When I wrote my first post for this class, I wrote what I felt. Edgy, sad, I thought that portraying New York City as anything other than the glamorous city it’s seen as by the world would accomplish something. Trigger a reaction, make me reconsider my own perspective, perhaps just make me seem cool. But I quickly realized that many of my classmates echoed the same sentiment, the things I pass every day that cause me to quicken my pace and avoid eye contact was something every New Yorker was experiencing, and it was relieving to know that I was not alone. It made me wonder what it was that gravitated not only me but others towards the trash on the streets rather than the countless beauties hidden between the building walls.
I found my wondering satisfied only when I left the city. The picture I took was really interesting because the beautiful skyline that is marveled worldwide looked like its caged inside. Of course it was just a coincidence that the picture lined up in the way it did, but I felt it symbolic. A lot of people grow up in NYC, go to school here, and build their career. In a sense, the city is the world to some people, not only in a metaphoric manner, but quite literally in scale. And when your world is always full of dirty trash and the trees are always fading, it can make a person pessimistic. This relates to the subject of this IDC course. It’s the ‘future of NY’ yet rather than fantasizing about fantastical possibilities, we’re stuck with very real problems that seem very hopeless to solve. World hunger, climate change, loss of biodiversity, we keep asking “what’s the solution”, well knowing that such a question simply invites pessimism. In a sense, we cannot solve such problems. Not by ourselves in such a large scale. We try to tackle on the world’s problems not knowing how big our world is to begin with, nevertheless how monumental and complex its ailments are. In the same way, how can we expect us to believe in ourselves to save NYC when it is, in scale, the world to us? Suddenly one city seems like a thousand webs intertwining with a thousand others, each thread a problem to solve, and the more you try to unweave them, the more they get tangled.
It helps to take a step back then. Like I did on the shore of New Jersey looking out at the NYC skyline, it made me realize how my mentality had caged itself in, making the city my world and its problems seemingly endless. But once I realized that it was but a city that could be observed so easily from just a short distance away, it made the city smaller, its problems more manageable, and myself a bit more optimistic. And this is how I think we can find a solution. Not by trying to overwhelm ourselves from the beginning and become discouraged, but to take things little by little, until one day we really do end up solving the world’s problems.
