I’m sitting on an airplane from NYC back to SF doing some reflection.
I am so happy that I went to Fordham and NYC. After a lot of travel throughout my life I’m at risk of making an overarching statement: New York is currently, globally, the center of the bullseye as a city. You can of course go chill out in Europe, warm up in LA, and get smart in SF, but it will not stack up to the cultural and professional buffet available in New York.
As much as I love it, right now I find myself living in San Francisco. It’s been six months now. After getting a job at Guild, early in its stage, I wanted to head over to the other side of the country to see what was up. The people I work with are all smart and good and I’m witnessing what it means to build something in the midst of a genuine transition period for society at large. I love building and toiling within companies that are not codified, that is where the invention and grit is found. In other words, the truth. You get the hindsight of how the codified business got there and what it took, if the business makes it and is lucky.
In SF I work in a world represented by one uncomfortable and overused word right now: AI. My money is made via the new mainline tool which will reach its arms into every part of our lives. This is the space I’m getting my experience in, a classic situation of the money being in the things that are textbook morally ambiguous. Software, with its zero marginal cost and promise of efficiency, is the classic ground of grey area societal effect. And the most classic example one can conjure up is the experiment of social media. Connected, yes. Better? I don’t know. We are all, whether we like it or not, on a freight train of progress that will not stop. In the words of Chris Waterson, “At Netscape, we knew what we were doing. We were connecting the world. Now, it seems like what’s happened is that we’ve commodified thinking. That’s wonky.” I think it will be wonky. But not without its classic spread of unbelievable positive and unforeseen effects accompanied by dreadful feeling of what was lost.
In San Francisco there is indeed a persistent feeling that culture is not overflowing from the top. This is something that I do not enjoy. It is corrosive to spirit and understanding of the human condition when you live an airy existence of optimized exercise, work, and health in a place of persistently pleasant weather. That said, I’m lapping up the lifestyle and the health while I can. It’s addictive in a sense, how good it is. My neighborhood, Cole Valley, is incredible. I wouldn’t rather live anywhere else in SF and spend the majority of my time in Cole Valley (and downtown for work). I live in a Victorian with bay windows across from Buena Vista Park and I don’t wake up to sirens.
To tie in the other place in this title, I’m looking forward to heading home to Boulder for thanksgiving. It brings me and my friends back on a consistent basis. There is something in the air in Boulder. There is an untouchable, utterly unique vibration that runs through it all. I always sound like a broken record about Boulder and my love for it with my friends, but as I venture off into these other parts of the world I understand how important it was to grow up there and be unconstrained by the establishment of the East and the looseness of the west.
Boulder is what my Grandma Baba would describe as a “thin space”. She explained the term to me once when we were walking through her beloved town of Assisi, Italy where she takes pilgrimage every year for the sake of Saint Francis. There are thin spaces that exist in the world to be felt and inspired by. In the thin spaces you can see through the usual cultural veil and into something special, human, and divine.