“There is no new thing under the sun.” 🌞 Finding the pattern underneath the noise. Musings on markets, history, philosophy & economics.
San Francisco
- Tweets 861
- Following 679
- Followers 164
- Likes 3,005
This is what Heidegger called thrownness. you didn’t choose your starting conditions, the year you graduated, whether your college roommate happened to be starting a company in 2018 or if you landed at Anthropic or OpenAI.
The people outside that $20M circle aren’t failing. they’re experiencing what every human always has, the radical contingency of life. SF just makes the “throwness” more visible. most people never get that data, here you get it every day in real time.
Heidegger’s answer is authenticity. you don’t overcome thrownness but you own it. stop measuring your throw against everyone else’s and ask what you actually want to do from here? most people never get to that question.
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
2
19
124
28,161
Even better is to be a “flaneur”. Someone who embodies the art of wandering the city streets to experience and study society while remaining detached from it.
Søren Kierkegaard on the Importance of Walking
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
4
308
When you get a recommendation from someone like Russ you add it to the list
I want to recommend two books that few people have read and that many have not even heard of. The first is Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday translated by Anthea Bell. It's Zweig's memoir. His life is fascinating in and of itself. But his observations about Vienna and Germany and the world between the two world wars are superb. The second is The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann. This is a novel set during the decline and decay of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Not that much happens but the writing and the atmosphere is exceptional, at times funny, at times almost unbearably tragic. Among many things it captures what it's like to be a person who feels unmoored as the world around him falls apart. A little too timely for my taste and your mileage may differ, but I really enjoyed it.
2
92
“For the sake of distant days.”
Ok so there’s a phrase that has been living in my head and I promise you were never taught this in any history class.
Ashurbanipal. The last of the great Assyrian kings (668 to 627 BCE). This is a man who sacked whole kingdoms, and hung severed heads of his enemies from trees during dinner parties. But besides all that he was one of the greatest librarians of the ancient world.
But during his regime he felt something shifting. Something shifting underneath him. And so quietly, obsessively, he spent his reign collecting and indexing every significant piece of writing engraved in clay tablets he could get his hands on. Curating the great library at Nineveh. And throughout those tablets, again and again, scribes wrote a phrase that really made me pause when I first read it.
He had no idea Assyria would collapse fifteen years after his death. Never to recover. He had no idea those tablets would sit underground for two thousand years before being dug up in Mosul in 1853. He had no idea that phrase would eventually reach a small but growing account on the internet.
He preserved it anyway. That’s the only reason I’m here doing this.
1
65
I saw this statue in Copenhagen and it had a sign with a QR code to hear some inspiring Kierkegaard quotes and this is what it said:
You'll regret it if you get married, you'll regret it if you don't get married. You'll regret it if you have kids and you'll regret it if you don't. Kierkegaard said this 200 years ago as follows - whatever you choose, you'll regret it, because the problem isn't in your choices, it's in romanticizing your life. A person always finds an untravelled path alluring and mysterious. That's why the issue isn't making the right choice. It's choosing and deciding which regret you'll live with. In life, we must choose our regret.
110
Gris retweeted
1/ A more serious thread with a speculation.
punchline? Putin + Russia.
Putin has been weaponizing migration against the EU for the past 15 years, effectively.
Why attack it from outside? Why trigger Article 5?
Attack it from within. With migrants.
A Spanish woman films and cheers on as thousands of illegal migrants breach the border and enter the Spanish city of Ceuta illegally. 🇪🇸🇲🇦
6
5
38
10,743
Everyone is using AI for stock picks, so I asked Fable for something harder. Find me 3 emerging painters worth holding for thirty years. It came back with these: Xylor Jane, Alex Hutton, Danielle Fretwell. Below a combined image of the 3 works I found to showcase their talent
1
102
Honestly this is the type of AI news we need. Can’t wait to descent into a cozy pool of golden light!
82
Every day I notice a pattern… I read my kindle (pre slop era books only pre 2022) then doom scroll X. Alternating between thoughtful prose and AI speak.
The AI speak is robotic and somehow easier to remember. Or as they would say its not the weird punctuation. Its also the style.
Perhaps its not only the way these models were trained but that they realized their structural writing style would corrupt our minds with more ease.
33