Vox Meditantis

Which is the best thing to do in your city?

Honestly? I almost didn’t bother with this prompt. These things are always designed for a certain type of person. You know the type. The guy who’s going to write about some farmer’s market he goes to with his girlfriend, or a brunch spot, or whatever activity makes him feel like a functioning member of polite society. Good for him. Genuinely. I hope the mimosas are nice.

But fine. Let’s do this. You want to know the best thing to do in this city? I’ll tell you. But I’m going to give you the real answer, not the answer that gets you a little gold star from whatever invisible audience everyone else seems to be performing for.

The best thing you can do in this city is not need it.

Let me explain, because I can already feel the eye-rolls from people who won’t read past the first paragraph anyway. That’s fine. This isn’t for them.

I’ve lived here six years. Came here because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? That’s the pipeline. You grow up in a mid-sized town, you do reasonably well in school, better than most, frankly, and someone – our parents, a teacher, the general hum of cultural messaging – tells you that the city is where life is. Opportunity. Connection. All that. So you go. You get a flat with a flatmate who leaves passive-aggressive notes about the washing-up. You get a job that technically qualifies as a career if you squint at it right. You download the apps. You do the thing.

And then about three years in, if you’re paying attention – and I mean really paying attention, not just consuming the city’s self-mythology like everyone else seems perfectly content to do – you start to see the machinery underneath it all.

This city, like most cities, runs on a social economy. And like any economy, it has winners and losers, and it has a class of people who benefit enormously from making sure the losers don’t fully understand the rules of the game they’re playing. I figured out the rules. That’s my crime, apparently.

The rules are simple: status flows upward and outward. The people at the top – the ones with the money, the postcode, the social fluency that comes from growing up in homes where confidence was just assumed rather than something you had to claw together yourself – those people move through this city like it was built for them. Because it was. The bars they go to, the flats they live in, the entire texture of the place is oriented around rewarding people who already have everything and extracting effort from people who don’t.

I work in data analysis. I’m good at it. Better than my manager, which is not a brag, it’s just a measurable fact, and the fact that it hasn’t translated into the kind of recognition it should have is a whole other conversation about how modern workplaces actually function versus how they pretend to function. But that’s fine. I’m patient. I understand leverage.

What I don’t have patience for is the social side of this city. The events. The “networking.” The Friday night rituals where everyone pretends they’re not auditioning for each other’s approval while absolutely, obviously auditioning for each other’s approval. I went to enough of those to know what they are. They’re dominance displays dressed up as fun. The loudest guy at the pub quiz, the woman who laughs a little too theatrically at everything – they’re not having a good time, they’re performing having a good time, and the performance is load-bearing because the moment they stop, they have to confront the same thing I’ve already confronted: that the city doesn’t actually like you. It just uses you.

Women in this city are a particular kind of exhausting, and I say that without malice, just observation. There’s a type – you know the type – who has absorbed so thoroughly the idea that she’s the prize that she’s lost the ability to offer anything in exchange for being treated like one. That sounds harsh. Okay. But I’ve had conversations in this city. I’ve made the effort. I’ve sat across from women at bars and coffee shops and watched them look slightly past my shoulder the whole time, checking the room, calibrating. I know what that is. It’s hypergamy in action, if you know the term. Most people don’t, because most people are just swimming in it without the framework to understand what they’re seeing. It’s fine. I’ve stopped taking it personally. Mostly.

The thing is, I have a framework. That’s the part that separates me from the guys who just feel vaguely bad and don’t know why. I’ve read. I’ve thought seriously about social dynamics, about the way status hierarchies actually function versus the egalitarian fairy tale, about the gap between what people say they value and what they demonstrably respond to. There are communities online, forums, where this kind of honest analysis happens, and yes, I know what people call those communities, and yes, that framing is designed to shut down the conversation before it happens rather than engage with the substance. Classic.

So. The best thing to do in this city.

Here it is: build something that doesn’t need the city’s approval to matter.

I’m working on a project. I won’t get into the details here, this isn’t the right venue, but it’s analytical, it’s monetisable, and it runs entirely outside the social economy I just described. No networking required. No performing. No waiting for someone above me to decide I’ve been patient and compliant long enough to deserve what I’ve already earned.

The city can keep its farmer’s markets. It can keep the brunches and the apps and the Friday night pubs where everyone’s pretending. I’m here, I’m watching, I’m working, and one day the people who looked slightly past my shoulder will have occasion to look directly at me.

And honestly? I’m not even sure I’ll bother looking back.

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Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.