Shocking Reasons New York Is So Expensive and People Stay Anyway

I’ve never been there. I still really fucking want to go.

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If you offered me a ticket right now I would be packing before you finished the sentence

Here is a genuinely embarrassing thing about me.

If someone messaged me right now and said “there’s a free ticket to New York, it leaves Thursday,” I would not ask any follow-up questions. I would not ask where I’m staying. I would not ask who’s paying. I would not check whether Thursday is convenient, because Thursday would become convenient. I would be pulling a bag out of a cupboard while typing “yes.”

I live in Maharashtra. I have never been to the United States. Nobody in my family has ever lived in New York. I have no job waiting there, no cousin in Queens, no reason of any kind. There is no line of logic connecting my actual life to that city.

And yet I have thought about it so often that I have preferences. I have opinions. I have a mental map. I have, and I want you to understand how stupid this is, a rough sense of which parts of the city I think I’d like, based entirely on footage.

I don’t know what the subway smells like. Everyone says it’s bad. They say it with a specific weariness, like they’re describing a relative. I don’t know what “bad” means here. Bad like a fish market? Bad like a public toilet? Bad like something that got into the walls in 1974 and made a life for itself? I have no idea. I have never smelled it.

I don’t know if I’d like it. That’s the part I keep coming back to. I don’t know if I’d like the actual city as much as I like the city I’ve assembled in my head over about fifteen years of screens. There’s a real chance I’d land, walk around for two days, and think: huh. That’s a real risk. That’s the most likely outcome, statistically.

I want to go anyway. Badly. Stupidly. In a way I can’t defend in an argument.

And a few months ago I was lying awake at maybe 1 AM, doing the thing where your brain picks a topic at random and refuses to release it, and the topic was: why the fuck do I want this so much?

Not “is New York good.” Not “should I go.” Not “how much would it cost,” which is a question I’ve looked up more times than a person with no immediate travel plans should. The question was about me. Why has a city I have never touched taken up this much space in my head, rent-free, for years, while I live eight thousand kilometers away and have never once had a practical reason to think about it?

I couldn’t answer it. So I did what I do, which is overthink a thing until it becomes five thousand words.

And at the end of all of it, having learned that the city is brutally expensive and that a majority of the people in it are struggling to cover basic costs and that two people who live there can’t agree on whether it’s worth it:

I still want to go.

That’s the essay. Not “New York is amazing.” Not “here’s why you should visit.” The essay is: here is every reason not to want this, presented honestly, and here I am wanting it anyway, and I’ve been trying to work out what that says about me.

I have strong opinions about neighbourhoods I have never physically stood in

Let me establish the full extent of the ridiculousness first, because I think honesty about this is the only thing that makes the rest of it bearable.

I have views on New York neighbourhoods. Actual views. I have absorbed, from a decade of ambient content, the idea that Brooklyn means one thing and Manhattan means another and that these two things are in a long-running argument. I could not defend a single one of these positions under questioning. But the opinions are in there, fully formed, sitting in my head like furniture in a house I’ve never entered.

I have absorbed that Times Square is for tourists and that liking it marks you as an idiot. I have absorbed this so thoroughly that I have pre-emptive shame about wanting to see Times Square, which I do want to see, obviously, because I’m a tourist and I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise. I have somehow acquired the local disdain without acquiring the locality.

I have imagined myself walking through Manhattan holding a coffee. I do not really drink coffee. In my actual life, in my actual house, coffee is not a thing that happens to me. But the version of me in this fantasy is holding a paper cup, walking fast, going somewhere, and the coffee is essential to the image in a way I cannot explain and am not proud of. That’s not a memory. That’s not even an aspiration. That’s an advertisement I absorbed and started running internally without permission.

Which means somewhere along the way a real city with real problems and real rent installed itself in my imagination as a feeling, and I never noticed it happening, and now I want to buy a plane ticket to somewhere I have never had a reason to go.

That’s what I’m trying to take apart here.

Where the hell did this come from

Movies did a lot of it, but not the way you’d think.

It isn’t that I watched films set in New York and thought “nice city.” It’s that New York was the default location for a certain kind of story, and I watched enough of those stories that the city stopped being a backdrop and became a mood. Somebody arrives with a bag. Somebody’s life changes. Somebody fails and stays anyway. Somebody stands on a rooftop at night looking at the lights and having a realisation. The city was where things happened to people, and I absorbed that as a property of the place rather than as a convenience of the film industry.

