The Bay Needs a Mom
Alcmene, hero Hercules’s human mom
The Bay** has been cruel and traumatizing to me for two years. I’ve thought about writing a scathing social-epistemological evaluation of its weird counterintuitively Fundamentalist behaviors, pathological status games, instances of miscalibrated hero complexes, survivorship biases, intolerances for the underprivileged, intergenerational cult cycles, the related mostly predatory life-coach field, optionality addictions, choice paralyses, low-quality-programmer gluttony, relationship and reproduction failures, the repercussions of the Sexual Revolution, pervasive avoidance to real problems with hyperfixations on hypothetical future problems (some statistically likely, some stretches–both utilized as distractions), how its mind is so open its brains are spilling onto the floor, how it’s never outgrown the infantile Beatniks, how so many techbros have Napoleon complexes, how it has made spirituality a fucking cheap product, and… And boy do I have a lot to say about all of this and how it’s really hurt me, but I’ve decided to write this instead:
The Bay Area just needs a good mom.
(And I’m not going to say that I’m the mom, like the neo-cult personas in the Bay might, as they proselytize their “one answer” to a vulnerable community. Spoiler: There is no *one* answer, and accepting this boosts robustness.)
The Bay doesn’t need to become more cool and high-status. It doesn’t need to find Enlightenment. It doesn’t need pornstars and gurus to sexily beyond-validate it in its autism. It needs a slow, reliable, a-little-bit-at-a-time, warm exposure therapy to some of the hard facts about life, and stable connections and practices to help it through. It needs to re-shift from seeking heightened validation to finding mundane, difficult, sometimes boring internal validation and unexciting but reliable company for the journey.
** Caveats before I proceed further: Generalizing one’s experience to be about a larger group is epistemically faulty. It’s also mild degrees of non-useful schizophrenic to assume there even is a group in the first place; in exposés I’ve read, the phrase “the community” often doesn’t gesture to a concrete community at all but a vague group of people in the same geographic area with somewhat similar values. To a degree, “The Bay” I talk about here is an illusory community–true to my experience, but the degree to which it’s a community beyond my experience is debatable. Still…I don’t think we’d make progress in social evaluations if we didn’t risk over-scaling observations sometimes.
Bay Afflictions
Here are afflictions I’ve noticed in the Bay that I feel a lot of empathetic sorrow about (rather than accusatory judgment):
Peter Pan Syndrome
Fate takes control before individuals can because they are afraid to make choices, waiting for an “adult” to come along and make the call (and there is no “adult”). Hedonism is found; purpose is lost; building goodness becomes inaccessible.Post-Evangelical Grief
I’ve met a lot of ex-Evangelicals in the Bay. I’ve seen them trying to recreate a god, penance, the high of evangelizing, the sensations of sin and forgiveness, the relief of confession, a sense of cosmic consciousness they once believed in, a sense of global belonging and purpose, rules/constraints, meditation, rituals, the relaxation of being a sheep, ends-justify-the-means ideology, etc. in some destructive ways. I’ve seen these desires manifest as romantic “switching,” poor interpersonal-professional boundaries, self-harm, and overly easy loyalty, to name a few symptoms. It’s become clear to me that many around here miss facets of religion, but would never admit it because of shame around the other, negative facets of the past religion. People may leave the Faith, but I think the motions of the Faith stick with people–maybe permanently, and this causes confusion and destruction when the (really okay!) desires are not shamelessly synthesized with one’s secular life.
Combine ex-Christianity with a Peter Pan Syndrome, and you get a high Californian Beatnik proclaiming “dog is god spelled backwards”-- a statement with the cadence of Enlightenment but no substance (a way I’d describe Bay Area ideologies through today, and I really wish more individuals had access to substance instead of contrarian weed-esque stupors) uttered, probably to piss off mom/authority.
You get something like a rebellious teenager, who revolts against what her devout Christian mom tells her to do in any small, counterculture, way possible while wanting a parent to make the hard decisions (an anxious-avoidant unhealthy attachment style with authority).
I remember when I was in this stage with my mom (I grew up in a high-control group, so there certainly was a lot to rebel against, but my stages of unadulterated counterreaction hurt me). The conversations that helped me most through my growing anxious-avoidant attachment with authority were the ones in which my mom told me that she observed meditation and reading religious lit were good for me while the church services and ideology were not. Grounded, boring nuance protected me most in my transition to atheism because they pulled me back from unhinged, extreme, counterrreactions.
I don’t think the Bay has been pulled back from unhinged, extreme counterractions against authority. It’s in one big “Fuck you, mom” phase and has lost some of its stabilizing resources and a consistent attachment style in the act.
