Americans go large on leisure and should get credit for it

It’s common knowledge that everything is bigger in America: desserts (ice cream cookie cake with extra sprinkles, anyone?), vehicles (SUVs and 18-wheeler trucks barrel down central Manhattan roads as standard, and everyone bounces around on the pavements without even raising a well-plucked eyebrow), high-rises (a 20-floor apartment building is “cute”), and coffee (a medium cup from any coffee or cart on a morning will be enough to leave you jittering and paranoid for days.) But what Americans don’t get enough credit for is the fact that they also go large on their leisure activities.

This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the weekend activities I’ve been invited to with friends in New York City in the past six months: indoor archery, shuffleboard, axe-throwing, upstate hiking, salt cave meditation, and bouldering. The bouldering happened last weekend, and is the reason why my fingers typing this are set into the shape of claws. Did you know you could get muscle pain in your finger joints? Now you do!

In London, most of my favourite weekend and post-work activities could be charitably summarised as “socialising” and realistically summarised as “drinking”. A sunny day calls for beers in the park. A cold day calls for beers in the pub. A weekend calls for celebratory drinking. A Monday calls for commiseration drinking. A birthday means drinking. Even a funeral means a lot of drinking.

In the US, there is a lot more of an emphasis on “clean living” and much less of an expectation that you will stagger home in the early hours of the morning wearing a kebab and telling lampposts to “get out of my face, yeah?” When I went to my first New York house party where everyone had three drinks between 6pm and 2am, I thought I’d entered the twilight zone. But by the time I’d done it three weekends in a row, I was used to experiencing a Saturday morning free from the feeling that a sledgehammer had hit me repeatedly throughout the night.

Going outside before midday on the weekend initially felt wrong; sacrilegious, even. But I powered through and discovered that there were people out there walking dogs, buying ice-creams, going for jogs in sportswear, constructing their own smoothies at overpriced hole-in-the-wall establishments presided over by humourless Brooklynites with man-buns and blenders. I don’t know how it happened, but I joined them. On Friday nights, I now attend a hip hop-themed spinning class with UV lights where everyone high-fives at the end.

I never thought I’d find myself hanging off an outdoor climbing wall while my fiancé yelled up at me to “drop into the mulch” and the N-train rumbled past on a subway line directly above. I never imagined I’d run a 5k in 27-degree heat on a track beside the Manhattan skyline without someone putting a gun to my head. But I did both of these on the same day last weekend. And when I told my American friends about it, none of them found it strange.

I realise this makes me sound like I’ve become borderline unbearable, but I’m not an evangelist for that kind of lifestyle; I’m just a chameleon. Living the life of a stereotypical New Yorker is worth trying out when you come to the city, because it syncs you up with the people you meet and gives you context for why the people around you behave the way they do. I enjoy it as a kind of social experiment. And when my London friends take the piss, I just shrug and say: “New York can make you weird.”