Let’s get incredibly stereotypical.
Who is a tech bro? Well, they’re pretty easy to spot, just look for the mid twenties White or Asian male wearing a Patagonia zip up with a corporate logo atop joggers or jeans ending in All Birds wool runners. If you manage to inject a few probing questions into their anti-social bubble, you might hear words like FAANG or startup followed by some ridiculously large six figure number that could be referring to either their total compensation or penis size in micrometers
Every tech bro starts somewhere, and somewhere happens to be middle class America. In this setting they spend their decade of adolescences behind a screen, playing video games and surfing the web, foregoing normal social activities like clubs, sports, music, and arts. They don’t have much going for them outside of the virtual world.
Then comes college. They’ve spent their whole life in front of the screen, so it’s no wonder they’d want to pick a career path that allows them to continue spending every waking hour staring at dots of light move across a glass display. Plus it’s good money and there’s prestige in it. Everyone is wowed when they slyly remark “I work at FAANG company”. Finally, something to be proud of, something to be recognized for. So they wrap their whole personality around the one thing they have that seems to have intrinsic value to the outside world.
Spending their teenage years in front of the computer leaves little time to form social skills, like making friends, much less talking to girls. So back to the internet, to search for a solution, “How do I lose my vir… backspace backspace backspace… How do I get girls?”. They live a life dictated by Reddit users who have gone out into the world and are back to report their findings so that they don’t have to venture out into the cruel, darkness of non-virtual reality. Back in non-virtual reality they come up with generic hobbies like hiking, climbing, lifting, boba, and hotpot along with a generic dress style like the r/malefashionadvice uniform and gorp core pieces like Arc’teryx and Patagonia that they use only for their office commute. Just ask your female friends what they see on Hinge in the Bay Area.
So they wake up in their $5k/month luxury apartment in downtown San Francisco which was built just last year, replacing the old apartment block that mysteriously burned down. Coming down the steps, they dodge around the homeless man taking a shit and the drug addict smoking heroine to hop on their FAANG company corporate bus to take them on their 1.5 hour long ride to their corporate office in Silicon Valley where they spend the day enjoying free lunch and other perks, simultaneously trying to do the least amount of work possible and seem as busy as possible, all so they can meet their KPIs and get a glowing performance review at the end of the quarter which will hopefully translate to a nice fat bonus with which they can finally afford to unlock the full self driving feature of their Tesla Model 3 that they pay $300 a month to park in their San Francisco luxury apartment’s parking garage where it can be safely kept until getting it’s windows smashed on the one day they decide to go to that new climbing gym that just opened in Oakland.
If you have a good sense of humor, you’ll probably find this funny. If you don’t find this funny, maybe you should reevaluate how your life is going.
best wishes,
E