I think it's important to acknowledge that you're talking about _your_ Bay Area, not _the_ Bay Area. What you're talking about feels very white, professional, techie-adjacent upper middle class. If you hang out at a Black church on a Sunday do you feel the curse of Aboutness? If you work at an unlicensed backyard taco stand in Fruitvale do you feel the curse of Aboutness? If you go to a sideshow or a rideout do you feel the curse of Aboutness? If you go live for a while at one of the sprawling homeless camps do you feel the curse of Aboutness? If you stand in the parking lot of Home Depot and take day labor gigs do you feel the curse of Aboutness?
By demographic numbers, these other ways of being are just as common as parties where everyone talks about their AI startup.
Literally next door to Snail Bar is a place called Yosi's Cafe. It's quite unassuming, the decor isn't fancy, it's just a cafe with pastries and coffee and an Ethiopian-inflected food menu. The owner's name is Azib. She's from Ethiopia, but has been in the area for several decades. She always dreamed of opening a restaurant -- an Ethiopian restaurant, naturally -- but she has four kids, and a husband who owns a business that keeps him very busy, and she was always worried that the kids would "take a wrong path" if she wasn't there, so she was a stay at home mom.
But now the kids are mostly grown-- one's a software engineer, one graduated from UCB in math, one graduated from Brown in economics-- now she can have her dream. But there are already "too many" Ethiopian restaurants so she opened a cafe instead. When we visited she had us taste coffee, because she's not really a coffee person and wanted to find a good blend people would like. She's a tea person, she likes a good English Breakfast.
Not everything on their menu is amazing, though it's all solid, but if you can get a croissant fresh out of the oven I promise you it will forget all about Aboutness for a while. Meanwhile in between the occasional dorks like me, there's usually a rotating cadre of multigenerational Ethiopian and adjacent community that likes to sit at tables and drink coffee and just kind of... hang out. Like you do. The language is mixed Amharic and English, so I don't really know what they're talking about, but I know the tone-- it's chatter, it's laughter, it's gossip and banter. They're probably not talking about AI, but maybe they are? I don't feel a lot of Aboutness there.
Around the corner from Snail Bar, past the Children's Hospital and the Church of the Good Shepherd (a largely Black Baptist church with thumping music on Sundays and block parties) is a day care named LaVonda's Crayon Box, and if you walk by you have a good chance of meeting a man named Dell who is often outside. He knows basically everyone in the neighborhood, from the techies and the lawyers to the cops and the drug dealers and the car thieves. He's an excellent carpenter and handyperson, you'll notice the Crayon Box is always in tip top shape, and he will go around the area at times fixing up buildings and vegetation that's causing a problem, just because it annoys him when things are broken. He'll hang out on the street for hours, just talking with folks who come by, including you if you happen by and say hello. He's got a couple cones blocking off a parking space so people can pull over and chat. Someone called 911 on his cones once as being a "traffic hazard", I saw it on Citizen and texted him to have a collective laugh at whatever idiot wasted OPD's time with that one. You won't find a lot of Aboutness there, just Dellness.
I'm not saying your observations are wrong, and I hear similar things from a lot of people, I'm basically in the same bubble you're in. But we should all remember that the area is big and diverse and has a lot of people who don't spend much time listening to podcasts or thinking about AI but do experience life in planes that a lot of us never even see.
The thing about writing in gestural hyperbole is it’s a natural mode of communication that’s good for capturing emotional truths felt by lots of people. So when you do it, readers who aren’t committed to taking you completely literally say “omg thank you, you get it,” and then a couple of people get pedantic as they look to fact check something that obviously isn’t written in the spirit of rigorous argument. It’s a tradeoff I’m happy to make.
Your grand stand relies on the idea that second class American cities are somehow incapable of supporting rich communities and lives. Bubble popper, pop thyself.
Thanks for this; I've lived in the Bay Area for a couple of years and even in a relatively short time have seen the Bay Area of the main post and some of the many Bay Areas similar to this comment. I love it here, but also realize all of these Bay Areas have real problems.
"Cities do have different hardships and characters, and complaints like these often do have some basis in reality: it’s true that Boston has worse Asian food than Los Angeles, and San Francisco has more people working in tech than Milwaukee. And because of these differences in realities, moving to a new city that doesn’t do what you’re used to quite as well as where you’re from, or doesn’t have the family and friends that you’re comfortable with, can be a painful experience.
The difference in realities can become compounded and seem extreme to the complainer: the fact that there is less Asian food than at home, and maybe you don’t know any other Asians, can make it seem like there’s no Asian food; the fact that the only people you know are your tech coworkers who aren’t showing their full personalities at work, while at home you had family and friends with different backgrounds and interests, can make it seem like everyone works in tech and has no personality…
When a person’s experience in a city becomes lonely and painful, the pain can subsume the entire experience of being there: it becomes their reality of the city, regardless of the factual realities of the city itself and all it has to offer."
You should ask yourself why Azib felt she had to lie to you and claim that you tasting the coffee was doing her an “altruism” or whatever. Rather than the truth, which is that this is probably the Ethiopian hospitality tradition? What would cause her to sell her being decorous to you as you instead creating utility for her, except what this article is about?
Tbh, it feels like the authors Bay Area simply paved over whatever your Bay Area used to be. Whatever authenticity is left in the land of big data is living on borrowed time, and inherited from a different era.
Agree. I hung out with low end art school hipsters in the Mission, not VCs. *So* much of Bay Area discussion on this site in particular gives a certain perspective on SF.
Growing up in Berkeley and now living in LA this is such a validating essay. The Bay claims "authenticity" as a value, but it feels so stifling and like the only way to be seen as authentic is to denounce anything benignly superficial or playful. Growing up there, it felt like the only acceptable "authentic" way to be was to wear clothing that doesn't accentuate your body, talk about the same topics from pretty much the same perspective, and hike. lol. There are many naturally beautiful terrains and special elements of the Bay Area that I adore, but this essay scratched an itch I hadn't been able to pinpoint. And what I love about LA is the opposite. It doesn't claim to be authentic, and the veneer of falsity feels so obvious that it is easily peeled away to reveal a vibrant and truly diverse group of people, if you're willing to look for them. LA feels challenging at times when you don't know what you're looking for, but when you do, it feels like a treasure hunt.
Having grown up half in San Diego, half in LA, with family in the Bay Area, I feel like San Diego was the most authentic place and everything starting from Orange County onward was a society of social statements.
In LA you had your social statements of "Skate Culture" mixed with the older generation's white suburban dream, and it's subsequent fall (See American History X, Falling Down, and the glut of media revolving around Compton/Watts gang culture).
In Orange County you had your wealthy white culture as laid out in "The Real OC" and "The OC" and all that.
In Ventura County and Santa Barbara, LA people fleeing from............LA people. Same habits and mindsets but they all think they're unique. Lots of people buying wineries and hilltops in hidden canyons just close enough to work but far enough to feel like they escaped.
And then farms until you get to the Silicon Valley era Bay (My mom and her side all were there when it was just farm country and Cupertino was a nowhere town of farmers and farmhands). Then this essay becomes wholly relevant for at least the non-ethnic folks. The last time I went to Berkeley was something like 2011 or 2012 and I got stuck in traffic because of a protest against.........................Kitty litter!!!! The silent planet killer!!! Right outside of a Nepalese crystal store or some such.
I've lived outside California for the better part of the last 15 years and I found that a lot of it has to do with California Whites as a demographic to themselves. While in Boston you have Irish, and New York you've got Italian and Jewish, and in Michigan and Minnesota you have Scandinavians, and all the other places with their subcultures, in California White people took to heart the idea of erasing where they came from. They're essentially a lost demographic who have no recognized or recognizable past surrounded by Chicanos and born Lat-Ams, immigrant Chinese communities over 150y old, and depending where we're talking a smorgasbord of other cultures. The Tech Indian and Chinese folks all bring their cultures with them and make serious efforts to maintain them.
The Bay in particular has the problem that when surrounded by authentic cultures doing cultural things, it begs the question to each White individual: "What's *our* thing?". You'll get breakfast burritos in the morning, Thai at noon, and Ethiopian takeout for dinner. Taiwanese Boba at the Boba Bar afterward. Inject the liberal ethos of "White Savior/White Guilt" into that environment and you get exactly what you described: people without purpose trying to define what others already continued doing from the "old country".
Imagine being the Ethiopian cafe owner mentioned in the first commebt, and feeling like you have to lie to your customers about the traditional Ethiopian hospitality custom of giving coffee and, although still giving coffee to customers/guests to taste, you need to tell those, you're being hospitable to, that they're actually helping you with their expertise!
Like a woman turning round to the man on their first date and saying "see this beautiful dress I wore, don't worry I didn't wear it for you, I'm not decorous, I actually wore it so I could get your opinion on the fit and the way it is sewed!"
Then the man goes on a Substack comment section, below an article about his own Aboutism, to use this anecdote to try and argue that actually people feel perfectly comfortable to be decorous around him and his culture isn't obsessed with aboutism at all! And then that becomes the most liked top comment!
O.o What's your explanation for former Mexican Mafia boss Joe "Pegleg" Morgan who is from a Croatian background but grew up in the hoods of San Pedro? Does he owe reparations too as a Croatian whose parents migrated in the 1920s?
