The truth about SF vs. NYC: REVEALED

well, maybe

I could start this essay with some hawing about how I’ve been moved, by recent discursive developments, to insert myself into the ongoing fracas regarding the respective merits of New York and San Francisco, the only two cities in the world, but the truth is that I am publishing this because I would like to get out ahead of my friend Sam Kriss, who is a better and much more famous writer than me and has a big slanderous piece coming out in one of the big magazines about the San Francisco “scene” that is for now bottlenecked on the legacy publication insistence on editing. Fine: If I can’t beat Sam on style I’ll beat him on speed.

You can probably guess that I am an SF partisan. I lived in New York for almost three years and found it profoundly disappointing but like everyone I came into it from a very particular set of circumstances. Maybe it will be helpful for the purposes of this article to describe them.

I had been living in China, the People’s Republic of. I was there for five years through the meat of my twenties and I left on February 11, 2020 because of well, you know, and for a long time I thought I would be able to go back. I kept my apartment there with all my stuff in it for months. When the borders closed and showed no signs of opening ever again, I got on a video call with my cleaning lady and we went through every item in my apartment, yaobuyao?, and that’s how my old life got packed into boxes. Those boxes sat in storage for another half year until I got a friend to send them to me, across the ocean (across which ocean I don’t know – I think about this sometimes, occasionally fantasizing they were on the ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal). When the boxes appeared on the stoop of my group house in DC in the spring of 2021, battered, creased, much the worse for their journey, my reaction was not dissimilar to those registered by clients in Sherlock Holmes when some horrible token from their time in a distant corner of the Empire comes to haunt them. My face drained of color; my heart pounded; I broke into sweats. I let the boxes sit in the living room for weeks until my roommates complained. After that I schlepped them upstairs and deposited them in the corner of my bedroom, where I let them languish unopened for months until eventually, one summer morning, the metaphor became too glaring.

What’s important to understand here is that China had meant everything to me. It was where, as far as I was concerned, I had travelled to the frontier of human experience. It was where I had become a writer and even, toward the end of 2019, seemed on the verge of becoming a successful one. For the time I was there, and for far too long after I came back, the idea I might not make it as a famous writer was quite unbearable. I still find it a tiny bit unbearable. Thus my fake-but-not-really beef with Sam.

So China, in the opening years of the 2020s, was to me pretty much synonymous with disappointment and pain. I preferred to not talk about it or think about it (I didn’t read the news for three years because of the tendency of China to feature in it) and to not even mention the name, if at all possible. In this sense my move to New York at the beginning of 2022 on account of an accident of podcasting was quite opportune. You see: New Yorkers have the remarkable ability of being unable to interest themselves in places that are not New York. I was going to a lot of parties then and a mention of Chicago, much less China – it was like when they put you under for a colonoscopy. One-two-three lights out. And that was fine, that was great, because I was eager to forget the place I had been and let New York absorb and enthrall me as it apparently had my interlocutors.

But it never did. Months and then years went by and New York was still not more to me than an expensive and hectic city. I promise you I tried to make it work. I attended downtown parties; dressed up for opera at the Met; dressed down for DIY theater in Brooklyn; walked around in the rain listening to Leonard Cohen; took in ponderous art films at rep cinemas; took up with an inappropriate man; bumped cocaine off of inappropriate objects; moped around Prospect Park; bought and wore a tan trenchcoat; watched fireworks over the Hudson river; joined the Park Slope Food Coop etc; etc; etc. Nada. Never more than a frisson.

Perhaps my cliche-clogged itemization just now provides the key to my failure. I can’t say I ever felt in New York that I was doing or seeing something new or original. Recall that in China I had travelled to the frontier of human experience. I had spoken, in Chinese, to people who had never before seen a foreigner. They had unfolded to me their life stories, taken me on expeditions. I had transgressed national and class boundaries on the daily. I did not need to do much more than leave my apartment in Chengdu to have an interaction completely unprecedented and more importantly - uncatalogued – in human history. In China, meaning was ripe for the picking and for literary processing.

In New York it was hard not to feel that whatever meaning the city once had on offer had long since been arbed out, maybe sometime in the 70s: Patti Smith, Lou Reed, and so on. A problem in Manhattan especially. Last month I had a delightful stay at my friend’s apartment in the East Village which I spent mostly prancing up and down St. Marks’ Pl to the Walgreens for toiletries I’d forgotten. Ambling around the City I was shocked as to how well worn, how exhausted, every image and phrase that popped into my head was: standing in line at the sample sale; sleeping on the subway grate; etc. A picked-overness that extends to inner Brooklyn and even parts of Queens (the places inhabited by postscarcity-jaded meaning-seekers like myself, twiddling their thumbs at the end of history). In these zones, meaning is rivalrous and finite. Thus the pinched quality one observes in the seasoned New Yorker; thus the prevalence of gatekeeping.

There is still some meaning to be found if you’re willing to schlep to the outer boroughs. I can think of one time in particular. It was early spring and I had taken the bus to meet my friend at a Malaysian restaurant in Sunset Park. My road to trayf took me through the Hasidic pocket of Boro Park. It was Shabbos, and as I waited for the connecting bus, trash blew through the empty streets while large black-clad families hurried home from shul. When the bus came it took me and a handful of other passengers down a road lined with nearly identical walkups. Through the lit windows of each walkup you could see black-clad families sitting down to the evening meal. Sitting on the bus, watching the identical tableaux, I was totally spellbound; a laowai again. I was a stranger in a strange land and never more comfortable.

