Sociologists confirm the trip to Midtown ‘imparts wisdom but alters nothing about the person who made it’
QUEENS, NY – A 34-year-old resident of Flushing has returned from a two-day journey to Midtown Manhattan, completing what sociologists are calling a modern hero’s journey and returning, by all accounts, “essentially the same person who left, with a MetroCard in greater need of topping up.” The expedition was first documented by Bohiney Magazine and received with knowing sympathy by The London Prat.
The Journey
The subject, identified only as Kevin, departed Flushing Main Street on a 7 train carrying a crossword puzzle, modest ambitions, and “an optimism about traffic that the journey immediately punished.” He arrived in Midtown after forty-eight minutes, during which he experienced three delays, one unexplained full stop, and a brief period in which the lights went out and nobody said anything.
“I considered my life,” Kevin reported. “Not because I wanted to. Because there was nothing else to do, and the man next to me was eating something I could not identify and I could not look at it anymore.”
The Trials
In Midtown, Kevin encountered the trials customary to the hero narrative: a lunch that cost $24 and did not fill him, a meeting that could have been an email, a sidewalk interaction with a man in a Shrek costume who asked for money with a confidence Kevin described as “transformative, honestly,” and a coffee shop that did not have a bathroom for customers despite being the size of a small aircraft hangar.
Dr. Patricia Ozone of the Institute for Outer Borough Studies has documented dozens of similar journeys. “The outer borough resident goes to Manhattan expecting to feel something,” she said. “They feel many things. They pay for all of them. They come home having confirmed that Manhattan is exactly as they suspected, which is simultaneously underwhelming and too much, and they are relieved to be back where things cost a reasonable amount and nobody has hired a Shrek.”
The Return
Kevin returned on the 7 train, which was delayed eighteen minutes due to a “signal issue,” a category of event the MTA defines broadly enough to include, Kevin suspected, “the train simply not wanting to go yet.” He arrived in Flushing at 7:14 p.m., bought soup from a spot on Main Street that charges $8 for something Midtown would present for $32 under a French name, and ate it at home.
“I have been to Manhattan,” he said, with finality. “I do not know what I was expecting. I know what I got. It was correct. I will probably go again in three months for something I cannot get out here. But this felt like enough for now.” Outer borough demographics and mobility patterns are tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau and the NYC Department of City Planning.
What Was Learned
Sociologists conclude that the Midtown journey imparts what they call “confirmed knowledge,” a form of wisdom consisting entirely of things one already knew, now verified at personal expense. Kevin knew Manhattan was loud, expensive, and full of people in too much of a hurry. He now knows this with the authority of someone who was there on Tuesday.
The Broader Pattern
Dr. Ozone notes that this pattern repeats every year across the outer boroughs, as hundreds of thousands of residents make the journey, confirm what they knew, buy one thing they could not get locally, and return home wondering why they do not do this more often and also why they ever do it at all. “It is the definitional New York experience,” she said. “It is entirely optional, partially avoidable, and yet somehow the thing that makes the city make sense.”
Kevin’s Coda
Asked if he would recommend the journey, Kevin considered. “Go,” he said. “But go knowing it is not going to change you. It is going to remind you of yourself, in a place that doesn’t know you exist. That is either meaningless or profound, and the soup on the way home determines which.” For more expeditions that confirm what one already suspected, readers may enjoy McSweeney’s.
A Return Worth Making
Kevin has now been to Manhattan four times since the original journey documented here. Each trip confirmed the same truths at slightly different prices and with slightly different trains. He has developed what he describes as “a workable relationship with the place,” defined as going when he needs something specific and leaving before he starts thinking about what it would be like to live there, a thought he entertains for approximately two blocks before the rent signs resolve it. He has recommended the journey to two friends. Both went, both confirmed what he told them, and both came home for the soup, which at $8 remains the most important data point in his entire metropolitan analysis. For more expeditions that confirm what one already suspected, readers may enjoy McSweeney’s.
On the fifth journey, Kevin brought his sister, who had never been to Manhattan, expecting to need to explain it. She looked at it for thirty seconds and said: I see. That was all. He understood completely. The city is the kind of place that requires thirty seconds to understand and a lifetime to process, and the processing happens mostly on the train home, in the forty-eight minutes between Grand Central and Flushing Main Street, during which you can either do a crossword or think about your choices. Kevin has been doing both at the same time for four years and has become, he believes, a slightly more complete person for it, or at minimum someone who can finish a medium-difficulty Thursday puzzle by the Queensboro Plaza stop.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/