Most of the "White" category folks that I have known in the 27 years I lived in California were *not* Anglo-Saxon. Many were Italian or Jewish or from Slavic nations like the example I gave. Some were Irish or Scotch, who themselves suffered abuses under the system of slavery and British imperialism. Lot of Germans and I even knew a guy with a Slovak background, all who came in the 1900s.
And then there is the hilarious bullshit of everyone calling Asians "White" because they didn't wallow in their shit but climbed out. Same for Jews.
The numbers game would suggest that a good many of the "White" folks in California are therefore *not* ethnically perpetrators of anything but for this reason or that got caught up in ways that their peers in other cities or states didn't.
For every skin smoking meth down in Lancaster or holding a 5 man rally in Palmdale, you've easily got 30 others who are being beaten over the head as responsible for something their ancestors didn't do or weren't even around for.
Which brings to another interesting point about it: when those that see things the way you do happen to judge "Whitey", do you actually look into their family history to determine how you'll treat them??? Social media that reaches me abroad implies that nobody can be bothered to ask or investigate before they act out their violent and hateful impulses on others.
As a fellow Bay to LA transplant, this nails the difference. My wife (who is a software engineer that doesn’t fit the traditional boxes) calls SF “the best Tuesday-Thursday city in America”
I visited San Francisco earlier this year and the place gave me such horrible bad vibes. Because it's extremely affluent, and ambitious (billboards for AI products everywhere! You can overhear people having in-depth technical discussions in the street!), but the homeless crisis is so, so bad. I saw worse things in San Francisco than I ever did in an entire life of living in Puerto Rico, a much poorer place. The juxtaposition of extreme wealth and utopian ambitions with the deepest misery was quite horrifying.
Oh yeah I mean all of my complaints above don't even touch on the economic disparity and public disorder elements, simply because I assume they go without saying
It's gotten quite a bit better in the last few years, but still is rough
When I turned 18, I visited family in Palo Alto, and I took a solo day trip by train to SF
My friend who lived there met me for coffee and dropped me off for my day at the Wharf.
At first SF was so cool! I was like “wow this is SF!”
But, as I was making my way from there through the city, hitting as many sites as possible, my phone dropped to 2%. And I had to pee.
No business would let me use their bathroom, I finally found one in Chinatown, quickly looked up where to go to get to the train station, realized I couldn’t memorize it, and instead made a beeline to the Apple Store.
I got SO lost. Phone dead, middle of nowhere. Walked by town hall thinking that would be a good area. No, it took me through the tenderloin district to town hall and I’ve never seen so many homeless. I’m from Detroit and people think it sucks, Detroit i see like 2-5 homeless in a whole DAY of being downtown.
In the literal city center of SF I saw 20-30 on ONE BLOCK!
I finally charged my phone at the Apple Store, made plans and set off.
The train station is apparently not somewhere you want to walk to - I felt so unsafe as a young 18 year old walking under a highway pass where 20 people were shooting up in a tent.
Basically my trip started out amazing, touristy, and vibrant, and by the end of the day my nervous system was shocked.
Even bought a painting from a homeless man in the core of the financial district. It felt ironic, in front of buildings of such grandeur, to have this interaction.
I wish better things for SF. That being said, it still does have beautiful sides to it!
Lived in Oakland 2014-2021, now Manhattan 2022-present.
Sasha, obviously we've met several times on your visits to this side of the continent, and I had no idea you felt this way about the Bay, this would have been an interesting in-person conversation! But in lieu of that, a Substack comment:
I have experienced the exact frustrations you're feeling so many times over, and was practically nodding my head in agreement at most of what you've written. If you haven't found your people, and even if you have, San Francisco can be an infuriating place socially, and I've etched many similar missives over the years about the social scene. It is the primary reason why I moved to New York.
I understand that this article is essentially a rant based on vibes and not intended to be thoroughly fact-checked, and while again, I agree with the majority of it, I think it would be useful to restore some perspective.
> In New York, the attractive people are attractive, but so are the ugly people — from the West Village girls to the octogenarians, costume and posture convey points of view.
Yes, but this also comes with frightening undertone of "all that matters are vibes". Walking around Manhattan these days, there's plenty of style, but no substance. The salient virtue a Manhattan pedestrian seems to care about is looking — and acting — "cool". These are not nice people. These are not people with humility, who can make fun of themselves. These are not people that treat others with respect.
Cults aside, monoculture aside, in San Francisco, people care much more about doing good, changing the world, and though they may be inept, or fail in very scary, powerful ways, San Francisco has far more substance than Manhattan (I am excluding Brooklyn here, purposefully, for a 1:1 comparison).
> Sure; I am describing a pair of bubbles: the tech and spirituality cliques. You can live outside of those bubbles — at which point, you are in a 2nd-tier American city, which is to say, living one of the best lives possible in material terms, although without much of a shared social fabric.
2nd-tier?! Au contraire! If you remove tech and spirituality completely, San Francisco *still* has the second most interesting people outside of New York. You could completely avoid both scenes and have an abundant, intellectual, caring social life.
> San Francisco is an avoidant city, and Berkeley is an anxious colony.
I notice that San Francisco and Berkeley are mentioned, but not Oakland. Though I worked in tech, I did not associate with the San Francisco tech scene at all. Most of my friends lived in Oakland, and were either from the ultimate, coliving, or rationality (and adjacent) communities, or just fit the archetype of "cool person that lives in Oakland". Explore the Oakland scene!
I have had better conversations in my "Oakland" scenes than I ever have in all of New York City (including Brooklyn). Yes, the pandemic and rise of AI-culture have severely dampened the Bay Area, I'm sure, but these people are still out there.
> It could help to implement Parisian sidewalk drinking culture.
Sam Altman, when he was with Y Combinator, once wrote an short blog post theorizing that one of the reasons San Francisco was rather antisocial was because it gets cold at night year-round and thus a lack of outdoor dining/bars. I'm having trouble locating this article, if anyone remembers it, let me know. But that was the gist.
It's funny, reflecting on our brief conversations, I sort of feel like we were talking about these things without talking about them. The Oakland scene may be the place for me!
I accept that these objections are reasonable. The ideal amount of vibe focus has to be somewhere between Manhattan and SF...
I too was hoping for some mention of Oakland, and although it can also suffer from the transient nature of this region, has a very different feeling.
As a native East Coaster who has 4 west coast years, 2 return trips and 1 recent visit: the article did mention a some. things that Oakland doesn’t have. The afraid-to-look-good is one I couldn’t quite put my finger on before I read it but wow!
Honesty and bluntness is missing. It’s almost like everyone is walking around on eggshells afraid to reveal their own true self in case they offend someone. Imagine that! Offending someone else for being yourself.
Post pandemic I do see things changing. I’m curious still, but so pining for a certain cultural warmth of home.
Berlin shares many similarities with SF here (money topics being a notable exception). Women lose social status with other women in Berlin if they look like they're trying to look good. When you remove some status games, like beauty, you get other status games, and often they are weird. Both cities also share a performative non-conformism that is more conformist than most mainstream cultures. And both have sexual liberty, but emotional repression and the devaluing of conventional beauty makes things feel less sexual. The drugs do alleviate some of these issues in both cities, while causing their own.
>When you remove some status games, like beauty, you get other status games, and often they are weird. Both cities also share a performative non-conformism that is more conformist than most mainstream cultures.
The older I get, the more appealing I find religion to be. It's almost like humans have a limited number of cultural "slots" which need to have something plugged into them, and religion is a way to plug them in on purpose rather than based on happenstance.
(Note that the important part of religion here is not really the supernatural claims, e.g. Confucianism would count as a religion for the purpose of this argument.)
An example is that most groups of people benefit from some sort of hated outgroup to achieve unity. In progressive culture, this unity gets achieved by scapegoating community members who deviated from the orthodoxy. In Christianity, we invent an entirely fictional character ("Satan") to unite against for solidarity purposes. Pretty clever.
As a woman who has lived in SF for the past 14 years, your premise doesn't ring true for me or my friend group (nor does the author's). My girlfriends and I hype each other up and genuinely enjoy looking good, especially when we go out. We have regular women's circles (sometimes they're more like covens, or regular meet-ups, sound healing, etc) where we talk about our emotions and create space for each other. Can't speak for the men of course, but this comment and the author's observations feel more like an East Bay issue.
The problem these guys have with the bay area is that compared to NYC or LA the women are on average much less attractive. They can't just say that without sounding like assholes, so it becomes about how the women here don't put any effort into their appearance when there's no evidence that's the case.
Conversely for the men, but I disagree about the on "average" part of your argument. Both LA and NYC have millions more people, therefore the number of "attractive" you see in the street will be higher, but you also see way more unattractive people too, you just don't notice. NYC and LA both have a higher concentration of actors/models of course, so there's an industry component for sure, but with that comes a less natural standard of beauty. For example many of the women in LA have had work done and it's obvious, especially up close. Even my normal (non-industry) friends in LA have had work done (boobs, lipo, injections). There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, that's the culture there. So if that's what you're looking for then, yes, there's more of that. But don't forget that the men there are also better looking so your competition is much higher (also likely to have had work done). I find it so funny that men in the bay will complain about women in the bay while look like slobs everywhere they go, lol. Despite that, I think there are tons of beautiful people in SF and the bay in general, it's a more natural beauty. It just depends on your definition of beauty and you preferences. There are tons of beautiful women here, but your minds and expectations are warped by social media, porn, and your ai girlfriends.
