Dawn view from my window.
Being asked often by friends and family back home – How’s New York? What’s it like? – I’ve had a lot of opportunity to consider my response.
Why is New York so good? Why is it my favourite city?
To these questions, I have two answers.
1 – You can make New York any city you want it to be.
This is a choose-your-own adventure city. If you want Paris, the monuments, the restaurants, the biking through leafy streets, you can find all these things here in New York. If you want great Korean food and karaoke, you can find it. If you want to eat vegetables, brown rice and exercise all the time, New York can provide that too. If you want clubs and cocktails and and the high-life, it’s never more than 10 minutes away. And if you just want a quiet life, reading books, drinking coffee and writing, there’s no better place.
Any life you want, any experience you need, it’s usually just a $10 taxi ride away.
That’s the first reason I love New York. You get to make it what you want.
2 – In New York, you can be who you want to be.
In New York, you’re invisible no matter what you do. No matter how grand your ambition, how outlandish your attire, how poorly you want to sing on crowded streets, in New York there’s always someone with loftier ambitions, crazier clothes or a worse voice.
You can’t do much to shock this city. And that means that you get to choose every day who you want to be without needing to worry about what other people think.
I love the freedom that invisibility brings. Here, you set your own boundaries. You create your own definitions.
That’s the second reason I love New York. You get to be who you want.
If you want to know what it feels like to be invisible in New York, watch this video my friend Mark Lobo shot recently on a stroll through the city. I love it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I only recently noticed in that video that the same couple that was in front of me raising their hands kept on popping up throughout the video, all the way till the end. They were just as invisible to me as I was to them.
The reason you love NYC is almost the same as why I love LA. Except there is no $10 cabs just driving for an hour. One big difference between the cities is cost of living. Someone once said to me ‘You can have a bad idea in LA and last 2 years on it, in New York you have 2 months then you’re broke’.