'NYC Is a Capitalist Nightmare and I'm Miserable Here!'

No one is ever happy, no matter where they live or how rich or successful they are, until they can trade in the shiny fiction of their fantasies for the mundane but exquisite frictions of reality.

The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro (1909), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I moved to New York City seven months ago because I thought it was still a haven for weird artists and freaks with no money but instead it’s a capitalist nightmare and I feel more trapped than ever. I have never lived in a place where I have felt happy and free, and while I was living in Chicago I convinced myself that NYC was the place for me, because when I had traveled to NYC to work on projects (I am an early-career theatre director) everything had felt so right. Opportunity seemed to be everywhere, people were motivated to start projects with me, there was a play to see or an event at which to meet new people every single night, and I always thought, “This is what I’m missing in Chicago! I feel at home here. I feel limitless! I should move here.”

And then I moved here. And I’ve never been so miserable.

I work all the time at a horrendous coffee shop in NoHo. Half my paycheck goes to rent. I love my apartment, but come on. Nothing is worth that, right? All I think about is how to pay all my bills- rent, medical insurance, all that. My brain is unable to think of anything else. The limitless feeling I’d experienced here has vanished, replaced by a sense of the walls closing in around me at all times — this sense that I am not allowed to live here simply because I don’t make an insane amount of money, and I’m trying to make it on my own. And that’s the other thing! You wouldn’t believe how many people here are only making it because their parents send them a check every week. How naive of me to assume we were all playing life on hard mode, right? I serve assholes every day at my cafe who never had to work for any of the luxuries they have, and they have the audacity to act superior to me. I’m sorry for raging, but clearly I am in a tornado of rage and frustration that I can’t pull myself out of.

I need help. I don’t know how to relax here. I don’t know how to maintain my creative life while freaking out 24/7 about money. I don’t feel like myself. No one knows me or loves me here. Should I just leave? But where would I go? I’ve got it in my head that this is the only place to be if one wants to be an artist. I tried Chicago, but I didn’t feel as inspired there. The theatre scene felt stale and slow there, in comparison to here, where everything is lightning-fast and vibrant. I moved here, I guess, because the energy felt right. And it still does, at times, when I’m free from all my worries and woes. When I’m seeing an insane piece of theatre with my friend, or walking in one of our beautiful parks, or directing a friend’s play, or striking up a conversation with another weirdo at the bar after work. So much of NYC is unique unto itself. That’s why I love (most of) it.

Is it possible to live the wrong life? Is it possible to have made the wrong decision? Or am I exactly where I’m supposed to be on some “god has a plan for you” shit? I gave up a lot to come here. I left my best friend (the only peer I have who truly understands and loves me) and I left a sort-of-boyfriend I’d been dating for a year who made me feel so happy and secure. I guess we fell in love but I fucked that up by moving to New York Capitalist City for no reason I can presently articulate. I feel like a dumb idiot for thinking I could “leap, and the net would appear.” There’s no net. I’ve ruined everything.

So yeah, you may be thinking, “Why the hell did you move here in the first place?” I wish I could tell you. It was an impulse. I had the feeling something wonderful was waiting for me here. The first three months were great. I was high off the risk I took, and the novelty of everything. I’m on month seven and nothing wonderful has happened to me yet, so I’m losing hope. But I suppose that’s an entitled point of view. Maybe I should be more patient? Give it until 2030 and if my life still sucks and physically pains me then I’ll leave, I guess. But what if the pain doesn’t stop even if I move to another place? Even if I become less broke? How long does it take for life to click into place? When will I feel like I’ve done the right thing? I can’t take this pain for much longer.

Here’s what I want: I want to be loved by a close group of friends and by a romantic partner who will never leave me and will never make me doubt them. I want to work consistently as a director and get out of the indie scene eventually so I can start making real money doing what I love and what I have a genuine talent for. That’s what I want to do here, what I want to attain here. And it’s not happening, and I don’t know how to make it happen. I feel like I’m not doing enough. Like I’m letting my terror around money and survival stop me from feeling confident enough to take risks and to believe that I deserve all the opportunities that I’d thought this city would promise me. I’m angry that my life right now is not at all the life I want to live forever. But I can’t picture any other way of living. How will I pay the bills without spending every waking minute serving yuppies at this NoHo cafe? And if there are always bills to pay, how will I ever quit my job and get out of this hellish cycle?

