Goodbye NH, Hello NY, Goodbye NY, Hello NH

September 19, 2025

We are idiots. But maybe we're slowly getting better.

Earlier this year, we moved to New York City. I wanted to try working in an office again. Both of us yearned for walkability, bikeability, more restaurants, more culture, easy access to music venues, and public transit. NYC is one of very few places in the USA where you can walk or bike to a tech sector job, we both lived there after college, and we both still had some friends in the area who we dearly miss. What could possibly go wrong?

Meg was wise enough to know that she loved our little community in Littleton. I was not so wise, and got caught up completely in the excitement of a move to a city with More Stuff. Leaving our friends, hobbies, and local haunts was gut-wrenching, but we ultimately executed the move and wound up in NYC in April.

The first month was fun. We moved right as NYC Spring sprang, so the change in weather was incredible. While Northern New England was still cold and brown, NYC was already warm, green, and blooming the first wave of Spring flowers. We reunited with old friends. We nostalgia toured our old haunts in Astoria, Manhattan, and Greenpoint. I started cycle commuting to the office 5 days a week. We rode our bikes around the new protected bike lanes that have sprung up mostly in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Meg returned to her favorite gym of all time; I started running on the East River again. NYC life was a big change of pace, not without its struggles, but we soon adapted to the fight-club-trader-joe's lifestyle and picked up right where we left off with long walks to breweries, parks, and restaurants.

Then Summer hit. Those warm temperatures turned to face-melting 100 degree highs for multiple days in a row. The humidity skyrocketed, then firmly lodged the dew point in the mid 70s. Nighttime temperatures rose to 'just a smidge beneath face melting'. The smells thickened into a miasma of rot and waste somewhere between cleaning a chicken coop, pumping out your septic tank, and forgetting a trash bag on your asphalt driveway for the entire summer. I saw dozens more flattened rats in the bicycle lane than I am comfortable disclosing (and I still wonder what exactly flattened the rats on the Brooklyn Bridge bike lane, which is completely separate from car lanes). It got so hot that we weren't comfortable biking anywhere any more. A few close calls with cars and poor infrastructure started to sully our enthusiasm for cycling in the city. We ran out of new coffee shops and breweries to explore within easy walking distance of our apartment. We took the train upstate a couple of times, enduring the anxiety of sporadic subway closures when you have a firm deadline to get on the last train out of the city, dealing with the fact that Moynihan train hall is an absolutely awful train boarding experience (why do they wait until the last 10 minutes before departure to tell you the platform?), and learning that apparently every single Amtrak train out of the city is fully booked these days (which, combined with the awful boarding experience, makes finding a two seats together for the 7 hour molasses-slow train ride upstate a desperate struggle very likely to end in failure).

By the end of July, we knew that we had made a mistake. Our will to do just about anything melted in the scorching, muggy NYC heat. We missed our Littleton friends. We missed leading run club at Wildbloom. We missed the incredible craft beer scene of Northern New England. We missed nights that actually cool to bearable temperatures. We found small things to love, like a movie day at Nighthawk Cinema, an open street in Park Slope, or a Bluegrass night in the backyard at Saturn Road in Cobble Hill. I kept up my commute over the Brooklyn Bridge and up the West Side of Manhattan, taking up showering as an utter necessity the minute I arrived in the office. We figured we'd hit the end of the honeymoon period and just needed to settle in and start our new life.

Then we visited our friends back in Littleton. Even in the muggy, buggy heat, we had an absolute blast riding our bikes, walking, and trail running on the town trails. We hiked, an activity we very much took for granted when we first lived in Littleton. I had forgotten how nice it can be to sit outdoors at a restaurant that isn't a hole-in-the-wall backyard or a hot slab of concrete on the side of the road. We biked a ton. We relaxed in backyards. We walked all over town. I biked even more. We socialized with local friends all week. We viewed a house out of morbid curiosity. Ultimately, it was just as hard to leave as that gut-wrenching feeling in April.

Then we returned to New York. Or, more accurately, we delayed returning to New York City by spending more time upstate with family. With each passing day, we found ourselves more reluctant to return to the city. Our apartment didn't feel like our oases in the concrete jungle, or even like our personal cozy outpost in the city that never sleeps; instead, it just felt like a soulless box in the sky. When we finally boarded the molasses-slow Amtrak train to the city, we just... weren't excited to do New York City things again. We couldn't help but plan our next escape from the city. And not just to upstate to visit family; to Northern New England, to see our friends, to do silly outdoor activities in the woods, to relax.

So we started passively watching the housing market in Littleton. We planned another visit around Labor Day.

As luck would have it, a decent house in a perfect location popped up a day before our visit.

We viewed the house. We bought it September 15, 2025. And now we're breaking our lease and moving in this Thursday, in just 6 days.

Ultimately, we learned a few lessons from this experience. I'm recording our thoughts here so that we don't stupidly forget these important lessons in the future:

• I am a fool and my judgment cannot be trusted. Meg's intuition was spot-on. My crazy scheme was not a good idea.

