The Great NYC Rationalization

Why people refuse to leave

In the 1983 smash movie, The Big Chill, Jeff Goldblum’s character, Michael, contends to Sam (Tom Berenger) that rationalizations are more important than sex.

Sam pushes back, “Come on, nothing’s more important than sex.” Michael counters with a rhetorical mic-drop: “Oh yeah, have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?”

You might think I’m bringing up The Big Chill to impress my Gen Y readers with the depth of my Reagan-era pop culture fluency, but that’s not it. I mention this memorable scene because, after a year in New York City, dealing with the bone-chilling winter, the nausea-inducing cost of living, and the chaos of sharing space with 8 million slow-walking residents, I have not gone a week without rationalizing our decision to move here. And many of these rationalizations are simply absurd.

The other day, I heard myself saying, “Sure, private school costs $70,000 per kid, per year – BUT THE BAGELS!” As if the availability of warm, circular bread made with magical local water can somehow compensate for the utterly deranged cost of educating one’s child here.*

Living in New York is hard. Not just financially, but logistically and emotionally. So, it’s not surprising that we residents are constantly convincing ourselves that the city’s unique amenities make its costs worth bearing. Thus, the constant self-justifications:

• “Yes, freezing rain falls sideways for 3 months of the year, but the museums are amazing!”

• “Of course, housing costs $2,000/square foot, but I can get Ethiopian food delivered at 3:00 in the morning!

• “Okay, city government is corrupt, ineffectual, and likely to get worse, but where else am I going to run into Richard Kind at a bodega?”

This is why real New Yorkers—and yes, I’ve paid sufficient dues to consider myself one—bristle when visitors chirp, “I just love it – I could move here.”

Oh yeah? Prove it. Show me your elevator-sized apartment with a tub in the kitchen. Break out that $500 bill from your plumber for just for showing up. Let’s see you ignoring the ubiquitous rats and—worse—the mouth-breathing idiots who play their UFC videos at full volume on the Q train.

Baby Boomers Gone Wild: The Big Chill still has

Unless you’re willing to bleed for New York, you don’t truly love it. You like the idea of the city. So, you come to town once a year, stay in a clean hotel, and post a photo of your Playbill and a $34 martini before you fly home to your yard, plentiful personal space, and demographically curated neighborhood. How adorable.

If you’re not willing to seek out the pain—to endure the weather, to have every discretionary dime squeezed from you, to be harassed by crazy people covered in feces—your testimony rings hollow, so keep it to yourself.

The sentiment isn’t intelligent, but there’s a reason for it.

There’s no better example of this urban tenacity than new parents who cling to the city, hauling strollers to and fro their 5^th-floor walk-up. They endure for as long as humanly possible, unwilling to submit to the siren call of Westchester, Connecticut, or New Jersey where square-footage is plentiful, public schools are outstanding, and almost no one takes a dump on public transit.

They suck it up because moving to the suburbs would be a betrayal, not just to the friends they leave behind, but to their identity. It would mean they sold out. It would mean the city broke them.

So they stay. They persist in profound geographic masochism and they rationalize, at least once a week, to convince themselves—I mean ourselves—that the madness is worth it.

Because this is who we are. Because this is where we belong.

And because the bagels are just that good.

Aren’t they?

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*Yes, I know public school is an option, but I have observed that those New Yorkers who have the financial capacity send their kids to either independent schools or one of NYC’s prestigious public magnet schools (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Latin, etc.) into which one must test and beat out every first generation Taiwanese pre-teen who has been studying for the exam since they were a zygote.