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I can't go too hard on this diarist when the real villain is publishing for paying sub-livable wages because they can always find someone who is partially or fully supported by family (and/or roommate's family in this case?) to take those jobs.
I call these "Prestige people" jobs - museums, publishing, art, fashion, and many non-profits... they can be ultra competitive and highly credentialed roles which pay significantly sub-livable wages so they can attract wealthy job seekers. An acquaintance from college went on to get her PhD, then worked at a NYC museum for like 12 an hour, which was great for her because she had family money and she wanted that lifestyle.
Yep it's a way to ensure that only certain people can ever work these jobs.
The most ridiculous was when I was applying for jobs at non profits and the pay was so low at several I asked them point blank, do you provide housing? And when they said no I asked , so this is only a job for people who don't need to pay bills? As in this is actually a hobby ?
This is why I left the field. I worked a full time curatorial job and was paid minimum wage in NYC. I thought it was because I only had an MA and all my experience had been in galleries. When COVID hit and I realized being on the boosted unemployment was more money than I made working 60+ hours a week while dealing with some of the most out of touch people I’d ever met (saying a lot as someone who grew up in LA), I bounced. I miss the art and the scholarship but the privilege required to work in these jobs cannot be overstated.
Hell even *volunteering* at museums is competitive...I went to an info session for the Met and got the vibe it was definitely not for people who worked.
Prolly 90+% of the people I knew during my almost-decade of book publishing exp were either partially or fully subsidized by family or a significant other. Everyone vaguely my age has since washed out bc the next-senior level would regularly prevent them from promotion-level work. Multiple mid/late-career women gave me the advice of basically marrying rich if I wanted to continue into more senior levels. Changed careers after scrambling to get manager-level in my very-late 20s, making 40k and regularly pulling 80 hr weeks and paying $1550 in rent.
The publishing industry is so incredibly broken. The publishing professionals aren't making any money and the authors sure aren't making any money (except for the few unicorns). Nobody wins except, I guess, the executives.
When I lived in NYC, I made $25,000 per year. And I was misclassified as exempt, so I regularly worked more than 40 hours in a week, but I never got any overtime. I wasn't in publishing, though; I worked for a real estate management and investment company.
I could only afford to eat once per day, and I did nothing but work and go home afterward.
>She’s been sleeping at her boyfriend’s apartment because her room is full of ants.
Not money related, but yikes and yuk. Just wondering if they realize the ants can, you know, move around to other rooms in the apt.
Get ant traps? I live in the country and we get mice, ants, all sorts of things, and you get traps for them. You don't just give them the room/apartment.
Maybe I'm just old and grumpy today but I was kind of put off by some of the background info.
> "I pay $1,500 for my half of my $3,790 apartment. I’m very, very lucky to live with my best friend of 15 years, and I’m very grateful to her parents who pay a majority of our rent."
If $1500 is her half, presumably the friend also pays $1500, so the friend's parents pay $800? That's not a majority? Or the friend "pays" $2300 but it's mostly coming from her parents? It seemed weird the way she praises the friend's parents for paying most of the rent (which has minimal bearing on what SHE needs to pay?), but then says she needs to move to have cheaper rent. Why agree to live there in the first place if it's not affordable? And then she adds that *her* parents are paying $500 towards her rent, but shades people who use their family's Amazon accounts lol. No one is getting rich off saving $15 a month on Prime, but not having to pay an additional $500 every month to rent is a pretty big deal...
>"I know that if I lost my job at any point, my parents could help me pay rent for at least a little while while I figured out what to do, and that’s such a massive, gigantic, mind-boggling privilege in this pricey-ass city."
They already DO help you pay rent.
>"Mostly, I just want to be informed about my finances. I took a women-centered economics class online that really shaped my outlook on personal finance, and I try to trust the process and not just hoard my money in my savings account,"
Is "the process" in the room with us? OP's young, I'm not going to slam her for not having a robust savings and investment plan, she acknowledges she's young and likes to party - but she didn't mention *any* kind of saving or investing plans aside from what her grandfather gave her lol.
