Going Woke And Losing Faith

Ahhh shit. Your boy is coming out of retirement for this one. Okay, I wasn’t retired, but I released some new rock n roll and stood up a new company + been busy at my seed startup day job, so writing had to take a backseat for a minute.

So this topic again, wow. Are you the dumbest idiot Jack? The answer is nuanced, but the tl;dr is “absolutely”.

I’m gonna ask that whoever is reading this apply nuance, critical thinking, and generous interpretation to what I’m about to say because I am not writing this with any sort of malice or duplicity, and I’m not going to over explain things that are obvious when viewed unemotionally. This post is intended for adults (anyone over like 25, if you’re a girl, maybe 23). If you aren’t an adult, enjoy learning how we got here and feel free to overreact, you get til 26 to do that.

So politics, oppression, privilege and growing up through all of that. What do I, the most qualified type of person, a straight white male, have to say about these things?

How I was raised

September 11, 2001 I was 6 years old. I awoke in the small bedroom I shared with my brother. Everyone was already up, and I was quickly ushered to my parents’ room by FOMO—everyone was glued to the TV. Cartoons, on a Tuesday?

There was a burning building and a plane, and eventually the plane ran into another building next to the burning one.

Not cartoons.

I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew it was bad.

I went to school that day in a somber mood, and when I got there, it appeared everyone else was in a somber mood. Whatever, I’d catch Pokemon that night and things would be good, and they were.

As time went on, I sort of understood what happened. “Terrorists” had taken over some planes and flown them into some buildings because they hated people like me, Americans. The response was of collective mourning, but also unity. I felt proud to be an American, because the next day we all went back to work, and we delivered cold justice to those terrorists.

We recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, and the response to 9/11 gave meaning to those words, but like, in a non-cliche way. Even though I was 6 and was mostly just told to be proud to be an American, I did start to understand what that meant.

I was raised by both of my parents.

In the evenings when my mom was busy with my sister, my dad was tasked with feeding and entertaining me and my brother. We usually had Little Caesars or Jack in the Box, or if my dad already had a handle of Seagram’s 7 on deck, chicken and rice, and we usually ate it while watching Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly. This is how I spent probably 10 years of my life. Fast Food and Fox News.

Over the next few years of elementary school, I kept expecting a plane to fly into my school on September 11th, but that fear eventually faded. I was afraid of middle-eastern people or anyone who wore anything on their head for a few years as well, but that fear also faded.

My dad is from a classic midwest family. Substance abuse, divorce, too-early pregnancies, welfare. We got it all baby.

My mom was adopted by two Spanish immigrants, my grandpa, an illegal immigrant who fled Franco to seek a better life in San Francisco, and my grandma, who never really got up to speed on English. I knew almost nothing about my grandma, but I loved her because of how much she loved me (a lot). Good, hard working people.

My mom ended up valedictorian. She rejected her Stanford admission to go to University of the Pacific, which at the time was a comparable school, but known for also being fun (Stanford’s Med School used to be Pacific’s). There she met my dad, who was fresh out of the army and top of the class in the pharmacy program they both attended.

So my household was interesting. Well educated, but culturally still blue collar with hints of saffron.

My mom didn’t work most of my childhood, so we lived in a modest house in a very nice town. Money was always tight, but I usually got what I asked for for Christmas, so I didn’t really mind.

School though, was interesting.

In elementary school, we all took an IQ test (you could retake it every 2 years IIRC). If you ended up in the 98th percentile or above, you were put into a special program called GATE (Gifted And Talented Education).

In Kindergarten, I got in at the 98th percentile, meaning I got most of the idiosyncrasies that come with being smart, but without the title of “genius”. My older brother had gotten in with I think the top score, so he called me stupid for basically my entire childhood.

Around this time, I developed severe OCD. If anyone coughed or breathed audibly, I’d have to wipe myself off and restart whatever I was doing. As you can imagine, this was about as disruptive as a thing could be. It ebbed and flowed, but generally always hampered me achieving my potential.

I grew up in one of the many diet Palo Altos in the Bay Area: Pleasanton. The expectation was at least UCLA/Berkeley, if not Princeton/Stanford. It was expected that you got a 4.5, and if you didn’t, your life was going to be measurably worse. No one knew why it would be worse, but it was drilled into us through the culture that < 4.5 = bad.

Outside of class, in some ways it felt like a teen movie. Popular kids, jocks, nerds, the extras in the background that only serve to fill space while the main characters have their stories told.

I was an extra.

My friend groups were scattered. My best friends were always ethnically diverse, but I did fit in with the unpopular white kids as well. Basically if you were weird or a late bloomer, we were friends.

Despite constantly being on edge from the inevitable coughing that happened 100 times a day, I was generally well liked because of my kind heart and openness to even the weirdest kids.

I did get picked on a bit though. Being a late bloomer and a loud mouth, I was asking for it in some ways. The memory that sticks the most was having the most popular guy in my grade call me gay (like actually) in the locker room in front of all the cool kids I wanted to be friends with. It stung. I definitely don’t still think about that all the time.

In class, things were very different. Most of the kids in the AP classes I took were not white guys. Maybe 15% were white guys, 5% were hispanic or black kids, and the other 80% were an even split between Asian/Indian kids and white girls.

It was funny, because being white at my high school was seen as a disadvantage. Everyone “knew” Asian people were better at math, and Indian people were smarter all around. That was trite wisdom.

White people, specifically white guys, were nothing special, and that wasn’t an unfounded stereotype.

The white guys at my school ended up in 3 buckets:

1. 50% community college, which most often led to a service or trades job

2. 30% state schools, which led to a job in sales or “business”

3. 20% Cal Poly or equivalent which led to jobs in engineering

I think we had maybe 5 white guys go to “good” schools, but for the most part, “good” schools were reserved for the white women and the Asian/Indian kids.

I didn’t have a problem with the white guys ending up on normal paths. They didn’t earn the elite college admission, and as far as I knew, white guys were the ones who worked normal jobs anyway.

