New York City, the best mating place and our prehistoric instincts. Why is it different nowadays?

The world’s most populous cities hold a special place in the hearts of people. Traveling and immigration to other places are our evolutionary adaptations how to spread our selfish genes.

When people live at their original places, they find a lack of mating partners, resources, reciprocal altruism, status potential, forming alliances and security (large groups are safer). They may also avoid competition and genetic inbreeding.

While some of the things work even nowadays to some degree (for example, higher salary, connections, more opportunities), this globalized world differs in many aspects.

Homo sapiens – as I pointed out – have mental equipment for the African savanna. Not only you will likely get the same potential sexual partners at different places, but our modern economy is based on reciprocal altruism (money, stocks, goods), we have a social net, no safety from wolves and genetic inbreeding are issues. It same goes for forming alliances.

You may object it makes sense to immigrate from South Sudan or Niger to the United States and I agree.

In 2024, various fates were reported when very poor people immigrated to New York City, spending all their money on the journey. To their biggest surprise, New York City has one of the biggest social inequalities in the world (therefore, people in Manhattan can afford taxis that ride around the borough), there is an absolute lack of any social net, enormously low social mobility, and even Prague care far better of their homeless people (as the care is very poor, contrary to very close Berlin or Vienna).

So they have seen NYC in movies and have traveled, ended up in the streets homeless. And since the carefully watching people are sensitive kindhearted beings, they loathed them for being stupid (seeing something on TV is different in reality) and were callous hearing their stories.

So if you want to immigrate, I would rather choose a left-leaning country with a good political culture (Nordic countries, Germany, Netherlands). So do you want to emigrate to the US now?