They say desire is the root of all suffering — all I do since I’ve moved here is desire, desire, desire. Desire love, sex, success, excitement, freedom, MONEY. It is a nightmare, but I do not know how to stop. It seems like everyone around me is caught in the same desire loop, too, and it feels unique to this city. It feels maddening to be just one of many, many lost lambs. Maybe I should move elsewhere for this very reason. Please tell me what to do.

Confused, Terrified, and Broke in NYC

Dear CTABINYC,

Every city has features you have to ignore in order to thrive. In San Francisco, the fog was romantic, the views were amazing, the food was delicious, the city streets were delectable, but it was always chilly, and there was a chill type of bro who just loved to chill out and do chill shit and work his bro job and then chill, dude, chill chill chill.

I hated the weather and I hated the bros. It was very hard to ignore these things. I was broke so I had to work as a temp downtown, surrounded by finance bros. I hated finance and I hated my shit heel of a boss and I hated my sad apartment in the chilly Marina with my increasingly distant bro boyfriend, who just wanted to chill and watch football with his bros.

I mean, come on. It was the wrong life. It was all a mistake. My boyfriend dumped me and I almost moved back home to North Carolina. Instead, I looked for a shared flat in the Upper Haight. I talked to four groups of roommates. I didn’t vibe with the first three groups, and then the fourth were my people, weird and interesting. They could be difficult — opinionated, bossy, loud — but they were fun and social and they were trying to do interesting things with their lives. I moved in and life changed and I stopped worrying about how chilly it was and how chill everyone was. I stopped freaking out about the big picture and I engaged in the everyday, mundane, difficult experiment of being 22 years old in the city, ambitious and ambivalent and alone and very afraid.

Having roommates completely changed my perspective. Being crowded, feeling aggravated, dealing with noise and mess and trouble of roommates: These things were very good for me at that moment of my life. I signed up for a year with them without knowing much. I committed to staying for another year. This was also good for me. It got me out of my head and into the reality of surviving and trying to feel happy.

I don’t think you should leave New York right now. I know exactly what you mean about visiting and feeling alive and then falling to pieces after moving there, because you suddenly know what it tastes like day after day, how cold it can be, and also how ambitious and desperate and pointlessly snobby everyone around you can be. Nothing you’ve described feels inaccurate to me at all, but it’s also the exact shit that you have to ignore or wave off or push out of your view or even ENJOY SEEING MORE CLOSELY if you’re going to thrive.

In other words, you can’t tell a simple story about where you live. You have to insist on a far more complex, rich, nuanced picture, one that has no clear moral, one that changes from light to dark, colorful to grayscale, sloppy to precise. You have to open your eyes wider and welcome the rich and frightening reality of the city into your cells.

You do that by getting out of your head as much as possible. Your money struggles are making you neurotic. You have to figure out a short-term solution, either a second job or a roommate situation or an obscenely strict budget or all of the above, that will keep you from flipping out around the clock about your money situation.

You also have to get out of your head about whether this choice was RIGHT or WRONG, and what to do next. Just put that question on hold, because it’s making you nuts. Forget the big picture for a while and instead, start getting very small and granular about your present moment. You need to start cobbling together a sustainable life among people who have a similar sensibility and drive, and similar resources (or lack thereof). I think what you need more than a boyfriend and an amazing group of friends is a COMMUNITY — or a few different communities, messy gaggles of humans that, LIKE ALL COMMUNITIES, will include a lot of differences and bewilderment and mediocrity and small annoyances.

You require FRICTION.

Friction is what you get when you walk out into the world and try something new among other people. They don’t agree with everything you’re up to. They push back. They are indifferent. They are not sidekicks or bit players in your fantastical vision of How Life in New York Should Be. They are real people with their own sometimes questionable agendas. Sometimes they get checks in the mail from their parents. Sometimes they’re trust fund kids. Sometimes they’re broke. Sometimes they have drinking problems. Take it all in without instantly reducing each human to a stereotype. You’re an artist. This is your work.

That said, pay attention when you meet people who prefer FICTION to FRICTION. When you meet someone who is heartbroken but has zero good friends and talks to every new friend like they’re auditioning a new therapist or someone who is kicking weed but has no interest in socializing without being high or someone who has a Big Dream but speaks mostly about how unfair the world where their Big Dream takes place is, you’re meeting people who are depressed, sure, but they’re also allergic to FRICTION. They want other people to speak to them like sidekick characters in a romantic story where the hero rises to the top WITHOUT HARDSHIP, STRUGGLE, OR CONFLICT. They want to hear that it will get easier and easier, and soon everything they’ve ever wished for WILL BE THEIRS.

