I am very ambitious personally, but my ambitions are all personal-writing, painting, doing things to explore being alive. One reason I don't fit in is that I am not competitive at all. Today, I can't think of almost anywhere I would less want to live in than NYC. I'm grateful I didn't because I ended up extremely ill in my 30s and would have had to have come back here.
R56 I wanted to live in NYC 20 years ago when I was young and full of energy. But it's been the environment around me all my life. The culture (if you want to call it that) is interest in policy, history, law, technology, money making, building networks to exploit for personal gain, and acquiring things to show off. My only big gripes about living here are the climate and the lack of any interest in the arts and sciences. as a city of neighborhoods apart from the ambitious assholes who move here for work. I live in Kalorama and I like my neighborhood, and I like the people I like and the rest I avoid. My job isn't as transferrable as various other skilled jobs are. People choose where to live for different reasons.Īt this point, I am middle aged and have always worked in a nonprofit sector that is largely a local industry. Now she is gone and my father is declining physically. I stayed because I am close with my family and my mother was ill for a long time and I wanted to be near. The stereotypical DC person is an import from elsewhere whose career ambitions or educational ambitions brought them here. My sister works in child protective services and I've always worked for nonprofits. My mother grew up here, my father moved here from NC after he got out of the Navy and my sister lives here. R53 As I said above, because I am close to my family. Perhaps you just did not notice those of us who kept our heads down and continued to live and thrive in the city. Fortunately the tides of politics rolled out the flotsam every 4-8 years. I'd snicker as I saw the Preening of the Suits, trying to out-rank each other at Happy Hour at JRs. Yes, the Tracy Flicks (and their male counterparts) of the city were pretentious and annoying but easily identifiable. Yes, you could throw a rock in any direction, and you were bound to hit a lawyer. I also relished the number of different cuisines, and miss the Adams Morgan Festival to eat my way around the world.
I found the city very livable, walkable/bike-able, and surprisingly cosmopolitan with many people with international experiences from living, family or work. I loved my time there, but we grew tired of city life and now live in a rural animal with our dogs. by Anonymousīoth my husband and I were there nearly 30 years (late Carter to early Obama), and neither of us ever worked for the federal government. No one who can tell a story not about the band camp of their job. No one who can talk about anything but the big annual conference that's coming up and the details are leaving them without time enough to shit. No one who has any interests outside talking about politics and watching pundits.
No one who's been anywhere beyond a school trip or a semester in Lincoln, England. No credit card hippies fresh back from 3 years in Ibiza and India. It's the only place I've known where whole conversations start -and end- not with a "Hi." but straight on in to a "What do you do?" and the hand extended so quickly will retract twice as fast and, without so much as a word, you will see the back of your assailant fast shrinking into the distance, hoping for better luck with the next victim, someone who knows someone who knows someone who is in a position to offer them so new job, a quarter ring higher than the last job. It is, in fact, boring as all fuck and twice as smug. It's a beautiful city in some ways, but not that beautiful, and certainly not that interesting. It's being so very fucking impossibly busy doing nothing anyone can put a finger on and no one would much miss if they had to do without. It's the international epicenter of self-satisfaction, of patting oneself on the back, of small dreams fulfilled,of having risen to the middle of something, anything, adjacent to someone who knows someone who knows the chief of staff of some Senator.
Too many such people because they mistake the first non-profit or law firm or accounting firm or consulting agency or government contractor that would have them as the best place to be, the Metro the cleanest, the bars, the people, the best, tippity-top, the cream of the crop, top drawer, special. So many people who were the first in their families to leave for university and internships and jobs in DC.