Someone recently said the following which I’ve been mulling over for the past few days:
“In big cities like NYC or London you can’t ever live your best life. Fancy dinners? Too expensive! Rent, crazy expensive! Fun date night at a play or opera? Too expensive! You have to have a ton of money to live your best life there”
There’s a lot of truth in that statement above. As cities become more popular, they increasingly become more expensive. And New York seems to be a playground for the wealthiest of the bunch. So how can someone live their best life in a big expensive city?
To start, as our wealth increases, so does our tastes and demand for more ‘things’. This vicious cycle isn’t happiness, but we often use retail therapy as a means to satisfy us when we are unhappy. So living in big cities and going shopping for designer clothes will never be part of living our best lives!
But experiences are everything for us. So a night out on Broadway, a baseball game, a jazz bar, or whatever captivates us IS directly tied to living your best life. But all experiences cost us two things: Time & Money. I can spend a Wednesday night in a variety of ways in NYC:
Netflix at home, baseball game, gym/run, video games, date night, drinks with friends, meetup group, working, blogging :), reading.
That probably accounts for 90% of my spent nights in NYC. Each carries a different price tag for our happiness. But don’t expect us to realize that in the moment. Usually the activity we choose is whichever fulfills our current impulses for gratification. And those short term impulses are never tied to our long term views of our best life. (I believe this is how one feels ‘stuck’ in their own life).
More so than anywhere, New York is full of dreamers who’ve come there with the goal of finding personal success and growth. Nobody moves to New York to find happiness. They enjoy the normalcy of being busy. You can get lost in the crowd there, but to outsiders it’s perceived as you’re always ‘hustling’.
I think travel teaches you that your occupation is not your personal identity. And often our career is our identity in NYC. So as I am in search of designing an ideal life for myself I need to accept that NYC will never check all the boxes. So it’s worth assessing the advantages available to one here that can’t be replicated elsewhere. Same with Miami. Same with the places I’ve traveled to now.
I love to travel. But it’s not ideal to consistently change environments every week. I look forward to having some normalcy again and an ability to design and live a life longterm somewhere.