This is not a commentary on who went to what school, or who deserves what. The Asian/Indian kids and white girls had better GPAs and test scores, so they earned their keep. It’s America, merit wins.

What about me?

I knew I wasn’t going to an Ivy League school pretty early on.

For starters, I wasn’t on “the track”. Most of the kids who ended up at those schools either had a college coach and took prep classes, or were just better than me—more disciplined, smarter, older (I was young for my grade). The few kids that I was friends with had coaches. They were rich, and I was obsessed with whatever they did.

My dad had no conception of how to become successful in today’s world. He had joined the army and gotten a degree in healthcare because it was a stable middle class industry. That was his rubric: stable and middle class = good. My mom essentially did the exact same thing sans the military.

There was no game to them, it was just go through school, get a degree in STEM, then buy a house and start a family.

So yeah, between me being a fairly dysfunctional OCD-ridden kid, and having literally no idea what to do to get into a top school, I basically just signed up for a few AP classes, did my homework, studied for tests, and tried to fit in. When homework was done, I rode my mountain bike and dirtbike, I skateboarded, I got into weightlifting, and I started little businesses and art projects.

Random aside: I haven’t mentioned black or hispanic kids much because we didn’t have that many. One black kid was one of the richest kids in school. The other went to prison. Others performed similarly to white kids.

Anyway, I got a 3.8.

I worked hard, and did mostly just as well on the tests as the other kids, but I didn’t have the full package.

I didn’t do the 40 hrs a week of homework and extra studying outside of class. I didn’t take 4 AP classes a year. I couldn’t get through a test without a couple cough-induced meltdowns. I didn’t play 3 sports. I didn’t volunteer at the local homeless shelter.

I started bands, and businesses, and youtube channels, and guilds in MMORPGs, and mountain biking teams. I spent a lot of time alone because that was when my OCD was the least obtrusive. Things came quickly to me, and my brain moved fast, but I was overstimulated and distracted. I was an H100 hooked up to a chromebook. I didn’t have control of my brain yet.

Picking a college

At 14, my mom had told me I could get into Stanford or MIT. At 17, my parents were suggesting I apply for University of Nevada, Reno, maybe as a safety school or affordable option, but come on, I was capable of more! This is not a knock on UNR, in fact, I probably would have gotten a better education there than the school I did attend, but UNR!? I felt like a failure, and I got a big chip on my shoulder from this.

I applied to 2 schools: one was a top Tier 2 school, and one was University of the Pacific. Sorry UNR.

I got into both. Financially and familiarly, Pacific was chosen for me, so that’s where I ended up, just like my parents, and sister, and brother (he had gotten the 4.5 and SAT score, but he wanted to ride his dirt bike + still see his high school friends).

UoP gave me a decent scholarship and I was excited, but it quickly became evident that this was not the same school my parents attended.

In my first week, I had a professor tell the class that white men have ruined the world. Great start.

My dad + Bill O’Reilly had warned me about people like this, but I always thought “yeah yeah, whatever, this is just a “feminist””, which the internet had told me were women who wanted equality, yet some were even going as far as to want to bring men down.

I assumed equality must be a problem if so many women were up in arms about it, but I didn’t like that someone was saying all people who look like me are bad people. I stood up to her and said I disagreed.

Obviously an 18 year old going toe to toe with a 50 year old academic is going to be outgunned, but we didn’t even have a reasoned argument (this all took place in the middle of the seminar class where we were taught to think critically).

She said, and I’m not really paraphrasing, that white men have had it too good for too long and it wasn’t fair. I didn’t understand her. I had just gotten out of a high school where white men were nothing special. I didn’t chase that thread, instead I took it personally.

I asked her point blank, in front of the class, if that meant that I shouldn’t be allowed to succeed. She said “yes”.

Great.

Date Rape

Over the next few weeks, I heard grumblings, mostly by guys in other fraternities, that my brother’s fraternity regularly raped girls.

Uh, okay.

I had started to get to know those guys through my brother, and I didn’t believe they were all rapists. My brother wasn’t a rapist, that I was pretty sure of, and his friends weren’t either. In fact, they had a steady flow of all the prettiest girls repeatedly coming in the front door for parties, dating them, etc.

As a guy who hadn’t kissed a girl yet, I was attracted to the female attention and huge parties despite what I’d heard, which at this point, I was confident was false.

I joined, and learned very quickly that the rumors were just rumors.

Jumping forward a bit to caveat the rumors point: during my time, we did throw out 2 guys (out of probably 150 total through my 4 years) who were awful. They were creepy toward women and they tried to fight, uh, everyone. Just sloppy, shitty drunks. We first tried to reform them, but nothing took.

It was up to us to police the worst of our brothers, and we generally did. I can see, however, how one bad exchange with those guys leaves you thinking that’s who we all are, or that we condone sloppy behavior, and that’s understandable, especially if you’ve only had that one experience at our house.

Alcohol + hormones = bad

Ok, back on track, I joined, and part of pledging was interviewing all 100 brothers in the house. I was the only one who actually accomplished this, so I got to know a lot about everyone pretty quickly.

In my interviewing, I learned of one guy who was accused of rape. This was before I got there, and before he joined the fraternity. He was forced to leave the school for a year as a public safety risk before they eventually dismissed the accusation and let him come back. Oof.

The “rape” thing wasn’t a major thing for most guys in the house, maybe because they didn’t know the story, or maybe because they didn’t spend all their time online and in their head.

All this, along with the echo chambers on Reddit of guys getting falsely accused, put the fear of god into me that women could and would ruin your life if they wanted to.

The first night of my sophomore year, I got DRUNK. I got drunk a lot during this time, but this night we were drinking for sport; I podiumed in BAC, but got the gold in regret.

I’d been at a party and come back to my room to link up with my roommate. There were a handful of pretty girls there with my roommate, and let’s just say one of the girls took a strong liking to me. She was sober, and I was half a beer away from blackout.

She gave me that half a beer, and I came out of my blackout on the other side of a major milestone.

That isn’t where you thought this was going.

