It's always fascinating to me to hear people in California talk about California. I have a friend of mine I grew up with who moved to LA about 15 years ago, and in that time, I don't think I've ever heard him say something good about it. I don't think he even has anyone he'd call a "friend", he's only ever lived in terrible, crappy apartments with terrible people as roommates, and his girlfriend is an absolute ghoul of a human being. I've offered him housing, a job, even continued education, and for fifteen years he's resolutely refused to even leave California to visit other places. There seems to be something about California that gaslights everyone living there.

I went to visit him a few years back because I had to be in Santa Monica for work, and took him out for a couple meals. He said it was the most seafood he'd eaten since he got there, and I just looked at him like "then why the hell would you rather be a 40-year old barista with roommates here, than come to a reasonable state and live like an adult?"

Any time California comes up, it makes me think of Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Gold Coast", where he says "California is where the American dream and Manifest Destiny ran up against the Pacific Ocean and stopped, where all that unspent energy and fervor pooled up and soaked into itself, and it became the most 'America' place in America, with all the negative connotations that brings." (paraphrasing from memory, sorry)