20 lessons from 2 years in New York City

I spent a decade dreaming about New York City. Here’s what living there taught me

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Two years ago, I moved to New York City with my wife and our cat. I’d first visited nearly a decade before, and it had always been a dream of mine — one I’d talked myself out of many times. I’m Canadian and I wasn’t sure how I’d figure out a way to stay. Working visas felt precarious. It was the most expensive city in the world. Plus, the best part of NYC was history — the present is nothing like the past, I told myself.

“Some dreams stay dreams, some dreams come true,” the song lyric goes. I had thought that living in NYC would be one of the many dreams that would have to wait. It wasn’t until I shifted my approach to work — giving up working independently, and applying to work full-time — that living in NYC became a real possibility. I went through six rounds of interviews and got a job offer at Figma, which came with an opportunity to move to NYC. This was an opening, and I took it.

I lived there for two years, and got to know it in ways I never could as a visitor. Here are 20 things I learned from actually living there as a local who paid an astonishing amount of rent, refused to jaywalk, and finally learned to…