A bit selfishly
There are 3 things that prompted me to start working on this project. One is entirely selfish. I’ll start there.
I’ve been experiencing a sort of generalized ennui that I believe is endemic to my age group. Over the past couple of years I’ve been wrestling with a question that could be articulated in a variety of ways but more or less boils down to the fundamental question most people ask themselves at one point or another “What should I be doing with my life?”
I’m in the back half of my mid twenties (26) and the initial excitement of joining the workforce, making money (to spend! to save!), and moving to a new city has worn off, resurfacing the same question I struggled with the entirety of my senior year of college. Luckily at that time my choice was more or less made for me. With the onset of the pandemic I ended up focusing more on getting a job, any job, than discovering my vocation.
I followed a fairly traditional route: working at a large company followed by an even larger company, consistently getting promoted, working hard (sometimes really hard) and fundamentally learning a lot about what it means to have a 40+ hour a week job that’s not just a summer gig. I have been lucky enough to find mentors early on. People who gave me guidance on how to navigate the workplace but more than that, who gave me responsibility, one of the greatest gifts you can get as a young person. After almost five years I can point to clear paradigms from traditional career paths, people working at well known companies who are highly highly successful in a career I might want.
Despite this, there is a nagging sense that I haven’t done all my research, that there are people out there who are not only providing for themselves and their families but are working on something interesting and exciting, building something worth building. I have examples of paths I might want for an office job but I don’t have any paradigms for people who have made the alternate path work. My first reason, my selfish reason, for starting this website was to be able to sit down with people who have followed that alternative path in a setting where I could ask whatever question I wanted under the guise of an interview. As I go through the process of figuring out the answer to the question that has been nagging at me with varying intensity for over 6 years I am still searching for those paradigms.
The second reason I started 202 was to create a sort of log of place. I wanted to build a running collection of interviews, walks, and profiles with Washington DC as the thruline. I previously ( and still!) do some work for a fantastic website called Shops Around the Corner. They are building a small database of shoppy shops around the country, interviewing some of those owner/operators in the process. After writing for them for a while, I found that I couldn’t escape the sense that DC as a place was so fundamental, so essential to how small businesses here are run, that focusing on them as part of a national project would be doing them and The District a disservice. Even with all of the flack that DC catches from people who don’t live here, this place a whole lot going for it. Reminding ourselves of the normal lives, the lives of people who don’t work directly in government, has value.
Finally, this city and the people in it are just cool. Running a small business, any small business, is maddeningly, impossible hard. The fetishization of small business ownership that populates my Instagram “For You” page tends to miss the point by ignoring all of the inane tasks comprised in making something work. Skipping right to an aesthetic video of a well dressed former banker turned baker, pulling dough out of the oven while a 15 second sound bite of “Chicago” by Flipturn plays in the background is a far cry from what small businesses owners really think about. The friction is part of the point. Small businesses are nothing if not incredibly painful passion projects. You need to love it to keep doing it. Erasing all of the hours these owners spend diving into item by item margins on Quickbooks cheapens what they do. There is a tension to their work that I find fascinating. Every person is doing their utmost to balance between the business and the experience, and that push and pull is what leads to long term, rooted, businesses that are deeply embedded in their community.
If you have a story you want to tell that broadly fits within our reasons for being, come join, we’d love to have you.
