Leaving San Francisco

When I first landed in the Bay Area my taxi driver got lost.

It was July 2011. I had just stepped off a 13-hour flight from London, where I had spent the past 2 years. (Technically the flight was from Stockholm where I had been visiting friends for a long weekend, but regardless — )

I wasn’t going far — just to Menlo Park, where I was to be staying on a friend’s sofa — but this was before you could assume everyone had a magic box in their pocket that could solve more or less any problem in a few taps. 6 weeks before, when I had been staying with the same friend while interviewing for a new job, I had to get a GPS with my rental car to find my way around. It was a strange, liminal time. Everyone could feel that the world had fundamentally changed but the oncoming wave of mobile technology was still primitive and limited, an often frustrating glimmer of its full potential.

Eventually I navigated to El Camino Real and from there down to the vicinity of the Stanford campus.

I was staying with my friend Brian. Back then he was a Ph.D student at Stanford, but in college we had been roommates. We both came from the midwest and played percussion in some of the university’s various ensembles so we’d grown close. Despite the fact I had spent the four years between college and my stint on his couch hopping between New York, DC, and London in various finance jobs while he headed straight west for his doctoral studies, we were able to pick up more or less where we left off. We played foosball in his living room, obsessed over Farmville (I was interviewing at a couple of mobile gaming companies), and talked about relationships and where our lives were going until the small hours. The normal, somewhat banal mid-20-something navel-gazing.

And so moving to the Bay Area in 2011 was easy. Social networking was still novel enough that I could simply search Facebook for people I knew in San Francisco, message them, and get a lot of enthusiastic responses. People weren’t yet jaded about being perpetually online. In fact, that’s how I found my first roommate — a friend of a friend who would go on to co-found Instacart. This was the era of the Facebook Effect, when the larger narrative around these platforms was one of their ability to foster positive change and connect people. The notion that they could channel our cruelest impulses, addict us, and grow into a modern panopticon was not yet what people discussed at dinner parties.

The Bay, the epicenter of everything tech, had a special kind of giddy energy. It was far different from the cities I had recently left behind: New York, Washington D.C., and London. San Francisco was friendly, encouraging, “yes and” — seemingly everyone I met earnestly thought they were changing the world for the better. And when they weren’t, they were rock climbing, playing in bands, performing stand-up comedy, making art, dancing on the beach until sunrise, and willing their wildest dreams into existence. The Bay was the home of the Black Panthers, the Hell’s Angels, Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, The Whole Earth Catalog, and all the descendants of that family tree. You can more or less draw a straight line from the end of World War II through the biker gangs, the hipsters, the civil rights movements, and the hippies straight to Apple Computer, Burning Man, and Google. It wasn’t just that people in the Bay believed they could change the world: they knew they could. All the proof they needed was all around them.

Last Thursday I loaded most of my possessions onto a truck. After eleven and a half years, I’m leaving San Francisco — for now.

What changed? Is it not still true that the Bay is home to the hackers and misfits who are dreaming up and building a better future?

I could cynically weave a narrative about how, in the last decade, the underdogs went mainstream. The pirates became the navy. Startups became The Man. How now every newly-minted MBA rushes out to Silicon Valley with a business plan in hand to build the next “Uber for X” squeezing every last drop of efficiency out of a yet-to-be-digitized industry and that entrepreneurship is just another career ladder. How the real rebels have moved on to weirder pastures and geography is no longer relevant: we all live in the metaverse already, and those who understand that are the ones living in the future, poised to build the next big thing.

I could bemoan the sclerotic San Francisco government and its inability to solve basic problems despite vast resources: homelessness, housing costs, property crime, and quality of life concerns. People earnestly debate the role of racial and class equity in preventing public transit fare-jumping, prosecuting individuals shoplifting or selling stolen goods, and open-air drug dealing and consumption. Both sides feel righteous in their anger. The basic social contract is visibly fraying. These things matter.

I could note the dissonance between how small teams can build world-changing products and the Bay Area’s collective lack of political will to allow for change. How the region’s politics are dominated by attachment to ideas about the way things should be rather than acceptance of the way things are. How our fixation on aesthetic ideals about how the world should work — from housing to transportation to opening a business — beggars the vast human potential both already living in the Bay Area and that wants to move here. (Despite bad governance, the Bay Area is still growing faster than anywhere else in the country.) How this all amounts to a massive failure of imagination, of aspiration, and of belief in humanity’s potential.

