According to this year’s Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index for the United States, Silicon Valley boasts the best quality of life in the entire country. The New York Times published a handy interactive map of the Index this weekend.
While the Times chose to review the results by state – where Hawaii comes out top – the results were actually compiled by congressional district. Of those, California’s district 14, which pretty much contains the entire Valley, was the highest ranked.
The Index was derived by aggregating measures of reported happiness, education, health insurance, job satisfaction, community safety and other factors that together make somewhere a good place to live.
To some of us who inhabit the Valley, our preeminence was a surprise. There’s really nowhere else better? In the entire nation? After all, the area is stupendously expensive. Try buying a house here. Or a tank of gas. And this is a place where everyone works insanely hard. They’re super-competitive. Commutes can be crazy. There’s very little job security.
But many of these negatives reflect something that’s arguably also very positive about the place: that a lot of people here are very good at what they do. That means they get paid well, and wealth correlates very neatly with contributory factors to well-being such as access to housing, health care, good food, and clean air.
To be good at what you do also takes caring about your work. That can produce stress by the bucketful, but in the right environment it promotes job satisfaction, too, and the flip side of the Valley’s poor job security is that its inhabitants feel free to leave any job, anytime, whenever they’re presented with a better opportunity.
Most crucially, then, the place offers – even in a recession – money and possibility, and maybe that’s what really puts us at the top.
The Valley remains full of people with new ideas, launching new ventures, making all kinds of deals every day with — and here’s the kicker — a small but genuine chance of actually succeeding. Plenty fail, for sure, but even that is understood as a learning experience here and not a judgement on your character for life. And that freeing, energizing potentiality rubs off even on those who simply service the more entrepreneurial among us.
Paul Graham, the founder of the startup incubator Y-Combinator, wrote an essay a few years ago entitled ‘How to Be Silicon Valley,’ that imagined what it would take to reproduce the Valley somewhere else. You’d need only three things, he argued: rich people, nerds, and a place they both want to live. Such a place would likely have a university, he suggests (nerds like to live among smart people), and also be “the kind of town where people walk around smiling.”
It’s a cute line but perceptive, too.
A smiling citizenry is either complacent or still hopeful about its future. We have plenty of wealthy people here who can afford complacence, but what’s remarkable is how many of them remain engaged as financial supporters of young people looking to make it themselves.
The rest of us, meanwhile, may not be rich enough to feel self-satisfied, but the sense of sheer possibility that permeates the culture in which we’ve chosen to live – for all that it makes the region a popular and thus breathtakingly expensive place to inhabit – is a great generator of grounded, realistic hopefulness. And isn’t that, in many ways, the ultimate marker of personal well-being?
SimonFirth.com 
Authenticity and the end of online anonymity
Just over a year ago I wrote a piece in the London Evening Standard that asked if it would soon be all-but impossible to be anything other than your true self online.
Those days, it seems, are fast approaching. “Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone,” announces a headline in today’s New York Times. Author Brian Stelter picks out several recent examples of people caught doing something unusual, illegal or embarrassing in public and then being swiftly identified through their online activities and social connections.
Another news item from today — detailing the arrest of an alleged member of the LulzSec hacker collective — suggests that even those who know their way around web anonymity are finding it hard to stay hidden.
Since I wrote the Standard piece, the financial information-sharing website that I featured, called Blippy, has gone under. At the time it looked likely to fail because relatively few people had taken their online self-revelations to the extreme that Blippy required to succeed. I was nevertheless interested in how the tell-all culture upon which Blippy was predicated was growing in strength, a development that I predicted would eventually spark suspicion of those who refused to share.
What I didn’t address was the idea that it’s also becoming ever-easier for one’s behavior, both online and off-, to be revealed even when you had an expectation of anonymity. But if we’ve reached that point too, as the Times article suggests we might have, then the same consequences hold: that we’ll likely feel ever greater pressure to be authentically ourselves whether we’re online or off, and that that pressure might in turn have us modifying our behavior in both spheres.
As I said in the article, “Maybe, as a result, we’ll all be inspired to lead more responsible lives in the future, figuring that since so much about our modern lives is searchable, we might as well just be good instead of worrying about looking good.”
The same caveats also hold, however. To live both publicly and safely requires a system that’s law-abiding, tolerant, open and totally accepting of its critics and malcontents. Unfortunately, that’s not something that our shifting ideas of authenticity and anonymity are likely to make it any easier for us to secure.
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