Ambition and San Francisco

can I make a home from this feeling?

My photo of a beautiful sf sunset

These are some of my longer notes on SF. I will be writing another piece for Cities — a substack series of cities we live in + what we love and hate about them.

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Imperfect Cities

I pile my suitcases into an uber at the San Francisco airport. It’s a cool, dry, pale orange evening. We drive past countless DTC billboards, the darkening water by the highway, a winding loop through the Mission District, through the lit-up Hayes, up the hills.

All I can think about is the first time I took this ride, the euphoria and fear I had of a new place, new surroundings, new people.

We live amid surfaces, Emerson once wrote, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Being young in a big city is touching all surfaces at once. Not quite sure which ones are firm enough to stand on.

Living in a big city is buying a convincing sales pitch. For people. Money. Beauty. Ambition. Part of the allure is feeling like a singular place is the solution to all your problems, insecurities, and desires. Being young means thinking yes I can love it despite its shortcomings. No sacrifice yet, only valor and desire. For a moment in time, this city is the center of the world. Later you look back and your time here will feel like a dream.

Enter the Bay Area. The canyons, the sea, the cliffs, the long stretch to the furthest glimmering point before the ocean meets the shore. The cypress, the willows, the bluest water and so much sky. J and I drove to Marin to hike, marveling at how in just 20 minutes we could careen off a busy freeway into a still, quiet place looking over grey rocks and the sea crashing below.

Part of California’s charm is the paradoxical co-existence of natural beauty and accelerating man-made technology. The world bends towards both.

People come to the city of SF because its focus and fervor are infectious. By being here, you start to believe mostly anything is possible with enough grit, belief, and scale.

Some things I love about SF: How everyone here is a little bit obsessed with something and actions toward it. I like people who try to achieve mastery because it indicates high effort and patience. My friends are highly agentic and want to build something of value, meaning. There’s something earnest and compelling about that. The risk tolerance here is a few notches up from anywhere else in the world. My dreams are very small, pragmatic in comparison, which makes me feel like I should dream bigger, maybe wilder too. So much of a place is just expanding your concept of yourself, right? Of what you believe you are capable of.

But there is a particular cognitive dissonance that comes with SF. As there always is with bargains of love, bargains of time. There’s always a sacrifice.

Its failures are as prominent as its promises. Every party I went to I was asked the same questions. And then felt bad because I couldn’t give that interesting of an answer. I constantly felt like I had to prove I was building something of value to fit in here. I witnessed first hand tech’s boom and bust cycles. A truly wild amount of money and then no money at all. Outside of my apartment block the whole pavement was lined with tents, strewn with black market items every Sunday. These problems are complex and rarely have solutions. I can’t omit them. Even the brightest of places have dark pockets.

Big cities have Big Myths. When I left my hometown I dreamt of New York and SF and London — thinking they’d be perfect places, big enough to engulf my smaller dreams into one bigger dream.

But of course these cities couldn’t fulfill my fantasies. They are fundamentally imperfect. Just like love: you can theorize all you want but until you grapple with its complexities, doubts, faults, you cannot truly know it.

Some of the innocence of first coming to a place is lost, as it always is. The question is: after you see it for what it is, can you still find the good in it?

Same question extrapolated: after you see someone for who they are — all the ugliness and distress and darkest parts — when you’re really up close: can you still love them?

For the right places, the right people, it’s worth trying.

Even after all that, the reason I love SF is because it showed me the power of effort. It has been a stretch experience the whole way. After feeling uncomfortable, I started to feel more open, more free. I like that the city took my core beliefs and shook it around a bit. How it rewired my relationship to uncertainty. It showed me how to pursue the things I wanted — wholeheartedly, unashamed.

The human experience is just that, isn’t it? Persistence. Living with the fruits or the consequences of trying again and again. At least that’s how I want my life to be.

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Ambition

Someone at a dinner party I attended once said: it’s important to have both magnitude and direction for ambition. That line really stuck with me. If you’re someone with a lot of unspecific ambition, you need to channel it properly or it will give you a lot of restless anxiety. Most of us have no problem with magnitude, but the right direction is hard to find.

Your proximity to a certain flavor of ambition influences you, no matter how hard you ignore it. The ship is steered by both the captain (you) and a strong tide (your environment).

Every city is a tide that pushes you toward a particular direction. But it’s your job to stay awake, stay perceptive and ask: Is it right for me?

I still think the same as what I wrote a while ago:

New York makes you desire intensity and status, SF makes you desire thought-leadership and freedom. I grew up in a place that desired order and risk aversion, and I’m still trying to figure out how much of that I believe. Places and people can make you believe certain characteristics are more sacred than others.

People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I’ve been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I’ve loved and the ideas I’ve embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand (Eve Babitz)

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Reinvention

My friend Yash once told me that he moves every 4 years or so. He tells me he wants to submerge himself in a new place, reinvent certain parts of his life. Maybe he’s right. Maybe by surrounding yourself with new external stimuli, you grow deeper inward roots.

I see reinvention as updating parts of yourself, making them truer and more faithful to your core essence. Like me: I came to SF wanting to be someone new, but now I realize all I wanted to be was more myself.

Upstream by Mary Oliver:

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

An old note from Nov 2021:

Since coming here, I haven't been in my head much. Something about this place makes me feel less neurotic, more calm. I've been feeling more than planning, less self conscious, less burdened, less wondering if I could've said something better or laughed more prettily, or went out more, or slept in less. I have no expectations for what this chapter is meant to be at all.

That's much more than I could have said in the past. That's progress isn't it? I promise I'm not getting sentimental. But I have to say this: watching your reinvention, and mine too, is such a pleasure.

Rilke: I live my life in widening circles. I live by that idea that reinvention is the act of dipping ourselves into new environments, soaking it all in, seeing what sticks. Jumping into the abyss. Let’s see what we’re like on the other side.

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PS: you might like something I wrote when I first moved to SF: default states, or writing on how much we change from place to place, person to person: the changing self.

Good writing on cities: Cities and Ambition by Paul Graham + the book Here is New York by E.B White (thanks for the rec, G)

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— Octavia Butler

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