In the days since an election that will substantially reduce the likelihood of your going to Midtown more than three times over the next four years, the pervasive mood in New York has been grief-stricken and despairing. The city has emerged, perhaps unpredictably, as the nation’s capital of discontentment (Los Angeles, San Francisco, we know that you are trying), the frontier of enmity to the potential hardships and catastrophes Donald J. Trump’s impending presidency might produce.

In Manhattan, Hillary Clinton defeated Mr. Trump nearly nine to one.

Thousands feel distraught. Many have marched or plan to march; many more are searching for something constructive to do and weighing the value of symbolic gestures. Some mothers in Brooklyn said they were thinking about a transcontinental hand-holding — palms clutched from Cobble Hill to Santa Monica — but actions like these are as likely to invite accusations of liberal cluelessness as they are to change minds about the deportation of undocumented immigrants.

This past week, Lena Dunham posted a video of a call she made to the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, on Instagram, relaying her concern over the appointment of the former Breitbart News head Stephen K. Bannon as a chief strategist in the Trump administration. (We imagine Mr. Ryan, a Republican, listening to the message and thinking, “Hmm, well, maybe if I get to meet Adam Driver…”) Just days earlier, the actress, who had campaigned around the country for Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat, wrote a blog post expressing her dismay over the fact that so many white women had voted for the Republican candidate, describing them — with no apparent fear of invoking a tone of alienating condescension — as “unable to look past their own violent privilege” and “inoculated with hate for themselves.”

In the age of Instagram activism, it is not necessarily a simple thing to tell the earnest do-gooder from the self-promoter, particularly when history has just made it clear that social-media celebrity is the path to world domination. Within the professional political class, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, both Democrats, now seem to be elevating their longstanding rivalry to one for the role of progressive opponent in chief. In the days immediately following the election, the mayor tweeted, and emailed, and tried to comfort.