It’s very easy to make fun of New York and the artists who flock to it.

Ironic fixed gears; misappropriated plaid; male cutoffs and career baristas; an excess of profound utterances and an absence of thought. Add to this well-practiced angst, deep-rooted entitlement, and basically most of the shit on Girls.

But of course, this is a stereotype. While it carries a kernel of truth, it’s also a mean-spirited exaggeration, levied by certain groups of people against something alien and unknown.

It also comes from a place of fear: financiers and everyday breadwinners and government-minded folks like me, residing in a world of material cause and effect, do not want to allow the thought that these people with their heads in the clouds have found a way to live life better. We can’t allow the thought, at least without also questioning whether our own paths are the right ones.

Every time I’ve taken a stab at entering or even understanding this world, I’ve bounced back off it. I walked for hours around MoMa gazing slack-jawed at colored polygons before finding an exhibit on the horrors of war, which I could understand. My appreciation of poetry ends in the late 19th century, and my interest in painting stops around the point the subjects stopped looking like people. I’ve put down Kerouac – “damn dirty self-indulgent hippie tripe” – three times, which in retrospect is just kind of embarrassing.

But I’m also sure there’s something there, something I haven’t really found. Wandering around New York this weekend – through neighborhoods whose sunny cafes and tiny walkups have long been a global intellectual, literary, and cultural locus – it was impossible to escape the sense that in some way those starving artists have a good thing going. It’s something you miss if your intellectual interest and professional passion sink too deep into straight facts and figures, your leftover leisure time mopped up by Netflix and all the little banalities of life.

I’ve talked about the sense of opportunity cost before; I’m sure I will again. It’s well and good to feel, generally, that you’re on the right path, but it’s difficult not to think of the other adventures that each day pass you by. Even if you do slay the Economist on the reg – make a splash, master your finances, and have a kickass family – that Brooklyn-bound novelist inside you quietly shrivels away to nothing. You never really know who that other person could have been.

As for New York, our most storied, self-obsessed, and interesting city, the last word goes to E.B. White:

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will remain forever elusive.

Add me to that choir.

Header courtesy of Elena Romanova.