fear builds quickly. longing builds beautifully.

I bought an impulsive ticket to Los Angeles on a Thursday night and gave myself exactly two days to spend time in the city. The motivations were many: scenes from Rachel Sennott’s I ❤️ LA flashing in my head, the chance to catch up with old college friends, and the prospect of overspending on an HB skin glaze smoothie. But the real reason was simpler and much harder to admit… for the first time in four years, I’ve been feeling disenchanted with San Francisco.

These feelings conveniently have arrived just as everyone in the city insists it’s “back.” And compared to when I moved here in 2022, it definitely is. But even with the momentum emanating from Daniel Lurie’s instagram or celebrities flooding the streets of SOMA during the Super Bowl, it all seems to be drained by the way my X timeline has started to sound like a march to the end of the world.

Every day I see a new post about how what you’re working on is already dead - why your job, your company, your entire category is six months from obsolete. Job anxiety has followed me my whole life; I don’t need to start losing sleep about how I’m going to pay for my non-existent kids to go to college (or whatever will be expensive in the future if college, itself, is also obsolete). I don’t necessarily think these doomsday preppers are trying to give me a heart attack before turning 30 nor do I think they’re posting from malice, exactly. I just think theres a desperate mentality to be the one who called it first. Hidden behind the veil of a resurgence is a different energy, one that feels existential.

I say this as someone who genuinely believes in technological progress and as someone who spends most waking hours thinking about what’s next. But somewhere along the way, “you can just build things” stopped sounding expansive and started sounding reckless. You can just build things that put people out of work. You can just build things that move faster than anyone can keep up with. The fear isn’t just of missing out - it’s of losing control to the very systems you’re racing to create.

If fear is driving SF right now, longing has driven LA for decades.

From my east coast vantage point, LA always seemed organized around desire. Before I ever visited, Tumblr had already sold me the myth: golden hour light, palm tree silhouettes, Didion on the freeway, Lana making heartbreak look like a lifestyle. An entire generation romanticized LA before setting foot in it. The strange thing is, the reality doesn’t fully disappoint.

When I crash-landed on my friend’s couch, I was woken at midnight by their third roommate coming home. We hadn’t met, but I’d heard of her. She’d left everything behind in Chicago to pursue her dream of acting; with the same glow a CS dropout moves to SF after graduation (except her mecca doesn’t come with equity or a signing bonus). She still works a 9-5 to support herself, but every hour off the clock is given back to the thing she actually came for. No pitch deck, no exit strategy. Just someone finding any open moment in the day to create something that they believe in and that they hope will get them to what’s next for a passion they love.

And she’s not unusual there. The city is full of people like her, living inside the golden haze of a dream they can’t fully explain and don’t feel the need to justify. That’s where culture actually comes from, not from taste being manufactured or marketed, but from people who genuinely care about making something that they personally believe in.

On the other hand, I’m well aware that LA isn’t innocent. The same longing that makes her story beautiful makes the industry predatory. Living this dream metabolizes people, and most of them go home eventually, having given years to something that never gave back. But that darkness is specific, human, earned. It holds space for vulnerability, flaws, longing. SF holds space for leverage, scale, control. LA lets you want things out loud. SF asks you to justify the wanting.

I moved to SF because I believed you could just build things. I still do. But lately I’ve been asking myself whether everyone around me has been building from curiosity or from anxiety.

Maybe the point of my two-day escape wasn’t to romanticize one city or critique the other. Maybe it was just a reminder that the emotion underneath the work matters. Fear builds quickly. Longing builds beautifully. And if I’m going to spend my life making things, I’d rather it be from a place of desire than panic or process.