All We Have to Do Is Go

Disclaimer: This isn’t a normal newsletter. I’ll be back to the regularly scheduled programming next week with tech and adjacent topics. Thank you for reading, it means the world. - Rachel

Every so often, I wonder why I live in New York. I don’t mean that sarcastically. I love this city, but what’s keeping me here is choice rather than responsibility. Sure, it’s nice to pop into a studio or swing by an office for a meeting, but unless there’s a big emergency, for the most part, I could work in Guadalajara if I wanted to. When I start to feel like this, I know I have to shake it up and start really embracing the city.

I go full New York mode, slowly embodying Fran Lebowitz and others who embrace the city that tried to ball them up and spit them out before welcoming them with open arms.

I make more of an effort to have a conversation with my across-the-street neighbor named William and ask how my bodega guy’s day is going, even if it means I will miss the next subway. There will always be another.

I go to different parks and see what they have going on. Most of the time, it’s the same as my park, which is insane because I think my park is the center of the universe and it turns out other people have other parks that are the center of their universes.

I reach out to random people online to grab coffee, just because I know they live here.

I also go to see people talk. I love seeing people talk.

Living in a major city means everything and everyone comes to us. It’s like we live in a mecca, and there are pilgrimages people take here in hopes of experiencing what it really means to live. This city is a breeding ground for art, culture, and ideas and it’s a petri dish for the soul.

Going to hear from the people that inhabit, and spend their valuable time visiting, our beautiful city will never cease to amaze me.

To almost everything, I go alone. Sometimes I see people who I know. Rarely do I go with a friend arm in tow. It makes the experience feel braver and more like an act of self love than a time to socialize. I keep that for restaurants and bars and the sidewalks and streets outside of those restaurants and bars. Going alone is also a gift. In a city where there are so many moving parts, I can go to these things solo as much as I want and I never feel lonely. Other people are alone, occasionally I meet people, and no one thinks it’s strange.

At Parkrangers Capital’s AGM, I had the pleasure of hearing from Claire Hughes Johnson, former Stripe COO and author of Scaling People, a topic she dove into during her time behind the mic. One thing that stuck with me was her point that scaling is less about adding headcount and more about producing more at the same level of excellence. That applies to work, of course—that’s what she was talking about. I see it from an agency perspective all the time. But I also think it applies to personal relationships. In New York, “more” is often interchangeable with “better,” and people can be socially collected as easily as hot sauce packets from a Taco Bell near a college campus. As I get older, I want to invest more in scaling the relationships I have.

Julia Fox and art dealer Vito Schnabel spoke about their upcoming black comedy film The Trainer, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. I have been a Julia Fox fan since reading about her in Into the Gloss in 2015, many years before her Kanye West relationship. As for Vito… Well, I think I caught him on an off day—he didn’t remember many of the questions he was asked in the interview. Julia Fox was magnetic, personable, and funny. I get why she runs in so many different circles. She agreed to the project with Vito because she’s known him for a long time, both growing up in New York, and thought that the film would “be good or at least different or exciting.” That is so different from how I approach things. Julia is okay going into projects that might not turn out the best if they will cause commotion and make people talk. I am not. Maybe I should. She is very much a believer in “if everyone likes you, you’re doing something wrong,” which is another pill that is hard for me to swallow because the idea of being disliked makes me uncomfortable. She is disliked by many and seems to be okay with that, but she did mention she misses anonymity. I can imagine it’s hard talking to people for the first time who know so much about your life when you know nothing of theirs. The film is coming out in 2026 and it looks a bit goofy from the trailer we watched. It was produced by controversial director Tony Kaye, who seems hard to work with. If you saw it, let me know what you think.

I saw a documentary about the last reindeer tannery in Finland called Between Lichen and Heaven at Scandinavia House, followed by a conversation with the creators, ASF Fellow Susanna Monseau and filmmaker Ruth Grimberg. The tannery, located in the small town of Kronoby, has since gone bankrupt and shut down. I talk a lot about my solo trip to Finland. I’m a little obsessed with the people, the culture, the saunas, and their habit of drinking coffee too late in the day. I only visited Helsinki, but this film was shot in a remote northern town where daily life still revolves around reindeer herding. The documentary follows Sámi herders, local workers, and people in the fashion industry to show how reindeer hides are at risk of becoming waste. Finland prides itself on sustainability, and using every part of the animal is a core value for the Sámi people, the Indigenous community of northern Finland and the Arctic region. Reindeer herding has been central to their culture for generations, built on respect for nature and a sense of balance that now feels increasingly fragile. The tannery’s small scale meant it could only sell hides to luxury brands, but those brands are shifting to faux leather and larger suppliers. Strict laws on reindeer culling, combined with high environmental standards, make production slow and costly. Climate change adds another layer of strain, disrupting grazing routes and leaving herders struggling to keep their animals alive. When one part of this circular chain breaks, the whole system suffers. The tannery is gone now, but the hope is that the craft and the culture around it can find a way back. The screening made me want to visit the Arctic and also made me think more deeply about my consumption.

This is why I live in New York. In a single week, I got to sit in a room with a business executive I look up to, learn from a cultural icon who lives by rules I’m still afraid to break, and hear about problems so far removed from my daily life that I’d never encounter them otherwise. These people and their stories came here because they believed New York would care, that someone in this city would think their work mattered enough to show up. And they were right. I showed up, along with strangers who became less strange just by being in the same room. When I start to wonder why I’m here, this is the answer: because everything comes to us, and all we have to do is go.

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By Rachel Braun · Launched a year ago

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