5. LIFE IS A GAME; MONEY IS FOR KEEPING SCORE. Whether or not New Yorkers have more money than people do elsewhere, they have fewer qualms about spending it. Any suspicion that putting your net worth on public display might be in poor taste, insensitive to those who have less, is drowned out and dismissed on the grounds that it’s the just reward for hard work and ingenuity. Whatever you’ve got, you earned it. Money talks—and talks and talks.
6. NEW YORK OFFERS THE BEST THAT MONEY CAN BUY. Meaning the Yankees? But even beyond baseball, New Yorkers assume that top dollar guarantees the finest quality. Take medicine, to name only one example—you get what you pay for, so if you’re paying the most, you must be getting the best. Here’s a business idea: a travel agency for medical tourism, not for discount-surgery expeditions to third-world countries but for junkets to Baltimore, Cleveland, or Rochester, Minnesota, where New Yorkers accustomed to $500 office visits and round-the-clock private-duty nurses to cover for the negligence of an overworked hospital staff would find first-rate care at a fraction of the cost they pay at home, in a setting where people are patient, thorough, and kind.
7. NEW YORK IS A SMALL TOWN. New Yorkers take this to be the case because they go to parties year in and year out and see the same people. But despite the familiarity, New York has something small towns don’t: anonymity. Which is great if you’re looking to put your past behind you, but not so great if you’re being played by a guy who claims to travel for work when he’s got a wife and kids uptown. In someplace truly small, the pool of potential victims would be finite, his lies would catch up with him, and he’d be run out of town. And where would he go? He’d go to New York.
8. CENTRAL PARK IS NATURE. Sure it is, the way zoo animals are wildlife.
9. OUTSIDE OF NEW YORK, EVERYONE IS FAT. Not everyone. But okay, lots of people. Here’s the thing, though. Once you’ve lived somewhere else, too many New York women look emaciated, like hypercompetitive, anxiety-plagued lab rats who live on rations and exercise relentlessly to burn off calories.
10. ONCE A NEW YORKER, ALWAYS A NEW YORKER. Though many, if not most, New Yorkers stay a lifetime, they also entertain fantasies of escape, as I have discovered. At parties in the city, I’ve become a lightning rod for would-be fugitives, who maneuver me to a quiet corner and ask if it’s true, that you can slash your overhead and still end up with more amenities someplace else, where money goes farther? They want to know if I’ve found anyone there I can talk to. They confess to looking at real estate when they’re on vacation, tantalized by sunporches, attics, a hammock slung beneath an elm—all for the price of a studio in Harlem. They wonder where I got the nerve. “That took a lot of courage,” a colleague said when she heard I’d moved.
