The lost romanticism of moving to a new city

Picture this: Konkona Sen Sharma stepping off a taxi in Wake Up Sid, suitcase in one hand, hope in the other, calling herself “the new girl in the city.” Farhan Akhtar in Luck By Chance, shuffling through crowded auditions in sweaty Andheri buildings. Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada, dragging boxes into a tiny New York apartment as the skyline glows outside. Or Life in a… Metro, with its tangled lives unfolding under the humming local trains. We grew up on these scenes - the big city as a character, the gamble as the plot, and the protagonist’s transformation as the payoff.
I was reading a book by Elif Shafak recently. She begins her novella by saying how she moved to Istanbul to become a writer. That struck me. You rarely find contemporary stories anymore about an aspiring writer packing their bags for a big city, brimming with noise and possibility. You hardly get films where a small-town actor takes the train to Bombay, or a fresh graduate moves to Delhi in search of work, purpose, and a friend who “knows someone in the publishing industry.” So, what happened?
In the 2000s, the “small-town dreamer in a big city” arc was almost an archetype: you packed a suitcase, rented a matchbox apartment with peeling walls and leaky taps, and surrounded yourself with other misfits who were just as broke and idealistic as you. The journey was linear and tangible. You could see yourself going from the train station to the theatre audition room. But now the internet has collapsed that physical gap. You can be an aspiring writer in a small town in West Bengal and get published in New York without ever leaving your room. We have Instagram now, and we have Twitter. Damn, if you try hard enough, we even have TikTok. That’s incredible access, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also robbed us of the journey of romantic geography. The hunger is still there, but it’s flattened into screens and algorithms instead of winding alleys and cramped coffeehouses.
Another thing that strikes me is, romanticism thrives on a certain margin of comfort. Enough stability to suffer poetically without actual destitution. Twenty years ago, you could share rent with four strangers and survive on street food while chasing auditions or publications. Now, the cost of rent, food, and transportation makes that bohemian gamble harder. You’re not just sacrificing comfort, you’re risking survival. I also think another reason we don’t hear these stories anymore is because the people living them are too consumed by survival to tell them in real-time, and by the time they’ve “made it” enough to write the memoir, the narrative has shifted into a self-help arc, not a romance of the struggle. It’s a loss, honestly, not just for nostalgia’s sake, but because those “arrival in the city” stories are such good mirrors for ambition, risk, and transformation.