new york & indecision

New York is an amalgamation of things, and perhaps that is both its greatest strength and its biggest weakness. Geographically speaking, it’s a small island - perhaps not even a speck on a worldwide map - but in the thick of the city, it feels as if you’re in the center of the world; ten million people squished together on a chunk of land not even 3 miles wide with nowhere else to go … it is the center of everything, but it also feels incredibly isolated.

New York is a transitory place. Everything always seems to be in motion, and nothing ever seems to stick. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that I’ve recently thought a lot about. I don’t know many people that move to New York to spend the rest of their days there; everyone views New York as a one-time thing - a couple years in your 20s - but never a destination. You go to New York to experience it. And once New York has experienced you, it spits you back out, and you’re all the better because of it.

The choices in the city are endless, whether it’s the choice between a coffee shop or a restaurant, a friendship or a relationship. Just as how one cannot decide whether to leave New York or to stay, the same choice paralysis seems to plague the city’s inhabitants for every decision. When presented with so many options of everything, how does one choose? How does one stake their claim on one thing and forgo the rest? Everything comes at a price, and that price is the next best thing. With so little time, the dangers of choosing the ‘wrong thing’ - even something as miniscule as a restaurant reservation – seem insurmountable. 

I recently visited New York, and the plethora of options seemed to be a common issue. I happened to be in the city at the same time as a friend’s birthday, and I was pleasantly surprised by the number of potential friends that I met. I loved every person that I talked to, and if I actually lived in the city, I would have most definitely asked them all to hang out again. 

I shared a taxi with one of these newfound friends on the way home. “Is it hard to make friends here?” I asked. 

“Yes, it is,” she lamented. “You meet so many people here, but it’s hard for anything to actually stick. Everyone has their own lives and other friends, and people like the façade of always being busy.”

I thought about all the people that I have met in passing in the city, and I could understand the distance. It’s easy to feel like you have acquaintances in a place like New York, but it’s hard to feel like you have friends. The city seems to morph the definition of ‘friendship’, where simply being around someone automatically equates to one. Even in the sea of people that is New York, I’ve had times where I’ve never felt lonelier. Everyone’s watching everyone, and the options are endless. In an island with so many people and so many mutuals, doing anything alone feels absurd. Why eat a meal alone, when you could call up any one of your slew of acquaintances? 

From an outside perspective, dating also seems like an impossible feat. All the men that I’ve ever met in New York have been veritably uncommittable, and there seems to be a common fear amongst the 20-somethings that you are always missing out. It’s scary enough to confess to someone that you don’t want to be with anyone else, and in a place with a range of back-up options, why stake your claim at all? It is completely possible to always be in a state of easy limbo, simply bouncing from one person to the next, without ever having to utter those three ugly words.

This choice paralysis can be seen in something as simple as choosing a dessert place. After grabbing lunch at Raku (dare I say that the udon there is the best, and there is no comparison), my friend and I set out in search of dessert. I searched up ‘dessert near me’, and almost a hundred small red pins popped up in the blocks around me. I mindlessly scrolled through cafes and patisseries and gelato shops without a single way of differentiating any of them. I didn’t know what I wanted, and Google maps didn’t know what I wanted, either. My friend and I started aimlessly walking down the street in hopes of stumbling upon a hidden gem. 

We got lucky, and we came across Schmackary’s Cookies.

I was quite hesitant before entering the store that boasted ‘Broadway’s top cookie.’ Was this what I really wanted? Was there another place that was even better? Could this be a waste of our time and money? If it weren’t for my friend, valiantly ushering us inside the small storefront, perhaps we would have spent the rest of the afternoon in the same pointless daze. 

Schmackary’sturned out to be perfect for what we were looking for. It was quick, which I appreciated because I had to leave to catch my train soon. As an added plus, it was cheap (I’m sure the struggling artists of Broadway are probably not regularly buying cookies from Levain). My friend and I sat on two stools in front of a wide window, contently dunking our warm, gooey cookies in cold milk and watching the passerby. 

I feel like it’s a common sentiment in the city - and perhaps all other places - to get lost in search of the ‘best’ thing, when ‘best’ is unquantifiable. The criteria list is subjective, and some things cannot be compared. For what we wanted at that moment, Schmackary’s was the best dessert place in all of Manhattan. 

Of course, the range of options has its beauty: the people are diverse and the chance that you meet a potential spouse is high just based on sample size alone; but on the flip side, existing within such a massive sphere of eligible singles makes the chance of turning nothing into something almost an impossible task. There is no fear of scarcity, but there is fear of the wrong decision. Scarcity should never be the reason for dating, but I find the existence of it to make affection all the more interesting and meaningful: there is no ‘next best option’; there is only this and nothing else.

Life in the postmodern age is fast and unforgiving, and it makes sense that we have learned to not dwell on the mediocre and to always be in search of the best. The Internet, with its dating apps and online reservations, has only made the number of options even higher. There is both beauty and ugliness with choice: we can experience the most amazing things in life because of it, but we can also be grossly gluttonous at the same time.

My hometown, Ohio, has the opposite phenomenon: things there are good because you are told that they are good. The restaurants in a 10 mile radius of my neighborhood do not venture far from the regular Olive Garden or Chili’s - in fact, these restaurants and their archetypes were the only places that I could imagine going to on a Friday night. I celebrated my sweet 16th at the Cheesecake Factory because that was one of the most upscale places that I could think of. I thought the avocado egg rolls were so delicious that even Eve could not possibly resist the temptation (I later went back to Cheesecake Factory a couple years later and had a noticeably different experience). 

But had I stayed in my same quaint hometown, I may have never figured myself out. 

I would have never experienced the joy of eating fresh hand-pulled duck noodles from LanZhou LaMian in Atlanta, and I may have never had the privilege of dancing in a sea of sweaty bodies to Calvin Harris at Creamfields in Hong Kong; nor would I have been able to experience the Boston Public Garden on a sunny afternoon in August or meet people that complement me so well in both experiences and values that they would become friends and lovers that I could not imagine life without. Perhaps I have been greedy in my 22 years thus far … but the beauty of these moments and these people alone are enough to remind me of their rarity.