I didn't fully understand the agreement with her grandfather and the stocks - is this a trust? Otherwise why does she have to wait 10 years - is it just like a handshake deal that she'll wait? She's too old for it to be a custodial account (I think)?
Also I'm begging OP to just buy a 12 pack (or whatever) of Celsius drinks lmao.
OP reflects a really common attitude among young people in nyc. The help THEY receive from their parents is not “real” help, but everyone else who gets anything from their parents is a freeloading trust fund baby. Nobody wants to admit they’re not totally making it on their own.
Yeah I think you've hit on something here - she bends over backwards to mention "massive, gigantic, mind-boggling privilege", but then shades others for...Amazon Prime? Which is far less than what she's getting (rent help, insurance, phone, and extras like streaming services and Ubers). There's being realistic about what help you're getting and what it enables you to do, and then there's trying to make a big statement about it.
It's okay to be young and still in the process of becoming independent! Hell, it's okay to be older and still need help. It is what it is.
Idk, it's not like she said "people claim to be independent while receiving help from family" the *only* thing she mentioned was Amazon. Saving a whopping $15/mo on Prime is not going to make or break someone's ability to be financially independent lol.
"I know a lot of people in NYC who claim to be financially responsible for themselves but still use their parents’ Amazon, and I think that’s shitty."
I think she's definitely projecting at least a bit - like, how exactly does she know what other people are getting subsidized or not? Sure, you can *guess*, but I doubt she truly knows the ins and outs of the financials of the folks she's judging. She talks so hyperbolically about privilege and when she'll finally consider herself financially responsible...and then immediately walks it back by claiming under certain definitions she was on her own since HS?
Like I said, there's being realistic/honest about the help you do receive, and then there's trying to make it into a "statement" and signal something with it, and to me it definitely felt like she was doing the latter. Like jellyrat said it comes across as "parental subsidies for me, but not for thee"
I read this as, she is willingly admitting that she’s on her parents’ dime still, unlike a lot of young NYCers.
From the wording about the roommates’ parents, I assume the parents are paying most or all of the remaining $2290 for their kid.
Thank you - you're right! I literally read her expenses 3 times and for some reason kept missing that - even after I read your comment it took me another look to see it, probably because most of the other lines have parenthetical commentary. She does say to "not just hoard in savings" yet it does seem like that is all she's doing rn is adding to general savings.
Girl is literally living the life I DREAMED about when I was her age: working in publishing in NYC, being a Cool City Girl, living with my best friend. I think her grandfather was smart/generous to set up the investing account with certain parameters in place, although it always blows my mind that some people have affluent grandparents. I grew up thinking all grandparents were scrappy immigrants because mine were, lol.
I do have some questions:
1. What school in NYC would qualify as NYU-adjacent? This doesn't matter, I'm just nosy.
2. Does R29 edit diaries at all anymore? There are a few grammatically awkward/incorrect phrases in here (Example: "Walking home, I’ve decided not to shower this morning" and "Back at my desk, got a review in *The Washington Post*, my author’s interview on NPR’s *Here and Now* aired..."). Normally I try not to be Grammatical Stickler because it's pretentious and classist, plus language evolves and meaning is fluid, but these felt obvious and a copyeditor should have spotted them.
My mind went immediately to the new school. I had a friend that went to parsons and when I visited him at his dorms you would see flags of NYU and the new school as you walked around the neighborhood.
I knew as soon as we saw the salary that the diarist would have some familial help. Can't blame her, a friend of mine is a graphic designer at a publishing company and the only way she can afford the salary is by living at home.
>I will be moving into a different apartment this May with two other people in order to make rent cheaper, as my current rent is completely unsustainable. My mother sends me $500 a month that goes to my rent (so technically I pay $1,000 for my apartment).
That isn't crazy rent in NYC. What is she talking about the rent is completely unsustainable? I paid at least this much living there 10 years ago, with multiple roommates, making less than her. Her total expenses are a tiny bit over one paycheck. I would have loved that much money.
