For sure it's cooler than the suburbs and I'd recommend any single 20s something person live in NYC over any suburb. But once you get tired of partying and find a nice girl/guy, get established in your career, and tired of paying top dollar for crap accommodation in a stressed out nature-starved environment, it prob makes sense to move out. Though I guess that was always the move anyways - just instead of settling in a New Jersey suburb now you can just live anywhere because f*ck offices.

Back in NYC after being gone for a while, is it just me or has the city peaked? Manhattan doesn't even seem cool anymore. With the rise of remote work, it just seems like less and less people will put up with the overpriced garbage housing accommodations. You basically need to be rich to rent the nice places, and if you're rich then you'll prob disappear for the winter to Dubai or Singapore or somewhere warm. All that will remain in NYC will be locals with family here, students, and people just visiting in town. Families will move further to the outskirts where prices and accommodation are more reasonable, or just leave the NYC tri-state area altogether. NYC has a bit of monopoly power in being the only serious large city in the U.S that's walkable, but it's massively overpriced with shitty housing, and the remote work exodus will lead to the decline of its "cool" factor as it turns into the washed up old guy at the party who used to be popular back in high school. The ambitious people who would've moved to NYC and put up with paying $2,500 to live in a tiny dark roach-infested walkup tenement building with roommates will instead become globetrotting digital nomads and then move to more affordable 2nd-tier cities to pop out hippy babies with European views on work/life balance.