keeping your options open

new york city is a place that has everything, or at least it wants to. people come because they can find, be, do whatever. music, hobby, drugs, food, person, art, content.. every type of any thing.

it feels like everything is happening around you at all times. someone, everyone, is doing something—or at least it feels that way. you don't see people at home just existing when you're outside, or in a cafe, so there's a very powerful availability bias at play. freedom is not easy, and having access to everything requires a lot of decisions. all the time, constantly, you have to make decisions. you can do anything, every day, so where do you start? what do you prioritize? what do you _de_prioritize? and also, who.

now this must be true of any urban environment, especially international cities with lots of different cultures and age groups. and these decisions and prioritization strategies are just what it takes to make a life for yourself. but something about the sheer density of nyc, the fast-paced, american, hedonistic energy engulfing you, the subway readily connecting you to any person/place without much effort.. it's different. there aren't many infrastructural obstacles (just money, naturally), so most things boil down to what's important to you, not what you have access to, or who happens to be nearby.

so decision fatigue, in new york city, hits different. very different. as a result, it feels like everyone is always keeping their options open. there's a brutal war between spontaneity and planning ahead, between making commitments and playing things by ear. to maintain access to anything at any time, you must make last minute decisions (unless of course you need a reservation for a restaurant, or a ticket for a show). and it has destructive cascading effects: if you make rough, noncomittal plans for a given time window, because, say, a friend will be in town, the rest of your plans in that time window have to be rough if you want to keep your options open enough to be available for your friend. and believe me: here, a friend is always in town. it feels like i'm trying to observe quantum particles, balancing waves that are constructively and destructively interfering with one another, waiting until they collapse into a single point, an outcome, so i can make a decision.

again, this tension is normal in life, but in new york it ramps up to unsustainable levels. you can resolve this by either making all of your plans ahead of time, or by making all plans by ear. and full sending one requires almost everyone in your circles to act the same way. if you mix and match, you're fucked. and it seems like everyone is fucked. the smoothest way to resolve this (or at least limit your perception of it) from what i've seen is to be part of one or a few large friend group chats with constant spontaneous desire to do things—it seems great for the participants, but they're virtually inaccessible by anyone outside the group(s). the group becomes their entire world, and their ability to make external or one-off connections is reduced to near zero.

it feels like everyone is a different type of busy, and most are incompatible with one another. there's a strange discrepancy between the (very large) quantity of people you meet, randomly in public or through friends, and the (very small) number of people you're able to see again. even when you make surprising, seemingly meaningful connections with people with whom you know you'd be good friends (or more) in another city, it's more likely than not that you will never hear from them again, and you'll never know why (almost every time, there's no reason and it's not about you). for those of us that are eager to prioritize connection, sensitive to the value of knowing other humans, it's heart-wrenching. the overwhelming availability of options and people make it such that anyone outside of your typical flow are extremely difficult to follow up with: if you don't share an activity or a mutual friend, or for whatever reason naturally end up seeing each other regularly, you have to force it into existence, and most of the time there is enough (too much) going on that the energy to make it exist is entirely unavailable. so meeting a random person in public almost never pans out into a relationship, of any sort.

i haven't been here very long, less than a year, and i already have examples for all of these types of people as well as several experiences of missed friendships and potential romance. the only recourse as far as i can tell is to not take it personally, which luckily isn't terribly hard, given the sheer density of social interaction and constant stimulation here. nevertheless, it sucks. it does however reinforce the philosophical truth that i have a fundamentally limited influence over who/what enters and remains in my life, making clear that cultivating authenticity, striving simply for presence without pretense, is the only viable path forward. it's liberating to recognize that energy spent on anything else is futile, as outcomes mostly feel arbitrary. the vibes i emit will attract those that share them, and all i have control over is how i act on my values and express myself to others.

now, i think these problems more or less become irrelevant as you discover and settle into communities and activities, establish long term friends and routines after a few years, and deal with the chaos long enough. i'm in my first year, and the city is hazing me—i recognize that. but this is the social fabric here, and it will simply become the background where it was once the foreground. you can escape it by immersing yourself in the chaos and coming out the other side, however wounded, wisened, and grown, but if you live here, it will be happening around you regardless. and your environment is important. i'm not convinced you can avoid the suffering of your surroundings by establishing good coping mechanisms, though you can maybe find more personally useful or maintainable ways to suffer (coping being a way to achieve that).

one of the hardest parts for me is the need to constantly reorganize my people priorities. it's one thing to be interested in more hobbies than i have the time (or money) for, learning to find the balance between enjoyment, finances, work, social fulfillment, and personal time. but i don't need to grieve much when deciding to prioritize roller skating over badminton. both are fun, badminton doesn't have feelings, and i can always pick it back up later. people are different. relationships involve another human, require attention and intention to maintain, and, preferably, are intimate and meaningful. now, some people enjoy having surface level, activity-specific or environment-dependent friendships (or they've convinced themselves they do and don't examine too closely). i see the value in those relationships of course—climbing partners, clubbing friends, or coworkers, to name a few—but it can't be the majority of people i spend time with. that's more often than not an unhealthy coping strategy that masks a fear of vulnerability and self-examination, creating a paradoxical loneliness—surrounded by people yet connected to none, distracted by the illusion of intimacy with those you neither truly know nor deeply care for.

when i'm simply not that vibe-aligned with someone, it's not that hard to let them go, deprioritizing them in favor of people i'm already close to. but, a blessing and a curse, it's easy enough to find people you are vibe-aligned with here, and once you find some, you find a lot more right around the corner. there are just so, so many people. and so i often find myself in the position of having more potential threads to pull on than i have the time or energy for; already struggling to spend enough time with those i'm already close to, how can i possibly choose someone i don't know over someone i do? well, as it turns out, quite often in fact it seems like there's a good chance the new connection will serve me better than some of my existing ones—we are potentially more vibe-aligned, or i learn more about existing connections and fall out of interest because i recognize we're less vibe-aligned than initially projected. this is when it starts to feel transactional, and shitty. when i'm subconsciously comparing pros and cons of full humans, ones i'm close to, not the superficial ones, deciding to stop giving them my energy and attention, that they're somehow not worth it anymore. i love my friends. i really can't keep people around very long without eventually loving them. and now i'm in the business of having to weigh what everyone offers me with so many contenders for my attention, some of which may turn into lifelong meaningful friendships or romantic endeavors, every one of them an investment and a risk. the overwhelming quantity and frequency of interactions here force human connection into an almost quantitative experience like i've never seen, and i don't know what to do about that, nor how one can accept that and live like this forever. again, i suspect this is just what happens as you mature into an independent adult, but here it's turned up to an untenable degree.

this might be the fundamental tension of new york city: in a place where you can be whatever, meet anyone, do anything, the challenge isn't finding what you want, but choosing to want what you find—learning to commit to the choices you make, even when better ones are everywhere if you just kept searching. it feels like the internet in a place. it's giving "top 10 best backpacks of 2025", on 8 different AI-generated websites, when you already have 3 backpacks that are pretty good in your closet, just not the perfect size for your laptop AND your new book, so then you buy a smaller laptop instead. i can pratice shedding FOMO, being happy with what i have, recognizing and ignoring the facades, and live happily within all the chaos for quite some time, but not forever. the most valuable influence i've seen in all this is the overwhelming demand to learn how to be myself regardless of my surroundings with whoever and whatever i encounter. what i'm not ok with is comparing friends transactionally, having to give up on meaningful connections to prioritize new ones, and having too many to actually pay attention to. i'm not sure how that will develop, and how i find peace in that, but hey, at least it's kind of fun.