Going from Life is Beautiful to... Death is Beautiful 🤷🏾♂️🤔
How do you go from creating epic live experiences to fixing the way we remember people who have died? Spoiler: they're both about keeping the party going...
I have been a generalist my entire career, bouncing from challenge to challenge, which inspired me enough to dive in and help solve problems. But the shift I made from founding one of the world's most culturally impactful music festivals to solving end-of-life memorialization seems the most shocking, but couldn't be more connected. Much like festivals, memorialization is in service of the living, to foster community in unexpected ways. Here's how I got from Life is Beautiful to death is beautiful.
I founded Life is Beautiful, a music & arts festival based out of Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2002. I did so after participating in what had to have been my 5th year of Lollapalooza, one of the most successful music festivals in the world. The inspiration didn't come from the excitement of being at a large-scale event (I'd attended them since I was 14, so the hype had worn off long before). Instead, the idea for LIB was born out of an article I read on the flight into Lolla, where I learned, for the first time, that rates of depression and suicide were rising faster for 14 - 23-year-olds than any previous generation in history. Those rates were an epidemic we are all too familiar with now, but in the early aughts, we're just scratching the surface. So, as I sat in a field with 90,000 people (mostly between the ages of 14 and 24), I began seeing the sea of bodies jumping in unison in the direction of another up-and-coming rockstar differently. 1-in-5. That's the stat that was ringing in my head. One in five people aged 14 - 24 years old were contemplating suicide, and one in 1-in-10 would attempt it. In that field, at that moment and purely statistically speaking, 18k kids had or were actively contemplating suicide.
I didn't go from "Wow, that's terrifying" to "Let's start a large party in the desert" immediately. It was a slower burn. My first step was visiting the producers of nearly every major music festival, pushing them to let me build a mental health program/experience within their existing events. These execs met my pitch with cold stares, laughter, and enough eye-rolls to make me feel like an emo tween all over again. The final straw for me was when a prominent LA-based festival founder looked at me and said, "Look, we're trying to throw a party here, and talking about suicide is just… a downer." It was at that moment, in that board room, across the table from that specific person, when I said to myself, "fuck it, I'm going to build my own."
The first year of Life is Beautiful featured over 40 nonprofits, most focused on mental health awareness, a handful of oversized public art installations engaging attendees through their experiences with trauma, and another ~50 thought leaders sharing their stories of resilience and pain. I remember the exact moment when I felt like we were onto something. It was seeing a mother and daughter embrace in a flood of tears while talking to a suicide prevention counselor at one of the nonprofit booths. We were scratching the surface of what would become an entertainment phenomenon.
Fast-forward seven years to 2020 and I was in a different place. I had left LIB, met my wife, and followed her to NYC, where we got married and had our first child. Nico was a year old when the first COVID-19 lockdown occurred in the city (the first in the US). So early 2020 would find our small family spending 24 hours a day in our 1,100 sq/ft apartment, Jess doing her news shows live from our living room, and me working through an existential crisis around what place, if any, I’d have in the entertainment industry after the pandemic passed and in-person experiences reopened. I quickly began to embrace my new place in life — as a 40-year-old father and husband who would rather eat nails than fly to another crowded city to attend yet another music festival (or any live event). I asked my wife for permission to retire from live entertainment, which she enthusiastically gave (she didn't feel a married father should be hitting 20+ festivals a year, herself), and took the space to find inspiration again, this time for something new.
I explored every ridiculous idea imaginable but kept crossing them off my list because of a new filter embedded in my psyche — I would only work on things that fostered community. That immediately let ideas like a "party in a box" subscription service and a new streetwear line for new fathers become nonstarters. It wasn't until I saw my wife working on building video memorials for the communities grieving the first COVID victims that I realized I'd found a place for my inexplicably cartoonish brain to live. To me, memorialization didn't translate the way it had for the death industry, which used tools like obituaries and funeral home profile pages to give loved ones a final digital resting place. From my perspective, remembrance was in service of the living, not the dead, as a method of encapsulating the learnings and experiences of a person who had died and allowing you and others to continue learning from them.
From that line of thinking, Chptr was born, originally envisioned as an art project that we nurtured into a tech platform and community. I sketched the early vision for Chptr as a solution to the problem I struggled with when working on LIB — how do we help people globally by strengthening communities? LIB, at its most successful, was always going to be a single weekend event, the limit of which was to the 50k+ people who attended that particular year. Chptr is something else; it's a way for communities to remain connected around the memory of a shared loved one and provide ways of strengthening those relationships over time. Through this platform, our team provides access to modern, community-driven memorialization tools to every single person on the planet.
Life is Beautiful was my way of enabling a community to form in service and support of each attendee's mental health needs, a way of crowdsourcing inspiration and help for those who needed it. Chptr is our team's way of enabling micro-communities to form around the legacy of a person who has died and crowdsource inspiration and help for those who need it within that group of people.
A friend once told me I was "the only person who could turn death into something fun." While we're never going to get that far into changing people's experiences with death, I sincerely believe we can fuel the celebration-of-life side of losing someone. Keeping community alive, even in death, can ensure the vibrancy of a person’s life continues to ripple through the lives of those most impacted by their existence. Those people who loved them. The result is a community effort to make each other feel stronger as we all continue living our own beautifully inspired lives.
Who knows, maybe the shift wasn’t as crazy as it seemed after all.
Thank you for reading. As always, stay good to each other.
Rehan
Founder x CEO, Chptr