I just got back from 10 days in New York. I was there on a professional mission. Every year, New York makes me feel the same way: you don't lie in New York. It's a city that keeps the books. A city capable of giving, also of taking back. It's a city that's afraid of nothing and can make you believe anything. Because anything is possible in New York. It is a generous city with people who try, who do, who go there with everything they have. Vigilance is knowing what you have. What you bet is often what you get. If you don't have a heart when you bet, you lose.
New York is a rough town. You can see the truth of an American system that has created an empire on a state of mind, that has created the culture of the reign, and that has made it such a powerful industry that no thought about America is expressed without being unconsciously associated with power. America is a power, and no matter who's in charge, it fights every day to remind us of it.
Power illuminates weakness. It means that my love of New York is also an affront to my weaknesses. Every year I fall in love with a city that looks me in the eye and keeps track of everything.
But it doesn't matter. No matter how many mistakes you make or how long it takes you to make progress, you're always in front of everyone who doesn't try.
And New York knows how to remind you of it.
American culture has been brewing in me for years. Part of my family was born and lives there. Entrepreneurship, at least as it exists on the other side, is not a profession. Money, not a dirty word. Difficulty and compromise, not options. envy, risk, movement, components. Of course you walk or die. You're sure to move on. And in the meantime, accounts count.
Work isn't a life you give up for another when you go home at 7:00. You're not ashamed of your job. You don't turn into something else when you walk out the door. You choose your life, because if you don't, the system won't choose for you either. He'll reduce you to the only choice to survive, with all the money you don't have that he'll take.
You have seen the lights of the city during the holidays, think that the shade is at least equal.
Then why New York?
For the rarity of linearity. For the recognition of the game and the importance of betting. For the individual responsibility to get away with it. For choice.
When you leave your city for another, you are blinded by the difference in reality. The lesson is not to experience another reality, but to realize that there is none. We create realities, everywhere, in every city in the world. We are under the yoke of a great history of which we have not been the physical witness, nor the creator. Far from questioning history, we are entertaining ourselves with habits and certainties. One day after another, we reproduce the great story we are told. We are engaging in pathetic politics without knowing anything about it, without yet again being a physical witness or witness to the events as they are told to us, without even sometimes being involved in them.
We work, we get married, we take out loans, we pray, and we close our eyes. The only ones who open them have barely enough time to open them up and they are judged to be collateral damage from false conspiracies.
We are not ourselves, but the reflection of all the packaging that has literally created us. Our perception of money, of success, of family has been bludgeoned for years and free thought is still considered the worst species of a world that is infinite in singularities and yet frightened by difference.
In 2017, the majority still do not choose their religion, profession, city, salary, partner. The majority replicates the known. The majority doesn't learn, she admits.
New York is just one city among many. She has no truth, like any of us. It simply reminds us of what it feels like to be naked, to be able to do everything and choose everything. It reminds us that we can lose everything and when we realize that we can lose everything, there are still 2 fundamental questions:
What is so deeply rooted in me that will never be able to get out of me?
What does it matter when I subtract all the things the system calls "essential" that can disappear in a snap of the fingers?
You got some serious thoughts bro....
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