Slouching towards San Francisco

The first time I read Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was in 2017, which was coincidentally also the year of the essay’s 50th anniversary. I remember feeling transfixed by it, partly because of Didion’s incisive writing and partly because of the striking characters that Didion met on the streets of San Francisco in the sixties. Characters that felt familiar, somehow almost too real.

I have reread the essay numerous times since then, and each time, the San Francisco of Didion’s world has felt even more similar to the San Francisco of my world. The longer I live in San Francisco, the more prophetic Didion’s essay becomes, and as I approach my seventh year of living in the city, the more convinced I am that the San Francisco I know today is an uncanny reincarnation of the same social fabric Didion witnessed in the sixties.

The characters Didion meets in the city are unmistakably Californian. Not in the sense that they grew up in California but in the sense that they came to California to find their true selves, only to later realize they didn’t even know what they were actually searching for.

There is Max, who tells Didion he “lives free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang-ups,” seeing his life as a triumph over “don’ts,” evidenced by his adolescent affairs with peyote, alcohol, mescaline, Methedrine, and his resistance to committed relationships. The same Max who later invites Didion to his place for a group trip on acid, but tells her that they have to wait for six to seven days because he and another friend, Tom, have been on STP for a while. The same Max who, as Didion later learns, is a trust fund baby and plans to travel to Africa and India to “live off the land” with his girl Sharon.

Sharon, a teenager who left her separated parents and moved to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, is keen to transcend the banality of everyday life by getting high, even making a door sign that said “DO NOT DISTURB, RING, KNOCK, OR IN ANY OTHER WAY DISTURB. LOVE.” so that the group could drop acid in peace. But she gets restless on the day of, waiting for Tom and his girl, Barbara, and is bored “just sitting around.” Max tells Didion that Sharon exhibits “pre-acid uptight jitters.”

There is also Don, who is on a macrobiotic diet. Then there is Jeff, who doesn’t pre-plan and lets “it all happen” and who really doesn’t like the fact his mother would ground him for not ironing his shirts for the week. He describes her as “just a genuine all-American bitch.” Another gem is a guy named Sandy, who is reading Laura Huxley’s You Are Not the Target when Didion first meets him and who sees meditation as a turn-on. Or a guy who goes by the name Deadeye, who “made a connection” to earn money and prevent getting evicted from his house, by getting acid from someone who had it and giving the acid to someone who wanted it.

It’s hard for me to read Didion’s essay and not marvel at the remarkable similarity, even fifty years later, between her protagonists and the people I regularly meet in San Francisco. Similar evangelists abound today in the city, be it the two guys I’ve known who once competitively compared their meditation routines, the friends who worship at the altar of Soylent, or the trust-fund acquaintances who microdose and read self-help books to find purpose amid the noise of the Bay Area rat race.

The industry I work in is predicated on people’s triumphs over “don’ts,” so much so that every veteran techie will proudly admit their startup idea was initially met with discouragement from their family, from their friends, and from their investors. It’s a badge of honor, in the tech industry, to resist society’s disbelief and to endlessly explore and play, not unlike how a headstrong kid defies its parents and does not yield to house rules.

That same resistance is highly valued today in San Francisco’s social contracts as well. A girl I recently met at a friend’s party moved from the South Bay to San Francisco in her early twenties, and found herself inducted into an unofficial polyamorous commune, which she described as a friend group at a “very thin line between a community and a cult.” She loved it because the people there helped her break out of her shell, but she did admit that monogamy was not less preferred—it was implicitly discouraged.

When Max, Sharon, and Tom drop acid in the essay, lounging together with Didion, there is a beautiful moment of fabricated, childlike togetherness. After all the “innumerable last-minute things” Tom has to do, Sharon’s pre-acid uptight jitters, Barbara’s indecisiveness over whether to smoke hash or drop acid, the group finally gets to enjoy the high, and there is no sound or conversation until four hours later, when Max simply says, “Wow.”

This hyper-optimized communal spontaneity that Didion’s new friends continuously chase strikes me as not so different from the togetherness that some of my friends and people I know in the city diligently engineer every year at Burning Man. One night in 2019, after telling a friend that I would never go to Burning Man because spending several days in the desert without all my skincare and fragrances sounds like hell, the same friend complained how I don’t seem to understand the connection and love she feels with other Burners for that one week in the desert.

I did want to ask her why that connection and love couldn’t exist outside the playa, but I figured I already knew the answer: when playing hard at Burning Man was over, she had to go back to working hard. In the words of one workaholic, energetic type-A tech executive who once told me before leaving for Burning Man, he was to be “off grid” for customers as he set out to playa to “lose a few brain cells.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I am above this. As Didion mentioned in the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, “Killing a snake is the same as having a snake.” I don’t go to Burning Man and I don’t drink Soylent, but I know that I am also a consumer of the bumptious lifestyle that comes with the mainstream San Francisco scene. And I also know that my view of the city is myopically limited to the tech scene, which is where I have ended up by the mere nature of working in that industry.

