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🌱 Transplant from Missouri

Reasons the grass is actually greener

When you forget why you're leaving — and some days you will — read these.

I. The Water — why you are thirsty

  1. 1Missouri does not support its contrarians. Not from cruelty — from thin margins. A place can love you completely and still have no water for the kid who will not fit.
  2. 2The exact thing that made you an outcast back home is the thing the garden was built to grow. Same trait. Opposite climate.
  3. 3You were never short on talent. You were short on water, and the water is mostly other people who think like you — which you were simply never introduced to.
  4. 4Deserts reward fitting in, because fitting in is how you survive a place with thin margins. Gardens reward standing out, because a garden has water to spare on the strange seed.
  5. 5Getting bullied for being different is a data point, not a verdict. It means the local climate cannot use what you have. Climate is a thing you are allowed to change.

II. The Map — the argument

  1. 6You can grow almost anywhere. You cannot grow into the biggest things humans build from anywhere. Those grow in a handful of gardens, and the biggest one is a train ride long.
  2. 7A kid from St. Louis moved west and built the town square, then built the bank. R-001 R-002
  3. 8A kid from the St. Louis suburbs is now steering the closest thing we have to a machine god. R-003 R-004
  4. 9A farm-country kid from Wisconsin opened the entire web — four hundred feet from Stanford, not four hundred miles from anything. R-005 R-006
  5. 10A boy shipped from Taiwan to Kentucky to Oregon now sells the shovels for the whole AI gold rush. R-058 R-059
  6. 11One founder escaped Hungary, learned English on the way, and became the third person at the company that put "Silicon" in the Valley. Refugees know exactly what a desert costs. R-052
  7. 12Two brothers from a village in Ireland wrote a few lines of code that now move a frightening share of the internet's money — here, not there. R-078
  8. 13One founder was denied a U.S. visa eight times, got in on the ninth, and built the thing that held the whole world's face together in 2020. R-080
  9. 14The pattern stops being subtle the moment you look for it: the people who grew the largest companies on earth mostly started somewhere that was not here. Then came. Then grew.
  10. 15Staying is allowed. But staying is a choice with real math, and choosing it is choosing to make it harder on purpose. Choose it knowing.

III. The Cost — the part we refuse to hide

  1. 16The Bay is expensive: a San Francisco one-bedroom averages well over three thousand dollars a month, R-042 which is exactly why half of this website is about not signing a lease.
  2. 17It is lonely at first. You will homesick at 2 a.m. in a way you did not know was possible. That is not weakness. That is roots, doing exactly their job.
  3. 18A full-hookup camper site out where it is cheap runs $1,400 to $1,700 a month R-030 R-032 — about what an apartment costs in St. Charles, Missouri, R-041 and less than half a San Francisco one-bedroom. R-042 Missouri money for a spot in the garden.
  4. 19San Francisco itself has turned hostile to the cheap-camper trick — a two-hour cap on big vehicles, and a ban on living in one — so you park further out and commute. R-022 R-023
  5. 20It is hard. Genuinely, grindingly hard, in a way the glossy version never admits. We are admitting it. It is still worth it.
  6. 21Nobody here will care about your family name, your church, or your hometown. For some people that is a real loss. For a kid who never fit the mold, it is the door swinging open.

IV. Going Home — the whole point

  1. 22You do not owe the Bay your life. Come, get watered, grow — and carry it back to Missouri if that is where your heart lives.
  2. 23Going home is not failure. Going home changed is the entire reason for leaving. The oldest story humans tell has that exact shape.
  3. 24Some of the best things anyone builds are built by people who left, grew, and returned carrying water.
  4. 25There are fireworks coming — the largest show in the history of the species — and it is being built a train ride away, mostly by people who had to move there first. R-004
  5. 26You can hear about the fireworks, you can watch a video of them, or you can stand in the field with the light on your face. The desert gets the video. The garden gets the field.
  6. 27Roots matter. We keep saying it because it is true. Honor where you came from. Then go get the water it could never give you.
  7. 28You can always go home. That is a promise, not a warning. Now go.