Ex-Tech –> Homeless in SF
zamoshi.substack.com
zamoshi.substack.com
It is depressing easy to have this happen and even worse how many people are convinced it could never be them.
Keep your hands on the steering wheel, eyes on the road
What happened to the author's equity?
Again, I don't know what happened in the author's specific case, but think it's important to know that lots of startups have exits that can look big on paper but still are a wipeout for common equity.
It would seem like it is some kind of felony charges that are the cause. Whatever they were.
But all in all - the downside risk is huge in the US.
I do agree that if he was truly in need he would have stolen an iPhone or some designer purses.
How privileged to steal sleeping bags and food.
That wasn't any kind of necessity. He lost me there.
I guess this is the only way people with high salaries or wealth in the US can find peace with themselves - maybe that's the mental illness?
I'm not saying it's his own fault. I'm also not too happy when people point to mental illness. But this is his blog description where he mentions himself that he unpacs a 6-month journey through psychosis.
6 months of psychosis means you're mentally ill with psychosis as a symptom.
1. He was given food and shelter, which he declined - most of his comments about the food are that it's too sugary.
2. He makes it sound like he was offered more permanent shelter in Feb of 2025, which he also declined.
To be clear, I'm not making a judgment about this person - and, for that matter, the comment you replied to didn't seem to be making a judgment either, just stating a reasonable conclusion that the author suffered from mental illness.
So I'd like to know what additional resources you think would have changed this person's circumstances?
You're not making a judgment, but are somehow able to diagnose mental illness from a blog post? Wild.
It's far easier to conclude that the system has failed this person, as it habitually fails millions of people in the US, in these same circumstances. Are they all mentally ill?
And even if mental health is an issue, does that mean that they are somehow less worthy of assistance? That it's OK for a human being to live under a bridge?
The level of self-righteousness and lack of empathy in your comments is baffling.
The author literally talks about his "psychosis" that led him to his predicament, so no, I don't think it's a judgment, just the ability to read.
> And even if mental health is an issue, does that mean that they are somehow less worthy of assistance?
I have no idea where you seem to get this idea. My point is that, at least in this author's case, he has received assistance. He discusses 2 separate instances in this post where he declined resources and support - he is living under a bridge because he specifically rejected the shelter that was offered him.
Could the process of getting people support be better? Of course, but his experience dealing with the pains of bureaucracy doesn't seem much different that bureaucratic slights we all, rich and poor, have to deal with when trying to get assistance from government. FWIW I especially liked his "I identify as a woman" comment in order to get a shower.
> The level of self-righteousness and lack of empathy in your comments is baffling.
The only self righteousness I see on display is your belief that everyone else is so uncaring because we don't necessarily think the government should force this person into a shelter. I'm not judging the author at all, but I'm certainly judging you.
I think I can extend me predicament about mental illness to you also.
> My public defender reminded me of a woman I did ayahuasca with in upstate New York.
Well...
This phrase is only true because you include alcohol, otherwise it would be false. Not everybody does drugs.
What are you talking about? He specifically mentions drinking beer and doing ayahuasca in the past.
Also, can we stop stigmatizing "drug" use? Most of humanity uses "drugs" regularly for various reasons. Just because a specific "drug" which someone enjoys using recreationally is on a government list doesn't mean that they can't be a productive member of society. Live and let live.
Dignity and personal space is something the richest country in the world can afford for all of its citizens. Yet chooses not to.
People committing petty theft are largely forced to do so due to the circumstances they live in. Your judgment is better aimed at people committing white-collar crime with far worse consequences in the same city the author is located in.
> The end of March happened and so did the temporary shelter. I needed to find a new place.
> I remembered a place in San Mateo I rejected back in February. It hadn’t crossed my mind when I first arrived back in San Francisco. When I had been offered it in February, I rejected the offer because I thought it was ludicrous to think I was homeless. I come from a relatively privileged upbringing, and the idea of homelessness was a distant concept to my naive brain.
Even people who are self or outwardly destructive, do not deserve the outcome the author got.
I think a harder to answer question is, assuming there are not enough resources to help everyone in need (in a practical sense) should we prioritise the “more deserving” over the less.