My brain had decided that this arrangement was…safe! It was terrible, and weird, and a bad introduction to being an adult doing adult things, but I wasn’t going to prison if I was the drunker one, so I didn’t spend any time thinking about what had happened, just that I wasn’t going to be thrown out of school.

A few months later, all of greek life was forced to attend a mandatory seminar where we were taught to not rape people.

It was basically admin telling, and then roleplaying with, the guys in the audience how to ask for consent. I’m sure it was for insurance purposes but bleh.

This coincided with the hookup culture revolution.

I didn’t really have much success with women in college despite having all the technology. I had spent the preceding 18 years closer to a bean bag than a sexual object, and I was still a head case that talked too much (still am baby!), so it puzzled me how some of my friends were having a lot of “fun” with a lot of “friends” while I was too afraid to kiss a girl.

I generally walked away from these first couple years confused, thinking “it’s up to the girl before, during, or after anything intimate if she wants to ruin my life. Let’s avoid that.”

Bad to worse

This was also the beginning of our deviation from nuance.

Being an engineering student, I didn’t have too many classes outside of STEM, but without fail, every single one felt the same.

Rape is everywhere and white people (this eventually got filtered down to just the men) are privileged and abortion is great and racism is the worst it’s ever been.

It was 2012-2016, we were all in college, and this is what people chose to think about? Who thinks about this stuff this often?

I’d started to hear the blanket “men are trash” thrown around, and I’d eventually hear “if you don’t think this is a problem, it’s because you have privilege.”

It all felt like it came out of nowhere, and while it definitely invoked a tribal immune response in me, it felt more like a pander pity party, and a contrived one at that. But again, not something I worried about—it was literally just a few old hippy ladies who taught sociology classes, and one of them regularly skipped class (as the teacher!).

Campus life and culture got worse.

Pacific sat in the middle of Stockton, a fairly dangerous town, so the entirety of the social scene was frat/athlete parties. First they got rid of the Men’s Volleyball teams because there were too many men's teams (Title IX I believe). Then they banned partying almost entirely. Then the fun culture was slowly replaced by a sapling of the zeitgeist we all know and love today. Fraternities, once the fulcrum of campus life, were constantly under attack and under threat of expulsion. By my senior year in 2015/2016, we were barely even socializing, and when we were, we’d do it off-campus in the heart of Stockton.

Very safe.

Like every year, my senior year I did move-in crew to recruit freshman guys and find hot girls for our parties. On the first day of move-in, we were all of the sudden expected to introduce ourselves with the pronouns we went by (huh?).

A huge change in just a few years.

Despite the rollercoaster that was me first 3 years of college, I did my darnedest to turn things around from high school and become the best version of myself. I had grown to be 6’4”, I had stuck to strength training, so I was a lean, muscular 200 lbs, and I had put in the work in and out of the classroom to become close to the top of my class while balancing a full plate of extracurriculars.

Alcohol and puberty had made my OCD much less obtrusive, so even with the 15 IQ point hit from being hungover all the time, I was running a fraternity, setting curves in classes, and going to tons of parties and social events.

Personal Growth

My fraternity gave me exposure to much richer and much poorer people of all backgrounds. I had been raised by Fox news, so while I leaned conservative, I was moving toward the center pretty rapidly as I started to understand more about other people.

It was a great experience.

I had more friends from more backgrounds: we had gay guys, truly lower class guys, millionaires, and random schmucks like me. We all worked hard and accomplished amazing things when we worked together. We were a unit.

I started to change.

I started to regularly say that people born with bad hands should be given a little extra help to keep them in the game. Helping the little guy, either in my fraternity, or just in general, was in my nature.

I gradually stopped saying words like retard, fag, gay, etc. We even used to jokingly say the n-word. Never at anyone, never malevolently, but because it had voodoo associated with it and we all grew up on Xbox Live and we were stupid kids who wanted to say bad words. I don’t know, maybe I was a monster.

Words like those were bad words that I’d been told were attached to oppression, and I definitely didn’t believe in oppression.

The school had proven to be good for me despite the bad encounters. I didn’t have exclusively terrible professors, in fact, I had some amazing professors (including two favorites that were women) that fostered curiosity in me, encouraged me, and legitimately changed my life.

Things were really good: I was solidly in the top cohort of students, I was involved in all sorts of programs on campus, and I felt I’d finally gotten to show what I was capable of.

Is something off?

Despite this growth and success, I started to feel something. I don’t know if ire is too strong a word, but it felt like the diversity people and admin were doing Stepford Wife smiles while I was doing real ones.

I ran into headaches with unfair treatment of my fraternity. My buddy even successfully argued a discrimination case based on the school’s treatment of him. Yes, this is outrageous, but the treatment was so undeniably biased that the admin that had unfairly treated him couldn’t disagree. He’s a rockstar consultant now, I’d hate to not be on his team.

Up to this point, I had NEVER considered race or gender to be of any material importance. I had seen empirically that being white and male in the game I was playing could only be a setback or a neutral, but definitely not an advantage. Asian/Indian kids and women (regardless of race) were the gold standard, this was obvious to me, and still held true, even at Pacific.

I started thinking that maybe me being a confident white guy had something to do with these “bad-vibes”, but this was so subjectively different from what I’d experienced up to that point in life, that I dismissed it.

I’m an ally now

Through a friend, I met some really smart girls whom I respected a lot, but for the first few months of knowing them, they always treated me like a buffoon.

These were girls that had turned down the Ivy League because they had gotten insane scholarships to Pacific. These were the top of the top. I wanted to be like them. I wanted them to like me.

I did eventually become best friends with them. They told me when they first met me they thought I was an actual idiot based on what I looked like and how I carried myself. Some of this was definitely the muscles and tank tops, but oof.

After this exchange, my experience in the fraternity, and generally feeling like people didn’t like a confident white guy, I really tried to change. I had a purpose for doing the right thing beyond arbitrarily believing I should be doing the right thing. I was part of the solution. I was an ally.

