Who Needs a House Out in Hackensack?
There’s a conversation that keeps popping up as you get older. It’s a lil’ different depending on the time of year, but it goes the same way most of the time.
Someone mentions their rent. Someone mentions their lack of space. Someone’s cousin just bought a place in Philly and honestly, the Amtrak isn’t that bad. Have you tried their dining cart?? And somewhere in there, without anybody really saying it, the conversation becomes about whether you're still here because you wanna be or because you just haven't gotten around to leaving yet.
It’s funny how space becomes shorthand for having your life together. At some point, wanting another closet becomes wanting another bedroom, which becomes looking at houses in Jersey “just to see.” There’s nothing particularly weird about wanting more room. New York will have you paying a wicked amount of money for the privilege of storing your vacuum behind a door. What is weird, is how leaving gets folded into the idea of growing up.
The house starts to represent more than a house. It’s stability. Proof that things are moving forward. That you’re growing up. Meanwhile, staying here can start to feel like something that needs an explanation. Are you still renting? Do you really want to raise kids here? You still ride the subway? There’s an assumption underneath those questions that eventually everyone wants the same version of adulthood that comes with a driveway and a Sedan.
What gets lost in the conversation is that New York has its own slice of stability. It just looks a little different. It’s coming in third place at trivia from the same stool every Thursday. Knowing your super’s daughter’s name. Having the chicken shop guy ask where you’ve been because you’ve been gone too long. The conductor who’s always on the 3:19 downtown 6 and sings the station names. A block that feels like yours because you’ve made the connections.
New York gets treated like somewhere you live while you’re figuring things out, before real life kicks in somewhere else. Except people live entire lives here. They build careers here. They raise families here. They turn 44, 56, 72 here and somehow continue to survive!! They didn’t fail to grow up. They grew up here.
None of this is an argument against leaving. People leave for all kinds of reasons. Families. Schools. Money. Maybe you actually do want the space. Maybe you wanna try something completely different. The point isn’t that you should stay. It’s that leaving doesn’t have to be the natural conclusion of getting older.
You might eventually want that house. Maybe you already do. But the more interesting question is whether you actually want that life, or if you’ve just been in the conversation so long you forgot you had a choice. Getting older doesn’t mean you’re supposed to want something different. The life you’ve built here doesn’t stop being enough just because everyone around you has started looking somewhere else.