Every human who is suffering deserves compassion, but should we deprioritise those who are suffering partially because of their own choices?
Opening the discussion about who is more worthy of assistance is a slippery slope towards some people not getting it due to personal biases and politics of those in power.
Poor life choices can be consequences of poor upbringing, mental health, or simply bad luck. People can be helped in different ways to avoid making those mistakes. Reform is possible, but it starts with a society and government that cares for all of its people, and doesn't marginalize some as lower-class citizens.
When Covid came to Europe, we saw on the news how Italy was hit and what doctors had to do.
Long story short: young people lived, old people died. Because doctors faced the awful decision of whom to put on life support.
In the Covid case there's a genuine moment of lack of resources (good luck training enough doctors to help, even in a utopia it wouldn't be possible). Unfortunately, since many countries are bad at distributing their own resources enough such that no one is poor, we're basically in a Covid-like situation when it comes to homeless people.
And I'm saying this as a Dutch person. As I have one family member who didn't eat for 2 weeks, fainted, got found, etc. Granted, this person doesn't want to deal with bureaucracy and is quite stubborn, among other things. But still, even in a country that has "socialism" this stuff happens. And we're not as socialistic as one might think: Polish people that come here to perform labor do so in quite awful circumstances, to the point that when they lose a finger or a thumb they get reimbursed like 300 to 500 euro's IIRC. I watched it from some Dutch documentary (probably Nieuwsuur).
Countries are just incredibly bad at resource (re)distribution.
You forget stupidity and ignorance. Sometimes people make poor life choices because they're stupid or ignorant (or both).
Yeah sure poor life choices can be consequences of poor upbringing, mental health, or simply bad luck, but that's not always the case.
Regarding this specific piece of writing and as a tech person myself, i wonder: why does this person not have some safety net savings?
Having worked in the highest-paying city (San Francisco) in the highest paying state (California) in the richest nation (USA)... Why didn't this guy build his own safety net?
Sorry - its acceptable that I do not have compassion for those suckers!
Do you suggest they should be forced to the asylum for mentally ill people?
This post reads to me like someone suffering from mental illness and/or personality disorder.
Sometimes people are just assholes, eh.
I don't have the data to say this is the case, but "just being an asshole" is a circumstance that is often under-considered.
For those older folks, an NPC is a character in an adventure that is scripted or run by the Dungeon Master.
He's homeless and still manages to look down on the people helping him.
I don't have a hard time guessing why he didn't have any other person's place to stay at, even temporarily.
He is an adult, and is not sick enough to warrant involuntary intervention, so he is free to choose to reject care. Also, he mentions using psychedelics (to self medicate? Or just cause he wanted the experience?) So this could be 100% self-inflicted for all we know, although I'd put my money on self-medication.
Mentally ill people (depending on the type of illness) can be really hard to be around for long periods (source: father and brother who are bipolar.) It is no surprise he would have trouble finding a friend to let him crash. His narcissism and superiority-complex are just part of the package.
I will also note that it was infuriating that he got access to a women-only shelter when he said "I identify as a woman".
Don't get me wrong, I do not want to play clever here, it's just a honest question.
Also, by the time he is already homeless homeless, he is likely no longer able to afford the fixed costs of a move. He is not getting an apartment even in small town USA if he can't put down a deposit. He is not even getting there without money to pay for the trip. He'll also likely need a car to hold any job which is another major cost.
And by the way, you said he should get a job, "any job." Now put yourself in the position of a small town mcdonalds franchise owner. Someone just moved to the town from California cough all in a sudden. He has no local connection, no experience in food service (or whatever other low skill job you are offering), probably not even an address. Why would you hire him instead of literally anyone else?
I'm not sure what your qualifications for 'reasonable' and 'capable' are, but without a support system those things are difficult to prove such that you can utilize them properly.
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine have been evicted from your home and have no job. You have no car, no phone, no ID, no money, no credit or bank account. All of the people you know who would give you money or a place to stay or a reference have disappeared and cannot be reached. What do you do?
