Why he left

Blogger John Manoogian pens a very interesting post here. I for one understand what it's like to be inside what he calls his "amniotic bubble."

A friend asked me why i left {my old job, town} and moved to SF. This is what i wrote in response. I took a wild new job. and i felt like it was time.   felt that by living in detroit, i had to work harder than i would have to work in other cities to connect w/people who understood the sorts of projects i love to build, and that it was really hard to find audiences and collaborators for, well, most things i cared about. i love detroit, but i could see that meeting collaborators and mentors would be easier in a more creative city [1]. i also started felt that the attitude i had adopted was defensively masochistic, i.e. “yeah it’s way harder to make yourself understood here, but because it’s tough makes it worth struggling for”. and that attitude was kinda childish. yes, hard things are worth doing, but just BECAUSE something is hard, doesn’t make it worth doing. you might just be doing it in the wrong way, or in the wrong place.

When i quit my job of seven years at Organic, i had nothing definite lined up — i just had some approximate opportunities and open promises from friends for interviews and freelance work and so on. but before i left, i realized something: Organic was an amniotic bubble that protected me from Detroit. what i mean by that is: work provided me with a complete, self-sustaining ecosystem that assuaged my needs and wants, while muffling the roaring vacuum of the Detroit environment. it provided constant travel to SF, NY, Toronto, and Europe. it provided access to a network of information, and people in those cities. by remaining inside that protective bubble, i could continue to live a semi-normal creative life inside detroit, because new culture and people and technology were being drip-fed into my amniotic bubble by my employer.But an artificial equilibrium doesn’t hold, and one day i realized i was a Matrix-baby spoon fed by the system, and i had to escape. so i left. and upon cutting that life-line, i needed to go somewhere where the oxygen was rich and plentiful, if i wanted to breathe. so i picked SF. So that’s my story. i hadn’t planned on writing quite so much, but it just sort of expressed itself.

Anyone else feel like that - your thoughts, comments?