Returning home after an extended stay
Paul Graham returns home to Cambridge after an extended stay in the Bay Area. He writes that it gives him an appreciation of how an outsider might view our fair Hub - both the bad (crumbling infrastructure, overall rudeness, you know the drill) and the good:
... When Boston is good, though, it's really good. It's so concentrated here. Everything in the Bay Area looks like it was built in the 1960s. Cambridge looks like it evolved gradually over hundreds of years. It's much richer in an information-theoretic sense. The Bay Area, like suburbia (which most of the Bay Area is), is like walking into a room in which the air pressure is too low. It's suffocatingly empty. ...
I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you "you should make more money." LA tells you "you should be better looking." Rome tells you "you should dress better." London tells you "you should be hipper." The Bay Area tells you "you should live better." And Cambridge tells you "you should read some of those books you've been meaning to."
Comments
Cambridge speaks
...that's odd. When Cambribge spoke to me it said, "It's OK to ignore personal grooming".
Agreed
After living in the Bay Area for years and years, I have to agree on all points in that blog post. San Francisco is OK -- but just OK to me -- and the suburbs there are the worst. Strip mall, shopping center, chain store, 12-lane freeway, strip mall, shopping center, chain store, 12-lane freeway. It's really isolating.
Of course it's no contest if he's talking about Palo Alto
Paul Graham's list compares New York, LA, Boston/Cambridge, London, Rome, and Palo Alto,
which has no business being in this list. He conveys the wrong
impression by characterizing that "empty" burg as having all of the
attributes of "the Bay Area."
On the other hand, San Francisco, is a wonderful dense slice of
urbanity, with accessible and varied neighborhoods, a great system of
transportation, some of the best food on the continent, and a buzz and
vibrancy that stays with you wherever you go.
Paul Graham just went the wrong way when he left the SFO airport.