My work here in Belvedere-Tiburon has developed considerably since I founded Elixir back in 2009. Over the last several years it has also taken on a different tone, which I will now explain:
The population of the San Francisco bay area has changed. A younger group of people are here now, people who believe they’re perfect just as they are.
This group is profoundly conservative, even though they imagine themselves to be the opposite. When I say conservative, I don’t mean politically. I mean that they are mentally, emotionally and perceptually isolated, mistrustful and avoidant of anything that has not been officially approved, trademarked and marketed to them by the psuedo-authoritative hive masters of their highly insulated society.
These new people have achieved great material wealth, being conditioned from birth to develop a one-pointed culture whose singular guiding principle is the belief that money is all there is to life, and that once they attain it, they can do anything they want.
Living largely outside of social contracts and personal agreements and only knowing how to take, their only loyalty is to gain. Relationship for them is an extractive commercial exercise, a kind of game where everyone is defined as a winner or a loser to plunder and then move on when they think there’s nothing left for them to milk.
I’ve observed this new crowd fashioning themselves to be kings and queens of their own little kingdoms, exploring the limits of self as defined by their unlimited desires and the very conditional social acceptance on which their entire game balances itself so carefully.
A portion of their impulse is correct- the idea is to create heaven on earth. Yet these personal heavens are hollow because they lack a heavenly core. Instead, the foundation is a self that has gone out of control in a desperate search for social acceptance, validation and inclusion. Those of the new crowd have become monarchs, but not of themselves, and are virtually never seen, experienced or appreciated for who they are rather than what they are.…