No Snowflakes in San Francisco
But there are some flaky people
When I read the Bold Italic’s “Why are San Franciscans so Goddamn Busy All The Time?”, I got a crook in my neck from the vigorous head-nodding that accompanied. The piece is a facetious attack at how San Franciscans seem to be perpetually busy doing everything and yet, nothing at all.
Unless an incredible amount of people took up “being a superhero” or became doctors, how is everyone always so inexplicably unavailable in San Francisco?
We’re inexplicably unavailable to others. And ourselves.
The problem with being busy or “busy” means that things eventually get lost in the fray. And those things are engagements with real people. To be a busy person is to tread a fine line between busyness and flakiness (flaky as defined by shirking commitment and being generally unreliable). The Bold Italic piece got me thinking about the people in my life, my fellow San Franciscans. Did I consider them flaky? Did they consider me flaky?
I found a Quora question on the flakiness of San Franciscans relative to other American city dwellers. The responses hyperbolize the “cowabunga dude” stereotype and blame technology for our always-connected-yet-fragmented culture. Here’s one gem:
I know tons of High Tech people who live in SF. They’re all flaky because they all have 20 places to be at any given time. But they are all available via text message which makes it all cool :) Like tonight three buddies at Yahoo, Google and VMWare all flaked on foosball league, but they were all at work. All cool.
Reading this and other answers was infuriating. “There has to be a confound,” the psychologist in me said. “It can’t be inherent to San Franciscans.” I, born and raised in the Bay Area and of Indian origin (ever heard of IST?), received one tardy slip my whole life (in the 3rd grade because of my dad who I’ve almost forgiven), attended a weekly piano class for ten years no matter if it landed on Thanksgiving or my birthday or the day before the AP US History Exam, and missed exactly zero college lectures. No, being flaky couldn’t be inherently San Franciscan. Further Quora hunting revealed that the exact same question, with similar responses, exists for New York.
People can be flaky. But why?
Fact #1: Sometimes plans work out
Fact #2: Sometimes plans don’t work out
Fact # 3: Sometimes life is better unplanned
Desperate for an explanation for these facts, I whipped up a survey and shared it with my social networks. 2/3 of the people who took it were between 23 and 27 and the rest were under 32 years old. Respondents were West and East Coasters alike, and even some middle-of-the country folks. Responses don’t differ based on demographic. The results, to be taken with a grain of monkey (response bias, surveys suck, experimenter bias), gave me lots of answers.
What is behind (our perception of) frequently failed plans? What drives flakiness?
People with demanding jobs plan for about 3-4 social engagements each week outside of work. More often than not, someone is over ten minutes late, and once in a while, plans (that don’t involve tickets, travel, or family) get rescheduled or canceled altogether.
Why? The most understandable is that something unexpectedly comes up at work. But here are some others that are equally common:
- Someone is overambitious with social engagements
- Plans are not firm when they are created
- Someone is tired or comfortable and doesn’t want to leave home
Here’s my interpretation (most things considered): We want to make the most of our young adulthood by meeting interesting people and having quality experiences. We plan lots of things knowing full well that while all of them won’t pan out, most of them will. The best way to do this successfully without being a complete flake is to make half-baked plans. This leaves room for inching in and backing out. Maybe because we’re optimistic or maybe because we want to pretend they don’t exist, we rarely account for work, fatigue or um, reality, coming in the way of our plans.
Most people say they aren’t bothered by plans changing. This isn’t surprising. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we feel when we hold dissenting beliefs or actions. We (sub)consciously work to minimize when things are at odds. Despising flakiness but being a flake yourself would invite undesired cognitive dissonance.
We should probably do something about all this at some point, lest we forever lose the sanctity of man sticking to his word. But we can’t fix it immediately. Partly because we’re busy tonight and mostly because we’re just really comfortable on this couch, doing nothing. So until someone finds a plow for the peopleflakes, I leave you with this:
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