Density
More than twice as many people per square kilometer live in New York compared to London—the biggest city I’d known before coming here—and the difference is palpable. You feel it on streets thronging with people: people in mysterious queues, people spilling from restaurants and bars, people on bikes, in cars, and on foot, people with dogs to match outfits, with hats and haircuts of a range I’d not considered, with tattoos, scars, children, totes. Many such people.
On the subway, during rush hours, sensory overload approaches apotheosis. In narrow, dirty cars aflush with people—people smushed together in impersonal intimacy—I notice hands, fine-veined and elegant or calloused and misshapen, nails manicured or gnashed, sneakers, eyes, forearms, screens. Subway copy too: loud and unsubtle. A surprising number of ads for injury lawyers. America, I’m often reminded, is beyond self-parody. Not its fault. As ground zero for most pop culture, of course this place is strangely familiar: the real thing evokes the simulacrum, itself an evocation of something real. Conservatively, I must’ve spent hundreds of hours with media—movies, music, shows, books, games—set in this city. Streets are bleached by their mythopoetic status. All the voices sound familiar.
In recent months the word “ersatz” has cast a shadow over me. It describes something that is a substitute or an imitation—typically one that’s artificial or inferior. Instagram offers ersatz community, connection, companionship. Even its overstimulation is ersatz. In this cacophonous city, the overstimulation is authentic, farm-fresh, home-grown. It frequently smells like shit. Many public spaces are dusted with grime. So many lives in such close proximity creates friction, which creates sparks, which dazzle.
In such conditions, infatuation with strangers feels futile. As a friend pointed out during my first week, living here drives home the impossibility of feeling you know everyone; the somewhat selfish notion that you are a centrepoint sinks in the face of endless centres. Life emanates messily from everyone around me. Constant participation is impossible.
In Durban and in Cape Town, I could sustain an illusion of expansive knowing (the fact that I obviously did not know everyone, not even close, notwithstanding). In those places—relatively small towns by comparison—I recognized the dominant archetypes; buckets into which people could be sorted. Reasonable inferences could be made. Filtering for education, age, interests, and the like, I was typically within two degrees of separation from most of my peers.
Here, there’s simply too much for that to work. How people look is a poor predictor for how they sound, and a worse predictor for what they’re like. The grace of one’s jawline has little to say about the quality of their character. That’s true anywhere, of course, but it feels heightened here, where representatives from every territory on Earth brush against each other.
Still, I notice I naturally turn toward beauty, whatever its form, and naturally tune out its shadow. With an air of mild embarrassment, I avert my eyes at the sight of garbage, urine, one time a flattened rat slotted into cracks on the sidewalk. Maintaining a rarefied bubble is not easy. “Boundaries don’t really exist here,” a local informs me. Indeed, though Americans are notorious among international travelers for being loud and brash, in their own land, it all seems to cancel out. Shamelessness pervades.
Before I got here, I promised a friend that whatever happened to my accent, I wouldn’t turn American in spirit. But I’m terribly impressionable. I notice my boundaries adjusting, expanding outward, as pinched apartments demand my life unfolds in public to a much greater extent than I’m used to. It feels natural enough.
Perhaps due to ancestral ties, I am pathologically nosy (curious, really, nosy is a subset), so when I’m in the mood, I get a kick from overhearing snatches of conversation. There are many to be snatched. I’ve been wandering around without headphones more often than usual, ambient dialogue rolling over me in waves, wearing me smooth. I feel myself to be a roaming camera, taking pleasure when things are well-framed; trying to change my perspective when they’re not.
I’m also trying to stay out of my way. Smart guy, Tharin, but he can talk too much—idle chatter which obstructs the ever-interesting present. I’m reminded of a line from Susan Sontag, who frames eloquence as unnatural, “a byproduct of solitude, deracination, [and] a heightened painful individuality.” I don’t find it painful, for the most part, but I know what she means.
“You must like your own company,” said a youth seeking career advice, when I described my now-itinerant life, and I suppose that’s true. In motion alone, I feel myself constantly flipping between the roles of parent and child: planning outings and making sure he’s had enough to eat, and then being present outside, enjoying the food and the sun. Other times it feels more like dating; we go to the movies pretty often. We are partners, collaborating across time, as if existence were one great group project.
I’m here to amplify my intuition, instil some discipline, quiet my mind. On the way home, weary and passive, I content myself with being privy to private moments, watching expressions drift like clouds across the open skies of strangers’ faces.
Destiny
There’s a sense in which my life to date—varied and blessed beyond reason or belief—has all been prelude, foundation-laying, preparing me to land here now.
There’s also a sense in which that’s ridiculous—a convenient after-the-fact rationalization; a neat story to help process a chaotic, arbitrary world.
I feel in my bones that both things are true, due to the delicate interplay between choice and fate. While creation is fundamentally non-consensual—I didn’t ask to be born, or choose my starting conditions—I have since consented to remaining on Earth, playing the cards I was dealt as best as I can. In this sense, at least on the margin, fate is a choice.
So is meaning-making. The idea that “everything happens for a reason” has never compelled me. In one sense, it’s trivially true: of course everything happens for a reason, that’s how causality works, we can pull back the thread of cause-and-effect—I’m like this because of my parents, who are like that because of their parents, and so on—all the way back to the Big Bang. But the fatalistic inference—that the reasons for which things happen are preordained or cosmically coherent—feels too implausible to supply my life with any meaning.