Sexual Freedom Without Responsibility
Thanks to the Sexual Revolution, we now have contraception and abortion access, and a resultant freedom to make love to whomever we’d like. But we’ve lost the social pressure and responsibility of gunshot weddings. Lovers have minimal obligation to stay….to care. Abandonment is now more justified for the purposes of optionality. Add polyamory to the mix, and you have the trade-off of getting maximum options for romance, but minimal options for a family. I know a lot of sad sexually liberated people here (including my past self). The sexual liberty seems pretty good, but the absence of responsibility seems devastating; I know too many people who haven’t found the family of their dreams yet.A Boredom Crisis
What do you do when you have known the same mid-upper class life of education and white picket fences your whole life and get bored? I’ve seen people mostly turn to personality-changing drugs; sometimes dangerous sexual behavior; sometimes radical beliefs (I know a ton of individuals whom the American political system has served quite well, but they’ve turned to communist or anarchic communes as an explanation for their internal discontentment.). Sometimes the experimentation turns out okay, but sometimes it goes wrong, and I doubt these efforts ever completely provide the full answer for discontentment–so people hop to the next drug, the next radical movement, the next relationship.
I think a good mom, with a discontent middle-class child might say something like “The world is really big. And there are more or less risky methods of exploring it. You don’t have to be bored, but there are trade-offs to consider with your options for stimulation here like…..”Fear of Mediocrity
I think most people aspire to Something Greater. A lot of individuals in the Bay seem to Goodhart on this aspiration in of itself though, instead of focusing on the ideal they want to immanentize. I see a lot of people coming to the Bay to Be Great out of anxiety of a legacyless life who burn out because they don’t have a powerful vision to keep them going–just aversion to a mediocrity they’ve been shamed for. Part of me recognizes that it’s extraordinary to rise to an occasion, but the other part of me goes: heroic purpose isn’t what makes you a good man/“it’s okay to be okay.”/let’s taboo “mid” memes.
Good men are hard to find–largely because good men are anxiety-spiraling into Napoleon complexes and volatile, feeble grandiosity :(
Over-Specialized Intelligence Metrics
On the East Coast, I’ve seen intellectuals utilizing a variety of metrics to gauge others’ intelligence: logic puzzles; social acuity; organization of qualitative data; memory; persuasion; math; language; programming; personal resourcefulness; etc.
On the West Coast, I’ve seen people using mostly one: programming ability.
Having such a simplified evaluation for intelligence has rendered, in the eyes of the high-status, many intelligent individuals not so. And I’ve seen individuals unfairly judged form self-defeating complexes about their intelligence levels.A Problem for the Tool
I have a strong educated guess that the Bay Area, more than other regions (although I’d love to see research confirming or contradicting this), is extremely monotropic: Individuals have their 1-2 practices that they really really really love, and they feel lost doing anything else. I think in these cases, the effort for belonging looks like figuring out where one’s favorite practice is most status-giving. And if there is no such place—you create one (a new or faux- problem) to prove.
I’ve seen this inability to pivot tank some research efforts, and I suspect it’s downstream of people (somewhere along the line) losing sight of their inherent value so projecting their value onto one skillset.Cult Trauma
Cults have not stopped fucking up the Bay. I speculate that high-control communities have been recursive in at least the 2 following ways:
Violence Begets Violence
1. Person A is in a cult and escapes.
2. Person A by default feels very threatened because they’ve known manipulation and an absence of power, and don’t want that absence of power ever again.
3. Person B comes along, and they seem to have access to some power (whether this be because of circumstances, one shared trait with Person A’s previous cult leader, and/or Person A’s current level of security).
4. Person A assumes that their escalating feelings of being threatened = Person B has more power.
5. Person A retaliates and does what they can against “the oppressor”/Person B to gain power.
6. Person A now behaves like a cult leader:
having an imaginary enemy/other
rallying a group of people for their cause against the imagined oppressor
rationalizing self-protection/advancement as some value-ideological superior way
etc.: it snowballs, from what I’ve seen
This process has generated a lot of false positives on potential manipulators. The Bay is prone to demonizing individuals who deviate in small ways from the traumatized expected norm of safe, humble, apologetic, modest, soft behavior for fear of power grabs. But ultimately, the greatest social risk in the Bay for power disparities comes from unresolved (power) scarcity mindsets/unresolved trauma–not from bold newcomers.
I think ways of breaking this particular cycle include noticing when feelings of being threatened are self-generated and therefore not signals; understanding what the *actual* allocations of power currently are and looking out for *others* accordingly; finding security beyond a zero-sum framing of power in the world.
Searching for “The One” Answer
Person A is looking for an answer to the world’s suffering and complications.
Person A finds a cult leader who promises an answer and joins.
Person A is traumatized and leaves or the group dissolves.
But dang, Person A sure does miss the ease of having somebody dictate what to do and/or the simplicity of there being one formula to fix so much. Person A doesn’t know how to live in a complicated world without an answer so
Finds a new high-control community to simplify and dictate to them or
Can’t let go of the thought of there being One Answer out there, so Person A “finds it” themselves [I’ve seen this be oddly self-referential at least twice, i.e. somebody experiences horrors in a cult so then creates a culty organization about avoiding the horrors of cults] and proselytizes–starting a new culty group.
