the newyorkification of everything

when it comes to finding culture in the digital age, the city that never sleeps finds a way into our dreams

Like a large swath of Americans, I grew up in a small suburban town. College Station, Texas is home to around 120,000 people, not counting the extra 70,000 students that attend Texas A&M University, which the city is built around. I moved there when I was 4 and attended K-12 school, and eventually attended A&M when I finished high school. I lived the first 20-odd years of my life in a town whose biggest claims to fame include Johnny Manziel, Disney-channel star Raini Rodriguez, and the girl who had that really viral tiktok about trying kombucha for the first time. I had a pretty good college experience, and I wouldn’t say that growing up in CSTAT was a bad experience at all. But like most suburban 20 somethings, I always wanted something more. I wanted to go where people were, where vaguely defined things were happening. I wanted to experience culture, for christsakes! I wanted to live in the big city, where everyone knows your name and you can walk to a restaurant that costs $30 per plate. I wanted to live in New York Fucking City.

Of course, you can find these things in pretty much any city anywhere. But as a suburbanite with an honestly pretty limited worldview, I was taken by the idea of living in New York almost from the moment I found out it was a real place. I grew up with gen x parents who consumed lots of New York Media. My mom and I would watch reruns of Friends and Seinfeld after I got home from school - I was absolutely enamored by Monica’s big apartment or the idea of taking the subway to Coney Island. Even recently, when I completed my first full watch of Sex and the City, arguably one of the most important pieces of New York Media ever created, I was obsessed with the idea that I could be Carrie Bradshaw, roughing it in a cozy apartment and going to hip restaurants and clubs each night. Our media is full of stories of Big City Dwellers who live in the Big Apple or a fictionalized version of it. Millions of people live in NYC and with so much culture being created and exported from the there, there’s a reason that it’s considered a caput mundi, a latin phrase which described Rome as the capital city of the world.

New York isn’t the only city that exists in our popular imagination as the Place To Be. LA, Chicago, Paris and London all have romanticized as extraordinary centers of What’s Cool and Exciting, The Place To Aspire To Live. And none of these places are anything they’re chocked up to be in the movies. As the cost of living has skyrocketed in the past quarter-century, places like LA and New York have become the most expensive places to live in the U.S. Influxes of people moving north have only thrown gasoline on the fire of the national housing crisis in our largest cities. Paris can be so disappointing to some tourists that there’s a syndrome for it. Despite their problems, these cities still have massive appeal for people who want to move their for any number of reasons.

I didn’t move to New York City after college. I was up for some jobs there and seriously thought about it, but the cost of living and being far from my friends put me off. I ended up moving to Houston for work at the beginning of August. I was so excited by the prospect of living in a city that, while not perfect, is considered one of the most diverse cities in the country. There’s lots to do here, amazing food, nightlife and tons of stuff to do off the beaten path if you know where to look. So despite all of this, why could I not help but feel like I didn’t do the right thing by moving here? Why did I feel like no matter what, New York was the place I absolutely needed to move to at some point in my future?

I think in addition to the fact that our culture is so saturated by New York-centric media, social media adds another, even more psycholigically damaging layer to the “Place You Need To Be Complex”. Social media lets you see the most curated version of everyone’s lives - whether it’s the picture perfect vacations or the millions of “day in my life as a rich Bushwick socialite” TikToks, you’re inundated with a constant stream of media telling you the best parts of life are happening wherever you’re not. To my 22 year old brain, seeing social media posts of European study abroads, vacations and perfectly coreographed videos of people going out with their friends while I spent my post-college summer alone in my apartment looking for a job made me feel like I was wasting the best years of my life. Did I not make the right friends? Did I waste my time not looking for more study abroad opporitunities that I probably couldn’t afford? Was I settling for a city that was “only” an hour and a half away from me when the best parts of life were really in the far off places I created in my imagination? Worst of all, I was beginning to entertain the idea of graduate school just to see if maybe that would help me end up in one of those cities where I believed Culture Happened. I was making myself miserable thinking that the only way that I could be happy was if I took some sort of vague media job in New York City where I couldn’t afford to rent a broom closet, let alone the huge studio of my Sex and the City inspired fantasies.

I got the chance to visit New York City this past spring. I took a roadtrip with some friends and spent three days sight seeing in the city and I really enjoyed it. I did all the things you’re supposed to do when you visit. I went to the museums, I stared up at all the buildings until my neck hurt, I got lost in the subway and I got yelled at by Elmo in Times Square because I didn’t know you’re not supposed to take pictures of the guys in costumes without paying them. My bad. I fell in love with the city and my trip cemented in my head that it was where I needed to be to make the most of my twenties. But having given it more thought, I realized that I didn’t experience anything that can’t be found most places. In fact, what I really experienced was what capitalism and modern urban planning has deemed to be culture. I spent way too money in shopping centers, I walked around corporate office districts and spent forty-five dollars a plate at food halls. I didn’t do anything off the beaten path, anything I couldn’t experience in any midsize metropolitan area in America. What I and millions of other construed for Culture was really Consumerism sold back to me as Authenticity.

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and various news outlets all contribute to the NewYorkIfication, and more broadly, the Cityification of our society. If you get lots of your culture through the internet, as a good chunk of people do, chances are you follow or see lots of NYC based journalists, writers. You saw lots of articles this summer debating whether Dimes Square Was A Thing (is it? I have no clue and decided that I don’t need to care). There was that incredible New York Times op-ed about how the Gen-Z reactionary catholics like Dasha Nekrasova are part of a new trendy subculture. Local and regional newspapers owned by large media conglomerates regularly beam news from the Big Apple and other cities into our inboxes and feeds, oftentimes making it hard to find out what’s going on in our own cities. As a trans woman, it can feel like all the cool trans people all live in New York City and do ketamine, and the only way I could ever really find queer community is if I pack my bags and go north. Again, none of these things are applicable to the millions of people who don’t live and work in our nations cultural capital. But if you spend anytime online, it can feel like all culture is happening somewhere else, and you’re missing out on it. All you need to do is go out to eat every night, have expensive drinks and mill around places designed to sell you things you probably don’t need. None of this is actually fulfilling. It will never fill the space in my heart that I reserved for the imagined world of my fantasy twenties.

Since moving to Houston, I’ve been trying really hard to ingrain myself into the vibrant culture here. I’ve started to try to orient my digital feeds around where I live, following local businesses and venues I like in order to keep myself appraised of what’s going on in my city. Undoing the damage that cultural FOMO has done to me hasn’t been easy, and I think it’s excacerbated by my own feelings of insecurity that will stay with me no matter where I live. Last night, as I cooked dinner in my small apartment kitchen, I had the incredibly stupid but important realization that living in New York City wouldn’t fix me, just like retail therapy or drugs and alcohol don’t fix me when I’m feeling down either. In fact, living in NYC might alienate me more than anything else. At least in Texas when I feel lonely, my college friends and family are just a short drive away. In New York, I’d be in an incredibly small apartment cooking noodles with no support system. There’s always something happening to get involved with wherever we are, whether it’s the big city or the middle of nowhere. When the internet and politics alienate us from each other more than ever, the most important thing that we can do is try to make real, tangible communities in any way that we can.