One man’s schlep is another man’s whatever

The thing about urban life is, you become so accustomed to the inconveniences, you stop noticing them.

Cities have a way of normalizing hardship.

What’s interesting to me is, it impacts perceived versus actual suffering.

Like when your relatives say, wait, you walk up three flights of stairs just to get home? Every day? And you take two trains to get to work? Then you walk fifteen minutes in the snow to drop your kid off at daycare? But isn’t it like twenty degrees outside?

Yes it is, and yes I do. Sorry to burst your bubble, but basic inconveniences are not extreme survival challenges here. They’re simply part of my ordinary existence. I don’t view them as personal hardships. It’s just life. You adapt.

Now, I appreciate that people are concerned with my wellbeing. But they act like I’m a nineteen century dock worker living in tenement housing. Like everything I endure is a goddamn human rights violation.

It’s fine. I’m okay. Suffering is relative. One man’s schlep is another man’s whatever.

That’s the benefit of living in such an environment. You get good at viewing things as nonissues. You become desensitized to minor discomforts. And you become resilient by facing small, manageable struggles daily.

I’ll never forget when my wife and I first moved to the city. Our landlords invited us over for dinner, and gave us the skinny on urban life. One of them told us, to save yourself a lot of frustration, assume it takes an hour to get anywhere.

That piece of advice changed my life. For real. Walking out my front door and not expecting to arrive at my destination for at least sixty minutes transformed the relationship I had with public transportation.

Sure, I’d still get frustrated when there were delays and cancellations. But mostly my response was, of course.

Of course my train is closed for maintenance after a pigeon strike. Of course they roped off ten city blocks for a dog marathon. Of course there’s a naked homeless dude taking a shit on the park bench where I planned to eat my lunch.

Those inconveniences might knock less resilient people out of the game, but for me, that’s simply the reality of where we live. Yet another thing to adapt to.

And for the record, I’m not saying these little moments of hardship are endearing, or part of some shared cultural experience. I don’t have a perverted sense of pride because I’m managing to scrape by here.

But at a certain point, if you want to keep your sanity intact, you either move, or get really good at acceptance and surrender.

My theory is, you don’t always have to like it, you just have to live through it.

Seems like a healthy lesson to learn. Especially if you’re someone who makes things all day.