Television did more, because television repeats. A film gives you a city for two hours. A show gives you the same six streets, the same apartment, the same coffee place, for years. That’s how you learn a city’s grammar without going there.

Stand-up did an amount that surprised me when I started thinking about it. Comedians talk about their cities the way people talk about a sibling they resent and would fight anyone else for. They complain with detail. They complain about rent, about neighbours, about the specific indignities of a specific train line. Tourism boards give you the skyline. A comedian gives you the noise complaint. I ended up with a version of New York that included the annoyances, which felt more like knowledge than the postcards did, even though it obviously wasn’t.

And then the internet, which is where it got out of hand. YouTube has an entire genre that is just a person walking through a neighbourhood with a camera, no talking, forty minutes, rain sometimes. I have watched a lot of these. There is no reason for me to watch these. They are not entertainment in any conventional sense. I think what I like about them is that nothing is being sold. Nobody is performing the city. It’s just a street, and traffic, and people going about a Tuesday, and I’m watching it from Maharashtra like it’s a nature documentary about a species I’ve read about but never seen.

So it wasn’t one thing. It was fifteen years of small exposures. Nobody radicalises you into liking a city. It just builds up.

Here’s what I find genuinely weird about it, and I don’t have a neat explanation:

I became emotionally familiar with a place I have never physically experienced. Not informed about it. Familiar with it. Those are different things and only one of them makes sense.

The apartments in these things make no fucking sense

I want to spend a minute on this because it’s the part where the fantasy visibly breaks and I love it.

Fictional New York has an apartment problem. Characters whose entire personality is that they are broke live in apartments that would, in reality, require an income they explicitly do not have. A waitress with vague artistic ambitions has a two-bedroom. A guy who is unemployed for six consecutive seasons has a living room you could hold a wedding in. Nobody in these stories ever appears to be doing the arithmetic that would be consuming their entire waking life.

The technical explanation is boring: sets need room for cameras. The effect on someone watching from eight thousand kilometers away is not boring at all. I grew up absorbing a model of New York in which people struggled spaciously. In which being broke there was a temporary and quite comfortable condition, more of a plot stage than a situation.

I knew all of this was fake. That’s the thing. I wasn’t fooled. But knowing something is fake doesn’t stop it from teaching you a feeling, and the feeling I got was that New York was a place where a person without money could still be at the centre of something interesting.

The real version, as I would find out from actual numbers and actual people, is significantly less generous than that.

Didn’t fix anything. Still want to go.

What I actually want to do there, and what each one of these gives away about me

This is the part I’ve thought about the most, which is embarrassing to admit for a trip I have not booked.

I want to ride the subway. Not once, for the experience. I mean I want to use it. I want to be on it at 8:40 in the morning with people who are annoyed about being on it. Here’s what I think that’s actually about: everything I’ve seen of New York is heightened. Lit, scored, edited, shot at the good time of day. The subway is the opposite. It’s the machinery underneath. I want the mundane version of the city, not the postcard, because the mundane version is the only one that would tell me whether the place is real.

There is a strong chance that I will get on it and discover that it is, in fact, just a train. Loud, functional, unromantic, moving people to work. That would be genuinely funny and I’d deserve it.

I want to see the skyline. Everyone wants this. But specifically I want the moment where a thing I’ve seen ten thousand times in two dimensions acquires a third one and a temperature and a wind, and I find out whether that changes anything or whether I just stand there thinking “yes, that’s the picture.”

I want to eat the pizza. I want to find out if it’s actually good or if it’s a thing people have agreed to say. I’m suspicious. I’m from a country that has extremely strong opinions about street food and I have watched a lot of confident foreigners be wrong about ours.

I want to go to a comedy club. Not to see someone famous. I want to see somebody working out material in a small room, badly, on a Tuesday. That’s the version I’m curious about, because comedy is the art form that taught me the most about the city and I want to see it happening at the level where it’s still a job rather than a show.

I want to see Times Square and I’ve already been made to feel bad about that by people who have never met me.

