Gratefulness vs. Dignity.

Manhattan Life 2024

When I moved back to New York in the summer of 2023, I began a hellish apartment search in Brooklyn and Manhattan. While working full-time and living with my parents in the tenement apartment where I grew up in Soho, I viewed and applied for countless apartments. September was an endless barrage of highly invasive paperwork, garbage-stinking stairwells, and tiny studios crowded with prospective tenants, the air ripe and mildewy from the still-wet towels of the current occupant. Sketchy brokers assured me it was normal to have no oven or buzzer. No one needs to cook at home in New York City, one assured me. “I bet you’ll be so excited about the neighborhood; you’ll eat out every night!” they said.

I pictured the person they seemed to expect as a tenant and envied her: an enthusiastic 25-year-old FIT graduate student with inherited wealth, lots of tiny purses and brunch dates at Sadelles.

One day, I went to see a newly-renovated studio in Chinatown—a windowless fluorescent-lit box of a room, reminiscent of an asylum’s isolation chamber, I anxiously told the broker, Mike, “I make $70k a year.”

Mike sucked his teeth. “You a teacher or social worker or something?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’ll find you a roommate.”

“I don’t want you to find me a roommate,” I said.

“Look,” he said, “there are some landlords who might like that you’re low-income. A woman with a good income, she’s gonna be demanding, ask for repairs. You? You’re gonna be grateful for what you have.”

“OK,” I replied hopefully. I was so desperate, this comment gave me hope.

Some weeks later, a family friend who owns the apartment building across the street from the building where my parents live offered me a unit at a slightly discounted rate. And as Mike suggested, I was grateful to her. I am grateful to be permitted to spend 85% of my paycheck on rent. I am grateful to be in a perpetual, highly contentious conversation with this woman about the cost of minor repairs such as my broken fridge, my broken toilet, the roach I found in the sink, and the top lock, which simply fell off the door frame when I tried to lock it. But I try not to complain too much because afterall, I should be grateful.

A year ago, while living in Berlin, nannying for 16 Euro an hour, and bartending for 11, I could have only dreamed of making 70k a year and moving back to New York. Shouldn’t I be grateful? There was a woman I knew in Berlin—another expat with a British passport, PTSD, and a coke problem—who told me she “practiced gratitude.” In her apartment, there was a hallway covered in yellow Post-it notes expressing gratitude to some elusive higher power for small joys such as the opportunity to see a specific DJ at Berghain, a delicious ice cream she ate, a sunny day, or a visiting friend. “It really changes your mood,” she told me. So, I tried it. I was cripplingly depressed and unmoored and dissatisfied with my life. “I am grateful to have somewhere to live,” I tried. “I am grateful to have US citizenship and legal residency status.” I was grateful, usually for basic necessities. Sometimes I was grateful for a croissant. But who was I grateful to? God? The government? A landlord? Chance? I quickly gave up this practice, along with the equally nebulous oil-pulling.

Lately, I feel lucky and happy and in love and still, when I wake up in the morning, there is this vague, persistent dread. I’m kind of trapped and anxious, but this anxiety just seems to be the norm in New York, or maybe in the United States. Please allow me to explain this anxiety and dread:

There is an anthropology opening on my block in Soho, which indicates to me that Soho is entering a new low-brow mass consumer era of prohibitively expensive mediocrity. This neighborhood is no longer chic. But that’s not the problem. The problem is I think, I am living in the epicenter of some dystopian state-of-the-art AI-driven marketing experiment.

Across from the Anthropology is the Vesuvio Playground where I learned to swim and ride a bike. I remember the neighborhood kids of Italian and Portuguese immigrants, the mob bosses, and a rotating cast of local eccentrics—artists or delinquent artists picking used coffee cups out of trash cans. If you’ve read this newsletter before you know how I feel about the current residents and tourists who populate the neighborhood—how I loathe the frat boy shoe designers and girl bosses who circle the block, loudly recapping an office drama that occurred on their “team.”

