What a city asks of you

I’m eight months into living in San Francisco, and frankly, it’s been an adjustment. I find myself missing Los Angeles and trying to bring as many pieces of that city as I can here. You might call it coping.

When people ask me what I miss, I try to refrain from the normal retorts that you might hear others give about the weather or quality of life. Don’t get me wrong, there’s something idealistic in waking up every day in a city that constantly feels like it’s 70 and sunny.

But that’s not why I miss Los Angeles.

The real difference, to me, is orientation and connection. The two cities ask different things of you. San Francisco asks what you can produce. Los Angeles asks what you can feel.

San Francisco, to me, is a city centered around utility. It asks: How big of a company can I build? How many dollars can I raise? How many people can I impact? That is beautiful in a way. There is something genuinely moving about a place where so many people are trying to bend the arc of the world. I don’t want to dismiss that. There is ambition in San Francisco that can feel almost spiritual in its intensity.

But there is also something completely draining about it.

You walk through the city feeling like everyone is trying to optimize energy in for maximal energy out. Exponential return. The implied belief being that your life should be far greater in impact than the construct of your physical being.

There’s an unnerving energy to exert impact in San Francisco. It’s controlling.

Even rest can start to feel instrumentalized. Sleep is for recovery. Exercise is for performance. Friendship is for networking. Reading is for insight. A walk is for clearing the mind so the mind can go back to work.

There is something important in that. Don’t get me wrong. I have undoubtedly been shaped by living this experience. I’ve lived a majority of my life with a tight grip on outcomes. With a belief that I am intrinsically capable of shaping the world in any direction. That the limiting factor is only my sheer will. My career wouldn’t be where it is without feeling some of those things.

But as I get older, I find myself questioning those feelings. It can feel devoid of embodiment. Devoid of feeling. As if the body is just another input in the system: something to manage, regulate, feed, exercise, and deploy in service of output.

What I miss about Los Angeles is that the city seems to ask a different question. Not “What can this become?” or “How can this scale?” but “How is this going to make me feel?”

You walk into a local restaurant, a corner store, even someone’s backyard, and there is often an immediate attention to energy: the light, the form, the materiality — the architectural version of the word, not in relation to money — the negative space.

The environment invites you to become a slightly different version of yourself. There is an attunement to the atmosphere. To energy. To the body. To the fact that the spaces we move through do not just exist for our physical bodies, but to house our souls.

LA, at its best, understands that beauty is not frivolous. Feeling is not secondary. The way something lands in your nervous system matters. The way a room opens or closes you matters. The way a neighborhood makes you feel expansive, dulled, alive, self-conscious, romantic, or free matters.

These things are not beside the point of life. They are the texture of it.

That, to me, is the deeper contrast. San Francisco is brilliant at asking what can be scaled. It is a city of utility, leverage, and output. Los Angeles is more interested in embodiment: how the world lands in the body, how beauty changes your energy, how a space can return you to yourself.

Maybe that is what I miss most. Not the weather, not the restaurants, not quality of life. The feeling of living in a place that reminds me I am not just here to produce. I am here to feel.