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Comment by jazzyk | Hacker News Reader

>If you are upper middle class or higher in the US...life here is better than most other places in the world

Please change to: your purchasing power is better than most places in the world.

Do not confuse purchasing power with better life. 13% of Americans are on anti-depressants. I know many "successful" people in my very affluent suburb of a major US city, who have an addiction problem ( prescription drugs, mostly).

Add growing social isolation, caused by constant uprooting (moving from place to place to advance one's career).

As they say, "all that glitters is not gold"

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If you want to quote stats about anti-depressants, please do so for other competing places as well. I do not have those stats, but stats about suicide rate[1] show that other supposedly better places with free healthcare, social bonds and no guns (Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Japan) have higher suicide rates than the US.

Wading into social indicators is a tricky business without the full context of a place, so I will speak only about SV - great climate, progressive policies like enthusiastic adoption of Obamacare, unemployment benefits, good employers provide health/401k/parental leave benefits, non-racist environment (though certainly classist) etc.

Finally, my point was about "a software engineer in SV working at MAFANG or unicorns", who should not have to constantly uproot. A new job should be across the street for such a person.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

1. Suicides rates are influenced by other factors, such as weather (Finland, etc), societal norms (Japan), etc.

2. The US would move further up the suicide table if you classify deaths from overdosing as suicides.

3. If the US population had not had such an easy access to "happy pills" (mood enhancers), the suicide rate would have been higher.

>A new job should be across the street for such a person

There are a lot of people coming and leaving S.V. on any single day. This has been discussed many times on HN.

If you are happy in S.V., good for you, but don't project the mini-bubble you live onto the whole country.

> There are a lot of people coming and leaving S.V. on any single day.

And yet, bay area population went from 7.15M in 2010 to 7.75M in 2017 [1].

> ... don't project the mini-bubble you live ...

The thread is literally asking for personal anecdotes (Ask HN). Why should one not post about their positive experiences with SV in that case?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Demogra...

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