I was no longer buying what Fox News was selling, and the words of that professor my freshman year echoed through my head. Was I privileged? I still felt like I couldn’t be on her team, but maybe if I apologized enough, I could be a “better” white man…or accepted or something? Maybe I was privileged. Maybe I was oppressing people. I’m not being sarcastic or rhetorical. I was genuinely obsessed with these questions.

I have always been wired to love people, and I had learned through my diverse fraternity experience that teams win when they stick together, but it was, I suppose, possible that I was holding people down, and what we needed was diversity after all. I remember it being drilled into my head “diversity is good”.

Diversity was never defined. I always assumed “diversity” meant diversity of class, which to me (class) was the only reasonable thing I could point to that affected the outcome of people. However diversity was almost always conflated with race. Even though I didn’t fully agree that it was this simple, I’d accepted that class and race must be at least correlated.

Thrown out

So back to the macro-story. I was very politically confused: I wasn’t a conservative, but was I liberal? Was I the problem? Was I doing something wrong?

It had been years, yet I still felt the sting of what that professor had said to me during the first week of my freshman year, and it still felt wrong, evil even. I was confused, but I was now playing for what I was told was the right team, and that was cool.

This all came to a head my senior year.

First, I got thrown out of my fraternity. The last 2 years in my fraternity, we were forbidden by the school from hosting events like dances and formals because we had continued throwing mostly off-campus parties, and that was not allowed.

For damage control, the fraternity put me in charge of the newest pledge class. I got rid of the hazing, the bullshit, pretty much everything not-productive and really focused on creating good, value-aligned men.

One night at a retreat, we were all drinking together when a 21 year old pledge drank too much. He was older than me, so I hadn’t kept an eye on him. He had to be up early for an event, so a sober member drove him home that night. When they got back to campus, he was totally fine, albeit as drunk as I usually got, but that didn’t matter.

His RA caught him drunk and sent him to the hospital(!?). They promptly sent him home with a gatorade, but the school had to be informed.

The school forced our nationals to kick me out of the fraternity, and left me commuting (from home, an hour away!) for a good chunk of my final year.

Whatever, I should have been monitoring his drinking more, that was my fault.

But that was not the big one.

A robbery

We had to do a senior project to get our engineering degree, and we’d be competing with others in the class. I had done my project on redesigning the library.

I became the de facto team lead on our team of three; I had spent 4 years breaking fraternity records and eventually running a high performing fraternity that was always mired in bullshit, so I was at this point an A1 operator.

My brother put in 20+/hrs a week to his project a few years earlier, so that was my standard. It’d be worth it though, I would prove that I was who I believed myself to be.

I spoke to the other teams to get a feel for how we stacked up, and generally walked away feeling confident. One team even said they were taking turns doing a couple hours a week on the project. Wow.

Our project was ambitious, and what started as just a report full of suggestions, CAD designs, and mocks, turned into a real shot at having the school implement our work.

A dozen meetings with school admin and library staff, hundreds of hours of analysis and preparing presentations, and a final presentation that was actually accepted and put into practice.

This school project had turned into a consulting gig where I was paid to advise an architecture firm on the redesign. I received a ton of praise from professors, school faculty, and other teams, and the cherry on top would be winning senior project day for my cohort.

When judging happened, it was a sure thing: my team would win.

But something happened.

First, our professor, literally the day before it was to be presented, told us we couldn’t just have a tri-fold project board. We needed something tangible. What? What did this even mean?

We just redesigned the library. We had CAD drawings, powerpoints that had been presented to high ranking university staff, and a perfectly good tri-fold done to the letter of the instructions. Not to mention the main deliverables—a presentation with a fly-through of the new library and a report (it ended up at 69 pages ;p).

We had done everything asked of us and a significant amount more, why the new requirement all of the sudden? That was my first tip that this wasn’t going to be the victory lap I thought it would be.

Whatever, maybe we read the instructions wrong. Maybe this was nothing (and I mean this, maybe I was overthinking this). We acquiesced, mad-dashing to a craft store 30 minutes before closing and buying a bunch of supplies that would exceed our reimbursement budget. We spent hours that evening building a janky 3D diorama of the library, and we got it done.

Our project was head and shoulders above everyone else. It was polished. It had hundreds of hours and refinements put into it. It was literally being built by the school. Yes, we had this janky diorama, but it honestly looked similar to what other teams were showing, so I didn’t give that a second thought. I was confident.

The next morning, we got up early, got set up, and gave our presentation. As mentioned, we crushed it. We’d already presented multiple times to administrators and library staff. High fives all around, people were stoked.

This is when something totally unexpected happened.

It’s just so hard to choose

My team didn’t win.

If the project that had won had been good, that’d have been fine. Again, I was used to losing academically from high school. My goal is to be the best version of myself, and losing to people who are better than me exposes my flaws.

But the team that beat us was not better than us, and the “flaws” that were exposed to me were not things I could fix.

When it came time for judging, the professor said “all the projects were so good so he just couldn’t pick.”

No man, that’s not true at all.

Instead of choosing a project, he had his autistic daughter (not being mean, an objective statement) pick her favorite project. I almost don’t even believe this happened because it’s so preposterous.

How is a 12 year old autistic girl supposed to evaluate a fully redesigned CAD design of the library? This is not a middle school science fair where the baking soda volcano wins. This was a college engineering project, and now an actual engineering project.

Also, I’m almost 100% certain she wasn’t even in the presentations, she was just looking at the posters!

This is where my conspiracy theory brain was born: whether maliciously or reputation-ally, I think he was thinking about optics.

She would go on to choose the project that I had spoken about previously. The couple hours a week project. The project with three girls.

Of the three girls who won, one of them is rock solid—I don’t think she cared to win, she just wanted to get an A. One I didn’t know. The third had drama.

She had a reputation for being someone to avoid. She had been regularly skipping work at her internship, and when they found out and tried to fire her for still collecting a full-time paycheck, she claimed discrimination and harassment. Sigh.

EVERYONE knew it was bullshit, but this was 2016 and feminism was having a moment.

