A couple weekends ago, my co-founder Peyman took a pilgrimage of sorts to San Francisco. One goal was strategic -- to raise money for our startup -- but another goal was spiritual, to rediscover his spark of the "California spirit," some innate sense that good things are still possible, that collaboration is abundant. I think he wanted to capture that easygoing nature in a bottle to sustain him for a hard road ahead.
What he came home with was quite different.
Could east-coast and west-coast personalities flip?
Throughout the 2010s, my Californian friends saw their home as a mythical land of the "yes, and." The mindset in 2010-2015 was that of a carefree abundance. Startup money was plentiful, YC was easy to get into, life was laid-back and casual, events started on "California time," Mountain View was where you moved when you wanted to get promoted. When I moved to San Diego for grad school, people said it was always sunny in La Jolla; that everybody was happy there. "Sure, people in Florida say they're always happy but here we actually are always happy," locals told me. The bay area radiated with a kind of magnetic energy.
"We run a chat system for distributed and remote teams"
"Must be willing to relocate to San Francisco"
It's funny how one's perception of home changes when viewed through other peoples' lenses. The Californians I knew saw East Coasters in a different light. New York City, the "city that never sleeps," retained a kind of panicked intensity in their minds. When my Ph.D. advisor moved to Cornell Tech, he was put off by the complicated process of buying a house in New Jersey. He lamented that "they require both sides of the transaction to retain a lawyer. It feels so slimy." Before I moved to follow, a dear friend pulled me aside one day to explicitly discourage me from moving to New York. He was earnestly worried for my mental health. "Cornell suicides are so common that they even have their own wikipedia page," he confided in me once. "I just don't want you to get depressed if you go there."
There's something in the wind
Peyman's spiritual journey a few weekends back was largely unsuccessful. He was hoping for abundance, but instead he witnessed a pervasive panicked energy; some sense that San Franciscans are either billionaires or just scraping by. He spoke of how every overheard conversation was about work, tech, AI, or startups.
Artificial intelligence is certainly responsible for a big chunk of this sentiment. College graduates are facing the grimmest job market in years and even established staff engineers in my social circles are having trouble finding work.
But I think the shift I'm seeing in the emotional resonance runs deeper than that. Across the board, engineers are worried about layoffs, efficiency, redundancy, even though we are the overwhelmingly dominant force reshaping the Bay Area. Startups on the west coast routinely expect employees to abide by the 996 work schedule - from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week. This schedule is already familiar to service workers with long commutes who have to go to extreme measures to just make rent, but the flood now rises to swallow every discipline.
A labor force that never sleeps, never leisures, never has time for art... What city does this remind Californians of?
Tech will probably continue to entrench itself as the dominant power animating the West Coast. Tech will probably continue to expect ever-more extreme dedication from its tradespeople. As this process happens, I wonder if NYC might someday steal the reputation as the place where non-tech disciplines can still "thrive," at least for the moment.
I earnestly wonder if the energy around "west coast" and "east coast" might switch places soon. I don't think NYC is becoming more laid back, but I certainly think the bay area is rapidly becoming more intense, and I think it may outpace the east coast someday if it hasn't already.
Final Thoughts
This sort of position piece is new to me. I'm used to academic, structured writing, where every claim is enumerated and supported by evidence, so it feels quite strange to write about my gut feelings, or my -- shudder! -- earnest guesses or worries, especially since I'm not prepared to support them in a debate.
But if I were to continue sketching this topic out, I'd want to outline:
- The role of individualism in shaping the forces of capital
- The way that the individualism of Americans differs from the individualism of other countries
- Community as remedy for some of this
- The role of non-tech disciplines as ecological signifiers of our noosphere's health, the rising tide that lifts all boats
Am I wrong? Is this post full of shit? Write your own blog post and tell me about it! I'd love to hear your thoughts!