I was wondering if something like this occurs in the US.
So, I live in Poland, and there’s this phenomena where a lot of people from Warsaw (capital) are known to think that the world resolves around them, that they’re “better”, that there’s basically nothing in Poland outside of Warsaw, and everyone who lives outside is a hillbilly.
They even have their own derogatory terms for people who recently moved there. Sometimes when you ask someone on the internet or over the phone where they live, they are going to tell you the name of a hood that most people outside of Warsaw don’t know about, or even worse, they’ll tell you on what street they live at, instead of simply naming the city.
Overall because of that, Varsovians have a bad reputation around the country, and are considered ignorant assholes. Funniest part about this is that Warsaw metropolitan area is not even the largest or densest metro area in Poland.
Do you have this phenomena? I was thinking about New Yorkers but I’m not sure. Are people from LA like this?
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NYC and LA.
NYC, LA, and Chicago
Of course this is a huge generalization and not everyone is like this, but yes I’d say both New Yorkers and people from LA act that way.
That would be New York
Our population is not clumped up enough in the capital to have an effect as strong as in Poland there, so I’d say NYC, LA, or Chicago
While of course not all of us are like that (I’d like to think that I’m not), it’s certainly a reputation that us New Yorkers have.
I wonder if most states have this experience.
Here in Massachusetts, the joke is that Bostonians think of themselves as the center of the universe.
I mean, I’ve met New Yorkers online who can’t grasp why anyone would ever want to leave the city but that’s not really the same thing as what you’re describing.
I think the USA might just be too big for any one city to completely dominate like that across the entire country. What can and does happen though, especially in states that have a single major city like New York or Illinois, is that the people outside of the city can get tired of city desires and issues controlling state politics and people in the city can get sick of people out of the city undermining their efforts to improve the city.
On top of that there is a phenomenon, at least in Illinois, of where you define the city starting being different depending on where you live.
So we have close comparisons but not exactly the same.
New York
NYC.
The smoke from the Canadian wildfires has been causing air quality warnings for us in the Midwest for weeks. Newspapers/news outlets only cared when it hit NYC.
I am from NY. I never realized how NY focused national news is until I moved to metro Detroit. It is treated like the center of the universe.
NYC, the capital of the world.
NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, and the entire state of Texas. Also, a lot of us seem to think that our own neighborhood is (or should be) representative of the entire country, or the whole world.
New York: “Well of course it fuckin’ does!”
L.A.: “Um, the rest of the what?”
NYC and LA for sure.
Let’s just say, you don’t see the aliens invading Topeka in the movies.
New York and Los Angeles for sure. Chicago as well, but not to the same degree. Chicagoans know it’s the most important city in the Midwest, and due to that they don’t give the other major cities in the region much thought. On a national level though, the only city Chicagoans see themselves in competition with is NYC. Obviously that doesn’t apply to everyone who lives there, but that was the impression I got after living there myself.
Basically the entire state of Texas is like this.
Boston literally refers to itself as The Hub, as in “The Hub of the Universe.”
New York City thinks its the center of the world. It’s been that way for a while, here’s [an example](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue).
The Coasts of the US think they’re main parts of the country–the East Coast (Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-DC for business/living and Florida for vacation) and the West Coast (Los Angeles + San Fransisco ~ California). The whole middle of the country is referred to as “flyover country” or “flyover states”–places you only fly over in airplanes as you fly between NY and California.
At the regional level, Texas and California tend to think they’re particularly important or better than the rest of us.
NYC, LA, SF and DC certainly spring to mind as the main ones. There is a term called flyover states because these hubs of activity are on opposite ends of the country and you just fly over the rest of the country where presumably less is going on.
Also since the US is so big the phenomenon that you describe happens to an extent at a more regional level around other major cities
The entire state of Texas
Generally [New York](https://brilliantmaps.com/new-yorkers-world/), as immortalized in the *New Yorker* cover. But there are secondary versions of this regionally because we are so big. LA probably #2. In the Bay Area, “the City” refers to San Francisco, not Oakland. Probably nothing that happens in Wisconsin overshadows what happens in Chicago. Even if it is the [deadliest wildfire in recorded history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshtigo_fire?wprov=sfti1).
Sometimes there are practical reasons for this. A lot of publishing happens in New York, and people write what they know (See: Marvel comics). So the rest of us hear about it a lot in entertainment. The telegraph lines in WI burned down in the fire, so news about the Chicago fire could spread more easily.
States. Each region has a state that thinks it shits gold bricks.
New York forgets the entire rest of the northeast is populated.
California is pretty sure it represents the entire west. Portland and Seattle are cities fighting to the death over leadership of the PNW.
Georgia *thinks* it runs the south. Louisiana or North Carolina *should* run the southeast, but really we are all just being dragged straight into hell by Fucking Florida.
Texas eats the rest of the Southwest alive and wins by default there.
The Midwest is just Illinois screaming over everyone else and a tornado siren. Oklahoma is sweet, but they might actually be three tornado sirens in a trench coat pretending to be a person?
The Rockies are sparsely populated outside of city centers, and even those are small in comparison to the other regions. Montana wins that region just by merit of being the most sociable, which is still them keeping to themselves and waving from a distance.
Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, and Puerto Rico actually do shit gold bricks, but they’re all super chill about it.
I’m from NYC, was born and raised there and rarely left up until recently. When I was in 8th grade we went on a field trip to DC. On the bus on the way there I asked my friend, ‘why is the trip so long, isn’t DC in NY?’
So yeah. Maybe I thought NY was the center of the world😳
NYC and DC… I’m in the Denver area, but work with a lot of people on the east coast. It’s amazing to me that people from these cities have ZERO clue about anything outside of their small radius.
For instance, was chatting with a coworker yesterday who’s in NYC with all of the smoke… he actually had the audacity to say ‘I hope you guys out in Denver never have to experience something like this.’ I informed him that the Western US experiences wildfire smoke just like that (or worse, in some cases) all the time, and has for more than a decade. His mind was blown, to say the least… He didn’t understand how we could have fires ‘with all the snow on the ground.’
So yea, they’re kind of clueless.
You could have a single day in which a Rays player cures cancer, an Orioles player cures AIDS, a Jays player cures global warming, and a Red Sox player cures the housing crisis.
The lead story on the sports news that night will still be about what kind of bagel did Aaron Judge have for breakfast that day, and what does it mean for the Yankees chances of winning the World Series this year.
Yes, I know he’s the best player on the team with the biggest fan base, but would it kill the four letter network to stop talking about him like they’re the North Korean state media singing the latest praises of Kim Jong Un?
New York is literally just discovering forest fire smoke like it was invented a few days ago so uh…yeah.
Definitely NYC. I think the whole Canadian smoke thing really proved it. The whole east coast was dealing with this smoke and the majority of what I heard was “Smoke in NYC.”, “Look at the NYC skyline with the smoke.”, “NYC are you okay?”.
NYC, DC, LA, and San Francisco basically in that order. Anyone from these areas is shocked to learn anything about another part of the US and can only compare things to their city.