Hello To All That, part 1: How I moved into a good house

My answer to why I'm so happy in New York

1/3 — Six reasons my life has been good in New York

People write a lot of advice on the internet but probably you will not change your life in a serious way unless and until you fail at whatever it was you were trying to do. In this I should differentiate “optimizing” from the more fundamental question of how you should live your life. Optimizing obviously questions no core assumptions and is merely trying to improve a system someone perceives as already working. I hope for optimizers’ sake that this is indeed how they feel: that their lives are going well, and they simply want them to go more well. If this is not how they feel, they might consider more fundamental changes. 

I am writing because since my last post, where I wrote about how happy moving to New York from LA has made me, I’ve been asked:

What has been so good about your life in New York?

(Btw, if you like my writing and/or want to hear more, keep letting me know, privately and/or by sharing this post—it’s helpful.)

There are some easy answers to this question, and more complex answers. Here are five easy answers, roughly in order of how they unfolded, and one complex answer:

1. I accomplished a big, difficult thing—moving to New York—that I had wanted to do for a long time, which allowed me to see something from the inside that I was always looking at from the outside, and this is pleasing and satisfying in its own right.

2. I moved into a good house.

3. I stumbled into a good social world.

4. I got a fun, interesting job that pays me twelve times as much as I made as an adjunct creative writing professor in Canada.

5. I’m in love.

6. I quit the religion of literature.

Any one of these would have been a transformative improvement on my life. All of them together within one year have created a change in my well-being that I frankly was not dreaming of seeing in my lifetime. An entire tier or three of negative feelings and thoughts are just gone.

I’m going to write about each of these things individually, but if there’s one point I want to make it’s that there are some big categories of how to change your life that are not relevant here. None of these changes were due to therapy, meditation, any kind of ‘inner work’, nor even anything remotely emotionally complex, such as repairing old friendships, improving my relationship with my parents, learning to express my needs better. None of these changes had anything to do with my health or body, such as exercising more, or improving my looks or clothes. Finally, only a small portion of these changes are a result of working hard—though that is, to some extent, in the background of a lot of it.

On the other hand, all of these these changes in my life, with the exception of the religion-of-literature one, could be communicated by a four-year-old arranging Lego men in a sufficiently complex play town. Therefore, I advocate for changing the location of your body and being in different environments and around different people in order to be happier. It may not seem like it online, but the world is fantastically large and there is a good chance there is a corner of it better-suited to you than wherever fate dropped you. The catch is that some of these corners are really hard to get access to. The moral of my story, then, I suppose, is that it’s worth it to try.

With that, I bring you the story of:

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2/3 — How I moved into a good house

One thing I tried to get across in my previous post was how random, and lucky, so much of my move to New York has been—being invited to stay at a friend’s apartment for a week, going to a party I’d seen an invite to on Twitter without knowing a single person, randomly meeting a few people that turned out to be very influential in my current social life.

How I moved into my current house is another example of that.

I was staying in AirBnBs for my first 3 months in New York, and I ended up living in the house I live in now—a very social house that has been important for my social life, not least because it’s how I met my girlfriend—because I showed up to an effective altruism marketing talk, my first-ever New York EA event, six weeks after I’d arrived in New York.

I very nearly didn’t go. I only knew about it because I’d joined the EA NYC Slack group, and saw a link to a Facebook event that six people had responded to. The address was in midtown and it was at 6:30pm on a Wednesday night. I was imagining an empty conference room in some office building with maybe four people there, and some corporate person droning on maybe not very insightfully. I had never met any New York EAs, so I wouldn’t know a soul, and that night I happened to have a first date which I was kind of excited about—a former lawyer seemingly in the middle of an Eat, Pray, Love mental breakdown arc who left me long, rambly, but kind of charming voice notes, through Bumble. I was at a bar in Williamsburg with this person at about 6:45pm on the day of the marketing talk, one drink in, when the question of a second drink arose.

