Spencer Lund

If you’re thinking of moving to New York City, don’t. You probably think of yourself as misunderstood, or ambitious, or destined for greatness, or an individual stifled by the cloistered town you live in. You wish to break free of your dismal existence and New York City, the bright lights of the Big City is where it will happen. It won’t. This isn’t some depressing diatribe against New York, far from it. There’s so much to do, and see, and achieve here. It’s overwhelming to be in the epicenter of everything and everyone’s dreams.

It’s not as overwhelming as the press of human flesh on the trains during rush hour. Not as overwhelming as the rapidly approaching first of the month when you have to pay your landlord with money you don’t have. Not as paralyzing as watching other people, prettier people, more talented people, younger people, more “together” people, achieve what you can only hazily dream about: dreams without lucidity. The amount to do here isn’t as overwhelming as all the trouble you can find here too.

Maybe you’re longing to blow a gram of coke throughout the day while you bar hop through the Flat Iron district, schmoozing with the pretty waitresses and hucksters that line your yellow brick road of debauchery. That bacchanal at 4 AM on Stanton and Suffolk streets is here. You’ll get whisked inside and when they frisk you and find the blow and ecstasy you have, they’ll just be glad you aren’t packing a gun. You’ll tentatively creep down the cavernous stairs to the basement packed with a sort of dancing El Dorado steeped in black lights and speakers larger than your body. You’ll pop your pills, and throb in time to the music while sharing blunts with gangsters and drinks with Wall Streeters. Around 10 AM on a Sunday morning, your pills will wear off, and your sweat-caked body trembles out of the basement onto the street. The hidden club’s house music blaring in your ears behind you, you’ll drag your beaten body to the subway on Lafayette, except the train isn’t running, so you’ll trek up to 14th street and hop on the train back to your cockroach-infested pad in East Harlem.

There is that and more. Maybe you write verse and you love to slam tangents you write on scraps of napkins or your iPhone notes. Go to the endless array of readings and meetings that drape the cities pubs and poetry clubs. You’ll find an audience eager to hear your claptrap about home, and the possibility of the city. The city is not beautiful. It is a city. It is THE city. It is narrow flat of earth between rivers and Ocean and old marshland dredged into a river. It is a place where millions of people live. Millions of people you don’t know, and won’t ever know.

That feeling of solitude you feel in your hometown or college town, or wherever you’re thinking of moving from is in the same world as New York City. Except, it’s cheaper, and less arduous on your synapses. Be an individual wherever you are. Just don’t expect to find refuge here in New York City. You’ll be more alone than ever. Individualism is a lonely endeavor by definition, but it’s augmented in New York City. Millions of commuters and neighbors and shopkeepers and co-workers and every which way you turn more people. They’re just strangers. You’re better off where you are. Alienation isn’t just some feeling. It’s New York City, and you’ll do better without it.

“Lord have mercy. Mercy on me.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a train to catch into the city.