Question
What are the most common Silicon Valley/Bay Area beliefs and attitudes that are not shared by people outside of this area? What are things that feel and sound normal here but wouldn't elsewhere?
Answer
I am trying to find the mother of all SV bubble beliefs and I think it is this one (never explicitly stated -- it is more of a missing belief/blindspot than an active one)
"There is no point in planning for my future." (in practice manifested by NOT thinking about the subject at all, beyond the next move)
Everywhere else, people think about aging, retirement, what they might do when their skills get duller with age, having kids, buying a home, etc. etc. Career/life planning elsewhere extends at least abstractly to death, and at least a few concrete next moves/what-ifs. In SV it extends to the next build and a vague one-move ahead thought about the end of the current project.
In SV, this is a curious side-effect of being involved in inventing the future, knowing 100x more about it and having a 0.000001% chance of getting rich off it in ways that would make personal future planning trivial. It makes people, especially younger ones, incredibly short-term/present-oriented in their outlook. If you subconsciously believe you'll have 2-3 million dollars "soon," of course there's no point in thinking too much about your future. SV conversations about personal life rarely venture beyond a year or two out. Elsewhere you get people sharing thoughts about their lives 5-10 years out. Because they have zero expectations of big money in thir future.
I've never met people who think so hard about our collective future and so little about their individual futures. It's a knowledge penalty (knowing too much about the potential future, the so-called paradox of choice) plus a survivorship bias. People who "fail" to achieve the SV dream become invisible or leave the area altogether because it becomes unaffordable, so visible life is dominated by young hopefuls and older successes... the typical mix at an SV coffee shop like Coupa, Red Rock etc. So it is easy to fall into the unconscious trap of thinking you'll age into the older people you see around you.
The bubble starts to weaken a bit near San Jose and across the Bay, and pretty much collapses by Santa Cruz.
By way of comparison, here in Vegas, the 4-5 coffeeshops I frequent have an incredible diversity of human life stories on display. Military vets gathering to chat, rich moms, poor students from UNLV (nothing like Stanford types), tired strippers/waitresses grabbing coffee on the way to/from the strip, shady event promoters, doctors and nurses from a nearby hospital, depressed looking middle aged people browsing job search sites, lots of retirees both sad and happy-looking, USAF people... even if you don't speak to any of them, just being around them forces you to think bout vastly more what-ifs and timescales, the effects of planning vs. not planning etc.
Being in SV, one is faced with almost a military-level homogeneity in life scripts on display, by contrast.
By the way, this is also why SV people find it so hard to market to the mainstream. They literally don't think about their lives or plan them the way the other 99% does. They have no idea how full others' lives are of behaviors and actions driven by longer-term life scripts. Yes, there really are people who barely check email (often Comcast or Hotmail). That's how not-early-adopter they are.
"There is no point in planning for my future." (in practice manifested by NOT thinking about the subject at all, beyond the next move)
Everywhere else, people think about aging, retirement, what they might do when their skills get duller with age, having kids, buying a home, etc. etc. Career/life planning elsewhere extends at least abstractly to death, and at least a few concrete next moves/what-ifs. In SV it extends to the next build and a vague one-move ahead thought about the end of the current project.
In SV, this is a curious side-effect of being involved in inventing the future, knowing 100x more about it and having a 0.000001% chance of getting rich off it in ways that would make personal future planning trivial. It makes people, especially younger ones, incredibly short-term/present-oriented in their outlook. If you subconsciously believe you'll have 2-3 million dollars "soon," of course there's no point in thinking too much about your future. SV conversations about personal life rarely venture beyond a year or two out. Elsewhere you get people sharing thoughts about their lives 5-10 years out. Because they have zero expectations of big money in thir future.
I've never met people who think so hard about our collective future and so little about their individual futures. It's a knowledge penalty (knowing too much about the potential future, the so-called paradox of choice) plus a survivorship bias. People who "fail" to achieve the SV dream become invisible or leave the area altogether because it becomes unaffordable, so visible life is dominated by young hopefuls and older successes... the typical mix at an SV coffee shop like Coupa, Red Rock etc. So it is easy to fall into the unconscious trap of thinking you'll age into the older people you see around you.
The bubble starts to weaken a bit near San Jose and across the Bay, and pretty much collapses by Santa Cruz.
By way of comparison, here in Vegas, the 4-5 coffeeshops I frequent have an incredible diversity of human life stories on display. Military vets gathering to chat, rich moms, poor students from UNLV (nothing like Stanford types), tired strippers/waitresses grabbing coffee on the way to/from the strip, shady event promoters, doctors and nurses from a nearby hospital, depressed looking middle aged people browsing job search sites, lots of retirees both sad and happy-looking, USAF people... even if you don't speak to any of them, just being around them forces you to think bout vastly more what-ifs and timescales, the effects of planning vs. not planning etc.
Being in SV, one is faced with almost a military-level homogeneity in life scripts on display, by contrast.
By the way, this is also why SV people find it so hard to market to the mainstream. They literally don't think about their lives or plan them the way the other 99% does. They have no idea how full others' lives are of behaviors and actions driven by longer-term life scripts. Yes, there really are people who barely check email (often Comcast or Hotmail). That's how not-early-adopter they are.