Miscellanea: Top ten wonderful benefits of city life.

Expert demographical prognosticators inform us that the future looks progressively urban. About 54% of the world’s population currently lives in cities, with a continuing trend of growing urban/shrinking rural population. Mega cities of 10 million or more are increasing in number, and are projected to house two-thirds of the world’s 9.7 billion people circa 2050. It seems that we will all eventually live in cities, like it or not. It is therefore well, for those of you not yet having made the move, to reflect upon some of the benefits such a life will afford.

Why own a home when you can rent? So you have taken that first, fateful step, and have moved to the big city in order to pursue your economic aspirations. You need a base of operations, a sanctum sanctorum, a retreat, a place to call home; in short, (and considering you are likely not yet able to afford your preferred Mc-mansion) you need an apartment. Securing one will not be easy; you may find both rents and occupancy rates to be discouragingly high, and subsequently need to downgrade your expectations from two-bedroom/dining room/living room/kitchen/bathroom to room/shared laundry-sink. You may find your landlord to have been not entirely forthcoming in re the Wi-Fi, plumbing, utilities, and indigenous insect population. Never mind. Exorbitantly high rents are indicative of a booming economy, which is a good thing, even though the tailings fuel burgeoning vermin populations—and landlords have a right to a living like everyone else.

Employment opportunities: Making that monthly rental nut is no cakewalk. Odds are you are not yet financially independent; you will need to find gainful employment. Good news: in a growing economy you will find a great variety of jobs available; it is simply a matter of matching the right job to your skill-set. Of course, as a recent graduate, you will not have much of a skill-set, and the great variety actually resolves itself into two basic categories of office/service-retail, so your choices will not be as unlimited as you had hoped. Best strategy, begin in the service industry; the pay is generally very low, which means working two jobs to cover your rent while leaving a little something to yourself, but there will be less of an onus on you to feign interest or enjoyment in whatever menial task you are doing, which is a definite bonus. With careful planning, assiduous financial management, and diligent training, you should not have to work in the service sector for more than four or five decades. When you do finally ascend to your long-coveted office position, do not be surprised if there be a period of confusion and adjustment. You will have to alter your wardrobe, for instance, to iterations of basic business casual, a style of dress in which it is possible to express your individuality, so long as it is done within a predetermined set of forms and colours. You will also have to alter the way you interact with your co-workers; the salt-of-the-earth banter that makes service jobs bearable has no place in your new environment. Learn rather to fill the air with insular waffling; perfectly detached banality should be your ideal conversational tone. Remember, everyone in the office is just as miserable as you are, but none of them want to be reminded. With practice, you will eventually learn to disappear beyond the event horizon of your own irony. And if your existential office ennui should grow too burdensome, deal with it like your co-workers do: sit quietly at home, with the lights off, drinking gin strait from the bottle.

Public transit is fun: The city is a big place; how best to navigate? Walking is excellent exercise, but can be impracticably slow. Cycling is healthy as well, with the added thrill of risking life and limb in rush hour traffic. But if neither of these is to your taste, and you wish to eschew the cost and hassle of owning a motor vehicle, there is left but one choice: public transit. As you cram yourself, at all hours, in all weathers, onto overcrowded buses and subway trains, be satisfied that you have well and truly made it—to the exact centre of the bell curve. Within this statistical space you will meet interesting people, many of whom will scream at you, vomit on you, or panhandle you, sometimes all at once, thus injecting a little variety and excitement into your otherwise tedious, soul-crushing life.

Wet cigarette buts are beautiful: A city’s broad vista makes for an attractive postcard, but a worm’s eye view reveals the truth: our streets, side-walks, and buildings are encrusted with filth. We may eulogise cities as staging grounds for human industry, commerce, and distraction, but they are really just machines for the production, concentration, and distribution of human excreta. There are any number of wasted objects, which you and I cast so blithely into the streets (knowing their administration will be somebody else’s problem) that illustrate this point. For me it is cigarette butts, for which I feel a visceral loathing. Feel free to choose your own favourites, as beauty is in the eye of the litterer.