Barring a trip to the outer boroughs you need a big, catastrophic defamiliarizing event for New York to reenchant. This was COVID for some people; for me it was the wildfire smoke that drifted down from French Canada in the summer of 2023. For the days the city was wreathed in particulates I thought only of you know where. I kept bumping into doorframes. One night I had a first date with a nice man, a listener of my podcast, who was probably disappointed to discover I had nothing to say. The smog had deleted my ability to converse. With great effort I dredged up monosyllables, strung together platitudes. I still feel bad about that. But what was I supposed to have done? I am afraid I cannot meet you, my brain is in a different country and I cannot retrieve it until the swirling graininess of air under the street lights ceases to recall the place that still haunts me? Well, maybe.

I was, throughout this time, working on getting a real job, with a salary and benefits and so on. I was going to grad school and learning data science. Whenever I told people about this plan at parties they got the colonoscopy look in their eyes. They said things like: Hmm, data. Once someone pronounced mistily that I was “so brave.”

At the end of the summer of 2024 I was offered the job I have now and moved out to the Bay. That job is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. If you are a reading this, and you are wondering if you should get real job or continue down the bohemian path while waiting your turn to become a famous writer/artist/whatever, my answer is unambiguous: Get a job. Get one now.

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Perhaps, at this point, you are feeling a little cheated. You are wondering if I will ever finish navalgazing about my particular hangups and throw you some re-stackable, re-tweetable red meat about the differences between New York and San Francisco, the only two cities in the world.

Well, all of the stereotypes are true. San Franciscans dress abominably, struggle to make small talk and are generally illiterate. New Yorkers dress wonderfully, talk brilliantly about nothing and are generally innumerate. The modal party in SF is one at which everyone underindulges and converses way too earnestly about artificial intelligence. At the modal party in New York there is way too much cocaine and talk about internecine literary/art/whatever drama. There are distributions to everything, of course, but those are the central tendencies. If I wasn’t convinced before that there is indeed a tradeoff between style and substance, I am now. End my Tiresian report to the Gods.

I’ve made it sound just now like NYC vs. SF is a wash, but you know from earlier I am an SF partisan. The reason is quite simply this: SF, unlike New York or really anywhere else in the US, is open to the future. Unfortunately, while I was writing this, Dan Wang – another person who is a better and much more famous writer than me who I am definitely not jealous of – published his yearly letter in which he captured this point more succinctly than I ever could:

But San Francisco better embodies an ethos of openness relative to the rest of the country. Industries on the east coast — finance, media, universities, policy — tend to more carefully weigh name and pedigree. Young scientists aren’t told they ought to keep their innovations incremental and their attitude to hierarchy duly deferential, as they might hear in Boston. A smart young person could achieve much more over a few years in SF than in DC. People aren’t reminiscing over some lost golden age that took place decades ago, as New Yorkers in media might do.

San Francisco, in other words, has a little of the flavor of the place Dan and I both are obsessed with: China. When I first came to China in 2014 the country seemed to me to be swimming in possibility.¹ One felt, even just walking around, going to get noodles or whatever, that one was witness to history was in the making. On my yearly visits back to the U.S. I always found my home country a little provincial and dull. It’s the same now when I go back to the East Coast from SF. Where are the Waymos? Where are the Chinese peptide raves? Where are the funerals for discontinued Claude models?

If there’s one thing I miss about the East, it’s dressing up. To an eccentric summit called Human Directed Futures, subhead the Data Center Stability Reorganization Initiative, at which I witnessed men become priapic over, among other things, EUV lithography machines, I wore my red Tory Burch kitten heels to give a talk about electricity prices and was asked by three different people if I was visiting from New York. Oh well.

There is social climbing in San Francisco, just as in New York, although it is characteristically much less artful. Not long after moving here I was at a party, chatting with a guy who is a very big deal on AI twitter, when a drunk girl elbowed me out of the way and thrust her sheepish looking companion in front of my former interlocutor. “I want [guy who is a very big deal on AI twitter] to retweet my boyfriend,” she told me in halfassed sotto voce. Then, as if to compensate for her interruption: “I think [AI twitter guy] likes you. You should talk to him.” She then quoted to me the exact number of this guy’s twitter followers.

If you thought I would be offended by this you’d be wrong. I have a lot of time for the bald Austenian accounting of twitter follower counts and compensation packages and net worths. It’s very honest. Indeed, I am vastly more offended by social climbing when the stakes are a story in a downtown literary magazine than when the stakes are billions of dollars and the favor of the Machine God. When it comes to supplication, I say go big or go home.

People in New York always ask me how dating is in San Francisco. It’s no worse than anywhere else. It’s a hard time in history to be dating, what with the postscarcity-induced inflation of expectations and the rising opportunity cost of time and so on, and everyone is doing their best. People in SF are working on solving this problem, the dating one, although I am less bullish on their finding a solution than I am on say, artificial general intelligence. The same weekend I attended Human Directed Futures: the Data Center Stability Reorganization Initiative, I dipped into the Love Symposium, a conference devoted to the dating problem. The highlight for me was the near-psychedelic jargon, some of which I recorded and reproduce here with no context:

Human mating market from zero sum to positive sum

Simple prediction head for sense of humor

Dating market is efficient it’s just people have astronomical alpha

Some users are constrained by being unattractive or having absurd preferences

Entire city caught up in reproductive suppression

Status games with slim payoff chance

Reproductive mimetics

Maybe none of this sounds good to you. You would rather not spend your weekends going to weird niche conferences and hanging out with people who will offhandedly mention their plans to cryogenically freeze their head. Fine. Go to New York, do cocaine, consort with the beautifully dressed and the exquisitely read. I’ll be here, voyeuring, a laowai again, unburdened by narrative, peering into the future.

1. I’ve heard that that sense of possibility, which was already diminishing at the time I left, is by now greatly reduced. I’ll be visiting in June - the first time in 6.5 years! - and will report back.