Cities, Ambition, and Leaving
Paul Graham has an essay arguing that cities send you a message. New York whispers you should be richer. Silicon Valley whispers you should be more powerful and build something that matters. The city you live in tells you, constantly and below conscious thought, what kind of ambition counts as normal there, and that message shapes you more than you’ll admit, because you breathe it instead of hearing it.
I grew up in Delhi and left for the crypto work, and I’ve felt his thesis in my own nervous system. A place really does set the floor on your ambition. Surrounded by people who think a stable government job is the summit of a good life, wanting to build something global feels almost rude, like you’re insulting everyone by wanting more than they’ve decided is reasonable. Surrounded by people who took protocols past a billion dollars or shipped products to millions, that same ambition feels small, almost lazy. Is that all you’re attempting? The water you swim in resets your sense of normal, and your sense of normal quietly sets your ceiling.
This is the strongest argument for leaving I know, and it has nothing to do with money. You leave to change the ambient message. You move toward the city, or the field, or the room, whose background hum matches the size of the thing you secretly want to attempt, so it stops feeling absurd. Half of ambition is just permission, and the cheapest way to grant yourself permission is to stand among people for whom your wildest plan is an ordinary Tuesday. Their normal becomes your normal whether you consent or not.
But I want to push on Graham here, because the agent age is quietly editing his thesis. His essay assumes the message comes from physical geography, that you have to drag your body to Manhattan or Mountain View to hear the right whisper. That was true when ambition lived in physical rooms you had to be in. Less true now. The most ambitious rooms I’m in aren’t rooms. A group chat of builders across six time zones. A comment thread. A corner of the internet where the hum is build something that matters and nobody shares a zip code. The city that sends the message is increasingly a network, not a place.
This is liberating and it’s a trap, and you hold both. Liberating, because you no longer need to be born in or relocate to one of three expensive cities to stand in an ambitious current. You can find the right ambient message from anywhere with a connection, which is genuinely new in history. A trap, because the default networks the algorithm hands you whisper consume, react, perform, envy, the exact opposite of build, and most people drift into those without choosing. You have to curate your inputs as deliberately as Graham says you should choose your city, because the network you marinate in becomes the ambition you end up with.
The founders understood you become the conversation you’re soaked in. Franklin built the Junto on purpose, a deliberate room of ambitious, curious people, because he knew you become your inputs and refused to leave his to chance.
So pick your city, still, if you can. But more importantly, pick your network, your feed, your group chat, the voices in your daily hum. They’re whispering something at you every single day. Make sure it’s the right thing. And if it isn’t, leave. Leaving is cheaper than it’s ever been.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.