The Pressure To Always Be Doing Something: Why Do I Feel Guilty For Staying Home?
Exploring the Cultural Norms of New York City
I’ve recently realised that it isn’t just a “me problem”.
People who live in New York, on average, have a greater propensity to feel pressured to get out of the house and do something. It’s almost taboo to say that you stayed home over the weekend.
This led me to wonder what characteristics of the environment shaped this culture; and I think my very naive, first attempt at answering this question is that it’s far easier to find interesting activities and to go for them.
Accessibility
This is a function of density, transport infrastructure and weather. If you want to meet someone, you don’t even have to plan ahead. If both parties are available, chances are that you’d be able to meet up within 30 minutes. With the subway running 24/7, you also lose the excuse of having to leave early. And while it gets ‘too cold’ occasionally, light rain doesn’t really hinder your plans.
Diversity
There’s a meetup for anything and everything you can think of. From common ones such as running groups or book clubs, to niche hobbies such as fermented foods, if you can’t find an activity which interests you, you’re the odd one out. Or even if that were true, you’d find that people you talk to are interested to learn about your hobbies and interests — you’d feel the pressure to kickstart a community around it. Of course, this itself stems from the varied backgrounds of people who live in New York.
Thus far, I’ve only outlined the characteristics of what makes it easy to make plans in New York. But that may not directly answer the question of why pressure exists in the first place. Maybe job satisfaction is lower and people make more plans for weekends to compensate. Maybe it’s that living spaces are small and people want to get out. Or maybe it’s so interwoven into the cultural fabric of its history that you couldn’t possibly find a definitive explanation for what simply is the city’s culture.
