Goodbye to you, 5 reasons why New Yorkers don’t give a shit you’re leaving New York City

Now -a -days all I see over my Facebook timeline are the same articles being shared about why people are leaving NYC. Prices are too high, people are too mean, lack of fresh air and so on and so forth. I could only see so many of these articles before I finally decided to say something back to these schmucks. On my behalf of my fellow real New Yorkers and people who are madly in love with this city like myself, here are some reasons why us New Yorkers could care less about you leaving.

First and foremost we honestly don’t care. 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. New Yorkers don’t care; we’ve heard enough of your complaining. Most people reading your articles are probably people sitting on the toilet. We don’t have time to read your sob stories. Like we don’t hear enough of the rest of the United States always talking shit 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 in New York. 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 can give me goose bumps like when I’m flying back into New York City; and it’s the same for many people. Even driving back into the good ole Bronx from New Jersey, crossing the GW gets me excited. As a young teenager I always thought of how great it would be to leave New York City and have a nice house upstate and 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 to show my mom I’m capable of living somewhere else and loving it. It was the very first night I was away I knew instantly what my mother had been telling me for years. 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 and from that moment on my love for New York 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 are not even from New York City. The very first article I read the author starts off by saying I grew up in Westchester, a suburb outside of New York City. That right there should tell you, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. But I still gave it the benefit of the doubt and read it. The article mentions how the author’s father came home smelling like Metro North seats. Seriously, if you were born and raised in New York City your parents do not come home smelling like leather Metro North seats. I can’t even begin to explain how much this article makes my blood boil. Westchester is not New York City, never has been, never will be. If you didn’t attend New York City public schools growing up but did attend Westchester schools, you have no right to tell people you grew up in New York City. The real New Yorkers don’t go out to Broadway plays on a Saturday afternoon, granted some do, but they’re not coming in from Westchester with their suburban family. Growing up in The Bronx in the 90’s my friends and I would play baseball in the street or manhunt. We would ride our bikes up and down the block while our mothers screamed at us to not get hit by buses. We played in fire hydrants because we didn’t have fancy community pools. We watched old Spanish men play dominos, barbeque with their shirts off on their fire escapes, and blast salsa music all night long. There was no Broadway matinee with our parents or fathers coming in smelling like leather Metro North seats and stay at home mothers. We had both parents coming in from work with all the stenches of this beautiful city. My personal favorite the smell of the 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 show is that privileged people come here, can’t handle it, whine about it and leave. New York City isn’t just bright lights, Broadway shows and an apartment in Greenwich 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 haven’t even done but I explore new spots weekly. Go to Dyckman and eat a chimichurri off of a food truck; Go to The Bronx and eat pizza made by Albanians; go to Queens and play at a handball park or watch old Chinese men play Chinese checkers; go to Brooklyn and look at all the amazing street art or teenagers free-styling on corners. There’s countless things you can do in New York City so don’t be quick to dismiss it because you got tired of going to your expensive Broadway shows.

If you don’t like the city that’s fine. It’s not for everybody, but stop down talking it and stop down talking the people. There are people who would kill to live here and you people come in and try to shit all over the name of this great place. I’ve had enough of it. If you don’t want excitement and a fast pace lifestyle don’t come here. Sure the cost is expensive to live here but that’s the price you pay for convenience and this wonderful lifestyle. That’s the big difference between real New Yorkers and those who claim to be New Yorkers. The real ones will grind and make that 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, because not even my closest friends and family members can persuade me to leave.