This “controversy” (it’s not controversial) didn’t sit well with me…and we lost to her. Was it because we were all men?

Yeah, I went there.

I have tried to attack this outcome from so many angles through the years, but I come up empty handed every time. Why was it hard to choose a winner? Why did my professor ignore the 100s of hours we poured into our project? Why would he let his daughter crown the winner? I could not understand.

The professor isn’t a stupid man—he was my literal advisor, teacher, and up to that point, mentor. I looked up to that man. He was so kind and seemingly so fair. Maybe I’m way off and I’ve been upset about this for 8 years for no reason, but I still just cannot understand this.

So yeah, we lost. There was a collective gasp when this was announced. There wasn’t even a podium. The tween picked a project and the rest of us went home.

We should have done our project on Hannah Montana.

This experience was salt on the wound that was opened almost 4 years prior, and certainly one of my top 10 formative experiences, but in the moment it faded pretty quickly because I was going to get my masters!

Faith in merit restored

I finished with a solid 3.5 in an engineering degree I had decided I didn’t want. I’d switched into Engineering Management halfway through so I could take some business classes, posturing myself for a career in finance, and now I was headed to a new school with better politics and smarter people to study economics.

My experience during my masters was so much different. So much better.

More diversity (ethnic and social), more reason, more people who understood me. A much better academic and cultural environment.

I continued my dominion, and by that, I mean I got really good grades, while taking online night classes in data science on the side because I had decided I didn’t want to go into finance either. I had even stopped drinking almost entirely at this point, as I was laser focused on realizing my potential.

Everyone was smart, and balanced, and thoughtful, and just great. You didn’t have nonsense, because people were too smart for that. I fell in love with that school. I sort of had my first girlfriend. I felt like I was becoming a big fish in a big pond.

I did experience dissonance though.

I struggled quite a lot with imposter syndrome since I was getting a masters (and not a PhD or bachelor’s out of high school), plus it was a new, unproven masters program. But for the most part, the school really instilled in me that the world outside of Pacific was meritocratic, like my high school, and like my high school, you just needed to be the best.

This was 2016/2017.

Trump

I didn’t vote in this election.

Hilary Clinton is a crook. You can tell she is self-interested and a hypocrite. You can tell she doesn’t like people and takes advantage of them for her own gain.

Donald Trump is cocky and immoral, and openly exploits weaker people, which really didn’t jive with my moral compass. I did like his concern for the middle class and American Dynamism, but I didn’t want either candidates as I was still a political nomad.

Again, didn’t vote.

Trump won.

People were upset by Trump’s victory, but one of our professors (this guy is still a role model and I haven’t seen him in 6 years), said that politics needs balance, and this would be just fine.

He argued that the goal of our two party system is to battle test ideas and keep things stable. Good ideas would break through, and bad ideas wouldn’t make it past the partisan lines. A Republican could be good to slow down some of the rapid march toward progressivism, leading to a more stable America. I took his word for it.

The 4 years under Trump, in my experience as an American citizen, were actually exactly what my professor predicted. The economy was stable, we didn’t get into crazy wars (which I hadn’t been following, but apparently Obama had been a bit of a hawk?)—the subjective experience of living in America was very chill.

Everyone in my family and friend group, including the women and people of color, had their lives relatively unchanged or slightly improved. I can’t speak to the experience of others, but generally, in day to day life, you’d think things were just fine.

The insanity machine

That all changed when you went online.

I felt like whatever dial had been turned up during my undergrad seminar classes got cranked to 11.

Everything online was negative. Everything. Politics was the only thing people talked about, and this even started to species jump from just online forums and liberal arts classrooms to instagram feeds and everyday life.

I’d be rock climbing with friends and Trump being a racist would come up. Like what? We’re rock climbing. We’re at one of the best schools in the country. We’re all normal American kids. We’re all doing well. We’re 22. What’s going on here?

I’d research it, and every time, one side saying Trump is a rapist/racist/bigot/etc, with sometimes decent, but usually questionable evidence, and the other side saying something entirely different. I didn’t even vote for Trump, but I found myself concerned by the whole internet, and eventually the whole world, turning into an editorial, which ironically activated the critical thinking that professor my freshman year had inadvertently taught me.

A story, which oftentimes felt a bit exaggerated or vague, would come out about some bad thing, or even normal thing. A major publication would publish a piece about it and add their “interpretation” (read:opinion) of the matter. Then all the other publications would cite that piece with their own interpretation of the interpretation. Then influencers on social media would use all this “evidence” to condemn whatever happened. Then users of Instagram/Reddit/Twitter would go nuts. Repeat.

I watched many friends and MANY people online go nuts, like properly delusional, with a strange fixation on Trump.

Trump was just another president. America was still America. Sure, I thought things could have been more unified under him, and I partially fault him for not trying to bridge the growing ideological divide the internet seemed to be creating, but as an American living in America, my life was the same or better.

That’s my entire opinion of Trump. Yes, he’s a philanderer, but JFK and Bill Clinton were equally philanderous. I don’t approve of that behavior, but it’s clearly not a dealbreaker for either party.

I was still an ally at this point, even identifying as “woke”, but I lost the plot entirely on the Trump stuff.

Social Justice and going woke

This is when the internet started its deviation from what I considered reasonable.

Every week a new word was labeled as oppressive.

People were losing their jobs over opinions they had 10 years ago (and even jokes!). We’d rally around causes that objectively didn’t align with reality because a video would go viral and be marketed to the right people.

None of this happened at once. Little by little, almost slow enough to not notice, the whole world changed. Maybe this was me getting a taste of the elite now that I was rubbing shoulders with them, or maybe the world really was losing its mind. In any case, a lot changed.

It’s not even that these new “movements” weren’t “not good”. Probably everything that anyone protested or complained about or canceled others for was “not good”, but there is a difference between “not good” and “let’s burn it all down for this”.

We had years of riots and property damage and ruined reputations and donations to questionable causes because a couple videos would go viral. If you dug into the stats, you’d find the problems were illusory, blown out of proportion, or not actually targeted to the specific group; in almost every single instance, it wasn’t about justice, it was about Justice.

