new york without i*stagram by Janet G. '27

i’m starting this entry at an airport at 5am. sometimes waking up way too early for a flight has its benefits: you get to sit in an airport, people watch, and reflect on how you should compensate for your irresponsible spending by writing a blog.

i was in new york over the past few days (mainly for christmas), and due to a mixture of factors both within and outside my control, i had an overall pretty mid time. it wasn’t awful, but considering how much all of my friends raved about this city i was pretty disappointed with my experience here.

i’ll get the hate out of my system first. i’ll preface it by saying that this is my very biased personal take, subject to change blah blah blah

midtown manhattan⁠01 where i spent all my time is the epitome of late stage capitalism, and you could take that as either a compliment or an insult depending on your personal philosophies. personally, i find it a little comical that one of the most famous attractions in the city is a set of massive advertisement billboards. 

i dislike that the big draw of this city is to find different ways to spend a lot of money. everywhere is extremely crowded,⁠02 for what it's worth, probably exacerbated by the tourism season people are always tense and hurried, and you have to watch your step to avoid stepping in some trash-filled puddle every few minutes. even the rich pieces of culture felt underwhelming and couldn’t improve my opinion of the place. at some point, the beautiful pieces of the Met start conflating into one glittery blur and you start thinking about how you could probably estimate the number of lives it took to make these extravagant jewellery pieces.

fancy eggs in question

this photo could not capture the pain in an $18 chicken kebab sandwich just off the side of times square

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broadway was very well produced, and while it was cool to see some big names live, i didn’t like the numbers of this musical⁠03 lol i'm not going to put the name here to not evoke too much controversy and thus couldn’t ignore the underdevelopment of plot and characters that felt jarring to me. 

with all of that said, there is something iconic about new york that doesn’t allow you to fully hate it. there’s an infectious sense of wonder when you’re wandering the streets and see everyone dressed up in their best fits and beaming at the camera. there’s always a lot of energy in the streets. complaints about the Met and Broadway aside, they are some of the most iconic places in the world for a reason. you couldn’t find another museum that was as extensive and well-curated — every exhibit was placed with care and intention, it would take me years to get through and understand the richness of every piece of history there. as much as the musical numbers failed to latch onto me, the dances and set was still fantastic, the song delivery was powerful and incredibly clear, and i’m not sure when else i’d get a chance to have jordan fisher be literally less than 4 feet away from me. 

i also enjoyed walking through central park,⁠04 which still had lingering snow, and i LOVE walking through snow grabbing a lox bagel at liberty bagels despite the lines and price, and seeing the new york skyline at the rockefeller center.⁠05 which is not cheap but i think this experience is still a must have new york city is The City, after all, and there are some things you should just tick off for the sake of it.

central park!

new york skyline

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knowing what you personally enjoy while travelling is important. travelling without an express purpose — without my family or other people planning my itinerary — forces you to think about your own desires rather than what your parents/team leaders want. the most interesting conclusion i gained from this trip is that not having instagram has really changed what i want. 

for context, i deactivated my accounts sometime in the fall semester. there are really valid use cases for instagram: staying in touch with friends, stalking your crush’s tagged posts and occasionally trying to send them a reel for no reason at all, proving to your haters that you’re living a better life than them with your matcha latte at the cutest coffee shop ever, so on so forth. i just primarily used mine to send my friends deranged memes and post unhinged stories about my transport debacles. one day i decided that this was not worth it and decided to leave and never go back. 

during the semester i was mostly too busy to realise the impact that no instagram had on me. being in new york gave me a lot of whiplash — after all, is this not the most instagrammable city of all time? i grabbed my rainbow lox bagel and after taking a bite of it first,⁠06 i was HUNGRY and it smelled good i took a photo and paused for a moment as i realised that i was trying to get the perfect lighting to show how beautiful the cross-section was. but like, why was i doing that? it’s not like i was going to post this on instagram to prove that i went to a cute place with a cute bagel. i also personally care about the taste of the bagel much more than the appearance, and the rainbow bagel just literally looks good. 