You could find a cash job as a dishwasher or something similar. If you work nights you can sleep in the library on in other public places. But where do you put your things? Spare clothes, toiletries, books, everything you might need to feel comfortable or to look decent has to be carried on your person, and even then is liable to become lost or stolen. How do you shower? Every restroom experience is using a public one. You can't cook meals, so you have to find free ones or buy them.
Hopefully what you got out of that is that access to things that you and I take for granted is a really big deal to someone without a home, and cities like San Francisco make many of those things difficult instead of impossible.
I plan on sharing more of the story in future writings. During this particular story, I was on the tail end of a state of a psychosis, which I didn’t know at the time. I just thought what I thought. Truth to be told, I took too many psychedelics in 2024 and one day I woke up, and started experiencing a bunch of delusions that ripped me away from reality.
I had spent the majority of my life living in New York, Vegas directly before San Francisco- I was in Grass Valley.
I arrived in SF last January and didn’t know anyone close enough to reach out to. Plus my delusions were beginning to pick up, dramatically.
I threw away my cash and IDs, got rid of every item I owned, and was paranoid that my phone was tracking me. So I voluntarily got rid of it.
I was navigating all this chapter without a phone.
I obviously got out of the situation. I’m not in jail. I did successfully defend myself, pro se, against the felonies. I eventually got a job. Which connected me with people. I started volunteering on art and back in the homeless shelters. I found more and more jobs. I found a home. I started researching psychosis to try to understand what happened to me.
This was an intense experience. And at this particular moment in time, as many people in here have picked up on- one of my survival mechanisms was believing I was the hero of my own journey. I was isolated. I was lonely. My delusions were based on video games, and books, and movies, and AI, and predictions about the future. Being homeless in San Francisco- where there’s people bent over on fentanyl and an AI sign everywhere, everyplace promoting AI is sort of surreal. Especially if you are in the middle of psychosis. Jail and homelessness will compound that more.
There are many good people trying to help in this situation. Some from the HSA, the old ladies and other volunteers making food at the homeless shelter, the other hurting souls, the DA involved in my case, a wonderful woman from the shelter in Redwood City. My family. My mom. My brother. I will share some of those good stories. And there’ll be more context- as to why it was the way it was.
I suppose anything that splits people is a good thing. And I appreciate the level of insight on both sides that people give in this thread.
Congrats for successfully defending yourself, getting a job, handling the psychosis, etc!
Obviously more to this story when someones support network has collapsed to this degree, but at the same time people don't have great support networks anymore =/
There's something deeply disturbing about a society that allows this to happen, and yet it's something we've learned to accept and largely ignore for centuries. The promise of technology bringing forth universal prosperity is a lie promoted by those who have something to gain from that narrative. Yet we keep believing these people to this day.
Where in the world is the answer no? Maybe if you’ve freshly immigrated to a new country or something?
That is a very scary thought, but it’s also scary for me to think that so many people live such isolated lives, it’s such a foreign concept to me culturally.
To the point where you have no friends. To the point where even your own parents have given up.
> Where in the world
Everywhere. You can’t comprehend it because you don’t know anyone like that, likely because the government you live in takes care of that problem for you.
> isolated lives
And by the way, the people in your culture in this situation are isolated too, from you. And that’s okay, and maybe good even. But you don’t know about them.
I don’t know what the right answer is. America’s answer is definitely not the right answer. But interrogate your culture, too, and how it takes care of your most vulnerable people. You may be dismayed at the answer, or you may not.
SF's pro-homeless policies in particular attract people away from real support networks and towards government-assisted ones.
I pay taxes and live in a country with a government in exchange for protection and a decent standard of living. Relying on family, friends or strangers for basic necessities is a sign that my government has failed me.
Technically a satire quote criticizing the robber Baron it's credited for, but the sentiment is the same. Pay off a bourgeois and they'll fight against the the sympathetic bourgeois and proletariat happily. The elite don't even need to lift a finger.
It’s so gross contrasted with the theme. The very first paragraphs start with a poor attempt to humble brag his”credentials” as not just a “normal” homeless person.
The self mythologising, the framing of negative things more like the weather than consequences of his choices.
