2016: I Didn’t Go to College. I Went to Goop.

I was nineteen, under-qualified, and somehow exactly in the right place.

This week I posted something entirely innocuous on Instagram. A Yeti cooler made a cameo. I tagged it—maybe optimistically, maybe delusionally—hoping that one day it might turn into a sponsorship. But for now, nothing sponsored, nothing strategic. Just a cooler doing what coolers do.

Within hours, a few messages landed in my inbox. Thoughtful ones. Pointed ones. People telling me Yeti wasn’t a brand they believed in, that its values didn’t align with theirs, that they knew people who had left the company because of the principles it represented.

It stopped me mid-scroll.

Partly because I don’t stand for those values either. And partly because—how is anyone actually supposed to know what every brand stands for? Is there a handbook I missed? A spreadsheet circulating quietly that explains who’s morally sound and who’s quietly evil?

Once I got past that initial spiral, I thought deeper.

Not because I felt defensive—but because it cracked open a much bigger question I haven’t stopped thinking about since:

Are you the brand you work for? And in reverse—does a brand become the people who work there?

And then, more uncomfortably: Have I been the brand I worked for?

Also this week, 2016 has apparently become a trend.