Success Quote by James De La Vega

“The pressure of survival in the big city” lands like a hand on your chest: not poetic struggle, but rent, late trains, overstretched gig work, the constant math of how to stay. De La Vega frames the city as a machine that doesn’t need to hate you to grind you down. Its power is impersonal, and that’s the point. Survival becomes a full-time job that quietly demotes your dream into a hobby, then a guilty thought, then a punchline you avoid making eye contact with.

The ellipsis does real work here. It mimics the way ambition gets interrupted, not by one dramatic failure, but by a thousand small concessions. You don’t “quit” the dream; you misplace it. The subtext is a warning about narrative drift: when the city sets the tempo, you begin to confuse endurance with destination. “Lose sight” is chosen carefully. The dream is still there, but the angle is wrong; you’re too close to the wall to see the horizon.

Then the tonal pivot: “Hang in there.” It’s almost corny, which makes it honest. Coming from an artist, it reads less like motivational merch and more like street-level solidarity, the kind exchanged between people who know inspiration doesn’t pay upfront. De La Vega’s context as a working artist matters: this isn’t a manifesto from above, it’s a message from within the squeeze. The intent isn’t to romanticize hustle; it’s to name the trap and offer a small, stubborn strategy: keep the dream visible, even if it’s only in the margins.