Why I Left
[This post was featured on the Rise of the Creative Class website]
A friend asked me why i left {my old job, town} and moved to SF. This is what i wrote in response.
I took a wild new job. and i felt like it was time.
I felt that by living in Detroit, I was working harder than I would in other cities to connect with people who understood the sorts of projects that I love to build, and that it was really hard to find audiences and collaborators for, well, most things i cared about. I love Detroit, but i could see that meeting collaborators and mentors would be easier in a more creative city [1]. I also started felt that the attitude i had adopted was defensively masochistic, i.e. “yeah it’s way harder to make yourself understood here, but because it’s tough makes it worth struggling for”. and that attitude was kinda childish. Yes, hard things are worth doing, but just BECAUSE something is hard, doesn’t make it worth doing. You might just be doing it in the wrong way, or in the wrong place.
When i quit my job of seven years at Organic, i didn’t have anything definite lined up — just some approximate opportunities and open promises from friends for interviews, freelance work, and so on. but before i left, i realized something important:
Organic was an amniotic bubble that protected me from Detroit. what i mean by that is: work provided me with a complete, self-sustaining ecosystem that assuaged my needs and wants, while muffling the roaring vacuum of the Detroit environment. it provided constant travel to SF, NY, Toronto, and Europe. It gave me access to a network of information, and people in those cities. by remaining inside that protective bubble, i could continue to live a semi-normal creative life inside detroit, because new culture and people and technology were being drip-fed into my amniotic bubble by my employer.But an artificial equilibrium doesn’t hold, and one day i realized i was a Matrix-baby spoon fed by the system, and i had to escape. So i left. And upon cutting that life-line, i knew that I quickly needed to get somewhere that the oxygen was rich and plentiful, if i wanted to keep breathing. So i picked San Francisco.
So that’s my story. I hadn’t planned on writing quite so much, but it just sort of expressed itself. :-)
[1] Richard Florida’s book “The Rise of the Creative Class, and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community, and everyday life…” influenced me a bit.
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SF and Organic together was a wild ride….one I was sad to get booted out of, but it would have been just a matter of time anyway. Now, out of the cubes entirely, I am a much happier person. SF and Organic was fun but dangerous, the two flowed so easily together, before you knew it you were working all the time because work was your friends and friends were SF and…… =)
Thanks for the good post. I’m currently working in advertising in Detroit, and are trying to escape.
Was thinking about San Francisco. How do you like it?
I like SF a lot. amazingly different than detroit in some ways — the same in a few other ways. but someplace new and dense with lots of old and new mashed together is always great, no matter where it is. I used to come to SF often for my work, so moving here was a very slippery transition; rather than a “move”, i feel like i just swapped the time chunks i spend that i spend here vs. in detroit :-)
Good on ya. Hope all’s well in SF.
Thanks for taking the time to write that response to me, John.
I understand what you are getting at - it totally fits who you are, and what you do in life. While your presence will be missed here, I am glad that you have the freedom and the guts to take it by the horns out there in CA. Not to mention the utterly dismal atmosphere this state has of late - while the economy seems to be on the upswing in almost all others.
Michigan geeks will always miss you, and you always know you have peeps back here to call on, if needed.
-b
thank you.
DETROIT SEMPER FI!
Jani Anderson,
Detroit ex-patriot, now in Chicago.
come back to Detroit. SF, Beantown, NYC…i’ve lived in all of them. they are all overrated. our biggest problem as Detroiters is that we believe the marketing (through TV, film, radio, etc.) of other cities with being cynical of our own hometown. In the end…Detroit has a unique heritage and actually deals with the issues of American life in a way that other places don’t. the issue of race in SF is a non-issue: black people don’t live there. Poverty…yeah right.
Keep it real. Make a difference. Come on back to Motown.
@hobby: i don’t believe the hype for a second. detroit is great, and i made a difference there for 29 years. now i’m making a difference somewhere else. i support your good fight!