I couldn't agree more, I have spent significant time in Milwaukee, Madison, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Austin and the feel and driving factors in each city is vastly different. It's a function of who lives in those cities, what the support network looks like, and how good the competition is. While living in Chicago I worked in futures while trying to get a band off the ground. Compared to other bands and futures workers I/we were average. The problem was that the competition for bands was so weak and the competition for futures traders was so high that when I finally got spit out of both of these I found I was above average as a a futures trader but below average as a musician. Relatively speaking you are only as good or slightly better then the competition. You have to pick the best competition to compare yourself to or you will never grow.
Cities and Ambition
301–310 of 313 posts
Re: Cities and Ambition
#302Your characterization of New York is very much that of a visitor, as it should be. "You should be richer" is not the defining characteristic of New York, it's "you're a minority." For anyone who has lived here for a year or more, the fact that everyone is a minority on some level is what makes New York breathtaking. The New York you're talking about is also a minority. From the outside, Wall Street and Madison Avenue…
While I would agree with your observation that everyone in New York is some sort of minority, and that the city has overall ambitions that are much more varied and interesting than simply "you should make more money," I do think that sentiment is a pretty strong undercurrent in Manhattan. I recently began taking night classes at an art school there, hoping to get away from the obsession with earning more that I felt surrounded by, but on the first night of class, I was bitterly disappointed. The instructor spends his day working for Morgan Stanley, and talks about it often; the general population of the class immediately lost all interest in me when they learned that I'm not currently employed.
Overall, I would say that New York has an abundance of different ambitions, but most of them are permeated by a vaguely corporate insistence on caring about getting richer.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#303I've noticed messages as well: Gary, IN: Lock the doors. Do not stop. Macon, GA: You know, Atlanta is just up the road, right? Elko, NV: The only winners are the house and the mine owners. Milwaukee, WI: Fourth place is just fine, given enough beer. Clearly, I need to hang out in better cities.
Bloomington, IL: Don't be afraid of medocrity
Terre Haute, IN: South side of Chicago, without the rest of it.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#304You sound like a bitter Bostonian who was priced out of New York because you couldn't afford to pay rent on your studio in Alphabet City.
And as a Bostonian, I'd expect you to have enough cerebral instinct to be less transparent with your intuitive writing style. But alas, you all to easily portray your hometown's sad trace of pragmatism by holding ideology over realistic execution, hence why you were probably priced out of NY to begin with.
Another down year on Wall St., yet my bonus alone still affords the Cambridge flat you so wish you could afford to purchase. Hope you grow up some day, and find yourself, cities aside pal.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#305Your characterization of New York is very much that of a visitor, as it should be. "You should be richer" is not the defining characteristic of New York, it's "you're a minority." For anyone who has lived here for a year or more, the fact that everyone is a minority on some level is what makes New York breathtaking. The New York you're talking about is also a minority. From the outside, Wall Street and Madison Avenue…
your post made me smile. i lived in the city for 14 years. there were the uptown kids, boring upper east-side parties, divorcee moms of the upper west, faux-hipster of avenue a, drug kings of Avenue d, pretentious bowery gays, i-bankers who poked at plebeian lawyers, hedge funders who poked at i-bankers and took home their madison ave. girfriends of west village, little chitaly, 2nd tier murray hill post grads who couldn't afford turtle bay, turtle bay types who only used their apartments for sleep, pretentious chelsea boys vs. the "matured" hell's kitchen gays, soho of old, new soho (new jersey), the area of south midtown of low 30's and upper 20's that to this day still has no identity, battery park city's isolation to the rest of the island, forgetting there's a world past 11th avenue.
there really is no one new york when you live in manhattan. if i didn't have a family who loves living out west right by the beach, i would be back in a heartbeat.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#306I think the biggest shift in deciding where to live is happening "online" rather than "offline". I am an online nomad. I never lived and never will live in MySpace. I do not like the MySpacians message (Hey lets try to see who has more friends and hookups). I sometimes spend time at Facebook. I lived there for a little while until I realized I am not so much into keeping in touch and I had no friends in the few hours…
PG,
You sound like a bitter Bostonian who was priced out of New York because you couldn't afford to pay rent on your studio in Alphabet City.
And as a Bostonian, I'd expect you to have enough cerebral instinct to be less transparent with your intuitive writing style. But alas, you all to easily portray your hometown's sad trace of pragmatism by holding ideology over realistic execution, hence why you were probably priced out of NY to begin with.
Another down year on Wall St., yet my bonus alone still affords the Cambridge flat you so wish you could afford to purchase. Hope you grow up some day, and find yourself, cities aside pal.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#307Awesome.
Well, I live in India , always have.
Born and live in Bangalore, a startuper and love doing exactly that.
In India,
Mumbai means money, Bangalore means power(as in the bay area), Delhi means political power, Kolkata is an intellectual's haven so on and so forth.
I guess we dont have a say in where we are born, but most of us do end up "belong"ing somewhere, like, i will feel completely at home at SF. You should write about the other cities too.
Divya
Re: Cities and Ambition
#308An exceptional case, but he makes a good point:
(from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2007/c... )
At a critical time, when I was contemplating leaving Harvard as a faculty member and going to Utah, he, being familiar with my self-sufficiency, counseled me that I could do good science anywhere. The move turned out to be a good decision. In Utah I had the luxury to pursue long-term projects that were not readily possible at Harvard, which, in too many cases had become a bastion of short-term gratification.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#309Having been to The French Laundry in Napa Valley on a few occasions (admittedly none in the last few years), I can attest that they did not require jackets. They certainly did not in January 1998 when three friends and I dined there without knowing anything about it other than having a recommendation from someone at the St. Jean winery, a place that we had stopped at earlier that same day. A kind woman associated with the winery made reservations for our group and told us how to find the non-labeled house. I probably wore blue jeans to one of the best meals of my life... -Loren
Re: Cities and Ambition
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