I grew up in New Orleans. I went to college in Philadelphia. I moved to Boston for 6 years, during which I logged about 100,000 miles a year touring across the US. What felt like normal was being on the go for weeks at a time. Eventually Boston got stale, and I almost moved to San Francisco. I barely escaped moving to Chicago, too, but I thought better of those options.

And in 2002, I moved to New York City. Brooklyn. A year later, to Manhattan.

I never thought that I could spend so much time in one city, in one place. I thought the road would always be a part of my life. New York City showed me the value of going deep, not wide. It also showed me how much I love being in the city. I was watching the New York Philharmonic recently with 50,000+ strangers on the Great Lawn. There’s still nowhere else I’d rather be than here.

Where Would You Go?

A friend posed this question to me: “If you had to move, not for money reasons, just because you were forced to leave New York and resettle- where would you go?”

I had no answer. I couldn’t think of another city where I would move. It’s a pretty amazing feeling, knowing that you’re in the right place. New York City, this endlessly interesting place I call home, though, is really where it’s at- and no other city has ever gotten close.

Don’t get me wrong. The outdoors is something else. Years of summer camp, two summers helping to lead hiking tours in Israel turned me into a desert enthusiast. Walking in the forest is fun, RV trips are incredible, and tent camping is a pleasure that it took having kids to discover. Mountains, rivers, vistas, little creatures, and trees. How I adore trees.

But trees are in Cities, too. And I just love cities more. Paris. Barcelona. Munich. London. Tel Aviv. Pierre, South Dakota. Lima, Ohio. Everywhere I go, I expect to find what makes a place special, what makes it different, what makes its people interesting and unique.

I can’t say that that expectation has proved true everywhere. AirBnB has sucked the life out of a lot of neighborhoods and cities across the world. Or maybe, I hate to say it, some places just don’t have a strong-enough sense of identity. They fight the tide of Instagram, of universal social media access to fashion and culture, and the threat of homogeneity. Bars, restaurants, clothing all starts to look the same. What is left are accents, geography, landmarks, history, and most importantly, the people. Because it’s not the place that makes it special. It’s the people that make the place special. And if a city isn’t attracting the right people, it’s sunk.

No tech founder intended to erode a sense of place. No Bay Area CEO thought that a monoculture would emerge from everyone looking at the same influencers. Yet here we are. It’s the United States of Generica in a way.

We are not meant to live alone, and we certainly hate feeling alone. And we can’t really get through this life alone, anyway. It really does take a village.

As a broader society, we react against this unintentional pressure to conform to norms, new and old, in different ways. We strive to be unique: We get tattoos. We try to give our children names that not everyone share. We encourage the impulse for our fellow he/she/them’s to follow their truths.

How is it all working out so far? The results are mixed. While we strive to have a sense of place that is unlike anywhere else, it gets harder to find. Mark Twain had it right more than a century ago. You don’t want to be Cleveland. You want to be New Orleans, San Francisco and New York. These days, no one seems to want to be San Francisco, either.

Easy vs Hard

My brother Judd used to say, “In New York, the hard things are easy, and the easy things are hard.” Even he moved away eventually to live on a different island, one with a beach and a little warmer weather. I suppose he had the hard things handled.

Over twenty years here, technology has succeeded at making the easy things less hard here: Online shopping, getting around, and car renting services are some of the things that come to mind. It hasn’t dented New York’s uniqueness. Not one bit. And it really has nothing to do with making it easier. We love New York in part because it lays down a gauntlet that, if you get through, you know you can do anything.

What’s Next?

The question I get asked most often is this: “What is going to help New York come back?” They complain about the grit, the current bout of homelessness, the cost of living, the empty office buildings, the changes to quality of life.

Does New York need saving? I’m not sure it does. New York needs only to be itself. New Yorkers need only to be authentically New Yorkers. We have nothing to prove. We have everything we need to thrive, to create the newest version of New York. The city that gives as many people as possible the chance to make it here, and make it anywhere. The city that lifts up the weird, the focused, the creative, the striving, the hard-charging, the blunt, the loud-mouthed, the ambitious.

I celebrate anyone who makes a go of it. I can see it in their neon-lit eyes in the morning on the subway, in their dimmer eyes at the end of a day of looking at computer screens, in their far-off looks on the street, as they contemplate what was and what’s next.

New York is perfect just as it is. It’s just sometimes a bit harder to see it. Look a little harder, please. And never stop believing.