I like physical newspapers. I don’t subscribe to any, but I do enjoy my morning read of our little hometown paper, the Palo Alto Daily Post, which is pretty much 80% real estate ads and 20% news stories. On Thursday morning, I was greeted with this:
Immediately to its left, also on the front page, were these mentions:
And, the very next morning, also on the front page, was this article:
We live in poisonously prosperous times. The Bay Area has been the beneficiary of literally trillions of dollars of newfound wealth over the past couple of decades. And yet over the course of a couple of days, in the very epicenter of all this wealth, intellect, and success, we have:
- An engineer from Meta poisons his two young sons to death, shoots his wife (herself a Zillow engineer) in the head, and then kills himself;
- A corpse found in VMWare’s corporate parking lot, perhaps someone despondent from having been laid off;
- A person leaping to death in front of Caltrain;
- A young man from an insanely rich and famous family overdosing himself on drugs at UC Berkeley.
I say again, this is all happening during GOOD times.
Unemployment is extremely low. Incomes are sky-high. The stock market is absurdly inflated, having made the nation feel richer than ever. And yet we find ourselves encountering despondency, death, and murder.
Something is very diseased about our society, even in the very epicenter of what is supposed to make people “happy.” I can only imagine what this world is going to be like when the wheels fall off, because things already seem irreversibly broken, and that is contemporaneous with virtually everyone pretending that things are just great.
