Missed part one? Find it here!
Of course rent, and even finding a place to live in this leviathan of a city, isn’t your only concern. It’s not even really your main concern, just one that hits you much earlier than the other ones.
Most people would think that the larger a city, the more people you will meet on a daily basis, and therefore the more friends you’ll make over the course of any given time. Well, let me disillusion you on this issue.
There is a deep flaw in that reasoning, which can best be explained using a ‘shopping’ metaphor. Say you’re out looking for socks. Naturally you’d go to a big department store featuring a huge undergarments section. However, when faced with 10 rows of socks, you’ll take but a cursory look at everything that doesn’t fit your original idea of what you want your socks to look and feel like, and out of those 10 rows you’re only likely to take a serious look at maybe a third of one row.
Well, people in New York are a bit like that, and you will undoubtedly soon become that way either, unless you’re determined to drive yourself completely mad. Consider it this way: there are some 10-12 million people in New York. Do you seriously think that it’ll take very long before you stop considering each one of those people as a full and complete human being with hopes and dreams? I think not.
Nothing drives the point home quite like a typical NYC example — the dead man lying on the street. This is not that uncommon! In a city of 12 million there is a surprising number of people kicking the bucket at any given moment, and some of them, believe it or not, simply do not have time to pack up and go home or check into a hospital when the grim reaper comes a-callin’. I’ve seen two such incidents, the saddest of which had me come across a man who had evidently died of a heart attack at the corner of 40th street and 7th avenue. To be sure there was absolutely nothing spectacular about it — just a guy laying down dead on the street, McDonald’s milk-shake in hand, with a cop standing over his corpse waiting for the meat wagon to arrive. What was sad about it was that, aside from the cop, there was absolutely no one else paying any attention. People walked by, taking a quick look or two, but once they realized that there was in fact a figure of authority there taking charge of the matter they kept their steady pace.
What did I do? I did exactly what they did. Conformity is the hallmark of big city livin’. Sure, this is not proper to New York; someone keeling over dead in L.A. or Chicago would probably receive the same sort of non-attention. Some with the misfortune of doing so in Tokyo’s busy rush hour, on many streets, would probably be trampled beyond recognition. However, since I have not lived in any of those places, it’s probably a sight I’ll associate with the Big Apple for the rest of my life, and let’s face it, because New York’s rather unique geography tends to cram an apparently infinitely-large number of people in a fairly small section of a very small island most of the time, this sort of thing happens in midtown Manhattan more often than anywhere else.
In a smaller place — even Quebec City, which is hardly a ‘small town’ by any standards, this would seriously impact the neighborhood, and get reported on the evening news. Not here, unless the death occurred as a result of some crime, in which case the victim would be reborn as ‘poster boy’ of ‘what’s wrong with this city’, with his/her name no doubt getting lost or misreported in the fog of war.
Not that you need death to bring out the ‘anonymization’ you go through after spending more than a vacation’s worth of time here. New York is the single most dehumanizing place you could possibly move to. This is due partly to the size of the place, and partly due to the sort of people that it attracts. Attracts? yes… New York is a very transitory kind of place. Few people you’ll come across here are in fact from here. But that’ll be the subject of a future rant. By and large New York attracts fairly ambitious people who have an eye for getting to the top of their profession, putting a little money aside (HA!) and then settling in a place that’s a little more liveable some time down the line. This implies, of course, that most of these people are focused on their careers (in a genuine way, not the ‘girl blowing you off’ routine). As such, there might be tons of interesting people about who take interest in things other than fashion or gossip, but you’re not all that likely to see those people anywhere but at the office. This goes double since Mayor Bloomers decided to enact a silly smoking ban on practically every public place in New York — it’s quite enough to have to step outside the door every time you want to light up (apparently some visitors from afar confuse the practice for a nascent prostitution crisis), why would you put up with that crap on your spare time as well? And in bars?
That aside, well, aside, that is one sad truth about having many choices — the more choices you have, the less of them you’ll actually consider. Not really proper to New York, but it’s probably most remarkable here; what’s more, everyone’s here for the work, which is probably the reason you’d make it here as well.