Why We Are Sad – Seven reasons why Steve Jobs is deeply mourned in Silicon Valley

By declaration of the Governor of California, today is Steve Jobs Day. A national memorial of sorts for him is being held about now at Stanford University. The degree to which Jobs’ death continues to affect people all over the world is remarkable. In Silicon Valley, though, we’ve felt – and continue to feel – his loss especially keenly. He was, after all, our very own global icon. But I don’t think that’s why a surprisingly large percentage of the people I know here took the time to visit his house in the days after his death. They weren’t feeling self-important, I think, or gawking . They were genuinely moved by the passing of a neighbor they didn’t know but to whom they wanted to pay their respects in some way, even if it was just to stop by for a few quiet minutes of witness.

The roots of our sadness are complex, I think. Here’s my attempt, though, to tease out some of the reasons for it.

– Firstly, it was because he was one of our own, by which I mean an entrepreneur, someone who took huge risks, who worked incredibly hard, who had huge belief in himself and the capacity of others. Even in his ego and his management foibles, he was an exemplary Valley figure.

– It’s because he was an outsider, too. Jobs managed to always stand as being with the people against The Man, even when he and his company were big enough to be the Establishment themselves. In addition, Jobs was not a technologist by training. What brought him prominence more than anything was the preeminence that he gave design – even his vaunted skills as a salesman were secondary to that. He didn’t have to sell snake oil, though, because he saw to it that the products he sold were simply beautifully – and brilliantly – put together. Even now, that deference to design is a path few here take. But this is also a land that loves mavericks – and so we admired Jobs’ difference, even as most of us have chosen much more conservative paths.

– It’s because he succeeded – Jobs was one of the greatest of all come back kids. And like all Americans, we love that story. He would have earned obituaries if he’d only founded Apple and then crashed out with Next. Or if he’d come back to Apple the second time, but blown it on his return. But he came back and rebuilt Apple into one of the most valuable companies in the world, even as he grew ever more sick. We revere that outrageous successes and mourn that we lost him at the top of his game.

– It’s also because he failed – in the end, of course, he wasn’t a come back kid. We were rooting hard for him to do it again and beat his cancer, too. We’re saddened and sorry that he couldn’t.

– It’s because he died young and in a place that doesn’t really know how to mourn. Seeing anyone die before their time has its own particular sadness. But in losing leaders from whom we still have more to learn, whom we feel would have inspired us yet more, that sadness is compounded. Silicon Valley remains a young place, too, and we face that loss without the rhetoric or rituals that have mollified the early loss of the great and good in other times and places. Perhaps because we’ve really only seen one great tech generation pass – that of the Hewletts, Packards, Termans and Noyces – we’ve yet to build death into our culture. We have no unique rituals to make sense of the passing of those who’ve most impacted our lives. Perhaps we never will – maybe that’s just antithetical to a community that is otherwise so relentlessly forward-looking. But without the ritual local comfort of an Irish wake, a New Orleans jazz cortege, or a Royal memorial mass, we’re left all the more bereft.

– It’s because Jobs acknowledged his mortality – Jobs had known he was very sick for years, as had we. He took that as a chance to meditate on his life path and to share the fruits of his mediation with the rest of us in his widely circulated Stanford graduation speech. His response to his sickness was to dedicate himself to two things only: his family and his work, both values that we profoundly share. But he did it in the context of his (and our) inevitable death. “Death,” he reminded his audience, “is the ultimate change agent.” And in that he broke a taboo we hold, despite our future-worship, against imagining our own demise, or perhaps he simply drew us out of our cultural immaturity. Again, he both exemplified our values and broke the Valley mold.

– Lastly, I think it’s because by his death Steve Jobs had become, somewhat surprisingly, the great living father figure of the Valley—and I think this is the ultimate root of our sadness. Jobs wasn’t the oldest of our billionaires, CEOs, former wunderkinds, or other local grandees and swells, nor was he the richest, or the most beloved. But – especially after the Stanford speech – he became our psychic taskmaster. We felt that if we knew him he’d only respect us if, like him, we reached for excellence too. If you take him at his word, and I see no reason not to, he wasn’t motivated by money, or power or glory. What drove him instead was a desire to fundamentally improve the world as best he could, and how he chose to lead was to try and inspire the same desire in others. In that he exemplified the hugely demanding but ultimately fair, strict but self-directed, bull-headed but in the end social-minded good father long mythologized in the American West. We might never have relished the idea of actually being his employee or child, just as few people ever really want to work for their dad. But fathers – and father figures – make indelible marks upon our lives and that, perhaps, explains more than anything why we morn the loss of our neighbor Steve Jobs to a self-surprising degree.

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