Nowadays, all I see on my Facebook newsfeed are articles about why people are leaving New York City.
Prices are too high, people are too mean, lack of fresh air, whatever the reasons are.
I could only read so many of these stories before I finally decided to write something back to these schmucks.
On the behalf of my fellow native New Yorkers and other New Yorkers who are madly in love with this city (like myself), here are some reasons why we could care less about you leaving.
First and foremost, we honestly just don’t care. At all
I can’t emphasize this enough.
I’m not writing this because I want you to stay. Please leave, just don’t write articles or memoirs or take videos letting us know about you leaving.
New Yorkers don’t care; we’ve heard enough of the complaining. Most people reading these articles are probably people sitting on the toilet. We don’t have time to read the sob stories.
I mean really, as if we don’t hear enough from the rest of this country always talking sh*t about our city and how it’s “overrated.”
Yes, many New Yorkers haven’t lived anywhere else, but a good amount have-- and still choose to live here
I always keep an open mind about other parts of the world and other parts of the United States. I love to travel, and I love to see new places. I traveled to Alaska this past January and it was a very humbling experience.
But by the end of my travels, I was more than ready to come home to New York City.
To this day, nothing gives me goosebumps like when I’m flying back into New York City; and it’s the same for many other people.
Even driving back into my good ol' Bronx from New Jersey, crossing the George Washington Bridge, gets me excited.
As a teenager, I always thought of how great it would be to leave New York City and have a nice house upstate. Then my mother would just laugh at me and say, "Yeah right, good luck living in the middle of nowhere." My mother knew how much I loved this city before I even did, and being the obnoxious stubborn teenager I was, I applied to go away to school in a small New Jersey town just to show my mom I’m capable of living somewhere else and lovin' it.
It was on that very first night I was away that I knew instantly what my mother had been telling me for years was true. "You’re going to hate it." I called her that same night, apologizing, telling her she was right.
All in all, I’m still happy with my decision because I got to realize at the perfect age that I want to stay in New York City forever and from that moment on, my love for this city only got stronger.
In the words of John Updike, “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."
,People writing these resignation letters to New York City aren't even from NYC
The very first article I read, the author started off by saying he or she grew up in Westchester, a suburban county outside of New York City.
That right there should tell you, you don’t know what the fu*k you’re talking about. But I still gave the piece the benefit of the doubt and continued reading. The article then mentioned how the author’s father came home smelling like MetroNorth seats. Seriously, if you were born and raised in New York City, your parents did not come home smelling like those leather seats.
Westchester is not New York City, never has been, never will be.
If you didn’t attend a public or private schools physically in NYC, you have no right to tell people you grew up in New York City.
The real New Yorkers didn't go out to Broadway plays on a Saturday afternoon-- granted some did and still do, but it's such a small percentage.
Growing up in the Bronx in the 90s, my friends and I would play wiffle ball in the street or manhunt. We would ride our bikes up and down the block, while our mothers screamed at us to watch out for the buses. We played with fire hydrants, because we didn’t have fancy community pools. We watched old Spanish men play dominos, BBQ with their shirts off, and blast music all night long.
There were no Broadway matinees with our parents or our fathers coming in smelling like leather MetroNorth seats, and there sure as hell weren't any stay-at-home mothers. We had both parents coming home from work, with all the stenches of this wonderful city on them. My personal favorite was the smell of stale cigarettes on my father, as he walked in the door with a soda in one hand and old computer parts in the other.
There is so much more culture here than you think you know
All these articles indicate is that privileged people come here, can’t handle it, whine about it, and then leave.
New York City isn’t just bright lights, Broadway shows, and an apartment in the Village that mommy and daddy pay for.
If you want to experience the real New York City, you have to hit every little cornerstone of every neighborhood of every borough-- which to this day, I still haven’t even done myself.
But go to Dyckman and eat Chimichurri off of a food truck; go to the Bronx and eat a slice of pizza on Arthur Avenue; go to Queens and play handball or watch those old Chinese guys play Chinese checkers; go to Brooklyn and look at all the amazing street art or listen to the teenagers freestyling on street corners.
There’s countless things you can do in New York City, so don’t be so quick to dismiss it because you got tired of your good ol' Manhattan lifestyle.
If you don’t like NYC, that’s fine
This city is not for everybody, but stop downplaying it and its people.
There are people who would kill to live here. If you don’t want the excitement and a fast-paced lifestyle, then don’t come here. And don't tell us how much it sucks, because we don't want to hear it. It's that simple.
Sure, the cost is expensive to live here, but that’s the price you pay for its convenience and lifestyle. That’s the big difference between true New Yorkers and those who claim to be New Yorkers.
The true ones, the real ones, will grind and make a living so they can stay here, while the rest give up to go live in the middle of nowhere. That’s fine, go do that-- just don’t try and persuade me to the same, because nobody can ever (or will ever) talk me into leaving this city, my home.
This article was originally published via Angry New Yorker. To read more from this author, visit here.
If you enjoyed this article, check out 7 Reasons Why I Don’t Regret Leaving Florida for NYC (and Never Will)!