Does where you live matter?

An obituary for a millennial lifestyle fantasy.

Typically, when I read fiction, I prefer it to bear little relation to the themes that are dominating my writing life. So recently, when my very well-read friend sent me a novel I had to read, I had no idea that this slim and self-assured book would collide so fantastically with much of what I’m currently thinking about.

Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico, depicts an aging millennial couple, Anna and Tom. We’re never told what their nationality is beyond “southern European,” but we meet them in Berlin, where they have settled to forge a new aspirational creative life. They are graphic designers who live in an apartment that features every interior design element that has dominated your Instagram feed for the last ten years. Their friends are exclusively writers, artists, designers, developers, and journalists. They do not know any nurses, teachers, or tradesmen. They have strong opinions about typography.

Their life on the page feels vivid and real, without verging into satire. But it also feels incredibly dull and tired. I can imagine the exact bowls and soap they use, the newsletters they subscribe to, and the chore jackets in their wardrobe. If writer Kyle Chayka’s 2016 coinage of the “airspace aesthetic” marked the high water mark of this millennial lifestyle fantasy, then I think Perfection is a kind of obituary for it. I’ll never be able to look at a monstera plant the same way again.

I was so taken by the hyperreal depiction of Anna and Tom’s life because I used to live a version of it. For a period of my twenties, about ten years ago now, I didn’t live anywhere. I was a freelance journalist who needed nothing but a laptop powered by the full suite of Apple charging adapters.

I had a boyfriend in Paris; “permanent addresses” in the US and UK at my parents and aunt and uncle’s houses, respectively; and I spent months-long stints in southeast Asia, Europe, Cape Town, and California. I not only lived as that now-reviled term “digital nomad,” I was one of the first journalists who wrote about it in mainstream publications. Later, I covered the rise of “live like a local” travel in Lisbon (where Anna and Tom also visit in their story), which I think you could argue was a direct descendant of early digital nomad culture.

I aged out of that peripatetic existence when I realized that not living anywhere was, at least in my case, the perfect fuel for an anxious mind. However, I didn’t entirely leave the mindset behind.

For years I operated under the illusion that the next place, the next job, the next flat, the next Big Change was going to be the thing that made my life finally make sense. After leaving London in 2020, and then moving once again to be closer to my husband’s family in the spring of 2024, I wrote about being worried I was falling for the fresh start fallacy all over again.

Back in my twenties, like Anna and Tom, I could live anywhere, do anything. But in effect I was rooted nowhere, because I was always waiting for perfection to arrive just over the horizon.

Friction Lite

Ultimately, what Anna and Tom seem to be pursuing above all else is a life free of friction. They want work they can do from the comfort of their home, on their own terms. They have a friendship group of people who come and go with the whims of illegal sublets and remote job opportunities. These people seem to elevate their professional and creative personas by proximity, but never require any reciprocal, day-to-day obligations or challenging emotional dynamics.

They prefer their apartment to appear staged like an Airbnb listing at all hours of the day. Even though they live in western Europe, they expect authentic Thai or Peruvian food to be delivered to their door when they don’t feel like cooking, which is often. They pity the provincial mindset of the people in the nameless place where they grew up, and they seem to never interact with anyone who isn’t between the ages of 22 and 38.

And yet, despite levels of cultural access and economic opportunity that their ancestors would have found inconceivable, we see that they are profoundly dissatisfied with their lives.

This idea of friction is fast becoming the obsession of our moment. From my own viral essay about it in 2023, to the more recent piece from

kyla scanlon

which looks at it from an economic lens.

Scanlon outlines that we now have three states of being: The digital world now promises to be mostly friction-free — you don’t even need to hire humans anymore, if you can’t be bothered to. The real world is full of annoying friction like a flight delay or finding a doctor when your kid inevitably gets sick on Friday afternoon. There’s also a third state — one that comes with enough money and the right class status — where you can move through the physical world with the privilege of Friction Lite. Scanlon uses the example of Manhattan’s West Village, which has had a controversial renaissance as the ground zero of Gen Z youth culture.

“West Village is an NYC neighborhood that serves as a production set for an optimized lifestyle. You can live your entire life within a five-block radius: Pilates, three-drinker dinners, charm bars, espresso martinis, run clubs, spritzes, connection. It’s great.

This isn’t unique to West Village. There are all sorts of spots that do this strange, careful curation of friction. The boutiques are selling the appearance of effort without its substance. Hand-crafted aesthetics at mass-production prices. Rustic cafés with lighting fast WiFi. This illusion of locality with the convenience of globalization (pre-tariffs, at least).”

This Friction Lite space is the world I used to inhabit — back when millennials, not Gen Z, were the young buzzy generation — and I dotted around cities like it was my job. (Or was it my job?) Though I knew I was privileged to move through the world in this way, I also saw this lack of friction as a good thing, a sign of how far the world had come. It massively helped my career, and it gave me a network of people all over the world just like Anna and Tom. And yet, back then, I couldn’t yet see what I was giving up in exchange for it.

Coming and going

One reason that Perfection lands so well in this moment is that I detect a real anxiety of people trying to find their perfect place in the world. It’s understandable, given the abhorrent state of US politics, that so many Americans are trying to leave the country for saner places. But Europeans are doing it too. When I posted Perfection to my Instagram story, multiple British connections told me they were reading it as they prepared for a move to Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin.