I want a completely ordinary morning. This is the one I want most and the one that’s hardest to explain to anyone. Not a landmark. A Tuesday. Somebody buying something, somebody late, a street being cleaned, the specific quality of light at 7 AM in a place where the buildings are that tall. Nobody makes content about that. That’s exactly why I want it.

And I want the moment. The stupid one. Standing somewhere at night, surrounded by people who don’t know me and have no reason to, looking up at buildings I’ve only seen through glass, and thinking holy shit, I’m here. I know exactly how corny that is. I want it anyway. If I’m going to be a tourist I’m going to be a sincere one.

Notice what most of that list has in common. Almost none of it is spectacular. I’m not describing a highlights reel. I’m describing an attempt to check, to hold my version of the city up against the actual one and see how much of mine survives.

Then I spoke to two people who don’t have to imagine any of this

The best part of this, and I want to make sure the geography lands properly, is that it didn’t happen in New York.

It happened in Mumbai.

Alex and Ethan are New Yorkers. I met them here, in my half of the world, in the city that has been sitting underneath my New York fantasy this whole time without me noticing. So the entire conversation had this shape where I was asking them about the place I’ve never been, while they were standing in the place I actually know something about. Two guys from the city in my head, in the city I grew up next to, and me in the middle, interrogating them like a man who has cornered someone at a wedding.

I’d like to report that I was cool about it. I was not especially cool about it.

Here’s what I wanted from them. I wanted the inside version. I wanted them to puncture something. I had this whole idea in my head that if I got two actual New Yorkers talking, they’d start contradicting each other within four minutes and I’d have my article: one of them would love it, the other would be quietly plotting an escape to somewhere with parking, and I’d sit in the middle of that disagreement and write something clever about how nobody can agree on a city.

They didn’t do that. They agreed with each other almost completely, which was inconvenient for my structure and much more interesting than what I’d planned for.

The thing they kept coming back to was this: yes, it’s expensive. Not expensive in the mild way people complain about a restaurant bill. Expensive as a permanent structural condition of your life, the thing you organise everything else around. They were not defensive about it and they did not try to sell me on it being reasonable, which I appreciated, because I’d half expected the tourism-board version.

And then, immediately after that, the other half of it: once you’ve stayed in New York, you don’t leave.

Not “it’s worth the money,” which is the sentence I’d been braced for and which I’d have been suspicious of. Something more like a one-way door. You go, you stay a while, and then leaving stops being a thing you can seriously picture yourself doing. The expense doesn’t get resolved or justified. It just becomes the price of a thing you’re no longer willing to give up.

I’ve been chewing on that ever since, because it’s a strange claim when you look at it directly. It’s not an argument. Nobody’s saying the maths works out. It’s closer to a description of what happens to people, told by people it has happened to.

Then they brought up the song, and this is the bit I didn’t expect.

They told me Empire State of Mind is accurate. Jay-Z’s, from 2009, the one with Alicia Keys on the hook, the one she later did her own stripped-back version of. And I want to explain why this specific claim knocked something loose in me.

I have known that song for years. Everyone has. It’s the sound of a stadium, it’s what you’d get if you asked a computer to generate a New York song. I’d filed it under spectacle: big anthem, big chorus, big city, not information. If anything I’d assumed it was the most airbrushed possible version of the place, the audio equivalent of the skyline photo taken at exactly the right minute of dusk.

And two people who actually live there told me, without hedging, that it’s accurate.

Which reorganises the song entirely, or reorganises me. Because either they mean the specifics are right, or they mean something harder to pin down: that the emotional register is correct, that the size of the feeling in that song is roughly the size of the actual feeling, and that the thing I’d dismissed as marketing is closer to reportage than I gave it credit for.

I have spent this whole essay being carefully suspicious of the New York I absorbed through screens and speakers, treating all of it as a beautiful lie I need to go and correct in person. And then two residents told me that one of the most commercially enormous pieces of New York mythology ever produced is, in their experience, true.

So maybe the mythology isn’t a distortion of the city. Maybe the city is genuinely like that and the mythology is just loud about it. I have no way to know which. That’s the entire problem with being eight thousand kilometers away.

The last thing they said is the one that’s stayed with me longest, and again it matters that we were standing in Mumbai when they said it.

They pointed out that Mumbai is expensive too. Crowded. Hard. And people don’t leave it either. Same thing. Same city, different city.

