California Everywhere

Everyone kept telling me to go to California. The O.C., the Chili Peppers, E3 in Los Angeles, celebrity gossip shows, my classmate André—everything pointed the same direction. At some point you stop arguing with it.

I didn’t actually want California for any reason I could name. No dream, no plan, just this ambient cultural pressure that said California was the place. The songs about it, the TV shows set there, the magazines, the parties in the Hills, the whole apparatus of pop culture treating it like the obvious destination.

When you’re young and everything around you is pointing at the same place, you feel the pull even if you’re not sure why. The mythology does the work. California becomes what you’re supposed to want because enough people have decided to want it already.

That’s it, really. Not the place itself—the idea of the place. The agreement that California matters. Once enough reference points align, once the signal gets loud enough, you don’t need a real reason anymore. You want to go because the culture wants you to want to go.

I never did go, but I lived in the shadow of that pull for years. That’s what California was—an inevitability in the culture, somewhere you looked toward even if you weren’t looking for anything specific. Just the place everyone agreed to look at.