Change Your Location, Change Your Life
When moving to a new place--in or outside the US--is the best solution to your problems
When I was in my twenties, living in Washington, DC, and working in the Clinton Administration, my boyfriend and I took the train to New York City for the weekend so I could see my first Broadway show and meet some of his college friends.
Within hours of setting foot in Manhattan, I knew I had to live there. I couldn’t believe a place like this even existed. From that day on, all I did was strategize how I could make the Big Apple my home.
Fast-forward a few years, and I was working at America Online, Inc., which had purchased Time Warner, headquartered in New York City. I pitched my boss on a move, and she gave me the green light. Within a month, I had sold my house and moved into a sublet on the Upper West Side.1
I knew only one person in the city outside of work. You would think I would’ve been lonely, but quite the opposite. Every morning, a few seconds after opening my eyes and realizing where I was, I would jump out of bed, thrilled to start the day and explore my new city.
I was madly in love.
It would be hard to underscore how much moving from Washington, DC, to New York City changed my life.
My social life expanded well beyond anything I had before. I became a person who regularly went to plays and art galleries. I attended fashion shows and saw movies in theaters just steps from my apartment multiple times a week. The new friends I had quickly amassed lived mostly within walking distance or a quick subway ride away, so socializing was easy, and I felt more connected than I ever had before. For the first time in my adult life I didn’t have a car and I walked and walked and walked, which was good for my mental and physical health.
Looking back, it is amazing to me how quickly my happiness and life satisfaction level rose. Just weeks before, I had been bored and lonely living in a city that left me feeling cold.
All it took was a change of location and I had an amazing new life.
This topic is on my mind because I read a terrific essay by Brian Wiesner, Europe Will Change You,2 in which he expounds on how moving from the US to Spain has changed his life in all sorts of wonderful ways and underscores how much the place you choose to live will determine the kind of life you have.
His piece is a bit of a rebuttal to a post called Europe Won’t Fix You.3 The American author, Elizabeth, who lives abroad laments, “the untold alcoholics, lost souls, and troubled ex-pats I’ve met during my decades abroad—most of them running from something, rarely to anything.”
No matter where you decide to live, she claims, at its core, life is the same. If that sounds familiar, you may be thinking of the popular maxim, “Wherever you go, there you are.”
It’s both catchy and, as I think my New York City story demonstrates, not really true.
This notion, popularized by meditation guru Jon Kabat-Zinn, is meant to underscore that you can’t outrun your problems. No matter where you go, you will still be there, and I guess it’s supposed to be profound to claim that we are the cause of all of our problems.
If your problem is that you are impatient and get testy when standing in line, then Zinn can probably help you. If you notice a pattern of being commitment phobic, then perhaps therapy could sort that out. But if your problem is that you have to work seven days a week to afford rent and food and don’t have time to see friends or family and have understandably become lonely and depressed, you are not the problem.
You don’t need Europe (or anywhere else) to fix you, because you aren’t broken.
If you are living in a place that is grinding you down, the solution just might be moving to another place, in or outside the US.