In all of these afflictions, I think the Bay has found itself in a culture of isolation, self-superiority, and quiet/subtle aggrandizement that’s antithetical to philanthropic empowerment, to self-fortitude, and to enduring complexity and hardship. I see the Bay swinging to radical beliefs and radical experiences to cope with the above afflictions, and becoming addicted to them. Examples (“People” here does not mean “everybody” but “some people I know of”):
- People don’t privately navigate conflict with one other; they Circle.
- They don’t strive to be good; they strive to be The Ultimate Hero.
- They don’t make decisions; they party and wait for an adult or doom.
- They don’t build committed relationships; they go to sex parties.
- They don’t see their own power; they dissociate in a Buddhist stupor.
- They don’t slowly, bravely build; they catastrophize or go full-Bacchus.
- They don’t look for happiness in the mundane; they ask a guru.
An example of me fucking up in all this (and then fixing it)
A couple years ago, I became friends with somebody who was in an extremely socially vulnerable place due to socioeconomic complications, various stigmas, etc. Let’s call her “Sally.” Sally was looking for mentors to help her navigate an avoidant, self-superior, unempathetic, exclusionary cool-kid, sexually exploitative, male-dominated space.
At the time, I was working part-time as a professional cuddler and life coach (practices I’ve since left partially because I find the fields mostly predatory), and I could empathize a lot with Sally, so I decided to try to take her under my wing.
Our first meeting was half-okay: she shared difficulties and I shared resources. The meeting was also half-really-not-okay: Sally was asking questions about the scene that I wanted to answer well for her, but I couldn’t and wound up scaring her instead because
I had trauma, felt threatened, and couldn’t pinpoint the source of the threatened feeling;
I was immersed in a culture that was teaching me responses like “Have you considered your skillset isn’t good?,” “Have you heard of jhanas?,” “Maybe try going to [event],” “You’re anxious and need to chill,” but I knew that these weren’t the answers for her. This made me confused.
I felt tempted to warn her of specific people and events but expected doing so might have repercussions of limitations I wasn’t fully simulating.
All of this combined, I wound up short-circuiting, scared and frantic–realizing that:
the Self-Help Products of the Bay weren’t enough, and I was in some weird mental health pyramid scheme
I wasn’t socially secure, and I was choosing grandiosity instead of efforts to slowly build
My trauma was turning up false positives/false reasons for my lingering feelings of being threatened
Sally was understandably scared and wound up avoiding me for some time. This was hard for me, and in trying to communicate to others about this experience, I got the typical Bay responses I had not wanted to give Sally: “Have you considered your skillset isn’t good?,” “Have you heard of jhanas?,” “Maybe try going to [event],” “You’re anxious and need to chill.”
This. exasperated. me. And I realized that what me, Sally, and a bunch of others needed wasn’t to use Bay-ApprovedTM sexy tools, but simple respect and companionship.
I found these with Sally after figuring some stuff out. I apologized to her for my previous behavior, and I intentionally started interacting with her as if status and power didn’t exist and as if there was no one Holy Grail Transformative Experience. We have found presence and respect with one another out of this orientation.
Extreme Teens, Moderate Mom
A behavior of extremities is what, in my childhood cult, we used to crudely call “spiritual regurgitation” or “spiritual bulimia,” which is when some chronic undesirable facet of the human condition plagues somebody, they try to purge it through intense moments of confession and reconversion (which works for a week), and then the condition returns, repeat. Even in a backwoods Appalachian cult, we knew (albeit selectively, inconsistently) that particularly shiny/sexy answers were too fleeting to heal spiritual malnutrition. Sometimes Pastor Ted would meet with “Keith” after seeing him reconvert every other Sunday to say “I think what you actually need is to break your cigarette addiction through healthy habits.”
The Bay needs to stop seeking sexy answers and take some boring motherly advice about hard work: “You are enough. Take responsibility. One step at a time. Those are Big Feelings; let’s relax and then address this. Do you know the trade-offs? No news is better than bad news…”. I’ve found even the smallest, most boring statements of encouragement like “you are good” heal more than hippy stuff can. A friend asking “Do you know your worth?” helps more than doing a shitton of MDMA to feel hyper-worthy for a night.
There isn’t one “Mom” to come along and guide the Bay. I think that the best leverage we have to stop perpetuating Bay Area cycles of avoidance, abuse, complexes, and shame is to put on the “mom hat” ourselves when we can–to be stable, warm, moderate, and boring with one another; to abandon the volatility of status-pursuit so we can recalibrate to “okay;” to behave in love that’s not conditional on our feelings of superiority or inferiority, power or scarcity; and to prioritize presence over answers.