Yeah, I think the men here are much less attractive as well and also lack charisma. I think women place less emphasis on looks (and are also socially conditioned to pretend they don't value it as much as they actually do) so instead you get "the goods are odd" type complaints. SF does have attractive women, but they're concentrated in like three neighborhoods, often on a few blocks. Beyond that I don't see a gap between Berkeley/Oakland and SF (though there is a huge gap between these cities and the South Bay).
You lose me when you start talking about "definitions of beauty." Come on, there is such a thing as conventional beauty and the Bay Area just has much less of it regardless of filler use/cosmetic surgery, etc. I've lived in DC and plastic surgery there is rare (there's more of it here in my estimation), but I'd still venture the women are on average more attractive. I don't like excess make-up use and am honestly turned off when it seems like woman has spent too much time on her appearance. Talking about men being warped by social media/porn is just cope.
Conventionally attractive exist, sure. But you just told me there are a few blocks in three neighborhoods in SF where hot women live, come on. Even you can't hide your strong preferences (tell me the neighborhood and I can tell you what kind of women you like). Not to mention I'd guess those zip codes are economically advantaged, because rich people tend to invest in their looks; clothes, hair, jewelry, fitness, and surgery etc of course). Your preference of a more natural look would likely mean there are more women that you find attractive here than in LA, as few women there sport the look you described. I had a guy friend who wasn't very attracted to Asian women, which sucks for him because SF/the bay has tons of stunning Asian women. So for him, there were fewer "hot" women here. We can say what we want about conventional attractiveness (re: facial symmetry and fitness) but preferences matter, and beauty is subjective. I've spent a lot of time in DC (used to go for work twice a month). The fact you think there are better looking women there tells me you prefer people who are more dressed up and polished, people go to great lengths in DC to "look the part" because politics is another industry that selects for attractiveness. Which is also totally fine. We don't dress up as much in the bay, fashion is not as culturally important as it is in other big cities around the world. My point is a person's definition of attractive and beauty makes all the difference here, and there are a lot of things that go into it. Its fine to say people don't dress up as much and you don't like it, but saying people are less conventionally attractive on average as a *fact* feels like a huge stretch. For sapiosexuals, the bay is glittering with hot people and LA is a wasteland (I'm being hyperbolic but you get it). Without an objective study measuring facial symmetry/fitness, it's all subjective. We can all have different subjective options about it, like my friend. Separately, the idea that porn and social media is damaging men and their expectations around love and sex is a well documented phenomenon, not a cop out. It's harming women too, but in a different ways. So to say that doesn't matter in this context is silly.
>Even you can't hide your strong preferences (tell me the neighborhood and I can tell you what kind of women you like).
You got me. I like fit women and think they're more attractive than fat women. Is this the patriarchy?
>Not to mention I'd guess those zip codes are economically advantaged, because rich people tend to invest in their looks; clothes, hair, jewelry, fitness, and surgery etc of course).
Yes, poor people are more likely to be fat and spend less money on their appearance. Just like rich people are on average more educated than poor people, rich people on average are more attractive than poor people.
>Your preference of a more natural look would likely mean there are more women that you find attractive here than in LA, as few women there sport the look you described.
I lived in LA for 2 years 15 years ago. The 20 something woman from some podunk midwest town waiting tables and going to auditions for small roles can't afford cosmetic surgery. She's just hot, because that's a baseline expectation to have a decent shot at succeeding in film/tv. LA gets the hottest people from all over the US for a reason.
>We can say what we want about conventional attractiveness (re: facial symmetry and fitness) but preferences matter, and beauty is subjective.
Conventional means what the majority of people find attractive. So on average a city that has more conventionally attractive people will be thought by most people to be more attractive. "Beauty is subjective" is the ultimate cope.
>The fact you think there are better looking women there tells me you prefer people who are more dressed up and polished, people go to great lengths in DC to "look the part" because politics is another industry that selects for attractiveness.
If politics selects for attractiveness and more attractive women (and men) move to DC relative to SF (because tech doesn't select for it), than DC will have on average more attractive people.
What are we arguing about again?
>We don't dress up as much in the bay, fashion is not as culturally important as it is in other big cities around the world.
This is the point you initially argued against! And I agreed with you! I don't think bay area women are bad at fashion or spend less time on their appearance! You've just argued against yourself to avoid an unpleasant conclusion.
>My point is a person's definition of attractive and beauty makes all the difference here, and there are a lot of things that go into it. Its fine to say people don't dress up as much and you don't like it, but saying people are less conventionally attractive on average as a *fact* feels like a huge stretch
Okay, this makes more sense now. This whole thing boils down to not liking the conclusion.
How about this? "Success is subjective". There's no difference between the guy who runs a billion dollar company and the guy who works at Wendy's and lives with his parents. They're both successful on their own terms. There's some woman out there who thinks the Wendy's guy is successful, so who are we to say who is more or less successful? Just because it's convention to think otherwise?
>For sapiosexuals
LOL
>the bay is glittering with hot people and LA is a wasteland
Love the imagery. In all seriousness, I would rather date the modal woman from Berkeley vs Beverley Hills, but I'm not going to pretend Beverley Hills doesn't have more attractive women.
>Separately, the idea that porn and social media is damaging men and their expectations around love and sex is a well documented phenomenon, not a cop out. It's harming women too, but in a different ways.
There's no solid evidence that porn is raising men's standards on the dating market. The social science evidence we have shows that men are more likely to have absolute standards (i.e. they will date anyone who clears some pre-defined threshold of beauty) and women's standards are more likely to be responsive to environment (they will raise their standards if surrounded by successful men -- this is what happens in the Bay Area).
I would say Berlin must be the most different from SF. Of all the western cultural capitals of the world, in Berlin you can probably get by on the least amount of money, opening the door for people to really pursue art and creative activities in a way that isn’t possible in London, or presumably any American cities (I don’t have any direct experience of living in America)
I feel like adult male friendships are generally cursed with Aboutness. I wonder how much your age and happy, monogamous relationship colors this analysis.
Yeah. Not that I’m trying to take away from this. I just wonder how pronounced the differences in difference is between early to mid 20s people in SF and NY and mid to late 30s people. There’s a chance it goes either way: like maybe as you get older it gets more pronounced, or maybe young people in SF are even more eager to fit in and affect the attitudes you’ve detailed here so the difference is more noticeable.
If it changes anything I’m a mid 20’s male and none of my male friendships are this way. That being said I don’t really make male friends historically I prefer and have female friends so maybe I’m biased too!
Not to big brother you, but in my experience it’s something that happens over the 28 -> 35 time horizon. You basically have a handful of lifelong amazing friends you almost never see, and then a different handful of guys you do a specific thing with.
i'm a displaced 5th generation bay area native. my great great grandfather was born on telegraph hill in 1872 and every family member in each generation following - until mine - was born in San Francisco proper. my cousins and i grew up spread out across the bay area suburbs. i am very proud of where i'm from. i literally have the area code 650 tattooed on my calf.
unable to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of living, i tapped out a few years ago and moved to chicago. all but a couple of my family members have left as well. i know it's a bit hackneyed at this point to be a bay area native who resents tech... but i am a bay area native who greatly resents the effect of Big Tech on my beloved home.
your article resonated deeply with me and i think you hit the nail on the head in many respects as it relates to the tech bubble and the people who occupy it, particularly the transactional nature with which techies tend to "socialize."
with that being said, you do a thing that transplants tend to do when complaining about the bay that irks me a little bit. you briefly acknowledge this but you constantly refer to the Bay Area as a whole when really what you're talking about is the tech bubble. respectfully, i think you're telling on yourself a little bit here. this being your experience of the bay is partially a consequence of the people who you choose to surround yourself with.
maybe i'm blinded by nostalgia glasses and have an overly pollyanna view of myself and other bay area natives, but i think it's important to differentiate us from the tech bubble. there are many multi faceted, genuine, and good-hearted people in the bay. we have a distinct culture. we have bay area food, bay area slang, bay area art, bay area clothes, bay area humor. this still exists and it's beautiful and it's out there for you to experience in order to have a more enriching experience living there - it might be out of the way but you can find it (if you care to). after all, there was a bay area before Big Tech hegemony.
i love my life in chicago but i still get very homesick. if the housing bubble ever magically burst or if i won the lottery, i'd start packing immediately.
I would truly love to be inducted into the deeper culture here to the extent that it exists; I don't know how to get in. Your irk is fair. My social exposure here is really a product of complete happenstance; I'm not in tech, but people on the fringes of tech tend to like reading my stuff, and one of them married me. If I grew up here, I'd likely know a more complex subset...
Writing a piece like this, you face a dilemma. If every sentence you go, "but it's just my perspective," and "but this is just my little subjective experience," you write something boring and defensive. If you don't, you communicate in gestural generalities, and people can rightfully complain that you didn't capture the subtlety. I choose the latter and outsource some of the interpretive work to kind commenters like you...