It was an observation in passing, not a thesis. But it did something to me. I have spent years quietly wondering whether my attraction to New York was some borrowed second-hand thing, a fascination assembled out of American media that I’d absorbed without permission and mistaken for a genuine feeling. And here were two New Yorkers, in Mumbai, telling me that the thing that keeps them in their impossible city is the same thing that keeps millions of people in mine.

If they’re right, then I wasn’t imported. I already had the local edition. I just recognised the foreign one when I saw it.

They didn’t give me my contradiction. They gave me something I liked less at first and more the longer I sat with it: two people who’ve paid the price agreeing, calmly, that they’d pay it again, and then handing me a comparison to the city outside the window.

Jesus Christ, the actual numbers

So then I went and looked at what it costs, expecting to be depressed, and was depressed in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

The number I want to give you doesn’t come from a rent website. It comes from the True Cost of Living research produced by the Center for Women’s Welfare at the University of Washington with the Fund for the City of New York, updated in 2026. What it measures is not poverty in the official sense. It measures what it costs to simply exist in the city: housing, food, healthcare, transport, taxes, a thin buffer for emergencies. No holidays. No restaurants. No fun. The floor.

For one adult with no children, that floor is $70,334 a year.

For context, so this actually registers, that’s north of sixty lakh rupees. To not have a good time. To cover rent and food and a train pass and stay upright.

The median resources available to that same single adult come to about $57,680. So the typical single adult in New York is roughly thirteen thousand dollars a year short of what it costs to be there.

And this isn’t a minority experience. About 61.8% of New Yorkers, more than five million people, don’t have the resources to meet the true cost of living in their own city. The traditional poverty measure put that number at around 18%. So depending on which measure you use, either most New Yorkers are fine or most New Yorkers are not, and the honest measure says not.

Two more details, and then I’ll stop with the numbers.

Among the people falling short, the average gap is $39,603 a year. That’s not something you fix with a side hustle. That’s a second income.

And about 8% of the people below the line meet every category except one: savings. They cover rent, food, transport, healthcare, everything. They fail only at putting anything aside. Which means they are completely fine right up until the day anything at all goes wrong, and then they aren’t.

Five million people in the city I’ve been daydreaming about are not comfortably covering the cost of being there.

I sat with that for a while. It should have done something to the fantasy. A responsible person would report that it did.

Still want to go.

So why doesn’t everybody just leave

This is where I expected an answer and got about nine of them.

The obvious one is jobs, and it’s real, but it doesn’t survive contact with the numbers on its own. Plenty of people in that city would clear more disposable income doing exactly the same work somewhere cheaper. Some of them have done the maths precisely, in a spreadsheet, and stayed.

So it isn’t one reason. It’s a pile of them, and different people are standing on different parts of the pile.

Some stay for work that genuinely only exists there, or exists there at ten times the density.

Some stay because their friends are there, which sounds soft until you’re thirty-five and realise how hard it is to build that from scratch again.

Some stay because their partner’s job is there, or their kid’s school, or their mother is two neighbourhoods over and getting older. Some stay because of sunk cost, which is supposedly a fallacy but doesn’t feel like one when the thing you’ve sunk is eleven years.

Some stay out of pure inertia. Leaving is a project. Staying is what happens when you don’t do the project.

Some stay because they’re scared of what starting again would prove.

Some stay because the city has become a piece of who they are, and leaving would mean editing themselves.

And some stay, as far as I can tell, because on a good night the place still does the thing it does, and one good night can pay for a lot of bad months. I don’t fully understand this one. But I recognise it, because Mumbai does something similar to people I know, and I’ll get to that.

And here I have to admit something about my own reporting, since I’ve been going on about honesty for four thousand words.

I did not get the misery from Alex and Ethan. I went looking for it. I wanted the part where somebody’s voice drops and they tell you what the city has quietly taken from them, because that’s the part that makes an essay feel balanced and it’s also, if I’m honest, the part that would have let me off the hook. If a New Yorker had told me it was hollow, I could have written a tidy piece about seeing through the fantasy and gone back to my life.

They didn’t. They acknowledged the cost and then told me they weren’t leaving.

So the darker material in this essay doesn’t come from them. It comes from that research, from five million people short of the line, from the eight percent who cover everything except the ability to absorb a single bad month. That is a real New York and it belongs in here, but I want to be clear that I got it from a spreadsheet and not from a person, and those are different kinds of knowing. The spreadsheet doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be inside the number.

