I love Sydney. For most of its quirks. All in the space of a few hours you can smoke cigarettes and shisha inside a club with BYO drinks, then catch an Uber a few suburbs over and spend $25 on a smoothie that you’ll drink while cosplaying as a Bondi-to-Bronte walk enthusiast who wears leggings to house inspections. It’s a city of yin and yang. You’d be stretched to call it balanced, because literally everything is in extremes, but once you get used to that you love it.
No one has summed up the Sydney social experience better than writer Jonno Revanche when he mused on X that ‘Sydney is full of complete psychos with unresolvable neurotic damage who constantly inflict psychic violence on one another yet believe they are completely normal.’ Plus, a poignant and deeply personal analysis of the city in a longer Substack article.
Poetry.
As someone who grew up here, stayed here for a while, left multiple times, then came back – I feel I’ve touched enough social circles to understand this network of individuals in the metro region that you can’t seem to avoid if you don’t live under a rock.
I’ve seen and heard it all. Girls glassing girls at house parties for no reason. Guys hiring sex workers, sleeping with them, then refusing to pay them. Barefoot CEOs who have secret clubs (dungeons) under their houses that they lure teenage girls into with drugs. Famous fashion designers who party with people less than half their age and get them hooked on meth. I could make this a tell-all.
