Moving?

“You should live where you live”. “NYC is the best city in the world”. “There are Increasing returns to every year living in the same place”. I’ve said these things many times to many people. Throughout my years living in NYC I’ve talked and thought about the odds I would still be in NYC 5 years from now (in the given moment). The answer has basically always been above 60% (I think the lowest it has ever been is 50%).

I’m currently strongly considering living in Berkeley for 1-3 months. Even just sitting here trying to write the next sentence after that feels awful. I’ve got this big tangled knot in me. I can feel it so viscerally. Twisting and turning. There’s so many different aspects, and I’m struggling to sort through.

1. I am feeling the best I ever have about doing meaningful purposeful work with real impact. It seems like if I want to continue to do my absolute best, being in the bay is a requirement. It is the place where AI and AI safety are happening.

2. I am feeling the worst I ever have about me fitting into the future of the communal house I put so much effort into making happen. I’m feeling dropped, and I am relatively certain there is a way through this. I think if I stayed and prioritized this I think I could feel very good about it, I think the house could return to harmony. [3/19 edit: I am feeling way better about the house, turns out when you have great communication norms and care about each other you can just work through hard things, who knew¹?!]

3. I am feeling really unexcited about people right now. I was at a dinner party this weekend that I was really really excited to attend, and then I got there and within an hour I had approximately decided that I wasn’t excited about any of the 10 or so people. There was such a visceral sense of like "you all just talk about your clearly oft repeated college and high school stories with maybe some offhanded discussion of your boring corporate job. There were 3-4 people that were new and not ingroup and they just got kind of abandoned to talk to themselves, none of the group of longtime friends tried to bring them in. None of the group conversations tried to broach anything hard or new or interesting, it all felt so cached². I had one or two 1:1 conversations that I enjoyed, but I came away wishing so badly that I had more curiosity. More innate burning passion to want to know these other souls. But I couldn’t do it. I used to be so so excited about people. New people. All people. Everyone felt like a flower I could unfold and find something fascinating. My desire for this was so great I was down to have 30+ people in my house every other Saturday - cooking for all of them³! Somewhere in the intervening 5 years since I started that event I got burned, worn out, resentful. And it’s really hard for me to tell how much this is a correct update vs. some sort of internal emotional blockage⁴. I put myself out there, really bared myself to the world, was my authentic truthful self to the many hundreds of people who came through my house - really truthfully fully wishing to both facilitate and personally find connection. I’m picky. Or at least that’s been my reality. The base rate of someone I am really genuinely excited to be in connection with is so low. I really really really wish this weren’t the case⁵. I don’t hide this. I will absolutely be excited for someone to be at my event or be excited to be having a fun/engaging conversation with someone, etc. I will not pretend to be personally excited about forming a 1:1 connection with them. Where am I going with this? It feels bad to get EV less than 1 invite back for each 30 people. It feels bad to feel some connection and then have it fizzle and die by the 3rd hang. Over and over. And it’s not to say I got nothing out of this. My wonderful communal home probably wouldn’t exist otherwise. Many of these people I feel very close and comfy and intimate with. I enjoy being with them on couches, at dinner, being part of a tribe. Sharing our lives with each other feels good. But even still for some of them I’m really uncertain whether I am genuinely excited at spending purposeful 1:1 intense conversations with them. Probably the reason I love communal living so much is I can have that genuine connection, the care, the closeness, the “I care about this person”, without having to personally be super excited at the prospect of an intense⁶ conversation with them⁷. This is probably why I’m having a hard time in the repair process with some of my homies for whom I do really care about, but I just want to like be in connection in our home. Ease back into comfy care. I want us to be vulnerable and excited to be around each other, like just do the thing that has always felt good and real you know? We don’t need to do some other realm of scheduling 1:1s! This paragraph is huge, what’s the point…

4. I have a hypothesis that as much as NYC is great for so many reasons that I have talked about ad nauseam, maybe a different city would have a much higher base rate of the kind of people I want to bare my soul to. NYC is filled with really smart really driven people. People making shit happen. I love talking to smart driven people. The problem is it’s the city where people go to make money. Money is not a terminal goal, yet so many people here see it that way⁸. Don’t get me wrong purpose is really hard, I’ve been flailing at it for over a year now. But, maybe a city with a different core ethos would be good for me. I have two friends⁹ who moved from NYC to Seattle who are constantly talking about how much better their lives and social fabric became after moving. I was very skeptical of confounding factors¹⁰, but at this point I think I’m convinced it’s at least worth testing for at least a month. Berkeley clearly has a different ethos.