I think the bit about bullying at the end is the key point - there world does actually need a city where unkempt weirdos argue about insane ideas that could completely reshape society, Vienna cafe culture for the 21st century. The issue is that no one in modern SF, especially the tech/rationalist circles, is confrontational enough to actually argue or disagree about anything - they coalesce into overly agreeable cults like you say, and are "contrarian" in the uniquely Bay Area way where you're contrarian in the exact same way everyone else is. I don't think importing a bunch of hot socialites of any gender will fix the Bay Area's problems; SF has always been a weird place, it's never gonna function like a NYC. But will actually help is a willingness to tear into each other's bad ideas, with the understanding that it's not personal, just the nature of the game - which I think is frankly too direct and aggressive for the city of awkward overachiever nerds the place has become. (I say this all as an awkward overachiever nerd myself.)
Is anywhere in the world like what I'm describing? Or is arguing about ideas, like so many other things, just limited to the internet now?
Maybe we need more of a public debate culture so people understand that it's just part of the game. Arguably this already exists for court cases. ("My client hired me to argue the case for X, and I'm doing my best.")
The issue is that sometimes you want to challenge some of the underlying premises of rationalism (the movement, not the concept of being rational) and that doesn't go as well
This isn't true in my experience. I'm not sure what you consider "underlying premises of rationalism", I wouldn't say there are any, but my local meetup regularly gets people that disagree with popular ideas among large rationalist bloggers, like utilitarianism or AGI x-risk.
A suggestion: maybe you feel that nobody is being sufficiently "contrarian" because nobody is expressing your beliefs. You should go do that! It sounds like you have a unique perspective.
You're really selling it LOL Being a New Yorker I was pretty shocked by all of California society that I've seen (La, Frisco, San Diego, mostly). In California everyone offers you a bright, sunny 'Hi!' but what they mean is 'Fuck you'. In NY you get a grouchy 'Fuck you' but what THEY mean is a bright, sunny "Hi!"
this is an excellent post. I have lived in the bay area my whole life and I'm acutely feeling this curse in my 30s. I would love to add an additional component of the curse. It's the Bay Area clique (or tribe). These are groups of people that only hang out with each other. It's very exclusive, whereas I feel like NYC is far more inclusive. My parents are in a couple cliques with other first gen immigrants. They have been hanging out for 30+ years. These cliques overlap with other first gen immigrants. Some of my friends who I went to high school and college w/ are also in these cliques. If you're in, the bay area is nice. You have your routine dinners and hikes and birthdays. If you're out, you're cursed
I grew up between France and the bay (my mom is french, dad is american) and I felt so lonely in the bay. The disregard for aesthetics in general was always something i thought actually made the quality of life a little inferior. I live happily in Paris now and can vouch for the Parisian terrace, it does wonders for bringing people closer. I do love visiting the bay for hikes and creative alone time though, you're spot on.
this was my favorite piece of the week. I am from LA and grew up roadtripping to SF in the 2010s and 2000s as a kid/teenager. I finally went back in 2024 and ugh, it was so lame. i mean
dont get me wrong, there's still a lot of fun stuff to do and i have people there i like and could have fun with anywhere, even phoenix, but it just felt like all the coolness and grime had been totally zapped up.
i can't write as well as you off the top of my head, but I laughed so much reading your piece and loved the incisive description of the "social" scene there. I am curious about the phenomenon u mentioned -- there's somehow way more men than women, so ostensibly this would be good for women in that men have to fight and claw, but then the women are desperate for monogamy. is it just that there is a small pool of actually fuckable guys, and they all are poly? i'd assume that the men there, in their desperation, would forgo their desire for non-monogamy if it at least meant getting a girlfriend? i also think SF is ground zero for this "Aboutness" thing, which I love. ive noticed increasingly adults don't know how to hang out without eventifying everything. like, i just wanna show up and have a beer and talk shit. why does everything have to be an axe throwing board game barcade paint and sip book club?
https://eudai.substack.com/p/the-odds-are-good-and-the-goods-are "If you share my taste for this kind of guy (shy, well-read, awkward, logical), or can get yourself to share it, you can also get into this ludicrously undertapped market of smart, high-earning men. If they’re not to your liking, ah well. But if they might be – try them out."
I suspect part of it is something like: There are many poly women in the bay area. Due to the skewed gender ratio, if you're a man, your best shot might be dating a woman who already has 4 boyfriends. If you subsequently meet a woman who wants monogamy, then you're forced to break up with your existing girlfriend in order to date her, which is unappealing. More realistically, you'll try to persuade her to adopt poly so you can stay with your existing girlfriend. Hence the "mind virus" aspect. Another angle: Monogamous men stop dating when they're in a relationship. Poly guys continue dating, which means they get a lot more practice at charming women. Dating is also lower stakes for them since they are likely to already be in a relationship. So they're more relaxed and charming.
Us tech guys have a typical range of personality types. If that range overlaps with what you want in a man (e.g. high-earning, sweet, braniac, outdoorsy, feminist, etc.) then the bay area is a very good place to be a single woman. On the other hand, if you're a tech guy in the bay area, it's not so great because all of the women who want guys like you are already spoken for.
It’s the last paragraph entirely. A lot of women in the US don’t want to date men in tech. It’s a low status profession when compared to other high income white collar jobs. There is also an aspect of where no matter what, a lot of women will always be only attracted to the most attractive men in the setting they’re in. Women’s attraction tends to be more relative than absolute.
Outside of that, Silicon Valley ratio is so bad that if even 2/3 of men aren’t single then there’s not a single woman left. A third of men have to be single no matter what just due to the lack of women. These men go up to SF as well.
>A lot of women in the US don’t want to date men in tech. It’s a low status profession when compared to other high income white collar jobs.
No, women don't want to date the type of man who works in tech. It's in no way a low status profession, especially when you control for credentials. One of my Chinese colleagues only dates tech guys (she thinks they're the smartest, lol) and she has friends who are similar. The kind of guy who works in tech is a master systematizer and this is what turns women off.
Eh, I think the relative status of tech guys has been going up and will go up further.
>Outside of that, Silicon Valley ratio is so bad that if even 2/3 of men aren’t single then there’s not a single woman left. A third of men have to be single no matter what just due to the lack of women. These men go up to SF as well.
I’m not sure if this is cause you’re in the rationalist distortion field or what but in regular circles - tech is a hated profession and looked down upon. It’s seen as mostly a super nerdy and profession you go into if you were a loser in high school.
With regard to Sasha's remark that hippies know how to fuck but don't know how to adult: I hypothesize what's going on there is something like, due to the rarity of single women in the bay area, you kinda have to be on top of your game as a man if you want to find one. Same way an RPG might let you specialize as either a warrior or a mage, in the Bay Area, men are more likely to specialize in either "career" or "social", because it's harder to succeed at both.
(Not only is it harder to find a woman in the bay area, it's also harder to *get good with women* because they tend to be default-frosty towards men.)
I'm also curious about why poly is be as popular as it is in an area where women can dictate the rules of the game. How are they deciding to end up in poly relationships, while craving monogamy, if ultimately they have the upper hand in the dating market? Something doesn't compute.
This post does an excellent job advertising the Bay Area to people like me. I feel right at home in cultures where social gatherings have legible purposes and norms, where the atmosphere is asexual by default (but there are sex parties for those who want it), and where conversations are dominated by weird people detailing their nerdy interests. But my heaven is another man's hell.
I think it's important to acknowledge that you're talking about _your_ Bay Area, not _the_ Bay Area. What you're talking about feels very white, professional, techie-adjacent upper middle class. If you hang out at a Black church on a Sunday do you feel the curse of Aboutness? If you work at an unlicensed backyard taco stand in Fruitvale do you feel the curse of Aboutness? If you go to a sideshow or a rideout do you feel the curse of Aboutness? If you go live for a while at one of the sprawling homeless camps do you feel the curse of Aboutness? If you stand in the parking lot of Home Depot and take day labor gigs do you feel the curse of Aboutness?
By demographic numbers, these other ways of being are just as common as parties where everyone talks about their AI startup.
Literally next door to Snail Bar is a place called Yosi's Cafe. It's quite unassuming, the decor isn't fancy, it's just a cafe with pastries and coffee and an Ethiopian-inflected food menu. The owner's name is Azib. She's from Ethiopia, but has been in the area for several decades. She always dreamed of opening a restaurant -- an Ethiopian restaurant, naturally -- but she has four kids, and a husband who owns a business that keeps him very busy, and she was always worried that the kids would "take a wrong path" if she wasn't there, so she was a stay at home mom.
But now the kids are mostly grown-- one's a software engineer, one graduated from UCB in math, one graduated from Brown in economics-- now she can have her dream. But there are already "too many" Ethiopian restaurants so she opened a cafe instead. When we visited she had us taste coffee, because she's not really a coffee person and wanted to find a good blend people would like. She's a tea person, she likes a good English Breakfast.
