Someone in Seattle Is Reaching for Their Coat

It is 4:12 PM, an hour at which I have failed to be productive but have not yet earned the right to start drinking, and I am eating a piece of cheese over the sink because plates feel like a commitment I cannot make today. The window is open. The neighbor's wind chime is making its small, polite complaint. I am refreshing GeekWire on my phone because I am a person who has confused dread with information, and the two have been dating for years.

The headline asks if we are on a road to nowhere. It is referencing, I assume, the Talking Heads song, which is a song I have always found unsettling in the way that cheerful people are unsettling at funerals. The piece is about Seattle, and about how for three decades the tech industry here has been an extraordinary economic engine, transforming the region into a global center for cloud computing, e-commerce, and artificial intelligence. But cracks, the article suggests, are forming. The foundation is doing the thing foundations do right before they stop being foundations.

I have lived around this industry long enough to recognize the particular feeling the article is describing, which is the feeling of being at a dinner party that has gone on slightly too long. Everyone is still laughing. The wine is still being poured. But someone has checked their phone twice, and someone else has started mentioning their morning, and you understand that the evening, which seemed eternal an hour ago, is in fact a thing with edges. Seattle, for thirty years, has been the dinner party. I am not saying it is ending. I am saying I have noticed someone reaching for their coat.

What I cannot stop thinking about is the word "masks" in the headline. Growth masks anxieties. Which means the growth is still happening, the numbers are still going up, the buildings are still going up, the people are still moving here in their hopeful little U-Hauls, and underneath all of it is a separate weather system that the spreadsheets cannot see. I find this more disturbing than a simple downturn. A downturn you can grieve. A mask you have to keep wearing to brunch.

I think about the people I know who work in tech here, the ones who bought condos at the top of the market and now talk about their mortgages the way my grandmother talked about her gallbladder, with a kind of resigned intimacy. I think about how every conversation eventually returns to whether they should leave, and where they would even go, and whether the leaving would solve anything or just relocate the feeling.

The cheese is gone. The wind chime is still going. The phone is still in my hand, glowing its small institutional glow, and outside, somewhere, the city is doing extremely well, which is the most worrying thing it could possibly be doing.

Source: GeekWire (image and reporting)