[...] My reasons for deflecting and deferring were pragmatic—money, social affirmation, a sense of stability—but they were also personal. I still clung to the belief that I could find meaning and fulfillment in work—the result of over two decades of educational affirmation, parental encouragement, socioeconomic privilege, and generational mythology. Unlike the men, I didn’t know how to articulate what I wanted. Safer, then, to join a group that told itself, and the world, that it was superior: a hedge against uncertainty, isolation, insecurity.

These motivations were not aging well. In reality, there was nothing superior about those whom I was trying to impress. Most were smart and nice and ambitious, but so were a lot of people. The novelty was burning off; the industry’s pervasive idealism was increasingly dubious. Tech, for the most part, wasn’t progress. It was just business.

This was both a relief and a disappointment. It was also, perhaps, the root of my empathy for the young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. Many of them were at least a decade deep into lives they had selected for themselves as teenagers. Surely, I thought, some must have wanted to try something different, get off the ride. Surely some were beginning to have moral, spiritual, political misgivings. I was radiant with projections.