Not everything on their menu is amazing, though it's all solid, but if you can get a croissant fresh out of the oven I promise you it will forget all about Aboutness for a while. Meanwhile in between the occasional dorks like me, there's usually a rotating cadre of multigenerational Ethiopian and adjacent community that likes to sit at tables and drink coffee and just kind of... hang out. Like you do. The language is mixed Amharic and English, so I don't really know what they're talking about, but I know the tone-- it's chatter, it's laughter, it's gossip and banter. They're probably not talking about AI, but maybe they are? I don't feel a lot of Aboutness there.
Around the corner from Snail Bar, past the Children's Hospital and the Church of the Good Shepherd (a largely Black Baptist church with thumping music on Sundays and block parties) is a day care named LaVonda's Crayon Box, and if you walk by you have a good chance of meeting a man named Dell who is often outside. He knows basically everyone in the neighborhood, from the techies and the lawyers to the cops and the drug dealers and the car thieves. He's an excellent carpenter and handyperson, you'll notice the Crayon Box is always in tip top shape, and he will go around the area at times fixing up buildings and vegetation that's causing a problem, just because it annoys him when things are broken. He'll hang out on the street for hours, just talking with folks who come by, including you if you happen by and say hello. He's got a couple cones blocking off a parking space so people can pull over and chat. Someone called 911 on his cones once as being a "traffic hazard", I saw it on Citizen and texted him to have a collective laugh at whatever idiot wasted OPD's time with that one. You won't find a lot of Aboutness there, just Dellness.
I'm not saying your observations are wrong, and I hear similar things from a lot of people, I'm basically in the same bubble you're in. But we should all remember that the area is big and diverse and has a lot of people who don't spend much time listening to podcasts or thinking about AI but do experience life in planes that a lot of us never even see.
This is a wonderful comment! I believe I did directly acknowledge that I was talking about my Bay Area — but now I'll go to Yosi's Cafe, so, whatever.
The thing about writing in gestural hyperbole is it’s a natural mode of communication that’s good for capturing emotional truths felt by lots of people. So when you do it, readers who aren’t committed to taking you completely literally say “omg thank you, you get it,” and then a couple of people get pedantic as they look to fact check something that obviously isn’t written in the spirit of rigorous argument. It’s a tradeoff I’m happy to make.
Yeah, I got your drift perfectly.
I love the so-called "" :)
Well clarified and original decision a balanced choice.
Your grand stand relies on the idea that second class American cities are somehow incapable of supporting rich communities and lives. Bubble popper, pop thyself.
Which things described in Dan's comment are not available in any second tier American city?
Thanks for this; I've lived in the Bay Area for a couple of years and even in a relatively short time have seen the Bay Area of the main post and some of the many Bay Areas similar to this comment. I love it here, but also realize all of these Bay Areas have real problems.
I wrote about the idea of a person's city vs. the city a while back: https://statisticsandsentiments.substack.com/p/complaining-about-complaining-about
"Cities do have different hardships and characters, and complaints like these often do have some basis in reality: it’s true that Boston has worse Asian food than Los Angeles, and San Francisco has more people working in tech than Milwaukee. And because of these differences in realities, moving to a new city that doesn’t do what you’re used to quite as well as where you’re from, or doesn’t have the family and friends that you’re comfortable with, can be a painful experience.
The difference in realities can become compounded and seem extreme to the complainer: the fact that there is less Asian food than at home, and maybe you don’t know any other Asians, can make it seem like there’s no Asian food; the fact that the only people you know are your tech coworkers who aren’t showing their full personalities at work, while at home you had family and friends with different backgrounds and interests, can make it seem like everyone works in tech and has no personality…
When a person’s experience in a city becomes lonely and painful, the pain can subsume the entire experience of being there: it becomes their reality of the city, regardless of the factual realities of the city itself and all it has to offer."
omg this 💙
You should ask yourself why Azib felt she had to lie to you and claim that you tasting the coffee was doing her an “altruism” or whatever. Rather than the truth, which is that this is probably the Ethiopian hospitality tradition? What would cause her to sell her being decorous to you as you instead creating utility for her, except what this article is about?
LMFAO
Tbh, it feels like the authors Bay Area simply paved over whatever your Bay Area used to be. Whatever authenticity is left in the land of big data is living on borrowed time, and inherited from a different era.
Get a grip lmao he's describing his experience of the bay area, this is performative nonsense
Agree. This is not the vibe in Oakland. At least not in *my* Oakland.
Agree. I hung out with low end art school hipsters in the Mission, not VCs. *So* much of Bay Area discussion on this site in particular gives a certain perspective on SF.
No one experience accurately describes the finest intricacies of every single person in a geographic location. Yeah 🤷♂️
Man shut up
yeah this 100%
talking to random people on the street is a great antidote. you are in a city, use it.
Brilliant comment. 👌
Growing up in Berkeley and now living in LA this is such a validating essay. The Bay claims "authenticity" as a value, but it feels so stifling and like the only way to be seen as authentic is to denounce anything benignly superficial or playful. Growing up there, it felt like the only acceptable "authentic" way to be was to wear clothing that doesn't accentuate your body, talk about the same topics from pretty much the same perspective, and hike. lol. There are many naturally beautiful terrains and special elements of the Bay Area that I adore, but this essay scratched an itch I hadn't been able to pinpoint. And what I love about LA is the opposite. It doesn't claim to be authentic, and the veneer of falsity feels so obvious that it is easily peeled away to reveal a vibrant and truly diverse group of people, if you're willing to look for them. LA feels challenging at times when you don't know what you're looking for, but when you do, it feels like a treasure hunt.
Couldn't agree more on the comparison; I lived in LA for a couple of years and deeply love it. LA is sincere pretend, the Bay is fake real.
Having grown up half in San Diego, half in LA, with family in the Bay Area, I feel like San Diego was the most authentic place and everything starting from Orange County onward was a society of social statements.
In LA you had your social statements of "Skate Culture" mixed with the older generation's white suburban dream, and it's subsequent fall (See American History X, Falling Down, and the glut of media revolving around Compton/Watts gang culture).
In Orange County you had your wealthy white culture as laid out in "The Real OC" and "The OC" and all that.
In Ventura County and Santa Barbara, LA people fleeing from............LA people. Same habits and mindsets but they all think they're unique. Lots of people buying wineries and hilltops in hidden canyons just close enough to work but far enough to feel like they escaped.
And then farms until you get to the Silicon Valley era Bay (My mom and her side all were there when it was just farm country and Cupertino was a nowhere town of farmers and farmhands). Then this essay becomes wholly relevant for at least the non-ethnic folks. The last time I went to Berkeley was something like 2011 or 2012 and I got stuck in traffic because of a protest against.........................Kitty litter!!!! The silent planet killer!!! Right outside of a Nepalese crystal store or some such.
I've lived outside California for the better part of the last 15 years and I found that a lot of it has to do with California Whites as a demographic to themselves. While in Boston you have Irish, and New York you've got Italian and Jewish, and in Michigan and Minnesota you have Scandinavians, and all the other places with their subcultures, in California White people took to heart the idea of erasing where they came from. They're essentially a lost demographic who have no recognized or recognizable past surrounded by Chicanos and born Lat-Ams, immigrant Chinese communities over 150y old, and depending where we're talking a smorgasbord of other cultures. The Tech Indian and Chinese folks all bring their cultures with them and make serious efforts to maintain them.
The Bay in particular has the problem that when surrounded by authentic cultures doing cultural things, it begs the question to each White individual: "What's *our* thing?". You'll get breakfast burritos in the morning, Thai at noon, and Ethiopian takeout for dinner. Taiwanese Boba at the Boba Bar afterward. Inject the liberal ethos of "White Savior/White Guilt" into that environment and you get exactly what you described: people without purpose trying to define what others already continued doing from the "old country".
Imagine being the Ethiopian cafe owner mentioned in the first commebt, and feeling like you have to lie to your customers about the traditional Ethiopian hospitality custom of giving coffee and, although still giving coffee to customers/guests to taste, you need to tell those, you're being hospitable to, that they're actually helping you with their expertise!
Like a woman turning round to the man on their first date and saying "see this beautiful dress I wore, don't worry I didn't wear it for you, I'm not decorous, I actually wore it so I could get your opinion on the fit and the way it is sewed!"
Then the man goes on a Substack comment section, below an article about his own Aboutism, to use this anecdote to try and argue that actually people feel perfectly comfortable to be decorous around him and his culture isn't obsessed with aboutism at all! And then that becomes the most liked top comment!
Incredible....
Come again?
Please no
O.o What's your explanation for former Mexican Mafia boss Joe "Pegleg" Morgan who is from a Croatian background but grew up in the hoods of San Pedro? Does he owe reparations too as a Croatian whose parents migrated in the 1920s?
Most of the "White" category folks that I have known in the 27 years I lived in California were *not* Anglo-Saxon. Many were Italian or Jewish or from Slavic nations like the example I gave. Some were Irish or Scotch, who themselves suffered abuses under the system of slavery and British imperialism. Lot of Germans and I even knew a guy with a Slovak background, all who came in the 1900s.
And then there is the hilarious bullshit of everyone calling Asians "White" because they didn't wallow in their shit but climbed out. Same for Jews.
The numbers game would suggest that a good many of the "White" folks in California are therefore *not* ethnically perpetrators of anything but for this reason or that got caught up in ways that their peers in other cities or states didn't.
