Garbage Valley
The Future wasn't something I would have to plan or build or work for. I believed the Future was going to be created for me by benevolent corporations... All I had to do was stay alive long enough to inhabit it.
They all come to this place to succeed, looking for the next big move in their career. It's there, right there, they think. They might be right. But is it worth it? Never do they stop and ponder, in their never-ending fall, if that’s the right path? One day, too little too late, they realize that they've been spending the last five years, maybe decade, maybe more, in a non-sense lifestyle, having allocated most of their time to the starring of a screen, pretending to change the world with their peers in rooms without windows. Unless it is the room with windows and with the free drinks and cookies. Accumulating money and stocks til’ they can buy a house in some expensive zip code and produce some offsprings that they can live vicariously through. One day they’ll die of old age, in a system that only care about old people that are rich motherfuckers.
The bay is truly a prison. One where you are endlessly given what you want, in exchange of your time. So you give your time, and in return you buy the latest technological birth of the valley. In exchange you shop for the most comfortable and the most pricey sweatpants that you can wear at work. In exchange you subscribe for flavored bottles of water. Because you can, because you have the money, because you fucking deserve it, you're working so hard and playing hard for fuck sake. And so once in a while, when you have some free time, you drop in wine country. They have subscription there too, they sell you the bullshit and you empty your wallet. It's not worth it, but you don't care, this is monopoly money.
On your way to a Kafka meetup you cross the low souls of the San Francisco street, the heroin heads, the trash of society. You don't even see them anymore. You get your cheese matcha boba gluten-free latte for $10 and you wonder why all these cashiers have the same square point of sale that asks you for a tip. Should you tip? You don't really want to tip. But someone dressed in a Patagonia sweater behind you is looking at the screen. So you tip the minimum. It's fuck you money anyway.
Comes the night, you're so fucking lonely. You think about the fact that Coachella and Burning Man were cancelled. You want to get a hard seltzer somewhere, maybe the Battery. All the streets are empty because tomorrow all the ants need to wake up at CEO time to get to their useless meetings. You still ask some friends on Telegram but they all live in south bay or maybe even worse, Oakland. They probably have a worse life than you, that makes you smile.
So you medicate yourself to sleep with some of that legal drug. The next day, you wake yourself up with a cup of another one. It's a cycle, you know it, everything is a cycle. You either dream big, or you dream of leaving. But you're vesting, and you're going to make it, and if this one is not the one, maybe the next one will be. The people in LA sounds like they're having fun, but we're changing the world here. We're fucking changing the world.
But these days, you’re starting to doubt. You’re starting to wonder if you took the right path. You’re starting to wonder about the time you’re not spending with your parents, or the time you’re wasting for that tech lead who’s slaving everyone around them in order to get to their promotion. You’re burning out. You’re hiding your face in all the zoom meetings, you’re not reading slack anymore. They know. You won’t be able to hide for too long. So be it, if they fire me it’ll be a good thing. In the meantime, I’m vesting.
