And so millions of young people wary of global economic competition in the corporate world, and not so trusting of government service, now have a growing alternative lifestyle—a career as a Non-Profiteer. As a result, more of them are choosing not just to do good for themselves but to do good for others.

  PART XI

  Looks and Fashion

  Uptown Tattooed

  What art form has, at different times in its history, signified royalty, loyalty, criminality, circuses, and coming of age in the Ivy League? Yes, tattooing, or the practice of permanently decorating your skin via hot, painful needles. From the Tahitian word tatau, meaning “to mark,” tattoos have been used throughout human history to identify social status, fulfill religious rites, denote pirates and spies, and declare youthful independence.

  And what started in the U.S. as part of the hippie and motorcycle gang movement has gone mainstream—for young people, getting a tattoo is becoming as common as getting your ears pierced. Tattoos have become high fashion.

  Hair was once the signature form of rebellion and individuality in the face of parental and societal consternation. Now it seems hair has gone short, with going bald more common among men than going long. Body art has become the way more and more of us like to signal our individuality, in America and around the world. And unlike hair, which everyone can see at a glance, tattoos are usually hidden so they are part our private individuality, revealed only to those who get to see the full inner person, or those who share our locker rooms.

  So in case you still associate tattoos with bikers, sailors, criminals, or other lowlifes, you should get over it, and preferably before your 20-something child—the one with the college degree and the excellent job prospects—comes home for Thanksgiving with a red rose, or maybe a Chinese symbol for virtue, stamped on her hip. According to a 2003 Harris poll, more than 1 in 3 Americans aged 25–29 have a tattoo. Nearly a quarter of university students have them. (Something like 13 percent of Americans aged 18–24 have a tattoo and a body piercing, not counting women with pierced ears.)

  Sources: Journal of American Academy of Dermatology, 2006; U.S. Census, 2003, 2006

  Overall, as of 2006, more than 30 million Americans—or nearly 1 in 4 adults—have tattoos, up from fewer than 20 million just three years ago.

  This tattoo phenomenon is not only limited to the United States. Folks in Britain, Australia, and Japan are also lining up to paint their bodies. Some 8 percent of Canadian teens have tattoos, according to a survey done in 2000, and 61 percent of these teens are girls.

  And so once a signifier of the down-and-dirty, tattooing is now every-person’s rite. Boys do it; girls do it; people wearing pearls do it. Indeed, in the Harris poll, the best-represented income group among tattooed Americans (22 percent) are people making over $75,000. By contrast, only 8 percent of people making $15,000–$25,000 have gone under the electric paintbrush. In other words, the richer you are these days, the more likely you are to have a tattoo.

  Part of the appeal is, no doubt, rebellion. A little Japanese pictograph connotes far greater worldliness than, say, one’s provincial parents could ever pull off. A little athletic or cultural symbol locks in one’s identity, literally “branding” oneself to peers. Like cigarettes in the 1970s or hot rods in the 1950s, tattoos are today’s edgy-but-not-too-dangerous way for middle-class kids to show off their wild side.

  But it’s not just the liberal, rebel types. To more conservative folks, tattoos also represent discipline and loyalty. How better to demonstrate the core conservative ideals of permanence and commitment than to burn an idea (or a person) into your very being? According to the Harris poll, 14 percent of Republicans in the U.S. have tattoos. While that’s slightly less than the percentage of Democrats, it’s still something like 7 million tattooed Republicans walking around in America.

  Why tattoo? According to the Harris poll, one in three people say it makes them feel sexier, including nearly half of all tattooed women. One in four people with tattoos say it makes them feel more attractive.

  And they’re in trendy company. Film star Angelina Jolie has at least a dozen tattoos, including a tribal dragon on her left biceps (which used to be nestled under a “Billy Bob” tattoo, until they split up and she had his name lasered off). Rapper 50 Cent’s entire back is covered in tattoos. Britney Spears apparently has a fairy, a daisy, a butterfly, the Chinese symbol for “mystery,” and three Hebrew letters burned onto her feet, stomach, and neck. Soccer star David Beckham tattooed his arm and back with the names of his wife and sons.

