I live in downtown NYC. I wouldn’t consider FiDi a particularly cool neighborhood. Geographically speaking, I could probably be further from the scene—I’m not in the burbs!—but socially speaking, I haven’t broken in. To be honest, I could not be less interested. 

Yes, there is occasional FOMO. While I moved here for work, when I don’t push myself to be part of the scene, I find myself reflexively asking, “Why am I paying this rent?!”

Yet here I am, perfectly content with not being a part of it, and the scene is perfectly content with not having a part of me involved.

Part of aging gracefully is concerning yourself less with these matters. It also means accepting that you’re not as cool as before. This comes with a less obvious benefit: you see things more clearly, and sometimes more incisively.

There was a post in today’s Deez Links, which covers the NYC scene. While I felt mildly embarrassed about not being a part of the scene, the pseudonymous author suggests that it’s the scenesters who should feel embarrassed about trying so hard to conform to it. They write:

What is embarrassing is your commitment to playing it safe. You’re dedicating the best years of your life to a small circle of people trapped in a loop — checking their edge and asking where the party is — because chasing actual desires is too hard. I’m sorry, but you’re not a person. You’re a cardboard cutout. You’re not part of the real world. You’re no better than the cul-de-sac you came from. You’ve Stockholm’d yourself. You’ve mono-cultured yourself. You built the zoo and put yourself inside it…

All I see is a bunch of young people and a fistful of men edging midlife crisis age, too scared to drop all the posturing and take a real chance on themselves while desperately trying to fight the fact that they’ve pissed away most of their potential for a scene that’s in hospice. I can’t imagine how loud the tick of the clock must be while you rock on your heels, phone in one hand, cigarette in the other, out in the cold, waiting for an invite to a second location that will never come.

How refreshing! It feels right to close off with a poem Kenneth Koch wrote for the New Yorker in 1998:

You Want a Social Life, with Friends

Kenneth Koch

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends—
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends—
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.