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Amanda Lee McCarty, sustainability consultant and host of the Clotheshorse podcast, remembers fixing a tear on her Forever 21 shirt with a staplerjust long enough to get through the workday before tossing it out. In the early 2000s, when fast-fashion brands began flooding the market, clothing became so cheap that shoppers could endlessly refresh their wardrobes. The garments were poorly made and tore easily, but it hardly mattered. They were designed to be disposable, encouraging repeat purchases. “It didn’t seem worth the time and effort to repair the top,” she recalls. “And besides, I didn’t have any mending skills at the time.” [Photo: Levi’s] McCarty isn’t alone. Starting in the early 1900s, schools trained studentsmostly girlsin the art of sewing and mending clothes in home economics classes. Students learned how to operate sewing machines to create tidy hemlines and sew buttons by hand. But by the 1970s, partly due to the feminist critique that home economics classes reinforced traditional gender roles, these courses slowly began getting cut from public schools. There are now several generations of Americans with no sewing skills at all. In a recent study conducted by Levi’s, 41% of Gen Zers report having no basic repair knowledge, such as fixing a tear or sewing on a buttonwhich is double the rate of older generations. [Photo: Levi’s] This also coincided with clothes getting cheaper, thanks to a global supply chain and low-wage labor in developing countries. Suddenly, clothes were so inexpensive that even the poorest families could buy them instead of making them. Eventually, as McCarty illustrates, they were so cheap that there was no point in even mending them. Today, the average American throws away 81.5 pounds of clothing every year, resulting in 2,100 pounds of textile waste entering U.S. landfills every second. This transformation of the fashion industry has led directly to the environmental disaster we now find ourselves in: Manufacturing billions of clothes annually accelerates climate change, and discarded clothes now clog up landfills, deserts, and oceans. Levi’s believes that one step in tackling the crisis is to teach Gen Z how to mend. The denim brand, which generates upward of $6 billion a year, has partnered with Discovery Education to create a curriculum aligned with educational standards that teaches high schoolers how to sew a button, mend a hole or tear, and hem trousers. This curriculum, which launches today, is available for free and will be shared with teachers across the country who can incorporate it into a wide range of coursesfrom STEM to civics to social studies. [Photo: Levi’s] “Needle-and-Thread Evangelism” The idea took hold during a poker night. Paul Dillinger, Levis head of global product innovation, noticed that a button had popped off a friends Oxford shirt. Oliver said he didnt have time to throw it away and put on a new shirt, Dillinger recalls. It was an illustration of everything thats wrong with the current paradigm. And it could be fixed with a little needle-and-thread evangelism. Dillinger, who trained as a fashion designer and is a skilled garment maker, spent 20 minutes teaching the groupmen in their mid-twentieshow to sew the button back on. Since then, hes made a habit of preaching the gospel of mending with everyone in his orbit, including his colleagues at Levis. [Photo: Levi’s] One of them was Alexis Bechtol, Levis director of community affairs. She saw an opportunity for the company to scale that education beyond informal demos. Bechtol helped spearhead the Wear Longer program and the partnership with Discovery Education, which specializes in developing age-appropriate lesson plans aligned with state and federal standards. Levi’ and Discovery Education worked together to create a curriculum that teaches students the foundations of mending a garment by hand without a sewing machine. There are four lesson plans that are each designed to take up a single classroom period and are flexible enough to be incorporated into courses across disciplines. Kimberly Wright, an instructional design manager at Discovery Education who worked on the curriculum, says the lessons arent positioned as a revival of home economics. Instead, theyre framed as practical, transferable skills relevant to a wide range of careers. Were seeing a resurgence in skills-based learning, Wright says. Across the country, theres a shift toward not just making students college-ready, but career-ready. The initiative is funded through Levis social impact and community engagement budget rather than its marketing arm, although the curriculum will be branded with the Levis logo. Dillinger believes that it is valuable for Levi’s to be associated with mending, because it emphasizes that its products are designed to be durable and long-lasting. “Levi’s wants to be the most loved item in your closet, the thing you wear most often,” he says. “If we empower our customers to sustain this old friend in their closet, it creates brand affinity.” [Photo: Levi’s] A Small Fix for a Larger Systemic Problem At its core, the curriculum aims to challenge Gen Zs perception of clothing as disposable. In theory, mending keeps garments out of landfills. Its about extending the life cycle of your product so you dont have to buy something new, Bechtol says. Gen Z is coming of age in a world dominated by ultra-fast-fashion players like Shein, where clothes are cheaper than ever. Mending is no longer an economic necessityand in some cases, it can cost more in time and money than