I want to pause here and talk about my first six weeks in New York, the first month of which, as I mentioned in the last post, was in an AirBnB in Jersey City. That month was bleak. I was on the west side of Jersey City, meaning further away from Manhattan, meaning cheaper, and, as it happens, uglier. Some people live in Jersey City and are like “it’s perfectly nice and it’s only 15 minutes from Manhattan.” This was not that Jersey City. This was several stops on the PATH train and then a bus. This was Italian sandwich shops where you go in and the two guys behind the counter are arguing and they don’t stop arguing and you just have to leave and go somewhere else to get food. Massive potholes in the streets, red traffic lights interpreted as suggestions. The house I was in was three stories of AirBnB rooms with keypad locks on each door, bare floors and walls, and light fixtures in the common spaces without lightbulbs. I would bring the desklight from my room out into the common area and plug it into the wall to work at night. I had two copywriting contracts and was always interviewing for more work. I would take Zoom meetings with guys in bright blurred-out coworking booths in Berkeley who would explain to me their computational projects to predict everything that would happen in the future of the world. I knew about five people in New York, but with the exception of perhaps Dara, who had moved to New York six months before me and had quickly gotten into an all-consuming relationship, they all seemed to be in the middle of their own lives, with mostly only a crumb or two of room for a new friend. A couple times I hung out with a very Christian former male model who had been living on the top floor of this AirBnB for almost a year, ‘trying to get his shit together’ while living off his dad’s money. One time he read me an excerpt from his memoir in the parking lot of a gas station, and I thought: Okay, I guess this is my life now. A week before this Bumble date I had written to myself:

After I said goodbye to [a writer acquaintance who was visiting from Texas] last night I cried in the LES Champion Pizza. It was 2am and slammed with 21-year-olds and every time a new pop song came on I really felt the aggressively synthesized pop hooks in my heart, and I was overcome with sadness in a way that’s unusual for me, not because I’m always happy but because I’m usually not feeling anything, I’m numb, I’m lonely, I don’t really have any good friends who I actually love who I’m close to who I talk to regularly. I’ve tried to rekindle things with people and we have a good conversation but it doesn’t become a habit; I move too much, I go through life removed from most things that ever made me feel anything, I’ve become an isolated automaton mechanistically trying to accomplish tasks and it’s not very human and it doesn’t even work that well, because the loneliness is a drag on my body and spirit, it makes me sluggish I think, and muddled.

A week after I wrote that, sitting across from the former lawyer in the Williamsburg bar, I had some vague sense, I think, that what I needed was deeper than a date. Looking at this random person, with her mildly amusing stories about house-sitting in Connecticut, her presence seemed so thin—she was such a stranger, and, like every woman I’d been on a date with since moving to America, I felt like we had nothing in common.

By contrast, one thing that seemed promising to me was EA. At least it seemed interesting, and, though I’d barely met any EAs in real life, I resonated strongly with their writings online.

In a split-second decision, I told the former lawyer that I thought one drink was enough for me, this was nice but I had an early morning tomorrow, etc etc, and I got out of there, and got a car into Manhattan.

3/3 — Effective Marketing

The first surprise was that the address was an apartment. I was arriving about half an hour after the start time, but I saw the talk didn’t start till 7, which there was still one minute to, and someone had shown up about 7 steps ahead of me. This guy was at the door, ringing the bell, and I saw over his shoulder that he was looking up on Slack if there were any specific instructions. 20 seconds after I arrived another girl showed up behind me, and the three of us waited to be let in.

We eventually got in and—it was packed! It was someone’s apartment, it was a nice apartment with a nice big living room, and dining room, and kitchen, and all of these areas were full. My phone was almost dead but I’d planned for this and asked a guy who greeted me if I could plug in somewhere. It turned out it was his apartment. He showed me into his bedroom and I plugged in. We made small talk and I said I was a writer and somehow we were talking about Huel. He said he didn’t like it, he preferred Soylent. I said I’d never tried it, and he took me into the kitchen and handed me one out of his fridge. Chocolate. I unsealed the bottle, hung up my coat near the door, and headed back into the dining room. It was just in time for the start of the event so I took my seat immediately. I didn’t know anyone and was nervous about small talk so I was glad to be able to just sit down. I took a seat in the far corner under where some plants’ branches were hanging obtrusively over some seats. I figured I would sacrifice myself and take this weird spot. This decision made me notice that my perception of the vibe of the night had influenced me and I was policing and exaggerating my altruism.

