The dialectic of sucking
Everywhere sucks. Now what?
Whenever I open at twitter the past few days I am bombarded (among other horrors) with posts about how much Boston sucks. Certainly the driving sleet and icy sidewalks of early January are not helping the situation, but the most servaphobic city in the country faces a grim outlook as the biotech downturn trudges on.
Besides brief detours for college and a postdoc, I have lived in the greater Boston area my entire life. I love Boston. Here is why it sucks:
Boston, like its dominant industries, is deeply uncool and allergic to fun. Boston is full of stuck up nerds that are too smart for their own good looking down on literally everyone. Anything exuberant, playful, weird, ambitious, or even a little bit silly is shunned and shamed. There is a deeply ingrained belief that good work should be serious and silent, buttoned up, and absolutely not fun, and that by extension, if you’re having fun and telling people about it you must be up to no good. Why would anyone want to come and build with us?
In this, Boston is the opposite of San Francisco. San Francisco sucks because it is constantly patting itself on the back for the smallest, most pointless, or even actively harmful things. It is all about just doing things and having fun doing them, no matter how annoying or terrible those things are. Boston tut-tuts; San Francisco high fives.
The Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote from a fascist prison that “the challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned…I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” Boston is overstuffed with intelligence and seethes with disillusioned pessimism hidden under Puritan restraint, unwilling to try anything. San Francisco overflows with optimistic illusions and delusions.
I don’t believe there is a perfect magical city where innovation is easy and progress inevitable. And I don’t believe that walking into a lab building amazing contraptions to observe and understand biological development is or should be an “only in San Francisco” moment. But I believe a better synthesis is possible. Boston is full of stuck up nerds, but many of them are also genuine, thoughtful, creative people who are uncool in a good way. There are many great people and teams that marry skepticism with courage. There are many amazing people here going after really hard problems with passion and imagination. There are many weird and wonderful contraptions and ideas incubating in labs near me.
But too often the pockets of joyous experimentation that do pop up here are chastised into silence and punished for daring to step out of line with new ideas or approaches. They are ostracized for failing rather than celebrated for trying to do something hard. This leads us into a wretched feedback loop where people pre-emptively play it safe, stay quiet, keep their heads down, waiting for success that is so much harder to come by. When it seems like nothing is happening, no one comes to join the fun.
I talk to students, founders, employees, and thinkers here who are all so brilliant, but who are terrified to try things that don’t seem like a sure thing, or to say basically anything at all to anyone. I’ve found myself more than once asking “who hurt you??” but I know the answer. It is Boston. It is biology and the culture of science here. It is the way that biology in Boston makes us think that nothing ever happens and nothing can be done. That science is best when it is as cold and dead as Boston’s winter. That the best we can do is wait and see.
For people and ideas to thrive in Boston we need to break out of this spiral. We need people to get excited about what we are learning and trying and building here. We need people to want to join in. We have to be able to deal with the scorn of the boring scolds and the sneers of the people afraid of what others might think and say. We need more “how hard can it be?” and less “what will people say?” We have to host and go to weird events, we have to seem a little silly sometimes, we have to tell people what we’re learning about and what is exciting us. We have to drown out the haters and invite more dreamers.
I don’t think we can solve this with CEOs having dinner with politicians. I don’t want to hear about taxes. I want to hear about your weird projects and wacky ideas. I want to see what you’re building and how much fun you are having. If you’re doing something weird and fun with biology in Boston, I want to hear about it and I want to help other people hear about it too. Please reach out!
every Boston bio company should be legally required to pay a tax that goes to you and in return you bring one weird art thing to their offices each week
I've often compared Boston and San Francisco as east coast/west coast cousins (a fun game to play with many cities).
As I was reading this, I kept thinking about something that struck me in my early months living in the northeast: the surprisingly strong cultural affiliation with Europe. For example, going into restaurants, you're far more likely to find a wine list full of options from France and Italy than California or Oregon. Much of this, especially a culture that punishes attempts that aren't guaranteed success, echos what I hear friends in Europe lamenting about their own context for entrepreneurship.
Given the historical role of Boston in differentiating our country from Europe, it's ironic, but also tells us the problem isn't incurable! Like San Francisco, I think Boston might lose it's way from time to time, but I'm optimistic for the long term.