The first week I moved to New York City, my phone learned a new sound.

It was not a ringtone. It was the tiny intake of breath I made whenever a new email landed between 10 p.m. and midnight. Friends overseas teased me. “You people are obsessed,” they said, laughing from time zones where dinner still belongs to humans.

I laughed back, then answered the email. That is the first thing expats rarely admit about American work culture, especially the version that crackles in New York: the gravity field is real, and even those of us who swear we know better find ourselves leaning toward it.

I lived in the city for years. I have clocked in at restaurants, in small offices with ambitious floor plans, and in rooms where everyone knew which chair had the power outlet that worked. I have hired people and I have been laid off by people who used “reorg” like a verb. I have loved and loathed the American way of working often within the same morning. When friends who were new to the city asked what to expect, I told them the truth, then watched them discover a parallel truth they would never say out loud. Here it is.

The intensity feels personal, even when it is not

Americans, or at least New Yorkers, do not think they work hard. They think they are working toward a thing that matters. The schedule is not a schedule, it is a story. A deadline is a step in a plot. That is why so many of us answer at odd hours. We are not only afraid. We are hooked on the feeling that the next reply moves the story forward.

My friends from gentler work cultures would roll their eyes at this, then fall into it. They would vow never to check messages after dinner, then find themselves peeking on the subway, then editing a deck at 10:47 because “I am awake anyway.” They would not admit the pleasure in it. But it is there, a secret battery that keeps the city lit.

Niceness is not kindness, it is currency

People call Americans fake. I do not buy it. What looks like fake is a kind of civic lubricant. How are you is not an invitation to bleed. It is the oil that lets thirty people pass through a revolving door without bruising each other. This shows up everywhere at work. The meeting starts with warm noises, the email ends with appreciative fluff, the break room has cupcakes for a birthday you did not know existed, and none of this guarantees anyone will back you in a crunch.

Expats hate admitting that they get good at this. They learn the script. They learn that small warmth buys grace for later. They start to say great question, even when the question could end an empire. They still miss the blunt honesty of home. They carry both dialects in their mouth, and they feel a little ridiculous in either.

Overwork is theatre, and the audience is you

We talk about grind like it is an external god. Here is the quieter truth. The city sells tickets to the show where you are the protagonist who never leaves the stage. You perform presence. Even if your company swears that outcomes matter more than hours, you will sense the social cost of being the first to leave. Managers might not judge you. Your peers will. You will. None of us like saying that out loud.

When I ran a small team, I started a rule: leave when your work is done, and if I catch you loitering for optics, I will send you home. People still stayed late on Thursdays. The theatre is sticky. It asks, Do you care. Everyone wants to be seen caring. That is the show within the show.

Health insurance is the leash you do not see until it pulls

If you did not grow up in the States, you underestimate how much health insurance shapes American work. It sits under every career choice like a quiet weight. People stay in jobs that bruise them because the plan is good. They hesitate to freelance because COBRA sounds like a snake for a reason. They avoid risk at 34 because of a knee that once twinged at 19.

Expats do not always admit how quickly they adapt to this reality. They make the same calculus, then pretend it is about professional development. They say, I am learning a lot, which might be true, and also I need my dentist. Everyone in the room nods. No one says, This is a weird way to live.

Meritocracy is both myth and muscle

Here is the double bind. American work culture swears that hard work pays. Sometimes it does. You will meet thirty year olds who climbed in five because they were talented and lucky, and you will meet brilliant people who never got the call because bias is not a ghost. Expats often see the myth first. They say, Come on, the playing field is tilted. Then they discover the muscle. The city rewards repetition. Show up, add value, fix the thing no one wants to fix, keep receipts, learn to speak in clear sentences about what you did. You will move.

No one wants to admit both can be true. The story is cleaner if it is all rigged or all fair. It is neither. The ladder is missing rungs. You can still climb if you learn where to wedge your foot.

Networking is not sleaze, it is irrigation

In New York people network the way plants move toward light. You will be handed coffee with a stranger’s card tucked underneath. You will sit at a talk and the Q&A will sound like auditions. You will roll your eyes, then you will do it. Because relationships here are irrigation. A single introduction can water a week. People do not admit how much they come to rely on this, partly because it feels transactional, partly because they enjoy it.

There is an art to doing it without feeling gross. Offer something first, a skill, a connection, a clean favor with no hooks. Follow up fast. Keep promises. Do not hoard introductions like cash. The city remembers who shares the tap.

Meetings are speed dates, and the romance is data

I once joined a meeting that had thirteen people and fifteen opinions. We used all sixty minutes to name the problem. It was thrilling and useless. This is a New York disease. We want to be in the room where it happens, even when nothing should happen until two people do the math.

