Day 2

In September 2007, all of my old college friends were doing one of two things: working for JP Morgan, or working for Google. Okay, untrue: some people were working for Bain, and some people were working for Facebook. Details, details. That was the split - tech sector or financial sector. Both sorts of people were drowning in cash, but more, I could see in their faces a sense of self-wonder, of entitlement wholly justified.

No one had bigger or more-oft-sucked dicks than bankers; you could smell the money, and the power, and the moral indecency that Big Money people wear so much more impeccably than mere criminals, like their drug dealers or their illegal maids. With the tech people, there was maybe less money, but more attitude - there companies were in the headlines, and they were at the center of a boomtown atmosphere, and whether they were at a major social network or at a tiny start-up, they could tell themselves and you could believe that their company was redefining the internet, the economy, the whole human condition.

Both groups of people worked round the clock, which seemed to only enhance the awesome grandeur of their being. First-year bankers sharing shots of tequila at 11:30 on Saturday night, still wearing their work clothes, laughing about all the work they'd be doing tomorrow morning while slum people and suburbia went to church. Start-up people shaking their head and grinning about mountains of code still left to do, as they packed the joint just a little bit more. You heard how Google had a gym, spa, massage parlor, Happy Hour; how Facebook has those epic parties with professional photographers and college-style drinking with grown-up liquor; Silicon Valley seemed like some kind of neo-Communist dream-utopia, where work blended seamlessly with play.

In September 2007, I was three months out of college, living at home in the South Bay. I'd spent the summer reading Dave Sim's 6000-page comic book "Cerebus" and, less successfully,, trying to make a bad relationship work. I knew that I was a parasite. I have very old-fashioned ideas about the economy, about working for a living. In August, a friend mentioned she might have a job for me at her non-profit in Chicago. I flew out for a visit, loved the town, flew home, and the non-profit folded. Two weeks later, the terrible relationship ended. Scrambling, disoriented, awaking from some weird summer daydream, I found an internship in San Francisco, and made The Company my whole life. I ended up working two jobs there, met a new and wonderful girl there, began an actual career there.

February, 2009. Everything is different. The US economy has been trampled and mangled and elbow-raped and serial-killed and left on the side of the road in the desert in a thunderstorm on Mars. My banker friends aren't bankers anymore. New career opportunities have been sought, by force. The few still working at banks and insurance firms with now-infamous names are still working round-the-clock but without the glamour, without the old bravado. You see them, and it's like some noble rowdy WWII soldiers woke up one day thirty years later in Vietnam.

Friends in the tech trade still have jobs, but there's the same sense of energy sapped, of some kryptonite explosion. Facebook is suffering from Twitter, and Google's massive hiring spree now looks as insane as it actually was (while its once-cute expenditures - gyms, massage parlors, catered food, jet planes - now look like pure Felliniesque decadence), and all my friends with the big start-up ideas are wishing they'd monetized back when money was still money, not pretty retro wallpaper for the Chinese. Grad school applications are leaper percentage-wise, and Peace Corps/TfA volunteership is experiencing a jump in applications, and everyone is left trying to figure out how to weather this massive shitstorm called History.