  And lest we forget those Republicans, former Secretary of State George Shultz is said to have a Princeton Tiger tattooed on his rear end—a claim he refuses to confirm or deny.

  But as the tattoo clientele moves from criminals to coeds, from the dispossessed to debutantes, what are the implications for America?

  First, tattoo artists might want to do what every expanding service does—move upscale, set up proper licensing and regulation, increase prices, modernize the designs and graphics, and set up national chains, with a few celebrity spokespersons. (Jolie or Beckham alone could sell millions of tattoos on TV.) There are now estimated to be anywhere from 4,000 to 15,000 tattoo parlors in the U.S., up from 300 just twenty years ago. This is a potential billion-dollar marketplace—in something as elevated as “body art,” with mainstream demand—and yet it’s still being run by mom-and-pop shops that sell Dungeons and Dragons card sets. Where is the McDonald’s of tattoos—with standardized brand, safety assurances, and national advertising? (And where is the Le Cirque, with the most elite artists for the most elite clientele?) Such a rolling-up of the business could double the market overnight.

  Look for changes in official policies, too. Although the U.S. Coast Guard still rejects recruits with visible tattoos, or ones that cover more than 25 percent of a lower arm or leg, the Army changed its policy in 2006 to allow tattooed hands or necks so long as the tattoos are not “extremist, indecent, sexist, or racist.”

  Does even that restriction violate the First Amendment? Just as long hair was once ruled protected speech, isn’t a tattoo constitutionally protected speech, too? Is the day far off that the Supreme Court will have to get into the tattoo business as well? (Will anyone recuse him- or herself, pleading a personal derma-secret under the black robes?) Imagine the impact of a ruling that tattoos are part of our inalienable rights.

  Google and Yahoo! already allow body art on their employees. So do Ford and Wells Fargo. Those organizations with tattoo bans still in place—like Starbucks, McDonald’s, Blockbuster, and many police departments around the nation—may soon revisit their policies, since body art bans may exclude lots of fresh young talent.

  And the federal government may need a piece of the action, too. To date, the FDA has not put its seal of approval on any tattoo pigments or ink, but what with the numbers of tattoos in America soaring like the butterfly on Drew Barrymore’s stomach, the regulatory agency may yet decide it needs to step in.

  Of course, what’s ironic about the Uptown Tattooed is that in their quest to show a little edge—their bad-boy and bad-girl side—they’ve actually ended up joining a very mainstream crowd. Oh sure, the Asian tiger on the deltoid. Been there, inked that.

  So the question is what’s the next trend, now that ear-piercing is conservative, tattooing is mainstream, and body-piercing is a yawn. Will flesh-as-advertising-space catch on? If you can be art, why can’t you be a billboard? How about $10 an hour for walking around the beach with a “Buy at Sunglass Hut” tattoo?

  Perhaps the tattoo industry has not developed to the next level because people believe it is a passing fad—like the hula hoop. But more likely, using our bodies to make political, sexual, romantic, and fraternal statements is here to stay, and the technology will develop to enable disappearing tattoos, 3D tattoos, and glowing tattoos. Moreover, since people who have them like to socialize with other people who have them—as the numbers keep growing, the numbers are likely to keep growing.

  Snowed-Under Slobs

  America has always fancied itself a country that values neatness. It has never been a very formal country—but it is one where “put away your stuff” is heard every day in tens of millions of homes.

  Neatness is such a craze it has spawned a $6 billion a year industry in home-organizing products, like plastic bins and file cabinets. We lay out $3 billion on top of that just trying to organize our closets. Every New Year’s, we resolve to “reduce clutter” almost as much as we resolve to lose weight.

  And when Moms aren’t nagging us to be neater, religion is. “Cleanliness is next to godliness” is said to be a second-century Hebrew proverb. The so-called Bible Diet promises “40 Days to Cleanliness.” In Islam, it is said that “purity and neatness are half of faith.” At least one recent study found that two-thirds of us feel guilt or shame about how messy we are.