The fact that despite privileged upbringing and working in tech in the valley he has no one willing to offer him a couch.
The most striking for me is the framing of his own grandmothers death as exceptional, proving his lineage is special.
Calling others NPCs, framing of stealing from stores as being the heroic action, even with approval from grandmother.
I feel this is getting redundant. I’d love to hear if anyone disagrees and what their thoughts are.
...
> The old lady’s came marching in, and fed us pasta and bread and cake and cookies. There was Coca Cola. I ate because I had no choice, but suspicious of the sugar they forced on us. We slept on green mats. Most of the folks, drenched theirs in Industrial Clorox. I thought they had it wrong. Embrace the filth. Do you trust the chemicals?
...
> Some of the people around me drenched theirs in mountains of maple syrup. Is sugar the enemy?
...
> My paranoia of the place had dissipated slightly as the idea of having my own room felt pretty nice.
...
> I had refused to steal, convinced I was in purgatory and doing the “right thing” was the only way to pass the test. But standing there, the rules dissolved.
This article is dripping with psychosis. It's a story about a failing health care system.
Reading some of these comments, I'm starting to understand how the system could be the way it is, and just how far we have left yet to go.
Maybe if you miss that sentence, the rest can fly under the radar. Assuming one also ignores the commonly reported correlation between homelessness and mental illness. But try and have those two elements front of mind, and re-read the article: it should be abundantly clear that this is in no way a healthy person down on his luck--this is a story of someone going through a mental break.
I think that's the whole shtick because most tech workers are so far removed from homelessness they don't even consider the possibility. It's not about the author being a narcist, it's about most people from higher social classes having some flavor of narcism.
> The fact that despite privileged upbringing and working in tech in the valley he has no one willing to offer him a couch.
Totally believable. There are very few people I'd offer a couch for more than two nights, and I imagine that in highly competitive environments, like the US tech sector, the typical situation is more grim. Look around and ask yourself - how many true friends does a typical corporate employee have? Someone they could realistically call "ay I'm going homeless can I get a bed for free for like, a few months". Most "friendships" turn out to be very superficial when tried.
> The most striking for me is the framing of his own grandmothers death as exceptional, proving his lineage is special.
This makes a lot of sense. From his point of view, his grandma was special. From your point of view, your grandma is special. The whole point of this post is the contrast between "I am special" and the world disagreeing.
Imagine a situation: someone steals all your money and frames you for pedophilia. Instantly you lose your job, all your friends distance themselves from you, you get evicted from your house. Suddenly, through sheer unbelievably bad luck, you have $5, an old jacket, and serious charges. You show up at soup kitchen in order not to starve and you see all these meth addicts, mentally ill, mentally ill meth addicts, and other types of folks from the lowest class of the society. Would you stand there thinking "ah yes, I'm equal to them, these are my homies, wassap nigga" or would your brain scream "no, this isn't happening, I'm only passing by, I'm different, why is this woman with rotting face staring at me, I need to get out of here ASAP".
I think a lot of people are willing to open up their couch. That story changes big time when that person has what might be schizophrenia.
I have never been homeless or close to being homeless, but it seems incredibly likely that under the stress of losing my job, not knowing where my next meal is from, where to sleep tonight, etc. – I would slowly lose the ability to make the kind of rational ethical decisions you’re criticizing him for.
Heck, even going a day or two without sleep is enough to make the average functional person incapable of pragmatic, rational thought.
But the US is a f*cking dystopia at this point.
How come the richest country of the world - the model of capitalism - allows so many of their citizens go homeless?
It's mindblowing.
They've got capital, but I'd argue that they're long way from model capitalism since some time. There's both over- (regulatory capture) and under regulation (consumer and environment protection) that goes against this and companies have enough sway to influence the law and consequently the market. Free market in the original sense of "free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities" is not even a goal anymore.
- bodily autonomy; people do have the freedom to sign DNRs, which is death being more free than being alive, as it's about choice
- freedom isn't to do with people giving you things; it's about being able to choose things. It's not "freedom from"; it's "freedom to"
Stupid semantic games. “Freedom to” not die in the streets works just as well.