Stress of Living in Silicon Valley
Allyson Levy
Silicon Valley, CA—On Christmas morning, I woke up to snap stories of kids showing off their brand new Mercedes and Louis Vuitton purses. For some people, this may seem crazy, but it’s the norm in Silicon Valley: privileged kids and their rich, successful parents. However, this privilege comes with a price.
The home of Google, Tesla, Apple, and other startups, Silicon Valley is the hub of success. Everyone either knows someone or is successful in their craft, whether it be a rich venture capitalist or an engineer for a software company. These people are either hardworking or lucky. Whichever they are, they are well off: able to push their kids through the best private schools in the area or have the money to send them across the country to attend college prep camps. Now don’t get me wrong- the kids of these parents are mostly thankful; but, the pressure to perform at the same level as their parents is unbearable in the Bay Area.
Finals in the Bay Area is a stressful time, as it is in any other state or country. Oddly enough, the tests aren’t the most stressful aspect of the process. It is the dreaded day the grades come back. All the students huddle out on the quad as if it were the “reaping” in The Hunger Games. Students nervously check their GPAs to see if they match up to the expectations of the UC schools. Students look across the street to the perfect Stanford campus with perfect star students, thinking to themselves how they could never get in with their grades. How dare they get an A- instead of an A+! Our teachers constantly remind us to “not stress;” yet, they didn’t have the stiff competition of getting into an excellent college.
This seems common for every school in the United States, but anyone can notice how it intensifies the deeper one goes into the Bay. Future-obsessed parents have their kids on a leash, taking them to SAT prep classes and then to their varsity sports practice right after. With this tight leash, pulling harder and harder, students lose sight of what this process is really all for. Mental illnesses and anxiety disorders are not uncommon for high school students in Silicon Valley. In a survey performed at a high school in Fremont, 54% of the students suffered from depression and 80% had moderate to severe anxiety (Noguchi).
Silicon Valley has the best of the best. We are lucky to be in this beautiful, privileged area and to have the opportunities we have been given to succeed, but with every privilege, there is definitely a price.
SOURCE: Noguchi, Sharon. “Stress Crisis: How Bay Area Schools Struggle to Keep Kids Safe.” The Mercury News, The Mercury News, 12 Aug. 2016, www.mercurynews.com/2016/04/09/stress-crisis-how-bay-area-schools-struggle-to-keep-kids-safe/.