Let's get real for a second. Like, New Yawka real. Before you look at another trending article entitled "Top Ten Reasons New York is the Best Thing Ever and Made of Sunshine and Marshmallows" and before another one of your friends' posts an Instagram entitled "Rockefeller Center ready for the Holidays!" and before you overhear some naive friend say they're moving to New York because "it's got so much culture and opportunity," let's get something really, really straight. New York is not that great MOST of the time. I am of the honest and supported opinion that to live here, you must have something really jacked up there. Your brain has been short-wired. You have some serious, skeleton-in-the-closet issues that only years of being in New York and countless visits to a spiritual guru can help you sort of, maybe, kind of come to terms with. You probably won't though, because you live in New York City and this, kids, is not a concrete jungle where dreams are made of. This is just a concrete jungle. New York City is the biggest love/hate relationship you'll ever be in and here are some reasons why.
EVERYTHING COSTS A BAJILLION DOLLARS HERE BUT YOU'LL STILL PAY FOR IT
Long gone are the days of two-dollar shot specials and ten-dollar pitchers of Bud. They peaced-out with your inevitably irrelevant college degree. Everything costs a billion dollars here. Forget going to a bar without ringing up a $50.00 tab (because you're going to try and look like a swag mother fucker by buying your friends a round of shots at some point before crying in a puddle of your own vomit later). You're going to bite your lip and pay $23.00 for a martini at that rooftop bar with the sort-of OK view. You're going to pay for a $25.00 cab home to Brooklyn after the J train somehow turns you into Benjamin Button after midnight. You're going to, at some point, gaze into your wallet and realize you're $2.00 shy of that $10.00 bodega card minimum. You'll go back into the isles you can barely fit between and pick up eight more things because you guess you need some organic soap, some organic kim-chi, some organic lip balm, and some organic agave syrup. Better grab some of that organic, fair-trade dark chocolate with cashews and roasted sea salt crystals sprinkled with the dried hearts of baby nymphs. It's your cheat day, after all. Oh, $56.00 you say? OK, whatever, you just want to get home - the home that costs you $1000.00 a month (before utilities) and takes 45-minutes to reach. But don't worry, once you get there, you can tune into that 24" flat-screen TV you bought from a local electronics and appliances store and cost you $450.00 with oddly no warranty whatsoever. At least you made it out alive without buying a $250.00 juicer that the salesman almost guilt-tripped you into getting because he noticed the bags under your eyes from the sheer exhaustion of being there in the first place. He knew that juicing was the hottest thing to do in New York since moving to New York in the first place. Whatever, you know what's great for under-eye bags? Organic, locally-sourced cucumbers. Better run back out to that bodega. I hear they are having a sale. Buy one cucumber; get a punch in the throat for free.
CITY KIDS ARE CUTE, HORRIBLE GOBLINS
Oh look, every single one of your friends back home is having a baby. That's precious and the 50 Facebook albums of those weird, wrinkly raisin humans remind you of that daily! But guess what? They would never stand a chance on the mean streets of New York because New York kids don't fuck around. Don't look at that adorable baby in the stroller taking up the entire left side of the subway car the wrong way because if the mother doesn't shank you first, the baby will. They all seem adorable at first, but despite the fact they are usually the product of two gorgeous people, kids run around this city like it's their bitch and parents abide. Granted, New York kids are certainly privileged to grow up in such a fascinating and stimulating place. Just look at all the fun, dangerous things to crawl all over! Just don't fall and scratch your knee because you WILL get street AIDS.* Parents have no sense of child-wrangling here and it is for that reason you can be thankful for intimate brunches ruined by running and screaming children. Countless times will you be afraid you almost stepped on a tiny, adorable human walking down the subway stairs. Just don't stifle their creativity by telling them to behave or, god forbid, STOP hurling their under-developed bodies through public places. New York parents are the innovators of your future generation and if Sage, or Thyme, or whatever the hell sort of herb you decided to name your child after doesn't want to eat at Jean-Georges for brunch, then by-God so be it. Just don't feed them after midnight.
