Expand Your World: Use Your Tech Superpowers to Unlock More Freedom

06.12.15

About a year ago, while sitting in a hole in the wall cafe in The Mission district of San Francisco, I struck up a conversation with this beautiful Latina girl, Laura. We talked about everything and anything, but most of all we talked about the City itself. I mentioned that although I grew up in the Bay Area, I've never truly experienced San Francisco. My memories of the City mostly involve sitting in the back seat of a car while my mom drives her friends from China around its hilly streets. It's always the same story: some stranger from my mom's old cushy bank job come to visit America on the Communist Party's dime, I get dragged along for the ride as we spend hours getting stuck in traffic near Chinatown while my mom points out all the iconic buildings. Then we would get off at the golden gate bridge so they could snap some pictures. The trip would wrap up with a stop at the Apple store in Palo Alto, where the visitors would purchase a small bucketful of iphones for their friends and families back home, writing it off as "business expense."

Laura's San Francisco, however, is entirely different from mine. She grew up in the heart of the city, in the historically Hispanic neighborhood of The Mission. She knew all the ins and outs of the city, and she decided to show me around her neighborhood. She took me to an alleyway where the walls were covered with murals. She knew everything about these murals, such as who the artist is and the stories behind each painting. I saw a side of the city that I have never even knew existed. As we walked among the quaint victorian era houses of The Mission, she told me that soon people like her will no longer be able to afford live in this neighborhood, which has been her home for as long as she can remember. The reason, she told me, was a flood of the newly rich tech people. Because there was so much wealth pouring into the City in the recent years, rent prices has gone through the roof, and people who were living there for generations have been pushed out of their homes. People like artists, low-income Hispanics, and free-spirited Bohemians are being tossed out into the streets. This, in turn, has raised much bitterness and resentment towards the people in the tech industry.

But it doesn't have to be this way, this overcrowding caused by the tech people can be easily solved with the solutions created by the very industry that's causing the problem. A tech career is one of the few truly mobile careers nowadays, made possible by advancements in technology itself. Thanks to recent improvements to internet speed and communications infrastructure around the world, a tech job can be done almost anywhere. Services like google+ and skype provide lightning fast video chats and screen sharing, making it easy to work with others in real time without the need for physical proximity. Github and other code sharing networks provide intricate platforms for collaboration and project management. There are multiple online communities that can provide solid support for technical problems anytime and anywhere. This mobility is what attracted me to take a break from my medical career and to explore what the tech industry has to offer. I can’t exactly treat my future patients remotely from a laptop, but I can fix their website while laying on a beach in Brazil and sipping my Mojito.

Even big companies like Automattic, the parent company behind the well-known hosting service WordPress, are functioning as a distributed network, meaning that they have their workforce spread out all over the globe. So it is completely feasible to find a tech job that offers location independence, and the opportunity to do so would only increase as communication and information technology continue to improve.

So why are the people in the tech industry continuing their pilgrimage into the already crowded heart of Silicon Valley? They can literally be anywhere, and they belong to one of the few industries blessed with the ability to do so. I think the best solution to the housing problem in Cities like San Francisco is for the tech people to think big, and think global. Rather than paying $2000 a month to stay in some dingy studio apartment above a hardware store, why not spend a fraction of that and live much more comfortably in Asia, South America, or even some parts of Europe? Long term travel is even possible for family with Children, just go on google and you will find at least 30 blogs teaching you how to do so. And I'll bet the children who grew up travelling the world with their parents will be much more mature and cultured than their peers whose parents were too busy with the mortgage, the 9-5 grind, and the 2 hour commutes to pay attention to them.

So I say to the tech people, to hell with convention, and embrace the future. The technology industry has always been at the forefront of innovation and experimentation, so why not take the leap and be innovative with your own lifestyle? You have the ability to broaden your own world and prevent others from losing theirs, so it is up to you to take action. As the famous quote from Spiderman goes: "With great power, comes great responsibility."" So go forth into the world, carve your own path, and may the blessings of the internet god be with you.