5. It feels much easier to tackle lots of medium/small problems after making a huge shift (totally random example: moving) where everything is naturally disrupted. Tackling lots of small/med problems from a stable state is so much harder because the natural existing equilibrium for all of these problems is that they are in the state of being a problem.

6. Am I just running away from my problems?¹¹

7. Fuck

I was really hoping writing all of this out would help me work through some of this, maybe feel like I have a path towards how to decide. It’s so hard to weight all of these things that are coming from so many different places - from very intellectual to very emotional. I think if anything I am generally very biased towards taking the action. Doing the thing has never been my problem.

I think the best possible world would look something like actually it turns out I’m not picky. The base rate of people I like can be higher and it’s just internal. In this world I still get to consider Berkeley on the merits of AI safety without also trying it as a treatment for dissatisfaction in my excitement for connection. I don’t have great odds on this best possible world being true, but I see other people being so much less picky so open to connection with people and I am jealous. So, if you have thoughts¹² in that direction I’d love to hear them.¹³

1. 😝

2. Hi Emma, thanks for subscribing! Sorry the first post in your inbox is me kinda trashing your party. I do think a lot (but definitely not all) of this is about me I would love to chat about your event some time if you’re down.

3. Yes, there were many other motivations. But the single largest selfish reason was my desire to meet and connect with others.

4. ofc these are not necessarily at odds, in reality it’s probably some combination of both.

5. And I’m still not fully convinced this is innate and unchangeable. I think there could definitely be worlds in which something shifts inside of me and the range of people I find exciting and energizing to connect with grows substantially.

6. Intense doesn’t necessarily mean serious. If anything I think too serious is bad. I think it’s something about really being in it, but also there’s more than that because I can have conversations with someone else and they are clearly in it and it still doesn’t hit. Something about wavelength? Frame? idk

7. Also, is intense conversation what matters? Like idk there’s this frame that I need to enjoy and be impressed by someone’s thoughts in order to really want a deep friendship shaped connection, and I think this is at least slightly wrong since there are clearly people that I care about for which this isn’t true. But also this is what I feel the most desire towards when it comes to connecting with people. There’s also something in there about playfulness but I’m even picky when it comes to playfulness! It’s fucked, I wish this weren’t the case. It’s much harder (but definitely not impossible) for me to be playful when I think I’m smarter than someone (and like here smarter is standing in for something that is about brain speed or wit.)

8. Or at least this frame is pervasive and insidious and I think it feels like in NYC it really just sneaks its way in, whether from the artists who still have to pay NYC rent or the smart elites that went to elite schools only to spend 20 years of their life playing a comparative status competition with their peers.

9. Hi Katie, hi Maddie. I don’t like calling while you are cooking, it feels unconnective when you’re clearly distracted and it can feel like I am performing juicing my life for you to intake at 50% of your total attention. I will mention this/talk about solving it next time we call.

10. Obviously your life will improve if you go from working a grueling unenjoyable 80+ hours a week to working 40-

11. There’s so much to say about this. Do I think I will navigate being close with each and every person in my house for whom I feel genuine connection to all of them? The odds seem bad, there will definitely be costs - relationships that end up seriously harmed. That feels really bad. I am so bone tired of solving these problems. And like idk, I do generally love solving problems - so why am I so weary? I think there’s something about problems feel better when the payoff feels worth it. It feels like [back from my cry break] it shouldn’t be this hard. I put in so much work to get all of these people together in this wonderful comfy community we have, convincing, finagling, helping settle in, making comfy, building processes from the ground up, financial risk, all of the parties hosted that led to this just so we could actually end up finding eachother. And now that you’re not certain whether we should be friends, I have to do more work to fix it? That’s a terrible strategy in a repeated game. you’re defecting and then I have to take on the cost? But (of course) I don’t feel sad/awful/angry/resentful for intellectual reasons. I want to be taken care of. I want to be held. I don’t want to have to ask for it, this is a community it’s about putting in the hard small effortful things to make the lives of others better. Of course that’s my own advice. I should be putting in the small effortful things to make all of our lives better. Maybe I just want to reap the rewards of all of this effort at some point? But am I complaining about my toast being too buttery? I do in fact live in a community that (other than this current conflict) feels wonderful - my baseline is so high. Maybe that’s why it feels so bad to be suddenly told by a subset that they don’t particularly feel excited about being part of my life. What’s the difference between choosing to not solve a problem because I’m giving up vs. choosing to not solve a problem because it’s not worth solving. Knowing when to give up is genuinely hard, it certainly was agonizing with the end of my longest relationship - and it’s tough right now.

12. Or thoughts about anything else, etc etc. As always feel free to take anything from this and make it a conversation. All these threads are just waiting to be pulled on!

13. Claude’s thoughts as always