SF is boring. That’s the point.

San Francisco gives you an attention rebate - shorter commutes, fewer distractions, more doing.

I landed in SF with two suitcases, a spare key to my brother’s apartment, and four months between me and the shipping container holding the rest of my life. I borrowed his guest room and when I did find an apartment, I tossed a mattress on the hardwood. By the time my stuff arrived, the floor-mattress life felt normal. Strange relief, after years of obsessing over cushion prints in London.

That’s San Francisco in miniature: constraint as the default. A mattress on the floor, hardly any standing plans, calendars that say heads-down instead of let’s catch-up. Compared to London, it feels…boring.

Constraint is usually framed as limitation, but in the last year, I’ve also come to see it as liberation. It funnels attention to the things you said you’d do. Boredom is the pop-up blocker for ambition.

SF isn’t “boring” in the sense of nothing happening. It’s “boring” in the sense that everything happening points in the same direction. The city is tiny - 49 square miles, water on three sides. Housing is scarce, so ambitious people cluster in the same neighborhoods. Commutes are short; social lives compressed. Constraint reallocates attention. In London, half my life was lost to transit. In LA, half your life is lost to traffic. But in London, the city also hands you endless plots - museum openings, Michelin-starred omakases, theater tickets. In SF, you don’t get handed a plot. You have to bring one.

And, because the city doesn’t hand you a plot, narrative matters even more. It has to be made, not found. Almost everyone I’ve met is working on something long, hard, or both. Willpower alone doesn’t last. The survival tool is story: a why strong enough to return to when funding wobbles or energy dips. You see it everywhere. Founders use story to align teams they can’t yet pay. Investors sell LPs on decade-long bets. Employees take pay cuts for equity because they buy the mission. Narrative is the currency that buys undercapitalized projects time.

The conversations reinforce it. Fundraising, latency, visas - on loop. All practical steps in keeping long, hard projects alive. I’ve probably referred my O-1 lawyer to a dozen friends by now. From the outside, it feels tediously boring. Inside, it feels mercifully efficient. You don’t need to spend twenty minutes explaining why something matters; everyone already lives inside the same story. You just get to the point.

Add it all up and you get an attention rebate: shorter commutes, fewer distractions, less overhead. I feel like when I’m at my desk in 20 minutes flat. San Francisco subsidizes focus - at least for the people who know what to do with it. Of course, SF isn’t monolithic. For plenty of people, it’s just home, not a startup monastery. But for those chasing long, hard projects, the rebate is real. And fragile. That’s why people complain when SF feels “less weird,” “less focused.” They’re not just mourning culture. They feel the attention tax creeping back.

San Francisco’s secret isn’t that it’s exciting. It’s that it’s boring enough for you to make something exciting.

Thanks to my brother Varadh and Laura for housing me when I first moved here.