Stress Valley

Despite a booming economy, pleasant climate and natural treasures, nearly two-thirds of Bay Area residents say the quality of life here has gotten worse in the last five years, according to a new poll.

No wonder people working there get paid a lot as compensation for the misery.

Apparently people love money and fleeting fame so much that they have made quite a deal with the devil!  And even the people who don't have money don't want to leave, which makes no sense to me.

Meanwhile, The New York Times notes that the Silicon Valley's very-important-people seem to be obsessed with the virtue of suffering.

They sit in painful, silent meditations for weeks on end. They starve for days — on purpose. Cold morning showers are a bragging right. Notoriety is a badge of honor.

Madness, my friends, madness this is!

I have often joked with students that if I wanted to starve and not have hot showers, well, I could have easily stayed back in a poor village in India ;)

So, the Valley's very-important-people are turning to ... Stoicism?  WTF?

Stoicism has been the preferred viral philosophy “for a moment” for years now — or two decades, by one count. The topic of Stoicism usually comes up in the Valley in terms of the maintenance of the personal life. Start-ups big and small believe their mission is to make the transactions of life frictionless and pleasing. But the executives building those things are convinced that a pleasing, on-demand life will make them soft. So they attempt to bring the pain.
“We’re kept in constant comfort,” said Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, in an interview on Daily Stoic, a popular blog for the tech-Stoic community. Mr. Rose said he tries to incorporate practices in his life that “mimic” our ancestors’ environments and their daily challenges: “This can be simple things like walking in the rain without a jacket or wearing my sandals in the December snow when I take the dog out in the mornings.”

Seriously, these are the nutcases that are shaping our collective future through hi-tech?

Why Stoicism?

Ada Palmer is a professor of early modern history at the University of Chicago and a novelist. Her books are popular in Silicon Valley, and she often visits for dinners with tech workers.
“It’s very interesting to see their sort of sad lethargy,” Dr. Palmer said. “When you’re 37, rich, retired and unhappy, it’s very perplexing.”

"Sad lethargy." There is a cure for that--go do something that connects you with real humans.