Which leaves me in a slightly ridiculous position. The two people I actually spoke to made the city sound like something you’d sacrifice for. The data says most people there are, in fact, sacrificing. Both of those are true at once and I can’t get them to sit comfortably next to each other from here.

I don’t think that’s a failure of the interview. I think that might just be what the city is: a place where the people inside it will tell you, sincerely, that they’d do it again, while the arithmetic sits there in the corner being unarguable.

Mumbai is under all of this and I didn’t notice for years

Here’s the thing I only worked out while writing this.

I did not develop an interest in New York out of nothing. I developed it on top of a foundation that was already there, and the foundation is Mumbai.

I’m from Maharashtra. Mumbai is the giant at the edge of everything here. It’s the place the ambitious people go. It’s the place in the films. It’s the reference point for what a city can be, and everybody in this state grows up with some relationship to it, even people who’ve never lived there.

And Mumbai taught me a specific feeling that I don’t have a good word for.

It’s crowded past the point of being funny. The locals at rush hour are a physical negotiation with strangers, conducted daily, with rules nobody has written down. Rent is absurd against what people actually earn. Apartments are small in a way that would shock someone from almost anywhere else. The monsoon arrives and the city stops pretending it’s in control. The inequality isn’t hidden or zoned away somewhere polite: it’s stacked vertically, a tower and a settlement sharing the same view of the sea.

It can be genuinely exhausting. People who live there talk about being tired in a way that isn’t about sleep.

But there’s this other thing. This electricity. The sense that something is happening, constantly, all around you, at every hour, whether or not any of it is happening to you. Marine Drive at night with the lights curving off into the distance. The unspoken understanding that half the people you’re standing next to came from somewhere else with a plan. The mythology of the film industry sitting over the whole city like a weather system, so that everybody knows somebody who came with nothing and everybody also knows somebody who went home.

You can be broke in Mumbai and still feel like you’re standing close to something. I don’t know if that feeling is useful or if it’s a trap. Possibly both. But it’s real, and it’s the exact feeling I get from New York through a screen, and I think that’s the actual mechanism here.

Mumbai gave me the template for what a huge city could feel like. Movies gave me New York. The internet made New York available from my bedroom for free. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the two things fused into a want.

But they’re not the same city and I’d be an idiot to say they were

I need to be careful here, because there’s a lazy version of this comparison that I refuse to write.

New York is not the Mumbai of America. Mumbai is not the New York of India. Anybody who says that has looked at neither closely.

The histories have nothing to do with each other. The economies work differently. The housing systems aren’t comparable in structure or in law. The way people arrive, where they arrive from, what they’re escaping and what they’re chasing: all different. A Mumbai monsoon and a New York winter are different problems requiring different clothes and different levels of resignation.

I also want to be honest that I’m comparing something I have lived near to something I have only watched. That’s an unfair comparison and I’m making it anyway, because it’s the only one I’ve got.

So here’s the more careful version of the claim, which is smaller but actually true:

They’re two completely different cities that trigger the same response in me. Not the same city, not equivalent, not parallel. Just two places that both seem to run on the assumption that you might be somebody who arrived with a bag and an unreasonable amount of hope, and that this is a normal way to be.

A city where most people came from somewhere else

Which brings me to the fact about New York that I think is doing more work on me than any skyline.

The 2026 edition of The Newest New Yorkers, published by the city’s Department of City Planning with the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, is the first full update since 2013. It puts the immigrant population at roughly 3.1 million people, more than a third of everyone in the city, and about 43% of the workforce. Nearly a third of those 3.1 million arrived in the US in 2010 or later. Close to half the city speaks a language other than English at home.

A third of the people. Nearly half the workers.

I’m not interested in that as demography. I’m interested in what it does to the air in a place.

If a third of the people around you came from somewhere else, then coming from somewhere else isn’t a deviation. It’s not a thing you have to explain or apologise for or work around. It’s just the ordinary condition of the city. There’s no waiting period nobody tells you about. Being new isn’t a status, it’s a stage that everybody’s been through and most people’s parents went through.

