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I've been where you are, in a sweltering city, no air conditioning. You need to quit whining and complaining about how you can't get out and GET OUT. New York City is NOT the center of the universe. Wanna know how to escape, how to turn the tables? Leave it all behind. All of it. Your friends and their achievements (whatever they are), your parents and their definitions of success, which they've been drumming into you from the age of two, and everyone's expectations about what you're supposed to do in the summertime. You want to win? You can only win by refusing to play the game.
Go somewhere high-altitude, where the air is clear and dry in summer, the property values are reasonable, and people do things outdoors because they love them, not because it's the Thing To Do. Don't go to San Francisco, because you'll get trapped in the same game, just the West Coast version. Go somewhere where you can have your own yard and inhale the smell of fresh-cut grass and June roses. Someplace where you can ride to work on bike trails without worrying about getting clipped by buses and evil taxi drivers and psycho BMW-driving investment bankers. Teach. Work in a coffee shop. Write. Find a nice guy who likes to fish on weekends and doesn't mind going with you to see movies with subtitles. Spend your summers out on your shady deck or balcony reading novels from the good secondhand bookstore in town, or the college bookstore, or ordered online. Watch afternoon thunderstorms come up over the mountains and drop precious rain on parched desert towns and alpine forests. Sit out there at night with your boyfriend or your friends and a pitcher of margaritas and watch the Milky Way reveal itself in the clear night sky while fireflies and luna moths dance in the flowers in your garden and tiny green lizards scuttle up your walls in search of bugs. Someday, your stressed-out New York friends will come and visit you, and they will envy you.
Or at least, that's how I spend my summers. At some point, none of what you're worried about is going to matter. The New York way of life isn't stable. It can't go on forever. And it's a huge migraine. In the end, you will be successful and happy if you can find your own way to love the summer, not the way that everyone else--parents, friends, mainstream media, Hamptons vacation realtors, travel agencies-- thinks you should love the summer.