People seemed angry at something and they needed their vengeance. If you challenged any of these—what I now can only describe as inflammatory marketing campaigns—you would inevitably be labeled a “bigot”, which became a meaningless word that instead became a label for pariahs.

For me, black people were just people with African origins up until this point. Now they were all struggling and it was up to us to fix it. Yes, many black people inhabited poor neighborhoods, but so did a bunch of Mexican and white people. I had family members who were “poor”, and I knew successful black people. It felt derogating, divisive, condescending, and literally racist to be making these blanket statements that “black people” were down bad and incapable of solving their own problems. But this was allyship.

BLM had been brewing while I was getting my masters, but it was more “hey, Trayvon Martin wasn’t cool, we should not resort to force so often in police interactions.” I assumed black people get stopped by the police more (whether justifiably or not), so it made sense that we should limit force so we’re not just throwing away black lives. I get that. Black lives matter too.

I want to keep the story going, but I will revisit BLM.

I finished up my masters with a 3.8 and a data science certificate, and moved in with my grandpa in his tiny house in Sunnyvale.

I had a truly horrible 6 months looking for my first real job.

I got a double dose of depression from this. I was literally under the impression that being a white guy was life on easy mode, so not only did I feel useless not having a job, but I felt like I was extra useless because others must certainly have had it harder.

My brain has pondered suicide a handful of times, but this was the closest I got. I was romanticizing killing myself in the bathtub. Not great stuff.

My family also helped a lot in making sure I had enough to keep me occupied. My dad and I had a pretty bad relationship at this point, but even he had started to soften up after he saw how much I was struggling.

My saving grace came from a data science internship in SF.

I was commuting 4 hrs a day making ~minimum wage, working for a 25 year old Indian guy who definitely acted 25. I thought this was better than being unemployed, but it wasn’t. I was able to parlay this into a new job near Sacramento, but this one was not a good fit. I stuck it out for a year and a half, but I wanted more.

Eventually I started talking to my brother about starting a company. I had always loved building businesses as a kid, and I still had a chip on my shoulder, so we started wrenching on some stuff after work.

I relocated to Palo Alto, where after another grueling 6 month job search, I got a job as Product Manager. This was a dream job. They only hired people from top 20 schools, so I felt like in some ways like if I could succeed here, I could convince myself I’d made progress in catching up to my peers. And it happened: I did really well, got promotions, praise, etc.

My brother and I kept working on startups, and actually raised a pre-seed round while still moonlighting. It cost me my health, but we were young and hungry.

A virus 

Eventually we started hearing rumblings of a virus from China. First we were told not to wear masks, then to wear masks, then not to. It went back and forth. We were figuring things out.

We got a government order to “shelter in place” aka stay inside as much as possible and work from home. We’d never gotten a government order like this. I was scared.

That few days turned into a few weeks. It sounded like we just needed a couple weeks to get emergency rooms under control and then things would go back to normal.

That didn’t happen.

We were told that many people who got sick were asymptomatic, and that those people could still transmit the disease, so we couldn’t safely see other people without endangering their lives. That makes sense I guess, incubation periods and differing immune systems and such.

Then the government printed a ton of money and gave it out to the people who couldn’t work because the world was shut down. Inflation would be bad, but people needed to eat while we figured out this virus.

Then we were told a vaccine would come and open the world again.

Then the vaccine came, but everything stayed closed.

Then we all got the vaccine, and a bunch of people I know had weird side effects from it, including myself.

Then people started getting sick that had already had the vaccine (also me), and those people started getting other people sick that had the vaccine, but these were just rare breakthrough cases.

Then we started labeling anyone who didn’t get the vaccine a murderer for not preventing the spread, even though we knew the vaccine didn’t prevent the spread.

Then it became racist to say it came from China, even though it was obvious to everyone that it came from China, including China.

Then it was revealed that almost all the deaths from the virus were people who were already very unhealthy, but that somehow didn’t warrant opening the world back up because no one wanted to admit they were either wrong or lying (my opinion).

Then anyone who spoke up was slandered or turned green on CNN, and if you still didn’t get the vaccine, you could be fired from your job (I’ve met a handful of Uber drivers who this was true for).

Then we had to keep sheltering in place a year later, but if there was an important protest, we were allowed to not shelter in place and go congregate with thousands of people, but only if we were protesting. I guess they also made exceptions for people going out to dinner and celebrating Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.

At some point, I think everyone I know who hadn’t made caring about Covid their identity had had enough, but depending on political affiliation, you either openly said it, or simply postured you agreed with the regulations and then promptly ignored them.

In either case, people lost faith in the government having literally anyone’s best interest in mind. There was some hidden incentive to all of these baseless policies, and while no one knew for sure what it was, people know when they’re being played.

This was a really weird time.

#MeToo happened somewhere in here, which started as women exposing powerful men who had dangled sexual favors in exchange for career advancement or threatened to hinder professional opportunities if their advances were rejected. Then it turned into women who had bad sexual experiences with powerful men. Then it turned into women who had regrettable sexual experiences with powerful men. Then it turned to women who, I don’t know, just had an experience 20 years ago with some guy who is now famous-ish, and they’ve retroactively decided it was bad or something.

I was literally just some guy who went to work and built startups in his free time from a janky little house in Palo Alto, but this was hard to ignore.

I was still woke at this point. I mostly agreed with #MeToo. It activated the same immune response I had 7 years prior when I joined my fraternity, but I was less afraid of women after gaining experience with them. I figured most men were bad and I was just one of the good ones.

But then the blanket statements started happening again.

Men

“Men need to keep it in their pants.”

“This is men’s fault. Men are pigs.”

“Educate your boys not to grow up to become rapists.”

These statements are awful.

I didn’t want to look anything while writing this since the point of this is for me to share my experience growing up “privileged”, but I had to look this up for diligence purposes.

10% of men in America are felons (~15 million men)

20% of felonies are violent crimes (3 million men)

10% of violent crimes involve sexual assault (300,000 men).

