Most people who live in New York City are actually cockroaches in mind, body and spirit. Fragile, starved and ugly, they scurry around living pitiable, fearful lives.
Like cockroaches, they live in tiny spaces with two roommates (sometimes a rat is a third). Their food is whatever they can get their hands on (meaning afford). It’s often some fake food slop meant to feed cattle waiting to be slaughtered in a hellish factory farm. Most people are scrawny or skinny fat, pale and facially unimpressive. Skim through the dating apps and you’ll struggle to find beauty. Many are obese or skinny fat.
Ryan Landry describes this mindset in his book Masculinity Amidst Madness:
Look at the men who shuffle like defeated tribesmen, shoulders hunched forward, heads down, eyes down. Everything curling inward as if hiding from the world. They take up as little space as possible, afraid to own the ground they walk on. They are as helots waiting for the strike from their masters. Men who move like bugs afraid of the light roll their eyes at eating meats and cheeses. Those are not healthy per the credentialed experts. They eat processed soy and vegetarian meat substitutes. They hold their heads high eating their recommended diet of grains and vegetables. They might as well eat grass, like cattle. These foods weaken them, yet they eat them because they were told them they were healthy….They do not eat food for power but for the possibility of one extra day. Rather than live with thumos, they simply want to exist. The three Thai restaurants in your city all have the same menu. Maybe you even eek out an extra two or three years by eating like a South American peasant. What does it do for you? You live a life resembling a fearful mole in the city. Three extra years of that is of no value.
To scurry faster, everyone uses a transit system that looks like a sewer. Subway tracks are rusted, filled with garbage and infested with rats. Walls look decrepit and are falling apart. Homeless people sit on the benches and stink up the place. Subway cars have ugly, soulless ads.
What passes as spirituality in this city is empty-headed positivity. People here think meditating, doing yoga, living by the moral standards dictated by the New York Times and trying to be a happy person all the time makes you spiritual. They’ll do back flips to avoid any mention of God or sin. It’s so shallow you barely distinguish it from atheism.
Enter Covid-19 and you truly see what these people are made of and how they respond to pressures. Everyone wears masks inside and outside. Some even wear two masks now. They keep their heads down and don’t make eye contact. Like cockroaches, they scurry around to avoid danger.
The bars, restaurants, events, social atmosphere and everything that made the city great have been emptied without any resistance from the residents. They are so scared of death that they will accept a complete degradation of their life and impose it on others, whether through mean stares, yelling or snitching.
Everyone in the city parrots whatever MSNBC or the Daily Show says— evidence that they can’t actually think for themselves. Whatever they feel is dictated by propaganda media outlets. They’ll be told to be outraged and act accordingly. Like animals, they live by their reactive emotions. These people accepted a summer of riots, looting and violence because some digital rag like Vox wrote some garbage article titled “This is Why the Riots Justified.”
Residents are unaware of how shitty their lives and city actually is. They instead think they live in the greatest city in the world and can’t fathom that they have a low quality of life in almost every way possible. Their time here is spent scraping by and finding whatever morsels they can find.
I made a montage of this shithole city and posted it on my Twitter account.
This is the New York we lost.