But in later years, he reclaimed his original name with pride, grounding his creative spirit in his heritage. Cook graduated from Pratt Institute in 1953 and was later named its Alumni of the Year. His professional path led him into advertising and design, but it was in 1967—when he co-founded Cook and Shanosky Associates—that his most enduring legacy took shape. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like The Top 25 Most Beautiful Women In The World Car Novels Undo — stereochromo (@stereochromo) A Universal Language Without Words In 1974, the U.S. Department of Transportation posed a challenge: how can public spaces be made more accessible to everyone, regardless of language or literacy? Collaborating with the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), Cook's firm was selected to design a comprehensive system of pictograms that could be universally understood. What followed was a design revolution. Drawing from global influences—Tokyo's airports, the 1972 Munich Olympics—the team created 34 minimalist pictographs that distilled essential information into simple, elegant forms. The generic male and female figures. The cigarette with a red strike-through. The airplane and locomotive. These were not just symbols—they were acts of translation, transforming complex information into immediate understanding. You Might Also Like: How an artist gave computers an aesthetic soul without writing a single line of code? Cook's philosophy was clear: clarity over decoration, meaning over embellishment. 'Design communicates to its maximum efficacy without frills,' he wrote. These symbols weren't just beautiful; they worked. The Helvetica of Pictograms These signs, often dubbed 'the Helvetica of pictograms' for their clean, efficient lines and widespread adoption, are still in use today. In 2003, the 'Symbol Signs' project was inducted into the collections of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and The Smithsonian Institution, sealing its place in design history. It's no exaggeration to say that Cook's work changed the way we interact with our environment. His symbols removed linguistic barriers, democratizing access to information in public spaces across the globe. In an age before smartphones and Google Translate, these little icons were quietly revolutionary. Beyond the Signs: Art, Activism, and Identity Yet Cook was not just a designer of signs. As his firm wound down in the early 2000s, he began creating three-dimensional sculptural boxes—assemblages made of found objects that reflected his political consciousness and deep concern for the Middle East. Many of these works were inspired by his trips to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, where he served on a Presbyterian Church task force for human rights. These boxes were intimate and provocative, a sharp contrast to the silent neutrality of his signage. You Might Also Like: Why are resilient people so funny? Wellness expert explains the science behind laughter and healing from pain Cook used these works to grapple with the conditions faced by Palestinians, infusing his art with narratives of displacement, occupation, and resilience. They stood as personal testimonies—small yet profound acts of remembrance and resistance. — ireallyhateyou (@ireallyhateyou) The Man with More Connoisseurs than van Gogh Despite his profound contributions, Rajie Cook remained largely unknown outside design circles. He once joked that more people had seen his work than a Matisse or van Gogh—not in galleries, but in elevators and restrooms. And he was right. His artistry was not hung on museum walls (though it eventually was) but lived in transit hubs, hospitals, and city streets, working quietly and efficiently in the background. Cook passed away on February 6, 2021, in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He left behind more than a design legacy; he left a universal language. A system that does not discriminate, that speaks instantly to everyone, and that continues to shape how we interact with the built environment. In a world often divided by words, Rajie Cook gave us symbols—monochrome, minimalist, and profoundly human—that speak louder than any language ever could. You Might Also Like: How a Nobel-nominated scientist was cancelled for exposing the invisible danger we face every day
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'I thought I was going to be someone': how Gen Z became a generation of rejects
