On hating New York City

a rather unpopular take.

I took this picture a year or so ago. I was reading in Central Park and it was sunset and I was looking at the homes of the billionaires and feeling kind of sad and kind of happy but mostly just empty.

Just about everybody you meet in Los Angeles lived in New York City at some point. They all did a stint there and they all remember it fondly. I don’t blame them for it, it’s wonderful, exhilarating, beautiful, to be young in a city. Every young person with a soul should do it. I did it in Washington DC and I loved it. But I don’t like New York City. And I feel a little bad saying that. How do you say (without sounding like a bitter-old-prick) I don’t like this thing you all love.

This isn’t about selfishness and it isn’t about New Yorkers. Or maybe it’s a little bit about New Yorkers. Their fondness for their city confounds me — the way their eyes glow when they talk about it. A few months ago, I was talking to a guy who worked at Gawker. Like the real-as-hell, old school Gawker. And, though we were both dads in these new phases of our lives, his whole face lit up when he talked about New York City. About what it was like to be in the thick of it. I was jealous. I’ll admit it. Not because I wanted to be in the thick of it, but because I want to like the big apple.

New York City is a concrete playground, they say. And I get that vibe. But how do you not get cagey in this playground? How does the concrete not suffocate you? I get claustrophobic by the buildings, by the people and their insatiable ambition. Zadie Smith says you don’t come to live in New York unless there’s something in you like “the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires.” She says “there’s an energy generated by this town.”

But what if you just can’t handle that energy? What if it makes you depressed and triggers a flight response? What does that say about you? Am I the weaker person?

It occasionally strikes me that I’ll never be a successful writer — whatever the hell that means — because I can’t handle New York City. Maybe that’s not exactly true. Hemingway hated New York City and described literary New York as “a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.” But, then again, half the time Hemingway was full of shit and what’s the point of hitting it big as a writer/painter/musician if you can’t stand New York City?

I suppose this I can’t stand New York City pose I’m giving is another way of saying I just can’t play the game. New York City is a playground but it’s also a game, some people play it better than others. Some people like Anna Delvey or Honor Levy or that TradCath girl from the Red Scare podcast play it exceptionally well. The catch, of course, is that playing the game well doesn’t make you any happier. These well-played New Yorkers seem well-read and interesting and moderately attractive, but they don’t seem happy. I am weightily happier when I’m not in New York City. I wonder if they’ve ever tried leaving.

I hate New York but I do not hate New Yorkers. I need to be absolutely clear on this point. I am envious of them for their ability to love their metropolis. New York exhausts me. I suppose I’m envious of their social stamina. But I have friends in New York. I like to see them when I’m dragged into that life-sized escape room. I’d like to see more of my New York friends. According to the rough Substack stats, about a hundred people are reading this right now in New York. I love all of you.

And I love shades of New York. The bistros open and surreptitiously serving wine in coffee mugs until five am. The lawlessness within the law of it. The way you can sit on a Central Park bench, reading a book in the middle of it all with the experiences hitting you like city busses.

It should also be said that I’ve never felt unsafe in New York. On dozens of occasions, I have walked carelessly through that city at 3am. I have no empathy for that terror of cities that has become a fixation of the right-wing media (especially (and bizarrely) the New York Post). I just don’t like it — it feels like angry cowardliness.

The larger question, the question at the end of all these things is: what’s the point? Why bother defending a distaste for a city that’s so beloved? I suppose the point goes back to the beginning of this piece — all the criticisms of New York seem bitter. They seem always to be voiced by people who couldn’t make it there and so they have transformed the place, in their mind, into a den of vultures. And they want the rest of us to believe in this depiction. But I never tried to make it there. I considered it, briefly, and then realized I couldn’t breathe in the concrete playground no matter how hard I tried. I suppose, to go back to the top, I don’t hate New York City after all. It’s just not my thing.¹

1. worth noting that I’m writing this from a pier overlooking the ocean and I can see palm trees lined along the coast. I surfed for five hours this morning and I can see the surf break from where I sit. I’ll go surfing again on Monday, after I drop my kid off at preschool. This, this exact feeling of golden bliss, it strikes me, is why people leave New York and move to LA.