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 rootedness 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.