In a World of Gatsbys, Trying to Be Earnest

Gatsby was a low-key guy. Everyone knew him.

But Gatsby's entire life was a production staged for an audience. It was performative larp. I wish that were something that only existed in movies, but it reminds me of San Francisco more than I would like.

Tech's performative behavior

San Francisco has become one of the most performative places in the world. I don't think it was always like this—at least, based on everything I learned from watching Silicon Valley.

When I was in high school, I had a "Cali or bust" mentality. I imagined it as a place where it was okay to be unapologetically nerdy about the things I cared about. I loved software because it solved problems, and because a solution could be distributed to the entire world. I hadn't been exposed to anything like that before. Once I discovered it, the ideas never stopped. I have been building ever since.

Eight years later, I finally moved here—not for an internship, but fully. For the first week, it felt exactly like the place I imagined in high school. Everyone was building something. Everyone was ambitious. The energy was real.

Then you begin to notice how much of that energy is pointed sideways.

People are not only building; they are watching one another build. Announcements become performances. Dinner conversations become pitches. Every project needs to sound inevitable, every week needs to look productive, and every person needs to appear one introduction away from something enormous.

Ambition is good. I moved here because I wanted to be around ambitious people. But ambition and performance are not the same thing.

Performance optimizes for what other builders can see. Earnestness optimizes for whether the thing works.

Looking like a builder

It is easy to look like you are building. You can talk about the market, post the launch, collect the right vocabulary, and surround yourself with people doing the same. None of that requires sitting with an ugly problem long enough to understand it.

The dangerous part is that performance is rewarded quickly. A polished story gets attention today. A useful product might take months before anyone notices.

That gap can pull you away from the reason you started. You begin with a problem you genuinely care about, then slowly replace the work with the appearance of work. The audience becomes more important than the user.

Gatsby did not build his life around what he valued. He built it around what he wanted other people to believe about him. The tragedy wasn't simply that the performance failed. It was that the performance became the life.

Trying to be earnest

Earnestness is quieter.

It means admitting when the product is bad. It means talking to users who do not care about your credentials, your investors, or how difficult the technology was to build. They care whether you solved their problem.

It means choosing the unglamorous fix over the impressive announcement. It means being willing to look early, uncertain, and occasionally wrong. Most importantly, it means remembering that software is valuable because of what it lets another person do—not because of what building it lets you signal.

I still believe in the version of San Francisco I imagined as a teenager. I see it whenever someone becomes completely absorbed in a problem, when a conversation skips the status games and turns into genuine curiosity, or when a tiny team ships something people actually need.

That place is real. It is just easy to lose beneath the performance.

In a world full of Gatsbys, I am trying to be earnest.