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With few exceptions, these twenty-somethings had boxed their lives into a tiny corner of experience: they were only high-tech workers who thought that their title was the key to the universe. Most of them had chosen a high-tech career because they felt it was a safe place to exist. In school they had been called geeks and nerds by students in the social sciences and humanities, who were adept at connecting their lives with other human beings. But the "geeks or nerds," labeled as such by their fellow classmates, felt demeaned as outcasts. They were "weird," which was the operative word the more socially oriented students used to describe them. [...]
There were many reasons why this kind of self-isolation felt safe and comfortable in contrast to associating with the world where people connected with each other [...] Best to isolate oneself and get away from threatening interpersonal relationships. Machines were the solution: they didn't talk back, neglect you, abuse you, or demean you. Since you were in control of the machines instead of them controlling you, they were safe. Isolation was safe; nobody could harm you.
too real
All of these avenues of anguish were ways they were protecting their long-developed self-images that they were valuable human beings solely because they were high-tech careerists. For hadn't they had the last laugh on all of their former high-school and college classmates who thought they were weird? They had been making $75,000 a year, with options added, while their former classmates were lucky to make $30,000. They could flaunt their economic superiority as payback time for their being shunned in earlier years by their classmates.
But now their self-esteem was under attack. Many felt their stomachs turning into empty pits of fear. If they had no career identity, then they were nothing! That feeling is the equivalent of death. [...]
aaaaahh
I learned to survive in that hellhole of a family by becoming all things to all people. Life is a game to me. Always look pleasant, look interested, look compassionate, and act as if you always wanted to be helpful. In my business it's important to win people's trust. I always show I care about their problems. I'm in a highly competitive industry, so it's important to win the trust of my clients to get the big-time deals [...]
this is so sad
[...] Silicon Valley is more than just a geographical area in northern California. It is also a state of mind - a state of mind that lusts after the easy life, wealth without working for it, wealth that defines your important status in life. [...]
hm part of this conflicts with the whole work-as-identity strain of thought but noting anyway
[...] Youth was the gold mine CEOs could exploit, and the media hype of the 1990s kept proclaiming that not only was Silicon Valley a revolutionary new industry, it was an industry whose revolution was powered by young people. It was a time when everyone over thirty-five or forty was considered expendable. The corporations of Silicon Valley regarded workers in their late thirties and forties as "over the hill," expendable drains on profits. Loyalty and trust and the value of experience may have been appropriate for the old manufacturing way of life, but this new century was the Information Age century in which hiring and firing in obeisance to the bottom line took precedence over the other values in life.
As long as one was in one's twenties, this devaluation of becoming older was accepted as something to brag about and flaunt in the face of people in their thirties or forties who were doomed to live on a fraction of what the young men and women in the Valley were making. They had bought the belief that after thirty, creativity is lost. [...] They were entitled to their economic success because they were young [...]
Carol and Harry had bought this illusion that being young was the only value in life that mattered. But this illusion began to erode when they turned thirty. They made excuses for themselves on their thirtieth birthdays that they were not really deteriorating, going down hill in life after all. [...]
Having a child meant acknowledging you were growing older. But Harry wanted to be the only child in his marriage to Carol. For his behavior throughout the marriage was the behavior of a self-indulgent child, always wanting center stage, always wanting instant gratification. He considered his impulsive behavior a badge of honor, not something to be modified. These character traits, combined with his very competent adult business abilities, made him attractive to many people. He created an image of boyish charm combined with adult business success.
[...]
Harry remained Harry. He still lives in Silicon VAlley, still is successful in the job he still likes. He's known as a "player" and enjoys surreal short-term relationships. He continues to fight the battle of staying young forever and is now busy looking into new genetic and hormonal developments as possibilities for arresting the aging process. He has yet to realize that only the dead stay young forever.
just a great character study (somewhat inspo for neil even if the specifics are different)
[...] One night, during a trip abroad, in the fall of 1903, I recall kneeling on my (flattish) pillow at the window of a sleeping car (probably on the long-extinct Mediterranean Train de Luxe, the one whose six cars had the lower part of their body painted in umber and the panels in cream) and seeing with an inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth. [...]
god i love this
The sepia gloom of an arctic afternoon in midwinter invaded the rooms and was deepening to an oppressive black. A bronze angle, a surface of glass or polished mahogany here and there in the darkness, reflected the odds and ends of light from the street, where the globes of tall street lamps along its middle line were already diffusing their lunar glow. Gauzy shadows moved on the ceiling. In the stillness, the dry sound of a chrysanthemum petal falling upon the marble of a table made one’s nerves twang.
this is just pretty
HAVE often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionist, and here is my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.
Presently my attention would wander still farther, and it was then, perhaps, that the rare purity of her rhythmic voice accomplished its true purpose. I looked at a tree and the stir of its leaves borrowed that rhythm. Egor was pottering among the peonies. A wagtail took a few steps, stopped as if it had remembered something—and then walked on, enacting its name. Coming from nowhere, a Comma butterfly settled on the threshold, basked in the sun with its angular fulvous wings spread, suddenly closed them just to show the tiny initial chalked on their dark underside, and as suddenly darted away. But the most constant source of enchantment during those readings came from the harlequin pattern of colored panes inset in a whitewashed framework on either side of the veranda. The garden when viewed through these magic glasses grew strangely still and aloof. If one looked through blue glass, the sand turned to cinders while inky trees swam in a tropical sky. The yellow created an amber world infused with an extra strong brew of sunshine. The red made the foliage drip ruby dark upon a pink footpath. The green soaked greenery in a greener green. And when, after such richness, one turned to a small square of normal, savorless glass, with its lone mosquito or lame daddy longlegs, it was like taking a draught of water when one is not thirsty, and one saw a matter-of-fact white bench under familiar trees. But of all the windows this is the pane through which in later years parched nostalgia longed to peer.