These numbers are estimates I got from looking up crime statistics. There are other numbers that say 1 in 4 women have been raped, and the average rapist rapes 6 women, bringing the number to 1 in ~25 men (check my math on that). I don’t know which number I trust. I don’t know what definition of rape was used in either case. What I do know is #MeToo had a profound effect on the way men and women interact.

Good men became terrified of women. Women became terrified of men. The rapists…probably didn’t care. Criminals know the rules, that’s not why they break them.

This is when I started losing some of the plot on being an ally. I know hundreds of good men, yet I don't think I know any violent felons. This statistically makes sense—the overwhelming majority of people who finish high school and get a job are not going to be felons, and that demographic comprises the people I interact with.

But it was men’s fault.

Not a certain cohort of men (which it mostly is if you look it up)(not talking about race).

This was men.

This blatant distortion and blanket condemnation really hurt me, and America never came back from this.

BLM took a similar turn.

You couldn’t just treat black people equally. You had to treat them better, or different or something. I don’t know. If you were white, you had to repent. You had to acknowledge you were “guilty”, and that you were the reason there are poor black people in the world.

I’m not hyperbolizing here. These were real things, and they were everywhere.

You had to post a black square to acknowledge the plight of black people and how unfairly they were treated. (I don’t know if any of my black or lower-middle class friends posted these, but all my successful friends did).

You had to buy a sign and put it in the window of your $5MM house in Pac Heights or Palo Alto so the oppressed black people in your area, who were sure to see it, would feel uplifted. Or maybe it was so you could unracist all the racists who drove by?

You had to ensure you were hiring more black people for better roles, and promoting existing black employees to higher positions so you could meet quotas.

You had to donate money to Black Lives Matter to…um…I actually don’t know what the donations went to, but it later came out that there was a lot of embezzlement and fraud that went on. Hmm.

The American Dream may have been true for my grandpa who spoke no English, had no money, and joined the Korean War for his citizenship, but it wasn’t for people of color, so we had to rethink everything we knew and start fresh.

Then women got their turn.

Apparently women were also being oppressed.

Again, this went 180° against my experience, but they were pretty pissed, and how could I know? I’m not a woman.

I had only known women to be more successful than men. My high school. My parents’ careers. Women had always done better than men in all contexts that mattered (except bench pressing, sorry ladies).

There were less women CEOs and engineers, and this was a big deal. Women wanted to be CEOs and engineers too. My engineering school was maybe 10-20% women. I assumed this was about reasonable, or even a little high. Most of the smart women from my high school wanted to be doctors or lawyers. While there are of course the women out there that could eat my lunch, was it 1:1?

Despite what I believed, because who gives a shit what I believed lol, the black and woman lobbies made a compelling enough case that not only were they oppressed regularly and kept out of positions they deserved, but that it was white men who were pushing them down. A 1-2 punch.

They got their scapegoat:  ✨Men ✨

Women and black people and gay people and trans people and middle eastern people and disabled people and eventually even southeast asian people (the top dogs by literally all metrics that matter) needed to be brought up, and men, namely the straight white variant, needed to be brought down and disempowered so they could stop “thwarting the ascension” of these “oppressed” groups.

You had to lean into what made you different and oppressed and even create new things to identify as so you could get your piece of victimhood against the heteronormative white men in power.

You had to add and remove dozens of words from your speech to ensure you weren’t oppressing these new groups of people, words that had previously just been adjectives (eg “fat”, “criminal”, “stupid”).

You had to signal that you were on the right team whenever you could, and commit a significant portion of your time and energy to fighting for Social Justice.

Again, I’m still in my room at this point.

Was it meritocratic

What had happened in these 4 years where we went from “treat everyone equally” to “treat everyone differently”? I don’t know.

I still believed the world was meritocratic.

In high school, the smartest kids did the best.

In college, the same rules applied, and this time we had a TON of lower class people thrown into the mix. Literally anyone can get Cs in an engineering degree there, and the acceptance rate at Pacific has steadily climbed from 20% to 93% in the last 10 years. You can get the same engineering degree as me!

Who were these men oppressing everyone? What filters was I getting through that stopped so many others? When was this filter being applied where people, en masse, were systematically held back? I’m again not being rhetorical or factious, I didn’t know.

I still believed all people are created equal, and I wasn’t sure where this filter was coming in and stifling the progress of non-male, non-white people.

Is it real?

I had started dating a pretty white girl who worked at FAANG making $200k a year (more than I have ever made) as a 25 year old. Her gay roommate also did. They both went to top schools.

She’d regularly ask me what I thought about the political stuff, and I was honest with her: I didn’t really get it, but I thought blaming others for your problems was a sure fire way to never solve them.

Wrong answer.

She decided, and told me and her friends, that she “wasn’t sure I respected women.”

I still don’t know what that means, but I guess that was an oppressive answer.

She was eventually assaulted by a naked homeless man in SF at an outdoor work event in Mission Dolores Park. I got upset at the homeless problem. She chastised me for not being more sensitive to the “unhoused”. A month later, she threw away a $300 holiday food basket she got from work instead of donating it. I was upset by this, she didn’t think twice.

We inevitably broke up.

I finally quit that PM job and went all in on my startup.

I needed to hire a small team. Was I supposed to hire women and black people? Where would I find women and black people who could write software and work for scraps? Where would I find time to recruit people?

We made a reddit post and a post in a builder community, and we got two resumes.

They both passed our technical bar, so we hired them. But…they were white guys. Does that make me a bad person?

Eventually that company failed, and I needed a job. I was used to working 50-60 hrs a week as a founder, so I thought finding a job would be easy. Most of the people I knew working in tech were doing 25 hrs a week and making way more money than I ever had, so I was confident it’d be easy, and I was wrong.

I once again struggled a lot to find a job, did eventually get some deal flow through my small network, and ended up at a buddy’s company doing growth and product stuff.

