5 years in New York City
Trying to live up to the ambitions of my younger self.
When I moved to New York in 2021, I submitted an essay about Manhattan to a literary magazine that I had no business writing.
To my surprise — and despite my lack of published essays and actual years in Manhattan — they published the piece.
I had written a love letter to a city I did not yet know.
I described the place with both the confidence of a lifelong New Yorker and the ignorance of someone who had just arrived.
(You can read the full piece here.)
Five years later, I read it with a strange nostalgia and tenderness.
So much has changed. In more ways than one I am not the same person who authored it.
At any rate, I do in fact now feel like a New Yorker. And while I write about business and finance each day, the city has kept my literary spirit nourished nonetheless.
The mythology of New York is old enough to have real texture and weight.
Writers have always been especially susceptible to it.
Literary types come because Whitman walked these streets. Baldwin sat in its bars. Didion named its particular dread so precisely you could feel it in your chest like a cold.
They (we) come because they have read too many books set here and not enough set elsewhere, and because somewhere in them lives the half-conscious belief that proximity to greatness is the same as achievement.
I arrived with ambitions I had not yet stress-tested against reality.
The city, I had decided, would do the testing for me.
It’s true you are not special here. I got that right in 2021. But it turns out to be clarifying rather than deflating.
Everyone around you is also trying. Some are failing. Some are succeeding at things beyond imagination.
As I wrote in 2021:
“Much of the allure, I think, comes from the same romanticism of Paris or Hollywood — the promise of being a star among stars and the fear of ignoring a talent you are certain is unique to only you.
…there’s something hopeful about looking up at skyscrapers while bumping shoulders with anonymous millions. The city gives me a sense of optimism that shields me from self-doubt and brings out a certain innocence in me.”
Half a decade and a few apartments later — Upper West Side, Upper East Side, midtown — I can confirm the indifference is real.
The skyline does not adjust for new arrivals. The subway does not wait. The throng of office commuters will walk straight through you if you linger too long.
And yet something about being genuinely unimportant to a place so alive turns out to be its own form of liberation.
The city is too large and too indifferent to sustain your self-consciousness or insecurities.
That, I think, is what I was calling innocence. Not quite naivety, but the loosening that happens when the pressure of your own ambitions gets outweighed by the sheer scale of everything around you.
There’s another line from that essay that has stayed with me:
“It’s a place where anything is possible, not so much because you are capable but because the city demands capability from you.”
New York is an intensifier, not a giver. It amplifies what you bring.
Meanwhile Paris aestheticizes failure and Hollywood is organized so thoroughly around stardom that even its casualties tend to perform it.
New York has no such sentimentality.
It just keeps moving.
If you allow it, the city absorbs you into its forward motion. And even if you don’t, it swallows you up anyway.
That relentlessness is democratic in a way that is both clarifying and, with the right lighting, motivating.
Five years is not really a long time but it feels so when measured against the expectations you set as a much younger person:
“If I discover I can make it in New York City, I doubt I’ll want to try to make it anywhere else afterward.”
I have not become the writer I imagined when I moved here.
I don’t have a great American novel to my name. I haven’t written fiction in years. The only chance my name gets mentioned in the same sentence as Hemingway is if I’m spotted reading one of his paperbacks on the train.
It isn’t at all a bad thing I have become something different than expected. That is it’s own gift.
Still, reading my own words back today reminds me that I am still working to live up to the ambitions of my younger self.
Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Media | Host of Full Signal