Eight Million People, Nobody Home

You move to the city to escape the emptiness, and then the city hands you a different kind of empty—quieter, more crowded, somehow worse. That’s the specific cruelty of it. Pressed up against strangers on the subway, shoulder to shoulder in bars and coffee shops and stairwells, and still there’s no one to grab by the arm and say: hey, are you okay, am I okay, does any of this feel real to you?

Paul Riccio made a short video about living in New York City that gets at this feeling without overselling it. No dramatic score, no montage of lonely faces staring at phones—just the texture of a place that contains multitudes and offers none of them to you personally. I’ve felt exactly this in more cities than I’d like to admit. That sensation of being a ghost moving through a crowd that can technically see you but won’t.