Every night, inhabitants of the city that never sleeps are kept awake by everything from the sounds of slammed front doors reverberating down hallways to insomniac oboists who could use a few more lessons (ideally during the day). But what, exactly, are N.Y.C. residents doing while the rest of the world is sleeping soundly?

The Aspiring TV Writer

She is working on a musical, hour-long dramedy titled "The Neville Wears Prada" -- which casts Neville Longbottom as a wide-eyed fashion assistant looking to impress his witch of an editor boss -- that she claims will be a larger cultural sensation than "Hamilton" and earn her an Emmy that she will proudly display next to her bar-trivia trophy (a history degree has to be used for something, right?). The Aspiring TV Writer also spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about the Snapple cap she threw out before reading the fun fact. What if the fact could have inspired a long-running syndicated sitcom?

The Finance Bro

After he finishes work at 2 A.M., he is too wired -- from a potent mixture of caffeine and Excel functions -- to go straight to sleep. He lies awake wondering if his Tinder date didn't text him back because he did an impression of a mime during sex, or if it was because she realized that his third cousin is not, in fact, friends with Travis Kelce. Over the weekend, he purchased a pizza (no expense accounts on the weekends -- boo!) and left it out on the living-room floor. But food waste is wrong, so he'll get up and have a slice. If he gets food poisoning, he'll just save money on the juice cleanse he was planning to do before Burning Man.

The Foodie Influencer

She is constantly refreshing the Resy pages for a variety of high-end restaurants, hoping that somebody might drunkenly cancel a Carbone reservation. Simultaneously, she is purchasing burner phones so that she can have as many devices as possible calling a certain reservation line at any given moment -- all she wants in this world is to have the privilege of eating dinner in a clothing store's basement restaurant at 10 P.M. on a week night. Is that so much to ask?

The Student

He's wired from a potent mixture of dining-hall "coffee," promotional energy drinks that were being given out for free in the quad, and academic anxiety. Whenever he's feeling really overwhelmed, he records an audition tape for "Survivor," but never sends it in. He currently has forty-two audition tapes from this semester alone. When one of his friends sends a text to the group chat saying that they have stomach pain, he secretly hopes that it means he can do a midnight dorm-room appendectomy (he has seen so much "Grey's Anatomy") and that it's not just a reaction to the dining-hall "food."

The New Parents

They haven't slept in days. Between playing Guess That Smell (is it the baby? dog? apartment? city?) and wondering if the large local rodent population could be trained to do child care, they are drained. Late at night, they try to make a dent in the overflowing bins of Sephora samples they have collected over the years, which promise to de-age their under-eyes. They made a New Year's resolution to only go commando for sexy reasons and not because they ran out of clean underwear and are too afraid to do laundry when the baby is asleep. Next on their to-do list is learning to speak Gen Z so that they can communicate with a babysitter if they can ever afford to go out to dinner again.

The New New Yorker Who Just Moved to the Big City from the Second City

She spends her nights frantically Googling "best side hustles N.Y.C." after her mother offhandedly commented that her feet were too ugly to sell pictures of on OnlyFans. Right now, she is heavily considering starting an OnlyFans of feet pics from statues at the Met (as a comedy bit, unless it works). Every few minutes, she goes down to the laundromat to check if there is finally an open machine. She would never tell her mother this, but she has been using a roll of Bounty as a towel for the past week and a half. Defeated, she returns upstairs to rummage around for random items to sell on her building's message board, as a way to meet her sleepless neighbors. ♦