The Call of the City

Make it to the big city, or die trying

New York’s a strange sort of town. I grew up next to it. For my entire childhood, it was the only city I ever knew. I thought all cities were like that. Full of life all the time, hustle & bustle, a million people doing a million things, all with the aroma of trash hanging sweetly in the air.

I was disappointed when I moved out West and found out that not all cities are like New York. Standing in the middle of Union Square in San Francisco, a couple weeks after starting college at Stanford, I convinced myself it must be a national holiday, because I couldn’t find any of the people I thought would be there, teeming about.

For a kid growing up in New Jersey, there really are only two places: the City, and everywhere else that wishes it were the City. The City casts a wide shadow over everything. It’s where you go for special occasions. It’s where your dad works. It’s where your older siblings go to school, where they go to escape the confines of a boring suburban life, where they get drunk, cut loose, live life.

I’ve got two kinds of friends from those days now. The ones who made a life in The City, who worked up the grind to find their little corner in the madness, and those who, for whatever reason, never really cut it there.

For a long time, I thought “cutting it” meant having the competitive drive, the raw talent that it takes to succeed in or survive in the teeming pit of humanity’s most ambitious. Because that’s what defines a city more than anything else. More than its skyline, more than its food, more than even its people, a city is a city because of ambition.

Human beings are not meant to live in confined spaces. We grew up as free-roaming, nomadic hunter-gatherers. The wide open space calls to us, in a way that the claustrophobic settling of a city with its cramped apartment boxes and traffic and constant sensory stress do not. But then why are more and more of us moving to cities?

It is one of the biggest trends in the last couple hundred years: the great migration of human beings from the open spaces they lived in for most of their existence to cities. The urbanization of the human species has had profound consequences on our condition of life and our impact on the planet and the environment. Cities support the existence—not the thriving but the bare-bones existence—of more people than a plot of land the same size did before. It is a concentrated delivery point for all the resources a human being needs to survive, even if those resources they get there are of sub-optimal quality.

We have urbanized because we industrialized. The technology and advancements of industrialization are only possible with the advent of specialization—or as the father of the whole thing (Adam Smith) called it, the division of labor. When we lived on our own, in small agrarian communities, we were generalists, because we had to do everything ourselves. We butchered our own meats, repaired our own tools, planted our own crops, even churned our own butter.

But today, most of us can do at most one thing, and one thing only. We depend on others to provide us all the other things we need to survive. We depend on trade.

Trade happens faster and more efficiently the closer people are together. Distance makes the cost of trade high—you have to spend the time traveling, at least. Density makes it easy: everyone you need to trade with is a literal stone’s throw away. Collaboration is easier, too. Groups building a specialized thing together form, they call themselves companies. They grow. Each one of them specializes in part of what the group needs to do, to succeed in the market of trade. That usually means making something people need. That is better than any one of the options on its own. “Better” is more than the sum of the parts, but the parts to play a critical role. Each one must be done well, by an expert in that narrow domain.

The more people who move to cities, the narrower their field of expertise becomes. The deeper enmeshed in the web of dependencies they become. They are highly skilled, at least in that one thing, but their skill can’t let them survive on its own. They need someone to give them a job, to employ that skill, to get paid so they can go buy all the other things they actually need.

Imagine you have just a single tool. Maybe a nail file. That’s all you have, except it’s one of the best nail files in the world. It does the job perfectly in just a pinch. None of that filing, slowly, idly, randomly nonsense. This makes perfectly shaped nails almost instantaneously.

You’ve spent your entire life learning how to use this nail file. You spent most of your childhood learning all the steps leading up to it. Thousands were the files, were the various theories that emerged over the years about the best way to file nails, from people who spent a lifetime thinking about it.

Then you get to work. You started filing nails. You were good, even from the start, but with practice, you got a lot better. People paid you. You got more and more customers. To do that, of course you had to be around a lot of people. But that wasn’t a problem, because to pursue your career as a nail filer, you moved to a city, and there are plenty of nails to file there.

Here’s the problem though. You can’t eat nail files. You can’t cobble together filing and make a house. You have to exchange this very specialized skill for money, which then you can use to get all those things you need. So you need two things. You need enough customers to pay you well, who generate enough need you’ll file. And you need enough people selling enough of the things you need to buy to survive.

If you could sit in the beauty of the wide open space and ply your trade and meet your needs, you probably would. But you can’t—or even, if you could, you got this burning ambition to do more than just meet your needs. Either way, you end up in the city, with a highly specialized skill in search of buyers.

This is what happens in the world today. Young people over-indoctrinated into the belief they need a specialized skill set to survive. They spend most of their youth developing one. They work and work and work away to become ever more refined, ever more specialized. They suppress the natural human curiosity, to ask questions about unrelated things. Instead, they sit there, textbook open in front of them, and learn one more incremental thing at a time.