Less than six months ago, Zoe De La Paz, 26, was splitting an apartment with a roommate in Chicago and earning about $75,000 a year as a mechanical designer for an engineering firm. But she was feeling creatively unfulfilled and was looking for a way out. Today, she lives in Mammoth Village in Yellowstone National Park, where she works as a seamstress. She says she is living what she considers a dream life and working a job she truly loves.
This is an installment of CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series, which profiles people across the globe and details how they earn, spend and save their money.
Produced by: Tasia Jensen
Editor: Marisa Forziati
Camera: Lucas Mullikin
Managing Producer: Beatriz Bajuelos
Animators: Christina Locopo, Alisa Stern
Senior Production Manager: Kathy Mavrikakis
Additional Footage: Getty Images, Zoe De La Paz
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I Quit My Corporate Job To Become A Seamstress At Yellowstone National Park
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I'd do this in a heartbeat. Been sewing for 50 years. Hire me.
With your experience, for your next job you might see if you can get on in Ashland Oregon for theater/costume sewing. That is a big theater scene and employs a lot of support staff, many of who live there year-round. The plays go spring thru fall. It would also be a pretty place to live surrounded by good hiking areas.
Until this opportunity to exploit falls into the gaze of Soren and they privatize the uniform supplies and force park employees to pay for them 🙄
Imagine if we could have rent for $100 and no car payment, no car insurance, low cost health care, and a nest egg, free planned activities. We could choose jobs we loved rather than simply to literally provide a roof over our head and food on the table. We all need and deserve universal health care and a living wage.
seamstress is a useful job, not many good ones out there, my sister has a business, she can't keep up, she doesn't even have a sign on her shop, we all grew up behind a sewing machine, she just expanded on it.
she did 72 bridal gowns since April, just crazy, I help her whenever I can,;
i mean that's great for her.
having extremely cheap rent. and subsidized food/utilities. it's great that she can basically work a low stress menial job and live a life of relative comfort (while her hourly wage is bolstered by federal protections from liberal administrations).
the stupidity is that 800lb gorilla in the room. millions upon millions of americas make similar or less hourly wage. spend thousands on rent/no cheap housing available, need to have a car, and spend hundreds on food. (let alone child care, and healthcare. —which she misc does not pay for) and those people… often exactly the ones making less money are subject to extreme stress, and violence via employer pressure/threats, and have little to no viable alternatives given the razor thin margins between employed/homeless
It’s a shame she feels the pressure to say she hates her job. It would be great if she could just be herself amongst her friends.
7:05 smart lady, yeah! 🎉
Good grief hitchhiking?
Yellowstone is sooooo beautiful and makes you feel free from the wide open spaces to all the animals you can see. It makes you realize how wonderful our Parks in America really are!!! I was there 3 years ago and wish I could go back each year!
WOW I totally admire you. I love to sew as well
Comfortability is not a word. It’s comfort
The hitchhiking is the only thing that horrified me in this video!!!!
Leap and the net will appear……. I like it but…. 😂
This is corporate propaganda and a rationalization of why you too should be happy to have no healthcare and accept poverty
As someone who loves going to National Parks, Thank you for showing the people who help keep the nature accessable.
If you decide to leave the park you can make a killing opening your own business as a seamstress. It’s a dying art , we had 4 in our town and now we have 2. The new one that just opened up is booming.
I think thi might be my dream…
I love this so much
WOW ! Thank you for sharing !
Brave. I want to quit my 70k job and do what I want
Resilience! What a wonderful story. 🙂
I Love this live style. I have lived in many dorms. Unfortunately, no more dorms…I have a cat 😏😻