@BlueOcean Indeed. It's quite a problem for someone like me who was raised in that former culture of behaving as you want others to behave. To me, that is how the world works, that is how everyone reacts by default, and that's always my perception. So imagine how impossible everything becomes when you're one of the few still doing that? I feel like I live in a foreign country now, and I don't remember leaving. I feel as much an outsider here as i would if I just moved to Tokyo tomorrow. If not moreso. Japan still follows that honor system to large extent...not quite the same way...not companies or politicians....but the overall public largely does. In some ways their world, alien as it is, is more familiar to the one I remember than what I see in front of me. Perhaps the last place like that, and perhaps it's fading fast there too.

Sadly I doubt it comes back. The human default is savagery. What used to be took lots of work, maintenance, and violent war to create. It's almost impossible to create and the cost of lives is high, and it's easy to lose with even the slightest apathy. At some point people gave in to convenience and self indulgence and stopped caring about that broader culture. Ultimately I think the blame lies with the WWII/Depression generation. Their lives were so horrible from the start they set out the spoil their kids so they could have the happiness they never had. The result was a generation of self absorbed individuals with no sense of their greater effect on others, and not really a care about it....and each generation that lesson amplifies. If it ever corrects, it will be the result of great catastrophe and suffering.

As for NYC...well...it's unique. Less unique than it used to be. It used to have charm....dirty, noisy, loud, but there was only one place in the world like it. So much was unique to it. In recent years the little stores and districts have faded and been replaced by global chains and homogenization..... You'll get to see it before it's completely "mallified". Look for the little, grimy, off the track places...that's the "real" NYC. The people on the other hand....well they're....err....direct.......and they have always been like that....not sure how, but since day one, that's been NY

On his way to sign the Constitution in 1776, John Hancock commented that he traveled through New York, and never before had he seen such rude, improper, and noisy people in his life. So, NYC has been the same NYC for 250+ years, for better or worse,

Couldn't pay me to live there, but it's a neat visit. Though I last saw it in it's old "real" self, not the newfangled mallified version overrun by chain stores.