a garment is worth. Levis is trying to reframe mending as something else: a creative act that allows wearers to personalize their clothes. Over time, Dillinger says that personal investment changes how people value what they own. Once youve invested time and care into repairing a garment, it shifts the value equation, he says. It becomes more like a plant or a petsomething youre responsible for sustaining. There’s no doubt that mending is a crucial part of the sustainable fashion movement. McCarty, who once stapled her shirt, now repairs her clothing to extend its life. But she points out that the fashion industry’s bigger problem is flooding the market with cheap clothes and encouraging constant consumption. While individuals can buy less and wear clothes longer, she says brands must take responsibility for producing fewer, more durable products. “It’s sort of like putting a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound and calling it fixed, when there are larger issues to deal with,” she says. [Photo: Levi’s] McCarty extends this critique to Levi’s itself. While some Levis products are durable, she notes that the company also produces large volumes of lower-end jeans for retailers like Target and Kohls. These garments are often made with synthetic fabrics that are harder to repair and wont biodegrade. “Levi’s is selling far more volume in lower-end jeans than they do in premium,” she says. “Some of these products are just not repairable.” Still, McCarty believes the Wear Longer program could meaningfully educate Gen Znot only about mending, but also about the broader consequences of overproduction. Dillinger agrees. “Once you become a participant in the life of the garment, it becomes harder to ignore the broader industrial reality of how clothes are made,” he says. “You’re not participating in a similar set of tasks to the people who made the clothes.” Ultimately, Dillinger sees mending as a form of empowerment. Teaching young people how to repair their clothes gives them agencyto extend what they own and to engage with fashion more critically. “The sooner we respect kids as emerging adults with agency, the sooner they can make more responsible decisions for themselves,” he says.
Category:
E-Commerce
As our attention spans and cognitive abilities are increasingly damaged by digital overuse and AI-mediated shortcuts, the ability to focus deeply and learn something in depth is quickly becoming a critical skill. Never have we had such broad access to information. And never have so many people felt unable to concentrate long enough to truly master anything. Learning is everywhere, yet depth feels elusive. In a world where artificial intelligence can retrieve, summarize, and recombine information faster than any human, what remains valuable is the capacity to incorporate it. And for that to be possible, you need to stay with a subject long enough for it to transform you. To develop judgment, sensibility, and embodied understanding. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Engineering scarcity in a world of abundance It is striking that some of the wealthiest people on the planet are actively trying to recreate conditions of scarcity for learning. Silicon Valley billionaires famously send their children to schools with no screens. The goal is to give the young brains of their offspring the chance to build attention, memory, and imagination without constant digital solicitation. And to give them an edge over hyperconnected, cognitively eroded plebs. Conscious of the erosion of their cognitive abilities, more and more people attempt to engineer artificial information scarcity for themselves. They block websites, silence notifications, use distraction-free devices, or retreat into deep work bubbles. A growing number deliberately swap smartphones for so-called dumb phones, accepting inconvenience in exchange for cognitive space. Among younger generations, a curious trend has emerged on TikTok: videos of people filming themselves doing absolutely nothing. What looks like absurdity is, in fact, a rebellion against overstimulationa desire to recover the ability to sit with oneself without external input. All these strategies point to the same intuition: Abundance without boundaries is not liberating. It is paralyzing. And learning, in particular, seems to require limits to flourish. Learning when the future is radically uncertain This matters all the more because learning has lost one of its traditional motivations: predictability. For decades, acquiring skills was tied to relatively stable professional trajectories. You learned accounting to become an accountant, law to become a lawyer, engineering to become an engineer. The link between effort and outcome was broadly intelligible. Today, nobody knows which skills will be valued among future white-collar workersor whether many of those will still be hired at all. Entire professions are being reshaped, fragmented, or automated faster than educational institutions can adapt. In such a context, learning can feel strangely demotivating. Why invest years mastering something that may soon be obsolete? And yet, this very uncertainty may make deep learning even more meaningful. When external guarantees disappear, learning becomes less about employability and more about orientation, about building internal resources like discernment, aesthetic sense, and intellectual resilience. This is where Taoist-inspired approaches to learning suddenly feel increasingly relevant. Whats Taoism? As one of the great spiritual traditions of China, it is traditionally associated