I was lucky. Draining my bank account to exercise my stock options was only tenable because I knew I could borrow money from family, or from Ian. Some of my coworkers, largely women in nontechnical roles whose work had been foundational to the company, but whose salaries did not allow them to save …
the multimillion-dollar sums that went to people I suspected had done indelible harm to coworkers
San Francisco was the final stage of a prelapsarian era, the end of our generational Gold Rush, an unsustainable age of excess.
I was always looking for the emotional narrative, the psychological explanation, the personal history. Some exculpatory story on which to train my sympathy. It wasn’t so simple as wanting to believe that adulthood was a psychic untangling of adolescence, willful revisionist history. My obsession wi…