When Em graduated from the Pratt Institute in May 2020, two months into the pandemic, there were simply no jobs for a sculpture major, even in New York. "That absolutely set the tone for the rest of my attempt at a career," Em, now 26, says. So they took an intensive nine-month coding boot camp and started applying for tech jobs. After they got rejected from about 10 roles, the entire tech industry was besieged by mass layoffs in 2022, leaving Em even more dispirited. "It was just another pathway to shit," they recall thinking. Eventually, they found work as an office manager at a nonprofit for a while and quickly lost their coding skills. Last year, Em applied to more than 400 jobs across the communications, administrative, and service industries — and was rejected by every one. "I am miserable, and it is breaking my body down," Em tells me over the phone from California, where they've been living at a relative's house scraping by on $700 a month from contract work. They add, flatly, "I am not living a life that I feel is worth living at this moment." Em's experience with such unrelenting rejection may sound extreme, but their story speaks to a panic and despair pervasive among members of Gen Z. Lately, I find that the tone people over 30 most often use when talking about today's young adults is less a reflexively finger-wagging "kids these days" and more a genuine sympathy over (mixed with relief to have dodged) the particular set of historical circumstances they've faced as they've come of age: COVID-19, climate anxiety, the chaos of the Trump administrations, the internet's wholesale usurpation of IRL culture, AI's potential to upend entire industries. Gen Z has been called the most anxious generation, the most risk-averse generation, the most stressed generation, the most burned-out generation, and the loneliest generation. Last year, the World Happiness Report dubbed Zoomers the unhappiest generation. But there's another superlative — one exacerbating all that stress, anxiety, loneliness, and burnout — that's so far been overlooked. By several measures, Gen Z may be the most rejected generation in human history. Every cohort believes it has drawn the shortest straw; as Will Smith, a Gen Xer, famously groused, "Parents just don't understand!" But as Gen Zers strain to establish themselves, they face a uniquely fraught tension between unprecedented technology-enabled opportunity — infinite possibilities a click, swipe, or DM away — and an unprecedented scale of rejection. From education to careers to romance, never before have young adults had this much access to prospective yeses. And, in turn, never before have young adults been told no so frequently. What does the experience of this new scale of rejection do to a young person's psyche, and to Gen Z's collective state of mind? And how will it reverberate through the rest of society as Gen Z eventually takes the reins of power — when the rejectees become the rejectors? In interviews with psychologists, therapists, guidance counselors, career coaches, and more than a dozen Gen Zers (most of whom, like Em, requested I use their first name only to not hinder their job hunt), the ascendant generation's worldview-warping experience of mass rejection in the dating scene, college admissions, and the job market came into focus. At stake is not young adults' egos or sense of entitlement but our expectation of agency in an increasingly mediated world. Through the 1960s, most Americans got married in their early 20s to partners they met through their social circles. Today, they spend nearly a decade longer dating; the median age for first marriage is 31.1 for men and 29.2 for women. During that additional eon, they're also equipped with an arsenal of apps that can summon — and terminate — new prospects on a daily, if not hourly, basis. If we tallied up the literal sum of all the unreciprocated swipes, DMs, follows, or texts that create today's ambient mode of romantic rejection, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that a typical Zoomer on the apps is getting rejected by, and rejecting, more prospective partners in a week than a typical married boomer has in their entire life. The paradox of online dating has been thoroughly documented: Despite having more access to potential partners than ever, young people have invented vocabularies to describe the endless purgatorial disappointments of "ghosting," "situationships," "breadcrumbing," and the hellscape of the apps themselves. Last year, Hinge surveyed 15,000 people about their dating views. Ninety percent of Gen Z respondents said they wanted to find love, and 44% said they had little or no dating experience. "That was a surprising number for me," Logan Ury, Hinge's director of relationship science, tells me. Much of that gap is due to Gen Z's heightened risk aversion, Ury says, something she attributes to a social-media-augmented awareness of the world as a scary place and widespread "overparenting," or helicopter parenting. "Rejection is intimidating for everyone, but Gen Z daters seem to feel it more acutely," she adds. Fifty-six percent of Gen Z respondents said that fear of rejection held them back from pursuing a relationship, compared with 51% for millennial respondents. So as young people relentlessly reject each other, many are too scared to risk truly putting themselves out there in the first place. "It is so easy to get involved with someone and then detach," Catherine, a recent Barnard grad, says. "I have friends who have been texting with people that they met on dating apps for weeks or months, and yet they have never met in person. I actually had a friend who had a date all set up, and she went to the restaurant, and by the time she got there, the guy unmatched her and blocked her on everything before they