I was in New York and soon I will be back in San Francisco, a city that I love
I quit my job in January, and have been on a professional sabbatical since then. I have spent the past six weeks in New York, a city I lived in for two years two years ago.
New York has always been, to me, a city of fantasy. When I was unhappy in San Francisco, it was imagining a better life in New York that drew me out here. During my sabbatical, similarly, I've primarily been exploring the vague possibility of a different career, something outside of tech.
In both cases, I value enormously the experience that I have had in this city, which is like no place else. It is culturally vibrant, full of smart, ambitious, highly interesting people. It is also, unfortunately, a city that drives me crazy and that I cannot live in. The main value of my experience has been to squash this kind of fantastical thinking, putting to rest that there is some "other" place or line of work where I would find myself happier.
When I left my job in January, I was extremely unhappy with my career, to the extent that I could not possibly imagine myself returning to the tech industry, that I would pursue anything else, whatever that was. After a few months, I got into the habit of writing full-time, and did a bit of freelace work. In New York, I went to readings, talked to writers, had an overall great time, and completely disabused myself from the notion that I want to live here or make a radical career change. I find myself, weirdly, excited and interested to get back to work in the tech industry, one that I left only six months ago on very negative terms.
Being in New York reminded me of how difficult I find it to simply exist here. I relate to stories of people who lived here a year before "crashing out" and returning to where they came from (it took me two). In New York, a city I broadly think very highly of, I feel deeply and persistently unsettled, with a source that I cannot identify and, no matter how much time I spent here, doesn't really go away. At its best, New York challenges me to get far outside my comfort zone, to becoming stronger at overcoming daily indignities and suffering. The city is loud, chaotic, dirty. The people are, broadly speaking, unfriendly, brash, and somewhat insular. These are obviously generalizations (and I love many people in New York and have had many great interactions, even with friendly strangers), and I do not mean them to be criticisms, merely simply a comparison to the easy-going, flexible, and open culture of northern California—a culture which I find myself existentially at complete ease (and which drives some East Coast people completely crazy).
In New York, I find myself obsessed with these sorts of SF comparisons, to the point of sometimes irritating people. I think I feel self-conscious because, on paper, New York is a city I should love, whereas San Francisco is a city that I do love. I saw a Substack debate where Sam Kriss explained how viscerally he hates the city (by which I of course mean SF), an attitude shared by many New Yorkers (towards whom Sam, a Londoner, is far more aligned). Recently, a sort of cultural meme is that anything uncool in New York is a result of "San Francisco" people taking over the city. This narrative is of course, misleading, there are probably far more uncool people and tech employees who moved to New York from the East Coast.
There are many extremely legitimate reasons to be critical of San Francisco and its impact on the world. In the past few years, the city has become highly associated with artificial intelligence, a revolutionary technology that has been received extremely negatively, and which most people, especially outside the Bay Area, have little interest in, something they view at best as a nuisance. Mark Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things" has been emblematic of the carelessness with which tech industry leaders have considered their enormous and often highly negative social impact on the world, and the Bay has an unfortunate association with horrible project's like Peter Thiel's attempts to destroy American democracy, Elon Musk's hoarding of unfathomable amounts of wealth, or Bryan Johnson's bizarre and quixotic quest to overcome death.
None of these people, it is worth noting, live in the San Francisco, nor even the Bay Area. San Francisco, for some, occupies a space as a cultural symbol that resembles everything that people may find wrong with the world. I simply think that this is often unfair or undeserved—the median experience of San Francisco is of kind, ordinary people enjoying the most beautiful city in the country.
For me, my relationship towards SF is a kind of natural, unconditional love, characteristic of the best kind of relationships. Even after years living in the city, I find myself frequently spontaneously struck but how much I love everything about this crazy, beautiful place. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation." In San Francisco, it is not that I defend its ugly parts, it is simply—and this comes very naturally—not where I direct my attention, which is instead directed towards everything wonderful about this place. I'm not sure where this attitude came from, but it might have to do with the fact that this is where my family grew up, it is the place I was born and which I simply have no interest of shaking from me.
On Twitter (a website dominated by New Yorkers and an exceptionally non-representative sample of SF residents), a video circulated of a "fashion show" where a muscular man puts on sunglasses and flexes a pose while wearing a vest branded for the AI insurance startup Corgi. Several comments suggest this might be worth breaking the eighty-year taboo against offensive usage of nuclear weapons.
It is, in a word, cringe. People in San Francisco, broadly speaking, operate heavily on a "live and let live" kind of attitude, where the worst thing you can do is harsh someone else's vibe. To many in New York, this is precisely the problem: no one is willing to teach these dweebs some shame.
It is on this point I disagree: San Francisco has problems, but its problems do not emerge, in my view, out of this kind of concentrated California-ness. A few blocks South of this fashion show, once a year, you can observe Folsom Street Festival, an event difficult to describe if you are not familiar with, and dedicated to the public display of "alternative sexuality." Neither the Corgi fashion show nor Folsom Street Fest are for me. But they are for some people, and both exist because of a kind of San Francisco's cultural libertarianism, acceptance of oddity, and deep cultural aversion to beating anyone down for the crime of being their authentic selves. I think this culture is worth celebrating, and one of my favorite parts about the city, one in which I think anyone and everyone should be (and often is) made to feel like they belong.