i like the west coast but the more i grow up i realize how weird it is that every west coaster i meet seems very obsessed with a region/talks endlessly about it's beauty and relative to the east coast, it's chill culture when all of my black family and black neighbors has been pushed out of the west coast(i am from SF originally, have family from the bay, also have family in vegas) to the point that theres a scary low number of black people left, the only black people i see in SF are drugged out on the streets and/or homeless and its always been weird and depressing to witness when the California Tech Gentrified Everything Is Sunny and Happy Here culture thing is brought up that even west coast natives still peddle

and when you think about the PNW, where there seems to be a weird whites only vibe there, it makes the lamenting over the chill west coast pretty sus to me and has always triggered in me an inkling that hey maybe all of these people like the west coast because black people (and other poc depending on the state) and poor ppl have been able to be so successfully removed from this region so that white rich people/ rich tech poc can have their ideal automated shangrila (but i know that thats just my paranoid take)

it doesnt help that tech has caused a lot of the west coast culture to become really infantalizing and catering of tech people rather than being a real, authentic place---obviously authentic real places still exist but a lot of things seems to be tech washed and its weird

gentrification obviously happens in the east coast but at least there isnt the google logo over your childhood home to add insult to injury where all the google kids with their google badges pile onto the google bus like adult children(yes i was born in the mission why do you ask :( )