What a boring, flat, pointless story! If you read a play like that, you’d throw it out the window immediately! That’s not how life feels, not how it works, not what it’s made of.

Life is cobbled together from mistakes. You don’t start living until you start making big mistakes and small mistakes and navigating through the reality of those mistakes. Pain enters and so does anger. You are not the lead character, ever, even when it feels like you are. You aren’t even the author some of the time. Sometimes it’s possible to feel like a bit part in a tragedy.

That’s where the FRICTION comes from. But when you finally put away your fantasy and lean into the friction of reality, you discover the raw ingredients of real, earned, in-the-moment happiness. Real happiness isn’t granted to you once you cross your fantasy finish lines. Real happiness is built in the present moment, from the materials you have on hand. It requires ALLOWING New York City to be exactly what it is right now, with all of the lost lambs and shitty rich people and ridiculous capitalist hogs and also the many, many, many people who are just living their lives in an ordinary and unassuming way, working very hard to feel good every day however they can.

For a while after I moved into my new shared flat in the Upper Haight, I felt excruciatingly lonely every night, particularly when I got home from going out with my roommates. I was used to having a boyfriend. I was addicted to the reassurance of having someone there, even when that person was mostly indifferent or conflicted or not that into me. So I would make a late-night improvised Shepherd’s Pie: ground beef, onions, peas, mashed potatoes. I mean, gross. And then I would smoke a tiny hit of pot and listen to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic on my headphones in my room, and I would eat the delicious mess of food and I would feel like: Okay. I can be alone without feeling desperate.

This is not a recipe for survival. I don’t recommend any part of that picture, not smoking pot and not listening to the words “Bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks” over and over on a Saturday night. This anecdote is imperfect and full of FRICTION. I drank too much back then. I was so charming in some ways, but I was very dysfunctional and very insecure, too. I had a drab, low-paying job. Somehow that ritual of food and a tiny hit of pot and Dr. Dre felt like a way of supporting the supposedly-chill college kid with the stoner friends I’d been before.

When you’re fighting tooth and nail not to run away, you need more than a vision of a long-term climb to the top of your chosen field. You need more than an image of true love and amazing friends. You need more than weed and food and music, too, if I’m being honest. The weed and music and food weren’t the important part. What was important was that I was trying to build a new way of life. It was an experiment.

That ritual didn’t stick because I didn’t want to feel depressed and bloated every Sunday morning. The pot and the giant heap of food were both, arguably, mistakes. But thanks to those mistakes, I started thinking about how I DID want to feel, and I started running in the morning, on Sundays and then before work. And I started playing guitar late at night, quietly, and writing down lyrics. And I started talking to my roommates about writing and music, which I didn’t know some of them were into before that. One thing led to another, and I slowly started to redefine who I was and what I loved and what I wanted next.

I could tell you hundreds of stories of the mistakes I made that year, the next year, last year, this year. The one thing I need for you to understand is that you will only learn to be happy by ENJOYING your sweeping, angry stories and then also, letting them go whenever you can, pushing away the images of New Yorkers as either lost and desperate or rich and nasty, and doing some very frightening, slow excursions and experiments that involve joining communities, building communities, learning more, researching more, seeing more, and living slowly among other human beings who are doing the same exact thing.

The humanity of New York City loves humanity. That’s what I want you to feel under your skin every day you leave the house. New York sounds a little rough and wrong, it looks a little dismissive and snotty, but once you take your compulsion, your FANTASY, about being a lead character, out of the picture, what you’ll see is the gorgeous FRICTION of real human beings who appreciate humanity itself at the most granular level, in their most vulnerable moments AND their most dismissive moments.

Half of the people you see every single day are in New York for the exact same reasons you’re there. They have pure hearts and they want more life out of their lives. They want energy and purpose and drive to be bouncing and echoing around them. They have open hearts that need to be protected, yes, sometimes by dismissive or cold-seeming words and actions. But under the nastiness there is love and longing and a real, concrete, felt, and lived desire to be close to other humans and celebrate and support HUMANITY ITSELF.

That’s romantic. Sometimes it’s a dark gothic romance but look, without darkness, without tragedy, without longing, without suspense, without discomfort, there is no romance. We are not robots, we are imperfect, lost humans who are struggling, each day, in small ways, to find each other, to see each other clearly, to love each other in spite of everything.

