Don’t overthink it.

Sometimes, Silicon Valley seems like the most fantastic place that has ever existed and I kick myself for not moving out there when I was younger. What is better than going out to the Bay, buying sunglasses at the airport, walking past the ads for enterprise whatevers, then past the airport yoga room? (Has anyone ever entered the SFO yoga room? I wonder if it’s filled with alligators.) The sun is so bright and some days the only clouds are sequestered away in server farms; the air smells of microservices. Plus the freshness of the avocados—the way the pit pops right out with a tap instead of needing to be pulled from the goop with a knife—for me, it’s impossible to walk out of SFO without thinking, “this would be nice. I could do this.” Other times (for example when I'm reading Hacker News comments for the second hour or I've fallen too far down the Medium entrepreneurship hole), the Valley feels like one of those vast farms where all the pigs are bred in such proximity, and to such exacting genetic tolerances, that the barns must be kept at a constant temperature and a steady drip of antibiotics must be fed into the pigs by the industrial farmers because otherwise they’ll all get viruses and die in days. Are the farmers venture capital investors? Are the pigs in this metaphor the programmers or the product? The answer is yes! Also you need more microservices.

Instead of building tools for “silly human mammals” who are “easily trained by positive reinforcement,” she argues, technologists should embrace the messiness of human life and put it into the core of the products they build.

Instruments to choose for busking, ranked

Airbnb’s purpose, it seems, is to bring us back to some imagined past where strangers felt welcome in each other’s home, but in the placeless future of the internet. Airbnb emerges as a unifier, restoring trust between strangers, between everyone on earth, in fact. A friend is just someone you haven’t met yet. We can all belong anywhere. Anywhere can be home. It is wishful thinking that Airbnb can scale up “what makes this global community so special” rather than have its community become co-opted by the values of the global marketplace — presumably efficiency, the maximization of profit, and personal interest (as opposed to “trust and safety”). It seems like Airbnb would like to wish away the complexities of what community really means: shared interests that hold people together, a set of agreed-upon rules to keep people in check, and transparency.

Because nothing has made my life richer than coming down off my pedestal and, instead of spinning in neurotic circles, working hard to enjoy the pleasures of everyday life. I can finally see that my best moments are not those when I'm being celebrated or adored. In my finest moments, I'm working hard at something that feels very difficult, or I'm taking in the grace and humor of the people around me, or I'm just staring out the window, watching the wind whipping through the trees on a late October afternoon. To feel fully alive and calm and in the zone is to also be, in some ways, in the background, borderline invisible, a vessel for something bigger than yourself. That's also, not coincidentally, practically the definition of relaxation and peace. It's not a lobotomy. It's using your brain to focus outward, until the whirring machinery in your head is silenced. Some part of you believes that it's too late to fulfill your incredible, extra-special potential, so why even try? But there's no such thing as too late and there's no such thing as extra special. Grand accomplishments are nothing and process is everything. Right now, you have no process. Dare to consider what kind of work might engage you fully. Dare to join us here in the real world, where we do things that are difficult and sometimes feel arbitrary, where we chip away at something outside of ourselves (sometimes just so we don't chip away at ourselves instead), where we get to know each other and take great satisfaction in slowly but surely revealing JUST HOW FUCKED UP WE REALLY ARE. You are not a crazy genius or an irredeemable asshole or a misfit who's damned for all time. You are just a person. We are all damned in our own little ways. We are all uniquely blessed and uniquely fucked. Welcome to the world.