Illustration courtesy of Irina Blok

You wake up in a puddle of water. It’s 5:00 a.m.

Not water. Pee. You realize it’s pee. Your three-year-old has been having trouble sleeping lately and expertly wedged herself between the two of you. You lazily decided to forego the pull-up last night. You both pretend not to see the wet patch. One of you will deal with it later.

You can’t fall back asleep. You reflect. You turn on the Headspace app and give yourself 10 minutes of peace. You have no idea whether meditation works or not. It’s really boring, and all your mind can think about is Instagram. It feels good, though.

Podcast Episode with Jacob Jaber, CEO of Philz

Now you can spend the rest of your sleepless hours looking for new jobs on LinkedIn.

Your last start-up failed. You ran business development. It turns out your 27-year-old CEO, who never ran an enterprise software start-up, ran the company straight into the ground. You reflect for a bit on the reasons why this happened.

Your company had a “no ego” and “no asshole” hiring policy. He was somehow exempt from both rules.

Open-office concept by David Basulto

Maybe the company failed because, not unlike the company’s open-office concept, the company’s databases were open to hackers. Or maybe it’s because you don’t know who was actually doing work. To your knowledge, most of your coworkers were ordering stuff on Amazon, talking about each other on Slack, watching the World Cup, or WFH. The company’s business model should have been subleasing its $75-square-foot office space on Fridays, since no one showed up.

But life is better now. Forget start-ups; they are not for you. You used to think that life was over. You’re 35, and you haven’t had an exit. You don’t own a house, but now you tell people that renting is part of your “long-term plan” to provide more flexibility. You used to think you’re a failure.

But then you discovered Botox and realize you have more time than you think.

You drop off your kid at elementary school. Parents are part of an intricate social hierarchy. It’s public school, but somehow you are guilted into a “donation” every quarter. You run into Janice. She got drunk at the parent auction and bid $25,000 for Taylor Swift tickets. A week earlier, Dropbox IPO’d. You do a calculation of her approximate net worth in your head. Drop in the bucket for her. She’s now one of the “cool” parents. FML.

The playground

Ferdinand is out on the playground again 30 minutes after he dropped off his kid. He likes to chat up any mom who will flirt with him — with that mesh baseball cap. He doesn’t work. You give him a high five and a bro hug.

You realize high school never ends.

You took a job at a big company. Big, predictable—that’s what you needed. You commute to Foster City. Way better than San Frat-cisco. You love the faux landfill lake filled with sickly ducks—it inspires you on daily walks. The geese sometimes chase you around and make hissing noises, but so much lower key. You go to a poke place every day for lunch.

Faux Foster City Lake with ducks hanging out

You don’t wear start-up logo hoodies anymore, and you instituted a household ban on Patagonia. You’ve attempted to read Man’s Search for Meaning multiple times.

You don’t need the excitement anymore—boring is where it’s at. Your wife is the high flyer now. Her start-up took off. You are the junk bond; she is the high-growth stock. You’ve accepted your place in the portfolio.

You spend a lot of time in meetings. Meetings create a great rhythm for the day. Especially standing meetings. You’ve been to three meetings today with the same four people. Maybe you should put your desks together; then the whole day will be a meeting.

That one meeting last week was rough. You closed it out with, “Thanks, guys.” You got reminded by the smug 24-year-old growth manager—whose entire life experience has been comprised of private schools, vacationing in Laguna Beach and deciding what color BMW 3 Series to drive—that you probably offended a large portion of the room by using that term. You vowed to be a better person.

You are standing beneath a company-values sign that reads, “Humility above all else!”

The big project you are working on is outsourcing all of engineering to the East Bay. Your company used to outsource engineering to India, but they quickly realized after looking at the company’s Twitter feed of pictures of the ice sculpture from the holiday party that they should be asking for a lot more money. You’re afraid you are also in the process of outsourcing your own job. Someone, somewhere would definitely sit in meetings for less money.

Your boss is your age. He never got an exit either. He references his “start-up glory days” regularly.

OK. Who are you kidding? You are bored. You are surfing the internet. You start with searches about real estate licenses. Maybe you should be a real estate agent. It feels like the purpose of tech companies and venture capitalists is to funnel money into property anyway. Maybe if you magically get between two gigantic piles of money, some will land in your lap somehow.

You research day trading. Maybe you could make a few bucks that way. What if you bought some crypto? It’s down right now. Maybe Tim Draper is right, and it will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or maybe Warren Buffet is right, and it will be worth nothing. You create a Coinbase account but don’t have the courage to do anything. You should have just bought Facebook stock at IPO and held. You would have made more money.

Nah, buying Facebook stock would be evil. They create addictive products and swayed an election. You #deletedFacebook but kept Instagram and WhatsApp.

You browse Instagram. Arti has literally posted the same selfie of herself multiple times. Greg likes your photo of a duck in the faux lake but hasn’t responded to your text from two days ago. The infinite scroll makes you angry. You started posting in the Story format recently after you discovered that you can tell who’s watched your Story. Makes you feel good every time someone you thought hates you looks at one of your Stories.

Now you’re not happy with your relationship — you don’t do enough date nights. You do a bit of research on spicing up your marriage. You read some Cosmo articles. All of this feels too hard. You do some searches on polyamory and open relationships, and whether they work. Reddit tells you they are a bad idea. You realize in the process of researching that Google autocompleted everything you imagined asking.

More meetings. Who actually does work at this company? Maybe big companies aren’t any better than start-ups. You start looking at AngelList for start-up jobs. Or maybe you should go work for Box or Salesforce. Aaron Levie’s Twitter stream is really great. So is Marc Benioff’s. Must mean they are awesome CEOs with no ego.

It’s finally 5:00. You don’t have to pick up the kids today. Your parents are watching them for the evening. You went to years of therapy because you resent your parents, but hope they can do a better job raising your kids for you.

You’d normally call your nanny, but she quit. She just had a kid. You saw her a few blocks away in a bigger house with two nannies of her own. She drives a Model S. You drive a Leaf.

Which boutique fitness place should you go to with your free time? Will it be Orangetheory, Barry’s, Core Power Yoga or the Barre Method today? Which podcast will you listen to on the way to your class? You go with SoulCycle and Michael Rapaport’s I Am Rapaport: Stereo Podcast. You will go to Sweet Green after. A perfect end to your premium mediocre day.

Have to sneak into a SoulCycle workout

You walk into your apartment. You shout out to Alexa to play some ’90s hip-hop. It turns on your neighbor’s unit. You tried listening to “new” music a month ago. Someone suggested Portugal. The Man. You listened to two songs, gave up and went back to your old shit.

You hit the Eaze app. Everyone in your building vapes, but no one does it together. The delivery guy hands you a bag as you give him a sheepish look. Your wife comes home from work and talks about how she saw a dude on a Bird getting doored.

You start a conversation about leaving San Francisco for San Diego (Qualcomm? Eh), then Austin (Texas — eh), Los Angeles (too much traffic), New York City (too pretentious), Chicago (too cold), Atlanta (no), DC (proximity to politics), but then drift off into a deep sleep on the couch when Boston comes up…with Chapelle’s comedy special playing in the background.

You can clean the dried pee on your bed tomorrow.

This is part 2 of “This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley,” which was originally published two years ago.