The first thing you learn about New York City is that nobody is actually relaxed here.
Everyone is in motion—power-walking through subway tunnels, squeezing onto packed trains, and typing emails while standing in line for coffee. The city doesn’t rest, and eventually you stop resting too.
In this story, I’ll call myself “R” again. R is a college student trying to build a future in a place where ambition is the baseline, not the exception. He thought moving through the city every day would make him feel important. Instead, it made him feel invisible.
Every morning starts with a race.
The train is already crowded by the time it reaches my stop. I wedge myself into a corner, headphones in, backpack between my feet so no one trips over it. I watch the skyline blur past the dirty windows and try to convince myself that all this movement means progress.
It doesn’t always feel that way.
Some days, the city feels like a scoreboard I never agreed to play on. There’s always someone younger doing better, someone with a nicer apartment, someone posting photos from rooftops I can’t afford to stand on. New York has a way of reminding you that ambition isn’t enough—you need money, time, and connections too.
After classes or work, I roam the streets with nowhere specific to go. Not because I love wandering, but because going straight home feels like admitting defeat. The city lights make failure harder to see, even when you’re carrying it in your chest.
During COVID, the hustle didn’t disappear—it just changed shape.
The sidewalks were emptier, but the pressure felt heavier. I watched delivery drivers become essential workers overnight while students like me tried to stay motivated in apartments that suddenly became offices, classrooms, and bedrooms all at once. Everyone was struggling quietly, masked not just by cloth but by routine.
There’s a scene in this story where R calculates how many subway rides he can afford before the next paycheck.
He does the math while walking through Times Square, surrounded by neon signs and tourists who look like they belong to another world. The numbers don’t work out, but he keeps walking anyway. That part didn’t happen exactly like that—but the feeling did. The constant awareness that everything in this city has a price, including rest.
New York makes you earn your exhaustion.
It’s the long waits in line for jobs that don’t pay enough. It’s watching luxury apartments rise next to buildings where people are choosing between rent and groceries. It’s browsing job listings on a phone that is about to lose service due to an unpaid bill.
And yet, somehow, you keep going.
There are moments when the city surprises you. A stranger holds the subway door so you don’t miss your stop. A late-night bodega owner asks if you’ve eaten today. The skyline glows at dusk like it’s offering you something back, even if you don’t know what it is yet.
Those small mercies are what keep R here.
He tells himself that someday he’ll look back and see this period as necessary—the marathon before the finish line. He doesn’t know where the finish line is, but he keeps moving because stopping feels worse than running.
That’s the contradiction of New York City.
It drains you while daring you to dream bigger. It overwhelms you while convincing you that if you can survive here, you can survive anywhere.
This story isn’t real—but the hustle inside it is.
If you live in NYC or another big city, what part of the daily grind wears you down the most?