Expats from cultures that respect silence get whiplash. Then they adapt. They learn to show up with numbers, keep contributions under ninety seconds, and end with a clear ask. The part they rarely admit is how much they miss meandering conversations that go somewhere unexpected. They miss loafing with ideas. New York teaches you to loaf on your own time, bring a loaf to the table, then slice quickly.

Vacation is both sacred and suspicious

Yes, managers send the “Please disconnect, enjoy” note. Yes, out of office messages are cute. Also, everyone notices when you are gone for two full weeks. We want to be the place that applauds your boundaries. We are not there yet. People take their laptop “just in case.” They check “once a day.” They blame the time zone, the Wi Fi, the dog. What they mean is, I am afraid to be out of the story.

Expats act allergic to this. They swear they will never be like us. Then they book the return flight on a Saturday so they can “ease in” Sunday night. They nod solemnly when a colleague returns with a cold because rest is a skill many of us lost. They do not admit that they left a little part of themselves on the group chat, like a candle in a window.

At will employment feels like running with one shoe untied

You can be let go with two weeks of severance and a box, and sometimes less. Companies like to say that means high performers thrive, the rest of us hear the subtext. Keep your parachute packed. Nobody wants to admit that this anxiety shapes behavior. It does. We court visibility, we over document, we build a private network of people who would hire us on a Tuesday. We keep side projects warm. It is entrepreneurship for the risk averse. It is also exhausting.

When big layoffs hit, the unsaid code kicks in. You check on the people you would rehire. You text the ones who went quiet. You become the sort of colleague who keeps backpacks by the door. Expats pretend they are above this. Then their team gets cut and they learn the choreography in a weekend.

Work friends are real, and they are confusing

American work swallows a lot of our hours, which means your colleagues will know your coffee order and the nickname you had at 13. The friendship is real. It is also woven into a system where money and power move quietly. Expats sometimes say, These relationships are shallow. I disagree.

They are deep in one dimension and limited in others. After a layoff, I have cooked meals for former peers. I have also let certain threads go slack because our bond lived inside a room that no longer exists. Both choices felt correct and cold, which is an American contradiction that rarely makes it into onboarding.

The city rewards people who ship boring things on time

This is the least glamorous truth. In New York everyone talks about disruption. What moves your career is not disruption, it is reliability. Can you solve the dull problem that costs real money.

Can you deliver the draft before anyone pings you. Can you run a meeting in 28 minutes and land the plane clean. We do not like to admit how much we respect this, because it is not cool. It is adult. Adult is underrated.

I learned this when I ran restaurants. The sexy part, for outsiders, was the menu. The thing that kept the doors open was a stack of boring wins. Payroll accurate, deliveries checked, drains unclogged, schedules that did not burn out the good servers, vendors paid on time. That is American work at its best, the promise that if you do the unglamorous things with care, you get to keep playing.

If you are moving here, or you are here already, a few quiet strategies

Build a personal ritual that cannot be scheduled over.

A morning walk, a gym hour, a phone call home. Put it on your calendar as if it were a meeting with someone you cannot disappoint. Learn to use the sentence, I can do Tuesday or Friday, which works better, then stop explaining. Keep a simple record of what you ship.

Once a month, write one page titled Value I Created, then send a gentler version to your manager. Talk about money with at least two peers. The taboo is weakening, and transparency helps. If you supervise others, tell them what is truly urgent and what merely feels loud. Protect their weekends the way you wish yours had been protected at 23.

And find a friend who knows your off switch. Someone who will text, Laptop closed, meet me for dumplings. Go. The city can eat you, but it is also a very good place to be a person if you let someone tug you back to the sidewalk and remind you that pigeons are hilarious, and that parks exist on Tuesdays, and that you do not need to earn your dinner.

I still live with the reflex to answer late emails. Sometimes I do. Often I do not. The trick I have learned is to keep my own story running alongside the company’s story. The company’s plot will always be urgent.

Your plot needs to be stubborn. It needs to include coffee that is not multitasked, sleep that is non negotiable, a skill that is not billable, people who would visit you in a hospital without asking what to bring. American work culture will not hand you that. You build it in the cracks, then you defend the cracks like they are waterfront property, because they are.

Do expats admit this out loud. Not usually. We joke about the grind, we adopt the slang, we buy the ergonomic keyboard and the blue light glasses. We mock networking while doing it flawlessly. We fly home and sleep for three days and come back because the power of the place is real.

New York is the most intense group project you will ever join. If you learn its rules without letting them erase your own, the work can make you bigger instead of smaller. That is the part worth saying out loud, even in a city where everyone already seems to be speaking at once.