I live in Florida, but I’ve visited Berkeley twice. Today, I’m headed there for a third time. Each of the first two times was highly eventful. I’m not hoping for that this time. But it does have me reflecting.
Prologue: The Invitation
I graduated college in 2013, and sometimes thought about the stupendous luck that I lived in America and, having a college degree, could expect to live a middle class life. I was going to have much more money than most people in the world, even with a near-minimum-wage job. I didn’t feel guilty about this, but I did feel disquieted; everyone around me was freaking out about inequality and the 1% all the time. Yet here we were! It seemed like probably I should be doing something.
Anyway, I read a blog post in 2014. It suggested giving 10% of my income to charity. So I started doing that. My income was low, but if the estimates were right I could save a kid from malaria every couple of years. Sounds like a good deal!
There was a community of people who all gave 10%. I didn’t formally join it or commit to giving 10% forever, but I did use their infrastructure to keep track of my donations. Which put me on a mailing list. There was a conference, apparently, for this high-leverage charity stuff. I was automatically invited.
Heck, why not? I decided to go.
First Visit: The Pledge
EA Global was an exciting time. I went in without any expectations. My main identity was that of a budding novelist, so I was eager to absorb the vibes. I was also pretty eager to help out with stuff. When I introduced myself, I said I was a footsoldier, rather than a general.
Surprisingly, this story was well received! The conference had a whole lot of prospective generals, and not a lot of people ambiently looking to help. I did find a few people who took me up on offers of editing work. I also made a friend!
Some people at the conference seemed very aloof. But this was a wacky curiosity for me. I had no need to be an insider, so I could watch the royalty float by as a happily amused peasant. There was a fun experience where one (not aloof) very high status person had been to my college. We talked for a while, both of us unsure that the other remembered us from back then.
There was a consistent and positive culture shock. At the closing ceremony, the MC insisted we all fill out a survey on what the conference had done for us. People were constantly forming groups to discuss things, and wanted these conversations to have tangible outputs. Everyone seemed to have a project, or even multiple projects. It seemed like a very cool cluster of people. I was besotted.
Most importantly, I did take the 10% pledge, committing to give away 10% of my income until I retire. That moment is my profile picture a lot of places, including this Substack, though I look pretty different now. Time stops for no one.
Interlude: The Application
I went to another conference in Boston, where I volunteered. This was a lot of fun, and I met some of the event organizers through my role. They said they were hiring a software engineer, and encouraged me to apply. I’d since become a (local, fairly low end) programmer, so my tiny salary had become a small one, and I was now saving approximately one child per year from malaria. But doing that while working for a really cool nonprofit sounded even better, so I applied.
The application process was intense. There were several interviews, one of which I attended via video call waiting for my turn at a local Super Smash Bros tournament. Ultimately, there was a two day work trial, building a system within 48 hours. I drank a ton of sweet tea to stay caffeinated. I have never worked harder than I did in those two days. It was enough. I was invited for a longer work trial: two weeks, in Berkeley. If they liked the cut of my jib, it’d seamlessly become a permanent job.
They did not like the cut of my jib.
Second Visit: The Trial
When visiting a strange land with little knowledge of the customs, if there are no stakes, you can be Chauncey Gardiner. Or, at least, a welcome curiosity. When there are stakes, though, you’re just a boor.
I was a boor.
In my defense, there were many warning signs and challenges, to put me off balance. To list a few:
The work trial was long enough that I had to quit my job to attend it, meaning that failure would mean (and did mean!) having no job at all
Nobody would tell me what the salary of the job would be in advance - the CEO (who was my designated point of contact on the topic) just kind of didn’t respond
Early in the trial we all went to a house party with a sister organization, where people did drugs and one person, who claimed some medical know-how, assured me that recreational nitrous was perfectly safe1
They’d been intending to hire two people, but actually there were three at the work trial, including an ex-Google engineer helping out, so I had the feeling that if she decided to stick around they wouldn’t need both of us, and the other guy was local and already immersed in the culture
The AirBnb where I was staying had no AC. Not normally a problem in the San Francisco Bay Area, but there was a freak heat wave
It was a tough time. I also was trying to learn new technologies I’d never used before. I’ve done very well with all those technologies in roles since then, so I doubt I was particularly bad. But the people I worked with had lots of reasons to be biased against me. And indeed, I think they were. I was somewhat less of a true believer than the rest of them, for example; it was the fashion at the time to be very concerned with the long-run future, and I was a provincial 10% pledger giving my money to saving single-digit numbers of children in the present.
The worst moment was at another house party, a dinner party this time, where various people it’d be good to impress were Australians. Unaccountably, I mentioned boomerangs. This was not a conscious effort to stereotype, and indeed I was not thinking of Australia consciously at all. But you can imagine (as I have, many times, over the years) how it probably came off.
Another nightmare situation was when I came in on a holiday during the work period, thinking I’d have the office to myself and get ahead. But everyone was there. So rather than feeling like I was going the extra mile, I felt like I was late. Pair this compulsory overachieving with the Californian norm of acting laid back and like nothing’s a big deal, and you get a real bad time for a clueless Florida guy.
There were good things about the trip. I finished rereading Homestuck. I was defeated in a board game that back home I generally won, in spectacular fashion. I made another friend. I had dinner with a third friend I’d made along the way, who happened to be roommates with my favorite blogger, and he grunted at me when he went to the fridge for a gulp of milk.
In the end, though, they decided not to hire me. Also, a hurricane hit my hometown right when I was supposed to go home, so I had to stay a few extra days. The guy who rejected me let me stay in his apartment, which he shared with the CEO who hadn’t told me how much the role would pay. They were both away, so the apartment was empty. They had nice air purifiers. It was just as miserable as you’d think.
Third Visit: The Return
I haven’t been back since.
But time still stops for no one, and healing does happen. I’m happy with the trajectory of my life since not moving to Berkeley. The jobs I was able to get in the private sector paid better than working at a charity (no surprises there), and also didn’t tacitly expect me to work on holidays or weekends. I think it would have been really good for me in some ways to be surrounded by extremely ambitious people, but bad for me in others. Even before I went out, I mused that moving to Berkeley would probably make me less happy (because of all the scary social comparison), but that it would still be worth it for my growth and development. Perhaps I was right. But as consolation prizes go, happiness ain’t bad.
Various other things have happened, that would have ranged from more difficult to impossible, had I moved to Berkeley. I got married and had a baby, which seems like it’d have been harder, since the distance between myself and my now wife would have been much larger, both culturally and physically, if I’d been out there. (That I might have had a different baby is unconscionable.) I also bought a house, which, near San Francisco, would have been impossible.
Still, I have a good track record of making very cool friends when I’ve visited Berkeley, and I haven’t seen my current friends there in a long time. I’ve enjoyed blogging this last year, and there’s a conference about it.
What could go wrong?
Even if he was right about the gas itself, which seems doubtful because inhalants are pretty bad in general, it seems likely to me that the pressure probably puts trace amounts of metal in your lungs if you don’t use a balloon, which they weren’t.