Paul Graham offers a nuanced comparison of what life is like in different American cities, mainly focusing on New York, the bay area and the Boston area.
Reading the essay really made me think about how much I have been influenced by New York. I have always noticed that I enjoy every peaceful break I get from the city (I spend more than half my weekends away from it), though I get sucked right back in whenever I’m back. It’s not a chase after the power of money, from my perspective, but all that results from it - excessive materialism and consumerism that is just the culture.
Fred Wilson describes NYC as “the never ending chase of “what’s next” whether it be art, music, media, money, shopping, food, nightlife, etc, etc.”
The longer a stretch of time that I spend in New York, the more I end up chasing after these things as well. It takes a certain conscientiousness to self-motivate toward what I feel really matters. Would it be different in a different city? Inevitably. But more powerful than trying to find the right city would be to make oneself strong enough to balance it out.
The article/post reminds me of the beginning of The Departed; Jack says something like he doesn’t want to be a product of his environment, he wants his environment to be a product of him. I like underdog cities because I don’t want to ride a wave, I want to create it, ya know? It’s not just centered around me; ideally, it’d be me and my people doing our thing in an underdog kind of place. I fantasize not only about being an interpreter or purveyor of ideas, but as the source. The only problem with that is that my people are scattered, I am a wanderer, and some of my people think that they want to live in world class cities. Another side benefit of living in an underdog town is that there aren’t well-established notions of social capital. Then people don’t know who you are by what you do (impose an understanding of you based on your recognized type) and therefore people are more friendly to each other.
Oh, and the quality of the more recent Paul Graham essays has been kinda poor. That essay read like, look at all the places I’ve lived.