For every skin smoking meth down in Lancaster or holding a 5 man rally in Palmdale, you've easily got 30 others who are being beaten over the head as responsible for something their ancestors didn't do or weren't even around for.
Which brings to another interesting point about it: when those that see things the way you do happen to judge "Whitey", do you actually look into their family history to determine how you'll treat them??? Social media that reaches me abroad implies that nobody can be bothered to ask or investigate before they act out their violent and hateful impulses on others.
As a fellow Bay to LA transplant, this nails the difference. My wife (who is a software engineer that doesn’t fit the traditional boxes) calls SF “the best Tuesday-Thursday city in America”
I visited San Francisco earlier this year and the place gave me such horrible bad vibes. Because it's extremely affluent, and ambitious (billboards for AI products everywhere! You can overhear people having in-depth technical discussions in the street!), but the homeless crisis is so, so bad. I saw worse things in San Francisco than I ever did in an entire life of living in Puerto Rico, a much poorer place. The juxtaposition of extreme wealth and utopian ambitions with the deepest misery was quite horrifying.
Oh yeah I mean all of my complaints above don't even touch on the economic disparity and public disorder elements, simply because I assume they go without saying
It's gotten quite a bit better in the last few years, but still is rough
When I turned 18, I visited family in Palo Alto, and I took a solo day trip by train to SF
My friend who lived there met me for coffee and dropped me off for my day at the Wharf.
At first SF was so cool! I was like “wow this is SF!”
But, as I was making my way from there through the city, hitting as many sites as possible, my phone dropped to 2%. And I had to pee.
No business would let me use their bathroom, I finally found one in Chinatown, quickly looked up where to go to get to the train station, realized I couldn’t memorize it, and instead made a beeline to the Apple Store.
I got SO lost. Phone dead, middle of nowhere. Walked by town hall thinking that would be a good area. No, it took me through the tenderloin district to town hall and I’ve never seen so many homeless. I’m from Detroit and people think it sucks, Detroit i see like 2-5 homeless in a whole DAY of being downtown.
In the literal city center of SF I saw 20-30 on ONE BLOCK!
I finally charged my phone at the Apple Store, made plans and set off.
The train station is apparently not somewhere you want to walk to - I felt so unsafe as a young 18 year old walking under a highway pass where 20 people were shooting up in a tent.
Basically my trip started out amazing, touristy, and vibrant, and by the end of the day my nervous system was shocked.
Even bought a painting from a homeless man in the core of the financial district. It felt ironic, in front of buildings of such grandeur, to have this interaction.
I wish better things for SF. That being said, it still does have beautiful sides to it!
Lived in Oakland 2014-2021, now Manhattan 2022-present.
Sasha, obviously we've met several times on your visits to this side of the continent, and I had no idea you felt this way about the Bay, this would have been an interesting in-person conversation! But in lieu of that, a Substack comment:
I have experienced the exact frustrations you're feeling so many times over, and was practically nodding my head in agreement at most of what you've written. If you haven't found your people, and even if you have, San Francisco can be an infuriating place socially, and I've etched many similar missives over the years about the social scene. It is the primary reason why I moved to New York.
I understand that this article is essentially a rant based on vibes and not intended to be thoroughly fact-checked, and while again, I agree with the majority of it, I think it would be useful to restore some perspective.
> In New York, the attractive people are attractive, but so are the ugly people — from the West Village girls to the octogenarians, costume and posture convey points of view.
Yes, but this also comes with frightening undertone of "all that matters are vibes". Walking around Manhattan these days, there's plenty of style, but no substance. The salient virtue a Manhattan pedestrian seems to care about is looking — and acting — "cool". These are not nice people. These are not people with humility, who can make fun of themselves. These are not people that treat others with respect.
Cults aside, monoculture aside, in San Francisco, people care much more about doing good, changing the world, and though they may be inept, or fail in very scary, powerful ways, San Francisco has far more substance than Manhattan (I am excluding Brooklyn here, purposefully, for a 1:1 comparison).
> Sure; I am describing a pair of bubbles: the tech and spirituality cliques. You can live outside of those bubbles — at which point, you are in a 2nd-tier American city, which is to say, living one of the best lives possible in material terms, although without much of a shared social fabric.
2nd-tier?! Au contraire! If you remove tech and spirituality completely, San Francisco *still* has the second most interesting people outside of New York. You could completely avoid both scenes and have an abundant, intellectual, caring social life.
> San Francisco is an avoidant city, and Berkeley is an anxious colony.
I notice that San Francisco and Berkeley are mentioned, but not Oakland. Though I worked in tech, I did not associate with the San Francisco tech scene at all. Most of my friends lived in Oakland, and were either from the ultimate, coliving, or rationality (and adjacent) communities, or just fit the archetype of "cool person that lives in Oakland". Explore the Oakland scene!
I have had better conversations in my "Oakland" scenes than I ever have in all of New York City (including Brooklyn). Yes, the pandemic and rise of AI-culture have severely dampened the Bay Area, I'm sure, but these people are still out there.
> It could help to implement Parisian sidewalk drinking culture.
Sam Altman, when he was with Y Combinator, once wrote an short blog post theorizing that one of the reasons San Francisco was rather antisocial was because it gets cold at night year-round and thus a lack of outdoor dining/bars. I'm having trouble locating this article, if anyone remembers it, let me know. But that was the gist.
It's funny, reflecting on our brief conversations, I sort of feel like we were talking about these things without talking about them. The Oakland scene may be the place for me!
I accept that these objections are reasonable. The ideal amount of vibe focus has to be somewhere between Manhattan and SF...
I too was hoping for some mention of Oakland, and although it can also suffer from the transient nature of this region, has a very different feeling.
As a native East Coaster who has 4 west coast years, 2 return trips and 1 recent visit: the article did mention a some. things that Oakland doesn’t have. The afraid-to-look-good is one I couldn’t quite put my finger on before I read it but wow!
Honesty and bluntness is missing. It’s almost like everyone is walking around on eggshells afraid to reveal their own true self in case they offend someone. Imagine that! Offending someone else for being yourself.
Post pandemic I do see things changing. I’m curious still, but so pining for a certain cultural warmth of home.
Berlin shares many similarities with SF here (money topics being a notable exception). Women lose social status with other women in Berlin if they look like they're trying to look good. When you remove some status games, like beauty, you get other status games, and often they are weird. Both cities also share a performative non-conformism that is more conformist than most mainstream cultures. And both have sexual liberty, but emotional repression and the devaluing of conventional beauty makes things feel less sexual. The drugs do alleviate some of these issues in both cities, while causing their own.
>When you remove some status games, like beauty, you get other status games, and often they are weird. Both cities also share a performative non-conformism that is more conformist than most mainstream cultures.
The older I get, the more appealing I find religion to be. It's almost like humans have a limited number of cultural "slots" which need to have something plugged into them, and religion is a way to plug them in on purpose rather than based on happenstance.
(Note that the important part of religion here is not really the supernatural claims, e.g. Confucianism would count as a religion for the purpose of this argument.)
An example is that most groups of people benefit from some sort of hated outgroup to achieve unity. In progressive culture, this unity gets achieved by scapegoating community members who deviated from the orthodoxy. In Christianity, we invent an entirely fictional character ("Satan") to unite against for solidarity purposes. Pretty clever.
As a woman who has lived in SF for the past 14 years, your premise doesn't ring true for me or my friend group (nor does the author's). My girlfriends and I hype each other up and genuinely enjoy looking good, especially when we go out. We have regular women's circles (sometimes they're more like covens, or regular meet-ups, sound healing, etc) where we talk about our emotions and create space for each other. Can't speak for the men of course, but this comment and the author's observations feel more like an East Bay issue.
The problem these guys have with the bay area is that compared to NYC or LA the women are on average much less attractive. They can't just say that without sounding like assholes, so it becomes about how the women here don't put any effort into their appearance when there's no evidence that's the case.
Conversely for the men, but I disagree about the on "average" part of your argument. Both LA and NYC have millions more people, therefore the number of "attractive" you see in the street will be higher, but you also see way more unattractive people too, you just don't notice. NYC and LA both have a higher concentration of actors/models of course, so there's an industry component for sure, but with that comes a less natural standard of beauty. For example many of the women in LA have had work done and it's obvious, especially up close. Even my normal (non-industry) friends in LA have had work done (boobs, lipo, injections). There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, that's the culture there. So if that's what you're looking for then, yes, there's more of that. But don't forget that the men there are also better looking so your competition is much higher (also likely to have had work done). I find it so funny that men in the bay will complain about women in the bay while look like slobs everywhere they go, lol. Despite that, I think there are tons of beautiful people in SF and the bay in general, it's a more natural beauty. It just depends on your definition of beauty and you preferences. There are tons of beautiful women here, but your minds and expectations are warped by social media, porn, and your ai girlfriends.
Yeah, I think the men here are much less attractive as well and also lack charisma. I think women place less emphasis on looks (and are also socially conditioned to pretend they don't value it as much as they actually do) so instead you get "the goods are odd" type complaints. SF does have attractive women, but they're concentrated in like three neighborhoods, often on a few blocks. Beyond that I don't see a gap between Berkeley/Oakland and SF (though there is a huge gap between these cities and the South Bay).
