My Time in New York

It's not always clear why I moved to and from New York. I will do my best to explain it, but my reasons often feel post-hoc. I moved here in January 2022 and am leaving January 2024.

I grew up mostly in a quiet suburb of St. Louis and went to college in a small town in Northern Missouri, and since then, I've sought bigger and bigger cities: first Chicago, then San Francisco, finally New York. I considered myself an urbanist, and for a long time I could not get enough of city life — the vibrancy, the overwhelming feeling of seeing and being seen, the endless sense of possibility, the depth and intensity of daily life, and so on. And especially in New York: a global city of culture, a city where you really can see anyone and do anything.

But something shifted in me that made me see New York — America's one true city — differently. I started to feel unsettled. I became more anxious here than I have in many years. Things that I used to love, like the subway, or the Manhattan skyline, felt loud, ugly, and oppressive to me. I began to experience New York's urbanity as a grotesque affront to human life: a mean, cruel, over-crowded, alienating city. The abrasiveness, aggression, and ambition of New York became distasteful to me, and I found it rubbing off on me, found myself becoming a person I did not want to be. I realized that whatever I was seeking here, it wasn't there, and that I've been seeking in the wrong way for the wrong things.

None of this is really exactly true about New York. I still think the city and its people are incredible, but my negativity stems from me and the fact that this is not my home, and never felt like it. I made friends here and had all sorts of great experiences, but never shook the feeling of being a passer-by, someone marveling at the city but not really living in it.

I've begun to more appreciate smaller, more tight-knit places, communities like the ones I've left in the Midwest, or where my parents live in the peninsula in Washington. There's a sense of rootedess and community there, and a material and natural connection to the sustenance of human life, and a culture and a history that is placed and specific. These are communities and ways of being that I have under-valued.

My decision to leave came slowly, then abruptly, but was one I feel solid with. I'm returning to San Francisco, where I was born, where I've worked for the last four years (two remotely), and where my family is from. I know what I like and dislike about San Francisco, but it does feel like a place that could be a home to me. It's a slower pace, more connected to nature, closer to family, and the Bay Area and West coast in general has a culture which I find myself more naturally in. San Francisco is, of course, still a city, but it's a smaller, quieter kind of city, a step "back" in the right direction (maybe on a path that leads me elsewhere on the West coast) — a place for me to focus more on community, relationships, and openness to life, away from cynicism and personal ambition. And it may be the most beautiful city in America: despite all its issues, still a very special place.