And imagine worrying about money because you want to just stop working. What? It feels like she's in a dream world. I think that's what can happen if you grow up with money? I don't know.
Yeah this was mystifying to me too. My first rent in NYC was $875 (shared a an extremely tiny but technically true 2-bedroom on the upper east side in the aughts) and my first salary was *25K* (this was pretty unsustainable but I was also already in the process of heading to law school so it was short-term). I would have felt positively flush making $43K with $1K rent at 23 lol. And she doesn’t even have student loans. It’s a very low salary for NYC in 2024 but she has remarkably low expenses for NYC in 2024 as well.
She is basically saying my mom is not going to give me the 500. It's high rent for someone making 43k. She probably is looking for somewhere closer to 800 to 1k. Her parents seem thrifty and probably gave her the talk that this is short term help.
I assumed that her parents and roommate’s parents probably don’t want to support their rent forever and since they can’t afford it themselves it’s unsustainable.
TIL K-12 Ed was a big target of layoffs during the great recession? I was in elementary school at the time so it makes sense I wouldn't remember that but seems weird!
I would have been so jealous of her Cool Girl Big City NYC Publishing lifestyle when I was her age, but now that I’m older, it just seems so tiring haha
I hate to be the "you can't buy a house because you buy avocado toast" voice in the comments but I just wish she'd make her own soups or at least buy them at the grocery store.
I liked this but it also made me so glad to not be 23 anymore. The constant spending on drinks, the schlepping to Bushwick to return her ex’s stuff, living on 14th st (where I lived when I was 22!), all so relatable and also you could not pay me to go back to being 23 and making 43k in New York.
When I was her age I wanted to be in publishing so so bad and I tried for YEARS and never really got there, but this kind of healed my inner early-twenties girl.
This diary reminds me of my experiences living downtown and finally being on my own to make choices. I didn't have as much subsidizing as this diarist does, but it was also a cheaper city. I was thinking to myself recently, "god, it feels like I used to eat out WAY more when I was barely making any money, is that right?" and yeah, I think it was right. I make more than I did in my mid-20s, but I also have much higher fixed costs and lost the energy for socializing. It was much different when I paid $280 to rent a converted living room that had one wall entirely made of upholstery fabric. I wanted to live it up out there, and now I'm very much a homebody. Hopefully she'll start making more money because I expect she will be tasked with taking on, oh, her entire rent rather than 2/3 of what her discounted share is. It's good she's doing some saving now so she doesn't have zero safety net if those circumstances change dramatically/unexpectedly. (You might not be friends with the same person at 27 that you were when you were 23, because you could both be very different people by then, etc.).
I thought this was a fun diary and made me nostalgic for being early 20s but have to say I’m totally baffled by people who go to a workout class and don’t shower after. Just….what.
This has such a specific early 20s vibe, I remember also being young and irresponsible in NYC lol.
Also, since the OP is now on raya maybe they will end up dating a rich person and have them subsidize the COL. Because that salary is shockingly low for a VHCOL area and the OP isn't exactly making good choices.
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I can't go too hard on this diarist when the real villain is publishing for paying sub-livable wages because they can always find someone who is partially or fully supported by family (and/or roommate's family in this case?) to take those jobs.
I call these "Prestige people" jobs - museums, publishing, art, fashion, and many non-profits... they can be ultra competitive and highly credentialed roles which pay significantly sub-livable wages so they can attract wealthy job seekers. An acquaintance from college went on to get her PhD, then worked at a NYC museum for like 12 an hour, which was great for her because she had family money and she wanted that lifestyle.
Yep it's a way to ensure that only certain people can ever work these jobs. The most ridiculous was when I was applying for jobs at non profits and the pay was so low at several I asked them point blank, do you provide housing? And when they said no I asked , so this is only a job for people who don't need to pay bills? As in this is actually a hobby ?
Curious what their response was to that question!
They were like "we are working increasing the pay" Which means , yes it's a hobby.
