February 2025:

I’m writing this as a way to get myself warmed up at writing again. Lately I’ve felt the summer buzz of ideas and a suffocating pressure, almost like I need to throw up. I’m pooping and suddenly I think about the constraints of genAI dev tools; I’m walking to work and I think about that internet archive talk I totally meant to write about five months ago. Maybe Rick Reubon had a point in The Creative Act - you must act on the creative forces of the universe before its too late. My thoughts are scattered and my notes, still, don’t have a consistent place - they’re littered between physical notebooks and messenger notes and other apps but I must constellate and forage through my memory!!

San Francisco, after I came back from my two month east coast bender, has been decidedly different. I’ve done several things that I consider #justSFthings - multiple days in a row where I’m just working the whole day and maybe I talk to like two people. After working on Saturday at some random hackathon with a friend my eyes were tingling despite my bluelight glasses and I went to a startup launch party that raised a series B 7 months after a series A that got called out on twitter as “glorified data labeling startup” by 22 year olds one who went to prep school in the bay area but either way I was amazed by their music choice in the first 15 min I was there before it devolved into Drake. What amazed me more was that the men’s bathroom line was 5 times as long as the women’s which had no wait. It was then I thought, ah, I am really in the bay area now.

March 2025

To continue the list of other extremely strange SF things that I’ve done, I went to a free capitalism party hosted by some Tech CEO, which I went to because there was a open wine bar, got extremely drunk and threw up in the SF Mint. It was interesting because optically you would expect the most raging conservatives to be in attendance, when in reality it was filled with people of middling political views (which is your typical techermans) who were also there for the free wine bar. It was decidedly an event filled with an air of people trying to be someone.

Although outside of the frequency of extremely online tech events and encountering san francisco is truly man francisco each time, I think this recent half in SF has been much better than the last. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t traveled in three months, but I’ve finally developed a routine - coworking once a day on the weekends (often at the beloved Church street cafe), routing whether I should bus or bike or uber, my weekly run to Duboce park and back, relishing rare 70 degree days, and my favorite - bumping into people at events without a plan.

I’ve also become used to the sometimes quiet monotony of my days - speaking to like three people in the office, heading home to run, dicking around on my computer until it’s time to sleep. This is what the me from a year ago wanted, and wanted to be comfortable with, only to be unable to handle the reality of being confronted with your own thoughts and self with no distractions.

So what changed? I would attribute though my recent ability to “lock in” more aggressively to being rejected for 5 months straight and my twitter FYP somehow indexing me as a 20 year old college drop out who recently moved to SF to work at a startup. I had always loved design dearly and would consider myself a tryhard, yet I was still not good enough to pivot into at least B2C design at a late stage startup with good craft. After the 3rd or 4th rejection I realized that if the work I presenting still wasn’t good, and if I still couldn’t do exactly what I wanted at work, then I would have to do it myself even if it took forever. In a recent undergrad alumni panel to people in a club I used to lead, they asked me what my dreams were. My dreams, I said, were no longer to be externally validated - if my 9-5 did not represent my values then my work I did independently should. I said it because I wanted to believe it because I was tired of trying to figure out how to play the game.

In SF, the weather is always 50-60 degrees, as I told my fellow east coasters - I always missed the emotions of the seasons. The failures taken in the winter were felt by the biting cold, but in san francisco, yet no matter how shitty of a day I was having, I would always encounter the sun in the morning. The unbearing light was so cruel, and so beautiful - I did not want to get up but yet I did. But 50 degrees recently feels different than 60, which feels incredibly different from a 70, and from the outside my days continue on unchanging yet I gradually feel myself growing warmer.

July 2025

I wanted to send out this dispatch earlier but I couldn’t, because I wanted to write a satisfying end to the story. I had gotten the question, why did you move, in regularity since I came here, with my answer slightly switching each time. I came here to lock in, to explore the city of intrigue, to run away, to run towards something. As my months dwindle into weeks into days left, I think I’ve found it.

You have to go through your lows to reach your highs. My most recent month of June I had spent shivering at the city’s coldness, the quietness of the evenings and frustration that true agency didn’t exist. I went to design networking events to be told “I could just do things” yet felt like even with “doing things” I still wasn’t doing the thing I wanted to and there was absolutely no way to get there. If I really cared enough I could do this unpaid work trial for a week. If I really cared I should tweet a glass shader of a popup modal. I wasn’t “there” yet because I wasn’t caring enough.

I tried to do everything, the magazine, the interviews, the building, and often felt like I wanted to do nothing at all. SF, the city of gold, you live in the pursuit of the dream you’ll never reach. I went to my friend’s office cooling and her cofounder told me that you spend so long reaching for the 10 million ARR that once you hit it, you’ve already forgotten and started thinking about the next goal. As I laid in bed scrolling, I saw an ad - “Sisyphus couldn’t stop rolling his rock, but you can”. Could I even get everything I wanted? Would I even be satisfied?

It’s kind of ironic a week after thinking that and deciding to move back to New York, events occurred that made me feel like I had struck gold. Through a fortunate turn of events, I work trialed at an early stage civic tech startup. I held a party where I invited 40 people, most of whom I did not see that regularly, and had a really good time. It was possibly the best party I had ever held. I felt like a part of myself had reemerged, the part that just wanted to have fun with friends and laugh really hard at stupid jokes. I had a really stupid idea to make people meet each other through a bingo board with extremely specific prompts like “find someone who knows a member of the tiktok rizz party”. It was really nice to see all the context collapsing, suddenly aspects of my identity I had considered at odds from each other - being a chronically online yearner, an ambitious startup tryhard, a highschool shithead - merge into one.

For much the year that I felt like my move was made out of naivety. I had pressed reset on my timeline, forced to relive a first year out of college again and unable to move on from the past. Yet, as I stood there, looking at all the people in the room, I felt so lucky. Two years ago, graduated and morose from my college experience I never knew how much better it was going to get. I’m so grateful for the general human condition and for all things I get to experience, no matter how fleeting and temporaneous.

Isn’t it wonderful to realize no matter what timeline you’re on, what decision you make, it’ll probably be alright in the end?