with the Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao-Tzu (around the 6th century BCE), and later texts such as the writings of Zhuangzi. At its core lies the concept of the Taooften translated as the Waythe underlying, ever-changing principle that governs the natural world. Taoism is not a doctrine of control or optimization. It emphasizes alignment rather than domination, and harmony rather than performance. One of its central ideas is wu wei, often mistranslated as nonaction but better understood as effortless action: acting in accordance with the natural flow of things rather than forcing outcomes. Another key idea is pu, the uncarved block, symbolizing simplicity, openness, and unconditioned potential. Taoist wisdom consistently warns against excessof desire, of knowledge, of interventionand values emptiness, slowness, and restraint as conditions for clarity. In short, Taoism offers a sharp lens through which to rethink how we learn today. A lesson from Fabienne Verdier: scarcity as a teacher I was reminded of this while reading Passenger of Silence, French artist Fabienne Verdiers remarkable account of the 10 years she spent in China in the 1980s, studying calligraphy and immersing herself in Chinese artistic and philosophical traditions. (Until March 2026, some of her striking works are being exhibited at the Cité de lArchitecture museum in Paris, offering a visual echo to the intellectual journey she describes.) Verdier recounts the ascetic teaching methods of her calligraphy master. The caricature comes to mind immediately: the merciless master in Kill Bill, forcing Beatrix Kiddo to repeat the same gesture endlessly, withholding validation until the student is almost broken. Repeat and repeat and repeat the same strokeuntil boredom, frustration, and despair surface. Wait months, sometimes years, before being deemed worthy of moving on. Prove motivation, patience, and humility before even being accepted as a student. At one point in her book, Verdier recounts a decisive moment of collapse after being asked to paint endlessly the same strokesone that her master greets not with concern, but with joy. After months and months of training, I burst out one winter morning in front of my master:I cant go on anymore; I dont know where I am. In short, I dont understand anything anymore.Goo, good.I dont know where Im going.Good, good.I dont even know who I am anymore.Even better!I no longer know the difference between me and nothing.Bravo! The more I fumed, the more delighted he became, his face radiant with happiness and amazement. He was hopping with joy, tears in his eyes. I went on, overwhelmed by an inner pain, thinking he hadnt understood what I was saying:After all these years of practice, I realize that I am still just as ignorant in the face of the universe. I will never manage to accomplish what you are asking of me.Yes, that is exactly it, he said, clapping his hands with joy. He danced in place with an incomprehensible delight. At that moment, I thought he was delirious.You have no idea how much pleasure youve just given me! There are people for whom an entire lifetime is not enough to understand their own ignorance. 5 Taoist principles of learning we could all adopt 1. Learning as transformation, not acquisition: In Taoism, knowledge is not something you accumulate but something you become. The Tao Te Ching repeatedly suggests that true understanding comes not from adding more, but from stripping away the superfluous. Mastery is not about collecting credentials or information, but about internal change. Learning is successful when it alters how you act in the world. 2. Patience as a prerequisite: Lao-Tzu famously writes: I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Patience is a condition for learning to occur at all. Progress cant be forced. Growth unfolds in its own time, like the seasons. In learning, waiting is not wasted time but part of the processespecially when what is being learned is judgment, taste, or sensibility. 3. Scarcity and simplicity as cognitive discipline: Taoism consistently warns against excess. The ideal learner is not surrounded by infinite resources but protected from distraction. Fewer tools, fewer references, fewer stimuli allow attention to settle. As Lao-Tzu notes: When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. 4. Process over outcomes: Taoist wisdom is skeptical of linear progress and measurable outcomes. Learning does not move smoothly from beginner to expert; it circles, deepens, stalls, and restarts. This stands in stark contrast to modern learning cultures obsessed with efficiency, milestones, and KPIs. If you focus too much on results, you miss the internal transformations that constitute real mastery. 5. Boredom and not-knowing as thresholds: Perhaps the most radical principle is the role of boredom. Taoist practices value stillness and emptiness as gateways to insight. In learning, boredom is often the point where superficial motivation collapsesand where something deeper can begin. To tolerate boredom, uncertainty, and silence is to resist the constant stimulation of digital environments. Learning humility in an age of hubris Taoism dismantles the illusion of mastery and domination. It reminds us that knowledge is always partial, that control is fragile, and that force ultimately backfires. Water defeats rock.Those who claim to know do not truly know. Learning, in this tradition, is inseparable from the recognition of ones ignorance. Verdiers master does not celebrate her despair out of cruelty, but because she has finally reached a point where ego, certainty, and ambition collapse. Only then can real learning begin. This stands in sharp contrast with our contemporary climate of hubristechnological, economic, and politicalwhere confidence is rewarded more than doubt. Taoist learning offers a counter-ethic. It teaches that in brutal times, restraint may be the most radical form of resistance. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