In recent years, I’ve found the best way to make meaning is through authorial control. Our lives are, of course, stories we tell ourselves, consciously and subconsciously; stories of who we are, what we’re like, what we enjoy, what’s worth our time. We are baptized in narratives, accounting for our roles in the world. I was cast first as a baby, a son and a brother, a grandson, a nephew. I have since taken other roles.
The cultural scripts which structure our experiences from birth are useful. They tell us what’s permissible, what’s desirable. This is how a son should act. This is what success looks like. But without periodic interrogation, they can become claustrophobic. I often meet people who feel cheated, who did what was expected—studied, partied, worked—climbing every ladder laid before them, only to now find themselves at a loss for where to go next.
If you don’t take the time to articulate yourself—Who are you? What do you like? What do you want? How will you get it?—the world will do it for you, and you might wake up one day awestruck by the dissonance between the script you’ve been following and what you actually want; if you can even tell. It’s hard to discern genuine preferences when capitalism is predicated on inculcating material desires, so it may profit from them. Recommendation algorithms in media streaming platforms have removed most of the work of developing personal taste. Instagram and the like are particularly pernicious; an endless cascade of others’ preferences, beating you over the head with glimpses of glamorous lives you may not even really want to live.
Mostly, social media makes me feel agitated, voiceless, and fractured. It’s hard to maintain a coherent story of who I am and what I care about when I’m persistently hypnotized by snippets of others’ successes. Everything feels calibrated to sell me something, which feels asphyxiating.
Thank god, then, that meaning is not something I have to passively imbibe from my sociocultural environment; that it’s something I can define, simply by articulating myself. Anyone can. Open a Google Doc, jot down what you care about, where you’re trying to go, how you might get there…there are various techniques. It’s all perfectly legal. Of course, many things are easier said than done. But so often they are not even said in the first place.
The process is intoxicating—just by writing things down, you can make them real. So I know where I’m trying to go next—New York has no shortage of cultural scripts to tap into—but it’s a provisional knowledge, subject to revision in a few months time, when I’ll zoom out and ask myself again, “does this seem right?”. I have hunches and hypotheses. How delightful to test them.
Most of the stories that structure our lives are invisible, told by our subconscious. And as Jung knew, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Manhattan to the West of Me
This whole city is lousy with iconography. From the rooftop of my Brooklyn apartment building, I can see the Manhattan skyline strung like fairy lights across the East River. My small-town brain struggles. Some days I feel a roiling madcap energy, New York settling on my skin like snow. On others, doubt’s a howling wind; I consider ceding ground to a sense of futility.
I’ve never been this close to the stratospherically successful. The gaps between the people at the top are wider than I knew. Consider by example: for someone of moderate wealth, the least wealthy person they know might be one-fifth as wealthy, while the wealthiest person they know might be five times wealthier. For a multimillionaire, the least wealthy person they know might be one-five-hundredth as wealthy, while their wealthiest peer might be a multibillionaire, five hundred times wealthier. I suspect similar dynamics are at play not just with wealth, but with skill and ability more generally. It’s dizzying.
New York seems to draw some of the brightest people from across the world, and unlike a place like San Francisco, it’s home to the apex of multiple industries, meaning “there are a bunch of different status hierarchies” according to writer David Perell. “Fashion, finance, theater, advertising, media, real estate, and so many more. The status ladders are parallel, not stacked, which relaxes people,” he says. I don’t feel particularly relaxed just yet, but we’ll see; it’s still early. I’m trying to embody my beliefs without letting them ossify. Every day invites fresh battles against petty vices. I’m getting used to all the grids.
I’ve gathered mantras like soft blankets to ward off the cold. Classics like “don’t let the perfect defeat the good,” “words are not the bottleneck,” and “people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in a decade.” I sense how my younger self would’ve behaved differently, let loose in a city this size. I’ve yet to see even a sliver of it; most of my opinions remain reserved for now. I’m in no great rush. I’m trying to move neither too fast nor too slow. I feel the sinew of experience, supple and strong, supporting me.
Sometimes, examining myself in the mirror, I see the features and expressions of the people who raised me—parents, cousins, aunties, uncles, friends—and I get overwhelmed, to think I should be so fortunate to have been shaped by their love. I feel as mercurial as ever, straining against my own edges, buoyantly optimistic one moment, disordered and anxious the next. Most of my loved ones are sequestered in a different time zone, six hours away, which makes for a curious desynchronisation. Some days I text myself, and the robots, more than anyone else.
I get the sense that the person I’ve spent most of my twenties trying to become is giving way to the person I already am. I am in fact a writer, a reporter, a friend. To lay claim to these titles is no great scandal. The game now is to ever-more fully become myself; to let the world work through me, so I may be its vessel. I think often of the scene in Fleabag where, melting down, she says something like “I have all this love, and I don’t know where to put it.” Here, in my work and my still-under-construction life, is one such place.
I’m usually not very good at celebrating small wins. But last weekend I sat on a bench overlooking the Hudson, my sun-beaten backpack curled at my feet, and allowed myself a moment of joy. I’m not here to experience everything all at once. I’ll take my time. After a lifetime spent training, I’ve finally made it to base camp; the real climb lies ahead. But I live a ridiculous life replete with love and romance, and sometimes that’s enough. I think my grandfathers would be proud. I have this sense of carrying a torch steadily forward towards a twisting and uncertain future. There is so much to witness.