People sat down around me. One woman with curly hair and glasses introduced herself in a very forthright way. She said she was a social worker, and then said something like, “I have to confess, I’m also a community manager for NY EA.”

I didn’t really know what that meant. “Like mental health?” I said.

“Community health,” she said. “How deep into EA are you?”

“Like medium?” I said.

“Okay. Do you know who Julia Wise is?”

“I know the name but not really what she does.”

“Okay so basically like, if there are any issues with like, people, in EA, someone might check in with her. So I’m basically doing that for NY. Like personnel stuff—any kind of, like, issue.”

“Oh okay,” I said.

Another person near us seemed to know her and they started talking.

A minute later the speaker took the floor, with this tall young guy who introduced himself as the host. I recognized his name from the NYC EA Slack. He was like a community manager or something. He introduced the speaker, Ana Bradley, who stood there smiling patiently while he gave a somewhat bewildered account of her accomplishments. When it was Ana’s turn to talk she apologized for any possible incoherence as she had just flown in from London and was severely jet-lagged. She then proceeded to give a spectacularly engaging, professional, and well-sourced talk, with illustrations of all her points that demonstrated the effectiveness she’d had with many different orgs, mostly around content writing as a strategy to get eyeballs on causes, and help orgs climb their Google pagerank. It was hit after hit after hit. People were impressed. She was funny and witty and very convincing. She was playing to a home court; people were ready to be charmed and convinced. She took some questions afterwards. The first was a guy in the back, perhaps the only professional marketer, who seemingly was present more because the talk was about marketing than literally everyone else in the room who knew nothing about marketing and perhaps were not specifically interested in learning about marketing and were mostly there because it was an EA event—it did seem like the whole community had turned out for a talk on a topic that did not seem especially juicy, from an outside view. Anyway, the marketer’s question was what he could do if he wanted to help out. With EA stuff. As someone with these skills. Ana did not seem especially prepared to answer this, as she wasn’t really there as an ambassador of EA itself; she was expecting to speak to EAs, not on behalf of them. She said something vague like there are probably many orgs that could use your skills, which, I’m not sure what else she would have said, and the question period continued.

When the questions died down, the official part of the night was over, and it basically became a house party. I talked to a handful of people—I was following EA stuff enough by then to be able to discuss, for example, the proposed NYC coworking space—but a sequence of superficial, introductory convos quickly drained my social juice, and I made my way to the door. I put on my coat and had actually opened the door, but was pausing because of: my half-consumed bottle of chocolate Soylent.

I wasn’t going to drink more of it, and I didn’t want to take it out onto the street, and I was unsure about whether to go back into the kitchen and throw it out or to leave it on a random surface, and was having a mini-spiral about the ethics of this decision because I was surrounded by more EAs than I’d ever been around in person and I didn’t know their mores yet (this event was so much more adult than the one other EA event I’d been to in person, a picnic in LA, which had been 95% recent college grads or people still in college, and 100% male, whereas this event was people age 25-45, even gender split, regular-looking people)—when I heard the word “sublet” slip out from one of the large groups of people talking somewhere across the living room. This seemed important, and I went over to a group of people, interrupted the conversation, and said, “Did I hear someone say they were looking for someone to sublet their room?” This black-haired girl said oh! Yes! Let me take your information. By the way who are you?

And that’s how I moved into the Linden EA house. The rest is not really interesting—Masha (the black-haired girl) and I messaged back and forth a bit, I went over and met the roommates, and a week or two later they told me I could move in. I moved in on Dec 1, 2022, 6 weeks after meeting Masha at the effective marketing night. Six weeks after that, mid-January, I met Naina, my girlfriend, for the first time at a party at my new house, though we didn’t start dating till many months later. But that is another story.