I have moved so many times in the last 15 years — including leaving the US when I was 21 — that it would be flagrantly hypocritical of me to say that where you live doesn’t matter. Finding a place that matches your priorities and preferences obviously does have some bearing on your quality of life. My most recent move has proven to me that sometimes the energetics of a place really do matter, even if they are maddeningly hard to define. (So does having more help.)

However, I have also learned that as much as where you live, your relationship and attitude to it shapes your experience there. You have to really be there. The richness and meaning arises in part from choosing it at the expense of all other places you could be and things you could be doing. Accepting a place’s shortcomings, the things it lacks, and its imperfections is essential to appreciating everything it does have to offer.

Having lived as an American outside of America for a decade and a half, I’ve met a lot of people that have made lives far from home. The people that have really done it over the long haul have done so in a way that has involved so much friction. They’ve made huge sacrifices, navigated unbelievable amounts of bureaucracy, endured the pain of learning a language or gaining a new cultural fluency. They have had to change their ways by force and let their ways be changed by the humiliation of doing it wrong. They can’t easily undo it, or go back, because they are not the same person anymore. They have built a whole new life at the expense of their former one.

This feels very different from the “careful curation” of the Americans moving to Europe I see in my Instagram feed — and explored well in this piece in New York Magazine about the “Euro-mom fantasy.” I can imagine these American expat families largely interact with other American expat families, rather than the people who actually live in the country they are posting from.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that, of course — sometimes you just want a year-long adventure that’s not supposed to last forever. However, as long-term transplants will tell you, the entire expat experience is one defined by transience. If you want to build a life beyond air conditioned short-term rentals and matcha cafes where everyone speaks English, you have to go deeper than befriending other new arrivals. And you have to navigate a boatload of bureaucratic friction that will make you want to cry. (Hello, IRS’s treatment of Americans abroad 😭.) That’s when the experience can become challenging — when it starts to test your willingness to stay.

As Anna and Tom’s life proves, when it’s easy to come and go, people come and go. It is now stunningly easy to imagine a whole new life from the things we see in our feeds. To skim the surface of the world’s most desirable cities with app-enabled ease. You no longer have to bumble through the language barriers, or a new taxi system, or figure out how to order a coffee without embarrassing yourself. There’s all a template, so there’s no friction.

Opportunity costs

As I progressed farther into Anna and Tom’s story, I jokingly thought to myself that they should just have a baby — it would immediately cure their existential ennui, simply because they would be too tired and too broke to think that deeply about the state of their life.

But the book’s omniscient narrator tells us that Anna and Tom have no interest in a baby, probably for some of the same reasons outlined in Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ must-read New Yorker piece on the global decline in fertility rates.

In that piece — which I read as a non-fiction companion to Perfection — Kraus interviews a sociologist who posits that the rapid decline in birth rates is in part down to “social media’s role as an accelerant of global monoculture.”

“It has never been easier to acquaint yourself with the opportunity costs of childbearing — the glamorous destinations unvisited, the faddish foods uneaten. ‘People once had only local comparisons,’” [the sociologist] said. ‘Now they see other people’s lives — in New York City and England and France — and they have a sense of relative deprivation: my life is not good enough.’”

If I could summarize the “opportunity cost” of having children in one word, it would be (you guessed it) friction. Way too much of it, in fact, if you’re doing it without the support of a village. But there is a quiet upside: the more you do it, the more you stop thinking about what else you could be doing, and focus on where you actually are.

What I’ve learned in my mid-thirties is that tangling with the friction is where the sense of belonging I’ve so long been looking for actually begins. So perhaps what Anna and Tom need is not kids, but more specifically obligations and responsibilities to something other than themselves. They are missing the friction that comes from being known and needed by a wide range of people — not just high agency creatives in the prime of their youth — because they want to preserve a life they can leave at any moment.

I think often about the fact that, had I not had the immense and evolutionarily bizarre privilege of doing whatever I wanted for a solid decade of my adult life, I may never have reached these kinds of conclusions. After all, it’s easy to say that contentment comes from staying put when you had the luxury of traveling to more than 40 countries before you hit 30. It would be dishonest for me to say I regret spending a decade of my life that way.

And so the problem that I share with Anna and Tom is that, by quirk of history, technology, and privilege, the three of us simply know too much about the world. As humans, we were never supposed to live with this much optionality embedded into our psyche. People didn't used to see the myriad obligations of their lives as opportunity costs, but rather as the unavoidable work of being alive.

Though it’s now possible to eliminate a large chunk of friction and obligations from our lives, that doesn't mean that doing so will help us thrive. As we move into this bizarre era of AI-assisted living, I’d argue that the quality and meaning of people’s lives will increasingly be determined by whether or not they realize that fact. Whether or not they recognize that while drudgery, routine, and obligation are now optional — they are also a big part of what makes life meaningful.

At the end of the book, there are hints that Anna and Tom might get it, but it’s tenuous. It still feels like their choices are dominated more by how it looks in the feed than how it feels day to day. As a reader, I’m not entirely convinced that they’ve realized something: Not making a choice is a choice. And it’s one that excludes the sense of belonging you cultivate when you engage with life in its fullest, most imperfect sense.

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