Quiet quitting. Silent space-out. Faux focus. Call it what you want, a lot of todays workers are going through the motions on the surface while quietly powering down beneath it. Nearly half of Gen Z employees say theyre coasting, and overall U.S. employee engagement sits at a decade low. When engagement fades, performance becomes performative. But disengagement isnt just a problem to solve, its a signal to heed. Employees arent turning off. Theyre trying to tell us something. As CEO of SurveyMonkey, Ive witnessed how curiosity can be the cure to the workplace phenomenon resenteeisma state of resentment combined with absenteeismwhich is often fueled by the current economic uncertainty, high-profile layoffs, and the always looming threat of a recession that compels employees to stay in difficult jobs. Here are a few best practices: When you ask better questions, you reveal truer truths By asking better questions, you can get to the heart of what employees really need. A few small shifts in your approach to asking can make a big difference. Ask about feelings and solutions separately. Instead of asking, What do you think about manager-employee communications? Ask, How do you feel about manager-employee communications? Then, separately, What do you think would make it better? Dividing feelings and solutions into two distinct categories enhances understanding of each, providing a better roadmap to real change. Keep it simple. Avoid double-barreled questions that blur answers. Instead of asking, How satisfied are you with your managers communication and support? Ask two clear questions: one about communication and one about support. Be receptive to harsh truths. When you ask questions with a genuine interest in the answers, employees will be more likely to open up, share ideas, and re-engage. Asking harder questions often reveals truer answers that get to the heart of the matter faster. Youll hear frustrations, confusion, and even criticism. But discomfort is often where innovation starts. Plan to be uncomfortable, and you wont be disappointed. Be clear about anonymity. Anonymity can surface more honest feedback, but its not always the best route. Sometimes youll want to follow up on a great idea or recognize the person who shared it. Either way, be transparent about whether feedback is anonymous. People will keep sharing when the ground rules are clear. Make every day listening second nature Too often, conventional check-ins like annual reviews and quarterly surveys feel like impersonal boxes to check. Approached clinically, managers are more likely to miss early signs of disengagement. When people feel like their feedback is lost in a dashboard, they stop providing it. Employees know when feedback requests are performative, and they respond as such. Sincere listening needs to be lighter, faster, and less formal. You can normalize curiosity in small, consistent ways, including: Ask a simple question at the end of a team meeting: Whats standing in your way today? or What can we improve this week? Run short, focused pulse surveys that take 60 seconds or less to answer. Follow up verbally when something needs clarification, rather than using email or Slack. Share one piece of feedback youve acted on recently. My team has seen that a five-minute feedback loop can reveal what a 50-question survey misses. Its less about frequency and more about follow-through. When employees see their input lead to action, trust grows, and engagement follows. Take every comment seriously Even the tiniest morsel of feedback can spark outsized change. A lone remark can connect teams, bridge silos, and turn passive frustration into active progress. One of the best examples Ive seen came from a deceptively simple comment in a benefits survey from our Chief People Officers team. While the overall feedback was positive, one person asked: What about the janitorial staff? This simple yet powerful question led her team to re-evaluate benefits for the vendor partners who keep our offices running every day. Within months, she expanded health insurance, paid time off, and transportation benefits to all contract employees. The ripple effect of this change was immediate. Our contractors said they felt more motivated, and regular employees were proud to work for a company that took care of everyone under its roof. That motivation and pride translated into stronger engagement, higher productivity, and a more unified culture. All of it started with a single comment, taken seriously. Start small, stay curious Resenteeism isnt just a blip. Its a signal. If we know how to listen, we can turn that signal into strategy. The key is to start small and stay consistently curious. Ask one question. If you dont get specific feedback, such as a vague All good! or Its fine!, reframe it: What part of this experience didnt land for you? If its a 9 out of 10, what would make it a 10 out of 10? You cant reverse disengagement overnight, but you can make incremental progressand progress compounds. Its a philosophy my team and I try to live by: better is better. What question will you ask today?
Category:
E-Commerce
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