Fear the walking undead: How fondly I recall the idyllic early-to-mid 1990’s. PC’s were becoming a ubiquitous part of our lives; the information superhighway was revolutionising the way we consumed pornography, and cell phones were finally affordable and hand-sized. These digital toys had a wondrous effect on our behaviour: we could now comport ourselves in public like powerful, jet-setting CEO’s, loudly declaiming our intimate personal arcana to all about us. But talking was so 20th century; texting and scrolling have replaced this archaic practice. The next step on our march to the matrix was the introduction of the smart phone, which led to the rise of the smart-phone zombie—a phenomenon not limited strictly to cities, but population density makes it more noticeable in that context. If you have not yet partaken of this digital voodoo you will experience almost daily the unsettling sensation of being the only one on the bus, at the traffic light, the bank, the gym, or the mall, who is not obliviously mesmerised by those tiny little glorified television sets. Smart phones and social media do have their critics—they are addictive, they cause anxiety and depression, they are dehumanising—but who cares? Life affirming activities are quaint anachronisms; embrace your post-human future.

Alien nation: Living in a city of millions, your personal ratio of friends/family to total strangers will be several orders of magnitude wide. This is a good thing; it is as if there will never be a shortage of extras in the ongoing movie of your life. Sometimes, however, as you are swept along in the teeming, impersonal bustle, you may experience feelings of distraction, disconnection, insignificance, and lack of meaning or purpose. Never mind. That is just your inner hunter-gatherer dying the death of a thousand Pumpkin Spice Lattes.

Exotic urban fauna: For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good, said a man well acquainted with preaching in cities. All sufficiently dense populations will breed a not insignificant class of both bog-standard homeless and somewhat more exotic street lunatic, and it is dealer’s choice how you choose to interact with them. You can try the more beatific approach, maybe throw them a few coins, do some volunteer work, attend a few relevant public lectures, knowing that with just the right combination of misfortunes and poor decisions, it could be you freezing or starving in that alley, or holding obstreperous debates with invisible air demons. Or you could stonewall their existence altogether, secretly hoping that the wheel of fortune never spins long enough to flatten your ass. Either way, like the man said, they will always be there.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité: While it is true that country folk are no strangers to the passion for justice, moral enlightenment, and progress, it is equally true that these affections concentrate themselves far more strongly in towns. Thus should you feel the noble calling to improve the plight of the underprivileged, the marginalized, the oppressed, or whomever, you will find, in your travels throughout the city, no shortage of opportunity. Indeed, it is impossible to escape the merchants of righteousness, even when you want to do nothing more than, say, finish your grocery shopping and get home to binge-watch season ten of Modern Family. You will find them on street corners, on subway trains, in malls, handing out pamphlets, waving placards, sometimes marching, sometimes protesting, sometimes setting fire to police cars and smashing windows. From Amnesty International to Black Lives Matter to Falun Gong to The Jehovah's witness, each and every one sells an enlightened bill of goods that, incredibly, has your name on it.

Permanent Vacation, free of charge: In his magisterial survey, History of Rome, Theodor Mommsen pointed out that capital cities, being foci of migration, tend to lose their national character over time, growing progressively polyglot and ethnically diverse. What was true in antiquity, for cities like Rome or Alexandria, is truer than ever, now that technology as shrunk the world into a village. Thus, living in a modern, large North American or European city obviates the need for vacations, as all the world’s cultures are now at your doorstep. It is now perfectly common to walk the streets or ride public transit and hear a plethora of languages, none of which are comprehensible to your “native” ears. Just remember that should this exotic variety of ethnicities and languages leave you feeling like a stranger in a strange land, or in any way alienated or disquieted, then you are a terrible, terrible person and should immediately drink bleach.

Twinkle twinkle no little stars: Cities are brilliantly lit. You will have no problem, any time of night, parsing the licence plate of the Uber that ran you over, or identifying the faces of the gang-bangers who shot you through the pancreas. Ironically, all of this brilliant electric light completely obscures the heavens, and if you live in a city long enough you may forget that the universe comprises more than just the sun and moon. Travelling to a non-light-polluted area will rectify your Milky Way myopia, but why bother? The night sky’s natural light is so first millennium; leave it to your A-I/Illuminati overlords to contemplate the heavenly glory, and keep your gaze fixed firmly on the pavement where it belongs.