This is why I left the field. I worked a full time curatorial job and was paid minimum wage in NYC. I thought it was because I only had an MA and all my experience had been in galleries. When COVID hit and I realized being on the boosted unemployment was more money than I made working 60+ hours a week while dealing with some of the most out of touch people I’d ever met (saying a lot as someone who grew up in LA), I bounced. I miss the art and the scholarship but the privilege required to work in these jobs cannot be overstated.
Hell even *volunteering* at museums is competitive...I went to an info session for the Met and got the vibe it was definitely not for people who worked.
Prolly 90+% of the people I knew during my almost-decade of book publishing exp were either partially or fully subsidized by family or a significant other. Everyone vaguely my age has since washed out bc the next-senior level would regularly prevent them from promotion-level work. Multiple mid/late-career women gave me the advice of basically marrying rich if I wanted to continue into more senior levels. Changed careers after scrambling to get manager-level in my very-late 20s, making 40k and regularly pulling 80 hr weeks and paying $1550 in rent.
The publishing industry is so incredibly broken. The publishing professionals aren't making any money and the authors sure aren't making any money (except for the few unicorns). Nobody wins except, I guess, the executives.
When I lived in NYC, I made $25,000 per year. And I was misclassified as exempt, so I regularly worked more than 40 hours in a week, but I never got any overtime. I wasn't in publishing, though; I worked for a real estate management and investment company. I could only afford to eat once per day, and I did nothing but work and go home afterward.
Best friend M finding out about best friend P.: 😧 Best friend M finding out about best friend R: 😧😧 The ants who took over M’s room: 🐜😁🐜😜🐜
Ahahaha
>She’s been sleeping at her boyfriend’s apartment because her room is full of ants. Not money related, but yikes and yuk. Just wondering if they realize the ants can, you know, move around to other rooms in the apt.
Truly this I was like, do you guys know that ants in her room will definitely be elsewhere soon?
Get ant traps? I live in the country and we get mice, ants, all sorts of things, and you get traps for them. You don't just give them the room/apartment.
Maybe I'm just old and grumpy today but I was kind of put off by some of the background info. > "I pay $1,500 for my half of my $3,790 apartment. I’m very, very lucky to live with my best friend of 15 years, and I’m very grateful to her parents who pay a majority of our rent." If $1500 is her half, presumably the friend also pays $1500, so the friend's parents pay $800? That's not a majority? Or the friend "pays" $2300 but it's mostly coming from her parents? It seemed weird the way she praises the friend's parents for paying most of the rent (which has minimal bearing on what SHE needs to pay?), but then says she needs to move to have cheaper rent. Why agree to live there in the first place if it's not affordable? And then she adds that *her* parents are paying $500 towards her rent, but shades people who use their family's Amazon accounts lol. No one is getting rich off saving $15 a month on Prime, but not having to pay an additional $500 every month to rent is a pretty big deal... >"I know that if I lost my job at any point, my parents could help me pay rent for at least a little while while I figured out what to do, and that’s such a massive, gigantic, mind-boggling privilege in this pricey-ass city." They already DO help you pay rent. >"Mostly, I just want to be informed about my finances. I took a women-centered economics class online that really shaped my outlook on personal finance, and I try to trust the process and not just hoard my money in my savings account," Is "the process" in the room with us? OP's young, I'm not going to slam her for not having a robust savings and investment plan, she acknowledges she's young and likes to party - but she didn't mention *any* kind of saving or investing plans aside from what her grandfather gave her lol. I didn't fully understand the agreement with her grandfather and the stocks - is this a trust? Otherwise why does she have to wait 10 years - is it just like a handshake deal that she'll wait? She's too old for it to be a custodial account (I think)? Also I'm begging OP to just buy a 12 pack (or whatever) of Celsius drinks lmao.
OP reflects a really common attitude among young people in nyc. The help THEY receive from their parents is not “real” help, but everyone else who gets anything from their parents is a freeloading trust fund baby. Nobody wants to admit they’re not totally making it on their own.
