Good morning.
As you may know, earlier this year I moved out of New York City after living there for 15 years. My girlfriend and I moved to Austin, where she and her family are from, to see if we want to stay here to start a family of our own. There’s obviously a lot more to it than that and there are plenty of things we’re considering as we try it out. And we are incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to work remotely for our current employers. But that’s the general story for us this year.
I’ve never really moved from one city to another. I left Long Island to go to school in Upstate New York and then I left Upstate New York to basically move to Brooklyn. That’s not really relocating anywhere major, and I was 22 the last time I did any kind of move outside of a single New York City borough.
Moving, actually moving, and deciding where you want to live is weird. That may seem like a stupid thing to say and it probably is but, I don’t know, it’s just kind of weird. Figuring out why a particular city is better than another and why it will be better for you to live in one place over another is a strange thing to think about. Obviously family and friends, health reasons, childcare options, work, and finding a climate haven are all major factors that determine why you live somewhere, but the rest is kind of just like 🤷.
Maybe I feel this way because when we were getting ready to leave New York and I was trying to make sure it was the right decision (as if we ever really know if any decision we make is the right decision except for a select few) I would spend a lot of time laying in bed reading Reddit before I went to sleep. This was clearly a terrible idea and yet I persisted.
I’d read the Austin subreddit and see people complaining about how much Austin had changed, how unsafe it was, how expensive it was. Then I’d see people tell those people that they’d never lived in New York or San Francisco or I’d see people say that it's better to live in a city that is growing versus one that is dying. But then you’d often see people saying that they see these kind of complaints on every city-based subreddit. One comment I recall reading went something like, “If you think Austin is bad, check out /r/portland.” In fact, just the other day I read a comment that said, “Every city’s subreddit thinks they have the worst crime and the worst drivers.” And then I read an article that said some cities that other people assume are unsafe are perceived as safe by the people that actually live there.
If you paid attention to stuff like this, you would come to the conclusion that there is really no good place to live in America. Part of that may be true. We have a massive housing shortage that has plenty of knock-on effects. Homelessness is on the rise and isn’t just confined to the usual cities in the headlines. Major cities are at risk from the environmental effects of global warming. The United States is still woefully under-serving people in cities with accessible public transportation options. I’m seeing it first hand.
Like many American millennials, I’m still caught up in the idea of owning property. For some reason, the idea of having a house, just a regular sized house, and even a little yard means something to me. And I want to have that in a city—doesn’t have to be the size of New York, just don’t really want to live in a suburb. But it's harder and harder to do that today.
So we’re living in Austin right now. Maybe we’ll be able to buy a house next year. Maybe we’ll stay here for a long time and make a life for ourselves like my girlfriend’s parents did. But lately I’ve been thinking it would be nice to live in Manhattan, Kansas.
Why Manhattan, Kansas? Because Somebody, Somewhere is, behind The Bear, probably the best television show I’ve watched this year. If you aren’t familiar with the show, it follows a middle-aged woman named Sam who grew up on a farm in Manhattan. When the show starts, she is attempting to get over the sudden death of her oldest sister with whom she was living and also admired.
What the show is actually about is connecting with and finding people you can be yourself with, learning to believe in yourself, learning to forgive your family and friends, learning how to accept people for who they are and not hold them to the expectations you make up in your head, learning how to love yourself and admit that you can be happy.
There is a wonderful ensemble cast and the energy of the show is warm and, for lack of a better word, friendly. But not in a Parks and Recreation or Cheers way. The closest thing I can compare it to is Please Like Me, which is essential viewing for anybody. The stakes are low, but the drama, when it does rise, feels real and true to life.
Bridgett Everett’s Sam is charismatic, childish, lewd, tender, and impossible all at the same time. Jeff Hiller’s Joel is both sweet and frustratingly passive. But the scene stealer is Murray Hill who plays a character called Fred Rococo that might be one of the most inspired character creations of the last twenty years or so. Man, does Fred Rococo love Kansas State University and farming.
When I watch Somebody, Somewhere and I feel good being with the characters, I want to walk the same low-trafficked Manhattan, Kansas streets they do. I want to go to the little coffee shop they go to for brunch. I want to pass the cutesy boutiques. I want to see the royal purple, white, and silver sweatshirts around town. I want to live in a manageable house with a manageable yard.
But Manhattan, Kansas gets tornados and the extreme weather hasn’t spared them this year either. Every place has got its problems and Somebody, Somewhere is just a TV show. Yet, it does feel good to know—even for brief snatches of time based entirely and misguidedly on a work of fiction—definitively that there is some place you’d want to live. Otherwise, how the hell are you supposed to know?
Feel all this very deeply. Thanks so much for sharing and articulating it all so beautifully, Matt.