Bucharest is the city everyone complains about. The one where you say every day that you can’t stand the traffic, the noise, the dust, the queues, the bureaucracy. You promise yourself, “That’s it, next year I’m leaving,” convinced that somewhere else life must be simpler, cleaner, quieter. But you don’t leave. And if you do, you realize you miss exactly the chaos you tried to escape.

The addiction doesn’t come from asphalt or buildings. It comes from people, and the way you feel them close even if you don’t know them. From overheard conversations on the subway, from the bus driver’s swear word, from the barista who knows your order by heart. Bucharest seeps into your skin through small details, and it doesn’t let go.

It’s a social drug: it doesn’t feed you, but it keeps you awake. It gives you the illusion that you’re “at the center,” part of a place that never stops pulsing, that boils even when all you want is quiet. And it’s this energy that ties you to it. It exhausts you, but without it you go into withdrawal.

Those who leave notice it quickly. In another city, the quiet is too quiet. Clean streets become boring, polite people feel cold, the absence of constant events makes you scroll compulsively to check “what’s happening in Bucharest.” You miss the madness. You even miss the reason to complain.

Bucharest is a paradox: it drains you and yet gives you energy. You feel it steals your time, but it also makes you believe you’re always living something. It offers frustration and adrenaline in the same day. Here, you can feel alone among millions of people, but also plugged into a collective vibration that never switches off.

The addiction isn’t to the buildings, but to the human dynamic. To the way people collide, argue, reconcile, organize, dismantle, and create. Beneath the congestion and the nerves, there’s a living network that keeps you connected, like a current always running through. The city won’t let you sleep, even in your sleep — because you know that somewhere, something is always happening.

And maybe that’s the real problem: not the city itself, but the fact that you end up defining yourself through it. You complain about Bucharest as if it’s a toxic relationship, but it’s exactly that relationship that gives you the energy to keep going. You know it’s not healthy, but you also know you can’t replace it. When you say, “I can’t stand Bucharest anymore,” what you really mean is, “I can’t stand needing it.”

Because here’s the brutal truth: if one day Bucharest suddenly became calm, clean, and perfectly orderly, many of us would run away from it.