  But despite the commercial, cultural, and religious pressure to Clean Up Our Act, there is a growing group of Americans who just won’t, or don’t, or can’t. And it’s not because they love mess, or think it’s liberating or inspiring. They are just swamped with stuff, and given the volume of things in their lives, they have simply decided that all the straightening, sorting, and scrubbing isn’t worth it.

  While my personal philosophy is to keep everything fairly neat, I have adopted a utilitarian approach to filing and neatness. If you are going to look at something at most once, if ever, don’t create a file for it. For example, in 2006, just throw all the bills into a bin—“Bills 2006,” and don’t bother to create a file for every different type of bill. If you ever need to find something, spend the time filing then. It’s my own system to keep myself from drowning in useless filing, even though today most everything is online. But more and more people are adopting an even simpler philosophy—just give up and give in—and let the mess begin.

  In the spring of 2007, we did a quick poll to find out just who America’s Slobs are, and how messy they are compared to everybody else. We carved out “Slobs” as anyone who identified him or herself as “very messy,” anyone who said others would call him or her a slob, or anyone who said that messiness has in some way slowed them down or lessened their quality of life. The incidence of such hard-core Slobs in America was about 1 in 10. Of 200 million adults in America, that’s 20 million people.

  The Slobs are not, as you might have thought, overwhelmingly male. Men do outnumber women, but only by 55 to 45 percent. And neither are the Slobs slothful or unsuccessful. More than 2 in 3 are employed full-time, and of those that have kids, most of them have kids under 5. They are significantly more likely than Non-Slobs to have finished college and/or graduate school. They are twice as likely as Non-Slobs to make over $100,000 a year. And Slobs identify as liberal at nearly twice the rate of Non-Slobs (37 versus 19 percent), with a remarkable 47 percent of Slobs saying they are Democrats.

  Fewer than 1 in 4 make their beds as part of a daily routine. More than 1 in 3 will leave dirty dishes in the sink more than a day. About 15 percent will even leave dirty dishes in their den, living room, or bedroom longer than a day. When they get undressed at night, almost 4 in 10 drop their clothes on the floor. One in 3 lets kitchen countertop clutter go uncleaned for more than a week, if not indefinitely.

  In 2007, business experts Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman published A Perfect Mess, a book out to make the case for sloppiness. They said messy desks are linked to wisdom, experience, and higher salaries (which is consistent with our poll, at least for earners over $100,000). They said sloppiness allows for the qualities critical to greatness—like improvisation, adaptability, and serendipity. (If Alexander Fleming hadn’t been sloppy enough to leave dirty Petri dishes lying around his desk, he would never have discovered penicillin.) They even said that messy people make better parents—focused as they are on warmth and hominess, rather than stacked-up toys and ring-free coffee tables.

  They even hinted that clean is killing us. Doctors are now starting to credit the “hygiene hypothesis”—the idea that the sharp rise in childhood asthma and allergies today is attributable to the lack of exposure to certain germs. Chlorine bleach, which erases all mistakes one can make in clothing, is said to poison hundreds of kids a year, and may be linked to breast cancer in women and reproductive problems in men. Pesticides, those cure-alls for green trimmed lawns, have been linked to diminution of short-term memory, hand-eye coordination, and drawing ability in children. Suddenly dirt sounds sane, if not entirely sanitary. The Anti-Antiseptics may be on to something.

  But our poll found that most Slobs are not so much embracing the mess as giving in to it. They are less out to prove that disorder is not a disorder, so much as to manage their own experience of it. More than two-thirds of Slobs said they wished they were neater (and none wished he or she was messier). Two-thirds of Slobs agreed that being neat helps people be in control of their lives. Hardly any Slobs defended messiness, with fewer than 1 in 4 saying it helps them be creative. Indeed, over half of Slobs said that even they could never live with a slob—pretty near the number of Non-Slobs who said that. This group is not about proselytizing pandemonium. They are just trying to manage their mess.

  Because when people were asked why their houses get messy, both Slobs and everyone else led not with pride, or indifference, or even lack of time. They pleaded an overabundance of stuff. Having too much, and too few places to store it, made up more than half of the reason why America’s Slobs are struggling.

  What is the biggest reason your home gets dirty or messy?