• Working remotely is an incredible blessing that we should appreciate more. Sure, it's isolating. Sure, it's weird to spend so much time alone in your house. But it's so much better than wasting hours of every week on a stressful commute into an office that probably has a worse desk, a worse kitchen, a worse bathroom, and air temperatures that fluctuate randomly thanks to poorly managed office HVAC. If you get lonely, go socialize after work. Call a friend on the phone and ask them about their life and their day. The office will not scratch that itch.

• Every place has highs and lows. Adapt. Learn. Evolve. If you have community, activities that you love, and a reasonable cost of living, you have a firm foundation to smooth out those highs and lows.

• No matter how cool an activity is, it's not worth much if you can't actually book a ticket. We constantly see interesting events in NYC that are completely booked out. And if an event doesn't sell advance tickets or offer some kind of pre-order pickup, you will wait in a line with seemingly every other New Yorker.

• I value cheap, deep hobbies with a long learning curve. NYC hobbies are not cheap. Because nearly everyone is a renter who moved to the city in the last couple of years, the learning curves of popular activities don't tend to be that long, either.

• There are plenty of breweries in New York. That doesn't mean there is a lot of good beer here. Small spaces, underpaid brewers, and incredibly high demand are a dangerous combination of brewing ingredients.

• Cars ruin cities. Pedestrians and bicycle riders are clearly a second thought in NYC, even with a few more bike lanes. Until this city gets rid of street parking in the busiest neighborhoods, widens sidewalks, and starts enforcing quality of life concerns with cars, like loud exhaust, aggressive honking, speeding, and double parking, NYC will continue to be ruined by cars. I am excited to return at some point if the City that Never Sleeps ever decides to wake up from its unsustainable and dangerous love affair with cars.

• You might think that 85 degrees in Littleton, New Hampshire is hot, so who cares if you have to deal with 95 degrees in New York City. You would be sorely, incredible, tragically wrong. There is a big difference between temperatures that sort of suck to run in and temperatures that literally make you turn around and go back into your apartment. There were many days in June, July, and August where I simply couldn't sit outside in a shady backyard in Cobble Hill. Completely still, sweating profusely, in the shade, with a cool drink. Some people can apparently still function at that temperature, even wearing a suit or jeans. I am not one of them.

• It sucks to see braindead MAGA propaganda in rural New Hampshire and Vermont. You know what's worse? Walking past ICE headquarters in lower Manhattan and seeing candlelit shrines, handmade missing person posters, and entire families being ushered into courtrooms like goddamn Muggles under Voldemort's Ministry of Magic. Absolutely soul-crushing.

• Kitchens and bathrooms need an external vent.

• It's weird when everyone knows you in a small town. You know what's even weirder? When nobody seems to know you exist in an entire city full of millions of people.

• Cars suck. But when you live in the USA, the land of car-dependent infrastructure, you know what sucks more? Not having a car.

• Amtrak sucks. Every year, as the infrastructure degrades, the prices rise, and social norms decay, it sucks more. I would not recommend relying on it as a core method of transportation.

• Shared laundry sucks. In-unit laundry is worth every penny, if only because you never have to wait on a machine and you can fit laundry comfortably into relaxing activities like watching movies and making dinner.

• Owning things is nice. You can improve them. You can maintain them. You can ignore them, if you so choose. Most importantly, it's your choice to do all of those things. The more common spaces you have to deal with in your life, and the more people who use those common spaces, the higher the chance of people who have vastly different values from you making those choices for you.

• Bugs are annoying. DEET is a much cheaper and easier fix than living someplace where sprawling human infrastructure has destroyed all insect life except for cockroaches, ants, and lanternflies.

• Cities are fun to visit, because they are full of cool, unique opportunities. They are less fun to live in, because they are full of a lot of other things that aren't cool or unique, but you still have to hear, smell, see, walk around, and otherwise futz with them.

• From filling in potholes, to removing downed tree branch, to picking up trash, to unclogging storm drains, to making the subway run on time, to every other responsibility a government has, NYC will screw it up. Except for tax collection. That, they're experts at.

• The tech scene in New York City is even more obsessed with fads like cryptocurrency and AI than the tech world in general. If you're at all skeptical of those fads, beware. Most in person tech jobs in the city deal exclusively with those fads, because that's where the startup funding focuses.

TL;DR: We made a mistake. That's easy. The harder part, once you realize that you made a mistake, is to admit it and get to work on fixing it. We're doing our best to do that by moving back to a place we love.

New York City isn't bad or evil or wrong. It's just not our preference any more. For those of you who haven't visited since covid: the city is no different from how it's always been. It's gentrifying. It's expensive. It's noisy. Like most places, 24/7 places have essentially disappeared since 2020, and prices have gone up 2-3x since 2015. But the city is essentially the same as it ever was, at least in my adult lifetime. It's still extremely safe. Lots of people walk. More people bike than ever before, though unfortunately most of them are using e-citibikes, and an awful lot of them are browsing social media on their phones as they ride.

NYC is great. But I'm over it. We have changed a lot since we last lived here in 2019. Time to return to our lives.