so you can tell that i ate a bite before i remembered that the proper way to take a cute bagel pic was to open it and show the halves… anyway it was good

the same thing happened everywhere else i went. realising that i no longer had to perform for some imaginary audience forced me to confront why i cared about the perfect photo. for some contexts, this still mattered; i think it’s totally valid to want to create and keep the best memento of your experience at certain places. if i had to pay like 50 dollars to go stand in the wind above a bunch of light pollution then my photos better be good. but also i realised that for some places it’s just not worth it — times square felt like a spectacle meant for the optimised instagram algorithm; the bright lights are supposed to capture your attention as you apathetically tap through a bunch of stories.

i like not having instagram. it means that i have to work harder to prove to myself why i want certain kinds of life experiences, beyond the idea of “i can make a post on instagram and get some gratifying likes”. maybe this takes the fun away from many decisions, such as why i decided to take a $3 premium to get the rainbow bagel over the NYT-recommended everything bagel. but also, maybe this means that the next time i come back to new york, i can go visit places i know i actually want, rather than places i feel like i should go for some experience that i was replicating based on everyone else’s curated stories. i no longer have instagram as a sample set anyway.

in some ways, i felt the same incentive structure when it came to writing my college application essays. i framed myself as a very specific kind of person so that i could draw attention to myself in the hopes that the admission officers would notice me and admit me. i mean, it worked. but what i also found very useful was to look at my essays and ask myself, what do i actually want? is this an authentic version of myself? and maybe this is a question you should answer after your college application season is over, because you just really need to get your essays out before the looming deadline and you’re stressed. but most of my favourite essays that i wrote — essays that i specifically wrote for specific schools because the prompts spoke to me — come from a place of authenticity. don’t be afraid to write about something that you feel like doesn’t fit your portfolio or narrative that you’re trying to build. 

one of the best pieces of writing advice that i got from my short stories professor last semester was that “every good piece of writing has some piece of a beating heart inside”. for every school i was admitted to i could point to one or two essays that i wrote exclusively for them because i really liked their prompt. don’t get me wrong — there’s a practice amongst people to copy and paste essays with minimal edits for multiple schools, and i think you should know that this is a reasonable and often necessary practice to make sure that you don’t go insane applying to too many schools at once. especially if you’re still looking at schools to apply to, you should most definitely do this copy-pasting thing so that you can toss your hat into the rng ring. 

but i encourage you to not worry about the idea of trying to make the AO admit you — to take off the instagram-style filter of “would my audience like this and give me some gratifying likes?” — and engage directly with the prompts and stories yourself. what do these prompts mean to you? what is the story that you want to tell?

i also highly recommend this essay for you to procrastinate on if you’re stressed about writing. the tl;dr is that you could consider my thoughts above as advice on how to write your college essays, but you could also consider the reverse of my advice, which is basically that you should not be too authentic. maybe not everyone wants to hear about your crippling addiction to genshin impact because you wanted that specific ganyu skin, and instead they want to hear you explain why you actually wanted to lead the n-th nonprofit teaching kids maths in the area.

i’ll close off by saying that i know this period is rough, and i’m sorry you’re still stuck in this sense of limbo. i fondly remember the two weeks before college applications were due to be the worst two weeks of my life (hyperbole), and i did a lot of coping because i was stressed out and overthought about how my life was contingent on some random guy’s 5 minute skim and the sandwich they ate that day.⁠07 this is again an over-exaggeration i make no claims to know how much time AOs actually read their applications. you can go to admission podcasts and directly hear their experiences here were some of my favourite ways to destress during trying times:

• orangutan jungle school which is the CUTEST
• some excellent short films i watched (the kiwi one is a personal fav and i am not biased at all. honestly if you look up short films you’ll find a few good ones. they taught me a lot about storytelling and gave me a break without making me too guilty)
• ellie’s excellent list – didn’t have this bAck iN mY dAy but they’re still very cute!
• yes i also read a lot of the blogs lol

hoping everyone has a good holiday season!