Andy Nieman

NYC is no longer a city, it is an algorithm. If you live in, say, Cincinnati, when you go to get ice cream with your friends, you really are just going to get ice cream with your friends. In NYC, this is not possible. You cannot just go to get ice cream, because, against your will, you are very self-consciously “someone who lives in NYC, going to get ice cream with their friends, in NYC.” You are never able to achieve full presence of mind because you are constantly placing yourself inside a chapter in some made up, schizophrenic and highly disorienting book. Put another way, as a New Yorker, you do not live in a city, but a massive, procedurally generated simulation of one. You are nothing more than a vapid unit of flesh and bone trapped since a Baudrillardian infinity mirror, where the references have their own references. You become more of a vague concept than a real person—some strange, soulless mix of ambition and violent/sexual impulses—and in your constant confusion you fail to ever become a true subject. You pay $17 for the ice cream cone. Then, you pull out your list of saved Instagram Reels which tell you where to get reservations for pasta later. When you arrive, you find yourself stuck in yet another long line, with people who look just like you. The longer you wait in lines like these, the harder it becomes to ever recover the soul of the person you were before you moved into your East Village studio.

serious question: what is good about New York City? I've never been, though I've been to Paris (several times), London, Rome, Istanbul, Montreal, Boston, San Francisco (but no other US cities)

Just stayed at a hotel in Maryland for work. Turns out their AC units shut off while you sleep as part of some new woke Green New Deal nonsense. It's a terrible policy that's making their state like Europe. Just one more example of why they've never won an SEC Championship.