san francisco: two months later

reflections

one of the most annoying things in the world is when people generalize about cities based on their individual experiences. however, talking about cities is so much fun, so that is what I will do in this post. take it all with the understanding that every city is big enough to mean drastically different things to different people.

(this is a casual follow-up to my previous post about moving.)

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when people have been asking me the past few weeks how it’s been living in SF, I spare no hesitation to tell them I absolutely love it. indeed, this is one of the few “big decisions” I’ve made in my life where I haven’t looked back even once.

when I was graduating from college it seemed “cool” to shit on SF. it doesn’t feel that way anymore, at least not among the people I know. (I’m sure there are still some circles where it’s cool to shit on it.) SF is definitely an odd place, to be fair. all the billboards on the highways are about optimizing some aspect of your SaaS startup. it’s hard to get out of the “tech bubble” here, if you’re in tech or are adjacent to it. but I personally have stopped viewing this as a problem; at least, not enough of a problem to make me not want to live here.

it’s interesting to notice how much the fear of being a “tech bro” dominated my thinking and decisions a few years ago. I interned here one summer, and was inexplicably terrified of coming back. not because I had such a bad time per se…but because the idea of being here working as a full-time software engineer at some SaaS company and going climbing on the weekdays and going out on the weekends and occasionally playing board games with friends or whatever…something about that was eery. I think I was really afraid of a loss of a sense of identity. who am I? if I’m completely interchangeable with any other random software engineer in this city, that’s scary.

what I didn’t realize at the time is that your identity is never fully defined by the fact that you “live in X city and work at Y job.” your identity is defined by many more details than that: your friends, your passions, what you actually do at work day-to-day, your family, your pet peeves.

this “dread of being a nameless cog” was pretty overpowering – I would feel it even on brief trips to SF. but now I just don’t feel it at all, which would have shocked my past self. this dread almost never comes up these days because (1) I have a clearer sense of who I am now, and (2) more importantly, it’s clearer to me now that anytime I realize I’ve landed in a life or identity I don’t like, I have the power to change it. the dread is entirely based on a self-perception in which you won’t make the changes you need to make to be happy.

I like that people here are unusual. people have unusual interests and host unusual things. people here are intensely curious. I went to a birthday party where we spent the day reading the papers of a professor (along with a break to play frisbee and tag in the grass). that’s the kind of thing that I might have hosted myself in NYC, but it’s certainly not the kind of thing I was ever invited to in NYC. that same weekend I went to a “sunday night lecture” on fluorescent proteins hosted at a group house. these things exist in NYC but I personally was never that exposed to them.

people talk about “SF has nature” and I always thought they were talking about three-hour drives to Tahoe or whatever but actually there’s so much nature literally right here, here are some pictures I’ve taken on walks:

okay, there’s gotta be something that isn’t good about SF – what would that be? two things come to mind: (1) people like being flexible about plans, which I’m generally a fan of, but it occasionally gets annoying. it’s more normal here to just not commit to plans until literally an hour before the plan. (at the same time I have found that the non-flakey people show up more consistently.) (2) people try too hard here sometimes – as in, they try hard at everything. every aspect of your life is something to optimize/maximize. there is sometimes a sense of “if you’re not literally changing the world, wtf are you doing with your life?” one of the first things someone asked me upon meeting me is “what’s your theory of change,” i.e. what is the lever by which you are intending to have maximal impact on the world? I didn’t have an answer for her.

my favorite thing about SF is the same as my favorite thing about any other place: the people. really curious and thoughtful and also nice. I’m inordinately lucky that I get to live here with my brother and see close friends regularly. I see internet friends every wednesday and sunday at meditation night and coworking; I see my college best friends every weekend when we watch Severance. whenever I’d land back in NYC I’d feel a bit of dread, it’s just such an intense and overwhelming city. whenever I land in SF I feel…relaxed. like ah this place is nice and quiet and charming. it reminds me of Baz Luhrmann’s quote where he says, “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.” we’ll have to wait to see when that happens.