Lessons Learned Through Living in New York City

By Jacob Krouse
Contributing Editor

1) People spit everywhere openly in public – on the street, on the side walk, on doors, out windows, and on each other (yes – I saw a girl spit on a guy playfully).

2) Living in New York makes you lazy, in one sense. You only want to go places that don’t require getting on the subway, although you do know you’ll have to walk to your destination.

• When living anywhere else in America, one would never think of driving 15-20 minutes to go to a restaurant, but 15-20 minutes on the subway is for some reason unbearable.

3) All those neat street and subway performers get old after a week. At first, the drummer you see and hear while waiting for your subway seems nice, when you’ve lived in New York for a month and you see the same drummer every day… he gets old.

4) You have no sense of distance when living in New York. Walking 10 blocks seems ridiculous, but it’s only a mile. DePauw’s campus is over a mile across.

• Also, you can walk roughly half of Manhattan in a little over an hour – walking an hour in Lexington wouldn’t even get me downtown.

5) You will have your personal space violated each morning commute – deal with it. Subways are crowded and people here don’t care if you don’t want to be squished – they want to get to work.

6) If you live in New York, you will become a jerk. Sorry for those from New York, but it’s true.

• Why do New Yorkers walk so fast from place to place? Because their time is important. Why do New Yorkers cut each other off, bump into people walking down the street, and slam themselves into subway cars that they clearly will not fit into? Because they think their time is more important than others. I do the same thing – weaving in and out of human traffic like I’m Joseph Addai (I’ve even knocked someone over).

• Additionally, the elevator becomes a source of hatred. Daniel and I work on the 30th floor of our building and thus feel entitled to go straight to our floor with no stops. We get frustrated with anyone who stops on a floor below ours. Why are we anymore special than anyone else going to work?

7) If you live in New York, you’ve been exposed to every kind of germ imaginable – you’ll never get sick anywhere else.


This is why I recommend anyone in the New York area take a break from the hectic pace of NYC. Go somewhere where the air isn’t polluted, the trees aren’t surrounded in pavement, and people don’t think of the rest of the nation as “fly over states.”