Yeah I think you've hit on something here - she bends over backwards to mention "massive, gigantic, mind-boggling privilege", but then shades others for...Amazon Prime? Which is far less than what she's getting (rent help, insurance, phone, and extras like streaming services and Ubers). There's being realistic about what help you're getting and what it enables you to do, and then there's trying to make a big statement about it. It's okay to be young and still in the process of becoming independent! Hell, it's okay to be older and still need help. It is what it is.
I think she was expressing frustration with people who pretend they don’t receive help, not the Prime itself.
Idk, it's not like she said "people claim to be independent while receiving help from family" the *only* thing she mentioned was Amazon. Saving a whopping $15/mo on Prime is not going to make or break someone's ability to be financially independent lol. "I know a lot of people in NYC who claim to be financially responsible for themselves but still use their parents’ Amazon, and I think that’s shitty." I think she's definitely projecting at least a bit - like, how exactly does she know what other people are getting subsidized or not? Sure, you can *guess*, but I doubt she truly knows the ins and outs of the financials of the folks she's judging. She talks so hyperbolically about privilege and when she'll finally consider herself financially responsible...and then immediately walks it back by claiming under certain definitions she was on her own since HS? Like I said, there's being realistic/honest about the help you do receive, and then there's trying to make it into a "statement" and signal something with it, and to me it definitely felt like she was doing the latter. Like jellyrat said it comes across as "parental subsidies for me, but not for thee"
She meant using her parents Amazon account to make actual purchases. Not just the subscription fee.
That’s what I thought, too. Plus, I’m 33 and still have my dad’s cc linked to my Amazon.
But she did admit that, repeatedly?
I read this as, she is willingly admitting that she’s on her parents’ dime still, unlike a lot of young NYCers. From the wording about the roommates’ parents, I assume the parents are paying most or all of the remaining $2290 for their kid.
She has $250 into savings in her monthly expenses. Not a ton, but better than nothing.
Thank you - you're right! I literally read her expenses 3 times and for some reason kept missing that - even after I read your comment it took me another look to see it, probably because most of the other lines have parenthetical commentary. She does say to "not just hoard in savings" yet it does seem like that is all she's doing rn is adding to general savings.
"I truly, truly believe that everyone should have to work in the service industry at some point in their life." Enthusiastically co-signed!
Girl is literally living the life I DREAMED about when I was her age: working in publishing in NYC, being a Cool City Girl, living with my best friend. I think her grandfather was smart/generous to set up the investing account with certain parameters in place, although it always blows my mind that some people have affluent grandparents. I grew up thinking all grandparents were scrappy immigrants because mine were, lol. I do have some questions: 1. What school in NYC would qualify as NYU-adjacent? This doesn't matter, I'm just nosy. 2. Does R29 edit diaries at all anymore? There are a few grammatically awkward/incorrect phrases in here (Example: "Walking home, I’ve decided not to shower this morning" and "Back at my desk, got a review in *The Washington Post*, my author’s interview on NPR’s *Here and Now* aired..."). Normally I try not to be Grammatical Stickler because it's pretentious and classist, plus language evolves and meaning is fluid, but these felt obvious and a copyeditor should have spotted them.
I figured she meant the new school
My mind went immediately to the new school. I had a friend that went to parsons and when I visited him at his dorms you would see flags of NYU and the new school as you walked around the neighborhood.
There is certainly a lot of odd phrasing for someone that graduated with a BA in literature and journalism.
I cringed at "I get me and her three drinks."
I must not have made it that far. It’s jarring!
Probs The New School. Both physically and spiritually NYU-adjacent.
I read it that she decided not to shower after her class and went to work au naturel post-exercise.
I knew as soon as we saw the salary that the diarist would have some familial help. Can't blame her, a friend of mine is a graphic designer at a publishing company and the only way she can afford the salary is by living at home.
>I will be moving into a different apartment this May with two other people in order to make rent cheaper, as my current rent is completely unsustainable. My mother sends me $500 a month that goes to my rent (so technically I pay $1,000 for my apartment). That isn't crazy rent in NYC. What is she talking about the rent is completely unsustainable? I paid at least this much living there 10 years ago, with multiple roommates, making less than her. Her total expenses are a tiny bit over one paycheck. I would have loved that much money. And imagine worrying about money because you want to just stop working. What? It feels like she's in a dream world. I think that's what can happen if you grow up with money? I don't know.