even had a date." Gen Z has normalized mutual risk aversion, says Jeff Guenther, a licensed therapist who counsels millions of lovelorn Gen Z TikTok users as @therapyjeff. "It's this funny situation where it's OK to not get back to people, he says. "Sometimes that's empowering, but then there's the negative effect of all these little mini rejections that eventually cut so deep that somebody might not decide to be vulnerable." No wonder that breakup coaches who talk in therapy-speak and dating influencers who claim they can definitively discern "green flags" versus "red flags" have proliferated, each of them promising to demystify the romantic ambiguity plaguing Gen Z. Guenther says today's young adults seem quicker to discard connections in favor of the seemingly unlimited reserves of suitors awaiting just a swipe away. "There's the resilience that comes from the frequent rejection that makes them great at moving on, but then they're less equipped for the real-world relational challenges that require compromise and patience," he says. But Natalie Buchwald, the founder and clinical director of Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, says she sees a distinction between healthy resilience and the blasé, noncommittal attitude she sees many Gen Zers deploy to cope with rejection. "I'm finding there's more of a pervasive numbness that looks like resilience," she says. "But that's not resilience; that's disconnect." Meanwhile, more technology-augmented opportunity has also bred much more rejection in the college admissions industrial complex. Until 1960, more than half of all college applicants applied to just one school. In the 2023-24 admissions season, the average applicant applied to 6.65 Common App-affiliated schools alone, up 7% from the previous year. Just in the past two decades, the number of applications to the country's 67 most selective colleges has tripled to nearly 2 million a year. Gen Zers are knocking on more doors to their future than ever and, in turn, having more doors slammed in their faces. For some, this is shaping their core beliefs on motivation and merit. Dylan, a 22-year-old New York University student whose high school credentials included varsity rugby and a 4.7 weighted GPA, tells me that he applied to roughly 20 schools — including most of the Ivies and Stanford — a number he felt "insecure" about compared with his peers. "I know a lot of people who applied to 20 to 40," he says. In the end, he received only three or four acceptances, which was demoralizing. "I just remember feeling like it wasn't necessarily our qualifications that mattered, that it was just like, hopefully, the right person read it on the right day." Ella, a 20-year-old from Allentown, Pennsylvania, applied to 12 colleges and got rejected from 10. "I had so much hubris and unfounded confidence," she says. "I just thought, well, I'll only want to go to college if I can get into a 'prestigious school.' They ask, 'Why us?' obviously, and I couldn't tell them why besides it's Harvard." In a Substack post she published before her high school graduation, she described how at odds her tenfold rejection was with her belief in simply working hard to succeed. "I thought that I was going to be someone," she wrote. While she's now a junior at Bryn Mawr, Ella tells me she still hasn't gotten over the sting of going to a seemingly less elite school. Others have taken rejection to court. In February, an 18-year-old from Palo Alto, California, who applied to 18 schools and was rejected from 16, sued the University of California system and the University of Washington, alleging racial discrimination against "highly-qualified Asian-American candidates." "When the rejections rolled in one after another, I was dumbfounded. What started with surprise turned into frustration, and then finally it turned into anger," the student's father told the New York Post. As a millennial and former teenage overachiever, I also call up the best expert I personally knew: my high school counselor, Kim Klokkenga, who has helped wrangle the collegiate aspirations of the student body at Central Illinois' Dunlap High School for the past 30 years. In her view, the commercialization of college applications is as much responsible as a new generation of helicopter parenting, along with the technologically mediated literal ease of application. "Back in the day, I would literally ask a student how many envelopes they wanted," Klokkenga says. "I didn't have people applying to 20-plus schools, like now. It might've been 10 or 12, and that was outlandish!" (In case you were wondering, I'd been one of her favorite nut jobs, with a total of nine applications in 2010.) When I ask if she thinks Gen Z students are handling rejection better or worse than previous generations, she says she can't say for sure. "I have fewer students come in devastated that they didn't get into their schools," Klokkenga says. Perhaps they were already steeling themselves against rejection — another shade of disconnect. "I am hearing students say, 'Well, I wasn't expecting to get in; I just wanted to apply to see,'" Klokkenga adds. "I think they're just throwing them out there sometimes to see what'll stick." Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who famously observed the relationship between consumer choice and satisfaction in his 2004 book, "The Paradox of Choice," distinguishes two types of people: the "maximizers," who want the absolute best option, and the much-happier "satisficers," who go with the "good enough" option. Today's perceived infinite-choice standard seems to have given rise to legions of maximizers among Gen Z. Per Schwartz's central argument that overabundance of choice tends to lead to more disappointment, this does not seem to bode well for their general well-being. But what happens when one's choices are preemptively limited, perhaps relentlessly, via rejection? "It's possible there's a kind of resilience that people develop when you're applying to 50 schools and it doesn't hurt anymore to get rejected by 47," Schwartz tells me. But, much like Buchwald says of rejected romantics, he sees the "whatever" reaction among rejected applicants as a "very self-protective response." "If you minimize the significance beforehand, then the pain of failure will be less consequential," Schwartz says. "It kind of drives me crazy to see people doing this, especially if it's a reflection of their effort to protect themselves rather than just their cynicism about living in modern society." College is its own gauntlet, but the scale of rejection in the job-hunt is an order of magnitude more hellish. Via LinkedIn, Workday, and the ubiquity of other online job boards, many Zoomers apply to more jobs in a day than many lucky Boomers have in their lives. In February 2025, the average knowledge worker job opening received 244 applications, up from 93 in February 2019, according to data the hiring software provider Greenhouse shared with BI. That's 243 nos — or ghosted applications — for every yes. This scattershot reality is not specific to Gen Z, but it's the only reality that the incoming workforce has known. Among the Gen Zers I talked to, their "body counts" of submitted job applications were regularly in the hundreds. Christopher, a 24-year-old who graduated with a finance degree, says he'd applied to 400 jobs in finance and 200 in merchandising before finding a job that still wasn't what he really wanted. His computer science grad friends have been sending applications in the thousands, he says. Even though the logistics of applying are more or less streamlined, Gen Zers note the disconnect between the effort they're expected to make versus the consideration given in return. Colleges at least have to formally tell you no, while jobs, like a dating app match, tend to ghost at any point in the process. Is it really a mystery why some Gen Zers have started ghosting employers back? Since graduating from Barnard last year, Catherine has applied to 300 jobs and interviewed for 20 of them. The 23-year-old says her college counselor's advice to deeply invest in her job applications — via networking, seeking referrals, getting personalized feedback on résumés — has come to feel ridiculous, given the fact that you could sit through six rounds of interviews, a practice test, and more for a single role and then, after months of waiting, not even get a proper rejection email. For her, the resounding lesson is hard to ignore: It's better not to hope for too much or to try too hard. "You have no idea if you're even doing it right," Catherine says of the impersonal process, which is often mediated by an unknowable (and highly fallible) screening algorithm. "You don't have any ability to get feedback. It feels like being in a hedge maze, and there's probably a path through, but you feel like you keep running into walls and you're like, 'Man, if I could just talk to the person who built this.'" She adds: "I worked so hard for four years, and I built this great network and support system, and now I'm just sending applications into the void." For Gen Zers, the disenfranchising reality of chasing entire flocks of wild geese has diminished their self-esteem. Lanya, a 22-year-old who graduated last year with a degree in media studies, tells me she thought she had done everything right as a first-gen college student who counted a Nasdaq internship among her achievements — and feels incredibly guilty that she has yet to find a job. "Self-worth-wise, this is the lowest I've ever felt," she says. "This is my time to say thank you and pay them back by showing them what they sacrificed was worth it, but I can't help them the way I want to." Dylan, the finance grad, says the job hunt made him modify his expectations for the future. "I just remember applying to so many and feeling like: I don't care what I get. I just need to survive. I'm not scared of failing; I'm just scared of dying." For others, mass rejection can be liberating. Several Gen Zers tell me their collection of "we regret to inform you's" in their inboxes has inspired them to invest more deeply in passion projects, move abroad, or start their own businesses. For many Gen Zers, the influencer economy is the one job market that seems legible to them — and it's always hiring. As Gen Z grows older, the rejection and risk they face could easily compound. If you're starting out with a high degree of risk aversion, any pedestrian experience of personal rejection might harden that stance — which means we could end up seeing Gen Z calcify into incredibly risk-averse adults (and parents). Those who are resilient enough to weather the new standard scale of rejection — those who continue to shoot their shots — will eventually gain a firm foothold. But in college, careers, and romance, it's often less a matter of perseverance or merit than it is pure luck. For much of Gen Z, success is increasingly boiling down to a numbers game. Jeff Guenther Is the real problem simply the overabundance of options, which puts Gen Zers' expectations on a collision course with reality? No help, of course, is the 24/7 firehose of comparison and fantasy provided by social media — which has shaped Gen Z's construct of reality pretty much straight from the womb. Schwartz, the psychologist, acknowledges that a zillion potential mates, schools, or careers that are seemingly so accessible are liable to make us all feel disappointment. "Some of us live in such a culture of abundance that even if you find some way to limit the options, you are thinking about what's out there," he says. Here, I think of a line from Tony Tulathimutte's aptly titled 2024 book, "Rejection," an interlocking series of horror-esque stories of young people who are puzzled by and rage at the world for their arbitrary exclusion: "His sadness, he knows, is a symptom of his entitlement, so he is not even entitled to his sadness." But Schwartz also believes that the experience of rejection is markedly different from that of disappointment. When you're underwhelmed by your Netflix selection, or when you order what turns out to be a disappointing entrée, it's easy to have order envy for your table mates' more tantalizing plates. But while making that choice was a matter of your own agency, "a rejection is a comment on you," Schwartz says. "It's very hard to just say to yourself, 'Well, Stanford rejects 96% of its applicants. It's impossible to get in," he adds. "It's not a statement about me; it's a crapshoot.' You can say all that stuff, but my guess is you don't really believe it." This, for me, is the most tragic element of Gen Z's rejection arc. We can expect experiences with personal rejection to trigger material consequences and a formative reckoning with one's self-worth or belief systems — taken as a collective, it's what shapes each generation so that they can turn around and bray at the next one about what they've survived. But for Gen Z, their fates are increasingly shaped by the uniquely depersonalized, and depersonalizing, forces of technology, primarily the algorithms that pervade modern dating, college admissions, and the hiring process. These algorithms set the rules of engagement for nearly every aspect of Gen Zers' lives, making once analog processes utterly streamlined yet mystifying. No wonder various corners of the culture have responded with cottage industries of layoff coaches, résumé consultants, professional matchmakers, emotional "courses" and boot camps, and countless influencers who espouse how to "hack" life's algos. For now, the onus is still placed on the individual Gen Zer to buck the system and learn the hacks; it remains to be seen whether Gen Z will collectively reject the very sorting mechanisms that are failing them. "There's this technology, whether it's the algorithm or AI, that's sort of against you, and that's something to take into consideration," says Guenther, the TikTok-famous therapist. "You're not being rejected by actual people, but you're being filtered out or rejected by technology. And maybe the anger should be directed at Apple and Google and Tinder and Facebook or Meta." Yet this anger is curiously absent in all my conversations with Gen Zers. For one thing, they're savvy enough to understand that technology itself isn't worth blaming if you aren't addressing the human biases codified in the automation. Instead, the predominant mood was one of resignation, or perhaps acceptance. "It's a numbers game," one current college student says, or a "waiting game." When we speak again several months after our first conversation, Em has a promising update: After applying to more than 400 jobs, they've found a position at a perfume shop in Oregon. Amid the grueling job hunt, David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs" dramatically reframed their view of careerism. "He talks about how humans feel when they can't make an effect on anything — it is not only psychologically traumatizing, but it creates physical problems," Em says, adding that the perfume shop was one of the best jobs they'd ever had. It's 35 hours a week with no benefits. But, Em says, "every single day in this job, I get the chance to make someone's day — to actually see my impact on the world, even if on a small scale." Delia Cai is a writer living in New York. She runs the culture and media newsletter, Deez Links. Read the original article on Business Insider
