Someone told me last week that LA is "basically unlivable." We were standing outside a coffee shop in seventy-two-degree weather. In May. The mountains were visible. I was holding a four-dollar cold brew from a place that doesn't have a line around the block because it's not on anyone's Instagram.
I didn't argue. You can't argue with someone who's already decided to be wrong.
People Love to Hate This City.
It's America's favorite punching bag. Mention you live in LA and people have opinions — strong ones, usually from people who've never lived here. The traffic. The cost. The fires. The "fake" people. Whatever that means coming from someone who lives in a subdivision named after the forest they cut down to build it.
I've heard every version of this conversation. At dinners. At conferences. From relatives who visit once, spend the whole time on Hollywood Boulevard and the Santa Monica Pier, and leave thinking they've seen the city. You haven't seen the city. You saw the lobby.
Los Angeles isn't the Walk of Fame. It isn't whatever influencer neighborhood is trending this quarter. It's Leimert Park and San Pedro and Eagle Rock and a hundred neighborhoods you couldn't place on a map. It's the guy selling fruit on Slauson who's been there longer than most of the buildings around him. It's the taco truck at 11 PM that'll never show up on your Yelp search because it doesn't need your review.
The real LA doesn't market itself. It doesn't have to.
People visit the lobby and review the whole building. That's not how this works.
Yes, the Traffic Is Bad. Next Question.
I'll give people this one — the traffic is real. The 405 at 5 PM is a spiritual experience, and not the good kind. I've aged visibly sitting on the 10 eastbound. There are days when a twelve-mile drive takes seventy-five minutes and you just sit there listening to a podcast and quietly questioning every decision that led to this moment.
But here's what people outside LA never understand: we know. We're not confused about it. We didn't move here thinking the freeways would be empty. We've made peace with it the way you make peace with anything permanent — you adjust, you plan around it, and you find the routes nobody else knows about.
And honestly? Some of my best thinking happens in that car. No desk. No screen. No one needing something from me. Just me and whatever's on my mind and ninety minutes of forced stillness. I've come up with entire business strategies on the 110 South. Worked through problems I'd been stuck on for weeks while staring at brake lights on the 101.
The traffic isn't the cost of living here. It's the commute tax on your thoughts. And mine are worth it.
Every City Has a Disaster. Mine Comes With a View.
I'm not going to pretend the wildfires aren't real. They are. They're devastating, and they've gotten worse. Climate, drought, wind patterns, decades of building in fire-prone canyons — it's a serious problem that deserves serious solutions and mostly gets reduced to Twitter takes about why California is a failed state.
I've watched neighborhoods burn. I've smelled the smoke sitting on my couch with the windows sealed shut. It's not abstract to me.
But every city in America has a thing. The Midwest has tornadoes that erase towns in minutes. The Gulf has hurricanes that shut down entire states. The East Coast gets blizzards that kill people. Florida has — well, Florida. Nobody tells someone in Oklahoma they're stupid for living in tornado country. But mention LA and suddenly everyone's an urban planning expert with a one-way rental truck booked to Austin.
Disasters are a geography problem, not a character flaw. I'd rather deal with mine under a clear sky.
people in the city of LA proper. 13 million in the county. When someone says they've "been to LA," they've seen maybe half a percent of it.
This City Runs on Delusion. I Mean That as a Compliment.
The one thing about LA that I genuinely love — the thing that separates it from almost every other city I've spent time in — is the ambition. Not Silicon Valley ambition, where everyone's optimizing for exits and valuations and talking about "disruption" like it's a personality trait. LA ambition. The raw, slightly unhinged, possibly delusional belief that you're going to make something of yourself regardless of what the odds say.
I run a telecom company. That's not exactly the entertainment industry. But the energy is the same. Everyone here is building something. The barista's writing a screenplay. Your Uber driver has a music career. The accountant has a side project that might be a nonprofit or might be a clothing line — she's not sure yet, but she's doing it anyway.
Some people find that exhausting. I find it electric. I'd rather be surrounded by people who are trying too hard than people who stopped trying entirely. Delusion, when it's pointed in the right direction, is just ambition with worse marketing.
I'd rather be surrounded by people who are trying too hard than people who stopped trying entirely.
I Know What I Sound Like.
I know this reads like an LA defense essay, and honestly — that's exactly what it is. People defend their cities the way they defend their families: irrationally, emotionally, and with zero interest in being fair about it. I'm not being fair. I don't care.
I'm here because I belong here. Not in a cosmic, meant-to-be sense. In a practical one. This city rewards people who work — not people who wait for permission, not people who expect things to come to them. People who get up, build something, survive the traffic and the smoke and the rent, and do it all again tomorrow.
That's been me my entire life.
So when someone at a party or a conference or a family gathering tells me LA is "too much" or "not worth it" or "falling apart" — I nod, I take a sip of my coffee, and I think about how nice it's going to be to drive home at 10 PM with the windows down and the mountains lit up against a dark sky while they're shoveling their driveway in February.
I'm never leaving.