I've done it all - I've met new interesting people, explored K-town bars, found that hidden speakeasy jazz restaurant to where I take all my friends from out of town. But when I left my summer in the City, I couldn't help feeling both the feeling of being so sensually alive yet consciously lost - leaving me conflicted about the city that never sleeps.
No, it's not that the subway commute, nor the hot summer in NYC that had gotten me down. (Even though my apartment didn't have AC and twenty flies were stuck on the kitchen ceiling because my roommate forgot to throw out his trash).
Cities reflect a constant sense of contradictions that leaves me uncertain of what I have become. It questions me about who I want to be. Being dressed up in business professional gave me a false sense of importance — that I am doing something meaningful. But I know I was not. I was a disposable body in this endless sea of people working on Wall Street, doing the same work with little creativity. Even starting artists, while drenched with creative passions, may see that their hard work has little impact on the outside world.
Yet, this is New York City! With its New York energy. I am among so many different characters from different places, working at the same block, at the same time. This is where anyone can be anyone.
I watched a Washington Square Park party spontaneously break out at 12:00am. Dance performers, immigrants, and white-collar workers dancing together. I shared an apartment with a cs student from South Korea, an aspiring physician assistant, and a successful casting director from Mumbai, India.
Yet, even with all this found success, the city is the epitome of income inequality. CEOs are in buildings right next to the homeless. And every day when I pass by a person asking me for money on the way to work, I feel an internal conflict. Do I give? Would it matter? Would giving money help in the long term? Should I buy them food instead? Is it wrong for me to have financial security in my life? Should I feel guilty to have spent 4 dollars on my Bibble & Sip lychee foam tea? Am I a bad person for walking away each time?
It's not that I don't care. It just feels that the problem is too great. It's probably a common feeling, the thought that just because I can't fix the greater problem, I am not part of the issue.
Meanwhile the skyscrapers and the skylines glow in the distance. The city itself is an engineering work of art. And yes, while the subways are beyond dirty and the age of the infrastructure is certainly showing, it is still unfathomable how people made such a city a couple hundred years ago.
But with all concrete structures, footsteps here make less of a difference. I am in a man-made bubble that matters little to the outside world. My footsteps won't change the concrete surfaces I walk across. In the desert, on soil, one footprint can make an impact on a whole micro-ecosystem. My movement there impacts how the wind and sand flow through the air.
Here in the city my footprint on the physical land is diminished. I just hope that it is not an omen of my work's footprint on the world.
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