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What’s not to heart, right? New York is the best. It’s absurd to even try to explain the city's alchemical essence after everything that’s already been expressed about it. It's a feeling, an idea, the greatest city on the planet. No matter what you're looking for, chances are you'll find it in New York. But now you want to leave. Just for now, you say. Anyone with an ounce of cool in them should move here, duh, but you have to take a temporary break. You have a litany of excuses: I just need to get out of here for the winter. I should save up before I really settle down here. I’ll be in New York my whole life so what’s a couple years away? And while you’re packing your closet of an apartment you’ll tell yourself, like some existential Austrian android: I’ll be back. But it’s a lie, whether you know it or not. Sure, you might visit, but you'll never live there again. Here are the 10 reasons why it's over.
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It Was Just a Phase
It won’t feel like it when you’re packing up to leave, but your time in New York will become a thing of myth, through which your suburban friends can vicariously feel more cultured. You’ll categorize that part of your life as wild years, when you did crazy things like eat pizza at sunrise and bagels for dinner. When clubs with unspeakable names pumped you full of music and chemicals. Even though a more typical night might be spent huddled around a space heater with a bowl of ramen hoping one of your friends would spend 45 minutes on a train to come see you, the legend of your New York salad days will, at the very least, make it feel like going back could never quite be the same. Because it wouldn’t be.
The Hurt Was Too Deep Last Time
Like attempting to reunite with a former partner, your chances for a clean out are slim to none when you crawl back to the city you once abandoned. Could you stay with New York forever? Sure, you’ve had some good times. But is that really you, or who you’d like yourself to be? Hell, even if you both wanted it to work again, for real this time, could you? If you thought leaving was hard last time, can you imagine what it’d feel like if it didn’t work out again?! Because pretty much everything is telling you that it won’t. Are you willing to fight those odds? For love? And, like, pizza?
You’re Too Old for This Shit
No one wants to move the entire contents of an apartment into a 4th floor walk-up when they’re 22, much less 32 (or 42 for that matter). There’s undoubtedly plenty of life left in that bag of bones you’re sporting, but maybe that energy will go further in a city where you have more close family members and well-placed escalators. And hey, a two-car garage certainly offers a nicer “welcome home” than a heavy, filthy gate that doubles as a pigeon cage. Creature comforts are an opiate that only gets harder to kick with age.
You Are Poor
Or you will be if you move back to New York. Big city prices are probably a large part of why you left in the first place. Many people move to New York to pursue a passion or find a community they can’t find anywhere else. But having a passion and a community often doesn’t cover rent. If it does, you don’t leave. Meanwhile you’ve discovered you can pursue your passion in Portland and live in a castle for $600 a month. Even if your passion is fairly lucrative or you’re resigned to working a job for which you have no real love, it’s harder to justify moving back to a city where saving money is just that thing you do a week before rent is due. Unless you have a much better job waiting or you or your calling is finance, your thrifty brain will quickly categorize New York as a place for indulgent visits, not for raising a family.
Kids (The People and The Movie)
Even if you can justify returning to the adult playground you spent your early adult years climbing on, it’s another story to gather the chutzpah to consider raising your future children upon that harrowed ground. Didn’t you see the movie where a 13-year-old New York native girl contracts HIV from a kid who then spits on her parents’ perfectly clean coffee table? Is that what you want?! Can you imagine your progeny riding the subway to school? Yes, there are some excellent schools in the city and the subway is statistically very safe, but you know what else is very safe? That cherry minivan in your immaculate garage... #daddreams
You Said You Would
You basically jinxed it. An exceedingly chill meditation graduate student instructor once told me that 90% of plans don’t unfold as expected, man. There’s too much beyond our control to account for so precisely in advance, and no matter how much you think you’ll return before you leave New York, you simply can’t keep track of everything that will change once you’re gone. So essentially, if you think you’ll return, you’re probably wrong.
Winter Is Coming
For proof that even steadfast New Yorkers are creatures of circumstance, listen to their tunes change around February when four months of dark and cold create a sort of delirium where ideas like moving to Florida start to sound reasonable. Yes, other places have cold winters too, but when coupled with criminally claustrophobic apartments and icy-hot subway experiences, small upgrades like bigger closets and car ownership can be hard to give up. And then there’s the elephant in the room: California, where the year’s heating bill may never exceed the Lincoln Tunnel toll. If you’ve made it that far west, your chances of moving back evaporate with every passing non-season.
There Will Be Settling
Wherever you go after New York, you’ll go through some withdrawals. Nowhere else has what that city is holding. And like the reliable fiend that the city trained you to be, you will find your methadone in the form of substandard bagels, pizzas, and delis that, while bland and inferior, will stifle your cravings. And then you’ll wean onto those and other local delicacies as your new fixes. You’ll forget you were ever even hooked on the good stuff. Same goes for theater, art, music, bars, sports arenas, and beautiful people. New York may have done it better, but even New Yorkers are creatures of circumstance and will learn to love again by any means necessary. Do your worst, Noah’s Bagels.
People, They Just Don’t Understand
In most circles, you sound like an insane person if you talk about moving to New York for anything but business after the age of 30. The same friends and lovers who think of New York as being essential to the development of your coolness, will not be cool with you returning to that stomping ground. At the very least they won’t fully understand it. And it makes sense: New York encourages selfishness. It’s not a place you go to take care of others, so the people in your life that you care about will probably pose a good case for you not going back.
What If You Fail? Or Worse, What if You Succeed?
People don’t move to New York to just get by. That ends up happening, but it’s not the intention. People move to New York to detonate their potential in a fiery plasma bomb of success. Can you still find the spark to activate yours, or will you stare blankly at a subway poster ad until father time returns you to the dust from whence you came? Then there's the fact that if you do manage to succeed, you might become one of those callous New Yorkers who complains about how the city has changed while doing nothing to preserve its character. Can you be successful in New York while maintaining your down to earth vibes? Many have grown jaded under the city’s steely watch, but many others have thrived furthering its culture and industry, creating their own fertile communities along the way. All this is to say if you’re on the fence about moving back to New York, you probably won’t, because only those madly in love enough with the city will ignore their better judgment and dive back in head first like they’ve never been hurt. Godspeed, you crazy kids.