You lose me when you start talking about "definitions of beauty." Come on, there is such a thing as conventional beauty and the Bay Area just has much less of it regardless of filler use/cosmetic surgery, etc. I've lived in DC and plastic surgery there is rare (there's more of it here in my estimation), but I'd still venture the women are on average more attractive. I don't like excess make-up use and am honestly turned off when it seems like woman has spent too much time on her appearance. Talking about men being warped by social media/porn is just cope.
Conventionally attractive exist, sure. But you just told me there are a few blocks in three neighborhoods in SF where hot women live, come on. Even you can't hide your strong preferences (tell me the neighborhood and I can tell you what kind of women you like). Not to mention I'd guess those zip codes are economically advantaged, because rich people tend to invest in their looks; clothes, hair, jewelry, fitness, and surgery etc of course). Your preference of a more natural look would likely mean there are more women that you find attractive here than in LA, as few women there sport the look you described. I had a guy friend who wasn't very attracted to Asian women, which sucks for him because SF/the bay has tons of stunning Asian women. So for him, there were fewer "hot" women here. We can say what we want about conventional attractiveness (re: facial symmetry and fitness) but preferences matter, and beauty is subjective. I've spent a lot of time in DC (used to go for work twice a month). The fact you think there are better looking women there tells me you prefer people who are more dressed up and polished, people go to great lengths in DC to "look the part" because politics is another industry that selects for attractiveness. Which is also totally fine. We don't dress up as much in the bay, fashion is not as culturally important as it is in other big cities around the world. My point is a person's definition of attractive and beauty makes all the difference here, and there are a lot of things that go into it. Its fine to say people don't dress up as much and you don't like it, but saying people are less conventionally attractive on average as a *fact* feels like a huge stretch. For sapiosexuals, the bay is glittering with hot people and LA is a wasteland (I'm being hyperbolic but you get it). Without an objective study measuring facial symmetry/fitness, it's all subjective. We can all have different subjective options about it, like my friend. Separately, the idea that porn and social media is damaging men and their expectations around love and sex is a well documented phenomenon, not a cop out. It's harming women too, but in a different ways. So to say that doesn't matter in this context is silly.
>Even you can't hide your strong preferences (tell me the neighborhood and I can tell you what kind of women you like).
You got me. I like fit women and think they're more attractive than fat women. Is this the patriarchy?
>Not to mention I'd guess those zip codes are economically advantaged, because rich people tend to invest in their looks; clothes, hair, jewelry, fitness, and surgery etc of course).
Yes, poor people are more likely to be fat and spend less money on their appearance. Just like rich people are on average more educated than poor people, rich people on average are more attractive than poor people.
>Your preference of a more natural look would likely mean there are more women that you find attractive here than in LA, as few women there sport the look you described.
I lived in LA for 2 years 15 years ago. The 20 something woman from some podunk midwest town waiting tables and going to auditions for small roles can't afford cosmetic surgery. She's just hot, because that's a baseline expectation to have a decent shot at succeeding in film/tv. LA gets the hottest people from all over the US for a reason.
>We can say what we want about conventional attractiveness (re: facial symmetry and fitness) but preferences matter, and beauty is subjective.
Conventional means what the majority of people find attractive. So on average a city that has more conventionally attractive people will be thought by most people to be more attractive. "Beauty is subjective" is the ultimate cope.
>The fact you think there are better looking women there tells me you prefer people who are more dressed up and polished, people go to great lengths in DC to "look the part" because politics is another industry that selects for attractiveness.
If politics selects for attractiveness and more attractive women (and men) move to DC relative to SF (because tech doesn't select for it), than DC will have on average more attractive people.
What are we arguing about again?
>We don't dress up as much in the bay, fashion is not as culturally important as it is in other big cities around the world.
This is the point you initially argued against! And I agreed with you! I don't think bay area women are bad at fashion or spend less time on their appearance! You've just argued against yourself to avoid an unpleasant conclusion.
>My point is a person's definition of attractive and beauty makes all the difference here, and there are a lot of things that go into it. Its fine to say people don't dress up as much and you don't like it, but saying people are less conventionally attractive on average as a *fact* feels like a huge stretch
Okay, this makes more sense now. This whole thing boils down to not liking the conclusion.
How about this? "Success is subjective". There's no difference between the guy who runs a billion dollar company and the guy who works at Wendy's and lives with his parents. They're both successful on their own terms. There's some woman out there who thinks the Wendy's guy is successful, so who are we to say who is more or less successful? Just because it's convention to think otherwise?
>For sapiosexuals
LOL
>the bay is glittering with hot people and LA is a wasteland
Love the imagery. In all seriousness, I would rather date the modal woman from Berkeley vs Beverley Hills, but I'm not going to pretend Beverley Hills doesn't have more attractive women.
>Separately, the idea that porn and social media is damaging men and their expectations around love and sex is a well documented phenomenon, not a cop out. It's harming women too, but in a different ways.
There's no solid evidence that porn is raising men's standards on the dating market. The social science evidence we have shows that men are more likely to have absolute standards (i.e. they will date anyone who clears some pre-defined threshold of beauty) and women's standards are more likely to be responsive to environment (they will raise their standards if surrounded by successful men -- this is what happens in the Bay Area).
Valid nuance!
I would say Berlin must be the most different from SF. Of all the western cultural capitals of the world, in Berlin you can probably get by on the least amount of money, opening the door for people to really pursue art and creative activities in a way that isn’t possible in London, or presumably any American cities (I don’t have any direct experience of living in America)
Price is definitely a big difference yes!
I feel like adult male friendships are generally cursed with Aboutness. I wonder how much your age and happy, monogamous relationship colors this analysis.
Hugely, I am sure
Yeah. Not that I’m trying to take away from this. I just wonder how pronounced the differences in difference is between early to mid 20s people in SF and NY and mid to late 30s people. There’s a chance it goes either way: like maybe as you get older it gets more pronounced, or maybe young people in SF are even more eager to fit in and affect the attitudes you’ve detailed here so the difference is more noticeable.
If it changes anything I’m a mid 20’s male and none of my male friendships are this way. That being said I don’t really make male friends historically I prefer and have female friends so maybe I’m biased too!
Not to big brother you, but in my experience it’s something that happens over the 28 -> 35 time horizon. You basically have a handful of lifelong amazing friends you almost never see, and then a different handful of guys you do a specific thing with.
I can see that - careers and houses and wives and kids I’m sure that introduces a lot of aboutness, am I tracking?
What? It’s plural because I’m speaking about multiple men. Notice it says “houses” not “house”
Feels like you really went in on this one. Lots of really beautiful turns of phrase — some of my favorite writing from you in a while
Honestly, I wrote most of it hastily in an afternoon and hesitated about publishing it, so I appreciate the affirmation so much
i'm a displaced 5th generation bay area native. my great great grandfather was born on telegraph hill in 1872 and every family member in each generation following - until mine - was born in San Francisco proper. my cousins and i grew up spread out across the bay area suburbs. i am very proud of where i'm from. i literally have the area code 650 tattooed on my calf.
unable to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of living, i tapped out a few years ago and moved to chicago. all but a couple of my family members have left as well. i know it's a bit hackneyed at this point to be a bay area native who resents tech... but i am a bay area native who greatly resents the effect of Big Tech on my beloved home.
your article resonated deeply with me and i think you hit the nail on the head in many respects as it relates to the tech bubble and the people who occupy it, particularly the transactional nature with which techies tend to "socialize."
with that being said, you do a thing that transplants tend to do when complaining about the bay that irks me a little bit. you briefly acknowledge this but you constantly refer to the Bay Area as a whole when really what you're talking about is the tech bubble. respectfully, i think you're telling on yourself a little bit here. this being your experience of the bay is partially a consequence of the people who you choose to surround yourself with.
maybe i'm blinded by nostalgia glasses and have an overly pollyanna view of myself and other bay area natives, but i think it's important to differentiate us from the tech bubble. there are many multi faceted, genuine, and good-hearted people in the bay. we have a distinct culture. we have bay area food, bay area slang, bay area art, bay area clothes, bay area humor. this still exists and it's beautiful and it's out there for you to experience in order to have a more enriching experience living there - it might be out of the way but you can find it (if you care to). after all, there was a bay area before Big Tech hegemony.
i love my life in chicago but i still get very homesick. if the housing bubble ever magically burst or if i won the lottery, i'd start packing immediately.
I would truly love to be inducted into the deeper culture here to the extent that it exists; I don't know how to get in. Your irk is fair. My social exposure here is really a product of complete happenstance; I'm not in tech, but people on the fringes of tech tend to like reading my stuff, and one of them married me. If I grew up here, I'd likely know a more complex subset...
Writing a piece like this, you face a dilemma. If every sentence you go, "but it's just my perspective," and "but this is just my little subjective experience," you write something boring and defensive. If you don't, you communicate in gestural generalities, and people can rightfully complain that you didn't capture the subtlety. I choose the latter and outsource some of the interpretive work to kind commenters like you...
Just returned to domepiece-dominated Boston from a wedding in New Orleans.
Four days of warmth and southern charm and my comfort levels with strangers probably tripled.