Those are all stories I could tell about my relationship to the Bay Area — and none of them are relevant.

When I moved here I was 25 years old. I’m now 37.

If I was the same person at 37 that I was at 25, I’d be disappointed in myself. I’ve experienced so much and those experiences have changed me.

Relationships are the story of overlap. When you meet someone — a friend or a partner — or when you take a job, move to a city, or pick up a hobby, it’s an action that reflects an alignment of circumstances in your life. It’s the right time for that connection to happen. And yet you and whoever (or whatever) you’re in relationship with are both changing all the time in ways both big and small. Those changes accumulate and eventually you might wake up and realize you’re not the same person. That old sweater no longer fits you — maybe not literally, but it no longer feels right. That friendship takes more effort and each time you hang out interactions feel a little more stilted and forced. It’s time to let it go.

If you continue to hold onto it there’s a gnawing friction — maybe guilt, maybe grief, maybe just a feeling of nagging discomfort — because you’re out of alignment. You’re acting out of habit. You’re refusing to accept the change that is happening. Change will happen regardless of your attempts to stop or control it. You’re choosing to remain stuck — and choosing not to be open to new things that will enter your life if you let old things go.

There is no judgment in changing or letting go. There is no fault or blame. There is no good or bad. It’s just acceptance of what is. It’s the failure to accept change that leads to suffering.

Since moving to the Bay I’ve gotten married and divorced. I’ve raised a puppy. I’ve had a half dozen jobs. Friends have come and gone. Some friends have passed before their time, by their own choice or not. Some have had kids. Others have had cancer. A few have had both.

I’ve survived a global pandemic. I’ve picked up new hobbies and let others go. My body has transformed: I’ve trained it, injured it, modified it, and healed it.

I’ve built and raced several cars, ridden a motorcycle to Burning Man, danced until dawn at underground raves, and sang at the top of my lungs, soaked in sweat seeing my favorite bands perform. I’ve worked out so hard I had trouble stringing together coherent sentences. I’ve made art, played music, watched a meteor shower on a mountaintop with someone I loved, road tripped through the desert, encountered anteaters in the central American jungle, and swam naked in the moonlight in Puerto Rico.

I’ve had my heart broken so badly I thought I’d never feel happiness again. I’ve gone to therapy, stopped going to therapy, started going to therapy again, and started doing psychedelic-assisted therapy.

All of this has been possible because of the life I created in San Francisco. Had I not moved here over a decade ago many of those things would not have happened. (Naturally, another set of things would have taken their place; yet I do not grieve for not having experienced them.) San Francisco made so much available to me, things that were unique to being here in this decade of my life and at this moment in time, and I gave so much back to it. San Francisco changed my life, and for that I will always be grateful.

And yet that does not create an obligation. As my former wife once told me, a relationship is not a death pact. Or, in the words we would both use now: attachment is the root of suffering. Choosing to stay in this city — remaining attached to the life I created here — would be denying change, choosing to foster the conditions for my own unhappiness, creating my own suffering. Living here, in the life I have created with its habits and patterns and quirks and opportunities, is no longer right for who I am. So I am releasing myself from it.

I am not blaming the city. I think we do ourselves a disservice by placing agency for our actions outside of ourselves. Our paths converged, intertwined, and are now diverging. It’s okay. Life goes on, just in different directions.

Nothing is permanent: those paths might yet intersect later, as Brian and I found out many years ago. By letting go, I am allowing for my own change, growth, and flourishing. Maybe I’ll return, and if I do it will be as a better, more fully-realized version of myself; and it will be because I am once again able to wholeheartedly commit to, celebrate, and contribute to this city’s unique vibrancy. Letting go is sometimes necessary for growth. It is an act of love both for ourselves and for those with whom we are in relation.

Sometimes love is not grinding it out, forcing yourself to continue down a specific path, grasping tightly to what you “should” do. Sometimes love is allowing for space so that each of you has room to blossom in the way you need. Sometimes love is thanking your partner and letting go.

So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Now it ends as it began: staying at a friend’s place, balanced on that golden thread between what is and what might be, holding it all lightly.