You have my permission to move anywhere at any time. Don’t discount smaller cities and more podunk-seeming theater scenes. I love my smallish town so much! There are so many interesting, non-chilly, non-chill people here! But before you move anywhere else, I want you to embrace the friction of this one fact:

Your life right now is undeniably romantic. THAT is the big picture that should guide you through each day, even if you leave eventually.

Maybe you need to move in with some roommates, and maybe you don’t. Maybe you need to stuff a roommate into your apartment for a few minutes to see how that could feel. Maybe you need to join some clubs and groups. Maybe you need to eat cheaper green leafy bullshit for a few of your meals and then save up for more plays and experimental theater visits. All of these things will sometimes be dark and disappointing and even infuriating. That’s friction. That’s what you need.

Support your ability to see your life clearly by eating very carefully and working out every day and also stretching and meditating and reading a little. Pay attention to how your body feels when you’re starting to succumb to rage and despair. Be gentle with your body when it reaches that threshold, and keep the big, reductive stories that are echoing through your brain out of there. Notice the shame and insecurity in those stories, and think about how those feelings are tied to your childhood experiences. Find ways to use the friction of your current life as a form of art. Lean into the friction and write it down. Ask yourself what it will take for you to slowly nudge your brain out of dark places.

My guess is that exercise and leafy green stuff and nuts and seeds and more sleep and less storytelling ALONE will reset your brain a little.

Of course if you decide to leave eventually, that will be fine. Of course, of course. Keep talking to your good friends elsewhere but try to listen to them first and foremost and let your continuing story about BAD DUMB EVIL NYC change shape in each moment. Don’t stick to your theme when you talk to everyone you know. Let your body tell you what the theme is each day. Try to start with no theme. Notice how good it feels to have no story at all.

You can do whatever you need to do to feel good. But it’s friction, not rewards and dopamine hits and indulgences, that will save you.

Of course rewards are always a part of life. True love and amazing friends and delicious cocktails and achieving big career goals are all very good things. But the essence of happiness lies in the ways that you make meaning out of small, slow, solitary moments, the ways you start to identify as a capable, flexible, loving, open person even when life is fucking brutal and ridiculous. You go to your shitty job and you take in what’s there, the smallest beam of sunshine coming through the high window, beaming across the spider plant, glimmering in a puddle of water on the counter that needs to be wiped up. Some kid who looks like his Mommy sends him $3k a month is asking why his cold brew lacks cardamom-and-almond cold foam. Look into his eyes. His screenplay is stalled out and no one cares about movies anymore anyway. His boyfriend is acting distant ever since he moved to Bushwick to be closer to his superficial college friends, who only talk about art openings in the most pretentious, delusional language imaginable, but somehow because they went to RISD they know everything.

Everyone is improvising and experimenting in their own crude ways every day, even the old people who didn’t go to RISD. Everyone just wants to feel like they’re not actively making even bigger mistakes than the ones they made yesterday. All we have is this beam of sunshine. Forget the big picture. Live where you are. Do an experiment with this moment. What structure can today take so that your body can feel good, so that your mind can feel curious, so that you can feel deeply rooted in the present, in this day, in this hour?

Hand the sad man his Americano and say,

I hope you have a really great day today.

Say it and mean it. If there is absolutely no time to say all of those words and you don’t want to do that, then say it with your eyes alone. Say it with the shape of your face. See if it lands. When it doesn’t land, when he doesn’t give a fuck, savor the rush of rejection inside your body, notice how fragile you are right now. Feel that. Relish being fragile. Feel your sadness at how vulnerable you’ve been for weeks now. You are so alone and so at sea. It’s beautiful. Friction is romantic. Live here. Breathe it in. This is where everything good begins. Don’t run away.

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! In the comments, let’s talk about other pragmatic things that the LW can do to feel relaxed and clear-headed enough to make art again while staying in NYC! Let’s also talk about how you survive(d) in NYC and why you stayed or left and where you are now. Just remember that, no matter how old you are, how rich you are, and how much you’ve accomplished, the struggle returns over and over again and the struggle is real, motherfuckers. Real friction and real struggle (that you refuse to avoid through escapism, addiction, narcissism, fantasy, scrolling, sleepwalking, sadism, fascism — so many things to avoid!) add up to real joy. Be very gentle to your body, mind, and impatient, wild spirit, no matter what. I’m opening the comments to everyone because this LW needs input from ALLLLLLL of you today! Thank you for being here!

Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. I appreciate your support a lot!