We’re driving along a sun-dappled street in the hills when a friend — let’s call him Niraj — tells me that he’s going to be rich. He doesn’t say it like that, exactly. He mentions the valuation of individual shares in a company he was involved in and then states a sum. The number sails over my head. I’m too busy looking out the window, where leafy trees arch over the streets, multimillion-dollar homes gaze out at three-bridge views and pollen floating on the breeze looks like it’s painted gold.
“Wait, sorry,” I interrupt him. “I think I missed that number. Did you say $ — ?” I have to ask because it’s six figures, enough to buy—outright—a small condo here in Berkeley or maybe a fixer-upper in El Cerrito. And that much money — a stupid amount of money for somebody with no kids, wife, student loans or chronic health condition — feels so massive that it can’t be right.
He confirms.
“Holy shit. That’s insane,” I say. Pause. “I’m really happy for you.”
Am I?
I say this line, the “happy for you” thing, because another friend, whom I’ll call Jason, said the exact same thing to me when I told him about getting a full-time-job offer at the nonprofit where I work. It made me feel peculiarly humbled and grateful to see an unselfish joy break out across his face — the expressiveness loosed, undoubtedly, by alcohol, but still. It felt novel—someone being so happy for me with no caveats. Frankly, it was the opposite of the dogged sense of competition I’ve felt with respect to many of my friends’ successes. Or while reading someone’s op-ed in the Washington Post, seeing a blue checkmark by another’s name on Twitter or reading a Facebook update about someone getting accepted to Harvard Law. But jealousy is my most impotent vice; all I do is type out “Congratulations!” and ruminate.
“Congratulations!” Jason exclaimed to me, beaming. We were perusing menus at a Chinatown noodle shop when I delivered the news, and he ordered Tsingtao beers and three entrees and declared he was paying.
The earliest Chinese immigrants to San Francisco named this place Jiùjīnshān, or Old Gold Mountain, on account of the precious metal running in the veins of the earth.
“You paid last time,” I protested. At an upscale Cambodian restaurant in Oakland where we’d seen Warriors coach Steve Kerr eating, no less. Our bill then had probably been close to 60 dollars.
But the harried Chinese waitress arrived, and he grabbed the check. He paid for our Uber too. At his apartment, I offered him and his roommate organic farmers’ market strawberries. One container had cost me maybe $5.
How many boxes of strawberries would it take to pay him back?
I didn’t ask that question then. Justification enough, silent in both our heads, was the simple fact that Jason makes more money than I do. It wasn’t always that way. We were students at the same time. My partner was one of his roommates for three years in a cramped apartment where the landlord painted over the creeping mold with layer upon layer of white paint. I became a nightly fixture on their dark-green couch. The couch was a street find I’d discovered sitting forlornly a few blocks away from their apartment. Now that couch sits in my room, and Jason lives in San Francisco. When we graduated, he started working in tech; I started working at a nonprofit; and our financial lives diverged sharply, probably never to even out. It’s the same story with most of my friends, off to start-ups weaving vital systems out of the skeins of the cloud or publicly traded companies churning out moneymaking beauties made of glass and cobalt and gold.
The earliest Chinese immigrants to San Francisco named this place Jiùjīnshān, or Old Gold Mountain, on account of the precious metal running in the veins of the earth. Some men got lucky; many didn’t. I wonder how the unlucky ones felt. Alongside all those striking it rich in California were the launderers and barkeeps and brothel madams, people whose only profit trickled out of the filth and sorrow and lust of the rich.
I think of the gold rush now because of this element of luck. There was a tweet I saw, probably from a software developer, saying something about feeling undeserving and lucky to be in an industry that is highly in demand through an accident of history, while schoolteachers and firefighters work twice as hard and don’t get half the recognition. It went mildly viral, although not to the extent that I can remember the guy’s name. Later I saw it in my newsfeed again, this time quoted disparagingly by a woman of color who said that there’s no accident at play here: sexism and racism mean that when white men flood an industry, it gains prestige. And so it goes with tech. That’s a story that’s borne out by evidence: the New York Times Magazine feature “The Secret History of Women in Coding” shows that this industry wasn’t initially populated by fratty brogrammers or nerdy wunderkinds, but by women whose “traditional expertise at painstaking activities like knitting and weaving” were said to build the exact mindset needed for excellent programming.
Today, though, the ranks of high-profile tech companies and the higher-education talent pipeline that feeds them are both dismally un-diverse. That reality leaves many people just like me — often women, with degrees in the social sciences or humanities, working in industries perhaps adjacent to but not directly within tech — riding in the passenger’s seat next to our friends, men telling us they stand on the precipice of wealth we may never achieve in our lifetimes. Are we happy for you?
A slew of IPOs is about to hit San Francisco. Maybe the panic about real estate is all hype, but one real consequence of new wealth is less material and more intimate: the psychological distance created by wealth disparity.
It’s unclear if our friends will invest as much in our collective uplift as they do in their brokerage accounts.
“Disparity has always existed,” you might say. But humans in precapitalist societies must have been limited in the wealth they could amass in comparison to their neighbors — restricted, at least, by the finite nature of their resources. Modern finance capital makes it possible to squirrel ever-vaster sums away, the magic of money that makes more money. And while pay transparency is important for fairness, the dick measuring about shares and salary we’ve normalized in the Bay Area tech scene also means that someone’s whole friend group could easily figure out they just made a million.
That creates social chasms. There are interpersonal interactions made awkward by the “poor” friend’s financial limitations. What do you say when your friends want to go to a bottomless-mimosa brunch and you can’t afford it the fifth time in a row? Or when they’re booking a spontaneous group trip to Japan, courtesy of six-figure salaries and unlimited PTO, while you still haven’t paid off your student loans?
But even those of us whose wealthy friends are so frugal that their lifestyles seem unlikely to eclipse our own still have to grapple with the ways that the very knowledge of inequality affects us — all of us. Researchers from the University of Granada write in the International Journal of Psychology that higher levels of perceived income inequality lead people to be more individualistic and identify less with the collective, creating social divisions and undermining prosocial and cooperative behaviors.
That’s bad news for those of us who want to build solidarity, support organized labor and push for the rights of society’s most marginalized. These things take building together, not hoarding apart. And it’s unclear if our friends will invest as much in our collective uplift as they do in their brokerage accounts.
Still, I really am happy for Niraj and his incipient windfall. Surprisingly, for someone who has benefitted so much by capitalism, he has an old socialist’s dream: early retirement and no compulsion to work. He suggests getting a coffee to celebrate, a break from his famous frugality, and we stand in line at a cafe where social-justice activists’ faces and bios adorn laminated table numbers.
When the cashier asks, her fingernail flicking over the iPad screen, “Together or separate?” and I turn to glance at him, he looks surprised.
“Oh,” I laugh. “I won’t make you pay just because of…,” my voice trailing off. I wonder, as I pull out my credit card, if some things between us will never change.
