Two years ago, I advertised a sublet in the San Jose Mercury News—a 7-by-12 room with a bathroom and private entrance but no closet and no place to prepare food except in a ridiculously out-of-scale microwave, which, with a comfortable cushion, could have doubled as a chair. You could barely fit a bed in the place.
A neophyte landlord and a newcomer to Silicon Valley, I had no idea how much to ask for the room, but I knew that dinky, overpriced and kitchenless were not impediments to renting it. Studios at the time were fetching $1,200 and up. I settled on $500, utilities included.
By 10 a.m. on the morning the ad appeared, I had had 50 calls. Desperate, pleading calls from (mostly) young guys who had come from all parts to work at hot start-up jobs but couldn’t find a place to live at any price. One of them told me all he needed was a place to sleep because he expected to be working 16 hours a day, six days a week. Another said he didn’t care about not having a kitchen—he never ate anywhere except McDonald’s. I found myself in a peculiar and unexpected role—having to determine who was most worthy of my pathetically inadequate but highly desirable rental. I chose an apprentice electrician who had been commuting 150 miles each way to a job site on the Peninsula.
Although I was happy to rent the room so easily, the sacrifices these people were making to accommodate their jobs left me wondering whether they were acting out of inspiration or desperation. Perhaps a bit of both, I later decided.
The excesses of the ’90s boom years were both destructive and invigorating. Seized by the gold rush mentality of the era, legions flocked to technology centers and happily subsumed their lives into ventures that were sometimes revolutionary and exciting and sometimes, let’s face it, ill-conceived whims. Countless people I interviewed at the height of the mania professed to having so much fun they didn’t think about all the things they were missing out on. But over the past year or so, and particularly since September 11, the trade-offs that placed career over relationships and money over time have become less palatable.
I confess I was relieved when the steam from the overheated economy began to dissipate. There was a sense that normalcy was returning, that prudence and restraint and reasonable schedules might not always seem like a sucker’s bet. But then the slowdown became a shutdown and people I knew started getting laid off. My secret happiness about the more leisurely pace was replaced by concern about friends and neighbors who were struggling to get by. At a dinner party I attended over the holidays, a friend and former Stanford graduate student—unemployed for much of last year—commented that he wouldn’t regret the passing of 2001.
And yet, unlike previous recessions during which joblessness and financial uncertainty generated unremitting anxiety, this one has elements of outright relief as well. As Ann Marsh, ’88, learned in her conversations with Stanford alumni hit hard by the sagging economy, few miss the days when getting ahead seemed to require leaving everything else behind. Many have discovered—perhaps rediscovered—that it’s okay to not want relentless, inhumane work schedules or every meal eaten out of a Styrofoam container.
This phenomenon is interesting to observe and contemplate. Will it last, or last only until the next gold rush comes along? If nothing else, our collective values seem less elastic than they were 18 months ago. We’ve all been grounded one way or another, and even if some bruises were absorbed in the fall, the ground feels pretty good after you’ve been out on a flimsy branch for a while.
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We need your help telling some great stories about great teachers. We have tentatively planned, for publication this fall, a series of first-person accounts about Stanford faculty members who have changed the lives of their students. We are looking for richly evocative stories about men and women whose impact has been profound and long-lasting. Write to us at Great Teachers, Stanford Magazine, Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford, CA 94305-6105, or e-mail us at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu and put Great Teachers in the subject line. Submissions should be between 500 and 1,000 words and should arrive no later than June 1, 2002. We look forward to hearing from you.
You can reach Kevin at jkcool@stanford.edu.