That’s the role I’m in now. It’s a cool, very fast-paced job where I learn a lot and get the requisite stimulation I need to be fulfilled. I make less money than I did when I quit my job to become a founder 3 years ago, but I still live like a founder, so I feel like a king.

I work out of an incubator that is probably 50% white and 85% male, which are ratios I’ve encountered a bunch of times over a bunch of time horizons, which makes me think that, at least on very technical teams where you’ve got to really want to be there, these are probably the natural demographic equilibrium points.

Victims 

All these movements feel like copy pastes of each other.

1-2 things go viral, 100 opinion pieces are published around those 1-2 things, people argue about those pieces, and polarization naturally occurs until one side dismisses the issue and the other stakes its entire identity on it.

I read an article the day of the October 7th attack (October 7th) that telegraphed what would happen over the last 6 months to a tee. Maybe this is how predictable humanity is with social media and no monoculture.

I started this post by talking about 9/11 because 9/11 was the first time I really felt like an American. We had a common narrative back then, we had the last vestige of religion, and we had one culture.

None of those things seem true anymore.

Based on which news channels/social media algorithm you’re tuned into, you have your own set of facts, which is why I believe I’m so out of the loop on why everyone appears to be insane. I don’t use social media that much, and whenever I read something inflammatory, I spend 5 minutes reading about it from both sides, and then close Twitter for the day after I decide that truth doesn’t even matter.

American culture has been supplanted by dozens of cultures. We used to be one nation, (questionably) under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, but instead we’re kind of one nation, that hates religion and tradition and rules, divided, with increasing restrictions on liberty and speech, with Justice at the expense of being just.

There’s got to be more to this

Is Israel terrorizing Gaza? Who terrorized who first? Is self-defense terrorism? Is the US a terrorist state for siding with Israel?

You can read stories that say Israel is bombing hospitals. You can read stories that say Hamas accidentally detonated a bomb in a hospital parking lot and then blamed it on Israel.

Depending on what you read, you’ve got a different take on the conflict over there, and every conflict that has happened or will happen, here, there, or anywhere.

It’s all horrible stuff, but it’s all propagandized and sensationalized and politicized so we’re not even worried about the people involved anymore, we’re worried about the “injustice” and “power dynamics” at play, which feel like less messy, less nuanced targets.

It’s fun to have things to fight for—it gives us purpose—but we don’t believe in anything anymore, so we fight for whatever we can.

A year ago we hated the powerful Kanye West for oppressing the Jewish people in Hollywood, and now (this was written in early 2024) we hate powerful Jewish people for oppressing Hamas and Palestine; it’s the same hate that we keep retargeting as literally any reason occurs to adjust our aim.

After the Covid debacle and all dozen of the copy-paste movements that followed, it’s almost clear to me that none of these movements are about the people we’re ostensibly looking out for. With Covid, or BLM, or literally any other, there’s a pretext that this is all about saving lives, inevitably pulling heartstrings (including my own), but what’s the catch? Why do I feel like there’s a catch? Just like with Covid, or BLM, or literally any other movement, I imagine in a couple years there will be a story that no one reads, where the truth will fall on distracted ears and woolen eyes.

What am I?

Am I a bad person for being a white man? Have I ever earned anything? Does any perspective I share matter? Am I privileged for, I don’t know, everything I’ve ever accomplished?

I’ve been asked (maliciously, rhetorically) these things probably a dozen times in my life, usually by people doing better than me, and I believe the answer is no.

Every time someone makes one of these “macro-aggressions” against me, it feels like a kick in the teeth. It does the same thing that having most of my cherished belongings stolen 6 months ago did to me (thanks SF!). It makes me want to quit. Maybe that professor got through to me after all.

As long as this post has been, I’ve omitted A LOT. Times when I got passed up for the job/promotion, dumped for wanting commitment (like 12 times lol), failed to raise money, etc. etc. I fail a lot, I have a lot of bad days, and I’m pretty sure that’s just being human.

I’m not even just “white”. I’m a healthy mix of white and middle eastern, but that has never crossed my mind except for when people tell me I’m a worse person for “being white”.

Yes I look white, but I think being hot and challenged in high school probably did more for me than any dearth of melanin ever did, and losing all my hair to alopecia in a month threw a wrench in my hot.

I wasn’t raised to think about race. I was raised to be an American.

You don’t solve problems by blaming people or complaining about them. You don’t solve implicit racism/sexism with explicit racism/sexism in the other direction, at least that’s what my gut tells me.

Fighting fire with fire just makes bigger fires, and if the “fire” you’re fighting doesn’t even exist, all you’re doing is starting a fire.

There is never an acceptable time to lie or cheat or go against your word. Maybe the ends justify the means, but what if the ends are wrong or a lie or sensationalized, or what if you lose your humanity in the means?

I’ve always tried to be a good person, and all the change over the last 10 years stopped feeling like progress in the last few. More people hate more people, more people are unhappy, more people’s lives are getting worse, yet we are still calling this progress.

I still believe merit wins, but now if you’re a white guy with big aspirations and middle class parents, you’ve probably gotta add a few years to your 5 year plan, if you’re a black person, white people may think you only got your job because of DEI and they might be afraid you hate them, and if you’re a woman, guys are probably terrified to ask you out, so you use dating apps, which mostly just lead to hurt (at least you’ve got a good job).

Whether men had an advantage, I’m not sure, but I can say with certainty that we got one: we have no scapegoats, so we have no limiting beliefs, and we have no simulacrum of meaning that burdens us with the plight of millions of strangers.

We have to make our own meaning, which like generations before us, lies in creating value. It’s useful to have people who can zig when the world believes you can only zag, so this scapegoating, at least in my experience, is creating a generation of zigge…um, people who zig. tl;dr If you can keep your head up when everyone is trying to bring it down, you can do anything.

Yes, discrimination and racism and sexism and crime will always exist, but blaming all people who look like the few people, or even just share the same genitals, as the few people who are allegedly (or maybe even actually) perpetrating all this discrimination and racism and sexism and crime only creates spite and pushes the good ones, the allies, away.

Thanks for reading, back to work.