New Yorkers

I was once a New Yorker. I am no longer.

I should explicate further—I never technically lived in New York, unless you count a two-year period on Governors Island when I was a kid. I lived in New Jersey, in Hoboken and West New York. Pre-9/11, I took the ferry into Lower Manhattan, and post-9/11, I took the bus into the Fabulous Port Authority bus terminal. But I never actually lived in the city. Close enough, I figured—I spent 12 hours a day there, in Times Square, of all places.

I’m going to say the most obvious thing in the history of obvious things, but New York has a culture that is unique to anywhere else in the United States, even other large big cities. The best way that I can describe it is that it is full of strivers. 8 million buttheads, each one of them trying to have it all. More money, more status, more power, more everything. A lazy person in New York City would be the hardest working person in Myrtle Beach. Another word for it is ambition. Everyone is trying to get ahead. If you can harness this productive power, you have a 100-square mile area that has a GDP that exceeds the vast majority of countries.

The first thing that tourists realize when they land in New York is that everyone is in a hurry. Don’t stand there on the sidewalk like a galoot. Get the fuck out of the way; people have places to go. Don’t stand in front of the subway turnstiles looking at a map, trying to figure out where you are going to go. People have no patience for that shit. The economy relies quite a bit on tourism, but everyone despises the tourists. They can all stay in Times Square, standing on that TKTS thing and take selfies and go to Red Lobster. Fuck Times Square. I go to New York all the time, and I haven’t been to Times Square since the desnudas were a thing, trying to get some cheap thrills. The whole New Year’s Eve thing is just nuts. People will stand in a pen for 10 hours, wearing diapers, urinating and defecating all over themselves. Jesus Christ.

New Yorkers are smart. There are a lot of businesses there that require a lot of knowledge workers. I am a bit obsessed with IQ, and I’d say that the mean IQ of the city (including the boroughs) is 115, one standard deviation above the mean. Go on a bank trading floor, and it is one standard deviation above that. Go on the trading floor of a quant/algo shop, and it is one standard deviation above that. There is a name for a society that is run by smart people: it is called a geniocracy. Unfortunately, the smart people don’t run the city; it is run by complete dopes. Whatever you think of Michael Bloomberg’s politics and his ill-advised run for president, he was a pretty good CEO, and he was a much better mayor, and for the first time, city government started doing smart things. The Bloomberg years in NYC where the halcyon days. He paternalistic instincts with the Big Gulps did him in.

So you basically have a 17-mile long island with all the smartest people in the world crammed into it, piled on top of each other. Smart people tend to be fussy people, and I would say that outside of the ever-present risk of being mugged, (which, in spite of the recent increase in crime, is still very remote in affluent areas), people have what I like to call high-class problems. My Amazon Prime delivery is a day late. The subway door closed in my face. This Starbucks line is taking three minutes longer than it should. Living in any city, especially New York, is an exercise in putting up with nuisances and indignities, and New Yorkers don’t handle it very well. A spot of mustard on a necktie will ruin someone’s whole day, which is to say that people don’t have a lot of perspective.

And this is where the bubble comes in. New York, the city, is a giant bubble, with an environment that resembles nothing like anything else in the world, and everyone living inside the bubble thinks that their experiences are completely normal and shared by everyone else in the country. It took me three years to calm down after moving south. Three years. I learned for the first time that you’re not supposed to honk the millisecond after the light turns green. I never did much driving in New York, but when I would drive in New Jersey, I got in the habit of never using my turn signal, because if I did, the car in the other lane would speed up so that I couldn’t change lanes. This is insane behavior, and people think it is completely normal.

Also, when you get the world’s smartest people crammed into a 17-mile island, they want everything to be perfect. They are utopians. And busybodies. And they elect leaders that are utopians and busybodies. City government is the most grandiose, malignant homeowners association ever imagined. And when these people do eventually leave New York, and go to places like South Carolina or Tennessee or Florida, they bring their busybody ways with them. They get elected to homeowners associations and make everyone else’s life miserable. This is the essence of the argument for conservatism: everything is fine as it is, and we’ve always done it this way, so shut the fuck up. City governments in coastal South Carolina are being overrun with these people. Years ago, they passed a helmet ordnance in Myrtle Beach. All the motorcyclists said, fuck you, we’re going someplace else. The ordnance was eventually struck down because a municipality doesn’t have the authority to regulate motor vehicles, but the damage was done; Bike Week was gone forever. When I moved here in 2010, the place was run by the good old boy network. Now it is run by the busybodies. I preferred it the old way.

As you know, every 4-6 months I plan parties in New York, and I have a hell of a time getting people to show up. Don’t get me wrong: people will buy tickets. But then some other opportunity will come up and they’ll go to that, instead. Everyone is rich, so nobody is worried about losing $25. In South Carolina, if I plan a party, and people RSVP, they all come—all of them. If 30 people RSVP to a party, 30 people will come. You know why? Because everywhere else in the country, a verbal agreement is binding. It’s binding in New York, too, unless a better opportunity comes along. Then they’ll send a text an hour before the party sending their regrets. Every single party in New York that I’ve ever thrown, and I mean every single one, my phone blows up from people bailing because something came up. Now, I turn off my phone before parties. Things come up in the South, too, but people go anyway, because that is what they said they were going to do. One of my favorite sayings (which I made up myself) is that there is no commodity that is so rare and so valuable as a man who does what he says he is going to do.

The thing that really grinds my gears about New Yorkers is the astounding levels of self-absorption. New Yorkers think about New Yorkers, and not really about anyone else. My job, my wife, my kids, my kids’ soccer, my clients, my commute, my workouts, my life that is so incredibly busy—I just don’t have the time or the energy to answer this call or text. And I know this, because I used to be like that. When I was at Lehman, if someone called the trading desk for anything other than business, I would hang up in their face. I have opinions. The 35-year-old midlevel banker with a wife and two kids will absolutely refuse to make time for anything not involving work and family. I am an extremely busy person, and unless you call right at 9am when I am trying to get a newsletter out, at which point I’ll tell you I’m in a personal fast market and will call you in an hour, I will always pick up the phone. And if I can’t talk, I will always call back. And that’s the paradox of New York City—with 8 million souls, they are all utterly alone.

Don’t get me wrong. I made some great friendships in New York that have transcended both geography and the decades. A lot of that is because my colleagues and I were on a great shipwreck, and our joy in escape from disaster did not subside as we went our individual ways. If I am being honest, I still have many more friends in New York than I do in South Carolina, and they have the additional benefit of being better friends. There are a lot of great friends from US Airways flight 1549 that went down in the Hudson—even a couple of marriages, too. There is something about the shared experience of going through hell that forms bonds that lasts a lifetime. And New York is hell. Everywhere else, people have it too easy, and friends are more of the fair-weather variety.

I’m a writer, and writers complain, and sometimes go beyond complaining and take a giant shit on something. I’m too old to live in New York. I spent four weeks in New York last summer, and I was a physical wreck from all the walking. Too old for this shit. It’s a giant playground for young people. But now, there’s no more clubs, and the bars close down at ten. Well done—now it sucks something awful.