And this, I think, is the piece of it that actually has a hook in me. Not the buildings. The permission structure. The sense that a place exists where the sentence “I came from somewhere else and I’m going to make something of myself here” is not an unusual thing to say, because five million people have already said it.

Mumbai is also full of people who arrived, though its version comes with its own rules about who you are and where you’re from, rules that are mostly invisible to me because I’m standing inside them. From here, New York’s version looks cleaner. That’s almost certainly because I can’t see it properly. Distance flatters everything. I know that and it hasn’t helped.

Everything above is a reason not to go and I still want to go

Let me total this up honestly.

The city costs $70,334 a year for one adult to merely exist. Most people who live there can’t cover that. The apartments are small, the winters are hostile, the summers make the trains unbearable, the trains are apparently disgusting, and two people who live there right now could not give me a clean answer on whether it’s worth it.

I have no job there. No family there. No plan. No practical reason of any kind.

And if the ticket appeared tomorrow I’d go tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to be honest with myself about why, and the closest I can get is this: I don’t think I want to live there. That’s the thing I figured out somewhere in the middle of writing this. The fantasy was never about moving. I’m not trying to become a New Yorker. Reading five million people’s cost-of-living gap did not make me sad because I’d been planning a life there and now it’s ruined.

I want to see it. I want to check my work. I’ve been carrying around a model of a real place for fifteen years, assembled entirely out of other people’s footage, and I want to hold it up against the actual thing and find out how wrong I am.

Because I am wrong. That’s guaranteed. The only open question is the direction and the size of the error.

Maybe it’s not the city, but I’m not fully convinced by that either

There’s a tidy explanation available here and I can feel it trying to arrive, so let me put it down and then poke a hole in it.

The tidy explanation: I don’t want New York, I want the version of myself I’ve imagined living there. Cities are just containers for our imagined future selves. The guy in my head who walks fast and holds coffee and belongs somewhere loud is the actual object of the desire, and New York is set dressing.

That’s clean, and probably partly true. When I picture myself there, the me in the picture is noticeably better than the me typing this, which is suspicious.

But I don’t think it’s the whole thing, and I’m not going to pretend it is just because it wraps up nicely. Because there’s a version of this that has nothing to do with self-improvement. Sometimes you just want to see a thing. People want to see the ocean without wanting to become a different person at the ocean. I’ve spent years looking at something through glass and I want to look at it without the glass. That might be all this is. Simple curiosity that got out of hand and put on a suit.

Honestly, I don’t know. That’s the least satisfying sentence in this essay and it’s the truest one. I’ve written five thousand words about why I want to go to New York and my conclusion is that I’m not entirely sure. I know the wanting is real. I know it’s survived everything I learned while writing this, including numbers that should have killed it. I know it doesn’t respond well to argument.

I’ve stopped expecting it to make sense. It’s been fifteen years. It’s not going anywhere.

Still haven’t been

So that’s where this lands, which is roughly where it started, except now I’ve spent a month thinking about it.

I’ve never been to New York. I now know more about what it costs to live there than most people who’ve visited, which is a genuinely stupid combination of facts about one person. I’ve spoken to two people who live there, in Mumbai of all places, and they told me the city is expensive and that they’re never leaving it, in the same breath, without appearing to notice that those two things are in tension.

And I want to go more than when I started.

Maybe I’ll get there and it’ll be nothing. Maybe I’ll walk around for three days and feel exactly like a guy who is walking around, which is what I’ll be. Maybe Times Square will annoy the shit out of me within eleven minutes and I’ll have to admit that every person who warned me was correct. Maybe the subway will be precisely as bad as advertised and I’ll gag on a platform in front of strangers who won’t even look up, because they’ve seen tourists gag on that platform every day for thirty years.

Maybe the worst outcome: it’ll be fine. Just fine. A big city, expensive, crowded, competently run, unremarkable to be inside of. And I’ll stand there with fifteen years of accumulated expectation and think that’s it?

That’s a real possibility and I’ve made my peace with it, or I’ve told myself I have.

But there’s the other one. Some random night, no landmark, no plan, standing on a street corner at an hour when I should be asleep, surrounded by several hundred people who have no idea who I am and no reason to care, with those buildings going up further than seems reasonable and the noise doing whatever the noise does.

And I look up and think: holy shit. I’m actually here.

I don’t know which one I’m getting.

I want to find out.