Two Pairs of Eyes

I've been thinking a lot about San Francisco and Silicon Valley lately.

More specifically, I've been thinking about why these two places, only forty minutes apart by car, feel like two different countries.

Silicon Valley is not a city. It's a suburb. Plaza after plaza, neighborhood after neighborhood, corporate park after corporate park. Every town has a so-called downtown, but compared to SF, those downtowns are basically just one block.

But geography is just the surface. The real difference is the gaze.

When you live in Silicon Valley, you can always feel someone watching you.

But honestly, those people aren't actually watching you. The truth of American life is that you spend more time alone than you think. The gaze you can feel — almost all the time — is yourself watching yourself.

It's just that the eyes you're watching yourself with were installed by the place you live. Once they're installed, you can't take them off. Even in an empty room, on an empty highway, at 2am with nobody around, those eyes are still open.

Silicon Valley installs a pair of eyes with very clear markings on them. They keep asking you: did you get the promotion? What's your company's valuation? Which school district did your kid get into? These questions all have clear answers. You can answer them at any moment, and at any moment you know exactly where you stand.

These markings are double-edged. On one hand, they slowly grind you into the shape they measure. You end up becoming a person mostly defined by these numbers.

On the other hand, a person without any markings also has a hard time pushing anything to its limit. I know this take isn't popular, but I think it's correct.

Caring about whether those eyes are scoring you and caring about whether you've actually done a good job are the same internal structure. A person who genuinely doesn't care what anyone thinks usually doesn't write code with tests, doesn't ship a product polished enough for a thousand strangers to use, doesn't sustain a thirty-year career arc. Patience, rigor, finishing — these are qualities that come more naturally to people who have an audience. Even if the audience is only imagined.

Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because those eyes have, over decades, produced the world's best engineers, the most ruthless product standards, the longest patience. They kill creativity. But they also feed excellence. It's the same thing turning into different things at different stages of your life. Invention needs those eyes closed. Building needs them open.

I think this is similar to what happens in Asia. Asia installs the same kind of eyes — invisible, internalized, always there. They eat freedom, but they also build the kind of order that lets generations live stable lives. It's not a question of good or bad. It's a question of whether you need them right now.

San Francisco has its own gaze too. I don't want to write SF as a city without a gaze, because it isn't.

But the eyes SF installs are different.

The Silicon Valley eyes ask you: do they see you?

The SF eyes ask you: do you see yourself?

The first question has an answer. The second one doesn't.

The answer to the first is on your paycheck, your LinkedIn, your kid's acceptance letter. The answer to the second is something only you can faintly feel at 3am, alone, and very often you can't feel it at all.

So SF isn't actually a lighter city. It just changes the direction of the work. It swaps the work of being seen for the work of seeing yourself. The first has KPIs. The second doesn't. The first you can perform. The second you can't. When you do the first one right, people clap. When you do the second one right, nobody knows.

A lot of people think moving to SF lets them escape the gaze. It doesn't. They just move from one gaze to another. And many of them quietly bring the SV ruler with them — they live an SF life but score themselves with an SV scorecard, and end up paying both costs.

That said, the SF gaze is genuinely thinner, because from the very beginning this city was a refuge for weird people. Gold rushers, missionaries, drifters, poets, coders, people who didn't want to get married, people who didn't want kids, people who didn't want to wear normal clothes, people who didn't want to do normal jobs. They all found their corner here.

The architecture says the same thing. It's not telling you the city is beautiful. It's telling you: you don't need to be normal to live well.

Silicon Valley's architecture speaks a different language. Low, flat, clean, white, beige, lawns always trimmed, Teslas always parked. These buildings don't tell you anything. They just wait for you to fit them. That kind of fitting isn't romantic, but it has an underrated kind of good. A house that doesn't demand anything of you is, for someone who has been demanded of all day, its own kind of rest. It doesn't ask you to be interesting. It doesn't ask you to be edgy. It doesn't ask you to prove anything. You can be tired. You can be bored. You can stare into space. You can spend three hours being nobody at all. The beige and the lawn don't ask you whether you spent the day living meaningfully enough.

AI brought the young people back to SoMa, to Hayes Valley, to the Mission. Twenty-somethings, not married, no kids, no Tesla, renting a studio, or sleeping on a friend's air mattress, writing code in a cafe until 2am. They're building things that might change the world, or might pivot in two weeks.

Silicon Valley is mostly houses. SF is mostly apartments, condos, townhouses. I think there's something interesting hiding behind that.

When you live in a house, your connections point inward. You have a family, a backyard, a dinner time. The relationships that matter most to you are already inside these walls. You don't need to go looking. And your thoughts stop changing that easily.

When you live in a studio, your connections point outward. The apartment is too small to want to stay inside, so you go out — to cafes, to coworking, to random meetups, to meet people you've never met. You don't know where your next idea will come from, but you know it won't come from inside your 120 square feet.

Both are connection, just in different directions. One tends to what's already there. The other keeps reaching outward. That's probably also why people in SF change their minds more easily.

And eventually I figured it out: these two places really represent two states a person can be in at different stages of life.

Silicon Valley is for people who already know where they're going. Their lives are meant to be optimized.

SF is for people who haven't figured out where they're going. Their lives are not meant to be optimized. They're meant to be invented.

That's the difference between poetry and the grind. But the grind isn't bad. The grind is taking the ruler somebody else wrote and being as good as possible on that ruler. Poetry is throwing that ruler away and trying to find one nobody has made yet.

Most people will probably need both at some point. First use someone else's ruler to lay a foundation, then throw it away and look for your own. Or the other way around — wander around with your own ruler for a while, then accept the more mainstream one and grind it into your own. The question isn't which one is higher. The question is which stage you're in right now, and whether you're being honest with yourself about it.

Honestly, every time I drive north out of Silicon Valley, past Daly City, and the SF skyline emerges from the fog, I feel myself exhale.