YOUR CAREER IS "TAKING OFF" BUT NOT REALLY AT ALL
You'll go home for the holidays (if you're one lucky son of a bitch) and your parents or friends or pastor or whoever will ask you how your career is going. After all, you moved to New York to be a graphic designer! You moved to New York to work in finance! You moved to New York to be an actor! You moved to New York to work at the MET! You're a regular Mary Tyler Moore, except Minneapolis is looking better and better with each passing day and you've found yourself more in the transgendered shoes of Tootsie, mixed with the psychotic rage of DeNiro in Taxi Driver. You'll tell your loved ones back home, mouths agape with wonder and pride, that your life is wonderful and work is keeping you busy all the time. Never mind "work" translates into interning for free and running coffee to upper-management like a groveling plebian. Never mind "busy" translates into pow-wows with your other destitute friends in a dive bar writing bad sketch comedy over cans of PBR on a Monday afternoon. Never mind the intrigue and glamour of the MET has been so completely ruined for you by herds of tourists and the aforementioned city goblins that the idea of working there makes you almost shave your head in an attempt to "start fresh" a la Britney 2007. Alas, you will slap that fake smile on New Yorkers have mastered and tell your family you are a regular city sensation. As far as you are concerned, you have a roof over your head and haven't started pedaling for coins in Union Square which you hear is now an acceptable thing to put on a resume when applying for entry-level positions on Wall Street.
SUMMER IS LIKE DISNEY WORLD HERE AND EVERYONE HATES YOU IN THE WINTER
It's the truth – New York City is like some weird, never-ending theme park filled with wondrous, magical, adult-themed attractions in the summer. Every corner you turn, you'll see another beer garden, a new pop-up shop selling oddly alluring hand-crafted metal necklaces, another open-air food court filled with ridiculous crap like alcoholic milkshakes and meatballs stuffed with crack cocaine and 16 Handles will release some new artisanal flavor of froyo that you just HAVE to try after Bikram. It seems nobody actually works in New York during the summer. You won't work either, and when you do, it won't feel like you're at work because it's above 60 degrees outside and you're catching margarita happy hour with your friends at 5:00. Your boss will blissfully parade off to the Hamptons for like, the entire season, and you'll be left with a steady income and a daily rooftop party RSVP. It stays light until 9:00 and hangovers are erroneous because they're expected of you in the summer. Everyone in New York is one, big, sweltering entity of non-stop gaieties and celebration. The city is united and homeless people go around high-fiving investment brokers.
And then winter comes.
Have you ever seen, I don't know, ANY movie that made New York look all cold and dreary and miserable? That's not Hollywood bullshitting you into believing it's all steel and industry and cold-hearted assholes here - It's all absolutely accurate and you have winter to blame. The SECOND the last golden leaf falls from whatever tree everyone gushes over during autumn in Central Park, New York turns all Mad Max and transforms into a barren wasteland of ugly parkas and pissed off people. Your office stops going out to happy hour and instead, starts a pool on how long it will take until the boss starts letting people go in a Xanax-fueled descent into madness. Black becomes the new dress code for the entire city and people wear so many layers, you won't be able to tell men apart from women but that doesn't matter because nobody is getting laid anyway. Everyone is too cold and pissed off and arousal only comes in the form of that one weird day in January where it will get up to 52 degrees and everyone will act like they're at a fucking Sandals beach resort. Restaurant proprietors will frantically pull their summer terraces out and New Yorkers will come in droves, sitting outside and chattering their teeth over their eggs benedict. It gets dark the second you wake up and "seasonal affective disorder" just becomes an excuse for everyone to start acting like Santa Claus just killed their puppy. The only ray of hope comes in the form of Christmas, but you probably won't be able to afford to go home, so you MIGHT go up to Rockefeller Center a few times to cry into your bodega coffee and lament over the fact that the only thing keeping you mentally together is that $50.00 fake plastic tree you shoved into the corner of your tiny, freezing, expensive apartment. The food courts are gone, the pop-up shops have become a sanctuary for the homeless, and the beer gardens have been converted into mass-suicide halls. If you're going down then everyone else is going down with you.