  All Slobs

  There’s too much stuff 29 33

  I don’t have time to keep it clean and neat 18 22

  There’s not enough storage 17 18

  My home doesn’t really get dirty or messy 22 16

  I/we don’t care if it’s messy 4 8

  Mess helps me be creative 1 2

  Don’t know 7 2

  And so this is a trend about overabundance in America—making it less like laziness, and more like obesity. We have a glut of possessions, like we have a glut of food. Hence the surge in Slobs among the wealthy. The more we can buy, the more we do buy—and get, and win, and collect, and keep. And while many people go out and spend on more stuff to help them organize their stuff, the Snowed-Under Slobs simply live amid it all, letting clutter be their natural environment, instead of fighting it one dish and dirty sock at a time.

  The implications are significant. First, if you live with a Slob, stop nagging. Fully 76 percent of Slobs said they hate being nagged about being sloppy—much as the obese don’t generally appreciate being harangued by (or eat any less as a result of) spouses’ complaints. Slobs are not open to rational persuasion on this front; they’re feeling bad enough about themselves as it is.

  And if we all loosened up a bit, maybe life would be all that much more enjoyable. We are in an age of more permissive parents, greater individual expression, and greater personal choice. Neatness may not be a thing of the past, but for 1 in 10 Americans, it is just another one of those ideals that is unachievable due to the crush of work and responsibility. Failing to live up to modern standards of neatness is, as our poll shows, a “high-class” problem. The richer, more educated, and busier you are, the greater the likelihood you are one of the growing class of American Snowed-Under Slobs.

  Surgery Lovers

  A very shy, demure friend of mine recently had Lasik surgery, which she found to be wonderfully effective and painless. For weeks afterward, she stunned everyone by asking, “What else should I have done? Do I need a nose job? Should I buy some silicones?”

  Had she done either one, of course, she’d have had plenty of company. Cosmetic procedures, both invasive and noninvasive, have become so popular in America lately that between liposuction, Lasik, nose jobs, and tummy tucks—and the latest favorite, eyelash transplant surgery—it seems like it’s the rare American who hasn’t volunteered to go under the knife.

  What used to be the genteel secret of aging, wealthy, white women is now spreading to everyone—including younger, middle-income, and non-Caucasian people. In 2005, 41 percent of surgeons surveyed said they’re treating teens. Only 1 in 8 people considering plastic surgery have an income over $90,000; the biggest group (at 41 percent) have incomes between $31,000 and $60,000. And from 1999 to 2001, the number of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanics seeking facial cosmetic and reconstructive surgery grew by over 200 percent.

  Oh, and men. Of the 12 million cosmetic procedures performed in 2004, more than 1 million were performed on men. (In 2005, there was a 417 percent boost in the number of men who had “ablative skin-resurfacing”—which means peeling off the top layer of skin with a laser and heating the collagen underneath to “regenerate” it.) Ten years ago, a man wouldn’t be caught dead on the plastic surgeon’s table. Now, men are trying to stay competitive at work by looking more youthful and energetic, and they’re trying to keep up with their perpetually youthful wives.

  In fact, 1 in 3 surgeons surveyed in 2005 said they see husbands and wives coming in for cosmetic enhancements together. One-fifth of surgeons said mothers and daughters come in together—the numbers say that’s probably a face lift for Mom and bigger breasts for Daughter. The family that “lifts” together shifts together.

  What used to be a wink-wink secret for ladies (if their eyes could still flutter) is now an open pursuit for everyone. New technologies have made it a breeze. You can zip in and out in a day, or during lunch for Botox, and unlike the old days where one took a “vacation abroad,” today there’s hardly any recovery time. Many procedures cost less than a nice laptop. What’s not to love?

  Nothing, apparently. Since 1997, there has been a 444 percent increase in the U.S. in the number of cosmetic procedures, whether it’s face lifts, breast enhancements, skin-resurfacings, or fat injections (into the lips). Americans spent almost $12.4 billion on cosmetic procedures in 2005—about the same amount we spent on physical fitness and exercise. Why work to improve your body if you can just buy a better one?