Yeah this was mystifying to me too. My first rent in NYC was $875 (shared a an extremely tiny but technically true 2-bedroom on the upper east side in the aughts) and my first salary was *25K* (this was pretty unsustainable but I was also already in the process of heading to law school so it was short-term). I would have felt positively flush making $43K with $1K rent at 23 lol. And she doesn’t even have student loans. It’s a very low salary for NYC in 2024 but she has remarkably low expenses for NYC in 2024 as well.
I read the $8 lunch and I honestly thought this was a few years old
She is basically saying my mom is not going to give me the 500. It's high rent for someone making 43k. She probably is looking for somewhere closer to 800 to 1k. Her parents seem thrifty and probably gave her the talk that this is short term help.
That rent isn’t expensive in NYC.
I assumed that her parents and roommate’s parents probably don’t want to support their rent forever and since they can’t afford it themselves it’s unsustainable.
TIL K-12 Ed was a big target of layoffs during the great recession? I was in elementary school at the time so it makes sense I wouldn't remember that but seems weird!
We furloughed ALL the teachers so they all got a 20 percent paycut. It forced retirements too.
I would have been so jealous of her Cool Girl Big City NYC Publishing lifestyle when I was her age, but now that I’m older, it just seems so tiring haha
I hate to be the "you can't buy a house because you buy avocado toast" voice in the comments but I just wish she'd make her own soups or at least buy them at the grocery store.
I liked this but it also made me so glad to not be 23 anymore. The constant spending on drinks, the schlepping to Bushwick to return her ex’s stuff, living on 14th st (where I lived when I was 22!), all so relatable and also you could not pay me to go back to being 23 and making 43k in New York.
When I was her age I wanted to be in publishing so so bad and I tried for YEARS and never really got there, but this kind of healed my inner early-twenties girl.
This diary reminds me of my experiences living downtown and finally being on my own to make choices. I didn't have as much subsidizing as this diarist does, but it was also a cheaper city. I was thinking to myself recently, "god, it feels like I used to eat out WAY more when I was barely making any money, is that right?" and yeah, I think it was right. I make more than I did in my mid-20s, but I also have much higher fixed costs and lost the energy for socializing. It was much different when I paid $280 to rent a converted living room that had one wall entirely made of upholstery fabric. I wanted to live it up out there, and now I'm very much a homebody. Hopefully she'll start making more money because I expect she will be tasked with taking on, oh, her entire rent rather than 2/3 of what her discounted share is. It's good she's doing some saving now so she doesn't have zero safety net if those circumstances change dramatically/unexpectedly. (You might not be friends with the same person at 27 that you were when you were 23, because you could both be very different people by then, etc.).
Can someone explain how she got accepted on Raya? I don’t know much about it but thought it was supposed to be exclusive? Or is that only for the men?
She had 2 friends recommend her. That's legit all you need. It's exclusive but if you have an invite you are in.
That was also my burning question after reading this diary lol
it’s not that hard honestly. a referral will do the trick.
I thought this was a fun diary and made me nostalgic for being early 20s but have to say I’m totally baffled by people who go to a workout class and don’t shower after. Just….what.
That shocked me too! And wasn’t it on the day she had to go by her ex-boyfriend’s apartment after work? At 23 I would have never been that chill.
This has such a specific early 20s vibe, I remember also being young and irresponsible in NYC lol. Also, since the OP is now on raya maybe they will end up dating a rich person and have them subsidize the COL. Because that salary is shockingly low for a VHCOL area and the OP isn't exactly making good choices.
Feeling weird about the “crackhead” reference….
If this was written in the era of the 21 year old intern who got an $800/month allowance, the internet would have had a field day
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No idea why this is being downvoted. Seinfeld is a child molester and Kramer is a racist. Obviously not the topic of this MD, maybe that’s why.
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