If San Francisco is so great, why is everyone I love leaving?
She says the ones coming in to California <i>&quot;...flock here for gold and glory, ready to hustle and disrupt, hammering to hit the motherlode and laughing at the odds&quot;</i> while the ones leaving <i>&quot;...leave their families and communities behind on the chance they will, ironically, strike gold.&quot;</i><p>In other words they are the same.  In both cases they&#x27;re de-prioritizing more traditional values (home, family, friends, community) to pursue wealth and fortune.  To put it bluntly and somewhat negatively (although I&#x27;ll make a disclaimer in a sec), they&#x27;re coming for greed, and they&#x27;re leaving for greed.  There&#x27;s no contradiction.<p>Here&#x27;s that disclaimer and a bit of a tangent: Greed has a good side, like Gordon Gekko&#x27;s speech in the ancient movie Wall Street -- &quot;Greed is good. Greed works.&quot;  Basically greed is just a thing; the desire for more ___.  And keep in mind that all things have dual nature dark&#x2F;light just like the yin&#x2F;yang symbol shows.  Dark and light are not only coiled intimately around each other, but there is also a spot of the one inside the very heart of the other.  It&#x27;s really a brilliant piece of symbology and a good reminder about the world, that participants in fruitless and polarized political debates would do well to pay attention to.  (Though nobody wants to hear there&#x27;s as much evil in them as in their opponents, or that there&#x27;s as much good in their opponents as themselves... especially when it&#x27;s true.)<p>Anyway, with that in mind, you can state something like &quot;Steve Jobs was greedy&quot; and see what a perfect statement it is.  It captures both sides.  But yeah so in that case let&#x27;s not fail to call out the aspects of the Silicon Valley &quot;dream&quot; that are inherently materialistic.  Or opportunistic, might be a better word. Should we really be surprised that such a place, through its own success, begins to crowd out other uses&#x2F;priorities&#x2F;values including both traditional ones (home, family) and non-traditional-but-non-materialistic ones (art)?<p>Also what of these other towns where life is cheaper?  They are filled with people who stayed put, who chose &quot;home and family&quot; above &quot;gold and glory.&quot;  Granted some of them had the <i>luxury of choosing</i> let&#x27;s say &quot;being an artist&quot; because the town is cheap enough to do so.  Others had <i>no choice</i> but to be pretty-much without gold or glory because of a general dearth of opportunity.  But don&#x27;t let either one of those things distract you: People in these places, especially people who grew up there, value the things they value.  I&#x27;d imagine you&#x27;d find &quot;home and family&quot; are ranked as higher priorities, as well as &quot;creativity,&quot; while &quot;fame and fortune&quot; would be ranked lower.  Materialism and opportunism would be lower.  Restlessness, shallowness all would be lower.  If you could measure things like that.<p>So again, should we be surprised that when people steeped in the Silicon Valley go-go-get-&#x27;em environment -- either the ones who already traded &quot;home&quot; for &quot;success&quot; once in order to go there, or the ones who, like the author&#x27;s friend, are doing it for the first time -- land in those other places, and end up standing out unwelcomely like the proverbial sore thumb?  Try to blend in(0) and you might find less &quot;hate.&quot;  The &quot;angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere&quot; aren&#x27;t pissed because they think you&#x27;re rich snobs (though those do stand out more, in part because of their disproportionate ability to influence the actual physical architecture of a place, more on that in a minute); they&#x27;re mad because by virtue of your very relocations, you display a verifiable history of being at least greedy&#x2F;opportunistic enough (again, in both good&#x2F;bad senses) to do so in the first place, and of embracing the values the Valley&#x2F;Bay is famous for, and of actively disdaining the (apparently now contrary) values these people adhere to, which are ironically the ones whose loss is being lamented in this piece.<p>(0) I shouldn&#x27;t have said &quot;blend in.&quot;  &quot;Blending in&quot; sounds too much like fascism.  &quot;Harmonize&quot; would be better. Because like people in a band, you might all be playing different instruments and parts, but you sort of have to be playing the same song, don&#x27;t you.<p>Architecture provides a good metaphor here.  An ostentatious new ultra-modern house that makes no effort whatsoever to harmonize with the surrounding architecture -- there are now plenty of those in these towns.  If you say you don&#x27;t like them, people will disingenuously say it&#x27;s because you&#x27;re an ass-backwards hick who hates modernity, but that&#x27;s not the reason.  It&#x27;s because it&#x27;s artless, jarring and tone-deaf, like someone who joins a band while it&#x27;s playing and starts playing a different song.