In 2020, the investor Paul Graham wrote an essay titled "How to Think for Yourself." One lesson: "If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have. But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to [sic], and to think of more." At the end of the essay, Graham thanks the broad panel of independent thinkers with whom he has surrounded himself: Six of the seven are men between forty and fifty-five years old. Five of the seven work at Y Combinator, a business incubator in San Francisco cofounded by none other than Paul Graham. One is the CEO of the payment service Stripe. The seventh is Peter Thiel.

A myopic perspective on the world has long characterized the tech industry, but success has amplified it. Age and wealth often inhibit contact with people whose lives and careers have unfolded in fundamentally different ways. When great fortune befalls an individual, they might ask themselves some lonely nights: "Do I really deserve all this?" But when a group collectively rushes from success to success, when truly extraordinary success has become the norm by the age of twenty-five, thirty, or thirty-five, and you are forced to then age alongside one another for decades, each constantly aware that your peak lies ever further in the past, then it helps when fellow travelers constantly reassure you that you are still relevant, that the gnawing feeling of irrelevance is, in truth, the fault of others. A concept like "vibes" allows them to understand their aging process, and the alienation that inevitably accompanies it, as identical to the course of the world.