I felt that way during the first tech bubble. I was 17 in 2000, and it seemed like Exciting Things were happening far away, and here I was as a senior in high school in the middle of Pennsylvania.

Now that I'm older, I don't feel that way, because I know how the sausage is made and what the territory looks like. The people becoming "instantly rich and famous" are either (a) rich kids whose parents are laundering the family connections and wealth through VC or acqui-hire, or (b) deserving hard-working people whose "overnight" success took 10 years (we're just noticing them now, so it seems "instant", but there was a decade or more of hard work and sacrifice behind it) or (c) statistical outliers who can be likened to lottery winners.

I've looked into the soul of Silicon Valley and there is no there there. Don't get me wrong: there are individual companies and people doing great work and advancing the state of humanity, but the intersection between Real Technology and the celebrity personalities that dominate Silicon Valley is almost the empty set.

Most of the easy money is going to investors, upper management, and talentless celebrity hacks. People doing real work have a shot at some of the hard money, but it's not guaranteed that there will be any reward. (That's why it's called "hard money".)

As for "a big party going", well... there are a few things to keep in mind. From the ground, you might see "a cloud" as a concrete thing, but inside that cloud is just fog, and from the point of view of a water droplet there is just a semi-formless mist of other droplets. Things look different from outside than inside. Most people "in the party" are miserable about not being part of a more exclusive inner party. There's a certain fractal self-similarity to material striving that keeps at a constant level of misery (if they're inclined that way) no matter how far they rise.

Most likely, you were never invited to "the party" and you'll never get in, because it will have dissipated by the time you'd be eligible. The $5M/person acqui-hires (which, by the way, deliver 3 orders of magnitude less than that figure to the rank-and-file engineers actually building the shit) are favors to the well-connected parents of the founders, and the people making new discoveries in physics (or, in truth, doing just about anything that actually matters) are just as far away from the party crowd as you are.

If you're trying to get into the "startup scene" in 2015, my advice is, don't. Climbing the ladder this late is pointless because if you're not already most of the way up it, it'll dissipate before you've ascended. Focus on gaining lasting knowledge. Take the hard CS courses that pre-startup kids avoid because the workload interferes with "investor networking" events (that won't be fruitful, if you're doing real work, anyway). I'm not saying that you should dismiss CS or technology or programming or hard work (on the contrary, I'd say the opposite) but I think that you have no chance of getting into this bubble world (and who knows when the next one will rise? I can't predict that) if you're coming into it this late.

What you're seeing is like Vegas at night. From 20 miles out, it's a glamorous and almost magical city in the desert, brilliant and alluring at all hours. Then you get there and it's seedy and pushy and unpleasant. Then morning comes, the whole world goes to sleep, and now you're alone in this hot, sun-ravaged ghost town.

What you envy is not real. At least, not for people like you and me. Making things is real, but you don't need to be in "the scene" to do that.