Every single time I spend time in cities like New York or Shanghai, I notice something shift in me. It’s like I’m feeling something really different — which I think a lot of people can resonate with.
I recently read this article “Cities and Ambition” by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator. He wrote it in 2008. And it’s one of those things where you read it and you’re like, okay, this person just described something I’ve been feeling for years but could never put into words.
The core idea of this article is that the city you live in is always quietly sending you messages.
And the way he put it is very interesting: “a city speaks to you mostly by accident. In things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It’s not something you have to seek out. It’s something you can’t turn off.”
And I think that last part is the key. You can’t turn it off. You don’t choose to opt into it.
New York’s message is: you should make more money. The whole system there revolves around wealth. Cambridge, where Harvard and MIT are, the message is: you should be smarter. Silicon Valley or SF, people don’t really care how much money you have. It’s more about power — meaning how much influence you have on the world.
And I think you feel the same thing in cities in China too. Shanghai’s message is similar to New York’s in a lot of ways. It’s about being polished, being put together, keeping up. The conversations there move fast and they tend to be about what you’re doing, what you’ve achieved, what’s next. Beijing feels different. The conversations there are bigger — more about ideas, culture, what’s happening in the world. There’s a weight to Beijing that Shanghai doesn’t have.
Basically, different cities have completely different definitions of what it means to be doing well. And the thing is, you absorb this without choosing to. You just live there and these things get into you.
Something I think is really underrated in this article is that he talked about how encouragement and discouragement don’t work the same way.
If everyone around you is doing something you don’t want to do, that’s fine. You can resist that. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is when nobody around you cares about the thing you care about. That’s when it starts to die. Quietly. And you don’t even notice.
And I think that’s the thing that actually gets to people. Because nobody is actively stopping you from being ambitious or curious or driven. It’s just that the environment doesn’t reward it. And over time, you start to care less too. You don’t even realize you’re becoming someone you didn’t really choose to be, because everyone around you is treating it as completely normal.
This connects to another interesting example he mentioned — that professors in New York and the Bay Area are basically second-class citizens, until they go start a hedge fund or a startup.
It’s this idea that you might be really good at what you do, but what if the environment doesn’t recognize it and you don’t get rewarded at all?
In 2023 I traveled back to the city I was raised in — a small coastal city in southern China, where I spent almost 20 years. I hadn’t been back for about eight years. And I just felt like something was off. The life there is so comfortable and slow, and I could literally see what the next 30 years would look like. Some of my older friends were settling in and they seemed completely fine with that, which made me feel like maybe I was the one with the problem. Like maybe I was the one who couldn’t just relax and appreciate a simple life. But something in me just knew I didn’t belong there anymore.
Another thing Paul brought up was that in the fifteenth century, almost every Italian painter you’ve heard of came from Florence. Not Milan — even though Milan was the same size. His point is that even someone with Leonardo da Vinci’s natural ability couldn’t beat the force of environment.
And the thing is, a lot of people kind of know this on some level. But the way they think about where to live is still completely practical. Cost of living, job market, weather, commute. Right now everyone’s talking about geoarbitrage. Move to Thailand, move to Vietnam, move to some cheaper city because the numbers make sense. And yeah, on a spreadsheet it does make sense.
Paul mentioned that the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, cramped place with bad weather. And obviously the same thing applies to people living in New York and Shanghai.
And I think that kind of calls out a certain way of thinking. A lot of people advocate that the smart move is to optimize for cost. But the people who only optimize for cost are probably optimizing for the wrong thing — especially when they’re early in their careers — and they just don’t know it yet.
So I think the real question from all of this isn’t whether you should move. It’s more like: do you actually know what message your city is sending you right now? Because most of us are oblivious to it. We think we’re making our own choices about what to care about, what to chase, what kind of life to build. But a lot of that was already decided for us by the place we happened to be in.
Which means if you’re in the wrong place right now, you might not even know what you’re capable of wanting. You thought you weren’t ambitious — but that’s probably because you’ve never been somewhere that brought it out of you.