New York may attract the best and the brightest, but it also attracts the worst and the dimmest.
Before you make the big move to the big city, there’s a lot you need to consider. Make a pros and cons list. On the pros side, you can include everything you’ve learned from the movies and TV shows that wax rhapsodic about life in the Big Apple.
On the cons side, you can list all the cons and ex-cons that live here, ready to take advantage of a naive newcomer. Note these few reasons why you shouldn’t move to New York City, and try someplace a little less intimidating, like Lagos.
New York City Will Ruin Other Cities For You
The biggest disadvantage to living in New York is that it ruins living anywhere else. Despite the smells, and the sirens, and the supermodels. Like that one good New Year’s you once had, you’ll always find yourself comparing NYC to your current place of residence. And the competition will never stack up.
After all, everyone moves here for a reason. New Yorkers might bitch and complain about their hometown more often than not, but that’s because they’ve melted into a weird sort of family.
Interrupting Movie Shoots
At any given moment, no matter what time of day, there are roughly four million film productions taking place on the streets of Manhattan. And that’s not including Law & Order. You can tell when you’re getting close to one when hot dog carts subtly morph into trailers, or if they belong to A-listers, fortified land yachts.
Then you’ll inevitably reach the Location Shoot’s version of a bouncer: the obnoxious twenty something Production Assistant, who will hold his hand up to you and stop you in your tracks without ever uttering a word or establishing eye contact.
If you aren’t immediately forced to backtrack and circle around, he will pretend to look important while using the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt until you are finally allowed to pass, indicated by another silent wave, this one accompanied with his eyes rolling.
Another problem you might encounter is the eye and neck strain you’ll receive from attempting to see anyone famous while trying to look like you’re too cool to care.
If You Weren’t In New York, You’d Be Home By Now
According to CNN, of the ten worst cities for driving, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan rank first, second and fourth respectively. The only reason the Bronx didn’t make the cut is because the researcher reporting the data is still trapped somewhere on the Major Deegan.
The only thing that takes longer than driving from point A to point B in New York is finding a place to park. Barclays Center could actually be defined as a small planet by astronomers mistaking circling commuters trying to get to a Nets game for orbiting moons.
Traffic is so bad that New Yorkers must find increasingly resourceful ways of getting to work on time. That bearded guy always drenched in sweat who rides a unicycle up First Avenue? That’s not quirkiness, that’s desperation.
NYC Has the Best Transit System in the World—on Paper
Unlike other metropolitan areas, the subway and bus network in New York can actually get you pretty much anywhere, relatively quickly. In theory. Unfortunately, this marvel of modern transportation is often hindered by an endless supply of construction delays, outages, and rerouteing. Sometimes, your train will sit in the middle of a tunnel, in the dark for several minutes, just because.
The MTA wouldn’t leave you blind, though. Instead, they blindfold you and spin you around a few times with indecipherable PA announcements seemingly recorded on Edison’s original phonograph and omnipresent detour instructions you’d need the Rosetta Stone to interpret.
There Will Be Rats
You might find you don’t need any pets at all when nature is already providing plenty for you. Well, nature and the fast food restaurant downstairs that uses your walled-in “courtyard” as a supplemental dumpster.
Just like you’ll have to choose whether you want to live Downtown or Uptown, West Side or East Side, you’ll also have to decide if you want a roach apartment or a mouse apartment. If you really strike out on Craigslist you might end up with both, but typically one species has already devoured the other in the Darwinian struggle for your Hot Pocket crumbs.
But these vermin only hide indoors because the streets have already been claimed by the rats. New York rats are products of their hometown, they’re entitled and strictly business. Dustin Hoffman didn’t improvise the line “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!” in Midnight Cowboy, he borrowed it from a rat. If you come across some on your walk home, and you will, just keep your head down and don’t make eye contact and you should be alright.
And if there’s a sanitation strike, it might just be best to stock up on canned goods and stay indoors for a while. On the plus side, you don’t have to worry about alligators in the sewers. That’s just a rumor spread around so the rats won’t seem as abnormally large when you first see them.
NYC is the Confidence Murder Capital of the World
While actual shootings and stabbings have gone down in recent years, if anything, the Big Apple’s millennial boom has escalated the rampant slaughter of its citizens’ self-esteem. Everyone here is beautiful, successful, and, in general, doing better than you.
You could’ve been a big fish in the small pond you swam upstream from, but now you’re treading in the biggest ocean on the planet, and no amount of improve classes are going to change that. The grass is always greener, not that you would even be able to see it on the rooftop garden you’ll never afford.
There Is Nothing to Do There
Figuratively speaking, of course. New York is the city that never sleeps, the cultural capital of the world. But if you’ve just spent all day busting your ass so your rent payment will only be a few days late instead of a week, suddenly all those entertainment options aren’t as feasible.
Your friends will love telling others that you live just around the corner from the Metropolitan Opera; they probably won’t mention that the only time you’ve been inside was when the bathroom at the adjacent Domino’s was busted and you snuck into the lobby to break the seal.
Of course, if you look hard enough, you’ll find the pleasant diversions other cities and towns have to offer, like bowling and mini-golf. But they’ll be about as expensive as the Met and infested with those termites of the ironic activity world—hipsters.
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