It's something I can feel physiologically. Unreal!
Social grace creates immediate physical effects that are contagious, social awkwardness is the same...
100%. Thanks for the piece Sasha
"domepiece-dominated Boston" 🪦💐
I think the bit about bullying at the end is the key point - there world does actually need a city where unkempt weirdos argue about insane ideas that could completely reshape society, Vienna cafe culture for the 21st century. The issue is that no one in modern SF, especially the tech/rationalist circles, is confrontational enough to actually argue or disagree about anything - they coalesce into overly agreeable cults like you say, and are "contrarian" in the uniquely Bay Area way where you're contrarian in the exact same way everyone else is. I don't think importing a bunch of hot socialites of any gender will fix the Bay Area's problems; SF has always been a weird place, it's never gonna function like a NYC. But will actually help is a willingness to tear into each other's bad ideas, with the understanding that it's not personal, just the nature of the game - which I think is frankly too direct and aggressive for the city of awkward overachiever nerds the place has become. (I say this all as an awkward overachiever nerd myself.)
Is anywhere in the world like what I'm describing? Or is arguing about ideas, like so many other things, just limited to the internet now?
> Is anywhere in the world like what I'm describing?
http://fractalnyc.com. Big culture of San Francisco expats who moved eastward and formed this for the exact reasons you mentioned.
Arguments in person over ideas that no one takes personally would constitute a great leap in civilization.
Maybe we need more of a public debate culture so people understand that it's just part of the game. Arguably this already exists for court cases. ("My client hired me to argue the case for X, and I'm doing my best.")
Try going to a rationalist meetup. It's all arguing.
The issue is that sometimes you want to challenge some of the underlying premises of rationalism (the movement, not the concept of being rational) and that doesn't go as well
This isn't true in my experience. I'm not sure what you consider "underlying premises of rationalism", I wouldn't say there are any, but my local meetup regularly gets people that disagree with popular ideas among large rationalist bloggers, like utilitarianism or AGI x-risk.
A suggestion: maybe you feel that nobody is being sufficiently "contrarian" because nobody is expressing your beliefs. You should go do that! It sounds like you have a unique perspective.
You're really selling it LOL Being a New Yorker I was pretty shocked by all of California society that I've seen (La, Frisco, San Diego, mostly). In California everyone offers you a bright, sunny 'Hi!' but what they mean is 'Fuck you'. In NY you get a grouchy 'Fuck you' but what THEY mean is a bright, sunny "Hi!"
This is a pretty tired take.
this is an excellent post. I have lived in the bay area my whole life and I'm acutely feeling this curse in my 30s. I would love to add an additional component of the curse. It's the Bay Area clique (or tribe). These are groups of people that only hang out with each other. It's very exclusive, whereas I feel like NYC is far more inclusive. My parents are in a couple cliques with other first gen immigrants. They have been hanging out for 30+ years. These cliques overlap with other first gen immigrants. Some of my friends who I went to high school and college w/ are also in these cliques. If you're in, the bay area is nice. You have your routine dinners and hikes and birthdays. If you're out, you're cursed
I grew up between France and the bay (my mom is french, dad is american) and I felt so lonely in the bay. The disregard for aesthetics in general was always something i thought actually made the quality of life a little inferior. I live happily in Paris now and can vouch for the Parisian terrace, it does wonders for bringing people closer. I do love visiting the bay for hikes and creative alone time though, you're spot on.
this was my favorite piece of the week. I am from LA and grew up roadtripping to SF in the 2010s and 2000s as a kid/teenager. I finally went back in 2024 and ugh, it was so lame. i mean
dont get me wrong, there's still a lot of fun stuff to do and i have people there i like and could have fun with anywhere, even phoenix, but it just felt like all the coolness and grime had been totally zapped up.
i can't write as well as you off the top of my head, but I laughed so much reading your piece and loved the incisive description of the "social" scene there. I am curious about the phenomenon u mentioned -- there's somehow way more men than women, so ostensibly this would be good for women in that men have to fight and claw, but then the women are desperate for monogamy. is it just that there is a small pool of actually fuckable guys, and they all are poly? i'd assume that the men there, in their desperation, would forgo their desire for non-monogamy if it at least meant getting a girlfriend? i also think SF is ground zero for this "Aboutness" thing, which I love. ive noticed increasingly adults don't know how to hang out without eventifying everything. like, i just wanna show up and have a beer and talk shit. why does everything have to be an axe throwing board game barcade paint and sip book club?
Here are some substack posts on the gender ratio thing in the bay area:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-the-bay (note the subtext of this post, she's overwhelmed with options and has become very picky)
https://eudai.substack.com/p/the-odds-are-good-and-the-goods-are "If you share my taste for this kind of guy (shy, well-read, awkward, logical), or can get yourself to share it, you can also get into this ludicrously undertapped market of smart, high-earning men. If they’re not to your liking, ah well. But if they might be – try them out."
I suspect part of it is something like: There are many poly women in the bay area. Due to the skewed gender ratio, if you're a man, your best shot might be dating a woman who already has 4 boyfriends. If you subsequently meet a woman who wants monogamy, then you're forced to break up with your existing girlfriend in order to date her, which is unappealing. More realistically, you'll try to persuade her to adopt poly so you can stay with your existing girlfriend. Hence the "mind virus" aspect. Another angle: Monogamous men stop dating when they're in a relationship. Poly guys continue dating, which means they get a lot more practice at charming women. Dating is also lower stakes for them since they are likely to already be in a relationship. So they're more relaxed and charming.
Us tech guys have a typical range of personality types. If that range overlaps with what you want in a man (e.g. high-earning, sweet, braniac, outdoorsy, feminist, etc.) then the bay area is a very good place to be a single woman. On the other hand, if you're a tech guy in the bay area, it's not so great because all of the women who want guys like you are already spoken for.
Sharp analysis!
Sasha thinks I might have a future as a cult leader and cutting edge social theorist
I’ll blurb your manifesto
That's a great take, I haven't thought of this logical chain re mind virus, sounds very plausible. Thanks for sharing.
It’s the last paragraph entirely. A lot of women in the US don’t want to date men in tech. It’s a low status profession when compared to other high income white collar jobs. There is also an aspect of where no matter what, a lot of women will always be only attracted to the most attractive men in the setting they’re in. Women’s attraction tends to be more relative than absolute.
Outside of that, Silicon Valley ratio is so bad that if even 2/3 of men aren’t single then there’s not a single woman left. A third of men have to be single no matter what just due to the lack of women. These men go up to SF as well.
>A lot of women in the US don’t want to date men in tech. It’s a low status profession when compared to other high income white collar jobs.
No, women don't want to date the type of man who works in tech. It's in no way a low status profession, especially when you control for credentials. One of my Chinese colleagues only dates tech guys (she thinks they're the smartest, lol) and she has friends who are similar. The kind of guy who works in tech is a master systematizer and this is what turns women off.
Eh, I think the relative status of tech guys has been going up and will go up further.
>Outside of that, Silicon Valley ratio is so bad that if even 2/3 of men aren’t single then there’s not a single woman left. A third of men have to be single no matter what just due to the lack of women. These men go up to SF as well.
Exactly.
I’m not sure if this is cause you’re in the rationalist distortion field or what but in regular circles - tech is a hated profession and looked down upon. It’s seen as mostly a super nerdy and profession you go into if you were a loser in high school.
I heard things are like that in the UK. But I've never felt judged for working in tech in the US. If anything the opposite.
This is based on my experiences chatting with women outside the rationalist community. Their responses range from neutral to very positive.
You can see in this post, profiling a NYC guy with 1896 likes on Hinge, he's a startup founder and he puts it front and center in his profile: https://lovemelikearobot.substack.com/p/the-infinite-pussy-glitch-the-data
founders are different from software engineer chattel -- different jobs, different personalities, different status
Dating apps are mostly based off of physical attraction. That’s what that guy has. If you’re hot, what you do has no influence.
With regard to Sasha's remark that hippies know how to fuck but don't know how to adult: I hypothesize what's going on there is something like, due to the rarity of single women in the bay area, you kinda have to be on top of your game as a man if you want to find one. Same way an RPG might let you specialize as either a warrior or a mage, in the Bay Area, men are more likely to specialize in either "career" or "social", because it's harder to succeed at both.
(Not only is it harder to find a woman in the bay area, it's also harder to *get good with women* because they tend to be default-frosty towards men.)
I'm also curious about why poly is be as popular as it is in an area where women can dictate the rules of the game. How are they deciding to end up in poly relationships, while craving monogamy, if ultimately they have the upper hand in the dating market? Something doesn't compute.
Yeah, many of the men don’t fuck and many of those who do have so much money there’s a temptation to keep just “having fun” till you’re like 47.
This post does an excellent job advertising the Bay Area to people like me. I feel right at home in cultures where social gatherings have legible purposes and norms, where the atmosphere is asexual by default (but there are sex parties for those who want it), and where conversations are dominated by weird people detailing their nerdy interests. But my heaven is another man's hell.
❤️
This was amazing! I've felt similarly disheartened from seeking dozens of cities and cultures to be my home. I get it.
However Berkeley is it for me. There is no place I'd rather be. I've found more meaningful authentic connections than any other city.