What I do want to point out instead is that maybe the veneration and the scorn surrounding the social scene today in San Francisco are the same opposing forces that the city had seen before. Maybe these seemingly disparate communities—the hippies of the sixties and the techies of today—actually have more in common than one would think.

There is a good question presented in the essay, from a psychiatrist Didion met in San Francisco, that I found particularly indicative of this similarity: “Anybody who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It’s a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you’ve got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it’ll take for that to happen?”

The alleged counterculture that we see today in San Francisco’s tech scene is very similar to the quintessentially romantic social movement of the hippies. The innocence manifests through the Peter Pan syndrome, the desire to never grow up and to continue playing and exploring. An itch for the transcendental is the ignition that propels so many people in the city’s tech scene to build, to create, to “change the world,” all in the name of greater good and nonconformity. And sometimes that itch is the same one that the hippies had, which gets scratched with drugs and by getting high; not necessarily to be numbed, but to transcend.

Didion makes a great remark in the essay that she had been witnessing children detach from their roots to create a community in a social vacuum, an irrefutable evidence of the society’s atomization post World War II. Though she does not state this explicitly, I believe she was never dismissive of the pacifist values that were born out of this process in the sixties. But what she does point out indirectly, through the stories of her Haight-Ashbury friends, is that these counter movements often end up not so counter after all, precisely because they seek to establish the same values many of us run away from.

For Max, Sharon, Tom, Barbara, and many of the other characters in the essay, their counterculture meant rebelling against the norms imposed by the previous decade of suburban boom, familial rigidity, and growing American corporatization. It meant trying out every drug, resisting commitment, defying suburbia gender roles, and letting everything be “groovy.” And yet, what Didion witnessed were weeping cries to find a home, carefully orchestrated trips on acid, teenagers who want to commit but cannot, and girls who dislike “earning more than $10 or $20 a week” and most of the time “keep house and bake.”

For many of us who moved to San Francisco to be part of the tech scene, counterculture meant rebelling against stability, predictability, and employability, all of which had been the norms imposed by the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It meant dropping out of school instead of getting that prestigious degree, working for a startup instead of a predictable office job that “opened doors,” hanging out with “builders” instead of networking with VPs and SVPs and the C-suite, and thriving in ambiguity instead of seeking stability. And yet, a few years down the line, we find ourselves job-hopping between startups to optimize our comp packages, waiting out on the IPO to get those downpayment checks, coveting nomination-only memberships at San Francisco’s clubs for the tech elite, and having mentors at work to “cope with uncertainty.”

This similarity is why I felt so transfixed by Didion’s essay when I first read it. I think her experience helped me understand why I often felt cheated after getting to know the mainstream San Francisco scene. I expected to see defiance, maverick values, valiant impulsiveness, but in reality, most of us so far have been fairly predictable characters with a well-established, longstanding, approved narrative.

From the 1960s to the the 2010s and now to the 2020s, the society’s atomization has continuously produced us, characters who detach from their nuclei and seek to rebel against society’s norms, ending up in idolized communities that, in the end, seek to establish the same values many of us run away from. What has plagued me though, each time after reading Didion’s essay, is that I haven’t felt the same level of despondence that she did in 1967 when writing this story. And I think I finally understand why.

Didion’s implicit argument in the essay is that nuclear, familial structures are necessary to prevent further atomization and disintegration of American society. As she says, “Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. […] These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here.“

But what if today the society’s atomization doesn’t need to be reversed? What if those cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors are not good for us? What if their values are oppressive and suffocating and ignorant? What if both statements can be true? I am part of a community that exists in a social vacuum, composed of people who are not actually rebelling but merely running away from the norms that suffocated them. And, it’s a community that, however faulty and paradoxical, is the right place for me—at least for now.

The reality is that all of us here have detached from our nuclei for some reason. I love my real, nuclear family. But I’ve always known that, for my own sanity and quality of life, I had to embrace society’s atomization and detach. I had to build a life in which I would find a chosen family, far away from home and far away from my nucleus. Maybe it’s selfish, but I accept this paradox now and I no longer see the mainstream San Francisco scene with suspicion. Instead, I see it with empathy. Because I am a part of it.

I think we all have to ask ourselves ultimately, if our society keeps getting atomized, and there are people who not only embrace the atomization but actually need it, then is the problem in the society’s atomization or in the society itself?