A LOT OF PEOPLE MOVE HERE FROM THE MIDWEST AND LET YOU KNOW ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME
Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore. You're not in Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Tennessee, Iowa, or any of those other states no one cares to memorize on a map, either. And we know this. New Yorkers are reminded of it every day. We see your hand-knit beanie and your Packers jersey and raise you a middle finger. There are a surprising amount of "fresh off the cow field" implants here. They walk around the city with their Instagram at the ready, pay obscene amounts of money to live in some crack-den on the Upper East Side and complain about virtually nothing because the bitter hell fires of New York hasn't set ablaze to their souls yet. They buy ceramic owls from Urban Outfitters and hang collages of their friends in their living rooms. They drink Starbucks Pumpkin Latte's and fly home on their parent's dime every other month to "reconnect with their roots." They visit dog parks on the weekends and bat their lids at Broadway rush-tickets and have cookie-decorating parties and listen to Mumford and Sons on the treadmill at Planet Fitness. They walk around with a sense of self-entitlement, a naïve "I'm going to make this city my own" mantra. But it's only a matter of time until New York gives them a swift kick in the ass. This will come in the form of Mom and Dad separating the umbilical. This will come in the form of stacked credit card charges and Urban Outfitters collection agencies. This will come in the form of the first serious illness and the realization that doctors don't give a flying shit whether it's you, or the meth addict sitting next to you in the waiting room of Beth Israel, that kick the bucket first. This blow will come, chartered by Hell's Angels themselves. But until then, yee haw. Enjoy your land of opportunity, assholes.
IF YOU'RE A SERVER, YOU'LL BE RICH AND MISERABLE
My second day in New York City I was hired at a popular Times Square restaurant chain to serve tables and you would have thought Ryan Gosling just proposed naked on a bed of rose petals. I cried, I called my grandmother, I'm pretty sure I spun myself around a lamp post whistling at some point. I had made it – the dream of waiting tables in New York while working as a struggling actor had come to fruition and I was well on my way to accepting Golden Globes and talking candidly about "rougher times" in press interviews for my latest biopic co-starring Meryl Streep. You'll slowly learn that waiting tables in New York (especially if you're one of those crazies pursuing acting) is the most financially sound survival job you can have, aside from of course, doing what you actually came to New York to do. You'll be in a blissful land of (mostly) heavy tips and routine dinner shifts until you'll start to realize that waiting tables is sucking your soul of out of your mouth Dementor-style. You will form a weird camaraderie with your fellow servers that quickly escalate into mandatory beers after work and wasting hours reflecting upon that one couple that didn't tip you 18%. This will envelope your life and soon the only thing you'll find yourself talking about on a regular basis is how much you loathe every diner on the face of the earth for one reason or another. Tourists in your section will become some sort of unvoiced punishment from the host, your manager's (likely) cocaine addiction will become increasingly prevalent, and you'll find yourself staying awake until 5:00 in the morning until your early-onset carpel tunnel from holding trays settles down enough to pass out in a Nyquil-fueled nightmare. But you'll wake up again around 2:00, chug a Red Bull, and do it all over again because it's paying the bills like a motherfucker and you can't break free from the masochistic ritual that is serving tables in New York.
YOU'LL BITCH ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME, BUT YOU WON'T LEAVE
You will come down from your New York high after about a year and life will begin to take form. You'll move out of that crack den and over to Brooklyn or Queens because a 4-floor walkup in a brown stone looks like the Ritz-Carlton and ONLY costs $600.00 a month. You'll learn to manage your time and where to spend your energy in the summer and winter months. You'll NEVER visit Times Square again, and life will start to feel a little normal, you guess. Your body and mind will begin to numb and you will become used to all those annoying aspects of your life. You'll start to feel like a real New Yorker and real New Yorker's don't give up on a challenge like a bunch of pussies – they mask it with callused hearts and jaded minds. You won't leave, even though you'll want to because New York is infectious. It will crawl into your vulnerable brain and turn you into a cynical droid, void of compassion and joy. ONE OF US, ONE OF US, GOOBLE-GOBBLE GOOBLE-GOBBLE.
*Street AIDS is not an actual thing. Everything else in this article is completely, 100% factual.
Share This Article