The problem is the contempt I feel for the people around me. The problem is I am indistiguishable from them. The Tiktok algorithm leads me to the same coffee shops and sandwich places for the same fad items the tourists are lusting after. The employees at these places are overworked and exhausted, often stoned on edibles purchased from one of the five million illegal Orwellian dispensaries on every street. I like to remind the workers at local businesses I am native to the area as if it sets me apart. But I too breath and dream consumerism. We all know there is nothing personal about Soho except for the efficacy of America’s highly personalized ads in action.

Every weekday morning I commute to work in Brooklyn. This is the daily routine: Wake up weary but hopeful. Skincare and olive oil shot, adaptogen mushroom supplements, and homemade sourdough toast. Lovely. So far, Ok. Then fashion people buying coffee. Unhoused people sleeping by the F train entrance. Disaster begins on the train platform with idle use of Tiktok. I have become German in my sensitivity to noise-polution. Board the train and delay on the bridge cus of a…signal? sick passenger? suicide? Back on my phone I browse images of starving children in Gaza and detonated land, and a clip of an ex-military officer (or something) screaming at parliament in Hebrew but it’s still loading. “You are fools!” he is shouting. In the next reel, Jared Kushner is talking about opportunities for a beachfront development and “if you could just move the people.” Then, in the stalled train car where I sit, a slew of South American asylum seekers and their children sell chocolate bars and I lower my eyes in shame as they approach, fixing my gaze on another stalled video of a stunning, retinoid-faced influencer making a matcha collagen latte, biding her time in Venice Beach before she is probably replaced by an even less human and more effective form of AI marketing. Social media isn’t bad because it makes us compare ourselves to others. Social media is bad because it leeches our life of joy and meaning while selling us shit we don’t need. After I close Tiktok, searching for relief in intellectual stimulation, I listen to a fucking Ezra Klein podcast like a Park Slope dad: “the internet is broken,” he posits, “AI is about to fuck the internet even more than we said it would last week,” “your baby’s autonomous use of the internet is preventing it from experiencing the benefits of ‘deep reading’,” and “Americans are not actually having babies at all and here is a guest sociologist who can explain to you that you, bitch, are too disenfranchised to have a baby”

When I arrive at work, I am often harried and skittish. But I love my Zoomer co-workers who neg me about being a Millennial and send me memes about how their generation’s biggest splurge is groceries. We talk about stealing from Whole Foods and Erewhon, speculating about the eventual repercussions. “I hear they let you get to $10,000 before arresting you,” someone once said encouragingly.

Once a week, I order lunch for my coworkers on the company card and inevitably lose my shit at the Doordash customer service agent. I once yell-typed at an agent when they told me it was impossible to leave a tip for the delivery person —the “dasher”— on my desktop.

“Shayna, you must download the app to tip,” the customer service agent wrote me.

“I am in a meeting,” I wrote self-reighteously, “please add the tip with the card on file.”

“Shayna, only you can add the tip.”

“Stop using my name like that,” I said.

“Is there anything else I can help you with today?” they reply.

“Go fuck yourself,” I write back, “Fuck your company’s executives and their corporate greed.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

I remember this moment, when I abused a worker while supposedly defending workers’ rights, a very low point, characteristic of our everyday experience of dehumanization. I couldn’t contain my rage over the anonymity of the customer service chat, which also allowed me to speak cruelly to another human. I was only vaguely aware of the person on the other end of the chat as human. Because this is a caste system and by design, and usually without even noticing, we dehumanize those we understand to be below us. The anonymity of this era of technology is so lonely.

I feared this would happen: I’ve become overwhelmed by my own righteous anger at this stage of capitalism. Its abuses are overt and infinitely expanding. Still, I believe I’m happy. As the real estate broker told me, I should be GRATEFUL. I am grateful, grateful for my apartment, my job, my health insurance, and my health or some shit.

Recently I realized I am not actually grateful, which implies gratitude to a specific entity or divine grace. I am appreciative. Every day, I try to remember, appreciate, and make more of the good things: human connection, sensual pleasure, and beauty. I don’t linger on the good things because I believe I should be grateful for them but because I am trying to preserve my humanity and my dignity.

“To be human in an aching world is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us.”

-Cole Arthur Riley